skonen_blades

April 30/30

8/30

Lie no longer, sly young man. Each silk caress that carries you home to bed will be a wish that is fulfilled with tiny hands, enthusiasm, and no guilt. I’ve got your underarm worries packed safely into this cotton kit of first-aid brush strokes. Your enamel will strengthen, your veins will widen, and every stroke of cold genius that haunts your mind’s underbelly will be a hallway of light for your allies to reach out for you. You are about to not only go on a vacation, you are about to straight-up BECOME a vacation.

Your fingerprints are in the flan. The food that tempted your heart becomes crumbs at your touch. Each kind-hearted knife thrust cutting up red peppers to feed hole-hearted families of hippo-handed hard-ons was an indigo mirage, thrust up for the benefit of sailors and mermaids lost in the desert. If your expiry date hangs limply in wet rags, if your half-snail shell game of a life is at the flattening point, if your tire pump has become a dust-ridden topaz horse chandelier, then look at what your hands have done to soft surfaces. You can kid yourself that you’ve made no difference here but that’s not the case.

The sheriff’s wife awaits you. In the hot kitchen of summer. The man who enforces the law with good sense and a gun is at work all day and all she does is bake pies in short dresses, wipe sweaty locks of hair off of her amazing forehead, and guzzle lemonade until you show up to take her mind off of the sun-baked forgetful lizard’s eye of a town. She’ll wear his boots and you’ll get better at leaving your self-control at the doorway to her bedroom. It’s not as though you invented rope tricks. It’s just that sitting up straight gets harder to do every day and this, while stupid and carrying a fuse, is lively in a way that hasn’t been wrong since humans first settled townships.

And you’re not even a mailman.




tags

another sprucing of an old piece

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It was a way of life down here to prove how far you were willing to go.

The stew of Oddtown. The people that lived here knew that they’d never work in a place that required a dress code let alone a mannered way of behaving. The modifications they had done to themselves were extreme.

There was work that a person could get done that was reversible. Horns, smaller tattoos, piercings, subdermal implants, that sort of thing.

Judge’s kids got those to show that they were rebelling against a society that they didn’t create. All tasteful and done in places that could be covered up by business suits and hairstyles in later life when they realized that their destiny was to be a benefit to society rather than a burden.

They took their little rebellious walk in the wilderness on Oddside. If they were lucky, they made it back out with a few ‘hardcore’ stories and some street cred with the other kids from rich families. Learned a few staring tricks for negotiations in the boardroom when they finally accepted Daddy or Mommy’s tuition and went to law school. Memories to make them think that they had a soul or had experienced ‘real life’ for at least a little bit.

If they were unlucky, they met up with the people that didn’t give a fuck about their parents or futures. A few shots of crackoin later, a few hours of video later, and few ransom demands later, a few brain burns later, and the little girls and boys from the rich side of town ended up in pieces amongst the garbage bags in the alleys. Either that or just stumbling around dead-eyed until they starved to death.

But the smart inhabitants of Oddside realized that these kids had money and would soon be running things. Becoming friends with these kids could be good down the road. Ever since the inheritance act was passed, the poor became poor forever and the rich angled with each other for more money. The gulf between the two societies became an uncrossable trench littered with the Icarus skeletons of people who tried.

It’s all about appearance.

Take Mannycentric, for instance. He had robotic, cherry-red fists the size of oil drums. His shoulders and biceps were grafted to take the weight. If he relaxed, his knuckles dragged on the ground. Those fists could knock chunks out of buildings when they were fully charged. They weren’t gloves. The birth-meat of his forearms and hands was long gone.

Killie had antlers and four hearts. Her scars and tattoos ran the gamut from tribal to baroque. Not much of her original skin still showed. Hundreds of small, scalloped shark fins inserted from her tailbone up to her shoulder blades turned her entire back into a cheese grater.

Flail had extra joints installed in his legs. He ran like a deer and leapt like a flea. He had the buttonhole pupils of a goat.

They were currently letting a blonde rich girl buy them drinks and impressing her with violent stories, watching her eyes grow wide, feeling her excitement growing. She obviously thought she had a wild streak and was ready for whatever the night threw at her. She was wrong. Manny, Flail and Killie had been promised a hundred credits to deliver her to the Skinner. They were just waiting for the roofies to take effect. If they didn’t need the money, they might have tried to make her a friend.

It was a way of life down here to prove how far you were willing to go.




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They called him Longhand.

He was a tall sheriff. He was a very pale Swede with fine, blonde hair. The black suit he wore was not required by his office but it made the silver star stand out against his lapel like a metal tooth in the smile of a killer.

He had the long, elegant fingers of a pianist. He never played any instrument except, some might argue, The Gun.

He wrote a lot and didn’t talk much. He was quick with a pistol. He was fair but extremely harsh. The town was as afraid of him as they were grateful for his presence. He was no mere scarecrow to criminals. He was a plague.

Longhand was older than most in the new town. The prospering nature of the village had attracted a lot of young folks with families. It was growing fast. Longhand had hired a few deputies but they mostly minded the office and patrolled the streets at night.

They rarely had to send for the sheriff. It was like he had a sense for trouble. As one turned to shout for help, Sheriff Longhand was already striding through the door, his bootheels marking out seconds in the silent room as he strode towards the problem.

He kept his blonde hair long which was unusual for the day. Or at least, unusual for an employed gentleman living in a civilized setting. His eyes were blue but they lacked the dreamy, mesmerizing quality that most blue eyes possess. They were the cold eyes of a non-feeling thing. They were eyes that brought to mind cliffs and rivers. They had all the emotion of a seagull.

The were twin lights pushed into the mask of his face. He came across as mechanical when he entered a crime scene or an event in progress. A living puppet.

He moved with a slow economy of motion in an affected nonchalance. It was enough, coupled with his reputation, to put most criminals off their plans and most drunken louts back to a sober state.

For those that wanted to press their luck, had never heard of LongHand or were feeling just plain suicidal, the end was quick.

A small flurry of fabric like the flap of a flag in the wind, a gunshot, and silence. Most criminals grunted in surprise at the sudden hole in their forehead, convulsed, and died, leaving the world no poorer.

Some survived the experience but you could count them on one hand. They never committed a crime again. Or ate without help.

Longhand ruled quietly in the West. No glory befell him. It slid off of him like the passing stares of strangers.

Some say that he is where we get the expression “the long arm of the law” but it can’t be verified.


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He’d earned the orange Mohawk.

This was a small town. Mullets were considered effeminate. Stoic men uttered grunts and monosyllabic commands. Ex-army men and farmers, all of them.

No-one knew why Terry took it into his head to shave and dye his hair into an orange Mohawk. He never volunteered the information.

He was beaten every time he went out in public. Some times he put men in the hospital, sometimes they put him in the hospital.

He maintained the Mohawk.

This went on for two years.

It changed every man in that small town. Broken noses, cheekbones and jaws adjusted the contours of most of the men’s faces. Some of them had limps or had become left-handed because they’d punched their right hand into uselessness.

Terry himself miraculously avoided a wheelchair. He lost a few degrees of vision in his right eye and his face was a map of scars. He no longer resembled either of his parents.

One day, the men in the town left him alone. Terry became the guy with the Mohawk and that was that. No one laid a finger on him again.

He’d earned the orange Mohawk.

But he joined in when they killed that drifter with the long pink hair.


tags

It was the middle of July in a 1987 tiny Texas town named Grover’s Join. The locals shortened that to The Groin. The population of The Groin was around three thousand and on the decline. There were no secrets, there was no future, and there was nothing to do. Flat and dusty with one school, one hospital, and two bars. The town was bored.

The teenagers were nearly insane with the need to feel something, anything. Television sets glimmered to them like brilliant blue green fishing lures in the night, showing them other Americas where Stuff Happened. One kid ran away nearly every month. Some to New York, some to California. Half of them sent postcards back with lies on them about how well they were doing. The other half just became memories.

The town wasn’t dying so much as it was disappearing.

Until the Circus of the Dead came.

The brilliant red semi trucks pulled up into the parking lot of Lucky Lou’s tavern that afternoon. They were immaculate. The chrome trim on them was sparkling and fresh. The red paint on them was as bright as a brand new barn. There wasn’t a speck of dust on them. They were gorgeous.

After their air brakes died down and the engines shut off, the dust of their passage settled around them back down onto the deserted parking lot, tired from the brief excitement. It was a windless day and the sound of the Henderson’s dog barking in the distance echoed out over the scene.

The passenger door of the first semi truck chunked open with a hiss and white smoke tumbled out to the ground through a dim blue light like the inside of the cab was not merely air conditioned but refrigerated. A long leg dressed in black leather arched out and the metal heel of a black cowgirl boot clinked on to the first step.

She came down slowly like she’d just woken up and the sun was thawing her out. She wore black leather head to toe. The sun glinted off of the silver plated holsters on her hips. The sun glinted off of the buttons and zippers on her creaking leather outfit. The sun glinted off of her polished spurs. Wild bright red hair splayed out around her pale face like an iridescent halo lit to fire by the sun. An old leather top hat perched on her head at a rakish angle trying in vain to tame the hair. She was wearing large sunglasses that almost looked like welding goggles and her red, red lips were twisted in a cruel smile.

She was pulling her gloves off finger by finger and walking towards the bar. Her spurs jingling were the only sound. Even the Henderson’s dog had gone quiet.

Behind her, the trucks waited in the noon sun like sleeping giants waiting to build.


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