Fossiloctopus by Forrest Aguirre Read Free Book Online

penchant for fried goat fat, died in his sleep – a rare royal victim of death by natural causes.
    One must assume that security in the astronomy bureau had grown lax in the few centuries between Chung Ho-hsiang’s discovery and the death of Emperor Zhengtong.  For an unknown assistant at the observatory was so moved, upon hearing of the emperor’s death, that he saw fit to adhere the key – colloquially known by that time as “Chung Ho-hsiang’s Visitor” – to the object mirror of the recently-forged telescope, thus reminding all who looked through the lens that Zhengtong had ascended, like a bright star, into the heavens.  Of course, this rendered the telescope useless, but this was soon rectified when a second, more powerful telescope was built alongside the first.
    For over 500 years – a span of time almost incomprehensible to the western mind, let’s be honest – the Visitor loomed before the eyes of astronomers, curiosity-seekers, and historians.  Then, in 1967, cultural revolutionaries dismantled the telescope, painted the bust of Chairman Mao over the top of the key, then re-assembled the scope.
    Given the state of Chinese art in that decade, one who has not seen the portrait can only imagine the comical affectations given to the ruler’s visage.  Chairman Mao can now be seen gracing the heavens at any point in the sky, day or night, a 24/7 twinkle in his left eye.  Even the introduction of Capitalism has not sullied his starry gaze.  He just keeps on smiling.  If you’re lucky, you might catch him winking, a sparkle of acknowledgement just for you.
     
    Unlocking Vollmer
     
    Everyone wants to talk about it, but no one wants to touch it. It is hip, chic, and utterly forbidden by good taste. All the coolest writers write about it, singers croon anthems to its praise, academics publish erudite articles about its place on the literary keychain, but its allure is that no one with any degree of mental stability would be willing to handle it and those whose damaged sense of reason would not render it taboo to use the thing would have no clue how to find it.
    This is a good thing.
    The object is rather simple, even puerile in its representation. The handle is cast in the shape of a revolver, the tip a .38 caliber bullet, and the stem between them a stylized gunpowder flash like that in a comic book. Inscribed on the key in tiny, almost inscrutable letter, is the following:
     
    My molten-steel bullet will unerringly reach my target. MY target, not that of the trigger-puller, who naively views himself as a self-stimulating enticer of fate. This firearm follows its own rules. My projectile defies the laws of physics, obeying the trajectories of misfortune, the gravity well of sorrow. He, the so-called wielder, sees, in his drunken bravado, an epic retelling of the William Tell myth. But I see to it that the idyllic landscape of never-was collapses into the soul-stealing black hole of never-will-be. You would like to use my manifesto for your own purposes, to cure the world of its ills by abolishing its tools. But I reject your anti-parochialism. I tear your agenda to shreds. I glory in the small. For this manifesto was written for one man only, and you are not that man. My entry wound is small, a mere centimeter in the woman’s head, but the exit wound pulls the man’s being through it, turning him and his life inside out. You cannot use me. I am the user, he the used. I the trigger puller, he the trigger. She, the target, he, the victim. Now who is the key and who the turner as we unlock Vollmer?
     
     
     
    Nancy Davis' Bridal Veil
     
    A lifetime blink of lucidity came to Ronald Reagan as he lay on the bottom of an immense walk-in closet in a house that he did not know he owned. Nor did he know how he got there, legs akimbo and covered in rayon dresses. Rayon, all except for one, a brilliant white wedding dress whose tail wrapped around his waist, an, an albino boa constrictor of sequined mirrors.