Congress of the Birds

All of the universe is a union meeting: five minutes into the reading of the proposed amendments and there has already been a motion from the floor, a contention so fierce that the doors have been locked and heads counted, fists raised, temperatures and humidity index alike both spiked sky high.

Sweltering, despite their technology, the air thick and muggy with the smell of the river, the distant sea, a heaving mass of life and breath and dander, shed hair and scales and hides and horns all borne aloft on the slightest breeze to hover threateningly in the uneasy glimmer of the afternoon sun, the bounce light from the LEDs, the soft fill of bioluminescence.

This is not the first time this has happened, nor the last, and yet: every gathering splinters so. What is united must dissolve, what is separate must join together. In the streets they riot, an unruly mob, tails thrash and rhizomes clash, seeking water, seeking soil, a centuries deep humus horizon with the fungal networks carrying messages between. A brick flies through the air, knocking a fascist from his horse; in the hot light of LA Harry Hay flees through the alleys to take shelter with the drag queens.

Trigona Necrophaga

Rain rattles against the windowpane and she is six feet deep in the bedding, moving inward and down. Outside the wind shakes the houses and the apartments and through the rain the sound of the freeway has dwindled to almost nothing.

The streets are not truly empty; there is never a time of day or night where something is not moving or just passed, and if the streets are still then a plane is passing overhead, a train is rolling in the distance, a siren is howling in the hills, a bell is ringing in the harbor.

But close enough.

Next to her someone snores quietly, two floors up and three units over someone coughs wetly. She may or not be the only one awake, but she is not alone, never alone, her sisters may never see her nor know her name, but they are bound together through walls and floors and the sound of the rain. The alchemy of the gut, the sour taste of the meat.

Tomorrow has a gravity like the edge of a cliff, drags at her bones like the tide. In the dark hours she staves off sleep, eyes clear and unblinking, legs and arms unresting, heart stuttering in her chest. Bones ache, teeth grind; time cannot be stopped but she tries. She cannot live past sunrise, and every minute clawed out of the night is a minute free of the dread beast of the future.

Hoarders and Wasters

You are patient and unkind as the grey light of a winter’s dawn among the canyons of downtown, anonymous, one more white face beneath a dark cap, bundled in a nylon jacket. No one notes your lack of breath hanging in the early morning air, not with the face mask digging into the waxy flesh of your ears.

You do not hunt merely to survive. True enough, you prefer the mist coiling into a room, and teeth white against bruised lips, a mouth pressed to your chest until it drinks; romance might be dead, but so are you, so. You have at your command all the tricks and tools of the common man, and all the patience and skill of four hundred years. Your hand does not quiver on the trigger, your breathing does not cause the barrel to weave.

He stops for coffee, as ever he has, and you are scant feet behind him when he emerges. The gun kicks in your hand, jams once, twice, but he is already falling. Sheer waste, the blood spreading over the sidewalk, but when meat has turned it must be discarded.

Ahasuerus

He doesn’t worry about the frauds, time always sorts them out, and at this point what’s the rush? He can wait a lifetime to see, and really where is the harm anyway.

It’s the real ones that spook him, even now, because you never know when you’re going to walk around a corner in Addis Ababa and bump into that surly prick, and the thing about that is that after a while you sort of get used to running into folks every few decades or centuries or so. The world’s big, but it’s not that big, and when you’ve got nothing but time you get to where you expect it, that’s all.

So it starts to gnaw at him when he hasn’t seen one of the others in a while, like maybe they’ve gotten off the ride and he’s the only one left on it, like maybe he’s missed last call somehow. He doesn’t sleep much these days; ever watchful, ever ready, ears strained for the soft footfall of a thief in the night.

In that sense it’s a relief when he’s picking his way through the fox-haunted forests where Chernobyl used to be and there he is, getting gnawed on by a lynx, glowering up at the rain. “You’ve looked better,” he tells the Roman, and Longinus has the decency to laugh.

(credit for this version of Longinus as always to Brendan Adkins)

Atmospheric River

It’s pissing down rain like the weather’s got a grudge against the city and Tits is in a foul mood. Too much blood lately, too much gunplay; her nose is numb with the sharp reek of sulfur. You’d think the rain would scrub all that away, but no: every wretched festering smell gets caught in the teeth of the fog and rots there. No joy in life, these days.

Still, it’s not without its uses, this feculent storm. Folks, honest as well as not, mostly stay indoors as much as they can, and the rivers and ditches boil and froth with the water they can’t choke down. A bad time for losing bodies, but a great one for finding them that’s been lost, and so tonight she’s out in this misery with a fishhook and a line trawling for whatever remains of Fjaler the Swede, which scuttlebutt has was ditched in the lake a month back.

Her line snags and she bends double against it, rain drumming on the rubber of her hood. He’s ugly and fishgnawed as you’d expect, when what remains of his face comes floating up under the leaden surface of the water, but still: Tits grins, all teeth and pupils. “Step back out of hell for a second,” she tells the corpse, “I’ve got work for you yet.”