Will Hindmarch's Stories

Father Bryce Meets An Alien

2008-06-13T20:05:40Z

Outside the room where Father Bryce meets his first extraterrestrial are twenty marines with face-masks and oily new guns. Politely, neither Father Bryce nor the space alien mentions this.

They’ve been talking about nothing for an hour when the alien finally gets through the ice. “So. The general said—”

“Yeah,” says Father Bryce. “I’m supposed to ask you a few questions.” His hand’s out in a may-I-please way.

“Sure, sure,” says the alien.

“Religion.”

“Yes.”

“We— Do you… have religion?”

“God.”

Father Bryce is still. “Yes.”

“Sure, we know God.”

“Really?”

The alien looks uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

“Great! So, how… do we make sense of the issue of… being made, you know,” Father Bryce sees the alien is smiling now, nodding encouragingly, “in His image.”

“I,” says the alien, smiling, “was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Really?” asks Father Bryce. He wants to laugh.

“Yeah!” They laugh. “I didn’t how to bring it up,” says the alien. They laugh.

Drying an eye, the alien says, “Oh, that’s funny.”

Waiting for Klaatu

2008-06-13T19:37:33Z

The goblin folds up the paper and turns to the elf, who’s slurping his tea. “So the Catholic Church says it’ll welcome space aliens as brothers and sisters,” says the goblin. They’re at their usual worn-down wooden table at the pub in Cork, hours after closing. Outside it’s morning, but barely any of that makes its way in here.

“Really,” says the elf. “How d’you figger they’ll handle the ‘made in His image’ thing?”

The goblin holds his hands apart and makes a face that says “who the hell knows?” He slaps a slice of tomato on his tongue and chews.

“Is this just going to be the missionary-heathen thing again?” asks the elf.

“The savage from outer space?”

The elf pushes his eggs around with his toast. “Not sure I like what that says, though.” He puts his cigarette out in egg yolk. “Aliens get the benefit of the doubt, after all the shit we put up with?”

The goblin’s chewing sausage. “Maybe it says they learned something.”

“Yeah, like the fact everyone’ll jump ship when Klaatu lands.” The elf lights up.

Why I Eat Brains

2008-06-06T18:03:57Z

It isn’t like peeling an orange. It isn’t like popping a walnut. Skulls are harder than I’d imagined.

How long do I have, now? I’m still here, enough to know this is wrong, but I love my wife and I love my kids and I want to hold onto those memories and for that I need a brain.

Someone is coming closer, hesitating, slack-jawed. I scream at him, meaning to send him words like, “Fuck off! This is mine! I caught this one!” but I think all I holler is noise. I’m not really there. I’m in my fingertips, scouting over the surface of this slick and bloody head.

I get the jaw in one hand, the head in another, brace the whole thing against my chest, and pull. Something gives. But no go. His mandible waggles like a broken toy.

With his head in my hands, hair sticking to my bloody fingers, I drag him to the curb. I stomp. Something is cracked, beneath the skin. I nip at skin like it’s a cellophane wrap. I get fingernails into the crack. I pull. Fingernail breaks. This brain, and maybe I’ll remember my wife’s name.

Networks Without Tongue

2008-05-23T15:42:45Z

DONNA : I’m having an affair, Danny.

DANNY : Yeah, I know.

DONNA : Right now. An affair.

DANNY : Can’t have one right now. I’m your husband.

DONNA : No. Now. Even while I’m here, I’m really there.

DANNY : Having an affair.

DONNA : Right.

DANNY : Okay.

DONNA : You don’t believe me.

DANNY : I believe you.

DONNA : I’m logged on right now. With him. We’re, yes, I think, we’re making love. Right now.

DANNY : Finish your sandwich.

DONNA : He’s kissing me. He’s kissing me, and I’m kissing him.

DANNY : If you don’t finish it, I’m going to.

DONNA : [ fingers the plug behind her ear ] Can’t eat. I’m using my mouth to kiss another man.

DANNY : I had sex with Saria Smythe. A couple times. [ he takes her sandwich ]

DONNA : No you didn’t.

DANNY : Sure did.

DONNA : Danny, she’s a cartoon.

DANNY : Yep.

DONNA : So it, like, doesn’t count. This is another man, I’m with.

DANNY : I’m right here and I don’t see him. You gonna put your tongue in his mouth?

DONNA : Ew, no.

DANNY : Then who cares. I’m finishing your sandwich.

Caldera

2008-05-17T00:14:14Z

I’m blind and I breathe fire. My mouth is full of molten rock, sloshing like soup too hot to close your lips around. I cough out black smoke, splattering out searing liquid as I do. My mouth fills again with magma, bumped up like bile from my guts.

I am buried in the sand, up almost to my lips, head tipped back, agape. I have no arms, no legs. My throat runs deeper than my bones, down to the churning guts I share with other mouths, other souls.

Flakes of jagged metal, like bits of broken rust, scrape my throat on their way out. They scrape the sky and the smoke. They make sparks, and lightning arcs out of my mouth. I am sick, sweating inside, and desperate.

This is when they come.

I don’t know how they look, but they feel light and tiny. They stand on my lips and sing songs. Then they leap into the soup and become bundles of twigs. They’re cool to the touch, for a moment. Soothing.

I swallow them like pills. Two and three at a time. They dissolve.

Then the liquid cools into stone and I sleep.

#220 and #221

2008-05-09T16:41:56Z

“Not anymore, Herr Doctor,” she said. “And never again.” Behind her teeth brass cylinders rotated, clicking together to form the right shapes to transform the air from her bellows into words.

“How can you say that?” the Doctor asks. Behind his glasses his eyes are red and swollen.

“I cannot”—the cylinders catch and hiccup—”love, love you.” The Doctor reached out to her with his good hand and brushed her porcelain face. “I cannot—not, not—love you,” she said again.

Mortimer spoke up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a phonographic record, black and grooved, from the front of his apron. “Do you want try number 221?”

The Doctor put his plush-and-fabric hand to his eyes, scrubbed away tears. “I don’t know how many more of these I can handle today,” he said, taking the record and swapping it with the one on the back of her brass skull. He cranked up her insides, like the weights inside a grandfather clock, and fitted the needle against the new record.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said.

“Good morning, my love.”

Bullet Number Six

2008-05-08T14:25:09Z

He woke up in straw with his six-gun, Colt Army, in his hand. Outside the barn Yankee scouts were searching for him.

His first two shots were for cover for his run from the barn to the woods. The third shot went into a Yankee belly, right when that Yank’s bayonet went into his. They caught each other by surprise at the tree line.

The fourth shot bought his chance to run from muskets coming up on his rear. Musket balls broke branches all about him as he rushed through the woods.

He found a huntsman’s shack and slipped inside. The fifth shot went to the padlock on a trap door in the floor. Padlock in hand, he slipped through the door, underneath the shack, eased the door shut, said a prayer.

He took his last bullet out of the cylinder. It was a chance to take out one more Yankee. Maybe take his musket, then take another Yank, another musket. Make a chain of dead Yankees all the way back to Charlotte.

He kissed that sixth bullet, then loaded it. Bleeding, he pointed the gun at the trapdoor, and breathed.

A Loaded Gun in the Mailbox

2008-05-02T20:13:48Z

In his mailbox there is a hand holding a gun. It’s severed, this hand, just on the elbow side of the wrist, and it has oozed a bit of blood out into the box. The whole thing has gone sort of pale, which makes the revolver in its grip look blacker and shinier.

It’s snub-nosed, this revolver, with a fat cylinder in which he can see the little metal heads of bullets nestled in their shells. The gun is pointing out at him, as if this hand wanted his money.

He looks around him, up and down the street. He closes the mailbox door. He opens it again. There is a hand in there, holding a gun. He reaches towards it, squinting, wincing in preparation of the bang, then chickens out. He stands to one side of the mailbox and leans in front of it. He waves his hand past the barrel of the gun. Reaches into the box again, gives up again.

He goes inside, past his wife, who’s doing dishes, and gets the phone. He dials 911. She asks what’s wrong.

“There’s a hand holding a gun in our mailbox,” he says.

“Finally,” she says.

Gunfire on the Forgotten Colony

2008-04-25T15:47:51Z

It’s spring in the forgotten colony, when the bugs and the bullets come out. The last of the police died this winter, but Kitridge doesn’t even know that. He’s up on top of an aluminum shell that was supposed to be a factory that would’ve fed and funded them had the corporate ships ever shown up.

He’s got his rifle. He’s got a bottle of moon-grown moonshine. He’s got his wife’s picture and a badge that’ll get him back to Earth on a transport ship that’s not coming.

To the couple driving by, he’s a lunatic on a roof, spraying gunfire at the stars, screaming and stamping his foot. To the couple driving by, he’s a dark shape against the curve of the gas giant they orbit, revealed in ragged light of machine-gun muzzle flash.

The bullets come down at an angle, thudding through the car. One of them comes out of the driver’s mouth, knocking out his teeth. The car coasts into another one. Inside, their RFIDs go dead.

The stats get beamed in the direction of Earth. It looks like no one’s listening. But they are.

Automatic Anubis

2008-04-18T19:02:22Z

“Can you keep a secret?” he says.

“No! Not this secret!” I say.

He’s got his back against the secret door at the back of the tomb. On the other side, crafted from sand and bronze, animal bones and dung, is an automated man, jackal-headed, with accusing glass eyes.

“Keep your voice down,” he gets out through grinding teeth. The secret door thuds.

“It wants out!” I yell. “It knows we’re here. How do you figure we can keep this a secret? Why would we even do that!?”

“I, uh, sort of promised it I would.”

“The hell is the matter with you?”

“Four-thousand-year old machine man made a demand. I—”

“Then why does it want out?”

“Why do you think? He hears you and knows you’re untrustworthy. And, uh,” he releases his weight, steps forward. “I’m sorry, man.”

The door is swinging open.

“No. No, no. You’re siding with—”

“Call this a special case. I mean, I know you won’t kill me. But he —”

“Think he can outrun me?”

“Yes.”

“Then, Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“I am going to haunt the shit out of you.”

The Flying Lie

2008-04-11T15:07:20Z

“You know why flying cars sell so great?”

“Why is that?”

“I’ll tell you,” he says with that used-car-salesman tone that implies the word if is on its way. “But,” dammit, “you can’t tell Hodge I told you.”

“Okay.” No point in telling him Hodge was dragged to death behind a very-much-earthbound car yesterday.

“Okay. Here it is: flying cars are easy sells because nothing ever goes wrong with them. Absolutely no practical downside to owning one of them.” He smiles, all upper teeth. “Dream come true.”

“Except. For the, you know,” I let it hang there for a second, but he doesn’t see it, “fact it’s not true.” He squinted and shrugged, then went for his coffee. “The part where they don’t exist.”

He slurped off the top of his mug. Under the table, push the recorder closer to him. “Well, like it says on the brochure, we sold a dream. An experience.”

“No,” I correct him, finger pointing up between us, “you told them they could take these cars home.”

“And McDonald’s tells people that a clown loves them.”

Oh, The Elephants Know

2008-04-04T16:32:06Z

None of the elephants trust me. I don’t know why. I’m a nice enough guy, but they have some sense that goes beyond that. They know where to hide, where to die, and where to go to play the drums or paint their pictures and all of those places seem to be away from me.

I volunteered for the elephants. So it hurts to see them steer clear of me. They like Jackie, but when I come in they all drift to the other side of the pen.

Jackie says I’m overreacting, but I swear Howard’s painting is of me—a small, featureless spot on the canvas, a gap in the Pollock-like sprays and smears of color. When I confront Howard, hold the canvas up in from of him, he coils his trunk like a hose and backs away, staring at me out of the corner of his eye.

He and the other elephants stand in a clique, touching their trunks together, part sign language and part braille. They glance over at me, past their ears, like they don’t want to get caught.

The old one senses something about me that I can’t. He flicks his trunk. The others nod.

Diving on Jupiter

2008-03-26T20:05:05Z

He wasn’t falling like he was supposed to. He’d missed his target.

Looking behind him, he saw it through the reflections of orange and red clouds in his faceplate—a black ship with a flat belly and a long, arched back, like a humpback upside-down. It was getting smaller. His platoon, like fleas, landed on its hull.

His vision was shaking, his body rattling in alien turbulence. His helmet speaker crackled. “Crazy gust. Henderson went wide,” the sergeant reported to command. “We lost Henderson.”

He flipped off his radio. Now he could hear the Jovian atmosphere roaring around him. His respirator whined. His suit snapped in the air like a flag.

Nothing but clouds the colors of coffee and fire, now, for the rest of his life. Atmo pressure would crush his bones, squish his insides into a bony soup. His suit might survive, full of rotting man, tossed around in an century-long hurricane. Burial in the sky.

He tried to think of something to say. To broadcast. He chose silence, and hoped it would be haunting.

Call It A Keepsake

2008-02-04T16:29:24Z

“My ex-wife gave me this arm.”

“And you still want to keep it?” Kendal’s got him by the wrist joint, one foot on his thigh, and she’s pulling.

“That’s not,” his voice breaks into a shriek as his elbow port disconnects, “funny!” He’s panting. Something drips out of the joint. A bit of conductor fluid, a dab of blood.

“The worm’s in your wrist now, for sure. You’re about ten seconds from losing your shoulder. You want I should wait?”

“No,” he says. “Yes. Wait.” He looks at the ceiling. Yellow tiles, used to be white. He swore he’d never let her do this again. He smells the electric burn of his elbow grinding itself, out of place. If the virus gets into his myokinetic interface, into the flat ribbons under his shoulder muscles, leading to his spine, it could mess with the signals that run from brain to arm in a game of bioelectric telephone. Permanent damage.

And yet.

“Don’t do it,” he says. Almost crying.

“Screw that,” Kendal says, leaning back into it, pushing off thigh until his arm’s off its threads.

The Suicide Dog

2008-02-01T14:49:34Z

“Sit,” Master had said as he climbed over the balcony railing. “Stay.”

He was going somewhere. He’d put on his shoes and jacket and tied a tie. Then Master leaned out, both hands gripping the balcony behind him, and rocked back and forth like he sometimes did at the bus stop. Impatient, maybe. He had no tail to wag.

Master turned his head but didn’t exactly look back when he said, “Good dog.” Then Master left. A car alarm went off.

The police pounded at the door, but Buster was a good boy. Kept quiet. They came inside, but Buster did as he was told. Didn’t move. Just looked back over his shoulder, sort of upside-down, at the policemen as they came in. Watched them touch all Master’s things.

Release, Buster thought. Say “Release.”

“Okay,” one of them finally said. “Come on, boy.”

Buster looked him in the eye. Release. Say it. Come on, sir.

“Hey, Harry!” the policeman said. “He won’t move.”

The two cops stared at Buster. He looked back and forth between them.

Say it. Buster stared. Say. It.