Ghosts of Corel Clipart

In 1994 I bought a Corel Gallery CD-ROM with 10,000 clipart images. Nearly 30 years later those images haunt this ghost story bot. Credits: clipart from Corel, flash fiction by Mark Sample.

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LOBSTER4.BMF: A gigantic red lobster brandishing its claws. The problem is—and this is true of the 🦞 emoji as well—that lobsters are not red while alive. They are generally brown, gray, or green, perfect for camouflaging themselves on the seafloor. Lobsters, like 🍤, only turn red when cooked, or in the case of lobsters, boiled alive. So what are we looking at here? Either this is an extremely rare 1 out of 25 million red lobster, or, it is a zombie lobster, the crawling dead, coming after its human murderers seeking both brains and revenge. A lobstrosity.

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VA_REV.BMF: A silhouette of the USS Virginia, a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser. The U.S. naval vessel was decommissioned in 1994 and sold in 1996 to an individual the Department of Defense described at the time as “an interested investor and military history aficionado.” The official sales papers list the buyer only as “Grimbard and Associates.” The buyer and his ship seemed to have disappeared after that. Until 2033, when Grimbard and the Virginia came back into public view, and the Sludge was already beginning.

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SHAVE.BMF: A cartoon illustration of a man, his face covered in shaving cream, a razor in his hand. Here, now, in the present, Mark shaves his father in the hospital and in the brief pause between chin and lip, his father says, I remember shaving Pappy—his own dad—in the hospital the night before he died, and Mark says, well, you’re not dying on me tonight.

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PCHINAR.BMF: A low resolution graphic of the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China. The original version would have shown Tiananmen Gate at the entrance to the Forbidden City, with the five stars of the national flag. But this low-res version, it’s useless. An insult, in fact, thinks Yìchén, special operative in the Eleventh Bureau at the Ministry of State Security. Yìchén flags the poorly converted clipart, as well as the creator of the account whence the clipart came. This matter requires further inquiry.

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ICECONES.BMF: A page border consisting of 42 ice cream cones of various flavors. @evansezwut thoroughly dissects the image on his latest Substack, theorizing which flavors are depicted based on color, texture, and popularity. Unfortunately, the newsletter is only available to @evansezwut’s paid subscribers, so you will not learn the significance of the number 42, which @evansezwut lays out in a 10 paragraph exegesis (part 2 is coming out next week).

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KENEDJR1.BMF: A color portrait of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy. Shown here circa 1995, RFK Jr. at the time was known as an environmental lawyer, going after corporations and municipalities for their pollution of the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. In the 2000s, Kennedy garnered attention for his anti-vaccination positions. His positions drifted toward conspiracy theories, and he became a popular celebrity embraced by anti-authority figures on both the right and the left in the 2020s. The net worth of this populist, man-of-the-people everyday working class hero is around $15 million.

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CAR_RACE.BMF: A racing-themed page border. A yellow Formula One car sits in three-quarters profile on the lower left, as if ready to speed across the page. Colored pennants signifying the finish line flutter in the upper right corner. Checkered flags fill up the rest of the border. The center of the page is blank, for now, but the words “Happy Birthday Evan!” will soon fill the empty space, and the sign will hang in the dining room of the Slife residence, printed on twelve pieces of paper taped together. When Evan blows out ten candles on his similarly racing-themed birthday cake, Dr. Slife looks on with fatherly pride. A perfect day. It isn’t until Slife looks up and sees in the corner an uninvited guest, a lithe figure clothed in green mouthing the words, “I am Cutty Soames,” that Slife’s bladder undoes itself and the party goes south.

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R_EST_SL.BMF: A real estate agent posing next to a “For Sale” sign. She appears poised and self-assured but secretly has doubts about her ability to sell the small two-story suburban home. An entire family disappeared from the house three years ago, for God’s sake. One day they were here, the next they weren’t. No notes, no sign of struggle, no financial trail, nothing. No trace of the mother, father, or two kids. The parents were even semi-famous, in the way people could be semi-famous before the internet. They would have been spotted, if they were some place. It’s as if the house on Ash Tree Lane swallowed the family whole.

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BAHREIN.BMF: The former flag of the Kingdom of Bahrain, spelled here archaically as Bahrein. The flag, which was in use from 1972 to 2002, features white and red fields separated by a serrated line of eight white triangles. The mangrove forests at the edge of Tubli Bay in the east of Bahrain were once renowned for their rich marine and bird life. In the 1970s developers began land reclamation projects, dredging sand from the ocean to fill in the mangrove forests on the coasts, which they replaced with luxury resorts. By the 2020s, the vast mangrove habitats had been reduced to a few patches here and there. By the 2040s, the mangroves were gone, and so were the luxury resorts.

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CLASFIED.BMF: The word CLASSIFIED in a grey stencil, as might be stamped on a top secret government document. When the officers shove Matylda into the interrogation room, she sees her file on the bare wooden table. It’s not stamped in English, obviously. Nor Czech. Instead the words STRENG GEHEIM are stamped on the file. The Kriminalkommissar eyes Matylda warily. You predict the Reich will fall, he says with an acid tone. You are wrong, of course, he continues. But you will tell us the source of this so-called information. You will tell us everything you know. Matylda glares back, her eyes grey and gauzy with cataracts.

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PHONE195.BMF: The cartoon image of a woman in a white top talking on the phone, holding a powder blue handset to her ear. With her cherry red lipstick, dark seductive eyes, and soft curves of cleavage showing, one wonders what was going through the head of Phil at Totem Graphics when he designed this clipart. Is this woman a flame from his past? An unrequited fantasy? Whom he was talking to late last night when he dialed a 1-900 number, blowing through $79 on his AmEx in the space of an hour? The same AmEx card that investigators find several years later on the floor of his kitchen, along with his driver’s license and passport? No, it is not. It’s Phil’s mother.

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PHONE07.BMF: An antique wall telephone, known as a top box. There are no numbers to dial. The crank on the right generates electricity that rings the bells on the other end of the line, usually a central exchange. The operator there answers the phone and redirects the call. The front looks like a human face, with the two bells as eyes and the speaker the mouth. When you see faces in inanimate objects, it’s called face pareidolia. How much damage has been done seeing faces where there are none?

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MOWING.BMF: A middle-aged man cutting the grass with his push mower. He’s got a big smile on his face. He waves to every jogger who passes his house, pauses to chat amiably with his neighbors. He’s the living embodiment of the friendly guy-next-door, Red is. What fun he has playing pretend in suburbia. He can barely wait for the day to come—and come it will, Red has no doubt—that reporters and TV crews swarm the street, badgering the neighbors with pointless questions, to which the answers will always be: I had no idea, and, He seemed like such a nice guy, and, You just never know, do you? Red giggles just thinking about the day. What a great trick he has played upon the world.

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SYMB329.BMF: A black and white icon of a javelin thrower. Not pictured off to the left: a woolly mammoth, as stupefied as the athlete that it’s here, its shaggy coat smelling of copper and ozone.

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SUZUKI1.BMF: A color portrait of Osamu Suzuki, who has led the Suzuki Motor Corporation since 1978. The secret of his phenomenally successful tenure has been finding new markets for Suzuki’s smaller cars—countries ignored by other car manufacturers such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Hungary. The only blemish on Suzuki’s leadership was his company’s ill-timed entry into the faerie market just as human-fae relations began to break down in the early 21st century.

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OTTERT.BMF: A sea otter lounging on its back in the water, an open oyster shell on its belly. The day I saw the otter in the Seattle Aquarium was the last day of what we came to call the Before Times. My flight home was delayed, first by a little and then by a lot. So I left the airport, ubered back into the city and spent time down on Pier 59. The otters cavorted in their tank like there was no tomorrow, and in a sense, there wasn’t. I managed to catch a red eye home late that night. The terminal was a vast encampment of suitcases and sleeping kids, huddled passengers exchanging rumors and hearsay, crowdsourcing the end of the world. My American Airlines flight was the last flight out of Seattle that night. The last flight out of Seattle, ever.

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DZAR.BMF: A grayscale illustration of a national emblem or coat of arms. The bulk of the image is perfectly symmetrical, the right side mirroring the left. Each side has an olive branch and a small crescent and star symbol. In the lower center of the emblem is a larger crescent and star, the only element of the emblem not mirrored. Mark had the toughest time figuring out what country this emblem belongs—or belonged—to. He scoured Wikipedia, Reddit, Google Image Search, looking for the source of the emblem. He even described it to ChatGPT. Everywhere, he came up blank. It’s as if this flag were hoisted above a nation that refused to submit to Mark’s curiosity. Then one night he received an anonymous Signal message from a number in China. The message said simply: Algeria.