009
Title: History, They'll Tell You, or A Picture of the Future in Seven Parts
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1158
Warnings: None
Notes: Free writes drawn together into one piece.
Summary: The centurial trickle down theory, where time meets the hourglass and foliage is lost in sand.
1.
The Juicer 5000 drained the rainbows of their colours last weekend. Scientists met us at the schoolyard and sold us technicoloured oddities filled with silver dew, fish scale aqua, and pear tree green. It's the wave of the future, they simper over brand name bispectacled frames with lecherous leers, tempting us to dabble in their twisted science.
It's not all that.
I've tried the mountains and the brick houses and even the earthworms, but they all leave a sour taste in my mouth, leave me parched and dehydrated. The labels tell me to buy more, drawing insecure infants in with their false advertisements and gobble-dee-gook gimmicks. Still, the Surgeon General brands us generic and ships us off to our sponsored schoolhouses, filled with the monochrome machinery, their flavors having been drained decades ago. They'll continue to elope with their brilliance, and soon no one will remember the alchemists, only the black and white rainbows fading out with the noise.
2.
The daisies in the field smell like persimmons, but it's only a technical error, they tell us, by tomorrow they'll be good as new. If we had been more interested, the placard overhead would have explained it to us, but we had been far more enamored with the mechanical bees to care. The real ones died off years ago, our text books tell us, next to pictures of forgotten countries and dead nobodies. Marta says she saw one once, but we knew she was lying. The real daisies and persimmons, that had smelled like daisies and persimmons and not persimmons and daisies respectively, are long gone too. For now, we're stuck with plastic pansies, metal marigolds, and glass geraniums, but we never knew anything different, and so we were content. Scholars will continue to feed us lies and call them history, and we'll drink every one up like cheap wine, telling each other this one is fabulous, you should try it my dear. And we'll laugh gaily and discuss futures we know will never happen, pasts that never existed, but never presents. They could never lie about the present and that scared them, so they focussed thoughts on the mechanical bees and malfunctioning daisies that littered this distorted museum of theirs.
3.
We all believed him because he wore a monocle. His suitcase reeked of burnt books and cheap leather, and his 3 piece suit was an eclectic mashup of three different suits and we had all wanted to find these other men with their pants, vest, but no jacket, or vest, jacket, and no pants, or any combination of the three. We never asked him, blamed the weather for distracting us or astrology for misguiding us, but we just weren't feeling it, I suppose. The monocle was all that mattered in the end. Some days it would rest in his pocket while he napped on the schoolhouse, painting pictures with his mind on the dark innards of his garish teal top hat as it rested precariously over his face. We'd join him and his monocle for lunch sometimes and he'd sip our tea and tell us tales of his magnificent adventures in the Past, where the trees still existed and books were on paper, where East Asia was still a continent and England had not been swallowed by the sea. He'd draw us pictures in the air of animals long since extinct and races decimated by wartime and poverty and prejudice. We never judged him, never really believed him, until all that was left of him was his garish teal top hat floating on the wind.
4.
The Hourglass stopped working last night at 4:21 AM. Grains of salt and sand dangled in midair like stars against the dark silhouette of the blue glass encompassing it. We had been asleep when it happened, lost in our monochromatic dreams, pondering pensively the pasts into which we never journeyed outside our own sub-conscience. The scientists attempted to invert it, stringing together fanciful hypotheses, calling themselves Alchemists of Time, but when they'd turned it on its axis and the cameras flashed their approval, the Hourglass remained, the crystals of salt and sand still hovering perpetually in place, and the world was no different then before, just a little less faithful and a tad bit more skeptical. We children stayed behind, stood strong against the currents of media vans that swarmed around us, until there was only the Hourglass, frozen pouring upwards, sandy fingers reaching up towards the heavens, and we knelt beside it and prayed along with it. We prayed for nothing in particular, and who knows what the Hourglass prayed for; all we know is that when we'd awoken in the morning, hands still splayed before us like a forrest of fingers, the Hourglass had disappeared and we were no different than before, only a little less faithful and a tad bit more skeptical.
5.
He planted popsicle sticks because he wanted to bring back the trees. Picture-books and television screens painted exciting, picturesque scenes into Arden's childhood, until realism had set in and he was forced to take a step back and rediscover the world. There were no trees, not anymore, at least. Scientists had done away with them centuries ago, For science, always pouring from their lecherous grins and intoxicating the rest of us like thick brown bourbon. We'd followed their pied-piper melodies to a quick paced allegretto, ignorant to the going-abouts that surrounded us. With the oxygen dome encasing us in our underwater cities, we were told we'd be better off without them, that they wasted space and were too, as they put it, high maintenance. This did not stop Arden, who danced in dreams of stolen, foreign memories: the Amazon Rain Forrest, Penn's Woods, bonsai gardens, all sorts of dreams dyed in viridian hues. He'd awaken parched and thirsting for the soft caress of an oak leaf, only to settle for the cool, choking grip of steel.
6.
Arden once took me to see his plant collection. He'd stolen me away from the grayscale machinery and tucked me in his jacket, pressed me to the wall with cracked scarlet lips puffing hot breath against my ear, and spoke jibberish to me. The walls around us echoed with his crazed, manic, raw breathing as his tongue danced around foreign words, words long since burned from the encyclopedias, plucked out by the alchemists like fresh grapes.
Petal, he'd whispered.
Apple.
Hazelnut.
Branch.
Each puff of breath and accidental graze of teeth or tongue against the shell of my ear sent shivers down my spine, shivers that sang out against the steel doors behind me. In the dark, he'd ushered me past chrome buildings in the pale cerulean glow of the ocean above us, and together we'd fallen down the Rabbit Hole, fingers intertwined into our private wonderland. But there was no croquet with the Queen, no Mad Hatter tea party, only the rose thorns underneath us and the words Drink me, Eat me scrawled in honey on the ceiling.
7.
We found him in the refrigerator in the old meat packaging district on 46th street. The glaze that glistened across his eyes like a contact lens we feared would shatter if we moved him, but we did anyway, slipping and sliding on the velvet red carpet that had trailed behind him in his wounded wandering. I loved him, I think. But I did not love the dead, abysmal wound that had cried scarlet tears from his third eye. I did not love the hair that, once beautiful and pure wheaten, was now a matted, dull rust red against the crown of his head. I had loved his fingers that tickled the nape of my neck when he'd smiled that amber smile and told me he'd be back by tuesday, he had drowned himout with the rest of the crowd, unwillingly ushering himself to his own River Styx. Words had once trickled from his sycamore lips like wine, but now all that I can take of him are the frozen teardrops that stain his cheeks and the dreams for the future that he had sowed into my hands.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1158
Warnings: None
Notes: Free writes drawn together into one piece.
Summary: The centurial trickle down theory, where time meets the hourglass and foliage is lost in sand.
1.
The Juicer 5000 drained the rainbows of their colours last weekend. Scientists met us at the schoolyard and sold us technicoloured oddities filled with silver dew, fish scale aqua, and pear tree green. It's the wave of the future, they simper over brand name bispectacled frames with lecherous leers, tempting us to dabble in their twisted science.
It's not all that.
I've tried the mountains and the brick houses and even the earthworms, but they all leave a sour taste in my mouth, leave me parched and dehydrated. The labels tell me to buy more, drawing insecure infants in with their false advertisements and gobble-dee-gook gimmicks. Still, the Surgeon General brands us generic and ships us off to our sponsored schoolhouses, filled with the monochrome machinery, their flavors having been drained decades ago. They'll continue to elope with their brilliance, and soon no one will remember the alchemists, only the black and white rainbows fading out with the noise.
2.
The daisies in the field smell like persimmons, but it's only a technical error, they tell us, by tomorrow they'll be good as new. If we had been more interested, the placard overhead would have explained it to us, but we had been far more enamored with the mechanical bees to care. The real ones died off years ago, our text books tell us, next to pictures of forgotten countries and dead nobodies. Marta says she saw one once, but we knew she was lying. The real daisies and persimmons, that had smelled like daisies and persimmons and not persimmons and daisies respectively, are long gone too. For now, we're stuck with plastic pansies, metal marigolds, and glass geraniums, but we never knew anything different, and so we were content. Scholars will continue to feed us lies and call them history, and we'll drink every one up like cheap wine, telling each other this one is fabulous, you should try it my dear. And we'll laugh gaily and discuss futures we know will never happen, pasts that never existed, but never presents. They could never lie about the present and that scared them, so they focussed thoughts on the mechanical bees and malfunctioning daisies that littered this distorted museum of theirs.
3.
We all believed him because he wore a monocle. His suitcase reeked of burnt books and cheap leather, and his 3 piece suit was an eclectic mashup of three different suits and we had all wanted to find these other men with their pants, vest, but no jacket, or vest, jacket, and no pants, or any combination of the three. We never asked him, blamed the weather for distracting us or astrology for misguiding us, but we just weren't feeling it, I suppose. The monocle was all that mattered in the end. Some days it would rest in his pocket while he napped on the schoolhouse, painting pictures with his mind on the dark innards of his garish teal top hat as it rested precariously over his face. We'd join him and his monocle for lunch sometimes and he'd sip our tea and tell us tales of his magnificent adventures in the Past, where the trees still existed and books were on paper, where East Asia was still a continent and England had not been swallowed by the sea. He'd draw us pictures in the air of animals long since extinct and races decimated by wartime and poverty and prejudice. We never judged him, never really believed him, until all that was left of him was his garish teal top hat floating on the wind.
4.
The Hourglass stopped working last night at 4:21 AM. Grains of salt and sand dangled in midair like stars against the dark silhouette of the blue glass encompassing it. We had been asleep when it happened, lost in our monochromatic dreams, pondering pensively the pasts into which we never journeyed outside our own sub-conscience. The scientists attempted to invert it, stringing together fanciful hypotheses, calling themselves Alchemists of Time, but when they'd turned it on its axis and the cameras flashed their approval, the Hourglass remained, the crystals of salt and sand still hovering perpetually in place, and the world was no different then before, just a little less faithful and a tad bit more skeptical. We children stayed behind, stood strong against the currents of media vans that swarmed around us, until there was only the Hourglass, frozen pouring upwards, sandy fingers reaching up towards the heavens, and we knelt beside it and prayed along with it. We prayed for nothing in particular, and who knows what the Hourglass prayed for; all we know is that when we'd awoken in the morning, hands still splayed before us like a forrest of fingers, the Hourglass had disappeared and we were no different than before, only a little less faithful and a tad bit more skeptical.
5.
He planted popsicle sticks because he wanted to bring back the trees. Picture-books and television screens painted exciting, picturesque scenes into Arden's childhood, until realism had set in and he was forced to take a step back and rediscover the world. There were no trees, not anymore, at least. Scientists had done away with them centuries ago, For science, always pouring from their lecherous grins and intoxicating the rest of us like thick brown bourbon. We'd followed their pied-piper melodies to a quick paced allegretto, ignorant to the going-abouts that surrounded us. With the oxygen dome encasing us in our underwater cities, we were told we'd be better off without them, that they wasted space and were too, as they put it, high maintenance. This did not stop Arden, who danced in dreams of stolen, foreign memories: the Amazon Rain Forrest, Penn's Woods, bonsai gardens, all sorts of dreams dyed in viridian hues. He'd awaken parched and thirsting for the soft caress of an oak leaf, only to settle for the cool, choking grip of steel.
6.
Arden once took me to see his plant collection. He'd stolen me away from the grayscale machinery and tucked me in his jacket, pressed me to the wall with cracked scarlet lips puffing hot breath against my ear, and spoke jibberish to me. The walls around us echoed with his crazed, manic, raw breathing as his tongue danced around foreign words, words long since burned from the encyclopedias, plucked out by the alchemists like fresh grapes.
Petal, he'd whispered.
Apple.
Hazelnut.
Branch.
Each puff of breath and accidental graze of teeth or tongue against the shell of my ear sent shivers down my spine, shivers that sang out against the steel doors behind me. In the dark, he'd ushered me past chrome buildings in the pale cerulean glow of the ocean above us, and together we'd fallen down the Rabbit Hole, fingers intertwined into our private wonderland. But there was no croquet with the Queen, no Mad Hatter tea party, only the rose thorns underneath us and the words Drink me, Eat me scrawled in honey on the ceiling.
7.
We found him in the refrigerator in the old meat packaging district on 46th street. The glaze that glistened across his eyes like a contact lens we feared would shatter if we moved him, but we did anyway, slipping and sliding on the velvet red carpet that had trailed behind him in his wounded wandering. I loved him, I think. But I did not love the dead, abysmal wound that had cried scarlet tears from his third eye. I did not love the hair that, once beautiful and pure wheaten, was now a matted, dull rust red against the crown of his head. I had loved his fingers that tickled the nape of my neck when he'd smiled that amber smile and told me he'd be back by tuesday, he had drowned himout with the rest of the crowd, unwillingly ushering himself to his own River Styx. Words had once trickled from his sycamore lips like wine, but now all that I can take of him are the frozen teardrops that stain his cheeks and the dreams for the future that he had sowed into my hands.