Sunday writing

So this kind of got away from me, or maybe I never really had a handle on it in the first place. It’s free-writing, based on a newspaper headline and a drawing from the New York Times book review pages. So it’s almost guaranteed to not be completely coherent. But it’s what I wrote today, beyond the morning pages, which I’ve been doing consistently since the end of January.

If they had killed her, she didn’t remember it. She couldn’t let herself think about that now, anyway, not with the portal behind her closing — no, wait, she’d blinked, and now it was closed — and the next portal not scheduled to appear until she didn’t know when, or how, or where. She didn’t even know what this city was called, much less where the portal had dumped her inside of it. Where were the street signs, the people? It looked so different than it had just a minute ago — not that a minute ago it had looked any less strange. The thing on her belt, what she thought Leo had called the actopulse when he’d first hooked it there and shoved her through, that was blinking; and when she looked at its readout, the red flashing numbers painted across its dented and silvery face, it seemed to suggest she’d traveled forty years into the future. Which, okay, sure, fine, she could believe that. She’d seen a lot weirder happen since she’d bumped into Leo that morning, and time travel at least seemed plausible enough as far as explanations went. But then, was this still the same place, that crazy city that Leo had stranded her in when he pushed her through that first portal? Because then where were the people? And not just the two who had been chasing her, had opened fire just as she’d —

Damn, why couldn’t she remember? It was these portals, or maybe just this last one, that had Swiss-cheesed her brain. She’d liked to give that jerk Leo a piece of her brain when — no, wait, of her mind. He’d probably wanta piece of her brain after this, stuffed in a formaldehyde jar on a shelf in his lab, studying what had happened to her, what happened to a person exposed to the portals, the actopulse — if that even was what he’d called it. And why couldn’t she remember? Had they killed her? She couldn’t be here, forty years later, if they’d done that, could she?

Okay, she thought, brain’s still a little foggy after that last jump. I know I opened the portal to get away from those two guys, the two in black with the weird guns. And they’re not here, so at least that much is good. She just needed to figure out where she was, and —

Maybe there was another Leo here, too? He’s the one who’d sent those goons after her, right? She was starting to remember, at least a little. This was some kind of parallel dimension, and she wasn’t supposed to be here, like physically not supposed to be here, on a quantum level. And the actopulse didn’t really work worth a damn. It kept her from getting ripped apart, atom by atom, whenever she stepped — or got shoved — through a portal, but it didn’t stop wear and tear on those atoms, didn’t keep her memory safe from that wear and tear, and didn’t help her one bit when parallel versions of Leo tried to have her killed for invading his private kingdom.

Would he still be king of this world forty years later? She couldn’t imagine any world dumb enough to let that happen. She needed to find out, get off the street, and then figure out a way to get home. Or at least get to the next portal, which probably wouldn’t be good for her memory or atoms but which might at least lead somewhere better, somewhere else. She’d keep going till the actopulse, or her brain, conked out.

Tonight, I think I’m going to spend reading Kaleidotrope submissions. Because there ain’t no party like a slush-reading party.