Barda and Kabe have reached the age when their bodies have no bright new rooms to discover: familiarity breeds clarity, and the cracks under the plaster show through the paint. The temples of that old metaphor are filling up with moneylenders, starting to hock their gilt.
It’s not even a very old age.
So they swing. They’re the youngest in this particular club, and that’s good for a sort of cruel elation. Two dozen eyes snap to when they enter. Eleven hearts gnaw when they pick and leave.
In other people’s beds they lie waking, watching their ceilings start to flake.
Lizzie never found it, the fork he hurled into the yard in pie-sick fury, until her next boyfriend’s riding mower spat it quivering an inch deep into the outside doorframe. If she’d been bringing him lemonade like a dutiful whatever it could have killed her, but she was cool in the basement, smoking the cloves she’d told him she quit. Someone once told her that cloves are to your lungs like ground glass to your stomach. She sucked hard, needing the smell, needing the scent memory to summon his exquisite face when she told him she’d pissed in the pie.
A Grocery List for Disaster is playing an all-ages at Clifton’s, which means Ceez didn’t show, which means Bhavini has to spar with Gomer. Gomer is frail-looking and old; he is also fast and mean and smells of mung beans. Like some fifth-dimensional shape, Bhavini thinks glumly, this situation has only downsides.
Sensei squeezes her shoulders in that way that’s supposed to approximate a shoulder rub but comes off like a Vulcan murder grip. “How’s my contender?” he chuckles. “Gettin’ psyched up? Got ‘Eye of the Tiger’ on your headphones?”
“No,” she says, “A Grocery List for Disaster.”
“–similar to a sugar pill including nausea blurred vision and increased desire to gamble see our ad on health dot com,” finishes Zyrexitab, panting slightly and beaming at the class’s haphazard applause.
“Very good!” says the teacher. “Okay, has anyone not gone yet? Mirazinol? Apostrophex? Wait–yes, our newest classmate! Is it… Reggie?”
“Uh,” says Reggie, who’s been dreading this. “I can’t recite my disclaimer.”
The teacher smiles. “Don’t be shy!”
“No, I mean… I’m named after my grandfather. I don’t have a pharma patron.”
The whole class stares, then, as if cued. Rich boy, mouths one of them, accusingly silent.
It’s really tough doing witness protection for the Wrasses because all it would take would be one classmate blogging the phrase “that family with twelve kids” and the guns of criminal desperation would fire their bullets right down through the tubes. So they get four houses on a cul-de-sac, assign five full-time agents and literally deal the kids out, face-down assignments. The Wrasses find this an immense relief. The agents, less so.
“So what’s keeping the neighbors from saying they all look alike?” wonders Agent Five (the “single mom”).
“Reflexive shame,” murmurs her supervisor, “seems to serve.”
The autobiography of Cording Vance–callsign Rakehell; alias Cordwood Vance, alias Thomas Cording, alias Tommy Bombshell; interfederal fugitive on charges of racketeering, assault, contraband weapons trading and a number of murders so great it is technically classified as a war crime; called the Fire on Algol, the Sunkiller, Slick Burn Tommy, Bloodbather or the Terricide; subject of the late Jacen Knobpop’s #1 intergalactic megasingle “Demon Star;” threat to disobedient children; pimp, controlled nucleotide dealer, enforcer, executioner, gangster, petty warlord and, of late, writer–reads in its entirety as follows: “Listen man don’t EVER fuck with librarians that’s all I’m gonna say.”
It’s hard being a unicorn driver on the cotton candy plantation. “Believe in the magic of your dreams!” they’re always crooning at him. “Let’s all take… a snuggle break!” Dilbo’s whip arm aches by the end of the day just from shutting them up, and they eat all the candy.
But he keeps trying, because the gnomes all teleported to Canada and he still remembers what happened the last time his monthly totals dropped. He sees the consequences every time he comes home, and his wife staggers to greet him: the rictus of her frosting smile, and her rigid gingerbread hug.
The all-expenses-paid trip to Detroit is more fun than Layla expected. (Well, still.) There’s actually a great theater scene; she sees an all-female Othello and doesn’t even hate it.
Afterwards she finds the cast at a bar where the waiters wear corseted jackets and set your coffee on fire. Whiskey and caffeine stretch her judgment like Silly Putty, and she ends up making out with Iago in her hotel jacuzzi. Iago’s leftover stage mascara runs in the steam.
Layla goes to the bar again, but it’s too early, and the jackets are shiny with wear at the edges.