Another journal

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/ManyChristianEyesOpening

The lights are out, the curtains drawn. She sits in one of the two chairs there by the small round table in the corner, wrapped in a thin white towel, hair limply, darkly damp. Hand on a knee, elbow on the table by a slim black phone, screen of it cracked. She blinks. Neatly draped over the dull yellow coverlet of the one queen-sized bed a pair of black jeans, a sort-of folded black T-shirt. On the shag carpet at the foot of it a pair of Chuck Taylor hightops, one white, one black, both grubby, fraying duct tape wound about the toe of one of them. She draws a slow, deep breath. Lets it out.

There’s a knock at the door. “Jo? Hey. Jo.”

“It’s open.” She doesn’t get up out of the chair.

A lowly ruddy flare of morning light as the door swings open, and somehow the room becomes smaller, wallpaper shot though with fraying metalled threads, dusty flat screen of a dead television, peeling veneer of the dresser, expressionist print of a football tackle askew above the bed. The man in the doorway heavyset and tall, leaning a shoulder on the one jamb, hand braced against the other, in the fingers of it a featureless yellow keycard. “I need the room,” he says.

It’s unclear whether she nods, or shrugs, at that.

“So I gotta kick you out,” he says. Looking about the room. His hair is greasily brown and cut to no specific length, his short-sleeved shirt a drably olive, his tie of mustard yellow. “Do you,” he says, frowning. Shifting his weight in the doorway, still braced. Trying again. “Did you even get any sleep?”

“You don’t get to pretend you give a fuck,” she says, quietly, but clear.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/ManyChristianEyesOpening

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/news/ChangingChannels

A sharp eye might’ve noticed some changes to the various outlets listed on the Books page, as other places where: Spectator Books in Oakland has been added, there’s a selection of zines on the shelves there now, so if you find yourself on that side of the Bay, head on over, say hi; and but also, Smashwords has been removed.

https://thecityofroses.com/news/ChangingChannels

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandClosing

A house much like the others all along the one side of the street, low, demure, set close to the curb, only a shallow curl of driveway, a freshet of paving stones crossing the scrap of a yard to the front door. He pauses, one Chelsea boot on the front steps, glossy tobacco polish marred by dust, an ugly scuff across the toe. Looks back, over his shoulder. A high stone wall lines the opposite curb, lofting from dim pools of streetlight into thickets of shadow above, themselves swallowed by the looming slope of night. He’s stood in the light of the lamp hung over the warm yellow door, his suit of a blue as dark as those shadows, his salmon shirt buttoned up to the throat, and no tie knotted there. His weird white hair swept back in matted locks long enough to brush his shoulders, just.

He opens the door, he steps within.

The unlit hall, a stairwell spiraling up to the right, a kitchen to the left, cold and dark. A great dark empty space ahead at the end of it that he heads toward, boots quiet on the dust-dulled floor.

No one stands watch at the hole smashed through the great curving wall of window. Jagged blades of glass still hang dangerously above, to either side, framing tree-shapes without silhouetted against the city’s glow away off below down there, a vague brightness drawn in and caught by cracks that leap through the window in every odd direction, faint lightning frozen in the moment of impact creaking and scraping even at the gentlest breath of a breeze. He’s headed for the glass balustrade mounted about the stairwell in the middle of that room, and the long straight flight of steps headed down. “More!” someone growls below. “C’mon! All of it!” There’s light at the foot of the steps, hotly yellow-white but wildly uncertain, guttering, redoubling with a shocking flare.

A hand on the transparent railing, he begins his descent.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandClosing

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActIV

Two swords laid side by side on the glass-topped table. To his right the blade is long, widening from sharp tip shining clean and straight to the palm’s-width ricasso, where a crude sigil once was stamped some time ago, a simple block shape worn and faded with time, a horn perhaps to one side, the suggestion of a foot, there where the shallow fuller begins its slope down the clear bright length of the blade. The plain cruciform hilt of it stolid and thick gleams even in this light with all the randomed nicks and dings and here and there a notch whacked into the quillions stretching simple and straight to either side, and then the grip, bound about with straps of tawny leather smoothed and darkened by much handling, and the pommel, a wide flat plain-faced coin, thicker through itself than the largest thumb, the beveled edges of it scratched and chipped, even here.

To his left the blade is shorter and more slender, a needle next to the other, shining but darkly, chased the length of it with coiling waves that swirl in the depths of the steel. The hilt is simple and straight, wrapped in dulled wire, and the quillions almost as long together as the hilt, but over and about them a glittering basket woven of wiry strands that meet in thick worked knots of steel all gathering together in a sternly singled cord that swoops to the great silvery clout of its pommel. Stamped above the quillions on what thickness the blade can manage a crude sigil, the lines of it still sharp, a horn clearly emerging from one side of the block shape, and the foot.

“Mason,” someone says, and he looks up.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActIV

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActIII

Rolling over under the untucked sheets, pastels tangled together, flush of teal, icy pink, a yellow startling in the sunlight, black hair abrupt against the one white pillow. Her arm tugged free still socked in black and white to brush some of that hair from off her face, to dig sand from the corners of her eyes. Not quite a groan, she takes in a breath, sits up, pastels falling away, pale waves crashing back to a rumpled ocean. “Hey,” she says. Shoving the bulwark beside her. “Hey. Want some breakfast?” Reaching across herself to scratch her shoulder, dig under the cuff of the sock. Not a word or a breath from the bulwark. “I want some breakfast,” she says, tugging the sock down, working it off.

He sits up sometime later, blinking thickly in the sunlight, pastels puddling his lap. Absently scratching the wiry black that mats his breast. She’s over by a freshly assembled credenza, the only other piece of furniture in a room that still feels crowded. She’s pulled on brief black shorts, a cropped white T-shirt pasted to the curves of her breasts and her belly, she’s stirring something atop a little electric griddle. He sniffs, and again, deeply, closing his eyes. His mustache thick but neatly trimmed, the black of it hatched with white. “Oh,” he says, “and is that speck you’re frying?”

“If by speck, you mean bacon?” she says. “I’d offer you some.” She shrugs.

“Just as well.” He yawns. Another elaborate sniff. “Odor alone is almost enough, for a man in my condition.” Slapping his jowls, shaking his head. He works his way out from under pastels to the edge of the great thick mattress. “Ghost of a pig,” he says, scooping up a grimy grey union suit, “for a pig of a ghost.”

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActIII

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActII

Stifling a shriek she steps too hastily back, stumble-scuff the pavement of the esplanade, arms outflung, bare arms against a fall that doesn’t, she’s, her T-shirt’s back to black, and cracked across the front of it a devil’s leer. Moody’s sitting on a stump with his back to the empty river, the shining city, smiling unctuously, black leather hat tipped up, his ragged jacket of army-surplus green.

“That’s, that’s mine,” says Jo.

“Yeah?” he says, stuffing his hands in the pockets of it, pulling them out, setting his collar, his shoulders as he rolls his neck. “You got my shirt,” with a jerk of his chin. “Took me way too long to put two and two together. You stole it. That night. Didn’t you.”

“How,” she says, and a deep breath. It’s all so quiet about them, even the overpasses behind and above. “How did that happen.”

“What,” he says, looking about, a performance of uncertainty, “all that?” undone by his smile. “Just now?” He points. “I live in your head, Bambi. Rent’s awful cheap.”

“You live,” she says, “in prison,” quiet and cold and definite. “You got arrested. You pled guilty, even if it was only a tenth of what you ever did. A hundred, and twenty-four, months,” stepping across the esplanade toward him, sat there on that stump, “and I didn’t have to think, about you,” she says, “I haven’t thought about you, not at all, not once since then, not till Christian went and said you, you were, back. Danny Moody’s back.”

He scowls, he shrugs. “I bet you don’t believe in tigers, neither,” he says.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActII

Posted by Kip Manley

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActI

Uncertain laughter, and a scuffle. A knight in sleekly cobalt sleeves, a woman short and round, white apron over taupe, they’re pulled apart without much trouble under buzzing fluorescent lights racked high above, the shine a harshly cool that somehow warming as it falls to buttery summery softness gathered in so many glimmering sparks clutched tight in hands held high, so many caught on fingertips, knuckles, lingering on lips and cheeks, so many drifting freely among the biding rustle of that wordless crowd. A tickle of strings, a rattle of sticks against the concrete floor, a crash of metal and glass somewhere without. Someone whoops. “The hell,” roars Gloria Monday, there before the raised stage, starting off toward the overhead door, but Anna Nirdlinger catches her arm, “It’s okay,” she’s saying, as a ramshackle beat assembles itself from the clicks and strums. “Gloria, it’s okay.”

“Okay?”

No I would not, a ragged chorus dissolving in giggles as the incipient song redoubles, asserts itself, and then a great breath taken all at once, Carol in her slinky gown, the Blue Streak cross-legged on a crate, cradling his guitar, the Bullbeggar, Otto Dogstongue, knelt on the concrete, coaxing that popping lopsided beat from a couple of overturned plastic buckets, no I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day, laughter still shaking their words, and the joy that dancing whirls about them.

https://thecityofroses.com/story/UpAndStandActI