Multimedia, Bite, Eagle

by Marcus Jonathan Chapman

It used to be a symbol of freedom and strength, bald though it was called. There were statues in official buildings and statuettes on the tops of flag poles. It was tattooed on the soldiers, officers and citizens with overwhelming pride. The eagle.

Now the laser shows had taken over. Lights pointing in all directions, splayed in all sorts of colors. Dots on walls, shapes bouncing off flat surfaces.

At first there were lasers only in the hands of civilians. At sporting events and theaters, jokesters would point single, red lasers into the eyes and crotches of athletes and actors. The more responsible among us used the lasers in academic settings, pointing at important points within lectures. Then video went viral and seemed to spark the consciousness of all mankind onto one laser beam.

A young girl, taking her parents lasers and adding some of her own, taped all of them together and stuck them on the weather vain of her roof. As she stepped back to admire the lasers whipping in all directions the wind would blow, she fell off the roof and never was the same, but neither was the world.

An explosion of tributes made to the girl, Lucy, became know has Lucy’s laser’s. People were putting together lasers with everything, on lawn mowers, through cereal boxes, on car windshield wipers, their dogs tails. They started adding other media to the mix, lasers playing out the scenes of movies to music and interpretive dancing. Soon, there wasn’t a time of day or night, or a direction in which you could look when a laser beam could not be seen.

This was the end of the eagle. So fickle were the people of the country, that they blamed the eagles weak eyes on the biblical downing of great birds. Almost like a plague, the baldies fell from the sky. Chomping their beaks and grasping with their talons on the way down, seemingly hoping to clutch a branch or telephone wire.

“The laser and its beams are what make us strong now. We were wrong to follow that stupid bird.” And so at every official gathering, public event, statue and statuette, the eagles were slowly replaced with lasers, light shows and multimedia extravaganzas.

This was the way the country found something they could control.

Extraterrestrial, Prisoner, Distance

by Marcus Jonathan Chapman

Dust. So much swirling in the air that it became mud in the eyes and chewed up cake in the mouth. Their ears built dams of wax and stone. Their noses reduced to only to hold up glasses, unable to pass air in or out from the mucus and wet clay caking its opening.

This was where we sent our poorly behaved, even badly behaved of society. Those who lost their cool or nerve or patience and acted. They were not banished to a cage, safe and warm and well fed. They were sent to the far end of the western United States, on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. Once the heartland, now simply a vast swirl of dust from the beaches all the way to middle of the eastern country.

To resume their lives and learn from their mistakes, they’d have to find the lines of wire that ran from West to East, leading them home. Or die. There were checkpoints with food and water but they would have to be found. Often times they were lost in the dust storms. Missing a check point meant starvation and none of the safe houses along the way were evenly spaced out. There were no calculations to be made along the way. No planning or rationing, just pulling oneself along the wire to the next symbol of hope.

It might take months, or years. Never less than months to make it back to the livable Eastern United States.

When the prisoners arrived, they would be so fundamentally changed, that the states called each survivor a “remarkable recovery.” Under their breaths, however, officials were more terrified of the blank stares, lean muscle and wild hair.

These men and women crawled their way back to what, at the beginning of their journey’s, they called home. Upon arrival, however, there was nothing comforting or homely about it. For the rest of their lives, their minds would be trapped in the swirls of dust. Their bodies would wander through their former lives like cosmonauts on an unfamiliar planet. Aliens to all those around them and to themselves, living in an alien world.

Surface, Sandals, Nail polish

3 things to inspire 1 story written in 20 minutes. #story320
words/phrase provided by @ninajo47

He picked at his finger nails, chipping off the black and red polish. On the surface of thee white linoleum floor, flecks were starting to become noticeable.

Usually, these appointments were nothing to worry about but since his last visit he’d been exposed to music.

Every month he was to meet with his Selector, the person managing his life experience as a clone. His original had long since died, and now he was allowed to live a sorta life of his own.

At first he was confined to the compound. As he learned to socialize, comprehend and maneuver complicated social situations, he progressed to excursions. These were day trips with his selector beyond the compound.

He went out to eat, had a drink, watched a movie and went bowling. Then returned home and processed everything through the machine covered in buttons labeled with letters.

He was allowed to leave longer and more often until he reached maximum liberty, as it was called. He could live outside of the compound if he was able to sustain himself with some sort of job and checked in with his selector once a month.

It had been two years, and although he had lived outside of the compound, he stayed within the confines of the life experiences he’d been taught at the cloning facility.

Once, he had caught a glimpse of the manual the selectors used to manage clones.

“Managing the Living Experiences of Like-Humans: A Manual and Practical Application of Puritanical Mores”

None of that meant anything to him but he liked the words.

Now, waiting for his next meeting he was beginning to feel just a hint of an inclination of what the Manual’s title was supposed to mean.

He had been invited to a concert, “the Trashy Cans” was the name of the band, an all female group. The experience changed his life. For two hours it was as if the “application of puritanical mores” were stripped from his being like slow-motion footage of a bomb blast: First burning off the clothes, then melting the skin, peeling back the muscles and tendons and finally disintegrating the bones.

That was rock ‘n’ roll.

Now he was in that all white building of his origins, feeling bad but uncertain as to why. Though he had a hunch that the nail polish, flip flops and beard wouldn’t go over well.