symptomized speech

How could your disfigured tongue fail to anything but mangle conjugations. The language you inhale is pure, but when it leaves your lips it is tainted. That some prize it speaks only of their perversions. You cannot polish your rotting utterances into poetry. I study them as a doctor studies the ugliest of diseases, that its understanding may enable its banishment from the world.

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magnetostriction

Due to the filings embedded in his face, a nearby magnet gave his features a new form. Generally he could control it with a special pin in his collar, which he could activate or deactivate with a power source in his shirt pocket. He didn’t expect to have powerful fields imposed on him.

joy in health corroded

He would suck the life force from random strangers not for himself, but for his house. There was a transducer in the doorjamb which, when he touched his foot upon it, transferred the power into the building. The house wouldn’t let him in until he had given it enough. He tried just leaving people cold and weak, but still alive, and at first that was enough. But soon enough the house would collect what he had and still not let him in, until he went and got more.

ceramic punishment

What you call your ‘experiments’ on the red tide pervert the nature of the angel of January. Curl up while you can. No amount of coincidence will hold off the example we will make of you.

citizen of the same town

The artist projected microscopic slides of desiccated plant cells onto sheets of metal, and then etched the designs on them with acid. She was the main suspect until it was discovered a voyeur had been watching her for months.

marked expression

She refused to explain why she always cried as we passed the stone into which the cartoon was carved.

attribution

The poison was discovered all through the meat of the bull after it had been slaughtered for the festival. The breeder denied any knowledge of it, insisting that anyone could have fed the bull the poison, as there was easy access to it and it was known to lick treats brought to it. Although he was acquitted of attempted murder, he was convicted of blasphemy, since the problems of his bull had forced the cancellation of the festival.

epispastic print-through

They are surrounded by a wall, but the radiation produces a ghostly image in the rock. We can reconstruct a three-dimensional image from this, but don’t be surprised by how strange it looks. It represents a revolution of the thing: think of it as what you would see if you left a camera exposed and then turned the thing around. If you did that to your own face and head, it would look just as strange. I imagined the thing turning in there, feeding on who knew what, perhaps on itself. The walls that had holes in them appeared to have weakened from the inside, but nothing remained within. We were about to break open into a container that was still hot.

drooling shards

I asked him about the grinning beetle with irregular fangs on the packages in the grocery. He explained about the particular beetle, which was a local delicacy but they had a poison a protecting poison that was extremely corrosive to the teeth. It’s a bit of a home industry, actually, if you extract the poison you can use it as a cleaner a solvent a powerful solvent. So, I asked, anyone can breed these bugs? He frowned at bugs. Well, yes, but they are pretty territorial it’s hard to keep them very many of them in a small space. The next night he took me to a restaurant famous for its beetle dishes, and they cook it right in front of you so even if you get a dish that doesn’t look like a beetle you still will have seen it wriggling at the beginning of the whole process. The trouble started when the chef thought he recognized me as one of his old enemies.

load onboard

We had promised each other that we would only pull the lever when we had no other way out. While we were clearing the field of stones one of the younger boys pulled it with no one else there. Whether he was being devious or naive is still debated. We can’t ask him, since he was killed.