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.

Tuliptime

Upriver, things are different. In the flats, it’s all tulips and small towns and the largest concentration of street gangs outside of SoCal: red and blue and X3 tattoos. Upriver, past the rotting concrete factory, in the flood plains, where the houses are built on stilts or just sink slowly into the mud with every spring thaw, they come, drawn from all along the west coast, the burnouts, the methmakers, the traumatized veterans, the snipers. The social workers keep their desks turned toward the wall, backs to the open door; everyone who enters is a surprise, but any time things go sideways, there’s a desk between you and your client. Everyone’s got a story, but none of them quit. So it goes.

In the spring, the tulips bloom and tourists come from all over the state to wander through the fields. The town smears on stage makeup and apes a white Dutchness it never had. The windmills are for show, and the farmworkers wear masks to harvest the blossoms. In the language of flowers, tulips mean friendship, but you don’t want to breathe them in, don’t want their detritus to linger on your skin.

Buried against the side of the hill is a series of signs half-eaten with mildew, white on red: Around the corner/lickety-split/nice car/wasn’t it?

Large Pacific Striped Octopus

On the way back from the bar she coils around Dolfein in a tangle of limbs, flesh digging against flesh, mouths hard and clashing. Boneless with need. He gulps for air, face tight and pulsing, and she mirrors him, quivering red, lips fluttering in the wavering light. Too many mouths, too many limbs, he is the thin rubber skin of a balloon wrapped around a bubble of water.

“Tonight,” he gasps, fumbling for the door, “this once, now, please, oh, please…” She presses him down, envelops him, he is flat and flailing under a hand the size of a bed. He holds her off, but she slips his grasp, too many arms to count, around his wrists, his legs, his chest, his neck.

Squeezes.

There is a moment: the light clenches into a pinprick and he feels himself going, panic coursing through his veins like cancer, scrabbling helplessly against her arm, digging for space in the bloated meat of his throat, useless, too late, too late, not enough… Her grip relaxes and she slides off him. The world comes rushing back, he feels the color draining out of his face, his body aches, it hurts to swallow.

He cannot move, cannot do anything but drink air greedily into his lungs. Alive, somehow, still, alive, alive, o! The night is young and the weekend is long; god willing he’ll live to see Monday.