The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
Restore the Land
2-06-2000

I was traveling through some woods when I came upon a creek. A middle-aged man and woman were tending to a garden there. They told me the story behind it. The land here was once bare, literally worked to death. There were many bones all over the place, the last remnants of all the people who used to toil over the land. Here by the creek was a building, an old church. Sitting on a stone bed inside the church, propped up against a dripping, slimy wall so that he could drink, was the same man. He was hardly a man, though. He was literally a skeleton with a few brown fibers holding him together. He didn't even have eyes. It was a miracle he was still alive. One day a very old woman stumbled inside and gave him a bone. It was all she could find. He took it and she left. He started gnawing on it with the intention of sharpening it enough to stab himself through the throat with it. But when it broke at the end, he tasted something. Bone marrow. He licked it, ate what little there was, and it gave him strength.

Later, when he was strong enough, he searched the banks of the creek for bones, eating the marrow. It was his only nutrition. Other people survived this way, too, and they all started working together again, for all they could, to restore the land.

Then one day a man named David came. He was young and healthy. They asked if he would stay and help them, so he did. With his help, the land became fruitful again. Everyone became healthy again, and more people were drawn to the newly prosperous land.

I looked around and saw crops everywhere. The ground was so dense, particularly with peaches (yes, I know peaches grow on trees). I stayed on with them for many years. David died, and others came and went as well, but the three of us lived a very long time.

I left to visit my friend Cary, who was a manager at McDonald's. The line was very long, so it took me a while to see him. Eventually I was let inside, through the back, where I visited with another friend. The phone rang, and I answered it. It was my old friend Rachael, crying about how she'd lost her man and everyone else in her life. I said, "So now you've decided to come running back to me, huh?" I knew full well that if that were true, I'd have to turn her down anyway, since I'd already found someone. She came to the McD's and met Cary. I overheard her say she never felt anything for me, then Cary announced that he was going to leave and show Rachael around the city. I was furious, because I didn't know my way around the McD's kitchen to serve the customers, and I didn't want anyone I knew to see me working there. So the other guy and I just shut down the windows after Cary left and watched TV.

When Cary returned, without Rachael, he didn't find it odd that we weren't open. He watched some TV with us. He finally noticed, and upon opening the windows, a very long line was revealed, even though the franchise right next door was open. I left them to their work.

I went to my old church gym to play a game involving an oversized, elastic softball. One had to throw it hard enough to make it to the basketball backboard and bounce back. I was wearing gloves that made it hard to throw, though, so I always came up short. Barbeque was served, too, and it got everywhere. Since we were all suddenly wearing all white, that was a problem. I ended up spilling something on a girl's dress. She got very upset, and her boyfriend carried her out of the gym. I made a snide remark about how she'd always acted that way.

I went back to the creek, which was still flourishing. I saw people there I hadn't seen in a long time (fake dream people), or hadn't expected to be there, but I guess I'd been gone a while and things had changed. There was so much fruit that it was falling into the creek and being carried downstream. I saw a deposit of large green fruit that was floating in from upstream, and the middle-aged woman explained that two fruits had combined during their transit here and formed a new one. I found that amazing, but maintained my doubts.

It was night. There was a man in a sled, holding some reigns meant for dogs, but instead they were attached to a vacant motorcycle. He skillfully navigated himself through the snow this way into a snow-sports competition. His kind was rare, as most people had skis or other vehicles, and every time someone like him made the last death-defying jump into the inner ranks of the complex, they cheered wildly. I watched a large truck try one of the jumps into the parking lot, but it couldn't get enough speed and collided into a wall in a ball of flame. The driver was flung out, burnt to a crisp. I figured it was a plastic dummy, especially when someone tossed it away.

Disembodied somehow, I made my way to the top of a slope and watched someone snowboard down a course. At first they went through the slolem poles, but then they started screwing around, passing people who didn't know what they were doing, and at the end, got a 7.1 score, which was still one of the better scores. I thought about how the people at the X Games were so much better. One smiling man in red made it to the bottom. He got the highest score, and when the announcer announced his name, he repeated it, saying, "That's right." Some women flocked over to him and I hated him immediately. At the ski lift, he made some comment, and I deduced that he was bisexual, and I made this observation known.

On the chair lift, I decided I wanted to put jet boosters on the back of my skis, and instead of skiiing downhill, I wanted to ski cross-country, controlling these boosters by wiggling my toes or something.

There was a cave at the bottom of the slope, and guarding it was some large giant humanoid monster. We didn't exactly know what it was, but we threw a boulder down at it anyway.


posted by Phlegm at 11/25/2003