“So then, what year did the Great Unification take place?”
“F– fourteen hundred. And fifty … sir …”
“Summer or winter?”
“N–neither–it was spring–early spring–”
“Ha ha, very good. Then, the Treaty of the Five Kingdoms?”
“Summer the same year–ah–Master Frest–”
“Who signed the treaty for the House of Quertis?”
“M–my honorable great … great-grandmother, the Duchess Maria Valia Quertis. Master Frest, please–”
“Very good, Winter. You may finish.”
Around three o’clockish on a Thursday in October, James Wellesley lay in an excellent specimen of a claw-footed Chatterham bathtub, where he slit his wrists and waited to die. Unfortunately, the desired cessation of existence was not so accommodating, and he was forced to climb out of the tub and don appropriate clothing when summoned for supper two hours later.
It all started when Derren woke up naked, with a hangover, curled up in a strange bed next to another equally-naked man, smelling faintly of cheap beer and sex.
No, that wasn’t quite right, he supposed; it began when that godawful history lecturer from hell asked Derren to be his TA after a series of highly improbable instances in scheduling caused him to be in Mr Willoughby’s courses. Ten terms in a row. Ten. They had become quite familiar with each other in that time, in the strange sort of way coworkers do even if they detest each other with every fibre of their beings. (The Willoughby-Hale tension became a bit of a campus joke by the seventh term they had been together. It did not help that both men were very openly gay.) Mr Willoughby may have despised Derren’s constant verbal belligerence in class, but he had begrudgingly accepted that Mr Hale was quite the competent young man. On the other side, Derren had just begun thinking about applying to grad school, so he needed the money and figured it would be a good mark on his record; also, Mr Willoughby may have played a rather key role in Derren’s decision to switch from his intended maths major to European history, not that he would ever admit it.
This is the best shaggy-dog story that I know:
Way back when I was a freshman in high school, I had this math teacher named Mr. Siegal. Mr. Siegal was a hardass. You hear stories about hardass teachers sometimes, the ones that push their students hard and take no shit and never let up and turn out to be the best, most inspiring teachers a guy could ever have–well, that wasn’t the kind of hardass that Mr. Siegal was. Mr. Siegal was a hardass because he wanted everybody else to be just as miserable as he was. Later on I found out that he’d burned out on his PhD program and had to grab the first job that came along that he was qualified for, but all I knew back then was that he hated everything, including his job and us. We didn’t like him much, either.
Twenty minutes in to American History class, Bethany Morrison poked him in the elbow and passed him over a folded up piece of notebook paper. He unfolded it and found, written in Liev’s familiar angular but neat scrawl, the words: “‘My name is Chris and I am a bitch.’ Check a box below to indicate true or false.” Beneath that were two boxes, both helpfully labeled ‘true.’ Chris looked over his shoulder to Liev, the next row over and two seats behind. Liev gave him a little ‘what’s up’ nod and smirked.
Chris gave him the finger from underneath his armpit, and took his pen to mark both boxes with big black X’s.
Jed looked up into the pure blue sky, clouds of smoke moving gently against the breeze and weaving through the treetops. The ground was soft under his back, his fingers resting delicately against the damp soil and churned-up grass. He could feel something wet and warm sliding down his face. As he reached up his hand to brush it away, he was met with abrupt burning pain that shot from his fingertips and ended somewhere deep between the bones of his right arm.
The noise of the battlefield was suddenly loud around him. Springfield rifles roared as the Confederates fled up the steep slope of Missionary Ridge. He could hear men crying as they slowly died while soldiers ran past. There was a hum in the air, mosquito buzzing mini balls, the drone broken only by the dull thud of good aim. He thought he could hear cannon fire from the south, but it might have just been his heartbeat in his ears. Jed watched as Union soldiers, their blue uniforms bright in the midday sun, moved past him. With a groan and surrounded by a blissful fog of pain, shock, and gun smoke, he watched the battle rage around him.
The shout was shriek-like in a way no human voice should ever be. It plunged the longhouse into silence, everyone straining to hear what was going on. Then a very loud, very sharp and very brief sound resounded outside. Suddenly, it was madness all around. Calls turned to shouts, soft footsteps to a loud pounding of feet. In the chaos, a hand took hold of Yahto’s wrist and dragged him along. Mother shouted “RUN!” and so, he did. Inside, on the battered earth, it was easy enough. Once they left the construction for the uneven ground of the forest, things became more complicated. Roots, stones or nothingness under his foot when he had expected solid ground were traps to which he never failed to fall. Each time, the hand would tug upon his and keep him more or less upright. Around them, the forest was filled with the rustling of leaves brushing against running bodies. Behind them, more shouts, more thundering. His mind came back to it, wondering what caused that sound. The distraction meant more fumbling, more jerks of surprise when a branch hit him. Until there was both a root to trip him and no earth to help him regain his footing. He felt himself fall forward, felt the sweat slicked hand lose its grip on his wrist and, finally, felt the pain as his body landed harshly on the ground. “Up, Yahto,” said Mother’s panicked voice “Get up and run!” she ordered while pulling him to his feet. Before he could be up and running again there came another voice, shouting. A man’s voice. His words didn’t mean anything for Yahto who had never heard any such word before. But his mother stopped her tugging and abruptly pushed him back on the ground. She joined him there, her body on top of his, her voice begging, her words suddenly just as impossible to understand as the man’s had been.
“Behold, she comes to meet you, does the Beautiful West, meeting you with her lovely tresses, and she says, ‘Here comes he who I have borne, whose horn is upstanding, the eye-painted pillar, the bull of the sky! Your shape is distinct; pass in peace, for I have protected you’ — so says the Beautiful West to the king.”
from Pyramid Text Utterance 254, trans. R. O. Faulkner.
“It is good of my mother to order me like this,
‘Give it up out of your sights’;
see how my heart is torn by the memory of him,
love of him has stolen me.
Look what a senseless man he is
– but I am just like him.
He does not realise how I wish to embrace him,
or he would write to my mother.”
from Papyrus Chester Beatty I, trans. B. Mathieu
I came to St. Louis in April 1847 with a letter of introduction from my schoolteacher in my pocket and a rucksack slung over my shoulder. The rucksack contained all my worldly possessions, save for my savings, which were in a small pouch tucked into the lining of my coat. I had an appointment on the afternoon of the day I arrived with Edwin Thatcher, a well-established attorney in the city, and I hoped to be taken on as a trainee under his tutelage. I was nineteen years old.
“Fucking, fucking bag of moo and shit,” Sergei muttered. He eyed the cow, just out of reach. It rolled its eyes wildly back at him. A little more of the ledge it stood on crumbled.
“How did you even get there?”
The cow didn’t answer.
The fight started after the last gas station stop up I-5 before the turn-off, although it didn’t start as a fight. Just as (Jon would maintain to himself, pathetically) an attempt at advice — but in their still-rattled state after their near-miss with that 14-wheeler it had bristled Cris immediately, which in turn had stung Jon, until the whole thing was blown out of all sense and proportion, another shambling, misshapen beast loping off across the landscape, tearing down buildings and ripping up powerlines without losing its fangy malformed grin. That was the thing: it was always stupid to start, always nonsense. Otherwise they might notice it instead of letting it fly under the radar, and could stop it before it began to grow.
He has a tent. He has a sleeping bag. He has a week’s worth of: energy bars, MREs, vitamin C, water purifying tablets, batteries, coffee, socks, multivitamins. He has two sets of thermal underwear, a knife, a flare gun, a first-aid kit, a lighter, a flashlight, sunscreen, a compass, bug repellent, deodorant, a length of rope, half a dozen ballpoint pens, a notebook, sunglasses, two small solar panels.
He also has: one Canon 1DS Mark III, one Canon V1, an assortment of lenses, 300 rolls of Kodak film, and a tripod.
Above him, the helicopter rotors whir away, whump whump whump whump whump whump, fainter and fainter until they fade away entirely.
Frank Blakeley’s office was the size of my entire life. His desk was a slab of mahogany as big as a door, nothing marring the perfect mirrored darkness but a telephone and a pristine blotter. The rug was thick enough to drown in. Outside his windows most of Seattle hunkered down in the overcast darkness, like a beaten dog showing Blakeley its belly, hoping for a pat, expecting only another kick.
Even the smoke from his cigar looked rich: thick white curls eddying around his head like an ersatz halo, too heavy to rise until they had a moment to dissolve. Frank’s family was money, and more than money, power. He might have been the district attorney but he didn’t work out of the DA’s office downtown, tucked away in those concrete rat warrens making the city go. What Frank liked was this private office like a showroom, high up in Smith Tower where he could look down on the rest of us and smile. I didn’t belong here, and I knew it. His smile said he knew it too. I rested my battered fedora on my knee and waited, patiently, to find out why I’d come.
“Just, you know, thrash about a bit. Moan some.” Jake lit one of the candles and placed it at a precarious angle on the side of the bureau. “I’ll go downstairs, see if the old woman’s got some baking powder.”
Will shot him a look so sour it could’ve curdled milk. “I know you are not going to leave me tied up here.”
“Got no other choice. And you ain’t that tied.” After that time in Amarillo (a string of bad circumstances Will referred to collectively as ‘that time I should have killed you’), Jake had learned that no matter how important authenticity was, you never tied a body up with an inescapable knot unless you were real invested in that body’s being unable to escape no matter what the circumstances. Jake reached over and patted his friend’s knee. “Back in an hour, give or take,” he grinned, and headed for the door.
“I swear to Jesus, I will wring your–” Neck, Jake supposed, was what came next, but the old farmhouse was a well-built fortress, and once its heavy wood doors closed, you couldn’t hear a peep from the other side. Putting on his best grimly resolute face, but smiling inside, he walked down to the room where the household had been told to stay put.
