City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and union meetings are beseiged by ghost bicycles.
Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous.
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
Almost dissolved, a once-white cloud attenuated into strands of an oily iridescence barely differentiable from the placid water in which it motionless hangs above her submerged lap, brownly warm against the pink enamel of the tub. Sitting up so gently she barely disturbs the water, a ripple only slowly rolling out, sway as she lowers her head over what’s left of it, all that longly heavy hair slipping from out of the hand of the woman beside her to droop and coil in so many thin black tendrils caught between floating and sinking, and the woman beside her with a click of her tongue against her teeth downs the brush she’d been wielding in her other hand, “Majesty?” she says.
“Leave us.”
She gets to her feet, bent over as she does to reach for this and that piece of discarded clothing, “Dress, in the hall,” says the woman in the tub. “We would be alone.”
“Majesty,” she says, gathering up her skirt with her underwear, as well as the brush she’d set down, and with her ungainly bundle slips away out the door. When the latch clicks quietly home, Queen Annisa lifts up her head, and more of her long hair dipped in the water about her, her expression fiercely blank, her cheeks wetly sheened. Lurching back suddenly, legs folding hips slid forward to submerge herself with a mighty splash, and all her black hair flung to floatingly up through the water above and about her, dragged by its slowly soaking weight into sagging curtains to collapse around her, all that water wallowing slopping settling reluctantly above, and only when the surface has once more stilled, and not even a bubble rising to trouble its tranquility, only then do her eyes blink open, under all those tendrils stilling and curled.
She sits up, water crashing away, all that coiled and wanton hair of a sudden clung a sleekly slenderly wetly shining rope a-dangle down her dripping back as gathering her feet beneath her, gripping the rim of the tub, she steps herself out.
“I think he stuck the landing. This was good, damn good.”
“—over the top, long winded, unnecessary, grossly elaborate and just bloated beyond all proportion.”
“—if you like fantasy, and fancyness, swords and knights and long-winded sentences and a big vocabulary and really interesting characters with lots of character—”
