“Excuse me, Mr. Shanagan?”

Myrick Shanagan glanced to his right, and his pulse immediately quickened. The Administration officer watching him held an orange ticket.

Orange tickets were always bad news.

“Come with me, please,” the officer said crisply.

Myrick nodded and slowly followed the officer out of his private office. Thankfully, it was Sunday or his co-workers would have witnessed this entire humiliating scene. He paused to lock the door, then pocketed the key and wondered if he’d ever step into his office again. He had had no time to say goodbye to his wife or daughter. What was worse, of course, was that he had finally been discovered.

The Administration officer escorted him to the car waiting below, politely indicating for him to get in first. Myrick quickly obeyed, his palms leaving damp prints on the cool, black leather seats.

The officer slipped into the backseat beside him, and the car pulled away from the curb. Myrick stared straight ahead, even though he could feel the officer watching him from the other end of the seat.

“You’re accused of using 34,903 words over the permitted limit,” the officer said quietly. Myrick jerked when the officer slipped the orange ticket into his hand, pushing insistently when Myrick refused to accept it at first.

Myrick sighed. “What took you so long to catch me?” He was making things worse by just speaking, but he couldn’t help himself. What was the use of prolonging the inevitable by reverting back to the norm, anyway?

“Your methods of hiding your extreme word usage evaded our sensors,” the officer admitted.

Myrick plunged his hands into his jacket pockets, where his fingers curled into fists. The orange ticket was now a crumpled ball. “What will happen to me now?”

“You know the punishment.” The words seemed brusque, but the officer was trying to limit his words, too. When Myrick finally looked at the other man, the sympathy in the officer’s eyes caught him offguard.

“34,914,” the officer said abruptly, as the car stopped. Myrick’s door opened, and another officer grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. The top of his head banged against the roof of the car, and Myrick heard himself cry out as pain ripped through his skull. The officer holding his arm loosened his grip. Just before they injected him with the hypo, Myrick heard the first officer whisper, “All is not lost.”

He craned his neck to look at the man, but the officer had already turned away.

His last conscious thought as they loaded him on to a stretcher concerned his wife - what would she say when her husband came home as a Mute?

Then the world as he knew it went black.

She’s usually one of the first to arrive, since her last class is located further down the same corridor. Because nobody’s opened the lecture hall yet, she sits outside and eats the meager dinner she brought, reads a book or does her homework. Those last vestiges of procrastination still haven’t been worked out of her yet.

Jeanine shows up next. “So what did you think?”

“They were okay,” she replies, making a face and thumbing through the book of poetry they were supposed to read for the class tonight. “I read it in an hour.”

“I don’t get this stuff,” Jeanine says. “I liked the last book we had to read. This one…ugh.”

Rajah arrives, and the topic switches to her bridal shower, then to a faculty member with a condescending attitude towards his students. Apparently he doesn’t like “stupid” questions, but then again Rajah doesn’t like conceited instructors, and wasn’t afraid to tell him this to his face, either. The instructor didn’t take this very well.

Then Josh comes, out of breath, hurrying to write up his homework at the last minute, too. Chad sits down next to her and they talk some more about their assigned reading: it sucks. I liked it, but… I can write poetry, but I have trouble reading it, y’know? That’s because poetry’s a self-absorbed exercise, Tim says, joining the conversation. Ouch.

Philipps shows up with the key, and the students who now line both sides of the hall scramble to their feet.

They file through the narrow doors, line up to turn in the assignment for the week, wait for Philipps to introduce the guest writer. He steps up to the podium, shyly greets the assembled students, and says he’s going to read from that same little book of poetry for about thirty minutes. Ye gods! Beside her, Tim groans loud enough for only her to hear. Neither of them are enthusiastic about that idea.

They are the students, and class is about to begin.

“So what is it?”

“A cleon. C’heran weapon,” she added, when a trace of confusion entered his face to mingle with the admiration. “I grew up learning to wield it.”

“Sounds fun. Can I hold it?”

“Sure. Just don’t touch the handholds.” She tossed it to him, and he fumbled catching it, shocked because it was much heavier than he’d expected. He held it with both hands and slowly rotated it in his palm.

The wooden pole was capped on both ends with copper-colored metallic paddles. It was three centimeters in diameter and nearly two meters in length, and weighed maybe a couple kilos in his grip. The pole itself seemed to be made of oak wood, or at least had the color of such, but he could’ve been wrong on that score.

Between the two paddles, two blue-tinged, gel-made handholds with clearly defined finger grips were equally spaced apart. He resisted the urge to touch them, as she’d ordered.

“What’s with the handholds?”

“Throw it back.” He did, and she caught it between the two handholds, then threw it up into the air again and this time caught it on the handholds.

One paddle hissed, shimmered iridescent blue, and then a blade that would’ve looked better on a medieval Terran spear shot out of the paddle end. The blade started with five centimeters at the base, and climbed like a pyramid to a single sharp tip; the blade was approximately twenty centimeters in length.

“The handholds control which blade comes out, depending on how you press on them,” Rhiain explained, demonstrating the different grips that caused one blade to detract and another to slide out of its copper-covered sheath. About seven blades in all, each different in length and shape.

He stared, fascinated. “Seems easy to use.”

“Not really,” she countered. “It takes years to learn how to press the ‘holds correctly to get the blade you want. I’ve known quite a few people who managed to get a finger or another part of their anatomy severed because they were careless.”

He winced. “How long have you practiced with the cleen?”

“Since I was a child of four. And it’s cleon.” She grinned at the wry face he made and continued. “I know it’s heavier than it looks - it all depends on the person’s own weight and the weight of the blades. They’re quite light, even if they seem menacing.”

“Ceremonial weapon?”

Rhiain nodded. “Mostly, anyway,” she said. “When I left C’heras for the first time, I brought mine along to continue practicing with it, for old times’ sake. But it seems to have come in handy on some missions.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Primitive inhabitants mistook me for a goddess most of the time.”

“I knew that hair of yours would come in handy.”

She laughed and pressed on a ‘hold, watching the last blade retract. “There are also a number of ‘combat dances’ that we learned. They’re really a pattern of maneuvers we memorized for different situations.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Did those dances help on the same primitive worlds where you were a goddess in a GD uniform?”

“Yes.” Rhiain held the pole up vertically like a shepherd’s staff. “And only because I improvised.”

He eyed her with a slight smile. “You’re infamous for improvising.”

She answered with a wolfish smile of her own. “We’re all infamous for something.”

Now his expression turned thoughtful as he continued to watch her. “Indeed.”

His name was Nate. He towered head and shoulders above her, a little heavyset, loud, a mop of dirty brown hair, soft large eyes, a blunt nose, always smiling, always joking. He worked at a pet hospital and came to the seminar wearing the top half of his uniform, about an hour late.

He annoyed her because he usually talked to the people sitting behind him at the same time the training session leader was going through the lesson, distracting her and making it difficult to concentrate on the information given. What was worse, his answers to the session leader’s questions had nothing to do with the lesson.

That changed during the break.

“Hey,” he said, stopping her outside the conference room, “I’m sorry if I was being obnoxious or anything.”

She just looked at him and, despite herself, began to soften. “It’s okay. No harm done.” Just don’t do it again, will you? she added silently.

He smiled and held out a hand. “I’m Nate, by the way.”

“I know.” They shook hands and talked a little more, about life outside the session, where they were from and what they did for a living.

And then she noticed a funny thing about him. He complimented her on the sweater she was wearing, told her that she was attractive, but backed off and apologized immediately after the words left his mouth. When she smiled back, he talked about the irony of meeting women who were interested in him when he was already attached to someone and how no female approached him when he was single.

Mixed signals. Was he interested? Did she care?

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“Um, no…”

“Really? You looked like the type who would have one.”

Well.

He asked her for a hug before they parted ways, and she gladly gave it. Then he asked her for a kiss on the cheek, which she gave a little more reluctantly.

One of the other guys in the seminar watched them, amused. “Kiss her on the lips,” he suggested.

Nate looked at her. “Nah. Well…” He leaned towards her, lips already puckered.

She turned her face away. “No…”

He apologized again, but asked for her email address. “And maybe your phone number,” he added with a grin as she wrote it down. “And what you’d like to eat for dinner.”

“Why don’t you email me so you can get all that information?” she replied lightly, smiling at him again. The email address was one she hadn’t used in a long time, and one she probably wouldn’t use again after that day.

He laughed and said he would. And just before she left the room, he grabbed her and hugged her again, and kissed her hair. “Aha!” he said triumphantly, letting her go and beaming. “I caught you on the top of your head, at least!”

She smiled and left without a word.

No emails from him yet, and she hoped he’d forgotten. Men like Nate made her feel strange and cold.

Her voice contained a trace of valley chick, mingling with sharp-angled academian, but she was mostly city girl.

When she read from her book, she wasn’t an author or writer, two completely different occupations. She was an actress, her tone changing for each character, the omniscient narrator maintaining a certain amount of objectivity despite the first person view.

The reading itself was okay. When I first saw her, she looked like a schoolteacher - grades one through five, not college level. When she said she was a playwright, I was surprised.

“I found an active community in theatre that I didn’t find in writing fiction or prose,” she said. “The actors involved weren’t afraid to let me know what they thought about the script because they didn’t want to look stupid when they performed.”

Well, that made sense. That also sounded like a playwright talking.

The questions flew from the audience and from submitted index cards. They were about marketing her work and about the characters of her book which had been assigned reading, about writing in general and also about publishing. She also touched on writing influences and the process of writing - yeah, didn’t I just say she talked about publishing and writing in general? Also different things, from a writer’s perspective.

She seemed open with her answers, often pausing to phrase them so they’d satisfy the questioner. Sometimes they were an answer, sometimes not. She didn’t seem nervous to be up there, either, in front of a large group of students who weren’t shy to ask her anything, being potential novelists and playwrights themselves.

She wasn’t Danielle Steel or Tami Hoag.
She was a published author.

That was reason enough to be her audience.

PS: I hope she didn’t see me yawning. I hope the applause made up for that.

Intentional Fallacy: a “term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it.”

I sat on the wrong side of the train - or so I thought.

Normally, I try to avoid the side through which the sun shines because it’s hotter than the shaded side. Normally, I try to predict which side turns out to be the sunny side when I first get on the train so I can avoid it. Normally, my prediction turns out to be wrong.

So the sun blazes down during the hourlong ride, but I keep my eyes on my reading and think that maybe my side will turn into the shaded side. Traveling east to west, one would like to make that assumption, to build up false hopes about relief from the torturous heat on a particularly hot day. Such people should keep those assumptions to themselves or sell them to professional psychologists for analysis.

Then the train plunged underground, and the sunlight disappeared completely. Whether I was right or wrong about my predictions, about what side of the train would be the right side to sit on, didn’t matter now.

The train was moving, though, and it would soon reach its destination. Perhaps the sunlight there wouldn’t be as painful to avoid as it was at that moment. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to choose sides on that end, either.

The familiar glow overhead winked like a slowly dissipating mirage. It was only part of a sky full of untouched black and silver freckles, like the kind a makeup artist would apply with eyeliner pencil for a play. As silvery as her own hair. But these freckles fell to earth and were reborn within a matter of centuries. She had lost her own freckles within a matter of months when the summer heat finally faded into the frostier fall. The sun always seemed to have that effect on her facial skin.

She gathered her legs to her chest with long arms and looked up until the back of her neck creaked in protest. She may as well have lain down on the sweet-smelling grass that surrounded her family’s Holding and made it easier on herself. But she fell asleep whenever she laid down, and sitting under the stars was a better position to be in when one wanted to get lost in thought.

The tour was still on her mind, although her father had only grazed over that subject at the dinner table. She couldn’t understand why, considering how much he had insisted that the tour was a mandatory Prime Heir function. Had someone told him beforehand about her “curious” exchange with the attendant?

“I’ve always wondered how far the stars went. They seem to go on forever.”

“M’lady,” he said patiently, addressing her as a child and not as a Prime’s Heir, “there are more species and worlds among those ‘glowflies’ than you will ever know. If you can catch them, you can catch the entire universe in your hands, too.”

Now the stars seemed much farther away from this level, out here on the O’uce property, away from most of familiarity. She caught a strand of hair between her fingers and idly rubbed it. The silver of her hair glinted against her cheek, caught by the amber light from the torch, silver and amber back to back, reflecting pale on her fair skin. She glanced down at the strand, blinking against the sudden dizziness that quick action provoked, before turning her gaze upward again.

One day, she vowed, even if was only for a moment, she would see the stars’ silver light glint against her cheek as well.

Monday

The train pulled into the Daly City station, and I looked up from my book to see a Bart employee with a walkie-talkie approaching the man sitting near the door. The man wore a bright yellow sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his unkempt hair; he had the look of a homeless drunk who was passing the time by riding the trains with no particular destination in mind.

“Sir, is this your destination?” the Bart employee asked politely.

“Huh?” Yellow Sweatshirt looked about, a little dazed, before his expression fell. “No, I think I went too far.”

“Well, let’s get off here so we can have a good look at you,” the Bart man replied, and gestured towards the open doors. The walkie-talkie squawked, and he brought it to his mouth. “Yeah, don’t close the doors till we’re clear, ‘kay?”

Yellow Sweatshirt stood and slowly limped towards the door. His pants were starting to sag and he didn’t seem aware of where he was going. He wasn’t swaying, so he couldn’t have been intoxicated, but he was being careful enough about walking to catch my interest. I glanced at his feet.

His left foot was bare and covered with raw lacerations, and he was doing his best to shift his weight to his undamaged foot while the Bart man encouraged him to keep going until he’d stepped on to the train platform. I wasn’t the only one staring.

However, I was the only one worrying about what to write for my assignment due tonight. I’d already thrown out one scenario that had to do with my captain alter-ego, which involved a jungle, a bunch of marines and a weapon that was a cross between a spear and a Swiss army knife. It got too complex, however, and I was too lazy to do the necessary research, so the scene in my mind would sound right when I started describing it on paper. I was delving into Marvel Universe territory, the way things were shaping up, so the story scrap disappeared into my mental file dubbed “Unfinished Crap.”

I returned to my book, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and pretended that the train doors were closing and we were on our way out of the station. “It’s not that bad,” Yellow Sweatshirt said on the platform.

“Yes it is,” Bart Man countered. He lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth again. “Yeah, he’s not in the train anymore. Go ahead.”

The usual ping sounded somewhere above us, the doors slid shut and the train began pulling away. Platform Three rushed past the dark-tinted windows and the wail of a train overrode the last glimpse of Yellow Sweatshirt and Bart Man as I headed for my own destination.

Suddenly, wondering about where those foot lacerations had come from sounded like something better to occupy my mind with rather than stuffy homework.

This post has been floating around in my head of late. I think it’s mostly because I’ve started reading this book, plus a number of other factors. Ah, well - enjoy.

Shana Barrow carefully eased herself through the slim opening in the back that, for the moment, served more or less as an entrance into the war-torn building; all of the other “doorways” were now just gaping holes that the enemy could easily use as target practice.

She wished John had joined her for this simulation run, but the practice schedule he’d enforced for his students seemed to have wiped him out just as much as it had the students themselves. No matter, she thought. There’s always next time.

She silently slipped up the stairs to the third level of the seven-story building and let herself into the room where her Baby was waiting. A half-smile briefly crossed her face as she approached the loaded rifle and checked it over one more time.

Perfect. Everything was perfect. And her target was right on schedule, from the crunch of pebbles and the hollering voices wafting in from right outside the building.

Shana had checked to make sure no one had followed her back to this particular spot; it was not like her to boast about the ability to play a shadow, as it were, but her own safety was her first priority. The target itself was secondary. If he saw even a glimpse of her, her operation would be endangered.

She checked the scope, letting her vision adjust to the barely visible crosshairs etched into the eyepiece. Her Baby was angled down so that the barrel pointed at the wide swath of dirt that served as the main street in this part of the city. Anyone standing in her line of fire would be dead before they’d figured out what had killed them, mainly because no one would suspect that she was behind the room with the actual window until it was too late.

Snipers were very meticulous about their set-up, John especially. Shana would know - the man had once been her instructor. And she could still hear him lecturing her about the myths the old Terran movies had depicted about sniper positions.

“You don’t ever stand next to a window in an urban area, Shay. You could be dead before you got a shot out. They’d be able to see yer muzzle flash, and they’d be all over you in seconds.” The numerous simulations they’d run had more than proved this to be true.

Her target slowly rolled into view in an early twentieth century vehicle that still seemed brand new. The soldiers milling about and the target’s various lackeys failed to shield him from her Baby’s eye, which she quickly lined up with the tiny patch of skin just above his upper lip.

Turn your head just a little to the right, my friend, and say “Auf Wiedersehen"�

“Corporal Barrow?”

Shana slowly straightened and quickly schooled her features as the entire simulation dissipated in a quick flash of pixels exploding into nothing. She turned sharply and saluted to the officer standing in the simulation chamber doorway. “Mon Capitane?”

He smiled apologetically and inclined his head to one side. “Lights out, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, of course.” Her shoulders slumped, but her face stayed expressionless. “I’m sorry, sir … I didn’t realize how late it was.”

“It happens.” He watched her salute again and begin to leave the chamber, then stopped her just outside the doorway. “I caught you at a bad time, didn’t I?”

She paused, then turned to look back at him. “I nearly had him, Lieutenant.”

“Who?”

The half-smile that had touched her lips earlier now reappeared. “Have you ever wondered what Terra would’ve been like if certain tyrants had been done away with before they had the chance to unleash their terror upon innocent people?”

“I dream about it, Corporal. Frequently.” He gave her a curious look. “Which target were you aiming for this time?”

“The F�hrer,” she simply answered. “Adolf Hitler. Goodnight, Lieutenant.”

For Jer - and all others who need some encouragement.

A man treading the path of Life finally collapsed in exhaustion by the wayside, watching the earth’s populace pass him in their meandering paces. He noticed that some bore heavy burdens upon their shoulders and wondered why any person would want to lug such troublesome rocks along for the journey. Others walked past with black thunderclouds hovering over their heads. Still others walked by, cheerfully, blindly smiling at nothing ahead of them, as if this trip were another excursion to a paradise that was but a mirage.

But then the man noticed that some people who continued to fall every few feet would dodgedly trudge on, despite the numerous invisible barriers that caused them to stumble so frequently. While he mused over how they could resume a path that tormented them so, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see a cleanshaven man in beautiful robes beside him, watching the endless parade.

“Who are you?” the tired wanderer asked, startled by the other man’s sudden appearance.

The newcomer merely gestured to the sea of humanity traipsing past them - to those who fell but regained their footing. “You wondered how such could continue, despite the obstacles. I will show you.”

He stepped closer and passed his hand slowly over the traveler’s eyes. The voyager’s mouth fell open. Behind every person who stumbled was a man dressed in similar garb as his newly arrived companion. Every time an emigrant fell, the man behind would gently help the person to his feet and persuade him to continue on.

“I believe, friend, that you only have a little bit more of the road to walk,” the stranger said kindly, and held out a hand.

The wanderer stared at him for a moment, then slowly reached out to grab the proffered hand. He was surprised at the strength behind the other man’s grip; the man pulled him up and wrapped a comradely arm about his shoulders, guiding him back towards the road. “Just a little further,” the helper murmured with an encouraging smile. “A little while longer. You’re almost there.”

“Who are you?” the traveler whispered, both awed and perhaps even a bit frightened.

“My name is Hope,” the helper simply replied. “And I am ever with you.”

- SMN