But as I have noticed on more than one occaision, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.
In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toin and suffering.
After a long moment I closed the freezer door. I wanted to lie down and press my cheek against the cool linoleum. Instead I reached out with my little finger and flipped the Barbie's head. It went thack thack against the door. I flipped it again. Thack thack. Whee. I had a new hobby.
Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.
She stared at me "You have a message," she said. "On you machine." I looked over at my answering machine. Sure enough, the light was blinking. The woman really was a detective. "It's some girl," La Guerta said. "She sounds kind of sleepy and happy. You got a girlfriend, Dexter?" there was a strange hint of a challenge in her voice. "You know how it is," I said. "Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutel..
By noon, we had run almost every test we could do in our own small lab, and found one or two useless things. First, the basic broth was made from one of the commercially popular high-octane energy drinks. Human blood had been added in and, although it was difficult to be absolutely certain using the small and badly degraded sample, I was reasonably sure it had come from several sources. But the last ingredient, the organic something, remain..
I found Albatross Airlines down at the far end of the terminal. A woman in a brown uniform stood behind the counter. She was about fifty, with a leathery face that looked like my cab driver's twin. I wondered if she was the girlfriend of my new friend on the dock. For his sake, I hoped not.
We found this," Debs said, standing at my shoulder and holding up a plastic evidence bag with a sheet of plain white paper in it. There was a red-brown stain of dried blood on one corner, but I took the bag from her and looked: On the paper was written a short message, in a large and ornate font that could have come from any computer printer in the world. It said, He disagreed with someone who ate him. "I didn't realize cannibals were so cl..
THIS PART OF THE HOSPITAL SEEMS LIKE FOREIGN COUNTRY to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed administrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors. There is no stench of blood, antiseptic, ..
Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless--and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Deci..
Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless--and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Deci..