Skip to main content

Good Old Boys


“But— how does it know what to do?” 


I’ve seen this face a million times, by now. Distraught, confused. There’s an ache in there, and suddenly every tidbit in history class about one era becoming another has a bit more weight to it. This particular face is pale, doughy; almost a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature of old wealth. 


He’s looking at the Box— staring, really— like it’s just marched in on its own, found a spot to be planted, and declared to him that it’s here for everything, even his trophy wife hidden somewhere in a far-too-big house in the hills. Sympathetic as I can be at times, right now is not one of them. I have to actually try hard to not crack a cynical smile. It *is* a little funny. Men who celebrated their whole lives over essentially imaginary numbers, whole ecosystems of potentiality and calculated risks, thrown into a world where the tiniest unseen particles can decide the fates of more currency than has ever been generated in human history. Like daydreamers suddenly beaten over the head with their wayward thoughts. 


“It’s a quantum-groove algorithm”, I say, dipping back into the Marketing Voice. I dream in that voice now, I’m pretty sure, even use it during sex. It’s just automatic. Now matter how hard I’ve tried to scrub it away. 


“It watches the market with predictive programs that use electron waves..” He’s lost. I can see it in dower, glossy eyes. Looking back into days where this place would’ve been crowded with traders, big and quarrelsome voices echoing over frantic chained numbers. Hands clapping on suited backs. The place is empty as a tomb now, except for the delivery bots wheeling in more Boxes. Large, slick onyx monoliths where one side is a singular glassy panel covered by colorful patterns. They look like out of place experimental art beneath a classical revival ceiling and on the burgundy carpet. 


I continue on down my recitation like a good parishioner. He signs the paperwork, still resigned to a far away place. When I leave him, he’s still there. Looking at the Box.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Monsters in the Age of Men

 I saw a woman in the grocery store.  I saw her true shape, beneath raven black hair and pale eyes. She bore great wings, wings that carried endless plains across them and above roared storms, bruised clouds cracking and howling. Lightning split the sky into so many shattered pieces. She stared back at me, surrounded by the tiny people who so long ago had feared and worshipped darkening skies, crashing crescendoes.  We found each other out in the night, behind the building where trees and grass and vines grew untamed like in memories of vanished wilderness. I felt electricity when our lips met, felt spiking painful potential when I caressed her bronzed skin. In my ear I heard thrumming and pounding, shrieking wind. Building and building up into the sky, strong enough to crack mountains and scatter the stars.  I gave her the sea, brine and crushing depths between every kiss. I unfurled myself beneath massive wings, sprawling and armored and impossible, flashing colors...

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...

Traitors Folly

 Traitors Folly Dad always dragged us to roadside attractions. But, while I’ve forgotten the tallest stack of butter and the fattest cow and a million other tidbits of oddness, I haven’t  forgotten the Monument to Insurrection.  I don’t think I ever will.  Whatever internet searches might have you believe, there are roadside attractions in the East Coast, they’re real common. Of course, I can’t tell you exactly where we were— no one can seem to remember, or doesn’t want to remember. Just that, heading back from relatives in Philadelphia and about five more hours from home, dad was excitedly pulling us into some lot. It was morning, maybe seven or eight, and no one was really there.  “All the better!”, dad practically cheered, and we were out, stretching legs or twisting backs. Dad went on ahead, of course, but not far. I could see him, standing in the shadow of what must’ve been our reason for stopping: a bronze statue of a man, maybe thirty or so feet tall....