Of Speculative Fiction, Dreamers, Rumors, Cannibalism, and Human Sacrifice

by Ernest Hogan

So finally, it’s officially released, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology edited by Alex Hernandez, Matthew David Goodwin, and Sarah Rafael Garcia, with a preface by Professor Latinx himself, Frederick Luis Aldama. 

Good reviews are already coming in. Publisher’sWeekly says, “This is a knockout.” 

It’s 400 pages in which the Latinoid imagination is unleashed in works by Lisa M. Bradley, Pedro Cabiya, Scott Russell Duncan, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, Julia Rios, Sabrina Vourvoulias, and many others.

One of the others is the old Chicanonaut himself, me.

That’s right, a brand new, never before published story, “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” It was inspired by my travels in New Mexico, and bizarre developments in Aztlán. I came, I saw, I speculated. I am particularly proud of this one--it's a bold demonstration of why I’ve come to be known as the Father of Chicano Science Fiction.

What more can I do? How about a teaser. Here’s the opening:

The frankentruck left Pie Town and headed toward the Very Large Array when Lola yelled, “Cowboy alert!”

“And it don’t look like he’s from around here,” said Chuncho, who was driving.

Down the road a white kid in a cowboy hat, ostrich-skin cowboy boots, jeans, and a Virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt stood, backpack on his shoulder, sticking out a thumb, smiling.

“Yeah, pard, muy suspicioso. Better give him a ride. Check him out.”

     “You never know these days.”

     “Besides, we’re ahead of schedule, and it might be fun.” Lola leered.

And it gets fun--a wild ride into some possibilities that may get you rethinking your ideas of the future.

Speculative For Dreamers, buy it, read it, live it . . .

Ernest Hogan is an old Chicano who doesn’t mind being called Latinx is if it means he can get published and warp more minds. He's also judging the 2021 Extra-Fiction Contest.

Chicanonautica: Extra-Fiction Contest Emerging in 2021

by Ernest Hogan

 

In the dreaded year of 2020, the Extra-Fiction Contest, a production of Somos en escrito, The Latino Literary Online Magazine and publisher, did not happen. It was canceled, a victim of COVID-19. The planet in turmoil, not enough submissions were received.

Undaunted, they have decided to try it again, even though the virus is still skulking about the planet in deadly new variants.

And once again they asked me, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, to be the judge. I said I would, because I’m all about encouraging those in the Latinoid continuum to push La Cultura into strange new vistas.

Or as they put it: “. . . we are keeping a few of our extra eyestalks out for anything EMERGING.”

I got the news that it was a go while my wife and I were on an interstate memorial road trip in for her mother who recently, at age 99, went “traveling in time and space.” 

I was asked to make a video, so with my phone, in the Cowgirls room of the Silver Saddle Motel in Santa Fe New Mexico, I did my stuttering best to shame would-be constants into getting their caca conjunto and daring them to blow my twisted mind.

The deadline is September 30, 2021. Plenty of time, considering that it’s been one of the weirdest years ever. You should be brimming over with ideas.

The first place winner will get $100 and a copy of the upcoming Povenir Ya!,Chicano Science Fiction Anthology, that will have a new story by me. Second and third places will also get copies of Provenir Ya! There will also be two honorable mentions. All of the finalists will have their stories published online in Somos en escrito.

So, what are you waiting for? I need to get my mind blown.

Ernest Hogan somehow managed to have a career writing science fiction from a Chicano viewpoint even though the Anglophone publishing world is still convinced that there’s no money in such things. He invites all of you out there to join him in proving them wrong.

Chicanonautica: Can a Chicano Be Mainstream?

by Ernest Hogan

Intercepted conversation from an unidentified source:

Ernest Hogan: Victor? What the fuck? It's 4:24 AM, for Tezcatlipoca’s sake! 

Victor Theremin: I'm feeling restless. Could use some writer talk. 

EH: I thought I turned my phone off . . .

VT: You know I have access to outlaw technology.

EH: What? There's video, too? I haven't downloaded any apps for that.

VT: I’ve had my hacker friends download stuff to your phone.

EH: I wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s an invasion of my privacy.

VT: Is there any such thing as privacy anymore?

EH: Uh-oh. I nearly woke up my wife. I better go to the living room . . .

(The sound of footsteps, soft impacts, profanity.)

VT: There is so much to think about right now.

EH: As usual.

VT: Actually, cabrón, there's a helluva lot more than usual.

EH: Yeah, I guess you're right, with COVID, and all that political and other pendajas going on.

VT: Precisely! This is the end/beginning of new eras! And you know what that means?

EH: What? You on a beach somewhere? Why is the sky purple?

VT: It means that us Chicano science fiction writers are gonna have to rethink everything, and reconsider what we've been working on! 

EH: I know it happened to Emily.

VT: How is your wife?

EH: Restless. Eager to get on with a new phase in her life.

VT: See? There a helluvalota that going around.

EH: Just what is a helluvalota?

VT: Quit trying to change the subject.

EH: Can't help it. You knocked me out of some heavy REM sleep.

VT: I tell you, something is happening. Something planetwide. More than the pandemic, or politics, something affecting everybody’s brains . . .

EH: There you go again, losing track of where the sci-fi ends and the reality begins.

VT: I keep telling ya, it doesn’t matter these days. 

EH: Could be. I’m thinking about pitching my next novel as mainstream.

VT: What? The one with the AIs, aliens, and a character based on me?

EH: Yeah.

VT: Uh-oh, looks like you’ve gone over the bend.

EH: I don’t know. I just realized that it’s actually a modern day retelling of Don Quijote, and what could be more mainstream than that?

VT: I always considered it to be the first psychological sci-fi novel.

EH: About senile dementia?

VT: The final frontier.

EH: The problem is when I try to come up with things to compare my stuff to in the pitch, I have a hard time coming up with recent, popular sci-fi. 

VT: You’re solidly in the tradition of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick . . .

EH: Today’s sci-fi audience doesn’t remember them.

VT: Stick with sci-fi, Ernie. The truth will out!

EH: It might work better if I said I was like Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ishmael Reed.

VT: Like the modern reader remembers them.

EH: I know the post-Twilight/Fifty Shades of Gray audience doesn’t like to think when they read, but I keep hearing that the mainstream audience is bigger than genre. And I really would like to take the chance to actually make it big before I go back to tin-cupping it in the underground.

VT: What, you think you can be the Chicano Vonnegut?

EH: Better than being the Chicano Kilgore Trout.

VT: I thought I was the Chicano Kilgore Trout!

EH: I’ve been busting my ass as a Chicanonaut in Scifiilandia, where I’m treated like the most talented leper they've ever met, and I’d like it all to amount to something.

VT: And how has the mainstream world treated you?

EH: I still have trouble convincing them I exist. And they still give me the bum’s rush. Or take off running when they see me. And this is all before the realize I’m a Chicano.

VT: Ever thought about where sci-fi ends and the mainstream begins?

EH: A lot lately. When I shelve books at the library, I keep running into books that look interesting in the General Fiction section, and when I take a look they have science fictional plots, only they don’t have the entire universe, or even multiverse in danger, like they insist on in commercial sci-fi these days.

VT: This is the age of genre meltdown, besides, genres are just marketing gimmicks, and high-brow conceits like magic realism and speculative fiction are just pretensions for readers who want to feel intellectual.

EH: In my ten years as a bookseller, not one customer ever came in asking for magic realism or speculative fiction.

VT: So, whatcha gonna do, ese?

EH: Think I’ll keep all my options open. When trying to sell the book, I’ll start at the top, go for the dough, and if that doesn’t work out, I still have one foot stuck back in the underground.

VT: Sounds quixotic as all hell. Good boy! Uh-oh, there’s an unidentified phenomenon in the sky that I need to investigate, gotta go, bro!

Ernest Hogan is the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, and Victor Theremin is a fictional character, at least in this universe.

Now Slouching Toward June to be Published

Review: Rudy Ch. Garcia. Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub. Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, 2021. (Coming June 2021)

Michael Sedano

June lurks just around the corner, not near enough you can feel its breath on your neck nor see how it butchers its victims leaving behind the parts it doesn’t eat. But close enough to start looking behind your back.

Sorry, that’s not June. That’s the beast, the dragón, animating Rudy Ch. Garcia’s monster thriller and tongue-twister, Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub. June is when publisher Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press (link) unleashes the horror thriller for eager readers.

There’s lots of reasons to be eager, I’ll focus on three: Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub is a rare Chicanocentric fantasy novel. Death Song does some teaching. Chickxulub brings lots of fun.

Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pito, Ernest Hogan, Mario Acevedo, Rudy Ch. Garcia

Chicana Chicano fantasy novels are uncommon enough it’s still possible for someone to have read every work of the genre, and for its writers to know one another. Garcia, for example, once sat on a sci-fi/fantasy literary panel with Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pito, Mario Acevedo, Ernest Hogan, and Jesus Salvador Treviño. Had some monster devoured that table, 90% of the writers of Chicana Chicano fantasy would have been swallowed up in Riverside.

Garcia sets Dragón in New Mexico and Mexico City, with narrative visits to ancient Aztlán along with an origin story that’s plausible enough younger readers should be careful not to take speculation as fact. According to Garcia, the Mexica got booted out of Tenochtitlan and wandered in a great northwestern circle until landing back in Mexico City, pursued at every turn by El Muerte Blanco.

It’s far too easy to suggest the name of the critter is a clumsy metaphor about assimilation into anglo cultura, but with an anglo protagonist named Miguel Reilly doing some cultural slumming on his way to freshman year at some fancy university, the metaphor’s easily accused. Having Reilly bouncing against raza caricatures in New Mexico and a hot indigenous woman in old Mexico is grist for Garcia’s mill. To the author’s great credit, he lets the trope speak for itself and doesn’t try to milk it with author’s messages in bright lights.

Chicana Chicano readers will appreciate the publisher’s stylistic convention of not translating Spanish, nor does the author take pains to offer some appositional translation into English. Chicana Chicano readers live in code-switching comfort. Those italics are their own muerte blanco on Chicana Chicano Literature.

Miguel is an interesting protagonist. Garcia positions him as a well-informed amateur anthropologist using his money and social standing to conduct participant-observer research.  Reilly is troubled by becoming too much a participant, a classic researcher’s conflict. Garcia has his kid abandon that scientist’s value. Magic, a brujo, Miguel’s fate and ancestry, the allure of that woman, send the boy in unplanned directions. 

The reader gets an heroic quest and a 300 pages of fun. There’s a people-eating monster. Magical people do magical things to and for the kid. You know that movie where hunters track a monster with technology? That’s here. Writers, Garcia’s descriptions of light, visibility, and sensation, are few but gems of synaesthesia.

When the old brujo wants to assess Miguel’s worthiness for discipleship, he asks if Miguel’s ever written a poem? Miguel later uses the query to melt the heart of the unmeltable Maritza. Kismet. That Maritza’s a formidable woman, the men in her circle fear her even as they lust after her. 

That dragon might occupy the title and the heart of the plot, but this novel’s about relationships and self-discovery, about theory, belief, and action. Toss in some history, a lot of local color, too much alcohol, and readers will have a blast while learning a few cultural insights. 

Kick back until June, then let Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub do what speculative fiction does best, keep you entertained and turning pages.

Chicanonautica: Creating Pablo Cortez

 

by Ernest Hogan

 

I’m an artist as well as a writer. I started out wanting to be a cartoonist as a kid. People say my writing is very visual, cinematic.

I draw a lot. I’ve even painted. Recently, my mom texted me some pictures she took of one of my paintings. They illustrate this post.

It’s a big one. The biggest I've ever done. It’s not a great painting but has a helluva story behind it.

It was after the great Vietnam/Watergate crash. Gerald Ford was president. America was in deep funk. I was trying to find my way in world that didn’t seem to have a use for me.

I fell into the community college thing. Me and school never got along so good, but I was trying to make the student thing work because people kept telling me that education was the answer to everything. If I tried really hard I could get good grades, and it threw me into depression. I was a sad zombie student.

My art classes helped save my sanity. I got paint and ink all over my clothes, face and hair. Instead of dragging my easel into a corner to hide like everybody else, I would set up in the middle of the studio and make a spectacle of myself.

I was an artist. There was no doubt about that. But what could I do with it?

In a painting class the teacher gave us an assignment of doing a totally abstract painting. The teachers were all staunch modernists, who liked it when your art didn’t look like anything, and thought “storytelling” was a dirty word. I always “got” abstract art, and would even dabble in it as a kid, so I dove in.

The result is the painting in the photos.

First, I threw up a bunch of bright colors, knowing that my teachers didn’t like them. Then I splashed turpentine on the oil paint because they told me that it would just wash it off—note that the canvas still has paint on it. 

Then I dribbled paint mixed with turpentine and let it drip. The problem was it always dripped in one direction—down. How monotonous. In my frustration, I turned the canvas on its side, and kept turning it. The problem with that is that ended up creating a vertical/horizontal, architectonic grid.

The problem was the canvas itself. The rectangular shape. Those four corners. And gravity.

I had to come to limits of abstract expression.

If only I could paint in orbit . . . yeah, Jackson Pollock in space! That would be something!

Of course, I couldn’t do that, but I could write about it.

And why not make the artist a Chicano? No one had done that before. Why not test the limits of science fiction while I was at it?

It was another long, hard struggle, but eventually I came up my first published novel, Cortez on Jupiter.

My teachers weren’t that impressed with the painting, which was okay, because I wasn’t very impressed with them, or the fine art world. I don’t “get” these people who buy art, and don’t quite believe that they’re real. To me they’re like UFOs, Bigfoot, or El Chupacabras.

The question is now, what should I do with it? Maybe its connection to the novel will make someone want to buy it . . . My wife suggested we put it in the bigger house we may buy someday.

Maybe I should sign all four corners and scrawl instructions on the back to turn it regularly. Or it could be mounted on slow motor that would turn it . . .

There I go, testing the limits again.

Ernest Hogan, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction is working on novel that he in composing like mural.

Chicanonautica: Ernesto Publishing Updates

by Ernest Hogan

For reasons I can’t fathom, my writing career has taken off  running during this quarantine. It drags me along, keeping me busy, and giving me so much stuff to announce that I have a hard time keeping up with it all. I need to remind myself that some people would love to have this kind of problem.

You may have already heard about Latinx Rising that has my story “Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails,” wherein the reasons my character Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars’ interplanetary migration are revealed, and “Tomorrow is Another Daze,” based on the current world situation, free online at ASU’s Us in Flux, but that’s not all.

The 2020 Look at Mars Fiction Book is out with “The Rise and Fall of Pacho Cohen and the Mariachis of Mars,” the first story I wrote about the character. I really should get around to writing that novel about him . . .

That catches us up to what’s available now, but I’ve also got some coming attractions!

Strange Particle Press has been “VERY pleased to announce” the upcoming release of Nine to Eternity that will feature my slapstick space opera, “The Great Mars-A-Go-Go Mexican Standoff.” Yeah, I wrote it to see if I could get away with using the word Mexican in the title of a science fiction story. There are also great stories by eight other writers, including my wife, Emily Devenport. Stay tuned for details.

And now there’s Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. It’s got a never-before-published story, “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated,” that was inspired by my travels in New Mexico. There’s a Kickstarter campaign to help pay us authors.

If that weren’t enough, Strange Particle will also be putting out Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions, a collection of some of my most outrageous short fiction that will set synapses sizzling.

 

So, look out! Here comes the future.

Ernest Hogan is also working on a novel Zyx, Or; Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin.Hhhhhhhhhhff

Far Out Trip on Interstate 10

ROAD TRIP: SOMEWHERE IN ARIZONA
Michael Sedano

Marvin Hendrickson sits up suddenly alert. “Red” is about to call it a night and deadhead back to H.Q. when the open road materializes into a dark glistening blur racing East on the 10. The trooper figures he’s been counting flowers on the wall and spaced out, otherwise that damn thing came out of nowhere.

Red thrills at the push of gravity when the roaring engine races down the onramp, the vehicle an extension of his determination. They say shit like that in training.

Betsy Ross smiles when white headlights swing onto the pavement off the fast-disappearing Tonopah ramp behind the Tesla. Betsy nudges Andrea. Andrea speaks quietly, “start recording.” Betsy slows and eases over to the side of the road where she puts the Tesla in park.

Marilyn Hendrickson’s red-headed youngest boy-child smiles at two bobble heads in the vehicle. Women drivers are the best kind of stop. They all cry, and with the really desperate ones, you can get lucky. And here we are in the middle of nowhere, not calling it in, just us girls. Marvin remembers his Training Officer’s drawling advice, “Boy, you’d be surprised how many college girls like that back seat boogie instead of a moving violation.”

Marvin’s mind runs through a dozen scenarios, none nice at all, as he walks slowly to the silent luxury wheels. Give them time to sweat. Marvin grins at the thought of the women’s asses sweating into their panties.

The trooper stops at the rear license plate. The driver’s window rolls down silently. Marvin reads loudly, “Californicate”, adding, “now there’s a suggestion.” The Tesla wears current tags and all its lights shine steadily. The passenger window remains up, the bobble head unmoving.

Hendrickson’s thick-soled boots lift his height and his ego. He steps heavily to coax a crunch from the deep roadside gravel. The two bobble heads don’t move a muscle. “Do not move.” He adds, “Please.” Marvin feels his command presence already cowering the bobble heads, he can afford to be courteous. Red feels a pang of disappointment when neither head twitches. Neither turns to him when he marches to a stop at the door.

Marvin’s heart races and his groin warms. Even in the enclosing darkness of the fancy car’s interior the passenger’s golden-blonde beauty glows as if illuminated from within. That dress hides nothing. Her seatbelt is attached, point for her, and stretched diagonally across two exciting breasts. Two points for me. Driver’s belted.

Trooper Hendrickson didn’t like Mexicans and he especially didn’t like Mexican women driving hundred thousand-dollar cars. Hot as the blonde friend is, that doesn’t cut the dowdy dark-brown bitch any slack. Red has a sour taste in his nostrils that a second before smelled of a flowery musk perfume.

“Papeles,” pause, “License, registration, proof of insurance. English?”

The bitch remains silent but turns to establish direct eye contact with Marvin. He doesn’t move. The woman’s eyes move slowly down the khaki uniform. Marvin’s hand grows warm around his Glock when her eyes pause. The nondescript brown woman sweeps her gaze to focus on Hendrickson’s ornate bull riding belt buckle. She exhales slowly and locks her eyes on Marvin’s. His hand tightens around the Glock. It is ice cold.

“My license is in the white purse in the back seat.”

The driver’s lips don’t move. Marvin can’t identify the accent under the soft voice he hears. The trooper leans his head into the window for a better look at the blonde. She has turned her head to stare into the open desert. Good goddamn she is fuckable as they come. The blonde’s shoulders start, her hands grip her hot white thighs where that short red skirt has ridden up.

“Ma’am, do you have ID?”

What’s she doing with the beaner? The driver’s hands squeeze the steering wheel. Furtive movement. Red Hendrickson reflexively jumps back pointing at the driver shouting, “Bitch, keep your hands on the steering wheel!” Just like training, Marvin thinks, as his hand unsnaps the holster and in the same motion pulls his Glock.

Andrea says nothing but turns to look at the shadowed face of the trooper, her expressionless face bright against the dark glass behind her. Marvin steps forward, expecting compliance, his adrenaline wary for any threat.

The driver bitch stretches her fingers. Marvin jumps back again, again he raises the pistol, this time he points the muzzle at Betsy Ross. His thumb twitches against the safety lever. One in the chamber, nine rounds in the magazine. Red feels powerful, the look in his eyes says, “Go ahead, make my day.” The bitch is a statue.

Aiming at the driver’s frozen face, Marvin moves around the front of the shiny Tesla. Scuttling his feet in the sand as if wary of a sting ray in the surf, Marvin's empty thoughts chant “Choo, choo, choo.” He stops and faces the Tesla.

“Get out of the car.”

He hears himself issue the command automatically. Marvin feels as if he’s watching himself watching as the gull-wing door lifts in a smooth arc in a cloud of perfume. He watches eagerly a pair of diaphanous legs swing out the door.


Andrea Ross remains silent as Betsy eases her Tesla back onto the 10. Betsy was right, and Andrea doesn’t feel like confessing her glee to be wrong.

Five miles to the Tucson cut-off, hoping not to suffer the silent treatment all the way to El Paso, Betsy decides to take the gentle approach.

“So the center-fold blonde body works better than your J-Lo, que no?” When Andrea doesn’t reply, after a few miles Betsy adds, “You look good in uniform, mi’ja.”

Andrea doesn’t say a word. The pale red-headed Arizona trooper sitting next to Betsy pats his Glock. The uniformed trooper fades into shadow to be replaced by brown Andrea, glowing and brunette in a shining red hootchie dress.

“That’s a hell of a lot of trouble for bad-tasting country food, Mom. But I did get a kick out of his final thoughts.” Andrea touches the screen.

Red Hendrickson stands paralyzed in soft off-screen glow that brightens with its approach. He looks into the camera and thinks, “Uh-oh, I done fucked up good this time.”

“Well, duh, you think so?” Betsy Ross laughs.

“There’s the cut-off Mom. Speed it up, I’m hoping for some Indian food.”

“Did you say you Hopi?”


GO OUT THERE AND GET SOME NEWS! BILLY MARTINEZ, CUB REPORTER

The bubble gum lights had warned-off helpful spectators until the cruiser’s battery died sometime before 0421 hours, when Sergeant Ernie Zeferino hung a U across the divider and parked behind the darkened Dodge Charger. Red Hendrickson, major fuck-up, failed to make end-of-turn muster. No wonder I have to come out here and find his ass. Add poor maintenance to his credits.

Marvin H. “Red” Hendrickson, Class A fuck-up, was nowhere in sight. Only a total idiot can get lost in those flatlands. Ernie doesn’t bother to get to higher ground. Not a case of lost anymore. Search and rescue has the job now, I have mine: Two cruisers by the side of the road, two disappeared troopers. Now number three lands on my watch. Fake news, but someone’s gotta investigate, disconnect the fucking dots.

“Gallup, Flag, and now right here in Tonopah,” Billy Martinez takes notes. Two miles east of Tonopah Road. The City Editor is having a bad day with the network down and needs Billy to gumshoe the state troopers for any information on Red Hendrickson. Sergeant Zeferino has lead.

That’s why the City Editor called me in. Asshole. Billy counts three before measuring his response. He’s my padrino from Confirmation. Pause. Swallow. He’s not part of my life. The sealed lawsuit picks away at Martinez’ brain. The City Editor ignores the cub reporter’s discomfort. “Go out there and get some news, Nosy Bear!” Take a lens and get me some art on scene.” Ha, ha, Billy thinks bitterly, nosy bear and art.

Jimmy Olsen couldn’t get anything interesting out here. Billy Martinez looks across the flatlands and counts three species of chamizo, the bush semi-informed anglos call saltbush. That’s what they see. Billy identifies three species of Atriplex. Jimmy likes facts. Right now, it is one hard and true fact there is nothing to photograph where Zeferino found the car. Presumably, the trooper disappeared here, too. Billy scuffs his feet in the road litter, “choo choo” skips in and out of his head before he hears a voice echo, “Use the force, Luke.” William hears himself say the words aloud.

“Choo Choo Choo Choo,” Billy’s feet scuffle through the sand turning up detritus where technicians had taken plaster casts of top-line Michelins, a Tesla. Martinez rehearses the facts in the report. Red Hendrickson’s Cat’s paw heels track to the driver side of the imaginary Tesla. Red stops. Next, the soles head around the invisible Tesla where Hendrickson stops. Evidence techs lift a plaster heel print from the packed earthen berm off the front of the imagined Tesla. Red Hendrickson must have stood here and looked into the windshield with a full view of the interior and the Suspect, or Suspects, the report concludes.

Martinez squats like a Korean campesino and stares into the hard noontime light. The empty distant roadway shimmers with rising heat waves that resolve into a low-slung Tesla speeding out of the night. What did Red Hendrickson see that night?

Billy opens a flood of imagination. The Harpies, Eagle-clawed women swooping out of the heavens seizing you and carrying you away. The stories of kids who go around a mountain trail and disappear and all their desperate parents hear is their baby’s voice screaming mommy mommy coming from the air somewhere. Did a chupacabra snatch Red? Facts, Billy says aloud, facts.

Billy Martinez rolls out of the kimchi squat to lie on his back. He points the lens at the edge of the berm and visualizes that moment three nights before. Red is standing on his right foot, his left knee bends with that leg on the berm. The night sky filled with stars, there wasn’t a moon, what did Red see when he looked into that Tesla? Billy’s vision blurs. The landscape is a painted canvas that deforms and is sucked into a vacuum hose leaving only darkness. The reporter struggles to gather the facts that unfold before him.

Red scuffles his boots around the front of the Tesla. Outlined by the cruiser’s beams, the Tesla’s color changes like a chameleon with prismatic skin throbbing in and out of visibility with bursts of impossible color.

The image in the trooper’s mind makes William gasp, his breath kicking a fine sand into his nose.

Marvin Hendrickson’s nose wants to sneeze. Where’d that come from, fuckin chameleon skin? Prismatic, what the fuck is prismatic? The blonde is smiling at me. The wing doors opening slowly, a praying mantis. A foot touches the ground, a creamy alabaster calf. Here she comes.

Red looks down. His trousers bundle around his ankles.

“I did that.”

Red hears a sweet melodious voice, innocence with a sinful smile in it. But the golden blonde woman rising from the Tesla doesn’t say a word. She stands in darkness, her naked body emitting an inner glow.

Marvin Hendrickson’s mouth falls open in an epiphany of clear-headedness.. The glowing naked figure wavers like highway mirages before parachuting out in a translucent jellyfish mantle wearing a sparkling red hootchie dress. The billowing Andrea collapses around the off-balance deputy. Red Hendrickson tumbles over the berm landing face first in the sand. The cool wet skin coating him begins to burn. “Uh-oh, I done fucked up good this time. I can’t breathe.”

Technically, his last words are “I can’t breathe,” Betsy added, but let’s go with uh-oh.”

Andrea keeps the deputy’s body as her own for an hour while she digests the shiny belt buckle with only a little discomfort. She decides to keep the J-Lo body. As Betsy argues, the sexpot look has universal functionality. The blonde looks cheap. Why Betsy insists on taking her grizzled litigator look remains Andrea’s lasting puzzle. It explains the lean and hungry look.

Cub Reporter William Martinez lies face first in the sand smelling Red’s astonishment. His nose sneezes loudly. Sand and grit blow back into his face. Billy opens his eyes and turns and raises his nose toward clear air. He puffs and spits sand over the berm. Down here, this wicked patch of earth smells of Chanel 21 and shit. Billy can’t get the movie out of his head. The hootchie blonde sweats a cloud of Chanel 21 that materializes into that shimmering medusoid mantle collapsing onto the paralyzed uniform. Coated in throbbing jello that insinuates itself into every fold and crevice of the trooper’s body like a shrink wrap machine, the writhing figure melts into the mantle.

Where did that come from?, Billy wonders. The reporter sits cross-legged leaning against the berm, blowing sand off the lens when tires pull off the road onto the sand behind him. Over his shoulder, Billy makes out a dazzling Tesla coming to a stop. A good Samaritan, Billy smiles. People are good.