The Ward

AS RICHARDS SAT cross-legged and fuming on the kitchen’s dirty linoleum floor, yards away, in the front room of the house, his fiancée Priscilla reclined on top of a threadbare orange sofa, trying hard to avoid his moody stare.

For ten minutes now this impasse had lingered on between them, the whole time Richards hoping that his crafted expression of piety and exasperation might eventually compel his fiancée to respond, and, though his efforts thus far had been unsuccessful, still he went on glowering, faithful that at some point she’d have no choice but to fold under the nagging weight of his persistence, while in the meantime the couple’s ward—a five-year-old boy named Cyrus—had spent those same minutes lying ignored on his stomach near the foot of the orange couch, carefully sorting a small pile of paint chips he’d peeled away from the wall.

At first Richards had felt more than confident that this grievance with his fiancée would resolve itself easily—shortly and in his favor—and he’d been surprised when a speedy resolution was not forthcoming. He was, however, no longer surprised when, having already been engaged in their struggle for over ten minutes, he and Priscilla then managed to continue the stalemate, unchanged, for another five, at which point Richards suddenly found himself faltering, dropping his glare and allowing it to glance accidentally over the face of his forgotten ward. Unlike Priscilla, Cyrus answered Richards’ glare with a look of his own, and this caused Richards to redirect his own eyes sharply toward his fiancée, all the while keeping Cyrus at the edge of his vision, watching as the boy cast aside the paint chips he’d been sorting with a wave of his small arm.

“It would be helpful, I think,” Cyrus said, dryly, “if we discontinued whatever this is we’re doing and got back to the task at hand.” The boy’s eyes were fixed on the stained carpet.

“The task at hand,” Richards chuckled, punctuating his statement with a snort that came out louder than he’d intended. “Believe me, I’d love to, but unfortunately one of us is making that impossible.”

As he spoke, Richards narrowed his eyes and glared harder at his fiancée, who then responded with a sigh from the couch, still refusing to meet his stare.

“Look,” she said, “I know you think I’m at fault, but I didn’t even touch them. All I did was walk past.”

“That’s not the point,” Richards answered through clenched teeth. “The point is that you were the closest one when they fell, therefore rules of common decency suggest that you should have stopped what you were doing and at least started to put them back up, instead of walking away like nothing happened and expecting someone else to fix them for you.”

“If I remember correctly, repairs are your responsibility,” Priscilla said, finally giving in and making eye contact with Richards after all of her resistance, though Richards was now too caught up in his own aggravation to appreciate the victory. “In fact,” she continued, looking straight at him, “you were the one who sold us on this house in the first place, since, supposedly, you’d be able to handle whatever work needed to be done.”

“That’s true,” said Richards, and while he did he stood up, turning away from Priscilla and walking toward a heap of mini-blinds that lay crumpled beneath the kitchen window, “but when we chose this house the work didn’t include broken blinds.” He leaned down to inspect the heap more closely. “Not that I can’t handle broken blinds,” he added,  “they’re exactly the kind of repair I can handle. Cleaning up, changing light bulbs, hanging things that have fallen down—this is precisely what I had in mind when we chose the house, so, of course, a broken set of mini-blinds isn’t out of reach…like you said, I was the one who sold you two on this particular house from the beginning, because other than some filth and a few run-down furnishings there isn’t a thing wrong with it…at least nothing we’ll be able to notice in the time we’re here. But to the point, it’s not about my ability to fix the blinds,” he paused to breathe, inhaling and exhaling deeply while staring at the pile on the floor, “it’s about the responsibility you should have taken to start the job.”

Finishing this thought, Richards turned around to glare at Priscilla once more with his best attempt at righteousness and indignation, and she met Richards’ glare with a deadpan expression, holding it briefly before breaking into hysterical laughter.

The Anthropologist

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST stretched his wings wide as he flew over the coastline, straining his ocular sensors to pick up signs of life along the craggy rocks and choppy waters; he was now more than three weeks into a fruitless search that had taken him from coast to coast, yet still he refused to believe that his varied and corroborating sources could be in error. Distinctly unrelated oral histories, forgotten scriptural texts, and the few preserved testimonies of travelers claiming to have ventured across the landmass all held in common a mention, however vague, of a humanoid presence somewhere in the area, and it was on account of such evidence that the anthropologist had become determined—despite the fact that this coastal edge appeared as barren as the first—to locate the presence, in order to provide the sort of reliable documentation that had been traditionally unavailable, and worse, unappreciated.

And so today, months removed from making his determination, the anthropologist carried the search forward, resting his wings and gliding along as he soared half-heartedly with the wind. Though his faith in the evidence had never faltered, he’d lately begun to feel weighed down by a mounting frustration, a frustration made immediately worse when—for the third time in as many days—periodic flashes of static began to erupt across the length of his ocular field, a sign that he’d overexerted his systems. He first tried to ignore the condition as he’d done before, but it soon became unbearable, forcing him to make a slow, circular descent toward a nearby beach. Once he’d descended, he then perched on top of a large rock that overlooked the waves, gradually shutting down his sensors and allowing the blackness of cessation to replace the grey of the misty ocean air. Grey in turn retook black, and when it did the display in the upper right corner of his ocular field read that it had been offline for three hours.

Slowly, the anthropologist stood, trying to shake the stiffness from his limbs and wings. Despite his extensive training the exhausting nature of the journey had begun to take a toll—he’d found it harder to focus his attention, and his thoughts crowded and stumbled over one another with a growing frequency; meanwhile his wings, ocular sensors, and the rest of his self-modified bio-technical equipment were all losing their charge at an increasingly rapid rate, deteriorating to the point that when he suddenly noticed an island in the distance, covered by a huge, dome-like structure, his first instinct was to run a diagnostic on his sensors, checking for visual distortion.

The anthropologist followed this instinct without a second thought, yet his examination was unable to find any evidence of systemic failure, leaving him no choice but to conclude that there was indeed an island just off of the beach, covered by a massive dome, independent from any misfirings of his machinery, and as he reached this conclusion he then began to record his visual input to memory, taking flight and soaring in the island’s direction until the dome covering the island grew large and close enough for him to observe its design: what had appeared at a distance to be constructed from inert building material was, his sensors now told him, in fact comprised of wingless humanoid bodies piled on top of one another, their arms and legs intertwined in an intricate web of structural engineering. The anthropologist’s pulse raced. According to his readings, these bodies were alive.

The Theater

RICHARDS had stumbled through a series of hateful jobs during his late-teens and early-twenties, most of which had involved him standing behind a cash register for hours on end, splitting his time evenly between staring into space one moment and weathering the whims of irate customers the next, until even today, though it had been years since he’d last needed to support himself in such a manner, still the hours of boredom and indignity stayed with him, taking enough of a toll on his mental landscape that they sometimes conspired to influence his dreams, calling him out of nothingness onto a sales floor, sluggish, half-awake, and cold at the prospect of returning to a kind of drudgery he thought he’d never have to endure again.

Fortunately though for Richards these sorts of dreams were easy to pick out, each time betraying themselves by the inevitable glitches in their surroundings: the fact that, for instance, the company employing Richards no longer existed, or that all of the customers he encountered spoke gibberish, and so it was no surprise that when he found himself inexplicably dressed in a purple, black, and teal uniform, reporting, it seemed, for an evening of work at a dilapidated multiplex movie theater, his first inclination was to think he was dreaming.

He stood in the theater’s deserted lobby, looking through its smudged glass windows at a blood-orange sky. All of the bulbs in the lobby’s display cases were burnt out, and the torn, yellowed movie posters inside were obscured by shadows; meanwhile both the box office and the concession stand were dark and un-staffed, as video screens in the upper corners of the high-ceilinged room looped trailers for films that had been released ten years earlier.

Confident, Richards smirked and began to shake his head back and forth, trying to wake up. These work dreams were never pleasant, and he saw no reason to slog through another one if he could help it, yet after several minutes of shaking his head to no effect his confidence began to wane, disappearing altogether when, suddenly, he was approached from around the far corner of the concession stand by a severe looking woman with grey, waxy skin and a tight helmet of curly brown hair. This woman was dressed in an off-white, button-front shirt tucked into a pair of stiff, khaki slacks. Neither young nor old, frown lines marked her scowling face, while a heavy ring of keys dangled from her right hip.

“I assume you’re here to work?” she asked. Her voice was flat and business-like.

“Yes…I am,” Richards said, cautiously, deciding he had no choice for now but to treat the situation as a real one. “Where would you like me to start?”

“Well…” the woman said, seeming to process his question as she spoke, “there’s almost an hour left before the next round of screenings, so I can’t use you in the box office or taking tickets…”

She stopped and considered the situation further, while Richards began to shift awkwardly in response, awaiting his assignment.