fiction.

Your Plan Which Is Assured of Success

From your bedroom you will call a friend, your heart abuzz, and nonchalantly but for your traitorous ululating voice you will ask if I have a girlfriend, and your friend will be unsure,
      or else your friend will confidently tell you that I do not, and give you my number,
      or maybe your friend will be sitting opposite you in your bowl-shaped chair, giggling and counseling you to call, to do it, now, stop thinking and just do it, and you will dial each number so slowly that a recorded voice will suddenly materialize and order you to redial,
      or you will hold your breath and stare at your thumb as it rapidly bangs out the ten digits, and feel as though you were diving into the icy chlorine-sharp pool in the high school basement, and the phone will purr interminably, once, again, again, and my sister will pick up, and you will lose your nerve, (more)

The Fraud

Drem was leaning over the barrier with dusky, occluded eyes. Then he saw me.
      “Drake,” he boomed (“DRECK”), “my God, you look something like bushwhacked,” a word perhaps my predecessor had given him.
      “That’s true,” I rasped.
      “A fourteen hours flight for you! My God!”
      “Yes.”
      “I hope you managed all right to sleep?”
      “I did,” I said. “Drem, your English sounds much improved.”
      “You should hope so!” he cried, and then seemed to compose himself and cough out a controlled little chuckle.
      We were waiting at the baggage carousel. Around us were uniformly bedraggled people.
      “I’m a little worried about the bicycling,” I ventured.
      “Oh, it is nothing,” he assured me. “It is a flat city, you’ll pick it right up.”
      Closest to us was a 35ish woman, alone, wearing fake-leopardskin-patterned clothing, and not much of it. Her hair crept in oily spirals down her back, which was the color of yam meat. Drem contemplated her with frank happiness. (more)

Fish Soon to Be Returned to Water

Leith and Feldspar staked their suspect out for hours before he arrived, and when he did, there was no doubt it was him. They had passed the time with glacial silence. Occasionally they reviewed the dossier or checked email, but generally they meditated mutely on the urban traffic, like lifeguards, or God. It was a cool autumn day, and had there been trees, some might have been orange, or barren of leaves. They were situated in the Summit On Magnolia Hill, six stories up, their laptops and printouts and microwaved Senor Crispo Beef Bacon & Cheddar Tostadas carefully squared away on a gleaming kitchen table.
      At 6:08pm, they had their first sighting of Marco Malevi, marketing assistant at Rising Phoenix Publications and suspected terrorist. More accurately, they were first aware of his approach at 6:06pm, when the already tempestuous rush-hour ocean of vehicles gradually swelled into cacophony. A din of horns was sweeping down the boulevard, roiling and uncoordinated. Remarkable not only were the horns but the shouts, the windows rolled down, the raucous corrective abuse bawled into the nearing dusk, probably for the sport of it as much as for anything else.
      Eventually, Marco rounded into view, and no one could have missed him. Wobbling, teetering, fluttering lazily among the traffic, he cut slow tight corners around the cars and trucks, seemingly oblivious, his shoulders bobbing busily from side to side. His left hand held a takeaway coffee cup high above the handlebars as if in salute, his right hand was in a pocket, and with his hips he was steering a veteran bicycle. From a dirt-gray messenger bag, a baguette nosed forth. Instead of protective headwear, he wore a ratty black cap; instead of the customary bright orange vest and Spandex leggings, he had on a flapping tracksuit emblazoned with unfamiliar insignias.
      He swigged from the cup and as he did so, his bicycle suddenly accelerated and neatly shot the gap between a Hummer and a right-turning Jeep. Enraged, the driver of the Jeep leaned over the top of his car and emitted several paragraphs of invective. Grimly, Marco raised his cup even higher, in acknowledgment. (more)

The Afterlife

Waking in the starlit darkness, Dee discovered that she had regained the use of her lungs and limbs, and that she had believed in the afterlife all along.
      She spun the globe, stopped it, zoomed in on herself. She examined her life’s tube—emerging in Baltimore, coiling tightly in apartments in Philadelphia and Chicago and two houses several streets apart in Portland, jumping several times across the Pacific and about a dozen over the Atlantic, thickening out the paths between work and home in thousands of redundant iterations. From far away, it was a thin, knotty wire, like a headphones cable left in someone’s pocket.

      Corresponding briefly with her parent code, Dee called up an infinite database, her own. It hummed and spread as she touched it, pulled it apart with her fingers, froze columns and cleared reckoning space for herself. Her first calculation was also the first calculation of 92,304 people before her. (more)

Up Left Up Right A B L R

Come here, starveling. By God, come here with that bottle, you mincing ass. Come to Thorolf!
      I have no dogs, no home, and no wife. I carry my twenty bloodstained weapons in a weightless, inconspicuous sack. I absorb gold like a sponge, and my wounds are healed by flowers and steins of mead. I have never slept.
      You awful waif, sit and listen to the story of Thorolf.

      It was in one of the ten thousands of identical halls I have visited. As always, four goblins waited like fools behind the oaken door. FOOLS! I feinted left with my axe, backed away and to the side, and as they pranced out into view, I switched in the blink of an eye to my enchanted crossbow and with a melismatic burst of light I sent them squalling and crumpling down to hell. (more)

Most People But Not Everyone

The other ones might have deserved it, thought Degvan, staring briefly at the crushed blackening nail of his right fourth finger, but surely not this one. The thumb was a brute, a masher; the second, a poker and a jabber, a pushy ringleader; the third pushed its way ahead of the others like an arrogant know-it-all; and even the puny fifth had a curling cunning, a book-end’s complicity with the plot. The poor fourth finger couldn’t so much as nod without dragging half of its mates with it. What in the Holy Father’s name was the good of punishing the fourth finger.
    “The world ignores the guilty,” he announced to the stout, droop-cheeked man at his feet, wincing as he bound his bulging wrists, “and it does not particularly give a shit about the righteous either. What it likes best is to smash the innocent. It enjoys seeking out your fourth finger and pulverizing it, when it is all of the other fingers that are culpable.”
    Mamut moaned incoherently, ten feet away.
    “Mamut, brother in God,” said Degvan. “What is mine is yours. Know this, if I die today. If my head is broken open, out of it will flow my wisdom and accumulated learning, and it will pour like milk into yours. To the dregs, you will sop me up. To the last scraps of my vocabulary and half-formed notions of my subconscious.
    “I would estimate the likelihood of this happening today, however, as very low,” he added, shouldering his gun and approaching the steep decline to the river. (more)