The Wild Man of Summersend wears breeches with hair belt; he eats grubs and honey. He tried eating locusts and honey but apparently you don’t get locusts in the woods. He spends his time vomiting grubs and accosting travelers. “Guilt!” he’ll shout, and hurl a mudball down the path.
“Hello, God-touched,” says the Knight respectfully, raising his visor to wipe away mud.
The Wild Man drops his next mudball and stares. “Whose face are you wearing?” he whispers.
“Nought but my own.”
“Whose face!” shouts the Wild Man, then sees the Knight’s burnished chest and remembers: ah, yes, the mirror’s.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Paraphernalia retains a few things in her name, on her wedding day: a Bible and rosary, grooming items and a key to her parents’ home. Everything else becomes the common property of the Wives of Newton.
Even the dress is theirs, one of three they let out or take in as needed. The bodice is a little loose. She tries not to fidget as the priest of Apollo drones Greekly on into the ceremony, and then Madam Conduitt is smiling, holding her husband’s golden hand on a platter.
“I do,” says Paraphernalia, and lets her ring clink with all the others.
Yevgeny does the puzzles and Minzhu unlocks the people. There are lots of other Yevgenys in their neigborhood, but they don’t have a Minzhu. They live in Steganopolis and are very, very rich.
“Which won’t last long,” says Yevgeny. “We should enjoy it. Last month’s losers have connections within the city, and they’re unhappy with you.”
“With you,” she corrects. “I’m just a tourist trying to divine the city’s anima.”
“Really?”
“Kind of.”
“I told you what the secret anagram for ‘Steganopolis’ was, didn’t I?” Yevgeny’s face is sober now, alert and still.
“Not yet,” says Minzhu.
“Oops!” says Yevgeny, “Genitals.”
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Redeco’s done, and it’s just as cheap not to store the scaffolding–that’s why they hire Schroder. He and his apprentice Plink wear Teflon jumpsuits in that invulnerable shade of green.
They start at the top. Schroder aims the pump hose at the scaffold ceiling and watches pale sky appear; he raises one hand and passes it through the empty space. Never gets tired of that.
Plink rattles her detailing can uncomfortably. “Does it bother you? Wondering where it all goes?”
“I believe it mostly ends up in my closet,” says Schroder, who hasn’t the courage to try spraying in there.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
To understand why Lombard builds his bomb you have to understand that in his time, anyone can see the Earth from space, and it’s a natural consequence that one should also thereby see ads. Eva Longoria in Vegas, iStralia, the Wall twisted into hanzi for “Deng Xiaoping.” It’s a growth market.
But the night that turns Lombard to explosive misanthropy is the night he watches an Earthset from the moon. You can’t see much from there except the aurora borealis. Lombard bites his finger very hard, when he does so: green and gold, ghostly, WAL-MART flaring against the startled void.
The librarianeers tear whooping through the reference section, plundering atlases, grabbing haphazard Britannicas, snapping the OED from its pedestal chain. Commander Zouave struggles with the ropes that bind him to the circulation desk. “I don’t care about the indignity we’ve suffered,” he fumes to First Mate Sibwell, “it’s the sacrilege. The sacrilege.”
After the rescue, Sibwell glumly assesses the state of the stacks. “It’s not good, sir,” he says. “They got into the Deweys too.”
“All that knowledge, loose among the riffraff,” mutters Zouave. “Who knows what they’ll do with it?”
Away in their black Bookmobile, the pirates are reading, reading.