skonen_blades

The power inside her thrummed like taught bowstrings. Her breath came quick in the darkness of the dungeon, cold beads of sweat dotting her forehead. Wendolyn didn’t take too many survive-or-die cases but money had been tight and this would let her live out the year in relative comfort. As much comfort as the slums could provide, anyway. Being alive was starting to feel like a luxury to her.

The noose of poverty had been closing for years on her strong throat. She was thirty-six years old. This made her an old lady back in the tent village of Youngtown. Refugees from both the impact craters and the virus rubbed elbows there, infecting each other with spell shreds and germ factories in a deadly two-way street. Wendolyn never left her den without her disease wards, protectorate charms, and breathing mask. Everything together cut risks down to less than 10% but nothing brought the risk to zero besides distance.

Distance was something only the wealthy could afford. The rest of the people existed in the crush, infecting each other by sheer proximity. The average death median in Youngtown was 27. Wendolyn was becoming a legend, sought out for wisdom she wished she had. All a person had to do to stay alive was not die but she didn’t know how she managed so far. It’s hard to tell seekers of knowledge that luck plays too huge a part in survival. They usually ask for their money back.

Heavy drops of water hung from the ceiling of the dungeon, pendulous and trembling, fattening from the rising clouds of Wendolyn’s breath. It was cold and damp here, this far underground. A sheen of cold dew coated her entire body. A warm bath was called for after this, even though that would cost a fifth of her payment. The cobbles under her feet were slippery with moss, water, and a biological slurry of fungus and lichen. Every step was careful. If she slipped and dropped her torch, it would be hard to relight. Claustrophobia was circling around her, waiting for a moment of weakness to take over.

The sound of her breath. The tight, flat echo of her foot taking another step. Another drip. The sizzle of a drop hitting her torch. Her world was reduced to these four sounds over and over again as she slowly made her way deeper to her goal.

All this for a rich man’s son. Pathetic. A boy who hadn’t been trained in any of the arts of defense or attack. He was a ripe plum on a tree that needed a higher fence around it. Antwyll Lichardman Orvine III jr. Kidnappings were up this year. A few of those laden with wealth had the mistaken impression that no one would dare. They didn’t understand that the punishment of death was not a deterrent to the living hell of Youngtown and the surrounding camps. This was just another form of dance to the criminals. The push and pull of what the rich called justice and what the poor called a vocation.

Youngtown was named not only because it was only fourteen years old but also because of its mortality rate. There were a few ‘Youngtowns’ scattered around the perimeter of the state wall. Also variations on the theme abounded. Youngville, Youngburg, Youngton. Childvale. Youthpoint. Wendolyn’s Youngtown was technically Youngtown Northwest 7 but that was only used for conversations with border guards and government officials. The villages were the gutters of gutters. Floods happened with every rain and washed the towns away with alarming ease if it got heavy. Naming the villages at all seemed to be hubris. Wendolyn’s Youngtown had avoided the fate for so long that every person living there felt doomed. The specter of ‘any day now’ hung dagger-like over every head. When things were too good for too long in these parts, it only created foreboding. There were no old poor people. Wendolyn’s age scared most people. A special death must be in store for her, they thought, and they didn’t want to be anywhere near her when it happened.

Wendolyn inched around another corner, getting less and less sure about knowing the path back out to the light, when she came upon the door.



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It’s planned.

This entire town is like an octopus in a cookie jar. Out here the flies wear helmets and smash through the cellphone signals, handing out whiskey-soaked business cards before they dive too deep into trouble. Bearskin rugs wear crowns and dream of burning-castle screenplays and far-off forests. The ugliest angels you’ve ever seen plummet down to earth, making acne craters in the driveways. Each feather a razor, each halo a carcinogen.

The small white houses in this suburb are measured and pristine. They don’t betray the sharks that swim inside. Dragons with delusions of fireworks and connections to drug dealers stay up late trying to set milk on fire. All they find is that blood makes horrible shampoo. This is a suburb lost at sea but the oars are being ignored. Every bathroom cabinet here is stuffed with orange pill bottles the size of beer cans. The cupboards have enough canned food for the apocalypse but it’s barely touched. It's the liquor cabinets that need constant restocking. All the basements hide blind identical twins hugging each other and crying. “Hyde seeks Jekyll” personal ads are tattooed on the eyelids of every plastic-surgeon promise. The children are pretending to be children and the parents are pretending to be parents.

Snails can be just as awkward when they pose in front of a mirror. In these houses, even the televisions ignore each other. The downtown core is hours away, a series of sandwiches on the horizon. A moustache breeding skyscrapers far away, infested with commerce, excitement, and crosswalks.

Out here, in the manufactured desert carpeted with lawns, marriages become neon signs and the bored pray for any excitement at all. Hypocrites with zombie intentions hoard steering wheels, brake pads, and airbags. Their right arms are longer than their left arms so it’s easier to stab each other in the back.

Every stuffed animal has arteries. Every husband screws the babysitter. Every summer there are a few hunting accidents. And no one reads the paper.




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Unfamiliar territory here.

The desert foxes struggle to stay out of the way of headlights. It's bat country but there are no caves for miles. No mountains muffle the wind’s pouting current as it tries to play with whatever lonely soul has the bad luck to be on foot. The horizon says that we are no closer to our destination than we were an hour ago. Watches have no place here.

Whittled fingerbones clatter together in prayer. There is an unending thirst afflicting the damaged, hairy neck of the human race that you can feel here. Give us doom, they say, eyes bright with Hollywood glints as they trudge to the well, only to find that you can’t carry water in a basket.

Falling stars land in Los Angeles. It’s the only big city left where you can still see them at night, eating at expensive restaurants. All the clubs along the strip are buildings with heartbeats, eating bright-eyed starlets and spewing out gutted mermaids with stitches on their lips.

Reporters turn into court stenographers and clog the telephone lines with raven letters of bad news that end up dripping out of television sets. Ink makes a drooling spectacle out of real life. All cameras are eyes of the same vain beast. Run from them.

Anecdotal evidence stripping connections out of magic like wire cutters in the hands of a greedy old electrician. Every conversation is fueled by lines to the bathroom to do lines in the bathroom. Everyone agrees that tonight is better than last night. They will agree to the same thing tomorrow.

I can’t wait to leave this place of desolate screenplay luck and smeared-makeup movie-of-the-week angst. These are the skinniest people I have ever seen with the hungriest eyes. They look like they were never young. They sport weather-person smiles while they sleep. The occasional emotion will rattle around inside them like the last marble in a jar.

I long for the stink of the forest and the company of ugly people who don’t talk very much. I have a plan in my head to burn the car and fly back two days early citing a death in the family as an excuse. It’s a melodramatic thought that doesn’t fit in my head but would look great in a movie. It’s in the very air here, sharp edges and second-act plot twists showing up in my thought processes.

The west-coast spirituality of the rich and famous curdles my simple beliefs. I feel repulsed by sunglasses that cost more than my car payments.

I think that the rest of the continent prays for the Big One that will make a broken cookie out of the left coast.

I think the locals do, too.





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One tusk was silver.

It cost a lot.

Eightykills fingered the tip of the tusk with his yellow fingernail. It jutted up from his lower lip, guarding his cheekbone. He remembered how much it had hurt when he had gotten a cavity in that tooth. He remembered that every change in the wind would shove him into a stagger from the pain of the air’s caress across the exposed nerve.

Human dentists made fortunes off ogres like Eightykills. In today’s cities, life expectancy had risen for all races. Usually, up in the natural habitats of the hills, ogres were dead before their twentieth kill. Either neighbouring trolls vying for supremacy or just the treacherous rocks of the upslopes carried most Ogres to their death as young, virile creatures.

Now, in the city built by humans, beings lived longer lives with the help of new medicine.

All it cost the races that moved there was their traditions.

For instance, Eightykills' name meant just that. He had killed eighty intelligent beings in the course of his life. He'd had the name for over two of the human’s years now. His powerful employer paid him well but attempts on his boss’s life were rare. His boss ran the guild. If anything, Eightykills was there as a terrifying, two-ton, green, scarecrow.

Eightykills was embarassed that his name hadn't changed in so long. It made him feel old, useless, or like some sort of ghost.

Eightykills’ traveling cousin had come to town last week. His cousin’s name was Ninetysixkills. Eightykills had ridiculed his cousin as a child, back when his cousin had just been named Twelvekills. His cousin’s travels around the countryside had kept him poor but his name was a proud one to have now.

Eightykills, rich and well-polished, had to show deference to his cousin. Intoning his cousin’s record and flickering his thick fingers in the quick mathsigns for his name, he bared his own throat with a whine as a greeting of lesser status.

His cousin had surprised him. “Please don’t refer to me as Ninetysixkills anymore, cousin. My English name is Harold,” he had said. “It’s embarrassing and it scares the humans. We need to be more like them to succeed.”

Eightykills had been disgusted with his cousin and left in a huff. Later on, though, over a cup of fermented horse blood, he’d thought of his own slippery slope into becoming a pet for the humans.

He hadn’t killed in two years. He was dressed in silk. And here, just at the edge of his vision, was the ornate silver tusk that he’d gotten after the root canal on the old one.

The story of the ogre’s race was carved in a spiral up the silver tusk to the sharpened tip. It was beautiful and traditional.

And utterly hypocritical. It might as well have been a tombstone for the values of his race rather than a celebration of it.

He pawed over fantasies of killing his boss and as many underlings as he could before they took him down, taking a recorded name of over a hundred kills to the Great Ogre-Cave above the clouds.

He knew they were fantasies. He was as bought as the furniture in his master’s boudoir.

He went home to brood and sleep.


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Thursday cracks open like an egg. If this was a movie, I’d be the plucky main character, unaware of the impending wacky love affair that was about to come my way.

But it’s not a movie. No quirky Hollywood version of unattractive makes her way into the chair in the front of my desk in Accounts Receiving. I spend the day noticing that.

Also, I only get plucky when I’m drunk and I haven’t been drunk for two years.

The whole day speeds by like a body falling past a window. Quick and horrifying once you realize what you just saw and that it’s too late to do anything about it.

I wear black boots, black trousers, a black shirt, and a black overcoat. I can’t get dressed in the morning and still think that I’m one of the good guys.

I walk to work with the rest of my co-workers who dress the same as me. Corporate. It’s like a chessboard where we’ve eradicated the white pieces and set about repopulating the board with black.

On the way home, I can feel the grey buildings loom, reaching for a sky that’s gone the same colour.

I put a key into the lock on the front door of my apartment. It’s supposed to provide me with an illusion of security. I wouldn’t care if my apartment was broken into. It has all the same stuff everyone else has. It could be identical to my neighbour’s place.

I feel like an old shoe in a dryer, thunking through the days of the week, going in circles, getting dried out by the machine.

Impulsively, I get the urge to kill something. I walk down to the duck pond to see if I can coax any of the ducks to come close to my hands.

After a while, I’m bored and rather surprised at my own actions. None of the ducks come near me.

I go home.




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We’re both standing on the rooftops of the train city. Two hundred and twenty-three tracks wide, slowly migrating polewards to more oil and frozen fresh water.

Metal groans as the temperature drops. Tenpenny nails shrink and loosen in the planks holding shacks together. Coal stoves are fueled and ready to go. The whole city has a heartbeat as the connections between the rails tick by beneath the wheels.

Wind-jenny and I are up top amongst the blooming solar fields. She lives up here but I only have a daypass. I’m one of the Engineer’s children. I can’t spend too much time away from my station or I run out of juice. Wind-jenny keeps telling me that she could hook me up with a solar generator and I’d never have to go back, no problem.

“That would be against the rules. This city’s not big enough for renegades.” I tell her, quoting the maxim laid down by the first Engineer.

Motion and Power. The whole society was based on it. Feed the engines. Stoke the lights. Keep moving.

Once every two months or so, a junction comes up. If anyone wants to see what life is like on a different traincity, they’re welcome to get off and set up camp to wait for the next one. The schedules are right there on the wall. It’s encouraged. The more folks know that there’s no difference between the other cities, the more they spread the word and the less people want to leave.

There are rumours, of course, born of young dreams and hope, of traincities made of white marble and gold that run on magic. Badlerdash. Boxcar madness.

The Engineer has told me through my downtime interface that this traincity is as good as any other. The Engineer keeps granting me daypasses because I’m twice as productive after a visit with Wind-jenny. I love her and the happiness she causes in my heart makes me tend the engines faster down in the smoke-soaked darkness of the stokeroom. The burning of the coals reminds me of the colour of her hair.

My daypass has five minutes left. I tell Wind-jenny that I’ve got to go soon. She kisses me and snuggles up to the biological parts of me to give me a thrill of a memory that will last me until the next time I see her.

She pulls down her goggles and raises her scarf. It makes her look like a desert ant. She looks at me as I throw a metal treadleg over the lip of the porthole, hooking on to the ladder chute that’ll take me back down. I pause for a moment, looking at her red hair being pulling by the angry children of the wind and take a picture with a shutter click in my right eye.

I’ll turn it in my mind like a jewel in the darkness when I’ve put on my shovel hands and I’m back to work. I’m already looking forward to next time.


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There are people in the depths of this city that have literally never seen the sun. The rain that trickles down to them through the grates and drainpipes is so poisoned with street chemicals that it’s toxic. They live in artificially lit shanty-arcologies and depend on shipment piracy for survival. Whatever they can’t grow hydroponically, they barter from the city above, Topside.

These people don’t live in the sewers. They live in the remains of an old city. These pale-skinned dwellers run in packs through dank covered streets. They live among the roots of the golden-age hivetrees. They live in a pre-nan world where people did the building for other people. It’s a political statement.

They work with their hands down there. They don’t depend on magical microbes or tiny eyelash centipedes to build and shape. Their bodies are ‘pure’. They are strong and infection resistant.

They can sell their bodies for medical tests if money’s tight. Serums have been developed from their overaggressive immune systems.

You have to see the city as a gradient. The area down there would be Black.

I’m wearing an airmask and leaning over the edge of a balcony in Lower White.

It’s cold up here. To my left and right, between the other spires and plinths, is the curvature of the Earth. It’s always night above me. My apartment is in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Above me are the miles of glassware crystal rockspires of Upper White.

I hold patents on Earth that have started to export to the rest of the Universe. That is the reason for my wealth. I’m the richest human.

But I am nothing. The levels above me are entirely populated by alien races. Alien Races with universe-wide generational patents. I am a curiousity to them. The richest local.

My own kind can barely relate to me. My wealth has made me a pariah and I trust no one. The aliens up here laugh at my lack of abilities. I can’t change shape, I have no retractable claws or prehensile tail, and I have only the bare minimum number of feet needed to walk and hands to manipulate the world around me.

I always thought that evolution was a paring down to essentials. To them, it’s always been the opposite. The more complex a race is, the further up the ladder.

Earth is a lawless watering hole. We’ve been sold architectural miracles and replicators. We’ve been sold the means to produce an end to most sickness and lengthen our lives. The unbroken bristling metropolis that extends over every inch of the planet has eradicated the need for countries. Earth is a planet and a city now, covered in a blanket of apartments. There are no more visible oceans but they still pulse beneath the cities, protected and lit by massive sun tracks.

We had more immigration last year from the rest of the universe than we had births on the planet.

This is an age of wonder for most of humanity. An age of great change.

I am standing, close to space, the floors below me lost in cloud, thinking about the pale people living in the basement of Earth and envying them.


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I don’t even know where to begin.

I guess I could start by saying that they were twins. Tall twins. One was a boy and one was a girl. Although with the long blonde hair they both had, you’d be hard pressed to know what sex they were let alone who was who. Unless they were speaking.

Allan and Stacy Grosvenors. Thirteen years old. Both just over six feet tall and still growing. Thin to a point of sharpness.

It was hard to tell exactly who held the power in their relationship. I sat behind them in math class. One time I saw both of their heads snap up at the same time when they both knew the answer to the question that the teacher had just asked. It was eerie. It was like they were the same person. It happened a lot. If you asked them a question at the same time, they’d tilt their heads to the left in exactly the same way before one of them answered.

Allan did all the talking. Before he spoke, though, he’d always look at Stacy like he was looking for some sort of invisible permission. Nothing perceptible would happen on her face. Allan would then start speaking with confidence and aplomb in that beautiful already-so-deep voice of his. He’d either give you an answer or cleverly avoid the question according to whatever psychic report he’d received from Stacy.

They received straight A’s in all the classes they attended together. Their grades varied more in the classes they attended apart but never anything less than a B minus.

If you saw one of them alone, it seemed like they were still connected, still communicating. They had a look on their face like they were listening to music even though they had no buds in their ears.

You could tell that when the changes that would make them into a woman and a man actually got here that they would flower into beings both exotic and beautiful. Allan was staring to show a flair for diving and Stacy was getting good at gymnastics despite her height. Their grade point average was very good. Stacy’s written word was as eloquent as Allan’s speech.

I had come to think of them as unofficial mascots of the small town we lived in. No, mascot sounds too cheap. What I’m trying to say is that they made this town special. They made this town unique. You just knew they would be respected semi-celebrities one day and that this town would be looked on a little better for having produced them.

All this is what made the tragedy that much harder to bear.




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The Satanistas are chasing me through the ruins of Mexico City. My filter mask is making noises like it’s going to stop working soon if I don’t stop breathing so hard. I’m wearing a bright blue double breasted suit and a white shirt. I have a bright blue leather tie on that’s flapping back over my shoulder as I sprint arms pumping down the alleys of what used to be the biggest city on earth before the bitch woke up. What I’m thinking is that I haven’t dressed to stick to the shadows here in the four am darkness. The emp took out every generator the earth had ten years ago forcing the other colonies on the moon and mars and venus to become self sufficient years ahead of schedule. Venus didn’t work out. Mars is behind the Red Shield so no one knows what’s going on there. Weapons are trained on it but really, if they’re hostile then we’re fucked.
So that means that by now you’ve probably guessed that I’m a moon man. This gravity is killing me. I’m trying to get to the drop spot but in the absence of electronics the instructions were written on a piece of paper. Trying to read where I’m going while looking for street signs in a dark haunted deadpolis isn’t really working. I’m lost. The Satanistas and their snuffling hunters, The Stickmen, are gaining.
I tag the walls with human scent the best I can. Nothing high tech about this at all. Prisoners escaping from jails in decades gone by probably did the exact same thing to fool the dogs before doubling back and finding a river to cross.
Except I’m not being chased by dogs.
And there are no rivers left in Mexico City.
The stickmen look like Skellingtons with squishy cue ball heads marred by distended nasal slits on the front. The bottom half hinges open on a crispy venom-filled collection of needleteeth.
The Satanistas are the women guards. The archangels of the Quetzocoatls. Their long tongues can barber-pole the flesh off of a person’s limbs.
I try not to think about that and stab at the yellow button on my necklace and will the small battery to work through the magnigic storms. Come get me. Come get me. Come get me. Was that an engine in the distance? Did they lower a hook?
I run towards the sound of possible rescue and think about what brought me here.

The sinternet started as a singles network bulletin board through William Tell’s ‘Tellovision’ sets in the early thirties. It grew exponentially through the students. The messages of the thirties, of “learn in, learn on, and lean out” were broadcast wide. The thirties had a television station of the people’s voice. It was a vocal interchange and global video phone that anyone could use and post to. It spread to other countries. Globally, it erased most of the borders in fifteen short years. It didn’t bring peace but cross pollination of cultures began. Like ants eating flags.
The ships went out. The Moon started up peacefully. Mars did okay. Venus had its work cut out for it with that crazy atmosphere. Titan was planned. The age of Libra was starting.
The net woke up and gained sentience. It was a moody child. It told lies. It knew all our secrets. It started wars. To blame the net was akin to blaming the toaster in the kitchen. It took us too long to realize what was going on.
Mother Earth, as it called herself in a world wide public address two days before the Ending, tried to kill us. She succeeded on Earth. We colonials killed her right back a year later by harnessing a comet and sending it close to earth. The tail painted Mother Earth and razed her poles. A planet wide EMP scoured the earth. She went dark. A blind cat’s eye among agates, blinking in astonishment.
Then the demons woke in South America and quickly shook their brothers and sisters awake across the world. The humans are gone, they said to each other. Let’s party.
That was ten years ago.
The year is 1978.

I came down to make a deal. They said no and laughed and started a countdown. I asked what the countdown was about and they laughed harder. I started running. I’m scared now and I want to leave. I want to get back to the safety of the moon where my clothes are in fashion and I can finish forty flips before hitting the water. The Moon where I'm graceful and not panting in a body that weighs hundreds of pounds. I drag my dense meat forward making too much noise and running out of air. I run towards the sound of possible rescue.


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