11/11/11
by Gary Feuerman
You get up early, and see the candy stripes of dawn in the windows. It is still dark, and muted in your bedroom, the light so delicate you need to wear slippers. Your exposed knees feel cold coming up from the concrete floor. There’s the sense that someone else can see you, or maybe you want that and it seems so. Your closet is neatly arranged and that’s pleasing, but your longjohns are not in there. You left them in the dryer. The kitchen holds the promise of a breakfast salad and hot tea, but you’re not ready. It’s dark near the floor but light is beginning to grace the undulating outline of the mountains. You grab the iPhone and turn it on, waiting interminably for that apple icon to turn to full operation mode. The background picture on your phone, a liquid light of indigo and charged lavender, is quivering in real time over Wheeler Peak. You throw on your thick navy sweatpants, the green base layer shirt, and the North Face slippers. You forego the hat. It’s 18 degrees but so calm that your warmth stays with you as you climb the adobe wall to stand on the soft surface of the vast sage plateau. Your slippers sink into the sandy clay. First, you look to the sacred mountain and see that peak outline so vividly that it brings a faint sadness. You take pictures of the mountain with its one shredded pennant of cloud ,which sticks to the peak as if from static. It looks like vapor from a cauldron. You walk on the desert above your house, in the dead quiet before dogs, before rabbits, and you feel levitated off the surface by the intimacy of walking in such an immense, unstirred scene. The sky to the west, against the feline spines of the old volcanoes, reflects an aquamarine ocean blushed indigo, plum and the beginnings of magenta. You put the phone up in front of your face and press the camera icon with your thumb. You then turn to the south and do it again. After that, you stop and listen to your heart beat feeling tall and unraveled.
Pink Moon
by Johanna DeBiase
Nothing was ever the same after the sky turned pink. It took months for scientists to even theorize the cause – talk of radiation, solar flares, atmospheric changes. Religious zealots claimed it was a message from God, but those were split. Half thought God was warning us to get it together before the pink phased to red and all went to hell. The other half thought God was showing us his rose tinted glasses, offering us a second chance. Philosophers insisted that the sky did not change but our way of seeing it did.
The pink sky sure did make everything look different; an extraordinary glow coated dull surfaces such that the world was warm and inviting. On the other hand, my brain was never quite able to adjust. After a while, all that pink made me nauseous and I could no longer bare the sight of it. I trashed tutus and wore blue lipstick. I closed myself inside with shades drawn until sunset when, just for a moment, the sky turned blue again and life seemed okay. At least, I had the night, the dark maroon of midnight.
by Ned Dougherty
by Robin Powesland
Not Another Day
by Charles Clayton
Lots of these in a lifetime. The sunrise I mean. Every single day whether you're paying attention or not. Spectacular each and every time, just like the other blessings unfolding in your life. Food on the table. Roof over the head. A body that works. The pitter patter of little feet. A cup of hot coffee. A good woman to share it all with. And every day the sun rises to shine a light on it all, like icing on the cake of goodness.
And just like that it's gone. Not the blessings, but the blissful ignorance and the belief that there will always be plenty of time. A fateful diagnosis, or a car crash, or maybe just slipping on the ice. Suddenly the lost moments really are lost, and you can't get them back. Sleeping through another sunrise. Maybe tomorrow. Staring at Facebook instead of into your child's eyes. Just one more minute, honey. Nursing a hangover instead of your marriage. I'll never do it again, my love. You'll never do it again.
Blood Sunset
by Eric Mack
They used to say the dirt was holy, but when people started turning, it became harder to believe. Several that we used to call friends and family had been buried in it. It didn't do the job. We resisted calling them zombies at first. The word was associated with an archetype of pure fiction, fiction that had long since been weaponized. Part of us wanted to preserve that past, simpler times when our nightmares couldn't so easily be realized with quantum genomics. The first real-world vampire had been created in a Singapore lab less than a month after the initial discovery was leaked and picked up by the network. The engineers held all the power now. Our legends and myths had become impotent the moment they became real. It was funny at first—the company that designed a line of bodyguards all identical to Pinhead from Hellraiser; then it became weird when the werewolf prostitute incidents started to be reported; and then the network took it to another level that pushed it all over the edge. I can't even imagine what's going on out there now. If I could, I wouldn't tell, lest the vision winds up in a lab somewhere.
An academic friend of mine got a wire through to me the other day. Wanted me to join the effort. Said they're working on bringing Jesus back to help set things right--the real one, not the Mormon fairy tale, he had assured me. I declined, of course. Can't see how a few tons of bread and fish is going to help our situation.
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