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You’re eighteen. Your fairy godmother just fired you, because after three balls, the prince has grown bored with you. Tonight you stepped on his foot during a gavotte. “If you’d been cleverer,” the fairy godmother says—her words silver chimes girded with steel—“you’d have pretended your clumsiness was really punishment: a reminder to focus on you, not that floozy in scarlet silk across the room.”
“God” is not the word I’d use. But it is the only one that suffices. There are all kinds of gods: the old and the new; the useful, the useless; the capricious and the dependable; the wrathful and the meek. They all had one thing in common—whether they were created at the dawn of time when hunter-gatherers huddled in caves and cowered at the crack of thunder, or they were engineered by men in frocks, or worse, born of minds harvested by modern technology—all gods were born starving.
“What do you mean the nanobots formed a union??” I asked the lawyer, biting my thumbnail.
It’s an old habit, kept up well after I got the “Pro Nano Blitz Package,” as the ad called it. A muscular man in tight clothing explained: a quick, painless injection, then a couple days sick as a dog, then another month for the nanobots to multiply, specialize, and spread out through the body. Then: easy street.
Lise’s personas have no warning when the XexlCo Construct appears at the gate of her memory garden, smiling cheerfully at each of her personas in turn like a neighborhood milkman making his daily rounds. They watch the newcomer saunter by with open curiosity, moving aside to let him pass as though he’s a regular guest in Lise’s subconscious. There’s nothing threatening about him. He might’ve popped in a million times, the way he behaves.
Rachel sat at the edge of the sparkling pond in the secluded glen that had taken her five years to find. The air smelled of roses and lavender and pine. Tiny white sparks, like fireflies, floated upward, almost as if they were watching her.
The magician raises his wand.
Initially, this commission seemed simple. One large country invading a much smaller one, a clear case of aggressor and victim—but nothing is ever so straightforward.
He hates the birds. There are two, a breeding pair. Their eyes are red as devils’. On land they’re stupid, little feet pushed so far back on their bodies that they can’t escape by running. Yet they glide over the water, glossy mottled boats. Their chicks ride their backs. The adults protect them, tuck black wings up to shield them from wave and eagle. They are good parents.
There’s a wolf where my brother used to be, a beast absolutely hellbent on ruining my life. He plunges his broad snoot into the Wednesday night spaghetti, and neither Mom nor Dad cares when half the bite slides off his nose and onto the table, to later be jostled to the floor by his grabbing, grubby paws. But if I came to the table without washing up first . . .
Abuelita has been feeding me her memories. Yesterday, it was the time she trudged up the mountain carrying a basketful of offerings for Pachamama (flowers, incense, a llama sculpted out of animal fat and adorned with gold leaf) in hopes the Earth Mother would alleviate the drought ruining the harvest. Today, it’s the time she visited Tío Roberto’s farm in Sapecho, how the smell of the cows made her eyes water and how at her uncle’s urging she coaxed one over to her with a big yellow carrot and let it eat out of her hand while she stroked its ears.
There once lived a boy who paid for a fortune. Nassim wore carob hair and eyes severe like cardamom. He spent his days scouring the souk for unique trinkets he liked to collect or counting the uneven stones of Jerusalem’s cobbled streets as he passed Al-Aqsa Mosque or picking up groceries for his grandmother. He knew it was best to avoid attention and wise to steer clear of the soldiers clad in olive drab watching from the shadows of their field caps in Al-Quds, walled and on fire.
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