Savage Tales

at the ready. A world without speech.
    Vocal cords deteriorated. Singing was forgotten.
    The strange building in the Arizona desert began to rot, and then one day it vanished into the night sky.
    The man who had gone in, the only one, was old now, nearly ninety. He had regained a primitive speech faculty, but his mind had returned to its former precision.
    Then one day he suffered a stroke. He was confined in the hospital again.
    While he waited to die, he stared at the plant next to his bed and began to speak to it without words. He was one of the few who wore no earplugs and still remembered how to speak.
    The plant listened. The man began to merge in consciousness with it.
    His life began to unwind like thread, going in reverse, until he came to that day when he had gone inside that odd building. What had prompted him to run in like that?
    And he went back further in time to the events that had set it all in motion, those carved words on the side of Everest. He imagined the mountain before those words, and saw them blank, with the mind of the plant. He stared into those mountains for hundreds of years it seemed, until out of the silence words and thoughts began to emerge.
    He wrinkled his brain in just the right way. He could see… all things.
    He wrinkled the mountain… the plant did… or he did… or all did…
    And from it came scratching, stretching, impossible things. Letters emerged from the rock, and words emerged from the letters. He was past the point of caring, and they came out how they would.
    As the sun set, his mind switched off and lowered its speed to nought. Electricity stopped and circulation halted at last.
    A nurse came and switched off his monitors and covered his face with the sheet. No family came to say goodbye.
    A few weeks later a comet was seen approaching through the night sky. It was followed with great interest by the astronomy community. It seemed to be coming closer and closer to the Earth. Finally its trajectory was calculated and the worst was feared.
    In the Arizona desert a hole remained where once a giant building had been. The hole was so empty.

LIGHTER TIME-MEDIUM

    My father was a moth. My mother was a moth. I am a moth.
    Sometimes at night when I cling to the tree surrounded by the others, I wonder if there is more. But this is ridiculous. I am a moth. Why should there be more?
    When the sun comes up, I let go and flap my wings and go where I will until I find something to eat. Then I eat as much as I can. Sometimes there are birds that come after me. I always get away. I don't think about tomorrow.
    One day I was on the tree talking to Ralph.
    "Yeah, I think we get a pension," he said.
    "So we can retire. That's a relief. I always wondered where the others went."
    "Sure, you just worry too much."
    "I guess you're right."
    But I thought about it and the next day I asked him again how they would when we're old enough to retire.
    "They keep records and stuff," he said.
    That sounded unbelievable.

    I awoke freezing, the blanket and sheets scattered on the floor across the room, sweat beading in pools in my cratered skin. To dream of being a moth and awaken a man. That was my synopsis.
    My alarm wouldn't go off for another hour, but there was no going back to bed. I drank about a gallon of coffee I guess, to keep me away from that moth life.
    Got into work and Ralph said to stock the ladies department. I cut open some boxes and started getting the clothes ready. As I was putting a blouse on a hanger, my mouth acted on its own. I swear. My tongue was on that blouse, chewing. Ralph chose that despicable moment to come around the corner.
    "Stuart?"
    I unclamped. "I'm okay."
    "You're… you're okay? Because you don't look okay. You looked like you were sucking on that blouse."
    "That's how it may have appeared. From your angle. The light. The way you're standing."
    "You know, we have a psychologist we keep on salary. We can bring her out anytime."
    "What do you mean?"
    "I mean for you to talk to."
    "For what? Because you think I was sucking on a blouse? Come on, Ralph, I thought we were friends."
    "It's because we're friends. The store's closed now, but if we had customers here and they saw what you were doing… well, I might have to let you go. You got to keep your fetishes at home, man."
    He told me I could see this shrink lady while I was on the clock. That didn't sound so bad. I had never been to a head doctor but I remembered on TV and movies how you always lie down on a