The Binding Code

THE BINDING CODE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Janie spent her weekends purchasing containers of bread crumbs and attempting to reassemble them into loaves of bread. She'd been working at it for decades but still hadn't mastered it. It had taken years just to get the first loaf together and that thing was a fiasco compared to the work she was doing now. Loaf number one was unidentifiable as a loaf of bread unless the observer was prompted by Janie as to its true nature. It actually looked like a fat gerbil covered in sawdust. It still sat freeze-dried in her storage locker, what she insisted on calling The Janie Mulmer Museum of Reconstituted Bread Loves.

Nowadays, her loaves really looked like loaves. "You've got to approach it like a jigsaw puzzle," she told her patrons. "Do all the crust pieces first. Then it's easier to fill in the rest." The new loaves were often missing slices. As they began to resemble actual bread, Janie looked to recreate the flavor and the texture of the real thing. And of course, the only way to really know was to try them.

First off, they didn't taste like bread, they tasted like bread crumbs. For some reason, she hadn't expected that. Janie hadn't considered that herbs are added in the production process. Even loaf number six, from which she extracted each and every herb with the aid of a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezies (tweezers were old school), still tasted wrong enough that she had to switch bread crumb brands. It felt, for some reason, like a great setback to her life's work, but hell, it had to be done.

Her philosopher's stone was something she referred to in her notes as The Binding Code. It was the formula that would bring crumbs together into a loaf indistinguishable from one store bought.

Until she cracked the code, texture would be an issue as well. The flour water she now used to glue her crumbs together made the loaf gummy and gross while the crumbs themselves were much crunchier than bread had any right to be and she always had to work in freezing temperatures so the whole mess wouldn't get nastier.

She kept the phone nearby as she worked, always expecting a call from the MacArthur people to lay one of those sweet genius awards on her. Janie had always considered herself a sweet genius. Apparently no one else did, because the call never came.

After four decades of toil she met a man named Javier at the grocery store while she was buying milk (I'll bet you thought she was buying bread crumbs. What did you think, she never drank milk?). He gave her cow eyes and she melted. She invited him over for dinner and they ate the cow eyes and drank the milk. After the best night of her life, Javier held her in his arms and said:

"Janie, I know your work means everything to you and you have no reason to forsake it, but I have to ask. The angels will banish me to Hell if I do not ask: Janie, will you spend the rest of your life with me? Heck, just spend the rest of my life with me, that's all I ask."

She thought of her work, her museum. Just eighty more years of toil and she was sure she'd have her breakthrough. She'd have The Binding Code.

"To Hell with it," she said, "I'll just learn how to bake."

So

Random thoughts:

Last week was a stink week. My too many early mornings schedule turned me into a zombie and next to no work got done. The last few days have been better but I'm still over two-thousand words behind on the novel. No sweat.

My daughter, Ivory, and I decided today that Mountain Dew comes from the Mountain Dew squirrel, a tiny species that lives in pant pockets and scurries along house and car keys the way its older cousins run through the treetops. Thousands of these are thrown into a press at one time and are squeezed until Mountain Dew comes out. It was all cutesy until that last part, I know.

Anxiety visits us all now and again but when we visit my sister-in-law there are times when I achieve true peace of mind. See, I've got this sort of phobia about running out of toilet paper. I've even been known to run to the store near the moment of truth just to stock up. But when I sit and do my dirty business in her bathroom I have at times counted up to twenty-four rolls of toilet paper in there, all within reach. I can't tell you the feeling of security that gives me, knowing that there's nothing that I'm physically capable of doing that would require more than twenty-four rolls of toilet paper for clean-up. So cheers to you, Bev.

Finally, this thing is just frickin' cool: The Jeep Waterfall.

The Price

THE PRICE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

When my car got hungry it walked off the road. I flipped because I was already late for my meeting and the damned fuel gauge said I still had 1/32 of a tank. They'd never made a decent gauge since we moved away from fossil fuels. The car could have easily made another thirty miles, but when it felt hungry, none of that mattered. It slowed to that familiar crawl, its tires peeled apart into steel-reinforced rubbery feet for off-road terrain and it started grazing on the unmown grass on the side of the expressway.

"Shit!" I cried, pounding the fleshy dashboard. "Not grass, you idiot!"

The thing responded by shaking like a wet dog while my door and seatbelt buckle both sprang open. It threw me a good ten feet, but I didn't even feel the impact in my fury. Vegetation was the least efficient fuel the thing could have found.

"Stop eating that grass, damn you! I didn't pay eighty-thousand dollars for an omnivore to have you eating goddamned grass! Especially not now, find some squirrels or something!" I looked around in vain, praying we'd stopped near a cow pasture. Nothing.

The car stopped and went to a nearby tree. I searched the branches figuring it had indeed smelled a family of nice fat squirrels. Instead, it gnawed on the tree, stripping a chunk of bark and chewing contentedly.

At this rate, it'd take all day to consume enough calories to satiate itself. And if I missed my meeting, I'd be out of a job. And if I was out of a job, I'd be out of Karen. Sure, Linda would stick by my side, but she was the gum beneath my shoe. The kind of psychotic sticky wife that drove me to Karen in the first place.

Fuck it. This is where we separated upper-management from middle-management. I tore off my left pant leg (wouldn't be needing it anyway) and tied a tourniquet around my upper thigh. I dialed up the heroin on my hitbox and fed my whole mother fucking leg to the thing. The bitch tried to eat me whole but I beat the tender underbelly with a stick until it backed off. The thing still salivated, threatening another feeding. I figured I would decide on its next course rather than let it decide. My left arm went next and I hopped into the driver's seat before dessert came.

With a sharp kick, I got the beast back on the road and rolling again. I called my assistant, telling it I'd be a little late. I told it to print out some prosthetics and have a new suit sent up.

"Nothing can go wrong here, Troya," I told it. "My bonus is riding on this presentation and daddy needs the scratch. Goddamned price of fuel is getting ridiculous."

Give It Up

For those of you lamenting the dearth of quality fork art in today's society, I give you this.

I've got a couple of blog stories brewing in the old AlphaSmart, they're not ready just yet. Maybe you can have one for dinner tomorrow

Today started out as a bad day. I ate crap all day, did some mindless shopping and wrote maybe three sentences. I did get a story idea, but overall, what a waste. Around seven p.m., I gave up on feeling miserable about it and decided to throw myself into the badness wholeheartedly. I ate more shitty food and watched TV all night. Fuck it, why not take a day off once in a while? I at least had the presence of mind to stick something on the blog.

Sorry I haven't been blogging, but if I don't have a story, I just don't have anything interesting going on about which to write. Case in point: these four paragraphs.

In other news, besides today, the New Year's Resolution is moving along well. I've been writing slightly over five hundred words a day and started out a little ahead of the game to give myself a little cushion, so we're looking at over thirty-seven thousand words so far. I've got about half a first draft now.

Tomorrow will be a better day. I can feel it. (No, I can't. Tomorrow might suck too. What do I look like, a precog? And there's a big container of cheeseballs on the air hockey table that just keeps calling to me.)

Family Tree

FAMILY TREE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They came online in the middle of 2007, The Total Genealogy Project, revealing the relationship between every living thing and every other living thing. It became popularly known as Yggdrasil, after the world tree of ancient Norse mythology. It was wikified and lonely old men poured their data into its hungry maw by the truckload. Every proud relationship to some obscure historical figure was chronicled. Fractured families found one another as stems met at branches and branches met on limbs. Good.

Then the genetic research files began flowing in and things became unpleasant for some people. If you looked at enough of the treasured charts that laymen kept in their dens, you'd realize there were a lot less bastards there than there should have been. The genetic data with a little detective work showed that queen so and so might have had a little tryst with one of the squires and there was a reason that a certain branch of the family was a little closer to olive-skin than alabaster. Mysteries were solved. People grew angry. Racial purity groups had to adjust their standards once it was found that there just weren't any racially pure members to be had. Peace broke out everywhere, to the consternation of many, when family ties kept being brought up as a reason we should all get along.

While they were still sorting through the mess with the humans, the animal family trees were dumped into the mess, which pissed off a lot of America's heartland. They didn't like the idea of people being related to animals. There was the evolutionary problem and the implied age of the Earth problem. Even so, all of that was easier for many of the white people to swallow than the fact that this crazy Internet said that their ancestors had all come from Africa.

Each branch of the family tree was less welcome than the one which had proceeded it. Finally the vegetarians had something to feel guilty about. They'd been eating their cousins of course, like the omnivores, just different ones, and encouraging others to eat the same group of cousins.

"If you're going to eat," The U.N. Secretary General said, "You've got to eat a family member. There's no getting around it." He resigned in disgrace when people took this as an okay to eat their children and aunties.

Fortunately everything was fixed when the people banded together into a multitude of large and unruly mobs and destroyed the Internet.

"Glad that's over," remarked one mob spokesperson. "Now we can all go back to being unrelated again." Everyone seemed quite happy once more and the killing began again in earnest.

Days To Burn

DAYS TO BURN
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Jeez! His head was killing him! He'd just sprung into existence at midnight, the very instant after the old geezer had croaked. Baby 2007 had grabbed his first glass of champagne at one second old and hadn't stopped drinking until he was about five and a half hours. Had he really run around naked all night? Ah, hell, they were parties, right? It's not a good party if you don't have a story to tell afterward.

He crashed what, maybe sevenish? He hadn't been tired, necessarily, he hadn't been up the day before, but he was a baby and babies can only handle so much booze. Try it with yours, you'll see. Even so, 2007 could drink any baby under the table. He woke around five this afternoon, puking and throbbing and dry as a pressed flower. "I'll never drink again," he promised the spinning walls. And here he lay in the same crib, even now. Still throbbing, still regretting. The dry toast came back up a few minutes ago and then there were the dry heaves.

He hadn't seen a heck of a lot of daylight, his first day on earth, but that was okay. There'd be plenty of other days. He figured he had at least two-hundred great ones to come later on in the year. Two-hundred was a heck of a lot. What was one day? Looking out at the vast stretch of year before him, it seemed glorious, even in the wake of the his first drinking binge. He'd hit it hard tomorrow, leap out of bed and grab the bull by the horns and all that shit. And if he didn't, he'd do it the day after that. He had days to burn.

Watching The Clock On Old Year's Night

WATCHING THE CLOCK ON OLD YEAR'S NIGHT
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Unbelievable. Just a year ago he was a fat and sassy little baby, shaking it for all to see in nothing but a white sash and a suntan. Now here he stood, hunched over his cane, bald head aglow above the comet-like tail of his long white beard. He looked again at the clock. Not much time left. This must have been how Saddam felt just a couple of days ago. When that big bloody ball descended mere hours from now it would be like watching the executioner's switch thrown in an unbearable slow motion.

What a screw job. It hadn't even been much of a year. Damned elections. Between the attack ads, the debates, the pundits and election day coverage itself, he'd missed out on days of quality television time. He wasn't a political animal. 1968 had enjoyed politics. Now he'd had a good life. All 2006 had wanted was new episodes of Married With Children and there wasn't a chance of that happening.

At least he had half an Olympics. If they hadn't switched their crazy little system around, he wouldn't have had that.

2006 hoped there was such a thing as reincarnation. Imagine coming back as 4017! He bet that would be a cool year. Maybe they'd have world peace by then. No, No! A leap year! What could be better than being a leap year? To have your life artificially extended by .274 percent. Man, that would be sweet. What would he do with an extra day if he had it? Catch some more of the Twilight Zone marathon, he supposed. Eat a whole bag of Doritos. He really liked the Twilight Zone. And Doritos.

But of course, all that extra life would have been stolen from three other years that had their lives cut short by six hours each. He didn't think he could live with the guilt of those poor suckers' hours on his hands.

Wait a minute! He was one of those poor suckers! Who was it? Was it 2004 that stole his time? Or would it be 2008? He wanted revenge on one or both of them suddenly, more than he wanted anything else in life. But those years weren't here to face him like men. His eyes filled with water until the clock on the wall blurred.

"Stop it, stop it, old man," he told himself. He wiped his face. "This is the hand you were dealt. Make the most of it. Seize the day."

He checked the clock again, with a clearer head. He turned on the TV. Cheers would be on soon. It was one with Diane. He liked Diane.

2007, Here We Come


Well, gang, it’s resolution time. And this year, my resolution affects you, my occasionally loyal readers. You see, after many misfires, I’ve decided that 2007 will be the Year of the Novel. I’m resolving to finish a novel and send it out the door in 2007. I’ve been tinkering with a little something for years now, a trilogy of short stories featuring the same characters, and I’ve decided to weld them together into a novel. I’ve got about 31,000 words down and I figure about 45,000 more would make a decent sized book. At first, my goal was to get the first draft done by the end of March, but then I realized once I reached that goal, I’d probably just let the first draft sit there for many more years. So, I expanded the goal.

“How does this affect me,” you ask? Certain things have to take a back seat to the goal. Not that I’m quitting anything, but my daily work on the novel takes first priority from here on out. I want to lose about twenty more pounds (I’ve lost seventeen since Halloween) and build some muscle up so I don’t look like a flabby-skinned stickboy, but if at the end of the day, I only have time for one thing, the novel comes before the exercise. So, I have no idea what kind of impact this is going to have on the daily blog story. Perhaps you won’t notice a difference, perhaps there won’t be another story for a year. The reality will probably be somewhere between these two extremes. I’m preparing you now.

I still haven’t thought up a story for today, but I’ve still got nearly five hours to go.

I posted this bulletin on MySpace a couple hours back:

I want to wish all of you a 2007 that will shake your soul and show you meaning through the
simple act of doing that which you haven't done before.

Tell those people you love that you love them. Go outside and take a deep breath and feel it in
your lungs. Relive what your heartbeat feels like when you're doing something so exciting or
terrifying that the experience will stay with you forever.

And for once, stop listening to those people.

Soylent Green: It Isn’t Just People


For some reason the subject of cannibalism seems to come up a lot more often at my house than (I can only assume) at most other people’s houses. My wife, Bianca, made an astute observation on the subject yesterday. “The thing about Soylent Green is it isn’t just people,” she said. “It’s old people.”

Doing The Thing

DOING THE THING
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Slappy wanted fame, wanted fortune, wanted love. For decades he had nothing, including talent. On his forty-second-and-a-half birthday he had an epiphany: The lowest common denominator was a concept he could actually put to good use. He wrote his book within minutes.

It wasn't a novel. It was too short for that. But it did come in book form. And it became the best selling book of all time. It's title? "The Covenant".

It's content? As follows:

A person did a thing.

And that was it. A more universal message could not be found. Once he hit the New York Times bestseller list, people hounded Slappy wherever he went.

"Hey, I did a thing! Just like the person in the book!"

"Your book really spoke to me!"

"Finally, a character with whom I can identify."

"What's up with that title?"

"I just thought it sounded cool," Slappy admitted.

Slappy got his fame, Slappy got his fortune. Slappy had yet to get his love. There was one woman who caught his eye. Dara Klyburn. Once Slappy's book went big, Dara jumped on the bandwagon with imitation after imitation. Her book, "The Elms of Yesterday" went like this:

Some people did some things.

But who the hell wanted to read a book like that?

She to boil down Slappy's message even further with "The River Karma":

Person thinging.

No.

"Frowning in the Elderberries" went:

You.

But everyone thought it was about someone else.

"The Mortician Doesn't Ring at All":

Me.

But everyone thought it was Dara's autobiography, and a bit thin at that.

If imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, then Slappy was flattered beyond belief. He had to have this woman.

He wrote a book for her, a one copy press run called: "Alkali." The text read: A woman did a thing. It reduced Dara to tears.

"It's about me!" she cried. "It's so detailed!"

"Marry me, Dara," Slappy said. And she was helpless before him.

Everybody Loves Ramen

EVERYBODY LOVES RAMEN
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Poor Bjorn. As the only elf-repellent salesperson in a land of elf lovers and respecters he lived on the cheap in a big, big way. He couldn't afford an apartment or a car. About the only thing he could afford was ramen noodles. But Bjorn was a resourceful young man. He built himself a house and a car out of noodles (uncooked, of course). However, he found himself constantly ridiculed by the townsfolk he loved. They called him things like "Noodle Man" and "Soupy" which were pretty lame, but hurt him nonetheless. He constantly received fines and tickets from the authorities for his unsafe construction, but he was at the end of his financial rope anyway. Jail was an improvement.

As Bjorn sat in prison, the mother of all blizzards swept across the country. They lost power and the roads were blocked for weeks and famine set in.

"I can help!" Bjorn said. "If you just let me out!"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Noodle Man?" his captors said. "You're just itching to get free so you can build a ramen airplane or something and kill yourself. You just sit there and think about what you've done."

But days after the last can of sardines was finished, Bjorn squeezed his skinny self through the bars and ran home.

"Everyone follow me!" he shouted on the way. Bjorn pushed his car into the volcanic hot spring in the center of town. The people feasted on noodles and when those ran out they threw his house into the spring. Everyone was saved. Bjorn was their hero. Until the snows melted.

"Hey, can I get a lift back to jail?" Bjorn asked everyone.

"Screw you, freeloading Noodle Man!" they said. And Bjorn sank into obscurity once more.

That is, until the elves attacked.

Jerry And The Monsters

JERRY AND THE MONSTERS
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Jerry kept his clothes piled on top of the bed. There were so many monsters in the closet, he couldn't fit anything else in there. His parents scolded him for the mess on his bed. They opened the closet door to show him that there were no monsters in the closet. The monsters ate them.

Jerry didn't leave. He had no where else to go. He wasn't afraid of the monsters, he just wanted them gone. They took up too much room. And they had eaten his parents. That was supposed to be bad too.

He tried starving them out, but that didn't work. There were too many nosy friends, social workers, and police officers looking in the closet for that too happen. If anything, the monsters were getting fat and taking up even more room. Too make things worse, Jerry's room stank of monster poo.

When he'd had enough, he went to the closet. He planned to drag them out if he had to. Jerry opened the door and lunged for the nearest lump of prickly fur. It shrank back, even in those tight quarters. He reached for a green and glossy hoof which pulled back startled like a doe's. There was a reason the monsters stayed in the closet. They were afraid of him.

Jerry closed the door again, left his hand on the big metal knob until the coldness left it. He got boards and nails from the shed and sealed the closet permanently. After one more look at his childhood, he closed his bedroom as well and slept in his parents room after that, on the other side of the house where he couldn't hear the low moans of the sad, dying things.

Man Of The Worlds, Part IX (Conclusion)

Farwir charged down the passage screaming, with his short sword held straight out. Suddenly the gladius disappeared and Farwir's arms were caught in the beast's mouth. The Blue Man heard a sickening grinding sound as he tried to pull out the arms of the screaming Farwir. Had the man been wearing any sort of protection on his arms he probably could have escaped with them intact, albeit crushed. As it was, this looked as though it would be a mortal wound.

Unable to pull the young man to safety, the Blue Man yelled at the young Anamather in an imitation of its parent enraged.

"Trelest poui heig marayt!"

He was answered with a coughing flood of something that was supposed to pass for speech from the not yet fully developed Anamather. Farwir was pulled back to the steps of the entrance as soon as the creature had opened its mouth. The Blue Man screamed for the barrage of metal from above to stop, and handed the people above the moaning figure of their would-be hero.

The flame on the tip of his staff had once again gone out and it now lay in the dirt below, wisps of smoke rising in the stale air. The Journeyman Exterminator called for iron spikes and began to hammer the odd pieces of armor and silver to the walls, wedging the spikes beneath the stones that made up the wall, oblivious to the screams of the Anamather trapped at the far end. When most of the walls and ceiling were covered, the Blue Man held his staff so that one end was above ground in the sunlight. Once again, he called upon the sun, though in a different manner this time. From the top of the staff the rays of the sun shot out, reflecting from the polished metal thousands upon thousands of times, and filling the space with a brilliant yellow-white light. Now the Anamather's screams turned from frustration to unimaginable pain. Instinctively, it teleported from the passage to the back of the cellar, covering its eyes. The Blue Man was upon it almost at once. He was no longer concerned with the light, for he was certain that the monster's eyes were damaged beyond repair. Throwing his voice, he swatted the Anamather with his staff while scolding the beast in its mother's voice. Then something inside of him made him stop. The pathetic mound of malformed flesh lay at his feet sobbing and choking up thick liquids. It was hardly in a position to harm anyone now.

He stood over it for a short time letting the pain sink into his murderous side. This would be an intelligent creature someday.

It could just as well have been Ithcyer a hundred years ago. He knelt down to stroke the thing softly, full of pity, and spoke in Moragadriel's voice for the last time.
"My baby, please come home."
The young Anamather disappeared.

The Blue Man's heart welled up with guilt for misleading the young one with a tone of voice that it would never actually hear from its parent. Anamathers cared so little for their offspring it was a wonder the species was able to perpetuate itself. But he had spared its life, among other reasons, in the hope that it would live long enough to feel a change, in the individual sense and in its species.

He dropped to the cool dirt, exhausted from the day's work. Though two families had been preserved, he had originally only worked for the preservation of one. His motives now struck him as questionable and he felt shamefully burdened by the title 'Exterminator'.

When he rose into the afternoon sun he was met with the cheers of the crowd. Old Soot ran to him.

"We thought you had been killed, Journeyman Exterminator. Did you destroy it?"

"Your home is now safe, Soot. It is gone. And I would ask that you no longer refer to me by that title."

"Of course, sir. What would you have?"

"Perhaps, you could call me . . . A Student of the Worlds."

Man Of The Worlds, Part VIII

The man directly in front of him jumped backwards as well as he could, being surrounded by people, and let out a startled yelp upon the return of the Journeyman Exterminator.

"He's back! The Exterminator is back!"

A few others grabbed him and tried to lead him back towards the cellar entrance. He couldn't be moved until finally he decided to walk on to the front of the screaming crowd and see if someone else's ear had been eaten. At the trap door he was grabbed and mauled, while at least seven people vied for his attention. All that could be understood was that something was happening beneath Soot's home.

Concentrating, he chanted and gesticulated and finally pointed to the sky with one hand while passing the other in front of the never-closing mouths of those about him. One by one they fell silent, though their mouths kept moving. Their voices were projected hundreds of feet in the air above them, and some passers-by took the skittish reaction of overhead birds as an ill omen.

Soon there was quiet about the Blue Man save for the chicken farmer. The exterminator reached through the mass of bodies and pulled the excited young man to him. The farmer also fell silent, realizing that he was the only person who hadn't lost the ability to speak.

In a calm monotone, the Journeyman Exterminator asked him to explain what had happened.

"Younger Farwir, Exterminator. He's gone down to slay the beast and impress the ladies."

"Listen to me, carefully. Get all the polished armor and silver your people can get together and throw it down into the cellar."

The Blue Man said no more but created another flame, and broke the spell of voices. He pushed through to the door and went below, staff firmly in hand.

"Die, you filthy, livestock-propositioning bastard!", yelled the man at the bottom of the steps, drawing back arrow after arrow and plunging each into the tough hide of the screaming Anamather which was now wedged between the crumbling cellar walls. "You smelly, fat-headed, dung eating, rancid, . . . thing, you!"

The Blue Man held back for a moment. He couldn't deny that Young Farwir' tactics weren't all that bad. Perhaps it was time to invest in a bow. However, the arrows seemed to infuriate the young Anamather more than harm it. Soon Farwir's quiver was spent, and the fervor of the upper hand possessed the man to take up his gladius, raising it until it hit the low ceiling. The Blue Man grabbed his arm but lost his grip as a large silver teapot bounced off of his unprotected skull from above.

(To Be Concluded)