By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to many as though there was nothing that an acrobat could do with their body which had never been done before.
Claudia changed all that: during one particularly spirited performance, she leapt from her trapeze into the pupils of her audiences' eyes, down into the depths of their visual cortices, and landed to loud, sincere applause.
“Wow! How about that, folks?” The ringmaster boomed. “Is she still on this stage, or is she just inside our heads? Can you let us know which it is, dear Claudia?”
“Oh my,” she covered her mouth with one glitter-coated hand. “Do I really have to choose?”
The crowd may have laughed, but the question went unanswered. Many of them continued to dream about her for months.
Any trick can be understood if watched closely enough.
“This limousine is endlessly long. Were you to reach the front, you would be at the end of space and beginning of time.”
“But there is a driver?”
Before setting foot in the temple, she unfastened her shadow from her boots, then folded it neatly at the base of the stairs. This was not just a matter of reverence, but also one of self-preservation; the lanterns that flanked the entrance had teeth, and the flames within them had tongues.
“Me and the other girls from the power plant, we come here after work all the time. Their special milkshakes are to die for. I haven't found a single flavor that I didn't like."
Together, they drank an indigo wine fermented from Neptune's clouds, and wondered if they'd ever travel so far together.
"I could never do it, my love."
Six men sat down to play Russian roulette, and by the end of their game, seven of them were alive.
"I've seen this happen before," the new player spoke.
Kissing was invented in the city of Thusk, a seaport with thousands of citizens, yet only one dentist. Her services were scarcely needed, for the civic biologists had rendered most of her profession obsolete.
"This telescope was built to accommodate several different modes of operation,” the observatory’s director explained. "For instance, right now, it's set to hermetic mode. That means that whenever you focus its lens on a particular star, the image of that star exists just as far backwards within your mind as the star itself is from your eyes."
When he is seen in visions, Nexorpan, the god of small agonies, has no face: what appears to be a sea urchin sits atop his neck as a surrogate head. Its numerous spines have shredded the torso of his three-piece suit, exposing the raw patches of violet skin beneath. Every morning, his handmaidens bathe him, dress him, and tend to his wounds, yet all of their work is swiftly undone.
He noticed the crystal ball on the oracle's table. “I take it that this is what shows us the future?”
"Nah." Her face flashed briefly into view beneath her hood as she lit another cigarette. "You didn't do your homework, did you? Looking in from outside, the crystal ball shows you the past. Looking out from inside, it shows you the future. Here, let me show you how it works.”
The gargoyles of the Red City cannot fly; the wings of fossilized coral that they carry on their backs serve as an ever-present reminder that they were built by humanity to surveil in stillness. Even so, they shamble through the streets of the city at night on legs that groan in defiance of their stone composition.
"My mother taught me that all of the punctuation marks that you miss while typing build up in your fingertips over time." She held up her hands, revealing that the ends of her digits were covered in black splotches. "So, I haven't used any since I was twelve. I’m chock full of them now, periods, commas, parentheses, you name it.”
While it’s not uncommon for factory errors to result in fortune cookies with blank messages, when Martin split his open, he found that it contained an atypical form of blankness. Along the left-hand side of his fortune, a blinking cursor could be seen, still awaiting user input.
At times she was known as Ararat, at others, Meru. When seen from Greece, she was known as Olympus, and in the time of Gilgamesh, she was known as Nimush. Her peak reached such unimaginable altitude that it could be seen from all the nations of the world, even those that were a hemisphere’s arc away. This summit was said to be the exact point where heaven and earth intersected, and as such, only the holiest among the living were allowed to climb her thousand faces.
FIRST COURSE
paris-style tobacco gnocchi
wrapped in pan-seared dollar bills, glazed with jalapeño jam
“The greatest literature is that which needs neither be written nor spoken. Tell me, Henry, have you ever explored the genre of ‘silence fiction?’”
“Hmm. No, I can't say that I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Are you sure? Some people refer to it as sly-fi.”
When she brought him back to her loft, it was clear that, one way or another, she’d been planning on having company. There was a bottle of Chardonnay plugged into the wall, emitting a faint, amber glow.
By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to many as though there was nothing that an acrobat could do with their body which had never been done before.
Claudia changed all that: during one particularly spirited performance, she leapt from her trapeze into the pupils of her audiences' eyes, down into the depths of their visual cortices, and landed to loud, sincere applause.
"This is the library's killswitch," she explained. "In an emergency, we can use it to generate a hyperglyphic field that turns the Roman alphabet inside-out within a quarter-mile radius.”
“Christ. What would we ever need to use something like that for?"