“Give it!” says Boko, and, grabbing the TransfoJet 5000, he shoves little Lucia down the stairs. She tumbles into a heap at the bottom and wails.
Now Boko has Maser Man and the TransfoJet 5000. He glances slyly toward Jamon, playing with the Glop Fortress.
He stomps and yanks hair. He bites and shoves. He becomes a terror, and the other children flee before him.
At last Boko finds himself alone in the playhouse. He has all the newest, shiniest toys, but nobody else to play with them.
It’s completely awesome and he lives for a hundred years and dies happy.
Miss Havisham waits expectantly.
“We had, um, a midnight feast, is all,” explains Iala. “In the dorm.”
“Which dorm?” Miss Havisham asks quietly.
“2B!” says Iala. “3A!” says Ernestine.
“It was sort of in both,” says Iala. “Or either.”
“Only,” says Ernestine, “there was a fight. With food. A food fight.”
“No one was hurt,” says Radiane. “It was all in fun. Gentle fun.”
“Well, to be perfectly honest,” says Iala piously, “someone did get hit with a sausage.”
Miss Havisham’s eyebrow can climb no higher.
Proserpina sits in the back, grumpy, cheeks red and left eye puffing up quite nicely.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Shit yeah!
You only get one club in street golf, usually a big one. Some people tape an aluminum bat to the side of their clubs, which is called, in street golf jargon, “bat-taping.” It’s technically illegal. It’s also sort of inadvisable to call anyone on it, because they have a bat.
Anyway you basically just hit the ball as fast as you can until you get to the manhole with the little pointy flag in it. Whoever doesn’t get arrested wins.
Street golf!
You’re allowed to use parkour but only if you admit that you look like a douchebag.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The problem with subterranean medical care is, at heart, a cotton shortage.
“Ragachak think it infected,” says Ragachak mournfully, picking at scabs. “Ragachak not know why!”
“Probably because all five of you used the same bandage,” sighs Doctor von Bloöd. “I keep telling you goblins that sharing is not always caring. Nurse, sterilize these?”
The nurse breathes fire on the instrument tray.
“I’ll lance it, but you’ll need to keep it clean,” says von Bloöd. “Can’t you waylay some do-gooders carrying clean water for once?”
“Ragachak try!” chirps Ragachak. “But it hard to tell before we drop the big rock.”
As a boy, Malzberg watched Leviathan’s approach on CNN for effectively 24 hours a day; when his mom dragged him to bed he’d DVR everything overnight and skim it during the next day’s commercials and political scandal. As the impossible whale drifted past Mars orbit and fetched up in the Lagrangian point, though, earthly matters faded away.
He’d break away from the TV just long enough to peer desperately into his backyard telescope, thinking maybe, maybe he caught a gleam of its spacepocked body.
“Get some sleep, Malzberg,” his mother would sigh. Even then nobody called him by his first name.
Once they stop shaking, Sara does noisy things to the roof door with her multitool. Zach scowls at shoppers in the mall below as she thumbs Euros down a phone, then leads him into an alley.
“Szervusz,” says one of two enormous, shiny-headed men.
“You’ll never take us alive!” Zach says, trying to make his body peel off the wall and stand in front of Sara.
“Zach, meet István and Pál,” Sara sighs. “They’re friends. Friends of friends. Protection.”
“Oh.” Zach grins with relief. “I wish I’d known you had local security for yourself!”
“Sure,” says Sara carefully, “for myself.“
Thursday, August 21, 2008
It’s pretty late and the whole ruling council of Capua is hopped up on hummingbird tongues when one of them leans over to Quintus Flaccus, hiccupping.
“Wanna know,” he giggles, “a secret?”
“Yes,” says Quintus Flaccus.
“ROME SUCKS!” whoops the councillor. The other senior men shriek and toast him.
Quintus Flaccus nods thoughtfully. The next morning he has them all beheaded, which given their hummingbird-tongue hangovers is a relief all around. Then he enslaves the rest of the city.
“This blows,” the Capuans point out.
“Blowjobs,” Quintus Flaccus declaims, “are the price of disloyalty!”
Nobody ever writes that down though.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Reaching the West Reaches pads along bamboo causeways with an ease he could never have managed before. Ahead of him flits a blue shade: The Plum Of, in her ghostly robes. He stalks her like a shark in the shallows.
The Wish Power thrums through him, carrying images. See Me is elsewhere on this cloudbound island, the Speaker elsewhere still, and at the center is the source of the mist, a fount of icy froth. It waits to ensnare a victim.
None of this matters.
Keep looking, whispers The Plum Of, somewhere ahead of him. Keep looking. Our daughters are here.
When Mori arrives at the station the desk sergeant makes a big show of finding her name on the twenty-page authorized translator list; by the time she gets back to Interrogation Two, Yusuf is fuming.
“About damn time!” he says. “So I’m right? They speak Pinter?”
“No,” says Mori, “Mamet. Not my specialty, but…”
“Are you actuallygonnafucking–” yells one of the perps.
“We’vebeentalking all morning and it’s like–” says the other.
“TRYING to spillthebeans–”
“‘Cause thesemotherfuckers–”
“FuckingMORNING they’ve been–”
“Theybeenfucking–”
“Areyougonnalisten? Huh?”
“Mother–”
“So?” says Yusuf. “Can you make sense of that?”
“I think they want some beans,” Mori frowns.