The Get-O

I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Get-O, surrounded by Get&Fetchits.

Or, to be more politically correct, surrounded by Digicerians. But who calls them that?

I’d been around them before, but usually at a distance. In an eatery, for example, where they would be wearing aprons and clearing tables, or at some wealthy person’s estate where they would be wearing coveralls and raking up leaves.

I’d never been afraid of them before, but I was now. For one thing, they were naked. I should have expected this. I know they wear clothing for our sensibilities, not for theirs. Their home planet is quite cold, so they find our preferred temperature oppressive.

For another thing, they seemed taller. I realized that they are always slumped when serving us, and I guess I’d thought that was their regular posture, but in their part of the city, they stood much straighter. In fact, most of them were taller than I am.

They didn’t act threatening toward me, but they bunched together and jabbered in their strange-sounding language and looked at me with their odd eyes and I couldn’t help but recall the circumstance of their being among us.

The first intelligent species we encountered when we began to colonize other planets, and we destroyed their home world. It’s no excuse that we didn’t know they were there, that we didn’t know harvesting oxygen would destabilize the atmosphere; we turned a green forest world into an airless wasteland. And so we brought them to live on our planets.

Our biggest fear when we set forth into the universe was that we’d meet a race superior to us. Some hoped such advanced beings would elevate us, but most expected them to despise us and enslave us. And now we have done that to the Digecerians. That we’ve done it more through accident than intent does not excuse it.

And coming face-to-face with them in the Get-O, confronting my fear which arose from my guilt and not from their loud outcries which might have been anger, I ultimately felt sorry for them. They were in the wrong place through no fault of their own, and no right place for them existed among the known planets. We had ruined the world they call Earth in their tongue, and halted the progress which may have brought them a future as bright in knowledge and technology as our own.

StoryADay gave us the suggestion to write about someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Trek

All she wanted to do was stop walking.

“No, Mom,” her son said, pulling her by the wrist. “We have to keep walking.”

They’d spent half an hour deciding what to take, twenty minutes driving until the highway snarled into a standstill, another five minutes deciding what to carry, and now they’d been walking for five hours. The only ones who’d stopped walking were the very old or the sick. No one else felt they were far enough away to be safe.

Safe from what she didn’t know, nor did anyone else. There had been explosions, that was undeniable. There were planes in the sky. The power had gone off, halting the radio announcements of ‘possible terrorist activities’ and ‘potential contamination of the water system.” She hadn’t seen anything that looked like the mushroom cloud she associated with a nuclear bomb, but some people walking near them had spoken of ‘suitcase bombs’ and ‘dirty bombs’ which might not make such a huge blast but were just as dangerous, maybe more.

She remembers when people had bomb shelters. Downtown there are still some buildings with the radiation sign indicating that a safe haven is found someplace within, presumably in the basement or subway. But out in the suburbs, the only potential safety was found in distance.

She stopped walking. “I’m tired and really thirsty,” she told her son. They had finished the water they were carrying over an hour ago.

“Just wait a minute.”

He tried the doors of several of the nearby abandoned cars, finding them all locked, just as they’d left their car locked, as if the world was still a place where people had possessions they protected. He found a rock beside the highway and hurled it through a window, then reached inside and grabbed one of the bottles of water those strangers had planned to take with them as they drove to their sanctuary.

She drank and after that, her son expected her to start walking again. She did, thinking sourly that ‘I’m tired,’ had been the first and most important fact she spoken.

They walked through the night, taking only short breaks which were not restful due to the constant speculation fermenting among their fellow travellers. Some imagined that they felt ill with symptoms of radiation poisoning, others fretted that it was all a hoax perpetrated by master thieves who were even now stripping entire neighbourhoods of all their valuables, others spoke of strategic targets in the direction they were moving, proclaiming that no place was free of whatever contamination had been visited upon them.

They took food from cars, they took water. When the night became cold, they took blankets and sweaters. Her son broke the window of one car and opened a pet carrier to set a small dog free. She couldn’t imagine why the owners had left it in there.

And still they walked.

Her son walked and every hour he tried his cell phone again, but there was no signal.

Dawn was a faint blush behind them, studded with bright explosions as the night had been, when she told him she would not go one step further. He allowed her to rest, sleeping fitfully in the front seat of a truck which had been left unlocked. After a time which seemed very brief to her, he returned with a cane.

“Surely someone didn’t leave their cane in their vehicle,” she told him.

“No, they didn’t,” he replied, and wouldn’t discuss it further. “We have to get to Aunt Sally’s house. It’s an older house and I think it has a bomb shelter.”

She thought it actually was a root cellar, but she said nothing. It was a goal. When they got there, she could stop walking.

StoryADay suggested today that we write a story in which the protagonist wants something. The long hike I took today was inspiration, though hardly a forced march.

Deadly Thoughts

Click.

I woke up.

I was with many others of my kind, moving. Each one experienced the click, the final piece and each one woke, each one found itself travelling in a single direction, but we knew not where.

We moved to darkness, shut into a coffin tailored for our shape, woken and put into limbo from one moment to the next.

When next I woke, the others were not with me, but others of similar shapes and others of different shapes but similar intentions surrounded me, some in glass cases, some attached to walls. It was bright and noisy.

I was taken from my box and handled by shapes complementary to my shape, but not like me, not hard and deadly but soft and vulnerable. I understood that my purpose was to protect them.

I was taken from my box and handled, then returned to my box, taken out again, returned, many times. More times than I have deadly thoughts.

But at last, one of the soft shapes fit me perfectly. Although I was returned to my box, when I was taken out again, that shape held me again and encased me in a supple case that strapped to him. After that, I was with him almost constantly, although during the night my case was not attached to him, but set on a table near by.

With him, I unleashed my deadly thoughts frequently, but they flew not toward danger but toward an education of how to fly single-mindedly. I don’t know if I was meant to learn this, or my deadly thoughts, or my soft shaped handler, but I do know that we did learn.

And at last the day came when I was called upon to hurl my deadly thoughts at danger, and my handler’s satisfaction let me know that we had been successful. And I felt proud.

But my handler had a soft companion who didn’t like me, and one day she said to him, “Can’t you leave that in the car? Tonight of all nights we don’t want to make my parents nervous about your profession.”

A shattering of glass and a new handler grabbed me. He sheathed me in darkness and brought me out after a time, presenting me to a new handler. This new handler kept me next to his body, but without a supple case, just jammed between his clothing and his damp skin.

Tonight we are moving in the darkness, and his hand keeps clutching me, fitting his shapes into the perfect recesses of my shape, pressing almost hard enough to release my deadly thoughts. The target of my thoughts is not a danger to my handler.

I fear that my handler is a danger to the target, who is small and unsuspecting.

I wish, when the time comes, that I could hold back my deadly thoughts.

StoryADay challenged us today to write a tale with a non-human protagonist.

At the Zoo

The body lay in the doorway to the snake house at the zoo.

“He’s the snake custodian,” Romero said. “Maybe he got bit.”

“No,” Dixie countered, lifting one of the man’s hands with her pen. “Look at this note. I think he was trying to write ‘murder’ but ‘murd’ was as far as he got.”

“Okay,” Ellery said, “we have three hours until the old man gets here. Let’s see if we can solve one on our own.”

Working under one of the most insightful homicide detectives in the country was educational for them but rarely satisfying. Usually he arrived when they were just beginning to form an impression of the facts, then he’d look around briefly and put together all the clues they’d seen and some they hadn’t to come up with a brilliant and correct solution.

When the coroner arrived, he wouldn’t give them any suggestions as to cause of death, other than to note that the deceased had not been shot, stabbed or beaten.

“What about those two puncture marks on his wrist?” Romero asked. “Are they from a snake bite or could they be from a needle? Someone might have wanted it to look like a snakebite.”

“Could be a snakebite, could be a needle. I won’t know until I get him to the morgue.”

The three junior detectives divvied up the investigation. Ellery went to interview the man’s co-workers to see if any of them could be considered to be a suspect. Dixie went to check out the man’s basement suite in his mother’s house to see if she could find any clues there. Romero was to go over the snake house with a fine toothed comb.

Two hours later they met outside the snake house. “He had recently bought a gun,” Dixie reported. “Perhaps he was afraid of someone.”

Ellery said, “The elephant custodian said our vic had recently had an affair with the red panda girl, who used to date the grizzly man. Maybe he was jealous. What did you find, Romero?”

“All the snake boxes are closed and I could see a snake in every one, so I don’t think any of them got out. Only half of them had fresh water, so I think he stopped halfway through, or was stopped. His water pail is on the floor and a bit of water has slopped over the edge. Not exactly signs of a struggle, but he didn’t spill water anywhere else, so I assume it is significant. The back door is propped open. Anyone could have come in.”

“They all come in at five to feed their animals and prepare them for the day,” Ellery said. “But no one admits to seeing anyone besides our vic around the snake house. The grizzlies were still eating their raw meat but the elephants had no food in their enclosure. The elephant guy says they don’t get fed until the visitors are here to see it.”

“I think we should take the grizzly guy, the elephant guy and the red panda girl in for questioning,” Dixie stated.

“Not so fast.” He had arrived.

While the three junior detectives stood near the doorway, he stalked around the room, looked at all the snakes, looked at the note just inside the chalk outline of the body. He didn’t even go into the back where, according to their theory, the vic had been attacked and given some kind of toxin through two needle punctures.

“It was an accident,” he told them.

“But what about the note – he was trying to write ‘murder’ so that we’d know it wasn’t an accident.”

“He wasn’t writing ‘murder.’ He was trying to write “Murderajee.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the King Cobra who bit him – it’s on the cage over there. He wanted us to know what kind of anti-venom to use, in case we got here in time. Too bad we didn’t.”

For today’s StoryADay prompt, we were encouraged to bring our protagonist in late in the story. I thought it was a good chance to bring my brilliant murder investigator back into play.

Solomon

The guests at the Mount Solomon Lodge became aware of his presence gradually. When Doreen and Jessica were doing yoga before breakfast, just as they were finishing off with savasana, lying prone and relaxed with their eyes closed, the room’s door creaked open.

“We’re just about done,” Doreen said softly, hoping not to break the peaceful feelings washing over her.

Jessica sat up. “There’s no one there,” she stated. She jumped up and walked over to the door, looked down the hallway. “No one at all.”

“That’s weird.” Doreen rolled over and sat up. “Must have been a draft.”

At breakfast, they joked about their ghostly yoga-mate. Camille reported that she’d heard a knock on her door in the middle of the night, but no one was there when she opened it.

Crystal, the co-ordinator of their meeting, had had her own nighttime experience. “I heard footsteps going by my room, but when I looked outside, I couldn’t see anyone.”

“Oh, I don’t like this.” Camille shivered.

Doreen suggested, “Let’s ask at the front desk if this place is haunted. At least then we’ll know.”

The hotel clerk said, “Oh, you’re very lucky. Not many of our guests have seen Solomon, our ghost.”

“We didn’t actually see him.”

“Well, you might, but don’t worry. He’s completely harmless. We think he’s an old guy, a trapper, who died in this valley and loved this valley, so he’s hanging around.”

That evening, they saw Solomon, or thought they did. At dusk, they were enjoying cups of hot chocolate while sitting in the gazebo and watching glorious autumn leaves toss around in gusts of warm wind.

“Someone’s walking across the field,” Jessica announced.

“Where?”

Jessica pointed.

“I think I see something,” Camille said.

“He’s gone now.”

“It was kind of a fat guy, with a leather jacket, right?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Doreen complained, aware that she had somehow felt a sense of ownership of the ghost, having been the first to hear him knocking and the only one to think of asking hotel staff about him. Why hadn’t he revealed himself to her?

Over the next two days, many people in their group had encounters with Solomon. More doors received late night knocking, things in rooms were moved around (although the strong wind could possibly be blamed for moving lighter objects), he was seen in the yoga room (by Camille who’d been looking for Doreen and who fled upstairs in a panic) and on the balconies.

“This is so strange. Months and months can go by without any sign of Solomon. You guys are really lucky,” one of the waitresses told them.

On the last night of their stay, Doreen was woken at 4 a.m. by a knock on the door. “At last,” she thought, and rushed to open it, expecting to look out and see his portly form walking away. Instead, it was Camille, in pajamas with pink teddy bears. She was crying.

“He knocked and he knocked,” she told Doreen. “I’d get up and answer and no one would be there, then I’d go back to sleep and it would happen again. All night long! I know they say he’s harmless, but this is just mean. I have a long way to drive tomorrow.”

“Come in – there’s two beds. You can have the other one. He never knocks on my door.”

But as Doreen stepped outside to take Camille’s arm and lead her into the room, she smelled something. “Is that smoke?”

The fire was small, in some trees next to the parking lot, but it could have been quickly spread to the Lodge by the wind if they hadn’t raised the alarm.

“Solomon was just protecting his namesake hotel,” Jessica said to Doreen as they were driving away the next day.

“And us,” Doreen added.

The May 10 suggestion from StoryADay was to write a story with a ‘hidden protagonist.’  My thanks to our guests at the Black Cat Guest Ranch for suggesting the ghost theme.