Falling Stars

There was a carnival down on the town's square with games and concessions set up all along the street.  I went down there on a Saturday morning.  There was a booth where a man did amazing things with soap bubbles.  I stopped and watched as he blew a bubble for a little girl in a brown coat who stood before the booth in rapt anticipation.  He blew the bubble in the shape of a toy soldier.  I could make out the shape of the tall hat and the bayonet slung over its shoulder.  He just kept blowing the bubble bigger and bigger.  It grew up higher than the surrounding buildings on the square.  It grew up higher than the ferris wheel spinning across the way.  It stretched high into the sky and the little girl strained to look up, but it grew higher than she could see.  It grew to fifty thousand feet or more.  It grew beyond the blue sky, out into space, towering over our tiny little planet.  Then, unable to keep its shape in the void of space, it finally burst, raining down in droplets of flickering light.  The little girl giggled ecstatically as she raced around in circles, trying to catch the falling stars.

The Bugs

Some men in suits and sunglasses showed up on my doorstep one day.  They took me to a secluded compound out in the wilderness, where they had me working long days in a lab, providing only occasional breaks for walks around the property trailed by armed escorts that kept their distance.  There was this one big, old tree that I liked, out at the far corner of the fence line.  I always passed by it on my walks.  It was a great place to stop and rest and think.  Somehow staring at the tree and its gnarled roots helped me focus my mind and sort out the problems I was working on.

In the few months that I had been working in the lab, I had helped create a system that would allow all the governments of the world to monitor everyone on Earth, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, twenty four hours a day.  I had developed the system by reverse engineering software from an exterminating company that combined motion tracking with surveillance technology.  The system gathered a database by marking, coding, and cataloging everything that moved.  It had been designed to track cockroaches; now it would track humans.  As far as implementation was concerned, there was little difference.

I had misgivings about my role on all of this, of course.  I didn't want to see everyone constantly monitored any more than anyone else did.  But I felt better somehow, being involved.  Someone was going to do this, and at least I could be there to make sure it was done right.  Plus, being on the inside of the project had given me the chance to design a glitch into the software that would be accessible through a back door in the program.  That way I could crash the whole thing if it started getting out of control.  I just had to keep this glitch a secret, and pass it on to my successor, and they could pass it along to someone, and they would have to safeguard it though the generations, until it came time to bring the system down.  I turned from the tree and nodded to the guards.  I was ready to get back to work.

Late Night Television

I found a brittle newspaper clipping tucked away in the pages of an old book.  It was a news article about a tragedy that had occurred on set during the filming of an episode of a popular black and white science fiction show from the 1950's.  The episode was called "The Last Race."  The exact details of the tragedy were extremely vague and enigmatic.  The article just mentioned that something had happened in the background of a shot.  It didn't say how or when or what.  But I was quite familiar with the show, and I watched reruns of it nearly every night before I went to bed.

One night as I was brushing my teeth, the episode in question aired.  I sat down on the corner of the bed and leaned towards the TV to better scrutinize the screen.  "The Last Race" was one of the later episodes in the show's run, and the show's failing budget was apparent in the episode's extremely simple composition.  The episode consisted almost entirely of a wide shot of a small winding race track lit up with flood lights at night as race cars zipped around the tight turns.  The story was supposed to be set some time in the future, involving a final race for the fate of humanity.

At one point in the story one of the drivers wrecked his car.  The episode cut to shots of him leaning against a rail at the side of the track where he had crawled away from the wreckage.  These shots were the only other shots in the episode besides those of the race track.  At one point, near the end of the episode, the driver delivered a climatic monologue grasping at all the potentials of mankind lost to trivial and barbaric spectacles, establishing the rather labored twist that the last race was actually the human race.  And that's when I saw it.

In the background of the monologue shot, just beyond the floodlights that shone on the injured driver, there was a crowd of extras gathered behind the track's railing.  These people were there to represent the audience watching the race.  In the middle of the driver's monologue, just at the very edge of the frame, I saw a distraught woman that seemed to stand out from the crowd.  Rather than cheering on the racers, as the extras were presumably instructed to do, she looked about frantically, clutching at a handkerchief.  Then she looked directly at the camera with tormented eyes.  It was the way that she stared at the camera that really caught my attention and made her stand out.  I could see that something was horribly wrong.

Then, driven by who knows what inner turmoil, the woman unexpectedly climbed the rail and ran out onto the track.  All of this transpired in soft focus at the corner of the screen.  I might never have noticed it if I hadn't been looking.  As the woman ran out of the shot, I could see the flicker of the headlights of the cars zipping by out of frame.  Then an arm from the crowd reached out frantically after the woman and the fingers of the hand curled into a claw as though something had slipped beyond their reach.  I could only see the arm and the hand, but it wasn't difficult to piece together what had happened.

The episode continued with no acknowledgement of what had transpired in the background.  After the driver had delivered his speech, he slumped limply against the railing, having apparently expired.  Just at the moment that he died, just at the exact moment, the woman appeared again in the background behind the rail, standing still and staring towards the camera with those same tormented eyes.  And then in a blink she was gone.  It was as though her image had been inserted into a single frame, just as the driver was dying.  Maybe an editor had grabbed a shot of the woman from the earlier footage in a clumsy attempt to try to smooth over what had happened and to maintain continuity.  Maybe it was from a different take, one where she contemplated running out onto the track but never did.  Maybe the camera had captured some lingering regret, after the fact.  I had no idea.  I turned off the TV and the lamp and climbed under the blankets, trying to put the whole thing out of my head.

Cigarette Butts

I went to work on a farm that fall.  I was sixteen, young and full of energy.  It was a cool and cloudy afternoon, and I had on my blue jean jacket.  There was a lively bustle about the place.  From the barn I could hear the hiss of steaming water through the screen door of the kitchen up at the house as they washed the dishes dirtied from lunch.  I could hear the machinery out in the fields.  I was hanging up a pitchfork on a peg when I saw a long black car come down the gravel driveway.  It was my uncle, stopping by to see me.  It was break time just then and everyone came up from the fields to smoke and sit by the trees around the house. 

My uncle had borrowed my cigarettes and he tossed the pack to me.  I fumbled the pack trying to catch it and spilled about half the cigarettes out on the ground.  I went to pick one up and light it, but it broke in my hand.  The workers around me all laughed.  I tried to pick up another and suffered the same result.  As I kept trying to pick them up, the cigarettes grew older and stale and dirty, no longer freshly fallen from the pack, until finally I found myself picking up nothing but the crushed and spent butts that had been long scattered around the yard.

The laughter around me dispersed as though carried off on the wind.  I raised myself up on old, tired, and cracked joints and there was no one around me.  My uncle and the workers were gone like ghosts.  The barn and the house were empty, long deserted and collapsing into ruin.  The sun poked through a cloud and shone in a cracked upstairs window of the house in diminished radiance as the day went cold and wasted silence prevailed.  The cigarette butt in my hand had been extinguished ages ago, in completely different days gone by.  I tossed it back to the ground.

The Landlady's Son

I rented out a room in the last house at the end of the street.  A tired older woman with deep lines on her face lived there with her only son, a chubby little boy who was about six years old.  His brown hair was always slick and smoothed to the side as though his mother was constantly combing it.  He would often stare up at me as I climbed the creaky stairs to my room.  Whenever I was late with the rent, whenever I had rowdy friends over making too much noise, whenever I came stumbling in at two in the morning and woke this woman up, she would take her anger out on her son.  She would hit him and beat him for anything that I did.
 
Once, she burst in on a poker game that I was having with my friends and found us all puffing away on cigars, which she had strictly forbidden.  She marched the boy into the room in front us and made him hold out his right hand.  She made us watch as she took his fingers and broke them one by one.  We could see the boy trembling as she started with the thumb.  There was a loud snap and he cried out in pain and fidgeted all about, but he didn't even try to run off.  She held him firmly by the wrist and moved on to the index finger.  She took each finger systematically in turn.  The boy's lip quivered as she took his pinky and scowled at us.  We sat there still.  Even the cigar smoke didn't seem to stir.

It went on like this for weeks.  She hurt the boy in nearly every possible way.  Finally, I came down the stairs one day and she brought him in from the dining room in a wheelchair.  She had crippled him for life for the things that I'd done.  The boy sat crumpled and broken in the chair.  I looked up at the mother through my tears.  "How can you do this?  He never did anything.  I did all of it.  Why does he have to pay for it?"  Her face went red.  She didn't say a word.  She just slapped the boy as hard as she could across his cheek.  His head rolled from the blow but he didn't even seem to hardly feel it.  He slumped in the chair and stared off blankly at the wall.

I knew then that I had to leave.  I went to my room and got my things.  I made up the bed and put everything just as it was when I had moved in.  I straightened the table and chairs and fastened the window latch.  I wanted to leave this woman no cause to complain.  On the walk out front, I took a long deep breath of fresh air.  The woman had wheeled the boy to the front window and I could see him there, watching the rain drip from the tree in the yard, watching me as I went.