Contemporaryfictiongurl

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Contemporaryfictiongurl!

It's late September and cool in the morning. I walk around and check the pepper plants, which are starting to ripen, and pick a handful of cherry tomatoes.

I sat out on the patio and read a couple chapters of Snow Crash while I ate my fried egg sandwich with a second cup of coffee. A hacker named Hiro Protagonist is hot on the trail of a neurolinguistic conspiracy to reverse the Tower of Babel story by reprogramming everyone to speak in tongues. Some would call it "science fiction" because that's the section where it is shelved in the bookstore. Others would call it "cyberpunk" because that's the subgenre where its fans say it fits like a nanotechnological glove. I'm just looking for a live story.

This is the suburbs. Name's Sven Golly. I'm an editor.

After breakfast I mixed some dry yeast with warm water and sugar, let it sit, added flour, and set the bowl of whole wheat sponge out in the sun to grow into dough. Then I started a second batch, pouring sourdough starter into a bowl, adding a little oil and water, some flour, and setting it in the sun to encourage select microorganisms to propagate and grow in that nutritious, moist medium and carry their informational structure into their organic environment. A culture spreads in a community; software informs and instructs hardware; viruses attach themselves to a habitable medium and change it.

I hear a dog's sharp bark down the block and look around for Dali. A minute ago she was chasing a squirrel up a tree, but I don't see her anywhere in the yard. She isn't napping in her usual chair in the house, so I worry. Did I leave a gate open? I walk to the corner, where some new neighbors, Rita and Dennis, are sitting in lawn chairs having a yard sale. "Nice bike. You haven't seen a little spotted dog, have you?" No, they haven't, and the barking is their golden retriever. I hadn't even noticed their moving in (this week?), or Brian's moving out (last week?), or the for-sale sign being taken down. That's how disconnected I am from my immediate environment.

Is there a story here? Can one be crafted from the scant material available? Does the mind make one up anyway, filling in the missing facts as needed to make sense of it all? I decide to check one more place, and Dali is found whimpering in the upstairs bedroom where she has locked herself in. Mystery solved.

I decide to pickle some cherry tomatoes in a sealed jar of saltwater and see how they react. It works with peppers, why not tomatoes?

Something purple has dripped on the pale pink ceramic tiles of the patio table, staining it in irregular blotches. A few little bundles of brown pine needles mixed in, smearing the purple pigment. Some kind of berries? Bird poop from the overhanging maple tree? One perfectly radiating purple splatter looks like photos of solar flares leaping from the surface of the sun, or Jackson Pollack's careful randomness, or an ink blot on paper.

Zelda wants me to read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I don't know why, but she thinks I'd like it. I saw a copy of it lying on the floor of her room. She declared her intention yesterday to read a "classic" once a month to make up for the many great books that weren't assigned while she was in school. I had to ask what defines 'classic', and for her purposes it's canonical literature - Beowulf, Dickens, Hemingway. I think she knows what she's doing: she calls herself a "contemporary fiction girl." She wants to broaden her knowledge base, and she's in a good position to do it now.

When I found the dog up in Zelda's room, there was stuff all over the place: clothes, art books, paperbacks, cigarettes, empty cups and glasses. Yet I sense an orderly, self-contained fermentation taking place in that warm space.