Being back was like someone had lifted all my skin just far enough away from my body to slip a layer of black pepper beneath, then tugged it back on so tight that it was all I could do not to claw myself bloody to get out. The hotel ballroom’s doors were decorated with flashing lights and a hand-painted sign that read TIME MACHINE, but stepping inside was less like traveling twenty years back, and more like being pushed twenty years closer to my inevitable death. It was the worst paranoia of a pot high mixed with the uncomfortable disorientation of being just this side of browning-out drunk, only without the positive side effects of either condition, and I was hit with a wave of panic so fierce that I might have bolted right then and there if a pair of tiny hands hadn’t spun me around and slapped the left side of my chest.
Author Archives: ssbb-admin
Unwound
It’s freezing outside, and Austin’s building’s front door is like some sort of Nirvana, shining forth into the hardship and dusty toil of a Tuesday night. He’s walked twenty minutes from the library, where he spent six hours fighting with Cicero, until the Latin was swimming in front of his eyes. It takes two or three frustrating tries, numb fingers fumbling his keys, before he gets inside and breathes in warm air.
He makes for the stairs without even looking at the mailbox. Getting home has given him enough energy to jog up the first flight, but it fades pretty fast, and he takes the second at more of a trudge. He checks the time as he sorts through his keys again: eight forty-seven. Crap, he never had dinner, no wonder he feels so…extra-awful. He thinks about food, thinks that he’d maybe rather not.
Foreign Exchange
Liam Conway was practically raised on American Westerns. His mother had been a fan of one actor in particular, a man that rarely spoke in his films but radiated a self-assurance that had made her and his sister swoon. He remembered gathering around the telly and catching the marathons on just the right channel.
Though he wasn’t as vocal or as visible as them, perhaps he swooned a bit too. While he knew to some extent that it wasn’t real–particularly the parts with the Indians, which always made him a tad uncomfortable–he had always hoped that America was full of tall handsome cowboys.
If the airport where he’d landed was any indication, he’d been sorely mistaken.
Jealous Of The Gods
by Shouga Naiko (生姜ないこ) (mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/139128.html) Love1
Gardens In Your Heart
by Yuite Dio (神莠射手) (mirrors http://s2b2.livejournal.com/140327.html) Love0
Painting Petals Red
Lilly-white. The last one had possessed such skin too, before he’d thrown himself into the fire.
Tried to make himself ugly to him, as if that would stop him from admiring the bone structure beneath the skin, the organ that lay limp between his legs.
And then he’d ripped into the flesh of his own wrist, determined to be free of the life of captivity, when he’d been rescued from the fire and healed. Though burned, he still had looked beautiful.
Ever the prideful ones, fae.
In the Library
[Readers sensitive to consent issues may exercise due caution. –Ed.]
There was something splendid about the scent and feel of old books. To be surrounded by them was something he’d desired since his earliest recollections. As technology progressed, he became more and more of a throwback, spending long hours pouring over tomes that would be much ‘easier to carry’ on a ‘reader, but he loved the feel of the paper, the smell of age, the sound of the pages turning, the sensation that he was actually learning something as opposed to having it plugged into his brain without digesting it. He resented the ‘ease’ of technology, how it made people take for granted the beauty of the words on the page, how they flowed from one mind to another over the expanses of time and distance.
In another time, he would have been one of the Irish monks, keeping alive the words of the ancients despite the church’s edicts and the layman’s fears. Such an ascetic life would suit him, if he had access to words on paper. More than anything else, words were his god.
Set in Stone
Only when the sun was at it’s highest was the haa’sith of the Light allowed to travel through the temple grounds to bathe. It was the only chance Ashiid had to clean his pale scales of the temple’s cloying incense. It was also the only designated place where he could be away from the priests, the citizens and the other haa’sith.
Ashiid hid his nudity beneath a robe as pale as his sun-bleached scales. It was a billowing thing, made to accommodate generations of Ateimei bodies, from young to old, lithe to gargantuan. His role as the light haa’sith, or emissary in the Standard lexicon, was the most flexible of all haa’sith.
The Doll
There was an old house at the end of Shiro’s street—Victorian, his architect brother would have pointed out. With a sunken porch, boarded windows, peeling paint, and shingles littering the overgrown lawn, it was a poor sight. Lonely. It seemed a shame that such a place had gone to decay.
Go to China!
“Go to China!” his father said. “See the world!” his mother added. (“Use all those seemingly useless ‘dialects’ you learned in college!” his own brain chimed in, treacherously.)
Somehow, Roger was fairly sure that this was not what his parents had meant: a sleeper car on a zhida train– overnight direct express– from Wuhan to Shanghai.
It wasn’t actually horrible, despite Roger’s initial misgivings about being a foreigner sharing a car with three curious Chinese. They asked questions only at the beginning of the trip, before the train departed, and Roger answered them easily: no, he wasn’t here to teach English; he had an internship at a brokerage in Shanghai waiting for him, thanks to his father; he looked forward to sleeping the entire way.
No Easy Way
At the foot of the Hollowed Cliffs in presence of sea and sky, under the names of the Brother and Sisters of the wave he once served, the man once named Ker Caliel dei Salis swore off any future expeditions that did not come with a treasure meant to be found. No more inane riddles, no more locked rooms passable only after every single necromanced fiend died eight times, and he banned puzzles that could only be solved at dawn. It prevented necessary rest. Caliel rubbed bleary eyes, swearing when dust, sand, and the crumbling rock around him crusted his skin.
