The best part about writing the college paper’s semiannual satire issue used to be that you got the last word in any one argument of your choice, but that was before Tack and Christiane were both on staff.
He starts it with Latin Useless, Argues Student Exempt from Medicine, Law, but she catches it in layout and slips in Foreign Language Dept. Deserves Expansion, Maintains Klingonophone.
Art History Jobs Still Desperate for Applicants, he retorts.
Op-Ed, she snaps. My Mass-Produced Che Guevara Poster Makes Me a Rebel!
Noted Local Feminist Demonstrates Sisterly Affection at Frat Party
Douchebag Somehow Full of Shit
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
It’s harder to see magic in winter, Skroder knows, when space heaters and furnace-vents have their own floating hazes to compete with the ripples in the air of sorcery at work. Neither the wine nor the candle-dim helps.
“Look, Harkins has seen Saigon. We haven’t,” says Albion, earnestly turtlenecked. “If we don’t intervene–”
“Which ‘we’ is that?” murmurs Erske.
Albion flushes, but Skroder steps in. “Well, that’s a good point. ‘We’ Americans or ‘we’ Adepts? Imagine bringing a mass invocation to bear on the insurgency.”
“Are you sure,” says Erske, “nobody has already?” Her tongue shimmers like a summertime road.
Monday, September 14, 2009
They’re fighting dogs in the bathroom of the Bank of England, and Secretary Grahame as usual turns a blind–no, he can’t quite think that. A deaf ear. A numb tongue.
Thus willfully distanced, Kenneth doesn’t squint when the lunatic in the lobby offers him a scroll tied with two ribbons. He just plucks the black one. The scroll opens to unspeakable inscriptions: dead gods and blood, infinity, the roiling despair of–
Water. They’re subduing the lunatic with a firehose; Kenneth crouches behind a chair, shaking, unharmed.
Later he quits and writes The Wind in the Willows (seriously, look it up).
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The caged models are shouting, glistening bodies blue with pancake; Isambard pauses in flicking through the channel guide. It’s amazing that they choose to protest through nudity, but he doesn’t question his luck. Not since he started getting it from the source.
“Humans for the Ethical Liberation of Pixies staged another protest today,” drones the reporter. Isambard shoves his hand through the door of one of the golden birdcages.
“Fly free, fair friends!” they’re chanting on the television.
Isambard holds the squirming, peeping thing tight, sits down before the mirror and razor, and begins to scrape the sparkle from its wings.
Monday, September 7, 2009
The dirt’s like glass shavings and the three suns are blue and distant, but some of the old Earth knowledge still works: their trap line yields three plump smeerps for the stewpot that night. Alriel stirs them over the fire with a stick like a birdbone.
“Do we know if these things are safe to eat?” asks Delorem, glancing at the dwindling pile of S-rations.
“They’re just rabbits dyed green,” says Alriel. “Here, try some.”
Delorem sips with an unconvinced expression. “Tastes like chicken.”
“Don’t you mean iku’unu?” sneers Alriel, before the boiling smeerp-spores embed themselves in her face.
Friday, September 4, 2009