I had a few minutes on my birthday last month where I got to won-
dering what the old crowd was doing now. If I hadn't been laid up with the
flu later that week maybe I would have forgotten about it again; I don't
know. Nothing like spare time alone with a phone to keep curiosity smoul-
dering.

- Pillbox is Phillip again; he's a batting coach in Seattle. AA players dur-
ing the season, disadvantaged kids in the winter. He still sounds good on
the phone, which I guess you never really forget. No kids. The first thing
he asked was if I was planning a reunion. The last thing he asked was "Well,
would you think about it?" Okay, I'm thinking about it.

- Nanny runs new-word research for Merriam-Webster. Her people have to read
every magazine that comes out for recent lexicon items; she mostly manages
and applies that old bullshit filter to the results. I asked how her French
was, but she just brushed it off. She can't travel too much for fun, but I
promised to let her know if people were getting together near any of her
conference appearances in the near future.

- Near Future, natch, dropped off the network two years ago. I called in
some old favors--Colin, these people were NOT pleased to hear from me, and
I need to ask you about that--to find a messenger who said she could find
NF. Hiding from the big bad world? That's not what I expected from him.

- Ole Pole is the Shah, as near as I can tell from the people who answer
phones in her building. After half an hour of How dare you have the temer-
ity to even inquire (and so on) I gave up. Her company has no registered
trademarks, doesn't list in the Yellow Pages, etc. She must be busy.

- Hoffman has a (legitimate) scientific outfit that works in tandem with
the Australian government doing research in Antarctica. Half the time he's
supposedly out on the ice, he's actually importing blue movies to Singapore
and other places nearby. On the subject of getting together, he sent me
several promotional tapes and his regrets.

	But what about you, Colin? I hear you still have a lot of pull, so
here's my suggestion: take care of the phone calls that I shouldn't have
made and meet Phillip and I for coffee, and I won't ever ask after you
again. You'll have your halo as far as I'm concerned. How about it? Let me
know through the traditional channels.

Yours,
the Hon. Kathleen ("Cold") Schoder

written for Michael Davidson in my living room 10/28/01

I felt like I was in the middle of a slide here and wanted to end it. I didn't really succeed, but I did okay, I suppose. I'm trying to develop a set of conscious tools for approaching these one-hour stories (part of admitting that this is not the only way to write, nor even the only way for me to write); the first is knowing when to concentrate words and when to diffuse them. Here, I was tempted to put 'blue' (ice) and 'halo' (seen in the glare of sun on ice) together with 'arctic', but that wouldn't have left me with much.

Tone wobbles furiously, and the letter's recipient is introduced clumsily midway through. Otherwise, this isn't bad.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

<< back to more fast custom fiction<<