terga.

Honora entered in the middle of the story.
Now she gets to be the one who works everything out via an oversized narrative monologue.

Read:
The Mistress won’t be heard from for a while.
She’s off listening somewhere.

The Master is licking his wounds in the recovery ward.
Hedge helps him get the bandage fuzz off of his tongue. 

Liege still plays in his sandbox, bubbling and brandishing his ever-peaceful beam of a smile at the world.

Swivel hides in dark corners.
With The Mistress gone, his confidence has been reduced to ashy flakes.

Elsie & Enna thought they owned their new house.
They were incorrect; they’re still in escrow. 

The neighborhood needs a newspaper.

ata.

Skye is dancing.

Liege leads.

It works perfectly, despite his small stature.

The Mistress stares in open astonishment.

Skye hasn’t danced a step in almost five years.

Her waltz is flawless.

The diamonds on her character shoes glint in the studio light as they glance off The Master’s broken limbs.

Hairline fractures.

For now.

His hands clutch tufts of Hedge’s feathers. 

Neither are completely incapacitated as of yet; the applicable phrase is “in hot water.”

Skeeter’s been bound & gagged- he’s old news.

Swivel will be his cellmate. 

All characters accounted for, the dance whirls on.

Skye is has been will be

^ dances.

boira.

The Mistress doesn’t know what to do with her head.
M.P. doesn’t know what to do with her eyes.
Swivel doesn’t know what to do with his feet.
Skye doesn’t know what to do with her smile.
Grier doesn’t know what to do with his soul.
Coggs doesn’t know what to do with his cerebrum.
Skeeter doesn’t know what to do with his shoulders.
The Master doesn’t know what to do with his clouds.
Elsie doesn’t know what to do with her inclinations.
Enna doesn’t know what to do with her cells.
Mismatch doesn’t know what to do with her hands.
Sphinx doesn’t know what to do with her answers.
Liege doesn’t know what to do with his pulse.
Chimaera doesn’t know what to do with his research.
Hedge doesn’t know what to do with Its alterations.

Uncertainty is entirely underrated.
Uncertainty is entirely overrated.

tacito.

It rains.
Chimaera and Swivel were supposed to have a date with the basketball hoop today.
Mother Nature's suggested they have a gaming day instead.
They don’t protest.

Swivel tosses aside his controller and cracks open a new can of Red Bull.
Nectar of the gods, that stuff is. He’s sure of it.

“So, The Red Herring?”

Chimaera stretches out on the floor.

“Work is work.”

“I guess.”
Inaudible, the words ‘whatever floats your boat’ hover in the air nearby. 

Chimaera crunches the empty can.

Beat.

Beat.

“So, The Mistress?”

Beat.

“Yeah. I dunno.”

“She’s...”

What are the words?

Swivel knows.

“She is. It’s...”

Maybe there aren’t words.

Chimaera tries again.

“Are you...?”

Swivel shifts. 

“Another round?”

Chimaera studies him. 
A door has closed.

“Bring it.”

mahalle.

The neighborhood is playing Red Rover; the teams are obvious.

Hot dogs burn as alliances are formed on the asphalt battlefield.
The block party was Skye’s idea.
She chirped something about potential while everyone made a game of ignoring her.
They had eyes only for potato salad.

The teams are uneven by design.
Community politics demand it.
The Mistress and The Master aren't speaking; she and Swivel kind of have a thing, though no one understands why they insist on separation.

Halfway through the game, the new girls show up with brownies and hopeful smiles.
Elsie & Enna will make a nice addition to the Femmes.

“Who’s up one now, bitch?”

The Mistress always was competitive.

vakle.

There’s no bread left.
Swivel doesn’t know what to do with this information.
Action verbs are not his forte.

He counts the blades of the ceiling fan and thinks about The Mistress. 
They’ve been hanging out a lot lately, and-

She saunters in.

“There’s no bread.”

Damnit. Action verbs.

“I know.”

Silence.

“Were you planning on doing anything about it?”

He considers his options, and settles on honesty dipped lightly in essence of acerbity.

“I was getting there.”

She gives him a Look, walks over to the bookshelf, and pulls out Oxford’s. After briefly flipping through the rice-paper pages, she underlines something and hands it to him.

He reads: gerund (N)...

“Smart-ass.”