Flash for 8/16/2013 in Flash for 8/16/2013

fait accompli
Pots. Pilfering. Poltergeists.
stained glass, blood on my feet, the ugly sister G

cayenne, bark, kilometer            
bespoke, mantra, dash           
deviation, flickered, curve         
barking dog, broken finger, outhouse

“The curve reflects a standard deviation.”

“Fait accompli, let’s put it to bed and go home.”

Her eyes were red as cayenne. Fifteen years among the Martians will do that. Martians is what we called them, at least in the states, some throwback to movies or novels done twenty years before the oldest man was born. They didn’t invade and they didn’t come in peace, they’re a lot like us except for the red eyes and they speak a patois of all earth languages. Here, they speak a patois here. I’ve never heard them speak anything else. She probably has. Fifteen years.

“Yeah, except there shouldn’t be a standard deviation.”

“There always is, nicht wahr?”

A stained glass slide slipped off the stainless steel counter and broke on my shoe. I just looked at the blood on my feet, and looked back into the microscope.

“No, there isn’t. This breed is like … you know those trees that share a root system? A whole forest and it’s just one tree?”

“Si”

“That’s how this breed is. Every dog has the exact same DNA.”

“Ales inbred sind?”

“No, but the thread is dominant, no matter how diluted the gene pool gets if there is any of this breed in it there is no deviation in the base DNA.”

The red eyes got curious.

Scared the shit out of me when they did that. I was used to the Martians doing that, you’d barely discern my flinch. Seeing one of us do something so … so alien, scared the shit out of me. She put her eye to the scope, I left her to get an alcohol swab for my shoes, a bit alarmed at how shabby they were, wondering what else I might have let go.

I was gone a minute. I came back and heard her bark.

“What?”

She barked again, I mean like a dog, like a barking dog. It didn’t seem to bother her. She was talking to the blood.

“Poltergeists.”

She might as well have still been barking.

“What?”

“Poltergeists ex machina, qui?”

“Wha--- oh. Ghost in the machine?”

The red eyes and flat affect, the patois purposefully used to be imprecise, almost meaningless, took being freaked the fuck out to a calm paranoia.

“Yeah, that’s probably it, a ghost in the machine. Let’s report what we have and try it fresh in the morning, ok?”

A pause. One beat. Two beats. A nod, unblinking, flat affect.

We parted in the parking lot. I drove the kilometer to my flat, slowed down, almost pulled into my driveway. It’d be six hours before they knew I was gone, at a steady 120 kph that’d put me with fifty K of the territorial border. She had barked to the blood.

Domestic animals, pets, they could have agents in every house. If I set cruise control at 130 I’d be across the border. There was a resistance movement in the west. The Martians hadn’t invaded, not like a war. But they hadn’t come all friendly either. The resistance weren’t soldiers, I mean they weren’t an army, but they did keep expecting small pox blankets. She barked at the blood. Small pox blankets/ mans best friend.