MCM's Blog, page 27

Skimming, And Why I Dislike It

Greetings, everyone. How has the week been so far for you all? Good? Well that's just wonderful.

Because mine has been absolutely horrid.

Wednesday morning (of last week, obviously) I woke up to excruciating tooth pain. It was so strong that I could barely move my mouth without it feeling like someone stabbed at my gums with a machete. After very little deliberation, my husband set up an appointment for my dentist, since I am both terrified of the dentist and could barely speak.

Trying to get me to go to the dentist is like trying to give a cat a bath.

The earliest I could get in was Friday, so I sat there for the next two days shoving tylenol into my mouth and whining to my husband about how I no longer wanted to live in this cold, cruel world.

I'm currently working on three projects. The Antithesis is never-ending, what with all the art I need to draw for it, and the emails I need to answer, and the episodes I need to publish. The others are a collaboration piece I'm working on with a long-time friend and talented writer, and a prequel to The Antithesis, though it's intended to be read after the former. Oh, and then MCAT studying on top of that.

So needless to say, I don't really have the time for any effing tooth pain. Because while I was trying to write, the pain was blaring like a fog-horn and I could barely concentrate. I'm surprised I'd been able to publish Thursday's article.

Come Friday afternoon, I walked out of the dentist's office with a referral to an oral surgeon. I'd learned my right lower wisdom tooth is infected, and thus we were removing all four of them two weeks from today.

I got home on the verge of a panic attack, considering I'd never had surgery prior, and the idea of being placed under anesthesia scares me. I don't like the idea of being knocked out and completely at the hands of men and women I'd only met for about ten minutes beforehand.

I sat at my desk, scowling over the fact that I'd have to live with this tooth pain for another two weeks, my stomach flipping from anxiety of being told I will need surgery, and I decided to check my site statics while shoving handfuls of tums into my mouth.

The statistics site I go through that tracks and analyzes my web-serial allows me to get a detailed view of who looks at what, and when. My eyes trailed to the top of the list and saw a person had been on my site for four hours reading through the story. At first this pleased me, making the hell that was my day seem a little nicer. Until, of course, I clicked on their detailed page visit analysis, and found that they'd made it through almost the entirety of the story that had been posted so far. They'd only spent about three to five minutes on each episode.

Let me tell you; there is nothing more frustrating than having horrendous tooth pain, nausea, and the discovery that a person is skimming through what took you months and months of careful and thoughtful writing in only a couple of hours.

Right now you're lofting a brow at me, going: 'Who cares? At least they're reading it."

Allow me to elaborate.

They're not actually reading it. I don't even know what they're doing. But you would be amazed at how many people actually skim through books, rather than taking their time and reading the entire thing. In fact, the behavior of skimming confuses me. If you're skimming, it means the writing is too boring for you to want to read thoroughly, or it doesn't grasp the attention you find worthy of actually doing so. But, despite this, you continue to skim, wasting hours of your time.

….Really?

As an author, this is a major slap in the face. I can't even begin to tell you the countless hours I've spent plotting and planning my story. My story is the kind of story where you must read thoroughly to understand everything that is happening. If you're taking three minutes per chapter, you're not getting the entire story, and you won't be able to fully appreciate it. There's nothing more heartbreaking than watching all of your hard work negated because someone is too lazy to read through the entire chapter.

I'm sure this sounds like me doing nothing more than whining and moaning, and for that I apologize. I think my tooth pain is making me a little more emotional than normal. However, there is a point to my rant. I'm hoping people who skim may one day read this and perhaps think twice about skimming. It makes a big difference, it really does.

Because skimming takes away the entirety of the read; the entirety of the story. Readers can't fully appreciate or judge a story if they don't read the whole thing. No one ever starts a television show in the middle of an episode (if given the choice), and if you purchase a book, I don't really see the point of barely reading it.

As a reader, some of my absolute favorite books are those that carry subtleties of characterization, whether they be the thoughts of the main, or their interactions and dialogue exchanges with other characters. Sometimes both. If I skimmed, I would miss a lot of this. I might also find that without the aforementioned components, I wouldn't like the rest of the story much.

Lastly, skimming is the most inefficient method of reading for all parties involved. Not only do you waste the author's precious time of creating something that was meant to be fully read and enjoyed, you also waste your time because you've most likely cheated yourself of all the enjoyment the story could have given you, had you read the entire thing.

And, if you're finding yourself skimming despite knowing all that I've mentioned, then you shouldn't even be reading it at all, because if a book does not hold your entire attention, you should stop wasting your time with it and find one that does.

So exactly what am I trying to say? I may have lost you in the rather abrupt and random switch from my infected wisdom tooth to why I disapprove of skimming. I really tried to be clever and sort of lead into the real topic at hand, but I probably failed since it's seven o'clock in the morning and I've yet to go to sleep due to my searing tooth pain. Therefore, allow me to summarize my point in a single sentence:

Be a reader; not a pseudo-reader. It saves everyone's time.

Okay, that was two sentences, but whatever.

 

"You cannot step into the same river twice."

- Heraclitus (Diogenes Laertius, Lives)

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headline image by Jeff Carter

 

Celebrities

The body in the trunk wasn't the most pressing problem he was faced with. Her fortune secured by the bland, eternally vague Sousa and her tea leaves, Clara was oblivious to his discomfort at having to leave his original post. He had been placed in the geographical region for a reason, he was sure of it, and there was no reason to believe she was telling him the truth. He'd never seen her talk to an officer of the law before, and the likelihood of his target being on some nebulous train heading to an equally indefinable city or town in California took on all the honesty of a teetotaller soak bragging of his sobriety. Just as the bobbing heads at the bar of the underground speakeasy kept loving tabs on their drinks, so Clara did with her lies.

But it was difficult to discount her completely, for he had long learned that Clara was partial to the truth, in that her ridiculous claims came out of bits and pieces of a larger truth, morphed into a sturdy lie, but retaining some miniscule grain of hope within it. Thus, her conversation with the policeman obviously never happened, but some random drunk may have provided her with some clue, such as his target getting on a train, to an unknown destination. This world consisted of more than this dirty, windy city, and he would be wise to remember this. Though her travels were to take them to the other side of the continent, it would not be out of the realm of possibility that his target would be somewhere along that route, especially if they followed the train.

It was a gamble, and one highly unlikely to earn him a win. There were hundreds of miles of possibilities to cover, in all directions, and they were journeying to only one. Still, all signs pointed to her being correct, and his target was long gone from the vicinity, hidden so deeply even his superiors had no idea how now he should proceed. Clara sat beside him in the motor car, her blue-black lips pressed tight together as she checked their hue in the side mirror. He didn't trust her. It was the geography that couldn't lie.

He scratched under his chin, the skin a thin veneer that scraped angrily against his host's nails. He could feel angry red welts sting his neck, and when he checked his nails a layer of human skin lay embedded in them like fish scales.

"I'm sure it's the motor oil," she said, shrugging, not all concerned by this strange new symptom his host's body exhibited. "You can't fill up your guts with that stuff, it's not made for human beings. If you were this motor car, maybe, and even then you might do something bad to the engine. But we don't have pistons and pulleys, you know. In case you haven't noticed, we're mostly water, and if you know any chemistry at all you know that water and oil don't mix." She eyed him critically. "You shouldn't be wearing those priest robes any more. You'll attract too much attention."

He brought the motor car into gear and began the slow pace onto the main road. She was curled up in the passenger seat, her back pressed against the door, knees drawn up to her chin in what seemed to him to be an uncomfortable pose. "Don't be so mopey," she said, pouting. "Getting rid of him will be easy."

"You are getting too confident," he warned her.

She snorted at this, her pearls brought to her teeth. She clacked them against her grin, ivory on greyish white. "Of course we need to be careful where we dump him. Don't worry, once we're out of the city and heading south, there's lots of empty lots and abandoned farms along the way. Frankie told me so himself. And even then, I got a place in mind for him, one that he'd appreciate." She sighed, as though tired. "I guess he wasn't so bad, as far as lunkheads like him go. He did buy me these pearls back in March. They ain't glass, neither, they're the real thing."

Frankie, now overripe in the trunk of the car, his eyes neatly x'd and o'd, had nothing further to add to the conversation. He had plenty of experience in the extermination department himself, what with being a rum runner's debt collector. It was a strange collection of friendships that ended all too easily in murder. A bill unpaid. A bad word put in by Frankie's boss. Everyone was a target, eventually.

Perhaps he wasn't as alien to this world as he thought.

"Why did we need to kill him?" he had to ask.

"The usual," she said, shrugging. She rested her head against the soft cushion of the passenger seat, her pearls dangling carelessly in her grip. Her foot tapped out a rhythm her body held in memory, some silly jazz tune that was all fluff and squeals, with none of Langley's morose soliloquy. "They think I'm stupid, is what the problem is. They think when I ask something of them, it means they can get whatever they want, whenever they want, in return. But the truth is, I know they're all morons, not worth a damn. They'd murder their own sisters if it meant they got ahead further in their stupid pecking order game. See, I got ambitions, and you don't get anywhere without knocking a few heads off now and again." She batted her large, dark eyes at him in mock innocence. "I got peepers made for Hollywood, and a mouth fit to eat Valentino. I got a contact out of Frankie, a director who's looking for a girl like me to put in his moving pictures. Got an address and everything."

"So why kill him?" he repeated. He turned left, the road strangely quiet at this early hour, devoid of anyone save a few derelict souls who had no home to hide in.

"I'm so sick of paying the price for what little I get," she harshly replied. "Stop asking stupid questions and keep driving. I'm doing you a favour, and you'd be smart not to forget that. You get what you want, and I get mine, and that's all that matters. Got it?"

"Moving pictures," he muttered.

"You don't even know what they are," she complained. Then, suddenly brightened, "It's flashes of shadows in the dark. I bet it's just like your home, full of flashing light and grey bits of people and places. Yes, that's what moving pictures are. What life was like for you, over there, in that place you come from."

He gripped the steering wheel tight, not wanting to look at her. His chin burned from where he'd scratched it, the red welts now bleeding.

"No," he said. "It's not like that at all."

* * * * *

She drew long on her cigarette, white, slender fingers curled around the ivory holder. She held the smoke in, as though swallowing it, before releasing it out into the open air, where the smoke spun behind her, dissipating instantly into the country morning. It had taken several hours to get out of Chicago, and there was a mutual relief to be coursing across an open stretch of highway, with nothing for company save the rustle of thick trees, their leaves gossiping about them as they sped past.

Flies buzzed in the back seat, hitching a ride. They settled on the back of his head, threatening to take a bite. Every now and then he would swat at them, and wonder why not a one would go near Clara. "It's still hot," he said to her.

"Of course it is, it's summer all over. Bright skies and sunshine all the way." She gave him a twisted grin. "Still, it'll be a while before we catch up to desert country. According to the map, we've only just hit Missouri." She yawned and flicked ashes over her shoulder onto the sandy road beside her. "I know, it's kind of strange, taking this long, crazy trip. Don't worry, it ain't all a straight line, there's someone in Kansas I'm set to visit. Don't you be moping, Hollywood isn't going to disappear if we get there a week or two late.

Hollywood. Sounds like candy on the tongue, to me. Or maybe not, maybe it's a nasty weed, when you think about it. 'Damn garden is infested with hollywood'. It's kind of like that. Instead of people putting it out of their minds as just idle nothing, it grows and grows and takes over everything."

A stream of wind caught her bobbed hair, strewing it across her pale face. "You know what I think? I think we're all just going to be shadows someday. Little bits of grey in the dark. That's what we are."

"You're going to Hollywood to prove this?"

She was pensive for a long moment, her slender ghost's fingers tucked neatly beneath her chin, her dark hair an unruly halo around her harshly symmetrical face. Ahead of them, the dark pull of the desert beckoned from its western horizon, telling them to hurry, its sands were still too far away and it longed to desiccate them in its suffocating welcome. She straightened her index finger, her lips slightly parted. A fiercely manicured nail tapped at her incisor. "I think a lot about their eyes," she admitted. She narrowed her own as she stared down the rows of trees that lined the highway, their whispers hushed, judgemental. "It's the one thing I'm not sure of, when we get to Hollywood, that is. In those moving pictures, the eyes, always so big and exaggerated. It's easier, see. Sometimes, when I get out my switchblade, it's like every eye I stare into reflects back this piercing light. Like a piece of mirror, tossing out the sun." She spread her hand wide and touched the air spinning past the passenger side of the car, fingers making x and o motions. "Strange, isn't it? Hunh. I've picked up some weird habits these days."

He didn't like this mood she was in. He hated it when she talked this way, her eyes misty and pensive, lost in her horrors as though they were soft dreams comprised of childish happiness. For her, perhaps this was true. This proclivity for humanity to bask in their vices as though they were wistful dreams disturbed him, and made him feel alienated, a misshapen piece that drifted into their simplistic puzzle. The counter-top huggers at the speakeasy weren't so different, their bobbing heads assuring all who dared to ask after their families that all was well, that they knew how to be good husbands and fathers. Lies, he learned, told to an empty bottle. The slack fist of a drunk would tighten when he wasn't at that counter. A black eye for a wife. A slap for a hungry child.

There were those who fought against these things, but they were weak-minded, and feeble in protest. Scratching the surface of their moral imposing would only reveal darker secrets better left unsaid. There was always in the human heart this thirsty need to deflect blame and spotlight one's own inflated, false virtue. Bragging mouths to hide the gnawed on skeletons in every closet. "I'm not so bad as that one," a twisted, painted mouth would say. "I might fool around, sure, but her, she's a real whore." Clara, and her severe, permanent judgement. Sliced x's and o's painted in slashes of red on white.

She sat beside him, her hand caressing air, and she could never be so further from him in ethics, despite her being a fellow hunter. He was a hired hand, sent to destroy one specific being whom he couldn't properly find and she, she killed indiscriminately, her switchblade slicing into any pliant flesh that happened to disappoint her. He was set to kill for a reason. For her it was sport. It was an incongruity of purpose he found difficult to reconcile.

"If we keep this pace up, we might get into Springfield by late afternoon," she said, hopeful. "Keep on through, and we'll be in St. Louis, Missouri, and then on into the night until we find the Merama Caverns in Stanton. That was where they say Jesse James himself used to hide out when he was on the run from the law. How's that for a lark? Dropping him off in there, so he can sit and chat with old Jesse's ghost and be told how he wasn't such a big shot after all. Jesse robbed banks, made himself a legend, a damned American outlaw saint, that's what he did. " She gestured to the back seat, as though the corpse in the trunk was an invisible passenger. Which in truth, he was. "What great thing did this dumb and dead lunkhead do? He never took any initiative, not like our Jesse James. This lunkhead just took orders, and he even got those wrong. Last I heard, he was going to get the axe anyway, seeing as how he lost Georgio's last liquor shipment to some New York copper. There was a price on his head, I did him a favour knocking him off early." She pressed her lips together, smearing her lipstick even. "Imagine, thinking he was going to get a quick get up with me in the back seat of this car. I mean, just look, it's not like there's room, it would be real uncomfortable. Top down on a chilly, wet night. That ain't a way to be a gentleman. I bet Jesse James would give him a tongue lashing for acting that trash with a top drawer kind of girl like me."

He doubted it, but he kept his opinion to himself, concentrating instead on the long stretch of highway that was set to intersect across the entirety of the country. Despite his misgivings, he was glad to be on the open road, using the motor car to slip past time zones, a feeling of disconnect pulling him out of this world and making him feel more at home. The smeared rush of landscape beside him reminded him of the way his world intersected with time and space, the constant movement giving him a sense of homey comfort. He liked the way he could stare at this kaleidoscopic vista, its colours and shapes muting her ever present chatter in the seat beside him. He couldn't block her out entirely, and snippets would catch his ear over the loud hum of the motor, her red mouth eager and snappy as she gorged on her own words.

"Valentino ought to get ready. I've got plans for him."

" They say he's with that whore Pola Negri, but I know better, he's got more class than that. But naw, I shouldn't say that about her. She's got style in spades. I'm just jealous, is all. Look at me, all green-eyed already and I haven't even seen a script yet."

"Louise Brooks. Now there's a class flapper, a real top drawer gal. I can't wait to meet her. We'll be fast friends her and I, I know it."

"The gal's got real class. I have to say it. I bet she has one, tucked in her pocket, or under her skirt. There, in her garter, to be whipped out at first notice. A nice and shiny one, not all rusted up from overuse like mine. She can afford a fresh one after every kill."

"I bet Louise Brooks has a whole cigar box of switchblades. I can relate. I'd have one myself if I could afford it."

He frowned over this, the hypnotizing bliss of the highway upset by her delusional rambling. "Louise Brooks has never been accused of murder," he reminded her. "No headlines crying 'Hollywood Starlet Laughs Over Mutilated Corpse'. "

She scoffed at this. "Goes to show what you know."

The air was hot as it cascaded over them. The motor car engine sputtered and coughed, longing for oil. His arms ached from gripping the steering wheel, his neck stiff. The taste of oil welled thick in the back of his throat, and he swallowed back a cough.

"I think I should know enough when someone is being foolish," he said to her. He gripped the steering wheel tight, concentrating on the highway before him, and refusing to meet her furious glare. "Louise Brooks is nothing more than a moving picture actress. She is not tearing across America, with a cigar box full of switchblades, slicing down gangsters. There has been no murders to speak of in her vicinity, there are no trails of corpses, no witnesses, no complex scheming of bank robberies gone bad or rum runners who can't stock their boss's inventory. She is, as you've said before, nothing more than a flicker of grey and white in the dark, and all the more dark than light." He turned his head towards her, annoyed with her pouting. Her arms were crossed tight over her chest, dark eyes full of malice. "You are not used to telling the truth to anyone, not even yourself. I may not be as knowledgeable as you in the ways of human interaction, but I have observed through the perusal of your newspapers that actors and actresses, due to their notoriety thanks to their art, are not usually in the habit of wanton, indiscriminate killing sprees."

"Like I said, goes to show what you know."

"Page one, yesterday's headline: "Sunny Days Keep Getting Brighter". Not a word about your Miss Brooks' murderous rampage."

"Not a word," she agreed, nodding her head sagely. "And not one word about Frankie, neither. No coppers knocked on my door. No questions asked, no newspaper asked for my quote." She raised her head high, her chin jutting out in fierce pride. "So what does that tell you? If a simple girl like me can get away with it, what makes you think Louise Brooks doesn't have notch after notch of dead men counted on her pearls?" She slouched further into her seat, victorious against his silence. "You don't know about humanity, so you can't be making assumptions. This is how it is on our green neck of the universe. People kill each other, and no one pays a mind."

He wasn't sure about this. He'd read in their papers that murderers were jailed to pay for such crimes. But then, they were executed as well. Murdered murderers.

Perhaps it was as Clara had suggested, just another excuse to do what was reprehensible and call it a moral victory.

Perhaps she was lying.

As usual, he could never be sure.

Maps

The days alone in the chartrooms were bearable. It was rare for anyone to interrupt her studies, and Freya found the images endlessly fascinating. Some places she knew better than others; some battle sites were more notable or more recent, and always the memories came back on the flood.

Blood and death.

And exhilaration.

Life; and blood that swam with light and heat. When your heart drove you so hard you swelled and grew huge and unbreakable; there was nothing you could not do, or see, or believe. A sword arm was fluid fire, legs iron bands, shoulders were wings, and lungs burst with the need to laugh and scream. In battle you glowed from within. In the heat of a fight you were a god.

She looked down at her map and raised the flame to brighten the cold stone gloom. There was no life here.

The large hanging in Paske's chamber was a composite and not one she could often study. Section by section, square by square, it had been produced and reproduced, and she worked on the template for each separate area. She had a small key to work with, just a handful of likenesses and with them, their words. Most of them she had already learned to recognize.

When she found a landmark missing she could mark it in, carefully. But when she remembered an important fact that needed a notation, or when the tiny images she transcribed needed words of explanation, she had to take it down along the corridor to where a cabal of clerks huddled in flickering light, scratching away at parchment. Arrogance in an officer was to be endured; smugness in these glowworms was galling.

Before her now, the massive cliffs of Rodo Vendre showed pale and wide against the green background, and Freya chewed at her lip, moving her finger in slow circles over an area an hour's march to the south. Several seasons past her scouting party had been pinned in the lee of a heavily forested hillock, ambushed from the tree cover and trapped when their attempted retreat brought them against a deep coombe bog. They were death to men on horseback; icy silted meres covered from edge to edge in turfy green, but acid black below. Even if a soldier was saved from drowning, the dark water poisoned their lungs, and in the mountain air, to be soaked and have no fire was just as deadly.

They had lost three of their eight men that day. Urte, mounted and arrow-struck, had hit the bog at full gallop. She had vanished beneath the mantle in an explosion of kicks and shrieks. Another, who had no name Freya could recall, had fallen as the company dropped, spread wide, and turned back in a crouching dash for the cover of the trees. Back toward the enemy.

Freya grinned, no longer seeing the chart at her fingers. She was light and fast and sure. With Dragan a few hard strides behind, she had slipped through the sabine copses that trailed into the forest shade, oblivious to scrapes and scratches. One part of her mind counted flights from above, noted origins, sized up her opposition. Another part slipped ahead, picking shade from deeper shade, cover from peril, on the route toward their nest. Without any thought, she slipped the quiver and light bow from her shoulder; amid thorns and branches it was only a hindrance, and she drew the short blade from her back. It was in her hand where it belonged as she hunted.

Tethered horses on the path ahead forced her to move from the flank. The archers' camp was well hidden, but protected by an outcrop of rock only from the front. Rising into a run before panicky horses could sound an alarm, she burst from the shadows, leaping over a low bracken bank, and whooping as the sharp golden light of her blade shone red.

She heard without seeing the screech and clash of swords behind her head, and she ducked and spun. Opening the space for Dragan's reach and range, she turned in and around behind him as he forced his way into the confusion of defenders. Others were joining them, jumping into the middle of the fray from all points.

If the enemy had been smarter or older, if they'd had more experience, they may have had watchers in position above the camp, ready to move in as back up under attack. But these men were young, their defense frantic slashing, their lives forfeit from the start.

So they'd fallen; all of them; dead. And all in the time it would take to throw up your arms and scream thanks for the victory, and curses for the gods, at a clear mountain sky.

She rubbed gently at the paint. The bog should be noted; it could cost men their lives. Slowly she traced the low profile of the map, its carefully applied colors forming layers of revision.

She could do this, of course she could. What were they but worms?

They looked up as one when she stood at their door, seven pasty dough-faces reflecting the lamplight, their eyes dark myopic holes. Some turned back to their scratching, some grinned. Kulle, the least offensive of them, silently moved his document aside to make way for the map that needed annotation. "Here," Freya said softly. "These hills are shown correctly, but it should be noted how densely wooded they are. They are just forward of the front; they should be watched. This area is a coombe bog, deep enough to drown horses." Her finger moved over the map, but she stole suspicious glances at the men around her.

She met one grinning face, as it expostulated, "That where you hid your family?"

A small titter spread around the room and a second, braver clerk quipped, "No, that's where she won the war for us. Single handed, too. She drowned a whole battalion there, didn't you, Oernen?"

Oernen was the name Dragan had given her when he learned she had no family name. And more, he had taught her to sign it in a wide sweeping hand. The eagle, a great predator of the heights as she was, and this insect had no place for the word on his tongue.

On the bench in front of him, a small sharp blade for trimming the styluses glinted in the broken light. In a moment she could drop his tongue into his hand, where he could better learn to hold it. Before she could move he added, "Come on, tell us tales of your glories. Who did you kill there, a monster? A devil? A thousand?"

Freya stepped closer and he hadn't the sense to back away. "No," she smiled, close. "It was children. Only children." If she had cut a sliver from his cheek or chopped down on a finger joint, the look on his face could not have been more satisfying. Spreading his sheaf of scrolls across the desk, she lifted the ink pot and slowly and carefully emptied the red-brown wash over all his precious words.

* * * * *

Paske sat behind his desk, slapping his cane against his hand. He tap, tap, tapped it in an irritating imitation of a time waster while Freya stared past him at the arras. She let her thoughts wander slowly along the curved line that marked the journey to the city of Koldem. She had time. She still had fifty-five days.

Now she could see errors in the likeness. In reality, the city she remembered was not so neatly laid, and the symbols for the palace and the temple were wrongly shown together against the northern wall. She shook her head, the slightest movement, acknowledging how little it mattered if the western portions of the map were wrong.

On the day troops needed accurate information on the layout of their cities, the front line would have moved across the mountainous borders, swept by the citadel and its sister far to the north, moved on past the great forests of the central plains and all the wide tracts of farmland. In fact, if the war had moved to the cities' gates, there would be nothing left of the empire to save but the palace.

Tap, tap, tap.

She watched the shine slide up and down the length of the cane as it rose and fell. The wood was pale, its grain open. Soft wood. A smile twitched at her lip and she bit down on it and straightened her shoulders. It was apt, she thought, when it so resembled his cock. And he really loved it, never let it out of his hand.

At least it was not a truncheon, and he was not a sheriff. When she'd been no more than four, she'd hidden for weeks with an arm bone cracked by the sheriff's kosh. Huddled in shadows she'd waited in silence, with bruises down the side of her head, a closed up eye and a split lip. The little ones were always easiest to catch, and even the fast ones like her could be bowled over and belted before they could scrabble back onto their feet. Street shit; best beaten to death.

Tap, tap, tap.

"There's no pleasing you, is there?"

She closed her eyes, listened to her own breath, listened for a pulse, and then opened them again. "Sir." There was no life here.

"I let you hide in the safety of my walls. I even kept you from the ridicule of the men." He paused, perhaps to accept her gratitude, perhaps to listen to the echoes dying in the cold hard corners. "I don't think there are many among the other ranks who would even know you are hiding here."

No. The other ranks were away from the safety of stone out on the other side of the mountains. By now they would be fully engaged on the front giving their lives for the glory and prosperity of the empire. "No, sir."

"And yet you waste my time. You waste everybody's time. It will take a month to transcribe the documents you destroyed. Should I add a month to your conscription?"

The words hit her like a blow, and she struggled to keep her face calm. Fear burned in her chest, and the skin of her throat and cheeks prickled. If he thought for a moment he had scared her, he'd have won a victory greater than the sum of all the empire's striving. "No sir."

"No." He stood and moved around the desk like a predator, and her heartbeat lurched into a gallop. His tread fell slowly, heavily and the skin of her arm, down her side, and up the back of her neck began to bristle. She could feel him behind her just as surely as if he was a naked flame.

"No," he repeated from close behind her. "Tell me, what are you saving yourself for?" His fingertips skimmed over her hair, the touch so light she was uncertain whether she'd actually felt it, or simply imagined more than his breath at her shoulder.

Her back straightened slowly, the hard muscle of her upper arms clenching and drawing up fists. On the desk in front of her lay an ornate knife, much as the clerk's had been, but made of silver and embossed bone. It was within easy reach and she turned slightly, moving her left shoulder closer to him and her right hand a little closer to the knife.

"Sir?" she hissed, letting her tone speak warnings her rank forbade.

"When you are released, what then? You will be safe, your life spared." He shifted back to her right, his lips and hot words brushed her ear. "What possible use could you be?"

Paske stepped back sharply as her left elbow jabbed the air where he had been. The cane smashed down hard on her injured shoulder, and the trimming knife, already held, skidded from her numb fingers.

Freya cried out in pain and fury as he thrust down again on the length of his cane, forcing her legs to bend. His knee jabbed up into her kidneys hard enough to knock out another grunt of pain, and he bent over her to smile, and whispered, "There is no pleasing you. You need to learn some manners. You've been living out there like an animal for far too long."

He walked away, long strides carrying him back to his chair, and Freya doubled over, clutching the injury that roared like fire down into her chest. Her right arm was numb, the fingers of her right hand flared with pins and needles. Using the edge of his desk, she pushed herself back to a stand, riding waves of pain and dizziness that threatened to drop her into darkness.

"From tomorrow, you have new duties." He smiled, fresh, as if they'd had no more than a morning tête-à-tête. "You will scrub the mess hall floor, end to end, between every food service. Beginning tomorrow, of course, our new intake will arrive. You will have more than enough to keep you busy, then, won't you?

"Oh, but wait. I have one thing more for you. A surprise." While she steadied herself on the edge of the desk, he flicked through a pile of documents.

"Here now." He handed her a square of parchment neatly inscribed with small intricately interlaced words, painted in gold. It shook in her hand and she made no pretense of studying the script. "That's right, how insensitive of me; you can't read that, can you. It's an invitation. For our great war hero. There are guests coming out from Talsiga to view the new intake, and they want to see the stuff of legend. That's you." He could contain his joy no longer and he laughed, tipping back in his seat as his eyes sparkled with enjoyment. "Be sure to wear something elegant, won't you."

Editing, with thanks to Essie Holton.

Come and chat about Touchstone.

Interview With Actionopolis Author Justin Cline

Greetings!

Today I have author Justin Cline taking center stage here at 1889 Labs. I met him a year ago online, as my husband directed me to speak with him since he had been publishing a novel that he'd been writing on his blog, and it was technically him who had given me the idea to do the same with The Antithesis. So, quite a few of my readers should thank him!

I had the pleasure of meeting him in person this March at Planet Comicon in Overland Park, Kansas, as he was helping out a local comic book shop that both he and my husband frequent, and he was just as awesome in the flesh!

Aside from his awesomeness, Justin is a published author with Actionopolis, a young adult fiction publishing company, which is primarily electronic and is quite successful. Their book lines are available for both Kindle and Nook, along with many smartphone applications. Since we at 1889 Labs are all for both digital publishing and alternative publication presses, I now think it's time to meet Justin Cline.

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When did you first start working as an author for Actionopolis, and how did this career come about?

I started plotting out my first book for Actionopolis editor, Shannon Denton, in July of 2010.  If you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that my introduction to Shannon was the single most important thing that had happened in my writing career to date.  But I would have been selling it short.  There's no way I could have known then that less than a year later, I would consider the man not only a friend but also a mentor.

As far as how the two of us came to be working together, I would have to give credit to an online novel I was publishing early last year.  Though I never did get it finished (more on that later), the fact that I made good on most of my self-imposed deadlines hadn't gone unnoticed.  A comic book writer friend of mine, Jai Nitz, approached me with a possible job offer.  A friend of his was writing a comic book for an independent publisher and needed someone to write a prose backup story.  Having been a lifelong fan of comics, I jumped at the chance.

Jai put me in touch with Shannon and Shannon explained the job, sending me the details on the character the two of us would be writing:  a World War I flying ace.  [Insert the sound of a record scratching to a halt.]  Suffice it to say, I didn't know the first thing about WWI, let alone a WWI flying ace.  Still don't.  I was on the verge of turning down the assignment for fear of handing in something that betrayed my ignorance on the subject when I remembered a bit of an old Hollywood actor's advice.

"If they ask you if you can ride a horse, you say 'Hell, yes, I can ride a horse!'  Then the first chance you get, you figure out how to ride a horse." Good advice, that.

So I wrote the story, and it was well received (even if 99.9% of it took place on the ground and not in the skies).  A year later, that story is still sitting on someone's hard drive, unpublished, but it led me to bigger and better things.  Having seen that I was willing and capable of writing something more significant than a short story, Shannon offered me my first Actionopolis book.  And that was that.

Tell us about your current published works.

The first book I wrote for Actionopolis is entitled Master of Voodoo.  Much like the WWI flying ace story, this book required a lot of research on my part.  That may sound strange, given that it's a book aimed at children, but I wanted to be true to the ideas of voodoo while still being able to tell the story I needed to tell.  In the end, it wound up being a great learning experience for me.  The Actionopolis books are only 20,000 words long (roughly 75 pages double-spaced), so they are heavily outlined in advance.  That wasn't something I was used to doing, but under these circumstances it was more than helpful.  I can't imagine anything worse than if I had reached a point where it was time to wrap up the book and only having 500 words left to do so.

The story concerns a teenage boy, Gibson Cross, who discovers a great grandmother whose existence has been kept secret from him.  At the same time, he's dealing with a newfound ability to communicate with ageless voodoo spirits called the Lwa, who grant him something akin to super(natural) powers.  With the help of his friend, Rav, Gibson has to do his best to save both his town and his family from the darker elements of voodoo, which threaten to turn everyone he knows and loves into zombies.

Shortly after finishing Master of Voodoo, I started on a second book:  Vampirium.  My initial thought was that I didn't want this to be a traditional vampire book.  Despite the fact that vampires continue to be popular, there's not a lot of originality where the characters are concerned.  I wasn't telling a love story here, and there wasn't going to be any glowing.  So the challenge is to take the idea and turn it on its head.

In Vampirium, our hero, Wyatt Kent, is still getting used to having moved to a new town when he discovers he's a descendant of a race called the Vampirium.  This gives him both heightened senses as well as the ability to travel through shadows.  Unfortunately, the use of his powers puts him on the radar of the Vampirium.  Along with his cousin, Kody, he has to prevent the return of this ancient and evil race as well as their attempt to bring their world into our own.

Right now, I do have a third book completed for Actionopolis, but I can't talk about that one just yet.  All I can tell you is that it's more of a science fiction buddy comedy, and if you're looking for something that's incredibly over the top and fun, then you'll find it with this one.

Both Master of Voodoo and Vampirium are now available as e-books through Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and they should also be available in print-on-demand editions coming later this year.

Who are your inspirations, as an author? Is there any other works that stand out to you? Why?

I draw most of my inspiration from writers who allow their readers to help carry the burden of the story.  When I read a book, I want to be an active participant.  I want to bring all of my own thoughts and memories to the process, and the more excessive an author becomes with the details the less I'm able to do that.

I want plot and character on the page.  I can bring everything else.

I don't think I'm alone in crediting Stephen King for interesting me in books when I was a kid.  Admittedly, his later career's been a little hit or miss, but his early work had a vibe about it that was unique and visceral.  When I started writing, I was very much trying to ape his style.

Same thing with Quentin Tarantino.  Though he doesn't write books, he was very influential to me when I was in college.  I'm drawn to both great dialogue as well as finding new and inventive ways to tell a story.

Other key influences would be Billy Wilder, J.J. Abrams, William Goldman, Paul Auster, and Richard Russo.

Since I've been writing books for children or teens, I've also checked out quite a few writers in the teen fiction arena, and I like Suzanne Collins and James Dashner a lot.

I think what most of these writers have in common is a sense of the cinematic.  They are very much telling stories that are visual and play out inside the mind's eye for the reader.  With every story I tell, that's what I'm going for.  That's what I'm trying to achieve.

What are things that inspire you (aside from authors)? Are there any forms of other media (music, movies, etc) that give you ideas, or make your creativity flow easier?

I hear people talk about writer's block all the time, and I have no idea what they're talking about.  I've never suffered from not being able to think of a new story.  Sometimes it takes a while to crack a particular plot problem, but inspiration abounds.

For me, inspiration always comes from the juxtaposition of two or more ideas.  I keep a notebook on me at all times where I write down interesting things I've seen or heard in my everyday life.  These things may not mean anything at the time, but when I look over them a few days later, I may find that that little snippet of dialogue fits perfectly into what I'm working on.  Or it might go together with something else to come up a new concept.

What I find is that if you spend too much time looking for the big X, then sometimes you miss out on the treasure.

What are three things you aim to do before you die? Think carefully.

I would like to be successful enough in my writing career to do it full-time.

I would like to write an on-going title for DC's Vertigo comics line.  Not only do I think these titles are the pinnacle of adult comic books, but I appreciate the autonomy of the line, where each title succeeds or fails on its own merits.

I would like to both write and direct a feature film.  I have written several screenplays and had one filmed, but I've never directed.  I think I'd enjoy it.

Explain your writing process. How do you go about writing a story, from beginning to completion of the novel itself?

For the purposes of this question, I'll use one of the Actionopolis titles as an example.

With Master of Voodoo, I received a brief outline of the story from Shannon, a rough idea if you will.  This was something along the lines of boy gets voodoo powers, finds out about secret great grandmother, suffers setbacks, ultimately triumphs over evil.

From there, I wrote an outline.  In this outline, I'm roughing out the characters as well as the sequence of events.  I'm breaking out chapters, so that I get a sense of how many pages I can devote to each part of the story.  With only 75 pages to write, there's no padding here.  Everything has to be relevant to both character and plot.  Otherwise it cannot stay.

Once that's approved, then I put together a beat sheet.  These are basically bullet points that denote every time there's a significant change in the story.  If you don't have at least two or three upheavals per chapter, something's probably wrong.

From there, I write, knowing that I have a rough word count/page count to hit with each chapter.  If I save up a few words in this chapter, then there are more to use in the next.  Vice versa, if I use too many, then the next chapter has to be cut back.  My plan here is to play it lean and mean early on so that I can make the last two or three chapters really count.

The actual writing is where the good stuff comes out, and the best stuff comes out of editorial.

Maybe the most important thing I learned with this book is that your first idea is most likely your worst idea.  In almost every instance.  It may seem otherwise, but in a given situation, nine writers out of ten will come up with the same idea on how to handle it.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying it's your job to be the tenth writer.  The tenth writer is a maniac, and his stuff doesn't even make any sense.  Your job is to be the one amongst the nine who goes back and comes up with a second or a third or a forty-seventh idea until it's something worth writing.

Once the rewrites are complete, I wait for the killer cover design to show up, and then we're on to publication.

Is there anything you are currently working on?

Earlier, I mentioned a book that I had been writing online last year.  I've returned to that, and I'm working on doing rewrites as we speak.  I feel like I've learned a lot of important lessons during my Actionopolis experience, and I'm applying a lot of those to my current work.  If all goes well, I'll be trying to shop that one around next year.

I am also writing at least one more Actionopolis book.  This one has to do with monsters.  Big, hairy monsters.  With fangs.

Aside from writing, what are your other hobbies and/or interests?

When I'm not writing, I'm usually hanging out at my local comic book shop, Elite Comics.

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Further information on Justin's works, along with other musings of his, are available on his blog.

Until next time.

" Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

-Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" 1916

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Headline image by asluthier

Travel

It was the mothballs that made him gag, not the black murky chunk he coughed onto the carpeted hallway outside of her apartment. Clara cast him an evil glare, but Sousa, who immediately opened her door, didn't seem to mind being woken from her bed. She had a thick line of red outlining her wrinkled mouth, and when she yawned it was as though she were about to consume them. A heavily manicured hand met her mouth as she lazily hid her yawn, and with a gesture that suggested tired inevitability she waved them into the cramped confines of her upper floor apartment.

Hot water screamed from a teapot on the stove and she waddled over to it, bare feet dirty on an equally dirty plank floor. There was the pungent smell of boiled cabbage permeating every crevice, as well as an indefinable spice that hovered somewhere between cinnamon and red peppers. He would have liked to open a window and continue listening to Langley's depressed morning solo, but the windows here were nailed shut with thick layers of paint. The only music here was the screaming lilt of the teapot that died into a limp weeping as she pulled it off the stove and began her ritual. Clara sat at the crowded kitchen table, its surface strewn with bits of string, bobbins and chunks of lace and bowls and multicoloured material obviously cannibalized from pieces of old clothing.

"This is so exciting," Clara said, her eyes dancing in glee. She pulled out her compact and gave her ruby red lips a good study. "It's all going to be top drawer, I just know it!"

"Your father," he said, unsure of how to approach the subject she hated most. "He didn't sound well on the telephone."

She snapped her compact shut in practised impatience. "He never does."

"Where is your mother? I didn't hear her."

"She's around."

That was as far as the conversation went, for Sousa had finished stirring the black tea leaves into the pot, and was now pouring them into the delicate cups she used for the purpose of divining a person's future. With strong, steady arms and hands that would have intimidated a construction worker, she placed the cups on a tray and brought them over to where they were seated. Sousa did not offer candy or cakes to go with her tea, for it was a special brew, one full of promise and bitterness that always sat ill on the back of his throat. Clara grabbed her cup, and Sousa placed a firm, meaty paw over her pale knuckles, halting her.

"You wait. Is not good to be so rushing." Sousa tsked as Clara took the cup anyway the minute her hand was released. "Always with the rushing. You'll rush right into death and not even think twice about it."

"It's better than lying around here, waiting for something exciting to happen," Clara whined. She sipped her tea, though it was clearly a struggle for her not to gulp it in order to get her fortune faster. "All I ever do is go to stupid parties full of stupid people. It's about time something real happened, something I can really get my teeth into. And I've got a plan, so Sousa, you have to tell me how well it's all going to work out because everything, and I mean everything, is riding on it."

Sousa shrugged. "I just say what tea says."

"It has to be more than that," Clara insisted. "I need details, I need names and dates and roads and addresses and…." She gulped back the last of her tea, wincing as it burned her throat. She thrust the teacup at Sousa. "There. Go on. Read me."

Sousa refused to take the cup. She sighed as she sank her large, round frame into the chair opposite them, its legs creaking under her bulky weight. "Rushing, rushing," she muttered. She cast a black rimmed eye on Clara's silent companion, her pencilled in brow raised high on her forehead, like a check mark. "You," she said, as though meeting him for the first time. Her eyes became black slits. "You are so boring. So dull and stupid. You make me tired looking at you."

"You always say this," he reminded her.

"Why is this true? No one is so painfully slow, but you, your life, it is not just open and plain, it is like a legal insurance form. Boring, dull like the dishwater. This is strange, this. It's like you have no future at all, and no past to investigate. Bah! Why bother you, to waste my tea? You leave me nothing but dead leaves."

She groaned and ran her vast, meaty palm across one of her several chins, a bead of sweat captured within it. Clara pushed her teacup towards her, and she flicked a wayward piece of dried tea off of the side of the cup, and pushed it along the inside of her index fingernail. Sousa's divining was always an intensely physical process, her shoulders hunching, her garish lips smacking and always that meaty palm swiping across the bottom of her frog-like face, with thick, burgundy nails scraping along the fat folds of her cheek.

"There is a journey…" she began.

Clara whooped as though she'd been told she won a contest. "I knew it! I knew I was on the right track!"

"You are too rushing," Sousa said, frowning over the cup. She cast Clara a withering look that nearly took all the confidence out of her joy. "There is trouble coming on this trip. It is very far, through many lands you will go…."

"California," Clara blurted out, and he took the news as though she had brutally stabbed him. She cast him a wild, happy grin, a sentiment of happiness that he clearly didn't share. "We're leaving right after this. Right after Sousa gives me her blessing."

"I don't understand," he said. He frowned, trying to piece together the fragments of lies and truths she had told him since they had first met. "You said my target was still here, in Chicago."

"Well, now they aren't. Now they are in California, and you are coming with me, because there's no other way to find them, is there? Look, I know you think I steered you wrong last night, but fact is, I was talking to a copper who had a few too many just before I went out to meet you both. He said he saw a person matching your target's description getting on the train bound for Los Angeles not four hours before the party. I do my homework, I do. You don't have to look at me like that, I'm not fibbing." She turned her attention back to Sousa. "Keep reading. That leaf, that one right there near the bottom, what does it mean? It's captured my eye, and I have to know, it's got to mean something important, right?"

Curious, he stared into the cup, but all he could decipher was that it was cracked and dirty, with a hideous pale blue flowered pattern adorning it. The handle was splintered, and it pinched Clara's fingers when she used it to pick it up.

Sousa shrugged, taking the cup from her. "It is the death. The one I tell you of earlier."

Clara frowned. "What do you mean?"

Sousa fixed her a blackly slit glare. "I don't repeat."

"I don't understand. I'm going on a trip, a long one, to California. I'm going to get my name known in Hollywood and get into the moving pictures, like I've planned. My friend here is coming along for the ride and he makes a fine enough companion, so there's no need for all this talk of doom and gloom and death. How rude, Sousa. I thought better of you than this."

"You think nothing at all of me or anyone," Sousa firmly shot back at her. She got up from her creaky chair with a series of groans and tossed the chipped teacup into the sink. "I tell you your future. You can go now and let an old woman get her rest."

Clara was furious. She clenched her fists, her thin knuckles turning bone white. In his mind, he could hear the click of the blade, and in her eyes was that ever present flash of steel, a glint that cured her disappointment. "You harpy!" she shouted at Sousa. "You fat, ugly old harpy!"

He was worried, because despite her appearance and her strange ways, he did have what might be interpreted as a fondness for Sousa. True, it was more about knowing a familiar body and place in a world that was always fluctuating and changing, a vista of unfamiliarity from one moment to the next. He needn't have been concerned, however, for Sousa was used to these kinds of tantrums from selfish customers, and she knew what to say to ease their shallow consciences. "But there is a man," Sousa said, smiling with sneaky mirth. "A very handsome man. He is a beacon of light in a place of darkness. But beware, lest he steal away more than your heart!"

"A very handsome man," Clara repeated, and her fury instantly morphed into joyful giggling. "Oh, did you hear that? We can head out without a care now, Sousa has cinched it. We're going to California!"

"No," he said. "I'm not."

He waited for the fury she had visited upon Sousa to greet him, but she remained cheerful, blissfully oblivious to his concerns. "I've already packed. You should have heard the way Daddy hollered at me, but it's no matter. The parties around here are boring me, and there's more to this world that some stupid jerk with a gun in his hand and nothing in his pocket. I want to go where the real men are, the ones who know how to recognize beauty in a woman. I want to take a snap at Hollywood, shouldn't be any big deal. I got a name, a good contact, and I know it's real because the one who gave it to me had nothing left to lose for telling me." She snatched at her pearls and brought one of them dangerously close to her ruby lips. "Let's go, the usual way, through Route 66. It's a long road that goes on forever. You'll probably like that."

"No," he said, an edge of desperation riding in his voice.

"Don't be a fusspot."

"You lie to me. Over and over…."

"And you believe me, so get over it."

His frustration reached its peak, and he clenched his host's fists, the strength in them enough to snap the neck of a strong man. "I have wasted enough time with you already."

The pearl spun in her fingers and she clicked it against her front teeth, the grin she gave him insufferable. "You don't remember how good I've been to you," she said. "All those days when you lay weeping on the chapel floor, sure that you weren't able to survive. That first day, you thought I was going to step over your corpse, but oh, no, stupid me. I helped you." She tossed her pearl into her lap. "Fat lot of good that's done me. You're an ungrateful fiend, you are. After all I've done for you, and now you just sit there, moping, saying how you don't want to go on the most amazing trip you could ever experience. All because of your stupid target, and your mission. Well, fat luck on you getting what you want without me. You know I'm the one with the connections. I told you, that copper saw your prize getting on that train. It's California here we come, for you and for me."

He glanced over at Sousa who had no interest in their cryptic conversation, her duty completed, thus the only involvement that remained was her patient waiting for them to leave. The silent request was understood by Clara, who reached into her purse and paid Sousa her usual sum of fifteen cents for the reading. "I got us a car, a real beauty. You're going to like it."

"I don't care about such things," he said. He wanted to lash out, and it took all his willpower not to grasp her neck between his forefinger and thumb and neatly snap it. Let Sousa see it, let his superiors see how far he had fallen since they had dumped him here, with barely a warning as to the perils of this murky, confusing place.

She picked up her small handbag and held it close to her as she sidled past him and opened the apartment door. "Thanks bunches, Sousa," she cheerfully called behind her. Sousa didn't answer, but spit into her sink. When they were finally in the apartment corridor, Sousa slammed the door shut behind them both and bolted the door with three locks.

"I don't get why you're being so difficult about this," Clara said, rolling her eyes in exaggerated drama. "It's not like you're doing anything, and besides, with what happened last night, you need to get as far away from this place as possible."

He stopped short at this. The crumbling, dark, musty smelling hallway took on a new, sinister dimension as he pondered her words. "I did nothing last night," he reminded her. "That was all you."

"So you think," she said, tutting. She swung her arms from side to side as she walked, a cheerful spring to her step that did not at all coincide with his very dark mood. "You were so wasted on motor oil you've forgotten a bit of your history. Shame, really. it was the most interesting thing you ever did."

He pressed against the rib cage, feeling the sharp splinters dig into his pliant essence. "You're lying. I'm nothing like you."

"I don't always lie," she assured him. "And come on, when would I lie about something like that? It's my favourite kind of night, one that ends properly, with me winning in the end. I remember it well, the way you dragged the body to the back of that car, and how easy it was for you to jimmy the trunk. Kind of obvious, I thought, but who am I to argue?"

"It was you," he insisted, the splintered rib digging deep into his consciousness. "You were the murderer. I do no such things."

"Funny how they all say that. I guess I would, too, it's at least worth a shot not going to the gallows, am I right? Do they still hang people here? Isn't that hysterical, I don't rightly know." She laughed at the irony, her pearls dancing against her midriff as she made her way down the back stairs, crumbling walls leaving bits of cement on her palms as she steadied herself. "I know, I shouldn't be so cruel to you about your motor oil problem, especially seeing how I'm a real teetotaller myself these days. I think I'm still drunk!"

"I have only one target," he reminded her. He clenched his host's teeth as he seethed in pain, the ribs now joined by a bruised kidney. "I am meant to find, destroy, and return. That is my goal. Not making you 'happy', not going to California to make it in moving pictures. Target. To be reached. Nothing more."

"Well aren't you the most many layered person I've ever met," she said, dryly. "I don't care about your mission, Mr. One-Dimensional. What I want, despite this little tantrum of yours, is exactly the same as what you want. A resolution to a problem. Your problem is the need for destroying someone, and I can certainly sympathize. But I'm on a building mission, one for myself. I'm dragging my sorry ass life out of this muck and getting rich and famous like I'm supposed to be. And if you stand in the way of that, my own mission, well I guess I'll just have to call you one more silly obstacle I'm going to have to get rid of so I can keep moving."

"You can't threaten me."

"I did. I liked doing it. I think I might do it again sometime." She dangled a set of keys at him as they walked out of a side door and into another alley. He was always visiting alleyways with her, he thought. Like a stray cat rummaging through garbage.

She walked out of the building and into the bright morning sunshine, her arms outstretched towards its warmth in worship. "It's like this every day in California. Not a cloud anywhere, not even in your soul."

"You're sure of that?"

"Always doubting me and calling me a liar. Does that car look like a lie?" It was a streamlined white convertible, the latest model that hugged the open road in glamourous style. Unless it rained, in which case one would simply have to suffer a drowning, which considering his present mood, thunderclouds were forming in his future. He didn't need Sousa to know that.

"How long will it take us?" he asked, resigned to the plan. She was right, of course, he had nothing to wait for here, even if she was lying. His target could be anywhere, and he had to trust that somehow his superiors were right in the method they had chosen. He moved away from the splintered rib and the bruised kidney and filled his borrowed lungs with the gasoline taint of a windy Chicago summer morn.

"Look at this!" she exclaimed, and pulled out a ridiculous looking leather riding hat. She put it on and it hugged her skull close, her large eyes suddenly huge without that shock of bobbed hair to absorb some of the attention of thick kohl. It had wide goggles buckled tightly on top. She looked ready for flight rather than a simple car ride across the country.

He sank behind the steering wheel, the angle hurting his borrowed spleen. He was sure it had sprung a leak since last night. He would need to patch it later, and hopefully before the internal bleeding became so severe he had to pop a hole in his side and release it, like a gory balloon.

He made a face as he placed his hands on the steering wheel. "What is that terrible odour?"

"Frankie," she said, shrugging. She had out her compact and dabbed her nose with powder. "Like I said, it was your idea. Poor guy, it's a bit harsh, I wouldn't have done it, but you insisted. It's a scorcher of a summer morning. He's a real ripe banana in that trunk."

Needed

Dragan chewed the knuckle of his thumb, pinching the soft skin inside his lip against his teeth and swearing at the sharp sting. It was taking too long.

He had no real confidence, when it came to the test, that Freya could stand in the face of hard questions and keep up her determination to leave. He knew that while he stood with her she could lean on his certainty, but he'd left the decision too long. In doubting himself and in doubting his partner, he had let their chances of survival slide toward inevitable failure. Freya feared failure more than death. To him they were one and the same.

Behind him, the parade ground was clearing. Young men had been gathered into units and marched off to war. The process was swift and orderly but it still took hours, and now those hours had passed. Midday was closer than he would have liked it to be. The mess hall had long been empty, but now the tide was turning as the permanent members of the defense establishment, those who remained in the safety of stone, drifted back in toward their luncheon.

He had no interest in their progress, but he checked the door with each new arrival, anxious for Freya's return. It was no small surprise, then, that the face he saw entering was not one he had expected.

A young clerk, no more than a child, nervous and gangly in his movements, was making a beeline for where Dragan sat, and a young woman followed behind. She was modestly covered, a heavy blue cape pulled in close about her shoulders and a hood pulled down over her hair, shading her face. She looked up, relief rushing over her features as she found him.

The clerk nodded once in silent acknowledgement, and turned away from his client to continue other pressing duties.

Dragan stood, and his guest seized both his hands in hers as she rushed to sit on the trestle opposite. "Lenka. Why are…? Did you travel here alone?"

"Yes, alone, and it wasn't easy, Dragan. I was bad scared." She drew a shaky breath, peering around at the men who sat at nearby tables and judging every one a threat. "I rode the old mare, rickety as she is, but there was no choice. We've been tried, really tried, and I have to bring sad news."

Dragan slipped his hands free, guessing at the news that would drive such an uncharacteristic journey. "My father?" He knew the answer, felt the jolt of certainty hit deep in his chest before he could read the confirmation in the pale blue of her eyes.

She nodded, her hood slipping back over platinum silk. She snatched at her cowl, pulling it hastily back into place, hiding from these crowds of strangers in the shadows it lent. She leaned to whisper, "He's been laid out many a night now and you didn't come. You've got to come now; your mother's been in a terrible state. She's watched for you going on weeks now."

He had left all things too long, waited, when he should have acted. Again the fates laid their accusations at his feet. Too much had moved beyond his control.

"She says you're done with fighting. She says you're coming home to manage for her. Weeks now, Dragan, she's been watching."

"I couldn't come when the season ended. There are things here I had to finish. But today I will know, I hope. Soon. Lenka, I might not be finished with the army yet. I may have to go back out."

The chilly wind had chafed the blush of roses onto her full cheeks, but around the pink, the skin had drained as pale as milk. She shook her head, denying the possibility. "No," she breathed. "You must come. There's no one else."

Here was the weight that had slowed his decisions; the knowledge that this must come, and the responsibility it carried with it. There was no one else to take care of the farm. Lenka was the daughter of a neighboring farm, an orchard with rich fields that lay down along the Iultea River, but for all her strength and skill, the world she knew needed men.

"Don't say you won't come. You're needed."

And needed by his mother not least of all. He knew. She had no need to lay more guilt on him; he knew just what his choices would cost. Or Freya's choices. He needed to see her, to know what she had decided. The wait that had been trying only moments ago, now hung like a millstone on his conscience.

"Soon, I'll know soon." He looked hopefully toward the door, but no one came. However Freya had needed to make her case, it was taking much longer than it should. Too long. Warnings began to tick and click at the back of his mind, unformed and meaningless.

"Have you eaten?" Suddenly the needs of this woman, here alone to retrieve him because there was no one else, broke through his reverie. The mores of a life from which he was too long removed accused him again.

He was in uniform, for all anyone knew he was still in service. With all it had taken, the army could offer some small hospitality to his guest. He stood, glancing once more at the door, and then moved to fetch a tray of food and warmed cider.

"Where're you going?" Lenka snatched at his hand, half-standing in her haste to prevent him from leaving her. "This isn't a place I want to be alone."

"I'm not leaving. I'm going to fetch you some food and a warm mug of cider. I won't be further away than there." He directed her attention to the near wall and the smorgasbord.

"I'd rather you stay," she said nervously, but the thought of food drew her hand back to her lap and she settled slowly back to her seat. "I'm not used to so many men about. Strangers."

Dragan smiled, "Not so many now. This mess can fill three times over with men when they're mustered together. All the fighting men have gone."

Words dropped from his lips, dull with the weight of realization, "Oh no. No." He looked around, but there was nothing to rebut the fear that rushed adrenaline through his system. How many hours had he waited, wasted. No point in moving now, or searching. If she had gone with them, then she was gone. It was done.

Looking down at Lenka's questioning expression, Dragan let the burning ice of frustration, anger, and hurt wash over him, leaving cold sweat on his lip and a dry burn at the back of his throat. For the moment he was too shocked and appalled to think. There would be things he could do, decisions he could make, but in that instant he felt nothing more than a conviction that Freya had chosen the brutal reality of death over the less, he thought, brutal reality of life.

"Dragan," she said softly, "I'd eat if you'd fetch some food."

"Yes." He nodded, dragged his feet toward the counter and mechanically loaded a platter with hot food and drink.

His father was dead, and Lenka had travelled all this way alone to bring him the news. She should never have had to take such a risk; he should have been there. He would have been there when the last season finished and his contract expired. Would have. Should have.

His father was dead and he was his mother's only hope, and she had waited for him to come home. Watched and waited. Now the reason he had put everything important in his life on hold and turned his back on his first and greatest responsibilities had vanished. He set the platter in front of Lenka and slid down onto the opposite trestle.

"When will you know?" The words were slurred around an eager mouthful, but were clear enough.

He rested his forehead down onto his hands and rubbed at eyes still raw from the night before wondering how to answer that. He could say, 'I know now'. But then, would he add, 'Let's go home;' or 'I'm leaving now, to try to find the woman I've loved for…'? How long? He didn't even know the answer to that.

"Soon," he said. "What happened to my father?"

"He fell from a ladder, grafting apple slips. He was tired; with lambs coming and drystane courses needing chocks, and the field to be turned, and slurries for the vines. Powerful tired. And your mother on him all the time, watching for you all the days."

Dragan nodded, shouldering more guilt. He should have been there.

"She's in a bad state, Dragan. Moaning alone; won't rise; won't eat. She left me to manage the lambs and such. I'm not crying on it, but it isn't my place."

"No."

"Don't say you won't come."

"No." He watched her eat a while, pushing food into a vacuum and watching him watching her from under her brows. He couldn't refuse, but the image of his mother weeping on her bed bought a tentative hope. There was a place he could check, one small stone cell in all the world that would affirm his fears, one way or another. "Come on, finish up. I'll go now for my answer."

Lenka stood, shoveling a parting forkful and slurping the mug of cider one more time before she followed from the mess hall and through the maze of high stone halls. The heavy skirts she wore slowed her progress, and Dragan paused impatiently as she puffed and struggled up worn stairways and dark halls. Her awkwardness forced him to slow, or else he might have run.

Nearer to Freya's room, his pace slowed and his heart rate rose. It might be empty. She might be there. Both possibilities filled his chest with hard air and left little room for breath.

The door was closed and he stopped dead. If there was a way to prepare for what lay on the other side, it was beyond his ken, so he knocked, quietly at first, then with the side of his fist, and called, "Freya."

There was no answer; he pushed. The door stayed firm, its bolt thrown from the inside and he came close to a laugh of pure relief. Lenka moved the implications of her presence closer to him in the gloom, and the tide of relief ebbed as suddenly as it had risen. "Freya," he pounded the door again, determined that she would speak, and her words would resolve the issues dragging him in opposite directions. "Open up, girl."

When the bolt slid and the door yielded slowly under his pressure, Dragan raised a finger to Lenka asking her to wait as he moved cautiously inward, leaning on the heavy oak for support. The light from her open balcony filled the room and her small fire blazed, hopelessly insufficient to warm the solid block of air that rushed in off the water. Freya sat on her pallet facing the fire as if its flames held a greater fascination than he ever could.

"Well?" he asked as he moved slowly toward her.

"Well," she answered flatly, and shrugged. When she turned her face up he saw the remnants of tears, but they had dried and left her eyes empty. There was no expression on her fine features; her hands were open, cupped loosely in her lap as if she had nothing left to hold.

Dragan felt like an oaf, awkward and graceless. He couldn't stand over her, couldn't sit on the narrow military cot beside her, and could not touch her; his hands were not made for such delicate contact. He needed her to move and to speak. He needed her strength, her grace, and her humor, but he could see none of them.

She nodded, as if she understood all he could not say, and looked back to the fire. "No discharge," she said and he closed his eyes. She moved a fraction, sliding down the cot as if the small space she made was the difference between having someone at her side or not, and he moved to sit beside her. "It's all right, they have plans for me. None for you; you're free to go."

There was a tremble in his fingers and heat in his breath when he spoke. "What kind of plans?"

"Plans," she shrugged again and her hands moved together, her fingers lacing and squeezing as if they were trying to choke the air from some unseen throat. "I'll be here, mostly. They have maps, campaign maps, and I have to revise them. I have to learn the scale of the battlefields and advise the officers about the conditions on the ground. They don't know, you see, they don't go out there in the snow and mud. They stay here with their papers." She turned to look at him again. "And I will have to stay here with them."

He looked hard at her words, trying to find the horror she saw in them. "That is going to be all right, isn't it? It's honest work, useful. And you only have three months."

She laughed suddenly, and snot left from her crying bubbled out. Wiping a hand across her nose carelessly, she said, "Three months with words and papers, and men who know more about words than wars. Three months as one of them, them that you say are to blame for the fighting, them that get rich while they send poor men to defend their gold."

He slipped an arm around her shoulders and she leaned against his chest saying, "I don't think I can ever forgive you for this."

(Editing, with thanks to Essie Holton.)

Lies

He gripped the edges of the chipped porcelain sink with shaking human hands. He didn't often take stock of his feelings, especially since he couldn't be sure if they were really his own, or some leftover infection from the flesh he had been forced to inhabit. But it was perhaps not so different a house, not with the way the blood continued to pump through the thickened veins, the heart beating just above his forehead as he settled in behind the unfortunate soul's ribs. The longer he stayed within this skin, the more he melted into it, and there was nothing worse, no punishment so severe, as to remain like this: Cramped and corporeal, enduring a life measured out in haphazard sequences of minutes, hours and seconds. None of these remained in the memory long, not like those from home, his elders, who retained every moment within their minds. Entire universes lived within their memories, birthed and destroyed. Memories tripped along forever, coursing through him like this blood coursed through this creature's veins.

But memories were not permanent in this world. They became muted. Fictional. He had been here too long and he had allowed himself to fall victim to its linear influence. It seemed so long ago that he arrived, but perhaps it wasn't.

He couldn't remember his name.

He had an understanding that he wasn't always anonymous, that at some point in his existence there was a point of referral. A series of syllables that were alien on the human tongue. But with his stained, bloodied hands on either side of the sink, he stared at the image in the cloudy cracked mirror and gained no clue as to his identity.

Frankie. Maybe that's who this was, and now himself. No, he had a different purpose, a far more complex mission than the proper utterance of his name.

It was the oil doing this. He had to stop.

He washed away the blood with cold, rust-tainted water. The blood stained deep beneath his fingernails and he couldn't remove it no matter how much he scrubbed with the filthy rag he used for this exact purpose. The evidence of her past betrayals was still embedded in the grey fibres. He reached for the bar of lye and it slipped out from between his fingers, flakes of dark burgundy staining the cracked sink like bits of dried paint. He forced the evidence down the drain and worked hard on his fingernails, digging beneath each one with care. He snapped one off of his index finger and cursed over the way it bled. All that effort for nothing.

He stared at the horrible bend of his nail and the gushing blood that seeped out over the pad of his finger. It dropped fresh crimson into the grey sink, mingling with his host's former bloodstream. He ran the injury under the dirty, cold water and wrapped it tightly with the cloth he had been using to wash up. He dripped soapy remnants of pink as he left the sink and headed for what served as his dining room.

It wasn't an uncomfortable place, this tiny room above the chapel, even if all signs pointed to it being an abandoned post. A single room comprised of one table, a chair, sink in the corner and a cot beneath a barren light bulb. A cross was the sole decoration above the lumpy bed, and it absorbed the light from the bulb, the shadows playing on it and making it far more ornate than its simplicity suggested. He wasn't sure what happened to the original rector. In truth, he hadn't thought on it. He'd been told, "Put these on. You can live upstairs," and that was how things came to be as they were. The voice he heard in his memory was Clara's, not his superiors. They wouldn't know, even in their all encompassing knowledge, how to navigate this world.

He felt nauseous as memory picked at the slimy grey matter that was his host's brain. He could hear her voice, telling him with all her cheerful intonations: "It's no problem. I know he won't be back. You've got nothing to worry about, you can hide out here easy."

Lies, lies, and yet he always felt compelled to believe her.

She had a name. Clara. Similar to clarity. How strange it was that her label was the opposite of what she was, for every word and nuance was masked in her deceitful web, a taunting melody that he couldn't help but listen to. She'd lied. There was no Frankie, no friend who needed to be taught a lesson. What had he called her before she had ended the night with the glint of steel smeared with moonlight? A moll. A whoring, silly moll. He'd broken her heart, she told him later, that man she called Frankie who wasn't Frankie. He'd broken her heart and she had to make sure she broke his in return. She'd shrugged her pale, white shoulder as she skipped off into the darkness of the alley, promising to visit him tomorrow. "It's just how things are around here," she assured him. "It's tit for tat. That's how it all works."

He'd watched her saunter off into the late hour, purse swinging, pearls dangling. She had nothing to fear from the blackness that surrounded her. She was a part of it, a spectre that revelled in shadows, lighting up with pleasure the darker everything around her became.

He shook his head, uncomfortable. Perhaps he had been imagining things, for hadn't he sucked back a near half gallon of oil? He'd been trying to temper himself of its effects, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. Soon, he would be like the cronies at the basement speakeasy next door, his head bobbing up and down over a glass of black liquid, his mouth drooling over the beautiful, smooth escape it provided.

He collapsed into the creaky wooden seat at the small table and felt a sharp pain ride of up his side as a broken rib nastily pierced him. His host was becoming an increasingly uncomfortable place of residence, and it wouldn't be long before he would require a new one. He possibly could have borrowed Clara's latest conquest, but she had been too busy placing her marks on him, her usual x's and o's carefully carved above the lids of his eyes, blinding his corpse. It was a curious habit, and she herself had no proper explanation for it. Like many things since his arrival, he had learned to accept what didn't make sense. He shifted inside of his present body, being careful to avoid the splintered rib and the piece of spine that jutted inward towards the kidney. He bumped into the spleen and a sudden gurgle rose from it, to rise up his chest and into his throat. A long, thin trickle of black oozed out from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand in irritated impatience.

He was definitely drinking too much.

He cast a glance back at the filthy sink and felt an inward groan rise within him. He would have to clean it up properly, give it an ample scrubbing to hide all traces of himself from living here. First, however, he had an itch to scratch, and though he was loathe to admit it to himself, he needed this sustenance, because without it he couldn't bear to face her and the vile world she lived in again. How else could he confront her, without its thick taste welling in pools around his host's tongue?

He pulled his robe over his head, revealing the pair of well cut trousers and tank top he wore beneath it. The fresh can of motor oil he'd purchased was tucked against his suspenders and he released it onto the table, the tin brightly coloured in vibrant red and orange, full of the promise of being the best for one's capital investment–the motor car. He hesitated for a moment, only to decide that it would be better to finish it off here and now, to finally end it and say this was the very last one he would ever imbibe. There was a pink teacup on the far corner of the table, its contents long since dried up and leaving a brown sludge on the bottom. He grabbed it, and with eager motions that filled him with shame, he unscrewed the can of motor oil and poured it into the teacup until it was near to overflowing.

He brought it in front of him and stared into it as though divining a future. That's what humans did, he knew, because Clara occasionally visited the elderly woman who lived in the apartment two stories up from the speakeasy. "She's wise," Clara insisted. "She's got the sight, if you know what I mean."

He didn't. In his world, the future was part of the present, and there was no need for googly eyed old women with pinched expressions and a foul, mothball aroma that pervaded every wrinkled crevice of her body. There was no wisdom for him, only watery tea and a sad shake of the head that could have meant any number of emotions. Annoyance at his being there. Anger at being roused at a late hour to take a few pennies from a sparkling flapper. A creaking, ancient body torn from her bed only to divine that his future was boring and not worth telling. From his experience, the latter was usually the case. He would watch as she pulled out a cup of tea and patiently filled it for Clara, who drank from it greedily, burning the roof of her mouth. With quiet determination, she would feign reading the signs on the bottom of the cup while Clara listened in rapt concentration. 'A new man,' the old crone would slyly hint. "One to replace the old one."

She'd be pale in the red tainted light of the old woman's kitchen, a colour deftly created thanks to the red kerchief draped over her lamp. "Did you hear that?" Clara would say to him, her voice edged in whispered wonder. "Isn't she amazing?"

"She can tell you what everyone already knows."

"She's amazing. Don't listen to him, Sousa. He's a drip. No fun at all. Just like the tap–drip, drip, drip. How boring!"

Through the thin walls of his room, he could hear the plaintive cries of Langley's trumpet, his practice notes full of his usual melancholy. He hadn't yet touched his teacup full of motor oil, and he was still in the throes of indecision over whether or not he should drink it and be done with it, or if he should wait a while, maybe until mid-afternoon or even later into the evening. A peculiar sense of timing had brewed between himself and Clara and he had grown to understand that it was during these times of day that he would most need the medicinal comfort of slick black pouring over his insides.

Langley's trumpet wept as he caught a glimpse of his face reflected on the inky black surface of the cup. He looked ill, by human standards. As well he should. She had tortured him yet again with her empty promises and he had fallen for them, a ruse that he surely could detect by now. How she managed to convince him otherwise every single time he wasn't entirely sure, and he was starting to wonder if there was some kind of scientific merit to the idea that a woman could cast a spell upon a man's reason. Langley's trumpet seemed to think so, though perhaps his situation was a bit more complex than most.

Langley's trumpet didn't have to wash up the blood. It didn't taunt him with promises so it could glean terrible favours. When Langley cried, his trumpet lamented along with him. Not so Clara, who would laugh at his pain, and giggle at his disgusted wincing.

A new man. There was always a new one. The glint of metal and x's and o's and bucket upon bucket of blood.

The more he thought on the night before, the more the motor oil tempted him.

He'd been trying to understand her reasoning since the day he'd met her that long, long time ago. She called it two weeks, a fourteen day stretch, a fraction of time to her understanding, but so much more to his own. He'd never experienced what it was like to live minute by minute, counting out each second that crawled past, unused, wasted. Such an alien concept, this measuring of time. He still had issues with its accuracy, for while he knew he had been there, in the alley, the night before, there was a mixture of memory assailing him that was imperfect. He had snippets instead of whole pieces of what had transpired. The motor oil had done that, dulled his perceptions and put him back into that non-linear plane of reasoning he properly understood.

But someone, perhaps Clara's person of interest, her beau if that's what he was–He had called him Frankie and looked on him as though he'd seen a ghost.

Langley's trumpet sang deep and slow in profound agreement. He rubbed his chin in thought, the fingertips of his host feeling as dry as scales. There was no need for some mothball stinking diviner to figure out the past, the trumpet knew it well enough. What had happened was something awful, and vile, and it was so much better to drink a sip of oil and forget most of it beneath its muddying haze.

He was about to take a sip, a big one, when the telephone rang.

It rang and rang and rang.

He placed his teacup back down carefully, slopping some of the motor oil onto the matching saucer. The telephone always made him nervous. He wiped his dry, scaly palms onto the tops of his thighs and forced his breath to resume its more natural, human pattern. How did one answer this thing again? Receiver, ear, depress lever, dial a number. What number?

He rose from his seat and walked into the kitchen, where the telephone was bolted to the wall. He picked up the receiver and, with hesitant words that refused to hold any conviction said "H-Hello?"

"Did you have to let it ring a million times? Honestly, it's not going to bite you." She sighed on the other end, and in the distance he could hear her father, roaring and coughing in tandem as he tried to desperately bring his wayward daughter back into his iron control. "I have good news for you, if you're willing to listen."

"Your father seems angry," he said.

"He should be, since he's kicking me out of the house and all."

"Ah, now that will be a problem for you."

"Says who? I've got plenty of digs to sleep in, and I don't need to do much of that as it is. Besides," she became sultry as she spoke to him, " I got an iron clad plan and you're a part of it."

"I don't think I want to be."

"Too late. You're in."

There was crackling static on the line, and he could hear her sigh in between another conversation invading their own. "We have to talk private. Sousa has to hear what I have to say, I'm going to need her special insight before we leave."

He was taken aback by this. "Leave? I don't understand, there is nowhere to go."

"Oh, you think I'm not helping you, but I am, in every little thing I do. One day you'll get it, you'll see. You'll say 'My, but that Clara was something special, the way she understood how this was going to happen, and it did, just like she said. I'm so glad I listened to her, even if she did steer me wrong once in a while–No fault of her own, no, none at all."

"I don't believe you," he said, but he already doubted himself.

"I got my bags all packed and I'm ready to blow this joint. Daddy is being a real pain. He was so upset when I showed up at five am this morning, furious that I'd let the sun come up. I told him, if that were in my power, that ball of fire would be hurtling towards earth instead of just sitting there, being a bore and taking up all the attention from all the other planets. Apparently, a girl like me shouldn't be alone at such an ungodly hour. I didn't know there were different levels of morality according to the hours of the day. Did you?"

He thought on his reasoning of her acts of misconduct coinciding with the certain parts of the day that he imbibed more motor oil than is safe to any body, alien or human.

"No, I didn't."

"Well, now you know."

"I am educated."

There was a slam of a door, and a protracted, furious bout of cursing levelled off by a final lung crushing gasp that wheezed and tortured itself in and out of his damaged lungs. "Whore," he managed to squeeze from the last breath he managed to draw in.

She ignored him. Behind her he slowly suffocated in his own despair, staggering against furniture and knocking over vases, at least this is what the scenario was suggesting over the telephone. The reality was probably far worse.

"I will meet you at Sousa's in about an hour, I have some unfinished business to attend to here. But you better believe me, this is a big one, a real juicy tidbit you can't leave behind. You're coming with me, because there's no choice to it, and Sousa will agree with me, and you'll see."

"Going with you?"

"Half an hour. Toodles."

She hung up the telephone leaving him to contemplate dead air. On the table, sitting pretty, was his black pool of motor oil promising a sweet escape. It didn't matter how early the hour was this time. He pounced upon it like a hawk on an injured rabbit and drank every last drop in one satisfying, anxiety-free gulp.

The Science of Writing

My apologies, most of you probably don't know me very well.

While we have a rather exciting week ahead, what with an interview with an Actionopolis author who is also a friend of mine, along with more fiction from M. Jones and Letitia Coyne, I think I'll take this time to properly introduce myself.

Yes, my name is Terra Whiteman, and yes, perhaps some of you know me as the author of The Antithesis, but what else? Since I'm going to be entertaining you for God knows how long, you might as well get to know me a little better than that.

I'm originally from Canada, but now live in Central United States–er, the Midwest, to be exact, having just graduated with a Biology and Chemistry degree. I originally came here with the intentions of just going to school, but I met a man, and now I can't think of any other place I'd want to live. …. Except for Rome. Or Spain. Or Greece. Or–

Anyway, there are two things I am passionate about: science and writing. I try to do both at the same time, to considerable success. Those who are reading this and are familiar with my writing know what I mean. Those who are not are probably like, 'What?' so I'll elaborate.

For me, writing fiction is not just writing a made-up story. That is perhaps the foundation of fiction writing, but how beautiful would Doric or Ionic pillars be if they only had their foundations?

In fact, fiction is rarely ever completely made up. Some say that 10% of every lie is truth, and the same could be said for a fictional story. Now, I'm almost certain the percentage of realism would be significantly higher for a fictional story… Or, at least the ones I write.

In all actuality, my work is a reanimation of everything I've experienced and learned about life and the world around me to some extent. The lessons I've learned, morals and controversies, science and philosophy, happiness and pain, they are all pertinent to both me and my writing. And, because I am officially a scientist now (with my wonderful diploma to prove it), I have a duty to try to educate and enlighten those surrounding me. I want my readers to experience what I have, and perhaps learn what I have. However, since my voice alone is probably as exciting as a four hour Humanities lecture over neo-classical art, I disguise it within a fictional story. Instead of telling you about things, I show you them. Before you know it, you're thinking about issues and concepts you never thought you would. And then I know I've successfully accomplished my goal.

Only when readers tell me how much they've felt and thought from my writing do I think I've done my job. Entertainment is wonderful, yes, but I also want to enlighten and move you; perhaps even motivate you or inspire you do something as well.

Writing is art, after all. Art should both inspire and edify.

I'm not the only one that does this, either. I'm pretty sure every single one of you who are reading this and has ever written anything has used something from your life, or taken something they've learned, or felt.

So, what the hell am I trying to say? I suppose my poorly laid out thesis here is that there are a lot of stories now that don't send us messages. Like television, they are simply there to give us mind-numbing entertainment, and when we are done with them, we think: 'Well, that was nice." And while the book is great, and the author does an excellent job of writing it, it doesn't really move us, or make us think about it afterward. It just… dissolves as we move onto something else.

Many great stories, ones who are considered among the classics, became practically immortalized because they provoked thought, inspiration and enlightenment through controversies, powerful emotions, and moral lessons. These authors worked very hard to present to us art in its best form. We are humans, and one of our primary goals as an intelligent life-force is to learn. But whoever said learning had to be completely academic or studious? Why can't we learn from art? We can, and we should.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Science of Writing.

 

"Wisdom outweighs any wealth."

- Sophocles

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Headline image by wburris

 

 

 

Rank

The sheen of polished brass always reflected a certain arrogance, and it was immediately evident in Paske, the officer who sat behind his desk, waiting. Short blond hair, square tanned face. Cold eyes. It was an attitude that Freya found grating but not one she usually paid much heed; it was simply the attitude of rank and she was accustomed to it. It made her task no easier. His eyes called her worthless.

"Discharge." It wasn't a question, more an accusation. "Now. As we mobilize. Now, as we speak?"

"I couldn't come earlier, sir. It was a difficult decision and I only made it today." She wanted to drop into a squat and hug her knees, anything to keep the cold shame and dread from spreading out through her flesh. But she was here now, the approach had been made. "Now," she added, shrugging apologetically. "This morning. Sir."

"This morning." Another sneered accusation and she nodded, tacitly accepting the charge of cowardice. He had scrolls in his hand, and he flicked the curled edge of one, then another, down to better see the reports written there. Drawing one free from his bundle, he tossed the others aside and used a silver-capped cane to spread his chosen document wider across the table. "It looks to me like you've passed all your fitness assessments. You have regained an acceptable range of movement, I see. There is a note here from the medical officer who conducted your last battery of tests specifically praising your levels of strength and endurance. 'Remarkable tenacity' he's written here."

Using the heavy silver spur on his cane as a pointer, he sat back, opening the document for her appraisal, waiting for an answer to a question he hadn't asked. Freya leaned closer, clamping her hands into fists and holding her breath to keep it from trembling. The markings on the page were meaningless to her; if they had not been upside down, they would have made no more sense, but she searched them urgently for a clue or an excuse.

The study drew boiling blood up into her ears. "I, ah …" Humiliation slipped from her lips with the attempt at speech, and she sucked in a deeper breath, stretching her cramped lungs. "I did my best. That's all. I tried hard to pass and to be fit to fight. But…."

"That's all we ask. And look," he tapped at a red mark which cut across the inky lines of text, "– it was enough. Look!" He jabbed again at the scroll, reprimanding a stupid child. "See there? What does that say?"

He held his cane against the red marks, tapping them impatiently as she stood mutely staring at the unintelligible symbols that would decide her fate. She glanced up at his face and read the contempt in his features on the instant, but the page before her offered no such insight. Nothing.

"It says, 'Application for physical evaluation. Critical impairment of joint mobility and function.'" He tapped another block of writing, also marred by crimson slashes. "Here, what does it say here? Can you guess? It says, 'Recommendation: immediate medical discharge'" His words were growing louder and sharper, raising red hot shame.

At that moment she might have withdrawn. It was too much to be so embarrassed, and to stand like a fool with her weaknesses held up to ridicule while she begged to be allowed to take the coward's way.

If not for the fact that Dragan waited in the yard below with the weight of his life thrown against her, she might have dignified herself with a nod of deference and returned to the field. She could have taken her chances with the casting of the lot.

There was no room to move and no answer to her humiliation but anger, and it fed on the ice in her tormentor's glare. "That's what I'm here for," she managed. "I want my medical discharge."

"You can't have it!" Paske rose forward suddenly, pushing his face into hers, forcing her to blink and give ground. "You have been passed fit!" he bellowed, shoving the report up at her. "Repeatedly!"

"Sir," she responded automatically, pulling herself erect, her spine and shoulders straightening.

"Read it!" He shook the useless page at her. "Passed! And again, 'Recommend assessment'. Passed! Can't you read?"

"No, sir."

"No, so take my word for it. Four, no five times you have had the opportunity to accept a medical discharge and refused. Now you have been marked fit. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir. I am not stupid, sir."

"Are you not? Let me be the judge of that." He stepped back, picking his cane from the desktop and slapping it thoughtfully down his thigh. Against the thick woolen pleats of his thegn, the bar made a hollow thwack, suggesting just enough violence to make Freya flinch. Violence she could answer. That she understood. "Why now?" he asked the air.

"Why sir?" She steadied her breath. "I don't believe that I can fight. I want to. I want to believe I've been able to train hard enough to be as good as I was, but I don't. I can't."

"The medical officers think you can. You were adamant they should pass you fit. What changed your mind this morning?" Again he tapped the cane, the ornate silver hook tangling in fabric and rattling against a studded boot. He caught a sharp breath and turned suddenly, lifting the cane to point at her chest. "I know you, don't I?"

In better circumstances, Freya would have speculated aloud that everybody knew her. In the mess hall or on the parade ground she would have wagered blood on it; she would have hawked the sour taste of certainty from her mouth and spat it at his feet. Here though, she chose to meet his interrogatory glare with silence.

"Yes." He chuckled, nodding his head slightly. "Yes, I do."

He moved back to stand by his desk, tucking the cane under his arm rather than relinquish his hold, while he freed his hands to straighten the documents he had earlier discarded. He read, nodding and clucking to himself, making an occasional small noise of surprise or admiration. "Something of a hero? Quite a record and previously uninjured. Favored by the gods, are you?" He looked up, "Or just lucky?"

Frustration burned. It rolled through the muscles of her back and neck, clenching in fists and strangling the breath in her throat, but she said nothing, only glared her defiance at the wall and willed the harm she could not move to inflict. In everything about him there was the reek of toad.

The brass on his breastplate shone where no verdigris had ever had cause to bloom. The skin of his face was smooth even if there was some silvering at his temple. There were no marks of the sun or the wind or snow in the softness around his eyes. He sat his chair, and rolled his papers, and judged his reading more useful than horsemanship. He handled a cane where there was no sword for him to hold. And he had a sneer to sharpen his words where words were all he had in abundance.

"And here you are at the end of your contract, almost." The twisted lips turned into a smile. "And your partner is done, I see. Is he lucky, too?"

"No sir, he's good. Very good." Words she would have awarded herself if she could; if they had not amounted to an admission of fitness to serve.

"Is he? And I suppose after so many seasons together he could have been relied upon to carry you and your injury. No chance of him bringing a slur against your great name, is there? But a new partner, that would be a different story, wouldn't it? No certainty there. None at all.

"Tell me," he stepped up close, "How do you weigh the risk of death in battle against the threat of tarnished glory; a failure on the field or a coward left behind?"

"There is no risk to balance, sir." She stole what she could of Dragan's passion, using his arguments as if they were her own. As calmly as she could, she said, "There are only certainties. If I fail in the field, and I will, there will be no partner to carry tales. He will be dead beside me. No question. There is no chance I'll return in disgrace. I will be a corpse among the corpses, and whoever you assign as my partner will leave this citadel a dead man."

"Noble, then? You'd rather the shame of being recognized as a coward than to risk the life of a partner. The name, the face that has inspired the best in our young warriors for years now, remembered at the last as the one who slunk off into the mists to hide." His grin widened.

"A medical discharge, sir. There is no shame in that." The lie tore something inside, something hot that throbbed.

"You can't have a medical discharge. You are fit and I have the reports to prove it. I know it. You know it." He turned away, walking slowly toward a wide arras worked in swirling greens and browns that covered most of the chamber wall. "Everybody knows it," he smiled.

His hands were pink, the nails immaculate, and his fingertips soft and rounded. The heavy weave of his thegn showed no sign of pilling or rub or unnoticed threads tugged loose. Even the segmented leather laminate that hung down his thighs fell from the bands of a gilded girdle. No blood or marrow grease had ever dried and stained his skin. The grime of battle and the shit of fear had never crusted under his fingernails, and yet he had the gall to call her a coward.

She was fit. Fit enough.

From below, the calls of men assembling, falling into marching columns, laughing, living, clapping shoulders and vowing their blood, one for another, rose like the perfume of better days. Out there, somewhere below this toad in his clean stone tower, was the life she knew, and its call was stronger than she could easily bear.

Men died in battle. They knew that, all of them, and yet they stood together, ready to walk out into fear and blood and glory. It was not Dragan's choice. He could not force her to this humiliating place. Out there, they knew her. There was at least one strong young arm she knew would be raised without question if she called for a new partner. If he lived or died….

"Can you read a campaign map?"

"Yes sir." Maps were the mainstay of any battle plan. Scratched in dust or burned into leather, they shared the vision of one with many. A campaign map could be no different.

"This is what you're running from." Standing before the vast arras, he clapped the stiff oilcloth with his cane and Freya stepped forward peering into the mess of color, frowning. Words and symbols rose into focus; dotted lines traced their way over the surface, some black some red; arrows noted circles large and small. It was like no map she had ever seen.

The sneering toad watched her.

The maps she knew showed landmarks; peaks, waterways, crossroads, and they were marked by their likeness. Here the things marked were known by their words, and she could make no sense of it. A river snaked through it; that was all she could easily recognize.

"We're here." He snapped the silver spur against the map, and where it rested she saw there was a likeness of Orlik citadel, tiny squares that curved around the pale circle of the tarn. Instantly her vision widened. She was not looking at a mud map, not the square of a field where a river ford was easiest, but a vast area wider than the valleys and peaks, spreading further than the cities to the west.

And there they were. She didn't need the words for them; she could see the neat grids of the streets she had once known. It was an easy five days' ride west to the city of Talsiga, so the area shown away to the east of the citadel was at least equal to that.

Behind their ancient fortress, the land rose steeply into the vast boulder-strewn passes of the Delian mountains. That was where the empires, like two massive bovids, locked horns and shoved until the bedrock of their lands were driven up into the sky. And where the resulting ranges rushed from north to south, there on the map were the snow fields and cliff faces, the narrow paths and the wide rich valleys between.

It was extraordinary. Treks that would take a troop a week of murderous slog for every league they gained were shown here in the length of a finger. Parts of the mountains where even goats could slide to their deaths, here were flat beiges and grays. She reached to trace a journey with her finger, trailing from the fortress walls through the dense foothill forests, and on upward toward the active front lines, just stirring with the spring thaw and ready to draw blood.

A month or more she could study this map and still wonder at its magnificence.

Paske the toad was smiling again. "No, I can't give you a medical discharge. I won't."

Freya snapped her attention back to the discussion at hand, ready to concede. It was not Dragan's choice; she could not let it be. She could return to her life on the front. Some choices cost more than life.

"But I think I have another solution." Sliding the polished cane through his hand like a slick span of phallus, he grinned and sent ice prickling through Freya's gut.

(Editing credits, with thanks, to Essie Holton.)

Speakeasy

Alcohol was not a substance he understood. His home had no such concoction, and the very idea of willingly taking a liquid that would make a person act moronic and impede his or her memory seriously compromised his respect for human intelligence. Take this man at the bar, for example. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes dirty, his tie askew, his face haggard with several days worth of stubble. This was the shining example of human achievement in this brightly lit basement, the sparkle of his cuff links belying his social status. A wealthy man, by all accounts, except for the fact he had to come here every night and lick the last remnants of alcohol from the bar as his cheek lay stuck to it. He was not alone in his quest, for several of his cronies had joined him, a drooling, half-lidded mass of unkempt bodies and wasters of time.

For a race that was encapsulated in the linear lines of minutes and hours, this purposeful waste of productive work was sickening to witness.

He turned away, the scales under his skin itching as he surveyed the bar. He caught the red glimmer of a familiar shade and he inwardly cringed as he met her gaze across the room, her dark smile drawing him to the back of the revelry on the dance floor. He pushed through the crowd, the dry skin of his gentle touch leaving scales across wayward wisps of feathers, sweating bared shoulders and the backs of black silk suits. He was jostled and turned by the dancing crowd, most of whom could barely manage a slow waltz let alone an energetic fox-trot. They staggered like formless mannequins on the dance floor, jerky, unfamiliar movements forced upon limbs that refused to co-operate.

A shoulder met his and nearly sent him toppling. "Watch it, jackass."

"I'm sorry, but you bumped into me."

"Then what are you saying sorry for?"

The man was blocking his view of Clara, who was busy concentrating hard on lighting her cigarette and ignoring the altercation about to occur. Though this was a linear world, there were clear patterns that could be discerned, and it was often easy to determine the outcome of a set of variables. A man bumps into another. He is inebriated. He is of low moral character. He has a girlfriend draped and bored on his arm, her pink lips twisted in a tired grimace. He yells expletives, he clenches his fists. Someone in the crowd reminds him that he is starting a fight with a priest. The man doesn't care. He only feels the dull ache of his shoulder and the disapproving glare of a drunk woman whom he doesn't even like very much, but with whose company he is constantly stuck.

The fist will come first, before the kicks and the swearing monologue that accompanies violence. He ducked before it came, and with one fell swoop grabbed the man's arm and twisted it behind his back. There was a satisfying crack, and a squeal of terror from his now not-so-bored girlfriend.

The man collapsed to the floor. Just a few feet away, Clara continued to study the ashes at the end of her cigarette, both oblivious and uncaring of the drama that unfolded before her. He slid into the seat she had reserved for him, and she offered the can of motor oil as a tantalizing temptation.

"Go on," she insisted. "No one here is going to care."

But she was wrong, for all eyes were now on him, some of them the friends of the man who had wanted so desperately to have just one night that didn't end in bored sighs and rolled eyes. Their hands were clenched in fists they tightened and released, mealy dark eyes piercing into the dark corner where Clara was tucked away.

She tapped her ashes into the ashtray before her, and blew out a long plume of smoke. It snaked above her head in an uneven halo. "Have a drink. I know you want it."

"I don't," he insisted, though his body craved the sustenance she was so blithely providing. He bent low to her, his brow creased as he offered her a worried whisper. "I think I may have caused a scene."

The man with the broken arm was still encircled by his pals, who were gathering him up, four strong men carrying him fireman style up the narrow stairs. They kept bumping his busted arm, the bone snagging against the railing. His scream of pain stopped the band playing for an entire minute before they resumed their usual ragtime plonking.

"You worry too much," she said, smacking her lips and taking a long sip of her gin and tonic. "Stuff likes this goes on here all the time, you know that."

"They're all staring at me."

"You're a priest and you aren't drinking. That's all they're worried about. That you're bringing around the coppers." She took another long sip before putting down her drink. It was hot and damp in the basement, and a layer of thick condensation lined her glass. She smoothed it over with the pad of her thumb before grabbing the can of motor oil and concealing it beneath the table.

"Just a shot," she promised, and she looked up and around, shifty-eyed enough to send the signal that was she was giving him was more potent that mere vodka or whiskey. She poured it, thick and black into a concealed shot glass and then placed it quickly onto the surface of the table. "Knock it back," she said, pushing it towards him. "You can thank me later."

All eyes in the dank basement were on him, even the soaked souls at the bar who were expert drinkers. He hesitated slightly, dry, scaled fingers touching the rim of the shot glass. Then, unable to resist any longer, he snatched it up and downed it in one shot, the thick black tar sliding like the congealed blood of his borrowed body down his throat. He closed his eyes, sickened by the unpalatable bitterness. But this feeling was quickly replaced by a cooling, gentle sensation, one not unlike standing beside a waterfall after wading in hot, sizzling lava.

The sages of the bar nodded their heads and offered him a toast by tapping on their empty glasses for a refill. All eyes turned away, for he had now revealed himself as nothing more than yet another thirsty member of God's chosen flock. There was no judgement. Jesus himself loved a bottle of wine or two.

"You've dragged me in here, and I see no evidence of my target," he chided Clara, who fidgeted where she sat, her pearls meeting her teeth in their usual click-clack-click, keeping in time with the jazz drum of the band.

"I know where, but I can't tell you yet." She finished her cigarette, tossing its smouldering ashes into the ashtray in the middle of the table. She sipped delicately at her drink. "If you want to finish your mission, you have to do something for me first."

He didn't like the sound of this. He'd been caught in this trap too many times before. Always, always, with the empty promises and half-truths. But she was the only connection he had, and he clung to it, hoping that somehow the pattern of her linear life would draw him to his target and he could complete his work and finally, without further delay, be allowed to go home.

"It's nothing big. Just the usual."

He bristled more at this. Sensing his worry, she secretively poured him another shot of motor oil and handed it to him. He downed it, and then another with practised ease. "I told you before. No more favours."

"I guess my information isn't worth going home for."

"You're lying. I can feel it deep in the fourth marrow of my rib. A stabbing pain that chafes against my skin." The effect of the motor oil was making him dizzy, but his scaled skin was starting to fade into its usual pink hue, his appearance more human than foreign. "There is no room for favours. Either you tell my what I need to know, or I am leaving you here."

She clacked a white pearl against her teeth in thought. "It's a damn shame you won't help me. I know I've been a little, well, prone to exaggeration at times, but I've never fully steered you wrong. Your mission always has been top priority."

He doubted this, but he listened nonetheless.

"What you need to understand is that sometimes, to get my information, certain obstacles need to be removed." She gave him a blood red smile, lipstick staining her white teeth and the circular pearl she had tapped against them. She pointed a finger in the air to a passing waiter, who rested a gin and tonic in front of her. He tried to take away the oiled shot glass, but she held her hand over it, preventing him. When they were alone she turned back to her robed companion. "Just one. That's all, I promise."

He didn't want to acquiesce, but there was such surety in her manner, and with his home contact so perversely silent, he had no other course but to follow her lead. "It's risky," he said, looking over his shoulder with nervous glances. The cronies at the bar nodded to him. "I've already made an impact here."

"People only see what they want to," she said. "You could slice him in half in front of this entire dance floor, hell you could go onstage and do it right in front of the band. Some people might turn away, others might gawk. None would turn you in. This is a blind man's home, in case you haven't noticed. Lost souls clamouring their way to the bottom of every bottle."

"That's not how it is for you. You're rarely drunk."

"I find my pleasures in other ways," she said, and downed her waiting gin and tonic in one, solid gulp.

He sighed, truly not wanting to be a party to this, but as she was his only connection, choice was seriously limited. He cast a glance out onto the crowd, the low ceiling hugging them in tight in the near darkness. The glittering chandelier affixed to the ceiling was missing several of its glass tears, its asymmetry a reflection of the general sense of darkness and decay within the confined space. It was much like his chapel, he realized, only packed solid with souls that kept a firm grip on their sins.

Or so the rote went. He scratched at his collar, the motor oil doing little to ease the way the seams of the black robe chafed his skin. He wasn't sure of this alien religious sect, with its promises of a life that never ends, and a non-linear existence that was heaven. He knew, from experience, that neither of these things were entirely true. What was strange was that they would harbour a consciousness of such a state, and that they would blanket it in ignorant, positive terms.

"I'm not talking about the usual method," she assured him. "This guy is a real sleazeball, a real crazy loony, if you know what I'm getting at. He's not a good person, not like my Daddy makes you believe he is, and not like me." She sat back in her chair, confident in her self-assurance. "He owes me a connection that he didn't deliver."

"I can sympathize," he said, tired of her excuses. "Why should I help you when you give me nothing but the same? Perhaps it's you who should be worried, I might make you suffer the same fate as those who disappoint you."

She stiffened at this, her body rigid. She cast an unforgiving glare on him that stopped his body's heart cold. "You will never say such a thing to me again," she ordered him. Long fingernails scraped dangerously over the surface of the table between them, ending in curled claws. "We're on similar missions, you and I, but you don't want to admit it." Her eyes sparkled with violent glee, murder intent in her iris. "Believe me or not, but never, ever, threaten me again. You know as well as I do that I have no qualms against getting rid of any obstacle in my path–and that includes alien freaks in priest robes."

She relaxed, enjoying his discomfort at her words. She poured him another shot, and he took it gratefully, the tremor in his hands betraying his fear. "I didn't mean to be unkind," he said to her, only to inwardly frown. That wasn't the right sentiment, he thought. Kindness. Such an unwelcome word.

"His name is Frankie, and he's one of Georgio's fences," she told him. "He told me he had connections in Hollywood, and he was going to get me in one of those moving pictures. Said there was a script made for me, and the director said it was all set, all I had to do was show up and I'm the lead. Don't even need an audition."

He nodded, taking in her words carefully.

She let out a tired sigh. "You don't know what moving pictures are, do you?"

"No," he admitted.

"No Clara Bow, no Louise Brooks where you come from, hunh? Shame. The world hasn't been the same since we all got so addicted to little flickers in the dark." She gave him a bored shrug of her marble white shoulder. "Think of it like this, a play performed by actors, only they aren't actors. They're shadows, with bits of grey and white scenery in between."

"You want to become a shadow of yourself?" he asked, confused.

"I'm going to be in pictures," she said, ignoring him. Her mouth was a thin, tight line of burgundy. "Frankie thinks he got one over on me, but he's going to pay for this."

"It seems a simple enough lie, one you've fallen for before. Isn't this how your other friend and I met?"

Her harsh features softened at the mention of her old flame's name. "Mikey and I had a thing, and it was grand while it lasted. But that's the trouble, see. People always disappoint." She drank the rest of her drink and motioned to the bartender to bring her another. "Me and Mikey weren't exactly on the best of terms when you met up with us."

He thought back on that night, on the spilling of blood, on the pleas for mercy and cold, glinting stab of steel digging through pliant flesh and into resisting muscle.

"No, you weren't," he said.

"It's like this," she explained. "I always expect more from people than they are willing to give. And sometimes, I get a little over the top angry about it. Like with Mikey that night. He was supposed to get me a diamond ring and all he brought me was this dull old ruby. Hell, any whore can have a ruby. I wanted a diamond. That's just not the way you treat the one you call your girl. That's casting her aside, telling her she's worth nothing more than second best." She shook her head. "It's over with. Ancient history. Frankie's the one on my mind now, and he's the one I'm concentrating this on. He'll be at the end of the bar at one o'clock, and I want you to tell him he has to come outside, that I'm waiting for him in a cab. He'll think we're going somewhere romantic, like the Clifford Motel. He'll fall for it. He's a dumb jerk like the rest of them were."

"I don't know," he said, still uncertain. "I've already broken a stranger's arm. This Frankie is going to be on his guard."

"Do what I told you," she ordered him, and got up from her table. She walked unevenly towards the front of the bar, her steps forced as she made her way through the dancing crowd to find the set of stairs that led to the alley outside. "I got everything waiting. All you have to do is play look-out. Easiest damn job in the world."

* * * * *

The pavement shone with the thin glimmer of moisture that had collected in pools beneath the black walls that lined the alley. He was warned against it, but he didn't care. He needed his sustenance. With a shake of his wrist, the bottle of motor oil slid into his hand and he took a long, refreshing drink from it, far more than the tiny amounts she'd used to taunt him. The crude black substance crept into every crevice of his mind, muddying it, the images of what he was seeing before him shuffled into uneven pieces. Along the slick back of a fossil fuel he rode into familiar territory, where images of time filtered into his consciousness, some crystal clear, others murky.

There was a hand. A glint of a knife. Wounded eyes pleaded with him, shocked at this act of betrayal. A name he recognized slid from blood-soaked lips, and with a final sigh the last syllable of it died with him.

"Frankie."

He was pulled out of his motorized dreams, the name echoing across the vast horizon of his timeless consciousness. Frankie. But he had pulled that man, that one she had pointed out, into the alley with nothing more than a promise of a shot of whiskey. Frankie. Why had the man stared at him like that, and called him by his own name?

Within the darkness, the glittering pools of water captured the flickering gaslight that hovered over them in hoary invitation. He tried to focus properly as a new, but familiar, shimmer walked towards him. He shook his wrist, the motor oil spilling out and staining his sleeve. He swore, the language alien on his numbed tongue.

She grabbed his wrist, her ghost's flesh injecting frostbite.

"I told you to wait."

She snatched his motor oil away, and he could feel his soul clamouring towards it, his tongue dry in fear as she held it aloft.

"No more of this," she said. She took off the cap. He shook his head. She nodded hers.

He turned away as she poured it out, black and thick upon the puddles of the alley, the ripples eddying outward and staining the soles of his shoes.

"I warned you about this stuff," she said, shaking her head as she kicked the now empty can across the alley. It landed with a dull thud against something soft and wet. "This is going to be a problem, is it? I hope you can find the wagon, my friend. You aren't tagging along to anything unless you're riding that hay ride."

He frowned, sure this wasn't the conversation he wanted to have. "He called me Frankie," he told her.

"Of course he would," she answered, and snapped her compact case shut.