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
There’s this stretch of Larrabee Road where the stop signs have all been turned north-south by enterprising souls and all the streetlights disabled, which keeps the traffic down. Claire likes it. The smell of cold french fries has taken up residence in the car’s ventilation system, but it’s not unpleasant, and the heater halfway works.
Claire burned a mix of shoegaze and wordless ennui and hasn’t taken it out of the player yet. She won’t, as long as it works.
You can coast a lot longer than you’d expect, on flat ground, once you take your foot off the pedal.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
In 2002 Rhoda won a sweepstakes reproduction of the house from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids–built for the threequel, but identical down to Rick Moranis Character’s wacky Rube Goldberg devices. There was a cash option, but she took the house on a whim. You can’t beat California real estate for investment value!
Ha ha ha ha!
She’ll never sell it, she knows, morosely lubricating a model train. It’s supposed to pull the string to tilt the track to run the marble down and put on some music, but everything here is disintegrating. The only record that plays is “Yakety Sax.”
“How glad I am to see you, your honor,” says a slightly feverish Federico, when the guardia march him into the receiving hall of the ruler of Florence. “Oh, how long have been these twenty years, as I travelled all Asia at the behest of your lordship’s curiosity. But I have returned, with the truth clutched in my fist!” He brandishes a tiny crystal bottle. “Though my companions perished, though the journey left me divorced and bankrupt, I return to you with the essence you requested: the source of scent!”
“I said ‘some sort of sense,'” says Lorenzo.
“What?” says Federico.
Beneath the newspaper bundles there’s another room, cold and dim. Aniridia looks down, realizing for the first time that the light comes from nowhere here. None of the rooms has had the courtesy to provide a lantern.
“It is very dark,” she mutters to herself. “You may be eaten.”
The rough-edged hole she’s torn is not a way out, but it’s a way different. She thinks of her father, diving into deep cold water, holding his breath twice the length of the pool.
As she lowers herself into it, Aniridia leaves fingerprints on its edges. The newsprint looks like ash.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Ice groans like a great door opening, and Ashlock realizes that above her, things in the darkness are unfurling their batlike claws.
How do you apply kung fu to non-Euclidean anatomy? She’s wondered before, but perhaps it’s not the day for an empirical test. She hauls Tach’s rigorous body into the center of the star.
“Here’s where I bet on you being in trance,” she says, “so don’t make me wrong, you Japanese motherfucker.” The steel of the drive burns through her mitten. Â Ashlock unreels its cable with woolbound fingers and finds the USB port at the base of Tach’s skull.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011