The stone basin is inaudible outside this room, but inside it’s a perfect laughing gurgle: cool and sweet, endless, out the tap and down the drain forever. She blocked it up once to flood the room, but it just sank through the floorboards. Even in the room that should have been directly beneath it, there was no sign of a leak.
She chose it as the center of the map she’s drawing, quill ink onto sheets of soft vellum torn from the empty books. The basin wall is north. The room’s a square, labelled “Water Here.”
She never gets thirsty anymore.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
“Are you okay?”
Kai and Ayane are waiting by the door, concerned. Kai pretty clearly has to go: she’s trying to not to hop from foot to foot. “Yeah!” says Jason, muffled. “Sorry, just a minute!”
“What else can you say to that?” mutters Chyler over a euchre hand.
Agnes cracks a grin, and Hector cracks up. It’s lost on Chyler.
“Like you can just go ‘No, actually,'” she says, in a Jasonesque baritone. “‘Having some difficulty. Think you could come on in and help?'”
Hector’s off his chair, and Agnes covers her eyes. Chyler barely notices. Her hand really sucks.
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Kristi’s never understood the way slow-motion works in movies. Important things happen gracefully, with panning and time for consideration.
For her, it’s just the opposite. Things happen instantly, and thinking back she remembers before and after, but not while. Her brain shuts its eyes at the scary part.
Which is why, trying to remember it, she gets only a few sharp images: her blouse brushing the door, the pull as it snagged the loose latchplate screw. Annoyance as she pivoted around it. Silence. Looking up, sudden horror, seeing Victor, knowing exactly where the grape juice in her other hand had gone.
What would it sound like, if it spoke? “Nasal” makes her think of Gilbert Godfrey, Ad-Roc maybe, but that’s too high. It’d have to be lower, more guttural, lugubrious. Nicolas Cage? Why does that sound right? She pictures it opposite Cher, how the morality would play out: she’s hollow inside! It’s disgusting outside! See–
Maria’s dizzy for a moment when she realizes she’s coming up with instant crap plots for a movie starring… whatever it’d be, all the snot in her head right now if it took on a life of its own. She has got to get out of LA.
“It was getting old,” he says, and takes another bite of bamboo salad, “seeing the same faces, you know? I mean, studding was fun, flying all over the world, but there’s like… ten females out there. They’re not all centerfolds. And half of them are my cousins!”
June’s still staring. “When–how…? They just let you go?”
“Had to, once I learned to talk,” he laughs.
“That’s amazing.” She’s following again the pattern of white on his cheeks, the way it draws her back to those beautiful black eyes…
Ling-Ling smiles, and puts his paw on her hand.
It feels nice.
Thursday, December 4, 2003
He’s thought about her naked before. Hasn’t he? Surely, all the fantasizing, the watching–he must have. But if he did, then how did he imagine she’d look?
He’s on the roof, alienated as usual. Below him, they’re all piling into the pool: drunk, high, naked. It’s very late but still warm. “Skinny dipping”–that makes him think of being seven, his cousins and the pond at the farm. For some reason it’s seemed an innocent term until now.
Holly’s naked, her face flushed with wine. A thousand hours she’s lived in his head: can he really have had no expectations?
Wednesday, December 3, 2003
After a while it’s like she can see them wash each other away: sucking cold when the doors open, sharp heat when they close. This happens every two to five minutes, and she’s grown to like the variety.
It’s like this every winter for five winters now, every day but Wednesday (the bus runs even on Christmas). It’s weathering her face. At night she can almost see the tiny spread of her new laugh lines.
Vanetta doesn’t get desperate with lotion, doesn’t buy hydroxy cremes. Let her face find age: let her reduce, crease, dessicate, leave a happy old-apple shrunken head.
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
Dark before day. Fear before joy. Coal before light.
They said the words over her when she was born, and smeared her head with ash. She sneezed and wailed. She didn’t like it.
Her hair kept trying to grow out fair, and whenever it straggled to an inch they’d hack it off. Finally, after six years, it’s starting to darken: blonde, honey, mahogany brown.
She hates her hair, hates more when they cut it. She weeps silently afterwards.
There’s always one who will speak to a hurt child, in darkness. “There, there, little Nightjar,” soothes hers. “Someday we’ll find your voice.”
Zoltan Thule has a completely awesome name that somehow always makes everyone think she has a lisp.
“It’s a name out of antiquity,” she insists, lightning crackling around her power gauntlet. “On maps it signified the region too far north to be charted! It symbolizes how I gained my power in a quest that took me deep into the ice of–”
“Uh huh,” nods the DMV lady. “And is that S-U-L-E or is it spelled like the city in Korea?”
Eventually she just gets the stupid license with the name spelled wrong. Reindeer bouncers never check ID anyway.
Friday, November 28, 2003
“We have to get to the airport,” says Com, “or someone I can’t communicate with might get on an airplane.”
“And leave?” says Rom.
“Almost definitely.”
Before he finishes the last word there’s carbonized tire tread on the ramp out of the downtown garage. “Play playlist ‘excited music with no words,'” Rom orders the car as they accelerate. Earlier he was playing music with words, but not now. This is too important.
But then, they come face to face with the impossible: expected traffic patterns.
“Have you tried calling her, or–” says Rom, inching forward.
“Telephones do not exist,” says Com.
Thursday, November 27, 2003