Giant Nut Head does not have a giant nut for a head. It’s a long story.
See, his name is Bryan, but in tenth grade he had to switch from trumpets to the percussion pit because of his asthma. The only carless percussionist, he hitched a ride to Zephram’s party and developed this hilarious squeaking cough when everyone went downstairs to smoke up. One of the older girls (Landrey) smiled and told him it was okay; he, with the unplumbed desperation of youth, fell in love with her.
Then everyone started calling him Giant Nut Head.
Okay, it’s a short story.
The tracks of the train are a bit pinged up by spacetrash now, but still as beautiful as that famous photo: helices of carbon spiraling up out of the gravity well, product of insane mathematics and clever branding. Nobody wanted a space elevator; that’s where you get stuck while they play bad music.
But everybody gets excited on the way up a rollercoaster.
Another thing they took from coasters: gravity isn’t always down. Spin us fast enough and we’ll believe anything, thinks Lila, wishing for windows, even if they’d make her barf. Without scenery, it’s a long trip to the Moon.
Hawthorne’s taken to walking around with a syringe of oxytocendorphin jammed into his skull.
“Jesus!” says Senji.
“What?” says Hawthorne, following his gaze, trying to crane his head around to get a look at the back of his own head. “Oh! Right. Say, would you mind giving that plunger a little tap?”
“That’s disgusting!”
“Fine,” grumbles Hawthorne, backing up until it bumps the wall. “Oooh,” he adds, eyes glazing.
“Aaagh!”
“Look, I just streamlined the process. The old way was a clumsy cargo cult!”
“What process?” says Senji.
“Love is addiction,” says Hawthorne. “Addiction is love.”
Senji has nothing to say.
(503) I just wonder about the source of this whole phenomenon.
(1-503) ?
(503) I mean, EVERYBODY uses it. What they actually post to the site must be a fraction of the stuff they receive, but that fraction–all these young drunk wits and their sheer unrelenting joy in debauchery. Their joy in shame, for that matter! The Algonquin Round Table is still around, it’s just been distributed and had its names changed to protect the guilty. If Twitter is a cultural bandwagon, this is the counterculture, and what does that say?
(1-503) …so much longer than a real txt
Chrestomancy is the art of divination through Diana Wynne Jones books, and it’s difficult when the store has such a limited selection.
“Ridiculous,” says Harvey, fanning a copy of Howl’s Moving Castle with a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE sticker on it. “She just put out a new book.”
“They have priorities other than your prophetic needs,” says Satchel gently.
“Shortsighted ones,” says Harvey, checking the Ws for misshelved copies of Eight Days of Luke.
“Just try this,” she says, opening the discarded Howl’s to a random page.
“Oh, confound it all!” Sophie yelled.
Harvey nods. “Precisely.”
“You set that up,” Satchel scowls.
“You must consider yourself quite the sartorial expert,” Gieves smirks.
“Not everybody has to train their sartors to be evil!” says Hawkes.
“You’ll never win the Savile Tournament with your soft-sew methods!”
“Houndstooth!” says Hawkes. “Attack!”
“Mungo,” snarls Gieves, “destroy them!”
The sartors burst out of their dressforms; Mungo’s grunge attack skids narrowly off Houndstooth’s stain-shield. They whip tape around, taking each other’s measure, and the shears come out.
When the scraps clear, all that remains is a hacked t-shirt and a trucker cap.
“No!” cries Gieves. “He was my last accessory!”
“Back to Hipster Island,” Hawkes sighs.
They broke him to the sound of the great clock tower. It was their little joke, a bespoke punishment, and now any bell tone deeper than low E causes him to vomit uncontrollably. He’s ruined good shoes and friendships by unhappy proximity to a church at noon. He hasn’t approached Westminster in months.
He is considered a reformed terrorist, and lives under a terrible constraint. For most people this would be an effective muzzle. But there is this about constraints: they fire the imagination.
De Card is walking down Bridge Street, a bomb in his briefcase, rubber plugs in his ears.
“I’d love to have you as our guest at the seaside,” says Stavros.
“Would you?” says Xylia, at which point the demon of courtesy jams a hot spike into her antitragus.
“I mean,” she says, teeth grinding, “that’s so generous, but we couldn’t possibly–”
“Oh, I insist,” says Stavros, desperate, literally spurred on by a demon of his own.
“You’re too kind!” Xylia shrills.
The lights of the lobby pulse; with relief, they nod to one another and begin to navigate back into the theater.
“We’re three minutes early,” the stage manager reproves.
“You’ll live,” says the demon of small mercies.
