Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(77)

I have no regrets. Only a tilted windmill and father time complex. I wonder what the futre holds but I am not there yet.

The train rumbles out of the station and I follow it as best I can. With my heart. Because that is all I have left. My heart. It is undone. The last man standing gives up on procreating. His lips are sealed. And he still stammers in his head thinking he is speaking out loud, and he is embarrassed. Just like he used to be before his lips were sealed by the fire. It doesn’t matter. He’ll be dead soon, too. Death is like that. So are disasters. You are dead before you know it. And if the future wasn’t all there was. Is. I couldn’t write about it before it got here. But that’s what futures are about. Isn’t it. Aren’t they. They the getting here.

The train follows me out of the station.

I wave goodbye to the last man.

He is looking for a semen cup to leave soeting something behind. But he already has ’cause the future is now, like I said. I board the plane, train.

“Ah… second man,” the conductor says.

I see he is written in italics and wonder at the font. I didn’t know this typerwriter was a selectrix and had a ball font you could turn and get different script. My fingers have stopped moving. The future is written. Anyway.

Two hundred an d five words left. Not many to go. And the end is near. In sight. But it hasn’t happened yet. Because it never will. It is the future. The end. That is the secret of living in the future. It never gets here. Ands if you want to live for eternity you just have to stay in the future. Forget the past. Even the present. Just remember the future. As you see it. Read it.

The last man standing is stammering inside his head to a cow he can’t see and isn’t there but he wishes it was so he could see it drink from the waters of the tilted windmill flowing in the stream of life and consiousness where cows drink from streams o f futre tenses and remedies for all that ails you as long as it isn’t beer ale. That would be a laguer without a key. Lost my spell check with the typewriter reincarnation. Four words to go before there are only a few left and I wish this typewriter had a ribbon so I could see what it writes… but it does in the future… else how do you think you see it…

I reread the beginning in the future like you reading it for the first time. Are you sitting? Or standing? Or neither. What is YOUR future?

I read,

Disaster struck. One man left standing. No woman to speak of. He could see. If there was one. How would he procreate? Could he. If he could. Find a woman. And he had any juice left.

Food would be scarce. And there was no power to speak of. Candles. One windmill. Tilted. No cows. To speak of. He stammered even if no one was listening.





DOG FOR DINNER


dvsduncan

The dinner special was dog. Why should that night have been any different? The meat was popular, amongst those who were permitted to eat it, and was relatively plentiful, though not as plentiful as it had been a few years ago. The city packs had been heavily hunted and trapped. The surviving animals were wary and clever, more like ghosts than prey. Most of the meat came from the country now. That was fine with Joyce Collingwood because the country dogs tasted better.

Her cleaver came down with a solid thud. Good dog meat meant good stew. She looked around the market tent and then back at the ragged, red parts on her block. There were few potential customers at the moment but it was still early. Most of her trade was done after sunset, when the wind died and the fog rose. Then a blaze would be built in the centre of the tent to keep the damp out and a minstrel would fill the air with music. She hoped it would be the hurdy-gurdy man with the honey voice. He sang about the world before the Great Fire.

A burst of laughter attracted her attention. Guardsmen were pushing their way through the flap in the far wall, holding it open for their fellows and letting rough gusts through. Joyce quickly threw a cloth over the raw meat. No one wanted gritty stew. When the last guardsman was in, they stood as a mob to consider the stalls. One of the merchants quickly rearranged the flaps to keep the wind out.

“Hey, Joyce,” one of the guardsmen called, as he separated from the group. His name was Otis, though whether that was his first or last name Joyce neither knew nor cared. He considered himself handsome. His uniform had been freshly laundered but it was already mottled with dust. “What’s for dinner?”

“Dog,” she said, without turning around.

“Again?”

“My customers like dog.”

“I could be your customer too, if you’d only cooked something a Gaian could eat.”

He was smiling. Broadly. She could feel it. There was no need to look up from her work. She asked, “Why not try the dog?”

“You trying to convert me?” he asked in return.

Joyce sighed and wiped at her cheek, spreading a broad smear of blood across it in the process. Then she looked up to meet his eyes. Two of his fellows had joined him, both large and well muscled. They all wore the same smug grin. She knew what they saw: a skinny teenager with a wild mop of red hair dressed in a stained apron and the coat of a Penitent.

“The trouble is that, by order of the Caretakers, it’s illegal to prepare or eat meat,” Otis said.

“Unless I have a dispensation,” she told him. He knew that her paperwork was all in order but the coat and nails alone should have been enough for him.

“And why would you have a dispensation?” Otis asked, feigning ignorance. His backup chuckled.