by Tricia Reeks
***
The dust that kicked up when he opened the door was far more noticeable when a beam of sunlight shot through. Once Selwyn strode in, he wasn’t quite sure what to do next. Millie kept by the door and only peered inside. He felt like he should say something, but the words stuck. She saw the roses before he even went near them. From then, he took a deep breath and grabbed the steel bouquet. He could just barely lift it with one hand. Still nothing said.
Yet, Millie did pull off her gloves and stuff them in her belt just so she could take one and feel it between her fingers. “Roses,” she whispered and then bit her lip. “For me?”
“Yes.”
“How long did it take you?”
“Not too long.” Two weeks.
Millie continued to examine the rose. Wire stem, petals formed from steel beaten into delicate ripples. If not for the color, it would have seemed organic. “It’s beautiful, Sel. Better than the vee. They’re beautiful.”
He went up to her closer, and she took the bouquet, both their hands intertwined for a moment. Millie tilted her head up slightly, and closed her eyes, and Selwyn leaned towards her. But just as their lips were about to touch, she turned away with a blush. “You can’t give ’em to me, Sel.”
She would have gone on, except as she moved to push the flowers back, one of the thorns nicked her palm. The bouquet shattered in her hands and fell with a tinkle on the metal beneath her feet. More blood dripped off the wire.
He would have helped her. Instead, he gave a miserable glance down at the roses and then back. Millie pushed one hand against the other to staunch the cut, then, seeing how he stared, blushed again and quickly bounded away from him.
For the remainder of the evening Selwyn gathered his roses.
***
Specks of blood lay smothered across the stem, but Selwyn couldn’t bring himself to clean them this time. He lay them all down save one, and only held it dully while his thoughts wandered elsewhere. No sobs, instead he deliberately squeezed the rose in his fist until his own thick blood joined hers, flowed down the stem.
He thought he would feel pain, like the others. There wasn’t any. It felt more like his hand was party to several kisses. The thorns punched in his skin sunk deeper and seemed to root themselves into his veins, drinking, drinking. He pressed his fist tighter. And watched the rose gradually bloom.
***
Later, Nydia found him with his back turned to the door. She said nothing, just shut it and sat beside him. He looked back and smiled a little, and when she looked over his shoulder, her eyes widened. “A real one? Where’d you get it?”
“I made it,” said Selwyn. “I made it, and it came alive.”
And he pressed his nose into the flower, took a deep, deep breath. It didn’t seem so bad, any more. Millie could go if that’s what she wanted. But he had . . . this.
Light emerged over New London.
Traveler
Michael Milne
Henry comes home tired, but he tries to cover it up as he rings the doorbell. Like a guest.
Thumping from inside, as Henry’s son Jason opens the door. The boy has shed a dozen toys behind him, ones that Henry barely remembers buying.“When were you today, Daddy?”
“Quite a while back. Hundreds of years. And I was then a long time.” Jason is too young to read the implication, and Mel is out of earshot. “But it wasn’t so bad.”
“Hi honey!” Mel enters from the kitchen and wraps her slender arms around him, as she does whenever he arrives home. The kiss on his cheek is a feather across gravel. She smells like honey and home cooking, and her skin is a kind of soft he barely recognizes. He smells like engine coolant, and he’s pretty sure he could sand down their dining room floor with his stubble.
This last job has lasted eight months, and he holds onto Mel like his grasp is the only thing maintaining her heartbeat.
“Oh, baby. That long?” She probably knows the metric of these embraces—the tightness of the squeeze. The jobs aren’t usually this long, except when they are. He exhales into her neck, more desperate than he wants, and she tries to giggle it all away, whatever it is.
Sometimes the passion in these reunions can overwhelm her, he knows. She has to abandon any dangling grievances, as they are swallowed whole in the gulf of his relief. An argument in the morning about money is ancient history by the afternoon. For Henry, so much is buried deep in the sediment of their marriage. Did they fight today? This week? Henry has no idea, and Mel has developed an impenetrable poker face.
After a while he pulls back, just enough that her hands rest across his shoulders. Sweat has slicked the fabric of his shirt to his skin—it was not summer where Henry has been. He sniffs at the air like a stray dog. “Dinner. Pork chops?”
She smiles. Every meal is a homecoming. Once, Mel had made pork chops every night for a week and he hadn’t noticed until she told him.
Sometimes the era is harder. Diseases and outdoor plumbing, salmonella or a wide lack of deodorant. He will realize he is the wrong color in the wrong place or the wrong time. People stare hard, take in his bizarre clothes, whisper in slurs he doesn’t know. If he gets sick, breaks a limb, he must rely upon the medicine of the then present. He can’t count the number of times he has been leeched. If he is imprisoned, if he is detained, if people mark him as a witch, he must use his wits and stumble back to his watchcar, defeated and bloody, and start the hunt over again.
The turn of the millennium, this last job, had proved pleasant enough. Haircuts that Henry found funny, cell phones that seemed Paleolithic. But weeks had turned to months, scars had multiplied, and at one point Henry had forgotten his son’s middle name.
Henry strips his shoes and vows to shower as soon as possible. The hall closet is full of hundreds of new-old shoes, leather and rubber and strange plastics. Fashions from dozens of eras, forgotten trends in business, casual, and sport. Henry stretches as Mel closes the door, and he feels old.
Mel is moving off to the dining room to set the table. The sunset seeps through the open window, slides over her eyes and her neck. She looks as young as when they met—or no, maybe he forgets. She wears her hair down now; she seems more mature. But she could still be a photograph—that tattered, beachy portrait he keeps slipped under the visor in his watchcar. The picture is long faded, and her one-piece and her gaudy sunglasses look scooped up from a distant era. She seems like an immortal, like he must have picked her up as a stowaway on some far flung trip.
Henry hoists Jason onto his shoulders and marvels at how light his son is. He expects the boy to suddenly climb in height, to meet his hip or his chest, to be reading, to have joined the rugby team, to have a girlfriend. After each job, Henry slips into his personal car (still unmarred by months away; still a full tank of gas) and drives home, the whole while worrying about Jason.
He wonders each time if the boy will have forgotten him. Maybe the months will make a scar of Henry, something to be healed and forgotten. Jason is just young enough that another man, anyone really, could slot in, be a father, and Henry would slip away. His hand trembles sometimes as he reaches for the door, but he opens it and spies his boy, always his boy. Jason barely meets his knee and his teeth have big gaps between them like painted spaces in a parking lot.
Henry goes to the kitchen to see if he can help with dinner when he catches a glimpse of himself in the hallway mirror. There’s a patch of new gray hair, staking territory across his temples and staging battle maneuvers on the space behind his ears. The stock of anti-aging meds, big purple capsules the size of his pinky fingernail, ran out three months into the last assignment. After this many jobs he is easily ten, twenty years older than Mel, but usually he doesn’t show it.
There are times when he comes home looking different. A new scar, a new freckle. Once, a full beard grew like a forest overnight. He picks up new smells—ocean salt, windshield washer fluid, some briefly popular cologne. New clothes are a given, as people will notice you even more when you do
n’t dress the part. Mel at least pretends not to be shocked anymore.
The intangibles and the invisibles are harder. He will return unable to talk to his family, knowing that the silence is abrupt and brutal but unable to help himself. Other times he is nearly manic, riveted, joyous at the luxury, the sumptuousness of home. His hugs go on for just a little too long, and he marathons eye contact until Mel has to look away. After one particularly long shift, he had come home and declared himself a devout Buddhist. Another time, a vegetarian.
“You okay, darling?” They work together to strain the vegetables. Henry sees her glance at his hair, which she has just noticed. He feels confident that he’s hidden the rest. She won’t notice the bullet holes—those were repaired back at the office. “You don’t seem yourself.”
She always says that when he comes back wrong—Henry can sense her suspicion. He’s not Henry of Henry and Mel, circa seven years ago before he took this job. He supposes he used to be better-groomed. He remembers when he actually cared about his hair, but it feels monumentally long ago, a fairy tale handwritten on papyrus. Mel sometimes looks at him like he’s a veneer laid overtop of the man she knows, something to be worn down and washed away.
Sometimes he will try to think back, years and years past, to whoever he was then. He laughs at old pictures of himself, embarrassed and ashamed, and realizes that they have been taken only days before. When Mel is really upset, when she says she doesn’t know him anymore, he will watch himself in old family vids, and try to impersonate the man he sees. Henry is a role for Henry to play.
“It was just a really long time away,” he says, and she smiles and breathes deep. She seems to believe him, or fakes it for the sake of dinner. He kneads his hands and moves to the bathroom to wash them while Mel dishes up their meal on their worn hand-me-down plates. He has already scrubbed his hands until they were raw and chapped back at the office.
Jason is eating when he returns, talking about the other boys in preschool. Mel smiles and nods to Henry’s plate and his wine. The glass is too full—Mel always does this when she suspects a long job. Some anesthetic before they can operate and remove the last few months or years from him like sickly flesh.
Henry never talks about the job—it makes them both sad. He doesn’t talk about the people either, how far they run, or why, or what they do when he finds them. There was the woman whom he resuscitated before hauling her forcefully back to the present, where she had been a high-end tech and AI thief. There was the man who jumped through seven different decades before Henry finally caught him. The man had been the president of some bioengineering company and had fled when details surfaced of the grim research lab the company had stowed underground in some backwoods in Australia. Henry doesn’t tell her about James Hofstadt, or the weapons discharge form that he filled out today. He fears that it will make her look at him differently.
Once he came home after four years and a day hadn’t passed for Mel. She had taken Jason to school, gone to work, and met her sister for lunch. In his time gone he had grieved and made peace with his loss; he had given up and accepted giving up. He had learned to speak Portuguese. He had broken his arm, had it fitted with a cast, and healed over. When he finally staggered home he was tired somewhere deeper than his muscles, and he parked on the wrong street twice, half-convinced that Mel would have moved away. When she opened the door she gasped at his beard; he had forgotten it was even on his face. She had led him straight to the bathroom to get cleaned up. Sometimes he wished she would look at him differently—he wished she knew how.
“When will you be tomorrow, daddy?” Jason is stuffed to the brim with mashed potatoes, and Henry still hasn’t eaten yet. “Can you pick me up from school?”
“I think I can,” Henry says. He will spend the day at home tomorrow. They always discharge detectives for a day or two after life-threatening injuries. Mel will come home, maybe meet him for lunch. Henry will appear at the fence of the kindergarten, and he will experience eight hours as eight hours.
For now, he is the same. He looks mostly unchanged, the same man Mel married, the same man she met those years ago. She is the same as always, and she plants a kiss on their son’s forehead as she moves past. Mel sits down in her seat and Henry smiles across at her—right now he feels like he is her Henry in the quiet early evening of their dining room.
Virgin of the Sands
Holly Phillips
Originally appeared in Lust for Life: Tales of Sex and Love, Véhicule Press, April 2006
Graham came out of the desert leaving most of his men dead behind him. He debriefed, he bathed, he dressed in a borrowed uniform, and without food, without rest, though he needed both, he went to see the girl.
The army had found her rooms in a shambling mud-brick compound shaded by palms. She was young, God knew, too young, but her rooms had a private entrance, and there was no guard to watch who came and went. Who would disturb Special Recon’s witch? Graham left the motor pool driver at the east side of the market and walked through the labyrinth of goats, cotton, chickens, oranges, dates, to her door. The afternoon was amber with heat, the air a stinking resin caught with flies. Nothing like the dry furnace blast of the wadi where his squad had been ambushed and killed. He knocked, stupid with thirst, and wondered if she was home.
She was.
Tentative, always, their first touch: her fingertips on his bare arm, her mouth as heavy with grief as with desire. She knew, then. He bent his face to hers and felt the dampness of a recent bath. She smelled of well water and ancient spice. They hung a moment, barely touching, mingled breath and her fingers against his skin, and then he took her mouth, and drank.
***
“I’m sorry,” she said, after.
He lay across her bed, bound to exhaustion, awaiting release. “We walked right into them,” he said, eyes closed. “Walked right into their guns.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sounded so unhappy. He reached for her with a blind hand. “Not your fault. The dead can’t tell you everything.”
She laid her palm across his, her touch still cool despite the sweat that soaked her sheets. “I know.”
“They expect too much of you.” By they he meant the generals. When she said nothing he turned his head and looked at her. She knelt beside him on the bed, barred with light from the rattan blind. Her dark hair was loose around her face, her dark eyes shadowed with worry. So young she broke his heart. He said, “You expect too much of yourself.”
She covered his eyes with her free hand. “Sleep.”
“You can only work with what we bring you. If we don’t bring you the men who know . . . who knew . . .” The darkness of her touch seeped through him.
“Sleep.”
“Will you still be here?”
“Yes. Now sleep.”
Three times told, he slept.
***
She had to be pure to work her craft, a virgin in the heart of army intelligence. He never knew if this loving would compromise her with her superiors. She swore it would not touch her power, and he did not ask her more. He just took her with his hands, his tongue, his skin, and if sometimes the forbidden depths of her had him aching with need, that only made the moment when she slid her mouth around him more potent, explosive as a shell bursting in the bore of a gun. And he laughed sometimes when she twisted against him, growling, her teeth sharp on his neck: virgin. He laughed, and forgot for a time the smell of long-dead men.
***
“Finest military intelligence in the world,” Colonel Tibbit-Noyse said, “and we can’t find their blasted army from one day to the next.” His black mustache was crisp in the wilting heat of the briefing room.
Graham sat with half a dozen officers scribbling in notebooks balanced on their knees. Like the others, he let his pencil rest when the colonel began his familiar tirade.
“We know the Fuhrer’s entrail-readers are prone to inaccuracy and internal strife. We know who his spies are and have been feeding them
tripe for months.” (There was a dutiful chuckle.) “We know the desert tribesmen who have been guiding his armored divisions are weary almost to death with the Superior Man. For God’s sake, our desert johnnies have been meeting them for tea among the dunes! So why the hell—” the colonel’s hand slashed at a passing fly “—can’t we find them before they drop their bloody shells into our bloody laps?”
Two captains and three lieutenants, all the company officers not in the field, tapped pencil ends on their notebooks and thumbed the sweat from their brows. Major Healy sitting behind the map table coughed into his hand. Graham, eyes fixed on the wall over the major’s shoulder, heard again the rattle of gunfire, saw again the carnage shaded by vulture wings. His notebook slid through his fingers to the floor. The small sound in the colonel’s silence made everyone jump. He bent to pick it up.
“Now, I have dared to suggest,” Tibbit-Noyse continued, “that the fault may not lie with our intel at all, but rather with the use to which it has been put. This little notion of mine has not been greeted with enthusiasm.” (Again, a dry chuckle from the men.) “In fact, I’m afraid the general got rather testy about the quantity and quality of fodder we’ve scavenged for his necromancer in recent weeks. Therefore.” The colonel sighed. His voice was subdued when he continued. “Therefore, all squads will henceforth make it their sole mission to find and retrieve enemy dead, be they abandoned or buried, with an urgent priority on those of officer rank. I’m afraid this will entail a fair bit of dodging about on the wrong side of the battle line, but you’ll be delighted to know that the general has agreed to an increase in leave time between missions from two days to four.” He looked at Graham. “Beginning immediately, captain, so you have another three days’ rest coming to you.”
“I’m fit to go tomorrow, sir,” Graham said.