The kid stumbled backward. I felt the hiss of the kid’s ancestors as they released my will from their bonds, stunned by my disdain for their offering. They couldn’t hold me, not with popcorn. Back in my day, offerings came piled up with fruit and smelling of incense, flavored with the earnest prayers of the devout.
“I’m pretty damn good at my job,” I said, “but I didn’t feel real good about it. I’ve had a long time to think, and I’ve come to realize—there’s always a chance to do better, you know? No matter how much of an asshole the cowboy was in the past, or what type of bad stuff he did to get by, or how much he don’t want to care about no one because he don’t want to keep losing, he always gets a chance to prove he’s changed. That, deep down, he’s got the grit to risk everything for one more shot at happiness. And if it ain’t his happiness he wins, it’s at least someone’s. It’s a chance to set things right. To leave the town a better place than the one he rode into.”
I crossed my arms to show that I wouldn’t draw on her, even though I weren’t armed. “This is me now. I ain’t no ordinary mo gui, and I ain’t at your beck and call, no matter what you offer me. I might be all hat and no cattle, but I’m here waiting for my last ride into the sunset, and I ain’t gonna do nothing to jeopardize that.”
“Don’t you want to go home?” she asked.
I shot her the Ben Grady look—that narrow, squinting scowl that had withered dozens of black-clad villains where they stood on the silver screen. She didn’t so much as quiver.
There was some semblance of a backbone, somewhere in there. Maybe the kid had a chance after all.
I pretended to take a cigarillo from my mouth and flick it onto the ground. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time.” I touched the brim of my imaginary hat. “I’m where I need to be. I am home.”
She stood silent and still, fists clenched at her sides. I waited for her fingers to uncurl, her shoulders to relax, the anger to fade. Then the trembling started.
I caught the kid before she collapsed.
She shook so bad I thought she was laughing, until moisture soaked through my uniformed shirt and I realized she was crying. I’d heard plenty of tears before, wails and lamentations from the dead and living alike, but I’d never heard nothing like this—this deep, gut-wrenching, body-twisting sobbing that sounded and felt as if she was turning her guts inside out for the world to pick through.
I didn’t know what to do. But I’d seen how in the movies, sometimes folks just held on to each other for no good reason while they cried. So I wrapped my arms around her parka-puffed shoulders and held her until the shaking stopped, and she could talk again without hiccupping.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She scrubbed her face with her parka’s sleeves, leaving slimy trails of snot and tears. “I just don’t know what else to do when they make fun of me.” She sniffled. “When they make me feel like I’m nothing, just because I don’t look or act like them.”
I grasped her by the shoulder. “You can’t change the way you look, but you can change the way you act. The way you react. That’s all on you, kid. That’s all you’ve got control of. Change. Become something better than those hooligans. Be the cowboy.”
She mulled it over. “Leave the town a better place.”
I chucked her under her chin. “You’ve got it, kid.”
It took damn near forever. But her answering smile, when it came, beamed like sunshine bursting through after a storm.
I took her guns, of course. She didn’t tell me where she’d gotten them in the first place, and I didn’t ask. The point was, she didn’t want ’em no more. I disintegrated them so that they couldn’t cause trouble, and lifted the aura of forget-about-me from the theater.
When the kid left, I felt the shift before I saw it, the sighing whisper of power gathering and coalescing. The digital projector flickered on and a movie began playing on the big screen.
A lone cowgirl stepped through the screen, spurs jangling and thumbs hooked through her belt loops. Her hat was slung so low that I couldn’t see her eyes, but I saw through her mask anyway.
“Boss,” I croaked.
This was it. I’d been caught in disgrace, hell-deep in dereliction of my duty. Hell, I’d even let the kid leave without helping her create the chaos Boss demanded of me.
Boss had every right to obliterate me.
She glowered, her hands hovering dangerously near the pistols riding low on her hips. “You were showing such promise,” she said. “What happened?”
I didn’t answer. It’s hard to talk back when the other person has the right of it, and I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t further condemn me.
She spat near my feet. “I thought so,” she said, and then added for good measure, “Coward.”
That did it. I’d felt guilty she caught me not doing my job, but she had no right calling me names. Especially when she was dead wrong.
I straightened my shoulders and raised my eyes to meet hers, scowling back, my lip curled. “It takes more balls to admit when one’s done wrong,” I said, “and to stick around trying to make amends, than it does to strut around like a cockamamie doodle boasting about how big or how fast yer guns are.”
She flinched. “What did you say?” she asked, slowly, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard.
I don’t think anything or anyone had ever made Boss flinch. But I just did, and seeing that uncertain look come over her eye, it built steel into my spine and I held my ground, just like Ben Grady would’ve.
I spread my hands at my sides, palms open, like I’d seen some of those bald monks do in kung fu Westerns. Showing my inner peace. Showing acceptance of my fate. Showing Boss that I was done – done creating her chaos, done reaping souls for her benefit, done working for her.
I was my own demon. Just another loner passing through, looking for one last shot at happiness. For redemption. For forgiveness, for what I’d done, at Eventide and elsewhere.
For that, I’d risk everything. I’d risk oblivion.
“I said,” I told Boss quietly and deliberately, “I quit.”
Gunshots rang out in the theater. Startled, I jerked my head up to look at the screen.
It wasn’t showing the sci-fi flick. It was showing one of my favorite movies, the one where Ben Grady saves the town from the gang of ranchers threatening to run all the townsfolk out so that they could buy up their homes for a pittance and turn the land into grazing land for a giant profit. At the very end, Grady swings into his saddle and tips his hat to the adoring gazes of the newly saved.
“Don’t ask me to come back,” he says. “There ain’t no place for me here.”
Boss snarled. “Oblivion is too good for you.” She flourished an arm toward the screen, but she still didn’t seem to notice the movie. “Go. Get lost, and never come back. Suffer as the mortals do, in loneliness and despair, without a place in the world, without purpose.”
I watched Grady’s rugged visage as he nods at the far-off sunset, burnished a deep, burnt orange.
“My place is out there,” he says. “There ain’t no other place for the likes of me.”
“You’re banishing me from demonkind?” I asked Boss, slowly, to make sure I understood.
“For eternity,” she confirmed, her expression grim and uncompromising. She thought she was punishing me.
She didn’t know she’d just set me free.
Like I’d told the kid, I was home. And I had a purpose greater than the one I’d been created for.
There were more folks out there, livin’ in towns that needed a cowboy. A former demon. A hero to help ’em rise up against their foes.
I meant to ride into every last one of them.
My heart soared, thumping faster than a wild mustang’s. I didn’t have a horse—not yet—but I weren’t worried. I’d find one eventually. The weight of two pistols settled comfortably into the gun belt slung around my waist.
I tipped the brim of my hat to Boss, and sauntered o
ff into the sunset, a mo gui redeemed.
C.H. Hung grew up among the musty book stacks of public libraries, where she found a lifelong love for good stories and lost her 20/20 vision for good. She possesses a stubbornly rational soul intersecting with an irrational belief in magic, which means her stories are often as mixed up as she is, melding the plausible with myth and folklore.
Her genre-spanning short fiction has appeared in anthologies published by WordFire Press, LMBPN Publishing, Camden Park Press, and WMG Publishing, and will soon appear in Pulphouse. Read more at Chhung.com.
Love Your Mother
Kevin Pettway
Love Your Mother
Maita picked over the larger of two yard sale tables in the student housing parking lot, searching for an appropriate murder weapon at a reasonable price. While the sun pressed down on the mostly young and summer-clothed Los Angeles deal hunters, a steady, cool breeze tried, and failed, to whisk the heat away.
“You don’t need a machete,” Lidia said in her thick Cuban accent. Her steel-gray hair lifted in the breeze, and she scowled up at her daughter through oversized sunglasses. “You’re a lawyer. Lawyers don’t need machetes.” A frown pulled at her wrinkled features, heightening a thin scar that ran in a smooth arc down her right cheek. Maita had given her the scar while an infant, when she’d gotten her tiny hands on a broken jar of pureed carrots.
“I told you, Mom,” Maita said as she reached across the table, “it doesn’t have to be a machete. That was an example. I just need to be able to kill someone with it.”
“My daughter doesn’t need a machete.” Lidia banged her fist on the table, making both the assembled tchotchkes and the two girls hosting the yard sale jump. “Even forty years after you run away from home and leave me alone, you are still the only one who can hurt me.”
“It’s only been thirty-five years, Mom. More like a long weekend.”
Other yard sale patrons cast sidelong glances at the short, elderly cubana and her tall, statuesque daughter. A few whispered and pointed at Lidia.
“I heard that,” Lidia said with no small amount of aggression, glaring at a pair of boys in swim trunks and sunglasses. They grabbed each other’s hands and moved to the opposite side of the sale.
“It’s true,” Maita said. She smiled at the boys and shrugged. “She hears everything. Most annoying superpower ever.”
One of the two boys jerked his head away and made a tsk sound with his tongue. The other scowled at Maita.
With her fiftieth birthday barely a week behind her, Maita had long ago stopped putting up with other people’s stupid crap.
“If anyone’s carrying a sword-bladed bayonet, early 1800s or so, I’ll fight you for it.” It paid to know your weaponry in her line of work.
The immediate area around Maita and Lidia drained of people.
“My daughter should be making good money at a good job,” Lidia went on. She pushed Maita’s bushy black hair—with more than a few strands of Lidia’s own dark silver creeping in—behind her daughter’s shoulders where it wouldn’t blow in her face. “Do you ever think ahead? What about your retirement? Eh? How are you going to take care of me when you have wasted all of your money on monsters and murdering?”
Well, she had stopped putting up with everyone’s stupid crap except for her mother’s, anyway. Some dynamics died hard.
“Please don’t make me sorry I invited you out here.” In the time since Maita had run away from home, she had put herself through law school by cashiering at grocery stores, built a successful career as an entertainment attorney, and parlayed that into a less lucrative but far more rewarding job as writer, director, and producer of B-horror movies. Along the way, she briefly married the father of her own daughter, Artemia, before his alcoholism forced their divorce.
Her mother would never find out about Artemia.
“You live your life without me. I don’t even know you anymore.” Lidia frowned up at her daughter. “We need to talk. About when you left.”
“Maybe so, but we aren’t doing it now.” Maita turned away and cast her gaze over the rest of the yard sale offerings. Beyond the two tables, in the open bay door of a cluttered cinderblock garage, handles poked out of a battered plastic trash can. Not wanting to lose any possible treasures to the milling crowd, Maita sped toward it.
Lidia followed.
“You were just a little girl, mija. You couldn’t know what you saw. You don’t know what you heard.”
Maita pushed aside the rusted golf clubs and dented wooden bats, and spied unexpected booty in the back. She came up with a corroded blade, some two feet long plus the grip. It curved forward a bit and was heavier toward the end, so the user could chop as well as slash.
Or just swing it around and try not to hit anyone because they ran out of money for fake props.
“Falcata,” Maita whispered. She held the rusting sword up in front of her and admired it. Hannibal used blades just like it against the Romans in the Punic Wars. This particular sword looked old enough to have seen those conflicts first-hand. It would be perfect for the monster’s weapon in her movie, and just in time for tonight’s shooting.
Even if it did look a little bit like a machete.
Bright studio lights illuminated the unconcerned blonde girl lounging in the cushions of a soft brown loveseat. Behind her, a picture window took up the entire wall and looked out on a nighttime suburban street, while below her and to the side, a round piece of white foamboard reflected soft light into the shadows of her face.
The room smelled of potpourri and stale french-fries.
Outside the window, a shadow stalked closer. It glided out of the gloom under the old oaks on the even lawn, a silent silhouette cut from a distant streetlamp.
Black passed into black and, for a moment, nothing moved. Had anything been there at all?
The girl picked up a magazine and flipped through the pictures of celebrities and sexual positions guaranteed to keep that man in your life forever. She sighed and pulled at her baby-blue tank top, where the couch cushions drew it too tightly around her middle.
On the lawn, a face caught the glow from the key light and reflected it back, twisted and horrible. The huge countenance bent and curled in a tangle of protruding scars, a permanent mask over the soul buried within. An enormous body towered in the window, covered in bloodstained overalls that might once have been white, but now displayed all the colors of violence.
The figure raised an ancient sword, curved and pitted with rust. In the dim corners of the room, people clung to the shadows, holding booms and secondary cameras.
“Stop, that’s enough.”
“What now?” the girl on the sofa asked. Her name was Kayla, and she’d been picked because she was a “social influencer.” The fact that she turned out to be a very good actress was why she had not been fired.
Repeatedly not fired.
Maita pulled off her headphones and stepped from around the camera. She pushed a lock of wavy black hair behind one ear and shoved the sleeves of her gray hoodie up her arms.
“Reggie, can you come in here? I still have a problem with this blocking.”
Outside, in the window, Erik-the-monster lowered his sword to his shoulder and raised several parts of an eyebrow in befuddlement. Below him, Kayla rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath.
Reggie, plaid flannel over a T-shirt that read Make an Assessment, strolled out of the kitchen and into the hall just outside the little room, potato chip bag in his hand and crumbs in his beard. His glasses reflected the bright white key light.
“These are stale,” he said.
“Are there any locally sourced apples?” Kayla peered over the top of her magazine at Reggie. “Craft-Lady said she’d get me some.”
Maita closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She loved making movies. She really did. But it would be so much more enjoyable without the actors.
“Erik isn’t going to look scary clambering over a cushy loveseat.”
Maita said to Reggie. “This room is too small for both of them, the sofa, and the lights.”
“Sorry, boss,” Reggie said with a shrug. “I thought it would work. That’s my bad. We can move it into the dining room if you want. It’s bigger. Then he can come out of the hall here.”
Kayla interrupted the conversation with a shriek.
“Jesus Christ,” she shouted as she came to her feet from the loveseat. “It’s just standing there, looking at me. Someone needs to put a fucking bell on it or something. That face is so gross.” Kayla flitted across the room and pushed past Reggie into the hallway.
Reggie leaned in Maita’s direction. “She does know that’s his real face, doesn’t she?” he whispered.
“Take twenty, everyone,” Maita said, raising her voice over the conversations beginning around her. She dug in her pocket for keys and tossed them to Reggie.
The room emptied of crew. Erik, his expression unreadable, walked away.
“Reg, take my van over to my apartment and get Arti to help you bring back the TV chair. The one with the flowers. It won’t fit in your car.”
“Sure. Don’t break my mom’s house while I’m gone.” Reggie hesitated. “Is Arti gonna wanna come? She scares me a little.”
Maita’s lips quirked up in a brief smile. “She’ll come. She’s been dying to meet Erik.”
“She likes guys who fell into lawn mowers?”
“No,” Maita answered. “She likes reruns of old sitcoms between trips to the bookstore. Erik used to be that kid on The Lights Are Always On. Before the face thing.” The face thing was saving them several thousand dollars in make-up and prosthetics.
“Now be a good AD and go. I have to fix this. I want to get this shot tonight.”
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