Mom

Ira’s mother was standing in his doorway for some reason. If he looked at her, he’d have seen that her eyes were considering the carpet in the bedroom like quicksand. She’d come up there, left the kitchen without taking off her oven mitt, and her skinny little son thought Breakfast of Champions was some sort of invisibility shield.

So she said, “why do you hate me?”

Ira looked up from the book and squinted at her and would have smiled because it was a good question and props to her for having the guts, but it was important to maintain distance with the appearance of hollow consideration.

“I dunno. Why?”

“I was just making dinner,” she said, offering her oven mitt as evidence, “and I just thought about how you must be hungry. And I think you’re a pretty cool guy. So I cut you an extra big piece of ham.”

“Thanks.”

“And then I just turned around and left the ham and before I knew it I was halfway up the stairs. So I figured while I’m up here, I would ask.”

“Weird.” Ira set the book down and folded his hands. He waited for Brenda Hofstadter to feel the intimidating silence he brought to the party. She was six feet tall with chin-length blonde hair as thick as paper; she lifted her right arm to put her paper hair behind her giant ears but was thwarted by the oven mitt. Ira stared.

“Well, hasn’t that psychic explained it to you?”

“Cheryl said you are a strong and passionate young man who asks a lot of things from the Universe and becomes resentful when they aren’t given to him. She said that you will learn in time to leave your impossible demands behind and be at Peace.”

“Hm. That must be it then.”

“You think so?”

“What do you think?”

Brenda made eye contact with her son for about a billisecond and decided she found the quicksand carpeting less terrifying. She waded through the fiber, slipped through the underlay and popped out on Christmas 2011: the living room. She was attempting to explain to a sniffling nine-year-old Louie that Metal Gear Solid 7 was unsuitable. Ira was hugging his brother and sardonically asking her to please explain exactly what it was about improved spatial and problem solving skills she found so threatening. He was eight. Brenda laughed. Ira took it as a compliment when she joked that he had blown her mind. Later, she burned her finger on the stove, knocked the Jell-O on the linoleum and heard her youngest son whispering to his brother that it must be permanently blown.

“Nothing.” Ira stared.

Brenda’s right hand was sweating.

“I love you, Ira.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Will you eat my ham?”

“Perhaps.”

The Cryptogoddess and the Astronaut

Joel the astronaut should have known the sea monster would be expecting him. They had been dreaming of each other – Joel and Señora Colbert, the beast, lush by choice and omniscient sentience of the fourth dimension by obligation – for as long as things have been. The young astronaut met the Chilean Cryptogoddess on the day he quit his job.

It was the 2032nd year of Western Fable.

The United States government sold NASA to NBC Universal in 2029, and his stint as a tour guide on Universal Studios: Earth Orbit Experience paid for deli sandwiches and a room above the Paint Palace. Daily he saw the old Marble in storms of dust and wind, turning at the will of money and love, sifting it’s surface in travel and tides, and he never once in his career felt like Kate Muglrew, his grandmother, who told him in her senility that he could be whatever he wanted to be. He became a bearded man, sitting in the shuttle narrating continents and having a beard growing contest with every bearded man on earth.

On the day Joel the astronaut quit his job, the Irish heritage foundation booked the 2 p.m. shuttle to celebrate the 103rd birthday of the last natural red-head on the planet, who had a heart attack and died somewhere between seven gs and “ladies and gentleman we have left the atmosphere.” The tragedy caused the women to wail and ask why, the men to forge a bagpipe jam session, and the old men to climb into the employees only booth and beckon Joel in morbid warnings: “do not waste your days,” a rickety limey in plaid said, “have you done it all? Seen Titans? Felt the salty breeze of venture on your wretched face?”

“Not recently.”

“Then GO!” the old man charged him in freckled fury.

So the young astronaut manned the escape hatch, nodded to the plaid prophet, pressed the appropriate switches and fell at a rate of approximately 9.89 m/s/s into the southeast Pacific.