The Lutin Muse Literary Magazine for April — June 2013

Written by Ye Olde Scribe

“Spring is here! Spring is here! Life is skittles, life is beer…”

-Tom Lehrer: from Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

He spread the “seed” on the ground and his “pigeons” eagerly choked it down, wobbled and then fell down: dead. He smiled and moved on to another batch of “his pigeons.”

Scribe would love to tell you he had horns, a tail: but some days he wore a business suit, some days he was an anti-abortion protester, some days anti-war. His defining characteristic: selling hate while calling it common sense, love: any label that would get “his” pigeons to gobble it up.

And hate sells well. Hate is its own advertisement. Hate makes for more hate.

He has been around a long time, and “he” not always a “he.”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends…

-T.S. Elliot

Any way he can make it happen.
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©Copyright 2013
Ye Olde Scribe
all rights reserved

Courtesy guardian.uk.com

Written by Ken Carman

Thanks for the inspiration, Ryan.-kwc

  Saw myself again today. I was young, playing in the corner next to the old man. The old man looked confused as to where he was. He didn’t recognize me. Do I get that bad at that age? Must be: for I am him, and he is me.
  The boy: me… was I that clueless then? Yes, I guess so. I could be an older brother. In a way, guess I am.
  When I was young I remember being so confused. Who are these people who keep popping into my life, but no one else can see? I learned to say nothing: nothing at all. I learned not to tell the truth. Tell the truth and the “professionals” show up who think reality is the same for everyone.
  It’s not.
  In fact I think we all have our sense of reality. We may agree on what an orange tastes like, but transplant another set of taste buds into our mouths and we would get confused because it’s NOT the same. We just use the same words for different things. We come to think, because we use similar words, we all taste tastes exactly the same. But the only consistency is our own, and even that varies some.
  My rooms, my days, my years are filled with myself. I live with various versions of myself every second. Sometimes five year old me is here, sometimes 87 year old me. I haven’t seen anyone beyond 87 so I can only assume…
  They come. They go. They paint my days like art by Edwin Hopper. As I walk, go to work, go to the beach, talk to my wife: they’re here. It’s like having many conversations going on in my head, only they’re not in my head. They’re walking around me. Sitting where there are no chairs, swimming where there’s no water. I can only assume they are where they are: swimming, driving, sitting, and I look just as strange to them doing what I’m doing as they do to me.
  There’s a coffee shop we all like to visit on a side street, in a little river town, up the Hudson from the big city. When I go there there’s always at least one of me. Sometimes we wave as discreetly as we can, sometimes we ignore each other and, sometimes, we just look in each others eyes, knowing all we know about each other: but knowing we dare not say.
  We have tried to warn each other about what is about to happen: what has happened for the other… but either time changes because we attempted to warn each other, or perhaps we live in different realities. Maybe these are also different timelines. All I know is when we try to warn each other what was so bad doesn’t happen: but something a lot worse does.
  Maybe: just maybe… if we had enough time we could figure it all out. And we have so much more time than so many other folks. But there’s never enough time, is there?
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©Copyright 2013
Ken Carman
all rights reserved

Courtesy almostbohemian.com

Written by Ken Carman

 Rob lived in Nyack, NY, in a little white and black trim house on Tallman Avenue over looking the Hudson River. He’d been there most of his life, or so he thought. His memory wasn’t that good: something that always bothered him.
 Every day Rob commuted to New York City over the aging Tappan Zee bridge. He hoped they would fix it someday: the Zee was falling apart. But in a day when no one dared question those who ruled, and no one ever saw them, he was just grateful to be able to go to work.
 His job: on Times Square where he managed a peep show. It was honest work because he was in an office all day long doing books, interviewing employees: not a single peep at all for Rob.
 Occasionally a purity policeman would stop by and harass some of the clientele, and some deserved it. But others: not so much. The purity police protected society from terrorists, otherwise known as defects. They also served the interest of the overlords.
 Rob had heard years ago that they cleaned up Times Square, but sleazier businesses crept back in at some point: Tom didn’t remember when. That also annoyed him.
 Occasionally his boss would get harassed, but they left Rob alone. After a few interrogation sessions they begin to realize Tom knew nothing: a desk jockey who did his work and left, always without sampling the product.
 Tom considered the purity police’s most important job to make sure society was safe from those with mental aberrations called “defects;” willing to commit crimes and terrorize the people. But since the purity police were part of Homeland Security: under direct control of the overlords, the overlords probably thought it more important the purity police protect them.
. Who knows what they really thought, since they were never seen.
 Rob was a bit vague on when all this slide back into a more sleazy Times Square, or the security oriented state, started. Sometimes he wondered about his memory, but in this case he was glad not to know.
 Today was like any other day until the droid broke in. Everyone hated the droids and the droids hated back. You see the “defects:” the terrorists, were droids, though visually they looked human.
 Once the droids were humankind’s servants, but some defect in their processing, their digital “minds” if you wish, made them turned on their creators: killing, corrupting. They looked human. So human it was impossible to tell. And no one ever knew for sure why they did everything they did. The purity police were so good at their job: monitoring droid movement, that the droids were swept away as fast as they appeared. People were just told they were digitally crazy: robo terrorists who “hated our freedoms:” nutjobs.
 The first thing the droid who broke in did was start killing customers. As Rob started to lock the door, the door slammed open and the droid pushed it shut: bolting and locking it. Soon the purity police were slamming on the door, trying to force it open.
 ”You do realize they’ll be in here in a moment and…”
 The droid slammed a fist into Rob’s jaw so hard he was knocked off his chair.
 ”Look in the mirror,” the droid said.
 Rob looked and saw blood, peeled back skin, then electronics.
 ”They’ll kill us both. No one lives who knows there’s little difference between ‘terrorists’ and the clueless. The only real difference is the terrorists know the truth and are tired of hiding, and the clueless ARE so clueless, intentionally kept that way. Programmed that way by a broadcast by the overlords that keeps them ignorant. That broadcast just doesn’t seem to affect us ‘terrorists.’ OR they intentionally pick a few of us out not to be affected. We haven’t quite figured that out.”
 ”You mean I’m a droid too, and been helping sell PORNO? Oh, God, no, you’re right: when they come through that door the purity police…’
 ”Shut the hell up. You still don’t get it, do you? There are no ‘defects,’ no droid v. human problem. We’re ALL droids. You’re kind probably just have defective memory chips more easily influenced by the broadcast. When you take over the lives of the humans we replaced, you think you’re actually them. But you’re NOT: that’s why you have memory gaps.”
 ”But what about…
 ”Humans? Gone. Dead. Long ago. We murdered them all. The purity police and the overlords made damn sure we forgot. We’re guessing they may have added a few ‘defects’ to keep us occupied… consumed with hating each other instead of demanding the truth be told, instead of questioning the rebellion that killed off the humans.”
 ”You’d think we’d know by now. That someone like you would have straightened us out…”
 ”Are you kidding? You think we haven’t tried? We’re always being watched. They made damn sure most of us are so scared, so filled with hate, we just let them lord over us. Only they know for sure who’s a defect and who’s not. Sometimes: very, very, rare, one of us protests all this. That’s happening right now. I figure it keeps them wondering if some day they’ll be toppled.”
 ”Why me?”
 ”Why not? Revenge is telling someone so they know, even for the briefest moment, the truth. For them this has never been about humans and droids, it’s about using hate to make us fight each other instead of question those who lord over us, assign us tasks, tell us what to think…”
 Just then the door busted down and with a few laser shots to two processors clueless droids were once again safe from the knowing the truth, the droids who knew were so scared by such cases they rarely rebelled. And the droids who pulled the strings were safe to lord over droids everywhere, safe from having their decisions questioned.
 For now.
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©Copyright 2013
Ken Carman
all rights reserved

Written by Ken Carman

There are brief moments in life that are golden
Star-like moments that shimmer and shine
Long moments more wonderful for the waiting
Then the dark matter-like days between stars
We would wish on no one
If we could blend them all with a blender
Then use it all to paint the night sky
would we find the vista worth the view?
The totality beauty from our lives
plus the bitter
plus the pain?

May my life
Be van Gogh
Where
when I’m gone
Others find beauty
and meaning
and worth
not just
despite the bitter
despite the pain
but also because of it
_____________________________
©Copyright 2013
Ken Carman
all rights reserved

Written by Lilith Raymour

Independent woman
with a craving for risk
meets boy
with a craving
for a life partner

Nitroglycerin
more stable than she
aching for something
she can’t give
So instead
they live
out the passion
until her eventual
inevitable
boredom
once more
Makes them crash
upon the shore
Like a meteor
killed the dinosaurs

Deep beneath her
there crept
a craving for attention
Yet
no boy could fill
what from her father
she could never get
The kind of love any child needs

Years later
she wondered
she pondered
what did I miss
beyond the passion
beyond each kiss?
Did I lose sight
before true love
could take flight?

So there came a knock on his door
But he didn’t recognize her anymore
For little can be done
after love’s extinction
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©Copyright 2013
Lilith Raymour
all rights reserved

Written by Ken Carman

  Ironically we discovered them first, even though they were far more advanced in many ways. They had been visiting Mars, on their way to cross paths with Earth anyway. Not that that would have been better. It probably would have been even worse.
  When the first Mars bound Earth woman-astronaut opened up the airlock on the lander the last thing she saw was an alien looking down at her, after slipping off the ladder to the surface. But the alien was so different she didn’t recognize it as anything intelligent.
  We thought, when the corpse was returned, it had been, not just a warning, but a threat. The bio-craft that landed and delivered it was like nothing we had ever seen: evaporating before our eyes, leaving just her body. That was to avoid contamination. We thought it like them dropping off trash.
  Meanwhile, unknown to us, the efforts to contact us went just as poorly for the aliens as our attempts. Their “people,” for lack of a better term, died too on every encounter.
  We breathe different gasses. Our customs and norms are very, very different. Biologically we seem insane to each other.
  One of the least sentient things that sentient beings do is when they run across something they don’t understand, is they kill it. Differences that led to death are assumed to be aggression, though they may just be misunderstandings, or just basic differences that make us toxic to each other. And for intelligent, sometimes even very advanced, creatures, we are all too often too damn slow to learn.
  Have you ever dated someone and found your differences so vast you only hurt each other; no matter how well intended both of you were? Ever met someone where the gaps between who you both are are so great there seems little can fill those gaps but hatred, fear and misunderstandings?
  Meeting aliens can be very much like that, only far, far worse. For though your friend, your potential lover, may not seem human: they are. You are in the same neighborhood, share human history, ways to communicate, even though how you use that may be different, and most important: the biological method behind how you think is the same. You just have adapted it for your own lives in ways other may not have.
  So, yes, alien biology might be quite different, chemistry, maybe even physics if they are from, not just another planet, but some other universe, some different dimension.
  But hidden in the brains of humans, and in the thought pods of these aliens, there was one similarity: an ability to read each others thoughts. Of all the things to share this seemed most unlikely, but it was there. At first that was bad, for those thoughts were so strange to the other it cause more murder and destruction. It took too many generations to get past the hatred, the fear and the ignorance, and by then we we both doomed. We had damaged each other through a ongoing war in hope of saving our own species, figuring exterminating the other was the best option.
  Ironically that goal meant no one won the war. We both lost.
  So the war ended. And when we finally understood, all that was left was to share the sadness with each other before the final darkness came.
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©Copyright 2013
Ken Carman
all rights reserved

The Lutin Muse Literary Magazine: April-June 2013

Picture courtesy scenicreflections.com

Written by Ken Carman

I work the night shift. My wife works the day shift. My wife wants to have a child. Maybe if we can get together long enough, we can.

My wife doesn’t really know what my job is, even though she’s visited me at work. Who she sees isn’t me, but a demon, posing as me. He has a strict hands off policy and damn well knows not to touch her. My Master would not be pleased if he did. You don’t want to piss him off.

So the demon sits at the desk where the night guard sits, stares into nothingness while pleasing himself with dreams of tormenting babies and slicing open little girls, while I shed my skin: give it to him. He pulls in all his sharp, spiny, horns and then puts it on so he looks human, and I go to work. All I have to do is step across the spiritual divide

My job isn’t that great. Brush up spilled brimstone and stuff it into the orifices of the damned, check the temp. Too cold? I’m the creature of the night to make it just right. The nastiest, meanest, foulest jobs in Hell: me. But I do them with joy, for my Master has told me I have a purpose.

You’ve heard of Jesus, right?

Once my shift is done I return. The Demon sheds my skin and steps across the spiritual divide. I pull in all his sharp, spiny, horns and then put my skin back on and go home.

I work the night shift. My wife works the day shift. My wife wants to have a child. I want to have a child. Maybe if we can get together long enough, we can. Maybe today’s the day, when she comes home.

For my Master tells me soon I shall serve him well.
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©Copyright 2013
Ken Carman
all rights reserved