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Unexpected Results from Swedish Furniture
by Kat Beyer
Mason wanted to get the kids' room finished, so, determined that the best thing to do was get some cute furniture, he carried me off to IKEA, hoping that that chair with the leaf hanging over it would be there, as well as a free table at the cafeteria so we could have meatballs and lingonberry juice.
We didn't bring the kids, because we knew that then we would go way over budget on pillows shaped like hedgehogs, tiny lamps that changed colors, etc.—not because we can't say no to our children, or because they might throw tantrums, because they don't much—really!—but because Teresa, in particular, has a way of sitting down on a pillow shaped like a hedgehog that makes it impossible not to want to repeat such an experience of total adorabilosity in our own home.
It's horrible, I know, but it could be so much worse.
Instead, I sat down on the pillow shaped like a hedgehog, Mason laughed (I love having a husband who laughs when I mean to be funny), and everything went dark.
I woke up in the manager's office with Mason trying to revive me with lingonberry juice, the lights in his spiky hair flickering into focus. I said, "I've always thought that haircut was too metrosexual," and almost went out again. He squeezed my hand.
"Thank goodness you're all right," said the manager. "We could give you the pillow," she added to Mason. "I'm sorry. It's just that it would be so bad for business if you came back."
"Well excuse me, aren't adults allowed to sit on hedgehog pillows?" I said, trying to sit up.
Mason squeezed my hand tighter and said, "Of course they are, monkey. The trouble is that they don't usually start rolling their head and prophesying when they do it."
"What?"
"You don't remember anything?"
"Nothing."
"I must have arrived while you were in full swing," said the manager kindly.
"Yes," Mason told me, "you pretty much gave a full synopsis of the next decade."
"It was the bit about our stocks that got to me, I admit," said the manager. "Although it was nice to know who's going to win the election."
They gave us the pillow. I'm looking at it right now, trying to decide what to do next (we've already agreed not to let Teresa sit on it).
Typecast
by Kat Beyer
The younger typesetters told stories about Samuel: how he had once set the Canon of the Witches in one night, and how when the oil in the lamps had run out, he had gone on in the dark, with only his sure fingers to guide him. Or how when Gundrid of Maesbury lost her temper and turned the mayor into a field vole, then ordered tiny books to be printed for the poor woman by way of apology, Samuel had hired dormice to cast the type, but had composited every page himself, with tweezers and an immense magnifying glass.
Even so, Bridget warned him before she shut up shop. "Sir," she said, "hadn’t it better wait till tomorrow? I mean... when we are all here? So it's a bit—safer?"
The others thought she was brave to say that. He shook his head.
"It's wanted Frida’s Day," he said.
So he opened the book when all the locks were locked, and turned from page to page, both hands working on their own, pulling vowels and consonants, ligatures and punctuation from the case. Under his hands the words of the spell formed themselves in the formes. This job they would have to print blindfolded. But even if he set it in the dark, he still had to shape the words, taking care that they did not shape him. He recited verses from the Canon, interleaving them with the lines he set, like protective leading.
He’d left one window open to let the spring air in, the air of a perfect evening, just free of a soft rain, the cherry tree outside the window covered in blossoms so sweet they seemed to scent the moonlight.
I, H, A, V, E, B, E…
When the words took him he knew. They felt like the touch of his master on his shoulder. He almost expected to hear Old Jack's voice, saying, "Well done, Samuel." Then he knew it was too late. Fear bit him.
It will feel heavy as lead, he thought. Binding as a forme, oily as ink.
But it didn't. It felt light as the words in his mind, soft as the lead between his fingers. It felt fine and funny, like setting text for field voles.
I have become. Let my wings open. Let it always be spring, and I in it, he thought. I did my best.
Straight Out to Yurtville
by Kat Beyer
To celebrate our first anniversary, each of us here at the Cabal has written a story beginning with a line kindly provided to us by Jay Lake. Click the link at the bottom of the page to see the stories Alex, Dan, David, and Edd have come up with, and check back Monday to see what Luc Reid does...
Zoli liked to hang around psychiatrists' waiting rooms to hit on the low self-esteem chicks. The waiting room on the Pacific zeppelin was the best, because every time the airship lurched the chick would fall into him and many pleasant sensations would result, usually up in her cabin after her session was over.
And then, landing in Tokyo, taking her cell number, and skipping town for Ulan Bator while the piece of paper with her number on it got washed down a gutter with the cherry blossoms in the Asakusa district. He always went to the temple before he left town. A couple of prayers to Her Holiness Kannon were a good idea: somebody had to have mercy on him, and the Goddess of Mercy was best qualified, right? Light a couple of incense sticks and head straight for Yurtville, the last place some clingy chick would look.
Zeppelin Freak Number 23 was pretty hot for a low self-esteem chick. She slouched like a professional, which made it easier to see down her shirt, although she had a face worth looking at too, an Ethiopian princess thing going on, even if she didn't take care of her skin--pockmarks on her chin and cheeks screamed "I hate me!" Perfect. Sarcastic and sad, even in bed. He found himself trying to cheer her up when he should've been getting off. She almost didn't give him her phone number.
"You won't call," she said.
"Yes I will," he lied, kissing her on the cheek.
Three incense sticks and two airships later, he settled into his guest yurt, thinking about Genghis Khan, who would never have screwed chicks who hated themselves. But old Genghis wouldn't have had a problem getting laid. Zoli drank too much airag and stayed up late playing dice with his landlord (also named Genghis).
In the night she stood over him, shoulders back this time, face like an Ethiopian queen this time, pockmarks royal instead of ugly, and she struck him about the face with the long sleeves of her kimono.
"You said you would call, and you didn't!" She roared in a voice meant for velvet compassion. He got a boner even in terror.
"And then you had the gall," she continued, leaning close, "the appalling gall, to light three sticks of incense at my shrine and pray to me for mercy? You're an idiot."
How Captain Mojo Struck the Wrong Note
by Kat Beyer
Powered almost entirely by whiskey and attitude, Captain Mojo’s ship "Chastity’s Bottom" sailed its way across the sky in search of trouble and rock 'n roll—but more importantly, in search of her.
The crew had sold all the cannon for hammocks and guitars. The First Lieutenant gave herself the nickname "Ten-Shot Hammond," the Second Lieutenant called himself "Six-string Butler," and everybody called the Third Lieutenant names that could not be printed in the presence of gentlemen—or ladies, for that matter.
They swept through the air, and the other travelers of the skies feared them, especially when they started to play.
"Tell us where she is," they would shout across the range of clouds, "or we will start a fifty-minute guitar solo!"
So folk in their air boats would lie rather than listen.
"She’s in the City of Rain!"
"She’s dead!"
"She’s joined a band and they’re on tour in the Twelve Currents!"
"She never wants to talk to you again, she hates you, and she wants all her sheet music back!"
"Who the heck are you looking for? Who is she?!"
Only fools asked this question: Captain Mojo would answer them in song, before he burst into tears and hurled empty whiskey bottles across the abyss between ships; he would tell them of her red, red hair, and her glow-in-the-dark tattoo, and her smile like a thunderhead looking for a fight.
The last whiskey bottle flung, he would always end by leaning his elbows on the gunwale and sobbing, "If you see her, tell her I meant it as a compliment!"
Beetle Mercy
by Kat Beyer
My mother was Suzanne Miller, the woman who used to win prizes for her vegetables at our county fair every single year, even the years she didn't enter.
"How do you do that?" Asked Maureen next door. "It must be witchcraft."
Of course this was true. But if every magic has a signature, my mother's was in loopy, if exact, handwriting, the kind of handwriting that tells the reader that here is a person who used to put hearts instead of dots over her "i's."
She used to turn beetles into birds for the day, then turn them back in the evening. When we saw her doing it she would say to us, "I think they need a change of scene."
"Suzanne," our father would say, and somehow fit whole ranges of reproach and love and weariness and desire into her name, notes which I can only hear now, when I'm grown up, and remember the exact sound of his voice.
When they took her up to the hospital and we followed in the car, our father saying softly, "Suzanne," to himself and the wheel every now and then, we knew something would happen, even if we only felt the knowledge under a blanket of tears.
When we saw her sitting up in the the hospital bed we knew but we didn't want to know. Our father looked at her and took her hand, and she said, "not long now," terribly sad for his sake, and he said, "I know." She took us each in her arms and tried hard to squeeze the breath out of us the way she used to when we came home from long trips, but she was already too weak. And she kissed our father the same way he said her name.
"Suzanne," he said once more.
"A change of scene," she said seriously, and then she wasn't there. I guess we must've all blinked at once, not to see her go. The sheets settled back where she'd been.
When we got home the house finches over the door had finished building their nest, and my brother crawled out on the roof and counted three eggs.
"One of them will be her," he said, very sure.
The Hardest Step
by Kat Beyer
I should have known when we took the ship too easily. "She's cursed," one of the prisoners told me smugly. I looked at her where she hung still in the water. "You board," said my Captain.
I hauled myself aboard, sweating in the tropic night, wondering why I couldn't smell gunpowder—but then, few shots had been fired. We had won by the trick of having more guns than they, and they could not have known that we were nearly out of balls and powder both.
I took a step towards the aft deck and jumped in the air when a voice spoke beneath my feet.
"Where do you come from?"
"Fr-from the sea," said I.
"And claim this ship?"
"I d-do," I answered, choosing that that would be the last time my voice shook.
The voice laughed with a creak and boom below decks.
"Then take the wheel."
"I will," I said.
The first step was not the hardest. The night pressed in on me suddenly, squeezing the breath out of me, tight as a corset, thick as August in Tortuga.
But I bore it. I had before. The air parted again.
The second step was not the hardest. A riptide of blood covered the deck, washing me to the knees, while out of it rose every man I had killed in battle, clutching their wounds, looking at me with eyes that stared into my future and saw my end. I smelled the stench of iron in their bloodsoaked clothes.
I faced them all a second time. The tide receded, taking them with it.
The third step was the hardest. The lights from the other ship went out, the water stood empty, then surging waves shook the whole sea and I saw the ship I stood upon, and I myself, sailing down into a terrible maw with teeth of foam that would surely take me—alone, all alone.
But I kept my sea legs. I had earned them. The lights blinked back over the still water.
"Take your ship, girl," said the voice.
"Not so loud," I said.
I took the wheel, and called across the water that the ship was mine, could I have a crew?
"You've got balls, I'll give you that," laughed the Captain. "Very well, I will send you a crew if you will sail under me."
"For a while," I called back. "Long enough."
Fair Warning
by Kat Beyer
We still haven't found the grave of Alexander, but we believe that the Ark of the Covenant lies guarded in an Ethiopian church, and we have three possibilities for the location of Atlantis. My colleagues and I spend a great deal of time and grant money just turning down back roads on hunches.
For example, I once stopped in a village for gas and coffee at a place where one rather smelled like the other. In the course of a long smoke, while we waited for the owner's cousin's son to come fix the gas pump (you have to be willing to smoke and wait long hours if you want to get far in this profession), the owner told me about a cup at his cousin's house, a cup no one must drink from.
"Most people die," he said between drags.
"They just drink from it and die?" I asked.
"Just die. Like that. But not everyone. Every now and then somebody drinks from it, again and again, and that person lives a long time, long enough to get sick of living."
"No really? Has it got poison in it? Why don't they just destroy it?"
"Can't. Old Joseph, when he brought it, he said, 'Take care of this.' Well, we give what is asked for, here, in this place."
I decided to test this.
"May... may I see it?"
He took me up to his cousin's house, where we were graciously shown into the garden, and where I saw the Grail in its little homemade shrine, set into the wall against the hillside.
Now, I have tenure and a reputation to keep up, and I did not want to violate my host's hospitality, so I waited a week before I came back to steal the Grail.
When I climbed into the night garden, the shrine stood empty, except for a polite note in a copperplate hand that read: "Old Joseph warned us that people would try to take this, even fight over it. So we leave it in the open, because we've learned that that is the best way we can protect it. If you don't want to die, please do us the courtesy of telling this story, but never say the name of our village or give any particulars that might help someone else find us. Thank you, and have a good night."
The Lady or the Tide
by Kat Beyer
If I give it back to her, she will walk all the way down the shining valley to the sea. She will step into the water and never return, if I give it back.
She might not. But I think I know. I've heard the stories at closing time down the pub (no one tells them at the start of the night, before the dark and the rain). It might be modern times, we might park a Range Rover where my grandfather kept his cart, but I know—I'm not such a modern educated man that I can't feel this truth under my skin and hers—it's what drew me to her, after all.
And I will be left here, to mind our children until they mind themselves, mind themselves away to college and London no doubt, and I am left to grow old sitting in the same patch of sun my father sat in, pining and looking down the valley to the sea.
But if I never say anything, and I leave it hid in the thatch where I first put it, I will have kept a secret from her, my own wife, my heart outside myself.
I once thought to put it in a deposit box at the bank. People in the stories always leave things like this about to be found, it seems. I wanted to be wiser and safer. But the thatch seemed the right place. There is no explaining it, I suppose.
If I never say anything, I will know what she does not. It will be like the secrets some other men in here keep, about women in Oban or Glasgow. The wives who do not know make my heart ache. But then, some of the husbands don't know either: they make my heart ache too.
I couldn't have that kind of secret—how could I love anyone else but her? No house has been warmer, no children brighter eyed and sounder hearted. Sometimes with her, one glass of wine seems to last all summer.
She's away today with the children, up the coast, and I'm standing here, looking down the valley to the water, holding this sealskin in my hand, waiting for the sea and my own heart to return the answer.
The tree on the shore
by Kat Beyer
A prince put an apple on the orchard wall by the river. He told the apple, "Wait here until I get back."
He didn't come back. A bird ate the apple and dropped a seed on the riverbank, where it did what seeds do best.
The third king of the Two Lands camped under the apple tree, on his way to a campaign in the East.
The Emperor of All Between the Rivers rode under the apple tree. He took one heavy, yellow apple in his heavy, ringed hand, and kept riding.
The twelfth Queen of the Three Oceans hung a target from the apple tree. The Queen hit the target, but an assassin had better aim.
A boat came down the river. A young woman stepped out of it and came to the dying tree.
She bowed to it.
"Thank you for waiting," she said. She picked the last apple and ate it, swallowing one seed. She waited until she was sure. Then she said, "When you are born, we will come back here and plant a tree."
Hugo Dreadnought in Love
by Kat Beyer
Hugo Dreadnought loved Captain Harriet Sanguine for three reasons:
1. She hated war.
2. She was too damned smart for her own good.
3. She forgot her stylus behind her ear at least once a day.
He thought the trouble had started during the Battle of Trafalgar Loop, when the good ship Protector had assisted the Navy. Later everyone had said, heroic service, above and beyond, etc., but veterans knew it for a darting, shark-and-sardines dogfight, with enormous carriers and tiny junks chasing each other into the dark.
While the enemy ships were still a distant glittering line, First Engineer and Helm had asked him and Second Helm to plot six courses for every maneuver. First Engineer had explained, "If our course isn't working, you see, we simply must have more than one way out. And as soon as we adjust, you must start all over again. Six more. Good study."
Helm had added, "Yes, and you might save our lives."
So Hugo and Toyohara Chikayoshi, Second Helm, had strapped themselves to the navigation table so that no blast or fall would dislodge them. They taped bits of paper beside screens and made notes with Navy issue ballpoints, knowing that at any minute they could lose power. They did, twice. The second time, in the silence on the bridge, Hugo realized something must be very wrong and, yanking free of the straps, dove down the hatch to the engine room. He saw what he hadn't wanted to see, and came back to Second Helm, saying, "We've lost them." First Engineer relayed the news up to Captain Sanguine where she sat in the dark. Up ahead, a ship was struck and her face was lit up in the glowing flash, serene and sad.
"Can you cover it, Dreadnought?" she asked.
"I can," he had replied with all his heart, and had spent the rest of the battle dodging back and forth between the engines below, while calculating breathlessly into his headset every time Second Helm needed him.
He and Toyohara had come out of it feeling like brother and sister. Then the Captain had come picking her way through the Engine Room and set a hand on his shoulder and said, "Well done." She'd stopped then, frowning, and felt above her ear.
"Must've lost it in all the fuss," she'd muttered, and kept on with her tour of the ship.
Seen through Feathers
by Kat Beyer
Every now and then the Scottish winter yields up one halcyon day, and our little university town is packed from ancient wall to ancient wall with holiday-makers. I had to work round hundreds of strollers and brisk grannies with ice cream cones just to turn in my essay.
I decided to skip lecture and go walking on the cliffs. I packed a flask of tea, a sandwich, and a jumper ('sweater' to my fellow Americans) in case winter changed its mind.
I got to my favorite picnic place, a hollow in the sandstone high above the waves, and had my tea and sandwich. I left the crumbs off to one side for the birds, which is why I didn't expect what happened next.
There were ravens all around me all at once, with black feathers and scholarly eyes and sharp, sharp beaks, flapping and calling out and there was no way out of them except over the cliff. I didn't even have time to cover my eyes. I thought the kind of stupid thoughts one thinks at times like these, like, "Why ravens instead of seagulls?"
The sun flashed through their wings, through the barbs of their feathers. And then I remembered about my ex-boyfriend, about our last shouting match--and then about my parents' last shouting match--and then about the mean things said at my grandmother's funeral--and then all the sorrows and all the angers together, as insistent as the waves below.
I felt something tapping at me, like someone trying to wake me up, and realized it was a beak. A raven was very gently pulling something out of me in the midst of all the flapping and all the noise. Then another and another went to work, still cawing and calling.
Then they were gone, flapping away with all the sorrows and all the angers in their beaks. I had nothing but the open air.
I couldn't believe it, so I sat there a long time. At last I took the cliff path to the next town over, needing to think. A woman met me on the path, her wild hair very dark, and said, "Well done. That was the first bit. Now you're ready for the next;--" and walked on, before I could tell whether she meant the path or the birds or something else entirely.
The Diplomat Complains about Rice
by Kat Beyer
The Diplomat didn't like rice. He told me why in the first village we stopped at, the first village that didn't know my village had exiled me, and that didn't call him "Gaia rat,"--the first village that feasted us instead.
He said that rice reminded him of growing up in the monastery back on Gaia. He was adopted into the monastery like many other hungry boys. There was little else to eat but rice.
"Earth was having some population problems," he said, which was odd, because by now I knew that he called each thing what it was, and what had happened on Gaia had been a disaster. Maybe my village had feared that he brought the disaster with him.
"The rice was never very good. It always had maggots in it."
I love rice, one of the few foods from Gaia that we like here. It's an honor-food. But I hate maggots. Now I could understand.
"We were desperate for the protein, so that was not so bad."
I didn't understand again.
"Except for the boiling," he went on. "I hated taking those little lives. It wasn't their fault that they looked exactly like rice grains."
He turned his bowl round in his hands.
"They reminded me of the soldiers always marching through. Soldiers like those little lives, caught up in a rice bag that wasn't their fault."
He paused.
"My metaphor is not good. Of course rice is a living thing as well. But for me eating rice is like eating grief."
He had never complained about anything before. At last I ventured, "Then why, Elder, are you eating it now?"
Together we looked down the rice in our bowls, the honor-food of the feast.
"Surely they would make you another dish if they understood?" I pressed.
"On the other hand," he said, "Maybe I need to learn to eat grief. Maybe I could do with more patience. Besides, they are only trying to be thoughtful. I wish to be a good guest."
I wish to be a good guest. I have spun those words around and around in my mind many times since. Sometimes I wonder if I was exiled for being a bad guest in my own home, perhaps being ungrateful when I was fed something I didn't like.
"The maggots and the memories aren't their fault," he added.
A Mostly True Fairy Tale
by Kat Beyer
In the days when SUVs were small as doormice and organic vegetables were ugly, there lived a girl who could talk to machines. She had them bring her treasures: cappuccinos and camping stoves, software and silks. She taught them to make lovely things to sell that vanished the next day. But one day the machines came to her.
"Everything you make is gone the next day," they told her. "And none of it helps other people. If you do not change this, your powers will disappear."
Naturally she didn’t listen. So she lost her powers: no more silks and stoves. She sat alone in the dark, for she could not even speak to the machine that made the light.
One day someone knocked on the door. "Come in," she said. In the doorway stood an old lady.
"I can’t stop long," said the old lady. "Others to see about. Here,” and she held out a jewelry case.
The girl opened it and saw a necklace of strange letters. She asked the old lady, "What do I do with this?"
"You'll either work it out, and get out of here, or you won't and you won't," said the old lady, and left.
The girl thought this was really too much. First she cried, then she yelled.
Much later she took out the necklace again. She could only feel the letters in the dark. There were no "A's" or "B's" -- not so much as a "Q." They didn't even feel like kana, or akshara, or anything like that.
Studying a long time, she found one letter that always spoke to her of birds, and another of mercy, and another of sunrise, and she learned that she could rearrange them without breaking the necklace, making letter-pictures that shifted and grew in the dark and did not disappear the next day.
One day she made a letter-picture that turned the light on.
After she got over her shock she noticed the door handle. It felt good to turn it.
Outside, the air was bright and smelled of coffee.
The girl lives out in the world now. Her letter-pictures pay off people's debt and froth cappuccinos and do many other wonders besides. Machines and people like to come and visit her. If you have seen the old lady lately, maybe you could let her know the girl would like very much to thank her.
Captain Sanguine Solves A Problem
by Kat Beyer
A laser torpedo passed most accurately over the bow of the ship and sped on into open space. It did not even leave behind a burn mark on the forward solars: a warning shot.
"A soupcon to starboard, Helm," said Captain Sanguine, setting her teacup aside.
"Aye aye, Captain."
"They seem a bit piqued."
"Aye, Madam Captain."
"Can't think why."
"Perhaps they don't like the Law, Madam Captain," ventured the Second Engineer. (His name was Hugo Dreadnought and he had been admitted to Sheriff’s Corps because he was the son of Samuel Dreadnought, Lord Peabody, Duke of Jupiter and Io. Even so, he was a fine engineer--just didn't fancy being shot at.)
"Perhaps. Kindly hail them, First Communications."
"Aye aye, Captain."
The screen before them flickered, and then a particularly ugly Martian appeared, glowing green with annoyance.
"Good evening, Madam Captain," he gurgled when he caught sight of her. "I am Commander Wig Mxwibbleit of the good ship Dopplekibble. And you are?"
"Captain Harriet Sanguine of the good ship Protector. Good evening. What can I do for you, sir?"
The Martian glowed more fiercely.
"You can stop this demmed nonsense, Madam, that’s what you can do!" he gurgled. "All this stamping through my precinct as if you had jurisdiction, which you most certainly do not! What do you mean by it, madam?"
Captain Sanguine raised her eyebrows. As Helm said to the Engineers later, "I quite understand what you're saying -- we are the Law, and he ought to have recognized us right off. But when both parties have whacking great guns, it's awfully important to preserve good manners."
On the silent bridge, Captain Sanguine looked at Commander Mxwibbleit and everyone waited. At last, she sighed.
"The First Lord will insist on having the Sheriff's arms painted too small to read. Perhaps you would care to examine them more closely? I will have them sent you."
Commander Mxwibbleit stopped glowing at once.
"Ah. No need, no need. My mistake. Quite understood. Safe voyage, Madam Captain."
"Thank you," replied Captain Sanguine. "But do let us know if you need our assistance," she added.
"Of course, Madam Captain. I do beg your pardon. Safe voyage."
He faded cautiously from the screen.
Engineer Dreadnought muttered, "Ought to have him flogged."
"I heard that, Engineer Dreadnought. Short rations for speaking ill of a superior officer," said Captain Sanguine, picking up her teacup.
The Diplomat Teaches Leaving
by Kat Beyer
I was exiled, for I would not kill the Diplomat. He had arrived at our village on foot, with robe and begging bowl and a faded badge from the government of the planet Gaia. I had tried to kill him, and had learned that I would rather admire him instead. "Gaia rat," they called him, and me, "helper of the Gaia rat." But when I told them of his mysterious powers, how he had disarmed me by--talk? My own tears?--and how he had outlived our strongest poison, none of them were brave enough to kill him themselves.
"Go," they said to me, my father, my mother, everyone I loved; "where?" I asked, and they said, "We do not care, for you are like the corpse of a stranger now," and for a moment I felt my flesh crawl with chill, as if each cell in me were really falling still.
I said, "Then I will go with the Diplomat, and be twice dead to you." Just as I turned away I caught a small movement of my father's hand and knew then that they did care, that their whole hearts ached with love and anger.
I went to the orchard. I saw from the Diplomat's face that he did not need to be told what had happened, but I told him anyway, while we walked. When I was finished we had reached the edge of home. I did not want to look back, but he said, "Will you be my student?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then look back," he said, and added simply, "You must carry this place with you."
I looked. I saw the cluster of bumps that were my people's houses, sitting together like loaves at a feast; the glint of the solar stills and the oil press beside them; the hatcheries and the sheep-yard (not all things from Gaia were bad, were they?--I asked my people in my mind); the low stream running through the valley bottom, the orchards, the quiet flags on the hill--hanging flat today, though no doubt tomorrow they would carry a message to the other villages: "A son is dead."
The Diplomat brushed my wrist with his rough thumb. We turned and walked down the hill.
The Ham Sandwich of Destiny
by Kat Beyer
The day the evil shaman came to the café, Matt could feel her before she walked in the door. The coffee beans were nervous. Being a good shaman himself he began to place protections on the counter—but then she was there, and there was nothing to be done—she was after his soul. Already she was clouding his senses. There was no time. There was no thought. He spotted a croque Monsieur on the order counter. In one breath he sent his soul into the layers of ham and cheese. He could grab it in a moment. She would never suspect.
He turned to face her. They dueled silently. Perhaps no one suspected, not even the Socialist reading the Wall Street Journal.
"Can I help you?" He asked, while searching the Over-Soul for her name.
"Double decaf nonfat latte, please," she replied (definitely an evil shaman). It's too late for you to seek my name, you fool!
"For here or to go?" I will never let you have my soul! Who orders decaf espresso?
"For here, I think," she said, smiling. Me! I’m evil! And you are too weak—I will find it and feed upon it!
"Great. That'll be up in just a minute at the counter over there." NEVER!
But suddenly he felt teeth sinking into him. He whirled around, her change still in his hand, and saw a girl sitting by the creamer counter. He was too late! She had taken the first bite of the sandwich that held his soul. He stared at her until she looked up, and then found himself swimming in the Over-Soul of her eyes.
"Never mind, I'll get it to go,” said the shaman behind him. He didn't want to stop looking at the girl, but he dragged himself around to face his nemesis. Foiled, but not for long, said her eyes.
"Change the decaf latte to go!" He called to the barista, who called back, "On it!"
He handed her her change, putting a small curse on the dime as he did so.
"Thanks," she said.
Matt walked out from behind the counter and sat down across from the girl with the sandwich. At the door, the shaman laughed.
The Diplomat
by Kat Beyer
I had to kill the Diplomat. The elders said so, and nobody argues with them. He agreed to have breakfast with me.
I took him to the orchard, and he helped me make a fire pit. He talked about his home planet, Gaia, but he called her "Earth." I said I thought that was a plain name for such a beautiful-looking planet. "I like it," he said, "plain, yes, but there's a lot going on under the surface there—like here," he added, and patted the earth beside him with one wrinkled brown hand.
After I served him, I slipped my knife out. They said they chose me because I was the best rat hunter. The first ships from Gaia brought rats with them, and we lost a lot of harvests. "Gaia rat," they called him. I thought rats never looked so peaceful.
"But won't his people come with big ships and guns?" I had asked my father (not an elder yet—OK to argue).
My father said, "He came on foot. No big ships. Just a little old guy in a robe. His badge is faded, and the plastic on his communicator is yellowed. What do you think?"
I looked at the Diplomat peacefully eating. A film of grief started to form over my eyes but I wiped it away.
He looked at me and smiled.
"You were going to stab me with that, weren’t you,” he said.
I saw I had wiped my eyes with the back of my knife hand. I stared the blade.
After a moment I said sadly, “It’s still too late.”
He looked down at his bowl, then up at me. "Ah?” he asked, holding it up.
I nodded. His grin seemed to embrace me.
"I forgive you for killing me," he said.
I did not wipe the film away this time, and I buried my face in my hands and howled.
After a moment he tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up, rubbing my eyes.
"My dear friend," he said, laughing, "Did you think I prepared for this journey without defending myself? Did you think I had no protections?"
"I know you disarmed me somehow," I said hoarsely.
"Well learned. And if you want to poison a human, galangal doesn't really work. We use it in cooking.”
That's when I laughed too.
Aunt Mary's Place
by Kat Beyer
My aunt left me a house. Well--I was the third cousin in line, anyway. The first two didn't manage to spend a whole night alone in the place, which is what she asked them to do in her will.
Of course the house is on the edge of town on a high hill, and of course it is surrounded by gnarled trees that need pruning. I walked up slowly, feeling more forty-five than ever, and thought to myself, 'This place isn't any more gloomy than it was when I was a kid.' But I'd come in the afternoon on purpose. Not smart arriving at dusk.
The caretaker had left me a dinner in the fridge, and I ate it out on the front porch. It was that first day in September when you know summer is gone for good, and the wind gets tricksy and just a little bit mean.
I had this odd idea that if I turned on her ancient television set I would see her face, so since no one was around to catch me being a superstitious idiot I read a book instead. I went to bed early, 8:30 by my wristwatch (of course all the house clocks were stopped by other superstitious idiots).
At nine I thought I heard my name: "Rooobert? Rooooobert?" But it turned out it was just the door creaking open in the wind.
At eleven I woke up with a start. Someone was grunting, "Who's there? Who's there?" in the corner. Shaking, I turned on the light, and saw a bullfrog that had somehow made its way into the house. I took a pretty glass bowl from the nightstand, scooped the fellow up, and took him outside. "A tad late in the season for you, little guy?" I said as I liberated him.
At the stroke of midnight my aunt flew out of the shadows, hair streaming, eyes starting out of her skull, shrieking these dreadful words:
"I didn't bake that pie so you could leave half your slice on the plate, boy!"
I was so scared I sat up and started laughing out of sheer terror. "Shi—Jes—holy tomato, Aunt Mary, why the he—heck did you have to come at me like that?!"
She stared at me, and believe me a ghost with eyes half out of her sockets can stare.
"Anyway, I finished all my pie tonight," I added reproachfully.
I guess this was what she wanted, because her hair calmed down and she sat on the edge of the bed. I waited, still really shook up. Finally, she said, "So, was my sister Lucy happy with the silver, or did she want the house too?"
"Oh, no, though she was mad Matt didn't stay the whole night."
"He was fun. Didn't stay to argue about pie, for sure."
We spent the rest of the night catching up on gossip since the funeral.
She still shows up sometimes. It annoyed my wife at first, and she's a good-natured woman as a rule. But the kids think it's cool.
The Water Lily House
by Kat Beyer
The Waterlily House at Kew closes in November, and, nearly always, I am the last visitor there. Then I wait--without noticing I'm waiting--through the entire chilly, bone-wet English winter for it to open again. The Waterlily House doesn't float on the surface of my mind through December, January, February and March, not at all. Only, sometimes, when I'm having a cup of milky tea at home after a long day at work, I will feel the steam on my eyelids when I lean over it, and think of the House.
Through those months I think, without meaning to think, of one lily in particular. It's the sacred lily of the Nile, and it has translucent blue petals and a yellow heart. I wonder where that cup of color goes in the dark months. I think it sinks into the roots buried in the mud at the bottom of its pool. Does it sleep in winter, or is it always standing ready to return, or both?
In April the lilies and I both return. I take the first Saturday I can, even if I was up late with my mates the night before, and if April is being a bit chilly I wrap up against her, but always in layers, starting with my favorite dress and with a jumper and a jacket and a scarf. In April the Waterlily House is still silent. I stand inside the door and take off the scarf, jacket, and jumper, and walk through the silent steaming air. I fill my lungs with the smell of green tropics.
I come back again and again, waiting until the Nile lily blooms. I've begun to realize that the day it blooms, and all the days that its blue and yellow petals are open to the air, are the only days I feel truly calm in the whole year, the only days when I make sense to myself. I wish I knew why.
This year, while I gazed on the open flower for the first time this spring, I heard a sound like the ringing of tiny tambourine bells. The next weekend it was trumpets, and I thought I saw the water flash with hot sunlight.
I once overheard my mother saying to my father, "I miss the temples. I miss the silence on the river. So much noise--cars are so noisy!" I think one day soon I will have an answer. In the meantime, I stand before the lily, my jumpers and scarves on my arm, and stare into that translucent cup of blue and gold.
Monkeypants
by Kat Beyer
On my planet, "Monkeypants" is not just a loving nickname. We have these tiny monkeys that will just crawl right up into your pants. I'm not kidding! Listen, really. Mature adult females are about as long as your forefinger, tail included, and mature adult males are just slightly longer and have bigger shoulders.
The babies are maybe about as big as a knuckle by the time they are allowed to leave the pocket, and if you have got pant monkeys breeding in your trousers, you are in big trouble, because the babies will scamper around a lot and play with each other like crazy, and you will spend the whole day jumping around and barking. And let me tell you, if you happen to be a member of the Pan-Planetary Parliament and you're trying to give an important speech on upper canopy financing and about three tens of baby monkeys start playing "Chase the Martian" up your inseams, well, let's just say that the top fifth of your forests might not see much chlorophyll funding that day.
And there's nothing like having to jump up and down squeaking and jittering while trying to give a serious government speech to ruin your credibility. Although, fortunately, the voters in my quindrant thought it was hilarious and sweet.
You can't kill them to get rid of them, for sure. That would be awful anyway. They are so cute, with their big googly eyes and their soft, soft fur. If you pet them (carefully, with one finger) they spread out flat in the palm of your paw and you can feel their tiny heartbeat tickling against your pads. My friend Nicholas from Earth says that all mammals call to each other, and when I look down at my tiny relations running all over my imported Levis, I can only agree.
The Walnut Tree (from a Farmer in South Carolina)
by Kat Beyer
My mother never minded that I didn't believe in ghosts. She patiently told me about each one on our farm, from the old man that walked with her and pointed to the ripest carrots and beets, to the woman who giggled in the rafters when the rain was coming. Some were long-dead friends and relations, others helpful strangers. According to her there were even two twins who guarded all the chickens and ducks. They came by one October night after the war was over, and stayed, and no fox or raccoon ever got one of our birds again. My mother left the twins two bowls of cereal every full moon.
"Easiest time for them to see my gifts," she explained, "their eyesight isn't so good."
She taught me what each ghost liked and went on letting me laugh and tease and shake my head.
Stopped laughing about a year after she passed away. Saw the old man for the first time the summer after she went, and he walked the rows with me in the dusk. I apologized for not leaving out his pipe tobacco as she had instructed, but he just smiled and shook his head as if he understood. She always said he never spoke.
A few nights later I asked him, just before I hoisted the basket to my shoulder and went to fetch the kids, would Mama come back too, to help? And he smiled and pointed at an old walnut tree and nodded. Right now I think she's traveling the world, but I'll look for her to settle there when she's ready.
Instruction Manual
by Kat Beyer
Operating instructions
1. There are none.
2. Please remember not to try to steer it. Thank you.
Basic care
1. Leave it alone as much as possible.
2. Enjoy it.
3. Try not to use too much of it at once.
4. We strongly recommend that you do not produce radioactive or toxic waste, as this voids the warranty on protein codes.
5. Do not touch the wings of the butterflies, as it damages their scales. Thank you.
Emergency care
1. Study it very carefully.
2. Figure out which parts you did not leave alone.
3. You can panic, but please remember that that is a function of your glands. We advise an initial stage of panic followed by considered, careful action.
Tech support
You can call us at 1-800-277-1324. But it won't do any good. If you've messed things up, we certainly won't be able to figure them out.
Ted asks that you call us if you like the flamingos.
Parts list
Too numerous, particularly the moving parts, which are also changing all the time, therefore we feel it is not worth producing and revising a set list. But before you start using it, check to be sure these principal parts are intact:
1. Warm core.
2. Hard crust.
3. Watery surface.
4. Shell of air.
5. Local star (ensure correct distance, between 147m-153m km).
We hope you have found this manual useful. If not, we recommend that you re-examine your product more carefully, because it's damn complicated, and we still haven't figured out what it's for, even though we like it a lot.
The End of the Mission
by Kat Beyer
I was sitting on the front porch of my guesthouse, waiting for the mothership to come, enjoying the hot evening, when out of the grass they rose, one by one, little whirring beings with lanterns in their bottoms: blinking on; blinking off; blinking on. A local alien had told me the day before that this blinking was the way these little lantern-beings spoke of love.
I was still pondering this when the great beam blinked on and pulled me up into my mothership, among all my friends and cousins, "home sweet home" as the aliens say, and a surprise party for the end of the mission besides. Somebody had even hand-programmed a holograph saying "Happy End of Mission!" The cycling on it was wrong so it blinked on, blinked off, blinked on.
From a bartender in the East Village
by Kat Beyer
I used to live under the ocean. I was there for about a week. The rent's okay, the girls are cute even if they have fins, but there's no coffee. I had gotten into that poem by T. S. Eliot, you know, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." So I moved. But it's not all it's cracked up to be. The thing about lobsters and other ragged claw types is, they're not very intellectual. You're better off talking to the starfish.
Five ducats
by Kat Beyer
I used to work for El Periódico in Guatemala City. On my walk to work I would stare up through the smog and the noise of honking cars, trying to work out if there was a volcano above the city or whether it was just a strange cloud formation in the brown haze. Very often I wouldn't look where I was going, just stare up, and this is a mistake in Guatemala City, believe me. One day I ran smack into a big businessman with a whack that felt like a burst of the irritating summer heat. I coughed in the smell of his expensive cologne. We both fell back, I about to apologize and he about to swear, when he swallowed his words and looked at me carefully. His brow clouded in a frown.
"Damn you, where have you been? You still owe me five ducats," he growled.
Neither of us could make any sense of that sentence. We stood open mouthed, gasping in the heat. The cloud passed from his brow, and he shook his head slightly, and said, "I have no idea why I said that. Watch where you're going, yes?"
After that I didn't walk any further for a little while. I watched his well tailored back press on in through the crowds, and then I found my eyes drawn back towards the mirage-cloud-volcano, while my thoughts traveled far. 'So all those dreams where I'm standing on the deck of an old ship--they must be memories of a past life,' I thought. I chuckled to myself. 'Look at you,' I said to myself. 'You've never believed in reincarnation.' Still, I kept looking up at the hazy form above the city. Mountain? Cloud? World? Illusion?
The Boring Seed
by Kat Beyer
My uncle gave me a thunderstorm seed for my 14th birthday. I had just unwrapped three PS games (none of the cool ones, Mom didn't want the violence to rot my moral fiber, whatever) and a Judy Blume book from my misguided Aunt Cheryl (hello, I'm a boy! What was she thinking?!). I picked up a tiny box next, and when I read Uncle Tom's name in the card, I felt a jolt of disappointment: this was the uncle who had given me a power drill the year before, and frankly I was expecting something, well, bigger.
But I smiled my fake polite smile, which I have had plenty of chance to practice with six aunts and uncles and not enough kids to dilute their attention, and unwrapped the box.
At the exact moment that I opened the lid and saw the plain gray seed, about the same size as a cherry pit, my uncle said, "I know it looks kind of boring."
"Yeah," I said, relieved.
"Well, don't be fooled when something comes in a boring package. Don't touch it!"
I pulled my finger back.
"What is it?" I asked, automatically putting the box in Aunt Cheryl's hand when she reached for it.
Each aunt examined it, nodding solemnly before she passed it to the next, and I could tell everyone else knew it was.
"Something for the future," he said mysteriously. "Plant it when you want something exciting to happen, but only when you're really serious, not when you just feel bored. Plant it before a hot date," he smiled.
"Tom," said Aunt Cheryl in a scolding voice, but I saw her cheek twitch before she could hide her smile. He ignored her the same way I ignore my sister sometimes.
"Don't you think he's a little young...?" My mother asked him in the kitchen later, when she thought I was outside playing with my youngest uncle.
"Oh, I don't know. You guys have already got him thinking about Yale," he said, laughing.
I forgot about the thunderstorm seed until the night before my junior prom. I had a special date for the prom: a girl I hadn't noticed at the start of the year, mostly because she sat at the front of the class with the other brains. But one day in February, when school couldn't have been any grayer, she made a joke and I fell out of my seat laughing.
And so, in that spring when prom dresses and acceptance letters bloomed, on a nervous night after I had picked up my tuxedo, I planted the seed.
All I can say is, bless Uncle Tom. He never told me where he got it from.
Overheard in the courtyard of a very ancient apartment block in Cairo
by Kat Beyer
"Hassan, change your sister back right this minute. I mean it."
"But Mama,--"
"Hassan Ibn Sina, change your sister back or I will make you sorry you ever came out of the womb, so help me Almighty. Don't give me that look."
"But Mama, she likes being a butterfly."
"I don't care whether she wants to be a butterfly for the rest of her life. You change her back this instant, do you hear? She can be a butterfly all she wants when she's old enough to do it herself. For now, she has to be a little girl and eat her supper. And you, you will not get any supper at all if you do not do as I say. What, do you want me to change you too? Because I guarantee you, I'm angry enough right now, I'll change you into a dog turd in the street."
Told to Me by a Woman in the Air India Lounge at London Heathrow
by Kat Beyer
I once loved a man who changed into a tiger by day. It didn't work out. Among other things... well, there is no way to put it delicately... Tigers, you may know, get quite a bit of carrion caught in the sheaths of their claws, and even as a man he could never quite rid his nails of the stink of sambhur-flesh. But I shall always remember the way the moon, shining through the lattice, made stripes across his back as he crept over the bed.