11.26.08
Come Out, Sun, Come Out!
Come out, sun, come out! Faster, faster!
It is very cold this morning.
Frost is crisp on my window.
Grass crunches underfoot.
The air sucks moisture
From my dry tongue.
Come out, sun,
Come out
Now!
11.21.08
The Good Neighbor.
The insistent knocking threatens to tear down your door – you can actually see the frame shuddering. You hasten to open it.
A short angry redhead stares up at you. “Took you long enough,” she grunts, shoving past you uninvited. She is already in your kitchen by the time you close the door.
You are more than a little angry at this stranger, especially when she starts going through your fridge. But you say nothing, except to offer her a drink, which she accepts with a curtness that is more than a little rude.
You turn away to get a glass down from the cabinet, and as you bring it down in front of your face, you catch a fleeting glimpse of the stranger’s reflection: a shambling thing of thorny vines and roses with naked eyeballs peering in all directions including right at you and a glint of something at her core that could be an apple or could be a star, but the image is gone before you can tell for sure.
She leaves after drinking your milk and eating your bread, and for weeks afterward neither runs out and you find rose petals in the oddest places.
11.20.08
The Grin.
It was just his luck that he’d get taken hostage when he went to deposit that lousy dollar Jones had given him.
Though at least he had some luck. These guys were clearly incompetent; only one gunman watching the crowd? With his back to the open window behind him? Please. Sure, the bank was up on the fourteenth floor, but that wouldn’t stop half the people in Arkham from climbing in anyway.
Okay, so he wasn’t in Arkham. The point still stood, as evidenced by Teleika Thaziazhsta perching like a gargoyle right behind the gunman, grinning like a barracuda.
He kind of hoped the other hostages weren’t stupid enough to draw the robbers’ attention to her, but given the way his luck usually ran, he wasn’t holding out much hope.
Teleika caught his eye and winked.
The gunman looked up, right into some damn ornamental mirror.
Teleika winked at him, too.
With lots of shouting and melodrama, the gunman turned around and fired. Teleika vanished from the windowsill.
Only to rotate back up into her previous crouch. Damn, he thought, she’s got strong fingers.
Before the gunman could fire again, Teleika punched him, and he was down and out. Served the dumbass right, for wandering that close to the window.
The other robbers came running out, but Teleika, grinning that ghastly grin and moving like she had no bones, took them all out with ease. One punch a piece.
Then she stood up straight, put on a more composed face, winked again at the slightly-unnerved hostages, and left.
Smith shrugged and went back to trying to deposit his dollar with that grin still floating in his mind.
11.17.08
Djinn in the Rain.
It’s surprisingly easy to tell where Harun is when it’s raining: look for the steam.
Most of the time, he just looks like a human, as long as he has his glasses on. Get too close, and you can feel heat rising from him, but you have to get that close first, and he’s remarkably hard to find in a crowd.
Unless it’s raining.
He goes out and stands in the street every time the heavens open, and cars just never drive down the road when he does this. He leaves his sunglasses inside and stares at the cloud-darkened sky as if he has to compensate for the lack of stars by revealing his own burning, star-like eyes. The raindrops explode into vapor when they hit him, and in a short time he ends up wrapped in his own personal fog.
It’s little wonder the few people who glimpse him like this think he’s a demon.
He has never said why he does this. But every time it’s raining, Harun stands in the street and watches the sky, and waits for the storm to pass.
11.07.08
Rewiring.
Someone landed lightly on the roof. Adrian didn’t take his eyes off the door as Amethyst pointed her gun at the ceiling.
“Who’s there?” The sheriff’s question was a command.
A dark, grinning figure dropped down in front of the door. Adrian blinked and shifted his grip on his sword.
Francis tapped on the window. “Can I come in?” he asked in his own voice. Silver glinted at his throat.
Adrian looked back at Amethyst, who nodded, lips tense. He opened the door.
Francis walked in as if he’d never used a wheelchair.
Adrian sucked in a sharp breath. Amethyst’s eyes widened.
“Francis…”
“What did you do?”
Francis gave another sharklike grin. “I spent the past six days rewiring my spinal column and hardwiring my neural net against seizures,” he said. “It’ll probably last until the next thunderstorm rolls in, so let’s get this sonuvabitch already.”
Adrian was already watching the alleys again, waiting for the shooter to move. Amethyst looked Francis over, and nodded.
Perfect Memory.
“Wow, that’s a weird star.”
“It’s not a star.”
Meshu looked down at his daughter in surprise. “You know this how?”
The six-and-three-quarters!-year-old flopped back on the hillside. “I’ve watched the stars for a year and a half, now. That one has never shown up before. Besides, I’d've seen it last night. It’s not a planet, comet, meteor, or stellar anomaly, either.” Small fingers stabbed at the sky in punctuation.
“Satellite? Plane?”
“No and no. There are no satellites visible in the sky at this time, and a plane or helicopter would show up differently.”
“Lia, how do you know all this?”
Lia blinked up at her father. “I just remember it.”
There was a pause.
“Weather balloon?” Meshu said, hiding a grin.
Lia shot him a look of withering disdain.
Up in the sky, the UFO blinked twice, and vanished.
Eyes.
A hand reached down and snatched off Ekion’s glasses. “Huh,” said Iason.
Ekion glared up at the other siren. “What?”
“You’re not wearing contacts.”
“You noticed.” Ekion blinked rapidly. The flickering images the wind carried him were rapidly getting annoying. “Can I have my glasses back?”
Iason turned them over. “Do you even need them anymore?”
Ekion extended his hand with another glare.
“I mean, they’re not ground for correction. They’re just weirdly tinted.”
“Can. I. Have. My. Glasses. Back. Please.“
Iason looked him square in the eyes. “Not until you tell me why your eyes aren’t blue anymore.”
Ekion sighed. “I don’t know, okay? I woke up one day a while ago, and my eyes were sort of purple and I couldn’t see with my old prescription. They got redder and sharper as the month progressed.”
“So why are you wearing glasses at all, if you now have perfect vision?”
A hand reached out of the wall and swiped the glasses from Iason, startling the siren into nearly falling off the ledge. “He already answered your question,” Nathan said from somewhere inside the masonry.
Ekion grinned, took his glasses from his lover, and sauntered off down the hallway.
11.05.08
Celeste.
She spends a lot of time down at the junkyard. The father and son who run the place know her, and they’re more than happy to tell her all about the latest things that’ve come in. She pokes around, turning over this piece and that, spending much of the afternoon half underneath a scrapped car, and leaves with some pieces. The older man gives her most of it for free.
She doesn’t know, exactly, what causes her to pick one piece of scrap over another. Other pieces are in better repair, or would require less reshaping. But she takes the pieces that call to her, and goes back to her workshop.
It used to be a student science lab, before she was given exclusive access. There are still gas taps for the bunsen burners and weird-ass emergency showers all over the room.
She’s altered most of them.
She builds all sorts of things, from junkyard sculptures to random appliances, from simple toys for the kids at the orphanage down Ide Street to complex engineering masterpieces that cause folks from all over to hound her for days, if they ever find out about them.
She is only seventeen, and she has 23 patented inventions to her name.
She never knows what she builds until she starts, and usually not really until she finishes. And nothing is ever finished. Everything could use some modification, eventually.
She is not really sure why she is an engineer/tinker/inventor/mechanic/junkyard artist, just that she is.
She never tells anyone that she hears the metal singing.
11.03.08
Pseudo-Poem.
The sun sets.
Pinks, blues, and greens litter the sky.
There is a fish tapping on my window.
