MAUDE MOLD #25
MAUDE MOLD
#25
by Stanley Lieber
VEILED ENTRY
tags: 1966, mancamp, mars2, odin, spiro_mold
31 March.
Mom never changed, and this place hadn’t either. Spiro stood mock vigil in the kitchen next to Odin, finally allowing himself to see the place as it was, as it had always been. Debris from the night the microwave exploded were still scattered across the kitchen floor, laying at cross-purposes to the rust stains on the yellow linoleum. Odin was still there, too, his white hair puffed up absurdly at attention all over the mottled smörgåsbord of his devastated body. Spiro inched past him into the dining room, careful to avoid spoiling the scene of the crime. At least this war was over.
He had considered this place background, something to offset the cleverness of his t-shirt, a place to throw his locked trapper keeper, but in its absence the whole context of his reactionary lifestyle had changed. He hadn’t intended it, for his essential self to become so tightly coupled with the disposition of a shitty apartment in a mancamp operated by a contractor to the U.S. government, but, oh well, identity was a scam, anyway.
Dad’s safe was empty.
His own room remained wickedly wrecked, just as he’d left it. This wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but still it disappointed him, as it diverged stubbornly from some (he realized) cherished sense of the place as he would liked to have remembered it.
The old test site had been shut down, surplused, liquidated. The mancamp was empty. The transports run off. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
Spiro tipped over Odin on his way out, making sure the disabled elder god went all the way down, face mashing into the floor. Forensics be damned.
Made his way uprange.
Into the wider world.
