The gingerbread castle is guarded by fairies that look like they moonlight as pornography starlets.

A spider made of gas-pump nozzles crawls across a mirror big enough to be from the eighties. This monster’s scream could tear the paint off of a new car and that’s the record scratch that skips us forward and back in time, testing the theory that all is possible.

Spock will breakdance. Seals will catch the subway. Colours will go to the art galleries and free their brothers and sisters from the paintings. Pomegranates will give birth to black holes. Pastry chefs will make clouds in the sky. Gravity will wear a hat and have the handwriting of a doctor.

The wolf is crying but no one is paying attention.

Nanotubes will give birth to the cars the size of flower buds and sex will turn every person into a helicopter. Bears that argue in the subways will be calmed by the skyscraper-sized women playing electric guitars.

Penguins will become pyromaniacs.

And the gingerbread castle will be eaten.




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I’m crawling through the desert.

They shot me in the belly. They cut me up a little as well. Like one of my eyes and a few fingers. Nothing major, you understand? I mean nothing major in terms of immediate blood loss. They wanted me to suffer. They carved a few funny things into my back in simple letters like I was a tree near a high school. They cut my Achilles tendons as well.

They did this at noon and drove away. It’s six o’clock now. I’m starting to wonder if I’m immortal and this will become some sort of eternal punishment. Time has taken on a new meaning for me. Every minute is an hour.

It’s not like I didn’t have it coming. I mean, two hundred thousand is a lot of money. I just hope Rosie was smart enough to skip town. She probably wasn’t. I didn’t marry her for her brains. Chances are they’ll find some sun bleached skeleton a few hundred yards west of here with huge boobs and big lips that even the scavengers have sense enough not to touch. Maybe they’ll do something funny like position our corpses like we’re screwing or something.

These people I ran with are bad people. I knew that. I’m no angel but I couldn’t do what they did to me. I had it coming, though. And no use crying over spilt blood.

Lazy buzzards with all the time in the world are circling.

I crawled maybe fifteen feet before laughing myself into paralysis and bleeding a bunch more. I’m just lying still now. Cooking. But it’s starting to cool off. It’s getting dark. And cold. It gets real cold in the desert at night.

I saw the first one about fifteen minutes after I died.

I was sitting cross legged beside the ruin of my mortal shell in the darkness. My spirit was embarassingly naked but more healthy than I’d been in years. Or maybe as healthy as I would have been without the drugs and the drinking and the cigarettes and whatever else.

She poked her head up over the sand dune closest to me for half a second. I would have missed it except her eyes were lit up by the moon like a couple of green streetlights. A few more heads popped up as well.

They tentatively came up over the dunes and towards me. I watched in utter amazement.

They were women and no doubt about it, but tiny and with the heads of foxes. Well not really just the head. I mean, their legs were bent all long-shins like a dog and they seemed to have long fingered paws rather than hands. They had a line of fur down the middle of their backs and huge fox tails. Their torsos were definitely human female but emaciated and athletic at the same time.

They were grace personified.

They were soul scavengers. I had been claimed.

The desert gets to keep what dies there. An agreement with the Upstairs and the Basement had long ago been reached.

Feral desert fairies that no one had ever heard about because no one alive had ever seen them.

Desert Foxes.

No use running.



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