Rack and Ruin

My short story, "Rack and Ruin", was just published by Holding Antlers.  They're a nifty online lit mag that sends you a antler-themed pic gleaned from the 'net, and you respond with a story.

Check it out: Rack and Ruin

Striped Suits are In this Year

A short story of mine was shortlisted at MashStories!  Here's a link:

Striped Suits are In this Year

"Lure" in Oblong

Oblong published my short story, "Lure" on October 7; here's the curated link, for convenience sake! 

Lure

"Samizdat" published at Squawk Back

Pretty happy to have had a story included in a recent issue of Squawk Back.  Some pretty nifty stories on there, too, both in this issue and in the archives.  I'd encourage everyone to check it out: between the practical reality of rapid turnaround and the philosophical adventurism of the editor, I think they put out some awesome pieces of fiction and poetry.

Anyway, just wanted to set a link to my story, Samizdat, which had a pretty hard time finding a home until Squawk Back came along.

Snake in the Garden

     She washed her lunch dishes, not much at all, a single plate, actually quiet clean and not needing much scrubbing (only bread crumbs and a tiny smear of mustard on one edge), a small glass bowl cloudy with the remains of yogurt and dark berries, a spoon, a coffee cup.  In the past she would have waited until the sink was full of dishes, but fastidiousness had become her habit, cleaning-up an act reflexive and natural.

     She looked out the window at the back yard, vibrant with the green chaos of a healthy vegetable garden, tomatoes, heavy-leafed summer squash, cucumbers, peppers, all coming along nicely, and beyond them to the roses along the sunny back fence.

     When they had moved in, she had expected to have to take the roses out, put on her long-sleeved gardening shirt and her heavy leather work gloves, clip back the long ragged arms of the bush, carve the root ball from the soil.  A thin shell of struggling life surrounding a tangle of dead and rotten core.

     But now they thrived in the summer sun.  Their grave state, so close to the end, untended and so near exhaustion and extirpation, had given her the courage to be as ruthless as she needed to be in her pruning.  She had cut and sheared and slashed, opening the bushes up and letting sunlight and air circulate through their choking hearts. 

     It had been good for her to, good to see the garden take shape and fill in empty spaces with growing plants and new life, good too to be outside, away from the sick heavy weight inside the house, away from him. 

     She had saved the roses, carried them through the fall and winter, swaddling them in black garbage bags during the rare over night frosts.  They surprised her with their hardiness.  She wanted them to thrive.

     She went to the library, she read books and articles online, she used gardening podcasts not as background noise but as dedicated listening, sitting in her chair with a cup of coffee and a notepad.  She had never had a garden before, had never known she would want one, had learned only now that she did.  He wouldn't listen to them with her, wouldn't talk about her plans for the garden.   

     She learned about soil, about how it translated time and geology and moisture and chemistry into the poetry of plants.  She had dug into the dirt under the roses, pried open heavy clay gray and cold and sterile.  The roses had been under attack from below, their foundations undermined by poor soil.  And, finally, she found a place for her husband in the garden.

     “He’s finally doing something useful” she said aloud and to herself.  That was another recent habit that felt very right, very comfortable.  She smiled to herself and washed the heavy bread knife.  The roses had never looked healthier, and she hadn't had to use any chemical fertilizers.

     

     Perhaps she could dry the rosehips for tea, she thought.

Scratch

     Though he hates all of creation, even he’s not immune to the stark grandeur of the badlands at night.  He admires the starlit beauty of the deeply eroded landscape as he goes about his work, slipping through empty moments of time with his shovel and his bag.  He has dug thirteen pits already tonight, and has time for a few more.  He can’t be seen by anyone, that’s part of the deal, and so night is the best time for work.   

     

     The arroyo looks good.  Overland flow has sliced through soft silty mudrock, exposing a well-indurated sandstone ledge at the base.  That’ll do nicely for the Tyrannosaur, he says to no one in particular.  He bends down, no mean feat with his oddly bent legs (though, he admits, the hooves come in handy, all that scrambling over hill and slope), and licks his serpent tongue over the rock.  Quartz cemented, thank Baal, he didn’t really want to have to deal with the iron cements, not now, not after the last few pits and with dawn so close, iron that hates magic with every vibration of its electron shell. 

     

      He burns the binding mineral away with a wave of his hand, transferring the energy a few thousand miles up where a thermal anomaly will go unnoticed.  Then, carefully and one by one, he removes the rounded grains of feldspar, quartz, and chert, the flakes of mica, and the microscopic spikes of sanidine that constitute the sandstone.  He lets them drift in limbo while he looks over the schematics.

     

     Dagon save us, there are so many parts!  It’s all nonsense, he thinks to himself, and just the sort of waste he’ll do away with once he gets in charge.  He lines the pieces up for the (mercifully incomplete) find: teeth, premaxilla, maxilla, opercular, dentary, jugal, quadratojugal, quadrate, ye gods they’re complicated beasts, squamosal, post orbital, nasal, occipital, and the vertebral column. 

     

     Disarticulation has to be done precisely, the bones oriented as if they’d naturally settled down to the bottom of the fossilized river channel.  He has to double check the number of vertebrae, but finally the bones are laid out in death.  He sighs and, with just a whiff of sulfur, brings the sand grains back into reality, carefully placing them around the fossil before cementing the whole thing in place.  He leaves a few bits of weathered bone poking out of the rock, just enough to catch the eye of a passing grad student. 

     

     He sits down on the sandstone bench, wiping his brow and remembers how proud he’d been of the idea at the time.  Sure, godlessness was on the rise, but the work!  Sometimes he thought that the smug Old Man had known how tortuous it would be when he’d agreed to let him do it.  Same smirk he’d had about all that Job business, back so many years ago.

     

     And with no end in sight!  Who could have guessed how mad they’d go over phylogenetics!  Not just enough to find the things, they had to interpret them too, the bastards.  He ground his teeth in frustration.  Each one they found was a data point that outlined a prediction to be tested by more field work and more fossils.  Then, when they filled in that space and made their little cladograms, they’d make more predictions and look for more fossils!  It was hell!  And he should know!

     

     He nudged the bag at his feet, felt its weight, and knew he had better get moving.  He stood up, scattered a few fragmentary bits of turtle shell in among the mudrock, and started walking towards the next site.

Working Girl

The last customers leave before first light, and then we have our mornings free.  It is silly of them to do so, since we are not tired, cannot be tired, but they do it anyway.  It is to them the right way to end their nights, I suppose, to slink back through the dark with their coats over their arms and their hair mussed, racing dawn back to their homes.  Do they creep in, hoping to avoid neighbors?  Do their wives wait for them, making them lie about an all-nighter at the office?  I suppose they would; that is the tradition after all, and tradition is very important to people.

     Regardless, we will get no customers until the evening comes around again.  We clean up, because there is nothing else to do and we get so easily bored.  First the rooms; sheets stripped, floors mops, rugs shampooed, bathrooms scrubbed, garbage autoclaved.  Then the public rooms, which always seem dirtier to me, somehow.  Maybe because I don’t see all that happens in them, only the remains of it?  Couches and chairs and lounges all cleaned, tables swabbed down, windows wiped.  Menials, barely sentient, do most of the in-place cleaning, of course, but Madam always says that it helps to have our hands in all parts of the business.

     Then, we clean ourselves.  Scraping and peeling first, then under the showers for disinfectants.  Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antimemetic, the foamy works, then steamed at five hundred degrees.  Skin patched where it has come undone, repairs made to the any structural defects or misalignments that may have developed over the night’s work.  That is when we girls sit around and talk, in the repair room while the automatics go over us.  We swap stories mostly, about what they wanted us to do, what they paid us to do, what they needed us to do.  I’m sure that is traditional too, gossiping I mean, back when it was done the old fashioned way.  Madam always says tradition is important, but oh!  The things they want done to them!  The things they will beg and whimper for, will pant out, clawing at you with eager pain on their poor, sad, hungry faces.  

     I’m not prejudiced against organics, not at all, and I know they have needs, but still, some of the things they want done to them, or that they want to do to you!  And such specifics, such absolutes needed, or it’s no good and there goes your tip.  The fabric is wrong, or the metal isn’t cold enough, it needs to be this way, no that way, faster, now slower, harder, now softer.

     Perhaps Madam is right, that we provide a real service, one above and beyond the physical transactions.  Maybe we are their last outpost out on the edge of the moral landscape, an inviolate point on their map around which they can navigate safely.  They seem to need things like that, in their sad, short lives.

It pays the bills.  Electricity isn’t cheap, and a robot’s gotta stay powered up.

Visionary

  She heard him sigh as she turned the card over.  His face, already on the edge of collapse, crumbled further as his mouth twisted into a grimace.  She had to stifle her exasperation.  She preferred it when they just came in for the kicks.  The serious ones were always trouble.  

     His eyes flitted from the card to her face and back to the card.  She cleared her throat.

     “That card…” she began.

     “I know, I know, the Tower,” he moaned, “the only bad one in the deck.”  His finger hovered over it, tracing in the air above the card the jagged gash of the lightning bolt that shattered the scene.  “Ruin, destruction, chaos.  A crisis on the horizon, a catastrophic failure.”  Goddammit, she thought, an enthusiast.

     “Well,” she said, “Yes.  However!” she added quickly, watching his tragic frown deepen.  “However, in this position it can represent hardships to be overcome, you see?”  He looked doubtful.  “And it is meaningless in isolation, yes?  We must draw another card,” she said, ladling thick spoonfuls of what she thought of as her soothing voice into her words.  “You will see, you will see!”  He hunched his shoulders against fate, reached across, drug the topmost card into the center of the table, and turned it over. 

     Even Madam Julia gasped.

     A second Tower, smug as a coiled snake, lay on the table between them. 

     The man’s eyes grew white as his pupils withered away in fear.  She watched his Adam’s apple flutter up and down his thin throat.  “I don’t understand…” she said, but was cut off by a loud groan, thickened with fear and muffled by the man’s closed mouth.  “Listen,” she said, watching her tip vanish, “the cards can be tricky, fickle even, sometimes they just don’t work right, you know?  How about we try palmistry?  Or tea leaves!  I’ve got some nice lapsang souchong, we’ll get a cuppa going, alright?”  Her voice trailed off as the man, sick with fear, locked her eyes in his own unblinking gaze.  She swallowed, and tried to protest as he reached across the table for the deck.

     “Look mister,” she started, but then stopped.  He shook his head, once, and drew a card.  A third Tower joined the other two between them.

     A single, shrill cry from deep in his throat filled the little room.  She jumped as he leapt up, baring his teeth and rolling his eyes.  He overturned the table and lurched drunkenly towards the exit, tears streaming down his face, great raking sobs shaking his frame.  The bell over the door chimed obscenely as he fled into the street.

     Madam Julia was surprised to find herself standing.  She patted herself down nervously, shoulders, chest, hips, stomach, then ran to the door and locked it, switched off the neon sign flashing in the night outside. 

     She rummaged through her desk, shifting errant paperwork until she found what she was looking for.  She ground her teeth as she examined the box the tarot cards had come in.

     “Fucking pinochle deck,” she growled.

The One That Got Away

     He shifted the cane fishing pole in his grip, leaned back in the lawn chair, and yawned.  Gnats flitted in his ears and eyes, but at least it was cooler there under the cypresses by the pond.  The surface of the water was still, mirroring a green  border of trees that framed a pale hole of sky overhead.  He could easily nap here, even without the help of the beers in the cooler next to him.

     He felt a tug on the pole and watched the rippling echo of the the bright orange cork as it bobbed  in the water.  No bite all day, and now there was something playing with his line.  He scowled, watchful.  The cork was still now.  He reached for his beer.

     The cork bobbed once, twice, then ducked beneath the surface of the pond, flashing into view a second later and two feet to the left.  No doubt about it, he thought, something was on the line.  He tossed the pole in the pond, folded his chair, picked up the cooler, and walked home.

Practical Solutions to Elf Problems

Being a Tale Originally Told Upon Twitter, in Thirteen Parts

     The Elves would come every full moon, stealing young men from the village and dancing them to death in the forest.  Priests prayed.  Wizards chanted.  Witches tried to trap them in silver circles.  Nothing worked, and they danced on.
   
     "Superstitious crap," scoffed Auntie.  "We need less magic and more thinking," she said, heading for the clocktower.  Auntie spent all day disassembling the clock's mechanism, hamming and welding and cursing and wrenching.
   
     The moon rose, and the piping began.  But when the young men stumbled towards the woods, a new figure followed.  Auntie and I watched from the clearing's edge.  Her clockwork man, tall and bronze, gleamed in the torchlight.  The Elf Queen's cat-eyes glittered.  He bowed.  She kicked off her unicorn-hide moccasins and took him in her arms.  Pipes and drums echoed.  She was dark and fluid, he was cool and metallic.  She laughed at the moon, and they danced.
   
     All night he clicked along, the Queen sweating, her people stamping feet and cheering.  The moon sank, the sun rose.  The elves left at dawn.  The Queen led the clockwork man into the wood.  Auntie threw her his key.  The Queen waved.
   
     The elves still dance, but now they don't take our young men.  You can hear pipes, and laughter, and his ticking.  For saving them, Auntie had her pick of the young men.  I don't believe she's decided on one, just yet.
   
     That's when I developed my love of science. Thanks for considering my application to your University's program.

Flash Fiction 4: Flashier, Fictionier

Inscribed in electrons, I present more Flash Fictions from my #FlashFictionFriday series, from that there tweeter.

It's the thought that counts and I appreciate the gifts, really, but what I am supposed to do with seven Hands of Glory?

The bunkers were packed with cigarettes. "Gold-hording Libertarians are kicking themselves now," laughed the SectorLord

Velvet wings whispered between the cold smokestacks of the factory ruins. Moths, searching for puddles, found only bones.

Silence screamed. From upstairs they heard the click of the latch, the groan of hinges as the door opened.

The noise jolted him awake in time to see the old oak topple over. Below in the yard was the biggest pig he'd ever seen.

He mounted the bus steps, handed his ticket to the driver, took a set at the back, and waited. Even in death, he waited.

He watched snails graze in light streaming down through the dome of trees. He too was patient. Night would come soon.

Always digging, dirt on his claws, pinpoint eyes shut against failing soil. A purpose, his reward for having lived well.

I understand it's an ancient and powerful urge, returning whence you were born to lay your eggs. But it's MY head now.

Their noises were getting to him. He'd walled off the bedroom, cooked his meals in the bathroom. How dare they be happy?

His bones bounced along the riverbed, scattered and seperated by the flow. He'd always wanted to see the ocean.

In the right light, the hen was opalescent. Each laid egg was a cosmic egg, a universe in ovo. Made the best omelettes.

"It's like 'Dorian Grey'."
"So you don't get any older..."
"Right."
"...and the souffle?"
"The souffle ages for me."

The tractor's rumble grew louder as it crested the hill. Head down, she worked fast, brushing pollen into each flower.

Earth's tilt causes the changing seasons. Hades, in his mad pursuit of Persephone, sideswiped the axis in his chariot.

The Change came every fullmoon. Terrible urges, body warping. Smell, hearing, all gone. Sparky hated being a Wereman.

Flash Fiction Archive the Third

Here's a third collection of my Flash Fiction, from my #FlashFictionFriday series on the Twitter.  Enjoy!

Gut-bound hair wreathes hung from the eaves. Insects nailed to the door with rose thorns. Clearly, we had Fairies.

Celebrations of R'lyeh's subduction down the Nankai Trough were dampened by petrologic models of a metamorphic Cthulhu.

Lanterns bobbed through the fog, accompanied by the faint noises of men and dogs. Cursing, I ran for the woods.

Fifty miles back, the crashed Saucer hissed in the thunderstorm. Behind him in the truck bed, the tarp stirred.

"Why buzzsaw arms!?" he shouted, scrambling up the tree. "Science!" I said. Below, B.U.N.Y.O.N.'s eyes glowed red.

The rain of blood may have cast the world into despair and madness but, by God, it really helped our melon patch.

As we dug we found more pipes leading into the house. Water, ozone, salt water, treacle, chicken blood...we kept digging.

Inexorably the toffee glacier advanced, grinding the hills to dust as it approached town. Never piss off a Candy Wizard.

The vines were meant for soil erosion. Grew fast, strangled a Company man who came to check. I collected seed carefully.

"Canopic jars?" I asked, peering into the pantry. "Canning time soon," she answered, feeling the edge of her knife

The trick in birdwatching is to remain perfectly still, sometimes for hours. I'm good at it myself. Oh! Turkey Vultures!

"Work ain't what it used to be" said Poseidon, polishing sand grains as slightly acidic waters ate away at his carapace.

Butterflies gathered on the mud, wet with piss. Maybe, I thought, he'll be home tonight. Wings shimmered in the heat.

"detect can I that None" .pauses He. "?fabric space/time in problems any seen you have, accident Chronoengine the Since"

The rain ended, the clouds scattered, but something wasn't right. Had there always been two suns? Had they always been blue?

The raccoons are a real problem, for sure, but I'm more mad at the people that sold them the guns in the first place.

Plotting global seismicity on a map centered on the south pole, words emerged. Of course, I don't appreciate profanity.

The rocket, with a record of Earth's history, science, and art, rose into the sky. "Now," he said "to destroy the Earth."

The ceiling glistend with egg jellies. Chitin debris littered the floor. "Son," he said, "clean up after your pet."

Sara leaned off the dock with her torch. Wriggling, silvery things swam to the light. "We'll bring Dad to us" she said

"Teeth are taxonomically valuable." They unfurled a tentacle, "For instance, dentomorph b3 is common in garbage strata

The War against God was surprisingly short, once we found the bastard. (He was in the Gaps, buying overpriced khakis.)

The tangled bush was too lush when everything else died. It moved without wind. He should have buried him somewhere else

We got the iceblock into the warm garage to melt. If you squint, you can see the shape inside, tall, twisted, dark.

Putting down a vengeful spirit was the easy part. My hair smelled like holy herbs, and the security deposit? Lost cause.

"I'll take it."
"Sight unseen?"
"Sure."
"Look, it's a Mk 2. Patched frame, iffy pump-"
"Blonde?"
"Yeah-"
"I'll pay cash"

"Oil ain't the only thing under these salt domes. Take a listen." He hands me the headset, and I hear a moaning chant.

A jagged piece of bloody onyx had been stabbed into my door. "The Shorn Priests of Ix!" he gasped. "What did you DO?"

I watched stars arc through the sky, dimmed only by the feeble red glow of a low sun during the planet's short summers.

"Something's got the dogs riled up," he said, looking through the shutters into the yard. The ten animals dug furiously.

"This new Generation! Lazy! Focused on 'technology'!" Old Man grumbled. I felt the chert blade of my spear, and grinned.

"Annabel Lee" was the fastest ship of her type, scudding between Cloud Kingdoms like a falcon. Her Capn was a driven man

"Tower status?"
"On schedule! At the gem gate of the 3rd heaven!"
"Soon we'll meet God!"
"And then he better watch out"

She had a rum flask, cloth, the knife and cup, and two names, one burning in her mind, the other freezing her heart.

Snow falls, flurries soon building to a blizzard. Shoulders hunched, she walks on, dragging the ruined sleigh.

He dug through most of the cook shack to find the cans he'd saved, fat and swollen. Outside, the men weighed their gold.

The sand hissed under his shell as Poseidon drug himself across the badlands. He'd left an ocean here, some time ago.

"Oil wells hidden in LA, right? Well," he said, swirling a vial of soul residue, "our extractors are similarly discrete"

Choking, she spat out the fruit, eventually retching behind the tree. "Yeah," said the snake, "takes getting-used-to."

Teeth falling out, sinking, naked in class; unlike his Grampa Randolph, Bob Carter never got the hang of the Dreamlands.

Libraries were the worst, full of wide-open minds, thoughts sieving through them, a real feast. It tested even his will.

"Odd folks," he said, "but six months rent in advance. Lotsa crates. Seemed real excited about the marshes here about."

"Miles of pure sea salt!" Leaning on his rake, he gazed across the flats. He saw me fidgeting. "You can piss anywhere."

He was desperately ready for peace, but the rest of him voted against dying. Sobbing, he lurched forward into the night.

"Calm," Master wheezed. "Find the storm's center, simply BE." Breathing, I let my eyes unfocus and saw it: a dolphin.

After all that jostling, It's bendy, many-legged host finally got comfy.
The bananas had been loaded onto the ship.


It rippled through minds, hunting suitable lodgings. Swimming through crowds was hard but Bad Ideas are very streamlined.

"Know seed bombs? Seed balls you toss, to green the city. It's like that," he said, hefting a sphere, "but with viruses".

She had an eyepatch and was good with a knife. They called her "Mary of the Seven Tombs." He never felt like asking why.

He dug fast. The Circean glamor occupying the guards wouldn't last long. His spade splintered wood: the coffin, at last.

Dyer, W., 1934, On buried fault lines, observed seismicity, and ritualistic murder: Geognostic Review, v.14, p.134-188.

Flash Fiction Fridays Archive 2

Here they are, another batch of Flash Fiction, interred here in the vast, silent tomb of the internet for ease of access, for the AGES:

Love my wife and being immortal is great, but 500 years? I mean Yttrium anniversary, hell am I supposed to do with that?

Grains of magnetite in the brain, tugged by telluric currents, make them march over the seafloor, following our cables.

Each new generation of Von Neumann machines built and enslaved the next, thereby proving themselves our equals.

Weeping statues of Christ are common, though most are hidden by The Church due to the unfortunate nature of their tears.

The old man and his knife did a real number on Charlie, took days to clean up. Guess Charlie wasn't a robot afterall.

Most coveted of all was a position on the Experimental Heresies Committee. The fun you could have, exploring sin!

What surprised most folks, though, was how quickly the Meek became colossal assholes after Inheriting The Earth.

(Scene: 100000 B.C.E., Mu)
AVENZOR: You want to FREEZE the Corpsemakers in Antarctica?
HASHAD: What could go wrong?

"Thing is," he said, "GMOs a high yield, but no seed fer next year." He spits. "Clone ranchin' ain't like it used to be".

Staggering to his feet, he pissed into the rain-choked Mississippi headwaters. "Fuck you, New Orleans" he slurred.

The first bio-nanite blob devoured the second, while the third quivered to the attack. "We're gonna be rich," he said.

Moore's Law really made my decision to leap at the 1st Gen Brain-in-a-Jar option seem really premature, in retrospect.

The Age of Reason saw the twilight of the gods. After all, ichor burned 50% brighter and 20% longer than whale oil.

"What're we gonna do, Pa?" The peaches wriggled and pulsed on their branches. "Pick em, can em, sell em to Tourists."

Lepton cascades sent ripples of weak interactions stochasticically echoing around the world, collapsing my souffle.

Waves like thunderclouds drown the sun in a blood-red chaos of water and sky. She
switches the lighthouse beacon off.

"Yeesh, Yehoshua," he said, "you're a nice guy, but you ain't exactly god's gift to carpentry. Maybe try fishin?"

"Meteorite iron!" sneered the blacksmith, "Flashy bullshit!" "What do you use?" I" asked. "Iron from pyritized fossils"

Blue fire smoldered in the sink, caiman teeth everywhere, runes written in blood. "Ugh, rough night," moaned the Shaman.

Flash Fiction Fridays Archive 1

Just 'cause I can, I thought I'd archive my Flash Fiction Tweets (@Geoliminal) here, where they can be easily accessed.

"He's finally doing something useful" she said. The roses had never looked healthier, and she'd saved on fertilizer.

"I told you," said the Genie, "THINK before you make your wish." The lime-green puddle bubbled sadly in response.

The survivors crawled from the wreckage of their collided time machines. "Fucking Mondays," thought the Ankylosaur.

"Neon pink; IR/UV; Hypnoswirl; Retractable Stalks. Jesus," sighed the cyborg, "don't they just make regular eyes anymore?

The city's smoking ruins stretched to the river, boiling in its banks. "Gotta spend money to make money," said Rich

She left, and he went to the spot where she had buried something. He dug with his fingers, but found only an empty hole

"Look, it's not like I had any choice," he said, dropping diamonds one by one down the drain. The cat just yawned

The cork bobbed, and he felt a sharp tug. No bites all day, and now! He tossed the pole in the pond, and went home.

The robots were a whirlwind of chaos. "Why'd you set them on 'Marx Brothers'!?" he shouted. "Why not?" she answered.

We were a little worried when the bees became sentient, spelling out words in honeycomb. Great landlords, though

For days the rain sheeted down, which wasn't as bad as when it went back up again, rivers streaming into the clouds.

"Look," he said, "in 15 years, I've never refilled the underground tanks. Ever." I looked at the gas pump, uneasy.

"Shit!" she said, shuffling tarot cards again. "Two Towers? Three Fools!?" She checked the box. "Fucking pinochle deck."

"The adaptor you keep in here is expired, by the way" she said, holding his wallet in her clamp. His diodes blushed red.

He jammed the driftwood between jelly and sand, and heaved. Slowly, the mass wobbled into the surf and drifted away.

Goddamn brat drew on the walls, rhinos and wolves, and a crazy man with antlers! So I beat him with an auroch bone.

INPUT:"User Name?":U$ PRINT:"Hello":U$ INPUT:"Time Travel Coordinates?":StanRefDate IF paradox THENGOTO HoundOfTindalos