Small Beer Press
www.lcrw.net

Copyright ©2003 by Small Beer Press

First published in 2003, 2003

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

CONTENTS

Kukla Boogie Moon

Lunar Fate

The Changeling

The Faith of Metal in Ghosts

Home and Security

The Greebles

Dear Aunt Gwenda: Advice from a Better Time & Place

The Poor Man's Wife

Rowboats, Sacks of Gold

White Rabbit Triptych

Salesman

Legacy

Serpents

A Last Taste of Sweetness

Pinned

Sidhe Tigers

The Guest Film Column

The Magnificent Dachshund

Mama's Special Rice Tin

The Meat and the Mushrooms

Contributors

* * * *

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet no.13

Gavin J. Grant,

Cake is love.

Kelly Link,

Cake is cake.

Diane Kelly &

Vanessa Scott,

Interns is interns.

* * * *

Gentler readers beware the final story.

* * * *

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, No.13 November 2003. ISSN 1544-7782 Text in Bodoni Book. Titles in Imprint MT Shadow. Since 1996 LCRW has usually appeared twice a year. As of 2004, there will be three issues per year: April, July, & November. LCRW springs forth from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net/lcrw $4 per single issue or $16/4. Except, as the sharp-eyed observer may have noticed, this issue is $5. This is an experiment (look at that art! look at that binding!) and may or may not be a good idea.

Contents (C) the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c. should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. If there were torpedoes, we'd have to build a dam. As it is, how about a new ship of state?

* * * *

The Ichthyomancer Writes His Friend With an Account of the Yeti's Birthday Party

David J. Schwartz

* * * *

Xaya:

You no doubt recall (or perhaps you don't; it's been quite a while) that last Thursday was the Yeti's birthday. I wanted to tell you about the surprise party we threw for him. We were sorry you couldn't be there, but obviously that would have been impossible. If it makes you feel any better, there were quite a few people there whom I don't believe you've met.

The guest list was too large to have the party at our apartment—the fish are upset by crowds. So we looked for a restaurant. We had to call around a little bit to find a place with a vegetarian option, since the Yeti doesn't eat meat, but we settled on a little Thai place downtown. Maggie and I had eaten there a few times, since it's not far from our place, and we've always enjoyed it. The rama Thai is excellent.

Maggie and I arrived early and had a drink in the bar. Maggie wore a turtleneck and a short skirt with high boots and nylons. She looked incredible, as you can imagine. For myself, I wore a long-sleeved shirt, charcoal-colored, with some green pants. The fish call them our Quiet Party Clothes, which is their snide way of insinuating that we're predictable. The Black Mollies have an entire spectrum worked out: our Social Obligation clothes are dark and conservative, while our Loud Party Clothes are brighter and don't need to be dry-cleaned.

When we got to the table Todd and Mictecacihuatl were already there. Todd is a lawyer; right now he's representing the dolphins in their lawsuit against Miami. Mictecacihuatl is a god of the underworld, which is nice work if you can get it. Mictecacihuatl was overdressed, as usual, in a black tuxedo. One of the gods he works with, Ixpuztec, told me once that Mictecacihuatl bought the tux for a wedding that never happened, but it doesn't seem like the sort of thing you ask about.

Maggie told a few lawyer jokes. Todd's a good sport about them, but she had to stop after a while because Mictecacihuatl has false teeth, and his rather wild laughter kept knocking them loose. I suppose that working where he does you learn to appreciate a good joke, or even a rather formulaic and predictable one.

It wasn't long before more people arrived. Max and Earl, the conjoined twins, came in with their seeing-eye dog Bathsheba. Max and Earl aren't blind, but when Bathsheba retired she sort of lost her direction, and one day a couple of years ago we found her begging door-to-door for bowls of Beaujolais. She says she doesn't have a problem, but she's certainly happier since Max and Earl adopted her.

Sergeant Rust was there—stunning in a sleeveless red dress—with her new husband Arvid, the arachnid taxidermist. The Flying Cardellini Sisters were there, and I got a dirty look from Maggie when I waved to Phyllis, the middle sister. Maggie knows I dated Phyllis before we met, and she's terribly insecure about the sex, although she won't ask about it. The truth is that Phyllis was very conservative sexually, and the trapeze above her bed was strictly for practicing in her sleep.

The Zulus came, although they spent most of the time talking on their cell phones, which I thought was rather rude. Dr. Wise was particularly irked by this, as he has a script he's been working on about the female pharaoh Hatshepsut which he's determined to see Johnny Depp star in. But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, instead of pitching his script he spent the entire evening listening to Lawrence—the mastodon, not the fire elemental—complain about his dating troubles.

(Between you and me, I think poor Lawrence's problem isn't the depth of the dating pool but rather his dislike of children. Female mastodons these days are rather militant about breeding, which is why the males tend to go into engineering or medicine or other financially stable professions. By the way, Lawrence was telling me that he thought he'd seen you on some satellite photos—he works for Rand-McNally now, you know. I told him I didn't think you'd be recognizable by now, but he seemed pretty certain.)

It was a big group, and eventually we had to ask the waitress if we could add another table. She was very gracious about it, I think because the Monkey King was especially charming that night, and likely could have talked her into coming home with him if she hadn't been happily married, as she told us several times.

Before long everyone was there, from Coventry Rose to Hector Elizondo. Yes, that Hector Elizondo; apparently the Yeti met him while they were both on a ski vacation in Banff. It's amazing, the facility the Yeti has for making friends, but then you know that better than anyone.

Evelyn was supposed to bring the Yeti by at seven-thirty, but she had called Maggie at ten minutes to eight to let her know they were going to be a bit late. So we talked. Joan—the macaw, not the dominatrix—told a story about a jaguar and a giant otter that made Mictecacihuatl spit up his drink all over Ling Ling, who was very calm about it considering how difficult red wine is to get out of fur. Maria Cardellini told a story about a bearded lady and a thin man that seemed to rather embarrass Lawrence. And we all talked about the weather, which was so unusually warm for the Midwest in February.

Still the Yeti didn't arrive. I was enjoying myself, but I must admit that every time I checked my watch I got more worried. I'm a worrier, Maggie tells me, and you will probably agree. I knew the Yeti could take care of himself, and Evelyn was a very safe driver. She was probably trying to hurry him along as much as possible without making him suspicious.

Mpande spotted them first, and hung up his cell phone in time to cue us all to shout “Surprise!” I'm afraid we startled a busboy, who stumbled and would have dropped an entire tray of glasses if Lawrence hadn't steadied it with his trunk. In the confusion I missed the Yeti's reaction, but he was all smiles as he circled the table, shaking hands and kissing the ladies. I have never seen the Yeti miss a chance to kiss a woman, and yet I've never seen a woman resist him either. I suppose it's the teddy-bear look that makes him seem harmless.

There were presents, of course. Dr. Wise gave the Yeti a first printing of Walden, which quite moved the Yeti and left the rest of us feeling our gifts were inadequate. The Zulus gave a set of ivory combs and brushes, and were careful to mention that the ivory came from elephants who had died of old age. The Yeti thanked them and ruffled up his fur to try out the brushes, which produced a roar of laughter and a few sparks of static electricity. Maggie and I gave him a pair of snowshoes—with a smaller set for Evelyn—since he had told us he was going back to visit the Himalayas in March. He thanked us and said they'd come in useful for outrunning photographers.

The food came soon after we ordered; I think perhaps the management was trying to rush us out. If so, it didn't work, since everyone spent as much time talking as they did devouring their Pad Thai and spring rolls. Sergeant Rust and the Monkey King swapped war stories, while Dr. Wise tried to interest Hector Elizondo in the part of Tuthmosis II.

At one point Maggie leaned close and asked me why we didn't do things like this more often, and I shrugged. In my experience things like this happened when they were good and ready, when schedules opened up and everyone was in town. (Everyone except yourself, of course. Which reminds me, Maggie says we should try to visit in June, after she's turned in her grades for the spring semester. Let us know if that's a problem.)

Of course, it didn't all go smoothly. Baron Samedi said something which mortally offended Coventry Rose. I never did find out what was said, but when Lawrence—the fire elemental, not the mastodon—confronted him about it, he was convinced that we were all siding against him. Despite our protests, he threw a pair of twenties on the table for the bill, tipped his top hat, and vanished in a puff of black smoke. You can imagine the stir that caused among the other diners, especially considering that we were in a non-smoking section.

The Baron's dramatics notwithstanding, it was a wonderful dinner, and I was sorry when the group started to break up. Max and Earl excused themselves before dessert on the grounds that Bathsheba was rather drunk, and the three of them went weaving out. Sergeant Rust and Arvid left soon after in order to get their babysitter home at a decent hour. The Zulus had a flight to catch, and they swept out in a flurry of embraces, pursued by Dr. Wise, who was still trying to get a phone number from one of them.

Soon only Maggie, Evelyn, the Yeti and myself were left. We sipped our cordials (all except the Yeti, who has quit drinking and was content with a Thai iced tea—did I tell you about the unpleasantness at Geb's barbecue last summer? I can't recall) and talked quietly of the old days. It seems such a long time ago that we were students, and yet it seems like yesterday. I do miss those days, although I never dated and wouldn't have had money to go anywhere if I had. Maggie says the pictures from then don't look like me, although the Yeti of course hasn't changed. (Maggie says you look adorable, although I've tried to explain about your size. I also tried to explain that “adorable” was probably not the right word for the master of the mountains, but that's Maggie. I'm curious to see her reaction when that two of you finally meet, since I've come to suspect she's immune to surprise.)

Of course, once we began sorting through the checks and cash on the table we realized someone had shorted us. Maggie engaged in some rude speculation as to whom it had been, but in the end I simply threw two hundred onto the pile to make it worth the waitress's time. The Yeti asked Evelyn for his wallet, but we wouldn't let him pay. Business is good, and if I can't afford to treat my friends then the money doesn't mean a thing.

We left then, making plans to see Evelyn and the Yeti again before they left for Nepal. They're truly happy together, and it's a wonderful thing to see. Evelyn used to be so moody. Remember the way her tail would droop when she felt self-conscious, which was nearly all the time? And the Yeti—I must admit that I used to think the Yeti was rather superficial, and any woman could make him happy. But Evelyn has illuminated new depths within our hirsute friend. They make a wonderful couple, and they both send their regards.

As we walked back to the apartment, Maggie asked me if I thought Dr. Wise would ever get his movie made, and I told her we should ask the fish when we got home. And do you know what they said? The Zulus had already been in touch with Johnny Depp's agent, and he was eager to see a script.

We're sending some cookies along with this letter; Maggie's idea, which I didn't have the energy to argue against. I'm fairly certain they'll be shaken to crumbs in transit. I'm not even sure you still eat—how is the transformation progressing?

Let us know about June. I know there's been some distance between us since you moved back home, but I want to spend some time with you before you go back to sleep for another thousand years. The fish say we will see each other again. I hope they're right.

Take care,

Allan

* * * *

Kukla Boogie Moon

Eliot Fintushel

The telephone rang at sunup. I groped my way to a phone just in time to hear my boy, Apollo, pick up in the next room. The caller started right in to talking, and I listened while the fog in my larynx burned off.

"This is Gabe Tyvil, Silas's father. I will be there in exactly three minutes, and I want Silas to be at the door. At the door. I have heard what Mr. Jack Earl is burying in his yard, by the way. I suppose there is nothing a decent person can do about it, but I will not have anyone of my household exposed to such a perfidious person or to his tainted and perfidious children. Three minutes. Repent. The clock is running."

Apollo said, “Have you tried the new flavor of Kukla Boogie, Mr. Tyvil?"

Click.

Through the wall:

"At least I'll make fifty cents off the stinker when the Kukla man scans my implant."

I hung up on dead air. I have to say, I thought it was interesting that the Tyvils had waited till morning to call. They must have been secretly glad to have us handling Silas for the night. That's how it is with some of those darn Muddites, is my view—I mean, with the Modern Luddites, to be nice about it. They can't keep up with their own principles—too many and too hard. For pity's sake, they're even against the Kukla Boogie Moon.

"Boogie man!” Gabe had barely hung up when the meter man rang at our door. “Kukla man! Boogie boogie boogie man. Kukla Boogie man."

"Coming!” I trotted down to let him scan my implant, but I guessed I'd let Jack and Apollo wait and be scanned at some more civilized hour. I opened the front door and pulled up my sleeve.

"Morning, Mrs. Earl. Nice day for a Kuke, isn't it?” He was a pot-bellied old tout, just a little bit silly in the striped pullover with that bottle-cap hat.

"Will be, when it's daytime,” I huffed. “Sorry. I'm not awake."

"I don't mind, as long as I get my fifty cents for saying it. Want to know your account stats?"

"Not just now, thanks."

He holstered his scanner. “See you next time."

* * * *

Where was Jack during all this ruckus, you want to know? In bed, that's where, where a person ought to be so early in the day. He was dead tired from the hauling and digging he'd been doing, poor man. But I heard the sweetheart sing in his sleep. It was that old song . . .

* * * *

I believe in Kukla Boogie Moon.

It won't fade soon—

That's like our love.

* * * *

I believe in passion, pep, and power,

Boogie by the hour—

That's like our love.

* * * *

I snuggled in, my lips close to his ear and sang the next part:

* * * *

I used to wander, wan and clueless,

Without a boogie to my name.

My sky was boogieless and blueless.

No Kukla Boogie sunshine . . .

* * * *

Sure enough, Jack supplied the next line: “No Kukla Boogie rain.” We crooned and snuggled under the comforter . . .

* * * *

I believe in Kukla Boogie Moon

From Perth to Cameroon—

That's like our love.

* * * *

I knew he was completely awake now, because the next verse was pure Jack:

* * * *

I believe in doing God one better

Making water wetter—

That's like our love . . .

* * * *

Then the doorbell rang for the second time that day. And the third. And the fourth.

"I'd better go get it,” I said. “That'll be Gabe Tyvil to pick up Silas."

"Darn Muddites.” Jack pulled a face. He looked just like our Apollo whenever he did that, pinching those Valentine lips and squinting his baby blues to little sequins. Needed a shave, though. Always needed a shave, my Jack.

"Modern Luddites is what they like to be called, Jack, and you know it. They have their lights, dear."

"I didn't tell you what happened yesterday."

"The door . . ."

"Oh, let him wait. Those darn Muddites got wind of my contract for the Kukla Boogie sludge, and they were out picketing at KB Corporate in Tonawanda, stopping traffic, the louts. I couldn't make my pickup—I hope Gabe busts his finger on the doorbell.” Throwing off the covers: “Get me a warm Kuke out of the closet, would you, honey? Get my motor going. Might as well hit the sludge, long's I'm up."

"Sure thing, sweetums."

Jack liked to keep some in the closet. Kuke is good for all occasions, you know, and it's good to have some near at hand in every part of the house.

"Atavistic bastards."

"Now, Jack, Silas's parents love him in their way."

"Sure, sure. Say, what do they think poor Silas is guilty of this time?"

"Self abuse. They consider it killing the unconceived."

"Dear God, if any, please just let me get through this day with my sanity. Hey—they haven't been messing around near the sheds?"

"Not that I know of—"

"Don't let them near the sheds. Don't let the kids go in there either. If Silas got in there and then his folks found out . . ."

"I do wish you'd find another place for that teleport sludge."

"It's only temporary, Helen."

"That's what you said last month. Here's your Kuke—"

"—Don't say it."

"Why not?"

"Let's wait until the kids get up, so we can make a little extra off their hearing the jingle."

"You're absolutely right. My heart and brains!"

"I love you, Helen."

"Right back at you! How's the Kuke?"

"Yummilicious!"

Gabe stopped ringing and commenced to hammer. I ran downstairs to the front door before realizing that he was at the back door, and then, when I opened the back door, I discovered that the reason he was hammering so loudly was that he was really they. Gabe and Sarah Tyvil, the both of them, were standing on the back porch with their four fists clenched and their four eyes blazing and their twenty toes dug in and their two faces just as white as a couple of snow drifts before the dogs hit. They said two words. They said it in perfect unison: “Where's Silas?"

"Would you like a couple of Kukes while I—"

Gabe interrupted: “Don't waste your breath, Helen. Your kind has spoiled many things—"

"Gabriel,” the Mrs. whispered, “it's pearls before swine—"

"I will have my say, Sarah. Helen, Kukla Boogie may have printed their corporate logo in mile-high letters on the face of the Good Lord's moon, but they have not, Helen, and will not, defile my heart."

"Is somebody getting their heart defiled on my back porch?” Jack picked that moment to come tripping down the stairs. “Because, as the householder, I get a percentage of any action back there—oh, Gabe, Sarah, what a delight to see you. Honey, aren't you going to get our neighbors a couple of yummilicious Kukla Boogies?” Jack squeezed past me onto the porch. I stayed back in the doorway. Truth is, I felt a little embarrassed that Jack was bare-chested and still in his pajama bottoms.

Mr. Tyvil, blackly: “We know everything."

Mrs.: “The sludge."

I could see my Jackie's face tighten up like a dish rag when you twist out the water. “Have you been nosing around my property, Gabe?"

"The crime site, you mean? This yard is strewn with corpses."

"Corpses? Whose corpses? Every one of the people who teleported out of the capsules in this yard is walking the earth today, hale and hearty, with pockets full of cash."

Gabe was one of those shorter men who try to gain altitude by waxing ferocious. His golden-haired Sarah stood by him like a pillar of salt, holding his arm in her arm with a look of angelic righteousness. Gabe set his jaw. “It's not them, Jack, and you know it. They died in those cans of yours. They were murdered."

"Murdered! I tell you, they are alive and well. Damn it, Gabe, do I have to give you a physics lesson?"

"No."

I've never known that syllable to stop my Jack. He charged on:

"When one of those high hats teleports somewhere, and it's always the high hats, of course, except for your medical emergencies and whatnot,"—trying for some prole camaraderie there, but Gabe wasn't buying any—"they do it through ‘entangled particles,’ with the old Einstein-Podelski-Rosen Effect."

"I know this,” Gabe Tyvil groaned.

"EPR particles are perfect twins, y'see: if one sneezes the other goes, ‘Atchoo!’ even if they are a gazillion miles apart. They've got two tubs of them, one here and one at the destination."

"I know the theory."

Me, I rolled my eyes. “Particle by particle,” Jack went on, “a supercomputer aligns the home-side tub with your body. It's like pressing your face into a pin board.” Instantly, particle by particle, he was going to say. “Instantly, particle by particle, the destination tub takes on your looks. But here's the thing . . ."

"I know."

Your original body, the old you, turns to sludge.

” . . . Your original body, the old you, turns to sludge. You can't have two of a person because it would violate the Uncertainty Principle; between the two, y'see, you could measure everything at once. So the teleportee has to turn to sludge.” He grinned like a cracked melon. He turned to me. Men. “You gonna throw your arms around me and kiss me now or what?"

Nothing doing.

Back to Gabe: “All those cylinders full of teleport detritus, they stack them up in a warehouse somewhere. They were just waiting for a guy with some spunk to come along and offer to take the problem off their hands. Well, here I am—Acme Teleport Sludge Removal Service."

"Look, I know all this."

"Honestly, what's your beef, Gabe? It's not like it's radioactive or toxic or some damn thing. It's just TP sludge, for pity's sake. And as to your teleported person, he is particle-for-particle identical with the original.” Jack flashed me another of his kiss-me-now smirks, but me, I only wanted the thing to be over.

"There is no original to compare it to,” Gabe put in, “and I do mean it. In your so-called teleport process, Jack, as you well know, the original is murdered. The difference between the actual original human being and your golem on the receiving end is one you science types don't seem to care about: the original had an immortal soul."

"Come on, Gabe. How do you know the immortal soul isn't teleported right along with the rest of him?"

The two men were pitched and tight as a couple of hissing alley cats. Gabe let peal a derisive laugh. “What, through the Uncertainty Principle? Einstein said it, Jack. ‘God does not play dice . . . ‘"

"Pity,” Jack put in. “A person could win some pretty big pots—if he could make the ante."

"You people are replacing divine law with your own private roulette wheel."

"Jack,” I said, “let it go."

But he just spat back: “We are using God's law. We got our methods from a study of nature—God's creation, right?"

"You are a ghoul employed by murderers. I pray for your immortal soul nightly. Bring us the boy."

"Go up and get him, you Neanderthal Muddite."

"God will forgive you your sins, Jack,” Sarah Tyvil said, “if you but repent."

I was cowering at the back door when Silas sidled next to me. “I want to stay here."

There was a thunderous silence.

Sarah's lower lip trembled a bit, I thought. Then Gabe gave her a hard tug at the elbow. “I told you all along what it was, Sarah.” He turned her around, and the two of them walked away.

My dear husband was about to laugh. “Don't,” I said, and he swallowed it.

I pulled Silas closer. “I'll talk to them for you, Silas."

"No. Wouldn't do any good. You mind having me?"

"No, it's fine, Silas dear. For a while."

Apollo poked his head out and squealed, “Yummilicious!” He tugged Silas up to his room for God knows what monkeyshines.

Jack clucked his tongue. “Benighted Muddites. How do they get that way?” He trudged over to the port-a-shed to stack his “corpses."

I called after him, “Jack, have you figured out what to do with the stuff yet?"

"I'll get to it."

"I'm worried, Jack. As long as the sludge is in our back yard, there's bound to be trouble. The Tyvils are mild compared to some of those Modern Luddites."

"Relax, hon, it's on my list. And I've lined up a buyer for the canisters, too, as soon as I can get rid of the stuff inside them. Teleportation is our golden goose."

* * * *

Apollo and Silas got along like nobody's business. They showed up for meals and Kukes and bed. You'd see one of them scamper by yelling “Help! Help!” with a Fay Wray grimace; then the other, Silas usually, would shamble after him on his gimp leg: “The vengeance of the zombies be upon you, mortal. Die! Die! Die!” Their laughter spread like boogie fizz all over the house and yard.

The night after Gabe and Sarah's retreat, with Apollo fast asleep on his side of the bed, I tucked in Silas at the other. I could see the bump and the pucker of skin where his head had cracked open on the marquis of the KB Theater in Brockport.

He opened his eyes. “Mrs. Earl . . ."

"Yes, Silas?"

In a whisper: “Do I seem dead to you?"

"Dead? Of course not. What would give you an idea like that?"

"I fell off the roof of the KB Theater."

"I heard."

"It was a long way down.” His little brow furrowed and his eyes began to tear. “I shouldn't have been up there. I knew it could kill you."

"They got you straight to the hospital, thank God."

"They had to, Mrs. Earl."

"Silas honey, of course they had to."

"The leg didn't matter so much, but my head, Mrs. Earl—that hospital down in Manhattan was the only place that could fix me."

"They saved your life, Silas honey."

"I had to get there fast too, didn't I? A plane wouldn't have been fast enough, not even a jet."

"Not even a jet. Must be five hundred miles from the KB Theater to Manhattan Neurological. Shh! Shh!” I wiped the tears from his cheeks with my fingers.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Earl. I'm going to sleep now. You can go. I don't want to wake up Apollo."

"Would you like a goodnight Kuke?"

"No. I'm okay. Just go now. I'm sleepy. Just go, please."

"Sure, Silas. We'll talk some more tomorrow, huh?"

"If you want to."

What could I do for the poor kid? I went to the porch out back and boogied down on the glider. Jack was still digging. I could hear his shovel hit the gravel back behind the sheds. In some ways, men have it easy.

Next day Silas seemed as normal as an open Kuke, prancing about and making mischief with Apollo. Turns out, Apollo talked him into getting an implant. Of course, it's perfectly legal for children to be implanted without their parents’ consent—the Kukla Boogie lobby took care of that, and why not? Like everybody says, There's Nothing Like A Good Boogie, And Kukla Is The Boogie With The Rune On The Moon. You can get implanted at most grocery stores nowadays, it only takes a minute, and there's that flow of pocket money forever after. Still, I wanted to keep peace with Gabe and Sarah, as well as a person could. I figured, they weren't going to stay mad at me forever.

This was three days after they had stormed out of our back yard. I fixed my hair and put on something simple and nice. It was hard finding a blouse without the KB logo, but I was afraid the sight of it would get the Tyvils’ gander up, so I made do with some respectable old thing. I had me a Kukla Boogie, I took a deep breath, and I went over to Gabe and Sarah's and knocked on their door. Gabe opened the door; the missus was right there behind him. He held her by one wrist while she stared at the floor. Looked like I had caught them in the middle of a scrap.

"What exactly is it that you want, Helen?"

"Well, it's about Silas . . ."

Gabe interrupted: “Our son Silas is dead.” Sarah started to whimper, and he yanked her to make her shut up.

"You can't cut him off that way,” I said. “You're his mother and father, for pity sakes."

"It's not a matter of cutting off."

"I just came over to tell you that the boys went down to the UltraMart this morning, without anybody's permission, and Silas got a boogie chip put in. Now, we can get it taken right out, Gabe . . ."

"What that thing does is no concern of ours."

He slammed the door. I stood there staring at the jambs and mumbling. “Thing? He's your son. You can't just dump him with a neighbor . . ."

Apparently, they could.

* * * *

Silas tossed and turned and mumbled in his sleep. Sometimes Apollo would come in and complain to me about it, and I'd let him snuggle in with Jack and me, while Silas tossed by his lonesome, poor thing. I kept thinking that Gabe and Sarah would soften up, but it was nothing doing. Like they say, there are some stains even a Kuke won't bleach. They flat-out ignored the child.

Then came the sleepwalking. At least, that's what I thought it was. In the dead of the night I heard the door open and close downstairs, and there was a scratching and shoveling sound out back. At first I figured it was Jack, but I rolled over, and there he was beside me, sleeping like a baby. I peeked out the bedroom window. It was Silas, of course, roaming about the yard, poking every few feet, turning up earth, then piling it back, or disappearing into one or the other of the sheds.

I didn't tell Jack, because I was afraid he'd get mad. So I went down and cleaned up after Silas before Jack woke. I filled in the holes he hadn't finished filling, and I tidied the disordered cylinders.

Next night the same. Silas dug, and I filled. I didn't know what to say or do. Maybe Silas had gotten a screw turned wrong when he fell from the KB Theater. Probably he didn't even remember what he did in his sleep. Why add to his sorrows?

But the morning after that I was slow getting up, and Jack beat me to the yard. When he saw the state of things, he let out a yelp that you could hear all the way to Syracuse in one direction and Niagara Falls in the other. It was enough to scare the bubbles out of a Kuke. It woke up my Apollo, I can tell you, who had been sleeping with us in bed again, and he clung to me so hard I got red marks where his little fingers had been.

Well, I pushed my head out between the curtains, and Jack yelled up, “Would you just look at this? This is the work of those bleeping Muddites."

"Shh!” I said. “No, Jack, no it isn't. Come back upstairs."

"The hell it isn't.” He stood near the back porch and surveyed what you could see of the neighborhood from there, all those sleepy folks peering out of their bedroom windows. He brandished his shovel like a battleaxe. “And as for you busybodies, I've got one thing to say . . .” He flashed me a wicked smile, and then he shouted, “Drink Kukla Boogie—it's the beverage with leverage."

I planted Apollo in our bed and ran down the stairs while Jack tramped up, the shovel still in his hand. “Jack, Jack,” I tried to whisper, “it wasn't any Muddites. It was poor Silas, in his sleep."

"Wha . . . ?"

Before Jack could finish one word, Silas himself appeared on the landing: “I wasn't sleeping.” By this time Apollo was standing next to Silas in his pajamas, screwing up his eyes and cocking his head. Silas went on: “I was looking for something."

"What on earth for?” Jack said.

"For me, Mr. Earl. I was looking for me. I thought I might be buried out there."

I could see the lemons line up in Jack's eyeballs. Silas's crying at night. His folks disowning him. Jack looked at me, and I nodded.

Apollo draped an arm around Silas and gave his shoulders a squeeze. “You dope.” Then to us: “Silas thinks he's a zombie because he was teleported to the hospital in New York after he fell off the roof of the KB Theater."

"Shut up. I can say it myself."

"He thinks his real self is in a can somewhere."

"Shut up.” Silas said it the way people do who want you to go on talking.

"I told him, Pop only has the juice of KB execs and big shots, not some kid from a 911, but he keeps up, anyway."

"Is it true, Mr. Earl?” Silas gazed at us with little lemur eyes. “Is that all you have is that kind of people? Couldn't I be back there too?"

Jack didn't say a word. He turned on his heels and shot down the stairs, knocking a fine divot out of the wallboard with the business end of that shovel. He bounded for the door.

"Jack, what are you going to do?"

Next thing I knew, his shovel rang against the Tyvils’ door. “Come on out of there, you snarl-brained Muddite throwbacks."

The way the door slammed open, I expected Gabriel Tyvil to come out loaded for bear. Instead, he stepped out in his PJs, arms at his sides. He lifted his chin, turned his head sideways, and said as calmly as you please, “Here's my one cheek, Jack, and when you're done with that one, why, I'll give you the other. That's the way of us ‘throwbacks.’”

Jack sputtered for a minute, then threw down his shovel. “Dammit, Gabe, what kind of a ‘way’ is it to treat your own son as if he were dead? You think some teleport sludge deserves your affection more than that sweet live child looking out at us this very minute from my porch door?"

Gabe worked his face so, you could tell he had a lot of things that popped into his head to say, but all that finally came out was, “You wouldn't understand."

"You're probably right. I wouldn't. Your boy has been crying nights and plowing up my yard looking for his buried soul, while you lie snug in your bed, cuddling and snoring. What's it to you, huh? Hell, you ought to be . . . teleported."

Sarah pushed out past her husband. “It's a lot to us, Jack. More than you can know."

"Quiet, Sarah,” Gabe said, “it's pearls before . . .” His voice choked off into a sob.

"We loved our boy,” Sarah went on. “This is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's like a nightmare to see him playing right outside my window and not to be able to call to him or make him lunch or hold him in my arms or tuck him in at night."

My Jack said, “Dammit, then, why don't you?"

"Don't you think we tried? We flew to Manhattan to pick Silas up, I mean, it, to pick it up. He was so sweet—I mean, it was so sweet. You're a father; you know how they are when they're sick, Jack. And we brought it home. It slept in Silas's bed, and it ate from Silas's plate. It talked with Silas's voice, and it kissed me, Jack, it kissed me with Silas's lips. But it wasn't Silas.

"Oh, I couldn't tell. I might have just held onto him like he was my little boy, but Gabriel knew. Gabriel could see. He told me the truth. And all the time, Gabriel was hunting for our real son, the one they killed, that was still in that cylinder at County Emergency—but nobody could find that cylinder, Jack. They must have done away with it, with him, with our son, like he was some kind of sewage."

Gabe had gotten his voice back now, although it was ragged and slid between anger and grief two or three times a word. “They put him in that thing. They scraped him up off the pavement and put him in that awful thing. They never asked us. They just slapped Silas into their contraption and turned him to sludge, while they sent that golem to some New York City doctors.” He grabbed hold of Jack's collar, and Jack, God bless the man, let him. “Why didn't they ask us, Jack? We're the boy's parents. Why?"

"You know why, Gabe. There wasn't time. He would have died."

"He did die."

"You know that isn't true."

Silas stood beside me on our porch watching the whole thing. Apollo was there too. Probably I should have taken them inside and spared them such grown-up agonies, but I was riveted to the goings-on, and I hardly noticed the kids, shame to say, until Silas piped up: “Daddy! I'm right here!"

Gabe turned to stare at the boy. I've never seen such grief in a human face. Then he looked away again. He let go of Jack's shirt. He took his wife by the elbow and he stepped back inside his house. He shut the door in Jack's face. The lock clicked. Inside, Sarah wailed.

Jack stood still a minute and stared at his shoes. His nostrils were big as the lip of a boogie bottle. He breathed so hard I thought I'd see steam come out of his ears. He snapped his head toward Silas. “You won't find yourself out in the yard, so you can stop looking. There's nothing there but bigwig sludge. County Emergency doesn't contract with me. But I know where they put it, Silas.” He flashed me one of his inscrutable looks, a combination of Richard Nixon, Jack the Ripper, and the Easter Bunny. Then he did one of those things I positively hate in men, a tough-guy movie thing, where they look at one person while they're talking to another. His eyes were on me, but he said, “And you know what, Silas? I'm going to go get it for you. Today."

I rolled my eyes. Honestly, sometimes, I don't know why I love that man like I do.

"Breakfast, boys.” I scooted the kids into the house and away from all that monkeyshines. We'd had enough sorrows for one day, and the day hadn't even begun by any civilized person's clock. “Kukla pudding with toasted boogie loaf."

"Yummilicious,” was Apollo's answer. Silas wiped his eyes with a pajama sleeve and followed us in, but he kept looking back at my Jack. And I thought I saw that rascal husband of mine wink at him and nod.

* * * *

We did not see Jack for the rest of the day. I stewed. He had no right to build up the boy's hopes that way. And if he succeeded, then what? I doubted that Jack had thought it out that far. He was just like a twelve-year-old sometimes, was my thought. The Tyvils would rejoice over their canned sludge son and keep the real one out in the cold. For Silas, nothing would change.

The boys laid low. “Keep close to Silas today,” I told my Apollo. “Cheer him up. Split boogies, if you like. He's had a hard morning."

Wouldn't you know it, at ten-fifteen at night, under a full Kukla Boogie Moon, when the boys were asleep in bed and I was lying between my sheets tight as a shook stoppered boogie, thinking of devastating things to say to my Jack whenever in the land of Goshen he decided to make his appearance, up he clunks and bang! into the bedroom with a gallon gas can in his hands.

"Don't tell me . . .” I said.

"I won't,” he said, “but go get the boys dressed, if you please, hon, and meet me out on Gabe and Sarah's porch in fifteen minutes. I just lugged this thing up here to give you a little motivation. This is the genuine article. This is going to be a red-letter day for the Tyvils, and no mistake."

"But . . ."

The bum kissed me on the mouth and skedaddled.

When the boys and I got to Gabe and Sarah's porch, Jack was already in the middle of an argument with them.

"It's not,” they said.

"It is,” Jack said.

"For one thing,” Gabe said, as the three of us mounted his porch, “nobody, not even a child, could have fit in that can you're carrying, and everybody knows that they seal up the remains in the same thingo they supposedly ship them from."

"Not at Ontario County Emergency, they don't. That's what I'm telling you, Gabe. That's what I found out. That's why it was so hard to locate this, well, your son Silas's soul. They don't have the moolah over at County to use a new booth for every medical teleport. They transfer the, uh, dead souls to these urns,"—is what Jack called his gas can—"and then they throw them into a bin in the basement of the Albion Town Hall along with a bunch of old real estate records, styrofoam dishware, and contraband being held for exhibit at trial."

Sarah covered her mouth. “That is where they were holding our Silas?"

"I'm sorry to have to say so, Sarah."

Gabe stared my Jack in the face to see if he would back down. But it was Gabe who backed down at last. “Well, I would never have believed it.” He laid his hands on the gas can with something like reverence. “So we are to be allowed to properly honor our poor dead son after all. Thank the Lord."

He made to take the can from Jack, but Jack held tight. “Not so fast.” He looked back at us three huddled behind him in our half-buttoned clothes. “Silas, come here."

"Yes, Mr. Earl?"

"Are you thirsty, boy?"

"Wait a minute,” Gabe tried to say.

But Jack cut him off. He had screwed open the gas can. “Then drink this."

Gabe bolted forward, but Jack got in his way. It didn't take much to restrain him, and I figured that his heart must not have been in it. Silas took the gas can and tilted it to his lips. You have to hand it to that boy. He didn't stop until the can was empty. He set the thing down with a clang, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and panted.

For a full minute, nobody on that porch had an inkling what to do.

Then Sarah lurched toward Silas and hugged him like a cold boogie on a hot day. She covered that boy with kisses. “Silas, darling, you've got your soul back.” Except for Silas's sobbing and Sarah's endearments, that porch was absolutely silent. Finally Sarah Tyvil looked up at her husband. “Hasn't he, dear? Hasn't he got his soul back?"

Gabe looked at his wife with his mouth open and nothing coming out of it. He looked at his son. He looked at Jack. Then he looked at me, and what could I do? I nodded. I like to think it was my nod that restored his last missing marble. “Yes, he does. Indeed, he does. In all its glory. Welcome home, Silas.” And the three of them fell together like—well, they just fell together, that's all. And they stayed that way for a good long time.

We Earls stole back to our own house. I put Apollo to bed. He didn't want to, he didn't want to, and out he went like a light as soon as the pillow was plumped. Twelve-year-olds! That's pretty much all I wanted to do as well. There had been too many early mornings and late nights lately. I sat myself down on the glider out back just to take a load off and gaze at the Kukla Boogie Moon. I could hear Gabe and Sarah through an open window kissing their boy goodnight, and the last thing I saw before my eyes sort of closed themselves was the Tyvils’ lights turning off.

I must have drifted off then, because the next thing I knew, Jack's arm was around me. I smiled and snuggled against the hollow of his shoulder.

"Hey,” says he, “I found us a buyer for the sludge. I ran into some KB suits at the county offices in Albion. Seems KB Corporate has had a little epiphany. They're going all over Kingdom Come buying up people's TP sludge and trying to get back their own that they farmed out to fellows like me. I got a damn good price out of them, dearie dear. What a howler. I made money off KB in both directions. This'll buy us some time on Easy Street whilst I think up a new idea—you gonna throw your arms around me and kiss me now or what?"

"Hold on. Whatever are the KB folks going to do with all that sludge?"

"Oh, I don't know,” he said, and that mischievous curl came into his voice. “This and that."

"Well,” I said, “thank God they missed a can."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean from the county offices."

"Oh, the county didn't have anything to sell them. The county streams their TP sludge into the Erie Canal—under covers, of course, because they're not supposed to dump it like that."

"But what about Silas's soul?"

"Oh, yes, that. Well, you know, hon, I was never too strong on my metaphysics. But there's one thing I believe in."

"Oh, and what would that be?"

The rascal started in to singing:

* * * *

I believe in Kukla Boogie Moon.

It won't fade soon—

That's like our love.

* * * *

He tried to kiss me, but I pushed him away. “You mean it was Kuke that Silas drank out of that gas can?"

"Wait right here.” He ran into the house and came out with an open bottle of Kukla Boogie. “Try this."

"Jack Earl, I'm too tired for this sort of goings on. For pity's sake, I've had Kukla Boogie before. I know what it tastes like."

"But, honey, this is from a brand new batch. Those suits gave me a sample or two. Look here.” So he showed me the label. It was an ordinary Kukla Boogie label with the KB logo just like it is up there on the moon, only there was an extra little bit of writing underneath. It said:

* * * *

New and Improved Kukla Boogie—

Now with a SECRET INGREDIENT

that will make you say:

"KUKLA BOOGIE: The Stuff of Life!"

* * * *

When I stopped laughing, I kissed the joker. And when I stopped kissing, I had a long draft of new improved Kukla Boogie.

It was yummilicious.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Lunar Fate

Mario Milosevic

* * * *

I remembered when the moon will fall

quietly tracking across the sky

in its accustomed arc

then one tip of its crescent

snagging on a branch

of a hillside tree

and just like that

the inspiration for poets

and the engine of tides

will have been moored

on the horizon's edge

where it will sway in the breeze

like a great slow balloon

and children will gather round

with hands outstretched

to a clever entrepreneur

who will have secured the right

to cut up the moon into small pieces

and sell them for a dollar each

to the children who will mistake them

for candy at first

then collect and trade

pieces of the moon

like they were baseball cards

until one day all those pieces

will end up

in attics and the backs of closets,

forgotten artifacts of childhood.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Changeling

Leslie What

My boyfriend's nickname was Spot because of his condition—vitiligo—which bleached out pigment from his dark skin and left behind erratic white patches that made no sense. He'd always hated the nickname, and I thought a better one was “Domino.” Too bad the people who cared about such things were never the ones who got to choose their friends’ nicknames. Instead I used his real name, Steve.

I didn't even know Steve had any spots until I saw him without clothes, which wasn't until our fourth date. By then I was in love and surface imperfections didn't matter. I'd never been with a black guy; for all I knew, spots were normal. Steve had been with white women but he was polite and didn't compare, even when asked. Steve told me his white spots complemented my freckles. We both believed our differences were no big deal.

Last Monday, I threw up on the futon and had to tell him I was pregnant. Fourteen weeks, by calendar count. I wiped the sheets but one stain was stubborn and just spread out more, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

"Forget it,” Steve said. “Want coffee?"

"Sure,” I said. I threw that up too.

"Anyway, you aren't supposed to drink coffee,” Steve said. He rubbed my belly to help my stomach settle.

"I think you mean alcohol,” I said. I wasn't ready to give up coffee.

Steve was wearing red shorts and a white terry robe belted at the waist. His chest was beeswax smooth and he looked boxer strong and handsome. I pretended the white spots on his chest weren't there. “What do you want to do?” Steve said.

I didn't know. “Do you love me enough to get married?” I asked.

"I don't know. Do you love me that much?"

The day before, I would have said yes. I said yes anyway.

"Then let's get married,” he said. “For the baby."

"For the baby,” I said.

We got dressed and went to work. Steve managed World CD and I clerked at U.S. Jeans.

When I called my mother on my break, she said, “Get an abortion."

"It's one thing to have sex with one, but I don't think I could ever love the child,” Mom said. “Neither black nor white. Unfair to give a child problems to begin with."

I could not believe she would say that. I yelled, said she was prejudiced, and hung up the phone. It was weird because Steve's parents felt the same about me as Mom did about Steve.

I decided to make Steve tell them the news.

The rest of the day was customer hell. At closing, the register was short sixteen dollars. When I came home, Steve told me to sit and rest. He wouldn't let me help make dinner.

I worried I was making a mistake. Every baby deserved to be loved, especially mine. “Maybe we shouldn't get married,” I said. “Maybe getting married is for the wrong reasons."

"You aren't thinking of abortion?” he said. “Because I think that's murder."

"No,” I said, even though I wasn't sure I wanted a baby.

"Good,” said Steve. “I mean, it's your body. But it is half my baby."

That night I dreamt of babies half black and half white, split midway down the centers like jester hats.

In the morning we had sex and it was good. After, Steve held me and tenderly rubbed my belly. I loved almost everything about him: the way he talked, his thoughtfulness, the CD art hanging on his walls, the way he looked in clothes, and the way he felt out of them. I loved his body and how his skin felt waxy like polished jade, except for those bleached spots, which were rough to the touch and didn't look like they belonged on him. I loved how he took the lumpy side of the futon and gave me the better half.

"How about some green tea?” he said.

"In a bit,” I answered.

My stomach felt calm so long as I didn't stand up. Too bad I had to work. Clearance sale today, but at least the busy days passed faster.

I started to cry without a reason.

Steve whispered, “It'll be okay, baby."

By baby he meant me and not the baby.

There was a white spot near his navel and I touched it. My fingers traced the perimeter and then sneaked inside to explore the white circle. It felt bumpy and abnormal and weird. “Will they ever come out?” I asked. “The spots?"

"This is who I am,” Steve said, sounding grouchy. “Get used to it."

"I will,” I said. “I am. I'm sorry."

Steve said, “I forgive you. Hey, I got the name of a doctor. We're gonna need prenatal care."

"Oh, yeah,” I said. The baby. I wanted my prenatal care from a kit, like the pregnancy test. I didn't want strangers looking into places I couldn't see for myself.

I propped up on my side and stared at Steve and pictured him as a father and not a lover. There was something wrong with the picture. He looked the same. Whereas I would soon look fatter.

I let Steve shower first so I could lie still as long as possible. I stared at my belly to see if I was showing, but couldn't tell. I wouldn't have known I was pregnant if my boobs weren't sore and my periods hadn't stopped and I didn't feel like throwing up and if all three home pregnancy tests hadn't been positive. Maybe Steve's doctor would order a sophisticated test that instead proved I had tumors.

I wanted to have tumors. It would have been so much easier to deal with.

I showered and dressed in jeans and a white tee shirt. Steve brought me saltines and I ate them and sipped tea and managed to keep both down. I rode the bus to work, standing to give my seat to a woman with a tiny baby. The woman had caught me staring, so I felt I should say something. I said, “Isn't it cute!” even though it wasn't.

Customers lined up half an hour before we opened. My manager said, “Just keep smiling,” when one pounded on the windows, pointed to her watch, and mouthed something nasty. The morning passed sunrise quick. The starchy sizing scent of new clothes made me sick and I threw up twice. On my lunch break, I made the doctor's appointment. The chatty receptionist said the doctor was white but from South Africa. I felt glad, then guilty for feeling glad, and hung up to look through the phone book for a doctor who was black. None of the ads had pictures, except of the chiropractors, so I ended up staying with the first guy.

On the bus home, I gave up my seat to a retarded girl who might have been pregnant or just fat. Either way, people looked angry with her. Someone said, “People like that shouldn't have children."

That pissed me off. I said, “Don't be so judgmental!” Then I decided that the retarded girl was just fat, and I got mad at her, too.

Steve was away at practice; he played bass in an alternative rock band. I felt trapped in a mood where nothing held my attention and I kept flipping channels with the remote. I couldn't commit to a television show. Was I crazy to think I could commit to a husband and a baby? Eventually, the batteries died; I solved that by sitting close enough to the TV to change channels with my feet.

My mom called.

"Oh,” I said. “It's you."

"Is something wrong?” she asked and I said no because really, when you thought about it, there wasn't. I was in love. I was pregnant. Didn't everyone want to get married and have a baby?

"I was a bit harsh,” she said. “About the baby. I'm sure I'll come to accept it,” she said. “Things sometimes take a while to get used to."

"It's not about you!” I said.

"True,” she said, without asking how I felt.

I left serial messages on Steve's cell phone, then waited for a callback. He didn't call, but showed up around one. “I didn't hear the phone ring,” he said and I said, “Oh."

We snuggled in bed.

"I thought you wanted to talk,” he said when it was obvious I was going to say zip.

"I do,” I said, not knowing what to say. We fell asleep and I woke up before him and watched his profile bloom in the morning light.

If only Steve didn't have spots! My fingers walked along his skin until they found a small white circle on his thigh. I'd never noticed it before, because of his leg hair. I'd thought I already knew everything about him, so this new spot bugged me. I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice when I started to rub harder, with as much pressure as I'd used to scrub the sheets. My fingers dug into his skin like a number four eraser trying to snuff out marks left by a number two pencil.

Steve said, “Ouch!” and I saw I'd drawn blood. “Baby,” Steve said, “what the hell are you doing?"

"I don't know,” I said. “I wasn't thinking."

"Well, think,” he said with a laugh. “For my sake, think."

He stared at his leg and said, “Jesus, what did you do?"

I apologized for making him bleed. Except it was worse. Instead of the white patch disappearing into the black the way I would have expected, I had erased the surrounding dark pigment and made the white part spread like melted butter.

"I didn't mean to,” I said. And I had a terrible thought: that it might be easier if Steve was white.

"Oh, man,” he said with a sigh. “Think you're the only one who worries we'll face problems?"

"It doesn't matter. We'll work it out."

"Is that right?” he said. “I don't believe you."

I didn't believe me either, which scared me.

Steve said, “We should see a counselor."

"It's too late for talk."

"I suppose you're right,” Steve said.

Because Steve disliked rubbers, I was having a baby. This wasn't fair! I stared at the insensitive, selfish man I was about to marry. Maybe he wouldn't be such a good father after all. I climbed atop him and scrubbed the white patch on his chest.

"Please stop,” he said, but I kept at it until I made the white spot stretch.

"I can't handle this!” he said. “Why should I change and not you?"

"What are you talking about?” I said, letting go. “You want me to change? So, change me!"

Steve held my arm and picked at a freckle on my arm. Massaging the brown spots with his thumbs made the color break open and seep into the white. He darkened a full moon across my shoulder before stopping. “There,” he said. “How's that feel?"

It felt all wrong.

I touched Steve's new white patches. They felt bay leaf dry. “Shit!” I said. “I'm so sorry!” I really was.

"This is stupid,” he said.

"No duh,” I said.

I laughed and so did he. Our first big fight; no wonder we weren't any good at it.

I rubbed big circles over my tummy, wondering if that could make the baby change colors.

"Even if you turned me white or I turned you black, this baby's made,” Steve said.

"I'm not ready,” I said.

"Me neither,” said Steve.

"Oh well,” I said.

"Exactly,” said Steve.

I remembered why I loved him. I felt something weird from inside that began as a tickle and grew stronger, like a skater tracing a figure eight into the ice. “The baby!” I said. It was kicking with its tiny feet. Was it was trying to change me, the way babies did, from the inside, in ways you couldn't see?

"Let's call it, Domino,” I said. “You know—because a baby topples the stack."

"Good one,” said Steve. “Do we stand by and watch everything fall? Or do we try to just pick up the pieces once they scatter?"

I hugged him tight. “We have to be ready for anything."

"You're right,” he said.

I felt happy. We both stared at my belly, curious, maybe a little scared, and waited, helpless to do anything but watch for the baby to make its next move.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Faith of Metal in Ghosts

Richard Polney

"Surrender the consciousness to the rhythms and spectacles of the natural worlds,” Annie thought as the embers in the fireplace dimmed. She wanted her father to tend it, poke it, and move the coals with his bare hands. She remembered his pores were the old style, random KISERVA equations—slightly artificial. She felt in her jacket pocket for her cigarettes and cell phone and when she found it, it rang. She answered.

"Surrender!” said the voice. She dropped the phone and the battery broke from the phone's body.

It rang again. Annie's younger sister, Susie, got there first but she didn't answer it. She could only hold the cell phone at arm's length, staring at the IR outlet. Susie put the phone under a couch cushion.

"What should we do now?” said Annie.

Susie was leaning by the window, looking out, and talking to no one. She assumed the pose of a Victorian-era woman waiting for a lover, but she was more afraid that the phone would ring again. It was close to midnight; Annie returned to sitting in the sink while rocking just slightly, smoking her cigarettes.

To kiss her father in his grave.

"'Ghosts are ghosts because they don't permit social reconstruction of their biorhythms,’ is what mum says.” Susie muttered. Mum always made things better. Surrender the consciousness.

"Mum says there might be good news for the rest of us,” said Susie, thinking of her own sputtering cadmium-nickel batteries as she took the seat next to Annie. Although MANOVA programming dictated them to sleep, the girls instead spent the night in nightmare. Compound symmetry and spherical equations could not ameliorate the contradictions of ghosts running upside down on bedroom ceilings.

To morning, first thing.

Their mother greeted them at breakfast. Annie walked into the kitchen first; wishing that father were already there, eating some fourth-rate magnesium fuel cell that mum swiped from the candy factory. Annie stopped for a moment to touch a layer of dust on the spectacles resting on the kitchen table.

The girls registered happiness smiles to their mum who began to prepare breakfast. “It's Them and Us,” mum thought, snapping algorithms.

With a spasm, Susie lurched inches above the ground. She'd gone into saint mode! “Look, your father's holding her up!” said mum in awe. The three used multivariate criteria to test the statistical significance of the possibility of future repeated visitations, contrasting colors of three suns. “He's giving her a consciousness-insight,” mum said. Annie rested her cheek against Susie's cold, floating knees.

Their faces were almost sentient. “Surrender the consciousness to the rhythms and spectacles of the natural worlds,” they said in church-unison, algorithms snapping, knees going cold and dead.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Home and Security

Gavin J. Grant

With thousands of like-minded others, I went to the big peace rally in New York City on February 15th, 2003. It was a cold day, and my wife and I walked up Third Avenue from 32nd to 68th Street before we could cut over to First Avenue and join the rally. Which was really a slow march, but since the city government wouldn't give us a permit to march, let's call it a rally.

* * * *

What do we want?

So many things.

When do want them?

It doesn't seem possible, but now, please.

* * * *

...March 5th, 2003, Local News: Writer and editor Gavin J. Grant, 33, (picture) of Northampton, Mass., is believed to be one of hundreds of detainees held after police and other government agencies moved in to calm a noisy and potentially-violent peace rally in New York City's Washington Square Park....

* * * *

I joined the United for Peace and Justice email list for information on future rallies. I forwarded their email about a march and vigil on the fifth of March to my wife. She had to pick up some freelance work in New York and readily agreed to go.

* * * *

Tell me what a democracy looks like.

From here, a dictatorship.

This is what a democracy looks like.

This march, or this war? It's hard to tell.

* * * *

...March 7th, 2003, Email: Gavin, Dad here. Got a call from INS (IRS?) saying you had been held (under Patriotic act?) after rally and asking re: marriage and so on. Confirm ok by you to send these? Love, dad and mum. xx....

* * * *

The march and candlelight vigil on fifth of March was as depressing as the February 15th rally. Thousands of people gathered outside Senator Hilary Clinton's office and marched to Senator Chuck Schumer's office to protest their voting to send the USA into war with Iraq. We marched down Third to 42nd Street and then snaked over to Fifth, blocking crosstown traffic. We marched to Washington Square Park and were closely watched by the Fifth Avenue business owners,- some of whom seemed to dither between a desire to join us and a fear of the crowd. But we were no mob. People drummed and danced, sang the usual songs, held or wore signs that were as funny and direct as ever ("The only Bush I trust is my own” was more popular this time), yet, will this stop a war? Hundred of police seemed to think we might start a Battle of Seattle ourselves. Which leads to thoughts of whether we might place some of these police in the White House.

* * * *

...March 8th, 2003, National News: Detained immigrant Gavin Grant's website (Internet Archive link) has been taken down by the federal government under suspicions of terrorist links. Grant, a freelance writer who has written for alternative publications such as The Urban Pantheist, Weird Times, and Xerography Debt, recently published altered transcripts of two of President Bush's remarks on Iraq on his website. Citing freedom of speech and linking to satirical websites such as The Onion, Grant simply switched the President's name with Saddam Hussein's in two transcripts. The first transcript made it appear that Hussein was about to attack the USA with 3,000 cruise missiles—with no differentiation of civilian and military targets. The second transcript, however, was perhaps even more threatening and, given the present Orange Alert, is likely the reason Grant was arrested. Grant altered President Bush's remarks on the possibilities of an internal coup in Iraq and changed them to suggest that generals and others in the U.S. Armed Forces might find themselves well rewarded if they initiated an internal revolt. The White House announced there would be a press conference concerning the latest detainees at 2 p.m. today and referred all questions to Richard Ashcroft's office....

* * * *

We, The People, Don't Want This War!

Shame Bush hasn't noticed.

March 15: The thing is, I haven't been arrested. I'm not even in hiding. This morning I sanded the ice in my driveway and talked to Jeff, our contractor, about building some bookshelves in a room upstairs. When I opened my email there were 250+ emails—mostly from people I don't know. 90% were supportive, but some were just vitriolic. I haven't even posted my articles yet—they were just ideas I was playing with. I was going to contact a lawyer friend and a guy I know who ran a satirical website to get some advice before I posted. The lines keep moving and I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to cross any of the dangerous ones.

* * * *

...March 12, 2003, NYPD Spokesman: We can confirm arrests of a number of individuals participating in an anti-government rally in Washington Square Park on the evening of March 5th. These individuals are no longer in our jurisdiction. They are being held under the auspices of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 in an undisclosed location....

* * * *

I don't like singing and chanting with the other marchers. I think walking quietly is just as important. That way we don't all look as if we're being carried away in an ecstatic trance. A few people jangled their keys as they walked. I wondered if it was just an impulse to be rhythmic or if they had read Ursula K. Le Guin's story about a revolution, “Unlocking the Air."

* * * *

Drop Bush, not bombs.

Or at least his lapdog, Blair.

* * * *

At the end of the February 15th rally when the closely-herded thousands of us were leaving, I went to walk around the outside edge of a phone box. A policeman stopped me and told me I had to stay on the sidewalk. Cold, frustrated by this abject stupidity and niggardliness, I objected.

"That,” and I pointed to the two feet of sidewalk between the phone box and the street, “is the sidewalk.” The policeman declared it was not, and another policeman moved closer to us in case I was trouble. I repeated that the space between the phone and the road was, in fact, sidewalk. The policeman, putting his hand on his billyclub, repeated his determined opinion that it was not. I held my hands up in the air to show I wasn't about to start anything, could not stop myself from calling him a fascist, and left. I wondered how near to arrest I'd been.

* * * *

...September 5, 2003, National News: Detainees from the March 5th peace march in New York have now been held for one hundred and eighty days without access to family, legal aid, or media. The Department of Homeland Security refuses to release the number of detainees or any identifying information. Twenty-three of the detained have since been stripped of their citizenship and deported to their countries of origin. Mothers of the Disappeared, a new New York City-based organization claims that the detainees are being tortured and tried in secret courts. White House spokesman Jim Morrell refused to comment on what he called “pure fabulation."....

* * * *

The US government declared the war in Iraq over in May 2003. The ongoing reports of killings in Iraq remind me of growing up in the U.K. War was never formally declared in Northern Ireland, but the headlines were often about bombings, murders, and shootings. The peace process in Ireland is one thing that fills me with hope. Perhaps the past can be let go—not forgotten—and a new future can be chosen based on peace and negotiation rather than on the acts of a randomly chosen period one, two, or three hundred years ago.

* * * *

...March 5, 2004, National News: The one-year anniversary of last year's national peace rally and the accompanying series of arrests was marked today by rallies, countrywide student sit-ins, and the third masked Black Bloc flashmob appearance (exclusive video) in New York City this week. Although a number of the detainees are known to be serving prison terms, the Department of Homeland Security resolutely refuses to release the original number of marchers detained, or any identifying information. Mothers of the Disappeared claim the detainees have been moved to the US military base in Guantanamo Bay and that, citing Amnesty International interviews with ex-prisoners from the Afghanistan war of 2001, the conditions in Guantanamo are an abuse of the detainees human rights. White House spokesman Jim Morrell refused to comment on what he called “pure fabulation."....

* * * *

I never carry my green card with me. I know the number, but I don't want to lose it if my wallet were stolen. So if I were arrested my identity cards would be my New York driver's license with my old address on it, credit cards, and membership cards for the library, Pleasant Street Video, AAA, and Amnesty International. I look in the mirror and I'm not sure who's there. There's a man with lines around his eyes, and a somewhat blank expression. What does he want? When does he want it? Not this President. Not this future.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Greebles

Jason Stewart

Beware, boy pretending to be bewildered,

For sitch-swipping with their villainous Vernious

Grabble the Greebles o'er the moon-splashed rooftops.

They sniggle the criggle cracks like starry hounds,

Cursing with cries, “Gillify!,” without a sound,

Until a little noggin full of whimsy

Sprouts a glozing dream, plump and ximbsy.

Sprigging betwixt the shingles and the shadows,

These vile glossolalists mumry ecstatic—

Woe! to those whom they choose to extricate, boy!—

Bridilling you with their graveyard caterwauls,

Their hoary fingers swish and fish in your skull,

Wheedling your slippery persimmon glands free,

They sitch-swip them, then burple back to the roof,

Riding the breath of your great-grandmother's ghost.

The Vernious vrawls, the Greebles gruggle “Grumgaw!"

And with your persimmon gland snitched and bewitched,

They sliff back to their Greeble-holes to distill fine

Dream-wine,

* * * *

So remember my boy, and beware my boy,

The noises that knock on the rooftops at night,

Come from the jibbering Greebles who bite.

Keep your skullcap and scalp fastened quite tight,

And never, never let your dreams out of sight.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Dear Aunt Gwenda: Advice from a Better Time & Place

* * * *

Dear Ms Bond,

I share a house with my boyfriend and another guy. While we have our regular share of visitors, one in particular takes ‘guest’ to its absolute limit. Let's call this unwanted visitor ‘Steve’ and characterise him as someone who talks a lot and has a non-subtle presence. While Steve initially came over a few times a week to hang with the guys, he's settled into a routine over the past couple of months where he comes over every evening specifically to hang with my boyfriend.

Apart from the fact I don't have any evening time with my boyfriend any more, I no longer enjoy a quiet night at home as Steve's favourite place is our lounge room. I'm happy for us to have visitors and I genuinely like Steve, but his presence in the house has gone from innocuous furry visitor to full-blown pain-in-the-ass Stephen King rodent. I've talked to my boyfriend about asking Steve to come over less often but he's unwilling to get involved. He doesn't want to upset a long-standing friendship and believes that the situation will sort itself out when our housemate moves out in a couple of weeks. I'm in total disagreement with this. The moving-out housemate finds the continued presence of Steve as annoying as I do and doesn't want him to become a regular fixture at his new place.

I want to tell Steve to stop coming over quite so regularly but I can't quite find the words. Please help or suggest a witty means of coping with a very ugly situation.

Thanks,

Kitty Pickle

* * * *

Dear Kitty Pickle,

The obvious solution is to throw over the boyfriend for the roommate. You have similar taste in people and he's getting a new place where the two of you can be blissfully alone. Your boyfriend can date the pesky friend; you can all get together occasionally for pie and Trivial Pursuit. Lovely.

If you're dead set on keeping the boyfriend around because you love him, or whatever, then he should at least make a good faith effort to procure a spine from a mail-order catalogue. As for the ixnay on the friend-ay, you're on your own till the spine arrives. You could just scream a blood-curdler whenever you open the door and see the pest standing there. Or you could tell him your doctor said that you can only be in the presence of one man's worth of hormones at a time, so he can't be around when you are. If all else fails, there's always the old “We've gone religious and unless you join us on Planet Zapstar Suicide Cult, we really can only hang one night a week on what our people call the Holy Day of Normalcy, i.e. Tuesday.” Or, as my grandmother did when she had problems with contrary members of the opposite sex as a child, you can hit him in the head with a book. I guarantee he'll come around less.

Sincerely,

Ms. Bond

* * * *

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Karl and the rest of the boys done locked the red button away and won't tell me where it is. What should I do to these stinking horsethieves?

GWB, DC

* * * *

Aunt Gwenda says: The real question here is why you want to know where the red button is. Repeat after me: I will keep my stinking paws off the red button.

But seriously, you should also teach those horsethieves a lesson. You should fire all of them—every single individual in your direct chain of command, including the Veep—then you resign and go live the rest of your days dim and quiet on that big square plot of tumbleweeds in Texas you like so damn much. That'll show ‘em.

Next?

* * * *

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

My wife and I always spend our holidays in Western Maine—the part away from the water where all the bugs are. She says she loved going there as a child and doesn't see why she should go anywhere else. In college I used to love going to Florida for Spring Break (where I met my first wife) but my wife won't hear of going there. Do you think it's time for separate vacations?

* * * *

Aunt Gwenda says: I think it's time for a divorce, if you seriously want your wife to go on a Florida Spring Break vacation with you. (And while I've got your attention . . . You married someone you met in Florida on a college Spring Break?! Is the wedding video available in finer video stores with the word “Uncensored” emblazoned across the cover?)

What you need is a globe, a hat and several slips of paper. Choose some places that are not in Maine, or Florida, preferably where neither of you has ever been or met a future spouse, write their names on the slips, and then draw one out of a hat. Voila, compromise vacation somewhere cool. And yes, you let her do the drawing. Ahem.

* * * *

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Some time ago my local coffeeshop started a discount club where, when you buy ten coffees, they give you one free. My boyfriend and I are arguing over whether it is fair to pay for ten small black coffees then get the shuper-tall-latte-grande-with-cream-and-chocolate-sprinkles. What do you think?

* * * *

Aunt Gwenda says: They made the rules. Trust me, they're still getting the better end of the deal. Do the math.

This is not an ethical dilemma, but a dire lack of perspective. Really, what the coffeeshop's doing is rewarding your customer loyalty. So, what kind of reward do you deserve? What kind of person are you, anyway? Grande with sprinkles or small with non-dairy creamer? Don't tell me, tell your reflection in the mirror tomorrow morning, Tiger.

* * * *

Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Did you just tell someone to do the math?

* * * *

Shut your filthy cakehole. (And if I did, I meant the kind of math where you use your fingers at best and a calculator at worst. What kind of girl do you take me for?)

If you have a moral dilemma or unanswerable math problem, we suspect the answer lies just a few drinks away at your local bar. However, if you'd rather hear it from Aunt Gwenda, email (info@lcrw.net) or write to us and we'll send it on.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Poor Man's Wife

M. Thomas

Pinoy kept shop in an alley, and had a way with bits of string, soleless shoes, occasional pots, pigeon carcasses, broken glass, forgotten dolls, ravaged hope, and old regrets. He made them into things that came out new, though not necessarily bright. It could not be said Pinoy was a maker of nice things so much as needed things. That was how he came to make the poor man's wife.

Afterwards Rashi, his housekeeper, watched while Pinoy and the poor man ran their hands over the marzipan form, sticking their fingers in all her crevices to make certain the depth was just right, licking their fingers afterward to catch the sweetness that clung to them. While Rashi watched, Pinoy gave the poor man a long, guided tour of his new wife's confectionery morphology—"You see how the breasts, just so, and the thighs, so firm, and the chin, you said small, and the nose, you said pert,"—and the poor man nodded, his eyes bright.

"Her upkeep will be less expensive than a real wife,” Abram said to Pinoy. “That is where my plan lies. The butcher on Machester and his seven sons are delivering meat for free to their customers. I'm only one man. How can I be expected to do such a thing? Now she can run the shop, and I shall deliver meat. And when I've saved a few pennions you shall make me seven, no nine, no twelve fine sons. They will be made of iron perhaps, or something stronger than marzipan at least."

When they had gone, Rashi went and touched the new creation's smooth, golden brow and the delicate curve of her eyelids, under which lay pieces of blue glass that would be her eyes. She stroked the marzipan throat, touched the woman's shoulders, perfectly rounded, and put her arms around herself tightly. She looked for a while longer, then went back to the kitchen.

* * * *

"Have you seen her? The Marzi?"

"Marzi?"

"The Marzipan. Pinoy's Marzipan. He made her for poor Abram."

Within days the entire left bank of Ulmagon knew about the marzipan wife. The other side of the city, with its high, white houses, couldn't care less about the left side where things leaned and the wonderful tick-tock magic of their own clockwork sorcery was bastardized by the uncertain necromancy of men like Pinoy.

They came after Rashi with many “how did he's,” and “tell me about's,” but she shook her head. Don't know. Can't say. If she had, Pinoy would scold her, though she was too old for scoldings, really. Rashi knew her business, and it was none of theirs.

The next day, the rains of Omestas began. Pinoy ordered her out into the torrents to poor Abram's house, to see how the new wife was coming along. Rashi took off her light shift to put on her thick hose, her woolen socks, her boots, her undergarments and overthings, her gloves, her scarf, her hooded cloak, and her wide-brimmed hat. She traveled from Par Felling to the butchery on Melog where Abram lived, and knocked on the door.

He answered, looking disheveled and upset. “Oh good. Rashi. You must come in. Tell my Marzi about the rain, please."

The marzipan wife was in the kitchen, staring at a collection of pots and a hearth-fire.

"Why?” she said as Abram and Rashi entered, continuing a conversation from before.

"She doesn't understand about the cooking, and the pots,” Abram said. “Also, she doesn't understand about the rain."

"She understands the cooking and the pots,” Rashi told him, motioning to where Marzi had put a pot of water on the hook over the fire. “She doesn't understand why. She has no need to eat. She doesn't understand why you do."

"Yes.” Marzi nodded. “Why?"

Rashi saw the finished product of Pinoy's working for the first time. The bits of blue glass had become round, wet, fragile blue eyes. The marzipan form had become a golden flesh unusual for rainy Ulmagon, where skin like Rashi's—pale and white—characterized the people who hurried to and fro between awnings and across the swollen river five months out of seven.

"It is because he must first cook the food, then put it in his body in order to live,” she told the woman.

"Why?"

"It's the way he works.” Rashi shrugged.

"Why?"

Rashi turned to Abram. “This is your own fault,” she said. “You remembered well enough about the breasts and thighs and nose, but you didn't tell Pinoy to put any thought into her."

Abram blinked. “Thought? In her head?"

"That's right. Do you want to know what Pinoy put there instead? Rose petals. Oh yes, they're very pretty, and she'll always love you because she's got them in her heart as well, but she'll never be able to think with them. She'll always be simple."

Abram watched his new wife wander over to the side-board, pick up a chicken thigh, a roll of uncooked dough, and a carrot. She put them in the cooking pot together.

"But can she learn?"

"Little pieces. Cooking, probably. Cleaning. Dressing herself. But never anything substantial."

Abram watched his wife. “Well. If she can learn, she will. And what man never wanted a wife without any thought in her?” He smiled at his joke.

"She's so lovely. But you must teach her about the rain, Rashi.” He turned to Pinoy's shop-girl urgently. “Please. Of all things, she must know about the rain. I love her."

So Rashi tightened her gloves, and went to Marzi. She took the woman by the hand, and led her to the door. Together, they stared at the rivulets coming down from the roof, and beyond that, the leaning drizzle blown in from the west.

"You mustn't go into the rain,” Rashi told her. “Nor ever get wet. Do you understand?"

"Why?” Marzi asked.

Rashi took her hand, and thrust it out into the runoff from the roof. Where the water fell on Marzi's flesh, her smooth, real flesh, it reminded her element of what it truly was. She sagged in ripples where the marzipan ran off.

Rashi brought her back into the house, and smoothed her finger over the damaged places until they were flesh again.

"You'll go away,” she said. “You'll go away, and never come back."

Marzi stared at her. “Why?"

"Because that is what happens,” Rashi said. “You're only marzipan, after all. Do you want to dissolve away?"

The marzipan woman shook her head.

"Then you must not get wet. Wear gloves. Don't leave the house. Watch out for the fire as well. Be careful."

Rashi stayed the evening, taught Marzi how to cook, and took home a nice cut of beef for Pinoy from Abram's shop for her troubles. She watched him while he ate, eyeing the familiar pale brow, the disheveled beard and slight paunch that might have been endearing to some. Then, while she gathered up his dishes and put them in the empty washing tub, she stiffened at his touch lingering in the small of her back. His questioning finger ran along the length of her shoulder and arm.

"No, Pinoy,” she said.

"You're about as much use to me as a doll made of straw.” He dropped his hand.

"Maybe you should make one of those,” she replied. She waited until he got to the door, then said, “Why would you make a woman out of marzipan, in a city where it rains five months out of seven?"

"May as well ask me why I would make one out of salt,” he said.

"Well?"

"It was all he could afford. Sugar and salt are much easier than cloth or metal. And sugar . . . well, I thought it might work better this time."

"Maybe it will,” she said.

"Mmm.” He retreated to his study, and she prepared herself for the washing of dishes.

* * * *

For the first three months, Rashi visited Abram and his wife when she could, braving the rain to teach Marzi about small things—sewing and buttons and combs and petticoats and cooking and cleaning. She always received something nice for Pinoy from Abram—sausage or a slice of pork—because the man might be poor, but he was thankful.

Day after day she cared for Pinoy. Night after night, she rejected his advances, watching him walk slowly back to his study, miserable and confused, in a way she could not comfort. He was a kind man. He had tried for a long time to endear her to him, with small gifts and caresses. She read his books, studied his texts, learned and formed and expanded her thoughts until she knew of parody and romance and dynamism and longing. Still, neither he nor his books managed to touch her meaningfully, and never had.

Meanwhile, Abram became discontent.

Rashi heard about it from the neighbors.

"Oh, a row last night in the poor man's house! Some yelling, and I swear he hit her, though it sounded like a man punching a sandbag!"

"What did they say?” Rashi asked.

"Why?” quoted the gossiper. “Why? I'll tell you why. Because I say so is why. But why, my love? Don't ask why. Just because I say so, just because—"

Rashi walked away then, having heard enough.

* * * *

As they moved into the fourth month, the month where dogs often went mad at the unending rain and ran howling through the streets, the month where the gutters spilled over and flooded the streets with excrement, the month where men would murder one another over a card-game or nothing at all, Marzi still failed to understand money. Abram begged Rashi every day to come and teach his wife, and every day she sat across the kitchen table, pushing pennions around in front of Marzi—"Seven pennions is a quorot. Five quorots is a slathe. Now, if I bought twelve pennions worth of beef, and gave you a slathe, how much would you give me back?"

Inevitably, driven by her generous rose-petal spirit, no doubt, Marzi would try to return all the money, and even some of her own. At first Abram would stomp from the room, muttering under his breath. Then he refused to come in the room at all, preferring to yell from the hallway, “Three quorots and two pennions! By the bleeding river, I told you that yesterday! You cannot run the shop if you give away every pennion we make!"

Though Marzi could not cry, her lips would tremble. “Th-three quorots and two pennions,” she would stutter miserably, and push a handful of coins back at Rashi. But it was useless. The coins and their values made no more sense to her than food.

The tales of shouting and abuse continued. No one much bothered with it. It was useful gossip fodder for a while, but in the end the Marzi wasn't a real thing, and she belonged to Abram, so who were they to interfere? Besides, bruises never showed on her marzipan skin. She could be hurt, but never show the damage.

Rashi would tell Pinoy of this as she watched him eat. If he blamed himself for not putting any thought into the woman, he never admitted it

"Rose petals,” he said once, and only once. “He wanted rose petals. I gave him exactly what he asked for."

"Perhaps it just isn't meant to work at all,” she replied, picking up his dishes. “It has never seemed like a good idea to me, Pinoy, this idolatry of confections, this making of needed things out of odds and ends and cast-off garbage. Real need can't be salved by these liniments of pretend."

He chuckled. “Liniments of pretend,” he said. “How you talk, Rashi. That, at least, entertains me for a while."

* * * *

The end came in the fifth month of rain, and Rashi couldn't help but wonder afterward whether things might have gone better if Abram had managed to make it through the rainy months.

A neighbor came to the door of Pinoy's shop one afternoon, and when they let him in he gasped, “It's Abram. He's taken her to the river."

Pinoy rushed out before Rashi could get all her overthings on. When she at last got to the river, her scarf wrapped tight around her mouth and chin, her gloved hand raised to ward off the rain against the upper portion of her face, she found Pinoy struggling to sit up, his hand pressed against a darkening bruise on his face.

"Please, Abram. There may still be something we can do—"

"I told you to stay away!” The rain made dark thorns of the hair plastered to Abram's cheeks and forehead. He had something in his hands.

It was his wife.

Marzi had been stripped of her clothing, and dangled in the water like a sack, held fast by the wrists. Her legs were gone, leaving stumps. The rain and the splash of river water had dragged down on her, here and here and here, so that her face sagged; one of her blue glass eyes was gone, and her shoulder was a chunk, like some child's neglected treat, half-devoured.

"I love you,” she cried, struggling in his grasp. “Why? Why?"

"Don't ask why!” Abram said. “Don't ask why!"

"But I'll go away in the water,” she said, just before a small wave rose up and took her chin. Little by little she became a torso, a breast-less clump, and finally Abram let go of her hands. The rest of her sank into the river, dissipated in thick brown swirls, and was gone. Further down the river she became so much sludge, bound for the sea.

Abram sank down on the bank of the river and wept. His tears made no difference to the rain.

Rashi went to help Pinoy stand, and walked him home. As she bathed his bruised cheek in cool water, cleaning the small cut that had opened up, he stared at her.

"You didn't try to stop him."

"What could I do? She was never real to him. And she was broken."

"You felt nothing at all?"

She stopped her ministrations, and looked at him. “I never have."

"He loved her at first,” he insisted.

"He loved the idea of her. He loved her thighs and breasts and nose. He loved the liniment of her pretend."

He rose, more stooped than ever, slow and careful as an old man. He turned to go, and she stopped him again, just at the door.

"Abram said, ‘what man never wanted a wife without any thought in her.’ He said that about his Marzi, when he first loved her,” she told him.

He stared at her for a long time, perhaps remembering running his fingers over her morphology, checking the depths of crevices.

"Do you think she can still feel, Pinoy? Out there in the sea?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think she's alone? Is there marzipan in the sea?"

"No,” he said. “There is no marzipan in the sea. Only salt.” He sighed.

"Pinoy,” she said after a moment. “I wish you had given me rose petals instead of sage. You would have been happier."

"Yes,” he said. “You're probably right.” Then he left.

She went to his workshop and sat there until night, staring around at the cast-off things: the pigeon feathers and old shoes and bits of string and jars of herbs and a half-empty sack of salt. In the dark, Rashi took off her wide-brimmed hat, her hooded cloak, her scarf, her gloves, her overthings and undergarments, her boots, her woolen socks, and her thick hose.

"Only salt,” she said.

She remembered how she had ground the almonds, how she had cooked the Marzi batch by batch over the fire: drawn her out, poured the simple batter on Pinoy's marble slab, kneaded her and shaped her, and slept by her that night while she cooled. She remembered how Pinoy had come to press the rose petals deep in the marzipan chest and head, and smoothed over the imprints of his fingers.

Rashi stepped out, naked, into the last rains of Omestas, unnoticed on the night-slick streets of Ulmagon; one needed thing amongst thousands, remembering Marzi and the way she bled away down the roads of water.

Little-by-little Rashi turned into less-and-less. When she could no longer walk, she crawled. When she could no longer crawl she lay still, her eyes open to the sky. Somewhere amongst the puddles, with the very substance of her being, Rashi became her own, small ocean.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Rowboats, Sacks of Gold

Tim Pratt

1.

First time. College. A bagel shop with bright murals done as part of a WPA project in the thirties when the restaurant was a public building of some kind, a painting of happy workers shearing wheat with sickles, a yellow-and-orange sunset spread across the wall. I ordered a plain bagel with raspberry cream cheese—I've had an abiding love for raspberries, since I was a little girl. The boy behind the counter flirted with me and I looked at him blankly; how could he flirt at six-thirty in the morning? It was too early. I couldn't possibly be cute so early.

I also ordered raspberry tea. The boy behind the counter said I'd better be careful, if I kept on this way I would turn into a raspberry. I wanted to pat him gently and tell him it would be okay, that someday some girl would like that kind of joke.

I took my food outside. The sun was barely up, and not even half as bright as the one in the mural. I shivered in the chill coming off the bay, just a few blocks away. There were trees in the courtyard, I didn't know what kind, shedding pink blossoms.

A man sat at a table in the otherwise untenanted courtyard, with an enormous wooden board set up before him. A plate rested on the chair beside him, but the food was gone, just a dusting of crumbs left behind. I couldn't tell what he'd been eating.

A mason jar full of white and black smooth stones stood on the chair beside his plate. He reached into the jar in a measured way, without looking away from the board, and drew out a white stone. He placed it on the board, seemingly arbitrarily. There were already several stones of both colors on the board. He contemplated the configuration for a moment, then reached into the mason jar, again without looking, and drew out a black stone. He placed it on the board and nodded to himself.

I recognized the game, though it took a moment. Go. I'd heard of it. I'd never played it.

He looked up and caught my eye. He was older than I'd thought at first, lines around his eyes, careworn, but I liked his face—it looked genuine and lived-in, if a little sad. He wore a light jacket, pale green, zipped all the way to his chin. He nodded toward the chair across from him, on the other side of the board, the invitation implicit—sit.

I sat. It seemed the thing to do, all a piece of the morning, as inevitable as midday following dawn.

"Go,” he said, drawing a white stone from the jar. I wasn't sure if he was identifying the game or telling me to take a turn.

"I've never played."

His hand trembled, slightly. I might not have noticed, but I could see the movement telegraphed through the polished stone. He didn't look at me. “Never played. So. Would you like to?"

I shrugged. I often shrugged. I fancied myself jaded.

He explained the rules to me, briefly but clearly.

When he'd finished, I frowned. “But I've been watching you, and you haven't been removing the captured stones at all."

"I keep track in my head,” he said. “Truly advanced players don't need a board at all."

"But how do you use the spaces again when you don't remove the captured stones?” I demanded.

He waved his hand dismissively. “Never mind. We'll play in the traditional way."

I played white. He devastated me methodically.

He sat back when he finished, not smugly, just naturally, a man relaxing. I frowned at the board, furious. I didn't like losing, not even then. My raspberry cream cheese bagel sat on its plate, uneaten. A flower had fallen on top of it, stuck in the pinkish cream, and that made me angry. My tea had gone cold.

"Now you've played,” the man said, sounding both solemn and satisfied. “That's one.” He stood up. “Some say Go is very symbolic."

"In what way?” I asked, vicious and sarcastic. I was an economics major, and I thought symbols were stupid.

He shrugged. It was an eloquent, shoulder-rolling shrug, the shrug of an indifferent master. A shrug to which I could at that time only aspire.

Nodding goodbye, he walked away, out of the courtyard. “Hey!” I called. “Your board!” As if he could have left it by accident, forgotten it, a board as big as a tabletop. He walked on, shoulders slumped, wispy hair lifting in the breeze.

I nudged the Go board with my finger. It was heavy as lead. It might have been carved from petrified wood.

Grumpily, I picked the blossom from the cream cheese and ate my bagel in four bites. I poured my tea out on the bricks.

I didn't see the man again for two years.

* * * *

2.

Second time. New Orleans. My last year of college, a spring break trip. I was walking alone in the French Quarter, my head thudding. I was hungover, but couldn't stand the motel room any more that morning, with the five girls I hardly considered friends and all their belongings jumbled everywhere. They were prettier than me, and they'd spent a lot of time last night showing their tits to frat boys while I tried to convince them to come listen to jazz.

New Orleans was all a-bustle, even at ten in the morning, but at some point I noticed that the noise had faded, that people no longer filled the streets. I looked up from the cobblestones and realized, with a dark thrill, that I didn't know where I was. The buildings were dark and old and ornamented, like mausoleums for giants. I walked along, wondering which way the tourist district was, wondering if I wanted to find my way out of this dark and water-stained section of the city. It might be nice, I thought, to get lost in the midst of my adult life.

Adult life had not been impressive so far. I'd changed majors three times in college, finally settling on Classical Studies as a reaction against my hatred for economics, the cold arithmetic of business. I wanted a useless course of study, knowledge for its own sake.

My love life had been as indecisive as my academic one, until finally I'd given up on serious boyfriends, settling on casual affairs. I often spent the night with the boy from the bagel shop, the same one who made the silly joke about raspberries. He never stopped thinking I looked cute in the morning. He was dumb and sweet, the romantic equivalent of empty calories, and apparently incapable of jealousy or possessiveness, all qualities which suited me fine. I wanted to touch life only lightly. It seemed easier that way.

I went down a twisty alley, thinking that it might be a shortcut to somewhere worthwhile. The alley looked like it should smell of piss and beer, but it didn't. It smelled vaguely of flowers, cherry blossoms.

I came upon a little courtyard, and found a wrought-iron table tucked under a tree (not a cherry tree; a gnarled thing, a roughened tree). The careworn man was there, sitting, and I recognized him right away. He had his jacket zipped to his chin again. Still. A green glass bottle, with a fluted neck, sat on the table, as did a deck of cards. The man looked at me, and put his hand over the cards. He nodded to the chair across the table.

I didn't feel that sense of inevitability this time, and I just stood there.

"You don't have to take my suggestions,” he said. “But it does make things go more smoothly."

I sat down. The ironwork on the seat pressed into the bottoms of my thighs. I regretted wearing such a short skirt; the metal was cold. I felt like we were sitting in a blind corner of the world, the blank backs of buildings facing us, windows unadorned by curtains and grimed by dust. Anything could happen here, any sort of transaction, and no one would ever know. It would have been sinister, except for the cherry-blossom smell.

"Absinthe,” the man said, thumping the green bottle with his fingernail, making a ting sound.

"Wormwood wine?” I asked, surprised. “Doesn't that make you go blind, and isn't it illegal?"

He shrugged, but not so expansively as that last time, two years before. This was a shrug of ordinary indifference. “You've never had it before,” he said, voice rising a little at the end, like it was a question.

"No,” I said, amused, wincing over the remnants of my hangover-headache. “Nor do I intend to have it now."

He sighed. “Suit yourself. Have you ever had your fortune read with Tarot cards?"

"No."

"That, then."

I nodded toward his hand, still covering the deck. “Go ahead."

He looked at his hand as if surprised to see it resting there, over the cards. “Oh, no.” He lifted the deck of cards, showed me the back. Worn blue playing cards, Bicycle brand. Not Tarot cards at all. “These are for . . . other games."

"What kind?"

"Mostly card cutting.” He wouldn't meet my eye. I wondered if I'd somehow embarrassed him. “You know, high card wins."

I looked at him, frowning. The man who played Go in his head also cut cards for fun? “Do you want to play that?"

"I don't think so. You've cut cards before, I assume."

"Sure. It's like flipping a coin, I've used it to decide where to go have dinner, things like that."

"Well, then. It's not important."

"So fortune telling?"

"Go to Jackson Square and pay your ten dollars like the other tourists,” he growled. His face was quite serene despite the growl. He picked up his green bottle, sloshed the liquid, sighed, and walked away.

I sat in the courtyard for a while. It didn't feel any less oppressive with him gone, and the comforting smell of cherry blossoms had faded.

I found my way back to the French Quarter easily, after turning a couple of corners at random. I went to Jackson Square, annoyed with myself for doing as the man said. I found a woman near the church, with a kind face and hoop earrings. She sat at a rickety card table, turning over Tarot cards in a desultory fashion. Too early for her to have much business, I guessed. I sat across from her.

"Ten,” she said. I handed over a bill, and it disappeared. She had me cut the deck, explaining a little about the mysteries of the Tarot, a set spiel that she delivered without much enthusiasm.

The first card she turned over was the Death card. I sighed at the cheap drama of it all, and wondered if she'd stacked the deck to make it come out that way. I hadn't expected more than a gentle scam anyway, but this was too much like a B-Movie. Death was a skeleton with its jaw agape, mowing a field of wheat with a scythe. “Now don't worry,” the fortune teller said. “Death isn't literal death, but symbolic death. Death is symbolic of transformation. There's a great change coming in your life."

That was a safe enough prediction, I thought. Everything changes. Always.

The next card was also Death. I gathered from the fortune teller's gasp that such a thing was unusual, and wondered, a bit nervously, if this was part of the scam, too. High drama. But this Death was damned unsettling, not like the cartoonish walking boneyard from the first card. This death was inhuman, for one thing, with a skull more like a pig's than a man's, complete with tusks. He stood in a meadow, slashing at pink wildflowers with a shiny silver blade.

The fortune teller turned the card over quickly, muttering. She reached for the next card, then paused. “I'll give you your ten dollars back,” she said. “Someone's messed with my deck, it's not like it should be, I'm sorry."

"It's okay,” I said, rising. I felt as if my brain were tethered to me on a string, like a balloon, and floating a few feet above my body. “It's okay, things change.” I hurried away.

I went to the Cafe du Monde. The careworn man sat at a table, with an empty chair across from him, of course. He had a plate before him, dusted with fine grains of sugar and a few crumbs.

"I got you a demitasse,” he said when I approached. I sat down and picked up the cup he'd indicated, sniffing it suspiciously. It smelled wonderful, and I drank.

"I just had the worst fortune telling ever,” I said.

"Maybe Tarot doesn't work objectively. Maybe it's a metaphor."

"For what?” He exasperated me. I'd spent perhaps forty minutes with him, total, over our two meetings, and still he exasperated me as no lover, no relative, ever had.

"That probably depends on your perspective."

I looked into my cup, at the black liquid. “There were two Death cards."

"That's odd."

"She didn't even finish telling my fortune."

"Maybe she did, and she didn't know it, and you didn't, either. You can never say you haven't had your fortune read, now."

"The second death had a pig's skull.” I looked up at him for some reaction.

A garden-variety shrug. “According to the Chinese, pigs are omens of good health.” He cocked his head, as if trying to recall something half-forgotten, slippery. “Sometimes boars are associated with the devil."

"That doesn't help me much."

He shrugged again. “Perspective.” He dropped two big silver dollars, Lady Liberty cartwheels, on the table. I wasn't sure why. He'd ordered at the counter, paid already. “Two,” he said, sounding satisfied again but not so solemn.

Sensing he was about to leave, I said “I don't even know your name."

"When I think of you,” he said, “I think of you as ‘Carla.’”

"My name isn't Carla. That's not even close."

A more impressive shrug. “Tra la.” He walked away.

I always thought of him as “Carl” after that.

* * * *

3.

Third time. San Francisco. A year after graduation. I worked at a PR firm, “slaving in the bowels” as I told my friends. I mostly copyedited and nudged pixels. It wasn't a bad life. I didn't care about my job, so I had no stress, and it paid fairly well. I didn't live in the City, but I lived close enough to go there anytime I wanted, which I did fairly often, having nothing much better to do.

Walking one afternoon in Golden Gate Park, I saw cherry blossoms on the sidewalk. “Shit,” I said, and hurried down the walk. I found Carl sitting on a bench. It was summer, but he still had his green jacket zipped to his chin. A paper plate rested on the seat next to him, smeared with a bit of mustard but otherwise empty.

He greeted me with a grave nod. I started to sit down beside him, but he held up a hand to stop me. He reached to the side of the bench and lifted a canvas-and-wooden folded thing. A camp stool, I realized. He opened it up and set it on the path. I nodded—this felt right, sitting across from him and not beside—and took my seat, perching on the flimsy stool.

"Have you ever eaten a lotus?” he asked, and lifted a plastic sack full of pale flowers. The sack came from a grocery store, and one of the handles had broken at some point and been tied back together.

"No,” I said. I'd been thinking about him a lot, off and on, about his questions, the things he said. “I don't want to eat lotus."

"A very potent flower, the lotus. You've heard of lotus-eaters? Their bliss?"

"I studied the Classics. Of course I've heard of the lotus-eaters.” I snorted. “Their bliss? They never did anything but forget. I guess that's bliss."

"Ah. I didn't realize you'd studied such things."

"It's not like we know each other well, Carl."

He looked startled, then smiled. “So you don't want the lotus?"

"That's not the thing I'm after. You always nudge me toward things I've never done before, right?"

"I don't know about always,” he said. “That's a bit lofty. We've only met twice."

"Yeah, and you did the same stuff each time, so that's always."

He shrugged, a “this doesn't matter, you're wasting time on semantics” shrug. I could understand his shrugs better than I understood most people's conversations.

"Well this time,” I said. “I want to fly.” I'd planned this for ages. I wanted to see what he'd do.

"You've flown before.” He yawned, not a bit put out.

"What do you mean? What, in my dreams? Does that count?"

"You've flown sixteen times. The first time on a trip to Ohio to visit family when you were a little girl, most recently to go back home for a funeral, many times in between."

I wanted to ask him how he knew that about me, when he apparently didn't know my name or what I'd studied in school, but I was afraid that if I asked, he'd answer, and I might not like the answer. Instead I said “Airplanes."

He held his arms out to his sides and moved them up and down a couple of times, like a slow-motion bird flapping. “Flight."

"Well.” I thought that over. “How about love?"

"What?"

"Love. I've never been in love."

"You have. The boy at the bagel shop."

"That wasn't love,” I said, but immediately doubted it. His tousled hair, the bliss, the wish to protect him—suddenly I missed him, very much. “Not the kind of love I mean,” I said more quietly.

"Ah. Well, I'm better with more concrete things, anyway."

I wanted to ask if he was some kind of genie, but I didn't. I knew better. I didn't know what he was, but he wasn't something out of an Arabian Night.

"I really wasted the first two,” I said slowly. “A game of Go, and a fortune telling. I could have gotten those without you, even.” He didn't respond, not even with a facial expression. “Do I only get three? I mean, isn't it usually three of whatever, in cases like this?"

"You get as many as you get."

"And the lotus?"

"Will be an end to this."

"The lotus eaters never changed,” I said. “They never . . . transformed.” I thought of the Death card. I wondered if Go was a metaphor for transformation, too, and decided that, of course, it could be, just as pigs could be devils or good luck, depending on which way you looked at them.

I looked at the man. His eyes were gray, and very lovely. I'd never noticed that before. “Am I wasting something?” I asked, my throat tight, suddenly afraid. I felt like one of those foolish people in the old stories who get three wishes and use them on stupid things like sausages and rowboats and sacks of gold.

"You can do something you've never done before,” he said. “Same as always. Same as you can do on any day of the week. Same as anyone can do. Maybe you haven't wasted anything. Maybe you've done just the right things, little things that changed your life in major ways, only you don't know, because you'll never see what would have been."

"I changed my life with a game of Go and a fortune-telling that told me nothing?"

He shrugged one of his all-encompassing shrugs.

I felt on the edge of revelation—it was like standing on a high ledge, looking down on a street, seeing it from a viewpoint I'd never imagined. “Everyone dies,” I said finally. “Death is one thing everyone does, that they've never done before."

"Death is always the last new thing,” he agreed.

"In this world,” I said, partly question, partly statement, partly plea.

"This is the world I'm concerned with. Anything else is outside my realm. I told you, I'm better with concrete things. Sometimes those things can stand in for abstractions.” He rolled his shoulders. I loved that shrug, I loved it suddenly and fiercely. “Abstractions give me a headache."

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, my face close to his. He looked at me, surprised by my sudden proximity, his hair rising like smoke in the breeze and waving. He didn't look any older than the first time I'd met him, or any sadder, or in any way different at all.

"You've been doing this for a long time,” I said.

"For as long as I can remember."

"You're not much of a spiritual guide. I don't understand anything."

"I just nudge people along the path, Carla. I can't control which flowers they stop to smell, whether they shade their eyes or look straight at the sun, what shapes they see in the clouds."

Perspective, I thought. I wondered if he had any perspective, if he saw anything in the clouds anymore, if he noticed the path at all. If anything in his life (if you could call it a life) ever changed anymore, if it ever had. I thought not. I decided that meeting me didn't count. Not yet.

I stood up and kicked over the camp stool, and for the first time he was really surprised—his face opening up, his eyes widening, his mouth gaping.

I sat down on the bench next to him, close enough for our legs to touch. He turned his head, looking at me, closer than we'd ever been. His breath smelled like fresh cherries. “Carla—” he said.

"I think we should change our names for each other,” I said.

I kissed him.

It took a moment, but then he kissed back, and I unzipped his jacket.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

White Rabbit Triptych

E.L. Chen

1. Alice

Sarah will spend most of her short life waiting for it to catch up to her.

Her premature birth is an indication of what is to come. By the age of twenty, Sarah will master the art of indifferent boredom. She'll be the first to arrive at parties. She'll bloat on water and breadsticks while chafing her elbows on restaurant tables. She'll impress potential employers with her apparent enthusiasm for job interviews and she'll know every magazine in her dentist's office cover to cover.

Thus Sarah will die as she lives.

* * * *

Sarah's death will fall on a Tuesday, a sunny afternoon that'll put all but Sarah in a good mood. The light flooding through the office windows will aggravate her already furious headache. She'll wheedle two extra-strength Tylenol from a co-worker but they won't help, as her editor's going to burst into her cubicle after lunch and shout, “Get it straight, Wong.” (He likes to address his employees by their last name as if he's running a Victorian orphans’ asylum.)

Sarah will wince, bringing her hands to her temples. Her editor will continue, “It's a good article, but you got your myths wrong. The person who kills Death becomes Death, not whoever beats him in a game of chess."

He'll rant about the young generation and popular culture until he notices Sarah holding her head in agony. Then he'll gruffly tell her to go home and sleep it off.

Sarah will gratefully sweep up her purse and splurge on cab fare home; her bus doesn't come along for another fifteen minutes. She'll stagger into her apartment, jerk the curtains closed and collapse on her futon.

As she falls asleep in the dark sanctuary of her bedroom, an aneurysm will claim her fourteen minutes ahead of schedule.

Sarah will open her eyes and climb off the futon, only to discover that her body still lies on the mattress. No amount of pushing and prodding will persuade her body to get up with her. When the absent pulse reveals that she's dead, Sarah will plop down beside her body in shock. She won't be able to believe that her existence has come down to two monosyllables:

Now what?

Where are the pearly gates? The lighted doorway? Sarah will review everything she knows about death and conclude that her editor is right; she should've paid more attention in school and less to movies. Perhaps then she would've been able to recognize the afterlife's rabbithole.

The sound of the front door opening will startle Sarah out of her confusion. She'll creep to the bedroom door and peek outside.

A tall, hooded figure in a long black coat will enter the apartment.

Sarah will watch as the intruder ignores her TV and stereo and heads straight for the bedroom. As he steps inside, she'll plaster herself against the wall, behind the door, wondering if he'll be able to see her now that she's dead.

The intruder will turn to Sarah instead of her prostate body. “Ssssarah,” he'll hiss. Terrified, Sarah will seize the closest heavy object—a lamp—and swing it with all her might.

The sound of cracking bone will echo within the room. Sarah will gasp as the intruder's coat drops to the floor, without his body in it. Her would-be attacker will have disappeared.

She'll toe the crumpled fabric and discover that it's a hooded cloak, not a trenchcoat.

It won't be the career she dreamed of, but she has nothing better to do. She'll collect the cloak from the carpet, brush off the dust, and slip it on. It'll be a perfect fit, despite her small stature.

A rectangular object will bump against her hip. Sarah will search the folds of the cloak and draw out a leather-bound day planner. An earmarked page—Tuesday April the twenty-seventh—will reveal her illegible name among a list of others.

The next person on the list will be slated to die at five forty-three. Emma Linardi. As Sarah reads the name aloud, her apartment will shimmer like a wet rainbow trout and fade away, and she'll find herself in a hospital room.

A pale and withered elderly woman will lie in the hospital bed. Sarah will frown; according to the pulse monitor, Ms. Linardi's heartbeat is normal. Sarah will check the day planner again, and glance at her watch.

Five twenty-nine.

Sarah will pull up a chair, sighing, and pick up a copy of Cosmopolitan from a pile of magazines.

* * * *

2. The Rabbithole

Quentin Smith is at the top of his game.

Mr. Punctuality, his colleagues call him, good-naturedly to his face and mockingly behind his back. He arrives at work each morning at nine o'clock sharp. He makes all his deadlines and never works overtime. The executives have noticed his reliability and the department is abuzz with rumors. Smith merely shrugs when colleagues speculate that he's up for a promotion. “All in good time,” he says.

At home, dinners are never left cold and uneaten on the table. He pays bills and taxes on time and puts out the garbage on the right day. The twins know that when Daddy says he'll pick them up from daycare at six-thirty, he'll be there at six-thirty.

Friends are in awe of his healthy marriage and pester him for the secret of its success. Smith always laughs. “There is no secret,” he says. “Just good timing."

* * * *

May the eighth, a Saturday. Smith's personal Day of Judgment. The executives wake him with an early-morning phone call, explaining the urgency of a new RFP. The proposal's due in a week, but they feel he can handle it. They need him to come to the office in exactly one hour. Smith recognizes that this could make or break his career. His wife turns over in bed and sleepily wishes him luck.

Traffic is busy for a Saturday morning; Smith guesses that there must be a sports event downtown. He glances at his watch. Even if the highway is bumper-to-bumper, there should enough time to get to the office.

He approaches the last major intersection before the onramp. The car in the opposite left-turn lane is a shiny red pick-up, the very truck Smith used to dream about during his bachelor days. Of course he traded in the fantasy for a roomy SUV when he got married and had kids, but he can still dream.

Perhaps that's why he doesn't notice when the truck makes an ill-timed turn. Smith's SUV bites into a shiny red side panel and spits out a handful of broken glass.

As his face smacks into an airbag, Smith's eyes bulge in the direction of the pick-up's driver. Her face is twisted in a frustrated snarl. Traffic is already driving around the collision, as if it anticipates their heated dispute.

Smith switches off the ignition, unbuckles his well-strained seatbelt, and does something he hasn't done since the twins were born.

He shouts, “Fuck!"

He slams his fist into the dashboard.

"I can't be late!” he adds. His protest ripples through the still air.

Smith cannot be late. Thus time as he knows it peels back, like an onion, to reveal another layer.

* * * *

3. Wonderland

Ten minutes was all Donald needed to have a successful career and a happy future with the woman of his dreams.

Unfortunately he was doomed to be one step behind his life. The career died before he graduated from high school; he slept through his alarm clock the day of the SATs. The love of his life gave him one last chance and he accidentally stood her up.

He figured that she would've eventually dumped him because of his inability to hold down a job. His chronic lateness did not find favor with interviewers. Those who hired him anyway had to let him go for tardiness. After a decade of tenacious slacking, an exasperated relative pulled a few strings and found him a graveyard shift job at a factory. The night manager didn't care whether he came to work late as long as Donald filled his quota.

Thus Donald could lag behind all he wanted. It wasn't as if his life were going somewhere, anyway. And now that he saw little of the sun, he was at last free from the rules of time. Or so he thought.

All Donald wanted that weekend was a carton of milk and a pack of smokes. He'd come home from work in the morning and had decided to buy groceries before the Saturday afternoon rush. He changed his clothes and climbed back into the dilapidated hatchback without bothering to buckle his seatbelt. The grocery store was just around the corner, after all.

He pulled out into the main street, puzzled that traffic could have become so busy in so short at time. At a congested intersection, he noticed a young Asian woman standing on the sidewalk with a magazine tucked under the arm of her long black coat. She was alternately stealing glances at him and checking her watch, her brow furrowed. He wondered if she knew him.

He was so distracted that he nearly rear-ended the SUV in front of him as it collided into a red pick-up. The pick-up's driver looked pissed off, even though she was at fault, and Donald was thankful that it wasn't his hide that was going to be chewed up and spit out this morning.

The young Asian woman on the corner stared unabashedly at him now, annoyed, as if he were to blame for the accident.

"Women,” he grumbled.

As he drove around the collision, he realized that if he'd reached the intersection seconds earlier, he would've been the one picking his front bumper out of the pick-up's side. Or, more likely, the truck would've sent him spinning across two lanes of traffic. Considering his hatchback's age and condition and the concrete barriers at the side of the road—and that he wasn't wearing a seatbelt—he probably wouldn't have survived the crash.

He shivered. The air trembled around him, as if rent by a trumpet blast.

* * * *

The dead went first. At least that's how it appeared to Donald. He drove a block and discovered that traffic had come to a standstill. A long, single-file line of people was winding down the street, down toward the intersection from which he'd come, blocking cars in both directions.

Donald couldn't believe they were merely going to see the accident. Human curiosity overcame common sense; he switched off the ignition and joined the other drivers who had also abandoned their cars to watch the procession.

Startled gasps and shouts sounded around him as Donald's fellow drivers recognized deceased loved ones in the line-up. Donald looked at them, askance, wondering if he'd been denied the full experience of a mass hallucination.

Then he saw his father.

Donald tried to duck behind his car, but it was too late. His father had spotted him.

"This is your fault,” Donald Sr. said as he passed by. The bastard wore the same ill-fitting suit he'd been buried in. “Damn it, you can't even die on time."

Donald turned away. His father disappeared down the street. Donald went back to his car and sat inside, having no choice but to wait for the procession to finish.

To his astonishment, as soon as the parade of dead ended, the living followed. The bystanders eagerly melted into the line without any concern for their vehicles and belongings. They left their keys in the ignition and their purses and briefcases on the seat. It wasn't just the drivers; people streamed out of nearby coffee shops and dental offices and joined the line-up. Donald, confused, climbed out of his car and pushed rudely into the middle of the crowd.

"What the hell's going on?” he asked. “Why are you all lining up?"

"There's been a rupture in the space-time continuum. Linear time is no more,” a middle-aged man answered. Donald let him slip by without question. Obviously he'd seen one too many episodes of Star Trek.

"It's eternity,” the next person in line said, her eyes glowing as she clutched the crystal pendant at her neck. “We've transcended time, and we're being elevated to the next astral plain."

"It's Judgment Day,” another said with a self-righteous glare. “The living and dead are to be tested before entering the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘There is no difference in the Lord's sight between one day and a thousand years.’”

Donald's fingers twitched; he had never needed a smoke as desperately as he did now.

A younger voice piped up:

"Time to follow the white rabbit down to Wonderland."

The kid was about twelve years old, but Donald paid attention as the lazy drawl reminded him of himself at that age.

"Rabbit?” he said.

The kid pointed to the front of the line. Donald squinted, making out a slim figure dressed in a long black coat. It was the young Asian woman who'd been staring at him earlier. “One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Grim Reaper herself,” the kid said. “Though I always thought she'd be more—I dunno—Caucasian."

Donald replayed the accident in his head, remembering the woman's annoyed look. So his father had been right; he'd been late for his death and consequently he'd screwed up the universe. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He eyed the long queue. It appeared endless, unfolding into the horizon, and there were still hordes of people joining it. He glanced at his watch. The hands had frozen, but he figured that he had enough time to run to the store as he'd intended. Wherever the line led to, he doubted that they sold cigarettes there.

* * * *

Ten minutes was all that was missing from the story of Donald's life. And his death.

He tossed a handful of change on the deserted grocery store's checkout counter and slipped the carton of cigarettes into his shirt pocket. He lit up in the parking lot, and then made his way back to the main street.

The line was gone.

Donald cast aside the cigarette butt and ran down the street between abandoned cars. He was alone. He reached the intersection where the accident had occurred, hoping that Death would still be there to let him into wherever everyone else had gone. Bits of glass crunched under his workboots as he skidded to a halt. The Asian woman in the black coat was nowhere to be seen.

As Donald slumped against the dented SUV to catch his breath, he noticed two unusual items. First of all, someone had discarded a dog-eared magazine on the SUV's still-warm hood. It was a glossy Cosmopolitan. Donald flipped it away in disgust.

Secondly, a folded piece of paper was tucked under one of the SUV's windshield wipers. His name was written on it. He snatched it up.

Donald, it said in a woman's neat handwriting, I got tired of waiting. Sorry.

The page had been ripped out of a day planner. Sunday May the ninth. Tomorrow, if there was such a thing.

Donald crumpled up the note and dropped it onto the broken glass.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Salesman

Philip Brewer

The blonde sipped her gin and tonic, looking at me appraisingly over the rim of her glass. “So, what do you do for a living?"

How to answer? It wasn't a hard question. It was just that I hardly ever bought attractive women drinks, and therefore had limited experience in making the related small talk. “I'm a kind of salesman, I guess,” I said.

She finished the drink. I immediately signaled the bartender for another for each of us and tossed back the rum and coke I'd been working on.

"What kind of salesman?” she asked.

I couldn't think of anyway to make my work sound interesting, so I just said, “I demonstrate nanoscale medical devices for Brooks-Holmes."

"Really?” she said. “What exactly do you demonstrate? But don't give away any secrets! I should warn you that I work for NivaPharm."

We both grinned at the notion that we were competitors.

Talking about my work wasn't what I'd had in mind when I introduced myself, but she seemed to be interested. “I work with people who have minor affect disorders,” I said. “For example, I get a lot of clients who feel that they aren't decisive enough. For that, Brooks-Holmes makes Nowaverin."

I paused, trying to think of a way to turn the conversation to her, but before I thought of anything, she said, “What does Nowaverin do?"

"It adjusts certain neurotransmitter levels. It's one of the safe ones that the government allows us to demo without a prescription."

I broke off, for just a moment. The NivaPharm people had been criticized recently for going even farther than Brooks-Holmes in pushing the limits of what could be done without a doctor's prescription. I was afraid that she might think I was making a pointed comment, but she didn't seem to take offense.

"It doesn't really have much effect on people who are already decisive,” I explained. “But people who are hesitant, never able to make up their minds, always second guessing themselves—for them it makes a big difference."

"I bet you're good at your job,” she said, gazing at me with big, blue eyes. Normally a line like that would make me figure that she was making fun of me, but she seemed sincere.

"Well, There is a knack to it."

She put her drink down and gave me her full attention.

I shrugged. “It's a matter of timing. I give them a dose of Nowaverin programmed to expire in just ten minutes. Then I ask them some questions that give them a chance to make choices.

"They're so pleased with themselves,” I continued, shaking my head. “Finally being able to make a decision and not instantly second-guess themselves! I'll make a comment or two, raise some of the doubts that they know they'd be raising, if it weren't for the Nowaverin. But they find that they're steadfast.

"Then,” I said, holding my finger and thumb an inch apart, “I put just a bit of pressure on them to invest in a permanent treatment. Of course, pressure is just the wrong tactic for people with some Nowaverin in their brain. If I've timed it right—and that's what I'm good at—they'll start to reject my pressure and then: Bam!” I slapped the bar for emphasis. “The Nowaverin expires."

"And then they're not so sure of themselves any more,” the blonde said.

"That's right,” I said. “Suddenly they don't have what it takes to make a decision and stick to it. But, they remember what it was like."

"I bet it's an easy sale after that."

"Yep."

She started to speak, then her PDA beeped.

It was just the opening I'd been waiting for. I pulled out my PDA and opened my mouth to ask her to beam me her home phone number.

But before I could get the words out, my throat closed on them. She'd never give me her phone number. She'd laugh in my face if I even raised the topic. She'd no doubt been laughing at me the whole time I was talking to her. She probably had friends watching, laughing at me make a fool of myself, buying drinks for a beautiful woman like this.

The blonde smiled again. “Did you like the feeling of confidant mastery you just experienced? If so, you'll want to buy NivaPharm's new Viraplus. With it, you can do things you never thought you could. I'll beam you my business card and a fact sheet."

I don't know what my expression was: Shock? Horror? Shame? Whatever it was, it prompted a hard-edged smile from the woman as she pushed aside what was left of her drink and stood up. “Don't look at me like that, big boy. You know you liked it."

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Legacy

F. Brett Cox

He brought her flowers every day. There was a patch halfway between his house and hers that belonged to no one he knew of, and there was always something there. Nice ones in the spring—daffodils and jonquils, magnolia blossoms from the lone tree near the edge of the road. But even in the cold months there were small blossoms to be had, and he always stopped and picked some of whatever was there. It was the least he could do. If things continued as they were, it was all he could do.

She met him at the door and took his gift for the thousandth time with the appearance of as much gratitude as she had the first time. He did not know after so long if appearance and reality were the same. He supposed it really didn't matter.

He carefully removed his hat as he crossed the threshold of her home. Rather than waiting for his hostess to take it, he hung it himself on the dark maple coat rack that stood by the door. She allowed him that familiarity. He followed her into the parlor and paused as she placed the flowers in a waiting vase on a table beneath a picture of her grandparents—not the ones who were the source of all the troubles, but her mother's parents. They stared rigidly from the wall, the man's forehead just to the edge of baldness beneath his white hair and above his crooked tie, the woman's mouth drooping at the corners, the left side of her head obscured by a diagonal white cloth. Two years after he first started calling on her, she had told him that the cloth was there to hide a tumor that her grandmother never had removed. God had placed that mark on her, her grandmother said, and no man was going to cut it away.

They're lovely, Franklin, she said. You shouldn't trouble yourself so.

It's my pleasure, Constance, he replied. Always.

They sat side by side on the divan and talked pleasantly, neutrally before going in to the supper she had prepared. Her students were undergoing their first encounter with a complete play of Shakespeare; one of the girls, her favorite of the term, had asked if Juliet wasn't going to get a beating from her father for being so disobedient. The demand for auto supplies was increasing so much Franklin had determined to double his orders for the month and set up a display in the store. There was talk of war in the papers, but President Wilson promised not to shed American blood over European complaints, and the state house in Montgomery seemed more concerned with how, or if, to pay for flood control along the Tombigbee river. Her hands rested comfortably in her lap and her skirt brushed the floor. Franklin had seen pictures in the catalogs that came into the store of newer fashions, skirts that hung only to the tops of the ladies’ high-button shoes, but Constance had not changed yet. He sometimes dreamed of her ankles.

After a decent interval, they went into the dining room, where he sat at one corner of the dining table. The table was absurdly long. Her parents had been known for their dinner parties, but after their passing Constance had not kept up the tradition. She served the meal—green salad with fresh garden tomatoes, cream of spinach soup, pork chops with gravy, new potatoes and sweet corn, peach cobbler for dessert—and then sat across from him. She did not have a maid, although with what her parents had left her, she could easily have afforded one. She did not really need to earn a living teaching. But she preferred to do these things. They ate heartily. Constance was a wonderful cook.

You've outdone yourself, he said. A man couldn't ask for a better meal.

Thank you, she said. Here, have some more potatoes.

After dinner he helped her clear the table and stack the dishes in the kitchen sink. He always offered to wash them, and she always declined. She was so precise about some things, less so about others—in sharp contrast to his own mother, she had no objection to letting the dishes wait until bedtime, or even until the next day. It was one of many things he loved about her.

They returned to the parlor. He reclaimed his spot on the divan, and she sat at the piano and played for him. Some of the old songs—"Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” with the perfect air of melancholy that had brought tears to the eyes of the old men and women at the Burns Society fundraiser last winter. Some of the new songs—she had just acquired the music for the latest from Mr. Berlin, and she played it with total, uncalculated delight. He tapped time gently with his foot and felt himself smiling. When the sun finally set, he turned up the lamps and she sat back down beside him. It was March and the days were getting longer.

At this point it was all right to take her hand, to hold it and relax into the divan and look into her eyes, so deeply blue in the day, turned slightly green in the lamplight. She laid her head carefully on his shoulder and stroked the top of his hand with her own.

I could stay like this forever, she said.

You can.

No, we have to work tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that.

You can stay with me forever. I can stay with you. I don't have to leave. If you'll just—

Franklin, she said. It was a self-contained statement, not a prelude to anything. In the early days of their courtship, five years gone, even a hint of the topic would cause her to stiffen and pull away. Now, after such a long time, she offered no resistance. And no acquiescence.

We could be married, he said. It was the first time he had uttered the word in months.

No. You know we can't.

Surely if nothing has happened by now—

Franklin. She sat up straight beside him, rose from the divan, walked over to the piano, and rested her hand near the picture on top. Her great-grandparents on her father's side. The source of all the troubles. An old man and woman, plainly dressed, surrounded by two younger couples and a young woman, Constance's grandmother Alice, centered in the frame, looking neutrally at something far beyond the photographer. She stared at the faded portrait in silence.

Franklin waited for her to speak, but knew there was nothing to say that had not already been said a thousand times before. Great-grandfather Henson's cheating of Peg Donovan in a slave transaction. The old woman's lawsuit, and what she thought an unsatisfactory settlement. The disturbances that followed: I am Peg Donovan's witch, and Ethan Henson shall know no peace. The inexplicable torment of the grandmother pins stuck in flesh, hair pulled out by the roots, obscene voices in the empty air. The family become a public spectacle for four years until the great-grandfather finally died and the grandmother's engagement to Franklin's grandfather was broken off. I am Peg Donovan's witch, and they shall never marry. Only then had the sticking and pulling and voices stopped. Years later. a New York paper said the grandmother was a liar, a ventriloquist, a fraud like those Fox girls up north. She had sued the paper for libel, and won. Sometimes Franklin thought that, more than anything, was what kept Constance convinced.

And we shall throw away our own happiness, Franklin said, the bitterness he thought was past creeping back into his voice. The sins of the grandparents shall be visited upon the grandchildren?

Apparently so, she said, still staring at the picture. You know what our families have been through since then.

All families have misfortunes, he said. Everyone dies sooner or later. It's not preordained. It's not a curse.

We can't take that chance, Constance said, and then, more softly, I can't.

He wanted to say, It didn't want your grandfather to marry my grandmother, and what has that to do with us? He wanted to say, It said it would come back, but it said it was an Indian, then a Spanish monk, then the ghost of another of Henson's dupes. Why should we believe it now? He wanted to say, Peg Donovan was said to be in league with the devil, but Peg Donovan is dead. He wanted to say, You will be thirty this year.

But all he said was, again, We could be married.

No.

It's the twentieth century. We are free adults who can read and write. I can speak into that box hanging in the hallway and be heard a hundred miles away. In a few years, you'll probably even be able to vote. We have no room for witches and spells and curses.

There is still plenty of room for death and suffering, Constance said. Look at Europe. Read the newspaper.

And you are more afraid of a supposed curse than modern warfare? Our witch is more powerful than artillery shells and mustard gas?

A slave trade, she said, as if he had said nothing. Crooked business. All this because of crooked business.

Constance—

I wish we had left Africa alone, she said. I wish we had never heard of Africa.

He looked down at his empty hands. There was no use continuing. All right, Constance. All right. Come and sit back down with me.

She did, and they talked of other things. The lights shone through the scrolled globes of the lamps and cast familiar patterns on the wall. When they heard the grandfather clock in the living room strike nine, he stood automatically and she walked him to the door.

He kissed her in the open doorway before she turned on the porch light. She tasted of peach cobbler and her own skin. He looked at her until he was satisfied she was not angry or upset with him, and then he went home.

As he walked the half mile back to his own house, New Orleans came to him unbidden, as it sometimes did. Once, before his courtship of Constance had begun, when he was first taking the reins of his business, he went to New Orleans on a buying trip. He was a good man and had tried to be what his father had always called a True Gentleman. His father had warned him about the sins of the flesh, warned him how such activity was not only disreputable but debilitating, draining a man of much-needed vital energy. After Franklin had attained his majority, his father had even confided that he had marital relations with Franklin's mother no more than once a month for that very reason.

But New Orleans—its deep exotic layers, its sights and smells and very texture—was like nothing Franklin had ever experienced. One night at dinner in the French Quarter with some other young businessmen, he let himself get drunk, which hardly ever happened, and the others swore they could go over to Storyville and get whatever women they wanted, and it was perfectly legal. His mind told him it was wrong; his body and spirit followed the others over to Basin Street and a large house with a red lamp by the door.

He found himself in a cluttered but clean room with a woman whose auburn hair fell to her waist. She sat patiently in an overstuffed chair and crossed her black-stockinged legs so that her robe fell back from them. There were small signs on the wall with odd phrases: Oh! Dearie, I give U much pleasure; Dearie, U ask for Marguerite. An embroidered pillow balanced on the back of the chair announced, Daisies won't tell. From beneath the floor came the muffled clatter of a piano playing a song he had never heard before. He stood swaying in front of the woman as she opened her robe. She wore nothing underneath. He fell on top of her; she pushed him off, made him take off his pants, and guided him to the bed. She lay on her back and stroked her own nipples and said things he barely understood. He fell on top of her again. It was over too quickly and he wanted to stay, but he didn't have enough money. On his way out he noticed for the first time the pictures on the wall of men and women doing what he had just finished doing, and on the vanity by the overstuffed chair, a lone photograph of a little girl feeding ducks by a pond.

In the corridor he passed by one of the other young businessmen, who clapped him on the shoulder, gave him a wink, and walked on.

He burned with shame at such thoughts, especially after spending the evening with Constance. And he was not always so preoccupied after his visits. But he sometimes was. Of late, more often than not. He had to remind himself of what he truly loved in Constance, what the Storyville whore could not possibly have. The whore could not cook. The whore could not play the piano. The whore could not recite Shakespeare from memory. The sun did not rise and set in the whore's blue eyes.

By the time he reached his bedroom he was filled to bursting with his love for Constance and his memories of Basin Street. He took care of the matter, bathed, and went to sleep. He dreamed of marrying Constance and taking her to New Orleans for their honeymoon.

He did not see Constance for several nights after that. There was nothing unusual about it; as close as they were, it would have been an imposition to spend every evening with her. He did go by her house and leave her flowers everyday. His father, who approved of both Constance and her family's money, had learned not to question him too closely. Instead, when the new and larger order of auto parts came in, he complimented Franklin on the resulting storefront display.

And then one day she called him at the store and asked him to come over that night. There was something wrong in her voice, but she refused to elaborate. He said of course he would.

She met him at the door but immediately turned and went into the parlor and sat down, ignoring the flowers in his hand. She had never done that before; he had no points of reference for such behavior. After a moment, he hung his hat and laid the flowers carefully on the table by the vase which still held yesterday's assortment. She sat on the divan with her hands clenched tightly together. He stood mute, uncertain what to do.

Do you know Aaron Huckabee? she asked.

Jake Huckabee's brother? He has a farm over near Andalusia.

Yes.

He's two months behind on his account at the store.

She looked at him the way his mother used to if he ate his salad with the wrong fork. His daughter Ruthann is one of my tenth-graders.

Yes.

She was not at school today. Or rather she was there long enough to leave a sealed note on my desk. Constance rose, went to the table with the flowers, took a piece of paper out of a drawer, and sat back down on the divan.

Dear Miss Baldwin, she read. I am so sorry but I will not be in class ever again. My daddy has gone too far this time and I cannot stay any longer. I am sorry not to tell you face to face but I tried once or twice and I just couldn't. He has beat me more and more and done other things too. It hurts all the time and I can't look in a mirror I hate so what I see. Please don't be mad. I have learned a lot from you. My mother has people down in Mobile and I will go to them. Please don't tell my father. I love you Miss Baldwin you have been very good to me. Please don't tell. Love Ruthann.

She set the letter on the end table and held her head in her hands.

He sat by her and put his arm around her, removed it, put it back. Constance. I am so very sorry this happened.

She tried to tell me and couldn't? Or was I just not listening?

The Huckabees are a bad lot, Franklin said. Aaron's mother's family was the worst sort of trash, always fighting and cutting. My mother said when she was a child they could hear them clear across the creek. I'm not surprised this happened.

She had bruises sometimes, Constance said. I didn't think anything of it. She lived out on a farm. They all had hard labor to do.

This is not your fault.

Ruthann had a strange tone in her voice when she was asking about Romeo and Juliet. I realize that now. I should have realized that then.

This is not your fault. He tightened his arm around her and she leaned into him.

Other things, Franklin? What sort of man could do that?

His head suddenly filled with the room in Storyville and the photograph of the little girl on the vanity. He shuddered and held Constance even tighter. Don't think of it, he whispered. Don't think of such things. Her people in Mobile will see after her.

And who will I see after? She pulled away and walked quickly over to the piano. She stared at the photograph on top. And who will see after me?

I will.

I have been so careful. So very careful. I have preserved myself, preserved us. I wanted to make a difference with the children. She lowered her head. I wanted you to be proud of me.

Oh, Constance, I am. He rose and went to her. He wanted to embrace her fully but simply touched her cheek. I am so very proud. No man could ask for a better woman. You are everything I've ever wanted.

It doesn't matter, does it?

It doesn't matter that I love you?

It doesn't matter how careful we are. Terrible things happen for no reason. We can take all the precautions in the world. We can never leave our own back yard, and a tree will fall. We can confine ourselves to one room, and the lamps will turn over and burn us.

He had never heard her talk like this. It frightened him and made him hold her closer.

Constance—

We can't do anything to stop it, she said.

He turned her face to his and kissed her mouth. In the light from the window her blue eyes seemed nearly black. She kissed him back, wrapped her arms around him. He buried his face in her neck and almost fainted from the pressure and the scent and the warmth.

They returned to the divan and remained for a very long time. Then, without speaking, he rose and took her hand, and they walked side by side into her bedroom.

He had not known she kept a picture of him on her vanity. She took down her hair; it fell almost to her waist. At her request he helped her with the back of her dress, but when he tried to push it off her shoulders she gently stopped him and disrobed herself. The dress rustled noisily to the floor. He helped her again with her corset. To his astonishment, his hands were steady. She stepped away from him and removed her undergarments. She stood with her arms over her breasts; her face looked like her grandmother in the picture on the piano. He took her arms and pulled them gently toward him, kissed her hands, placed them on her breasts, and moved them in slow circles. She lay back on the bed and waited for him to undress. Her hands moved over her breasts, around and around. He came to her as gently as he had kissed her hands. She cried out in pain, once, and he thought his heart would stop, but she wrapped herself more tightly around him and it lasted a long time after that. He had never felt such things. He had never been to New Orleans.

And then when they were finished and lay side by side, Constance cried out in pain again, sat up and grabbed her shoulder. Franklin! It hurts!

My God, Constance, what is it—

It's sticking in me! It's on fire! She rose naked from her bed and clawed frantically at her side, then both her arms. A swath of her hair rose from the left side of her head, stood straight perpendicular to her body, and pulled itself loose. She screamed and fell to the floor, but before he could get to her a voice said: Couldn't wait any longer, eh?

No! Constance shouted. No!

I knew it was only a matter of time. I knew in the end you wouldn't disappoint me. The voice was harsh, distant, metallic, as if it were coming through a telephone from a distant place.

Leave her alone! Franklin shouted. This is not her fault!

Oh, come now. Do you really think I care if you fuck her? Your grandparents fucked like dogs. The words were horrible but flat, without inflection. But they never married each other, and neither will you.

We haven't done anything to you! Franklin was on the floor and held Constance as she sobbed. We haven't done anything—

Of course you have. You in particular, Franklin. You did that whore on Basin Street, didn't you? If you call that doing anything. You did better this time, boy. In Storyville you almost came in your pants before that whore got them off you.

Constance's sobs were uninterrupted; mercifully, she did not seem to take in what the voice was saying. Shut up! he shouted. Stop this!

I will stop when I'm ready to stop, prick. His picture rose from the vanity and smashed against the opposite wall. The corner of the frame scraped the top of his head as it flew by. Constance screamed again. No! Go away, please go away!

Oh, no. I'm just getting started. You're just getting started, too. But you have a lot to get used to, Franklin. The blood for starters. Didn't you smell it, that awful coppery stench when you came in here! Every month, boy, no amount of flowers or perfume can get rid of it—

Shut up!

Welcome to her body, Franklin. There was a rattling sound under the bed. The chamber pot slid out from beneath the dust ruffle, slid across the floor, leaped in the air, and shattered against the wall over the bed. The voiced laughed, an explosive, emotionless sound that frightened Franklin almost more than the rest of it. My bowels moved for thee.

God damn you, stop this!

Constance shits as much as you do.

Stop!

She does other things, too. She takes that picture of you and holds it in one hand and puts the other between her legs. You should hear what she whispers to herself—

Go away! Constance pulled away from him and rose unsteadily to her feet. She whirled in circles, seeking the voice. I don't care! Do what you want! I don't care anymore!

Of course you do.

I don't! I love him!

Of course you do.

I shall marry him!

No, you won't. The room shook as if in an earthquake. Franklin jumped up and grabbed Constance, tried to soothe her as the room rattled around them. He felt something on her back, cried out as he saw huge welts rise and run down to her buttocks. Entertain yourselves, children, but expect my visits often.

Merciful God, Franklin said. Our father which art in heaven—

Oh, please, the voice said. There was almost a hint of feeling. What did He ever do for you? Your families? Ruthann Huckabee?

—hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come—

You are bags of shit and piss and blood and you will die. With or without me.

And then the room was still.

When he finally stopped shaking, when Constance was finally still, he pulled on his pants, ran to the parlor, and drew all the drapes. He came back and picked up her clothes and took her with them to the parlor and left her to dress. He returned to her bedroom and put his clothes back on. He tried to pick up some of the shattered things but his hands started shaking again and he went back into the parlor.

Constance sat on the piano bench and did not acknowledge his presence. He sat on the divan and waited.

Finally she said, Take me out of here.

Of course. Come home with me. Or to my father's. There's room.

No, please walk me over to the hotel.

But Constance—

I do not want your father or anyone else to know of this.

What will you tell the clerk?

Something. Please take me there now.

He forced himself to stand. Then he walked her the half-mile to the town's only hotel. At her insistence he left her at the front entrance. As she walked through the doorway he felt his life fading away like the pattern on a much-trampled rug. Then he went home.

He returned to the hotel the next morning, but the clerk said she had left at first light. He endured two agonizing days and sleepless nights, and then he received a telegram from her saying she had gone to stay with her aunt in Tuscaloosa until the repairs on her house were complete. She was gone for over a month.

When she returned she looked well, if a bit thin. She asked him over the second night, and for many nights thereafter. They talked as they had always talked. Her cooking skills were undiminished. She played the piano for him, and he always brought her flowers.

A week after her return, he tried, tentatively, carefully, to talk with her about what had happened. He was afraid she would break down, be overwhelmed by the cold dead terror that had come and the desire that would not leave. But she simply put a finger to his lips and said, Hush, Franklin. It's all right. We are safe.

But Constance, I—

It will not come back, she said. Don't worry, Franklin. It will never come back.

Oh, my darling, my love, please—

Don't worry, Franklin. Dear Franklin. It will never ever come back.

As the weeks turned into months, he came by less frequently. The following year, Constance went back to Tuscaloosa and spent the entire summer with her aunt. When she returned in the fall she was engaged to a medical student. They married the following spring and he returned with her to set up his practice in her town. Franklin left her flowers the night before her wedding but did not attend. She and her husband lived in her house and were never disturbed.

Two years after Constance's wedding, Franklin married a second cousin who had admired him since they were children. By then he had opened more stores in nearby towns. Before his father died, he declared how proud he was of his only son.

Constance quit teaching soon after her marriage but occasionally gave music lessons. She had her husband and her home. Franklin had his family and his business. He found a whore in Mobile once, but he never went back.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Serpents

Veronica Schanoes

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think—

Oh bondage! Up yours! 1-2-3-4!

—The X-Ray Spex

* * * *

And what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a serpent?

—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

* * * *

"Will you take the path of pins or the path of needles?"

It doesn't sound like much of a choice to Charlotte. Dark woods, sharp metal. It sounds like some kind of test. Perhaps if she gives the wrong answer, toads and snakes will fall from her tongue whenever she tries to speak. Charlotte wouldn't mind that. She likes snakes: she likes the way they move, twining themselves along the ground. She thinks she might be a kind of serpent herself, sliding along in a smooth sine wave, wise and cunning. Serpents don't sew.

"The path of pins."

The scenery changes, wavers like a snake curving from side to side, and then slides away. While it is swerving and sliding, Charlotte wonders if the world is a snake as well. That would make her happy, to be a smaller snake inside the belly of a larger snake undulating through tine and space. The past would be the tail and the future the head, and the massive sinuous body would coil and curve over and under and through itself in a Moebius pattern, and the past would be the head and the future would be the tail and the world-serpent would hold its tail in its mouth, a tale in its mouth, its tale in its mouth.

Snakes never blink.

* * * *

Charlotte finds herself on the path of pins. As far as she can see, the dirt path is strewn with pins, safety pins, straight pins, hair pins, hat pins, diaper pins, glittering like scales along the back of a winding serpent. A careless little girl could cut her feet to shreds, but Charlotte is wearing her purple fourteen-hole Doc Martens. She can't even feel the pins grinding into the dirt floor of the forest under her heels. She walks along, imagining the silver serpent that has shed this skin. It would be huge, she thinks, to shed this many scales and the pins would almost be more like stiff little feathers than smoothly overlapping scales. As she begins to imagine the cold sapphire eyes of the pin snake and the sharp metal teeth lining its mouth, she realizes where the pins are coming from. The trees lining this path have pins where the leaves should be. These trees would be impossible to climb—one wrong move and you'd have a face full of blood and scratches. You'd probably need a tetanus shot.

While Charlotte contemplates the trees, something is moving very quickly towards the path, making as little noise as possible. It skids right in front of her like a schoolgirl crossing Park Avenue against the light to get to homeroom before the bell rings. Charlotte is thrown off balance; she tries to stop in mid-stride, and almost instinctively, like a snake sensing motion, she whips around to follow the movement. She tries to balance on one leg, her arms pinwheeling as her left foot waves in the air behind her. She's almost regained her balance when she skids on some pins and falls heavily to the side, bloodying her hands, her knees, and her face.

The sun is setting. Oh my fur and whiskers, I shall be too late.

But Charlotte is not too late; she turns her head aside just in time to avoid an eye full of pins. As she lies where she's fallen, breathing heavily, nonsense phrases slide through her head: it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Not needles. Pins. Charlotte takes a deep breath and stands up. She dusts pins off her blue skirt and white apron, leaving red streaks from her bleeding hands, streaks the same color as her wine-dark motorcycle jacket, with all the zippers and pockets holding her subway pass, silver eyeshadow, red lipstick, liquid black eyeliner, a fake ID that gives her age as twenty-two, a neon-pink cigarette lighter, a pack of cigarettes (she doesn't smoke), some speed, some bobby pins, a thimble, and a box of comfits. She opens her basket and pulls out gauze and tape. After bandaging her knees she puts on a pair of swimming goggles. No pins in her eyes, thank you very much. No needles either. She sets off to find whatever it was that made her lose her balance. She steps off of the path.

Aha, you may be thinking. We all know what happens to little girls who stray from the path. Do we?

As Charlotte walks carefully and firmly through the pin-grass growing in this part of the woods, she thinks about goggles. Do snakes wear goggles? It depends, she thinks, on whether or not they go in the water. Water moccasins go in the water. So do other snakes. She likes to watch them skimming, sliding along the surface of the water, arching their bodies back and forth. She wonders if sea serpents swim the same way, gliding in “S” shapes along the surface of the ocean. Probably not, she decides. Sea serpents swim through the water, not on it. She imagines a sea serpent weightless in a wine-dark sea. She imagines the same serpent pulling a fishing boat down to the ocean floor, twining the rope of its body around the boat as strapping young sailors shriek and hurl themselves overboard. The thoughts make her smile. Sea serpents, she thinks, might wear goggles.

She continues to track the quickly-moving creature. Her Docs make surprisingly little noise as she goes; perhaps she's done this before. She draws closer and sees it is a white rabbit, breathing heavily and shaking. Blood and mud are smeared across its paws and its fur. Its small pink eyes roll around in an even madder manner than usual.

Charlotte wonders whether or not snakes eat rabbits. Surely swallowing a rabbit wouldn't be much of a difficulty for a boa constrictor, she thinks, remembering pictures she's seen of other smaller snakes with rat-shaped lumps in their bodies. As if sensing the predatory turn her thoughts have taken, the rabbit freezes, its ears triangulate frantically trying to catch the sound of her breathing, and all at once it leaps down a rabbit hole that has been concealed under a mound of stacked pins piled precariously like pick-up sticks. Charlotte throws herself after it and is falling, falling down a hole whose walls are made of pins with duck heads holding diapers onto babies’ bottoms, safety pins punched through clothing, straight pins piercing butterflies as they flap their wings vainly, push pins holding Charlotte's second-grade essay on poisonous snakes to a cork board, bobby pins twisting her hair too tightly, safety pins through her earlobes (they had already been pierced so it took only a steady hand and some patience). The hole is quite long and it twists and Charlotte feels as though she is being swallowed by a snake. It is not a bad feeling. She lands with a rush on a leaf pile of pins.

Her goggles, Docs, and motorcycle jacket serve her well—no pins make it through. But her exposed legs and face are now scratched, cut, bloody. Charlotte pushes herself up, scraping her hands as she goes. She opens her basket and takes out a bottle of iodine and methodically applies some to every inch of broken skin. Charlotte is a wound and its cure, a germ-free adolescent.

Which way is grandma's now? She looks around, trying to orient herself. She rubs her eyes, leaving bloody smears across the lens of her goggles. From now on, she will see the world through the haze of her own blood.

Something about the tiling of these corridors looks familiar to her, but not until she reaches the glass booth does she realize that she's in the Astor Place subway station. She brings the subway pass out of her pocket and waves it at the token clerk, who is not there anyway. She jumps the turnstile. She sees the rabbit on the platform and begins to run toward it, but the dirty feral creature spots her and is so distressed that it leaps off the platform, launching its body straight out over the tracks. As it falls and Charlotte watches, it changes from a rabbit into a small mouse and scurries away.

Charlotte is disappointed. A snake certainly could have swallowed that morsel.

She is not disappointed for long, though. She is thinking about having a cigarette and whether or not her grandma would smell the smoke in the folds of her jacket or the cuts in her skin, and if she did, whether she would believe Charlotte if she told her that the smell was from the show she went to last night, when the train comes hurtling into the station at breakneck pace. Snakes have no necks to break, thinks Charlotte. Or maybe they're all neck until their tails.

Charlotte has always loved the subway system, the dark, dank smelly stations, the more labyrinthine, the more exits and interchanges the better. She likes the seemingly random assignments of letters and numbers; she likes the confusion, and mourned when the difference between the AA and A was dissolved. She likes it when an uptown local becomes an express on an entirely different track and when the F with no warning starts running on the A line. She likes the small signs that presage the coming of the train—the soft clank of the track shifting, the mice moving quietly to the sides of the track, the faintest pin-prick of light down the tunnel. It won't be long now. Not long. She loves the look of the stations, the steel beams and bolts and cracked concrete—the bones and organs of the city. And when the train comes, she likes that best of all, the free-fall rush of air it pushes before it, the long loud clatter and screech. Subways, Charlotte thinks, are like snakes when snakes ruled the earth.

When Charlotte was little, she used to make her mom ride in the first car so that she could stand at the door at the head of the car with all the warning stickers (Riding between cars is strictly forbidden; No se apoye contra la puerta) and press her face against the glass. As the train hurtled through the darkness, Charlotte would watch wide-eyed as incandescent lights stretched out in bright streaks flashing by like the Millenium Falcon making the jump into hyperspace, only better. What Charlotte liked best was the occasional ghost station—18th St. on the 6, for example. Abandoned, covered with phantasmagoric graffiti, but still kept lit up in perpetual, futile wait for passengers and trains that never stopped. Charlotte used to dream about getting off in the old stations to explore, being left behind as the train pulled away, left to fade into the stretched and flamboyant graffiti. They were nightmares, sort of.

Charlotte gets on the train, arranges her skirt, and closes her eyes. She tries to doze but she is just too hungry. Instead she opens her basket and peels a hard-boiled egg, leaving bloody fingerprints, a murder mystery detective's dream, on the shell and on the surface of the white, which gives beneath the pressure of her fingers and then returns to its perfect shape. She is eating her second egg when she becomes aware that the shrieks and squawks of the other passengers have been drowned, engulfed by a silence, the silence of people pressing away, the silence of fear and loathing.

As Charlotte chews the second bloody bite of her second egg she realizes that the other passengers are birds: not pigeons or other city-vermin birds, but dodos, lories, eaglets, and hawks. She thinks she even catches sight of a bird with plumage all of pins, which would be painful for a snake to swallow, but perhaps she is mistaken. Slowly and deliberately she finishes her egg as a finch in the little love seat in the corner tucks into a tupperware of living centipedes. Charlotte shifts position, which is painful because of the way the cuts in her legs are sticking to the seat.

As muttering and chirping starts to replace hostile avian glares the train judders and shudders, stopping suddenly. The lights go off and then back on. Charlotte and the birds stare straight ahead as seconds and then minutes drift by silently. The PA system emits a loud crackle of static. Charlotte doesn't know it, but if she could play that static backwards and at twice the speed it would be the sound of her mother as a little girl telling her to be careful on the path of pins. But she can't, so she will never know. To her, it just sounds like a hoarse snake, hissing and spitting and coughing all at once. A snake with strep throat.

But you and I know. That will have to be enough.

There is a pause in the static, and then the PA starts to play music, particularly insipid sentimental pop that seems to distress the birds as much as it does Charlotte, who has no intention whatsoever of sitting in a stalled-out subway car listening to Celine Dion. She stands up, walks over to the door leading to the area between the cars, where you're not supposed to ride, and opens it. She steps out onto the ledge and lowers herself onto the track, followed by the birds who are grateful for her deft opposable thumbs even if she does eat eggs. They are clearly more comfortable following a bleeding egg-eater than they are staying behind in the subway car which is beginning to fill with hot salt water.

Charlotte walks deliberately and firmly. She is convinced that every so often she can spot a pin glinting up at her from the tracks. The birds follow silently. Every so often Charlotte glances over at the third rail lying coolly under its sheltering guard. The lure is strong, like the fear that you might throw yourself off the top of the Empire State Building or try to grab a policeman's gun just because you can imagine yourself doing so. Charlotte pictures herself laying her hand against the third rail and filling from hair to boots with burning electric energy, her consciousness flickering and then running straight into the electric blood of the city, crackling through trains and street lights, merging purely and quickly with the pulsing islands surrounding her.

She doesn't know if the birds are thinking along similar lines or not.

The way along the tracks is long, much longer than the path through the woods, and the birds become restless, rustling their feathers and crowding forward, even pecking Charlotte's back, although she certainly can't feel it through her jacket. One of the wrens decides that he can lead way better and takes off straight into the third rail. His skin turns black and splits, spilling his bones and lungs, still quivering, onto the ground. The smell of burning feathers makes Charlotte vomit. She stops walking in order to rinse her mouth out with cinnamon mouthwash from her basket.

The remaining birds are looking a bit green as well. Charlotte passes out the comfits for them to suck on.

After they have been walking for what seems like hours, Charlotte finds that they are at the abandoned 18th St. subway station. The funhouse graffiti is layered on over older graffiti; infinite strata of urban fireworks marking successive waves of fucked-up youth. Charlotte walks through the station: her goggles, her blood- and iodine-stained face and legs, her bandaged hands, her red motorcycle jacket, and her comet-tail of birds make her look like a walking piece of graffiti. She climbs the stairs only to find her way blocked by an iron gate. She rattles the bars but the grille is locked. She picks up one of the birds and pushes it through the bars. It flies away and the others get the idea. Soon the only company Charlotte has left is the dodo, who is too large to fit through the gate and can't fly anyway. Together they walk back down the stairs.

Charlotte finds a section of the wall which has less art and is mostly painted with slogans instead. She leans back against “Rip her to shreds” and “Hate and War,” removes her goggles, and takes a nap, right under “God save the queen” and “Heavy manners.” The dodo sinks down next to her, rests its head on her should and falls asleep as well.

When they wake up, Charlotte is unsure how long she has been sleeping. She lights a cigarette, stubs it out, and passes it to the dodo, who eats it. Charlotte thinks this is all to the good, because she doesn't like to litter. The city has enough trouble. So does she.

She sighs and puts her goggles back on. The red smears of blood are still damp. The dodo looks a bit anxious, so as a gesture of friendship, Charlotte gives the bird a second pair of goggles from her basket. She tightens the strap around the bird's head and it squawks in appreciation. Then she takes a small bottle of seltzer and piece of cake out of her basket. She and the dodo share breakfast? lunch? dinner? Neither one of them knows and neither do we.

After eating, Charlotte examines the bottom of her left shoe and pulls out several straight pins that had stuck in the rubber. She is oblivious to the dodo's embarrassment at having nothing to give her in return for the goggles and food. Luckily, the awkward bird spots something glinting in the corner of the abandoned station. It is Charlotte's own thimble, which has rolled out of her pocket while she was sleeping. The dodo, ignorant creature, has no way of knowing the shiny thing's provenance. It picks up the thimble in its beak and solemnly presents it to Charlotte. Charlotte accepts it back graciously, although she'll never need to use it again. Snakes, remember, don't sew. She slips it in her pocket.

Charlotte stands up. As she pulls away from the wall she feels her jacket sticking, but she cannot see why. The graffiti that she was leaning against, old and chipped as it was, has imprinted itself on her jacket like wet paint in a silent movie or a Sesame Street sketch. The mirror ghost print of half-a-dozen punk slogans criss-cross her back.

Together Charlotte and the dodo climb the stairs. Armed with the pins from her boot she begins to pick the padlock keeping the gate closed. It's a fruitless exercise. The straight pins cause nothing but pricked fingertips and a steady subway rumble of foul language from Charlotte.

Finally she gives it up and throws the pins away. Sitting back down on the ground she opens her basket and takes out a large solid key with four different ridged edges that match the + at the bottom of the padlock. She unlocks the padlock, puts the key back into her basket, slides the lock off of the gate and locks it around a belt loop on her jacket. Then she pushes the gate open. She and the dodo step through together.

They climb up another set of steps. When they come up from underground they are at the very edge of a forest. Looking back Charlotte can see two paths winding back through the trees. Looking the other way she can see her grandmother's cottage two, maybe three blocks away. She checks to make sure she still has everything she needs: goggles, jacket, basket. The dodo watches her uncertainly. It shuffles its feet and clears its throat. Charlotte picks the bird up and hurls it as hard as she can up in the air. The dodo spreads its stubby prickly wings and flaps ferociously, twisting its barrel-like body back and forth as it rises. It hangs suspended for a few seconds, contemplating Charlotte. From this height she looks like a red blur, a blood-stained egg, and compared to the dodo, she is barely more than an egg. The dodo wishes her luck and then continues its ascent.

Charlotte has already turned away and is walking to her grandmother's cottage. There is nothing left in her way, just smooth sidewalks unrolling under her feet. When she gets to the cottage, she knocks gently on the door, and when there is no response she uses her school ID to jimmy open the lock. She walks in.

Grandmother is not bed-ridden, and her eyes, ears, and teeth are just the right size. She is wearing a green dress and kneeling in front of the crackling sparking fire in the fireplace. She is crying softly and inconsolably. She does not even turn her head to look when Charlotte comes into the room.

Charlotte kneels down next to her grandmother and takes her hand. “It's OK,” she says.

Her grandmother continues to weep over the long tube of patterned snakeskin. “It's dead,” she whispers. “It's dead."

"No, Grandma,” says Charlotte. “It's not dead."

But her grandmother continues to weep gently, bent like a willow over the shed skin. Charlotte sets her basket down and takes from it a loaf of fresh bread, a quart of homemade chicken soup, and a bottle of red wine. “These are for you,” she tells her grandmother. She takes a red apple from her basket and places it in her grandmother's hand, closing the older woman's fingers around it, but still her grandmother does not turn her head.

Charlotte stands behind her grandmother and begins to undress. She takes off her motorcycle jacket, folds it lovingly, and lays it on the floor. She unties her blood-stained apron, takes it off, and lays it on top of the jacket. Her sky-blue dress follows as do her black cotton underpants and bra as well as her hair ribbon, leaving her standing in only her purple Doc Martens and her goggles.

"It's OK, Grandma,” she repeats. “It's not dead. Look."

And as her grandmother turns to look, Charlotte—slowly, slowly—begins to shed her skin.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

A Last Taste of Sweetness

Karina Sumner-Smith

Alone in my kitchen, I make pancakes. I shake flour from its plastic container, watching until it forms a mountain of white in the bottom of the bowl. As I put the container down I wonder, did I watch the way the flour shifted and fell? Did I see it explode into the air, float through the band of sunlight?

I cannot let myself worry about such things. The moment is gone; let it go.

* * * *

A little girl peels bark from a tree in her back yard. Her mother has told her not to. She holds the strip in her hands saying, “This is brown. Brown. Brown."

She does not know how to spell “brown” and does not realize that she will never learn.

* * * *

I crack eggs into the flour, aiming it so that they fall at the peak of the mountain. They hit and gather cloudy whiteness as they slip down the side of the flour to wallow against the side of the bowl.

I feel things that I have ignored for years: the sticky feel of raw egg white on my fingers, the rip of the egg's fine inner membrane, the chill of a refrigerated shell.

* * * *

She does not know why she told him that she didn't want to die a virgin. Maybe because that's what girls say in movies. Maybe because she didn't know what else to do.

They do it in the basement, where it is cold and dim and they will be hidden. It hurts, and she knows that she will bleed.

She lets him come into her, unprotected.

As she listens to him pant, she wonders, what does it matter, anyway?

* * * *

I get the milk from the fridge. I have always bought milk in bags, three of them, even though I now live alone and she was the only one who drank milk. There is something of tradition and something of her in this. The milk, too, is cold, and I take the time to smell it; I dribble some on my fingers, just to know what milk feels like. I do this over the sink. Everything is ending, soon to be engulfed, and yet I cannot bear to get milk on my clean countertop, or splatter a little on the Spanish tiles.

I wonder if this is habit or something deeper.

I pour milk into the bowl in a long, thin stream. I've always liked the way milk twists as it falls. If I was a scientist—or maybe if I'd paid more attention in high school science class—I'd know why that happens. Maybe if I were going to be alive tomorrow, I'd look it up.

* * * *

She lies in bed with the window open. She gets up only to go to the washroom, or to make herself tea and toast. She has always loved breakfast in bed, and now breakfast is every meal and every meal is appropriate for bed.

Lying back on mounds of pillows as a cup of tea steams on the bedside, she watches the summer air push out the window sheers. Smells cut grass and pollen. Hears the songs of birds.

* * * *

I blend the mixture on a low setting, watching until large bubbles rise to the top and are sucked under again by the spin of the beaters. When it is ready, I drop the beaters in the sink and heat a pan. I pour in a bead of corn oil, roll it slowly around, waiting for the sizzle.

If she were here, she would say that I was doing it wrong. Mixing too slowly, heating the pan too quickly, using too much oil. And she would laugh as she said it, and that would somehow make it okay.

I cannot let myself wonder if she is alive. I cannot let myself wonder if she too is waiting for the light, wishing that she could share these moments with me, wishing that we hadn't let it end.

But I will not speak of regret. I will not speak of memories, fond or otherwise. I will not speak of dreams. These things fill me, and my eyes stream, and I have no words. I need no words, not while I have breath. Merely the shock of knowing, like the sudden meeting of eyes across a crowd.

* * * *

The air is cool but the water is not. It rushes up around her feet and ankles, a nothing temperature, inviting her in. She walks slowly, but the water rises quickly around her. She can feel the round lumps of rocks, the wash of sand, the edges of shells beneath her feet. Soon, she can feel nothing but water.

With calm, easy strokes she begins to swim. The sunlight sparkling across the surface brings tears to her eyes, but she does not need to see where she is going. There is only an empty stretch of ocean before her, waiting.

* * * *

I set the table for one, with an ordinary plate and ordinary cutlery. I light a lilac-scented candle because it reminds me of her, and a lily-scented candle because it reminds me of me.

I place a pancake on my plate; there is a whole stack waiting for me in the oven. They are round and flat and even.

I lay a row of strawberries across the middle of the pancake and then slowly roll it like a crepe. I pour maple syrup, as much as I want. It is golden and heavily liquid, thicker than water, sweeter than blood.

* * * *

She runs her fingertips across the surface of the paper. It is thick, delicately scented, and blank. Her fountain pen rests between still and heavy fingers, the metal cool in the embrace of her hand. After a moment, she places it gently on the desk.

The time for good-byes is past.

* * * *

As I take a bite, I can feel it ending.

I close my eyes and concentrate on the taste of the pancake. It is soft and warm, and the sweet taste of the syrup fills my mouth. I chew slowly.

There is no heat yet, no sudden shock, only brightness. I let myself see it through closed eyelids, the red and yellow of that thin veil of skin all that is left between myself and the end.

To be alive and knowing in this moment: I can think of no greater blessing.

* * * *

She lies down in the middle of the car park, grocery bags discarded at her sides. She is a body between yellow lines. The heat from the pavement scorches through her T-shirt and shorts, all along her sweaty skin. She will not move or turn away.

She looks up, stares at the sun as it grows across the sky, welcomes tears and blindness.

There is so much light.

* * * *

What is there to remember?

This fleeting moment. The feel of heavy eyelids and slow fingers. Pancakes and syrup, strawberries and candle flame.

A last taste of sweetness.

Her lips.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Pinned

Hannah Wolf Bowen

The butterfly was dead. A beautiful butterfly, orange and black and banded white, fuzzy-fine across back and wings. He tried to be sorry that it was gone, glad it had ever been alive. But it was dead, trapped here in glass, and all that he felt was nothing.

He lifted the camera and focused—clickclick—to snap the picture, still image of a dead thing. The light was good, the glass case wouldn't ruin the shot, and he had to believe that even a butterfly had a soul to lose.

A cool breeze had kicked up while he was in the museum and now sent leaves head-over-heels, four lanes to safety and no stoplight here. He picked his moments carefully, finding gaps in the traffic and darting to teeter on dotted white, on the median, grass sanctuary just wide enough to stand upon. He exchanged smiles there with a pretty girl crossing in the opposite direction, her yellow dog trotting at her side.

He asked, “Why did the walkers risk life and limb?"

"Why?"

"To get to the other side."

She smiled again. The yellow dog wriggled as he bent to pat it and then there was another gap and they were gone. He turned back towards his destination, saw his chance and took two steps. He leaped back to the grass at screams behind him: brake and human both.

The girl went to her knees in the street, tripped up by a pothole. Cars careened; he dodged. The yellow dog ran, wild-eyed, leash trailing, no traffic in the lane by the median but bolting to sidewalk safety into the path of truck skidding, brakes locked. The girl lunged forward, grabbed the leash and hauled, sent her dog back to safety but offbalanced herself, stumbled headlong out of her lane.

He flinched. He closed his eyes.

The truck came to a halt half-atop the median, blood on its bumper with more meaning than a Darwin fish. The yellow dog ran by him three-legged, one wounded paw held high; he grabbed the leash and reeled it in. He looked back towards the road and then he looked away.

He pushed his arm to the elbow through leash's loop and opened his camera case. Clickclick.

* * * *

The evening news said of the girl, “Killed instantly.” Sarah examined the dog and decided that: “He'll be fine.” Yellow Dog whimpered in his sleep, sprawled across knees long since gone to sleep themselves. He rubbed the lanky creature's shoulder and played with half-flopped silken ears; Sarah leaned forward, backlit by the lamp, and studied the bandaged paw.

"He'll be fine,” she said again. “Poor lucky guy. I wonder what happened to him."

"Me, too,” he said, and ran a finger along the narrow white that blazed Yellow Dog's skull.

"We should call the shelter. Or put up fliers—you could take his picture."

He glanced away and down. But he got out already. Shrugged. “Tomorrow."

Sarah nodded and, “Did you get anything good today?"

"Yeah—” He glanced to the unmoving dog and pointed her across the shadowy space to his camera on the table by the darkroom door, to the photos he'd placed beside it, riot of color and some black and white, not the whole day's spoils but not a bad cross-section: the ones he knew she would like. Sarah reached the butterfly, all smiles, and demanded to know where he'd gone that day.

"The botanical garden,” he said. “By the museum."

Frost sketched designs on the big picture window; the sky was grey with impending snow. “Isn't it getting too cold for butterflies?"

He shrugged: “Just lucky, I guess.” He asked her then about vet school and she told him about the animals she'd dissected and the cures that she'd studied. Old married couple, he thought rueful, all honey, I'm home and how was your day already, except for the part about being old and also the married bit, and it was comfort of routine, of belonging, instead of boredom and disinterest. She kissed him eventually, stopping the words, and he leaned into her warmth, and Yellow Dog woke long enough to hop down from the couch with a long-suffering sigh.

* * * *

"I could take him to school,” she said the next day. “So he doesn't have to stay here alone. No one would care—Doc Marsh brings her dog all the time."

"I kind of wanted to take him with me,” he said, and Yellow Dog sat on his feet and grinned a doggy grin. “Have to take some pictures to the gallery, and I thought maybe I could put up those signs . . . see if anyone recognizes him.” And Sarah agreed, kissed him and then the dog's nose and tripped down the stairs to the street. He scooped up the sign they'd made for photocopying and crumpled it into a ball in his pocket.

"You and me,” he told the dog. “Let me know if you're getting tired, okay?” He snapped new leash onto new collar and blinked outside in the sunlight glare.

First to the gallery and haggle a price and then out for walking, the rest of the day all to himself. A few blocks down a lonely tree was marked for cutting. Its leaves lay on the sidewalk, bright mourning banner, clickclickclick from several directions and then zooming in on the little plaque half leaf-covered: In memory of. Across from the park with its grass and its lake, they found a late-season duckling that no one had thought to make way for, barely there beneath tire tracks, mother and siblings all gone away. He pulled Yellow Dog's nose away: clickclick.

He wavered at a statue of a man both famous and gone, decided against it and snapped instead a striking shot, slice of sky between buildings, barest glimpse of freedom blue. Sarah would like that one.

In the park, he sat on a rock and opened his backpacker, reaching for paper bag and folder. Sandwich from the former, peanut butter and honey stickysweet on his tongue. He threw the crusts to Yellow Dog and discovered the dog knew how to shake hands and lay down on command.

"Good boy,” he said, cupping the blunt muzzle in his hands, staring into soft dark eyes. “Good, good boy.” Yellow Dog blinked back, then bounced and licked his nose.

He chewed on an apple held in one hand, careful with the juice, and flipped through the pictures with the other. The other pictures, the girl in the street—Sarah hadn't seen all of these. He stared hard at the not-botanical garden butterfly and its artificial flowers. Sarah's eye had always been good. The butterfly seemed right at home and even knowing to look for it, he couldn't see the pin.

He didn't realize he'd started shaking until the photo fell from his hand to browning grass and lay there, face down between Yellow Dog's paws. He picked it up and tucked it back into the folder, but not before whispering, “I'll get you out—it'll be okay."

They would never let Yellow Dog into the museum, and they would never let him take the butterfly out. He zipped the folder safe into the pack and lay back in the grass with the dog dozing heavy across his chest. The sunsoaked grass warmed his back. He tried to inhale its fresh green scene, but it warred with the early-autumn truth of rot. He drew a deep breath, tasting the air, and the wind cut slices from his lungs.

He slept without meaning to, woke when Yellow Dog lunged to leash's end, jarring his shoulder in its socket and his wrist within the loop. Yellow Dog reared at treebase, forepaws up against the bark, keen-eyed at the squirrel that chattered from its perch.

"Cheer up,” he told it. “Could be worse."

He tugged Yellow Dog back. Squirrel-scolding followed as they wandered from the park and on the way out passed one of its kin, albino this one, white fur and red eye, and body here, head over there. Some dog had been meaner than Yellow Dog, or just faster, and poor squirrel not much chewed upon: just sport.

Clickclick.

* * * *

"Are you all right?” Sarah asked, same as always. “I mean, really. You seem . . .” She screwed up her face, concentrating. “Not okay,” she said at last.

"Thanks, Doc,” he said, and smiled. “All becomes clear."

She grinned at the joke—he'd hoped she would—but then sobered again, staring hard. “You should go,” she said. “Get out of here. Really. I only have one more year in school and then I'll come with you, someplace away from the city. I mean, I want you here, but you're never happy anymore . . ."

"I'm happy we have a dog,” he said. “I'm happy to be with you. I'm happy to be here."

"You're a liar,” she told him, but smiling again. She meant what she said, he knew—but she didn't really want him to go, would be sorry if he left.

He reached out, tapped her cheek and traced the line of her jaw. “I'll be okay. I'd miss you . . . you'd miss me, wouldn't you? And like you said—it's only one more year."

* * * *

Heat rolled off the fire, trembling the air, bright glowing against the night sky, not as bright as it could have been if undimmed by surrounding city lights. He couldn't see the stairs.

Yellow Dog whined uneasy at the flames from where he stood tight-lashed to the elevator housing. The building roof was built in beds and terraces, kept stocked with soil and planted with vegetables and flowers. Wearing down now, always gone by the time the roof was blanketed in snow, but green during the summer: alive. The roof had tipped the balance, when they'd been searching for a place to live. It boasted a view of the city, the lake, boasted green glowing things and stretches of pavement perfect for safely setting a fire.

He sat with his back to their fading roses, his face to the city and suburb beyond. The lake would have been a better view, but the wind blew in fits and starts to kick the smoke back into his face.

He opened the folder and flipped through the photos. “You first,” he told the girl, car-crushed, Yellow Dog's friend so loyal even when it hurt. The picture twisted in the fire, curled, bubbled and blackened. The smoke tasted bitter, stung tears from his eyes and left him coughing even wind-aided away. He pushed at it with his hands and urged, “Go on—you don't belong here, don't have to stay."

The tree burned, and the duckling, and the squirrel, souls written in smoke drifting free on the wind. He bent over the flames, tears hissing as they fell, vapor before they landed in ashes. He poured water over the fire, careful, slipped the butterfly's picture back into the folder, freed Yellow Dog and followed him back inside.

* * * *

"What do you want to do tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?” he asked. “You don't have class?"

Sarah glanced up from her textbook and arched an eyebrow. “On Saturday?"

Oh. “I want to take pictures."

"You do that every day. We could go out—see a movie, or go camping—or something?"

He shook his head and rubbed Yellow Dog's ears. The camera waited on the table; the folder with its lonely photo lay beneath it.

"You don't want to do anything at all?” She set her book on the coffee table and sat up, eyes narrow, unconvinced. “Are you sure you're okay?"

He nodded, said nothing and stared out the window, their view of the street thick with cabs that milled in holding patterns. “I want to go to the museum,” he said at last.

* * * *

They would never let him take Yellow Dog into the museum. They would never let him take the butterfly out.

They worried about leaving the dog alone and so they lurked outside the door, alert for signs of separation anxiety. He stood beside Sarah and listened, shifting weight from foot to foot; his hand itched, empty of leash. They thought they heard something that might have been a snore.

And it didn't matter about the butterfly. They wandered exhibit to exhibit (clickclickclick) and stared through glass at long-extinct birds with dusty feathers, passenger pigeon steadfast beside its mate. In one room, a saber-toothed tiger stood frozen mid-prowl, one skeletal paw held high above the tar pit; another beastie thrashed within. Stuffed dead mammals gave way to insects and Sarah studied an anthill where the living struggled at their work, treading on the dead.

And he stood alone across the room, unblinking beside the butterfly's case. Speckled handsome and striped with color, poised on the flower in the space between breaths but never moving, never again. He watched until he forgot to breathe and then he watched some more and the glass fogged with his breath. He couldn't see the pin, no matter how closely he looked, or maybe it was glue, but surely nothing to be taken out, nothing that could ever be removed to set the creature free in smoke, not without destroying it.

Again, he found himself shaking.

"That looks like the picture—” Sarah's voice at his elbow, hushed and low as she focused away from the butterfly, onto him. “Hey. Hey. What's the matter? Hey—don't.” Eyes wide and concerned, a hand on his arm, an arm around his ribs. “Come on,” she said, and on he went.

* * * *

"I take pictures,” he said, “of things that are dead."

Negatives lay on the coffee table, backwards image of color and form, some smudged with dogspit from before Yellow Dog had hopped onto the couch.

"Catch them,” he said. “Only for a little. And I burn them to let them go."

"Oh,” Sarah said, and held a negative up to the light.

"I'm sorry."

"You hate it here,” she said, and then, “Why didn't you say something?"

She tried so hard for him, he knew, wanted so badly not to hurt him. She'd even let him run off if he wanted, even let him run out. He shrugged, and she sighed. Yellow Dog's muzzle lay heavy across his knee.

"We could move,” she said, “or go on vacation—or something. I can take a term off—or you can go, and I'll come when I'm done with school—it's only another year.” She stopped, stared at him, bleak. “Something. Please?"

He looked down at Yellow Dog, looked at the negatives, took them gently from Sarah's hands. The butterfly was on this roll, and Yellow Dog's girl as well, steadfast and dead. He lifted his gaze to Sarah again. Not going to leave you. Again: “I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry,” she said, and he looked away.

* * * *

She slept, and so did Yellow Dog with his doggy twitches and his snores.

He lay awake and stared out the window, not at the stars. He thought about the butterfly, pinned unknowing to the flowers. He rolled out of bed and padded into the bathroom, picked up the camera on the way.

He took pictures of things that were dead, and some of them didn't know they were, and even if they did, they still couldn't escape. And some of them did, and could, but wouldn't.

He lifted the camera to focus in the mirror.

Clickclick.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Sidhe Tigers

Sarah Monette

At night the tigers pace. In the hall outside the little boy's bedroom, they pace like patient, vengeful angels. They are pale green, like luna moths; their eyes are lambent milky jade. They are cold and silent; when he has to go to the bathroom at night, the tigers stare at him with their pale pale eyes, and sometimes they open their mouths, as if they were roaring, but they make no sound. Their breath is like the aftertaste of brandy and the cold sting of snow. They never come near enough to touch. He wants the tigers to like him, but he is afraid they don't. They brush against the walls with a distant shushing noise, and even in his room he can feel the soft, relentless percussion of their padding feet. The moonlight shining through the hall windows streams straight through them.

No one else can see the tigers.

The house is always cold. His desire for warmth causes his father to brand him a sissy-boy, a weakling. At night he hugs himself, because no one else will, and dreams of escaping this loveless house, these cold tigers.

Years later, his father dies. He goes back because he must, leaving behind lover, friends, work, passion—his adult life like a treasure, locked in a chest for safekeeping. The house is unchanged, his mother petrified in her harsh condemnation of the world and its inchoate yearning for love. She puts him in his old room at the top of the house, as if he had never left at all.

That night, he hears the tigers, the patient rhythm of their feet marking off the seconds until Doomsday. “You aren't real,” he whispers to them, lying stiff and cold, afraid to close his eyes because then he might be able to hear them more clearly. But the tigers, unheeding, continue pacing until dawn.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Guest Film Column

Lucy A. Snyder

California Noir: The Salton Sea

I wanted to see The Salton Sea the moment I saw the trailer on Apple's Quicktime site, but it seemingly spent only about five minutes in theaters here in Columbus, Ohio before it disappeared. I think the studio figured it had tax write-off marked all over it, and didn't bother to do much to promote this one.

Which is a real shame, because this is one hell of a movie with a great cast, razor-keen writing, an excellent score, and stylish, smart direction.

The Salton Sea stars Val Kilmer as a widowed jazz trumpet player who adopts the persona of death punker Danny Parker in an undercover attempt to discover his wife's murderers in the seedy world of methamphetamine addicts and dealers.

Kilmer's got a bad reputation in the movie world as being one of the worst prima donnas in the business, and as a result directors have been reluctant to work with him. After seeing his performance as Danny Parker/Tom Van Allen and after seeing his interviews in the supplementary material on the DVD, I wondered if Kilmer hasn't turned over a new leaf. His acting here is some of the best work he's ever done. He seemed subdued and careful in his interviews—perhaps he's realized the effect his bad behavior has on his career. Perhaps we'll be seeing him in more and better roles from now on. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part.

Vincent D'Onofrio turns in another of his trademark wonderful performances as Pooh-Bear, a methamphetamine cook who snorted so much crank that his nose rotted off. Pooh-Bear is a redneck surfer dude psycho, ridiculous and frightening in the same scene. D'Onofrio went to great lengths to prepare for the role, gaining forty-five pounds and getting a bad farmer tan and bleaching his hair. The director reported that he didn't even recognize D'Onofrio when he showed up for the first day of rehearsals.

D'Onofrio's part is comparatively small, but his scenes are riveting. When we are introduced to Pooh-Bear's character, he's directing a home movie recreating the Kennedy assassination—with pigeons strapped into a remote-controlled toy jeep and his buddies with rifles. That scene was some of the blackest comedy I've seen in a while. Another amazing scene is when Parker comes by to do a drug deal. Pooh-Bear, suspecting Parker's an informant, tries to torture the truth out of him. I won't go into details, but Pooh-Bear's unique brand of “encouragement” involves Parker's pink bits and a very angry, starving badger.

A big surprise for me was the director, D.J. Caruso. His name wasn't familiar to me, but The Salton Sea is so expertly directed I figured he'd done lots of other features. Not so—up ‘til now, he's mainly done made-for-TV movies. This is a young director I hope we'll be seeing more of. He apparently made an effort to combine the best of the script and the best improvisation his actors could offer—he would evidently film certain scenes in radically different ways to see what worked best.

While his technique is perhaps debatable, his results are brilliant. The movie constantly surprises you. The first part of the film—which details Parker's wry observations on the world of the tweaker—leads you to believe that this is going to be a darkly comic Trainspotting with meth addicts. But it gets darker and darker, and suddenly it's squarely in film noir territory.

This was one of the best films I've seen this year. If you enjoyed films like the original Get Carter and The Limey, this should be just your speed.

* * * *

The Salton Sea (R); 103 minutes; Director: C.J. Caruso; Writer: Tony Gayton.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Magnificent Dachshund

Geoffrey H. Goodwin

Tortellina adored her adventures with the Magnificent Dachshund.

At age five, her hair still curly and strawberry-white, like a dream the Magnificent Dachshund magically appeared and carried her off into the cricket-chirpy night. They zoomed out her bedroom window, down to the lower forty acres, past where the wildflowers became thickets.

She was never scratched by the brambles on the one night a month, either the seventeenth or the eighteenth, when the Magnificent Dachshund would fly her down to the river. The nights never seemed chilly, yet Tortellina could always feel the cold moss between her toes.

They would stare up at the scattered stars in the sky and discuss one of the eighty-eight constellations officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union, or theoretical astrophysics, or the attributes of various galaxies.

Eventually, after a few years of once-a-month visits, Tortellina asked the Magnificent Dachshund what he did after he deposited her back in her lavender-canopied bed and lightly starched sheets.

"Well, my dear, after you're snug, I look after the things on the other side of the river."

And Tortellina tugged at the hem of her nightgown and demanded to know what was on the other side of the river.

But the Magnificent Dachshund would not tell. Instead, this time for the first time, the stately dog offered to zip across the soundlessly bubbling water and fetch Tortellina whatever in the world she desired.

In the blink of one eye, the Magnificent Dachshund brought Tortellina a box of Sugar-coated Oaty-Os and chilled soymilk. She carried her treasures in her arms and the sleek hound transported her back up the hill, home to her bedroom. If she'd thought it all the way through, she would've also asked for a bowl and a spoon—so she wouldn't have had to tip-toe downstairs and slurp her cereal extremely quietly, afraid her parents might ask where the bowl of Oaty-Os came from.

In time, Tortellina told everyone she knew about the Magnificent Dachshund. She explained and explained how one night a month the tofu-sausage-shaped doggie would retrieve her from her dreams and take her down to the mossy riverside. Few believed her, but some did, perhaps enchanted by her wonder-filled green eyes. Her mother might have believed her most of all. With a look of mild concern, her mother fastened the lock on Tortellina's second-story window a bit more tightly—but the Magnificent Dachshund still found his way in.

And Tortellina grew older and became interested in daytime television and boys who rode motorcycles, but even when she journeyed to Ithaca to study astronomy, Tortellina found excuses to spend the night at her parents’ house, snug in her bed, on the seventeenth or the eighteenth of every month.

The Magnificent Dachshund always brought whatever she asked for, but if it was too heavy for her to carry while she rode home on his back, then she could never find it at the riverside the next morning. This was most saddening when she first learned the lesson, when she asked him to fetch her a wild pony that had traveled to the New World on a Spanish galleon, just like Misty of Chincoteague. Tortellina spent most of the next twenty-nine days wandering the shore hoping her little horse was okay, before the Magnificent Dachshund returned and made it clear that the pony had merely been too big to carry, and was healthy and safe in a magical place called the Great Repository.

Her parents never asked how her room slowly filled with stickers of exotic butterflies, photographs of boys from daytime television on motorcycles, silvery sculptures, telescopes, books about everything—even romance novels that told the truth, and other near-priceless treasures.

As it went on and on, Tortellina cared less and less for the lavishly illustrated atlases, finely worked earrings or even the pawfuls of money that the Magnificent Dachshund would bring. She longed, more than anything, to know what was so important on the other side of the river.

She did, of course, once she'd grown old enough, borrow her parents’ car and drive to the other side, even walking the moonlit shore on nights that were not the seventeenth or eighteenth. And she discovered nothing. She needed the Magnificent Dachshund's help to show her the secret place where he could go.

And the Magnificent Dachshund would offer to get her a book of challenging crossword puzzles or the long-lost mate for a lonely sock she really liked, and once she chose, in the blink of one eye, as long as she could carry it home, it was hers.

Finally, after hundreds of nights spent sitting on the cold moss of the riverside—she'd driven several hours from the research laboratory where she worked at counting the stars—Tortellina said, “All I want is to know where you go on the other side of the river."

"That is not something you want to know, but I can bring back anything you'd like."

Tortellina dipped her toe in the river and kicked.

"I guess I'd like a soy cappuccino."

The Magnificent Dachshund reappeared, balancing the environmentally friendly reusable plastic cup on the bridge of his dignified nose. It always seemed like less than an instant. The foam was exquisite and the cappuccino was exactly the right temperature, not burnt but charmingly hot.

They talked until just before sunrise, discussing M-97: the Owl Nebula in Ursa Major.

A month later, her hair so much darker than when it all began, with a gray strand or two she wouldn't admit, Tortellina sang:

* * * *

"Ooo-oh, Magnificent Dachshund,

where do you go?

When you leave me snug in my bed,

and zip to guard the things on the other

(Ooo-oh) side of the river?

Does the water still flow or has it stopped

long ago?"

* * * *

And the Magnificent Dachshund began to relent.

"Since you have sung the magical song, I will let you come with me, but, believe me, you do not want to go."

And Tortellina bit her upper lip, then bit her bottom lip, and finally said, “I'll sing again if I have to."

So the Magnificent Dachshund carried her across to the other side of the river, to the infinitely large secret cave of the Great Repository.

Everything ever was there. The Great Repository contained every gift Tortellina should've asked for. A heart monitor for her Aunt Bernice. A dewdrop-shaped compass that pointed in the direction of one's true love. A special bracelet that helped find empty parking spaces. Enough bottle caps to earn free computers for everyone she'd gone to school with.

Every cat that had ever been lost. Reference books with all the answers to the questions that most people were too terrified to ask.

Seeing everything stored, shiny-new in the Great Repository, Tortellina realized that her simple selfish wants had been so meager, so shallow, compared to the great big magnificence of the treasures of everything ever.

She could have done much more good in the world.

The Dachshund turned its sleek, tofu-sausage-shaped body toward her, shed a long thin tear, and said he would never return to take Tortellina to sit in the cold moss or talk by the riverside. With a half-waddle and a leap, the Magnificent Dachshund vanished.

The air was quiet and still as she walked through the lower forty and then through the upper forty, brambles catching her hair, catching her nightgown, and scratching her ankles.

And Tortellina changed her name to Bernice, went back to school, became a tight-lipped reference librarian with a secretive smile, and never told anyone else about the Magnificent Dachshund. But she was always very helpful to people who needed answers to questions.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Mama's Special Rice Tin

K.Z. Perry

"Don't want the dead left in the rain forest,” whispers Mama B.

After spitting twice into the crackling fire, she pours a handful of rice into a hot skillet, and waits. Kat squats on a flat stone and tries to look uninterested, but it is the first time she has been allowed to witness Mama B's ceremony.

"Ghost can't just appear. They need to tell me how to find them."

Kat nods and hands her Zuna's tongue. It is pink and hard, so unlike the tongue that once kissed her. In secret she flicks her own tongue against it to see. Though only hours old it tastes strong, like goat meat left to bake in the sun.

Carefully, Mama B places the tongue on the cooking rice. She shakes her soft braids until they dangle like fishing lures down her wide forehead. While her black eyes roll up behind her eyelids, her face turns to greet the darkness. “He's lost his way, looking for his family."

"Bones in mud.” Kat pats her cheek, refusing to admit that she loved Zuna. No temporary wife ever does. She's only worth the two kilos of the mineral coltan paid for her to share a bed, cook food and haul water for as long as her “husband” digs the black mud from the earth.

Eventually all miners leave the camp. Lucky ones walk out of the jungle and they never take Kat with them, although she asks. When they return to their families their new-found riches can buy a radio, cooking pots, dishes, clothes, or a bicycle. Their new money makes them forget their temporary wives. Unlucky miners are bones in mud, like Zuna. Before the mud-sickness claimed him, he paid Mama B a tomato tin of coltan to have his spirit stored in a grain of rice, in the hopes of one day having a proper village burial, outside the forest.

Kat refuses to cry.

Instead, she stares hard and for a moment she thinks she sees the sky in the pan. She glances quickly at Mama B to see if she notices, but Mama B's still working her trance. The black pan holds rice the color of the moon. The glow is blue.

A creeping chill tickles along her neck. Kat raises up on her haunches, anticipating the warning shriek of a monkey. The night is full of muffled whispers. The wind breathes heavily through the roof canopy of sticks and leaves. In the shadows it moves like rippling water.

"Maybe this is death, glowing blue when it gets too close,” thinks Kat. She doesn't speak, fearing Mama B would chase her away. “Or maybe it's Zuna's spirit, fighting to enter the rice."

The thought partly satisfies Kat and she moves closer to the pan, letting the warmth soothe her.

She's heard many times from Mama B that greed, hardship, and mud-sickness own this mining camp. With each passing day Mama B's special rice tin grows full of grains. Wrapped in banana leaves and waterproof eko bark, the tin is stored in the boot left behind by a soldier from the North. Lately the tin is opened and shut almost as frequently as the heavy mists that lace the trees, shielding the workers from the judgment of the sun.

"Rice is ready,” says Mama B, abruptly. All of the grains have huddled against the edges of the pan except for one which is browned and curls slightly at its edges.

Kat can't pick it up. It is Zuna, but not him, and she can't bring herself to pinch the grain between her fingers, and not somehow feel him. And it still glows blue.

It doesn't matter. Mama B doesn't need to hear Kat speak her pain because she knows; she has also lost a man. The difference is, Mama B's heart has had time to harden.

Using her long, dirty nails that are crusted with dried mud, Mama B reaches into the pan, as if she is plucking lice from a child's head. Slowly she closes the tin and walks away, the musk of overripe melons lingering in her wake.

Kat is alone with the tin and the rice. She shakes the tin and it chatters like old teeth.

* * * *

What Kat Sees

"Time to bake bread.” Kat shakes Mama B gently. Her arm feels hot and clammy.

Mama B arches her back, stretching like a cat, and drags a rag across her stomach to wipe the wetness from beneath her sagging breasts. Grunting, she lifts a ten-pound flour bag, once carried on her head with ease, takes a few steps, before lowering it to sit and rest.

Kat's afraid to look because she knows she'll see what Mama B hasn't told her.

Mama B is losing heat. She has the same sickness as Zuna and everything about her is fading: the song-bird in her trembling voice, the red-orchid glow in her cheeks. When Kat's real mother died nine years ago, Kat had felt the shiver of a rain storm in the stillness of her skin. Kat's afraid that the heat around Mama B will also fade until there's nothing except cold. Blue.

"Two new miners came into camp last night for beer and cigarettes. Jean and Gregoire.” Mama B clears her throat and chokes on her words.

Kat waits until Mama B finishes her cough. “Hasn't been a new miner in nearly a month,” says Kat.

"If they're coming for quick fortune, they should have come six months ago. Now the work is longer, the digging harder. The buyers don't come around every day. When they do, the price keeps getting lower. Soon it's going to take two days digging to earn a meal. Most men are leaving, one way or another."

"What then for us?"

"We won't starve because Jean and Gregoire are here now.” Mama B shrugs. “Wear your shiny lipstick and red dress."

For as long as she can recall Kat has belonged to somebody. First her family who sent her far away to hide the shame of her rape, next to Mama B. After that, to a series of miners—Mouko, Kako, Thony and Zuna.

"Will they need a washtub?” asks Kat.

"Tell them a spoon of coltan for a loaf of bread."

Mama B calls coltan the mineral of the gods. Men chop down the forest, dig holes in stream beds, and slosh the mud in a washtub until the coltan settles to a glittering stain on the bottom. She says men ship it around the world to turn it into a powder used to make—what? The best Kat can imagine is a monster that listens to voices and sees visions—it's still unclear.

Kat watches a cluster of men, carrying picks and shovels, head off the well-trodden mud trail connecting the camp to the digging, and into the dank greenery of the trees. Their movement sends a parrot fluttering into the top of a strangler fig tree. At one point nearly four hundred men lived in the camp. Now that number has been cut in half.

A man approaches. The lines on his face are sharply defined, with a jagged scar etching a disfigured path across his cheek, crossing his left eye. His brown hair is shaved closed to his head, and his serious brown eyes are shaped like almonds.

"Jean, where's your friend?” asks Mama B.

"Gone,” he says. “A soldier shot him for his boots."

Mama B nods, saying nothing.

Jean sizes up Kat, inspecting her for marks. His large hands grip her shoulders when he spins her around. Mama B steps between them to wrap her arm protectively around Kat's waist.

"One eye's the color of a mandrill, the other of grass,” says Jean.

"She's sweet as sugar cane and brings a digger luck.” Mama B's tone is boastful, the way Kat's father once was when he had proudly introduced her to prospective husbands. Kat lowers her eyelids, remembering, and smiles.

"What kind of luck?"

"Won't know until you pay to own her.” Mama B covers her mouth and hacks into her hands. “She's two kilos of coltan because she's still young and pretty. If you don't like her, pay a second fee and swap her for another."

Jean frowns, squinting in the direction of the thicket. “One wife should be all I need. I hope to make enough so I can head north. I hear there's better work at the gold mines."

"No reason to stay here beyond your fate.” Mama B nods. “It consumes you or kicks you out. It's the way of the forest."

* * * *

Jean is not Zuna

His kisses taste like cacao, cigarettes and stale beer. His hands, callused from months of cutting timber in a logging camp, are rough to the touch. When he isn't drunk he's aloof, displaying the type of behavior Kat has come to expect of temporary husbands. Although he's not quiet like Zuna, his body gives off heat while he sleeps, and Kat finds that comforting until their fourth morning together.

At first Kat believes she is awake because she feels the wind tickling her face. It tastes salty. She must be asleep because the forest is gone and before her moves a strange, gigantic river that has no sides and crashes like a flat waterfall. The water swallows her footprints. It goes on as far as she can see and although the sight of it causes her heart to skip, she can't look away.

When the dream releases her, Jean is still asleep and Mama B's special rice tin rests beside her, in the curl of her neck and chin.

Shrieking, Kat startles to her feet, nearly knocking the tin to the soft dirt. The tiny hairs on her arms stand alert. Even her heart thumping furiously in her throat can't erase the chill. Her feet stumble on an empty beer bottle as she backs away from the metal box, certain of its meaning.

Mama B is dead.

Kat doesn't know what to fear more, a box with no feet finding its way into her bed or no Mama B. Pressing her fists into her mouth, her breath comes in short gasps, jagged and uneven.

Jean raises himself onto one elbow. “What? What?"

"Did anyone come into the hut during the night?"

Jean doesn't answer, instead lifts the tin up to examine it. Blinking sleepily, he flicks something from his arm, and starts to open the lid. Kat scrambles to him, but he twists away, deflecting her advance. She lunges again. Jean is stronger, his hands pushing her away.

Peering inside, he says, “It's just rice."

"No. Spirits are in the rice. Ghost grains."

Abruptly he freezes. When he drops the tin, rice scatters at their feet.

"Witch-girl! Why would you bring that into my bed?” With choppy motions Jean grabs himself, as if someone were clawing at his shirt. His voice grows shrill, laced with fear. “A spirit will strangle me."

"No, no,” she insists, although she is uncertain. “The spirits are in the rice. They can't escape."

"How do you know?"

"I,” she stutters, unable to reply. Suddenly he slaps her.

The sensation of his open palm against her cheek is the same sore shock of a bee sting, throwing her off-balance. She pitches to the ground, landing flat on her back. Peering up at him, Kat realizes it is a new view of Jean, an unwelcome angle that she had experienced once before. With the unspeakable him. Back when home was home, before she was branded as soiled.

Stunned, she slowly raises herself up and stands. She can almost see the anger steaming out of Jean: his lips have paled as though painted with flour; his fingers continue to rhythmically open and shut. He's losing heat, and he is waiting.

She holds her breath, keeping her feet leeched to the ground. The thick air paints her silver cosmetic case, a gift from Zuna, with shiny pearls of moisture. In the distance the grunting alarm of chattering monkeys bites into the morning hum.

"Clean it now.” Jean's voice is tight, as if tethered by a rope.

"Yes, yes.” She nods obediently.

Kat shudders, her legs reduced to trembling branches. She plucks a grain from off the floor, savoring the ting it makes when it returns to the tin. She fumbles with another grain, so many spirits needing to be collected, begging to be mourned.

She whispers to the rice, “Is that you, Zuna?"

When the grains are all gathered, Jean takes the rice tin from her, grabs his shovel and storms out of the shack with elephant steps. A grazing okapi startles at his movements, and disappears into the bush.

Although she can't hear or see them, she believes that the spirits in the rice grains are protesting. Who are they, these men-in-rice? Kat can't remember all the miners or temporary wives; there are too many names to recall.

If the dead don't have recognizable faces, the dead can't speak.

Her muscles ache from listening for a voice to tell her what to do. She is crying now, finally, allowing the tears that she has held on to for so long to empty on to her face. A blur of wetness and salt, for Zuna, for Mama B, and mostly for herself.

She is afraid that if the dead can't speak, it's just plain rice.

And she is alone.

* * * *

The Way of the Rice

While the air keeps its morning cool, Kat sets out to Mama B's hut. On the way she passes a naked corpse left to decay on a bed of wet leaves. She covers its face with dirt, knowing without a proper burial its spirit will be refused entrance at the Place of the Ancestors. Instead of being reborn, it will spend eternity confused and bitter, wandering in the jungle.

At Mama B's hut, her thongs lie abandoned, as if she has vanished in her tracks.

Faint wisps of smoke curl out from the smoldering cooking fire, with an empty pan resting on top, smelling of starch and burnt food. A purple scarf wraps around a bundle by the shoes. Inside is Mama B's stash of coltan, cigarettes, and a loaf of bread. Kat knows it is a gift meant for her, and perhaps a means for leaving the forest.

Where would she go?

So she waits all day for a sign, thinking about her eerie water dream. She thinks of Mama B, a woman of her word, and of her wisdom.

"The grain is the embodiment of the Rice Mother, the goddess of life. Only the Rice Mother can be the keeper of the spirits.” Mama B had said. “Spirits are lured by heat. You cook the rice until the spirit can't resist the warmth. Only a salty bath can release the spirit to be reborn."

Don't want dead left in the rain forest.

By late afternoon, Kat performs the daily ritual she learned from Mama B. She cooks rice and places a small mound on a banana leaf at the entrance of the hut to feed the spirits of the forest, and hopefully keep them at bay. After sipping a mixture of rice powder, salt and water, she moistens her temples and attaches luminous white kernels to absorb the healthy life force of uncooked rice.

Mama B's wisdom of the way of the rice seems of little help.

"What is, is what is,” Kat's father used to say, and she's surprised she recalls him now. Most of the time she prefers to forget her family. Otherwise she becomes lost in the memories: eight older siblings coaxing her from a river bath, sweet yam scent beneath her nails after harvest digging, or the gravel voice of her father urging her to “work hard, stay honest, and make yourself proud” on the day he disowned her.

Kat misses Mama B's special rice tin. It was supposed to give the unlucky a chance to one day rest peacefully with their ancestors. It was the only hope that they would ever leave the forest and rejoin their families.

Like Kat.

* * * *

Darkness, Just Beyond the Village Bar

Men huddle in groups around the village bar. It's an oversized box with wooden walls, a roof and flat surfaces instead of the sticks and leaves used for living quarters. The air smells ripe, laced with the sharpness of tobacco. Just outside the fringes of the building Kat crouches in the shadow of darkness behind a bush. Parts of the conversations carry past her; she hears the words of the Man Talk, without fully understanding their meaning.

"If the embargo keeps up, the camp will have to shut down."

"If I had another job, I wouldn't come here. It's this or starve."

"Same doing up North at the reserve. Game wardens burned it to the ground."

She sees Jean next to a burning torch, posing in an orange shirt. One hand clutches a pick, the other wraps around a quiet, temporary wife, known for opening her legs more frequently than her mouth. If he catches Kat spying, perhaps he will cut off her nose, or something worse. He will know that she wants the tin, and stealing can be punished by a man's anger, so she remains hidden, watching for a while longer.

Something abruptly moves behind her. The wind scrapes the land, drawing a faint whistle from the foliage, provoking the walls of the wooden bar to squeak. Two aardvarks abandon their ant holes to scamper in jagged lines across the unpaved road; as the night song of crickets cease, a consistent low humming, almost morose in tone, replaces their chatter.

She focuses on the shadows. “Who's there?"

The leaves part, fluttering as if they are inhabited by an unseen spirit force. In a flash she is up on her feet, scrambling towards the village bar. She runs a few steps before falling, striking her cheek on a sharp box that is half-buried in the dirt.

When Kat tries to rise, something kicks her down. She tries to stand up again, but a foot against her neck holds her down, pinning her to the ground.

She inhales deeply, fighting the panic that rises in her throat and tastes like dirt. Hoarsely, she whispers her request into the ground, which is the same as saying nothing at all, “Please don't."

She lifts her eyes and is relieved to see Mama's special rice tin sticking out of the dirt before her. The man whose foot holds her down is laughing.

Suddenly, the pressure against her head releases and she is lifted to her feet by her armpits. Jean stands over Kat, his fists latched against his hips, in disgust. He is surrounded by miners. Some hold beer bottles while others dangle cigarettes or clutch torches.

A slow chill creeps around Kat's toes. She wiggles them.

"Why were you watching us?” Jean points with his chin towards the tin resting on the ground. “How did you get that? I thought I buried your ghosts."

Kat rubs her hands together until they start to warm.

"Give them to me."

She picks up the rice tin from the dirt. She brushes the dirt off and nearly hands the tin to Jean.

"This time I'll burn it.” Jean's voice is impatient. “Then you won't summon your ghosts against us."

Backing away, Kat opens her mouth, as if to speak. She wants to say, “No. The grains belonged to Mama B.” However, she can't quite say aloud those defiant thoughts, not yet. But she's not ready to give up the tin.

The moon's face is bright and surrounded by circles of gray and purple. It reminds her of a tired eye beset by bags and rings. Mama B's eyes.

Jean strides towards Kat with his hands outstretched. She turns her shoulders to shield the tin, protecting it in a cradle between her breasts.

Impulsively, she opens the rice tin and pops a grain into her mouth. The rice is sharp against her tongue. She forces herself to swallow. For a moment she hesitates, expecting the forest to close ranks around her, but it doesn't. She eats another and a third. She is gagging on hard, dry, grains, nearly vomiting. With her hand poised inches from her mouth, she steals a quick glance at Jean, and something about him makes her stop.

His face is full of astonishment. It's the way his head angles slightly, chin tilted downward, with his eyebrows arching like mountains, that catch Kat off-guard. It's the first time a man has ever looked at her that way. Besides the fear, he wears a look of awe, and even a little respect.

Restless spirits fill her belly, kicking around inside of her, urging her forward. Maybe it's the voices of the swallowed dead, telling her what she needs to do. Maybe it's Mama B. Or maybe it's an inner voice that never spoke until now.

The voices tell her to keep eating and swallowing, and she does until she no longer minds the taste of the grains: the flavor of mud, bones, rice, and ghosts. Her first taste of respect.

She feels as if she has been struck by lightning. Her cheeks are warm and the heat is spreading from her face down her neck. The air smells of cooking, a little like fresh bread.

For the first time Kat sees glimmering faces on the surface of the rice. Blue ghost forms that flit like glowing butterflies.

Don't want the dead left in the rain forest. Don't leave us in the rain forest.

Another grain, and another. The men watch.

Pausing again from her task, she glances at the pale moon glowing against the sky. The blue doesn't scare her, not now, anyway.

She looks down. Someone has placed a half-empty beer bottle and a stick of dried meat before her, as an offering. Another man steps forward to toss a few crusts of bread.

"The ghosts belong to me,” Kat says boldly, to the men standing before her, to the forest, and to all things that listen. “What else are you looking to buy?"

She's not full yet, and plenty of rice to go.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Meat and the Mushrooms

Spencer Keralis

The witch and her brother sit at the table by the window playing cards. In silhouette, from outside the window looking in they appear perfectly normal—just a young man and woman playing together, sitting across from each other, heads bent over their hands. But inside, they're not playing the same game at all. Two hands of what appears to be solitaire, but then again does not, are arranged on the table and the witch and her brother are not looking at each other. The black wings of her hair frame her face. Her rings glitter in the candlelight. He fusses with his cufflinks, staring intently at the little fan of cards pinched between his fingers.

The witch's name is Clothilde, after her great great grandmother. Her brother's name is Bertrand, which is not a name that has appeared in their family before. The family voiced their disapproval of introducing a new name, but by then it was too late.

At last Clothilde wins her game and looks up at her brother. His hand hovers over a card—the Ace of Orchids lying atop the Chimera, which is wild. She can tell by the placement of the Hyacinth and Morel suits that he's been cheating. There are more Truffles on the table than there should be at this point in the game and he hasn't played the Manticore yet. She thinks it's silly that he cheats, but she doesn't think less of him for it. She loves her brother.

"I don't think she's going to last much longer, Bertrand.” the witch says. Her brother's brow furrows and he bites his lip, tiny sharp teeth breaking the skin just a little. His pointed pink tongue flicks out, pulling the dots of blood inside.

The witch and her brother raise mushrooms in long wooden boxes of manure deep in their basement. They have morels and shiitakes; oysters blue and golden, straw, wood ear, lobster, enoki, button, porcini, cremini, portobello, chanterelle, pom pom blanc, cinnamon cap, clam shell, nameko, hedgehog, black trumpet, matsutake, and red reishi for the kitchen.

In the long boxes of shit in the basement they also raise aminita, fly agaric, brain mushroom, false morel, death cap, destroying angel—stark white and utterly deadly, tricholomas, entolomas, gyropilus, laughing mushrooms, poison pie, russula, omphalotus, milk cap, liberty cap, inky cap, psilocybin, coprinus, ergot, earthballs, sulfur tuft, and philiotina for other purposes.

The heat and moisture must be regulated very carefully for some of these varieties are particularly delicate. Many of them require specific types of manure, elk or elephant, for example. The witch and her brother have it shipped to them from zoos all over the country. The neighbors used to complain about the smell but now there are no neighbors.

The witch and her brother keep pets. Clothilde has six cats: Linda, Alek, Erin, Heidi, Angela, and Naomi. Bertrand has a little dog: Nathaniel, and a raven: Shirley. One summer Shirley escaped from the house but came back after a week or so. Later she laid two eggs, which hatched. The fledglings were named Clive and Edgar. When they learned to fly, they left and were never heard from again. Shirley accused Erin and Naomi of eating them but the cats just ignored her.

Nathaniel sits in the sun and stares at dust motes. The cats slink around him, waiting for a moment when they can pounce on his tail and sink their teeth into it. His yelps fill them with a deep satisfaction.

The witch and her brother used to play a game involving poison. They took turns, for years, poisoning each other. The only rules were 1) the poisons had to be slow, and 2) the antidote had to be unlikely but readily available. But on May sixteenth Bertrand was so excited about a new poison he'd found that he played out of turn. Rather, he was excited about the antidote. Anyway, he played out of turn. This wasn't exactly cheating, but it was rude.

He mixed two drops from the salivary gland of a rare toad found only under the roots of a baobab tree into the powdered shell of a beetle that exists only in the coal pits of northern Wales. This sapphire blue fluid mixed invisibly into Clothilde's milk. She drank it greedily after consuming two marzipan cookies with her afternoon tea.

"You cheating prick, it's not your turn,” she gurgled as black foam began to issue from her nostrils. Struggling to keep her eyes from rolling back into her head, she rose off the floor and chased him through the house with a lobster fork. His little dog ran after them, yapping frantically until the cats pinned him down and threatened to pop his eye with their claws. The witch finally cornered her brother against the grandfather clock and threatened him with the lobster fork until he tossed two baby aspirin onto the carpet below her feet.

"What's this?"

"It's the antidote, Clothilde, you bitch. Now take the fork out of my nose."

"Baby aspirin?"

"It's not the aspirin; it's the naphthalenesulfonic acid—in Yellow Dye #6—what makes them orange. Now put me down, you're hurting me."

She levitated the aspirins into her mouth, but didn't take the fork out of her brother's nose until the foam subsided and her eyes stayed in their proper places in their sockets.

After that, they never played the poison game again. And the witch didn't speak to Bertrand until he cooked her a special dinner. The witch hid in the attic with the bats and mice. She could hear her brother below her in the second bedroom, then tromping down to the kitchen, whistling to himself. So they're having meat for dinner, which they normally don't—they usually only have meat once or twice a year. Eventually the scents of hot oils, sweet mushrooms, and braising meat drew her down from the attic to the table.

Over dinner, the witch was still not speaking to her brother. The meal was cooked perfectly—Bertrand is a fine cook—and the meat flaked easily from the tiny soft bones. The bones were so soft you could bite right through them to the tiny squirt of marrow, which is sweet and salty all at once. The wine was a deep ruby red that looked beautiful in the corners of her brother's mouth after he took a drink. Suddenly the witch rose and kissed him on the lips.

"I forgive you, Bertrand."

And the meal was so much nicer after that.

It is June twenty-first, the equinox, and the witch's brother is upstairs. The witch sits on the settee, hugging a pillow to her chest. She can hear him moving about up there without her and it makes her angry. Suddenly she tosses the pillow across the room and scampers to the foot of the stairs where she pauses, listening. Her hands are clenched into fists; her ragged nails leaving little white half-moons in her red palms. She hears him laugh, and then the sound of something heavy falling to the floor. With a suppressed growl of fury she scrambles up the stairs, past the locked room where his shadow flickers under the door and his sharp yelp of release sounds loud above the rustling of the bedclothes, and on up to the attic. She hides there for hours, pulling the wings off bats, biting the heads off mice. Her cats squirm around her and howl, sharing her pain.

When she comes back downstairs, covered in bits of fur, her face sticky and red, he's in the study reading poetry. He's wearing their father's gray smoking jacket with the hole in the left breast and the stained lapels. Their father's fez sits jaunty on her brother's head.

"I wasn't born to be a skeleton,” he quotes at her.

"Yes, you were, you little shit.” She spits a bit of gore at him, it's a tail, maybe, and stomps to her room. He turns the pages idly, letting her spittle dry on his face.

Bertrand is obsessed with dental hygiene. He uses a different toothbrush every day and there is never blood when he rinses. He keeps dental floss in his waistcoat pocket. The witch is indifferent to her own teeth, which are naturally sharp (she suspects her brother of filing his).

"You must take better care of your teeth, Clothilde."

"When I am a hag, Bertie, I'll need ragged, rotten teeth. Whoever heard of a hag with good teeth?"

"When you're a hag, Clotty, you'll need good teeth. Do you want to gnaw bones with your gums? Or will I just have to boil them soft for you?"

She glares at him. She's twenty minutes older—he's not supposed to get the better of her. He knows she hates soft-boiled bones.

"I suppose I could get dentures.” She warms to the idea. “I could have different sets made. I could have a set made like tusks. I'll root for truffles under the oak trees like a great wild pig!” She flounces from the room in a whoosh of gray silk. He pulls the floss from his pocket and begins to worry at a gristly bit stuck behind a back left molar.

* * * *

There's a particularly deadly variety of inky cap that is so small it can only be seen properly with a magnifying glass. It grows in clumps about the size of a quarter. This little mushroom is extinct except for a few acres of land around a palace near Strasbourg and a carefully tended box in the witch's basement.

The hag who sent the inky cap spores to the witch and her brother made provisions in her will for them to be shipped one box of manure each month from the herd of Pere David's deer raised on the palace grounds. Without it the tiny mushrooms would die.

The miniature inky caps are very special. The Zionist underground in the Soviet Union used just one of them to assassinate Stalin. A whole quarter-sized clump could drop a bull elephant in about eighteen seconds.

While Bertrand is out of the house, Clothilde brushes their older sister's hair and massages lotion into the stretching skin of the girl's belly. It is August twenty-eighth and the sun is shining. The girl's hair is very long but the witch keeps it well tended. It takes her an hour to wash it all and two hours to brush it. The raven cocks a beady eye at her from the doorway. “Piss off, bird,” hisses the witch. Shirley croaks at her and hops away. She hopes her brother doesn't come home before she has time to finish the job. She's not supposed to be in the second bedroom.

When she got fat, Clothilde was terribly unhappy; her silk dresses didn't fit right. Her feet looked swollen like dead fish left too long in the water. Her rings caught painfully on her knuckles. In the early afternoon on April the third, the witch drank a special tea that smelled bad and tasted worse. It made her feel dizzy, then sleepy, and she sweated through her dreams. Her brother sat beside her, mopping her brow and worrying. Within a few days of drinking the special tea, the witch woke up and was fat no longer. Her dresses, shoes and rings all fit. The witch was happy once again.

When she finishes brushing her sister's hair, the witch runs her hands slick with lotion over the girl's swollen belly and wonders when her brother will bring the girl the tea. It will probably be in October. Bertrand loves to cook for Halloween.

The witch and her brother sleep in their parents’ bed. She wears her mother's nightgown, even though it's torn and bears old stains. They're nestled together like spoons and she clutches his arm to her chest, even in sleep. His breath stirs the small hairs at the back of her neck when he exhales. He draws in her dreams when he inhales. The witch's foot twitches in her sleep. Her brother whispers “ his eyes moving quickly behind their lids.Tuber melanosporum,"

One afternoon in late September, a little boy comes up to their porch on a dare. A little clot of other children stand across the street, egging him on. As he opens the gate, his bowels begin to churn in a horrible cramp. Fearing the ostracism that comes with failure, he grits his teeth against it and walks to the stoop. On the first step, his nose begins to bleed, once on the porch, his breath comes in gasps and he begins to gag. When the index finger of his left hand touches the center panel of the door he is flung back as the cramp engulfs him, head to foot. He shits himself violently and vomits blood and bile all over himself, rolling from the porch while trying to scream through the mess roiling from his throat. The other children scatter, leaving him there on the ground in his filth while the witch and her brother giggle madly at the dormer window, high at the top of the house. After a cruelly long while, the cramp leaves him and he crawls home.

It's Halloween and Bertrand is cooking them a feast. Clothilde can hear him singing in the kitchen, can hear the snick of his sharpest knife working against bones, the slap of scrap meat hitting the garbage pail. His happiness is almost infectious, but she has something serious to do. Her cats twine around his legs, yowling for scraps.

"Distract him, my darlings,” whispers the witch.

First she creeps down to the basement, being careful not to let the door slam behind her. She hears the boards creak above her head and can feel the heat from the stove. She does not risk a light but knows exactly where she's going. The smell of roasting meat from above tickles her nostrils and she can hear the oil sizzle as the morels and oyster mushrooms hit the pan. She can picture them releasing their sweet moisture into the hot oil. She can picture the look on her brother's face over the heat of the stove, the sweat on his brow and lip, his narrowed eyes, his lips slightly parted, breathing steam. His look of concentration disturbs her and she almost stumbles in the dark.

Having secreted her prize in a pocket of her dress, the witch scampers back up the creaking wooden stairs to the kitchen where she pours a glass of milk. Bertrand smiles absently at her through the steam, his hands a blur as he crushes garlic with the French knife, then sweeps it into the hot pan. Then some dill, some white pepper. Clothilde barely registers in his consciousness. He doesn't notice the tiny bit of deer shit she has tracked into his spotless kitchen.

The witch floats to the foyer and up the hall stairs, being careful not to spill the milk. On the landing she whispers a spell to unlock the bedroom that used to be hers. Her brother doesn't know that she's mastered this spell. He thinks he has the only key. She sets the milk on the nightstand next to the empty teacup and then goes to the bathroom to fill a basin with warm water. Returning with her hands full, the witch forgets to lock the bedroom door behind her and begins to wash her sister. On a shelf by the door, two dry old skulls, one with long hair still clinging to its crown, the other with what may have been a mustache over its bared yellow teeth, look down wisely on this operation.

The witch carefully bathes the tattered mess between the scarred stumps of the girl's legs and her newly small belly. She washes the bite marks on the stumps where the girl's arms once were; the thumbprint bruises on her throat. Her sister's lips are chapped, so the witch squeezes some water from the cloth onto them to ease the dryness. The girl can't lick away the pink liquid because she has no tongue.

The witch crumbles one tiny mushroom into her sister's milk. The girl on the bed is still groggy from the tea but she watches the witch's fingers and begins to cry with relief. She knows what's going to happen. The witch stirs the milk with a spoon—there's an oily black film on the top of the milk from the mushroom. Slowly, patiently, she tips the milk into her sister's mouth. The girl gulps the milk eagerly, being careful to swallow every drop.

At the foot of the stairs, Bertrand wipes the fourteen-inch long French knife, his favorite, on his apron and calls for the witch: “Clothilde? Dinner is ready."

The milk is gone and her sister's breathing is slowing. When Bertrand's tread sounds on the stairs, the witch begins a spell to make fire. It plays blue and orange over her fingertips.

Mercifully, the girl on the bed is dead before Bertrand reaches the top step. He calls to the witch, “Clothilde? What are you doing? Clothilde!” A note of panic and maybe even rage creeps into his voice when he sees the door to the second bedroom ajar; his knuckles whiten around the handle of the knife. His hurried steps are loud on the landing and he hits the door at a run, but the witch is ready for him, flames dancing in her palms.

* * * *

[Back to Table of Contents]

Contributors

* * * *

David Blair's poems have appeared in AGNI, The Greensboro Review, International Poetry Review, and Chicago Review.

* * * *

Gwenda Bond is not a senior administration official. Her website is at bondgirl.blogspot.com.

* * * *

Hannah Wolf Bowen is a Philosophy major. Would you like fries with that?

* * * *

Philip Brewer speaks Esperanto and uses it to communicate with people all over the world. He graduated from Clarion in 2001.

* * * *

E. L. Chen works hard for the money, so you'd better treat her right. She has been previously published in On Spec and Challenging Destiny. Everything else that she doesn't mind you knowing can be found at www.geocities.com/elchensite.

F. Brett Cox is co-editor, with Andy Duncan, of Crossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic (Tor, 2004). He used to live an hour from the Gulf Coast in Alabama. He now lives an hour and a half from the Canadian border in Vermont. It's a good thing.

* * * *

Eliot Fintushel is an itinerant showman now living in Santa Rosa, CA, hard by the fairgrounds and between the transmission shops and the horse stalls. He has written many stories, published mostly in Asimov's. His work has been nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards. He has twice received the NEA Solo Performer Award. His current touring show, employing masks and ancient music in the original tongues, is Apocalypse, a solo performance comprising the entire Book of Revelation word for word in the translation commissioned by King James in 1611!

* * * *

Geoffrey Goodwin is a generous man who works in a bookshop outside Boston, MA. This is his second story for LCRW. He is not worried by this.

* * * *

Spencer Keralis grew up in Wyoming but now lives in Minneapolis, which is colder. His written work has appeared in The Dry Crik Review of Contemporary Cowboy Poetry, The Owen Wister Review, STET Magazine, and The Plastic Tower, among others. In another life he co-authored a textbook on Asynchronous Transfer Mode circuits now in use at a major telecommunications corporation, but that's a long story and really not very interesting.

* * * *

Mario Milosevic's poems and stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and in the anthology Poets Against the War. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, novelist Kim Antieau.

* * * *

Sarah Monette collects ghosts in books, pressing them between the leaves like dried flowers. She has sold stories to LCRW, Alchemy, Tales of the Unanticipated, All Hallows, and Lovecraft's Weird Mysteries. Her story “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” from LCRW 11, won the 2003 Gaylactic Spectrum Award.

K.Z. Perry's stories have recently appeared in MOTA 3: Courage, Talebones, Book of More Flesh, The Urban Bizarre, and Problem Child. She lives in New York.

* * * *

George Plimpton will be greatly missed.

* * * *

Rick Polney is an adjunct professor of English and Humanities, a former Army officer, a sometimes performance artist, and an unrepentant risk-taker. He is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop and studied writing under Chip Delany at Temple University. He has been published in TurboCharged Fortune Cookie and Schuylkill.

* * * *

Tim Pratt's first collection, Little Gods, will be dropping through your ceiling sometime soon. He is a frequent contributor to a host of magazines and has joined the publishing party as co-editor of Flytrap.

* * * *

Veronica Schanoes is from New York City. She won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Prize from the Academy of American Poets. This is her first non-academic publication. She's very, very pleased.

* * * *

David J. Schwartz is the reincarnation of a famous dancing bear who once entertained thousands of Bolivian mine workers. He is indigenous to the Midwestern United States, and traces of his spoor have appeared in On Spec and Flashquake.org. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop and prefers tea, thank you. He keeps a reading journal at snurri.blogspot.com, and he would be humbly pleased if you would read it.

* * * *

Lucy A. Snyder lives in Columbus, OH. Her writing has appeared in Chiaroscuro, Snow Monkey, Strange Horizons, The Midnighters’ Club, and Cumberland House's Guardian Angels anthology.

* * * *

Jason Stewart lives between the toes of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. With his two cats, he watches a tiny door in his living room which he has never opened, for fear of finding greebles. When he's not consumed by these fears, he spends his time at Colorado University where he works in the library and is finishing his BA in English. His work has appeared in Almagre, Riverrun, and BLAH.

* * * *

Karina Sumner-Smith is fairly sure you've never heard of her. That's okay. She forgives you.

* * * *

M. Thomas is a writer and teacher in Austin, Texas. She is a short story editor and contributor for the ezine Deep Magic. Her fiction has previously appeared in Deep Magic, Abyss & Apex, and Strange Horizons. She dabbles in magic realism, humor, and young adult fantasy. She maintains a website for writers at www.found-things.com, and welcomes your visit.

* * * *

Leslie What is a Jell-O artist and writer from Oregon. Her writing has won awards for drama, nonfiction, and fiction, including a Nebula Award for short story. Her comic novel, Olympic Games, will be published in 2004.

* * * *

Mieke M. Zuiderweg is a photojournalist in Western Massachusetts who is trying to work up the courage to walk away from taking pictures of angry mourners and burning buildings to pursue a career solely based on her photo illustrations and picture experiments. She resides in Northampton but is originally from the Netherlands. Hence the unpronounceable name.

* * * *

Website links and richer, deeper, more meaningful bios can be found on this page: lcrw.net/issues/lcrw13.htm

* * * *

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

Table of Contents

Kukla Boogie Moon

Lunar Fate

The Changeling

The Faith of Metal in Ghosts

Home and Security

The Greebles

Dear Aunt Gwenda: Advice from a Better Time & Place

The Poor Man's Wife

Rowboats, Sacks of Gold

White Rabbit Triptych

Salesman

Legacy

Serpents

A Last Taste of Sweetness

Pinned

Sidhe Tigers

The Guest Film Column

The Magnificent Dachshund

Mama's Special Rice Tin

The Meat and the Mushrooms

Contributors

[Back to Table of Contents]