Author Archives: ssbb-admin

16
Dec

Beautiful Things Below the Sea

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged

Though for him there was no escape from the heavy brand of geekery, Brian “Brain” Jackson considered himself, despite his alphabetically organized music and societally abnormal fascination in fish, to be nearer to the “cool” side of the spectrum than not. For one, he wore his sweater-vests ironically. For two, more than once had an undergrad’s fragile freshman eyes gone wide and round and wet as she or he tried to pull him from the path of propriety, to win his love, his lust, his body, and perhaps a good grade in the lectures he TA’ed. Yet it’s pretty common knowledge that a GPA romance only will carry flirtation so far. There’s got to be a chemical component as well — a bodily attraction that outdistances the scholastic for most college-age youth to try and make bodies hit bed, and to sulk when all goes wrong. What this means is that it was not just for the grades semi-subtle seduction was attempted. Brain, despite it all, was a good looking guy.

This is the truth of it. Maybe you’ve heard some folks say that humans begin to resemble what they work with, just like people begin to look like their spouses, their dogs, or their favorite pair of pants. Yet Brain had loved fish since his first county-fair guppy and he looked no more like a fish than the average proctologist resembles an anus. Sure, he had a swimmer’s build, but a human swimmer’s build, with broad shoulders and thin waist. His complexion was just a few shades past creamy coffee, just a bit darker than his great-grandma Jolissa, who had passed for white, become a Harvey girl and moved the family out West. She had been beautiful, and honestly, so was he, though sometimes that’s not considered a compliment for a modern male. Still, while his looks cemented his popularity in the undergraduate sphere, he’d yet to give his heart to anyone.

The problem with people, he often saw, was that they lacked the proper lateral lines, gills, scales and swim bladders that put fascination in fish. The minds of men may be mystifying; the heads of women, closed books; yet fish are the final frontier of mystery. Fish are a glimpse of a different reality.

What secrets might scientists reveal with a closer inspection of fish lives? It was possible Utopia existed, but that humanity was just moving through the wrong element to discover it. Yet here was Man, the great upright ape, wrecking both land and sea — crushing the opportunity to discover truths humankind’s greatest dreamers could not even begin to form. Yet it was not the destiny of mankind to play Azrael to the planet. The fish would not remain passive to the bitter, bitter end. Someday soon, in a last-ditch effort to spread their perfect politics to the land-swimmers, the fish were going to come to shore.

16
Dec

But ever in the moonlight

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged ,

by Ogiwara Saki (荻原咲) illustrated by beili (mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/264311.html) The moon was bone-cold over the dark, murderous waters the night Simon Carrington died. It had been night when he began to die; it was night when he progressed full forth into the act; and it would be night when it was finished, as he lay […]

16
Dec

Seven Roses

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged

Vega was out with Lyra on the night that he met Altair.

They’d been walking home, together, after a long day at market, and the night had just begun to fall, gray-purple and very soft. It was dark in the forest, and singing with insects.

Vega had probably noticed him first, but it was Lyra that stopped, resting one of her small, rough hands on Vega’s wrist. “Do you suppose he’s okay?” she asked.

“Who?”

She pointed into the shadows, and the figure grew more defined as Vega focused on it.
He was a shape at the base of a tree, dark and huddled into itself, and his brown arms were clenched over his knees. The night gleamed blue on him, and his eyes were hidden.

Vega swallowed at the sight of him. He was tired, feet aching and hands raw and tingling from handling fabric all day. Any other day, any other man, and he would have pulled on, to home and supper and sleep.

But the man under the tree lifted his head, hearing Lyra’s voice, and his eyes gleamed in the dark. They were eyes that pulled.

16
Dec

Yes, And

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged

There was a spark the first time they met. Just an instant explosion of chemistry, bad teens popping off roman candles in the night. It wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar sensation. When you were a performer you got it pretty often if you were lucky. When you did comedy you got lucky a little more often. And when Alan met David for the first time, well, he felt pretty fucking lucky.

Alan was an actor, of the ‘you’re that guy from that thing!’ type. Though with the kind of parts he usually got, he was more of the ‘you’re that guy from that toothpaste commercial!’ type. It paid the bills. It paid some of the bills. His wife paid most of the bills. He’d gotten hooked into an improv group back in college, though, and that was what got his blood pumping. He did it for free in front of crowds of drunk people, but bouncing off other quick wits, giving trust over to someone that they’d keep you going and you’d do the same, all to make those drunk people laugh their asses off, that was the best feeling in the world.

And David, David was a stand-up. Alan had tried that exactly once and never again. Too lonely up there, just you and the stuff you’d probably overthought coming out of your mouth against the crowd. But David had a friend who had a friend who was in the group Alan performed on in a regular basis, and that was how these things came together. Hey, I liked your act and I’ve been wanting to get in to leading to David’s going to perform with us tonight.

Alan was dubious, of course. But that was before he met him. David was the kind of guy who got on stage in a suit and tie, and Alan was also that kind of guy, so that was one point in his favor. And then David turned out to be the kind of guy who could yes, and a man so hard he lost all composure years of practice had brought him and ended up giggling into the stage curtains. That was worth about a million points and the audience losing it nearly as hard. He could stay. He could stay a while.

16
Dec

Satchel gets his stuff back

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged

It was a long, twitchy walk back to Napanee Depot. Satchel’s blade had been strapped to the fork of his bike, and though no one had seen a walker in these parts for three or four years and he’d practically stopped thinking about them at all, now that he was defenseless, every rustle in the brush and moan of the wind through the leafing-out trees sent adrenaline sparking along his nerves. He kept to the cracked yellow lines in the centre of the road. By the time he limped through the depot’s plywood-reinforced glass doors, the sun was a suggestion of orange on the underside of the clouds, blisters had formed and burst on the balls of both feet, and the thinning sock on his right foot had turned the back of his heel to fucking hamburger.

“Satch, honey!” Sharon said as he staggered into the lobby. “What are you doing back?”

“Sinkhole up on forty-one,” Satchel said, scrupulously editing the adjectives out of the diatribe he had been building in his head for twenty-three kilometres. “Just past the bend. Skidded right into it.”

“Are you hurt?” She got out of her chair and came around her desk to him.

“Nothing serious. I managed to climb out.” It hadn’t been quick or easy, and he’d felt gravel skidding away under his soles for a long way back down the road. “Lost my bike, though.”

16
Dec

The Crossroads and the Gate

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged ,

Venadan had hoped that he could at least pull the stranger’s shoulder back into alignment without waking him up, but no such luck; the stranger woke at the pressure of Venadan’s foot on his chest, so that Venadan’s first word to him was “Motherfucker,” and the stranger’s to him was a miserable yowl. The stranger didn’t pass back out at this either. He bit down on his second scream and sat up halfway, sweating, pulling his arm out of Venadan’s grip and getting his long hair in Venadan’s eyes. Venadan reared back. “You were out when I found you,” he said. “You were attacked. Do you remember?”

“Do I…?” the stranger said, and looked blearily out at the corpses littering the clearing. “Oh. I really don’t know why I thought ‘giant spiders’ was an exaggeration. The villagers were so insistent about it. How much leg do I have left?”

“Right ankle’s broken,” Venadan said. “You’ve got a hole in your neck, too– keep your hand off it!”

The stranger dropped his hand. His eyes were huge, tracking poorly, and he kept taking these deep, shuddering breaths that Venadan could only hope were panic and not a collapsed lung. “Who are you? Not that I want to sound ungrateful,” a pause for breath, “when you’ve been so friendly. Did you leave out my left leg because it isn’t there any more?”

“Your left leg is fine. I was just passing through.” He had enough water to spill some out against his handkerchief, and he pressed it into the stranger’s wound, eliciting another yell. Too much blood. “You’re a wizard, aren’t you? Can you close your own wounds?”

16
Dec

Makes Three

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 46, Text | Tagged ,

I heard from someone once it was good etiquette to have someone announce your presence before going in to meet with a lady, so that’s why I made sure to bounce one of Aveshi Karaen’s guards off her door real hard before going in to make introductions. Trevor wasn’t so much hung up on etiquette, though, so his guy just got a punch in the nose and went down in a big puddle of swishy purple fabric. Fuckin’ purple on these guys.

I picked up my guy again with one hand and gave him another good bowl right into Aveshi’s door. His helmet made a real nice ‘thok’ sound against it and he groaned. He’d be real purple himself tomorrow. So I was doing him a favor. Trevor got their dumb purple guns off them and I swiped the keycard I’d nabbed earlier through the lock. We were pretty well announced, I figured.

Aveshi was just sitting in her fluffy chair with her hands folded on her lap when we came in. She picked up a long thin pipe off the table next to her and brought it up to her mouth, resting the tip between the split in her lower lip as she took a draw. She leaned her head back and let the smoke curl out of her nostrils. She was supposed to be the real scandalous type with how she wore her veil to show her mouth and nose, but I wasn’t impressed. You see one salaari under their veils and you seen them all, and I’d seen more than one. I’d seen three.

28
Oct

Henshin Tension

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Stand-Alone Art | Tagged

28
Oct

The Master Cat Redux

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged ,

For the longest time, Henry Lee had believed that nothing was worse than having to pursue a ruthless trained killer over rooftops while taking fire from irate gunmen. This, he now realised, was inaccurate. The greater ordeal was having to transcribe and translate a full radio transmission of said chase – as well as all fifteen hours of the subsequent interrogation.

They had given Henry a desk. A desk, an ergonomic chair, and a view of Grosvenor Square Garden that Henry frankly didn’t care for. He also had a computer with not two but three screens arranged at optimal angles to each other, the third of which served no apparent purpose apart from bathing Henry in the eerie glow of the CIA desktop wallpaper.

Will would have laughed himself to tears to see Henry penned in like this – sitting through recordings of some whippersnapper with college-level Mandarin floundering through Class B interrogations, spending his lunch hour making small talk in the cafeteria, or – God forbid – tending the potted plant by the window out of obligation. But Will wasn’t here. And, really, that was the root of Henry’s problems. Because if Will had stuck around, hadn’t let something as mundane as a bullet to the chest get the better of him, they would both still be on assignment in Shanghai.

28
Oct

Serenade for a Soldier

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged ,

I was waiting under a street lamp on the corner outside the Grand Theatre, where I had said I would be waiting. Above people’s heads, I could see most of the poster advertising tonight’s concert hanging in a frame by the doors. Big, elegant letters spelled the name of the choir and a list of compositions the choir was going to sing. The concert itself made me excited, but I was rather conflicted about everything that was supposed to happen next.

I took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. A faint cloud of smoke coiled lazily in the air.

I was waiting for my companion. Or, to put it more bluntly, a whore. A male whore.

28
Oct

The Red Scare

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged

At first, Paul didn’t understand what was happening, so all he said when he looked up from his desk and saw Percy standing in the doorway was, “Don’t forget to pick up paper towels if you’re going out.”

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Broderick,” said Percy in a tone that was part business and part ice, and that was what made Paul really look, shoving his glasses up the bridge of his nose and marking his place in his new as-yet-unpromising biography of FDR with the flap of the dust jacket as he stared across the dim span of his study. The room was windowless, paneled with mahogany, and lined on all sides with bookshelves; a brass clock on the desk gave the time as 1:50, but it could have been early afternoon as easily as the middle of the night. The bulb of his desk lamp hit his eyes like a spotlight, illuminating the top of the desk and half-blinding him to everything beyond it. “Did the girl out front offer you coffee?”

With the great calm of a well-learned routine, Paul placed his book on the desk, folded his hands atop it, shut his eyes, and took three long, deep breaths, listening to the soft rushing sounds as his lungs moved the air tidally in and out. When he opened his eyes again, Percy was still standing there in an unfamiliar, ill-fitting suit and Paul was reasonably sure he wasn’t having a hallucination. Well, that solved one question, but raised several others. Was it a.m. instead of p.m.? The book hadn’t been that good, but he’d lost more time to less.

Percy was not a tall man, but he crossed the study in four purposeful strides, briefcase in hand, and with every step his well-oiled wingtip shoes squeaked as his feet bent inside. When he reached the other side of Paul’s desk, he put the briefcase down and opened it so that Paul couldn’t see the contents. Paul sniffed the air. “Is that … Brylcreem?”

28
Oct

Bal Masqué

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged

“Champrose will be two days further, but they have great ale,” Marion said, holding his horse’s reins tightly in one hand, his only good eye scanning the map in their captain’s hands for the city he had just named. He pointed at it with the cheese he was holding. Sean watched with great amusement as Thane’s aristocratic features twisted in a grimace—it made him look like one of these sneering nobles they hated working with—and Thane moved the map away from Marion’s greasy fingers.

“If that’s our criteria, then Vieux-Port should have a festival about now,” John protested. He tried to take the map from Thane, but their leader moved it again, without even looking. “That’ll be way more fun than good ale, Captain, and I bet we can find work once the festival is done,” he said, trying to grab the side of the map closest to him. Thane jerked it away again and promptly folded it, holding it very close to his chest. Thane had a thing about people touching his precious papers. Considering that the last map had gone up in flames, Sean understood that particular hang-up.

Jean took on a thoughtful expression. “Lots of merchants due to be heading back home, I’m sure someone will want protection for the road back.” He said it with a shrug of his bony shoulders. It was rather comical in Sean’s opinion. The man was like a living scarecrow.

Thane had probably already considered the job possibilities himself, but he still nodded to the two.

28
Oct

Smug the Magic Dragon

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged

It was such a rotten cliche, to be smitten with the cute boy behind the counter at the coffee shop, but, well, cliches had to start somewhere. At least in Adam’s defense, he had only been caught in deep smit for the three minutes he’d been waiting in line. The boy in question had soft eyes and long lashes and a scruffy chin and smirky lips and Adam was just fine with waiting as long as possible while he got practice at staring while pretending not to stare.

When it was Adam’s time to come up to the counter, though, he saw the barista’s nametag read ‘Smug.’ Well, at least he was properly labeled.

“What can I get you today?” he asked, and up close Adam could see he had the loveliest eyes, rich brown like strong tea.

“Tea…” Adam blinked rapidly. “Ah, no, pardon. A large cappuccino, please.”

The barista — Smug, Adam supposed — gave a glance over to the girl behind the espresso machine, who was muttering to herself and seemed to be having a bit of trouble. “Might take a few minutes more, if that’s all right with you.”

“Oh, that’s fine, just fine,” Adam said. He was the last person in the queue at the moment, so he felt no guilt for lingering.

“Right, thanks,” he said, and tilted his head back to call to the girl. “Large cappuccino please, Marian.” He got a faint grumble in return, and Adam stifled a laugh. Smug — it was ridiculous to even think of that as a name, but it was easier on the internal monologue than ‘Perfect Handsome Man at the Coffee Shop I Wish to Marry’ — told him how much he owed for his drink and handed it over. The register clanked and jingled and Adam just watched his face. Handsome eyebrows, even; he’d never thought of eyebrows as something to be handsome.

He shook himself out of his charmed reverie. “Ah, my change?” he said. Society had to keep functioning, even in the face of infatuation.

Smug just smiled at him. A bit smugly, to be perfectly frank. “I think you’ll find it’s in your hand, sir.”

28
Oct

I am the one who has you now

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged

The last thing Cai felt like doing after a six-day work week was going to a party, but he’d told Marc he would, and with everything that was going on with him he was trying hard to keep his promises. The bells hanging from the red velvet bow on the door chimed and rattled against the glass as he stepped into a seasonal sub-climate comprised of equal parts pine, beeswax candles, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and wet winter coats. Heads in the living room turned; Maryanne, perched on the arm of a couch, waved a half-eaten gingerbread cookie at him. He waved back and toed off his boots, and carried them down the hall into the spacious back kitchen. It was the size of the living room, and twice as crowded.

“Cai!” Syl’s embrace wrapped him in white lace and satin and fringe. “How have you been? How’s Marc?”

“Good, he’s good, we’re good.”

“Did he bring those coconut cherry things he made last year? Because people have been asking.”

“I don’t know. I came straight from work.” Cai inclined his chin at the diadem of white Christmas tree lights–lit and blinking–that crowned her salt-and-pepper curls. “White Witch?”

28
Oct

Firefly Catching (蛍狩り)

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 45, Text | Tagged ,

As a gimmick, many of the districts’ entertainment houses ordered large amounts of fireflies to release in their gardens and party rooms. But since everyone was doing it, it had lost its charm. Even the low folk making their homes in a riverbed could enjoy the view of fireflies released near the K River. At night, during the start of the festival season, all mingled. Groups of children, yelling and running along the riverside through willows and cherries, chanted the firefly-hunting songs, though there was no sweet water in the capital. Surely it was also tiresome for the prostitute boys dressed up in pale greens and yellows for the occasion. There were even rumours of gold dust glowing on buttocks in shows of excess among patrons.

Other houses took their inspiration in advertising from anything that might give them an advantage with the tourist crowds. Many a historical and mythical figure turned out. Yoshitsune and the master tengu descended from Mt. Kurama to entertain with a crowd-pleasingly unsophisticated repertoire, and were booked flat till the end of the month. The great M-district courtesan, Sasanami, became an older Takeru with his hair tied in buns, which caused quite a sensation among his fans.

“Can you believe that shit?”