Fritz Goes There

Fritz went there. It seemed like the right thing to do, in the flashpoint of the moment, where there was no rewind, undo, command z. The camera would spin around, for then it could be seen the reactions of both Fritz and Ann in an instant.

Fritz had made the mistake of saying the obvious - "I told you". It never really serves any purpose, after all. It isn't even that satisfying on reflection, when the fallout settles in. Ann was so thinned skin anyway. Comments never bounced off of her; they would bruise her ever so slighting, and sometimes she would nurse them back to health, but she was really a bad nurse - often her concern would make it bigger than it was, which meant that it was always big. This was, for Fritz, the biggest deficit in their relationship, inside his mental spreadsheet.

They had a cat. Had a cat. Sentra (the cat's name) was a rogue. He was cagey. He pissed in Fritz's closet, so Fritz put a litter box there. Peace was then achieved, but like North and South Korea, peace was really just a term for un-war.

Things would get knocked over. They found a dead mouse lying on their bed. Fritz flashed back to "The Godfather" for a moment. When either of them left, Sentra would be there, ready to jet out.

It was a slice of freedom, and he did indeed escape. Fritz had warned Ann about this many times, because it was he that would have to chase him down. Sentra was smart, or maybe just so dumb that he really couldn't quite be understood by humans. Cats are like that.

Ann had come home from Trader Joe's, with her two bags of frozen stuff, and the brownie mix Fritz liked. She had fumbled for the keys. The obvious thing would have been to put the bags down, but no, as Fritz would point out, she didn't do that. Unlocking the door, she pushed it open with body, and in doing so, saw the gray blur of Sentra out the door.

Ann had not had much luck with finding him when Fritz showed up to help in the search. Their townhouse was a sea of many, with varying faces, but ultimately clad in a shade of vinyl. Fritz thought, if I had the brain about the size of a walnut, I would get lost too. Or maybe just not care. At least until dinner time. And even then, that could be a bug, or maybe a rodent.

Fritz thought these thought while wandering through the complex, occasionally looking underneath rows of parked cars. There was no point in calling Sentra's name - first, he would feel like an idiot for doing it - people would think he had lost his car, and was calling for it - and second, it was doubtful that Sentra would even acknowledge him.

Later than night, the discussion incrimination interrogation would begin, and the eventual "I told you" would surface.

Ann at that moment narrowed her eyes. She had moment where she thought of Sentra out there , wandering around, and then she was out the door too.

Sentra, on the other hand, had already moved on. Three streets over, in the late afternoon, Nicolette found Sentra grooming himself on the sidewalk in front of her town home. When she opened door, Sentra zipped in before her. Nicolette decided that this was a sign.

Sentra, on the other hand, didn't really care one way or another. Humans were these big, mobile meat-things - too big to eat - really just there to provide a warm place to sleep, food and cleaning up crap. Nicolette decided this was a fair arrangement.

Fritz, on the other hand, had to work really hard to get Ann back. It took two days of pleading, going by her parent's house, waiting out in the cold for her to come to the door, having messages relayed that she wanted nothing to do with him. This was an unfortunate side effect of both of their brains being bigger than walnuts….at least that was what Fritz decided in the end.

Alfredo the Tiger

Alfredo felt it was useless to go on. Vera had fallen asleep during the long, protracted argument/counterargument that he had so eloquently constructed inside his own dialog with himself….the equivalent of masterbation, but in the case, followed by a brisk splash of cold water, and no happy ending in sight.

Vera wasn't anti intellectual, it was simply that pragmatism was her grounding spot. There wasn't the nuance, for her is was just noise, stray data around the margins to prevented getting to the heart of things. It was in her taste in clothes (largely Goodwill) and her choice of music…for her is was the ONE album, "Double Nickels on the Dime", which would always come on at some random spot when she started her car. It was a weird sense of pragmatism even her; let someone else make the mix tape, so that it is all different and all the same.

Alfredo rolled over, and ended up sitting on the edge of the bed. The dim glow of electronics was enough of a nightlight to make out Vera's profile. She lay still. Alfredo, on the other hand, always hogged the bed. But somehow he managed.

It was at this moment in contemplation that he heard the sound of a car door opening. Downstairs. In front of his house.

He waited.

He heard the definite sound of a car door creaking. Definitely. Vera drove a 1975 Chevy Nova. The door definitely squeaked.

At this point, Alfredo had to make a decision. A very hard thing for him to do. He had just argued with himself for half an hour……about italian neo-realism. Now, he needed to find his cell phone….it was downstairs…..sitting on the coffee table in the living room.

He put is slippers on, thinking it would deaden his steps as he crept downstairs. He was tempted to peek outside, and paused for just a microsecond to look at the front door, but then he snapped back into focus, and found the phone, just where he left it. A small miracle indeed.

The next 5 minutes will be re-examined again and again….in the future, in the same way that those pesky italian neo-realists argued in Alfredo's head. Things became quite blurry, but there was evidence at the end that could point to some of the major points.

First, there was the phone call. It was, as records would later show, brief and incoherent. 15 seconds, to cover the most basic of information: a noise outside, and an address. After the briefest of time, Alfredo decided to look outside after all, as he could now hear the sound of a engine's starter kicking in and out.

He doesn't remember grabbing the umbrella. Creeping out of the back of the house, looping around to the front, hiding under the bushes. The car kicked in, and shut off again. Alfredo could see someone half in and half out of the car.

He then ran towards the car, and gave the car door a good kick. Some one cursed. The thief stood up, and unexplicably Alfred found a Sony Explod radio/CD  car dash unit hurtling towards him, but fortunately the thief was a poor aim, and it fell on the ground.

What happened next seemed like destiny, as a CD popped out. Alfred picked it up, and threw it like a frisbee.

It is important to understand that Music CD's are not frisbees. They do not fly particularly well. They have a tendency to turn sideways, which this one did. But it did hit the car thief squarely in the head, and despite it's small mass, knocked him over. Alfredo doesn't remember this part - the part about the umbrella, but when the unknown person started to get up, evidentially he was met with a solid whack from the pink umbrella.

Later they would find fragments of the Minuteman CD on the ground. Alfredo offered no explanation, but in retrospect, should have at least made something up. There was definitely a chance to elaborate. He was so unfamiliar with actually acting on something immediately. It actually made him uncomfortable. Vera, on the other hand, saved the fragments for many years. Alfredo, for her, was a tiger in a pair of bedroom slippers.

Archangel #38

It came as a shock, an emotional shock to be sure, but also a real electrical shock for Jimmy Bowden, as he casually flipped on the light switch. He had insisted on using the cool brushed metal plates for the switches in his new studio, but he actually had no business working with electricity at all. It didn't help that he was color blind, but even more - that he was definitely challenged when it came to simple mechanical tasks. Changing a tire.....maybe, if he took notes. Anything requiring a power tool had been deemed off limits by his then girlfriend Charisse. He had almost severed a thumb with a power drill, for christsakes, never mind the drill holes he had left in the small eat-in kitchen dining table that tended to become is adjunct workspace when his old studio was full of stuff he had pulled (rescued he says) out of dumpsters. And some of it did smell.

Jimmy did jump back at that moment, and kind of crashed into a table full of paints. Some of these little plastic containers cheerfully popped open, and left spatters of paint, similar to a giant paint gun, on the floor. And Jimmy did like paint guns. Archangel #37 was painted entirely with a paint ball gun, after all.

Jimmy's shock subsided when smoke began to pour out of the switch box, but that did not last long, fortunately, for the power breaker did finally kick in. At least he did not burn the house down. That would be a shame.

The space itself had been built by someone else, a gruff beer-bellied guy who always wore jumpsuits, typically gray or blue, made by Dickies. He didn't say much, and listened to his stream of conservative talk radio at full blast on his admittedly cool DeWalt black and yellow boom box. Jimmy kind of envied it, and swore he would have one some day. It was LOUD, and Jimmy was so sorely tempted to plug in his iPod to it to listen to Morbid Angel, if could even figure out how to do that. He doubted the handyman/builder would like death metal.

The paint on the floor sort of coalesced, and created this swirl of pattern on the floor. It was cheap acrylic paint that he had doctored up with various stuff so that it had a slightly runny texture.

Jimmy had decided that he really needed another light switch, so he had wired it himself. He was confused by the wires, and red, green, blue (what was blue for?) and black were one thing, but the fact that it was hard for jimmy to tell some colors apart made it even more of a challenge. He looked at the smoldering, melted switch, and proceed it to pull it out of the wall with a crowbar, for in addition to everything else that made Jimmy unique, he was impatient and unable to think more than 3 minutes ahead. At some point, the box came free, and Jimmy fell backwards hitting his head on the floor, making a light thud as it bounced off the floor covered with industrial vinyl, the kind seen in commercial establishments with the little bumps about the size of quarters. His head at this point was covered in paint. He appeared to be bleeding psychedelic blood as he stood up, wobbly on his feed. He then slipped again, falling forward into a pile of whitewashed masonite siding he had scavenged. The paint had been absorbed enough that his body acted as one giant paint roller at this point.

Later this year, he would hang Archangel #38 in his one-man show. He was careful as always to not say much as people milled about making comments. The general view was that it was his best work yet, a sense of spontaneity and spiritual explosion combined with the temperance of man's physical being. Or something like that.

Latisha Eats Lunch

She looked in the back of the fridge, at the suspicious, small plastic containers. Some of them were perhaps viable, some were not, but she couldn't be sure until the lid was opened. She was wise enough to know if the lid bowed outward the least little bit, it was straight to the trash. These disposable food containers were so handy.

But Latisha probed on. With her boyfriend gone, it was indeed time to get rid of this stuff. He was notorious for eating things way past expiration. Lunch Meat, in itself kind of gross, was unfortunately aged in the fridge until there was a sheen of slime on it. But Sean would happily consume it in a sandwich consisting of a slice of plastic looking American cheese (how appropriate indeed), a thick mortar of mayonnaise, two slices of lunch meat and oddest of all - a fried egg (in itself often well out of date).

In the very back was a truly odd plastic container. It was low and oval shaped, and snapped together in the middle. It was made of a kind of semi-opaque silvery plastic, smooth and well made. Inside she couldn't quite make out the contents, but it looked like takeout Chinese. There were what appeared to be noodles, and little chunks of vegetables. It looked strangely appetizing.

Prying the container apart took some effort. Using a table knife was not sufficient, plus she was concerned about injuring herself. In the end it was the tip of a flat blade screwdriver and a wine bottle wrapped in a towel that allowed it to pop open.

When the container opened, there was a fragrant aroma - was it ginger and citrus? She couldn't quite pin it down, but it looked and smelled wonderful. There didn't seem to be any dangerous growths on it. It actually looked quite fresh.

She found to her delight that that container itself was quite microwavable, although it did glow ever so faintly as the food heated. She was quite unable to hear the muffled screams from the container as it was bathed in hi intensity radio waves.

----

Znged had been patient. He was part of the early scout forces from a distant planet, which was called Lacasli Four, being the fourth planet (and final one) that had been colonized by his people. This had been over 4*4*3 years ago.

The proud Lacasli's had managed to prosper and grow, despite the fact that their appendages were like limp egg noodles, and their bodies a lumpen mass, with all the organs seemly thrown in at random. This was actually their strength, for it was difficult to wipe them out once they took root. Shooting or stepping on them only caused them to spread. The only thing that had seemed to work was intense heat, and who had the time to do that? Fortunately for the Lacasli's, the planets they had conquered had been inhabited by dimwitted creatures that were slow moving and apathetic.

This planet had been a long-shot, an inter-galactic crapshoot. They had blasted off in a huge ship shaped somewhat shaped like a kidney bean, and right before hitting earth's atmosphere, their little individual pods scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind. It was the hope that at least a few of them would survive the plummet to earth, their speed unabated by parachutes or retrorockets.

Znged had not anticipated it being so cold on earth. It made him even more sticky and clumpy than usual. It was hard to move. It seemed to him that the sun more or less came on for random times, and would stay on for only a short while. He needed sunlight to grow stronger, and now he was feeling particularly weak and lifeless.

However, he could now feel himself being moved,  and then the sun shone intensely into his ship. He could feel things warming up. "At last", he told himself, "the invasion can begin". But as the temperature continued to rise, he became worried. Soon, he could feel himself beginning to cook. This had not been part of the plan.

----

Latisha munched down on what she decided was Ginger Lemon Tofu with Noodles. It was some of the best she had ever eaten. She decided that she did need to talk to Sean after all, if for no other reason to find where he did get this wonderful asian takeout.

The container, made of a remarkable material that was neither a plastic or metal, ended in the trash because she could not find a recycling code on the bottom to identify it. Soon it would end up in a landfill with several dozen other empty containers, the contents consumed with gusto. The invasion wasn't a success, but was delicious none the less.