In Space

          This is a short story I started in class three or so years ago that I'll probably never finish.... Well, here you go.

***

          Space Commander Dunham awoke from hyper-sleep to see two round pixel eyes staring down at him through five inches of chipped glass. His helmet slowly lowered onto his head and the robot took two heavy steps backwards, letting the Commander’s sleep module open in a cloud of steam. The robot extended a tube of coffee to the yawning space traveler. The Commander sleepily tried to put it to his open mouth and it hit the glass of his helmet.

            Drowsily, he said, “Eugene 3.1, what happened to my sleep module? It’s all chipped. If that glass broke, why, I could have asphyxiated!”

            “I was so lonely,” said the robot, who was awake the whole time. “Hold me.”

            Eugene 3.1 sought comfort in the folds of the Commander’s space suit.

            “But… where’s the rest of the crew?” said the Commander, looking around at the empty, cracked sleep modules. “Are they outside? What planet are we on?”

            Eugene 3.1 stepped to the side to block him from the spacecraft portal. “Yes, what is left of the crew is outside, Commander. We crash landed on Ziploc 5 two months ago. Only Clipper, Garbler, and Quiche survived the landing. However, there was something wrong with the colonists of Ziploc 5. It was discovered to be a space virus. Don’t go outside. I beg you.”

            The heedless Commander pressed a button and the portal opened to the planet outside.

            “My God, I’ve never seen anything like this, Eugene 3.1. What happened…”

            He could find no words. The entire planet was swarming with adorable puppies.

Image Credit: The People Magazine pet section and a preschool education website.

Villa Villekulla

I’m trying something new and scary called “organizing.” In spite of what I may state in cover letters, I have no talent for it. I firmly adhere to the aesthetic of rubbish. However, there is a fine line between a charming mess and an unsanitary pit of chaos, and the feng shui of my living space is careening towards the latter. Piles of books, piles of paper, piles of fabric, piles of receipt tape with notes scratched in the plastic coating – I cannot live a Zampano-esque lifestyle; it will not do. It's no wonder that I spend all of my time in the kitchen.

My bedroom contains six full shelves of books, and those that cannot squeeze onto these shelves are scattered in six piles in various places in my bedroom. These shelves are also a haven for kitschy fairy statuettes dismembered by the strikes of mischievous cat paws. It is the home of stuffed rodents, fortune cookie fortunes, and desiccated wisdom teeth in an envelope. There is a preserved rattlesnake head in a glass paperweight and a sizable collection of squirrel paraphernalia.

How do I go about organizing the books? I suppose I could organize them by color and put all of the green covered books on the north wall. I could alphabetize them by name. I could construct signs that will point me to the proper section of the alphabet.

←A-J

K-R→

S-Z↓

↑Oversized

I suppose I could sort them by genre. Perhaps I could squeeze all of the fiction into one bookcase. I can group the French language books and the Czech language books together with the travel guides somewhere between the hollow chocolate Satan and the Eiffel Tower figurine. I can put the mime technique books with the face paint. I can stack issues of the theology journal directly above the Vishnu paper lantern.

Or I can group all of the works by the same author together. My Oscar Wilde books should be set in front of the mirror so they can continually gaze at their own reflection. Books by Mark Dunn should be arranged so that the first letter of each title spells out a morsel of semantic vocabulary.  I could hide Mark Z. Danielewski’s books under a pile of newspapers inside of a trunk.

I will make a bookcase shaped like a three-tiered birthday cake for Leonora Carrington’s books and a UFO for Kurt Vonnegut's.My Edgar Allen Poe collection will naturally sit beside the bust of Pallas above my chamber door.  I will give Virginia Woolf a room of her own. Books by Samuel Beckett will be stuffed into a drawer full of bananas. And I could tuck the Amelia Gray books into a tangled nest of my own hair.

It won't be long before my bedroom becomes a superbly hygienic and navigable place once more.

Along Came a Spider

One night I went outside to gather some oregano for an improvisational bean dip. I approached my patch of herbs with a pair of scissors in hand and jumped as I beheld the most enormous spider web I have ever seen. It stretched from my house to a nearby cedar tree.

The most massive spider I have ever seen (that wasn’t tarantula in a small plastic carrying case with holes on the top) was constructing the outer rings. I suspect that it is one of those spiders from Australia that survive underground for years without water and eat honey badgers. Boy Scout points to anyone who can confirm this baseless speculation.

I ran into the house to fetch my camera-savvy brother. Perhaps I would have found this late night session of nature photography and flashing lights dangerous and invasive were it not for the “PHOTOGRAPH ME” message scrawled in iridescent web. I stood nearby holding an LED flashlight so that my brother could get a good view of the spider.

As we looked on, a fly was caught in the tremendous web and the spider swiftly dove upon it and wound it up like an unwilling bobbin. She left it alone, squirming in an iridescent straightjacket, and went on with her weaving. “This is nature!” I cried.

I carefully picked a few sprigs of oregano that were not bolstering the web to prevent my hand from being mummified in a similar fashion. Nature can be cruel, my friends.

Not So Carnivorous After All

            I was making a quinoa salad in my kitchen when I noticed an enormous black ant skittering across the floor tiles. I considered taking it outside where it could start a nice little homestead in the hostas, but then it occurred to me: I have a carnivorous plant. Instead of releasing the ant into its natural habitat, I moved it into hostile, flesh-eating territory.

I dropped its wriggling body from a mason jar into the open terrarium in the bay window. After I closed the lid, the ant crawled up and down the dewy walls of the terrarium and danced spastic circles around the red lips of the pitcher plant’s largest mouth. I watched in horror, waiting for the moment where he slipped down the waterslide into the digestive acids of doom. But no, he moved from the plant’s mouth to the wall of the terrarium once more and slipped into the peat moss.

The ant waved his fragile legs in the air so pitifully that I promptly opened the terrarium and rescued him from its swampy depths. I transferred him to the porch, where he will probably take advantage of the next opportunity to reenter my house.

I considered the pitcher plant, which has sprouted another luscious, red mouth since my last portrait session. Everything I’ve read on the subject of pitcher plants indicates that they aren't amazing photosynthesizers and require meaty meals, but my recent experiences have planted a seed of doubt in the peat moss of my mind. She is now bonding with my cat, Holly, a creature far too large for her to comfortably digest.

I suspect that my pitcher plant, Angelina, may be a vegetarian. It is not my place to criticize; I also dislike eating things with wild, wiggly legs. Perhaps it would be more amenable to my quinoa salad, served on the tip of a pair of pincers. Keep an eye out for my new food blog, Vegetarian Recipes for Your Carnivorous Plant.

Mars Needs Drama

For my Playwriting class, I was supposed to use a New York Times article to make three ideas for plays. I found this article about Mars Needs Moms incredibly inspiring for this assignment.

Mars Needs Ideas – A Tragedy

Bob, Jack, and Steve, three filmmakers, sit together around a table on stage. While brainstorming and smoking cigars, they come up with a brilliant idea for a 3-D film about Martians kidnapping the mothers of ungrateful earthling children. The three filmmakers take turns fantasizing about all the money they will make and how they will spend it. They invest $175 million into making and marketing the film only for it to flop. Later, they sit around the same table wondering where they went wrong as the contents of their studio are carried away.

Mars Needs Film Producers – A Comedy

Three producers – Bob, Jack, and Steve – are kidnapped by a space ship full of Martians, transported to their home planet, and dropped into some sort of inescapable chromium zoo. They find that the creative team of The Adventures of Pluto Nash is already there. A little green Martian explains to Bob, in fumbling English, that Mars has a severe shortage of intergalactic family films. The three producers then smoke cigars around a chrome table and brainstorm the idea of Mars Needs Moms, inspired by the adventure that brought them to this strange and mysterious red planet in the first place. They spend $175 million Mars dollars making and marketing the film only for it to flop because of its socially insensitive depiction of Martians.

Mars Needs Film Producers – In 3-D!

A play that will be performed in… 3-D! The story will be the same one mentioned in the previous paragraph, but the audience will pay 30% more for the tickets.

Mars Needs Pixar Animators

The characters of Toy Story quietly watch a bootleg copy of Mars Needs Moms on Andy’s giant television. They feel sort of embarrassed and turn it off.

Mars Needs Action Romance

Bob and his two film-making friends are kidnapped and taken to Mars. They are dropped into some sort of chromium zoo where several slovenly Neanderthals with outdated filming equipment seem to have been stranded for years. Bob and his friends watch in horror as the hideous, green Martian faces gaze down from the space-glass above. Zafronia enters through steel doors and explains, in fumbling English, that the Martians want them to make an intergalactic family film. She has stylish hair and breasts which indicate that she is an attractive female Martian. Bob, Jack, and Steve desperately work together make a film, but it flops in the intergalactic markets. Conveniently, Zafronia has a warship and helps the filmmakers escape during the disastrous premier. She reveals to their surprise that she was just an Earth-Mom that was kidnapped and turned into a Martian. After blowing up Mars, they return to Earth and make the film Mars Needs Moms.

The Zemeckis Technique

Actors will perform Mars Needs Moms on a bare set wearing uniforms outfitted with sensors that record their movements. An avant-garde production for the whole family!

(Image credit: www.joeacevedo.com, home of the perfect Martian woman.)

Unnatural Happenings in My Backyard

I believe this is the quickest I’ve ever followed one post with another. I’m sitting cross-legged at my writing desk in a thunderstorm. My hand is cramping and I would really like a snack, but I feel compelled to relate the following story.

Yesterday I saw a creature pollinating our petunias that initially appeared to be a hummingbird, but on closer inspection resembled a bumblebee. It had transparent wings with a brown border and a long curly “nose” like a butterfly. Rather than black and white stripes it was yellow with one large, brown stripe. I suspected it to be the lovechild of a hummingbird and a bumblebee, the result of a tryst forbidden by Mother Nature.

Later, chasing a plastic back across the lawn, I stumbled upon a second alien creature in the shade of the woods. I saw a patch of completely white flowers. They looked like wilted rosebuds sucked dry by a vegetarian vampire, a cross between a crocus and a fungus.

After I recovered from the shock of all of the disparate organisms breeding in my yard, I wrote an e-mail to my friend, an authority on matters of plant and animal identification, asking what they were and if I should fear them.

Before she could respond, my curiosity lead me to Google. First, I searched, “Strange hummingbird and bumblebee like insect.” I found this page. The seemingly anomalous insect turned out to be a Snowberry Clearwing Hummingbird Moth. Then I searched “Strange white and transparent flower,” and I got this page. The plant is called Indian pipe. It has no chlorophyll and feeds off of the delicious fungus on the dead leaves. It is also known as Ice-Plant, Ghost-Plant, Corpse-Plant, Plant-of-Death, Ominous-White-Plant, and many other suitable titles.

Later, my friend responded to my e-mail and confirmed my search results. My conclusion is that Google is the boy scout of the twenty-first century.

One Month: Revival of Dead Plant Short-Lived, Indeed

I have been stalling the writing process for a few days to avoid showing what the terrarium actually looks like right now. Both plants were growing at an alarming rate and the leaf shapes looked perfectly alien. Right when I was getting excited and hoping to see some teeth soon, I left it outside in the sun to photosynthesize on Monday. Plants need to photosynthesize, right?

It appears that the recently resurrected plant has spontaneously combusted, whereas the other plant seems to have been seared by a small, contained forest fire. I watered it promptly and moved it back inside, vowing never to leave the terrarium outside in the sun while I go to work again. Next time I will leave it with a sitter.

I do not foresee a second resurrection in the future for my dearly departed carnivorous plant. I discovered a frosty white mold blanketing what is left of it tonight. If it returns now, it will be in the form of a fly-eating zombie.

I suppose I’ll have to find something else to write about if the other plant decomposes with it. The avocado pits are moldy. The strawberries are brown. I only have so much to say about these pleasantly striated onions.

Originally I planned to write about my adventures in Prague, but I have a while before the time comes to venture over the big blue puddle. What to do, what to do….