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In one case, I volunteered for a magazine that had several crates full of unread subs, and I dug out a story that I had sent them a few years earlier. I reread my own piece, saw that it was completely wrong for the magazine, and had the dubious pleasure of sending myself a rejection letter.
“Everybody thinks I’m out to swindle them!” Richard Wolf threw his hands in the air, thinking of all the tsuris he had endured. “When in fact it’s always the client who can’t express a wish in clear and straightforward terms. They always leave out crucial information. I do my best. It’s like stage directions without any stage left or stage right. I interpret as best I can.”
Lydia wasn’t really a pirate, though she did work at a pirate-themed adult bookstore near the interstate called the Lusty Doubloon, with the Os in “Doubloon” forming the absurdly globular breasts of its tricorner-hatted mascot.
They all sat for a long time, listening to the Cantopop and their own internal monologues about failure.
She didn’t add that she really needed this group to continue the way it was, that these people were becoming her only friends and the only reason she felt like the future might actually really exist for her. She didn’t want to get needy or anything.
“You are all good people, with the strong moral centers. You have given much thought to the time travel, and yet you speak of it without any avarice in your hearts. Not once have I heard any of you talk of using the time travel for wealth or personal advancement.”
“Well,” Ricky said at last, standing up from his cheap metal chair. “I will definitely bring your proposal to our Senior Visionizer, Terry. But I have a feeling the VCs aren’t going to want to pay for a launch without kicking the tires. I’m not the one who writes the checks, you know. If I wrote the checks, a lot of things would be different.” And then he paused, probably imagining all the things that would happen if he wrote the checks.
“It is the warning. Sometimes you have the power to change the world, but power is not an opportunity. It is a choice.”
It was then that Malik said the thing about wanting to stand outside history and see the gears grinding from a distance, all of the cruelty and all of the edifices that had been built on human remains. The true power wouldn’t be changing history, or even seeing how it turned out, but just seeing the shape of the wheel.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” Doug realizes he’s inadvertently quoted Phil Collins. First he’s mortified, then he starts laughing like a maniac. For the next half hour, Doug and Judy speak only in Phil Collins quotes.
Now, chances are, if you’ve been to Rachel’s, you’ve already heard my views on the evils of zoning. But just in case you missed it … [Editors’ note: the next ten paragraphs of this manuscript consist of a tirade about zoning boards and the ways in which they are comparable to giant flesh-eating cane toads or hornetaurs. You can read it online at www.monstersofurbanplanning.org.]
You could witness a love triangle being born, its corners sharp enough to slice you open and expose your trembling insides to all sorts of infections, including drug-resistant staph, which has been freaking me out lately. I always wash my hands twice, with antibacterial soap and holy water. Where was I? Right, love triangle. This was an isosceles of pure burning desire, in which two men both pined for the same impossibly beautiful, permanently heartbroken lady. My first thought was: There’s got to be a way to make some money off this.
Every time you would think their eyebrows couldn’t get any more expressive, or their gazes more smoldering, they’d kick it up another notch. Their eyebrows had the dramatic range of a thousand Kenneth Branaghs—maybe a thousand Branaghs per eyebrow, even.
This is the kind of kinky shit I used to dwell on, back when I was a slut and had a lot of spare mental capacity.
With ice cream, all things are possible.
Sally said you can’t separate a work of art from the intentions behind it. I’d never had any artistic intentions in my life, and I didn’t want to start having them now, especially not retroactively.
that’s why I leave the geopolitics to other people. I’m just the go-to guy if you want someone to ride a vacuum cleaner off the top of a Styrofoam coliseum into a mosh pit of gladiators, Mormons (real Mormons, not costumes), and a confused cop.
Civilization, you know, has always been a relative thing. It rises, it falls, who can keep track?
The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face, to save their lives.
All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void, that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, with its sleek red hot dog battering ram surrounded by a metal bun.
But it wasn’t any individual, it was the whole group, we had gotten in a rhythm together and we all believed the same stuff. The love of the ocean, and her resilience in the face of whatever we had done to her, and the power of silliness to make you believe in abundance again. Openness, and a kind of generosity that is the opposite of monogamy.
The longer he stared, the more it seemed to Leon that the Christians were generating their afterlife, focusing psychic energy so that they made a stable conduit and created something on the other side of it. They were almost writing lines of code in the fabric of reality.
San Francisco used to have a million pockets and folds in her long flowery skirts, where the strange and barely loved could create their own reality. Lately, not so much.
“Sometimes the best communities come out of people just trying to get laid. I love that moment where we start taking care of each other instead of only wanting to fuck each other.” Wanda works as a graphic designer, and her phone is full of work contacts—but also, people she had sex with five years ago, who will still drop everything to help her move a refrigerator. “That’s how it works.”
It’s true. Back when I met Wanda, I had so many lovers that I had no more bandwidth for all their problems, like Gravy was getting evicted and Jeri’s bed frame shattered and Roxie was getting evicted and Susie’s water heater broke down and ZQ was getting evicted and Frankie’s truck was making a noise like one of those truffle-sniffing pigs all the time, and also Frankie was getting evicted too. I couldn’t be there for all of them. So I started just networking them with each other, like I got Frankie to replace the bed frame while Gravy fixed Frankie’s truck, and I was also sleeping with a
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The anticipation of loneliness, surrounded by the people who will soon be gone, is maybe worse than actual loneliness. You can’t get used to something that hasn’t even started yet.
“I created a Local Embarrassment, which collided with the Temporary Embarrassment fields that those ships were already generating, and set up a chain reaction in which this region of spacetime became Incredibly Embarrassed. Which means…” “… none of those ships will be going anywhere for a while,” Sharon said.
They’d made a lot of terrible mistakes in their years together, but they’d never picked up a stowaway from a giant-space-testicle cult before. This was a new low. They immediately started doing what they did best: bicker.
Getting a state-of-the-art communications system had not been a priority for Kango and Sharon, since that would only encourage people to try and communicate with them more often, and who wanted that?
You two, you are so small, and all you care for is each other. How can you stand to have no connection to greatness?” “We had enough of other people’s greatness a long time ago,” Sharon said. “You start to realize that ‘something bigger than you are’ is usually just some kind of stupid mass hallucination. Or a giant scam.”
“Let my friends go, or you’re next!” “Whatever you say!” the head Fixer stammered as she unlocked Kango and Jara. “We all just want to be with our families—or possibly go to an end-of-the-galaxy blood orgy. One of those. Bye!”
The intake process begins with dismantling her personal space, one mantle at a time.
Life is crammed full of things that you have to pay for after the fact, and the word “plan” in “payment plan” is a cruel mockery because nobody ever really sets out to plunge into chronic debt.
It’s all too easy to get sucked into metaphysical flusterclucks about identity and the soul and what makes you you.
His head still feels too heavy with pain for a normal body to support, but also he’s increasingly aware of a core-deep anxiety shading into nausea.
Rachel is someone who obsesses about random issues but also claims to avoid introspection at all costs—in fact, she once proposed an art show called The Unexamined Life Is the Only Way to Have Fun.
How would you know if you were in danger? Rachel had said that was a dumb question, because danger never left.
True power, Rachel thinks, is being able to destroy others with no consequences to yourself.
Books are the best way to discover what people thought before you were born. And an author is just someone who tried their utmost to make sense of their own mess, and maybe their failure contains a few seeds to help you with yours.
Matthew and the others chose to cross through Molly’s store because books meant civilization, or maybe the store’s name seemed to promise a kind of safe passage: the first page leading gracefully to the last.
