By Gaslight Chapter 1 Mesmerist

Machu Picchu, Peru, January, 1869

 

D

rood stood, bent from his burdens, in the shadow of his larger accomplice, Timothy the Irish Blackguard.  Drood was just a deserter, who had been bullied into this expedition by Her Majesty’s Own Pompous Braggart Agent, out of fear of being turned in to receive the D brand under his arm to match the BC brand for bad character on his chest—and a flogging to boot.  Drood placed more confidence in his criminal accomplice than he ever did himself, not alone because the hulking fellow was twice his size, but for his quick wit in a bad spot—and this would be it.

Something unnatural was about to transpire and Drood felt it shiver his bent and crooked bones under his weathered skin.

They stood, above the godforsaken jungles they had trudged through hauling this man’s scientific equipment, among the hideous ruins of some long lost city, overgrown and tangled as if choked to death by the creepers and weeds and trees of the mountains—and still higher towered those other mountains behind which the sun would fall in another half of the day.  And as the sky soared above the distant western mountains and those mountains soared above these, and these mountains looked down giant-like below them…it was not geography that made him feel so impotently wee.    

Towering above him, looking eye-to-eye with Big Timothy and continuing his litany of demands, was Captain Burton, the Queen’s own goddamned secret agent.  Burton stood before them in his black frock coat and held his spy glass to one eye as he declared, as the sun rose above them and he checked for shadows on the various mountain sides, “Yaas, my men, we stand before the very Hitching Post of the Sun.  Thanks in no small part to your stupendous labors and gallant conduct on the pampas, the Royal Geographic Society has found the Lost City of Zed!”

Burton then turned to him and commanded, “Drood, begin setting out my table and book and take particular care with the Hindoo charm, arrange it just so, between the pages of the open book, those pages being 362 and 363.”

“Aye, Captain,” he grumbled as he broke open the goddamned heavy teakwood chest he had lugged all the way from Argentina for this unbearable brain on legs, who stood there devil-may-care with his two savage witchdoctors, chattering with them in their jabber-jaw squawk.

There was no stopping this man.  When Drood had complained, about his book wrangling assignment—and what a book, all ten stone of it—that he could not read or follow the numbers, the man had taught him like a school master.  His brain still hurt from the burden.  He could not wait to find a cantina, a jug and a señorita and erase this misery.  

Could not he simply enjoy the day?  Must there always be something over the horizon, some secret yet to be found, something, anything to bore to tears this poor fool who just ached for a roll with a wee whore?  

The Captain droned on, “Big Timothy, clear all of this brushy vinery away with your machete from this wondrous altar to the sun!  Snap to it, now with an Irish jaunt, as if you had ever toiled honestly in all of your grifting days.  We have a mere two hours and fifteen minutes before the sun is directly overhead!”

Then came the voice of Ehrin!  Rumbling in his nasal brogue, Big Timothy Kern, an M for malefactor tattooed on both of his big rugged hands snarled, “I don’ thin’ so, Cap’n.  I’m done bein’ ye boy.  Just ova dose high mountains pass the sunset—ye said it yeself—is the road down ta the sea.  I’m done wi’ dis circus a’ ye hocus pocus!”

The Captain glowered in a rage, “You refuse your duty, you fulminating rascal!  We have a compact—my word at the embassy and you are off to America and on your way.  Now to your task, or I shall thrash you, boy.”

“I’m don fer ye boy!”

With that outburst Big Timothy Kern drew out that machete.  He did not take it to the vinery, but instead menaced their high and mighty leader.

“Ye wi’ me, Drood!” demanded the big man and Drood, with a sinking feeling in his guts, drew out his fish knife what he had gutted the Gaucho with down on the pampas over that fireside disagreement the Captain had had with their cattle-ranging clan.  He did feel somewhat terrible, turning on a man he had served in battle—but he was such a high and mighty bastard and Big Tim was the only friend he had ever had.

He felt even worse when the Captain threw back his coat and drew that American Confederate saber he had gotten God knows where but always carried it bold since he emptied his pistol into those gauchos down on the pampas.

The saber rasped harshly and the two little copper colored men stepped back and cringed and the Captain roared, “You litigious, low Irish negro!  No man has crossed blades with Richard Burton and boasted of victory!  And you, you lick-spittle, slow-English beast of a man.  I give you a three count to surrender your weapons and do your duty.”

“Arr!” snarled Big Tim as he stepped in with a mighty swing of the machete and Drood slid up beside them and—Oh God, I’m done!

Drood sat on his ass looking at his ruined right hand dangling from the remaining bone and tendon, squirting good clean blood and looked over at big Tim, holding his barrel chest right under the breast bone where the Captain’s sword had passed through and run out his back.

“’orry, Lille Droo,” slurred the big man, and Drood wanted to cry.

The Captain was in a rage about them staining his perfect record of never killing a white man on safari and was commanding the witchdoctors to attend them.  As Drood was losing consciousness he was having his hand wrapped and pressed and could hear the Captain declare, “There is hope yet, for your ghastly souls at least, if not for your misbegotten bodies.  I am a world-renowned mesmerist, a sufi, a dervish… a Hindoo priest of sorts . You may be of service to me yet, you poor, beggared fools!”

Big Timothy looked at him with far away and glassy eyes.

*   *   *

Drood came to his senses sitting on a stone altar with a pillar in the middle, the clear-shining sun beaming directly down.  Across from him sat Timothy in a daze, his belly bloody red and caulked like a busted ship’s plank.

The Captain stood before them to Drood’s right holding his black disc of Hindoo mesmerist stone on its brazen chain, chanting in some unknown language that only madmen must speak.

As Drood wondered about all of this, the witchdoctor attending him placed his left hand kindly on Drood’s back, even as he saw the witchdoctor attending Big Tim do the same, and they each, in a cadence, mumbled their own incantations, and with their free, steady brown hands tilted a hollow wooden drinking tub into the mouths of Drood and Tim.  The Captain drank of a similar frothy red potion, drank deep as did they all, then looked at both of them at the same time—one eye dedicated to each as his head seemed to expand into a giant face and his mouth, under that devilish, mustached and scarred face, split ever wider as he drawled in his characteristic affirmative, “Yaaas!”

In This Hat, He Believes:

The Crackpot Hobo Historian Living Out of a Backpack Declares Social Justice Mommydarity—At Last!

It is this Crackpot's belief that he has been rendered homeless for failure to kneel and pray forgiveness from the gods of Guiltopia. For, as he limps across this ill-gotten land, an impiously guiltless man, no longer spry enough to step over the prostrate poor, shuffling around his fallen, fellow man, signs sprout ever upward from manicured lawns and church marquees in black, white, red, yellow, green, purple and baby blue declaring...

I am sorry, but I don't have a house, just a hat and a backpack. So as I haul my vast store of privilege around the nation with me, somehow the words become refracted upon passing through the ireful nimbus aglow about this lowering brow:

Hate is Homeless

Fat Lives Matter

Bitch Lives Matter

This Human is Illegal

Science is Not Real

Disabilities are Rejected

Kindness is Misleading

I hope I didn't lose anything in the hobo translation. 

Molly Hatchet

July 4^th, 2041, 4:48 P.M.

 

Rick reclined in his hard wooden chair, Molly chirped on his shoulder.  He poured three shots of Bacardi Coconut Rum into the amber coffee cup as he held the downward-reaching neck of the gay giraffe before him.

“Yeah, girl, I wish that motherfucker was here too.  Asshole spent fifty years practicing for combat and then curls up and dies on a couch in the middle of nowhere.  What the hell.”

Rick looked at the old picture form a half century ago of that skinny, long-haired fucker he had befriended in middle school when they were alone and hated by one and all, misunderstood and filled with hate for the world against which they both stood, tiny and quiet in its all-devouring shadow.

“You liked your rum, didn’t you, Jim—fuck you wherever you are.  I’m joining you soon.  You’d like that wouldn’t you?  Meeting on some black diamond bridge over Hel’s abyss—sick fuck.”

Molly screeched and alighted on the picture frame and pooed down the back of it as she looked at him, quizzically concerning his getup.

Rick had changed his wife beater and flared jeans for an old Halloween costume of the New York Mets, complete with cleats and tights.  To this he added a blank white hockey mask, the aesthetics of which had always pleased him.  Of course he had that old practice bat, that unbreakable chunk of heavy wood in his left hand, his Mets cap on his head.  His brown face was looking good and his old Spalding backpack was loaded.  He had also his $1,200 skateboard from 1998, which he could still ride.  However, the cleats would have to be exchanged for his climbing boots with the rock guards if he was going to keep the board under control.

Off came the cleats, tossed in the corner of the impeccably neat room.

He now understood—never having been much of a drinker—why a man who hated the world drank—it eased the contours and contrasts in the mind and helped plan its demise.  He lit up a blunt after changing shoes and had a drag with Molly before that picture of his long-dead deserter friend.  Molly took a hit and then fluttered over to the 5-gallon bucket of fun and landed, skittering and off balance on the haft of his old camp axe.

“Molly Hatchet, huh?  Molly want me to have some fun?”

Molly screeched and Rick stood up, put out his blunt and placed it in the mesh side slot of the backpack.

Rick laughed, “Molly, you have to stay here.  My Live Identity just got home from work.  So I have to go to work, Girl.  See you soon.”

He then pulled down his hockey mask and Molly screeched and fluttered frantically away, like a tiny emerald chicken fleeing a towering fox.

Rick emerged from behind the blue tarp energized and driven stoically to his task as he walked nimbly among the pallet stacks, eventually wending his way to the riverside ramp, mounting his skateboard in obscurity and rolling down into the Strip District, where his Live Identity ran his bitches and Pakistani traffickers bought and sold anything that could be humped.

He soon rolled by a gang of Pakis dressing up this little unmasked, redheaded girl like a boy and making her swish back and forth between them.  The crazy thing was the girl kept praying with her hands together, which made the scene doubly obscene.

The two largest waved him over, thinking he was what he seemed to be, and he nimbly veered in their direction, skipped off the board, kicked it up into his left hand and brought his bat to rest on his right shoulder.

“Yo,” he said, unconvincingly from behind his hockey mask as they arranged their sharia hijabs under their fitted caps and the leader said, “Wan’ to fuck, huh—fuck dis bitch?”

The man then held the little girl cruelly with both hands by the base of her skull below her ears and Rick could see that she was perhaps ten years old, not even in puberty yet and he said, “Sho’, I like to fuck,” and as he stepped forward slammed the point of his sixty-pound skateboard into the mouth of the man so that blood and teeth spilled down through his hands into the girls’ pretty red hair.  As that skinny-fat Paki crumbled, Rick brought the practice bat down on the one nearest to his right and crushed that pin-headed skull like a watermelon.  Then he stepped left and backhanded the short fat one across the nose with the back of the skateboard and sent him reeling into the gutter with blood squirting from the shattered bridge of his nose.

One yelled in Arabic and a small one ran for a storefront, where a gun would obviously be.  So Rick took a wide reaching leap at the remaining Pakis, and as they stepped back he dropped the skateboard, snatched up the girl, stepped on, and pushed off, no footsteps sounding behind him.

The girl was shivering in fear in her little boy clothes and clinging to his belt and baseball suspenders as he balanced with his left hand and rested the bat on his shoulder, awaiting the sound of the gunshot, a shot that never came.

A siren sounded in the distance as he turned the corner and he realized, that his violation of grooming gang activity had gotten the PIGs called on him.  So it was a race down the street to his Live Identity’s apartment, where he would certainly not be expected to have fled.

“Hold on Little Girl.  I’m Rick.  I don’t hurt kids.”

“I know,” the girl chirped.  “God told me so.”

A chill played down his spine and Rick pushed harder than he should and somehow saved it in the turn, and before the siren got to the location he had run from, he was at McCloud’s place, an hour behind the PIG’s usual arrival home, according to Mike that is, Mike who seemed to know absolutely everything except how to get the hell out of bed.

The skateboard was now an identifier, so he stopped, stepped into the alley, and tossed it on the roof of the bar across from the apartment building where McCloud lived.  He glanced around and saw no camera angles, then turned to the girl who looked up at him and pulled off his hat and mask, and said, “I’m a good guy, see.”

The girl looked up at him and said, “I know.  But why are you so old, and how come you are painted up like a black man?”

He looked down at her and could not help but smile, “What is your name?”

“Rebecca, I’m Rebecca Dorn, daughter of Joshua and Ellen.”

“Okay, Rebecca, I’m so old because I break the rules about diet and activity so I can help a little girl.”

“God told me that, too.”

Rick was about to be sick with all of the brainwashing and his head spun.  He didn’t come from God.  He was just stubborn and this girl had gotten momentarily lucky back there.

“Okay, Rebecca, we are going into a policeman’s apartment and you will be safe.”

She began to cry, “How can you be a good guy if you are taking me to the police?  The police raid our church services and sell us kids to the Muslims—the guys you took me from.”

“Check that, Rebecca.  I came here to punish the policeman and ran into you.  So you have to stay in the hallway with my teddy bear—his name is Care Bear—until I’m done in the policeman’s apartment.  Then I will find you a place to hide—then I go.”

Rebecca jumped tiny jumps in place while she clapped her hands, “God sent you.  I know it, Rick!”

He snarled under his breath, tossed his cap and mask up on the roof, took the little holy roller by the hand, walked up to the UPC reader, opened his palm to scan the UPC for Officer McCloud, and the glass panel door to the lobby of the small apartment building with its back facing the strip district docks opened.  In he went with little Rebecca Dorn held by his devil-marked hand.

Stepping off into the staircase, Rick shucked his backpack, put it on her little back where it hung down past her butt, took out the bear and handed it to her, slid out the camp axe and hurried back to the lobby door and used it to jam the slide.  Returning to the doorway he extended that hand again so the little girl would feel safe, and, hand-in-hand they went, up the stairs he went, to apartment 3-C for a reckoning with his Live Identity.

 

Travis Drexel McCloud

A PIG with a Glorious Fate

 

B

orn 3/20/2015, Joliet Illinois

Gender: Masculine, Permanent Intent

Medical Status: Testosterone enhanced, law enforcement exemption, PDA Order L-16, 2038

Psychiatric Status: Psychopathy-3, law enforcement waiver of treatment, PSP Umbrella Order 2039 

Race: African American

Age: 36

Height: 5’ 10”

Weight: 175

Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice, with Advanced LEO Certifications in Medical Justice and Social Justice, Penn State University, Class of 2036

Pennsylvania State Police

Sergeant: Special Weapons and Tactics

Assignment: Special Victims Extraction

Addictions: Cocaine [powder], Ambien, alcohol 

Rackets:

-Protection, Three Rivers Somalia

-Prostitution, Strip District, Asian bitches and Caucasian trannies

-Medical trafficking, supplier, Children’s Hospital Harvesting Team, customer, Brill and Brillinda Yates Foundation, Human Resources Department       

Impending Return of the Hobo Historian

Visual Inspiration and Audience Questions

Some guy on the East Coast has kidnapped my old podcast cohost and will be putting him in front of the camera for audio-visual exploitation.  I asked my twitter friends to suggest topics and here they are:

Andrew Edwards (author of King of Dogs) asks for comments on push daggers. Image is an antique for sale here $$$$.

A fellow known as King of the Blind writes, "I would be interested in his take on bayonets. Before ww1/2 militaries seemed to treat it as primary and shooting as secondary."  

Brown Bess Bayonet:

1968, student protest against military government in Brazil:

WWI photo of French troops in a bayonet charge:

The following are photos I've run across of beautiful weapons and armor.  I would like James to talk about how the ancients acquired and maintained such belongings, what is the significance of ornamentation or style development, and comment on his favorite historical examples.

From Gareth Harney on twitter:

Ancient bronze Samnite helmet and neck-guard dating to 450 BC. The Samnite people of central Italy were staunch enemies of the ascendant Roman Republic but after three wars were forced to recognise the supremacy of Rome.

The Worthing helmet, a 3rd century Roman cavalry parade helmet made of gilded copper alloy, decorated with sea dragons and a very grumpy eagle's head. Dredged from the River Wensum near Norwich in 1947.

A stunning Corinthian bronze helmet with engraved decoration, a grotesque Gorgon on the forehead, serpent eyebrows and mirrored prancing lions on the cheek guards. Similar surviving helmets suggest these decorations were once gilded in gold-leaf. Iberia, 6th-5th Century BC

From Jim Craig on twitter:

On the neck guard of this remarkable 1stC AD Roman helmet found near the Rhine are the engraved names of its ancient previous owners. Titus and Statorius from Antonius Fronto's century had both owned this helmet suggesting it saw years of service and quite possibly a few battles.

Beautiful Italian knives showing regional styles:

Hernan Cortes on twitter gives us this:

King Henry V was able to survive a six inch deep arrow wound to the face due to English surgeons having real healing skill. A mass grave from the battle of Towton in 1461 had a veteran with a large healed wound, likely from a sword. He probably died from a poleaxe to the face.

Hope that gives you something to get started on!

A Broken Heart in Hell

The Death and Rebirth of Rick Pensky

 

T

he Wicked Witch of the West manually kicked them out of the Rainbow Bridge Please Fund Me site, and Rick found himself standing next to Mike in his bed, with his gravity vacuum diaper sucking away, and the good person that was Mike under that mountain of socially prescribed sloth shone through in word, “Rick, Bro, I’m so sorry.”

Rick intoned hollowly, “Can you get me in there before they kill her?”

“It will take me a couple hours.  I’ve been in and out of this site.  Any friction that might conflict with upload, once a patient has agreed—”

“Motherfucker, she’s a child!  Agree to what!” roared Rick.

Mike began to cry and started whining, “I knew it was bullshit, Bro.  I just want to be gone—it was nice to believe I’d be on a generation ship with Brill Yates.  Besides, I can’t use my body anymore and they tell you about how many African kids you can save with your organs being harvested to be reparations for the slavery—it made me feel like a little more than whale shit.”

“Motherfucker, how long!” snarled Rick, as his iron fingers squeezed into and through Mike’s massive arm and found bone, which began to bend and give and hurt.

Mike blubbered, “She is already sedated.  They are pressurizing the room, drawing down the temp and sending in the harvesting team.  They will not pull the plug until she is denuded of all internal organs, and her eyes—her skin will be used for sickle cell research…  Rick, buddy, she’s gone in ten minutes.  If you had a jet pack you couldn’t get there in time.”

Rick was streaming tears, red with rage and racked with silent sobs.

After a time, he looked coolly at Mike, and Mike knew fear, fear born of seeing a brokenhearted man, a super sweet guy—remaster his shattered self with a snarl, and a roll of his shoulders and wrists.  Mike thought to himself, Did I just see my only friend die inside and come back as a demon?

“What can I do, Rick?”

Rick stood, ominous in his brown shoe polish and intoned, “Who facilitates this?”

“The medical corporations, owned by the banks and the oil sheiks, the billionaires, the infotech moguls.”

Rick hissed, “How do they keep us inside, force our loved ones into hospitals, send lonely little girls across imaginary bullshit bridges—how do they do that?”

Mike thought out loud, running through the enemies list of humanity, or what was left of it as it teetered into oblivion, “Cops, safety officers, medical warrants—that means doctors—courts, the National Guard, all the intelligence agencies—its millions of willing executioners, Bro.”

Rick steeled, and his skin was less disturbed by the raised veins under his shoe polish tan.  His voice was like ice, “I don’t want your credit.  I’ve got today, maybe tomorrow.  Make me a cop, Mike.  Find me a fucking PIG my height and weight—if they aren’t all piles of blubber now, and get me his address.  A black cop.  The shoe polish might as well stay on.”

Mike whined, “Okay, Rick.  I need about an hour.  I’ve got some fried chicken on the way in ten minutes.  You can get into your role while I pick you out a live identity.  Bro, you kill this dude and you’re him, alright.  If you don’t mind, I’ll patch in through his body cam.  Fuck Rainbow Bridge!  We’re going to burn this bitch down.”

Rick looked straight into the screen as the roll call of potential live identities scrolled by and he pointed at a SWAT leader, about half his age, “Fuck yeah, Carl Weathers from the Predator movie.  That’s me, get me his file.”

Rick then absently handled Care Bear, picking him up, as his eyes and sinuses drained their last drops and the bear spoke in Dandelion’s voice, “Hello, I know who!”

“What,” asked Rick, “am I going insane?”

Mike blubbered, “Bro, you been nuts since 2021 as far as I can tell.  That teddy bear is part of the Cuddle Huddle series.  He recorded both of you, an interactive media companion.”

Rick looked amazed at the pink teddy bear he had so lovingly decked out after Mike had bought him for Dandelion and muttered, “Her voice, her words, at least some of them, some of her…”

Mike felt a fire light deep inside of his gelatinous chest as he watched in wonder at his elderly friend—the guy that once bathed him in return for online anonymity in his endless quest to stay free of medicine and government—now turned on those two vast monstrosities like some ancient hero shaking his fist at the gods and sharpening his sword.

Well, Mike mused to himself, a hero who fights gods and monsters should have a terrible, swift sword.

“Rick, fuck Rainbow Bridge and fuck this world—I’m in until they send a drone through that window—I’m your eye in the sky!”

And Mike’s fingers twitched as fast as his fat-fueled mind could send the impulses.  The logistics of the Medical Social Safe Space streamed by on the screen, mesmerizing the savage bodybuilder standing with the teddy bear as the full array of military and law enforcement and medical hardware scrolled ominously down and across the screen on Mike’s furious tour of the soul-eating Machine that had once been a thing called America, a supposed home of the free and land of the brave—now a thing that ate children like a fiend in its echoing cave.

Care the Bear

 

July 4, 4:20 P.M. EST
Children’s Hospital Pittsburgh

 

D

andelion Machi had lain alone in this bed all day since the nice little man brought her medicine and lime Jello.  Before long the not-so-nice lady, the big one, would be along with her soup.  It was always like that, Jello and soup.  It was so much nicer back before her parents went over Rainbow Bridge.

Mom and Dad used to argue with the hospital ladies all the time until one of them could be suited up safely and be let in to see her.  Since Dandelion had ARDS—the kid’s version she called it—she couldn’t get hugs or kisses or even her hand held, except by a gloved hand.  It had been hard for Dandelion to understand that she was so dangerous to adults, and at the same time, that they could make her sick somehow when she was already sick.

“Grownups,” as Uncle Rick had often told her, simply “sucked,” and were impossible to figure out.  This was an interesting thing to hear from the most grownup of grownups, for nobody Dandelion had ever met was older than Uncle Rick.

She well remembered Uncle Rick sneaking out of grownup hide-and-go-seek with the police and ARDS-chasers from the government to come take her for secret walks by night, on his big shoulders, where no one could see, not the ARDS-chasers, not nobody!  He would tell her about raccoons, possums, rabbits, squirrels, foxes and owls.  They would even play soccer in the yard by night, once even made a snowman.

Then she had got the ARDS, which the mean lady said, over, and over again, was short for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.  Since Mom and Dad had gone over Rainbow Bridge without her she was so sad.  The nice little man with the food was not allowed to talk to her and smiled a lot to make up for it.  He was a little tan man in a blue uniform.  He had tried to speak with her but his English was really hard to understand and then the mean nurse lady, almost the same color as her white uniform, had chased him off.  That lady, from behind her hawk-like nose, down which she peered like a monster, kept telling her that the other lady, the one in the suit who looked like a boy, would be back to sign the Rainbow Bridge release and then she could leave and be with Mom and Dad.

With the ARDS she was not allowed to leave except by Rainbow Bridge.  This confused her, because the little kids with the nice skin and the dark eyes, who weren’t all pale and freckled and pasty like her—with her sick eyes like a winter sky—they would sneak in for visits and play with her and tell her about the new parents they were getting from the hospital.  They had somehow recovered from the ARDS.  It seemed that she was especially sick.  The little girls felt so bad for her, that they even lied and told her how pretty she was even though she was almost the color of the bed sheets and felt ugly amongst them as they smiled and giggled and brought her their extra chocolate milk.  They seemed genuinely sad about Dandelion not being allowed to leave or have new parents.

“I wonder when you guys will sneak out again and come see me?  Or did you get your new parents already?”

As if the TV was listening to her—not that she had any idea why it was called a TV, though it seemed to have a lot of ideas about her—it turned on and the great Rainbow Bridge opened before her on the screen, the kind mommy voice of the unseen speaker announcing, “Dandelion, you have a visitor.”

The screen spiraled into a rainbow swirl and opened up like a flower and there was… a teddy bear.  This was no ordinary teddy bear.  It wore overalls, like the overalls that Uncle Rick had made for her from one of his warm shirts.  It had little black buckle shoes like the shoes that Uncle Rick had brought her from grownup hide-and-go-seek ARDS-chasers.  The bear was, of course, pink and had a fancy hat like Uncle Rick wore as a disguise one time, with a green Molly feather in it—Molly the hero parakeet who tricked ARDS-chasers!  And, to identify the messenger for sure—because you had to sneak to be near the ones who loved you in hospitals and among grownups in general—the bear had a dream catcher made by Uncle Rick’s own caring hand.  For Uncle Rick brought a dream catcher for Dandelion every time he had come to visit, for all of her eight years of life.  This made her smile and brought back the memory of Uncle Rick making her a dream catcher out of dandelions, despite the fact that it was against the law to go on the grass at the park without a mask—but Uncle Rick didn’t care about laws.  He just cared about Dandelion!

The teddy bear then spoke, spoke in that voice equal to three dads, like the voice of a police that was not a mean ARDS-chaser, that was not a lock-you-up-until-you-are-better safe spacer, a voice that was like an unstoppable machine, the voice that always came back for her—the voice of Uncle Rick:

“Hello, Dandelion!”

“Hello, I know who!” answered the little girl, suddenly alive with color.

Uncle Rick’s voice came from the moving mouth of the bear, “That’s right, Dandelion, I’m the Bear that Cares.  Call me Care Bear!”

“Oh, Care Bear, thanks for visiting me.  It would be so nice to have a hug.”

“One day, Dandelion, we will have a hug!”

“Oh, Uncle Rick I miss you!”

The bear then shook and spoke, “Care Bear, I am Care Bear!  I love you, Dandelion!  I will be there.”

“Really?” she said, amazed.  “They told me that Mom and Dad are waiting at Rainbow Bridge.  But they didn’t say anything about you, Uncle Rick—I mean Care Bear.”

“Uncle Rick?” came the voice of the mean nurse lady with the eagle nose as Dandelion felt a gloved hand pinch her thigh through the bed sheet and saw the face shield of the mean lady fog in anger and then her non-pinching gloved hand reached for the remote stem.  Dandelion snatched her TV controller back and let it drop off the right side of her bed as the mean nurse lady glared into the TV screen and began touching the screen itself, bringing up various images of Rainbow Bridge officials, doctors, police and barked in her shrill voice, “The Rainbow Bridge account of Dandelion Machi has been hacked by an ARDS-denier named Rick.  Alert Safety Officer on duty.”

The Rainbow Bridge screen was now replaced with the heads of these terrible grownups as the mean lady responded to the boy-looking lady in the suit who worked for Rainbow Bridge, “Yes, Facilitator Landry, I am initiating sedation while downloading authorization.”

The lady then pressed the screen and it was filled with the face of a triple-masked man who spoke clearly, “The harvesting team will be bed-side in twelve minutes.  Initiate pressure-lock and reduce temperature.”

Dandelion did not understand these words.  But the adults who ganged-up to chase Care Bear and Uncle Rick’s voice from the TV were mean and that made being little, ARDSed-up and alone all the more unbearable…

The pressure in the back of her left hand brought Rainbow Bridge leaping into view all around as the rushing of cozy sleep waters came to her on her lily pad as she floated up and over Rainbow Bridge—and there, across the way stood Mom and Dad, their arms wide open, both dressed up in the wedding dress and tuxedo they had been married in long before Dandelion came along…