“How long has it been since your last appointment?”
“About two years,” Lowry mumbles around the hissing tube.
“Mm hmm.” Dr. Andrus tugs his gently jaw downward and peers in, over half-moon glasses and the screen of a paper mask. “And have you had any lapses in your regimen?”
“Well, I haven’t flossed enough,” says Lowry, “I mean, who does, but… Um. I drink a soda with dinner most days. Once in a while I chew ice.”
“I see,” says Dr. Andrus gravely. “Well, let us pray.”
Lowry sighs, and tries to remember how to start the Act of Dentition.
The focus takes Jake by his sixth chakra on a Saturday afternoon and drives him, scrambling and skipping, like a doll dancing on a springy plank. The wind of his passage is binary static: he could concentrate on listening and pick out the message, if he tried, but by then he’d be tumbling and ground to chuck.
After it leaves him, he assembles himself: hunched over, alone, sand-eyed with his back complaining. It’s dark outside and the clock is blinking with exhaustion. He’s surrounded by an impossibly intricate sculpture of taut wire.
He plucks it. The room coughs up arpeggios.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Alcina leaps the widening crack down Radia Street and leans to sprint in a circle through the big public archway, trailing a rope as thick as lightning. She ties it (ground-line hitch) and tugs twice; it goes instantly taut, and she catches another and sprints away.
Above, the great zeppelin trembles, tethered by a hundred more hawsers to the tired and lopsided structures of the city. The cracks are accelerating, but Alcina is too: an overpass, a plaza, and the last one tied around her wrist.
The island falls into the ocean. Atlantis rises, on lines as tight as hope.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
During the Decline everybody gets bored with gladiation, so the organizers flail for new stunts to lure back audiences. Men fighting women! Men fighting lions! Every spectator gets a free pair of sandals! Women fighting lions! Men fighting with potatoes! Men fighting a fire! Every spectator fighting a fire! That one is sort of a retroactive promotion and they promise to build better exits.
Then there’s the sack, of course, and they try out a new promotion: men fighting the organizers! Also lions! And a fire! But the Vandals don’t make any money off it (they are total crap at marketing).
Appleseed Johnny meets Jack Frost meets Jack the Man with the Lantern.
“Harvest is over,” says Frost, and the lips of his smile are tattooed.
“They’ll slaughter the winter cows soon enough,” says Johnny, peeling a Gala with a paring knife. He tosses the long red ribbon over his shoulder. “Let them have their bonfire first.”
“I love bonfires,” protests Frost. “I love it when they gutter.”
“Not all fires die,” says Jack the Man with the Lantern. In his hand a pumpkin glows, its heart a hellborn ember.
“To the harvest, anyway,” sighs Appleseed, and pours three shots of cider.
“And anyway,” she says, “I’m only fourteen, and more anyway, I already have a–a suitor, if you must know.”
It would be different if he were threatening her somehow: she’d know how to deal with that. But instinct tells her that fists are not the proper tools for this situation. Proserpina, exasperated, wishes she knew how to counterpunch a grin that makes her back tingle.
“So which is it,” Elijah says, “you’re too young to pursue, or already caught?”
“Neither,” she finds herself whispering.
Her overall impression of kissing is that it is sort of wet, and rather defuses everything.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
“Of course I’m worried,” snaps Blow the Skin. “And you should be too! Rotten Gamble and Dragalong never returned from this awful place. If I told you half the things I’ve heard about this Papa Bosom–”
Grit squeals in Kid Rabbit’s exasperated gears. Once again he’s trundling through the desert with a message in his heart, but the place seems crueler now than it has before: dawn pinks the sand like blood in the water. They crest a dune and come upon a crenellated maw, blind ancient iron, too dry to rust.
“I’d better knock, I suppose,” mumbles Blow the Skin.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008