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It’s pretty bold to call yourself
. It conjures all kinds of images and an ideal of old-fashioned, red-blooded storytelling to live up to. Fortunately- as todays submission shows- our man Frank Kidd is worthy of the name and of keeping that Pulp tradition alive, while weaving in some 21st century themes and tropes for good measure. I’m looking forward to reading more from Frank, as I hope you are now too.Enjoy.
We stand on an overpass, the highway below abandoned. It stretches into the distance, an asphalt artery across a corpse. I take a bite of deer jerky found loose in my pocket. The child. My child picks up a piece of rubbish. "What is it Daddy?" "Put it down. Its broken." "But what is it?" I adjust the fur coat against frosty morning air. The highway is choked with abandoned cars. Still no sign of the runner. The morning silent. Peacefully so. "It's an answer box." "An answer box," she says to herself. "But what does it do?" she asks, looking up at me with blue saucer eyes, her nose running from the cold. "It doesn't do anything, anymore." "But what did it do?" she asks. I take the small rectangle from her hand, its glass face cracked. I trace the symbol on the back with my finger, an apple, like the one from the garden. "People used to ask it for answers. Answers to anything. It would tell them what they wanted to hear," I say handing the box back to her. "Answer box, what game should I play today?" she asks it. When there is no reply she turns her saucers back to me. She punctuates the silent cry for help by wiping a little red nose on a puffy sleeve. "They don't work anymore, honey," I stifle a laugh. Her disappointment is cute, but she is still disappointed. "What happened to them?" she asks. "What happened to everything," I said. "We made machines that could think." She looks back at the answer box, and I look again for the runner. The triumph of science had been the death of it. They had no idea how it worked, only how to make it. At some point scientists became wizards, conjuring consciousness from a void of code. They had created a black hole and then trusted it with the world. The machines didn't rise up. They didn't roast the world in nuclear war. No, they did what we told them too, as best they could. Spirits in the machine. When they got sick, nobody knew why, and there was nobody left who could fix them. We had hoped the machines would fix themselves, the way they were "designed" too. But that didn't happen. And then it all fell away, not with a bang, but with a wheezing sigh. We were left out in the cold, adrift in the future, lost in a strange place with no idea how we got there. No way to trace our steps back. Every day we walked the corpses of useless machinery, the manuals to which, first locked behind paywalls, were now bricked and lost inside the answer boxes. The runner appears in the distance. He is no longer running but doggedly jogging. He brings news from the next city over. Of goings on there. But he also brings books, books to trade. Most are useless of course, either too advanced for someone missing the fundamentals, or too fundamental for someone needing the advanced. "Let's go, honey," I say. She skips along after me, and we meet the runner in the highway. It's a new guy. "What happened to Roger?" I ask. "Broke his leg," the runner says. "They tried to set it best they could, but nobody is quite sure how. I guess it’s all a guessing game now." He chuckles at the darkness of it all. I hand the runner one of our books, and he hands us theirs. It's the Art of Gardening. I pass him The Home Tanning and Leathermaking Guide. He turns it over in his hands, "Say you folks don't happen to have any medical books?" "I'll have to check," I say. "If we do, I'll bring it next time." This is how knowledge circulates now - slowly. The runner system brought peace after everything broke down. It was bad for a while, we fought over resources, over food and access to water. And then after that, we fought over knowledge. What had been the public library, was looted first, firebombed later. In war, depriving your enemy as good as victory. We watch the man leave, and I remember that I never got his name. He's too far up the highway now. I'll get it next week. We start back, and my shadow skips to catch up. Geese fly in a V overhead. Their honking breaks the morning stillness. "Why do they fly like that?" my shadow asks. "They fly like an arrow," I say. "Pointed makes it easier to fly." "Oh," comes the little reply. I can't tell if she is satisfied with my answer. "Why can birds fly, and we can't?" "They have hollow bones." "Oh." We walk in relative silence for a while. Up ahead is a bridge that crosses the river. We stop in the middle of it, and I wait for her to finish dropping rocks in the water. She pulls the answer box from her pocket and drops it over the side. Delight lights her face as it splashes into the water. A bigger splash than the pebbles made. "You didn't want that anymore?" "It was broken," she says, suddenly second guessing her decision. "Besides, I got you." "Yeah," I smile at that. "I guess, I'm your answer box, huh?"
So that’s it for this week. We are going to skip Easter Monday and return to business as usual on Wednesday 12th.
Happy Easter and thanks for all of your comments and support since we started this venture back in February.
Frank is in a league of his own. His writing is clear, crisp and complex all at the same time. He builds a movie on the reader’s retina.
I personally love these types of stories and the mood in this one is perfect. Great great stuff, Frank!
Felt like a scene out of "The Road" but the world is warmer and hopeful.. Enjoyed this a lot.