It’s hard being a unicorn driver on the cotton candy plantation. “Believe in the magic of your dreams!” they’re always crooning at him. “Let’s all take… a snuggle break!” Dilbo’s whip arm aches by the end of the day just from shutting them up, and they eat all the candy.
But he keeps trying, because the gnomes all teleported to Canada and he still remembers what happened the last time his monthly totals dropped. He sees the consequences every time he comes home, and his wife staggers to greet him: the rictus of her frosting smile, and her rigid gingerbread hug.
The autobiography of Cording Vance–callsign Rakehell; alias Cordwood Vance, alias Thomas Cording, alias Tommy Bombshell; interfederal fugitive on charges of racketeering, assault, contraband weapons trading and a number of murders so great it is technically classified as a war crime; called the Fire on Algol, the Sunkiller, Slick Burn Tommy, Bloodbather or the Terricide; subject of the late Jacen Knobpop’s #1 intergalactic megasingle “Demon Star;” threat to disobedient children; pimp, controlled nucleotide dealer, enforcer, executioner, gangster, petty warlord and, of late, writer–reads in its entirety as follows: “Listen man don’t EVER fuck with librarians that’s all I’m gonna say.”
The other thing about time passing is that after a few hundred years it gets impossible to find a good catamite. There are alternatives, of course, but any diet suffers for lack of variety: it’s as if apples were going extinct. Longinus finds himself going to preposterous lengths just for an afternoon with a companionable nine-year-old. It’s one such fit of desperation that drives him to learn Japanese, just in time to get expelled by the shogunate.
He tries thinking about it in terms of relative ages, but it’s no use, and anyway mathematics always made him go soft.
Reaching the West Reaches quenches the mended blade, and brackish steam flares up around him, faster than he expected: brings with it towers and terraces, figures in the mist, screaming, minarets shattered in flames.
Stumble Jade lifts his welder’s mask to glare. “Control, control, you must learn control!”
“I saw a city in the clouds,” says Reaching the West Reaches slowly.
“It is the future you see.”
“They were in pain.” He rubs his head thoughtfully, the scars smoother than they were when he came here, tan blending their edges. “Will they die?”
“Always in motion,” says Stumble Jade, “the future.”
It’s really tough doing witness protection for the Wrasses because all it would take would be one classmate blogging the phrase “that family with twelve kids” and the guns of criminal desperation would fire their bullets right down through the tubes. So they get four houses on a cul-de-sac, assign five full-time agents and literally deal the kids out, face-down assignments. The Wrasses find this an immense relief. The agents, less so.
“So what’s keeping the neighbors from saying they all look alike?” wonders Agent Five (the “single mom”).
“Reflexive shame,” murmurs her supervisor, “seems to serve.”
“–similar to a sugar pill including nausea blurred vision and increased desire to gamble see our ad on health dot com,” finishes Zyrexitab, panting slightly and beaming at the class’s haphazard applause.
“Very good!” says the teacher. “Okay, has anyone not gone yet? Mirazinol? Apostrophex? Wait–yes, our newest classmate! Is it… Reggie?”
“Uh,” says Reggie, who’s been dreading this. “I can’t recite my disclaimer.”
The teacher smiles. “Don’t be shy!”
“No, I mean… I’m named after my grandfather. I don’t have a pharma patron.”
The whole class stares, then, as if cued. Rich boy, mouths one of them, accusingly silent.
“If you need me to teach your entire coterie how to pulverize one tempermental milksop,” says Proserpina dryly, “she must have hit you harder than I thought.”
“That’s not what we want!” snaps Iala. “It’s the–the way they look at you, everyone. The fear. The respect.”
“I’m sure you’re fantasizing, and in any case, I can’t teach it.”
“Then show me how to earn it!”
“How? Hurting Ernestine?”
“If necessary!”
“No.”
“Then why do you love fighting so much?” Iala sniffs.
“Because boxing isn’t a weapon,” Proserpina says, smiling, as the idea begins to light her up. “It’s a sport.”
A Grocery List for Disaster is playing an all-ages at Clifton’s, which means Ceez didn’t show, which means Bhavini has to spar with Gomer. Gomer is frail-looking and old; he is also fast and mean and smells of mung beans. Like some fifth-dimensional shape, Bhavini thinks glumly, this situation has only downsides.
Sensei squeezes her shoulders in that way that’s supposed to approximate a shoulder rub but comes off like a Vulcan murder grip. “How’s my contender?” he chuckles. “Gettin’ psyched up? Got ‘Eye of the Tiger’ on your headphones?”
“No,” she says, “A Grocery List for Disaster.”
Annamarie works that summer as the cashier at the self-checkout lane at the Winn-Dixie, where she stands at a counter and glances at receipts and politely points out forgotten twelve-packs of Coke on the bottom racks of shopping carts. She swipes her own Lunchables for her break next to the ice machine.
There’s a little TV at the stand and it flickers between cameras pointed out from under each laser scanner, so you can see what they’re trying to weigh as unlabeled produce. It shows faces, too, distorted and bulbous. Every one she sees could be her mother.