Reh Izo came from Toynejo, where they believed in wishes. Lopi knew Reh came from Toynejo because of her accent, and because of her rings, and because of way she always accepted packages with a little jerky nod. That was a Toynejo habit, that jerky nod.
Martha killed the wolf as it belly-wiggled out from the chicken coop. A head shot, on account of the wolf was only halfway out, and the fence blocked most everything else. With her newfangled Winchester, she could’ve had another shot, but there was no call to waste a second bullet.
Yes, the Cloud Nine does have wings. Huge wings, each twice as long as the ship itself and ten feet thick, covered atop with what can only be checkerboard grids of black solar cells, their trailing edges spouting long lines of presently immobile propellers. It’s like standing on the back of a gigantic metal manta ray.
She made a false step in the darkness, maybe even two steps, and stumbled off the road and couldn’t stumble back. It was insane; how hard could it be to turn around and undo a thing as simple as a step?
The whispers fly home at dusk, rushing to the castle. They flow through windows and holes in the ceiling and the spaces between collapsed walls, eager to share what they’ve learned since their last gathering.
The Mumbaki came, as did the elder warriors, and they sang of Bugan the sky goddess who descended to earth to marry the warrior Kinggawan. They sang of how the lovers lost each other and how Kinggawan seeks his Bugan to this day. When the Mumbaki poured the wine over your head you did not cry.
I am Molimus. I live under the bridge where the day-boats go from wet and wooden Bracklow to the foot of the sweeping stone stair going up the hill to Firmitas and the military school.
The Mission District of San Francisco is a weird place, even by SF standards. If Herb Caen was right, if this is Baghdad-by-the-Bay, then the Mission is the back corridors of the seraglio, where the eunuchs trot about with chilled sherbet and headsman’s axes.
It is said that, of five hundred and fifty-five ways to cook a lobster, only two hundred and twenty-five are still known in the city. Older chefs lament the days of their great-grandparents, when more ways were remembered. No one knows why this loss took place.
Once upon a time—we might as well put it that way, why not?—you are bathing, innocently enough, in the bend of the river closest to your home, when bobbing along with the current, out of apparent nowhere, comes the smoothest, ripest, most glowingly golden mango anyone has ever seen.
