wytchcroft

Memory:

Falling, it’s extreme. Some people make a sport of it.
Dress it up any way you like, spread yourself, use whatever you’ve got, some fancy jet, a ret-board, a parachute, wings, it’s still falling.

“No, it’s not, it’s flight. What, you think you fall... with wings - how butt crazy is that?”  Halley, of course.

“Whatever.” and Eva sulking.

“Whatever yourself grll-fren', you can fall all you want. Me - I’ll be flying.”

"Woah! Halley, cheese much? You practiced that one in the bathroom huh?" and Eva laughing. "Well, ok, ok, you fly – then if I fall you'll catch me.”
 

Three:

Like the breaking of a fever, the thing called time - fractures, cools, ebbs away, a wave in retreat. There is debris left behind all the flotsam and jetsam washed up. There are husks of butterflies everywhere; dropping like leaves from the edges of windows, from the fronds and trellises of bush and plant, from the walls and the trees. They crunch under foot.

“Ugh,” the girl exclaims twisting her foot to peer disgustedly at the sole of her boot, “disgusting!”

She looks up again and at the old man. “What is it?” she asks with an exaggerated wrinkle of her nose.

The man waits, toying with a broken I.D. disc – one of the objects found in his evidence searches, of itself just a small piece of twisted metal, the old man has decided to give some meaning to the object, to the name stamped on it – Lee Chuang.

The girl blinks and asks slowly. “Who – are – you?”

It could go on forever like that.  

Islands

There's a scraping, he is, a scraping away, I can hear it, I can see him, scraping. He thinks, I have never been so awake. I have never been so aware. The pale girl is staring at him as he scrapes at his plate with the blunted cutlery. She says, “I think something bad happened here.” But it doesn't feel that way to him, it can't do, must not do - this sensation, this miracle awakening. That's all he has to hold onto.

That's in the kitchen, if it is a kitchen. Somewhere else there is a garden of sorts,, a neglected scrub of green at least, and there are cliffs, a wide lake. Sitting by the edge she says the same thing again.

“No,” says the old man. “I don't know about that...”

A  Translator Speaks:

This interview transcript is reprinted here c/o Syswatch Productions and with only minor editorial adjustment is almost entirely verbatim.

Is this – are we recording? So strange a device, you must forgive me, I am used by now of course to a human, that is a living, amanuensis. Indeed I am rather inexperienced with words in this manner, I mean words alone.

Oh yes, introductions, forgive me I thought you had already… certainly;

My name is Rotteiger, Horence Rotteiger, and I am part of the translation body here at the Martian reliquary. My particular field, my specialism, is the deduction, simulation and/or reproduction of those scents key to the library of what we somewhat simplistically hail as the Martian texts.( Read more... )

Part four:

 “You really think it can be done?” I’m staring into the monitor, into her eyes, willing it to happen, willing the possibility to solidify and become real.
 

I am studying him, the Detective, as he paces slowly and self-consciously around the chamber space, a performance; but whether for him or for me I am not certain.

He drops his helmet with a soft clatter, runs grateful hands through the sweat dampened grey at his temples.

"So," he drawls, addressing me by name, "MAGAI. You gonna tell me what we got here? You gonna help me - or just sit there scratching your ass?"

I have studied the human mind and all the known language articulants it can muster, and I understand both the concept and execution of humour and yet I cannot tell if the remark is funny or not.

"How may I be of assistance Detective?" I ask.

 ............

( Read more... )

Watching a flag get trampled in the dirt always brought a tear to Jerry’s eye, it was the romantic in him; Even if the flag was the United Colours of Benetton.

Squinting through the astringent smoke and with his ears ringing to the piped strains of Anarchy in the UK, the last of the musician assassins watched as the stubborn defenders of the accessories department finally gave up the ghost and arranged themselves in an artful display of splashes, drips and smears; Abstract expressionism at its very best, look good on a billboard too, one day.

Maybe in the past.

He squeezed off a photo just in case.
( Read more... )

17 at the outpost.

Strange to be reporting from an outpost in the interior.

In any case such is where I find myself after withdrawing from the remains of the Raptors and my night vigil.
( Read more... )