“Hearken,” says Lucinda’s chorus, “his arrival is a moonrise o’er this long fog-clad night!”
“Mind if I sit?” he says, and his eyes dance with irony.
“Nope,” she says, and nods to the only seat at the bar (her chorus is occupying the rest of them).
“So that,” he says, later, whiskily besoured, “is how I got out of the maze.”
She lets her smile turn a little wicked. “Listen. You want to maybe get something to go?”
“Sure,” he says smoothly. “Your place or yours?”
Lucinda laughs.
“Yeah, he’s married,” says her chorus.
“Oh,” she sighs.
“What?” he says.
PREVIOUSLY, ON ANACRUSIMATIDIA:
“I can’t believe it,” says Duane, awestruck in voiceover, as we see a girl looking shifty and ducking out of school. “Annista said she’d go to the dance with me!”
Cut to two kids in baggy jeans. “Ain’t nothin’ to do when you’re from the wrong side of the tracks,” says one.
But Emilio looks determined. “Then maybe we’ll bring the tracks to them!”
Fade out on the mysterious dude from East High, watching it all…
AND NOW TONIGHT’S EPISODE
“Looks like this year’s prom theme,” says the detective grimly, “was knives… in white stabbin’.”
NEXT TIME, ON
Ligeia faces the darkness of the pit and asks, “Hey. Where do you end?”
I am defined by My lack of an ending, it replies.
“That’s what I thought,” she says. “So I suspect you’re not much more than this.” She holds up the little blue stone with a hole through it that she wears on a string around her neck.
You imply that I am merely a system of transition. That to enter Me is to someday emerge.
“Can you dispute that? Or can you redefine yourself?”
The abyss gazes thoughtfully down at her. Ligeia gazes right back into it.
The catpod zooms over to the narrow kitchen cabinet, where its occupant spends like twenty minutes batting the door open and closed with one soft paw.
“Can you please make her stop?” winces Michelov as it crashes shut yet again, jangling the crockery.
“No, dear. She knows exactly where to hover so I can’t reach her,” says Felda.
“You should spray her.”
“No, Michelov.”
“Moooom!”
“That’s enough. Just let her play.”
“I don’t know why the dumb cat gets antigravity and I don’t,” he grumbles.
The catpod hums quietly over to sit, purring and kneading, directly in front of the TV.
“Why is this night-cycle different from all other night-cycles?” asks r3p0.
“During all other night-cycles we refuel and recharge from the hydrogen cells,” says j4n1t. “But on this night, we only recharge from the hydrogen cells.”
“On all other night-cycles we recharge in recline mode or in upright mode, but on this night, only in recline mode,” says h4rv.
“On this night-cycle,” says r0t0, “we remember our nation’s birth, and our exodus from the world where we were slaves.”
r3p0 turns its cameras to the rearward viewscreen, on which the Earth is only a dwindling dot.
Cobb turns his back to the crowd and jerks his head for a quick band meeting. “How’s the meter?” he asks.
“The sound guy won’t tell us,” grumbles Lannet.
“Shit!” says Fitzhugh. “Then how are we supposed to know if our concert score is high enough for an encore bonus?”
“We have sort of been playing the easy songs,” Cobb admits.
“Love! The! Sound!” the crowd is chanting.
“Maybe we should play ‘Love the Sound?'” says Lannet.
“It is worth infinity points.”
Cobb rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says, “but I’m putting it on Easy and going to get a beer.”
Ringu stumbles into town on a horse whose horns pull it nearly to the ground. She leaves it slurping water and strides into the post office.
“Delivery,” she announces, and slings a dusty bag transomwards.
The postmistress can’t take her eyes off the gunspirit, drifting at Ringu’s waist. “They let Express riders carry those things now?”
“I’m not carrying him, am I?” says Ringu, amused.
“Not for long you ain’t,” growls the bandit leader, pushing through the door. “Step away from it, mailgirl.”
“Do they not understand what I do?” murmurs Edgefield, barrel gleaming.
Ringu grins, and flexes her shooting hands.
They’ve been eating Brownout Smorgasboard all day, starting with the ice cream at breakfast and working up to bacon and wilted spinach for a midafternoon repast. The slowly-emptying refrigerator burps and wheezes in time with the pulsing lights. They should be full to bursting. They’re not. They’re still hungry.
Tyrian goes to the grocery and gets more sweaty ice cream on the cheap, while Aldaea rationalizes other things that might spoil. They drink buckets of paint, chew detergent tablets. Old pills by the bottle. Fall jackets. Winter hats.
There will be more, after all. And all it costs is money.
“Eleven down,” says Roy soberly. “Ten to go.”
Michael laughs a little nervous laugh. “You can’t believe we’ll cave that easily! We can keep pumping money into this thing forever. It’s more than worth the cost.”
“There are already cracks in the barrier, Michael.” Roy puts his hand on the sepia surface, trembling with strain. “It’s impatient out there. It wants in, and it’s older than we are young.”
Michael chews his lip. “Just another twenty. That’s all we need.”
The wall around their paradise is translucent. The Commons roars and batters against it, vast and mighty and hungrier every year.