Another journal

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActIV

those teeth that gleam in sunlight hazed through windowed walls that narrow to a windowed point. “You’re not,” she says, coming down the low steps into the open room, hat in hand. “I was here,” she says. “I’ve already been here.”

“You came back,” he says, the words slipped carefully through such long teeth. “Remember?”

“I wrapped his body,” she says. “I went to get the tarp, I brought it here so I could drag him down the,” looking back, over her shoulder, “hall, why did I come back?” Brushing her cheek a flower, delicately pink there at the end of a green stem sparsely leafed, long enough to coil once about her shoulders, rooted in a pucker on the slope of her breast. “Who knows?” he says, climbing down off the high-backed black office chair. “One last look about the place. You’re going back!” He sets the wide-bladed cleaver down on the box before him, by a small glittering bit of bone. “We’re going back,” he says, pushing back his tattered cuff to check his watch. “That’s what matters.”

“You’re dead,” she says.

“You keep saying that,” he says. “What I have to keep asking myself is how I can hear you, if it’s true.”

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActIV

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActIII

the air, a towering arc to leap the wide river below, and at the very top two flags still limply fly. She stands in the shadow of a slender overpass, ragged red shoes, black briefs, the broad straw hat in one hand, the gold watch wrapped about the other. Pavement stretches cracked and crumbling before her, yellow lines and white baked almost away, just ahead a single skid mark, each nubbin and crease printed clearly on the concrete, a swerve to the left that ends at the guardrail. To the right, another lane rises at a slightly steeper angle, climbing to cross over hers up ahead, just before that towering arc, one deck of that great bridge stacked atop the other, and the next cool patch of shadow. A deep breath, and she drops to one knee, bending her head. A hand lifted to cover the broken stem on her breast.

“The hell is that?” he says, looking up as they come out from under the trees. She swings back, lurching toward him, dark hoodie, black jeans, fists balled, “You don’t,” she snarls, “you don’t talk to me, you don’t follow me,” he’s smiling, “Jo,” he says, “you keep the fuck away from me,” she says, “I ever find out how you did, what you did,” and “Jo,” he isn’t looking at her, “you,” she says, “I am gonna fucking kill you, you goddamn–”

“Jo!”

“What did you do to them!”

“Who!” he bellows, she throws up her hands, spins away, turns back, leaning in, “Becker!” she yells. “Lymond! Everyone!” Echoing up and down the empty street. “Where did they go!”

He bursts into laughter, doubles over, hooting, hacking, gasping for breath, “Me?” he manages to say. “What did I do? Jo. Look.” Waving an arm for emphasis. “They didn’t go anywhere.”

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActIII

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActII

the sun shining down through concrete pillars that support a tangle of onramps and offramps knitted against the white sky above scoring the brownly dappled water with shadowed maps. Quick chopping strokes of the rough-hewn paddle scoot the stern of the canoe about a curl of a turn to the right under a low bridge, skidding through shadow and back out into dazzling bright. She keeps her head down, shaded by the brim of her broad straw hat. Another bridge ahead, even lower, anchored to a grassy ridge just breaking the water’s surface, and she ducks forward as the canoe slips under and past with the last of its momentum.

A lapped lagoon beyond, pavement rising up from under her to crest that grassy yellow slope, a sudden shore crowned by dark trees, and splashing and peals of laughter echoing. She swings the paddle out and around, suddenly wary. Past a skeletal stand of drowned trees, the rusted tops of a couple of sunken fence poles, there’s a fold in the shoreline, a shallow pool snug against the sudden loft of the ridge, and a half-dozen kids splashing and laughing, dark against the bright water, the yellow grass. Falling silent as her canoe drifts up crunching snagged to a stop on the shore. Red shoes splashing she drags the canoe higher onto the grass, drops the paddle clattering into the belly of it. “Need to keep your ears open,” she calls down to them. “Eyes peeled. Moody’ll come down and get you.”

They laugh, all of them, the boys with black hair closely clipped, the girl with her curls tied up in beaded twists, even the toddler, clapping pudgy hands and kicking up water, “He ain’t come down in years,” says one of the boys, shading his eyes to peer up at her, and “Everybody knows that,” says another.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActII

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/news/YuriSecret

Miyazawa Iori

It’s true that I don’t want to say anything... I think there’s this mutual understanding among yuri fans, “don’t talk about yuri, make yuri.” If I accidentally blurt something out, it’ll provoke a flame war, and I don’t want to have what I say here spread around with a totally different meaning. And if it does, I’ll have to slice you all in half. I’ll be talking today with these feelings in mind.

https://thecityofroses.com/news/YuriSecret

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActI

the water brown and oily sunlight-frothed, sluiced into the bucket by a current slow and strong. Twang of the rope as she pulls it hand over hand up through the pulley, wobbling, sloshing, white plastic striated with hard use. Wrapping the rope about one hand, letting go with the other, leaning out over the drop to grasp the bucket’s handle, balancing rope, pulley, bucket, herself, she shifts, hauls, releases a screech of the pulley the bucket slopping in through the window.

Leaned against the weight of it she makes her way past a wall of silent grandfather clocks out into a broad dim showroom broken up in niches and nooks by arrangements of furniture, settees and love seats, end tables, coffee tables, rugs laid showily atop the dull grey carpet, a phalanx of loungers, a couple chaises longues. Her red shoes, black jeans, dark hoodie. A row of freestanding fireplaces, red brick and white and yellow and grey stone, white tile, smoked glass, gleaming chrome, but every hearth is cold. At the end a wide white plaster mantel, elaborately molded, and four or five mounds of blankets and pillows laid out before it.

Long windows at the front of the showroom glazed with sunlight, and another line of fireplaces there, faced out toward the empty street. She sets the bucket down before a pot-bellied stove at the end, with a ramshackle sheet-metal chimney run up and back to a hole punched in the wall. Dry wood stacked beside it, split and neatly trimmed. Protecting her hand with the cuff of her hoodie she levers the door open, eyes the glowing embers, stuffs in a log, and another.

The water in the bucket brown, but slicked with hints of rainbow.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsActI

I've been loving Greatures, the current KC Green comic. It's a gag strip that takes place in some kind of purgatorial labyrinth that gradually reduces the people and objects caught in it into strange archetypes. (Much like a continuity-free gag strip does, now that I think about it.)

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsOpening

the body on the blue tarp, draped in filthy fleece, bone-bleached chinos, the one foot laced in a torn leather shoe, the other gone, that trouser leg knotted off just below the knee. Glint of gold about a wrist, a watch. The only sound a lazy lap of water somewhere below.

“You can’t,” he says, “think of it like that. The past is not another country. You can’t go to the future. They’re directions. Not places.”

She steps off the little wooden porch, sinks to her knees with a crackle of dead dry grass before a broken wooden tub. Ragged red Chuck Taylors, black boxer briefs, broad straw hat. A single sob heaves up shoulders burnt a ruddy brown, her back, her legs. Running from the waistband of her briefs a pale seam pinkly white against her sunbrowned belly shining up and up to the thick green stub of a stem, freshly broken, rooted in a gnurl of flesh on her breast.

“David?” she says. He’s slumped in the high-backed black desk chair, photographs spread over his lap, under his unmoving hands. Hazed by light from windowed walls that narrow to a windowed point in that open room. “David,” she says again, there in the kitchen, black shorts, red shoes, the broad straw hat, and something else, a flower a-bob there by her chin, bloomed delicately pink from a long green stem coiled once about her shoulders, and rooted in her breast. A scuff of something underfoot as she heads down from the kitchen, blue glitter brightly scattered on the steps.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/MarbleSendsRegardsOpening

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/OnPretendingThatClosing

The alarm clock blinking 12:00, 12:00, the blue glass reading lamp unlit. The paperback book, flocked with mold, the cover of it faded, Chanur’s Legacy, it says, just legible. She tosses it to the wrought-iron bed, kicks her way through the clothing strewn about the bare wood floor toward the only flat wall in that round room, the plain wood door and not one of the half-open casement windows, the quiet night without.

Down tightly winding spiral stairs, hair a white-gold cloud in the shadows, her grey overshirt, black boots quiet on the hallway rugs. One hand idly brushes the wall below a line of portraits in darkly ornate frames, a portly white-haired man in an antique suit, sat before a pigeonholed desk, holding up a feathered pen, a gaunt man in a flour-dusted apron looking away from tins and pans and spatulas on the board below his outspread gnarl-knuckled hands, a stoutly white-haired woman in a brassy cuirass and a polished morion, gauntleted hand holding an outsized compass above a calligraphed parchment map, a fat man crowned with tangled white hair, swaddled in blue robes, his ring-bedecked hands clamped tight about the leashes of the wolfhounds at his feet. Down the long straight staircase to the front door, set with an arc of frosted, leaded glass, that she opens quietly just enough to see him there on the front porch, waiting, grey jacket, bush of a beard, small round sunglasses. “Upstairs,” she murmurs, stepping back to let him in. “To the right, the second hall,” but they’re both brought up short. There in the shadows by the staircase, white locks unbound, his belted robe pale blue, Agravante holds a cut glass tumbler in his hand. “Sister?” he says, roughly. “Magician? What is the meaning of this?”

https://thecityofroses.com/story/OnPretendingThatClosing