by Ellen Datlow
“Mr. Stockton.”
Stockton paused. He took a deep breath.
Somewhere faraway the atomizer hissed, releasing another burst of citrus spray.
There was a white roaring in his ears.
You don’t have to look back, he told himself. You can push through the door and into the hallway beyond. Walk out through the lobby into the bright afternoon. Judy will have the car idling. It will be cool inside and you can pull away from this place forever, tires humming on the pavement. You never have to look back again. This is all behind you now. This is all behind you.
“Mr. Stockton.”
Against his will, as if some force compelled him, Stockton turned.
Keyes stood there, so close that a single step would have closed the distance between them. He was gaunt and tall. His eyes were dark wells.
“This is over,” Stockton said, “this thing between us. Between the three of us.”
“Is it?” Keyes said, and Stockton shouldered through the door, that white roaring in his ears—out through the lobby and past the desk clerk busy at his station, out, out, into the blistering heat.
The Shooter
M. Rickert
He’d been reading sympathy cards for a long time. None of them conveyed what he felt. So many pictures of birds, flowers, and clouds shot through with sunbeams as if death relegated one the emotional capacity of a kindergartner. The words were worse. Almost cruel, really: ethereal and vacuous.
Clearly, he was hoping for too much. He needed to choose one and be done with it. What difference did it make? No card could bear the weight. Just pick, he scolded himself.
“I know. They’re shit, aren’t they?”
“Excuse me?”
“I couldn’t help but overhear.”
Had he spoken? He peered at the young man who looked up from beneath a dark forelock hanging above his pretty eyes, long lashes and perfectly arched brows. Impossibly thin, as seemed to be the fashion, a boy as substantial as a black butterfly, fleetingly seen and forever remembered.
“We have others, you know.”
“We?”
The boy smiled, the dazzling display quickly obliterated by narrow lips. “Sorry. Kent.” He pointed at the name tag affixed to his cotton shirt, a summer plaid of patriotic colors. “I work here.”
Alex nodded. He wished he could think of something to say, but the impossible task at hand—and all that led to it—had depleted him of his ability to function reasonably. He shouldn’t have come. It was too soon. What had he been thinking?
“They don’t want me to tell you.”
“Excuse me? Kent? I’m—”
“I was supposed to send them back to the distributor. Kyle, he’s the manager, said he’d gotten complaints.”
“Where is Kyle?”
“Gone. I don’t know where he goes, but I know he won’t be back for a while, which is why I feel safe telling you.”
“Listen, Kent? I appreciate—”
“No problem! Follow me. I’ll show you where they are.”
They were in the back room—past boxes stacked on boxes, shelves of paper towels and cleaning supplies, past the employee bathroom with the door open, the toilet lid up, the basin, rusty—in a cold room Kent illuminated by pulling the chain of an overhead light. The naked bulb dangled there like a hanging.
“Let’s see, okay here’s some, but there’s more. Someone keeps coming back here and moving shit.”
Alex looked down at the carton Kent held out with one hand even as he continued to search through clutter, mumbling about “a little consideration for the dead” and whatnot. The boy’s anger, however benign, frightened Alex. He took the carton.
“I see them now. Christ.”
Kent shoved boxes aside, tossed a few to the ground. Alex wanted to warn him to be careful but could not summon the words. Instead, glancing down, he saw blood and almost dropped the carton.
“Yeah, I know. They make ’em look real.” Kent sneezed. “It’s the dust,” he sniffed. “This shit back here really gets my allergies going.”
Alex decided to pretend everything was normal. He tried to smile, which was surprisingly difficult under the circumstances.
“Thank you,” he said. “I—”
“No problem.” Kent sneezed again. “Take your time. The others are right there. I gotta get back to the register.”
Alex nodded—already planning to make his escape—when Kent, with dancerlike grace, turned and pointed a gun made out of his fingers before pirouetting away, receding into the dark labyrinth they’d entered together, leaving Alex shot with horror.
He immediately moved to set the carton on the shelf but, while doing so, his thumb dipped low and brushed a card which was smooth as skin, unblemished or scarred by the texture of dried blood. He paused to wipe his fingers across the face, picked it up and read the message, then set it down, and chose another.
He was both appalled and fascinated by the bizarre collection. At first he thought they were all for accidental shootings, but after a while realized the cards had been stacked in categories. He had to search the other boxes Kent had set aside to find school shootings. There were quite a few of them, which made sense of course.
It seemed wrong to be happy, and with that thought alone Alex was able to tamp down the emotion. What was happening to this country? And yet, what a relief it was to find the situation so thoroughly addressed. In fact, he continued to read cards even after he found the perfect one. To be sure, he told himself though he knew it was a charade of sorts. Finally satisfied, he tucked the card into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and made his departure, turning left at the shelf of cleaning supplies when he knew turning right would have led him back to the boy waiting beneath the fluorescent lights, so pale his veins shimmered blue through his skin like an effervescent insect.
There. Straight ahead. Alex saw the door with the exit sign above the warning; USE ONLY IN EMERGENCY, ALARM WILL GO OFF. It did. Screaming and sirens, and Alex in the bright light that consumed him like a neutron star.
• • •
The thing was, Alex knew he had died—he just kept forgetting—and, in that way, he mused, death was so much like life. Everyone said they knew they were mortal and, technically, they did, but Alex remembered how he had been, and suspected—in spite of his childhood hopes and aspirations—his life had been quite ordinary, his forgetting ordinary too. He’d spent very little time remembering his inevitable demise. When such bleak humor did arise—usually prompted by the death of another, that bitter winter after his mother died, for instance—he was able to get over it, eventually. Shocking, really, how completely filled up he had been with sorrow, only to find himself—months later—watching television and laughing, his grief destroyed by something so minor he couldn’t even recall what it had been. Yet, that, probably more than anything else, seemed to define the human condition. The great sorrow they all felt, the overwhelming anguish and despair alleviated with time. Just as now, he realized, others were alleviated of him, and he was left to wander.
He didn’t know where he was.
• • •
“Well, you know, I guess it depends on your own belief system, right? But what you got in your hand there is called cow parsley, and I agree it’s pretty but I think you should know its other name, which is dead-man’s flourish.”
“I thought it was Queen Anne’s lace,” Alex said to the girl. “What about these?” he pointed at a blue vase filled with cheerful flowers he remembered growing in his mother’s garden.
When the girl shrugged, her dangling earrings made a faint sound like breaking glass.
“What?” he asked. Then, surprised at how mean he sounded, added. “Sorry. I’m . . . this . . .”
“It’s just I’m not supposed to discourage buyers. Tammy keeps saying that. ‘Quit discouraging buyers.’ ”
“Tammy?”
“She owns the place.”
“Well, where is she?” Alex asked.
He frowned. Why did that sound so familiar? “I’ll take them,” he said, lifting the vase to bring to the counter.
The girl shook her head. “But they’re daisies.”
“Yes,” Alex said. “All right.”
The light, shining through the large front window, blazed across her face. When she looked up at him, beseeching, he was confused.
“Okay, I’m just gonna tell you this so you can make an informed choice. If you want to buy ’em, I’ll sell them to you. But daisies were, like, planted by dead children.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, to try to cheer their parents up.”
“But that doesn’t . . .” Alex didn’t finish, however. He carefully returned the vase to the spot he’d taken it from. It was nonsense, of course, but once heard he could not unhear it and wasn’t able to consider a flower with such bleak associations. He glanced at the girl who seemed absorbed in picking a cockroach off her sweater.
“What about this?” Alex pointed at a woody green plant in a simple terra-cotta pot.
She sighed deeply and shrugged.
“What?” he asked. What could possibly be wrong with such an innocuous plant? When he leaned closer he smelled a pleasant aroma that reminded him of soap.
“Well, it depends,” she said.
“I like it.”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
“But?”
“Well, you said this is for a funeral, right?”
He had almost forgotten, and it had been a relief. But there he was. Doing this terrible thing.
“Rosemary is for remembrance, all right?”
“Excuse me?”
“So I guess it depends whether they want to remember or not.”
“Why wouldn’t they want to remember?” Alex asked.
The bell above the door rang, signaling that someone else was entering the shop. Alex was relieved when the traffic noise was quickly cut off, the store returned to shelter. He was in no mood for the world. He just wasn’t.
He moved away from the rosemary; it, too, contaminated. This made no sense. Who was this girl, anyway? She was nothing to him. Nothing. Alex glanced her way, surprised by the presence of the slender young man that leaned across the counter watching her arrange a bouquet, her movement languid and expansive, sweeping her arm in an arc to add a leafy stem to the arrangement.
“The traditional flower for funerals is daffodil,” she said.
He thought the tone of her voice was scolding, and then assumed he imagined it. Grief made him think everything was mean.
“Okay, daffodils, then.”
“Come on,” she said. “Follow me.”
He felt that was strange, but maybe it wasn’t. When was the last time he’d been to a florist? So long ago he couldn’t remember. To be polite, he nodded at the customer. The dark-haired boy smiled, and pointed a finger gun at Alex who, horrified, turned to follow the girl.
“Hello?” She couldn’t have just disappeared, right? People didn’t just disappear, but he couldn’t find her amongst the torn stems and scattered petals, and soon accepted he was lost. He thought he might be able to make his way back, but the idea of the boy with his gun spurred Alex to keep moving forward. When he saw the EXIT sign he went to it and pressed the door open, immediately terrorized by the alarm and blinding light. After he blinked away the sun spots, however, his fear was replaced with enchantment. As far as he could see—flowers—an endless field of them. Daffodils, he assumed. Struck by their beauty, he fell to his hands and knees. They were bright yellow, and shaped much like daisies but for the small petal bell that rose from each center. Alex cocked his head, drawing his ear close to listen, but the bells were silent. The alarm had stopped, and when he looked behind him he could no longer see the building he’d just left, or any other. Everywhere he looked, daffodils—the stunned world perfumed with a musky vanilla scent, and green. Could green have a smell? It was almost too much. He closed his eyes. Alive, he thought. The scent of green is alive.
• • •
For a brief period after he died, so many people knew him, it was flattering, really, the way they said his name with reverence and prayed for him; perfect strangers wept for him. He had never been popular and, initially, was both flattered and comforted by the attention until it became exhausting to be pulled in so many directions, finding himself in strange houses, in rooms he didn’t know, summoned by people who had no idea of his presence or who, seeing him, cowered beneath covers, trembling as if he were the shooter. He wanted to say, “My thoughts and prayers are with you.” He wanted to say, “We are one in our grief.” He wanted to say, “Evil never wins,” but he was a ghost, and unsure what he believed.
• • •
Alex walked through the forest, carrying a massive bouquet of daffodils in his arms, the sympathy card tucked in his pocket. He wondered if he should go back to make a casserole, but then he would be late. Absence, he decided, was worse than inadequacy, especially in this instance.
The forest canopy made the sky green, cool, and contained, as if built in a terrarium like the kind he remembered from his childhood, little gardens under glass domes visited by fairies whose passage was not limited by life’s barriers. It was his understanding children no longer believed in such magic, and Alex wondered why. Before he could explore the question further however, he was distracted by the arrival of a cloaked figure approaching with catlike stealth. The face that looked up at him from beneath the brown hood was ancient, wizened, and kind. “Are you going to the funeral?” she asked.
“Yes,” Alex said. “How did you know?”
She made a sharp gunshot of noise he identified as laughter.
“The only ones who come here are going to funerals,” she said, gliding forward. Alex decided to trudge along beside her, embarrassed by his lumbering steps, breaking twigs and stumbling over tree roots she seemed to float above, impervious to the uneven terrain. The sharp caw of a crow caused him to look behind, surprised to discover that he and the old woman led a procession. Many were cloaked like she was, but others were dressed in vibrant harlequin colors, and some appeared to have wings. He wondered if they had passed a Renaissance faire he hadn’t noticed, though he didn’t think that made sense.
Some carried flowers, though no one had so many as Alex, who held his with both arms as though cradling a small child. They carried sunflowers and little pine trees decorated with ornaments. A few folk held lanterns. It wasn’t so dark, really, that they were necessary but Alex appreciated them nonetheless; the glimmering lights like fireflies he used to chase as a child, running barefoot on the grass. Others carried food. Platters laden with bright orbs of fruit: jeweled strawberries, orange smiles, sliced pomegranates with glistening red seeds, and baskets from which emitted the yeasty aroma of fresh-baked bread. Alex felt bad that he hadn’t brought something to eat. Who had ever been sated by flowers?
“Soldiers used to carry daffodil bulbs in their packs, you know,” the old woman said, startling Alex.
“Oh? I wouldn’t have guessed they were gardeners.”
The woman snorted. “They ate the bulbs after suffering a mortal wound. It made them forget their pain. It made them dream while they were dying.”
“What did they dream?” Alex asked.
She stopped midglide, and everyone in the procession stopped as well. The whole forest became as still and quiet as a picture in a children’s book, until the page turned.
“What did you say?” She looked at him, waiting. It seemed everything was listening, even the green leaves, even the crows perched on the branches.
“I said, ‘What did they dream?’ ”
She shook her head. “That’s the wrong question,” she sighed and continued on her way. Alex let the others pass as he tried to figure things out. What was the right question, he wondered. What was he not understanding? Crows swooped down from
the trees and began pecking bread and plucking seeds from sunflowers, a few even swooped to pluck hairs from unhooded heads but the gentle folk swatted them away.
He looked up and saw that the sky had opened a little, the green world parted to reveal the blue one beyond. At first he thought the sound was the breaking of a limb, and he searched the trees, uncertain where to run, not able to fly through that hole in the sky the way the crows had, but the sound cracked again and someone shouted, “Run, it’s the shooter.”
Alex ran, dropping daffodils that tangled in his legs and made a bright gold contrail of his passage in the dark wood. When he fell, he found a few flowers still clinging to his pants, so he began shoving petals and stems into his mouth, hoping to dream something else.
• • •
In his whole life, no one had ever called Alex beautiful, but when they described his death they said that it was tragic and horrible, yet he was incandescent; a man covered in blossoms of gold and stems of green. The mourners wept and crushed flowers to their hearts; they promised they would never forget and he, just another ghost, never believed them. He believed in some things, but not forever.
• • •
When the children came, running over the hill, he thought maybe he’d finally found his way, but then the boy with the gun showed up. This, Alex could not believe. “Not the children,” he said. “Let them have monster nightmares, not this.” But the boy just smiled. The children ran amongst the daisies, screaming and wild. They tore the flowers apart, not unkindly but in the spirit of blowing dandelion wishes or plucking petals in the old way; “he loves me, he loves me not.” They hugged each other with glee then broke apart, falling to the ground and screaming. The children were screaming and the light was so tender, Alex thought; a sky that did not know human terror. The children were glowing as they ran through the field and he thought there was something he had once understood, something vital that was lost, but maybe he had just imagined it. He ran into the field, trying to save all of them, or some of them, or at least one of them, but the field was not really there, though the children were, and in that mortal world stood a boy with a gun whose aim was good.