Betwixt the two of them, they lick the platter clean, snapping and whining for more even after Kora pulls it away. “That’s enough!” she says. Monday looks sullen; Friday pants with undimmed hope. (Wednesday looks aloof, of course. He long ago figured out that she could let the other two heads eat for him.)
“It’s time for walksies anyway,” Kora says, and before she’s finished undoing the leash they’re dragging her off through the stalagmite maze; little ghosts mewl and scatter out of their way. At least they haven’t eaten me yet, she thinks grimly. At least there is still that.
Friday, November 14, 2008
“They were just here when I arrived for practice,” says Radiane with some chagrin.
Proserpina surveys them: a smaller gathering than at the big match, but still far too conspicuous a crowd of teenage girls to be clattering around in a closed wing.
“What do we do?”
“Start teaching them in shifts, I suppose,” Proserpina says.
“But you haven’t finished teaching me yet!”
“Exactly how much do you think I know?”
“Proserpina!” shouts Ernestine, traipsing over. “Where have you been?”
“Yes, out alone?” asks Radiane.
“No,” says Proserpina, too quickly.
Radiane cocks her head. “Not alone?”
“Not that either!” Proserpina says.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
“Oh, there you are, Bongo,” says Thaddeus, wobbling in through the swinging door. “Did you get lost?”
“Heh, yeah,” Bongo says. “I’m not used to working in a place anything like this size!”
“You’ll learn your way around the Educational Funtime HQ soon enough.”
“I mean, you guys have like an entire snack bar in here!” exclaims Bongo, waving one floppy arm around the vaulted chamber. “Not to mention the leather couches and the plasma TV… this is the nicest studio I’ve ever seen!”
“This is the bathroom,” says Thaddeus.
“You have a bathroom?” gasps Bongo, eyes full of puppet tears.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
“I’m taking Reaching the West Reaches and my friends,” says the emissary, cool and cocksure, silk-robed in black. “You can either profit by this or be destroyed.”
Papa Bosom laughs and laughs.
“You’re standing on–” Dog Shouting tries to hiss in warning from her lounging spot on the floor, but a yank on her leash chokes her off.
“There will be no bargain, Hopeless Warrior,” purrs Papa Bosom in his wet and backward language. “I shall enjoy watching you die.”
The guard’s bolter flies to the Princess’s hand: a flash and a crackle, a scream, and then the floor disappears.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The self-loathing Nazi brain in a jar goes back in time to kill itself, and hesitates.
“I can’t do it!” sobs the speakerbox of the headless corpsebot in whose chest it currently resides. “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem!”
“I don’t know what Gerry existentialist crisis he’s yappin’ about,” whispers American Haymaker, “but I say we strike now!”
“Hold on,” says Damsel Disaster (actually her granddaughter, here in disguise from an alternate future to make sure things don’t go too well).
“Ach!” shrieks the self-loathing Nazi brain in a jar, who just got its own pun.
Monday, November 10, 2008
“How long has it been since your last appointment?”
“About two years,” Lowry mumbles around the hissing tube.
“Mm hmm.” Dr. Andrus tugs his gently jaw downward and peers in, over half-moon glasses and the screen of a paper mask. “And have you had any lapses in your regimen?”
“Well, I haven’t flossed enough,” says Lowry, “I mean, who does, but… Um. I drink a soda with dinner most days. Once in a while I chew ice.”
“I see,” says Dr. Andrus gravely. “Well, let us pray.”
Lowry sighs, and tries to remember how to start the Act of Dentition.
The focus takes Jake by his sixth chakra on a Saturday afternoon and drives him, scrambling and skipping, like a doll dancing on a springy plank. The wind of his passage is binary static: he could concentrate on listening and pick out the message, if he tried, but by then he’d be tumbling and ground to chuck.
After it leaves him, he assembles himself: hunched over, alone, sand-eyed with his back complaining. It’s dark outside and the clock is blinking with exhaustion. He’s surrounded by an impossibly intricate sculpture of taut wire.
He plucks it. The room coughs up arpeggios.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Alcina leaps the widening crack down Radia Street and leans to sprint in a circle through the big public archway, trailing a rope as thick as lightning. She ties it (ground-line hitch) and tugs twice; it goes instantly taut, and she catches another and sprints away.
Above, the great zeppelin trembles, tethered by a hundred more hawsers to the tired and lopsided structures of the city. The cracks are accelerating, but Alcina is too: an overpass, a plaza, and the last one tied around her wrist.
The island falls into the ocean. Atlantis rises, on lines as tight as hope.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
During the Decline everybody gets bored with gladiation, so the organizers flail for new stunts to lure back audiences. Men fighting women! Men fighting lions! Every spectator gets a free pair of sandals! Women fighting lions! Men fighting with potatoes! Men fighting a fire! Every spectator fighting a fire! That one is sort of a retroactive promotion and they promise to build better exits.
Then there’s the sack, of course, and they try out a new promotion: men fighting the organizers! Also lions! And a fire! But the Vandals don’t make any money off it (they are total crap at marketing).