Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
Disco Zombie
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Barry woke up feeling claustrophobic and irritable in a pitch black, stuffy place where something stank. Above him, something hard was in his way, and in annoyance Barry punched it. He was surprised and pleased when his hand smashed through easily, and surprised and pissed when dirt poured through the hole onto him. Aggravated, Barry bashed and clawed his way up through what was left of the hard thing and through the dirt above it until he broke through into an open space. It felt like forcing himself out of a birth canal.
He found himself outside in a misting rain and some hazy moonlight, and now that he was calming down, he began to notice strange things–like the fact that he had just clawed his way up from underground when the last thing he’d been aware of was passing out after doing too much coke at the disco, and that his gold pantsuit was rotted nearly to rags, and that he had forgotten to breathe and it didn’t seem to be bothering him.
“Good morning, disco zombie!” someone called out, and Barry turned to see a skinny woman standing nearby, the ground around her scattered with heavy books and with candles that flickered under the protective shadow of a beach umbrella.
Barry took a step toward her, a strange, salty smell drawing him forward. Brains.
She stood up, snicking out a knife. “Hold on there,” she said. “I need you to do me a favor.” She held up a little baggie, and even through the bag he could smell that it was coke–which was funny, because when he was alive, coke hadn’t smelled like anything.
“You knew I’d care more about the coke than the brains,” Barry croaked.
“I made a point of using a legendary addict,” she said. “It’s how I’m going to control you. You play nice, or no coke.”
He thought about it for a moment, stepped forward, and cracked open her skull with his fingers. The knife jerked into his chest and probably damaged something, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be something he needed.
The brains were perfect: warm and savory. Afterward, Barry did the coke and wondered what the favor would have been. Then he went out to look for a disco.
The Third Side
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
This is the third story in the Elephant Corners sequence, after “At the Elephant Corners” and “In Search of Elephant Corners.”
Sylvie sat in a marble rowboat in the middle of a pool in one of the teaching basements, trying to read the future from ripple patterns of thrown pebbles.
Katerina watched from the wooden shore.
“I don’t know,” said Sylvie. Every splash looked the same. She wished she could go back to reading clouds, coins, or chicken bones.
Even down here, Sylvie thought she heard the ghost rumble of her stolen motorbike vibrating the stone. She forced herself to sit still, to stare at the water. Katerina called her stubborn.
“Something about a book?” Sylvie said.
“Something,” said Katerina with that almost-secret smile that meant she’d seen everything Sylvie had missed, that made Sylvie want to run up the stairs and out the elephant-leg door and never come back.
Sylvie had learned a dozen methods of future-finding. She knew she’d only learned the beginnings of each, that there were dozens more she hadn’t even started.
Each method was a different vantage point, according to the old man whose breath smelled of figs, who taught her a couple afternoons a week. The way a scene looks different depending where you stand, different readings give you different perspectives.
“When the thief was alive,” said Katerina, “he wanted something from you, from us. Now all that’s left of him is wanting.”
“What did he, does he want?” said Sylvie.
“The thief was an adept in the origami arenas on Phiros, the floating island. There is a divination akin to dueling-origami. It might tell you.”
They went upstairs. The fig-man gave Sylvie a crisp square of paper. The basics were easy to learn.
She folded through the night, until the paper was soft as cloth, seeking what her teachers called the third side of the page. That was where the answer would be written.
She folded while the sun crossed the sky. She noticed the skin of her palms stung with papercuts; all the folding hadn’t blunted the edges. She looked, and by candlelight — was it night again? the second, or the third? — she could make out runes in the clusters of cuts, not quite like what she’d learned to read in chicken bones or the angles where clouds met. She knew it was the answer. She knew she couldn’t decipher it. Maybe that was what she was meant to learn.
She found Katerina on the second-floor sofas.
“Please read my palms,” said Sylvie.
Katerina’s smile was an open secret.