Letters II

He uncurled himself from the bus seat slowly, feeling every joint in his body protest as he brought himself to standing...

It had been a long night and a longer ride, he felt.

He was used to the feeling of being held in - confined to a space that most people would find impossibly inadequate. He had spent the last seven years behind bars, after all. What, then, was a few hours on a bus.

With his shoeboxes of letters clutched under his arms, he made his way down the aisle of the Greyhound bus - passed passengers still sleeping, and the empty seats left vacant by the people who had decided to get off to stretch their legs or grab an early morning soda from the gas station's mini mart.

He was the only one leaving the bus at this stop. He was glad to go.

Honestly, he didn't know exactly how long he had been riding for. He vaguely remembered it being dark, and light, and dark in turn. He remembered noticing that the bus had gone over mountains and through valleys - through cities and small towns.

Mainly he noticed that the people around him had changed. People he had watched intently for the first few hours of the ride were no where to be found. Now, strangers sat in their seats. He didn't care so much, he just noticed. Much like he noticed that it was now time to get off.

His time on the bus made him realize how much of himself was still in prison. How easy it was for him to settle back into the pattern of dissasociating himself from what was going on around him -- how easy it was to be there without being there. That's how you get through years and years behind bars, you watch it happen to someone else and you barely realize it when its over. You take yourself mentally to somewhere else, and only come back when something in your body tells you you need to.

As he looked around at the gas station, and the stark mountains rising close beyond it; down the main street of the town where the bus had stopped - he felt like he was finally home. He had only been here once before, really for just a fleeting moment. But he had let his mind drift here often while his body was locked up. Over the past years he had adopted this town, while it stood and grew, oblivious to his feelings. But this was where it all had started, and where he knew he had to return.

The strap on his duffel cutting into his shoulder brought him back from his reverie. He adjusted the load and walked on towards the center of town.

LETTERS

The letters he had written to himself from prison were strewn piled in front of him on the kitchen table.

There were about fifty.
He had served seven years.

He hadn't seen them for quite some time. He had no family left so he had paid a friend to recieve them and collect them unopened. The friend had come through and had kept an eye on his mail for all that time - squirreling the letters away in shoeboxes as they came in.

Dear Me,

you're the only one who I can think of who might one day want to read what I'm going to write down. I don't know what exactly what it is going to be yet - but I know most of it is likely to be strange. I've arrived where I am today because of a lot of reasons. Some of these are pretty normal - many of them are strange. Overall the strange things, I think, outweigh the normal ones. But you'll be able to decide when you, er, I um...we get out, I guess.

When he had been released, the friend's house had been one of his first and least ceremonious stops. He had walked from where the Greyhound dropped him off, through sleepy, suburban neighborhoods, across the scraggly lawn and up to his friend's door - to knock loudly on the metal security grate.

After a time, he heard footsteps in the house. Then the door opened wide enough for one eye to peer out.

"S' you're out, huh?" was all he got by way of greeting. He expected nothing less.

" 'Peers so, I guess."

"Good! Uh,..good for you. (pause....pause some more...a breeze ruffles the trees.) "Reckin' y'all want what ah've been a-keeping for ya'."

"You reckon right."

Footsteps shuffle away and in a few minutes return.

"Here they are. Last one I got was last week. Should I be lookin' for any more?"

"Nah, that should be the last - for now, thank you again."

"Don't mention it...but we're done, yeah?"

"Yeah...uh....thanks?"

"I said don't mention it."

A package door opened in the security grate and three shoeboxes were fed out quickly. The door behind never opened more than just wide enough for the boxes to fit out. They were out almost before he could get his hands under to catch them. And by the time he had them stacked in his hands to carry, the door was shut ... and the eye and the arm that fed them out were gone.

The street was quiet. He began the walk back to where the Greyhounds stopped.
Friends like these....

ISLAND - Part 3

"Damn stick."

As Jerry worked his way deeper into the interior of the island, the jungle closed in. The damp air seemed to grow warmer and more stifling with each step he took away from the beach. As he walked, thorny vines tore at his tattered clothing and scraped past his exposed skin.

In his opinion, the thorns were one of the island's most ridiculous features. Which was saying a lot - since Jerry viewed the whole place as more or less completely ridiculous.

The snakes he could understand, having seen enough such jungles in movies and in TV programs to understand that they were lovely places for snakes to be. Without being particularly science-minded Jerry was still savvy enough to gather that oppressive heat, the high humidity, and the presence of a preponderance of hanging vines available for impersonation were all things that classy snakes looking for new digs would find attractive.

The island's interior had these in spades - marking it, as far as Jerry could tell, as an environment ideal for snakes looking to live their snake lives in style, have loads of snake babies with one another, and generally get along in various other snake ways together.

From personal experience Jerry could tell that impersonating vines was an activity that gave snakes particular joy - especially the large ones who, Jerry had discovered, were especially fond of hanging near steep or slippery spots on the trail where they might be accidentally grabbed by passers-by. Most notably those wearing loafers not particularly suited for off-road travel - who happened, for this reason, to often need help regaining their balance.

The results were usually hilarious, if you happened to be a snake.

So, while Jerry could accept that the snakes had a definite and particular place within the jungle's overall motif - he thought the thorns clearly exceeded the boundaries of good taste. They were emblematic, he felt, of a larger flaw in the overall design of the jungle itself - which he had found to be an almost gaudy celebration of themes of annoyance and physical discomfort in all their various shades.

A flaw he was going to be sure to bring to someone's attention - as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

He hoped that it might once things calmed down for him a bit.
He had been finding most of his free time lately spent wrestling with the issue of Not Being Dead, and had found little time for anything else.

COWBOY

The cowboy poked at the dying embers of his fire.
Mesquite scented smoke rose in wisps from the glowing coals.
The fire's light had dimmed, and the desert beyond the tiny campsite was bathed in the silvery-blue glow of night.

That was the thing about the desert, the thing about it at night. Darkness could never take it over.

During the hours that the dark of night held dominion in the streets of the towns, and under the boughs of the forest - The desert pushed back at it with a phosphorescence all of its own. The reflection of moonlight and starlight was enough to ensure that night would never rule completely over the desert's sand and rocks and scrubby brush.

From where he sat at the dying fringes of the campfire, the cowboy watched the desert's light creep in as the fire's light receded. The remnants of his dinner snapped and popped within the now empty can in the heart of the coals.

FREEDOM BALLOON (Yee Haw!)

"It's a freedom balloon," Bigby said and gazed proudly at the oval shape in the sky.

"A freedom balloon? I've never heard of such a thing before," I said back, squinting against the glare.

Above us the white shape hung motionless, high in the sky enough to be slipping in and out of view behind the clouds. from this distance it looked so very small but somehow the way it hung completely motionless above us as the clouds crawled by was eerily menacing. In truth, it looked like a giant white blimp - one that was in no particular hurry to be anywhere but directly above us. It didn't take me long to figure out what I thought about it.

"I don't like it," I said, still not quite understanding why.

"What do you mean you don't like it?" Bigby gaped. My response didn't sit well with him. He didn't often have to deal with ideas that were different from his.

It was because he was a real patriot, and he truly loved our country.

"I just don't," I said gazing down at my shoes now, "It makes me feel funny. Someone should take it down."

It made me feel silly to tell Bigby I didn't like it. Bigby always meant Business, and he felt things with Conviction.

He got a real kick out of my reply and slapped his knees,

"Funny? Ha! What would be funny would be someone actually taking it down. It's important. It watches over us. You know it has more than 10000 cameras on it don't you? Think about it, most casinos in Las Vegas have less than that. 10000 eyes looking down on you every day and night to keep us safe. - That's 5 thousand security guards - airborne security guards, isn't that something?"

I still didn't think so, but I wasn't about to press the point further.

NEW WORDS

These are some new words.
They are provided here for your enjoyment.
We thoroughly apologize for the recent lack of new words.

Our supplies had dwindled to a scary level - and we didn' t have many to spare.

BRANT

As he lay at the bottom of the airshaft Brant came to the realization that human beings are incapable of imagining hell while they're alive.

Having been raised Catholic, he had spent a fair amount of time trying in the past.

In Sunday school when the teacher was trying to tell them why it was so important to live a virtous life. as a young man trying futily to stop himself as he fell deeper and deeper a life of drugs and crime. As a man, bellied up to some bar, envisioning the fate he was sure waited for him just beyond the horizon - at the bottom of the next bottle or in the magazine of some other slimeball's gun.

But he knew now that all that time spent musing on what hell might be like was wasted. Every human has a mental failsafe that keeps them from even imagining true discomfort.

He now knew that the amount pain that was possible on earth, much less in the underworld, was so much more than any person could imagine without experiencing it for themselves.

The pain was insufferable.
Excruciating.
Like a being pricked by million flaming needles all at once -
vor being caught without your skin in a sandstorm of broken glass.

And he hadn't died...

He had fallen thirteen stories through a stainless steel tube. A set of ducts that met each other every 50 feet or so in a diagonal junction, polished to a featurless, gleaming, surgical finish. After the first wrong step there had been nothing for him to do but slip-thump, slip-thump, slip-thump, through a descending infinity of steep, slippery z shaped junctions - feet first, flailing for purchase while he still could.

Now Brant's body was bent and broken, crumpled in on itself, limbs curled and folded like a pretzel at the bottom, suspended on a grate over a fan that threw flashing shadows in the dim light of the chamber where he now lay.

And he hadn't died...
Why hadn't he died?

The lower half of his body must have cushioned the upper just enough to keep him alive, and protect his important parts enough to keep him from dying - but that was it. He couldn't move, he couldn't scream, but he could still breathe.

The light flickered through the fan, and all was quiet except for the wet sound of his own breathing. Brant waited for his time to finally come, he prayed for it...
The minutes like hours slowly ticked away.