THE MUSEUM OF TERROR, says the shadow of a stencil on the concrete wall. Hidebound fiddles with the fire exit and drags him in; Zach wonders if he is to be the latest exhibit, or a curator.
There’s an old chair with straps on it. Hidebound sits him down hard, puts the straps to their intended use, and pulls up a little stool.
“Why are we here?” says Zach. He can feel holes in the chair under his hands and feet.
“Atmosphere,” says Hidebound. He removes a silver cigarette lighter from his boot.
Hidebound, Zach happens to know, does not smoke.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
“What is it they call us?” muses the Inger Stevens seated across from Pearl. “Knockoffs? Copycats?”
“Kinkos,” says Pearl carefully.
“Kinkos.” She smiles (it is a brilliant smile). “How arcane. As if their own faces, tragedies of genetics, are something to be proud of.”
“How do you tell each other apart?” Pearl asks. “Not to be rude. But if you’re all perfect copies–”
“Not perfect. Not quite; that would be infringement of beautymark. We each choose a unique flaw–I have this dimple, you see?”
Pearl leans close, as for a moment, they’re surrounded by a passing swarm of Vivien Leighs.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
“Tap-scrape. Tap-scrape. Tap-scraaape.”
The firelight’s nervous on Hephaestus’s face as he makes tapping/scraping gestures at his audience. Hermes has stuffed his face with popcorn; Ganymede’s so rapt that he hasn’t noticed Aphrodite’s hand halfway up his thigh.
“A bit lowbrow even for him, isn’t it?” murmurs Apollo to his sister.
“They can’t all be… lyrical,” she says, grinning.
“Christ,” he scowls, “I don’t know why I even talk to you about this kind of thing.”
“Because,” says Hephaestus, “he’s RIGHT BEHIND YOU!”
Thunder tears down the slopes of Olympus. Humanity cowers. Zeus has to go change robes.
Binyamin read somewhere as a kid that you can’t touch the tips of two pencils together; he kept trying until his knuckles were stippled with accidental graphite tattoos. His parents would have freaked out about tetanus if they’d noticed. He switched to ballpoint pens.
Because his life is a straightforward progression of metaphors, Binyamin becomes a mediator, talking people into meeting at the tiniest point imaginable: common ground. He likes his job and he’s good at it. The parties involved always address him as if he’s the translator, aching with pride wounds. Binyamin coaxes them together, a child forever unbreaking homes.
It’s intoxicating, the freedom of living under terror, moreso than the cider or the lateness of the night. Silhouine and a boy she doesn’t know kiss shivering, and stumble from the embers down alleys that have always intrigued her.
Morning: she sneaks in the back door, coiffured like a thicket, because Ms. Imbri is ringing the bellpull at the front. Silhouine splashes stale water and makes desperate overtures to her hair.
No more bonfires, she promises, red-eyed in a tin mirror. She stays home for two nights. This is how she misses it when the Iron Heart bombs the Stolen Bridge.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
White makeup in his beard. Abram considers the mirror: the clown, they say, cries inside, but what about the one crying outside too? Crying tears of blood? Holding an axe?
He hadn’t understood Mr. Johnson’s hidden smirk when they gave him the assignment: he’d felt confused but eager to serve the Bureau, to be trusted with undercover work. He did the research. He committed.
When, during his career as a false Juggalo, did mask and reality cease to diverge? Abram isn’t sure. But he knows purpose now: the thrill, the pride, the necessity of having Mr. Johnson’s head in one’s bookbag.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Les Morts Petits are overworked and understaffed, which is why lately, during orgasm, there are so many of his ghosts around.
Rio’s tired of them. They crowd the room and crouch on the dressers, staring and blue and always naked. Their faces are dumb. He can see them even when (as one might expect) he closes his eyes.
They only last a few seconds, but it’s enough to remind him: so many children not chosen, so many choices unmade. Unfinished business. Rio puts in calls to the Département des Âmes and gets hold music that is, appropriately, not haunting at all.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
HeLa is everywhere: stealthy and tenacious, hungry, a laboratory weed that has ruined more than one career by eating lesser cancers alive. Longinus is everywhere too, though closer in age and lineage (he suspects) to the transmissible tumors found on the genitals of dogs.
Sometimes he fakes research credentials just to get into labs and contaminate their petri gel. Here, he thinks, poking his dirty finger first in HeLa, then in or YAA or Tsugane or EB33. Have a nice forever! He can almost see why the old bastard gets off on it, this touch of life, this infliction of immortality.