Websites Are A Go!

I finally got some web space and now, my writing site is launched! 

http://www.senordwall.com

It is meant to showcase my original writing with excerpts of my (unpublished) novels, some of my better short stories, random illustrations and cover designs I've done, and, of course a massive section for my better fanfictions.

Linked to the site is my resurrected bone art site - an old site I tweaked slightly but still liked the design of showcasing the unusual art I do with painted animal bones.  

......

Now, it's opinion-time!

I just saw some news on Yahoo and... ugh.  I just want to shake my head.  When there's a high-profile suicide in the news, particularly if the victim is connected to someone with political ties... I don't know, I just want to tell everyone who bothers to comment on it "this is not about politics" nor is it time to blame families or to gloat about "karma."  This goes double if the victim was a known mental illness sufferer and was in treatment. 

I want to tell the whole entire world:  You "normals" out there, repeat CAREFULLY after me, stops included for emphasis:  "I. Will. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER-EVER. Understand. Mental. Illness. Until. I Develop. One.  EVER!!!" 

People who live with a sufferer come close to understanding, as do trained professionals / compassionate therapists, but really... unless you live with it, you will NEVER understand it and, as far as I'm concerned, do not have the *right* to judge someone's suicide or to make a some kind of snarky statement about beliefs or politics on it. 

I finally got ahold of a therapist and started therapy last week.  It took me a lot to want to get this kind of help, even though I've been medicated for years.  I don't even know what's going on in my own mind half the time, let alone other people... but through my observations, I've come to the conclusion that some impulses and gaping maws of despair are things that people who do not ever understand unless they experience them.  It's like there's this gulf between it and "normal" as wide as the Grand Canyon.  

In other words, don't make fun if you're not even going to give two shits about making it right.

Old Shame, By Request

I was over on Slacktivist last night and people were in a conversation about one of the Left Behind book except posts there (namely how the books' Antichrist was pretty poor at running an evil empire compared to certain other evil empires in fiction)... and inevitably the conversation turned to the lack of empathy among the "heroes" and the datedness of the technology in the books as it stands today...

Somehow, I wound up mentioning how dumb Young Me, who used to be a fan of the (first few) books was touched off in inspiration to write my own "post-Rapture" story.  I actually won a contest with it and got it published in a 'zine - not a Christian 'zine, just a plain ol' avant garde random content 'zine.  I described my story as I remembered it (very small scale, cozy, focused upon one character and an aspect of the Rapture as bandied about by "prophecy" evangelists that I seem to remember them forgetting about).  It's old shame now since I'm not particularly into that specific kind of theology anymore and because I'm embarassed about where the initial inspiration came from, but upon re-reading the story in my copy of the circa 2000 'zine, I decided that I was surprised about how "not-horrible" my story was.

Now, I didn't say "good," just... "not-horrible."

Since someone on the Slacktivist boards really wanted to check it out... I went to my computer with multiple hard drives and all my old shame stored on it and was pleasantly surprised to actually find the thing... after all these years. 

So, here it is. 

(Is it just me, or do I seem to really like cemetaries in my work)? 

_____________________________________

Shadowtery

Ruth was alone.

The night was as quiet and dark as the girl wandered through the cemetery. She stepped slowly, letting the cold dew on the grass caress her bare feet. She glanced into the clear indigo sky to watch the stars wink. She hummed, her humming slowly becoming words.

"Tiptoe through the tulips,
In the tulips, that’s where I’ll be,
Come tiptoe through the tulips with me…"

Ruth then began humming "Pomp and Circumstance" as she danced between headstones. She would have been marching to that tune in a few short months upon the football field of Middleridge High School. It would have been a proud evening. Ever since her first day at Middleridge High, the only thing that Ruth wanted to do was get a diploma in her hands and get out of that place.

It was not easy being the "class freak". Ruth was introspective and studious, someone who didn’t believe that school was just something to do between parties and she suffered for that attitude. The slender girl stretched her long arms to the sky.

As a child, Ruth’s big sister and her friends used to tell her stories about ghosts and vampires roaming around in the cemetery at night. They would weave tales of how if little girls wandered among the headstones on a cloudless eve like tonight, the angry spirits of the people buried there would reach up out of their graves and pull them straight into Hell.

Ruth became skeptical of her sister’s claims after their mother found out about her and those same friends toilet-papering the cemetery a few years ago as a Halloween prank. Lisa had returned alive and well from the graveyard that Trick-or-Treat night, but was grounded for two weeks.

Tonight, for Ruth, this cemetery was a refuge. She feared nothing from the dead. It was the reigning chaos in the places of the living that gave her terror.

She stepped gracefully past an empty grave, one of the many in this place. Dirt lay scattered in fresh heaps around the open depression and the casket lay haphazardly within it, half-in and half-out. Its lid was open and creaking on its hinges.

The utterly strange events of the past few days left Ruth wondering about many things. The week had begun mundanely, then began spinning into something out of a bizarre nightmare.

Ruth loved to read of the paranormal. Anything weird or spooky immediately captured her attention. She relished stories about astral projection, near-death experiences, cryptozoology, flying saucers, and alien abductions. She studied these with vigor and knew of the various theories proposed about them all: hallucination, collective cultural archetypes, parallel dimensions, and hypotheses claiming that they all pointed to some great underlying cosmic truth.

Ruth raised her head and let out a dark, semi-maniacal laugh, "Who’s laughing now, skanks?" she cried into the empty night air.


Her interest in the strange was part of the reason why Ruth was the "freak" of her Senior Class. Her peers gave her derisive nicknames such as "Ruthie Girl from Planet X", "Scully" and "Creepy Chic". Even now, she could hear Emily Hendrix and Patricia Whalberg cackling at her in the locker-hall.

"Too bad the aliens didn’t get you last night, Creepy Girl! Mrs. Johnson’s giving us that Algebra test today and there’s goin’ to be Hell to pay if you don’t let us copy your answers this time!" Emily and Patricia, always too lazy to study, always the first to call her "Creepy Girl", skanks.

Ruth did not know where Emily and Patricia were now, whether they had disappeared or whether they were, like her, wandering aimlessly somewhere despairing and alone.

Maybe the aliens had come. It was a very strange way to announce their presence to the Earthlings, if so. Perhaps Grandma was right; she used to talk about something like this.
Ruth’s Grandmother, like she, held an interest in the bizarre, though hers leaned more toward a theological nature. Ruth recalled the old woman speaking of the idea of resurrection.

"It is like the legend of the Phoenix."

"Phoenix" echoed in Ruth’s mind. It was the mythical firebird that perished in flames only to rise again from its own ashes. There was a city named Phoenix-the capitol of Arizona. It had originally been built by an ancient native people called the Hohokam, only to be rebuilt by settlers centuries later.
According to the current Archeology, researchers were unable to decipher what had exactly happened to the Hohokam people. "It was as if everyone stopped what they were doing and left;" as one of Ruth’s junior high teachers had put it. The trail of their culture had simply run cold, whereas many other ancient cultures had left material clues as to what happened to end their societies. Ruth and her friend, Eva, had proposed a strange and humorous theory about alien abduction when they gave a report to their eighth grade class. They got a "B" on that report, and gave their fellow students a few good giggles.

Ruth was not feeling particularly funny now. Remembering what she learned of the Hohokam, she thought about what was happening to her own town-and to the entire world-now. Perhaps, She mused; every society must undergo some form of a "cultural cleansing". If not by human means, then by some cosmic or natural phenomenon?"


What Ruth did not understand was why so many corpses were gone. It would make sense for the living people to disappear. If it was some sort of mass alien abduction, why would the dead be taken? Perhaps curious and intelligent beings from another world would take fresh corpses for dissection and anatomical study, but not bones that lay for decades. Ruth walked past an open grave whose headstone read: Mr. Peter Sorensen 1879-1925.
If it was some sort of strange, cosmic spiritual cleansing, it also made little sense that so many dead people would be taken. The living, yes, by whatever forces or powers that be, but the dead? It was the living that made a society, not the dead.


A breeze ruffled the leaves of the cemetery’s great willow trees. Ruth listened to the sound and watched the moonlight play with their shadows. An amorphous winged creature played at her toes, the shadow of a headstone carved into the shape of an angel.


A phrase came to Ruth’s mind; "We, in this world, are all speeding toward our corporeal rot. But we have one great Hope…"



It was a quote from the Pastor of her family’s church, Pastor Rubens. He had been among the Vanished. Ruth was the only one of her family that had remained. Pastor Rubens had said that something like this would happen someday during one message she heard when she joined her family in church. It was the message of two Sundays ago, in fact. Ruth did not know why she had remembered it.

Rubens had said that Christ would come back for his people someday, and that the day would come "like a thief in the night". He said that the "saved" should watch and pray and work for the Kingdom of God, whatever that was, and that the sinners should not put Christ off until it is too late.


It was the same weird story that Grandma used to tell her. The woman was an enigma, she didn’t consider herself Catholic, but she loved those candles with paintings of Saints and prayers in Spanish on them that were sold in the local grocery stores. Grammy’s house was filled with those darn things and the many rooms always smelled faintly of smoke even though she said that she believed using them for prayer was a form of idolatry.


She used to tell Ruth that she bought them because she liked the pictures on the glass and because she liked to think of the Saints as examples, the candles reminded her of the stories of their great deeds.
Supposing that’s what happened? Ruth pondered, What Pastor Rubens and Grandma said, would that explain the cars careening off the road and all those prisoners ‘miraculously escaping’ from the prisons? And would it explain way my family disappeared?


Ruth could not stay home and watch the news anymore. All it was about was the Vanishings and the accidents, the suicides, and the outright murders that were happening because of the widespread panic and despair. Millions of people all over the Earth were suddenly…gone. Many living disappeared, but also, large numbers of the dead, their graves burst open like the many empty graves of the Middleridge Cemetery. Not every grave in every graveyard around the world, but many, lost their occupants.


The news didn’t even report half of what was going on after a mere three days. Martial Law had been declared in some areas, those places where the looting, rioting and general panic had been the worst. Some groups of armed soldiers had been wielding their government-given power at the media centers in order to control the news that was broadcast, for fear of more panicking and riots.


Ruth had come to the cemetery, to the only place that would almost surely be quiet and at peace in the town of Middleridge, which had suffered much of the chaos of the rest of the world, maybe more, since most of the town was among the Vanished.

The question for the dead was the same as the question for the living, why some and not others? Ruth’s Great Uncle Danny still lay underground, as well as her Cousin Martha, killed in an automobile accident two years ago.


Whatever was responsible for the Vanishings, what need did it feel to desecrate graves?
Ruth stepped lightly among the grass, dancing as a lunatic among the shadows, which was not entirely untrue, for she was nearly mad with sorrow and fear. The dancing…calmed her a little as she felt the dew on her feet and the breeze kissing her bare arms. She stopped dancing when she came to the grave of her Grandmother.


Grammy, the same Grammy who used to burn prayer candles and have long discussions of her thoughts on paranormal phenomena with Ruth had died of a sudden and massive stroke two years ago that January. Ruth was devastated when her mother told her the news. Mother had found Grandmother lying on the living room floor in her house when paying a visit and called an ambulance, but it proved vain. Ever since then, Ruth visited the cemetery on the first of every month with a Saint’s candle to light and place on Grandma’s headstone.


To Ruth’s horror, the grave was open, her Grandmama’s casket lying like a piece of shipwreck flotsam washed upon some muddy beach, just outside the massive hole. Dirt lay everywhere and the scene looked as if a small bomb had been detonated somewhere just under the casket. Wood lay in thick splinters in a vaguely circular arrangement around the plot and the purple flower-patterned dress that Grammy had been buried in lay sickly dangling out of the inside of the coffin, looking like it had been torn by a wild animal.
Grandmother?


She…was among the Vanished, her body ripped violently from its resting-place. Ruth was swept over in a wave of confusion. Why? was the only word that came to her mind in that strange and terrible moment. She fell to her knees, awash in fear, in anger, and in confusion. She wanted to shout her indignation to the skies, but found herself too weary to raise her fist. Ruth simply sat in the damp grass and mud and pulled her knees to her chest. She curled there beside the desecrated grave of her Grammy, rocking back and forth and weeping.



Copyright S. E. Nordwall, 2000

All Rights Reserved.

King of the Manure Pile

This is another one of those stream of conciousness rants.

I don’t know if I’ve really “given up” on Humanity, all I know is that just don’t have what it takes to have any all-encompassing faith in it.  I’ve been thinking lately about things like primal impulses (for a story I have in mind), our pride, ability to self-deception and in general, how it is impossible for us to truly accept each other as equals en masse, as strangers.  Family can love each other well enough (if you’re lucky enough to live in a functional family), and lovers and give and take equally and truly respect one another – and of course, no matter what one’s friends are into, one has a tendency to make excuses for one’s friends.  The rest of us? Yeah, we’re screwed because it is in our nature, whether knowingly or subconsciously to see each other as a little less. The sad part is, I think this is a fundamental part of human nature that none of us can completely get away from. 

It’s not always extreme enough for us to notice… I was half-watching (while doing another thing) a show on PBS about sex-trafficking and how girls in parts of Asia that are sold into the brothel system are pretty much literally seen there as sub-people.  Which is of course why they get beaten and their eyes stabbed out (in the case of one of the escapees shown).  This goes on *today.* 

Then, there is the less institutionalized version… the other day, I was at a mall and was carrying my Nintendo 3DS around because I like to keep the wireless on to capture random Miis from other people’s DS-es.  (For those who don’t know, they’re little cartoon avatars you can make of yourself on modern Nintendo systems that you can set loose online and if your little pocket game system is in the range of another, you can meet new cartoon versions of people).  The strap on my carrier came loose, I heard a “chink” as it hit the ground and a young man graciously picked it up for me and handed it to me.  After checking everything to make sure it was still there, my guy and I walked and talked and he said that the kid had this “snatch and grab, oh crap I’ve been caught!” look on his face when he turned around and my attention was to the ground – and that I had only experienced faux-gentlemanliness.  I think it’s true because the strap had come loose in such a way that it only would have if someone had come up from behind and actually tugged it…

Which brought me to some very un-Jesusly, un-neighborly thoughts of “If he had gone ahead and run with my DS, I would have leapt on him like a beast!”  I am… a bit of a berserker. People who know me in real life know this.  My primal urges came to the fore. I also knew, in that moment, just how much this random person devalued me – to think it was totally okay for him just to come up and try to swipe my stuff because I was “oblivious” or “stupid” in his eyes because I was in a crowded mall, looking ahead.  Maybe because I was visibly female, even.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I had an unpleasant memory flash in my mind of being in high school and almost getting kicked out of the Art and Writing Club (with my artistic abilities being the only thing most people really liked me for in that hellhole) because when the club was selling candy for a trip, I had to resign from being on the candy crew because people in my classes found ways to distract me and swipe my candy.  I was losing more than profiting.  It wasn’t even a matter of me being unobservant – in high school I was the designated target, the Meg Griffin, if you will.  Everyone knew I was “kosher” to mess with when they wouldn’t mess with someone else.   I was devalued and theft was one of the manifestations of that.  So, yeah… I’m about ready to put myself in a mall jail if someone pulls crap like that on me again.  (Though I also know which specific mall is the skeevy-mall not to take anything fun to now).

Last night, browsing the Internet because I had insomnia, I found someone’s link to an interfaith / psychology of religion kind of blog/site.  Among other interesting things, it featured a section on how people *should* believe in the concepts they believe in by someone who doesn’t share that theology, and not just in a getting along in society way, but in an actual *theology* way.  I hate that.   I don’t care who is doing it to who, or if someone’s against my world view but thinks I’m one of the “good ones,” there is no way to tell someone “believe WRONG, right!” without looking down your snoot at them.  I think that is the way with everyone who thinks they are “right” – and since I think there are essentially as many “religions” as there are people, I think it’s all but guaranteed that a lot of people are going to be telling others to be “smart about their stupidity” and thus making people they don’t share something “important” with a little lesser in the subconscious mind.    

And as much of as doubtful and insecure person as I am, I do this kind of thing, too. I admire people who choose a vegetarian lifestyle for health or moral reasons, but there’s a part of me that regards vegans with an attitude of “You are denying your primal nature! Humans are predators!”  I definitely look down on people who nanny-goat about videogames and fantasy literature, because those are things that I enjoy and the people who whine about them have no idea what they’re about.  Yesterday, on a forum I go to, someone posted a topic about the Comic Sans typeface, wondering what people thought of it, if it was really as horrible as people make it out to be and I went on a little graphic designer’s rant about how both Comic Sans and Papyrus are so overused that they’re the very mark of the amateur and of design-ignorance.  Yes, a small part of me looks at the signs for Yoga studios and whole foods markets and pities the lack of artistic mindset and skills on the part of the people who designed or commissioned them. 

I do actually think the world is getting better… that as slow going as it’s being, we’re really *trying* to become more equal.  I think about this whenever I run into a forum game regarding time travel or hypothetically living in a past era. I think “Medieval Europe might be neat, or the Old West, or Ancient Rome…” and that’s when I think “Wait, I have boobs.  None of these eras would be good for me.”  Also, it was cool to grow up with mixed-race friends and it wasn’t even a thing… but you know, as much as we try, I really doubt Humanity will ever be capable of getting over its “king of the mountain” games.  This is probably the reason why I persist in holding onto a belief of something “other” than just Humanity, regardless of any logic. 

It’s kind of hard to realize, no matter how much I try to do something great in life, to someone, I’ll always be “inferior,” and, in turn, I’ll always have my own things to look down my nose at in regards to other people.  It’s all just a vicious, horrible cycle.   

Sex.

Now that I've got your attention...

I hardly ever post on here anymore, and I am thinking of scrapping the whole thing if/when I ever actually get a new website up, so this place has really become a place for random thoughts.  Since I didn't want to re-register at a site I browse just to leave comments that will get ridiculed, I figure I'd share some random thinkage here. 

I was reading a topic about a sexuality-related scandal and was reading the comments on it.  I came across someone's comment about how "sex is vital to a fully-lived human experience."  I suppose it was inevitable... such commentary annoys me, but it's so depressingly common - there are even TV Tropes named after people's thoughts along those lines ("Virgin on the Edge of Stupidity" and the like).  Plots of popular movies centered around people helping others to lose theirs...

... The only time I think I've ever seen a sentiment I agree with on this was that episode of Firefly in which Inara (a character who is a high-class prostitute for all zero of you who might be reading this who might be unfamiliar with the show) speaks to a young man client regarding virginity and non/virginity being "just states of being, nothing more" - not something to get excited about.  (The character's father had hired Inara to "make a man" out of his son and the young man was suprised at not feeling any different after the um... manhood ritual).  At the end of the episode, the young man did become a man by standing up to his father, but, even then, the show leaves it open as to whether the kid grew a backbone or if Sex was Magic and inspired him to do so. 

I wonder if our culture's obession with sex is the problem here.  On one hand, it creates people who are quick to condemn anyone who "steps out of line," people who've already "stepped out of line" and a WHOLE LOT of self-condmentation.

I remember the self-condemnation a friend of mine had as a teenager about getting pregnant by her boyfriend... I was really into church back then, so she kind of naturally assumed that I would condemn her.  When I found out she'd had a child I had so much emotion about it.  I felt hurt that she thought I would shun her, and the whole time she was shunning herself and turning away from former friends, I thought that she was avoidinng me because of my weirdness and my general unpopularity.  (At this point in my life, I was used to former friends "growing away from me" because of my introverted nerd-ways and the issues I had with my emotinal states that I didn't know at the time were signs of a disorder).  My friend didn't need to assume things and hide away from friends who could have supported her. 

And then you have these scandals like the one I just read about where a guy deperately tries to change himself for what he thinks is the better and is caught being a hypocrite being on services he's not "supposed" to be on, but just further condeming himself and others. 


The other side of the obession-coin, of course, is people telling the world at large and thus folks like *me* (I'm asexual and am happily, so far, an adult virgin) that I "don't live a fully-realized human existence."    Okay, so I understand the condemnation of straight up mentally-hilarious freaks like me, but what about the adult virgin who is so because they have some kind of severe learning disability? Or a physical problem with the "plumbing?"  Do *children* not live a fully-realized human existance if they happen to die before experiencing the mystical magical genital-tour? 

The time for stupid statements is over. 

Even for a freak like me (just lacking an apparently normal sex drive), I tend to persist in the folly of thinking of myself as a full-human.  (I probably ought to stop it, really.  Thanks to the Internet I've found out my "not-real-human-ness" and/or general human inferiority about a variety of issues).  Maybe the answer here is "You know, forcing or coercing someone to have sex when they don't really want to/aren't quite ready is, um... you know.. a word brought to you by the letter 'R."   

In any case, I don't think somene hasn't or doesn't live a fully-realized human life because they have yet to try sushi, or haven't stood on the shores of both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, or been to New York, or because they haven't seen the Grand Canyon.  These are all things I've done that I see, in my life, as "vital human experiences," - neat things that I've done.  Heck, the way some people are addicted to love, I've developed an addiction to salmon maki.  Brushes with death? I could say that those are a vital human experirence that makes you really feel alive and "truly human" - but I wouldn't wish my experiences with that on anyone (unless of course they were in some severe need of humbling or finding courage).   

I suppose if culture was as obessed with the consumption of raw fish, or visiting the edges of canyons, or narrowly surviving almost getting killed by the dangers of a farm, maybe people would obsess about the "exact right time and place" one is supposed to eat certain things, or people like me would be able to look down our noses at "harrowing-experience virgins," or something. 

Maybe we should all take a lesson from Inara - what goes on between your legs is just a state, nothing less and nothing more.  Even if there's a right time and place for it, it's not something that makes you less or more "human" than anyone else.  Frankly, my life is only pooer if I think it's poorer - and I don't - not for this particular reason.

Accidental Unoriginality

Accidental Unoriginality

A little bit to get off my chest. 

Over on the videogames forum I go to, there are personal blogs for members and a whole blogroll.  It’s not formal, people post whatever their thoughts are there, from seriousness to silly things like memes and, recently, one guy laying all of his Legend of Zelda series games out in a pattern after the official Timeline.  I post more often there than here lately.  I’m actually contemplating scrapping this thing in favor of designing a website to promote my writing so I can have something for Kindle to link to should I break down and self-publish one of my novels in e-book form.  I actually got a Kindle for Christmas mostly for the sake of seeing how works look on one, getting a feel for it for the possibility of self-publishing after facing the facts that I’m not good and/or flashy enough to get published in the conventional way. 

That brings me to talking to people on my little forum blog about publishing and books.  There’s someone on the forums who’d bought a company’s publishing package and I asked him how that went.  There was another young person who was dismayed at the depressed tone of my complaint at receipt of a rejection letter who was basically all “Never give up! Never surrender!” 

Then she said something that made me twitch.  I had posted bits of query letters from two of the works I’ve done as basic samples of “These are the basic premises of two things I have written, you can get a feel for my general style. Is this marketable?” - For the guy I was talking publishing/marketing stuff with.  The girl who responded to me, in a fit of encouragement told me “That second one! It reminds me of His Dark M-”

And immediately my mind screamed “GOOD LORD, NOT ANOTHER ONE!”

I have a novel about people and their guardian creatures.  With what I hear from people, it seems, when I try to describe it before I even get two sentences out, you’d think that Phillip Pullman had *invented* the idea of supernatural guardians instead of them being a staple of mythology and fantasy everywhere.  Ugh.   I informed my blog-reader that I had not read the His Dark Materials books, that what I’d heard about them turned me off of being inclined to read them due to ideological differences thus far, even though I’d heard they were good, and that I actually got the initial idea from something in one of the Legend of Zelda games (Link and his guardian-fairy).  Of course, I happen to prefer bat-winged dragon-lions in my own fiction… 

The blog-buddy messaged me trying to convince me that I really should read her favorite book series, not to be tainted about what I’d heard about it.  I punched up TV Tropes on it and went through its entries there again – tropes descriptions and reviews from fans, links to review articles and the like and… I can see a lot of ideal logy in the descriptions that I can agree with, but some of the things that turn me off are things I suspect would really turn me off in a full reading.  I’m strangely enough not turned off by a fictional world in which God is evil and must die by the end, but I am turned off by the Unfortunate Implications that no-one who ever made the honest mistake of believing in said God is portrayed with any sympathy at all. Coupled with the class-ism described in the Unfortunate Implications part of it, it leads me to wonder if in reading these books, I’m signing a mental contract with an author who thinks that people who gravitate toward the “lowly” or toward things he disagrees with are “just inferior people.” Doubly problematic when I fall under a couple of “inferior” categories. I know I’m stupid for it, but I am hypersensitive about things like that.  I have to watch my depression-triggers.  I’m probably reading too much into a friggin’ tropes description. 

I read a few of the Left Behind books back in the day when they were popular.  They were particularly odious in regards to “agrees with the authors on abstract concepts = good / disagrees = all their works are tainted.”  A few books in and there were even pages at the head of the books dividing the “sides” people were on.  “Believers / Villains / Undecided.”   Nuanced as a brick.  Arbitrary, too. I’ve realized since I’ve left those books behind, that I’ve pretty much outgrown the idea of categorism.

I remember getting annoyed reading The Lord of the Rings over there being no good Orcs... that’s how deep it goes with me.  One of the things I like about my beloved Legend of Zelda game series is that, while it runs on a black and white morality, there are a few shady people and some “good” monsters.  The usual “humans are good, monsters are bad” gets diced up a little on occasion, and pretty much puree’d for Twilight Princess. I actually got annoyed a bit on the lastest title, Skyward Sword when the resident good-guy helpful monster thought that he had to transform into a human to be “good.”  He was good already.  I’m with his little child-friend in that game: He should have kept his flappy bat wings.  He didn’t need to lose them to be good.      

I like to think with my own writing, that when I’m writing characters who disagree with me about a broad, abstract concept that I’m giving them sympathy, sense and reasons in regards to why they would disagree with me.  I’ve had too many genuine friends who disagreed with me sharply on abstract (and even hard-in/right now political ) issues where we could discuss things without me coming away feeling stupid, and us still being friends and seeing the goodness in each other.  I find it fairly easy to write this way when I don’t know what I’m about most of the time and am a depressed, insecure person and I feel like whatever position I’m trying to convey, I’m coming from a place of weakness rather than strength.  In other words, I’m not even sure if my own message is the right one.

 Yes, I have villains who are actually villainous, but I tend to make that a combination of being messed up in the head and having a personal sadism. Somewhat based on history and real events/people who’ve existed (you don’t need ideological enemies to have a serial killer villain), and moreover based upon my own dark side, things I can imagine.  

I don’t know if I do any of it right because I’m not published yet and… ARGH! As soon as I open my mouth about anything I’ve written or am writing, I get some spiel from someone about how “That’s totally like this very favorite thing of mine!” 

I was almost turned off of one of my favorite childhood movies because I was a part of a writers club in which the head of the club insistently and repeatedly compared a character of mine to Falcor because she thought she was being cute, apparently.  I was a part of a writer’s club years ago that met in a bookstore coffee shop.  I was having them read a story of mine I’ve since scrapped.  I had a character that was a white German shepherd with wings.  The head of the club got it into her head that “white flying dog” must equal Falcor the dragon from “The Neverending Story” even though they were nothing alike save from being white in color and able to fly… AUUUGHG. 

Strangely enough, a friend turned me onto what has become my very favorite videogame by saying “this is like something you’d write” but I think that was because she didn’t compare anything among my characters or premises to anything specific in the game.  In fact, there is nothing specific in Shadow of the Colossus that’s a mirror to anything in any of my stories.  However, the idea that I write stories with melancholy themes and isolation indicating that I would like something with a similar general theme really hit a winner. 

Maybe that’s the trick to attempting to compliment an idea of mine to encourage me to write:  Don’t compare the premise to being “Oh so totally like” your already favorite thing after having only seen a couple of sentences of it.  This only makes me worry that I’m accidentally ripping off people who are known and probably a lot better than I am and feel like giving up on my premise.  Don’t compare one of my characters in a borderline rip-off way to a favorite character of yours when you know well they are very different and only share a fur color.  If you want to encourage me by comparison like that, try *themes* - raw *themes.*  

Please don’t make me worry I’m ripping off something unless I’m *actually ripping off something.* 

Thank you.  

The World's Still Here. I'm Mildly Dissapointed.

Hmm.  I haven't posted here in a while (I've actually been using a blog-space connected to a fandom message board more often because I happen to be popular enough at that board that sometimes people read it and I feel generally informal there).  I have a short story / experimental novel chapter I could post, but I'm not sure it's very good, plus I'm trying to bring together more of the ideas I have for the greater story in my brain.  I shared the little chapter I have so far with a friend and she "wants to know more about how the world got that way" - and, frankly, I do, too... I'm waiting for the details to come to me. 

A lot of news going on in the world. You could say it's part of the reason the world dissapoints me by still turning, but that's sort of dark. The short story/chapter I mentioned had a mention of gun nuts vs. people who actually use guns to hunt because of when I was writing it...  I could use this space to say something about the woeful state of mental health care in this country, but I'm all ranted out from responding on news sites and serious blogs by people who actually count in this world.  Besides, who wants to listen to a crazy person?  As for the gun issue... I quipped to my guy "I think we should have a compromise.  We keep the 2nd Amendment on the grounds that civilians are only allowed to have guns of the models that were around when the 2nd Amendment was drafted!  Imagine how rampages would go if someone had to muzzle-load a musket between shots!"  - Okay, so that's not a real solution to anything, just a joke.  Take it as an interest in historic weapons.  I have relatives who know how to hunt with powder-rifles, so you know, it *does* happen as a sporting and meat-getting thing in the modern age.

 I wasn't expecting the world to end on the Solstice.  I did what I'd planned to do that day: Whipped out "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" and started playing a new file.  For those of you unfamiliar with that videogame, its major theme is Apocalypse, in that you play a child-hero character who gets trapped in an alternate world (of his homeworld, it's a sequel to "Ocarina of Time") and must save it from the machinations of an angry child, a demonic mask that wants to make his darkest desire come true and a falling moon that will crash into the world on a "three-day" time-limit from the start of each gameplay session. Every Legend of Zelda fan I know was making references to Majora's Mask and the 21st.  I also remember playing a bit of MM during that May 2011 end of the world claptrap.  It's a beautiful game, too... you cleanse corruptions, ease the regrets and pains of the dying (seriously, you comfort dying people in this, it's how you partner with their souls in form of masks that give you powers) and, of course, you meet The End of the World and kick its ass!  It's all basically what I describe as a "whimsical nightmare."  If one wants me to get philosophical about the game, I sort of see the villain of the game (Majora's Mask) as nihilism personified and Link (your player character) fighting against it for all he's worth - because people and the world (even when it's not his own) are worth something! 

Which brings me to something I saw today... some comment on an article about the "Mayan Apocalypse" with someone talking about how the end of the world nuts will just move on to the next fad... we survived Y2K, we've survived the end of the last Ba'ak'tun (spelling?) and the person was wondering "why" about that.  I think the reason why is that these "End of the World prophecies" are distractions from the real problems going on. If you're stocking up for "doomsday" you aren't as likely to be worried about today, are you? I seem to vaugely remember a passage in one of the letters of Paul in the Bible's New Testament where he was basically rippinig into his fellow Christ-followers who'd decided to give up their jobs and sit around waiting for the Second Coming.  If more self-proclaimed spiritual leaders of today had that kind of wisdom...a lot of people wouldn't be distracted from their solid real-world work. Then again, a favorite blog of mine wouldn't be nearly as popular if it didnt' have a certain apocalyptic book series to rip into...At least I know that's how I found out about it.

We have a lot of problems in our world that are essentially "destryong it" - making it an unfun, dangerous place to live (not that it hasn't always been), but we have some major things going on now, in our interconnected age.  The spectacular pronouncements of "The world is going to end on this day!" or "on this year!" priming people to expect some major cataclysm perhaps serves as an mind-catching distraction from the "slow path" things that are happening every day and whittling away peace and justice by increment. I don't even mean a vague "belief in Heaven," either, because I know a lot of people who believe in somelace nice to go after they die who care about here and now *more than anything* (myself included).  It's the whole idea that the world is going to end in some kind of sucidial bang and it's going to happen on this date, this hour that's the distraction from the problems of the world that seem ordinary, but are still problems.  It entertains people, nothing more.  The idea of the world's sudden death probably hurts less than the slow death.  I know that I react to a lot of news these days with sheer, staggering apathy, and that scares me.  The Conneticuit shooting... I saw something blip online about it and thought "Okay, another one" and thought it was something that had happened a month or so ago with only a couple of deaths.  It was only when I turned on the news and saw the mass death - and child deaths - that I cried.  Before I knew the magnitude of it all, my attitude was sort of "ho hum" because what was once and should be EXTRODINARY has become ORDINARY. 

Ordinary evils and dangers tend to be met by apathy. Only the dramatic and the cataclysmic catches our attention anymore. 

The moon is falling slowly.  Are you going to fight the darkness, free the good?  Is the world worth it?

Abscence (Revised)

An edited / spiffed-up version of a short story I put up on this blog previously. 

"Some miracles are unwanted."

Absence

S.E. Nordwall

It was being called “Spontaneous Cellular Regeneration” and by a few other “science-y” sounding names that he couldn’t quite wrap his tongue around so as to avoid the inherent religiosity of the term “resurrection.”  There were some terms he found insulting and, thankfully, only a few people in the media used them before getting the idea that they should stop.  It didn’t matter what anybody called it, the fact that it had yet to be explained remained to frustrate everyone involved, not the least of which was its subject.

Alfred Stiff (and that was his real name) rubbed his left arm where blood had been taken as he walked the pleasant paths of a sunny cemetery.  It was close to the hospital – a few blocks over.  The man had not needed to drive, which was a good thing, as he had yet to get his license back.  The legal hang-ups with that were nightmarish. 

“At least it wasn’t bone taken this time,” Mr. Stiff muttered to himself.  Why the staff had to use huge horse-needles on him, he did not know.  It was then that it occurred to him that he’d seen a horse being given veterinary treatment once and the vet had used very tiny and delicate needles on the animal.  Lucky beast.

Alfred walked to the plot where his own grave lay.  It had yellow police-tape staked up around it.  The tombstone reading “A. Stiff” was still there.  If nothing else, Alfred thought, his family had a sense of humor that came in a lovely shade of black.  The grave had been kept separate on the request of people who were investigating his case.   

The man vaguely remembered clawing his way through dirt.  He had no idea how he broke the seal on his coffin.  According to investigators, it had popped loose on its own somehow, but a busted coffin was hardly the miracle here.   

Alfred Stiff had been alive just about a year now.  Before that, he’d been dead for ten years.  He was being called the “Great American Zombie.”  Most of the country seemed to regard him as a huckster even though he’d had very little, if any monetary gain from his adventure.  His status had brought him enough suffering to make him wish he’d stayed dead.  Alfred really wasn’t a zombie, though.  He may have been one in the most technical sense and that is where he preferred to use the term “resurrect,” even as his doctors were trying to find some other term for him.  “Revenant” was likewise okay with him.  “Litch” was absolutely not. 

His body was currently healthy.  If he were a “zombie,” he would be rotting, or at least not be in possession of his own, sharp mind.  He was inexplicably healthy for someone who’d been pumped full of embalming chemicals and buried for a long time.  If there had been no witnesses to his “wakeup” or said witnesses had not been confirmed as mentally sound, what had happened to him would not have been believed by anyone.  As it was now, accusations of a hoax and of severe mental illness ran rampant. 

Mr. Stiff felt profoundly sorry for his witnesses. They’d been the family and friends of some other dead man, gathered for a funeral.  That man had not returned.  Because of the accusations of mental illness, Alfred got the impression that these people were considered by many to be even less “human” than he was for being merely a freak.  He’d had some trouble with that.  His legal status was still “deceased” – since there was no precedent for someone in his situation. 

Alfred sat on a bench at the edge of the trail and looked at the sky.  “Wish I could remember Heaven,” he said to himself.  “Maybe it would be easier.  Hmm. Maybe it would just make things more complicated.” 

Mr. Stiff did not remember anything between his falling and rising.  He remembered dying, yet he had not fully registered what it was at the time.  After that was the sensation of cool fresh air, the feeling of dirt under his fingernails, and after that, the discomfort of people poking and prodding him on a hospital bed.  It was all vague, but he didn’t remember a misty Heaven, a fiery Hell, or a life spent reincarnated as a squirrel or whatever else was supposed to have happened to him.  He greatly annoyed disbelievers in those sorts of things as well, on account that he did not dismiss the possibility that his spirit went somewhere and that he simply did not remember it.  “We all sleep.  Not all of us remember our dreams,” he’d say. 

Mr. Stiff had quite a time when he was on one of those cheesy talk shows.  He’d been hesitant to appear on one of those things that served, in his eyes, to perpetuate the stereotype that people who watched daytime network television were idiots.  The spiritual guru that had been on the show had pressed Alfred intensely on the subject of the afterlife and of spiritual “awakening.”  Mr. Stiff had felt sorry for him, or something along the lines of “almost sorry” simply because he’d always found it hard to feel much for the rude.  The way the guy leaned into his personal space was something he found creepy. 

He’d had nothing to give the guy, having decided to remain honest.  No light, no peace – not even darkness or a “void,” to disappoint some members of the studio audience as well as the strawman-style skeptic that had been brought on the show.  He’d apparently hoped to hear that his experience had been like deep sleep – maybe not the “death” part, but the “dying” part.  From feeling a “punch” and realizing he’d been shot in the chest, to the sensation of falling to the floor, to the vagaries of “waking up” – for all that was in between, the element of Time had not existed for Alfred.  He’d let the skeptic down mightily when he’d failed to see his “lack of time or anything” as proof that there was definitely no afterlife.  As far as Alfred was concerned, his experience wasn’t proof or disproof of anything at all.  He was letting people of science try to figure out why his body was alive again, but all he could give them was his body. 

That was the way those talk shows worked:  They put two people of opposing views on along with a main guest because not only does debate get going, the studio audience gets riled up into a frothy mass.  Conflict attracts viewership, and if the truth lies somewhere in-between, the truth be damned for the ratings.  This was one of the reasons why Alfred saw them as “television for idiots” and only made an appearance because of the money that was offered.  He had the need to upkeep himself and felt the need to help out his family.  Being a famous victim-of-something-strange pretty much meant fortune for being a freak and all-but guaranteed exclusion from ordinary work.  Still, he outright refused the televangelist that had come to him.  Morons and sensationalists he would work with while cringing just a little, crooks he would not work with at all.  The smell of sleaze on that one was as thick as the scent of his hair-gel. 

Alfred wondered if he had any right to owning such standards.  There were times when he’d wondered if he should have left honor in the grave.    

“What’s wrong with a cross on your tombstone?” Anne asked as they stood before Alfred’s grave. 

“Nothing, really, but…” Mr. Stiff answered his sister. 

“You are not lacking for company,” Anne suggested, “and you always believed in your own way, even though none of us have been active in the church for a long time.” 

“It’s not bad in and of itself,” Alfred answered, “It is what you thought I would have wanted.  I do not find it an offensive symbol; I just fear others might someday” 

“You fear others might someday...?” 

Alfred sighed.  “I think that sometimes symbols are more important to people than reality… or actual people.  Reality and real people are complex things.  Symbols are simple.  With the way the world’s going and all of the bad stuff we hear about hypocrites and criminals in the churches, well… along with a lot of other unfortunate associations… I just fear that someday our world will change enough that people in the future will see crosses like we see swastikas today.  The stupider ones will raid graveyards like this, knocking over the headstones in hopes of desecrating the memories of folks they don’t think deserve to be remembered… not that it will really hurt them, being already dead, but still…”

“That’s a harsh vision.”

“Even swastikas weren’t originally and always evil,” Alfred muttered, “They’re symbolic of fortune and suchlike in some cultures – some Far East luck-symbol, at least before the West got a hold of it.  Most folk think in the negative, I suppose – Easier to gain a bad association than a good one.  A little bad use or bad press can wipe out thousands of years of good fortune.”

“So, you’re saying you don’t want people to assume things about you.” 

“Exactly,” Alfred said with a smile.  “The cross is not a bad symbol; it’s just that it has both good and bad associations.  As long as I have breath to speak, I can justify whatever I happen to be associated with.  I can explain why I follow the good parts of something and reject the bad.  Maybe people won’t believe me, but at least I can have my say.  I am powerless when I have no breath, though.  I know that better than anyone alive today.”

Alfred Stiff had moved in with his sister and her family shortly after the media storm had begun to die down and the hospital released him.  Anne had to procure him lawyers to win that right.  Having been deemed a subject valuable to science and having legally given up the rights due to the living upon his death, his general personhood was something that had to be earned for him in court. 

There was mention of vivisection and even dissection after “killing him again” to get a thorough look at all aspects of his body and brain early on.  The individuals that suggested these things had been quickly dismissed from the project.  The team that worked with Alfred in trying to figure out what had happened to him and what was going on with his body, for the most part, cared about his welfare and happiness – if for nothing else than the fact that a happy, cooperative subject was the easiest kind of subject to work with.  More, too, could be learned from one “undead” body than one simply made dead again.  

They had not wanted to release him to begin his life anew, preferring that he live at the hospital twenty-four-seven, but that was most of Mr. Stiff’s contention with the main team.  He came to the hospital as a study subject as to a job now.  He had eight-hour days with two days off per week.  Their tests and sample-taking often hurt, sometimes, quite a bit, but the man knew his value to science.  He hoped that study on him would help people someday.  In the keeping of a willing subject, giving Alfred Stiff his freedom and basic rights helped his morale, but he was still glad that his sister got lawyers involved.  It was a comfort to him that his humanity was down on paper and in record so that people like the mad-scientist idiots who’d first observed him couldn’t get their way without ramifications. He remained “deceased” in most of the practical, legal documentation, but was, nonetheless, declared a “legal person.”  It was a strange in-between.  He couldn’t drive or buy a home, but he could live and expect not to be tortured. He was still fighting for his remaining former rights.  As he saw it, no one in the world ever had rights that didn’t have to be fought for.  He was grateful to have people on his side.

For his part, Alfred’s hope was that knowledge gleaned from the studies would save people near death or bring back people lost to sudden tragedy.  He hated to be selfish, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to see everyone in the world resurrected as he was – at least with the world as it presently existed. 

He sat in a chair in a clean room decked out in tones of white, blue and machine-chic  watching a favorite old television series on a laptop resting on a desk before him. 

“Oh, I love this episode!” one of his doctors said.  The red-haired woman leaned over his shoulder to watch. 

“It’s a bit mind-trippy,” Alfred replied.  “I’m not sure physics would actually work that way on the ship, even in the weirder depths of space.”

“Not to mention the giant space-octopus.” 

“That, too.” 

She turned to him. “You really like space operas, don’t you?” she observed.  “They’re all I’ve see you watch while you’ve been here.” 

“Better than talk shows.  You haven’t seen me watch the couple of cooking shows I like.  I figure that’s our future.  Not the octopi, but the stars…”

“I bet you wanted to be an astronaut as a kid.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I was always more interested in biology than astrophysics.  Find me a space-octopus to study and I’m in!”    

“Well,” said Alfred after calming his laughter, “If you crack me, figure me out… I’m… kind of hoping the world will save the widespread resurrecting until we reach the stars and find some planets to terraform and all that good stuff. Some might say that we need a ‘new heavens and new Earth’ for such a change in the dynamics of life.  We might need a really big heaven and lots of ‘Earths.’  Think about it.  If we bring people back willy-nilly, folks will have to stop making babies for…Earth to…um…work.  As it is, I still get hungry and need to breathe and, of course, I take up space.  I don’t think I’m immortal, just…returned. We’d glut up the planet real quick if everyone who died got brought back as a normal, everyday thing.” 

“Have you ever wanted children?  It would appear to be possible for you, given that all of your systems seem to be intact.” 

“My ex-wife and I thought of it when we were first married, but held off actively trying until the time was right.  Good thing, too, since we didn’t last long.”

“She hasn’t come to visit you.  I’d think she would, Miracle Man.”

“Eh. The breakup was ugly and so was she.” 

“Such an evil grin!  ‘Miracle’ or not, I guess we can’t call you a saint.”

“Don’t you even dare.”

Alfred Stiff decided at once point or another that people were more or less fictional to each other.  He didn’t think that reality was a subjective matter or that human beings did not actually exist or anything as overreaching as that.  What he concluded from his observations, however, was that people had a tendency to create their own narratives concerning others.  People made guesses as to what a given other person was like, what their motivations were and their thoughts based upon appearance, position and a few mannerisms. 

Since there was no way of knowing what and how a given individual thinks apart from what they chose to share with others, this shorthand and the little narratives that came with it were, in Stiff’s reckoning, the best mere mortals could do.

If everyone’s mind was like his own, the world was made up of people living complicated inner lives that they’d never share with even those closest to them, not just out of privacy but out of sheer complexity.

This was apparent in a study of history.  It seemed that when a person had made themselves some fame and were long-dead, everyone quoted them.  If they were vindicated by history and people thought of them as “good,” their every speech-quote and every scrap of writing that they left behind were used as evidence of being on a group’s side.  If a person was infamous, their every quote was analyzed and used to connect them to their enemies. 

Alfred hadn’t made much use of the Internet ten years ago, but his sister had a fast connection and several household computers – some old and scavenged, one expensive and new.  Alfred had read that the name for a particularly popular phenomenon on some of the forums he’d take a look at was “Godwin’s Law.” It applied to quoting Adolf Hitler and comparisons to him.  He wondered if there was some kind of positive form for it, a “Jefferson’s Law,” considering how often the quotes of Thomas Jefferson were used by people of every political party as supposed support for their more-often-than-not purely modern agendas. 

The longer you were dead, the longer you were “nice and safe,” and moreover – “useful,” it seemed to him.    

This realization was a little more unsettling when it came to the rewritten memories of people who knew a deceased person in life.  After a while, those could become distorted, too – “absence makes the heart grow fonder” as was the common saying.  Alfred learned this intimately in regards to his own life, his own death and his own family.    In the case of his ex-wife, who bothered to meet him just once after his “awakening,” he’d become more demonized over the years in her personal narrative of him.  She’d definitely wanted him to stay dead.  For his part, he felt sorry for her new husband. Alfred had suggested a good local bar that served some very strong concoctions to him.  He had not reacted positively.

Dealings with his sister were more distressing in that she had never stopped loving him, but had changed him slightly in her mind. He found that she was surprised and offended by some of his little mannerisms.  Alfred cursed rather causally, for example, except around her two boys.  It wasn’t anything novel that had come about after his awakening – he’d always remembered firing off an expletive every once in a while when something wasn’t working right, when he was untangling electrical cords or had received a particularly annoying bill in the mail.  (He asked Anne how his dept collectors got word that he was alive again.  Her response was that they’d never acted as if he’d died.  They just forwarded bills to next of kin, addressed to him, for the entirety of the decade.  The same thing had happened with requests to re-subscribe to magazines).    

“Could you tone it down?” She’d asked him when he was trying to fix the hinges on the screen-door of the family porch.  The woman had yelped as though Alfred’s casual swear had physically hurt her.  She spoke to him as though he were a child she wished to discipline. 

“I dropped a screw.  They’re hard to see, the little buggers.  The boys are at school, what’s it matter what I say?” 

“You never used to be like that.”

“Hmm?  I don’t recall ever doing anything different…” he grumbled.  You act like a meaningless word is dangerous.    

Anne stood still for a moment. 

“Something wrong with you?”

“I just realized something.”

“Hmm?” 

“You’re right.  I guess… I just didn’t remember how you spoke in the little moments…”

“What are you talking about, Anne?” 

She began weeping.  “After you d-died…” she whispered… “I forgot…It seems like I just forgot so many little things about you.”

“I’ll watch my language for you if you really want.”

“No!  Please, be yourself! It’s just… this whole business is weird.” 

“I know,” Alfred said, stepping over to his sister and wrapping an arm around her.  “What’s happened to me is something that hasn’t happened since the time of myths. I wonder, like everyone else, if it really happened at all…”

“I don’t believe in collective hallucinations,” Anne replied, “And I know you weren’t a twin. I saw you in an open casket after being done up.” 

“When a thing happens that everyone tells you shouldn’t have happened, you begin to doubt it and doubt yourself.  It is okay, Anne, don’t cry.  Maybe some would rather I stayed dead than gotten lucky so as not to disturb what’s ‘supposed to be,’ but I know that you aren’t one of them. You’re my little sister and nothing’s going to change that.

“Has your medical team figured out hide or hair of it?” Anne asked. “It’d be nice to have some explanation beyond it just being a ‘miracle.” 

“Eh,” her brother said, separating from her and picking his screwdriver up again.  “Maybe I was revived by a fairy or someone, somewhere made a pact with a shadow-demon that can bring people back from the Land of the Dead.”

Anne laughed.  “Dylan and Francis will have to show you the little game-room they have set up.  Compared to the games we used to play, the graphics on theirs will blow you away.” 

“I never asked what you did with my old consoles.” 

“We kept them. They’re also in the game room, though the 1980’s- beast is up in the attic.”

“Have the boys ever played with that one?”

“Nope. The old games are with it, though in an old crate.”

“I shall have to dust it off and bring it down and school them,” Alfred said with a grin.

“This is all we could get,” Francis said as he showed off a game-case of some title that “Uncle Al” had never heard of.  “It’s from a few years ago, outdated…”

“But the used stuff is cheaper, anyway,” Dylan finished for him.  “I like used games better – that way I can read reviews online so we don’t waste our money on lame-ass crap.”

“Your mother shouldn’t hear you say that,” Alfred scolded. 

“We say worse!” Francis said, sticking his tongue out at his older brother. “The trick is to listen for her at the door when we’re playing one of the fighters so she doesn’t hear us…” 

“I bet you come up with some creative insults for each other,” Alfred said.

“Play with us, Uncle Al! We’ll play whatever you want to play first!”

“Yeah, and maybe next week, you can talk Mom into taking us to the game store in the city.  They were going to build a Lana’s Castle a couple of blocks from here, but…”

“But?”

“When you… what mom said… you know…” Dylan struggled.

“What he means to say,” Francis butted in, “is that there was this big protest from the town council and people, since the guy who killed you liked videogames.” 

“Oh, that…” Alfred said, biting his thumbnail. 

“We’re lucky Mom even lets us play stuff,” Dylan explained.  “She doesn’t let us play the really cool stuff, though, nothing really bloody and awesome.” 

Among the game-cases, “Uncle Al” found an old favorite of his.  He and Dylan sat side-by-side on the carpeted floor with controllers playing a player-versus-player swordfighting title.  Francis watched, eager to play the winner, but cheering on his uncle.

Mr. Stiff had known Dylan.  The child was two years old when he’d embarked on his adventure in coffin-stuffing.  Francis was new to him, born a year after his murder.  It warmed his heart that the children had an appreciation for some things that he did not think they’d have an appreciation of.  Videogames were expected, but not the titles he knew.  Though the game he was playing at the moment had a roster of characters with fierce and sometimes improbable-looking blades, the carnage was bloodless, with damage shown in light-flares and effects to the character’s hit-point bars. 

The man thought, as he played, to the young man who’d killed him.  He had not remembered his face very well from the incident.  Most of what he knew came from news article archives he’d read.  The kid had been twenty-two years old and had been an ex-employee of Steve’s Market, a small grocery store that Alfred had stopped off to in the evening after work. 

Alfred remembered the contents of his shopping basket that night: There was a frozen chicken-fried steak dinner because he didn’t feel like cooking anything for himself that night, nor picking up another burger from a sack made transparent by the grease.  There was a box of nasal-decongestant pills because he could feel himself coming down with a minor cold, and he’d grabbed a bottle of some cheap off-brand cola.   He’d walked to one of two staffed registers (Steve’s had yet to install a do-it-yourself scanner station) when the kid had come in – dark, messy hair, black denim jacket and white tennis-shoes that were falling apart (Alfred had no idea why he remembered that).  The next thing he knew, the kid had pulled something from his coat and there were several sharp popping sounds, some screams, and something that felt like a mule-kick to his chest. 

He felt wetness before he felt the appropriate pain, but he suddenly could not breathe.  He looked down to see red splats on the floor, felt his knees buckle and that was just about all he remembered before the sensations of cold grave-dirt on his fingers and some doctor shining a light in his eyes.

According to what he’d been told and what he’d been able to see in news video and article archives, he was one of four people killed in the rampage, including the gunman. There had been very few people in the little market at the time.  One other man who was a customer of the store had been shot in the head.  A little girl had taken a body-shot and died at the hospital.  Her mother was wounded as well as the clerk at one of the registers.  The young assailant had, after seeing what he’d wrought, eaten his gun before police even arrived.   

Alfred Stiff had visited the graves of the victims other than his own, including the grave of the murderer.  From what he’d read, the boy had been very troubled, not that it was an excuse in any way for what he’d done, but the man felt more a sense of sorrow over the whole ordeal than a desire for revenge.  He did not hope for a Hell for the boy for having died by his hand.  If he carried any anger, it was over the dead little girl and the random man he never knew rather than for himself.    

He had inexplicably “gotten better,” after all.  He thought the little girl should have “gotten better,” not him.  If it was the whim of a God, perhaps a dark sense of humor or trickery was involved. Perhaps his fate was the doing of a capricious writer.  Maybe the little girl was very happy in a Heaven he couldn’t remember and wishing her back wasn’t something she’d want anyone to do.  Maybe nothing was involved save some bizarre quirk of biology and there was no one to blame or to beg a different outcome of.  All he could do was to leave some flowers beside the headstone of the girl he never knew and move on… 

And play videogames with his nephews, who were glad to have an Uncle Al.

Reports on the young killer noted, among other things, that he had been quite an extensive videogame hobbyist and a few of the kid’s favorites - according to his relatives and what had been found in his home that had been listed in one article - were some of Alfred’s own favorites.  There was a title or two he’d never heard of and a few he’d avoided (although an adult gamer, he generally found himself much more fond games featuring swords and sorcery rather than gun-filled historical simulators or gritty things that were supposed to be set in real-world locations).  Still, to keep a gaming store – something he would have welcomed in the community – out even partially “in his name” seemed a little harsh. 

The articles also had what he felt was a disturbing emphasis on the killer being a “loner.”  Alfred wondered just why, whenever someone who was gregarious did a notable mass-murder or attack with that as an intent, the news media would print and do sound bytes proclaiming how “appalling” it was that such a normal, social person would act out like that.  Whenever someone who happened to be an introvert flipped their pancake for whatever reason, their introversion was portrayed “normal for unstable people.”   Alfred was living under the care of his sister’s family at present, but in his previous life, he’d lived alone and liked it.  He’d tried the marriage-thing, and it hadn’t worked out.  He’d enjoyed his solitude and, like friends of his he rarely saw because they also enjoyed their solitude – he’d stockpiled books in his apartment, not guns.

Being an unwilling and unwarranted “martyr” for keeping gaming culture out of the neighborhood wasn’t as bad as being used as an unwitting shill for other things, but it still annoyed him. 

It was another reminder of how powerless the dead were.  He assumed he’d be in that state again eventually.  Given his basic mammalian survival-instinct, inevitability had always bothered him, but now it bothered him more than ever.  Right now he knew keenly that his “name” could be used for or against damn near anything and in his absence he couldn’t do squat about it.  

Perhaps he’d request to have a symbol from a game-universe etched on his new eventual tombstone instead of a cross.  He knew of a harmonious arrangement of triangles that could be nice.  Considering that a local trash-collection company and a local accounting firm used similar symbols, it would confuse people. Alfred considered that a bonus. 

The misguided memories of those he’d left behind had deepened to an extent he never could have predicted. 

Alfred found himself hugging his sobbing sister again.  This seemed to be happening on an ever-more-frequent basis.  Some little mannerism would set her off either because she’d remembered it from their youth together or because it seemed, somehow, out of character for him only for the woman to be given a reminder that it wasn’t. 

More than that, Anne had constructed memories of her brother that never were, because they never could be.  She had so many scenarios for which he’d been absent that she’d imagined “If Alfred was here” for.  By his off-hand comments and the small actions of his day-to-day living, he’d been shattering her illusions without even meaning to. 

“When did you change politics?” she’d ask.  “You never liked shows like that,” she’d say… 

“The Al I knew wouldn’t put up with that garbage they’re doing to you at the hospital!” she demanded, “You were always so defiant, what happened to that?” she moaned.

“Ssssh,” the big brother told his little sister, rubbing her back after a particularly hard conversation.  “Isn’t it natural for people to change?”

“But…” Anne said with a tiny choke, “You haven’t… you really haven’t.  It’s only my mind that’s changed you!  I feel like… I don’t even know you anymore sometimes, but it’s not even your fault!  You do something unexpected, then suddenly my mind tells me I should have expected it, that it’s my addled mind to blame!”

“Your mind isn’t addled.  It’s just human.” 

“I-I…I’m worried that I cherish the memory of you more than I cherish… you. You, Alfred.  It’s almost like…”

“You wish I’d stayed in the ground…”

“No! Never that!” 

“The dead are supposed to stay that way… you said your goodbyes. You had closure. Then I had to wake up and mess it all up. I reopened all of your wounds and I can’t even be the person your mind wrote me to be, what your heart really wants me to be…”

“Al…” 

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  It also distorts the memory.”

“I can make new memories of you.”

Alfred sighed.  “I received a miracle I never asked anyone for, but that doesn’t mean a miracle was a good thing.”  

A. Stiff looked at the grave with the marker that read “A. Stiff.”   He plucked a small wildflower from the path-side and placed it before the stone, bending down past the police tape.  The man smiled at the thought of laying a flower on his own grave. 

In some ways, existence itself was just a kick in the pants, but it had its bright spots, too.  He’d been made a stranger in his own world, a foreigner to his own life.   He was largely out of the news now, his “miracle” having become mundane – it wasn’t that it had been replicated in any way or even figured out, it’s just that life went on.  There were always new stories in the world to chase.  News would be a breakthrough on his case or another one like it occurring.  For now, he was relatively free.   

He was not sure that the miracle he’d suffered was a good thing, but for the time being, he’d make the most of it. 

END.