Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Dear Diary II
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
Dear Diary
Today I caught a little god and put it in a jar before it can become a big god and hurt little people.
Mom says I’m a brave girl for ridding all those worlds of their gods. She also says to be careful but I don’t see what’s so dangerous about the little gods.
Mom wants to take my jars of little gods to the swindler’s market to sell, but I hide them from her and feed them scraps of magic. Sometimes I steal souls for them from Aunt Rue’s cookie jar. The gods grow and grow until their faces are smash up against the glass of their tiny jars and then they grow until their spines are all twisted and then they keep growing until they die.
I have 117 jars, so there are 117 godless worlds.
Today I dropped a dead god into a little world. The little people scurried around like ants, trying to grab pieces of the dead god. They fought for the toes and for the Word and for the Book and they carried away the chunks of godmeat and killed anyone who came close. I felt bad and tried to tell them it was only a stupid dead god but they didn’t listen to me. If Mom finds out she’s gonna kill me. I hid that world where she won’t look.
Sue said she’ll teach me to hunt angels. Angels make good earrings. If you’re careful and don’t kill them when you grab ’em, they keep wriggling their little wings when they’re hung from your ears and last like forever.
Dear Diary: please forgive me for not writing more, but I’m running off to hunt angels with Sue.
In the Night Market
Monday, May 7th, 2007
The autumn wind was coming down the valley from China, but, to Javad Azaizeh, it felt as chilly as if it were pouring south from Siberia. He should be inside on a night like this, but insomnia always left him feeling lonely, and Khabarovsk’s night market seemed like the perfect remedy.
Vermillion in the shadows of the next row of kiosks caught his eye, and he walked closer. In the narrow aisle between a noodle stall and one that sold prepaid viewpads for the municipal space, a stocky man in an apron swept his bare forearm up and down, back and forth. Red flashed with every movement. The noodle-seller — he hadn’t even put down his long chopsticks — paused, and the diodes in the skin of his forearm winked out.
He was looking over Javad’s head, and Javad turned.
Up on a rooftop overlooking the market square, a woman waved in response. Her arm, too, traced red on the night, a series of symbols that hung on the air through persistence of vision.
Javad smiled in recognition — he knew those symbols. Forty years ago, touring with Cheba Alia’s orchestra when he was just a city kid who’d never been more than ten kilometers out of Paris, he’d seen the same alphabet on hand-lettered signs in towns on the edge of the Sahara. They’d seemed then like the most exotic thing in the world. He’d never learned how to read them, and what a noodle-seller in a Korean market in a Russian city was using them to say, he couldn’t guess.
Javad turned back to see the noodle-seller resume his side of the conversation, his arm a blur. There must be some sophisticated on-the-fly processing behind the simple arm-waving — the quick-fading scarlet lines were crisp.
Javad’s admiration was tempered by hunger — the smell of fish and spices reminded him he hadn’t eaten since midday.
“Pardon, but when you have a moment…” he said.
The noodle-seller’s arm continued flaring letters on the twilight, his gaze remained fixed on his distant companion, and Javad had no idea if the man had even heard him.