As a sophomore, Danielle found herself entranced by a cadre of older students: neither bright Christian Athletes nor defiant flannel survivalists, but kids who laughed and did what they wanted and kept the bullshit at bay.
Startlingly, they noticed. Danielle found herself anointed a member of Forster’s aristocracy. She didn’t undergo some metamorphosis, but she learned from their kindness, and grew.
Now she’s a senior (oh, so much older) and, contemplating an interesting sophomore, she wonders at their surety. Was it real? Will she ever find her own? Or is growing up just a chase for your betters that never ends?
“Your rows are all over the place,” Spencer informs her. “Did you get the seeds mixed up or something?”
“I never really understood why people wanted everything in rows anyway,” says Jessica.
“Well, it’s easier to weed, for one thing,” says Spencer. “Plus it’s easier to be consistent with pesticides.”
“I’m just using cayenne and coffee grounds.”
“Have it your way,” he shrugs. “It’s all on your head when you try to figure out what’s ready to harvest.”
Jessica just smiles and watches the rune garden grow, the slowest spell she’s ever cast: cabbage and sunflowers spelling out Ansuz, Raidho, Thorn.
Nothing about the dream is whimsical or gentle; certainly nothing about it is what one would call dreamy. Roul flickers from place to place, architectures from childhood with celebrities and dead uncles imposed on them.
It’s not a lucid dream, but it goes on for so long that at length Raoul assembles his moments of self-awareness into a slow and turbid stream of thought.
He remembers the diagnosis, the treatments. He remembers his lungs failing.
So this is the afterlife: a dream from which there is no waking. No gentleness, no whimsy, no sulfur, no choir.
Raoul hopes to forget.
“I won’t permit this,” says Proserpina’s mother, who is scared and worried and upset and has nothing else to say.
“You can’t prevent it,” says Proserpina. They’re waiting at a train station: almost a year ago (only a year ago?) she arrived here for fall term. She remembers her steeled jaw, her buried fear.
“You’re my daughter–”
“You wanted me to take up with the Buchanans, to secure our future. Well, I have.”
“I wanted you to be safe!”
“None of us is safe,” says Proserpina, as Dacelo walks in with hope on his face, and his father follows with hunger.
Salman is playing chess with the Addict, and losing.
“I don’t see you as part of myself anymore,” he says. “I’ve attained a certain distance. I can analyze the way you acted–”
“We acted,” says the Addict.
Salman trades rook for bishop. “And the most embarrassing thing to see is how simple your motivations were. Anyone asks why I did anything–fear? No. Sex? No. Long-term strategy? No. Fix?”
“Yep!” says the Addict.
“It’s such a relief,” says Salman, checked, “to be a little more complex these days.”
The Addict reveals a lazy smile. “Oh yes,” he says. “You are.”
They’ve eliminated guage bosons, neutrinos, tauons and five flavors of quark, but the scientists working at the Innocence Project feel that this only strengthens their case.
“Our detractors brandish Occam’s Razor,” Velena types into the latest press release, “but the rigor of our science should prove that we are not multiplying entities—we are subtracting them, and thereby coming closer to the truth.”
They discard top quarks later that afternoon. No matter. The men and women of the Innocence Project are set to isolate the particle emitted by childhood’s decay, and they believe they can do it.
They really, really do.
Murdron and Garmegula have been battling so much lately that people are starting to talk.
“Do you even remember the last time Murdron threw down with Welbaru?” says Gerania, eyebrows high.
“No…”
“February! I checked!”
“You really think something’s going on?” says Hebron, as they duck and cover from a blast of napalm breath.
“I don’t know how they expect to stay off TMZ.”
Garmegula and Murdron are engaged in a long, staggering clinch; Garmegula’s dorsal blades shred the bank tower. There’s a lot of subsonic grunting.
Watching from the volcano a mile away, Akikai weeps. It’s probably just the fumes.
“What is that thing, anyway?” asks MacGuffin’s subway seatmate, as he careens miserably through the tunnel with the enormous crate wedged against him.
“The stuff nightmares are made of,” says MacGuffin. Ape, with Tangerine rocks itself over to better compress his toe.
“How much you want for it?”
MacGuffin lights up. “A dollar.”
“Would you take,” says his seatmate with cunning, “eighty cents?”
MacGuffin returns from lunch to find it back in his office, of course. Beagle’s mouth is mightily pursed.
“Why won’t you keep it?” he asks.
“It doesn’t work,” says his former seatmate, hand extended for his money back.
MacGuffin climbs back in at 5:05, slides around the crate, exchanges a scowl with Beagle and takes the 170 home. He prepares a supper (sausage and hominy), views a brief pornographic video followed by a series of sitcoms from the previous decade, and falls asleep with a cat on his feet. He wakes up the next morning and screams because the crate’s in his bedroom.
While his heart rate jerks back to normal, he examines it: it’s garnered one new sticker, emblazoned “Prev. Rr. [TFT Fwd.] 55.”
In his hasty exit, he hits the beautiful but deadly woman in the face.
MacGuffin finds himself, that day, using his paperweights for their intended purpose.
“Think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, MacGuffin?” asks a large man, sliding into his office.
“No,” says MacGuffin.
The large man leans out and grasps at the desk. MacGuffin uses a painter’s pole to push his platform just out of reach. At length, the large man gives up.
“Next time, MacGuffin,” he says, a little red-faced, and leaves.
On the way out he bumps into the next threatening large man, and they spend an awkward but entertaining minute trying to get through the door at the same time.