When Lieutenant Kitty Spinoza and her platoon are thrown into the hot dark aluminum prison, they have a simple cypher ready within hours: boring sentences, their word order changed to mean “cell checks tonight” or “southwest corner.” The laundry room becomes a post office. As they end up in solitary, one by one, they write a better tapping code than Morse.
When they disassemble the prison and it’s all a hoax, an experiment, the Major congratulates her personally. “We regret the deception,” he smiles, “but your squads should be proud. You’ve yielded some valuable data.”
Kitty understands: this is another code.
“Little Devotchka’s decided to die today,” says Lakshmi, and to Pavel it’s a slap in the face. He manages to turn it into an open-mouthed smile.
“He’s only six!” Pavel shakes his head. “Our little prodigy. I should be surprised it wasn’t sooner.”
Lakshmi offers him her hand, but he doesn’t take it yet. His hair’s gone shamefully gray, but he can still walk to the temple, to see his grandson reach inside himself and turn off his life. To watch, as he watched his wife and children go in bliss. To know that he is watched himself. To fear.
Romper decides to make a body. She gets a shirt from the closet and some rubber feet from the bottom of the blender. She gets some blood. She gives it a heart and bellows, a porkpie and glasses: she draws a moustache on a potato. She sews on three fingers she found in the trash. She wants her friends to like it. She wears it to a party.
“Aiieee,” say most of her friends.
“Bodies are for people,” sneer most of the rest.
“I like your body,” murmurs Spads, wearing a bowl of dog food.
“Fresh!” blushes Romper, and slaps him.
It’s a summer cabin, but air-conditioned, and that means insulation. The space heater keeps the bathroom warm enough. Theremin fills the bathtub with pillows and books. She shuts the door on winter.
The space heater glows and its cord is frayed; its metal grille recalls a goalie’s mask. It’s dangerous just to be near it, moreso to keep it on all day. Reading a paperback means toasting its edges brown.
Theremin runs out of food and keeps reading. The cabin’s owners will notice the electricity bill. They’ll find her. She’ll already be in the tub. She’ll never be cold again.
Cosette reaches down into the void. She feels a crack and, inside, two small objects; she hides them in her hand.
“Wealth death dearth hearth heat teeth,” she whispers.
She opens her hand. They’re pills with names on them. One is TRUTH, and translucent. The other, orange, says HEALTH.
Cosette watches Millicent blindly try to wash herself. She sits down and picks her up, opens the kitten’s mouth and drops in HEALTH, strokes her throat and believes, believes that it will heal her eyes. She swallows TRUTH to make it so.
Millicent lies down in Cosette’s lap and doesn’t move anymore.
Grip tape on her deck and Swiss ceramic bearings: Chicago likes the language of skating, the tumble and slide of it. It says what it is.
But cars, gah. Their language is so bent and angry, so tired: crankshaft gasket manifold. Ding. Chicago’s got a permit but, she reflects as she hauls him into the passenger seat, they never did get around to those driving lessons. So what. She’s seen a key cranked, she knows about mirrors. How hard can it be? One of them is gas, the other is brake, and she’s got this empirical test to distinguish between them.
Yohon is running out of mans. “Maybe if you jump on his head you can grab the fire escape,” he advises the next one.
“DEEDOODEET,” the man agrees.
“Start!” says Yohon. The man majors in accounting, graduates, gets married, lands a high-pressure securities job, hires escorts for stress relief, gets caught, pays certain family gentlemen to hush it up, gets audited, turns states’ evidence, enters a dark alley and tries to jump on a thug’s head. The thug pulls him down and brains him with an aluminum bat.
“CONTINUE?” screams the next man.
“Gotta slide this time,” Yohon mutters, wincing.
When one of the plummeting cumulonimbi takes out Lyle’s house, he decides to just go with it. The insurance company won’t pay, but who needs them? Or their God? His shovel escaped unbroken, so he digs out a nice burrow: beanbag chairs in every room, and the nice thing about clouds is that your fridge can also be your window. Other people start to dig connecting burrows. Some of the people are girls.
Come spring the cloud will melt and this will be over, Lyle knows. But the beanbags are waterproof, and once the sky has fallen, it can’t fall again.