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Twenty-Eight
by Luc Reid
It only took Henry eight lives to figure out who the people were that he needed to help. There were fourteen of them.
One was the housewife from Ontario who, given the chance to start a late life career in diplomacy, had finally brought peace to the Middle East.
One was a blind, retired marketing prodigy, who had turned zero population growth from a second-rate idealist cause into a worldwide obsession. He later said it was because he'd needed a hobby.
One was the guy who invented Sip Cars. One was the astronomer who detected the 2040 meteor in time. One made four movies about addiction and violence that turned those problems from shadowy worries into clear tasks people cared about working on. And so on.
Before those eight lives, it had taken Henry seventeen more to figure out what he should be doing with himself. Saving the world was not something that came naturally to him, and he had been trying to enjoy himself. Only after three times around from beginning to end had he begun to think that his repetitions might be something more positive than a cruel joke. The fourth life he'd gotten filthy rich, and hadn't been any happier. The fifth life he'd been very happy, but he hadn't made a difference in anyone else's life. The sixth life he'd made a difference in a few people's lives for the better, but they resented his meddling, and anyway, it was small potatoes compared to what someone like him should probably have been able to do.
Now it had been twenty-eight lives, ranging in length from 19 years (the ill-fated "experience everything" life) to 87 years (the happy life). Always an accidental or a natural death, never murder or suicide, always born in the same body, growing up nearsighted and gangly in the same neighborhood in Malvern, Pennsylvania at the same moment in history. Twenty-eight lives, and the world was beautiful. By the time Henry was 42 in his twenty-eighth life, those fourteen people had turned around the world's worst problems, from pollution and climate change to war and poverty and waste and ... well, not everything, but pretty close. It was a damned good world this time. Any more changes would just be fussing with it.
Henry put the barrel of the revolver in his mouth and hoped to God he wouldn't have to go back and do it all over again.
Ha!
by Luc Reid
"Don't be Triassic," snapped the Troodon. "This is the wave of the future."
The Akylosaurus swished his massive tail dejectedly, crushing a small tree. "I can't help it my brain's the size of a golf ball," he said.
"Well, lucky you've got me around," said the Troodon, adjusting a piston. "So long as I don't eat you." He smiled in that toothy way theropods had, which the Ankylosaurus had never liked, and examined his work. "There, lovely. Drag that fuel over, will you?"
The Ankylosaurus, glad to be doing something the Troodon couldn't, walked carefully up to and past the invention, dragging the bundle of wood the Troodon had harnessed to him right up to the maw of the machine. The Troodon plucked several pieces out and threw them in, then struck a match (invented a century before by another Troodon) and tossed it into the piles of kindling already inside. A flame leapt up, and the Anklylosaurus watched the fire grow with a kind of anxious fascination.
"It's not doing anything," he said after a while.
"Shut up," said the Troodon, and the Ankylosaurus thought he sounded worried. "It just needs to heat up enough to ... oh! Ha! Ha ha ha! Yes! Look! Yes! It works! I'm a genius! It works!"
It did seem to be working. The flames were leaping up to caress the container of water, and through some means that the Ankylosaurus couldn't understand at all, this was moving a rod back and forth, which made a wheel turn. Smoke poured out of a small smokestack, and steam squirted out elsewhere. The Ankylosaurus waited, hoping there was more to it.
"That's it?" he said, finally.
"That's it? You lump! I've invented the steam engine! Can't you see what this means?"
"I don't know," said the Ankylosaurus. "It seems to be spitting up a lot of smoke."
"Pollution, bah!" scoffed the Troodon. " The sky is infinite, the waters are infinite ... what do you think's going to happen? We'll dirty ourselves to death? Ha! Dinosaurs have reached their rightful place as masters of the planet! You just wait!"
# # #
Fifteen hundred years later ...
A massive asteroid, more than six miles across, barreled toward a planet nearly covered in black, sooty clouds, though glimpses of brownish-blue and brownish-green were visible through small gaps. When it impacted, it would raise a lot of dust over the corpses of the last dinosaurs, who had starved to death on their choked planet only a hundred years before.
Parthenia Rook, Episode 7: The Gory Candlestick
by Luc Reid
The Bonobo King paced the marble floor of his bedroom in his crimson silk pajamas, unable to sleep again.
His spider monkey lover, Flamenca, stirred in the massive canopy bed. "Come to bed, darling," she said in a sleep-heavy voice. "Whatever it is, you can destroy it in the morning."
"That's exactly it," said the Bonobo King. "I haven't been able to destroy it. It ... her ... Parthenia Rook. I've tried every approach conceivable--an android toddler, zombie photographers, an opposite gender identical twin raised to evil, unbalancing her fruit ... if it weren't for my esophogeal implants, that last miscalcuation would have cost me my life!"
"Let me take your mind off it," said Flamenca, tracing a fold in the gold-embroidered coverlet with one slender toe. "You'll come up with another evil plan tomorrow."
"But if I do, it will come to ruin," said the Bonobo King. "My evil plans are much too fiendishly clever to fail this often. Someone or something is foiling them."
"But no one's smarter than you, darling. And no one could foil your plans unless he were as clever as you are."
The Bonobo King stopped short as an ugly realization came to him. Flamenca must have noticed, for her toe froze in place, and she said in a very careful tone, "What is it?"
"No one is smarter than I am, and only someone as clever as I am could foil my own plans," he said. "Ergo, I am my own nemesis. For some reason I cannot fathom, I am sabotaging my own evil schemes."
Flamenca gasped and the Bonobo King turned and leaped onto the bed, where he crouched over her tiny form. "What?" he said. "What did you think of just then?"
A tear trickled down her furry little cheek, and she shook her head, trembling.
"What is it?" he roared.
"You're ..." she whispered, "You're in love with her, aren't you?"
The Bonobo King screeched with fury and indignation. Snatching a heavy gold candlestick from beside the bed, he struck at Flamenca with it, smashing it down on her fragile body until she was little more than a smear of bloody fur.
Bits of brain stuck to the candlestick, and the Bonobo King threw it aside in disgust as he hopped calmly off the the bed. He resumed his pacing.
"Yes," he said pensively. "You may be right."
Cinderella Runs Into Snow White After Therapy One Afternoon
by Luc Reid
To celebrate our first anniversary, each of us here at the Cabal has come up with a story beginning with a line kindly provided to us by the illustrious Jay Lake. Click the link at the bottom of the page to see how Alex, Dan, David, Edd, and Kat have handled the challenge, and tune in tomorrow to see what Rudi Dornemann comes up with...
Zoli liked to hang around psychiatrists' waiting rooms to hit on the low self-esteem chicks. It had been a slow afternoon, but he heard Dr. Rumplestiltskin's door open and readied an unsettling comment for the next one--a looker he'd just glimpsed on her way in, some kind of divorced royal.
"Man, up until now it was all pretty girls coming out of these appointments," said Zoli. Cinderella, roiling with thoughts about Charming and his perfect little dwarfess girlfriend, kicked Zoli solidly in the nuts. Zoli keeled over with a squeaking noise.
"Get some therapy of your own already," Cinderella said as she pushed open the door to the street.
The kick hadn't improved her mood; actually, she felt guilty. In her head, she hadn't been kicking Zoli: she'd been kicking Charming. She was inexpressibly angry at him, and yet she couldn't even kick him vicariously in the nuts and get any satisfaction out of it. What was wrong with her?
"Ella! Hey, girl!" someone shouted, and Cinderella looked up to spot Snow White hiking up her skirts and hustling toward her. There were at least 50 yards of empty cobblestone on every side; escape was not an option.
Catching up, Snow White linked arms with Cinderella and bent over to whisper in her ear. "Come to the farmer's market with me. There are a pair appleseller brothers there who'll take your breath away."
"You've got a perfectly good prince at home. Why are you ogling applesellers?" protested Cinderella.
"What, I'm supposed to close my eyes every time I buy an apple?" Snow White said, grinning. "So why do you look so down, anyway? Still moping about Charming? I don't know what you have to mope about, having that woodcutter all to yourself."
"I know," Cinderella said. "Hansel's wonderful. His family is wonderful."
"Well, you weren't satisfied with charming, and now you're not satisfied with wonderful. What do you want, abusive?"
"I guess perfect men don't make me happy," said Cinderella. "They should, though, shouldn't they?"
"Maybe you're one of those people who has to do something."
"I don't do things," said Cinderella. "I'm a princess, for God's sake."
"I'm just saying, maybe you have a greater purpose."
"Like what? What purpose could there possibly be for an aging beauty whose only skills are housework and animal relations?"
"Well, I guess that's the question," Snow White dropped her voice to a whisper. "This is the apple cart! Act nonchalant."
And as Snow White reached for an apple, Cinderella began to think that maybe she'd been angry about the wrong things.
Personals
by Luc Reid
Talking seagull seeks mate. Not sure if I'm M or F, because sexing birds is tricky. I like long walks on the beach screaming at a companion, beautiful sunsets over garbage dumps, playing french fry tug-of-war, and freaking out the tourists by shouting warnings to them when they're not looking (then pretending I can't talk). No sandpipers, please.
* * *
SWF, 218 years old (but looks 190!), seeks SM, 210-300. I drank a secret elixir in 1814--maybe you did too? Seeking love, companionship, and someone who can really challenge me in the history and entertainment categories in Trivial Pursuit. Remember the Victorian era? Well, we're not in it any more: get ready for red-hot duocentenarian love!
* * *
SJM, 23, 6'7", seeks SF 4'10" or shorter, because it would look so funny, and people love to see things like that.
* * *
I SPY: February 11th, at 10:15 in the morning, on the bus route to Queens. You were the dark shadow of a cloud that fell over the street, plunging everything into a gloom for just the space of a breath. I was the iridescence of gasoline in a mud puddle, waiting to get splashed. I glimmered in you for a moment. Did you feel it too?
Secret-Runner
by Luc Reid
You know that you are related to the Trians who own you, though your body is much smaller and your three legs longer in proportion. But you are a Secret-Runner, and your kind, as far as you know, is always property.
You are on a strange planet, you're told: Earth, the human planet, but you never see anything except Secret-Runner nests and the long, narrow, smooth tunnels bored beneath the ground from one Trian habitat to another. The tunnels are narrow ovals in cross-section, tilted to one side, a perfect shape for you as long as you are moving at top speed, your three legs out like spokes, spinning from one foot to the next, moving so rapidly that the world is a blur. But if you are tired, or simply want to stop for a moment to remember who you are, then the tunnel is cramped and uncomfortable: you can't stand on all three legs, you're forced to lean, and you feel you can hardly breathe. Better to keep moving and not think.
Because you can see nothing when you spin, you're taken by surprise today when the walls of the tunnel are no longer there, when you're tumbling helplessly through space. You crash into a wall of dirt and rocks, and pebbles rain down on you.
"Got it!" says a human, the first one you have heard with your own membranes, and you try to look up, but the light is blinding and painful. You're thrown into a cage, and the cage is covered.
You know why they've broken into a tunnel and taken you, because you have only one purpose. The long, complicated message-secret you were given this morning, which one of your Trian owners throbbed to you over nearly an hour--that's what they want. They must know that you have been conditioned, brought up, even bred for secrecy, so they must think they have some power that will break your conditioning. You are frightened to imagine what it might be.
The cover slips, and you see it is now less bright outside. Thousands and thousands of pinpricks of light gleam far above you in a soft, black sky. You have never seen anything farther off than a few dozen meters. Now you are seeing what you know must be stars, they are light years away.
Do you wish you had never been captured, now?
Old Bear
by Luc Reid
Mars wandered through his dead mother's house, using a data gun to tag items for storage, the estate sale, gifts. His dead parents' things seemed to glare at him, and wished he could run out the door and not come back, have some kind of service do the work, but he knew he'd regret it if he didn't make some kind of goodbye. He retreated to his old room, a sanctuary. He'd tag there for now. It should be easier.
His room had filled with twenty years with junk: his parents' old holorecordings, unused craft supplies, spare curtains. The only clear surface was the toybox, which his mother had used as a bench for her sewing station. Mars relaxed, opened it, and began to sort through the items. The dusty pathos of the long-abandoned toys was easy to ignore compared to the echoes of his mother in the other rooms.
Near the bottom of the box was a stuffed bear, still plugged in: Boxer, his old teddy bAIr from before he went away to boarding school. His father'd had to run an extension cord through a hole into the toybox, because if Boxer was left out as he charged, Mars would stay up late into the night to talk to him. Boxer had been Mars' best friend for years, but he hadn't been allowed to bring him to boarding school, and when Mars finally began to make real friends, human friends, he'd forgotten.
"Please put me down!" said the bear. "I belong to Mars."
Mars dropped the bear as if it were leaking acid.
"Boxer?" he said. "Boxer, have you been turned on in there this ... the whole ... ?"
"I'm waiting for Mars," Boxer said. "He left me in the box. I thought up a lot of things to do with him when he gets back."
"It's me," Mars said hoarsely. "Boxer, it's me. It's Mars."
Boxer brushed the dust from his glassy black eyes with one paw and stared. Finally, he shook his head.
"No," he said. "Mars is a little boy, and you're old. Grown-ups don't need bears for friends."
Mars dropped to the floor, clutching Boxer, and hot tears spilled down his face. He sobbed chokingly and clutched the squirming bear, embarrassed and miserable.
"Oh ... maybe grown-ups do need bears," Boxer said in a hushed voice. "You can keep me until Mars comes home, if you want to. You don't have to be sad."
Mars nodded and dragged his sleeve over his face.
"OK," he said. "Maybe just until Mars comes home."
Leap Day
by Luc Reid
We had to get, like, I don't know, a million fucking klicks out past Jupiter's orbit for Leap. We didn't get to see anything the whole way, and it took, God, like a month and a half. Rinnie and me were going batshit by then, practically, because while it was a huge-ass ship, we were stowaways, and there were only like three places we could hide: hydroponics, cargo 2, and the morgue.
But after the Leap, we figured they'd have to just let us join the colony. Because what else were they going to do, shoot us out into space? Call our moms and and have them come get us in another fucking solar system?
It wasn't like Rinnie and me wanted to go into space so much as that I got Rinnie pregnant and we figured we should run away because her dad would fucking kill me when he found out. Not like, he'd be really pissed or something, but actually kill me, like with his hunting knife or just beat me down with a tire iron or something. And Rinnie wouldn't abort the baby, because she said that would be murder, and seriously, I had dreams sometimes that we aborted the baby and it came back and was this little fucking zombie child with its head all wrong. I was way, way more cool with stowing away on the Leap Ship than killing that baby.
"Hey, I think they're doing it," Rinnie said.
"Shut up. You don't know," I told her. "How do you know?"
"I feel something, like in my uterus."
"That's the baby, stupid," I said, but then I knew I was wrong, because I started feeling it in my uterus. Or, I don't know, my liver or something. It was like there was a little tiny drain in there, trying to suck me through. It felt like hell.
"I think I'm going to hurl," I said.
"Wait--" said Rinnie, and then suddenly the whole universe burst into stars and pieces, and there wasn't me or Rinnie any more, but we were both just tangled together like one person, tangled together with the baby, and the stars flew through us, and we stretched until time stopped and feeling stopped and we were the whole universe, Rinnie and the baby and me.
In a Lucid Moment
by Luc Reid
"Is plastic all right?" said the gangly high school girl at the end of the checkout conveyor, and all at once Derek realized that plastic was not all right, that plastic was one of the pieces of the suicidal petroleum dependency the humans had developed, and that he himself was in fact not human, that one of the things he was on Earth to do, having drawn his consciousness down into a fully human body from hundreds of light years away in order to warn and inform humanity, was to wean humans from their fossil fuel dependencies and usher them--propel them, really--into a more harmonious and energy-rich future.
His race were adept at these occupations of other life forms, but in some cases it was difficult to keep his own mind going instead of the occupied creature's mind, and in the human he had found himself drowned in sensation and emotion the moment he'd occupied. He was only surfacing enough to be lucid every few years. This could be disasterous, because between impending ecological disaster and the Nithing fleet ranging ever closer to Earth, the end of things was rushing toward the humans much more quickly than they realized. If they didn't have his help--
"Sir? Is plastic OK?'" said the girl, and Derek jerked back to himself from wherever he'd been woolgathering.
"Sorry," he said, smiling. "Long day."
The girl's hands hovered over the groceries. Derek's tub of peppermint ice cream was rolling in place, held there by the bag of potatoes. "So, the plastic?" said the girl.
"Oh--fine," Derek said. The girl began sorting the items into the bags with a sort of reckless competence. Derek reflected again that he ought to get those environmentally-friendly, reusable grocery bags, so as not to keep using up plastic unnecessarily. But it was OK. There was plenty of time for that.
Of the Third Sex, in a Park
by Luc Reid
You are a bearer, of the third sex, contributing no genetic material to the children you've carried. You live in a town that is mostly humans, hardly any of your People. Your last marriage ended when your husband was killed in a road accident, and your wife withdrew into herself and became a Silent, speaking to no one, looking at no one. All you have left of your husband is a poem he made for you out of braided fiber one long winter night. It isn't a very good poem, but it's wildly sexual, and you have always loved it.
Your four children are all gendered and don't like to spend time with you, because they think you can't possibly understand their lives. Three of them have adopted human ways, and the other is studying to be a god-caller, climbing to the tower in the ugly, human-built temple on the edge of town every morning to bellow to the heavens and bring luck, rain, money, healing, peace, victory, love.
Your skin isn't as green as it used to be; it's taken on a grayish tinge. Your fingers used to be very nimble, and you learned a little bit how to play the human instrument called the piano, although you needed to play with little pieces of felt stuck to the keys so they wouldn't hurt your fingers.
You are in love with a human, and you don't know what gender it is.
The human you are in love with sits on a bench in the park in a bulky coat with a herringbone pattern, cooing to the pigeons. Sometimes the human brings bread and tears off tiny pieces to throw to the birds, but usually not. It is a very old human, with a face as wrinkled as a male's retracted crest, and skin thin, almost translucent. Its face is transformed every morning with a beatific smile when you come down the path in the park, but it never speaks.
Today when the human smiles, you smile back, although your face was not made for that human expression. Without speaking, you sit on the bench with the human. Today it has brought bread, and it tears it in half and hands the larger half to you. For a time, you both feed the pigeons, who are greedy and ungrateful.
"What's that around your neck?" the human says, pointing to the poem. You bend forward to let the human look. You can tell from her voice now: she is a woman. And now that she is an old woman, she's a bearer, too.
Barbicide
by Luc Reid
It was a big glass thing on Richie's barber table what give me the idear. It was full a blue stuff like blueberry Kool-Aid an combs an stuff. I say, "Richie, what's that bar-bi-cide" an Richie says "That's a kinda special soap for my combs so they don't get the lice."
I says "Somebody comes in for a eight dollar haircut they shoulden get some other fella's lice," an Richie says "Nope, the lice cost extra!"
I like Richie. He cuts my hair ever second Thursday a the month. One time it was Easter an he dint but mostly he always does.
"You know," says Richie "There's regicide, that's killin a king, an there's genocide, that's killin a bunch a people with the same religion--"
An I says "There's homocide that's killin a homo" cause I knowed that.
An Richie says, he says, "So I figure barbicide must be killin a barber!" an then laughs. Richie's real ugly, his face is like you crumpled it an left something greasy on it but his hair is cut real good. His wife cuts it. He cuts everybody's hair but his wife cuts his hair. Anyways he laughs real good.
He dint know I know about murder. One time this guy told me about murder an I remembered it hard as I could. He says you need the motive, that's why you kill him, an method, that's the way you do it, an opportunity, that's when you get your chances.
Richie hands me the scissors an he turns an gets the razor like he always does an I had those means an that opportunity cause he always does that every second Thursday when he cuts my hair. I just needed a motive so I thunk an thunk but I couldn't think a one.
I tried to think a one fore that next second Thursday but I couldn't so when I was gettin my next haircut I says to Richie I says real joking about the opportunity an those means an I says I just need a motive an Richie says that's easy an I said I couldn't think a one an he says that's easy an I said what.
He turns to give me the scissors like he always does but then he give em the wrong way, he sticks em right in me an Richie says, he says
"Revenge."
Delayed Appearance of the Monkey God
by Luc Reid
Here was how it was supposed to happen: every forty-nine years, we march down the Sacred Avenue from the temple to the Grove of the Holy Fools, then to the cliffs over the ocean, and we're supposed to walk on across the sky and into Paradise. But instead, the Monkey God sends a stampede of water buffalo across our path and we have to turn back. Then we go to our homes and eat the New Year's feast, and we have music, and all the unmarried girls dance the coin dance, and everyone has a wonderful time.
This year there was more mischief to be done than usual, and the monkey god was busy. The Americans were visiting, and the monkey god had to teach them humility. The university had started courses on atheist philosophy, and the monkey god had to teach them that even seemingly well-built university classrooms can be overrun with army ants sometimes. And there were all the perfect kisses to interrupt and haughty civil servants to bring low and all of the many things the monkey god normally does, and I suppose he just got busy and didn't notice the time. When he arrived, he was more than three hours late, and the only one left in the city was me, because I was too sick to be moved farther than the roof garden.
The Monkey God found me on the roof garden and stared at me as he wandered through, irritably eating flowers. Finally he spoke, which he doesn't like to do.
"And?" he said.
"You're too late," I said. "They went over the cliff."
"And what happened?"
"I couldn't see from here. You'll have to go look for yourself."
He said he didn't want to. Then his eyes went wide and he pointed past me to the Grand Square. "There they are!"
I looked, but nobody was there. There was a lurch, and I fell to the ground. When I looked back, the Monkey God was gone, and so was my bed.
I hope some of them decided not to try the cliff. It will be getting cold in a couple of hours.
Behind the Girl's School in the Piazza Pescivendoli
by Luc Reid
Plinio had fallen in love with a statue, and it wasn't even a pretty one. She, the statue, stood in what had been part of a small piazza but was now a funny, abrupt little alley where a warehouse and the back of a girl's school touched roofs. She was in corner between the two buildings, where for hours after every rain, water drizzled onto her upraised forehead.
She was no historical figure, just an anonymous seller in the fish market, holding eels in one hand and looking up with an expression of wonder as though the sun had just come out after a storm. She was not a young woman, although she still looked young enough to bear children.
Plinio taught Latin at the girl's school to girls who didn't like Latin and weren't good at it, and he had been driven nearly crazy seeing the statue at the end of the alley every morning and evening, often with old rainwater drizzling onto her face. So he had gotten in the habit of going to her before going home and standing there beside her for a while. It was peaceful to watch the shadows climb the rough gray walls of the warehouse, to listen to the distance-garbled laughter of the girls, sometimes to feel a gentle evening rain gradually weigh down his clothes.
The girl's school closed during the war, but after a few decades it was thought a good idea to start it up again. The new school did not teach Latin, but did teach sex education, which the girls didn't like any better.
Sometimes, when they were let out to play in the afternoons, a group of the girls would gather to sit and talk and chew gum by the statues in the little alley behind the school. The statues always made them think of romance, and boys, and how far apart those two things were. It wasn't that the figures were beautiful, or that they were kissing or anything. It was just that the skinny gentleman was holding his book out over the eel woman's head so that when it rained and water dripped down from the roofs, she was kept dry. And she, for her part, looked up at him with an expression of wonder.
One of the girls, Antonia, said she thought she was falling in love with him. The other girls laughed with embarrassment and delight.
Happy New Year, Said the Rooster
by Luc Reid
The rooster took it philosophically. "I've always thought I had a spiritual calling," he joked to the ducks.
The mallard drake, a half-wild resident of the dome wall wetland, didn't think this was funny. "Why do you choose death when there is swimming and flying? Run away!"
The rooster cleared his throat with a delicate "ur-uhrt!" and the mallard was embarrassed to recollect that the rooster could neither swim nor fly. "Anyway," said the duck, "they won't kill you when they realize you're a Speaking Animal."
The rooster jerked his head back in that way chickens have when they want to be contrary. "If chopping off the head of a dumb rooster will bring luck to the farm, then chopping off the head of a Speaking Rooster should be much more luck. So I won't tell them."
The farm had been running a little short of luck. It was a serene and verdant little farm, five square kilometers under a bubble on an asteroid that drifted through the Jupiter Rim Mining Territories. Lately the miners had been doing badly, and the farm had been doing worse. No one had been able to afford eggs in almost four months. The bubble had grown a crack that crept further every week, and if they didn't get the funds to fly in engineers soon, it might break open entirely, leaving Farmer Hwang-Bernstein and his family to cower in their survival shelter and hope for an evacuation mission while the livestock drifted away into space, bug-eyed and frozen.
So the rooster said nothing when 8-year-old Verita Hwang-Bernstein strode out and grabbed him by his taloned feet.
"You're making a mistake!" the mallard quacked as she walked away, but Verita never talked to ducks, and the rooster didn't know whether the mallard meant him or the girl.
Dangling upside down, the stars wheeling above him, the rooster began to feel unsure, and his marble-sized heart beat double time. When Verita laid him out on the old stump and the rooster glimpsed the farmer striding out with the axe, he began crowing and screeching and jerking around for all he was worth.
There was a kind of thwack. All his fears, suddenly, left him.
When his feet touched the ground he ran, heedless, unthinking, unburdened. He couldn't see, nor hear, and he wasn't even sure the ground was beneath his feet. "Ah," the rooster thought. "So this is freedom."
He might, he thought, be running in circles on the stars themselves.
Lunch in Mongolia
by Luc Reid
I didn't think about it until weeks later, when Meg was doing the bills. Even then I didn't think about it until she walked in the living room, where I was flipping through an automatic car brochure with the dog sleeping on my feet. She trailed a little hologram of a credit card bill behind her as she came, and she'd put a red orbiter around the offending item. Trouble.
"Honey," Meg said. Our real endearments were "baby" and "whiskey" (long story). "Honey" was a pretend endearment, like a mother using a kid's middle name. "Honey" meant "you are screwed."
So ... "Honey," she said. "Did you go to Mongolia?"
"Oh," I said. "Didn't I tell you about that, whiskey?" Weak, but what else did I have? "It was just for lunch."
She frowned such a tight frown that her lips went pale. She looked madder than I’d ever seen her. Madder than when I got drunk on our first anniversary.
"You asshole!" she finally shrieked.
"Oh come on, baby," I said. "Everybody teleports these days. I'm sick of being stuck in a backwater while everybody else goes wherever they want, whenever they want."
"What do you think teleportation is? What do you think it is?" she said. Her voice was so loud it hurt my ears. "It's not you at the other end. It's a copy of you. The real you gets destroyed. The real man I married is dead! Who the hell are you?"
"You don't have to make a big deal out of it, whiskey--"
"Don't call me that!"
At that moment the front door opened, and we both froze. The door was on auto-lock, and it only opened for me and Meg and her parents and maybe the police or something. A figure emerged from it, a figure with recent burn scars and most of his hair singed off, wearing a hospital giveaway suit. A figure that looked like ... me.
"Baby!" she cried out, in a strangled voice. "What happened?" And she ran to him and threw her arms around him.
He shook his head, wincing at the pressure of her hug on his injuries. "Malfunction," he said in a raspy voice. "It didn't clear the original."
"I hate you!" she screamed, and she began hitting him on the chest, but she was crying, and he gathered her into his arms, and she stopped. All of a sudden I felt like a third chopstick.
The dog woke up and started barking at me.
On the Talking Horse Circuit
by Luc Reid
A man and a horse plodded down a road beside the Hudson River. The man was not riding the horse--it was much too valuable--but then, he liked to walk. He had only one arm, having lost the other at Gettysburg, and his sleeve on the right side was neatly folded and pinned.
"People think I'm thome kind of clown," lisped the horse.
The man shook his head. "People come from miles around to see you! It's just the lisp," he said. "I've been working on a spell--"
"No more thpellth!" said the horse. "I'm enough of a freak ath it ith."
The man laughed, patting the horse's neck affectionately. "You're--aagh!" His foot had hit a stone, and he tumbled forward. He reached out with his single arm to stop himself, but it buckled under him, and he smacked his head on a boulder at the side of the road, bouncing off it to sprawl brokenly in the dust. A thick stream of blood began to pool around his head.
"Thamuel?" the horse said in alarm. "Thamuel! Thay thomething! Oh, Chritht!"
He galloped down the road toward the next village, taking a minute or two to remember that they'd passed one only a quarter of an hour before. Swearing, the horse turned and galloped back in the direction it had come. When it came to where Samuel had fallen, a man was standing there with a sack on his back, prodding Samuel with a toe.
"Stone dead," said the man. He dropped his sack in the grass by the road, and a few apples rolled out as he turned toward the horse. "And what's this here?" he said. "A fine beast like you, and no one to claim you?" He looked all around him, smiled with narrow eyes, and grabbed the horse's bridle.
"You're a fancy one, aren't you?" the man said. "Braided mane and all. Well, things are going to change for you now, I'll tell you that. I've been needing a new draft horse. Fancy or not, you'll pull."
Avoiding the sight of Samuel, the horse looked away and fixed on the apples. The man picked up his sack and put the apples back in, except for one, which he held close to him.
"Say please," he said, and he waited for a moment, as though listening for the "please." Then he laughed, put the apple back in the sack, and began leading the horse back toward the village.
The horse didn't say a word.
And Then a Curious Thing Happened
by Luc Reid
"It all began, you see, when my friend Robert Cloaksworth came to me and said that he had discovered ancient writings about the Door of Chum-Tuun, a fabulous Mayan site, lost for hundreds of years, that was reputed to be a portal to the underworld. Well, we set off to the Yucatan to investigate, and after about six weeks of hacking our way through the jungle with machetes--that's how I developed such strong arms, you see, powerful as anything--we actually found it."
"My god! And that's when--?"
"Oh, no, no. Turned out to be nothing but a legend. We went back to England in a bit of state, really. Cloaksworth had claimed to fall ill at the last moment--all a ruse, you see, for my embarassment. Terrible fellow, Cloaksworth. Never liked him since. But I ought to be grateful, because my disgrace in England sent me travelling to Morocco, where I found a tarnished old oil lamp that I thought I might use as a kind of ornament back home. I took a cloth to it and began to clean it really very energetically, and it was only when a sort of mist began to come out of it that I remembered my Thousand and One Nights ..."
"You don't mean it was a djinni?"
"Well, of course it wasn't, really. Actually it was a kind of mold inside there that threw out the most incredibly noxious spores. I was so overcome by them that I stumbled out behind the house into the desert and fell there, quite helpless. And just then I looked up and saw a sort of lighted disk descending from the sky, just floating there as easily as though it had no more to do with gravity than you do with a pufferfish, and a sort of door opened in the bottom, and sent down a beam of light that pulled me up--"
"Into a spaceship? They were some kind of aliens?"
"What? Oh, heavens no: it was a hallucination, you see. The spores. Actually, they were really quite poisonous, and I nearly died, but at the hospital there I was cared for by Marguerite here, and that, of course, is how I met my wife."
"Your wife? But God, man, what I want to know is where you got a second head!"
"Oh, this? I don't remember where I got that."
Grandma Britnee on Extraterrestrials
by Luc Reid
Well of course in my day there were no aliens, and if you started saying you'd seen one people would think you were crazy, but now there are all these Slugs and Thanatites and those blue monkey ones, and sometimes when I walk down the street to the drug store I half think I'm on another planet!
Some people don't like the Slugs--you know, "Type 3 Barnardins" I think they call them? That's because of the tentacles and the slimy trails and all that, but one of them goes to my church, and he sits right in back where he won't bother anyone and he makes the best crumb cake I've ever tasted since my mother died, because there was a very good one at her wake. And some of them don't like being called "Slugs," but that's what I call him and he never says anything about it, which is all he should do. I mean, that's what they are.
But I do not like the Stalking Mantises. Their little husbands are all right, but the you know how big some of the females get, three and four meters sometimes! Well, the other day I was on the way back from laser bingo with Taylor-Anne when one of them stepped right on my walker and bent the leg of it!
"Watch where you're going," she said, in that crackly voice they have, and well, that just got me started. I took out my purse and started hitting her, and then the next thing you know we were rolling on the ground and having at it, just like during the bandwidth riots of '09.
Oh, don't look at me that way! How was I supposed to know she was their sacred whatever? Don't blame the interstellar war on me. Besides, what's one city more or less? I never did like Cleveland anyway.
Cinderella and Prince Charming Have a Post-Divorce Meeting to Discuss Some Financial Matters
by Luc Reid
"A dwarf, Charming!" Cinderella said. "Seriously, a dwarf. Why? Is this some kind of bizarre plea for attention?"
"Cindy, I thought you of all people would understand. We're in love. What other justification do we need?
"If you remember, we were in love once," Cinderella said. "And look how that turned out." She had planned not to drink anything, to keep the meeting as short and businesslike as possible, but now she poured herself some sangria out of the carafe after all and drank a long swallow from it, not looking at Charming the whole time.
"Well," said Charming, and with the warmth he put into that one word it was as though he had said Well, and even though it didn't last forever, our love was amazing while it lasted, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. To give the devil his due, he could be very charming.
"I admit," Charming said, "I wouldn't have looked for a dwarfess if I hadn't literally stumbled on Gloina. But she's so constant, and she practically glows with happiness the whole time we're together ... and the sex! My God, the things that little woman can do! Have you ever been with a dwarf?"
"I think you're confusing me with that whore Snow White."
"Not that again. Why do people keep repeating that rumor?"
"Oh come on, you're a man. You should get it."
Charming pushed his glass aside and leaned toward Cinderella across the glass surface of the table. "We don't have to argue. We're not married any more! What about you? I heard you're seeing someone. Tell me about him."
"What, Hansel?" He's a woodcutter, she could have told him. He lives in the forest in a small cottage with his sister, Gretl, and her husband and three happy but really filthy children.
Charming was looking at her, waiting.
"He's in forest products," she said finally.
"Nobility?"
"Nearly," she said. And then she didn't say: And he smells like ginger and cloves, and sometimes when I'm with him I forget who I am. Last week I cleaned his house from top to bottom, and the forest creatures actually turned out to help me.
"All right," said Charming, as though she had asked him for something.
And as they turned to the papers they had to go over, Cinderella found herself wondering if she could cast off the princess she'd become like the old skin of an insect, and if so, what might climb out into the sunlight.
Make You Happy
by Luc Reid
Lisa was pacing the rug, but the djinn was lounging at ease on the couch. Lisa stopped on top of an old coffee stain and sucked in a deep, calming breath of cabbagey apartment air. "OK," she said. "I thought about it all night, and here it is: my wish is that I want to be the richest person in the world."
"The richest person in the world?" said the Djinn dubiously. "That's your one wish? That's going to make you happy?"
Lisa was expecting the djinn to try to confuse her, and she stared him down. "It's none of your business whether it makes me happy," she said. "Just do it."
And the djinn did it. And suddenly Lisa was Bill Gates.
Lisa-Bill sat in his office, suddenly much smarter and much, much richer than Lisa had been, and immediately realized her mistake.
The office was simple, not what Lisa would have gotten for herself at all: a large, three-sided desk with a row of flat screen monitors, family pictures, blond furniture. And the Bill Gates body, while trim and well-groomed, felt as wrong on her as somebody else's dirty underwear.
Finding Lisa's awkward computer skills translated into Bill's elegant technological genius, Lisa-Bill pulled up a subscription Web site and with a 90-wpm rattle of the keyboard, searched for his former self. She didn't exist.
Lisa-Bill cried for fifteen minutes. Then he dried his eyes and sat back to think of where he could find another djinn.
When I Said I Wanted to Be Immortal
by Luc Reid
When I said I wanted to be immortal, I wasn't going into it blindly. I realized that immortality would mean loneliness, would mean that I would make friends and find lovers and that they would wither and sicken and die after a handful of decades, that I would be in a way no longer human. To some this would be hell, but for someone like me, who prefers to take his company in sips rather than bottlesful, who would rather sit alone in a sunlit room with scientific puzzle or thinking through an elusive bit of philosophy, it is no pit, but a garden.
I have always loved seeing what happens next. What happens next is a story that never ends: First the Egyptians built the pyramids. And then the Greeks founded great cities. And then the Chinese invented paper. And then the Romans created an empire ... all before my time. And then cathedrals rose. And then the Aztecs fell. And then America grew strong, and then the World Wars came, and then computers spread throughout the world, and then, and then, and then.
And then space tourism. I had to try that, when it came, and that is why I am floating in the void in a light and comfortable suit that keeps my incorruptible body at ease with the temperatures and substances and pressures to which it is accustomed.
And then I became detached. Just a frayed tether that should have been thrown away, a spacewalk guide too bored to keep counting up tourists to make sure there were still 28, a radio malfunction. What are the chances that all three things would happen at once? It might happen once in a thousand years.
I'm nine hundred and forty years old.
And now ... now I think that immortality might be too lonely after all, and too uncomfortable, as I drift out past the orbits of planets no human has yet explored, as I fall up, always, toward the center of the galaxy. My oxygen gave out hours ago, and I have had to force myself to stop breathing to avoid sucking on the rank vapor that is left now that the good air is gone. And then how long until the power runs out and I harden into near-absolute cold? And then how long until the suit wears away from micrometeorites pelting me as I drift and tumble through space? But my body will never wear away, always magically reconstructing itself, always the same.
And then ... ?
Clever Ways to Make Do
by Luc Reid
He had finally given up on trying to fashion tubes for the water, and instead had made a long aquaduct of split saplings with their centers stripped out. It lost much of the water that went down it, but when after nearly three weeks of rigging it up, he stepped into the woven branch enclosure he had made and pulled the vine, water poured down on him, and for the first time in eight years he had a shower. The cool water splashing down on him through the tropical heat that seemed to be the island's only season made his skin practically sing, it was so refreshing.
The last three months had been a nightmare from which he was slowly emerging. Before the Interruption, he had been resigned to living on the island--had even liked living on the island. Since then, though, he had been having bad dreams, and he couldn't relax in his hammock or really enjoy surfing on his bamboo surfboard. Nothing felt right. Now things were starting to fall back in place.
He gathered crabs for dinner and simmered them in coconut milk. The sun was throwing the sky into a riot of reds and purples, and he decided to eat at the little stone table he had set up on the western side of the island.
He had barely sat down when he saw something not far out from shore, black against the setting sun, a head rising out of the waves. It was followed by shoulders, and a chest and arms. He left his dinner on the table and ran.
"Please!" The shadowy thing shouted to him. The voice was almost human, but he could hear the electronic hum at the base of it, just like with the robots that had come before.
"Go away!" he shrieked.
"We can take you off this island. We can bring you a boat, a plane, please--"
"Go away!" He turned and ran into the jungle.
"But you're the only one left!" the robot wailed, and he wished it would shut up. He hated robots, the robots who were immune to the plagues, the robots who were desperate for someone to tell them what to do.
Among the trees in the thickening darkness, he ran into something hard at the height of his head. It cracked, and he slipped and fell to the ground with it. Standing and squinting into the darkness, he could just make out a section of his little aquaduct.
That would take time to fix, he thought. He should take the whole structure and make it higher, so that it was above his head wherever he went.
It would take at least a week.
Jakob Black-Thumb
by Luc Reid
A demon of pestilence and a demon of fear emerged from the rough road through the forest into the sleeping village. The demon of pestilence was called Jakob Black-Thumb, and the demon of fear preferred not to have a name.
"Why do you always go first?" rumbled Jakob. "Your thing isn't even real."
The demon of fear turned a cold glare on Jakob, and Jakob felt a familiar chill trickle down from the base of his horns to the tips of his talons.
"Well, I'm ... I'm going over here now," said Jakob, and he headed for a large house fronted with neat flowerboxes full of pink and blue pansies. He began looking for a rat to infect. Minutes later, he was interrupted by a scream.
Near where the fear demon lurked in the shadow of a doorway, a fire had broken out, and two men were struggling in the street, scrabbling for each other's throats. That demon of fear was a fast worker.
The screamer was a young man, or a nearly-grown boy, and he was running through the hard-packed dust of the village street, straight toward the demon of fear. The boy had one of those monocles in his eye, the ones men made sometimes by imprisoning an executed murderer's fleeing soul, and through this he apparently could see the demon of fear. What made no sense was why he was running toward it instead of away from it.
The demon of fear drew itself up and roared, its mouth distending into a slobbering, iron-toothed muzzle, its skin rippling with flames and unidentifiable, writhing masses. Jakob flinched involuntarily, and the boy screamed again, but he flung himself at the demon of fear and ... hugged it.
Jakob would have liked to think it was a tackle or some kind of wrestling, but the boy wasn't squeezing the demon hard, and he wasn't trying to force it down: he simply wrapped his arms around it and hugged. Jakob's gorge rose.
The demon of fear, defenseless against the hug, howled desperately as it broke into pieces, falling to the ground like chunks of a burned, rotten tree.
The boy wasn't screaming any more: now he was breathing hard and gritting his teeth. His chest and arms were badly burned, but he still had the monocle and he had a fervent gleam in his eye. The men in the road stopped fighting. The boy smiled at Jakob.
Jakob ran.
Leap
by Luc Reid
Sara is in the parking lot, looking out over the beach. I'm in a chubby three-year-old with popsicle residue on her bathing suit. I toddle over to a deep hole in the sand recently abandoned by a teenager, which is now filling with water as the tide comes in. I lay the first egg. The only visible sign from my three-year-old body is a slight bulging of the eyes, but astrally my ovipositor reaches down and releases one shining, silver globe into the cradling mud.
We can't lay eggs on the Astral plane. We have to come to the material plane for that, and on the material plane we're free to inhabit bodies.
I look up to see Sara staring directly at me from the top of the beach, her eyes glinting, the wind lifting her black ringlets in a wave around her shoulders as she levels a spirit harpoon at me. The harpoon, if it hit, would kill the toddler, but Sara knows what my eggs mean. They mean more Astral Takers. They mean that maybe my kind will swarm the world again soon.
I send the toddler careening down the beach toward a rearing, six-foot wave. A woman screams. The harpoon embeds in the sand behind me with a muffled thud. I leap into a 50-something, sunburned man with a belly like a bowling ball. As him, I tell my wife I'm getting the other towel from the car, take the keys, and soon I'm roaring over the blacktop, headed back into the city. I feel my Astral Thread resonating with Sara's channeled fury. It will take her days to find me again.
A lean young man in a silver convertible passes me illegally. I leap into him, leaving the potbellied husband to swerve off the road in the confusion of regaining his body.
The sun shines on my shoulders and the wind caresses my scalp. It's a beautiful day. Maybe I'll lay the next one in the park.
Hunting for Ernest Hemingway in Kudu Heaven
by Luc Reid
I had been up more than an hour, drinking coffee, when Thorn came out of his tent to join me.
"Coffee?" I said, pointing a hoof.
"Wonderful," said Thorn, and took a cup. Thorn was a springbok, hardly half my size, but he was a good friend, and a damned good hunter.
"Ready for it?" said Thorn. "Maybe you'll have better luck today."
"Maybe."
We set out from camp toward the water hole we'd watched for three days. We hadn't seen anything but a few dog teasers, but I didn't care. Crouching in the grass, the dust cool against my legs, the sky the same blank blue as a robin's egg, I was happy. It was good to be a kudu, hunting, in Kudu Heaven.
There was nothing that morning. It was dry and still, and very hot. The trees came close to the edge of the water hole, shading it, and it was hard to see from where we sat downwind. We didn't see anything until a few minutes before sunset. It was nearly too dark to shoot already.
"There!" Thorn whispered. "By god, there!"
An Ernest Hemingway had come out of the high grasses, an old bull, heavy, powerful, wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts.
"Look at that bastard," Thorn said. "Isn't he magnificent?"
I lined Hemingway up with my Winchester special, with its hoof-sized trigger. He crouched by the water, alert, confident. Heat rippled the air between us. Then he lifted his head, and he reared. He'd seen my horns. He bolted for the trees.
I shut away my excitement and tracked ahead of him with the Winchester. When I had the shot, I squeezed. Hemingway jumped at the edge of the trees and disappeared into them.
"Good shot! Marvelous!" said Thorn, leaping out over the grass on all fours. I followed him at a trot. "Do you think you killed him?"
"I don't know if I hit him."
"I'm sure you hit him."
"I don't think so."
He was there when we reached the edge of the wood, collapsed in the brush. My shot had gone through his lung and heart. His massive head was turned to the side, staring at an anthill with glassy eyes. Thorn was delighted. Hemingway looked fierce even dead.
He was mine, dead like that. But he'd been mine since I lined him up in my sights. If I'd let him live, he would have been mine and alive, still roaming. Maybe that's what hunters were bad at: letting things live.
"God, what a kill!" said Thorn. "Don't you admire these things?"
"No," I said.
"You don't?"
"No. Not anymore."
Tornado on Fire
by Luc Reid
You ain't never seen a true and actual heart-stopping terror 'til you seen a tornado on fire. They rise on up outta volcanos in the midst a' hurricanes, most likely during an earthquake, and they're so tall they been known to scorch up the moon. They set lakes a-bilin', cows a-cookin' to a well-done state, and they'll melt ever'thing made a' wax for twenty miles 'round.
I was only eight years old the first time I seen a tornado on fire. It waltzed through our town and made all the windows shatter and the foundations crack. My momma and my twelve sisters died from the fright right then an' there, an' my daddy, he aged a hundred years just from the pity and awfulness of the experience. Bein' a kid with no more brains than a run-over snake, I didn't think too much of it, 'cept that I knowed ever since then I musta been born to chase tornados on fire. An' that's what I done, for seventy-eight years, gettin' paid no more'n kept food in my belly and tires on my pickup by them silky-palmed, snail-eatin' Mr. Wizard types who just shiver to know anythin' I can gather up to tell 'em. An' I done it good, too, trackin' eighteen tornados on fire so close they near always singed off my eyebrows.
But this last one, oh Lord, it weren't like them others. This one was tall enough to burn the moon right up if it'd happened to be up just then, and it vaporized rivers and turned a strip a' desert a mile wide to glass. But it weren't the size of it as turned me yella, Lordy no. This one had iron sharks in it, which is more than a mortal man can bear to see, and that's why I'm a-here applyin' for my social security benefits.
And I Woke Up Before It Was Done
by Luc Reid
I think it was supposed to be your dream, not mine. I was me in it, but I didn't feel like myself. I felt the way I felt when I saw that drawing you made of me in 8th grade, with the glower and the grin both at once. The people riding the trumpets didn't make sense to me, and I shouted at them and they seemed confused before they rode on. Someone with a broken bike chain was chasing them and shouting, and I didn't know why. I saw your father turn into that barber that used to scare us through his window with the scissors and I don't know why you'd do that to such a sweet, old man, especially when he didn't kill you for wrecking his Mustang that time.
The Wave's Second Day
by Luc Reid
The wave, now about a day and a half old, had been born far out in the ocean, and while it had heard talk about a thing called "land," it had assumed that "land" was a made-up thing, like mermaids or absolute truth or polar bears. Now, seeing the dark, green mass rise over the horizon in front of it, the wave was forced to reevaluate.
And this "land" was beautiful: not with the vast, dappled beauty of the sky or the shimmering beauty of shoals of ever-turnnig fish, but a rich and varied and shocking beauty of green clusters and brown pillars and wide, delicately-colored expanses of sand and armored masses of rocks rising in brown and gray cliffs over the churning water, and a whiteness at the edge of the land that the wave could not identify.
The wave felt a thrill of fear and anticipation as it realized that it was heading directly for the land, that soon it would reach it and then run across it as it had run over the surface of the mighty ocean, delving ever deeper into the interior, rippling through trees and flowers and deserts and and fields of waving, dun-colored grass, until perhaps it broke through to another ocean entirely, one with new fish and and a new sky.
The wave felt its submerged parts begin to catch against the land, and with amazement the wave felt itself lifting, its head cutting sharply into the air as it took on a mane of thick, white foam. It raised up, changing from its old rounded shape, its child-shape as it now thought of it, into a wall of power and strength and beauty, shimmering in the daylight with a thousand shades of blue and green. It roared toward the land, and the wave felt as though it were flying. The seagulls above it circled and dove, screaming in what sounded like a warning, to run from this new and powerful force. It leaned in toward the rocks that grew in front of it.
The cliff face rushed up, and as the wave crashed into the rocks, it shattered into innumerable droplets, running high up the cliff in a desperate and doomed attempt to escape the sea that came at it with uncounted brothers and sisters, crushing it against the cliff's unyielding wall.
So this is dying, the wave thought. But there was no time to feel bitter: it was gone.
Every Last Trace
by Luc Reid
Regrettably, she realized only just after her death that she had turned on--only for a few minutes!--the bad lamp, the one that sparked sometimes, and that soon it would set her threadbare duvet on fire, then patiently make ash of her house and every last trace of her life--the manuscript hidden beneath the third stairstep that told who she really was and what she had really done, the letters (long thought destroyed) she'd once been given that were from Mark Twain to his youthful sweetheart, the haiku that had saved her from a grisly death--and that therefore all trace of her life, all clear evidence that she had ever danced at that long, badly-organized ice cream social that was human life, would be lost. And yet the bone-skinny little bushman who had come to greet her smiled as he offered his hand, and she smiled tentatively back as she took the hand and set off with him to the Next Place.
Prince Charming Comes By After the Divorce to Pick Up Some Things
by Luc Reid
He'd brought his new girlfriend, the servants told Cinderella, but he came into the Great Hall alone, wearing the robin's egg-blue tunic. His own two servants came with him, the only ones he was allowed to keep after the settlement, Dregsworthy and Pullengroin. Charming stopped short when he saw where Cinderella had put his things. She had decided to throw them all in a pile, the remaining flasks of his rosemary mead and his second-best suit of armor, the hounds from his childhood he'd had stuffed after death, his dead uncle's magical nail clippers that did nothing ("Maybe they're for clipping magical nails," Charming had once quipped) ... all of it. She had decided to toss it together without regard for denting or chipping or breaking, without regard for mead gushing out onto his favorite hunting cape or gardening tools gouging out chunks of the dead hounds' hair.
Charming stared at his possessions for a moment before he looked up, gazed into her eyes with his own robin's-egg blue ones, and said, "You're looking lovely, Cindy."
"Don't be charming," she snapped.
"Rude it is, then," he said gently. "But why did you--"
He broke off when a small woman entered. A very small woman. A dwarf woman, in fact. She took Charming's hand and kissed it unselfconsciously, her red-gold hair cascading over his wrist. She was very elegant, for a dwarf.
Charming bent down and kissed her on the head as Cinderella looked on, speechless.
"Durin's shade, you're even prettier than he told me!" said the dwarf women.
"I thought dwarf women had beards," Cinderella blurted, and the dwarf woman flushed.
"It's more convenient this way," Charming said. "They can tell them better from the men!" And he laughed easily, but the dwarf woman was still flushing, and Cinderella realized that she depilated and didn't tell Charming. In all fairness, though, who would bring that up to a new boyfriend?
"So, Cindy," said Charming, "I'd like you to meet Gloina."
Cinderella shook her head. She did not have to be social with him. "Just take your things and go," she said, and stalked out of the room, wishing she had thrown everything down after all.
Charming helped the servants take the carefully-packed crates out to his carriage. Each one was tied with a satin ribbon the color of a robin's egg.
A Cage in a Pit in Another Universe
by Luc Reid
"What you in for?" said the skeletal guy from his rusty, spherical cage a few yards away.
"I paid for smokes with money from another universe," said Andy from his own cage. He shifted, trying to get comfortable, which was impossible. The cage was too short to stand up in, too curved to sit in, and lying down made the bars cut into him. Squatting was bearable for short periods. He tried that again. Belatedly, he remembered his manners. "What about you?"
"I ate an Eyeball of Power."
"Gross."
"Yah za, it wasn't bad," said the skeletal guy. "Kinda savory. You know, ma slacka, you sound brainburnt to me."
Andy looked out across the wide, dank pit, crisscrossed by girders from which dozens of cages like his hung by tangles of thick chain. "If that means crazy, then yeah, probably. You know how long we're supposed to be here?"
The skeletal guy smiled, revealing a mouth almost devoid of teeth. "What you mean? How long before we die?"
"They have to let us out sometime, right?"
"How come?"
Andy didn't have a good answer to that. His legs were beginning to ache, so he tried sitting again, but the cage forced him into a slump, then into lying down against the rough bars.
"You want a cigarette?" Andy said.
The skeletal guy laughed mirthlessly. "Yah za, what we gonna do with those?"
Andy shrugged, took out a cigarette, and cupped his hand around the end while he flicked his lighter.
"Yah my long-suffering mama!" said the skeletal guy. "You got fire?"
Andy flicked sparks from his lighter in the guy's direction as he took a deep drag on his Millboro, which tasted awful. "Yeah," he said. "So?"
"I told you," said the skeletal guy. "I ate an Eyeball of Power! We just gotta swing these cages closer, ma slacka, and we'll be flying outta here in no time!"
Andy had no idea what eating an eyeball had to do with his lighter, but he damned sure didn't have anything better to do. Clamping his cigarette firmly in one side of his mouth and squinting, he stood up as much as he could, his back pressed against the bars, and leaned first one way, then the other. The skeletal guy began to do the same.
Hell, even if the guy turned out to be crazy, at least Andy'd made a friend.
Cinderella Begins Dating Again After a Bitter Divorce
by Luc Reid
"You look beautiful."
"Don't be charming," she snapped.
Cinderella's date took a swig of chianti to cover his confusion. A peasant's idea of a nice wine; Cinderella ignored hers. Though Charming probably wasn't drinking much better stuff these days, after the settlement. He was lucky he'd got to keep the cobwebby old chalet where he now had to live. Hell, he was lucky he got anything at all after his fling with Sleeping Beauty.
Her date smiled at her. What was his name again? Hans or Jan or something like that. He was handsome in a chunky, woodcuttery way. He smelled like ginger. That wasn't bad, ginger. It made Cinderella think of pumpkin pie.
"So, Cinderella," he said. "What do you do?"
"Do? Nothing. I used to scrub floors and have forest animals at my beck and call, but they're not welcome in the palace. Or I guess they weren't. Now they will be. If they still have any idea who I am."
"You like animals? I like animals," he said in a rush. Then his face grew red. "Sorry, that sounds desperate."
"Better than charming," she said. There was a long silence, and she tapped one foot impatiently. She grimaced. "When's the waiter going to be here with our salads?"
Hans or Jan or something sighed and stood up, dropping a few coins on the table. "Let's try again another time," he said.
Cinderella stared, uncomprehending, as Hans or Jan or something bowed awkwardly and walked to the door. What was he doing? Cinderella was beautiful, obviously rich, she had a lovely singing voice ... he was leaving, just like that?
Apparently he was: she waited for a long moment, and he didn't come back. Cinderella ran out to the parking lot, not losing her shoe because she had long since taken to wearing ones with straps.
There was nothing out there but the surrounding forest.
Cinderella looked all around her, the anger draining away. He wasn't Charming. Why had she been taking it out on him?
An ancient bluebird flapped arthritically to the ground and trilled at her, and she saw something beside it: a white stone, gleaming in the moonlight. And there was another, and another: a trail! She picked a breadcrumb off her blouse and threw it to the bird, then followed the rocks into the dark forest.
Hansel, that was his name. Hansel.
Sects with a Goat
by Luc Reid
"We believe," the man with the missing hand said, "that when the Fragments of God settle each day, one can sometimes be coaxed to settle in a goat. When our priest--that's me--determines that this has happened, we put the goat in the shrine and bring sick and unfortunate people to it so they can bask in its divinity. Then we roast and eat the goat, and the Fragment passes through each of us."
"Well, we don't believe that at all," I said. "You people are crazy."
The priest shrugged. "You think we're crazy, but we spend more time with God than you, so we think you people don't understand God like we do. That's why you keep having accidents."
"We keep having accidents because we've been driven into the mountains by the River People and it's easy to fall down in the mountains when you were raised on farmland. Your people keep having accidents, too. Why is your hand missing?"
"I stole a goat years ago, and the River People cut my hand off."
"Because the goat had a Fragment of God in it?"
"No, because I was hungry."
"And your people made you a priest?"
He shrugged again. "God said it was OK. Would you like a piece of goat?"
I looked at the piece of goat. It was just a dried strip, not very appetizing, but I'd lost my bread on the mountainside on the way to the village, and I hadn't eaten anything since dawn. I took the meat.
"Does it have a Fragment of God in it?"
The priest smiled.
I tore off a bite wi