Xeres

Though it be not written down, let it be known that I am drunk.

Alcohol, a vast ocean of specific knowledge. Do you know— no, listen. Do you know? All alcohol is pure spirits, all flavors come later, after the sugars have been eaten, passed through the invisible dying cells of the flocculent yeast, up the copper tubes, down to the terracotta pots, there to reswallow traces of earth, of pear, of agave, of horseradish, of nothing in particular. In Xeres, the solera drips across decades, the angels, wings and eyes and fire, dip their mouths toward the open barrels and take their share.

In the bar, the bartenders love her. Cedar asks questions, offers no wisdom, but is enthusiastic about everthing. This one tastes like dirt. This one like apples. This one comes from the highlands, you can tell (they say) because of how unsweet it is. Cedar, who had swallowed the spirits of a hundred cities, nodes and gasps and prods, and they love her for it. A mouth to taste and an ear to listen. She learns, as she learned the rope paths between the trees, as she learned to harvest ears, storing it all within her word hoard.

You are drunk, they tell her, eventually: go home. Yes, she says, indeed I am, I am made merry with alcohol; and by this grown wise.

Universal Childcare

Ellis is passed from stranger hands to stranger hands, poked and prodded, smelled and weighed and manipulated. Every time he opens his mouth to shriek they pop something into it, a nipple, a bottle, a toy, a thumb. He loathes their rough skin, their faces sprouting hair, the orange smear of wax deep in their ears, the long hairs curling from their noses. They jiggle him on their knees and if he had the power to strike them dead, they would die. He laughs, helpless, betrayed by his body, giggles and chortles and wiggles mechanically, and his face turns red and then purple with fury and they sweep him up into the air, as if vertigo and the illusion of flight should still his fury. Their voices are loud and mumbling, a senseless jangle of consonants grinding together like rockfall, pushed past yellowed, misaligned teeth and pale gums. He beats at them with his fists, reaches for their faces to gouge out their eyes, bites down with all his force on their hair. He hungers, and they feed him, but he hungers still, falls asleep uncovered and dreams of burning skies, seas of plague, choking fumes, trenches hipdeep with blood.

Bordet

The loggers overwinter in Spokane and are meat for the sharks in their tan suits: mister, want a job? got a line on a good one, two dollars and it’s yours. And then the job is a farrago or the bosses hire and fire folks so fast it might as well be. One company with a staff of 50 went through 3000 men in a season that way, each out on his rump after two days at most.

So the soapboxes come out and the placards go up, Wobblies marching up and down in front of the agencies on shark alley, chanting Don’t Buy A Job. Bordet is one of them, up from California by way of Seattle, and gets scooped up with the rest when the city cops decide to sweep up the suckers so the sharks can swarm in peace.

In the can he’s starved, hosed down, shuttled between unheated cells and sweltering steam rooms. His hair freezes, his gums recede, tuberculosis settles into his lungs. The cops beat him repeatedly. No charges are brought, but when he finally leaves town, his appendix is swollen fit to burst and the Portland hospital does such a hack job of removing it that the wound never closes entirely, weeping pus for months.

The Wobblies in Holtville pass a plate around to try to get him back in the hospital, try to crowdfund through the other chapters, but it isn’t enough, isn’t fast enough: Bordet sinks lower and lower and finally dies of his wounds a year later, seventy pounds lighter. The Spokane council repeals the ban on public speaking and the cops call it a victory. The Wobs call it murder.

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 amateur 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.