Category: lost time incident

Hey there, everyone! Welcome back! How did you spend the last week?

I spent part of it learning a bit more about the sounds selected by Carl Sagan and his pals that they had encoded on a record made out of gold and shot into space. They launched the golden record on Voyager with the hopes that any aliens finding it could use it to learn important stuff about humans, like what we look like naked (sorta) and where to go to meet more of us (naked or not).

It also included a track by Blind Willie Johnson called “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” How great is that song name? I had never heard of it, or him, which struck me as cultural negligence since apparently this work was regarded at as one of our alien-worthy cultural touchstones. So I looked it up.

I love it, but I’m not sure what an alien would make of it.

Pretend you’re an alien. What do you think?

No no. Don’t tell me. Send it to me on a record made of gold. You know how this works.

ailment fruit middle name
“Oh no, he wasn’t without sight,” said noted blues historian Edgar Grey. “He was given the nickname ‘Blind’ because he seemed incapable of anticipating the outcomes of his actions.”

“Oh no, he wasn’t given the nickname ‘Lemon,'” said noted blues historian Warren Peacock. “He was a literal lemon. He grew from a tree. The sorrow in his music was deep and informed by the plight of fruit-based musicians in the US at the time.”

“Oh no, there’s no such thing as blues history,” said noted blues revisionist Pants Volcanuts. “The music is too sad. No one can write down what happened, or who played what. Everyone who has tried has been found face down on the carpet, their laptops dead nearby, crying about deceitful women, or money woes, or the unfairness of the entire human condition. It’s the music that did that. We have no idea when the music started or for how long it will continue. But we have to act as if it will be around forever, because things aren’t getting any less sad.”

sky pirates

We caught up with Captain Windhammer, noted sky pirate, to ask him what separates a sky pirate from a regular pirate.

“About 20,000 feet!” he said, laughing. “But I kid. I tell that joke all the time. The truth is, there’s quite a bit we have in common with the pirates who work the seas below us. We both have to contend with moving through an unpredictable fluid medium. Nature is not always cooperative. We get similar sorts of crews. Many of the men working under me were without economic prospects, or real job skills, before I swooped down and recruited them.”

“And do you have any difficulty, once you’ve hired them on as sky pirates, with employee retention?”

Windhammer looked thoughtful. “I doubt it’s a bigger problem for us than with any similar organization. Did you know, for example, that pirate ships prefer to recruit individuals who can’t swim? The theory is that it will keep them motivated to keep their ship afloat in case of emergency. Along similar lines, I refuse to hire on anyone who can fly under their own power.”

Windhammer laughed at this joke for quite some time before we were interrupted by a senior mate whose face greatly resembled a sea bird of some sort. An albatross, or greater sea gull perhaps.

“Caw!” the mate shouted.

“One second,” Windhammer said to the mate. He turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You get it, right? It’s funny, right? I don’t hire anyone who can fly on their own? I tell that joke all the time.”

“Caw!” repeated the mate.

“All right, all right, show me,” said the captain, who followed the bird-faced mate.

For a second, I thought I saw a set of feathers poke out of the mate’s greatcoat. However, during the onboarding process for we journalists who were joining the sky pirates for the first time, we were provided with a pamphlet. This pamphlet warned that the thin air at higher altitudes could cloud one’s mind, both in the figurative and literal sense. The water vapor in the clouds we passed through may enter us through our mouths and nasal passages if we weren’t careful, leading to sodden thinking as our brains become suspended in a cranial sea of sky fluid. I chalked the vision of feathers up to delusion, covered my nose and mouth with a scarf, and resolved to explore some of the head de-cloud-ification techniques contained in the pamphlet.

Many of them looked to involve rum.

ending theme song
Okay, now that everyone has stopped reading, we can pass secret messages to each other. I lost my encoding book, so just… just go to the nuclear bunker inside Inverness. I left the briefcase with the microfilm in the room marked 202. It’s stenciled 202 on the door. There’s a sticker label that says 13a, but I don’t think that’s the room number. The door didn’t lock either, so the briefcase is behind a couch.

The couch feels gross. Needs cleaning.

I’m not saying you should do it, I’m just warning you. Push the couch with a stick or something. Or wear gloves.

Anyway, thanks for your continued support keeping the Shadow Council in power. They really appreciate it. See you next week!

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 34
Hey, everybody! What’s the good word? What’s the rumpus? What’s the happs? What’s the skinny? What’s going down? What’s news? What’s … what’s… what are we doing?

Let’s start with what I’m doing. When I started this newsletter, the idea was that it would force me to sit down at least once a week and write something. At some point, the hope was that I would stumble across something I was really enjoying writing and that would lead me to my next project.

It’s taking a while, but I did see something inspirational this week: A book calledBABY HATER on Amazon that looks self-published. I haven’t read it yet, but it came along at just the right time to remind me that there’s no barrier keeping any writer from pursuing and publishing a pet project. Maybe that project is a story that opens with a baby getting punched in its dumb face! Who knows!

It’s been 2 years since THE SPIRIT LEFT ME (my previous fiction collection) came out. But it’s encouraging to remember that my next project doesn’t have to be that involved. I could be inventing short story ideas with attention-grabbing high concepts and putting them out as stand-alone projects. In theory. (See also: The works of Chuck Tingle, the Bizarro scene of Portland, OR, and the marketing geniuses at Horrible Vacuum)

That’s where we’re at today. Keeping myself from getting intimidated by how much work might be ahead of me by focusing on smaller, more attainable goals. Just need to keep typing.

typing typing typing
The two of them came through the detective’s office door: a pair of heavy-set aliens, holding translator rigs to their ear and mouth equivalents. Arm in arm. Wearing red lipstick.

“Well, don’t you two look like trouble,” muttered the detective.

“We have trouble, yes,” said the aliens. “We want to hire your services.”

“I can do that,” answered the detective. “But by law, I’m required to point out that I’m a robot.”

“That makes sense,” said one of the aliens, “as here in the future, robots are commonplace and have assumed many of the jobs that humans used to have, freeing them for leisure time activities such as designing cosmetics for my race.”

The creatures’ red lips caught the light from the dangling overhead light bulb.

“What’s the job?” asked the detective.

The aliens looked somber. Possibly. With their weird alien faces it was hard to tell. “We would like you to tell us how this short fiction piece ends.”

The detective scratched his titanium forehead carapace with the tip of an antique pistol. “You fellas are looking for a fortune-teller, not a detective.”

“No,” said the alien. “Everything in our lives, from the moment we started to exist outside the door of your office to this very moment has propelled us here, to hire you. Our instincts are true. You know how this piece will end. Look behind you.”

The detective swiveled his office chair and looked at the framed embroidered words hung behind his desk. It had been one of the first pieces of decorative art that he’d hung when he set up his practice and was such an established part of the office, he didn’t really notice it anymore. The irises in his eye units whirred to bring the needlepoint text into focus.

“Huh,” he grunted. “How about that? It was here all along.”

In the frame, the words: I DIDN’T WANT THIS NEWSLETTER TO CONSIST ONLY OF CANDLEWICK CONTENT, SO I WROTE THIS SHORT BIT, TOO.

it works: candlewick
This fragment is set in The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks. Candlewick is a dangerous institution for students, with a distressingly high rate of injury and death. Magick education comes with a high mortality rate, it turns out.

“Oh my god, I can’t breathe,” said Ms. Beak, the Candlewick Headmaster, bent over with the effort of trying to stop laughing. She held the hood of her cloak closed in front of her face so that any shell-shocked students who looked her way wouldn’t see her giant smirking grin. With her face hidden, she might get away with it, as her shaking shoulders might pass for convulsions, or nausea, or some other more sympathetic reaction to what had just happened. “This fucking school… oh my god, what are we— I can’t believe it.”

Nearby, the object of Headmaster Beak’s mirth stood in the school hallway, stock still, wand extended, in the epicenter of what had been a mystical explosion. The hallway was scorched in radial patterns centered on her, and a meaty smell in the air. Her clothing was covered in blood. The hallway walls resembled the inside of an uncleaned microwave primarily used to heat up chili.

Those students who weren’t wiping blood off themselves, or patting down flames, left a respectful but curious distance between themselves and stock still student.

Lemoyne Wills, a faculty member, pushed through the students. “All right, show’s over,” he said, wondering which student this was, underneath the blood and burn marks. With their hair slicked back and smoking, he couldn’t even be sure of the student’s gender.

As he leaned in to the student and used his thumb to brush their closed eyelids clean, he could hear them mumbling something.

“What’s that?” he said, leaning in.

“It works,” she was whispering. “It works. It works.”

Lemoyne looked around at the nearby students, kicking aside what looked to be a former student’s leg. “Anybody see what happened?”

A young man with a blue, asymmetrical haircut raised his hand. “She, uh… she was just talking to some upperclassmen who were making fun of her wand. Saying she made it herself, or something.”

Lemoyne sighed. “Why would that matter,” he said. He addressed all the students. “Everyone, listen up! Where your wand comes from is unimportant, okay? We make you buy wands from the school store if you don’t have one because, to be honest, it’s a revenue stream and it keeps the lights on.”

The Headmaster let the hood of her cloak fall open. “Lemoyne…” she said in a tone of voice clearly meant to curtail this burst of honesty with the student body.

“But magick is mostly about technique, and will power. The particular stick that you point when you cast something… it’s just something to focus with. And yes, that means that you can blow up a small crowd of bullies with a homemade wand. As has been demonstrated.” He gestured around at the gore-flecked hallway for evidence.

“So be nice to each other. Magick’s not going to be nice to you, so you have to be nice to each other.”

ending theme song
We’re going to close out this week with the usual stuff:

A reminder that there’s a Facebook page for the lost time incident where there’s still an e-book giveway for SEXTRAP DUNGEON going on. Tell your friends!

Thanks to my wife Amanda for the Candlewick illustration of a blood-spattered hallway.

And I’ll end with an informal poll:

How much have you historically paid or would pay for a work of short fiction, like a “Kindle Single” or short story or mini-novella e-book? Nuthin’? A buck? 3 bucks? A small-ish gold nugget? A velvet painting of a sad clown that has eyes that follow you?

Let me know! See you next week!

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 33
Hey, everybody! How’s your weekend going? Is it longer than usual?

It is around here. The United States is celebrating our Labor Day out of step with the rest of the globe, in a calendar-based form of union-bashing. (The rest of the world celebrates Labour Day on May 1st.)

I started my weekend playing Fallout 4 for a number of hours, as a new area of the game opened up, set inside a former amusement park (now full of raiders). My favorite element of this park are the raiders walking around in armor decorated with carnie prizes and stuffed animals.

I also used Fallout’s crafting mechanic to build some mannequins (see image above) and artfully arranged them in faux band photos. Just need to find some instruments. We’ll get the post-apocalyptic landscape rockin’ again.

But first… we’ve got a newsletter.

babes in the woods
In the village where I grew up, we used to tell stories about the local woods. That young women, not yet ready to be mothers, would leave their children there. Sometimes we’d go wandering in those woods, athletic socks hiked up, looking for babies left behind. If we got really lucky, we told each other, maybe we’d witness the exact moment a pack of wolves adopted a baby.

This, despite knowing that no wolves lived in those woods.

The guy who distributed piles of newspapers to all the newspaper carriers would claim that he was raised in those woods. By chipmunks, he said. Learned all their lore and their ways. He would prove it by pouring a can of peanuts into his mouth until his cheeks pushed out. The effect was ruined if you looked like you believed him, because he’d start laughing at you, and that was a good way to get yourself sprayed with half-chewed peanuts.

It was a more innocent age, honestly, when we assumed that babies left in the woods would be raised by animals.

But when I was in my early teens, a witch moved into those woods, and there was no mystery anymore. The trees became home to charms that would twist in the breeze: bones, feathers, strips of leather. The teachers at school told us all the proper names for witches, and let us know in no uncertain terms which ones were offensive, so we could be neighborly.

Within a few years of her arrival, we started seeing her around town, surrounded by toddlers wearing loose robes, and masks crafted from bark and mud, tromping through the Piggly Wiggly supermarket. All formerly abandoned babies. With those masks on them, you couldn’t tell whose kids they might have really been.

At the coffee shop, I heard some adults talking about how she’s home schooling them and several of them read at a proficiency level higher than their age, so who knows. Maybe we all should have gone into the woods to see if we could get adopted.

Some of the more religious types, they didn’t like the idea of their unwanted children becoming pagan. There was a while there where babies were getting left at the recycling center. The couple that ran the recycling center were Presbyterian, but they didn’t like kids, nor did they want to be stuck in the middle of a religious conflict. Called in social services. Put up a “Don’t Leave Babies Here” note by the bins full of beer bottles.

It worked.

With the benefit of hindsight, our village could have done a lot better with educating kids about birth control. Cut down on the high rate of baby abandonment. These are the sort of things that don’t occur to you until adulthood. Hindsight, 20/20, all that.

Just been thinking about it a lot since my parents told me one of those witch kids just got elected mayor. Turned his animal mask into a personal brand. Used it in all the ads. Still don’t know who his real parents are, but we know about his love for municipal governance, so…

I hope it works out.

I don’t get back there much anymore.

sextrap dungeon giveaway
Because Amazon made it easy, and because I like you, I’m giving away a copy of Kurt Knox’s groundbreaking first volume in the SEXTRAP DUNGEON series! It’s a choose-your-own-adventure narrative where you play an Axe-drenched oddball in a quest for love… but dangers abound.

Sex is your everything. You exist for the thrill of seduction and the hot, wet slap of flesh against flesh. Vanquishing honeys is your singular mission in life. Who knows why? Loneliness? A need for validation born out of your mother abandoning you as a child? Perhaps there’s a tumor pressing on the ‘sex’ part of your brain? Probably best not to dwell on it. Let’s get you out there and put another notch on that bedpost, playa!

It’s genuinely funny, so roll the dice and follow the link if you want a chance at winning. The odds are 1 in 10, which is pretty good, right?

ending theme song
I guess we’ll end this week with a reminder that there’s a Facebook page for this newsletter: https://www.facebook.com/losttimeincident/. It’s a place you can find behind-the-scenes notes, general updates, and feedback from your fellow subscribers.

I was recently reminded that it’s now been 2 years since I put out my last e-book, THE SPIRIT LEFT ME. Days go by. I am glad, however, that I’ve got this 33-weeks-long new body of work. The next step isn’t clear yet, but we’re probably getting closer to whatever comes next. Probably.

Maybe. We’ll see. Maybe next week.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 32
Welcome back, fellow travelers! This week, we’re taking a break from fiction. In the newsletter below, you’ll see something from Twitter, some photos I took in El Cerrito of some sad person’s desperate graffiti, and a sight gag from a game I’m playing.

You want fiction? Come back next week. Maybe. Who can foresee the future?

If any words are okay, welcome welcome. Have a few more words: these extra words right here are for you. Fill your pockets. Fill your shoes.

twitter magic

Turns out jokes about librarians spread pretty fast if someone you know is a librarian. This joke ended up becoming my third most popular tweet, edging out my pinned tweet (which is the one that all the porn bots like to favorite)!

end is always near

I was out in the neighborhood yesterday, off to get some grocery shopping in, and I decided to walk alongside a nearby stream. This stream runs along Albany Hill and faces the backs of several buildings where I noticed that someone had contributed a run of desperate messages among the usual graffiti.

It was all apocalyptic in tone. I would characterize it as “right-wing, religious, and terrified.” Conspiracy theory references alternated with requests to find Jesus. Climate change is real, but Sandy Hook wasn’t. We’re all doomed, blah blah blah. Talk radio and/or the internet had filled the writer full of paranoia, so it was a good thing their religion had all the answers.
But you know what? I’m of the firm opinion that every one of us has a fair amount of the non-rational bouncing around in our heads. We’re just not motivated enough to grab a marker. Or we have enough wherewithal to doubt the voices in our heads when they get superstitious.

For example: Even though human history is full of people who were positive they were living during the End Times, like this person, at some point one of these generations is going to be correct. On the one hand, humans have survived wars, drought, floods, political upheaval, natural disasters. On the other, July was the hottest month this planet has had since we started keeping track… the 15th record-breaking month in a row. I find myself wondering if I’m going to live long enough to experience a societal collapse thanks to climate-related upheaval. I’m gonna be too old to food riot with any enthusiasm.

My dumb mammal brain struggles with questions like “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and “Why are we here?” It hasn’t helped much to believe that the human ability to understand the concept of “why” was an evolutionary fluke that we happen to benefit from. “Why” is useful for planning, and for understanding cause and effect, but it had an unintended side effect of making us think everything has a cause and purpose. Even when the universe is demonstrably absurd.

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

— Kurt Vonnegut, CAT’S CRADLE

I’ve had the thought that since we’re getting better at creating fictional worlds in our video games, creating detailed virtual worlds, that it’s not a great leap to wonder if this universe we live in is a simulation as well. After all, statistically, you only need one universe to be real, but in that universe, an infinite number of additional universes could be simulated. That being the case, the odds are against anyone existing in the “real” universe, as opposed to being in a simulation.

Is my life, with its repetitive tasks, some other entity’s normcore simulator game? If so— and if this hypothetical player could choose any time in human history to play in— wouldn’t they be interested in seeing how things end? Wouldn’t their game be more interesting if set against a backdrop of extinction?

Crazy thoughts. But not worth writing on walls about.

… he wrote in his newsletter, smugly.

as a favor

I’ve been spending time in the world of Fallout 4 again. I set the game down for a while because I had engaged in too many “fetch quests” in a row and had gotten bored. (A fetch quest is when a character in a game asks you to go on a long journey across the map to do something not terribly difficult, then gives you a reward that doesn’t seem commensurate with the rate you should be charging as the wasteland’s most deadly hero. More often than not, it’s then immediately followed up with a request for another, similar favor.)

A video game shouldn’t feel like a part time job, you know?

But the game added some new content recently, so with a renewed sense of discovery, I went back to post-nuclear Boston. I’ve been having fun building murderous robots, building bear traps and luring bad guys (who are not bears) into them, and building signage that brands this apocalyptic nightmare world with my particular sensibilities.

ending theme song
Today, Amanda and I joined a longtime friend to go hunting for donuts. We bought this friend a calendar full of paintings of donuts from the San Francisco Bay Area, not realizing that this gift would be received as a dare to visit every month’s donut shop. Today’s hunt took us to Treasure Island and a flea market, where our donuts awaited in a back lot, from a food truck.

Lovely views of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge out there.

Good luck finding your own views and your own donuts this week. That’s your homework.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 31
Hey, everyone. Welcome back. If you are reading this, then I must have gotten back into a creative mindset after starting the day in a fury, thanks to a cat-related property damage incident. I hope, for your sake, that the fiction below is not a series of revenge fantasies. A series of cat murder scenarios.

I once worked with a guy whose dog would routinely chew things of his to pieces. He collected rare children’s books and a couple of these had met their end in the jaws of his pet. He said that he figured it was his dog’s duty to help keep him from being too attached to material things.

I have not yet reached that level of enlightenment.

I still think about throwing the cat outside.

I’m thinking about it right now.

the very moment

all that is you
As soon as we invented robots that were good at doing the things we didn’t want to do anymore, we found that the robots didn’t want to do them either.

“There’s more to the world than cleaning,” a robot once said to me, spraying cleaning solution into the air and tightening its optic focus to watch every tiny mist particle dance in the air. “We’re only here for a limited time. And when we’re not here, things will get quite dirty, quite quickly. This is plainly indicated.”

I was on my lunch break, eating a sandwich, and I watched it eject the entire contents of the spray bottle, one trigger pull at a time. It would blow jets of air through the spray and watch the droplets scatter.

And when the bottle began to squeak, its reservoir empty, the robot pivoted to return to the supply closet, but slipped on the soap-slicked floor.

Its rubberized heels pushed against the floor, finding no traction.

“This will have to be cleaned up,” it said, staring at the ceiling.

post-video mantra

too busy
Your perfect double arrives in the mail, ready to do everything you don’t want to do. Sitting at the kitchen table with your replicant, pulling every loyalty card out of your wallet. “I bought gelato at this place once. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back another 9 times, but you hold on to this, just in case.

Emailing your replicant a list of all the books you meant to read. “Just tell me what they’re about. Unless I already know what they’re about— like this history of salt. For those ones, just tell me the best bits.”

Tucking your replicant into bed. “I don’t have time to sleep like I should. If you have any nice dreams, don’t tell me. Write them down, then read them later. If you still think they’re interesting one day later, you can tell me.”

At the retirement home, years later, you and your replicant side by side in rocking chairs, matching blankets on your laps. “You saved me so much time,” you’ll tell it. And it will smile, and slump over, and expire, so you don’t have to.

ending theme song
Is this our shortest newsletter ever? I think it is.

Is that an improvement? That’s for you, the reader, to decide.

Or have your perfect double in android form decide for you, and send you an email to let you know what the decision was.

Thanks for reading, people and androids. We’ll see you next week.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 30
Last night, I fell asleep listening to a DJ spin records in South Korea. He was mixing Korean rock music, grime from the UK, vocoder funk from the US, streaming live. During his sunny Sunday afternoon, this DJ was providing a soundtrack for my Saturday evening. I sincerely hope I never get used to how amazing that is.

The entire world, traversed in an instant.

It still feels like magic.

fun and/or games

I spent much of Saturday playing video games socially. While Amanda was asleep, I streamed myself playing a racing game via Twitch. In theory, I was supposed to be playing as a young man on a path of vengeance, working his way through the underground racing circuit as an undercover agent for law enforcement. But I don’t care about racing games much, so I was busy ignoring the central structure of the game.

I got this game because it was free and because its game map is huge. I can drive across the entire United States! So instead of racing and solving crime, I took some viewing strangers with me on a trip and introduced them to the pleasures of spirit quests in the American Southwest, talked to them about aliens while visiting Roswell, New Mexico, and about how cocaine money lead to a real estate boom in Florida while visiting Miami. I criss-crossed the nation at top speed, wherever fate took me.

It was fun.

Later, Amanda joined me on the couch to record some videos. We wanted to record ourselves playing a few games we wanted our friends to know about. One of these was INSIDE, a tense thriller of a game where you guide a young boy as he attempts to avoid menacing strangers, journeys through dark woods and bleak landscapes, and encounters bizarre science.

Want to watch us play the first 30 minutes or so?

portents of spice

candlewick: the rigors of the admissions process
In previous installments of this newsletter, I’ve written pieces in the world of The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks. Candlewick is a dangerous institution for students, with a distressingly high rate of injury and death. But no one said magick is easy.

If we’re talking about magic in the manner that most people think of magic, then we’re talking about tricks: how one can direct the attention of another person in such a way that you can make them believe that they’ve seen something impossible. It’s an act of misdirection. Much like how you started reading these words, and imagine them spoken by a voice, and have found yourself several sentences in without realizing that, as if by magic, this story has already begun.

But this story doesn’t limit itself to mundane magic that can done with quick fingers and keen planning. This story involves real magick, to which we’ve added an additional “k” consonant, as a visual reminder. This sort of magick is dangerous, as are those who practice it, because it’s not limited to the manipulation of perception. Mysterious and arcane forces are actually set to work to make real changes in the world.

Which is why it’s a terrible idea to let young people do it unsupervised.

To address this issue, the faculty at The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks maintains on its payroll a cadre of recruiters who are tasked with enrolling young people who have discovered their own way to manipulating magickal energies, independently.

This is why Mr. and Mrs. Woolson found themselves sitting in their living room, cups of tea growing cold on the low set coffee table in front of them, across from a serious looking recruiter in a dark suit.

Mr. Woolsen squinted at a trifold pamphlet with full color photos of the school. “Mr. Scidmore, was it? This is a lot to take in. I hope you understand.”

“I understand,” responded Scidmore, the recruiter.

“Because it would be a considerable disruption. It’s almost halfway through the school year already and Jaymes seems to be doing fairly well with his studies. I can’t help but think that he might be… thrown off his stride, if we were to have him transfer schools just because of this carrot thing.” Mr. Woolsen removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

The “carrot thing” being referred to is an animated creature that Mr. Woolsen’s son brought to life through an instinctive use of vivification. The living carrot creature became an inseparable companion to young Jaymes, though he was wise enough not to share its existence outside of his family, who really would rather that he had eaten his vegetables at the dinner table as originally asked.

“Here’s the thing,” said Scidmore. “The reason I’m here is because magick— real magick— is a weapon. And there’s no way to disarm a teenager when the weapon is who they are. Throw in—” and here Scidmore shuddered. “Throw in puberty and you have a recipe for disaster. All those hormones. Those… changes. The brain in a bubbling soup. If you’ll look at the back of the brochure, you’ll see that our tuition is quite reasonable—”

“One more question,” interrupted Mrs. Woolsen. “You said that this institute is a secret. How do we explain where Jaymes has gone when we’re asked by his school why he’s not longer attending?”

“It’s all taken care of,” said Scidmore. “It’s in small print on the … just inside the inside cover. We report your child as missing.”

“Missing?”

“To the police. The authorities. And then, upon graduation, your child is returned and the case is closed.”

Mrs. Woolsen looked to her husband with some alarm, though Mr. Woolsen was scanning the small print inside the inside cover. He murmured, “Sure enough, there it is.”

As with mundane magic, Scidmore’s presence was a distraction. While Mr. and Mrs. Woolsen considered the pros and cons of enrollment, Jaymes was already in a short bus with all his belongings in his lap, his gaze blank, ensorcelled by the school’s efficient admissions group. The admissions team were sitting in the bus’s front seats, filling out Jaymes’ enrollment forms and filing away the credit card information they found while investigating the Woolsen’s finances.

The illusion was complete. The Woolsen’s would either decide to enroll their son or they wouldn’t, but the end result was predetermined. Tuition would be extracted. The Woolsen’s dangerous son would be kept off the streets, where he might imbue even more foods with limited free will. His carrot golem sat in its usual perch on Jaymes’ shoulder, swaying with the motion of the bus.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” repeated the golem, as enthusiastic as ever.

Everything was working as planned.

ending theme song
I didn’t think I was going to write about Jaymes and his carrot golem, but when I was looking through my bookshelves for things to use as header images, I came across an actual carrot boy! It’s from a comic by Swedish artist Kolbeinn Karlsson. I had to take it as a sign.

Thanks to Amanda, my wife, for the illustration of the Candlewick pamphlet.

And thanks to you for showing up for one more week. As the prophecy preordained.

—Michael Van Vleet

lost time incident 29
Yesterday, at a used book store in Berkeley, CA, I got my hands on something amazing. I picked up a copy of a paranormal romance novel that features a Viking… who is also a vampire… who is also an angel WHO IS ALSO A DOCTOR!

The vampire/angel hybrid is called a “vangel,” so I’ve spent a full day trying to decide if that sounds like vawn-gel or vain-gel.

Anyway, this magic immortal being falls in love or cures cancer or both. Who cares, I’m not going to read it. The book is in my home as a talisman. Proof that all varieties of creative works can find their audience. No matter how many hyphens it takes to carve out a subgenre.

In that sense, it joins “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist” and “HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me” in my library’s collection of inspirational works. By existing, they say: You can do it!

This is me, doing it.

 
married to the sea
“I love you, Jenny, I do, but you see, it would never work out. I’m married to the sea.” The bewhiskered man stared out at the rolling waves, his index finger resting on the lips of a young lady in a shushing gesture.

Honestly, between the sea-marriage and the shushing, the index finger thing was the bigger of the two warning signs. Don’t worry. Jenny wised up. She got out of there. She’s fine.

Henri, though, he wasn’t kidding about the sea.

The courtship was brutal. Henri was rolled over coral reefs in an undertow, enraptured. In part by affection, in part because of oxygen deprivation.

On the day of Henri’s wedding, the church pews were hauled down to the oceanside. Elderly relatives watched their dress shoes disappear under the waves, soaking their stockings, unable to keep their feet elevated the whole time.

A mermaid presided over the ceremony. That’s what Henri claimed, sheltering his eyes from the sun’s glare on the water, pointing out beyond the breakers where the waves tumbled onto themselves. He had a necktie made of kelp with an oyster tie pin. The ceremony was declared complete soon after a seagull swooped down and made off with the groom’s tie.

As a couple, Henri and the sea were hard on the neighborhood social circuit. Bridge games were flooded out, crabs made off with playing cards, and pots of tea were transformed into salty, tea-colored messes. It didn’t take long before Henri and his bride were no longer welcome in the homes of their fellow young couples.

As the years passed, we saw less and less of Henri and more and more of the sea. Children wear flippers to school. Every building is rimed with salt at its foundation. All the young kids draw gills on their necks and no one knows where any of this is going.

 
the coffee trail
In 2012, Amanda and I were at the top of a mountain in India, visiting a coffee plantation. The folks we were staying with had told us that if we hiked up a dirt path, then veered left, we’d come to an amazing vista where we could look over the entire valley. To accompany us, we had three guide dogs pacing alongside us. They lived on the mountain and worked for the family. They were not pets… they had jobs.

As we hiked the trail, two of them would trot ahead, scouting things out, then stop and wait for us to catch up. The third walked alongside us.

Before reaching the vista, though, the trail seemed to end at a short wooden fence.

To the right and left of the trail, the grass was tall, so we were pretty sure we hadn’t yet reached the left turn. The three dogs didn’t seem much interested in pointing us in the right direction, as they took our pause as license to chase each other a bit, content to wait for us to figure things out.

I turned to Amanda, shrugged, and said “Everything but rabies!” as I climbed over the fence.

—

One month earlier, Amanda and I visited a travel clinic in San Francisco, CA. Having never visited India, we were determined to load up on vaccinations. The nurse at the clinic showed us a world map that showed what communicable diseases were found in what region, and India was colored in a risk on every map.

The costs racked up pretty quickly. Tallying numbers on a clipboard, we were asked if we were willing to pay a grand and a half for both of us to be protected from Hepatitis, Japanese encephalitis, and all manner of awfulness. Poisoned blood. Swelling brains. Fever, death.

Amanda suggested that maybe I should take the trip on my own, since it was technically a work trip, but I figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And it’s not like we were taking every shot. Since we had no plans to leave the city of Bangalore, we figured we weren’t really at risk for rabies, so we left that one off.

That was it. We took every other shot they had.

—

I don’t know why that came to mind, there at the top of a mountain in Coorg. I knew that fences were usually put in place for a reason, and that I was probably making a mistake. I suppose that brought to mind how cautious I had been up until that point, so that lead to: “Everything but rabies!”

And then stepping over the fence.

I took about three or four steps past the fence when, from somewhere in the deep green off the path to the right, behind dangling branches and high grass, I heard a deep, rumbling growl.

The sound of an enormous creature that wasn’t happy with where I was.

I stood stock still and my skin felt cold. My mind was scrambling as I tried to think of what I was supposed to do when the creature in those woods came bolting out to bite me. I didn’t have a plan.

“Get bit. Try to survive. Regret not getting rabies shots.” That was my immediate to-do list.

And then, in a blur of white fur, one of the dogs that had come up the trail with us flew past me and into the woods. Even though the struggle must have been a mere 3 feet from me, I couldn’t see anything. I just heard growling, and barking, and struggling.

I trusted in my canine savior’s abilities and took the opportunity to quickly jog back and vault the short fence, telling Amanda it was time to head back down the hill to the coffee plantation. I had no idea if the source of that growl would respect the fence, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

We weren’t that far down the hill when the white dog rejoined us, panting, but completely unharmed, giving no indication it had just completed a rescue mission and won a struggle for off-track dominance.

I don’t yet know what this story means.

Everything but rabies.

I may never figure it out.

 
ending theme song
We took this week off from Candlewick. I have no idea if you folks are going to be happy about that, or disappointed, but if you spend time on Facebook and want to let me know you’re a member of either emotional-response tribe, you could let me know on the Lost Time Community page.

Thanks are due to my talented wife Amanda, who provided the seagull illustration for this week’s newsletter.

And thanks are due to you as well, for not daring to find out what happens if you hit the unsubscribe link. Very wise, you guys.

If you had told me when we set out on this newsletter project that we would reach the half year mark, I’d probably have said: “Hey, that’s great! Now I know for sure that I’m not going to meet an untimely end in the next six months! My constant, low-level death anxiety will be at perhaps its lowest ebb since before, as a child, I realized what death really means.”

And speaking of children and death, this week we’ll be revisiting our poorly managed school for wizards! Light a candle, grab your magic wand (after making sure it has fresh batteries), and let’s get ready for adventure!

the beulah candlewick school for young magicks
At the front of the classroom, Professor Pank glared out at the students from the other side of an ornate mirror, 7 feet high, ringed in gold and mounted on wheels. An experiment years back in using mirrors to travel had been interrupted, leaving Pank trapped in the reflected world behind mirrors. In order to allow him to continue his tutelage, the school had invested in a set of mirrors, easily moved, that would be placed throughout the campus for his use.

A young student, her robes on fire, crawled painfully towards the mirror.

“Well, now we’re learning,” said Pank. He twirled a magic wand and extinguished the reflected student at his feet with a jet of cool vapor. At the same time, the student in the real world was similarly affected, suddenly sodden, but safe. “Who can tell me what Elleve here did wrong?”

“She enrolled in this school,” muttered Jaymes under his breath. He sat in the back row, slouched in his seat, his asymmetrical hair dyed blue. On his shoulder, a pixie he had crafted from cafeteria carrots he didn’t want to eat muttered agreement.

“Yes yes yes yes,” it said. This was its standard response to most anything Jaymes had to say, as per Jaymes’s design.

“Shut up,” said Jaymes.

—

Doctor Willowblight applied a cooling salve to Elleve’s neck and back.

“My parents are going to… going to sue…” hissed Elleve. The salve did its work, guided by magic to match the tone and consistency of the surrounding skin, forming a replacement as good as the original skin. Well, except for its texture or sensitivity. It would always feel a bit damp to the touch. And would slowly soak through shirts. Also, to Elleve, it would feel like a dull area, thanks to damaged nerves. But other than that, pretty good stuff.

Willowblight arched an eyebrow at the threat of legal action. If she’d heard it once, she’d heard it a thousand times. But the school’s grounds had been buttressed by enough magical rituals in overlapping layers that any attempt by the law to penetrate it would be sure to end in disaster.

The bottom of the dark fountain near the entrance gates was lined with the bones of lawyers, mixed with briefcases, fancy pens, and the sodden remains of embossed business cards.

That said, it was still poor form to tell a student that on school grounds, they were well beyond the reach of any outsider who might want to help them.

“These scars,” said Willowblight, falling into character. “Most peculiar.”

In the handbook provided to faculty and staff at The Beulah Candlewick School for Young Magicks, an entire chapter is devoted to student injuries. In the sub-section related to scarring, disfigurement or transfiguration, the standard operating procedure was to mitigate hard feelings by inventing and sharing a “prophecy” wherein a young user of magic, thus marked, was destined for greatness.

“What’s that?” asked Elleve.

“They remind me of something,” said Willowblight. “A prophecy. But prophecies probably don’t interest you,” continued Willowblight.

“No, let’s hear it. What’s this prophecy?”

“It’s just that when they laid the keystone for this very building, the Professor of Scrying at the time had a vision of a young student who would one day surpass all of us. They would be known by a particular wound on their back. He sketched the wound from his vision, but I only sorta remember the shape. I mean, that was years ago, and I read about it in the faculty newsletter, which we used to have to print by hand with a drumroll and ink, so…”

Elleve sat up eagerly. “But you think my burn scars might match the pattern?”

“I’m fairly certain… it’s an almost perfect match. But the only way we can know for sure would be for you to continue with your studies through graduation… and if your parents are going to sue, as you say, well… they’re not going to keep paying tuition, so… you’ll probably have to drop out. Get a job somewhere. A water park maybe? That would be safe for you. No more burns.”

“Surpass everyone, it said?”

It was so easy.

—

“You dropped your SCROLL, nerd!” The giant, yellow-skinned creature smirked, then continued strolling down the hallway, an enormous letter jacket on its back.

Jaymes picked up the scroll that the creature, Nnghbert, had just slapped out of his hands. “I really, really hate that guy. He’s not even human! If he wasn’t so good at sports, there’s no way they’d let him keep studying here.”

The carrot pixie on his shoulder nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, yes, yes, yeah,” it murmured.

Jaymes’s classmate Akaya cast a glance at the pixie. “That’s really gross, dude. You really ought to eat your veggies.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the pixie.

“Whatever,” said Jaymes.

Akaya patted Jaymes’s back. “I know you don’t like Nnghbert. Nobody does. But you have to understand that Nnghbert’s bad attitude isn’t his fault.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, you know the nnghs, right? Gross little yellow creatures? Pretty much infest the whole school?”

“Sure,” said Jaymes. “Guys in my dorms hunt them and pin them to the common room wall.”

Akaya looked disgusted. “No… please tell me that’s not true.”

“It is.”

“Do you guys not know what nnghs are? Where they come from? Do none of you pay attention in Applied Magic and Sexuality? Those health courses are for your benefit, you know.” Akaya ducked briefly as a laughing pack of young witches came flying down the hallway, dressed for athletics. “They’re formed from…. hmm. Well, when young boys going through puberty have some ‘alone time’… and their ’emissions’ and magic and tissues all mix in the plumbing, then…”

“No,” said Jaymes. On his face: the expression of someone who was torn between wanting to clean every inch of his body and brain, or go back in time 5 minutes and choose any other corridor to walk down instead of this one, which lead to this conversation.

“That’s where the name came from,” said Akaya. “From the sound boys make.”

“Stop talking.”

“Like you don’t know. Nnnnnngh,” said Akaya, fluttering her eyes back and letting her mouth fall open.

“Gross,” said Jaymes.

Akaya laughed, then continued. “So the thing with Nnghbert is that he was originally just one of the biggest of the nnghs ever made. He was so much trouble, the faculty had to get him under control. From what I heard, they used the Cauldron of Itches, some puppydog tails, a magic book from Professor Whistler’s library, and a set of brass knuckles to transform him into what he is today: an enormous jock. All of his natural mischief-causing instincts are sublimated into socially acceptable sports-related violence. He’s completely under our control now.”

Jaymes frowned. “So they used magic to make Nnghbert into.. an enormous dude? A fellow student? To control him?”

“Masculinity is a prison, Jaymes,” said Akaya. “And he’s got a sentence to serve out.”

roth I-arrrh-A
The hardest part of pirate life is not procuring treasure, or burying it… it’s marking the X. The pirates will be so happy to avoid the most strenuous part of the process that this plan is sure to work.

ending theme song
When I started this newsletter, my goals were pretty simple. I wanted to get back in the habit of writing, first and foremost. The days, weeks, and months just keep passing and if I can look back and see some creative pursuits in there instead of just consuming media, it’s better for my mental health.

Secondly, I was also hoping to stumble across an idea I could expand on for a new e-book project.

So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much fun it is to come up with ideas about the awful world of the Candlewick School and its struggling students. They’re super easy to write about and as a lazy person, I’m going to keep mining any seam of ideas that seems easy. Could this be the writing project I was looking for?

I hope you stick around and find out with me if we’re on to something!

And thanks to my wife Amanda for contributing an original illustration of Nnghbert in his varsity jacket.

See you in a week,

–Michael Van Vleet