Scintillating building island
NUN MUM - Dying before either of ones parents; ceasing to fight just because ones enemy is winning The man from the silver cup, the man in the silver cup who lives in our garden. The other man nodded his agreement.Well, so Sundy you can do some work on them power-tools you got in your cellar. A quiet weekend at home is a good thing in lotsa ways. But were not on any known trail, Ed said thoughtfully. I believe our methods have been all wrong—stringing out a bunch of men, looking for trails in the snow. All we’ve done is announce our presence to anything with ears for miles around. That glider pilot made no sound; he came on them without warning.” Yes. I settled down comfortably, recognizing the reminiscent tone of voice. You do crazy things when you are young.” Mrs. Klevity leaned heavily on the table. “Things you have no business doing. You volunteer when youre young.” I jerked as she lunged across the table and grabbed both my arms. “But I am young! Three years isn’t an eternity. I am young!” Using two of the tools, he found a fissure and pried the bottom apart. It came open like the belly of a bomber; it was a pocket, a pouch, a receptacle that the thing wore, and in it were four beautiful little tools or instruments or weapons, each about an inch and a half long. They were beautiful the way any object of functional purpose and loving creation is beautiful—the way the creature itself would have been beautiful, had it not been an insect and myself a man. Using tweezers, Lieberman took each instrument off the brackets that held it, offering each to me. I took each one, felt it, examined it, and put it down. They are religious documents, as well as their only history, she continued, sort of like the Mahabharata. She expects you to observe certain rituals in handling them, like repeating the sacred words when you turn pages—she will teach you the system.” Stubbornly, he pressed on toward the crest of the hill. He needed food. His hunger was a compelling agony. It was the only thing that could have driven him out into this cold and wind. Always before, when a cold time came, he had huddled in his lair until it stopped—until the sky was blue again, and the powderlike white stuff on the ground turned to wetness, and the air turned warm. The important thing with women is (a) have a knife in your pocket (b) make sure your hair is combed (c) drive a red car (d) something else. Or if Borges had been translated as he wrote, if the eight stories inFicciones (Fictions) had been available in 1941, instead of 1962 . . . Mangon! he heard Alto snap. He craned forward, saw Alto eyeing him. Mangon waved to him and Alto nodded slowly, at the same time smiling to someone in the audience, then turned on his heel and took his place in the orchestra. scintillating building island Jims and Leo’s voices faded in and out of his fever dreams. His back was numb now, where the rock dug into it This morning my monthly reports were due. I took them into Libo City with my libolines. I wasnt content just to leave them with the receiving clerk, as usual. Oh, no! I took them right on in to Mr. High-and-mighty Hest, himself. I slapped them down on his desk and I said, All right, bud, see what you can find wrong with them this time.’ At a sign we lay still. Nobody knew where we were, or whether we were ten or a thousand strong, until they fired a flare, a white flare, which went off in the sky with a shaky light. Under that light we must have been as easy to see as cutout silhouettes. A violet flare went up then and—believe me!—it was a dream, every man with half-a-dozen shadows, all dancing, as Mike threw out his hand in the sign that meansForward. Then we charged, muddy-bellied as wild pigs, every one of us with his machine pistol and his grenades. She started.I beg your pardon? Then she yawned, and I realized she had been fast asleep all the time. She pulled a small transistor radio out of her bag and lit a cigarette. She was a real beauty of a girl. The first bars of music. Jazz. But she did not answer my question. At the wordreal the Black Crone and the Black Girl strangled and began to bend and melt like a thin candle and a thicker one over a roaring fire. Burgade! But the sentiment had not been shared. Ecclesiastes could take a night off. I wanted to write a poem, a poem about the one hundred-seventeenth dance of Locar; about a rose following the light, traced by the wind, sick, like Blakes rose, dying....
