Things I Can't Sell

Two Girls

Two girls, a he and a she, married along the far shores of the Shadow Sea. They were both very small, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough to fly. Frost kissed their eyelashes. They lay in the snow, dressed all in martyr's white. We stoned then to death at dawn. The blood was very beautiful.

The Women of Our Occupation

The drivers were big women with broad hands and faces smeared in mortar grit, reeking of the dead. Their eyes were filmed over with memories of dust. When we did not see them passing through the gate, ferrying truck loads of our dead, they came to us in dreams, the women of our occupation.

Wonder Maul Doll

We'd set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We're all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

Sho

There was a boy in the snow. He was not beautiful.

He was left to me because I am an old person, a man by right of absence, not presence. I had all those organs removed years ago. The boy was carried and set down -- not gently -- in the gutter along my street, three doors from my stoop. The streets were bitter cold. If I left him where he lay, no doubt, the unbeautiful boy would become as the trees, coated in icy frosting and pushed into the sewers by the street sweepers in their growling machines.

I'm thinking it has... ahem... something to do with the themes...