Now I'm forty-seven. I barely nabbed Tom in time—I was not at the height of my prettiness, but not too far past it. Now my hair is graying, and all the dyes look artificial and make my face pasty. My knuckles look like turtle leather. I'm developing jowls, to match my puffing belly.
Tom was the only man who ever loved me. He was one in a million, one in six billion.
I don't want to die alone, but who would want me now?
* * * *
I checked frequently on the remaining kittens the rest of Sunday, telling myself I was worried because one had died, not because of a ghost dog's potential interference. I cringed every time I walked past the fridge. Once, I made myself open the freezer door and look at that folded paper bag tucked into the corner.
Each time I put Boston's toys back into the cardboard box and closed the flaps, I later found the toys scattered again, the box opened.
I knew I should be scared, but I was too worn down. And I'd missed him, my little Sheltie dog. Even if I was crazy, even if I was fooling myself, it was a nice delusion.
Monday I called in sick. They're used to that from me by now. That afternoon, I brought the paper bag with its frozen corpse back to the Humane Society. They told me don't feel bad, it wasn't my fault, you just never know with newborn kittens brought in without their mom. A kitten's first forty-eight hours are the most crucial, because mama cat gives her babies immune-system builders through her colostrum.
Of course, I still felt like shit about it. Responsible. They came in alive, they should leave alive. Anything less meant I wasn't doing my job. And frankly, I felt responsible for enough deaths already, thank you very much.
By Tuesday evening, the dead kitten's lookalike—with the dark gray head and light gray hindquarters—was looking sluggish, not making an effort to stay in the warm kitten-pile. (Boston? I thought. But what could he be doing?)
I put the sluggish kitten in the middle of the pile and tried to beat down the panic inside me. Maybe he was just sleepy.
A few hours later, he was lying apart from the rest of the litter. Not moving. Not breathing.
The score was now Mama, 3; Freezer, 2.
* * * *
“Boston.” I said it aloud. The name echoed in the kitchen. “Boston, you have to stop. You can't kill any more kittens. If you do, I—I'll find a way to exorcise you. I'll get rid of your toys, your collar, your ashes. Don't make me do that."
If he didn't understand English in life, why the hell would he in death? But dogs understand tones. I made mine stern.
“Boston, you were a good dog. Are a good dog. But you stay out of that room, you...."
My voice died. Beside the kitchen table lay a purple lump.
An argyle sock, stuffed with another, tied with string. Our homemade cat toy. I heard the faintest thrum of a purr.
I whispered, “Ruffles?"
* * * *
There's a dead kitten in my freezer.
It's not the first. It may not be the last.
* * * *
What the hell was going on? Thinking back, I was pretty sure I had seen no evidence of Boston until after the first kitten died.
Maybe he hadn't killed it. Maybe the kittens were dying of natural causes. Maybe their deaths were somehow waking the spirits of those who had already died in this house. But why—because they were so new, so fresh, so close to both birth and death?
Boston died first, and came back first.
Come to think of it, I hadn't found Boston's toys around today. I checked the closet—his box was closed. Untouched.
I'd lost him again.
I was furious at the tears that erupted from me. Sobbing, I slid down the wall till I was lying on the floor on my side, wailing like a maniac.
Warmth settled by my head. Fur, and purring. I closed my eyes and pretended it was real, let the avalanche of guilt and grief rip through me.
“Forgive me,” I whispered. It took three tries to get it out. “Ruffles, I'm so sorry. I swear I didn't see you, I didn't know you were in the driveway!"
The soft warm rumble lulled me through my tears, and out the other side.
* * * *
Wednesday morning, I put away the argyle sock toy for the umpteenth time since Tuesday evening and brought that second rubber-banded paper bag back to the Humane Society. When I got home, I expected to find the argyle sock in the doorway again. It wasn't there, nor in the hall, nor on the stairs, nor in the kitchen. I checked; it was in Ruffles's box in the closet, where I'd put it. Boston's box was still closed, too. I opened it and found his toys right where I'd put them.
The tar pit at the bottom of my mind roiled. Grew.
I'd run out of tissues days ago. Was working steadily through rolls of toilet paper now, as if there could be enough Charmin in the whole world to blot my never ending supply of tears and snot.
(Tom honey, I have never missed you so much as I do right now. The way I'd bitch and you'd just smile and say, “Oh, sweetie,” the warm pressure of your thigh behind mine at night. Sometimes—oh, Tom, I'm so embarrassed—sometimes when it gets really bad, I put the heating pad on low and wrap it around a couch cushion, then snuggle my legs back against it under the covers, so I can pretend it's you back there. It lulls me to sleep, when nothing else will.)
Just breathe, I told myself. You can do this. Just breathe, and let the tears come. Watch TV, cruise the Internet, try to focus enough to read. You used to like that, reading. You have to keep going. You have to.
If nothing else, you have a responsibility to those kittens. And to sweet Mama Sky.
* * * *
I never wanted kids. Talk about responsibility. But now that Tom is gone, I wonder if getting through each minute of each day might be easier if I just had something alive, something that laughed, to remember him by.
I maintain well enough, I suppose. I go to work most days. I process words in this dull legal-code-publishing office. The pay is shit, but they don't expect me to be perky and I can wear sweatpants and it doesn't matter if I haven't showered.
Frankly, I would have lost any other job by now.
* * * *
The next morning, I couldn't rouse myself to call in sick. But I made myself check on Mama Sky and company.
The last adoptive kitten seemed to be doing well. I called him Cuckoo Kitten because he was growing up in another mama's nest. He was nursing, loudly opinionated, active. His light gray coat looked fluffy, healthy. He'd be a lovely cat if he grew up.
When. When he grew up. He was a tough little thing, the last survivor of his litter. At only a week old.
I thought of Tom's dear face, the way his hand cupped my cheek. His tender smile.
I left Mama Sky and the nest box outside the crate during the day. She seemed much happier, and a happy mama is an attentive mama. Mama Sky's own two kittens were doing great, one big and black and precocious, one small and stripy and loud.
But I liked Cuckoo Kitten better. He'd had to struggle so hard to stay alive, and I loved his velvety coat and his white-marked face. So precious, so vulnerable. Such determination, all of them, squabbling over favorite nipples, voicing their objections to Mama Sky's least little shift. At a week old, they were completely dependent on her for everything. They would die within hours without her warmth, her milk.
* * * *
I can't.
That first tiny death brought Boston back. The second, Ruffles.
Tom had died right in this house, right in our bed.
They would never question it at the Humane Society. The last of a weak litter. Mama Sky still had her own two fine, healthy babies, proving that it wasn't my fault.
It's just a kitten. He's probably going to die anyway; there's obviously something wrong with that whole litter. He'll fade slowly, get sleepy and still, pass gently from life into death. Really, I'd be doing him a favor, putting an end to his suffering.
No. I can't. I have a responsibility. I gave my word.
Lying in bed, I closed my perpetuall
y leaking eyes and felt the tar pit bubbling, spreading, reaching for me. Once it got hold of me, I'd never get back out again. And I was slipping.
No. I never knew exactly why Tom had loved me, but maybe it had to do with my integrity. How could I abandon the one thing he could respect about me?
I got up, found a cushion and the heating pad, and crawled back into bed.
* * * *
Seven in the morning. Faint cold light crept in through the windows. The night had crawled by my sleepless, swollen eyes, an inch at a time.
Shivering, I shrugged into my bathrobe. The house felt so still, so quiet. Eerie enough before Boston and Ruffles put in their appearances, now impossibly unnerving.
I turned lights on ahead of me as I slumped down the stairs. Put my hand to the doorknob, hesitated. Steeled myself for what I might find.
Mama Sky blinked up at me when I turned on the lights and opened the crate. She stepped out of the nest box.
Yawning, I refilled her food and water, stroked her soft head. Looked down at Cuckoo Kitten, nestled beside his two adoptive siblings.
I'll just look at him, I thought, scooping him up.
He wriggled and mewed, his tiny heart beating fast against my hands.
I shooed Mama Sky back into the crate and locked it.
Cuckoo Kitten cried plaintively when I set him down on the carpet. Mama Sky stared at me with her solemn blue eyes. I turned and left, closing the door behind me.
When you're drowning, even integrity becomes dispensable.
I climbed back into bed, my feet chilled so badly I couldn't stop shaking. Lay on my side.
Waited to feel Tom's warm thigh press against mine.
Copyright © 2006 Melissa Lee Shaw
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* * *
SCIENCE FICTION SUDOKU
This SF Sudoku puzzle, the subject of which was suggested by sudoku contest runner-up Rebecca Mayr, is solved using the letters AERIKNRST. Place a letter into each box so that each row across, each column down, and each small nine-box square within the larger diagram (there are nine of these) will contain each of these letters. No letter will appear more than once in any row, column, or smaller nine-box square. The solution is determined through logic and the process of elimination. Beneath the puzzle is a set of twenty blanks. Rearrange the following letters for a famous SF title: A, E, E, F, I, K, N, N, N, R, S, and T. The answers for teh Sudoku puzlle and the anagram can be found after the SF Conventional Calendar. The solution each puzzle in independent of the other. We've inverted the answer to the anagram so you don't come upon it by accident.
* * * *
* * * *
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* * *
DOWN EARTH BELOW
by William Barton
Over the past thirty-five years, William Barton has written numerous SF works, including the award-winning novel Acts of Conscience (Warner Aspect, 1997) and several stories for Asimov's SF, most recently, “Harvest Moon” (September 2005). Regarding “Down to the Earth Below,” he says, “When you're young, especially when you're young and spend all your free time reading SF and fantasy, the world around you is jam-packed with inviting mysteries that send a delicious little thrill up your spine. This story's big dark hole in the ground was quite real, once upon a time, and I always wondered what was down there. In my world, the hole was filled to the brim with water, and I never found out. But in some remote corner of the Multiverse, it was dry, and the version of me that was there walked right on in...."
I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem....
No, wait. Let me start over.
I know a place where a man can be happy, and all the more so, the boy who was father to that man. Oh, I know. I know. Still, that bit about the friendly, hospitable people, and the beautiful women who are amazingly anxious to please?
I guess they feed us that guff so we'll get up and go to school every day, then, later on, toddle off to some pointless little over-and-over again job, until the time comes when we face the man with the shovel and don't quite realize we never had a roly-poly little batface girl at all, much less a beautiful one who was amazingly anxious to please.
So: No Rufo. No Irish Sweepstakes. No mysterious ads read as I was whiling away my time on the French Riviera. And I'm not old enough to go be a military adviser somewhere on the other side of the world.
No, I just awoke, slow-eyed as usual, slanting yellow sunbeams pouring in through the smudgy glass of my bedroom window, warm, damp wind blowing in through the cranked open casement. They said it was an unusually cool month, August 1964, but you could've fooled me. Something to do with Hurricane Cleo building up in the Atlantic, I guess. Warm and damp, rather than the usual blazing inferno.
I sat on the edge of my bed, feet on the bit of oak floor exposed beside the ratty blue carpet my parents let me have, sat there in sweaty white jockey shorts, sat there smelling myself, wishing the floor was cold, the way it would be come winter. By which time I'll be shivering, wishing it was summery warm.
It's funny how around the time I started to grow hair in places besides the top of my head, I started to stink. I didn't used to need more than a couple of showers a week. Sunday night, maybe Wednesday too. Now ... Hell. It's summer vacation. Anyone doesn't like the way I smell can stick it up their butt.
I pulled off the jockey shorts and kicked them in a corner, found my hand-me-down yellow chenille bedspread, the one my parents had had on their bed before they bought all new, where I'd kicked it on the floor some time during the night, used it to dry myself off. Clean underpants. Ummm ... blue gym shorts from school, already too tight for me to use again in the ninth grade—Christ, only a month away! Clean T-shirt, the white one where I'd drawn a copy of the Royal Seal of Aceta in red and black magic marker, something like a cross between a hawk and a dragon's head in a circle. White crew socks with a red stripe around the top. Dark red US Keds.
I pulled my fingers through sweaty hair, making it stick to my scalp, a summer pretense of combing, then rummaged in my closet and got the hard hats Dad'd given me, the ones with the brass carbide miner's lamps mounted on the front. There was one for me, and a spare for Micky. I stuck an old brass magnifying glass and Granpa's old pocket watch in my pockets, and walked out through the quiet, empty house, my little sisters gone to spend a few days with Dad, Mom's door still shut, nothing but silence inside, the whisper of the wind in the windows, distant birdsong, the very far away sound of cars on Route One.
It was sunny outside as I walked down the long hill of Staggs Court, toward Carter Lane and the creek, the sky a deeper, fuller shade of blue than you expect around here in August. More clouds, too. “An unusually cool month.” Down the hill, across the empty blacktop, not a car in sight, all the men long gone to work, quick through the Davidsons’ yard, though no one was home, down a grassy slope, plunging into the cool, woodsy shadows around Marumsco Creek.
I stopped at the bottom of the hill, and stood looking at the water, looking down into its dark shadows, at the pebbled, sandy bottom, wondering for the zillionth time why it was here. Good thing it is. This is where I played. Played as a kid, as a not-quite-kid now, summer and winter, spring and fall, played Barsoom with this as the river Iss, played Amtor for a while, imagining targos in the forest, voo klangan in the sky. Then that imaginary Jupiter Micky and I invented one winter with nothing better to do, Onol the mine inspector, Desta the artist-engineer, making me snicker at our lack of inventiveness, my father a geologist at the Bureau of Mines, his a draftsman for the Smithsonian.
Still, it was something, to imagine myself Onol of Aceta, to imagine myself a grown man with a job to do, not in a business suit in the rusty dusty America of 1964, but a man with a sword and diadem, inspecting the fabulous mines of Aceta, the City on the Mountain, on a vast, faraway world you could see most nights as a brilliant diamond gleam in the sky, Onol of Jupiter.
On Jupiter, I thought, suddenly silly, they w
ouldn't like “Hard Day's Night,” wouldn't care that the silly-ass Beatles had come to America. Maybe they'd like the Animals instead, would like “House of the Rising Sun,” or maybe even Bob Dylan and...
I started walking up the creek to the rendezvous point, rolling my eyes in self-exasperation, picturing a movie drama, with Burt Lancaster instead of me as Onol, Bob Dylan twanging away at his version of movie theme music. Jesus.
Anyway, I know a place where there's no Gulf of Tonkin, no “incidents,” no President Johnson looking more like a beagle than ever as he gave some idiotic speech, no damnfool “resolution” as Dad called it. No three civil rights workers turning up dead, no boozy parish priest trying to explain Ecclesiam Suam from the new damn pope. No damn civil war in Cyprus, much less any truce. No damn New York World's Fair, no endless poont-poont-poont of Ringo's damn drumming on every cool FM radio station I could pick up....
Deep breath.
Damn. And I can't even remember what happened last week!
* * * *
By the time I got to where the creek was spanned by a fallen gray tree trunk, not far from the big old ant stump, Micky, Johnny, and Kenny were already there, Johnny's deep-as-a-grownup voice booming, “Alan! You're late!"
Johnny was a big Irish redhead, five-nine already, three inches taller than me, blue-eyed and freckle-faced, maybe a little dumber than the rest of us, though still smarter than most kids at Garfield Jr. High, which isn't saying much, I guess. Micky, just as big as Johnny, but fat and Italian, dusty-looking black hair in a buzz cut that'd grown to an inch-long mess over the summer, had already made himself a sword from one of the hardwood reeds that grew along the creek, was waving it around in a big figure-eight, “just like Tars Tarkas,” thin wood making deep whoop-whoop sounds at the outside of each arc.
“Come on, let's go, Onol!” he shouted, wobbling on his feet like one of those punching-bag clown toys. He was always like that, clumsy looking, but Micky had better coordination than I did, was the only one of us who had played Little League baseball, and was proud of his reputation as a “power hitter."
Asimov's SF, October-November 2006 Page 27