The Drop

We had to stop the car and get out when we reached The Drop.  It was a town: small, quaint, carefully looked after by bucolic residents, and it was right on the edge of the Drop itself, a cliff that no-one had descended to the bottom.
Well, no-one living that is.
The roads were smooth blue-black asphalt with broken white lines painted down the middle.  On some of them were houses, offices and public buildings to the sides; the houses were wooden constructions, usually three or four stories high, though we did see a bungalow off in the distance at one point.  Trees grew around them like sentinels, standing alone but in sight of other trees, evergreen and tall.  The offices were steel and glass, very modern looking affairs.  They had carparks outside, and often underneath, accessed by gentle ramps and never blocked by yellow-and-black striped bars or severe metal gates with automatic openers.  The public buildings were usually brick, either red or yellow.  We figured it out after a while: the colour of the brick indicated how close the building was to the edge of the Drop.  The library was red and about two streets away from the Drop, but the town hall was yellow and right on the landside edge of town.  I think it was Paula who eventually pointed out that all the academic and intellectual side of life in The Drop seemed to be edgeside, and all of the political and infrastructural life seemed to be landside.  Marcus gave her a filthy look when she said that.
We parked the car outside the homeless shelter, which was less than fifty feet away from the edge, and went to look at the view.
There were no railings at the edge of the cliff, no warning signs either.  Nothing to tell you that you were stood at the top of the Drop, a height that had never been measured.  Nothing to tell you that if you stepped forward, or jumped off, or were pushed, then you'd fall for a long time, and the last thing you'd see would be something that very few people, if any, had ever seen before.
"It's like they want people to jump," said Marcus.  I'd positioned myself between him and Paula, in case either of them tried to do anything stupid.  "There's no warnings, nothing!"
"It's like the roadsigns," I said.  We'd passed several; the ones for the traffic going landside had numbers on, usually limiting the traffic to 50klicks an hour.  The ones going edgeward simply read "Your speed is your choice."
"Yeah," said Marcus.  "Did you see the road over there?"  He pointed, his tattooed hand and fingers stretching out across my face.  I turned my head, and saw what he meant: the asphalt went right on the edge and only ended when the land did.  "And did you see where the street-lights ended?"  I shook my head because I hadn't.  "About four streets back," he said.  "If you were driving at night, you'd get here just as you thought you were able to see things clearly, and the open air wouldn't warn you at all that you were about to drive off the Drop."
"So... you think they want people to fall off?  Why?  It's not like shipwrecks, there's nothing to pick up unless they've got a way of getting to the bottom.  And even then, what's going to be left after a car hits the ground at terminal velocity?"
"Perhaps it's an unusual form of impact mining?" said Paula.  Marcus and I shuddered, her voice was raspy and buzzed slightly on the nasal consonants.  She'd been the same ever since she'd been invaded, although sometimes in her dreams she spoke in her own voice again.  She said strange things, it sounded like she was dreaming of places that we'd never seen, and sometimes it sounded like she was crying.
"Must be something very tough down there then," said Marcus, a little shortly.  He'd been Paula's boyfriend until the invasion.  Now he said he wasn't sure what he was to her.
"Well," I said.  "It's what we're here to find out, isn't it?"
"Only if it works," said Marcus.  He started to turn away from the Drop.  "It's not worked for anyone else."
"No-one else has me with them," rasped Paula.  I turned away from her them, unable to cope with the way her eyes gleamed without any light to fall on them.  I saw that Marcus was watching someone coming out of the homeless shelter.  They were stumbling, one arm thrown protective up over their head.
"It's worth a try," I said.  "Let's see how far down we can parachute Paula's camera first.  We don't want to be going down blind ourselves."
"I don't want to be going down at all," said Marcus.  He was still watching the stumbling homeless man.  "He's going towards the Drop!"
We all looked, and it was true.  The man was still stumbling, couldn't see properly with his arm thrown up like that, and was heading towards the edge of the cliff, the Drop.

These traitorous hands

Clytie, short for Clytemnestra because her father preferred to read about ancient Greek history to just about everything else, shouted up from the street below.  It was a little hard to hear what she was saying because there were car-horns blaring, some of them sounding quite frantic, and sirens were beginning to become audible in the distance.  Xoggie, short for Xogenes which name his mother refused to explain, thought about ignoring her while he cleaned his paintbrushes.  He dipped them into the small, smeared jar of white spirit and methodically squeezed the liquid and paint residue from the bristles with a scrap of paper towel, until he could no longer hear the drip-drip-drip of the liquid back into the jar.  Then he sighed, a heavy, melodramatic sigh that lifted his whole chest up and let it fall again, reminding him that he'd gained yet more weight, and walked to the window.
The sky outside was blue with scraps of white cloud scudding across on whatever urgent missions clouds have, and the pavement, a broad pedestrian walkway put in as a traffic-calming measure two years ago, was clear and clean.  The planters, containing small evergreen trees were mostly upright, only one having been tipped over by drunks from one of the eight nearby pubs, and little soil had escaped this time.  The road – the road was blocked with stopped traffic, and it sounded like all of the cars were now wailing their horns.  Xoggie couldn't see into any of the cars, the sun was behind him and low enough to bounce off their windows blinding him when he tried to look, but it looked like a voluntary stoppage.  And there, out of the road but very visible from it, was Clytie, holding a small man in a soiled suit by the neck, looking rather red-faced and embarrassed.
Xoggie waved, and to his surprise and slight horror she waved back.  Using the hand holding the small man, who swung worryingly at the shoulders as though his neck might rip and his penduluming body would fall to the pavement.  She shouted something, but he couldn't hear her over the noise, so he started to sigh again, thought better of it, and went downstairs to let her in.
"What's going on?" he shouted in the hallway, where even with the front door closed the traffic noise was unpleasantly loud.  He led the way through the back kitchen into his sculptor's conservatory and closed another set of doors behind Clytie, which thankfully dulled the noise to a distant hubbub.  He sat down on the twisty-stool he used when throwing pottery, and Clytie remained standing, while the man she was clutching continued to slowly strangle.
"I don't know," she said, a hint of a girlish giggle in her voice.  "It my hands, I think they've gone wrong."
Xoggie looked at her hands, which were elaborate metal contraptions that she'd had replace her own hands a couple of years earlier.  She'd replaced them one at a time, to give herself a chance to get used to the idea of vastly increased power and speed, and then she'd had them upgraded a little here and there, first weaponising the fingers with blades and electricity; then going from relatively human hands to much more obviously abhuman hands.  She now had eighteen fingers on hands that were outsized for her arms, all done in black, silver and brass that was an artistic statement by itself.  There were at least two artificial intelligences in each hand that consulted on actions, although they were supposed to be subservient to Clytie's own entirely natural intelligence.
"Won't they obey you?" he asked, rememebering a time a little while back when she'd not gotten used to her new strength and had put her hand through his front door.
"They're feeding back to me, they're saying that I don't understand the importance of this," she said.  "They say it's very important that this man is not allowed to talk to someone, but I can't work out who this someone is.  I think perhaps they don't know this someone's name."
"Can't you just turn them off?"  Xoggie had spent days trying to convince Clytie to get an override switch installed that would cut the power to the hands in emergencies.  This, he felt, was just such an emergency.  She had the grace to look guilty.
"No," she said, and clearly had no intention of explaining herself.
"Well," said Xoggie, leaning on his potter's wheel while he inspected the man who was looking bluer and bluer, "who is he?"
"He was coming out of the Unsantiago Gallery," she said.  "I was walking past, wondering what you were exhibiting this week, when he came out of the gallery and my hand just grabbed hold of him."
"By the neck?"
"No, not at first.  They... I?... no, they – grabbed his arm, pulled him close, then grabbed his neck and lifted him off the ground.  I've been trying to work out what to do next."
"I'm not exhibiting at the Unsantiago gallery," said Xoggie thoughtfully.  "I'm exhibiting at the Colostreum this month.  So it's probably not me he's not supposed to talk to."
"Why would this be about you?"
"It's not.  It means that your hands can probably stop squeezing the life out of this guy while I find out from him what he's doing and then we'll know what's going on."
"Hmm.  If you say so."
Clytie's face relaxed a little, smoothing out in a surgically maintained death-mask of beautiful perfection while she talked to the AIs that ran her hands for her.  Xoggie watched, growing increasingly aware that the little man had soiled his suit recently, and then finally she reanimated and her hand relaxed its grip enough for him to suck air into his lungs again in reasonable quantities.  While he gasped, Xoggie dug around for a pencil and paper to make notes on.  Whatever Clytie had got herself into this time, it looked like trouble.

Analphabetic Soup

My editor, an otherwise lovely woman with impeccable taste, had insisted that I pay a visit to this restaurant.
"It's new!" she said, as though that meant anything.  "There will be celebrities there!"  She fluttered her hands in front of her face as though fanning herself.  "I've even heard that... Gordon might be there!"  She sat back in her chair, the expression on her face suggesting that I was supposed to know who Gordon was and why it was significant that he was there.  Wherever there actually was.
"Look, I don't normally do this," I said, feeling unaccountably like I was turning down a date.  Possibly with Gordon, as there's no way I'd date my editor, and I suspect her ogre of a husband has similar feelings on the matter.  "I pick my restaurants based on research, not on looking in the paper for whatever's new this week.  I don't generally go anywhere where there are sublebrities clamouring for attention, as they tend to get served the better food and the rest of us can go hang, because if Kate or Britney is eating the soup then everyone wants to.  Even when Kate's throwing it up in the toilets five minutes later.  Oh, and I don't know who Gordon is."
"He's a chef," said my editor, putting so much emphasis on the job title that italics and bold wouldn't do it justice.  Imagine her leaning over you, looking down the length of her nose at you, disapproving with every syllable.  "How can you not know a chef?"
"Easy," I said.  "I eat the food, from the restaurant.  Very often it's not been cooked by the chef du jour at all, but one of his brigade.  And while Norman Normal might be a very nice kid, two years out of cooking school, on his third stage and turning out beautiful pierogies, no-one cares because he's not got a name that people pronounce in special ways that my keyboard can't transliterate.  But he's the one producing the food, and that's what matters when you're the one eating the food."
"You're going," said my editor, her face doing that blank thing it does when she doesn't want to listen anymore.  "I'd come with you, but I've got another engagement that evening.  But you're going, and you're eating, and I want you to meet Gordon and make sure his name gets in the article.  And get a picture of him too!"
"Topless?" I asked, and she shot me a filthy look.
"Yes!"

*

I arrived at seven fifteen for a seven thirty table and there was a queue at the door.  I took this in, a little surprised, as the restaurant itself seemed rather smaller than I'd been expecting: almost like someone's front room, completely with tiny, hedged garden outside the window.  I strode confidently to the front of the queue, ignoring the cries of distress and the whimpering of small, starving children.

"I have a reservation," I said to the maître'd, noticing that his suti looked creased and the lapels appeared stained.  "For seven thirty."

"Your name, please?" he asked, and I told him.  He stared at the page of the appointments book for a moment, and then dipped his head, a jerky little nod.  "You do," he said.  "That makes a change.  I see it's a table for one.  Would you like to choose a dinner guest from the queue outside?"

"No," I replied.  "Desperation does nothing for my appetite.  What are they all there for?"

"They want to meet Gordon," he said, with just a hint of anger in his voice.  "What else?"

"The food?" I said, slightly surprised that there should even be a question.

"Hah, hardly," he said.  "I'm sure you'll form your own opinion though."

"I have a meeting with Gordon too," I said, as he showed me to a wobbly table with a threadbare tablecloth.  I looked at it, he looked at me, and slowly I realised that I would have to sit down as he had no plans to seat me elsewhere.

"Oh, you're that guy," he said, sounding tired.  "Gordon will come and meet you between courses."

"Topless?" I asked, but the maître'd had already turned away to answer the question of a belligerent, chunky woman with a feather boa.

The menu was insipid, with nothing that looked particularly interesting, or even appetising.  Since the starters all seemed to variations on prawns save for the soup, I ordered it.  When it arrived, I stared at it, and the waiter walked hastily away while I consulted the menu again.  There it was, in small print: analphabetic soup.  Swirling in a salty, hot broth that tasted industrial were strands of pasta that, at a push, might have been Chinese pictograms before they were overcooked.  I pushed them around, wondering if I was making sentences or just piling them randomly and offensively together.

As I laid my spoon down, deciding that not eating the soup was better than eating it, Gordon appeared. Somewhat to my astonishment he wasn't just topless, he was also naked save for a chef's toque, that he was incongrously wearing on his head.  Well, incongruous given his state of undress.

Without hesitation I took advantage of the screaming groupies throwing themselves at him to duck out of the restaurant and hide in the nearest bar that carried single malts.  My editor could pick her pictures out of the blogs in the morning.

Fizz Mission

She was Fizz Mission, abandoned at a young age by the nuns who had been to take her in and bring her up as one of them.  She had only dim memories of them: shadowy black and white people, vaguely conical in shape, moving silently around large, echoing spaces.  Geometric symbols adorned the walls, and for the last six months she was there she had entertained the idea that she was being raised by mathematicians.  Invisible mathematicians, mostly.  There has been murmured words, which she later learned were prayers, and later still learned were the prayers of desperate people, who perhaps should have been more cautious around a child they feared.  There were long polished floors, and hard, high-backed chairs.  There had been hours of sitting still and being silent.  And there had been a vegetable garden.
They took her out to the vegetable garden to punish her, telling her that the eyes of God were everywhere, but it was an imposition to ask him to see inside buildings and through walls.  So she was beaten outside, usually pressed face-first against a rough-barked tree by a calloused, strong hand, and she was told the whole time that God was observing her punishment.  If there was anything unjust, a woman's voice said, then God would surely intervene, and if He chose not to, then there as no wrong done in his eyes.
When she was three, old enough to know what was happening, two of the nuns dressed more heavily than she'd seen any of them dress before; robes over robes over thin metal sheets beaten into curves that approximated the human form over padding and thin blouses.  Then, attired as rather bulky, unattractive women, they'd taken her out from the nunnery, walked for half a day to a pleasant cliff-top where a river ran along a stony bed and then leapt off and out, a rainbow-laden waterfall to a valley below.  Birds called to one another and swooped and sang in the air, and insects chittered and chattered as they busied themselves about their business.  The nuns pointed out the birds, showed her with infinite care how to draw back leaves and grasses to see the insects, and marvelled with her at the infinite variety of God's Kingdom.  Then they took her to the cliff edge to see the rainbows hanging the in the spray from the waterfall, each took a hand, and swung her back and forth three times.  At the peak of the third swing they let go, and she flew out into the air, off and away from the cliff, and fell to the valley below.
The world seemed to tumble around her as she flew, the air growing cold as it rushed past her ever faster, and the birds cries of astonishment turned to drawn out screams as the sound dopplered away.  When the tumbling stopped she was head down, and the trees and grasses and rocks of the valley were growing larger and closer by the second.  She closed her eyes, tensed her whole body, and screamed.

*

"Fizz?" The voice was thin, and it tasted white.  She swallowed, not entirely pleased with the flavour.

"Fizz, open your eyes please?"  She shrugged, wondering if she was being held again – wait, why did she think again? – and opened her eyes.  She could move freely.  Above her was a suspended ceiling, with those funny acoustic ceiling tiles that deadened noise so that large offices could be open-plan without confusing everyone with unending echoes.  There was a fluorescent light tube a little way away from her eyes, turned on.  Of course.

"Fizz, where do you think you are?"

She thought about that; she could remember falling to the ground again, screaming into the light, but... but that wasn't here, was it?  This was an office of some kind.  This was... this was the office of the psychiatristic Moore, wasn't it?

"I'm here with you, Dr. Moore," she said.  Her voice was warm, but it never tasted of anything.  She didn't know why.  "You're psychiatring me, aren't you?  As you do every Monday and Thursday, business permitting."

"I'm providing you with a safe space where you may talk freely," said Dr. Moore, his voice quavering slightly on the sibilants.  "As your boss wants, as you know."

"Then are we done for today?"  Fizz sat up; the office around her was small, cluttered, and beige.  The walls were beige, the desk was tan, the blotter on the desk was beige, and the pens on the blotter were muddy brown.  Even the paper, squared neatly with the edge of the desk, was an off-yellow colour.  Dr. Moore seemed to live in a sepia world.

"We got no further than last time," said Dr. Moore.  There was a tapping noise, perhaps a pen against a pad of paper.  "We need to be more productive.  It would help if you could remember why the nuns wanted to get rid of you."

"Yes," said Fizz, memories stirring in the back of her mind, but none coming forwards.  "That is odd, isn't it?"

"Murderous nuns usually make the news," said Dr. Moore.  He sighed.  "Unless they were all killed of course."

There was a pause, a momentary silence while Fizz's memories coiled in the darkness of her mind like snakes settling down again to sleep.  "Killed?" she asked, sure that Dr. Moore wouldn't wake the snakes now.

"There's a possibility," said Dr. Moore, his voice fainter still, "that someone, or something, killed the nuns shortly after they thought they'd killed you."

"The ones who threw me off...?"

"All of them."

Game of Sitting Rooms

"Your brother," and here Mrs. Golddieb sneered without changing the lightly conversational tone she was using, "had telegrammed us to say that he will be in London this coming week and wishes to visit."  She was sitting in a high-backed wing-chair in the Blue Drawing Room, one of three in the Golddieb's five-storey townhouse, stiff-backed herself and holding the offensive telegram in one hand.  The chair was brocaded to match the carpet and appeared almost to grow out of the floor in an oddly organic way.
Mr. Martin Golddieb took care to look pained, and left the comfort of the Welsh Dresser to cross the sand-and-silver carpet and take the telegram from his wife.
"Oh Miriam," he said, glancing at the telegram.  "Well, I suppose we have a duty to entertain hi–"
"Like he entertains those whores?"  Little red blotches appeared in the centre of her cheeks, and he could almost swear that she was trembling with rage.
"Pas devant les enfants," he said reflexively.  "Mir–"
"The children are with the nurse," she said, hissing her sibilants like an angry snake.  "But you are here in front of me, telling me that you intend to invite that little viper into this house again!  How can you stand to be under the same roof as that vile little man?  You know he consorts with consorts frequently in his house in Leeds!  You must remember that he attempted to marry one of them last Spring!  Hah, if your father hadn't intervened then we'd all be disgraced.  And only two months ago, he hanged a man in his front garden!"  Her hands were clutching the arms of the chair so hard that her knuckles were bone white, and when he looked at her face again little beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead.
"The man was a traitor," said Martin, working backwards through the litany.  "He stole boot-blacking and was selling it to the baker to adulterate bread with.  My brother sought to kill three birds with one stone: he stopped the theft, he stopped the adultery–" he paused while Mrs. Golddieb snorted, "– and he made an example of the man that others could not deny they'd seen.  I sincerely hope you'd expect me to do no less under the circumstances."  He paused again, waiting for agreement from his wife.  The angry silence drew out, first for seconds, then for nearly a minute.  At last, unwillingly, she glanced at the Welsh Dresser where the heads of the northwards-neighbour's children were floating in preserving jars and nodded, her jaw tight and her eyes fixed firmly forwards.  "My father did thankfully intervene with Johann, and none are more grateful than me for that.  None," he emphasized, his foot striking the floor in time with the word.  "He had his failings, but we all have those and it is best not to mention them in polite company.  Even in discreet company it can only fare ill to talk of these matters."  He sighed, his tone dropping from formal and angry to weary all of a sudden.  "But you are right, Miriam, you are very right.  When Johann comes this time I will speak to him about his attraction to the less salubrious side of life and set him straight.  He must reduce his contact with these women; in fact, he should take a wife, a proper wife, and the sooner the better."
"I am pleased that you think this way," said Miriam stiffly.  Although she was pleased with her husband's words she couldn't bring herself to step down from the argument as easily as he could and would need to leave the room and let her anger cool down from its simmer before she could agree to his truce.  "I think I shall go and see what the children are learning this afternoon, and then instruct the cook to provide something suitable for their tea."  She stood up, and smoothed down her heavy dress that provided insulation against the cold and made her feel like walking was a constant struggle.
"I would like cucumber sandwiches for tea," said her husband quickly, aware that his wife was growing increasingly keen on the idea of a diet of raw meat for the boys.  "Perhaps with some of that new spice?"
"Paprika," said Miriam.  "If you insist, dear."  She swept out of the room, the fabric of her dress rustling against itself like the wind in trees in a storm.  The Blue Drawing Room door closed behind her, just loudly enough to be a final reproof, and Martin sighed again, and went back to the Welsh Dresser.  He picked up one of the heavy preserving jars in both hands and turned it until he could look into the dead eyes of the boy's head.  Their northward's neighbour had sent the children into his garden on a raid, probably hoping that not all of them would come back.  None of them had returned.
"Well Christian," he said to the dead head, "it looks like Johann will be causing his usual excitement.  All it needs now is for Nickie to cause a scene as well and announce her arrival and it will be a menagerie here instead of a home."

Prozacade

"There you go, my pretty," muttered Gladys under her breath, pouring half of her can of Prozacade into  her dragonette's water dish.  The dragonette, a slim pink dragon as long as Glady's arm, watched her from what it considered a safe distance, waiting until she'd moved away from the dish before it came over to see what had changed.  Its long black toenails clicked on the parquet floor, and its tail swayed gently from side to side behind it – not an indication of friendliness, but just a means of staying stable – until it was close enough to sniff the contents of the dish.  Huge nostrils flared until they were as large as its eyes, which, like an anime character's, were too big for its head.  It tilted its head this way and that, and eventually decided that what was in the dish smelled fine.  It dipped its head and lapped up the Prozacade.
"Gladys?"  The voice behind her was soft, caring, and sounded a little tired.  Gladys's back still snapped ramrod straight and she froze as though she'd been caught hacking the nursing home's computers again.  "Gladys, what are you doing?"
"Feeding Lulu," she said.  She turned round to face Dr. Elizabeth, a middle-aged woman with horn-rimmed spectacles and a permanent clipboard held defensively at chest height.  Dr. Elizabeth's eyes moved down until they were focused on the can of Prozacade.  "Lulu likes it!"
"I expect she does," said Dr. Elizabeth.  The clipboard lowered and she took a pen from its attachment point on the side.  She looked Gladys in the eyes again.  "You used to work for BioPets didn't you?  Which is how come you have a dragonette, in fact."
Gladys said nothing, waiting for Dr. Elizabeth to reach her conclusions and go.
"Come on Gladys, you can talk to me.  Dragonettes: theyr'e gengineered pets aren't they?"
"Well of course," said Gladys, irritation forcing her to speak.  "They're not natural, are they?  Or do you have a bunch of them frolicking at the bottom of your garden?"
"That would be nice," said Dr. Elizabeth, a smile brightening her face.  Gladys thought that she still looked like someone's mother.  "How much are they fetching on the open market at the moment?  More than my annual salary, I expect."  Gladys nodded, unwilling to provide numbers, though she knew them all down to the decimals.  "No, they're not natural, and they're expensive and hard to come by even if you have the money.  And yet here you are, feeding your dragonette your Prozacade instead of drinking it."  Gladys could almost hear "like a good girl" at the end of that sentence.  "Why?"
"It likes it," said Gladys.  She stuck her chin out unconsciously.
"Yes, yes," said Dr. Elizabeth, writing something on her clipboard.  Gladys found herself curious as to what was being written, but the clipboard was angled just out of her view.  "But you wouldn't give it something it liked if you thought you were risking its life, would you?"
"Maybe," said Gladys, though she knew she'd not do anything to harm Melchior, her dragonette.
"Maybe," said Dr. Elizabeth, writing on the clipboard again.  She was writing for too long to have just written Gladys's answer down though.  "Maybe."  There was a pause, and then, just when Gladys was hoping that the conversation was over, "You used to work for BioPets, didn't you?"
Gladys stayed quiet again.
"Well, let me answer that for you," said Dr. Elizabeth.  "It's here on your chart.  You did, you were at various points the Dragonette Lead Researcher, the Technical Director for Reptilian Research, Head of Dragonette development, Vice President for Reptiles and Ophidians, and Medical Officer for Xenospecies.  It's a very impressive CV, and it suggests to me that you know exactly what Prozacade will do to a dragonette."
"Make it cheerful?" said Gladys.  She was slightly stunned that all her significant job titles were on her chart – this was just a nursing home after all, for people like her who considered children a nuisance rather than a life-insurance policy – and a little puzzled that Dr. Elizabeth was paying any attention to them.
"Hah, wouldn't that be a surprise?" said Dr. Elizabeth.  "Those things seem to be permanently grumpy unless they're with they're owner."
"They're territorial," said Gladys feeling a little awkward.  "They're quick to identify competition."
"I think," said Dr. Elizabeth, looking at the dragonette appraisingly, "that Prozacade probably opens up some extra branch of coding inside the dragonette.  I think that you did it deliberately; some little trick that you kept secret and took away with you, so that when you got bored with retirement you'd be able to use it to go back to work.  It won't work Gladys, you're simply too old now."
Melchior the dragonette stretched, feeling a little odd.  Its brain felt like it was fizzing and bubbling, as though there was a really big, important thought coming.
"I don't want to go back" said Gladys.  "There was always too much work and too few people."  Dr. Elizabth looked perplexed.
"Then what...?" she asked, just as Melchior opened its mouth, belched, and blew a ball of fire in front of him to crash against the wall and burn up the wallpaper.
Gladys turned to Dr. Elizabeth, who was staring wildly at the dragonette.  "I just want to take out an insurance policy."

Steal your prayers

They used to call her Jackie back in the day, back when names had a meaning to her.  Now she wears tin-foil curlers in her hair to keep people from reading her thoughts, dresses out of dumpsters, and is the kind of hooker you go and find when you've already caught every disease going and need something worse to chase them all out of your system.  She was standing on the other side of the road as I exited through the hatch, my chest scraping along the pavement on some kind of slime – I was hoping for vomit as that washes out – squeezing spots on the side of her neck and peering at me like she was hoping she could frisk me before I woke up.  Her eyes were as crazy as ever, and her lips were so red I knew instantly I didn't want to know what she was using for lipstick.  She scuttered over to me like a hermit crab spotting a new hideout.
"Jackie," I said quickly.  A normal man would have stood up and chased her off, but I wasn't about to try standing for anyone until I'd got my breath back, and whatever I'd slid in across the pavement was making me retch.
"I'm Bella!" she said, her voice a half-shriek, cracked and scratchy.  "I'm Bella!"  She tilted her head sideways like a bird and eyed me again.  I felt like day-old carrion being scrutinised by the vulture, and suspected that I looked a lot like it too.
"Bella then," I said.  I got my hands underneath my chest and tried to remember if there were any tricks to doing a push-up.  "It's Mac."
She recoiled, and I felt insulted.  It's one thing knowing that there are fungi that consider you too far down in the sewer for their children to grow on, but it's quite another to meet any such fungus.  I pushed with my hands and they sank into whatever I was lying in without actually moving me any higher up.
"I'm Bella!" she squawked again, and I wondered how much of her brain had been scrambled by the tin-foil hair-curlers.  "I'm all sparkly!"
I pushed harder and managed to lift myself enough to get my knees underneath me and then my feet underneath them.  I felt like an accordion, but it was enough to lurch, unsteadily, to my full height and lean against a wall while my lungs heaved like a blacksmith's bellows on a midwinter evening.  "What are you doing here, Jackie?" I asked.  I didn't really want to know the answer, but I wanted her to keep in mind I was still alive and could probably fight back.
"I'm Bella!" she said again, and I wondered if she counted as a woman.  My mother, on those rare occasions she'd talk to me before she obtained the restraining order, had told me never to hit a woman.  I try not to disappoint her more than twice a year, and I still had four months to go.  "I'm turning tricks for Edward."  I thought about this: Edward couldn't be the name of her pimp because there wasn't anyone mad enough to take her on.  Even the guys who had two live hookers and three dead ones wouldn't take a chance on Jackie – or Bella, or whatever name she thought she had when she woke up that morning – in case they ended up with just her.
"That's great, Bella," I said, managing at the last moment not to call her Jackie again.  "I bet you're doing a great job."  There were no noises coming from the doors nearby, so either none of them went into the Blue Swan or they were still trying to sort out the fire-retardant chemicals.  I eyed the hatch warily, just in case.
"I'm pregnant!"
That was a low blow; just as I was trying to inhale and getting ready to move, she hit me with news that  I'd have sworn was physiologially impossible.  I actually stopped breathing through shock, and had to bang my fist against my sternum a couple of times to get things going again.  While that was happening, I thought I saw the hatch move very slightly.
"By Edward?" I asked, nervously.  "Is he the father?"  Had the hatch flexed a little then?
"No silly, by Jacob."
"Jacob was the name of that dog you used to keep on a chain," I said, concentrating on the hatch.  It looked like someone was trying to beat it open from the inside.
"I'm pregnant! By Jacob!"
"Right," I said, the horror of what she was saying knocking politely on the front-door of my attention while the definitely-flexing hatch kicked in a side-door and starting shouting.  I checked both ends of the street and decided to go with the closer.  It looked like a T-junction at the stop.  "Gotta go, Jackie, stay... stay... stay!"
She froze, and I lumbered into a run, my knees clicking like castanets and my feet slapping against the floor like an overenthusiastic penguin.  Behind me the hatch banged open and dark smoke began to billow out, while the bouncers slumped across each other, greedily sucking in fresh air.  Jackie – or Bella – stared after me, her eyes wider dilated than an elephant's cervix during the birth of twins, and as I rounded the corner I heard her say plaintively, "They steal your prayers."
"They can't if you never say any," I muttered to myself, and then I had no more breath for anything other than running.