YEAR’S BEST
                          FANTASY
                              3

                         EDITED BY DAVID G. H ARTWELL
                             AND KATHRYN CRAMER



                         TO ELIZABETH C ONSTANCE C RAMER HARTWELL, TO
                                       WHOM EVERYTHING IS NEW

                                      A DF Books NERDs Release

  This is a collection of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’
imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events,
                 locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

   YEAR’S BEST FANTASY 3. Copyright © 2003 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer All rights
   reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required
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    PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.




                                              Contents




Introduction
Kage Baker
Her Father’s Eyes




Patricia Bowne
Want’s Master




Neil Gaiman
October in the Chair




William Mingin
Greaves, This Is Serious




Nalo Hopkinson
Shift




P.D. Cacek
A Book, by Its Cover
Charles de Lint
Somewhere in My Mind
  There Is a Painting Box




James Patrick Kelly
The Pyramid of Amirah




Ron Wolfe
Our Friend Electricity




Ursula K. Le Guin
Social Dreaming of the Frin




Michael Swanwick
Five British Dinosaurs




Jeffrey Ford
The Green Word
Stepan Chapman
The Comedian




M. Shayne Bell
The Pagodas of Ciboure




Gene Wolfe
From the Cradle




Donald Barr
Sam




Tanith Lee
Persian Eyes




Ellen Klages
Travel Agency
Steven Popkes
A Fable of Savior and Reptile




Naomi Kritzer
Comrade Grandmother




China Miéville
Familiar




Liz Williams
Honeydark




Patrice E. Sarath
A Prayer for Captain La Hire




James Van Pelt
Origin of the Species
Brian Stableford
Tread Softly




Darrell Schweitzer
How It Ended




Michael Swanwick
Cecil Rhodes in Hell




Nicholas Royle
Hide and Seek




R. Garcia y Robertson
Death in Love




Story Copyrights




Acknowledgments
About the Editors




Edited by David G. Hartwell




Cover




Copyright




About the Publisher




                                           Introduction



It was an especially good year for fantasy short fiction in 2002, and we wish this book could have been
twice as long so we could have fit in a bunch of longer stories that are just as good as the ones collected
here. It was an exceptional year for children’s and young adult fiction, as well. The publishers had geared
up for a year in which there would be no new Harry Potter novel (and to follow up on the huge success
of the film of The Fellowship of the Ring). Everyone knew there is an audience for good
children’s/young adult fantasy, and many tried to satisfy it, including a goodly number of successful
writers, from Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman to Isabel Allende and Michael Chabon, as well as less
familiar names such as Nancy Farmer and Cornelia Funke. Readers are going to be catching up on 2002
for some time to come because there was so much that was so good, and in such unusual places.
Perhaps the best anthology of original stories was The Green Man, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri
Windling, also a young adult publication.

So welcome to the third volume of the Year’s Best Fantasy, representing the best of 2002. Like the
earlier volumes in this series, this book provides some insight into the fantasy field now, who is writing
some of the best short fiction published as fantasy, and where. But it is fundamentally a collection of
excellent stories for your reading pleasure. We follow one general principle for selection: this book is full
of fantasy—every story in the book is clearly that and not primarily something else. We (Kathryn Cramer
and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Science Fiction in paperback from Eos as a companion
volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short science fiction, too.

In this book, and this anthology series, we use the broadest definition of fantasy (to include wonder
stories, adventure fantasy, supernatural fantasy, satirical and humorous fantasy). We believe that the
best-written fantasy can stand up in the long run by any useful literary standard in comparison to fiction
published out of category or genre, and furthermore, that out of respect for the genre at its best we ought
to stand by genre fantasy and promote it in this book. Also, we believe that writers publishing their work
specifically as fantasy are up to this task, so we set out to find these stories, and we looked for them in
the genre anthologies, magazines, and small press pamphlets. Some fine fantasy writers will still be
missing. A fair number of the best fantasy writers these days write only novels, or if they do write short
fiction, do so only infrequently, and sometimes it is not their best work.

This was a notable year for short fiction anthologies, as well as for the magazines both large and small.
The last SF and fantasy magazines that are widely distributed are Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and
Realms of Fantasy. And the electronic publishers kept publishing, sometimes fiction of high quality, in
spite of the fact that none of them broke even or made money at it. We are grateful for the hard work
and editorial acumen of the better electronic fiction sites, such as SciFiction, Strange Horizons, Fantastic
Metropolis, and Infinite Matrix, and hope they survive.

The small presses remained a vigorous presence this year. We have a strong short fiction field today
because the small presses, semiprofessional magazines (such as Fantastic, Weird Tales, and Horror
Garage), and anthologies are printing and circulating a majority of the high-quality short stories published
in fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The U.S. is the only English-language country that still has any
professional, large-circulation magazines, though Canada, Australia, and the UK have several excellent
magazines. The semi-prozines of our field mirror the “little magazines” of the mainstream in function,
holding to professional editorial standards and publishing the next generation of writers, along with some
of the present masters. We encourage you to subscribe to a few of your choice. You will find the names
of many of the most prominent ones in our story notes.

In January of 2003, as we write, professional fantasy and science fiction publishing as we have always
known it is still concentrated in nine mass market and hardcover publishing lines (Ace, Bantam, Baen,
DAW, Del Rey, Eos, Roc, Tor, and Warner), and those lines are publishing fewer titles in paperback.
But they do publish a significant number of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, and all the established
name writers at least appear in hardcover first. The Print-on-Demand field is beginning to sort itself out,
and Wild-side Press and its many imprints look to be the umbrella for many of the better publications,
including original novels and story collections.

This was a very strong year for original anthologies. Among the very best were The Green Man, edited
by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Leviathan 3, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre;
Conjunctions 39, edited by Peter Straub; Embrace the Mutation, edited by Bill Sheehan; Dark
Terrors 6, edited by Stephen R. Jones, and the DAW 35th Anniversary Anthology: Fantasy, edited
by Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim. One noticeable trend evident in some of these is toward
non-genre, or genre-bending, or slipstream fantastic fiction. There were a number of quite good original
anthologies and little magazines devoted to stories located outside familiar genre boundaries, yet more
related to genre than to ordinary contemporary fiction—and marketed to a genre readership.

It was also a good year for novellas and novelettes in the genre, though, sadly, we do not have the space
in this book to include more than a couple. There were dozens of good ones, and we would have liked to
include many of them.

We repeat, for readers new to this series, our usual disclaimer: this selection of fantasy stories represents
the best that was published during the year 2002. It would take two or three more volumes this size to
have nearly all of the best—though even then, not all the best novellas.

We try to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and
responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges. This is a book about what’s going on now in
fantasy. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in
the year 2002.

                                                                 David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
                                                                                    Pleasantville, NY

                                          Her Father’s Eyes

                                                 Kage Baker




Kage Baker [http://members.tripod.com/~MrsCheckerfield/] lives in Pismo Beach, California. She
is known primarily as a science fiction writer, especially for her series of stories and novels about
The Company, an organization from the future that sends agents back in time to retrieve lost
artifacts, such as priceless art treasures. Her collection of stories in that setting— Black Projects,
White Knights: The Company Dossiers —was published to substantial critical acclaim in 2002. She
has attracted additional notice in the last few years for fantasy stories. Last year her story “What
the Tyger Told Her” appeared in our Year’s Best Fantasy 2. Her first fantasy novel, The Anvil of
the World, is published in 2003. She worked for some years for the Living History Centre and says,
“Twenty years of total immersion research in Elizabethan as well as other historical periods has
paid off handsomely in a working knowledge of period speech and details”.

Her attention to period detail in certainly evident in “Her Father’s Eyes.” This story was
published in Asimov’s, where most of her short fiction has appeared. A girl child and her
parents—her father just back from military service—are riding a train in the late 1940s, and she
sits next to a little boy who is in the custody of an evil couple who are not really his parents. There
are perhaps echoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s great fairy tale “The Snow Queen.”
It was so long ago that fathers were still gaunt from the war, their awful scars still livid; so long ago that
mothers wore frocks, made fancy Jell-O desserts in ring molds. And that summer, there was enough
money to go for a trip on the train. She was taken along because she had been so sick she had almost
died, so it was a reward for surviving.

She was hurried along between her parents, holding their hands, wondering what a dome coach was and
why it was supposed to be special. Then there was a gap in the sea of adult legs, and the high silver cars
of the train shone out at her. She stared up at the row of windows in the coach roof, and thought it
looked like the cockpits in the bombers her father was always pointing out.

Inside it was nicer, and much bigger, and there was no possible way any German or Japanese fighter
pilots could spray the passengers with bullets; so she settled into the seat she had all for herself. There
she watched the people moving down on the platform, until the train pulled out of the station.

Then her parents exclaimed, and told her to look out the wonderful dome windows at the scenery. That
was interesting for a while, especially the sight of the highway far down there with its Oldsmobiles and
DeSotos floating along in eerie silence, and then, as they moved out into the country, the occasional field
with a real horse or cow.

The change in her parents was more interesting. Out of uniform her father looked younger, was neither
gloomy nor sarcastic but raucously happy. All dressed up, her mother was today as serene and cheerful
as a housewife in a magazine advertisement. They held hands, like newlyweds, cried out in rapture at
each change in the landscape, and told her repeatedly what a lucky little girl she was, to get to ride in a
dome coach.

She had to admit they seemed to be right, though her gaze kept tracking nervously to the blue sky framed
by the dome, expecting any minute steeply banking wings there, fire or smoke. How could people turn on
happiness like a tap, and pretend the world was a bright and shiny place when they knew it wasn’t at
all?

The candy butcher came up the aisle, and her father bought her a bag of mint jellies. She didn’t like mint
jellies but ate them anyway, amazed at his good mood. Then her mother took her down the car to wash
the sugar from her face and hands, and the tiny steel lavatory astonished and fascinated her.

From time to time the train stopped in strange towns to let people off or on. Old neon signs winked from
brick hotels, and pointed forests like Christmas trees ran along the crests of hills, stood black against the
skyline. The sun set round and red. While it still lit the undersides of the clouds, her parents took her
down to the dining car.

What silent terror, at the roaring spaces between the cars where anyone might fall out and die instantly;
and people sat in the long room beyond, and sipped coffee and ate breaded veal cutlets as calmly as
though there were no yawning gulf rushing along under them. She watched the diners in awe, and pushed
the green peas round and round the margin of her plate, while her parents were chatting together so
happily they didn’t even scold her.

When they climbed the narrow steel stair again, night had fallen. The whole of the coach had the half-lit
gloom of an aquarium, and stars burned down through the glass. She was led through little islands of light,
back to her seat. Taking her place again she saw that there were now people occupying the seats across
the aisle, that had been vacant before.
The man and the lady looked as though they had stepped out of the movies, so elegant they were. The
lady wore a white fur coat, had perfect red nails; the man wore a long coat, with a silk scarf around his
neck. His eyes were like black water. He was very pale. So was the lady, and so was their little boy who
sat stiffly in the seat in front of them. He wore a long coat too, and gloves, like a miniature grownup. She
decided they must be rich people.

Presently the Coach Hostess climbed up, and smilingly informed them all that there would be a meteor
shower tonight. The elegant couple winked at each other. The little girl scrambled around in her seat, and
peering over the back, asked her parents to explain what a meteor was. When she understood, she
pressed her face against the cold window glass, watching eagerly as the night miles swam by. Distant
lights floated in the darkness; but she saw no falling stars.

Disappointed, cranky and bored, she threw herself back from the window at last, and saw that the little
boy across the aisle was staring at her. She ignored him and addressed her parents over the back of the
seat:

“There aren’t either any meteors,” she complained.

“You’re not looking hard enough,” said her father, while at the same time her mother said,

“Hush,” and drew from her big purse a tablet of lined paper and a brand-new box of crayons, the giant
box with rows and rows of colors. She handed them over the seat back and added, “Draw some
pictures of what you saw from the windows, and you can show them to Auntie when we get there.”

Wide-eyed, the little girl took the offerings and slid back into her seat. For a while she admired the
pristine green-and-yellow box, the staggered regiments of pure color. All her crayons at home lived in an
old coffee can, in a chaos of nub ends and peeled paper.

At last she selected an Olive Green crayon and opened the tablet. She drew a cigar shape and added flat
wings. She colored in the airplane, and then took the Sky Blue and drew on a glass cockpit. With the
Black, she added stars on the wings and dots flying out the front to signify bullets.

She looked up. The little boy was staring at her again. She scowled at him.

“Those are nice,” he said. “That’s a lot of colors.”

“This is the really big box,” she said.

“Can I draw too?” he asked her, very quietly, so quietly something strange pulled at her heart. Was he so
quiet because he was scared? And the elegant man said:

“Daniel, don’t bother the little girl,” in a strange resonant voice that had something just the slightest bit
wrong about it. He sounded as though he were in the movies.

“You can share,” she told the little boy, deciding suddenly. “But you have to come sit here, because I
don’t want to tear the paper out.”

“Okay,” he said, and pushed himself out of his seat as she moved over. The elegant couple watched
closely, but as the children opened the tablet out between them and each took a crayon, they seemed to
relax and turned their smiling attention to the night once more. The boy kept his gloves on while coloring.

“Don’t you have crayons at home?” she asked him, drawing black doughnut-tires under the plane. He
shook his head, pressing his lips together in a line as he examined the Green crayon he had taken.
“How can you not have crayons? You’re rich,” she said, and then was sorry she had said it, because he
looked as though he were about to cry. But he shrugged and said in a careless voice,

“I have paints and things.”

“Oh,” she said. She studied him. He had fair hair and blue eyes, a deep twilight blue. “How come you
don’t look like your mommy and daddy?” she inquired. “I have my daddy’s eyes. But you don’t have
their eyes.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the elegant couple and then leaned close to whisper, “I’m adopted.”

“Oh. You were in the War?” she said, gesturing at her airplane. “Like a bomb was dropped on your
house, and you were an orphan, and the soldiers took you away?”

“No,” he said. He put back the Green crayon, took a Brick Red one instead and drew a house: a square,
a triangle on top, a chimney with a spiral of smoke coming out of it. He drew well. “I don’t think that’s
what happened.”

She drew black jagged lines under the plane, bombed-out wreckage. She drew little balloon heads
protruding from the rubble, drew faces with teardrops flying from the eyes. “This is what happened to the
war orphans,” she explained. “My daddy told me all about them, and I could see it when he told me. So
that didn’t happen to you?”

“Nope,” he replied, drawing a window in the house. It was a huge window, wide open. It took up the
whole wall. He put the Brick Red crayon back in its tier carefully, and selected the Gray crayon. “The
War is over now, anyway.”

“Everybody thinks so,” she replied, glancing uneasily up at the dome. “But my daddy says it isn’t really. It
could come back any time. There are a lot of bad people. Maybe those people got you from an
orphanage.”

The boy opened his mouth, closed it, glanced over his shoulder. “No,” he whispered. “Something else
happened to me. Now I’m their little boy. We came tonight so they could see the meteors from a train.
They never did that before. They like trying out new things, you see.”

With the Gray crayon, he drew the figure of a stick-man who towered over the house, walking away
from the window. He gave it a long coat. He drew its arms up like Frankenstein’s monster, and then he
drew something in its arms: a white bundle. He put away the Gray crayon, took out the Pink and added a
little blob of a face to the bundle.

“See,” he said, “That’s—”

“What are you drawing, Daniel?” said the elegant lady sharply. The little boy cringed, and the little girl felt
like cringing too.

“That’s a man carrying wood into his house for the fire-place, Mother,” said the little boy, and grabbing
the Brown crayon he drew hastily over the bundle in the man’s arms, turning it into a log of wood. The
little girl looked at it and hoped the lady wouldn’t notice that the man in the picture was walking away
from the house.

“I’m going to be an artist when I grow up,” the little boy said. “I go to a studio and they make me take
lessons. A famous painter teaches me.” He sketched in a row of cylinders in brown, then took the Green
crayon and drew green circles above the cylinders. “That’s the forest,” he added in an undertone. He
took the Dark Blue and drew a cold shadow within the forest, and sharp-edged stars above it.
“Is he taking the baby to the forest?” she whispered. He just nodded. When he had drawn the last star he
folded the page over, and since she had used up all the room on her page she did not complain, but took
the Olive Green crayon again. She laboriously drew in stick-figure soldiers while he watched.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” he asked.

“A waitress at the dinette,” she replied. “If I don’t die. And a ballerina.”

“I might be a dancer too, if I don’t die,” he said, reaching for the Gray crayon. He began to draw
cylinders like oatmeal boxes, with crenellations: a castle. She took the Black crayon and drew bayonets
in the soldiers’ hands, remarking:

“Boys aren’t ballerinas.”

“Some boys have to be,” he said morosely, drawing windows in the castle walls. “They have to wear
black leotards and the girls wear pink ones. Madame hits her stick on the ground and counts in French.
Madame has a hoof on one foot, but nobody ever says anything about it.”

“That’s strange,” she said, frowning as she drew the soldiers bayoneting one another. She glanced over
at his picture and asked: “Where’s the king and queen?”

He sighed and took the Blue Violet crayon. On the top of one tower he drew an immense crowned
figure, leaving the face blank. He drew another crowned figure on the other battlement. “May I have the
Black, please?”

“You’re polite,” she said, handing it to him. He drew faces with black eyes on the crowned figures while
she took the Red crayon and drew a flag on the ground. She drew a red circle with rays coming off it to
the edges of the rectangle, and then drew red dots all over the flag.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the blood,” she explained. “My daddy has that flag at home. He killed somebody for it. When he
told me about it I could see that, too. What did your daddy, I mean, that man, do in the War?”

“He sold guns to the soldiers,” said the boy. He drew bars across the windows in the castle and then,
down in the bottommost one, drew a tiny round face looking out, with teardrops coming from its eyes.

The little girl looked over at his picture.

“Can’t he get away?” she whispered. He shook his head, and gulped for breath before he went on in a
light voice:

“Or I might be a poet, you know. Or play the violin. I have lessons in that too. But I have to be very,
very good at something, because next year I’m seven and—”

“Have you drawn another picture, Daniel?” said the elegant man with a faint warning intonation, rising in
his seat. Outside the night rolled by, the pale lights floated, and the rhythm of the iron wheels sounded
faint and far away.

“Yes, Father,” said the boy in a bright voice, holding it up, but with his thumb obscuring the window with
the face.

“It’s two people playing chess. See?”

“That’s nice,” said the man, and sat down again.
“What happens when you’re seven?” the little girl murmured. The boy looked at her with terror in his
eyes.

“They might get another baby,” he whispered back. She stared at him, thinking that over. She took the
tablet and opened it out: new fresh pages.

“That’s not so bad,” she told him. “We’ve had two babies. They break things. But they had to stay with
Grandma; they’re too little to come on the train. If you don’t leave your books where they can tear the
pages, it’s okay.”

The boy bowed his head and reached for the Red Orange crayon. He began to scribble in a great
swirling mass. The girl whispered on:

“And you’re rich, not like us, so I bet you can have your own room away from the new baby. It’ll be all
right. You’ll see.”

She took the Sky Blue crayon again and drew in what looked at first like ice cream cones all over her
page, before she got the Olive Green out and added soldiers hanging from them. “See? These are the
parachute men, coming to the rescue.”

“They can’t help,” said the little boy.

She bit her lip at that, because she knew he was right. She thought it was sad that he had figured it out
too.

The boy put back the Red Orange, took both Red and Yellow and scribbled forcefully, a crayon in either
fist. He filled the page with flame. Then he drew Midnight Blue darkness above it all and more sharp
stars. He took the Black and drew a little stick figure with limbs outstretched just above the fire. Flying?
Falling in?

“I’m almost seven,” he reiterated, under his breath. “And they only like new things.”

“What are you drawing now, Daniel?” asked the lady, and both children started and looked up in horror,
for they had not heard her rise.

“It’s a nice big pile of autumn leaves, Mother,” said the little boy, holding up the tablet with shaking
hands. “See? And there’s a little boy playing, jumping in the leaves.”

“What a creative boy you are,” she said throatily, tousling his hair. “But you must remember Mr.
Picasso’s lessons. Don’t be mediocre. Perhaps you could do some abstract drawings now. Entertain
us.”

“Yes, Mother,” said the little boy, and the girl thought he looked as though he were going to throw up.
When the lady had returned to her seat she reached over and squeezed his hand, surprising herself, for
she did not ordinarily like to touch people.

“Don’t be scared,” she whispered.

In silence, he turned to a fresh pair of pages. He took out a Green crayon and began to draw interlocking
patterns of squares, shading them carefully.

She watched him for a while before she took the Silver and Gold crayons and drew a house, with a little
stick figure standing inside. Then she took the Olive Green and drew several objects next to the figure.
“That’s my bomb shelter, where I’m safe from the War,” she explained. “But you can be in it. And that’s
your knapsack, see it? I made it with big straps for you. And that’s your canteen so you can be safe
afterward. They’re colored like what soldiers have, so you can hide. And this is the most important thing
of all.” She pointed. “See that? That’s a map. So you can escape.”

“I can’t take it,” he said in a doomed voice.

“That’s all right; I’ll give it to you,” she said, and tore the page out. Folding it up small, she put it into his
coat pocket.

Moving with leisurely slowness, he put back the Green crayon. Then, holding his hands close to his chest,
he pulled off one of his gloves and took the folded paper out. He thrust it into an inner pocket, glancing
over his shoulder as he did so. Nobody had noticed. Hastily he pulled the glove back on.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied.

At that moment gravity shifted, the steady racketing sound altered and became louder, and there were
three distinct bumps. Nobody in the car seemed to notice. Many of the grownups were asleep and
snoring, in fact, and did no more than grunt or shift in their seats as the train slowed, as the nearest of the
lights swam close and paused outside the window. It was a red blinking light.

“Ah! This is our stop,” said the elegant man. “Summerland. Come along, Daniel. I think we’ve seen
enough of the Dome Car, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Father,” said the boy, buttoning his coat. The elegant lady yawned gracefully.

“Not nearly as much fun as I thought it would be,” she drawled. “God, I hate being disappointed. And
bored.”

“And you bore so easily,” said the man, and she gave him a quick venomous glance. The little boy
shivered, climbing out of his seat.

“I have to go now,” he explained, looking miserable.

“Good luck,” said the little girl. The lady glanced at her.

“I’m sure it’s past your bedtime, little girl,” she said. “And it’s rude to stare at people.”

She reached down her hand with its long scarlet nails as though to caress, and the little girl dodged. Two
fingertips just grazed her eyelid, and with them came a wave of perfume so intense it made her eyes
water. She was preoccupied with blinking and sneezing for the next minute, unable to watch as the family
walked to the front of the silent car and descended the stair.

But she held her palm tight over her weeping eye and got up on her knees to peek out the window. She
looked down onto no platform, no station, but only the verge of the embankment where trees came close
to the tracks.

There was a long black car waiting there, under a lamp that swung unsteadily from a low bough. The
elegant couple was just getting into the front seat. The little boy was already in the car. She could see his
pale face through the windows. He looked up at her and gave a hopeless kind of smile. She was
impressed at how brave he was. She thought to herself that he would have made a good soldier. Would
he be able to escape?
The train began to move again. People woke up and talked, laughed, commented on the meteor shower.
She sat clutching her eye, sniffling, until her mother got up to see if she had fallen asleep.

“Did you get something in your eye?” her mother asked, her voice going sharp with worry.

The little girl thought a moment before answering.

“The rich lady’s perfume got in it,” she said.

“What rich lady, honey? Don’t rub it like that! Bill, hand me a Kleenex. Oh, what have you done to
yourself now?”

“The lady with the little boy. They sat there. They just got off the train.”

“Don’t lie to your mother,” said her daddy, scowling. “Those seats have been empty the whole trip.”

She considered her parents out of her good eye, and decided to say nothing else about it. By the time she
was bundled off the train, wrapped against the dark and cold in her daddy’s coat, her eye had swollen
shut.

It was red and weeping for days, even after they’d come home again, and her vision in that eye remained
blurred. She was taken to an eye doctor, who prescribed an eyepatch for a while. The eyepatch was
useful for pretending she was a pirate but did not help, and made her walk into walls besides.

She knew better than to tell anyone about the things she saw out of the other eye, but she understood
now why the boy had wanted so badly to escape. She thought about him sometimes, late at night when
she couldn’t sleep and the long lights of passing cars sent leaf-shadows crawling along her wall.

She always imagined him running through a black night country, finding his way somehow through the
maze of wet cobbled alleys, hiding from the Nazis, hiding from worse things, looking for the dome coach
so he could escape; and he became clearer in her head as she thought about him, though that always
made the headaches come. She would pull the covers over her head and try to hold on to the picture
long enough to make the train arrive for him.

But somehow, before he could slip into the safety of the station, bright morning would blind her awake.
Sick and crying, she would scream at her mother and knock her head against the wall to make the pain
go away.

In the end the doctor prescribed glasses for her. She started kindergarten glaring at the world through
thick pink plastic frames, and no one could persuade her she was not hideous in them.

                                              Want’s Master

                                                 Patricia Bowne




Patricia Bowne, who published this story under the nomde-plume A. B. Ming, lives in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, and is a zoologist and an associate professor at Alverno College. She says, “My
writing career has centered around academia, my first adult exercise in fiction being an
undergraduate term paper in which I tried to convince my World Literature professor that The
Pirates of Penzance was a parody of Hamlet. My interest in fiction continued into graduate school,
where I wrote much of a never-to-be-assembled science fiction novel on the backs of ATM
receipts. It wasn’t until I left university and realized how much I missed its excitement, its
diversity, and its sheer silliness that I was motivated to create the Royal Academy of Osyth, a
setting that has kept me interested enough to write multiple stories and two novels. My academic
career centers around fish, and ichthyologically inclined readers will find fish names in my fiction
(mainly as the names of demons).” Her first story, “A World They Never Made,” appeared in
2002 in The Leading Edge, with her real name in the table of contents.

“Want’s Master,” her second published story, appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated. It is a tale of
love and magic, in a university setting.




When William Harrison Gracile came in to work at four-thirty in the afternoon looking as if he had aged
twenty years overnight, his suit hanging loose on a wizened frame, his secretary wished him good day and
went back to her typing. Gracile was offended. He had never been late to work before; he had never
come in with a hair out of place. He deserved better from his secretary, he thought. She should make
shocked noises, ask after his health, give unsought advice; she should stop him, as he went into his office.
“I’m sorry,” she should say, “I don’t want to intrude, but…”

“Oh, by the way,” said his secretary, “a package came for you. I put it on your desk.”

A package was exciting, even to someone of an age and station that begged for unsolicited, meaningless
packages. This could be the one from someone who mattered, the one filled with treasure rather than
with advertising information. Indeed, it was too small a box to contain flyers. The package was the size to
hold jewelry, perhaps a tie tack with some charity’s logo on it or a refrigerator magnet…but it was
wrapped in brown paper and addressed by hand in a clear, old-fashioned, feminine script. When Gracile
opened it he found a sheet of paper wrapped around the box within.

“A thank-you for last night,” was written on it in the same hand. “I’m sure you’ll know what to do with
it.” The note was unsigned. Gracile opened the box and it was a tie tack, indeed; a silver tie tack, with a
moonstone set in it. A muted rainbow swirled through the stone, restless and demanding. He looked the
paper over for watermarks or clues and examined the box carefully, and then he leaned over the tie
tack—absurd, such caution for a tiny piece of silver—and touched it with one finger. And if his secretary
had been there, even she must have been perturbed to see her employer become in an instant twenty
years younger, thirty pounds heavier. When Gracile turned to look out the window he saw his outline
reflected over the Royal Academy’s buildings and fall leaves, the outline of a man in his prime. He closed
the box and put it in his pocket.




When William Harrison Gracile had joined the Royal Academy of the Arcane Arts and Sciences as
Development Officer, he had insisted on an office overlooking the campus. He had told the president that
an enchanter couldn’t work without an eyrie. “What the eye doesn’t see,” Gracile had said, “the heart
doesn’t yearn after.” And as yearning after things was his job, that had been argument enough.
When Gracile stood at the window with his back turned to the City and the suburbs behind it, he looked
north into the past. Far to his left lay the undeveloped part of the ley-line, the river of magic that tumbled
down a chasm at each end of the Osyth plateau and filled the valleys below with mists and wonder. Built
squarely on the ley-line, to west and east of Gracile’s gaze, the two great castles of the
Academy—Magic’s fairy-tale palace and Wizardry’s squat gray towers—glared at one another with
arrow-slit eyes, remembering the magewars of old. Outbuildings clustered around them, clambered up
their walls, pushing to get near the line. Between the castles rose the gargantuan modern complex of
Sorcery’s towers and teaching hospital. The three schools lay in a narrow band along the line, piled high
over its power, and beyond them Gracile could see the tops of trees and the tiniest bit of roof of the low
Alchemy building.

When he looked across the quad to that reef of buildings, Gracile did not see the modern Academy and
its staff. He saw the magicians of old, sallying forth down the ley-line with staff and pack. Wizards in their
red gowns clustered around half-finished buildings, girders lifting into place at their command; black-clad
sorcerers slipped past, their satchels full of nameless items…it was easy for him to believe, then, that the
Academy needed a new Wizardry Center. A field station for Celestial Mechanics. Six dozen dryad traps.
New gold plating in the pentarium, and the moat around the Magic Building dredged. He could believe
these things so much that his very longing for the perfect Academy would cast its spell over alumnae,
donors, legislators. That was enchantment.

When it was dark, the window turned into a mirror. Gracile could check himself and do touch-ups,
making sure his nose was as straight and his eyes as gray as they should be, that he was still the picture of
a successful administrator in his early forties. He could spy on whoever was entering his office and know
their names before he turned around. Even in June, it was dark enough by eight for him to see the Vice
President for Finance come through the door and turn to close it. The VP Finance was a sturdy man,
red-faced and white-haired, with a great beak of a nose. His reflection looked more solid than Gracile’s
own.

“Are you ready?” Gracile asked.

“No. Well, I am, but you’re not. The Dean of Wizardry wants to see you before the meeting.”

“No,” said Gracile, in dismay. “Are you letting him talk to the trustees?”

“The only way I can keep him out of the trustees’ meeting is to let him talk with you,” said the VP
Finance.

Gracile refocused his eyes and looked across campus at the Magic Building’s towers. “The more I see of
him, the less I want to get him a building,” he said. “You know that.”

“Don’t get temperamental on me, Bill. You have to have all the arguments before you see the trustees.
They have to be able to say you presented them with evidence. I can’t have the Dean of Wizardry going
around telling people you never heard the arguments in favor of this building, but you convinced the
trustees anyway.”

“Yeah, I’m only supposed to do that to donors,” said Gracile. “Well, show him in. Get it over with.”

The Dean of Wizardry was nothing like the red-robed powers of Gracile’s fancy. Talking to him was like
being eaten by a long slow snake, the kind that moved you down its throat with infinitesimal sideways
motions of its jaws, so that your head was swallowed and dissolved while your feet still dangled outside.
In less than ten minutes, Gracile had to convince the board of trustees that he could raise millions for the
man’s building project; yet with every word the Dean of Wizardry inflicted on him, Gracile’s enthusiasm
for the task dwindled. He looked out the window, therefore, and thought about how much he wanted the
Dean of Wizardry to be quiet, to go away, to fall off the tower to a flat and silent death. He thought about
how much he wanted to go home and sit under the tree in his back yard, drink a beer and read the
evening paper. He fortified himself with these images, and when he finally left for the board meeting there
was all about him the glamour of unfulfilled desire, the slightly haunted beauty that made people associate
him with high and noble causes.

The trustees met in a warded boardroom. They wore personal wards as well, and these always amused
Gracile. No ward was proof against enchantment, which drew its strength from human longings; and the
trustees had plenty of these, after five hours of meetings.

“We agree, the old Wizardry Building is out of date,” said the President of the Board. “But even if the
wizards built it themselves, we can’t commit the Academy to this kind of outlay for materials without a
significant initial donation. Even a challenge grant would give us something to start with.”

“A silent fund-raising campaign,” said Gracile. “Then we can start a general drive in the fall.”

“That soon? Do you have any donors in mind?”

“Always,” smiled Gracile, a man who knew what he was doing. A man to be trusted. “Just say the word,
and I can have a meeting with one before the week’s out.” How straightforward! Trust me, said Gracile’s
steady gaze, his businesslike gray suit. It was Gracile’s job to make magic seem respectable, and he did
it well. He looked just enough younger than the trustees to make them feel pleasantly superior, inclined to
let the boy try his hand. Trust me, said his posture, his patience, his eager silence. Trust me, so I can go
home and read my paper. So I can put my briefcase down in the hall, hang my coat up, take off my
shoes and loosen my tie. Pour a beer into a tall cool glass and take that first sip, feel it foam across my
tongue…

“Ahh,” said the president of the Board of Trustees, “I think that’s reasonable, don’t you?”




“Don’t try to charm a charmer,” said Mrs. Szince. “I’ve studied enchantment since you were a gleam in
your father’s eye, young man. Sugar or lemon?”

“Sugar, of course.” Gracile had never been in Mrs. Szince’s home before. The house built of dreams,
people called it—at least, people who’d never been invited in. While she poured tea he scanned the
room, looking for any signs of illusion. The Szinces were the richest family in Osyth; dreams from the
Szince factory were in every drugstore, next to the sleep aids, but it was a questionable industry. Selling
dreams was rather like selling narcotics. Gracile had expected the house to betray some lapse of taste.

The room was coral-colored, full of sunlight, its colors and fabrics worn soft. Tall windows looked into a
garden glowing with roses. A fire burned in the fireplace beside them, its flames almost transparent in the
light. It all set off Mrs. Szince perfectly, making her look twenty years younger than she really was, a
gentle and dignified lady. Her hair was silver, her skin soft and pale and powdery. What did it feel like?
Gracile wondered. Was her glamour strong enough to fool touch as well as sight?

“I wouldn’t think of trying any cheap tricks on you,” said Gracile. “I know when I’m outclassed.” He
smiled an honest smile and thought his hair into just the suggestion of a forelock, his head into just the
suggestion of a bashful nod, his tweeds into just the suggestion of a loyal outdoors-man, rough and
honest. Mrs. Szince gave him a sharp look.
“You may think I don’t know what you’re up to, but I do,” she said. “Not that I’m not enjoying it—while
you’re at it, flatter my looks and tell me why I should buy bricks and boards for these low-class wizards,
who aren’t even intelligent enough to recognize how low-class they are. That dean did not impress me at
all.” She bent forward confidentially. Her eyes sparkled.

The room’s colors looked even softer through the steam from Gracile’s teacup; it was a calm place, a
place where one could lie at ease and listen to the wind in the garden. Looking at the fire, he could
imagine the best of fall outside, leaves the color of those flames blowing past the glass on a wind the color
of steam. He would like to see that, and to see cold spring rains beating against the windows and turn
away from them to this warm corner.

“While you’re at it,” said Mrs. Szince, “tell me why you’ve taken up with those people at the Academy.
You can’t make me believe they appreciate you.”

“I’d prefer it if you told me why you’re asking,” said Gracile, leaning back. “Do I detect an offer?”

“Indeed you do. My late husband’s company needs a lobbyist. Besides myself, of course.”

“I’ve never considered it,” said Gracile. “I’ve never thought about selling dreams.” This was a
time-honored enchanter’s technique, the lie direct, and Gracile knew he did it beautifully; the statement
and the look, both serious enough to be taken as true but a little more intense than truth warranted. Done
properly, it left the hearer no choice but to believe or to join the enchanter in a closed circle of the People
Who Knew what was being said. Trust me, it said. Only you and I know what’s really going on here.

Mrs. Szince looked back at him through the steam, and her white hair gleamed. She was erect and
slender in her old-fashioned green gown, such as enchanters wore when they were creatures of mystery,
Gracile thought. The clothing of a time when people asked enchantment to carry them out of themselves,
to show them something they would remember and long for all the rest of their lives. If he only reached
out, that skin would feel like velvet, or something even finer. Her eyes were the color of dark honey.

“What a lovely liar you are,” she said. “Does anyone at the Academy respect you for it? Well, charm me,
young man. Charm me out of my money, for a bunch of silly wizards who think charming donors is
beneath them. You’ll get them the money, and they’ll say ‘Thank goodness he’s willing to do it, because I
could never lower myself; but then, enchanters have no standards.’ ”

The fire made a whispering sound, and a bird sang. I can’t hear any engines, Gracile thought—a miracle,
here in the city. This was what it sounded like a hundred years ago. Here in this room, a hundred years
ago, enchanters would have gathered. They would have spun marvels. They would not have made
enchantment respectable. They would not have worn suits, or flattered businessmen.

“Do you think modern enchanters have no standards?”

“I think modern enchanters have no imagination,” said Mrs. Szince. “People as a group have no
imagination. It’s small loss for most of them. But enchanters are meant for greater things. What a pity,
that we let people like that dean of wizardry dream for us. What do you dream of, Mr. Gracile?”

“I would never set my dreams up against a professional’s,” Gracile said smoothly. Mrs. Szince sat back
and watched him, and he watched the fire and thought about answering her question.

I dream of momentary things, he might have said to her. Of things seen in a flash and gone when you turn
around; the golden bird, flown out of sight before you can quite see it. Sparks, flying upward through
twilight air; the green flash you might see cross the sky, once in a lifetime, just at that moment when the
sun sets into the sea. Gracile dreamed of falling stars, and the smooth circles on water after a fish has
jumped, and all the beautiful things that go away. It isn’t restful, to dream such dreams. A night spent
chasing them is wasted.

“We all dream of home,” said Mrs. Szince. “We dream of a place where what we are is right, where
what we can do is the right thing. Don’t think it’s easy, making dreams. People come to me for what they
can’t imagine about themselves—people who’ve been told they’re wrong so often, they can’t even
imagine being right.”

“People can be fools, even in dreams,” said Gracile.

“Not in my dreams,” said Mrs. Szince. “It’s a big world, Mr. Gracile. There’s room in it for all of us. We
can all find our place in it, if we can once see ourselves truly.” And this, too, was an enchanter’s trick,
though it could only be used when the victim was already mazed, confused. This rhetorical assertion, that
only a churl could protest against but that only a fool could believe. Manners demanded that the listener
submit to the enchanter’s will, join the circle of those who agreed to be agreeable…

“No,” said Gracile, struggling to his feet. “There are people without a place in the world. But you and I
are not among them. You have your company, and I have the Academy.”

Mrs. Szince smiled. “My,” she said. “What a very complicated statement.” But Gracile knew better than
to explore himself under her guidance. The old lady’s spell was thick around him, here in her home. The
room’s soft colors, the whispering flames, Mrs. Szince herself, were like dreams of color and flame and
woman as they ought to be. Gracile stood in front of the fire and it was all he could do to keep himself
calm and unafraid and respectable.

“You’re too good for me,” he said. “I was a fool to think I could cozen you. But they’re expecting me
back at the Academy for a lunch meeting, to tell them how much money I got from the philanthropic Mrs.
Szince.”

“Oh, must you go? A pity,” said Mrs. Szince. “I’d so like to see what’s under that glamour. Come again,
Mr. Gracile. I’ll go easier on you, next time. Perhaps you’ll have something happier to tell them at the
Academy.”

Gracile found he could walk away, more firmly with every step. The room behind him would become
another flash of memory, to be longed for but never possessed, to be thought of when he needed to face
the trustees again…but lying to himself was not Gracile’s talent, and with every step he felt Mrs. Szince
behind him, ready to welcome him if he would only turn, go to her, bury his face in that soft skin and hair,
and want no more.




“We need to talk about the new building fund,” said the VP Finance.

“Oh, don’t,” sighed Gracile. The VP Finance opened his eyes wide.

“I thought I was going to have to tell you it was that bad,” he said.

“I know my job,” said Gracile. “It may not seem like it at the moment, but I do.”

He liked the VP Finance and never tried to charm him. A man needed someone he could go out for a
drink with. Gracile and the VP Finance went downtown, far away from the Academy and the Faculty
Club. Gracile liked being surrounded by businessmen, grownups. He liked the thick linen and heavy
silver, the way men’s faces were reflected in crystal and china.

“Unless you have something up your sleeve, we’re not going to be able to start the general campaign on
schedule,” said the VP Finance. He looked around the room as though one of its inhabitants might be the
ace up Gracile’s sleeve. “If you’re planning a surprise announcement at the Donor’s Ball, do my ulcers a
favor and tell me now.”

“No surprises,” said Gracile. The VP Finance sighed.

“I don’t want to tell you your business—”

“But you’re going to anyway.”

They drank in silence for a while.

“What made you so sure you could get the money this fast?”

“Mrs. Szince,” said Gracile. “I thought I could get it all from Mrs. Szince. Go ahead, laugh.”

“Why should I laugh? She gives away lots of money.”

“Because she’s an enchantress,” said Gracile. “Why do you think I kept away from her last year? She’s
better than I am. I got cocky.”

“So she turned you down?”

“She was charming. Too charming. If I go back into that house, I won’t come out.”

“Ohh,” said the VP Finance, and grinned. “A magewar!”

“You can’t have a war with only two people,” Gracile pointed out. “And this one’s already been fought
and lost.”

The VP Finance looked across the room with a dreamy expression. “I’m amazed,” he said. “Who’d ever
have thought Mrs. Szince was dangerous? That sweet old woman.” Gracile looked at his friend and
sighed. Mrs. Szince hosted large parties. Probably every man in the room had been in her house, was in
her thrall.

“She wants me to help her sell dreams,” he said.

“Oh, I can imagine! The legislature’s within an inch of declaring her stuff an addictive drug,” said the VP
Finance. “But if she can enchant you, she should be able to handle the legislators.” He shook himself.
“Well, so she’s out. You’ll just have to work the other donors.”

“I don’t know what I want to do,” said Gracile.

“You want to raise the money for this building. After that, you can go work for Mrs. Szince, if that’s
what—”

“I could work for her now, if that’s what I wanted! It’s not that simple.”

The VP Finance spread his hands and creased his round face into a question. “So tell me,” he said.

“I want to work for her,” said Gracile. “But when I am working for her, what’s there for me to want?
When you’ve gotten what you want, you’re not much of an enchanter anymore.”
The VP Finance frowned. “You get what you want all the time.”

“No, I get what you want.” Gracile swept his arm out in a gesture that meant the VP Finance, the
Academy, Osyth, the world. “What I want—I don’t go there. I steer clear of that.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’d be much use to Mrs. Szince, then.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I’d want to please her…she’d want me to keep enchanting people…it
could become very complicated,” said Gracile. He finished his drink and put the glass down hard. They
sat for a few moments looking at the table, and then the VP Finance pushed his own drink over to
Gracile. Gracile drank it.




“Who’s the girl in gold?” Gracile didn’t really want to know. But she was striking, a girl in a
champagne-colored frock, with a head full of gold curls. She stood by the window in the Hotel Eleuthra’s
penthouse ballroom, looking out into the evening light. Was she a donor, growing disgusted with the
Academy as she stood there alone? Or was she from the Academy, neglecting her duties? Gracile didn’t
care. It was just restful to look at something all gold against a calm autumn evening, all blue. The sun
poured in the windows beside her, blocks of glowing air leaning through the glass.

“Who’s the girl in gold?” he asked the Alumnae Officer. She craned her neck.

“Faculty,” she said. “Magister Hoth, from Demonology. Not doing very well, is she?”

“Perhaps I should go talk to her,” said Gracile. If faculty came to fund-raisers, they were supposed to
help raise funds. One demonologist looking superior could undo a lot of Gracile’s charm. Although this
evening, Gracile had charm to spare. He’d raised a lot of money this evening. People who’d already
given to the Academy; people who’d already given all they thought they could afford; people who’d
already given all they really could afford, he raised money from them all. The man running the cloakroom
had given him a few bills, just to be a part of whatever it was that Gracile wanted so much.

What Gracile wanted so much was dancing with the VP Finance at the other end of the room. Mrs.
Szince was silver and gray, mysterious as moonlight. He’d thought she might lose power outside her
home, but she was at her most beautiful, and she was flirting with the VP Finance. She whispered to him
and laughed a low, charming laugh at his replies. She rested her hand on his sleeve, on his lapel; she
leaned her silver head on his bosom when they danced, and the VP Finance gazed over it into the
distance with a rapt expression, noble and protective.

Gracile looked at the pair and felt his glamour flame. He was beautiful, passionate, inconsolable. What
could the donors do, any of them, except give him what little they had?

“She’s a lecher,” said the Alumnae Officer.

“What?”

“Magister Hoth. I suppose mere donors are small beer to her, after spending her days with incubi.”

“Meow,” said Gracile, and they both laughed. Purple shadows were darkening behind the girl in gold,
and the last rays of sunlight slanted across the corner of the ballroom to gild her an avid, brazen
flame-yellow. She turned and looked straight into the light, her eyes wide and un-afraid.
“I thought I should let you know—no, I shouldn’t. Forget it.”

A remark like that is effective, even for gaining the attention of a Development Officer in the middle of a
fund-raising event. Gracile turned all his glamour toward the speaker. It was Magister Hoth, not as
golden as she had been in the sunset. Late at night, under the ballroom’s lights, she was the color of pale
champagne.

“What?”

“This is conflict of interest,” she said. “Damn.”

“How can we have a conflict of interest? We’re here for the same thing.” Gracile looked closer and
discovered she was very angry. Some drunken donor had probably groped her or made rude jokes
about lechery. He gave her his full attention, the kind that made hardened businessmen reach for their
checkbooks. “If anything unsuitable has happened, I want it dealt with as much as you do,” he said.

“You can trust me.”

“It doesn’t matter whether I can trust you or not,” she said. “I’ve called the police.”

Gracile’s habit, whenever moved to shout “WHAT!”, was to stand perfectly still for a moment and then
take two steps back while looking mild and thoughtful. “I see,” he said gently. “What have you called
them to do, and why?”

“One of your guests is carrying an illegal incubus. I saw it in the washroom.”

“Oh, my goodness,” said Gracile. “First, are you sure it’s illegal?”

“I know what I’m talking about,” she said sharply. “I’m Vice-President and a founding member of the
Alliance for Ethical Lechery. Keeping an incubus is nothing less than sexual slavery. I’m only telling you
about this so we can get this woman arrested with the least disruption.”

“Which woman would that be?” asked Gracile, but he already knew. He stood taller as Magister Hoth
searched the room. I knew I was as good as any enchanter living, he thought. It took an incubus to
charm me. They were among the most powerful demons, those spirits of lust. An enchantress holding an
incubus captive, drawing strength from its longings—what would be her limits? And I walked away from
her, thought Gracile. She had all that going for her, and I was still able to walk away.

“Over there,” said Hoth. “The woman in silver.”

Gracile looked across the room at the woman in silver. Mrs. Szince, so beautiful, so powerful, so
seductive. He stared for a minute, cataloguing her strengths. They made this triumph all the greater.

“Are the police coming up here?” he asked.

“No. I told them I’d get her down to the front lobby.”

“That will be my job,” said Gracile. “You did the right thing. I can get her down there without causing a
fuss, and we’ll have this taken care of before the other guests start to leave. You go down and talk with
the police. Give me five minutes.” Hoth had barely walked away when Gracile was doing what he’d
wanted to all evening. He cut in on the VP Finance and took Mrs. Szince away.
She laughed, a low sound of triumph, shaking in his arms.

“You never came back,” she said.

“You were entirely too much for me, ma’am,” said Gracile. “May we speak in private?”

“Of course.”

“Not here,” said Gracile. “Not even on this floor.”

Mrs. Szince laughed again. “I like you,” she said. “You don’t waste my time.”

“I don’t have any time to waste, myself,” said Gracile. He stopped dancing; she took his arm and
swayed, slender against his side. She was like a tree in moonlight. When she smiled up at him she could
have been fifty, or fifteen. And Gracile could have taken her down the East elevator to the lobby and the
police or the West one, that led to the back parts of the hotel and out into the alley…he walked east and
saw all the donors they passed take that catch of breath you take when your everyday life snags for a
second on something wondrous. Romance didn’t end with youth, he saw them thinking. They would have
given Gracile more money, just for showing them this.

“Where are we going?” Mrs. Szince murmured.

“To the lobby,” said Gracile. He watched the numbers change, and felt her leaning on his arm. At floor
twenty-five, he had to speak.

“The police are in the lobby,” he said. “They’re doing some kind of sweep of the district for illegal
incubi.”

Floor twenty—floor eighteen—

“How interesting,” said Mrs. Szince. “Do you know, I fear I’ve forgotten my wrap.” Floor ten—

“I thought it was an interesting coincidence,” said Gracile. “Given that you’d called me about it. In fact, I
invited the academy’s lecher to this party so we could deal with it properly. You’ll be glad to know that
she’s an expert on illegal incubi.”

Mrs. Szince was very still, as still as moonlight. “Excuse me?”

“It must be very distressing to pay so much for something and then find out it’s illegal,” he said. “You did
the right thing in coming to me. The police will have to take your statement about who sold it to you, but
you can hand the incubus over to us. I know you wouldn’t want to remain in possession of it any longer
than you have to.” The floors chimed—floor three, mezzanine—

“My dear boy! You are a challenge, after all,” said Mrs. Szince. “You can’t imagine how much I
appreciate that. It’s lonely to think one is the last. The field has so declined from the days of the great
dreamlords. Too many of us are mere hirelings, nowadays. We waste our talents on the mundane things.”
The door chimed.

“Perhaps we can start over,” said Gracile. “I fear we began on uneven ground.”

“What an intriguing concept,” said Mrs. Szince. “As if it were a game…I’ve always viewed enchantment
as an art, myself. One does the best one can, with whatever comes to hand.” The lobby was before
them, two men in the black uniforms of Osyth Police talking to Hoth, and Mrs. Szince was opening her
purse and smiling at them all. “Mr. Gracile,” she said, “has been so helpful. I believe this is what you’ve
been looking for?”

Gracile had his first look at the incubus, swirling in a moonstone two inches across. It was beautifully set
in silver, an art nouveau brooch of sinuous naked bodies and water plants. Both policemen looked at it
with respect and apprehension as Patsy Hoth reached out to take it. She closed her hand over the gem,
and Gracile realized that she was more beautiful than Mrs. Szince had ever been.

“I’ll have to take it back to the Academy,” she told the police. “The standard procedure is to let it out
into a rabbit colony so it can feed. After that, it’ll be able to get away on its own.”

“Yeah, I know the drill,” said the shorter policeman. He had blond hair in a ponytail, and a loop of gold
chain through one ear. “What about this lady?”—indicating Mrs. Szince in a way she could not have
often been indicated. He might as well have said, “this old bag.”

“Mrs. Szince brought the incubus here tonight to hand it over to us,” Gracile said. “You’re just here to
witness the formalities; we hardly want to be possessing an illegal incubus ourselves, after all.”

“What?” said Hoth, looking up. Gracile turned all his attention toward Mrs. Szince.

“I’ll have them call your car,” he said. “Excuse me for a moment.” Hoth was at his elbow as soon as he
walked toward the bellman’s desk.

“You’re letting her go!”

“You heard her story,” he said. “You saw her give up the incubus. We don’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Oh, sure. And she has enough money to buy the academy.”

“If you don’t like donors, keep out of development. Your car’s coming around,” said Gracile, turning
back to Mrs. Szince. The open door sucked all three of them out into the night, toward the waiting car.
He didn’t want to see her go, to have this victory ended. Mrs. Szince smiled at him, gracious in defeat.

“Never imagine,” she said, “that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me tonight.” She reached out to
pat his sleeve in farewell. She still was a lovely old lady, a wise woman, silk and velvet, even without the
incubus—something shone in the air in front of him, a sparkle of powder, and he heard Hoth yell, saw her
drop the gem as it burst into a dazzle. When his vision cleared Mrs. Szince was gone. Taillights at the
corner might have been her car, might not.

“What is it?” Gracile picked up the brooch. Its stone was moon-colored, the rainbow glints gone. He
offered it to Hoth, but she ignored him and clutched her hands to her middle.

“She let it out,” she groaned. She doubled over and cried out, a harsh sound he had never heard before.

“Are you all right? How far is the hospital?” Gracile asked.

“No,” gasped Hoth. “No hospital. I’m fine.” Gracile put a hand on her arm and gasped himself. It was
nothing he had ever felt before, when they touched; pure desire, that almost shut off the mind. He felt his
glamour flare again. He was beautiful, powerful, invincible. If I’d felt like this a minute ago, Mrs. Szince
would have funded the whole building, he thought, and at that moment a cab pulled up.

“Get in,” he said, pushing Hoth down into the cab’s back seat, and she pulled him after her, clutched his
coat, rubbed against him.

“Where to?” asked the cab driver, turning half around. “You just want me to drive?”
“Get out of here,” said Gracile. “Around the block. Anywhere.” He turned back to Hoth, and she pulled
his head down and kissed him. He kissed back, but the cab turned a sharp corner and they slipped apart.
The desire diluted as quickly as it had come. “What is this?” he asked, and Hoth laughed up at him. She
was a pale blur, half-lying across the seat. They passed a streetlight and it lit up her face, excited and
shining.

“Sex,” she said. “It’s called sex.”

“But it isn’t real,” said Gracile, bracing himself against the back of the driver’s seat. Hoth laughed again
and reached up, putting a hand on the back of his neck. He felt her fingernails brush the short ends of
hair, her fingers opening and the warm part of her hand touching his skin, and then that power was filling
him again and the delight of using it was the only thing that mattered.




It must have been twenty years since Gracile had looked at his true face. He knew he had done it when
his last classmate retired. He had looked at the beginning of old age, then, and sworn at it, and thought
about things he wanted until his glamour was strong enough to cover that face. Ever since, he had put the
glamour on in bed before getting up. But this morning he was in bed with a woman, a golden woman lying
too close for him to see her clearly, and he could not call up any longing, could not think of anything he
wanted to change.

He felt his sunken cheeks, pinched them up into bristly folds. She’ll never sleep with you again if she sees
your real face, he thought. She’ll hate you. But the folds didn’t tighten under his fingers, and then he was
afraid, cold-sweat afraid, of—he didn’t know what.

Gracile snuck out of his own bed, silent as a schoolboy creeping out before breakfast. His bare feet
knew every crack in the floor and every shift in the pattern of sunlight and shadow that carpeted the hall
under the window. He looked out into the golden elm, his heart bouncing in his chest, just as a swirl of
leaves spun down from it. They said you could see the dryad of the tree in such a whirlwind of leaves.
They said you could rush into the eddy and clasp it to yourself…Gracile watched it fall to the ground,
choking down thought and panic, and went on to the bathroom.

This was himself, this stranger looking out of his mirror. Beneath his glamour, he had grown old. Gray
hair and stubble. Lines—the deep creases around eyes and mouth that puzzle whoever looks at the old
man. What expressions do they echo? Was this a man who smiled or scowled? Impossible to tell what
this face had been doing, hidden away by itself. Its eyes were washed out, its skin tough and bristly. And
as he squinted at himself in the mirror, wondering whether it was blurred by mist or farsightedness, the
bathroom door opened. Living alone, he never locked it. Patsy Hoth walked in.

“I—Oh!” she said, shocked twice—by walking in on someone, and by what she had walked in on.
“Excuse me,” and she was gone.

“Wait!” said Gracile, and looked into the mirror again, just for a second, seeing what she must have seen
in that second. Old. Decrepit. A geezer. He pulled the door open, acting faster than he could think, and
what he said almost surprised him. “You must be Will’s friend,” he said, and Hoth’s retreating back
stopped. “I’m his father,” said Gracile. “Bill, senior.”
“He doesn’t usually bring women home,” said Gracile. “You’re the first in—oh, years. I was still living
with his mother, then. She was still alive.” He had never said such a thing before. The public Gracile was
a bachelor, with a hint of mysterious heartbreak in his past.

“I’m sorry,” said Hoth.

“Don’t be. That was a long time ago. But how about you—are you and Will serious?”

“Us? No,” said Hoth. “It was an accident. An incubus.” She looked into her coffee. “It was my own
fault,” she said. “If I’d had my field kit, I could have let it out with no harm done.”

“You didn’t take your field kit to a donors’ ball? What were you thinking of?” chaffed Gracile. It was
morning outside, bright and merry, slipping carelessly away into day. He ate bacon and eggs and to hell
with his cholesterol.

“Is your family from Osyth?” she asked, and again Gracile had that strange feeling, the disorientation of
having to make up a new life.

“No,” he said. “I was born in the country outside Selanto. We moved here after the war.” He said this
delicately, not sure it would hold his weight, but it did. It was the truth, after all. The truth! He could tell
her about his real life, he thought suddenly. The things that had meant so much to him—the farm, the
family. Growing up. The war, his wife. All the things that had never happened to Will, that a man in his
forties could never admit to knowing. He found himself talking, babbling like any lonely old man. Like an
old man who had jumped off a cliff, who needed to say all he knew before he hit bottom. She listened,
drinking coffee, and he couldn’t tell whether she was interested or polite, and he didn’t care.

“You remind me of a girl I met in the war,” he said. “She had a head of curls like that—and I think she
was magic, as well, because she never got hurt. The whole village was bombed away, except their one
house.” He sighed. “I’ve had a full life. It’s Will I worry about. He hardly ever meets a nice girl.”

“I’m a lecher,” said Hoth. “I have to be a nice girl. If you give them an inch, the lab gets out of control.
So I don’t carry on affairs.”

“It’s too bad…”

“We hardly even know each other. It was just an accident.”

“Most magicians,” said Gracile, “won’t hang around with enchanters.”

“I don’t see why not. These distinctions are stupid…”

“But.”

“Well—I would always wonder if I was being charmed.”

Gracile leaned forward, propped his bristly chin in his shaky hands. “D’you drink? D’you worry you
might get intoxicated?”

“It’s not quite the same.”

“It is. The world—it’s always moving,” said Gracile. “You can hold on and and try to keep everything
under control, or you can let go and fly with it. You kids have never had a war. Things pick you up and
take you with ’em. That’s what life really is, not this sitting in one spot like a barnacle.”

“What happened to the girl in the house?” asked Hoth, changing the subject.
“Eh?”

“You were just telling me. The house that didn’t get bombed.” Gracile told her the rest of his story about
war, cold and muddy, and one house standing untouched among ruins. He told her about how warmth
and light feel to a man coming in from war, and about the way song can rise up around a blue plate on the
mantelpiece, and how beautiful a woman is when she gets up barefoot at midnight, wrapped in a ragged
sheet. When she leans against a door frame and looks at a dead land and says, “Nothing ever really
ends. The important things go on.” Hoth listened like a child, forgetting her coffee.

“But what happened to her?”

“I told you. The important things don’t end.”

Hoth sighed, and then sharpened. “Was that enchantment? Are you putting a spell on me?”

“Not that I know of,” said Gracile dryly. “And I think I would know.”

He had meant to send her off by herself in a cab, but they were friends by then. They rode downtown
together and said goodbye at the Hotel Eleuthra. He put his thin old arms around her, and gave her a
father’s kiss on the hair.

“Will should be home by midnight,” he said. “Call him.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “He didn’t even leave a note.”

“I’ll give him hell!” said Gracile. “I didn’t bring him up to act like that.” As soon as she was gone into the
parking garage, he went into a florist’s. He had roses and a note sent to her office. I must want something
to come of this, he thought; but the face that looked back from the cooler doors was still an old man’s.

Gracile spent the day in open spaces around Osyth, not afraid of being recognized. He watched birds
and beasts, sat in Westpark looking out over the edge of the plateau, walked along the ley-line where it
ran toward the Academy, overgrown with hawthorn, alder, fairy rings and mandrake. He walked for
miles, until he wanted to sit down. Wanted dinner. Wanted a beer, and to go home and find someone
waiting for him, waiting to hear his stories…at the outskirts of the Academy he looked into a window and
saw an echo of his younger self, and headed in to his office.

“A package came for you,” said his secretary.




A package too small for flyers or promotional videotapes, a package the size to hold jewelry; and even
before he touched it, he felt Mrs. Szince’s breath on it. A package full of wonders. A package of
treasure, of longings…for what greater treasure is there, Gracile thought as he stood over the open box,
what greater treasure is there than the dream of treasure? He touched it with one finger—absurd, such
caution for a tiny piece of silver—and felt the trapped spirit’s hunger surge through him. And in that
instant, the old man was gone. He had spent one day in the open, one day looking at the world without
longing and letting it look at him, and now he was gone. He was put away, with all his memories, closed
away as firmly as the box in Gracile’s pocket.

Gracile stood at the window looking at the Academy lit from one side, shadows pooling between the
buildings, with his own silhouette laid over them all, as solid and unchanging as any of them. He looked
for a long time, until the campus lights came on below and he could see himself clearly in the glass,
watching unchanged as suns and seasons faded away, and then he went back to his desk. He set the box
on his blotter and put away the note and wrapping paper in a desk drawer, and then he picked up the
phone and dialed.

“Magister Hoth’s lab,” said a student voice. “She’s not in—may I take a message?”

“This is William Harrison Gracile,” he said. “Tell her Mrs. Szince has sent me another incubus for her to
release. And tell her—tell her my father would like to see her again.”

                                        October in the Chair

                                                Neil Gaiman




Neil Gaiman [www.neilgaiman.com], who lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a world-famous
comics writer, and an excellent writer of fantastic fiction whose popularity has been growing in
recent years. His comic book Sandman is the primary basis for his reputation to date. According to
his website,“ Sandman the comic sold over a million copies a year. The collections have sold
several million copies in paperback and hardback, and remain in print.” The Los Angeles Times
described it as “The greatest epic in the history of comic books” and “the best monthly comic
book in the world.” He is a charismatic public figure in the fantasy and horror fields, and a
snappy dresser. However, 2002 was the year that he blossomed as a fiction writer, after years of
moderate success, with the bestselling novel American Gods and the distinguished young adult
novel Coraline. His previous complicated publishing history includes Angels and Visitations (1993),
a hardcover small press collection of his short fiction, prose, and journalism, issued to celebrate
ten years as a professional writer. Before that, he was co-author, with Terry Pratchett, of Good
Omens, a humorous fantasy novel, and was best known for his humorous works, Ghastly Beyond
Belief (1985) and Don’t Panic (1987), and, as editor, a book of poetry, Now We Are Sick (1991).

“October in the Chair” appeared in Conjunctions: 39 (see also the stories by Hopkinson and
Miéville later in this book). It is an homage to Ray Bradbury’s fantasy stories and quite engaging
in its own right.




                                           —For Ray Bradbury



October was in the chair, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled
from the trees that circled the grove. The twelve of them sat around a campfire roasting huge sausages on
sticks, which spat and crackled as the fat dripped onto the burning applewood, and drinking fresh apple
cider, tangy and tart in their mouths.

April took a dainty bite from her sausage, which burst open as she bit into it, spilling hot juice down her
chin. “Beshrew and suck-ordure on it,” she said.

Squat March, sitting next to her, laughed, low and dirty, and then pulled out a huge, filthy handkerchief.
“Here you go,” he said.

April wiped her chin. “Thanks,” she said. “The cursed bag-of-innards burned me. I’ll have a blister there
tomorrow.”

September yawned. “You are such a hypochondriac,” he said, across the fire. “And such language.” He
had a pencil-thin mustache, and was balding in the front, which made his forehead seem high, and wise.

“Lay off her,” said May. Her dark hair was cropped short against her skull and she wore sensible boots.
She smoked a small brown cigarillo, which smelled heavily of cloves. “She’s sensitive.”

“Oh puhlease,” said September. “Spare me.”

October, conscious of his position in the chair, sipped his apple cider, cleared his throat, and said,
“Okay. Who wants to begin?” The chair he sat in was carved from one large block of oak wood, inlaid
with ash, with cedar, and with cherrywood. The other eleven sat on tree stumps equally spaced about the
small bonfire. The tree stumps had been worn smooth and comfortable by years of use.

“What about the minutes?” asked January. “We always do minutes when I’m in the chair.”

“But you aren’t in the chair now, are you, dear?” said September, an elegant creature of mock
solicitude.

“What about the minutes?” repeated January. “You can’t ignore them.”

“Let the little buggers take care of themselves,” said April, one hand running through her long blond hair.
“And I think September should go first.”

September preened and nodded. “Delighted,” he said.

“Hey,” said February. “Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey. I didn’t hear the chairman ratify that. Nobody
starts till October says who starts, and then nobody else talks. Can we have maybe the tiniest semblance
of order here?” He peered at them, small, pale, dressed entirely in blues and grays.

“It’s fine,” said October. His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire
orange and wine red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple red.
He looked like a friend, like someone you had known all your life. “September can go first. Let’s just get
it rolling.”

September placed the end of his sausage into his mouth, chewed daintily, and drained his cider mug.
Then he stood up and bowed to the company and began to speak.

“Laurent DeLisle was the finest chef in all of Seattle; at least, Laurent DeLisle thought so, and the
Michelin stars on his door confirmed him in his opinion. He was a remarkable chef, it is true—his minced
lamb brioche had won several awards, his smoked quail and white truffle ravioli had been described in
the Gastronome as ‘the tenth wonder of the world.’ But it was his wine cellar…ah, his wine cellar…that
was his source of pride and his passion.

“I understand that. The last of the white grapes are harvested in me, and the bulk of the reds: I appreciate
fine wines, the aroma, the taste, the aftertaste as well.
“Laurent DeLisle bought his wines at auctions, from private wine lovers, from reputable dealers: he would
insist on a pedigree for each wine, for wine frauds are, alas, too common, when the bottle is selling for
perhaps five, ten, a hundred thousand dollars, or pounds, or euros.

“The treasure—the jewel—the rarest of the rare and the ne plus ultra of his temperature-controlled wine
cellar was a bottle of 1902 Château Lafitte. It was on the wine list at $120,000, although it was, in true
terms, priceless, for it was the last bottle of its kind.”

“Excuse me,” said August politely. He was the fattest of them all, his thin hair combed in golden wisps
across his pink pate.

September glared down at his neighbor. “Yes?”

“Is this the one where some rich dude buys the wine to go with the dinner, and the chef decides that the
dinner the rich dude ordered isn’t good enough for the wine, so he sends out a different dinner, and the
guy takes one mouthful, and he’s got, like, some rare allergy and he just dies like that, and the wine never
gets drunk after all?”

September said nothing. He looked a great deal.

“Because if it is, you told it before. Years ago. Dumb story then. Dumb story now.” August smiled. His
pink cheeks shone in the firelight.

September said, “Obviously pathos and culture are not to everyone’s taste. Some people prefer their
barbecues and beer, and some of us like—”

February said, “Well, I hate to say this, but he kind of does have a point. It has to be a new story.”

September raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “I’m done,” he said abruptly. He sat down on his
stump.

They looked at each other across the fire, the months of the year.

June, hesitant and clean, raised her hand and said, “I have one about a guard on the X-ray machines at
La Guardia Airport, who could read all about people from the outlines of their luggage on the screen, and
one day she saw a luggage X ray so beautiful that she fell in love with the person, and she had to figure
out which person in the line it was, and she couldn’t, and she pined for months and months. And when
the person came through again she knew it this time, and it was the man, and he was a wizened old
Indian man and she was pretty and black and, like twenty-five, and she knew it would never work out
and she let him go, because she could also see from the shapes of his bags on the screen that he was
going to die soon.”

October said, “Fair enough, young June. Tell that one.”

June stared at him, like a spooked animal. “I just did,” she said.

October nodded. “So you did,” he said, before any of the others could say anything. And then he said,
“Shall we proceed to my story, then?”

February sniffed. “Out of order there, big fella. The man in the chair only tells his story when the rest of
us are through. Can’t go straight to the main event.”

May was placing a dozen chestnuts on the grate above the fire, deploying them into patterns with her
tongs. “Let him tell his story if he wants to,” she said. “God knows it can’t be worse than the one about
the wine. And I have things to be getting back to. Flowers don’t bloom by themselves. All in favor?”

“You’re taking this to a formal vote?” February said. “I cannot believe this. I cannot believe this is
happening.” He mopped his brow with a handful of tissues, which he pulled from his sleeve.

Seven hands were raised. Four people kept their hands down—February, September, January, and July.
(“I don’t have anything personal on this,” said July apologetically. “It’s purely procedural. We shouldn’t
be setting precedents.”)

“It’s settled then,” said October. “Is there anything anyone would like to say before I begin?”

“Um. Yes. Sometimes,” said June, “sometimes I think somebody’s watching us from the woods and then
I look and there isn’t anybody there. But I still think it.”

April said, “That’s because you’re crazy.”

“Mm,” said September, to everybody. “She’s sensitive but she’s still the cruelest.”

“Enough,” said October. He stretched in his chair. He cracked a cobnut with his teeth, pulled out the
kernel, and threw the fragments of shell into the fire, where they hissed and spat and popped, and he
began.

There was a boy, October said, who was miserable at home, although they did not beat him. He did not
fit well, not his family, not his town, nor even his life. He had two older brothers, who were twins, older
than he was, and who hurt him or ignored him, and were popular. They played football: some games one
twin would score more and be the hero, and some games the other would. Their little brother did not
play football. They had a name for their brother. They called him the Runt.

They had called him the Runt since he was a baby, and at first their mother and father had chided them
for it.

The twins said, “But he is the runt of the litter. Look at him . Look at us .” The boys were six when they
said this. Their parents thought it was cute. A name like “the Runt” can be infectious, so pretty soon the
only person who called him Donald was his grandmother, when she telephoned him on his birthday, and
people who did not know him.

Now, perhaps because names have power, he was a runt: skinny and small and nervous. He had been
born with a runny nose, and it had not stopped running in a decade. At mealtimes, if the twins liked the
food they would steal his; if they did not, they would contrive to place their food on his plate and he
would find himself in trouble for leaving good food uneaten.

Their father never missed a football game, and would buy an ice cream afterward for the twin who had
scored the most, and a consolation ice cream for the other twin, who hadn’t. Their mother described
herself as a newspaper-woman, although she mostly sold advertising space and subscriptions: she had
gone back to work full-time once the twins were capable of taking care of themselves.

The other kids in the boy’s class admired the twins. They had called him Donald for several weeks in first
grade, until the word trickled down that his brothers called him the Runt. His teachers rarely called him
anything at all, although among themselves they could sometimes be heard to say that it was a pity the
youngest Covay boy didn’t have the pluck or the imagination or the life of his brothers.

The Runt could not have told you when he first decided to run away, nor when his daydreams crossed
the border and became plans. By the time he admitted to himself that he was leaving he had a large
Tupperware container hidden beneath a plastic sheet behind the garage, containing three Mars bars, two
Milky Ways, a bag of nuts, a small bag of licorice, a flashlight, several comics, an unopened packet of
beef jerky, and thirty-seven dollars, most of it in quarters. He did not like the taste of beef jerky, but he
had read that explorers had survived for weeks on nothing else, and it was when he put the packet of
beef jerky into the Tupper-ware box and pressed the lid down with a pop that he knew he was going to
have to run away.

He had read books, newspapers, and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad
people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind
people out there, side by side with the monsters.

The Runt was a thin ten-year-old, with a runny nose, and a blank expression. If you were to try to pick
him out of a group of boys, you’d be wrong. He’d be the other one. Over at the side. The one your eye
slipped over.

All through September he put off leaving. It took a really bad Friday, during the course of which both of
his brothers sat on him (and the one who sat on his face broke wind, and laughed uproariously) to decide
that whatever monsters were waiting out in the world would be bearable, perhaps even preferable.

Saturday, his brothers were meant to be looking after him, but soon they went into town to see a girl they
liked. The Runt went around the back of the garage and took the Tupperware container out from
beneath the plastic sheeting. He took it up to his bedroom. He emptied his school-bag onto his bed, filled
it with his candies and comics and quarters and the beef jerky. He filled an empty soda bottle with
water.

The Runt walked into the town and got on the bus. He rode west, ten-dollars-in-quarters worth of west,
to a place he didn’t know, which he thought was a good start, then he got off the bus and walked. There
was no sidewalk now, so when cars came past he would edge over into the ditch, to safety.

The sun was high. He was hungry, so he rummaged in his bag and pulled out a Mars bar. After he ate it
he found he was thirsty, and he drank almost half of the water from his soda bottle before he realized he
was going to have to ration it. He had thought that once he got out of the town he would see springs of
fresh water everywhere, but there were none to be found. There was a river, though, that ran beneath a
wide bridge.

The Runt stopped halfway across the bridge to stare down at the brown water. He remembered
something he had been told in school: that, in the end, all rivers flowed into the sea. He had never been to
the seashore. He clambered down the bank and followed the river. There was a muddy path along the
side of the riverbank, and an occasional beer can or plastic snack packet to show that people had been
that way before, but he saw no one as he walked.

He finished his water.

He wondered if they were looking for him yet. He imagined police cars and helicopters and dogs, all
trying to find him. He would evade them. He would make it to the sea.

The river ran over some rocks, and it splashed. He saw a blue heron, its wings wide, glide past him, and
he saw solitary end-of-season dragonflies, and sometimes small clusters of midges, enjoying the Indian
summer. The blue sky became dusk gray, and a bat swung down to snatch insects from the air. The Runt
wondered where he would sleep that night.

Soon the path divided, and he took the branch that led away from the river, hoping it would lead to a
house, or to a farm with an empty barn. He walked for some time, as the dusk deepened, until, at the end
of the path, he found a farmhouse, half tumbled down and unpleasant-looking. The Runt walked around
it, becoming increasingly certain as he walked that nothing could make him go inside, and then he climbed
over a broken fence to an abandoned pasture, and settled down to sleep in the long grass with his
schoolbag for his pillow.

He lay on his back, fully dressed, staring up at the sky. He was not in the slightest bit sleepy.

“They’ll be missing me by now,” he told himself. “They’ll be worried.”

He imagined himself coming home in a few years’ time. The delight on his family’s faces as he walked up
the path to home. Their welcome. Their love….

He woke some hours later, with the bright moonlight in his face. He could see the whole world—as
bright as day, like in the nursery rhyme, but pale and without colors. Above him, the moon was full, or
almost, and he imagined a face looking down at him, not unkindly, in the shadows and shapes of the
moon’s surface.

A voice said, “Where do you come from?”

He sat up, not scared, not yet, and looked around him. Trees. Long grass. “Where are you? I don’t see
you.”

Something he had taken for a shadow moved, beside a tree on the edge of the pasture, and he saw a boy
of his own age.

“I’m running away from home,” said the Runt.

“Whoa,” said the boy. “That must have taken a whole lot of guts.”

The Runt grinned with pride. He didn’t know what to say.

“You want to walk a bit?” said the boy.

“Sure,” said the Runt. He moved his schoolbag, so it was next to the fence post, so he could always find
it again.

They walked down the slope, giving a wide berth to the old farmhouse.

“Does anyone live there?” asked the Runt.

“Not really,” said the other boy. He had fair, fine hair that was almost white in the moonlight. “Some
people tried a long time back, but they didn’t like it, and they left. Then other folk moved in. But nobody
lives there now. What’s your name?”

“Donald,” said the Runt. And then, “But they call me the Runt. What do they call you?”

The boy hesitated. “Dearly,” he said.

“That’s a cool name.”

Dearly said, “I used to have another name, but I can’t read it anymore.”

They squeezed through a huge iron gateway, rusted part open, part closed into position, and they were in
the little meadow at the bottom of the slope.

“This place is cool,” said the Runt.
There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys,
and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what
sort of a place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.

“Who’s buried here?” he asked.

“Mostly okay people,” said Dearly. “There used to be a town over there. Past those trees. Then the
railroad came and they built a stop in the next town over, and our town sort of dried up and fell in and
blew away. There’s bushes and trees now, where the town was. You can hide in the trees and go into
the old houses and jump out.”

The Runt said, “Are they like that farmhouse up there? The houses?” He didn’t want to go in them, if they
were.

“No,” said Dearly. “Nobody goes in them, except for me. And some animals, sometimes. I’m the only
kid around here.”

“I figured,” said the Runt.

“Maybe we can go down and play in them,” said Dearly.

“That would be pretty cool,” said the Runt.

It was a perfect early October night: almost as warm as summer, and the harvest moon dominated the
sky. You could see everything.

“Which one of these is yours?” asked the Runt.

Dearly straightened up proudly, and took the Runt by the hand. He pulled him over to an overgrown
corner of the field. The two boys pushed aside the long grass. The stone was set flat into the ground, and
it had dates carved into it from a hundred years before. Much of it was worn away, but beneath the dates
it was possible to make out the words DEARLY DEPARTED WILL NEVER BE FORG.

“Forgotten, I’d wager,” said Dearly.

“Yeah, that’s what I’d say too,” said the Runt.

They went out of the gate, down a gully, and into what remained of the old town. Trees grew through
houses, and buildings had fallen in on themselves, but it wasn’t scary. They played hide-and-seek. They
explored. Dearly showed the Runt some pretty cool places, including a one-room cottage that he said
was the oldest building in that whole part of the country. It was in pretty good shape, too, considering
how old it was.

“I can see pretty good by moonlight,” said the Runt. “Even inside. I didn’t know that it was so easy.”

“Yeah,” said Dearly. “And after a while you get good at seeing even when there ain’t any moonlight.”

The Runt was envious.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” said the Runt. “Is there somewhere around here?”

Dearly thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t do that stuff anymore. There are a
few out-houses still standing, but they may not be safe. Best just to do it in the woods.”

“Like a bear,” said the Runt.
He went out the back, into the woods which pushed up against the wall of the cottage, and went behind a
tree. He’d never done that before, in the open air. He felt like a wild animal. When he was done he
wiped himself with fallen leaves. Then he went back out the front. Dearly was sitting in a pool of
moonlight, waiting for him.

“How did you die?” asked the Runt.

“I got sick,” said Dearly. “My maw cried and carried on something fierce. Then I died.”

“If I stayed here with you,” said the Runt, “would I have to be dead too?”

“Maybe,” said Dearly. “Well, yeah. I guess.”

“What’s it like? Being dead.”

“I don’t mind it,” admitted Dearly. “Worst thing is not having anyone to play with.”

“But there must be lots of people up in that meadow,” said the Runt. “Don’t they ever play with you?”

“Nope,” said Dearly. “Mostly, they sleep. And even when they walk, they can’t be bothered to just go
and see stuff and do things. They can’t be bothered with me. You see that tree?”

It was a beech tree, its smooth gray bark cracked with age. It sat in what must once have been the town
square, ninety years before.

“Yeah,” said the Runt.

“You want to climb it?”

“It looks kind of high.”

“It is. Real high. But it’s easy to climb. I’ll show you.”

It was easy to climb. There were handholds in the bark, and the boys went up the big beech tree like a
couple of monkeys, like pirates, like warriors. From the top of the tree one could see the whole world.
The sky was starting to lighten, just a hair, in the east.

Everything waited. The night was ending. The world was holding its breath, preparing to begin again.

“This was the best day I ever had,” said the Runt.

“Me too,” said Dearly. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” said the Runt.

He imagined himself going on, walking across the world, all the way to the sea. He imagined himself
growing up and growing older, bringing himself up by his bootstraps. Somewhere in there he would
become fabulously wealthy. And then he would go back to the house with the twins in it, and he would
drive up to their door in his wonderful car, or perhaps he would turn up at a football game (in his
imagination the twins had neither aged nor grown) and look down at them, in a kindly way. He would
buy them all—the twins, his parents—a meal at the finest restaurant in the city, and they would tell him
how badly they had misunderstood him and mistreated him. They would apologize and weep, and
through it all he would say nothing. He would let their apologies wash over him. And then he would give
each of them a gift, and afterward he would leave their lives once more, this time for good.
It was a fine dream.

In reality, he knew, he would keep walking, and be found tomorrow, or the day after that, and go home
and be yelled at and everything would be the same as it ever was, and day after day, hour after hour, until
the end of time he’d still be the Runt, only they’d be mad at him for leaving.

“I have to go to bed soon,” said Dearly. He started to climb down the big beech tree.

Climbing down the tree was harder, the Runt found. You couldn’t see where you were putting your feet,
and had to feel around for somewhere to put them. Several times he slipped and slid, but Dearly went
down ahead of him, and would say things like “Just a little to the right now,” and they both made it down
just fine.

The sky continued to lighten, and the moon was fading, and it was harder to see. They clambered back
through the gully. Sometimes the Runt wasn’t sure that Dearly was there at all, but when he got to the
top, he saw the boy waiting for him.

They didn’t say much as they walked up to the meadow filled with stones. The Runt put his arm over
Dearly’s shoulder, and they walked in step up the hill.

“Well,” said Dearly. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“I had a good time,” said the Runt.

“Yeah,” said Dearly. “Me too.”

Down in the woods somewhere a bird began to sing.

“If I wanted to stay—?” said the Runt, all in a burst. Then he stopped. I might never get another
chance to change it , thought the Runt. He’d never get to the sea. They’d never let him.

Dearly didn’t say anything, not for a long time. The world was gray. More birds joined the first.

“I can’t do it,” said Dearly eventually. “But they might.”

“Who?”

“The ones in there.” The fair boy pointed up the slope to the tumbledown farmhouse with the jagged
broken windows, silhouetted against the dawn. The gray light had not changed it.

The Runt shivered. “There’s people in there?” he said. “I thought you said it was empty.”

“It ain’t empty,” said Dearly. “I said nobody lives there. Different things.” He looked up at the sky. “I got
to go now,” he added. He squeezed the Runt’s hand. And then he just wasn’t there any longer.

The Runt stood in the little graveyard all on his own, listening to the birdsong on the morning air. Then he
made his way up the hill. It was harder by himself.

He picked up his schoolbag from the place he had left it. He ate his last Milky Way and stared at the
tumbledown building. The empty windows of the farmhouse were like eyes, watching him.

It was darker inside there. Darker than anything.

He pushed his way through the weed-choked yard. The door to the farmhouse was mostly crumbled
away. He stopped at the doorway, hesitating, wondering if this was wise. He could smell damp, and rot,
and something else underneath. He thought he heard something move, deep in the house, in the cellar,
maybe, or the attic. A shuffle, maybe. Or a hop. It was hard to tell.

Eventually, he went inside.




Nobody said anything. October filled his wooden mug with apple cider when he was done, and drained
it, and filled it again.

“It was a story,” said December. “I’ll say that for it.” He rubbed his pale blue eyes with a fist. The fire
was almost out.

“What happened next?” asked June nervously. “After he went into the house?”

May, sitting next to her, put her hand on June’s arm. “Better not to think about it,” she said.

“Anyone else want a turn?” asked August. There was no reply. “Then I think we’re done.”

“That needs to be an official motion,” pointed out February.

“All in favor?” said October. There was a chorus of “Ayes.” “All against?” Silence. “Then I declare this
meeting adjourned.”

They got up from the fireside, stretching and yawning, and walked away into the wood, in ones and twos
and threes, until only October and his neighbor remained.

“Your turn in the chair next time,” said October.

“I know,” said November. He was pale, and thin lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. “I
like your stories. Mine are always too dark.”

“I don’t think so,” said October. “It’s just that your nights are longer. And you aren’t as warm.”

“Put it like that,” said November, “and I feel better. I suppose we can’t help who we are.”

“That’s the spirit,” said his brother. And they touched hands as they walked away from the fire’s orange
embers, taking their stories with them back into the dark.

                                       Greaves, This Is Serious

                                               William Mingin




William Mingin lives in central New Jersey, where he runs a small book-exporting company. He
has published poetry and fiction in the small press, and over 70 essays, articles, and book reviews
(reviews for the St. Petersburg [Fl] Times, The Annual Review of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and
Publishers Weekly). He attended Clarion West and writing courses taught by Carol Emshwiller and
Shawna McCarthy. “I’ve got English degrees from Yale and Princeton, if you want to go back
that far,” he says. But he has published only a few short stories to date. From what we have read,
we hope for more, soon. His works are literate and embedded in a deep knowledge of fantastic
literature, as well as literature in general.

“Greaves, This Is Serious” appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated. It is number seven in a series of
short short stories called 1001 Deaths, others of which have been published there. It is a short
literary parody of the Jeeves stories of P. G. Wodehouse, and a fantasy with the effect of a neat
shot of whiskey.




Greaves oozed into the bedchamber bearing what I took to be that tonic for the nerves of which, with
his uncanny brain-power, he knew the young master had a desperate need. The man is little shy of
genius. He lives on fish.

“Greaves,” the selfsame young master—I—croaked out, “is it day again already?”

“Yes, sir. In fact, we are well into the post meridian, sir.”

“And is that which you hold the precious restorative cup of your concoction?”

“Yes, sir. I was sure that you would want it, sir.”

“I do. Bring it ’round.”

He brought the odd mixture—egg, tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, and Heaven knows what
else—ambrosia, eye of newt, and butterscotch pudd, for all I, young Ferdinand Brewster, cared—and I
downed it. There followed a sudden, threatening stillness; the next moment the Fellow Upstairs was back
at the old stand, and all was right with the world—or at least, with long-suffering self.

“Greaves, in the depths of my painful hibernation, did I hear someone ringing for entry?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Dodgson, sir.”

“Aunt Adele? And you kept her from the Inner Sanctum? Stout work, Greaves.”

“Indeed, sir, I can take only partial credit for the happy result; most belongs to the intense disgust which
Mrs. Dodgson presently holds for you. She would not see you at present, she said, if you crawled to her
domicile on your knees, sir.”

“Right ho! How did I work this magic, Greaves?”

“Perhaps her errand would enlighten you, sir. Mrs. Dodgson requested me to remind you when, as she
put it, ‘he finally rouses himself from his alcoholic stupor,’ that you owe her £20 for standing your bail.”

“Bail? As bad as all that, eh?”

“Yes, sir. Evidently, sir, you—as you put it last night—‘chucked biggish stones’ at the window of a
government ministry while singing songs that were not, perhaps, suitable for all listeners.”

“I say! Dashed sticky business, that, eh, what? I’m jolly well out of it.”
“I am afraid, sir, that you will have to appear before a tribunal at some juncture. Although I am sure that
someone in your position, and with a clean record, will merely have a fine to pay, sir.”

“You don’t mean to tell me I gave them my name, do you?”

“Evidently you could not remember any name, sir, including your own, so that the constabulary was
forced to—ahem—go through your pockets to ascertain it.”

“Distinctly rummy! Speaking of which—what was in those drinks you provided yestereve?”

“In the drinks of most of the company, sir, a light mixture of champagne and various liqueurs. In yours, a
mixture of champagne and, as you so aptly say, rum, containing alcohol in a proportion of slightly higher
than 75%.”

“150 proof?”

“151, sir, to be precise.”

“That was a bit much on your part, Greaves, I must say. Were you trying to render the young master non
compos ? I’ll have a devil of a time now trying to carry on the wretched political career Aunt Adele was
trying to construct for me.”

“Yes, sir. I believe you now have no future in politics. Mrs. Dodgson seemed also of this persuasion, and
instructed me to convey her sentiment that you are, and I quote, ‘a worthless idler, a waste of a human
form, a trifler, a blood-sucker, a drone.’ ”

“All rather ripe,” I said, reflecting gloomily. And then came the light. “Wait—you say my political career
is finished, and my Aunt says she will shun me, for the foreseeable f., like the proverbial p.?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And all I have to pay for this excellent result is a fine and a rapidly vanishing badness of the head?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Greaves, you are a genius! An unmitigated wonder! I must say, I can’t see why you shouldn’t go down
in legend and song!”

“Thank you, sir. I am most gratified to hear you say so.”

“Send the £20 round to my Aunt, and when you do—take another twenty for yourself. You’ve earned
it.”

“Thank you, sir.” Greaves went to the dresser to find the required sums among the bills scattered thereon
and




I set my teacup down. “Good of you to rally round, Greaves,” I said, with the frank appreciation that,
when all is said and done, noblesse oblige . “Awfully, sportingly Feudal. Imagine Aunt Adele setting me
up to run that charity wheeze—I mean, unwed mothers! I blush to think! Hundreds of droopy, weepy
females, giving yours truly the old fish eye, I’m sure. The look of silent reproach, don’t you know, and so
undeserved! To say nothing of the squalling offspring!”
“I’m sure Mrs. Dodgson had in mind only an administrative position, sir, and not
actual—ahem—‘hands-on-care.’ ”

“What then? Just another job, wouldn’t you say?”

“Precisely why I thought it unsuitable, sir.”

“Well, good thing the place was all wood. I suppose the insurance will let them build again, what?”

“Unfortunately, sir, the edifice in question, being located in rather—ahem—questionable environs, was
uninsurable.”

“Ah, well. I suppose they’ll find someplace else to run that blighted hole. Hmm, Greaves….”

“Yes, sir?”

“What is holding up the eggs and b.?”

“I am going just now to collect them, sir.”

“Good job,” I said, finishing the day’s first Bohea. I had hardly set down the cup before Greaves bowed
his thanks. I went on: “Your protuberant brain has sized up the situation, engineered the solution, and
carried it through with the executive skill of a generalissimo.”

He bowed again. “Thank you, sir. One does one’s best to give satisfaction, sir.”

“Satisfaction isn’t the half of it; life-saving, I call it. If it hadn’t been for the master plan, deftly executed, I
might before the end of the coming June have been forced to tread the strewn orange blossoms, or the
rose petals, or whatever it is one strews at weddings, with Catalina Glimpet”—one of the soupiest young
females, I must say, of whom I ever had the misfortune to make the acquaintance. She had the perpetual
look of a mollusk bearing a burden of unspoken sorrow. “Do you realize, Greaves, that she wanted a
brood of six? Or eight ? And that I was to work in Daddy’s business—leather tanning, or
import-export, or banana ripening rooms, or whatever wheeze they prosecute at the family stand—taking
on more and more responsibility, until yours truly would have been running the whole ignoble
enterprise?”

We Brewsters are of unimpeachable courage and resource, but the linkage of “responsibility” with “more
and more” gave this scion of the old tree absolute chattering chills.

“Yes, sir. I thought it most unsuitable, sir.”

“How did you come up with the idea? So simple, so effective! Just took the handbrake off?”

“Yes, sir. I knew the young lady in question was given to a swim at that particular hour of the day. The
happy position of the motorcar, the gentle but unimpeded slope, the vehicle’s inertia, sure to carry it
across the dock—”

“Thank Heaven for your knowledge of practical physics! Well, given the happy outcome, I suggest an
invigorating and celebratory ‘whiskey and,’ Greaves, rather lightish on the ‘and.’ ”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”

I took the glass from Greaves and raised it to the lips with a “God bless Catalina Glimpet, the poor
blister, wherever she may be!,” downed it, then turned and
“I say, Greaves,” I began as he brought me the day’s first revivifying cup of Oolong, to be followed in not
too tardy a fash, one hoped, by the matutinal eggs and b., “I say—”

Which I had said once already. I paused to marshal the thoughts. We Brewsters are nothing if not the
Field Marshals, as it were, of our thoughts, disciplined troops of logic and ratty-o—ratial—erm—what
was the word that Poe chappie used?




“I say, Greaves,” I said for the third and, one hopes, final time in this narrative, plunging ahead now, into
the breach, my marshaled thoughts doing double-time to keep up, “do we ever do
anything—erm—else?”

“Else, sir?”

“Else—different—other?”

“In what way, sir?”

I tsked at the fellow. I mean, I hauled off and tsked at him—and I meant it to sting . Could a fellow with
such a bulge of brainy matter really fail to understand even one of these three simple terms?

But no matter. I marshaled the aforementioned thoughts where he could review the troops. “Different,
Greaves, don’t you see? Other than what we have been doing. Oh, you know what I mean—something
useful—perhaps getting a job—marriage—raising children—as an adult person does. If not a paying job,
then perhaps running some worthy philanthropic institution. All the activities we’ve been trying to avoid.”

Greaves, in the true Feudal spirit, does not lightly gainsay the Master, so he shook his head with some
regret and said, “No, sir. In that sense, we do not do anything ‘different,’ as you say. Things will always
remain just as they are.”

I suppose for the moment I didn’t pay full attention to the man, as I was pursuing the vaguest of thoughts,
like the memory of a dream brought to mind by seeing someone sporting the same color spats they’d
worn in the dream op.cit . “Dash it all, Greaves, but sometimes I could swear by my dear Aunt Penelope
that I did things like that once—or I was supposed to, anyhow, wanted to, perhaps, sloughed them off a
bit and all that—wasted the precious shining hours. Well, now, here’s a ripe bit of flapdoodle—mustn’t
laugh at the young master—”

“Not at all, sir.”

“But I could swear I once was someone else, before I came here and did these damned silly things we
do, over and over and over.”

Greaves waited in respectful s. The Brewster brain was humming on—no, damn the Brewster brain. I
had a thought and spat it out before it could vanish.

“Greaves,” I said, going chill all over, despite the warmth of the breakfast beverage, which was served,
of course, at the perfect temp., “have I died? And is being this”—I motioned, judiciously, with the cup
toward Self—“my punishment? To be this trifling silly ass forever? To never—never touch anyone
again?”

The fellow nodded slightly, if gravely, and said, “Yes, sir. Very good, sir. The punishment is not fully
consummated until one comes to realize it, sir.” Then, finally, something was different. Despite his word,
Greaves laughed—and kept on laughing.

“Enough to give one the absolute pip,” I muttered—not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t utter
anything else. Then, at the full realization of my predicament, I emitted a hollow g.

                                                  Shift

                                              Nalo Hopkinson




Nalo Hopkinson [www.sff.net/people/nalo] was born in the Caribbean and lives in Toronto. She
studied with Judith Merril in Canada, and attended the Clarion East writing workshop in 1995.
She is on the steering committee of the Carl Brandon Society, which promotes the involvement of
people of color in speculative fiction. After publishing a few short stories, her first novel, Brown
Girl in the Ring (1998), established her reputation as an important new fantasy writer. Her second
novel, Midnight Robber, was published in 2000, and her short story collection, Skin Folk, in 2002.
Her third novel, The Salt Roads, will appear in 2003. Hopkinson edited the anthologies Whispers
from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000) and Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003). She
says, “I write speculative fiction. For anyone who doesn’t know the term, it’s fiction in which
impossible things happen. It includes magic realism, fantasy, science fiction and horror.”

“Shift” appeared in Conjunctions: 39, the large special issue of that distinguished literary
quarterly, edited by Peter Straub and devoted to “the New Fabulists.” The Neil Gaiman story,
above, and the China Miéville story later in this book are also from that fine collection.
Hopkinson here plays sophisticated fantastic games with Shakespeare’s characters from The
Tempest —Ariel, Caliban, and Sycorax.




Down,

Down,

Down,

To the deep and shady,

Pretty mermaidy,

Take me down.

—AFRICAN-AMERICAN FOLK SONG
“Did you sleep well?” she asks, and you make sure that your face is fixed into a dreamy smile as you
open your eyes into the morning after. It had been an awkward third date; a clumsy fumbling in her bed,
both of you apologizing and then fleeing gratefully into sleep.

“I dreamed that you kissed me,” you say. That line’s worked before.

She’s lovely as she was the first time you met her, particularly seen through eyes with color vision. “You
said you wanted me to be your frog.” Say it, say it , you think.

She laughs. “Isn’t that kind of backward?”

“Well, it’d be a way to start over, right?” You ignore the way that her eyes narrow. “You could kiss me,”
you tell her, as playfully as you can manage, “and make me your prince again.”

She looks thoughtful at that. You reach for her, pull her close. She comes willingly, a fall of little blonde
plaits brushing your face like fingers. Her hair’s too straight to hold the plaits; they’re already feathered all
along their lengths. “Will you be my slimy little frog?” she whispers, a gleam of amusement in her eyes,
and your heart double-times, but she kisses you on the forehead instead of the mouth. You could scream
with frustration.

“I’ve got morning breath,” she says apologetically. She means that you do.

“I’ll go and brush my teeth,” you tell her. You try not to sound grumpy. You linger in the bathroom,
staring at the whimsical shells she keeps in the little woven basket on the counter, flaunting their salty pink
cores. You wait for anger and pique to subside.

“You hungry?” she calls from the kitchen. “I thought I’d make some oatmeal porridge.”

So much for kissing games. She’s decided it’s time for breakfast instead. “Yes,” you say. “Porridge is
fine.”




Ban…Ban…ca-ca-Caliban…

You know who the real tempest is, don’t it? The real storm? Is our mother Sycorax; his and mine. If you
ever see her hair flying around her head when she dash at you in anger; like a whirlwind, like a lightning,
like a deadly whirlpool. Wheeling and turning round her scalp like if it ever catch you, it going to drag you
in, pull you down, swallow you in pieces. If you ever hear how she gnash her teeth in her head like tiger
shark; if you ever hear the crack of her voice or feel the crack of her hand on your backside like a bolt
out of thunder, then you would know is where the real storm there.

She tell me say I must call her Scylla, or Charybdis.

Say it don’t make no matter which, for she could never remember one different from the other, but she
know one of them is her real name. She say never mind the name most people know her by; is a name
some Englishman give her by scraping a feather quill on paper.

White people magic.

Her people magic, for all that she will box you if you ever remind her of that, and flash her blue, blue
y’eye-them at you. Lightning braps from out of blue sky. But me and Brother, when she not there, is that
Englishman name we call her by.

When she hold you on her breast, you must take care never to relax, never to close your y’eye, for you
might wake up with your nose hole-them filling up with the salt sea. Salt sea rushing into your lungs to
drown you with her mother love.

Imagine what is like to be the son of that mother.

Now imagine what is like to be the sister of that son, to be sister to that there brother.




There was a time they called porridge “gruel.” A time when you lived in castle moats and fetched
beautiful golden balls for beautiful golden girls. When the fetching was a game, and you knew yourself to
be lord of the land and the veins of water that ran through it, and you could graciously allow petty kings
to build their palaces on the land, in which to raise up their avid young daughters.




Ban…ban…ca-ca-Caliban…

When I was small, I hear that blasted name so plenty I thought it was me own.

In her bathroom, you find a new toothbrush, still in its plastic package. She was thinking of you then, of
you staying overnight. You smile, mollified. You crack the plastic open, brush your teeth, looking around
at the friendly messiness of her bathroom. Cotton, silk, and polyester panties hanging on the
shower-curtain rod to dry, their crotches permanently honey-stained. Three different types of deodorant
on the counter, two of them lidless, dried out. A small bottle of perfume oil, lid off so that it weeps its
sweetness into the air. A fine dusting of baby powder covers everything, its innocent odor making you
sneeze. Someone lives here. Your own apartment—the one you found when you came on land—is as
crisp and dull as a hotel room, a stop along the way. Everything is tidy there, except for the wastepaper
basket in your bedroom, which is crammed with empty pill bottles: marine algae capsules; iodine pills.
You remind yourself that you need to buy more, to keep the cravings at bay.




Caliban have a sickness. Is a sickness any of you could get. In him it manifest as a weakness; a weakness
for cream. He fancy himself a prince of Africa, a mannish Cleopatra, bathing in mother’s milk. Him
believe say it would make him pretty. Him never had mirrors to look in, and with the mother we had, the
surface of the sea never calm enough that him could see him face in it. Him would never believe me say
that him pretty already. Him fancy if cream would only touch him, if him could only submerge himself
entirely in it, it would redeem him.

Me woulda try it too, you know, but me have that feature you find among so many brown-skin people;
cream make me belly gripe.

Truth to tell, Brother have the same problem, but him would gladly suffer the stomach pangs and the
belly-running for the chance to drink in cream, to bathe in cream, to have it dripping off him and running
into him mouth. Such a different taste from the bitter salt sea milk of Sycorax.




That beautiful woman making breakfast in her kitchen dives better than you do. You’ve seen her knifing
so sharply through waves that you wondered they didn’t bleed in her wake.

You fill the sink, wave your hands through the water. It’s bliss, the way it resists you. You wonder if you
have time for a bath. It’s a pity that this isn’t one of those apartment buildings with a pool. You miss
swimming.

You wash your face. You pull the plug, watch the water spiral down the drain. It looks wild, like a
mother’s mad hair. Then you remember that you have to be cautious around water now, even the tame,
caged water of swimming pools and bathrooms. Quickly, you sink the plug back into the mouth of the
drain. You’d forgotten; anywhere there’s water, especially rioting water, it can tattle tales to your
mother.

Your face feels cool and squeaky now. You mouth is wild cherry-flavored from the toothpaste. You’re
kissable. You can hear humming from the kitchen, and the scraping of a spoon against a pot. There’s a
smell of cinnamon and nutmeg. Island smells. You square your shoulders, put on a smile, walk to the
kitchen. Your feet are floppy, reluctant. You wish you could pay attention to what they’re telling you.
When they plash around like this, when they slip and slide and don’t want to carry you upright, it’s
always been a bad sign. The kisses of golden girls are chancy things. Once, after the touch of other pale
lips, you looked into the eyes of a golden girl, one Miranda, and saw yourself reflected back in her moist,
breathless stare. In her eyes you were tall, handsome, your shoulders powerful and your jaw square. You
carried yourself with the arrogance of a prince. You held a spear in one hand. The spotted, tawny pelt of
an animal that had never existed was knotted around your waist. You wore something’s teeth on a string
around your neck and you spoke in grunts, imperious. In her eyes, your bright copper skin was dark and
loamy as cocoa. She had sighed and leaped upon you, kissing and biting, begging to be taken. You had
let her have what she wanted. When her father stumbled upon the two of you, writhing on the ground,
she had leaped to her feet and changed you again; called you monster, attacker. She’d clasped her
bodice closed with one hand, carefully leaving bare enough pitiful juddering bosom to spark a father’s ire.
She’d looked at you regretfully, sobbed crocodile tears, and spoken the lies that had made you her
father’s slave for an interminable length of years.




You haven’t seen yourself in this one’s eyes yet. You need her to kiss you, to change you, to hide you
from your dam. That’s what you’ve always needed. You are always awed by the ones who can work
this magic. You could love one of them forever and a day. You just have to find the right one.

You stay a second in the kitchen doorway. She looks up from where she stands at the little table, briskly
setting two different-sized spoons beside two mismatched bowls. She smiles. “Come on in,” she says.

You do, on your slippery feet. You sit at the table. She’s still standing. “I’m sorry,” she says. She quirks
a regretful smile at you. “I don’t think my cold sore is quite healed yet.” She runs a tongue tip over the
corner of her lip, where you can no longer see the crusty scab.

You sigh. “It’s all right. Forget it.”
She goes over to the stove. You don’t pay any attention. You’re staring at the thready crack in your
bowl.

She says, “Brown sugar or white?”

“Brown,” you tell her. “And lots of milk.” Your gut gripes at the mere thought, but milk will taint the
water in which she cooked the oats. It will cloud the whisperings that water carries to your mother.




Nowadays people would say that me and my mooncalf brother, we is “lactose intolerant.” But me think
say them misname the thing. Me think say is milk can’t tolerate we, not we can’t tolerate it.

So: he find himself another creamy one. Just watch at the two of them there, in that pretty domestic
scene.

I enter, invisible.

Brother eat off most of him porridge already. Him always had a large appetite. The white lady, she only
passa-passaing with hers, dipping the spoon in, tasting little bit, turning the spoon over and watching at it,
dipping it in. She glance at him and say, “Would you like to go to the beach today?”




“No!” You almost shout it. You’re not going to the beach, not to any large body of water ever again.
Your very cells keen from the loss of it, but She is in the water, looking for you.




“A true. Mummy in the water, and I in the wind, Brother,” I whisper to him, so sweet. By my choice, him
never hear me yet. Don’t want him to know that me find him. Plenty time for that. Plenty time to fly and
carry the news to Mama. Maybe I can find a way to be free if I do this one last thing for her. Bring her
beloved son back. Is him she want, not me. Never me. “Ban, ban, ca-ca-Caliban!” I scream in him face,
silently.




“There’s no need to shout,” she says with an offended look. “That’s where we first saw each other, and
you swam so strongly. You were beautiful in the water. So I just thought you might like to go back
there.”




You had been swimming for your life, but she didn’t knowthat. The surf tossing you crashing against the
rocks, the undertow pulling you back in deeper, the waves singing their triumphant song: She’s coming.
Sycorax is coming for you. Can you feel the tips of her tentacles now? Can you feel them sticking
to your skin, bringing you back? She’s coming. We’ve got you now. We’ll hold you for her. Oh,
there’ll be so much fun when she has you again!

And you had hit out at the water, stroked through it, kicked through it, fleeing for shore. One desperate
pull of your arms had taken you through foaming surf. You crashed into another body, heard a surprised
“Oh,” and then a wave tumbled you. As you fought in its depths, searching for the air and dry land, you
saw her, this woman, slim as an eel, her body parting the water, her hair glowing golden. She’d extended
a hand to you, like reaching for a bobbing ball. You took her hand, held on tightly to the warmth of it.
She stood, and you stood, and you realized you’d been only feet from shore. “Are you all right?” she’d
asked.

The water had tried to suck you back in, but it was only at thigh height now. You ignored it. You kept
hold of her hand, started moving with her, your savior, to the land. You felt your heart swelling. She was
perfect. “I’m doing just fine,” you’d said. “I’m sorry I startled you. What’s your name?”

Behind you, you could hear the surf shouting for you to come back. But the sun was warm on your
shoulders now, and you knew that you’d stay on land. As you came up out of the water, she glanced at
you and smiled, and you could feel the change begin.




She’s sitting at her table, still with that hurt look on her face.

“I’m sorry, darling,” you say, and she brightens at the endearment, the first you’ve used with her. Under
the table, your feet are trying to paddle away, away. You ignore them. “Why don’t we go for a walk?”
you ask her. She smiles, nods. The many plaits of her hair sway with the rhythm. You must ask her not to
wear her hair like that. Once you know her a little better. They look like tentacles. Besides, her hair’s so
pale that her pink scalp shows through.




Chuh. I’m sorry, darling . Him is sorry, is true. A sorry sight. I follow them out on them little walk, them
Sunday perambulation. Down her street and round the corner into the district where the trendy
people-them live. Where those cunning little shops are, you know the kind, yes? Wildflowers selling at
this one, half your wages for one so-so blossom. Cheese from Greece at that one, and wine from Algiers.
(Mama S. say she don’t miss Algiers one bit.) Tropical fruit selling at another store, imported from the
Indies, from the hot sun places where people work them finger to the bone to pick them and box them
and send them, but not to eat them. Brother and him new woman meander through those streets, making
sure people look at them good. She turn her moon face to him, give him that fuck-me look, and take him
hand. I see him melt. Going to be easy to change him now that she melt him. And then him will be gone
from we again. I blow a grieving breeze oo-oo-oo through the leaves of the crab apple trees lining that
street.




She looks around, her face bright and open. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” she says. “Feel the air on your skin.”
She releases your hand. The sweat of your mingled touch evaporates and you mourn its passing. She
opens her arms to the sun, drinking in light.




Of course, that white man, him only write down part of the story. Him say how our mother was a witch.
How she did consort with monsters. But you know the real story? You know why them exile her from
Algiers, with a baby in her belly and one at her breast?




She spins and laughs, her print dress opening like a flower above her scuffed army boots. Her strong legs
are revealed to midthigh.




Them send my mother from her home because of the monster she consort with. The lord with sable eyes
and skin like rich earth. My daddy.




An old man sitting on a bench smiles, indulgent at her joy, but then he sees her reach for your hand again.
He scowls at you, spits to one side.




My daddy. A man who went for a swim one day, down, down, down, and when he see the fair maid
flowing toward him, her long hair just a-swirl like weeds in the water, her skin like milk, him never ’fraid.




As you both pass the old man, he shakes his head, his face clenched. She doesn’t seem to notice. You
hold her hand tighter, reach to pull her warmth closer to you. But you’re going down, and you know it.




When my mother who wasn’t my mother yet approach the man who wasn’t my father yet, when she ask
him, “Man, you eat salt, or you eat fresh?” him did know what fe say. Of course him did know. After his
tutors teach him courtly ways from since he was small. After his father teach him how to woo. After his
own mother teach him how to address the Wata Lady with respect. Sycorax ask him, “Man, you eat salt,
or you eat fresh?”
And proper proper, him respond, “Me prefer the taste of salt, thank you please.”

That was the right answer. For them that does eat fresh, them going to be fresh with your business. But
this man show her that he know how fe have respect. For that, she give him breath and take him down,
she take him down even farther.




You pass another beautiful golden girl, luxuriantly blond. She glances at you, casts her eyes down
demurely, where they just happen to rest at your crotch. You feel her burgeoning gaze there, your
helpless response. Quickly you lean and kiss the shoulder of the woman you’re with. The other one’s
look turns to resentful longing. You hurry on.




She take him down into her own castle, and she feed him the salt foods she keep in there, the fish and
oysters and clams, and him eat of them till him belly full, and him talk to her sweet, and him never get
fresh with her. Not even one time. Not until she ask him to. Mama wouldn’t tell me what happen after
that, but true she have two pickney, and both of we shine copper, even though she is alabaster, so me
think me know is what went on.




There’s a young black woman sitting on a bench, her hair tight peppercorns against her scalp. Her feet
are crossed beneath her. She’s alone, reading a book. She’s pretty, but she looks too much like your
sister. She could never be a golden girl. She looks up as you go by, distracted from her reading by the
chattering of the woman beside you. She looks at you. Smiles. Nods a greeting. Burning up with guilt,
you make your face stone. You move on.




In my mother and father, salt meet with sweet. Milk meet with chocolate. No one could touch her while
he was alive and ruler of his lands, but the minute him dead, her family and his get together and exile her
to that little island to starve to death. Send her away with two sweet-and-sour, milk chocolate pickney;
me in her belly and Caliban at her breast. Is nuh that turn her bitter? When you confine the sea, it don’t
stagnate? You put milk to stand, and it nuh curdle?




Chuh. Watch at my brother, there, making himself fool-fool. Is time. Time to end this, to take him back
down. “Mama,” I whisper. I blow one puff of wind, then another. The puffs tear a balloon out from a
little girl’s hand. The balloon have a fish painted on it. I like that. The little girl cry out and run after her
toy. Her father dash after her. I puff and blow, make the little metallic balloon skitter just out of the child
reach. As she run, she knock over a case of fancy bottled water, the expensive fizzy kind in blue glass
bottles, from a display. The bottles explode when them hit the ground, the water escaping with a shout of
glee. The little girl just dance out of the way of broken glass and spilled water and keep running for her
balloon, reaching for it. I make it bob like a bubble in the air. Her daddy jump to one side, away from the
glass. He try to snatch the back of her dress, but he too big and slow. Caliban step forward and grasp
her balloon by the string. He give it back to her. She look at him, her y’eye-them big. She clutch the
balloon to her bosom and smile at her daddy as he sweep her up into him arms.

The storekeeper just a-wait outside her shop, to talk to the man about who going to refund her goods.

“Mother,” I call. “Him is here. I find him.”

The water from out the bottles start to flow together in a spiral.




You hear her first in the dancing breeze that’s toying with that little girl’s balloon. You fetch the balloon
for the child before you deal with what’s coming. Her father mumbles a suspicious thanks at you. You
step away from them. You narrow your eyes, look around. “You’re here, aren’t you?” you say to the
air.

“Who’s here?” asks the woman at your side.

“My sister,” you tell her. You say “sister” like you’re spitting out spoiled milk.

“I don’t see anyone,” the woman tells you.

“El!” you call out.




I don’t pay him no mind. I summon up one of them hot, gusty winds. I blow over glasses of water on
café tables. I grab Popsicles swips! out from the hands and mouths of children. The Popsicles fall down
and melt, all the bright colors; melt and run like that brother of mine.

Popsicle juice, café table water, spring water that break free from bottles; them all rolling together now,
crashing and splashing and calling to our mother. I call up the whirling devils. Them twirl sand into
everybody eyes. Hats and baseball caps flying off heads, dancing along with me. An umbrella galloping
down the road, end over end, with an old lady chasing it. All the trendy Sunday people squealing and
running everywhere.




“Ariel, stop it!” you say.




So I run up his girlfriend skirt, make it fly high in the air. “Oh!” she cry out, trying to hold the frock down.
She wearing a panty with a tear in one leg and a knot in the waistband. That make me laugh out loud.
“Mama!” I shout, loud so Brother can hear me this time. “You seeing this? Look him here so!” I blow
one rassclaat cluster of rain clouds over the scene, them bellies black and heavy with water. “So me see
that you get a new master!” I screech at Brother.




The street is empty now, but for the three of you. Everyone else has found shelter. Your girl is cowering
down beside the trunk of a tree, hugging her skirt about her knees. Her hair has come loose from most of
its plaits, is whipping in a tangled mess about her head. She’s shielding her face from blowing sand, but
trying to look up at the sky above her, where this attack is coming from. You punch at the air, furious.
You know you can’t hurt your sister, but you need to lash out anyway. “Fuck you!” you yell. “You
always do this! Why can’t the two of you leave me alone!”




I chuckle, “Your face favor jackass when him sick. Why you can’t leave white woman alone? You don’t
see what them do to you?”




“You are our mother’s creature,” you hiss at her. In your anger, your speech slips into the same rhythms
as hers. “Look at you, trying so hard to be ‘island,’ talking like you just come off the boat.”




“At least me nah try fe chat like something out of some Englishman book.” I make the wind howl it back
at him. “At least me remember is boat me come off from!” I burst open the clouds overhead and drench
the two of them in mother water. She squeals. Good.




“Ariel, Caliban; stop that squabbling or I’ll bind you both up in a split tree forever.” The voice is a wintry
runnel, fast-freezing.

You both turn. It’s Sycorax. Your sister has manifested, has pushed a trembling bottom lip out. Dread
runs cold along your limbs. “Yes, Mother,” you both say, standing sheepishly shoulder to shoulder.
“Sorry, Mother.”

Sycorax is sitting in a sticky puddle of water and melted Popsicles, but a queen on her throne could not
be more regal. She has wrapped an ocean wave about her like a shawl. Her eyes are open-water blue.
Her writhing hair foams white over her shoulders and the marble swells of her vast breasts. Her belly is a
mounded salt lick, rising from the weedy tangle of her pubic hair, a marine jungle in and out of which flit
tiny blennies. The tsunami of Sycorax’s hips overflows her watery seat. Her myriad split tails are flicking,
the way they do when she’s irritated. With one of them, she scratches around her navel. You think you
can see the sullen head of a moray eel, lurking in the cave those hydra tails make. You don’t want to
think about it. You never have.

“Ariel,” says Sycorax, “have you been up to your tricks again?”

“But he,” splutters your sister, “he…”

“ He never ceases with his tricks,” your mother pronounces. “Running home to Mama, leaving me with
the mess he’s made.” She looks at you, and your watery legs weaken. “Caliban,” she says, “I’m getting
too old to play surrogate mother to your spawn. That last school of your offspring all had poisonous
stings.”

“I know, Mother. I’m sorry.”

“How did that happen?” she asks.

You risk a glance at the woman you’ve dragged into this, the golden girl. She’s standing now, a look of
interest and curiosity on her face. “It’s your fault,” you say to her. “If you had kissed me, told me what
you wanted me to be, she and Ariel couldn’t have found us.”

She looks at you, measuring. “First tell me about the poison babies,” she says. She’s got more iron in her
than you’d thought, this one. The last fairy-tale princess who’d met your family hadn’t stopped screaming
for two days.

Ariel sniggers. “That was from his last ooman,” she says. “The two of them always quarreling. For her,
Caliban had a poison tongue.”

“And spat out biting words, no doubt,” Sycorax says. “He became what she saw, and it affected the
children they made. Of course she didn’t want them, of course she left; so Grannie gets to do the honors.
He has brought me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack babies. Brings his
offspring to me, then runs away again. And I’m getting tired of it.” Sycorax’s shawl whirls itself up into a
waterspout. “And I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale tattling.”

“But Mama…!” Ariel says.

“ ‘But Mama’ nothing. I want you to stop pestering your brother.”

Ariel puffs up till it looks as though she might burst. Her face goes anvil-cloud dark, but she says nothing.

“And you,” says Sycorax, pointing at you with a suckered tentacle, “you need to stop bringing me the
fallout from your sorry love life.”

“I can’t help it, Mama,” you say. “That’s how women see me.”

Sycorax towers forward, her voice crashing upon your ears. “Do you want to know how I see you?” A
cluster of her tentacle tails whips around your shoulders, immobilizes you. That is a moray eel under
there, its fanged mouth hanging hungrily open. You are frozen in Sycorax’s gaze, a hapless, irresponsible
little boy. You feel the sickening metamorphosis begin. You are changing, shrinking. The last time
Sycorax did this to you, it took you forever to become man enough again to escape. You try to twist in
her arms, to look away from her eyes. She pulls you forward, puckering her mouth for the kiss she will
give you.

“Well, yeah, I’m beginning to get a picture here,” says a voice. It’s the golden girl, shivering in her
flower-print dress that’s plastered to her skinny body. She steps closer. Her boots squelch. She points at
Ariel. “You says he’s color-struck. You’re his sister, you should know. And yeah, I can see that in him.
You’d think I was the sun itself, the way he looks at me.”

She takes your face in her hands, turns your eyes away from your mother’s. Finally, she kisses you full on
the mouth. In her eyes, you become a sunflower, helplessly turning wherever she goes. You stand rooted,
waiting for her direction.

She looks at your terrible mother. “You get to clean up the messes he makes.” And now you’re a baby,
soiling your diapers and waiting for Mama to come and fix it. Oh, please, end this.

She looks down at you, wriggling and helpless on the ground. “And I guess all those other women saw
big, black dick.”

So familiar, the change that wreaks on you. You’re an adult again, heavy-muscled and horny with a thick,
swelling erection. You reach for her. She backs away. “But,” she says, “there’s one thing I don’t see.”

You don’t care. She smells like vanilla and her skin is smooth and cool as ice cream and you want to
push your tongue inside. You grab her thin, unresisting arms. She’s shaking, but she looks into your eyes.
And hers are empty. You aren’t there. Shocked, you let her go. In a trembling voice, she says, “Who do
you think you are?”

It could be an accusation: Who do you think you are? It might be a question: Who do you think you are?
You search her face for the answer. Nothing. Your mother and your sib both look as shocked as you
feel.

“Hey,” says the golden girl, opening her hands wide. Her voice is getting less shaky. “Clearly, this is
family business, and I know better than to mess with that.” She gathers her little picky plaits together,
squeezes water out of them. “It’s been really…interesting, meeting you all.” She looks at you, and her
eyes are empty, open, friendly. You don’t know what to make of them. “Um,” she says, “maybe you can
give me a call sometime.” She starts walking away. Turns back. “It’s not a brush-off; I mean it. But only
call when you can tell me who you really are. Who you think you’re going to become.”

And she leaves you standing there. In the silence, there’s only a faint sound of whispering water and wind
in the trees. You turn to look at your mother and sister. “I,” you say.

                                        A Book, by Its Cover

                                                P.D. Cacek




P.D. Cacek[www.pdcacek.com] lives in Pennsylvania. The winner of awards for her short fiction,
P.D. Cacek is the author of a collection, Leavings, two humorous vampire novels, Night Prayers,
and its sequel,Night Players, and a contemporary werewolf novel set in Denver, Colorado,
Canyons. A lifelong lover of the supernatural, Cacek has begun work on what she calls her New
Hope Quartet—a series of nontraditional gothic ghost novels set in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She
is currently working on the second in the series, entitled Reflections through Beveled Glass. Cacek’s
nonfiction articles on New Hope, and its ghosts, can be seen on-line at www.newhopepa.com.

“A Book, by Its Cover” was published in Shelf Life, a $75 limited-edition fantasy anthology on the
theme of books and bookselling that was one of the best anthologies of the year, though not
widely circulated. It is the story of a bookstore owner, Reb Shendelman, and his young neighbor,
Yavin. Yavin suspects him of something evil in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, that night in Nazi
Germany in the 1930s when violent anti-semitic riots swept the country, windows were broken
and property destroyed or looted, many books were burned, and many Jews were beaten or killed.




A cloud passed in front of the sun and the already pale light faded to the color of bone. Snow was
coming, but not one of the people scurrying along the street, bundled against the cold as they hurried
from one shop to another, seemed to notice. Or care. All of them acted as if the day and the light and the
approaching snow was normal, part of the ordinary.

And he hated them, all of them, for that—for not noticing what the world had become.

He couldn’t understand why they didn’t see and how they could continue to shop and pray and go on
with the day to day business of living, as if the future still existed.

Because he knew better. He had seen the end of the future the day his grandfather had sewn the two
yellow triangles together to make the star on his coat. The future was finite now and he seemed to be the
only one who knew it.

Yavin Landauer pulled the old frock coat’s collar tighter against his neck and watched a man in a fedora
and camel-hair overcoat, the color of honey, walk hand-in-hand with a boy of nine or ten in knickers and
jacket and cap all of soft gray wool. The cheap cotton stars looked out of place on the expensive
material, material that Yavin could almost feel the texture of even from across the street. His grandfather
had obtained a few bolts of wool much like that just a few weeks before….

He shook the memory away before it could take root and glared at the man and boy. They were laughing
as they walked, the man pointing at things in those shop windows that had somehow, miraculously,
escaped the bricks and bullets and bats of the brown-shirted Wulf packs. But even if a window or two
had been spared, each building in the ghetto had been marked by the pack. Juden. In yellow paint
across each lentil, instead of lamb’s blood—insurance that the Angel of Death would not pass over them
this time.

Yavin let his hand drop from the collar to trace the edge of the star. His grandfather had been careful, the
star’s center was directly over his heart. When the future ended for Yavin, it would be quick.

Not like the little boy across the street. His future would end in shock and surprise because his father,
like so many others, didn’t notice the change in the light of the world. It was cruel and a part of Yavin
wanted to shout at the man, but he didn’t. He huddled deeper in the fire-blackened doorway of what had
been his grandfather’s tailor shop as the man and boy entered Reb Shendelman’s bookshop. He closed
his eyes. Took a deep breath and smelled snow riding the back of charred wood.

It had been almost three months since Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and still the stench of
the fire was as strong as the memory of his grandfather running out into the street when the first torch
shattered the shop’s front window. Yavin had stayed inside, hidden and safe, he thought, until the fire
began to consume the bolts of cloth. It was only then, when the fire came at him, that he fled—out the
small window at the back of the shop and down the narrow alley until he could circle back to the main
street.

And by then his grandfather was dead, a sacrifice to the new god who ruled Germany.

Yavin had hidden in the shadows and watched the pack of brown-shirted Wulfs as they laughed and
clapped each other on the shoulders. One of the boys, Karl, had been his best friend…once…when only
the night sky wore stars.

Once. Upon a time.

The sunlight brightened suddenly and Yavin opened his eyes, blinking as the first fat flakes of snow began
to fall. There were fewer people on the street—finally, they noticed.

Yavin leaned back against the only home he’d ever known and rubbed the cold out of his nose as the
man in the honey-colored coat left the bookstore. His hat was pulled low over his eyes and he was
clutching a brownpaper wrapped parcel to his chest. A book, what else would one buy at a bookshop?

Except from a bookshop that had no books?

Rolling his shoulders under the coat, Yavin stared at the object in the man’s hands. It was square and
looked like a book wrapped in paper…but it couldn’t be, he’d seen what the Wulfs had done that night.
The fire that had gorged itself on the bolts of cloth in his grandfather’s shop was nothing more than a
small camp fire compared to the inferno that brightened the night sky in front of the book-shop.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of books were fed to the flames while Reb Shendelman, ancient for as long
as Yavin had known him, howled and cried and tore at his clothes.

The old man had wept for his books, but not once so much as glanced at the body that was sprawled on
the ground only a few feet away. And when he finally said Kaddish, it was for the books alone.

Karl and the others had thought that was funny, that an old man should become so distraught over a few
words and ideas, so they let him live.

With only a small beating.

The man in the honey-colored coat stumbled on a patch of ice and dropped the paper-wrapped bundle
into the snow. The sound that came from his lips sent a chill up Yavin’s spine that had nothing to do with
the cold. Whatever it was, he thought as he watched the man brush the damp snow off the wrapping, it
had to be very valuable. Reb Shendelman could have managed to hide some of the more expensive and
rare volumes. That would make sense…and explain why the man seemed so upset.

Where was the boy?

Yavin frowned as he glanced up and down the street. He’d forgotten the boy as he watched the father,
but there was no sign of the child on the street. A gust of wind swirled into the doorway, powdering him
with snow. The little boy was probably already home by now, his father sending him ahead so he
wouldn’t be caught in the storm. Telling him to stay warm and not catch cold…lying to him by pretending
there was a future that wanted them.

Shivering, Yavin reached up and touched the charred remains of the mezuzah that had done nothing to
protect them from the Wulfs.
The man in the honey-colored coat came back just before sunset, holding the hand of a little girl. Dressed
all in white, the yellow star on her coat dancing as she skipped through the unswept drifts, she looked like
an angel made of snow.

Yavin nibbled along one edge of the roll he had begged from a neighbor and watched the little girl giggle
up at the man. She didn’t look hungry and Yavin hated her, a little, for that. Food had always been
provided for him without thought, now it had become something that was always in his mind and belly.

Just like the future, or, rather, the lack of it…always there, always grumbling. Always.

For some.

Hand in hand, the man walked the little girl into the bookshop.

The roll was a memory on Yavin’s tongue and his stomach was still grumbling when the door of the
bookshop opened again and the man in the honey-colored coat left. The brim of his fedora was pulled
low over his eyes and, like the day before, he clutched a brown-paper wrapped bundle to his chest. The
little girl in white wasn’t with him.

Yesterday there had been a boy, today a girl.

Something besides hunger growled in Yavin’s belly as he left the protection of the soot-covered shadows
and crossed the icy cobblestones. And only fell twice.

The man looked up from beneath the hat’s brim when Yavin stepped onto the sidewalk directly in front
of him. There were tears frozen on the man’s lower lashes and a look on his face that almost made Yavin
stumble again. It was a book. Yavin could see one corner of it through a tear in the brown wrapping, a
book bound in white satin, the thick pages edged in gold. It was the sort of book that would cost a great
deal of money, especially now, even for a man in a camel-hair coat, the color of honey.

Yavin felt his shrunken stomach turn over as he looked up at the man.

“What have you done?”

The man blinked as if waking from a deep sleep and shook his head, stepped to one side, tightening his
grip on the book.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave me alone.”

“What have you done with the little girl?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The man said. “There’s no little girl here.”

Yavin pointed to the walk behind the man. There were two sets of footprints in the snow—one large, one
small. Both sets led to the bookshop, but only one set, the one belonging to the man, left.

“She is safe,” the man’s voice was almost as silent as the falling snow. “Please, I must get this onto the
train. A woman has promised to take this to England for me. Please, I have to hurry.”

He was talking about the book, not the little girl. Yavin stepped back, the soles of his shoes almost sliding
out from under him again as the man rushed past. He could hear the man mumbling to himself.

“Why didn’t I listen before this? She will be safe, dear Gott, please…with her brother, please. I should
have come sooner, but who thought…who would have thought…Mein gott, bitter, let me get there in
time.”

Yavin felt his heart stop when the man looked back—but not at him. At the bookshop.

“Hurry, there’s not much time left.”

When the momentary death passed, Yavin made himself turn and look at the shop. It was so quiet the
sound of his own breathing pounded against the inside of his brain.

The bookstore sat hunched and still at the end of the street, aloof but miserable like a once pampered cat
that had been forgotten and left out in the snow. Anyone passing would think the building was deserted,
just another shop that had been abandoned. Or left ownerless. There were no lights showing through the
cracks in the boards that covered the broken front window and the snow had already covered the
scorched spot on the street. In an hour or less, there’d be no evidence that anyone had visited the shop
that day. Or the day before that.

Would a man sell his children for books? No…no…

One book, one child.

One child that no longer needed to be cared for or fed, for one book, hollowed out and filled with what?
Forged documents? Money? A pair of scissors to cut yellow stars from coats?

The future, without limits.

A man might offer anything for that.

The flesh on Yavin’s fingers stung as he curled his hands into fists and followed the shallow tracks back
to the book-shop. He only stumbled once and that was when he reached for the doorknob and looked
up. There had been a brass marker there, generations old, that once read Shendelman’s Books in
Hebrew and German. Now it was unreadable. Yavin had watched Karl in the glow of the fire, strike the
sign again and again with a hammer while the other Wulfs chanted: Juden. Juden. Juden.

There used to be a small brass bell that jingled every time the door opened—he remembered that,
remembered the sound of it echoing through the huge room filled with books as Karl raced him to see
who would be first into the shop. Karl always won and now the bell was gone and only the squeal of
unoiled hinges announced him.

To the room of empty shelves.

Yavin tried not to listen to the hollow thud of his shoes against the dust-streaked floor.

His grandfather had always encouraged him to be a scholar, and so only saw merit in those obscure
volumes of archaic text that were the size of a crate of whitefish. Each night, for an hour, Yavin would
wade through the didactic mire…and each day, with Karl, tucked into a corner out of the way of
customers, he would rediscover old friends.

Don Quixote. The plays of Shakespeare. Jules Verne. Shelly. Stoker.

Gone forever.

“I’ve wondered when you’d decide to come across the street, Yavin Landauer.”

The soles of Yavin’s shoes squeaked as he whirled toward the pale shape that hovered near the back
wall. Yavin was no longer a child, so the first images in his mind were not of ghosts or Dybbuks, but of
brown-shirts and black swastikas.

“What is it? Are you all right?”

Yavin’s heart was pounding against his ribs, like a prisoner trying to escape a cell, when Reb Shendelman
stepped out of the shadows. The old man was thinner than Yavin remembered and his feet dragged
across the floor as if lifting them was too much effort. He was still wearing the coat he’d had on the night
of the fire—the torn pocket fluttered like a broken bird’s wing with each shambling step.

“Yavin, what is it? Come, let me get you something to eat.”




Drool filled his mouth and his belly rumbled so loudly it sounded like thunder at the mention of food.
“No! I won’t take anything from you.”

“What take? I give it. Besides, we’re friends, no?”

Yavin looked down at the floor and saw the outline of a child’s shoe in the dust. “No.”

“No?” Reb Shendelman asked. “Then we are enemies?”

Yavin nodded.

“Ah.” The old man mimicked his nod. “Can I ask why? No? Then all right. It will be strange after so
many years, but if we are enemies, then we are enemies. So, enemy, come and eat. I have potato and
cabbage soup and some black bread. Come. We can discuss being enemies later.”

“What was inside the book, Reb Shendelman?”

Confusion flickered over the old man’s face as he lifted his arms toward the empty shelves. “What book?
I have no books, Yavin. You saw what they did.”

“I saw…but I also saw the man and the little girl today,” Yavin said, wanting to shout but barely able to
whis per. “And the man and boy yesterday. I know what you’re doing, Reb Shendelman. I know.”

“No,” the old man said as he waved Yavin toward the small back room, “you don’t, but you will. Come,
I’ll explain while you eat.”




It took three bowls of the thin, but wonderful soup before Yavin stopped shivering and his belly
remembered what it felt like to be full. And through it all, Reb Shendelman kept quiet.

…which, now that Yavin was finished, was a good thing. If the old man had tried to tell him the…fairy
tale while he’d been eating, Yavin might have laughed so hard the soup would have come back up.

A child might have believed what the old man was saying, but Yavin didn’t. He was a man, after all.

“I think it was because this building has always been a bookshop. With that many books, it almost makes
sense, doesn’t it? That the thoughts and ideas of those books could become something…real, no?”

Yavin stopped mopping up the dregs of the soup with a narrow crust of black bread to shrug, not that it
was noticed. Reb Shendelman was looking out into the empty shop, rocking slowly back and forth over
his clasped hands.

“Men can die, Yavin, but not ideas, never ideas. Do you understand?”

Yavin stuffed the softened crust into his mouth to avoid answering. Again the old man didn’t notice, he
kept talking as though the silence was an answer in itself.

“It isn’t that hard a thing to accept…not when you think of all the thoughts and ideas and words
contained in those books. Generations of books, lining these very shelves. How do we learn, Yavin, do
you know? How is what we read transformed into a memory that we can keep forever, huh? There was
so much knowledge here on these shelves for so long it must have been easy for some of it to seep into
the wood…to become part of the store itself. Such an easy thing, when you stop and wonder about it.
Thoughts and ideas can’t die, but they can build, one upon the other until all the knowledge of the
universe creates a life of its own.

“Wasn’t Adam begun as just a thought in the All Mighty’s mind? Adam became a man from a single
thought…so what is it for a building, within whose walls contained so many thoughts, to become a
shapeless thing endowed with life, but not body?”

The bread caught in Yavin’s throat and almost choked him.

“A Golem?” he squeaked when he was finally able to draw breath. “You’re saying that this building is a
Golem?”

“Yoh, a Golem…one constructed of thoughts and ideas, housed in a body of stone and mortar and
wooden shelves. A Golem of creation, not destruction.”

“And fed with the blood of children?”

“What are you talking about?”

Yavin tossed the empty bowl back onto the small table between them and shook his head. He’d seen his
grandfather shake his head like that whenever the truth was stretched too far and about to unravel.

“The children who are bartered for those very special books you sell, Reb Shendelman. Do you keep
them for the Nazis or do you kill them yourself so your invisible Golem can live? One book per child
seems fair…but you’ll give me a book without payment, won’t you? Unless you want everyone to know
what you’ve been doing.”

Again, the old man’s reaction was not what Yavin expected. Reb Shendelman stood up and walked to
the empty shelves, ran his hands gently against the worn wood and nodded.

“One book per child…or one man or one woman.”

“What?”

“Emmanuel Wiesel was the first. You remember Reb Wiesel, yoh?”

Yavin leaned back in his chair and hoped he looked apathetic. Of course he remembered the fishmonger.
Who inside the ghetto didn’t know the man who worked from before dawn to after dark, hauling fish,
cleaning fish, selling fish…and who smelled so much of fish he was the beloved of every cat within a
five-mile radius? Yavin also remembered the day his shop failed to open. The ghetto cats had been
mourning him for almost a year now.

Reb Shendelman sighed as he turned around.

“They were waiting for him in his shop, three soldiers with guns for one man who smelled of herring.
Someone warned him, so he came here. To hide or maybe just to say good-bye. When soldiers come,
few of us have the luxury to say good-bye. But instead he started talking about his favorite book. Ethics
, by Spinoza. Can you believe that? But what do I know from philosophers?”

“Here,” he said, spreading his hands out in front of him. “This is where it happened.

“It was Friday, late, just before Shabbos and I was about to close when Wiesel rushed in. I had turned
off the lights and I couldn’t light a candle, so we just stood there, in the dark, and I listened while he
talked about Spinoza. One minute he was explaining the philosopher’s idea that evil was only part of the
Lord God’s perfection and the next?”

Yavin saw Reb Shendelman’s hands begin to shake and felt a similar vibration roll across his shoulders.

“It was dark, so at first, I thought he had fallen or passed out, but when I ran to where he’d been
standing all I found was a book. Ethics , by Baruch Spinoza. A beautiful book, bound in leather with
thick parchment pages edged in gold, the title embossed in gold leaf. But the thing is, Yavin,” the old man
said, “I had no such book in the shop and I couldn’t even have produced a thing of such beauty even if I
had the materials. It was warm to the touch, like living flesh against my hands. Do you understand what I
am saying, Yavin?”

Yavin felt his head shake slowly back and forth without any effort on his part.

“No, that is the problem with miracles…they are usually too miraculous for man to understand. I didn’t
believe it either, so I stand there, with this wondrous book in my hand and suddenly I remember Wiesel
and I call out to him, ‘Emmanuel Wiesel,’ and then he is standing in front of me as if he’d never moved
with my hands on his arms. He looked startled and rubbed his eyes, told me that he had been dreaming
about sitting in Spinoza’s workshop, watching the man grind lenses while they discussed monistic
theory.”

Reb Shendelman suddenly clapped his hands and Yavin jumped. “But it wasn’t a dream, Yavin. The
Golem of the shop had somehow transformed Wiesel the fishmonger into the book he loved the best.
You see?

“I thought about the soldiers who had come for him and thought, in my ignorance, that I had been shown
the way to save him, so we spoke more about Spinoza and this time I watched the miracle happen.
There was no sound, Yavin, no stirring of the air. It was so peaceful. I placed him on the shelf with the
other books and that night I spoke to the Golem over the Shabbos candles and not the All Mighty. I
thought I could save them. A word here, a whisper there…people disappear from the ghetto all the
time.”

The smile faded from the old man’s face.

“I never thought they would burn my books.”

“That’s why you were saying Kaddish that night,” Yavin asked. “Wasn’t it?”

Reb Shendelman nodded and Yavin couldn’t hold the laughter in any longer. He could hear the soup
slosh and gurgle inside his belly, which made him laugh even harder. The old man shrugged and began
moving along the rows of empty shelves.

“Of course,” he said, “you don’t believe me, why should you? I know how impossible it sounds, Yavin,
but all miracles are unless you see them first-hand.”

Reb Shendelman stopped when he came to the far corner of the room, his hands dabbing at the still air.
“This is where you two liked to sit, isn’t it? Right here, yes? Yes…there used to be a chair here, and an
old ottoman where my wife used to sit when she sewed. You and your friend, Karl…I remember. The
two of you would sit here reading for hours. Let me think. What was your favorite book? I know it
wasn’t the work of Spinoza…what was it?”

Reb Shendelman’s hands stopped moving and Yavin found himself leaning forward, hoping the old man
would remember and hating himself for hoping that. What did it matter if the old man could remember
which book had been his favorite? That was a lifetime ago, in a different world. To think about it or
anything now seemed pointless, more than pointless…it was evil.

But even so, when the old man smiled and clapped his hands, Yavin felt his heart flutter.

“ Around the World in Eighty Days. Yes?”

And Yavin nodded his head, ashamed and relieved that someone, at least, would remember that about
him.

“Your grandfather, may he find everlasting peace, used to ask what you read…so I told him books on
kashruth law. A small lie, but it made him happy.” Reb Shendelman nodded as he walked toward Yavin.
“He was a good man, but one of narrow imagination. You, on the other hand—”

The old man stopped when he was still an arm’s length away and took a deep breath.

“You had the imagination of a true dreamer who could see beyond the hardness of this world and into
what might be. Can you still do that, Yavin? Can you see Professor Phileas Fogg in his beautiful London
flat? Can you see him accepting the challenge to go around the world…the entire world, Yavin, in only
eighty days? Can you see him, Yavin? Can you see the world as Mr. Jules Verne wrote it? You can, if
you try. Try, Yavin…see it…see…it….”

“Monsieur Passepartout.”

Yavin staggered and grabbed the gangplank’s rope handrail as he caught his breath. The air was
hot and thick with the scent of brine. Water sprayed against his cheek and Yavin looked down to
see the ocean lapped calmly against the barnacle-bedecked hull of a ship that had seen better
days. He could see where someone had tried to patch the worm-holes and painted over them with
tar. It was a miracle that the ship still floated, let alone that its captain could think it still
sea-worthy enough to take out of port.

“Monsieur Passepartout!”

A gull cried and Yavin jerked his head up to follow its passage—stark white against the pale
lavender twilight sky—over the lines of the bowsprit. There was a name on the bow, blocky
wooden letters, faded by sun and wind and sea: General Grant.

It was the name of the ship…the large sea-going paddlewheel steamer bound from Yokohama to
San Francisco with Phileas Fogg, Jean Passepartout and—
“Monsieur Passepartout, do you ignore me purposely?”

“What?”

Yavin clung to the rope as he turned toward the slightly shrewish tone. A woman, lovely and
young, glared down at him. One hand grasped the ivory knob of a lace parasol, the other was
tucked daintily against the tiny waist of her cream-colored traveling dress. A large hat, with
ostrich plumes of a color Yavin had never seen in nature, sat firmly upon the mass of black curls.
Towering above her hat and plumes and lovely face was the main of the three masts, rigged for
full sail, that would aid the General Grant in maintaining the breakneck speed of twelve miles an
hour and so cross the great Pacific Ocean in only twenty-one days.

Just like in the book.

Yavin laughed out loud. Until he saw the look on the woman’s face.

And remembered who she was.

“You’re Aouda. The girl who was going to be burned alive when the old rajah of Bundelcund died.
I know you. Phileas Fogg saved you from the ‘suttee’ because he’d been early getting through the
Indian forest and had time. That’s what he said to Sir Francis Cromarty, he said he had the time
to save you. You are Aouda, aren’t you?”

“I am,” the woman said with a heave of her fashionably confined bosom, “and you, Monsieur
Passepartout, are impudent! I shall complain most earnestly to Mr. Fogg about your lack of
courtesy.”

“I’m afraid,” a soft voice said behind Yavin, “that we don’t have the time for any reprimands at
this moment. It will have to wait until after we have sailed, but rest assured, Passepartout, we
shall discuss this matter. When there is time, of course.”

Yavin turned around and gazed into the bearded, tranquil and enigmatic face of Phileas Fogg. He
was just as Jules Verne had described him.

“Passepartout,” Phileas Fogg said, “why do you look at me like that?”

“I’m Passepartout?” Yavin asked, giggling as if his belly was filled by a million tiny bubbles. “I’m
Jean Passepartout?”

Phileas Fogg raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. “Passepartout, are you quite—”

“—all right, Yavin?”

Yavin found himself on the floor, staring up at Reb Shendelman.

“What did you do?” Yavin yelled as he scooted away from the old man until his spine encountered an
empty bookshelf. “Leave me alone! You’re some kind of mesmerist.”

But the old man shook his head. “No, I’m just the seller of books, Yavin. It was the Golem that
transformed you. Did you enjoy it?”

“There was nothing to enjoy!” His fear kept him shouting and Yavin could hear his voice echo back and
forth through the empty store. “It was a dream…an illusion. It can’t happen. It didn’t happen!”

“What didn’t happen, Jew?”
Karl came out of the darkness at the front of the store like the marauding Wulf-cub he’d become, silent
and gray. His hungry, bright blue eyes never left Yavin’s face as he crossed the room. Standing equal
distance between Yavin and the old man, Karl snapped to attention and raised his right arm in stiff salute
to his new god. Against the white of his armband, the black swastika looked like a giant spider.

“Heil Hitler!”

“Not in this shop, boy,” Reb Shendelman said and was rewarded with a slap across his face. For his
impudence, Yavin thought, remembering the word Aouda had used in his dream.

Karl…his one-time friend…was sneering at Reb Shendelman and wiping his hand against one leg of his
uniform shorts, as if it had become corrupted by the mere touch of Jewish flesh.

“You think just because we let you live the last time, old man, that your life is somehow sacred?” Karl
chuckled with a sound Yavin remembered from the times they sat, huddled together, in the bookstore.
“You’re only alive because you made us laugh when we burned your books. Poor old Jew, crying over
all those stupid books. We laughed about it for days and days.”

“Stop it, Karl,” Yavin said, forgetting for a moment, but only a moment, that they were no longer friends.
He remembered the moment Karl’s sneer found him.

“You dare tell me to stop, Landauer?” His lost friend asked. “You have gotten brave since I last saw
you…hiding in the shadows while your grandfather tried to be a hero. He was as stupid as this old man
here, but he didn’t make us laugh. Are you going to make me laugh, Landauer, or can I just shoot you
like a dog and put you out of your misery?”

The spider on Karl’s arm twitched as he pulled a gun, bright and shiny and too big for his hand, from the
holster hanging from his waist.

“I only came in here to see if there were any more books to burn,” Karl said as he leveled the muzzle at
Yavin’s face. “They made such a fine fire last time, but now I think this will be more fun.”

“What was your favorite book, Karl?”

Yavin turned and looked at the old man at the same time Karl did. There was a drop of blood in one
corner of his mouth that glistened like a dusty ruby in the dim light when he spoke.

“What was your favorite book,” Reb Shendelman asked again before Karl could answer. “I can’t
remember which book it was, but I remember it frightened you.”

“It did not!” The gun twitched in Karl’s hand as he swung it toward the old man. “Books don’t frighten
me.”

But the old man nodded. “This one did. I remember how you jumped once when I came with a plate of
cookies for you and Yavin. You remember, don’t you, Yavin?”

Yavin didn’t remember anything at the moment.

“Yes,” Reb Shendelman nodded, “now I remember. It was Dracula , by Bram Stoker. That is a very
frightening book. Even I couldn’t read it.”

“What are you talking about?” Karl lifted his head as the muzzle of the gun drooped toward the floor.
“That silly book didn’t scare me at all. I read it a dozen times.”
“What’s your favorite part, Karl?” The old man asked and Yavin felt his stomach clench. “I was also so
frightened when Jonathan Harker was in the coach along the Borgo Pass…I almost put the book down.
Mein Gott, when he looks up and notices how excited the other passengers are because night is falling.
Do you remember that part, Karl? Do you remember how the coach must have felt—how Harker
described it as swaying like a boat on a stormy sea? Do you remember how the passengers offered him
gifts and blessings and how they made the sign of the cross to guard against the evil to come? Do you see
it, Karl? Do you? Yes, you do, I know you do. See it…see the Carpathians rising against the twilight
sky…see it…see it, Karl.”

The scream that had built in Yavin’s throat as Karl’s body began to shrink and fold in on itself—over and
over and over—left his mouth as a soft hushing of air as he watched the old man bend down and slowly
pick up the thick, black leather-bound volume from the floor. It didn’t have gold leaf or gild edges, but
the title was embossed in red, the color of fresh blood.

“He’s…” Yavin licked his lips and tasted salt. “He’s dead?”

Reb Shendelman shook his head and gently brushed his hand along one edge of the book before placing
it on a shelf. It looked very lonely there all by itself.

“No, he’s…only dreaming the story. We can’t stay here, Yavin. His friends will come looking for him
and I don’t want you to be here when they burn this book.”

“Reb Shendelman, you can’t let them!”

“I can’t stop them, Yavin. But what I can do, is get you out of this hell…”

“Reb Shendelman, please.”

“Sha, Yavin. Listen to me. Do you know what my favorite part is in Around the World in Eighty Days
? It’s when they are all going up the Hudson River in America on that little boat. I have family in
America…someplace called Upstate New York along that same river. What was the name of that boat,
Yavin?”

“The Henrietta , Yavin answered and felt a numbing warmth began to grow in his belly.

“Ah, yoh, the little ‘Henrietta’ sailing past the lighthouse that marked the beginning of the river and the
end of the ocean…the end of one world and the beginning of another. Do you see the lighthouse, Yavin?
Do you see him, Phileas Fogg, walking up to the bridge because the captain is nowhere to be found? Do
you see him? See it, Yavin…see it…see…it…”

“Passepartout,” Phileas Fogg said to Yavin as he took the boat’s wheel. “I fear Captain Speedy
is still not enthusiastic about this diversion to Liverpool, so I ask that you keep him well
tended…but, above all, well kept in his quarters.”

“Of course, sir,” Yavin said while carefully pouring the amber-colored tea into three dainty china
cups—one for Mr. Phileas Fogg, one for Mademoiselle Aouda and the last for himself. “I shall see
to his needs, have no fear.”

“I never fear,” Phileas Fogg said with a nod, “it is too time consuming. Now, if my calculations
are correct, and there is nothing to say they aren’t, the Henrietta should be more than able to
make the three thousand mile crossing from New York to Liverpool in nine days, which would put
us on good English soil again on the 21st of December—the Solstice, I believe.”

Hanukkah, Yavin thought, but didn’t say anything except, “One lump or two?”
“Wake up, Yavin.”

Yavin opened his eyes, rubbing them against the bright yellow light that filled the small room. The room
only looked small because it was filled with books—wall-to-wall and floor to ceiling, and encircling a
narrow window through which Yavin saw a wide river bordered by high, rocky cliffs. A lighthouse, like
the one the Henrietta had passed on her way to the sea, blinked at him from a high overlook across the
river.

Reb Shendelman was standing over him, smiling in the bright yellow light.

“I was…dreaming.”

“I know,” Reb Shendelman said, “and now those dreams can come true.”

                                      Somewhere in My Mind
                                      There Is a Painting Box

                                              Charles de Lint




Charles de Lint [www.charlesdelint.com] lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with his wife Mary Ann
Harris, an artist and musician. Together they perform Celtic and traditional music. De Lint
popularized urban fantasy—fantasy set in the real world rather than an invented otherworld—in
the 1980s with such books as Moonheart, and continues to tell tales of his trademark city,
Newford. He’s been a full-time writer for eighteen years. He has also written a monthly book
review column for F&SF, and is a perceptive advocate of good fantasy fiction. His collections,
Waifs and Strays (2002), his first Young Adult collection, and Tapping the Dream Tree, his fourth
Newford collection and fiftieth book, came out in 2002. A Handful of Coppers is forthcoming in
2003, and is the first of a projected series collecting all his early stories. Spirits in the Wires is his
next novel, and A Circle of Cats will be a hardcover picture book for children.

“Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box” is from the Young Adult fantasy anthology The
Green Man, which is possibly the best anthology of the year, in a very strong year for fantasy
anthologies. It is the story of landscape painters who accidentally find the way into fairyland, told
from the point of view of a girl who finds one of their painting boxes twenty years later.




Such a thing to find, so deep in the forest: A painter’s box nested in ferns and a tangle of sprucey-pine
roots, almost buried by the leaves and pine needles drifted up against the trunk of the tree. Later, Lily
would learn that it was called a pochade box, but for now she sat bouncing lightly on her ankles admiring
her find.

It was impossible to say how long the box had been hidden here. The wood panels weren’t rotting, but
the hasps were rusted shut and it took her a while to get them open. She lifted the lid and then, and
then…

Treasure.

Stored in the lid, held apart from each other by slots, were three 8 × 10 wooden panels, each with a
painting on it. For all their quick and loose rendering, she had no trouble recognizing the subjects. There
was something familiar about them, too—beyond the subject matter that she easily recognized.

The first was of the staircase waterfall where the creek took a sudden tumble before continuing on again
at a more level pace. She had to fill in detail from her own memory and imagination, but she knew it was
that place.

The second was of a long-deserted homestead up a side valley of the hollow, the tin roof sagging, the
rotting walls falling inward. It was nothing like Aunt’s cabin on its sunny slopes, surrounded by wild
roses, old beehives, and an apple orchard that she and Aunt were slowly reclaiming from the wild. This
was a place that would only get sun from midmorning through the early afternoon, a dark and damp
hollow, where the dew never had a chance to burn off completely.

The last one could have been painted anywhere in this forest but she imagined it had been done down by
the creek, looking up a slope into a view of yellow birches, beech, and sprucey-pines growing dense and
thick as the stars overhead, with a burst of light coming through a break in the canopy.

Lily studied each painting, then carefully set them aside on the ground beside her. There was the hint of
another picture on the inside lid itself, but she couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be.

The palette was covered in dried paint that, like the inside lid, almost had the look of a painting itself, and
lifted from the box to reveal a compartment underneath. In the bottom of the box were tubes of oil paint,
brushes, and a palette knife, a small bottle of turpentine and a rag stained with all the colors the artist had
been using.

Lily turned the palette over and there she found what she’d been looking for. An identifying mark. She
ran a finger over the letters that spelled out an impossible name.

Milo Johnson.

Treasure.




“Milo Johnson,” Aunt repeated, trying to understand Lily’s excitement. At seventeen, Lily could still get
as wound up about a new thing as she had when she was a child. “Should I know that name?”

Lily gave her a “you never pay attention, do you?” look and went to get a book from her bookshelf. She
didn’t have many, but those she did have had been read over and over again. The one she brought back
to the kitchen table was called The Newford Naturalists: Redefining the Landscape . Opening it to the
first artist profiled, she underlined his name with her finger.

Aunt read silently along with her, mouthing the words, then studied the black-and-white photo of Johnson
that accompanied the profile.

“I remember seeing him a time or two,” she said. “Tramping through the woods with an old canvas
knapsack on his back. But that was a long time ago.”

“It would have to have been.”

Aunt read a little more, then looked up.

“So he’s famous then,” she asked.

“Very. He went painting all through these hills and he’s got pictures in galleries all over the world.”

“Imagine that. And you reckon this is his box?”

Lily nodded.

“Well, we’d better see about returning it to him.”

“We can’t,” Lily told her. “He’s dead. Or at least they say he’s dead. He and Frank Spain went out into
the hills on a painting expedition and were never heard from again.”

She flipped toward the back of the book until she came to the smaller section devoted to Spain’s work.
Johnson had been the giant among the Newford Naturalists, his bold, dynamic style instantly
recognizable, even to those who might not know him by name, while Spain had been one of a group of
younger artists that Johnson and his fellow Naturalists had been mentoring. He wasn’t as well known as
Johnson or the others, but he’d already been showing the potential to become a leader in his own right
before he and Johnson had taken that last fateful trip.

It was all in the book which Lily had practically memorized by now, she’d read it so often.

Ever since Harlene Welch had given it to her a few years ago, Lily had wanted to grow up to be like the
Naturalists—especially Johnson. Not to paint exactly the way they did, necessarily, but to have her own
individual vision the way that they did. To be able to take the world of her beloved hills and forest and
portray it in such a way that others would see it through her eyes, that they would see it in a new way and
so understand her love for it and would want to protect it the way that she did.

“That was twenty years ago,” Lily added, “and their bodies weren’t ever recovered.”

Twenty years ago. Imagine. The box had been lying lost in the woods for all that time.

“Never thought of painting pictures as being something dangerous,” Aunt said.

“Anything can be dangerous,” Lily replied. “That’s what Beau says.”

Aunt nodded. She reached across the table to turn the box toward her.

“So you plan on keeping it?” she asked.

“I guess.”

“He must have kin. Don’t you think it should go to them?”

Lily shook her head. “He was an orphan, just like me. The only people we could give it to would be in
the museum and they’d just stick it away in some drawer somewhere.”
“Even the pictures?”

“Well, probably not them. But the painting box for sure…”

Lily hungered to try the paints and brushes she’d found in the box. There was never enough money for
her to think of being able to buy either.

“Well,” Aunt said. “You found it, so I guess you get to decide what you do with it.”

“I guess.”

Finder’s keepers, after all. But she couldn’t help feeling that this find of hers—especially the
paintings—belonged to everyone, not just some gangly backwoods girl who happened to come upon
them while out on a ramble.

“I’ll have to think on it,” she added.

Aunt nodded, then got up to put on the kettle.




The next morning Lily went about her chores. She fed the chickens, sparing a few handfuls of feed for the
sparrows and other birds that were waiting expectantly in the trees nearby. She milked the cow and
poured some milk into a saucer for the cats that came out of the woods when she was done, purring and
winding in between her legs until she set the saucer down. By the time she’d finished weeding the garden
and filling the woodbox, it was midmorning.

She packed herself a lunch and stowed it in her shoulder satchel along with some carpenter’s pencils and
a pad of sketching paper she’d made from cutting up brown grocery bags.

“Off again, are you?” Aunt asked.

“I’ll be home for dinner.”

“You’re not going to bring that box with you?”

She was tempted. The tubes of paint were rusted shut, but she’d squeezed the thin metal of their bodies
and found that the paint inside was still pliable. The brushes were good, too. But her using them didn’t
seem right. Not yet, anyways.

“Not today,” she told Aunt.

As she left the house she looked up to see a pair of dogs coming tearing up the slope toward her. They
were the Shaffers’ dogs, Max and Kiki, the one dark brown, the other white with black markings, the
pair of them bundles of short-haired energy. The Shaffers lived beside the Welchs, who owned the farm
at the end of the trail that ran from the county road to Aunt’s cabin—an hour’s walk through the woods
as you followed the creek. Their dogs were a friendly pair, good at not chasing cows or game, and
showed up every few days to accompany Lily on her rambles.

The dogs danced around her now as she set off through the orchard. When she got to the Apple Tree
Man’s tree—that’s what Aunt called the oldest tree of the orchard—she pulled out a biscuit she’d saved
from breakfast and set it down at its roots. It was a habit she’d had since she was a little girl, like feeding
the birds and the cats while doing her morning chores. Aunt used to tease her about it, telling her what a
good provider she was for the mice and raccoons.

“Shoo,” she said as Kiki went for the biscuit. “That’s not for you. You’ll have to wait for lunch to get
yours.”

They climbed up to the top of the hill and then went into the woods, the dogs chasing each other in circles
while Lily kept stopping to investigate some interesting seed pod or cluster of weeds. They had lunch a
couple of miles further on, sitting on a stone outcrop that overlooked the Big Sinkhole, a two- or
three-acre depression with the entrance to a cave at the bottom.

Most of the mountains around Aunt’s cabin were riddled with caves of all shapes and sizes. There were
entrances everywhere, though most only went a few yards in before they ended. But some said you could
walk from one end of the Kickaha Hills to the other, all underground, if you knew the way.

Lunch finished, Lily slid down from the rock. She didn’t feel like drawing today. Instead she kept thinking
about the painting box, how odd it had been to find it after its having been lost for so many years, so she
led the dogs back to that part of the woods to see what else she might find. A shiver went up her spine.
What if she found their bones?

The dogs grew more playful as she neared the spot where she’d come upon the box. They nipped at her
sleeves or crouched ahead of her, butts and tails in the air, growling so fiercely they made her laugh.
Finally Max bumped her leg with his head just as she was in midstep. She lost her balance and fell into a
pile of leaves, her satchel tumbling to the ground, spilling drawings.

She sat up. A smile kept twitching at the corner of her mouth but she managed to give them a pretty
fierce glare.

“Two against one?” she said. “Well, come on, you bullies. I’m ready for you.”

She jumped on Kiki and wrestled her to the ground, the dog squirming with delight in her grip. Max
joined the tussle and soon the three of them were rolling about in the leaves like the puppies the dogs no
longer were and Lily had never been. They were having such fun that at first none of them heard the
shouting. When they did, they stopped their rough-housing to find a man standing nearby, holding a stick
in his upraised hand.

“Get away from her!” he cried, waving the stick.

Lily sat up, so many leaves tangled in her hair and caught in her sweater that she had more on her than
did some of the autumned trees around them. She put a hand on the collar of either dog, but, curiously,
neither seemed inclined to bark or chase the stranger off. They stayed by her side, staring at him.

Lily studied him for a long moment, too, as quiet as the dogs. He wasn’t a big man, but he seemed solid,
dressed in a fraying broadcloth suit with a white shirt underneath and worn leather boots on his feet. His
hair was roughly trimmed and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a few days. But he had a good
face—strong features, laugh lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. She didn’t think he was
much older than her.

“It’s all right,” she told the man. “We were just funning.”

There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t place it immediately.

“Of course,” he said, dropping the stick. “How stupid can I be? What animal in this forest would harm its
Lady?” He went down on his knees. “Forgive my impertinence.”
This was too odd for words, from the strange behavior of the dogs to the man’s even stranger behavior.
She couldn’t speak. Then something changed in the man’s eyes. There’d been a lost look in them a
moment ago, but also hope. Now there was only resignation.

“You’re just a girl,” he said.

Lily found her voice at that indignity.

“I’m seventeen,” she told him. “In these parts, there’s some would think I’m already an old maid.”

He shook his head. “Your pardon. I meant no insult.”

Lily relaxed a little. “That’s all right.”

He reached over to where her drawings had spilled from her satchel and put them back in, looking at
each one for a moment before he did.

“These are good,” he said. “Better than good.”

For those few moments while he looked through her drawings, while he looked at them carefully, one by
one, before replacing them in her satchel, he seemed different once more. Not so lost. Not so sad.

“Thank you,” she said.

She waited a moment, thinking it might be rude of her to follow a compliment with a question that might
be considered prying. She waited until the last drawing was back in her satchel and he sat there holding
the leather bag on his lap, his gaze gone she didn’t know where.

“What are you doing here in the woods?” she finally asked.

It took a moment before his gaze returned to her. He closed the satchel and laid it on the grass between
them.

“I took you for someone else,” he said, which wasn’t an answer at all. “It was the wild tangle of your red
hair—the leaves in it and on your sweater. But you’re too young and your skin’s not a coppery brown.”

“And this explains what?” she asked.

“I thought you were Her,” he said.

Lily could hear the emphasis he put on the word, but it still didn’t clear up her confusion.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

She started to pluck the leaves out of her hair and brush them from her sweater. The dogs lay down, one
on either side of her, still curiously subdued.

“I thought you were the Lady of the Wood,” he explained. “She who stepped out of a tree and
welcomed us when we came out of the cave between the worlds. She wears a cloak of leaves and has
moonlight in Her eyes.”

A strange feeling came over Lily when he said “stepped out of a tree.” She found herself remembering a
fever dream she’d once had—five years ago when she’d been snake bit. It had been so odd. She’d
dreamed that she’d been changed into a kitten to save her from the snake bite, met Aunt’s Apple Tree
Man and another wood spirit called the Father of Cats. She’d even seen the fairies she’d tried to find for
so long: foxfired shapes, bobbing in the meadow like fireflies.

That dream had seemed so real.

She blinked away the memory of it and focused on the stranger again. He’d gotten off his knees and was
sitting cross-legged on the ground, a half dozen feet from where she and the dogs were.

“What did you mean when you said ‘us’?” she asked.

Now it was his turn to look confused.

“You said this lady showed ‘us’ some cave.”

He nodded. “I was out painting with Milo when—”

As soon as he mentioned that name, the earlier sense of familiarity collided with her memory of a photo in
her book on the Newford Naturalists.

“You’re Frank Spain!” Lily cried.

He nodded in agreement.

“But that can’t be,” she said. “You don’t look any older than you do in the picture in my book.”

“What book?”

“The one about Milo Johnson and the rest of the Newford Naturalists that’s back at the cabin.”

“There’s a book about us?”

“You’re famous,” Lily told him with a grin. “The book says you and Mr. Johnson disappeared twenty
years ago while you were out painting in these very hills.”

Frank shook his head, the shock plain in his features.

“Twenty…years?” he said slowly. “How’s that even possible? We’ve only been gone for a few days…”

“What happened to you?” Lily asked.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “We’d come here after a winter of being cooped up in the studio, longing
to paint in the landscape itself. We meant to stay until the black flies drove us back to the city but then…”
He shook his head. “Then we found the cave and met the Lady….”

He seemed so lost and confused that Lily took him home.




Aunt greeted his arrival and introduction with a raised eyebrow. Lily knew what she was thinking. First a
painting box, now a painter. What would be next?

But Aunt had never turned anyone away from her cabin before and she wasn’t about to start now. She
had Lily show Frank to where he could draw some water from the well and clean up, then set a third
plate for supper. It wasn’t until later when they were sitting out on the porch drinking tea and watching
the night fall that Frank told them his story. He spoke of how he and Milo had found the cave that led
them through darkness into another world. How they’d met the Lady there, with Her cloak of leaves and
Her coppery skin, Her dark, dark eyes and Her fox-red hair.

“So there is an underground way through these mountains,” Aunt said. “I always reckoned there was
some truth to that story.”

Frank shook his head. “The cave didn’t take us to the other side of the mountains. It took us out of this
world and into another.”

Aunt smiled. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is you’ve been to Fairyland.”

“Look at him,” Lily said. She went inside and got her book, opening it to the photograph of Frank Spain.
“He doesn’t look any older than he did when this picture was taken.”

Aunt nodded. “Some people do age well.”

“Not this well,” Lily said.

Aunt turned to Frank. “So what is it that you’re asking us to believe?”

“I’m not asking anything,” he said. “I don’t believe it myself.”

Lily sighed and took the book over to him. She showed him the copyright date, put her finger on the
paragraph that described how he and Milo Johnson had gone missing some fifteen years earlier.

“The book’s five years old,” she said. “But I think we’ve got a newspaper that’s no more than a month
old. I could show you the date on it.”

But Frank was already shaking his head. He’d gone pale reading the paragraph about the mystery of his
and his mentor’s disappearance. He lifted his gaze to meet Aunt’s.

“I guess maybe we were in Fairyland,” he said, his voice gone soft.

Aunt looked from Lily’s face to that of her guest.

“How’s that possible?” she said.

“I truly don’t know,” he told her.

He turned the pages of the book, stopping to read the section on himself. Lily knew what he was reading.
His father had died in a mining accident when he was still a boy, but his mother had been alive when he’d
disappeared. She’d died five years later.

“My parents are gone, too,” she told him.

He nodded, his eyes shiny.

Lily shot Aunt a look, but Aunt sat in her chair, staring out into the gathering dusk, an unreadable
expression in her features. Lily supposed it was one thing to appreciate a fairy tale but quite another to
find yourself smack dab in the middle of one.

Lily was taking it the best of either of them. Maybe it was because of that snake bite fever dream she’d
had. In the past five years she still woke from dreams in which she’d been a kitten.

“Why did you come back?” she asked Frank.
“I didn’t know I was coming back,” he said. “That world…” He flipped a few pages back to show them
reproductions of Johnson’s paintings. “That’s what this other world’s like. You don’t have to imagine
everything being more of itself than it seems to be here like Milo’s done in these paintings. Over there it’s
really like that. You can’t imagine the colors, the intensity, the rich wash that fills your heart as much as it
does your eyes. We haven’t painted at all since we got over there. We didn’t need to.” He laughed. “I
know Milo abandoned his paints before we crossed over and to tell you the truth, I don’t even know
where mine are.”

“I found Mr. Johnson’s box,” Lily said. “Yesterday—not far from where you came upon me and the
dogs.”

He nodded, but she didn’t think he’d heard her.

“I was walking,” he said. “Looking for the Lady. We hadn’t seen Her for a day or so and I wanted to
talk to Her again. To ask Her about that place. I remember I came to this grove of sycamore and beech
where we’d seen Her a time or two. I stepped in between the trees, out of the sun and into the shade.
The next thing I knew I was walking in these hills and I was back here where everything seems…paler.
Subdued.”

He looked at them.

“I’ve got to go back,” he said. “There’s no place for me here. Ma’s gone and everybody I knew’ll be
dead like her or too changed for me to know them anymore.” He tapped the book. “Just like me,
according to what it says here.”

“You don’t want to go rushing into anything,” Aunt said. “Surely you’ve got other kin, and they’ll be
wanting to see you.”

“There’s no one. Me and Ma, we were the last of the Spains that I know.”

Aunt nodded in a way that Lily recognized. It was her way of making you think she agreed with you, but
she was really just waiting for common sense to take hold of you so that you didn’t go off half-cocked
and get yourself in some kind of trouble you didn’t need to get into.

“You’ll want to rest up,” she said. “You can sleep in the barn. Lily will show you where. Come morning,
everything’ll make a lot more sense.”

He just looked at her. “How do you make sense out of something like this?”

“You trust me on this,” she said. “A good night’s sleep does a body wonders.”

So he followed her advice—most people did when Aunt had decided what was best for them.

He let Lily take him down to the barn where they made a bed for him in the straw. She wondered if he’d
try to kiss her, and how she’d feel if he did, but she never got the chance to find out.

“Thank you,” he said and then he lay down on the blankets.

He was already asleep by the time she was closing the door.

And in the morning he was gone.
That night Lily had one of what she thought of as her storybook dreams. She wasn’t a kitten this time.
Instead she was sitting under the Apple Tree Man’s tree and he stepped out of the trunk of his tree just
like she remembered him doing five years ago. He looked the same, too, a raggedy man, gnarled and
twisty, like the boughs of his tree.

“You,” she only said and looked away.

“That’s a fine welcome for an old friend.”

“You’re not my friend. Friends aren’t magical men who live in a tree and then make you feel like you’re
crazy because they never show up in your life again.”

“And yet I helped you when you were a kitten.”

“In the fever dream when I thought I was a kitten.”

He came around and sat on his haunches in front of her, all long gangly limbs and tattered clothes and
bird’s nest hair. His face was wrinkled like the dried fruit from his tree.

He sighed. “It was better for you to only remember it as a dream.”

“So it wasn’t a dream?” she asked, unable to keep the eagerness from her voice. “You’re real? You and
the Father of Cats and the fairies in the field?”

“Someplace we’re real.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded, disappointment taking the place of her momentary
happiness.

“This is just a dream, too, isn’t it?” she said.

“This is. What happened before wasn’t.”

She poked at the dirt with her finger, looking away from him again.

“Why would it be better for me to remember it as a dream?” she asked.

“Our worlds aren’t meant to mix—not anymore. They’ve grown too far apart. When you spend too
much time in ours, you become like your painter foundling, forever restless and unhappy in the world
where you belong. Instead of living your life, you lose yourself in dreams and fancies.”

“Maybe for some, dreams and fancies are better than what they have here.”

“Maybe,” he said, but she knew he didn’t agree. “Is that true for you?”

“No,” she had to admit. “But I still don’t understand why I was allowed that one night and then no
more.”

She looked at him. His dark eyes were warm and kind, but there was a mystery in them, too. Something
secret and daunting that she wasn’t sure she could ever understand. That perhaps she shouldn’t want to
understand.

“What you do is important,” he said after a long moment, which wasn’t much of an answer at all.

She laughed. “What I do? Whatever do I do that could be so important?”
“Perhaps it’s not what you do now so much as what you will do if you continue with your drawing and
painting.”

She shook her head. “I’m not really that good.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

She remembered what Frank Spain had said after looking at her drawings.

These are good. Better than good .

She remembered how the drawings had, if only for a moment, taken him away from the sadness that lay
so heavy in his heart.

“But I’m only drawing the woods,” she said. “I’m drawing what I see, not fairies and fancies.”

The Apple Tree Man nodded. “Sometimes people need fairies and fancies to wake them up to what they
already have. But sometimes a good drawing of a real thing does it better.”

“So is that why you came to me tonight?” she asked. “To tell me to keep doing something I’m going to
go on doing anyway?”

He shook his head.

“Then why did you come?”

“To ask you not to look for that cave,” he said. “To not go in. If you do, you’ll carry the yearning of what
you find inside yourself forever.”




What the Apple Tree Man had told her all seemed to make perfect sense in last night’s dream. But when
she woke to find Frank gone, what had made sense then didn’t seem to be nearly enough now. Knowing
she’d once experienced a real glimpse into a storybook world, she only found herself wanting more.

“Well, it seems like a lot of trouble to go through,” Aunt said when Lily came back from the barn with the
news that their guest was gone. “To cadge a meal and a roof over your head for the night, I mean.”

“I don’t think he was lying.”

Aunt shrugged.

“But he looked just like the picture in my book.”

“There was a resemblance,” Aunt said. “But really. The story he told—it’s too hard to believe.”

“Then how do you explain it?”

Aunt thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“Can’t say that I can,” she admitted.

“I think he’s gone to look for the cave. He wants to go back.”
“And I suppose you want to go looking for him.”

Lily nodded.

“Are you sweet on him?” Aunt asked.

“I don’t think I am.”

“Can’t say’s I’d blame you. He was a good-looking man.”

“I’m just worried about him,” Lily said. “He’s all lost and alone and out of his own time.”

“And say you find him. Say you find the cave. What then?”

The Apple Tree Man’s warning and Aunt’s obvious concern struggled against her own desire to find the
cave, to see the magical land that lay beyond it.

“I’d have the chance to say good-bye,” she said.

There. She hadn’t exactly lied. She hadn’t said everything she could have, but she hadn’t lied.

Aunt studied her for a long moment.

“You just be careful,” she said. “See to the cow and chickens, but the garden can wait till you get back.”

Lily grinned. She gave Aunt a quick kiss, then packed herself a lunch. She was almost out the door when
she turned back and took Milo Johnson’s painting box out from under her bed.

“Going to try those paints?” Aunt asked.

“I think so.”




And she did, but it wasn’t nearly the success she’d hoped it would be.

The morning started fine, but then walking in these woods of hers was a sure cure for any ailment,
especially when it was in your heart or head. The dogs hadn’t come to join her today, but that was all
right. She could be just as happy on her own here.

She made her way down to that part of the wood where she’d first found the box, and then later Frank,
but he was nowhere about. Either he’d found his way back into fairy land, or he was just ignoring her
voice. Finally she gave up and spent a while looking for this cave of his, but there were too many in this
part of the forest and none of them looked—no, none of them felt right.

After lunch, she sat down and opened the painting box.

The drawing she did on the back of one of Johnson’s three paintings turned out well, though it was odd
using her pencil on a wood panel. But she’d gotten the image she wanted: the sweeping boughs of an old
beech tree, smooth-barked and tall, the thick crush of underbrush around it, the forest behind. It was the
colors that proved to be a problem. The paints wouldn’t do what she wanted. It was hard enough to get
each tube open, they were stuck so tight, but once she had a squirt of the various colors on the palette it
all went downhill from there.
The colors were wonderfully bright—pure pigments that had their own inner glow. At least they did until
she started messing with them and then everything turned to mud. When she tried to mix them she got
either outlandish hues or colors so dull they all might as well have been the same. The harder she tried,
the worse it got.

Sighing, she finally wiped off the palette and the panel she’d been working on, then cleaned the brushes,
dipping them in the little jar of turpentine, working the paint out of the hairs with a rag. She studied
Johnson’s paintings as she worked, trying to figure out how he’d gotten the colors he had. This was his
box, after all. These were the same colors he’d used to paint these three amazing paintings. Everything
she needed was just lying there in the box, waiting to be used. So why was she so hopeless?

It was because painting was no different than looking for fairies, she supposed. No different than trying to
find that cave entrance into some magic elsewhere. Some people just weren’t any good at that sort of
thing.

They were both magic, after all. Art as well as fairies. Magic. What else could you call how Johnson was
able to bring the forest to life with no more than a few colors on a flat surface?

She could practice, of course. And she would. She hadn’t been any good when she’d first started
drawing either. But she wasn’t sure that she’d ever feel as…inspired as Johnson must have felt.

She studied the inside lid of the box. Even this abstract pattern where he’d probably only been testing his
color mixes had so much vibrancy and passion. She leaned closer for a better look and found herself
thinking about her Newford Naturalists book, about something Milo Johnson was supposed to have said.
“It’s not just a matter of painting en plein air as the Impressionists taught us,” the author quoted Johnson.
“It’s just as important to simply be in the wilds. Many times the only painting box I take is in my head.
You don’t have to be an artist to bring something back from your wilderness experiences. My best
paintings don’t hang in galleries. They hang somewhere in between my ears—an endless private showing
that I can only attempt to share with others through a more physical medium.”

That must be why he’d abandoned this painting box she’d found. He’d gone into fairyland only bringing
the one in his head. She didn’t know if she could ever learn to do that.

She sighed and was about to get up and go when she thought she heard something—an almost-music. It
was like listening to ravens in the woods when their rough, deep-throated croaks and cries all but seemed
like human language. It wasn’t, of course, but still, you felt so close to understanding it.

She lifted her head to look around. It wasn’t ravens she heard. It wasn’t anything she knew, but it still
seemed familiar. Faint, but insistent. Almost like wind chimes or distant bells, but not quite. Almost like
birdsong, trills and warbling melodies, but not quite. Almost like an old fiddle tune, played on a pipe or a
flute, the rhythm a little ragged, or simply a little out of time like the curious jumps and extra beats in a
Kickaha tune. But not quite.

Closing the painting box, she stood. She slung her satchel from her shoulder, picked up the box, and
turned in a slow circle. The sound was stronger to the west, away from the creek and deeper into the
forest. A ravine cut off to the left and she followed it, pushing her way through the thick shrub layer of
rhododendrons and mountain laurel. Hemlocks and tulip trees rose up the slopes on either side with a
thick understory of redbud, magnolia, and dogwood.

The almost-music continued to pull her along—distant, near, distant, near, like a radio signal that couldn’t
quite hang on to a station. It was only when she broke through into a small clearing, a wall of granite
rising above her, that she saw the mouth of the cave.
She knew immediately that this had to be the cave Frank had been looking for, the one into which he and
Milo Johnson had stepped and so disappeared from the world for twenty years. The almost-music was
clearer than ever here, but it was the bas-relief worked into the stone above the entrance that made her
sure. Here was Frank’s Lady, a rough carving of a woman’s face. Her hair was thick with leaves and
more leaves came spilling out of her mouth, bearding her chin.

Aunt’s general warnings, as well as the Apple Tree Man’s more specific ones, returned to her as she
moved closer. She lifted a hand to trace the contours of the carving. As soon as she touched it, the
almost-music stopped.

She dropped her hand, starting back as though she’d put a finger on a hot stove. She looked around
herself with quick, nervous glances. Now that the almost-music was gone, she found herself standing in
an eerie pocket of silence. The sounds of the forest were muted, as the music had been earlier. She could
still hear the insects and bird-song, but they seemed to come from far away.

She turned back to the cave, uneasy now. In the back of her mind she could hear the Apple Tree Man’s
voice.

Don’t go in.

I won’t. Not all the way.

But now that she was here, how could she not at least have a look?

She went as far as the entrance, ducking her head because the top of the hole was only as high as her
shoulder. It was dark inside, too dark to see in the beginning. But slowly her eyes adjusted to the dimmer
lighting.

The first thing she really saw were the paintings.

They were like her own initial attempts at drawing—crude, stick figures and shapes that she’d drawn on
scraps of paper and the walls of the barn with the charred ends of sticks. Except, where hers had been
simple because she could do no better, these, she realized as she studied them more closely, were more
like stylized abbreviations. Where her drawings had been tentative, these held power. The paint or chalk
had been applied with bold, knowing strokes. Nothing wasted. Complex images distilled to their primal
essences.

An antlered man. A turtle. A bear with a sun on its chest, radiating squiggles of light. A leaping stag. A
bird of some sort with enormous wings. A woman, cloaked in leaves. Trees of every shape and size.
Lightning bolts. A toad. A spiral with the face of the woman on the entrance outside in its center. A fox
with an enormous striped tail. A hare with drooping ears and small deer horns.

And more. So many more. Some easily recognizable, others only geometric shapes that seemed to hold
whole books of stories in their few lines.

Her gaze traveled over the walls, studying the paintings with growing wonder and admiration. The cave
was one of the larger ones she’d found—easily three or four times the size of Aunt’s cabin. There were
paintings everywhere, many too hard to make out because they were lost in deeper shadows. She
wished she had a corn shuck or lantern to throw more light than what came from the opening behind her.
She longed to move closer, but still didn’t dare abandon the safety of the entranceway.

She might have left it like that, drunk her fill of the paintings and then gone home, if her gaze hadn’t fallen
upon a figure sitting hunched in a corner of the cave, holding what looked like a small bark whistle. She’d
made the same kind herself from the straight smooth branches of a chestnut or a sourwood tree.

But the whistle was quiet now. Frank sat so still, enveloped in the shadows, that she might never have
noticed him except as she had, by chance.

“Frank…?” she said.

He lifted his head to look at her.

“It’s gone,” he said. “I can’t call it back.”

“The other world?”

He nodded.

“That was you making that…music?”

“It was me doing something,” he said. “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it music.”

Lily hesitated a long moment, then finally stepped through the entrance, into the cave itself. She flinched
as she crossed the threshhold, but nothing happened. There were no flaring lights or sudden sounds. No
door opened into another world, sucking her in.

She set the painting box down and sat on her ankles in front of Frank.

“I didn’t know you were a musician,” she said.

“I’m not.”

He held up his reed whistle—obviously something he’d made himself.

“But I used to play as a boy,” he said. “And there was always music there, on the other side. I thought I
could wake something. Call me to it, or it to me.”

Lily raised her eyes to the paintings on the wall.

“How did you cross over the first time?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. That was Milo’s doing. I was only tagging along.”

“Did he…did he make a painting?”

Frank’s gaze settled on hers.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She pointed to the walls. “Look around you. This is the cave, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“What do you think these paintings are for?” she asked. When he still didn’t seem to get it, she added,
“Perhaps it’s the paintings that open a door between the worlds. Maybe this Lady of yours likes pictures
more than She does music.”

Frank scrambled to his feet and studied the walls as though he was seeing the paintings for the first time.
Lily was slower to rise.
“If I had paint, I could try it,” he said.

“There’s the painting box I found,” Lily told him. “It’s still full of paints.”

He grinned. Grabbing her arms, he gave her a kiss, right on her lips, full of passion and fire, then bent
down to open the box.

“I remember this box,” he said as he rummaged through the paint tubes. “We were out painting, scouting
a good location—though for Milo, any location was a good one. Anyway, there we were, out in these
woods, when suddenly Milo stuffs this box of his into a tangle of tree roots and starts walking. I called
after him, but he never said a word, never even turned around to see if I was coming.

“So I followed, hurrying along behind him until we finally came to this cave. And then…then…”

He looked up at Lily. “I’m not sure what happened. One moment we were walking into the cave and the
next we had crossed over into that other place.”

“So Milo didn’t paint on the wall.”

“I just don’t remember. But he might not have had to. Milo could create whole paintings in his head
without ever putting brush to canvas. And he could describe that painting to you, stroke for stroke—even
years later.”

“I read about that in the book.”

“Hmm.”

Frank had returned his attention to the paints.

“It’ll have to be a specific image,” he said, talking as much to himself as to Lily. “Something simple that
still manages to encompass everything a person is or feels.”

“An icon,” Lily said, remembering the word from another of her books.

He nodded in agreement as he continued to sort through the tubes of paint, finally choosing a color: a
burnt umber, rich and dark.

“And then?” Lily asked, remembering what the Apple Tree Man had told her in her dream. “Just saying
you find the right image. You paint it on the wall and some kind of door opens up. Then what do you
do?”

He looked up at her, puzzled.

“I’ll step through it,” he said. “I’ll go back to the other side.”

“But why?” Lily asked. “Why’s over there so much better than the way the world is here?”

“I…”

“When you cross over to there,” Lily said, echoing the Apple Tree man’s words to her, “you give up all
the things you could be here.”

“We do that every time we make any change in our lives,” Frank said. “It’s like moving from one town to
another, though this is a little more drastic, I suppose.” He considered it for a moment, then added, “It’s
not so much better over there as different. I’ve never fit in here the way I do over there. And now I
don’t have anything left for me here except for this burn inside—a yearning for the Lady and that land of
Hers that lies somewhere on the other side of these fields we know.”

“I’ve had that feeling,” Lily said, thinking of her endless search for fairies as a child.

“You can’t begin to imagine what it’s like over there,” Frank went on. “Everything glows with its own
inner light.”

He paused and regarded her for a long moment.

“You could come,” he said finally. “You could come with me and see for yourself. Then you’d
understand.”

Lily shook her head. “No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk out on Aunt, not like this, without a word. Not after
she took me in when no one else would. She wasn’t even real family, though she’s family now.” She
waited a beat, remembering the strength of his arms, the hard kiss he’d given her, then added. “You
could stay.”

Now it was his turn to shake his head.

“I can’t.”

Lily nodded. She understood. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the desire to go herself.

She watched him unscrew the paint tube and squeeze a long worm of dark brown pigment into his palm.
He turned to a clear spot on the wall, dipped a finger into the paint and raised his hand. But then he
hesitated.

“You can do it,” Lily told him.

Maybe she couldn’t go. Maybe she wanted him to stay. But she knew enough not to try to hold him
back if he had to go. It was no different than making friends with a wild creature. You could catch them
and tie them up and make them stay with you, but their heart would never be yours. Their wild heart, the
thing you loved about them…it would wither and die. So why would you want to do such a thing?

“I can,” Frank agreed, his voice soft. He gave her a smile. “That’s part of the magic, isn’t it? You have to
believe that it will work.”

Lily had no idea if that was true or not, but she gave him an encouraging nod all the same.

He hummed something under his breath as he lifted his hand again. Lily recognized it as the almost-music
she’d heard before, but now she could make out the tune. She didn’t know its name, but the pick-up
band at the grange dances played it from time to time. She thought it might have the word “fairy” in it.

Frank’s finger moved decisively, smearing paint on the rock. It took Lily a moment to see that he was
painting a stylized oak leaf. He finished the last line and took his finger away, stepped back.

Neither knew what to expect, if anything. As the moments dragged by, Frank stopped humming. He
cleaned his hands against the legs of his trousers, smearing paint onto the cloth. His shoulders began to
slump and he turned to her.

“Look,” Lily said before he could speak.

She pointed to the wall. The center of the oak leaf he’d painted had started to glow with a warm,
green-gold light. They watched the light spread across the wall of the cave, moving out from the central
point like ripples from a stone tossed into a still pool of water. Other colors appeared, blues and reds
and deeper greens. The colors shimmered, like they were painted on cloth touched by some unseen
wind, and then the wall was gone and they were looking through an opening in the rock. Through a door
into another world.

There was a forest over there, not much different than the one they’d left behind except that, as Frank
had said, every tree, every leaf, every branch and blade of grass, pulsed with its own inner light. It was so
bright it almost hurt the eyes, and not simply because they’d been standing in this dim cave for so long.

Everything had a light and a song and it was almost too much to bear. But at the same time, Lily felt the
draw of that world like a tightening in her heart. It wasn’t so much a wanting, as a need.

“Come with me,” Frank said again.

She had never wanted to do something more in her life. It was not just going to that magical place, it was
the idea of being there with this man with his wonderfully creative mind and talent. This man who’d given
her her first real kiss.

But slowly she shook her head.

“Have you ever stood on a mountaintop,” she asked, “and watched the sun set in a bed of feathery
clouds? Have you ever watched the monarchs settled on a field of milk-weed or listened to the spring
chorus after the long winter’s done?”

Frank nodded.

“This world has magic, too,” Lily said.

“But not enough for me,” Frank said. “Not after having been over there.”

“I know.”

She stepped up to him and gave him a kiss. He held her for a moment, returning the kiss, then they
stepped back from each other.

“Go,” Lily said, giving him a little push. “Go before I change my mind.”

She saw he understood that, for her, going would be as much a mistake as staying would be for him. He
nodded and turned, walked out into that other world.

Lily stood watching him go. She watched him step in among the trees. She heard him call out and heard
another man’s voice reply. She watched as the doorway became a swirl of colors once more. Just before
the light faded, it seemed to take the shape of a woman’s face—the same woman whose features had
been carved into the stone outside the cave, leaves in her hair, leaves spilling from her mouth. Then it was
all gone. The cave was dim once more and she was alone.

Lily knelt down by Milo Johnson’s paint box and closed the lid, fastened the snaps. Holding it by its
handle, she stood up and walked slowly out of the cave.




“Are you there?” she asked later, standing by the Apple Tree Man’s tree. “Can you hear me?”
She took a biscuit from her pocket—the one she hadn’t left earlier in the day because she’d still been
angry for his appearing in her dream last night when he’d been absent from her life for five years. When
he’d let her think that her night of magic had been nothing more than a fever dream brought on by a
snake bite.

She put the biscuit down among his roots.

“I just wanted you to know that you were probably right,” she said. “About my going over to that other
place, I mean. Not about how I can’t have magic here.”

She sat down on the grass and laid the paint box down beside her, her satchel on top of it. Plucking a
leaf from the ground, she began to shred it.

“I know, I know,” she said. “There’s plenty of everyday magic all around me. And I do appreciate it. But
I don’t know what’s so wrong about having a magical friend as well.”

There was no reply. No gnarled Apple Tree Man stepping out of his tree. No voice as she’d heard in her
dream last night. She hadn’t really been expecting anything.

“I’m going to ask Aunt if I can have an acre or so for my own garden,” she said. “I’ll try growing cane
there and sell the molasses at the harvest fair. Maybe put in some berries and make preserves and pies,
too. I’ll need some real money to buy more paints.”

She smiled and looked up into the tree’s boughs.

“So you see, I can take advice. Maybe you should give it a try.”

She stood up and dusted off her knees, picked up the painting box and her satchel.

“I’ll bring you another biscuit tomorrow morning,” she said.

Then she started down the hill to Aunt’s cabin.

“Thank you,” a soft, familiar voice said.

She turned. There was no one there, but the biscuit was gone.

She grinned. “Well, that’s a start,” she said and continued on home.

                                       The Pyramid of Amirah

                                            James Patrick Kelly




James Patrick Kelly [www.jimkelly.net] is well known and an award winner for his science fiction
stories, but in fact he has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and
planetarium shows. He writes a column on the Internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, with
which his fiction is closely associated, and his audio plays are a regular feature on Scifi.com’s
Seeing Ear Theater. He informs us that he is currently one of fourteen councilors appointed to the
New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and also serves on the board of directors of the New
England Foundation for the Arts. His collections include Strange But Not a Stranger (2002) and
Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (1997), and his novels include Wildlife (1994) and Look Into
the Sun (1989).

“The Pyramid of Amirah” appeared in F&SF, and is one of Kelly’s occasional fantasy stories.
Kelly said in an interview (at www.SCIFI.com), “Whenever I write a story that supposes that God
exists, I have to imagine that Her ways are mysterious—and therefore scary—indeed. God is the
ultimate alien.” This story is about a teenage girl who has been chosen as a human sacrifice. It
reminds us that there are many stories in scripture that are scary and disturbing.




Sometimes Amirah thinks she can sense the weight of the pyramid that entombs her house. The huge
limestone blocks seem to crush the air and squeeze light. When she carries the table lamp onto the porch
and holds it up to the blank stone, shadows ooze across the rough-cut inner face. If she is in the right
mood, they make cars and squirrels and flowers and Mom’s face.

Time passes.

Amirah will never see the outside of her pyramid, but she likes to imagine different looks for it. It’s like
trying on new jeans. They said that the limestone would be cased in some kind of marble they called
Rosa Portagallo. She hopes it will be like Betty’s Pyramid, red as sunset, glossy as her fingernails. Are
they setting it yet? Amirah thinks not. She can still hear the dull, distant chock as the believers lower each
structural stone into place—twenty a day. Dust wisps from the cracks between the stones and settles
through the thick air onto every horizontal surface of her house: the floor, Dad’s desk, windowsills and
the tops of the kitchen cabinets. Amirah doesn’t mind; she goes over the entire house periodically with
vacuum and rag. She wants to be ready when the meaning comes.

Time passes.

The only thing she really misses is the sun. Well, that isn’t true. She misses her Mom and her Dad and her
friends on the swim team, especially Janet. She and Janet offered themselves to the meaning at Blessed
Finger Sanctuary on Janet’s twelfth birthday. Neither of them expected to be chosen pyramid girl. They
thought maybe they would be throwing flowers off a float in the Monkey Day parade or collecting door
to door for the Lost Brothers. Janet shrieked with joy and hugged her when Mrs. Munro told them the
news. If her friend hadn’t held her up, Amirah might have collapsed.

Amirah keeps all the lights on, even when she goes to bed. She knows this is a waste of electricity, but
it’s easier to be brave when the house is bright. Besides, there is nobody to scold her now.

“Is there?” Amirah says, and then she walks into the kitchen to listen. Sometimes the house makes
whispery noises when she talks to it. “Is there anyone here who cares what I do?” Her voice sounds like
the hinges of the basement door.

Time passes.

They took all the clocks, and she has lost track of day and night. She sleeps when she is tired and eats
when she is hungry. That’s all there is to do, except wait for the meaning to come. Mom and Dad’s
bedroom is filled to the ceiling with cartons of Goody-goody Bars: Nut Raisin, Cherry Date, Chocolate
Banana, and Cinnamon Apple, which is not her favorite. Mrs. Munro said there were enough to last her
for years. At first that was a comfort. Now Amirah tries not to think about it.

Time passes.

Amirah’s pyramid is the first in the Tri-City area. They said it would be twenty meters tall. She had
worked it out afterward that twenty meters was almost seventy feet. Mom said that if the meaning had
first come to Memphis, Tennessee, instead of Memphis, Egypt, then maybe everything would have been
in American instead of metric. Dad had laughed at that and said then Elvis would have been the First
Brother. Mom didn’t like him making fun of the meaning. If she wanted to laugh, she would have him tell
one of the Holy Jokes.

“What’s the first law of religion?” Amirah says in her best imitation of Dad’s voice.

“For every religion, there exists an equal and opposite religion,” she says in Mom’s voice.

“What’s the second law of religion?” says Dad’s voice.

“They’re both wrong.” Mom always laughs at that.

The silence goes all breathy, like Amirah is holding seashells up to both ears. “I don’t get it,” she says.

She can’t hear building sounds anymore. The dust has stopped falling.

Time passes.

When Amirah was seven, her parents took her to Boston to visit Betty’s Pyramid. The bus driver said
that the believers had torn down a hundred and fifty houses to make room for it. Amirah could feel Betty
long before she could see her pyramid; Mom said the meaning was very strong in Boston.

Amirah didn’t understand much about the meaning back then. While the bus was stopped at a light, she
had a vision of her heart swelling up inside her like a balloon and lifting her out the window and into the
bluest part of the sky where she could see everything there was to see. The whole bus was feeling Betty
by then. Dad told the Holy Joke about the chicken and the Bible in a loud voice and soon everyone was
laughing so hard that the bus driver had to pull over. She and Mom and Dad walked the last three blocks
and the way Amirah remembered it, her feet only touched the ground a couple of times. The pyramid
was huge in a way that no skyscraper could ever be. She heard Dad tell Mom it was more like
geography than architecture. Amirah was going to ask him what that meant, only she realized that she
knew because Betty knew. The marble of Betty’s pyramid was incredibly smooth but it was cold to the
touch. Amirah spread the fingers of both hands against it and thought very hard about Betty.

“Are you there, Betty?” Amirah sits up in bed. “What’s it like?” All the lights are on in the house.
“Betty?” Amirah can’t sleep because her stomach hurts. She gets up and goes to the bathroom to pee.
When she wipes herself, there is a pinkish stain on the toilet paper.

Time passes.

Amirah also misses Juicy Fruit gum and Onion Taste Tots and 3DV and music. She hasn’t seen her
shows since Dad shut the door behind him and led Mom down the front walk. Neither of them looked
back, but she thought Mom might have been crying. Did Mom have doubts? This still bothers Amirah.
She wonders what Janet is listening to these days on her earstone. Have the Stiffies released any new
songs? When Amirah sings, she practically has to scream or else the pyramid swallows her voice.

“Go, go away, go-go away from me.
Had fun, we’re done, whyo-why can’t you see?”

Whenever she finishes a Goody-goody bar, she throws the wrapper out the front door. The walk has
long since been covered. In the darkness, the wrappers look like fallen leaves.

Time passes.

Both Janet and Amirah had been trying to get Han Biletnikov to notice them before Amirah became
pyramid girl. Han had wiry red hair and freckles and played midfield on the soccer team. He was the first
boy in their school to wear his pants inside out. On her last day in school, there had been an assembly in
her honor and Han had come to the stage and told a Holy Joke about her.

Amirah cups her hands to make her voice sound like it’s coming out of a microphone. “What did Amirah
say to the guy at the hot dog stand?”

She twists her head to one side to give the audience response. “I don’t know, what?”

Han speaks again into the microphone. “Make me one with everything.” She can see him now, even
though she is sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water and an unopened Cherry Date
Goody-goody bar in front of her. His cheeks are flushed as she strides across the stage to him. He isn’t
expecting her to do this. The believers go quiet as if someone has thrown a blanket over them. She holds
out her hand to shake his and he stares at it. When their eyes finally meet, she can see his awe; she’s
turned into President Huong, or maybe Billy Tiger, the forward for the Boston Flash. His hand is warm, a
little sweaty. Her fingertips brush the hollow of his palm.

“Thank you,” says Amirah.

Han doesn’t say anything. He isn’t there. Amirah unwraps the Goody-goody bar.

Time passes.

Amirah never gets used to having her period. She thinks she isn’t doing it right. Mom never told her how
it worked and she didn’t leave pads or tampons or anything. Amirah wads toilet paper into her panties,
which makes her feel like she’s walking around with a sofa cushion between her legs. The menstrual
blood smells like vinegar. She takes a lot of baths. Sometimes she touches herself as the water cools and
then she feels better for a while.

Time passes.

Amirah wants to imagine herself kissing Han Biletnikov, but she can’t. She keeps seeing Janet’s lips on
his, her tongue darting into his mouth. At least, that’s how Janet said people kiss. She wonders if she
would have better luck if she weren’t in the kitchen. She climbs the stairs to her bedroom and opens the
door. It’s dark. The light has burned out. She pulls down the diffuser and unscrews the bulb. It’s clear
and about the size of a walnut. It says: