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MOVING

PARTS

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Copyright © 2008 by Lex Fonteyne

Cover design and page layout by T44 Studio

(773) 474-9525

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book like this doesn’t just happen without some influences and

encouragement from any number of people.

I want to thank Denise and Nora and all the others from JSH/Mingle2 who

have been so supportive of my efforts.

Special thanks to Teresa of T44 Studio, who – once again– spent hours on

formatting, proofreading, sending questions and suggestions, brainstorming ideas

for the cover (and keeping me from becoming overintensively obscure and esoteric

in my own peculiar symbolisms!), and mainly for being there for me when it

needed to get done.

And thanks to Melissa, for being the first to read the whole thing, and for all

the constructive comments. There’s a character named for you in the next one,

Sug.

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For Melissa – my friend, confidante, proofreader, co-conspirator in the llama/caulking gun/duct tape/Velcro incident, provider of Fuzzy Peaches and the ever-elusive gray Staedtler pens. I couldn’t have done it without you.

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MOVING PARTS

BY

LEX FONTEYNE

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INTRODUCTION

Moving Parts is a book of short stories and poems, etc., many of which relate

to my previous novel Moving Day. If you haven’t read Moving Day, it won’t make

much difference, because all of the stories here should be perfectly comprehensible

as standalone pieces. The one possible exception is the very short piece The Last

Worm on Mars, which is directly tied to the Moving Day storyline but shouldn’t be

too hard to follow regardless.

You will notice that some of the stories actually tie together; for instance,

there is a thematic link between Painting the Rocks and The Pharmacy. In that

instance, it happened because the two were originally going to be one story, but I

figured out a way to add the Jimmy character (originally featured in The Coin, and

used several times afterward) into the mix.

Mr. Backenfort and Lest We Forget also share a minor link.

Several of the stories (Inspiration and Zero Is...., to name two) don’t tie into

anything other than themselves, and this is because I wanted to include some

pieces that took place outside the Moving Day universe. Actually, I did figure out a

way I could

tie Inspiration into the Moving Day storyline, at one point, but it would require a

certain (too much!) amount of convoluted shoehorning; in the end, I think that

story works best on its own.

For those who have read Moving Day, you will note the presence of Frank

O’Halloran here – he shows up in 1969 in Painting the Rocks, in 1993 in The

Operation, in 2007 in Lest We Forget. Frank is a key character in Moving Day, and

will continue to appear in the future as more of that storyline unfolds. A word

about the Jimmy character: Jimmy first appeared in The Coin, a story I wrote in

April of 2006 as an intended one-shot.

When I got the idea for the story that eventually became Painting the Rocks

and The Pharmacy, it occurred to me that I could incorporate a younger Jimmy

into this story; he would be the one who discovered the mistake that was made

during Painting the Rocks. After that, I wrote Have a Smoke as a sort of slice-of-

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Jimmy’s- life piece, which takes a brief look at his life approximately a year after

The Coin. Then came Prostake Lamb, with Jimmy at age five. The final Jimmy

story, The Operation, takes place when Jimmy is 21, and deals with the aftermath

and repercussions of his discovery during The Pharmacy – and may serve to

explain some of his subsequent behaviors. Or not. It also depicts the first

―meeting‖ between Jimmy and Frank, who, at this point, would seem to be the

focal points of the resolution of the Moving Day storyline.

I was originally going to call this book Moving Pictures, in the sense that

many of the stories are little pictures of a bigger, overall story linked to Moving

Day. Of course, there is always the possibility of readers becoming confused if an

author uses the same word in more than one book title (although it doesn’t seem to

have hurt John Sandford with his ―Prey‖ titles!), and for awhile I considered the

title My Sinking Teen Angel, a line from the poem Dunk Tank (included herein),

but eventually decided on Moving Parts, as many of these stories are ―parts‖ of the

much larger Moving Day story.

I am still tentatively planning on using the title Moving Targets for the sequel to

Moving Day, but, as always, that’s subject to change without notice.

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I hope you’ll enjoy these stories and poems.

Lex Fonteyne

The end of the world, it is written in Criswell Predicts, will take

place Wednesday, Aug. 18, 1999. That day, every point on earth

will be covered by a black rainbow—not just any black rainbow,

mind you, but ―a jet-black rainbow; an ebony rainbow; a black

rainbow which will signify the coming suffocation of our world.

This black rainbow will seemingly bring about, through some

mysterious force beyond our comprehension, a lack of oxygen. It will

draw the oxygen from our atmosphere, as a huge snake encircling

the world and feeding upon the oxygen which we need to exist.

Hour after hour, it will grow worse. And we will grow weaker. It

is through this that we will be so weakened that when the final end

arrives, we will go silently, we will go gasping for breath, and then

there will be only silence on the earth.‖

– http://www.criswellpredicts.com/criswell_predicted.htm

Didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t....at some point in

the future.....

....or that it hasn’t....at some point in the past....

....or something very much like it....

L.F.

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THE COIN

Jimmy is walking around at the mall, not really doing anything, just sort of

dicking around, wasting time. It’s 11:22 on a Friday morning, so there isn’t much

of anybody here yet. He sees a few old people inching along, looking into store

windows as if there’s some kind of giant mechanical lizard inside, devouring the

clothing-folders and cashiers, but he doubts if that’s the case, because even a giant

mechanical lizard would have to be pretty bored to show up at the mall at 11:22 on

a Friday morning. Especially without any money.

But I’m here, Jimmy thinks to himself. Well, that’s different. Jimmy really

should be looking for a job. When he left the apartment this morning, he told

Jennifer, his current live-in girlfriend (has it been seven months now? -- seems like

seventy), that he would be going to the old lumber yard down on 133rd Street, to

see if they were hiring. So, he went there, and, to his astonishment (and, if he

wants to be honest, a little bit of relief), the lumber yard has gone out of business.

Kaput. Poof. He knows they were still operating sometime last year; last fall

maybe, because one of the neighbors had gone there to buy some wood for a

bookshelf or something. Jimmy remembers seeing the guy pulling boards out of

the back of his station wagon that day.

But now the lumber yard is no more, and Jimmy feels he should reward

himself for having the diligence to obtain this new piece of (ultimately useless)

information. So he has come to the mall. Why the mall? He knows he can’t go

home. Jenny will be there; if he shows up at home this early, Jenny will know he

wasn’t serious about looking for a job today. Jenny will yell at him, maybe throw

something at him. She gets like that sometimes.

He gets mad, too. Sometimes he hits her. She cries and threatens to leave, but

she never really does. She holds the threat over his head, like that Sword of

Damascus he read about in high school. Where’s Damascus? He wonders. An old

memory flies up

into his consciousness. Syria. He has no idea where Syria is, but he remembers the

name.

What a memory I got! Jimmy thinks to himself. Another thing he should

reward himself for. Jimmy used to have a pretty decent job working for his Uncle

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Bob, who owns a landscaping business. Uncle Bob hired Jimmy as a favor to

Jimmy’s mom, Bob’s sister, who was concerned about her son’s viability as a

functioning (not to mention wage-earning) adult. Bob figured Jimmy would make

a suitable ―grunt,‖ as he referred to his less intellectually-gifted employees – the

guys who unloaded the tools off the truck, the guys who unrolled the big rolls of

sod, the guys who did all the work that was too ―dirty‖ (low?) for the big shots like

Bob and his prissy ―assistant‖ Marcelino. Jimmy showed a certain facility for

things like carrying a shovel from Point A to Point B, which helped, because that

was a huge part of his job; but, after a few months, Jimmy got bored and started

skipping work. And Uncle Bob looked the other way for a week or two, and then

told Jimmy he was fired. Jimmy had been fired before, plenty of other times, from

plenty of other jobs, of course, so this wasn’t exactly a surprise.

In a way, it was a relief, because he was tired of coming home every day

with dirt running through his clothes, cuts on his hands, sunburned – the pay was

good, he had to admit that, but you had to go through a lot of discomfort and

inconvenience to get it. Jimmy is sure there’s a better job out there for him

somewhere, a job where he won’t have to get dirty and bloody and put up with that

snooty Marcelino telling him he pulled the wrong thing off the truck again. I could

do a lot of things, Jimmy muses, although the specifics are still a little vague at this

point. Jimmy is only 34; it’s not like he’s an old man or anything. He still has time

to ―find Jenny might not see things that way, though.

She keeps telling Jimmy to ―grow up,‖ to start thinking about the future,

marriage, a family….

Jimmy shudders a little.

The girl at the information booth, the one Jimmy thinks is totally gorgeous,

isn’t working today. At least not this early; maybe she comes in for the afternoon

shift. Jimmy thinks maybe he’ll hang around till 2:00 to see if she shows up. Jenny

wouldn’t like that, a little voice whispers into his brain. Screw Jenny, he replies to

the whispery nobody, I’d dump her in a minute if I could get hooked up with

what’s-her-name at the information booth.

What is her name? Jimmy remembers seeing it on her name tag one day,

when he went up to her and asked some question about a pay phone or something.

He snuck a peek at her name tag while she was explaining that there were pay

phones near all the entrances and near the rest rooms. Jessica something. A little

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too close to Jenny? Hell, she can’t help it if her name starts with the same letter as

my annoying girlfriend, Jimmy thinks.

Jimmy walks by the information booth again, and notices that there’s only

one woman working there. Usually – on a Saturday or Sunday, or sometimes in the

evenings – they have at least two. Jimmy remembers seeing four of them in there,

on a weekend, right before Christmas. The mall was packed back then. People

everywhere.

Jimmy likes the mall, always has, but that one day, just before Christmas, it

was a nightmare. The noise, the kids screaming – no, shrieking – everywhere you

turned; the Christmas music, way too loud (there is a certain decibel-level above

which ―Frosty the Snowman‖ becomes painful); the self absorbed mothers with

their giant strollers who simply don’t care how much space they take up, or how

slowly they move, or how they hamper the progress of whoever is behind them; the

obnoxious sample-giver-outers, in their stained aprons and black shoes, trying to

force their baked squid patties on you – Jimmy remembers promising himself

never to come to the mall that close to Christmas again.

He turns a corner, walks by two empty stores; one used to be a shoe store, he

remembers, an athletic shoe store. Their prices were ridiculous, Jimmy recalls.

That’s probably why they’re out of business now. Jimmy can’t remember

what the other store used to be. He peers into the big plate glass window. There are

no lights on inside the abandoned store, but Jimmy can make out a counter on the

left side. There are a handful of tables scattered randomly across the floor. No clue

as to what they had been selling here. Or trying to sell; presumably, on some level,

they were ultimately unsuccessful.

There never used to be any empty stores in this mall, Jimmy thinks. Every

spot was full. On those rare occasions when somebody did close down, there was a

new tenant waiting in line to fill the gap. Jimmy laughs to himself. Gap. There

used to be a Gap here, too. What happened to that?

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Jimmy wonders if Jessica ever shopped at the Gap. He’d like to take her

shopping one day. Well, if he had any money. If he had a job. If he had a job where

he could make some money and not come home at the end of the day looking like

he’d been in a coal mine for six months, then he’d show Jessica a good time. She

would like him if she ever got to know him. Jimmy is sure of that. He could be

nice to Jessica. She’s not like Jenny. Jessica is meant for loving, not for hitting, not

for nagging. Jessica would understand him.

Jimmy is in front of the little bookstore, near the cell-phone kiosk, when he

sees the coin on the floor. When he reaches down and picks it up, he sees it’s not

like any kind of coin he has ever seen before. He looks around. There’s no one in

sight. Nobody saw him pick up the coin.

The coin is in a clear plastic sleeve, with a flap that folds over, and there’s a

small square of paper tucked into the flap. Jimmy looks at the paper. It says:

―Commodus (A.D. 180-192) was a megalomaniac who brought the era of good

emperors to a horrifying close. Commodus imagined himself as the reincarnation

of Hercules and personally participated in many of the gladiatorial contests.

Testimony to his conceit is found in a sestertius depicting him wearing a lion

skin over his head, just like the favored image of Hercules. He did not prove as

invincible however, and was murdered by a gladiator hired by his enemies.‖

Jimmy doesn’t know what a sestertius is, but assumes it must be a picture or

a painting or something. Jimmy looks at the coin. It’s about the size of a quarter,

which he originally thought it was, but it’s a little thicker and a little darker than

any quarter he’s ever seen before. The coin is obviously very old, very worn;

there’s a profile on the front, some guy looking to the right, he has a big nose – this

must be Commodus.

Doesn’t look anything like Hercules to me, Jimmy thinks conclusively,

conveniently forgetting the fact that he has no idea what Hercules actually looked

like, or if Hercules even existed.

Jimmy remembers Hercules as a character from old comic books, where he

was fighting Thor or Captain America or somebody like that. Hercules was a big,

brawny guy, with a beard and a huge grin, nothing like this Commodus fellow on

the coin.

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Circling the picture of Commodus’ head on the coin are some letters. Some

of the letters are too worn to make out, but the name ―COMMODVS‖ clearly

appears at the top. Jimmy thinks about the name Commodus. Like a commode, he

thinks.

He chuckles. He remembers a joke that was going around back when he was

in high school: Which Roman emperor had the biggest ass? Gluteus Maximus. Phil

Webber once explained to him that gluteus maximus was part of the butt, and

that’s why the joke is funny.

Jimmy turns the coin over. On the other side, there is a picture of a woman

holding something that looks like a banjo with an overly long neck. Jimmy is

pretty sure they didn’t have banjos back in 180 A.D., but he’s not an expert on

string instruments and really isn’t certain what this particular piece of equipment

might have been called. He remembers seeing some old string instruments in a

museum once, when he was a kid on a school field trip.

He remembers a harp, a lute, a lyre; but this thing on the coin is none of

those. It’s something entirely different.

Jimmy looks around again, and wonders where the coin came from. There is

still nobody in sight, other than an old woman gazing absent-mindedly at the big

mall directory standing at the end of the corridor. Jimmy frowns. Was there ever a

coin store in this mall? No – not here. There used to be one over on Knepper

and Fifteenth, but they went out of business years ago.

Jimmy pulls the coin out of its plastic holder and slips it into his pocket. He

puts the square piece of paper into his wallet (in case he wants to read about

Commodus again later), and then drops the holder into a nearby trash can. He

makes sure nobody notices. While he’s got his wallet out, he counts his money.

Twenty - seven dollars and ninety-three cents. I’ll have to call Mom and see

if she’ll borrow me a few bucks, Jimmy thinks. She’ll gripe a little, but she’ll come

through. She always does. Mom’s loaded and it’s not like she has anything better

to do with her money. He feels a twinge of guilt, for about three-tenths of a second,

but manages to shrug it off.

Jimmy is getting a little hungry (it’s almost lunchtime, and he’s been out

diligently looking for a job since 9:00 a.m.), so he wanders into the food court. He

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looks around at all of the restaurants; he can’t believe the one place is actually

serving panda. Aren’t they endangered? He remembers seeing something on the

Discovery Channel about pandas. Pandas are cute – not cute like Jessica, but cute

in a fuzzy, cuddly, like-to-have-one-for-a-pet kind of way.

Who could eat them?

Jimmy picks the burger joint – as he always does – and gets the double with

ketchup only, fries, and a Green River. Six bucks and change. If he had a job, he

could eat here every day.

Jimmy sits at one of the dozens of tables in the food court. There are a fair

number of people here eating now – it’s almost noon, and some of the mall

employees, from various stores, are drifting in. He notices a line starting to form at

the panda place.

He shakes his head.

As he eats his lunch, Jimmy pulls the coin out of his pocket and looks at it

again. This thing is more than 1800 years old, he thinks, doing some quick math.

It’s got to be the oldest thing he’s ever had in his pocket. He remembers going to

that old coin store, the one on Knepper, and the guy who worked there showing

him half-cents and two-cent pieces, three-cent pieces and twenty-cent pieces.

Jimmy remembers being skeptical about those coins, even as a kid, because

there were no half-cent, or two-cent, or three-cent, or twenty-cent coins anymore,

and if they made them once, why wouldn’t they still be making them today? Well,

maybe not the half-cent; you can’t buy anything for a penny today, so what would

be the point of a half-cent?

But all those coins had been from the 1800s. American coins. The guy had

some foreign coins, too, but not really old ones. Jimmy remembered the guy

showing him a coin from 1794; he called it a ―large cent.‖ It was a penny, but it

was the size of a half dollar. That made no sense. Imagine trying to put that thing

into a gumball machine! Jimmy laughs.

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But this coin – Commodus – this thing was way older than anything at the

coin store. Commodus was alive before Columbus ever came to America.

Commodus was alive before the airplane, the car, the telephone, the TV, had even

been invented.

Jimmy wonders if Commodus ever met any cavemen. They must have been

around at about the same time. Maybe the cavemen annoyed Commodus, and

that’s why he became such a bad emperor.

Jimmy finishes his lunch, gets up, and places the wrappers and his empty

cup into the trash bin. More people are coming in.

There is a small line at the pizza place, a larger one at the panda place.

Jimmy wonders why the animal rights people aren’t here protesting. Maybe they

don’t know about this situation.

Jimmy thinks about the coin. It must be worth something, seeing as how it’s

so old and has historical significance. If that guy on Knepper was still there, I

could take it over to him and maybe he’d buy it, Jimmy thinks. That would be

something, to come home with a few thousand dollars and show it to Jenny.

Then she’d get off his back for awhile. Then he wouldn’t have to keep

borrowing from Mom.

Jimmy thinks about Jessica at the information booth. If he had a few

thousand dollars, from selling the coin, maybe he’d ask Jessica out, take her to a

nice restaurant (no pandas!) and show her what a classy guy he could be. Girl like

that, you can’t take her to some burger joint, Jimmy thinks.

Jimmy wanders over to the center court of the mall, where the big fake

waterfall is.

People come from miles around to oooh and aaah at the fake waterfall, and

take pictures of it and throw pennies into the little pool at the bottom. They say the

pennies are gathered up at the end of the day and given to some charity, maybe

multiple sclerosis or diabetes or something. Jimmy thinks if it was him doing the

gathering, he’d just keep most of the money for himself – who’d ever know? It’s

not like they had a guy standing by the fake waterfall all day, calculating the

amount of money people were tossing in.

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But they also say that if you throw some pennies into the pool at the bottom

of the fake waterfall, you can wish for something and your wish will be granted.

Jimmy doesn’t believe in the supernatural, except maybe ghosts and UFOs,

but he’s feeling good about finding the Commodus coin and he’s just about at the

point where he can justify throwing some money in and making a

wish.

So he rummages through his pocket and finds the change from lunch, and

some other change he had when he came in. Seventy-two cents altogether, not

counting the Commodus coin, which he gently slips back into his front left pocket.

Jimmy tosses a nickel into the pool; watches it ploop down into the water

with a satisfying little spray. Next, he delivers a dime, a penny, another penny, a

quarter (should have saved that for laundry, he thinks, for just a second, and then

dismisses the idea with a but what the hell), until it’s all gone. Seventy-two

cents to cure multiple sclerosis. Maybe it’s my seventy-two cents that will put them

over the top to finding the cure, Jimmy reasons.

Jimmy makes a wish, or two, or three. He wishes Jenny would leave him

alone. He wishes Jessica What’s-her-name from the information booth would go

out with him, maybe move in with him. Hey, she’s got a job! He wishes his car

was better, newer, nicer. He wishes he had a job worthy of his talents, something

that wouldn’t require him to get dirty or sweaty or oily or grubby or covered in

fertilizer. He wishes he had gone to college. He wishes he could pay Mom back,

somehow, even though she never complains about his borrowing from her, she just

shakes her head and pats him on the shoulder before she goes into the bedroom to

get her purse.

The coin. The coin is a sign, Jimmy suddenly realizes.

Jimmy understands. He can sell the coin. It’ll be worth thousands of dollars,

maybe a million. Maybe more.

How many coins from 1800 years ago are still around? Can’t be more than a

few. Each one must be worth a fortune.

Maybe I’ve got the only one left in the whole world, Jimmy thinks.

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Jimmy thinks about the irony of Commodus, the cruel and evil tyrant who

destroyed so many lives when he was walking around in his emperor days, now

being the savior for Jimmy, nearly two millennia later. He thinks about Commodus

slapping Jenny, telling her to shut up and leave him alone.

Jimmy sees the pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters sparkling in the

pool.

Money for the sick. Their lives to benefit from the offerings of others.

The coin in his pocket.

Jimmy has to tell somebody.

He decides to call home. He’ll tell Jenny. She’ll complain at first, because he

was supposed to be out looking for a job; but, once she realizes what’s happened,

once she realizes he’s been given a sign, she’ll understand. She’ll understand that

this is the first step towards a better life.

I wonder, Jimmy thinks, if she’ll understand when I push her out the door to

make room for Jessica? He chuckles at the thought.

Jimmy walks past the gift shop, past the toy store, past the place where they

sell all the scary goth clothing and stuff, towards the south mall entrance. They

have pay phones by the entrances.

Jessica told him so.

He reaches into his pocket. He still has a coin in there, to make the call

home.

There are four pay phones just inside the entrance. None of them are being

used.

Jimmy smiles.

Somebody up there likes me, Jimmy thinks.

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Thank you for reading the first chapters of Moving Parts. If you enjoy the story

and would like to read more then don't hesitate to pick up a copy at

www.amazon.com