Olgy and Incher and black-tongued Ewards, each selling coke to burn blue in your stove; at the foot of the Furnace they’re bastard dukes. But each must answer to the Coal King.
“I asked,” booms the King, “where’s my real share.”
“Oh!” babbles Coker Ewards, dangling from the King’s grip above the Curbin Street well. “I hadn’t counted pieces of coke I sold multiple times but I see now that was wrong!”
The Coal King bobbles his belt for a second; a squeak echoes down the abyss.
“Afraid of the dark?” chuckles the Coal King, whose name, once, was Nat.
Rondo dreams that he’s completely on top of the whole Pittsburgh situation: everyone coordinating perfectly, grudges sidelined, signatures of approval piling up in his in-tray. On waking, he’s deeply disappointed that it wasn’t real. This is alleviated by the discovery that he can fly.
Rondo whoops through barrel rolls; he scatters geese and skims the center line down I-95. It’s so easy. There’s no wind noise or bugsplatter, and to accelerate he just bites his lip and squints and tries.
The next night he has a dream about money, and when he wakes up all his teeth fall out.
Widlow goes out bald and alone on a muggy evening, green shorts on pale legs and socks under sandals, and when his racket swats the ball toward the green back wall of the empty court it is the saddest thing.
Down the street a couple stop eating and talking, their mouths full of unspoken regret. Dogs lie down and sigh; children pause in their pretending, struck by the dread of a summer soon gone.
Widlow isn’t crying. Crying would imply catharsis. He shuffles over to where the ball has stopped and leans down for it, and drops it the first time.
It’s very difficult to be a node with more than two vertices in a Mexican standoff, but this is more or less the role for which he was born.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Pistolero.” Rodrigo’s sweating but his hands don’t shake. “We can figure out how to split the loot, and I’ll lower my weapon, and so will Nahuel, Adelmo, Cai, Pichi and Huenu.”
“What about Luis?”
“I sort of hoped you hadn’t seen Luis,” Rodrigo admits.
“As if I can’t count hammers cocking,” snaps the Man Made of Guns, and shoots all ten of them at once.
The velcro elves clamber by night up Euler’s winter jackets and weave hair and dirt in among the nylon loops. It’s not even his hair, it’s hair from dogs or tweed or, once, threads of real corn silk. Sometimes it’s the exact color of hair that will make your girlfriend so angry she leaves.
Most have forgotten the old ways of assuaging the fair folk, but Euler remembers: a bowl of milk and a piece of chalk by the door, and a little dry bread in his pocket.
This completely fails to work on the velcro elves, because they are dicks.
The whole fuckbuddy thing didn’t work, Rich muses as he picks shards of heart from the porch mat, because neither of them really wanted it to. Distracted by the memory of her chest when she cried, he manages to jam one sliver deep in his palm.
It was an arrangement founded not on lust but on greed: he and Allany were perfectly capable of orgasms alone. They wanted the treasure map, the kernel hack, the shortcut to unearned intimacy. Cruelty turns out to be as quick a path as sex.
Rich tugs the sliver from his hand. It bleeds; he doesn’t.
“Do you think it’s true?” asks Cote as the TV movie credits get squished sideways by an ad. “About the thousand paper cranes, and wishes?”
“Sure,” says Ballard, “and if you beat Tomb Raider ten times without dying you get to see her naked.”
“You think the whole notion exists just to screw with people? Why?”
Ballard shrugs. “Because people love cheat codes. Whether you’re trying to cheat death or Nintendo is just a matter of scale.”
Cote snuggles in closer. “You’re such an asshole. Why do I like you?”
“What,” he asks, “do you think I spent my wish on?”
Nimbus riding normally requires thick gloves and a steam suit, but Olivette didn’t have time to find hers. She lashes the reins yet again with one hand, just to break the ice continually mounting them, but her cloud takes it as a cue to surge ahead even faster.
To her left, Perreau whoops and kicks with his etheric spurs to keep up: it’s always a game, as long as you’re not the one gambling. Their mounts spiral like sea snakes through the bronze-pink air of sunset. Olivette’s hands are numb.
Behind them, darkly gathering, the iron bellies of the storm.
“Go over them again, Davey,” says Bongo McTweedlepants warningly.
Profoctor Davey sighs. “Fine. No cussing, although I never cuss and if I did they’d bleep it.”
“Keep going!”
Davey pulls the list from his wallet. “No reading from my dissertation on eugenics. No putting the kids’ names in limericks. No giggling when I quote Balzac. No discussing forced sterilization for Kentuckians. Okay? I promise!”
“Okay,” says Bongo, still edgy. “Terry, are we almost live? Okay, cue music.”
Theme soooong!
“But I can talk about euthanasia for the colorblind, right?” says Davey, as soon as it fades.
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST,” says Bongo.