House of Nezua [Libro]

I return from my walk along the stream holding a small bunch of red wildflowers. They had caught my eye immediately, the bright crimson hue shaking me from a daze of deep thought. Their lush, velveteen, petals blared forth from the greens and tans of the surrounding foliage like dime-sized drops of blood floating on the breeze. I had never seen them on the property before, which seemed odd. This was one of my favorite paths to walk.

“You don’t belong here,” I said, as I picked some to bring home. As soon as I spoke I realized what a ridiculous idea this was. Obviously the flowers belonged here more than in our kitchen, severed and in a glass vase. I was pretty sure, too, that they had a more fitting home here amongst the wind and the weeds than in the possession of someone who most likely would never see them.

But I keep hoping. And I keep doing things that make little sense. Less sense by the day. » Read the rest of this entry «

A twilight like none seen on earth hung over the hilltop.

This was the favored meeting time for The Five. Overhead, the skies were a dark indigo, but on the horizons behind them, the light warmed to a deep salmon glow. The stars overhead were brilliant.

None spoke.

The wind moved about the grass on the hill. The peach colored light of a seemingly imminent dawn rested gently upon the shoulders of the four who were present. And a shadow rested in the empty grass patch where the boy usually sat.

“Where is the List-maker; the Giver of Clues and Warnings?” asked the girl with the teardrop-shaped mark on her forehead. “Where is the Deliverer of Verdicts?”

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They wanted your blood. The scent made them delirious with thirst. They wanted to smear that dark plasma like strawberry oil over their puffy, tremulous lips. They longed to suck you into their bellies like jello, every pulse of every artery absolving every sin.

They were well-meaning dogs that didn’t understand their own needs, their own demands—how easily they could tear your cornea from your face with their horned and padded feet. They were…gregarious bears that could kill you with a happy swipe.

Or maybe they were not so forgivable as all that. Maybe they were hungry for the inner skin. Maybe they were wolves working a red velvet rope.

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It was time to write.

Tanya sat at the keyboard, facing the screen, fingers laid softly upon the home row. She could think of nothing.

What had been her last thought? How was she going to connect Nadioch and The Coming of the Dark days?

Her index fingers skated lightly in minute circles over the nubs on the F and J keys as she hung, poised on the edge of action.
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“Villainy,” whispered the little girl in the elevator with the spider tattoo on her forehead.

Standing next to the large man, her eyes pointed up at his back.

Ding, sang the elevator car, descending. » Read the rest of this entry «

Without speaking, she led me quickly down the corridor toward a moonlit window at the far end. A pale violet light shimmered back from the surface of her loose, voluminous clothes and we were enveloped by a hushing, rustle of sound as we moved forward.

Finally, we stopped, and she turned to face me. Her dark eyes glimmered with the intensity of spirit for which she was known so well.

“Do you remember why we are here?” she asked me. » Read the rest of this entry «

The man with the very large head lifted his chin because he was expecting an answer. His interest had greatly increased when he learned that Mictli had attended Brown University. Mictli didn’t care so much that the man found such a relatively unimportant fact of worth, he was more fascinated by how the man’s words and way of speaking were like plucking fork tines in Mictli’s mind. He heard the man’s voice as both musical and metallic, a dull nickle-plated tone with an unexpected twinge of melody weaving about. There was a rhythm to the older man’s speech that communicated the real questions in his soul, as there is with every person who uses speech in some way. Questions both found and denied, hidden to the speaker or held central in the cognizant mind.

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He sits back into the lawn chair, and the vibration of the ships causes the entire earth to tremble. The entire cluster of cities rising into the evening sky shakes Niqo’s very bones, his glasses, his balls, his teeth, his glass of scotch and the chair he sits upon as well as the numerous tiny, red, glass, figurines dropping one by one from the edge of the window sill inside his small dwelling—but he can’t hear them and even if he could he’d not turn and try to catch them, because none of it matters anymore.

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He slides the prong from its jack with a greasy, measured motion, holding his breath and unconsciously tensing all the muscles from his thighs to his neck as he does. It is always an unsettling and repulsive and…yes, delicious moment. But how grossly vulnerable he feels, then, even all alone under those fuschia light racks. In that moment of transition, how revealed and unpeeled and defenseless and suddenly deprived of the glowing circuit-lit haze of comfort, his artificial womb.

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