A Short Fiction

Hi guys! :-)

I had to write a piece of fiction for a class.  It's due tomorrow.  I'll give it to you all tonight.  Take it with a grain of salt.  It was written in haste and the subject matter is dark, but the flesh of the story hides things that are very meaningful to me.  Also, I copy/pasted this and some of the paragraph formatting looks a little screwy for some reason but it shouldn't detract from the story itself.

Sorry about all the gravity lately.  I'll write something lighthearted soon.

If you want it in PDF, for your e-reader or whatever, click here.

Also: for those of you that haven't, check out my new micro-blog here.

Here we go:

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A Night’s Work

The siren crept into his American long-legged dream slowly, droning softly in the background at first, covering the woman covered in his sweat and growing, breathing down his neck, rushing him, urging him on to his triumphant visceral climax.  As it manifested itself into that shrill discordant pulse of mechanical red light fear, he became lucid and knew that soon the alarm would break him free from his dream state and from the stack of breasts and blonde that lay beneath him, moaning that pop-song of the bicentennial into the American heartland.  He hurried himself, propelling himself faster between her legs, trying to beat the ticking clock that was his flesh ears, which would soon no longer stand for his sleep.

            She moaned louder. He could see it in the vessels and tendons attempting to pull themselves free of her neck through her pale skin.  He couldn’t hear it though.  As he thrust and pushed and tried, climax seemed to sink away from him as into a black hole and he began to get tired.  He wondered how he could tire physically in a waking dream and thought of his mother in frustration and then his mind turned to the missiles and he felt a single gigantic bead of sweat coalesce at the end of his nose.  He watched as it fell from him.  He felt the salty liquid spring itself loose.  Time seemed to slow down and he stopped thrusting, and she looked up at him with those eyes that begged too many questions and made him a woman and the siren stopped as the bead drifted along its straight path, downward, to explode in a cartoonish splash on the taught flesh just above her navel. 

            “Just… just one more minute…” he said to no one.  She suddenly had no face and no ears. Then, he woke up.

            The siren in his cramped workstation was deafening, and a red light on the wall blinked itself on and off along with the cacophony, warning him that the proximity sensor outside had been set off by the motion of some deer or coyote again.  Out there in the plains, where he watched his babies, the missiles, the wildlife came frequently.  He would suffer the sound of the alarm at least twice per week.  He sat in the cramped, obnoxiously white and well-lit space six days per week.  His shifts lasted twelve hours.  He wore his fatigues.  He liked his babies.  His five little children of death.

            Blinking the sleep from his eyes, vaguely remembering the blonde and his frustration, he stood himself up out of his big comfy chair and picked up his M-16, which stood propped in a nearby corner, aiming into heaven and the heart of God.  The gun was loaded, as always.  His sidearm, too, was loaded, but no longer felt heavy against his right hip.  He flipped a switch on a colorful control panel, next to his notebook computer, and the siren stopped.  Big black clown boots tick-tocked their way across the sterile, smooth cement floor as he walked the five feet to the tiny dark stairway that led out to the North Dakota emptiness.

            “These fucking deer…” he muttered to himself. 

            There were a couple of holes in the fence around his silos that had been on the slate for mending for months.  The coyotes and deer easily got through to the grass and the small game that moved around the one-mile square area in his charge.  It was seasonally warm outside when he pressed his full body weight into his shoulder and then into the big steel door that he didn’t bother anymore to lock.  He’d been scolded for it once, but the C.O. had his own problems and didn’t make a big deal about little things.  No one had ever attempted to breach the perimeter of the restricted area since the silos had been built.

            He’d forgotten to hit the lights.  He stepped back into the stairway about a foot and pounded his fist against a large red button on the wall.  Behind him, the grassy expanse lit up under the floods.  Procedure was to identify what had tripped the proximity alarm, and, if it was human, to detain it while calling for backup.  Since he knew it wasn’t human, he knew he might have a chance to practice his aim on some unfortunate animal.  He would log the disturbance in the hourlies and, hopefully, he thought, return back to the dream of the blonde.  The blonde was his apple pie.

            His eyes searched around him as he stepped out into the grass.  He could smell the dirt and the grass.  Stark contrast to the smell of the base, where he lived.  The base smelled like diesel and brass polish and gunpowder.  But out here, it was the smell of earth.  A beautiful place to take care of his babies. 

            Scanning the horizon, he immediately thought that the animal had already ran away.  Usually they did when he hit the lights.  They seemed almost as bright as the sun behind him and he could hear them burning with electricity running through their industrial bulbs.  He was seeing nothing out on that dark horizon.

            “Fucking deer….” He muttered to himself.  He saw nothing, but heard the gentle howl of a mother coyote to his North.  He reached into his breast pocket and produced a pack of Marlboro Reds and a Zippo lighter with a military insignia on it.  He thought of the dream again, and felt aroused.  He thought of the cigarette that he would have had at the end of the dream, had it ever came.  The end of his dreams never seemed to come though, and he flicked the lighter open with that familiar metal clink.  He pulled his callused thumb down once, twice, then three times across the tiny wheel that dragged across the flint.  Finally, a little poof and fire was his.  He lit the end of the cigarette and heard it crackle as he shut the lighter again with that satisfying American noise.  He liked the way the little cylinder fit between his lips and he felt as man.

            He leaned on his weapon and thought of little.

The cigarette was almost gone when he heard something a few yards away from him to his left.  He was startled, but told himself that he was not.  He hid behind his cloud of smoke and his missiles and his gun and did not ever have to be afraid.  He pulled the gun up from his side, up from where its butt had been resting in the dirt, and swung it around toward the noise.  He strained to listen, the still burning Marlboro pouring unfiltered smoke now up into his eyes.  There was a dark spot in the lights where a few of the bulbs had burned out, the way the fence had been holed.  He heard the noise again.  It sounded like a coyote.  Too soft to be a dear, but rhythmic like a footstep.  Eyes burned from smoke and focused.  Left hand pulled the cigarette down from his face.  Ears reached out.

            The steps, he realized, were not of four feet but of two, and his heart immediately began to pound. 

            “Stop!” he screamed on reflex into the night.  He thought he saw a figure emerging from the malfunction-produced shadow.  The steps proceeded, and he became aware of the shadow in a real sense.  A slight figure, walking slowly.  Deliberately.

            “HEY!  STOP OR I’LL SHOOT!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.  The butt of the Marlboro had fallen to the ground next to his boot and now he was staring down the length of the black weapon at the shadow.  It continued to move toward him.

            “YOU ARE TRESPASSING ON THE PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE! THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA! PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND KNEEL DOWN SLOWLY, NOW, OR I WILL OPEN FIRE!” he screamed.  He had never had to say it before.  Never threatened that thing they had made him memorize.  He’d never aimed a weapon at a human before, but he had dreamt it a million times.  Somehow, the dreams had never felt like this.  He thought of his mother and his babies.

            The figure advanced into the threshold of the light and he immediately aimed his weapon away.  He sucked in a gasp.  It was a young girl.  Maybe eighteen.  Her eyes were closed and she stepped slowly and deliberately toward him.

            “What is….” He started to ask himself.  He put his gun on the ground, breaking procedure, and walked toward the girl. 

            “Hey! Hey!” he shouted out, as his big black boots clip clomped like hooves across the ground.  He cleared the distance between his gun and the girl in a matter of seconds.  He wondered why she hadn’t responded.  He stood in her path as she stepped slowly forward and when she stepped into his space, he grabbed her small frame by its shoulders and shook her.  She started, and lurched back against his grip, eyes suddenly flung open.  A dark brown.  Almost black.  She lurched back as if in terror, but her eyes were soft.  Her hair was black like the metal of his M-16 and her skin was brown.  She smelled like a campfire. 

            “Where… what?” she whispered.

            He let her go.  She looked confused as she glanced around herself and then back at him.  He realized that she must have been camping nearby and had a spell of sleep-walking.  Campers frequently came out that way.  They weren’t supposed to.  No one stopped them, as long as they didn’t cross the fence-lines.

            “It’s okay.  I think you were… do you sleep walk?  You’re on Air Force land.” He said.

            “Oh…” she said.

            “Out there camping, huh?” he asked.

            “Yeah…” She was silent in thought, looking as if she was about to explain.  Then she just repeated: “yeah.”

            “Listen, you shouldn’t be wandering around out here like this....” he said, glancing around at the dark horizon suspiciously.

            “Wait… where am I?  Who are you?”

            “I’m Corp… I’m Chris.” He said. “This is a missile range.  You know, like, the nukes?”

            He said it proud and recalled his oath.  His oath had made him feel man, like the long, slender cigarette between his lips.

            “Oh god….” She said.  She stepped back away from him.  She struck him suddenly as perfectly beautiful.  Nothing like the blonde in the dream.  Something inside of him raged and he thought about the missiles being flung loose from their cages.

            “…what?” he asked.

            “You… this… you’re in charge of bombs?” she struggled to speak, but was beginning to appear more awake.

            “Well, just five.  But, yeah.  Well, it’s fifteen actually, each missile has three warhe….” He trailed off.  He wasn’t supposed to talk about the missiles to anyone.  But he had trailed off because her face was contorted in horror.  Her skin was smooth and looked as though it was rarely contorted at all.  He liked the smell of the campfire wafting off of her, but it was dissipating as she backed away from him.

            “Can I just go?  I won’t tell anyone I was out here.  I’ll just walk back the way I came,” she said.  She started to turn around.  He wondered what was startling her so bad.

            “No!  Wait! You can’t go.  It’s dangerous out there, and, anyway, the…” he wondered what to say, briefly, then continued, “… the guys on base are already on their way out to secure the perimeter.  You tripped the alarm.  If you don’t want to get in trouble, you can’t run off.”

            He lied.

            She paused, and turned back to him.  She appeared deep in thought for many seconds.

            “Why do you do this job?” she asked bluntly.

            “Are you kidding?  This is the coolest job in the world!” he replied.

            She looked angry.

            “You don’t know what you’re saying.  That’s crazy.  Why would you want to sit here by these things?  Where are they, anyway?” she glanced around herself.

            “They’re all over there, behind the lights.  You can’t seem ‘em from here.  But they’re there.  I like sitting out here.  I get time to read.  Play computer games.  Sleep a little here and there.  I was sleeping when you set off the alarm.  You interrupted a good dream…”

            “You interrupted a dream too…” she said.

            She stepped back toward him.  He pulled out the cigarettes and lit one. The coyotes curled a series of howls across the distant northern sky and the campfire smell got stronger again before the tobacco obscured it.

            “Do you sleep walk often?  Do people dream while they do that?  What was your dream?”

            She looked at his eyes but appeared to be focused on something distantly behind him. 

            “I can’t remember exactly.  I was with my brother… maybe in a car driving to St. Paul?  I think we were going to Minnesota but it might have been a bus or a train or…” she continued to look into his eyes as she conjured up the sliding memory of the dream.

            Suddenly her eyes widened.

            “What?” he asked. 

            “You won’t believe me… but my dream was about mushroom clouds! Fucking… nuclear explosions!  How WEIRD is that?!?  I have NEVER dreamt that before tonight…”

            He cocked his head to the left in canine disbelief. 

            “I remember… we were on a bus or a train and I remember looking back behind us and seeing these ridiculous explosions where we had come from… and I remember knowing that our family had been trapped there.  I remember knowing that my family was dying…” she said.

            “That is… REALLY weird.” He said.

            They stood there quiet for a moment.  He didn’t know what to say.  Surely she was exaggerating herself.

            “Walk back to the control room with me.  You can stay there for a bit.  Normally I think they would arrest you and you would be in big trouble but… I think I can convince them it was just an animal.”

            She was lost in thought, her eyes glazed over.  Then, almost robotically this time, she began to step her slender form toward the lights behind him.  He walked with her, and hurried ahead of her slightly to grab his weapon.  He slung it over his shoulder and then turned around to her.

            “So, in the dream, why were the nukes going off?  Shouldn’t you have been dreaming about explosions in Russia or China or something?”

            “I don’t know.  I don’t remember much specific.  Just the most sickening pain…”

            “Well that sucks.  My dream was way better.  I was dreaming about a girl.  She looked kinda like you, in fact.” He lied and winked.

            She stopped in her tracks a few yards from the door to the little stairway.  He dropped the half smoked cigarette to the ground and stepped on hit with his clown boot.

            “What if this means something?”

            “What?” he asked.

            “Why did I walk out here?  Why did I dream that?  This has to mean something…”

            “Don’t get all weird on me now, sister.  Maybe it just meant… that we were supposed to meet.”  He smiled big at her, trying to seduce her but not knowing how.

            She stared down at her feet, covered in designer hiking boots.  She wondered about how she could have tied them in her sleep.  She felt at once as though she was still dreaming.

            “What the fuck is this?  Who are you?!?” she shouted at him suddenly.

            “What do you mean?!  I told you already!”

            “This isn’t real.  I’m still asleep!”

            “No, no.  You’re awake.  And you’re starting to freak me out.  Come on and get in here you can go back to sleep on the bunk. I’ll take you back to town in the morning when my shift is over.”

            She thought about his proposal, staring at her feet.

            “No.  We’re turning these things off.”

            She stepped toward him.

            “What?”

            “We’re turning these bombs off.  We’re going to break them.  You’re going to break them.”

            He laughed.

            “I’d go to prison for a long time if I did that.  So would you.  You’re crazy.”

            “It could be done?”

            “It coul… no! We’d go to prison.  They’re never going to get fired anyway.  Who knows if they even work?  We’re not doing anything to the bombs. You’re crazy!”

            He thought about his mother and the blonde and his babies.

            Then he felt his eyes involuntarily moving up the gentle line of her body.  The curve or her hips was small.  She was short.  Thin.  Not his American dream girl.

            Suddenly, a violence erupted from her mouth.

“You mother fucker, you turn off those bombs or I’ll make you kill me tonight!” she screamed.  She charged at him.  Reflexively, he caught her before she could dodge by and into the control room.  He caught her and held her and she screamed.  He was starting to wonder if she was high on some powerful psychoactive or if perhaps she was schizophrenic.

            “Hey, kid, calm DOWN!” he said with force, pulling her into his chest hard to restrain her.  She calmed down physically and now her gaze drilled into his eyes and her focus was right there, seeping into his optic nerve, permeating his brain down to the reptilian center.

            She stared hard in anger and disgust.  He couldn’t imagine what to do next.  She was clearly unstable.  They hadn’t trained him for this.

            “I could get in trouble for you being out here,” he said softly.

            “Fuck you.  Turn them off!”

            “This is just my job…”

            “How can you live this way, with so many lives on your hands?”

            He’d never thought of it.  His mind was drawn into her.  He sucked in a deep breath and sensed a tiny whisper of perfume.

            “You’re beautiful…” he whispered.

She didn’t respond.

He leaned in and kissed her mouth.  It was short, and she jerked back, but did not free herself from him.

            “You piece of shit.  You want me?”

            He nodded, like a boy, sullen.  She smirked.  She leaned into him and kissed him hard.  Her tongue darted into his mouth and tasted stale tobacco.  She tasted like cheap beer.

            The kiss lasted several seconds, and then she pulled back. 

            “Turn them off?  For me?”

            “I… can’t.”

            He was becoming a monster inside.

            She lifted the 9mm Beretta from the holster she had unclipped at his side and dropped low, sliding from out of his arms with ease.  She stepped back two quick paces and pulled the gun up to point at his face.  He didn’t say a word, immediately placing his hands in the air.

            “Now… turn them off.”

            He stood like a statue.

            “Put the gun down.  The men from the base will be here any minute.  This doesn’t have to be like this.  Put the gun down and you can just walk away.  I promise,” he said.

            “You kiss like shit, you know that?”

            “I… I’m sorry…”

            Her eyes softened.

            “How can you live this way?”

            “It’s just the way it is.  If I wasn’t here, someone else would be.  There are a hundred silos out here.  Nineteen other guys doing exactly what I’m doing.”

            “Would you push the button if they called and told you to?”

            “I don’t think about that.”

            The heavy weapon remained perfectly still in her hands.  She had turned the safety off before aiming it.  She’d fired before.

            “Would you die, then, for them?”

            “What? For the bombs?”

            “Yeah.”

            He heard coyotes across the expanse of the night.  They sounded melancholy.  He thought about his American dream.  His white woman covered in sweat with preposterous breasts.

            “I took an oath.”

            “You kiss like shit.  Probably fuck like shit too.  You military men all fuck like shit.”

            He was startled and suddenly angry.

            “Why don’t you try me?”

            She laughed.

            “You couldn’t handle me, Corporal.”

            His heart was pounding and he could feel himself sweating now from anxiousness.  She looked calm and angry.

            “You will turn the bombs off now or I’m going to shoot you.”

            Heavy breath filled his shallow lungs.

            He thought of the warheads and was suddenly filled with resolve. 

            “Fine,” he said. He turned around and walked quickly toward the control room.  The steel door was still cracked open and cold white light flowed out of it.  He swung the door wide and darted inside.  He could hear her rapid footsteps behind him.  When she appeared around the edge of the door, the butt of his M-16 slammed into her temple and she crumpled to the ground, writhing in pain.  He kicked the Beretta away from her into the dirt.  She was silent against the hum of the floodlights above.  He reached over and hit the red button.  The lights flickered, and then were off.

            He pulled her inside and laid her on the cold cement floor.  Her brown skin was in contrast to everything about him.  She moaned and he fumbled to remove her belt.  She shut her eyes tight, trying to recollect her awareness.  The belt came loose and he began to drag her feminine cargo pants down her legs. 

            She opened her eyes and knew what he was doing.

            He pulled her underwear down and struggled quickly to remove his own pants and underwear, and then he went about his dream work.

            He thrust and thrust for a long time.  He felt, at moments, as though he were coming out of his body, shocked at his action.  He couldn’t believe himself.  He felt sick and he thrust himself into her and she lay there as cold and still as possible.

            He sweat.

            A bead of sweat rolled off the tip of his nose and splashed down onto her gray T-shirt, creating a dark little circle of moisture.

            He thought about his mother and he strained against himself and he thought about his missiles, long and hard, ejecting their payload of death, and he tried to eject.  He worked and worked.  He pushed and shoved and grew tired and finally, after his eternity and hers, he gave up. 

He pulled himself free of her and rolled onto the floor beside her.

            He began to weep.  She leaned her head to the side to look at him.  Fatigues around his ankles, boots still on, he wept.  Like a child.  Like a baby, curling into himself. 

She had been his first, and he had failed in the most profound sense.

            She stood up and pulled her clothes back on.

            “You fuck like shit,” she said. 

She leaned over him and looked at his face, red and hot from tears and potential nuclear fire.  She spit on him.  It landed on his cheek and ran down to his lip.

            She stepped out into the sound of coyotes and disappeared into the night.    He wondered what mommy would think, and he knew.

            He knew.

            He was no man.

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Love.