S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 22

The Peripheral by William Gibson (Review)

 

Today, we’re going to review The Peripheral, by William Gibson.  I think we can probably begin with the TL;DR version of this review: go out and buy this book now.  If you’re a fan of neo-noir, cyber-thrillers, cyberpunk, or general sci-fi, you should already own it.  If you’re not really a genre-fan, but you have an appreciation for watching well-crafted characters unpack their struggles in the wake of a difficult plot, you should also buy it.

William Gibson writes fantastic characters.  The sci-fi genre is full of massive space-operas and overwrought narratives, often putting the characters in the backseat to the setting or just throwing fifty one-dimensional cut-outs at the reader.  Historically, weak characters have been a go-to criticism for genre fiction.  William Gibson doesn’t have those, or, at the least, has so few of them as to be statistically unimportant to the books he writes.  Ever since Neuromancer, I have loved the intriguing and often subtle ways he reveals his characters inner-stories, whether it’s as simple as when a character excuses herself to the restroom or as complicated as the web of lies they tell to distance themselves from an alienating world, it all comes off as believably human and poignantly deep.  The Peripheral continues this trend.  The characters are unfolded and unpacked in wonderful ways, stunning ways.  Their relationships, simple or complex, are revealed and spotlit in admirable, potent prose.  One of the less-subtle examples:

The protector had a thin white elastic cord.  She pulled it on, settled the eye-shaped steel cups over her eyes, and sat in pitch darkness, while Macon positioned the soft tips of the thing’s legs on her shoulders.  “When do you start printing?” she asked him.

“Printing the circuitry already.  Do this headset stuff tonight.  We pitch an all-nighter, might have it together tomorrow.  Now hold really still.  Don’t talk.”

Something began to tick around the ring-shaped track, headed to the right.  She pictured the stuff in Conner’s yard, humped over with morning glory vines, and imagined him never joining the Marines.  Failing the medical, for something harmless but never noticed before.  So that he’d stayed here, found some unfunny way to make a living, met a girl, gotten married.  Not to her, definitely, or to Shaylene either, but somebody.  Maybe from Clanton.  Had kids.  And his wife getting all the morning glory cleared away, and everything hauled off, and planting grass for a real front yard.  But she couldn’t make it stick, couldn’t quite believe it, and she wished she could.

And then the laser was right behind her head, still softly clicking, and then beside her left ear, and when it was back around the front, it quit clicking.  Macon lifted it away and removed the eye shield.

The stuff in his yard was still there.

The cast is full of dynamic and intriguing characters, from the more intrinsically relatable Flynne and Netherton, to the increasingly alien, such as Lowbeer or Daedra.  And, of course, the entire gamut in between.  Watching these people unpack before you, interact with each other, act and react to their changing world, and struggle to exist on their own terms was a reward all on its own, but Gibson also offers us a stellar setting and complexly believable plotline.

Gibson, for anyone who is somehow unaware, has always had a reputation for interpreting the cultural meaning and narrative trajectory of our technology.  This book continues that reputation.  The two examined settings are in the 2030’s and 2100’s, and somehow it all seems to make sense, with most of the technology from both eras traceable back to our current one.  The culture makes sense.  The stepping stones seem easily visible from where we currently stand, as if this technology should be available ten years from now, and maybe less if you’re a big fan of Raymond Kurzweil.  Of course, that makes sense considering one of Gibson’s better-known quotations:

I’m not trying to predict the future.  I am trying to use science fiction to somewhat understand an unthinkable present.

It works.  Through the lens of the setting and plot, we’re challenged to consider our technological culture, and the society  built around it.  Of course, there’s also The Jackpot…but I won’t spoil that for you, since you’ll be reading about it soon.

The plot couldn’t exist without the setting, the technological culture of the setting, the strange way it all makes sense to today.  Again, I shan’t spoil it for you, but I will say that the complexity of it all is the sort of complexity you’d expect to come out of a machine with so many moving parts and so much data.  It’s tightly paced, woven around the characters seamlessly, and incredibly intriguing.  The ending isn’t your typical thriller-ending, either, which I appreciated.  It’s much more believable than your typical high-octane series of reveals and action sequences.

I will say that it begins, as these things often do, with a witness to a murder.  Except, at the time, she isn’t aware she’s a witness, or even that it’s a murder.  Part of the reason for that is that the crime happens somewhere around seventy years in the future, and she was just playing a video game.  After that, things build up, revealing decisions made for personal, political, social, and economic reasons that begin to spiral out of control, and at the center of the intrigue…a broke freelancer in 2030, and a washed-up publicist in 2100.

Worth every minute.

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No Grave Sneak Peek #5: Katherine’s Place

Katherine’s apartment was a frenzied clutter of miscellany.  There were nearly two dozen countertops, bureaus, and desks overflowing with books, letters, and bills.  The kitchen counters were overcrowded with colorful post-its and handwritten notes, which seemed to spread like a fungus across the front of the refrigerator, as well.  Nearly every wall had been converted into overstuffed bookshelves.  The only immediately visible furniture were a pair of office chairs and a gargantuan Lay-Z-Boy in chocolate brown, its dusty surface giving it the air of true age.

“I didn’t expect you quite so soon,” Katherine said as she waltzed across the apartment.  “I haven’t prepared at all.  Hold on,” she dug through the drawers of an old armoire and came back with a pair of scented candles, lighting them with a bright orange Bic.  “It should all smell much better in a moment.”

“It’s okay,” Nicole said, closing the door behind her.  “Really.”

“No, no, I insist,” she dug out another candle from a place Nicole didn’t see, “it smells like musty old books all the time.  It’s like I live in a library, but there’s alcohol stashed everywhere. It’s like I live in Ernest Hemingway’s library.”

Nicole felt a smile spread across her face.  “I don’t see the point in living in anyone else’s.”

Katherine opened a cupboard, revealing an absurd number of glasses ranging from champagne flutes to mason jars.  She plucked a pair of thin-stemmed goblets from the cupboard and rested them on an arts magazine laid out by the dish-cluttered sink.  “I bet the Fitzgeralds had some good supplies around their library, too.  Brandy and snuff,” she sniffed delicately, “the simple joys.”

“What are we having?” Nicole stepped into the small partition of the room still free of literary detritus.

“Well, like I said, the good stuff,” she pulled a bottle from a booze-filled cupboard above the sink.  There was a wide variety of wine bottles layered on top of each other, and one bottle of scotch, as per Katherine’s usual.  “This one set me back fifteen dollars, a small fortune.”

Nicole chuckled, feeling a grave heaviness lift from her chest.  “Don’t let anyone ever say you’re a bad hostess.”

“I wouldn’t stand for such an insult.  Why don’t you take off your coat and stay a while?  The coat rack is behind you.”

“What?  Where—oh…” Nicole turned in a sharp half-circle and saw the man-sized conglomeration of coats lurking by the door.  Presumably, somewhere beneath, they were supported by a long-vanished coat rack.  Nicole took off her father’s old jacket and rested it on top of the Lay-Z-Boy, instead.  “I’ll just put it here.”

“So, what’s been new with you?  Ghosts and goblins?  The spider baby?”  Katherine flicked her bright, green-hazel eyes over her shoulder at Nicole as she asked.  She’d fished a wine key out of the dish rack and was already uncorking the first bottle of the evening.

“Ugh, no.  There hasn’t been much since the werewolf, at least until yesterday…”

“Oooh, the wild and weird life of Nicole DuPond.  Do tell.”  Katherine was perhaps the only person in the world who could make the existence of monsters and spirits seem somehow droll.  She’d believed it almost too easily, when Nicole finally told her, and her attitude hadn’t changed, since.

Nicole shrugged as Katherine began to pour the wine.  “I, uh…I don’t really know, yet.  Did you hear about the animal attack down near Coney Island?” Nicole sat on the enormous chair, sinking into the old, comforting cushions.  “I guess it might’ve been something…”

“Otherworldly?” Katherine asked.

“Something like that.”  Nicole thought back to the pool of dry blood crusted in the rear of the alleyway, the ringing in her head.  She made a small, dismissive hand gesture.  “What about you?”

“Oh, who cares about me?” Katherine waved her off and set the wine bottle next to the sink, mostly empty.  The two glasses were filled to the brim when she was picked them up and drifted over to Nicole, offering one to her.  “How’s the fashion thing coming along?”

“Well, we’re breaking even, which is good…a little stalled, right now, with everything else going on and, um…” she took a sip of the wine.  It was a low, rich flavor with a snappy aftertaste.  Not much of an improvement over a six-dollar bottle, really, but she wasn’t exactly a cheap wine connoisseur.  “It’s coming along.  How’s everything with the arts fundraising and everything?”

“I quit,” Katherine said, taking a longer draught off her glass and letting her head fall to one side.  “The whole thing is just ughh, you know?  Just wretched people, really wretched people.”

“You quit?” Nicole sat up straight in her seat. “Really?”

“Really,” Katherine answered. “I’m getting my first funemployment check this week.”

Nicole hesitated before asking, “What happened?”

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No Grave Sneak Peak #4: A Performance

The leader stepped up on the stage and waved to the club.  He took off his coat with a broad flourish.  He wasn’t wearing a shirt under it, but instead was densely garbed in a robe of overlapping tattoos.  Thick, dark-hued suspenders held his pants aloft.  He seemed to be speaking to the crowd, and Tristan wished they had audio on the security feed as the man began to deliver a monologue, arms and hands making grandiose gestures as he crossed one end of the stage to the other.  When he left the platform after nearly a minute of talking, everyone in the club seemed to have their attentions fixed on the spot he’d stood on.

The first blurry figure dragged a fold-out chair with it up to the platform.  It removed a leather jacket from its body and rested it across the crest of the chair, turning towards the audience.

The figure began to twist its shoulder around, and its arm seemed to elongate.  It wrapped the limb up and behind its head, and started to pull its forearm across its own throat.  The image was too unclear to see what it ended up doing with the hand after that, but the arm shortly snapped back into place and the figure repeated the process with the other one.  Then it brought one of its legs straight up in the air, so that the ankle would rest just above the ear, and began to wrap it backwards behind its body.

“A contortionist,” Tristan surmised.  “Not exactly the kind of performance I was expecting from the description we got.”

“Not exactly, no,” Sam agreed.

The performance continued.  Limbs were woven together, peeled back, pulled from their joints, shifted into broken angles, and returned to normal.  It was only after this first segment that the true nature of the performer came about.  One of its arms stretched out too-long, an extra foot and a half Tristan estimated, and coiled its way around the performer’s throat.  The hand grasped the back of the chair.  The other arm extended, as well, and wrapped around its waist, holding it down.  It acted out its own strangulation, at first quietly realistic, but then growing in emphasis to wild parody, bringing the chair down on its side and dislocating its legs in its attempts to escape its own choking arms.  The crowd stared at the limp body for a few still seconds, then the performer stood back up and set the chair back in its place.

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Creepy Love Letter

From the moment I saw you standing awkwardly on the other side of the Apple Store, I knew you’d be the one. All I wanted to do was sweep you off your feet, carry you away, give you the experience of a life time, shower you with attention, and then watch you break as I locked you in a dark room with no windows for days on end, feeding you at irregular intervals so you lost track of time, the only sound the distant echo of dripping pipes after you’d lost your voice uselessly screaming for help…

A dream marriage.

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The Art of Asking, by Amanda Palmer

(You can click on the picture to buy it.)

The Art of Asking (by Amanda Palmer) is a very transformative read.  Or, at least, it was for me.  I have always been one of those types of people who has trouble asking for things, or being vulnerable, or opening up in any way that doesn’t involve art (acting and/or writing, in my particular case).  This book broke me down a little bit, made me question myself and the way I go about things, and opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities that I hadn’t been open to, before.  I highly recommend it for any artist or, hell, just any human, really.  As much as Amanda Palmer has to say about art and money and internet economics, it all pales in comparison to what she has to say about just being a human being.  (Buy the damned book.)

Amanda is a very conversational writer.  At times I forgot I was actually reading a book.  I felt like I was being spoken to, that I was involved in a give-and-take, that I was listening to someone spill the beans on their life and their philosophies and their hopes and triumphs and downfalls and…but, of course, that’s just a part of how Amanda Palmer interacts with her audience.  She’s phenomenal at it.  (And it’s a part of the aforementioned philosophy, which after reading the book I was certain was something I wanted to revisit in my own life.)  The writing is engaging precisely because it doesn’t feel like writing.  Having read a number of memoirs in the last year, I have to say that the memoir portion of this book was the most engaging auto-biographical reading I’ve done to date.  I felt like I was being entrusted with something, something with eye contact and authenticity and vulnerability, and I think perhaps I was…in a distant, artistic kind of way.  On that count alone I recommend this book.  The words, much like Amanda’s voice, seem to clasp you by the face and pull you in and whisper “Me, too.”

Content is critical to these kinds of books (read: non-fiction, memoir, essay, etc), and this book has plenty of it.  The Art of Asking is, at once, an exploration of art, artist, audience, philosophy, economics, and memoir.  The content is its honesty and its forthrightness.  The content isn’t a “how to” instructional for crowdfunding or art or expression.  It isn’t a “For Dummies” on Kickstarter, indigogo, or becoming cult-famous.  It’s much more intimate than all of that.  It’s an overflow of experience and opinion, of personal philosophy and personal success and personal failure.  If you’re looking for an educational experience you’ll have to be open to taking it personally, not professionally.  But if that sounds like your bag (and/or if you’re an AFP fan) then the content is 100% for you.

I cried reading this book.  Sometimes out of empathy or sympathy, out of sadness at the state of the world and oh such people in it, and other times out of sheer joy and gratitude.  As I said, it was rather transformational.  I went into this book feeling very grim, unanchored and lost, on the tail end of what I’ll admit was a pretty shit year, isolated and distressed and not knowing what to do about it or who I could turn to for help.  Moreover, I was pretty convinced that there was nearly nobody who would care if I did.  I’m not good at vulnerability.  I’m not good at trust.  Sometimes I’m not even that good at being authentic.  Art is how I’ve always parsed my internal life, but lately I’ve found myself on very shaky footing and questioning if I’ve ever been much good at any of it.  Going into this book, I was doubting the utility and meaning of my existence and the potential for any happiness in my years to come.  Coming out of this book, I have a much firmer grasp on how things got this way, and I’ve been reminded of how exquisitely different I used to feel on these topics.  I feel very much like someone has bent down and reminded me that it’s okay to get hurt and be vulnerable, and that it’s okay to trust people and be disappointed, and that it’s okay to open up to other humans.  A significant part of my 2015 plan involves incremental steps towards doing that, and I feel that I owe a tremendous debt of thanks to Amanda Palmer for being the person who, in some distant way, gave me permission.

So, yes.  Thanks.  Keep being awesome.

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No Grave Sneak Peek #3: Scene of the Crime

Nicole entered the alley warily, as though a creature might still be there waiting, biding its time in hopes of further prey.  She imagined it with slavering jaws, growling lips peeled back to reveal yellowed fangs, and breath like an exhumed corpse—but there was nothing there.  It was just a dark, cramped space between two dilapidated buildings.  To the west there was the side of an old warehouse that had been torn apart by Sandy.  A sign screaming ‘For Lease!’ hung hopelessly from its side.  The building’s concrete carcass blocked the setting sun and made the whole alleyway cool and dim.  A window in the side of the building facing the alley gaped open, glass teeth jutting from its frame.

Nicole could taste rusted metal.  There was a sound in her ear, a distant whistle, and beneath it she heard her friends voices as though she was underwater.  She took a step forward, her foot landing next to a mottled red-brown splash of dried blood.  She glimpsed down at it and, for a second, it seemed bright red, still wet and fresh.  She could hear the crisp, smacking sound of it splattering across the alleyway floor.  She blinked, and the blood had crusted over again, long dry.  Misshapen droplets of ichor were spread across the next few feet of cement.  The wound had been deep, and the man had tried to run away, sending drops of blood cascading to the ground.

“So there’s the initial,” Christina explained, her voice distorted under the whistle in Nicole’s head.  She pointed to the splotch of gore by Nicole’s foot.  “Bunch’a punctures to the lower calf and Achilles staggered him, but he must have tried to run, anyway, because the pattern spreads out for another few feet…”

“Then he got hit again,” Nicole continued.  She stared at another grainy, sanguine patch of crimson splashed against the alley’s east wall.  Looking at it, she could almost hear the echo of the man’s scream.  The blood stain shivered, calling her forward.  There were long rivulets crisscrossing the alley between this second strike and the final one, the thin trails of gore making it appear as though there’d been a vicious struggle between two combatants.

“Yeah.  Then there’s a fight, but it ain’t a long one.  The vic gets pinned on that spot,” Christina walked past Jimmy and Will to indicate the wide swath of blood just beyond the halfway point of the alleyway, a puddle of dense crust and a damp spot in the middle of it where the blood hadn’t dried, yet.  “After that, it’s a wham-bam job.  Thing tore him right up, almost tore the arm off, opened up the jugular…”

“In the photograph it looks like something opened up his side,” Will said.

“Yeah, that was post-mortem,” Christina replied.

“Guy was an ex-MMA fighter, owned a gym in the area,” Christina continued.

“Pro?” Angie asked.

“Four years, competed worldwide.”

“Why’d he retire?”

“I dunno.  I didn’t know the guy before I met his corpse this morning.”

Angie’s eyes drifted across the alley, pausing over the crusted pool in the center of the lot.  “So he might’ve been able to fight it off for a few seconds.”

“With credentials like that, yeah, for a few seconds.” Will said.

Christina puffed a few strands of hair from her face and looked to Jimmy, “So you see why I called you?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy mused, running his hands through his thick black hair and pushing it over his shoulders, “yeah, I do.”

Nicole stared down at the dense crust where the man had died.  It had pooled out from the tear in the man’s side where a monster chewed through his flesh.  She began to feel something vibrate inside of her, a low hum that rang up through her chest and into her brain, bass to the whistle’s treble.  A thought blossomed in her head like a flower made of broken glass.  This is a part of something.  She didn’t say anything, but she realized the others were staring at her.  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

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No Reflection Available on Smashwords

My first book (No Reflection) is now available on Smashwords!  Now, in addition to being able to get it for the Kindle, it’s available for the Nook!  Hooray!  Also, you’ll be able to get it in .pdf and .html files, as well, if that’s something you’re really into.  It’s also available for download at Barnes & Noble for your Nook.  It’s also available in paperback at Barnes & Noble, too.  I know, it’s a very exciting time for everyone.  You don’t have to thank me, I know how you feel.

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Zombie Flash Fiction!

Zombies.  You can always smell them before you see them, the half-rotted corpses steaming in their custom suits, their hipster flannels or punk leathers, their organs liquefying in whatever fashions they adorn themselves with, the reek of it wafting through the seams and hitting you like burning garbage and stale piss.  This one’s wearing a faded blue suit as he walks up, no socks, his bare, dry ankles open to the air.  One of his feet had been twisted around a bruised, swollen ankle, giving him a telltale shamble, a harsh stagger that makes him list with every step.

“Hey, baby,” the zombie rasps, vocal chords strained by rot, “you got a little brain to spare?  Just a bite, baby, I promise.”

You keep your head down and try to ignore the flesh-crazed monster, even as he shuffles after you on that bent and broken leg.  The hot noon sun scorches the sidewalk, and you think it makes his stench even worse, the sun accelerating the decay of his innards even as he shambles on.  You make it about half a block before he starts talking, again.

“Come on, I can smell that brain from here, that juicy juicy brain.  I love brain, baby.  I love brain!”

He’s wearing aviator shades, gold-tinted with steel frames, an almost stereotypical FiDi bro/douchebag, and you wonder what firm hired him.  Those companies have never been very forward thinking, definitely not so much as to hire the dead.  But there he is, half a block behind you, blue suit, shades, nice shoes, no fucking socks (maybe he’s just got the low profile socks you can’t see?), a broken ankle, and a mouth that just won’t stay shut.

“I’ll treat that brain right, baby, you know it!  I’ll stew it in a pot for a couple hours, add some spices, really flavor those folds…”

You almost turn around to yell something at him.  These zombies know no bounds, dead-heads like him always walking up to people in the street, begging or demanding, their snarling voices all scratching out the same question, “brains?  brains?  brains?” — you’re sick of it, goddamned sick of it, all the constant harassment spilling from their lips like viscous spittle.  Can’t someone just walk down the streets of New York with a brain and not have to deal with the dead?  Is that really too much to ask?

“Come on, I’m dyin’ here…” the zombie croaks out as you walk away.  He’s given up his shuffling pursuit, throwing his arms up in frustration as you make it through a crosswalk right before the traffic starts up, again.

You feel guilty, afterwards, but for a moment you have a cruel thought: good, you filthy corpse, rot, rot and leave me the hell alone.

COME ONNNNN BABE

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Flash Fiction Bedbug Edition

They were everywhere in the darkness, a writhing swarm of them, so many bodies squirming and twitching in the black night, each of them waiting for a feast, a meal, a holdover, each of them hungry, all of them hungry.  She blinked and they vanished, paranoid images retreating to the back of her mind.  Her eyes burned as she sat balled up in the corner, hands clamped around her knees, a hefty mag-light flashlight on the floor next to her spilling a pool of eggshell white across the carpeted floor.  They could be in the carpet, couldn’t they?  They could be anywhere.  That was the worst part.  They could be anywhere and everywhere, covering every surface, creeping towards her, waiting, biding their time, breeding, breeding, breeding…

“Bedbugs,” she whispered.  “Bedbugs everywhere.”

It was, after all, New York City.  Everyone had assumed, when the MTA found them on the trains that they were outliers, random occurrence, (it started with the N, Q, she thought, then the 4, 5, 6, the L, the A…spreading, spreading, spreading), nothing to be overly concerned with, but that was a long time ago.  That was before they found the Hive.  That was before the droves of them had surged through the subway tunnels like a flood, the first victims running across platforms screaming, crashing into other people on the way, their wild hands flailing as they tried to get the monsters off of them.  Yes.  That was a long time ago.

She twitched.  She knew they would come for her, eventually.  They came for everyone, eventually.  Everyone she’d met, at least, everyone she’d talked to, they all had their stories from before.  She’d heard of the monsters crawling through cracks in the walls between apartments, slowly infiltrating, spreading, hitching rides on backpacks and jackets and coats and spreading their influence quietly for years.  Now they ruled.  New York was their city, and their reign was unquestionable.  It was only a matter of time before they came for her, too.  Only a matter of time.

People used to say that if they could burn the Hive, things would go back to normal, but who was going to go in there and burn the hive?  Who wanted to go to that dark place beneath what was once Times Square and try to light it ablaze?  She’d heard rumors that the walls were alive, there, the bedbugs crawling so thick along every surface that the walls and floor seemed to move, to pulse, to shift and shudder as their bodies tumbled over one another.

“Bedbugs,” she whispered, again, itching at a bite on her arm.  Mosquito bite?  Bedbug?  She couldn’t tell.  She had a reaction to all bites of every variety, her skin always blushing bright red and swelling even in response to the smallest attack.  Maybe it was a sign.  Maybe they had a spy living with her, already, a scout searching for prime food, the perfect target, the next subject in their insect kingdom, and maybe they’d found her, already.  Maybe those figments of her imagination weren’t figments, after all, but premonitions… visions of a future impossible to stop.

This was New York, after all.  This was Bedbug City.

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No Grave Sneak Peek! – Meet Cyrus.

Cyrus ate on a sidewalk bench outside of Gilbert Ramirez Park.  He always thought calling this place a ‘park’ was a stretch.  It was mostly a collection of white concrete streets winding around moldy bird fountains and scrappy patches of dying shrubbery.  The walkways were lined with pale splintering benches framed in rusting black metal.  It sat across the street from a desolate, walled-in lot of unoccupied land where tall, blue boards cried out ‘POST NO BILLS’ in faded orange stencil.  Despite the fervent demand, nearly every board was covered in vivid graffiti, wild hues of purple and yellow scrambled together in arcs of text and almost-murals.  With amusement, Cyrus wondered if the copious graffiti counted as some kind of ‘bill.’  One of the spray-paintings, a nearly three-dimensional spiral, reminded him of something from his nightmares.  He did his best to avoid looking at it as he ate.

The park was a good place to eat.  It was lightly populated.  Small children ran between scrawny trees laughing and playing tag, while older kids threw a tennis ball against a high wall and caught it when it returned.  He saw an elderly couple holding hands on a nearby bench.  Cyrus had long ago found it was calming to be in the midst of a crowd.  Even in New York, where the mass of crowd around him neither knew, nor cared, who he was, and he could feel as distant from his neighbor as he did from the moon, there was something inherently safe about a crowd.  No matter what happened, someone would see it.  It was a pleasant thought, even if it wasn’t true.

Cyrus dropped the plastic take-out box in a curbside garbage bin and watched a pair of children chase each other around a birdbath.  He turned to walk down the street when he heard a voice pick up on the autumn wind.  “Cyrus,” it whispered behind him, soft and musical.

He twisted around to scan the park.  Bushwick, he reminded himself as his eyes searched for an unnoticed shadow somewhere between the attenuated branches of the trees.  He took a step towards one of the twisting white walkways and peered down to where it vanished in on itself behind a thicket of bushes.  He listened for another sound and heard a high-pitched giggle arch up from around a small hill.  He felt a static sensation on the hairs of his arm, like he’d had at the Last Ceremony.  Fire crackled in his memory and through its smoke he glimpsed a twisted Hell.  A child turned a sharp corner over the crest of the hill and bumped into him.   She was a small girl wearing a floral dress, her hair a black tangle on her head.  She stared at him wide-eyed until a boyish laugh sounded behind her.  She squealed and continued running.

Cyrus swallowed.  The only other sounds he heard were clipped exchanges of Spanish and muted voices talking in the distance.  He looked the park over once more, and started walking away.  He kept close to the park’s wrought iron fence as he moved, hands tense at his sides, glancing over his shoulder every few steps to see if he was being followed.  He’d spent years of his life learning to check if people were following him.  That was before everything else, though.  That was before Kenya Kitteredge.  Now he had different things to worry about.

He started for the bar, heading east towards Jefferson Ave.  He worked his cellphone free from his jeans pocket and glanced at the screen.  He thought about calling someone, but there was a tension in the air that made him feel unsafe in the open.  He stuffed it back in his pocket and kept walking, stepping past a large stoop where a family had set up lawn chairs and a grill for their final barbecue before the autumn temperatures dropped too low.  An older man stared at him as he walked by.

After another few minutes, he ducked into a 99-cent store.  A young girl behind the counter watched him as he made for the back of the store, pulling his phone back out of his pocket.  He hid out amongst the cheap hardware section, trying to conceal himself behind the tall shelves of cheap metal goods, and called Miranda.

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