Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Just Only the Endings
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
The man and the dog were both mortally wounded now, and Jack slumped down against the stoop next to The General. They lay there, staring at their pooled blood mingling on the hot sidewalk and trickling off to swamp a little cluster of anthills.
“It’s not true what they say,” said the dog. “Not every dog has his day. But I tell you what: I had mine.”
Jack laughed weakly. “You sure did, The General.” He threw the gun aside. Then he dug into his pocket and extracted a piece of paper, soaked with his own blood, to hold out to The General. His hand quaked.
“What’s that?” said The General.
“That’s the five dollars I owe you.”
Then the General started laughing, and Jack joined in, and they both laughed until they died.
* * *
“That’s the last of them,” Mona said, slamming the thick steel door shut in the rock wall. “Want to do the honors, Bessy?”
Bessy spun the wheel until the door was locked down, then took out the hack saw and started sawing the wheel itself off. The thin rasping of it sounded emptily across the badlands. Francine shaded her eyes and looked into the distance.
“You won’t be able to see the city from here,” Mona said.
“I know,” said Francine. “No reason I can’t try, though.”
The wheel fell to the rocks with sullen clang, and Bessy kicked it away into the dust. She packed the hack saw up carefully, even though there was no conceivable reason they would need it again.
With no more words between them–what words were left?–they formed a single line and began the long journey to the city they hoped was still there.
* * *
The Brownie finally succeeded in picking the lock. He pushed the door of the birdcage open and jumped down onto the bookshelf as the pixie flew past him and darted out into the free air. Together they surveyed the conference room, which was now overrun with panicked frogs.
“Should’ve seen that coming,” said the Brownie.
The pixie just nodded.
Arcade Lives
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
Everyone in the arcades knew Suskind. He was the one who made sure everything worked and fixed whatever didn’t. He unclogged the gas jets when the lighting in the panoramas grew dim. He fixed the broken panes in the cabinets of the curiosity shops and wonder-museums. On damp mornings, he directed the flaneurs and other artistic idlers toward the café tables closest to the grates where warm air welled up from the steamworks.
The Landlords’ Association paid his salary and, although they were even more despised as a collective than they were individually, this animosity wasn’t transferred in Suskind’s direction. Everyone regarded him as a friend. Even the poet, as bitter as he was brilliant, would occasionally share a drink with him (absinthe leached from other peoples’ second-hand sugar cubes was the best he could afford).
Everyone mourned Suskind when he was found dead; everyone wondered what had happened. Only the poet did anything to find out — Suskind’s ghost visited him nightly until he began tracing the repairman’s rounds, asking questions. Had anyone noticed anything in the repairman’s manner that suggested he feared some danger? Had anyone been following him?
The poet learned nothing, but pressed on, week after week. If he re-created the routine of Suskind’s visits, perhaps someone would remember an anomaly in his last days.
In the third week, when the panorama managers asked, he cleaned the gaslights, and the vistas of distant sea battles and blue-towered cities shone vivid again as life. He oiled the pulleys in the reputable theaters and found lime for the lights of the disreputable ones.
He became, as Suskind had been, an arranger of matches between chessplayers in disparate cafes who would otherwise never have met. He gave the secret of the table by the warm grate to a particularly rumpled playwright.
When he finally discovered that it was mere bad luck that killed Suskind, the coincidence of living upstairs from a family of necromancers who’d summoned one malign spirit too many, it was almost an anticlimax.
The poet began accepting the checks mailed by the Landlords’ Association. Although he could afford his own absinthe now, he’d lost his taste for the distraction it offered. He was writing again, every bit as bitter as before, but no longer weighed down by the nagging fear his brilliance was exhausted. It might be, but, poems or lights: his hands got things done.