Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  A rumble went up from the crowd. A rumble that became increasingly more threatening.

  The racing master frowned at her, and it was all Philomena could do to keep her back straight. She made up her mind and shoved her driving goggles up on top of her hair. “Sir Barclay is quite right,” she announced. “I have been competing for weeks, and I have bested the field fairly. My sex is of no account.”

  “Aye!” came a voice from the back.

  “She is right!” came another. A familiar voice. “This race is won by ingenuity and skill, no matter who possesses it.”

  “Ridiculous!” shouted Ightham. “These men have competed honourably. Will you have them shamed by a woman?”

  “There is no shame in the case—unless one is a sore loser.” Lewis might have been concealed by the crowd, but his remarks carried. “I call for a vote.”

  “An excellent notion,” said the racing master. He lifted the speaking horn. “All those in favour of allowing the Acorn to claim her prize, move to my left on the field. All those against, to the right. Sharply now, we haven’t got all night!”

  As though his horn had been a staff, the crowd parted like the Red Sea. Philomena tried to stop the shaking of her limbs, to appear calm, as though the heavy purse clutched between her hands did not mean the difference between eating and starving for the people at Oakmond if Papa turned them all off. And then—

  “The distaff side has it,” cried the racing master. “Young lady, you may claim your prize, and no man here may dispute it.”

  Her knees went weak. “Thank you all!” she called. And then, before the other side could collect itself in a protest, she mounted her board and ignited the engine. Purse in hand, she leaned forward and soared over their heads.

  Lewis clasped his hands in a victory salute. His face was alive with triumph and happiness.

  For her.

  Lady Philomena Noakes shot through one of the broken arches and out over the sleeping rooftops of Vauxhall, heading for Maggie’s little stone cottage. Before the gentlemen arrived, she had a few very pertinent questions for her old friend about who exactly Lewis Protheroe was.

  It was time for the skill and ingenuity he thought she possessed to make itself known. If Maggie had the knack of achieving what she wanted from life, then Philomena Noakes could learn it, too.

  After all, she was the only woman in London with the knack of flying.

  Ghost Colours

  By Derek Künsken

  Pablo whispered about x-ray energies and trace metals and sections. His refrain had backgrounded itself over the years, like the white noise of radio, weaving into dreams of other things. Vanessa pushed Brian harder.

  “Get him to shut up, Brian!” she said. He blinked. The curtains glowed with sunlight. Seven-thirty, Saturday morning. “Fuck!” she said, covering her head with her pillow.

  Brian slipped out of bed and padded to the kitchen. He ran the water, put on a pot of coffee, and then fell onto the couch in the living room. Pablo would follow. Pablo had haunted Brian for a few years now, and was hard on his relationship with Vanessa. The apartment smelled of coffee by the time Pablo’s voice, quiet, like a TV turned low, whispered in his ear about metals and the colours of feathers.

  Brian slept again and the sun was warmer and higher when Vanessa woke him by kissing his ear. “I’m sorry, honey,” she whispered. “I’m so sick of that creepy thing.”

  “I know.”

  She rose from where she’d knelt, picked up yesterday’s paper, and recycled it in the kitchen. Cups scraped in cupboards. He put his feet on the coffee table.

  Near the TV, in neatly taped boxes, were old things, knick-knacks, souvenirs, and a lot of the dishes, art, and CDs he’d picked with his ex-wife. Old letters from his marriage. Bits of detritus he’d inherited from Aunt Nicole, like bottle openers, gifts from her clients, and going-away cards. Vanessa was right. They needed to make space for her to move into his small apartment.

  Vanessa lived without the silt that filled every open space in life. If she hadn’t used something in the last year, she tossed it. She lived in a pristine present and did not suffer material what-ifs and maybes.

  It wasn’t easy to live like Vanessa. Brian sometimes needed a past. He reminisced. He re-rooted himself, not often, and certainly not every year, but letting go of the past did not feel easy. He liked the disbelief and proof of time when he looked at college pictures. He liked reminders of dusty Christmases. His bottle caps that had once filled a bag in the closet were coloured fossils of year-bleached summers.

  He’d broken cleanly with his ex-wife. He didn’t carry a torch or baggage, but neither had he tossed all of their old things, the last of the evidences of what he’d had. Some things were replaceable. Some things were not. The idea of throwing away old letters and notes gave him the same dizzying feeling as slipping a tongue into a gap where he’d lost a tooth. Time misplaced things. Memory lost its edge and dredged up the wrong thing. What came after coloured what came before, dishonestly so.

  His marriage had been dizzying, burning and tumbling. Their youth and passion had welded them in college, and they married for the right reasons. The end of his marriage was sad, like the end of beauty or innocence. It coloured what came before, as if there’d been no magic at all. He’d spent months wondering what life would have been like without her. Paths not taken. But then, he found a note she’d given him in the beginning, and he made peace with the past.

  The idea of peace with the past bemused Vanessa. She was neither at peace nor at war with her past. She had no relationship with it. Her present was complete. Being with her pressed Brian against the rush of now. With her, he savoured food, rolling in salts and sweets and textures. Without effort, she drew his attention to his body, the muscles that surged during, and ached after, a hard game of squash or pick-up football. Even sunlight seemed to be a thing to her. Near her, it became a thing to him, when he stilled the rush of life and warmth exerted pressure on his skin. She was a lens to sharpen the wonder and bloom of the present.

  Vanessa curled her feet beneath her to sit beside him.

  “Are you worried about seeing the gene therapist?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  She put a hand on his. “It’s a few treatments, Brian. The risks are small. People with heavier hauntings than you go through this every day. It will be good for you. And good for your children.”

  He looked up from her hand. She had an ironic smirk. They were about to move in together. They were young. They wanted to travel, to live. They had both avoided the question of children, as if by unstated collusion.

  “I’ll be with you,” she said.

  A tiny, distant sound began, a needle-tip scratching petrified silt from fossil, and Vanessa was on her feet. Pablo spoke in a thin, oblivious voice, at the edge of audibility, as if preparing for a lecture. “Traces of copper, revealed by synchrotron rapid-scanning x-ray fluorescence, map the presence of eumelanin to predict the colour of ancient feathers.”

  Vanessa stalked away. “I don’t know what I was thinking, dating a guy whose family is haunted!” she yelled.

  “I’m sorry,” Brian said.

  She came back in a few minutes, dressed. “I’m going to visit my mother,” she said. “I’ll be back in the afternoon to go with you to your appointment.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you.” She came close, kissed him, and then left.

  “Animal pigments, primarily melanosomes and phaeomelanin, can be mapped by x-ray illumination of zinc and calcium in fossils,” Pablo whispered.

  Pablo, in life, even when circuitously and fruitlessly courting Brian’s Aunt Nicole, had lived in the past. His science had done nothing useful, had not done anything for the world. His life’s work had been to add knowledge of colour to fossils. Plants. Animals. Feathers. Skins. Scales. Petals. And in death, Pablo clung to a love that had no use, either.

  Pablo had haunted Nicole for the last decade of her life. D
espite the fact that ghosts made most people uncomfortable, she had delighted in having inspired a love that death could not still. She revelled in the adoration, even as she held out for the one great love who never came. Was Pablo’s enduring, unrequited love of great intrinsic value, and admirable, or was it a sign of the shallowness of Nicole’s own life, that it needed a ghost to lend it meaning? In her last months, the only people at her bedside were Brian and Pablo’s ghost.

  “Eumelanin is inferred to have been present in the eyes of ancient fishes by the trace metals found in fossils, adding dark colours to our understanding of the past,” Pablo said from far away. He spoke on, quietly, but sometimes fiercely, about the pigmentation of fish scales, while the sound of his ghostly pick scratched an accompaniment.

  It was never difficult to dispel Pablo. It only took listening to him. Pablo might not even know he was haunting Brian. Ghosts persisted, wrapped in a past they could not penetrate, and they wandered until they found a place where they were comfortable, even if they did not understand why.

  Only when he was older did Brian come to understand what sorts of things went on at his Aunt Nicole’s, although from the beginning, it had felt odd. After school each day, Brian came in by the side door in the alley. A bouncer, or a girl in her underwear holding her robe closed with her hand, opened in response to the secret knock. Backstage, some girls primped their hair or fixed their costumes.

  Aunt Nicole’s office was at the back, and she gave him money from the petty cash to get a Coke and a bag of chips. The machine dispensed Cokes in bottles, and he learned to pry his own bottle cap off at the machine. They listened to music from the forties and fifties on her computer. Aunt Nicole wasn’t that old. She was about fifteen years older than Brian’s mother, and would only have known of such music like everyone else, by digging it up.

  Aunt Nicole drank gossip, even the happenings at Brian’s school. She learned the names of each kid in his class and pumped him for the endings of stories that needed days to unfold. The common stories, the ones that had no ending, disappointed her. She preferred stories where what Aiden did one day affected Rafiki the next, because things were connected.

  After his pop and chips and interrogation for gossip, Brian did his homework. Sometimes, she would help. Other times, she didn’t need to, or she didn’t know how. On Tuesday, on his second week of going to Aunt Nicole’s after school, the scratching sounded, like a dentist pick on teeth. Aunt Nicole was reading a book with a beautiful girl swooning on the cover. She read as if she didn’t hear the metallic scritching in the walls. When mumbling joined the noise, fear tickled down his spine.

  “What’s that?” Brian asked.

  “Don’t worry about that, sweetie,” Aunt Nicole said. “That’s just Pablo. He’s a ghost who likes me.”

  Brian felt his eyebrows rise high and tight on his forehead. Two kids at his school were haunted. They weren’t in his class, but he knew they got made fun of. He’d avoided them, too. The school had held a bake sale earlier in the year to raise money to get them gene therapy. Brian hoped he was never haunted.

  “He’s harmless,” Aunt Nicole said. “He doesn’t even know we’re here. Not in the regular way.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “He was a scientist. He worked with fossils, so he spent a lot of time scraping the old bones out of the rock that had them trapped. He’s still doing that now.”

  “You talked to a ghost?”

  “Well, goodness, no, Brian! You don’t talk to a ghost. They might talk a lot, but they spend a lot of time talking to themselves.”

  “When did you talk to him?”

  “Before he died. He used to come to see me dance when I was young.”

  “He liked you?” Brian finally said.

  Aunt Nicole put down her book. “Sweetie, he loves me,” she said, as if capitalizing the “L”.

  “Why?”

  Aunt Nicole laughed, and Brian’s face became hot.

  “I was the one great love of his life.”

  “Why?”

  Aunt Nicole patted his arm. “Everyone gets one great love, if they’re lucky,” she said. “Pablo had gone through most of his life without one. When he met me, he fell head over heels for me, like I was a fairy-tale princess.”

  “You’re not a princess.”

  “It was meant to be, sweetie. He was meant to know his one true love.”

  “Is he your one true love?”

  She snorted. “Pablo is too humdrum! My prince will sweep me off my feet.”

  The scritching scraping continued, sourceless and distant, like it was buried in the walls, or behind Brian’s chair.

  Children judge with a purity of selfishness that adults cannot replicate. If something did not affect them, their egoism had no room for judging others. So, Nicole taught him a different view of life. She taught in parables starring Pablo and Nicole, and their mistakes. She used Pablo the way Plato used Socrates, except that her parables clung to quixotic ventures and human failings. Pablo’s lack of money, his shyness, and his lack of grace and confidence all withered under her lens. She spoke down to Pablo’s weakness of resolve regarding her, the begging nature of his courtship. Those things did not attract her, but in a paradox even a young Brian could see, his pining did. She had a hole in her heart, an aching for acceptance and legitimacy, just like Brian did, except that her acceptance could only be enjoyed by denying Pablo.

  Nicole described Pablo’s passion for science uncertainly, always grasping for the right amount of dreaminess to describe a romantic spirit nourishing itself on things long dead, his heart beating for the colours of stone-etched dinosaur feathers and fossilized flower petals.

  “Why would he want to look at colours?” Brian asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know what colours the dinosaurs were?”

  This question echoed, more than any other, years later. It was a serious one, aimed at him as a child, even though he understood she meant it to have more meaning than he thought. This was the one part of Pablo that was a mystery to her, and she was really asking. The soberness of that moment etched into his memories, and he traced the sweating condensation of his grape pop with the purple bottle cap. It had never before occurred to him that dinosaurs could be any colour other than green.

  “Yes,” Brian said.

  “Knowing those colours is the great thing in his life,” Nicole had said. “So much that he didn’t stop doing it when he died.”

  “But you’re the great thing in his life,” Brian said.

  She smiled. “I am his one great love.”

  Brian smiled too.

  Brian could not say for sure what old thing separated Nicole from her sisters. His mother was free enough with stories of the past, but not about Nicole. In stories, Nicole was always implied to have been there, like something seen out of the corner of the eye, with conversations evaporating as soon as the young Brian asked about her.

  Only when Brian’s parents had divorced, and his mother was struggling with two jobs, a tiny apartment, and a son, did she finally turn to Nicole. And yet, even when Brian was spending three hours a day with Nicole, his mother avoided talking about her. She was not invited to holidays, and her gifts, “crass things,” his mother had called them, hibernated in the closet until garbage day.

  Brian came home with his homework done, and his pockets filled with bottle caps from strange places, printed with exotic symbols hinting at the vastness of the world. His mother, appalled, forced Brian to throw away the evidence, even if fermented, that Germany, Canada, and Holland existed. Brian saw Nicole, while his mother felt only the touch of her passing.

  As soon as Brian was old enough to stay by himself, his mother ended Nicole’s role in his life. And in the weird way that children keep no attachments, Brian saw no more of her, except for birthday and Christmas cards from her, which he opened eagerly for the small cheques within.

  One day, when he was thirteen, for reasons he did not know, he visited her a
fter school. The bouncers were new. Gone was the secret knock. Nicole arrived breathlessly at the door, holding closed a thin robe with a hand. Her hair was an unnatural red, and her face was older, pasty with makeup.

  She hugged awkwardly, and he was between the ages that knew how to hug back. She dragged him past the bouncers indecisively, through the back, and to the old office. She wasn’t the manager anymore. The pop machine had matured, shrinking into a modest thing that sold aspirin, caffeine pills, and breath mints. Aunt Nicole covered a sourceless embarrassment with an effortful smile. After only a little while, Brian said he had to go.

  Brian did not see Nicole again until he was in college. He was walking past a furniture store when an older woman, smoking on the sidewalk, stopped him. Nicole wore a respectable, but threadbare, suit, and sedate makeup. She must have been in her late sixties but was still working. They began meeting every so often for coffee.

  Nicole had lost none of her ability to speak to what seemed to be on his mind. She knew women, and she knew men better. She pried his girl-trouble gossip out of him and pontificated on relationships, as if she were teaching him to ride his first bicycle. And now that he was older, her lessons and stories drew on a deeper past, his mother and grandparents.

  She shone hard light on his mother’s hazy half-stories. The teenage lives of his mother and his aunts lost the editing. Nicole filled the gaps in his mother’s stories with violent boyfriends, past-due rents, part-time work as dancers, and drunken, broken hearts. His mother and his other aunts had left their pasts behind because they could, because they had lived their mistakes young enough.

  Brian was, by turns, appalled and embarrassed and sympathetic and forgiving for all that had been hidden. They’d committed some of their follies when they were younger than Brian was now, and the urge to protect them from hurts decades gone was hard to put aside.