Small Magic Collected Short Stories

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Small Magic Collected Short Stories Page 13

by Aaron Polson


  When their dancing was finished, they lumbered into their cages, their great muscles sliding in waves over their bones, chameleon hair brown then black than brown again under the lanterns. They sat with muzzles clamped, staring with their polished bear eyes at one another. Each month a new town, another mass of bleary human faces jeering at them as they trundled about, together, to the delight of the crowd. Night after night, town after town, until they had nearly forgotten their bear-hood.

  “Nadia?” Arkady paced for a glimpse of her in her cage, rose on his legs, and leaned against the bars like they were her shoulders. Human voices and laughter sounded in the distance.

  “Hey,” he called.

  She shifted.

  “It’s time. Tonight. While they’re drunk. We’ll do it like we’ve planned. Like they taught us.”

  She raised her snout and sniffed the air. “I can’t.”

  “Yes,” he growled. “Yes you can. We’ve been practicing, yes?”

  She rolled away from him.

  “Hey.”

  Nothing.

  Arkady backed away from the bars and reared to his hind legs. With his forepaws folded across his chest, he began to shake slowly, back and forth. His snout titled toward the sky and opened, his teeth folding back too far until his mouth split and collapsed on either side. A head poked through the opening, a human head. A man’s head with dark hair. The paws fell limp as the man pulled his arms from the bear’s skin. His new fingers freed, Arkady pushed the bear down, sliding his torso, hips, and legs from the ever-widening maw of his former body. Naked and shivering, he regarded his new skin. The remnants of bear melted away.

  “See, Nadia? So easy.”

  No answer.

  Arkady reached through the bars of his cage, cold metal stinging against his naked flesh, and pulled open the latch, a task which the bear found impossible. He padded across to the other cage. “Nadia?”

  Her head lifted toward him and her eyes widened. “Oh, Arkady. You were always a quick learner.”

  “You’ll come with me. I’ll show you how.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do it. I’ve never been as smart as you.”

  His hands fumbled at his sides, fingers twitching. “But—you should come anyway. We’ll hide until you can change.” He touched the cold metal bars. “Stay in the forests.”

  “Go alone, Arkady. I’m sick.”

  He didn’t move.

  The she-bear snarled at him, baring her yellow fangs.

  “I won’t leave,” he said despite an unfamiliar, human fear.

  She sniffed. “They’ll catch you. Looking silly like that. Naked. You don’t know what they’ll do to you.”

  He looked at his new hands. “I needed to work the latch. We can blend in better this way.”

  “Just go…now.”

  He sank to his haunches, watching through bleary eyes as Nadia’s side rose and fell with her breath. Voices tumbled into tent from without, laughter and boisterous stories. The men of the circus drank themselves into a stupor as they always did the last night in town. He worked the latch on Nadia’s cage and stepped inside. She didn’t move. Arkady swallowed the new, human fear. He brushed the stiff fur of her bear’s coat, feeling the thick, stiff fibers, remembering its warmth as a cub when he wandered through pine boughs in the foothills of the Koryak Mountains. He couldn’t go back, now.

  “If this is what you want,” he whispered.

  She turned her snout. Bear’s eyes met human. There was a quick nod.

  Arkady sat next to Nadia for a long while, and then moved quietly, leaving her cage hanging open and slipping under the tent skirt away from the drunken circus men. He stumbled in his unfamiliar body.

  Outside, the moon caught him with its bright face full of blemishes that bear eyes could only imagine. Arkady shivered in the cold, his human body covered with gooseflesh. His eyes gradually dropped to the dark line of trees in the distance, a black-smudge beneath a range of mountains not unlike his precious Koryaks. He patted his upper arms to beat away the chill. The lack of scent on the breeze surprised him, and he wondered if freedom always tasted so empty.

  The new Arkady did not hear the sounds behind him, the lumbering footfalls of a great brown bear. He jumped when the paw dropped on his shoulder. But, after he fell to the ground, he saw Nadia’s snout, her eyes. He could recognize those eyes from ten-thousand circus bears.

  “Y-you’ve come,” he said.

  Nadia pushed close to him, sharing the warmth of her fur.

  “I’ll learn,” she said. “For you, Arkady, I’ll learn. You give me hope.”

  Chapter 75: Acknowledgements

  Stories which originally appeared in Every Day Fiction:

  “How to Burn a House”

  “Faith”

  “Billy Boy”

  “Soul Marbles”

  “The Sub-Basement”

  “Better Lessons”

  “To Make Things Right”

  “Blue Collar Boys”

  “Inked”

  “Donuts of the Living Dead”

  Stories which originally appeared in Everyday Weirdness:

  “Gary Sump’s Hidden City”

  “Courtship”

  “The Long Contract”

  “Bona Fide King of His Realm”

  Stories which originally appeared in Flashes in the Dark:

  “Communion”

  “Fuzzy”

  “Bleeding the Trees”

  “Daddy’s Touch”

  Stories which originally appeared in Northern Haunts:

  “The Ox-Cart Man”

  “Old Water”

  Stories which originally appeared in other venues:

  “A Little Bit for Braz” – Eclectic Flash

  “Enough” – Necrotic Tissue

  “Manning Up” – Misfit Magazine

  “Full Count” – Eschatology

  “Dinner” – Macabre Cadaver

  “Everything in its Place” – 10Flash

  “Policy Woes” – Hypersonic Tales

  “Different Strings” – Whidbey Island Student Writers’ Choice Award

  “Melons” – Alienskin

  “The Man in the Hallway” – Blood Moon Rising

  “Why Susie McTavish Believes in Angels” – A Flame in the Dark

  “Watching the White Blossoms” – The Foliate Oak

  “Night Lights” – Niteblade: Nothing to Fear

  “Small Magic” (as “The Ballad of Arkady and Nadia”) – 100 Stories for Queensland

  Thanks especially to Robert Swartwood and Cate Gardner for several story titles.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1: How to Burn a House

  Chapter 2: A Little Bit for Braz

  Chapter 3: Inheritance

  Chapter 4: Gary Sump’s Hidden City

  Chapter 5: Enough

  Chapter 6: Faith

  Chapter 7: Manning Up

  Chapter 8: Bad Poetry

  Chapter 9: Full Count

  Chapter 10: Chaos and the Creative Process

  Chapter 11: Billy Boy

  Chapter 12: Soul Marbles

  Chapter 13: Luck

  Chapter 14: Why We Decided to Use a Blender

  Chapter 15: Poe’s Basement

  Chapter 16: How to Write a Horror Story

  Chapter 17: The Sub-basement

  Chapter 18: Unchecked Expansion

  Chapter 19: Thaw

  Chapter 20: Ten Years Late

  Chapter 21: The Ox-Cart Man

  Chapter 22: Crenshaw’s Gift

  Chapter 23: Better Lessons

  Chapter 24: Communion

  Chapter 25: Busted

  Chapter 26: One Up

  Chapter 27: Dinner

  Chapter 28: Armour-Plated Rooftops*

  Chapter 29: Old Water

  Chapter 30: Casualties

  Chapter 31: Sometimes They Don’t Come Back

  Chapter 32: The Thing abou
t a Haunting

  Chapter 33: Smoke

  Chapter 34: To Make Things Right

  Chapter 35: The Revolution

  Chapter 36: Fuzzy

  Chapter 37: Words Per Minute

  Chapter 38: Everything in its Place

  Chapter 39: Treats

  Chapter 40: Courtship

  Chapter 41: Bleeding the Trees

  Chapter 42: Quiet Time

  Chapter 43: Policy Woes

  Chapter 44: Consultation

  Chapter 45: Different Strings

  Chapter 46: Blue Collar Boys

  Chapter 47: Doping

  Chapter 48: Little Awful Things

  Chapter 49: The Long Contract

  Chapter 50: Tending the Garden

  Chapter 51: Ergonomic

  Chapter 52: Man Bites Man

  Chapter 53: Old School

  Chapter 54: Tickle, Tickle

  Chapter 55: Melons

  Chapter 56: Painkillers

  Chapter 57: The Date

  Chapter 58: Night School

  Chapter 59: Why Susie McTavish Believes in Angels

  Chapter 60: War is…

  Chapter 61: Attrition

  Chapter 62: The Man in the Hallway

  Chapter 63: Vintage Sunshine

  Chapter 64: "How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You That The Dog Ate My Homework, Madonna Spit In My F

  Chapter 65: Daddy’s Touch

  Chapter 66: The Truth about Rabbits

  Chapter 67: Bona Fide King of His Realm

  Chapter 68: Watching the White Blossoms

  Chapter 69: The Bet

  Chapter 70: Night Lights

  Chapter 71: Inked

  Chapter 72: The Find

  Chapter 73: Donuts of the Living Dead

  Chapter 74: Small Magic

  Chapter 75: Acknowledgements

 

 

 


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