Meditation in the Park

It's cold. Not blistering cold. Just a bit wet. Maybe I should get out of the river. No, wait, I think I see a goldfish. Hell yes, it's a goldfish! Okay, steady.. No sudden waddles. It's just waiting there. Waiting for me to eat it.. Slowly, steadily.. BLUUURBLE.

Hurkgobbleswallow.

Ah, yeah. That's the stuff. Okay, I think I'm going to head for shore now. It's been a good day - a goldfish and three dragonflies. I won't complain.

Huh, there's a human on the shore. It's just sitting there, poised on that rock. I'm not going near that. Augh, but there's no other place to get out of the water. Waitaminute. I think its eyes are closed. Okay, what if I just eke up real slowly and just sidle past it? Yeah, that might work.

Don't.. Make any noise.. No quacking, Ben. Just stay calm. Look at that, that other duck just sat right next to it. The human doesn't even notice. Maybe it's asleep. I didn't know humans could sleep crouched like that. What an intriguing species. I just like to sleep on my belly. Oh, dragonfly! Dragonfly..

Hurk! Gobble, swallow.

I spit the dragonfly out of my mouth and looked around the pond, dazed. My legs are asleep, my mind is washed.. It is close to dusk. Beside me sleeps a duck, in front of me another duck glances up. I slowly rise, stretch, and stare the duck in the eyes. It quacks. Then it swims away.

An Attempt at Fantasy: A Bit of Dialogue

Something strange is in the air. Smells damp.

...

"Please bother us no longer. We don't wish to cause disturbance, and insist instead on peaceful harmony. Your refuge here has brought us ill will, malady and misfortune, and we have done nothing to deserve such blight. On the contrary, we are weary from our travels - we only want solitude from whence we came and prosperity in a foreign land."

"Your kind have come here and desecrated these holy grounds. For months, you have looted our fields for provender and burned our forests for your comfort. You lack respect for those who have rested centuries in and through these hills. You have no rights here; it is our home, and we take umbrage not at your pilgrimage but at your harvest of our sanctum. This is no place for you, who do nothing but tear apart earth and its creatures and offer nothing in return."

"We offer nothing to those who haunt us in the night and spoil our crops and afflict our livestock! My people have come here to build new cities and new lives for our children; your ilk torture and threaten us. What rights have the dead to the land of the living?"

"How haughty you are, princess. We come from beyond you, yet we are every bit of material as you. We, too, desire peace, and these hills are our sanctuary, granted to us after a half-millennium of wandering among the dead. You may come to bid us alms. You may not pillage our graves."

"How have we pillaged your graves? There are no markings here nor any sign of dedication. What is your blessing? I see no steeple, watcher or headstone among these hills. You are baleful, and you cause trouble. Only strong, cautious and wary souls would see peace upon death, yet you have been banished to wander this temporal plane."

"You are foolish and naïve. You think we are unworthy of repose. But we fought for our posterior with valor and integrity. There is honor in every one of these souls on which you've trampled. We have wandered for so long following wars that predate your history, before your men declared themselves kings among the land and among your own people. Before so few of you chose to conquer all other men and place yourselves among all other tranquil life and earth. We are not the invaders of peace."

"Then why have you forsaken us and tortured us? Where is your honor there?"

"You do not understand the ways of honor. We have no one to protect but ourselves, and we can only protect ourselves by spell and curse, for we are cursed by your ancestors. Kind souls many ages ago have heard our plight and released us from the binds of a purposeless eternity. We have only these three hills through which water and verdure intertwine, and the creatures that graze and reciprocate to watch and protect. Without this, we have nothing to return to but the demons in their caves."

"If we settle, we disturb the ecosystem you protect."

"Only by your nature."

"Then I am sorry. We've come so far, and I guess we have longer yet to journey. It is against me to grant you restitution that I feel undeserved, but my people have suffered enough; we can't live in cursed land. Give us a fortnight to prepare the caravans, do not disturb us, and we will depart before dusk of the next full moon. May you keep these lands safe."

"I'm glad you see things our way. Farewell, princess. May you fare better in another place."

Essay: A First Organized Thought on Alien Contact

Over the past year, Americans have enjoyed a reemergence of discussion about the potential for aliens to exist. Firstly, two of the highest grossing and most anticipated films last year were District 9 and Avatar, both of which centered on human interactions with alien life forms. In both cases, humans are regarded as the superior species, and quite irrationally, a human is the savior of both alien races as well.

I'll leave the film buffs to critique the movies, but I'd like to focus on those alien-human interactions that are often misconstrued and misleading. Regarding this renewed interest in aliens, one recent article by the Times has quoted world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking as stating, "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans." Which, for anyone who has seen Avatar, I assert that Dr. Hawking just summarized the film.

Beyond the film and the article, discussions of alien life has been as far reaching as the Vatican, which if that doesn't blow your mind, you aren't an American. So, maybe something's out there. We're all coming to the realization that the probability for life to exist elsewhere at some other time is quite high. And some would even say alien life has already been proven to exist.

Given that life has shown to survive in the absolute worst conditions, in the hearts of volcanoes, under thousands of pounds of pressure in the sea, and yes, even in the harsh no man's land of space, I argue that life not only exists elsewhere, but that the universe is teeming with it. Life is a part of the universe's development, not an exceptional phenomenon.

Complex life is a crap shoot. We've only found any evidence of massive multi-cellular beings on one planet, Earth. Our planet houses a rich biosphere of millions of complex life forms that have developed over many millions of years, and one must keep in mind that the vast majority of species that have existed on this planet are now extinct. We are around 15 million years of evolution as hominids, 100,000 years of homo sapiens, 10,000 years of cultural civilization, and 200 years of technological development and globalization. Our Earth has been around for 4.54 billion years. Our universe is speculated to be around 13.75 billion years old.

We are so very young. And we are so very naïve.

Intelligent life is something ill-defined. As excellently stated (and I wholly recommend reading this article), if you find intelligent life once, it's a miracle; twice, and it's a statistic. What do we mean when we say "intelligent life"? If we mean self-conscious beings, then we have possibly identified multiple species on this planet that show increasing evidence of being self aware. If we whittle it further, and we mean self-conscious beings that can utilize tools and manipulate the environment, we bring the list down even further. At this point, we arguably ascertain, not certainly, that humans are the only species to clear this definition. But let's make it absolutely clear that we have broadly categorized human beings, and intelligent life now means self-conscious beings that can make use of the environment and also make sense of the environment. That is, we know why things work, not just how. Now we are fairly sure, within a negligible margin of error, that we are a miracle. We'll use this last definition for the framework of this discussion.

I won't argue the semantics of my definition, nor will I suggest that the last definition is "proper" or "correct". In fact, I aim to disprove my definition as inherently anthropomorphic.

Stephen Hawking points out that life does not necessarily need to form on planets with stable atmospheres. Some astrobiologists have theorized that life forms could be produced or live in stars, in gas giants like Jupiter, meteors and asteroids, or under ice in moons like Europa (also highly plausible since our multicellular life originated in the oceans). For the most part, our speculations on the development of life on Earth and extraterrestrial life are based off of evidence and data that are highly selective, not by some ulterior motive to mislead but by the inherent design of our experiments.(1) With each passing year, new results and theories change the possibilities and usually broadens the number of ways in which life can appear and survive.

This same principle applies to speculating on what intelligent extraterrestrials would be like, physically or cognitively. If the definition of intelligence must become more refined as life evolves, we can't be sure that we can be able to talk to any other self-aware being. For all we know, discussion with a space-faring alien race could be like trying to talk to dolphins now, or unfortunately for us, we could be no different to them then microbes are to us. This is exactly why we can't speculate with absolute assurance as to whether or not we should or should not communicate with intelligent aliens. We don't know what they would want with us, and we can't be certain that they would want anything from us. (2)

Before I continue, it helps to understand our current theory of the technological development for intelligent life forms. The simplest method is to analyze civilizations by the Kardashev scale. Simply, there may be three types of civilizations. Type I civilizations have the ability to harness the energy available on a single planet. Type II civilizations have the ability to harness the energy available on a single star. (So, we are almost a type I civilization, and if we colonized the solar system and collected the energy from the sun and each of the planets, we would be type II.) Type III civilizations can harness the energy from an entire galaxy. Civilizations of the last type would see us as no different than we see ants on the highway.

Carl Sagan grants one likely suggestion that when any two alien civilizations meet, it is highly probable that one civilization will have a huge technological advantage to the other, so much so that the other species would have absolutely no chance at survival in combat (a type I to a type II, or otherwise similarly analogous). Since it would be fruitless for the technologically lesser species to wage war, they will likely not. As for the technologically superior species, if they are so advanced that they don't need to steal resources from the lesser, it may instead welcome alliance in lieu of destruction. Yet, that means neither species can be inherently deleterious or with otherwise harmful intent that would make war inevitable.

For arguments like Dr. Hawking makes, that we ought to fear that aliens could be a threat to our existence for our resources (say, aliens wipe us out to mine our planet) or for habitation, we make the assumption that the aliens need our resources, that they are malevolent to other species, and that they are a type I or type II civilization. Not too far removed from where we are now, but still many thousands of years ahead of technological development ahead of us. A type III civilization could either ignore us completely, exterminate us cleanly and systematically, or could utilize our resources without our knowledge.

But we still consider too many anthropological arguments. We assume that these species are space faring, that they developed to utilize resources like we do, and that they may argue logically as we do. It is possible that, for any space faring civilization, they may be content with mining asteroids or other "lifeless" habitats, leaving alone other species as soon as they begin to leave their home planet and colonize their galaxy.

Furthermore, we have to consider the nature of the civilization. How do they perceive the world? Do they see the visible spectrum as we do, are they limited to blues and greens, or can they see ultraviolet and infrared? How perceptive are they to sound waves? Are they bipeds like us? Do they have opposable thumbs, tentacles, or some other means of manipulating their world with tools? Do they have religion? Are they sadistic or benevolent? Is their logic, mathematical, and physical understanding agreeable to our own, with necessary concessions? Do they have a currency, or an economy, or history, or literature? And lastly, how would we know these things once we find them?

Self awareness is but one element of intelligence. Human beings have tried for thousands of years to reach heightened states of awareness, most notably through meditation. In fact, astronauts have actually experienced what is known as the Overview Effect, which is the weirdest thing I've learned in years outside of particle physics. Essentially, several astronauts have reported feeling a euphoric, enlightened state, the Overview Effect, that is an awareness that all things are connected. If that doesn't surprise you, you probably already know about it.

We are young, and we are naïve. We make assertions based on what little we think we know. Yet, we don't appreciate how little time 200 years of technological development is. We don't see how much we've progressed from xenophobic hatred of other races to globalization that will only flourish if we start to put aside our differences. And for those of you who think I'm naïve to say that, what other time in history have we so fiercely defended every race as equal, and we continue to fight for the equality of each person? Humans have progressed. As long as we survive, we will continue to do so.

What little inferences we can make of our own development and history are ill suited to prepare us for the inevitable meeting with an "intelligent" being outside of us. Whatever intelligence means to them, however "inferior" we may be when this happens, the best we can do is to progress. It is our nature as humans, and it may be the nature of other species as natural in this universe. I can't say. I don't know.

----

The majority of these ideas and examples were compiled from previous knowledge and sources, and easily referenced back in this thought provoking thread on Reddit.

(1) Some examples include criticisms of how SETI conducts their searches for alien life, or how we searched for alien life on Mars 30 years ago.

(2) If we truly wish to speculate, life may differ greatly from star system to system, or galaxy to galaxy. It is possible that each galaxy has its own flavor of life, an inevitable result from the concentration and constituents of molecules in the galaxy. Some galaxy may favor a more gaseous life form, what would appear to be a sentient cloud, a being able to survive in space. I won't delve deeply into these thoughts, for these are the realm of science fiction and speculation, and we only have so much direct evidence to glean the possibilities of life.

Scissors

"I'm afraid that I'll never find love again. But I don't think I will talk about that. Every night, I stay awake and I write, or more often, I'll record myself with this old Toshiba camcorder, one of the bulky cameras that are better left on a flat surface than a tripod should the tripod collapse. I don't sleep until dawn, curious if anyone else is still awake. But that's not what I talk about. I discuss politics.

I wanted to be a politician when I was.. about seven or eight. Well, not true, I wanted to be the prime minister of England. Except I grew up in a suburb outside of Philadelphia, so that dream was all but shot. I'm not really sure why, but I think I fancied the cultural differences. It felt freer. Freedom eludes me still. I'm thirty-eight years old now, and I've never visited England.

When I was a teenager, we landed on the moon. My father heralded that moment as America's greatest achievement. He caught me later that day masturbating to David Bowie off the cover of "Man of Words/Man of Music". Early the next year, my dad moved out, and my mother moved us to Long Island. They stayed married for almost 10 years while he lived in Doylestown and boarded with a prostitute who would take the train to Philly. I saw more of her than I did him.

I would visit her from time to time because I liked her company. She really just needed someone to help cook or occasionally drive her to work at the corner of Twelfth and a hamburger stand. In return, I learned about men, women, sex and drugs. She was my first carnal love and my only emotional love. In her, I felt passion, fire, soullessness and depravity. Every sense I had, she over-stimulated until I flooded with augre pain. Whip tails, kitchen knives, fingernails and pinpricks. Massive dildos, flavored glow-in-the-dark condoms, beads and broken lava lamps...

She was in love with my father, but he never loved her back, and he worked all day, sometimes all night. Every time he came home, he couldn't finish a sentence. I don't drink because of him. But I am a heroin addict because of him. Sometimes I left used needles on his coffee table to see if he noticed. Either he never did, or the prostitute cleaned them up.

After she died, I kept up my habit, but I didn't use it any more or less. I couldn't afford it. Once, I was fined four times for parking next to a yellow fire hydrant. In lieu of rent, I lived in my car. My heroin habit remained stable even then. Then I was fired, and I just didn't buy gas for three months, biked pizzas, and lived off sardines that people never wanted.

So, I came up with this idea. I would discuss politics and record it. It wouldn't be about International relations, and I wouldn't talk about scandal or the state of education or science. Nah, I'll talk about being a transsexual. First thing you need to know is that I never pretended when I felt pain or stress or arousal, but I acted like it, and no one knew the difference.

I started working the same corner a year before she died. My clients were men and women alike. But I preferred the men. They were always conservative accountants who dressed well, smelled nicely, had kids and a family. Sometimes I'd service them when they were supposed to be at church, being pious and acceptable. That got me off like nothing else, to know that I was their weakness, the failure in their knees, their sin. That's from everything she taught me. I was Philadelphia's underbelly.

As of the past five years, I'm a personality on your weekly morning radio, broadcasted across the Mid-Atlantic from Syracuse to D.C. I show up at the studio fifteen minutes before we go live at 6 AM, pass off handwritten post-its to the DJ, and drone on for a half hour recapping the day before. For this, I used to read the Inquirer then followed it up with the Bulletin until that folded. Now I just watch CNN until I have my talking points. I go live, I go to bed. It's doldrums.

I don't regret anything. I only wish a few things. Like, maybe I should have told her I loved her, and that my clientele only stimulated that love. I had quit on the anniversary of her death, not in memory of her, but because my dad died a month before. After that, prostitution was just a job. I guess I never really liked it on its own merits.

But now I have to say my last words, to piece together my whole life. How about "let it go"? That sounds like advice I wish someone had told me. Advice I wish my mother, or my father, or the prostitute took to heart.

I'm going to jump off Benjamin Franklin after we wrap up at 6:25. It's 5:15 now, I can see the sun is starting to rise, just by the reflection of light off of the clouds. Here I am, as I really am. Tousled hair, purple blush, rouge lipstick. This is my last needle, and these are the scissors that I'll use to cut the band from my arm... Safety scissors, even. Anything can be an instrument to fatalism if you want it enough.

Alright, I've said enough. Mother, I always loved my father and I never loved you. But I don't think you'll watch this far to hear these words. I don't think anyone else will find this since you'll burn it like everything else. Maybe it'll be a mention in my obituary. I hope not. Anyway, let him go."

The Train from Sihnon to Milagro

The train goes from Sihnon to Milagro, and it stops only three times over the entire distance. It takes a day to make it to Milagro, so long that we the passengers all sit with our board games and crosswords in front of us, children quiet and engrossed in books, and the elderly reminisce as the same trees from their youth pass them by again, seventy years since they saw sprouts and budding oak.

The conductor walks down and up the aisle, occasionally asking someone from another car to show their ticket. "Bonjour, mademoiselle. Avez-vous ton billet de train?" They never seem to mind. I would mind. Slightly. I wouldn't be booted from the train for not having a ticket, but I would be detained and fined once we reached Milagro.

Outside the window, autumn nears. The trees are still green but for a few that begin to fade early in late August. Some forts pass us by. And some ponds. A family of deer made a home out of a fort that resided uphill from a pond. I could see all of this from the bridge as we passed by, perhaps ten or so meters above the Earth in some flimsy, man-made wooden structure. All the people on this dozen-car train are taking for granted the thought that we're separated from falling to death by some wooden beams nailed together by our grandfathers during the reconstruction. I'm sure termites have eaten away most of the old battens keeping the bridge from tipping over to the right as we curve. Maybe we'll fall.

About three years ago, I wasn't in the country. I lived in the desert. I had a pet salamander that would come to me when I called for it. It was a raspberry salamander, and if I said to it "come, Salamander," then Salamander would come. It was a smart amphibian, I liked it for its loyalty, and I don't think that salamanders, or desert creatures at all, are known for their dedication to their masters. This salamander was.

My mother wanted to move to Arizona, in the United States. I never understood why, but I went with her anyway. I mean, sure, what other choice did I have? And with that, we moved to Arizona. She opened up a shop by the highway, and it turned out to be a popular tourist stop for the cars traveling by. But the road was mostly the passage of truckers and cyclists. There was no need for them to buy jerky. They could make their own, I think.

Maybe Salamander was drawn to the jerky. I fed him some of our newest concoctions as I came up with them. I'll be honest, though, most were of the same variety. It was beef jerky cooked in barbecue sauce, beef jerky cooked in worcester sauce, beef jerky fried (we never sold that one), beef jerky with sea salt.

But this salamander didn't think much of the different shades of the same color. The jerky was jerky, and Salamander would lick a bit before scuttling around for a few minutes and climbing up some cacti. I miss that thing.

".. Monsieur? Ton billet, monsiuer?" Oh, shit.

John Dies at the End Australian Fan Fiction Competition Entry

This story is an entry to the John Dies at the End fan fiction competition. I was one of the winners.

An Excursion to Outback

I stood in the living room staring up at the ceiling. Molly barked, and I looked back down, level to the living room, and walked into the kitchen. When I reached the pantry, I grabbed a few steak-shaped dog treats before I walked back, again looked up at the ceiling, and held up my hand. The dog looked down at me (or up, if you're seeing the world through the dog's eyes) and nibbled the treats from the palm of my hand. When she finished lapping them up, she sneezed, winced, and licked my hair. I turned back into the kitchen and walked to the phone.

The phone rang twice before John picked up. "Dave, it's six in the morning. Is Amy dead?"

"It's six in the evening. No, she's at work. Molly's walking on the ceiling, just the same since you were here last Sunday. Are you sure she didn't get into the sauce?"

John made it clear he was annoyed. "You can't wait until a reasonable hour to discuss this, Dave? By my count, I believe I told you a million times that, no, I kept the can in the shed. Molly did not eat the sauce. Why don't you just take her to the vet?"

Right, take the anti-gravity canine to a vet concerning her lack of observing the laws of physics. I'm sure they have a shot for that. "Can you at least come over and help me strap the dog down before she tries to run outside again?"

"Can you afford my services?" John meant cigarettes.

"Yes." I lied, and I had no intention of going out to buy him a pack.

John sounded satisfied. "I'll be over after a power nap."

I agreed and hung up. Anytime between now and midnight, John's grey Volkswagen bus would churn along the street in a hacking cough, as the van lacked a muffler since he bought it from one of his band's original three bassists. (They had four now.)

Honestly, it was hard to tell these days whether or not anyone took the sauce, so I couldn't just count how much we had left. We only had one canister, but it could be full for an hour and then empty for weeks only to fill half up again. John retained the canister for a few months before I found out that he was taking advantage of the replenishing supply to forecast the weather so that his band, Three-Arm Sally, would always play in the rain, and so that John would always time his solos to start and end with thunderclaps. After a long argument and a seven-hour basketball shoot out later, I agreed to buy John a twelve-pack each week if we kept the canister in a locked freezer in my shed, along with all the other odds and ends unfit for this world.

----

John arrived around 8, when the sun began to set. Molly wagged her tail and yelped as he opened the door and stood in front of her, petting her for a second before walking into the kitchen. He opened the fridge, took out three beers, and set two down in front of himself and one in front of me. He then pulled a magazine and pen out of his jacket and set them down on the table before staring at me in the eyes and very solemnly spoke.

"Your dog is possessed. Read this." John circled an article headline on the opened page. I recognized the magazine as a recent paranormal tabloid that started up as a result of our excursion to Vegas a few years ago. They bothered us for articles for a solid year and a half until John convinced me to mail them an obscene letter written in ink that yelled out the letter's contents.

The article was brief and, honestly, retarded. It described an old couple in Florida with a dog that supposedly spoke to them curses in Latin and with only one witness, a Catholic priest notorious for his phony exorcisms, a girl whose dog exploded and came back to life a few days later, and an Australian man with a dog that walked on the ceiling but had no visual proof or witnesses. At the end of the article, the man claimed that his dog puked out a bunyip tusk and no longer had the inclination to walk on the ceiling. I already knew a part of this, since we received that same supposedly mythical animal tusk in the mail two weeks later. Except that this tusk delivered both John and I third degree burns when we tried to hold it, leaving Amy to take it out to the shed.

"See what we're looking at here? Molly has consumed some possessed article. I call this phenomenon Australian Demonosis Disincarnate. Perhaps it may not be another disembodied tusk, but it may just burn us again. Or dissolve a hole through the floor. Or open a void to a human detainment camp. But if we want her down, we have to be patient and deal with the devil in her accordingly. Got it, Dave? In the meantime, I'm being evicted, and I need a place to stay for a few days or whatever." John said as he finished his second beer.

The dog shat. I heard a wet splat on the coffee table followed by another, and finally, a trickle of urine. John looked at me, gesturing toward the table that it was my duty to clean up the mess that the dog made. I took some paper towels, Windex, and a trash bag out from under the kitchen sink and sat on the couch to wipe up the mess when John held out his hand and glared at me alarmingly.

"Wait, Dave."

Molly whimpered and shat again, this time into a spray across the wall, and a third stool landed with a wet thud onto the table before the dog swaggered above the sofa and fell from the ceiling into my lap.

I looked at John, saw him look down at the table, and turned my eyes down to the dog's shit. It spelled out "FAG". Then it blinked, formed into a Pillsbury Doughboy, and jumped down from the coffee table. It strutted across the carpet and kitchen linoleum, and pushed its way through the dog's flap door, presumably to terrorize the city of Undisclosed until a group of ghost hunters came after it.

After a moment, Molly barked at the door. John turned to me and said, "That, Dave, was a Pillsbury Shitboy."

----

An hour later, the shit stains were cleaned off the wall, the table and floor, and I had reclined on the couch watching a blend of static and local news on the TV. John, who was tasked to find and trap the walking shit dwarf, resigned after ten minutes to a Nintendo DS game. "I'm telling you, the tracks end at the driveway. It just vanished. Disappeared."

"You don't think some other dog got to it?" I suggested. "Then we'll get a call about it in a few days or so, and we can take care of explaining to some other dog owner as to why their dog is on the ceiling, and why we need to feed it plenty of laxatives."

John's cell phone twittered with an 8-bit rendition of Twisted Sister's I Wanna Rock. John answered it while blowing into the Nintendo's microphone. "Yeah, Drake, it's John. Do you still have the Queen pinball machine?" He listened for a moment before putting the game down and gesturing me over to him. "Alright. We can be there in 10 minutes. No problem." He hung up. " Good news. Our Pillsbury Shitboy was found."

----

After John took a moment at the shed, the both of us and the dog piled into John's bus and drove off towards the Undisclosed Mall, or rather, the Outback Steakhouse up the road from the abandoned mall. Most of the homes and businesses in the area suffered some odd paranormal activity or another, so the idea that the dogshit doughboy would wind up here did not surprise me. What I saw when we got to the Steakhouse surprised me.

If you've ever paid attention in grade school, you know about the Trojan horse. The big wooden horse that Greek soldiers used to sneak into and capture Troy. Well, I want you to imagine this giant horse, and now I want you to picture it as a cow. And instead of wood, imagine that it's made of.. Well, a cow. The innards of one. Are you with me? John, Molly, and I saw a giant, inside-out cow lording over the restaurant, legs along all sides and udder resting deformed over the roof. So, the fact that Drake called us about a 6-inch tall living turd didn't seem to fit the reality that we saw from a half-mile away.

John parked the car across the street from the Outback, and we walked across warily, aware of the intestinal cow god that had taken dominion of the place, but we weren't sure if the cow was aware of us. We kept out distance regardless, and pretended that the creature was nonexistent to our eyes. Drake welcomed John with a handshake and a cigarette.

"Good evening John, Dave. I'll cut right to the chase - we got a few reports a half hour ago about a walking shit character jumping up on tables and farting into people's plates. It's one of the weirdest things I've witnessed, since as soon as we get here, it molds into a bird and flies around the place. We tried to capture it, but it simply breaks up into smaller pieces and zips around the ceiling before recombining into the bird."

John nodded, appearing intent, and said, "Is the bird Australian?"

I turned to John and gave him what had to be the most dumbfounded look in the history of dumbfounded looks. He must have seen this coming, because as soon as I did that, he put his finger up without looking at me.

"No, listen to me, I'm certain that this has a connection to a case in Australia. The Pillsbury Shitboy clearly came, of all places, here to the Outback Steakhouse, an Australian franchise. And now it will not leave the restaurant, signifying that Australia is indeed connected to this monstrosity." John sucked down the rest of his cigarette and tossed it to the gutter. "And that leaves us with one question - why Australia? Dave, I'll leave you to field that question. I'm going back to the car to get the bunyip tusk."

I looked inside the restaurant and studied the place. No one but a few cops at the doors stood in the restaurant now. I couldn't see the flying shit-bird, but I could hear the music coming from inside. It was the jingle from the band that did the Outback commercials.. sort of. If "I'll eat your grandmother's soul, and make sure you hear her screams from hell" was part of the original lyrics, I couldn't know. Then the shit-bird came into view, and I ducked as it flew at the window.

It must have struck the window with the force similar to a jet engine, because I felt shards of glass scrape across my forearm as I held my head from beneath the window. The glass shards spilled across the parking lot, and the shit stained the lot in specks small enough to hardly be recognizable. I waited a few seconds before cautiously getting up to look into the restaurant, then back at John.

With the tusk in hand, John ran up to Drake, who suffered several small cuts across his face, arms, and uniform. After affirming that Drake seemed otherwise alright, John nodded at me with his stern "time to get serious" face, and kicked the door open into the restaurant. I followed after him, reluctantly.

John held the tusk like it was a gun, and I saw he probably sprinkled holy water on it while he was in the car, since the bottle stuck out of his shirt pocket. "You see anything off here, Dave? Anything particularly.. Aboriginal?" His idiotic pose aside, I didn't think he was capable of telling a joke that intelligent.

I turned to him and told him, "Look around that side of the Outback, I'll go over here. Check the kitchen while you're at it, I'll look into the restrooms."

After rummaging through every booth and turning over every table and chair in the restaurant and finding nothing out of place, I walked into the women's restroom. Nothing out of the ordinary here, until the door shut behind me and the lights went out. I felt surprisingly calm to see "KORROK" written in a dark red, glowing on every inch of wall, ceiling, and floor. Looking into the mirror, my face glowed and grinned at me.

My grin widened slightly with each step I took toward the mirror. Slowly, I reached out my palms to embrace the face of the pupil-less eyes that lured me into what grew into a lulling, green pasture.

The mirror displayed images of trees and mountains and streams. No hint of civilization existed, and no touch of man present. From the trees, I saw apples hanging from ropes, turning in the wind, and revealing a backwards K.

Backwards, of course, I'm looking into the mirror. I started to turn around, to look outside of the mirror.

The lights turned on, and I found myself in the bathroom once again. John popped in through the doorway and shouted that he found something I should see in the kitchen. I mumbled at him, and he left for the kitchen again. Turning back to the mirror, I found my palms held up to it and stared at my own face briefly before leaving the room.

John leaned up against a deep fryer and raised his eyebrows as Molly sat next to him, panting happily and licking the grease on the floor.

He pointed directly in front of us. "See what we're dealing with, Dave?"

In the center of the ceiling, there was a large ventilation duct that led up to the cow's udder. Immediately underneath it, on the floor, was a familiar void, one John and I were accustomed to seeing several years ago, but not so often lately. Seeing the void to another realm made knots in my gut.

John spoke audibly over the loud air vents, "I didn't think there would be another doorway like this so close to the mall. Of course, only you and I can see it right now. The cooks, Drake, no one knows about it."

I knew what John was thinking. "But we can't leave it opened, John. Already, this place is drawing unwanted attention. We need to close it."

John opened his mouth to reject but decided against it. He stood silently, sucked in his cheeks, and looked at the void, back at me, at the void, at the dog, and at me again. Without saying a word, he tossed the blessed bunyip tusk into the air at the hole and took a step back. Molly yelped and leapt after the tusk, snatching the thing in her jaws in mid-air. I pulled John back from grabbing Molly, and we saw the dog hurtle into the void.

Silence.. and nothing.

Then the roof imploded and the cow's udder came crashing into the kitchen. John and I scrambled like hell out of the back door of the restaurant and a blow of wind, strong as a hurricane, lifted us up and tossed us into the police cars along the side of the road.

I closed my eyes when I hit the car and laid there for what seemed no longer than a few seconds. More time must have passed because John soon lifted me up from the hood of one of the cars and pulled me to my feet. "Dave, the doorway's gone. So is the cow and most of the restaurant, but the important thing is that the doorway is shut."

I felt the back of my head, felt a moist, matted lump, and decided it wasn't bad enough to worry about at the moment. Molly barked from behind me, plopped aside me on the hood of the car, and licked my arm. John glanced at me with his "I don't know where the dog came from" look, which I recognize specifically for these very occasions.

Taking a few seconds to check that my body was still intact and most of the working parts still indeed worked, we walked toward Drake. He and John spoke for a few moments while I stood and interjected a few points that John exaggerated until Drake decided he would rather not file the report John was giving him. We left after making sure that no remnants of the doorway remained.

----

Amy arrived back at the house a bit past midnight, where she found the three of us playing hockey on the PS3. Well, the dog was chewing a rubber bone, but I was trailing behind john by 47 goals in a game in which each the 7 periods were 40 minutes long. Amy walked up behind me and rested her hands on my shoulders, massaging them gently before hugging me from behind.

"Did you miss me?" She squeezed and nudged my head to kiss me on the lips.

I paused the game. John went to the kitchen to grab another beer for himself and one for Amy. Then when Amy saw Molly, she ran over and picked her up.

"Hey! You got Molly down. How did you do it?"

Before I could say anything, John cut in. "Well, turned out your dog was possessed by the land down-under. As your paranormal specialist, I recommend not taking your dog into the Southern hemisphere, nor should you bring her in contact with any Australian birds or dough products."

Speechless, Amy took the beer offered by John, sat on my lap, and looked at me quizzically. I told her John was right and started the game again.

Oregon

(This piece sucks.)

She kept a locket with his name on it. Ralph Waldo Emerson inscribed inside of this small golden heart attached to a chain she wore on her wrist. I didn't think she wore it as often as she did, but her mother told me she "didn't take it off even to swim". The thought of it breaks my heart, but I can only smile.

The day is almost over, and the street lights flicker on down the row. Another thirty minutes, and the world will be night. With her locket clasped in hand, I stand on a wooden platform shoved into the beach sand, overlooking a tepid ocean fatigued by a passing storm. The somber clouds still hang over me, weighting down the world in whitened shadow and mist. I feel the wind and all that dust and cold that the gusts carry with it. There isn't much else to say about the scene. It's a Tuesday.

Given the lack of color of the surroundings, I was at ease feeling out of my own comfort. It's understandable, I think; I didn't ask for a beautiful day, and I didn't ask for a mediocre one. I didn't ask for anything today. So, it's okay to stand here barefoot, specks of sand irritating my city-boy feet, thinking about nothing special and out of the ordinary.

Out, far from me, there's a child in the ocean and her father behind her. She's spry, dancing in the waves, and her father watches and exhorts her to stay near, where the waves don't crash above her knees. He doesn't look to want to be out here today, but how could he say no to his daughter? In his position, I can't imagine I would do the same. Except, I'm not a father, and much too young that I would consider that plight. The waves crash at her waist - her father wades out to pull her in. She's has curly hair. Blond, curly hair.