Logical and Preposterous

By Erika Hammerschmidt

Book 3 in Erika Hammerschmidt's "If the World Ended" series. A grandpa attacks Santa Claus. A palindrome artist redefines fiction. A time traveler disappears. A telepathic vampire tries to change humanity, and a genie goes atomic. From deep and dark to lighthearted and zany, these speculative fiction stories explore the depths of unique and outlandish minds, and the strange forms of logic that can lurk in them. (Adapted from the 2013 short story collection "If the World Ended, Would I Notice?")

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erika Hammerschmidt
• Release date: Mar 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463438565

Erika Hammerschmidt

I am an autistic author, artist and speaker. I give speeches to schools and support groups, telling the story of how I grew up as an alien on earth.I was diagnosed with various neurological disorders around the age of 11, but labels aren't everything to me. We are all individuals, and a diagnosis is just one of humanity's flawed but natural attempts to arrange the world into categories that seem neat and orderly. It's language, and as much as I love language, it is not a perfect way of describing reality. There is no perfect way. No word's definition is universally agreed upon. No written definition can perfectly encompass the idea expressed by a word. And some ideas can't even be expressed by words in the first place.What I am can be described partially by the words "Autism," "Asperger Syndrome," and "Tourette Syndrome," with their definitions as printed in the 1992 edition of the DSM-IV, as they were interpreted by my childhood psychiatrist... but really, individual people all have their own unique mental conditions. Mine works for me right now, with or without labels. I see no need to change.

Book preview

Introduction

This is the final volume of the three-book series adapted from my original short story collection, If the World Ended, Would I Notice? and Other Stories.

The title comes from one of the stories in the original version— an expression of emotions I often had, when feeling isolated from the outside world. I often thought about the world ending, and often wondered how long it would take me to notice.

The original book was a widely varied mixture of science fiction, fantasy, and genre-blurring gray area. World-ending scenarios were part of it, but not really an overarching theme. I remember I wanted to get the book out in 2012, on that year’s wave of apocalyptic speculation, but things happened and it was delayed until 2013.

Short stories aren’t all I do. I have a memoir about my childhood, a collection of strips from my webcomic, and a science fiction novel co-authored with my partner, for which we’re now working on a sequel.

I have come to realize, though, that I’d like more people to see my short stories.

So I’m republishing If the World Ended, Would I Notice? and Other Stories as three books: Lonely and Precocious, Loving and Precarious, and Logical and Preposterous.

I have tried to separate these genre-diverse works into three thematically distinct volumes. And for this book I have written one entirely new story, Rip Skills. I’ve also added more illustrations, so each story now has at least one picture hand-drawn by me.

The book you’re reading now is the third volume, Logical and Preposterous.

While the first two books explored the social isolation of outsiders and then the social tumult of those in relationships, this book dives into the inner workings of those weird and solitary minds.

It deals with the creative reasoning of those who think outside the box, generating insights that make sense when logically analyzed, and yet set off the mind’s nonsense alarms when processed by emotion. Sometimes it explores those insights in the isolation of a character’s mind, and other times it throws them into the sphere of public opinion and chronicles the chaos and conflict that ensue between different-minded characters.

The first and second volumes, which you may or may not have read already, are called Lonely and Precocious and Loving and Precarious. Please take a look, if you’re interested.

Welcome to my world.

1

The End

This story came out of my subconscious mind some time after I got married in 2005.

At the time, my mind was going through a phase in which it insisted on spelling everything I read backwards.

Change two letters in Leah Carmichael’s name and it would be a palindrome.

That was the thought in Leah’s mind as she woke up to the sound of cars rushing past on the highway that nearly grazed her apartment building. She wasn’t sure if the realization was left over from a dream or just appearing in her head out of nowhere. It didn’t surprise her to think of something like that; she had always been somewhat fascinated by palindromes, even more than anagrams.

What did surprise her was that she hadn’t thought of it before... but then, people did sometimes have mental blocks that wouldn’t go away until some random point in their lives. Hadn’t she been thinking just last night about how Mrs. H. didn’t realize that her own name had five consecutive consonants until she was twenty-four years old?

In fact, Leah thought as she pushed herself up into a sitting position, maybe her own interest in palindromes was something she got from Mrs. H. in the first place. And quite likely Mrs. H. had even chosen to name her Leah Carmichael based on its near-palindromic spelling, back when Leah was born... not so very long ago, Leah thought, as the mild dizziness of sitting up after eight supine hours faded enough to trust herself on her feet. She was almost thirty—had the memories of twenty-seven years of life, at least, but...

Semi-consciously recognizing a train of thought that was leading someplace Leah didn’t want to go so early in the morning, her brain stalled, fixing on the motion of her legs toward the bathroom, the Impressionist swim of colors as her glasses-deprived eyes moved through space, the one bump in the floor that her right foot always stepped on while going through the bedroom door, but that she could never find if she looked for it, kneeling down, squinting, pressing from place to place with her hands and feet in the rough carpet...

The light in the bathroom hurt her eyes even though she squeezed them shut just before she flicked the switch on. Bizarre, how orange the light looked through her eyelids, orangish-black fading to just dark orange as she gradually unclenched the eyelid muscles and prepared to open them. Nothing rhymed with orange, unless you put a hyphen in more angelic or more ingenious and put the elic or enious on the next line, leaving more ing- or more ang- at the end of the first line. Mrs. H. had written a poem