Mastodon Droppings

Money

“There’s just nothing like the thrill of performing— all the people cheering, all the fans. That’s what keeps me coming back”, she answered, lying. She hated performing and always had. That was her mom’s thing, not hers. But she was on yet another comeback tour, not for the thrill of it, but because she needed money, just like anyone else.

My Shoes

My shoes have holes in them, one in each, where the calluses on the balls of my feet wear on my soles. They still look pretty nice though, and they’re comfortable, as long as it isn’t wet outside. I plan on keeping them. I hate shopping for shoes. I hate that someone can pry money out of me just because I have feet. It’s like my feet don’t belong to me, like I’m just renting them from Vans. And it takes forever to pick a pair, and they never feel as good as my old pair, and they always look too crisp—not till after a few weeks do new shoes start to look normal—and the whole time I’m picking them, I’m thinking, “What’s wrong with the ones I’ve got on now?”, and it’s a good question.

So I’ve decided not to buy shoes anymore. I’m going to wear these ones out. I’m going to beat the ever-loving shit out of them. I’ll patch the holes in their soles, and the next ones, and the ones after those. If they rip, or if they pop a seam, I’ll mend them. By the time I’m through with my shoes, there won’t be a single original stitch of canvas or scrap of rubber left in them, all that’ll have been turned over forty, fifty times. I’m going to put a half billion steps on these shoes. They’ll be nothing when I’m done with them, unrecognizable. I’m going to exhaust my shoes completely. I have to. They’re the only shoes I’m ever going to have.

The 25 Bus

It was a clear, warm, summer morning. Jim was doubled over at the bus stop catching his breath. His alarm hadn’t gone off—or he had turned it off in his sleep—so to make his bus he had to rush out the door and run all the way. Now he wasn’t sure, had he missed the bus, or was it coming any minute? He took out his phone to check the time, but—shit!—in his hurry he’d left it back at home.

Five and then ten minutes passed, or at least what Jim thought was ten minutes, and still the 25 bus didn’t come round the bend. It’d be another hour before the next one. Might as well go home, Jim thought. Call into work and tell them he’d be late. But just as he was about to leave, the 25 came toddling into view. Jim was relieved for a moment, and then not: There was something wrong with the bus. It was crawling down the road, limping, dragging itself. A broken-down bus wouldn’t get him to work on time, wouldn’t get him anywhere, so before it had even reached his stop Jim had given up on it and was headed back home.

The bus’s engine suddenly roared and it billowed a cloud of black exhaust and lurched forward, jumping the curb, flattening the bus stop sign—the one Jim had just been standing by—and running down the embankment along the highway. After a moment of stunned inaction, Jim followed the bus, running down the embankment muttering, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit”, as he went. The bus was still running, the engine still roaring and the exhaust still belching black smoke, but its tires were only spinning in place and digging into the earth now. A fir tree at the bottom of the hill had caught the bus and was holding it in place.

Jim couldn’t see inside the bus, the windows were tinted. He approached several times to try to pry open the doors, but the bus was growling and trembling like a wounded animal, and Jim was scared back. Eventually he did get hands on the door, but he couldn’t pull it open. Water was trickling out of the seams. His hands were left wet, and they smelled, a strange smell, like the ocean, and vinegar, and road kill that’s been left too long and popped.

Unable to do anything to help, Jim stepped back and could only watch. If he’d had his phone then he would’ve called for help, but he didn’t have his phone. Maybe he could flag down a car. He tromped back up the embankment. He looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t a single car. It’d been quite that morning, he recalled. He would’ve noticed if the streets were deserted, wouldn’t he?

Back down the hill, the bus started coughing and choking, and then it shuddered and died. The doors flung open and the water emptied out. The windows, it turned out, weren’t tinted, the bus was just filled with water so murky it looked black— or would a bus full of clean water look just as black? In any event the water that had filled the bus wasn’t clean. Seaweed spilled out with it, and sea stars, driftwood, barnacles… and body parts, human body parts, gooey and partially dissolved. The smell coming out with the water didn’t have the undertones of acidity or brine like the little bit Jim had gotten on his arms. Even from several yards away and up on the sidewalk, Jim started gagging on the smell of death and decomposition almost as soon as the doors were opened.

And still not a car to be seen, until, at last, limping round the bend, came the 25 bus—another 25 bus—with windows tinted black, and water trickling from every seam.

Pet

Mr. Paper had been running out of money for a few weeks. He tried to get more money, and he tried to stretch what he had, but now all the money was gone. The first morning Mr. Paper had no food for his pet cat, Marvin, he felt so badly about it he tried to share the toast and coffee that was his own breakfast. Cats don’t care for toast though, and they don’t drink coffee. That night Marvin ran away. Mr. Paper was sad about it—he liked having Marvin around—but he was also glad for the cat. He imagined Marvin being taken in by a kind, rich old lady that would love him and spoil him and feed him gizzards and fish heads.

Mr. Paper could get bread from the bread line, and he could swipe a bag of coffee from the grocery store every so often, and between the two he could get through the day, but he couldn’t pay rent like that. He came home from a long day looking for money and found his apartment key wouldn’t open the door. His landlord had kicked him out and sold all his things to cover a little of the rent Mr. Paper owed him. Mr. Paper could still get bread from the bread line, but without a pot he couldn’t make coffee, and now when he was stuck out in the cold and could use it most.

One night, the smell of bacon wafted into Mr. Paper’s dreams as he slept uncomfortably on a park bench, and the smell stimulated in him visions of Christmas mornings like when he was a little boy. A sharp sound startled him awake, and the dreams fled, leaving behind them no memories. Mr. Paper shot up, expecting to find a cop or someone trying to rob him. Instead there was a cat, a couple yards away, sitting under a streetlamp. The cat sat placidly for a few beats as Mr. Paper met his gaze. Then the cat meowed, an urgent meow, and Mr. Paper recognized the voice— it was Marvin! He got up and approached the cat excitedly. They met in the middle and exchanged affections, Mr. Paper stroking Marvin and Marvin snaking around his feet, but then Marvin suddenly broke off and trotted back to his spot under the streetlamp. Mr. Paper followed.

He found a dinner plate sitting under the streetlamp holding two slices of toast, one buttered and one with raspberry jam; two fried eggs; and five pieces of pepper bacon, thickly sliced. Next to the plate was a mug of hot coffee with sugar and cream, steam billowing from it into the cold night air in great curls. He pounced on the food— more food than he’d seen at one time in weeks. He offered the bacon fat to Marvin, but Marvin wasn’t interested.

Once the plate had been cleaned, and the mug had been emptied, Mr. Paper sat cross-legged under the streetlamp a while, with Marvin curled up in his lap, purring happily. But again, after a while of that, Marvin darted off, trotting a few feet away and looking back at Mr. Paper, beckoning him. Again, Mr. Paper followed. They walked a long time. Eventually Marvin led him to a nice looking apartment building in a nice looking part of town. The doorman let Marvin in— Mr. Paper blew in with the wind. They took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and Marvin let Mr. Paper into a nice looking two bedroom apartment, with central heating and air, and HBO, and good internet service— Mr. Paper’s new home.

From then on Mr. Paper had it easy. He’d wake up Marvin in the morning when he was ready for breakfast. Marvin would feed him before going to work. Mr. Paper would hang out at the apartment during the day, napping and watching TV and internetting. Then, in the evening, Marvin would get home from work and make him dinner and chill on the couch, curled up in Mr. Paper’s lap and purring happily until finally turning in for the night. Then Mr. Paper would sneak out of the house to roam the streets, fool around with women, get into fights with men… but he’d always come back in the morning, hungry for his breakfast.

And not a Sole for Miles

Halfway across the river, fifty feet of water beneath me, and I don’t think I can swim another stroke.

Breakfast with Grandma

I found my grandma standing in front of my open refrigerator door one morning, a gallon of milk tipped all the way back, guzzling it fast and not spilling a drop. It’s funny that that’s the thing that struck me most at the time, how she was just chugging this gallon of milk without losing any. My grandma had died going on ten years before, so you’d think seeing her there at all would be itself the big shocker that morning, but no, at least not at first.

When she was done with the milk she tossed the empty jug over her shoulder and started in on the eggs. It was Sunday morning; I go grocery shopping on Saturdays. She picked a good time to stop by if she was hungry. She ate each of the dozen eggs in one bite, shell and all, and tossed the carton over her shoulder. It landed next to the milk jug, in a little pile she was making, along with an emptied styrofoam tray of ground beef, an emptied jar of jam, and a wrapper for a brick of medium cheddar cheese. I have to imagine it took her some time to chew through all the cheese, it was a new one.

I didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t notice me. I went back to my bedroom and paced around, forgetting for the moment that I’d long since kicked the nail biting habit. I didn’t believe it was really my grandma. My eyes told me it was my grandma, she had my grandma’s skin, my grandma’s hair, she wore my grandma’s clothes, her shoes, her pearls, her perfume. But some other sense, one I can’t name, was screaming at me with at least as much certainty that this was not my grandma, that my grandma was dead and even if she wasn’t, the thing in my kitchen wasn’t her. I’d gotten up that morning to find a spider in my kitchen the size of my dead grandmother, far too big to put outside without touching it, far too big to smash. When it was done with my fridge and my pantry, what would it eat next?

My phone was charging on my nightstand. My wallet was there with it, which was lucky since I normally keep it in a dish on the counter in the kitchen. I took them both and cut a hole in my bedroom window screen with the nail file end of a pair of clippers from my headboard. I jumped out the window. I guess this isn’t my house anymore, I thought. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel much of any way about leaving my house behind with nothing but the clothes on my back, my phone, and my wallet. I was a little irked about the groceries, since I’d just gone to the trouble of getting them. My car though… there was no way to get to the keys without going through the kitchen. I left it behind. It hurt, it really hurt to leave the car behind like that, like I was leaving a friend behind, or no, not a friend, a pet. Someone who needed me. And after a few days of walking everywhere, it hurt a lot more.

A Perfectly Lovely Ride

It’s a perfectly lovely night to go for a drive. The air is cool outside, which is a relief after such a hot day. Back home is still full of the air from the late afternoon heat; the cool night air won’t seep in until three, four in the morning. In my car, speeding down the freeway, the air gushes in and I’m soaking it up. Right now it’s wonderful, but I have work in the morning, so I’ll need to be home before three or four in the morning, and the cool I’m enjoying now will make the stifling heat of my bedroom that much worse when I return. More importantly though—at least for right now—right now, it’s wonderful.

But hold on a tick— I don’t remember starting the car. I was in my underwear, sitting on the couch beneath the ceiling fan, just sweating and hating life. I stepped outside and it was nice, so I sat on the porch, still in my underwear—it was late so no one would see anything—and life was great. Then the mosquitos started eating me. That’s when I decided to go for a ride. But I don’t remember going back inside and getting my keys, or getting dressed, (I’m in shorts and a t-shirt now), and I don’t remember starting the car….

It’s quiet outside— it’s quite inside too. It doesn’t sound like the engine’s running. I can’t even hear the tires turning over the pavement. The only sound is the wind whistling by, like I’m falling. The ride is smooth, too— too smooth. The speedometer, tachometer, engine temperature gauge, and fuel gauge all read zero, and the dash isn’t lit up. I feel for the key in the ignition, but there’s nothing there.

Now I see everything with fresh eyes. The road is dark out ahead of me. It’s because my headlights aren’t on, but it’s not only that. The streetlights aren’t lit, and there are no headlights from the oncoming traffic, no headlights in my mirrors, no taillights from the traffic ahead of me. I ease up on the gas, but nothing happens. I take my foot off the gas completely, but I don’t slow down a bit. I touch the brakes and nothing— I press a little harder, but still nothing— I stomp on the pedal, putting it all the way to the floor, but nothing happens. I turn the steering wheel this way and that, but it makes no difference. I pull the parking break. None of it makes a difference. Nothing I do makes a difference. I’m not in control.

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On the Surface of the Sky

A damp, soggy, gray and sunless afternoon, typical for November. And on this typical day we find three friends, middle schoolers, killing time in their typical way, meandering down the train tracks and staying out of sight while they do things they’re afraid to be caught doing. In this case they’re smoking cigarettes. Joseph—everyone but his friends call him Joe—had snuck four cigarettes from his dad’s pack. Once he and the others were far enough down the tracks, Joseph would take one out of his pocket, light it, take a puff, and pass it to one of the others, like it was a joint. It would make its rounds while the three complained about school, teachers, parents, younger siblings— except for Virginia, who did have a younger brother but didn’t see him, and who didn’t live with her parents, but with an aunt and uncle. When the first cigarette was gone, they’d light the next and do the same with it. After two cigarettes, none of them would really want to smoke a third, but they’d all pressure each other into it. The fourth cigarette would be lit, but never would anyone take a drag off it; they’d take turns holding it for as long as they could stomach being so close to the smoke.

Things had been getting awkward between the three of them. Joseph could sense that something had changed, but couldn’t put his finger on it and didn’t want to bring it up. What he was noticing was that Virginia and Josh—the third one—had become boyfriend and girlfriend, but for the time being were keeping it secret. They talked on the phone for hours each night, sent each other pictures back and forth, exchanged meaningful looks around their friends, and sometimes they even went down the tracks, just the two of them.

They walked for a while and were far out of sight from anyone, but Joseph wasn’t yet comfortable. Josh grew impatient, but he didn’t say anything. But then, a miracle. It was Virginia who spotted it, a six-pack of beer, unopened and unsullied, lying in the gravel by the track. It was a great and wondrous find, but it also meant they’d have to go further still down the tracks. This six-pack could be a trap, Joseph argued, left by the cops to catch underage drinkers, or it could belong to a bum who was off in the brush taking a watery shit, or who knows what. Everyone agreed to go further down the tracks. Josh took up the responsibility of carrying the beer, which he wrapped in his coat to hide, and the three of them pressed on, abuzz with excitement.

They walked further down the tracks then they had ever before, and as they went the railway grew more and more poorly maintained, with broken and misaligned tracks, and trees encroaching on either side. The woods got thicker and darker and the path they followed, with the trees walling them in, got to feeling more like a cave. Virginia and Josh were getting afraid, and they were saying things like, “We have just as far to go back as we’ve come”, but Joseph was excited, and he wanted to go further and to see what was at the end of the line. It got to the point that they had to duck and weave to get through brambles laced across the tracks, and now Josh was even direct enough to shout—at Joseph, but plausibly at the thorns—“This is stupid!” But they all went through, and together they emerged into a clearing.

Here was a second, dreadful miracle. In the clearing was a Boeing 747, stood on its nose. Maybe it was touching the ground, or maybe it hovered an inch above it. Maybe it was resting on the tip of a blade of grass. In any event, there it stood, pointing straight up and down, motionless and without a sound. Josh and Virginia immediately ran away, Josh dropping his jacket as he fled, and the cans he was concealing in it burst open, spraying jets of beer. He and Virginia dashed through the brambles and got cuts all over, but they didn’t care. As they ran, they didn’t question if Joseph was running with them. They ran without stopping until they reached the place they’d found the beer. They stopped to catch their breath, and it was only then that they noticed Joseph was gone. “He must’ve run through the woods”, Josh said.

But unlike Josh and Virginia, Joseph didn’t run. He was transfixed by the sight, and couldn’t tear himself away. There were people inside the plane, and they didn’t all tumble down to the nose. They sat in their seats, and walked down the isle, just as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Their down was a different down than Joseph’s. He watched them through the windows, watched them killing time on their computers, or watching movies, or reading books. He watched them getting little drinks, making little trips to the bathroom, adjusting their light and their air. Joseph wondered where they were flying to, and he wondered what they saw through the windows, looking out instead of in. Then they all seemed startled, like there’d been a bump, and then another one. Turbulence, though, from the outside the plane was standing as still as ever. The turbulence got bad. The people got scared. Then all at once they shifted, like when a cook tosses some hash into the air from a skillet and catches it. But still, on the outside, the plane remained absolutely motionless. Joseph could see that their bodies had flown ten or twelve feet in a fraction of a second, and he could see them slam into the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cabin, and he knew that it was all terribly violent, but from outside it was so quiet and so still, so that it didn’t feel violent.

The wing nearest Joseph came off in a ball of fire and streaked upward, disappearing into the clouds. People came flying out with it, and followed. Some were on fire. Then, suddenly, the plane… the people… it was all rubble, bits and scraps and flaming chunks scattering and flying— or falling— or trailing into the sky. Then, nothing. Not a trace of the plane remained. It was strewn about up there somewhere.

Joseph took out one of his dad’s cigarettes, smoked it by himself, and threw up.

The Thousand Year Echo

Meryl was weeding in her garden when she heard the first voice. It spoke clearly, like it was the neighbor calling over the fence to her, but she didn’t understand the words. She looked around after the voice, but saw no one.

“Hello?”, she said, rising hesitantly to her feet. The voice was still speaking— had been speaking, uninterrupted since she first heard it. Meryl peeked over the fence. Maybe the neighbor had turned on the TV, or a radio. But when she got up on her tiptoes to see over the fence, she noticed the voice was gone. She made a sour face, then brushed it off and went back to weeding. No sooner had she knelt down to take up her trowel again than did the voice come back, along with several others, laughing.

“Who’s there?”, she demanded, stamping her foot as she stood up again and holding the trowel like a knife. No answer, just more of the same talking she couldn’t understand. She checked the other fence, and the other other, both with the same result. She returned to the spot she was weeding and listened. What language was that? Russian? Chinese? No, not quite. Was it just a bunch of babble? Was she having a stroke, or a seizure, and this was a symptom? She took out her phone and looked up “symptoms of a stroke”, and “symptoms of a seizure.” Neither seemed likely. Just making the search and reading the results was a strong indication, in and of itself, that she wasn’t having a stroke or a seizure. Then what was she hearing?

She stood there in her garden, completely baffled, listening to the voice carry on. Could somebody be playing a trick on her? How? Could the metal plate in her head be receiving radio signals? (She had no metal plate in her head, as far as she was aware.) Maybe it was time for a cup of tea, Meryl thought. She dropped her trowel where she stood, took off her work gloves and left them with the trowel, and walked to the back deck. When she stepped up to the deck, the voice cut out, like a radio losing reception. She stepped back down. The voice came back. She flossed the step, up and down: Up, no voice; down, voice.

Meryl skipped the tea. She went to the hardware store and bought a hundred orange marker flags. She systematically combed over each square foot of her back yard, row by row, like she was mowing the lawn. She’d take a step, listen for the voices, and, if she heard them, mark the spot with a flag. When she had covered the whole of her back yard there now appeared a swirl of markers, a spiral galaxy of orange flags with Meryl’s gloves situated in the center.

Over the next two weeks Meryl made a few more trips to the hardware store. She dug up her garden, digging along the contours she’d mapped out with the flags, then filled the area in with poured concrete, making herself a nice, if not oddly shaped and bizzarely placed, new patio. She put a wrought iron bench in the middle of it, and on either side of that, a flower box. It became her habit to spend much of her free time out on that bench, listening to the voices.

It had been a man’s voice the first time, but it wasn’t always. She’d hear, now a gang of children at play, now a young man and woman talking, and a baby crying. A whispering woman—and she could’ve been whispering right in Meryl’s ear—frantically muttering what sounded like a prayer was a recurring one. Always the voices came in that uninteligible, unplaceable language— apart from the baby’s.

Meryl looked for that language, scouring the internet for samples of any she’d never heard before. None of them were right. The more she listened to the voices on the patio, the more unlike anything else their language seemed. It was heavy, and solid like blocks of carved, polished stone. Every other language she could find was a twittering of birds by comparison.

One afternoon Meryl had friends over for dinner. She took the table from the back deck and set it up on her new patio, where they all dined that night. She was nearly as shocked as her friends were when they heard the voices. She’d been operating under the assumption this whole time that she’d gone discreetly and pleasantly insane, or something like it.

Jason—she’d had the biggest crush on him in high school, which no one ever knew about, and when he ended up marrying her sort-of friend, Dawn, Meryl drew closer to her out of some masochistic impulse—was particularly excited by the phenomenon and, after a few beers, announced to the dinner party that he was resolved to solve the riddle. Everyone laughed at this, except Jason. Conversation moved on. No one thought much of the announcement.

Meryl herself wasn’t very curious about the voices. Or, she was, just in the way that she wanted to listen to them, rather than in the way that she needed to have an explanation for them. It was troubling enough to know other people could even hear them. Finding out what the were, where they came from, what cuased them— to Meryl that would just be making matters worse. Jason started emailing her frequently, asking questions about the voices. She answered his questions. He was no trouble to her.

Until one day he showed up with a small crew of—were they scientists?—all duded up in hazmat suits like she had E.T. stowed away in her back yard. He promised her that it would only be two hours, tops, and then it’d be like they were never even there. They just needed to collect some data, he told her, that’s all. He pleaded with her, and flirted, like he always used to do in high school. He was old and ugly now, and the display was farsical, but in fairness she was old and ugly too, and anyway it worked. Meryl relented.

They were in and out in two hours, and they had left no trace, just like Jason said. Then, years passed, and Meryl never heard what came of it. Dawn and Jason had divorced not long after, (but unrelated to), the data collection episode, and their divorce had let the air out of her friendship with either of them. She fell out of contact with a lot of people, as it happened, and drew closer to the voices. She had, over the years, developed an understanding of their language, but she couldn’t articulate their meaning. To listen to a language for years, but never speak it… you get a sense of it, in your guts, like a dog must have for the way its human relatives speak. But a dog doesn’t have the equipment to talk back, and neither did Meryl.

In the same time, she had also developed lung cancer, which she fought and “won.” The sad truth is that one does not win against cancer. Meryl was down half a lung. Her life would be shorter than it otherwise would have been, because of that. And still, not a day would go by, from the first day she was diagnosed until her last, that wouldn’t be in the shadow of her cancer, or its returning. She didn’t think of herself as having won a battle.

Oh, and money. Not much of that was left, meaning the voices that had kept her company for so long now would be repossessed by the bank, along with everything else. This would happen, she was certain, save for a miracle. Then, a miracle.

Jason called her, out of the blue, to tell her that they’d found what the voices were. They were an echo. An echo from a long, long time ago. Using a lot of sciencey words that meant nothing to Meryl and that, truth be told, meant nothing to him either, Jason explained to her that any sound waves propagating through the space enclosing that little patch in what used to be her garden would be repropagated exactly, through that same space, some one thousand years later, by a process distinct from the one which causes familiar echos, but roughly analogous. Jason was very excited about all this. Meryl wasn’t. But along with this news, Jason had also called with a proposal: To make that special little patch of hers a destination. People would pay good money just to sit on her bench and listen to the idle chitchat of our distant ancestors, and even better—he said even better, but to Meryl it seemed even worse—they could leave a message of their own, to be heard by who knows who in a thousand years’ time. “Can you imagine it?”, he asked breathlessly.

Meryl hated the idea, but she did believe it would pay. Again, she relented to Jason. She kept the house, and raked in money besides. She even got to hear the voices still, on Sunday’s, when the house—not her house anymore, the house—was closed to the public.

She thought it was kind of sad, watching all these people come to leave their own personal messages for the next millennium. She understood, like she understood the voices, in her gut, not her head, that there simply wouldn’t be anyone to recieve them.