WARREN BEATH

It was the artist Vincent Van Gogh who cut off his ear and sent it to his girlfriend with the note, “Why haven’t I heard from you?”

Mike Tool waited at the computer for a reply from his girlfriend.  He knew she was there, unless she had to run those little errands she had mentioned in the morning.  She probably had run to FoodMaxx for cereal for her six children.  She probably had opened the pantry and shaken a cereal box and seen that it was empty.  So she had left the kids with her mom and run to the store which was only three blocks away. Undoubtedly.  And while there she had run into Rod the old boyfriend from the time she worked as despatcher at the trucking company.  Pleasantries had been exchanged and no doubt that was the end of it.  Unless maybe in the parking lot he had seen her struggling with the sticky latch on the trunk and gone over to help.  That was when his bicep had brushed her breast, and there was that electric spark between them.  Their eyes had met and it all flashed before them that fevered night outside of the Highlander when they were sweaty from dancing and wound up wrestling their clothes off in the front seat of his truck—-

He smiled to himself at his own silliness.  Probably there was a problem at the internet and she was on her way right now to her cousin’s to use her computer to reply to him.  Because she knew he would worry. 

He worried about her.  He knew she had been sad recently.  Or depressed.  It was problems with her ex husband.  Perhaps he had shown up unexpectedly in violation of the order.  Maybe she needed his help even now.

Or maybe he had shown up and an argument ensued.  He became violent again screaming into her face and holding her against the wall with his forearm against her throat.  Maybe with the loss of oxygen to her brain she felt a stirring called erotic asphyxiation and maybe she gasped for air but also writhed with something else, and when he pressed his lips to her she responded in her limpness her brain black dots around the edges as she felt an upsurge of that passion and pressed her own hips against—-

He shook his head to clear it of these silly thoughts.  Some times she pampered herself with a massage and maybe she had parked the kids with a friend and run down there.  Women worked there so there was no worry, well, mostly women but the big guy with the cleft palate.  And her only ninety pounds.  How do you get a ripped six-pack like that?  His hand kneading her shoulders and working the way down to the lower back, the towel slipping.  Her becoming excited like she did when she sat on the dryer during the wrinkleguard cycle with the buzzer going—- it was silly.  She would roll over and the towel would be on the floor and she would not know why it was happening it was the sensitivity of his hands and the way they—-

These were silly silly thoughts.  These things did not happen or did not happen with her.  They certainly happened in the larger world.  Everyone had some sort of experience where the moment was right and things were in alignment and the unexpected happened, the unanticipated unguarded moment.  They did not happen but they happened a little to everyone at one point probably.  He did not know it had ever happened to her an unguarded moment like that.  If it had not then she had one coming.  And he would never know, would he?

Well the mind of even a normal person can be an own worst enemy,  unless you counted the UPS driver in his shorts taut around firm buttocks who should that day be delivering the edible bouquet he had sent her.  Ringing her bell, and her signing for it and her robe slipping open slightly in that endearing way.  But she would sign and close the door, and that would be that.  And she would turn and there would be her ex on the couch smoking a cigarette, the smoke curling around his shaved head with the mudflap tattoo of  a centerfold silhouette on his beefy forearm.   The three-way with the masseuse had left all three loopy but satisfied,  and if it did not bother Rod to be thirdsies why should it bother him?  Mike Tool  wondered to himself.

Yes, the imagination took you strange places he thought as he poured himself a second cup of orange juice.  The imagination was itself the only limit to what could happen.  You never knew where things came from when you imagined things, and probably it was that way with everyone.  It was a fevered and trembling world out there where insects hooked up and flew off back to stomach all buzzing wings, and somehwere in Africa a scarred male was running off younger lions and herding his pride together.  An Arab sheik was inspecting pale and terrified stewardesses with the mascara running down their eyes, separating them like heads of lettuce with a riding crop.  This one spoiled, this one—-  over there.  On the microcosmic levels atoms collided and bounced away and formed new combinations.  Well the human mind was a ranch and you had to keep all the horses coralled, but it was inevitable or the law of averages that one would get loose and run wild—-  Or maybe it was chaos theory where any system—–

—–The blaring of the intercom on Level III woke Second-grade Starship Trooper Frank “Wrench” Stevens from this weird dream. 

Whoa!

There must have been a breach of the outer wall of the hull.  He shot from the top bunk and landed on deck with metallic clang of his anti-gravity boots.  The thrusters carried him down the length of the hull to the War Deck where the alien attack drones were firing antimatter missiles at the intergalactic transport.  He saw pilot Tracy Aldebaron at the control struggling to maintain the vector to the Saturnine rings where they could hide from the attacking starfighters in the flow of rocks and dust.  There was a slight sheen of sweat to her upper lip, it was very attractive.  It seemed she was sitting awfully close to Starship Ranger Paul “Chip” Armstrong.  That wasn’t her regular seat, was it?  Why was she sitting there? 

Probably the ship had taken a hit on the starboard side and the auxiliary guidance system had been disabled so that she had to improvise on the manual panel amidships and that was the only seat and so it was just coincidence—-

An antimatter bullet pierced the hull and the sudden decompression tossed him hard against the solar shield deployment system.  He saw his arm was bleeding profusely through the rift in his suit as oxygen escaped from the level.  The concussion had broken the plasticord securing the alien specimen chamber to the wall.  An Andromedan Octo-crab had escaped through a crack was scuttling across the floor toward him with tentacles whipping like chainsaw blades.  Its double mandibles opened to release the excess of red neurotoxin that was secreted when excited.

On the other hand he had thought he had seen glances between them, or a trace of glances if that was the word.  He had not known they even knew one another.  Maybe they had been at Academy at the same time, or had some kind of training together.  Anything was possible in a world where antimatter had been harnessed and gravity turned on its head to power million-ton space barges to distant galaxies. 

Globules of his own blood were floating before his face in the decompressed cabin as the torrent of escaping oxygen tore a larger rift in the delicate foreskin of the inner hull.  The thermodroids of the security system had been released with the accidental activation of the self-destruct timer, and they advanced with lasers down the wall on suction feet while deploying the circular bonesaws on forearm extensions that were their chief offensive weapon.  There was sizzling at his toes and rising sulphuric fumes that blinded him. The glowing atomic acid from the damaged retrothruster was burning through the floors toward the nuclear core.  He could see the red glow of the overheated cooling rods of the reactor through the widening metal gap between his feet. His radiation warning shield was glowing a hot red.

The close confinement of the control modules in the barges had left little room for the crew—- it was all dollars and cents to the designers.  More room for freight the more money each payload—- and the smaller the crew quarters.  So there were co-ed showers and that was where this might have started.  In theory the men and women had separate hours of employment but sometimes if the coils leaked radiation there was need for instant decontamination where the niceties, or proprieties, or whatever you want to call them—– men peeling off their anticontamination gear right alongside female crewmen and don’t tell me that when the showers went on and them pressed together there in that little chamber with the needles of spray hitting them and pressing them together maybe by accident the first time but touching anyway and her raising her arms to scrub her hair of contamination or space lice—–

He smiled to himself as he felt his lungs collapsing with oxygen starvation.  These are crazy thoughts.  And so they were no doubt.  But it probably was not as if it had never happened or couldn’t happen.  Anything was possible.