Fred and Kevin are shitkickers out in some bumblefuck little nothing town in Nevada. Calling it a town is putting on airs; the place is small enough that when they leave — like they’re absolutely going to, this summer for sure — that’s a tenth of the place gone right there. Course, that was before the giant worms started bursting out of the ground and eating people. Kinda put the kibosh on the whole plan.

Instead they’ve been stuck on top of the water tower for a couple of days now and Kev’s starting to get a little weird about it.

“I mean, it’d be a hell of a way to go, sure, but also: it’d be a hell of a way to go. I’m just sayin’.”

Fred spits over the side of the railing in outrage. “You are sick, man. I love you, but that’s bent. What about that little seismologist gal you were talkin’ to?”

“Hell, Fred, I’m not saying I wouldn’t mind a tumble in her rock polisher, I’m just saying—since we’re as likely as not to get got by those ugly sons of bitches—that I can think of worse ways to go. Dying of dehydration at the top of a power line, say.”

“Kev—”

Kevin coughs, turns his eyes very idly to the horizon where the first stars are just starting to show, says casually, “Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this thing on the internet called ‘vore,’ Fred, but I figure since we’re up here anyway, maybe I could tell you about it some.”

Things go… well, not downhill, exactly, but certainly sideways, after that.

for Andrew

Baby, you’ve got this. Today’s the day when everything clicks into place, I can feel it, I can feel the stars aligning, the high musical scrape of the celestial spheres grinding against each other shivering into an unexpected harmony, the pendula of the universe have all synched up for you, this is it, baby, it is breakthrough time.

What that looks like, who can say. Stare at the skydivers as long as you want, you won’t know what the fall is like until you jump. The future is here, it’s today, the world has been building towards this for untold eons of time, it’s all been leading up to this moment, this realization, this sad man looking out the window toward a night sky erased of stars, this sweeping orchestral music playing over a car leadfooting it out of town, these gunshots over the lake, this bloom of fire from the refinery.

Possible futures; but stay awake until your teeth hurt, the dawn’s coming anyway and the present slips horribly, inevitably into the future. You start awake, into another bodily epiphany, like so many before, like however many yet to come, the present is eternal, the future is always on the brink of being born, the past is the spit you smeared on the inside of your swim goggles to keep them from fogging. You’ve got this, baby. You’ve got this.

The gangster was a trouper, a composer and a softshoe man; an ego the size of the South and a mouth that wrecked as many opportunities as it generated. A broad stage Irish brogue that pronounced every extra h in aitch, he dominated in parlors and small stages across every unfashionable small town in the old Old Northwest.

“I’m the senior partner,” cracked the one with the mustache. “I’ll do the throwing out.” Too many horses, too many dancing girls, too much ego. You can’t stop Georgie; noodles and syrup are just enough to keep the dream alive, and he’s a natural fit to the boarding house with the tattered writers and the unemployed magicians. There’s going to be work any day now. Any day now.

Dinner at the house was all brother-sisters and husband-wife acts, and none of them have had work in years. The Depression stretched out into infinity, and the fat years were a memory at best. There’s only so far you can water the goulash and still call it a soup; but the difference between a trouper and a clasper is the willingness to overlook such trifles.

In the tenth century (using the Roman calendar) the library of Cordoba was a wonder of the world, with more than half a million handwritten volumes on every subject under the sun, with the index alone stretching to more than forty volumes. The life’s work of Caliph al-Hakam II, the library drew together books from the breadth of the Mediterranean, both temporally and geographically; in addition to contemporary works, the caliph commissioned a massive translation effort that compiled hundreds of works in ancient Latin and Greek into Arabic, a wealth of knowledge and learning that court visitors called the golden center of the West at a time when the largest Christian library had a collection numbering in the dozens.

Almost all of it was burned following his death.

Burned not through conquest or arson or accident, but piecemeal over decades by less studious usurpers bargaining with the ulama for power. Temporal power bartered from ecclesiastical, with al-Hakam’s son living a sterile, silent life in the shadow of al-Mansur the Victorious; the college of the faithful demanded a purer devotion from al-Mansur, and to prove his bonafides onto the bonfire most of the books went.

Still it was a golden age; al-Mansur’s bargain worked. Cordoba thrived, the silent outrage of later eras inaudible and unregarded.

Half the swim team had an orgy in a South Campus elevator, and it’s all anyone can talk about for weeks, if you don’t count regular conversations about food or class or politics or where to score weed or whether Drew needs to stop playing goddamn Zelda so people can watch the Simpsons hour. Other than that, though, hoo we, it’s all orgy rumors, all the time. This is the most entertaining bit of gossip since the orgy that was supposed to have taken place in a South Campus lounge last year; that one probably didn’t happen but the elevator one definitely did. (It’s always South Campus, South Campus is where the stoners and the poly kids live; North Campus is all first years, runners, and people who would be Republicans at other schools. There are sure enough multiple-partner hookups on North Campus, they’re just more drunken, ad hoc affairs you couldn’t call proper orgies, just three or four people fumbling at each other in a fourth floor hallway before crawling into a dorm room to fuck. South Campus plans its debaucheries.)

It’s a fun story, because half the people involved in it were free and clear and just there for a good time, and the other half, uh, had people they were still dating from back home and who they had to call and apologize to the next morning. Nobody apparently locked it into their word hoard, a dark, pleasurable secret they’d carry to their grave or at least until winter break, they all wanted to do the ethical thing and hash it out, and more power to them for it. Most of those conversations ended with a breakup, unsurprisingly and probably for the best; carrying a high school relationship into college is a fool’s errand, anyway. Not all of them, though — one swimmer’s partner was calling to confess their own orgy that same weekend and last I heard that couple is still together even now almost twenty years later.