The Cherry Blossoms of Regulon V

               Zob Kane stood above the greatest floral spectacle in the galaxy: myriads of grottos and rosy shadows, elegant trunks with spines extended and quivering in the alien sunset. “Ah, Regulon V is so sublime, in its summer cycle. Can’t you feel the sublimity?” He sighed: the long, peaceful sigh of the Artist-In-His-Element. “I could paint here forever.”

               Perhaps, thought Will. But nothing good.

               They set up their tripods, planting the legs deep in the nitrous-rich earth. Sublime… What did this idiot know about sublime? They’d eaten burgers for breakfast, for Chrissake. But Will didn’t go for mockery—it wasn’t like his friend would’ve listened.

 “Very sublime,” he said.

               “They’re poisonous, when they come down. The blossoms. Did I tell you?”

                “I was the one who told you.”

               “Right, right. Just like you told me about that girl, back home. Good call there. She was fantastic.” His friend fumbled for the z-axis paints, failing: the mittens of his space-suit were soon stained in a clumsy rainbow. There were newer models, but Zob had insisted on “authentic” suits. He tried to preen his Dali mustache, couldn’t do it because of the bubble helmet, and settled for a raconteur pose. “Look at those blossoms, how rugose! That quintessential sunset! I think I’ll start in lime-pink. Lime-pink is so trendy.”

               “You do whatever feels right, man.” Will moved his easel several steps back; he didn’t want to get in the way of genius, after all.

               “I’m so glad we came. My Muse is with me, Will. She’s embracing me.”

               I brought you here. It was my money, my life. Given for you.

               Will painted a Regulan flatworm. He wasn’t sure why; it just seemed to fit the empty space, its features sharp and vicious. The colors came to life, wriggled free of the canvas, and started floating towards Zob. The pincers snapped, the stinger flashed and throbbed with menace.

Will was quite far along, in Z-axis painting—farther, he suspected, than anyone had ever gone. Without a better word for it, he supposed he was a god. It brought no joy; the girl had been the last in a series of insults that stretched for years. His hands trembled.

Regulan flatworms were ethereal; they wriggled right through the molecules of your clothes and skin, to suck your organs empty. It was a horrific way to die.

                Zob, the peacock, stayed oblivious. “They’ll hang this one in the gallery, just like my thesis. I can sense it.”

               Liar. That work was mine.

              The theft had been subtle: “a little help” on the final graduate assignment had required more and more work, until it was unparalleled. Now, Will’s piece hung in the alumni hall at Berkelee, a plaque naming it Bee’s Insides in Radical-Yellow… by Zob Kane. 

            The flatworm was very close.

You do whatever feels right, man. Was this the act of a just god? 

A loving god?

Will’s hands grew still. He painted a gentle breeze of lavender-indigo: it rose from the canvas, drifted and blew the flatworm away. Its delicate body tumbled over the leaves.

               “The petals! Oh, the petals!” Zob was painting, Will saw: really painting. Not well, but still. The pigments were a pale copy of the valley, but the first layer had promise; the second might well contain real technique. The third… Well, by the finish, his friend might have something. His very first non-plagiarism. “Look at those colors. I see what the religious types are about, now. God is great, and all that shit!”

               Will smiled. “Yes. He truly is.”

               Zob turned to him, and his cheeks were shining the color of the toxic blossoms. “What would you know? You haven’t even started yet.”

"The Uber Out of Time"

You slam the door on your way out.

Stupid, stupid. If you'd just kept your voice down, just tried to work things out, maybe she wouldn't have accused you of all that. Stupid. Doesn't she know what you're going through? You can't be expected to listen to this shit. It's not your fault--you were coerced! You can't be blamed.

You need some air; you need to get away. Soon the ride-share car rolls up the street, speckled by drizzle. It's a Saab, of all things, but well-kept. You haul on the door handle and throw yourself in.

The driver turns around. He's nondescript. The app says his name is Kameel. "How's it going?"

"Hey." You aren't interested in small-talk. Not right now. Rage burns under your skin, and you feel like punching the back of the passenger seat. You don't.

"So, when do you want to go?"

You stare at him. "Now. I thought that was implied."

"No, no..." He holds up his phone. The app there is unfamiliar. You look down and see the app you have open isn't familiar, either. It sure as hell isn't one you downloaded. "I mean, what year? What point in your life?" He checks his phone. "You are Chuck Wentworth, right? You didn't put in a timeline when you requested me."

You stare at him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm Chuck." You're not.

The app is asking for a year and a date. Outside, the rain is thickening, fat spots of drizzle sliding cold and viscous down the Saab's window. Some corner of you wants to slug the guy, or laugh. But then the other side, the shrewd self that's been hiding lipstick smudges, kicks in. Maybe you'll humor him. See if there's a scrap of truth in his bullshit.

"How far can I go?" Can't believe this crap.

"That's on you, man. Big surcharge on 2020, though. Surge pricing, y'know?" Oh, ha-ha, very funny. You roll your eyes, and the rain stops coming.

It doesn't just pass--it stops falling completely. In midair. Droplets hang suspended; wind-swept showers wait on the cold breeze, captured like a photograph. A photograph you're inside of. Nearby, a sparrow caught in the wetness dangles over a puddle, the spray of its takeoff surrounding it, a halo of dew under the soggy orange streetlight glow.

The driver fidgets. "What's it gonna be? If you wanna cancel, that's fine, but there's a fee..."

"No, I'm fine, How about...." You swallow, the walls of your belief cracking open. "Same timeline. But... six months from now."

An eyebrow is raised. "You sure? Same timeline?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, bro. You asked." He circles the block, gently easing around frozen cars. When he arrives back in the same spot, there's a blinding flash--the corona of two hundred suns flashing across the sky all at once. A wave of heat and cold in alternating stutters washes over you. You find your fingernails longer, your hair shaggy. Your stomach paunchier. Clearly these six months without her have been stressful. Good thing you didn't have to live through them.

"Well, there you go, man. Home sweet home. Thanks for riding."

"Thanks..." You climb out of the car. It's sunny, now, and beautiful. The early, crisp days of March. You check your phone and see that you were charged $10.56 for your ride, courtesy of Yog, a company you've never heard of.

Well, damn.

You swagger up the sidewalk towards your apartment--free, easy, no weight on your shoulders. Barely comprehending. Yet you're loose now: no more responsibility. You cheated, in more ways than one: you've escaped. Now you can live your life without interruption, without nagging. Thank God. You always wanted to be a bachelor, on the inside, but you hated the loneliness, the stigma. Now you can start over.

When you get inside, your girlfriend is on the couch. She looks due in about three months: puffy, tired, and enormous. Her things litter the walls, crowd your tiny living space. She looks miserable.

"Hey," she says, cradling a bowl of ice cream. "Did you get that second job?"

Post 1: Moon Spiders

Welcome to Gaslight Rambler, home of rampantly unpublished part-time writer Paul Spears. Here we have the leftovers, the little deaths, the minor earthquakes and tremors of a story that might be or a story that might have been. Flash fiction, chunks of memoir, the story of what happened when Bonnie and Clyde got Instagram. This is the spiritual zoo where we keep the psychedelia, the purple leopards with yellow spots and eyes like beetles.

Here, under glass, I stash the strangeness in my head.

Post #1: Craterface

There are things on the moon.

Put that away. No, you can't see them on Google! Open your mind. That's not how you see reality. You go in there, reality has already been taken from you. Invisible fingers scrabble up the evidence, scraping the images clean. You're never going to see anything online. I'm talking about the naked eye here. I'm talking extraterrestrial shit.

I'm talking moon spiders.

Yes, laugh. Go on, laugh. I like it when you laugh: it reminds me they haven't gotten to me yet. The ones who tell me I should have stayed on the funny farm, the ones who burnt my fingers with matches when I was six, they yes T H E Y have already been lobotomized. Don't ask me how--it's not my place to say!--but I bet if you opened up their skulls, the cranial orbs of the cacklers and hatemongers, you wouldn't find brains but some sort of slippery collection of artificially inserted tentacles. Don't you tell me what's crazy!

I know a thing or two about crazy.

The moon spiders. That's what we were talking about. Yes, I can see them. You can too with a powerful enough telescope. A piddly Orion patio tripod isn't going to do it--no, you need something bigger, something on the order of Hubble. A big beast, the kind NASA shits out like diamond-encrusted taxpayer-funded turds every now and then. Turn my money into an orbital bombardment satellite and call it a telescope, will you? That's all well and good but you might as well put a lens on the damn thing, you know what I'm saying?

You don't know what I'm saying. That's fine.

Anyway, if you can get remote access to one of these--it's easy, if you know the right people--you can zoom in on the lunar surface. Very bleak, very beautiful landscape, like Arizona or Nevada with all the color slurped out. The Midwest in grayscale, ha-ha. And if you can up the resolution on the images a little--of course they've got a digital feed, you don't really believe that it's not live and twenty-four-seven and watching us all constantly, right?--you can see them. My strange little friends.

They're quite busy creatures. They live in craters, mostly; I find their communal structure fascinating. They seem to have a modicum of intelligence, which is more than I can say for the humans I know. Ha! Most times they roll rocks into odd configurations, or skitter across the landscape like dainty little puffs of legs on spiny tendrils. I say 'spiders' but really they're much more like crabs, big crabs on the order of the Marianas Trench entities or the ugly bastards off the coast of Japan. They're quite agile due to the low gravity. How do they eat and breathe? Don't look at me, I'm not a biologist. God, you just don't listen at all, do you? I've told you this a thousand times, over and over: I'm a cryptozoologist. I study cryptids. You don't care, you just don't care. That's alright.

I'll make you understand.

Sometimes the little guys (I haven't come up with a name for them yet, but I will--I named the legless weasels of West Virginia after my sister, she was so sweet when she was alive) will put on a puppet show. I shit you not; this actually happens. It's fascinating. They'll drag out a space suit from some poor undocumented CIA astronaut or lost Soviet cosmonaut, they'll crawl inside that ripped fabric with the bloodstains still caked in (frozen solid for all time, of course, it's chilly on the moon) and they'll do a little dance. I don't know what the dance is called, exactly, but they seem to be having a pretty good time.

I suspect it's a jab at communication. Communication is so important, don't you agree? I would have communicated with people more, if they'd cared about me. About my work. I would have talked with my sister more often. I might have even talked to you, before you cut my funding and stole my satellite uplinks away. We could have had camaraderie, you and I. We could have been good buddies.

But we're not.

It's so peaceful here, I like it. Nobody to bother us, or make noise. Just us, and the moon spiders. And this is why I brought you: they've taken up art, lately. Scribbling designs across the lunar dust. Not tracks, designs--they're writing. A curious, alien foray into literature, scratched on dead gray particles for the whole world to see. And they're very committed to this project--they've covered several square kilometers already. It will only be a matter of time before the patterns become visible to the naked eye. What will NASA and the world government do, then? Mass mind-wipes? Theta ray bombardments? It seems so much trouble, just to hide a few invertebrates. I shudder at the thought of such misuse of public funds.

Why are they doodling up there, do you think? Documenting their history, perhaps? Their culture? Or maybe they're just tired of being ignored. Like all strange, creeping creatures living in ugly places, they feel the urge to come out and taste daylight occasionally. To push their boundaries. Much like myself, when you put me under duress.

You shouldn't prod the lesser creatures of the universe... We have a tendency to bite.

Place your eye against the telescope--yes, right there. The patterns will become visible quite soon. A few days at most. The adhesive on the viewfinder will keep your skin nice and snug, removing any chance of a missed sighting. Electric shocks will keep your eyes open, when I want them open. It will take a little while, but you'll see. I was right all along, don't you get it? The proof is out there, right over our heads! My vindication!

At long last, you'll truly see.