I wrote this bit of flash fiction and realized I read a lot of children’s books …

Taking off the stovepipe hat, the huge feline shook himself awkwardly, standing on two legs. The inside of the surveillance van was small, but one of his red-jumpsuited partners bumped into him trying to remove, as he said, “these infernal onesies.”

A shrill tone sounded and the cat reached over and picked up a black satellite phone, extending the antenna to activate it, putting the call on speaker.

“Go for the Doctor,” he said roughly, picking flecks of milk and dried cake from his black fur.

“How’d it go?” the voice on the other end, a woman, asked.

“Pretty good, based on the contact high I got from the hallucinogens we pumped in there,” the cat said, smoothing the white fur on his belly with his gloves. “They believed I was what I looked like, and I’m pretty sure the boy thought his fish was talking when that skeptical little twat Sally kept being a killjoy.”

“You stayed in character and went with it, good,” the woman’s voice said, sounding pleased as the two men in red jump suits took off their wigs. She continued, “But you did the job? Hang on, you sound muffled … are you still wearing that mask?”

Chuckling, the cat pulled at his ears, revealing a pale, balding man with salt and pepper hair in streaks on both sides. “That thing’s comfy from inside, as cold as it is out there. My high was wearing off when the twins were doing their thing, after setting up the taps on data lines outside. While they kept the kids busy, I was able to install the cameras and microphones.”

“Do you think the kids will say anything?” the woman’s voice asked, worried.

“The boys down in psych ops had this right,” the man replied, smirking as he started to unzip his costume. “Nobody would believe a giant cat and two blue haired weirdos in a box were ever here. If they did tell their mom, what evidence could they present? That place is just the way we found it … with our own exceptions.”

“Good, then we should have all the intel we need,” she said, satisfied. “Wrap it up and get back to the safehouse, we need to get you three out of the country tonight.”

“Roger that,” the cat-man said as one of the twins, now dressed as a power company employee, took the driver’s seat. Clicking the phone closed, the cat-man said, “That really is that,” as the van drove into the rainy afternoon.

It really bothered me that the CITH disappeared for so long, and that Sally had no lines.

Coincidentally, I don’t see any reason the cheese should stand alone, either …

Playing (Music): “Panic Switch” by Silversun Pickups

As of this writing, I am at a medical facility, torso covered with electricity-enabled adhesives. I am told that I have a “ventricular arrythmia,” an irregular heartbeat based in the rough neighborhoods of my cardiac city.

WHAT? Yeah, it freaks me out too. I was among the healthiest people I know. No booze, no cigarettes, no red meat. Fairly regular walks and what have you. Fairly low sodium intake. Weird.

On Sunday, I got out of bed to get my youngest some almond milk. I felt my heart beating like it did when the regional spelling bee was on the line, but I had no immediate reason to be nervous. Ignoring it, I went about my day — lugging things down from the attic, packing, parenting, et cetera. Even saw a great Eccleston Doctor Who episode (I’m late to the party). At 11 PM, lying down to sleep, my heart jumped and jagged like a car engine that’s threatening to stall. I asked my wife to put her hand on it, causing her to run for the girls’ stethoscope. “You need to go to the hospital.”

Getting rushed past the waiting crowd was weird, but in I went for chest x-rays, EKGs and more to discover something, somthing that may have been there for years, was awry in the core of me. Something new, past the regular misanthropy and madness.

An overnight stay on atavan gave scant slivers of sleep. An afternoon angiogram is on the agenda, while my non-stop job will have to churn on without me, maybe for a month, if one cardiologist is to be believed.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT????? The bottom line is I’ll be okay. It’s very early detection, it’s “wholly fixable” and everybody here is treating it like a simple instance. I’ll be home with my ladies this weekend.

What’s funniest is that 90 percent of the things they thought would be the cause — smoking, fried foods, drinking, et cetera — were not relevant. My cholesterol and blood pressure are fine. Ditto blood sugar, and there are no signs of infections or foreign biohazards. Only worry — which I absorb through waves of second hand stress from half the people I know — stood as a red flag. I will have to try more exercise to offset the toxic energies floating around me.

Mostly it’s just a random accident of chance, the spin of some cosmic roulette wheel. Funny old life.

JUST IN CASE: There is a mathematically insignificant chance that something untoward might happen to me. If that’s the case, I want all my intellectual property turned over to Chinedum Ofoegbu (my wife has the passwords), and for his work on my work to be overseen by Vince Moore, Geoffrey Thorne and Brandon Easton. Any and all gross profits are to be divided evenly between my daughters, returning 45 percent of said profits to Ofoegbu, Thorne and Easton.

Not that any of us expect this to happen ..

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! Since 1 AM, a loud chime from a Phillips Intellivibe heart monitr has relentlessly sounded whenever my heart does something unusual, or I think about …

• my numerous writing deadlines, as I am poised on the precipice of greatness but with little time to achieve it
• my day job
• moving
• money
• making sure my daughters will be okay
• making sure my overworked wife will be okay
• why the end of the modern Battlestar Galactica sucked SO MUCH!

… as it does now. A head-splitting reminder of my inability to relax. 20 percent charge on my iPad, heading for traffic and dye in my arteries, I’m just trying to breathe easily and become still waters, so I can flow to refresh my wife and daughters — and hopefully you — for many decades to come.

… BUT IF ONE WERE SO INCLINED … If you have a jones to do something to help me, you could use the Gumroad link and buy copies of my novels, The Crown: Ascension or Faraway, as most of that money goes right to me (well, right into feeding my kids anyway). If you own it, buy a copy for a friend. All good.

Now, to try to get Netflix going on my phone …

Playing (Music): “I’m Ready” by Tracy Chapman

We will be here forever

Do you understand?

FOREVER

Forever and ever
And ever and ever

We will be here forever

Do you understand that?
Get what I’m saying?

FOREVER!

- KRS-ONE, “KRS-ONE Attacks!”

The essense of Black creativity in the shadow of the western world has been one of necessity and scarcity. “Make way out of no way” is the only consistent commandment from be-bop to hip hop, from STEM education to, finally, the science fiction that fueled many of those who sought it.

Steampunk, as defined by the fine people at Wikipedia, is as follows …

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century. Therefore, steampunk works are often set in an alternate history of the 19th century’s British Victorian era or American “Wild West,” in a post-apocalyptic future during which steam power has regained mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. Steampunk perhaps most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retro-futuristic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them, and is likewise rooted in the era’s perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art.

A quick web search for “steampunk” will deliver tons of images, comic books, short films, cosplay conventions and discussions … and dangerously few people of color. Google Images has their first non-white person under the search for the term 18 rows down, a single spot of brown in a drawing with three white people. One might take this data and believe that not only are Black people (and people of color, by extension) not interested in the sub-genre, but that they have no place in it.

Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade disagreed.

The co-editors of the new anthology Steamfunk! from MV Media Publishing offer up a definition that might not be found on Wikipedia …

The co-editors of the new anthology Steamfunk! from MV Media Publishing offer up a definition that might not be found on Wikipedia …

Steamfunk: a philosophy or style of writing that combines the African and/or African American culture and approach to life with that of the Steampunk philosophy and/or Steampunk fiction.

Their collection of short stories (nothing could be over 12,000 words) features the work of writers from the worlds of television, journalism and fiction, all positing a slightly more diverse world of fantasy and possibility than many have had access to in the past.

Anthology contributor Valjeanne Jeffers said, “Within this new genre we are witnessing the birth of worlds in which Black folks and that which moves us reign supreme. In short, Steamfunk is just as different from Steampunk as Black Science Fiction is from White science fiction. Imagine a Steamfunk hood, an antebellum South in which abolitionists fly airships. Or, as in my novel, Immortal IV: Collision of Worlds, folks living in a post-apocalyptic, steam-world with meta-humans…policed by androids. Now imagine each of these worlds predominated by folks of color: worlds in which Black, Native American, Latino, and Asian folks are not sidekicks but heroines, heroes and villains. That’s what Steamfunk is.”

Geoffrey Thorne, an actor and screenwriter with scores of credits to his name including Leverage, Star Trek: Titan: Sword of Damocles, Honor Brigade and more, said, “At some point in my lifetime I realized, ‘if I wished to see stories about people who looked like me engaged in the fanciful activities I loved in the books I devoured … the only way was to write them myself.’ That’s the best thing about being a writer; if you don’t like the world, just make up another one. So, I did. I did it a lot. I did it a lot A LOT and eventually came to the place I call THE OTHER COUNTRY. When you read the STEAMFUNK anthology, you will get a quick tour of the place and I hope you like what you see because that’s the point of that.”

Hannibal Tabu, weekly comics reviewer for Comic Book Resources and editor in chief of Komplicated at the Good Men Project, said, “When I started out, I didn’t even like steampunk. I didn’t get it. I’d seen the images and thought it was a little anachronistic — my eye was on tomorrow, not a brass-covered look at yesterday. However, I saw the amazing work Balogun and Milton were doing and, frankly, took it as a challenge to myself. Write a ’steamfunk’ story I’d wanna read, one with possibility and pomp, science fiction extremism and atmospheric flourishes. Along the way I developed yet another Black female protagonist who thinks first and kicks butt, and along the way … I kind of got sucked in. It’s just another kind of thing to like, you know, like I am nuts about Star Wars or the Patternists of Octavia Butler. You’re not gonna see me in a bowler and goggles, but I now like these fantastic ideas way better than I did when they tried that abysmal steampunk Transformers series a few years ago.”

Davis himself said, “I hope to see it expand. Hopefully other writers and readers will see the possibilities and share their own interpretations. As for me, I have a couple of novel projects planned that are set in my alternate history steampunk country of Freedonia: From Here to Timbuktu, an action adventure novel and Unrequited, an action romance series. After that, who knows?”

What is “steamfunk?” It’s Kool Herc behind the turntables, it’s Coltrane taking a deep breath, George S. Schuyler’s smile as he put pen to paper or Obama stopping to take it all in after the second inaugural. Taking the pieces of whatever’s available and making it wonderful, be it soul food or impossible situations and characters, coming to you one scintillating syllable at a time. Now there’s another new way, a path to “the other country,” and you’re welcome to take a trip.

“… there is a deeper world than this
tugging at your hand …

– Sting, “Love is the Seventh Wave”

The Steamfunk! anthology is available now.

[Originally posted on Komplicated at The Good Men Project]