The Meridian Club had been a monument to high-stakes vice; now, it was just an open wound catching the city’s freezing rain. Red and blue police lights pulsed through the ruptured doorway, casting long, fractured shadows across the pulverized baccarat tables and the sea of abandoned chips.
In the dead center of the devastation, Cross stood up from the gray ash and dusted off his suit.
Kogan’s lead ampoule shattered under my bandaged knuckles. The purified salt and cold iron filings scattered across the green felt, but the dead quicksilver didn’t just spill… It leapt. It shot from the broken glass like a liquid soul, violently drawn to the impossible shape of the Black Sulfur token.
It hit the velvet exactly as Cross’s rotting entropy and Gallow’s crushing stasis slammed into the table.
The ignition didn’t produce a fireball. It produced an execution.
we walk the high wire with all of our pasts trailing down old roads, old paths those frayed threads slipping through our fingertips twisting at the spindle
A poem prompted by a randomly selected Elder Futhark rune.
Today’s rune is othala, which has a core meaning of “heritage”, “inheritance” and “legacy”. These are all associated with home, kin, ancestors, stability and (in some interpretations) past lives or spiritual legacy.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
Cross’s amused smile vanished, replaced by a look of ancient, profound annoyance.
I sat dead still in the crushing quiet, my breath shallow and held tight. The dull, rhythmic ache from the deep cuts on my left hand from the shattered neon glass was a sharp, ordinary pain, the only thing anchoring me against the impossible physics tearing the air apart. My bandaged fingers held steady over the lead ampoule, caught in the dead center of a hurricane where absolute stasis was locked in a brutal collision with pure, corrosive entropy.
all eyes turn aglow at dusk casting shades on faces facing faces the song on the wind faint as the laughter at carnivals dark trading youth for hearts' deepest longing
base art generated by Gemini; text and design by michael raven
While Sunny Day Parasol Co., the serialized noir I’ve been posting, has been “in the can” for about a week now and the publication of the story has been winding up, I have not been idle with the spare time I have had at my disposal.
“I’ll pass on the gin,” I said, keeping my posture relaxed but ensuring my right hand rested casually near the slit in the midnight blue silk. “It dulls the reflexes, and I prefer to keep my head clear when I’m collecting a fee.”
Cross’s smile didn’t waver. He leaned back, his tailored suit seeming to absorb the harsh glare of the chandelier above us.
“Fair enough. Though I notice you are traveling remarkably light for a retrieval job, Miss Locke. Tell me you didn’t leave my property sitting in the back of that rented hack you took from the Brass Canary. It would be a terrible shame to lose our investment to a common cab driver.”
“I wouldn’t insult either of us by being careless,” I said. My left hand, wrapped tight in fresh white gauze, went to the velvet clutch resting in my lap. My burnt fingers brushed the velvet, feeling the unnatural, freezing weight of Kogan’s ward humming against the escrow token.
