Picture Perfect Pieces

Organic [test]

           The pale blue dot twirls never-endingly, a relentless French pirouetter trying to get it perfect, yet deciding it wasn’t good as soon as it ended. As he sits and stares at it, it’s no different as if he was looking at a computer screen with a black background, featuring one pixel of a cerulean dot smack on right side. This pale blue dot, this single pixel, the insignificant body where everything ever known to the human race has occurred, soon to be swallowed by the black void in the eyes of its beholder.

            The man caught his last glance and lay down in the chamber, where he would spend the next 245 days, sleeping an essential sleep. The sleep’s funding was hard fought by the space community, and seen as trivial by most compared to modern world events.

            Even though no one was conscious to observe it, a single bright red pixel popped up on that imaginary computer screen. It twirled much fiercer than earth. The lights, still on in order to stimulate the otherwise pale skin, were humming lightly in the background. It was completely silent.

            In perfect synchrony the chamber doors open, with the first sound the humans hear being the hydraulics of its doors. A cacophony arises suddenly, coughing, sneezing, vomiting, shrieks, cries, and laughing.

            They feast, eating fittingly for people who have only had liquid nutritional supplements for the past 245 days. However, to their disappointment the food was only solid nutritional supplement. They sat in silence, feeling as though they endured years of horrible deafening dreams without end, while others may have been under stimulated. Noises are quieter than silence.  

            After touchdown on the fine Martian soil, they all took a deep breath. To some, this breath was a sigh of relief, while to others it was filled fear, or adventure, or curiosity.

            Instead of saying what they had prepared before stepping on the sand, which is surprisingly cliché for a group of scientists, they stepped out in silence. They were consumed with their own thoughts, running all throughout their minds chaotically. They were brave. It was nearing sunset where they were.

            They began a voyage out and around the area they had landed. They explored and ventured further than any humans ever had. The mountains sloped steeper and were wider than any they could have imagined. They were huge arches which rippled and danced across the sky.

            They lost track of time and began to go farther and farther. It was almost sunset. They jumped and laughed and giggled. The Martians enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness; it gave them a sense of pure euphoria.

            As the sun set against the back of the mountains, the temperature began to decline rapidly. Their breath was visible against the helmet glass. They could see it’s white wispiness float around, the water vapor in their breath. As it floated in their helmets, it stuck and froze onto the glass. Before long, the entire helmet was covered in a thick crystal ice. The dust and other particles both in the air and on the helmet helped to sculpt an unpolished and unrefined shape of patterns on the glass. The fading sunlight gleamed on the mountaintops, a dirty yellow spread throughout the middle view. The sharp red sand was invisible against the illusion of light. The picture view was soon to be swallowed by exponential growth rate of the crystal. They took it all in and breathed it all out. One of the Martians whispered,

            “Oh my god,”

CCCP [test]

An ant scurried across the floor of the woodlands, scanning for a snack. She moved quickly, changing direction every so often, but still hovering about a general path. If her pathway was to be mapped it would crudely resemble that of any general wavelength of light.

Her brilliant eyes were analyzing the surrounding landscape, focused on both the left and right, for gods placed them on the sides of her head. Unbeknownst to the ant, school kids giggled only seconds ago due to the peculiarity of the Egyptians’ paintings’ sideways eyes.

Scuttling around the towering blades of intimidating gray and yellow, she bonked into a curious fishbowl. Even though she had traveled this same path since she was able to move, she was unfazed and in fact didn’t even perceive the bowl as anything else but an obstacle to her goal; food.

She began the trek along the circumference of the object, until a pale hand came down and grasped it, squishing her in the process. The vermin was promptly smeared across the fibrous suit leg of the inconvenienced, whose grime might be called one of the best pieces of abstract expressionism created in modern times. The fishbowl was relocated next to the vehicle, so that it wouldn’t shatter and stab him later on.  

The natural bristles on the man’s neck began to rise with the falling temperature. The raw day chewed through the man, puncturing and nibbling on his psyche, regurgitating it messily over his head, similar to the primitive bears that were in pursuit of him for their next meal. He duly decided to go back into the government commissioned vehicular craft. While waiting for the warmth inside the craft to diffuse into his body, he began to think over the discussed plan.

"Next time you are in my eyes you will be in Siberia, ha-ha yes comrade?" he remembered one of the reserve crew members saying. The comrade's corpulent head jiggled with ferocity as he laughed, bucking his skull back, revealing his dirty teeth which were putrefied from years of government sponsored living.

While the man was in Siberia, it was not the sterile wasteland of capitalist propaganda. The trees were burnt charcoal black, the yellow tufts of grass piercing against the dull gray, resembling an elder who forgot to wipe the mustard from his mustache after lunch.

The man continued to recall the simple plan, he had already started the homing signal, so they were coming toward him. He was just supposed to wait for the helicopter to find the signal and lie low.

***

He had fallen asleep suddenly; his clunky suit and warm shuttle had accelerated his tiredness. He began to stir, overwhelmed with the sound of a persistent fuzzy cry from outside the spacecraft. The man grasped his shotgun. He unlocked the hatch and looked out, resembling a hound, his arms on the ground and his legs still immersed in the safety on the floor of the hatch.

As he rose the sound started again. He began to walk to it, with nothing but a lamp clamp on his suit to help traverse the area. There was a small radius of 2 feet around him illuminated. Beyond that an ocean of black.

He was muddled and confused: lost. Was he in the black void that surrounded him only hours ago? Was this void lacking oxygen? His breathing became labored.

The cries grew louder and closer until they were mere feet above him, in the embodiment of a hooting owl. His face was paler than normal, covered in dripping beads of sweat. He let go of his breath and began to breathe heavily once more.

Nganga

“Hahahaha! Yeah, we’re actually going to check out the reef tomorrow.” she said, “We’re adventurers! Deep sea divers of the wild!” Her thick Aussie accent detonated the erupting blaze of laughter.

She moved to the stern of the boat as it began to accelerate. It was dusk, and the sun had just set passed the sloping mountains. The city lights glistened, a valuable yellow that lighted the way for people, casted over the water. She saw her face enveloped in the yellow. The reflected poles of light were stretched and pulled, she smiled, reminded of Mike Teavee’s prolonged body after using Wonka’s famed taffy puller.

The other boats and buildings began to shrink until they dissolved into water’s horizon. She shifted focus back onto the conversation.

“and that’s when I said, yeah and Hugh Jackman can eat a bagel!” It seemed that the group’s mirth spread to the rest of the boat, as soon enough everyone was whooping with joy. She reveled in the moment, and was elated to be there. “Ay, Krissy, how you likin’ Zealand? How much different is it from ‘the down under’?” he began to laugh from all of his hand motioning,
“Not much different I expect.” Smiling, she brushed off the question and continued listening what the others were saying.

***

She plopped into the warmth of the water, it filled her suit, “faster than a wallaby on skates” she thought to herself. For those few seconds before her entire body suit was submerged the water in her suit legs sloshed around. She began meandering through the water, her powerhouse kick propelled her forward.

A school of ebony fish jetted past her, their high concentration of mucous on their skin making it easy for them to whip around. She continued traversing the coral reefs, filled with bright vibrant blues, greens, reds, purples. And yellow.

Staring at her in the face seemed to be a sickly bumblebee nested in a reef alcove. The muffled black and yellow seemed problematic. The tube coral swayed back and forth on the crimson cauldron, hypnotizing her with its spiraling motion from the current, that brought life and pirates into the region long ago. The cauldron was oxidized and corroded, masked and camouflaged with the reef.

Biodoom

           The bright light fried an oval into her eyes, overwhelming her corneas, searing the image right into her mind. She shut her eyes and could perfectly place where everything was. Sight without sight. The bleached rays of light shone from the sun, no, the lamp in the sky. The water rippled with intensity, dragged by the wind across of the surface of the lake. The land was perfectly sculpted to appear like a painting.

“Welcome to the Biosphere, Mars’s premier biodome.” she remembered hearing on a commercial back on earth, and now she was here. She made it. She was standing on the grass, err, turf? No. Real meadows. The company had always prided itself in its 100% natural policy, which other terraforming companies did not guarantee.

The earth was defiled. Done in. Kaputz. The population was left unchecked, and every possible square inch was crammed with bodies. The closeness of everyone was unsanitary, someone sneezed and their snot ended up as a topping on their friend’s goulash. It turns out the snot was lined with a mucous covering oozing with parasitic laced juices.

While some parasites caused death, most caused debilitating side effects like paralysis, weakening the population. Thirty five percent of the population were born without motor control in their appendages, the central nervous system was attacked and numbed in the womb. All they could move was their eyebrows.Only the rich could survive, escaping the wretchedness of earth by converting their stacks of money into stacks of rockets. She was one of them.

The world was her oyster, err, at least until it became tainted, then like a piece of bad meat she threw it out and searched for the next piece, a ravenous beast whose thirst could only be temporarily quenched.

She turned round, started climbing back up the uneven hill into her estate. The path was made of rubble of ancient earthly kingdoms, while she happened to step on a fragment of a Spanish palace, she looked at her Alcázar inspired manor and thought about its underwhelming size. The front of her estate was lined with hand crafted tiles, each with their own special individual engraving of different species, coincidentally they were all of species that became extinct while she was on earth. Lining the avenue that the estate was situated on was other manors with different themes, that were situated closely together due to a lack of space in the Biosphere.

For Odin

The infernus cinders enveloped the entire paper lantern, burning it into nothingness, like it never existed. The first one was lit by the child of the deceased. Once the heat lifted it, the other’s launched there’s, filling the sky with waning bubbles of light.

There was crying. The weeps and wails of the people permeated the beach, overpowering the sound of the waves smashing the hard beach sand. With every tear let out an equal force of remembrance and happiness was embraced in the mind.

After the last bubble of light atrophied, there was a solemn silence. All that could be heard was the sloshing and wallowing waves pounding the beach. The absence of light comforted the mourner’s grief.

Most of them were wandering the obscurity of their memories with the departed, forgetting the raft that was making its way off the the shore of the beach. The late body was laying on the pyre, ready for the next step of life.

The pyre was chipped and worn, weathered from years of sitting and waiting to be used. Her body was dressed in her finest clothes, her burgundy dirndl had tears and splotches from a generation of hearty use, still had the worn initials her mother embroidered for her decades ago. Her family knew she would be embarrassed saying that it’s way too schmutzy, but they also knew it’s what she wanted.

English lavender. Forget-me-not. Chrysanthemum. Hydrangeas. Azaleas. Not lillies, she didn’t like those. Enveloped by nature and familial objects she was hugged and supported by nature.

A single arrow arced upwards, lit with a vibrant yellow body that began to sink, dropping directly into the flowers. Ascending into an inferno, the beacon was amplified by the reflection off of the ocean, doubling the area illuminated and blurring the line between fire and water. The dirty yellow ran across the sea.

Standing glued to the fire, their faces were lit up by the profundity of the blaze, a haze cloaked their eyes, unfocusing their vision of the scene into giant colorful blobs.

Prof. Dribble

I climbed the staircase up into the professor’s study, which was oddly unlike the rest of the house. It was crafted from Scottish stone, and felt appropriately cold for the most aloof person I am familiar with. Inside, electric lamps lined the walls by the archways, which lead to a larger observatory surrounding the small study. The portraits surrounding the tower above me were partially illuminated, mostly on the bottom, making their already disdainful appearances look even more arrogant than they already were.

The rusty globular structure that hung down from the ceiling, resembling that of a drooping snot of a child would twist and spin round sporadically, as if it had a life of its own. Somewhat frightened, I approached my professor who was writing feverishly with his quill. Just like the quill, he curiously seemed an anachronism, simply born five hundred years too late.

He dipped his quill in ink, continued scribbling whatever nonsense he was scribbling, and said in his deep and patronizing voice,

“Well, you might as well sit down.”

I nodded, even though I’m unsure why as he wasn’t even looking at me, and stared at his exquisite face. It was noticeably advanced in age, with many flaps and folds and dangles of the skin trying to worm their way off. His eyes were deeply situated inside his skull, creating dark shadows all around his eyes like some sort of demonic spirit. Other people said he had the eyes of Cthulhu, but I wouldn’t be generous enough to grant him that honor. His arms were squid like appendages, thin and lanky extending far beyond the normal reach. His eyebrows, well, the hair had vanished with time from so much ink dabbing on them, but he did create an impressive self serve tattoo.

He continued scribbling, aware of the fact that I was sitting in front of him, but apathetic.

“I’m here to speak about the botany class your offering next semester, and I…” but I couldn’t finish, he cut me off.

“I know why you’re here,” he said sighing as if he was ready for retirement, “but like a Madagascar Palm you must wait to be realized,” he said, emphasizing the word wait with every force he could put into it.

His voice echoed against the Scottish stone, instead of one gut wrenching punch into my stomach it provided two. His breath permeated the air around me, stimulating the flaring of my nostrils with the smell of rancid horseradish. His teeth were a dirty yellow, covered in a fuzz resembling a caterpillar.