101118 Her code name is hazel. they laugh about that kind of stuff all the time. “Forget sad things,” code name George will say to her, and they will have a good laugh. She doesnt like fiction that sounds like fiction but even more she doesn’t like being lied to. what is that smell in the kithcen? the kitchen smells bad again. has somebody died in there? again? it was surely only a mouse. squares her shoulders and walks through, head held high aginst the nausea. we must hasve some sort of pride and dignity, or else what’s even the point? how do you make fiction not sound like fiction? why would you want to do thast? thast. fuck you apple. she has to go to a meeting today. the meeting is with other rebels and revolutionaries. they’ve gone ahead and started calling each other that. it’s easier than trying to think of increasingly clever and more supple ways to not come right out and say that. it’s that they weren’t too sure at first. no one wanted to call themselves that because how could you? sitting at a table by the play-place at mcdonalds so the kids could play, having a furtive meeting over mcnuggets and sock-water coffee. and yet, every time their eyes met, they knew something was changing. something had to change. even the verb tenses have changed. hahah you’re funny, she says to a man sitting across from her. the kids are at their dads and so it’s ok for them not to be at mcdonalds. it’s ok for them to be at Larva Jarvis, the old coffee house on the west edge of the cool part of town. ovedr by the river that snakes through the valley that this city grew up all over like flies on a rotting mouse. the man is obviously pleased to have been called funny but he can’t think of anything else funny to say right now. that’s ok, she says to herself. she’s all about forgiveness. at least for some things. not when it comes to the revolution. there. she said it. it sends a thrill from her toes to her pussy, which the thrill then swirls around and passes on up her gullet backwards and spits out her mouth in another laugh. she would sound like an idiot repeating “you’re funny,” so she looks down at her coffe with half a smile and stirs it, even though it’s black coffee and there’s nothing to stir about it. there is an awkward silence. the trouble with being a revolutionary in this age is, you don’t always know what you’re being a revolutionary about. they got it all so locked up in terms of intelligence, artificial intelligence, automatice artificial judgment, vertiginous capitalistic hyperintelligence on the part of the slaveowners, verified intellgient dumbbelss, cameras in the corners of your eyes, songs that sound EXACTLY like songs you knew when you were a kid but are just not QUITE exactly the same and you can’t QUITE tell why. laundromats that know when your clothes are dirty and can come get you out of bed wait, where was she? she looks up. the man is gone. there never was a man. she stirs her coffee and the cream swirls into it like a sweet sweet galaxy. she wishes she could live in that galaxy. life would be so easy there. not like here. where we got augmented reality and it’s been augmented so much, it’s been raised up so much, it’s at such a higher pitch of intensity and efficiency, you never know exactly what you’re-- but there was some reason she had come here, right? oh yeah. fiction. She looks down at the table. there’s a magazine open beside her coffee cup. on the page seems to be some kind of story. it’s a stack of text, anyway, that usually means some kind of story. she’s lost the thread. she must have had to go to the bathroom or something, and maybe the wind turned the page. or maybe--she looks around, surreptitiously susopicious-- maybe on eof those kids at that table over there did it. they look like entitled little douche bags. they look like the kind of kids who would be willing to throw food in a public place. be too big in a little chair. talk too loud about dumb stuff, thinking they’re the center of the fucking universe. she wondered if her own kids had grown up like that. but there’s something about thinking that that she doesn’t like, and so she stops. what is it she doesn’t like about it? her features draw inward in a kind of quiescent pain. oh yeah--sounds too much like fiction. returns her gaze to the magazine. it seems to be a story about someone who does something he’s not supposed to. now that’s strange. why would she have been reading that? she looks around again. real quick like you have to. you know. One of the kids at that table over there gets up, pushing his chair back so fast it falls over and makes a tremendous clatter, causing everyone else in the place not to do anything at all but pretend nothing was happening. he makes some kind of big proclamation, and his friends laugh too loud. where are there parents? Why do people let their kids behave like this in public these days? Don’t they have any basic sense of decency? she sips her coffee and makes a tiny polite slurping noise and sets the cup down again, clink clink. the ceiling fan continues its revolutions. That word--that word reminds her of something. Some kind of weird gathering, french fries for some reason, and little kids, her little kids even, in sock feet, and a whole group of people eager about something, laughing about something dangerous, but it’s all kind of mixed up in her mind, and so she lets it go. Can’t spend all day being weird and daydreaming about something, anyway, can you? No, you can’t.