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
Bitches in heat on the sheep farm and boy dogs are testing everything for meat temperature. Kendall likes chastising them with paintballs, but Da expressed firm-handed displeasure upon seeing their technicolor coats. She’ll wait for her week alone, pasturing on the Jones land. Rain obliterates the evidence.
Padrig had better fuck her again there, too, or she’ll turn the muzzle on him. The smell of the rolled-up tent makes her shiver. Smells do it for Kendall: tent mildew, sweaty boy, and the wet wood of the dock they’d run down, diving bare into water as cold as the moon.
Symptoms may include loss of appetite, loss of concentration, loss of keys, ennui, and burning sensations in your eyes when trying to sleep.
Symptoms may include heightened sex drive, lowered standards, overly available digits, and gin goggles. Do not operate heavy anatomy while under the effects.
Symptoms may include trouble remembering names in the morning.
Recommended treatment: devoted and untroublesome friends who exist only in movies. Should these prove unavailable, consider waiting until the sun comes out in April and getting the fuck over yourself. Consult your physician before decreasing any masturbation regimen.
Side effects are similar to a candy heart.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
A point about high-functioning addicts: their function is often quite high.
Salman has two hours between errands to get the house presentable for tonight’s book club: he knocks out the laundry and the mopping in a tight fifteen. Gotta get some food in, too. Salman rinses a single plate with one hand and pops the dishwasher door with the other. He closes it with his heel.
One must have space to unpack the paraphernalia. One must have time to clean it, when done.
The door opens, and a smile is there to greet them. Salman could swear it wasn’t his.
His hand catches in limine, and he hesitates, turning to pull his finger free and examine it. There’s a splinter, long and dark, just under the dim translucence of his outermost skin.
He tries to pry it out and succeeds in snapping off the end. Tension mounts his lower back, draws his shoulders together. He sits down to worry at it; each attempt makes the wound a little more raw.
It’s driving him like a trapped animal. He gnaws at his finger, casts about for a needle, whimpers and curses and kicks the wall and why can’t he remember his name
Thursday, January 27, 2011
She plugs it in. The lights go out.
Your eyes react to things that aren’t light. Ashlock learns this when the glow through the ice of the floor picks out their veins and skeletons, faintly, backed by colors that have no name. The drive is whining. Air thumps above them. Tach convulses, and she holds him down, eyes stung with the hate of it, counting seconds against transfer-rate math in her head.
“Three cronomicon, two cronomicon, one,” she whispers, fingers tight on the cable. She’s already pulling it free when she makes the same mistake as Orpheus.
Ashlock looks down.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011