podcasts

Lying Is the Mark of Liars

Wealth accumulates at the top, entropy at the bottom. The foundation has rotted through, and a dense ooze the color of prairie soil has begun flooding the lower levels, filling the building with the heady smell of peat and tar, sun-baked grass and wildfire smoke.

Life on the upper floors goes on. Supplies are flown in by drones — canapes, crudite, alcohol in all its forms, delicate weed gummies like caviar, actual caviar, drifts of cocaine like powdered snow, marbled beef wrapped in gold leaf, everything rare and succulent and expensive. The parties continue around the clock, drowning out the slow burbling of the rising ooze.

No parties are held on the topmost floors, no wild orgies, no bacchanals. They do not live simply, but nor do they have any need or ability to flaunt. Generations of wealth and they have grown into the structure of the building itself, winding through the walls and down the elevator shafts like human ivy. A cluster of eyes pressed against a pane of glass, fingers and toes wriithing through the plumbing, organs ticking slowly over like an engine cooling. They know what is coming — feel it in their gelatinous bones — but they are grown too deep to uproot, too entwined to relinquish.

Do Not Despair

for Dave

Memory’s an untrustworthy thing.

Looking back on it, did all that really happen? How much was subjective, how much objective? What is objective reality, anyway — he stops himself from falling down that rabbit hole again.

Start with what you know.

He came to town with his father, that much is certain: his father is still alive, still here, they are still in town, good. He had an arranged marriage at what now feels like an irresponsbily young age: he’s married now, reasonably happily, doing fine so far. The rest of it — the fighting, the contests, the love triangles, the baking — that’s where it starts to get foggy. Looking through old pictures, they’re all so much smaller than he remembers, so much skinnier, so much more awkward. He is startled to realize that the woman he thought was ancient, centuries ancient, could not have been much older than he is now; the old man that plagued his father not nearly so shrunken as he recalls.

He finds a tape of a contest he’d been forced into — he can’t quite remember why — something that seemed like life and death at the time, two wild thunderstorms tearing at each other and the gym a shattered ruin afterwards, and it was just two gawky kids self-seriously flailing at each other. The gym is fine.

Every Day In Every Way

The damn thing has broken down again.

Swearing, viaductor Linnaeus hurls herself down the oil-sweet confines of the tube leading to waste reclamation. Something’s gotten wedged into the outflow pipe, and you can’t leave that to linger or the whole ship chokes on its chyme. Waste reclamation is silent except for the faint buzz of the archipelago of ghost lights that trace an uncertain path down from the digestor.

She’s not superstitious, but.

Last ship she was on, they pulled a half-dissolved woman out of one of the vats. She’d been in there at least a month, going by how decayed she was, and it wasn’t until the baleares started complaining about the strange taste of the taps that anyone came looking. They’d been brushing their teeth with corpse water for weeks. Nobody knew who the dead woman was; she wasn’t part of the crew, and they were a entire ship’s year out from the islands. Coalesced, they said, which sometimes happened; sometimes space clots and spits out a corpse, sometimes people go missing. Deep water is dangerous.

Linnaeus grits her teeth behind the mask and slips into the vat, hoping the ladder will still be there when she resurfaces.

Tempest Tossed

Unlucky traveler—

Out of the sea they come, the stallions of Ocean, wild and eager, cleft of hoof and sharp of tooth. They have smelled the mares we staked out along the shore, heads pointed toward the island, and so they are here, answering the ancient call. We cower in our underground chambers when the roof shakes, when the mares scream, clean our useless swords and pray for daylight. No one sleeps through that night; no one could, except the dying.

In the morning when the tide recedes we tremble forth to find the shore churned to froth, the mares shaking and wildeyed, knee-deep in new saltwater springs, necks raw where the harnesses that chained them to the earth have rubbed through the hair, bellies already distended with new life. The foals that are born from this joining are strong as the tide and beautiful as the horizon, and never more than half-tamed; we will sell them inland, far inland, where the sea is a rumor and Ocean a fable for children. Let them glimpse water but once and they are gone, and it’s the lucky rider who tumbles out of the saddle before being dragged before the waves.

The mares seldom survive the birthing; those that do will not suffer again a bridle. They must not be killed, lest the waters rise through the doors of the earth and wipe clean our city. Ocean is chary of its gifts.

Sweeping Philosophical Statement

In a bar, of course, and he won’t shut up, won’t listen, won’t even lower his tuneless goose honk of a voice.

No, no, breathe, it’s fine. (It’s not fine.)

An out-of-body experience, this level of vicarious embarrasment. Pinned, under the irritated eyes of everyone else. It’s a Tuesday, for christsake, it’s barely six o’clock, the bar is quiet and half-empty and he’s echoing around the place, laughing at his own jokes, a self-justifying machine elf, insufferable across multiple dimensions, and every other conversation has just died, they are laying (lying?) twitching and suffocating on the floor, flopping fish among the peanut shells.

He thinks they’re rapt, fuck me, he thinks he’s killing it.

He’s got opinions, which is bad enough, but worse, he’s got facts. Anecdotes. Interesting (no!) stories about the most inessential, mundane shit. The inventor of the Pringle. The ways that various countries spell whisk(e)y. Marxism. Is it worse that if he hasn’t read any Marx, or if he’s read a lot of Marx? Don’t get him started on Jungianism, he has no idea, but he saw a TikTok about it and god help you, he’ll show it to you.

The entire bar is watching him now. A full body flinch of a man. You can barely breathe: dead, you are dead. If only.