A Fantasy of Hope

by Jonathan Wood

“Do you believe in magic?” The old crone cocks her heads on one side.

The princess shakes her head, reaches out, and pricks her finger on the needle defiantly.

Narcotics, she thinks as she slumps to the floor, do not a spell make.

“Do you believe in magic?” the bird asks her. It is blue, a puffball of feathers–bright orange beak, wide yellow eyes.

This it is just an effect of the isolation, of the drugged food. It is just the fraying of her reason. It is getting hard for her to keep track of things up here, up in this tower. She counts the days in the millimeters her hair grows. It is down to the back of her knees now, but already the ends are frayed, split, strands snap each time she tries to drag her fingers through the knots. No-one could climb up these strands.

She shakes her head until the bird is gone. Whether it flies from the window or from her mind she cannot quite tell.

“Do you believe in magic?” the prince calls up. “Do you believe in love at first sight? Do you believe that tonight you will be riding by my side, answering the sunsets beckoning call?”

She looks at him and tries to imagine how he sees her. The tower is very tall. She must be little more than a pink speck to him. He cannot see the truth, only the story, the legend. He does not see her.

But if magic will get him up here, she will believe.

He falls less than half way up the tower. His neck snaps like an autumn twig–dry and brittle.

“Do you believe in magic?” the princess asks herself. She crouches upon the window sill, the wind pulls at her, at her bare feet, her nails grown to brown talon. Her dress billows, ragged as feathers.

“Do you believe?” She whispers the words aloud. She thinks she has been saying them for a long time. Her lips are dry and chapped, her tongue a rough wood block jammed into her mouth.

“Do you believe?”

“Do you believe?”

She jumps and waits to see if gravity believes in her.

Last Lap

by Ken Brady

We power south down Broadway toward West 57th and into lap five, and Barry pushes the big block Chevy to its limits to make up for lost time. As we blast through the synch gate there’s that now-familiar floating feeling, like drifting in both time and space, waiting for a new Manhattan to resolve around us. Which is pretty much what happens.

Then we’re through, cloudy skies gone blue, buildings where buildings weren’t, changed signage. But it’s all barely a blur as the car gets our full attention. Barry drives, I navigate. Challenging in any race, but worse when crossing timelines.

Barry flinches as the steering wheel moves, pedals narrow, seating position changes and the rear end drifts a bit before he can compensate. It takes me a few seconds to recognize the design as vaguely BMW, then I notice the Messerschmitt logo on the wheel and can guess enough about this reality. The German billboards on Zeppelins floating above the race clarify.

Off 57th and up Park and we overtake a gorgeous Daimler that I wish was available in our reality. I glance and see it’s Jean-Paul and Etienne. They’re new to this circuit, and I think swastikas in the Upper East Side are throwing them off their race. I wave as we leave them behind and make our way through East Harlem and on to Marcus Garvey.

Each lap is roughly ten kilometers around the park, though the track is always just a little different. Political, social, and economic realities might change the landscape, but it’s still Manhattan. We’ve done races in other cities: Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Shanghai. Have seen junkyard-like wastelands and futuristic utopias. But New York is always New York.

Through the Upper West Side past bright searchlights, catching a screen of our car sporting Bosch ads, and we make a pulse-pounding run for the gate. Branding across multiple histories is difficult when you never know what car you’ll drive from lap to lap, reality to reality. Makes it hard to collect our cut of the ad revenue, so it’s best to let a cross-reality agency handle it and just view the vids later.

On other laps we navigate beneath soaring Chinese skyscrapers, past Confederate flags, next to the walls of Central Prison, through hanging gardens and greenery, under the watchful eyes of millions of cameras. We drive an electric Hummer, Japanese Corvette, four-by-four Microbus, even something that feels like a jet-powered Edsel.

We take the checkered flag in a Subaru WRX and wave to our fans. Good to be home, through twenty laps of general weirdness and alternate landscapes. We slow to see if we can spot our families and friends. From the bleachers where they should be, hundreds of Native Americans, face paint and head dresses brilliant in the afternoon sun, cheer and whoop their approval. Oops. The feather and buffalo logo on the wheel should have clued us in.

Maybe a victory lap is in order.