POOL – Jim Day 1995 CS

When you get to the point where you can’t remember the color of your own carpet, yep, it’s time to go home again. All you have to do once you get there is unlock the door. Turn the knob. Push. Walk right in. Oh great, now I remember that the carpet is yellow. The same color as the bird sebum that oozed through the stretcher, wearing down the hooks and loops until I fell through. Time to go back out, I guess.

Not that the events interlock or coincide. I think of it as a night out on the low gravity plains, pinballs striking one another at random. I watch the last silver ball rotate and dissolve into a vast hiss of space, even though I shouldn’t be looking, due to the inevitability of another blink from that one distant light, which is yellow or red, if I remember correctly.

My eyelids are transparent. That means I don’t see too good. I stay bewildered between the long intervals of the distant blinking light. They made them this way because future designers looked forward to having all of our eyelids this way. I’m an OG, right in the middle of written history and where you are, Jack. In other words, I’m sensitive to light, so take it easy with the stereoprobe.

Damn. I just bought that pair of pants, whom I lovingly referred to as Wrong Way Jim, and already I’ve ripped them clean down the middle. Poor Jim, his boozy veneer oozed into the fabric as he looked for his lost ham and onion loaf.

I’m one to talk. I’m nothing but a prototype. Which means, really, I have nothing but time, now that I have reminded myself of the color of the carpet back home, to kick up my feet and let the net burn as it tightens around all the bumps and pushes out all the oil. As I drift into another dull dream of silver, I hear laughter coming from the green room. It subsides and, finally, all is still. Then, I hear a wisp from across the stretcher move this way. Ah, I knew it all along, a hair is a transparent organism that floats through the night until it catches on its hook at the scalp, finally becoming visible.

-Rick Weaver

Edition of 100