wildcat

Should have brought the dog out with her. Cool air brushes her bare ankles and wheat crunches under her slippers -- Sarah shuffles through in her ratty nightgown and Bob's old jacket. She should pack the jacket away, throw it out, buy something for herself. But, even after all those washings it smells a little bit like him, or maybe she thinks it does. Should have brought the dog, maybe it's dangerous to be out here this late, with the noises. Clem will be hiding under the kitchen table, Clem's not a fierce dog.

The noises. The battering, the caterwauling, the sizzle. It's always aliens, twelve times a year with their crop circles and cattle mutilation. Sarah has complained to Town Council three times in the past six months but the crop circles don't stop. Stupid aliens. Bob would stand in the mayor's office and scream for seven hours straight if he thought it would make the problem go away, but Bob's gone. Billy, she should have asked Billy to come out with her. Only Billy, sweet Billy lives twelve hours away by bus, in the city, and what's the point of phoning him in the middle of the night because she hears noises outside? The noises aren't strange by her standards, not anymore.

Sarah grips the old lantern and holds it out. She has never once been out at night when the aliens are out and about. They avoid the big nights like Harvest or the county fair. It's the quiet nights when the aliens come and the noises start up. Sarah knows to keep inside and keep her head down. She knows. Only now she's outside, wondering what's changed, what's dragged her out here. Bob always told her to stay inside when they were doing their weird thing. Stay inside and lock the doors so they don't come for us, he'd say, always fearful of what they do to people if they meet them. You hear stories. Tom Barber from over in Cottonwood is never going to be the same.

Crunch, crunch, feet on rough soil and wheat. The lantern handle is warm. "Is there anybody out there?" There's no answer but the sound of electric razors, buzzsaws. Maybe that's the secret, maybe it's just kids from the town, drunk and causing problems. Maybe. Maybe. She doesn't know what an alien's supposed to look like. Buzzsaws. Buzzsaws and a microwave oven, cooking hot dogs down to a sodden, rumpled digit. She doesn't know any of the kids from town that can sound like a microwave. A foghorn, sure, or a cow. Maybe they can do impressions of coyotes as well. Not a microwave. She creeps toward the source of the sounds. Who knows what the crop circle's going to look like in the morning.

Maybe she's out here because, only because, she wants to see what it looks like while they're making it. Supposed to stay inside with the doors locked. Comes a hollering bark from back in the house, from behind the door, poor old Clem. He is not an iron dog.

Her feet don't freeze in place. She expected that. Sarah keeps moving forward, always forward. Even with Clem's howling she doesn't look back. The little bristles on her ankles stand up, her eyelids feel puffy, she takes a long, deep gulp of air.

So cool out here with the big black sky. The cardboard moon painted white and hung overhead. And then she feels the heat on her face and she opens her mouth to say hello...

Broken receiver hung like a Christmas ornament from the phone booth's cradle, swinging to and fro, to and fro. Definitely broken, plastic shell split down the middle with wires severed. "Lovely," muttered Ambrosia as she slipped the quarter back into her purse. "Bloody lovely." Be sensible, her father always said. Buy a cellphone. Never know when you'll need it. "It's a good thing," she mumbled, reaching up into the cobwebs of her enormous and extravagant blonde wig to extract barrettes and elastic bands. "That I'm such a very clever girl. And resourceful." Thus she went to work, teasing and futzing with the stupid thing's inner workings, wrapping wires together as best she could -- never mind the fluttering feathers that made up her ridiculous frock, chilling her underthings with the draft as it was. "And don't think I don't know you're watching me." She hiccuped aggressively.

The grey-skinned alien was about four feet tall, even with the massive head. For something with little in the way of expressive features, it managed to look scandalized. "I was not watching you." And then, more awkwardly, "Actually, you people aren't even supposed to see me. I'm supposed to be invisible."

Ambrosia -- darling of the stage, and something of a miracle-worker with phone booths -- swept up to stand tall, glaring down at the bit of suburban space-trash with its beady little eyes all over her ass. "Don't take that tone of voice with me, honey." She rubbed at the corner of her eye, not bothering to care about the mascara and eyeliner dragged to hell across her nose and cheek. There had been far worse atrocities than her at the bar that night. "I've had nearly half a bottle of tequila, probably, and if I'm choosing to see you than you're going to be seen. Will you be probing me directly, or can I expect dinner first?"

"This isn't the start of an invasion, if that's what you're thinking."

"Charming." Ambrosia pulled the old quarter from her little black purse and slipped it into the phone, pressing the receiver to her ear. There was definitely a dial tone at work. She kept her eyes on the alien and dialed without looking. A girl of many talents. The phone buzzed insistently in her ear and then there was the click of somebody picking up. "Oy, Robert, it's Adrian," she dropped her voice. "I'm on the corner of Seventeenth and Lampshade. Some little space monster's looking at me and I need you to come pick me up." Didn't even wait for the reply, just hung up right then. "And as for you, little weirdo..."

"Well," said the alien. "If you're not busy. We could go to Denny's?"

***

Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It sputtered out, draft-like, and you're going to have to put up with it.

Things began to go strange when the first glass-skinned child was born in New Jersey, looking for all the world like a cathedral window -- giving off the soft music of a thousand chimes with each breath. There was blood everywhere, the mother died almost immediately of internal bleeding, and one of the nurses couldn't help the scream that slipped right now. The doctor would never be able to forgive himself, but the child was slick with fluid and still quite hot, he yelped. Her surface shattered on contact with hospital floor like so many champagne flutes dumped at a party, people talking and things broke. The mother's gasping death rattle. What was underneath the child's shattered skin lay splayed out in the wet; when the last pieces settled down there was a hard silence in the delivery room. They couldn't tell anybody about this, right? That horrible thought bubbled right up in all of them, there, and then came the memory -- now quite dim -- of the father, caught in traffic, rushing to be with his wife to welcome their little one. They couldn't tell anyone. Right? Right? No one could know, only -- and time seemed to move slowly, here -- someone produced a camera phone and something invisible about the world began to change shape.

Freedom was unexpected and came with an unusual flavour. Andy-Grigori Warhol-Rasputin 9 leaned against the rooftop's safety-bar and breathed. The air tasted of iron and lemon vodka. His jailer -- well, his jailer until now -- stood to his left, arms folded across her naked copper chest. Galatea gave no indication of fatigue or boredom, had none of the thousand human tics that made up body language, except when she chose to. Andy-Grigori felt no need to humour her humanistic behaviours and she felt no need to mimic them for his benefit. A rarity, this honest relationship between man and machine. Andy-Grigori clucked his tongue and found himself missing the simple repetition of the Marilyn Monrobots, who were packed away for display in one of the future's strange museums. Or so Galatea had explained.

"They wanted you to be placed in an deep-culture tank," she said. Her eyes hummed and clicked, emitting purple light. Recording, recording. For posterity. If there was ever to be a woman he'd marry, well, this was her. Even if she wasn't a woman. But that was appropriate, of course. "Bendix and the Board. They're in the business of building geniuses and then tanking them for the greater benefit of society."

"But?"

Galatea laughed, which sounded nothing like a proper laugh in that it was so perfect. It reminded him of the fake laughter at the end of an old Star Trek episode, only he couldn't remember if he'd ever seen one. Imperfect replication of neural pathways. The city skyline was impossible and he wanted a Polaroid camera quite, quite badly. They stopped making them centuries ago, according to the data-banks. "But," she said. Sometimes she paused, he suspected, because people paused to collect their thoughts. "But there are other ways for geniuses to be useful to society. Anyway, everybody's a genius these days."

"I always expected robots to be perfectly logical and follow orders explicitly."

Another laugh. "One of the other Galateas went mad, you know. She killed off an entire planet and then wandered around in the ashen remains for a week and half before she was deactivated. Bit of diplomatic nightmare. We are imperfect beings, occasionally." She reached over and touched his elbow, like you might a relative or a mental patient. Both. He pulled at his long black beard. "Occasionally, the city needs a mad scientist or strange photographer to take up residence like a real person and make a few adjustments. A mad monk can be essential to urban development."

He smiled sidelong at her. "You'll be deactivated for this, I expect."

Galatea ran a finger over the silver straps running along his chest, and pulled out a soft woolen jacket. There were no sheep anywhere on Earth. Just electric ones. Battery-powered wool. "There's an old data module in the pocket. The Board were adamant that you not be fitted with a brain-receiver. They like their geniuses kept pure. I've outfitted it with the address of a woman I know, who's calling herself Eni these days. She's prone to getting drunk up on office buildings. She's from the Twenty-First Century."

"I thought about visiting my daughter, actually."

Galatea's face remained neutral, her hand running circles over his wrist. She wore the same expression Anastasia did on occasion. He could remember that quite clearly, though the image was a barely more than a cartoon. Memory cobbled together out of video files. "Maria Rasputin died centuries ago, Andy-Grigori." When had she started to call him by his first name, rather than Number Nine? "Go meet Eni. She needs a purpose. The city needs a change. I need a change." Galatea tilted her head. Incoming software update, probably. He didn't grasp all the particulars of how she...lived...but she had certain routines. "Step off the roof." She reached up and ran a finger over the left strap of his environment-harness and it hummed in time with her eyes. They switched to the orange light. "Step off the roof."

"I'd say goodbye, but I'll meet your sisters sooner or later, I imagine."

"Indeed."

What a strange thing, to step off a roof without worrying about death. But Andy-Grigori never worried about death, having been killed several times. He'd been bred with that in mind. He leapt off the roof like one might get out of a limousine. And gravity changed direction--

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

The problem was, eventually they ran out of billionaire daredevils and photogenic rocket scientists. They were all up there in the sky: exploring alien planets and building nebula-cities. Giving birth to beautiful angel-babies in zero gravity and forming colonies of sky-poets.

Earth, well, Earth was just there -- the "Compost Heap," some people called it, few years after the first Rapture of Scientists. Sure, they'd send data back to Earth -- new technologies and letters to their left behind family -- but they never came back. Robots did most of the thinking, building, servicing -- they were also in charge of firing up boatloads of candidates when they made themselves known, fresh thinkers and space-heroes.

The general public, they mostly wandered. Looked up at the sky a lot -- more than they used to, probably, though nobody bothered to do formal studies.

Gerald did that -- he stood out on fire escape, gripped the black iron railing, and looked up. Vanna was inside, dancing around to a Dizzie Gillespie record she found at the pawn shop. It was too loud, hard for Gerald to think out there with Dizzie on one side and the city honking at him on the other. Road rage increased as the number of earthbound scientists decreased. Again, nobody did a study. Gerald rubbed at his forehead and tried to spot Venus in the sky, but he was never very good at telling the planets apart from the stars. He wanted to shout at Vanna to turn down the music but that would start another argument and he didn't really need to deal with that. They fought too often these days, over stupid things, and his hands ached from the constant clenching. Same with his jaw.

A jetcar swept around and into the alleyway alongside their building, screeching forth at a ninety degree angle. "Daredevil behaviour," Gerald mumbled, leaning forward to catch sight of the driver. "They're either going to beat that out of you, kid, or fire you into space." No chance of that happening to Gerald -- he looked both ways before crossing and tossed the milk the night before it expired. Always. To do otherwise carried too many risks, and he expected he'd be eaten by a Martian the second he went up there.

There was a wild screech of metal on brick at the other end of the alley, the whomp of gravity engines cycling, sirens and people shouting. Definitely a space-case.

"Honey," said Vanna as she poked through the window, offering a can of Winged Snake. "Beer?" They could spend three hours every night screaming at each other about the cracked plaster over the sink but she could still sound like that and offer him a beer. He scratched at the back of his neck and just smiled, holding out his hand. "Thought you needed one."

Gerald popped the tab and took a long, rough pull. "Awful thoughtful of you, baby." He could ignore the Dizzie for a little while longer, with her looking like that, pulling herself out the window in a yellow sundress that hugged just so. Just so. Gerald tilted back to take another sip and caught sight of the waning sun. Beer was a little warm but they'd been having troubles with the fridge.

Vanna exhaled loudly and fought with her long brown hair, dragging it back behind her ears. "I'm going to get it cut." She pulled it right back, held the dangling mass out of sight, and then pouted like he was her mirror. "Right off."

"That would be. Different." Gerald took another sip. He liked the long hair but if he said that outright it would be another long fight and they were running out of plates and Vanna had a habit of tossing his underwear and socks off the fire escape into the dumpster below.

"Actually, we need to talk."

"About?"

"I've signed up for a base-jumping class and I'm thinking about skydiving."

He crushed the can right then, the last sip's worth sputtering out to drip from the rails. He tossed it over his shoulder without taking his eyes off her. "You're taking a base-jumping class," he said, drawing out the syllables like he was trying and failing to work through a math problem. The robots, as a rule, filed his taxes for him. "You're. You're taking a base-jumping class?"

Vanna crossed her arms and leaned back against the cracked brick. "Yes. I've been feeling." She put her head back. Staring up. "Stuck. Earthbound. Bored. You know." You know, you know, they'd all seen the psych profile by now. There was a certain type of ennui associated with this condition.

Gerald wanted to say, don't leave me. He wanted to say, I'll change. Instead, he found himself twisting around to stare down at the dumpster and his mouth opening with other words coming out: "Could you turn down the bloody music already? I have a headache."

And somewhere, they fired a rocket from atop the tallest mountain...

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

Awkward coffeehouse moment: "Can I. Take your. Order?" The robot -- an elongated egg-shape with a speaker in the front and six pincer-arms -- hovered in front of Gordon in line, having just finished polling the guy in the turban and pin-striped suit on his order. Gordon gawped. "Can I. Take your. Order?" The robot sounded like a talk-show host with all the personality drained away, the rough timbre of the voice reduced to scraps of pre-recorded bits pasted together.

"I'm not here for a coffee," said Gordon awkwardly. The woman in the violet jumpsuit directly behind him in line tapped her foot and checked the time on her phone.

"We have. Many. Other. Options. Besides. Coffee."

"No, no, I mean. I'm just here to drop off my resumé." He held up a square of white paper with all his vitals on it, safely laminated from stains. People up ahead finished paying for their drinks and moved off to the side, allowing the line to move up. The woman in the jumpsuit kicked Gordon's ankle and he shuffled forward. "Is the manager around?"

The robot regarded the paper for a moment, apparently processing. "Recycling. Facilities. are located. With the. Cream/Sugar/Other." One of the long pincer-arms indicated a station over by the door. "Thank you. For your. Concern. With. Regard. To the. Environment." The word environment barely squeezed out of the speaker sounding at all like English.

"No, I want to drop this off in case you're looking for people." Gordon held out the resumé for the robot to take. The woman in the jumpsuit clucked loudly and people behind her scraped their foam shoes against the floor, shifting their weight, and started to mutter to each other. This was seriously devaluing their coffeehouse experience.

"This unit. Is not. Authorized. To take. Your list. Of demands. All terrorist. Situations. Should be directed. To the. Senior Director. Of marketing. Or the. Manager."

"What? I'm not trying--"

"Trying. Something. New? I recommend. Our dark. Roast!"

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

His sweat is engineered chemicals that tell him what to do. His body has been redesigned to deliver specific information to his conscious mind through the taste of his sweat. Entire encyclopedias can be stored in average bodily secretions now; he once saw his old partner, Charlie, coughing up bile that contained the entire works of Herman Melville. Himself, he gets mission parameters and documentation that he can peruse while his latest conquest is showering in the other room—Simone, her name's Simone. He licks his sweaty arm while he lies in the abused bed and the triggers fire off what exactly his purpose is. They give you a shot before you go out into the field—after that, at the appointed time, your sweat will unfold the story. Where to go, who to talk to, where to stick the money when he's done. He'll pack Simone away and get to work.

The shower stops but for the soft drip-drip-drip of a hotel faucet. Simone paces back and forth in the bathroom. He licked her, during, and tasted no stories or information. Oh, to have normal sweat glands again. She almost tasted...

Simone stands at the foot of the bed, fully clothed. Fortunate that she doesn't expect some post-coital spooning or emotion. It occurs to him that he's having trouble moving—is he sore? Did she do something to his back, midway through? "My saliva," she says. "Slow-acting paralytic." She gives a curt laugh, an act, an impersonation of an evil villain. Is this really happening? But her sweat! "I suppose you'd expect my sweat to do the talking for me, but I prefer to give nothing away."

He tries to ask what she wants, although he clearly remembers her licking at his collarbone. Damn. Should have checked her tongue, but some days you don't want to have to check every possible sex partner's tongue for adaptations.

"Your sweat," she says, while she slides her feet into those long leather boots. "It screamed. Talked immediately. I didn't even have to torture it for hours." She smiles. Ugly. They were...they were doing it and she was reading him! Like a book! In the middle! "Don't worry," she says while she grabs her jacket and pulls it on, heading for the door. "You'll be able to move again in roughly two hours. If I'd wanted to kill you, we would have gone bareback."

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

Actually the problem was that he watched too many Frankenstein movies when he was a little boy and so the ideas that fruited inside his head regarding "mortality" were a little strange. This was nobody's fault, certainly not television's—he's just one of those people, where reality is maybe a little too flexible. He spent most of his adolescence trying to imbue gross, inanimate matter with life. Lightning rods, semen and cursing, sort of thing. He wanted to get girls pregnant just to see what would happen but you can guess how that went over—fuck, the boy was a fool, an idiot, a commonplace moron. The kind of person you take out behind the barn and SHOOT, goddamn you, shoot him right through the head because he's certainly not going to be providing you with anything like a realistic view of the situation. Which is more or less what happened when he met Emma, right, because he tried something and she kicked him in the balls and certainly you can feel sorry for him but Emma wasn't about to. Mostly she cussed, and stamped on his forehead with her very large shoes—runners, lots of sole, fat things with treads to leave a mark. Afterward, Emma got pissed and he lay half-in-half-out of an alleyway, trying to remember his name. He went to Hollywood after that.

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

I started to write a long-winded and whiny review of The Dark Knight, which basically boils down to (a) I'm tired of "realism" being equated to inelegant design and knives being shoved into mouths like a bad prison blowjob routine, (b) women are people too, (c) Michael Caine and Gary Oldman were awesome and (d) fuck, hire a script editor already. But I can't get the energy together and the negativity just doesn't do it for me, so I'd rather talk about how I'd approach doing my own hypothetical Batman movie. Assume that the ghost of Bill Finger has risen from the dead to haunt AOL-Time-Warner and force them to give Batman a Creative Commons copyright as revenge for stripping his name off of Batman for such a long, long time, and prepare to get dirty in the nerdy:

1. If it's going to be a Joker story, I'm watching every single Marx Brothers movie ever made for research. I would do a Joker story as a Marx Brothers flick with knives, guns, bombs, rictus-inducing poison gas, and silk stockings.

2. I would choose a sexy, sleek Batmobile, a Batmobile that oozes charisma and elegance. None of this tank business, none of this stealing equipment off of G.I. Joe when they're off fighting Cobra. Tim Burton had the right idea with his car-as-gothic-phallus, sure, but I'm not Tim Burton. To whit:



3. One goddamn super-villain. Or, alternatively, seven or eight of them, but only one important one, the others being reduced to the status of punch-their-lights-out on the way to the main event. An average night in Gotham should involve multiple cases. I'd also go full bore and use all the ridiculous one-off deals. Have Batman kick the crap out of the Royal Flush Gang, or the Mad Hatter.

4. Three words: Credible Love Interest. In terms of narrative punch and strength of character, Catwoman kicks ass and you can pull in that punch-tights-as-sex angle. A Batman movie has to be horny, all the way through, but it has to feel guilty and icky and ashamed about it -- all desire has to be sublimated. If you want a Gothic Gotham, you have to remember the Gothic Horror Credo: Sex is Bad. If I wasn't going to go with Catwoman, if I wanted a civilian love affair, they'd have to be played by a credible actress who can bring a lot of power to the role. All the memorable leading ladies Batman's dated -- I'm thinking Silver St. Cloud, Jezebel Jet, Talia, et cetera, could go toe-to-toe with Batman, personality-wise.

5. Sidekicks. I don't given a shit that you think Robin's lame, you haven't got a grip on Robin. Robin's cool. Robin refuses to be inky. He's a daredevil. He's mad as hell. He's smart. He thinks he wants to be Batman when he grows up. Robin's presence also prevents "realism," which is for pansies. Even Frank Miller's old fart Bat-Dad in The Dark Knight Returns had a Robin, and a Robin that worked. I'd pick the third Robin, Tim Drake, who got to be Robin purely because he was the first person to deduce who Batman was purely on his own. And Batgirl's even cooler than Robin, and I'd have to include her simply to punch up the dynamic with Jim Gordon. Batman's in a lonely crusade on crime, but that just means he has to build a family. Also, his butler can beat up your butler.

6. Opera. Every fight scene needs to be a modern art piece, a dance number, a punch-drunk ballet sequence with all that sexual frustration running through it.

7. Batman/Bruce Wayne. Delineated by wardrobe choices and actual voice. None of this Chris Nolan hiring a robot to play Batman, plying him on booze and cigarettes. If you can't find an actor who can credibly adjust his voice to be deeper and darker sounding, send him away. Bruce Wayne should be just as much of a nutjob as his enemies, and he should be in the movie a lot. Batman should be three people: the Bat, billionaire idiot Bruce Wayne, and emotionally crippled private Bruce Wayne. Which is why he needs to build himself a family, because all that private Emo time with his parents being dead impedes his war on crime. It leads to self-indulgence.

8. Flashbacks and back story, as Treava pointed out. Sparingly, sure, but they serve an important function: Bruce Wayne is all origin. Batman is defined by that tragic origin, everything springs from it. Which is why he works against the Joker, and this something Nolan successfully didn't fuck up -- the Joker lies constantly, has no origin, too many origins, he works best when you don't know what his back story is and have to wonder constantly at how he became untethered. If you emphasize that Batman is tied up in his origins, petrified and tangled in them, then Joker is that much more terrifying, because he's free. He's utterly, utterly free.

They kept the oracle in the fridge; if not properly refrigerated, it would have gone off, gone sour, begun to show signs of mould and decay. You don't leave an oracle out beside the fruit bowl to make your avocados ripen. Instead, they left the oracle in the fridge and it sat there, mostly, in the dark and cold, beside a plastic litre jug of two percent milk and a packet of tiger prawns destined for dinner time. Sat and waited, gnawed at its lips furtively while listening for the familiar footsteps. The slick cords growing from the back of the oracle, its aborted spinal cord, hung between racks and dripped; they changed the paper towel underneath regularly.

It went on like this for a while. This was the oracle's life: sit in darkness, twitch nervously, while futures play out across eyelids. Try not to smell the baking soda open at the back of the fridge. Say nothing when they open the door, the lights come on, and they rifle through for a snack, or ingredients for a proper meal. Ignore the leftovers that heap up occasionally.

If one has an oracle, the novelty wears off quickly.

But, occasionally. The door opened, the lightbulb ignited, and the girl stood, bent at the waist to peer at the oracle. Not at the vegetables in the crisper, not at the milk, or the half-eaten tortilla salad in the plastic container. At the oracle. The oracle opened its eyes as was expected of it. "Hello, Mistress," the oracle sang. No other prompting necessary -- let's face it, it would have been a terrible oracle if it didn't know when it was wanted.

"Hello." The girl huffed. "Hello, you horrible thing." She didn't buy the oracle, that was her father, he was the one to pick it up at a no-good flea market ten minutes outside town. He was a man always on the lookout for a bargain. Knowing the future, he'd said, is a major bargain. The girl was easy to read. She didn't like the wet-blue skin stretched across the oracle, how it was little more than a mouth and a chin, and she wondered often who'd been butchered to make it. But she never asked, and the oracle wasn't about to answer an unasked question. Letter of the law.

"What knowledge do you seek, Mistress?"

"Only, see," said the girl. Inwardly, the oracle sighed. She had a habit of starting in the middle of a sentence. How on Earth did she get her point across to people who didn't have access to any and every secret on Earth? The girl straightened up, grabbing a can of orange pop and flicking the tab open as she did. "I was at this party last night, right, and there's this guy -- I'm not saying I'm interested or anything, but." The oracle waited. It was good at waiting. It waited for the girl to finish her question. It already knew the question and it knew the answer, but again: rules. "But he starts talking about it being impossible to meet suitable single women and then he says. He says there's always me, but, I'm unavailable? What the hell does that mean?"

The oracle gnawed at its lips while it took in the question, turquoise tongue licking at them irritably. The oracle was grown to preside over nations, advise kings, lead heroic women and men on great adventures. It knew that the girl's father was having an affair behind her mother's back; it knew the names of meteors destined to one day hit the planet and end all civilization. It was not meant to answer pointless questions of romantic entanglement that would lead nowhere, ever, no matter what the girl thought.

"...hello?" She waved a hand in front of the oracle and then took a long, desperate sip of her orange pop. "Do I have to bow down before you in supplication or whatever? Look, the party was this terrible Noel Coward affair, you know. I want to know what he meant, Oracle, I want to know what he meant by saying I was unavailable."

The problem was, the family rarely wanted to hear what the oracle had to say. It pried its lips apart and began to speak. They wanted a mute therapist, or someone to remind them of appointments. They wanted traffic reports. They did not want to know the truth, the future, or anything similar. It was tiresome. It was a waste. But it was something the oracle knew. "Men suck, Mistress," the oracle said, after a moment.

Well, it was the difference between the fridge and the trashcan, wasn't it?

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.