Stories: All-New Tales ngss-1

by Neil Gaiman

  “He came up to me and pulled it out, but before he could shoot, the woman I was with, a client, blocked his arm. He screamed and ran away, but as far as I could see she didn’t cut him or anything.”

  “But then how did he get paralyzed and crazy?”

  I hesitated. Up until that moment, my identity, my abilities were secret. Secrets are like the night: they hide from sight that which we suspect and fear. But I no longer wanted to live in darkness. Iridia, the love of my being, was not someone I wanted to hide from. And even if the truth made me lose her, at least she would know me, if only for a while.

  “I want to tell a story about a woman named Julia,” I said. “She named me Juvenal Nyx and made me a child of the night.”

  Richard Adams. THE KNIFE

  ALL THAT IS NARRATED IN THIS STORY took place in 1938.

  It was not until Philip actually saw the knife lying in the bushes that his life changed its nature, as it were, from a fantasy to a frightening possibility. He stopped, turned his head for a glance and then took a couple of steps back, stared and remained staring, as though he needed to make sure that the knife was real.

  Yes, it was real all right. It was the only thing for some time that had been able to break through the palisade of his dismal, all-absorbing dread.

  Before that, his thoughts had been dominated by his horrible apprehension, the prospect of severe physical pain, inescapable and coming soon. It was as though his mind had been running a tape again and again. For its starting point it had Stafford’s final words to him yesterday. “So I shall see you in the library after prayers tomorrow night, and you’ve got no one to thank but yourself.” Next came Stafford’s turning away and his own imprisonment, as it were, within those words, surrounding him like the bars of a cage. And then the intervening time; and so back to Stafford’s words.

  Ever since the beginning of this term and Stafford’s appointment as head prefect of the house, he had become-not only in his own eyes, but in everyone else’s-Stafford’s principal victim. “Stafford doesn’t like you, does he?” Jones had said. “And can you blame him?” added Brown, at which both of them had roared with laughter.

  All through the term his offences had accumulated, earning themselves on the way a whole series of petty punishments, which had climaxed last week in his being beaten by Stafford in the house library. The pain had been severe-the worst he had ever undergone-and now it was apparently going to be repeated.

  Last night he had hardly slept. He couldn’t eat breakfast and could hardly eat lunch. Jones and Brown were the only people he had told.

  And now here he was, trudging though the wet woods alone on a half-holiday afternoon. And now, here was the knife. It burst in upon his thoughts, which surrendered and came to a stop.

  It was very like the knives he had seen on television, the knives which scores of people had handed in to the police as the result of a public appeal.

  He stooped and picked it up. It was a good foot long in its fancy sheath and it had a very sharp point. And now, straight on cue, came the fantasy.

  The knife had been sent to him by a mysterious Power, and he was under orders to use it. He was always entertaining fantasies. There was no end to them: revenge fantasies, sexual fantasies, supreme-power fantasies. To a considerable extent, he lived in solitude with his fantasies.

  Under orders to use it. When and where? “My lord, I shall use it in the middle of the night, and no one will be able to tell”-He broke off. Deliberately changed his thoughts. However, the first thoughts returned. But of course he wasn’t really going to use it, was he?

  If he did, what would happen then? For once he couldn’t imagine. However, one thing was clear. There would be a tremendous row; the most tremendous row ever. But suppose no one could tell it was him?

  He wouldn’t be beaten again, would he? The beating would be swallowed up in the awful row. Everything would change. Yes, that was the real point. Everything would change, including his life.

  No one knew he had a knife. And no one would want to claim it after he’d used it as he meant to. Before house prayers that evening he had thought out exactly what he was going to do.

  Going upstairs to bed he was so much preoccupied that he stumbled into someone without noticing who. “Oh, damn you, Jevons, why can’t you look where you’re going?” “Sorry, er-sorry, er-”

  Most of the senior boys had single rooms. He had had one now for two terms. That night after lights out he lay silently in the dark, willing himself to keep awake.

  But he fell asleep. When he woke it was two in the morning by his watch. Last chance to say no. But yes, he was still determined to do it. What had he to lose?

  Got the knife? Got the torch? Got someone else’s bath towel he’d pinched from the changing room? He opened the door of his room, stepped into the passage and stood listening. Not a sound anywhere. It wasn’t far to the door of Stafford’s room (mind, no fingerprints).

  And now he was standing beside Stafford’s bed, listening to his steady breathing as he lay on his back. He turned on the torch, shone it on Stafford’s throat and all in one movement plunged in the knife. The point was so sharp that he hardly felt it pierce. He let go of the hilt and all in one movement spread the towel over throat, knife and all, ran back to his room, shut the torch in a drawer and got back into bed.

  All this he remembered clearly. And the aftermath? Well, the tremendous row. The shock throughout the school. The shock throughout the country. The newspapers, the headmaster, the police, the fingerprinting. (To what purpose? He had readily given his own.)

  Apparently, no one had told the police that he was a boy on the wrong side of Stafford. So many boys were.

  His parents had not been hard to persuade when he had asked them if he could leave at the end of the term.

  I’M HIS GODFATHER, AND I’ve always kept up a friendly interest in him. We’ve been close friends for many years.

  One night last week, after he’d come to dinner with me, he told me everything and said that he’d often had a mind to give himself up. I’ve told him to dismiss that notion altogether and assured him that his secret is entirely safe with me. I wouldn’t let on to a living soul.

  Well, would you?

  Jodi Picoult. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

  THE LOUDEST SOUND IN THE WORLD is the absence of a child. Sarah found herself waiting for it, the moment she opened her eyes in the morning: that satin ribbon of a giggle, or the thump of a jump off the bed-but instead all she heard was the hiss of the coffeemaker that Abe must have preset in the kitchen last night, spitting angrily as it finished its brewing. She glanced at the clock over the landscape of Abe’s sleeping body. For a moment, she thought about touching that golden shoulder or running her hand through his dark curls, but like most moments, it was gone before she remembered to act on it. “We have to get up,” she said.

  Abe didn’t move, did not turn toward her. “Right,” he said, and from the pitch of his voice she knew that he hadn’t been asleep either.

  She rolled onto her back. “Abe.”

  “Right,” he repeated. He pushed off the bed in one motion and closeted himself in the bathroom, where he ran the shower long before he stepped inside, incorrectly assuming the background noise would keep anyone outside from hearing him cry.

  THE WORST DAY OF Abe’s life had not been the one you’d imagine, but the one after that, when he went to choose his daughter’s coffin. Sarah begged him to go; said she could not sit and talk about what to do with their daughter as if she were a box of outgrown clothing that had to be stored somewhere safe and dry. The funeral director was a man with a bad comb-over and kind, gray eyes, and his first question to Abe was whether he’d seen his daughter…afterward. Abe had-once the doctors and nurses had given up and the tubes had been removed and the crash carts pulled away, he and Sarah were given a moment to say good-bye. Sarah had run out of the hospital room, screaming. Abe had sat down on the edge of the bed with the plastic mattress that crinkled beneath
his weight, and had threaded his fingers with his daughter’s. For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d felt her move, but it turned out to be his own sobbing, jarring the bed. He’d sat like that for a while, and then somehow managed to pull her onto his lap and crawl onto the cot himself, as if he were the patient.

  What he remembered was not how still she was, or how her skin grew ashen under his touch, but how she had weighed just the tiniest bit less than she had that morning, when he’d carried her through the double doors of the emergency room. It wasn’t remarkable to think that he-a man who lived by weights and measures-would be sensitive to this even at a moment as overwhelming as that one. Abe recalled hearing medical examiners say a person who died lost twenty-one grams of weight-the measure of a human soul. He realized, though, holding his daughter in his arms, that the scale was all wrong. Loss should have been measured in leagues: the linear time line he would not spend with her as she lost her first tooth, lost her heart over a boy, lost the graduation cap she tossed into a silvered sky. Loss should have been measured circularly, like angles: the minutes between the two of them, the degrees of separation.

  We suggest that you dress your daughter the way she would have wanted, the funeral director had said. Did she have a favorite party dress, or a pair of overalls she always wore to climb trees? A soccer uniform? A T-shirt from a favorite vacation?

  There were other questions, and decisions to be made, and finally, the funeral director took Abe into another room to choose a coffin. The samples were stacked against the wall, jet and mahogany sarcophagi gleaming at such a high polish he could see his own ravaged features in their reflections. The funeral director led Abe to the far end of the room, where three stunted coffins were propped like brave soldiers. They ranged from some that came up as high as his hip to one that was barely bigger than a bread box.

  Abe picked one painted a glossy white, with gold piping, because it reminded him of his daughter’s bedroom furniture. He kept staring at it. Although the funeral director assured him that it was the right size, it did not seem large enough to Abe to hold a girl as full of life as his daughter. It was certainly not large enough, he knew, to pack inside the turtle shell of grief that he’d armored himself in this past day. Which meant, of course, that even after his daughter was gone, the sorrow would remain behind.

  THE FUNERAL WAS HELD at a church neither Abe nor Sarah attended, a service arranged by Sarah’s mother, who in spite of this still managed to believe in God. At first, Sarah had fought it-how many idealistic discussions had she and Abe had about religion being akin to brainwashing; about letting their child choose her own rainbow of beliefs? — but Sarah’s mother put her foot down, and Sarah-still reeling-was weak enough to be toppled. What kind of parent, Felicity had said tearfully, doesn’t want a man of God to say a few words over her daughter? Now, Sarah sat in the front pew as this pastor spoke, words that flowed over the crowd like an anesthetic breeze. In her hand was a small teal green Beanie Baby, a dog that had gone everywhere with her child, to the point where it was hairless and frayed and barely even recognizable in its animalhood. Sarah squeezed it in her fist so tight that she could feel its seeded stuffing start to push at the seams.

  Try to remember, as we celebrate her short and glorious life, that sadness comes out of love. Sadness is a kind of terrible privilege.

  Sarah wondered why the pastor hadn’t mentioned the truly important things: like the fact that her daughter could take a toilet paper roll and turn it into a pretend video camera that occupied her imagination for hours. Or that the only songs that made her stop crying when she had colic as an infant were tracks from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She wondered why he hadn’t told the people who’d come here that her daughter had only just learned how to do a round off in gymnastics and that she could pick the Big Dipper out of any night sky?

  Oh, Lord, receive this child of Yours into the arms of Your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the company of angels.

  At that, Sarah lifted her head. Not Your child, she thought. Mine.

  Ten minutes later, it was over. She remained stone still while everyone else left to get into their cars and drive to the cemetery. But she had worked out something special with Abe; the one request, really, she’d had for this funeral. She felt Abe’s hand come onto her shoulder and his lips move against her ear. “Do you still-”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, and then he was gone too.

  She walked up to the coffin, surrounded by an embarrassment of flowers. Fall flowers, like the ones she’d had in her wedding bouquet. She forced herself to glance down at her daughter-who looked, well, perfectly normal, which was the great irony here.

  “Hey, baby,” Sarah said softly, and she tucked the small green dog underneath her daughter’s arm. Then she opened up the large purse she’d brought with her to the funeral service.

  It had been critical for her to be the last one to see her daughter before that casket was closed. She wanted to be the last one to lay eyes on her girl, the same way-seven years ago-she had been the first.

  The book she pulled out of her purse was so dog-eared and worn that its spine had cracked and some of its pages were only filed in between others, instead of glued into place. “‘In a great green room,’” she began to read, “‘there was a fireplace, and a red balloon, and a picture of…’”

  She hesitated. This was the part where her daughter would have chimed in: the cow jumping over the moon. But now, Sarah had to say the words for her. She read through to the end, going by heart when the tears came so furiously that she could not see the words on the page. “‘Goodnight stars,” she whispered. “‘Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.’” Then she drew in a ragged breath and touched her finger to her daughter’s lips. “Sleep tight,” Sarah said.

  IN THE GATHERING HALL at the church, Abe thought there were obscene amounts of food, as if pastries and deviled eggs and casseroles could make up for the fact that nobody really knew what to say to him. He stood holding a plate piled high that someone had brought him, although he hadn’t taken a single bite. From time to time, a friend or a relative would come up to him and say something stupid: How are you doing? Are you holding up okay? It won’t hurt as much, in time. Things like that only made him want to put down his plate and punch the speaker until his hand bled, because that kind of pain he could understand better than the empty ache in his chest that wouldn’t go away. No one said what they all were truly thinking, when they furtively glanced over at Abe with his bad-fitting black suit and his Styrofoam plate: I’m so glad it happened to you, and not me.

  “Excuse me.”

  Abe turned around to find a woman he’d never met before-middle-aged, with wrinkles around her eyes that made him think she had smiled, often, in her youth. Maybe one of Felicity’s church ladies, he thought. She was holding a box of daffodil bulbs. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, and she held out the box.

  He set down the plate on a chair beside him so that he could take the bulbs. “Plant these now,” she said, “and when they come up in the spring, think of her.”

  She touched his arm and walked off, leaving Abe holding on to this hope.

  SARAH HAD MET ABE when she was new to Los Angeles, and some friends had taken her to a cigar club that was so exclusive you had to enter through a corporate office building and give the doorman the password to be let into the correct elevator bank. The club was on the roof of the building, and Sarah’s friends had tried to cure her East Coast homesickness by showing off Mel Gibson’s humidor. It was a dark place, one where actors who fancied themselves to be musicians were likely to pick up a guitar and jam with the band; one that only made Sarah even more aware of how much she hated this city, this new job, this departure from where she really wanted to be.

  They sat at the bar, pulling up stools beside a good-looking guy with hair as dark as ink and a smile that made Sarah feel like she was caught in a whirlpool. Sarah’s friends ordered
cosmos and tried to outflirt each other-getting him to reveal that he was the drummer in the band, and that his name was Abe. When one of the girls came back from the bathroom and exclaimed, Have you seen all the stars? Abe leaned over and asked Sarah to dance. They moved like smoke over the empty dance floor, to a canned jazz track. “Why me?” Sarah asked simply.

  His hand, resting on the small of her back, pulled her just that much closer. “Because,” Abe said, “when your friend started talking about stars, you were the only one in this whole fucking place who looked up at the sky.”

  Three months later, they moved to Massachusetts together. Six months later, they got married, amid many toasts and jokes about Abraham and Sarah and their destiny to create a tribe. But like their biblical counterparts, it took years for them to have a child-eight, to be exact. Just long enough for Sarah to believe it was time to give up trying. Just short enough for her to be overwhelmed with the news of her pregnancy; to never give a second thought to the fact that this might not be the end of the struggle, but instead, the beginning.

  ON THE WAY HOME from the church, Sarah turned to Abe and told him to stop at the grocery store. “There’s nothing in the house,” she said, as if this wasn’t obvious on so many levels. They were too numb to think about how they looked, at one in the afternoon, moving through the frozen foods aisle in coat and tie and pearls and heels. They wandered through the store, picking out the items that seemed to scream normal: eggs and bread and cheese and milk; things any family could use. In the cereal aisle, Abe started to automatically reach for the berry Kix, her favorite, until he realized that they didn’t need it anymore; and he covered gracefully by taking instead the cereal box beside it, some god-awful bran thing that looked like straw and that he knew he’d never eat.

  They went to the line with their favorite checkout girl, the one who didn’t mind when their daughter helped scan the bar codes on the soup cans and the frozen peas. She smiled when she saw them. “Wow, look at you two!” she said, glancing at their clothes and winking. “Don’t tell me food shopping is what passes for a date without the kids nowadays…”