gchatus

The Prize Fighter

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:44:42 -0800

I’m bleeding into the mat and I think a piece of my nose is about two inches away, with a string of what might be skin but could just be blood and mess leading back into my face. I close one eye and the other is still staring up into the overhead lights and I think this means it’s hanging out of its socket and sitting on the mat too, and I picture it drying up like a raisin down the side of my face and wonder if I should just say goodbye to it now. There’s a piece of meat next to me and I think it’s my arm and every part of me that still seems to be connected is like a bag of broken glass. Willie is next to me and shouting “get up get up you shit” in what’s left of my ear and the other guy is still up and pacing and bouncing on his toes and I’m not even sure where my knees are and I’m wondering how many bad decisions led me here and how many more I’ll have to go through before someone will let me go.

First Date With the Empress of Vohrnorr

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:38:30 -0800

“Someone get me Hildegarde on the phone,” called out Imperial Magus XX’orlyxx III.

With a tendril he reached out to grab one of his pages, but they were too quick and escaped to the far corners of the throne room, all looking for a communications console. In doing so several of them ran into one another; one slipped on the floor, fell down and started to cry.

“This is foolishness!” cried the Magus. “The way you all attempt to live! You five — report to the compression facility to have yourselves mashed into croquet balls for my game next week with the Senator!” The pages ran off, holding one another and chanting rituals to the heavens that their ancestors might welcome them to the afterlife.

XX’orlyxx III looked into his personal mirror, slicking back his forehead membranes. “Yes sir,” he said to his reflection. “Hildegarde, you don’t stand a chance.”

He kissed the glass; it began to dissolve. The Magus smiled at himself with all his teeth, including the ones that grew out of his ears. “You,” he said to himself. “You. Are. Beautiful.”

Sometimes you just need to spend a morning organizing a couple...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:16:26 -0800

Sometimes you just need to spend a morning organizing a couple hundred flash fiction pieces into fake galleys, just to sort of know where you are as a person.

Breakfast on the Plieoscene

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:05:17 -0800

“Darling, this was the loveliest of ideas,” said Mistress Polfergohsem to her husband, Colonel Ralph. “The air is absolutely divine, and the scenery, while not entirely what I expected, has no small amount of its own unique allure.”

“Never doubt that I only seek the most exquisite entertainments for you, my absolute pearl,” the Colonel said as the waiter delivered their egg cups.

In the forest beyond their balcony, an allosaurus snatched a pteranodon from the sky. The creature’s spine was snapped mid-air. As the predator chewed through its ribcage, the pteranodon’s entrails rained to the ground to be devoured by scavengers, parasites, and foraging beetles.

The First Step Takes the Longest

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:22:00 -0800

She was a little overwhelmed, building up the edifice around her, but she said it was all she needed, and once it was done she’d be able to tackle all the rest. She kept creating additions — a fleet of hallways here, a score of floors there. She always found more things needed doing, but swore, swore, she was always closer to the end than she was the start. Meanwhile we grew. We watched the world around her.

The Division of the Olmenkack Estate

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:44:00 -0800

“Hear me, hear me,” called the judge as he walked in. He was clearly a little drunk, and the locals weren’t having it; this was too big an issue, too somber a day.

“Hurr this,” shouted Pa Olmenkack from the back, and he lobbed a bottle of whisky right at the Judge’s head.

The courtroom cheered; of course Pa was drunk too, but he was always drunk and most of the courtroom were related to him in one way or anther, and besides that even when he was plastered he always made for a mean show.

JawBreak Bones

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:00:05 -0800

JawBreak Bones was a big tooth-gnasher outta the lower regions; he was a brawler and coulda had a great career as a broadsider if’n he’d learned the rules and not spent so much time in penalties. After a stint in some outworld backbreaker minin’ ketterglow for the steamtraders, he came back to the uppercities as muscle for hire.

“It suits me, puttin’ a hurt on some lily trash,” he’d say. “Them people don’t deserve them fine things.” He was a champion cook; his foie gras was absolutely delectable.

The Photojournalist

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:00:05 -0800

The old photojournalist road alongside in the sidecar of Emma Christeen—he was out of Halifax and knew his way around the underculture. “You never turn your back,” he advised me. “You got no say anymore in how slow they’ll take to gut you, how quick you’ll blurry out as they drain your blood.” And I believed him. That was how I came to know the Armorgang.

We’d got hired out of Tulsa—me and the journalist getting’ shouted somethin’ serious by the giant invertebrate who slummed weight o’er us an’ sent out on our way. We went through Bali by way of Baghdad, me swift an’ silent an’ him chompin down hard on a cigar an complainin about the excess of flyways in this part of the interverse, He had some long sadness in him made him hard, most of him robot parts and tumbleweed and restlessness, same as any other beast that ever lived.

Queen Victoria, Or Life In Armorgang

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:00:06 -0800

We were fast on Gila Bill, who’d rallied all the gangs—the Penny Dreadfuls, the MutaRapes, the Cybernetic Sheen—and was closin’ in on municipal territory. He was boss of Undergang, and all that stood in his path was us—Squint-Eyed Julie, Sapphos Bloody Sapphos, Bugface Pete and Armor Giles, an all the countless others—our brethren, high on octane, set to collapse a world on fire.

Now all that counted was to get us through the snaky hollows of the windlands, through smoke-choked desert and the little nowheres; these are where we’d find ourselves, how we’d come to live inside each other’s bodies. I was just me, Queen Victoria—thrown out my knee highs and my hoop skirt underpinnings for the loose well-oiled leathers of the otherworld, set to find the sun and cast the empty bottomlessness from the heart of me.

The Custodians

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:04:05 -0800

They wandered into the blackened, cloudsoaked dreams of my former lover; they walked on all fours, two legs, six legs. They were fur, feather, skin, scales; they creeped and crawled and flew. They seemed to move with single purpose; they had the same focus, same glow, same eyes.

Childhood

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:00:06 -0800

Dad always told us to be gentlemen. He’d harness up the dogs and march them round in circles in our yard, smiling dearly at the neighbors and waving with a stiff left hand.

Mother held us, made us watch him from the windows.

“Remember this,” she said. “Never wait to run away.”

Goat Island

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:09:02 -0800

Ain’t you nivver heard of Goat Island?

They say it’s ate a thousand souls.

No one’s found the bodies.

My Life With Sectorgang

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:28:04 -0800

“You ain’t shoulda come down this way,” said Bob. Spittle hung low from his bottom jaw, and sizzled at it touched the tarmac. Behind him, figures gathered in the dark; we heard the rattling of chains, the whisper-slide of of billyclubs being unsheathed.

“Ain’t much of you suhvives down heah,” he continued, and the muscles on his face contorted into something I thought was a grin. “Ain’t much of you don’t get eaten.” Around us the underwinds blew, bringing stink and heat up from the basement of the earth and past us, heading toward the sky miles and miles away.

“There’s no escaping,” my companion wheezed; without light his solar cells would soon go out. “You continue as you’re able,” he breathed, as what was left of him began to die.

I felt Bob breathing; where the exhalation hit my skin it made a radiation burn. I lifted a gasmask to my face.

That was how I joined the Sectorgang.

When You Can, In Your Space, Where You Are

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:01:05 -0800

“There’s not a lot you can go in knowing,” he said as he led me down the tramway to the next available car. Around us the low-lights glowed amber, illuminating the undercity and the myriad pathways through the dark. “You’ll just pick things up, as you go along,” he said, and beckoned me to enter. I sat, and he sat beside me. We looked out into the gloom.

“It’s like life,” he said. “Most you can say is you might know more going out than you knew going in. Beyond that, you just do what you can. When you can. In your space. Where you are.”

And his ventilator wheezed, and I got this impression I was seeing inside him, as far as it went, which left me a little isolated.

Smoke and Steam and Light

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:00:06 -0800

He watched me watch the sky traffic below us, the weird self-maintained lines of highway in space through which all manner of car flew, on their own journeys.

“They don’t even care if it’s the end of the world,” he breathed, blowing out smoke. The voice was mechanical, but expressive; the eyes black domino pips that reflected something like the sun.

“You’ll never have to worry,” he said, cheer buzzing in his diodes. “It’ll be over before you have to face real hardships.” Below us the city sang, stories of smoke and steam and light.

The Bear III

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:00:05 -0800

The bear (for he was a bear) crawled through the ceiling-ducts connecting the upper rooms, his wooden sword scraping along the sides of the enclosure as he went. His stumpy arms had little purchase, and occasionally he dragged himself through slicks of mucus the beast’s black tentacles had left behind.

Behind him, the duck hung on by clamping his bill to some loose stitches in the bear’s leg, but was careful not to let the stuffing get in his mouth. Farther back, the rabbit and the lion tiptoed side by side, holding hands and jumping on top of each other each time the monster’s saturnine calls echoed, screeching, through the dark.

Sky Patrol & Central Air

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:00:06 -0800

Sky Patrol had major beef with Central Air.

“You can’t keep building up your infrastructure into the public airspace,” warned the sector lieutenant via bullhorn as the newest construction crew continued to do so.”There’s regulations, protocols—”

“Eat an asshole, rent-a-cop,” shouted the foreman, and he instructed the boys not to stop.

Not that they could. Their neurocenters hadn’t been built with choice knobs. The new ones would be armed with self-aiming laser rifles. That would shut up the local dicks.

A Bad Interview with the Electric Skull

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:06:06 -0800

He sat there, grinnin’, without much else that face could do anyways. He looked at us through the plastic sheen of his transparent skull, unskinned and manufactured with his brains showed through and wired to electrodes that ran o’er the carapace and sent blue sparks of lightning from front to back and one side to the other.

His eyes were blackened caves and his teeth clicked as he shouted, “Hey Mac, how long you wanna keep me around, see?”

In the back one of the sergeants said, “Christ this rube has shit taste in suits.”

The Present

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:49:17 -0800

I hadn’t heard from you in some long time, so when the package arrived I swept up on it like a lover, pokin’ and proddin’ when I could just as easy have opened in straight away. It smelled of where you’d traveled, and looked aged a thousand years—not rotted, but refined, and worn, and of-a-time-and-place. I suppose I can’t explain it well; I never had a talent for it. And no matter, for now it’s gone.

Inception Thru a Beeyootiful Mediyum

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:50:50 -0800

Inception Thru a Beeyootiful Mediyum:

Conversation in gchat (my true love), circa winter 2009 (hereafter known as the Winter of Despair) explaining the new hotness (not the old busted joint)

gothickers.tumblr.com/about