The Ad Hoc catches the bullet, of course, but doesn’t seem prepared when the catch fails to stop it. The bullet careens off a thick conduit and then the concrete floor, trailing Ad Hoc, until they bury themselves in a stack of foam insulation.
Rita lowers the gun and walks up to it. She doesn’t smile, but her mouth quirks. “Hi,” she says. “Go ahead and tell your friends their pet isn’t unique anymore.”
She pries open one of the Ad Hoc’s eyes. Its pupil is clicking and fluttering, an inhuman twitch, like the wing of a beetle in a web.
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
The little room is humid, and much warmer than the air outside: moisture condenses where it touches the plexiglass. Water drops find other water drops and bunch up together, until they collect enough weight to start their arrhythmic slides down to the baseboard. There’s some bamboo in the room. It’s not healthy bamboo.
The little pool in the center is lined with black garbage bags, and the filtration unit at its side wheezes and shudders. It’s choking on deposits of minerals and ammonia. The ammonia is from dissolved koi waste. There are seventy-eight koi in the pool, and Marguerite’s cold hand.
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Ellery waits a day for the varnish to dry before he takes the axe to the chair. After a while he switches to a sledgehammer, because it’s easier, and accomplishes the same thing.
“No record,” he pants to Kidra between swings. “No embarrassing beginnings. No evolution.”
“You’re not doing a very complete job,” says Kidra. It’s in crude, uneven pieces.
“Don’t care.” Ellery pauses to wipe his nose. “No snide commentary on my amateur days. Not ever. I want to burst into carpentry like Minerva, fully grown.”
But he buries the pieces instead of burning them. Kidra thinks she understands why.
He’s lighting up under a streetlight. Keira’s never smoked before, but she read about this trick in a magazine. “Oh, man,” she says as she approaches, “I just ran out and I’m gonna have a fit in a minute. Can I buy one off you for a quarter?”
“You read about that in a magazine?” he chuckles, but he gives her a cigarette, and doesn’t take the quarter.
Keira surprises herself by not coughing. “So what’s your name?” she manages; he just smiles.
“Come on,” she says. The ember tips of their cigarettes touch, and they jerk away as if burnt.
“You hear about down in Turquoise Park?” says the bus driver.
“I’m surprised they didn’t get electrocuted,” says the lady near the front.
“Hacked up all those Christmas lights. Ruined them.” The driver shakes her head. “Who would do that?”
“Electrocuted,” insists the other lady.
The bus driver finally processes this. “Yeah, you’re right!”
Tony can’t help himself. “They’d be fine if they used scissors with plastic handles, and it wasn’t–”
He flushes under the sudden suspicion of their glares. “–raining,” he mutters. Stupid, he thinks. He ought to remember by now that being sixteen is a punishable offense.
Thursday, December 2, 2004
When Biff’s lost in his own head, he stares off at nothing in particular, and his eyes will occasionally tighten as if he’s about to squint. Tara recognizes this expression on his face as he stands on his front lawn, in his underwear, under a very cold rain.
“Biff?” she says. “Biff! You’re going to freeze out here!”
“Hmm? Oh hey!” Biff focuses on her. “Nah, I’m okay. I… tried taking my clothes off to cool down, right? But it didn’t work.”
Tara looks up to see a belch of flame shatter his bedroom window.
“I was really hot,” Biff adds.
Wednesday, December 1, 2004
“You expect me to sell you a horse?” The horse trader sneers at Maksim’s ragged clothing. “What are you going to pay me with?”
“Trade me the horse,” says Maksim cannily, “and I’ll do twelve backflips.”
The trader guffaws. “What a ridiculous idea! As if you can even do twelve–”
“It’s a deal,” says Maksim, and totally does twelve backflips. Then he turns around and does twelve more backflips, to get back to where he started.
“Damn!” swears the trader. “My finest horse!” He gnaws his hat.
“Good doing business with you,” grins Maksim, then backflips onto the horse, naturally.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
He never wanted to be an extremist.
He’s no fool; he knows that things before the invasion were bad, that the system was broken. But he believed that given the chance to be its own, his country could have fixed itself. Not anymore.
Their rhetoric is all about freedom, but they’ve forced in new governance as if the tyranny of the many differs from that of the few. Their freedom smells like resources, gouging, white grins and money.
He had to choose a side. He had to.
With heavy shoulders, he opens the chest and pulls out his long white hood.
Monday, November 29, 2004
“Oh,” says a breathless Holly, smoothing the skirt. Rowan grins, but when Holly turns back from the mirrors her face is older than her fourteen years.
“You give me the nicest dreams,” she says heavily. “But I can’t afford it.”
“Ms. Rowan’s Fund For Underdressed Young Ladies–” Rowan begins.
“No!” Holly scowls. “You are not allowed to–”
“I am.”
“I won’t wear it!”
The dress has turned a creature of elbows and knees into somebody who’d ride a pumpkin carriage. Rowan doesn’t know which is more beautiful, but she knows why Holly’s afraid. She doesn’t know what to say.
Friday, November 26, 2004
Grady sits, then stands. He empties the trash. He turns on the television and flips some channels. He turns it off. He sits.
Tim looks at him wearily. “Stop being so–so preoccupied with this.”
“I get preoccupied with things for a living, Tim,” snaps Grady. “I can spend three rolls of film being preoccupied with the angle out of a car wreck, or a cemetery gate, or–”
“So get preoccupied with something else,” says Tim.
Grady stares at him, tapping his leg, then goes to get his old Nikon.
“Don’t look at me,” he says, and starts taking pictures.
Thursday, November 25, 2004