Tag Archives: shukyou

23
Jul

In the Bush

Posted by | Categories Text, Yes And Special no. 2 | Tagged ,

“Only four crates, correct?”

Eryn nodded, then held up the small duffel he had clutched tight in his hands. “And this.”

The customs agent nodded and made a note of it. He had a severe face with bushy brown beard and eyebrows, both of which sprouted several small, downy blue feathers at intervals. Eryn had considered that kind of combination, which would have been both sufficient to the Reserve’s criteria and cheaper, but in the end, he’d decided that he couldn’t have been happy with that kind of halfway. The post-transition therapist had said it was a good sign that he was adjusting to a lack of body hair so quickly. Eryn didn’t miss so much as a follicle of it.

25
Jun

The Campsite Rule

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 49, Text | Tagged ,

The last time he’d seen Mr. Elson, Antoine had been hiding upstairs in his room with Chris, trying to stay the hell out of the way of Chris’ feuding parents. Chris’ older sister, Amber, had been old enough to have her learner’s permit by then, so she’d gotten good at hightailing it out of there as soon as voices started to rise. But Chris and Antoine had been twelve at the time, so the best they’d gotten in terms of escape was how Antoine’s house was all the way across the street. Antoine had gone down the hall to the bathroom, and as he’d passed the window that looked out over the front of the house, he’d seen Mr. Elson with a heavy duffel thrown over his shoulder, stomping down the front walk to the pickup truck out front. That walk had marked — for Antoine too — the end of a lot of things.

23
Apr

And All the King’s Men

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 48, Bang*Bang no. 62, Text | Tagged ,

JULY

By luck, or chance, or maybe fate, I was the only wait-er in the waiting room when the neurosurgeons came in, one walking, one wheeling. The latter had the blank, semi-human almost-face of cutting-edge medical droid technology. Maybe its partner had brought it along so she could teach it how to tell friends and family that a loved one had passed away. Empathy lessons in real time, with me as today’s case study.

The human surgeon pulled a white mesh down from over the bottom half of her face. “The surgery was a success, and Senator Rask is in stable condition.”

For what felt like years, I just stared there, my gaze frozen on her wide, pretty mouth, trying to use my mind to will her to repeat that sentence, just in case I’d somehow managed to misinterpret the words ‘he’s’ and ‘dead’. I had seen the bright red fan his brains and blood had painted all over the white marble wall, after all; I still had some of both on my otherwise silver tie. The surgical droid whirred softly as it leaned a little closer to me. Its own appendages were clean. “May we speak to the family of Kayin Rask,” it said, its voice dropping pitch slightly on the last three syllables as its voice synthesizer composed proper nouns to insert into its otherwise-prepared script.

“I’m–” I scrubbed at my face. Sunlight was still streaming in from the windows outside, but this was high summer north of the Arctic Circle, so I had no idea what time or even what day it was. Mauri and Clio had been here earlier, but now they were both gone without so much as a coat left on a chair. “I have power of attorney,” I said, because it was true, and because sometimes for people like us, that’s even better than family.

26
Mar

The Red Woman

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang Special no. 9, Text | Tagged ,

In her ninety-fifth summer, Mayrat af-Qash met the dragon.

She’d been expecting something to happen; ninety-five was an auspicious number, after all, and to make it to one’s ninety-fifth year was an auspicious thing. Of course, most people lacked the heavy preservation of magic saturating their bones, making them look no more than four decades old, but Mayrat hardly considered that cheating. She’d given much of her life to her magic, and thus she thought it only fair it gave back.

She was working in her garden, tending to the grapevines that hung heavy with black summer fruit, when the evening air stirred and she looked over just in time to see a red dragon roughly the size of a large horse land on her roof. Most humans were struck dumb with awe and terror upon seeing a dragon; Mayrat was just irritated. “Get off!” she shouted, sweeping her arms in a great shooing motion. “You fat awful lizard, get off! You’ll cave the thatch in!”

For a moment, the dragon just looked at her, and Mayrat had cause to wonder whether or not all dragons were capable of understanding human speech, or whether they only sent forth as their envoys the ones who did. This one wasn’t very bright, obviously, or it would have settled on the clay path to Mayrat’s front door or the fallow field by the well or literally any other surface that did not include her somewhat fragile and quite flammable roof. “Get off!” she shouted again, and this time she cracked a shower of sparks from her knuckles; sure, she’d burn down her own house in the process, but she’d always been the kind of person who could accept the consequences of her own folly better than she could deal with the fallout from other people’s stupidity, and that went for dragons too.

But the dragon at last huffed and flapped its wings, relocating to the ground near the patio where Mayrat took her evening tea. It was a good thing this dragon was small, she realized; she’d seen paintings of ambassadors as big as cathedrals, whose long necks and terrifying claws gave even her great heart pause. Size notwithstanding, the dragon still wasn’t welcome. “Go away!” she shouted, marching over. She’d been weeding, and thus she found herself brandishing a trowel as though it were a sword without particularly meaning to. “I’ve no goats for you to eat and nothing of particular interest for you to knock down. Also, I’m a very powerful magician, and if you make me cross, I will … be very cross.” Damn it all, she was only wearing a light dress; without her robes or other trappings of office, she looked as imposing as a mother of eight on market day.

26
Feb

zero six four eight three are you listening

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 47, Text | Tagged ,

seven two six five one five zero three five two zero two one four one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero two one four one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero two one four one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero two one four one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero you one four one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero you are four one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero you are not one
seven two six five one five zero three five two zero you are not imagining this

16
Dec

Eve

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

“All right,” said Malcolm, drawing his knees up to his chest, “who’s first?”

The bottle of brandy set in the midst of them had been pilfered from the dean’s private stash, but since he wasn’t strictly supposed to have it there in the first place, Reginald had argued, there’d be little chance of his making a commotion upon finding it gone. Of course, he’d made this argument only after showing up in the dormitory’s small third-story common room with the purloined spirits, at which point old adages about begging forgiveness and asking permission suddenly seemed quite relevant. He was the most rakish of the lot, and indeed of the whole college; he was here on scholarship, on account of his brilliance at engineering, which covered steep tuition the other young men’s parents coughed up every semester. The other lads never let him forget it, but he in turn never let them forget how his name looked listed above theirs when exam results were posted. He was there because his parents couldn’t afford the train ride home from more than once a year.

Gautam tossed another log on the fire, though it didn’t stop his shivering. “I don’t understand why we are doing this again.” He was there because by the time he’d traveled all the way home to Madras, he would have had only enough time to remark on how he didn’t celebrate Christmas anyway before turning on his heel and starting the journey right back to his volumes of poetry.

“It’s tradition, yeah?” Izzy was another non-celebrant, though Hebraic where Gautam was Hindu. He was also an American, though, and thus had similar reasons for remaining over the winter holidays, his nose in his books of anatomy. “Read about it. Dickens and the Ghosts of Christmas What-Have-You. Not such a thing back home, so far as I can tell, but hey, when in Rome, right?”

Malcolm was a pedant by nature, but nevertheless refrained from pointing out that they weren’t in Rome, but in Sheffield. He himself had no family to return to. “It’s a tradition,” he confirmed, reaching for the brandy and taking a swift swig. It burned inside him, sending warmth spreading out to the farthest reaches of his extremities, even though he knew it made his cheeks flush and all the freckles dotting his fair skin that much more visible. “It’s just what you do on Christmas Eve.”

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?”

26
Aug

Stack Whackers

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 44, Text | Tagged

“The what?” I asked.

“Stack whackers,” Irina repeated, enunciating each word through her Russian accent — though it seemed I’d heard her clearly the first time. “Luna didn’t tell you about them?”

“Uh, nope.” I shook my head. My first week as a work-study student assistant in the main campus library, and already I was having visions of my death at the hands of mafiosos hiding behind the huge sliding racks of periodicals down on B-level. It seemed to me an inefficient place to stage a hit, but what did I know? My incredibly Italian surname to the contrary, I’d never been in the mob.

Luna, the head reference librarian, laughed without looking away from the computer screen. “It’s not the technical term,” she pointed out.

“You find them in the stacks,” Irina said, “and sometimes they … you know.” She made her fist into a hollow tube shape, brought it to her pelvic level, and began jerking it back and forth while making some of the most ridiculous pseudo-porn grunts I’d ever heard, bringing both Luna and me to giggles.

29
Jul

Six Sundays in July

Posted by | Categories Text, Yes And Special no. 1 | Tagged ,

1982

The first time I kissed Frank was the night Joe Cornish died.

I knew his was the finger on the other end of the button as soon as I heard the doorbell sound, so I dried my eyes and buzzed him right in. I heard him coming up the stairs to my fourth-floor rathole of a studio, each step weary and sodden, while the downpour outside echoed through the concrete stairwell. He rose into my view like a ship coming in over some far horizon, one dark, wet degree at a time, until he was there at my harbor in his tight brown pants and white summer sneakers, his moustache made sad by the rain.

“Joe,” I said, because there wasn’t anything else to say about it. Not even a year in, and we’d long passed the point of questions beyond ‘when’.

He put a hand to his face. “Jesus, I didn’t want you hearing from someone else.”

24
Jun

Ibeji

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 43, Text | Tagged ,

He didn’t look that heavy, but Taiye had been doing this for long enough to know one of the secrets of the universe, which was that a man doubled in mass as dead weight. He was alive dead weight, though, because the posting had been clear: back in a body bag was only worth a tenth as much as returned still breathing. Drunk and angry, he sputtered and thrashed as Taiye tossed him into the cell, but he might as well have been lashing out with noodles for all the strength he could summon. Taiye tapped the code on the outside wall and the force field shimmered, locking his bounty in. As attempts at evading capture went, Dr. Conall’s had been one of the more frantic and ineffectual ones Taiye had ever witnessed. Of all the bruises and scrapes the man in the cell would be feeling tomorrow, most had been self-inflicted.

The ship began to hum as the engines fired up, a low murmur that had become so familiar to him, Taiye only really noticed it when it was gone. A few seconds later, Taiye felt his stomach sway as the ship switched over from the planet’s gravity to its own. He was glad for this a second later when Conall doubled over and threw up.

Taiye made a face. “Facilities behind the blue panel,” he said, pointing over toward the wall nearest Conall’s hand. Already the environmental nanites would be swarming toward the biowaste, so as long as Conall didn’t roll around in it, he’d be fine for the four days it’d take them to reach the nearest waystation. “Need anything, shout. It’s a small ship.”

Conall rolled on his back — away from the sick, so at least his luck was holding somewhat — and folded his hands across his stomach. “Water,” he said, his voice a rasp.

“Water behind the blue panel too.” Taiye pointed again, just in case Conall had missed it the first time. “No shower, though.”

The room’s one interior door hissed open and Kehinde walked in, twisting her hair away from her neck and stabbing it through with a screwdriver to keep it in place. “Seventh in line,” she said to Taiye; she could have told him that from the pilot’s chair, certainly, but the ship’s autopilot could just as easily handle waiting in the departure queue, and she liked to keep an eye on things as much as he did. One long curl had escaped her earlier efforts at taming, and he gave it a little tug, a silent congratulation on a job well done.

When she didn’t respond, though, Taiye let his gaze follow hers, all the way back to Conall. He was still sprawled on the floor and looked green enough that he might empty his stomach again at any moment, but his light brown eyes were wide circles, binary moons in the sick-pale sky of his face. “I know you,” he said, looking from one of them to the other and back again.

“Sure you do,” said Kehinde, though the bluster in her words didn’t match the worry behind her eyes. “So at least you can tell your friends in prison you got caught by the best.”

But Conall shook his head with an eerie, spooked slowness. “3093-α and 3093-β. It’s you, isn’t it?”

It was a testimony to everything about their shared professionalism, toughness, and uncrackable poker faces that neither Taiye nor Kehinde so much as flinched. It was a damningly long minute, however, before either of them managed to speak again. “That doesn’t mean anything to us,” Kehinde lied, turning on her heel. “Better luck next time.”

29
Apr

A Prescription for Love

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 42, Text | Tagged ,

Jack Johnson, M.D., lowers the personnel file and narrows his eyes. He doesn’t like the man standing before him, the new face in the familiar hospital family. He’s young and handsome, what Jack was maybe fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. The young man sticks out his hand and introduces himself with a Mexican accent, thick enough to be exotic but not thick enough that Middle America can’t understand him: “Mariano Julio Vasquez, pleased to meet you.”

Jack’s face is defiant, his jaw set, his nostrils flared — but he’s a professional, and he’ll behave accordingly. “You’ll call me Dr. Johnson here,” says Jack, shaking Mariano’s hand with a measure of contempt. He lets show just how much he dislikes this arrangement.

Mariano’s young face looks troubled, but he doesn’t back down. “Of course, Doctor Johnson,” he says, pronouncing doctor with lilting emphasis on the second syllable. “I look forward to learning a great deal from you.”

“Well,” says Jack, looking down the six-inch height difference between them with his steely blue gaze, “even I’ll admit you come highly recommended. But this isn’t Mexico City. We do things differently around here. You’ve impressed some other people, to be sure, but that’s a far cry from impressing me.”

[Episode #1.4921, September 13, 1972]

25
Mar

Bless Your Heart

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang Special no. 8, Text | Tagged ,

JULIA: It’s just a little– Oh, shit.

[quick cut]

JULIA: And then you want to– Shit. Balls. Hold on.

[quick cut]

JULIA: But always– [offscreen crash] Oh, sweet Jesus, fuck me sideways.

[quick cut]

JULIA: Well, either these will be the best petit fours I’ve ever made, or I’m just going to have to kill everyone in the building to cover the evidence.

[musical cue, title card: “BLESS YOUR HEART”]

25
Feb

Riding Drag

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 41, Text | Tagged ,

“Velly solly, honorable sirs,” he said, all the while thinking, fuck your mothers.

17
Dec

The White Palace

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 40, Text | Tagged ,

Fard walked in the house, hung up his cloak and scarf by the door, and flopped face-down on the couch with such dramatic force that he felt a cord or two pop under his weight. Daanil didn’t even look up from his paper. “Went well, hm.” It was only a question by the most technical of definitions.

“I hate everything,” said Fard, though the sentiment was muffled through couch cushions that smelled like they’d had all manner of horrors spilled on them, which they had. They tasted even worse. He sat up. “I hate damned everything,” he said again, just in case it hadn’t come across the first time.

“Is that so,” said Daanil. Once upon a time Fard had mistaken Daanil’s unflappable tone for serenity, before he’d learned to recognize sarcasm for what it really was.

Fard blew a raspberry at the ceiling, then stopped when he saw the little drops of spittle fall back and dot his glasses; he tugged them off and wiped them with the tail of his shirt, shutting his eyes against the blurry world for the duration of the cleaning. “If I hear ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ one more time, I may scream and set the place on fire with my mind.”

29
Oct

Up the Garden Path

Posted by | Categories Bang*Bang no. 39, Text | Tagged ,

Ianaver Swordhand is a human fighter. Standing a majestic six and a half feet tall, he has high strength and charisma balanced by relatively low speed and dexterity. He wears a dwarf-forged breastplate, a gift from Nortiln Giantcrippler, the party’s other fighter (and himself a dwarf); he wields a sword that has a plus-three in dragonslaying, which is reputed to be very handy should he ever be approached by a dragon.

Literally the only reason Noah can remember most of this is because it’s all written on the piece of paper in front of him, on the table between his can of PBR and Jai’s bag of white cheddar popcorn.