Fiction
Today we took a day trip to Little Planet, just a short ride from C-Sphere, but still off the beaten track of most day trippers. Hardly anyone was there, but it was a lovely, starry place, small enough to walk around in about forty minutes.
It’s hard to believe that all the hours of stressful broom traffic were waiting to be escaped with just a ninety-minute spacebus ride from the C-Port. Aural starlight oozed jelly, white to purple, while long-poled speakers pumped echoing twinkles.
Friendly staff at the tourist center offered informative maps, and one of them explained the conceptual backing of the planet’s background music-sounds from the spacebus, below the threshold of perception, looped and pitchshifted to imitate a sheepcall. Nice concept!
Visitors may wonder how such a wonderful destination could still be so unknown, but with some sips of local brainwine, taking in the view, they’ll instead hope it stays that way as they’re washed with private pleasure.
Purple and yellow stripeworms were burrowing the neighboring planet, flinging candy from the mountains, frolicking, praising the jelly star. Their roars and violent quaking were to us a pleasant view as we rolled out our picnic blanket and poured ourselves some brainwine, watching the wormworld writhe in nothingness splashed with purple spotlights.
As we were taking our time relaxing, some gnome vendors approached on their gnometruck. “Truth! Truth!” they peddled in their gnomespeech.
“Look at this!” one pip-squeaked, bursting his woven basket, from which a liquid rainbow pummeled. “Ooohhhh!” we said, blood rushing with excitement.
“Heeere! Truthbutter, truthbiscuit, truthjam!”
“Ohhh! Looks yummy!” We grabbed the truthbiscuits, slathering the truthbutter and truthjam. I like to layer mine so thick that the oleic level would be sickening if not for the hard, sour seeds, truthbiscuit being the doughy stage for this double tsunami of yum.
Sorry guys, but YouTube’s encoding wouldn’t even allow for frequencies high enough to affect these mice; you’re just imagining the results. Your walls are hollow; mice run through them. You probably don’t understand this but hollow walls offer better insulation. Your house was made for you by someone else and you live in it without understanding. Inside your house are passages you don’t know, small passages through walls that the mice know well. They live there and eat there. They too want things and want to feel a certain way. Trap them in a closed space and they’ll scream with little voices. Your efforts to make this house only yours is a disingenuous means to overlook the truth that there’s nothing that is yours and you’re full of a leaky passages. Mice and spiders evade you and parasites live inside you, using you without your knowing it, thoughts and words powertubed to your dreams. The same fat that makes mackerels delicious was meant to protect them from frigid waters, and your words are ignorant of gravity and of what gravity does to your body.
The gooey, flaky truthbiscuit floods inside my mouth; doughy facts rush a sense of relief: at last, I know what is true.
In my dream I don’t care who you are where you’re from don’t care what you did as long as you *** me and at the moment Nick sings as long as you’re **** with me I am folded into an envelope delivered from this soil do you understand this in my dream? I wake up and my dick is little jutting from my zipper and everyone else watches on the dry land and I’m in the mud. No that’s not what I meant, I’m sorry, I didn’t say that. Child killing medicine gives you a dream about killing a child! ♪Although **** has always been a friend of mine / I’m leaving my **** in your hands♪
A long walk home through a baseball field at night, dome of stars suspended in a plump frozen grape: the truthbutter comforts me; this is what I want.
Nice buttons Bilbo, but how’d you get those in an agrarian society? You’d need mills and an economy to support that shit for various reasons. Your nice-ass hobbit hole, where’d you import that from you rich fuck, and what did you trade for it? We can only conclude that the Shire employs slave labor, how else could they uphold such a traditional existence while enjoying consumer goods? Saruman tried to change that and introduce technology to them but they resisted. Progress always wins in the end. I’m tired of reactionary nostalgia for the Shire. Gandalf perpetuated a legacy of abuse.
The tartness of the truthjam, stinging while also feeling good, making me feel like I conquered something.
Honestly the whole experience exceeded our expectations. We tossed the gnomes some C-coins and they jumped in the air to grab them.
“Thaaaaaank youuuuu!” the gnomes harmonized cutely, doing a traditional dance of thanksgiving. We exhaled luxuriously; the gnometruck puffed away.
Ah… what a perfect day. I’m so glad the gnomes burst that basket open. Brushing against some truth is more than worth the cost of the spacebus tickets and the time it took to get here. Now I feel motivated: I need to keep living. I take a sip of brainwine and listen to the speakers.
On the spacebus back I look at the seashell-shaped galaxies: the conch galaxy, coral galaxy, horseshoe crab galaxy. I imagine the galaxies as raw eggs in boiling water, boiling into the universe of matter, spacetime, egg drop soup.
Sometimes all it takes is a vacation to refresh one’s brain. Now back on the C-Sphere, I watch the lines of cute witches, all on their brooms going about their daily tasks, and I feel from the bottom of my heart that I’m proud to be one of them.
I can always take a morsel of truth to eat on my bonsai terrace, watching the white apartments, clean, dipping to surfaces inconceivable, such a distance from these heights, so many bonsai shaking out oxygen, bonsai granted, one to each terrace, recalling something nonlinear, feedback loop pitchshifting my life, the mirrored, musty storage room, the tuba band, walking, blasting their tubas, the fat funny pig man smiling in my face, serving his barbeque cut from his belly, the long pronged knife, everyone laughing, big long table, oversize room, white paint and wires, we’ve come so far now, too long scroll bar, same psalm posted again and again, but each time different, scary changes, minor, nonlinear, all my experience, sketched on my witch hat, only my story, these trillion witches, magically puddling, alleys of monuments, I am unique, I look from my balcony, endless crowds, cute, but not me, girly, beautiful, following orders, fun, my witch hat, woven my colors, radiant struggle, on whatever planet, freedom to choose, what’s right for me, appreciate me, my witch hat resting perfect in one hand, oversize crystal ball in another, showing my heart’s true crystal future, dream plucked, leafy, vein rust colors, refracted, contours of crystal-balled world, perfect, secret, my true colors.
Zachary Eller’s work has appeared or his forthcoming in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Driftwood Press, Jubilay, Waxing & Waning, and others. He lives in Jersey City.