The salty air felt cooler than usual and Gypsy was acting wilder than he’d ever seen her. She kicked off her high-heeled sandals and stood up in the seat as the Barchetta zoomed down the first straightaway. The savage wind tore at her thin, tie-dyed t-shirt, outlining her small, perky breasts.
“Messy. The messier the better. I want her to suffer, and suffer for a long time.”
The rest of the men exchanged smirks, interpreting his behavior as hesitation to take on the kid. Money appeared and changed hands. Lufberry surveyed the scene. He’d hustled some of these men in the past. No doubt they were eager to see him get his ass handed to him.
In Simon Hatworth’s basement, the vines grew strong. They stretched off his work counter, pressing themselves outward, sneaking down table legs and off into damp crevices at a crawl’s pace. Most of the time he’d carry on with his work ignoring their movements, but every now and then he’d stand back and marvel at their liveliness, their will to travel, their reason for being.
The Wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye…
But then there’s that one question in the middle of the form: Life Status: Non-dead / Dead(one time) / Dead(more than one time) [please specify number of times dead].
I hate that question. I hate having to check the Dead(more than one time) box.
The first time it happened—the first time anyone admits to it, anyway—was at a Decoration Day picnic being held at the battlefield at Chickamauga, Georgia. Several dozen doddering representatives of the Sons of Confederate Veterans had come together on a fine June afternoon for chicken-salad sandwiches and punch. Some sat in metal folding chairs, with their wives at their elbows, while others shuffled around the buffet table in search of the correct sliced cheese or condiment.
I was traveling to St Ives, met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks, each sack held seven rats, each rat had seven pups.
Pups, rats, sacks, and wives; how many were traveling to St Ives?
Pain. A sheet of razors and barbed wire across his chest, an iron maiden mask closed on his face, sixty volts of electricity running through the fluids in his veins. Ground glass in his trachea when he tried to breath. Behind his eyelids, jagged lime and lemon shapes slicing at the jelly of his eyeballs.
Portia had changed out of her Spartan business ensemble and donned a soft green evening gown that frothed chiffon at her wrists and décolleté. It brought out the color of her eyes. Poised against the backdrop of his marble and gold dining room, she was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen.
Johnny knew him. Mosh Frazier. Mosh of the wild hair. Mosh of the tattoos, skulls and fire. Mosh of the wide leather belt and the evil temper. Mosh was Johnny’s friend. At least that’s what Johnny thought.
Johnny had always been a little slow about people.
‘You are cordially invited to eat me.’ Well, this is certainly an evocative invitation, Carl.” Charlene tipped her glittering invite into the crystal bowl just inside the door, and it vanished in a puff of smoke.
She watched as the bus crested the hill and cut a silver blur across the burnt landscape. Her name was Tamara, and she had survived when the rest of her family had passed into eternity or oblivion, whichever came after death. Her husband, Terrance, had died in the fields, toiling to bring forth fuel from the red earth. Her mother and father had died in one of the subway attacks—a bomb or a terrorist or a derailing—she could no longer remember which. Her brother disappeared with the wind, and her sister died last winter, giving birth.
Hell, wrote the mad man in his lonely tower, is the absence of God’s love not brimstone and sulphur and nightmarish visions. The pains of Hell are metaphorical as well as metaphysical. The tortures, the torments, imagined as perpetual flaying of skin and the application of saltpetre to the wounds, are nothing beside the emptiness where once there was God.
He sees you and pauses, “This is all your fault, Mom.” He touches a red button and the outer hatch opens.
You collapse on the deck as your son is sucked out into space.
Finally, Timon threw the shovel up and out of the pit. He’d buried the son of a bitch deeper than he’d remembered, so the digging had taken longer than he’d planned. First, six inches of the seashells people used instead of gravel in the Panhandle. Then sand and dirt and dirt and sand and here he was, fifteen feet down and the sun already getting high. So much for grave robbing by dead of night.
Once he had been proud of his deformities; now he despised them. The malformed right hand that the most expensive surgeries could not repair, the ever-so-slight limp when he walked because bone surgery left one leg slightly shorter than the other, the fleshy, purplish bag of flesh on his left side that the doctors had not yet removed-these were the devils that tormented him night after night. Sometimes the tumors on his nerves pinched so tightly that he could not walk, but it was not the pain that kept him from sleeping on hot summer evenings. It was the specter he saw in the mirror.
You see, it all started in R&D - because let’s face it, the Elves, they’re not just in it for the toys and cookies.
It was Moshe who found the tablet. They were working in the hole, the three of them, army shirts discarded for short-sleeved tops. They had been working for hours, knowing that tomorrow they could be fighting again, could be dead or wounded in a country that wasn’t theirs, and happy for a chance to be free in the open air.
The man laughed and Katulo inhaled the stench of beer. “You don’t know Old Father? Yesterday some of those Tutsi animals were making trouble. Those boys there beat them down good. Made them run like the cowards they are.”
