“Shit, you’ve got it bad in here,” says Chelsea, playing the flashlight over the recording booth. They would turn the lights on, but there’s no telling which of the switches is real.
“I already called an exterminator,” says Yehuda. “They say they’re booked out for weeks.” He throws a glum bottlecap at the endless dials along the mixing bank. Some of them grow legs and scuttle away.
“Skeuomorphs are everywhere this year,” says Chelsea. “Like cicadas.” She reaches for the door and finds it’s got two new handles. Shuddering, she hopes none of them are already imitating rivets on her jeans.
Friday, February 11, 2011
With shaking hands he finds his cheap ballpoint and field-strips it, fumbling the spring from its barrel and prying it straight as pain until he’s got a sharp point to dig with. The splinter comes free, and blood, as always, follows.
He stares at it for a moment, mind as clumsy as his hands, then sucks it from his fingertip.
He will come to regret the waste.
When he reassembles the pen again it doesn’t work anymore. No matter. He drops it and, unnoticed, a slip of paper from his pocket tumbles down after it to nest between the floorboards.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Up, across the slippery floor, Ashlock grabs the dead drive by its cable and shatters it with the blade of her rigid palm. A shoulder under Tach’s limp tall body and a fireman’s heave: she leans forward into the sprint, down the dark long tunnel.
Silent now but for the tight whistle of breath. Ashlock fumbles her stupid phone from her breast pocket and runs by its bobbing glow. The island begins sobbing, a sound so low it blurs vision, thunder in the cave of her chest.
Ten steps from light of the loading bay, the ice gives way beneath them.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
“All right, we’re going to do another set of leg lifts. Ready? Okay! Five six seven eight! Lots of energy. Great job! Next we’re going to take your thumb and put it right against your shoulder blade. Got it? I need you to bring your chin right down to your glutes. I like to call this one the ‘unspeakable ideogram!’ Feel your calves defying the law of exclusion? Reality should be weakening near your navel. Hold it! Hooold it! The broodspawn of Ur’gthax are breaching the veil of reality! At last! Burst forth, my children, and scourge this world!
“Aaand relax.”
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Teutons are a bitch to play in this game but Alejandro really wants to see if he can get through the campaign, survive the Lithuanian uprising and limp to the Peace of Thorn.
“We miss you,” she says, her IM window making the monitor blort.
“I’m done with guild drama,” he types back.
“Nursing your chapped ass in VGA nostalgia?”
“No.”
“So you’re not trying to take back Samogitia right now.”
Alejandro winces. “Yeah, well.”
“Do you miss us?”
“You mean ‘me?'”
But she’s already signed off.
The Peace of Thorn is brief and bitter; it becomes the Hunger War.
“Nobody ever did that,” says Agnes. “It’s an urban legend.”
“Are you sure?” says Fantine. “If the ashes were fine enough–”
“You don’t snort something that smells wrong by accident! Because when you start to snort, you put your nose near it!”
“Cocaine dulls your sense of smell,” says Diego. “Also how are you so knowledgeable about snorting?”
“I’m knowledgeable about basic critical thinking skills,” says Agnes, “but only in comparison to present company.”
“Look, there’s only one way to resolve this.”
So they break into the crematorium. It doesn’t resolve anything, but Fantine’s coat smells like fire for a year.
It’s some time before her nose catches on and Aniridia realizes where she is: backstage. Not any backstage she recognizes, but the smell is universal, velvet and rope and dust on the lights.
And nerves.
The path is narrow, like a game trail, or the routes preserved through the hoards of the mentally ill. The tiny keychain LED leads her with a cold bubble of light, catching on jars of catseye marbles and stacks of wire birdcages. The cages are too small for more than one occupant. If you like birds that much, Aniridia wonders, why not keep them in pairs?
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Crystal flowers fractal through Ashlock’s skull, spars of ice and silicon bursting from her nose and tongue and the thin bone over her sinuses, lancing down into her throat. She can’t breathe. She can’t think. Her eyes are frayed optical fiber, every end a scraped and screaming nerve, and she cannot look away from the beast below.
She claws at the slippery edge of sanity, and Tach is there.
She’s never seen behind his trance before. He is unspeakable. Enormities thunder from his mouth, and her mind kicks backward out of madness, sending her body skidding twenty feet across the ice.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011