“Hi,” says the kid as Welch passes him.
“Hello,” says Welch. He smiles.
Around the corner there’s a pair of them–twins? “Hi,” says one, and “hi,” says the other.
“Hello,” says Welch. “Hello.” He starts to walk around them, but they block his path. Awareness prickles his back, then; Welch spins in a panic, but the scriptkiddies are already surrounding him.
“Hi. Hi. Hi.”
“Hello. Hello!” Welch gasps, trying to keep up. He can feel himself slowing down. “Please–stop–hello!”
They close in without hurry, their eyes empty but for a cool curiosity.
“Hi,” they say. “Hi hi. Hi.”
“One day this guy found a carnival ticket,” says Jarvis. “It said KEEP THIS COUPON, so he did, in his wallet, for thirty-nine years. One day he left it in his pants, and his wife washed them, and when she laid everything out to dry the ticket was white. Completely white. She went to show it to him, and he was dead!”
Carson and Doris wait.
“See?” Jarvis’s eyes are wide. “It’s symbolic!”
“Of what?” asks Doris.
“It’s… just symbolic.” Jarvis frowns. “What, are you guys high-culture snobs? It’s a story, okay?”
“Not every story is a story,” says Carson, shrugging.
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
“I couldn’t help but notice,” Gillian says warmly as she moves in closer, “that you’re wearing a white shirt and white pants. Not to mention white shoes and white socks.”
“Yeah… and that’s my white bike helmet, actually, over there.” The man seems to enjoy the attention; he puffs up a bit. There’s sweat on the bridge of his nose. “Why do you ask, little lady?”
“Just making sure.” Gillian bats her eyelids, leans in, and shoots him four times in the chest.
The critics are largely appreciative, except that jerk Myers at the Post, who calls it “flagrantly Tarantinoid metasploitation.”
Thursday, October 7, 2004
“Farrier! Yo!” Gavin raps on his housemate’s bedroom door and checks his watch. “Wake up, bud, carpool’s going to be here.”
“Don’ hafta,” Farrier muffles back. “Have’m nice day.”
“Isn’t he up yet?” asks Montano, coming around the corner with his tie in two hands.
“Look, I know the floor is cold,” says Gavin impatiently, “but what are you going to do, call in sick?”
“Look outside,” Farrier grunts smugly. “Then check the TV. At my job, we get snow days.”
Montano and Gavin stare at the door, then at each other.
“That’s no fair!” says Gavin.
“That’s brilliant!” says Montano.
Terrifyingly, Bob invents the cow-whistle. It leaps off the page and starts itself up right away; it was small and quick to finish.
They can’t hear it, of course, but they both know what’s coming. “Oh shit, Bob,” moans Yvette, looking at it with a drained horror.
“Hurry!” he cries. “The next one–I can’t tell what it is, but it’s big–”
His arms keep flailing, beyond his control, drafting perfectly with a pencil in each hand. Yvette leaps back in with the kneadable eraser, trying to sabotage whatever his subconscious is doing now.
But that’s when the cows arrive.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
“All this for the price of getting you drunk?” Dakota toes through the pile of clothing on the floor.
James sprawls on the bed, wildly naked. He smiles. “I’m a cheap drunk, too.”
“Cheaper than my fucking therapist,” says Dakota. “Whose appointment I have missed now, and will be charged for…” He finds the underwear and tries to catch them off his foot. He misses.
“I am a fucking therapist.” James sits up and scratches. “I fuck. I… therap.”
“Doctor James,” Dakota asks mockingly, “my mother’s disappointed by my lifestyle.”
James shrugs. “Your mother named you ‘Dakota.’ What did she expect?”
Thursday, October 14, 2004
“Nobody ever gets killed with a clean shirt,” says the man at the bar sadly. “Shoes, socks, pants–hell, underwear, mostly. But it’s not like you’re gonna die of a stab wound to the leg, right? The chest is the target. Filled with… with juice. If you hit it, it always spills! And heads!” He pulls at his Bud. “Heads are a mess!”
The man scratches his naked chest and stares morosely at a puddle. Young Emerson, who’s tending bar tonight, acts with remarkable speed of uptake: she drapes her towel over a sign, shortening it to NO SHOES NO SERVICE.
The Ganges is teeming; Gayle can hear it, blocks away from the hotel balcony. She wonders where the dolphins go, if any are left–it’s so filthy, so crowded.
“It’s so crowded,” she says aloud, as Raman comes up behind her with coffee. “How could it have happened in this?”
“It wasn’t always so crowded,” he says mildly.
“No,” she says.
“What happened here?” He sips. “Or would you rather be cryptic?”
“Not cryptic,” she says. “Cyphered. Somebody invented cypher here–cypher from ziphirium, from sifr, from sunya…”
His forehead wrinkles. “‘Nothing?'”
“Yes,” she says. “This is where they invented nothing.”
“Antibodies,” says Lydia urgently. “Otto, don’t you understand? You develop antibodies to microbes, you can even inherit some natural resistances, but if–if a strain of smallpox attacked you, you’d be helpless, because you’ve never encountered it. And advertising works exactly the same way!” She grabs his arm. “You’re young, and you’ve got no immunity. There are no vaccinations for this, you’ve got to fight–Otto, please tell me you can hear me?”
But Otto is oblivious, heedless and helpless. “Sure,” he grins cheerfully, “no problem,” even as he attempts, via blender and funnel, to get a tiger into his tank.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004