Shadow of the Mothaship | Page 5

a project, Stude. Nothing to worry."
"What kinda project?"

"Art project. Fun-fricken-tastic. You'll love it."
"'Cause you know, they tag the shit with buckyballs now, one molecule
in a million with a serial number and a checksum. You do something
stupid, I get chopped."
I hadn't known. Didn't matter, my parents' house was legally mine,
while they were up confabbing with their alien buds on the mothaship.
"No worries."
"That'll be, uh, sixty-eight cents."
"Thirty."
"Sixty, firm."
"Fifty-four."
"Fifty-eight."
"Take it in trade?"
"Fricken Maxes! Tradesies? You're wastin' my time, lookin' for bootleg
solvent, looking for trade and no cash? Get fucked, Maxes."
He starts to haw-up Tilly and I go, "Wait-wait-wait, I got some good
stuff. Everything must go, moving sale, you know?"
He looks really pissed and I know it hard now, I'm gonna get *taken*. I
hand him up my bag, and he does a fast-paw through the junk. "What's
this?" he asks.
"Old video game. Atari. Shoot up the space aliens. Really, really
antisocial. Needs a display, but I don't got it anymore." I'd sold it the
month before on a bored day, and used the eight cents to buy good
seats behind home plate at the Skydome and thus killed an entire
afternoon before Judgment Day.
There are some of the artyfarty "freestyle" kitchen utensils Mum used

to sell for real cash until Dad founded his Process for Lasting
Happiness and she found herself able to pursue "real art." There are
paper books and pictures and assorted other crap.
Stude clucks and shakes his head. "If I just gave you the monofil and
the fix-bath for this shit, it'd be a favour. Look, I can *get* real money
for solvent. I *pay* real money for solvent. This just don't cut it."
"I'll get more, just hang a sec."
He haws-up Tilly but reigns her in slow, and I dash back to my place
and fill a duffel with anything I lay hands to, and run out, dragging it
behind me, catching the cart before it turns the corner. "Here, here, take
this too."
Stude dumps it out in front of him and kicks at the pile. "This is just
crap, Maxes. There's lots of it, sure, but it's still crap."
"I need it, Stude, I really need some solvent. You already *got* all my
good stuff."
He shakes his head, sad, and says, "Go ask Tilly."
"Ask?"
"Tilly. Ask her."
Stude likes to humiliate you a little before he does you a favour. The
word is *capricious*, he told me once.
So I go to his smelly old horse and whisper in her hairy ear and hold
my breath as I put my ear next to the rotten jumbo-chiclets she uses for
teeth. "She says you should do it," I say. "And she says you're an
asshole for making me ask her. She says horses can't talk."
"Yeah, okay," and he tosses me the goods.
#

With stage one blessedly behind me, I'm ready for stage two. I take the
nozzle of the solvent aerosol and run a drizzle along the fatty roll of the
windowsills and then pop them out as the fix bath runs away and the
windows fly free and shatter on the street below.
Then it's time to lighten the ballast. With kicks and grunts and a mantra
of "Out, out, out," I toss everything in the house out, savouring each
crash, taking care to leave a clear path between the house and the street.
On the third floor, I find Dad's cardigan, the one Mum gave him one
anniversary, and put it on. She carved it herself from foam and fixed it
with some flexible, dirt-shedding bath, so by the time I'm done with the
third floor, my arms and chest are black with dust, and the sweater is
still glowing with eerie cleanliness.
I know Dad wouldn't want me to wear his sweater now. They say that
on the mothaship, the bugouts have ways to watch each and every one
of us, and maybe Mum and Dad are there, watching me, and so I wipe
my nose on the sleeve.
#
When the ballast is done, phase three begins. I go to work outside of
the house, spritzing a line of solvent at the point where the foam meets
the ground, until it's all disconnected.
And then I got to kick myself for an asshole. A strand of armoured
fibre-optic, a steel water pipe, and the ceramic gas line hold it all down,
totally impervious to solvent.
Somewhere, in a toolbox that I ditched out the second floor window, is
a big old steel meat-cleaver, and now I hunt for it, prying apart the piles
of crap with a broomstick, feeling every inch the post-apocalyptic
scrounger.
I finally locate it, hanging out