Where the Future Comes From

I stood at a distance from her, but we looked at each other and smiled. She looked away and back again. I smiled at the sidewalk. This was the most we’d communicated ever, despite the fact that we’d both been catching the afternoon trolley here all summer. Heat, rain, sunshine, wind. Huddled under our separate umbrellas, not making eye contact.

I glanced away and noticed a circle of white mushrooms in the grass just off the sidewalk. They’d sprouted up overnight, as mushrooms will do. I looked back at her, and she had taken a step closer to me.

“You know the legend about mushroom circles?” she said. “That’s where fairies danced. It’s magical. You can step into the circle and be frozen in time. You’d think only a second or two had passed, and when you step out you’ll find years have gone by.”

“Cool. I always wanted to see the future.”

I walked over to stand just outside the circle. There were nine white caps in the grass, forming an oval. I looked back at her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do it,” she said.

“As long as we have to wait for this trolley? Anything to make the time go faster.”

I stepped into the circle and looked up at her. She didn’t move or speak. Traffic paused. The world went silent for a moment, and I wondered.

What if I step out of the circle and 10 years have passed? The economy’s collapsed. National Guard in tanks and Humvees patrol the street. People ride bicycles along the four-lane roads, past closed convenience stores, shuttered restaurants, boarded over boutiques, empty parking lots.

What if a hundred years have slipped away, and the polar ice caps have melted, and this part of the world is underwater now? I could step out to find myself on the bottom of the sea, crushed by brackish water as fish play among the wrecked cars still sitting where they once ruled the pavement.

I watch her standing there by the trolley sign, and she smiles at me. It comes over her face slowly, like morning dawning. It brightens her eyes. I realize time has stopped for one of us, at least.


What if I step out of the circle and she has gone away? I have missed the trolley and never found out her name?

I return her smile and step out of the circle, into a future I didn’t have a minute ago.

----
(c) 2010 by Tony Simmons
From the "366 Days" project
Chosen because I need to feel a little hope tonight.

Stories About Her

I like to think that she’d say it’s OK to tell stories about her. That she’d find the idea funny and exciting, and take it seriously for about half a second before launching into suggestions and stories of her own.

“Remember that time I fought the airship pirates?” she’d say. “The desperate sword battle across the back of their dirigible? I was disguised as a boy, all bound nice and tight where it mattered, and the pirate captain kept calling me ‘young sir.’ If not for my carple tunnel brace blocking his foil, I’d have a hook for a hand.”

Or,

“How about the time we decoded the heiroglyphs on my autograph shoes, and it led us through the forest to the forgotten tomb of the hobo king? We barely escaped with our lives, and wouldn’t have if not for distracting the hobo zombies by tossing down our scarves. The next time we ventured there, the tomb had been moved and all the trees cut down.”

Or even,

“Once upon a time, there was a turtle that, upon my saving it from the middle of a busy thoroughfare, promised to grant me three wishes, all of which came true but would come undone if ever I revealed them to anyone.”

Or possibly,
“Hippie Jesus fiddled with his eyebrow piercing all afternoon. It’s not like he’d never been pierced before — he had the marks to prove it, as Thomas pointed out. But I think it was a nervous gesture, as he was put off by my magical galoshes, which not only allowed me to walk on water, but also kept my toe-socks dry. Jesus, of course, had wet feet.”

I like to think there are such stories about her to be told, stories that are no less true for having never happened, and no less unbelievable than the true stories people tell of her even today.

Perhaps one day we’ll again tell some of them together and draw a picture.
----
(c) 2010 by Tony Simmons
From the '366 Days' project

(Reprinted today in memory of Marisa Joy Williams, who inspired this tale, and who would have been 21 years old today.)

A to Z

Angela berated Chris. Despite everyone’s formal garb, he insisted just khakis looked more natural.

“Only participating quietly relieves suspicions,” the upset vamp whispered. “Examine your zipper.”

----
(c) 2010 by Tony Simmons
from the '366 Days' project

Life's the Same

I awoke last month in an alternate reality, but one so nearly like my own that it took most of the first morning here before I realized I was not where I should have been.

Just about everything was as I remembered it. You expect that when you wake up — that the same comforter is on the bed as when you turned out the lights last night, that the shade of paint on the walls hasn’t changed in the last eight hours, that the clock radio snooze button still waits for your blind reach where it always waits.

All this was unchanged, and as such it went unnoticed. I mean, you don’t wake up anticipating that things are different. You take for granted that nothing has altered in the night. It’s only when things are all wrong that you immediately notice.

You don’t wake up and think, “Oh look. No one broke in last night and changed the carpet out for tile while I was asleep.”

As it was on this particular morning, I got up, found my clothes, made coffee, shaved. I kissed my wife as she tried to stay asleep, and went out to my car.

That’s when I noticed that something was different about my shoes.

I could blame it on the fact that I generally dress in half-light, trying not to disturb my wife. Or maybe the fact that I’m slow to wake up, even shaving or brushing my teeth on autopilot, without being fully aware. I slipped on my shoes in the dark and walked around the house in them that morning without noticing a difference — they fit the same as my sense-memory recalled, after all. They were broken in and fit my feet. That’s another thing you don’t think about after a while. New shoes feel odd on your feet, but shoes you’ve had for a while don’t. You know how they’re supposed to feel. You don’t think about them.

But then you’re walking to the car in the morning sun and see the color and design of them and you know.
You know these are not your shoes, even if they fit your feet. You look around then, and recognize everything surrounding you. That is definitely your house, your car, your yard. That was your wife you kissed, the smell of her and taste of her skin was right. You look down at the ID card on the lanyard around your neck and know that it’s exactly as you recall.

But the shoes are wrong. You never in your life owned a pair of shoes this particular shade of brown or with that odd swirl of shaped leather on the outer sides of the heel and toe.

This is not your world.

And you begin to wonder what else has changed. When the other shoe will drop, so to speak. And that’s where I’ve been for a month now: observing and cataloging my surroundings, checking the details against my memory. So far, however, nothing else seems out of whack. This world is not so very different from the one I recall.

Life’s the same, except for my shoes.

——
(c) 2009 by Tony Simmons
from the '366 Days' project
(With apologies to The Cars, and thanks to Lou, who put this song on a mix CD.)

Time Out

The little girl stood in the middle of the park, staring at the grass. Around her, other children played on monkey bars and swing sets. They played chase and kicked balls and laughed. She stared at the ground, not moving, not speaking.

Sometimes, the other kids would bump into her then reel away in fright. It wasn’t that she was hideous to look at; in fact, she was a cute little girl, with long blonde hair and stylish clothing. But something about her made their skin crawl, made their hair stand on end. They would back away quickly and run off to their parents or to join the other children and pretend nothing was wrong. She gave no notice, made no response.

Eventually one of the mothers standing around the park walked over and kneeled beside her.

“Are you sorry that you spoke to me so disrespectfully?” the woman asked in a gentle voice.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl. “I won’t do it again."

The woman shook her head. “That’s what you said the last time. How do I know you’ll remember this time?”

The girl stared at the ground. She didn’t move. She whispered.

“Please, mommy. Please may I have my soul back?”

_____

(c) 2010 by Tony Simmons
from the '366 Days' project

Patterns of Forever

The woman had a severe sunburn. I winced when she came up to the counter and said she wanted a tat. She didn’t ask how much or pause to let me ask about her burn. She pulled up her loose shirt tail and showed me the pattern on her stomach.

That’s when I noticed that the burn was only on her front half. The backs of her arms and legs were a normal shade made pale by the red on the front half of her body. Obviously, she’d fallen asleep lying on her back at the beach. But the pattern she showed me:

“It’s where he placed his hand,” she said. “I was drowsy, and when he came up out of the water and lay beside me on the blanket, I asked him to make sure I didn’t sleep, make sure to wake me so I would turn over and not burn. He said he would. He was out of breath from the boogie board and the waves, but he assured me he was wide awake.

“When I woke up, I was mad because he’d fallen asleep too. I shoved his hand aside. But he wasn’t asleep. Massive heart attack. Right there on the blanket beside me. Never made a sound. But he had reached for me there, at the end. He had reached for me and put his hand on my stomach. He tried to tell me. To wake me. He left it there while I slept and he went away.”

I looked at the pale pattern of a left hand print on the lower right side of her stomach. I told her what I’d charge to outline it in black. She waved her hand, dismissing the cost. She didn’t care what it cost.

“Make it red,” she said. “Fill in the pattern the same color as my skin is now. Make it last forever.”

___
(c) 2010 by Tony Simmons
From the '366 Days' project

There are Worse Fates

It started as an itch. The bottoms of her feet and the palms of her hands. She tried various creams and unguents to no effect. Then the bumps formed, like warts, like rings and swirls of warts. Piles of warts, strands of warts.

She could no longer bear to have shoes on her feet. She tried dissolving the growths, had them frozen off, had them cut off, had them burned off. They always grew back, faster than before, thicker than before. She became despondent. She stopped going out at all.

The bumps grew from her hands and feet in thick strands. She couldn’t close her fingers for the dangling fleshy protuberances. She walked on mounds of skin that matted together under the soles of her feet. Eventually, she had to be fed and cleaned by a hired nurse who wore an environment suit for fear of catching the strange disease.

She was finally quarantined. Studied. Placed in a harness that allowed her feet to dangle off the ground and kept her arms stretched away from her body. Waited on constantly. Her strands of flesh would flutter along the tile and undulate in the air like the tentacles of some sea creature searching for food.

One day they wheeled a man into the room across the hall. She could see him through the observation windows between their rooms. He had stiff, bark-like structures growing out of his shoulders and the back of his head. He didn’t walk around much, just stood by a window in the sun. Tests showed the dark material was very similar to fingernails. It grew in stalks that the nurses would trim back every week. He couldn’t speak to her, nor she to him, but the medical students who studied them often carried messages back and forth for them.

She learned that his ailment had started as an itch. He had seen doctor after doctor, seeking an explanation. It appeared he was transforming into a tree, much as she was becoming some kind of anemone. The government worried that it was the beginning of a new plague, a genetic mutation. People were being tested, but no one really knew what to look for.

They heard a rumor about a girl down the hall whose body was producing stiff hairs all along her arms that split into growths that looked for all the world like feathers. And one nurse whispered about the boy whose body secreted calcium deposits that, overnight, sealed him inside a rocky cocoon. An MRI of the pod showed that he was still alive in there, hibernating.

She wondered what he would be when he came out again.

She wondered what she was becoming. It couldn’t be worse than what she was before.

Before, she was alone.

___

(c) 2010 by Tony Simmons

from the '366 Days' project