I dropped everything I carried and stood, gazing up at 1307 Whippoorwill Road. There were fifteen more years on it, fifteen stubborn and remorseful years, a sodden two-story mobbed by tall grasses and lived in only by small animals. The country was always wet around here, and the house hadn’t aged well.
I didn’t need the city’s yellow Unsafe sign to tell me our family didn’t live here any more, but I could see the truth of our presence. The patio, empty of chairs. Yellow gingham curtains in the living room window. The screen door, hanging by one hinge, eaten by weather and insects. The wooden ramp for Laura Lee’s wheelchair. Two lines of gravel where a tired Oldsmobile would have parked. I’d been born in the upstairs bedroom, ran down the stairs two at a time, raced cars over the kitchen tiles, built forts of cardboard, watched cartoons on a flickering color television. Fifteen years ago, I left.
Read More...
“Ugh, Charlie, can you kill that?” Annette points at the corner halfway up the wall.
“Leave it alone, Annette. Probably a wolf spider. They help keep the house pest-free. They don’t hurt any.” He bobs the packet of tea up and down in his cup, trying to pull strength from it into the hot water. She always wants him to kill spiders.
“Doesn’t look like one,” she grumbles, passing by him in a blur of color and jangling.
He lets the packet slide down to the bottom and slurps carefully, sucking heat from mustache gone grey. He looks over at the fold between the two walls, freezes. A tiny twig of a creature reaches and curles its way upward toward the ceiling.
So stupid. He can pick up spiders and dump them outside; why do silverfish affect him like this? They’re so delicate. They can’t bite. When they’re crushed they become tiny bars of armor and pasty gore.
His hands go slick. There is something in the way it flutters its feathery antennae, tiny legs sprouting like hairs from its body, rippling like centipedes. A memory from bad trips past, when he’d entered a darker himself and was unable to find the exit for a little while. The world had tied him up with gossamer strings and shimmered around him and took his breath and his sight, and things crawled upon him that were just like this silverfish.
He grabs paper towels in his hand, too many, and approaches the wall. His chest begins to tighten.
The oak tree probably doesn’t need me at all; it’s been there for generations. But it’s alone on this plateau, and it’s special. I’ve watered it every few days, laboring under this arid sun with a sloshing bucket in my hands. Today’s the last day. Sam Conrad’s come back to Rainbow Gulch, and Sam Conrad needs to die.
Read More...
From Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s “Children of the Sky”:
During the day the mud on their bodies dries and flakes off but leaves a residue of grime on their skin like a darkening mold that might not ever be expunged, just as their own destiny on the streets, which fate has forged, cannot be changed even if they bathe one hundred times a day in the slowly moving river whose dark waters are further darkened by pitch-black oil from some unknown source, carrying with its slowly moving course clutters of plastic refuse or an unidentified human corpse that is ignored by all until it has bloated with rot like a cat’s carcass with its distended belly bobbing on the water, no one knowing who the person might have been or whether he or she had died alone in some unidentified place and had been given no burial nor awarded a ceremony of any kind, even though it’s probably better to die and be freed from the solitude of streets so packed with people that none of the passengers in the passing cars are able to understand even a trifling of the suffering apparent outside, because in doing all they can to eschew such knowledge and free themselves from any kind of curiosity, they prefer not to take notice of the bleakness of poverty that stands right before their eyes with saddened faces, their hands extended toward them with other faces that are similarly obscure, mouthing unknown songs while clapping their hands.
I haven’t been myself, not really, not since my eyes shorted out. The first time they went on the fritz, anyway. That was the big issue with those early versions, the Infralites and the Windsor Ultra-Hue v20s. They tended to surge when they got wet or when you walked into a high-rad area, and your eye sockets started to smoke.
Hurt? Hell, yeah, it hurts. Feels like someone’s lighting a match in your sinuses, and the whole world goes dark, and then blinding white, then red, because your poor nerves are trying to decode this chaotic mess of energy, and failing. It’s the whole organic .vs silicate thing.
It was a lot better when Baxter came out with the Dialine 6400 series. You can see a little into the ultraviolet with those.
Still, I’m not the same. I can’t sleep, ever. I can’t concentrate without that sharp, familiar pain at the top of my spine. You know how it is.
I kind of miss the color green, though.
Life was not okay, but it was dormant for now. Mark could move in the world without feeling guilty, without judgment by his peers and his betters. He was the type of young man who lived his life as if on a breaking ice shelf, leaping from floe to floe, afraid to slide into the icy deeps of the world and its responsibilities. He had just given up a lifestyle, left a world behind.
Tonight was good. There was a competent DJ at Lipstick Nocturne, and Mark felt able to relax and let the bass fill his skull, dancing without the support of substances, absorbing what comforting darkness he could. When he spilled out the side exit into the alleyway, sweating old, resistant toxins from his body, he was refreshed and holy. It was time to return to the outside.
Read More...
Dear Great and Worshipful Master Martin Greenbones,
It is with some regret that I must tender my resignation as your apprentice. While I realize that I signed on for a goodly number of years, and I am thankful for the scraps of knowledge that have fallen into my hands, I feel it is best to take my leave of you now before something even worse happens. I feel that I am simply not cut out for the sacred arts of Alchemy and Divination.
To be honest, Most August and Powerful Sir, I can’t take it any more.
Read More...
