Skip to content

Monthly Archives: December 2004

Sarasota

“‘Noble gases,'” says Vernon, “man, you’d never get away with that now.”

“Yeah, too poetic.” Sarasota grins up at a neon LOTTO. “You’d have to call them ‘centigrade-stable gaseous nonreactive elements’ or something…”

“You don’t think that’s poetic?”

“And they’d think up the names for new ones with those big new-drug-name computers.”

“Vartifex,” Vernon announces grandly. “Glookinor!”

“There should be common gases,” she says. “No, that’s boring. There should–there should be whimsical gases.”

“Oxygen,” says Vernon.

“What, because of fire?”

“Because most of what it does, apparently,” he says as he squints at a penny, “is turn things different colors.”

Warwick

Warwick actually did start a scab collection once, in fifth grade, inspired by a moment of vengeful hatred for his sister (he was going to put them in her soup). He waited carefully for them to fall off in the bath, then he saved them in a Russell Stover box. After a week he forgot the whole thing.

It isn’t until sixth grade that he finds the collection, and at first he doesn’t realize what they are–they’ve mostly disappeared, leaving behind little black fragments. Even these puff apart at his touch; they in turn leave behind the smell of rust.

Lorraine

Lorraine’s been in the jury box so long she’s worried she’ll forget how to talk. You don’t get to talk, in the jury box, and she’ll have to soon.

It started when they couldn’t agree over the stenographer’s accounts, so they put her hand on a Talmud and made her a witness. Then they wanted the bailiff to corroborate, so they stuck him on the stand. Then the judge.

The foreman’s finishing his cross; Lorraine’s getting nervous. It’s inevitable. And after the jury, then who? The audience? The news crews? The

Hold on. Hello? I’m sorry, I–

Is this a subpoena?

MaxBetty92

  Posted 12/09/04 at 17:28:04
Maxbetty92

Posts: 79

yeah they ought to make these boards reg-only…..then PencilJay would just have regular stalkers and not the ones that want to eat him alive ;) LOL

  Posted today at 00:14:12

Guest

Posts: n/a

Eat him alive? Heavens no. He wouldn’t last long enough, and I fear there’s no room in the fridge…

No, I’d prefer him in pieces: a finger a week, perhaps? Roll his prints in ink first, save them on cardboard, and when that was done I’d lick them clean down to the bone.

  Posted today at 09:22:19

Maxbetty92

Posts: 79

:0

The Complicit

How do you get to be a writer? Cheat. Lie, rape, steal and backstab.

There is nothing new in existence, which is justification enough. Consider the books you read fresh meat. Find the devices everybody seems to like and replicate them as exactly as laziness permits (remember, effort spent writing is effort largely wasted). Take fanfic to its logical conclusion: copy sentences or, if possible, paragraphs in bulk.

Sleep with anyone who can get you out of the slush pile. I mean anyone.

They’ll tell you there’s no money in writing, of course, but of course they would. Think about that.

Rita

The Ad Hoc catches the bullet, of course, but doesn’t seem prepared when the catch fails to stop it. The bullet careens off a thick conduit and then the concrete floor, trailing Ad Hoc, until they bury themselves in a stack of foam insulation.

Rita lowers the gun and walks up to it. She doesn’t smile, but her mouth quirks. “Hi,” she says. “Go ahead and tell your friends their pet isn’t unique anymore.”

She pries open one of the Ad Hoc’s eyes. Its pupil is clicking and fluttering, an inhuman twitch, like the wing of a beetle in a web.

Marguerite

The little room is humid, and much warmer than the air outside: moisture condenses where it touches the plexiglass. Water drops find other water drops and bunch up together, until they collect enough weight to start their arrhythmic slides down to the baseboard. There’s some bamboo in the room. It’s not healthy bamboo.

The little pool in the center is lined with black garbage bags, and the filtration unit at its side wheezes and shudders. It’s choking on deposits of minerals and ammonia. The ammonia is from dissolved koi waste. There are seventy-eight koi in the pool, and Marguerite’s cold hand.

Ellery

Ellery waits a day for the varnish to dry before he takes the axe to the chair. After a while he switches to a sledgehammer, because it’s easier, and accomplishes the same thing.

“No record,” he pants to Kidra between swings. “No embarrassing beginnings. No evolution.”

“You’re not doing a very complete job,” says Kidra. It’s in crude, uneven pieces.

“Don’t care.” Ellery pauses to wipe his nose. “No snide commentary on my amateur days. Not ever. I want to burst into carpentry like Minerva, fully grown.”

But he buries the pieces instead of burning them. Kidra thinks she understands why.

Keira

He’s lighting up under a streetlight. Keira’s never smoked before, but she read about this trick in a magazine. “Oh, man,” she says as she approaches, “I just ran out and I’m gonna have a fit in a minute. Can I buy one off you for a quarter?”

“You read about that in a magazine?” he chuckles, but he gives her a cigarette, and doesn’t take the quarter.

Keira surprises herself by not coughing. “So what’s your name?” she manages; he just smiles.

“Come on,” she says. The ember tips of their cigarettes touch, and they jerk away as if burnt.

Tony

“You hear about down in Turquoise Park?” says the bus driver.

“I’m surprised they didn’t get electrocuted,” says the lady near the front.

“Hacked up all those Christmas lights. Ruined them.” The driver shakes her head. “Who would do that?”

“Electrocuted,” insists the other lady.

The bus driver finally processes this. “Yeah, you’re right!”

Tony can’t help himself. “They’d be fine if they used scissors with plastic handles, and it wasn’t–”

He flushes under the sudden suspicion of their glares. “–raining,” he mutters. Stupid, he thinks. He ought to remember by now that being sixteen is a punishable offense.

Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
This work is licensed under a Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.