Day: March 16, 2003

The glowing, pulsing blob of… well, none of the scientists had been able to figure it out, how was he supposed to make sense of it?… whatever-it-was, was speaking to him somehow. He blocked his ears, not wanting to hear its words, wanting to hear anything but its words, but they were already inside his mind. He suddenly knew exactly why whoever-they-were had sent whatever-it-was to earth, and that there wasn’t a damned thing he or anyone else could do about it.

Heffalumps, said the bear to his young porcine friend. I believe heffalumps may have taken my honey. I have never known heffalumps to particularly like honey, but the rabbit told me just yesterday that heffalumps are mysterious and strange creatures that often behave just as you’d expect them not to.

Why do you like honey so much anyway, Bear? asked the pig.

Bears like honey. I’m a bear, so I like honey.

Then why do bears like honey?

Because it’s sweet, I suppose. Don’t you like sweet things?

This isn’t about me, Bear. Give me a straight answer for once, will you?

What do you want to know?

Why do you like honey so much?

Hum… hum. Hum! I don’t know.

You can’t not know, silly bear. What is it that you like about honey?

Hum. It’s sweet.

You already said that, and it’s not an answer. Let’s try this a different way: is there anything you don’t like about honey?

It’s sticky. It gets all over my paws, and I can never get all of it out of the honey jars, and there are bees sometimes.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Honestly, I swear sometimes you’re more stubborn than the donkey.

What do you mean?

Oh, never mind, said the pig.

Do you think the heffalumps will give my honey back? asked the bear.

It was a perfect plan. The vault would be open and not a single guard in sight, as was so common in the small towns that had sprung up, fully formed, seemingly overnight, from the midwestern plains. It wasn’t about the money; he had been born into a wealthy family, and with skill belying his twenty-eight years had massaged his personal fortune to almost eight times his inheritance. No, it wasn’t about the money at all: it was the thrill of the experience.

As he’d expected, there was a crowd at the courthouse. He didn’t much care about the sentence–anything less than death by hanging would incite the townspeople to lynch the bastard anyway. The time was coming fast for both of them.

He stepped into the dirt street and sauntered, casually, casually, toward the clapboard facade of the bank, as the door to the courthouse opened. The murmur of the mob faded to nothing as the judge stepped behind the makeshift podium, then rose again as the sheriff and his deputies led the convicted man from the building. His eyes were already dead as he surveyed the crowd, finally resting his gaze on the lone man making his way toward the bank next door. No one paid either of them any mind as the judge cleared his throat and began, I sentence this man….

From the far side of the crowd a man’s voice screamed. You murdered my wife and daughters, you sonuvabitch! My darlings! My…. The hollow report of the shotgun blast severed the rest of the words. He watched the chained man stagger and fall to the ground, then glanced down at the grotesque liquid warmth that stained his own chest as he tumbled forward.

The door hit him in the forehead, hard. Shaken, he leaned forward, his right arm extended against the frame for support.

The creak of the rusty hinge was scant warning: again, the heavy wooden slab found its target. He dropped to one knee momentarily, then half-stood, wavering from side to side on his newly unsure footing.

He stayed on his knees the next time it came, slamming into the crown of his bowed head. And the next time.

And the next. And the next.

And the next.

The self-inflicted pain was bewildering in its intensity. It was constant. It was good.

I’ve been trying to write something the last few days that’s somewhat out of character. It kind of defies description: it’s fiction, but is semi-autobiographical; it’s a short story, but is primarily a set of barely-germinated stories; and it’s allegorical but true to history.

In its current form, the piece will never see the light of phosphor. The semi-autobiographical parts are still way too close to the mark for my liking, and unfortunately they’re what unifies the rest of the jumble.

It’s my first attempt at creating anything of this sort in ages, and it’s the first thing I’ve ever really been inspired to write. It might even be good, although I don’t hold out much hope–there’s little in it that would be of interest to anyone not living inside my brain. (My friend Kym points out that I put myself down a lot, and she’s right as usual. She kindly fails to notice that it’s with good reason.)

Certain sections will appear here shortly anyway. They will appear unrelated, and that’s because they are; they’ll be ripped verbatim with no framing structure at all, save for a relation to the latter part of this quote.