Short Stories | My Buddy, Daffy

I didn’t notice anything unusual when I went outside on a smoke break. Our building provides a few places to smoke—out front, in the parking garage and a sort of patio outside the glass walkway leading from the main building to the garage. I chose the patio so I could sit down at a table and relax my aching back. A co-worker came down with me, but forked off to the snack shop to get some cigarettes. I grabbed one of the black metal chairs and sat down at the matching table, lit up and exhaled slowly as the blur in my eyes from programming all day cleared away.

I took a few drags off the cigarette before my co-worker opened the door, unwrapping his pack of cigarettes and sticking one his mouth. I noticed a sound… like cardboard being dragged across the cement. That’s when I saw something unfamiliar, snagged between the bottom of the door and ground, “What the fuck is that?”

My co-worker looked down, gasped and jumped aside.

I went over to investigate, discovering to my astonishment a duck head—a real one—with a bit of spine protruding out of the neck and its beak frozen in a deeply disturbing sort of duck smile.

“Where’s the rest of it?” My co-worker asked.

Like I would know… I mean, I know I’m weird, but I don’t go around beheading ducks and I certainly don’t leave the remains laying around the smoking area at work.

I shrugged, somewhat disturbed by the striking similarity to a scene from the Godfather.

A few days later, I came back down to smoke on the patio, this time alone. The duck head had disappeared. It was like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, like some inscrutable alien left it there when nobody was looking, for some incomprehensible reason, then plucked it away one night. Like the Monolith, the duck had left me with something… not so much the flash of insight Moonwatcher received… more like a nagging melancholy.

Alone there, with my thoughts, I reminisced over the past few days… the time I first discovered the duck head.  The time I wondered how sharp the row of teeth along the inside of that bill really were.  The time I opened the door, the duck head dislodged  and I thought it had found a permanent resting place against the windowed walkway… forever smiling and watching over the smoking patio with that deep black glassy eye.

My nostalgic interlude was interrupted when the building janitor came outside. He looked around the patio a bit, “Where are all these feathers coming from?”

I shrugged, “There was a duck head out here earlier, but those aren’t duck feathers.”

“A duck head?!”

“Yeah. A real one.”

“How did a duck head get out here?”

It was a reasonable question… the patio is elevated from the street, so a dog or some other animal couldn’t have dragged it in that way. The only way to the patio was from the glass hallway… or the sky.

I looked up into the air, quickly closing my unaccustomed eyes to the sunlight, “I don’t know man…”

I wondered where the duck head went. If the janitor hadn’t cleaned it up, who did?  And, more importantly, had they treated it with the proper respect?

The janitor shook his head in a gesture of futility, “There must be another bird around here somewhere…”

“Yeah.”  As the janitor went back inside, I exhaled a cloud of smoke that swirled away in the thin breeze.

“Weird.  Another dead bird,” I thought, “still, I’m going to miss that duck.  I’ve never known anyone who could smile like that in the face of such adversity.”

Under the Sun | 9. High Contrast

Black hair, black fishnets and a black dress, between her thin fingers a cigarette was as burnt as the evening. A street lamp and a neon sign in the distance combined to give her pale skin a faint greenish cast. Her eyes, two pools of liquid night, searched the damp streets for anything of interest, only to find the same blandness she had tried to leave behind in the club. Men, rolled off an assembly line with mechanical precision, escorting women from the same cookie cutter trying to distinguish themselves with a different color of candied glitter. The crowd filtered out of the club into a fleet of imported sports cars that sped off belching poison and pretense.

Turning away, “there has to be more,” some distant voice whispered in her mind. She put the cigarette, almost forgotten, to her mouth and drew as much smoke as she could, leaving a maroon impression of her cool lips on the filter. She flicked the butt to the pavement sending it skipping on the damp street like a molten rock across a midnight pond.

A bird lay among the crushed beer cans, shreds of plastic and clumps of rancid food spilling out of the dumpster behind the club. On its back, its legs in the air, its head turned to the side so one eye, black as hers, stared somewhere beyond the thick clouds above, into eternity. “Scott,” the voice suggested to only her.

She was there the moment he died, in the hospital, his face beaten beyond recognition, swollen and numb. She was looking into his blue eyes when something seemed to evaporate from them, leaving them to stare, forever, into a place where eternity collapses into a flicker. She didn’t cry, only looked, numbly, as if something had evaporated from herself at the same moment as it had from Scott.

She wondered if that’s when the emptiness started. That blackness inside her that devoured any light cast into it. It seemed like it had always been there. She couldn’t even think about it long, as if it fed on her attention. Did everyone have it? Did they think their expensive cars and artificial lives were shrinking the emptiness?

The void demanded another cigarette and she complied, feeding it, and it strengthened. When did it end?

In the distance a grain elevator sat deep in a field off the shores of the city. Train tracks glanced alongside it like arteries. Red lights throbbed along the contours like faint hearts. She would go there after work, where it happened. How it happened was a secret of the wet, rusted metal and cold concrete. It called to her in some unspoken way, whispering some alien language deep in a place known only to dreams. The answer of Scott’s death was locked in that place.

She studied the elevator and it stared, not back, but past, beyond the clouds, beyond eternity. Forever empty, but with no concern.

The emptiness hadn’t always been there, she remembered. The day she met Scott, picking dandelions, she never thought to ask if there was more.

The red door of the club swung open and Anthony peered to the corner of the building, “Hey, I ain’t payin’ you to stand out here all night smokin’! Get in here and clean up!”

She didn’t respond, only watched as the head popped back inside and the door closed, like some ridiculous cuckoo clock.

Lisa glanced back at the bird—at Scott—one last time, with layers of dead emotion encasing her mind like a cyst. Shaking, she fumbled through her black purse and found a bottle which gladly gave her two pills. She chewed the oxycontins and a tear formed from somewhere in her black eyes, escaping down her cheek, trailing mascara, a streak of liquid night.

Site Notes | New Theme

I was getting tired of my crappy custom theme, so I’ve changed the theme for clusterlizard to “librio” from Deniart.

Curiosities | Why are You Afraid of Dying?

You’ve spent the past 15 billion years not existing, you should be used to it by now.

Site Notes | Threaded Commenting Works

I have been trying to get the Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin working with WordPress 2.3.1 for a while now. I finally sat down and traced through the HTML output of the original comments.php and the replacement comments.php needed by the plugin. As it turns out, you need to install the plugin as directed, activate it as normal, then go to Admin/Options/Threaded Comments and enter “wp-comments-post.php” (without the quotes) even if you haven’t setup a custom comments url (which I don’t). Otherwise, the plugin will not work.

So, that fixes that and I finally have Clusterlizard setup the way I want with Wordpress. I changed back over to Wordpress because I don’t want to keep dicking around with my own code. I’d rather spend the time writing stuff. I will, however, be making some changes to the threaded comments to get the reCaptcha plugin and the entry form to layout in a more pleasing way (I think the reCaptcha form should go above the submit button)… but that’s just my OCD at work so I’m not going to rush it.

Blue Aliens | IV. Entrapment

A week had passed since my meeting at the Den. The clone was busy in the kitchen preparing my favorite, German chocolate cake. I was in the bedroom fixing her dresser, though I had never understood her need for one, since she never wore clothes. I was a bit frustrated trying to get the wooden slabs to fit back together properly and to stay in that position long enough for me to secure them. I was a cat farmer by trade. I had no clue about dressers.

I heard a knock at the front door and used my shirt-sleeve to wipe some sweat from my brow as I stood, “Now what the fuck?”

“I will answer the door!” the clone purred.

“No, no, I’ll get it…” I patted her firm bottom as I passed. She smiled demurely.

I walked into the front room and immediately noticed a tall figure hovering at the door. An alien. Could this be the mysterious alien I had seen in Germany? Somewhat hesitantly, I walked up to the door and slowly opened it. The subdued light of the outer world oozed into the room, partially shillouehtting the alien. I could still make out it’s deep features. His blue skin was wrinkled badly, his cheekbones were unusually high for an alien. His eyes were deep yellow and catlike and possessed a hypnotic quality if one stared into them for only the slightest moment too long.

I have never met an alien that didn’t completely disgust me. Until now. This one intrigued me. When I looked at his eyes, I saw ancient wisdom, not the usual probing for some secret that could be used to gain an upper-hand. When I saw his long black braided hair, I saw an homage to cultures, not displays of rare metals and crafts created and arranged to identify superiority.

The alien bowed to me, humbly, “I have come to speak with you.”

I opened the door wider, without hesitation, gesturing for the alien to enter. I closed the door behind him and we sat on the couch. The alien interlocked his fingers for a moment and rested them on his thin, long, bony knee. There he sat for several moments. I was fascinated by this alien, who seemed to exhibit grace, dignity and respect. I sensed a genuine quality in him – another first for an alien.

“We are two of a kind, my friend,” the alien talked slowly and in a very deep voice.

Friend, I wondered, what is this? I’ve never heard an alien call a human that word, “Uh, who are you?”

“My name is Fredo,” the alien replied. They had taken names from movies. Evidentally, this one liked “Godfather II”.

“And how are we two of a kind,” I wondered aloud.

“We are both… different…” The alien paused, as if troubled.

“Go on.”

“You may have noticed all of my species are male.” The alien glanced at me, almost as demurely as the clone had earlier.

I hadn’t thought about it, but now that he mentioned it… “Hmmm. How do you guys…”

“Clones,” The alien replied quickly.

“Okay. And what does this have to do with anything?”

“As I said, I am different.” He hesitated again. I nodded to encourage him to continue.

“You do not seem to hold our kind in the same esteem as other earthlings. I do not hold our kind with much esteem myself. You see, I am female. The first female of my species. I am what your kind would call ‘gay’.”

“Wait. ‘Gay’ means you like others of your own sex…”

“Not among our kind. If you applied the term to us, I would be gay, since my species only have sexual relations with our own sex.”

I had no interest in further clarification. And I was soon disturbed by a thought that popped into my head, “What about my…”

The alien lowered his… her… its… voice to a whisper, “Your clone is an agent of the Governors’. At this moment, he is preparing a meal which will poison you.”

My lip quivered, “Eva? A…”

“Yes. You must come with me.”

“But…” I wanted to cry.

“We must leave at once!”

Blue Aliens | III. Perception

I stared in disbelief, my mouth wide open. Two alien governors deboarded a Concorde jet. Their eyes were covered with thick black sunglasses, though I had no idea why, since they had melted the moon and thickened the Earth’s atmosphere with so much of the plasma that it was eternally twilight. They were just trying to look “cool.” The assholes.

The governors paused (for effect) and waived at the adoring audience. You would have thought Elvis had just walked down a golden stairway from heaven flanked by John Lennon and George Harrison. The crowd screamed with delight. The governors smiled and nodded, the deep yellow tint of their teeth visible even on my small television.

My face reddened, “Goddammit, Eva, what the hell is the matter with these people? Fucking sheep!”

The clone shrugged.

“Fucking sheep!” I yelled at the television.

“Maybe they are happy because the governors have had a safe trip,” the clone suggested, subtly rolling her R’s.

Her innocence was maddeningly endearing. Two thick strands of her curled, platinum blonde hair framed her face. Her blue eyes sparkled even in the eternal twilight. My mouth drew up into a smile. I couldn’t control it.

“See? You are happy too,” her German accent gave me butterflies.

I put my arms around her and caught only the slightest hint of her naked womanhood before the phone rang.

“Fuckers.”

I scooted away from the clone and picked up the phone, “Yeah?”

It was Diamond Dave.

“What? Why do you always have to call me at the wrong time?”

“Hey, anytime is the wrong time. You’re always slobbering over that clone.”

I blushed. He had a point there, “Okay, so what do you want?”

“The governors want to meet with you today. At the Den.”

I sighed. Now what? “When?”

“Can you be here in an hour?”

I shook my head, “Yeah, later.”

“Why are you unhappy, now,” the clone asked, as I dropped the phone back on it’s cradle.

“I have to go to the Den to meet the governors. You stay here.”

The clone smiled as I pecked her on the cheek. She turned back to the television.

My anger sharpened as I drove to the Den, thinking of the clone sitting on the silky material that wrapped our sofa. I imagined her perfect form, perpetually naked as was the trend these days, pressing against my trembling body. My adrenaline flowed. My fingers felt charged with energy. My mind wandered into that twilight zone that awaits anyone willing to let themselves go while driving on the highway.

The Den was the location where the aliens made their “headquarters.” They organized into a tiered governance, with each successive level taking on finer and finer control of smaller and smaller areas. The Den was the lowest tier and controlled the smallest area. It was a given that when referring to the “Den,” one was referring to the Den which happened to control whatever area one was in.

The twenty minute drive seemed to last five minutes and I got out of the car. I had been sweating badly from the anger, the adrenaline and the climate. I was, as far as I knew, the only human left who still wore clothing. I approached the building, flat on one side and round on the other – a giant cylinder cut in half. I approached the rounded side, where the entrance was located. I saw Diamond Dave and two alien governors – one older than the other – waiting for me.

As I approached, Dave looked with some interest at my reddened face, “Calm down,” he winked.

I didn’t reply and walked past him. The governors led me inside to an office. Dave followed, somewhat nervously.

We all sat at a round table, Dave and I on one side, facing the two governors. One of the governors pushed a bottle of blue cheese dressing toward me. I looked at the bottle with disdain as the governors and Dave took large gulps from their own containers of dressing.

“What, you’re gonna serve me a salad?”

The governors laughed hysterically, spewing dressing all over the table. I could see years of dressing caked around their gums and between their large yellowed teeth. I gagged. Dave nudged me under the table and I scooted away from him.

The older governor looked sternly at me with his yellow cat-like eyes. The pupils constricted as he seemed to concentrate harder on my own eyes, “We understand that you recently made a trip to Germany.”

The deep bass of the alien’s voice vibrated through my chest. I crossed my arms across my abdomen, “Yes?”

“We know that you saw an alien on the side of the highway during your trip.”

I looked at Dave. How the hell did they know that? The clone didn’t even know about that and she was with me. I tried to remain collected.

“This alien is a fugitive,” the older governor continued, “we know that he will be visiting you in a few days. We desire your cooperation.”

I squinted. What was going on here? “What do you want from me?”

The governors smiled at each other, confident they had their patsy.

Blue Aliens | II. The Motherland

The swollen moon swiftly climbed high into the night sky.  A trail of plasma evaporated in the moon’s wake.  Nervously, I watched the event with my head pressed against the cool bus window.

“What now?” I wondered to myself.  Ever since those damn aliens had arrived, they had screwed up everything.  Suddenly, we had Indian elephants in the Midwest, the atmosphere was eternally blue and dark.  The temperature never rose above seventy degrees and never fell below sixty five.

I wondered why nobody else seemed to notice how badly our new “guests” had messed things up.  Maybe they did and were too scared to say anything.  Though, that didn’t make any sense either, since the aliens weren’t violent.  They never physically harmed anyone. They were just assholes.  With all of their technology and surliness, the aliens never threatened anyone.  In fact, they were always sucking up to humans.  Well, at least whenever they weren’t being assholes to us.

My clone scooted closer to me in the bus seat and rested her head on my shoulder.  Technically, she wasn’t really a clone.  The alien Governors had taken a sample of my DNA and modified it to create a duplicate of Eva Habermann.  Another case of the aliens sucking up to humans.  I honestly hated those aliens, but how could I refuse such a gift?  I glanced upon the clone’s naked form leaning against me.

Eva put her hand on the back of my head and began to massage my scalp.  One of the advantages of her being a clone of myself was that she knew exactly the right spot to massage.  I closed my eyes and shivered.  Her hand was cool and comforting.  It seemed to absorb the excess heat collecting under my thick head of hair.  Occasionally, she would scratch lightly with her blue-painted nails.

My clone was the whole reason for this little trip.  She wanted to come to Germany and meet the real Eva Habermann and get her autograph. I also promised to buy her some clothes, even though they were mostly just accessories in this day and age.  Another one of the many things that had changed since the arrival of the aliens.  The real Eva Habermann was redundant to me now, but I made the trip for my clone.

With my eyes closed, my other senses became more noticeable.  I gradually became aware of the overwhelming stench of body odor on the bus.  It was a putrid mixture resembling cooked hamburger and old onions.  I opened my eyes hoping to push the scent away with my sense of sight.  Most of us riding the bus were males.  That made sense, we seemed to smell worse than females.

The moon had stopped it’s climb.  I had opened my eyes just in time to see an uneven flash of white ignite around the surface and  evaporate, all in an instant.  I heard a loud crackling sound and could detect the scent of ozone.  There was a short pause and then an enormous explosion.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” I said, mostly to myself.

None of the other travelers seemed to notice the event.  They just stared blankly ahead and the clone continued to massage my scalp.  The moon was gone, its surface material converted into some strange plasma that was bleeding into the sky and causing interference patterns similar to oil in water.

“Fuckers.  Goddamn alien fuckers.”

I wondered what it would take to wake everyone up.  How much does our world have to die before people put their foot down?  Asshole aliens.  I’d just as soon spit on one as look at it.

Not that the aliens were ugly, by any means.  They were actually quite striking.  A short one would be seven feet tall.  Their skin was blue and their hair long and black.  Their facial features were almost Native American looking, though thinner and with an elongated philtrum.  They were wrinkled, and so even the children looked elderly. Their eyes were their most striking feature, yellow and self-illuminated, somewhat cat-like with deep, coal-black pupils in the center.

I looked back down and tried to see ahead of the bus.  I noticed the environment was bright enough to see, even without the moonlight.  The plasma in the sky seemed to illuminate the world so that it roughly appeared early-evening.  I noticed a tall, thin figure in the distance, it appeared to be walking toward the bus along the roadside.  An alien.

As the bus approached the alien, I could make out more and more details. It was wearing a brown leather vest, jeans and boots.  Its head was lowered as it walked with long strides.  It almost seemed to be concentrating on its own footsteps.  I could tell from the dress and the way its hair was braided that it was not a Governor.  Not that it mattered to me.  They were all crazy.  They were all assholes.

The bus quickly came upon the alien, as we were traveling at least 70 miles an hour, not to mention those long Goddamn strides those things take. As the alien passed by my window, it looked up.  I was shocked.  Our gazes locked and I felt hypnotized, connected.  It was one of those held gazes where it feels as though both minds are meeting.  A shock shot through my gut.  I felt the ancientness in those eyes.  The gaze lasted only briefly but it felt like minutes.  I turned as the bus passed to watch the alien as it continued uninterrupted, once again looking down to the ground.

The clone put her arms around me, “We are almost there,” she assured me, with her German accent, “finally I will meet with Eva!”

Blue Aliens | I. The Visit

The sky was dark and the air was cold and blue as I watched for Diamond Dave and the group of alien governors. Of course, the weather had been mostly the same since the aliens arrived, for they couldn’t survive here otherwise. They came and modified our weather to suit their own needs.

I guess it wasn’t as though they hadn’t been invited. NASA had decided to burn a message on a cd and sent it out on the Voyager Millenium Edition. Never underestimate the disastrous effects that can be produced by budget cuts. The message, which had originally been planned to be a welcoming in every known language and a collection of ’70s mellow favorites, actually turned out to be four short sentences incompetently monotoned by Pat Summeral: “Come on by Earth. We have plenty. PLENTY. And more.”

Who could resist?

A whirlwind of leaves swirled past the bay windows. I decided to wait outside and do some work on the barn.

The barn was falling apart, but it would still provide a good nest for the cats. Cats had a very hard time of it since the arrival of the aliens. All wildlife did. The aliens built settlements everywhere, annihilating practically every spotted owl refuge and caribou park on the planet. The mass displacement of wildlife made it more difficult for the domesticated variety.

I continued arranging the park benches and tarp in the barn to provide some cover for the cats. I found an old sofa and decided to use the foam from the cushions to make a nice nest for them. I was busy tearing the foam into strips when I heard a rumbling.

Thunder? Couldn’t be. The pattern was different… like…

I was shocked as a herd of elephants stampeded into the barn. Cats scattered everywhere. Most of them scampered up a single slat of wood onto the second floor of the barn. But the elephants followed. They were Indian elephants too. Fucking foreigners. “Fucking Indians!”

The elephants frothed at the mouth. I had severely angered them. But I knew they wouldn’t come near me, since I bore the mark of the aliens. I ran toward the elephants, first in circles, as they tried to avoid me. Eventually, one by one, they fled the barn, their trunks stiffened into the air, spewing foam.

“I hate Goddamn Indians.”

I straightened the barn out while the cats hid in the corner upstairs. I heard the dieseling death-throws of Diamond Dave’s car engine choking itself to a halt. Then the car doors. Three of them. Two alien governors had come with him.

I patted down some foam and rushed around front, into the yard.

“Helloooooo!”

“Hey, Dave.”

The alien governors looked at me with their emotionless yellow eyes as they sipped blue cheese dressing. I nodded at them with a wrinkled nose, unable to hide my disdain.

“So, what do you guys want,” I asked.

“I have a surprise for you,” Diamond Dave smiled.

I arched my brow, “Oh?”

Diamond Dave turned to the blue aliens who stood stoically behind him. Still emotionless, the aliens stepped aside to reveal a stunning naked blonde woman.

Diamond Dave looked at me and smiled, “We combined your dna with hers. It’s better than masturbation.”

The naked blonde giggled and ran toward the barn. The fat in her bottom rippled with each step. I looked at Diamond Dave, “Eva Habermann?!”

Diamond Dave smiled and nodded.

“Holy shit,” I ran as fast as I could to catch up with her, “I must touch her!”

The aliens guffawed, spewing blue cheese dressing all over Diamond Dave.

Fucking aliens. Just when you plan on killing them all, they give you such a gift.

Under the Sun | 8. Fireflies and Honey

Jimmy Johnson was born into the cold of a late fall morning, in his single mother’s bedroom. Aided by his three aunts, with old rags and a tin bucket of warm water, he opened his eyes to a new world. He, his mother and his aunts all cried, each for different reasons. Thirty four years later, Slimmy J closed his eyes to an old world. Nobody cried.

Leonard sat on the hillside overlooking the park, finishing a half-pint of whiskey in the damp grass. The night was clear, he wished his mind would be that way. He’d come here many times in his years of homelessness. He always came alone–always, and only when he’d lost one of his friends. The park was as empty as Slimmy J’s alley. And that’s why he came here. He took the last shot of whiskey and, dropping the bottle, laid back waiting for the ghosts to whisper in his ear stories of a life past.

Out of the alcohol, upon the wind they came, and carried him to another hill, in another time.

“Look,” Leonard pointed to a dot of star-like light, “it’s a satellite.”

Lauren looked in the direction of his finger. Her young eyes, much sharper than his.

“See it, moving across the sky there. It looks like a star.”

“Oh yeah!”

He loved her enthusiasm. It reminded him of a place he hadn’t been since he was a kid. A place where anything was possible, where imagination hadn’t been dowsed by commercials, bosses, taxes, products… She lived in a place where dreams were as real as the blades of grass poking them through the blanket.

“What’s a satt’ite?”

Leonard cringed. This wasn’t going to be easy, “It’s a machine that floats around the earth, like the moon.”

“Why do they do that?”

He felt himself getting into a quagmire that would make Vietnam look like a lazy day in the park.

“People use them to talk to each other and to figure out where they are.”

“How do they do that?”

He pondered a moment.

“Well, hold out your hands. Hold them up in the air.”

She lifted her small hands and giggled.

He lightly pinched her left hand, “Imagine this hand is a mountain.”

She giggled again.

He pinched her right hand, “Imagine this hand is a person on the other side of the mountain. Now keep holding your hands so they’re lined up.”

He turned on the flashlight and aimed it at her left hand, “Now imagine this hand,” He pinched his left hand holding the flashlight, “is a person that wants to send a message to your hand. See, the mountain is in the way and your person can’t see the light.”

“Okay.”

He held up his can of Coke and held it over her hand, “Now, imagine this is a satellite.” He aimed the flashlight at the can, adjusting it until the light reflected onto her right hand, “See, I can bounce the light off the satellite, over the mountain, and your person can see it now.”

“OH!” Her eyes lit up in a way the flashlight never could, not even the sun could.

As a teacher, he was happy she understood, but as a father, he was a bit saddened that he had stolen some magic from her.

“Are the stars satellites too?”

“No, those are suns. Some of them are much, much bigger than the sun.”

“How come they aren’t as bright?”

“Because they’re very, very far away. You know how the lights of the city look small and get bigger as we drive closer?”

“Oh.”

“If they’re suns too, are there people closer to them, like we are to the sun?”

“There are so many stars that there must be other people around some of them. There are more stars than there are blades of grass on all of the earth.”

He pulled a blade of grass from the ground, “If I just pull one blade of grass from the ground, there may be a bug on it, but probably not.” He showed her the blade, free of any life, then pulled up a handful of grass. A firefly that had been hiding in the clump was startled, lit up and flew away, “But if I pull up a whole bunch of grass, then I probably will get a bug.”

“Oh. Who put the stars and people there?”

His brain seized. There was no way he was going to try to explain even his own limited understanding of astrophysics to a five year old. That isn’t what she was asking anyway. He contemplated telling her some crap about God or Nyx and the golden egg but decided the truth was always best, “Nobody really knows.”

“Oh,” she replied, with some disappointment.

“But you can believe whatever you want about that and it’s as real as anything else.”

Lauren concentrated on the sky. He could see the gears churning in her head. Several minutes passed with nothing but the sound of crickets and the occasional buzz of some winged insect zig-zagging past them. Finally she smiled, and Leonard learned the origin of all the stars.

It seems that a little girl was at a huge pond one night with her dad. She was playing in the mud and decided to make mud-balls for the fireflies to play with. She made many many mud-balls and her father poured honey on them for the fireflies to eat. Soon, all of the mud-balls were covered with an unimaginable number of fireflies and they lit up. The fireflies tried to get away, but were stuck to the honey and the balls ended up rolling into the pond and floating in the sea of night reflected in the water.

Leonard shook away the memory, sent the ghosts away. He gazed up at the night sky. The stars dimmed and brightened like fireflies in the midnight park. He didn’t know whether it was real or the whiskey.

He held scant hope that some muddy little girl might be gazing back.