"That's it!" the man shouted, though his voice trembled. "I just can't come here anymore—"
"Now sit down, Mr. Ballard, and stop talking nonsense," said Madame. "You know very well that there's nowhere else to drink for miles around. Unless you want to take a gamble on that swill Barney Madson's got going in his cellar."
She smiled, refilled his glass, and nudged it toward him.
Ballard eyed the drink, then cast a furtive glance to the seat to his left, toward Captain Lawson. On any other day, he probably would have stayed, but he had started drinking early that morning and was fortified with spirits.
"I think I will, Madame. I think I will take a chance on Madson's. That is, until you decide once and for all to get rid of all these damned dead-and-gones—"
The wall of freezing air that hit him was enough to throw Ballard off his barstool and onto the floor.
Madame just sighed, watching the spectral form of Captain Lawson pummel the man with fists that could not really do much harm to living flesh. Can't take the salt out of a sailor, she thought, and not for the first time. That was the problem with having died in battle, she supposed.
"Now, Captain, that's about enough," she said, as Ballard's whimpers grew more pathetic. Her back was turned and she was adjusting a stack of bar towels beneath the register.
The truth was, though, that the lack of whooping and cheering that would normally accompany such a spectacular bar brawl disturbed her. Lawson and his men were no longer even a curiosity worthy of a cheap tour book. Half of her customers could not even see the ghostly sailors anymore, and the other half… well, there was no other half. The other half were the customers gave up coming, who had moved away, to better, happier places in the new country, taking their troubles with their wives, their dissatisfaction with their jobs, and their money with them.
Only she and the girls could truly see them now, the old dead-and-gones, in that same way only girls and women can truly see the very young.
When she heard the door slam, Madame Shirley finally looked up.
There's one paying customer I'll never see again, she thought. "Well you certainly taught him a thing or two—"
But instead of standing before her, inflated with the exhilaration of the fight, Captain Lawson was sagging against the frigid windowpane, peering out at his men as they jumped, one by one, off the cliff.
She came around the bar and stood near him. Just beyond the salt-spattered glass, there was a line of ghostly sailors, one after the other diving headfirst off the edge of the cliff into the sea below. How awful this must be for him to watch.
"You still have that wonderful fragrance," he said without looking at her.
His voice was so soft and hoarse, so unrecognizable. "Like sweet peas in my poor old mother's garden."
Madame felt a tear creep into the lines around her eyes, as a memory shimmered unbidden to her mind—the last time she had seen him looking so vulnerable, nearly forty years ago. The last time he had made love to her. Or the nearest thing to it, that is. She was suddenly flooded with sorrow for the man, whose world had passed out of being more than 300 years ago.
"Your grandmother smelled the same way," he said. "And her grandmother before her. There was one of them, in there, had the most beautiful black hair—putting your face right in it, you felt like you'd sunk into the Elysian fields and you never wanted to come out. But I expect it's all rotted away now, and her lovely white flesh with it."
And then suddenly, just like a river diverted, her sorrow turned to such a magnanimous, dizzying terror that for an instant Madame felt it was she who was diving headfirst off the cliff.
Captain Lawson, however, took no notice.
"There goes Ensign McAuliffe," he said. "Came from a shipwright's family on the Old Coast. And see three behind him there? I apprenticed with his great-grandfather. Good fellow, that old man. It's a terrible pity I can't remember his name now…"
"Why don't you go out to them?" she asked. She hoped the question sounded compassionate. She hoped he couldn't hear what she was thinking beneath it: why don't you go out to them, and maybe they'll convince you it's the right thing, to let the Tempest Fugit take you, too.
"I'm sorry about your business, Shirley," he said.
"Oh, Captain—" she faltered. The Tempest Fugit. It only comes every 300 years, she thought. Don't curse yourself to 300 more years of this… this old place won't be here by then, and where will you be? "I suppose… I suppose this old place is dying anyway, and I don't have any daughters to pass it onto. I suppose places just have their time."
"I suppose they do."
Madame cast a furtive glance toward the painting of the Battle of Melusinae. The largest sea battle in the history of the known world, they said. A thousand ships, and this man here, Captain Lawson, the hero at the head of it all, who died making these shores safe against the insidious slave masters to the North.
And it had been wonderful. The war had ushered in a new era of peace and prosperity that had lasted for—how long? A hundred years? Two hundred? A long time, measured against any man's life. People had paid homage to the dead at Melusinae for quite a long time. But it had been so long since then, and so many generations from both countries had lived and died, and since then new countries had been discovered, new contraptions invented, new wars had been fought over different things that Captain Lawson and his men wouldn't have even conceived of in their own time. It had been so long ago now that the ideals Captain Lawson had fought and died for were starting to crumble once again, and crumble into different directions this time. Directions that he should never have known about, because he should have long ago been eaten by the fishes in his watery grave.
She'd grown up knowing all the stories, all the folklore. But the young people today didn't seem to, the young people growing up in the town—no, it wasn't a town anymore, but a city with strange city ways of doing things, new laws and permits and pieces of paper that said you couldn't serve liquor within city boundaries anymore. Captain Lawson should have been immortalized in tall tales, as every hero deserves to be. He should never have been subjected to a world that had forgotten him.
"No!"
Madame and the Captain spun around. A young woman with masses of red curls was thundering down the stairs at the end of the bar, half falling on the banister which she clutched in one pale, desperate hand. Her other hand clutched at the air, toward the handsome, spectral sailor who had turned his back toward her. Her violet shift was rent at the shoulder, her face contorted with grief.
"No, Lincoln, please—Please don't go—"
"Lucy—" Madame rushed to the girl's side.
"Oh, Madame, please," the girl sobbed, pitching herself into the older woman's arms. "Please tell him not to go."
Madame made soothing noises and patted the girl's back. What a trifling, fragile creature this live girl was, like a baby bird fallen from a nest.
"With all due respect, Madame," said the man. "I did explain to her why I—why I have to."
Lucy shuddered violently. "All he said, Madame, was some nonsense about the slow march of time, about the wind and sea eating him all up in its jaws like a great big sea monster. A—a Tempest Phooey, he called it! Well I never even heard of such a thing!"
Madame looked up at the man. Lincoln Macmaster, Captain Lawson's faithful second in command. He had still not turned, was still facing the front window and the cliff beyond it. Another shadowy form leapt while they watched.
Captain Lawson turned back toward the painting.
"Maybe you should explain it to your captain."
Lincoln Macmaster's head dropped slightly. "Yes. I suppose I should. I owe it to him, don't I?"
"I think you do."
"That will be the end for him, too, won't it?"
Madame gripped the trembling girl, probably too tightly. "Yes. I think it will be."
Together they stared across the nearly empty bar, toward Captain Lawson hunched before the painting. There was a crac
k of thunder, and the lamps began to flicker and the windows rattled with wind. Captain Lawson cried out as before his eyes the green-painted sea began to roil. He leapt back in fright but then, slowly, crept closer. And then—the lightning, dazzling and dangerous, flickered across the surface of the painting, illuminating something that could not have been there before. It rose up through the cloud-daubed sky like a bloated corpse rising up from a place where it had been dined on by slow-moving and sightless creatures. It was a face. A pale, thin, almost womanish face…
Macmaster set his jaw. "It's coming," he said. "It's coming whether Captain Lawson likes it or not, and it's soon upon us." He tilted his head in that way that all sailors do, listening.
"Fearfully soon."
© 2015 by Christine Borne
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Christine Borne is a former YA librarian, rock music archivist, and independent bookseller. In 2012 she was awarded a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship in Literature from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the third largest public arts grantmaking agency in the United States. She likes wiener dogs, cemeteries, and Husker Du.
Sticks and Stones
Jarod K. Anderson
Waking up on a chipmunk's back racing through the underbrush might sound cute. It's not. Up close, chipmunks sorta smell like a dumpster fire. Plus, the first time you see a parasite, a semi-translucent tube sock full of dark blood the size of your forearm, emerge from the fur and then disappear like a breaching whale, you lose all thought of Alvin, Simon, and Theodor.
The moment I opened my eyes, I grabbed two fists full of wire-thick hair and held on for dear life. Those first few seconds were a bit fuzzy. I registered the shifting muscles of the creature beneath me. I felt the more mundane terror of being naked outdoors. And I was surprised by my own voice—not just at the change in pitch, but also I hadn't really screamed in sincere terror since I was a little boy.
I screamed for five minutes straight. I probably would have kept screaming until my lungs gave out, except that I had to switch my focus to dodging gnats the size of crows while my ride raced along the bank of a noisy little stream. That shut me up. That, plus I got a look at a spider. Just a glance. It was hanging right at face level on the underside of a rotten log. That sight was all the motivation I needed to want to shrink down to nothing and never make a sound again.
I'm not sure if there is a limited amount of fear in a human body and I used up all of mine, or if a person really can get used to anything; whichever the case, eventually I calmed down enough to start asking some obvious questions. Mainly, how does a bank teller in Granville, Ohio, go from taking his lunch break to being a naked rodent cowboy in a world of giant nightmares? Also, more importantly, how does he get back again?
I remembered clocking out. I left the bank and walked down to my usual coffee place on West Broadway. Onion bagel. Medium mocha. That scrawny blonde barista with the thick accent tried to talk to me about sports like he does every day.
The chipmunk turned sharply and I thought my arms were going to come loose. We seemed to be going up a slope but it was hard to tell. I had no sense of direction. Everything was impossibly distant. Everything was dark and wet. Each tree and rock raced away into a dirty green blur before I could make sense of any landmarks.
Every day at the coffee shop I gave the blonde kid a nickname. He looked like he should've been too young to work. Maybe fourteen, about the age of my younger brother. I called him Squirt, Boss, Chief. On creative days, I gave him names to match his appearance: Casper, Powder, Goldilocks, Blondie. I tried to throw in the nicknames just as he was handing me my order, but if I timed it wrong he'd ask me what I meant. I'd shrug him off or make something up. I couldn't place his accent, but English didn't seem to be his strong suit.
A burning itch just between my shoulder blades sprung up as I noticed the rose hedge looming before us like a slab of jagged twilight at the edge of the trees. The chipmunk slowed and as it did I noticed streaks of multicolored light zipping through the branches of the hedge, but I couldn't see any of them clearly.
The sensation on my upper back was building up to an electric crescendo. I wanted to reach for it, but I dreaded a sudden burst of speed from the chipmunk. I couldn't imagine what would happen to me on foot in that place. Inside the hedge, we picked our way among black-tipped thorns shot through with veins of dark green. There was no path that I could see.
I had timed my nickname wrong. The kid had forgotten my side of cream cheese, so he had time to ask me who Legolas was. I was too annoyed to make something up, so I told him.
In the center of the hedge, there was a space that was open to the sky. It was probably only six feet across, but to me it seemed like a vast courtyard. Seated on a low stone in the center was the blonde barista. He looked exactly the same as the last time I saw him, the same polo shirt and khakis, but he was surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of tiny people. All shapes and sizes. Some were mounted on animals, like me. Others zipped through the air on a dizzying variety of wings.
Blondie looked past all the others and locked eyes with me the moment the chipmunk trotted fully into the clearing. I think he was speaking in a whisper, but his voice boomed above all the noise. His tone was businesslike.
"You guessed my nature, son of Adam. By the old laws, you are one of us now. You are seelie. You are a vassal of the duke of thorns. Be welcome."
With that, all the flitting, crawling, scampering creatures in that place all turned toward me and echoed "Be welcome" in thrumming discord. Even the chipmunk roared out the words.
I felt vomit rising into my throat but managed to fight it back. That is until I felt wings, hot and wet, erupt from my back and slump quivering against my bare shoulders. I wiped my mouth on the back of my arm and forced myself to stay upright.
"When can I go home?" I asked.
The barista's eyes narrowed.
"You are not large enough to pass for human yet," he said, then sighed. There was a smile in his eyes. "I was your size once. Perhaps in an age and an age, you will grow large enough to return."
My head swam and I felt all my joints go loose.
"Until then," he added with a smirk. "Hang in there, Shrimp."
Then, he was gone.
© 2014 by Jarod K. Anderson
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Formerly, Jarod Anderson taught college English. Currently, he works at a foundation that raises money for a wide range of college scholarships. He writes about education by day and ghosts, monsters, and madmen by night. It’s a good arrangement. Jarod's work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, The Colored Lens, and elsewhere.
The Thousand Year Tart
Charles Payseur
"And to think the biggest problem the advance critics are having is religion," Shin says, smiling as he holds the pad in his hand, scrolling through the spotlight on his play in the arts page of the planet newsfeed. "As if it matters if I use New Servitism or not. It's science fiction. The future. As if the audience won't get the implication."
For my part I nod and stir, bring the spoon up to my lips to taste it. Too sweet still, and nothing to do about it other than start over. I suppress the grimace that wants to form on my face, and keep my attention on Shin.
"Like there's anything new under the sun anyway," Shin says, putting the pad down and looking over at me. His eyes are bright green, almost glowing, the mark of his enhancement, his genius. I bear no such mark, no such destiny, except to help him, to love him. He stands and walks over, licking his lips, his eyes peering at the chocolate mixture bubbling in the pan.
"Maybe they just want something familiar," I say, knowing it will come out wrong, that I don't have his way with words. But he expects me to speak, to act the part of the public that seems so far beneath him. "Maybe they just want some frame of reference."
Shin laughs, his voice high, towering in the air like a satellite. "They're human, aren't they?" he asks, and I just stir the pot. "They're fully equipped to understand, have all the to
ols. I think they just don't like the message. They want God to be the robot, mechanical, logical, putting everything right with pure reason. But the God I show them is a human god, an artist suffering. That's what they're afraid of, that God's just as messed up as the rest of us, that we are all just a work of art that was made and then walked away from."
"At least you're getting a lot of press," I say, hoping it helps, that it deflects the conversation away from God and art and all those things that Shin seems to like talking about endlessly. It's his genius, I know, but sometimes it gets lonely when he seems so far above, when I just want to feel him close, to be a part of him. I stir the chocolate and he reaches down, sticks a finger in the mix, tastes it.
"Ugh," he says, his face twisting some. "Too sweet."
Rehearsals are taking place in the small studio behind our flat, a cramped space barely able to fit all twelve actors and dancers. Since they are all mechanical they don't complain. I sit in the back with jars of spices, different flours, sugars, all laid out around me. I pick up a jar of cane sugar and smell it, let the pungent sweetness work its way up my nose, as though I am applying it directly to my brain.
The mechanicals, all of them humanoid in shape, all of them completely silent at the moment, sit before Shin as he reads from the script. They are recording, I know, all of them committing Shin's instructions to memory.
A completely mechanical play has never been done before. The unions are threatening to sue, to get Shin blacklisted, but he doesn't care; he's been blacklisted a dozen times before and they always take him back, and he continues to sweep up award after award.
"Okay, now this is where the Messiah is trapped in the temple," Shin says, "and the armies have him surrounded. And all the people inside with him know they don't have enough food to eat. They cry to him for bread, but he smiles slyly." Shin demonstrates, crossing his arms over his chest and looking at them with green eyes tinged with sadness and compassion and, somehow, a boyish mischief.
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #5 Page 5