• A Map of Ashes and Gold
    The thing about fixing cars is that you learn about people faster than you learn about machines. A car will tell you exactly what is wrong if you listen to it—rattle means loose bracket, whine means worn bearing, miss means fouled plug. But people? People lie to you. They say everything is fine when their engine is about to blow. They tell you they have been maintaining it when they have not...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 41 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Ash and Gold
    Ash and Gold The piano in Tottenham Court Road station sounded like it had been through a war. It did— one of the brewery on Tottenham Court Road had been bombed in May, and someone had dragged the piano underground two weeks later, probably because it was the only piece of furniture that still worked and the war had made everyone sentimental about furniture that still worked. Tom...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 38 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Ash and Gold
    The logbook was empty on the last page. Captain Julian Whitfield knew this the way a man knows that a room is empty—not by looking, but by the silence that replaces the sound he expects. He had written 842 lines in the book, one for each mission, and the 843rd page was white. He held the pencil in his right hand, the one that had signed his orders and signed his letters and signed his name on a...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 39 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Ash and Gold
    Ash and Gold I. The sortie order had Tom Ashford's name on line 81. He stood in the hangar at 4:17 in the morning, the Lincolnshire fog pressing against the Lancaster's wings like a living thing, and read his name printed on the clipboard with the same detached curiosity he might have used to read a train schedule. Eighty-one. The eightieth mission for his squadron in as many days. The...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 42 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Ashes and Gold
    The hangover was not like other hangovers. It was not a headache or a nausea or the general sense that the world had tilted slightly off its axis and would not right itself for at least twelve hours. It was an epiphany. Izzy Mercer woke in her garret apartment above the Rue Lepic café with the clarity of someone who has just woken from a dream so vivid it felt like a life. And in a way, it had...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 59 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Black Gold
    The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the dirt slicker. I was sitting in my office on Sunset, the kind of office that looks professional if you don't look too closely — fake plants, a desk that had been refurbished three times, a framed copy of the Bill of Rights that I'd picked up at a garage sale for two dollars. The radio was playing Nat King Cole, and the neon...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 61 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Cotton and Gold
    Oak Creek, Mississippi, 1894 The heat in Oak Creek did not simply sit upon you—it pressed, heavy and wet as a damp cloth held over your face. Silas Whitaker stood on the platform of the Illinois Central depot and felt it immediately, the way the air clung to his Boston wool suit like an unwelcome guest. He had packed for the South assuming it would be warm. He had not understood that warm was a...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 50 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Fool's Gold
    Fool's Gold I. My name is Frank Maloney and I am a liar. This is not self-deprecation—it is a factual statement, the kind you'd find in a police report, which is to say the kind that is technically true and completely useless to anyone trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I met Patricia Regan at the Pan Pacific Nightclub on Wilshire Boulevard on a Tuesday in March 1947. She was...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 44 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Fool's Gold
    Fool's Gold I. My name is Frank Maloney and I am a liar. This is not self-deprecation—it is a factual statement, the kind you'd find in a police report, which is to say the kind that is technically true and completely useless to anyone trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I met Patricia Regan at the Pan Pacific Nightclub on Wilshire Boulevard on a Tuesday in March 1947. She was...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 45 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Gold Beneath the Clay
    Gold Beneath the Clay The Beauregard house had been dead for a long time before Thomas Beauregard the Fourth walked through its doors, but the dead do not always know they are dead. They sit in their parlors with the curtains drawn, they pour drinks that have gone warm in the glass, they speak in voices that carry the echo of conversations that ended decades ago. Thomas walked through those...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 34 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Gold Dust
    Gold Dust The gas station sat on Route 6 like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence nobody finished. Kelly Dawson had been working there since she was sixteen, which was six years ago, which was most of her life. She wore lipstick every day. It was the cheapest kind — a tube from the dollar store that smudged if you looked at it wrong and tasted like wax and regret. Kelly applied it in...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 80 Views 0 Anteprima
  • Gold Dust
    Gold Dust Frank Kovac stood in the desert and watched the sky turn the color of a bruise. It was Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday. He had stopped counting after the first month. All the days were the same: hot, dry, and full of men in uniforms who thought they were doing something important. He had come to the army at nineteen because the factory closed and his father couldn't find work and...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 56 Views 0 Anteprima
  • The Golden Mirage
    # The Golden Mirage\n\n> **E-OTMES v11 Tensor Code (39-dim)**\n> `O0=5|O1=4|O2=0|A0=4|A1=7|A2=3|U0=5|U1=2|U2=1|H0=3|H1=5|Q0=0|Q1=0|Z0=3|Z1=1|Z2=4|H1d=1|Q0d=1|A1d=0|Z3=2|Z4=3|Z5=0|Z6=3|Z7=5|A9=1|A10=1|Q9=5|H9=9|V9=1|G9=6|LR0=3|LR1=1|PT0=1|IC0=3|IO0=3|AR0=0|RP0=4|LV0=1|LV0i=3`\n> **OTMES-v1-DBFEBD-058-M0+M8-022-2R550-967A**\n\n---\n\nThe morning light fell on London like a blade. It sliced...
    0 Commenti 0 condivisioni 88 Views 0 Anteprima
Pagine in Evidenza