“Ratio Tile never told you,” pants Reaching the West Reaches, “what happened to your father.”
“He told me enough!” Her voice is like skin tearing over wounds never permitted to bleed: the old man’s clever kindness and children’s stories, the way he found her drydocked ship on that filthy desert island and prodded her into sailing again. The way he fell in that bloody mess of robes, and the way she scraped their little fellowship together around herself. The way she never got to tell him that she knew.
“You killed him!” screams Dog Shouting.
“No,” says Reaching the West Reaches.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
“You’ve got what boils down to a binary choice here, son,” says Agent Garret. “You can attempt to avoid a responsibility you didn’t want; or you can, in the parlance of your peerage, ‘fuckin’ chill,’ make respectable your relationship with a perfectly lovely girl, join a highly privileged family–hell, just grow a pair!”
Agent Tambor squeezes said pair gently. “Seems like a pretty simple choice, Levi.”
“You know, I think I should run out and get me a ring!” says Levi, sounding only a little strangled.
“Would you believe it?” smiles Agent Garret tightly. “We have a selection right here.”
Monday, September 15, 2008
The entire point of a fort is to insulate oneself and one’s friends from members of the opposite gender, which makes things awkward when HR holds their annual antidiscrimination seminar.
“It’s not that we don’t want women in the department!” says Walmsley, his careful stresses muffled by the cushions they brought from home. “But the productivity gains we’ve achieved in here certainly encourage more–”
“Segregation?” snaps DJ.
“No!” says Walmsley. “Merely separation! A separation of equals.”
“Keep ’em talking, Agent W,” mutters Northwood. He’s almost finished scrawling out their attack plan, and Smithfield is due any second with the water balloons.
Friday, September 12, 2008
“Knew you wouldn’t miss tonight,” he says, as mustachioed men circle and sweat. “You’ve got a thing for Black Jack Sullivan.”
“I came to tell you I won’t be attending these fights anymore.”
“Oh, I see,” says Elijah, “now you have your own league in there to keep you entertained.”
“In fact, it’s because you made clear the risks–”
“Which risks in particular?” he says crookedly.
Proserpina’s pulse pounds in her healing eye. “Don’t try to be coy.”
“The risk of getting chased around by some squint-eyed cinema boy?”
“The risk of getting caught and–” she hesitates. “By some what?”
Thursday, September 11, 2008
“Well, we did it!” chuckles Jupe. “We solved the Case of the Pickled Papers!”
“With a little help from Nugget,” grins Frank. “Isn’t that right, boy?”
“Woof!” says Nugget, and licks his hand.
“But one thing still puzzles me,” says Jupe. “Why did Chet Norris leave his car keys on the other end table?”
“Why, you’re right–he’s ambidextrous!”
“Sounds like we might have the Case of the Clockwise Keyring on our hands!”
“Can I change out of the suit first?” Nugget pants. “The tail is really wedg–”
“You can damn well stay in character!” says Frank, with a friendly kick.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
At one point the Nazis track him down and inquire, via wine and jacked blonde ladies, where his spear is.
“What?” says Longinus, more interested in the wine. “I lost it.”
They attempt, via methods similar to those of the Inquitision, to jog his memory.
“The wine was more effective,” says Longinus.
“‘S in Masada!” he slurs later. “Defnitly Masada, less take a field trip down there.”
The covert mission into Palestine gets messed up pretty bad by the British spit-and-leather boys.
“Actually,” he muses to a blood-gasping SS kommandant, “I think it was in Libya! Man! Sorry!”
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
You don’t need tongs when you’ve got chitin.
Cadmilus can thrust his hand hot in the forge-heart for minutes, waiting for the steel to flare white, and all his skin will do is redden. The hard part is remembering not to scratch his nose afterward. That’s what got his father, in the end: or so old Heph said, when they buried him.
He keeps promising (on his shuffling rants around the caldera, always avoiding the real work) to introduce Cadmilus to some women like him, too. Cadmilus doesn’t really want that. Who wants to be caressed by a fiddler’s claw?
Monday, September 8, 2008
It is at night, during those weeks when the moon starves or gorges, that Howard finds himself drawn to read it. The URL is unpronounceable, full of strange and squamous diacritics; but it crawls from his fingers even when his browser refuses to autocomplete.
The story is grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer. His attention is captured by a vast description: a page in a book which, the story says, cannot convey in mere words its own unutterable hideousness.
Howard imagines going mad, reading it.
“The window!” he gasps, scrambling to click its corner X. “The window!”
Friday, September 5, 2008
Gheorghe’s been trying to flag a ride for hours and the sun is trembling on the swamp horizon: the dark chases his feet down the dirt of the road. He’s friendless, and the woman he loved is lost to him. His panflute pipes a lonely cockeye’s song.
A cold wind tosses the kerchief bindle over his shoulder, and the few coins in his possession spill onto the ground. He drops to his knees to scrape them up.
Six silver dollars stare at him, all on edge.
Midnight. Gheorghe Zamfir stands at the crossroads, shivering, knowing the devil will be there soon.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008