The rain starts to fall. In a microphone, it’d be loud as clumsy feet. Rain’s always louder in the movies, Izzy thinks, except when they talk.
The yard’s gone to hell. Weeds sprout in some places, but it’s the leaves that rule: brown and dry, inch-thick, a sheet pulled over dead grass. Izzy doesn’t care. He left the mulcher behind, and there it’ll stay, rusting in the shed. Comfortably wrapped in unreachability, she doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t want to. Why? Together they were epic. What is she, alone?
Worthless, a haiku, her opening line bland as “the rain starts to fall.”
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Carmel is running for his life, so he makes for the tree with the lowest branches and swings his way out of reach. Moments later the tree twangs like a bowstring as the witch rams it head-on; it sheds pine needles and a raccoon, almost. He grabs the branch next to Carmel.
“Hello,” says Carmel.
“Hello. What was that?”
“A witch,” says Carmel. “She’s very angry because I cut off her hands.”
“I have hands!” says the raccoon. He holds one out to demonstrate.
“Me too!” says Carmel, and they shake hands, hanging there. It seems like the thing to do.
She’s pleasantly hungry and the colored lights are like flavors. Apple green, ice blue, a streetlight turns Andra orange. Kenny has the camcorder again, but Paige doesn’t mind this time. Hayden touched her hand, opening the car door. She’s sure he’ll do it again. She hopes.
Paige decides to turn a cartwheel. Kenny hands off the camera and just falls down. After that everything anyone says is a laugh, and they end up in the lawn of Tales Told Coffee. Someone’s playing inside, and Paige lets herself think quietly at last, about what Spanish guitar can do for a summer night.
“Apples.”
“Water.”
“Good.”
“Girls.”
“Um. Clean?”
“Pretty.”
“Good.”
“Roses.”
“Kittens.”
“MSG.”
“What?” asks Rose, startled.
“Girls smell like MSG,” Diego repeats. “That’s the question, right? What’s the most popular response so far?”
“Just ‘good,'” says Rose. “Nine of twenty-eight couldn’t come up with anything else.”
“Right,” says Diego, “like if you asked them how Chinese food tastes. Only they’d say ‘MSG’ instead of ‘good’ because they’ve been told that’s what it is.”
“Girls smell like Chinese food.”
“No,” he shakes his head, “but it does the same thing. Bypasses your discernment, your categories, all of that. Just hits the pleasure center straight on.”
The question, thinks Shaun, is are you the kind of man who blusters here? Or do you take the hit to pride, so neither you nor she gets hurt?
“Hurry up!” snaps the man with the 38-caliber.
“All right,” Shaun says carefully. “Don’t shoot. I’m getting out my wallet.”
Something flickers through the streetlight above them. Both men look up, and Shaun registers that Lissa is not in fact standing behind him: she’s inverted in the air, acrobatic, spinning to kick the mugger’s face with a pair of legs that God must have put together as proof of Her own existence.
Halley knows nobody comes through this part of the library–that’s why he’s here, in fact, to find a free computer–so he’s surprised to see so many chairs in the Bingham Reading Room. It looks like they actually had a reading, except he can’t remember any such announcement.
He imagines a lonely janitor, gesticulating for an invisible audience. He imagines ghosts settling their cold-jelly bones, drinking ethereal tea. He imagines Long Huo, Chair Herder, ushering his charges to new pastures.
Halley laughs at himself and heads to the computer.
After a fierce debate, the chairs vote to have him killed.
Darlene is staring up at something when Rob arrives. A flock of starlings bursts from a streetside tree, whirls through a complicated figure, and settles again on a near-identical tree nearby.
Darlene’s lips move silently, then she says “Darkness is coming… darkness and heat. Death in the night, and betrayal.”
“Ornithomancy?” asks Rob.
“What?” she snaps, turning.
“Er, divination by birds. Flight patterns or, um. Guts.”
“Ridiculous. Birds are stupid, how would they know the future?”
“But weren’t you just–”
“No,” she says, “there,” and gestures beyond the starlings: a web of bright graffiti, as complex and dense as Sanskrit.
Tigo’s head emerges from the brush, scattering parrots. Sweat drips from his grizzle.
Hurree’s machete chops out nearby, and he follows it, standing damp but tall in cliffside grass. “Yes,” he mutters, surveying. “Just as in the stories…”
“You sure about this, Hurree?”
“Sure as I’ve ever been,” he says, shrugging off his pack. “Hold this. I’m going in.”
A moment later, he’s moving down the dirt track that hatches the cliffside. A lone yip reaches Tigo on the wind, and he stares bug-eyed into Barranca de Perroqueños Qui No el Miedo Saben, Canyon of the Pekingese Who Know Not Fear.