He steps outside and realizes he forgot to fold this part.
The sky above him glints like sugar spilled on ink. There are trees here, sharp and twisted things, like nothing on earth. Where is he?
When is he?
How old is he?
How old was she when–
He grabs a branch; his hand comes away bloody, and he smears it across the pages. Names lift from it and float away (Zocco Zion Zinnia Zhenya) but they’re all wrong. What page was it on? Seventeen? Nineteen?
Maybe he shouldn’t ask.
Somewhere a snowskull drifts to earth, ELIOT melting from its brow.
There are five of them, in sackcloth and a star pattern, rocking endlessly on a floorlike mesh of taut steel cables. The star’s missing a point. The taller suit applies pressure to Celesque’s joints until she kneels at the vertex.
Below her stretches sickening space.
Kirrily grabs her chin and Celesque sees that her head is half-shaved, one eye milky, ear a twisted keloid. “You tipped those two amateurs to my dirty laundry, didn’t you?” she asks in that beautiful, husky voice, and holds up a bluetooth. “You owe me some time.”
Celesque is terrified.
She really, really should be.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
They’re not called dead letter offices anymore, but Karaaz isn’t fooled by the Morcroft Mail Recovery Center banner tacked over the old sign. Necromancy works on lots of things.
“Arise!” she hisses through the little slot, and inside thousands of rectangles stand up on end. “Fly to me, my servants! Not that way! Slip under the door, you’re flat, wait not toward the sacred candle oh no not all of you, what are you MOTHS or something–”
“We knew they were bad at finding places,” Gretch points out.
“MY HAIR,” says Karaaz, trying to dampen out the fire with a sponge.
Yuriko’s roommate has some weird habits but, y’know, Craigslist.
“Hey, Neely bailed so I’ve got an extra ticket to the paloozamacallit,” she says, banging through the front door. “Did you want it?”
Her roommate, levitating in the corner of the ceiling, stares with bulging eyes.
“Because it might be nice to get some sunlight,” says Yuriko doggedly.
Her roommate pushes stringy black hair over her white face with fingernails like broken claws, then meows. Black liquid glugs into the sink.
“Look, do you want to go or not?”
“Not if it’s going to be full of fucking hipsters,” sniffs her roommate.
“Is this broccoli certified ironic?” says Paul.
“Yep,” says the clerk. Â “It’s ‘delicious.’ Says so right on the little rubber band.”
“Because it’s right next to some regular broccoli, and they look exactly the same.”
“Yeah, but the difference is, this one knows it’s broccoli.”
“Irony isn’t the same thing as–never mind,” says Paul. Â “So the other broccoli was grown under sincere conditions?”
“No, but that one you’re holding was,” says the clerk.
“What?”
“It’s delicious. Says so right on the rubber band.”
“You’re fucking with me, aren’t you,” says Paul.
“Dude,” says the clerk in that same monotone. “I’m hurt.”
He can place it now, the noise, the low whine rising. Everyone breathing together, said the end of the world. But breathing their first or last?
He flips through his notebook. Even the inside cover is layered in incomprehensibly dense script, black on white on black repeating, but he remembers writing his name first in case he were to lose it. It’s still down there somewhere. Information can be neither created nor destroyed.
What does it take to wash ink from memory? He touches the edge of one page with his still-bleeding finger. The paper sucks hungrily, and then he knows.