Author Archives: ssbb-admin

27
Aug

Spirit Week

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 38, Text | Tagged

On Monday morning, Drew gets to school earlier than usual. It makes sense, probably, but it does pose one small but annoying inconvenience: he has to pull his car up outside the entrance to the parking lot and climb out to unhook the chain, then drag it off to the side.

Rebecca is just pulling up as he gets the chain wound up, and she rolls down her window to say, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Wachowski! You’re certainly early this morning.”

“Spirit Week, Principal Hopkins,” he says, smiling at her, “Everybody on deck, I hear.” She laughs, and he ducks to peer at Neil through the window into her back seat. Drew says, “Go Manatees!”

27
Aug

This Story Is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Read It

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 38, Text | Tagged ,

According to Multiverse Theory, you, in an infinite number of universes, right now, are fucking Rick Santorum. All it takes for there to be a divergence is a decision, no matter how small: the second you make a choice, you go one way, and a universe where you make the other choice goes the other way. Another choice, another split. Every decision you make, from where to go to college to when to scratch your balls, is happening at that very same moment in an infinite number of other universes, and some of you are making one choice, and some of you are making another.

Or maybe the choice got made before you even got there. Maybe your great-great-great grandmother had a pickle for lunch one August Thursday, and that set off the chain of events that led to you, where you are, right now, reading this. Maybe if she’d had an apple instead, you wouldn’t be sitting here at all. Instead, you — or someone enough like you that it might as well be you — would be knees-up in some sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch four-poster bed, taking it like whatever you take it like from a former senator and presidential candidate in a sweater-vest. There’s even an infinite number of universes where he’s removed the sweater-vest.

There is, of course, an infinite number of universes out there where this is not happening. But mathematically speaking, infinity and infinity are the same — that is, you can’t have more of the infinity where a thing is happening than you can of the infinity where that thing isn’t happening. So if you could step through the thin membrane separating these universes into that next universe over’s version of you, odds are fifty-fifty that you’d find yourself on the receiving end of Rick Santorum’s glorious Republican penis.

Think about that next time you’re having trouble sleeping.

27
Aug

Reed Fixation

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 38, Text | Tagged

“Justin Preston!” a voice calls over the din of the symphonic band warming up. I start from my fingering and look around. The voice calls my name again. I can’t see who’s calling my name until Carson Finn of the varsity orchestra mounts the podium and blows our conductor’s whistle. There’s immediate silence.

“Once again,” he says, sounding annoyed, “I need Justin Preston to meet me in the instrument lockers. Now.”

Everyone stares at me as he steps off the podium and heads out the door. I nearly bite my reed as I maneuver my bassoon’s butt strap into my left hand so I can carry my bassoon with one hand and pick my way through the seats. My second chair looks like she’s about to cry as my first chair slaps my ass and makes a comment about making messy cork wax with the Prince of Double Reeds.

27
Aug

Consequences of the New York City Smoke-Free Air Act of 2002

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 38, Text | Tagged

He had a thing about rooftops. For a couple of years in there, he had gotten anxiety just looking at a ladder, but now as a grown adult man with a couple of years of therapy under his belt, he found himself hauling up to hang with the HVAC systems surprisingly often. Admittedly, the main impetus for getting over his hangup was the perpetual rooftop parties thrown by a dude he’d desperately wanted to hook up with a few years ago, but you had to take the motivation where you could get it. Making out with that dude as the sun set over Manhattan had worked like magic, really.

That dude was just history now, and as Dante staggered up through his mid-twenties and into his late-twenties and terrifyingly closer to thirty, his opportunities to go to rooftop parties with sexy hipsters were ever dwindling. He’d climb up to his apartment building’s rooftop from time to time to write, but most of his upper-storey time was spent on top of the school he taught at, lurking behind the ventilation so he could smoke without anyone getting on his case and without being a bad influence to the children.

He could hear the children, out at recess in the small amount of field the school managed to claim in Brooklyn. For the amount of tuition their parents paid, damn right they were going to a least get a swingset. His own class was down there knocking each other into the dirt, but it was happily not his day to supervise the insanity, so rooftop it was. He wouldn’t say he hated his job, but he also wouldn’t say that getting a nicotine infusion into his brain didn’t help get him through the afternoon.

27
Aug

Part of Something Ours

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 38, Text | Tagged ,

Zack pulled up his hood and slumped over the table, using his arms as pillows. Showing up at school when the sun wasn’t even up, on a Saturday no less, wasn’t what he signed up for when he joined the engineering club. It was a cruel and unusual punishment, as far as he was concerned.

A hand clapped him on the back, jolting him back into consciousness. Zack cracked open an eye and glared up at the culprit. Bryce looked down at him with amusement clear on his stupid face.

27
Aug

See You After School

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 38, Text | Tagged

“See you after school.”

It wasn’t loud enough for anyone else to hear, just a hiss across the aisle between the rows of desks. For a second Kiran stopped, in the middle of getting up, frozen with his backpack halfway hefted up; then he swallowed, and made himself finish and pick up his test sheet to deposit at the front on the teacher’s desk. He made a business of keeping his body between it and Jeff, though, blocking any possible view of the paper from across the aisle, and ignoring the sullen glare up from the circle of Jeff’s arm on his desk. If he was in for a penny, he was in for a pound, he guessed.

There was always something to set him off, anyway. A wrong look in the locker room after gym, a wrong word in the hallway between classes. Sometimes even less than that. It was just how guys like Jeff worked; they’d find any excuse in the end. This time it had been the history test, but it might have been anything. When Jeff had turned his head toward Kiran, under the screening cover of Tammy Fitzpatrick’s frizzy hair in the seat ahead of him, and whispered, “Hey loser, let me copy off you,” Kiran had just set his jaw, and shaken his head No. The consequences, whatever they might be, were beyond his control.

See you after school.

25
Jun

Swamped!

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Stand-Alone Art | Tagged

by melanofly (メラノ飛) (mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/216010.html) Love3

25
Jun

Bodies in Space

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged ,

Isaac didn’t make mistakes. He was a very thorough and hard worker, and had been praised for that by his supervisor on so many occasions that he’d lost count, and something had to happen very many times before Isaac lost count of it.

He’d made a mistake today, though, and the part of the computer that checked his work for mistakes told him of his error with a box with a message in it saying that he needed to check again. After that he took his break (the one he was supposed to take twice every day, even though he usually didn’t and just said that he had) and went to stand in the bathroom with the light off and the rattling old duct fan on for exactly ten minutes. When he had counted six hundred seconds, he turned on the light again and took two pieces of paper out of his wallet.

One was a picture of Saturn, its rings, and two of its moons; that picture had arrived on earth on November 3, 1980, exactly six years, four months, and three days before Isaac was born, though it had been taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft before that, because light took time to travel no matter where in the universe you were (at least on the scale at which humans and spacecraft operated).

The other was a list of things from Dr. Mazzy that were okay, and the third thing on the list was ‘making mistakes’. He read the whole list over four times, focusing on those two words in particular. He didn’t forget things; sometimes he just didn’t remember to remember them.

He decided it was okay to make a mistake when he was excited, and he was excited. On Friday, Rick would be back. That made thinking about anything else difficult.

25
Jun

Through the hostile jungles of Gaia

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged

Xander glared at his backpack as the shirt he had been trying to stuff in one-handed caught on the zipper and unfolded itself. Again. With an annoyed humpf, Xander gave up on any semblance of neatness and just shoved the damn thing in the bag. He stared at the rest of the items laid out on his bed and, after a moment of consideration, did the same with the rest of them.

25
Jun

I survived a deadly camping trip with an Australian park ranger

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged

In Simon Carroway’s view, there were three things that were particularly wrong with his current situation.

First, he was stuck up a gumtree and there was a protuberant piece of branch sticking into his arse; second, there were five dingoes sitting under the tree, muzzles upturned as if they expected him to just drop into their waiting jaws; and third, he had no mobile phone reception.

“Hungry, are you?” he called down at them. “Well, I’ve got news for you. Fuck the lot of you; I can sit up here all day.”

One of the dingoes stuck its tongue out of the side of its mouth and panted.

25
Jun

Tastes Like True Grit

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged

“Illian Nikado?”

“Illian Nikado.”

The name swept over town. It was spoken with varying degrees of contempt, praise and curiosity; tossed lightly from one person to another, appearing at the start of a scornful growl only to disappear again at the tail-end of a besotted sigh.

Despite all of these different entangled opinions, however, one might very well be able to find a common thread underlying it all given a close enough look.

Closer.

Closer.

There.

25
Jun

On Earth My Nina

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged ,

Jonathan Crowe @birdsinmybeard
Yesterday was not the first time I told someone I was an ornithologist and they thought I meant orthodontist, but I can pray it is the last.

Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
@birdsinmybeard It’s ’cause you got such beautiful chompers!

Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
I’m thinking: braces for birds — “Your smile will be im-pecker-ble!”

Jonathan Crowe @birdsinmybeard
@pen_ham I’m confiscating your phone.

Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
@birdsinmybeard Come and get it, chickadee.

25
Jun

Deadly Scorpions Ate My Shirt!

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged ,

Jimmy Olsen slapped his tattered passport on the table and pointed to the first page. It’s a long shot, he thought, but it might just work.

“Do you know what this says?” he asked.

Seid Suhail shook his head. Smoke eddied around his furrowed brow and collected in a thick layer beneath the trading post’s low ceiling. He bent over to examine the dog-eared page with a sceptical expression.

“It says that Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.” He smiled and pushed the passport towards Seid Suhail. It was lucky for him that the Arab trader had no way of knowing that Olsen was in the Sahara without the embassy’s knowledge or consent. “Assistance, Seid Suhail, and protection. Keid is still a British province. That means you have to help.”

25
Jun

Professor Worthington and the Search for the One-Eyed Trouser Snake

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 37, Text | Tagged

I was balls-deep in secondhand embarrassment from the start of the safari.

Let’s be clear, this was not my usual sort of client. As the only Good Ol’ Boy offering tours on Nakkavara Island (it’s this little uninhabited place a fuckton of miles away from any coast, don’t bother), I tend to attract a certain personality type. Like the rich asshole who wants to shoot something with horns. Or the trust fund asshole who wants to shoot something with claws. Or (my personal favorite) the rich asshole who brings his kids along so they can watch daddy be a man while he, yes, shoots something. I don’t know, something about having the only Texan accent for 200 miles tends to draw them to me.

But anyway, this character wasn’t one of those assholes. He was an entirely different type of asshole. No, not an asshole. Douchebag? Dumbass? Something like a cross between a ‘tool’ and a ‘twit,’ with a major emphasis on ‘dork.’ Fuckwit? Fuckwit.

23
Apr

Who Is Guilty?

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 36, Stand-Alone Art | Tagged

by melanofly (メラノ飛) (mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/212241.html) Love1