Sequential - The Magazine

Alexus was born in the slums, like everyone, trying to claw her way out. Obsessed with the sky. Like the little green vines in a tangled snare of brambles and thorns, reaching for the sun. But there was a voice that spoke to her at night. It told her she was special. It said she would grow and thrive, where the others withered and hardened until they were just more thorns in the briar patch.
It wasn’t terribly unusual to have a voice that spoke to you at night. There were plenty of voices who just wanted to talk, and they would do it for anyone who could listen to them. And there were voices who spent all their time telling people to buy this or that. Those would creep into your dreams, whispering thoughts of soda cane and spore games with bright logos that filled everyone’s mind with glitter. Bri said someone paid them to do that; lots of cash, or whatever it was that voices wanted to be paid.
But Alexi’s voice wasn’t like that.
Alexus lived by the beanstalk, where everything came and went. One time she was watching things come and go on the stalk, like the little round bugs that march up one side of a stem and down the other in neat single file lines, and she got the idea of trying to follow it with her eyes, up, up to the top of the sky. She thought maybe if she could do that, follow it to where it stopped, she would be able to go there. Not just with her eyes, but all of her. She squinted into the sharp air, glimmering blue, and followed. She followed it for a long time, until her face was sore.
Eventually she realized it was gone. She couldn’t fine the thin black line anymore, in all that blue haze. She didn’t even know where she had lost it. She would have to go back to the bottom and start again.
That was the first time she could remember crying, not because she was hurt or angry or for any reason she could plainly understand, but for what seemed like no reason at all. There was just an overwhelming sense of despair as she sat there, flailing in vain for the invisible filament strung between Heaven and Earth, and the tears would not stop.
Bri was a year and a half older than Alexus. He lived in a pile of cars and machines outside the loading fields, where there were lots of tracks and big engines that the working men used to carry things over to the beanstalk. Or out away from it. But usually they seemed to be moving things toward it. They wore orange suits and drove all kinds of big black and yellow machines and spent all day packing things into giant metal canisters that got sent up the beanstalk.
Bri’s place was set up behind a bunch of storage buildings. There were a bunch of kids there; they got cars and generators and refrigerators and whatever they could find from all over, and brought the stuff in to add to their house. The older ones would weld things together and sometimes they even got the working men with their heavy machines to help them lift a chunk of old metal up into the spot they had picked out for it. Bri said they had an arrangement with the workers. He said they were happy to help out.

[Previous]

     The first thing he noticed was the texture of the sheets, awareness of fingertips against silk bubbling up through the white noise. He realized his eyes were closed and decided not to open them yet. He tasted metal; it ran through his nose and throat like the chill of menthol. The hard cold of a bedpan was against his thighs; he felt the latex snap of a catheter pulling away when he moved. Muscles long unused burned as he stood up to look around. His feet touched burnished concrete. A panel of ceiling grew luminous, just slow enough so the change was nearly imperceptible. Activated by his motion or perhaps the time of day. Lines between light and shadow sharpened as the room came into view. The panel cast a sheen across four spotless aluminum walls, uninterrupted about their perimeter except for a thin seam defining a rectangle the size of a door.
( Read more... )

     In this, the first issue of Sequential - episode one of my first and so far only novel, A Dirge for the Sinking City. Be honest. Be brutal. Be kind. And, by all means, enjoy.

* * *
[Next]

      Age had built a landscape of wrinkles on the man's weathered visage. The light cast deep shadows on his furrowed skin; the dark played across his features as he spoke. It spilled across light areas and pooled like oil. The radiant halo dancing atop the candle cast golden light across his face. The flickering flame made a dusky sphere in the surrounding darkness.
( Read More... )