Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

“Those are narcissi,” she said. “Daffodils are a kind of narcissus.”

  It was spring in Hyde Park, and we were almost able to forget the city surrounding us. We stopped at an ice cream stand and bought two violently colored frozen ice cream confections.

  “Was there someone else?” I asked her, eventually, as casually as I could, licking my ice cream. “Someone you left me for?”

  She shook her head. “You were getting too serious,” she said. “That was all. And I wasn’t a homewrecker.”

  Later that night, much later, she repeated it. “I wasn’t a homewrecker,” she said, and she stretched, languorously, and added, “—then. Now, I don’t care.”

  I had not actually told her that I was divorced. We had eaten sushi and sashimi in a restaurant in Greek Street, drunk enough sake to warm us and to cast a rice-wine glow over the evening. We took a golden-painted taxi back to my flat in Chelsea.

  The wine was warm in my chest. In my bedroom we kissed and hugged and giggled. Becky examined my CD collection carefully, and then she put on the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Sessions, singing along in a quiet voice. This was only a few hours ago, but I cannot remember the point at which she removed her clothes. I remember her breasts, however, still beautiful, although they had lost the firmness and shape they had when she was little more than a girl: her nipples were deep red and pronounced.

  I had put on some weight. She had not.

  “Will you go down on me?” she whispered, when we reached my bed, and I did. Her labia were engorged, purple, full and long, and they opened like a flower to my mouth when I began to lick her. Her clitoris swelled beneath my tongue and the salty taste of her filled my world, and I licked and teased and sucked and nibbled at her sex for what felt like hours.

  She came, once, spasmodically, under my tongue, and then she pulled my head up to hers, and we kissed some more, and then, finally, she guided me inside her.

  “Was your cock that big fifteen years ago?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I told her.

  “Mmm.”

  After a while she said, “I want you to come in my mouth.” And, soon after, I did.

  We lay in silence, side by side, and she said, “Do you hate me?”

  “No,” I said, sleepily. “I used to. I hated you for years. And I loved you, too.”

  “And now?”

  “No, I don’t hate you anymore. It’s gone away. Floated off into the night, like a balloon.” I realized as I said it that I was speaking the truth.

  She snuggled closer to me, pressed her warm skin against my skin. “I can’t believe I ever let you go. I won’t make that mistake twice. I do love you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not, thank you, idiot. Try I love you too.”

  “I love you too,” I echoed, and, sleepily, I kissed her still sticky lips.

  And then I slept.

  In my dream, I felt something uncurling inside me, something moving and changing. The cold of stone, a lifetime of darkness. A rending, and a ripping, as if my heart were breaking; a moment of utter pain. Blackness and strangeness and blood.

  I must have dreamed the gray dawn as well. I opened my eyes, moving away from one dream but not entirely coming awake. My chest was open, a dark split that ran from my navel to my neck, and a huge, misshapen hand, Plasticine-gray, was pulling back into my chest. There was long dark hair caught between the stone fingers. The hand retreated into my chest as I watched, as an insect will vanish into a crack when the lights are turned on. And, as I squinted sleepily down at it, my acceptance of the strangeness of it all my only clue that this was truly another dream, the crack in my chest healed, knit and mended, and the cold hand vanished for good. I felt my eyes closing once more. I was tired, and I swam back into the comforting, sake-flavored dark.

  I slept once more, but the rest of the dreams are now lost to me.

  I awoke, completely, a few moments ago, the morning sun full on my face. There was nothing beside me in the bed but a purple flower on the pillow. I am holding it now. It reminds me of an orchid, although I know little enough of flowers, and its scent is strange, salty and female.

  Becky must have placed it here for me to find when she left, while I slept.

  Pretty soon now I shall have to get up. I shall get out of this bed and resume my life.

  I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine.

  I feel nothing at all.

  MY LIFE

  “My life? Hell, you don’t want to hear about my life. Jesus, my throat is dry….

  A drink? Well, since you’re buying, and it’s a hot day, sure. Why not. Just a little one.

  Maybe a beer. And a whiskey chaser. It’s good to drink, on a hot day. Only

  Problem with drinking is it makes me remember. And sometimes I don’t want

  To remember. I mean, my mom: there was a woman. I never knew her as a woman

  But I seen photographs of her, before the operation. She said I needed a father,

  And seeing my own father had dumped her after he regained his eyesight (following

  A blow on the head from a Burmese cat, which jumped from a penthouse apartment window and fell

  Thirty stories, miraculously striking my father in exactly the right place to restore his sight,

  And then landing uninjured on the sidewalk, proving it’s true what they say about

  Cats always landing on their feet) claiming he had thought he was marrying her twin sister

  Who looked completely different, but had, through a miracle of biology, exactly the same voice

  Which was why the judge granted the divorce, closed his eyes and even he couldn’t tell them apart.

  So my father walked out a free man, and on the way from the court he was struck on the head

  By detritus falling from the sky; there was folks said it was lavatorial waste from a plane

  Though chemical examination revealed traces of elements unknown to science, and it said

  In the papers that the fecal matter contained alien proteins, but then it was hushed up.

  They took my father’s body away for safekeeping. The government gave us a receipt

  Though in a week it faded, I guess that it was something in the ink, but that’s another story.

  So then my mom announced I needed a man around the house and it was going to be her,

  And she worked a deal with that doctor so when the two of them won the Underwater Tango contest

  He agreed to change her sex for nothing. Growing up I called her Dad, and knew none of this.

  Nothing else interesting has ever happened to me. Another drink?

  Well, just to keep you company maybe, another beer, and don’t forget the whiskey,

  Hey, make it a double. It isn’t that I drink, but it’s a hot day, and even when you’re

  Not a drinking man…. You know,

  It was just such a day as this my wife dissolved. I’d read about the people who blew up,

  Spontaneous combustion, that’s the words. But Mary-Lou—that was my wife’s name,

  We met the day she came out of her coma, seventy years asleep and hadn’t aged a day,

  It’s scary what ball-lightning can do. And all the people on that submarine,

  Like Mary-Lou, they all were froze in time, and after we were wed she’d visit them,

  Sit by their bedsides, watch them while they slept. I drove a truck, back then.

  And life was good. She coped well with the missing seven decades, and me, I like to think that if

  The dishwasher had not been haunted—well, possessed, I guess, would be more accurate—

  She’d still be here today. It preyed upon her mind, and the only exorcist that we could get

  Turned out to be a midget from Utrecht and actually not a priest at all,

  For all he had a candle, bell, and book. And by coincidence, the very day my w
ife,

  All haunted by the washer, deliquesced—went liquid in our bed—my truck was stole.

  That was when I left the States to travel round the world.

  And life’s been dull as ditchwater since then. Except…but no, my mind is going blank.

  My memory’s been swallowed by the heat. Another drink? Well, sure….”

  FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT

  0.

  The Fool

  “What do you want?”

  The young man had come to the graveyard every night for a month now. He had watched the moon paint the cold granite and the fresh marble and the old moss-covered stones and statues in its cold light. He had started at shadows and at owls. He had watched courting couples and drunks and teenagers taking nervous shortcuts: all the people who come through the graveyard at night.

  He slept in the day. Nobody cared. He stood alone in the night and shivered in the cold. It came to him then that he was standing on the edge of a precipice.

  The voice came from the night all around him, in his head and out of it.

  “What do you want?” it repeated.

  He wondered if he dared to turn and look, realized he did not.

  “Well? You come here every night, to a place where the living are not welcome. I have seen you. Why?”

  “I wanted to meet you,” he said, without looking around. “I want to live forever.” His voice cracked as he said it.

  He had stepped over the precipice. There was no going back. In his imagination, he could already feel the prick of needle-sharp fangs in his neck, a sharp prelude to eternal life.

  The sound began. It was low and sad, like the rushing of an underground river. It took him several long seconds to recognize it as laughter.

  “This is not life,” said the voice.

  It said nothing more, and after a while the young man knew he was alone in the graveyard.

  1.

  The Magician

  They asked St. Germain’s manservant if his master was truly a thousand years old, as it was rumored he had claimed.

  “How would I know?” the man replied. “I have only been in the master’s employ for three hundred years.”

  2.

  The Priestess

  Her skin was pale, and her eyes were dark, and her hair was dyed black. She went on a daytime talk show and proclaimed herself a vampire queen. She showed the cameras her dentally crafted fangs, and brought on ex-lovers who, in various stages of embarrassment, admitted that she had drawn their blood, and that she drank it.

  “You can be seen in a mirror, though?” asked the talk show hostess. She was the richest woman in America, and had got that way by bringing the freaks and the hurt and the lost out in front of her cameras and showing their pain to the world.

  The studio audience laughed.

  The woman seemed slightly affronted. “Yes. Contrary to what people may think, vampires can be seen in mirrors and on television cameras.”

  “Well, that’s one thing you finally got right, honey,” said the hostess of the daytime talk show. But she put her hand over her microphone as she said it, and it was never broadcast.

  5.

  The Pope

  This is my body, he said, two thousand years ago. This is my blood.

  It was the only religion that delivered exactly what it promised: life eternal for its adherents.

  There are some of us alive today who remember him. And some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.

  6.

  The Lovers

  After she was dead, she began to come to him in the night. He grew pale, and there were deep circles under his eyes. At first, they thought he was mourning her. And then, one night, he was gone.

  It was hard for them to obtain permission to disinter her, but they got it. They hauled up the coffin and they unscrewed the lid. Then they prized what they found out of the box. There was six inches of water in the bottom, the iron had colored it a deep, orangish red. There were two bodies in the coffin: hers, of course, and his. He was more decayed than she was.

  Later, someone wondered aloud how both of them had fitted in a coffin built for one. Especially given her condition, he said; for she was very obviously very pregnant.

  This caused some confusion, for she had not been noticeably pregnant when she was buried.

  Still later they dug her up for one last time, at the request of the church authorities, who had heard rumors of what had been found in the grave. Her stomach was flat. The local doctor told them all that it had just been gas and bloating as the stomach swelled. The townsfolk nodded, almost as if they believed him.

  7.

  The Chariot

  It was genetic engineering at its finest: they created a breed of human to sail the stars. They needed to be possessed of impossibly long life spans, for the distances between the stars were vast; space was limited, and their food supplies needed to be compact; they needed to be able to process local sustenance, and to colonize the worlds they found with their own kind.

  The homeworld wished the colonists well and sent them on their way. They removed all traces of their location from the ships’ computers first, however. To be on the safe side.

  10.

  The Wheel of Fortune

  What did you do with the doctor? she asked, and laughed. I thought the doctor came in here ten minutes ago.

  I’m sorry, I said. I was hungry.

  And we both laughed.

  I’ll go find her for you, she said.

  I sat in the doctor’s office, picking my teeth. After a while the assistant came back.

  I’m sorry, she said. The doctor must have stepped out for a while. Can I make an appointment for you for next week?

  I shook my head. I’ll call, I said. But, for the first time that day, I was lying.

  11.

  Justice

  “It is not human,” said the magistrate, “and it does not deserve the trial of a human thing.”

  “Ah,” said the advocate. “But we cannot execute it without a trial: there are the precedents. A pig, that had eaten a child who had fallen into its sty. It was found guilty and hanged. A swarm of bees, found guilty of stinging an old man to death, was burned by the public hangman. We owe the hellish creature no less.”

  The evidence against the baby was incontestable. It amounted to this: a woman had brought the baby from the country. She said it was hers and that her husband was dead. She lodged at the house of a coach maker and his wife. The old coach maker complained of melancholia and lassitude, and was, with his wife and their lodger, found dead by their servant. The baby was alive in its cradle, pale and wide-eyed, and there was blood on its face and lips.

  The jury found the little thing guilty beyond all doubt, and condemned it to death.

  The executioner was the town butcher. In the sight of all the town he cut the babe in two, and flung the pieces onto the fire.

  His own baby had died earlier that same week. Infant mortality in those days was a hard thing but common. The butcher’s wife had been brokenhearted.

  She had already left the town to see her sister in the city, and, within the week, the butcher joined her. The three of them—butcher, wife, and babe—made the prettiest family you ever did see.

  14.

  Temperance

  She said she was a vampire. One thing I knew already, the woman was a liar. You could see it in her eyes. Black as coals they were, but she never quite looked at you, staring at invisibles over your shoulder, behind you, above you, two inches in front of your face.

  “What does it taste like?” I asked her. This was in the parking lot, behind the bar. She worked the graveyard shift in the bar, mixed the finest drinks, but never drank anything herself.

  “V8 juice,” she said. “Not the low-sodium kind, but the original. Or a salty gazpacho.”

  “What’s gazpacho?”
r />   “A sort of vegetable soup.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “No.”

  “So you drink blood? Just like I drink V8?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “If you get sick of drinking V8 you can drink something else.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I don’t like V8 much.”

  “See?” she said. “In China it’s not blood we drink, it’s spinal fluid.”

  “What’s that taste like?”

  “Nothing much. Clear broth.”

  “You’ve tried it?”

  “I know people.”

  I tried to figure out if I could see her reflection in the wing mirror of the truck we were leaning against, but it was dark, and I couldn’t tell.

  15.

  The Devil

  This is his portrait. Look at his flat, yellow teeth, his ruddy face. He has horns, and he carries a foot-long wooden stake in one hand and his wooden mallet in the other.

  Of course, there is no such thing as the devil.

  16.

  The Tower

  The tower’s built of spit and spite,

  Without a sound, without a sight.

  The biter bit, the bitter bite.

  (It’s better to be out at night.)

  17.

  The Star

  The older, richer, ones follow the winter, taking the long nights where they find them. Still, they prefer the Northern Hemisphere to the South.

  “You see that star?” they say, pointing to one of the stars in the constellation of Draco, the dragon. “We came from there. One day we shall return.”

  The younger ones sneer and jeer and laugh at this. Still, as the years become centuries, they find themselves becoming homesick for a place they have never been; and they find the northern climes reassuring, as long as Draco twines about the greater and lesser bears, up near chill Polaris.

  19.

  The Sun

  “Imagine,” she said, “that there was something in the sky that was going to hurt you, perhaps even kill you. A huge eagle or something. Imagine that if you went out in daylight the eagle would get you.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s how it is for us. Only it’s not a bird. It’s bright, beautiful, dangerous daylight, and I haven’t seen it now in a hundred years.”