She comes to visit the museum most days that it's open. That's a little strange, but not so terribly unusual for a free public museum as large as ours. Like the library, it's a place where the public feels free to go when they have nowhere else to go. No work, no home? Go to the museum. They sit and stare at the paintings in one room for a while, ( Read more... )

When you see the man in black sitting at the bar, don't go sit down next to him. If you hear him tell somebody he's a record producer, don't listen. If you've got a gig in the bar, leave. Blow it off. You don't want the man in black to come to your attention. If you're about to leave, carrying your guitar, and the man in black looks over his ( Read more... )

Sinner man, where can you run to? You might have thought that was a philosophical, hypothetical sort of question. It's not. I figure that musician didn't know any real heavy people, but he asked all his usual procurers and dealers and finders and fixers and nobody knew the answer, so he went ahead and put it in a song. Crowd-sourcing before there ( Read more... )

The death-thoughts lingered in the corridor. What if I make chicken.... I need to find a sitter... Oh god I don't have his money.... I wonder why she looked at him that way.... I ignored the last three ghosts and focused on the chicken. It was a good, strong thought, linked with the taste and look of chicken, so I should be able to track it. I knew ( Read more... )

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The missile streaked across the sky like a cloud highlighted by the sunset. Two seconds before it wasn't there, two seconds later it was gone, and only the rising sun of the explosion would have told anyone its contrail was anything but a cloud lit by the sunset. We sat in the dhow, stunned, as the island we'd hoped could be sanctuary was destroyed ( Read more... )

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The trick about wiping memories is not to wipe them. That's the misnomer. That's the reason that people think it's never happened--oh, sure, in the beginning, maybe a teen wipes out a school and leaves everybody convinced it was a gas leak that caused oxygen deprivation and some brain damage, but after that, no. They'll be found and they'll be ( Read more... )

The shine in the dark alley was what caught her attention, she said later. It was the last thing she saw. Well, that was poetic license, used by all the newsies, the ones who didn't understand (yet) exactly what she was. Would be. Was becoming. Would always be becoming. She saw plenty of other things after that lone glint. She saw the stones of the ( Read more... )

She played with their marbles, ratcheting them up in little lines and then shooting them off to bounce around edges and off each other straight to insanity. It was a fun game. She was pretty upset when her mother noticed and confiscated all their marbles and gave them back, but that was what mom's did, she guessed: they spoiled the fun. Then there ( Read more... )