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true amaranth

2011-11-09T02:14:51Z

Posted by: rokuta

The mood in the logistics room desaturates, the night crew having come in straight from dinner with a telling look and nothing left between them and the launch. Funereal, you'd say, if pressed to it, but they're all MIT guys, Tokyo U, ETH-1; they know what not to do on camera.

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the way to the heart

2011-08-11T09:34:27Z

Posted by: rokuta

Dealing with confessions was always roughest at the end of winter. Touya's shoe locker literally rained them in the week before graduation, to the collective kudos of the boys from classes A and B, immediately heeled by an argument about which girls might merit selection.

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SOMEWHERE BETWEEN

2011-07-31T22:57:39Z

Posted by: rokuta

When I say it was only two weeks, I mean that the time we spent together was important, not that I'm making light of what, you know. Transpired. Between us. It isn't the sort of thing that happens every day. In fact I'm not sure this particular scenario has even happened to anyone else, ever, in like all of human history. To level with you, some days I'm not sure it even occurred at all. Like, in actuality. Not just to me, in my head.

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SCHOOL IS AWESOME AND FOR WINNERS

2011-07-19T08:22:59Z

Posted by: rokuta

There was a fine old plaque on Masunaga-sensei's desk, with the name MASUNAGA chromed out on it and everything. Narumi decided that he would like one of his own, for the office. It looked terrifically official.

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how to tie a tie

2011-07-08T08:03:45Z

Posted by: rokuta

"The blue," decided Narumi at last. "Looks smart, don't you think?"

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parler en aer

2011-06-26T11:11:22Z

Posted by: rokuta

Estelle, now. Estelle didn't know the first thing about nurturing a burgeoning relationship. You had to be aloof. You had to sort of hang around, looking bored, and wait for them to come to you. That's the way you got on top. So to speak.

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仲間

2011-06-26T11:05:57Z

Posted by: rokuta

No, they hadn't the time. The only time they had was time to get a move on.

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light/06

2011-06-13T19:12:45Z

Posted by: rokuta

But as Esenin turned the key, the prospect of a week off work began to weigh on him. There was nothing for it but to hole up in his little bedroom, steeling his thesis and stomach for another bout of getting sneezed on at MGU. To sleep and wake under the nymphs with some regularity. Or to call up Lyonka after all, so they could get a feel for the remaining grasses at Romanovo while Dunia was busy with the baby. The scene behind the pane now seemed sealed in, preserved for all mankind like a museum piece, The Last Day On Earth. The desks were strewn with the debris of the morning. Panteleev's had on it a glass of tea, mostly full and sweating condensation still, as if abandoned in the path of some calamity.

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conversation/01

2011-06-13T10:01:19Z

Posted by: rokuta

Arriving fresh-faced and ready to instruct at St Lucida, the young Gaspard Arneri found his junior fellowship mentored by Maestro Francis Kosteas. The otherwise soft-spoken Kosteas was locally infamous, foisted on newcomers for the bouts of indigestion which sparked his temper at random. These bouts rendered him metathetic, so that those on the business end of Kosteas’s readings-out felt the ungainly urge to laugh, cower, and correct him all at once.

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play

2011-04-26T07:04:40Z

Posted by: rokuta

Times it wasn't so easy going about tricking Raidou into having fun, because of how sharp he was. Not an easy nut to crack, either, the way he retreated into politeness when the going got casual. The second time around with the zashiki-warashi cases, which were a fine ploy from any angle, he just folded away his reward without saying a thing.

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a name like a noun

2011-04-22T09:58:56Z

Posted by: rokuta

Halfway through the night, someone tripped over him in the kitchen.

"What th," they said.

"I apologize for the intrusion," supplied Raidou instantly. In the same moment he was on his feet. He had slept in all of his effects but the Yumizuki cloak, which he had spread on the floor and in a motion replaced, his holsters, and his sword. The demons sensed movement and churned in their tubes, eager to find what manner of human was there, acting like he owned the place. The idea of kitchens pleased most of them very much.

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light/05

2011-04-21T19:21:00Z

Posted by: rokuta

He brought with him a satchelful of documents, none of which impressed the girl who fetched the transcripts. "I don't know what these are," she told him, and vanished. Esenin spent twenty minutes in wait for further signs of life, pacing the lounge and inspecting its posters with growing resentment. When the hands on his watch crossed into lunchtime, he gave up and went to make his case empty-handed.

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looks and brains

2011-04-17T21:04:41Z

Posted by: rokuta

"Well now," said Narumi. "This is a new one. You still you in there?"

Raidou shook himself from head to tail and said, "Ruff." With that he squeezed past the iron bars of the fence and vanished with a rustle in the topiary.

"I'll take that as a yes," said Narumi. "Right, Gouto-chan? Hey."

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light/04

2011-04-17T20:18:55Z

Posted by: rokuta

The black frames were repaired at both hinges. Esenin wiped the lenses, then worried if he shouldn't have. Thudding along the tunnel under Leninsky Prospect, he put the glasses in his breast pocket. As he arranged his coat again he could feel the jut of them against his chest, with nothing to cushion it but a reworn alcogolichka and a cotton shirt. It was too public a sensation for the Metro, as intrusive as open tears. Esenin's heart pumped like he was running. He pretended the glasses weren't there. When that didn't work, he pretended they were just a piece of clothing, only strange against his skin until his nerves dismissed them. Perhaps he had gotten away with it. He couldn't have gotten away with it. Perhaps, having noticed their absence, Panteleev was going to spring full-formed from the crowd pushing into the train. Esenin chuffed at the thought, but considering a moment longer moved the horn-rims back to their original location. That all this occupied him so much more than Pear's safety would strike home only later.

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light/03

2011-04-17T11:46:33Z

Posted by: rokuta

Lyonka himself had never minded losing by association, or at least had never seemed to. He was good because he was simple, and because he was simple he was a lost cause from the beginning. But even then Esenin had shared with him a sort of kinship born of struggle. Lyonka fared better, untroubled for being so low on the chain and so hopeless at schoolwork. When his classmates called him "Lyon-kol" after the post-like shape of the failing mark, Lyonka had to have the joke explained to him. He never stayed for workroom, and shredded his notes to cushion the saddle of a seven-string Ural, which he loved. He also loved Bylat Okudhzava, and had never been in a fight until he lost one just to keep Esenin company.

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light/02

2011-04-07T22:41:36Z

Posted by: rokuta

The tenements of Chapaevsky Passage had been built in 1934, the year of Esenin's conception, and as such still hearkened to a time before peepholes, when everyone was always surprised. Volunteering to answer the buzzer in 1957, their contemporary quickly became their latest victim. After a moment of staggering blankness he found himself clutching a sturdy doorknob. Then the leather cracked over his wits, to drive them boldly across a chasm between shutting the door and going for the horns.

"Nu, zdraste."

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light/01

2011-04-07T01:38:33Z

Posted by: rokuta

Vladimir Esenin recalls his old sofa, private behind the partition of a family bookcase, and falling asleep staring at the nymphs. Atop the bookcase there were three of them, all very nude, cast in plaster miniature to dance in a circle of interlocked arms. It was just the sort of dance nymphs would get up to: hands caressing, legs crossing legs. Their heads of half-caught hair were thrown back, such that each maiden seemed to cast her glance on the wall above. Just there, nailed up in the cramped span between nymphs and ceiling, hung an heirloom icon of the Nativity. Its shepherds echoed the nymphs with upturned faces, gazing at the Star of Bethlehem. The pathology of this spatial arrangement had always smacked of Esenin's mother, though she made no secret of hating the icon, claiming it triggered her memories of the air-raids.

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portrait/01

2010-07-02T10:20:09Z

Posted by: rokuta

When Nicolaes Vondel made known his intent to hire an assistant, all of Kleine Virrserijstraat should have gone abuzz with it. Painters should have gossiped like old women -- particularly the youngest de Bloot across the way, whose successes in procreation and investment balanced the blandness of his brush and let him think himself perceptive. But then it hardly took brains to know that invitations to Vondel's studio were normally reserved for his patrons: prim lawyers, modest industrialists, landless patricians upon sudden notions of frugality. And even they rarely accepted the privilege, hating to trip along the meat-market topping the Virrserijstraats (the Grosse tapered sausage-like to the Kleine) and preferring to send runners after their canvasses.

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mitch/01

2010-06-29T03:12:49Z

Posted by: rokuta

From the mixed-up home videos of Mrs. Lola H. Wilding: an artifact on VHS tape. The label establishes a period when Oskar, Mr. Wilding, still held dominion over the old Sony camcorder with its family biographies. His lettering is easy and masculine, the same hand that once marked Lola's essays on Chaucer and no doubt played some part in inspiring her to mark him back.

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