OC Blabber
Crownsville, Maryland, November 1996 The Shop The sign at the gate was hand-painted on a board nailed to two posts. It said HUZZAH, and under that, in smaller letters, LARP WEEK: NO DAY PASSES, CHECK IN AT LOGISTICS, and under that, smaller again and newer, someone had added in...
Atlantic City, November 1996 The Boardwalk They came over the causeway at eleven with the bay black on both sides and the whole city lit up ahead of them like somebody had spilled a jewelry box on the edge of the ocean. Hazel slowed down to look at it. She...
Washington, D.C., November 1996 The First Night Hazel rode with one hand off the grip from Baltimore onward, pointing at things. She pointed at a sign that said WASHINGTON 34. She pointed at a water tower painted like a peach, which turned out to be somewhere else entirely, and...
Kjalkur. Early autumn, the year the war ended. The first evening She started inside the walls, because she was standing in them when she decided to start. The house was finishing its day around her. Ragna was clattering in the kitchen. Eirik was leading the grey mare over the...
Kjalkur. Early autumn, the year the war ended. The first day The cart came up the road from Sörfur an hour before evening, and he knew from the way it took the last bend that it was not one of the King's. He had been told the ships had sailed....
Lou picked the movies. A month ago she had lain awake ruling them out: an hour and a half in the dark next to it, with nothing to do but think. Now she bought two tickets for a Wednesday matinee of a Christmas film about a divorced couple snowed into...
The trees leaned against a chain-link fence at the back of a supermarket car park, under a string of bare bulbs that buzzed in the cold. They were tied up in netting like something that had been caught. A man in a hat with ear flaps sat in a shed...
At ten past four Calvin was sitting on the edge of Leigh's bed in the dark, looking for his other sock. He found it under the chair by the window, where the blind didn't quite meet the frame and a bar of orange streetlight came through and lay across the...
Theo had stood in the wings of perhaps two hundred shows. He knew where to put himself: far enough back that the follow spot didn't catch him, close enough to the stagehand's headset to hear the calls, at an angle where he could see her face and the first rows...
Philadelphia. 3rd October 1996. The building was wearing a hat. That was the first thing she noticed, standing across Spruce Street at a quarter to eleven with the envelopes inside her coat. Thirty-odd storeys of pale brick going up and up, and then at the very top somebody had...
