The Forgiveness Gun, Part II

Part 1 is here. (I posted this more than two weeks ago, but it turns out it was just saved as a draft. Oops.)

*****

“When you were a child,” Garth began unsteadily, “did you ever misbehave?”

“Our observation doesn’t extend that far,” Johnathan piped in, although his attention remained focused on his blade.

Garth shrugged at Lily helplessly, hoping she wouldn’t judge him by the company he keeps and begging her to just answer the question. At least that’s what he thought he was doing; Lily just saw even sadder puppy-dog eyes, which caused her to take the requested action anyway.

“I guess so,” she said. “Not much, but, you know, who doesn’t?”

“And when you did, were you punished?”

Brief terror flickered across Lily’s face. “Yes,” she declared.

Garth noted her steel gaze. “No, no, nothing like that. Just, did, well, did your parents ever do anything to make you mad?”

Lily replied immediately. “All the time.”

“Did you punish them?”

“No. I was a kid. Kids don’t punish parents.”

Garth nodded his encouragement. “All perfectly normal. But did you ever wonder why kids don’t punish parents?”

“No.” Lily considered this question. “I guess it’s because we punish them enough by our misbehavior.”

Johnathan put down the knife and dropped his face into his hands.

“What, that’s not right?” Lily panicked.

“No, no, no. I mean, yes. I mean, no. I mean…” Garth took a breath to compose himself. “It’s not bad, it’s just not right. You know?”

Lily shook her head, bewildered.

“It’s a mentality, a victim’s mentality. Right? You accept your parent’s misbehavior, and even justify it, even though they don’t extend you the same consideration?”

“I still don’t understand.”

Johnathan smiled at her warmly—the first warmth he’d demonstrated in her presence. “What Garth means is, forgiveness is what you do when you don’t have the power for revenge.”

“No,” Lily insisted. “No, that’s not… I mean, yeah, but…”

And her face erupted with the ecstasy of discovering a new world.

“My work here is done,” Johnathan declared. He sheathed his blade, and jauntily high-fived Garth on his way out of the room.

“Couldn’t have done it without you, buddy.”

Johnathan’s guffaws disappeared well after he did.

“He really is an okay person,” Garth explained. “Once you get to know him. And good at what he does.”

“What’s that?”

Garth looked around instinctively for something snide from his partner before it fully hit him that yes, he was alone. This realization provided the same agreeable awkwardness that Johnathan’s presence would have, a point that Garth knew he could bring up at the next meeting to make the fellow do a rare bit of squirming. It also put him into a familiar, if not calm, place to explain.

“I thought you realized,” he said with a goofy giggle. “He stabs people.”

“Oh,” Lily responded, nearly a minute later. She knew it was wrong, yet she suspected it was also right.

“He might slice, I guess. I’ve never really watched or asked. Probably slicing makes more sense, though. Would you need to sharpen the edge to stab?”

Lily shrugged.

“Oh, you won’t need to stab anyone. Or slice or do anything violent. Reg is very clear on that. Not unless you want to.”

“I might want to,” Lily blurted, which she immediately followed by clasping her hands to her mouth.

“Don’t worry,” Garth assured her. “There will be plenty of time to decide that.”

Tabitha Jump

Tabitha Jump looked at the device in her hand, and a mass of lovingly rendered wires gazed back. The red symbolized fury, her rage at her ex-lover Zachariah’s betrayal, and how it propelled him to his exalted position in the High Command. Cyan was the color of Demoracorp, the pharmaceutical conglomerate whose injections had corrupted Zachariah’s mind, and which had transformed Tabitha into the woman she was today. Violet meant patience; Tabitha had planned her vengeance for ten years, and if it failed she would plan it for a thousand more. Gray was the cold, functional death that awaited Zachariah, while the yellow it wrapped around was Tabitha’s rebirth. And the green, the wire that would connect them all together? That was Zachariah’s payback.

But she had one more sacrifice to make. The chamber was fused by crackling antimatter and would require payment of its own. Whatever entered would return, but it would no longer be of this world.

Tabitha connected the final wire. Doubt or hesitation would only kill her now. The bomb’s slowly spinning dials showed two minutes and fifty-one seconds. Fifty. Forty-nine.

Tabitha grasped the device in her left hand, and thrust it into the antimatter chamber. Blindly, she found the matter envelope in its core. Touching it incinerated her skin, but she felt the bomb drawn from her fingers into it. It slipped from her grasp into the cocoon from which it would wreak her vengeance.

Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

“I always knew you couldn’t resist me,” came a nasally voice from behind. Tabitha spun around, the smoke from her now-withered hand rising in dangerous swirls around her.

“Pity you’re so… weak,” Zachariah taunted. He held his specially designed Omni-gun, an array of ten laser pistols that could blast holes in a five-by-five-foot area with a single trigger pull. He had justified the spending of High Council funds on its developing by arguing that it would be commercially successful among big game hunters. To be truthful, he had smote his fair share of elephants with it in its testing phase, but this moment was its true purpose.

Zachariah fired.

Ten laser beams hummed out of ten pistols—and then stopped. The Flail of Time, which had recently introduced itself to Tabitha as Beroungiat, had found her way into Tabitha’s right hand. She spun ten times and whacked ten laser beams, and had folded herself and leapt back into a loop on Tabitha’s belt before Time began flowing normally again.

Eight of the laser beams shot harmlessly away, as if they were golf balls struck by the galaxy’s worst duffer. Number nine ricocheted directly back to the Omni-gun, traveling straight down one of the central barrels to score a direct hit on the laser generation unit, which shattered and rained down shards of glass and crystal.

The tenth laser beam neatly severed and cauterized Zachariah’s left foot.

“You didn’t kill me,” observed Zachariah.

“We weren’t trying to. Yet.”

Zachariah threw his useless weapon aside. Most of him leapt forward; the boot remained in place, upright and still as a statue.

He made a pair of fists that seemed to grow the size of cantaloupes by the time he landed. “This will bring back memories,” he declared, as he reached back to swing.

“Not tonight, lover,” Tabitha retorted. She sprung into the air, using her good hand to vault over Zachariah’s shoulders. As she did this, Beroungiat decided she hadn’t had quite enough; she unsheathed herself and gave Zachariah a solid thump on the back of his head as Tabitha flew over him.

He fell unconscious, just for a few seconds, but far more than enough. In that time he crumpled to the ground, and when he came to, he found getting back to his feet nearly impossible with just one foot and no other support to get to.

Tabitha didn’t wait around to watch. Dimension Jet 9 was two rooms away; if Zachariah’s guards were doing their duty, that could be trouble.

They were, but poorly. One shouted “Halt!” as she reached the doorway. He shot a ray of some kind of death at her, but she flipped into the room in time to watch it harmlessly pass.

A second ray came when Tabitha had jumped into her craft, but Dimension Jet 9’s shields were more than able to handle that.

The walls began to quake.

Zachariah’s guard discovered the meaning of fear.

Zachariah realized what Tabitha’s blackened hand meant, and that she had beaten him at last.

Dimension Jet 9 faded, became visible again, and disappeared for good an instant before the antimatter chamber exploded. The antimatter it released found a healthy quantity of the matter it so desperately wanted, mating first with Zachariah and then a good portion of the High Command palace, and drawing it into a state of nonexistence.

Dimension Jet 9 materialized. It had found itself a nice-looking place, bucolic in the way of a farm on the outskirts of an idealized medieval village. Dimension number 197. It would be a nice place for a vacation, and if someone needed helping, well, Tabitha was proud of her fate.

And in total darkness, a single vengeful word is uttered: “Jump.” For somewhere, even nonexistence… is.”

*****

Well, this definitely needs some explanation.

In Exile Issues, there are three major characters: Nathan, the titular exile; Marty, the bored slacker who works at his father’s business, and Carla, the IT guru at said business.

Carla is obsessive in her fandom of a (very slightly steampunk) graphic novel, to the point of living vicariously through it, taking life lessons from it, and the like. And this, obviously without the art, is that comic book. (In the first draft, it was called “Golden Girl,” which I think was a pretty stupid joke.) A significant passage from an issue will probably show up in the book—that’s why it’s all ital, to show it’s not what’s actually happening. I’m not thrilled with “Tabitha Jump” as a title either, but it will do for now.

Carla is in one respect the driver of the plot. If not always looking for excitement, she will at least embrace it when it comes along, and persuade Marty to do so as well. Anything that makes her life more like Tabitha’s is OK by her.

She’s also morbidly obese. So in addition to not having any superpowers, her physical abilities are in many fields somewhat less than what an average person’s are.

It’s not intended to be a fat joke, and I don’t believe it ever comes off as one. (If I see any, I will excise them in editing). I think she’s at least a reasonably admirable character, in the way that she will take action without regard to whether her abilities may or may not be up to the action.

Lay of the Improv Land

The improv community in Chicago is large, probably the largest in the world, and like all communities, it has managed to organize itself into some rough hierarchy.

At the top is Second City, or at least parts of it. The very pinnacle is its two revue shows, where twelve people at a time who combine excellent improv skills with having caught the eye of the right people at the right time make a living not performing improv.

Second City’s Touring Company, generally abbreviated to TourCo, operates as a farm team for the big shows. TourCo members do perform improv for a living, although when they ask for audience suggestions they usually get “dildo.” Almost every improvisor wants to join TourCo, but most TourCo members come to hate it.

Three well-established theaters form the next tier. There is iO, owned by Charna Halpern. It was formerly named Improv Olympic before the actual Olympics went nuts with protecting the name. The largest pure improv theater in the city (which is true even though plenty of scripted shows play there too), anyone who’s anyone in the community and a whole bunch of people who aren’t will perform there at some point. Just about every improvisor wants to, at least, with two broad exceptions. First are those who tried to and didn’t get cast; they generally spend far more time than is productive complaining about how it’s all about who you know, or its close variant, who you fuck. Second are those who have been performing there and grew angry about something or other. This is a relatively common occurrence in an environment that has too many performers competing for too little stage time; “pissed at Charna” isn’t in any slang dictionary yet, but the number of people who feel that way could support the entry.

The Annoyance is the next of the troika. It has the reputation as the countercultural, rebel theater, even though there’s plenty of cross-pollination. Its shows are often profane and sometimes legendary. The theater doesn’t, as a rule, have the same runaway success of iO, but its training program is generally considered the best there is.

At the other extreme of this tier is ComedySportz, which is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a franchise of a national chain of improv theaters whose focus is short-form, game-based improv (“Like Whose Line is it Anyway” any improvisor will explain, with a sigh that signifies a tiny bit of their soul has died) rather than long-form art pieces, and as a result is sometimes looked down upon. But it is one of the most selective theaters in town, and its shows are consistently crowd-pleasing, if a bit repetitive and, due to the keep-it-clean policies there, a bit sanitized.

Occupying the next step down are a handful of companies that have managed to rent their own space on a reasonably permanent basis, but as relative newcomers haven’t acquired the reputation of the step above. Foremost among these is the Playground, which used to introduce itself as “the nation’s only not-for-profit improv co-op,” until they realized that that combination of words didn’t mean anything to anyone who wasn’t them. There’s a relatively take-all-comers philosophy to the booking of shows at these theaters, so most improvisors have performed at this level. They don’t necessarily invite everyone back, though, so becoming a regular can carry a certain prestige.

All of the above will be useful background information. This, however, is not their story.

*****

Hey! Another lunch-break post.

If I ever write a novel set in the world of Chicago improv comedy—which is likely, although I have no specific plans to—this would (tentatively, of course) be the prologue. The actual story would focus on people far, far, far, far, far lower on the improv food chain: The people who have been chewed up and pooped out by improv, and who still don’t leave.

In the meantime, it’s a reasonably accurate classification as far as it goes.

Da Bears

Heather strutted into town hall Monday after school.

She looked more buoyant somehow, simultaneously lighter and fuller, a bit like a parade balloon that got an extra burst of helium before taking off.

She smiled. She rarely did that in generic circumstances. “Afternoon, Mayor,” she greeted, or more precisely, gloated, as she flitted into Jonas’s office.

“Heather, good. I need help on the budget for the Peace Carnival.” Jonas exuded business as he spoke with an efficiency that was almost offensively out of place.

Heather decided to take amusement rather than offense, however. “The Peace Carnival is nine months away,” she observed. “You’re working on the budget for the town band, or at least, you would be, if you worried about budgets, but you just chuck the numbers in and fiddle with them afterwards when you know how much we’re actually in the hole.”

Jonas calculated instantly and decided that his best option was to continue his game. He silently tapped a folder and slid it across his desk.

Heather recognized the maneuver for what it was, and moreover, that she held the winning position and could therefore enjoy watching whatever happened. In one smoothe movement, she took the folder and offered Jonas a friendly mocking in the form of a curtsey.

At the bottom of this maneuver, she spoke one word.

“Bears.”

She let the word ping like a naval depth charge, stretching it out until it had at least three syllables and concluding with an audible puff of air. Her smile turned into a grin, which she presented to Jonas expectantly.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” This was clearly false. Heather was discussing football. As a native of Chicago, Jonas retained fierce loyalty to the Bears. Heather, meanwhile, had more-or-less randomly adopted a detectible but largely indifferent fandom of the Buffalo Bills. For three weeks, Jonas and Heather had been bantering about yesterday’s game between the two. Jonas supported his theory about the Bears’ inevitable victory with complicated diatribes about defensive theory and such, while Heather infuriated him by observing the Bills’ healthier auras and freshly cleansed spirits.

Bills 44, Bears 3.

So Heather prompted: “The game.”

Jonas responded with a blank expression.

“The game,” Heather repeated. “The gaaaaaame. The scoring tsunami, the triumph of pigskin precision, the absolute humiliation suffered by your Chicago Bears at the hands of my heroic Buffalo Bills.”

Jonas made a credible attempt to appear to be racking his brains. “I’m not aware of any such game,” he said.

“Oh, there was,” Heather assured him. “I listened to it on the little clock radio in my bedroom.” As a final shot, she added, “While I was brushing my hair.” It wasn’t true, but it would annoy Jonas; Heather knew him to be perfectly progressive in matters of gender roles, but she also knew that comprehending the combination of football with something so girlie was well beyond his abilities.

Jonas held fast. “I’m pretty sure you’re mistaken.”

“You lost! You lost! You lost! You lost!” Heather accompanied her chanting with an impromptu dance, or at least the semi-rhythmic waving of her arms.

“Can you offer some evidence to support your position?”

“Position?” Heather sputtered. Jonas’s joke was fun, but now it was getting old. “It’s not a position, it’s a stone-cold fact!”

“There’s no need for hostility, Heather,” Jonas said, with the exaggerated calmness of a psychiatrist or bomb defuser. “Simply provide some proof and I will accept it.”

“On your computer,” Heather directed. She jumped behind Jonas’s desk to call up news about the game, but she didn’t need to. Jonas was already reading a recap.

“Right here! It says right here!”

“The thing is, Heather, you really can’t trust what’s on the internet,” Jonas said with a practiced and insincere sympathy. “Anyone could have put that up there, and for any reason, and you just can’t know.”

Heather pointed at the source of the article forcefully enough to rattle Jonas’s monitor. “Associated Press,” she declared.

Jonas shook his head sadly and made tsking noises with his tongue. “Not a reliable source.”

“Not a reliab… You… NNNGGGHH!” And with that, Heather stomped her way toward the door.

“Heather,” Jonas commanded, as she was about to exit. She reluctantly turned. “It was a lesson,” he explained. “Any fact can be denied by casting doubt on the credibility of the source.”

Heather glared at Jonas for a few seconds before wordlessly turning and stomping away.

“Heather!” Jonas called, leaping from his chair and chasing after her, finally catching her half way down the hall and turning her around with a hand on her shoulder.

“So you admit lying to me, and that the Bears lost?” “Yes,” Jonas said sheepishly.

Heather’s countenance changed slightly too quickly for her anger to have been real. Once more she broke into a dance while chanting “You looo-ooost! You looo-ooost! You looo-oooost!” in ever-louder tones.

“You know, I don’t need to have an intern,” he grumbled. Heather responded with a playful punch to his arm, as they returned to his office to get some actual work done.

*****

This one is roughly an extension of a conversation that I had with my friend Derick. He’s a rabid Steelers fan, I’m an indifferent Vikings fan. Derick thinks the two teams played a couple of weeks ago, but I simply can’t seem to find any evidence. In any event, it feels right as a Heather and Jonas interaction in Clean Hippie Murders, so that’s where I’m putting it.

New Video: The Assassinated Presidents

Did you know that I rap? Well, after seeing this video, you won’t know that either. But I do play President McKinley, and he raps. At least, he did when he was alive.

The video is a Three Legged Race production, written and directed by 3LR co-founder Derick Hawksworth.

Mini Coopergasm, Part II

The thrilling conclusion!

*****

Zena took her place and sat down. It wasn’t so bad, she had to admit. The leather seats were comfortable enough, at least. Nothing jabbing or poking here. And there were a lot of dials. For all she knew, Zena might have been at the wheel of a nuclear reactor.

“Here’s the key,” Chelsea chirped. “You just put it in the ignition and turn.”

Trembling, she did. The machine growled to life.

“Oh, Danny!” Renee moaned. Danny, as Zena had recently learned, was Renee’s current fling, a strapping stud too young for anything long-term but a lot of fun for the time being. The knowledge failed to put Zena’s mind at ease.

Chelsea sensed in Renee’s ecstasy an opportunity to get back into the transaction. “Now this vehicle comes with heated seats standard, and…”

“Heated seats!” Renee shrieked, still at least half in Danny’s clutch.

Zena, for her part, mostly tuned them both out. It had been years since she’d driven, and it required her full attention.

“…so you can feel that you’re doing something good for the earth,” she half-heard Chelsea drone as she put the car into reverse. That is reverse, right? She double checked, and it was. Check her progress in the mirror and—total blackness? No, they just weren’t adjusted. Zena slammed on the brakes, a completely unnecessary maneuver, as the car was traveling below walking speed, but still. She needed to stop to prevent an accident, and that would do it.

“Whoa, cowboy!” Renee shouted, back from her fantasy and annoyed about it. Zena ignored her and carefully adjusted the rear-view and side mirrors, before inching the car backwards once again.

“…accelerate from zero to sixty in…”

But Zena didn’t want to accelerate. She didn’t want to waste time in traffic jams, or parallel park, or negotiate with mechanics about brake lines, or be honked at for not running a yellow light, or run the yellow light out of fear of being honked at and run over a little kid.

“…just $43,995 to buy, or you can lease…”

Forty-four grand? Zena definitely had things she would rather use that money on. But Renee was insistent, and probably right. Maybe she would lease, and she wouldn’t technically be buying a car, at least. Of course, she would have to buy insurance. So, yeah, she was buying a car.

“…and you can see the power for yourself…”

Unless…

Car dealers are insured, right? They must be. With that much inventory, they’d be insane not to be.

Zena was still in the lot, rolling down the aisle of cars on either side without yet having the courage to actually depress the gas pedal. She did now, and spun the steering wheel to the left as she did so.

The airbags—driver and passenger side, and side curtains—worked, even though Chelsea hadn’t bothered to highlight that fact in her pitch. They didn’t need to, really; even with her late burst of speed, Zena wasn’t driving fast enough to injure anyone.

“Maybe driving isn’t the way you want to get noticed,” Renee muttered.

“No,” Zena admitted, concealing her glee.

She agreed to pay $3,000 to cover the dealer’s deductible and not buy a car ever.

It was the best deal she ever made.

True Lincoln Park Tales, #4: The Mini Coopergasm, Part I

Zena’s hand trembled just a bit as she put the key in the ignition.

In her suburban youth, she had ridden in cars. She had obtained and maintained driver’s license, and had been a committed driver out of necessity for several years. But she had never liked automobiles, and once she both lived and worked in an area of Chicago where public transportation is universal if not beloved, she sold her car with great relief.

She found herself at a car dealership now out of peer pressure. Zena had recently been promoted at her job, to a sales position with a cushy base salary, a solid bedrock of loyal customers, and tantalizing shoots of potential future growth. Blessed with an outgoing personality and an eminently trustworthy smile, Zena had clear potential, which was recognized by her boss Renee.

Zena got results in her first two weeks. Good results, even. But not, as Renee said, excellent results. “And excellence,” she declared, “is where you belong.”

“You need to manage your image,” Renee announced. Zena was perfectly good at making sales, she explained, but she needed to do more. She had to make not buying from her inconceivable. And to start, she had to make herself look amazing.

Renee boiled it down thusly: “Everyone wants to be successful. When you roll up at their office in a sweet ride, they know that they can be simply by buying whatever you sell. But they will never know that when you walk up to their office from the train, branded with the aura of bums and urine and failure.”

And with a flourish of girlish excitement, Renee invited herself on a car shopping trip that Zena didn’t realize she was planning.

They had already inspected a BMW and a Lexus, both of which Zena had pronounced “really an excellent car, but just not me.” Further analysis was beyond her. Zena really didn’t like any car, but Renee’s exuberance had the force of a general’s orders, so she resorted to weak indecision as her only glimpse of a way to wiggle out of buying one.

Renee knew just what to do. “I agree completely,” she declared. “Those were fine cars, but you are a woman who needs to stand out from the crowd. This next one, there’s no way you’re not gonna love it.”

“What is the next one?” Zena asked, looking for an opportunity to declare that she really wasn’t a car person after all, and that they might as well just head home. But with a wave of her finger and an exuberantly restrained hum, Renee refused to inform her until they pulled into the next dealership.

Mini Cooper.

“It takes a special kind of person to pull off driving in these cars,” Renee declared. “I sure wish I could. But you, I think, can.”

“I don’t know,” Zena muttered weakly, but Renee dragged her into the salesroom and in front of a heavily made-up and preternaturally perky blonde saleswoman.

“I’m Chelsea, how are you!” she erupted.

“This is Zena, and she’s going to buy one of your cars!” Renee popped. While the tone of her voice had a way to go to match Chelsea’s implausible squeak, it rose noticeably in just one sentence, and probably would overtake Chelsea before the test drive.

“Zena, I just love that name. You’re like an African goddess and a warrior princess all in one.”

“She is,” affirmed Renee. “My newest superstar.”

Zena scrunched up her shoulders and tried to make a sound that would make her seem excited. “Eep” is what emerged from her mouth.

Renee pointed at a red car with a white stripe down the middle. “That is the car that you are going to buy.”

“The Model 9822, it’s exceptional.”

“Very nice?” Zena whimpered.

Renee held up an informational brochure dangling from the driver-side window. “It’s turbocharged.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Zena admitted.

“It means more power and higher performance. You—

Renee’s sales instinct took over, and she cut Chelsea off. “You want higher performance. You deserve higher performance. We’re going to take it for a test drive.”

And so Renee steered the trio outside. Luckily she took the exit to the right; to the left was the lot for resales, but as this was her sale now, nothing Chelsea could have done could have turned her around. Chelsea did manage to nudge her away from the 9522s and to an exact replica of the showroom model. She even managed to warn Renee’s hand away from the driver’s door with a perfectly timed throat-clearing.

“Right,” Renee said. “It’s just lust.”

*****

This one, which will be completed tomorrow, was inspired quickly; a woman moaning quite loudly as she drove past the apartment building where I live. I mean, really loudly. (I live on the fourth floor.)

Just kidding—I was exiting the building when I heard her. Still, it was loud, and she was feeling something.

I combined it with some of my experiences with salespeople; I spent a lot of my life working for magazines that are 100% ad-supported, and as a result have had far too much more than my share of… let’s just call them, moments. It’s kind of fun putting three salespeople together, though.

I’m expecting this post to get a lot of hits*. After all, it will be tagged with “orgasm,” even though the true Mini Coopergasm doesn’t happen until part 2. So hey, tune in next time!

*Relative to other posts on this blog. I’m still famous only in the future, rather than the present.

The Forgiveness Gun, Part I

“I know you know that rage inside,” Garth insisted. “I know that no matter how positive you try to be when someone drops their plate of problems on you that you want nothing more than to rip their heads off and then rip their legs off and stick the legs through the neck hole.”

A flicker behind Lily’s eyes told Garth that he was right. But when she spoke, she did so insistently. “What good would wishing for violence do? It would consume me from within and do nothing to anyone who wronged me. The only weapon that we have against people like that is forgiveness.”

Garth genuinely didn’t mean to be rude, but he guffawed hysterically anyway.

“I mean it!” Lily demanded. “You can’t change what other people do, you can only change how you react to it.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Garth stammered. “I mean, we have a higher standard of respect here. It’s just that, you know, Conan the Barbarian doesn’t carry a plus-three sword of forgiveness. There’s no forgiveness rays, or forgiveness sabers, and Rambo doesn’t invade Vietnam armed with a forgivenessthrower.”

“Not even a light forgiveness shield,” piped in Johnathan, who had apparently been listening to the conversation even though the machete he was sharpening should have consumed all of his attention.

“I’m just saying, anger doesn’t have much of an application.”

“I’m sorry, Lily,” Garth said, finally stumbling upon the phrase recommended by etiquette. “I shouldn’t have laughed. I do have to dispute with you, though.”

Lily already recognized Garth’s social awkwardness. She silently accepted his apology, and invited him to continue.

“I suppose your theory is even right, as far as it goes. But it’s not complete. You have no children—“

“I don’t, but how did you know?”

Johnathan chortled. He had watched Garth fumble through this section before, but it never got old. It was a big part of why he enjoyed this particular task so much.

Garth, cursed at himself silently, but visibly. “I apologize once again. There is no easy way to identify people who belong in our group, so we do spend quite a bit of time observing potential candidates. I assure you, we will not use the information in any way, regardless of whether you join us or not.”

“And what exactly is your group?”

Johnathan clapped slowly and sarcastically at Garth.

“Lily, please,” Garth pleaded. “I—I will explain, but it will be easier if we go with this example first. Okay?”

Garth seemed so much lower than Lily. She was somehow looking down at him, despite him being at least a half a foot taller than her, and he was looking back up, and moreover he was looking back up with such earnestness that Lily had no choice but to accept.

*****

So, this is a bit from Receptacle, which is a bit down the line on my project list, but one that I’m excited by. Without giving too much away, the backstory is that Garth (and Johnathan, in his way) are trying to recruit Lily for… well, they’re trying to recruit her for something. I guess it’s not the most backstory I’ve ever given out, eh?

Monthly Metapost: “What’s this, then?”

My goal is to write novels for a living. Specifically, comedic novels with an occasional science fiction bent. This blog exists primarily for me to share my writing in a fairly shameless act of self-promotion. But hopefully you’ll enjoy the writing, so it will really be a symbiotic thing. Fair enough?

I also perform improv comedy, write and perform in theater and on video, and write music*, so the blog will also contain samples and promotion in those fields, as well as occasional thoughts on the various crafts.

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* “Write music” is perhaps a strong term. I’m an award-winning lyricist (it’s not quite as impressive as it sounds) but pretty much inept at the creating-the-music part. I do plan a heavy push to work on that early in 2010, so perhaps this asterisk will go away in future metaposts.

Superiority Tourism

Mrs. Dupont loves to travel.

She has seen the pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower, and Red Square, and many of the rest of humanity’s most magnificent creations. She even has the photos.

The photos languish in albums on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in the back of her closet, behind her two formal gowns that had not been worn in a dozen years. Mrs. Dupont admits that this was not the ideal place for display; to anyone who asks, she sighs and says how she wishes they could be positioned more prominently, but she just can’t find the space in her tiny, tiny house.

In reality, the photos are hidden because they are irrelevant.

Mrs. Dupont does not travel to see the world. She travels to convince herself that she is better than it. Upon her return from Moscow, for example, she proudly displayed a number of shoddy Russian nesting dolls purchased from street vendors. When she had a visitor, she would exaggerate the difficulty of pulling the dolls apart and breathlessly declare, “I only bought them to show how awful the craftsmanship is over there.” At the Pyramids of Giza she purchased nothing; she used the fact that the northern part of the country was called “Lower Egypt” to demonstrate its people’s backwardness. But she adores her porcelain Eiffel Tower replica with one leg missing, or at least relating a well-practiced story of how it broke in transit despite being wrapped in three layers of paper and cushioned by four layers of cloth. (In fact, she had snapped the leg off herself, upon opening her suitcase and realizing that without some defect the piece wouldn’t have a proper backstory.)

There are business travelers, and eco-tourists, and family vacationers, and honeymooners, and even parents who travel to adopt a baby girl, but Mrs. Dupont is none of those. Mrs. Dupont is a Superiority Tourist, and proud of it.

*****

More from The Clean Hippie Murders. This passage, obviously, focuses on Mrs. Dupont, semi-estranged mother to Heather, who is the intern to Jonas, who is the mayor, protagonist, and if not chief investigator of the eponymous murders, at least an interested kibitzer. Does that make everything clear? That’s okay; it doesn’t need to be yet.

Like Rebecca in Exile Issues, the Duponts are a lot of fun for me to write. I haven’t really started on the book in earnest, and it has only the vaguest framework of plotline, but four of the nine stories that I’m planning to work in include at least one of them.