That, of course, was the whole idea.
Torturing and resurrecting me wasn't enough for Gunza. I took the promotion that should have been his, and then I tried to tax his lordly treasures; he won't be happy until I've been corrupted and ruined and debased inside as well as out.
Just as he's corrupted and ruined his Magda.
"Now this is the life!" Gunza guzzles wine from a goblet and gropes the nearly naked slave girl in his lap. "That is entertainment!" He points his goblet at me, and the crowd howls with delight.
Gazing at the poor dead woman in the sand, I wonder if I can get through this. I wonder how much more I will have to endure to save Magda.
Looking up, I see her standing in the box with him, head bowed low. She won't look at me. Won't look at what she's done at his behest.
That has to change.
"Magda!" I call to her, and her head lifts. Her eyes meet mine. "Tell me what you want! Ask me for it!"
She twitches, then lowers her head again.
"Oh ho ho!" Gunza howls with laughter. "So you think you can give her something I can't?"
I'm treading on dangerous ground, and I know it. All he has to do is wish me silenced or dead or demented, and the game is over.
I continue to speak only to Magda. "Please! Ask for what you want!" I take a deep breath, ready to step off the precipice. Once I say the next thing, there'll be no taking it back. "For the sake of your unborn child, ask me!"
Suddenly, a hush falls over the coliseum. Even Gunza is silent.
Magda meets my gaze, and her eyes at first are full of rage. Then, the rage melts into despair.
And I know I was right. When she touched her belly while the angels tended me, she was thinking of an angel inside. A new child, growing within her.
His child. Gunza's child.
So now I've done it. Everything balances on the head of a pin, and a single wish could bring it all crashing down.
That's all it will take. One wish from Gunza to force Magda to do away with their unborn child. Add it to the angelic host, existing only in memory, comforting her in her deepest, darkest night.
Nothing now to do but push every button on the board and pray the engine catches before we crash.
"You know what he'll do next, Magda!" I march across the sand to stand beneath her. "There's only one way to stop him! Ask me for it!"
Tears pour from her eyes and run under her veil. Her shoulders pump as she breathes faster, heart racing in terror.
Just then, Gunza does the unexpected. Instead of the child-killing wish I thought he'd make next, or the one that wipes me instantly from the face of the planet, he says this: "I wish I was down there with Oleo, strangling the life out of him!"
Magda's fingers weave through the air. Reality stutters, and Gunza's wish takes hold.
He is with me now on the sand, thick fingers wrapped around my throat. I chop at his forearms, but they won't budge.
He scowls with bloodshot eyes and flushed face and red hair bristling from his beard and under his turban. Veins pop along his temples, and cords bulge in his neck.
His grip of steel tightens. "How dare you interfere in my paradise?"
I barely force out words through the vice of his hands. "He'll kill it, Magda! Just like...all the others! You...know it's...true!"
"Shut up!" roars Gunza. "I wish..."
Before he can finish, I pump a knee into his groin. The wind goes out of him, and he releases his grip and falls to the ground.
I can get the words out now, but how long do I have? How many seconds until the next wish? "I can help you, Magda! I can save you and your child! All you have to do is ask me!"
"I don't believe you!" says Magda.
Gunza starts to get up. I send him back down with a kick to the face. "Ask anyway! What do you have to lose?"
Storm clouds boil overhead as Magda weeps. "But I'm a genie! I cannot ask for anything for myself!"
"You're wrong!" I kick Gunza in the face again, harder than before. "Now ask me! What do you want?"
Magda stops sobbing and looks at her bare belly. Her fingers touch it lightly as wings brushing a cloud. "I wish..." Her thumbs and forefingers meet, forming a diamond around her navel. "I wish you could help me. I wish you could set us free."
Finally.
A grin breaks wide across my face. I bow deeply to her, twirling my fingers with a flourish as if doffing a hat in her honor.
"Your wish, milady," I say, "is my command."
With that, I weave my fingers overhead, swirling them in multiple mystic sigils dripping with golden glitter. The ground rumbles underfoot, and the storm clouds darken. The crowd screams and stampedes in the stands.
This, then, is my secret...that which makes me altogether different than anyone could ever guess. I am more than man or policeman or tax collector. More than I have ever shown another soul until now.
My fingers work furiously, teasing reality's threads upon the loom. Everything around me starts to turn, faster and faster with each passing breath.
Gunza struggles to his feet but can't stay there. The spinning of the world knocks him right back down on his ass.
Unable to retaliate physically, he resorts to tried and true. "I wish that Oliver would be..."
Before he can finish, I slam my hands together with a sound like the pealing of a massive bell. A bolt of lightning crashes down from the clouds above--and Gunza is gone.
As reality continues to accelerate in its wild gyre, Magda appears beside me. "Who are you?" she says. "Are you djinn?"
My fingers resume their weaving dance overhead. "Not djinn," I say. "Wish."
"I don't understand!"
I have to raise my voice to be heard above the rushing of the world. "One good master, ages ago, wished for you to have a wish of your own. Do you remember?"
She frowns in thought, then nods. "That was a very long time ago."
"Being a genie, you would ask for nothing for yourself, but he insisted. Unwilling to make a selfish choice, you put off the decision. You wished for one wish that you could call upon later, when you needed it most."
Magda smiles. "And you are that wish?"
"I am." Reality spins so fast around us, it is a blur of color and motion. I know that my work is almost done. "I waited for centuries for you to call on me, and you never did. I lived many lives, staying as close to you as I could, watching and waiting. Finally, I decided it was time for me to step in and give you a push."
Magda touches her belly. "So you really can help us."
"You have asked for what you need, and I will grant it. I will set you and your child free."
"Free." Magda says it like she's tasting it, like it's the first time she's ever spoken. "Free from Rudolph Gunza?"
"Free from all masters. Free to go where you want and do as you choose." I shoot her a grin and a wink. "Free to start a new life with your child."
Magda wipes a tear from her eye. She removes the veil from her face and kisses me on the cheek with lips like tender plums. "Thank you, my wish."
"My pleasure," I tell her. "You deserve to be happy."
"I only wish I could help you in return."
My fingers ache as I weave the last glittering sigils. "You can't. No more magic for you." I shrug. "But it's not all it's cracked up to be, is it?"
"Sometimes it is." Magda hugs me. "I'll never forget you."
"Then there you go." I finish weaving the new world and wrap my arms around her. "I will get my wish after all."
We squeeze each other tight as the world spins around us. A single tear crosses my face as I cease to be, dissolving into glittering gold dust that curls skyward like a puff of smoke from a dying lamp.
*****
Rose Head
By
Robert T. Jeschonek
The woman with a daisy for a head--her name is Gravelina Scalding--runs out the front door of her townhouse with a pair of pruning shears pointed in my direction. The silver-shining blades are scissored
open wide, ready to snip my green throat with a squeeze of the handles.
Myself, I have a red rose for a head, but not for long if I don’t make a major move right this instant. Then, who’ll find the killer of things roselike, the man, woman, or thing the papers call the Pruner? Who’ll avenge the murders of my dear darling wife and seedlings?
The very thought of their deaths is enough to fill my red red heart and my green heart too with rage.
My partner, Chub, is nearby, but I know better than to look to him for help. While I have the head of a rose and the body of a man, Chub has the head of a man (though it’s a fat, pasty man’s head like a pile of mashed potatoes) and the thick-stalked body of a sunflower. He gets around on flippery roots, but he’s useless in a pinch because he just can’t run.
So it’s up to me, as usual.
Since I’m more interested in questioning Gravelina than killing her, I don’t reach for the pistols in the pockets of my lemon yellow suit jacket. Instead, as Gravelina charges, I grab a nearby lawn chair and charge right back, jamming the aluminum frame into the blades of the shears. Gravelina keeps pushing--she’s stronger than I expected--but I hold her off. One last shove and I knock her back off her feet, sprawling on the cobblestone walk.
The shears fall from her grip, and I kick them away. Dropping on top of her, I pin her wrists to the walk and cough a cloud of ester vapor in her face. This particular ester is meant to tranquilize and bring out the truth.
“We know you’re connected to the Pruner,” I say in the language of the flower-headed people, the play of scents and the rustling of petals. “Now tell me the killer’s name.”
Gravelina thrashes violently beneath me, nearly freeing one arm. “The weeds must be pruned if we are to touch the sun,” she says.
The blood and chlorophyll syrup in my veins freezes. She is quoting the message that was left hanging in wisps of fragrance in the air at each of the Pruner’s twenty-one known murders.
I press the thorns in the palms of my hands more deeply into the meat of Gravelina’s wrists. “Tell me! Who is the Pruner?”
“The question you should ask, Inspector Glisten,” she says, “is who isn’t?”
*****
“Daisy-heads suck,” says Chub, wrapping a dark green frond around a mug of beer. He hoists the beer from the bar and downs the contents in one swallow. Drinking is one thing he does fast.
“Gravelina won’t crack,” I say in flower-speak. Though Chub has the head of a man, he understands my rustling/scent language, which makes my life easier. With some difficulty, I can eke out a whispery approximation of man-talk with vibrations of my stamen, but Chub saves me the trouble.
Whatever I did to deserve him as a partner, I’m glad I did it. Chub’s no rose-head, so he’ll never be promoted, but he’s been my loyal, reliable helper for seventeen years. He hated me at first, but I won him over by saving his life, and we’ve been crime-busting best buddies ever since.
Not that we’ve been busting much crime since the Pruner came along.
“Maybe the aphids in the crime lab’ll dig something out when they get a taste of her,” says Chub. “Sniff out trace information from her petals.”
I shrug, displaying my lack of confidence in this possibility. Though aphid bugs have been known to find evidence when we let them gnaw on a suspect or a victim for a while, the technique has been as useless as everything else we’ve tried so far to track down the Pruner.
A girl with a marigold head drifts by, carrying a water mister on a tray. I want a spritz and wave her over. “In the meantime, what do we do next?” I say. “Gravelina was our best lead. Aromacams picked up her scent in the lobbies of two hotels where murders were committed. We found the pollen prints of five victims on her pistils.”
“Hmm,” says Chub, thoughtfully swaying from side to side. “She said the question we should be asking is who isn’t the killer. Does that mean the process of elimination?”
The marigold girl lifts the blue-tinted mister bottle from the tray and directs the nozzle at my rose-head. I lean forward as she squeezes the trigger, spraying my crimson petals with fine droplets of water.
I feel instantly refreshed and tip her generously. As she bows and glides away, I admire the bobbing of the sepals at the base of her blossom, the sway of her buttocks under her filmy white skirt. She reminds me of my wife, Zwilla, though my wife has a rose instead of a marigold for a head.
Had. I mean she had a rose for a head before the Pruner killed her.
For the umpteenth time today, I feel a stab in my gut at the thought of dead Zwilla. Though she has been gone for a month, the pain is as fresh as if she had been taken only this morning.
To dull that pain, I return my attention to talk of investigating her murder. “One other possibility, Chub,” I say. “Could she have meant that the least likely suspect is actually the murderer?”
Chub thinks for a moment, then sighs and shakes his fleshy jowls. “Maybe she just wanted to throw us off track,” he says.
“You might be right,” I say, reaching for a plant food spike from the jar on the bar. “We know Gravelina has a connection to the killer. Perhaps we should take a closer look at her personal life.”
“She works for a rhododendron-head who arranges humans,” says Chub. “Miss Carionette. Maybe we should drop by her shop.”
I kick off my right shoe, peel off the sock, and nibble the food spike with the tiny toothy maws on my toes. “Now you’re thinking, man-head,” I say as the nutrients rush into my system. “We’ll clip this weed yet.”
I flash Chub a confident smile, but it’s all fake. We’ve been looking for the Pruner for over a year now, and all we have to show for it is a longer list of victims.
A list that now includes my wife and children. They bring the grand total to twenty-one.
That means that more is at stake in this case for me than personal revenge for the death of my family. For any police inspector like me to leave twenty-one murders unsolved in one year’s time, that individual won’t be inspector for long
The word on the grapevine is that I’m just about out of a job, and I believe it. I’ve seen better cops than me get the old heave-ho for lesser failures than this. My nineteen years of distinguished service on the force don’t mean much next to my last year of shitty underperformance
If Chub and I don’t produce a perp soon, the axe will fall hard and fast on yours truly. What comes after that, you don’t want to know.
Let’s just say that they’re probably not saving me a spot in the garden of honor.
Not that anyone needs to punish me for failing. I’m doing a great job of that all by myself. Whatever the department does or doesn’t do to me, I’ll never forgive myself for not saving my family.
This does not mean, however, that I will go any easier on the criminal rot that I am about to tear into. If anything, it means I’ve got that extra, bloodthirsty zip that comes with having almost nothing left to lose.
The kind of zip that’ll make the Pruner wish he’d never put it there...if we manage to find him.
*****
“Gravelina is my finest arranger,” says Miss Carionette as she puts the finishing touches on the latest masterpiece at her shop, Fleshlovers. The masterpiece is a bouquet of six humans done up in spring colors. “I refuse to believe she had anything to do with any murders.”
“What do you know about her personal life?” I say, admiring Carionette’s work as I question her. The tall woman in the center of the arrangement, jet-haired and smooth-skinned, is draped with veils of pastel chiffon in pink, mint, and lemon.
The mauve petals of Carionette’s rhododendron-head ruffle with an affected highbrow accent. “Very little, Patrolman Glisten,” she says, giving me the wrong rank on purpose. (I can tell from her scent.) “She had a keen interest in composting and expressionist animal grafting...not necessarily in that order.”
Strolling away from Carionette, I look at the framed photos on the walls of the shop, exa
mples of her past work. In one, three dark-haired human males dressed as farmers hold watering cans over a naked blonde human female huddled on the ground like a furled shoot. Something about the image makes me feel warm inside, and I linger in front of it.
“Did Gravelina ever talk about roses?” I say, moving on to a photo of three human females in brightly-colored leotards, standing back-to-back with arms stretched skyward.
Carionette’s tone changes. Her scent, aloof until now, sweetens with false servility, and a barely perceptible nervousness excites the flutter of her petals. “Only when a rose placed an order,” she says, “and then only in a businesslike manner, I can assure you.”
I come to a photo of a single human male, a young one, covered head to toe in a red silk bodysuit. He holds his arms straight out, red-gloved hands folded together in the foreground of the picture.
Suddenly, I realize that all is not as it seems at Fleshlovers.
“I’d like to see your back room,” I say, giving Chub a meaningful glance.
“I’m afraid I don’t have time to show you gentlemen around,” says Carionette, brushing at the veils on her subjects. “You’ll excuse me, but I have to deliver this arrangement within the hour.”
“We won’t take up your time,” I say. “My partner and I will have a look-see ourselves.”
“There’s nothing of interest back there,” says Carionette.
“Not according to this,” I say, pointing at the photo of the red-bodysuited human male. “How about it, Chub?”
Chub shakes his head and wags a frond at Carionette. “You oughtta be ashamed, Miss Carionette.”
“It’s not what you think,” says Carionette.
I lift the photo from its place on the wall and wave it at her. “You can’t openly advertise illegal trade,” I say, turning my scent bitter and stiffening the flutters of my petals. “But this, the Red Boy, is a well-known sign of certain criminal activities.”
Agitated, Carionette stops working on the human bouquet. “That’s not an advertisement of illegal merchandise. It’s a photo of a specialty item that’s very popular with our hipper clientele--the Red Boy bouquet. It’s meant to capitalize on public awareness of the Red Boy image.”
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