Oliver Benjamin
He stood up to make himself some coffee. A new day was
dawning. The masses could all be drunk, but for now he imbibed the
dark bean. It was up to him to lead them down that clumsy cobbled
path to freedom.
Another clumsy path suddenly came unblocked and Partment
stood up to visit the toilet. “Hey, by the way, could you clean this stuff
up?” he said, pointing at piles of non-dairy creamer. The place was
packed with boxes of it. Partment had used it in his bomb recipe, but
some of the Hellians had broken into the leftovers the night before
and mistook the white powder for drugs. They had snorted quite a bit
before concluding that aside from imparting a general creamy
feeling, it didn’t really do much. Piles of the white powder were still
spread all over the place.
“And these pipes too,” he added, pointing to the dismantled
sprinkler system. The Anarkids’ bonfires and constant smoking had
set it off too many times. Too many perfectly good joints had been
ruined by ersatz rainstorms.
“Yeah,” I’ll put someone right on it,” Bean said as Partment left
the room, then thought: Asshole. Still, he has the know-how. I’ll ride
this one out. He slurped the rest of his beer soup. Mmm mmm good.
Could use more beer, he thought.
3. Sublimation
Leona looked out over the City of Angels, a monstrous point of view
from the top floor of the Biddenbrooks Building. She could see clear
out across the smaller edifices and serpentine freeways all the way to
the ocean, glittering in the distance like a thin string of silver. It was
a notorious L.A. summer day, and there had been many of the same
for weeks now. In contrast to the wild wet spell of the spring, the
summer had come with a vengeance. All that green stuff that had
sprung up in empty lots, along roadsides, that had pushed through
the concrete was now baking, dying and dry. The city was aromatic
with the funk of souls escaping their bodies. High above in her air-
conditioned office the funk could not reach her.
She carefully touched up her mask: Rouge to slenderize the face,
eye-shadow to brighten the gaze, lipstick to suggest sex. She pulled
her thick hair around her ears and applied a heady perfume to her
breasts. This was going to be a very important meeting.
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