“You aren’t supposed to see this,” says the end of the world.
Aniridia looks out at the auditorium and the dead filling its seats, quiet and still. Â “I didn’t intend to,” she says. Â “I want to go home.”
“Have you walked the maze?” The end of the world straightens from her sutures. “Have you named names and dug at the cracks? There’s no home for you anymore.”
“Dead dear fear feed fled,” Aniridia whispers, then grips the curtain, forcing glossolalia back down her throat.
“Which will you be?” she asks. “The end of the house? Â Or the girl in the world?”
When she looks up from the amorphous stanza she realizes she’s walked out of the area backstage and into the wings. Red curtain legs hang ranked alongside her, and she peers around them to see the grand drapes drawn shut behind a false proscenium. This device, she recalls, is called a tormentor.
Is there an audience out there? Of whom or what would it be composed? She almost doesn’t want to look, but her father would admonish her for willful blindness. Aniridia thinks of his poetry books and goofy legerdemain, and pulls the velvet apart to step out onto the apron.
His finger aches as he dyes the vellum crimson.
Paper sucks blood away, a capillary hunger he finds it somehow hard to watch, but soon the model is finished. He sets it in place and the light flares green and purple, colors of greed. It’s lapping at him. It is pulling him down.
The auditorium.
He crouches in the aisle, nauseated, feeling like a rough stone in a tumbler from his own graceless travel. But he’s back. He stumbles to his seat to find his notebook, a battered little thing covered in strata of ink.
A sound makes him look up.
They’re tourists, in Tasmania.
Ashlock flicks fragments of Twistie at the emus under the sign that says not to flick fragments of Twistie at the emus. Her new finger is clumsy, but she likes it. Nobody’s going to confiscate this brass knuckle.
“So,” she says finally, “any holes in your brain?”
“The first illegal number I ever memorized,” Tach says, “was set down in haiku. A clever form of transcoding. It unlocked certain rights for the management of digital media.”
“I’m sorry I did it,” says Ashlock.
“You did all right. One has to know something before one can forget it.”
They’re hard to kill, but oh, they do age. Â Slow, but they do.
Yarrow hasn’t had his own teeth in decades. Â He finds ways, though: his old-fashioned razor, his tongue, and the subtle Band-Aid. Â His eyes and voice still work their old glamor, and if the nurses and aides seem a bit pale and sickly, well, you know how things go around.
It’s a flexible facility, and if he wants to take his meals in his room and draw the blinds, well, it’s his money. Â Mr. Yarrow’s been here a long time. Â He deserves respect.
And on Saturday nights, there’s Bingo.
Some days let you have your farm implements, but others require tools of war. Either of those needs fire and anvil, sweat and time. Some people march to the front for battle. Others march out back to the forge.
She’s got her hammer free, and she’s beating fear from hot steel on the flat of a February morning. Try as you might, you can’t hone an edge on worry. You just set yourself to the work.
A flare of light from the cooling metal: recalescence. She smiles in the glow of her swords and plowshares, and marshalls summer against the dark.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Aniridia shouldn’t be surprised to find that someone’s left their copy of the script down here.
Not that it’s the kind of thing one can memorize. The words are scribbled in haste down the inside cover of a blank octavo, and they slide and blur under the wobbly pinhead of light; by the time she gets to the bottom, she’s sure the top has changed:
Fever dreams and mondegreens,
Innocent of time;
Tarry, scurry, hide the seams,
Multiply your eyes
Close the book of holorime.
Night will swallow day
And ink, and knives, and things unkind.
You’re better off this way–
Friday, February 25, 2011
“Better do this while it’s still numb,” she chatters, and though the medic’s knife is sharp, everyone hears the slippery crunch. Tach staggers off to be sick; the captain is pale. Ashlock exhales through pursed lips and then manages “I need a drink with all possible speed.”
The medic fumbles gauze. “You shouldn’t have alcohol until we get the bleeding–”
“I can still kill you with this hand.”
The captain finds a plastic flask of something clear and burning, which Ashlock hits hard. “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asks.
“Just make the boat go faster,” says Ashlock.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
1944 and it’s cold in occupied France, cold enough that PFC Jack Kirby spends a night in the mud and ends up with frostbitten legs. The London surgeons have no choice but to amputate and give him cyberprosthetics made of starmetal.
Seriously, look it up.
Between Steranko’s escape artistry and Ditko’s phantom cloak, the three of them are a crack team on the European front. Fists fly; energies crackle; the Axis cowers before them. Soon they stand atop the ruins of the Reichstag, triumphant, titans of the age.
Stan Lee is one of only nine official Army Playwrights, so there’s that.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011