Community Ambassadors

Someone’s been fucking around beneath the overpass again and it’s starting to piss Jillian off. You expect a certain amount of detritus, the odd condom or little glass vial, some anonymous dog or human shit, but lately it’s all chicken bones and black wax and pins. None of the others will touch the stuff, no matter that it’s clearly bullshit, so she’s always the one to scrape it up, down on her knee pads hoping the pins don’t poke a hole in her latex gloves.

The smell from the river is vile, but what else is new. Summer days you can almost see it, a wavering miasma of piss and muck and oil, simmering just below the temperature of blood, but she grew up here, it’s no worse than the paper mills down to the south or the hog farms up top of the cliffs. In cooler weather, folks go kayaking, and if you squint your eyes and only look at the parts they’ve rewilded, it’s even beautiful.

When she’s packed everything up, all the regular trash and the new cosplay shit swept into the city branded bag, she digs a stub of sidewalk chalk out of her kit and scrawls several sprawling equations over the pavement, a basic charm against sandflies and mosquitos but it looks impressive if you’re an idiot. It’ll wash off in the first rain, but god willing she can at least save the lives of a few chickens.

Accelerationist

She hadn’t meant to kill the old man, had Tits Akimbo, but she hadn’t noticed the inhaler that fell out of his pocket while she was stuffing the gag in his mouth, either. “You damn fuckwit,” she says, and kicks the corpse in annoyance. Not that it matters much; she hadn’t left a trace on the fourteenth floor office overlooking the lake, but normally she gets paid in one form or another, and this one’s gratis.

It’s a good view but the window doesn’t open, so Tits pulls out her little glass cutter and carves her way through both panes of glass, large circle on the inner one, smaller one on the exterior. She leaves them on the corpse’s chest with his cooling hands wrapped around them; it’ll send some kind of message to whoever find him, but good luck figuring it out. Might as well stick ’em somewhere useful.

When the Don’s motorcade comes rolling past the cathedral she’s set up proper. The rifle bucks in her hands and she doesn’t wait to see what happens. The car’s windows are bulletproof and odds are good that someone spotted the flash, but the point wasn’t to hit anything. Tits isn’t one for causes, but she’s no monarchist; let the rich dream of blood and fire while they may.

Imperial Privilege

Jannes and Mambres have been loaned out, and loaned out again, and while the renown is pleasant, the travel is wearying. They’ve just arrived in Ur Kasdim after weeks of eating nothing but dust and drinking nothing but leathery water, and so they’re sniping at each other: Jannes is flat upon his back with nausea after so long swaying in the saddle, and Mambres is rubbing rosewater over the abraded skin of his thighs. “Say what you will,” he says, “these outlying kingdoms are hospitable enough.”

Jannes groans, opens one dyspeptic eye. “Don’t get comfortable here, brother of my heart. The signs are inauspicious.”

Mambres blinks. “I have seen nothing of the sort in the charts. Let me see your figures.”

“It’s not a matter of figures.” Jannes waves him off, limp as a newborn lamb. “Did you not mark the gimlet eye of the vizier when first we came? The poison he plans for the king?”

“Oh, that. You know as well as I—” a grunt, as he stands up again and lets his skirts settle about his feet. “—that all is treachery, ever a treacherous king, a treacherous vizier, in all these border kingdoms. What is an execution, an assassination, to the wheel of the heavens?”

Jannes groans again, and covers his face with a cushion.

Hugger-Mugger

Hot nights prick dreams of blood out of their panting, heaving sides, tongues grown too big for their mouths, chins wet with slobber. In the warehouses, the revolutionaries stockpile guns, toys against tanks, the pitiful arsenal of the civilian, but in Dallas paw hits pavement and sizzles as they run. A wild, airless night, humid and heavy, full of frogcall and the thrum of cicadas, the night sky pressing against the city like wet rope, and they hunt.

They have carved names into the leather they wear around their necks, their wrists, their ankles, crisscrossed over the almost human curve of their chests: fascists, bootlickers, scabs, all the doomsday men in ill-fitting suits and ugly haircuts that have gathered to chant and wave torches. They circle the crowds, picking off stragglers, the slow moving, the drunk, the fat hunters with Wyoming tickets in their pockets, the Saturday warriors in their polyester camo. The alleys grow slick and sticky.

In the morning there will be empty seats, abandoned hotel rooms, empty book depositories. The air will roil with copper, iron, the black bodies of flies, the hope of a storm on the verge of breaking. They will return to work, collars peeking coquettishly from beneath apron straps, but tonight they are free, and roused, and revenged.

Cross Not the Ancient Ways

God help you, this board game night has a parliamentarian.

You had thought you were getting cruised by a grad student you met at a party and her husband for a threesome or a poly situationship, but somehow or other here you are, in a room full of sixteen people you don’t know and two you do. The game has been going on for years, across multiple sessions, and is some extremely complicated affair that involves dice and deeds of title and letters of marque and reprisal and frequent trips to other rooms to tensely negotiate with other players. You’ve spent the last hour haggling over Montenegrin forest futures with a widespread black poet and you’re not even sure you could find Montenegro on a map.

Some people seem to be in character, but you can’t get a handle on whether that’s a requirement or just a commitment to the bit; more folks aren’t in character than are, but both camps are sniffy about the other. You’re three beers in at this point and you’ve had the game explained to you by at least five different people, but it sounds like they’re all playing different games. One of them involved a lot of cones. Someone said vlet at one point, but they were shouted down by everyone else in the room, you haven’t figured out if that was a rule you aren’t familiar with or just rudeness or what. The room spins around you, and your palms sweat so that the paper money you’ve been holding on to since you walked in bleeds into your skin.

The parliamentarian sits in a chair in the corner, watching everything, saying nothing, a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order tucked threateningly under one stiletto heel.