Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

  There is nothing that they agree on, not even the temperature. My dad is always too hot, my mum always too cold. They turn the radiators on and off, open and close windows, whenever the other one goes out of the room. My sister and I get colds all year, and we think that’s probably why.

  They couldn’t even agree on what month we’d go on holiday. Dad said definitely August, Mum said unquestionably July. Which meant we wound up having to take our summer holiday in June, inconveniencing everybody.

  Then they couldn’t decide where to go. Dad was set on pony trekking in Iceland, while Mum was only willing to compromise as far as a camelback caravan across the Sahara, and both of them simply looked at us as if we were being a bit silly when we suggested that we’d quite like to sit on a beach in the South of France or somewhere. They stopped arguing long enough to tell us that that wasn’t going to happen, and neither was a trip to Disneyland, and then they went back to disagreeing with each other.

  They finished the Where Are We Going for Our Holidays in June Disagreement by slamming a lot of doors and shouting a lot of things like “Right then!” at each other through them.

  When the inconvenient holiday rolled around, my sister and I were only certain of one thing: we weren’t going anywhere. We took a huge pile of books out of the library, as many as we could between us, and prepared to listen to lots of arguing for the next ten days.

  Then the men came in vans and brought things into the house and started to install them.

  Mum had them put a sauna in the cellar. They poured masses of sand onto the floor. They hung a sunlamp from the ceiling. She put a towel on the sand beneath the sunlamp, and she’d lie down on it. She had pictures of sand dunes and camels taped to the cellar walls until they peeled off in the extreme heat.

  Dad had the men put the fridge—the biggest fridge he could find, so big you could walk into it—in the garage. It filled the garage so completely that he had to start parking the car in the driveway. He’d get up in the morning, dress warmly in a thick Icelandic wool sweater, he’d get a book and thermos-flask filled with hot cocoa, and some Marmite and cucumber sandwiches, and he’d head in there in the morning with a huge smile on his face, and not come out until dinner.

  I wonder if anybody else has a family as weird as mine. My parents never agree on anything at all.

  “Did you know Mum’s been putting her coat on and sneaking into the garage in the afternoons?” said my sister suddenly, while we were sitting in the garden, reading our library books.

  I didn’t, but I’d seen Dad wearing just his bathing trunks and dressing gown heading down into the cellar that morning to be with Mum, with a big, goofy smile on his face.

  I don’t understand parents. Honestly, I don’t think anybody ever does.

  July Tale

  The day that my wife walked out on me, saying she needed to be alone and to have some time to think things over, on the first of July, when the sun beat down on the lake in the center of the town, when the corn in the meadows that surrounded my house was knee-high, when the first few rockets and firecrackers were let off by over-enthusiastic children to startle us and to speckle the summer sky, I built an igloo out of books in my backyard.

  I used paperbacks to build it, scared of the weight of falling hardbacks or encyclopedias if I didn’t build it soundly.

  But it held. It was twelve feet high, and had a tunnel, through which I could crawl to enter, to keep out the bitter arctic winds.

  I took more books into the igloo I had made out of books, and I read in there. I marveled at how warm and comfortable I was inside. As I read the books, I would put them down, make a floor out of them, and then I got more books, and I sat on them, eliminating the last of the green July grass from my world.

  My friends came by the next day. They crawled on their hands and knees into my igloo. They told me I was acting crazy. I told them that the only thing that stood between me and the winter’s cold was my father’s collection of 1950s paperbacks, many of them with racy titles and lurid covers and disappointingly staid stories.

  My friends left.

  I sat in my igloo imagining the arctic night outside, wondering whether the Northern Lights would be filling the sky above me. I looked out, but saw only a night filled with pinprick stars.

  I slept in my igloo made of books. I was getting hungry. I made a hole in the floor, lowered a fishing line and waited until something bit. I pulled it up: a fish made of books—green-covered vintage Penguin detective stories. I ate it raw, fearing a fire in my igloo.

  When I went outside I observed that someone had covered the whole world with books: pale-covered books, all shades of white and blue and purple. I wandered the ice floes of books.

  I saw someone who looked like my wife out there on the ice. She was making a glacier of autobiographies.

  “I thought you left me,” I said to her. “I thought you left me alone.”

  She said nothing, and I realized she was only a shadow of a shadow.

  It was July, when the sun never sets in the Arctic, but I was getting tired, and I started back towards the igloo.

  I saw the shadows of the bears before I saw the bears themselves: huge they were, and pale, made of the pages of fierce books: poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear-shape, filled with words that could wound with their beauty. I could see the paper, and the words winding across them, and I was frightened that the bears could see me.

  I crept back to my igloo, avoiding the bears. I may have slept in the darkness. And then I crawled out, and I lay on my back on the ice and stared up at the unexpected colors of the shimmering Northern Lights, and listened to the cracks and snaps of the distant ice as an iceberg of fairy tales calved from a glacier of books on mythology.

  I do not know when I became aware that there was someone else lying on the ground near to me. I could hear her breathing.

  “They are very beautiful, aren’t they?” she said.

  “It is aurora borealis, the Northern Lights,” I told her.

  “It’s the town’s Fourth of July fireworks, baby,” said my wife.

  She held my hand and we watched the fireworks together.

  When the last of the fireworks had vanished in a cloud of golden stars, she said, “I came home.”

  I didn’t say anything. But I held her hand very tightly, and I left my igloo made of books, and I went with her back into the house we lived in, basking like a cat in the July heat.

  I heard distant thunder, and in the night, while we slept, it began to rain, tumbling my igloo of books, washing away the words from the world.

  August Tale

  The forest fires started early that August. All the storms that might have dampened the world went south of us, and they took their rain with them. Each day we would see the helicopters going over above us, with their cargoes of lake water ready to drop on the distant flames.

  Peter, who is Australian, and owns the house in which I live, cooking for him, and tending the place, said, “In Australia, the eucalypts use fire to survive. Some eucalyptus seeds won’t germinate unless a forest fire has gone through and cleared out all the undergrowth. They need the intense heat.”

  “Weird thought,” I said. “Something hatching out of the flames.”

  “Not really,” said Peter. “Very normal. Probably a lot more normal when the Earth was hotter.”

  “Hard to imagine a world any hotter than this.”

  He snorted. “This is nothing,” he said, and then talked about intense heat he had experienced in Australia when he was younger.

  The next morning the TV news said that people in our area were advised to evacuate their property: we were in a high-risk area for fire.

  “Load of old tosh,” said Peter, crossly. “It’ll never cause a problem for us. We’re on high ground, and we’ve got the creek all around us.”

  When the water was high, the creek could be four, even five feet deep. Now it was no more than a foot, or two at the most.

&
nbsp; By late afternoon, the smell of woodsmoke was heavy on the air, and the TV and the radio were both telling us to get out, now, if we could. We smiled at each other, and drank our beers, and congratulated each other on our understanding of a difficult situation, on not panicking, on not running away.

  “We’re complacent, humanity,” I said. “All of us. People. We see the leaves cooking on the trees on a hot August day, and we still don’t believe anything’s really going to change. Our empires will go on forever.”

  “Nothing lasts forever,” said Peter, and he poured himself another beer and told me about a friend of his back in Australia who had stopped a bushfire burning down the family farm by pouring beer on the little fires whenever they sprang up.

  The fire came down the valley towards us like the end of the world, and we realized how little protection the creek would be. The air itself was burning.

  We fled then, at last, pushing ourselves, coughing in the choking smoke, ran down the hill until we reached the creek, and we lay down in it, with only our heads above the water.

  From the inferno we saw them hatch from the flames, and rise, and fly. They reminded me of birds, pecking at the flaming ruins of the house on the hill. I saw one of them lift its head, and call out triumphantly. I could hear it over the crackling of the burning leaves, over the roar of the flames. I heard the call of the phoenix, and I understood that nothing lasts forever.

  A hundred birds of fire ascended into the skies as the creek water began to boil.

  September Tale

  My mother had a ring in the shape of a lion’s head. She used it to do small magics—find parking spaces, make the queue she was in at the supermarket move a bit faster, make the squabbling couple at the next table stop squabbling and fall in love again, that sort of thing. She left it to me when she died.

  The first time I lost it I was in a café. I think I had been fiddling with it nervously, pulling it off my finger, putting it on again. Only when I got home did I realize that I was no longer wearing it.

  I returned to the café, but there was no sign of it.

  Several days later, it was returned to me by a taxi driver, who had found it on the pavement outside the café. He told me my mother had appeared to him in a dream and given him my address and her recipe for old-fashioned cheesecake.

  The second time I lost the ring I was leaning over a bridge, idly tossing pinecones into the river below. I didn’t think it was loose, but the ring left my hand with a pinecone. I watched its arc as it fell. It landed in the wet dark mud at the edge of the river with a loud pollup noise, and was gone.

  A week later, I bought a salmon from a man I met in the pub: I collected it from a cooler in the back of his ancient green van. It was for a birthday dinner. When I cut the salmon open, my mother’s lion ring tumbled out.

  The third time I lost it, I was reading and sunbathing in the back garden. It was August. The ring was on the towel beside me, along with my dark glasses and some suntan lotion, when a large bird (I suspect it was a magpie or a jackdaw, but I may be wrong. It was definitely a corvid of some kind) flew down, and flapped away with my mother’s ring in its beak.

  The ring was returned the following night by a scarecrow, awkwardly animated. He gave me quite a start as he stood there, unmoving under the back door light, and then he lurched off into the darkness once again as soon as I had taken the ring from his straw-stuffed glove hand.

  “Some things aren’t meant to be kept,” I told myself.

  The next morning, I put the ring into the glove compartment of my old car. I drove the car to a wrecker, and I watched, satisfied, as the car was crushed into a cube of metal the size of an old television set, and then put in a container to be shipped to Romania, where it would be processed into useful things.

  In early September I cleared out my bank account. I moved to Brazil, where I took a job as a web designer under an assumed name.

  So far there’s been no sign of Mother’s ring. But sometimes I wake from a deep sleep with my heart pounding, soaked in sweat, wondering how she’s going to give it back to me next time.

  October Tale

  “That feels good,” I said, and I stretched my neck to get out the last of the cramp.

  It didn’t just feel good, it felt great, actually. I’d been squashed up inside that lamp for so long. You start to think that nobody’s ever going to rub it again.

  “You’re a genie,” said the young lady with the polishing cloth in her hand.

  “I am. You’re a smart girl, toots. What gave me away?”

  “The appearing in a puff of smoke,” she said. “And you look like a genie. You’ve got the turban and the pointy shoes.”

  I folded my arms and blinked. Now I was wearing blue jeans, gray sneakers, and a faded gray sweater: the male uniform of this time and this place. I raised a hand to my forehead, and I bowed deeply.

  “I am the genie of the lamp,” I told her. “Rejoice, O fortunate one. I have it in my power to grant you three wishes. And don’t try the ‘I wish for more wishes’ thing—I won’t play and you’ll lose a wish. Right. Go for it.”

  I folded my arms again.

  “No,” she said. “I mean thanks and all that, but it’s fine. I’m good.”

  “Honey,” I said. “Toots. Sweetie. Perhaps you misheard me. I’m a genie. And the three wishes? We’re talking anything you want. You ever dreamed of flying? I can give you wings. You want to be wealthy, richer than Croesus? You want power? Just say it. Three wishes. Whatever you want.”

  “Like I said,” she said, “thanks. I’m fine. Would you like something to drink? You must be parched after spending so much time in that lamp. Wine? Water? Tea?”

  “Uh . . .” Actually, now she came to mention it, I was thirsty. “Do you have any mint tea?”

  She made me some mint tea in a teapot that was almost a twin to the lamp in which I’d spent the greater part of the last thousand years.

  “Thank you for the tea.”

  “No problem.”

  “But I don’t get it. Everyone I’ve ever met, they start asking for things. A fancy house. A harem of gorgeous women—not that you’d want that, of course . . .”

  “I might,” she said. “You can’t just make assumptions about people. Oh, and don’t call me toots, or sweetie, or any of those things. My name’s Hazel.”

  “Ah!” I understood. “You want a beautiful woman then? My apologies. You have but to wish.” I folded my arms.

  “No,” she said. “I’m good. No wishes. How’s the tea?”

  I told her that the mint tea was the finest I had ever tasted.

  She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people’s wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious.

  She asked me if I liked hummus, and when I said that I did, she toasted a pita bread, and sliced it up, for me to dip into the hummus.

  I dipped my bread slices into the hummus, and ate it with delight. The hummus gave me an idea.

  “Just make a wish,” I said, helpfully, “and I could have a meal fit for a sultan brought in to you. Each dish would be finer than the one before, and all served upon golden plates. And you could keep the plates afterwards.”

  “It’s good,” she said, with a smile. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  We walked together through the town. It felt good to stretch my legs after so many years in the lamp. We wound up in a public park, sitting on a bench by a lake. It was warm, but gusty, and the autumn leaves fell in flurries each time the wind blew.

  I told Hazel about my youth as a djinn, of how we used to eavesdrop on the angels and how they would throw comets at us if they spied us listening. I told her of the bad days of the djinn-wars, and how King Suleiman had imprisoned us inside hollow objects: bottles, lamps, clay pots, that kind of thing.

  She told me of her parents, wh
o were both killed in the same plane crash, and who had left her the house. She told me of her job, illustrating children’s books, a job she had backed into, accidentally, at the point she realized she would never be a really competent medical illustrator, and of how happy she became whenever she was sent a new book to illustrate. She told me she taught life drawing to adults at the local community college one evening a week.

  I saw no obvious flaw in her life, no hole that she could fill by wishing, save one.

  “Your life is good,” I told her. “But you have no one to share it with. Wish, and I will bring you the perfect man. Or woman. A film star. A rich . . . person . . .”

  “No need. I’m good,” she said.

  We walked back to her house, past houses dressed for Hallowe’en.

  “This is not right,” I told her. “People always want things.”

  “Not me. I’ve got everything I need.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  She thought for a moment. Then she pointed at her front yard. “Can you rake the leaves?”

  “Is that your wish?”

  “Nope. Just something you could do while I’m getting our dinner ready.”

  I raked the leaves into a heap by the hedge, to stop the wind from blowing it apart. After dinner, I washed up the dishes. I spent the night in Hazel’s spare bedroom.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want help. She let me help. I ran errands for her, picked up art supplies and groceries. On days she had been painting for a long time, she let me rub her neck and shoulders. I have good, firm hands.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving I moved out of the spare bedroom, across the hall, into the main bedroom, and Hazel’s bed.

  I watched her face this morning as she slept. I stared at the shapes her lips make when she sleeps. The creeping sunlight touched her face, and she opened her eyes and stared at me, and she smiled.