( Read more... )

The dream doesn't start here, but the remembering does; she's in a square, at a bonfire, a heap of paper and wood and white-gold and gems, a fortune for anyone who doesn't mind losing a hand to the flames, and the once-purple Cricket is parked by a track that isn't asphalt but some kind of corduroyed surfacing she doesn't have a word for; something ( Read more... )

headlights
horns

hubcap

'RIZA!

She half-wakes in a hotel in Oklahoma, the tail-end of the dream slipping away in a white glare of I-can't-remember. It takes time to catch her breath, and time for a charleyhorse racking her right calf to unlock, but soon enough she'll sleep again.

But she'll remember.

Strut on a line
discord and rhyme

I howl and I whine; I'm after you

"Hey. Dickrinse. Wake up. End of the line."

Mouth is alive; all running inside

And I'm hungry like the wolf

Mordred starts awake, curled uncomfortably in the bucket seat. They've been driving... a long time. Hard to say. He feels like hot garbage. "I thought we were going to the Tower," ( Read more... )

Friday, just before quitting time. Mordred is clearing fallen leaves--old, slimy remnants of the fall and winter--out of a half-blocked culvert with a shovel in his t-shirt ( Read more... )