Brought to You by the Makers of Neon Clouds

By Dylan Ullman

Brought to You by the Makers of Neon Clouds is a sprawling triptych of separate but connected short stories about family, love and loss, featuring emotional moves within different modules of twenty-first century human life.. 

 

Part I: Weird Story - A suburban mother witnesses from afar the aftermath of a disaster, taking in the now-inspirational accounts of the survivors... at which point she makes a monumental decision.

 

Part II: My Wild Neon Light - Interspersed with poems by each of its two main characters, this story centers on a wandering man with a past unclear even to him, who makes a modest living near an international airport, frequenting strip malls -- and the strip clubs within them -- in his plentiful spare time. He meets one such exotic dancer, and after a while of knowing each other and growing closer, she reveals her many ambitions outside of her current job. Questions of a modern feral lifestyle in contrast with domestication arise, and he must reconcile with the new turns his life takes.

 

Part III: Go Away - A delivery truck driver in his late forties tries to get through his simple life of work, but is all but debilitated by memories of a trauma from the distant past, so much so that it evokes the spiritual -- and possibly paranormal -- within and around him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dylan Ullman
• Release date: May 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223972679

Dylan Ullman

Dylan Ullman is a writer and artist from Ontario, Canada. In recent years, he has focused on screenplays, and because of his passion for that medium along with work in prose and poetry, he has merged them in a new book titled Brought to You by the Makers of Neon Clouds.

Book preview

For C and B

Attention!

The reports contained herein, we have ascertained through matching and sequencing algorithms, share the main connection of having taken place in the geographical region commonly called North America on the planet called Earth (known to us as E5512-MWay).

This location is not the only connection, but it is the main one.

We are much obliged for your time, compassion, openness, and kindness.

Yes.

We are your friends.

Weird Story

This is such a weird story! I said from the kitchen island, in the direction of my husband, invisible to me at that moment. He was rearranging papers in our den doubling as his office, idly trapped in redundant tasks.

Printed in the Portland Mercury morning edition for Sunday June 17th, the story reported that a plane had crashed into the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Northern California the afternoon of Saturday the 16th, the previous day. The same story was also being fervently covered on the KOIN 6 News morning broadcast playing on our TV. Not all passengers of the Boeing 727 Airbus were lucky enough to survive but, mercifully, most did. They clung on to their floating seats exactly as they were told during the pre-flight safety talk, and a group of weary survivors had even strung together a series of the makeshift buoys in the unusually calm body of salt water.

Gravity had worked on these passengers and their now-beloved inanimate companions in many ways that day; the taut navy blue synthetic leather and under that a layer of unyielding Kevlar and under that the cornerstone polyurethane foam block to which they mostly owe their lives, though in this case the whole is reliant on the parts; from their buttocks forcing down on the foam for the duration of the flight up until the point of chaos, to the unified jutting and rattling of the people luckily alert enough to death-grip at the under part of the seat and, whatever they did, not letting go, to their bodies being held up by the same upholstered foam block which was undulating according to the water line like a very unaesthetic bird, a human dangling off of its body. Some of the seats' leather flaps had come loose on the sides due to, as one could easily imagine, the horrific and unforgettable impact, and looked a bit like that fictional bird's wings stretched out flaccidly on the water's surface.

The flight had gone, by all accounts, smoothly, until it had not—when the plane was in its circling-to-land pattern or whatever that's called. Survivor accounts detail an alarming BANG in a localized area of the fuselage: just behind the left engine turbine and below the cabin, somewhere in the cargo hold. An aviation official commented that the investigation would hinge on the determination of whether the mysterious BANG was caused by something colliding with the plane, inadvertently or advertently, or by something originating from inside the cavernous luggage area. The scope of and the method by which they would best complete the investigation was unclear, as it seemed they might have to somehow find out the origin of the BANG before discovering the physical evidence—the plane, whose main pieces were, by now, settling somewhere in the benthic zone, and the luggage, bags and cases that remained somewhat intact were floating within the large radius of the crash site.

I set the newspaper down on the counter and gazed off in the distance afforded me through the glass sliding door out to the deck, my world's morning sky marked by a strange but nice plume of lilac clouds. The record player in a unit between the kitchen table and the corner TV was on James Taylor’s ‘Oh, Susannah’, one of my favorites due to its evocation of my name.

Benjamin! I announced out of the side of my mouth, eyes still away, Get in here and eat your breakfast please. You're going to be late for camp! My thin-reed voice trailed down the hall of our bungalow. I still knew how to effectively throw my voice to any quadrant of the house at any time. It was truly remarkable if I may say.

No, I won’t! Benjamin said slyly as he skipped over to the dining table beside me and the counter I leaned my butt on, staring sidelong at my boy.

Well, you won't be if you wolf down your toast, which you now have to do. Hope you don't get a stomachache! I glared at him, raised my eyebrows, and flashed a mother-is-always-right-and-you-know-it smirk before turning around and running rapidly a moist cloth back and