Welcome to Fantasy Friday! Every week, you are invited to write and post anything having to do with fantasy, science fiction, etc., right here in the comments: a crazy idea for a new subgenre, a bit of a story you’re trying to write, your unbridled opinion of the last novel you read or the last SF convention you attended. At 5 p.m. PST today, if we’ve got at least ten participants, we’ll choose the day’s most entertaining writer and PayPal them $10 on the spot. Go start your weekend off with a cold one on us! (Minors, make that a couple of hot chocolates.)
Author Jackie Kessler has an alter-ego, Jesebel, who interviews fictional characters instead of their authors.
It’s one thing to be interviewed for a website or magazine. It’s a whole different kettle of fish when your main character kicks you out of bed, so to speak, and takes over. Writers are always saying things like that: “Oh, my characters took over my story!” which is usually said in the same tone of voice as “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”
So the main character of my novel, SHADOWBRIDGE, whose name is Leodora, was interviewed by the fictional interviewer, Jezebel, and Jezebel’s slightly unhinged sidekick, Melpomene, and first she talks out of school like crazy, but then she goes and makes up an erotic folktale about a woman who made a lover out of pure chocolate but who one night fell asleep on top of him after sex and the next morning he’d melted.
I had nothing to do with this. I’ve no idea where this story came from. And I refuse to make any further references to peanut butter, either.
(The interview is at http://www.jackiekessler.com/blog/2008/01/12/her-name-is-leo-and-she-dances-on-the-sand/, if anyone’s interested.)
Gregory Frost
Today, I listened to the earth spin.
It told me that it values my skills and appreciates my contributions. I am an important part of the earth’s restructuring initiative and am going to play a pivotal role in its success. The earth knows I want more, but it can’t offer that – not yet. The earth is growing, you see; optimizing, not marginalizing. With growth comes challenge. With challenge comes opportunity. The earth needs me to evolve with the changing landscape; to rise to the occasion of a new, more promising future. The earth is shifting paradigms, rising above its competitors through cutting-edge technology and improved functionality. The earth is paving the way for a brand new tomorrow.
And I believe everything the earth says.
The earth is a filthy liar! It told me there would be cake, but when I got there, there was only PIE.
PIE!!
CLOVERFIELD!! Woooooo! Play ‘Jessie’s Girl’!
Don’t talk to strangers, oh baaby don’t you…
Huh? Oh CLOVERfield. I thought you said something else.
My bad.
I spoke to the Earth yesterday, and it promised me pie. But when I got there, there was only cake.
…
More evidence that the earth cannot be trusted.
That’s precisely what the stars told me last week, but I thought they were just full of hot air. Guess I know better now…
I once tried to use an iron to flatten my hand… I mean cartoon got hit by a boulder flat, flapping in the wind. Naturally it didn’t work.
Now I’m bothered by the thought, what if it had? What would that make me? I’m almost tempted to try it again.
You should try using the iron to achieve invisibility. Apply it with force to an object until the object no longer has a width. You’ll still be able to see it from the right angles, but from one direction, it will be invisible. I bet it would be a great party trick.
I would like to take credit for this idea, but I can’t. The Earth told it to me during our discussion yesterday. Well, except the Earth said I should try it on myself using a boulder…
Have you ever imagined a movie you never saw, and then you saw it, and you were disappointed?
Or you saw a movie many years ago but when you saw it again you realize that your memories were inaccurate?
Once in a movie-guide book I read the title “Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.” There was only a brief synopsis that said it was an action sci-fi movie and a picture of a rough-looking hero. I imagined a whole plot, cast of characters and extensive, spectacular sets for the movie. Of course, when I did get to see the movie on cable a few months ago it was nothing like the spectacular space-opera I had pictured. It was a very big disappointment.
Then there’s the movies that my brain has modified. I could have sworn a scene happened in a low-budget fantasy I saw, but in fact, it never did. I had the clear memory in my childhood but with the magic of DVDs I was able to confirm that I had invented a scene.
Then there’s the movies that I don’t know if they’ve ever happened. I clearly remember watching an anime movie about a girl that escapes from the Sun (she’s some sort of fire elemental) and moves to Earth, where she acquires a synthetic body and becomes a rock star, but then degenerates into some kind of addiction, maybe even prostitution. Her body malfunctions and she ends up in this junkyard/facility.
The thing is I can’t remember if I ever saw it or if I made it up. I made up a lot of stories when I was a kid. Or maybe I just clobbered up pieces of stories and strung this weird thing together.
What worries me the most is that I may be remembering wrong or forgetting important stuff. Like the stories my great-grandmother told me about the Revolution or the history of my family. I’m an only child so I’m the only one who actually has the stories in her head and I fear one day I’ll simply misplace them in some part of my brain forever.
In short, I’m worried about how fragile memories can be.
I DO THE WORK OF THE BONE QUEEN
A story by John R. Fultz
After I died, I went wandering about the town.
Stars littered the sky like bloody diamonds, and the new moon was a silver sickle. Having left the flesh behind, I reveled in the freedom of ghostliness. No longer would a mangled and deformed body imprison me. I floated along the black alleys strewn with trash, past a crowd of rats gnawing a severed hand. One of the little beasts looked threateningly at me as I passed by, its eyes gleaming like minute stars. I laughed and willed myself higher, rising above the cracked pavement and the black rooftops of condemned buildings. The town lay spread below me, a neglected, dying organism rotting in its own filth. A heavy rain fell, passing through my ethereal self, and violent thunder shook the sky.
Across the collection of slumped roofs and crumbling towers, I saw the abandoned factory, a shriveled heart that had once pumped lifeblood into the town. When it had finally ceased operations, years after the industrial accident that crippled me, the town began to diminish and rot. I used to stare out my apartment window every morning at its boarded windows and rusted gates, wishing that it had closed down before it ruined my body. Its only products now were dust and decay. I knew its dead, festering walls like the backs of my hands, both of which I had left behind forever. What surprised me, however, were the glimmering lights shining now from the factory’s windows.
The light struggled to free itself from the fissured brick walls, seeping through cracks in the boarded windows. Floating ecstatically in the heart of the storm, I felt a magnetic attraction to that dilapidated place. My curiosity became a raging hunger, amazing to me since I no longer had need of any food or drink. This was a hunger of the soul. Who could be in the old factory lighting fires or installing generators to shed light along its decrepit hallways?
I willed my phantasmal form toward the building as lightning danced across the sky. Gliding through an ivy-smothered wall, I entered the musty interior. Orange flames belched from a line of soot-stained furnaces. Silent forms bustled about a collection of long worktables. The workers wore black smocks with heavy hoods. Their faces were indistinguishable in the shadows of these hoods, and opaque goggles shielded their eyes. Oversized gloves of dark rubber covered their hands, and they worked feverishly to assemble some arcane product that made its way down the line. Hundreds of these beings lined both sides of the tables, and as I floated nearer I saw crimson drops spilling from the tables’ edges. Had a new meat-packing plant moved into town overnight? If so, shouldn’t they have cleaned the rust, mold, and filth from the walls and floors? Weren’t there federal guidelines for such things?
I looked over the workers’ shoulders; they seemed completely oblivious to me. I saw that they were not cutting meat. Rather, they were assembling something, some unknowable form from variously shaped chunks of raw meat. At the next table, the black-gloved hands carefully chose pieces from a towering pile of shattered bones. The shoved the jagged bone bits into the fleshy sculptures, and passed their handiwork on to the next table, where blankets of blistered skin were stretched over the grotesque forms. When these misshapen sculptures of meat, bone, and skin reached the final assembly table, new workers hung them from metal hooks attached to rusted lengths of chain. The chains did not hang from any ceiling, but instead depended from a swirling sea of darkness that tossed and heaved above the worker’s heads. I expected the dark waters to fall at any moment upon them like a massive, oily tidal wave; but this never happened.
I hovered in the air above the manufacturing tables, watching the grisly work proceed below me, and a deep horror filled my bodiless form. What were these bloody sculptures and who were these faceless drones? What gruesome purpose did this installation serve? I imagined a work force of mass murderers engaged in the hopeless endeavor of reassembling the bodies of all those they had slain. But that could not be the case because the final products of their industry, hanging bloody from the hooked chains, came nowhere close to resembling human bodies. Yet I did notice that after a time suspended in the charnel air of the factory, each of the meat sculptures began to quiver and twist on its hook. If they had mouths, I was sure they would be screaming in agony. Eventually, each of the twitching oddities was drawn upward on its chain and disappeared into the inverted sea of roiling darkness.
I could not watch this process any longer, so I willed myself to float out of the terrible factory. But to my endless frustration I discovered that I could not pass back through the sweating walls. Passing into the factory had been easy, yet now I was trapped inside, and I wanted only to glide back into the chaotic freedom of the storm outside. I tried again and again, but I felt my airy form growing heavier and denser, and soon I stood on the gore-slick factory floor. I looked at my hands, transparent and ghostly before my intangible eyes. My translucent wrists bore deep gashes, spiritual recreations of the fleshly wounds I had inflicted upon myself earlier that night. I had used a shaving razor to make bone-deep cuts, and my life had flowed from these cuts drop by drop. At first, it was a glorious freedom, this death of mine. But now, I felt drawn into a terrible confinement far more horrible than the broken body that I had fled. Why could I not leave this place of deathly industry? This was not what I wanted when I murdered myself.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me about. One of the hooded workers stood before me. His face was completely obscured behind some sort of gas mask or antique breathing apparatus. He motioned for me to follow him.
“I don’t belong here…” I told him. But he only motioned again for me to follow, and pointed toward a darkened doorway where a set of stairs led upward. He held something out for me to take, and I peered at his gloved hand. A red, glistening chunk of meat pulsed in his open palm. It was a human heart, still living, pumping the last few drops of blood from its interior chambers.
I don’t know why, but I accepted the throbbing organ. As the blood ran down my forearm, I noticed that I was no longer transparent. It seemed that my flesh had returned, but my body was no longer lame or deformed. Had death healed me and given me a new body for its own obscure ends? The masked worker gestured that I should mount the stairs alone, so I complied.
Cast-off bits of mutilated bodies littered the steps: ears, eyeballs, lips, fingers. Each of them twitched horribly as I made my way upward. As I climbed, I passed a tall, gleaming mirror. I stopped, staring at myself in this mirror, but it did not reflect my newfound flesh. Instead, it showed only my grinning skull and the skeletal network that lay beneath my fresh skin. I watched, fascinated by my fleshless reflection, as it placed the beating, bloody heart into the center of its empty rib cage. A great confusion filled me, and the world swam about me.
Then, the heart beating wildly in my chest, I walked out of the mirror and continued up the stairs. I stared at my skeletal hands, glad to see that the deep gashes had disappeared along with my new flesh. The wounds had reminded me of my old body, and I had not liked seeing them. But now, I was glorious — the purity of gleaming white bone without a single ribbon of flesh. Except for the red, pulsing heart that floated within my skinless breast. My feet clicked against the slimy stone of the stairs as I ascended, emerging onto a wide balcony overlooking the production floor where the hooded workers feverishly assembled their sculptures of flesh and bone. I paused at the railing for a second, looking down upon the flurry of activity. Then I looked up, and saw the sea of darkness rolling and heaving right above my head. Looking upward, I felt a great sense of vertigo, and suddenly I was staring down into the dark waters. I fell.
The darkness swallowed me, and I sank like a stone. Leviathan forms swam past me, and tiny eyes like drops of flame swirled about my skeletal figure. Far below, which had once been above, I saw the roof of a great palace rising from the sea floor. The sand about its base was black as obsidian, and the towers were curved and pointed like scimitars, or hooks. A forest of chains floated upward from the many windows of the wicked palace, and I saw a few of them being drawn down toward the structure, hauling in the squirming creations of flesh and bone assembled in the deathly factory.
I sank to the dark sand before the towering gates of the palace. It was built from tremendous ebony blocks, and the figures of smiling fiends were carved across the gates, arabesques of tortured victims that seemed to writhe across the gleaming surface of the walls. Two soldiers stood before the gates, fleshless skeletons like me, but wearing verdigris-stained suits of ancient armor. Their empty sockets stared at me from beneath horned helmets, and they pulled the gates open, moving aside their crooked spears so that I could enter.
A host of fellow skeletons stood within, some in the robes of ancient Rome, others garbed in Grecian style, some in stranger garb from unknown lands, while others stood naked, phosphorescent bones gleaming in the dark waters. They stared at me, applauding as I walked along a path made from crushed rubies. Their bony hands made no sound in the thick depths, but I sensed their approval, their welcoming. I was expected here, and they were glad to see me.
At the ruby path’s end, the Bone Queen waited to receive me on her throne of skulls. She wore a crimson gown, and her grinning skull face was set with two great diamonds where eyeballs had nested in ages past. Her crown was a loop of dancing silver flame, blazing eternally even in these deep waters of despair.
I knelt, and kissed the bare bones of her feet.
“Welcome to the fleshless realm,” she said. “We have a special place for you.”
Her beauty was terrible to behold. It pierced my throbbing heart. She had no flesh to spoil the purity of her immaculate essence, nothing but bleached bone that seemed to glow with the heat of her royal presence. I knew her. How I had dreamed of her…
“I am your slave,” I said.
“As are all here,” she replied.
“How may I please you, Majesty?”
“I am told you have industrial experience,” she said. “We have a factory for you to run.”
I screamed then, and tried to tear the hammering heart from my rib cage, but the skeleton guards grabbed me and prevented this. They carried me away from the black palace and the terrible beauty of the Bone Queen.
They gave me a dark smock, with a heavy hood, and gloves of black rubber to wear. They conducted me back to the assembly tables and showed me to my glass-walled office overlooking the production floor.
In voices of grating bone, they reminded me that I had a quota to fill.
I could not weep, for I had no eyes.
So I dream of her beautiful, fleshless face.
I keep the production lines moving.
And I remind myself:
Now and forever I do the work of the Bone Queen.
-END-
This is a recycled post. It’s the latest post from my blog. Is reincarnation fantasy or science-fiction or horror? I’m not sure. I had to post here because Gregory Frost did. Gregory Frost is a good dude, man.
Audrey Rose & Reincarnation
Saw the movie Audrey Rose the other night.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0075704/
It’s about reincarnation. I got interested in reincarnation after I read a piece by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (now called “Osho“) saying that he’d lived another life 700 years ago. Although I’m not a Rajneeshee, I enjoy reading and listening to Rajneesh’s talks. I generally agree with what he says about philosophy. He’s well read, and usually is reasoned and scientific. His talks are usually matter-of-fact, pretty straightforward, notwithstanding his reputation as a cult leader. So I was surprised to hear him go off on what I consider to be non-scientific, this reincarnation bit.
But after all Rajneesh is from India, and reincarnation is taken to be a fact by the hundreds of millions of people there. Audrey Rose shows film clips of masses of crowds in India. That’s one interesting thing about it- it attempts to gain credulity for reincarnation by reminding the viewer that hundreds of millions of people in India take reincarnation to be a fact.
What really got me about this movie is that it ends up saying the same thing that Rajneesh says in his talk. To be specific, the Rajneesh talk I’m referring to is “Why I Have Come!” in the book “Dimensions Beyond the Known”. Past life experiences can be traumatic, says Rajneesh. That’s the same thing that happens in this movie- the little girl’s past life’s death experience was traumatic. She died in a flaming car crash, and relives this death as nightmare in her new reborn life. If you remember a previous life, you’ll also remember a previous death- and who wants to remember dying?