Sorry, Rosie.

I swear, Lucy meant nothing to me.


OK, so this what the inside of my head looks like.

Here’s the story. It’s fiction, and if this intro sounds a littel truncated, yhe long of it is explained one post down.

What genre? I haven’t a clue. Science fiction-ish, a little, around the edges.

What’s it about? It’s about...1,600 words, and I had a lot of fun writing it.

And it’s called:

Sunday Morning Coming Down.

The apartment was stifling and I had to get out.

Sunday morning in the hottest apartment on Earth. You can feel the hot liquid guts of the planet here and the flat hand of the sun. No way to coax or tease a breeze out of the air. All the interesting weather has gone to Florida or Europe. Right this minute a tornado is strapped into the Log Flume at the Epcot Center and a forest fire is negotiating for papal T-shirts in St. Peter's Square.

Revenge is what it is. You can tell. It's an angry, premeditated heat from a pissed off planet. I will surely die here.

The elevator makes it better. I take the garbage out with respect for what it can do. A block south of here some fool had kept his trash in his place too long and the proteins had started to replicate. With the fire in the air and the rotting vegetation and a planet with a fearsome agenda, you just don't do shit like that. When the police came they found his trash squatting over him, carrying its stainless steel can on it's back like a hermit crab, ripping pieces off of him like strips of bacon.

I double bag my stuff and separate out the recyclables, but you still have to be expeditious: the dumpster is no place to linger on a hot night.

The dumpsters are where the rats hang out too. They are too bold to trust anymore. They cleaned my dad out completely. They got into his trash and found an application for a MasterCard he'd thrown out, and they filled it out and sent it in. Then they got to the mailman and he turned the card over to them when it came (they had his kids though, and were making threats, so we can't be too hard on him.)

They went on a tear with it. New shoes and guns and they leased an Accura. Got drunk on brandy and started setting fire to the cars in my dad's block, and of course the police refused to come. Destroyed my dad's TRW and now he's back speedballing. I've given up trying to get him off the spike.

The rats in my neighborhood are a little smaller -- say beagle-sized -- but they own the two theaters, a Surfeit Video outlet and a string dry cleaners and are not to be trifled with.

The elevator is still the best game in town. I leave and get on it but find I do not have enough change. The roaches will take a marker, but it's best not to get in their debt. They're trying to take over the whole building and, one by one, people are signing their leases over to them. I pay the grease -- it's a flat fee -- but it leaves me little for luxuries like elevator passes.

Still, the cool air it makes as you ride up and down and back up tempts me. I almost dip into the money in the Food Jar for the price of a ride, but hold out against myself and take the stairs. 1800 flights, a solid nine miles straight down, and I figure I'll have to stay overnight on the stairs at least twice before I make it back up. But at least it's still free, and I pack a lunch and take my pillow.

Down is easy.

Going down, gravity is a pal and if you take your corners just right you can get a little breeze going. Like running down the dunes at Warren park when I was little. You're legs get longer and longer it seems, and you have to let your stride all the way out just to keep from falling.

We used to play soldier there, running down and down, legs windmilling faster and faster until we couldn't stay upright and then falling with our hands folded to our hearts, meeting the sand with our shoulders and rolling like we believed army men did when they'd been shot. But on the stairs you have to be a little more careful.

Even at mid-day there are sleepers and couples looking for a shady place to fuck. And there is the occasional body, for which the roaches will pay a premium if you report it to them before it starts to spoil. They say it's because a rotting body will attract pests.

Outside! Just the word is magic. I know I'll have to go back and it'll cost. I know I'll probably give up and pay for the roaches to ride me back upstairs, but sometimes a man just has to get out and look at things.

It's a disappointment, of course, like most things. Always seems better at a distance. Like Poe said, "Are not all things beautiful far away?" But that’s really irrelevant. Its is like the ability to willfully believe that the present under the tree is an Erector set even when it has the muffly sound of socks when you shake it. No gift is a letdown until it's opened.

The lake looks unhappy. We still call it that, out of respect I guess. There's Michigan Avenue and “lakefront property” and Edgewater. Too expensive and sad to change, and who'd want to bike down Mudflat Shore Drive on a spring morning? I can see people out there, not too far from the gritty shoreline. They have hip boots and carry cages, catching the squirmy things that live in the mud to cook for dinner.

Tastes like conch I'm told, but I generally stay off the lake. There are stories of bigger things out deeper, where the mud's really wet and there are still big pools of real water on the top.

They said that guy who said he could walk all the way to Michigan from Chicago was taken by one of them. The video from the news helicopter that followed him was edited and nobody will talked about what was on it. They explained that it was a sinkhole, like the ones in Florida that swallow houses and roads. But I have friends and they tell me it was a wall of mud and big as an office building that came up out of the gunk, like the fluke of a whale, and pulled the man under.

My friend Phil said that there was mud and runny green stuff all over the belly of the 'copter and it was a mile up, so how do you explain that?

My friend Phil says it's the Kraken and that the end of the world is coming soon. "Big summer blockbuster it'll be, you'll see," he says. "It stars everybody.”

Phil...Phil’s hopeful and intellectually sloppy, like a dog or an idealist. I basically like him so I don't tell him that the Apocalypse has come and gone, and that the Great War between the beast and the guy with the holes in his hands is going on in a whole other Universe, two doors down. The walls are pretty thin, so you can hear the ruckus of a trillion people on four lively planets fucking and screaming and killing each other very clearly at 2:00 A.M., after the roaches and the rats have gone to sleep.

It sounds very martial and heroic. Big Things are at stake in that other Universe; you can tell by the incidental music.

Where we're at -- this place -- this is just a dead dream lumbering on through the arc of its existence. On fumes, winding down and getting more ridiculous as the friction of the fiction slowly overcomes what's left of its momentum. There is no Lucifer here, no armies of angels -- Light, Dark or Beige -- raging over a burning Earth. No Babylon sluts, no triple-six tattoos, no final trump or judgment.

Here there are buildings that reach into low Earth orbit. There are rat landlords and roaches running public utilities. And, yes, there is the occasional mud-dog that urps up out of the dying ooze to swallow somebody stupid enough to risk life and all for a little taste of celebrity. And we even have some empty domes on the Moon.

The NASA guys slagged a couple of hundred acres of pristine, 12 billion-year-old rock. They did it with lasers and nukes and then real quick farted into the puddle with inert gas jets, like a four-year-old in a bathtub. But the money ran out and that was that. Problem was, unlike Archimedes, NASA ran naked down the street screaming "Eureka!" before they'd actually lowered their fat asses into the tub. This world -– this one here -- is covered with the ruins of those kind of half-good ideas.

This was about a year or so before the aliens blew the Pioneer probe to dust and sparks. Flying blind and useless it was, but it was still flying, about ten billion miles out, away from the mud swamps and the ludicrous cities and running like hell away from home.
The aliens beamed one message back and never spoken to us again. One message: our absurdist rallying cry.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" they hollered back at us monkeys.

Now, if you'll please get out of my way, I have to go grab a Sunday paper: the Tribune won't deliver to apartments above the five-mile-mark and I want to see what's going on.

And, if you don't mind me asking, "Where the fuck do you think you're going?"

THE END