Here is another thing you should know: driving is good, but the best place in the world to think is in the passenger seat of a car driven by someone else who has no interest in making conversation with you. So I have thought a lot. I have hitchhiked several times since leaving the place where I was born, and I have pretended several times to the person driving the car that I speak a different language. The kindest of them just smile, wave me in, and wave me out. I smile back at them and I put my hands together in a gesture of thanks, like a little prayer, pretending I don’t speak the language. Once I pretended I was deaf, another time, dumb. Pretending is easy: you just pull another face over your own, or pull your hoodie up, or think about how it would feel to be anyone but who you are. Once someone tested me; they told me they were going to hurt me badly, that they were going to leave me somewhere no one would ever find me, and I smiled at them and nodded, and they laughed but just kept on driving. There are good people and bad people in the world and you don’t know who you’re getting into a car with until you do. What’s the alternative? Never going anywhere? Regardless of who takes us, we all go somewhere.
I don’t know where my somewhere is, but I’ve been going there for several months now and I feel I will know the place when I get there. Part of me wants the place I stop to be the ocean. I have never seen the ocean. I wonder if we’ll get there tonight, if we can stop the car on the beach so I can walk into the waves. It sounds stupid, but like I said, I trust you, so I’ll say it: I’m not even sure how that much water in one place “works.” How does it move? What does it feel like when it does? My mother would wash my hair and my father would try to get me to look up by clapping his hands and making funny faces, so the water would run down the back of my head and the soap wouldn’t go in my eyes, and that’s the water I know. The amount of water in the ocean scares me but fascinates me at the same time.
The bright lights of an oncoming car illuminate the man in the black hoodie. It’s hard to see under it, but it looks like the corners of his mouth are turned up, like he’s smiling. Sure, he is a stranger, but I hope he’s having a good dream, one where people like him. Maybe in the dream, he’s eating something delicious. It costs nothing to wish a stranger well. I realize I’m getting really tired, too. Maybe we should pull over for the night. I shake my head, look at him and have a weird thought: is this Death, wearing a black hoodie in the middle of summer? My head dips for what feels like just a moment and the car drifts to the edge of the road, where the pavement has been scored to alert people who are falling asleep at the wheel. Like me. The loud rubbing sound jolts both him and me awake and I swerve back into my lane.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know. I just drove straight.”
“Good.”
He stretches and his arms seem to go for miles in either direction; there’s something about him that seems to bend the world as he moves through it, like parts of it fold in on itself around him. It’s hard to look at him and whenever I try, my eyes seem to find something else to focus on.
“What do you do?” I ask.
“I’m a collector.”
“What do you collect?”
“I collect cash, furniture, jewelry, whatever. Sometimes people owe other people favours or money and sometimes, they can’t pay it. I make sure they do.”
“What if they can’t pay, at all, what if they have nothing?”
“They still pay. One way or another, everyone pays.”
“You mean you kill them?”
He smiles. I don’t know how I know he smiles because like I said, I can’t focus on his face and besides, I’m driving, but something deep in my bones tells me he’s smiling.
“I don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt.”
“You sound like a cruel man.”
“And you sound like a curious child. I am not cruel. I am a function of the world. I am karma. If I hurt someone, surely they did something to deserve that hurt?”
“No. The world isn’t fair and it doesn’t work like that. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, all the time.”
“I don’t agree with you. The world balances itself out in the end.”
I want to ask, when is the end? Must we all wait for Judgement Day to be treated fairly? Instead, I say, “We will have to agree to disagree.” It’s something my father used to say to me and I never liked it but it seems appropriate here. We carry on in silence. Along the side of the road, small, dilapidated houses start appearing and the desert gives way to a small town.
There’s a red light up ahead and it feels strange to stop after being in motion for so long, like stepping out of a dream. I look at the gas gauge, and it’s still on full. I turn to him to tell him the needle is broken and that’s when I see the face at his window. It’s gaunt and the beard attached to the face is long and scraggly and the eyes are sunken. The face is connected to a head, which is connected to a neck, which is connected to a body, and from that body a hand emerges and knocks at the window, and then makes a cup with another hand, as if we should put something in it. The man in the black hoodie rolls down the window. The face makes a noise, something between an exhale and a word. The man in the hoodie reaches out and takes hold of the face’s hand. The face looks down and then into the face inside the hoodie and he whispers, “You.”
The man in the hoodie nods. “Yes, my friend.”
“Is it time?”
“No, not yet.”
The face sighs. “When will it be time?”
“Soon. But not now. Not tonight.”
Tears make tracks in the dust as they run down the cheeks of the face. The face nods and walks away. I suddenly want to give him some money and I yell, “Wait!” The face does not look back and disappears into the darkness. The light goes green, and I push the gas pedal.
“Who was that?” I ask.
“No one. A future customer.”
“What does he owe? He doesn’t look like he has anything.”
“Everyone owes someone something.”
“What about me? I don’t have anything and no one’s ever given me anything.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? That’s something. Everyone has something, even if it’s just that.”
“Yeah, I’m here but no one else is. Everyone else has left. I’m alone.” My eyes sting just a little. I talk to him and I tell him this because he’s a stranger and who else can you tell such things but a stranger, someone you will never see again?
“Turn here. I want to show you something,” he says. We turn down a dark side road. We come to an old drive-in movie theater, long abandoned, tumbleweeds and plastic packets blowing through the parking lot. He tells me where to park. I stop the car, turn it off, and pull up the hand brake.
“Are you going to kill me?” I’m not scared.
“No. I want to show you something.” I am waiting for him to show me a knife, but the white screen at the front of the drive-in flickers to life in strange colours, like thousands of fireflies are dancing on its surface. I turn around but there is no projectionist in the little building, and no one else is in the parking lot.
“What is this?”
“This is everything you were, before you were you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m showing you what you owe.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Watch.” He points at the screen.
The light on the screen flattens, like it’s settling out, and then it turns black. In the blackness, a small spark slowly becomes a star, and then there are many stars around it, and then there is a galaxy, and then there are many galaxies.
“Before you were anything, you were light,” he says. I watch as the camera pans further and further away from the light in the middle of the screen. The camera finds a flower.
“Then you were flowers and you bloomed, wherever you could bloom and when you bloomed, it was like a firework in slow motion.” And the light becomes flow
ers in red, and blue, and yellow. The camera finds them on mountains, in gardens, in pots outside apartments, and they bloom and turn brown and die and become more flowers again and again and again, and bees come and bees go, and the bees die and are reborn as little girls and boys.
“Some people were bees before they were them, and some people were lions, or elephants, or snakes. Some people were fish and some people were beetles. Some people were trees or butterflies and some people were wind and some people were waves and currents that travelled around the world. But you, you were a bird before you were a girl.”
And I can see the bird I was and something in me remembers. I was a starling. I remember reading a story in a magazine about the birds in one part of the jungle, how they still sang the songs they once heard someone play on a flute, and all the baby birds that hatched after them heard their mothers sing that song, and then they sang it, too, and now I must wonder, isn’t that all of us? Don’t we all still sing the songs we once heard long ago?
The starling on the movie screen in front of me opens its wings and its wings are made of light and the light comes out of the screen, bright as noon, and starts to wash over us, like the light reflected off a swimming pool in summer.
The man in the black hoodie turns to me and says, “The truth is, most of us don’t even know what songs we’re singing anymore. We drink because our parents drank, and we smoke because they smoked, and we are because they were. If you ever want to know what’s truly wrong with you, what your greatest flaws are, have children. They are soft and your hardness will press into them, no matter what you do, and leave a mark. Often, the mark is the same, and they will mark their children, and their children after them. Our cruelty and love for each other echoes into infinity; our hearts are butterflies, causing hurricanes in distant lands we will never visit. This is what we give each other. This is what we owe.” I can see his eyes for the first time, and they are filled with light, like golden orbs. His head is a skull.
I wake up suddenly and I breathe in salty air and the sun is rising, bright in my eyes. I fell asleep in the passenger seat. We are stopped in a parking lot, overlooking the ocean. The man driving the car has taken his hoodie down and he’s smoking a cigarette. His face is covered in an elaborate tattoo. He notices me awake and quickly pulls the hoodie up.
He looks at me and says, “I’m sorry—I didn’t want to scare you.”
I lean over, and I kiss him gently on the mouth and he tastes like pickles and cigarettes and life. The part of me that’s still a starling knows there’s a drum that beats in the heart of everything and it beats here in the car in the parking lot, and in him and me, and it beats in every bird and every flower, until the skin of the drum is struck one final time, and the world is silent forever.
I open the car door and I run toward the beach.
I do not turn around.
Fourteen years from now, I will meet a man with a kind face and gentle hands and I will have forgotten everything about this night. We will get married and we will live near the sea. I will give birth to a little girl and when she is born, she will be a light inside of me, in the darkness, beside that black planet, that will never, ever, ever go out. Every time I see her, I will smile.
I will do my best not to push myself onto her or give her too much of myself. I will try to let her be whatever she was before I knew her.
Forty-three years from now, I will see the man in the black hoodie again, in the middle of the night, and I will give him what I owe and I will not regret a cent of it.
This is everything you need to know about me.
Much of it is true.
The Way It Works
IAIN S. THOMAS
Here is how it works: You lie next to me in bed. You love me. You take your finger, and write the most secret words you can think of on my skin. Then I pull you close and I whisper them back to you and if I get them right, you never stop loving me, and I never stop loving you.
Small Yellow Cottage on the Shore
BY AMANDA LOVELACE
IN A PLACE NEITHER NEAR NOR FAR, and a time neither now nor then, upon a very tall cliff that loomed treacherously over the ocean, stood a rather quaint village never deemed important enough to appear on a map of any making. It was so unremarkable it has since been forgotten, like a sweetheart’s message hastily scrawled into the frost, only to be quickly misted over again.
A place of magick.
A place of myths, legends.
A place lifted straight from the pages of bedside tales whispered to story-hungry children.
For a short while in this place of lore, humans and faeries lived in harmony with one another—as friend, not foe.
Mermaids traded songs for gold-plated coin from fishermen, while trolls shared riddles over ale with drink masters.
Brownies were the owners of inns that appeared only at night and vanished again with the morning’s sun.
Will-o’-the-wisps led lost children out of the wood and back to the safety of their beds.
Dragon fire was a gift that kept families warm during long winter nights, not an object of fear and doom.
Alas, like most perfect things, this place could not last.
It’s a shame, really, how humans try to take the things they’re not allowed to have.
He was in her dream again. They were lying in bed, wearing not a stitch of clothing. They were much younger versions of themselves—in their twentieth years, if Gwenn had to guess. It surprised her to see how much they looked the same, and yet so different.
It must have been when they were first married, because this dream version of Gwenn was embarrassed for Kiernan to see all of her, so she tried to cover herself up with the blanket.
Her husband’s hands stopped her.
“Shh,” he whispered, putting an index finger over her lips. “Please don’t be frightened. Here is how it works: You take your finger, and write the most secret words you can think of on my skin. Then I pull you close and I whisper them back to you and if I get them right, you never stop loving me, and I never stop loving you.”
Gwenn agreed and regarded him with a love so powerful it almost erased any that had come before.
But when she looked down at her hands, something made her pause. There was a webbing of skin between her fingers, like one might find on a frog, a seal, or some other creature of the water.
She turned into Kiernan’s chest and sobbed, “I can’t. I’m sorry. My hands—something’s wrong. They’re not my hands. They’re mine, but somehow they’re not mine.”
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Gwenn woke to water dripping onto her nose.
This would have been a peculiar occurrence if it hadn’t been the seventh time in as many nights she had awakened thus, so startled she toppled bottom-first to the oak floor.
Unlike the previous six nights, Gwenn decided against trying to rouse her snoring husband. She straightened her nightdress—white, like her pallor—and touched her face to be sure there was nothing sticky and crimson spewing from either of her nostrils.
Nothing.
Thank the gods.
If there was one thing she couldn’t stomach, it was the taste of iron. For as long as she could remember—which wasn’t very long at all—she’d been unable to tolerate the tang of it.
“It’s just the rain getting into the attic and finding its way underneath those loose floorboards. Soon I’ll have enough coin to patch it, but for now, we will have to make do with the way things are, my dear,” her husband had grumbled each time, not even bothering to open his eyes. Then he would roll over and go right back to snoring another hole through the roof.
Easy for him to say, Gwenn thought. The blasted hole is directly above my nose, not his.
Since it was becoming more and more apparent that her husband had no plans to actually fix the hole, Gwenn decided to take matters into her own hands, stumbling determinedly out of their room and down the length of the creaky, moonlit h
allway.
Gwenn knew in her heart of hearts, in her soul of souls, that Kiernan had at least enough means to put in place a temporary fix. She couldn’t fathom why he hesitated. For their entire marriage, Gwenn had wanted for nothing. Well, almost nothing. Not for their well-appointed home. Not for her own private library bursting with leather-bound tomes from far-off lands. Not for the pearls at her ears and the string of rare and lovely seashells hanging around her neck—Kiernan’s wedding gift to her.
“Because I cannot give you your small yellow cottage on the shore with sand to call your own,” he had said to her, latching the jewelry in place, “I will make certain you carry a piece of it with you everywhere your feet take you, and I’ll be sure to add another shell to it every year we are wed.”
They still resided in the cliffside village where the ocean was nothing more than background music, and there were now six—soon to be seven—shells resting against Gwenn’s collarbone. “I hope this makes you feel more at ease here,” Kiernan said offhandedly with each new addition, chuckling at a joke only he seemed to understand. Gwenn thought it was a strange thing to keep saying, but she felt it wiser to keep that to herself. His temperament was usually sweeter than a freshly picked apple, except when she took it upon herself to criticize him, even jokingly.
As she fingered the ridges of one of the shells, Gwenn ruminated on her life with Kiernan. The whirlwind wedding, the passionate lovemaking. The years since. When was the last time he’d invited her to draw on his body? She tried to recall a time before Kiernan. The memories felt ethereal, unattainable. This inability to remember had weighed on her bones for a few years now, but Kiernan had told her it must be that all those things from long ago were no longer important enough for her to remember.
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