And it’s so easy to feel badass with the headphones on, with the bass up. Agnes rocks her wrists to keep from dancing.
“I’m not afraid of the dark!” she exulted to Diego, earlier.
“No?”
“I got my black belt, D,” she said. “My black belt.”
He laughed. “You’re that much better than you were last week?”
“I gotta go. The police want me to register my hands.”
Agnes bops the shadows between streetlights, looking down all the alleys. This new and easy confidence. Sneaker Pimps and her hoodie.
You want some of this, she thinks.
Are you talking to me!
Friday, September 2, 2005
“Want to take a break after this wave!” Longshanks roars as he hooks a scaling ladder off the rampart.
“What time is it!” Pellegrin jerks his face away from a hot spray of goblin blood.
“Almost end of shift!”
“Sure!”
The water cooler is next to the pitch cauldrons. Longshanks always thought that was dumb.
“We need a better siege process,” he sighs. “Our quartermaster’s not ISO-certified. What if we get audited?”
Pellegrin snorts. “They can’t sieze our assets if we eat them all.”
“Exactly!” says Longshanks. “No starvation plan! Are we supposed to eat the children first, or what?”
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Marietta’s fingers are perfectly tubular, less like hands than a child’s drawing of hands. Her eyes are large and dark as a guinea pig’s.
Jasmine’s two hundred twelve days pregnant and the only one here who knows CPR, dammit. Don’t they make you learn when you buy a pool? There should be a law. Jasmine had to pee a minute ago. She counts compressions, blows angry hair out of her face.
Marietta isn’t her kid. Marietta deserves better parents. Her mother’s bubbling to 911 while Jasmine pinches Marietta’s nostrils, although you’re not really supposed to, anymore. She realizes she’s wet herself.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
“Because you can’t eat popcorn with a spoon, and it’s uncivilized to eat frosting with your fingers,” says Nina.
“Ah,” says Jax. “So the fridge and oven are open and on because…?”
“The heat went out this morning.” Nina wriggles down into the blankets. “Refrigeration is exothermic, you know.”
“How do you make everything seem so reasonable?” Jax finally shuts the door and shrugs off his bag.
“Get over here,” says Nina, victorious. She dips out a ladleful of Orville Redenbacher Original Butter and rolls it in Betty Crocker Vanilla Sprinkles. “I’ll make it reasonable that we’re watching Teen Wolf Too.“
“CYNTHIA!” screams Ban from around the corner, and Cynthia sprints.
Etheldred’s hauling Ban and a rope into a third-story window when she turns the corner. He grins and waves, then disappears.
Cynthia saw the padlocks on the first-floor doors. She scrambles through her backpack; maybe a hook and line, a bobby pin–
There. A deck of cards. She flexes it and begins to flip them out, and while they’re still in the air she’s running up their backs toward that window. Higher, spiraling, don’t think about it: the deck is missing a joker, she remembers. Only fifty-three steps.
“SPELLBINDING… A POTENT TRANSCENDENTAL-NOIR BREW!”
—Kirkus Reviews
Leo Taggert’s laser eyes are trained on suburban Bangladesh in My Ganges Heart. Like the previous “TAGGERT’S PROSE IS TAUT AND LUMINOUS!”
—Seattle Post Intelligencer
Heh. Give me a minute.
“SECOND PLACE MUST SUCK!”
—Kirkus Reviews
“SHUT UP, CIRCULATION ZERO!”
—Seattle Post Intelligencer
Ladies! Calm down, I’m sure we can arrange “A POSTMODERN CLASSIC!”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Cleveland! I said not to call me here!
“I KNOW YOU MISSED ME!”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“BITCH, YOU DID NOT!”
—Kirkus Reviews
Oh shit. Oh Jesus.
“I’MA SLAP THAT OFF YOUR FRONT PAGE!”
—Seattle Post Intelligencer
Ian throws the plastic ball, and his brother swings and clips it with the red bat. The ball doesn’t go very far.
“That wasn’t a good throw,” declares his brother. “So it’s called a ball.” He kicks it toward the middle of the yard.
“How many of those do you get?”
“Four,” says his brother, hesitantly. “Then… I get a ghost runner on first. The other ones go to third and fourth.”
Ian’s positive there wasn’t a fourth base when they started, but he got out for missing it last time. He picks up the white ball out of the dirt.
But Sun hated the light.
“She said ‘Earth hurts my eyes!'” Mishaal hunches his shoulders, and his firelight shadow becomes round and menacing. “‘I will eat its light.'”
She rose up and began to swallow it, but Earth only made more.
“Sun shrank in pain,” hisses Mishaal. “The bright light crushed her to a tiny ball!”
At last, Sun cut a hole in herself to let the light out; she could keep eating forever, then, even as she swelled and fell.
“Earth saves its light by night,” says Mishaal, “and Sun heals, and the stars are her blood on the sky.”
Shelly decides it’s September.
“Nobody said it could be September,” says Wedgwood, when he blows in the door. His eyes are wide. “You didn’t check to see if it could be September.”
“I hate August,” says Shelly.
Wedgwood hesitates. “Because August was when we–”
“Because it’s hot,” she says.
“It’s all slipping now,” he says, “you made it too heavy at this end.”
“So merry early Christmas,” says Shelly, “go away.”
“You’re careless,” he says as October tumbles into Labor Day.
“You’re too critical,” she says.
“I know.” He breezes out the window.
Shelly hits winter hard, and cracks her lips.