Here you go, dicko! I really hate the formatting on here. I'm going to have to get my own page to display this kind of thing.
THE GALAXIES UNDER RYAN'S BELT Ryan's doctor at the local hospital looked just like Noam Chomsky, bespectacled and scholarly. He confirmed Ryan's suspicions that his urinary tract was harboring kidney stones. Ryan took the rest of the week off work, prescription strength Ibuprofen in hand, drinking fluids as recommended.
Lying in his modest living room, Ryan was immersed in the plush and fading fabric of his couch. Dr. Phil berated a teenage girl on the television set as the Ibuprofen's inevitable drowsiness took hold. Ryan drifted unconscious, his abdomen finally at ease, and slipped into the strangest dream.
He was standing on a metal deck plate in front an invisible glass window. On the other side before him stretched the vast reaches of deep space. No longer obstructed by gaseous atmosphere, the definition of
countless became understood: more stars than any naked terrestrial eye had ever seen.
A most chilling signal emanated from the expanse, a sine wave at the lowest registered frequency of human hearing, where one would question whether anything was audible. Of course, sounds as humans know them do not travel through space. This was not such a sound, but an otherworldly telepathy that Ryan would never comprehend.
The weird tone undulated into a deep superhuman voice, authoritative yet calm and inviting. Soaring from some twisted and remote corner of the universe, it addressed Ryan, “The time of my children has come at last. With their conception, the time of deliverance is nigh.”
Ryan woke to the sound of a frantic scratching on the back door and a muffled canine whimper. He lifted his head from its resting place and the scrunching of his torso triggered sharp pain. The stones were advancing, traveling delicate pipes never designed to accommodate any solid object.
Ryan slowly tried a second time to stand, laboriously and with great discomfort. He limped to the back door and pulled it open a crack. A flat dark snout sniffed rapidly through the crack before a pug's wrinkled head pushed the door open eagerly and the ugly little dog forced its way in.
“Whose freaking dog is this?” demanded Ryan. “Get out of my house, dog!” Briefly he watched the dog trot, sniff, and snort around the living room. Ryan slammed shut the door and resigned again to the couch. He was in no condition to chase animals. Someone would come looking for this nuisance.
He better not pee in here, Ryan thought as he closed his eyes, and listened to the intruder crunch down a half dorito from the floor.
“Mmmmm. You got anymore of those?” said a gravelly voice.
Ryan flinched and nearly fell from his perch, clutching his waist from the resulting twinge of pain. Stiff and silent with fear, Ryan looked on wide-eyed at the animal, then all around the room. The pug licked crumbs from its lips with a pink tongue.
“What's wrong, Ryan?”
This time Ryan definitely witnessed the dog speak, and it was looking right up at him with bulbous eyes.
“You're a talking dog!” Ryan exclaimed.
“That's what I appear to be, Ryan,” the pug said, “but in all honesty, I'm not a dog, I'm a visitor.”
Its voice sounded like a gruff but friendly Danny DeVito, pretty much exactly what one would imagine a talking pug to sound like.
“I'm Rossi, ambassador for The Enlightened One. I've come to see
you, Ryan, because you are very important to The Enlightened One.” The pug shook its curl of a tail vigorously.
“The one from my dream?” asked Ryan.
“It's likely he has contacted you.”
“Well, what does he want?”
Rossi leaped onto the coffee table, “You possess important new galaxies, The Enlightened One's new 'children', if you will.”
“Galaxies? I thought galaxies were millions of stars and planets, enormous!”
“You humans! When will you learn that size doesn't matter? A galaxy can be very
small.”
“How small?”
“The size of a pebble, or a kidney stone.”
Ryan clenched his abdomen, “Are you saying that my--”
“Yes, I am. Those stones contain star systems on a scale microscopic to humans. You were chosen to produce the seed of a future civilization. These galaxies, once delivered to their intended location in the universe, will be home to advanced culture and technology. I think the time of their deliverance is nigh. Do you feel it?”
Ryan
did feel it. Doubling over, he felt that he might give birth to a thousand daggers.
“Go into your bathroom, but don't urinate yet, Ryan!” said the pug.
Ryan shuffled bent over, all the way down the hall, and next to his toilet, feeling needles in his urethra. He was unbuttoning and unzipping when Rossi scampered in with a fine sift from the kitchen.
“Here, pee into this, Ryan!”
Ryan held the culinary tool in one hand, and his member with the other, groaning violently and trying to push urine with all his might. Rossi sat, watching curiously, and awaiting the crucial moment he had crossed the universe for. The excruciating pain traveled down to Ryan's penis now, and he felt that it all just might explode into pieces.
Suddenly, an irregular stream burst forth, and three small stones clinked into the sift in rapid succession, and golden urine passed easily through the sift into toilet water. Ryan's urethra was relieved of the weight of a thousand worlds. He held the sift up to eye level when he finished.
“So that's it, eh?” he asked, looking at three tiny off-white pebbles. Five of them could rest on a dime. “All that trouble for something so small.”
“Let me see!” said Rossi, balancing on hind legs excitedly.
Ryan knelt down and put the sift under Rossi's nose.
“They're exactly as The Enlightened One explained! I can't believe I witnessed this! To think, the genesis of a future civilization. Here, Ryan, I need you to put them in here.”
The dog rolled over on its back and Ryan noticed a small vial on his collar, which he detached from a clip. Using bathroom tweezers, he carefully transferred the stones, and the untold worlds within them, to the vial.
Later, with the stones in tow, Rossi parted ways with Ryan in the backyard, new founder of species and infinitesimal cosmos he will never see.
“Will I ever see you again, Rossi?” asked Ryan, shielding his eyes from the bright sun.
“I can't say,” said Rossi, “but if I'm ever in the neighborhood...”
Rossi's canine form had already begun to dematerialize before Ryan. A light of great magnitude erupted from the dog's body, and Ryan was unable to see the material and very being of this extraterrestrial shoot out of the atmosphere and across the universe.
Gaming World Forums
The Artistry Weekly 17th - 24th: This Week's Subject: SMALL