![]() ![]() ![]() When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean. I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia, at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than the food. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene, and feeling like there had to be more to life than this. People came from all over, because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth, and that’s when I decided to leave town. There were bookhouses, along with stinktanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of drycloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry on Friday nights. We were bad at music, and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We wanted to shake our cinderblock walls and make people dance until their feet bled. I lived in an old decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega-city as I hit my early twenties. I couldn’t deal with life in Fairbanks any more. I FELT LIKE I HAD ALWAYS BEEN WRONG HEADED When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.Ģ. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. And then someone-probably Miranda-farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we’d all remember in the bad times to come. Joconda was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road, hir beard full of flowers. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the little candle-boats we’d made as they floated away. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children’s toys, all the waterlogged treasures of long-gone people. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and alight after half a league, their tiny flames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water alongside the streaks of moonlight. We stood naked on the shore of Bernal and watched the candles float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north, in the direction of Potrero Island. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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