Corel Gallery Clipart

A gray-scale line illustration of a waitress carrying a tray of drinks, with a silhouetted couple in the foreground. While it looks like a slice-of-life scene from a random bar, in fact the moment is carefully choreographed. The waitress, covertly a low-level KGB operative, signals to the man through the arrangement of beverages on her tray; the man, who is more or less a courier and is paid not to ask questions about the packages he delivers, catches the waitress’s signal; the woman, having been confirmed as the recipient of the man’s package, grabs hold of it—the package—under the bar and discretely slips it in her clutch. It is over in a matter of seconds. The waitress continues her shift. The woman leaves the bar, heading out into the cold D.C. air. The man hits the restroom, where undoing his pants at the urinal, he is shot in the head three times by a fourth person, not pictured here.

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A red sign with “Help Wanted” in white letters. The sign was sideways, though, and Samantha had to tilt her head to make sure she was reading it correctly. The sign hung in the window of a nondescript office in a nondescript office park. Samantha wasn’t sure whether she was just passing through town or here to stay for a while. Maybe it depended on this sign. She took a deep breath. She forced herself to smile. She opened the nondescript door of the nondescript office and walked in.

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An anthropomorphic egg wearing a topcoat, bow tie, and vest. It’s Humpty Dumpty, before he sat on the wall, and before he had his fall. Since being an anthropomorphic egg is considered by most U.S. health insurers to be a pre-existing condition, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are nowhere to be found. They want nothing to do with Humpty Dumpty, who, should he have an unfortunate accident, will have to go to Urgent Care and pay out of pocket like the rest of us.

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Two towels draped over a towel bar. Rose jokes that the towels should be labeled Hers and Hers. Taylor laughs and says, yeah but we’d have to buy two separate sets to get two Hers. The year was 1994.

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The rear view of a nude woman, standing still as if for a medical exam or some sort of diagnostic scan. Dianne is about to undergo, as far as Lou understands it, a new kind of x-ray, something called magnetic resonance imaging. Lou doesn’t understand how it works, but he hopes it gives them some answers for Dianne’s back pain, her lack of appetite. She hardly sleeps. She barely eats. Lou is used to fixing things, but he doesn’t know how to fix this.

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A color portrait of Hollywood star Bette Davis, whose career spanned more than 50 years on the stage and screen. Her cold blue eyes can cut right through you, and, Ann suspects, mask a righteous fury harbored in her heart. Ann must have heard the song about Bette Davis’s eyes a thousand times before Ann finally paid attention to the lyrics—“She’s ferocious and she knows just / What it takes to make a pro blush.” And Ann decided she could be ferocious too.

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A cartoon of a man in a blue jacket and yellow tie, mid-hurdle as if jumping over an invisible obstacle. Something about the man’s jawline recalls the Muppet news anchor. Not the eagle, the other one. Or maybe Guy Smiley from Sesame Street. Either way, the Muppet-like man appears to be happy in his work. He must not work here.

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A chart purporting to show the soaring pace of corporate air travel. The X axis is labeled by year, with columns for 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1990. The Y axis is labeled 0 through 50, though it’s not clear what the numbers refer to. Flights? Passengers? Crashes? One thing is for certain. Were the chart to continue into the new millennium, there’d be a massive drop-off in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by an exponential rebound in 2022, finishing with an absolute drop to 0 in 2033. Such a chart would remain at 0 for the rest of the century.

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The shoulder sleeve insignia of the United States Army Military District of Washington (MDW). It shows the Washington Monument superimposed by a red double-handled sword. The MDW is responsible for ceremonial tasks, such as protecting and staging presidential inaugurations and state funerals. In 2034, one such state funeral and ensuing chaos will result in three weeks of martial law and result in a dramatic revision of the Presidential Succession Act.

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Major League Baseball Hall of Famer George Brett, who played 21 seasons with the Kansas City Royals. Brett was at the center of the so-called “Pine Tar Incident” of 1983, a benign prelude to the more malevolent Pine Tar Incident of 2033.

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A cartoon drawing of a young woman with blonde hair and a green shirt, working. What that work entails is unclear. She’s sitting at a desk, her left hand manipulating some sort of device. It might be a keyboard, but wireless keyboards, as this one would have to be, were not readily available in 1995. It might be a mold, the kind used to shape plaster or plastic material, though the mold appears to be empty. It might be a circuit board, but its featureless surface is smooth and unetched. It might be a weapon. It’s probably a weapon. Alien technology that obliterates all sentient life or destroys entire worlds.

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An illustrated portrait of the actress Dixie Carter, best known for her role on the late eighties and early nineties sitcom, Designing Women. At 11:30pm, after watching some late night reruns, Rose closes her eyes, hoping to dream of Annie Potts.

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An illustration of a Linotronic Postscript RIP machine, or raster image processor. In the early 1980s, a RIP would translate the Postscript commands in, say, a PageMaker file, into a pattern of pixels for a Linotype laser printer to print. It blows Mattie’s mind, the number of steps it used to take to print something professionally. An entire computer whose only function was an imagesetter. It reminds Mattie of a 17th century printshop, crammed full of specialized tools, requiring specialized knowledge. Now any asshole can print anything.

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A spiraled auger shell, speckled with brown whorls and tapering to a fine point. These small shells, which generally reach lengths of 1-2 inches, come from a family of small predatory sea snails called Terebridae. In the fourth decade of the 21st century, biologists began observing augur shells of improbable sizes washing ashore Ocala Beach, shells the size of canoes. The shells grew ever larger with each passing hurricane season. When a fifty-foot auger shell appeared one morning on the Gainesville Peninsula, a team of liminalogists and malacologists from the FSU Ocean Institute descended upon the beach, their Humvees full of scientific gear. EMF meters, full spectrum radiographic cameras, dowsing rods.

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The flag of the Cook Islands, a former British colony and self-governing island nation in the South Pacific. The flag is blue, with a Union Jack in the upper left and a circle of fifteen white stars in the lower right, representing the country’s fifteen islands. The Cook Islands are what Rod would call far flung, spread out over three quarters of a million miles. Rarotonga is the largest island, at about 25 square miles, but it’s not Rod’s favorite. That would be remote Pukapuka, a beautiful sliver of land that Rod swore, should things really start to fall apart, he would return to and live out his days. Things did eventually fall apart, faster than Rod—who’s not only seen but played a part in more than one nation’s rise and fall—ever would have thought. Rod didn’t make it to Pukapuka. He barely even made it to his armory.

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A color portrait of the American comedian and actress Sandra Bernhard. Originally known for her acerbic standup routines, Bernhard transitioned to television in the 1990s, becoming a regular character on “Roseanne.” Rumors flew around that she and Madonna were an item, rumors that Jack scoffed at. Jack would happily concede that Bernhard was queer but of Madonna, he was more cynical, knowing the singer since her early days at Danceteria. Whatever Madonna could do to get attention, Madonna would do. And Jack doesn’t mean that as an insult. Coming from Jack, it’s a compliment.

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A color portrait of American country singer Lyle Lovett, emphasizing his distinctive pompadour and angular chin. Yìchén hadn’t heard of Lovett before, but now he takes a few minutes from his current investigation to search out Lovett on QQ Music. Yìchén surprises himself by liking what he hears. At night he catches himself humming the melody to “That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas).”

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A fluffy kitten with wide, green eyes, a vaguely disgruntled look on its face. In 2010 the kitten would’ve been a meme with funny captions in 50-point all caps Impact. In 2050 the kitten has gone viral in a different way. It’s a legend survivors share around the fire at night, the story of a lone kitten spotted seemingly everywhere. Wherever a shambling house still stands among the ruins, there are tales of an orange and white tabby with startling green eyes, watching silently. The legends warn not to chase the tabby. Those who do are never heard from again, the legends go.

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You can’t think of the words to describe this shit clipart, or put your finger on what it might have been used for. Vaguely a ribbon, like you might find drawn on an award certificate. Then again, maybe it’s one of the countless bones of the inner ear. You can’t tell. You have trouble identifying what things are for these days. Trouble coming up with the names of things. Things. Everything is just a thing, and you feel the internal glossaries of the world slipping away. Everyone is just a face, everything is just a thing. And the world is indifferent to whether you can name the things in it or not.

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A New Yorker-style cartoon of a surgeon in scrubs. He looks a little disheveled. One can test for the New Yorkerish quality of the cartoon by applying the Universal New Yorker Caption™️ to it: “Christ, what an asshole!” If the caption works, then indeed the cartoon could have appeared in the New Yorker. Test results? ✅

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The emblem of the Naval Space Command, part of the United States Navy from 1983 until 2002. It shows an anchor superimposed upon the globe, with a braid of rope crisscrossing the anchor. The Naval Space Command operated reconnaissance, surveillance, and communications satellites, all in the support of U.S. Navy operations. The command was disbanded in 2002, at the request of Grimbard.

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A hot AF centaur, smiling a come hither look that only hot centaurs can pull off. He’s got a bow and arrow and a bright yellow horsey tail. If the human part of the centaur looks disproportionately outsized compared to the horse part, that’s because this is Samantha’s first attempt to draw the rakishly menacing figure that visits her dreams every night.

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A line drawing of a Beretta 92, an iconic handgun that has been adopted worldwide by law enforcement and the military. Formally known as Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta, the manufacturer is one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the world. Beretta has supplied weapons to every European war since 1650, and as Rod knows all too well, to quite a few non-European wars as well.

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Two doctors in white lab coats examine Dianne’s medical records. The latest test results are mystifying. Black spots on the back and spine. They order another round of scans for next week, return to the hospital room, and tell Dianne and Lou that the tests so far are inconclusive.

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A black and white icon of an overhead power line, with the conducting wires supported by crossarms at the top of the utility pole. When Mattie was a kid, the streets of her neighborhood were lined with such poles. Later, she moved somewhere where all the electrical and utility lines were buried underground. It was disorienting to be somewhere with invisible infrastructure. Looking up and seeing no poles and no cables it was like there was too much nature. Or maybe it was that the nature felt faked. Unearned. Civilization was there, all around her, just buried. In April 2020, what Mattie would give to look the window of her home office and see a bird on a wire.

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A decorative page border suitable for diplomas, with ornate floral flourishes in the corners. One might imagine lines of Latin filling in the page, OMNIBVS HAS LITTERAS LECTVRIS SALVTEM DICIT etc. etc. & etc. The only problem is, the last university degrees were conferred more than two decades ago. There are no colleges anymore. When I describe the point of a university to my grandson, he stares at me in disbelief. You mean, he says to me, there used to be places full of thousands of people and they’d do nothing but read and get drunk? And get laid, I add. They’d do that too.

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A gas station pump. It doesn’t work, obviously. There’s no power, and even if there was, the gas station fuel tank is probably empty. And even if it’s not empty, the gasoline itself is unusable. Regular gas lasted a few months before it lost its combustibility. You’d see diesel trucks on the road for a year or two after that, but even they soon became useless. Internal combustion engines are relics of the past, like books, phones, the internet.

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The flag of Liberia, a series of red and white stripes, with a blue field in the upper left corner bearing a single white star. The Liberian flag is obviously modeled after the Stars and Stripes of the United States, as the nation was founded by freed and free-born black people from the United States. The founding of Liberia was the project of the American Colonization Society. When we were kids, we were taught it was a great thing, the idea of giving formerly enslaved people their own nation. We didn’t think at the time—or rather, our teachers didn’t tell us—that this colonization meant taking land from someone else, and furthermore, that the project of Liberia actually helped to preserve American slavery. There’s much our teachers didn’t tell us. Unlike now, it was legal to teach us that history. They just didn’t.

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The coat of arms of the Republic of the Congo showing, as the country’s official description puts it, “a fess wavy vert, a lion gules, armed and langued vert, overall, maintaining a torch sable flamed gules, supported by two elephants sable tusked or, issuing from the flanks of the shield and sustained on a tree trunk gules.” There’s a code there to be cracked. You look at enough descriptions of coats of arms and you start getting it. Gules is red. Vert is green. Sable is black. Colors come after nouns. Lions are lions and elephants are elephants.

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The silhouette of a small girl playing with a toy. She’s in the shadows so it’s not evident exactly what toy it is, but Dr. Slife knows. His youngest daughter is playing with her Lite Brite again. He chuckles to himself. How she loves that toy. He steps inside her bedroom to take a closer look at the colorful design lit up on the board. He freezes. Outlined on the board in glowing green, orange, and pink pegs is the figure of a man who haunts Slife’s dream. A slender man in a green tunic. And Slife has no idea how his daughter captured this detail with the blunt instrument of a Lite Brite, but the slender man has teeth filed into points, just like the figure in Slife’s dreams. Just like the figure in Slife’s nightmares.

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