Friday Comes Early to Twinkletown
I wasn't always like this, so... detached.
But once they started selling detachable arms on the open market I couldn't resist! It's like, free arms! Well, only they weren't free. No, not by a long shot.
I wandered down into the downtown district of Sunnyvale, the buildings looming overhead, and the already grayish day turned into full-blown night down those grimy corridors of skyscrapers. I remember thinking the sky could use a good scraping, playing the old word association game I played when I didn't think I needed to be particularly aware of my surroundings. Only thing is, Sunnyvale had undergone some major changes, and when the thugs jumped out from behind the pawn shop with clubs, well, I should have been more wary.
The guys on the ends were taking mirrored swings at me that landed at exactly the same time, and it registered, at that point, that I'd better wake out of my little reverie about skyscrapers and get to work. It registering sounded a little like a rib cracking, which is exactly the sound my Teflar(tm) armor made when you hit it with something. It must have been some kind of inside joke with the engineers that made the stuff, I don't know. Whatever it was, I could see by the looks on these guys faces that they'd never heard of this particular tidbit, because they looked pretty damn pleased with themselves. And if I knew that I'd just hit a guy who had the means to be wearing Teflar(tm) armor and walking down into the downtown district of Sunnyvale alone, well, let's just say I wouldn't be grinning at all. Unless I had a morbid sense of humor, I suppose.
I put a fist each through... aww, listen. No details. There's no need for gory details. Let's just say they stopped bothering me, and I left the event a little more focused on where I was going, what I was going through.
The nickname Twinkletown came to Sunnyvale later, of course, when things started to go slightly sour. The city from the north had moved down and expanded south, the city to its east had also expanded, like a blister, and the city from the east bay also expanded south and down, across the bay, until Sunnyvale was consumed by all comers. The newcomers nicknamed it Twinkletown. No one quite knows why. There should be a study into that or something.
I got to the shop that I'd heard was advertising detachable arms, and it was actually an open market. The stalls were covered, so the grimy rain wouldn't ruin otherwise fine detachable arms, but you turned an alley down near what used to be Scruffy Murphy's, and there you had it, the detachable arms open market.
The first stall I stopped at had the arms stacked under a plastic, see-through tarp, and they looked big. Which, of course, is going to be the first kind of detachable arm you want: if it gets too heavy, take it off, leave it down. But when you need it, strap that thing on and Blam! Suddenly you're a force to be reckoned with.
"You sellin'?" I had to bend down beneath the seller's tarp, keeping the rain off himself, though not well, and at that stage I wasn't quite sure what for. He was soaked through and looked dirtier than anything down this alleyway except perhaps the gutters. Normally, I'd be nervous sticking my neck out, literally, under a tarp with a character like this. But the fight earlier had energized me like I'd been working out all day.
"You a cop." He said it in a sort of matter of fact way. Not a question. A belief system.
"No. I'm not." And that day, I wasn't. I just smiled at him in what I hoped he thought I thought was a reassuring way, but it was intended to come across as anything but.
Unfortunately for me, all the nuance that went into that took so long his damn son or something jumped me from behind with yet another club at the base of my neck, half on, half off the body armor, and took down the guy's tarp in the follow through swing. He tried jumping up on my back next like a monkey or something, when he saw I wasn't going down, but, like I said, I was jazzed from my earlier fight, so this one wasn't going to go like he envisioned.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
This week's issue is here thanks to William Murphy, who should have his own author page on this thing one of these days. Maybe that kind of incentive will get him to write more regularly. Of course, next week we'll have the next installment of this series, but that's not quite the same thing as writing us new stuff every couple of weeks so we can fire... err... ease the burden, on some of our other writers.
Okay, down to business... we're hovering in the one to two hundred thousandth in Amazon.com's sales rankings... which is tough, people, tough. This is possibly the finest fiction collection you could buy this year, and you're only settling for one or two copies, at most... we're going to need some more commitment. Fenway Fiction could very well be the book that changes your life. It could. Especially if you buy so many copies of them that you wind up having to stack a whole lot of them against the door of your house, and that prevents a burglary.
Now, we're not saying Fenway Fiction prevents crime. But it could.
To update last week's news, Matthew Hanlon, esteemed founder of this here magazine, will be reading from Fenway Fiction at Booklovers' Gourmet in Webster, MA on December 28th, from 5pm to 7pm. That change is that it's from 5pm to 7pm. You get a whole extra hour with the guy! And Adam Pacther, and possibly others from the author list of the collection we've been going on about for so many weeks now.
So book your plane/train/automobile tickets now, and witness an event for the ages.
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