Polite Fictions

Alphabet of Regret: Z is for Zimbabwe

Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos studied his maps. His plans to take over Zimbabwe and thus assume his rightful place as the world's preeminent scientific mind needed adjusting. Mozambique looked like an easy way in on first glance, but with each subsequent pass, the Professor reconsidered.

Now, to some, it might seem odd that taking over a small African nation would confer superior scientific status upon an individual, but Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos knew that he was right. He generally was, if you only looked to him for the current score. If anyone had asked, the Professor would have explained that due to his recent time travel problems, he had ended up being revered for his genius - no matter what havoc he wrought. He enjoyed it at first, but grew to despise the fawning and interruptions. So, instead, he would show the world who was boss - quite literally.

Respect was good. Respect was key, even, to the Professor's mind, but too much of a good thing turned out to not be such a good thing after all. Regardless, Pfah!, the Professor settled on Zimbabwe as his target. Once he controlled a country nothing could stop him.

He discarded the Mozambique plan and settled on an air-based attack strategy. Everything went according to plan. It was, the Professor thought, quite simple, looking back. Step one was the hardest, building an aircraft capable of flying over Zimbabwe while simultaneously spraying the entire country with a shrinking liquid. Covering the country quickly enough, and in a proper pattern was key. Without managing that everyone, their buildings and possessions would have shrunk unevenly. Lumpily, even.

Once the plane shrank the country the Professor stepped in, carefully - so as not to step on anyone, and swept up. Literally. The Atomi-broom gently, but emphatically, gathered up the buildings and people and extraneous pets into a holding unit. The unit itself was the size of a compact car, and within it, tiny robots went about pushing buildings into place. The robots, though tiny, were easily the size of busses, to the people now in the holding unit where they would live and prosper, albeit shrunken to the size of insects..

Zimbabwe taken care of, the Professor turned his attention to setting up shop. The world raged, but the Professor ignored them. Their respect quickly turned to horror and the Professor merely smiled. This, he felt, was more like it. Sometimes a certain state of mind is required for the best creative endeavors and, after achieving what he thought was his goal, the Professor had learned the true mindset needed for his own abilities. Certainly the success of his recently-trashed status was accidental, but it was still his, was it not? And as such, it was also his to upend gloriously, as befitting a genius.

And so Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos settled in to his new home. Populated by robot minions, curious wildlife, experimentations, twelve monkeys that were working on the recipe for perfect fried chicken, a collection of harmonicas and the Professor himself, the country felt perfect.

Until that one fateful day. A thundering noise shook the countryside. The Professor awoke from a dream and fell off his bed while trying to work out what could have possibly exploded. No one dared attack him, not after the first time the U.N tried to invade. They were still trying to find the attack force they sent in. And good luck with that, the Professor thought as he pawed around for his glasses. Good luck indeed, trying to find an attack force that was currently nothing more than scattered atoms on the wind.

Whatever attacked him now would certainly suffer the same fate. The Professor grabbed the Imagi-fire helmet, the same thing that reduced the monster Gargantua to less than a problem, and strapped it on. Outside the robot sentries ran in terror, screaming something or the other that the Professor couldn't make out. He made a mental note to redesign the robot's vocal chips to convey English when they panicked instead of binary. Binary screams were quite annoying and went on far too long, he felt.

In the distance, but growing quickly closer, he could see a large shape. It waddled as it approached, yelling and booming. Something about the shape looked all wrong. It looked for all the world like a badger given energy form and physical mass. Perfectly impossible. The Professor unleashed the power of the Imagi-fire helmet, a helmet fueled by the strength of his own imagination, and then turning that power into atomic fire. The energy-badger absorbed the blast without slowing down.

Soon the energy-badger was upon and he could see, in the center, floating and wearing a tiny helmet, was Harry. Harry the badger, the lab animal left being when the Professor first launched his campaign against Zimbabwe. Harry the badger, who never showed any promise of heightened intellect, now stood on the very land the Professor called his own.

"Harry! My word, the experiments took! Let us work together!" the Professor tried.

"Not a chance!" roared Harry, "I shall crush you and then claim Zimbabwe as my own. Your time is through!"

Well the Professor would have none of that, thank you very much. Still, Harry's energy/mass field would be able to resist almost any attack thrown at it. No, the trick, the Professor realized, would be to extrude the badger from his burrow, as it were. Running back into his lab, an action Harry mistook as cowardice, Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos set to quick work.

He would have to grab Harry from his womb of energy and them keep him still long enough to remove his helmet. Yes. Some suction, some… yes this would work! With only minutes to spare the Professor gathered up his invention and aimed it out the door toward Harry.

"This is your last chance, Harry," the Professor told his once-and-possibly-future-subject, "power down and we can work together. Refuse and be dealt with."

In response, Harry threw two monkeys, still holding fried chicken, at the building. Well, that settled that. The Professor threw the switch. A giant wind started to form, sucking everything it could in through the door. It howled and raged and sucked. Oh, how it sucked. It sucked up plants and fallen monkeys and their fried chicken. It sucked the dirt from the ground. Finally it sucked one hyper-intelligent badger from his energy womb.

Once inside Harry found that he was stuck to the sides of the device, other debris whizzing past him to stick along other bare spots on the wall. Turning the machine off, the Professor reached in and plucked the tiny control helmet from Harry's head. The energy creature outside dissipated and the badger frowned.

"How did you have time to create this?" he demanded.

"The Bubble Yum Wind Tunnel," the Professor said archly, thinking up the name on the spot for a machine that sucked things with wind and was also sticky and pink-walled, "is a simple application of my boundless imagination, you tiny fool. Like a spider with a straw against its web, I have trapped you."

"And now you'll kill me?"

"No," the Professor said, "I truly would like to work with you. But you are too dangerous and wish to kill me. Still, Harry, I am sorry I left you behind, before."

"Because I am now a threat?"

"Because you were never deserving of abandonment in the first place." Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos cleared his throat. "If I have one regret it is turning you into an enemy by mistake. I have found that I need to think these things through a bit more before I go ahead with my plans. Wouldn't you agree?"

The badger sniffed. "I would. But do not think this makes us even."

"Well, how about you take Zimbabwe?" The Professor offered.

"For my own?" Harry squinted and struggled against his sticky prison.

"Including the robots," The Professor said.

"But what will you do?"

"Mozambique might be nice." The Professor said, realizing he truly meant it. Zimbabwe was nice and all but it didn't have a "q" in the name. A "q" might be fancy to have.

"Aren't you worried I will attack you?"

"Worried? I look forward to it! Why, I have already begun to think up a schedule for when each of us could attack the other! Working together, attacking each other, we should each advance our science by leaps and bounds! It will be glorious!"

Harry the badger thought Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos a loon. But having a friend to play with would be nice. And between the two of them, the world would come to regret many, many things.

Except fried chicken. The remaining ten monkeys did work out the world's perfect fried chicken recipe, Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos' final gift to humanity before he resumed blowing things up for science. With a friend.

The Alphabet of Regret: Y is for Youth

Glass by glass, Benny Ostrogoth was reversing his position on drunk women.

“I dunno,” the drunk woman said, her head dipping briefly down to the bartop, “You’re funny – and kind of cute?”

“Kind of, yes,” agreed Benny. He made a circular motion over the bar with his index finger, the universal sign for two more of the same.

Drunk women, Benny was coming to realize, formed a vital part of any bar’s ecosystem. They took in desperation and, by an invisible chemical conjunction, emitted a faint aerosol of hope. Eventually they would wear away – and sometimes the reaction would catalyze explosively, a tangle of limbs and breath and a hastily snuffed out light – but then, Benny figured, so would he.

“What do you do?” the drunk woman said.

“I’m a young man from the motor trade,” said Benny. “Care to keep an appointment with me?” He flipped a card out from his palm.

The woman’s name was Sheena, of all things. Out of habit she kept it in reserve, partly because giving out her name in these situations was like dropping a key into a man’s palm, but also because most men, ever since her preteen years, would start singing a few lines from Morning Train. She was beginning to find that fewer and fewer people were making the connection, which meant that the bar’s demographic was tilting ever younger, while she was rooted in the same spot.

So far no one had ever sung Sugar Walls for her. So there was something to be grateful for.

She looked at the card: a heavy rectangle of paper, gold embossed script, a logo watermarked into its centre.

“You sell cars”. Sheena gathered up the fresh drink in one hand and tipped some of it down her throat.

“You should drop by some time. Any time”. Benny kept the card out, clamped smoothly between index and middle finger. Sheena plucked it from his hand with her nails and dropped it into her purse.

“I don’t just sell cars,” he said.

She watched the heavy drops of alcohol and syrup roll down the slope of her glass. A cone on a stem. Whatever this evening brought, it would need more cones, more stems, more talk.

She lifted her glass to the bartender and gestured in Benny’s direction.

“My name is Sheena,” she said.

X. And, Marking the Spot

He had dirt in his hair and in his teeth and when he cried for her there was a trickle of mud on his cheek for the dirt in his eyes.

He was always dirty. Always.

Ever since he found the map.

Ever since then, he'd been digging.

The only problem was that the X on the map kept moving around. And sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes that fucker wasn't even there at all.

So that was difficult. Being a treasure hunter had it's drawbacks.

But, he had faith and perseverance and balls. Obsession is what she called it when she left. And when she came back, she asked him to take his things and leave.

Since then he has been following the map and the ever changing location of the X. When he wasn't digging, he was sleeping in the pockets of giants and he hung his clothes on the sharp, upward sloping edge of the crescent moon and book marked his shovel and maddox between his dreams and his doubt. 

And his tears were mud and his eyes sparkled with flakes of mica and fools gold.

So he would dig. He would take one, two, three.....four-hundred and twenty-six paces east by southeast, and dig. Sometimes he would hitchhike and the presence of a strange man counting off footsteps while riding shotgun would always be too much for the driver. So, he would walk again.

And he would dig.

When he got to where the X lived on that particular day, he would dig. He wore no gloves and his hands were hard as axe handles, big as pair of catchers mitts. He would excavate topsoil and clay and rock. Sometimes there was asphalt or concrete. Sometimes other things. Once, the map took him to a cemetery. That was a hard day. Fuckin A.

Those were hard times. Hard as fuck.

It was always hard. All the goddamn time.

He didn't like to think about it though. He only cared for the digging. Some say it was the Hope that kept him going. Some say he was crazy as a shit-house rat. Others didn't say anything as they took up there own shovels. Followed their own map. And when he saw them - the ones with their own map and shovels - his heart would feel like activated thermite and ribbons of mud would run down his cheeks again.

Because he knows. He knows what they don't. He knows.....and he digs anyway.

He knows.

The X. The one that keeps moving all around his map. The one that sings him to sleep with it's lullaby of promise.

The X?

May never have been there in the first place. And that map may very well be an old, coffee stained Denny's menu-mat.

Still.

He digs.

He really has fuck all other options.

The Alphabet of Regret: W is for Wanderlust

He started planning his escape the day he realized that he no longer had any room to move at all. The walls of the cage they kept him in gradually closed around him, so subtly he hadn’t even noticed until it was too late. He was surrounded by the sort of silence you hear on stock market trading floors – saturated in the white noise that you can’t hear until someone tells you to hear it. Beat beat, whoosh whoosh, thump thump, rinse, repeat.

For months, in the blackness that surrounded him, he searched for an escape, a weak point in the walls, a gap or a hole that he could push or pull or tear against to get out. All he wanted to do was to get out. The blackened redundancy of his entire situation was driving him mad. He had to run. He had to see. He had to explore. He had to live.

And one day, when the dark walls were choking him, when he knew in his heart it was do or die, he went for it.

He kicked as hard as he could. He pushed. He shoved. He tore. And then, light. Bright, blinding light. A man. A mask. A gown. Water and blood. Cameras. Towels. There were strange arms waiting for him and stranger liquids filling his mouth. He was weak, he was tired, and so he stayed.

For a while.

For 10 years, he sat, stifled, waiting for his chance to escape. The walls that surrounded him were too soothingly pastel, the floors too plushly carpeted. The sockets were all plugged up, the cupboards all latched, the corners all padded. His dinner came prompt at five, dinner at seven, bedtime at nine. His homework was completed in perfectly not-too-sharpened number two pencils, his sheets always smelled faintly macabre – the scent of desperation rinsed in the mask of April freshness. He was surrounded by crippling predictability that left no room for error, no hope of danger.

And so, one day, he started to ever so subtly push. He pulled and tugged and bumped until one day, when the pressed bed-skirts began to constrict around him, he went for it.

A lego, a doorstop, a distracted mother. A bicycle and a back pack and some goldfish for the road. A street corner. A left turn. Another. Another. An anxious mother on the corner around which he’d just circled. A popsicle and a snuggle. He was weak, he was tired, and so he stayed.

For a while.

He sat in his office, plugging sales specs into spreadsheets. Delicately framed photographs of people he barely knew lined the walls of his cubicle, sweet cubicle. Diplomas hung, mapping his journey down Complacency Lane. The stapler and paper clip cup and World’s Best Father paperweight laid neatly out before him – the weapons of his mass self-destruction. His costume fit his role, the props matched the characters he portrayed, but the drawer to his left cruelly betrayed him. He shoved his chaos into that drawer, leaving it to marinate in it’s own unsatisfied wanderlust. Newspaper clippings from far away places where untold stories were weaving their own tales, road maps leading to uncharted lands of hope and promise bore the fresh, inky fingerprints of desire. A pair of keys lay waiting, restless, anxious. On the days when he dared slide open that drawer, the keys jingled in the same chords as the buzzing in his ears.

He opened that drawer and breathed in the smell of his own wanting. He’d lived 35 years a captive from the beginning. From his conception to this very day, he’d lived trapped in cages. Life had slithered around him, hugged him tight, and slowly squeezed the air out of his lungs. Nothing – not the booze or the drugs or the herbs or the yoga – could restore him like the air that rose from that drawer and filled his heart and head and chest with the life he’d waited his eternity for.

And so, this day, when the florescent lights overhead constricted around him, he carefully arranged his desk the same way he did every day. He straightened his tie, he tied up his shined shoes, and he opened that drawer. He took hold of the keys of his own destiny, fingering them like a new lover, and he began to walk. He walked out of his cubicle, out of the front door, across the parking lot, through the fields, around the corner, and plunged his key deep into the insides of his own salvation.

The ignition rumbled. The engine roared. The lights flickered. The pedals bent to his will in the most delightful way under the weight of his feet. He knew this was his moment, that is was do or die, now or never. It was time to push. It was time for his life to begin.

And so William stopped waiting, slid into his Wranglers, wiggled in to the seat of his Winnebago, and went.