Levi Fleming
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leadpipe.bsky.social
Levi Fleming
@leadpipe.bsky.social
100 followers 360 following 300 posts
Levi Fleming has never told a lie. He is definitely an adult person and not two children in a trench coat. He sets his own bed time and no one tells him no when he wants to eat birthday cake for breakfast and he can buy all the toys he wants, mom.

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leadpipe.bsky.social
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It was not one of those places where people stay settled. The town had all sprung up rapidly when people found a purpose to being there, but that purpose evaporated and nothing further anchored any of the transient population, drifting out as easily as they had drifted in. Without them the town rotted away and crumbled. A ruin of what had been, like the beach of a dried up oxbow lake.
December 27, 2025 at 2:09 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Grass grew in the spaces between plates of crackling asphalt underneath them. Trucks parked in tight rows like a convoy come to a complete stop and abandoned. Around them a forest matured and covered them in canopy, green army paint fading and discoloring irregularly under uneven sunlight, like the leaves over them in autumn.
December 21, 2025 at 1:20 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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All the old armor pieces had been lined up outside the spaceport, long silent now, their canons pointing the same direction to threaten with artillery the dry nothing opposite beyond the city boundary. Under that half-arcade in the slotted shade the racers and their teams gathered, checking their machines for any previously unnoticed defects as though they could turn their wrenches against fate. The race was already won. She knew that much. It was this way and could be no other.
December 15, 2025 at 12:47 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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At midday the sky was dim and red and smelled stingingly of the ash mixed cloudcover carrying high above the snowfallen landscape. Headlights and porchlights cut what they could from the gloom of the ruby-colored world, little pools of sanity in the wash of distant heatless anger.
December 11, 2025 at 12:41 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Turned-over earth smelled of iron and blooming dank and things rotten on the open air. A still and windless morning held it there like hands pressed to a wound to staunch the flow of blood. What was uncovered should have remained there, on the other side of the skin of the world. Only harm would come from cutting into it
December 8, 2025 at 2:27 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Above the grassed-over mud roads, old boards clapped dryly in the cold wind and the glassless windows within them warped, piping their thin howls. Together they were as an invisible audience applauding the spectacle of so much absence around them.
November 23, 2025 at 2:10 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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While the giant slept, the air rumbled and gusted and a slow torrent of drool ran over the rough fibers of his pillow and flooded the stone floor. Sound, if not quiet. Even if the noise of his resting had allowed it, there was no time for repose among the other denizens of his cave. They came out from the small places, the back depths of the cave and the crevices along the floor, teams of people to try their luck harvesting the giant’s body while he slept. They carved steaks from his skin, deep and thick at the callouses and thinner without so as not to wake him with their knives. Hardy men with axes felled the hair of his body for lumber. The truly brave scaled his face to bottle the tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. Any piece of the giant that could be carried off or removed without waking him had craftsmen devoted to it.
November 20, 2025 at 3:15 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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The last thing my mother said to me, she said in the old words, the ones she grew up speaking but never taught me except a few phrases. “Don’t come to my house with empty hands,” she’d said in the language she’d kept me from. Then she walked out the door, went home, and died. Even though I didn’t know how the words worked, I understood the rebuke. You don’t show up to someone’s home without bringing something to lighten the load. It was a shame to both the visitor and the visited. You don’t place the burden of your presence on someone without compensating and on the other hand you don’t encourage freeloading. If you show up without some small token, it doesn’t have to be extravagant or luxurious, some flour or rice was usually enough, you’d better be intending to do some work in exchange
November 16, 2025 at 2:48 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Down on the street the éboueurs in dayglo green busied themselves driving broom carts, sweeping up the remnant detritus of the previous night’s festivities. Glitter and confetti. What had been last night symbols of celebration were now just trash, pushed along and disposed of along with the garbage and vomit it had fallen among. Nobody watched them work, except Le Chevre. All were still sleeping. Even the vagrants and lost revelers sleeping on whatever flat surfaces they could find did not watch the work being done. They didn’t want to witness the world returning to itself. It was only for those few workmen to see the transition. Appointed by the hiring bureaucracy, like executioners for the colony’s joy.
November 13, 2025 at 1:08 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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It was old, but the car’s interior was immaculate. Clean and unblemished, seat covers and consoles smooth and perfect, dashboard instrument panel glass unscratched and unfogged. It was as though just off the lot, unmarked by the few test drivers who’d chanced it. It was hands of care, not benign neglect that had held it these decades, gently scouring all dust from corners and bevels, treating and repairing any crack in the upholstery. Anywhere entropy intruded, the caretaker was there to beat it back. He kept a notebook marking the date of each maintenance task and any particulars about it and logged each mile driven, satisfied that the number was never very high, while his children walked or biked until they were old enough to beg rides from their friends.
November 9, 2025 at 12:00 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Spindly legs topped with knobby knees found company with the fishing pole, rising above his slouching head while he dozed under his hat and reclining in the arms of the buoy's pylon, rocking silently many years since the bell’s hinge rusted and it made its escape into the waters below. Only the canoe’s hollow body could have made a sound, but he’d diligently moored it tightly to the pylon so they moved as one body. Exerting himself expertly so that he could enjoy the combination of work and rest until some fish chanced the bait on his hook.
November 1, 2025 at 12:12 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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He didn’t know what it said. The Screen overlay in his mirror displayed a message in small text and he blinked and squinted and rubbed his eyes as though to clear something on them, not in them, that was failing him. As a younger man he’d once parked his car in the only vacant spot in the far end of a gas station parking lot, some fifty yards from the counter where he went to renew his tabs. The clerk had asked him what his license plate number was and he stumbled for a moment, not remembering, before he looked out over that distance and simply read it. He’d been proud of that moment. And now age had taken that from him. Humiliated and fumbling over a line of text less than two feet from his face.
October 28, 2025 at 2:14 AM
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Voices of footfalls returned to him in the empty round room. People had been here, left scattered osseate remains of their feeding, picked over and abandoned again by vermin, crumbling stools dried and robbed of the threat of their scent now turning to soil. The walls and ceiling still held back the outside what the door and the corridor had not, both stripped of anything that could be carried or burnt, leaving bare the concrete bones of the structure, inscrutable scenes etched into their surfaces by what had been removed.
October 25, 2025 at 2:34 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Her lance bobbled in the saddle pocket with every step the horse took. The few clouds in the sky traced out their inscrutable shadow plays on the canvas of scrub brush and naked red earth. Apart from that nothing moved on the plain. Open air and countless paces between them. Her and him. But tethered. She would follow the marks he made on the land until she found him again.
October 21, 2025 at 1:34 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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His brow furrowed deep into the bridge of his nose and he stood walleyed as though his focus was dividing his vision. “I thought you said your name was Peggy,” he said. “It is,” she said. “Then why’d she call you Margaret, then?” “Peggy is short for Margaret.” He turned his face away as the dim calculus happening in his head could not bear to witness the object of its study. He knew at once two things: that he had been told about the alchemy of that particular nickname before and had once understood it, and that this was no longer so. His insides cooked with embarrassment while he searched for the remnant trail that would lead him back to understanding, but could not find it. Instead he spit.
October 17, 2025 at 11:45 PM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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She swayed with the motion of the train car, the fabric of her skirt finding little purchase on the aluminum poles that had replaced the actual seats while her shoes planted firmly in the rubber mat that designated the poles for use by the disabled or recent mothers. Above her the car's light flickered as it swung loose in its housing, performing a dance of lost contact restlessly swinging in its housing. Under the fuzz of her jacket pocket, her phone vibrated. It was her son, at home. He complained of being tired. Then go to bed, she said, but he whined and argued until he fell asleep and dropped the phone on his end. She ended the call and slipped the phone enviously back into her jacket pocket.
October 13, 2025 at 12:01 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Summer heat boiled all day. When twilight came, it hung still in the air like a dumbfounded anger with no outlet and in it hungry insects fed and flew in their idiosyncratic patterns, loops and darts and hovers among the tops of the heavy grasses. A pond was there, somewhere among the bent stalks, and bloomed its algaeic perfume into the air. The boy sat on a log and looked over the business of bugs as though he could name any of them or count them or numerate the stars.
October 10, 2025 at 2:13 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Tires on salt wet blacktop screamed static from the highways that carried in the thin high mist of the dim muted winter morning. Sidewalks had been dutifully cleared of the night’s white dust, leaving behind a mosaic glaze of crunching ice underfoot. Cars passed, headlights on against the diffused daylight, sticky slurry in the road made of reluctant ice melt. ‘That’s the last of it,’ Gene said. He slammed closed the rolling shutter door on the back of the truck and secured the latch. ‘Should last the rest of the year.’
October 7, 2025 at 2:20 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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When it was over the ground lay all around in slanted and misaligned plates like a pile of shatterings early in a mosacist’s process. Trees held fidelity to their roots and tilted in erratic lines, no longer oriented to the sky, brushing branches and leaves against newly exposed boulders and soil.
September 29, 2025 at 1:47 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Nothing moved. Windows smashed and doors stove in, shelves knocked slanted and emptied of the bottles and boxes of merchandise sprawled on the laminate floor like a search party hunting some lost contact lens, lights out and hanging from their overhead fixtures and disappearing in the gathering black at the back of of the shop where daylight could not reach. Nothing moved and yet it felt like a threat. The night had been eventful, but had passed, and in the weak morning she craned her neck from outside the puddle of shattered glass at the foot of the door to see if there was any chance that the pharmacy, vacant and unstaffed back along the darkest wall, still held her prescription ready.
September 26, 2025 at 1:49 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Bare dry soil lay on either side of the tracks where the thin grasses and lichens were not bold enough to venture. A thin grey sun limped through the cirrus cover without the verve to disturb the stillness while birds sang shrill and quiet songs, hidden among green needles. The scream of steel against steel keened through the cold air. The quiet birds fell silent at its herald. Its rhythmic trample communicated down the lengths of track and the ground trembled. Scarves of dirt rose from their barren beds among the stays and swirled in the stagnant unheated air.
September 23, 2025 at 3:19 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
I had thought that this was an exaggeration of the sort of 1960s attitudes about race you might find in an episode of Johnny Quest.

Nope, it's a direct quote:
September 21, 2025 at 12:11 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
Toby Danger played all that nonsense with some exaggeration for comedic effect. They live in a compound on some kind of island cum aircraft, fly proto-segway slabs of sidewalk, and have to defeat the world's largest semiconductor run amok.

There's also this line:
September 21, 2025 at 12:11 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Nothing moved. Windows smashed and doors stove in, shelves knocked slanted and emptied of the bottles and boxes of merchandise sprawled on the laminate floor like a search party hunting some lost contact lens, lights out and hanging from their overhead fixtures and disappearing in the gathering black at the back of of the shop where daylight could not reach. Nothing moved and yet it felt like a threat. The night had been eventful, but had passed, and in the weak morning she craned her neck from outside the puddle of shattered glass at the foot of the door to see if there was any chance that the pharmacy, vacant and unstaffed back along the darkest wall, still held her prescription ready.
September 16, 2025 at 2:42 AM
leadpipe.bsky.social
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Against the black overcast sky the tops of buildings disappeared on the benighted street, glowing from below where merchants' lanterns and fires burned dimly while they barked their wares to passersby. Bits of cloth or metal or now-impotent silicon boards, relics of the dead world, as if by possessing a piece of the road that brought them here one might find a way out. Above, the buildings left their shadows as dim blotches against the low, brightly colored sky, except for where the panelling failed and fell, leaving a clear view of the firmament’s scaffold and a glimpse into the empty black beyond. It was a good world he’d built. He’d sold it by saying as much. Good and safe. He didn’t care to know if it was true, just that saying so helped him sell it and everything in it. People crowded the streets and the shops and chattered about the latest new thing he’d turned them on to, even as they stepped around his corpse on the ground, pinned by the falling bit of sky.
September 13, 2025 at 2:00 AM