City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and river gods retire to comfortably shabby apartments.
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.
Up with a hoarse shout thrashing, leaning forward, knees tenting the quilt arms about them and a slow deep breath hauled in, let out.
“That was a darn good burger, though. Wasn’t it.”
He lifts his head. The darkness about, thickly complete, nonetheless somehow suggests a shadow, small, sat at the foot of the bed.
“Last one I ever ate,” he says, and opens his eyes, head laid back against the one white pillow, blinking his way into the thin grey light of a morning much too early.
Cages sway, chains creak, a scatter of seedfall, feather-rustle and weight-shift clenching step, hunched shadows hulking in the sweeping light of the phone he holds up in one hand, brushing this one, that one, lingering over an empty cage a moment before finding a third, there, in the next to last row. One of the closer shadows leans precipitously and with a pinion-rattling shudder unclamps from about a wooden dowel those talons sharp-limned when they’re caught in the light, cruelly flexing, two above, two below, curled in a shivering fist, and there’s a winking gleam of brass, just there, but the light’s moved on, he’s turned away, ducking out through the door at the end of the porch.
There, under the flight of stairs bolted to the back of the old brick building, a couple of plain cardboard boxes stacked one atop the other, and he hurls up his hands to see them, tips up and back his head, cheekbones hunched to squeeze his eyes in a grimace of anguished frustration. The morning held at bay by watery air too wetly glistening heavy to be considered a fog or a mist but hung about so still, not falling, not even drifting, not a drizzle at all, and the soaked cuffs of his workpants flop about his ankles as he steps up under the stairs to seize the topmost box.
“Just a glorious bit of writing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
“It’s what urban fantasy might be now, if it’d gone in different directions.”
