by Nick Mamatas
“Very well,” he said.
We trudged along in silence for the next mile, except for Lupe, who chattered away to Preddi. She had a trick of touching his arm to let him know she was speaking, to look at her, and he seemed happier than his usual self. I felt guilty—had Preddi been waiting all this time for someone just to talk to? I knew Rik’s mother had died birthing him—that would have been over a quarter of a century ago.
I kept hearing her voice as we rode, high pitched inconsequentialities, the rush of words that comes from someone who has wanted to speak for a long time.
It was easy enough to see where the wagon had gone into the gorge. It was a bad place where the road narrowed—Lupe said her friend had been trying to make room for a larger wagon to pass. The blackberries were torn with its passage down the sloping, rocky side.
And when I climbed down through the brambles, since it was clear Steel had no intention of it, I saw a familiar sight: Sparky’s little wagon, tilted askew.
He was not in sight, but I found blood and tracks near the front. Only his tracks, though confused and scattered, as though being pursued.
How to play this hand? What was Lupe’s game? I opened the back door of the wagon and peered inside.
Sparky had collected scrap. Iron chains draped the walls, along with lengths of iron and lesser metals: soft copper tubing, a tarnished piece of silver netting. And in the center, his tools in their box. I opened it, trying to figure out why Lupe wanted them. Ordinary tools: screwdrivers, picks, hammers. His father had made them and carved the wooden handles himself, Sparky had told me once.
Wooden handles. I looked down at the tools again, and then at the chain draped walls. Finally I understood. I imagined Sparky being driven from his wagon seat in a cloud of elf-shot, wicked stings that burned, wicked stings that drove him in a mad rush to where he could be safely killed.
Taking a length of chain from the wall and draping it around my neck, I took the box and clambered up the side of the gorge with its awkward weight below my arm.
Lupe’s fingers twitched with eagerness as she saw it. She and Preddi stood side by side, while Steel watched the road, ready to lead Bupus on a little further if some wagon should need to pass. I went over to him and laid the box between Bupus’ front paws. Touching the manticore’s shoulder, I leaned to whisper in his ear. He looked at me, his eyes unreadable, while Steel glanced sideways, eyebrows forming a puzzled wrinkle.
“Give it to me,” Lupe said. Her voice had an odd, droning quality to it.
“Not until we have the money,” I said.
She laughed harshly and I knew deep in my bones I’d been right. I stepped aside, putting my hand on his shoulder. Steel looked between us, bewildered.
“It’s Sparky’s wagon,” I said. “Looks like he was driven away to be killed.”
“You must be confused,” she said. “That wagon belongs to my friend. I don’t know who this Sparky is.”
I continued, “And then she found she couldn’t go in his wagon because of the iron, and yet there they were, wooden handled tools that she could use. You’re some sort of Fay, aren’t you, Lupe?”
Her black eyes glittered with rage as she stared at me, searching for reply. Preddi looked between us, his face confused. I had no idea what he was making of the conversation, or if he’d actually caught any of it.
Steel stepped forward, hand on his knife.
“Stay away!” she spat. Her form quivered as she shrank in on herself, her skin wrinkling, folding, until she resembled nothing so much as an immense, papery wasp’s nest, tiny wicked fairies glittering around her in a swarm. A desiccated tuft of brown curls behatted her and she rushed at me and the box in a cloud of fairies.
Bupus’s tail batted her out of the air, neat and quick, and I laid the chain across her throat.
It immobilized her. The tiny fairies still darted in and out of her papery form, but they made no move to harm me. Cold iron is deadly to the Fays, even beyond its hampering of their powers.
I had my own tools in the wagon.
Another traveling show paid well for Lupe, enough to get all of our members out of jail. She huddled in the iron cage, quenched and calmed, and the malicious spark had vanished from her eyes. I hoped the dulling had left her with some language. I had not performed the operation in a long time.
Suprisingly, Preddi chose to go with her. All he said was “She’s a good companion” but there was no reproach in the words. Rik did not entirely understand why his father was leaving, but he took it well enough.
In the evening, I took Bupus down to the stream near our camp for a drink. The full moon rolled overhead like a tipsy yellow balloon. He paced beside me, slow steady footfalls, and as he drank, I combed out his hair with a wooden-toothed comb, removing the road dust from it. When he had drunk his fill, I wiped his face for him.
There in the moonlight, he took my wrist in his mouth, pinned between enormous molars as big as pill-bottles. I froze, imagining the teeth crushing down, the bones splintering as he ground at them. Sweat soured my arm-pits but I stood stock still.
His lips released my wrist and he nosed at my side, snuggling his head in under my arm. I let go of the breath I had been holding. Tears sprang to my eyes.
He rumbled something interrogative, muffled against the skin of my hip. I wound my fingers through his lank, greasy hair.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“Good,” he said.
I stood for a long time, looking up at the moon. Its face was washed clean by clouds, and stars came out to play around it. After a while, Bupus began to snore.
Cat Rambo lives and writes beside eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish in the Pacific Northwest. She has had over two dozen stories published in venues that include Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and ChiZine. Recently, her story “Magnificent Pigs’ was short-listed for Best American Fantasy and will be reprinted in Best New Fantasy 2, while “The Surgeon’s Tale,” co-written with Jeff VanderMeer, was recommended by Locus and Tangent Online. She is a member of the writers’ groups Horrific Miscue and Codex. She holds an MA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and was a member of the Clarion West class of 2005. Her website can be found at www.kittywumpus.net
TRANSTEXTING POSE
Darren Speegle
The doorbell rang a second time. I called downstairs asking my wife to get it, but then the pipes bled in and I realized she was showering. I set down the newspaper and walked down the stairs in my socks, noticing as always that the empty spot on the wall in front of me desperately needed a picture or some other decorative object. It was a drizzly Saturday morning and no responsibilities but to the coffee-stained columns of recycled world events, the unexpectedly lurid paperback I’d been reading, and a crisp new deck of virtual cards that Luce and I had finally saved up the cash to purchase.
Ours was an old unit with a door that sported an actual peephole—which Luce will tell you is quaint if you’re not looking at her squarely. Through the hole I saw three little girls in identical khaki uniforms standing there all in a row. I opened the door immediately so as to leave them stranded no longer in the arduous desert of their mission. What were they selling? Did it matter?
My first thought as they said, “Hello,” almost in chorus, was that they were awfully alike looking, even for such a “pale” corner of our beloved diverse city. Then one of them went solo, reaching forward to collect an object from beside the door, where she’d presumably placed it so that it wouldn’t detract from the vision of three little girls all in a row.
The object was metallic silver and about the size and shape of a laptop, though considerably thinner. When she turned it, I saw its similarities to a laptop didn’t end there. Metallic silver described just the back side of it. The front looked much like a lit LCD screen, containing a scene very simple in subject matter and obviously meant to convey the conceptual. Indeed, the sense I had was of conceptual art within conceptual art. The image itself was eve
n free of frills or gimmickry, portraying a rowboat on an expanse of sea whose only other interruptions were three dark smudges in the distance that impressed me as islands. While it seemed reasonably safe to assume the picture was digital, it was impossible to tell whether the work was the product of a camera or a traditional artist—or both.
As though the wall at the foot of the stairs cared.
“And what do we have here?” I said, conscious of my flagrant adultishness.
“We are selling these for our project,” said the girl who held it like a sign in her small hands.
“Oh?” I said. “And just what might that project be?”
“Transposing text.”
Transposing text?
“Really? Sounds like a complicated project for a little girl.” Condescending, I scolded myself. Children do not like being condescended to.
These children didn’t seem bothered in the least. The one in the center spoke this time, as she pulled what resembled a business card from a pocket in her khakis: “We only need to raise five hundred dollars and we get a trip to the World’s Fair in Los Angeles.”
“Its theme,” said the third girl, “is ‘Our Virtual World.’ ”
I looked at the card. Though spare in content, it was quite nouveau in design. The words transposingtext repeated in a single horizontal line across the card, casting mirror shadows of the letter sequences tra and si and the single character x, so that the reflection read art is x art is x art is, etc.
“If we raise the money, we will have our own booth and our own sub-theme: ‘Redefining Man and God.’”
“Los Angeles,” chimed in her neighbor, “is the City of the Angels.”
“And what organization do you girls belong to again?”
They pointed to the card in my hand.
Transposing text. Art is x is art.
“How much for the . . . ”—I was becoming slightly disoriented, which wasn’t helping fill the empty spot on the wall—“the thing you have there?”
“Picture,” said girl number one. “Twenty-two dollars.”
At first I registered Picture twenty-two dollars. Then: Wow. Whatever happened to cookies. I fetched a twenty and a five out of my wallet and told them to keep the change. Man and God could always use some redefining.
Closer inspection confirmed that the image could not be distinguished from a screensaver. To me it was a remarkable medium. To others—that would be my wife Luce—it was a tackiness on the order of a velvet Elvis or Jesus, which violations were already sorely remembered in our house through the musical band Felt Pelvis & Christ, which I wouldn’t let her expunge from my somewhat extensive collection. No matter, it was what it was, and that was, to fulfill the desolate need of the space at the foot of the stairs. In that endeavor, it was the better of every other work of art we’d tried there, namely her father’s Army photo and my artist-signed-and- limited typewriter art image of Stephen Hawking looking at what might have been the very black hole Luce would not let him fill.
I had to hang it with two plate magnets, as it offered by way of accessory nothing but the fingerprints of the trio that had sold it. Which of course suited its neo-whatnot conceptual design. Luce would no doubt roll her eyes at that assertion, remembering my obsession with finding a way to keep the picture aloft. Aloft. Yes, that rather captures the sense of it as a floating thing, there on the wall, into whose meaningless simplicities my wife would sometimes catch me staring.
2
I am in a wooden boat with iron oarlocks, rowing. Before me is an island; above me, aloft, an airplane no larger than an albatross, throwing its shadow on the metallic silver water. I am looking for something but cannot remember (if ever in fact I knew) what. Where the image of it should be, there is near emptiness, the suggestion of a line here, a corner there. But the configuration itself, the proportions, remain shapeless. Unknown.
The island approaches steadily and the aircraft above me coasts at little better than my own pace, as if as lost as I. It occurs to me as I watch it lift on a vagrant wind that if it cruised at higher altitudes, it might seem a bird to the casual eye. Maybe that is what it was designed to do, to deceive the eye by flying outside the radius of dependable discernment, to seem a soaring bird when it is actually about darker business. That it glides low for me may simply speak to a malfunction, a random caprice of its mechanics. I doubt so. There is purpose here, dark or otherwise.
When I arrive at the island’s shore, it seems I have been rowing for hours, but then, maybe mere moments. The bird enters the tree line beyond the recessed beach as I am stepping into surf that does not startle my naked skin. I am clothed in shorts, khaki, nothing more. The air is neither warm nor cool, the sky neither blue nor gray. There is no discomfort except in the shape that will not complete itself in my mind. I feel I will recognize it when I find it, but where to look? Here, this island?
I walk across the sand in the direction the bird has gone. Only a short distance into the trees—short, long, all such terms being relative—I find a clearing, and within it, the landed aircraft. As I approach the plane, figures begin to materialize around me out of the very aether. People. More specifically, black people. Black people in street clothes, denim bags pooling around their basketball shoes. Gangsta types tapping chests, chillin’, discussin’—the rap materializing as smoothly and unobtrusively as the rappers. As with my contact with the water, there is no shock. There is only the realization, and the medium which they and I now share, though it is evident to me that they are unaware of my presence within it.
I have stopped, I realize, as I watch them gather around the airplane. One reaches down and opens a hatch on top of the fuselage and pulls from it a clear plastic bag. I step closer, imagining for a moment it might contain what I am looking for, but no, it is full of cylindrical class containers of clear liquid. Test tubes are assuredly not what I am looking for, though associations of conformity, of rounded edges, do occur to me as the chatter of my unlikely companions fades in.
“This looks like some good muthahfuckin’ shit.”
“God damn, that’s gotta be a couple ounces at least.”
“Break out da pipes, my niggas. We fixin’ t’git fucked up on this shit.”
Pipes. Pipes in the walls. Fading in. Bleeding in.
Only these aren’t pipes in the walls, these are glass pipes, test tubes. The person holding the bag passes out the cylinders one by one to his bloods, who then motions with a lift of his chin to a freshly materializing set of denim bags, who steps forward with a handful of what look like sacrament wafers. The brothers file up, uncapping the tubes, and he commences to crack the wafers over the open bottles, the whitish bits of matter dissolving in the liquid. As the last man gets his dose, the whole gang toss back the revised contents of their cylinders, gargling for a moment or so before spitting the reprocessed fluid back out, some into their empty tubes, others onto the ground.
This accomplished, the chorus lifts its collective head and begins to sing in the voice of angels, a music that strikes me as some soaring contract between Heaven and the ‘Hood.
Meanwhile, the man with the crumbled wafers collects the tubes from the choir. He pulls out his cock and pisses into the empty cylinders then returns all the tubes to the bag from which they came, stuffing it in the plane’s cargo compartment. The aircraft hums to life again, the chorus subsides, and in the relief, the bewondered voices of its tenors and basses expressing:
God damn, this is some good muthahfuckin’ shit.
“And they are brothers, all?” says the insipid white face before me. “No sisters?”
“No sisters.” I look around at what is an office. A desk stands between me and the insipid face.
“What does this say to you?”
“I’m not exactly sure. What does the fact that they are gargling angel water say to you?”
Words out of my mouth, just like that. It seems we’ve covered the story itself, the insipid white face and me, and we’re now looking at
deconstruction.
“The pipes,” says it. “What do the pipes mean to you?”
“Pipes . . . You mean the tubes?”
“You said they were smoking condoms out of glass pipes.”
I hesitate.
“Don’t think about it. Just respond. What do pipes mean to you?”
Pipes. Pipes in the walls.
“My wife has a set that would offend God himself.”
“Does she use them often?”
“Only when she is in the shower. Or one of her Catholic youth choral nightmares. Or on airplanes.”
“You jest,” says the insipid face.
“Do I?”
“Airplanes. Let’s go back there for a minute. Can you describe the miniature aircraft in a little more detail?”
“I can,” I say, wondering why the comparison is only now dawning on me, wondering why I’m speaking in present tense. “It’s like one of those search and reconnaissance camera planes that law enforcement got from the military. You know, the ones operated by remote control.”
“Oh, you mean like this?” An insipid white hand opens a drawer and pulls from it what looks very much like a remote control, points it at me and with an insipid white thumb, presses—
3
I am in the boat again, iron oarlocks creaking as I row. The plane practically hovers, itchingly so, above me. A new island approaches. The indistinct, amorphous sketch in my mind fails to fill out. Will I find this seemingly so significant, so (dare I say) crucial thing on the approaching shore?
My mechanical companion suffers an elongated shiver in advance of forsaking its painstakingly reflective pace for the island ahead. As it does I look for a camera eye, any sign of deception, but none is to be found in its smooth, metallic silver underbelly. If the machine possesses landing wheels, the seams of their compartments are invisible. Still, it propels fearlessly into the tree line, leaving me to splash blindly in the surf, across the sand, into the trees again.