Binyamin read somewhere as a kid that you can’t touch the tips of two pencils together; he kept trying until his knuckles were stippled with accidental graphite tattoos. His parents would have freaked out about tetanus if they’d noticed. He switched to ballpoint pens.
Because his life is a straightforward progression of metaphors, Binyamin becomes a mediator, talking people into meeting at the tiniest point imaginable: common ground. He likes his job and he’s good at it. The parties involved always address him as if he’s the translator, aching with pride wounds. Binyamin coaxes them together, a child forever unbreaking homes.
It’s intoxicating, the freedom of living under terror, moreso than the cider or the lateness of the night. Silhouine and a boy she doesn’t know kiss shivering, and stumble from the embers down alleys that have always intrigued her.
Morning: she sneaks in the back door, coiffured like a thicket, because Ms. Imbri is ringing the bellpull at the front. Silhouine splashes stale water and makes desperate overtures to her hair.
No more bonfires, she promises, red-eyed in a tin mirror. She stays home for two nights. This is how she misses it when the Iron Heart bombs the Stolen Bridge.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
White makeup in his beard. Abram considers the mirror: the clown, they say, cries inside, but what about the one crying outside too? Crying tears of blood? Holding an axe?
He hadn’t understood Mr. Johnson’s hidden smirk when they gave him the assignment: he’d felt confused but eager to serve the Bureau, to be trusted with undercover work. He did the research. He committed.
When, during his career as a false Juggalo, did mask and reality cease to diverge? Abram isn’t sure. But he knows purpose now: the thrill, the pride, the necessity of having Mr. Johnson’s head in one’s bookbag.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Les Morts Petits are overworked and understaffed, which is why lately, during orgasm, there are so many of his ghosts around.
Rio’s tired of them. They crowd the room and crouch on the dressers, staring and blue and always naked. Their faces are dumb. He can see them even when (as one might expect) he closes his eyes.
They only last a few seconds, but it’s enough to remind him: so many children not chosen, so many choices unmade. Unfinished business. Rio puts in calls to the Département des Âmes and gets hold music that is, appropriately, not haunting at all.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
HeLa is everywhere: stealthy and tenacious, hungry, a laboratory weed that has ruined more than one career by eating lesser cancers alive. Longinus is everywhere too, though closer in age and lineage (he suspects) to the transmissible tumors found on the genitals of dogs.
Sometimes he fakes research credentials just to get into labs and contaminate their petri gel. Here, he thinks, poking his dirty finger first in HeLa, then in or YAA or Tsugane or EB33. Have a nice forever! He can almost see why the old bastard gets off on it, this touch of life, this infliction of immortality.
The Holocene Conference on Alternative Geological Viewpoints is, like any gathering of heretics, contentious.
The Eparchaean Unconformists start a full-scale brawl with the Cascadia Subductics; folding chairs are weaponized. Two Geosynclines from Adelaide try to demonstrate banded oxidation by setting the auditorium on fire. A Young Earther sneaks in with a stolen badge and has to be rescued from drowning in the toilet. And everyone, everyone has something you have to hear about oil.
“How long until the next one?” asks Nevit, exhausted, when the last afterparty has been shut down.
“Only ten million years,” says Finke, already making lists.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
“We’ve been looking for you.”
Jamal spins around, frantically trying to click browser tabs closed with one hand. “I’m technically on my lunch break–”
“You know perfectly well that doesn’t matter,” says the lady in the suit.
“We’ve been on your trail for years,” grins the man in the other suit. “Ever since you started playing Nintendo on a sick day in ’97. Then the Small Soda To Go incident, and all those CDs you ripped before you sold them…”
“Who are you?” says Jamal, heart wide, eyes pounding.
“Rules Police,” smirks the lady. “And it’s finally Time Out for you.”
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
“Have you been down to the crypt yet?” mutters Craig.
“Shh.”
“Amen,” the congregation intones.
“I mean it,” Craig persists. “It’s something you need to see for yourself. The old inscriptions show men who clothed their torsos, who wore caps with the bill forward–”
“How can you even speak of such things?” Wentzle hisses. “We’re in the house of Dog!”
“We haven’t always ruled Santa Monica,” says Craig, jaw stiff.
Around them, Z-Boys drop their decks with a clatter, then stoop to kneel. Up on the altar, the Hawk crosses his arms: the sign of the Double Pits to Chesty.