karen > Books: free-tor-shorts‎ (373)

Caleb doesn’t mind defending his family, but too many of the Celebration teams have started acting like the real point of it is the shootouts i

Caleb doesn’t mind defending his family, but too many of the Celebration teams have started acting like the real point of it is the shootouts instead of the holiday specials. Lyle Odenkirk is a cheerleader for bloodshed, and his ratings suggest many Americans feel the same. To Caleb this borders on blasphemy, a legacy perversion from the days when open-carry groups started patrolling the malls. To him, the guns were never the point. It was about family. Still is.

Caleb doesn’t mind defending his family, but too many of the Celebration teams have started acting like the real point of it is the shootouts instead of the holiday specials. Lyle Odenkirk is a cheerleader for bloodshed, and his ratings suggest many Americans feel the same. To Caleb this borders on blasphemy, a legacy perversion from the days when open-carry groups started patrolling the malls. To him, the guns were never the point. It was about family. Still is.

It was not unusual for a cough or sneeze to slip out unexpectedly, drenching a plate as it went out to a customer, or even a whole pie that Bhu pulled

It was not unusual for a cough or sneeze to slip out unexpectedly, drenching a plate as it went out to a customer, or even a whole pie that Bhu pulled steaming out of the wood-fire oven. Bhu found ways not to care, ways to justify his lack of caring, but one reason won out easily over the rest: Bhu wasn’t going to get anyone sick, because everyone was already sick. He saw the symptoms everywhere. In the customers’ heavy, bloodshot eyes, in their puffy lips and cheeks, the swelling in their necks and fingers, the sweat that coated their hands and the damp bills that they passed to him when he worked the register. He wore blue gloves for when he handled the bills, and at the end of his shift the fingers were stained and corroded, the latex pocked with small blisters.

It was not unusual for a cough or sneeze to slip out unexpectedly, drenching a plate as it went out to a customer, or even a whole pie that Bhu pulled steaming out of the wood-fire oven. Bhu found ways not to care, ways to justify his lack of caring, but one reason won out easily over the rest: Bhu wasn’t going to get anyone sick, because everyone was already sick. He saw the symptoms everywhere. In the customers’ heavy, bloodshot eyes, in their puffy lips and cheeks, the swelling in their necks and fingers, the sweat that coated their hands and the damp bills that they passed to him when he worked the register. He wore blue gloves for when he handled the bills, and at the end of his shift the fingers were stained and corroded, the latex pocked with small blisters.

“I think you’re the only person here whose name I don’t know,” he says.

Choke.

You swallow. “My name is Kédiké.”

Reality flickers like a failing neon tube. Something nestles within that millisecond—a sound like flowing water, though you can’t be sure. Too suddenly, you’re back at the table, everyone still trying to wrap their tongue around your name. Alessia, intermittently contributing to the conversation from the side table where she’s tossing salads, says: “Do you go by a nickname?” She digs at the bowl with wooden spoons and flips with practiced ease. “Like Kay, or something?”

“Maybe what you need is an honorary American name,” says Charlotte, enthusiastic. “Name exchanges are great for cultural appreciation—you know the Indians used to do it with missionaries and soldiers? Anyway, my honorary Japanese name is Eiko. Means prosperous or something like that. I gave my friends American names, too: Kayleigh, Brooklyn, Chad. They love it.” She angles her head. “Maybe later you can give us African names?”

Another flicker, this time a half second, the crack wide enough to fit several images: white sheets; the sickly gray of a spider’s web; bloodred; fingernails scraping wood.

“Good evening, Christopher,” she said, voice delicate as a wind chime. “How did you sleep?”

“Well,” he said, and his own voice was a heavier thing, rendered more substantial by the mechanisms of his breath, which was used to keep him alive, not just to speak. “I went to the meadow and slept in the sun for a while. It was nice.”

“I’d like to sleep in the sun,” she said, somewhat wistfully.

“You could,” he said. “I could carry your bones to the hill and let you sleep with me for a while. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all. You’re light as anything.”

“But skeletons don’t sleep in the sun,” she said. “We sleep in beds of flowers, or in the cool of the catacombs, away from sunlight. That’s how it is in Mariposa.”

“Your Highness, with respect, you’ve never won against her.”

The King pursed his lips. “I’ve defeated lots of mushroom people.”

“Your Highness, with respect, you’ve never won against her.”

The King pursed his lips. “I’ve defeated lots of mushroom people.”

The Icebound Race is in the pure literal frozen ice-hell of the Norwegian Arctic. You know, the kind of Norway which is all the way out to Europe and

The Icebound Race is in the pure literal frozen ice-hell of the Norwegian Arctic. You know, the kind of Norway which is all the way out to Europe and then all the way up to a town where the ratio of polar bears to people decidedly favors the bears.

“Why do you race?”

“It is inevitable.”

“But how did it become the Icebound? How did people go from ‘Yeah, let’s all get on sleds and chase each other around some hungry undead corpses’ to—uh—‘Let’s get the hungry undead corpses on sleds and send them off at high speeds’?”

“Reason other than poke-the-bear, bread-and-circuses kind of thing?” he asks, reaching over me to get the bottle.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have a survival instinct. I got it from my father, who managed to escape the old country by snaking under a kilometer of razor wire and throwing himself over concrete walls twice his height as he was shot at by fellow officers armed with Kalashnikovs. He made it, though his twin brother didn’t.

“I had been right there,” he’d repeat with the same disbelief every time he told the story, “where he was hit. That same spot, a second earlier.” And he’d instruct me, cryptically, “Learn from me.”

I was never sure what I was supposed to learn but I grew up obsessed with what it was that made the difference—one zag instead of a zig and I wouldn’t exist. Snap. Just like that.

One zig instead of a zag and the bullet that felled my uncle would have chipped a concrete wall instead. And I’d be working in a tech startup or in marketing, because I wouldn’t have had to grow up with the horrible sentence: “I had been right there, a second earlier.”

But zigs were zigged and zags were zagged and here I am, seeking out experiences on the edge of survival that I can package into marketable epiphanies for eight cents a word.