Mars Williams Wanted A Sandwich

For this first story of the year, dear reader, a gentle reminder from a young scholar by the name of Mars Williams.

You may hunger; just don't forget your discipline. You'd be surprised, you see, what can happen when you're surprised by your own desires.

This week's story, then...

Mars Williams Wanted A Sandwich by M. K. Dreysen

What he got instead was a pocket dimension. One of the minor ones, good for a handful of coins (no paper) and a conversation every three weeks.

Short conversations, too. No long digressions, no footnotes to sophomore philosophy.

He'd tried to focus on his toes, had Mars. Or maybe it was his center; 101 Visions To Focus On had its good points.

But Mars didn't find all the clarity in the world between those covers. Or in Hermit's Magic For The Struggling Mystic.

That one, this nice lady wanted Mars to find a rock to sit on, and a valley of peace to build there. Only, Mars couldn't find many such rocks in downtown.

The Gulf Coast not being liberally possessed of rocks. Clay, sand, that sort of thing, but if you wanted to get up and away from the noise you had to settle for tall buildings. Like Mars's dorm room, at least on alternate days when the roommate gave space.

Mars had pictured his perfect sandwich. A Reuben. Bad ones, like the cafeteria ladies doing their best but come on kid there's a hundred waiting.

Good ones, like Murray's down in Rice Village. With the dressing and everything. Though Mars rather thought it was the latkes on the side that really topped everything off.

He'd tried the latkes only after Ginny told him they were just hashbrowns, only better. Just like the way he'd gone to Murray's with Ginny and Ty and Lewis for three or four semesters regular until he'd ordered something other than turkey on whole wheat. With potato chips.

Because what's pastrami when no one's looking? And cabbage on top? Come on, who wants that?

As it turned out, Mars Williams wants that, that's who. And the latkes because they tasted like...

like a distraction. The butter teased the back of his nose and tongue.

And thus the pocket dimension appeared. Instead of the sandwich and the pickle and the latkes.

Not that the pocket dimension had much on looks. Mars went three days wondering where his spare change went. Hard to feed the dorm's washer and dryer when you're short on both clean clothes AND pocket change.

The pocket dimension whispered its first conversational sally to Mars on the second Saturday after Mars's pocket change started disappearing.

Something about power. But that much Mars had learned properly. The Dual Path's author devoted their whole first chapter to that one. And The Martial Artist's Mind Tricks, that guy had written a whole book about all the ways to get sideways and weird.

Bad weird, not good weird. Like, Ty and Lewis and Trash Disco Nights were good, but hell yeah that was too weird for Kris and Kate and Mom and Dad, so he didn't try.

The crackled throat the pocket dimension had hidden somewhere, two packs and a bottle of something clear and bitter and a little bottle of white powder kind of throat, it whispered to Mars Williams and Mars had his reading and his preparation and so Mars didn't have to fight very hard to ignore the hint of bad weird wafting his way.

Not once he'd come down off the ceiling, anyway. He'd not exactly expected his little silver pocket change dish to come at him on a Saturday night with the tiniest voice of doom Mars Williams had ever heard.

And then he had to wait most of a month to finish the conversation. Through mid-terms, and the wind down from that.

"Power awaits your desires..." the dimension began.

"Wait, we've been through that already," Mars interrupted. In between studying, he'd wondered at the shortness of the conversation.

His coins had continued to disappear, so Mars knew the dimension still maintained itself. "How are you supposed to give me anything if you can't talk for more than five minutes a month?"

"It's more like seven minutes, on average," the dimension muttered.

"Did you work that out this month? Or have you been through this before?"

"Are you going to waste your minutes on irrelevant questions?"

Mars shrugged. He already didn't believe the dimension could offer much in the way of tangible benefits. "You're going to have to give me an example of something concrete."

"I'm not eating sand and pebbles," the dimension responded.

"Turn of phr... forget it. Look, how about a nice necklace, then?" But the timer ran out before the pocket dimension could reply.

So Mars waited his fortnight and a half. Patiently feeding the pocket dimension the results of his daily Coke and a snack from the vending machines habit.

"Right, so when we left off last time, you'd asked for a necklace."

"Necklace, maybe one of those dynamic sculptures?" Mars didn't ask for a ring. The necklace came too close for comfort as it was, but he'd said the first other obvious thing that came to mind.

He whistled when the dimension spat forth its work.

Not a gold necklace. "No transmutation?"

"For that you pay extra."

Not that it really mattered. The dimension had constructed a necklace of filigree and air; Mars didn't have a clue how much of the coinage had gone into the necklace.

Or body chain or something. The metal, fine wire, looped and threaded itself through Mars's hands. He slid the delicate tracing through his fingers.

And wound it down on his desk, when he realized he'd traced out far more of a length than should have been for a necklace. He closed his eyes and tried to forget how soothing it had been, chasing that endless loop.

The desk sculpture appeared after the Christmas break. "Go away," the dimension had told Mars in the in-between moment. "I'm busy."

Mars went home for the break, a pile of coins in the little silver dish to tide the mumbling dimension over. And came back to a tiny little solar system. "Where's Pluto?"

"Don't start with me."

Mars had to fashion a dome to cover it. To keep himself from staring at the planets, rotating themselves around the sun. They shouldn't have been, he knew. He should not have been able to tell their daily motion. Just like he couldn't spot any wires holding up Mercury and Jupiter, Saturn and Venus.

Yet, nonetheless, Mars found that, if he watched, patiently, the planets did spin themselves around the sun.

He lost a few nights that way. Thus, the cover.

And the vow to not spin the planets backwards. Not even when he failed that history paper. "Remember, you get one do-over," the TA told him.

"You have no idea," Mars whispered, once he'd left the grader's office.

Memories of the sculpture's mechanism trailing along behind him. He let go of them, Mars did, just like the Hermit lady had told him to.

He kept the dimension on strict rations, long on conversation, throughout the spring semester.

Well, as much conversation as he could get. The dimension didn't seem to enjoy probing questions. "Atlantis sits under a mile of seawater. Shangri-La is too crowded. Don't even get me started on Jerusalem."

After realizing that a metals-oriented dimension definitely had its reason for staying away from corrosion-promoting situations, Mars tried at least for history.

"You read the Conan stories, right? Close enough. It's history, kid, gone gone gone. Even the stone tablets have broken to dust. Thus is the way of all things."

Mars let the scholar in him sigh in disgust. Along with a brief dream of comics and gaming.

They both anticipated the summer. In their different ways.

The dimension broke the quiet interlude; Mars headed into the off week before spring finals anticipating long reviews, leavened by a short sparring session with the voice on his desk.

"Mars, listen, we don't have time this month. Someone's going to try and steal me away. Or worse. Soon, I can't say when exactly. The necklace is good, the sculpture will be a great aid if you've worked out a little of what it can do for you. Best I can tell, you've got time for one more small artifice before they come for me."

Mars let the first thought go, "What does a dimension fear?" And the second one, "Who, and how did they know about you?"

Everything produces waste of some sort. That the dimension's endeavors were visible to someone, somewhere; or that the dimension could be de-threaded in some way...

Mars let these noises drift away. "A mirror?"

"Oh..." the dimension breathed. "Right, of course."

The student and the dimension went about their end of semester business.

Mars noticed them out of the corner of his eye; just at the edge of his hearing. The conversation he almost understood, walking through the middle of the student center.

The second or third time he saw a face, some dude in black and gray. And not the typical didn't wash his clothes for a week, either.

So Mars packed up his hand-me-down Mazda, concentrating on the parking lot as much as he did the luggage. And when he walked into the house, kisses for Mom and Dad out of the way meant it was time to check out the computer.

And the camera feeds. Mom had installed them, maintained them.

The strangers didn't show up until after Mars had been home a week. Two weeks out from the next rotation of possibility with the pocket dimension. Mars had a fortnight to do something about them. Or not, but that thought didn't hang around long.

They'd agreed, the family had, that Mars could take over the little garage office. Mostly so that Dad could re-purpose Mars's old bedroom as an inside office, sure, but Mars did like the way he could go and come without checking in.

He really liked the way he could set up the traps. Under the circumstances.

The mirror focused light. Not a lot.

Just enough to rotate the planets in their orbits. Backwards.

Mars set the mirror just at the upper corner where moonlight or sunlight through the southern window would do, and then he laid the chain of nickel and zinc around the boundary of his trap.

They came in three groups, on three consecutive nights. First one person, then two, then finally a quartet.

Mars found that he didn't have any trouble sleeping. The little bit of unreality he'd built from the pocket dimension's workings faded away, blinked out of existence, leaving only the planetary model and the faint circle of metal on the floor.

"What do I do with them?"

"Wait. A couple more days and they'll be paleolithic."

Mars wanted to argue.

"You could feed them to me, if you prefer?"

Mars remembered that these strangers had come into his family's home, into his room, in the middle of the night. The cameras showed him their weaponry, before he deleted the recordings.

And Mars decided he didn't really want to know what the pocket dimension would make of human remains. "Have you ever tasted pastrami?"