ReTales

Midori had heard stories of the man they called Batuu, but for some reason she never shared a shift with him before this. Her father, Shinpei Mifune, spoke of Unmei, the incarnation of fate, and one customer, eyes red from meth, had once told her: “I think that he's the Master of the Beggar of Fate.” He being Batuu in this case. Midori always thought there was a strange logic to the brains of drug addicts. That was why she listened to Batuu when he told her his customers called him the Dreamkeeper, and that he could read dreams. “Go on,” Midori said, grinning. The short, bald man smiled back at her, and said: “I was born in a world of dreams. That gives me the power to read dreams. I can understand them perfectly, and that's why, I'm pretty sure, my customers love me so much.” He tapped the side of his acne-scarred nose. “Plus, I'm very good at stopping thieves. It is my passion.” He was so short that she wondered if he was actually a Little Person, bu...

Y'know, working this job: I don't think I've gone through a single day where someone hasn't interrupted my reading on a break. Like. That's how I spend my breaks. I eat, I read. I go to the bathroom if it's available, which it is occasionally. But I read. I read as much as I can. I read whole websites worth of short stories and reviews, I bring books in when I'm confident that no one will try to rob me. And every. Single. Time. I am interrupted. Sometimes it's a forgivable attempt to build up friendship, albeit a misguided one. The guy who sat way too close to me, and folded his newspaper on top of my book to ask me to do a crossword with him? He was just trying to be nice. The bagger who rants at me unbroken and breathless for all fifteen minutes about all the different computer parts he's bought? He assumes I'm interested, and I'm too anxious to tell him otherwise. But sometimes the interruption gets ridiculous. I remember once when I...

I don't always listen to them fully. I could be wrong about the context, that happens when you can't hear well to start with. But I guess if this is what I hear then this is what other people hear, and it's going to shape them, consciously or not. It will make them adopt negative ideals, or perhaps worse, bad taste in music. They're not going to look up the lyrics later to get the full story, and so, replicating that viewpoint, neither will I. Maybe they can zone it out and I'm just weird, I don't know. But I tried to remember the highlights. A male voice goes: Why don't you listen to the man who's lovin' you? Wuh-oh, oh This is the only line I hear usually. Brings up old paranoia about being called an “SJW,” because this could be romantic to some women (and men). Someone to take care of you when you can't be a good judge of yourself. Someone to tell you what to do in a world fraught with the anxiety of choice. But choice is...

Wherever there is pain, there are invisible tendrils of force that can't be battled. They are protected by equally-invisible barriers, projected by sentient beings who carry hate with them. Hate breeds pain—they are the twinbirth monsters. Their invisible roots grow all around us, where we let them grow. These animal-vegetable-spirit limbs, writhing without heads or bodies need and deserve only thing: a rigorous gardener. The Liberator was deep in her Pulse Chamber, floating in the combination of serums that kept her vital. The machinery of the Heart twitched in their orbits. The teleport circuit in particular, with the clairvoyance circuit prodding it, was eagerly fretting over events minutes on the horizon. Distantly, the Liberator already knew what was ahead of her, but she'd only be able to parse out the thought in human terms later. For now, she was the machine—a giant Heart, taking in all the world through circles of metallic flesh. The veins and arteries of the ...

Eleanor was staying on late one night when she heard the first suggestions. The first intimations that it was worms wriggling underneath the skin—that she labored in the corpse of a dead ghoul-thing. Pained cries, in the night. At first it seemed to be nothing more than a part of the shaggy dreamworld that flickered around her. She was used to imagining screams—the sounds of children turned to simple background obnoxiousness, though once she'd let it shake her. Every so often though there were screamed that seemed genuine—beyond the world of kids' play. They were back-alley screams, deep-metropolis screams. Sometimes she though they came from below—and there was a strange aquatic echo to them, as if there was a pond or pool buried under the store. She thought of far reaches of the store laden with the scent of rotting bodies. Then she straightened up and reminded herself that that smell, too, was the customers. And nothing but. Or so she hoped. Even if that opened ...

The sky was oil and the oil shone pink and blue and yellow under a liquid sun. The mechnoilluminators strode with a giraffe-like confidence across the chalkboard roads. All was void. None was sun. But the illuminators, blessed as they were, brought in a cool crisp lightbulb sting to help show the automobiles their way. The poor, living things were sometimes swallowed by the darkness—the cars, that was to say, and their equally-living passengers. It was the way of life. The darkness ate the people, and the people ate the darkness. The landing pad was surprisingly packed. Normally no one shopped at this Supplier. No one at all. Within, the aupers and gortras were rotting fecund on the shelves; gortra tendrils grew wild and wispy, their ends covered with coarse trichomes. Year by year it had been the job of the old timers to don the ceremonial runes axes and hack these vines from the shelves, so they couldn't get at the Supplier's then-specialty, hooba beans. Canned hooba ...