Cyberpunk

new world. It was hardly anything I’d mention to the crab, but I had an intuition his progeny might share his tropism for the human world, and be bereft without us. Perhaps this was my naive projection, an inability to fathom a universe without myself in it. But the crab himself had never known the sea, so far as I understood. He’d been born and raised in a landlocked state, in custody of a solidly middle-class, if not exactly loving, family.
    “Close the door,” the crab commanded. He scrabbled up the hump of grass, and back to his tile shelf. I wondered whether he ever even so much as dipped himself in the pool. It looked unsullied by any of the secretions I now detected in both dried and fresh traces on the tile and lawn. I followed back to the poolside, but didn’t retake my chair. I think we both sensed the interview was nearly at an end.
    “You get what you came for, Lehman?”
    “Far more, I’d have to say.”
    “Well, I’ve got one question for you.”
    “Certainly.”
    He paused, perhaps sinking into himself again for a moment. I couldn’t keep from thinking that the sight of the blank greenish tide of successors had made him every bit as melancholy as it had me. Before he spoke again he made another of his strange wheezy yawning sounds, and trickled his legs, including the amputated stump, along the tiles, quite softly. Each of his claws stirred, too, though they didn’t open.
    “I really caused you to think of Keaton or Newhart? Because I just don’t see it.”
    I was astonished it still mattered to him. “It was a stray thought, only intended as a compliment.”
    “Those figures are much milder than my character, at least after the first season. I always felt I was more in the line of a classic slow-burn specialist, someone like Edgar Kennedy or William Frawley or Beatrice Arthur.”
    “There’s validity in those comparisons,” I admitted. The fact that the crustacean could even supply these names made nonsense of his earlier claims not to have known Keaton’s films, and of his stiff refusal to consider tracing the lineage of influence behind his own work. But I was hardly keen to confront his inconsistencies.
    “Listen, nobody but you and me even remembers those names,” he said, hardening again, as if he’d allowed an instant of vanity to bare his defenses. “You need to get yourself a life that’s free of this kind of academic horseshit. If I can move forward without wallowing, it’s the least you can do.”
    Had he eschewed wallowing? It was another claim I didn’t care to refute. “I’m grateful for the advice.”
    “Mr. Boniface can call you a cab.”
    “That’s fine. I’ll wait in front.”
    “Lehman?”
    “Yes?”
    “One thing I ask. I don’t want you to lie about me, you understand? I don’t care what anyone thinks. Every word, every belch and fart, is on the goddamn record. You got this? Tell the truth about me.”
    I promised the crab I would try.

EL PEPENADOR

----
    By Benjamin Parzybok

    Pico sat on a child’s dirty dollhouse and drew from the end of a bottle of Marzo’s self-made sweetwine, which tasted a little of plastic residue and car oil and, like everything else, contained the fetid smell of the dump. The tin shed rattled and shook around him, hitting a harmonic and popping a nail from a tired hole at the roof’s edge.
    The rattling meant the trucks had arrived and the nackers would be gathering at the new spoils. He thought he could hear their hydraulic skittering over the din.
    Pico downed the last of the wine and stashed it deep in one of the dollhouse bedrooms. Then he grabbed his tharpoon and tool belt from the wall.
    Outside the shack, he whacked his chest once with his tharpoon shaft and said Aha! The pepenadores were gathered at the fringes of the settlement. He joined them, weaving slightly, making sure to keep a distance from his parents and whatever commentary they may have for him. Used to be, when the trucks came everybody sprinted for the new stuff. But since the nackers came, they were second-tier dumpdwellers now, and had to rely on old buried finds. Just trash themselves, looking for more trash to sell or use.
    At one end of the lineup he saw Mouse and he tried to move inconspicuously toward her, ignoring the names jeered at him as he went down the line; kekker, nackanigmo, pajero . He kept his head down as he passed. Mouse wore a cowboy hat and an orange mechanic’s jumpsuit with a missing arm. She liked to stand out, he