Renee gets fired for saying record stores are dead, which is okay, since she was working illegally. She takes her last check to the specialty print shop and blows a year’s negatives up to poster size. She gets some scissors.
She borrows her roommate’s Kodak and sends shots of the collage to galleries. Some of them want it. She picks the one with a capitalized name and it sells, shortly, to some nonprofit CEO.
It’s enough money for now; she moves out. Staring at the taupe walls of her new apartment, she realizes she can’t remember any of the original photographs.
“Will you offer us fealty, Spartan?” grins the Persian emissary.
“‘Fraid not,” drawls Leonidas. “Those Athenian homos already said no, right? We do have a reputation.”
They throw the emissary in a well.
“The Athenian well was way deeper,” he calls up.
Leonidas frowns. “Oh. Okay, we’ll… look around for one. Somebody haul them up?”
“The Athenians actually wanted to resolve everything by dance-off!”
“We could do that,” says Leonidas. His generals mumble protests. “Dudes! We’re not going to be outdone by homos!” he shouts.
Leonidas’s boyfriend whispers in his ear.
“Oh,” says the king. “Th-that’s what homo means?”
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
“Napa,” Grand admits, embarrassed. “On vacation, at a wine tasting. Is it less trite if they were married to other people at the time?”
“Scandal!” says Chicago, delighted. “Am I really allowed to know that?”
“That’s off the record!”
“Yeah, fine,” she grumbles. “Anyway, mine met when… he was stationed in Germany during Gulf War One. No idea why. They went out dancing and he came back two years later to take her home.”
“My parents had the Death Talk with me after she–um,” mutters Grand.
“Killed herself?” says Chicago lightly. “They should have given you the Drama Talk instead.”
It’s warm today, and Water left his grass cloak draped behind them. He’s found an interesting rock. He would call it rust-colored, if he’d ever seen rust.
His friend Noon watches as he picks up one black rock and touches them together. He lets go, and the black rock falls away. He picks up another rock, quite similar to the eye–but when he takes his hand away it remains.
Noon is too astonished to be afraid. “What?” he asks, as Water turns the rocks together slowly. “How?”
“Majk,” says Water: which is their word for “red,” and for “blood.”
Everybody knows the Lethe will help you forget. Nobody mentions its method of operation.
Limia vomits again and again, her stomach so tight and twisted that it makes her want to vomit, which she does. The taste of it is acrid and salty. She gasps raggedly between gouts of candy-ad jingles, locker combinations, towel smells and her mental map of Yorba Linda.
At the end she’s so weak that she can only bring her grandmother up in pieces. Each piece scowls disapprovingly at her from the water. Limia watches them scud away, wondering why she hates that woman so much.
Jet lag. Let’s jag.
Renee wakes on touchdown in Vancouver, her ticket the spoils of Tokyo high-stakes tiddlywinks: her fingers haven’t forgotten all their magic. She realizes, without much feeling, that she has now been literally around the world.
She changes her last three thousand yen for loonies and takes the bus downtown. She gets a job at a record store on the strength of her smile and the cut of her jeans. She crashes with an LJ friend; she looks for a sublet on Craigslist.
Vancouver looks like New York, and it takes her a while to realize why.
The daughter of Lester Scavenger has blonde curls and a blue dress, with which she’s careful as she picks her way over rusting Kelvinators and sloughs of compost. She’s lucky; they made a new drop during the night. She gathers watch cogs and batteries, a silk kerchief, most of a cake still in the box. It’s all treasure, and she holds it close.
When she comes home at dusk her father is stoking the blue fire. “What have you got today, my darling?” asks Lester.
The scavenger’s daughter clicks her mandibles happily, and opens wide the brass cage of her heart.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
“Whatsits,” says Costas, giddy on his fourth glass. “Exponents! Even if they only feed once a month, well, boom, thirty months and ‘smore than the population of the planet.”
“That’s your mathematical disproof of vampires?” asks Schreck.
“Good enough for Internets,” winks Costas.
“Those assumptions, though,” says Schreck. “Even in Stoker, it takes months to turn a victim.”
Costas shrugs. “Exponents,” he says. “Say it takes a year. A decade!” He doodles sums. “Everybody’s bloodsuckers by about… uh… last June.” The whole bar is staring. “And I’m not,” he adds uneasily.
“We’ve been waiting,” drools Schreck, “for someone to say that.”
On the evening of the sixteenth Sunday of the year, old men with ponytails accrete in the Northpark T.J. Maxx: they poke at housewares and wait for everyone else to leave. They wear tweed with leather elbows over sweatpants. When they are alone, they hang up their tweeds.
The ponytailed man behind the counter is also named T.J. (a coincidence). He dims the lights and puts on Natalie Cole. The men partner up, and bow, and begin to dance. Their faces are mournful; their eyes are closed, elsewhere, decades away.
At midnight they’re gone, leaving whiffs of Old Spice and regret.