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.

Trust Everyone

Coming home late that night, Carlisle finds a man waiting for him in the dark, bleeding gently into the upholstery of his one good chair. “They found me,” says the man. “I’m sorry… take this…” and drops a thumb drive on the floor. “Trust… no… one…”

He’s dead, and that’s upsetting, but that’s what the police are for, or so he’s heard. So he calls them, and they send over a detective, and they give him a blanket and a cup of coffee and they have a nice little chat while the paramedics take care of the body. He tells them about the thumb drive, but they don’t care, so when everyone is gone he connects it to his laptop and would you believe it’s full of games? and books?

He feels bad about the man dying, but it was nice of him to give him a present to apologize for making a mess of his chair. He spends the evening shooting little frogs in a tank in a pixel sewer, and that’s pretty fun. Not worldshaking, or anything, but it’s a cute little game.

The books are all pretty terrible, uniformly lousy science fiction from the 1970s written by men who clearly had a problem with Women Today, so he just ignores them. A few days later, a heavyset fellow in a bloodstained coat shows up and asks for the drive, so Carlisle gives it to him. The games weren’t that interesting.

Go In Your Hole!

The foul creature is alert.
The foul creature cannot be soothed.
The foul creature cannot be shouted down.

In the storm drains lives an enemy.
In the houses lives an enemy.
In the hallways and the streets lives an enemy.
In the trees and the bushes lives an enemy.

The foul creature moves like industry.
The foul creature cannot be stopped.
The foul creature cannot be turned aside.

If it jumps, it must be held down.
If it speaks, it must be silenced.
If it feeds, it must be savaged.
If it drinks, it must be driven off.

The foul creature does not sleep at night.
The foul creature has teeth so white.
The foul creature must bite bite bite.