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Collectibles

You might say he was living in the past. But it wasn’t his past—it was everyone else’s.

The man spent his days searching from dumpster to dumpster for collectibles. He had a particular interest in the collectibles of one young woman, a girl in her early 20s working in marketing with good credit. Week after week the man harvested her cotton swabs and junk mail to such an extent that, eventually, her discarded possessions made up the comfortable majority of his own.

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Inventions

“I’ve got it!” said Uncle Sigismund, sitting back down at the desk in his study. “Finally, something that will put an end to their disparagement. This—I can tell already—will earn me the respect I deserve.” He had just gone for a night-time walk around his study, which was in its own building—a converted toolshed. The shine in his eyes was exaggerated by the flickering candlelight. 

“Where’s Uncle Sigismund?” asked Kamil.

“Make a guess,” said Sophia, Kamil’s mother. “He’s out in his study, as usual.”

“Can I go show him this?” said Kamil, holding up a complicated schematic—or maybe it was a map—his mother couldn’t decipher. 

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Up in Freeds

It mighta been the afterlife, but we was certainly living the life.

Man, we was straight stunting, living large. Course we had our O.G. shit: all them iced-out cloisonne chains, studded filigree bracelets and lapis-lazuli beetle pieces, all the fucking scrolls and shit we got motherfuckers to write for us, all them damn departments of jewels and our preservated organs—we ain’t even needed them no more but we still had them, that’s how stacked we was—and what’s most importantly, our thrones. Thrones, motherfucker. We had ourselves some nice-ass motherfucking thrones, and we posted up in those bitches like you wouldn’t believe.

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The Spies

The countryside was green and patterned with lines of trees that snaked about, tangling with the dirt paths that connected the flat Spanish meseta with the Pyrenees ahead. Besides the paths, which never saw traffic, a modest wooden house atop a hill in the distance was the only sign of man’s existence for miles and miles. It was the home of an anchoritic monk; he’d lived there alone for his whole life, or at least as far back as his memory went. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to a human—he didn’t even talk to himself. He’d taken a vow of silence, after all, so it didn’t matter that there wasn’t anyone around to talk to, anyway.

It was a modest house, containing only the essentials for a pragmatic life. Outside there was a chopping block alongside the various tools he used throughout the day and a small patch of cultivated land from which sprung stalks of wheat and a few bulbous vegetables.

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Zepp’s Diner

After 8 p.m., the stores along Peru Street close, and the pedestrian traffic that clogged the sidewalks all day begins to dissipate. By 9 p.m., all the shops and restaurants in Saint-Michael—the reputable ones, anyway—are closed. Except some diners. A few minutes after 9, if you look down the street, it’d be an extraordinary thing if you saw more people than you could count on one hand. Even the street venders will have called it quits. Then, between 10 and 11, the Cleaners come out.

All day long, millions of people walking on the sidewalk conspire to trash the city. They go into the Starbucks around the corner and come out with an icy Vente Caramel Frapuccino, slurping it as they walk out. A few blocks down, all they’re sucking is air, and they toss the cup on the ground. Advertising. Sometimes there’s a little coffee left and it splashes out as the cup hits the pavement. Do people really do that, you ask? Yeah, more than you think. Just when “no one is watching.” All day long, they toss their McDonald’s french fry containers and pieces of paper and gum wrappers, without a second thought.

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Our Last Journey

After traveling for three days across the desert like prey to the vulture sun, enduring the near-sight from the sandstorms and living on bread and flask water, you can imagine my relief when we finally reached the Red Sea. At its bright, foamy banks we took an inadvertent, but well-deserved, break from our journey. The men were angry—as they often are—that our ship had not arrived on schedule, but the other women, and the few children that had accompanied us, were pleased.

I had stopped wondering what we were doing in the desert after the first two days. No one had told me, of course; I had no real business knowing, being a woman. Even so, I wasn’t sure I even cared to know. I suspected it was something dishonorable—something I wanted nothing to do with.

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Sun & Moon

PART ONE

The sun appears on the horizon, its light piercing through our window, and my father stands and walks over to my sleeping-place.

Every morning he wakes while it’s still dark and spends his first hour readying himself for the new day. He is the head architect of our village, but before that he is the head of our household. He first checks that no mishap has occurred overnight—he makes sure all our possessions are still in place; he prepares a breakfast of berries, grasses and perhaps some leftover meat; he performs any particular chores that need to be done; and after doing all these things he sits down to think. To think about the state of the world, to think about the things that are wrong in our village. To think about what might be over the vast horizon that surrounds our island.

As soon as a glimmer of sunlight appears in the window, sparkling in golden jubilation over the waters between the horizon and our shore, my father stands and comes to wake me. “Son,” he says, “Wake up. It’s time to leave.” I roll off my bed of reeds, still drowsy, dress in my hunting clothes and step outside our house, where my father is waiting for me. “Let’s go,” he says as he hands me my weapon. Today it’s a spear, meaning we will hunt mo’aki. I follow him behind our home, out of our village and up the hill into the forest.

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