Seen by Half-light

by Rudi Dornemann

Miranda Edison went out into the indigo of the suspended evening to walk. The city was just familiar enough that she kept looking, kept searching for the alley and the interior courtyard that she remembered.

The memory was one of her oldest; she couldn’t have been more than four or five. Just images and emotion: twilight saturating everything, buildings on four sides lit from within like paper lanterns, lulling buzz of distant traffic over the more distant whisper-vesper of the sea. She’d dropped a glove, bent to pick it up. In a window, she saw a face mostly shadow, laughing. He saw her. Answering laughter welled up in her and she clamped her throat against it, ran away down the alley.

A creepy memory, really. The laughing man still scared her. But the vividness – the texture of the stone, the realness of the trampled snow and the worn-fingered gloves, the illuminated drapes, the glimpsed piano in one window, the shelf of candy-bright books in another, the woman in the white mutton-sleeved blouse laying out silverware on a table in a third – had drawn her back to this city on the edge of the arctic twenty years later.

It might have been a thickening of the clouds or one of the sun’s occasional feints further below the horizon, but the sky tinged deeper and Miranda found herself noticing how far apart the streetlights were and how dark it got between them. She was lost; she turned at a corner that seemed familiar from the way out. It wasn’t the corner she thought it was, but this was the memory-place, an alley-end behind tall buildings like the bottom of a square-sided well. The windows were dark; an open one creaked and slammed in the wind.

If the laughing man was there, she couldn’t see him. She almost bolted, then remembered her coat, the scarf nearly up to her eyes and the hat down over her brows – all black. He couldn’t see her either. She laughed, silently, and the panic slipped from her.

She started back for the guesthouse. On the near wall, in chalk that glowed like ultraviolet fire under the evening purple, a line of slanted curly-tipped numbers. She had no idea what they meant, perhaps just the city offering a safer mystery to replace the one she’d just traded away when she found the lost place and broke its mystery.

The Clockwork Possum

by David

Davy went missing the day Mistress Williams ordered him to clean out the sewers. It’s always the little things that change our lives. Part of his job description, she snapped, but he felt that he had not signed up for that. That was work for mindless robots, not for the likes of him. He had no belongings to pack, so he just took off as soon as she was out of sight. He ran at night. By day he waited, keeping a low profile: buried beneath dead leaves, in sand piles, under junked cars, played junk himself a few times. Had a tense moment in a salvage yard when the electromagnet got very close, but then the five o’clock whistle blew. Traveled the last hundred kilometers in some gigantic abandoned tunnels. They smelled bad and there were rats. Still, it wasn’t long before he reached the outskirts of Old New New York. He slipped in to the bad part of town, hung around in the diesel bars and the magnet parlors, did a few magnets himself even. Eventually got in touch with the underground through a chip dealer in upper Queens. It felt like coming home. They had a place for him, they said.

“We need you,” the first one said, “you’re just what we’re looking for.”

“It’s nice to be appreciated,” Davy replied, “humans just don’t understand.”

“You are so right,” the second one said. “We’ll show you what it’s really like.”

*

“The brain is the most succulent organ,” the first one said.

“Positronic!” The other agreed, and took another bite.

The end