The Last Fiction Tale

The Last Fiction Tale


My spine tingled for a count of five, then silence followed for the same.

"uhmmmm......," the distant buzz of the phone was drawing me from a warm dream. The ocean vaporized. In an instant, the clam-man was gone; the beach; and then the girl. I held onto a brightly colored umbrella to no avail. Obscurity, darkness and then, I was out.

"uhhmmmmm.." It was him.

Without opening my eyes, I tried to burn imagery onto the black. It was a good dream, not like the rest. Pressing, I tried to recall her. The beach....

"uhhmmmmmmm..."

All hope lost, he was coming into view. Venus morphing into a flytrap. My weakened subconcious kept giving way until he appeared vaguely behind my eyelids. Then to be sure I opened my eyes- a reluctant motorist turning to view a sure fatal accident scene.

Lying back in the alligator-skin recliner with bare feet and unkept amber toenails springing from the cold granite surface of a massive desk, he was all the way in.

Fiddling with a leaky pen, he probably made the decision to call me while pulling all the skin on his face to one side to enunciate the pleasure he was deriving from the clawing of his unwashed crotch.

Jerry Ferguson was the last private publisher on earth, everything else was Government-run, otherwise I'd have flushed him down the toilet where he belongs a long time ago. He doesn't care much for me, either, except that I'm the last fiction writer on this sorry planet, so we engage in these Romanesque games- lashing with keen dagger tongue and slashing with dull sword, intending to inflict pain without death, co-sustained as the last two gladiators in a fading empire.

It was Sunday, 3:32 A.M. in L.A.

I tested my voice.

"Pick up." God I hate these holographic phones.

"So, you weren't thinking of taking the day off, were you?!"

His alert, dry, chummy voice wrenched my faculties so that I couldn't operate my jaw for a moment.

"......Good morning Jerry, how's the grand ol' windy city?" I finally began, running a blade through his spectre hanging like bad meat beside me, "Would you mind turning the sensory off this thing so I don't have to smell your half-assed attempt at cooking this morning? Reeks like rancid lard or something else you might consider eating, like maybe a dead rat...yeah that's it-a rotten, deep-fried, lard-ass rigor mortisss..."

"You owe me another story, Buckaroo."

Now my eyes were alert, focused and sending a clear image of the apparition that was his head. Eurotint eyepieces, stuck on like paper- mache pieces completed the image of his pallid, sagging face punctuated by a raspberry pocked nose.

"Wait a second, big Jer, let me get a wider angle on this so I can see the bloody Mary on the other end of the celery stick in the corner..." I felt a sense of drifting- now in, then away from Jerry's surreal paradise. I dropped anchor and fired a cannon.

"That's right, Jerry! One more story and that's it! I just can't fathom why you would be so anxious to greet the caboose on your fat little gravy train."

"Caboose?! HA! Keep the lights flashin' and the barricades down, baby!"

He threw his head back and cackled before thrusting it again at the camera. The roundover headrest shone with grease.

"Writer's don't retire, Bucky. They just die. You're not bailing out just because our contract's over, are you?"

I went with it down to the dust.

"Don't have to jump, Jerry, you neither. We're just going to stand up, straighten our suits, and walk right off into retirement. You can come back and climb onto this dead dinosaur of a train anytime you want, but it's not going anywhere. The journey's over. Last stop. We had the last two tickets and they ran out, don't you see? They brought us to the end of the line- to this very moment. This very place."

"I want my story."

Jerry was one of those guys who could never admit it was over. For some reason beyond comprehension I left the holophone on.

"You know how lizards drop their tail, Jerry?"

Jerry's image seemed mildy amused.

"You've dropped your tail. You've left your arms, your legs, everything behind. But you live, Jerry. You're a survivor."

"Didn't know I was being chased." The bemused look was gone.

"Nowhere to run, Jerry. You know it. The race is over, and you're lying there, living on ants, Jerry. My words. Ants. Tiny ants all in a row, marching across your path. Only one problem. The ants are gone. Dried up and blown away, as they say. Couldn't even find one to suck its soul."

I noted a quick nuance of anxiety in his animated fingers. He was beginning to suspect that I wasn't bluffing. I slowly pulled the pillow to my face, swelling with fresh glee.

"Don't play games with me Buck. I really could have you arrested for this."

"You, my reptilian friend," I began, pillow at my chest revealing a grin, "will just have to change your diet. Retire, or something. Starve. I don't care."

His sulfur skin began to twitch. His paradise was wilting. I shoved the sun closer to it.

"There are no more stories left, my friend. All been written. All told. Can't you just admit it?! We're nearing the end of our time here."

Jerry stood on his tilting isle and ranted, joined by bits of spark and flame.

"You're still asleep, dammit! Don't forget who you are! You have a responsibility. A commitment!! The bullshit has gone far enough! Go back to sleep and get your head screwed on! I'll call you when the drugs wear off!"

I almost felt sorry for the believer as his image collapsed, fumbling nervously for a cigarrette.

What Jerry doesn't understand and perhaps you, the reader may not believe is that I wasn't lying when I said there are no more stories left. Fact is, they've all been told. It's all plagiarism now in one form or another and I'm drawing the line.

All the myths have turned to legends and legends become truths and the truths stories and the stories lies, the lies tales and the tales back to myths again. The characters have lived and done it all and died and reincarnated in circles so many times the ribbon has run dry.

Kind Cremation has laid the parchment characters to rest on the flame to be tread into dust by the wavering footsteps of the so many recently blind.

To Jerry, who views it all through the scope of economy, it's a trip to the gallows for his "supply" side. For yours truly, a nine-to-five-with-an-hour-for-lunch fiction banker it's my last day on the job.

I can understand the starving masses out there. I bleed for the poor bastards. They wait, thirty million or so of them, for the hours to pass like suns, the days like seasons until finally it comes.

They gobble my next story like wolves to a rabbit, tearing the pages as they read, fighting for glimpses of a paragraph, stealing half-a book and fleeing. You can catch them tearing the pages out and folding them up, hiding them here and there until there is nothing left but the binding-the bone.

I am the last living writer of fiction on this planet! The rest are gone. They were folded into the cracks of Mars with everything else deemed destructive.

I have a captive audience; a best-seller every three months; real estate on every living sector; and enough royalties coming in to pay a mortgage on what's left of Sweden.

I have been their "hero," and I, Bucky Lance have been loved.

Thirty years ago the last ship went up, carrying the unproven history of man and the global fiction library. Fiction, they maintained, was destroying the world. Fantasy rooting in. Not enough emphasis on tangible skills in school.

Too many humans still in their homes, crunched in a corner with that odd grin on their faces, reading stories to carry them away from the stench falling from the sky or stretching slowly into drips from the faucets.

Fiction had become the new "F-word." It took on an "ism" and like alcohol addiction, became a disease. Doctors diagnosed an epidemic spreading across the land. The symptoms were pale skin, blurry vision and a general lack of concern for the New Plan.

Some gained a desire to create more fiction tales- in essence to propagate this world-crippling disease. Fiction would drag mankind under the soil, they vehemently warned.

Once the decision was brought down, that's when the real epidemic began.

They gathered the works of Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare and Isaac Asimov and scattered them in the pit. Once ignited, they torched Tolstoy and barbequed Ian Fleming. Jules Vern and Charles Dickens huddled in the flames. Stephen King, John Updike and Margaret Mitchell stacked themselves to protect tender skins. John Steinbeck vaulted to the top of the heap and exploded!

Readers, restrained by Police, protested and screamed. But the helicopters came. They buzzed overhead and dropped the books like rain, onto the pyre.

The President's committee sorted them like sharks sorting flesh from bone. Fiction took on a vagueness in the bloodied water. In the frenzy they separated fact from fiction, truth from lie.

And the books burned.

In went the rest of Shakespeare, comedy, playwright manuscripts and the shredded poetic ravings of Kahlil Gibrahn. Newspapers and periodicals, even personal notes fluttered in the wind. So-called religious books tumbled over the edge.

A self-proclaimed majority group saw an opportunity and set about their duties with new zeal. Individuals broke through the picket and police lines to hurl detested manuscript at the witch-fire. Some were killed by the Police, others by the protestors. A few dove head-first into the blaze clutching devil-books. As they cleared the low protective fence, fans raised their hands as though signalling a score in a bizarre football game.

As the blaze quelled, so the riot fell to a sobbing mass.

The sky went dark with volcanic soot and the ashes soared. Phrases cremated to microscopic spirits, pages to black snowflakes, rose and fell.

Other art followed, of course. Painting, sculpture, anything abstract or unexplained was pried from the earth and disposed of, including the originators- the Artists themselves.

They found them all. People began to dissapear. Not nine-to-fivers, they were busy. They were part of the machine, paying taxes, spending it all, borrowing and working overtime. Moving sand with sieves for shovels and keeping up with the flow. Gotta have the new VirtuaLiving game, the low-carb Food-Mate, the Saint Clothing Line.

No it was the others, the ones with too much time to think. Anybody who slowed down, gained focus, caught a glimpse of reality. The Artists. The Authors and the Painters and the Revolutionaries. The ones who wondered, quietly stepped off the moving sidewalk, looked around.

It scared the hell out of me. I was writing filler for a small private magazine "Deliver." Mostly it was just a collection of short stories and poetry, sometimes a political opinion piece. It was free and we piled short stacks of them locally where they'd let us. We had no advertising, Serese wouldn't have it.

Serese Lindley was a 20-something publisher living off the remains of her father's will. She was passionate and energetic for awhile, until she ran straight into the trap with the others. I miss that cluttered office and the chaos we created, the five of us. I miss them. It was splendid at times, the occasional interrupted cadence of our work and the laughter.

So you're probably wondering what I'm doing here, now, telling you this. You want to know how I got here. Well here it is, my pennance. My last gasp. My confession.

Yes they found them all eventually- some right away and others late. Friends were dissapearing. Soon I could sense my own shadow rising up.

Serese called me a few years back one morning.

"They're closing in on us," Bucky. "I can feel it. I got an offer last week to sell Deliver. I didn't think much about it until a few minutes ago. I think it was them."

"What did you tell them?"

"It was a him. A pleasant middle-aged man who said he was retiring. He always wanted to publish his own magazine. Said he had some ideas to improve it, and sponsors. Wondered if I would sell."

"And?"

"I laughed. Everyone knows Deliver dies with me."

I told her to forget it.

The next morning when I showed up at the office, the clutter was worse than usual.





I