Lavender: a Strangely Slipstream Novelette

Guilt

She imagined burying her head up against her father, smelling the familiar scent of his underarms and having to admit she was one of the Anti-Heroes bent on destruction of the time-share world he'd created.

They'd had such lovely dinners together. She wiped her eyes on a Bloodflower leaf. She blew her nose into another one, a soggy mess. When the blood from the cuts stung her into realization about what she had done to herself, she threw the leaves with force, and they spun around in the air around her. Her face swelled and she felt as if she deserved the sting. Pain made sense.

She shook her fingers the way the woman she had grown in her garden and named "the DayMare" had shown her how to do. The point was to get rid of obsessive thoughts, so she could fully enter the necessary state of wordlessness.

Though she hated the inevitable corruption of Lavender the Poetic World, she had to admit that she loved how a profound mood infused the air. A mood that that couldn't be captured in direct paraphrase. Only in nuanced cadences.

That wordless effervescence, like a fizzy alkalizing drink combined with salt triggered the scalp implants, allowing the conduit of travel back and forth between Lavender and Earth for the time-share sessions.

Often, people used the silent state of mind to travel briefly to Earth to get some snacks, treats too gaudily wrapped and corporately named to be allowed in Lavender.

If they ate chocolate-covered espresso beans, they then found the wordless state required to travel back to Lavender hard to achieve indeed. People with little control over their thoughts often had to try on a daily basis before they'd make it off Earth, and once they popped off, they'd stay a good while, taking advantage of all the non-poetic vices.

Something about all those people going so fast in cramped, zooming Woven Traffic to other alternative worlds made her shudder. She couldn't explain what it was that bothered her, even to herself. It was like tiny electronic wires made of consciousness. Awful. And it was her job.

She had to count her breaths to forget about Traffic in order to open into the necessary state of inner wordlessness, atmospheric and subtle: the Salt Meditation. The trip to Earth and back using that Meditation, in the illicit slow and deliciously consciousness altering way, was illegally transcendent.

But she had no intention of simply taking a salt capsule and appearing on Earth quickly, in a perfectly ordinary state. That was fine for people who liked to go by rules and never feel the tingle of enlightenment.

She preferred the luxurious lick.

She sat down in the DNA Garden in front of the Deerplant's salt lick and reached out with her tongue. The Deerplant regarded her with warmly expanded pupils as its tongue barely missed hers while they licked the white rectangle. Sometimes, its tongue flickered against hers as they took in the intense flavor, but it didn't seem to pay much attention.

Animals grown in Lavender's gardens weren't affected by Transportation Salt the way people were, since only people were implanted with the transducing device. Salt, forbidden as a flavoring for any humans, thrilled Anna's tongue. She could barely stand the pleasure as she began to taste it in the two worlds at once! Her skin buzzzzzzed.

Annatalia, at that doubled moment, pitied the renegades who refused the hyper-ionizing implantation, because they would never feel the amplified joy of transition between earth and an alternate world.

The rogues spent their lives hiding out on Earth from surveillance, never leaving for the required time-shares, thus taking up more time-space on the crowded planet than they were allowed. She felt they should be put in a preserve as a dying specifies when they got caught, rather than imprisoned. They were acting according to their conscience.

As was she.

She felt guilty about enjoying her alternative world, especially after moving to a different district within Lavender, away from her parents and younger sister. She supported herself by her job as a government youth-official rounding up the dangerously un-poetic people, sending them off to other worlds on the Woven rails.