The sisters of Gamma Beta Pi long held that the goddess was a myth.
That their initiation ritual, the bloodletting under the cover of darkness in the woods behind their house one night in late October every year, was nothing more than simple tradition. That the magic they claimed to call forth, bringing beauty and power to those few worthy women, were nothing but empty affirmations.
But Marsha Hart knew the truth.
Looking back now on all those times Dad died, I’d have to say the first one remains my favourite.
When he was twenty-nine, Dad was working as an in-house solicitor for a now defunct telecommunications firm. He lived alone in Peckham, and clocked in long, unsociable hours. One hot July evening, a little past nine o’clock, he got home and found a dead man lying at the foot of his stairs.
I killed my mother-in-law last month. Obviously, David doesn’t know I was responsible for his mother’s death. He thinks it was just an accident. Which is infuriating, because I was finally going to prove to him what a cow she was. But now I have to listen to him crying over “Poor Mummy,” and reminiscing about how perfect she was.
Department of Memory: Statement on Recent Memory NoteTM Upgrades
Memory NoteTM, the alert system transforming our conception of life, has been upgraded, announced the Department of Memory (DoM) today.
Upon completion of the Pilot Phase, DoM has done what it promised to do from the outset: learn. Upgrades to Memory NoteTM align with the system’s purpose: to bring memory to the present by alerting us in real time of which experiences we’ll remember far into the future.
Said Terry Bernham, Secretary of Memory. “The knowledge of what we will remember refines our behavior, changes our future, and adds meaning to our lives. This knowledge is NOTEworthy.”
From the road, the modern building looked out of place – as though it had been dropped into the Kansas wasteland by accident, meant for another location, but destined to end up here. We stood in silence, neither of us with any constructive thing to say and already exhausted in the creeping summer sun.
My eyes fell to the cheap sign that didn’t match the rest of the aesthetics: The Museum of Museums. The sign would have fit better in one of those old time tourist traps and looked at least twenty years older than the stark white behemoth it guarded.
Sasha’s attention fell on the harsh staccato of Stick’s nails, clicking across the hard floor. It’d been too long since she’d cut them, Sasha thought, distracted for a moment from the steady rhythm of her own breath. Stick clicked past again and Sasha heard him scratching against the front door. He had to go out. But it could wait. For one more breath at least, it could all wait — Stick and his nails and the world outside the door he was scratching at. Sasha re-focused her attention on the next inhalation, following it from the air fluttering past the edges of her nostrils, to the rising tide beneath her chest, as her diaphragm dropped and her lungs filled with—
The boys had gathered for Tristan’s return. Mulligan, a teacher, had driven from Galway through rain that seemed to resent his presence on the road. Rob had taken the train from Dublin. Shaney got a lift from a neighbour in Drumshanbo. And as for Tristan, he trumped them all: there was no beating a twenty-four-hour flight from Australia. (He’d failed to mention the stopover in Kuala Lumpur that broke the journey in two.)
There was no music in the bar. The owner’s son, who normally sang a disorientating selection of country tunes and pop hits, had taken a huff with his father. So the only bit of melody came from excited voices and clinking glasses.
The scene is like this. Julia’s guidance counselor who vaguely looks like hot Top Gun Kelly McGillis pushes her reading glasses up from the tip of her nose while holding out a manilla folder like she’s going to tell Julia something important about college applications or her next term schedule. Julia hopes that the anti-learning book banners aren’t trying to cut the school’s Latin program, again. Aside from working with marionettes, translating The Aeneid is Julia’s favorite thing. But no, to both Julia’s annoyance and relief, Miss Langtree doesn’t say this. Instead, the moment turns noir weird.
The operation had been a success. Moreover, it had been painless, just as Dr. Mayfield had promised. James had been skeptical, seeing as he was going to be awake as they cut into his brain. (James was well aware the brain had no nerves, but the skull surely did.) But Dr. Mayfield had been correct—James had felt nothing beyond a slight pressure. And now, with the chip implanted, James would never feel anything unpleasant ever again.
* * *
The first time James used his new power was the following Friday, during his company’s quarterly earnings review. The chip functioned flawlessly—eight hours of meetings passed in the blink of an eye—and James left the office wearing a large grin. His cube-mate and closest thing to a work friend, Alan, noticed his buoyant disposition.
Idle Ink 