MAUDE MOLD
#4
by Stanley Lieber
ACTUATION
tags: 1961, mars2, spiro_mold, qualia
9 August.
Spiro led the dog on its leash, which he’d read was a mistake. But otherwise they’d never have made it out of the front yard, so he accepted that he contained multitudes. Qualia paid no attention to his commands, and had hardly touched her food. He didn’t know what to do with her, but he couldn’t let her shit in the apartment, and his mom didn’t want it in the yard, either.
Activity uprange. Spiro reversed direction.
One drawback of living in the mancamp was proximity to all the strange goings-on that he wasn’t supposed to know about, which at times included literal high-powered explosions. Spiro was for some reason technically authorized to access all areas, but he wasn’t supposed to venture uprange unannounced, and he knew for a fact they didn’t want dog shit on the runway. He led the dog away from the access road and out onto the unformatted desert. The morning sun had finally dispersed all the gray. Everything was once again back to normal. Wall to wall pink, all along the way.
Qualia shit in the soft sand.
"Good girl," Spiro said.
She wasn’t doing it for him.
