Marla’s got the evening on a choke chain and autumn’s arm behind its back. The leaves are strangling on their branches, bruising brown and yellow. The sun’s flush with wallowed rage.
Campus: Latin for field, more specifically of battle. What did Caesar have that college doesn’t? Columns, lust and gluttony, blood on the grass and a knife in his back.
She’s knocking on the door now, tape tight around her knuckles. The Romans liked bloodsport, too. She’s ancient and aquiline, eyes blank as marble; she’s waiting for the Emperor’s thumb to turn. Marla’s no sadist. Pain isn’t pleasure: pain is pain.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Pretty much the usual way. Ensign Prozski reported for duty pale and sweating, and once they’d voted to defect and smashed the radio, it wasn’t like they could request a medevac. Within a couple days their little pressure chamber had yielded to the inevitable mathematics of infection.
Funny thing about nuclear subs: not only can they run silent and deep for decades, they can sneak in a mutation or two while doing so–even in viral DNA. Prozski and his comrades retain awareness and volition. They just get used to being a little peckish, speaking Russian, and cruising for amphibious sex.
The dreamcatcher works so well for Dagmar and Hesse that they buy a mailcatcher, a friendcatcher, a flycatcher and a discussioncatcher too. (The flycatcher is just one of those unrolled sticky things; they call it that for symmetry.)
Life gets a lot smoother. Too smooth, in fact.
“Dag,” says Hesse carefully one day. “Ever get the impression that we can’t actually… talk about those?” He waves toward them.
“Because of the dis–the disc–” She can’t quite name it.
“Yeah.”
“Um.” She bites her fingernail. “Should we take it down?”
“Mmf mmfff!” agrees Rondo, from the cotton web outside their door.
Young Lennie Briscoe hasn’t mastered the trick of looming yet: he gangles, and doesn’t seem to know what to do with his nose.
He’s back from Vietnam (his first tour–he’ll get another) and parking cars at the Atwater for half-dollar tips. Then one Sunday nobody comes in to pick up this ’57 El Dorado, a beauty with a bit of a smell about her. Nothing in the glove; they pop the trunk to check for ID, and–
“Oh my God!” gasps Lennie’s boss, dropping the keys. “A body!”
“Like I never heard that one before,” Young Lennie Briscoe quips.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Skittish investors scurry for relative safety when Kensington turns on the kitchen light, but she’s quick and manages to catch a couple of them by their tails.
“I knew it!” she says. “I’m going to have to call in the exterminators, aren’t I?”
“oh noes,” squeaks one of them.
“listen ok there is another solution 2 this,” chirps his dangling friend.
“Really? I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“we can has capital infusion kplzthx”
Kensington shakes her head very slowly and marches off to flush them.
Later, the rest of them burn her house down while they’re still inside.
Once upon a time there were four princes: Imago, Inigo, Lonago and Gad. Imago was swift; Inigo, strong. Lonago could sing down the wind in a high, clear voice like a violin.
The brothers learned to hunt and sail, the declension of Latin and to declaim in Greek. They cared for the people; the people thought them fine.
When they were twenty-three, twenty-one and eighteen respectively, Imago, Inigo and Lonago rode to the corners of the kingdom to seek wisdom and return as men.
Gad stayed home to actually run the castle.
This story has little concern for Gad.