Once the moon was an ocean; and the whale was there, and her name was Liwash. With her first breath she took in all its atmosphere, and the sea boiled away beneath her, and so she swam through the void tto the deepest places of Earth.
But she was not the first to arrive: there was Hufgafa, the beast whose arms fill the cracks at the center of the world. They battled, and when Liwash could tear one of Hufgafa’s arms away, magma escaped and formed these islands.
Why, yes, the same magma you see in the volcanoes.
They battle still.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Devon has a small deciduous forest on his scalp and shoulders.
“It’s called dendropecia,” he says honestly to anyone with the courage to ask. “It’s a rare condition, but it has its perks. After all, when I go bald I know it’ll all be back in the spring!” And they laugh together, because he’s given that permission.
Until, one day, his interlocutor doesn’t laugh with him. “But don’t you spend the day in heated rooms?” she asks.
“Well,” he says, “yes.”
“Then why make that joke?”
“I don’t know,” he says, trying not to stare at the raincloud above her head.
Monday, February 26, 2007
“But Margaret Thatcher isn’t dead,” says Statler.
“I know,” says Waldorf, “I said the late Margaret Thatcher.”
Statler blinks. “That’s… what that means.”
“No it doesn’t! It’s like… somebody you speak of with respect. You know, somebody who’s been around for a while, so they’ve earned it, later in life.” He smiles. “The late Jim Henson. The late Coretta Scott King.”
“Both dead,” says Statler gently.
Waldorf grabs the laptop and googles fiercely. “Here!” he says. “The late James Brown!”
“Last December, right before Gerald Ford–”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” hisses Waldorf. “I will make you late as hell.”
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
“Just like the fish,” whispers the boy, crackling over the golden wire between the hyporvrychio above his father’s wheezing. Fins are so much work! Perhaps in the next design a pump, or a finned wheel–
The wire’s taut. “Careful,” he warns into the speaking-tube. “Even fish go only so deep.”
“They go wherever they wish!” So fast, laughing, young legs finally free of their cell. “They swim deeper than any net!”
“No!” He pants. “The plating won’t hold, child–”
Pinging on the line; gushing; a cry silenced as the wire finally snaps. The copper fish vanishes into the hungry dark.
Lon’s editor is a small black bulldog with a thick tail where its hind legs should be.
“Gimme that one,” it snaps, and jerks its head at a word on the page. “And that one. Next paragraph, too.”
Lon obliges, and it gnashes them greedily down. He reads it again: it really is better.
“Whole page,” the editor belches. “An’ another. A chapter. More!”
The story’s as good as it’s ever been, but Lon’s out of paper. The editor fills the room.
“You know what’s next,” it growls, looking down, eyes beady.
Lon nods with relief, and holds out his hands.
Thisbe crosses her fingers and the world goes time-lapse, so they flicker through the driving and stop at every red light. At the red lights they kiss. Kissing at red lights never ceases to startle the heart, even when you do so forty-three times on the way home.
Pyr doesn’t want to be home yet, though, so he slaps down a narration box and they’re at the park the next day: sunlight, and water, and the long weekend still ahead. They whisper pale pink words and lie back on the grass, grinning, to watch the speech balloons float away.
The Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd is the fourth-oldest living thing in the world, which is obvious from his shoes. They’re whatever color gray becomes after brown turns into gray, when that brown was once polished black. They personally ground out the grooves on his apartment steps.
The Owl lets crackers fall from a sleeve as he climbs. He’s courting mice. He doesn’t eat them, not anymore; he just likes to stand at his doorstep, at the very top of the switchback staircase, and watch. Age has taken his beak, his shoes, and his silent feathers, but never yet his sight.