the-stick-scribblers

[the-stick-scribblers]

Red Dirt Black

In the middle of a fallow field in the vague area of land called Veritas Ridge squats a broken down truck, flakes of blue paint eaten through by rust so thoroughly the whole frame is unsteady. Most people in the area don’t know about it, which is a shame. The truck is a matter of life and death. Konnor steps toward it, hesitant, boots crunching on the ground despite his effort to be silent. Around him, dirt and sky blur together in the hanging mist so the whole landscape is painted the same blue-gray of the truck itself. He anticipates movement, though he doesn’t know where to expect it to come from. Probably not the truck. It must have been out here abandoned for thirty, thirty-five years, and there’s almost nothing left. Konnor sticks his boot into the wheel well and feels around for a grip. His toe hits the semi-solid axel and he grabs the ledge of the truck bed and hauls himself up and over. He cuts his elbow on a piece of curling steel on his way down.

His desire to remain as quiet as possible wins out over his instinct to swear loudly, but he makes up for it with a colorful string of expletives in his head. He settles into the truck bed to wait, nestling back into the corner so he is pressed up against the body of the truck. Then he presses his palm to the cut on his elbow and holds it. He should have been more careful; he hopes the applied pressure stops the bleeding quickly. Down below the truck, in the gaps between the wooden boards, dull lug nuts are scattered in red dirt. Below the lug nuts, white chalk circles weave in and out of each other like ripples. Like ripples, the ground at the center of the circles moves.

He can’t see it or hear it, but he can feel it. Churning. He’s grateful he was most of the way into the truck bed when he cut himself. If even a drop of blood had fallen to the earth, it would have sped up the whole process. Now, though, he finds himself anxious for it to begin. He doesn’t want to wait anymore. The waiting has lasted long enough. His body thrums with anxiety just as the earth beneath him thrums with what’s coming. Anna is back at the store, probably messing up all his displays, but holding down the building anyway so someone is available to receive the morning’s shipment. “In case you fuck this up,” she’d said when he loaded the last jug of gasoline into the trailer and started to lock up.

She wasn’t on the schedule. She just likes to meddle like that.

Finally, from beneath where he sits in the bed of the truck, Konnor hears something. It’s so subtle at first, he thinks he might be imagining it. Anxiety and anticipation melding in his mind to convince him of a change in the atmosphere where no such change is truly taking place. But he lets his body go still, stops his breath in his chest, and listens with his eyes closed. Then it’s unmistakable: the soft, shushing sounds of shifting earth. His body reacted to the noise on its own, drawing inward, pulling himself toward his own center to take up as little space as possible. Lug nuts jump up and down on the dirt, little whumps like popping knuckles that make his spine crawl.

He reaches inside his pocket and feels around, finds a soft lump and grabs onto it, every muscle in his body tense except for his hand, hyper-focused on being delicate.

With as gentle a touch as he can summon, he pulls the bird from his pocket. He thinks he can almost feel it breathing, its tiny body warm and soft in his palm, but he isn’t sure. He cradles it close to him and wishes he had any other option. Briefly, he even looks around at the land – the woods behind him, the long stretch of grass ahead – and considers how far he would be likely to make it if he took the little creature and ran.

Probably not far; the ground now is tossing the truck from its sunken home in the dirt with each rumble. The sound of the truck’s bones shifting after so long cracks across the field like fireworks. During one of the cracks, longer and louder than the rest, Konnor snaps the little bird’s neck. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s me.”

Konnor leans over the side of the truck, taking care to cling to the chilled metal with all the strength his hands have to offer. In his right hand, the dead bird is cradled in his palm, his fingers braced so hard against the truck they start to ache immediately, but he knows he can’t risk falling over, spilling like so much liquid onto the roiling ground. For three, maybe four seconds, he allows himself to close his eyes, breathing deeply, steadying himself. Then he leans out a little further, as far as he dares.

Staring up at him from the center of the rippling circle is his own, exemiac face. If only it were a simple mirror reflection – mole by his nose, thinning eyebrows, jowl – but he knows better. His skin crawls cold. Carefully, bracing himself against the shaking, broken wood, he tips the bird so drops of blood drip through the rotted center onto each of the face’s eyes, three apiece. Then he drops the whole bird into its mouth.

The next moment drags its feet forward as Konnor waits to see whether the thing is satisfied by his offering. Its less about the size of the meal than it is about the flavor, the quality, how fresh the meat. That’s why he always brings something soft and small and delicate – something innocent. He’s never had a problem before. But tonight, the thing squirms and fusses. Distressed. Hungry. Left wanting. And Konnor remembers his elbow. The thing, the not-quite-Konnor, can smell his blood.

Shit.

Konnor pulls a greasy shop rag out of his pocket and ties it around his elbow with one hand. He’s proud of the way he doesn’t fumble it at all; despite the truck’s shaking and his own, it’s a decent bowline and covers the whole scrape. Almost - Konnor stops gnashing its mouth and glowers at him blindly instead.

For a moment, he waits, as still and silent as he wants the ground to be again. But the thing still doesn’t go away. Now it knows the blood is there, even if the flow has been stopped for the time being. It doesn’t attack, but it doesn’t go away either. It waits just as Konnor himself waits, until finally, Konnor is forced to accept that he needs to give the thing something else. It isn’t satisfied, and it won’t go away until it is, and he doesn’t want to think about what will happen if it doesn’t go away.

He knows he can’t just let it smell the blood either. Whatever he gives to it, it must consume.

One time on a late night news program Konnor saw a man with three fingers total between the two of his hands. He had a disease, something fucked up in his brain – he’d bitten his own fingers off. They had a doctor on the show to talk about it. Konnor watched through half-eyes as the doctor said it’s actually not that improbable, because human fingers have the same tensile strength as a baby carrot. The only thing that stops most people from biting off their own fingers is self-awareness. If a person has nerve damage in their hands, or their neuro-pathways are disrupted in one of a million complicated ways, well. Bon apple teeth.

Konnor draws the cold, damp night air into his lungs in a slow drag, feeling it spread down his throat and into his chest. He doesn’t know which is worse, avoiding the eyes of the thing from the ground, or staring right at it. The latter holds some appeal, despite the crawling horror the not-Konnor fills him with, because being faced with that makes it easier to stomach the idea of doing what he knows he has to do.

In the end, he doesn’t make a decision. His eyes flick through the landscape almost of their own will. One second, they meet the eyes of the thing beneath him, and the next they fly toward the tree line, as though still imagining escape – something the rest of Konnor knows is not an option. There is only one way out of this now.

Slowly, he releases the breath he’d been holding, feels, in an absent sort of way, his lips pulling back from his teeth as his stomach pumps full of a frenetic, icy anxiety.

The pinky finger of his left hand fits well between his front teeth, lying cool and salty against his tongue. He pauses, thinks for a moment, and then moves his finger so the root of it rests between his molars instead.

He doesn't know if the instant of choice, hovering on the thread of time, extends out of an internal sense of itself, or if he's simply hesitating, building up the nerve.  He thinks he might be sick, so he forces himself to pull air into his body through his nose.  The air is cool and smells like mist and pine trees.  If Konnor were to close his eyes, he might almost believe that all of this is a nightmare.  He doesn't do this, not at first, because he doesn't want to lie to himself.  He allows the sick feeling spreading through his body, starting from his center and rolling out from there in waves, to wash over him and take its own edge off.  Sometimes if he embraces the nausea, it has less power over him.

His body almost ceases to function.  It riots against his will, against what he knows he has to make it do.

At the final moment, he closes his eyes, as though that will somehow help. He draws his jaw together in one quick snap, hoping that doing it fast will make it easier. The crunch is sickening, and his mouth fills immediately with tangy blood, threatening the fragile hold he has on the contents of his stomach. Before he can think any further about it, he leans back down over the edge of the truck and spits his finger into the waiting mouth below.

Other - Konnor's lips are cracked and filled with as much dark dirt as emptiness and blood. Konnor clutches his fist against his shirt and bunches them together in a twist to try and stem the blood. It keeps spurting. The initial crunch of his own finger was sickening; now, the grind of bone against broken bone below him and the pain at his front send pulses of tinny blackness across his eyes. He's going to have to come up with an excuse for this when he gets back to town. Anna isn't going to believe him no matter what he says, but it never hurts to keep up appearances. When the new freeway that was supposed to loop past the aluminum factory and add noise to the pollution bucket of Veritas Ridge cracks and moves east and a few of the lead foremen go missing, well. He'll have added mortar to his reputation of plausible deniability.

If he can make it back to town, that is. His own truck, functioning wheels and motor in place, just fine if a little loud on the drive out here, is parked at the top of the field. Dozens of thousands of wildflowers fill the distance between it and Konnor. Dozens of thousand of wildflowers and a twenty-foot ring of stained red dirt, that is. At the edge of the ring, little holes like burrows ripple and dip. Too many fingers wave from each divot.

Coming out here was a bad idea. He realizes by the faintness of his head and the distance not - Konnor has grown from the over-feeding, more than anything in his gut. His gut, bubbling with pain and blood, is an unreliable witness. Coming out here was the smart thing to do this morning. Now it's not. Life sucks, and then you die. Konnor is a bit of a secret masochist on the side - he'd prefer to let it suck a little longer.

It will require more energy than he got from his frappe this morning, though. If he touches the ground anywhere the demon touches, he'll be locked there by the worlds' collision; and if he drops any more blood on the ground, the distance will grow and be too far to leap.

Not like he has much of a choice, though. The demon won't disappear back into the ravaged earth until there's no more to eat up top.

For lack of another rag, Konnor shrugs off his shirt and saws it against the same metal he had cut himself on when he first climbed up here until he's got a wide enough strip. It's awkward to cinch around his hand, and there's no easy way to do it so it doesn't slip. He tugs at it with his teeth until it's tight as he can make it. He almost dislodges the cloth anyway when he jerks his hand away. The memory of teeth on skin, of skin in teeth, sends bile back up his throat. He manages to swallow it only because spitting it out might cement his fate. The truck rattles around him, and a clump of sharp prairie grass snaps against the fallen bumper as the demon clears another clod of disturbed dirt.

Then the whole truck snaps in half.

It's like in that sappy romance movie Anna likes to watch when she's halfway through a bottle of red wine, about a boat and class relations. Colossal? Olympic? Where the boat splits in half and most people drown. It's the same thing now, dying while God's shooting it in slow motion.

The truck bed tips. Splinters of rust catch in Konnor's jeans and exposed chest as he falls. One of his remaining fingernails rips away on an exposed nail; crisp air on the remaining pulp steals the last of Konnor's breath. Lug nuts pop against his shins leaving flowery, bone-deep bruises he won't ever get the chance to poke because now his shoelaces are trailing on the ground and the demon's many fingers have laced themselves into the holes in his shoes. And then his world is shrunk to bile, and salt, and red and black and black and black.

[the-stick-scribblers]

The Lap Cat

He sits below me asking for permission Quiet ears poking politely over the edge of my book.

"I am busy," I tell him "I am trying to understand the meaning of things, and What it is like to be human." He does not

Blink, saucer-eyes dark with The same love that fills his food bowl And overflows in a big mess every morning.

We stare along the love-line like that for several minutes.

"You are insufferable," I say, and I close the book and he lunges, Curls up on top of me black as a womb, And falls asleep.

[the-stick-scribblers]

Salt and Smoke

Outside the cabin, blue sky presided over a vast gray ocean, or at least the sky wanted to think so.  Apollo dragged sun over the waves, where it caught and glistened and fooled the eyes of less experienced men.  Salt off the sea made up as much of the air as the air did, and under the hot summer sun, the ship’s deck would feel warm to the touch.

But Ronan Lynch didn’t see these things.

Inside the cabin, Ronan stood in front of the captain’s desk, awaiting his usual warning before being unleashed.  On the deck at the same time, the crew received a similar warning from their quartermaster, the much-loved Noah Czerny, but for some reason, Captain Gansey always insisted he give Ronan a private lecture.

“You know the men will do what they see you doing,” Gansey said, leaning forward over his desk, shirt sleeves pushed up to his elbows.  His hair, mussed yet somehow miraculously without grease, shifted slightly when the ship rocked.  They were headed for home, for Nassau, and Gansey had set as fast a pace as the Glendower could manage.  The men were all anxious for land and the pleasures it offered.

“They’ll do what Czerny tells them,” Ronan said.  He kept his arms crossed over his chest.  He wanted to lean against something.

Gansey rolled his eyes.  “Only if it suits them, and you know it.  Only if they don’t see you doing something they like better.”

Ronan grinned.  The crew largely regarded him as Gansey’s dog, he knew.  His loyalty went unquestioned, and this did not make for a good quartermaster.  The men didn’t trust him to look out for their best interests if the captain ever led them astray, and so they had voted in favor of the meeker, but more pleasant, Czerny instead.  However, the crew, almost down to a man, revered Ronan.  Some even more than the captain.  Many, perhaps.  Ronan knew this, and while he had no mind to take advantage, it did make him laugh.

“I’ll behave,” he said.

“Please.”  Gansey pushed himself back from the desk and rolled down his sleeves.  His work was done, now that he had exacted this promise.

“I always do,” Ronan said, just to see the stricken look on Gansey’s face right before he turned to exit the cabin and return to the deck.

The men had scattered, scrambling to make preparations to anchor in the harbor.  Ronan made it to the rail just as someone shouted overhead that land had been sighted.  All around him, the crew gave out a raucous cheer.  They had been at sea for many weeks now, chasing a particular prize, which they had finally succeeded in capturing after several failed attempts.  Fortunately for Gansey, and all of them, there had been no shortage of merchant vessels between the Glendower and Gansey’s true goal, and so they were returning to Nassau with significant heft to their pockets.

Gansey counted on Ronan for these victories.  He had his mind, and his eye, set on larger sights.  So while Gansey planned and plotted, Ronan pillaged and plundered.  The crew saw the value in Gansey’s wits and trusted him to lead them to larger payouts in the long haul, and they knew Ronan would steer them right in the short term.  It was a beneficial arrangement for all involved: Gansey got a ship and a crew to help him find his treasures, Ronan got to fight, and the men got paid.

Now they would return with their gold and their goods, which would, for the most part, quickly be spent.  And when they sank all their hard-won money back into Nassau’s bustling economy, they would sail out again.  Normally Ronan waited not-so-patiently in town until the sea and her spoils called the men back, but today even he felt some measure of anticipation to step onto that familiar beach.

“You heard he’s back too?”

Ronan turned and had to squint against the sun to see Noah’s face.  The quartermaster had appeared by his side to lean against the rail, looking out over the water toward home.  That was how everyone saw Nassau: home.  Not Ronan.  The Glendower was Ronan’s home.  Gansey was home.  The rolling waves beneath his feet and the crack of bone beneath his fist.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Noah did not believe him.  Noah knew him too well.  And despite himself, Ronan didn’t mind much.  It was hard, even for him, to resist Noah’s pull.  He hadn’t been surprised when the men chose him for quartermaster.  In fact, while he would never admit it out loud to anyone, he’d been pleased with the choice.

“Whatever you say,” Noah said.  “But I heard he’s back.  And if I heard it, then you heard it.  Just don’t,” he stopped.

Ronan glared at him; it didn’t matter if Noah knew it to be all bark.

“Don’t look for trouble, all right?” Noah finished, and then he disappeared again.

Ronan looked back out over the water, in the direction of the harbor, though it hadn’t yet come into sight.  He wouldn’t look for trouble, he thought, wondering how many warnings his friends thought he needed.  But he wouldn’t say no to it if it found him on its own.

#

“Richard Campbell Gansey III.”

Ronan turned away in mock disgust -- mock, because he didn’t really care much, disgust because he didn’t need to see the soppy grin on Gansey’s face.

“That’s Captain Gansey, Jane,” Gansey said.

“That’s Blue, Captain,” Blue Sargent said.  “Besides, you’re not my captain.”  She shot an exaggerated wink over the bar and Gansey’s cheeks flared pink.

“Jesus, Gansey, don’t let the men see you like that,” Ronan said.

While it certainly would have been less than ideal for the crew to see their captain blushing like a schoolgirl, and they were all well within proximity to see it since his face burned brighter than a beacon, there was no real danger.  They were all equally distracted by the many other denizens of Fox’s Way, Nassau’s most popular brothel and tavern.

Blue bit her own grin into a smirk (it was bad for business to play favorites) and turned to Ronan.  “What can I get for you, snake?”

“What do you think, maggot?”

Gansey had long since stopped telling Ronan not to talk to Blue this way.  It seemed he’d finally figured out it was all in good fun.

Blue poured him some rum and put it down in front of him.  He tossed a few extra coins onto the bar for her, which she swept out of sight with a flick of her fingers and a subtler, more platonic wink of her eye.

“And you, Captain?” she said.  She reached across the bar and brushed a piece of Gansey’s hair away from his face.

This was Blue’s favorite game, to torment the customers, Gansey especially.  As daughter of the owner, Blue did not work as the other girls of the house worked.  She supervised, managed conflicts, and tended the bar.  But as for the other pleasures of Fox’s Way, Blue Sargent was strictly off limits.

Gansey cleared his throat.  “I’m afraid we’ve got other business today,” he said.  He tilted his chin to give Blue a significant look.  Ronan downed his rum and rolled his eyes, purely for Blue’s benefit.  She caught it and laughed at Gansey’s expense, though with the same fondness and warmth below the surface that Ronan had for him as well.

They hadn’t always gotten along so easily, Blue and Ronan, but over time they’d thawed toward each other, and when they’d spent enough time in each other’s company to know that neither posed a threat to the other in terms of Gansey’s affection, they’d become friends.  Not that either of them would ever say so.  But that was the best kind, as far as Ronan was concerned.

Blue glanced around to make sure no one was waiting for her attention and then led Gansey and Ronan to a private room not currently in use.

“You didn’t really find it?” she said once they were alone.

An ornate bed sat at one end of the room, which otherwise didn’t have much to offer.  Shutters over the windows blocked most of the light.  The air smelled like sweat and sex.

“We did,” Gansey said, too proud to sound brittle.

The chart had been hard won.  After weeks of searching for the correct ship, they had finally found her and taken her, only to discover that the chart had been moved the week before.  They’d lost a lot of men that day, and come closer to defeat than Ronan liked to remember.  There was no love lost between any pirate and the British Royal Navy, but Ronan had particular reason to avoid and detest it, and anyone who sailed under its colors.

“Let me see,” Blue said.

“It’s on the ship.”  Gansey didn’t look at Blue when he said this.  Ronan knew he didn’t like keeping things from her, but any prize won, even under Gansey’s leadership, didn’t belong to one man.  It belonged to the crew, and therefore no one, not even Gansey, could take it anywhere without the crew’s consent.

“I understand,” Blue said, her voice cold, though Ronan suspected this came less from anger with Gansey’s answer than something else.  She had once drunkenly confessed to Ronan that she wished she too could board a ship and sail beneath the black, that it would suit her better than staying on this bit of sand to tend the family business.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Gansey said.  “We’re close now.”

Blue nodded.  Gansey took a step toward her, put his hand on the back of her neck, and kissed her forehead.  Ronan turned away to give them a moment’s privacy.  Then Gansey pulled back.  “The men have money to spend,” he said, “but we’ll be off as soon as they’ve sated themselves. We don’t have much window of opportunity.  We need to take it now.  If I’m not able to say goodbye before we go, I’ll send word.”

Blue, accustomed to this by now, accepted Gansey’s words.  But in the dark and away from other eyes, sorrow shone in the lines and hollows of her face, already too worn for her age.

Gansey slipped from the room but Ronan hovered.  Before Blue could leave, he put his hand on her arm.

“Where?” he said and handed her another coin.

Blue took it, more reluctantly than before.  “In his tent on the beach,” she said.  She looked like she wanted to issue a warning of her own, her lip held firm between her teeth, but she didn’t.

“Thank you,” Ronan said and followed after Gansey.

#

Ronan stayed away from the beach until the sun had set completely and the sky overhead was black as the back of his eyes.  He stayed away until the pull was as strong as the tide and he could no longer resist no matter how hard he tried.

He didn’t make any effort to hide his presence on the beach.  Men from a dozen crews or more milled about around fires, in tents, fucking the girls from Fox’s in the open night air.  Even someone as recognizable as himself, as well known as himself, could get lost in the crowd down here.  Still, before he dipped into the tent he sought, he made sure no one was around to see it.

Inside, the air felt close but not stale.  The Dreamer must not have arrived long ago.  Ronan didn’t take the time to ask.

Kavinsky lounged on his pallet at the center of the small tent, one leg crooked.  He looked up as soon as Ronan stepped inside, but before he had a chance to speak, Ronan threw himself to the ground in front of him and tore at the strings of Kavinsky’s trousers.  He could already feel his mouth flooding, and he knew, could hear, that he was breathing hard.  Above him, Kavinsky laughed, but Ronan ignored it.  He gripped Kavinsky’s wrist, guided his hand to the back of Ronan’s head, and then he let himself take what he had come for.

#

Adam knew, from the creaking around him and the faint queasiness in his stomach, that he was still onboard the ship.  He saw nothing but the black of the inside of his blindfold.  He heard nothing but the gentle shifting of wood and the lap of waves beyond.  He felt nothing but the bit of cloth between his teeth and the chains around his wrists.

He knew, from patches of conversation he had caught here and there and from that same unease in his gut, that they must have reached Nassau at last, and that the ship stood at anchor in the harbor.

He knew he could try, again, to scream, but he had long since given up hope that he might find any empathy among thieves.

So Adam waited.  In the dark of the belly of the beast, he waited for his chance to escape it.

[the-stick-scribblers]

Tumby

The neighborhood is half suburbia, half forest, which is maybe why when he screams no one comes looking. 

One hand is occupied by a ring of keys trying to unlock the old car door; the other arm is full of wailing, wriggling four-year old. She hasn't yet noticed the beast on the other side of the street. Gabriel is frozen.

“Mona,” he croaks, eyes locked away from her on the danger. “Love. Shhhhhhh.”

“Tumby!” she wails

“We brought Tumby back to his family. In the woods, remember? The stream?” Gabe keeps his voice low, steady, soothing. The glossy crayon woman on the cover of his wife's favorite parenting book would be proud of his control, given the circumstances.

Mona wails louder.

“Hush,” he tries again, sharper, jiggling her more fiercely. “Shhhhh, sh-shhh,” The keys he fumbles awkwardly in his hand, cold metal biting into his paper cut from church craft time this morning, clanking against his wedding band. He winces at the sound. Mona grabs his ear and tries to kick her way to freedom. He squeezes her tighter but doesn't dare drop the keys. “Mona baby, I'm sorry. I know you miss Tumby. But I need you to be quiet right now. Papa's trying to think.”

There. The keys settle in his hand, jutting out from between his knuckles. Their car is a classic, gorgeous steel low rider from the sixties that's also prone to deciding not to move any part of it at unpredictable times. Today it has decided to jam it's doors. Getting in and driving into the beast heroically is, unfortunately, off the table.

Equally unfortunately, he left his cell phone inside. He can picture it exactly, nestled lopsided in the mesh of the yellow polka-dot lunch bag Maria bought him as a joke right after his promotion, before he left to take care of Mona; he uses it as an emergency kit. Normally he keeps it in the diaper bag. But the batteries needed replacing and medicines' expiration dates needed to be checked.  It's in the front hall buried under a jumble of hurriedly discarded hangers from their earlier walk to the park. Gabe dropped it right inside the front door while wrestling Mona into her shoes. Which are goners themselves now, at least a hundred feet away, right by the street and nearly on top of the beast's horribly dripping tail.

If he can get to the kit, he can call a ride.

The beast occupies the forest; the houses on this side of the road make up suburbia, linked by dead wooden hands all the way across the valley without a single break. The homeowners’ association takes appearances seriously. Normally, Gabe chafes at the caged simulation. Today it means he'll either need to bring Mona with him past the beast or set her down and leave her alone behind.

She sure wants to get down. Even without shoes her kicking feet are pounding his chest into a mosaic of tender bruises. Gabe's ear, the one Mona's tugging at with all the weight of her little body, is ringing and hot. Despite his dedication to the panic of the moment, he spares a few brain cells to miss the gentle way Mona was when she was three.

It's Tumby's fault, Mona's new voice. That damn lizard.

Maria and he agreed when Mona was born they would be the sort of parents who didn't freak over the small stuff. Who let their little girl get just as dirty as their boy and didn't fuss over things like lizards brought home in muddy pockets. Who kept more encyclopedia's on hand than pink or blue toys. Which is why, although Gabe thought the lizard's purple coloring was freaky and possibly poisonous from the start, he smiled at the kids indulgently and grabbed an empty butter box.

“Who's going to catch it bugs to eat?” he joked, holding out the lid so David could punch holes in the box lid with a screwdriver.

“Mona,” said David.

She nodded, her fists stuffed with brown grass and her chest puffed with the important gravity of being the chosen one during play time. Gabe held out the box so she could drop it into the bottom to make the lizard a bed. Then she dropped the lizard in, rather clumsily, on its head, which was the second sign something was weird. At work he'd always known lizards to be agile bastards.

Mona named it Tumby because it's stomach was a little light blue oval and was bottomless - the lizard liked to eat, and eat until all the bugs on their street disappeared for self-preservation. It outgrew the butter box in a day. It outgrew the shoe box in a week. By ten days, it was the size of a small yappy chihuahua and weighed twice as much. And it learned to climb. Mona forgot to bring it bugs that morning before her play date, and it scurried onto the kitchen counter and fell asleep in the bowl of the scale for most of the afternoon. Gabe found it with its nostrils poking over the edge of half-melted plastic like eyes and he nearly threw the knife in his hand out of fright. He told Maria that night it had to go.

“You're telling the kids,” she said, glasses tipped sideways on her face sensibly. It was such an extremely Maria moment, Gabe kissed her.

Mona thought the whole trip to the stream a great adventure, splashing about in her duck-print boots and tumbling about with David until both of their curls were littered with crunchy leaves. The trip back, she splashed less but chattered more, all about the adventures Tumby would have in the woods. It wasn't until Gabe was putting her to bed that night that the tantrum came as she realized Tumby's adventure was not a temporary one. She howled all night, and for a month straight anytime they took her outside.

Of course she's howling again now. Gabe starts to give in and set her down on habit to send her away to play before he looks up and remembers, right. The beast. Purple and probably a people eater. Most of its body is hidden in the shadows of the trees, so whether or not it can fly is still to be determined. It definitely has at least one horn; short for its size but still at least as big as Gabe's forearm. 

“Mona,” he says, giving in to gravity and setting her on the ground. He keeps his hands looped over her shoulders, so she won't turn around and startle. She sniffles, but quiets. “Papa needs you to listen very, very carefully. Can you do that?”

Her lower lip trembles and there are watery beads stuck in the baby hairs around her face. She's looking everywhere except at him. Still, eventually she sniffles, wipes her little hand across her eyes, and nods.

“Thank you, Mona. Papa forgot his phone and needs to go back inside. But there's a...” How much to say, how to say it without setting her off again? “There's a snake on the path and it's camouflaged, so I am going to carry you so you don't accidentally step on it. Understand?”

“There's a...snake?”

“Yes.”

“What color?”

Gabe smooths her flyaway hair and plants a kiss at her temple. “Brown. It blends in with the sidewalk.”

She clings to him so he can't pull away from her. “I wanna see.”

Kids. Was David this circular when he was Mona's age? Gabe can't remember, and it's only been three years. The eternal enemy of parents everywhere, time. “I'll point it out as we walk past, if it's still there.”

“Okay,” says Mona. And just like that she's calm again, nearly her pre-lizard self.

Gabe hoists her up again so she's tucked neatly against his shoulder and as sturdy as he can manage with one arm. He peeks his head out around the edge of the garage, gauging the distance. The dragon's body doesn't move. Its green eye - the same size as their Mercedes's hubcap - is closed, although thin smoke trails from its nostrils. Shudders threaten Gabe's grip. He blinks, long and slow, makes his panic a game for Mona and counts with her to ten. They take one step out, and then -

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the neighbor's front door open.

Bernadette is the sort of woman Gabe and his friends would have called a wicked witch and meant something mean by it, when they were children. She wears frayed, mismatched skirts, sending patchouli thick thorough the air with every step; she has flyaway hair, has the best garden on the block, and is older than everyone else in nearly the whole damn city, too. Her eyesight left her about the same time as her late husband, fifteen or so years ago. Her hearing lingers on halfway. Mona is still against his shoulder, but Gabe feels his heart rate pick up again.

“Bernadette,” he calls, loud as he dares. She doesn't look up. She doesn't look across the street, either.

There's a pebble near his shoe from the gravel driveway, dragged in by some forgotten romp. He nudges it sideways until he can lean down without dropping Mona, then tosses it at Bernadette's porch. It misses and clangs against the drain pipe on the other side.

“David, what sort of trouble are you up to today?” She's turned away the wrong direction, but her voice is the strongest part of her, and it carries. Too many years as an actress followed by too few years with anyone interesting to talk to but boisterous kids. 

Gabe finds another pebble, dances it to his side, throws it. This time it hits her wooden stairs. He calls again, “Bernadette!”

“I moved the keys to the garage, David, you won't be able to find them before I find you,” she says to the wrong house beside her.

“David's in school, Bernadette. It's Gabe and Mona.”

“Bullshit. David is far too naughty not to be suspended.”

“Bernadette, I'm sorry but now is really not the time. There's a -”

“No time for me, huh? He gets it from his father.”

Gabe sucks in a deep whistling breath through his front teeth. “Mona and I are stuck out here in the garage. I don't have my phone. Can you call - no!” She has finally turned around the right way and is starting down her steps. ”Don't come out further, it's dangerous -”

“It's only mud.”

“There's a -” Well, that is the question isn't it. “There's an animal.” You think. You guess. “Across the road. It's been watching us, but we can't get in the car and we can't get inside. Bernadette I need you to call someone.”

“You want me to call the police?” Bernadette doesn't trust the police, and says it again loud as she can every time Maria's brother comes to visit to rub it in. If he needed Bernadette to call the police, he wouldn't even bother to ask.

But animal control won't have anything for this beast, either. “Try the fire department. Tell them, uh -” Gabe eyes the trees across the road, the way the beast's head blends flat against the treetops. “Tell them they'll need extra ladders.”

“What kinda animal are they after, anyway?” Bernadette grumbles. “A monkey?”

Mona wriggles warningly, and yells, “Snake!”

Gabe bites down on the inside of his cheek. “Just call them,” he whispers towards Bernadette like he's on a stage.

“Suit yourself,” Bernadette says to the nearby flower box, and goes back inside. The screen door bangs shut behind her.

Gabe and Mona both jump. She nestles deeper into his shoulder, resuming her kicking with half-hearted attention. Behind the car in the corner of the garage is a tidy, tiny workstation with a short stool the kids like to swivel around on while he works on the car's problem of the week. It's cozy, and good for getting energy out, and most importantly out of sight. The beast - dragon, probably, although thinking its name feels akin to blasphemy, surreal and scary and brave all at once - flicks its tail and takes out two young trees. Gabe sinks back into the garage and sets Mona firmly on the stool. She looks at him with narrowed eyes, confused.

“Papa is going to go watch out for the snake. It's poisonous, and Miss Bernadette is calling for help. I want you to sit here and be safe until I come back, okay?”

Mona considers this. She stands on the stool and uses her leverage on Gabe's shoulders to see past him to the front yard; whatever she sees, she's sits back down again with a satisfying thump, and nods. The creak of the stool spinning around and around follows Gabe back to the entrance. It keeps him grounded. He has to stand at the furthest edge of the garage, away from and out of Mona's sight, to see the road and wave down the help. It's probably an unnecessary gesture. Anyone with functioning eyes should be able to see what the call was about. But Gabe still doesn't quite believe his own. He tries to blink one eye at a time because if he closes both eyes at once, he'll open them to find the dragon is gone, and spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. 

Bernadette's screen door slams open again against the peeling slats. When she steps back out, she hasn't got her phone. Instead, she's toting a rifle tall as she is, and holding it like she means business. She leans it tottering on the steps' railing and turns the long way around to face Gabe. “What did she say this animal is? Snake?”

“Did you call the fire department?” Gabe is going to have to schedule his annual doctor's appointment sooner rather than later. There's got to be some sort of lasting damage from adrenaline this high, this long. “Bernadette, please tell me you called.”

“What's those firemen going to do about a snake? You may never have done a day in the country in your life, but used to we took care of these things with a shovel.” She's reached the bottom of the steps, shaking the railing so the gun tips down after her. Across the road the dragon's unblinking eye rotates sideways until it's laser focused on Bernadette. The smoke coming from its nostrils is flecked with blue and purple embers. Where each one brushes against a leaf, a tree branch catches fire.

Gabe is halfway across the yard in pursuit of Bernadette before he stops. Arms too empty, shoulders too light. Mona. He turns around and runs back to the garage.

It's silent, and dim. He reaches the stool - no Mona. He looks under the car, and then panics, because the garage is too small and there's nowhere else to hide. He should know better, it's parenting 101, never leave your child unattended or they could get hurt. They could die. (“All those sharp tools!” chides his mother in his brain. “All those sharp talons!”)

Back to the yard, squinting against the sudden glare of day and patchwork fires. Looking at the shadows of the grass, the steps, the road, looking for a splash of purple color. There - Mona, waddling alongside Bernadette, leading her in a mostly straight path towards the dragon with her mouth spread wide, baring every crooked baby tooth. A look of pure glee on her face.

Gabe blacks out. He comes to with Mona cradled tight and kicking in his arms, Bernadette behind him ignoring every tenant of gun safety and trying to use the gun to force her way around. Gabe looks up. The dragon looks down. They're both standing nose to nose, breathing in the glowing smoke.

“Mona,” Gabe hisses. “Bernadette. Don't. Move.”

Something about his tone makes them both pause for the first time all day, or maybe the smoke has made him sound harsher than he intends. They both look up, following his gaze.

And let out twin gasps as they both finally see the dragon up close. Not entirely, because it was too large and too camouflaged even from the other side of the street, but in uncanny detail - eyes slitted like a cat's, scales the size of roofing tiles and so black they look purple in the light of the fires. Fine white streams of smoke are permanently etched around the dragon's jaw like whiskers. Well, at least Gabe can cross hallucinations off his list of symptoms he'll be bringing to the doctor if he survives this day.

Bang! A gunshot rings out, flat and startling. Mona screams. Then she bites down on Gabe's arm so hard she draws blood. Gabe's blood mingles with something dark and sticky, the same color of the dragon's scales - the dragon's blood? - and he has to press his hand up in his shirt to stop the flow. And he has to drop Mona. She immediately takes off.

“Mona!” he yells after her.

She runs towards the beast, arms outstretched, ignoring Gabe, still screaming.

“Tumby!”

[the-stick-scribblers]

Bloodless

Theo put the charcoal edge to his thick, cream-colored paper and drew the first line without looking away from the marble statue in front of him.  It was Tuesday morning, and the Portland Museum of Art was nearly deserted because all of the real people were at their jobs.  Theo didn’t have a job.  He never had and, if he was lucky, hopefully he never would.  And he had been for the preliminary testing the day before, which meant he had several days in a row now where his only responsibility was to “take care of himself.”

“Himself” meaning his body, of course.  His blood.  Next week, he would start getting the pre-donation injections, every day for the five days before the procedure, and he needed to be well-rested and in good health for them.

It was strange to think about in this context, as he drew the ancient body in front of him – immortalized, after a fashion, in this small city at the outer corner of the country.  To think about his own body as the reason he could sit here, bathed in the mid-morning sunlight, instead of holed up in some dark, fluorescent office-nightmare somewhere made him feel a little like a prostitute, and he supposed this wasn’t entirely inaccurate – in a way, he was literally selling (donating, yes, but not without incentive) his own blood so that he could be here, drawing and “taking care of himself” and nothing more.

Around him, the room was silent.  He hadn’t seen another patron inside the museum since he arrived here nearly an hour ago.  There were a couple of staff around, mostly getting ready, it seemed, for things that would happen later, but aside from them, it was only Theo.  Only Theo wandering through the lobby reading about the new exhibit.  Only Theo walking through the exhibit and trying not to allow himself to feel bored by it, though that didn’t work and after merely thirty minutes he’d seen all of it that there was to see, and he couldn’t make himself start back at the beginning.  It was an installation of some kind and it meant nothing to him.

But then he had found this room.  White walls, white floors, a whole stretch of wide, tall windows letting in the day’s perfect light.  A handful of perfectly white sculptures, set out in a line along the windows.

The first thing he thought was that it was sort of tragic that most people wouldn’t get to see this room in this way, with this light.  That most people would be here at night, would have to see the room, not in the dark of course, but without this brilliant sun to light it all up.

He had some half-baked idea that over the course of the fall, he would come back here again and again, until he had sketched every statue in the room, so that when he returned home, after his recovery, he would have something to remember this place by – because, he already could tell, he would likely never come back.  He liked the idea of his memento from a place being something he had made with his own hands, something he hadn’t even spent any money on (of course, he had to spend money to get into the museum in the first place, but he would have done that anyway).

His hands.  His body, again.  This time doing something for him instead of something else.  Transmuting the image in front of him – this Greek- or Roman-style sculpture of some Greek- or Roman-style body that may or may not once have existed in life – into his own version of it, an image of his own choosing.  He watched his hands as he worked, getting steadily stained with the charcoal they held, not taking any care to protect them, watching the gray of the medium mix with the blue and green of his veins beneath the thin skin of his wrists, the backs of his hands.

At the hospital the day before, he had met someone who was afraid of blood.  How could you be afraid of blood, he wondered?  That would be like being afraid of hair or teeth or skin.  Something so fundamentally a part of yourself.  How could you be afraid of yourself?

As Theo worked, the image took shape beneath his speeding hands.  Not for the first time, he marveled at his own ability, not just to create – what was he creating, after all, but a mimicry of someone else’s much greater work? – but to do it so quickly, with such efficiency.  He often found himself thinking of his body, his hands, even his blood, with such a complete lack of romance that it almost disappointed him.  These things were machinery to him.  In a way, he almost wished, sometimes, that he could be less functional, because then maybe he would appreciate the beauty of it all a little more.

But today, in moments like this, he felt nothing but gratitude and satisfaction for the pragmatism of what he had.  Theo knew no greater pleasure or joy than building something from nothing on a flat surface, watching a face appear from an empty space like it was growing there by the grace of God.  It made him feel powerful, and if not like he was creating beauty, then at least like he was facilitating its presence.

The image grew quickly beneath his hands, and before long the statue standing before him had been transferred fully onto his paper.  As he looked at his sketch and compared it to the marble, he considered the particular and peculiar quality that marble statuary had, especially when it came to human images.  They could look utterly real, and yet there was always something off about them.

They were bloodless.  And even if every wrinkle, in both flesh and fabric, were meticulously recorded, even if the veins themselves were mapped out in the stone, the missing pulse and color of it could never be replaced.  Even in the palest skin, the blood beneath fundamentally affected the body, how it looked, how it moved, its color and vitality.

On a whim, he lifted the charcoal again to his paper and began sketching trails of veins over his drawing of the statue, imagining where they would lie underneath the surface, how that would change the surface itself.  And again, he thought of the man he had met the day before, at the hospital, so afraid of the sight of his own blood that he was practically paralyzed with it.  How he had needed Theo, a complete stranger, to help him, he was so scared.  How he had needed Theo to take care of him.

If Theo were the type to write poetry, he would have written a poem about it all.  How he had gone to the hospital for testing, how they had been short-staffed for some reason that no one ever explained to him or any of the other patients waiting around to be stuck with needles and analyzed.  How when he finally did get called into the room to have his test done, there was already another man there, in the blue, fake leather chair, looking horrified as the nurse in pale scrubs wiped the soft bend of his elbow with antiseptic.

Feeling comfortable and at ease, Theo had watched as the nurse sunk her needle into the man’s arm.  Though clearly tense, he sat through it, refusing to look himself.  Briefly, as his eyes darted through the small room, they landed on Theo’s and then he quickly squirmed out of the contact.  Theo almost felt bad for him, or he would have, if that was something he did.

But the kid got through it, and the relief on his face as the nurse withdrew the needle, holding a bit of stark white gauze to his skin, lasted almost a full three seconds before he began to look ill again.

Theo was sure he would have made it through okay if the nurse hadn’t then been called away to another room.  She shot Theo an apologetic glance and said she would be right back.  “You’re all set,” she told the man who looked like he was about halfway to slinking out of his chair and onto the floor in a dead faint.  The nurse pressed the man’s fingers more tightly over the gauze.  “Just apply pressure.  There are band-aids on the desk.”

And then she left, and Theo watched the other man’s face melt into horror.

After that, what else could Theo have done but observe as the stranger looked down at the gauze pressed beneath his own fingers, frozen and apparently unable to do anything at all, and then stand to go to his rescue?

“That was rude,” he said as he stood, successfully distracting the man and startling him into looking away from his own arm and to Theo instead.  He didn’t say anything, just sort of gaped up at Theo, still holding the gauze in place with a desperation that belied his true fear here.  “Don’t like blood?” Theo said.

The man visibly swallowed and shook his head no.  Theo wanted to ask his name, but at the same time, there was a certain romance in not knowing, and Theo had never been able to resist the allure of that particular kind of romance.  He laughed at himself, internally, but didn’t ask the man’s name, and didn’t offer his own.

For a moment, Theo hovered, a little too close, though still within the boundaries of reasonable social interaction, his feet planted firmly on the linoleum tile floor, still several dozen inches from where the stranger sat, paralyzed in the chair.  Having already moved, he tried to project the sense that he knew what he was doing.  It was too late to back down now.  But for just a few seconds, Theo wasn’t sure what he would do.  And then he decided.

Such a simple thing, to find the bandages on the desk where the nurse said they would be.  To press down on the tiny pinprick of a wound and tell the man to look away.  To stick the band-aid into place.  Simple, and yet there was a magnitude to his actions as he took them.  A weight.

Between them was the knowledge that this should not have been done, that neither of them ought to have allowed this moment to unfold the way it had.  And yet, the needle was stuck – the blood couldn’t very well be put back in, not now.  And the fact remained that this man, stranger though he was, had needed help, and Theo had been the only one able to provide it.

Once the bandage was in place, the stranger had stammered through his hasty thanks and stumbled up out of the chair, out the door and into the hall.  Theo thought that maybe he’d looked back, briefly, before disappearing into the belly of the hospital, but now he wasn’t sure whether this had happened or if his imagination, fed on the charged quality of the memory, was getting away from him.

Now, in the sunny room at the museum, Theo half ruminated on the moment from the day before, slipping into a half-present state as he worked.  The effect was that in what felt like mere moments, his drawing of the statue, beneath his ministrations, grew to resemble something with real life in it, coursing beneath its alabaster skin.

Remaining where he sat, Theo lifted his sketch so he could see it side-by-side with the statue itself.  Though both lacked color, there was a vitality to his own drawing, now, that the marble lacked, as though the image on his paper had bled out, and the statue was what was left behind, lifelike in all ways, but empty and cold as stone.

[the-stick-scribblers]

The Cherry Blossom Plot

Soaking cold cherry blossoms clog the ground around you, squelching like dead skin when you roll over and rock up into a crouch. You brace your hands. Raw knuckles scrape sidetracked gravel someone kicked into the mud in the night, and the sun, weak for months, glints off the horizon in full force. The tree-laced sky overhead offers no sympathy nor shade.

Someone stole your tent.

It isn’t your first thought. Your first thought is that Jack must be crying again, and must have been for a while by the way the water pools into the grooves left by your thumbprints in the mud. Seeds from the sycamore trees at the edge of camp have been crushed by dozens of feet during the night, making your throat itch, and your second thought is to find some warmed honey mead as soon as possible. Another patrol is due by any minute; you make a mental note to reroute a few guards by Jack’s tent to check in and get back to wondering if the medic tent is open yet and, if not, if they would miss the small trove of antihistamines you probably require. You stretch, reach for your camp bag, and realize -

Right. Someone stole your tent.

You bite back a curse - damn hazing, damn new recruits - and scrub the sleep out of your face with the cleanest corner of your wet coat. A small family of grazing geese stop, turn, and stare at you as one. You tug on your boots, thankfully sheltered from the worst of the shower, stashed as they were with your equipment under your cot. One of the geese honks at you softly, and you swear you see a flash of fire in the air before it turns its family’s attention back to the grass.

“How’s your head?”

Greg is the behind you, the first one from the new patrol to catch sight of your predicament. You wince. 

He snorts. "That bad, huh? They got extra depressors on the truck last night. Better stock up before the fireworks blow your ass into pieces tonight.“

“I’m not on fireworks.” You scratch absently at your throat, and roll your neck until it cracks like those candies you ate by the bucket full as a kid. “Got a meeting with Jack.”

“Fuck you,” says Greg, then when you just stare at him, “Really?”

“It’s a hard day for her. One of her hardest.” The ground squelches meaningfully underfoot as you fall into step beside Greg. “Which reminds me - I need to borrow a couple of your guards.”

“The media tent is already on the loop. So is Jack’s tent.”

“Not the Response Center." 

Greg raises his eyebrow. "It’s supposed to be empty.”

“What about the equipment?”

Greg’s face flushes redder than usual. A vein along his jaw jumps, and he hides it by turning away to squint intently along the inlet where, behind the shuttered gates hundreds of people already wait, picnic bags and babies in hand. He’s professional, though. He knows better than to direct his anger towards The Meteorologist; you spare a pitying thought for his troops. “We’ve got an emergency guard. For the equipment,” he clarifies. “Millions of people milling about for a week straight causing all kinds of trouble, even the well-meaning ones - septic and shit. Of course we’ve got a guard. But no, it’s not on the loop. Not until the VIPs arrive for third watch.”

“Which is why Jack will be there until our meeting. She likes the space to clear her head.”

“You indulge her.”

“Wouldn’t you?” You know he wouldn’t.

“There’s too much on the line to have her disappearing every time she’s feeling a little weepy,” he grumbles reliably. The troops, led by a young woman with yellow rings in her nose and immaculate boots despite the conditions, speed up. Their fresh eagerness stirs up the fairgrounds from their year-long slumber, sending up a different intoxicating scent with each step. Mud. Dew. Straw. Old fire logs, long extinguished. Perfumed flowers, floating delicate from nobbled branches in clumps so thick if it weren’t for experience and the guidance of the familiar fair booths, you would have wandered from the path and into the river immediately. 

“It’s Julia’s anniversary.”

“I know,” Greg sighs, and he stops at the path’s sudden bend. “Sasha. Triss. Relieve Yeshe at the Response Center and stay on through third watch. Send Yeshe to O8 for crowd coverage; we’ll be around to join them after the next loop.”

The girl with the yellow nose and one from further back in the ranks, deeper wrinkles by her eyes with a different flower tattooed on each knuckle, step from the line and nod as one, and pivot. Decades in the force yourself tell you the move is highly practiced, but the girls make it look effortless as the sudden breeze committed to drying them all out before the festivities. Greg may be an out of touch hard ass when it comes to the Leaders, but with his squadron, it works. You watch them leave, idly, torn between appreciation and regret that their young lives just took a turn for the shorter.

“Women,” Greg says, watching them with you. And then watching you. “Will you be joining us for the flag?”

“No,” you say, “Unfortunately. You know how it is.”

Greg blinks at you. “No, I don’t,” he says. “But I know how you are. Have fun. Tell the Storms I said if they get bored watching you turn into a vegetable I hope they come to me and I’ll find them real jobs. Some of the new guards are too hotheaded for my tastes.”

“I want my tent back, by the way,” you say. “I got it on clearance. It’s an Adurable.” You slap his shoulder, and he grins.

“Just send them to me,” he says, and then he waves, and the patrol is gone, leaving you to wipe mud off your boots and turn off the path to walk overland.

The camp is a mile wide and one and a half miles long, and it still takes up only a corner of NAME’s land. The rest is a scattered heap of low brown buildings and cut open fields, of little white golf carts and trucks overflowing with more delicate equipment than they are legally approved to carry. Colloquially the area is known as the fairgrounds, but most of the year it serves as home to the National Association for Meteorological Efficiency, the newest subset of the United Nations and to date the only branch with an active force of guards dedicated to its protection. Greg’s loop took you all the way past the NAME’s largest cafeteria and the bio-life’s lab to the oxymoronic ocean’s edge. You lean against a damp metal pole and look out, scanning the brightening horizon for life and letting the gentle salt air settle alongside the beaded sweat on your neck and shoulders. Beyond the buoys marking the perimeter, almost out of your vision altogether, a bright yellow research boat floats with a dead motor. Sonar receptors pivot like ears aft of a tiny weather shelter that hasn’t been used since the last big storm, thirty-five years ago, before NAME’s founding, before you joined the ranks of the Storm, before you knew storms to be anything other than loud, and primal, and transcendent.

You loved storms for the echoes of rock they awoke in your bones. Your mother loved them for the whales.

Growing up in a sanctuary village in the modern day was less thatch, more rash boredom. You spent as much time lugging your rattling bicycle to the dock and racing other boys to the end as you did in the water, hauling the bike back out, or pulling out fish, or rubbish, or yourself. Your mother called you clever after each of your discovery dives, no matter how ordinary the findings. All the time you spent out of the water you spent on her ship, where revolving interns in collegiate hoodies delighted in your serious declarations of attention and taught you anything you thought to ask. You were especially dedicated to the migration patterns of marine life, although it wasn’t so rare. You were serious about everything. It made you an ideal candidate for NAME’s elite Storm, later. As a child it simply made you lonely.

Once, on a lonely dive in the April to retrieve a cage you’d helped set the week before, you met a miracle.

She was a small-large thing, as much shadow as curiosity. There was no scale on the boat because there was no point - even the smallest of the university’s subjects weighed at least as much as the boat - but still, you estimated with all your young wisdom she must have been at least the size of your mobile house. She had a white patch on her nose the same size as your oldest brother’s bedroom. From a distance the mark resembled a mountain. You did not look from a distance. 

You discovered her first by the darkness creeping across the gray sand, then by the peculiar dropping of your stomach that belongs to realizing something too late. Someone was watching. You turned, and bubbles tickled your nose on their journey from your dropped jaw. You froze. 

You looked at her eye to eye, child to child. Translucent eyelashes brushed across the tip of your nose, and the sky opened underneath your combined thirty tons and a hundred pounds, and time stopped. 

It started again in jerky bursts. The cable tethering you to the boat vibrated with the weight of your mother’s urgency and you were hauled up empty-handed, away, mind whirling faster than the speed of your frenetic ascent. You breached spluttering, wracked with shivers even underneath the fleece of two hastily fetched emergency blankets. You felt half drowned, and entirely alive.

Dizzy elation warring with awe in the most ancient sense. It was as good as a shot of drugs directly into your heart. Fourteen years later you joined NAME so you could protect that feeling with the backing and resources of the rest of the world.

Stepping into the Response Center now cuts you off from the sound of the lapping surf and your shoulders tense with its absence.

Card tables sag with outdated equipment, thick wires rimming the tent in a horseshoe. The center is filled with folding chairs lined up like children facing the tent’s one blank wall, at attention for their daily dose of good news. The tent is empty except for Jack in the corner, behind the soft blue screen. She’s stopped crying and started meditating, if her shadow is anything to judge by. 

You sit in a chair on the side closest to her, three rows back, and clear your throat gently. On Jack’s knee the shadow of her fingers twitch. Good enough. It would be easiest to interrupt her now, but the festival doesn’t start until sundown and neither does the migration. NAME would have time to fix the tethers before you could make it there to destroy the maps. You’ll have to wait.

You’ve been waiting for forty-seven years. These last few hours might last just as long.

At least in the Response Center you won’t be disturbed until you want to be, thanks to the recruits you sent to guard the equipment. They don’t know you’re in here; nor Jack, you suspect. She’s always been good for slipping under the radar when she wants to. That’s part of the reason the Meteorologists chose her for Minister.

Used to be when you were a kid a person became a person in charge by either charisma or money or being fucked up enough to not care about all the people lost in the race. Then came NAME, with a group of scientists simply called Meteorologists, and the result of a twenty-five-year study presented at the World Peach Convergence that posited global weather disasters could not only be moderated by humans, they could be entirely stopped, directed, reversed. Controlled. It had something to do with the wavelengths from weather patterns and human emotions, and a specially built amplifier that could overlay the two at just the right scale to make them identical. Something to do with a latch, then, to make sure the wavelengths stayed tied together, so that when one changed, so did the other. They demonstrated with one of their own. 

The day they presented the paper was sunny and smoggy. When they hooked the Meteorologist to the contraption - the same size as a house cat, more or less, cradled in her arms and hooked to her by veined wires running red and blue up to her heart - the day outside became a rainstorm in a matter of minutes. Honestly the breakthrough wasn’t the reason the limited news coverage gained so much traction. It was the Meteorologist’s face, published in a billion glossy close-ups: eyes glittering with rage looking straight into the camera, tears streaked salty across her cheeks, raw patches of red unchecked and flowering all over her skin. 

The idea spread just as fast, just as raw - that people deserve safety and life, and that the best way to guarantee both is to control for the uncontrollables. NAME never formally released the tethering technology, but they didn’t have to. Governments and their citizens fell over each other to volunteer as test subjects. By the end of the decade a sort-of economy sprang up. 

Anyone could volunteer. You did, a couple of times, although you were always dismissed in the last round on basis of an inconsistent heart rate. 

The Meteorologists choose fourteen Ministers, one for each cluster of volunteer countries with more in common than not. Ministers served a minimum of a one year term, then were up for re-certification. Most were replaced after three years, the strain of holding their emotions so tightly in check. Jack had been a Minister for eight, with her preliminary recert scheduled for May.

She’s unquestionably the best person NAME has in their pool for Minister. No other active Minister has been active for more than two years. Still, even if they make it as long, she’ll hold the record for at least six more years after she dies.

“Pass the whiskey,” Jack says, hand outstretched but still behind the screen. Her voice is low, her cadence slow, and it’s as reedy thin as she is, like it’s been tacked to a stretching rack over a wire and screaming for days. In a way it has, though you know she never speaks in excess. That’s what ministering does to a person. Wrings them out for every ounce of the human experience, until they go mute or go crazy from the weight of it all. So far they’ve all gone nuts first.

“It’s not lunchtime yet." You feel her shadow eyes open and glare at you, and you shrug, knowing she can’t see. "If a tsunami clears out all the trees before the gates have even opened tonight, it’s not on me.”

“It’s never on you,” she says. The tips of her fingers reach around the edge of the screen. Her nails are jagged, though she’s painted them a sensible pink for the occasion. “Whiskey.”

You pull the flask from your boot and press it into her hand.

Her gulps are quiet, but definitively gulps - when she passes back the flask it’s nearly empty. You pause, but when she says nothing else you shoot the rest. Wiping your lips on the back of your rain jacket tears through the quiet with a distinctive soft shushing swish. The guards don’t notice. They’re here only to prevent onlookers; this tent is soundproofed from the inside.

“How old would she be?” No point beating around the matter. It’s why they’re both here, after all.

“Eighteen.” Jack coughs, harsh, and doesn’t continue.

Maybe her murder will be a mercy for more than just the whales. Jack wouldn’t appreciate it that way; she doesn’t care much for conceptual parables, nor in tragedy solving tragedy. If she did she’d be a terrible Minister. But the ocean has no conscience, and no concept of concepts, and someone has to look out on its behalf. You say, “I’m out of whiskey.”

“Fine,” says Jack. She unfolds herself from her meditating pose - lotus? butterfly? you can’t keep them straight - and shoves the screen aside to limp over and lean against the tent’s center pole. The synchronizer, shrunk over the course of a decade to a manageable thing, hangs from her neck on a cotton rope and sways with her breathing, refracting deep purple lights off all the tent’s equipment. The result is thousands of flashy, otherworldly lightening bugs floating in the air between you two. Their color matches the hollows of Jack’s cheeks. “So what do you want?”

“To raid your baseball card collection.” Jack’s eyebrows raise, and you grin. “My niece’s birthday is coming up and she told me all she wants is Matt Harvey.”

“No. I don’t trust Angels fans.”

“Is it because of Anaheim?”

“It’s because of the halos. If you’re walking around wearing a neon sign post as a hat, you’re probably distracting me from something, and it’s probably something I will not like. The Rangers wear their scandals honestly." 

"They publish them.”

Jack shrugs. The synchronizer lights turn yellow. “What do you want?”

Too soon, too soon. But where’s the fun in that? “To keep you company?”

“Bullshit.”

“Sure.” You rock, forward and backwards in the fold-up chair until it’s dug itself into the tarp floor. Then you slide off, up to your feet, to the blank wall where the projector lives. “Do you remember Sri Lanka?”

“Some,” she says. “We’ve got an outpost there, if I recall.”

You nod. “Goda Gala. By Rumassala Sanctuary.”

“You’re from there?”

You nod again, but she’s still facing the roof and her eyes are closed.

Her shoulders are taught but her head is leaning against the pole, thoughtful. “I love the beaches out there. Small enough for camping, big enough for families to explore. Lots of interesting creatures in the tide pools. That’s where the blues swim, too. Further out. Used to go swimming with them.”

“My mom used to take me there in the spring, too. She studied them. I was a nuisance, most of the time, but I was curious often enough that I picked up the same skills as the interns by the end of my first season. I knew my way around that boat from before when it docked at the station. And I was the best at holding my breath, so it was perfectly safe for Mom to let me run wild to keep me out of her hair.”

“So not much has changed.”

“Have you ever seen a blue whale up close?”

Jack’s face, which had been slowly crinkling into a grin, freezes. She opens her mouth. Before you can find out if it’s surprise or to answer, you interrupt and carry on.

“People can’t get close anymore. Scientists decided they’re best helped from afar, let those majestic animals be, so most swimming tours keep well out of the way. But up close – they’re always intimidating.” Awe in its most ancient sense washes over you again as you remember: drowning, life. It bubbles up through you and if you move it will explode out, like poison, like the bends. Rotting, heart-shaped flesh flashes across your memory. You touch a hand to the tent wall behind your back, and hold very, very still. “Humans and blues have so much in common.”

"If your intention for passing the next six hours is to talk ecology, I’m interested.” Jack stretches, sending yellow-white firefly reflections into a dizzying dance on the walls. Her neck cracks, and yours tenses in sympathy. “If it’s to reminisce, I’m not.”

“They’re the same for me,” you say. “You could always leave.”

Wind slaps sharp against the outside of the tent and breaks the relative quiet with a warning of the crowd’s chatter. Jack’s hand meanders across her face, her eyes, her cropped brown hair, and settles on the front of her neck. The wind settles. “Go on with your lesson, then.”

“Humans and blues have so much in common. Both mammals. Both have similar skeletal structures. Both build cultures and societies and talk like babies to their youth.”

“Both supremely underestimated, although only blues are so under-studied. I read a report last year about a beached blue, a ten-year-old female.” Jack’s smile is rueful. “My husband was on the team that cut her open. He said the blue’s autopsy was the first of its kind to successfully preserve her whole parts.”

The bends burbling in your chest work their way into your throat, and your smile feels jagged on the inside. “Exactly.”

“There’s a hypothesis that the gap between chimpanzees and humans can be bridged by blues,” Jack says. “If you map out their brain, section for section, the structure is analogues to a human’s. And older - from this one autopsy they hypothesized blue brains developed higher cognition before human brains. I don’t understand how they figure that out. But it means that their social and emotional processing centers are more advanced even than ours.”

“Exactly,” you say again. Then you pivot. “Here’s a subject in which you are the expert: how do synchronizers work?”

Jack blinks. Cherry blossom tree shadows wave to you both on the outside of the canvas walls, but Jack is staring at you with a curious expression, nose wrinkled, eyes wide like a cat. Whatever she sees on your face, she doesn’t say. Animated voices return to you on the swirling wind, circling the tent, blocking you both into place. “Is there a point to this?” she asks.

Your fingers wrap around the meditation screen’s wooden frame in staccato rapture. “Indulge me.”

“It’s proprietary. As you well know.” The synchronizer’s yellow lights stutter white. Jack’s knuckles, clenched in her all-weather jacket, are white. “You should go. I’m sure the Storm could use your help with the final preparations.”

You wave your free hand at her dismissively in time with the voices outside. “Don’t get technical. Not the specs. Just generally, drawing on public knowledge, how do synchronizers work?”

“By sending shock waves through assholes like you who ask too many questions.”

“Cute. I meant how do they work with the weather.”

“Is this a test?” Jack asks. “Has my recert been rescheduled without notice, again?”

“Tell me you couldn’t use the distraction.”

She holds herself tight together, like a bowsprit. When she answers, her voice snaps thin and strong like a sail. “Synchs work on waves. Like sonar, but with the added component of tethering technology. They synch with human emotions and then synch with NAME’s tethers and use echolocation at a deeper frequency than humans can hear to synch with all kinds of currents - air, water, human, so many others. By synching it all up to one person, we can manage weather patterns to best benefit everyone. We can make it rain for crops or fires, or dry in areas that are used to drowning year after year.”

“How do you choose,” you ask, “when the world is so large, and everyone’s needs are so different?”

“We don’t. Not individually. There’s a council that helps the fourteen of us; world leaders and scientists and a few humanitarians to keep it even. In lieu of a unanimous, decisive plan for each month, we base the weather on a fifty-year daily average for the season.” Jack sniffs. “You’re on the council.”

“When you say ‘everyone,’ who do you mean?”

“People. The planet. You know.”

“What about animals?”

“They’re included under planet. The scientists sit on the council to ensure a balanced ecology.”

“Surely it doesn’t always align.” Your fingers tapping, her lights flashing white.

“What do you mean?”

“It must conflict sometimes, what’s best for people and what’s best for the planet.”

“Well, sure,” says Jack. “It happens. But it’s manageable.”

“Is it?” you ask. Blood and hearts and rot.

“You think it isn’t.”

“I’ve met a blue up close twice.” The memories rise side by side like bile - eyelashes brushing against your face, rotten eye staring straight into yours - and you bite out a smile. “The same blue, actually. One of my favorites. I helped my mother tag her the summer she was born. I took the tag off her carcass five years later. I didn’t even have to look at the tag when I wrote down her number in our little book. She beached herself.”

Jack’s white-knuckled hand massages the synchronizer against her chest, covering the center disc so the rainbow fireflies vanish. In their absence you can see the trees outside tapping against the roof, shaking blossoms sideways in streaks of shadowy rain. It’s not quiet filling the space between the two of you now. It’s a heavy, empty nothing.

“Surely the scientists told you last year’s beaching was not the first? Blues have been beaching en masse for over twenty years. The best hypothesis at the moment is sonar waves disrupting the currents along their traditional migration routes.”

“What are you saying?”

You unlock your shoulders and spread your arms wide, disarming. “That this? This festival, all the little choices we make so that people have it easier? It’s fucking it all up.”

“You disagree with the council, then.”

You snort. “Sure.”

“There are billions of people. You said it yourself - it’s a balancing act.”

“So let’s try to balance it. Why do we push storms out over the ocean for no reason other than to keep a clear sky for a festival? People won’t die from a thunderstorm.”

Jack shakes her head, though her face is tight. “Not often.”

“Explain.”

“People don’t die often. It does happen, though.”

“More than ten? More than twenty a year?”

“No. Because we control the weather so they won’t.”

“A hundred,” you say, “a hundred whales a year are beaching themselves. And we’re holding it clear for a damn festival while it happens.”

The first drops of renewed rain splatter overhead. Jack’s face matches her knuckles, the synch, the lights. Bone white. “What do you hope to gain from this conversation, held now?”

You shrug, and stuff your hands deep in your coat pockets. “It simply came up.”

“I need to work,” Jack says, with a pinched glance at the roof where the rain has moved on from taps to streams. “There are hours still before it starts to fix this. Grab me at half hour call.”

And the moment is over. She squeezes the synch one more time under hunched shoulders, then pushes herself off the center pole and moves stiffly towards the meditation screen behind you. You step sideways so she can pass. Just as her shoulder brushes yours, however, you grab it and hold fast.

“Sorry,” you say. Than you whip the syringe out of your pocket and stab her in the neck.

She slumps against you on her way to the ground, her all-weather jacket scratching against yours like a shriek. Lighting flashes, drowning the synch’s bone white bugs in light that is both bigger and more unfathomable than any of the man-made blips lining the walls of the tent. And as you drag Jack the rest of the way behind the screen, listening in the windy voices outside for any hint of alarm, thunder booms overhead.

~D. E. Scevers

[the-stick-scribblers]

From Nate’s Perspective

We moved into the hotel last week.  It's nicer than I expected it to be.  Even though Kat and I have to share a room, it's not really that different from the apartment.  John gave us a suite, so we have a living space and almost a whole kitchen.  Neither of us cook anyway, so it barely makes a difference. 

"As long as there's a microwave, I'm good," she said as soon as she saw the place, and while I wish I could disagree, I don't really.

Otherwise, the suite is nice.  All grays and whites.  The opposite of the way I think of John.

But the more I see, the more I think John the landlord and John the owner of a well-known hotel are two completely different people.  In the apartment, everything was brown and green.  Even the light had an earthy quality. Not here.

Kat is thrilled to be here. She's acting like we won the lottery. But I confess, I feel -- uncomfortable here. I miss the dark, close corners of home. This place feels transient. I mean, it's meant to, right? You're not supposed to get too attached to a hotel.  It would probably be a problem if you did.

There are too many people at the hotel too. Home is a place for few people. I had thought that if John was moving us in, it must mean the place was more or less empty. It's not exactly peak tourist season. But maybe I underestimated his generosity, or how much it would cost to out us up somewhere else. Because the place is, not full exactly, but far from empty. I can't go anywhere without running into someone, or somebody stopping me to ask if I know where the nearest restaurant or coffee shop is. For some reason I've been spotted as a local. I seem to be universally recognized. I don't know why. No one seems to suspect Kat of secretly belonging here.

I'm sure that's just racism, now that I think of it. But still.

The suite itself is nicer than I think either of us let ourselves hope for. We each have our own area, but they aren't exactly two separate rooms.  There's no door in-between. The only doors are from the suite to the hallway, and then the one on the bathroom. Still, even that isn't so different from our apartment, where Kat always keeps her door open anyway. Square-footage aside, the space at the hotel is so much more functional than our apartment was that it almost feels bigger.

Still, though. I'll be excited to go back. Whenever that ends up being.

The one thing I like better about being at the hotel is our proximity to everything. From the apartment, I would have to take the bus into work every day. Now I can walk, and it's easy to get anywhere I could want to go. I'm enjoying having the freedom my body is enough to give me here.  Because of this, I know I'll be out a lot. Since yesterday, though I we've mostly been moving in, so we've been in and out of the hotel a lot.

This has given us ample opportunity to get to know some of John's patrons.

There's Mrs. Madson, who seems to be the sole occupant of the top floor -- that's the fourth floor -- for the moment. And I don't wonder why.

If I had the choice, I would make sure she had a whole floor to herself as well.  She's perfectly nice, but everywhere she goes, a cloud of overpowering rose scent follows her, and she wants to do nothing but tell everyone she comes across all about her cats.  As far as I know, the cats are back home -- wherever home is for her -- or they're long gone.  Then again, I wouldn't put it past her to have smuggled them into the hotel somehow.  That might explain why everyone else avoids the fourth floor as though it were quarantined for plague.

Then there's Bud Horroway.  I have no idea where he's from.  I can't get a good read on him at all.  Kat thinks he's just a sweet old man -- a southern gentleman, she says -- but I don't know.  I think he's hiding something.  He told me yesterday, when he was helping me carry a box of Kat's books up to our suite (Kat didn't help because she says carrying heavy things is clearly men's work, under the patriarchy, and she may as well get use out of the patriarchy when she can) that he's been here for six weeks now.

Who lives in a hotel for six weeks?  The list according to Kat: people who recently lost everything in a fire, old men who don't know how to live alone after their wives have died, disadvantaged elderly who have been bamboozled by their young relatives.  I'm not sure that this last makes much sense, but I don't typically argue with Kat unless I have to.

I did point out that someone with something to hide might live in a hotel for six weeks.  She just laughed and said, "You always look for the worst possible answer, Nathan.  Besides, by the time we have to go home, we'll have been there for at least that long."

I realized she was right as soon as she said it, but I hadn't thought at all about how long we'll probably have to stay at the hotel.

My favorite person I've met so far is a woman on the third floor, an artist.  She told us she's here because she's working on a project based around Portland.  She spends every day wandering around town, sketching different buildings she sees.  Then she comes back to the hotel, which she's treating as a sort of studio, and she sculpts the buildings, using her sketches as her medium.  Apparently she got some kind of grant for the project, which is how she's paying for the hotel.

We haven't seen anyone here our own age.  There's one family with young children.  Emma, the artist, is forty-five.  But most people here are older.  A hotel full of baby boomers.  And Kat is thrilled to be here.  She doesn't even mind that everyone who sees us together assumes we're on a honeymoon.  I laughed the first time someone asked us.  I figured they must be joking.  But they just stared at me until Kat explained.

Kat has conspiracy theories about almost everyone who’s staying here, but the longer they’re staying, the more she side-eyes them.  I think she’s doing this mostly for my benefit, to make me laugh, and to tease me, which she doesn’t know I know.

She’s come up with some stories that are pretty outrageous – it’s a little impressive, though I would never make the mistake of telling her so.

Her favorite theories are about the hotel guests who I like the best.  The artist who makes sculptures of the buildings in town is secretly a Russian spy.  The man who camps out at the continental breakfast every morning, eating room temperature pancakes with cold butter and no maple syrup, tells jokes because he’s trying to lull us into a false sense of security, so that when he shows up to our rooms later, we’ll let him in without a care, and be murdered and robbed without any sign of a break-in or struggle.

I told her she has a morbid sense of humor, but she said I was a pot and she a kettle, and then she went on anyway.

I know she’s ay I’m just proving her point if I said what I’m about to write out loud, but the thing is – while Kat’s conspiracy theories are intentionally extreme – there does something to be something a little strange about this hotel.

Maybe I’m wrong and I’m just not used to being around so many rich people (or any rich people, unless you count John) but I don’t know.  It’s not that anything seems to be happening, exactly.  I’m not saying I secretly believe that there’s truth to Kat’s jokes.

It’s more that everyone here acts like only one piece of themselves is allowed out of their hotel room, like only a fraction of each of us is free to step over the threshold of our suite and wander the halls.  Like we’re all staying here as a way to hide ourselves.

Kat would tell me I’m projecting, and maybe I am, but I can’t get this feeling to let go of me – the feeling that I’m walking around with half a face, and everyone else is too.

I don't think about this in vulnerable moments, but in those times when I myself am in the in-between spaces -- the hallways on my way out, or at the breakfast tables.  Something about the nature of the place has me feeling like everything I do here is only half real.  It isn't mine, this place.  A hotel isn't anyone's, in a way.  And yet, I live here, so I feel a sense of entitlement over it in a way I've never felt before.

Yesterday I stole a pen from the front desk when Stacie, the hotel manager who usually stands there for hours at a time, was somewhere else.  And it felt so natural that I did it again today.

I know, I know -- they're just pens, right?  Printed with the name of the hotel along the side and everything, so you know they probably want people to take them.  It's not a big deal, I get that.  But the fact that I felt the urge to do it at all, and that I acted on it, demonstrates that being here is affecting me.  I'm not talking about crazy stuff.  Just that, maybe my surroundings affect me more than I think they do.  Maybe what home determines who we are, and not the other way around.

The last couple of days, I've started watching the other guests -- tenants? -- more closely.  Not stalking them or anything.  Nothing creepy.  Just, in moments when we're all around each other but everyone expects everyone else to be too self-absorbed to pay attention, I pay attention.  I don't think I really thought I would notice anything, but I have.  The pens, for one thing.  Not one of us seems to be capable of resisting the pens.  But it's other things too.  People take things, little things -- bagels at breakfast, knickknacks left on decorative tabletops -- just slip them into their pockets like none of it will ever be missed.

Everyone does it.  I even saw Kat do it once.  It wasn't a pen from the front desk either.  I saw her take a movie ticket from a coffee table in the lobby.  There were four, a family's.  She didn't take all of them, only one, and it struck me because, I mean, it's almost worse, right?  That she only took one.  So when the family goes to their movie, they probably won't even realize they're missing a ticket until they get there.  Still not a big deal really.  Anyone who can afford to stay at this hotel for real can afford to buy an extra ticket at the Nick.  But still, I've never seen her do anything like that before.

She didn't know that I saw her take it.  Later that day, I asked her what she did all afternoon, and she told me she went to see the new James Bond movie by herself.  I asked why she didn't invite me and she just shrugged it off.  "I felt like going alone," she said, but she's never gone to the movies alone before.

But is it this place?  Is it doing something to all of us?  Or is it just that being in a place like this lets us all behave the way we normally would anyway, if we had nothing to stop us?  Maybe that's why Kat keeps coming up with these conspiracy theories, because she's noticed too.  I don't know.  We haven't talked about it.

Normally we talk about everything.  Sharing the same one-bedroom apartment for three years kind of leaves you with limited boundaries.  It's like having two separate spaces all of a sudden has made us truly two separate people for the first time in a long time.  I'm not sure how I feel about it.  In some ways, it's nice to, I don't know, feel like more of my own person.  On the other hand, I sort of miss Kat, and I wish she would tell me about things like stealing movie tickets from children.  I mean, really, what is up with that?

Maybe I'll find out.  God knows we're stuck here -- get to be here? -- for a while.  If Kat gets her way, it will be months before we can go home.  Maybe it's my way too.  Maybe that's what I really want.  Maybe if we stay long enough, I'll find out.

[the-stick-scribblers]

Only on the Red

Inside the diner tasted like blood and cherries.  Everything red.  Everything sticky and bold.  J's own fingers smelled like metal from picking the lock to get in.  By the end of the night, of all went as planned, they would be dirtier with more than breaking and entering.

They told themselves they needed the money, and this was true.  They only hoped they didn't find anyone lurking.

To that end, once the door to the diner was locked again behind them, they peered into the murky dark and whisper-called hello, just to see if anyone answered.  No response.  A good sign anyway.

J had only been gone for a few hours, long enough for the place to empty out of all the late-night folks who came in for lonely milkshakes and desperate sides of bacon.  In that time, the neon signs had been powered down, the red leather seats wiped clean with pre-dampened Lysol squares, the red-and-white checked floor mopped and allowed to air dry.  The cash register locked and left, vulnerable and full, on the counter where it had been for decades.  Never breached.  Until tonight.  Until now.  Until J got their hands on it.

That was, if they could ever move from where they stood by the door.

It wasn't fear that paralyzed them, but guilt.  Shame.  Shame had that single power more than any other, in J's experience.  The worst of it came from knowing that no one would suspect them.  No would would ever guess.

Marie and Pete would come in the next morning, opening the place up exactly as they did every other day.  They would turn on the lights, the neon signs would flare to almost grotesque life, muted only somewhat by the bright morning sun.  They would pull all the chairs down from the table tops, start up the grill, lament that by the end of the day, the floor would be sticky again.

Only when Marie opened the register to perform the perfunctory start-of-the-day cash count would they even know anything was wrong, and neither of them would ever guess it was J's hand that had done it.

And there would be no physical evidence left either of course.  Even if J hadn't worn gloves, hadn't tied their hair back and held it down beneath a black hat, hadn't hidden their face from the outside security cameras (there were no security cameras inside, because who would ever want to cause any harm to Pete's?), it hardly would have mattered.  All J would have had to do was say they forgot something when they left their shift earlier that day.  And if their fingerprints were all over the scene, well -- of course they were.  J was here every single day.  Even on days off, they always came by for a rootbeer float or to do their homework at the bar, asking Pete math questions through the wide, steaming window to the kitchen.

J breathed in deep through their nose, taking in the familiar scent of red meat fried and broiled and grilled every hour of every day of every year for decades, tried to let it be a comfort, a balm, rather than the heart-clenching grip on them that it was.  And then, painstaking, they lifted their left leg and took a step forward.  Then another.

Each step came with a thought, a doubt, a question:

One step -- did it have to be this place?

Two step -- did it have to be today?

And each breath drawn in came with a rebuttal:

Breath one -- this was the only place where J knew where the cash was stored overnight, the only place they could get in and out undetected.

Breath two -- today J knew exactly how much money was in the register, and it was exactly what they needed, and they planned never to do this again, so they needed to get it all in one go.

Agonizingly, J crossed the diner, trying not to slip into their usual daytime habit -- a sort of game they played with Marie, of moving only diagonally across the floor, or stepping only on the red tiles, or only on the white.

They didn't want this to feel like any other day.  They wanted not even to recognize this place in memory, later, when it came to the surface to haunt them during long hours spent trying to fall asleep in bed -- long hours with nothing to distract them but the blacks of the backs of their eyes.

The clean linoleum squeaked beneath their rubber-soled boots, and then they were there, behind the counter, facing the uncracked treasure chest of the cash register.

J punched in the code, exactly as they did dozens, sometimes a hundred, times a day.  The sound the register made as it sprung open felt like a punch in the otherwise silent night.  Even the bars closed by two in the morning, and not even the Perenses, who owned the bakery, would be up and about until at least four.  The three o'clock hour was by far the loneliest, and the guiltiest.

The money inside was neatly organized, each bill a body tucked into its cozy, unassuming bed.  J ran a gloved finger over the worn and faded bills.  They were greasy and stained, pockmarked with blue and black ink -- snippets of conversation and smiley faces, immortalized forever, or at least until the bills were retired from circulation and shredded up in some forgotten landscape somewhere.

They looked tired.  Faded.  Some were even torn at the edges.  J began to pull them, in desperate fistfuls, from the drawer where they lay huddled together, held tight beneath the strong, spring-loaded arms of the old register drawer.

It was only then that J realized they hadn't thought this far ahead, hadn't planned for this late in the plan.  They began stuffing the bills into the pockets of their dark wash jeans, their too-big hoodie, because there was nowhere else to put them.  In a matter of seconds, they had soft paper slips jutting out from every free space, too much to fold and too much to hold onto, too much to hide away into the spaces, too much to keep out of sight, too much.

It occurred to J for the first time that they could take it all back.  Put it back.  They could straighten each bill and place it back into the drawer, close it up lovingly, and in the morning when Marie and Pete came in to open the diner, they would never, never know that J had done any of this.

They could just put it back.  And for several moments, they stood there, the register drawer open and empty in front of them, blood hot beneath their skin.  They looked into the deep dark of the hungry drawer and imagined doing it, pulling each bill, those flimsy slips of paper, one by one from their pockets where they were crumpled and stuffed so unceremoniously.  Straightening them out.  Running them along the edge of the bar to correct their wrinkles.  Sorting them by dollar amount.  Laying them back into their little beds.

J let themselves imagine it down to the most minute details.  Then they picked up the heavy napkin holder from halfway down the bar, lifted it over their head, and brought it down to slam against the edge of the drawer, not hard enough to do real damage, but enough to make it look -- when they looked, later, when they tried to find out who could have done this, and why -- just enough to make it look like whoever had been here had needed to struggle.

With the money shoved down as deep into their pockets as it could go, J went out the front door.

[the-stick-scribblers]

In the Vague Dark

Prompt: Inside-Out

Christine poured herself another glass of wine, but before she drank any of it, she lay back against the dirt and closed her eyes, blocking out the chattering of her friends and focusing, instead, on the rain pouring down on the glass observatory roof overhead.  She was already three glasses in, but they'd brought an entire case of merlot out here from the fundraising event currently going on inside the mansion to which the observatory was attached.

"We're in a real-life game of Clue," Whitney said, her voice dreamy.

Christine, generally, liked to keep track of how many drinks everyone had -- it made her feel better about herself, for one thing, and it helped her feel more in control of the situation too.  But she wasn't sure she was doing a good job tonight.  Whitney was on glass four -- five?

Opening her eyes, Christine did her best to focus them on the rain against the glass, but between the wine making her vision fuzzy, and the blurred nature of rain on glass in the dark, it had a hypnotic effect.  "No murder," she said.

"What?"

"We can't be in a real-life game of Clue.  Clue is all about murder, and that has nothing to do with anything."

Whitney scoffed, and Christine could picture her shaking her head, brushing off her comment.  Christine shrugged her shoulders even though it meant rubbing dirt into her blouse.

Inside the mansion, the party went on.  Christine could hear it, in the form of a low, constant murmur.  It seemed incongruous with the smell of plant life in her nose, the taste of dirt on her tongue.  Or, no -- that was the wine, but there was something earthy about it in any case.  And wasn't there something about the nose and the tongue being connected, so that to sense with one was essentially to sense with the other?

She stuck her tongue out and, for some reason, was surprised that it felt warm in the night air.  No warmer than the rest of her, but warmer than it seemed like it ought to.  She lifted her hand and clamped her tongue between thumb and forefinger.

"What the fuck are you doing, Chris?" Whitney said from several feet behind Christine's head.  She let go of her tongue and arched her back, stiffening her neck so she could look, upside-down, behind herself and see him.

"You're inside-out," she said and laughed.  "Upside-down."

Now that they had given up on the fundraiser entirely, with no thoughts of returning indoors and trying to maintain any real degree of dignity, Christine felt lighter -- except for the guilt; they were supposed to be supporting Jesse, after all, and it was a good cause, saving an endangered species of salamander or something.  But there wasn't much she could do about that now, so she sat up and left it behind on the dirt.

On her feet, she shifted, unsteady, but she felt a little clearer-headed than she had before taking her brief siesta on the ground.  "I've never been in a real conservatory before," she said and started poking around.

"What is it anyway?  Conservatory," Whitney said, and then she repeated it a few times, like she was tasting the word in her mouth, exercising it.

"It's for -- conserving things?" Christine offered, and then she laughed at herself again.  "What is this place usually?" she said, trailing the tips of her fingers over a deep green plant leaf.  It looked wrong and sort of magical -- like the rain overhead.  Here in the earliest days of spring, the world was all mud and dead leaves leftover from fall, newly visible and slimy as the snow melted.

Christine turned in time to see Whitney shrug.  She shucked her tailored jacket and dropped it onto a small tree as though it were a coat rack.  "Event venue," he said.  She began turning on her toes in slow circles.  "Sometimes-home of some rich guy who's got so many houses he's basically never home, no matter which one he's in."

Christine nodded, more to herself than to Whitney.  She'd always been curious about these big old, Victorian houses on the hill, overlooking the rest of the town.  Now that she was here for the first time, she found it generally disappointing.  But this -- this was nice.

"If I lived in this house," she said, "I would pull my bed and all the couches in here."

She tipped her head back and closed her eyes.  "And this is where all the parties would be."

"With your bed in the middle of the room?" Whitney said -- joking, but not without an edge to her tone, as though she really was bothered by this idea, despite its make-believe quality.

"You're such a prude," Christine said, making her voice sound unconcerned, even though really she wanted a little bit of a fight.

But Whitney didn't bite, either because she was too distracted by her own drunkenness or because she knew Chris too well, even inebriated as they both were.

Despite the itch to argue, the warm comfort of fondness unraveled Christine's resolve, a different sort of emotional pleasure, and one that she decided to accept.

The room, if it could be called a room, was arranged in a maze-like series of plant beds and aisles between them, scattered with the occasional bench or bird bath, though these seemed to be purely for the aesthetic, since this was technically all inside and from what Christine had seen, there were no birds here at all.

Despite the fact that there were, in fact, places to sit that were designed for that purpose, Christine, upon deciding that her legs had grown too syrupy and elastic to hold her up any longer, plopped down into one the plant beds.  She leaned back against the palms of her hands, feeling them sink into the loose earth, just a little.

It took her a moment to realize what seemed off about the way the cool dirt felt beneath her over-warm hands.  it was damp.  Almost wet, as it might have felt in the rain, without the glass roof overhead.

Christine looked up again, squinting through the gray-dark, trying to see if there was a leak in the ceiling.  "Do you feel anything?" she said.  "Like raindrops?"

"Okay," Whitney said and began to make her way over.  "You're cut off."

"No, come here."  Christine held out a muddy hand, rusty in the lack of light, and Whitney took it, allowing Chris to pull her closer.

Christine dragged Whitney forward until she had to bend over, pushing her hand into the dirt where Christine's had been a moment before.

"Jesus," Whitney said as she toppled, catching herself only barely, braced over Christine in the plant bed.  She righted herself immediately, and for a moment, it looked like she was going to wipe her hands clean on her new dress, before she remembered where they were or what it had cost her and thought better of it.  In that moment, she looked down at her hands, and she realized at the same time that Chris did: that the dirt was more red than brown.

Whitney might have been better off than Chris was giving her credit for, because she caught on before Chris did.  She staggered back and away, as though she could escape from her own hands.

Christine heard a goofy laugh spring from her own throat before she came to understand what Whitney understood already.  Still, her body moved faster than her mind.  She turned her head to look, even as she began to wonder if she wouldn't be better off standing, moving away, following Whitney back inside where they could wash their hands and forget all about coming out here in the first place.

But she didn't move away.  She looked down at the dirt beneath her hands, and in the vague light of the dying evening, caught a glimmer that, once seen, couldn't be ignored.

Her horror spread through her like a dawn, slow and unstoppable.  And maybe it was the wine wrapping, rope-like, around her mind, holding her back from reasonable or rational response, but before she knew what she was doing, she held it in her hands, her two hands, cupped in her palms as though it were water, only a pool formed by the rain, rather than what it really was: cold, and solid, and heavy.  The word impossible to hold, unlike the thing itself.  Until suddenly it wasn't, until her mind snapped back into her control.  The thing flew out of her hands and onto the chill tile floor of the path, and the word flew into her head, almost out of her mouth, but she clamped one muddied hand over it just in time.  Heart.

For a moment that seemed to draw itself out, longer and longer, Christine and Whitney remained still and staring, looking down at the dirt-masked thing between them on the ground.  Unmistakable shape, even though everything about it was wrong, wrong --

Neither of them spoke.  Christine didn't even realize she was tipping forward, leaning closer to the earth and tile, until she felt Whitney's hands on her shoulders, keeping her in place.  Dimly, she thought that there would be rust-colored hand prints, two perfect stamps, on her beautiful new blouse.

Whitney pressed her palms to the curves of bone beneath shirt and skin and muscle, dug her fingers in, and lifted, so in a second, Christine was on her feet.  And without a word, Whitney led her back inside, jacket left behind or forgotten entirely.  "We need to wash our hands," Christine heard her say, and she could only nod.

[the-stick-scribblers]

This is uh…a bit late of an announcement, but due to Chelsea’s birthday and my everything that went on this week, The Stick Scribblers did not update. But we’ll be back on Tuesday as regularly scheduled!

[the-stick-scribblers]

you will not be spared

The light has changed; middle C is tuned darker now. And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. - This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. This light of autumn: you will not be spared.

“Where's your lover boy?”

He looks up at Margo through his bangs, bleary, and looks right back down again at the table, shaking the cocktail mixer until the ice sounds louder than the beats. She doesn't take the hint.

“Ron? Scooby? Thelma?” Margo's hair is tumbling out of her bun in artful curls, three hours into the party, and the sheen on her forehead could be sweat or highlighter. She's either having a great time, or she snuck away to the bathroom at some point to make it look like she is. Hard to tell. “Watson? Sam?”

He snorts. “That one's made up.”

"Really." Margo's immaculately smudged eyelashes blink at him. ”Wait - really?”

Eliot stares back at her with matching incredulity, although it's less about her and more about...whatever the last pill was he took. Or the laced hors d'euvre from Josh. Or the French 69 he downed right before. Which, yes, but now the house needs more grapefruit. He snags the closest frosh and sends them out into the rain to the store to fetch, locking the door behind them with a satisfying click.

“I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you?” Margo is still raising her sharp eyebrows and talking behind him, and he presses his forehead against the door's old wood to help him focus. It isn't cool. In fact, it's hot, and wet, from the party and his sweat or someone else's, but the pressure of it is soothing.

Margo pokes him between the shoulder blades, and he groans. “Lord of the Rings?”

“Dismal response time on a homoerotic classic. I'm cutting you off.” She does, in fact, taking the newly-filled wine glass from his hand and downing it in one go before snapping her fingers and sending the entire boozy setup to fuck knows where. He groans again. “Back to the point: Quentin. You’ve seen him?”

“No,” he lies. “Why?”

Margo doesn't huff, but the tightening of her lips and the stilling of her shoulders indicates if it were just the two of them, she would. “Because Alice is over in the corner chasing everyone away with murder eyes, which is so not the vibe I arranged for today, and because you've had eyes for him like a damn tracking spell since the day he got here.”

“Your point?”

“My point is that - sweet Prince's ass.” The current DJ, stationed as she is on a platform at the side of the hall, has been steadily inching her equipment away from Alice's literal rain cloud for the past five minutes and is now making a hasty retreat with the whole setup as the rain turns to little droplets of glass. Someone enchants a worn out stuffed bear to replace her; Margo raises her voice with admirably little effort to match the sudden explosion of EDM. “My point is that I need to go find this party a better DJ. And you could use some fresh air.”

“You want Quentin to DJ?” It's such a preposterous idea - Quentin with his hair pulled back and frowning at the sliders, Monsters and Men and Evanescence intermixed with tasteless nineties rap, eyes creased in adorable, if mistaken, concentration  - that Eliot giggles. His curls, startled briefly awake, flop away from his eyes with less grace than Margo's but exactly as much sweaty determination. “Hard pass.”

Margo's fond glare turns steely. “I wasn't asking.”

“I wasn't agreeing.”

“El,” she snaps. “Out.”

"Fine. So bossy.” He rolls his head back to clear his eyes so he can glare at her and doesn't bother grabbing an umbrella, just unlocks the door and shrugs his vest straight. Margo, exhausted but regal, watches him go with glittering eyes. As soon as his heels cross the threshold, he's locked out.

The storm is unusual for New York, but not for Iowa. The heavy water suits his headache better than the house and for the first time since the fight this morning he lets himself relax into it. He's drenched within thirty seconds. It's the surest sign he's not an urban native, and a gesture he'll deny if anyone's still sober enough to see him from the cottage, but right now being soaked is a necessary allowance. He stands in the yard, face up to the shards of gray sky, until both the anger and the drugs dull and his thoughts stop sounding so much like fog. Then he starts walking.

Visibility is long past poor. If it weren't for the occasional flashes of lightning at the edges of his vision, he'd decide he must be blind. But it doesn't matter - Margo was right. He could find Quentin blind, with his eyes shut, backwards, from a different world, blindfolded, from sense alone. He lets his feet take him through the mud on autopilot and is grateful for the annoyance. Any stronger feeling is a guaranteed fucking catastrophe, and that quota was full last Tuesday.

Quentin is, as predicted, at the Wall. More accurately, he's lying on top of it, one leg dangling off the far side, apparently still deciding whether this will be the night he jumps. The air here smells more like dirt and stones than whiskey, but it leaves Eliot with the same heady sense of wrong, the same ugly desire to flee somewhere warm and small and maybe not comfortable, but safe. Out of sight, out of mind. Whose sight, whose mind? Who knows? But his shoes are already ruined. He hikes up the hill and settles on the Wall next to Quentin's feet.

Neither of them look at each other.

Instead, Eliot looks out. Brakebills sprawls behind them like a map on fire; New York, always a season behind, touches the horizon the other direction. There, it's mid-summer. The heat coming off the millions of people pounding thousands of yards of pavement casts the city as a mirage - heady, overwhelming, the only good thing to ever make Eliot feel small.

Quentin, on the other hand, is violent in his vastness. Eliot aches to look at him. But looking is all he can do - Q is too busy smoking to talk and the rain is stopping and Eliot has to fill the silence or he'll go back to drowning by himself, so he rips off the scab and pokes his pride where it hurts most.

“I'm sorry,” he starts, because why not. “I shouldn't have used your shampoo.”

Q doesn't move.

“And you weren't wrong about the TV schedule, and it's my fault Penny's tacky crime show got deleted. I'm sorry I used all your tea lemons for tequila shots when we ran out of limes.”

Nothing. But that's fine, Eliot has been fucking up his whole life. He can keep going for as long as this takes. Or until Margo relents and lets them both back inside. Either way, it could be a while.

“I'm sorry about the water bill last month, although I'm not sorry for turning the stairs into a Jacuzzi slide; but I am sorry for not warning you before I pushed you down them even though I think you ended up having fun. I'm sorry for thinking your Law and Ethics notes were the student handbook and using them to mop up when the toilet clogged. I'm sorry for lying about doing that and for blaming it on Todd.”

From the corner of his eye Eliot sees a bit of Q's mouth quirk. The blue smoke that escapes transforms itself into a ship and loops a languid voyage around Eliot's head before heading off to the fairer day of Manhattan.

It's metaphorical, and enough like forgiveness that he should stop now and enjoy their tentative peace, soak it up and keep it under his skin and let it make a home there. Unfortunately, because he's him, he can't.

Maybe it's the drugs, or maybe it's inevitable - he and Q have so much in common. The way they dismiss sadness with sarcasm. The way they talk about their lives exclusively through vignettes of self-deprecation. The desperate, pathetic need to belong to something other than where they've been. It makes sense even to his foggy brain that they share this rambling sense of loss, too. The apologies tumble out of him darker and faster, and he squeezes his eyes shut against the weak afternoon sun and so he can't see Q watch him tear himself apart.

“I'm sorry for fucking it up with you and Alice. I'm so, I’m- I’m sorry. I'm sorry things are so goddamned fucked up right now. I'm sorry you're here for it, for me being such a fuck-up for, and for Mike, for- I-”

He's fumbling at his chest pocket, chilly silk scraping against trembling callouses, coming up empty. His breathing should be muffled by the heaviness of the wet earth but it's not, it's jagged, ugly and too loud in his own ears. A stray ember nestled in Q's smoke drifts past his shoulder and stings his neck like a brand, and now his ears are ringing, his veins like ice, and-  Then he's got it, the soggy cigarette he lets everyone think is for show, and he shudders with relief. He snaps his fingers.

Nothing happens.

Again - a jolt in his trembling fingertips, but.

No flame.

Nothing happens. He's somehow fucked up even this, even a year one spell. Oh god.

Words keep bubbling up his throat but he grits his teeth before they can escape so they choke him, instead, and suddenly he can't breathe. Tremors spread from his fingers until his whole body is shaking uselessly and he wants to run and he wants to let himself fall but he can't do either. His mouth is disconnected. His fingers belong to someone else. He is drifting, drifting, out of control, off to the side. The cigarette drops into the dirt. He can’t breathe.

Pressure on his left thigh brings him back to himself.

Someone's leaning over him, anchoring him, holding a lit cigarette to his mouth. He sucks at it on instinct, and as the smoke fills his lungs he feels himself settle back into his skin. The coughing isn't graceful, but it's proof of…something. Not being dead yet, maybe. “Q?” he rasps.

“Yeah. I- Yeah.” Fingers dig further into his thigh and Eliot opens his eyes. There’s a smudge of ash on Q’s jaw and he wants to reach out and wipe it off and wipe off Q’s worry lines, too, but he doesn’t trust himself to stop there.

Instead, Eliot takes another drag.

Q is still looking at him, forehead creased. “El?”

Right. Words. He exhales, and the smoke curls soft around them both. “Yeah.”

“I’m-” Q starts, then huffs, then he lets go of Eliot’s leg and abruptly leans away. But before Eliot can miss the touch he’s back, hands shoved away in his pockets but huddling close despite it. Eliot wasn’t cold before. But now everywhere Q isn’t touching may as well be ice for all he notices it, completely numb next to the fiery sensation of Q’s shoulder against his, his wrist against Q’s, the startled synchronicity of their combined pulses coursing through him and electrocuting his heart with each painful thump.

He passes the cigarette back. Q takes it, not greedy but no hesitation either, and in the sunset Eliot watches shamelessly the way his lips hold it steady as he lingers on the inhale like he’s filling himself up, like he plans to become forest fog himself. When he exhales it’s almost on accident - smoke slips out through the corner of his mouth and hovers in the air so they both look smudged and a little hazy. That fits. Eliot feels a little hazy, too.

And lightheaded.

It’s probably fine.

Quentin is here. It’s good.

He shuts his eyes, and takes another drag of smoke.

((AO3))

[the-stick-scribblers]

I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, like they tell you to do when you're anxious and you just need everything to slow down.  And I think of Ireland because I remember the rolling green hills giving me this peaceful feeling, and that's what I want now.  This is what I'm imagining as I lay here, the IV in my arm, a place almost as far from here as possible.

Drawing blood, I suddenly understand the phrase in a way I haven't before.  Sort of dark to imagine, the tiny needle literally pulling blood from the vein in my arm, slowly draining it into the clinical plastic bag at my side.  God, why do they have to be clear?  The temptation to open my eyes, even just one of them, if only for a second, is strong.  I don't know why.  I hate this.  I can't even think about it without getting sick to my stomach, hence the conjured images of craggy green hills against a gray sea and white sky.  I cling to them but my stomach does a sick sort of flop anyway.

"Question," says a voice from my left, but I assume it's addressing one of the volunteers and I ignore it.  Then, "What are you doing here if you obviously hate it so much?"

Carefully, I turn my head -- fortunately the voice is speaking from the side opposite my own plastic bag -- and open my eyes.  The man, not much older than me I guess, on the table closest to me is lying with his own arm outstretched, and I can see his bag of blood just fine, though he isn't looking at it but at me.

"Sorry?" I say.  Isn't it sort of common knowledge that you leave each other alone at these things?

"You hate this," he repeats.  "So why come?"

He has a haughty sort of expression on his face, and I notice that his clothes are nice.  Well-fitted, and his shirt, rolled up to the elbow on his right side, just above where the IV is taped to his arm, looks expensive.  He's probably just here for something to do because he has no real responsibility.

I turn my head away again and roll my eyes.  This is a mistake, as it sends another wave of nausea rolling through me.  "It's a good thing to do," I say.  And this will be the end of it, I assume.

Only then the stranger says, "Oh, you're one of those.  A Do-Gooder."

Despite myself, I'm intrigued -- and annoyed.  Why else would anyone be here, and how dare this complete stranger write it off as trivial, silly, meaningless.  He doesn't even know me.

"Brian," he says then, and this time my head whips toward him.  He's laughing before I remember I'm wearing a brightly-colored name tag, the name "Brian," my name in at least one sense, scrawled across it in a bold, blocky script that couldn't be more different from my own.  "Brian Do-Gooder."

"What is your problem?" I ask him, and to my surprise he answers me.

"About a dozen things probably, though only three or four are the reason I'm here."

This startles me into paying more attention and I notice that the mystery guy's name is on his name tag too.

"Thurio?" I say.

"Shakespeare."

"Why?"

"No idea," Thurio says.  "It's not like I named myself."

Fair point, I guess.  Again I notice his clothes.  They're too nice to be at a blood drive, or maybe that's just what he wants people to think?  I'm not sure what to make of his statement that his problems are his reason for being here.  Does he mean literally -- is he sick?  Does that even make sense?  Maybe he means he's broke, though it doesn't look like he's donating anything they pay you for.

"Let me guess," he says now, and he tips his head further back against the little, paper-toweled pillow beneath his head.  "You think there's something wrong with you.  Maybe you've done something you're not proud of.  Hurt someone.  In the boring sense?"  He lifts his head from the pillow and looks at me more closely, like he can read what I'm thinking if he tries hard enough.  "No," he says slowly, drawing the word out, a long O.  "I don't think so.  Something more interesting.  But still not as bad as you act like it is.  And this is your way to attempt making some sort of cosmic amends.  Probably no one even knows you're here.  Am I right?"  He doesn't give me a chance to answer, but instead barrels on, with apparently no care for how rude he's being.  "So what'd you do?  God, you didn't get someone pregnant, did you?  This would be a really ironic way to try to make up for that, and it severely pales."

"I didn't get anyone pregnant," I say, and Thurio nods to me, as though he has suspected this all along even though he's the one who brought it up in the first place.  Still, I'm glad to have the chance to say this, because aside from the detail of it, his read of me isn't entirely inaccurate.  But he doesn't need to know that.  "I don't even know why I'm talking to you," I say, and turn away again.

I'm not sure if he's going to say anything else or leave me alone, because this is when the alarm starts.  At first I don't understand what I'm hearing.  I think it feels so impossible, so dissonant with the time and place that my brain can't supply me with the answer as fast as it usually would.  But it's the screeching, flashing noise of a fire alarm, and after several seconds of a frozen sort of terror, I realize this.

I'm so stunned -- can this happen at a blood drive?  We didn't go over emergency exits -- that for a while I don't move.  I'm not sure what to do with the plastic bag full of my blood, and when I look around, the volunteers working the drive are all busy with other people who probably need more help than I do.

"Jesus, you really can't deal with this, can you?" Thurio says from my other side.

I turn to look at him and he's standing right beside my padded table, his own bag of blood held in his hand.

"Here," he says.  He comes around to the other side and unhooks my bag from beneath the table where it's been hanging and slowly filling up as the IV does its work.  Then he wraps a hand around my elbow and pulls me so I'm sitting up.  He holds out the bag to me but I just look at it with the same sick, flip-flopping feeling in my gut.  I shake my head because I don't dare open my mouth to speak.

As all of this is happening, the room is clearing out and the alarm is still blaring.  The people working the blood drive are helping people out of the room, directing them toward the building exits, explaining where to go once they get outside.  No one is even paying any attention to us.

"All right," Thurio says.  He reaches for the IV in my arm, braces one hand against my forearm and grips the other around the long plastic tube.

"No!" I say, just in time to keep him from yanking the needle out of my arm.

"Seriously?" he says, but I can't stand the thought of this all being a waste.  But he shakes his head and leaves the needle in place.  I get down from the table and we rush toward the door of the room.  "This way," Thurio says, now carrying both bags of blood, his own and mine.  He hurries down the hall and I have to run to keep up so the IV doesn't get ripped out of my arm anyway.  Every once in a while I feel it tug against my skin.  It stings and gives me a lurching, ill sort of feeling, but there's nothing to do other than keep on, following Thurio, who at least seems to know where he's going.

Thurio leads us to a door no one else seems to be using, but I have no choice but to follow him.  Then we're outside, and I feel winded in a way I'm sure I wouldn't if all of my blood was currently in my body where it's supposed to be.  But the sun feels good on my face and there's no one over here, which is nice after the panic inside.

I gesture to the wall of the building and Thurio follows me over so I can lean against it and catch my breath.

I feel light-headed, and for a couple minutes I just rest, my face warm under the sun, and try not to think about anything other than stabilizing my body.  When I feel a little better, I realize that for a moment, I've felt that tugging sensation in my arm again, the soft spot on the inside of my elbow where the needle is still rooted in the vein.  I open my eyes and see Thurio shaking both of the bags.

"What are you doing?" I say.

"If you don't shake them every few minutes, the blood clots," he tells me.

I take his word for it, and the shaking only lasts another moment.

It's easier to see him out here in the sun than it had been inside when I was distracted by trying not to throw up all over myself.  Now the IV is attached to me but no longer pulling the blood out of my arm, and it's easier to focus.  He's got dark hair that seems to have a bit of a curl to it, though it's short.  Handsome features, though now he's squinting in the sun.

"Come on," he says.  "We should get this out of you."

He pulls on the bag as he moves toward a set of steps a few feet away, so I have to follow him and sit beside him.  Without the panic of the screaming fire alarm -- still going off faintly inside, and it occurs to me that in case there's a real fire, we should probably move further away from the building -- and the need to rush that it had presented, the idea of this stranger removing the IV from my arm no longer feels quite so horrifying, and I still don't like the idea of touching the bag myself.

"Just, be careful," I say.

Thurio looks up at me and gives me what I can only assume is a wry expression.

“Are you sure you know how to do this?”

“It’s not like it’s difficult,” Thurio says.

“Maybe we should just wait until we go back inside.”

Thurio looks up at me, expression plainly saying that it doesn’t make an inch of difference to him.  “Do you want to wait?” he says.

But the thought of staying out here in the sun for God knows how long with the needle still in my arm makes me feel a little sick.  I shake my head.

“Okay,” Thurio says.  He holds my elbow in one hand and gets a firm but gentle grip on the needle with the other.  “You might want to close your eyes,” he says, and I do.

[the-stick-scribblers]

Dragon Whiskers

Love is found in the silence, after.

Curtains striped with baby blue and white chevron crinkle where they drape onto the floor, next to linoleum speckles in clusters like toys in a bin. Silver instruments line the wall, sharp, dull, confusing, repeat. Arielle's gown, with its dollhouse clasps and cartoon rainbows, repeats too. It covers her knees underneath the blanket, the smallest size they had clean when we arrived early yesterday morning for her rushed admittance. A loose thread from the hem tickles my thigh; I hold my breath and shift in slow motion, until the tickle disappears. Thankfully, Arielle's pale eyelashes stay glued to her cheeks by sleep.

The whole room is maybe twenty by sixteen, and made of patterns, as if by surrounding us with them will force being here to make any more sense. Or maybe I'm projecting. Forty hours awake and counting - I can't trust myself at all right now.

Primera Point Hospital is not a children's hospital, but they do host the world's leading team for researching all the things no one knows yet about the body. Like why people dream. Or the point of the whole human micro-biome. Or why our cellular damage accelerates faster and faster each year until we reach a tipping point in mortality. Or why some people don't make it long enough to tip over.

Recurrent metastatic cancer of the brain. In a three-year-old. What's the fucking point of it all? 

Fucking God.

Dr. Simian broke the news to us one at a time, because someone needed to stay with Arielle; even with the IV-induced sluggishness, she's smart, and hospitals are a scary enough world before all the big words start getting tossed around. James went first. Through the little door window, I watched him push his hair back with his hands and leave them there, the time-old posture of bewildering grief. He looked wrecked. Twenty minutes later he came back in with two coffees and a steely sort of vacancy that reminded me of when my childhood home flooded in the desert, a miracle all the more devastating for breaking from the pattern. He's the crier. I'm the one who holds it in for the shower. Or, he was. I was.

How do you tell a baby she's going to die?

You can't. Or at least, James can't. He's gone home to pack a real suitcase and to retrieve my Kindle that I forgot in the chaos and to update the family (and to cry some more in private, I'm sure, the only reason I envy him the drive). Andrew is staying with Noah so he doesn't miss any school while we stay with Arielle in the city. It was only supposed to be for a couple of days, but Summer is an angel and before I could finish explaining the change she already had meal plans for the extra mouth made a full month in advance, the first easy thing since Arielle's headaches came back. Summer sent me a picture just as I was laying down with Arielle for a nap - Andrew and Noah, half blurry, running laps around the big granite fountain at the top of the field. It looked so sunny, I wept again. Andrew looked so happy. None of this is fair; we should be there with him.

Arielle's sleepy face is flushed, lips pursed, and it's a small stretch for my tired imagination to bundle her up in her monkey hat and stroller with the broken cup holder and take her to the park with me. We stop at the gate, first, to re-attach a wandering sneaker, and to look at the new tulips; we stay there for ten minutes making the other stroller-parent duos go the long way around. I always apologize, but Arielle's limited attention is reserved for things her size or smaller. 

Next stop is to chase a bug, Arielle toddling over the grassy hill in earnest pursuit while I sit on the warm garden wall and cheer her on. In contrast to my own coffee-fueled weariness, she is her own battery pack, glowing bright and indiscriminately joyful at each new stop on the hill. It seems she could run forever. But in the funny, honest way of babies, when she does decide she's tired it's all at once, once she's tripped and discovered the grass is a soft place to land. I scoop her up and tuck her back into the stroller, brushing off an errant leaf to the soundtrack of her sleepy breathing. We meet up with James and Andrew at the fountain, where they've been drawing uninspired, brilliant suns all over the place in chalk, to make up for its lack in the late day sky. 

Where the real sun is missing, however, are kites - bag kites and classic diamonds and kites that look like they airplanes and kites that look like they have wings and dragons with tails strung with bows that match the lopsided ones in Arielle's hair. Dozens of them fly against the clouded sunset, soft and fierce and eager in turns. Their colorful shadows cast colorful lights onto the sidewalk and stain the people watching like glass. It's breathtaking. I want to wake Arielle up to see, although if I do she'll never make it to dinner without a tantrum.

“Mommy?"

“Good morning, dove.” My eyes open and I pretend they were never closed, banishing the joyful spectacle of color in favor of reality. I press my lips against Arielle's dark hair, full of static from the hospital sheets, escaping in every wild way from her pigtails. God, I love her so much. “Did you have a good nap?"

"No."

"I'm so sorry to hear that." I wipe a piece of hair away from her eyes and use the corner of my sleeve to clear away a bit of lingering lunch by her mouth. "Do you feel better now that you're awake?"

"No."

My toes clench, the only part of me she won't notice. I file it away to tell the doctors later. "Did you have bad dreams?"

"No."

"Did you have any good dreams?"

Her eyes light up, and I savor it. "Yes!" She thinks, then announces very with great seriousness. "I dreamed...I dreamed about dragons."

"Oh! Were you a dragon too?" I remember the park and the ribbons in her hair. What a coincidence that would be.

"No," she says, and gives me a look that says I should know her better by now. "I was a Arielle."

[the-stick-scribblers]

Rosé Ritual

Emily took one step out of the car and sank ankle-deep into mud.  On another day, she might have resented this more, grown immediately embittered about the whole ordeal, but tonight she felt contemplative and therefore somewhat magnanimous.  In another mood, she might have yelled at Jess and Mark for this, the sticky mud already seeping into her sock.  Tonight, nothing could have been further from her mind -- which was otherwise occupied.

"This is disgusting," Jess was saying.  She had not worn the proper shoes for mucking about, because they hadn't known that they would be.

"It's just a little mud, J," Brandon said, but his Sketchers didn't look any better for the encounter either.

It had been raining for the past three days, and the four of them had been cooped up in their apartment with nothing to do and nowhere to go the entire time.  No small wonder that they'd wanted to get out as soon as the rain finally let up.  Why "getting out" meant going to the cemetery, Emily still wasn't entirely clear.  Something to do with a Ouija board Mark had stolen from his sister when he went home for Easter.

Apart from the mud, the cemetery was nice this time of the evening.  It felt later than it was -- only about 8 PM really -- but the sun had set behind the suburban trees, and the rain had finally broken the humidity that had been lingering, leaving the air feeling clean and warm.  A maintenance person must have mown the grass recently because it was all Emily could smell as she and her roommates traipsed across the sticky ground.

They each carried an important piece of the ritual: the Ouija board itself, a blanket, a set of candles for some light, and a box of cheap red wine from the corner grocery store.

Emily had never used a Ouija board before, but she didn't have much faith in its ability to do much.  If she did, she may not have agreed to come along at all.  After all, it had been a long few days trapped, just the four of them, in the apartment, and some time and space alone would probably have done them all some good.  But there was no denying a frantic sort of energy that had gripped them all over the last few days.  Emily had been trying to channel it into her poetry, but she figured what harm could a bit of fun with her friends do?

Besides, the wine called to her like an old friend, and she wouldn't mind catching up.

"This spot feels a little more dry," Jess said.  She'd wandered up ahead a little way in the attempt to find a place where they could all settle without soaking their butts through their jeans.

It was a square patch of grass just big enough for them to lay out the blanket they had brought.  Emily tried not to think about what might have been lying underneath. 

In a way, it felt wrong to be doing this during the summer.  The deep gray of the cemetery, the chill running up and down Emily's spine whenever she considered their purpose here, all of it seemed to point to another time of year -- any other.  The crisp alertness of fall, the foggy chill of spring, even the dead cold of winter all would have made more sense than this muggy and pleasant summer night.

Emily must have looked distracted as they each took a corner of the blanket and laid it out, because as they finished, Jess stepped around the blanket to ruffle a hand through Emily's hair.  Emily forced a smile for her -- her best friend, she reminded herself.  Jess was her best friend.  And sure, it felt different now, but that didn't mean everything had to change.

Now, with Brit gone, the link Emily and Jess had always shared, the piece that had held them together, was missing.  They were two puzzle pieces with edges that never quite matched, now mashed together by circumstances.  And it wasn't the same, but it was doable, it worked okay, they were managing.  They were the best in each other's lives now, and that had to be enough.

Mark had already sat down on the blanket, right in the center because he lacked self-awareness, and because he was taking the Ouija board out of its box.  It had never even been removed from its plastic packaging, which Mark now removed with a noisy series of crinkles before he tossed it to the side, out of the space of the blanket.  Emily made a mental note to make sure they picked it up before they cleared out of here.

The others lingered at the edges as Mark got the board set up, and then they sat down all around it.

Somewhere in the woods at the back of the cemetery, a few birds were trilling an evening song, lighthearted and bright.  They had come deep enough inside that they couldn't see the busy street where they had left the car several minutes ago, but if Emily focused on sound, she could just make out that of the bigger cars speeding by in the distance, a soft, sweeping sort of sound not unlike the ocean.

They -- the five of them -- had spent a lot of time at the ocean, when Brit had been alive.  She loved it there.

Emily looked around at her friends, Brandon already wrestling with the box of wine to get it open, Jess doling out little plastic cups, Mark reading the instructions on how to use the Ouija board, as though they hadn't all seen it done a hundred times in movies and on TV.

Brit wasn't buried in this cemetery.  Her family had insisted, rightly Emily reminded herself, that she be brought home and buried there.  How could they understand that this silly little town with nothing to do but school work and loitering had become her home?

College simply did that.  But maybe it was less that Brit's parents hadn't understood, and more that they had understood too well.

They had barely seen Brit since she'd gone away to school, and when she died, with all the renting pain of the sudden, it had been here, in this drowsy, boring place.  This town had seen the last of her, and her family hadn't.

So they came and they took her away, and this cemetery was little more than an accurate backdrop for a childish game, and maybe that was the reason -- part of the reason -- Emily didn't find herself particularly invested.

She took the plastic cup of wine Brandon offered her -- rose, because they could never agree, without Brit to break the tie, on red or white -- and took a sip.  It was warm.  When she saw a glimmer to her right, she didn't turn to look.

They weren't even here, technically, to try to contact Brit.  They hadn't even discussed it really.  In the end, they were really just here to play, a distraction from the long summer break without their friend.  They had the board in their possession, they had never tried it before, someone, Mark, had suggested it as a thing they might do, and that had been that.

But really, they were all thinking of Brit.  How could they not?  And the heavy presence of her on their minds made itself known with the somber sort of air in which they all sat silently sipping their wine as Mark read through the rest of the instructions.  He could never do anything without making sure he knew how to do it right.  That was one of the things Emily appreciated about him.  He could be quiet and surly, and his other friends were obnoxious sports bros -- not the kinds of people Emily would ever choose to spend her time around -- but he brought a level-headedness to the group that Emily appreciated.  It was nice not to always need to be the voice of reason.

When he had finished reading through the whole packet, he folded it up in exactly the right way and reached out of the circle made by their bodies and the blanket to put the instructions back into the box.  Exactly like a board game, complete with the brand label, bright red on the side of the box.

Maybe the reason Emily found herself detached as Mark synthesized the instructions for the group, giving them all the bullet points, was because she had spent these past months processing.  Late night beach trips on her own.  Writing poetry.

She didn't want to linger on it, but she knew she couldn't just forget.  She built mourning into her daily routine.

Another drink of her wine, another sweep of her eyes over her friends.  She hardly heard what they were saying.  The gentle sweep of the cars on the hidden road behind her swelled.

When the others leaned forward to place their hands on planchette -- the one thing she had picked up on while Mark explained -- Emily did the same.  Again came the glimmer, and Emily ignored it, for now.  She had to humor her friends.  They needed that from her.

Brandon asked the question, surprising all of them, Emily thought.  She missed what exactly it was that he said.  She was distracted, hyper-aware of the space around her.  Sweat sticky on the backs of her knees, the itchy press of fresh-cut grass at the edges of the blanket, a cinnamon-y scent that had no business being here in the cemetery.

She ought to be making more of an effort, she knew that.  Her friends needed help, needed to process, and perhaps this was the way for them.  The planchette wasn't moving, of course, and even though none of them had said it, they were all hoping that something, somehow, would come through.  No one would fake it, not now, not even Brandon.

Emily was hit suddenly with a wave of fondness for her friends, and because it was instinct, she looked up in that moment, over Jess's shoulder, where, in the very last light of the day, the glimmer was taking shape.  It occurred to her that maybe the reason she struggled to feel invested in the Ouija board venture was that she had been seeing Brit for weeks now.  Emily shared a private smile, and in the twilight, Brit smiled back.

~C.D.G. Bartlett

[the-stick-scribblers]

The Womb

Crime is up five hundred percent since the Academy opened The Womb.

Twenty years ago, some newish academics who were still in their first century and therefore still hopeful, published a groundbreaking study on crime. They said the problem was simple: people committed crimes because somewhere in their past or current reality, they lacked security and love. Becoming a criminal was simply a call for help, too late. That part wasn't groundbreaking, but it bore repeating (and repeating, and repeating - hit the boring nail on the head, they did). Here's the important bit: they then asked what would happen if criminals could return to their childhoods and start from scratch, supported by the state? The ultimate rehabilitation program? 

Instead of prisons, they imagined a system of homes with specially trained and vetted "parents" to provide love; instead of cells, there would be small rooms they called nurseries filled with safely approved enrichment toys and lots of soft things for squeezing; there would still be community service opportunities and classes and career preparation, but capital punishment was firmly nixed.

It hinged on some pretty wild de-aging technology, but once they'd made the proposal it was only a couple of years before the tech caught up and then it was all hands-on deck "for the future of all children" and other such meaningless shit. There were some modifications - the cells are simply called rooms instead of nurseries, for example - but when they rolled out The Womb it was pretty much as presented.

Let's say you commit a crime. It's a little one, like maybe you didn't pay a traffic ticket, or some dick egged your apartment and you told them where they could shove it in front of the wrong soccer mom. The judge says hey, okay, that wasn't very good. But it was probably just a little lesson you forgot to learn along the way that led you to your Mistake, so you're sentenced to be de-aged a year and you're given a counselor who's supposed to help guide you onto a better path this time around.

But let's say the crime is bigger. You threw a major party and then drove drunk and high on heroin and ran over someone's dog. You commit armed robbery. Someone got seriously hurt, repeatedly. A guidance counselor for a year isn't going to cut it, so that's when the jury steps in and tries to figure out where your life went wrong. Was it at sixteen the first time you shoplifted and got away with it? At ten, when your teacher told you your work would never be any good? At eight, when your mom started working three jobs because she was suddenly raising you alone? And then you get zapped back to the pivotal age and placed in The Womb so you can be Reborn.

Somehow in all their planning the academics and the politicians forgot to bank on the allure of avoiding all those five hundred-year-old wrinkles and arthritis for a couple hundred extra years. Most people when they hit four hundred rob a bank at fake-gunpoint. That's the biggest crime that's least likely to get them killed rather than de-aged. That, or they get involved in some sort of tax fraud scheme. What's losing access to a couple million when you're going to die soon anyway? A second chance at life has got to be worth at least that.

The worst offenders get de-aged all the way back to babies, but that doesn't happen very often. It can seriously shorten your life if you end up a repeat offender, and anyway raising babies is more resource-intensive than the other kids. You have to kill a whole lot of people in a whole lot of lives to make it worth the parents' time.

The years you de-age get borrowed off the end of your life. As long as you avoid any more Mistakes, you get those years back and get to live out your original life span in full, with the bonus of a second childhood thrown in. But if you make another Mistake, you lose them forever, and have to live with it. That's how come I've only got two years left to take over the world.

I have been twelve years-old seven times. The last time I was Reborn, I'd made it all the way to age three hundred and fifty before I made another Mistake.

"You gonna eat that?"

We Reborn may have to use our manners, but for some reason the Womb Workers are exempt.

I sit up straight, elbows off the table, and look at my pudding. "My spoon is dirty."

They pick up the spoon, squint at it, rub it on their apron, then return it to the table. "You going to eat that now?"

The pudding looks delicious, actually, full of real chocolate shavings and cherry jam and cream liquor. If I let myself look at it any longer, I might cave. So I look at the Worker instead. They look like they could use some prune juice.

"This spoon is dirty. I would like a new spoon." 

The Worker opens their mouth, probably to tell me where I can shove the spoon, when Ren interrupts in a tiny voice, "You've got to say please."

This is Ren's second time Reborn. She's six years old now. When she was twenty-one she was sent back for planting an eco-bomb, and for again stealing an entire corporate farm when she was ninety. She's got an impressive file; we could be a good team eventually. I like her. But, regretfully, I no longer have the time.

"Please," I say, and smile real sweet.

The Worker takes the spoon from my hand with a measured precision that means they would much rather stab me with it, and give a little bow.

"Tell Jeremy he needs to pay more attention; the spoon was dirty!" I holler after them after they've passed into the kitchen, to everyone else at the table's disapproval.

Because this is my seventh time in The Womb, I've been placed in a high-security house, with experienced Grandparents rather than normal Parents and bars on all the windows under the cheerful blue and yellow curtains. I've also only got five siblings rather than the usual nine; Ren is the littlest, and Matthew is the oldest at seventeen. The rest of us hover around the dining room table in the throws of those terrible years right on the cusp of puberty, and we've all got the lanky self-awareness to match. Really, the jury should have forgiven me the second they realized my pivotal moment was at twelve, or at least written me off as a lost cause. What preteen doesn't want to take over the world? How was living through that desire again and again supposed to make me desire it any less? But we've established the establishment isn't very smart about the details of redemption. They just want to Save the Children, or at least look enough like they are to appeal to the constituents a couple times a year. Statistics to the contrary are handily swept aside as anti-love.

Everyone here has taken a wood chipper to someone else's moral fabric, most more than once. Even the Grandparents have been Reborn once each, although they won't tell me how come. Just that it's part of the job requirement, so they can relate to where we're at on our journeys or something disgustingly syrupy like that. I'll miss them the least.

The Womb Worker reappears at my left elbow. Another little bow, definitely sarcastic this time, and then they hold out a silvered fork. "Jeremy says all the spoons are dirty, but he offered an extra fork. The pudding is thick; this should serve just as well."

Finally. I accept the fork and dig in with an admirably restrained glee, I think. The pudding tastes sweeter knowing that it will be my last meal in this place.

Jeremy is old hat, been with the place since it opened basically, and is the only Worker authorized to visit every Home because he's worked his way up from day cook to Head of the Households. The first time I met him (on accident, during a poorly planned slip during my first sentence, involving a new bouquet of flowers every day until the home was buried in chrysanthemums and little baby's daisies and Womb Workers had to come and confiscate them all) he told me about his First Home, in Libya. It's taboo to talk about First Homes, not because it's illegal or anything or even really frowned upon. It just makes people sad. But Jeremy smiled as he told me about the fried dates and bsisa, the ironic wetlands and sprawling steppes and the big sky full of birds over everything all the time, the migrations. About the little lizards, the way they sashayed when he chased them down the streets. He made me forget almost everything and believe I'd grown up in Libya too. I volunteered for kitchen duty every night after in hopes he'd be that night's cook.

He climbed the ladder and I followed behind him to each new role, begging for stories about Libya, and about The Womb too, since he knows everything there is to know about it. Including, of course, how to get out. It wasn't hard to bribe him. Just two more rebirths of a little bit of smiling, a little bit of begging, and I've now had six life cycles to practice my hand at money laundering. Jeremy is four hundred and ninety-five this year. It's time for him to bail.

The pudding is gone too soon, and I lick my lips and immediately wish I had some Vasoline. They’re dry, and they sting. "I'm not feeling well. May I please be excused?"

Ren's tiny face looks doubtful and a couple of the other kids look intrigued, but Grandnanna is a warm, benevolent rock. "Do you need me to grab a basket?"

"I don't think so. I think I just need to lie down."

"Let me feel your head."

"It's my stomach," I protest, but go to her nonetheless. I'm up from the table, which means I'm almost in the clear.

She puts the back of her hand against my forehead and cheeks, then turns to rattle in the credenza behind her seat at the head of the table. "Richard, can you grab me the thermometer please? I forgot I moved it to the study when that cough went around last month."

"I'm kind of dizzy. I just want to lie down." I cross my arms and hunch my shoulders and do my best to turn excitement into flush agitation. Grandnanna (what a laugh; she's younger than me by a century, at least) purses her lips.

Then she steps back, and sighs. Good for her – she’s learned how to pick her battles. Probably why she’s still only been reborn once. "Grab a clean towel from the cupboard on your way up."

I finished my part of our plan this morning - digging out each of the security features in the home and bypassing them with a wire or a code I custom-wrote before my latest de-age debacle. The bars are just a formality now. But that's the most I could do on my own. It was up to Jeremy to arrange the rest - reaching out to my old contacts, setting up the weekend lecture series, making sure the Grandparents are out, finding a Sitter with enough moral ambiguity to agree to pack their overnight stuff in over-large luggage and to not ask questions. It was a lot of work, and he hasn’t said it but he’s going to negotiate for a better cut once we're free and clear. At least fifty percent. That's a cliché, but it’s fine. I can do those too. Not everyone makes it to five hundred. There won't be any questions when he’s never heard from again.

The corridor to my room is lined with photos doctored to look original, of the seven of us in this home, and each door has an initial painted in well-meaning green that comes off as military in the dim light. I dutifully grab a towel from the closet and go to my room, draping the towel over my pillow and curling up under the fluffy comforter. Once I bust out there will be no niceties, at least for a couple of months. Definitely no pudding. I close my eyes and sink into the bed. I dream myself a feast.

~D.E. Scevers