September 7, 2011

From “That Lurking Dissonance” by Leonard S. Jonsen

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The music was still there, the bright jazz issuing forth from Cecil’s coronet.

But he found himself remembering less and less of each performance, though the raw spots on his hands were a testament that they’d happened. Between the dressing room–and all the pills, poweders, syringes, and smokes it contained–and the curtain, everything was, well, a blur.

Not only that, though. The music itself seemed to be different. Cecil had spoken with the audience, and they assured him that his playing was the same or better than ever. But what little he could remember of the performances wasn’t dizzying or joyful. No, something harsh and dissonant, straight out of Leo Ornstein, had crept into Cecil’s music.

And he was the only one who could hear it.

 

September 6, 2011

From “Easy Money” by Cull Featherton

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Easy money.

An artillery shell slammed into one of the adobe buildings across the compound. The defenders within, who had been returning fire with small arms, went out as a fine mist.

Easy money. That’s what Campbell had said.

The first line of skirmishers arrived, disembarking from a BMP. Most of them were killed or wounded, but there was far less, and far less accurate, fire from the rebel positions than there had been moments ago.

Easy money. A tottering autocratic regime, enthusiastic rebels rising up all over the country. Only a few firefights and then cash and poontang from grateful locals.

A second BMP–or, rather, a Chinese-made copy bought and paid for not three weeks ago–disgorged its squad. Bull raked them with heavy machine gun fire, but these weren’t the militia they’d fought earlier. They were disciplined, organized, took cover, laid suppressing fire. Polymer helmets, gas masks, and Chinese kevlar.

Easy money.

 

September 5, 2011

From “Young Adult Typewriting” by Colleen Knut Wisemann

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Shawn tossed the manuscript onto his desk. “I’m gonna be honest with you, Marilyn. It’s good, but it’ll never get picked up.”

Marilyn cocked her head and gave her editor the best ‘you’re-making-no-sense’ stare she could muster. “One doesn’t seem to follow from the other, Shawn. If it’s good, it should be able to be picked up, right?”

“Listen,” Shawn sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “There’s exactly two kinds of young adult literature that sell these days. And this isn’t either one of them.”

“It’s unique!” Marilyn protested.

“The publishers are looking for the next Harry Potter, or at least a knockoff good enough to inspire a major motion picture,” Shawn said. “Kids discovering secret powers and fighting evil, preferably with just enough spice so people with public hair might read it as well.”

“But a more realistic…”

“Right, that’s the other kind,” said Shawn. “Hard-hitting novels about kids coming to terms with things. No kid in the universe will ever read it on their own, but it’ll win awards and get assigned as a course reading and maybe even cook up a little sales-boosting controversy.”

“I think that…”

Shawn tapped the manuscript with a bony finger. “This is too in the middle. Realistic kids, underground killer squids, sibling rivalry, multidimensional travel? It’ll never sell.”

 

September 4, 2011

From “Hanna Maurer, Age 109, Tells All” by S. David Toepfer

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“When I played Carnegie Hall in…it must have been 1918 or 1919 or so…the result was a near riot,” Hanna said. She lit a fresh cigarette but didn’t inhale, letting the smoke wreathe her head. “My own composition–very dissonant, very futurist, full of radical tone clusters and other such nonsense. The result was a near riot.”

“They didn’t like it?” Berne asked.

“It was one thing for young turks like Ornstein and Schoenberg and Scriabin to play music like that. But a woman? There was an editorial in the Times the next day saying that I was childishly beating my piano and letting my handlers–my male handlers–transform it into something avant-garde.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent them a copy of one of my sheets with all the music there in full notation. Never did get a response, but I loved the fact that little old me could case such a sensation.”

Bern delicately cleared his throat and swatted away some encroaching smoke. “Why’d you give up performing then?”

“Two things, really,” Hanna sighed. “For one, I grew bored with futurism and dissonance. Experimenting with tonality…now that was enough to get me attacked from all sides. The futurists who’d made me their poster child weren’t happy, and the people I’d irritated in the first place weren’t either.”

“And the second thing?”

“I fell in love.”

 

September 3, 2011

From “Pizzazz the Parakeet Needs a Smoke Break” by Vernon L. Traverse

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Doug had his best ‘manager face’ on. “There aren’t enough orders in the middle of the day to keep everyone busy.”

“I know that.”

“You can’t work nights because of your class schedule this semester. So I need you to do something to pick up the slack.” Doug held out the Pizzazz the Parakeet costume and a sign advertising 6 pizzas for under $6! Pick-up only!

“Look, I appreciate the thought, Doug,” I said gingerly, “but I’d rather be fired than wear that thing in 100-degree heat waving at cars.” It was like being the ultimate pariah–cars virtually swerved into the other lane to avoid having to look at someone in a costume, and people on the sidewalk were about as polite with Pizzazz the Parakeet as they’d be with Hermann Goering.

Worst of all, the bird’s mouth was open, clearly revealing my face to all who cared to look.

“Fine, then, you’re fired,” Doug said. “Clean out your cubby.”

I tried calling his bluff by walking away, hoping to hear his voice from behind me like in the movies.

I made it about five steps.

“All right,” I said, snatching the costume. “I’ll do it.” The specter of unpaid loans, evictions, and–worse–moving back in with my parents were too horrific to ignore.

 

September 2, 2011

From “Behold, Corisio!” by D. K. MacDuff

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“Behold, Corisio! Land o’ the fair and strong, city of kings and cradle of emperors! Oh, to gaze upon thee’s to experience the wondrous, rapt’rous joy of an auspicious pigeon’s flight o’er Jove’s thunder’d brow!”

The words were like thick, Bulwer-Lyttonesque dust in Drummond’s mouth. T. Serge Poller may have been a native son; he may have once been considered a luminary of mid 19th century theater; he may even have been on the shortlist for Poet Laureate.

But times change, and Drummon fervently wished as he rehearsed that anyone who ever derided Shakespeare as dry and formal had complimentary tickets to the show.

 

August 29, 2011

From “The Editor’s Lament” by Carson O. Dolarmuth

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It had been a good idea.

The city had produced more than its fair share of writers, thanks to the local college’s endowment from an old benefactor, and many of them were still alive, still active. Asking each for an original essay or story about their hometown seemed like a stroke of genius, to say nothing of a ticket to easy street for the savvy editor.

That was before Peter had seen the submissions.

Of the eight authors that had agreed to participate, three had submitted nothing despite repeated promises to the contrary. One had turned in a typewritten manuscript in a manilla envelope, one so jumbled and muddled with pen and liquid paper corrections as to be nigh unreadable. Another had annotated a grocery list with a list of organs that the various items reminded them of.

And then there was Auguste Jones, who had apparently dropped his given name “Kevin” to appear more literary. His submission had been an index card with a citation for a 1948 edition of Goethe’s Faust, a cassette tape with the repeated phrase “chickpeas are angry” in a female voice interspersed with heavy breathing, and an embalmed hummingbird wrapped in plastic with the letter “Y” painted on its back with red nail polish.

 

August 28, 2011

From “The Suren Paradox” by Cris V. Flemming

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“We call it the Suren Paradox.”

“Suren was a great general in Parthia–Iran–who led less than ten thousand men. But with them he managed to defeat Crassus–the guy who killed Spartacus–even though the Romans outnumbered him three to one.”

“You’d expect something like that to earn you a pretty rich reward right?”

“You’d be wrong. Suren called attention to himself and his ability, which made the Shah afraid that his general would try to seize the throne. He got himself executed on some trumped-up charge.”

“So in the end the only winner was the Shah, who got a Roman invasion repelled and got to use Crassus’ head as a stage prop.

“The lesson, kiddo, is this: if you shine too brightly under someone who has absolute power over you, like your boss, chances are even that they’ll axe you for making them look bad.”

 

August 27, 2011

From “Denounced” by Glinka Konstantinovich Lyadov

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“If you are to tell your story–musically, theatrically, operatically–you must do it through proscribed means and with proscribed methods,” Dr. Stasov said. “It is like walking a tightrope.”

“How do you mean?”

“You must set your story in the distant past or the ideal present,” said Stasov. “You must describe it in terms of class warfare between bourgeois oppressors and proletarian revolutionaries, even if it predates Marx and Engels by thousands of years.”

“I want a story of love to be told in my ballet,” Voin said. “I will write the music first and then work out the steps with a choreographer.”

“Then you must be careful,” Stasov remarked. “Perhaps a serf in the era of Ivan can cause a nobleman to devote himself to the cause of socialist equality. Or two collective farmers might bond in the fields, or in a tractor repair workshop. But whatever you do, the nuances of your story must be through that lens. The alternative is denunciation and all that implies.”

 

August 26, 2011

From “The Voice at the Other End” by Amber D. Culpepper

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The nature of TechCo’s system was to prevent any one “associate” from having any real power or information. Every bit of information came from the database software, every action had to be double-checked with the floor manager, and any really big decisions were made by “supervisors” who were, in point of fact, hundreds of miles away.

This meant that Andrea had to keep customers on the line for a long time, much of which was dead air as she waited for higher-ups or the creaky database to give her information. She felt the need to fill these spaces with something beyond the boilerplate she’d been trained to spout–“your call is very important to us”–and tried above all to give the impression that people were talking to a human being.

It was only partially successful. Most people just grunted a reply when asked about their weekend, or their history using the widgets for which TechCo handled outsourced service calls. Others were so desperate for a human voice, especially one that sounded youthful and female, that they unloaded reams of personal information that a less scrupulous person could have put to nefarious ends. Some even asked for her personal phone number, which was grounds for instant termination from TechCo, though luckily most of those appeared to be mutants who weren’t numberworthy in the first place.

 

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