“You expect me to sell you a horse?” The horse trader sneers at Maksim’s ragged clothing. “What are you going to pay me with?”
“Trade me the horse,” says Maksim cannily, “and I’ll do twelve backflips.”
The trader guffaws. “What a ridiculous idea! As if you can even do twelve–”
“It’s a deal,” says Maksim, and totally does twelve backflips. Then he turns around and does twelve more backflips, to get back to where he started.
“Damn!” swears the trader. “My finest horse!” He gnaws his hat.
“Good doing business with you,” grins Maksim, then backflips onto the horse, naturally.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
He never wanted to be an extremist.
He’s no fool; he knows that things before the invasion were bad, that the system was broken. But he believed that given the chance to be its own, his country could have fixed itself. Not anymore.
Their rhetoric is all about freedom, but they’ve forced in new governance as if the tyranny of the many differs from that of the few. Their freedom smells like resources, gouging, white grins and money.
He had to choose a side. He had to.
With heavy shoulders, he opens the chest and pulls out his long white hood.
Monday, November 29, 2004
“Oh,” says a breathless Holly, smoothing the skirt. Rowan grins, but when Holly turns back from the mirrors her face is older than her fourteen years.
“You give me the nicest dreams,” she says heavily. “But I can’t afford it.”
“Ms. Rowan’s Fund For Underdressed Young Ladies–” Rowan begins.
“No!” Holly scowls. “You are not allowed to–”
“I am.”
“I won’t wear it!”
The dress has turned a creature of elbows and knees into somebody who’d ride a pumpkin carriage. Rowan doesn’t know which is more beautiful, but she knows why Holly’s afraid. She doesn’t know what to say.
Friday, November 26, 2004
Grady sits, then stands. He empties the trash. He turns on the television and flips some channels. He turns it off. He sits.
Tim looks at him wearily. “Stop being so–so preoccupied with this.”
“I get preoccupied with things for a living, Tim,” snaps Grady. “I can spend three rolls of film being preoccupied with the angle out of a car wreck, or a cemetery gate, or–”
“So get preoccupied with something else,” says Tim.
Grady stares at him, tapping his leg, then goes to get his old Nikon.
“Don’t look at me,” he says, and starts taking pictures.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
“I keep asking myself,” says Marco, pacing, ” where are we going? With this? I mean, yeah, the journey not the destination, but we still have to… are you, uh,” and he looks directly at her. “Are you listening?”
Cassidy’s trying, but there’s a banjo in her head. Dang a dit dit a liddle pang tong! “Yeah,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“I was. Uh.” Marco pulls something out of his pocket, then kneels jerkily. “Cassidy Fox?” he says. “Will you marry me?”
Cassidy stares. Diddle ting pong iddle dit pit a tang! she thinks.
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
robot lifts up the box, anticipating nothing. robot is Zen.
robot does well not to anticipate: under the upturned box is an old crone. “There is no kitten!” she cackles. robot is shocked at her blasphemy.
The journey is long, but robot is patient. Under one box, robot finds an abandoned used car lot; under another, some coaxial plumbing. There’s one moment of hope, but it turns out robot has just found Leonard Richardson.
At last, one box reveals an adorable feline, coat fluffy, eyes gleaming.
“KITTEN!” shrieks robot, and pulps it.
No! It’s okay! It was only a stuffed kitten!
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
“That McQuarrie guy,” says Ballard, “he ever do anything after Usual Suspects?”
“Won an Oscar. Made The Way of the Gun,” says Cote.
“Oh, yeah. That was awful,” Ballard yawns.
“It was not. It –”
“Worst thing I’ve seen Sam Jackson do.”
“Samuel L. Jackson wasn’t in it! We’ve been over this.”
“Whatever. You’ll admit it wasn’t Suspects.”
“Okay. It was… grittier. Not as clever.” Cote shrugs. “I guess everybody’s got one heist plot in them.”
“Either a movie,” Ballard says, “or a real one.”
“Heh. Yeah.”
Then they both get quiet for a while, staring off into the middle distance.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Chad remembers old Westerns. There are two phases of cowboy life, the one with cows and the one with guns, and though he’s no cowboy, his wrangling days are behind him now.
His ears catch the sudden silence behind him, and he feels the air change. It’s like an intake of breath by some great beast. Chad knows it instinctively: it’s the sound of a diesel engine, clutch popped, coasting. He waits.
A pedal creaks. It’s almost on him. Chad spins, draws and fires into the bus in one smooth snarl, and the buck of the gun throws him bodily sideways.
Friday, November 19, 2004
After the funeral, Mason searches frantically for every kiss she’s left behind. He looks in her purse and coat pockets, the couch cushions and her bathroom trash. In the end, he finds forty-five.
Grieving, he binges on four, then resolves to ration them: one a year, and when they’re gone he won’t bother to live anymore.
Next month he breaks it and uses three, but after that he’s stronger. One the next year. One the next. Until one January he forgets.
Among his possessions, his daughters find a tiny box. In it are thirty-two things, unidentifiable, like slips of brittle cellophane.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
When Ragade threw open the design for his Localized Air Density Field Inducer (U.S. Pat. No. 6,685,518), tech groups were ecstatic. A transcendent leap in the way we will build and travel, said WireScience. A great leap for mankind!
Everyone expected jet sleds, never-fail automatic parachutes and the end of car crashes. Everyone expected perfect acoustics anywhere you wanted them. Everyone expected instant invisible buildings. Everyone expected breakthroughs in mountaineering and deep-sea exploration–ultrafast rail transport–cheap, perfect lenses and optical cable. Everyone expected moon colonies. Everyone expected everything in WireScience to come true.
Nobody–except maybe Ragade–expected the skywhales.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004