Patrick Johanneson

Sto­ries in 1024 char­ac­ters or less, by Patrick Johanneson

The Wait

She planted the seed and waited. After a while rain came down from the sky, pelt­ing her skin, chill­ing her. She shiv­ered but didn’t leave, not yet.

The sun came out, warm­ing the soil, dri­ving the cold from her bones. She waited. Clouds scud­ded by over­head, in a hurry for some rea­son. The moon rose, stars wheeled, and then the sun rose again.

She didn’t just wait, of course. She prayed, she sang, she read the old sto­ries, the myths and the leg­ends. On the sev­enth day she snoozed under a cloud­less sky, wak­ing only briefly when a drag­on­fly hap­pened to touch down on her nose. She observed its cathedral-window wings, irrides­cent with refracted sun­light, and drowsed once more after it left her.

Rain, sun, moon, stars: she endured them all. The seedling broke the soil with a quest­ing green curlicue, look­ing for all the world like a ques­tion mark in the Old Tongue. She sat on it and waited more: days, months, decades.

A boy came along and asked her why she’d climbed to the top of the tree.

“I didn’t,” she said.

Eat­ing Every­thing There Ever Was

It started with a local hot-dog eat­ing con­test. Lou Ver­bain took first place, and moved on to the provin­cials, where he placed sec­ond. But the first-place con­tes­tant bowed out when his stom­ach rup­tured, and Lou was on to the nation­als. At inter­na­tion­als he placed a dis­tant third to a whip-thin Japan­ese girl.

Lou wasn’t about to take that lying down, so he went into hard-core train­ing. He ate all the hot dogs in town, then in the province, and even­tu­ally he caused a continent-wide short­age in meat-ish products.

He moved on. Ham­burg­ers, pies, cook­ies, any­thing he could stuff down his gul­let. He grew and grew, too, expand­ing like a weed, like a bal­loon. It was surreal.

The day he started eat­ing cars was prob­a­bly the point of no return. He started small, with a rusted-out Dat­sun, but by week’s end he was devour­ing Hum­mers and limos.

At some point hydro­gen fusion started up in his stom­ach, but he didn’t notice.

Long story short, now he’s a black hole, Ver­bain X-1, and the Uni­verse is slowly falling into him.

The Inver­sion

They shot me at dawn for my sins, gave me a pauper’s grave and a bunch of wild­flow­ers plucked from the river­bank. They regret­ted it, so they told me, wished I was still alive. I lis­tened from my black home beneath the dirt. What else was I to do?

What else, indeed.

When the sky split and the world everted, I thought it was per­haps the Last Trump, the Apoc­a­lypse of St. John come to take me home. It was an apoc­a­lypse, but not the sec­ond com­ing of the Mes­siah. No, noth­ing but mis­siles of proton-fusing power, wip­ing the liv­ing away, free­ing the dead from our bonds, loos­ing us upon a world transformed.

In my yard a tree grows that weeps blood, and my lawn, which I cut with a black iron scythe, is made of souls. This is a queer new world I have been granted, and I intend to enjoy it.

I only wish my wife had been killed, before the bombs fell, so that she too could enjoy this black-sun utopia, where no one’s pulse races because no one has a pulse. But noth­ing is per­fect, is it, eh?

Would you fancy some tea?

The Trick

“You want to see a trick?”

Her eyes nar­rowed. “What kind?”

“Like noth­ing you’ve ever seen,” he said, and took a swig straight from the bot­tle. Red wine stained his teeth. “Promise.”

“All right.” She leaned back in the chair as he stood up, crossed to the cen­tre of the room, and did some kind of odd shoulder-shrugging warmup dance. He’d left the bot­tle on the table, and she took it, wrapped her lips around it, and chugged what remained of the wine. She had a buzz going and wasn’t about to lose it.

With­out pre­lude, with­out scream­ing, with­out any warn­ing what­so­ever, he burst into flames. In per­fect silence he burned, star­ing into her soul with those intense grey eyes he had.

She dropped the bot­tle. It shat­tered, green shards every­where. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. She stared as he was consumed.

There was a pile of ash and a black spot on the hard­wood, and no other evi­dence he’d ever existed.

#

The door opened and he walked in. She leapt from the recliner, embraced him, and said, “How’d you do it?”

Danc­ing

On a hill­top at sun­set, they danced one last time. High clouds burned crim­son and chromium, and she sang to him:

o this is the guil­lo­tine, and this is the knife
this is for mur­der, this is for life

He whirled her like a dervish, spin­ning her about and about, watch­ing her dark hair mask her face like a funeral veil.

so come, hang­man, tie up your noose
my lover is here, wait­ing for you

He dipped her low, kissed her carmine lips, then lifted her into the sky. She laughed with delight, and he couldn’t remem­ber the last time she’d sounded so happy.

we dance on the hill, we prance through the heath
we eat, drink and are merry, till we’re all out of breath

And the music ended, and the first stars appeared in the east­ern fir­ma­ment. He bowed to her, both of them drip­ping sweat from their hair. Her smile was inscrutable.

“It’s time, isn’t it,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “Time to wake up.”

He woke, and the bed was empty, and once more he was a widower.

He put on his ring and faced the day.

Zookeeper

The sky opened up like a mouth and swal­lowed me whole. I passed through its throat, a black-shadowed and flex­i­ble tube that smelled of esters and monomers, and fell into a room as wide as all the sky, suf­fused with misty pink light.

I wasn’t alone. If only! But there were three oth­ers that I could see, and count­less oth­ers that I could sense.

The thing near­est me—I hes­i­tate to call it a per­son, though of course it was—sibilated and grunted in my direc­tion. I didn’t under­stand its tongue, of course. But I under­stood it nonethe­less, via some eldritch tech­nol­ogy that our hosts had instilled in the room. Where are you from?

“Earth, of course,” I said.

Indeed. Did you know that in my tongue, my world’s name is Earth too?

I con­sid­ered. “Sol three, then.”

Ah. It waved a ten­ta­cle, and a small win­dow appeared. A yel­low sun appeared therein, reced­ing. Sol, I trust?

“Yes,” I said, and choked back a sob as I watched my sun dwin­dle and finally disappear.

You get used to it, it said. Even­tu­ally.

The End of All Things

First we assaulted death with pills and tar­geted radi­a­tion, and then with nanites, gene ther­apy, and anti-ablative cladding woven into human flesh. Next came imprinted light­waves that held the mind, the record of a human, railed against by the Catholics and the Protes­tants and the Mus­lims as a slight against the soul. Shinto ances­tor wor­ship became a tan­gi­ble thing: ven­er­at­ing lac­quered cubes of hard­wood that con­tained quan­tum records of great-grandfathers.

Soon we left Earth behind, a crowded home­stead, and made our way out­ward. We molded worlds to our lik­ing, and then, later, wrote our con­scious­ness into the foamy black of space­time. After a large but finite num­ber of eons, we left the Galaxy behind, a crowded home­stead, and ven­tured further.

We left iden­tity behind, merged our­selves with the god­head, and wrote poems on the sur­faces of stars, sang songs to the iron cores of supernovae.

And now it’s all unspool­ing, the stars all gone dark a tril­lion years ago, and we think to our­self, we had a good run.

---