Plugs

Kat Beyer’s Cabal story “A Change In Government” has been nominated for a BSFA award for best short fiction.

Read Rudi’s story “Detail from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch” at Behind the Wainscot.

Susannah Mandel’s short story “The Monkey and the Butterfly” is in Shimmer #11. She also has poems in the current issues of Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, and Peter Parasol.

Luc Reid writes about the psychology of habits at The Willpower Engine. His new eBook is Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories.

Archive for September, 2010

How It Is

Monday, September 20th, 2010

The chicken settled into the in basket on my desk for lack of a better seat. He was clearly uncomfortable.

“I gather you’re here about your kind being killed for us to eat?” I said.

“Oh,” said the chicken. “So that part’s true. But–”

“Let me explain. When we kill a chicken–and by ‘we’ I mean some anonymous worker way off in a processing plant somewhere–we make most of the parts of that chicken into food. For instance, we might roast the whole chicken together–”

“After a decent funeral, I hope? No, I’m kidding. Sorry: nervous habit.”

I cleared my throat. The conversation was uncomfortable, but the chicken was more diplomatic than I’d been led to expect. “So we might roast the whole chicken, or we might use the breast meat in strips in one place and the wings in another … are you sure you’re all right?”

The chicken was scratching at the papers beneath him now, his feathers looking a little ruffled. “Honestly?” he said. “You aren’t quite the barbaric kind of creature I was expecting, but in a way this is worse. Your talk is pretty cold-blooded, for a mammal.”

“Well, unless we’re going to live on apples and tree nuts, we have to kill something, right?”

“But here we are, having a conversation … are you saying you’d just as soon eat me as talk with me? How do you justify that?”

“Listen, I’d love to see better treatment of your people while you’re alive, but it’s not as though you contemplate your impending doom the way a human would. And chickens don’t actually talk.”

“But … I can talk! Clearly your idea that chickens can’t talk is erroneous in some way.”

“You’re fictional. I don’t eat fictional chickens.”

“Uh … oh,” said the chicken. He spontaneously let out a kind of “buGAW!” noise, then looked embarrassed. “So that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is.”

“This didn’t come out the way I was hoping.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll just let myself out, then.”

“Sounds good.” I smiled perfunctorily, and he flapped down to the floor. “Oh, and would you send in the Amazon rain forest on your way out? Thanks.”

The Bagels of Wisdom

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Old Lady Think can flip dark to light and light to dark like a pancake. She lives out beyond the Milky Way, which the Dineh think is made up of the footprints of the dead. (They’re right on this one, but they’re not in this story.)

She’s got a bunch of names, more names than Allah, and—no offense, new gods—she’s far older. Used to sit around in the caves with us, looking pretty overweight and extremely pleased with herself. Now she appears in many forms, sometimes as a mysterious 2 a.m. call on your cell phone, or a bagel you did not order.

Such a bagel appeared on Nora McPherson’s plate during her lunch hour in the East Village. She’d stopped in to ignore some dancers she used to know before she moved uptown and went to work for Wall Street. (Mind you, think about all the dancers Wall Street funds.)

Ms. McPherson took a bite anyway, after the cranky waitress wouldn’t take it back, neither of them suspecting that the waitress held the pose of the ancient High Priestess of Tiamat as she did this. By the end of lunch Ms. McPherson was drafting her two weeks notice; by the end of dinner she was drunkenly apologizing over the phone to a friend from Juilliard, and at 9 a.m. the next morning she had an audition.

Back behind the Milky Way, Old Lady Think just smiled. Making mountains is fun, but sometimes, it’s the little things, like sending visionary bagels to the monkey children.

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