Lower CoSMOS: Life of Lance Vier #1

“Well…Sit down, Lance. Welcome. Now, who was this Mom of yours?”

Warning: Strong Language, Mild Sexual Themes.

I did what she said, and looked around the room to check the space. Bear walls from side to side except for a photo of Telly Savalas. I took a snap of him and searched later when the case worker excused herself to the bathroom. Her name was Laura. Fifty. Busty, she wore a full-length floral dress up to her neck, right up to the clavicle. She smiled and sat in her chair while I grabbed mine. There was too much extra staring on her part.

            “My, you’ve grown. You look nothing like your baby picture, Mr. Vier.”

            Did they have pictures? I don’t remember any.

            I nodded.

            “You must be excited, but I must tell you it may not be the outcome you might have thought. Ok, sweetheart.”

            I nodded again.

            She opened a folder on her desk, and I attempted to keep my eyes away from the desk.

            She pushed her index finger onto the top of a dark photo and spun the folder with her other hand in my direction, pushing it toward me.

            “Go ahead,” she said. Her delightful grin gave me some comfort.

            My head tilted down, and there it was, something familiar but still confusing.

            “I know, I know. It is impossible, but there it is.”

            “It’s a car,” I said.

            “The DNA was a maternal match.”

            I don’t think I fooled her by playing ignorant.

            Black and white photos don’t bring back much memory when it is so blotted and poorly reproduced. The entire front of the car was missing, half the hood bent up, and the glass shattered. I was lucky to get out of that thing alive. I remember being carried under the shoulder of a beast so dreadful and muscularly warped that I could smell her unearthly odor while looking at the photo. I remembered things well at one year of age. I cried a lot, but my memory is rock solid.

            “Mother,” I mumbled.

            “You can say that,” she snickered, “Let that go through your hunky head. I need to use the human’s room.”

*****

            I don’t know the small things about how this came to me and can’t tell you, but I will find out. Slowly. Eventually. That is why I am here. Her eyes were still on me, interrupting my thoughts to you. I turned around in the parking lot and saw the woman waving to me as if we had been married for twenty years, and I was off to war in another part of the galaxy-off-world.

            “You’re not a bastard to me, baby,” she yelled.

            I waved. It was a kind gesture, but it brought her to grab for the door and attempt an emotional run at me, a huge squeeze probably on her mind and eventually me getting to compromise into kissing a fifty-year-old woman.

            “I am fine. I can find my way,” I said.

            “I know where you can find your Momma,” she said.

            “No. No. I am good.” Flashing a thumbs up, I reached my Volkswagen Boden, eager for the door handle. Leaving the folder on the dash, I started my car but couldn’t let the day go by with that name pelting my head, not in a drone or a constant drawn-out pronunciation but ‘bam’ ‘bam’ again and again. “Bastard.” “You Bastard.”

            Son of a bastard or the bastard of bastard’s bastards. Premium cut bastard of the finest lineage of bastards. My birth remained one of those accidents in the old world where too much experimentation went unchecked with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s blessing. At that time, nearly an entire generation was inbred chimeric drones babbling about chicken soup and pork grinds, for that was their favorite meal. They were products of the sickening elderly mess that went by the name Granny Sometimes.

            I left the office of ‘Wilt and Wilt,’ not their real names but big fans of basketball players from an even older world. Granny ran the ‘Home for aborted pregnancies,’ legal back then. By then, things went ultra-designer to the point where stem cells were used based on how good the DNA was-hyper eugenics they called it. Dead now, thankfully. This type of practice allowed for someone to take care of the fetuses though they were obviously dead; a group named ‘Sacred Little Angels Technically dead but still human and need love just the same because we all need a place to call Home.’ Yes, that was their real name. Granny was the head and lobbied like a maniacal geneticist to take the “Little Angels” home. Yes, I was one of them. Reanimated. Alive. I want to know how she did it because if it were my decision, darkness would be the place to be.

*****

            These babies under Granny were bountiful and hidden from the pretending civilized world. If one went missing, she paid a heavy price to retrieve her angel back at her haven, ‘Crib Keep.’ Campy, you say? It isn’t far from the truth nor something to balk at. After paying exorbitant amounts to bounty hunters to retrieve these cherubs, she made her own out of the identical fetuses, extending their years beyond normal but not tempering the side effects. ThickPac was one of these. A male bounty hunter longing for the return of dominance by the gangsta rap of the late 1980s and early 1990s, making his best impression of his idol 2pac but going a bit too far in replication. He was still alive out of the pantheon of bounty hunters. Mother was in his tattered garage, covered with a black sheet and twisted underneath it. Unfortunately, for both of us, ThickPac spoke in rhymes, and I couldn’t get proper words in when I approached the home. The old bounty hunter or infant thief rocked his wooden chair back and forth, hearing me approach. He lasted longer than all the hunters, reaching age two hundred and twenty-seven.

            “Who is there? What do you need? I can’t see. My eyes bleed. When I creep, and I stop, please don’t come at me with a mother f-ing mop. Take heed if it’s weed…”

            “No. No. Nothing like that.”

            A door opened to the front, and a screen door slammed shut after I cut off the older man’s poetry.

            “What’s up here, young citizen?” the man said, leaving Pac’s home.

            It was an official custodian. Without too many details, depending on their status, each citizen has a Watcher appointed over the others. Exceptions are made—a little much to go into right now.

            “Hello, he sounds like he is doing good still,” I said, pointing at Pac, who was now mumbling.

            “Voice familiar, I can hear ya, step up closer, I’ll be near ya,” Pac said.

            “Let me finish with this younger, and we’ll get you situated,” the man said to Pac. He glared at me, pulled out an end from his official shirt inside his pants, and cleaned his glasses. Then, placing them back on, he squinted.

            “You look like a complete bastard,” he said.

            I wanted to grin. I tried, but I turned away toward the worn-down garage. The door was bent open in the lower left corner, where an old spider web remained.

            “This is not your place to be doing that, younger,” the man said.

            I kept going and stepped to the garage door.

            Both of their eyes were on me. Then, the silence cut with a loud voice and melodic songs unfamiliar to my ears.

            “You’re no son; you’re no son of mine. You walked out, you left me behind.”

            I turned to the men; they looked at each other.

            “You both heard that?” I said.

            They nodded.

            “It is a bastard, Pac,” the custodian said, “She’s calling. She’s singing again.”

            “I would stand but need a gun in my hand or cane because sitting in this chair is lame. What I fear, and what is done. This boy could be her son.”

            We all stared at the garage.

            “Well, do not be too hasty. If any of what Pac told me about that lady in that garage, you’re in for a rough time.”

            “It’s a car?” I said, back at him with a smirk. However, as any baby booster or bounty hunter knows, their cars are what get them their money.

            “You’re no son of miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!” the car said but with a voice singing, unfamiliar to any of us.

            “She’s alive, Pac. You hear?” the custodian said.

            I got to the front of the garage door. Before I could reach my hand out, the garage door shook, rattling, not trying to open but to evoke fear. As I moved, my hand away, the shaking tempered.

            “Good, younger. I wouldn’t. That legendary lady is meant for the few, the loud, and the unkempt.”

            “No son of mine.” Friends, you hearing this, reading this. Caring, maybe? I had no one. I had no father, no family, and was hoping for a Mother, but I listened to what she said. Oh, those words how they hurt. I will never forget it.