ABBA - "Tiger"

Amy gets a text message, she thinks about a response. She dons a tooth necklace, she sips a glass of wine, and reheats rice. "Your ninja lover. beware the wreckoning," she types back. She smirks in the mirror and runs her hands along the sides of her breasts. If she could, she would swing on vines across the city, like some real Tarzan Spider-Man shit. In her periphery she sees movement, a figure, dark. She spins her head around. Nothing. Just the table, the candle, a magazine. She puts on fingerless gloves, runs her tongue across her teeth, and slips on her shoes. She rides her slim bike up the street, into the dark streets, bent forward and silent. [Buy]

The Whiskers - "Ornithopters"

Slipped between the copies of "New Makon's Delight" and "Only For Today" is a hand-drawn picture of a landscape with an alien floating above the ground and an alien floating below the ground as well. The aliens look the same, they look like different attempts at the same drawing, and the ground is spare, with a couple trees and a distant farmhouse. Little blades of grass dot the line of the earth. The alien looks like he's put-putting with a little jetpack and wearing a spandex-y outfit that bulbs out at the joints. He's short with big eyes and a friendly smile. He looks like he came from a cereal box. It could be a doodle, they could just be separate drawings lumped together, but they form quite a little picture. It feels true that the aliens in the sky are the same as the ones in the earth. It feels right that the earth we tread upon is just the transition point, the surface of a mirror, that both worlds above and below are just as threatening, just as friendly, just as unknown. It feels right that when I fly over the top of my handlebars and scrape my face off on the road that another version of me is doing the same exact thing, in sympathy for me. [Pre-Order] (thanks Thom!)

(image is a cropped version of Falero's Departure of the Witches)