Jonathan from Kill Your TV recorded my reading at SXSW — it's a sixteen minute excerpt from chapter six of my forthcoming novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." I had fifteen minutes, but I went overtime. All told, it's an 6.1MB MP3 — the sound quality is amazing, considering that this was recorded with a camcorder's directional mic at an outdoor event.
I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bareskinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.
I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone's benefit.
But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.
(Thanks, Jonathan)
(Photo credit: Denise)
