Another ziney day

I spent the day mostly getting my butt kicked by the Sunday crossword and working, again, on layout for Kaleidotrope. Some minor tweaks, and final approval from some authors on my edits, I think I have an issue.

I also wrote a little something, as my weekly free-writing group:

She was having a drink at the bar when the man approached her.

“They got lost looking for the right train,” he told her. “I don’t think they’re going to get here on time.”

“That’s too bad,” she said, turning to face him. He didn’t sit, and so she slipped her gin and tonic back onto its napkin. “But tell me, do I know you?”

“Caster sent me,” he said. “From headquarters.”

“Headquarters…” she said, as if tasting the word in her mouth. She sipped her drink as if to wash the taste out. “That sounds terribly official. But I think you have the wrong person. I don’t know any Caster.”

“Caster said you might say that.”

She turned again and eyed the man carefully. He didn’t appear demonstrably crazy — well groomed enough for a cold Thursday night out in the city, and his eyes seemed focused and clear. But you could never tell these days, could you? Even nice guys could be villains. Take her now-ex-boyfriend Jake, for instance. Laura, her roommate, had this theory, that you should just throw the crazy back at them, double down on whatever weirdness the creeps trolling the bars liked to spout, and scare them away with the intensity of your own brand of nonsense.

“The dancer found the warp code when she picked the zombie’s pocket,” she told the man.

“What?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Nothing,” she said. She sighed and swished the last of the gin from her ice. “Just testing a theory. Didn’t expect it to work.”

“We have to hurry,” he said. “If they’re not going to get here on time — ”

“So this Caster…” she said. She herself was in no hurry at all, not after the night she’d already had so far, and she tried signaling the bartender for another drink. “He told you what I looked like?”

The man laughed, actually laughed out loud, at this. She knew she was maybe a little drunk — enough to play along with this thing, whatever it was — but she didn’t see what was so funny about that.

“It’s not like I could miss you,” he said. “You look just like your portrait.”

“My — ”

“The one in headquarters. I’m sorry. Caster briefed me, but I keep forgetting you’ve been in the field all this time. He said you might not remember. He said you might need some convincing.”

“Did he?” she said. What I might need, she thought, is another drink. “And how do you plan to do tha –”

But she never got to finish, because that was when the man reached into his coat, pulled something from the pocket, and the room exploded into a kaleidoscope of pain and light.

“The hell?” she managed, before everything went black. So much for that next drink.

We had to take three sentences, made up by the three of us, on the spot, and work them into a story. I think it’s pretty obvious what at least one of those sentences is.

I don’t feel like I got nearly enough sleep last night, so I think it’s early to bed with me tonight.