A Conversation

“You’re late.”

“No I’m not!  What time is it?”

“Six.”

“We said six.”

“Thirty.  Six thirty, is the time now.”

“Oh, that’s not too bad.”

“Six thirty is the time now, today.  Thursday.”

“I’m aware of the day.”

“Are you?  That’s good.  Because we were supposed to meet at six.  On Monday.”

“…”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.  Ok.  So, um, I’m late.”

“Very.”

“Where the fuck was I for three days?”

“The last I heard, you were tripping on fairy oil and dancing naked in the hills.”

“There are hills?”

“Evidently.”

“… Wait, have you been waiting here this whole time?”

“…”

“Wow.”

“Shut up.”

No, Seriously

“What’s it called?”

“Fairy Oil.”

There’s a cloud of smoke in the room, and the lights are all low, in a dozen colours, like the inside of a fogged kaleidoscope.

“How do we do it?” asks Remy.

Stomper hands each of them a vial of thin green liquid.  It flouresces in the miasma.  “Ok,” he says, sitting on the couch.  “This is gonna sound weird.”

They all wait.

“You have to pour it on your feet.”

There is a brief argument, and then Remy tries it, ’cause why the fuck not?  It doesn’t work.

And then he sees some shit.

Aadi

Aadi is, depending on the day, too tall, short, smart, dumb, or not blonde enough.  There’s also a problem with her teeth, but she hasn’t decided what yet.

She starts skipping class in the winter semester, drifting through the halls, trying to figure a fix.  Sometimes she thinks she has it, like when she was anorexic for a week.  Most days, she ends up drawing in her notebook.

Ray the Janitor who sells her pot leaves the door to the roof open most afternoons, and there’s always a few people around.  That’s where she meets Craig, and finds her fix.

Glider

Wren rubs uselessly at the soot caked on his goggles.  His scarf is completely black; he can taste the ash every time he breathes.  The glider creaks.

Navigating the Black Dunes is always slow, and often fatal.  The elementals that scour the hills burst in odd places, dancing orange and white and red, burning whatever little fuel they’ve found in the ashen wastes.  Wren walks a tightrope, getting close enough to catch the hot air and gain a few hundred feet without dropping within scorching distance.

From there it’s a long, slow descent, praying that he’ll make the next platform.

A Flower’s Petal

Ryold dreams of the day he got his lance, his instructor’s smile, the hum of his bird’s wings.

He comes to with a jolt, on his back on a flower’s petal, feet from the ground.  His bird, unridered by the swarm, is nowhere to be seen.  Above him the battle rages, his fighters stabbing at an ever-thickening cloud of wasps.  They’re going to lose.  Below him, the broken bodies of bird and bug and man litter the ground.

His flower sways, and he scrambles for a hold.  He looks for the disturbance; his heart swells.

The Squirrel Rangers have arrived.

Cardine

Keith’s message glowed on the screen, an image dug out of a Flickr account at the end of a long chase.  It hissed through Cardine’s head, seemed to undulate and grow.  She felt dizzy.

When the knock came, like bones clacking, she almost thought she’d dreamed it.

Through the peephole Steph’s head looked distended, her forehead huge, her eyes too far apart.  There was something else, but Cardine’s mind swam.  She opened the door.

“Steph.  Hey.  What time is it?”  She blinked, squinted.  “You ok?  What’s with your eyes?”

Steph rose, her feet leaving the ground, and the air crackled.

Wendy

Her name is Wendy, and she is (or was, or whatever) in HR at a bank.  Her kid grew up and left home, her husband having done the same long before, and she’s worried that she’s going to turn into her grandmother, who died alone in a condo in Miami.  She refuses to play bridge.

She tells Jeremy this (after she coaxes him out from behind a bus shelter) over cigarettes and cappucinos that they make themselves in a Starbucks.

The guy sitting at the table with them doesn’t move, but his eyes flick like he’s trying to say something.

Ripples

Tents are set up around the edge of the Lens, a shanty town housing a handful of scientists, soldiers, and people whose purposes are opaque. There are machines running tests, and debriefings every evening with Jones, the suit who brought him here. His job, he is told, is to think, and that’s all he has time to do.

The huge golden ring frightens him.

He watches it at sunrise and sunset, the light flaring across its surface. They’re told to stay away, but one night, alone, he reaches out a hand. Ripples spread from his fingertips, and then are gone.

There.

I’m caught up, more or less.  That missing week has now been filled in with stories, so if you’re interested, scroll down and check them out.  I promise that I won’t fall behind again, at least for a little while, unless, of course, I do.

June

June packs a bag with shot, hooks it from her Dora the Explorer belt.  She ties her jump rope across her chest, holsters her sling, and squeezes a juicebox into her water bottle.  As a final touch, she scrawls dark lines across her face with a magic marker.

She’s ready for the backyard.

The hunt is slow, hot, the grass weeks long, uncut because her brother keeps forgetting to do it.  In the bushes there is a rustling.  The insects buzz.

She readies a marble, pulls the elastic back, waits.

Captain Fluffy rounds the corner, hissing, his eyes green slits.