SpinningStarshine

"...Who told you?" "Who'd you tell?"

"Do you ever look up, Marek?" he asked me one evening, as we sat on the high wall that separated the inner city ring from the outer. Jorgenson always spoke suddenly and sharply, didn't often preface his sentences – didn't bother to explain himself. "What do you mean?" I asked. I had long ago conditioned myself not to flinch at what lay behind Jorgenson's tone: the cold assurance of my stupidity. "Out," he said, and gestured. "You're always looking out." I did so again, staring beyond the rings upon rings of fortified walls, to the empty plateau that lay beyond. Nothing broke the landscape but a canyon, and even that just looked like a

The water that flows in from the glass is a tide coming into a cove. It breaks against the perimeter and the low ceiling in splashes, swirls in eddies around the hollowed-out spaces which are in the gradual constant of being worn down. Soon, the water slowly drains to the back of the cove and out of sight. Sometimes the water that flows in from the glass recedes, expelled suddenly by some heaving force, a groundswell; whatever the motion, I'm made aware of all the spaces and niches where the water seeps through. There are lichen clinging to the stalagmites and stalactites of the cove, and they recoil as they are doused with a wash of cold ti

 I'm sitting on the front steps of my apartment early on this smoggy Monday morning, toying with a crushed pack that a friend had left on my dresser, letting one of his filched cigarettes hang unlit between my lips. I don't smoke, but it makes me look pissed-off and mean; the kid who delivers the daily won't have the guts to throw his newspaper on my steps while I'm sitting there looking like I am, chapped-lipped and sleepless. That's almost the whole reason I come out here this early: To go through this trouble to save myself some later. I'm fundamentally against the local paper.  Why read seventeen articles each month about the

We had that toaster for so many years, I don't even remember who gave it to us. Was it your parents? It couldn't have been mine. Maybe a friend—no, none of them would have sent it to us as a gift. Nobody would. Nobody was ever that cheap to us, were they? No, I don't think so. We already had the toaster when we moved in. Now I remember: During a visit to my parents, we picked it up at a yard sale of a neighbor who lived a few houses down. It was an old toaster, but the wife of the man who lived there – an elderly woman - promised its functionality. She even brought out a slice of bread on a plate to prove it. Sure enough, that litt

The Tic-Tac-Toe World Cup is on tonight, and my boyfriend Rick has invited our friends over to the apartment for a night of chips and salsa dip while they watch and pull for their favorites. I reluctantly leave my magazine in the next room when I hear the battlecries for more snacks and beverages, they're coming onto the final round and they can't afford to miss a moment to pop in the kitchen now. I figure it's late enough in the game for me to be interested, so I pick up another bag of tortilla chips from the counter and a six-pack of soda sitting on the bottom drawer of the fridge. I also grab one of those Yoplait yogurts and a spoon for m

I don't approve of your new lifestyle. But there was only one lifestyle of yours I ever liked, honestly. The one you had years ago, when it was frozen dinners every night and only the change in your pocket separated you from the people on the street. The lifestyle that, for a time, included me.

Day 0: The moon disappears from its place outside the house. The following morning I decide that the windows need washing. I take care of the one in my room first, and then my sister's, and then the bathroom, so no one will think it's anything but a general cleaning. The window in the hallway upstairs needs the most work; it's become smudged with finger grease and dirt. My sister comes up sometime early afternoon. "Istra," she says. "I have someone I want you to meet." She stands at the top of the stairs while I rub at a stubborn bit of grime that has stuck near the sill. While I wet the rag I am using into the shallow basin of water at my

Orion wants to love the night the way Hazel does, but he can't. It is because there is something disturbing about the shadows in and around her garden. They move, independent of the clouds traveling across the moon and the tall grass rippling in a stray breeze. They are shadows that rise from the earth, that stand up and prowl the night-washed landscape, shifting humanoid silhouettes with too-long limbs and inlaid with two luminous eyes. Orion watches them safely from the kitchen window on the nights when his curiosity manages to hold back his fear. Their eyes remind him of coals dying in the hearth, and the conversation with Hazel that fol

Oleanna, Lumn, and Milo tromped out of the outpost after an early lunch, instruments on their backs. The ridge they climbed that day was overshadowed by a half-circle of mountains, and the three found themselves digging their feet in and trying not to fall on their hands as they ascended the rocky, icy path. Oleanna brought up the rear, feeling like a  pack animal as her neck and shoulders began to ache; she couldn't carry this xylophone much further. "Milo," she called, feeling sweat forming inside her jacket even as her nose and fingers smarted from the cold. "How much further?" With her and her comrades' stooping gait, she could