Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  Crys saluted, trying to keep the shock from his face. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re not going to let me down, are you, Tailorson?” Tariq asked. “Because you know that if there’s one more brawl, one more incident of insubordination, one more accusation of cheating at cards, you will be flogged, demoted to private and put on permanent shit-pit and night duties for the rest of your time here. And, if I have anything to do with it, with any Rank you are rotated into in the future.”

  Crys swallowed, sweating harder. “No, sir. I won’t let you down, sir,” he managed.

  “Because it’s truly surprising just how much one line on a man’s record can follow him around for the rest of his career,” Tariq added, and while the threat was a little heavy-handed, it certainly made an impression.

  “I understand, sir. Consider me a reformed character, sir. A model officer.”

  Tariq snorted. “I doubt you’ll ever be that, but feel free to prove me wrong. Dismissed.”

  Crys saluted again and marched to the door, left Tariq’s office and stalked through the anteroom, past the smug smile of Bedras and out of the administration building into the drill ground. There he sucked in beautiful, clean northern air and thanked the Dancer and the Fox God both for his reprieve.

  He needed a bath and a hot meal and a long, long sleep, so he headed out of Fort One and across the grass to Fort Three in the distance, unencumbered by Bedras’s moaning for the first time in what felt like forever.

  He reached his barracks and stepped inside quietly. It was empty but for the cadre of night-watch sentries sleeping sprawled on their cots, and he slid past them to the curtained alcove at the far end.

  Crys ducked through the curtain and collected his filthy uniform and personal possessions, stuffed them into a sack. He flung it over his shoulder, picked up his weapons and armour, and made his way to the small building flanking the main barracks.

  The captains’ quarters were warm, quiet and familiar, four men to a room. It was empty, so Crys chose the unoccupied bed farthest from the window—it had been his before his disgrace, and he was pleased no one had moved into it in his absence.

  Tariq had only allowed them an hour between arriving back at the forts and making their reports, and Crys had spent the entirety of the three days previous acting as Bedras’s personal manservant, scout, defender, and crutch. He was knackered, he ached, he was footsore and probably in need of a few stitches, but he was home and back in his proper rank.

  He collapsed onto the cot and heaved out a contented sigh. Captain Crys Tailorson of His Majesty’s Ranks. Next time he had permission to take some leave, he’d head for Sailtown. Pretty girls liked a dashing captain who’d recently seen action against the Dead Legion, even if they were only blood-hunters. Not that he’d tell them they were only blood-hunters.

  The slamming of the door woke him and Crys bolted upright, blinking away the tendrils of dreams and standing at attention with automatic, unconscious precision. Bedras stamped into the room.

  Oh gods. He knows I told Tariq what really happened. Is he petty enough to . . . of course he is. He’s Bedras.

  Crys’s eyes strayed to his weapons and then back to the door, waiting for Bedras’s cronies to sidle in with clubs and brass knuckles and oily little smiles. Bedras was alone. He shoved past Crys and threw his gear down on the last unoccupied bed.

  And that’s when Crys noticed it: the man’s new rank, hastily pinned to his sleeve and over his heart.

  Crys sank down on his cot and put his head in his hands, letting Bedras clatter around the room and knock things over with his crutch. He waited for silence before looking up, and it was a long time coming. Bedras was sitting straight as a spear on the bed opposite, glaring, his expression overflowing with loathing and his martial bearing only somewhat undone by the splinted leg sticking out like an unfortunate and uncontrollable erection.

  “Hello, Captain Bedras.” Crys grinned, but there was absolutely no humour in it. “Brothers in arms, I see. Won’t this be fun? Tell me, how long do you have until you’re rotated to another Rank?”

  PETER ORULLIAN

  IT MIGHT BE FAIR TO SAY THAT I WOULDN’T BE WRITING IF IT WEREN’T for Stephen King. And I’m hardly the first writer to say as much. But his first two short story collections were like talismans to me. Still are. And either because they were so influential, or because my mind isn’t so different from King’s—as scary a thought as that may be—I get story ideas that seem to fall in line with both Night Shift and Skeleton Crew.

  So when one day I had a vision of a piece of college-ruled paper coming to life and berating me for not getting the writing done that I needed to be doing, I went with it. And I also let the little guy’s voice be what it was—dismissive and berating. I found him funny as hell.

  The other thing about the story—the deeper part, if you will—is a truth that writers usually find when they’re willing to write about hard things, personal things. And that’s simply this: a writer pays dues. It sounds a little silly when you say it out loud, but certain things hurt to write about. In this story, I’ve given that hurt a physicality. And make no mistake, paper cuts make me wince. But they’re also a metaphor for being willing to expose the raw stuff that usually make stories worthwhile.

  Peter Orullian

  The Paper Man

  Peter Orullian

  “I’ll tell you about writing, you fuck,” the paper man said. “Just do it, that’s all, just do it.”

  Stephen Kreig looked up through sleep-filled eyes with disbelief and wonder. What the hell? The paper man wasn’t a reporter, as in the Daily Herald, or an adult version of that vanishing profession paperboy, usually reserved for kids of eight to ten whose parents believe it’s never too young to learn work ethic. He was, in fact, a man made of paper, just like sounding it out.

  The paper man stood about eleven inches high, and looked to be about three inches wide. He appeared to be fashioned of a standard sheet of college-ruled rolled into a tube. The lower half was cut up from the bottom to form half-cylindrical legs. And somehow part of the paper had pulled out to create short arms with no hands. All of these flared slightly at the ends, giving the paper man a somewhat sixties look. And except for one of the ring-binder holes, which gave the paper man one pupil-less eye, there was no definite head.

  “What?” Steve finally croaked, still half asleep.

  “Writing, you fuck, writing.” There was impatience in the voice. Of course, there was no mouth to speak the reproach, but Steve heard it just the same.

  Some dream, Steve thought, but made no attempt to dismiss it.

  “What about writing?” Steve asked, his interest waking slower than the rest of him.

  “You’re lazy. Just flat out lazy. You pen that horseshit for your professors at the university, and you think ‘Oh, I’m doing something. I’ll serious up later.’ But you’re just a fuck, a lazy fuck. And it’s my turn to tell you.”

  “Who are you?” Steve asked, looking at the blank, featureless face. He wasn’t hearing the slander; he was hearing the minute, humorous crinkle each time the paper man bowed and turned, emphasizing “you fuck.”

  “Never mind that. Are you hearing me okay?” the paper man spoke with a hint of sarcasm. “’Cause I can speak up if you got wax in those mindless ears of yours.”

  “No, I heard you fine. But if I’m going to converse with a . . . a paper man, I’d like to know his name.”

  Steve started to smile. He liked this fancy. The paper man stood atop his computer, an old shop-built desktop, which meant cheap parts, maybe used. It also meant he’d lost lots of documents right out into low-cost-nowhere. Behind the paper man, right above Steve’s work area, was a poster of Albert Einstein that read: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” A pithy saying to comfort those who detour past college to start life. And that’s the broad and short of it, Steve thought: life or college, mutually exclusive terms by every stretch of the imagination, and Steve wishe
d he’d had the courage to detour past college. But right now the paper man was really a hilarious-looking dream creature. Imagination! Steve sat up and smiled broader.

  “You want to wipe that silly-ass grin off your face, you fuck. I didn’t come so you could exercise your jaw, either. You want to listen here for a minute and try to believe I’m not gibbering for my own sake.” The paper man took a step forward, curling one handless arm back toward his tubular body. Steve wanted to laugh but kept it in. He very much wanted to hear this little guy speak. It’s not often dreams come with such clarity, and humor.

  “Okay,” Steve said choking off his smile a little.

  “Okay, my ass, you still think this is a joke, but okay, just so you listen. I don’t care for you to believe anything but what I say.” The papery voice laid importance on say. Then he stepped back, and pulled his paper arms behind him like an orator. If he’d had a throat, here’s where he would have cleared it, Steve thought. The paper man turned to the side, obscuring Steve’s view of the one lid-less eye, and began to pace.

  “I’ll start with the compliments,” he said. “You’re not bad. Or, at least, you could be so you weren’t too bad. But you spend all your time with that pair of tits, or swilling beer at eight dollars a case. And maybe worst of all, you scribble something in the way of analysis for some esoteric, impotent professor and call it paid. Didn’t it ever strike you that the root of that word is profess—not exactly an argument for truth. Well, it’s fixed easy enough, just start writing. You owe the paper.”

  The paper man pivoted on one half-cylinder leg and started pacing the other direction. “Writing dues come all sorts of ways, and one falls for us. The muse takes her cut right off the top, and then the writer goes to giving it everywhere else. And what he usually means to say is, ‘It’s me. I did it. I busted my balls and I made it.’ But don’t you believe it. There’s dues all up and down a story, and it starts right here.” The paper man unfolded an arm from behind his back and beat it on his thin, hollow chest. The paper crinkled in and out, and Steve wanted to burst.

  “But all that’s after the writing starts, and usually when it’s done. You,” the paper man pointed his arm at Steve, “ain’t even put a serious mind to it yet.” He paused. “So start.”

  The paper man turned his cyclopic eye to Steve and all of a sudden it seemed baleful and direct. The paper man may be funny to look at, Steve thought, but he meant what he said, funny- looking or not. Steve could feel his own subconscious goading him. He had been resting on his laurels. Or maybe planting them was closer. The paper man was, if nothing else, right about the lazy stuff. Still, if Steve could have thought of a good rebuttal he would have argued back serious enough. Argued that he was too busy with school and couldn’t effectively manage both grades and fiction. But the paper man had hit a nerve, like drilling into the crook of a tooth without Novocain. So he sat there seeing the paper man superimposed over Einstein’s nose. Sat there as speechless as he was authorless.

  The paper man observed Steve with his single eye and finally said, “Just do it, dammit. No fanfare, no money. You owe the paper . . . you owe me.”

  Steve felt that writer’s prick then, and thought that the one real due was the one he owed to that internal pricking. Once it started, it had to be relieved, or else . . . no, no or else, it had to be relieved. And Steve thought the paper man could see him thinking.

  “Good,” the paper man said good-naturedly, seeing it indeed. “I think you got hope, my boy. I really do. Maybe not Shakespeare hope, or Faulkner hope, but son-of-a-bitch if you won’t make a dent. One great big dilly of a dent, you bet.” He clapped his hands together, making a small, flat paper smack, and Steve wanted to see a smile there, on that paper face, but did not.

  But Steve’s own optimism began waning even then. It was the same old situation. I want to write. I need to write. But what do I write? And with that, he began to drift. He wanted to force ideas, something he knew didn’t work, but something he did nonetheless, like many writers he supposed, or at least wanted to believe. Soon all his thoughts were a jumbled gook of garbage, which was plenty good enough to turn him to sleep.

  And by morning the paper man was gone, and so was Steve’s pricking.

  “I had the best dream last night,” Steve was telling his dad at the breakfast table. It was just Dad, because Mom had found aerobics a year before, and a guy named George just two months ago. But breakfast didn’t suffer; Dad had always been the cook.

  “What was that?” Ronald Kreig asked, shoveling in a bite of toast behind some egg.

  “I dreamt a little man made of notebook paper.” Steve smiled and lifted his orange juice.

  “Yeah, what’d he do?” Ron followed, as amused secondhand as Steve had been right off.

  “It’s not what he did. It’s what he said.” Steve chortled. “He told me I’m a lazy ass and ought to be writing. He said I owe the paper, that I owe him.”

  Ron didn’t return his son’s laugh. It was a sentiment, at least the first part about his son’s laziness, that Ron shared. But the man also knew it was risky to step so close to this particular subject with Steve. So he faked a smile and finally asked, “Well, what did you say?”

  Steve tried to ignore his father’s hesitation. The truth was, his dad had a genuine interest in his writing career, if so auspicious a title could be given to his half dozen unpublished short stories. It was probably because his dad had once entertained the same thoughts of marking up good paper to earn his way through life. Had, in fact, written the better part of a novel, but called it quits when Steve was born, because writing time gets used one way or the other. And, in moments of honesty, his dad had told him that his unfinished novel hadn’t been very good anyway. He just didn’t have the chops.

  But Ronald Kreig could, if nothing else, tell when writing was good, whether that writing belonged to the “canon” of English literature, or was sold at the checkout with a good word from the Book of the Month Club. “Good writing,” his dad was fond of saying, “doesn’t know the reader. It just does its job.” And his dad thought Steve was good, which is why he believed his son would do more than publish. He believed he could join the forerunners in modern popular fiction—as dirty a word as that is to the “canon.”

  Steve’s face fell a little, “I didn’t say anything. I fell asleep.” Steve thought a moment and added, “How’s that for life imitating art.”

  His dad smiled and Steve rejoined him. But Steve still had no plans to do any writing on his own. Just whatever appeased the University God.

  As Steve drove up “the Hill” on his way to what the University Parking Services jokingly referred to as parking, he had a really good idea for a story. It would involve a slavering beast that lived in abandoned bootleg tunnels that network underneath the streets of downtown Happyville. There would be a flower delivery guy who made trips into a flower shop basement to deposit money in a safe. He’d discover bricked-up archways, fresh dirt, and bodies. Then the story would end with him in a mental institution writing it all out, so you had to wonder if he killed the people or if the monster existed. Not bad, anyway. Everything is what you make of it. Even Shakespeare stole most of his stuff, but who remembers from whom.

  Steve’s idea didn’t make it out of the car. It certainly didn’t make it as far as his first class, Shakespeare 541. And it absolutely never made it into the office of his Shakespeare professor for his personal conference regarding his last paper, entitled “Let’s All Wear Coxcombs.”

  “I think you make some valid points, Steve,” his prof was oozing, “but I’m not sure what you say can always be derived from the text.”

  Steve let the smile that started in his brain filter into his lips. It would not be interpreted as disagreement with Professor Ooze, but rather as a wimpish blush at his paper’s digression. What the smile really meant was, Holy hell, you think I’ve gone out of the text? The man who tells us every couplet is taut with double entendre, wit, allusion, philosophy . . . ad i
nfinitum. Steve hadn’t thought it possible that he could get outside the text. Not with Shakespeare, or more accurately, with Professor Brentley, formerly of Oxford University.

  “Well, I guess you’re right,” Steve said, thinking, Bullshit, you’re wrong.

  “I’m not saying the whole paper needs to be redone, but the logic turns tangent too often. I’d like to see you work a revision of it.” Professor Brentley scrubbed one forearm while smiling the okay-interview-over smile. It was all happy-crappy. That’s all. And Steve supposed he could do a revision in his sleep. When you know your audience, just write to their prejudices.

  “I’ll do it,” Steve said, standing. “I appreciate your time, Professor Brentley.”

  “Yeah,” he said and began packing some Benson & Hedges as Steve closed the stipple-lettered door behind him. He dropped the paper into the trash can in the outer part of the English department office, pondering inscrutably on the shallow ka-thud the paper made on the tin bottom. Belongs in the old circular file anyway, Steve resolved. Besides, he had it on file at home. Just a touch away on his crappy computer. Then, with unwelcome abruptness the paper man flashed into his mind, right on the nose of Einstein.

  You owe the paper.

  Steve picked “Let’s All Wear Coxcombs” out of the garbage and walked absently toward the parking lot.

  They had cola in the fridge at home. Always Coke, and always bottles. Steve snatched one of these on his way to his room. Coke had a mellowing effect on him. No Pepsi Generation. Just cold carbonation from an upended bottle. Not that he was overwrought, he observed. Not yet, anyway. But somehow he always needed a Coke after a personal conference at the university.

  His room lay bathed in mid-afternoon sun. Uneventful sun. So much the better. Steve dropped his backpack heedlessly onto a clutter of wash-clothes. Since Mom had left he’d been doing, or rather not doing, his own laundry. In one hand he swayed his Coke, with the other he picked “Let’s All Wear Coxcombs” out of his pack. He looked at it and hated what it represented—so much tired rhetoric; pedantic might be the word he was searching for. But the deeper truth was that it wasn’t writing. Not his writing, anyway. It was regurgitation about some other guy’s work, a guy dead since 1616. It was . . . hell, it meant he wasn’t writing his stories. Somehow it was a tattletale. Steve’s eyes lifted to see a sheet of college-ruled paper, flat this time, lying on top of his computer keyboard.