Waiting on Pangea Proxima

I look at my wrist. 300 millions years to go, more than enough time to sell real estate. I'd finished with undiscovered countries, those hidden from maps, but was still to negotiate a string of Late Pleistocene lakes that draped themselves across the Mojave. Beach front property, sold vertically, up-and-down across deep time, my clients learning the meaning of sunken costs while basking upon the bleached shore of a dry lake.

[Submitted to The Short Story Postcard Project, April 29, 2021]

Dale Basin Haiku

DALE LAKE 1
Pleistocene plenty
A palace of indifference
Observant, faithless

DALE LAKE 2

Mist veiled nabkhas

Dale glimmering snow white

day's pregnant unrest

DALE LAKE 3

eye drink Dale Lake dry

the baited brine noiselessly

swell a crystal crust

FIVE ACRES 1
Virus dreaming green
off-grid, off-green, dry campers
Tuff Sheds on the lake

FIVE ACRES 2
Desert tropes, Dear John
140 years of failed dreams
Ain't enough for me

FIVE ACRES 3
Bad actors under
Aeolian blisters bake
ham-fisted desert

DESERT MODERNISM

Hashtag swag, Dear John

suburban feralities

Ka-Ching, greener Green

GREASEWOOD

Recovered memory

Larrea Tridentata

and managed retreat

LATE PLEISTOCENE LAKES

On deckled shores

dry lakes measured in bits of

Rhode Island units

[From a work in progress]

Al-Jabr 57

Spatchcocked on Al-Jabr 57 in a pigtail of a shipwreck, Braedon is reduced to a off-brand sigil. Ozone, burnt sugar, and wet dog flood the sensors, all needles bent. Fortune has undone his legs, Sly and Robbie, seeding a compass rose on a new world. Restless sugar sand erase all memory of animal joy. Al-Jabr is trouble, round and dangerous.

[Submitted to The Short Story Postcard Project, April 4, 2021]

Rolling with the changes

It was an experiment but it was well organized. Just a few simple rules.

Adhere to clock time. Go ahead and look out the window and continue your morning and evening walks. But obey the clock, or rather the clocks. (Note this doesn't include your mobile, that's not a clock, it's a camera with a tracking device).

Twelve or twenty four, your choice but your appliances prefer twelve hour shifts so most likely you'll stick to this.

When the power goes out, light a candle or be gloomy about your misfortune. When the power comes back on, your appliances take over and their revived clock faces are you new life-organizing standard.

You'll probably do some subtraction and addition maths at first but after a few cycles that will be nearly impossible. What is life like in this new world revolving around happenstance time? Talk it over with your Maytag and your Amana.

And it's a good thing you ditched that VCR. It would stubbornly blink twelve, zero zero, ad infinitum, tapping its feet waiting for human intervention. That defeats the whole purpose of the experiment.

[This was written for a Word Slinger session, Saturday April 3, 2021]