PerVisions

She swept those steps so much every day that it was a wonder she didn’t wear both broom and stones down to nothing.

Tracy is shorter than me, and her skeleton is less formed. She has less of a shape in the air. A boy once told me, via a poem that was wedged into one of the vents of my locker and that smelled of drying grass and corn, that my bone structure was “historic.” I set it on fire in the school bathroom’s sink.

One day Dust felt fine, the next she felt a lump. Is that how you want it? Like those screwy healthcare adverts on TV that pretend to care about your shit.

“If you value your life, don’t you cut that sheep,” I tell the lad. “You hear me, boy? Don’t let a single drop of blood fall.”

It’s the smell of blood that draws me to you. Salt like the ocean, and iron. Not cold iron, but flaming with life.

“I imagine you’ve rarely had the opportunity to speak to one who’s many,” the man said. “There are not many of us, after all—even fewer now, from your perspective.”

Indeed, a trickle of blood from my forehead dropped onto the velvet of Sibyl’s blouse. I wiped it off with a fingernail as she set me down at the bar.

At first I thought he wanted me for my body, the man with a handlebar mustache in a red wool plush uniform, each button burnished with such care that he had to have secrets.

“My absentee father and his irresponsible alien girlfriend made an illegal clone of me ten years ago, and now that they’ve abandoned her as well, you expect me to raise her?” she asked.

“It is illegal for a red Kowloon taxi to pick up customers from the New Territories unless their destination ends in Kowloon or Hong Kong Island,” he said.

So many crags and nooks, so many shadowy places. Not like the open grasslands below.

It was a hot humid day with a big crowd and several faintings. There were humans and there were bots. There were greenzies protesting and rich fatties shaded by parasols. There was a band in military blue that played Sousa marches.

When I was four I saw two boys go into the woods behind our house. They did not come out again.

Genetic material was less emotionally charged than embryo. Things could happen to embryos. You could watch the Discovery Channel and find them, watch cells dividing, see small suckling baby kangaroos. But “genetic materials” were the sorts of things you rinsed off in the shower or threw out with the trash.

Even after I dosed the hounds, I wasn’t prepared for his pursuit. Foolish. Drugged dogs won’t stop a force of nature. I’d underestimated his pride, but that still didn’t make me a doll—I was not a toy that he could rip limb from limb and then toss broken among the others.

Time was it was corn, or soy, or whatever the hell people used to grow here before the snows set up permanent residence, before the only way of growing things was in the greenhouses.

Footprints round my doorstone, when I came home. A strong woman, I am, and if someone has slunk unasked into my cottage they should be the fearful one.

It's last break of my shift and have just stepped out to the loading bay, leaving Little Mickey on duty, who since we are on subject is not so little and whose moniker am not so sure is even Mickey.

You can get tents that you toss in the air and they come down fully set up and ready to crawl into. But to be one of the arktoi, you need to know how to do it the old way.

... my recent spin around the dance floor with my boyfriend was enough to convince me that the stranger was right: I was a motherfucking pearl.

I was scrubbing the pot for the second time to get all the palm oil out when Tonye’s arms came around me. I jumped, orange-streaked suds spraying everywhere. I hadn’t heard him coming.

Hardee’s is right across the street from the graveyard. So, while you’re leisurely sucking down a hand-dipped vanilla milkshake, trying to figure out exactly how one would hand-dip a milkshake, you’re interrupted by the view.

Pine needles crunched underfoot. The broken moon hung in the sky, as deformed and grotesque as a clown mask.

It was the first time I entered Albert’s room. The room of the killer. I was afraid. A fear as palpable as the sweat that began to stain my shirt.

The zombies weren’t supernaturally strong and they died just like anyone else if you shot them, and in Minnesota, where I lived, they mostly froze to death. Because it was January, and the ability to check a weather report and bring a coat is apparently a higher brain function.

I’d told Diana I was giving up and cried on her shoulder and she’d held me and told me she was so sorry. Mo would have done the same, except she would have been angry for me too. Sometimes that’s just too exhausting.

As Naomi stands in her kitchen, a hypodermic needle in her right hand, a bowl of Cheerios in her left, she wants very much to close her eyes, just for a few seconds.

Art went out for beer and came back with a vintage Barcalounger. It was a wingback rattan recliner (spray painted gold) with orange Hawaiian print cushions (an obvious reupholstery.)

My life complete, I write these words on the walls of your shrine. My ink is the burned ash of whatever material I can find. If I had blood, father, I would use that instead. When I die this evening, the desert will intrude once more, and we will be buried together.

I see the ionized iron glowing in the distant Sun’s corona and the ammonia clouds swirling on the world below. I hear the constant information exchange in my innards. As my body wakes up, I taste a change in the ventilation systems. I’m gazing inside my own body and at the stars at the same time, and then—

You have struggled for a long time as to whether you have a soul or not—whether anyone does—or if you’re only a gathering of restless and ginned-up personality traits brought together to fool yourself that there is, in fact, a you. As opposed to an unrecognizable someone-else.

His eyes are molten puddles in the shadow of his brow and Mariam realizes he’s talking to her: “You don’t have to go out today. You can stay by the radio, if you like.”

There isn’t so much a sunrise on these mountains; it’s more a lessening of the dark. I imagine someone turning a giant dimmer switch to brighten the valley.

Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about my mom.

Nothing essential is sold in the city: you can find spun sugar here, and chocolates dusted with gold, but must go elsewhere for bread.

I thought perhaps that the assault was just the baboon way, or that it was an initiation, or that I had trespassed on their territory. It turned out that, no, these baboons in particular were just assholes. Some baboons are nice.

“We have a problem in the basement.” This from Kai, second only to Maya herself on the shift, and now having returned from the downstairs freezer bearing two great bags of shredded iceberg lettuce—bags he held, one under each arm, like trapped dirigibles, dirigibles of lettuce.

It wasn’t until I got close enough to kiss her that I saw her pupils were slit like a cats, and when I kissed her, I felt her teeth were fangs. I asked her out to dinner and she said yes.

“Do you love me?” I asked my husband, the night we were wed.

I had been told to ask. His answer was important to the College. It was not supposed to be important to me.

It took Annie only two dates to figure out that Gary Boran was a werewolf. Maybe that should have been a reason for canceling the third date, but honestly, she’d been in Pittsburgh for nearly a year by then, and she’d had an awful lot of bad dates.