Physics (flash fiction)

Physics

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

By 2001 it was clear there was no HAL. It was just some garbage made up like fiction, like a Dilbert cartoon, like Frankenstein or Leonard Bernstein, yet still we would become machines listing into the future like slack-sailed ships crossing the Sargasso Sea. 

Snails - Flash Fiction from my Prosthetic Amalgams collection

Snails

(from Prosthetic Amalgams)

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin

The fluoride in the water did it, caused the snails to grow bigger and more intelligent than ever before. Soon they were invading homes, their fortified shells impossible to crush leaving a trail of glittering slime everywhere they went. Maybe you’re skeptical, you should be, intelligent snails you ask? I assure you it is true, not only that but they appeared to be able to communicate and coordinate their.... what other word can I use, but.... assaults. Because that is what they were, they could devastate a kitchen overnight, consuming and transporting anything of worth to their underground bases. The invasive pest people consulted with the wildlife biologists to try and figure out how they were communicating but were stymied until they brought in engineers who determined they were communicating with microwaves using the tiny antennae on their heads. Attempts were made to jam the signals but nothing seemed to work, the snails were using a coded frequency-hopping system that was both indecipherable and impossible to jam.

They began feeding in waves across the country. Attacking and consuming the elderly, the homeless and the incapacitated. It was beyond biblical proportions. Then someone noticed that in all the devastation, all the destroyed kitchens and cities, the one thing they never touched was salt. Cities began laying out rivers, moats, mountains of salt and they were saved. The air force began slurry bombing with salt-water and the crisis was averted.  But clearly these were no ordinary snails, they had only retreated to their underground bases, biding their time, evolving, building saline-resistant shells, growing more intelligent and preparing to dominate the Earth, to take their rightful God-given place stamping their massive feet upon the soil, the sea and the salt.

[ If you enjoyed reading this there is much more like it in my Prosthetic Amalgams Collection at Amazon. ]

Smokejumper (flash fiction)

(first published at Eunoia Review)

Smokejumper

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin

They call us smokejumpers but that’s a misnomer, we never jump into smoke if it can be avoided and it can always be avoided. It’s just a sexy, headline-grabbing moniker for what is a dirty, difficult, dangerous job.

After the Crystal Mountain fire Janie left me again. She said she couldn’t deal with not knowing if I’d be back or not. I sometimes think she doesn’t understand my work, how important it is and the care, safety and conviction we take in doing it. We almost always come home. I love her. I do. With her it feels more real than ever, but I’m torn by her reluctant support. Can’t she see this is my passion, my love? I’m a smokejumper. We save lives, the environment, perhaps even the world from global warming.

My dreams are of fire. It does not frighten me. It is warm, welcoming.

At first you do it for the thrill, the rush. Like wild passionate sex. It consumes you, draws you in. There’s building anticipation as the plane makes its way to the drop zone, your heart pounds as you step into the air and slows as silence engulfs you while drifting towards the ground.

All relationships are difficult, but more so when you’re a smokejumper. You can be called out any time of day or night for unknown durations. Even the military has better defined time-frames for deployment, leave, and duty. For smokejumpers it’s all up to the fire. Almost all of us are single, some in relationships, a few married – mostly the firebosses who somehow find a way to make it work. We don’t talk about relationships. On the fireline there’s no time for that anyway. We’re overwhelmed with clearing brush, digging firebreaks, setting backfires.

You do it for those that died. The fourteen on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, the nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots on Yarnell Hill in Arizona, the twenty-nine at Griffith Park, California; Three hundred in the last ten years.

A wildfire burns at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. It can consume you. You must constantly be on guard. We jump from planes to reach the fire in the backcountry before it gets out of control. With a forest fire you know exactly what you are up against.

They drop us in and once on site we establish a fireline, a perimeter. We fight the fire by clearing fuel it would burn, often by setting a backfire. When our work is done we pack out to the nearest access point. On rare occasions they transport us out by chopper if there is a base nearby.

Before Janie it was Mary. She was a vixen. We did it everywhere – in the car, in the shower, in the woods, in the elevator and yes we joined the mile-high club on a flight from Denver to Seattle. It was pure passion, pure raging sex. She was a wildfire.

The cones of the Lodgepole pine are sealed with a resin that requires fire to release the seeds. This is an evolutionary adaptation to wildfire called pyriscence.

Fire can be fast, passionate, intense, like first-time sex. Each fire has its own personality. Some are torrid and tempestuous others slow and sordid but all have the power to destroy.  The first time Janie and I made love I lost myself in her. It was a week after the Wind Ridge fire. She said she could smell the smoke in my hair.

Have you ever watched a wildfire move? It can be forceful, overpowering -- crowning, flashing and torching trees as it races across the forest and up slopes in a vortex of conflagration. It can be gentle like a first-time lover, moving slowly and carefully across the forest; caressing, embracing and loving the trees with its warmth.

The tools we use are minimal, a pulaski -- a combination axe and grub hoe, our helmets, protective clothing and fire shelters. That’s it. One-on-one, man against wildfire, digging a firebreak, setting a backfire, working with air support if we are lucky enough to have it.

It was the Rawlings Ridge fire that got us, climbing the hill in a swirling blast-furnace updraft, preheating and consuming everything in its path. We had only precious seconds to deploy our shelters and the rocky slope was a poor place to survive a wildfire. Jonathan didn’t. The rest of us are lucky to have made it, me with third degree burns on my back, and right arm, the others with similar injuries. Only Carol came away unscathed, having found an optimal place to dig in.

Janie was waiting at the hospital when I arrived. She never said it, but I knew from the look in her eyes, it would be the last time.

I’ve been through the initial healing, the therapies. Will need additional grafting, regrowth and recovery of muscle tone and I will never be as flexible as I once was, but I’ve had time to think, to realize and to know that the only time I am alive and at peace with myself is when fighting a wildfire. It consumes me, thrills me, centers me. It makes me who I am. Janie is gone, but the fire still rages. I will jump again.

What Bukowski Thought

What Bukowski Thought

(from The Poet of Utah Park)

Red wheelbarrow my ass

I’ll glaze your friggin’ chickens

-- with peanut sauce

in my red-hot oven.

Kenny A. Chaffin – 6/19/2011

Bearded Squirrel

Bearded Squirrel

(from Prosthetic Amalgams)

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin

            Seven years from now a bearded squirrel looking like Rasputin glares at me from atop a fence post along the canal. Yes, the same canal I walk along now. He scolds me saying, ‘Why are you here? What have you done, it’s been seven years?’ I just look at him and shake my head because I too can see the past and say, ‘You think it’s easy? You up on your high post from your future vantage point?’ I spit on the grass in front of the post to make my point. I know as well as him what the future holds and am content with it, for I will have looked back on it that seven years ago and I tell him, ‘The world will know of you!’ I turn and walk into the future.

With the news of Opportunity completing a marathon on Mars I thought it a good time to post this from a  few years back. First published in James Gunn's Ad Astra and then in my collection The Poet of Utah Park

Silent Spirit

The pictures were brilliant

the best ever seen from the

surface of Mars. Then

as it reached out

to touch that surface,

like Adam reaching

to touch the finger of God,

it died, sending only a

nondescript tone across

millions of miles –

a heart monitor flatlined

leaving humanity listening

with perked ears and

waiting on Opportunity.

Kenny A. Chaffin 

BPD (flash fiction)

BPD

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

            It started on the East Coast. Cases popped up from New York to Washington D.C. It spread like wildfire in ever increasing waves. The CDC had no explanation for the disease or its possible contamination vector. No explanation, no diagnosis and no method to fight it even though the symptoms were clear – the blue blood, the obsessive desire to speak in public, the need to take from the poor and give to the rich, and a strange fascination for guns and tea parties. The American Psychological Association rushed to update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to include Borderline Patriotic Disorder.