“Hey, tell me, this look like Jesus to you?”
I come to Tito’s Tacos for a lot of reasons. The freeway overpass ambience, the way the old men in the kitchen wrap the burritos tighter than Cuban cigars, the shiny Kennedy 50-cent pieces you always get as part of your change. A lot of reasons. But conversation isn’t among them. Nonetheless, I dutifully look up from my lunch to see what the guy at the next table over is talking about.
It had originally thought the goal was to hit the two small creatures in the distance. They appeared to be identical to the three creatures whom he had joined in the game.
First approximation: separated by some distance, one attempts to down the group ahead of one using one of many metal-tipped sticks (called ‘clubs’) to ‘drive’ a small, hard ball. Those behind would, presumably, be attempting to hit one. So, one dodged and drove.
Her boyfriend put a slim hand to his forehead, as though shielding his eyes
from sunlight, even though the sun had set some minutes before. Where the
girl had pointed was a bright star, moving east.
Rated PG for frequent golf horror
We had an Elvis in the attic. Again.
Echoing in the ducts, his voice woke me around 2 A.M. I hopped from bed and headed for the attic–they always it up there. A Vegas Elvis stood by a rack of old clothes singing “Blue Christmas” to them.
As I edged in the door, he segued to “Jingle Bell Rock.” He waved me down to the front of his meager audience, conferring a special favor. I settled cross-legged on the floor and enjoyed his tunes.
For months there has been an Elvis infestation all over town, but this was the first Vegas Elvis we’d got. He worked the room hard, sweat dripping down the side of his forehead. He was dressed in his trademark white jumpsuit with the spangles and beads and the big white cape he flourished dramatically. The acoustics up here sucked, but even a big fat Elvis could rock the house.
Imagine a cross between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that Gaudí—he of the Segrada Familia and other biomorphic architectural whimsies—had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the faintest ghost of a notion of the splendor that was Babel.
Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.
Genres: Robot
Special closing monkey music by George Hrab
Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.
Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.
Narration first appeared at and produced by Starship Sofa. Special thanks to Tony Smith and Diane Severson for their kind permission to resyndicate this award nominee.
She sets a stepladder next to it. She claps her hands and the 26 monkeys onstage run up the ladder one after the other and jump into the bathtub. The bathtub shakes as each monkey thuds in among the others. The audience can see heads, legs, tails; but eventually every monkey settles and the bathtub is still again. Zeb is always the last monkey up the ladder. As he climbs into the bathtub, he makes a humming boom deep in his chest. It fills the stage.
And then there’s a flash of light, two of the chains fall off, and the bathtub swings down to expose its interior.
Empty.
2009 Hugo Nominee Winner!
Narration first appeared at and produced by Starship Sofa. Special thanks to Tony Smith and Ray Sizemore for their kind permission to resyndicate this award nominee.
But in the normal course of life, our need for air is far from our thoughts, and indeed many would say that satisfying that need is the least important part of going to the filling stations. For the filling stations are the primary venue for social conversation, the places from which we draw emotional sustenance as well as physical. We all keep spare sets of full lungs in our homes, but when one is alone, the act of opening one’s chest and replacing one’s lungs can seem little better than a chore. In the company of others, however, it becomes a communal activity, a shared pleasure.
“I’m sure,” I said. “Somehow, lunch seems pretty trivial after you’ve been thinking about God all morning.”
“God, sir?”
“The Creator of all things,” I explained.
“My creator is Stanley Kalinovsky, sir,” said Jackson. “I was not aware that he created everything in the world, nor that his preferred name was God.”
I couldn’t repress a smile.
“Oh great Emperor,” the gyoji said, continuing the ritual. “These two honorable warriors can not agree who will step aside, and who will join the sacred battle to return you to us. We would gladly send all our sons, but the Council of Infinite Japans says there may be only twenty-one. So now they must fight to decide.”
“May the best warrior join the fight,” the crowd answered in unison with the gyoji.
The gyoji stepped back. Asashoryu stared into Takanasuro’s expressionless brown eyes. The match would begin upon a tacit agreement between them. He kept Takanasuro’s mid section in his field of vision while focusing on keeping his own face blank. He knew the beginner’s lesson as if it were part of him; faces deceive and betray, but all movement starts at the hips.