And this other, this female. Such colors, such beautiful staining beneath the skin. All the colors of decay - green and black and purple and white. Like a rainbow of death she is, amongst them all. They approach her, they back away, they are uncertain. They fear her purple teeth.

And the song of this one, growing louder with each sip he takes. What fluid can cause such a display, all colors and sound? See how its mouth flays the flesh even as it sings, each increasing exertion on its part causing ever more damage. Yet it carries on oblivious as its blood pools around its feet, warning the others away.

Let us walk among the menagerie. Let us lick them, taste their salt and their heat. Look how they arch at the touch. They love it, you know. For just a little while. But our fluids will scar them, will etch them. We are like sculptors, and they like clay.

See this one, the small one. It is deadly. Like a viper, like a cuckoo. Do not let it touch your eggs with its oh-so-white hands. It looks like porcelain but its heart is dullest stone.

And this one, it has edges. Oh, how they bite at you. Posions so bitter you they will bottle your blood when you are gone.

They are dangerous, yes, these creatures, though we have such power of them. You laugh, I see you behind your mask. Oh yes I see you. And they see you too. For in observing we too are observed. Even as we seek a dish to serve, so too do they. Do not forget the rules of the menagerie. Always remember that beneath our clay, our silk, our layers of wax and pus, we are animals too. And one must always feed the animals, lest the animal feed on you.

During the bridge, the lyrics of which we never seem to know though Endiku kept singing off-key anyway (which the walls of heaven somehow resonate into a kind of harmony), Homer dashed to my side. “Did you hear?” Before I could shake my head, Homer had babbled on breathlessly, “Sure-footed Mercury said that knobby-kneed Pandora entered heaven with a Bowie knife, then vanished after he spoke to her.”

Julius and I guffawed. Long-winded Homer was forever making up stories. “Yeah, right,” I managed after catching my breath. With the back of my hand, I wiped away tears of laughter.

Endiku, off in his own world, catching sight of my tears, wrapped both arms around me. “Everything’s fine now, David: We’re in heaven.”

“You guys, burn me up.” Short-tempered Homer stormed off to find a more appreciative audience.

Time is difficult to measure in a place like this, but it couldn’t have been long before our corporeal forms began to rise, pirouette, and swirl about the hall like--well--Lincoln Logs in a toilet, getting faster and faster until our bodies slammed against the walls and tapestries that dematerialized as soon as we struck, our bones snapping on impact.

And then I was ordering another ambrosia, arms slung over the shoulders of my two favorite people. “Now be honest with me, fellas,” I asked the guys concentrating hard on not holding my sibilance for too long. “What’s the last interesting thing that’s happened up here?”

Endiku gave me a funny look. “You think nothing interesting happens because you already know so much.”

“Damn straight.”

The house's sonics still worked, and the neighborhood kids snatched up some of the bigger spiders and less poisonous scorpions that scurried out the windows and doors Karina had opened. Their parents didn't get anywhere near as close, just talked in little knots several driveways away. Something else Karina remembered: this trial period to assess a new arrival. She couldn't be the first returnee from the cities, but had no idea if that would grant her quicker acceptance.

She heard chanting that first night. Next morning, she saw they'd captured a royal monitor, penned it in a dry kiddy pool under sections of cyclone fence weighted in place with picnic tables. She couldn't get a good look down into the shadows, and stumbled back when it hissed and lunged at the fencing.

The headwoman of the subdivision watched from the picnic shelter. "It's for an oracle," she said, "to tell us how neighborly you are."

This was new to Karina.

The second night, she watched from a distance as they fed it a goat carcass, drugged, apparently, and pulled back the fence to let the children glue beads and rhinestones all over the lizard's hide. After the neighbors went home, she watched it, glinting in the moonlight and moaning a low dinosaur sound that might have been drug reaction or indigestion. Even back home, with the walls tuned to white noise, the sound bled through.

She couldn't sleep. Coming here was supposed to get her away from having to make choices.

She got up near dawn, heaved a couple of picnic tables aside, and hauled the monitor out of the pool. The body was like a German Shepherd gone limp, the decorated skin rasped her arms, and she tripped over the tail as she staggered up and down the dunes. She couldn't hear the noise anymore, just felt it in her chest and belly. She left the lizard a quarter mile out.

The headwoman and a few other neighbors were waiting when she came back, and lifted their mugs of root-coffee in salute as she trudged past.

"Good omens!" called the headwoman.

I love you for your friends.

I'd been here ten minutes and it already felt like a waste of time. A quick glance around the room showed a bland sea of black and white faces. They knew me, but I didn't know them. A few I knew popped up pastel, info scrolling above their heads so I could quickly de-prioritize them. Laylines gave me connections and circles of interactions. Mostly blah. A few interesting people glowed warmly, colorful, inviting, but there were no clear connections. No one to introduce us.

I was about to say fuck it and head to a green tech party in the valley for farmed sushi and organic hemp beer when you lit the room with your brilliant glow, a beacon that scattered bright lines to the few luminaries present. All heads snapped around, and you posed for adulation. Everyone streamed vids to prove they were there, and you soaked it all up, beaming. I waited long enough to verify your identity, then simply stared.

The color of the room changes, and people look between us. Finally, you see me. When we lock eyes the lines between us arch over the crowd, entwining into one glowing band.

As I walk toward you the room flows around us, almost slow-mo, choreographed. A cinematic moment frozen in time that signals true love. People talk about connections, but how many have really experienced it? I pity generations who came before, trusting fleeting moments to chance, technology a distant and erratic dream. Why miss anything at all?

Your smile is reserved as I reach you. You're so connected it makes me want you immediately. I want to party with sultans and crown princes, vacation on artificial islands, in underwater hotels, bridge cultural divides and branch out to the power centers of the Middle East. You want to connect with tech movers and shakers, current gods of new realities. We bring each other closer by degrees.

I reach out my hand and you do the same. We don't have to speak. You learned everything about me in the time it took to cross the room. Ranch in Marin, stock portfolio, meetings in the White House rose garden, enviable friends list. Your smile widens to an inviting and wordless "I accept."

Our first date is tomorrow. We'll go to the most exclusive venue, so don't worry; no one undesirable will get in. We'll have an automated guest list.

So you can bring your friends.

"She's from the edge of the field. The last row by the Fence!" Adam hissed.

"So?" Colin sneered, but he knew what Adam meant. Crystal could be, probably was, of mixed blood. Her mother looked like pure maize, but Crystal's father could've been a grass, wheat, quinoa; anything, really. Any plant that could insinuate its pollen into Crystal's mother's private places could have jumped genomes, crossed chromosomes, done the dirty deed and fathered hybrids, hybrids that looked normal, but their own children would be ... monsters. They might look like anything.

Colin knew this, but he forgot it all when he looked at her sturdy stem, her graceful leaves with their adorable tips, ever so slightly curved to left or right, her roots, beautiful in their symmetry. Love might not be stronger than prejudice, but lust sure was. What he wouldn't do to get his pollen into her warm moist receptacles. A little pollen squirted out at the thought of the verdant Crystal and her divine form, and a breeze carried it to the fence and over.

Colin blushed to his roots. Had anyone seen? It seemed no one had. Whew! He was the only one who knew, and he would forget his inadvertent emission as soon as possible.

---

Delilah stretched her blossoms to catch the pollen ejaculated by the fine young maize plant she'd been ogling from the outboard side of the path. He must have been watching her. She had seen him staring at the flowers outside the Garden, and she was the most ... inviting. She had pursed her petals at him, and had made him come with a gesture. How cool was that?!

Pollen grains drifted into several of Delilah's flowers. They adhered, and their tubes began to grow. It was like nothing she'd ever felt before.

Soon Delilah's ovaries swelled, gravid with chimerae. The seeds set, were fertile, and landed in due time on good, black soil. Alas, by the time they sprouted the following spring Delilah had moved on through the circle of life. She was nought but a withered brown nub. Colin had been harvested by a combine, and his aborted progeny were distributed among a few dozen cans of corn.

The end

*Yes, plant sex is weird and inventive. Successful reproduction between members of different species is just the beginning. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)#Hybrid_plants.

For me I bet it was about the same as it was for you ... I went to bed on Thursday, but woke up on Saturday. It wasn't a Rip Van Winkle kind of thing: Friday was just missing. Specifically, someone had taken it.

This wasn't the kind of problem we usually dealt with at the Department of Time Misallocation. It was a relaxed job, usually, punctuated with coffee breaks and donuts. Every day we'd get a few cases of stolen moments, someone would lose an evening to drinking, and every fall there was always a flood of hapless dorks who didn't remember what they had done with the hour of Daylight Savings Time they had saved in spring. It was never anything serious. Time isn't really lost, after all: it's just used. A little cognitive restructuring generally takes care of everything.

But this was different, because in that week there was no Friday. Someone had diverted the entire day, so paychecks had been missed, schedules had been ruptured, and millions of senior citizens were stuck with an extra day's worth of prescription pills they didn't know what to do with. It was a horrible theft, a breathtaking theft, an inexplicable and uninvestigatable impossibility. We spent months on it, actually, and between the feverish work pace and the lack of donuts, most of us lost between two and eight pounds. That was all the good that ever came out of it, though. When we closed the case for good a year after the fact, we'd gotten no closer than we'd been that mind-slapping Saturday morning.

If that had been all, if it had been one crazy incident, we could have put it behind us--but we know it will happen again. We don't know when, or who, or how, but someone's shown the way, and now everyone's thinking about it: what they would do with it, an entire day to themselves, stolen and available for use at any time. It was like hiding a djinni in a backpack, like folding a summer meadow into the closet in the spare room. It was a little like eating the sun. What could you do with a stolen, unblemished day? Or more to the point: what couldn't you?

Was it Anon’s imagination, or were his eyes now covered in scales? Perhaps the increased number of Lizard Breath spottings made him nervous. What at first seemed simple petty arson was now looking more complicated and sinister.

Anon Muss jogged long distances, slowly. He plodded through quiet, unpopulated industrial districts to soothe his mind. In case thieves happened by, Anon left his wallet at home, giving no one any reason to molest him. One night, after three years of jogging the same route, Anon was arrested. The cops escorted him around town, to an officer who didn’t think Anon was the suspect since the suspect wore different clothes and was of a different species—if not phylum. The friend of the suspect did not recognize Anon (nor did Anon recognize the friend). However, since Anon did not have a wallet on him, ergo, he must be the arch-criminal, Lizard Breath, who exhaled methane gas and set it ablaze with his cigarette lighter. When DNA samples came back negative, the cops let Anon go, with reluctance. As Anon waved goodbye, he found two pits where his ears had been. Where had he last seen his ears, the cops wanted to know.

From vending machines, Anon picked up a newspaper at a café and, like everyone perversely fascinated by the criminal element, bought a cigarette lighter. Idly, he flicked the flint lighting mechanism. It took more dexterity than he had supposed. He spread the newspaper before at one of the tables under the glare of the sun. The misdeeds of Lizard Breath were now ubiquitous as well as notorious. Entire buildings had gone up in flames. Criminal profilers suspected a syndicate. Anon raised his head from the newspaper accounts of Lizard Breath to contemplate why someone would do such a thing. A woman slapped him for scoping her out. He belched and lit his breath on fire.

Mrs Singh stood dumbfounded in the kitchen of her food stall. The fish, a grand red snapper with pointy teeth and auspicious markings, lazily trod water in its aquarium above the sink. It had brought Mrs Singh good luck since persuading her to spare its life three years ago. Her pescatarian menu consisted of curries and veg, and business had soared with the fish's presence. It had also provided a strange companionship after her husband had died and her children had moved away. This announcement terrified her with its consequences.

"Why would you say this, fish?"

"Because it is true. I have lived a long life, in part thanks to you, but it will come to an end later today."

"What if I buy you a new tank? Or a pond in which you can freely swim?"

"It will not matter, auntie. I will still die."

"I could change your food, buy the expensive flakes from Thailand."

"It still would not change the fact that I will die."

"Is there anything can be done?"

"I am afraid not. It is the way of things. But I do ask for one kindness in return for the years of wealth I have brought you."

"Anything, fish."

"Cook me as you would any of my brothers, and then consume me yourself."

"Very well."

And so later that day, after Mrs Singh had served her last customer, the fish quietly stopped moving and floated upside down in its tank. Mrs Singh descaled the snapper, gutted it, and cooked it in fiery curry along with fingers of okra and slices of eggplant.

With the first bite, she experienced a heightening of all her senses. With the second, she gained understanding of the speech of plants. With the third she perceived the sticky strings of the vast LifeWeb that connects all living beings. With the fourth, the knowledge that her new perceptions would fade by tomorrow.

Mrs Singh wept for the fish's gift, eating every last bit of flesh until her wise friend was completely gone.

It was a dare, a bet, another way to embarrass her, to expose her as an outsider, and yet it was all she could expect, the best she could expect, and for that the beak-faced girl let him kiss her.

His soft lips met the hard contours of her yellow mouth, his wide red tongue flickered against her thin black one. And in that moment of close-pressed teenage years she spread her wings and they lifted from the ground and he saw her for the first time true, in her own space, her own place, her own setting, and amongst the clouds she was beautiful.

The hard contours of her beak met his soft pink mouth. She spread her wings at the contact. She hoisted him aloft, she felt full, she felt beautiful. And she opened her eyes, and she saw him, small frail sack of meat thing. And in her horror at his sight she let go and he fell down, down to earth.

the SF Poet Anon Muss had transom-entangled to his lover. Responding to its fifteen seconds of fame, critics responded: “What lovesick, cornball hack hasn’t thought-twittered something to that effect?”

The difference here being that Anon’s object of affection was none other than the lovely Dionysia, recently loosed from a marriage contract to King Ash--he who decimated planetary kingdoms remotely with a tap of his pinky fingernail-chip. As one of Dionysia’s comrade lovers of the arts, Anon once had the displeasure of meeting King Ash--obesely lounging on a mountain of oversized cushions amidst a cacophony of incense. King Ash sneered at Anon as the power-jaded king sneered at all of Dionysia’s thinly disguised “art-loving” friends to mask their night-emission desires.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Anon Muss never intentionally found a loophole in their marriage contract. In fact, being rather outmoded in sex transactions, he sought ways to patch the contract for Dionysia. Nonetheless, when Dionysia uncovered Ash’s harem secreted into a pit beneath the mountain of cushions, his first target was none other than Anon Muss. One tap of his royal pinky: Slitters zipped across the rolling desert on autobikes, arc-blades slapping their mighty thighs.

Trip-lights warned Anon of the intruders, which gave him time to scramble-translate himself to Jac-sun V, a sparsely populated planet full of jutting buttes, tumbleweeds, and sand--a land where few of the sane would choose to stay. Anon wrote Dionysia to come live with him in the wilds--a world where their swelling love could engorge the empty spaces. After sufficient time to show that she and she alone was in control, Dionysia wrote back, “You’ve got to be shitting,” and chose a sycophant, the intrepid Captain Skylark, who gave her extravagant if impoverishing gifts, but who had the physique of one who had valiantly survived a famine and now lived to eat at USA Steak Buffets.

To this day, Anon translates copies of himself back to the home planet--in the vain hope that she might find her way to love him--only to watch his copy get diced by a slitter’s arc-blade on pirated vid-feed.

Anon refuses to write sad SF love sonnets since truth and justice triumphed in the end. No one likes to spoil a happy climax.

"What's wrong!" Shep jumped off the couch and crossed the small room in a moment. His body felt good, really good, but Jill disengaged after a few seconds and held him back by the shoulders.

"I'm so happy to see you?"

"You haven't been out." Her lip trembled.

Shep pushed past her. When he came back in he was fighting tears.

"I tried to get it off, too," she said, sighing.

"I didn't hear anyone! I wouldn't have let anyone touch our door." He paced back and forth, shoulders tense and head down. "They don't have any right! We're legal!"

Jill pulled him to her. She shut her eyes and ran her fingers up and down through the short soft fur on his back. "Nothing to do with you, Babe. Nothing at all. I got laid off. The T'lakash don't need as many human subjects now they're so close to finding the cause of the Anger Syndrome. They don't need me." He bared his teeth.

"Well, I do! We'll have to move. Where will we go? Your Aunt Kitty doesn't like me."

"That's vac," she snapped. "We'll think of something."

The door slid open to reveal a biped whose arms formed a ring just above the middle of his torso. Each arm bore 6 blunt tentacles. His face looked like the ventral surface of an octopus.

"Te'laksu!" Shep barked.

"Your human has been rendered superfluous," the government agent hissed.

"I can find another job!" Jill shouted, wrapping her arms around herself. Shep ... growled, no other word for it. He stepped in front of her and stood almost nose-to-nose with the Subadministrator.

She couldn't see Te'laksu well, but he made a sudden movement and Shep lunged. They went down, grappling in the doorway, but soon Shep rose to his feet, magenta fluid dripping from his chin. The T'lakashun sprawled in a growing magenta pool.

"Oh Shep!"

He spat something out and hung his head. She scowled, but couldn't stay angry.

"Have to call Kitty now," she said. Shep dragged the body into the room. The door slid shut.

End