Cover for Drabblecast episode Kiriki Grocery, by Tory Hoke
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Category: Drabblecast Page 11 of 28
Alone — but not lonely.
Three days, we’ve been on this planet. Over a year, Earth-time. But we don’t talk about Earth-time anymore. It weakens morale, says Sir Overgeneral Halfish.
My morale went out the window when I found out that I was sentenced to be transported off planet.
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“I will not leave this cavern,” the voice said as soon as I stepped into the cave mouth. A baritone decaying into vibrato, an old man’s voice, full of dignity and pride.
I tried to pinpoint its source, but the air was thick with fog. The haze seemed to originate from inside the chamber, where a mysterious current of cold wind blew from underground. All around me, where the vapour met the pink light, it glowed, the colour of the primrose buds in my terrarium back home. The thought of missing them in full bloom this year, pricked at me. Focus, Virginia, I told myself. Don’t be so bloody addled. There are lives on the line.
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The shovel bit through the foamy snow on the top stair of my front porch, then stopped with a clang. I scraped away the snow to see what was beneath. Ice. Serve me right for not shoveling after the snow had fallen last night. It had thawed, then the temperature had dropped into the deep freeze, and now the steps and the sidewalk were frozen solid.
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The fiery orange sun hung high over the Bangkok skyline to the south. Professor Tina Montri rearranged her skirt and adjusted the alligator skin briefcase on her lap which held the presentation and research notes from her talk at the university. A breeze stirred on the back of her neck, warm and relaxing. She could almost fall asleep if it weren’t for her precarious perch at the top of a tree.
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Izam’s fingers moved on their own. They found his sunken chest. And counted his ribs.
His father would have slapped his hand away. A stupid habit of a stupid boy. A stupid starving boy who counted his ribs when he was hungry even though it only made him hungrier. Izam knew it was stupid
but he could not help it. He was so hungry.
The ocean was silent. The boat was still, the fishing line as motionless as ever. The last rays of sun sparkled on the waves. There would be no fish today. No food. Izam’s fingers brushed his chest and began counting his ribs again. No food for another day.
The line tugged. The rod tore from his hand.
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Today I am going to the island.
I climb the slick wood stairs down to Whitmuth beach. The wind blows fierce through the town like usual and swirls back out to sea, smoky with our coal fires and smacking with hot oil from the fry shops up and down the boardwalk.
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The fish were restless. They spun the water mossy dark until the pond was the color of crushed bottles.
Pey held onto her sister’s hand. They peered down at the water.
This morning, their mother opened her eyes and said she was too cold to get out of bed, so their father said they would spend the afternoon at the hot springs.
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Susan found her boss’s feelings drawer by accident. She drank too much and took a wrong turn in Sundrun’s apartment at the office holiday party, while looking for the bathroom. It had been all the rage five
years ago, getting your feelings surgically removed. After a sensectomies, some people had the feelings stuffed or encased in glass to use as paperweights so they could show them off during meetings with clients. That’s my fear, the size of an inchworm! Impressive, isn’t it?
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The chair first appeared on a Thursday afternoon on the sidewalk in front of the Dollar Bank and Trust on Lancaster Street in Pulaski, Kansas. Nobody saw how it got there. At least, no reliable eyewitnesses have ever come forward, so we are unable to pinpoint the exact moment of its arrival. Customers began to ask the tellers about it shortly after lunch.
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Captain Confederation was annoyed when he got off the elevator and it showed. It would have been so simple and logical for him to land on the roof of the Superhero Administration Centre, or in the ample grounds surrounding it, but these alternatives were no longer open to him. Last month Transport Canada had proposed a regulation requiring superheroes to take off and land from helipads unless actually fighting crime, and for some inexplicable reason the Department of Superhero Affairs had gone along with it.
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Nate had expected the first serial killer. In fact the first thing he’d said to Kelly once their Ford rolled to a stop on the shoulder was, “This is serial killer country. We’re finished.” She made scaredy-cat eyes and drew a finger across her throat. “Finished,” he enunciated. She’d heard his bake before, something to the effect that certain places settled and then maybe recultivated to feel remote–the Wisconsin Northwoods, for example, or parts of Appalachia or, in this case, Tornado Alley–were stuffed silly with the dumped spent corpses that were the nuggets of serial killers’ labor. The type needed space to operate. So each tree in the Northwoods doubled as a headstone, each stalk of corn out here a memorial, and to hike cross-country through such territory was to traipse condemned through the densest kind of cemetery.
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After a year in San Francisco, my legs grew strong again. A hill and a half lay between the bookstore where I found work and the apartment I shared with the Kotos. Every morning and evening I walked, breathing mist and rain into my desert-scarred lungs, and every morning the walk was a little easier. Even at the beginning, when my feet ached all day from the unaccustomed strain, it was a hill and a half that I hadn’t been permitted for seventeen years.
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You’re listening to the Mike Colavito Show on Cleveland’s home for straight talk, WCUY 1200. The opinions expressed on this program do not reflect those of WCUY, its management, or its sponsors.
Fair warning; I’m in a mood today, folks.
We’ve got a mayor whose only talent seems to be showing up at luncheons and waving at the cameras.
Eighty bucks I had to pay yesterday for not wearing my seatbelt. Show me the seatbelts on a school bus.
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The ghost in my attic is Margaret, but she lets me call her Margie. She was seventy-six years old when she died, and now that she’s a ghost she sits in her rocking chair day and night, holding a tiny baby in her arms. The baby rarely moves and almost never cries. His name is Gavin, and he is thin and wrinkly and covered in fine brown hair. Funny looking, as preemies often are, but sweet nonetheless. Margie keeps him wrapped in a blanket of cobwebs, which I think is disgusting. I’ve always hated spiders.
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What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky. Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive.
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There’s a dream you have.
It’s not a proper dream. It’s impatient, fired with urgency. It arrives without warning, veering suddenly out of the night.
You’re kneeling on the bridge. It’s late afternoon. Clouds mass low in the sky, seagulls wheel over the bridge spans, humidity hangs thick in the air. Cars speed by on either side of you, the whoosh of
their passage filling your ears.
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