Dramatis Personae

I had discovered a glitch in the working of things.  It all started with an accident.  Someone slipped up.  I had been lost in the forest.  I came to the base of this large mountain that had a vast network of tunnels and caves hollowed out in the inside of it.  One of these tunnels terminated in an opening several feet above the ground, high above where I was standing.  As I stood there, staring up at the granite face of the mountain, I saw a man in a marching band uniform fall from the opening.  He stood up, dusted the burrs and dried leaves of the forest floor from his sleeves, cast a wary glance back at me, and then he took off through the trees and he was gone.

I didn't think anything of the incident until I happened to stumble upon a parade the next day.  There were floats and baton twirlers, and of course, a marching band.  As the band passed, someone stepped on someone else's shoe or something, and one of the band members tripped and fell.  I watched as he got back to his feet and dusted the dirt from the street from his sleeves.  And then he spotted me looking at him.  He shot me that same wary glance, and then he pushed the other band members out of the way and took off through the crowd before I could pursue him.

I returned to the mountain in the woods.  In one of the tunnels, I found a stage that was set up to look like a restaurant in my neighborhood.  I had stumbled across some sort of rehearsal space.  I took up a hiding place and I watched as these two women had the same lunch over and over again, reading all the same lines, trying to get it right.  Like the marching band member tripping and falling, it was an event that wouldn't happen until the next day.  This was where they rehearsed life before it happened, making sure it all came off normal and natural.

After about their fifth or six run-through, I began to notice something.  I saw that one of the women kept reproducing a twenty dollar bill from her wallet every time the bill came.  There was no resetting of the props between each scene.  It was a fresh bill every time.  An idea came to me.  I stood up and revealed my position.  They were startled to see me, but I launched right in, asking about the money.  I wanted to know where it all came from.  Was a new twenty created from thin air every time?  Had I found an unlimited source of funds?  A loophole in the economics of existence?

Unfortunately, once we started piecing it all together, we discovered that these funds were being generated from tiny changes out in the world, changes that normally no one would notice, things no one would miss.  But when we traced where the money that had paid for these lunches had come from, it all led back to this young bride-to-be.  Her wedding dress, which she had dreamed of since childhood, had been traded for a cheaper one to pay for the meals.  This would lead to a grave misunderstanding between her and her fiance', as the dress was the same one which an old girlfriend of his had worn for her wedding the previous spring.  And this suspicion, in turn, would break the engagement and derail this poor bride's entire life. 

We couldn't let that happen.  I sat down to figure it all out.  I took account of all of the different scenes being rehearsed in those caves.  We had to juggle the money around from one scene to the other.  We had to set things right and get this bride her dress back.  It was a vast undertaking, pennies from one life, dimes from another, but at last I managed to do it.  The world was back on course, and no one would miss a thing.           

The Night Eyes

I was asleep in a twin bed with a wooden frame and headboard, and the bed was outside in the night air.  It was down at the end of a long residential street, down past the last house, past the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, down where the sidewalk abruptly ends with a few trees and some tangled underbrush.

In a bush tucked away on the unlit side of the neighbor's house, I thought I saw something.  I could just make out the curving shape of the eye, and then the pupil and the iris, as though it had been sketched by pencil.  Then, having seen one, I began to see others, more and more, until the night seemed filled with eyes watching me from every corner.

I felt oddly untroubled by these eyes.  I just counted each new one that I noticed from my bed, as my own eye adjusted to all the nocturnal corners and crevices.  And having counted and cataloged all these eyes, as numerous as dew drops on every surface in the dark morning hours, I gathered up my blankets and rolled back over.  

Our Plastic Apocalypse

I was on a shuttle, returning to Earth with a small group of astronauts.  As we circled the planet, I had the uncanny feeling that we were in a little toy ship in a pitch black room circling a plastic globe with a bright reading lamp shining down on it.  I could even see all the names and borders drawn on all the different countries.  There was a stillness over it all.

We were over the United States when the first mushroom cloud appeared.  It burst like a puff of dirt off the surface of the globe without making a sound, but it did nothing to disturb the glossy surface or the inscriptions or the lines of topography.  It was like witnessing a strategy for ending the world in someone's war room, rather than seeing the actual thing.  Europe rolled away under us, and then on to Russia and the East, the mushroom clouds popping randomly in the landscape ahead of us.  There would be nowhere to land, no home to return to.      

Eventide

Late one evening, as I was walking along a dirt road, I came across a young man sitting under a tree by the wayside.  He sat facing the last flickers of sunlight and in the gathering darkness I could just make out a peaceful smile on his face.  Fireflies lit and then expired randomly in the tree above him, and I could hear the far off sounds of workers laughing as they were coming in from the fields somewhere, a gate unlatched and creaking on its hinges, the wide world opening up on the edge of night.

The young man just sat there taking it all in.  He told me that he had been a prince, but he had left behind his crown and his castle and his jewels.  He had abandoned it all in exchange for what he called "all the treasures of the world" with a sweep of his arm towards the horizon.  He seemed perfectly content to go on sitting there, so I continued on my way as the sky faded to reveal a wealth of stars.  But every now and then I stopped to think of the smile I had seen on the prince's face.         

A Liability Issue

My daughter was still little at the time, maybe around five or six years old.  We were having a birthday party for her.  A bunch of kids from the neighborhood had come, too many for me to count.  The house seemed overrun with them and they were ransacking the place from top to bottom, tearing up couch cushions and putting long gouges in the walls.  The whole thing was starting to give me a bit of a headache.

There was a toy train set up in my daughter’s play room.  It was large enough for kids to ride on and the track was laid out in a simple wedge shape that took up most of the corner of the room.  My daughter wanted to know if she could take everyone for a ride on her train.  I had to tell her no.  My wife started to object, but I pulled her aside and explained that we were responsible for anything that might happen to these kids and that they all seemed a little too rambunctious to handle playing with this train without one of them getting hurt.

My wife reluctantly agreed.  I hated to disappoint my daughter.  I knew how much she wanted to show the other kids her train and have them play with her on it, how much she had thought about it in the weeks leading up to the party, and how much I was letting her down.  I could see it in her face.  But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head of one of those kids putting their hands on the track and the sharp wheels of the train coming along and slicing off their fingers.