Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

from The Maltese Falcon, D. Hammett

“They think they’re clever, with their guns and their plans and their money, but they’ve lost the plot. Hardboiled, they say, but what do they know about hardboiled. Little boys playacting at being men. They can’t bear the scrutiny of idleness or the focus of work.”

Satan he nods, noncommittal, yellow and red. He cocks his head to the side and yawns; he’s heard it before.

“Always half smart. I’d kill the president for someone who was smart all the way around the track.” She spits out a tooth, not hers. “With their hands, sculpted by an artist who worked big and liked veins—nuts to that. Big hands, small hands, what does it matter. Any hands is big enough if you’re close enough.”

He hands her the knife and she flicks it open and closed and open again. Tests it against the leather: sharp as needed.

“Now,” she says, and leans over the table, touches one narrow fingertip to the tongue held immobile in forceps, “the past is prologue. Let’s get to work.”

He hit me over the head with an oar and dumped me in the bay to drown, which I thought was terribly rude. And after all I’d done for him! Hadn’t I taken him in, shown him the world, introduced him to the right people and the right attitude? He was so wonderfully louche, everyone adored him, the way he’d sweat and stammer when we’d ask him his opinions on art or music or politics or… well, anything, really! He wanted for nothing. I’d have given him the shirt off my back if he hadn’t already started wearing my clothes without asking.

Damned impertinent, really.

Still, so it goes, I suppose, if you’d believe my old father. “Don’t mix outside of your proper circle,” he’d say, “it’ll be the ruin of you yet.” I did think he was worried more about my getting hooked by some cheap piece that he’d have to pay off or send out of state to get the complications taken care off, but murder’s a pretty bad turn of affairs by anyone’s standards. At that he wasn’t far off, either, but I never did aspire to senatorhood, damn him. I could have been an artist, I swear, if I could have just buckled down and focused.

Well, anyway. Some hard feelings, but it’s too late for all that. Best of luck to him, the bastard.

Lotta folks ask Nudibranch Frank questions about nudibranchs and to be honest he does not have the answers. He has a lot of t-shirts and tattoos of nudibranchs, he thinks, but he’s never been quite sure what the precise definition of a nudibranch is. He just goes in and asks for a new tattoo and the tattoo artists figure it out, and after awhile his friends and family and, hell, coworkers, they all start buying him nudibranch pins and posters and whatnot and so from that he’s patched together a vague understanding of what they are. Some kind of aquatic worm? That comes in a bunch of shapes and colors? That’s about as far as he’s gotten.

It did spiral out of hand, yes, but he somehow hooked onto a group of drunk marine biologists during a convention and when they all decided to get tattoos it was too late to back out. Or it seemed like a good idea at the time. They’d picked out that first nudibranch for him, and one of them might have actually given him the tattoo, now that he thinks about it? He has a vague memory of needles and ballpoint pens and zippo lighters, and somewhere high on his back is a stick and poke done in an amateur hand.

They’re pretty things, anyway. Lotta colors. He likes how colorful he is with his clothes off, it’s like being a human skittle. He keeps in touch with the scientists, and every time there’s a convention somewhere nearby they’ll meet up again.

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.

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.