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First published in 2008, 2008

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CONTENTS

The LoveSling

The Problem of the Traveling Salesman

Heliotrope Hedgerow

The Chance

In the Name of the Mother

Holden Caulfield Doesn't Love Me

A Wizard of MapQuest

Marie and Roland

Ana's Tag

Three Poems

The Leap

The Girl With No Hands

About the Authors

* * * *

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #23

TABLE OF CONTENTS of an item that, surprisingly, given that the date is

NOVEMBER 2008, does not require A FEDERAL BAILOUT

fiction

Nick Wolven, The LoveSling

Kat Meads, The Emily(s) Debate the Impact of Reclusivity on Life, Art, Family, Community, and Pets

Susan Wardle, The Chance

Jodi Lynn Villers, In the Name of the Mother

Daniel Lanza, Holden Caulfield Doesn't Love Me

Alex Wilson, A Wizard of MapQuest

Kirstin Allio, Marie and Roland

William Alexander, Ana's Tag

Mark Rich, The Leap

Angela Slatter, The Girl with No Hands nonfiction

Ted Chiang, The Problem of the Traveling Salesman poetry

Christa A. Bergerson, Heliotrope Hedgerow

Kim Parko, Three Poems comic

Abby Denson, Jingle Love spot illos

Anna Sears, Chris Nakashima-Brown cover

Kevin Huizenga

Makers: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, Kendall Diane Richmond, Michael J. DeLuca, Sara Majka, Danielle Baldassini, Anna Brenner.

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No.23, A Celebration, November 2008 (but actually December—and very much looking forward to January 20, 2009). ISSN 1544-7782. Since 1996, LCRW has usually appeared in June and November from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 info@lcrw.net lcrw.net/lcrw

Subscriptions: $5 per single issue or $20/4. Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library and institutional subscriptions available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as an ebook through Fictionwise.com, lcrw.net, and lulu.com, and as a trade paperback from lulu.com/sbp. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Printed by Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

Thanks for reading.

The LoveSling

Nick Wolven

1

The package was larger than they had expected.

It took up nearly the entire foyer: a battered cardboard box sealed with packing tape. They had to push it down the hall to the bedroom, sliding it over the wood floor. In the bedroom, Andrew cut the packing tape with a key. He reached into the box and drew out a card.

"The LoveSling,” he read. “A dramatic new tool for mega love increasement. For bringing couples together and aggrandizing overall joy. Hooks into most things with facile assembly.” He lowered the card. “It must be from a foreign country."

"They had a picture in the catalog,” Amy said. “It looked kind of like a spider."

"And why do we need this thing, again?” Andrew said.

"To give the bed a rest, stud.” Amy knelt by the box. “I thought it would be fun. A new house. A new spouse. A new suite of romantic positions. We've worked through three books and two foreign DVDs; we've even taken tips from your perverted crew of friends. We've exhausted the potentialities of all level surfaces.” She pushed her hair back. “I thought we should effect a comprehensive paradigm shift."

"I love it when you talk dirty,” Andrew said, and kissed her ear.

* * * *

* * * *

That night they had Tuscany chicken and risotto with parmesan and peppers. They shared a bottle of Sauvignon-Blanc. They went into the bedroom and looked at the box.

"There's an awful lot of bubble-wrap in there,” Andrew said.

He squatted and excavated the package, yanking out wads of paper and inflated plastic pillows. Styrofoam peanuts clung to his forearms. He lifted a baggie. “There's a lot of screws involved."

"That's the idea, all right,” Amy said. She helped him pull straps and plastic tubes from the box. “Is there an Allen wrench anywhere? I think we're going to need an Allen wrench."

"I don't see any instructions,” Andrew observed.

"There was a picture in the catalog. It looked kind of like a rosebush."

"Where does this hose attach?” he said.

They spread the contents of the package on the floor.

"I'll get a screwdriver,” Amy offered. “I'll get tools."

She left the room. While she was gone, Andrew stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the black apparatus at his feet. When Amy returned, he poked the mass with his toe.

"It looks kind of like an octopus,” he decided, scratching his neck.

They drove the screws into the ceiling, and attached the hooks. From the hooks they hung the tube-like things, and from the tube-like things they hung the harness. The harness had pointy things. They plugged these into the pointy-thing sockets. The pointy-thing sockets supported the saddle, and the saddle seemed to be attached to everything else.

Andrew tugged experimentally. “It seems to be secure.” He squinted at the ceiling. “I think I found a stud."

"Are there studs in a ceiling?” Amy said. “Or only rafters?"

Andrew tugged again. “It's not falling down."

Amy put her arms around him. “I think I found a stud."

They laughed, kissed and cuddled. They took off their clothes.

"Are we sure this is safe?” Amy said. “How does this work?” She gave the sling an experimental poke. It swung away and then back.

Andrew seized one of the microfiber straps. “I think one of us climbs in, and the other—you know.” He blushed. “Stands in front.” The card was at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. “It says here it's ‘like something you have no experience.’”

"Sounds marvelous,” Amy said. She was already climbing into the harness. She slipped a leg through the straps, adjusted a breast, brought her arm around behind her head. “Is this how?"

"I think you have to—"

"Wait."

"No."

"Do this."

"No."

"I'm stuck."

"It seems like you have to loosen that buckle,” Andrew said.

"What buckle?"

He slipped an arm behind her. “Here."

She wriggled away from his fingers. “Did you get it?"

"Not quite. I've got something.” Andrew gave a pull. “Uh-oh,” he said.

"Is that supposed to come out?"

Andrew held a long, twisted strap in his fist. He pulled on it steadily. A black mass emerged from behind Amy's back, bulging like a birth from the guts of the sling. Andrew prodded it uncertainly. He said, “It's a net."

They considered the situation.

"Maybe,” Amy said, “the net goes under us. In case we fall."

"But the net is attached to the sling,” Andrew said.

"Right,” said Amy.

"And the sling is attached to the ceiling,” Andrew said.

"Right,” said Amy.

"So if the sling falls out of the ceiling, the net falls too."

"And then we land in the net,” Amy said.

Andrew looked at the ceiling. He looked at the floor. He looked at Amy. “Right,” he said.

He threw the net over his shoulder. It fanned out like a cape. He stepped forward and reached behind Amy. “If you just hold on, I can loosen this strap. Here, take my hand.” He took her hand. Her skin was hot. So was his. “Now pull,” he said. “Now lean. Now swing."

"Don't do that,” Amy said.

"Why not?"

"You'll get caught."

"I won't."

"You will."

"I won't."

"You will."

"I won't. I'm caught."

"What did I tell you?” Amy said.

Andrew lifted a foot, and braced it on one of the pedals. “I think if I climb on there with you, I can get through to the other side."

"And what's the advantage of that?” Amy said.

"A fresh perspective,” said Andrew. He hopped off the floor. Holding Amy's hand, he pushed off the pedal. The sling swung. The screws groaned. Andrew took his foot from the pedal, and put it on Amy's knee. He lifted his other foot from the floor. He flailed wildly at the straps. With a sound like a saw, the screws tore from the ceiling. The sling and its occupants crashed to the floor.

They writhed in the tangle of cables and cords. Andrew tried to move his arm, but it was pinned under Amy. He tried to move his leg, but it was tangled in the net. He shook his head, dazed with pain. “I thought I hit a stud."

Amy twisted to glare at him. “I'm about to hit you."

Andrew squirmed against her. “If you just move your leg..."

"If you just move your shoulder..."

"Your butt is in the way."

"Now your butt is in my face."

"I'm turning the other direction."

"You're twisting my wrist!"

"If you would just let go of my hand..."

"No, no; don't let go."

"I can't see what I'm doing!"

"I think we're in trouble,” Amy said.

* * * *

They lay on the floor as the hours advanced, as the window darkened, as the world changed around them.

The world did not change for them. They were tangled in the sling.

"I'm learning things about you I never noticed before.” Amy spoke to Andrew's heel. “You have the world's hairiest toes."

"And you,” said Andrew, “have a smelly lower back."

"A smelly back? Who has a smelly back? Nobody has a smelly back,” Amy said.

"I can tell you one person who has one,” Andrew said. “It smells like cheese."

Amy wrestled and wriggled. “We have got to get out.” She pressed Andrew with her nose. “If we just work together..."

"Put your hand on my back. We can prop ourselves up."

"We can use that pole."

"We can turn ourselves over."

They turned themselves over, and over again.

"I thought of something,” Amy said to Andrew's heel. If we can get to the phone, we can call my sister. If we call my sister, she can drive over here. If she comes over here, she can help us get out."

"I don't think your sister deserves this,” Andrew said.

"You didn't know her,” Amy said, “when you were ten.” She kicked Andrew in the elbow. “Here, help me grab that pole."

By using the poles, they were able to cross the bedroom. They pushed themselves like a horrible gondola down the hall. At the end of the hall, they had a revelation. If they held the poles correctly, they could use them like stilts. They gripped and pushed, pushed and shoved. They groaned and panted, adjusting hands and feet. They lifted themselves from the floor.

"Now,” said Amy, “we can walk. I think."

They walked like a crab on their poles and feet, across the living room to the den.

"This is actually kind of fun,” Andrew said.

Amy laughed.

Her phone was in the den, on top of the computer.

"I think,” said Amy, “if you just use that hose..."

"I think if you kick, like—"

"I think if we jump."

They jumped, and they kicked, and they used the hose.

"Woo-hoo!” Andrew cried. “We are awesome! We're awesome!"

"When you shout,” Amy said, “your breath tickles my loins."

"I'm sorry,” Andrew said.

"Oh, no. Do it again."

* * * *

Amy's sister lived across the city. She arrived two hours later. By that time, Amy and Andrew could run and jump with ease. They could somersault and skip. They could climb up stairs.

By using the hose, they could take things off counters. By using the pedals, they could roll on little wheels. By using the screws, they could climb up walls.

Every time Andrew spoke, his breath tickled Amy. Every time Amy moved, she rubbed Andrew's back. When Andrew breathed, Amy felt it with her skin. When Amy rubbed against Andrew, Andrew laughed with joy.

They were in the front hall when Amy's sister arrived. They heard the spare key in the lock, and crouched on the floor. Amy's sister entered, set her bag by the doorway. She saw the thing in the hall.

"Oh, my,” she said.

"It's great!” said Amy. “We can turn on faucets!"

"It's great!” said Andrew. “We scared the cat!'

"Every time she moves, it makes me shiver."

"Every time he talks, I get the chills."

They demonstrated. Andrew sighed. Amy cooed.

"I think I should leave you guys alone for a bit,” said the sister.

"Oh, no!” said Amy. “Stay awhile! We'll make tea.” They went into the kitchen. “Is lemon zinger okay?"

Amy's sister followed them. She had her disapproving face on. She pointed at a spot between Amy and Andrew. “Looks like if you move that hook, you'll be okay."

"Oh, no,” they said. “That's really not necessary."

Amy's sister pushed up her sleeves and knelt beside them.

"No, no,” they said. “We like it this way!"

Amy's sister reached between them, and took hold of the hook.

"Please,” they said. “That's really not a good idea."

Amy's sister pulled. She frowned. She pulled again. She squatted beside them. “Uh-oh,” she said.

* * * *

* * * *

2

On the street that led to the ice cream parlor, Mr. and Mrs. Plinth strolled hand in hand. They were old and liked to go for walks at night, when the air had cooled and the streets were less crowded. They always made a point of sticking to the same course, because deviation was bad for the stomach.

Mr. Plinth pointed down the street. “Well. Look at that,” he said.

"It looks,” said Mrs. Plinth, “like a piece of modern sculpture. Like one of those things your brother used to make."

Mr. Plinth frowned in disapproval. “It certainly does,” he said.

They strolled along at a steady pace, watching the object advance.

"Are those people inside it?” Mr. Plinth said.

"I believe they are. One, two ... at least seven. They shouldn't be doing that,” said Mrs. Plinth, “on this street. They'll set off the car alarms."

"They're certainly very fit.” Mr. Plinth sighed deeply. “I remember when I was that fit. I took gymnastics before men did that sort of thing. I could go into a bridge from a standing position. But I never rolled around, doing somersaults like a fool, with seven people in a giant black net!"

"Ten,” said Mrs. Plinth. “There are at least ten in there."

It was against their habits, but they stopped to watch the object. It was bigger than they had first realized. It took up the whole sidewalk. Its top brushed the lower branches of the trees along the street.

"They're coming right toward us,” Mr. Plinth observed.

Mrs. Plinth nodded. “Maybe they want to say hello."

"They probably want money. Artists always want money."

They stood holding hands as the object loomed over them. It was like a beetle, like kelp, like an exercise machine. It tumbled and squeaked and rattled and moaned. Now and then it let out a sigh of pleasure.

"They seem awfully excited,” Mrs. Plinth said, “about something.” She reached out to prod the advancing black mass.

"They're going to roll right over us,” Mr. Plinth complained.

And then Mrs. Plinth's finger made contact with the object. And they realized its true intentions, and they screamed.

* * * *

It traveled the city, and it traveled the country, and it traveled the endless suburbs in between.

It found a man who was looking for adventure, and a boy who couldn't leave well enough alone.

It found two girls in a street holding hands, and two women in a bedroom who were holding much more.

It found people hugging, and people too shy for that.

It found a man with a heroic and altruistic nature, who ran after it shrieking about rescue and salvation. He caught up to it and didn't shriek anymore.

It found people committed to the destruction of unnatural things, who tried to disassemble it, and tried only once.

It found people committed to the study of natural things, who tried to disassemble it, and tried only once.

It found people who knew what it was and ran to join it.

It found people who knew what it was and ran away. If they really meant it, they usually escaped. But there were only a few who really meant it.

It pulsed, and it throbbed, and it wriggled, and it moaned. It rubbed, and it wiggled, and it quivered, and it sighed. Its stimuli were the searching hand, the inquiring touch, the finger that wandered where it was not meant to be. It learned to hunt and it learned to flee, and it learned to find and keep the things it loved.

It moved and it grew, and eventually it found Dr. Luo.

3

Dr. Luo arrived with her escort in a blue sedan. They crossed a field of orange cones and stepped over a line of police tape. They passed a checkpoint and received special passes. As a genius, Dr. Luo had special privileges. As a genius, she had obligations, too.

"There it is,” the escort said.

They walked down an abandoned street among abandoned houses, toward the abandoned parking lot at the end. Dr. Luo surveyed the thing before her. She took out a pad and a pen, and made a note.

"It kind of reminds me,” said the escort, “of Tokyo. Have you ever been in the Tokyo subway? Or New York? Or Mumbai? It's kind of like that."

Dr. Luo glanced up from her pad and frowned. “There's nothing in the world,” she said, “that's kind of like this."

They walked the perimeter of the great squeaking mass, like two people strolling along a beach. The escort shivered in his shorts and button shirt. “It's creepy how it makes that noise. It kind of sighs. Kind of titters, sometimes. Kind of moans, or grunts. I knew a man who made recordings, for his thesis. He said he heard it slurping, like a really bad kiss."

"It makes all the noises,” said Dr. Luo, “that people make."

"No people that I've heard. At least, not all at once. At least, not in public. At least, not all the time."

Dr. Luo stopped walking. She made another note.

"I heard,” said the escort, nearly bumping into her, “that they tried to use lasers. Bolt cutters, crowbars, jaws of life. But nothing seems to work. The lasers are in there, now. The diodes, I mean.” He nodded with a kind of pride. “It really makes you think."

"What does it make you think?” said Dr. Luo.

The escort stood nodding with his fists on his hips. He stood without speaking for a long time. “I like the image,” he said at last. “I like the fact of it. I don't even mind the smells. It's all very intriguing to me, in its way. I just really, really, truly hate the noise."

"And yet,” said Dr. Luo, “it's all so very fragile."

"Fragile? How so? There's no way to untangle it! They've tried everything! Sharp edges, therapy, grease. They even tried hostage negotiators, once. But no one seems to get it. No one knows the trick."

"It's there,” said Dr. Luo, and pointed with her pen.

The escort looked. “There?"

"Right in there."

"Those two people?"

"Those two people holding hands."

"Right there?"

"Right in front."

"How do you know?” the escort said.

Dr. Luo turned and smiled. “That's what I do. That's my job. And as you probably should know, it's why they sent me out here. It's science. Knots. Connections. Mathematics and fractals. Order out of chaos.” She pointed again. “If they would just let go...."

"If they stopped holding hands."

Dr. Luo spread her arms.

"Amazing,” the escort said. He stepped forward and examined the couple. They were young and pretty and thoroughly connected. Whenever the woman moved, the man moaned happily. Whenever the man exhaled, the woman cooed. They looked lovely and committed, like newlyweds. But then, everyone in the mass looked that way.

The couple didn't notice the escort. They were too absorbed.

"Do you think we should tell them?” the escort said. “About their hands?"

"Why?” said Dr. Luo.

"To free them! To save them! To take this all apart. To undo this giant thing that no one else has undone."

"But it's so very interesting,” Dr. Luo said. She made another note and stood surveying the scene. The escort bent over to examine the couple. He poked with a finger at the link of their hands. Dr. Luo looked past him at the field of tangled limbs, the gross mob of connections that throbbed upon the land. She listened to the noise that was varied, content, and wet, like the aggregated burble of a billion feeding babies.

"It's a shame,” she said. “It would be so easy. To kill it, I mean. To ruin it, undo the knot.” She turned to the escort, but the escort was no longer there. She searched for his body, but without success. And yet she heard his voice in the air among others, exhaling softly a long sigh of joy.

She looked down at the couple and made a final note. Then she tapped her lip with her pen and crossed it out. She tossed her pad and pen into the pulsing mass, and walked back as she had come, along its quivering fringe.

She handed back her pass and went through the checkpoint, explaining about the fate of the escort as she walked. She stepped over the police tape and crossed the field of cones, climbed into the solitude of her black sedan. It seems right, she thought as she drove in the empty town, along the empty highway, through the emptying state. Dr. Luo was no naturalist, but she knew about laws. The thing existed: it had a right to exist. Like everything that lives and moves and feeds, it was bringing its message to the world.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Problem of the Traveling Salesman

Ted Chiang

Suppose you're a traveling salesman and you have a list of cities you need to visit. Gasoline is extremely expensive, so the problem you're faced with is, what order should you visit the cities in to keep your fuel costs to an absolute minimum?

This is what's known in computer science as the Traveling Salesman Problem, and while it's easy to state, it's actually a very difficult problem to solve. So difficult, in fact, that a really good solution would have an dramatic impact on our understanding of the nature of the universe. In this article, I'm going to try to give a brief, non-technical explanation of why this is the case.

To begin with, let's consider the problem of sorting. When you're playing a card game, probably the first thing you do when you're dealt a hand is arrange the cards into order. A common way to do this is to take the card at the end and insert it next to another card so that the two of them are in order; then repeat with the card that's at the end now, and so on until your entire hand is in order. This is a perfectly good algorithm when you have five or seven cards to deal with; you'd probably use it even if you had ten or twenty cards.

But now suppose you're given a box containing fifty thousand index cards with words on them, and you have to sort them into alphabetical order. Now the previously described algorithm no longer seems practical. You'll probably want to try something else; for example, you might sort the cards into piles “A-M” and “N-Z,” and then sort each of those two into smaller piles, and so on. Such a technique isn't useful when dealing with just five or ten cards, but when dealing with fifty thousand, its advantage becomes apparent.

This is one of the most important criteria by which computer programmers judge an algorithm: how well does it deal with large numbers of items? We all expect that a task will take longer when you have more items to deal with; the question is, how much longer?

Let's try to get more specific. Imagine that Word Processor A takes one second to sort a list of thousand names, while Word Processor B takes two seconds. This might make A seem like the better program, but suppose we test the two programs on longer lists, two thousand or three thousand names, and their performance looks like this:

1000 2000 3000 4000

———-

A 1 sec 4 sec 9 sec 16 sec

B 2 sec 4 sec 6 sec 8 sec

B's time increases linearly with the number of items, while A's time increases with the square of the number of items. If this pattern continues, sorting ten thousand names will take A a hundred seconds, while it will take B only twenty. B is the better choice when dealing with larger numbers of items, and when it comes to computer users, you can be sure that someone will want to handle a really huge number of items.

In reality, most sorting algorithms fall somewhere in between A and B in terms of performance, but hopefully you'll have gotten the general idea: when computer programmers talk about an efficient algorithm, they're interested less in how quickly it can solve a given problem and more in whether its performance degrades when the number of items becomes huge.

Now let's return to the Traveling Salesman Problem. Just as with sorting a bunch of cards, there are a variety of different procedures for determining what is the absolute shortest way to visit all the cities. But how well do these algorithms do as the number of cities increases?

It turns out, every known algorithm performs abysmally. That may sound harsh, so let's get more specific and you can judge for yourself. With the best known algorithms, the time it takes to find the solution doubles with every single city you add. That means if a program takes one second to find the shortest path connecting a hundred cities, it takes two seconds when faced with a hundred and one cities. It'll take over a minute when faced with a hundred and six cities, and over an hour when faced with a hundred and twelve cities. A hundred-and-twenty-five cities will take over a year. Think about that: the execution time has grown from one second to one year, and the number of cities has only increased by twenty-five. If you tried to give this program two hundred cities, it would take a billion trillion years.

The Traveling Salesman Problem is clearly very different from sorting when it comes to algorithmic efficiency. The issue isn't whether the Traveling Salesman Problem is soluble or not; a shortest path definitely exists. The issue is whether you can find that path in a reasonable amount of time. To computer programmers, problems of this sort are known as “intractable.” One of the reasons they're called this is that faster computers aren't of much help when tackling larger numbers of items. A computer that's twice as fast hardly makes a difference. Even a computer that's a hundred times faster won't change your situation. If you're trying to handle a really large number of items, you're essentially out of luck.

Sorting is an example of a problem in the class known as P, short for “polynomial time,” where the time to compute a solution is a polynomial function of the size of the input. (For example, if the number of items is n, the time to sort them might be proportional to n2.) By contrast, the Traveling Salesman Problem is an example of the NP-complete class of problems;[1] the time to compute a solution increases exponentially with the size of the input (proportional to 2n).

[FOOTNOTE 1: NP doesn't stand for “non-polynomial time"; it's short for “non-deterministic polynomial time.” NP is the class of problems where, if you are offered a solution, you can prove that it's correct in polynomial time. Roughly speaking, P is the class of problems for which a solution can be computed quickly, while NP is the class of problems for which a correct solution can be verified quickly.

* * * *

The category of NP-complete problems is a really interesting one. Consider some of these other examples:

* Suppose you want to pack a suitcase without going over the airline's limit of 50 lbs, but you have a whole bunch of items of varying weights. What combination of items should you put in the suitcase, so that you'll get as close to the limit as possible without going over? This is the Knapsack Problem: the more items you have to choose from, the time needed to find the absolute best combination increases exponentially.

* Suppose you have to color a map using only three colors, and you can't use the same color for two countries that border each other. This is the Map Coloring Problem: the more countries there are, the time needed to find a correct coloring increases exponentially.

* Suppose you're in high school, and you want to host a party for as many people as you can. Not everyone talks to each other; you know who will talk to whom, but for your party, everyone who attends has to be willing to talk to everyone else there. This is the Maximum Clique Problem: the more people there are to choose from, the time needed to assemble the absolute biggest invitation list increases exponentially.

These problems may appear unrelated, but in the 1970s, mathematicians proved that it was possible to convert any one these problems to the Traveling Salesman Problem, or into each other. This means that if you can find a way to solve any one of these problems efficiently, you know how to solve all of them efficiently. All of these problems are, at some level, the same problem.

Over three thousand NP-complete problems have been identified so far, and they've been found in virtually every area of scientific inquiry, from economics to biology. Even common games like Minesweeper and Sudoku has been shown to be NP-complete. (Imagine how long it would take to solve a Sudoku puzzle involving the numbers one to ten thousand.) More serious examples involve building digital circuits, solving various classes of equations, and generating mathematical proofs. All of these problems are exactly as hard as each other, and a really good solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem would be a good solution to all of them.

The question of whether an efficient way to solve these problems exists is known as the P=NP question, and it's probably the greatest unsolved problems of computer science. Most experts believe that P does not equal NP, but no one has been able to prove it (although some have proven that ordinary techniques for mathematical proof are incapable of answering the question). An organization called the Clay Mathematics Institute offers prizes of a million dollars each for solutions to seven unanswered questions in mathematics, and the P=NP question is one of them.

(Despite the importance of the P=NP question, I haven't seen it mentioned much in science fiction. Charles Stross mentions it briefly in his short story “Antibodies,” in which an efficient algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem ushers in the Singularity, but I'm not aware of any other examples. Probably its best known appearance in popular culture is a Halloween episode of The Simpsons: when Homer becomes three-dimensional and explores a wonderland of computer-generated imagery, the equation “P=NP” is visible in the background. There's also an episode of Futurama where Fry and Amy are making out in a closet at Planet Express, and two books on a shelf behind them are labeled P and NP.)

If it turned out that P were equal to NP, the consequences would be hard to overstate, because it would mean that computer programs could efficiently discover mathematical truths. For example, the other six problems listed by the Clay Mathematics Institute, some of which are over a century old, could all be solved quickly. Some people have said that if P=NP, then creativity could be automated. There's a sense in which mathematicians’ jobs is to look for the needles of correct answers within vast haystacks of incorrect ones (indeed, the same could be said of many people's jobs); an efficient algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem would, in effect, let us find those correct answers mechanically.

Is it possible that a fundamental advance in computer technology will make NP-complete problems easily solvable? Some scientists have investigated whether physical phenomena might be able to perform the equivalent of NP-complete computations quickly. Soap bubbles, for example, assume a shape that minimizes their surface area; a few individuals have tried to use this natural behavior to solve a specific NP-complete problem called the Steiner Tree Problem. They built an apparatus of two plexiglass sheets connected by pegs, dipped the whole thing into soapy water, pulled it out, and watched to see if the soap film took the shape of the best way to connect the pegs. If it had, then nature would have done something that digital computers can't do, but it turns out that soap film cannot reliably find the best solution.

What about quantum computers, which operate on fundamentally different principles than conventional computers? They're often touted as being unbelievably powerful, and may render current forms of encryption obsolete. To date, however, it appears that quantum computers are likewise unable to solve NP-complete problems efficiently; if at some point it's proven that they can, that would actually constitute an important discovery about the nature of quantum mechanics.

Other hypothetical types of computers that have been offered as ways to solve NP-complete problems efficiently have, under examination, been shown to violate our understanding of physics. Coincidentally, physicists have investigated what kinds of problems a computer could and could not solve if it were able to send signals back in time, and it turns out that such a computer could solve NP-complete problems quickly; in other words, an efficient solution to NP-complete problems might be as remote a possibility as time travel. It's almost as if the laws of the universe were designed to keep certain problems hard to solve.

In one respect, it may seem frustrating that, no matter how advanced our technology becomes, some problems will forever be resistant to easy solutions. But this could also be interpreted as good news, because it means that creativity can't be automated. The intractability of the Traveling Salesman Problem means that there will always be a need for ingenuity and insight. That's a relief, isn't it?

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Heliotrope Hedgerow

Christa A. Bergerson shall we now enter the thorny thicket the floor of the woods so fully clothed wicked roses strangling pale picket how neatly the grass seems to be mowed behind the heliotrope hedgerow lives

Hecate, a lady who surely knows the vision of Hermes Trismegistus and emerald tablets that ghost grass grows follow her to the other side of time visit the man with the thousand faces better hurry to be the first in line pray that you will be in his good graces take the key and cross through the clover door transcend sublunary forevermore

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The Emily(s) Debate the Impact of Reclusivity on Life, Art, Family, Community, and Pets

Kat Meads

The excitement—electrifying! The tension—tremendous! For here, tonight, together, in the flesh, as never before and never again, Miss Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, maid of Amherst, and Miss Emily Jane Brontë, maid of Haworth, will appear, discuss their life and work and respond to questions, as time permits. Representatives from each party have agreed to these conditions and have sworn, under threat of legal reprimand, that their clients will indeed show up and show themselves on a stage occupied just now by two empty chairs, a table, two glasses and tumbler of water. (Also provided: two mini-microphones, should either author wish to improve her vocal projection.)

And we in the audience? Near mad with anticipation, awed and exhilarated by the very prospect of sharing the same ether as such legendary, reticent beings. The potential staggers and stuns. The possibility of so many intimate facts divulged! The likelihood of so many wry and spicy details revealed! The depth and breadth of titillating disclosure is scarcely to be imagined. From front row to back: nervous coughs and fidgets, the rustle of notebook pages, for everyone attending this momentous event will take, must take, notes.

Upon organizer request, onstage, the two Emilys will be flanked by their most famous pictorial representations: Miss Brontë, by the portrait painted by brother Branwell of the Brontë sisters three; Miss Dickinson alongside her likeness, age sixteen, visage wan, body recuperating, throat beribboned. Those images are now brought forward and placed on easels: the first hint that Miss Dickinson will sit stage left, Miss Brontë stage right. Briefly, the curtain at the back of the stage balloons. A complaint originating from that distance sounds remarkably bark-like. The wait is crushing, killing. It is exceedingly difficult for us to hold our water. We are in grave danger of succumbing to the strain.

At last! There! An inaugural glimpse. The white dress, its shade purer than virginal white, is inhabited by a red-haired, freckled, exquisitely delicate, exquisitely neat creature with a step so light we do not hear her progress, only her companion's, a Newfoundland twice his mistress's girth. A pleasant murmur crests and subsides. We did not realize we would also be treated to the authoresses’ dogs. At the first note of our spontaneous applause, Miss Dickinson stops short, averts her face, raises a hand to her cheek as if stung there or slapped. Only when silence replaces our offence does she proceed to her chair, drop upon it like a tissue and direct her stare offstage.

Miss Brontë leads with her chin. She is long and lean and, it must be said, less careful in her toilette than Miss Dickinson. Her dress is dark, with leg of mutton sleeves and skirts that cling, the petticoats beneath lacking fullness. There is mud on her nose and shoes and on the shank of her unleashed escort, Keeper.

Miss Dickinson dips sideways, as if in swoon. The microphones pick up her whispered greeting, the word “devoted” slavishly intoned. When Miss Brontë snaps her fingers, Keeper drops instantly to the floor. The sleeves of Miss Dickinson's dress visibly tremble.

"Forgive me if I seem frightened. I never see strangers and hardly know what I say."

"It is not absolutely necessary to speak. With Charlotte, in Brussels, I sat in drawing room after drawing room and never uttered a word."

"A constant interchange wastes thought and feeling,” Miss Dickinson murmurs. “And then we are obliged to repair and renew."

"There is nothing cowardly in retreat."

We have now heard their voices! We can now boast to anyone: we have inhabited the same room, seen life-sized Emilys converse. We have witnessed mud and freckles. We have glimpsed covered ankles.

The authoresses fall simultaneously still and silent, and there is no escaping the conclusion that Miss Brontë's silence presents as sullen. The dogs are aware only of their mistresses, alert to the smallest of their movements, the merest blink of an eyelid. Even when water bowls appear on either side of the stage, the dogs are not to be distracted from their dedicated mission. A sprig of heather flutters from Miss Brontë's hair; Miss Dickinson's sleeves resume their trembling.

"Affected,” a member of the audience judges—shockingly aloud.

The Emilys affect not to hear.

As if each would rather slice open her palms, Miss Brontë and Miss Dickinson reach for their Guidelines for Discussion sheets, copies of which have earlier been distributed to the audience. It is a suggestions sheet only. The Emilys have been apprised they need not confine their remarks to the topics thereon.

Compiled from requests by scholars, readers and fans, the list contains the following (highlighted) queries:

The effect of living in houses that overlook graveyards?

The consequence of fathers who shut themselves in their studies, who dine alone in their rooms?

Your staunch defense of drunkard brother Branwell, of adulterous brother Austin: justify.

Define “eccentric."

Favorite recipe?

Whose handwriting is the tiniest?

Which of you is the better mimic?

Publication: why/why not?

Why no Civil War poems? Why no Industrial Revolution poems?

Least favorite domestic chore?

Your opinion of relatives who tamper with an artist's work, postmortem?

Rather curtly, Miss Brontë declares that her brother has been ill-used by life.

"What fortitude the Soul contains/That it can so endure,” Miss Dickinson feelingly commiserates.

"I shall never renounce my brother. Never."

"The heart wants what it wants,” Miss Dickinson concurs. “I offered Mr. Higginson day lilies. I collect and press flowers."

"As everyone knows, I walk the moors."

"On occasion, I cross the garden to Austin's house. I have been called eccentric."

"My father called himself eccentrick in a letter to Mrs. Gaskell. I am, of course, my father's child."

"My sister-in-law is an exceptional hostess."

"Charlotte would so love to be."

"It is not as if we hide from our families."

"Our families see us daily."

"My valentines first exposed me."

"It is Charlotte who refuses to write in secret."

From the audience: "Bor-ing. Tell us something we don't know."

Audacious, incredible, scurrilous—but: the second sacrilege is somehow easier to accept. This time there is no heckling of the heckler from audience rank. Instead: evidence of agreement. Seats begin to empty. On the backs of vacant seats, the casual and disrespectful propping of feet.

The disenchantment is mutual. Miss Brontë's face turns stony. Miss Dickinson bows her head. Both dogs rise onto hindquarters, alert to audience/author disengage.

"My wars are laid away in books."

"I can simultaneously sweep the kitchen and dream of Gondal."

"My black cake is much sought after. Also my gingerbread."

"I peel apples for Charlotte, potatoes for Taby. I shall never teach again."

Someone near the front is tearing the Guidelines for Discussion sheet in half, in quarters, in eighths, in sixteenths.

"I have asked Vinnie to destroy my letters to the world."

"Charlotte will assume she knows best. Charlotte does not heed requests."

More and more restive, this audience. Those who still bother to face the stage fixate not on the actual but on the two-dimensional Emilys. Why are the genuine articles so unprepossessing in person? Why do they deliver their comments so flatly? Why are they in appearance, style and commentary, so utterly unremarkable? The entire evening feels like a sham, a put-on, an outrage. Our expectations have been toyed with and—dare we say it?—abused.

A gentleman stumbles on a set of knees in his quest for the aisle. Others push to join him.

The Emilys watch the exodus in silence. Miss Brontë offers Keeper the Guidelines sheet to chew on. Periodically, the Newfoundland drools and growls.

A woman in the second row stands and impatiently waves both hands. Flushed and flustered and initially tongue-tied, she is also imperiously demanding. The show she has come for has been withheld. She will not leave without attempting to get something of what she came for. Before either Emily deigns to comprehend her question, she must repeat her question ad infinitum. Her question is: “What story about yourselves would you prefer suppressed?"

Miss Dickinson looks to her Guidelines sheet but the question isn't there, it isn't there.

"Inviting a visitor to choose between wine and a rose,” Miss Dickinson whispers eventually.

"The Keeper beating,” Miss Brontë crossly admits. “The violence of that episode was greatly exaggerated."

"Read a poem!"

Miss Dickinson puts a hand to her cheek in a gesture that has become all too familiar; Miss Brontë bites and bloodies her lip. After a taxing, unpardonable delay, they launch in.

"The night is darkening round me / The wild winds coldly blow;/But a tyrant spell has bound me / And I cannot, cannot go."

"Because I could not stop for Death—/ He kindly stopped for me—/ The carriage held but just Ourselves—/ And Immortality."

"The giant trees are bending / Their bare boughs weighed with snow, / The storm is fast descending / And yet I cannot go."

Some in the audience are convinced we could do as well onstage—better, even. Both recitations lack spirit and élan. Both lack credibility.

"My father's heart is pure and terrible,” Miss Dickinson bleats. “He cannot abide loquacious women."

"My mother went first to her grave. My father, I predict, will see all his children buried."

Miss Dickinson's distress, Miss Brontë's fatalism, detain a few curious souls. Even so, conversations irrelevant to either the work of Miss Dickinson or Miss Brontë build in volume. Guidelines for Discussion paper the floor.

"Heathcliff will forever be maligned."

"My Master will forever be misidentified."

"So what? Who cares?"

The final taunt.

Contractually obligated to remain onstage as long as anyone remains in the auditorium, Misses Dickinson and Brontë, with dogs, remain.

There is hissing in the hallway. There is booing in the lavatories. We are, to the person, exceedingly sorry we came.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Chance

Susan Wardle

The three of us are pulling weeds when the steam car comes bumping and puffing down the dirt track.

"Sally, it's a car!” says Jem. He's eleven and I'm fourteen and neither of us has seen a car other than in a picture book.

"You keep working.” Old Ma Wheatley grabs the rifle and walks across the potato patch to the gate, a man's shirt flapping on her thin frame. We don't get visitors often, not since Old Ma threatened the Chairman with a gun.

I hoe my way to the lane. What affects Old Ma affects Jem and me. I skip three rows, bringing me up behind the scribbly bark tree next to the track.

"Nice car,” Old Ma says to the driver. Its bonnet is dented and there are scrapes down the side. The door has a hole in it as round as my fist. The driver swings down from his seat and takes off his hat. He's younger than Old Ma, hair graying at the edges, eyes echoing the sky. “Where did you get it?"

"It was my father's,” he says.

"And who was your father?” she asks.

"Garrett Wheatley,” he says, and then, “Mum?"

"I haven't got a son anymore,” she says.

He starts telling a story, about his childhood and a little boy whose dad owned a rail yard and whose mum made the best pavlova and how he borrowed his dad's steam car to go fight in the War.

Old Ma picks her teeth, acting like she's not listening. My heart is pounding. I never knew she had family. I thought we were her family now. Why would she want us if she had a real son?

"I'm sorry I went,” he says.

"Put it in the garage where the whole world can't see it,” Old Ma says, stony faced. “I'm glad Garrett didn't live to see this.” She turns and sees us listening. “Back to work!"

* * * *

His name is Harris. He stays for dinner and helps himself to seconds. I think of the garden bed, and the hen that isn't laying.

"When are you leaving?” I ask.

"Thought I'd stay for a while, help out around the place.” He shoots us a grin, “Didn't know Ma had found help already."

"Can I drive the car?” Jem has been dying to ask all day.

"Dishes then bed,” Old Ma says. I wash while Jem wipes, then we kiss Old Ma on the cheek and walk out of the house and across the meadow, picking our way past the rusting engines and wagons, to the carriage we sleep in. We've lived in the carriage since the day we arrived five years ago after the Nationalist came through asking for volunteers and shot our Mum and Dad for saying no.

I light a candle and pull the curtains while Jem gets into his pyjamas. We have two beds set up where the passenger seating used to be and a bookcase made of planks of wood separated by bricks.

I tuck Jem in and blow out the candle.

"Do you think Old Ma would let me drive it?” Jem asks sleepily.

"I don't know,” I say. “Go to sleep.” It's simple for him, he doesn't think about consequence. I do. We're not kin, and Harris is. We just turned up one day and never left.

In the morning Harris brings in the goats for milking and helps finish pulling the weeds.

"Hey Harris, watch this!” Jem throws a stone at a galah sitting on the fence. It hits the pink feathered chest and the bird takes off, screeching abuse.

Harris laughs, “Good aim.” He pegs a stone at the gate post, hitting it. Jem looks impressed.

It's different having a man around. Harris makes the work go faster and easier, he tells stories about the coast and cracks jokes.

"Did you fight?” Jem asks.

"Yes,” says Harris, his face serious. Old Ma glares at them. She doesn't like talk about the fighting.

* * * *

* * * *

"What are you doing?” Harris is watching Jem and me work.

"Fixing the train,” says Jem proudly.

It's Sunday afternoon and Old Ma is having an afternoon nap. Jem and I are out in the rail yard, working on a rusty old steam-train engine. It's Jem's dream to fix it up and steam out of here.

Old Ma laughed when we started working on it. Promised us if we ever get it working and drive it to town she would give it to us. Every Sunday afternoon, and evenings in summer, we paint over rust, and work grease into levers, pistons and cogs. I do it for Jem. I don't believe in dreams.

"You're lucky this place is so far from the coast otherwise the army would have scrapped these engines for the war,” Harris says.

"They took iron sheets off some for the bakery roof,” Jem says waving a hand at the carriage carcasses by the shed.

"Here, that's not how you do it.” Harris takes the steam whistle off Jem. He pulls it apart and puts it back together properly, showing Jem how it's done.

He sticks around all afternoon, giving us tips.

"Are there still trains down on the coast?” asks Jem.

Harris shakes his head. “There were until about a year ago, two of them, steam trains like this."

"What happened to them?” Jem's eyes are fixed on Harris.

"One was derailed, the other got blown up,” says Harris.

"No one is going to blow up this train,” Jem says, horrified.

"Have you tried firing it up and building a head of steam?” Harris asks.

"No.” Jem shows him the driver's lever that we've re-built and how the fire door opens and the wooden boards we've used to replace the floor.

"What state are the old tracks in?” Harris asks.

Jem shrugs. Old Ma told us once how the train line ran all the way through the Tablelands and then down to the coast where it joined with the main line.

I look at the weeds growing between disused wagons and carriages and think of the Ironbark that fell on the track just past the river last spring.

"Are the tracks still good on the main line?” asks Jem.

Harris nods.

I wish Harris would go away. We don't need him.

"Have you ever been in the shed?” asks Harris, waving a hand at the big barn at the end of the tracks. It's shut with big double doors, and a padlock.

"No one's allowed in,” I tell Harris and hand him a valve full of gunk to clean. I don't tell him we've searched all four sides looking for a hole or secret entry. There is a small door on the same side as the house, blocked by a lump of iron as big as a dog.

* * * *

"Can we take the car to Market?” Jem asks the next day.

Old Ma snorts and keeps cutting up apples.

"Please,” he begs and Harris joins in. Lately one of them can't open their mouth to speak without the other finishing the sentence for him.

"And have every man, woman and child in town wanting to borrow it?” She is not one for attracting attention or making a fuss. I think the only time she did was when she told the Chairman she knew what he'd done after Mum and Dad were dead. It didn't make any difference as far as I could see, but Old Ma said it did. Said that the Chairman knew that she knew. Maybe she was right; he never touched me again.

On Market Day morning the car is outside the house, Harris feeding wood into it, building up steam. We load it with eggs, goat cheese, fresh vegetables. We won't have this much for Market next month if hungry-mouth Harris stays.

Jem and I sit up on the back, in with the wood. Old Ma comes out of the house wearing a dress and a large bonnet tied with a scarf. In five years I've never seen Old Ma in anything but pants and a shirt. Slowly we bump towards town, steam puffing.

As we turn onto Main Street people come out of their houses to see us go by. Harris toots the horn. Shirley Masterton, who never says hello, grins. Jem and I sit up in the back waving. Even Old Ma nods at acquaintances.

As soon as we park we're surrounded by townsfolk. People shake Harris by the hand and reintroduce themselves, people he grew up with. Old Ma leaves us to trade, says she's got business on the other side of town.

I look after the stall and Harris talks.

"What news of the war?” Dave Neeson asks and everyone listens in.

"The Centralists are stretched,” he tells them. “If the Nationals can rally and make a hard strike at the City, the power could shift. But they're split, cut off from each other and needing supplies."

There's not much comment, just nods. People in the Tablelands keep quiet and hope the fighting stays on the coast. We don't pick sides because there's never a winner.

"We're bringing back the train,” says Harris.

"Do you think you can?” Neeson asks.

"My mate here believes we should try.” Harris wraps an arm around Jem, whose chest puffs to twice its normal size. “It'll be a lot of work and we'll need help rebuilding the tracks."

"You get us a train and we'll look after the tracks,” promises Neeson. “If I could transport my excess grain to Minda I'd be able to sell it for twice what I get here."

"What about Gerrington?” asks Mrs. Lacey. “I've got a daughter living down that way I haven't seen since the road got cut after the last big rains."

I never realised so many people would have a use for our train.

The Chairman turns up, wanting to know what's happening and sniffing around for a ride in the car. He talks to Harris. I stare at his back and will him to die.

The crowd finally thins. I've done a good day's trading, worth more than the wood we used to fire up the car, Jem is buying a honey crunch with money Harris gave him.

"You lied.” I say to Harris, “You know the engine won't work."

"Sometimes a lie is just a truth that hasn't happened yet,” he says and winks like I'm his best friend.

Late in the afternoon Old Ma turns up with Jenna Ridge.

"Harris?” Jenna's voice is soft, uncertain.

He looks at her with a smile on his mouth and a question in his eyes.

"It's me, Jenna,” she says.

"Of course,” he says kisses her cheek. “How could I forget?"

"I married John Bates,” she says with a blush.

"Congratulations. He's a good man."

She looks puzzled, “You always hated each other at school."

"Just goes to show what good sense he had.” They all laugh then, even Old Ma. “You're more beautiful than ever,” he says, sucking up.

* * * *

* * * *

There are raised voices up at the house that night. Jem and I are sitting on the steps of our carriage when it starts. We sneak across the train lines and into the paddock to listen.

"We should open up the shed and get the Tableland Express running again,” Harris says.

"So you can take off for another twenty years?” Old Ma sounds angry.

"I'm not going to look after those strays of yours after you die!” he yells. “The train would give them something they could call their own."

Old Ma starts to cough. It takes her a long time to stop. When she finishes there is silence.

"There's a train in the shed,” Jem says.

"It's past your bedtime."

Later, I hear the creak of the door up at the house, and a muffled woof from one of the farm dogs. I look out the window. Old Ma is carrying a lantern down to the big railway shed. She tinkers with the lock for ages, then there's a muffled screech and groan of wood and the door opens just enough for her to slip inside.

I climb out of bed and follow her. When I get to the doorway she is standing in the middle of the shed, lantern casting a yellow pool of light on the floor. Towering over her is a steam engine. Black snub nose and funnel, boiler cylinder duck egg blue, wheels polished to a dull sheen. Old Ma walks around it, hand touching the fender lightly. As she picks up the lantern to leave I catch a glimpse of her face, tears reflecting in the glow.

* * * *

Old Ma sends the three of us out to plant tomatoes the next morning. She needs, quiet she says, to make goat cheese and butter.

Stiff-faced Harris spears the spade into the earth. There's no talk today. Jem and I follow him in silence, planting seedlings in neat rows, cold dirt wedging up under my nails.

"Could we attach a plough to the car?” Jem breaks the silence. Harris snorts and keeps shovelling.

"You'd have to chop wood for it,” I say. “So what's the point?"

"When we get the engine going we're going to need a heap of wood,” says Jem.

"You'll never get that engine going!” snaps Harris. “The guts are rusted out of it."

Jem's face crumples.

"Yes we will,” I say, wishing I could make Harris undo those words. “We don't need your help either. We were fine before you turned up.” I want to hurt him. He raises his hand.

"Go on,” I say, staring him in the eye. He glares at me, then his shoulders relax, hand dropping back to his side. Dumping the spade, he walks away.

I pick up the spade. “Come on Jem, let's get these damn things planted."

He nods and moves forward stiffly, face white. He's hurting but if we don't plant, we won't eat.

* * * *

"Where's Harris?” Old Ma wants to know.

"Walking,” I say and dish up the evening stew. There's meat tonight, Old Ma killed the hen that wasn't laying. I'm glad she did it while we were out.

When dinner's over Old Ma sends Jem out to make sure the dogs are chained then stares at me, waiting.

"I yelled at Harris,” I say.

She nods.

"He told Jem the old steam engine would never go."

"It won't,” she says. “I thought you kids knew that."

"It was important to Jem,” I say helplessly. “He wanted something that was ours."

"You've got this place."

"They'll give it to Harris, or allocate it to someone else when you're gone, like they did with our place."

She doesn't disagree with me. Her coughing has grown worse the last few months, we both know it. The door bangs. Jem is back and we don't talk anymore.

We are in bed when the dogs bark up at the house.

"He's back,” says Jem in the dark.

* * * *

Jem is a ghost of himself. He does his chores, speaks when he's spoken to, and doesn't listen to a thing I say. When he's not working he's looking towards the rail yard, staring at an old engine that he's never going to drive. The dogs don't understand why he's not throwing a stick for them, or rolling around on the ground, wrestling with them. I wish he'd do something silly or misbehave.

"I'm sorry,” says Old Ma to Jem after dinner that night. I didn't think she knew that word. “I shouldn't have promised you something based on what I knew couldn't be done. I've got something to show you."

Old Ma leads us outside, across the meadow, past the decaying engines to the railway shed. The key is stiff in the lock. We roll back the doors and hold up our lanterns.

The Tableland Express is larger than I remember from the other night. Brass fittings glinting. Jem walks around it, stopping here to touch a pipe, there to blow a cobweb away. He's tiny beside it, his chin on the same level as the driver's cabin floor.

The rest of the shed is a workshop. Large shelves, drills, pipes, pulleys, and a forge.

"She'll need a bit of work, but she should be sound. She'll get you to town."

Jem hugs Old Ma. She stands stiff in his arms for a moment, then hugs him back, her body awkward, unwinding. When they pull away they both have shiny eyes.

"It was Garrett's,” she says. “He'd like to see it back out on the track."

Harris pounds Jem on the back. “We'll get her going in no time,” he promises smiling.

* * * *

After breakfast Harris tells us he's going into town.

Old Ma sniffs. “All very well for some!” she says and orders Jem and me out to do more weeding.

Harris is back at lunchtime, eyes crinkling as he beats the dust out of his hat.

"How did it go?” asks Jem.

"The Chairman is organizing volunteers to work on the track and send word down the line by foot, letting them know the train's coming back. They'll mill new sleepers and salvage the side lines to give us one track all the way through."

Jem's eyes widen at that.

Harris laughs, “This is the biggest thing the Tablelands have seen since the War began. We're going to have to work hard."

Then he starts ticking off jobs to do, lubing, flushing lines, doing pressure tests, cutting wood, fixing the siding track and carriages for the train to pull on its first run.

A bell tinkles and Sam Neeson rides down the track on his pushbike. “Pa says to tell you there's a couple of men seen,” he tells us, cheeks red from the exercise and excitement. “Nationalists probably looking for supplies."

"Friends of yours?” asks Old Ma as the bike bounces away.

Harris flushes. “I've left all that behind,” he says.

I think Old Ma's going to say something more, but she just coughs, holding an old hankerchief to her mouth. There's a cool wind blowing and she's sweating.

* * * *

I help Old Ma keep the farm going while Harris and Jem spend more and more time on the train and out on the tracks. Jem starts eating like Harris, asking for seconds and clearing the pot.

Old Ma does less everyday, resting between chores. People come and go. We feed a work crew for a week while they mend the rail lines straight out of the shed.

Listening to Old Ma's cough I hope Jem's dream will happen soon, before it is too late.

I'm in the kitchen with Old Ma when there's a loud whoosh of steam and a whistle blows in the rail yard. We go out onto the verandah and there she is, the Tableland Express, out of the shed, smokestack sending lazy wisps into the air, the sun shining off her blue boiler.

Jem waves from the driver's seat and I see his grin all the way across the yard. I start cheering, tears wet on my cheeks.

The train rolls forward, smoke and steam rising. Jem chugs it to the end of the siding, then brings it slowly back, Harris feeding the fire.

"Go on,” says Old Ma. I leave the preserves and run down to help.

It's dark when we stop but the train is ready; carriages hitched and wood box filled, waiting for morning and our first run to town.

* * * *

Jem wakes me at dawn.

While he eats breakfast I build a fire in the engine. By the time Harris comes out the chores are done and the train is eating up wood, ready to be gone. Harris walks unsmiling across the lawn.

"Get down!” A strange man with a gun is standing next to the train.

"What's going on?” A fog settles on my brain.

"They're stealing the train,” says Jem.

Why isn't Harris stopping them?

"No!” says Jem.

"It was never for us,” I say as Harris walks past. “It's for the fighting isn't it? For the Nationalists?"

He doesn't speak, he just climbs up into the train.

There's a noise like a whip crack and the first stranger falls over, a red hole in his forehead.

"Drop the gun!” It's Old Ma standing on the front stairs of the house, rifle raised.

"I'm taking the train,” says Harris. “You won't shoot your own son."

"No,” she says and fires. Harris stumbles and falls over the side of the driver's box, a dark stain forming on the front of his shirt. Behind me the third man starts to run, dodging between the couplings, trying to get out of range.

Jem picks up a rock and hurls it at him. It hits him in the back of the head and he staggers, landing face first, his head hitting the tracks.

Old Ma is still standing where she first fired; her face the colour of porridge.

"Are you all right?” I run across the paddock.

"He wasn't my son,” she says. “My son left twenty years ago and never came home."

"What?” There's too much happening.

"I wanted it to be him,” she says, looking over my shoulder beyond the train.

Jem comes over, face pale. “What are we going to do?"

Old Ma looks at him, eyes coming back to life. “You're going to drive that train of yours all the way into town."

[Back to Table of Contents]

In the Name of the Mother

Jodi Lynn Villers

My daughter fell in love with religion—Noah's animal sets, disciples, Jesus who died for our sins—because of a radio show. I was only listening as a joke; we were stuck in traffic, and it was hilarious. Suzy, a little girl about Mabel's age, found God and converted her whole family through good deeds. Suzy mowed the lawn without being asked. She skipped a volleyball game to help her sister study multiplication tables. Then her sister asked for a Bible, and mom and dad agreed to go to church. The radio show ended by offering a free Bible to all the little kiddies out there and jingled out into harp music, redemption.

Now, I try to tempt Mabel, bring her into the world of sin with me. At her eleventh birthday party, I pass soda and candy out to her guests and set up a game of spin the bottle. You kiss in the closet, I tell them. You touch in the closet because it is dark. When Mabel redirects the party, leading them in a prayer for me, I unwrap my present to her, the Ouija board, and summon evil spirits that throw me into convulsions and move the party upstairs where it's safe.

When Mabel needs new sneakers, her first bra, I tell her she should shoplift. It's so easy to take the things you need. It's a commandment, she says. Thou shalt not steal. Wear Jesus rags, then, I say. When she doesn't buy a ticket for prom, I make fun of her for being a virgin, saving herself, as she says. I tell her how good sex feels, she couldn't even imagine, and then I buy a vibrator and place it on her bed, ready with batteries, while she's in the shower. All night, I lie awake, waiting to hear the buzz. Whore, I shout, when her name is called at graduation. I bake a drugged cake that says Welcome to the Real World in icing, but she won't eat because of the green color. And when Mabel forgives her father, makes peace with the bastard, I kick her out of the house, and she becomes a nun.

There are still nuns? I ask, amazed when she calls with the news. I thought you'd become a hooker when I threw you out. I thought you'd finally have sex, for the money. And then start using. I imagined visiting you in prison, sneaking contraband in, mothering you again. I'm married to God, she says. I have a new family. That's what being a nun means, and the phone clicks dead.

I want to understand, so I take some pills and drive to a church; they're everywhere. It's quiet inside. Light filters through windows colored with angels. I sit down and sing old-fashioned words I find in the hymnal: thou, thee, deliverance, sanctity. Then I see a painting of Jesus behind a podium. His arms are stretched out and he's not wearing a shirt. His muscles bulge in all the right places even though he is skinny. His hair is long like he fronts a band, and his eyes are so open, looking up, like he needs a mother.

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Holden Caulfield Doesn't Love Me

Daniel Lanza

Dear Journal,

Freshman year of college my friends and I used to play a game. We'd go around picking which literary character we'd marry or, given the current political climate, spend the rest of our lives with. Our answers changed as the years went on but, thinking myself to be some youthful discontent, the first love I ever picked was Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. After all, I've always had a penchant for younger men and when I was 18 the age difference seemed surmountable, if not endearing.

It's been years now since we graduated and scattered ourselves across the map, ending the game. I had almost forgotten about it before Holden walked in the front door this morning.

When he asked, I directed him to drop his stuff in the guest room. I tried to introduce myself but he shook his head and told me he already knew who I was. He looked so young standing there, more like a child than a lover. I took him out to dinner and he marveled at the emptiness of the landscape as we drove. Bakersfield, California, I said, is in an entirely different world than New York.

The heat has begun to leave the house now and I've opened all the windows, letting the darkness and empty space seep in. As sleep nears, I can hear him in the next room, unpacking his things. I can't help thinking of the way his face looked across that dinner table, diasporan and vacant.

I wonder if he won't be gone tomorrow. Part of me hopes he will.

* * * *

Dear Journal,

When I woke this morning, Holden remained. I found him in the kitchen, searching the cabinet for breakfast. When I entered he walked up and kissed me, as if it were a greeting between lovers. He took my hand just before it happened.

Afterward, he looked up at me and dropped my fingers from his own. I couldn't help thinking of his teacher—what was his name again? The one who came on to him on the couch? I can't help wondering if he felt the same way, seeing those young eyes so close, beautiful and resistant.

We both sit in the living room now. I offered to let him take a look through my bookshelf and he picked out Pride and Prejudice, saying he'd always wanted to read it. He read the first couple of pages in a rush before setting it down on the couch cushion in favor of the television. Friends banter across the screen and he smiles but won't laugh.

He hasn't looked me in the eye since this morning. Maybe I should have given more thought to sexuality before using my pick on him but when you're young you never do.

* * * *

Dear Journal,

It started out yesterday when I asked him if he resented me for bringing him here. He hesitated before conceding that he may. I reminded him that the world I'd taken him from wasn't much better. That he'd made a mess of his life there.

He thought about it for a moment before answering me. When he did, he seemed suddenly more severe than he'd been before.

Things may be rough there, he said, but there's always meaning in it. I mean, sure my life has gotten pretty shitty in the past couple of weeks, he continued, but there it's my life. That means something.

But we've got each other now, I said.

No, he said, you chose me, but I didn't choose you. I've got nothing.

The statement held until I grew brave enough to speak. Who would you want instead?

I don't know, he paused, someone of my own. Someone like Eliza Bennet.

From Pride and Prejudice? You haven't even finished the book yet.

I don't need to. I know what I want, he said, suddenly resolute.

Fine, I said.

Fine, he said.

Eliza arrived at the front door the next day, dolled up in petticoats and taffeta. They drank tea while he explained the situation to her. I sat with them, considering the mess I'd made.

Soon it was decided. Holden moved his things into the closet downstairs and Eliza settled into the spare bedroom.

It's slouching toward midnight now and I can hear them shifting through the walls, Eliza next door and Holden on the living room couch. The TV's loud enough to edge in around the door frame and fill my room with a babble of distant conversation.

If I could do it all over again, I wonder who I'd pick. Chabon's Sammy Clay, maybe. A creative type and queer, at least.

I can hear Eliza's door opening now and her footsteps down the hall. I wonder if she'll kiss him like he did me. Maybe if he's lucky.

There are the footsteps again, two pair this time.

Their voices in the other room blur into the television conversation still trickling down the hall in a murmur of fictional dialog.

* * * *

Dear Journal,

Sammy hasn't arrived yet. I've tried calling him, though. There's a stack of comics on the table at the empty side of the bed waiting for him.

(If you can read this Sammy, won't you come find me?)

Another joined the group yesterday, a week after Eliza's arrival. I'd found her with a copy of The Sun Also Rises the day before Brett arrived. I'm not sure what attracted her to someone so modern, but I guess I can imagine the appeal of fiction from the future. I think it was a decision for the sake of companionship more than anything else. No one wants to be left out of a game.

Brett's arrival is worrisome nonetheless. I'm planning on editing my library tomorrow while they're out. The last thing we need is a simulacrum of Humbert Humbert joining our impromptu community, even if it is, as of now, bereft of thirteen-year-old girls.

(Even your comics seem a dubious presence on the bedside table, but I'll continue to hold them here for you, Sammy.)

Eliza seems to be fairing much better with Holden than I ever did.

They grow louder through the wall each night.

* * * *

Dear Journal,

Holden's been spending more and more nights on the couch recently. Then yesterday, he asked if he could sleep on the floor of my room. I told him he could.

Space has been getting tighter since Brett invited Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby last week. The two of them spend the days driving across Bakersfield's barren landscape shooting the eyes out of billboards. I'm not sure where they acquired the guns, but in a town like this it doesn't seem so hard to do.

At night, they hit the bars and return to hold court with their suitors, whom they address alternately in dense, beautiful dialogue and short, clipped statements. Often, I get confused listening to them, only to recognize Brett's voice as her own once she has finished speaking.

* * * *

Now, whenever there's a knock at the front door, my chest tightens at the thought of you standing there when it opens. So far, it hasn't happened yet. That isn't to say I've given up hope, Sammy. I haven't.

* * * *

Dear Journal,

I walked Holden to the bus stop today. He said he was going searching for something. When I asked him about Eliza, he said he'd been wrong about her. He said she was just another phony. I asked if he would look for a way back into the book and he said he wasn't sure but probably.

There was just more there, you know? he said. Like, everyday I got up knowing I was doing something. Even if it was something stupid or sad, it meant something. He paused to adjust his grip on the duffel bag he'd taken from the hall closet. Here it's different. You can put in so much without getting nearly anything back. Like it's something, but not enough something.

I nodded, pretending I understood.

I asked him to write me if he found a way back.

He said he'd try.

I asked him if he wanted to kiss one last time before he left, to make sure. When we did, it was no different than before.

Okay, I said.

Okay, he agreed.

We hugged and he got on the bus.

* * * *

Dear Journal,

It's hard being here without Holden. I wandered out into a party last night when I was getting dinner. I could hardly recognize anyone in the crowd. Billy Pilgrim's here, and Camus’ Meursault. I can't imagine why anyone invited either of them. They just mope around the house. Half the time, I'm not even sure that Billy's really here. I guess he and Meursault have that in common.

Yesterday I found a picture of a woman with a Shetland pony magneted to the fridge like a report card. So it goes.

I don't know how long I can keep waiting here for you, Sammy. If you came, we could just leave them all behind and move somewhere else, somewhere free.

I think you could like it here now, Sammy. We wouldn't have to love each other in distant, overfilled cabins fearing the police. We've got Gavin Newsom and Michael Cunningham. We have David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin and Castro St. We could make our own territory here, our own home at the end of things. You'd see.

You could even call me Tommy, if you wanted to. I could handle that if you came. If you're out there. If I'm allowed to play the game one more time.

* * * *

Dear Sammy,

It's been a month since Holden left and still no word.

Eliza and Daisy are gone, now. As are Billy and Meursault. From what I remember, the latter said they were going to head west. Toward the beach, I think. I don't blame them. It stinks in here, and food and empty alcohol containers litter the floors and countertops. I won't even check the spare room.

* * * *

I bought a bus ticket today.

If you're reading this, then know that I'm leaving to find you tomorrow. I've held out as long as I can, but now my bookshelves seem hollow and my house is occupied by dozens of strangers who scrutinize me whenever I leave my room. I can hear them outside sometimes, joking about me, jealous of this room I've held for myself.

Hopefully Holden was right and there's a way back. I think I remember Sharon moving to Berkeley after graduation. If I'm lucky, she's still there.

I'm making my way north to see her. If you're reading this (and I hope you are) know that I'm thinking of you.

Don't worry, Sammy, I'm coming.

Yours,

Tracy

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A Wizard of MapQuest

Alex Wilson

Start out going Right (East) on Everett Street toward Lake View Road, 1.4 miles, if you're sure this is what you want to do. Understand if you can, my son, that right is no longer East. Ahead is now East, and Right is South. Had you chosen to stay in the tower, I would have eventually instructed you in these world complexities and perspectives. Do not let them frighten you. But if you do get frightened, call.

Turn Right onto Lake View Road, 0.3 miles, past the picnic table where on your twelfth birthday I taught you the language of the dragonflies. Recall how a Merely interrupted our private celebration. He wore bright colors. He carried a crude, immagical fishing instrument. His boots crushed the grass beneath him, rendering it useless for even the most common potionwork. He defiled us with his presence, under the pretense of some vague Merelian interest in the status of the weather clouds. Recall how the Merely smiled, how his unplucked forearm hair and omnivorous teeth frightened you, and how, sobbing, you clutched my tunic until you fell to sleep in my lap. The Merely was gone when you awoke, almost as a birthday gift to you. And then you wished to return home. Your idea, not mine.

Veer Left to stay on Lake View, 2.1 miles, and remember if you can that other time I let you out of the tower. You were five. We went to the mall downtown. You ate your first corn dog at the food court, once I'd consecrated the deepfryer and removed the taint of Merelian hands. You see? We do have much fun together. I was planning something special this year as well, but that's okay. I understand that you have things to do.

At the next light, Lake View becomes Pleasant Road, 0.6 miles. This isn't something you did, my son. The world outside the tower is inconsistent, and full of Merelies who would rob you in your confusion. Should a Merely rob you, do acquire a clump of its hair and overnight it to me using the FedEx account number I bade you memorize. I will take care of it.

Merge Left onto State Route 11 heading South, and feel if you can the moment you quit the borders of Lothboro, 1.9 miles. Should you choose to turn back even at this far point, you will find your room just as you left it. I'll even place your giant rat in stasis, to appease your concern about my slaughtering it for ingredients, or my remembering to feed it only the dry food. But if you truly loved your familiar, you would not leave it at all. If you loved it, you would stay at least through Autumn. But I'm sure it understands. It is only a rat. Surely it cannot feel betrayal.

There may be roads closed due to construction or weather conditions. There may be detours. Outside Lothboro, I can offer only guidelines. I am old, as you have said, and my wisdom is ancient.

Visit the AAA website for more recent updates and traffic patterns, but give heed to its conditional terms. Understand that they, too, make no guarantees of accuracy. You can trust no Merely. And should the weather force you to turn around, so must it be. But do not think I had a hand in it. I might keep the inside of the tower ever at seventy-eight degrees and sunny, but I possess no power over the outside skies. Think on this when it thunders, tempests, and quakes so far away from home. Seventy-eight degrees and sunny. Always.

You have chosen the fastest route. For the safest route, wait at least until Autumn. Find nearby restaurants with food satisfactory only to the basest of Merelian palates. Find cheap hotels, and may they feel as much like home as you can tolerate. You may reverse these directions at any time. I mean that. Should you fall in love with a Merely, FedEx me a clump of its hair, and I shall take care of it.

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Marie and Roland

Kirstin Allio

Roland Chapsky was tall, heavy-boned, with a rolled brow and a bad stomach. Ulcers gave his breath the smell of cooked tomato. He chewed tablets made of plaster but did not quit what Marie put in the hip flask. Off duty he wore a sun-faded baseball cap with salt deposits in a wave-line of sweat—he had never been to the ocean. He had fifteen acres abutting his father-in-law's fifty up the side of a low hill almost hollow from mining. The town of Drury, Pennsylvania was a coffee can with just enough loose screws to cover the bottom, rattling losers, miners and soldiers with caved-in noses telling the same old stories. As a police officer Chapsky knew his population: Who lived on the road, culled basement junk and arranged it on card tables weather-permitting weekends, like kids playing store; and who lived in sunken shacks like planter's warts embedded in the hills stripped of coal for at least a decade. Chapsky himself had grown up with a single mother in an apartment in town, a radio and a television like a cat and a dog vying for attention in the same household. His hallmark as an officer: He didn't take sides between town folks and outlaws. He liked to say ruthless and fair were the same in his profession, knowing he was neither. Nevertheless he could still spook himself when he had to go out to one of those private encampments—some had no electricity and no women.

Like hell they wanted a cop car nosing in on their moonshine, squirrels drying over the railing. He wanted to tell them he was nothing like what they saw on TV, cop shows, bouncing his balls over potholes like craters to get out to their places, only they didn't have TV at their places.

* * * *

Chapsky's own father-in-law lived in a dug-out shed in a crease of the mountain. Marie's nugget of childhood. As they used to say in town, she “came down the mountain.” Lately you could find the old guy flat on his back under the shells of junked autos. Chapsky's father-in-law called them autos, as if he'd been to school about it. Chapsky thought: You know the way yellow jackets or wasps die stiff and crackly if you spray them? That's what the old machinery from the mining operation at his father-in-law's put him in mind of.

Marie said they were big heavy lids that kept her dad from boiling over. Marie's mother had run off—and when she'd come back he wouldn't take her. Everyone had a heartbreak that split the trunk of the person, thought Chapsky, and then the two halves of the tree grew away from each other. Indeed the old guy (was he even sixty?) had once pleaded: How could you look a woman in the eye if you were off to blast the guts out of the center of the mountain?

Marie's mother was part Indian.

Maybe junked cars looked like spaceships, underneath, thought Chapsky.

* * * *

He'd done everything to please Marie's father: Police Academy, for instance, although back then there was still money in mining.

For the old guy's sake he'd moved himself and Marie out of town, off the grid, so to speak—not so much electricity, but snowplowed his own back assward mile—still Marie's dad didn't say two words to him. Marie kept chickens and a patch of vegetables. Chapsky put up deer fence charged by a deadly volt of hand-rigged, generator electric. She raised a fawn anyway—shit, it was like Bambi—and let it eat everything. That was a scurvy summer with no garden. Come fall the sportsmen from Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, even Philly—the way Marie went on about it, every last hunter had contributed a bullet to Bambi. But he had always thought of himself as a man who would do anything for a woman.

* * * *

His own mother: When Chapsky was six or seven her boyfriend had provided initiation into hunting. Remember he was a town kid. The other side of the mountain was coated with deep forest owned by Proctor and Gamble. The whole vast slope—he'd heard ten thousand acres—would be bulldozed into headquarters and factories sooner or later. The Goliath of soap didn't give a shit for a couple of poachers with slingshots. Did Roly Poly think the president of P & G ate venison?

That boyfriend started Roly Poly. That boyfriend said hunters were supposed to be good lovers. Doesn't bother you none, Roly; me and your mother?

Or, he was the Turtle. His short neck collapsed into his fatty shoulders. He thought he didn't mind about the boyfriend, but he wasn't going to stick his neck out (heh, heh) and pave the way to his mother. A couple of step-grandparents would adopt him—he'd make a sweet grandkid. He'd take their name, even. It was unmanly to have your mother's maiden name; his father had never claimed him.

* * * *

Marie cooked what he killed like a pioneer woman. She had instincts for salt and sex—never been to the ocean either. She had skinned squirrel for her daddy; but under his roof, Chapsky's, she would never have to hold a buck knife. He'd bought her a set of carbon and steel from a booth at the county fair in Bloomsburg. He'd hung on to the booth like a leaf to a log midstream. The crowds were a relentless whitewater rush around him—and he'd thought because he grew up in town he was used to people.

A sharpener too studded with real diamonds. Her skin had a pile to it, like velvet. Like the forest of Proctor and Gamble.

Indian summer they had eloped in blue jeans. Stayed drunk for a week in the woods like crazy Indians. With his own two hands he built her a log cabin.

* * * *

He'd put up a tree stand in princess pine and lichen where deer came to nuzzle for drop apples. Probably once a pasture—sparse crabapple and cedar. He liked to lie on his back on the little platform. This season was blood warm—you could almost forget where the air stopped and the body started. They called that temperate, thought Chapsky—or Indian summer. He could sleep like a dog and wake alert. Sometimes he dreamed Marie came to him and swept her black hair across his body. He woke and was ready to shoot an animal.

Lately Marie had been dying her hair and he found he was disappointed. He wanted them to grow old together. She kept it long and straight and didn't go into town more than she had to. (Then who was she dying it for?) She wasn't a common Polish-strain blond with a blocky middle and pinched buttocks like a turkey. Like his mother. You see? It was okay. He couldn't imagine Marie a mother.

She was slight as a girl, whittled down; he liked to think from what they did in the bedroom. He could see the ribs across her chest like washboard; her bony outline beneath the thin fabric of her breasts at forty. Her stomach hung too, around the shiny groove of a scar shaped like a sickle. A C-section. Sounded like instructions to an airforce pilot. He had seen her fight—teeth and nails and fur, red saliva—like a woman. No weapons, just body to body. They rolled the baby up in white and folded it into a new family. He and Marie were seventeen, high school books in a locker. They didn't elope till ten years later. That was his life story if he was ever interviewed for radio or television. The fine print, as they said. The way they hooked you.

* * * *

Drury had three officers. Red, they called Rankin, lost his wife to cancer, and McGrath was a shifty case that slept in a shed behind his uncle's. Chapsky loved them like brothers. Marie cooked for the whole police force and she wasn't afraid of their boozing. She boozed herself; why shouldn't she? She didn't have to look out for a handful of brats running into the road or playing with matches. When she took her afternoon bath her breasts grazed the water like floating petals. Brown bruised centers.

You see? Who said a childless woman was a hard woman? A hard woman wouldn't bruise so easily.

If she didn't give her heart away to nine kids and a kennel of puppies a woman wasn't natural? Well that was a crap-load, thought Roland. He, Roland Chapsky, did he know the size of his own organ? It was supposed to be as big as the fist that owned it. He had big, star-shaped hands and a heavy pulse like cannons under water. He liked to put his fingers inside his wife, like hand-feeding. He liked tying flies and he liked cleaning his rifle. He liked to shoot to punctuate his thoughts. He almost always threw the fish back in the water. Afterward, his heart was empty.

Not after I saw what that baby did to you, he liked to tell her. Even if you could have another I wouldn't allow it. Marie snorted. She watched over her daddy. She tended the garden and feathered the chickens and took the meat off his hands—still warm—when he brought her a trophy. She had plenty of time to sit on the porch of the log cabin he built her and drink whatever it was mixed up in her private tumbler. What a life for a woman.

* * * *

It was early evening when a little doe wandered by the tree stand. You really could say there was no separate—he moved his hand through the air to show it—contour. When he closed his eyes he merged and drifted. If only his mother could've enjoyed these breezes. She'd been miserable in “weather.” In summer a host of table fans churned hot breath through the second floor apartment. She pulled the shades and swayed beneath the same sack dress she claimed to have worn when she was pregnant. He recalled it smelled faintly of blood and iodine. It must have taken some doing, some loyalty—to him, Roly Poly?—to keep that dress in her closet. The fashions changed, even a man like Chapsky could see it. She'd never married. No, what he'd felt earlier, before he'd dozed here in his hammock of air, wasn't true at all. He had never wanted his mother to marry. Not to the boyfriend who showed him hunting, not to any of them.

* * * *

The deer was puny, hardly even dog food, but Chapsky had already pulled the trigger before he took in her proportions. Shit; he might stick to fishing. Fish were easier to dump back in, easier to carry. But still, he could congratulate himself for putting one over on the Philadelphia fat cats who practically shot out their car windows. They'd be careening all over the county, stoking fires in their outsized fieldstone fireplaces in their “rustic” lodges when hunting season opened. Let McGrath loose and he'd shoot out their high beams. In any case this little doe was one less leg of exported venison.

All of a sudden there was a streak across his field of vision. Chapsky ducked down compulsively. Why should anyone be privy to his lame shot, his flask uncapped, his loose pants and two-day stubble? Maybe just a bird or a bird's shadow. Sometimes a mother animal would come looking. Sometimes she spooked when she took in the immature thing still twitching in its carcass, and bolted. Other times she'd get up close before she realized, and then Chapsky had to look away because his fist-sized heart was affected. He didn't mind saying it. It sickened him. Bled his ulcer. He'd seen the look in the bloodshot eyes of his infant daughter—wrath and bewilderment. Like a fish gasping out of water, like any mother animal cut off from its baby. But that was the weird thing, thought Chapsky. The infant they cocooned in white and rolled away towards the exit light at the end of the corridor—it was like she already had the fury and the fear of a mother. All at once—a baby and a mother. That was womankind for you. He'd never told Marie. He wouldn't cause her pain he couldn't fix with diamonds sparkling in a knife sharpener. Marie rising from the pink bath water to get dinner started. Soft floral vapor from her dark hair, he knew she could never resist plunging her head under at the last minute. He'd have to shoot. He couldn't bear to see the animal stepping around her fawn, nostrils quivering.

He pulled himself up against the wall of the tree stand. He raised his rifle and started. A dark, human vulture, on top of his animal. “Hey!” he shouted hoarsely. A weird dream figure wrapped in doe skin. Not a Pocahontas dress or some hokey Western fringes—it was halfway between a woman and a deer, a deer mermaid. He had never been to the ocean. He felt he stood absurdly like a kid playing ship on the prow of his tree stand, or a foul-mouthed sailor. The ears were soft with a pile like velvet.

* * * *

Chapsky could taste the canker sores on his intestine. Like rolled up shards of cooked tomato skin.

Marie actually called it a fruit, the tomato.

"What'd Marie put in your flask, Chapsky? Wine? Cough syrup?” Rankin had snorted when he told them. And McGrath clapped his mitt on Chapsky's shoulder all concerned and then split a gut saying, “Now you know what the vets been dreaming!"

But he didn't care about the insult. It was enough he'd got away with his own heart. She'd come after him, the doe's steaming heart juice running through her fingers.

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Ana's Tag

William Alexander

Ana and Rico walked on the very edge of the road where the pavement slumped and crumbled. They were on their way to buy sodas, and there were no sidewalks. They made it as far as the spot where the old meat-packing factory had burned down when Deputy Chad drove up and coasted his car alongside at a walking pace.

Ana was just tall enough to see the deputy through his car window and the empty space of the passenger seat. Her brother Rico was taller, but he wasn't trying to look through the car window. Rico was staring straight ahead of him.

"Hi kids,” said Deputy Chad.

"Hi,” said Ana.

"I need to ask you both about the incident at the school,” the deputy said.

"Okay,” said Ana when Rico didn't say anything.

"It's very important,” the deputy said. “This is the first sign of gang activity. Everyone knows that. Gang activity.” He tried to arch one eyebrow, but it didn't really work and his forehead scrunched.

Other cars slowed to line up behind the squad car, coasting along.

"What's the second sign?” Ana asked.

"The second sign,” said Deputy Chad, taking a deep breath, “happens at night, on the highway. It involves headlights. Do you know that keeping your high-beams on at night can blind oncoming traffic?"

Ana didn't. She nodded anyway.

"Usually a driver has just forgotten to turn them off, and the way to let them know is to flash your own high-beams, just briefly. But they drive around with the high-beams on deliberately. If you flash at one of their cars, they pull a quick and violent U-turn and follow you, very close. Sometimes they just do it to see where you live. Sometimes they run you off the road. Bam!” He smacked the top of his steering wheel.

Ana jumped. He grinned at her, and she grinned back.

"What's the third sign?” Rico asked, without grinning.

"I can't tell you that,” said Deputy Chad. “Ask your parents. It is the last ceremony of initiation, and it involves blonde ten year olds."

"I'm ten,” said Ana.

"You're not blonde, so you're probably safe. Probably."

"Oh,” said Ana. “Good."

The line behind Deputy Chad was now seven cars long, coasting slowly. None of them dared to pass a cop.

"So,” said the deputy. “You can see why we need to put a stop to this kind of thing right away, before it escalates. Do you know anything about the incident at school?"

"No,” said Rico.

"What's the graffiti of?” asked Ana.

"It is deliberately illegible,” said the deputy. “It's in code. Probably a street-name. A tag. Graffiti is often somebody's tag, delineating whose turf is whose. It looks like it could be in Spanish."

Ana and Rico's parents spoke Spanish. They used it as their secret language, and slipped into Spanish whisperings whenever they didn't want Ana or Rico to understand them. Sometimes, in public, Ana and Rico liked to pretend they could speak it too. They would toss together random words and gibberish and use an accent because both of them could fake a pretty good one. They hadn't played that game for awhile.

Rico bent forward a little so he could look through the passenger window. “I'll let you know if I hear anything about it,” he said.

"Good boy,” said the deputy, and smiled a satisfied smile. “Be safe, now.” He drove off. Cars followed him like ducklings.

"Perro muerto,” said Ana. It meant dead dog, or maybe dead hair. It was one of their nonsense curses. “He thinks you did it."

"Yeah,” said Rico.

"Did you?” Ana asked.

"Yeah,” said Rico.

"Oh. What does it say?"

"Not telling."

"Oh,” said Ana. Rico pushed Ana to his right side so he could walk between her and the moving cars, and then he made a sign with his left hand. He tried not to let Ana see him do it. She saw anyway, but she didn't ask. She cared more about the graffiti. “I'll do all the dishes if you tell me what it says."

"No."

"Okay.” Ana thought about how long it would take to get to the East Wells high school, try to read the painted wall, write down all of her guesses and walk home. She decided she could make it before dinner. Maybe Rico would tell her if she guessed right.

They were almost to the gas station, which had a much better selection of soda to pick from than the corner store. The last part of the walk was uphill, and Ana had to work harder to keep up with her brother.

"Do you think there really are gangs?” she asked.

Rico shrugged, and smiled a little. “Gangs of what?"

"I don't know. Gangs."

"I doubt it,” he said. “East Wells isn't big enough to put together a gang of anything bigger than two people. Deputy Chad is just really, really bored.” He reached up and twisted his new earring stud. He'd pierced it himself with a sewing needle. Ana had held the swabs and rubbing alcohol while he did it. She'd felt obliged to help, because she already had pierced ears so she could offer him the benefit of her knowledge.

"Don't forget to clean that when we get home,” she said.

"I won't,” he said. He sounded annoyed. Ana decided to change the subject to something casual and harmless.

"Why isn't there a West Wells?” she asked.

Rico stopped walking. They were in the gas station parking lot, only a few steps away from soda and air conditioning. Ana turned around. Her brother was staring at her.

"What did you say?"

"West Wells,” she said again, trying to be extra casual and harmless. “We live in East Wells, but it isn't actually east of anything. There's just, you know, the woods by the school and then endless fields of grain on all sides. There's no West Wells."

Rico exhaled, loudly. “That's right,” he said. “There is nothing to the west of this dinky little town. You are absolutely right.” He walked by her and went inside. Ana followed. She had questions, endless questions bubbling up somewhere near her stomach and she had to swallow to keep them there because Rico was definitely not in an answering kind of mood.

She shivered in the air conditioning, even though she'd been looking forward to it. Rico knew which soda he wanted, but Ana took a long time to choose.

* * * *

Ana got her cat backpack from her bedroom closet. It was brown and furry and had two triangular ears sewn onto the top. She pulled a stack of library books out of it and replaced them with a flashlight, rope, chocolate-chip granola bars, band-aids, a notebook and magic markers. She filled up the small, square canteen that had been Tio Frankie's with water and packed that, too. Then she took out the flashlight, because it was summer and it didn't get dark outside until long after dinnertime, and she needed to be back by dinner anyway.

"Did you clean your ear?” she asked Rico's bedroom door.

"No,” he said from behind it.

"Don't forget. You don't want it to get infected."

"I won't forget,” he said.

She walked to the East Wells high school, taking a shortcut through two cornfields to keep off the highway. It wasn't a long walk, but during the school year almost everybody took the bus anyway because of the highway and the lack of sidewalks. Rico liked walking, even in wintertime. Ana saw him sometimes through the bus window on her way to East Wells Elementary.

She walked between cornrows and underneath three billboards. Two of them said something about the Bible. One was an ad for a bat cave ten miles further down the road. Ana had never seen the bat cave. Rico said it wasn't much to see, but she still wanted to go.

Ana crossed the empty parking lot in front of the high school, and skirted around the athletic field to the back of the gym. She knew where to find the gym because it doubled as a theater, and last summer a troupe of traveling actors had put on The Pirates of Penzance. After the show Ana had decided to become a traveling actor. Then she decided that what she really wanted to be was a pirate king.

A little strip of mowed lawn separated the gym from the western woods.

Three of Rico's friends were there, standing in front of the graffiti. Ana could see green paint behind them. They were smoking, of course. Julia and Nick smoked cloves, sweet-smelling. Garth wore a Marlboro Man kind of hat, so he was probably smoking that kind of cigarette. His weren't sweet-smelling.

"Hey,” Ana said.

"Hey,” said Julia. Ana liked Julia.

"Hey,” said Nick. Nick was Julia's boyfriend. Ana was pretty sure that her brother was jealous of this. Nick and Julia were both in Rico's band, and both of them were really, really tall. They were taller than Rico, and much taller than Garth.

Garth didn't say anything. He chose that moment to take a long drag on his cigarette, probably to demonstrate that he wasn't saying anything. Garth was short and stocky and scruffy. He wasn't in the band. He had a kind of beard, but only in some places. He also had a new piercing in his eyebrow. It was shaped like the tusk from a very small elephant. The skin around it was red and swollen and painful-looking.

Ana thought eyebrow rings were stupid. She liked earrings, and she could understand nose rings, belly-button rings and even pierced tongues, but metal sticking out of random facial places like eyebrows just looked to her like shrapnel from a booby-trapped jewelry box. She didn't like it. The fact that Garth's eyebrow was obviously infected proved that she was right, and that the universe didn't like it either.

"You should use silver for a new piercing,” Ana told him. “And you need to keep it clean."

"This is silver,” said Garth. He didn't look at her as he said it. He looked at the tops of trees.

"Don't worry about him,” said Nick. “He likes pain. He gets confused and grumpy if something doesn't hurt."

"Oh,” said Ana. She edged around them, trying to get a better look at the wall and the paint.

Garth threw down his cigarette, stepped on it, and reached out to knock the cloves from Nick and Julia's hands. “Bertha's coming,” he said.

Bertha walked around the corner. She was the groundskeeper. Rico used to help her mow the school lawn as a summer job, but this year he hadn't bothered. Her name wasn't really Bertha, and Ana didn't want to ever call her that, but she didn't know what Bertha's name really was.

Bertha sniffed and smiled. Her hair was a big, feathered mullet.

"One of you isn't smoking cloves,” she said. “One of you is smoking real cigarettes, and I am going to bet it isn't the one with the kitten backpack. One of you is gonna buy my silence. ‘Why no, officer, I sure didn't see any young hooligans smoking near your site of vandalism.’”

Ana, Nick and Julia all looked at Garth. Garth grunted, handed over his pack of cigarettes and walked away. He walked away into the woods.

"Bye, Ana,” Julia said. “Say hi to Rico. Tell him we need to rehearse.” She took Nick's arm and the two of them followed Garth.

Ana could see the graffiti, now. It was red and green and it wasn't anything Ana knew how to decipher. Parts of it were swoofy, and other parts had sharp, edgy bits. It looked like it was made up of letters, but she wasn't sure which letters they were.

Bertha lit one of Garth's cigarettes. “Gonna have to rent a sandblaster,” she said. “Won't come off without a sandblaster, and it's brick so I can't just paint over it."

"Deputy Chad thinks it was gangs that did it,” Ana said.

Bertha snorted. “Town isn't big enough for gangs,” she said. “Doesn't matter anyway. This is just somebody marking their territory. This is colored piss with artistic pretensions."

Ana took out her notebook, but she didn't have any guesses to write down yet. “How's the novel?” she asked Bertha. This was the usual thing to ask. Bertha had always been writing a novel.

"Terrible,” Bertha said.

"Sorry,” said Ana. She wondered if it was better to be a novelist or a traveling actor, and decided it would still be better to be a pirate king.

"What's with the notebook?” Bertha asked. She flicked her cigarette butt at the graffiti, and it hit the bricks above the paint with a shower of orange sparks.

"I'm going to draw it,” Ana said, “I'll take it home and figure out what it says, and then ... then maybe I'll know who did it. I'll solve the mystery."

"Have fun,” Bertha said. She opened a door in the gym wall with one of the many jingling keys at her belt and went in. The door shut behind her with a loud metal scrape.

Ana drew the graffiti tag. Luckily she had the right colors of magic marker. It took her seven tries to get it right.

* * * *

The screen door squeaked when Ana opened it. The kitchen lights were on. One cold plateful of food sat on an otherwise bare table. Ana's mother sat at the other end, face down on her folded arms. She was snoring. Ana hid her backpack under the table, and put the plate of food on a chair and out of sight.

"Wake up, Mama,” she said.

Her mother woke up. “Where have you been, child?” she asked, annoyed but mostly groggy.

"Here,” Ana said. “I've been here for hours. Sorry I missed dinner."

"You should be,” said her mother. “Where—"

Ana pretended to yawn. Her mother couldn't help yawning, then, and this made Ana yawn for real. “Bedtime,” she said, once she was able to say anything. Her mother nodded, and both of them went upstairs.

Ana snuck back downstairs to throw away her dinner and fetch her backpack. She ate the chocolate granola bars while sitting on the floor of her bedroom studying the graffiti in her notebook. She thought it might say roozles, rutterkin or rumbustical, but there were always extra letters, or at least extra swoofs and pointy edges to the letters, and the longer she stared at it the less each word fit.

Ana slept. She dreamed that her kitten backpack climbed snuffling onto the foot of her bed. She woke up when it stepped on her toes, and once she was awake she could see its pointy-eared outline. A car drove by outside and made strange window-shade shadows sweep across the wall and ceiling. Maybe the car had its highbeams on.

Her bag moved. She kicked it and it fell off the edge, landing with more of a soft smacking sound than it should have. Ana wanted to turn on the light, but the light switch was across the room. She would have to touch the floor to get there. She decided that now would be a really excellent time to develop telekinetic powers, and spent the next several minutes concentrating on the light switch.

Another car went by.

She got up, tiptoed across the floor and turned on the light. She turned around.

The backpack was right at her feet. She didn't scream. She swallowed an almost-scream.

The furry, pointy-eared bag wasn't moving. She pulled on the edges of the zipper and peeked inside. Her expedition supplies were still there. She poked through them with the capped tip of a magic marker, just in case there was also something else in there. The notebook lay open to the seventh graffiti-covered page. She tried to nudge it aside, but the tip of the marker went through the colored surface. She dropped the pen. It passed through the graffiti and vanished. The page rippled like a pond.

She took another magic marker and used it to close the notebook cover. Then she looked out in the hallway to see if Rico's bedroom light was on. It was. She took the notebook, tiptoed by her parents’ room, and sped up to pass the stairway. The air felt different at the top of the stairs. It felt like the stairway was holding its breath. It felt like the open space might breathe her in and down and swallow her.

She knocked on Rico's door. No answer. She knocked again, because she knew it would be locked from the inside so there wasn't any point in trying to open it herself. He still didn't answer. She tried the doorknob and it turned.

He wasn't there. She tread carefully on the few clear and visible parts of the floor, and took a better look around from the middle of the room. He wasn't standing behind his dresser or lurking behind the armrest of the ratty old couch. He wasn't hiding in his closet, because it was filled with too much junk already and nothing more would fit. She looked under the bed and he wasn't there either. She looked at the empty bed and found a rolled up piece of parchment. You play tomorrow night, musician, it said. Be ready.

The parchment crumbled into several brown leaves and drifted to the floor, settling among the socks and books and torn pieces of sheet music.

"He must be rehearsing,” she said to herself. “I'll try to find him tomorrow."

She went back to her room, and hung the backpack up on the knob handle of one of her dresser drawers to keep it from wandering, and went to bed. She left the light on. She didn't see anything move for the rest of the night, including her backpack. She heard things move instead.

* * * *

Rico wasn't at breakfast. This wasn't unusual, because he almost always slept until lunchtime, so their parents didn't seem worried as they bustled and joked and made coffee and went away to work after kissing Ana on each cheek. Ana went back upstairs as soon as they were gone. Rico wasn't in his room. Bits of brown leaves crunched and crumbled in the carpet under her feet.

Ana got dressed and took her backpack down from the knob she'd hung it on.

"Don't go walking anywhere without me,” she said. She took more granola bars from the kitchen and refilled her little square canteen, then locked up the house.

It started to rain when she reached the first highway billboard, and Ana's clothes and backpack were soggy by the time she got to the gym. The bag's sopping ears lay flat against the zipper.

She stood in front of the graffiti, took a deep breath and wondered if she was supposed to say something out loud. Maybe she was supposed to say whatever the graffiti said, and she still couldn't read it.

Something snarled in the trees behind her. Ana turned around, took a step backwards and tried to press herself against the wall. It didn't work. She pressed and passed through it.

"Hello,” said a voice that scraped against the insides of her ears.

Ana faced another painted wall, stone instead of brick. She took a breath. The air was still and it smelled like thick layers of dust. She turned around. An old man, thin and spindly, sat on a stool and polished a carved flute. He had a wispy beard. He tested two notes on the flute and set to polishing again. Behind him were several shelves of similar instruments. Some were plain and a pale yellow-grey. Some were carved with delicate patterns, and others inlaid with metals and lacquered over.

"Hello,” Ana said.

"The Grey Lady brings deliveries every second Tuesday, and today is neither thing. Are you delivered here? Has she changed schedules?"

"I don't know any grey ladies,” Ana said. “Except math teachers. Do you mean Mrs. Huddle?"

"No huddling things,” the old man said. He set down the flute on a carved wooden stand, picked up a bone from his workbench and took a rasp to the knobby joints. “Tell me your purposes then, if no Lady brought you. Are you here to buy a flute?"

"No,” Ana said. “I'm looking for my brother."

"Unfortunate that you should look for him here. How old?"

"He's sixteen."

"So old? Good, good. I won't have pieces of him, then."

Ana looked around for pieces of people. There was a straw cot in the corner beside a green metal stove. There were baskets and tin lanterns hanging by chains from a high ceiling. There were no windows. A staircase against one wall led up to the only doorway. There was a workbench, and shelves full of flutes, and a mural of moonlight and trees where she had stepped through the wall.

"He's a musician,” Ana said. “A singer. He's in a band, I think. Last week they were The Paraplegic Weasels, but I don't know if that's still their name. It keeps changing."

"Very prudent,” said the old man, rasping bone.

"He's supposed to play for someone tonight. I don't know who."

"Tonight there are many festivities, or so I've heard rumor.” He swapped the rasp for a finer file, and began to scrape the bone more delicately.

Ana took a step closer. “The invitation turned into leaves after I read it."

"Then he'll likely play his music in the Glen,” the old man said. “You should be on the forest paths, and not here in the City."

"City?"

"Oh yes. Underneath it, a few layers down.” He wiped away loose bone-dust, and set both bone and file down on the workbench. “The stone floor you're standing on used to be a road, but the City is always growing up over itself."

"Oh,” Ana said. She looked down at the floor. The old man reached down, scooped her up by the armpits and set her on the edge of the workbench. She swallowed an almost-scream when he pinched each leg, squeezing down to the thighbones, and then she kicked him in the stomach.

Ana jumped down, ran to the mural and smacked the surface of it with the palms of both hands. The surface held. Behind her the old man wheezed and coughed and laughed a little.

"No matter,” he said. “Both bones broken, and all the music leaked out from the fractures. Can't make any kind of flute from either leg. How did you break them both?"

Ana turned around to watch him. He sat back on his stool, wheezing, and he seemed to want to stay there. “I jumped off the roof."

"And what flying thing were you fleeing from?” he asked.

"Nothing. Rico dared me to jump, so I did. I didn't tell on him, either. He still owes me for that."

"Well,” the old man said, “I hope you can collect what he owes when you find him. Such a shame that your bones were broken. There are a great many children, and there isn't enough music. There isn't nearly enough."

"So how do I get out?” She hated admitting that she didn't already know.

The old man smiled, and widened up his eyes. “Boo,” he said, puffing out his thin beard.

Ana took a step backwards, and passed through the stone.

Her face was inches away from her brother's graffiti. It was dark, and she could barely see the colors by moonlight. She looked around. She was alone. Her backpack was gone.

"I told it not to wander off,” she said.

* * * *

There was only one forest path she could find. Ana took a walking stick from a pile of broken branches near the edge of the woods, took a deep breath, and set out. She wished she had her flashlight. She wished she had her backpack. In her head she promised to give it a scratch behind the ears if it would come back, and to never again hang it up on a dresser drawer knob. It had looked uncomfortable there.

The air smelled like wet leaves, heavy and rich. She followed the path uphill and downhill and around sudden corners cut into the sides of hills. She passed trees that looked like tall, twisted people until she looked at them directly. Ana hoped she was following the right trail. She saw a wispy orange light between the tree trunks and decided to follow that instead.

The orange light brightened as Garth inhaled cigarette smoke. He was leaning on a boulder. He looked up and blew smoke at the moon.

Half of his face was swollen.

"Hey,” said Ana. “What are you doing?"

"Nothing,” he said. “Waiting for little girls, maybe."

"Your infection's worse."

"True,” he said. “But this bit of silver is keeping me from gnawing on your bones."

"Oh,” said Ana. “Good. Everybody should stay away from my bones."

He took another drag, brightening up the wispy orange light, and tugged his hat down to cover more of the swollen half of his face. Ana held on to her stick.

"Do you know where Rico is?” she asked.

"Maybe. He plays tonight."

"Can you take me to him?"

"Maybe.” Garth dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, crushing the little orange flame. He walked off, away from the path. Ana waited for some signal from him that she should follow. She didn't get one. She followed.

Garth took long strides, and his boots hit the ground like he was trying to punish it for something. Ana tried to keep up, and she tried to keep a little bit behind him at the same time. She didn't want to be too close. He hunched, staring at the ground, and she thought he was moping more than usual until he dove, snarling. He came up holding a lanky thing covered in short, spiky fur.

"Where does the Guard keep watch tonight?” he asked.

The lanky thing shrugged and grinned many teeth.

"Where does the Guard watch the Glen?” He shook the thing in his hand.

It snickered.

"Please?” Ana asked, very sweetly.

The lanky thing blew her a kiss. “Tonight there is no waking Guard,” it said. “Tonight he is sleeping and dreaming that he guards, and he crosses no one unless they cross into his dreaming while he sleeps at his post, which is easy to do and see to it that you don't. Everything within a pebble's toss of him in all directions is only the substance of his dream, and inside it the Guard is a much better guard than he ever was awake. He guards the Western Arch."

"How many arches are there?” Garth asked.

"Tonight there is only the Western Arch. All others are overgrown. It rained today."

"Thank you,” Ana said.

The lanky thing bowed, which was difficult to do while Garth held it up by the scruff of its neck. Then it bit him hard on the wrist and dropped to the ground. Garth howled. The lanky thing snickered from somewhere nearby.

"Let me see your wrist,” Ana said. She had band-aids in her backpack. Then she remembered that she didn't have her backpack.

Garth looked at her. Garth never made eye contact, but he did so now, and he held it, and he also made a little rumbling noise in the back of his throat.

"No,” he said.

"Okay,” she said.

"You should know that I'm not interested in dying for your brother. He's all right. I like him. But I'm not interested in death on his behalf. I'm not interested in any of the things so close to death that the distinction makes no difference. This is something you should know before we go any further."

"Okay,” she said again.

He walked away. She followed. She wondered where her backpack was.

* * * *

They found an enormous figure in full plate armor, asleep. The Guard was dreaming a desert the size of a pebble's throw. All around it was sunlight and sand and nowhere to hide.

"That's the Western Gate,” Garth said.

"Where?” Ana whispered.

"Behind the desert. Cut into the wall of thorns, there.” He pointed. Ana stood at the very edge of the desert and squinted. She could only see sand and sun in front of them.

Garth dropped another finished cigarette, driving it further into the dirt than he really needed to. “Good luck,” he said.

"Wait,” Ana told him. “Don't go yet. I'm going to try something."

She picked up a pebble, took aim, and threw it at the precise moment that she stepped forward into desert sand. For just a instant she knew what it was like to be an unimportant part of someone else's dream. Then the pebble struck the Guard's gold helmet, clanging loudly and waking it up.

The desert vanished. Ana ducked behind a tree that hadn't been there before and leaned against the trunk. She could hear the metal movements of plate armor on the other side. She didn't know where Garth was.

"I am a pirate king,” Ana whispered to herself. “It's a glorious thing to be a pirate king."

She ran, and switched directions twice, and tried to circle back towards the Western Gate. She almost stumbled in the dark, but she didn't. The Guard almost caught her anyway. She felt gauntleted fingers snatch at her shoulder. Then she heard it clang and crash against the ground. She stopped, panting, and turned around to look.

Garth stood over the Guard, who was much shorter and less impressive than it had dreamed itself earlier. Garth looked at Ana, snarled and jerked his chin towards the Gate. Then he spit on the Guard's golden armor.

Ana backed further away. She watched the Guard pull itself up off the ground. It plucked out Garth's silver piercing with a little spray of blood.

Garth howled, and his face began to change.

Ana turned away and slipped inside.

* * * *

The Glen was at least as big as a cornfield, and covered over with a dome of branches high overhead. Inside the branches were orange wisps of light, glowing and fading again.

It was full of dancers. Ana looked at them, and closed her eyes, and looked again. She could hear Rico singing over the noise of the crowd.

"I'm still a pirate king,” she whispered to herself, weaving her way in between dancers and trying to find the stage. She dodged the dancing things, bumped into some, and passed through the shimmering substance of others. She saw colors and antlers and sharp teeth in strange places.

She found the stage. She found her brother. He sang, and the language sounded a little bit like Spanish but not very much. Nick played a red guitar, acoustic and covered in gold ivy. Julia played a yellow-gray flute. Both of them were even taller than they usually were.

Rico saw her, and Ana saw a lot of white around the edges of his eyes when he did. He nudged Julia, and she started a flute solo, and he got down off the stage and pulled Ana behind it. She opened her mouth and he shushed her.

"Okay, don't eat or drink. Whatever else you do, don't eat anything and don't drink anything. Now tell me what you think you're doing."

"Looking for you,” Ana said.

"I'm impressed,” he said, biting on his lower lip. “I really am. But this is very, very bad and I'm not sure how to fix it."

"What's the problem?” Ana asked, folding her arms and looking at him as though she were the older one.

"Okay,” Rico said, taking deep breaths. “Do you see those guys over there? The ones with the tattoos?"

"They're the gang?” Ana asked.

"Yeah. Sure. Kind of. And this is supposed to be my last task for them, and then after the concert I'll learn how to sing up every chrome piece of a motorcycle and ride it from town to town, stopping only to hum the fuel tank full again. I'll learn how to sing hurricanes and how to send them away. I'll learn how to sing something people can dance to for a full year and never notice the time passing."

"Sounds like fun,” Ana said.

"Sure. The catch is that this crowd has to be happy and dancing until the dawn light comes. If they stop before then, I fail and I have to serve the guys with the tattoos for at least a hundred years. So you should either go, right now, however you came here, or else hide somewhere and don't eat or drink or talk to anyone until dawn. And don't do anything distracting, because the crowd might stop dancing and that would be very bad. They like children, here, but they care about music a lot more than they care about kids."

Ana looked up at Julia and her yellow-gray flute.

"I have to go back onstage now,” Rico said.

"Okay,” Ana said.

"Hide,” he said.

"Okay."

He went back onstage. Julia finished her solo, and Rico sang. He was good.

Ana thought she saw her backpack scamper between someone's hooves. She followed. Then she saw Garth, or at least she assumed it was Garth. He had started to eat people near the Western Arch.

"Crap,” Ana said. He was distracting the crowd. Some of them weren't dancing anymore.

She ran back to the arch and slipped through. She looked everywhere, kicking up leaves. She found her walking stick and used it to poke through the leaves that were dark and wet and sticky. Then she found one golden gauntlet. Blood pooled underneath it. A small, silver tusk sat in its palm.

She picked up the silver. It was very sharp. She ran back through the arch and followed the screaming.

Garth was gnawing on a severed antler with his long wolf-muzzle. Some things in the crowd were shouting, and more were laughing, and most were still dancing but not all of them were.

"Hey, perro muerto,” Ana said. She threw her walking stick at him. It got his attention. He dropped the antler, bounded forward and knocked her to the ground, slavering.

Ana grabbed one of his furry ears with her left hand and shoved the tusk through it with her right. The skin of his ear resisted, stretching a little before the silver broke through.

Garth rolled over and howled. Ana got to her feet and looked around her. The crowd danced. Even those who were bleeding from the fight with Garth were dancing again. She took a deep breath, and she didn't get a chance to let it out all the way before someone's hand took her by the elbow and pulled her towards the stage.

She looked up at the arm attached to the hand. It had green and red letters tattooed all up and down its length.

Rico, Julia and Nick bowed to the sound of applause and unearthly cries. The sky began to lighten above the branches, grey and rose-colored and pale.

The owner of the green and red arm pushed Ana forward in front of Rico. “What's this?” Rico asked.

"Your last initiation,” said a very deep voice behind Ana. She didn't want to turn around. She looked straight ahead at her brother. “Sing her to sleep. Let her sleep for a thousand years, or at least until another glacier passes this way."

"I've already finished my initiation,” Rico said. “They all danced until dawn."

"Yes,” said the voice. “You held them, most of them, and they were deer in headlights highbeamed by your song. Those you lost you gained again as they danced bleeding. It was good. But it was not your last task. The last requires a ten year old."

"Crap,” said Ana.

Rico took her hand, pulled her closer, and tossed red and green colors into the air between them and the crowd. Colors settled into the shape of his tag. Ana still couldn't read it.

"Home,” Rico said. “I'll follow when I can."

"You have to tell me what it says,” Ana told him, but he just smiled and pushed her through.

* * * *

Their parents were as frantic as one might expect. Ana managed to slip into her brother's room and find green and red spray paint hidden behind the couch before her mother and father and Deputy Chad came in to look for clues to Rico's whereabouts. Ana kept the spray paint hidden under her own bed.

It took a long time for Ana to get back to the high school, because her parents kept closer tabs on her after Rico disappeared. Bertha had already sandblasted the graffiti, and she couldn't find the forest path, and she didn't know where Garth was. She hoped he wasn't dead, or something very close to dead. She walked home, and listened to three nervous phone messages from her mother on the answering machine. Ana called her back and told her she was home, and that everything was fine even though it wasn't really.

She went up to her room, and found her backpack sitting on her bed. She gave it a hug. It purred when she scratched behind its ears.

"I'm really, really angry at you for leaving,” she said. It kept purring.

Inside she found three pages torn from her notebook. They were folded in half together, with ‘Ana’ written on the front.

The first page was in Rico's handwriting. I'll see you as soon as I find a way out of a hundred years of servitude, it said. Don't worry, I'll manage. DO NOT COME LOOKING FOR ME. Keep a pinch of salt in your pocket at all times, and stay out of the woods, and DO NOT keep following me around. I'm serious.

Ana snorted, and turned the page. It was her seventh drawing, with a note written underneath: This is my name, dumbass.

She turned to the last page.

This is yours.

Ana looked at it, and saw that it was.

She took out her magic markers and practiced marking her territory on the back wall of her closet.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Three Poems

Kim Parko

Shiny Hair

One was always treated better than the other because of her thick, shiny hair, but that is not to say she was treated well. She was whipped. She was chained. She was berated. But her hair was lovingly cared for. The other was scalded and prodded and her limp hair was shorn. When they became teenagers, they developed suspicions. Maybe this wasn't a normal life. In their school, the others were unmarked; their flawless skin stretched tautly around their well-proportioned skeletons. The one with the thick, shiny hair was chosen to be admired, while the shaved one was picked to be scorned. This created a rift between them that a shared bedroom could not bridge. As adults, they were let loose and could do as they pleased. When it came time for their deathbeds, how different each scene. The shorn one breathed her last from a rickety cot as an apathetic nurse looked on, while the one with thick, shiny hair gasped her final from under an elaborate canopy circled by grieving generations.

Schoolgirl

She eats her breakfast like a good schoolgirl. She daydreams that she is drinking a glass of milk for her bones, and that her bones are weeping for dead calves. She daydreams that she is tasting bacon while a soft pig tongue licks the slaughter of its body.

During class, she has many desires: she wants to suck the knobs of her chest inward, away from probing boy-eyes; she wants to question authority but she looks like a pastel hooker; she wants to console Diana, who blames herself for misery amongst animals.

It is time for lunch. The bell rings and the schoolchildren line up at the trough. Today you will consume the rendering of animals, the woman in the hairnet mouths without joy. Her own daughter's breasts have been cut off, but she spoons out the mash just the same.

Sailor

A wayward sailor comes to the family's doorstep ensconced in seaweed. Mother parts his salty tendrils to expose a weathered, but not all that old, face. The life of a seaman is a principled life, especially the life of the seaman without ship. Why did this sailor decide to trade in the fathoms for the family's waning hearth? The children gather round the sailor. They giggle at his eel. stay, sailor, stay. They injure themselves on his stingray. go, sailor, go away. The fire is having its last crackle. Sailor speaks after regurgitating brine. His voice was meant for water's acoustics. Father cups his ruptured ears. This will not do. He mouths to his deafened family. This will not do.

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The Leap

Mark Rich

That morning, instead of walking into town to join the others around the tables at the gas station's restaurant for coffee, John Weeks turned to face the other way down the road. He felt around inside his head and could find no reason right at hand for turning this way, away from town; yet he could think of no reason not to, either, having gone this way for walks often enough before. At least this used to be the way he often took. Now that the notion had come into his head again he accepted it. Notions sometimes led places. He had noticed that somewhere along the line.

Not far this direction the old pavement, cracked at the edges, gave way to dirt and crushed stone. It joined with other county roads farther to the east, which meant it drew a bit of traffic off them and into the town of Carter. Those who went to Wellner with its implement dealers and hardware store went this way, too, half the time. Still he could walk a goodly ways and then homeward again and sometimes not be passed by any of the pickups, small or large, many the folks around here drove. He remembered when he would do this almost daily, go walking this way, usually with the sun on its slipping-down course instead of in its slow climb toward 9 a.m. as it was now. He gave up those walks for perfectly good reasons. Not perfectly good in the sense that the reasons were practical. Just perfectly good in that his feeling strange about a place he reached on this road was enough to stop him.

It had not been Lane Delancey's fault for what happened, John told himself now as he had before. John blamed Lane even though he knew it was wrong to feel so about the dead.

He and Ginny knew Delancey from before they were married. Or rather the situation was that Ginny had known both John and Lane, in a friendly way, with John being the lucky one in the end. John had struck it lucky every which way he turned there at the close of the War and afterwards, it seemed, partly because he was too young to have seen the worst of it. Europe had gone the way the Allies mostly wanted it already, and the Japanese had just seen a blinding light that seemed a kind of truth, at the time, and a devastating one, so that their country was beginning to fall subject to reconstruction rather than destruction by the time John felt the breezes play in his hair on deck there in Tokyo Bay.

He remembered coming back home to Carter and seeing the late-summer flight of starlings and being puzzled by their silhouettes against the blue and gray of the sky and the clouds. Then he realized his puzzlement came from all the training never put to use in spotting jets and being able to name them, and to classify almost unconsciously Allied makes and models in groupings separate from enemy ones: almost like different classes and orders, in taxonomy. And these starlings casting themselves across the spaces between trees: the triangles of their dark shapes—they caught him off-guard, for a moment. So much like arrows, they looked.

Lane Delancey's luck had been of the sort that was doled out to what seemed too many soldiers, although really not enough of them: just lucky to be alive. Shrapnel head wound, leg wound, too, and nearly two months in a hospital. Infection, but it was stopped in time. He appeared back in Carter a few weeks before Victory in Europe, and won bets with other soldiers back home about how well his head had mended by hitting targets with a knife, twenty paces, while most of them threw wild. He would throw knives at trees for hours, spend some time on amateur photography, hang out at the soda fountain where Ginny worked afternoons, and put in a few hours at his family's furniture store and funeral home.

John figured his luck had just been a little stronger, not just in the war but in civilian life. That was all. Ginny liked them both but took to John pretty easily, after a while. If she had felt regrets she had waited a long time to do something about it. He was glad about that, at least, that she had waited so long. Their years together had been good ones. At least he had thought so, not having seen any signs they might end abruptly.

John could hardly help running these thoughts through his mind now that he was walking this way toward Lane's house. He had not looked into the empty eyes of its windows since the day Lane fell. He wished the sister from Tulsa would find the time to come up and finish out matters with regards to its contents, just as a way to help close a door standing ajar a little too long.

Lane had kept the house in pretty good repair even though it had seemed he was often strapped for cash. White paint covered everything except the ornamental shutters on the ground floor, painted brick red as were the doors. He had married once, divorced, then lived alone there on the town's outskirts.

John stopped in the road for a while to watch the sunlight playing among the tree branches on the rise beyond Lane's empty house when he saw the movement upstairs at a window.

The light was wrong to catch details of the face in the window before it pulled back. Yet John had seen it. He had seen the curtains move away from each other. They were old, gauzy ones that looked ready to fall apart out of sadness. And yet there was no truck in the driveway. The grasses before the doorway into the shed in the back looked as though they had not been disturbed in weeks, which was in fact the case as far as John knew. He wondered for a moment if the sister from Tulsa had arrived at last: but there was that empty driveway.

John felt his scalp twitching as he walked into the yard to the sidewalk that was mostly overgrown. He knew he had no reason to keep quiet as he neared the house but stepped lightly anyway. He reached the planks of the front stoop and stepped up to the door. He peered in through one of the narrow windows alongside it. He could see little. Most of the view was blocked by sheer curtains. He tried the knob: locked, as he expected. He looked again and saw through one slender gap in the fabric a partial view of the stairs that came down from the second floor and ended up toward the rear of the house; and he realized it was lighter inside than he might have expected, the brightness coming from farther back. Other windows, he supposed. They were catching morning light.

Then he heard feet on the stairs. It raised the hackles on his neck to know no one was supposed to be in there and then to hear that noise. No one belonged here. John already had talked himself out of believing he had seen anything. He had not seen the curtains up there move and had not seen the slender face appear and most certainly had not seen the face of Ginny up there wreathed by dark hair. Would her hair have looked so dark? No. Unless he had seen her and his memory had played him tricks, giving her the slender and unlined face of youth, not that he could have seen her well from that distance, anyway: but at least that full head of curling and often messy hair that could dance around her face when she moved and spoke and laughed: that would have been just memory. It was all just memory anyway. She would not be hiding there. She was not the sort to hide. But he had thought she was not the sort to run. And now he had to have the shifting curtains of that second-floor window come back to his eye and remain there not to be denied, with this noise telling him someone had been there upstairs. Through the thick double doors he could hear fast and heavy footfalls descending and their heavy landing there at the rear of the hall. He pushed his head nearer the glass to see better and then backed suddenly away. What if whoever it was had reached the hallway and rushed now toward the front door? But John had just tried the door and found it locked. He went back up to the window and heard more muffled sound from within and then nothing. His sliver of vision into the house showed him nothing not already seen. The back door: that was it. Whoever had been upstairs, probably rummaging around and looking for left-behind treasures from three months before: the intruder had broken in the back door to look around and then, after seeing John near the house catching a glimpse and then walking closer, had rushed out that way. To where, though? John felt twinges in the muscles of his back and the pain in his knees he felt when he walked too far, although today he had hardly come any distance at all. He backed away from the door again. What if whoever it was had burst out the back and now was running around the edge of the house through the overgrown hydrangeas and the sumac and past the battered cellar door and around to the front to—to do what? Confront John? John had no weapon. Did she? He still confused whoever was there with Ginny, although it could not have been her.

"What's up over there?"

John's heart was beating so strongly he had heard nothing at all of the car slowing and stopping on the road.

"Tom,” he said, seeing who it was, “there was someone in Delancey's house. I caught sight as I was walking by. Now I don't know but he ran out the back."

"Then let's go see."

Tom Bishop was in his off-hours clothes, in his light blue Chevy. He stepped out and into the yard.

John joined him in going around the house to the rear, where they stared at the door hanging open, swinging slightly in the chill breeze coming from the northwest. Light shined fully enough on the rear patio but hardly seemed to touch inside where they could see onto the landing between the main hallway and the stairs into the cellar.

"We won't know what's missing inside,” said Tom.

"We could track the guy."

"Don't see tracks here, though,” said Tom. “He wouldn't have gone the other way around the house, would he? I would have seen him."

"I'd think so, too. Unless it was when we were coming around this other way, and he went that way."

"Then let's circle, opposite directions, and see what we see."

They returned to the back door again after meeting out front. Both of then looked into the loose woods, then. With the leaves down from all but the oaks, someone moving among them should have been easy to spot, although all the mixed textures of fallen leaves and tree bark and wiry underbrush and light-colored soil could hide a lot. The ground rose a little farther on. It was the color of dirt and dried grass, there having been no snow for two weeks.

"Let's go look,” said Tom. “If he got out beyond the hill before we came around back here then he must have been running and we might see the trail up there under the trees."

The grass had grown long here in the back, and was lying slumped over with brown winter weariness. John remembered the trim lawn Lane once kept back here, and the chairs by the outdoor fireplace. It had been a nice place.

"Look there,” said Tom.

He pointed to a spot of bare ground nearer the trees: deer spoor, looking fairly fresh.

Tom lifted his hand toward where those tracks were leading: up and over the hill, if they kept on going straight. Then he swung his hand back the other way. Back into that house's open door—if, again, they had come straight from that direction.

"You think?” said John.

"You think what you saw might have been a deer up there?"

"Didn't look it, but from the distance I suppose it could have been. I was certain right then it was someone's face but with the glass and the curtains and me just being surprised to see anything at all, I could have been wrong about that."

"Man's face or woman's?"

John laughed awkwardly. “Woman's."

"Well, I sometimes see women's faces where I ought not to. I suppose you're not seeing Ginny's face still, after three months now."

"I suppose not."

John figured from what he said that Tom thought he had seen her.

"Well, a deer,” Tom said. “Listen, I was on my way into town since it's about my shift at the department. Let me bring Dan down and we'll check the woods more thoroughly for prints. Dan's a good eye and if you and I go walking around here much more he'll complain we've wrecked it for him."

"Should we check in the house?"

"If there's damage or missing stuff, with that door being open—I mean, it must have been open already, for that deer to get in—then I guess that's something for Dan to do, too."

"Good enough."

"You were out heading anywhere?"

"Just a walk."

"Maybe we'll meet you on your way back."

"Morning's kind of not so peaceful any more, for a walk,” John said. “I'll ride back with you."

* * * *

For some reason, when Dan Anderson called the next day and asked John to drop in the office, John found he was thinking about Ginny again. “For Christ's sake,” John wanted to say to her, “what are you thinking? You don't just up and leave just because of some old heartache you finally gave in to!” He had written that postcard a dozen or a hundred times in his head, awake and asleep, but had never set it to ink and stamped it and sent it away, out of having nowhere to send it. Her own note had no return address. “I'm leaving,” she said. “I'm leaving because I have to. I'm not going to the city today the way I said but to do something that will hurt you too much for me to say it. But I have to do it and then I'm leaving because I can't help myself. Can't help myself about anything. I need to do this even though it is not because I do not love you, and because I need to do this I need to just leave and let my heart settle back in place for a time."

Three months.

Thirty years together and then nothing but a note, not even signed.

She had no close relatives any more anywhere for John to call. She had taken out enough money to keep her a month or two, was all, that she had said was for a shopping trip. John's birthday had been coming up.

He figured she would be back sometime.

Dan Anderson settled back in his chair after John walked in. Dan had an often cheerful countenance, his smile partly hidden by the bristly gray mustache but visible all the same. His eyebrows had a thickness and disorder akin to his mustache, in contrast to his hair that he kept combed close against his scalp and that seemed thin and sparse. Right at the moment little humor lit Dan's face, although he seemed glad enough to see John.

"Thanks for coming in,” said Dan. “Something I want to talk about that I didn't really want winded about over at the restaurant."

"About Delancey's house?"

Anderson nodded. “I scoured that area behind the back door and as carefully as I looked I wasn't finding trace of any shoes, no prints at all, except that short track you and Tom left leading out a short ways. But it's clear something was coming out of that house."

"That deer."

"And that's strange, isn't it,” said Dan. “Did someone break in sometime recently, leave that door swinging? And this deer pushed in and got itself up the stairs somehow? I've never seen a deer go up stairs but I suppose it could do so, given a reason. And then I suppose it could go across the landing straight to the front room and then push its nose out through the curtains. And that was what you saw."

"Must have been. You checked the house?"

"You know,” he said, “it seems fine. I had to check in there once before, a month ago, since Delancey's sister had asked us to do so, now and then, until she could get here and sort things out. And this time it looks about the same as before. It's as though the doe just got in, somehow, walked up the stairs, crossed to the window, and then left when you came up to the porch. Strangest thing."

"Yes,” said John, knowing Anderson was thinking how Delancey took his fall.

"But that's not quite the strangest thing about it,” said Anderson.

"What is, then."

"Got it in my head to follow the spoor out into the woods. I figured they would just go in among the trees and wander a bit, and disappear somewhere. But I had this notion to follow them, and I suppose it was how straight they were that got me curious. You saw how straight those tracks went."

"That I did."

"It's one thing if a deer is running but this didn't look that much like a deer running but rather one just going at a steady and easy pace away from the house, but not dithering and poking around, either. It was going somewhere but not scared the way you might have thought, with you at the door looking in."

"I guess I'm not too scary to a deer."

"Well, in any case I tracked it. The tracks went straight up that low ridge and then down, still going as straight a direction as could be taken, given the trees and bushes here and there. It would come to a clump of bushes and just walk around it and then go back to that straight line. That was kind of disturbing to see—that it was going off its straight line, and then going right back to it. Once you're over that ridge you don't see the house any more, but I was certain that if you took a bead back along that track you'd still have a line going directly in that back door."

"That's how it seemed from where Tom and I were looking."

"So I kept on following it. There's a hollow, then a small rise again, then another hollow, with the spoor going straight back. Then there was a gap, a pretty long one, about six feet. The deer had jumped, and once it jumped, I could see from the tracks, it was all the sudden skittish and nervous and moving this way and that before taking off. Judging from the tracks it really hightailed it then."

"As if spooked."

"About right."

"What made it jump?"

"Far as I could tell there was no reason for it, except that the floor of the woods did change right there. There was a depression that it jumped over. Just barely there. You know, as if the dirt had settled in a bit."

"A depression?"

"As I said, about six feet long."

* * * *

Maybe the strangest thing about Lane Delancey's death, not long after Ginny's disappearance, was that it was witnessed, and so well witnessed it was impossible for anyone to cast doubt on the story. Delancey was out with a group of his friends at the lookout over the valley south of town. If anyone said anything seemed out of the ordinary it was just that the view from Hansen's Hill was spectacular that day, with the sky clear and deep blue as the sun was sinking low toward the horizon, and the hills farther south covered with the yellows and oranges and reds of birch and alder and maple. It was one of those warm days before the cold settles in for good when it is impossible to resist the yearning to go out into the country, even if proposed on a Saturday afternoon among a group of friends gathered for their weekly nip at the bar. According to those who spoke of it afterwards, it was Ken Spillard, from the east side of town, who proposed the jaunt. They piled into two pickups, the six of them, and went the three miles to Hansen's Hill, parking in the visitor's area. A few other people were there, to judge from the cars, but not at the lookout itself, probably off wandering the trails beneath the color-laden trees. Someone had a bottle six-pack behind a truck seat, so that the men were perched on the wooden rail above the cliff, sipping beers and gazing over the valley and feeling the faint updraft from below. The steep slope and its dried brush and rocky outcrops have a way of heating up even under September sunshine, sending unseasonable warmth rising to the lookout.

The way Ben Orowski describes it, suddenly they were surprised out of their reverie by a shout and sudden commotion on one end. Delancey had been sitting there. Spillard said Delancey had been quieter than usual that afternoon. He had noticed. Orowski said he looked over and saw Delancey's beer sailing up into the air, and with that strange stretching-out of time that occurs when you are deeply startled by the unexpected he noticed flecks of the beer emerging from the bottle as it tumbled forward, catching and diffracting the sunlight, making a rainbow that was visible for a moment after the bottle had fallen away.

Orowski swore he saw all that first, and then noticed Delancey's hand, which he thought for one split second was trying to reach for the flying bottle. Then he saw Delancey was striving for balance, reaching into midair not for the beer but only because he had nowhere else to reach. Lane looked as though he had leapt from the railing, except that he had one foot still on the lower cross-piece, as if it had become stuck there for a moment. Then he was entirely free, not yelling and not screaming, but making a low noise almost like a groan as he fell forward over the edge. He somersaulted once going down and struck against the rocks with his head. Likely he was knocked unconscious before he hit bottom. At least everyone hoped he was knocked cold so as not to feel the end when it came.

Orowski saw only Delancey in those moments. Everyone else in the group saw the deer, too, although they all spotted it a moment too late. It must have come quietly out of the brush on the west side of the path leading to the lookout. It was a young buck, and one with such an unusual spread of antlers it riveted the four who saw it: they fixed on its branching rack and thought first of the season coming upon them soon and how here was the buck they would love to find walking past their stand: they relished the thought of the trophy, and of the stories they could then tell; and they dwelt upon the time to come, the hunting season, before it struck them how strange it was to be in a group of a half-dozen men sitting together and to have a deer walk up, calmly and quietly, and then to have it suddenly jump forward, head down, jabbing its horns into the back of the one sitting farthest off to the west, the one placed so he was impossible for the others to see, almost, because of the sharp brightness of the sun low in the sky beyond him—bucking forward and slamming into the back of Delancey, who shouted at the attack and then went forward, moaning, into the air to strike against tree branches and rocks in his descent to crumple in a wrecked heap alongside Eagle Creek.

Then the buck turned and ran, disappearing behind them into the brush, although everyone became so absorbed in the spectacle and horror of seeing Delancey going over they saw nothing else of the deer. No one saw it disappear.

The first thing the five men did was jump off the split-rail fence as if afraid that after Delancey's deer others would come for each in turn. The second was to confirm with one another what they had seen. They had seen Delancey fall almost certainly to his death; and, all but one of them, who, or what, had made him fall. Once they established they had imagined nothing, or if they had then they had done so together, they hurried back up the path and piled into the trucks to get down to the base of the cliff along Eagle Creek.

* * * *

Going through the memorial service for Ginny was hell, now that it was happening, but John sat through it silently and drank only a little too much afterward. She was reburied on the other side of town from Delancey's house. The dozen condolence cards that came in the mail he left unopened a week. A heavy snow fell at last. Anderson told him about but never showed him the dozens of photographs he had found in that second-story room of the white house down the dirt road, snapshots John remembered Lane Delancey having taken of him and Ginny, that happy Weeks couple, from their wedding day onward through the later years: photographs now with one figure cut away with scissors and another figure pasted in. Lane Delancey had a way with throwing a knife so it would stick point-first in a pale birch trunk no thicker around than a neck; and John could only contemplate that fact and wonder how it was that it had not been he who had fallen, not he the one who was cut out of Lane's real world, but that it was instead the one who always remained intact in those mutilated photos, the smiling one, the one John had married, the beautiful one he thought was saving him permanently from the world he had managed to trick so far: his good luck, the beautiful good luck he had come back from the Navy to find. She had always been there. Except for these past few months she had always been there.

Now in some ways she was back. Even that note might never have been left in the door, that one he thought he found there. He had thought it was her writing but now could only think how it might not be. She had not signed it. Or he had not, the one who had written it and left it. Like birds flying overhead: silhouettes, but not the ones he had expected.

"It doesn't make sense,” said Anderson. It was late morning at the gas station restaurant, a few weeks later. John had made no appearances here for a while. “The whole sequence of events. A buck doesn't come up from behind to charge a man sitting on fences. And a doe isn't going to catch your eye from a second-story window and then lead you to a grave. None of it makes sense."

"No,” said John. “It doesn't."

"But what does make sense—and there is a little that does. Like Ginny's shopping trip you said she was going on."

"Yes."

"She was shopping for you and needed someplace to store the thing until she could give it to you. Maybe something big."

"It's a stupid thing to think about now but she'd been wanting to get me that snow blower at last."

"Not stupid. Must have stopped along the way to see if she could leave it with an old acquaintance. Wanted to find that out before she went and picked up the thing."

"That could be.” The words felt like mud in his mouth.

"It was a bad business, all of it. I can't tell you how sorry I am about Ginny."

"You don't have to, Dan."

"I never told you,” said Anderson, “but I had my eye on you after you had word from Ginny about leaving. I knew there was some bad blood between you and Delancey around then."

"All I could guess was that it was him. I told you that myself."

"To your credit."

"But you were watching me."

"Duty to keep my eyes open,” said Anderson, staring now into his coffee. “I tell you, had there been footprints in the dust showing someone running up to that fence behind Delancey that next weekend, though I didn't much care for his ways myself, I would have checked your shoes."

"So what was there, there in the dust?"

"Hoof prints."

"A size too small for me, I would think."

"I have to say I was glad about that."

"You were right to suspect me because I sure did think Delancey had done me wrong."

"Which he did."

"Not the way I thought, but yes. He did. And it was worse. I didn't think there could be anything worse."

"Worse than anyone thought,” said Tom.

The two of them stared out the window for a while: snow, a truck getting a refill, a lot of muddied slush on the pavement.

"You've never gone deer hunting, have you, John?"

"Never been the sort, I guess."

Light sheered through the windows brightly and made the colored shapes within the formica table top seem to float in the air underneath their coffee cups.

Janice from behind the counter finished wiping up another table and brought over the pot for refills. She smiled at Dan, then John.

She's smiling because she sees sadness here, thought John to himself.

He imagined her unknotting her apron and pushing back her hair and wiping the tiredness from her face and then disappearing down the road and past the fields and to the woods beyond and running quickly between the cold trees with the snow heavy around her on the ground, her nostrils widening at the shock of the brisk morning air. He could imagine it only a moment before the picture fell apart and vanished into the brightness over the quiet restaurant tables.

"Well, we just have to go on, however we can,” said Dan. “It's hard sometimes but we just go on."

Or the other way around, thought John. We run for a while and then we must stand still. We stand still and we look and we listen before moving again: and if there is silence everywhere, then maybe that is how the world will be, for a time. We stand and we look and we listen and whatever we see and hear is how the world is. That is all it will be. Whatever we see and hear; and the stillness of the world around us; and the arrows of birds pointing us directions we maybe never understand until we, too, are gone: that is all. Sometimes that is all.

"I guess that's so,” he said.

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The Girl With No Hands

Angela Slatter

The Devil reclines on the rails of the old bridge, picking at his teeth with a long fingernail.

He's well dressed, handsome, looks like a feckless youth with nothing better to do. In many ways, it's the truth. A fallen angel, a disinherited son, he must pass his days as well as he can, taking not-so-subtle revenge on his father. Today, though, things are a little different.

The Devil has it in mind to take a bride. Not just any bride, but one as pure as she is beautiful, kind, gentle and pious. He could have his choice of glorious succubi, but what he wants is the thing he cannot have. He has chosen his playing field, set his pieces, and is waiting on the bridge for the pawn to arrive. He does not have to wait long.

The man is short, stout, balding. He is bowed under the weight of a sack, and leaves a thin golden trail behind him as wheat pours pitifully from a torn corner. The Devil smiles as the man looks up. The old man nods as well as he can to the handsome youth and continues on.

"Stay a while, good man, I'm in the mood for a chat,” begins the Devil.

Reluctantly, the man drops his sack and leans against the bridge for support. “What would you like to discuss, young sir?"

"What would you like best in life?” The Devil is charming when he chooses, for it's easier for him to get his own way.

"I'd like to not be carrying sacks about the place.” He wipes the sweat from his face. “I'd like to be rich, that's for sure—rich and able to employ a boy to do my carting for me."

"Then so it shall be if you agree to a trade.” Lucifer smiles winningly. “Let me have whatever is sitting in your backyard when you return home."

The Miller thinks of the apple tree and its reaching limbs, of the discarded barrels lying in the grass, of the fat gray mouser stalking its prey, and he laughs. “Surely, young man, you shall have your way. It's a deal."

He knows the lad is either touched or having a joke at his expense. The sack is not so heavy when he picks it up, as if the joke has lightened all his burdens.

"Excellent, good fellow! I shall call by tomorrow morning to collect my prize.” He leans back on the struts, well pleased, and watches the Miller, who is convinced he will never see the youth again, stagger away beneath his load.

Miller is still chuckling when he rounds the corner of his house. His heart contracts to something small and cold. Beneath the arms of the apple tree his daughter, her hair glinting in the sun, breaks into an impromptu jig. She smiles: Jephtha's daughter dancing for her father's return.

* * * *

The girl watches herself in the mirror.

Her hair is platinum and her eyes silver as the moon, in a face with the slightest blush of pink in her cheeks. On her wrists are two bracelets, plaited bands of gold and silver that appeared there not half an hour before her father returned home. These are her bride-gifts; they have grown on her like something organic but malevolent.

Madchen slips the straps of her shift from her shoulders. It pools at her feet as her eyes move across what will soon belong to someone else. Pouting breasts, firm curving hips, pink lips at the apex of her long thighs. She is a prize by any standard.

Her parents have been yelling for almost an hour. Hilde, fearful of the chests that now overflow with treasure, demands to know what her husband has done. When he told his story, she shrieked and beat him about the head. He defended himself as well as he could until she said, do you not know who that was? A name slipped from her lips in a whisper and took the fight from him. He dropped his hands to let her do her worst. Madchen went to her room.

The Devil watches her from the other side of the mirror. He traces her shape with his sharp nails, an artist etching her into mercury, a silver princess to be caught forever. The planes of her face, the curves of her body, the hints of her secret places, all are recorded by his tracing talon. His tongue protrudes as he performs his art in anticipation of the taste of her flesh. He leans forward...

Madchen, sensing someone watching, throws a shawl over the mirror, tucking it tightly around so that whatever watches her cannot climb out.

No matter to the Devil, he will have her soon enough.

* * * *

Madchen stands beneath the apple tree, in the center of a chalk circle. Every inch of her skin has been scrubbed until it glows pink.

Hilde, desperate in her maternal rage, had scoured her memory for knowledge to protect her only child. All she could come up with was the chalk circle and the cleaner-than-clean skin. She knows her daughter's heart is pure and there is no more she can do to protect the girl. She prays it will be enough.

The Devil ambles into the yard at the appointed time. He could appear in a flash of fire but does not want to seem ostentatious to his bride. As he approaches, however, Lucifer, the shining one, finds that she hurts his eyes. He stalks toward her and stops short of the chalk circle. He hisses at Madchen; she draws back—his breath smells like brimstone.

"Come out of that circle at once!"

"I will not, sir."

"Come out! I demand it!"

"Again, sir, I will not. No bride for you today,” Madchen sings sweetly. Hilde watches her daughter.

"Stay right there, my dove. He cannot harm you."

Lucifer swings around. He sees a mother's love, a mother's will, and smoke rises from his skin. Hilde wishes that she had thought of a circle for herself and her foolish husband.

"She will be mine, woman.” Lucifer turns his gaze on the Miller. “Give her no water with which to wash. I will claim her when she is dirty."

"But, sir..."

"And as for you, interfering woman.” The Devil points a long finger at Hilde. She gasps and falls, lying horribly still in the dirt.

Madchen moves to leave the circle.

"No! Stay there, daughter. I will see to your mother,” sobs Miller as he lifts Hilde's dead weight. “Your mother would want you safe."

The Devil smiles and disappears.

* * * *

The night passes with thoughts, and wonders, and dust storms.

Madchen wonders that her mother had to die when her father caused all the trouble. The dust storms pound her with dirt, and filth clings to her skin as tightly as the bracelets on her wrists. When dawn raises her head, Miller comes out, and Lucifer appears, this time in full flame.

"My mother?” Madchen asks.

Miller sobs. “Gone. Hilde is gone."

The Devil approaches in a leisurely fashion. He notes the smut adhering to his bride and smiles. Madchen begins to cry. She weeps so much that the tears wash the dirt from her hands. Lucifer screams his frustration.

"Miller! In the house!"

Miller follows the fallen angel. Madchen knows without a doubt that she cannot bear to lose both parents, not even her fatally flawed father.

The Devil stalks into the tiny parlor where Hilde lies quiet and cold. He does not give her a second glance. Miller stands in the heat of Lucifer's gaze, head bowed, fearing his own death more than the loss of his child.

"Miller, you will cut her hands off. I cannot take her while any part of her is clean."

"No! I will not harm my child further."

"You will or I will take you in her place,” says the Devil quite reasonably.

"I cannot..."

"Father, you must.” Madchen has left the chalk circle; her gleaming hands hurt Lucifer's eyes. He cannot look directly at her, she is too terrible, too clean, too pure. He wants her punished, maimed for slighting a prince of heaven. “Father, do as he says. I cannot bear to lose you, too."

There is much weeping and protesting but at last Miller gives in to the combined urgings of his daughter and the Devil. Beneath the apple tree, Madchen places her shining arms on the chopping block, urging her father to strike just above her bridal bracelets, just above the gleaming flesh.

His axe is sharp and he hits the mark once, twice! Madchen screams and the Devil laughs for glee. The girl begins to cry again and her tears wash the bloody stumps until they cease to bleed. Miraculously they heal and the Devil curses, knowing himself defeated once more.

"Sacrifice! Stinking self-sacrifice, you bitch!” He screams and throws a bolt of lightning that splits the apple tree in two. Leaning in to Madchen's face, he whispers with all his venom. “I cannot take you now and you think you've escaped me, little maiden, little Madchen, but know this: I will dog your steps. I will put chasms beneath your feet. I will raise mountains in your path. You could have ruled at my side, but you chose this."

He disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving his unwilling bride and her father to clear up the remains of her limbs.

* * * *

"Stay with me, Madchen,” sobs Miller. “I can look after you—"

"With the Devil's wealth, Father?” She shakes her head and clumsily pushes open the door with her stumps. “I will not stay here. It will be too easy for him to find me. And I cannot stay with you, knowing that you've caused my mother's death and my maiming."

Miller weeps. “I beg you..."

"A waste of time, a waste of breath. I will go into the world. Strangers cannot treat me any worse than my own father has."

Madchen takes neither food nor drink. Random kindness, she thinks, will be her only hope. Her life is not under her control; she has learned this harshly, but having learned the lesson, she will live by it.

* * * *

Lucifer watches her progress. His room is limitless, all the mirrors in the world back onto it like windows to the world above. He calls this space his crucible, where he ferments all ill—for the Devil lives behind mirrors. In the centre of the room is a great pool of molten fire in which he watches the world at large—the mirrors he uses to peer into lives and hearts, but the pool is his main informant.

He becomes bored with the repetition of her days. She walks, she starves. She grows thinner, the flesh melting back until she is bone with a canvas of skin stretched across her frame. She is still beautiful, shining like a saint in the grip of martyrdom. It makes him angrier and angrier but he cannot put his mind to revenge quite yet for he simply does not know what to do to her. After all, he has taken her mother, her hands, her father, all of her illusions. As far as the Devil can see, she is as low as she can get without death.

When and if she rises again (and he has no real doubt that she will for there is something about this girl that says indomitable), he will raise his hand against her once more.

For the moment he leaves his mirrors and turns his attention elsewhere. Perhaps for a few months, perhaps for years—time moves differently for him. He turns away, catching sight of the silvered portrait he made of her not many days since; his eyes rake the surface until the mercury bubbles and slides from the back of the mirror. The silvered princess is no more, her place in eternity gone.

* * * *

A pear tree, illuminated by the full moon, catches her eye. She has been two weeks without food and it seems as though her belly has crept back to stick to her spine. The pears are perfect, just on the turn from green to gold, and she knows they will be firm to the bite, then yielding and sweet, white flesh filled with juice. Her stomach growls loudly in the darkness.

Madchen starts forward; surely there will be some pears on the ground fit for eating. After a few steps, her feet sink and she stumbles back. A moat surrounds the orchard, wide and deep and impassable for a girl with no hands. She cannot swim.

She sits heavily at the edge of the moat, her feet in the water, her head resting on her stumps, and weeps for the first time since leaving home. Her tears are fat; despair makes them heavy as they fall into the water.

Madchen looks across at the impossible orchard. The water swirls around her ankles, shifts and heaves into the shape of a woman. The undine regards her curiously.

"You have given of yourself. What will you have in return?"

Madchen is too surprised to speak and the undine becomes impatient. “You have given your tears. You must ask something in return."

"Those pears,” says Madchen. “I must eat and I've a notion for those pears."

"Those pears are counted,” says the sprite obliquely. Nevertheless, she bows her head and the waters part until Madchen can walk across the damp floor of the moat and struggle up the bank. She turns to offer thanks but the undine has melted back into her element, and the moat is whole once more.

The pears grow beyond her reach. She leans her head against the trunk of the nearest tree. The dryad who lives within feels the splash of tears against the bark, and her boughs creak. Madchen steps back hastily to find the branches have lowered, and fat, juicy pears are at the perfect height. She stretches her swan's neck and bites into the flesh of the nearest fruit. She eats until her poor, abused belly protests at this gluttony so soon on the tail of starvation.

* * * *

The morning mist melts as the king takes his daily walk in the orchard. He has slipped the eyes of the court and made his way to the clump of reeds where the head gardener hides a small rowboat. The king enjoys this little piece of freedom, the blisters the oars make on his hands, the satisfying splash of the water as he rows across to his orchard with its counted pears.

He makes his way through the trees, idly numbering the fruits as he passes. His Majesty likes the pear trees, he thinks them elegant with their silvered leaves and green-gold fruit. When he reaches the final tree he frowns and re-counts the pears. Their number has dwindled since yesterday. He will have the culprit found, he vows, and then he sees her.

She still sleeps, her long body stretched in exhaustion, breathing with the rhythm of a wave. She is silvery like his pear trees, gleaming like a moonbeam. He kneels beside her, his head tilted, and surveys her face, the slow rise and fall of her breasts, and the strangely smooth stumps at the ends of her beautifully-formed arms. She is ever-so-slightly pear-shaped and this pleases him.

He settles beside her to wait. He has plenty of time. She will be his wife, this little pear-thief. His sensibilities are highly tuned to beauty, to refinement, to grace, and this girl pleases him on all counts. In his way, he's like Lucifer: sure of himself and certain that no one will gainsay his wishes.

He will have hands made for her, limbs crafted by his most cunning smiths, silver to match her hair and her sheen. His silver bride. He imagines the coolness of their touch on his skin, of their unyielding firmness, of the ridges made by decorative engravings. He imagines her mouth making up for the shortcomings of her other limbs. He smiles, well-pleased.

* * * *

The Queen settles her silver hands on her swollen belly as if she can feel the life stirring inside her.

The Queen Mother, Constance, watches this movement and her heart flips painfully, as it is wont to do when her daughter-in-law's handicap pierces her. Pity, sadness, pain, and love all wash over her. Most of all there is love, for the Queen Mother has come to care for Madchen more than she does for her son. It's something to do with the girl's helplessness. Sons grow up and no longer need their mothers but daughters always do. Or they always want to need their mothers, perhaps that's why the bond seldom breaks.

Madchen's mother, as Constance knows, is gone, murdered most foully. And the girl, maimed by her own father, is still good. This amazes Constance most of all, the girl's inherent goodness. She is kind, generous to a fault, gentle, graceful, as lovely as the moon, a misplaced gem of a Miller's daughter. Constance can see why the Devil himself wanted her—for all the perversity of his desire, she is a supremely perfect wife.

Her silver hands rub her belly. Constance knows she can feel nothing, that she will never be able to feel the warmth of her child beneath her fingertips, nor will she be able to defend that child or herself against harm, for although the silver limbs are beautiful and convincing, they have no purpose beyond a cosmetic one. They have no movement, no malleability, no facility or functionality.

Constance moves closer to Madchen. She does not touch her for that would be inappropriate in public, but hopes her sympathy will be obvious to her daughter-in-law. They stand on the steps of the palace waiting for the king.

Beyond the walls his armies are massed: today he goes to war. He has charged his mother with Madchen's care, and that of his unborn. He does not envisage the battle will last more than a few years.

The king strides down the stairs and bows farewell to his mother. He holds Madchen tenderly, running his hands over her metallic limbs so he will remember their feel, then up to the fleshy parts of her arms more briefly. Her mouth he tastes as if he already misses it and its skills. Finally, he places one of his gauntleted hands on her belly, where his son turns and kicks in response. The king smiles and finishes his journey to the courtyard, where a warhorse awaits.

Madchen watches him leave. She cannot imagine her hours and days without this man she has grown to love so. The years before him seem unreal and, now, strange. The place where she stores her grief begins to ache as this loss of her husband makes room for itself there.

* * * *

Her face, notes the Devil, has not changed. Luminous, a little fuller, her eyes the same shimmering grey he remembers. She is now a definite pear-shape, with her little bundle of the king's joy wiggling inside her.

He drags a thoughtful nail across his cheek, pondering how best to start.

"Was his father so handsome?” Madchen's laughter is limned with hysteria. It is only a few hours since the child pushed his way into the world after a long labor.

Her son's eyes are slitted with newborn's ecstasy at finding a full breast. He hiccups and his mother wipes the thin dribble of milk from his tiny lips. Soon full, his head slips, lips surrendering their determined hold on her nipple as he begins to snore softly, almost a kitten's purr. The weight of the child, his smell, seem to dampen the pain Madchen feels at her husband's absence. Or perhaps it just makes it easier to ignore the ache. Constance smiles down at them.

"Never so handsome. He looked like a shaved little monkey, all red wrinkles. And yelling! Born yelling.” She runs a gentle finger down her grandson's downy cheek; when he stirs in his sleep she pulls back. “What will you call him? We must have a name to tell his father."

"Hildebrand.” Madchen speaks quickly as if this thought has been hovering at her lips for some time, waiting to be spoken. “For my mother's memory."

Briefly, Constance is bitten by jealousy but it flies as soon as Madchen's cold hand touches her arm and the girl smiles with the warmth of a hearth-fire, seeking approval.

"It is good. A strong name, Madchen. I will write this to your husband."

She kisses the girl's brow and brushes a hand across Hildebrand's face. “Rest now, my girl. I will visit you this evening."

As the Queen Mother departs, waves of ladies-in-waiting cluster about Madchen's bed to fuss over her and the heir.

My Dearest Boy, Madchen has given you a son and your kingdom an heir. She has named him Hildebrand, a fine name. Both are doing well, my son. I pray you will return to us soon. God's speed. Your Loving Mother, Constance.

Lucifer finishes reading the letter aloud, his voice falsetto and bitter. The messenger who carries it is asleep under a tree, filled with ale generously provided by the fine young gentleman he met on the road.

The Devil pushes a thoughtful breath from his lips and lifts his hand. As his fingers pass over the parchment the letters dance and jumble, like feet on hot coals. He reads it aloud once more, his voice his own, his smile fat and happy.

* * * *

The king slumps in the saddle. A letter arrived this morning. Before his unseeing eyes, his army sprawls like a field of poppies in their red armor.

My Dearest Son, your wife has given birth to a monster, a child with the head of a dog. She is cursed. Pray tell me how to deal with this abomination. Your Loving Mother, Constance.

A soldier approaches, the naked blade of his sword catching the sunlight, and the king is reminded of his wife's sheen. He rouses himself, startled. Madchen has been nothing but a loving wife. She has never shown a sign of being anything other than she appears: a sweet, gentle, kind girl. If they have been afflicted with this burden, then they shall bear it together.

"Where is my scribe? I would have him take a letter."

"Now, your Majesty?"

"Now."

* * * *

Royal messengers really aren't what they used to be, thinks the Devil as the man's snoring rings in his ears. He turns his attention to the letter, which astounds him.

This man, this idiot king, still wants his wife. Loves her, supports her, bids her have courage in the face of her adversity; bids her be strong until he returns and they will shoulder their burden together. What does he think? That they will teach their dog-headed son to fetch?

He spits his disgust and the letters dance once more. There will be no more joy for Madchen.

* * * *

Constance lifts her head and wipes her mouth, thankful that no one is around to see her illness. Her son's letter sent her for the basin on first reading and the sensation did not lessen with the second. She has put it aside, determined not to read it again.

From the window she can see Madchen and Hildebrand. The boy is almost a year old now but the size of a child twice that age, straight and stocky as his father was. He is a determined, curious child, fearless. He loves his mother with all his heart.

Madchen speaks with the head gardener as the boy plays with the palace wolfhounds. The beasts tower over him but they are tender, never too rough. Madchen, ever an attentive mother, raises her eyes regularly to check on him as she discusses her plans for a new garden.

Constance looks over her shoulder to the letter. It moves, caught by a breeze, as animated as the malice it contains.

Kill them both. Destroy the corruption. Cut out their tongues and eyes to prove you have obeyed your king. Do not hesitate, Mother, strike swiftly.

The Queen Mother gingerly folds the letter and slides it to the bottom of a jewellery box. Her hands tremble as she contemplates her next step. She will do her duty as a mother and as a regent.

* * * *

"Hello, little queen."

Madchen, drenched by his voice, turns to face him squarely. She feels her son wiggling on her back and wills him not to draw attention to himself.

"What's that, my sweet? Offspring?” He swings down from the branch. He has been waiting for two days while she trudged away from the palace. “What lovely silver hands you have."

Still, she does not speak.

"Still alive, I see. Tsk tsk. Naughty Constance disobeying her son's orders. It's a sad state of affairs when you can't trust the Queen Mother."

"Why? Why do you dog my steps? You could have anyone you wanted; why me?” She despairs. “Why won't you leave me alone?"

"Because you said no.” He leans in close, his long nails playing across her face as gently as a breeze. “But you can change it all, you know. You still fascinate me, damn you. Say yes, now."

Madchen stands on tiptoe and kisses him. He will, he thinks, be merciful, now that she has been brought low, and she still makes him ache: his love and hate entwine like mating snakes. She pulls back, fixes him with her argent eyes and gives him a hard smile.

"You will never know the taste of me again. I hope the memory of that kiss lingers until the last trumpet sounds."

He strikes out and she falls but does not hit the ground even though her child and clothes do. Thousands of feathers break through the parchment of her skin. Her silver hands, immune to eldritch change, clatter on the stones of the path as, instinctively, she beats the air with new wings.

Hildebrand stops crying and stares at the large, snowy white owl. Madchen lets out a screech of anguish.

"Enjoy your life, Madchen. Try looking after your child with nothing but feathers.” He will think, from time to time, of the feathered maiden but he will not imagine she might escape his malice.

He disappears before she can finish her swoop at his head and her claws meet nothing but air. She settles beside Hildebrand, a picture of despair, and her son's hand reaches out to stroke her. He presses his face to her feathers and notes, to his comfort, that she still smells like his mother.

* * * *

Time and guilt have bent Constance like metal subjected to a fierce heat.

It is four years since she sent her daughter-in-law and grandson into the woods. The eyes and tongue of a gentle hind and her fawn float in a sealed glass jar, awaiting her son's request for proof. She received no acknowledgement of her last letter. Indeed, no word has come from her son at all, although troubadours and tinkers bring news of how he continues his war.

Letters bring her nothing but dread and the one that arrived today lies on a bureau, set aside from the documents she is signing. Her secretary pours hot, red wax onto the documents then stamps the royal seal into the molten mess as it cools. When the pile of papers has disappeared she turns her attention to the letter. The parchment crackles under her hands as she breaks the seal.

Her son returns, within the week, his war won, his dominions safe.

Constance folds the letter and adds it to the small archive in the jewellery box where her son's inhuman instructions have lived these last four years. She slips away, down the staircase leading to her private garden.

In a pear tree sits the large white owl that has taken to visiting her. The creature is truly beautiful, an artwork with strange silver eyes. Constance scratches at the bird's neck and it emits a soft, sad sound.

"I'm so scared, my lovely owl. My son returns and I will see once and for all if he is a monster. What if this man who came from me is something less than I believed him to be?” She sighs. “Tell me, white owl, will it hurt more or less?"

The creature starts and screeches. Her wings stretch wide and she takes off as if startled by the news. Constance watches her go, bereft.

* * * *

The owl circles down into a clearing. Dryads have coaxed their trees to weave branches into a roof, climbing vines and shrubs form the walls of a small hut. It is simple but comfortable, made with care.

In the clearing stands a boy, big for his age. A quiver of handmade arrows is slung across his back and a bow is in his hand. He sets snares and hunts for food now that he is old enough; but he never hunts the birds of the air. The storm of his mother's wings draws his attention and he watches her graceful landing, marvelling as always.

He is a child of silence: he has no memory of human speech, nor can he speak the language of birds. Communication between mother and son is rudimentary, one of love, not of sound. Hildebrand does not feel the loss, but it frustrates Madchen, for she had words before this time of feathers.

How can she tell her son that his father returns? How can she tell him that they are in danger? She will defend her child to the death. She does not know if it will be enough.

* * * *

The king wanders.

Constance showed him the jar containing evidence of his wife and son's fate. He struck her, would have drawn his sword had she not pulled the letters from the jewellery box and thrown them at him. Their contents stayed his hand and broke his heart. Finally, Constance, assured of his innocence in the matter, told him of their exile. He vowed to find them and set off through the private garden, into the woods, with neither food nor drink nor companions to sustain him.

That was five days ago and his kingly garb is ragged and dirty; he looks like a beggar. His boots, right enough for riding, are not meant for walking miles and miles across forest floors. He discarded them on the second day, finding the blisters too painful to continue shod. Forest creatures play in and around the stinking leather as the king stumbles deeper into the woods.

He finds a stream and follows it, lapping at the crystal water from time to time in the hope that it will stop his belly from constant complaint. Any extra flesh he may once have carried has disappeared and his mind is strangely clear, freed of earthly considerations. If he cannot find his wife, his love, his beloved burden, there is nothing in life for him.

Then there is his son. The child is not real to him; Hildebrand is merely a concept, a chimera. The king has no memory of touch, or sound, or smell on which to hang his heart. His child is a lesson he must learn. If he can find him.

A clearing opens before him. Woven branches and vines form a small shelter, outside of which stands a boy. The child sees the man, sees his face stripped clean by suffering, but makes no sound. Behind him, the trees and foliage move and shift, fold back into themselves until the little hut is no more. The child casts a look over his shoulder; his home is gone.

The king takes in the boy, his black hair and sturdy limbs, and starts across the clearing. There is a rush of air, the beating of great wings, and Madchen swoops at him, her talons drawn. He falls, bloody scratches on his face, and the bird plummets to follow up her attack.

The owl's screech is replaced by the screaming of a human voice, long silenced. Hands and fingernails slap and claw at him as he sees his wife's face, transfigured by grief and anger and fear. He does not fight her, merely lies beneath her and watches as her rage plays itself out.

She hears, as her screams subside, his first words to her in almost five years.

"Madchen, my love, my silver bride."

Her hands fail her, her rage washes away like an ebb tide. She sobs and collapses. Her husband wraps his arms around her and holds her until she lifts her silvered eyes to his dark ones, to feast upon his face, to consume the changes the years have wrought.

As they kneel in front of each other, Hildebrand approaches, uncertain how to treat this man who may be an enemy, or a friend—he cannot read his mother's strange behaviour. He stands just out of reach.

Madchen raises one hand to her son, keeping the other firmly caught between her husband's palms. Hildebrand stares for a moment then reaches out to touch the white-skinned limb. Madchen's hands, restored to her as wings during her feathered phase, are whole.

The Devil has watched, drawn to a casual mirror visit, his miscalculation causing his jaw to drop. That she would once again be willing to blindly sacrifice herself for someone she loved and so earn release from his spite, did not occur to him—that a fully-limbed owl might become a fully-limbed maiden. He clenches his hands into fists, his nails cutting into the soft flesh (which heals immediately). Lightning spits from his fingertips, he points towards Madchen's image but finds that the silvery sparks go the wrong way, licking up to his wrists, boiling around his own hands. This malignancy will not leave him. His shoulders slump, defeated.

Husband and son each hold one of the pale hands in wonder as they rise, the little family, and begin their journey to the castle where Constance waits with watchful eyes and an anxious heart.

About the Authors

Kirstin Allio's novel Garner was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. She was selected one of “5 Under 35” writers to watch (and hopefully read) by the National Book Foundation. She lives in Seattle, WA, with her husband and sons.

William Alexander lives in the middle and writes on the side. This particular story is dedicated to Kelly, both of them, the sister and the author and the editor. His stories have appeared in Zahir, Weird Tales, Postscripts, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008. He contributes to Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Jedediah Berry's debut novel, The Manual of Detection, comes out in February 2009 from The Penguin Press.

Christa A. Bergerson is a guardian of Nature and all of her wondrous inhabitants, even those who writhe betwixt the veil. In twilight hours, she finds pleasure traversing the wilds of Illinois and beyond. She is a Luddite, a bibliophile and suffers from occasional bouts of Chronophobia. Her poetry has appeared in Quantum Pulp, The Candor, Open Ways, Faerie Nation Magazine, and Balticon 42. She was a finalist in The Mattia Family 11th International Poetry Competition. Her poem “Sekhmet Upon the Horizon” garnered third place in the 2008 B.S.F.S. Poetry Contest.

Ted Chiang is a mild-mannered reporter by day, but at night he dons a costume and commits crime. Or fights crime. Or is a victim of crime. History will be the judge.

Abby Denson is a cartoonist and rock'n'roller in NYC. She is the creator of Tough Love: High School Confidential, Dolltopia, and Night Club, among others. She has scripted Powerpuff Girls and comics for Nickelodeon. She has webcomics on gurl.com and a dessert comic column, (citysweettooth.com) in The L Magazine. abbycomix.com

Daniel Lanza was born and raised in Northern California, but currently resides across country while he finishes a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. His work has appeared in Toasted Cheese Literary Quarterly and Zephyr. Like half the known world, he is currently at work on a novel. He is also collaborating on a graphic novel which will, at some point, have a website.

Kat Meads's most recent book publication is a novel, The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan (Chiasmus Press). She lives in California.

Chris Nakashima-Brown lives in Austin, TX. His most recent story is in the anthology Fast Forward 2. For more: nofearofthefuture.blogspot.com

Kim Parko is a writer, visual artist, and seasoned worrier who lives in Santa Fe, NM with her husband and dog. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 3rd bed, The Bitter Oleander, Caketrain, Diagram, and 5AM.

Mark Rich has two new fiction collections: Edge of Our Lives (RedJack) and Across the Sky (Fairwood). New stories are in Talebones, Tales of the Unanticipated, Zahir, and Analog. He is working on two books for McFarland, one on C.M. Kornbluth and what that author says about us, the other on Modern-century science fiction toys, and what they say about us. He and Martha Borchardt and Scottie Lorna, an avid squeak-toy aficionado, live in the Wisconsin coulee region.

Anna Sears is a writer/artist currently employed as a migrant holiday store worker in Staten Island, NY. She hopes to settle down soon and adopt a cat.

Angela Slatter is a Brisbane-based writer studying for a PhD in Creative Writing. Her stories have appeared in Shimmer, ONSPEC, Strange Tales II, and Twelfth Planet's 2012. Three of her stories gained honorable mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror 20; her story “The Angel Wood” was short-listed for the Aurealis Award, and she was short-listed for the Ditmars Best New Talent award in 2008.

Jodi Lynn Villers has her MFA from North Carolina State University. She lives in downtown Raleigh with a beagle named Turtle and has written a novella about a rehabilitation camp for girls who have killed their parents. Her short-shorts have also appeared in Staccato and Quick Fiction.

Susan Wardle is a graduate of Clarion South. Her fiction has been published in the Shadow Box e-anthology, Overland, Andromeda Spaceways, Antipodean SF, Fables & Reflections, Shadowed Realms, Ticonderoga Online, and The Outcast to name a few. Susan currently lives between Sydney and the South Coast (Australia) and spends her daylight hours (and some of her night time hours) working for local government.

Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov's, The Rambler, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Outlaw Territory II (Image), and elsewhere. He runs the audiobook project Telltale Weekly and publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art. alexwilson.com

Nick Wolven's short fiction has appeared recently in Asimov's and Paradox. He lives in Brooklyn.

Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

Table of Contents

The LoveSling

The Problem of the Traveling Salesman

Heliotrope Hedgerow

The Chance

In the Name of the Mother

Holden Caulfield Doesn't Love Me

A Wizard of MapQuest

Marie and Roland

Ana's Tag

Three Poems

The Leap

The Girl With No Hands

About the Authors

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