The Fanstastic Ms. Fox

Someone on TV mentioned that Prisoners of Gravity was available for sale. I was flying around in a rectangular hallway, blanket around my neck, humming the Superman theme to myself.

I like flying in dreams I think to myself.

A short woman in rustic clothing stops me She's interested by this flying business, and I stop, walk and talk with her, forgetting that this is a dream. It's night.

The area inside the park is lit differently, like it's lit just before sunset there.

We step through. There's a riverbank, or a bay or some body of water and a city full of lights.

“You shouldn't go in the water; why do you keep going into the water?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” I say, I look back to confirm that I'm well away from the water. I look back at her.

“You just did it again.”

I look back at the water, still well away from it. I look back. There's a skip.

“And again.”

There's another skip. The grasses aren't waving, but skipping about stacatto.

This is too weird. We decide to leave. Why not fly out?

People yell at us as I float by. Something about mocking god's laws.

“You better get both feet on the ground mister.”

Fine. Walking again.

Screw them. I pick up my co-conspirator and walk out. It's an awkward angle, and I have to drop her as soon as I get over the demarkation.

That was strange.

We take a carriage-bus home.

I'm explaining that I think there's something dodgy about me, and by extension, about her. Those people who were hassling us: I don't know how to fight, like I'd never been expected to do so. I don't see anything odd about meeting a woman at nigh and going to the beach with her. She shrugs it off, she doesn't give a toss for social norms. It occurs to me that people like this have always existed. Still, something seems amiss.

Inside the carriage-bus, most people's faces I do not see. But there's the disfigured woman I saw at the store, and there' a guy with green skin and one of his eyes is black.

I don't know about the woman from the store, but he's one of us.

I lean in, his body language makes it clear that I should do thins somewhere more private.

She relates a story to me, about a woman who was conditioned to obey what her friends told her. “Go into the waves” they'd say, and they'd shake a rattle and she'd do that. Sounds like House of Stairs.

“Pavlovian conditioning.” I say.

“What?”

I gather from what she tells me that it's 1897, or thereabouts. That explains a bit. I assume we're in Canada. The city across the river was Chicago in the 20's.

We'll meet each-other later.

The green man, his face turned a more acceptable shade of peachy-pink, gets off at my building. My little brother is with me, he's a creature of this time and place. We climb the stairs and no-longer-green and I talk quietly until he branches off at his floor.

There's a dead highlander crammed under the banister: kilt, kneesocks, tam, and I think some bagpipes. People want to know how he died.

I pass him and continue up.

At the eighth floor (this is a tall building for something without an elevator), my brother runs off, down a side stairwell.

He shouldn't do that. I want to yell at him to get back, but I can't remember his name.

I catch up to him inside the apartment. It's dark in here, our “parents” aren't home.

The door is closed, but I can see and hear space bend

To my brother.

“Get into the bathtub and hide. Now!”

Brave maybe, but I have no idea what I'm going to do.

----------------------------

Wow, do I feel inspired.

[Later note: confer "Darwinia" by Robert Charles Wilson]