Parker’s expensive gear lasts him about a third of the way up on his trip to meet the Bearded Man of the Winding Test. He makes the next mile up on berries and boots that grow increasingly thin, until he’s clawing near-vertical slopes with fingers long since nailless and fighting mountain wolves bare-handed for a sleeping niche. At last, gaunt and bled out, he collapses on the summit.
“Master,” he says, “I come seeking wisdom.”
“Life is an illusion,” says the Bearded Man, “and struggle is meaningless.”
Parker throws him off a cliff and grows his own damn beard.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The wind is like a shark; if it ever stops it becomes, well, dead air. Both are boneless, and deadly, and misunderstood. And neither has changed for a long time.
Mariah was summoned and bound to her name, given a quarry she never found. Her summoner’s been dead a thousand years, but she hasn’t stopped. The wind doesn’t know when to quit.
What people don’t understand is that those “Gusty Winds May Exist” signs in the New Mexico desert aren’t warnings or even quantum-mechanics jokes: they’re permission. Here, they say to Mariah, old and aching. Here, just rest, just be.
All the teachers in Borderlands Elementary are trained in basic quasidemon defense, but Mr. Rosenthal makes it a point of pride. Claws rake off his lesson planner; he blasts back with light from the overhead projector. Quasiflesh explodes with a smell like dust and Kool-Aid. Tamiquah and Billiam huddle with the other kids, ducked and covered, peeking out to watch.
“Kids!” shrieks the last remaining beast. “There’s only one book you really need to–”
“We’re going to have to clean this up again, aren’t we?” sighs Tamiquah, dodging a gurgle of ichor, as Mr. Rosenthal demonstrates how safety scissors aren’t.
“The minute I saw you waltz in here I knew you were trouble.”
“Just the kind of trouble you need,” purrs Kitty Le BoomBoom. “My old man somehow got the idea that I’m friendly with the pool boy and now he wants us to be splitsville–but if he has a convenient mishap first, I’m still tops in the will. Whaddaya say, gumshoe? Sixty-forty on a million clams?”
“Fifty-forty,” growls Dammet, “and ten points sends your pool boy to Acapulco.”
“Deal,” grins Kitty.
It’s totally cool! Nothing bad happens!
They just get rich and have sex all the time!
“A good activist strives to be the proverbial butterfly in China,” says Laetitia.
“First, that’s not proverbial,” says Milan. “Second, do you even understand that metaphor?”
“Well, according to chaos theory, the air pressure can influence the prevailing wind–”
“The prevailing wind,” says Milan, “has fuckall to do with hurricane formation. Hurricanes move under wind, but they’re generated by warm oceans, which in turn are generated by warm atmospheres. Guess how much heat a butterfly generates?”
“Fine! How would you say it?”
“A good activist strives to be the coal plant in China.”
Laetitia’s fillings grate when she grinds her teeth.
Monday, September 3, 2007