by IGMS
"I know your mother gave you this necklace and how much you love it. I love it now, too. Do you mind if I hold onto it for just a little longer?"
She stepped back and looked at me, her eyes crinkling at the corners as she smiled in pleasant surprise. "Why, Jake," she said, "when did you find joy in the cross?"
I smiled back. "Maybe a little too late," I said. "But better late than never. When will dinner be ready?"
"Oh, about an hour."
"Perfect. I'll be back in plenty of time. First, I have to go see Troy."
The dying sunlight made its own stark war in heaven as dusk came to Tryon on the walk back. In a world where some zones experience the endless light of sun-gods or the forever night of moon-goddesses, the transition from day to night here seemed to be the punctuation mark to my decision.
Everyone was where I left them.
Longman stood behind the bar while everyone else sat at a table, where Troy talked amicably to Alex.
I made my way over to the bar and nodded at Longman, who brought out a glass and a bottle.
"So what's the good word?" Troy asked to my turned back.
I took a long gulp and relished the burn a moment before I spoke.
"She won't age, will she?" I asked into the glass.
"She'll be a timeless beauty forever," Troy said behind me, "for as long as I keep my domain."
"That's a damn shame," I said before taking another hard swallow of whisky. "While part of me can't complain at coming home to see Terra forever beautiful, another part of me regrets not being able to grow old with her. That same part weeps bitter tears over Cody, who'll never grow to manhood."
"Small sacrifices," Troy said. "The important thing is you got your family back."
"Mummies, zombies, the revitalized essence of my wife and son, they're all just reanimated corpses. They only eat one thing." I turned to face Troy. "Right now I take it they're feeding on the people that didn't want to sign up for Team Osiris."
Sheriff Davies stood up. "You gotta look at the big picture here, Jake --"
"Shut up," I said pointing a finger at him while the rest of the hand clutched my glass. "You may be fine throwing your wife dismembered arms and legs, Jared, but I'm not. This is a diabolical engine, one I can't be a part of fueling."
I put my hand up to kill Troy's reply before he could say it.
"At least with Demeter you got some fine grain, which made for some fine whisky," I said looking at the liquid swirl in the glass. "Which is another damn shame."
I wheeled in a blur and smashed the glass into Longman's face. He screamed in pain and dropped his pistol. Grabbing the bar, I hoisted myself over it and came down on top of Longman, bringing him crashing to the floor onto the broken glass and spilled whisky. I grabbed a bottle out of the well and smashed it against the back of Longman's head.
Turned out I had a friend behind the bar with me. Moses sat there, ready to preach. I grabbed him, racked him, and rose to check on Alex.
Alex hadn't wasted any time. Apparently, she had turned over the table and now had Bobby Draper in a chokehold, pulling him toward the door, using him as a meat shield between Cleave and the sheriff's drawn pistols.
Sheriff Davies ended any budding relationship he might've had with Bobby Draper by blasting rounds into him, determined to shoot through to the paladin on the other side. Alex overturned another table to get behind. Cleave swiveled on me with his pistol.
Moses filled the darkening room with thunder and lightning. The shot took Cleave off his feet as his chest exploded. Troy ran into a corner of the room, where protective shadows wrapped around him. Sheriff Davies turned his sights on me, forcing me back down as his gun replied, and I stayed down as it rained shattered glass and cold liquor.
"Chingalo!" Alex cried.
I peeked over the bar briefly before the sheriff's shots forced me back down. But I saw enough. Alex had been forced to run for more cover as the dead Bobby Draper next to her had gotten back on his feet, hungrier than ever. Cleave had also risen.
That was another thing I hated about the zombie apocalypse; you always had to work twice as hard.
First the sheriff. I low crawled to the end of the bar, turned on my back and bent my knees so both feet were firmly planted on the floor. Moses at the ready, I pushed out from cover, sighted the sheriff's brown pants, and blasted. The sheriff crumpled in a holler as his right leg below the knee evaporated into red mist.
The rest was clean up really. I got to my feet and blasted Bobby Draper's head off before he could get to Alex, turned on Cleave so Moses could give him a more permanent sermon, walked over to Sheriff Davies, who shouted in pain as he clutching his stump, and kicked his gun away before he recovered the good sense to pick it up.
"You've think you've won?" Troy's voice said from the darkness of the corner. "You think you've done something?"
The shadows unfurled around him, leaving Troy standing in full Osiris battle regalia. White, metallic bandages covered his body from head to toe. A purple cape listed behind him and on his head sat the crown of a pharaoh. In either hand he held a crook and a flail.
"What do you think happens when the War of the Gods finally starts?" Troy asked. "It all goes to death. It all comes to Osiris."
"This ain't about the war," I told him. "It's about what you did to Terra and Cody."
I'm sure Troy was grinning behind his bandages. "Speaking of your family, they're on their way here right now, along with all the other dead at my disposal. It's going to be fun watching your boy chew through your neck as you gurgle in blood. Your bullets can't stop me, much less the dry-eyed follower of some god named after a sweet potato."
Alex grit her teeth.
"You shouldn't have said that, Troy." I shook my head. "There's not much difference between paladins and harbingers, but there is a difference. See, your god wants to expand his power, which means relying on power-hungry overachievers like you. But the god never fully invests in his harbingers. Even generals fall in battle, and what better way to keep the fight going than by having the power-hungry overachieving lieutenant pick up the reins with a quick battlefield promotion? That's why all your power resides in transferable totems, which to me looks like that crook and flail you're clutching.
"Then there are some gods who are altruistic. Enki, Quetzalcoatl, Prometheus: deities that don't want to see the world end or watch people suffer. These gods trust in altruistic people, who go out into the world and fight to maintain balance. The paladin's power resides wholly in them, not in the god-blessed water some of them may carry."
I took out my flask of holy water.
"Someone's gonna drown, cabron," I said, popping the top.
Alex's blue aura flared and the water streamed out of the flask and shot like tracer bullets into Troy's nostrils. I watched as Alex kept the water in Troy's lungs and throat, where he couldn't project it out no matter how violently he coughed and sputtered. Troy dropped the crook and flask with a clang and grabbed at his own neck. He collapsed moments later. Alex kept her aura up and the water working well past the point where the harbinger had stopped twitching. Then she deposited the water back in my flask and kept a little for her goggles.
I looked down at Sheriff Davies, who had been crawling towards the crook and flail. Once I racked Moses, the sheriff froze.
"I'm afraid you won't be getting that promotion today, lieutenant."
The sheriff moaned in anguish and defeat before passing out.
I bagged the totems of Osiris and placed them in my coat pocket. They were god-forged, not something I could just blast with Moses or melt with a small fire. We had ways of dealing with totems back in D.C.
"Sorry, brother," Alex said putting a hand on my shoulder. "About your family."
I fished my cross out of my shirt and looked at it, steeling myself for a long night of turning my tattered past into ashes. Terra and Cody would be reduced to so much dust, beyond the reach of harbingers and gods. At least none of the gods we could
see, at any rate.
"It's a preview of what's waiting for me," I told myself more than Alex. I closed my eyes and inhaled, my mind replaying the scent of sunflowers.
Maybe if I did enough good in this world, I'd smell it again one day.
The Sturdy Bookshelves Of Pawel Oliszewski
by Ferrett Steinmetz
* * *
When people asked me about Pawel Oliszewski's bookcases - which they inevitably did, especially for the brief period I was paid to answer their questions - I told them my story in strict chronological order. I explained how I moved next door to Pawel, a quiet Polish accountant, when my mother died. I told them how, over the course of seventeen years, my neighbor gifted me with seven fine specimens in his legendary line of improbable bookshelves.
No, I wasn't willing to sell them. Yes, he offered me more bookcases - roughly four a year, actually. Yes, I turned him down - the man would have filled my house with bookcases, if only I'd let him. Yes, I still have them all - the specimens I currently possess are specimen #89 (Vickers hardness test: 970 MPa), specimen #113 (Vickers: 1325 MPa), specimen #234 (Vickers: 2250 MPa), and the much sought-after late-era specimens #269, #287, #292, and #304 (effectively untestable).
Yes, it is an irony that each of the bookcases are worth more than my house now. Oh, no, I've never heard that one before.
But above all, I tried to tell the origin of the bookcases honestly - the tedious hobby of an asocial immigrant who specialized in awkward pauses. This was an error. People wanted Pawel's garage workshop to be a magical wonderland - wanted Pawel himself to be a sage, armored in wise silence.
The official biography - which I did not write, despite being both a professional obituary writer and a good friend to the Oliszewski family - jostled the facts around, made it seem as though Agnes knew there was something special about Pawel's craftsmanship all along.
But no. His bookcases were boring, as was Pawel, as was I. Ask yourself: If anyone had seen anything of interest in that quiet accountant, wouldn't the world have discovered his bookcases years ago? Wouldn't they have discovered Myra Turnbull's purses and Jeb Guhr's model planes?
No, the truth lay there all along, resting beneath cobwebs; it was just tedious. Easily overlooked. Like me.
Still. I'm going to tell you the way I've always told it. Strict chronological order. Just to channel a bit of the old man's magic.
Are you interested now?
"In three days, my father will offer you a bookcase," said the drab little woman on my doorstep. "You are not obliged to accept it."
"Pardon?" I asked. My mother's house was in a far swankier location than I could afford on my reporter's salary, but this merely meant I had moved to a locale where my neighbors no longer huffed spraypaint. These quiet Trumbull suburbs didn't seem wealthy enough to offer furniture to new arrivals like me.
The woman sighed dramatically, a guardian of a duty she had never desired. She was young, and mildly attractive under a mop of ink-black hair, but she had the dark-eyed, beaten-down look of a woman who came from a large and crazy family that depended on her.
"My father," she repeated. "He makes bookcases. He is currently on Step Fourteen - routing the dadoes to fit the shelves into them. Then he will sand the bookcase, and deliver it to you. You are nothing special. He merely needs someone to gift his work to, and you are a new and heretofore bookcase-free victim."
"Is this . . . common?"
She gestured dramatically down the road. "Open the door on every house on this block, and you will find an Oliszewski bookcase. They are as common as rabbits - and much like rabbits, they seem charming until they multiply. Your mother, wisely, gave hers to Goodwill. Do yourself a favor: refuse my father. It will do his ego no harm, and you may then safely avoid him in all future endeavors."
This was how I met Agnes Oliszewski.
Three days later, I perched by the door, curious to see if indeed I would be offered a bookcase. The doorbell rang, revealing a soft-voiced, beer-bellied Polish immigrant with close-cropped white hair and calloused hands.
"You come," said Pawel Oliszewski - not quite a command, as Pawel never forced things. He was meek as water, flowing effortlessly around people's expectations. He uttered these two words and turned away, never looking back to see if I followed.
Of course I followed.
His garage was small but meticulously organized; neat stacks of wood drying in the back, metal hacksaws glistening with WD-40, the concrete floor swept sawdust-free. In the center of this immaculate workspace stood a plain, chest-high bookcase.
Pawel did not offer what would eventually become Specimen #89 to me, not exactly. Instead, he stood next to it protectively and said, "I made this." Then he stepped aside, allowing me to carry it back.
It struck me as a funny thing to say -- "I made this." He evinced neither pride nor cheer. On later reflection, it seemed as though Pawel had measured the universe, found its length short by precisely one bookcase, and had quietly set out to rectify the issue.
I paused, uncertain whether I wanted to accept the gift. Pawel's bookcases are not particularly pretty, it must be said -- each was an undecorated, chest-high white ash box with three shelves slotted into grooves. Yet though Pawel never seemed to take pleasure from making them - never seemed to take pleasure from anything - I later found he never varied them, either. Each bookcase was a perfect clone of the last. When stood next to each other, they looked like pallid dominoes.
"Um . . ." I said. "Thank you?"
He nodded and turned away, fitting stacks of sandpaper into a box marked "sandpaper."
Once I'd lugged Pawel's bookcase through the door, I could see why my mother had given hers away: it didn't go with her furniture. One could hardly envision a décor Pawel's ugly, bare-boned bookcases would have complemented. But with my mother gone, there was no one left in my life to give me gifts. As such, I cherished this cheap woodworking project, even though I couldn't afford to buy books on my salary; instead, I filled Pawel's knotty shelves with my mother's collection of glass owls, which I could not quite bear to throw away.
Pawel and I barely spoke after exchanging those seven words, but that was Pawel's nature. He was cloaked in a marshmallow-like silence; conversations disappeared into that bland smile, never to be heard from again. He'd nod agreeably for as long as you cared to talk, yet never initiated a discussion I could recall - except, of course, when he asked if you wanted a bookcase.
Agnes, however, was always talking. She wandered her back yard, clutching her cell phone in both hands as though she wanted to strangle it. She spoke in a drained, hostage-negotiator monotone as she counselled yet another cousin in the drunk tank, yet another aunt refusing to take her diabetes medication, yet another sister justifying her abusive husband. Agnes flinched whenever her phone rang.
Empathy prevailed. I lured her over to my house with promises of red wine and blessed silence. After she'd drained her second glass, she eyed my décor: tinkling green Tiffany lamps, Victorian couches mummified in plastic protective film, cut crystal owls glaring down at us from everywhere.
"Did Liberace have a garage sale?" she asked.
"It's . . . my mother's furniture," I explained. "I can't afford new tables."
"What do you do?"
"I'm a writer." I looked away from Agnes' scrutiny; she was trying to determine if she should have heard of me. Noting my age and poverty, she decided correctly that she shouldn't have.
"What have you written?"
"Dead people, mostly." I watched the joke die slowly, a beached fish flopping to death on the table, then added: "The obituaries at the Norwalk Hour? I compose them."
"Oh. I've read your work, then." A polite pause. "You sure get the funeral times right."
"But I'm also a fiction writer!"
"That's good," she said, in a kind tone that seemed to ask me not to bring her any metaphorical bookcases, and we finished our wine in companionable silence.
The only sound was Pawel,
in his garage, planing the boards for another magical bookcase.
"You should let me write the headlines," I told my editor at the Norwalk Hour. "I've worked here for seventeen years. Why am I stuck in obituaries? Why won't you give me the good stories?"
"Because you never get the story," she replied. "You only get the facts."
"What does that even mean?"
"I'll show you. Write me a solid headline for this story, and I'll promote you." She gestured for me to get out my notepad. "Next week, starting on Monday morning, all the teachers of Norwalk High School will attend an educational conference in New Haven, Connecticut. Over the next five days, the seminar will cover the challenges of creating an orderly and personalized curriculum, stimulating change in budgetarially stressed times, and the challenges of assisting disadvantaged students.
"Now," she finished, so calm I could sense the trick in it. "What's the headline?"
She crossed her arms patiently while I juggled the facts I'd written down. After jotting down a few test cases, I ventured: "Norwalk High School Teachers Improve Their Skills At Educational Conference?"
My editor leaned over the desk. "Try, 'NO SCHOOL NEXT WEEK,'" she said. "All the teachers are out of town."
She walked away. I returned, humbled, to my obituaries.
Are you interested now?
The state of the bookcase, as viewed from my kitchen window, became a calendar; I could tell what day it was from Pawel's progress. The raw lumber, milled down to pieces by the third. The dovetail joints, fitted and hand-carved, by the tenth. The case frame, glued and clamped, by the twentieth.
I learned if Pawel was refused, he would simply go to the next neighbor, and the next, moving down the line until someone would take his wares. Nothing fazed him. He treated everyone as though they were workshop projects, frowning faintly when someone said something unexpected, as if envisioning methods to sand this imperfection away.
But mostly, he preferred the silent company of his tools.