Nonfiction: Simulating Success

Note: I started writing this to enter in a contest, but I didn't finish it in time. Maybe I'll submit it somewhere, but not sure about that. Enjoy. - Editied 6-30-17
 
I’ve been considering simulating an entire 162 game Major League Baseball season. I am not talking about taking one team and simulating 162 games. We’re going bigger than that, like the entire league’s schedule bigger.  That’s 2,430 games, not including playoffs.

Why? You ask.

Why not?

 

The playoffs will happen, too. As Tolkien wrote, “There can be only one.”

Was that Tolkien or Mortal Combat? I’d look, but there’s no use in straying too far from the subject yet. The point is that if you’re going to play a full season then you have to see it to the conclusion of crowning a single champion. God knows, I won’t be the winner.

This urge – it’s not an obsession yet – started with the gradual migration of my childhood crap to the home I share with my wife. Buried in one of the plastic tubs were my baseball cards and the Baseball Card All-Star Game.

The gist of the game is this: You create two teams and their batting lineups from whatever conglomeration of baseball cards you want, and then you play. No batteries required.

My bad. “There can be only one,” is from Highlander. Like the board game, Highlander was made in the 1980s. It’s about a band of immortals that duel with swords with the goal of decapitating the opponent. The last man – I think they were all men in the original movie­ – won the prize of being immortal. I don’t remember the plot well enough to understand the full crux of why they were determined to cut each other’s heads off, so I am not sure why they couldn’t all agree to put the swords down and find a better way to pass the time. I guess once you get an idea in your head, it’s hard to shake. No matter how illogical, time-consuming, or all together pointless it is.

I can relate.

The gameplay is simple. There are ten columns on each side of a laminated piece of cardboard. One side (shaded gray) is for players with twenty or more home runs during the most recent season listed on the ball card, and the other side (shaded pink) is for everyone else. The column headers are batting average ranges, and there are eleven at-bat outcomes in each column. The outcomes are numbered two to twelve, and you achieve an outcome by rolling a pair of dice. Simple. Roll a seven, you strikeout. 

The game rules ignore pitchers, but for posterity’s sake, I include them. I choose rotations and develop bullpens. When the dice turn on a starter, I go to the pen and even take a look at which arm each reliever throws with to see if it provides an advantage against an upcoming batter. Perhaps I should enact a rule that I roll the dice with the hand that corresponds with the arm the pitcher uses. Details like that matter.

For instance, Highlander starts at a professional wrestling event where the Fabulous Freebirds were the main attraction. The Freebirds had a couple different incarnations, but the most successful combination was the trio of Michael “P.S.” Hayes, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy, and Buddy “Jack” Roberts. The group terrorized the southern territories in the 1980s, waving the confederate flag while also portraying somewhat androgynous characters. Only in professional wrestling can “redneck” and “androgynous” get over in the south as a successful gimmick. In all other walks of life, those two terms, especially in the south, mix as well as oil and water. Watch enough 1980s wrestling broadcasts, and you’ll likely get hooked to such clichés as things mixing like oil and water. Another good one is the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. That means something, but after a million uses, it doesn’t mean anything to me other than something to do with Hulk Hogan charging into Andre the Giant.

Baseball cards and professional wrestling occupied much of my childhood. I have a tub of old wrestling magazines purchased from a local bookstore at a rate of three for a dollar on Thursdays when my mom would go grocery shopping. And if I were being completely honest, the day my dad brought home a VHS player after work probably still ranks as one of my best days. Not only could I watch important films like Highlander, but also I could start renting wrestling videos from the store. Remember when there were stores to rent movies?

For most, opening Highlander with a wrestling scene didn’t add much, but for me, it’s probably why a line like “There can be only one” is still floating around my subconscious. It doesn’t seem like much, but it mattered to me. Stuff like that always runs through my mind when I am writing. So does the baseball game.

While writing this, a bulb lit up above my head. It’s the best thought I’ve had today. The pitcher can bat despite the fact that most card sets do not include a pitcher’s hitting stats. See pitchers are like my writing career, very few hits. Ba-dum. We can assume every pitcher slugged under twenty home runs and had a batting average below the Mendoza line. This is a monumental thought in my desire to simulate a season. By employing this method, I can recreate the unique nature of both the National and American Leagues. Before this revelation, I employed a designated hitter in every lineup. Lame.

A note on the Mendoza line: The dubious honor for hitters with an average below .200 is named after former professional shortstop Mario Mendoza. For position players, sustaining a mark below .200 likely means their days on the roster are numbered. Mendoza accomplished the feat four times in five seasons in the late 1970s. It’s a fluke that he survived that long, and now his name is associated for failure in a game that he likely spent his entire life trying to perfect. Double lame.

I am an aspiring writer, but as of this paragraph, I am making Mendoza look like a hall of famer, unless you count publication in the sports section of the local newspaper. I’ve done that thousands of times, but I don’t count it. Before the sports reporters gather the pitchforks and torches, I am proud of my journalism career, it’s just not my current aspiration.

I don’t know if there is a writing equivalent to Mendoza. Someone who achieved their goal of publishing, but did so at such a mediocre level that it’s viewed by the industry as trite or meaningless or even detrimental – as Mendoza’s inability to hit undoubtedly hurt his team. Maybe Stephanie Meyer is that writer. Her Twilight books were panned by the industry despite selling like hotcakes. I guess I’ll try to avoid the Meyer Line. Except I’d love to get published, as Meyer accomplished, and boy, the money she made wouldn’t bother me either. I am a sellout, after all.

Christopher Lambert is a little bit like Mendoza, except that it feels like Lambert got cut after one bad season. Lambert played the leading role in Highlander and its subsequent sequels, but I can’t name another movie he starred in. Heck, I can’t name another movie he appeared in, much less was the lead. I also refuse to cheat and check on Google for his filmography. I suppose Highlander is trite and meaningless (although it does make you wonder if living forever would be all that wonderful), but I can’t say it’s any more or less detrimental to the film industry than the bevy of action movies from the 1980s. And nobody refers to an actor falling below the Lambert Line or a film below the Highlander Line.

The professional wrestling equivalent to Mendoza? The Honky Tonk Man. Or maybe X-Pac. I can’t decide. My mom once called me wishy-washy. She was right.

The inclusion of pitchers is controversial. With such a poor batting average, the likelihood of a hit would be low, and let’s face it, scoring runs is more fun. The argument persists in MLB, as well. Pitchers don’t practice hitting because the money in their ample paychecks is derived solely from their ability to throw pitches either at blistering speeds and/or with brutal movement. A few pitchers take pride in hitting, and occasionally one will get a hold of a ball and drive it over the wall. Fans love that. Americans love the underdog, and there might not be any bigger underdog in sports than a pitcher gripping a bat. Of course, America hasn’t been the underdog since the end of the Civil War. We’ve dominated the world theatre and throw fits when the slightest thing happens that doesn’t benefit us. We’re a strange folk. Selfish. Erratic. Comfortable. Endearing. Comical. Probably smelly.

The pundits – the new age pundits for the old-school guys detest change – call for the designated hitter to be adopted by the National League. The American League has utilized the designated hitter since the 1970s. We of the age of sabermetrics and reason and alternative facts have evolved beyond the momentary satisfaction of seeing a pitcher flail at a ball two feet out of the zone. Sometimes we are all just too damned smart for our own good.

I was never good enough to swing anything other than aluminum lumber that pinged when it made hard contact rather than making that crack that poets, musicians, and lazy sports writers romanticize. Maybe there is an App with the wood bat sound that I could play while simulating the season. The only sound the game offers now is the dice bouncing off the board – a square board with a field pictured and rectangles at each base to place a card when hitters become base runners after hits or walks. Hearing the dice rattle around for seconds takes me back to my youth, to quiet days in my bedroom playing the game. I probably fantasized about simulating an entire season at that point, too. The dice sound really doesn’t stir my poetic soul like the crack of a bat does for so many others. Better check the Google Play Store.

My abilities were so limited that I remember only two in-game at-bats. The first was early in my Little League career when I drew a walk, tossed my bat, and as my cleats squished down on first base, I gave a huge sigh of relief. My coach was incredulous at my reaction. Instead of standing at the plate fighting for a hit, I was satisfied to accept either a walk or a strikeout looking. I didn’t have the confidence yet to take true hacks and have faith that my bat could actually connect. Keep in mind, I am a guy who has thought about writing for most of his life, and at thirty-five is finally dedicating the time to do it and investigating opportunities for publication. I’ve never been quick to stick my neck out.

The second at-bat came during a tournament years later. I creamed a pitch – I mean I smashed that ball so hard that the seams receded into the rawhide – and it ended up one-hopping the fence in left field for a ground-rule double. My dad missed the hit while at the concession stand; I don’t know why I remember that. That was the closest I ever came to hitting a home run, and by God, there must not be a better feeling than hitting a dinger because that double felt amazing. It felt so good that I still think about it two decades later. I wonder what seeing my name in print will be like. Hopefully like standing on the second-base bag on a summer night with the moths swirling around the lights and the breeze whistling in my ears.

Frank Deford, a former Sports Illustrated writer, became a sports journalist after his college basketball coach told him he wrote about basketball better than he played it. I didn’t have anyone in my life quite so blunt, but I came to the same conclusion. After college, I caught on at the paper because I thought I could write a little, and they were willing to pay me to do it. Relishing in past glory never really entered the equation. Mostly it confirmed that most athletes were naturally better than I was. That’s okay, can they churn out roughly five thousand words on a board game? Take that, athletes.

I don’t cover sports anymore, or I don’t do it enough to consider myself a journalist. I took a gig with better hours and better pay about a year ago. See sellout reference above.

The extra time has led me to writing on my own, but it hasn’t been easy. You know, having ideas is one thing. Having talent is another. Heck, having a strong enough vocabulary concerns me. Many evenings with a blank screen before me is like standing at the plate way back in Little League, hoping that the pitcher doesn’t throw three strikes before ball four. Sigh.

So I linger on the feasibility of completing a season.

The first step is creating teams. I have thousands of baseball cards, all from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. It would probably be best to pick an entire set. I have one of those – a 1991 Donruss set I bought on the cheap at some point. These cards have either a green or blue border around the player photos, and I am not sure how they decided on who got what colors.  The cards came out before the 1991 season, and thus depict the stats and results from 1990.

The early 1990s were a different time. To be attached to a phone meant also being attached to the wall. Computers were used primarily for data processing and rudimentary games. It’d be the mid-90s before their true use as pornography hubs would be realized. Al Gore was a politician and not a tech whiz or a climate cop, and his wife, Tipper, had just lost a battle to censor popular music against the guy from Twisted Sister and John Denver. And when someone told a joke about Donald Trump being president, everyone laughed.

I was eight in 1990 and living on a farm in rural Illinois. My brother was eight years my senior, so you know, he didn’t want anything to do with me. My sister was four years older, and, you know, I didn’t want anything to do with her. In terms of entertainment, we had an Atari that we hooked up to a 13-inch TV in our kitchen in the evenings. That TV had rabbit ears and two dials to pull from two different kinds of aerial signals. The signals were acronyms. I think one was UHF, but that might just have been a Weird Al Yankovic movie.  We didn’t have cable or a satellite dish, which by today’s definition qualifies as child abuse. I am not complaining, but I probably did then. That life wasn’t so bad. It had its nuances and routines, and as I get older, I appreciate that. Without all the modern distractions, overthinking baseball board games was a definite option for me (when professional wrestling wasn’t on the tube).    

Each league had two divisions in 1990 rather than the three now. There were twelve teams in the N.L. and fourteen in the A.L. Two teams made the playoffs from each league, as opposed to the five that make it now. The Rockies, Marlins, Rays and Diamondbacks didn’t exist, and the Nationals were the Expos and played in Montreal rather than Washington D.C. Interleague play during the regular season was still a dream in Bud Selig’s mind, and the players could pass as my neighbor rather than powerlifters in uniform.

Not everything made sense in 1990. The Cincinnati Reds and Atlanta Braves were in the N.L. West, while the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were in the N.L. East. Of course, the Braves had moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, so they simply occupied the former Braves’ spot in the geography-based divisions. Changing divisions basically needed unanimous congressional approval at that point. It’s happened a time or two since 1990, including the expansion to six divisions, but a lot of that happened after MLB broke its fans’ hearts with a strike that claimed the World Series in 1994. Expo and White Sox fans – the two teams most likely to make the World Series –  will never forget that strike. Most other fans didn’t forget it until Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire started hitting genetically enhanced dingers in 1998. Steroids were the Band-Aid the sport needed to heal most fans. Even when the homers came into question, most fans only half-heartedly cared. The purists raged, but the rest of us shrugged our shoulders and kept watching. The Bill Clinton sex scandal was pretty much the same way, at least until 2016 when twenty-year-old transgressions helped keep Hillary Clinton out of office. We’re a pious country again and will be until we’re tired of it. I give it three years.

The latest thought: Do I recreate the exact schedule from 1990? The Baseball Reference website provides results and box scores. A truly revolutionary idea is to research the lineups and pitchers from each game and play with those. The sticky wicket is that a baseball roster is constantly changing. Some guys are promoted from the minors for a game or two, but never receive a baseball card. The point being is that there would be variances, and once you have one, the whole experiment is tainted.

Although the variances are what frees this from being some humdrum replaying of a 27-year-old season. This freedom opens a door for my creativity. Within reason, I can do anything I want with the lineups, so long as I hold to a personal code that what I am doing is in the best interest of that team and adheres to basic baseball philosophy.  

I also have the prescience of knowing which young players become great and which turn into duds. John Kruk, for example, is in my 1991 set. It’s early in his career, and he almost appears svelte and is listed as an outfielder. I know that in the years to come, he gains weight, plays first base exclusively, and becomes a key cog for the Phillies as they vie for a world championship. Having this knowledge has me leaning to moving him to first base, replacing a mediocre Ricky Jordan, and seeing if Kruk’s talent bears through when dice are used rather than bats. This power is intoxicating.

The 1990 season, which started with a lockout that lasted a week, finished with the Reds beating the Athletics, the defending champions, in a four-game sweep in the World Series. The outcome was as surprising as it was dominating. It’s like when Christopher Lambert’s character slices the head off the hulking antagonist in Highlander. The antagonist was huge, and Lambert came across as sort of a prissy antique dealer. On paper, the bad dude was the clear favorite. I guess that’s why they have the sword fights.

I could only be so lucky to have such a surprising end to a simulation. Endings are important. We dwell on them. The end of movies and books. The end of games. The winners. The losers. All of it is a simulation of our lives, and our hopes that we end appropriately, dramatically, exceptionally, and so on. That’s part of the reason doomsday predictions are so prevalent. As if our lives are so important that our end will coincide with the destruction of the earth. Most people are going to be disappointed by their end. It’s likely going to be the clichéd old, lost in a deluge of pain relievers or dementia, and without any last-second deep thoughts spouted from our lips. And the rest of the world will keep moving.

But should we care so much about the end?

Growing up a professional wrestling fan, I inevitably was involved in discussions about the predetermined nature of the matches. Once I grew old enough to form a logical opinion, I didn’t see the reasoning for people to dismiss it solely based on the notion that one person was picked to win and the other picked to lose. The joy isn’t only in the result. It is in the performance. The drama. The athleticism. The story being told. It is entertainment. Christopher Lambert, after all, stood tall at the end of Highlander, because the script called for it to happen. Hulk Hogan did the same hundreds of times.

If this simulation comes to fruition and I complete it, I imagine I’ll feel a sense of vindication and relief. Maybe sadness? The same emotions are likely if I were to get published.

Before I dwell on the sadness, we should talk about stats. Simulating this season isn’t occupying my mind only to see if team records would align with the actual results. Although that is an interesting thought, my mind is on the stats.

With the game theoretically assigning higher probabilities of hits for those with a track record of doing so, it is my interest to find out if players would perform on par with the stats displayed on the card.

Keep in mind, we’ve eliminated all the variables of actual baseball: weather conditions, player health, umpire preferences, and so on. Also eliminated are defensive errors (breathe a sigh of relief all you players with stone hands), double plays (a pitcher’s best friend), and managerial idiosyncrasies concerning player management, base running, bullpen use, and bunting.

It’s baseball in a perfect world. Every ball in play is either a clean hit or an out.

There’s something completely 1990 about that and utterly un-2017 about it. We can look back at 1990 through rose-colored lenses and wistfully dream of being in such a simple era. I am not just talking about baseball here. Because it’s the past, we can aptly identify the good and bad outcomes in every situation. Heck, the bad stuff doesn’t seem that bad. We made it through it, didn’t we? Besides, doesn’t it feel like everything was more cut-and-dry?  Maybe that’s because I was eight in 1990, and the world fit contextually in the small set of truths I had developed and accepted.

Truth in 2017? A clean hit or an out? That’s too simple for a world so compelled to argue about everything, and so quick to damn reason if it doesn’t fit into the narrative being wrote by our team.

The fact is that the hardliner against professional wrestling wasn’t going to be convinced to appreciate it because it was “fake.” Today’s world has similar lines drawn on hundreds of issues, and so many can’t be persuaded to change their thoughts, even if you show them the smoke from coal plants eating a hole in the ozone layer while a windmill’s blades stand still a mile away.

And politics. God, politics. I can’t believe how much politics occupies my mind. In fact, this whole business about simulating a season is one of the few things that can consistently distract me from the insanity overcoming this country. I don’t even like politics. I’ve never followed it, but now I can’t escape it.

It pisses me off.

Future presidents will worry about approaching the Trump Line. There, I said it.

Okay, breathe in…breathe out.

I trust that rational people in positions of power exist. It’s all I can do. … and play the baseball card game.

The compiling of stats creates a two-fold problem. One, it complicates the actual gameplay and increases the time for each game. A conservative guess being that it adds ten minutes per game. Probably more.

Statistical tracking starts with creating a baseball scorebook using one of the dozen or so wire-ringed notebooks that also migrated over in the plastic tubs. It occurs to me that whole forests have died from notebooks that get used a little bit one school year and then get deposited in some closet or drawer in the summer, and then new ones are bought for the next school year. Most kids probably dump the notebooks on their way out of school on the last day. I couldn’t do that. The blank pages offered so many possibilities. It saddens me that so many pages remained blank when I discovered them years later. It’s like I had dreams, but none of them were worth writing down.

That’s a half truth. I didn’t fill the notebooks, but I did use many of the pages and then systematically ripped them out, lest risk facing the embarrassment of somebody finding them and reading my personal thoughts. Part of me is still paranoid of people reading things I write. Yes, I was published thousands of times in a newspaper. Yes, there were mornings when I woke up and hoped no one would notice the by-line. It’s a hard habit to kick.

Keeping score for a baseball game is nothing new for me, but the creating of the scorebook for each game takes time. I don’t keep quite as detailed notes as I did when covering games at the paper because I don’t have to worry about turning some of the action into a narrative later. It’s such a strange thing that I’d focus on something so obsessed with numbers and devoid of narrative. The last few years at the paper I was the sports editor, and my main emphasis was to get my reporters to worry less about the numbers and the games and focus on telling the story of the players.

Of course, I am not dealing with real people. At least not people that are real anymore. They are thin pieces of cardboard with dated images, stat lines, and the faint smell of bubble gum. My experiment is to see if the random nature of dice can recreate those numbers. It’s heartless, monotonous, and the perfect distraction from the dysfunction of the government and the lackluster realities of my writing abilities.

Keeping the stats is the first part. Tracking the stats is the second. Becoming a sellout has provided me with Microsoft Excel skills. I even created a spreadsheet to track upcoming writing contests with columns for the fees, the deadlines, the word-count restrictions, and hyperlinks to the contest websites. I’ve found I like creating spreadsheets more than I like updating them. Updating is work. That’s why God created everything in seven days and then wished us good luck. Creation is divine. Maintenance is the hard work.

Excel is a beautifully soulless program that through the manipulation of data cells is the logical way to chart things like statistics. The one thing that it won’t do though is enter the data for me, and there’s a lot of data entry just to set up 26 rosters, plus team results, and league standings. I’d really like to track league leaders, too. It’s too bad I don’t have it in the league budget to hire an assistant.

Once all the teams are set, some of this will go faster, but it’s still roughly thirty minutes per game and let’s say ten minutes of entering the results into the spreadsheet. That’s forty minutes multiplied by 2,430. That’s 97,200 minutes to play the entire season. Using an Excel formula, let’s make that number make more sense. All right, add a pair of parentheses, a slash, and a sixty, and the result is 1,620 hours. A couple more key strokes and that translates to 67.5 days. That’s faster than an actual baseball season, assuming I did nothing else, like eat, drink, sleep, and defecate.

That’s just the regular season. The playoffs would be another few hours, depending on if each series went seven games. It’d be swell if they did.

When it ends, whether dramatically or with an underwhelming thud, I’ll have to face the reality of this venture. That’s where the sadness enters. Whenever something ends, there’s some level of sadness because whatever joy derived during the journey transitions to the past. The sadness, in this case, will be multiplied by the reality that those hours could have been filled by writing. Also, how dorky is it that I had nothing better to do?

I have to admit that the numbers above are less daunting than I thought they would be, which ultimately has me second-guessing my math. When I was in seventh grade, I won math student of the year honors. My interest and ability in the subject declined thereafter. Too much, too soon, I suppose. Truthfully, stuff with numbers came rather easily to me. Writing was more of a challenge.

And I still don’t know if I am any good at it?

That’s the ego confrontation I am hiding from with this whole baseball season business. For all the years of tinkering, I have more vindication concerning my ability to do junior high math than I do of any discernible writing talent.

In writing, there are an incalculable number games to be played before achieving anything, and there’s no guarantee that achievement is even waiting. Baseball is an appropriate comparison. It’s the game of failure. A great player records an out seven out of ten times he steps up to the plate. A writer faces and receives rejection at a much higher clip, especially a new writer. 

It’s an emotional risk to set out to do something where the probable result is utter failure.

I loathe thinking about it like that, but it’s ever-present in my mind right next to thoughts about our oxygen being choked out of existence by carbon emissions and Donald Trump’s increasingly orange-tinted face.

It makes me reach toward distractions.

Maybe the immortals in Highlander needed the threat of losing their heads to distract them from the reality of living forever. I suppose you can only bury so many friends, family, and lovers before it numbs the heart. There is life found in death. That sort of explains why they spent centuries whittling their numbers down to one. It was a barbaric act of mercy. The one left was the cursed victor.

Baseball dwindles teams down to one each season. Even if every team returned the exact same players and played the same schedule as the season before, the results would be different. I guess I don’t really need to do a simulation to know things will turn out differently. The reality of varying results provides hope. As a fan of the Cubs, I spent most of my life clinging to that hope. Then 2016 happened and with it the reward for all those years of waiting.

Can the same happen to my writing career?

I hope so.

 

 

Short Story Challenge: The Next Mission

Note: This is my submission into a writing contest. The rules are less than 2,500 words. I am in Heat 18 - Sci-Fi (genre), Delivery in 30 minutes or less (topic), a war veteran (character).

 

Brief Synopsis: Myra is finding that coping with peace can be as difficult as achieving it. It takes the insight from an unlikely source during a delivery to discover she still has a mission, even without a war.

Myra stepped from the elevator to the deck of the Pleasure Bot Express to begin her shift, but her mind was on the Dunes of Venisha. The blood of the last giant Gargola soaked into the sand, while her brother and sister warriors cheered. Three hundred years of war was over, and the scourge of the universe – the mighty Gargolas – were ushered violently into extinction.

Less than a year from that proud moment, she and so many of her brethren were dismissed, leaving her unemployed and left wondering what to do in a time of peace. She hadn’t known peace since her childhood, a childhood she couldn’t remember after three decades of killing. She worried that even without the Gargolas, she remained a killer and nothing more.

“Myra, you dunce, Myra!” A gravelly voice sounded in her earpiece.

“Loma, did I ever tell you that the last being to call me a dunce was Crasis, the Butcher King of Jenju?”

“Yeah, yeah, I am sure you cleaved his head off like all the rest. Unfortunately, you’re not in the head-cleaving business anymore. You’re in the Pleasure Bot business, and we guarantee delivery to any station in the district within thirty minutes.”

“Ridiculous, I went three days without food or water after the Battle of Wingo Pla, these perverts can wait five more minutes for their synthetic satisfaction.”

“Not with that nasty bug forcing a mating quarantine on the stations, and if we can’t deliver faster than the rest, they’ll use the rest. Now, you’re up. Bay 12, and Sharpe is loading an Eve X8 in your hull.”

“An Eve X8?”

“Yeah, a special order. This guy likes them big. Oh, and I am sending Sharpe along to keep you on track. You don’t get this one to Rip Station in time, you’ll be looking for a new gig.”

She pounded a fist into the nearest wall, knowing she couldn’t afford to lose the job, but hating to take orders from smut peddlers like Loma. Pleasure Bot Express housed its operation on a decommissioned war carrier. The bots were built on the second level, and quality checks were performed by the ship’s crew. The hull offered ample room for inventory, and the deck was designed to deploy fighter squadrons, but worked just as well as the heart of the shipping operation. In her past life, Myra jettisoned out of such bays in transports for ground battle. Now, she captained a small frigate designed for a maximum of three bots and two crew. The Eve X8 was likely large enough to fill the space for the bots.

            “Rip Station!” Sharpe said, his strange high-pitched voice unusually excited. The unique, usually quiet, boy-man had worked for the company for a few months and was normally delegated to loading ships. “I’ve never been there, and we will see Garas!”

“Big whoop, Sharpe.” The last stronghold of the Gargolas didn’t awe her, but she noted that Sharpe recoiled from her admonishment. She spent a year as a prisoner on Garas and returned years later to free the millions of slaves oppressed by the Gargolas’ underlings, the cruel dwarves from Asterbad.  “Is the bot loaded?”

“Yes, yes.” Sharpe snapped on a helmet, cringing as it pressed down on his enormous ears. Sharpe was a Mammo, a highly sensitive breed from an extinct planet. His hearing, as with all Mammos, was exceptional, and he likely heard Myra’s end of the conversation with Loma, even though she’d been on the other side of the ship and speaking at a normal decibel level. Mammos would have made excellent spies, except the breed was inflicted with a youthful innocence, which left them incapable of deceit. Sharpe had frail, boy-like features, but he was likely fifty or sixty years older than Myra. She understood little of Sharpe’s abilities, and she tried to guard her tongue around him.

The bay doors opened, as she activated the frigate’s navigation system. The ships hardly needed anyone to fly them, and she suspected most of her peers allowed the ships to do all the hard work, but she preferred taking the ship’s controls, at least once they slowed from hyper-speed near their destinations.

“Who was Crasis, the Butcher King of Jenju?” Sharpe asked, seated beside her in the cockpit. Like his ears, his eyes were about double the size they should be for his small, thin skull, and his pupils were tiny dots centered in a milky white sea.

“A massive Gargola, who gave me this.” Myra tapped her left leg below the knee. A robotic calf and foot gleamed below her form-fitting uniform shorts. The uniform, which included a top that barely covered her breasts, was supposed to appeal to the clientele. She suspected her green, scaled skin ruined the aesthetic. No one had cared about her appearance when she was cleaving the heads off of Gargolas. “He severed my leg, and I severed his head from his neck.”

“Wowwy, wow, wow, wow.” Sharpe said. Myra steered the frigate past the clearance zone of the Pleasure Bot Express station and then prepared its navigation for hyper-speed to the outer rim and Rip Station. “I hate Gargolas. They captured my brother and sister many, many years ago and ate them.”

“Yeah, Gargolas would do that.” Myra and Sharpe snapped back in their seats when the frigate skipped into hyper-speed. “Crasis was huge, even for a Gargola. It’s amazing he wasn’t added to the Group of Eight, really. Well, he was insane and a cannibal, so that was probably why they left him out.”

“He ate his own people?”

“When he felt like it, I’ve been told. He broke from the Gargola Alliance and started a band of particularly despicable wretches that terrorized the outer rim. They lived in the ruins of an ancient Gargola castle on Jenju, and that’s where we found him.”

“You fought him alone?”

“No, Gargolas usually occupied the better part of a battalion, and that’s what we took to Jenju for Crasis and his henchmen. I was one of the few that walked out, well I didn’t really walk, more like crawled. That was a great battle. For four days, we advanced through the giant castle, engaging a mighty bunch of Gargolas. You see, Sharpe, a Gargola’s skin is thick, too thick for blasters, and it takes several hacks with Merlyian Steel to draw blood. They have huge forearms and calves, and I think you could land a ship on their chests. And their strength, my gods, were they strong.”

“I know. I seen them. I ran when I did, I did.”

“Well, Crasis was one of the strongest, and he ripped my foot off with his bare hands. Luckily, he flung me away and forgot about me, and that’s how I got behind him and cut off his head.”

“Because Gargolas are dumb.”

“Dumb? I don’t know if that’s true.” They came out of hyper-speed and before them was Garas, a blazing red planet with swirling white storms spotting its atmosphere. She’d heard Garas had turned into a cesspool of crime since the slaves were freed. The government, which in its wisdom relieved ninety percent of its fighting men and women from duty when the Gargolas were defeated, didn’t have the capabilities to police the planet. Rip Station simply monitored the movements of any possible dissenting factions among the remaining few allies of the Gargolas.

“I’ve heard it said the Gargolas were once among the most advanced races in the galaxy. They built complex, yet beautiful, cities made of impossibly heavy stones. Well, when you’re ungodly strong, you can lug around blocks of stone, I suppose. They also wrote epic poems and painted enchanting murals. I saw the remains of one in Jenju. It had a mountain scene in the background with a field of brilliant red roses in the foreground.”

A buzz in her earpiece was followed by Loma’s noxious voice.

“You have ten minutes to reach Rip Station. Report your position.”

“We just exited hyper-speed. Rip Station is on the far side of Garas, but we’ll be there in no time.”

“Loma, Loma,” Sharpe interjected, “Myra is talking about Crasis, the Butcher. Myra, tell Loma about Crasis.”

“Shut it, Sharpe. Myra, you shut it, too. You don’t have time for old war stories.”

“You know, Loma, there was a time when I would have cut you in half for talking to me like that.”

“Ha. Well, maybe there was a time when you would never have considered doing such a thing, too.” Loma’s words struck her hard. Since the man employed so many veterans, he understood how to expose their insecurities, and Myra certainly dwelled on the war and its violence. Gods, what was a warrior without a war? “Here’s what is important. You are to unload at Bay 34. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT make a scene. Our client would prefer some anonymity.”

The line went dead, and Myra watched the red surface of Garas. Sharpe sat quietly, still obeying his boss’s orders to shut it. She supposed running from attacking Gargolas was the bravest thing that Sharpe had ever accomplished. She, on the other hand, had always ran toward danger, and yet her and this frail little being had ended up in the same place – delivering sex robots in less than thirty minutes for a minimum wage. She sighed. In some circles, she was still recognized as one of the finest and bravest of the entire Gargola Campaign.

When she killed Crasis, scaling a statue while dragging one bleeding stump of a leg to reach the Gargola’s head, she was certain she was going to die. When she hacked away at his neck, and he stumbled around in sudden, angry pain, she prayed not to lose her balance before finishing the job. It took four hacks to break the skin, and three more to remove his head. The blood spurted like a geyser as she rode the body to the floor, and she feared she might drown in his blood before being able to swim away from his huge corpse. It was her finest moment, and sometimes she wished it had been her last.

“There it is.” Sharpe sprang forward in his seat. “Rip Station!”

“Yeah with two minutes to spare. Begin the boarding process, Sharpe.”

Unloading went smooth, as some being stood in the shadows watching them and transferred the charge to the company’s account, acknowledging they had met their deadline. She supposed that meant she got to keep the job, but she didn’t know how to feel about that.

“The only thing that would have made this big girl better, would have been if it was free.” The man’s greasy voice teased acrid bile into her throat. No amount of blood or battle made her want to vomit as much as meeting the creeps that enjoyed the physical company of soulless robots.

“We’re the best, Mister.” Myra forced a smile. “Be sure to tell your friends.”

“Oh, I will.” He crept away, and the bulbous robot – having been activated upon arrival – shuffled behind. The Eve unit resembled female humans, and this one was the most obese version. Watching the bot follow the man reminded her of Crasis before she jumped to decapitate him, and Myra had the impulse to remove its head as a mercy killing. Gods knew what the client intended for this Eve X8.

“Come on, Sharpe, let’s head back.”

She circled Garas twice before even considering navigating back to headquarters. Sharpe watched the world from his seat, and she wondered exactly how much he could see with those tiny pupils.

“What was your home like?” she asked.

“Sometimes it was cold. Very cold,” Sharpe paused to consider the question more. “But sometimes warm and the air smelled sweet. I miss air you could smell.”

“What were the Mammos like when they were all together?”

“Quiet. When you have big ears, you don’t have to talk loud. I could hear almost every shift in the wind. I could hear when things were good, and when they were bad. When the Gargolas invaded miles and miles away from my home, I could hear it, all of it. It was...”

He dropped his chin to his chest, squeezing his eyes shut.

“I’m sorry.”

“All I did was run.”

Sharpe was likely one of the very few of his species left. Myra sometimes forgot how much was lost in the war. Before she could start punching in the coordinates to jump them into hyper-speed, Sharpe touched her wrist.

“Why did the Gargolas turn mean?”

She paused, considering the question.

“I think at some point they started killing, and then that’s all they grew to know and couldn’t stop themselves.”

“Even from killing folks that didn’t hurt them.”

“Yes, sometimes it stops mattering who it is.”

“Yikes.”

The frigate burst ahead and the galaxy raced by in a whiz of passing lights. Myra noted how each light seemed to fade before disappearing. Sharpe didn’t take his eyes off of her, making her feel naked. When the ship slowed and the Pleasure Bot Express appeared before them, he reached over and rested his frail hand on hers.

“It’s not all about killing.” The little man forced a smile. “You’re not just a killer.”

She put her hands to her face, covering the sudden rush of tears. How had he zeroed in on her worries so much?

“How do you know?”

“I hear more than words, I do. I hear whispers from your mind, your heart. There is more than killing there.”

She shivered as they approached the station, suspecting she’d never make another Pleasure Bot delivery again.

“What do you hear?”

“Hope,” he smiled. “Do you not hear it? Just listen.”  

She thrust her head back, trying to sift through all the battles and the blood to anything else, any sort of hope.

“You have to listen to the person inside you, Myra. Listen.”

She racked her mind.

“Hush, let all the rest go quiet.” Sharpe put a finger to his mouth.

Tears streamed freely down her face.

“When I was little girl, I remember staring up at a star-filled night. I promised myself then that I’d visit all the stars and help someone on each one of them. I became a warrior to see the universe and to help fight the Gargolas.”

“Hmm, and now that the war is over, you think your job is done?”

“Yes.”

“You are wrong. You need to help me find my courage, and I need to help you find yourself. We can do both by helping others in real trouble. Don’t you think that’s brave? That sounds like hope.”

Her gaze shifted toward the station.

A moment later, Myra ripped her earpiece out, took the controls of the frigate, and turned it away from the Pleasure Bot Express, directing them into open space. Millions of stars shined before them.

Work: Down on the Farm

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work” – Thomas Edison

My earliest memories associated with work are captured in three distinct images. The first is sliced apples. The second is stalks being chewed up in the combine. The third is bumblebees.

The Apple Slices

It doesn’t get any more American than this. Eating a packed lunch while sitting on a rock with your back resting against a huge, white barn door. The treat of the lunch was apple slices, which at that point of my life, fascinated me. We had an apple slicer, a metal one where you pushed down, and it cored and sliced the apple in one quick motion.

My brain tells me this is my first day of work. I might be five. I might be four. Heck, I might be younger. The little that I recall other than the apples slices is that it might be cloudy out, and it might be planting season.

The only possible reason this memory remains filed away with any importance has to be the lunch and the apple slices. I mean, you’re really a working man when you have a packed lunch and you eat it outside. Toss in your favorite snack, and that must have been the “bee’s knees.”

Before I get too far, I should explain. My father farms what is now a centennial farm – a farm owned by the same family for a century. Until I was five or six, he did this exclusively, but sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s, he was forced to take another job in town. My mother stayed at home to rear the three kids, take care of the house, and perform all the other work that probably went underappreciated.

The narrative in my mind says this is before my father took his day job – working at an animal feed mill – and for some reason, he was watching me while farming because my mother had something to do with my two older siblings.

I’d like to say there’s a big life lesson in this first image, but the closest thing I can garner is that it’s the first food association I make with anything. It’s sort of like how I think of noisy grade school lunchrooms when I eat a PBJ. It’s wonderful in the gold-shaded lenses of the memory, but at the end of the day, they were just apple slices or a sandwich.

The Corn Stalks

My mind plays funny tricks here because it tells me that those slices were ate on a day that seemed pretty spring like. There’s a dampness there, and that’s all I can recall. Yet, it also wants to tell me that later on I rode in the cab of the combine as my father picked corn.

As years later Tom would tell me after the election of Donald Trump that we live in the “Post-Truth” era, I think memory often forgets the truth. I certainly picked corn with my father at some point, probably not as often as I should have, and it’s possible it was the same day as the apple slices or the same day as I ate some apple slices, but not the ones in my memory.

I like to dramatize both scenes in my head. The eating of apples slices on a day with maybe threatening weather. The destruction of the stalks before me, as if my young mind was drawing some sort of deep meaning of life from the harvesting of a crop. I don’t know. I think there was always a part of me that feared farming. Maybe it was a voice – likely my mother’s – urging me not to get interested, but it’s not right to place that decision on my mother. I never wanted that work growing up, and maybe both of my memories are tinted with a bit of regret. In my mind, regret is tinted orange.

Mostly, I think farming scared me because of the bees.

The bumblebees

A few years ago, I was driving home after deadline during a time when I was serving as the assistant sports editor at Sauk Valley Media. From the start of the shift sometime in the afternoon to finishing the paper late in the evening, the world disappeared behind a wall of white snow. Never in my life have I been out in a storm like that, and hopefully I’ll never be driving in one like that again.

The headlamps on our Ford Ranger were devoured after only a few feet in the falling and blowing snow, and I made it about a half mile before slamming into an insurmountable drift. I wouldn’t discover until the next morning that I was driving almost four lanes farther to the left than I meant to be. This story probably comes up again later, as one of the times I risked my life for the sake of finishing a shift or completing a task.

After spending a few minutes trying to dig out, I returned to the warmth of the truck realizing I couldn’t risk walking back to the office because I’d either get lost in the blinding snow or get hit by a car. In those shivering moments, it came to me that if I weren’t very smart over the course of the next few minutes or hour, I just might not make it out alive.

When retelling the story, I’d like to throw out that it was the first time in my life I’d felt that sort of imminent danger. Until I started to think about the bumblebees, I thought I was telling the truth.

But the bumblebees were a danger and, even at a very young age, I sensed just how very real that danger was to that burning spark of life coursing through my limbs.

We’re back behind the barn for this one, and work is swirling around me as my father and my siblings unload a rack filed with bales of hay onto an elevator one bale at a time. The elevator carries the bales up toward a door and the loft behind.

I am wearing blue shorts. I am pretty sure about that, and the grass on the hill leading up to the barn is tall, maybe tall enough to reach over my head. Dreams of adventure dance through my head as I play and work commences in the world around me.

Then there is the buzzing, and it’s like the rest of the world stops. I freeze, nothing moves, except for the bees, which swarm around in angry circles. Below my feet is a hive. The buzzing drowns out everything else, and I focus on the tiny wings that flutter at god-awful speeds. The attacks come from all angles on my arms and my legs. I must cry out, because somehow others are alerted. I don’t hear my cries. I just hear the buzzing. I am scooped up by my father before the stings become too numerous and the buzzing fades.

I am certain death will be quiet except for one sound. I fear that sound will be buzzing for me.

As I look back, I realize that my time spent growing up on the farm was an opportunity, and not one I took great advantage of. It all seemed hot and dirty, and somewhere fluttering in the extremities of my senses lingered fear.

Four Curses: Part 1

Note: This started as a bit of free writing. My hope is to develop a longer narrative for this, but I don't know where it is going really. Enjoy.

 

The rain came just as Sarah commenced the latest battle in the long-standing war with the rusted, metal latch of the barn door. The barn, built with the sweat and ingenuity of her great-grandpa on her momma’s side, had a lean from tornado winds in ’78, and likely since then, the door latch stuck in the ring on the inside every morning, and that malady struck worse on days of rain, snow, wind, ice, sleet and, as grandpa liked to say, “on days when grasshoppers refuse to hop.”

From inside the barn, she could hear Gingersnap whinny and snort with impatience. Sarah pulled the hood of her slicker over her frazzled hair, glancing back toward the house, where only the light outside the front door glowed. Rose and Faith hadn’t woke when she left the house, and by some divine grace, appeared to be still in bed. All the better, Rose was old enough to handle herself, but the two together would have the house in tatters, if they woke while Sarah was doing chores.

The frigid raindrops slapped against her back like the icy fingers of death playing piano up her spine. She cursed the latch twice, using the “shit-fart” combination of the four family curses under her breath, before the latch clicked open as the wind changed direction. The door burst to life, and Sarah yelled, “Oh hell,” reaching out with both hands to catch the edge of the door as the wind tested the strength of the hinges. A stab of pain pulsated from her yellow work glove on her right hand, as her finger tips pinched down on one of the splinter-ridden boards. She hurried inside, managing to fight the wind to close the door and then force the latch into the ring with almost no trouble.

Flipping the switch, Sarah assessed the scene before her while pulling off her glove. Gingersnap, an aging draft horse, stuck his head out of his stall, the spots of white on his otherwise brown face looking grayer today than ever. He was blind in one eye, but never failed to see everything. A larger stall housed two quarter horses ­– Jack and Diane ­­– the forever bickering pair who were unhappy together and miserable when separated. The final stall on the far end housed Stinker, Rose’s pony, purchased by her papa when she was born. Stinker was probably sleeping, and like a kid being harassed to get ready for school, would want to remain that way when Sarah tried to lead her out of the barn to the pasture in a few minutes.

“Morning ya’ll,” Sarah said. “Oh, damn.” She added seeing the half-inch long splinter buried under the skin of her index finger.

Sarah studied the sliver, knowing it’d take tweezers to pluck it out, and thought about using the four curses. It had been in this very barn, up the ladder in the hay mow, where Grandpa John taught her the words. She was nine or ten, probably slightly younger than Rose, when the two sat down on one of the prickly bales of hay. This was before the barn had been converted for horses, and the main floor was filled with stanchions for their Holsteins. 

“You’re old enough for this,” Grandpa John said in that way he had of making a phrase both a statement and a question at the same time. He wore a pair of spectacles that were always spotted with dirt and his gray beard stretched in tangles down to his shirt collar. “Sometimes the world gives you a slap, sometimes a punch, and sometimes it drops the big bomb on you.”

“The bomb!” Sarah giggled.

“Now, hush,” he said. “When the world beats on you, whether it’s a tiny bit or a whole wagon load, it’s gonna make you want to say things.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like the word your momma used soap to wash outta your mouth awhile back.”

“Oh.”

“I ain’t scolding you. The fact is you can’t run around screaming them words, but sometimes you need them just to fend off the world a bit.”

“Really?”

“It’s true. But some of them words are too naughty no matter what.”

“Really! Which ones?”

“Ha. I ain’t going to tell you, because I don’t use them. I only use four of them, and trust me, that’s all you’ll ever need. The rest can be for the rest.”

“Can I use them too!”

“Yeah, but they ain’t to be used all the time, you hear. Just when you need them. Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Good. Shit,” he said, and she giggled, “fart, hell, and damn. That’s all the curses you need.”

Sarah grabbed her stomach because it hurt as the giggle lost control, and she rolled off the hay bale they were sitting on.

Sarah smiled at the memory, but then repeated the four-word litany in her head again. Twenty years later, she was dripping wet while standing in the barn, knowing this is what grandpa had meant by the bomb. Her husband gone, leaving her for a single bedroom apartment in Lincoln and more freedom to spend evenings at The Corner Tap. Leaving her with two children to rear, a farmstead to manage, and these stubborn animals to feed. Sometimes the words didn’t feel like enough, but she used them just the same.

1,000 Word Challenge: Round Two - Curious Cat

Note: So didn't score points on first story posted below. Didn't have the best weekend to write this one, so unless this one surprises me and I get some luck, I'll likely be out after this one. Enjoy.

Synopsis: Catherine has arranged for a public meeting with an internet flame. As she waits for his arrival, she reconsiders risking her marriage and family for her carnal desires.

The ponies plodded dispassionately in a circle under the blazing sun. Some miserable child wailed on the back of one painted white and brown. The pony remained as disinterested in the ride, as the rider did in appeasing his parents. The mother and father, who circled with the animal and the wretched beast they’d created, snapped pictures with the hope of getting one with a smiling child. Catherine remembered similar experiences with her own children, and she knew the only will stronger than a parent insistent on projecting and producing an image of the perfect child was that of an obstinate toddler. Catherine pitied the pony the most. The poor thing was destined to traverse the same damn trail a million times at Buck’s Petting Zoo at the Eden County Fair.

She glanced down at her cellphone, pressing the button to get the time to flash across the screen. Only two minutes had passed since her last check. How long before he arrived? Would he be early, as she had been? Or was he a late arriver? Why the hell was she putting herself through this? Waiting out here in the sun for someone with the ludicrous screenname of “Silver Cobra” was antithetical of her normal behavior. Was her marriage so lame to resort to adultery via an internet hookup site? A willful voice she recognized from her own youth blared out “Yes,” in her head. She tried to silence it, thinking about his profile that simply stated that he was in his late twenties, tall, disease free, and into older women. She was older, in her forties, married for twenty-one years, and eager for something new, as she stated in her own profile under the name “Curious Cat.” Her husband always called her Cat, and the acidic taste of her betrayal rose in her throat.

The petting zoo meeting was her idea, since she didn’t expect that anyone in her circle of friends or family would be there. After the public meeting, she expected sex. At least, she supposed that was how internet hookups worked. Damn, where was he? Her nerves were wilting in the cursed heat.

She brushed her ponytail off her shoulder. Her strawberry mane was tied back with a neon green ribbon she’d borrowed from her teen daughter’s dresser. Her daughter liked wearing the ribbon in her hair to high school football games. Cat chased the thought away by walking toward the goat pen. Inside, kids of the two-leg and four-leg variety bolted around making frantic sounds. Two fat women were seated inside, testing the mettle of a pair of folding chairs. They jawed loudly back and forth to each other between sips from ridiculously sized fountain soda cups. One had a loaf of bread wrapped in plastic on her lap. It looked homemade, and maybe was some kind of specialty loaf like banana or zucchini.

“Anyhow, I got down to the cake walk, and the only damn thing left was this loaf of banana bread,” the Whale with the bread said. “Can you believe it?”

“Last year, I won that German chocolate cake. Me and Buck ate it up in one afternoon,” the other answered.

“You got all the damned luck.”

The two rested their jaws. Finally, the woman with the banana bread looked around and remarked.

“Ain’t it a shame these poor animals are caged up all day, and all they know to do is beg for food.”

Cat rolled her eyes and plodded toward a shade tree with a bench under it. An old black man sat alone at one end. The movement shifted her thoughts back to her intentions. She wasn’t one to deceive her husband, and it wasn’t like he deserved it. He didn’t beat her. Wasn’t mean. Didn’t cheat. Had a job, and treated the kids fine. So why was she risking messing it all up? The youthful risk-taking voice chimed in.

“You’re just tired of being led in circles.”

“Hush,” she responded in her own head. It wasn’t too late to run home. Instead, she plopped down on the wooden bench. The man, who wore a white cotton shirt with suspenders, wrinkled his face at her. It made him look like groundhog. Before them, a zebra paced back and forth in a pen.

“That ole boy misses bein’ free,” the man said and spit a wad of tobacco on the ground before his feet.

“What?”

“He’s got it worse than all of them.  All these other creatures don’t know no different, but he used to run free on the savannah. Now, they got him all caged up. It ain’t natural.”

The man finished his thought, and like he’d been waiting there just for the purpose of voicing it to someone, he stood slowly with cracking knees and a stooped back, and started at a snail’s pace down the path toward the fair’s midway. Before getting far, he turned back.

“It’s hell getting old,” he shouted.

She considered his words, gradually becoming aware of a figure moving on the opposite side of the zoo. She made out only a blur of a person between the fences and animals and people. All the objects melded together. In her heart, she knew it was him.
The figure continued to move closer, but she couldn’t make out his face. Her “Curious Cat” voice was screaming. Anticipation and apprehension twisted her stomach. She raised both her arms up and placed her hands on the back of her head. Her fingers touched the ribbon. She thought of her daughter. Of her son. Of her husband.
 
She pulled the ribbon from her hair. Looked at it. Looked up. Spotted his outline.

She slipped the ribbon into her purse. Her legs started moving away down the path. Her gait started slow then increased to a trot. Before she knew it, she was sprinting like she did as a girl with the smell of free air in her nostrils.