"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
I came back from lunch to find these little (and one not so little) red guys adorning my desk chair. Yeah, I just have those kind of co-workers. I added the duck — which, coincidentally, I had just brought in that morning — and lined them up, but the rest of it — including this sign was all them.
And that’s about the most exciting thing that happened all day.
So I wrote this today.
“These are sensitive issues,” said the Director, “and they require a delicate hand, not some…trigger-happy hot-shot who thinks the rules don’t apply to him.”
“You know, I think he’s talking about me,” said Crosswell. “In case any of you had ‘trigger-happy hot-shot’ in the betting pool.”
“This is no laughing matter,” said the Director.
“You’re telling me,” said Crosswell. “I had twenty to one you were going to cite ‘flagrant disregard for agency protocol.’ That’s good money you just lost me.”
“This is serious!”
“I know,” said Crosswell. “I can tell from your grouchy face. Look,” he said after a moment, finally sitting forward in his chair, “no one’s denying I maybe got a little…over-eager with the gunfire on that last assignment.” He stared at the Director and at the other suits sitting around the conference table. “But are you going to tell me those xenophobic jerkwads didn’t deserve it? Just a little?”
“The Russian delegation?” asked one of the suits. Crosswell couldn’t remember her name. Then again, he’d only been half-listening during the earlier introductions.
“Jerkwads,” he said. “The lot of them. I mean, ‘the Cold War’s over, Ivan, lighten up a little,’ am I right?”
“Not even remotely,” said the Director.
“Potato, po-tot-o,” said Crosswell. “I guess we’ll just have to act like grown-ups and agree to disagree.”
“Unfortunately, your wholesale slaughter of the Russian delegation makes that rather difficult,” said the Director. “And to make matters worse, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Bingo!” Crosswell shouted. Then, when he noticed no one else was smiling, he said, “What? Didn’t anybody else have ‘tip of the iceberg’ in the betting pool?”
“The purpose of this meeting is decide on the proper disciplinary action,” said the Director. “Obviously the agency’s preferred course of action is disavowal, to strip you of your weapon and your clearance, and maybe, just maybe, if you’re really lucky, to not tell the Russians where to find you afterwards.”
“That’s a little harsh,” said Crosswell. “When did shooting three ex-KGB goons become slaughter? I was standing up for the Agency, you know, and for you. It’s not like I was unfaithful. They were bad-mouthing the whole outfit. I said they were wrong and you look fine in those pants. Have you lost weight?”
“Wow,” he added after a minute. “Tough room. And I’ve been tortured for state secrets.”
Yeah. So there’s that. Like always, it was based on a forty-minute free-writing prompt, in this case three random words. I don’t think it’s unamusing, but I also don’t think there’s anywhere to really go with it. It’s kind of a weak version of Archer, actually.
Meanwhile, in my never-ending quest to be non-productive, I have discovered and downloaded Bioshock. It’s a little like Portal, but with more shoot-’em-ups than puzzles, and I don’t think it’s going to replace those games as my favorites, but it’s nonetheless a bizarre and interesting (and violent) world.
Except for the trains, which were (not unpredictably) awful this morning, and the massive thunderstorm I didn’t quite avoid getting caught in this evening, today was a pretty average, surprisingly not at all terrible day.
High praise, I know. But hey, the week’s already more than half over.
So let’s see. I finally did my taxes yesterday, which is good, because it’s apparently already April.
You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the weather we’ve been having lately, though it did warm up slightly yesterday.
Which may explain why the landscapers showed up and spent an ungodly amount of time running mowers and leaf-blowers directly below my window. Practically all afternoon. (They also mowed a lawn not really in need of it and killed a bunch of flowers along with the nascent weeds.)
I didn’t do much else yesterday, now that I look back on it. I went for a walk, read a little for Kaleidotrope. There’s a review of the current issue at the Locus website, by the way, if you were worried this zine wasn’t actually a thing. Lois Tilton says, “the prevailing tone is dark, the situations compelling, moving” and calls the last two stories “a diptych of suffering.” But, you know, in a good way. There are also silly horoscopes and a fake advice column I had genuinely pleasure writing. (One of my goals going forward with the zine is to put more of a personal stamp on it.)
Then I ended the day by watching the latest Doctor Who, which was sweet and beautiful and rather disappointing, and the first episode of Hannibal, which surprised me by being really very good.
And today, I wrote this with my writing group:
The golden woman did not look happy.
“Listen,†I told her. “I shouldn’t be here, I get that. I got lost in the alleyway and couldn’t find my way back home. I was looking for a doorway when your goons dragged me back here. If I could just have my books and my pack, I’d be on my way and –â€
She said nothing, but I could see the shadows shift in the corner of the room when I mentioned the goons. For all their strength and speed, they were not subtle. I didn’t know what she was, exactly, only that they’d called her their queen, but it worried me, this patience, this deceptive calm. Brute force I understood; my bloodied lip and bruised pride both would heal. But her, the golden queen, her I could not read.
At least for the moment she had closed her terrible, terrible eyes.
“It was a mistake,†I said. “A…what do you call it? A miscast? A spell gone wrong.†I worried I might be tipping my hand too much here, but I had to tell her something. I’d seen worlds where spellcasters weren’t welcome — or worse, were hunted, rounded up, even killed. I’d heard stories, some of them even credible, about death squads that wandered between the worlds, about extermination camps. I was barely a mage myself — if I was, I’d have found that damn door — but I knew there were dangers in the Great Tree’s branches for the inexperienced magician traveling out on his own.
Not that I believed all that Great Tree multiverse mumbo-jumbo. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a religious man. There were other explanations for where I was, after all, for the shadow-things that had grabbed me off the street, for the golden queen and the terrible things I had glimpsed for just a moment hidden in her eyes. This was easily just another planet, one even in the Protectorate of Worlds, and if that was the case…well, a little diplomacy was all I’d need.
“I don’t know how you feel about mages,†I said, because the queen so far had said nothing. “But I don’t much like them.†This was not completely a lie. The Council had never been much help to me; membership had bought me nothing but citizenship in the Protectorate. And I’d bought the spells that had landed me here in the first place from another magician. He’d never done a damn thing to help me, even if he was my brother.
I think it got a little away from me near the end, when science fiction started to bleed into the fantasy, but I feel like there is a story here of some sort.
I need to spend more time writing, I really do. I didn’t do my morning pages at all last week, and I’ve let work on short stories slip. Part of that’s because I’ve got a couple hundred stories by other people to read for Kaleidotrope. I was so glad on April 1 when I could both announce the new issue and say I was closed to new submissions for the year. I don’t have to read all of those stories front to back — that might upset some people who submit, but it’s true; I give up on stories if they’re not working for me; a reader would too. But it’s still time-consuming.
But that’s still no excuse.
Today was a very long day. Well, these things are all relative. But it was a slow day. Mostly because things I needed to do at work need other things to happen before I can do them.
I swear, though, there were plenty of times today when I was sure all the clocks were broken…or dirty, lousy liars.