Dilations

September 21

I'll write a proper entry soon, maybe even tomorrow, but for now, I wanted to post a few story openings. These are what I'll mainly be working on for the story-dare; I think they might turn into pretty good stories. I usually do 8 or 10 opening, knowing I'll throw most of them away, but these are good enough that I only did four, and they're longish ones.

***

Not many people know this, but John Elroy wore the index fingerbone of a minor shaman on a fine silver chain around his neck. Everyone knew Elroy was missing his own index finger on the right hand, but not many people knew he hadn't lost it to gangrene after hand-to-hand combat with a terrorist at all -- it was removed by a well-paid surgeon who was later given a nice cabinet position when Elroy came to power. The assassin who took Elroy's life (and keep in mind, Elroy is the only president ever assassinated by drowning) kept a moldering middle finger in a plastic baggie in his pocket, and he always claimed he was given his mission by aliens who lived around the dog star, but no one made the connection, probably because there aren't many cultural anthropologists specializing in Sub-Saharan cultures working for the Secret Service. But I was Elroy's right-hand-man and bodyguard for most of his life, and you have to learn a lot, working for a man like that, especially one with his talents and interests. I know where the stars leave off, and the body begins, and I know what happened the first time Elroy and the assassin met, 20 years before the last time.

***

Frank had moles, turning his backyard into a labyrinth of underground burrows, humping up the ground, making it look like dozens of little burial mounds stretching from the woodshed to the rusted old swingset. He'd let the whole yard go to hell since Marie took sick (and that had started with a mole, too, of a different sort; at least, they thought it was a mole, but when the doctor took a paper-thin slice of it and looked at it under a microscope or whatever he did, it turned out to be cancer, just like her Mama died from). This was too much, though; he was likely to step right through the earth into a tunnel next time he went to the shed. He'd have to go down to the hardware store and pick up some mole traps, though he'd never liked them; they were cruel, spring-loaded, spiked.

When night fell, and Frank looked out into his backyard again, he thought he saw something flicker, like firelight, from one of the mole holes -- but that didn't make any sense, and anyway, a second or so later it was gone. Probably he wasn't sleeping enough, was all. And then Marie was calling him, voice weak and far-away, and he forgot about the fire underground.

***

Danny had always wanted to be a superhero, but that ambition had pretty much died by the time he was 15 or so; he'd given up at least a few of his cherished childish things by then, and anyway, he'd read too many comics by Alan Moore and Frank Miller to really believe in superheroes anymore. But when he found the stilts of Huang Ti in the far corner of a garage sale, the lacquered wood hardly scuffed by the passage of centuries, and bought them on a whim with the money he'd made cleaning out Mrs. Calhoun's basement, and then found out what they could do -- well, he looked at the possibilities from a wanting-to-be-a-superhero point of view. Which wasn't the best possibility (that would've been seeing them as the awkward footwear that could put him on a true path to Enlightenment), but it wasn't the worst possibility, either (which would've involved various revenges perpetrated on the young evildoers he'd gone to middle school with). Danny was a good kid. It could've been worse. At least he didn't actually manage to kill the two-headed Crane when he faced it on the shore of the Isles of Immortality.

***

I always noticed that one booth on Telegraph Ave., the small one tended by a small man with an immaculately trimmed gray beard, if only because it was usually set up across from the record store where I worked. The guy was a jeweler, and he was usually working on something, twisting wire or sorting semi-precious stones, hardly paying any attention to the people streaming by on the sidewalk. His display case was dusty on the inside and greasy with fingerprints on the outside and held rings and necklaces which were either boring or gaudy, none of them meriting a second look. The only interesting thing about him was the dirty old aquarium he kept beside his chair; it was filled, and I mean filled, with snakes, twining over one another, making a scaly knot. He was a weirdo, with nothing decent to sell, and yet, he did have customers, usually well-dressed and nervous-looking ones. I figured maybe he was selling stolen jewels or something, but that didn't make a lot of sense -- Telegraph Ave. is public, and you have to get a permit to sell stuff there, and cops come walking along all the time, and it just doesn't seem like a good place to deal stolen jewels. One day, because Valentine's Day was coming and my Kimmy likes shiny things, I decided to talk to the guy, and see what he had to offer -- if he was selling stolen shit, I reasoned, maybe I could get a deal on something nice.

***

That's them. Remarkably, I know where every single one of these stories is going -- as much as I ever know, anyway.

This could be a good month.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 166,600

Words written since last entry:
1,200

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Tim Pratt
P.O. Box 13222
Berkeley, CA 94712-4222

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