Stories About Things

by Aelius Blythe

Public Domain

(Creative Commons CC0)

Please respect the hard work of this author
by copying, sharing, modifying, or otherwise using this work,
wherever and however possible.

No Rights Reserved.

kopimi

(Don't worry, it's short.)

These are stories about things.

Some from this world. Some from other
worlds.

Small things. Disconnected things.
Meaningless things.

Just things.

~A.

Table of Contents

Part I. Thought and Memories: things of this
world...

Teacups

Time

The Name

Maple Syrup

The Swing

That Night There Was No Dinner

First Impressions

Part II. Fairies and Things: things of other
worlds...

Sun Set

Shark

The Dinner Bells

Leaves of Trees

The Bear Would Starve

Space

Part I. Thought and Memories: things of this
world...

ONE

Dirt.

That was a more pleasant smell.

Dirt didn't smell dirty. It smelled like
life and it smelled like growth and it smelled like comfort.

It was more pleasant than this.

This was old and it smelled like old.

Like oil mixed with dust mixed with rags
mixed with closed doors and no airflow and dark. Like the smell of
an old barn. Like the smell of someone's grandmother's house
forgotten on a lot with too many trees grown up around it.

The smell of neglect.

The china was cold.

It shouldn't have been. It should have been
warm, it should have been hot–too hot to hold and filled with tea
too hot to drink.

He wiped a finger around the flowers. The
paint was fine, thin, almost flat, but he'd always been able to
feel the designs on the cup, just a little bit.

He couldn't feel them now.

The flowers were covered in dust, and the
dust was all he felt.

She wasn't like this.

He bent down to the shelf. He shouldn't, he
knew he shouldn't. His back seemed to know it, it stiffened as his
head tried to bend down to the little china cup. He shouldn't. Not
here. Not in the place of closed doors and no airflow and dark. Not
here. But his head bent down anyway and his nose brushed the dust
at the bottom of the teacup and he sniffed.

The dust went in his nose.

The dust and the oily smell of the dark and
airless antique shop.

He turned away.

His eyes shut and he straightened up and
turned away from the shelf. He turned away even though his eyes
were shut, because he didn't want to face the cup.

It should smell like the ground.

It always had.

The tea in the cup had always smelled like
the earth after a warm rain. He never tasted it, but he would smell
it. As a child, he hated the smell of his grandmother's tea.

Now, the memories were sweet.

It shouldn't be here.

The dust and the smell of the dust and the
dark and the forgotten air of the antique shop was no place for
this cup. But there was no place for it now.

It shouldn't be here.

He opened his eyes and looked back at the
cup. It looked sad. It looked like it missed the heat of the water
and the steam and the smell of earth just like he did.

A sticker on the handle said $25. He'd only
gotten $5 for it.

But he did not have $25.

One hand brushed out and swept the cup to
the ground.

Out of it's misery.

"Oops," he said, because he felt like he
should.

"Hey!"

An old man hobbled out of the back room, but
he was too slow. The teacup lay shattered on the ground a bell
jangled and then the door banged shut.

TWO

Dr. Ellis had nearly given up on time travel.
He had built a solid theory, as well as a solid machine (several in
fact,) but it was all useless. The machine sat in his laboratory,
and the theory sat in his head because he had not yet devised a
method to power them with. He had tried nuclear power, solar power,
hydrogen fuel and even a wood-burning stove. None of it worked.

The answer came to him one day when he was
very hungry. He was considering a slice of cherry pie in a store
window, the sweet goo pouring out of the flaky crust, yellowed with
butter under a large swirl of cream. For what seemed like an hour
he stared, tried to remember how much cash he had in his pocket and
stared some more. When the bakery manager came out, Dr. Ellis was
startled out of his trance. Wiping a little drool from the corner
of his mouth he apologized, blushed, and hurried away, but not
before catching sight of the clock.

"That's it!" he shouted, then blushed again
as passers-by stared.
We've had the power source with us all
this time,
he thought, silently this time.

And so they–that is to say, people–had. For
as he walked away from the store and the cherry pie, he noticed
that barely two minutes had passed, yet surely it was an hour! He
knew then: the
mind
powers time.

And we are the machine!
he thought in
triumph.

Upon arriving home, he scrapped all his old
work and began to work on a new theory using the human mind as both
the vessel and power source. He experienced great success in this
venture. Soon, he could, in theory, make hours race ahead,
allowing, for example, one to experience the end and beginning of a
dull dinner party without any of the in-between parts that made it
dull. Or, he could slow seconds down to a near stand still allowing
more time for enjoyable things, like love-making, cherry pie, and
good books.

There were two problems with his research.
First, though he could slow down time or speed it up into the
future, he had not yet figured out how to go backwards. He
hypothesized, however, that this was possible, and kept working at
it. Perhaps a combination of factors could exert enough force on
the mind to make it turn backwards.

He tried many formulas to achieve this. For
example: a lecture on the tree-ant's sleeping patters plus full
logarithm tales plus a twelve foot pile of manila folders to be
filed. That one was pretty close; it managed to bring time to a
near standstill. But still it would not go backwards.

The second problem was the interference of
the subconscious. If left alone, it would drag the host through the
dull moments, expanding seconds into hours, and collapse hours into
seconds during the fantastic moments.

Dr. Ellis theorized that this was an
evolutionary mechanism, and quite a powerful one. Nature wanted the
organism to realize just how boring the boring moments were, so it
would avoid those in the future. The organism also needed to get
through the fantastic moments quickly so that they could seek out
more and more of these. While no doubt a biological advantage, this
was exactly the tendency he wished to counter.

The subconscious problem was a particular
beast. The doctor worked obsessively on it. He thought it was
rather as if the subconscious controlled walking. One could try all
morning to arrive at work, only to end up at the theater or the
bakery.

To solve the problem, he tried many methods
of distracting the subconscious. (Would it falter for a raspberry
torte? Or a well-proportioned blonde?) If it were distracted long
enough, then the conscious mind could sneak off through time. He
also tried tricking the subconscious mind into inverting its
natural patterns (would a caramel cheesecake make work meetings fly
by? Would a persistent itch make a holiday last forever?) The
subconscious, however, was a stubborn and well-disciplined
creature. It had made its patterns and stuck with them like
cement.

Still, he worked and he worked. One night, as
he was fiddling with a distraction contraption he'd built, he cut
his finger on a piece of aluminum foil. He tried to ignore it, but
the blood dripped all over the contraption and ran onto his notes.
He went to the bathroom to find a bandage.

He opened the door, with the non-bloody hand,
and walked into the bathroom. There was somebody there! He jumped
in alarm, shoulders twitching, hands shaking. Seeing the stranger's
reflection, he whirled to accost the intruder. But his knee gave
way, spilling him to the floor. When he looked up, the stranger had
gone. Shaking, knee throbbing, he stood, gripped the sink. There!
He was back! Slowly this time, but still trembling he turned his
head. But as he did, the stranger turned away. They turned back and
stared at each other, the mirror in between.

Dr. Ellis looked at his own drooping skin and
pale eyebrows.

"No!" he yelled. "I don't know how to go back
yet!"

He stumbled back to his desk. His notes were
all in disarray. He clawed through them desperately.

"There must be a key in here somewhere!"

Crimson drips fell from his finger.

Through stacks of diagrams and formulas his
withered hands searched.

"I know I can fix it...I know I can fix
it..."

The faster he searched, the longer his
grizzled hair grew. Joints groaned and stiffened. His concave chest
struggled to expand enough for air.

"There must...be a way...to go...back."

His head spun, and the panic grew wilder. His
hair grew faster, and his joints grew slower. His breaths grew
weaker.

Thunk.

The cement floor ground against his bent
back. Failing fingers clutched a stack of papers. Pupils, quickly
clouding with cataracts, strained to see.

"How...how..."

Then time stopped. At least, it did for
him.

THREE

Goddamnit.

Everyone else was tried not to let their
sobs drown out the eulogy.

Not me.

It wasn't that I wasn't sobbing (but I
wasn't.) It wasn't that I wasn't listening to the eulogy (but I
wasn't.) It wasn't that I wasn't totally remembering what a great
guy the dearly departed was (Of he was. Who needed reminding?)

Goddamnit!

It wasn't any of those things.

It was the name.

What was it?

He
was
a great guy. Totally. Fun,
energetic, handsome; the kind everybody liked. That was the reason
they all attended his funeral. That's why I was there, anyway. I
remembered the laughing, good-natured, slightly drunk face very
well.

But not the name that went with it.

Mother always used to scoff at the people
with funny names. But I remembered every single Dallas or Anferny
I'd ever met. My mental landscape was full of Toms and Justins, and
Jessicas and Katies. They were as common as paving stones and
slipped by without notice.

Could have been Justin. Could have been
Tom.

Tom... Tom?

The name started to insert itself into the
memories.
Tom.
That could have been it.

No stop that.

It would have been awkward if it slipped out
of my mouth. Or it
would
be awkward if it turned out that it
wasn't actually his name. For all I knew, it could have been. But
if not, would "Oops, wrong funeral," get me out of that one?