Pet Cobra

South By

It's somewhere past Way Too Late on a Saturday night. The high from running Friday's panel on the media and the New American Dad with friend and colleague Craig Heimbuch is still gripping me. ("What does it mean to sound like a dad?", asked by someone in the full room. "It's like jazz", was my reply.) I'm sitting at a table at the epicenter of SXSW Fun, the Driskill, talking to Laura Mayes and Catherine Connors and Jyl Johnson Pattee and Nathan Thornburgh and Caleb Gardner ; their intelligence and humanity are electrifying, like a thumping bass line in my head, stirring my blood like a good backbeat should. Joe Hernandez stopped by for a few minutes - he founded Klout, so naturally I had to ask him what his Klout score was. Earlier that day, I was sitting at a cell phone recharging station and struck up a conversation with the guy next to me. "Where are you from?", he asked. "San Diego," I replied. "Oh, my son goes to San Diego State!" "My alma mater!" The talk to turned to Aztec basketball, then to SXSW - was I here for work, or fun? Both, I said, and told him about the panel I did the day before. He was here for work - Rick Eaton, CFO of Hashable, who then took twenty minutes out of his no certainly busy day to walk me through SXSW's hottest new app. (At one point, he called for help, which came in the form of Hashable CEO Michael Yavonditte, both of them explaining to me what this did, what that did, and it was all I could not to clap my hands in delight. Such moments are geekworthy.) The next morning is Sunday, and I will get up early - "get up", like I've actually slept - and walk the streets of Austin, because when I go to a city for the first time I need to experience it before it wakes, to see what kind of silence it holds. Then I'll head over to a brunch with the PBS Kids production team, the creative minds who could be doing pretty much anything, who opt to make our children's world a little brighter. I'll meet Karen Walrond, and half-jokingly refer to her as a force of nature, but I can think of no better way to describe someone so radiant. I'll fly home, deal with a plane delay that causes me to miss a connecting flight from LA to San Diego, rent a car at LAX at 11:30 at night, make a two hour drive back to the San Diego airport to pick up my car, fall asleep at the wheel at least once, collapse in my bed at 2:45 AM on Monday morning, wake up at 7:30 AM that same Monday morning (have to, because it's my first day at a new job), and spend the next couple of days in a complete fog, battling a horrid case of laryngitis and trying to come up with a way of describing What SXSW Meant To Me. I'm thinking the whole thing was something like jazz. The Mile Davis kind.

IndieInk Writing Challenge #3: Untitled

 The IndieInk Writing Challenge rolls on. It's a pretty simple idea; one writer throws a conceptual gauntlet at the feet of another, and it's on, as they say. THUNDAHDOME. 

This week, Jules - she runs the Mean Girl Garage, AAA-approved and rightfully so - gave me a cryptic line as my challenge. It was

“I’m not a solution to your problem. I’m another problem.”

The line went dead. 

Fuck.

Fuckity fuck fuck.

She checks her watch. 0430. Smart. That time of night/morning when human reaction times are at their slowest. It didn't help that she'd had a couple rounds of cheap Scotch before turning in. Stupid. Stupider still: realizing only now, with an invisible icepick digging its way into her temple just above her left eye, that they'd known she'd been drinking. Blinds drawn, the only light the death throes of a flickering florescent bulb, and

somehow

they

knew.

She's lying on her bed, on her back. If she stands she'll be in front of the window. Would she hear the soft snap of glass, the whisper of the bullet? Lying down, maybe they can't tell where she is. She'd had the sense to turn off the light before drifting into sleep. The dreamless sleep of the dead and the professional.  And sometimes the dead professional, she thinks. She realizes that if the shot was going to come through the window, she wouldn't be having this conversation with herself. She reaches under her pillow and slowly

pulls

out

the

gun. 

It's a Magnum Desert Eagle, a massive thing, and the .50 caliber round in the chamber will slice through the hotel room door and a human heart with equal ease. 

The 

phone 

rings

once

twice

thrice

silence.

She rolls over on to her side, her back towards the window. Pretends to be in the grip of a dream, erotic, or terrifying, enough to cause her to kick the sheets off, in fear, or passion. If she has to move the sheets will envelope her and they'll become her burial shroud. She lies in something like a fetal position, her fingers entwined around the pistol's grip, the business end pointed at a spot on the door about five feet up. The bullet will go through the wood and into a throat, or, better yet, a skull. She

holds

her

breath.

Once, when she was a teen, she went scuba diving. What dazzled her was not the vast forest of brown kelp, undulating in the currents, or the garibaldi fish, orange and haughty, nipping at her gloves. No, it was the muted voice of the ocean. Silent, but not - the sounds of being adrift in a weightless echo chamber, hearing nothing, hearing everything. She's so quiet now as to be underwater - she hears a heart beating, as steady as that of a resting Olympian. She hears lungs processing air. She hears

footpads.

Exhales.

Safety off.

A knock.

"Room service."

IndieInk Writing Challenge #2: Martyr

A few weeks ago, the folks at IndieInk did me the honor of posting one of my essays. I felt kinda bad, because it was something I'd written for this site. So to assuage my guilty conscience, I volunteered to join a bunch of IndieInk'ers for the IndieInk Writing Challenge. It's a pretty simple idea; one writer throws a conceptual gauntlet at the feet of another, and it's on, as they say. I'm excited: recently, writing feels like work to me. Work that I love, but work nonetheless. This is my chance to play with words.

My second challenge was issued by Karla Valenti. "Photos reflect a life narrative that has moved the photographer. These photo montages are a collage of narratives taken by various photographers. Describe the story(ies) captured in photo 7 of the following collection:http://www.corinnevionnet.com/index.php?/photo-opportunities/." I was mulling over the photo, and decided to (GASP) write a short story featuring the main element in the picture. In doing so, my mind wandered into some dark places.

We are all believers, he thinks. Despite the throngs and their heat meshing with the sun's, he's not sweating. He's lived in deserts of one sort or another his whole life. The sick have a coolness to them and the dead are cold. Warmth buoys him. He shifts his weight. He's thinking about the didgeridoo, that bizarre Australian wind instrument. Funny how the mind can wander, even surrounded by thousands of people. He pauses to consider the crowd. They move like wheat in a windstorm. Swaying as if listening to eldritch music. He checks his watch. Any time now. He marvels at the fact that he's thus far remained unmolested, despite the benign nature of the crowd. 

A few more minutes. God, he thinks. These people gather here to worship Him. He looks down at the case at his feet, build to hold a television camera. No TV,  the security guard told him. You need to leave that here. Not that it mattered - he wasn't going to film, of course - but he'd gotten this far and wanted to get closer, to see it, to have it fill his eyes, and leaving the case wouldn't do. He considered the guard - early 20's, a green-tinted wedding band - and produced a $50 bill from his wallet. The case went with him. It had seen some miles; the al-Jazeera logo on the side was almost gone, faded from the suns of a dozen countries. He'd gotten it shortly after he began working for the network. It, and his false life as a network cameraman, had served him well. 

The didgeridoo. The crowd emits a hum like a million of them. When he was in school, he spent a summer in Sydney and one weekend they went into the wilderness. There was an old man, obsidian skin, and he played one for them. It was a sound like the earth mourning. They listened for a spell. The old man spoke in broken English. The dreamtime, he said. The dreamworld. When they buried him and the blood-spattered didgeridoo along with the guns and shell casings, someone mentioned that even though he was a non-believer, a heretic, infidel, perhaps the one true God would remember his music and take pity on him. That was good desert, full of scrub, crevices, cover of all sorts. An ideal training ground. They all had code names - it wouldn't do to end up down the hole, screaming out your brothers' names in the hope that the enemy would stop pulling out your fingernails. Better to shriek out nonsense - in this case, colors, an idea taken from a recent gangster movie. They spend days in the furnace, learning about microcircuitry and line-of-sight and frequencies and spectra. Along with that they learned to field-strip a weapon blindfolded, and how to use the knife so that the trachea is severed, thus preventing the target from yelling for help as he bleeds out.

He reaches into his satchel. There, next to the pager - they'd had a hell of a time finding one that actually worked - is a the modified cell phone and a Q'uran. His copy, much like the camera case, is yellowed from use. He's read it dozens upon dozens of time, entire passages coming to him as easy as his own birth date. The pager begins to vibrate. A number appears. He flips open the battered book and finds the corresponding page, and then the corresponding phrase. He smiles. Of course. He'd bet one of his colleagues that when the time came, he'd know exactly what the code would be. Hours spent memorizing thoughts, ideas, passages, phrases, words. He picks up the phone, which will, when the proper text message is sent, transmit a signal to the case at his feet. He types in the code word, looking around as he does. Thousands of pilgrims, here to see, and - God willing - touch the Black Stone. Al-Masjid al-Haram, the Sacred Mosque. And there, the Kaaba. The ebon cube. The epicenter of Islam.

The code phrase. When sent, what's inside the camera case will detonate. 

We are all believers, he prays. No doubt he'll burn in Hell for what he's about to do. The Q'uran - which he'd read in the hopes of better understanding his enemy - and The Bible both say the same thing about murder. He prays anyway. There is no God but God, and He so loved the world that He sacrificed His only son, in Jesus' name, amen.