Stupefying Stories: July 2013 (Stupefying Stories II)

by Russ Colson

  Zeus, Greg’s faerie, sat on his shoulder, watching the shenanigans with his arms crossed and an uncharacteristic frown on his tiny face. I figured I’d find out what happened when Greg was done, so I walked to my table. Kissing the top of Jade’s head, I sent her flitting into her aquarium.

  “Any trouble?” I asked Sheila.

  Sheila shook her head. “No, nothing. I don’t—”

  She was interrupted by Tommy running up breathlessly. He skidded to a stop, holding an empty critter tote. “I found this in the bushes at the far end of the parking lot.”

  I wondered if my heart could take much more of this. “It’s Amethyst’s.” I sat abruptly in the chair. “That’s it, then. Someone took her outside and turned her loose. I’ll never see her again.”

  Greg stomped up, carrying a blue ribbon, his expression furious. I automatically congratulated him for his win. “No thanks to Alec,” he growled, giving Zeus another strawberry.

  “What did he do? I saw the commotion.”

  “Nothing anyone saw. But he sure enough did something.” Greg tossed the ribbon onto the table, and Zeus flew into his aquarium. “Alec’s was the only faerie who wasn’t half-crazed over there. Other than Zeus, of course, who’s experienced enough that ring chaos doesn’t bother him.” He noticed Amethyst’s critter tote. “Emily?”

  “Tommy found it outside.” My voice broke, and I fumbled in my purse for a tissue. Greg gently squeezed my shoulder as I dabbed my eyes. “I’ll do the usual things, but you know what the chances are.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ll go look for her, Grandma,” Tommy said stoutly. “She can’t have gone far, right?” He set off at a brisk walk toward the door. “I’ll find her. I will,” he said over his shoulder, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Sheila had a speculative expression on her face. “He’s kind of nice,” she said. She shook herself, glanced at her watch, and shifted from foot to foot. “I’m almost late for Yarrow’s class...”

  “Go, dear,” I said. “My difficulties shouldn’t stop you from enjoying yourself.”

  “Are you sure? I can drop out.” She looked uncomfortable.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Go.”

  “If there’s anything I can do...”

  “You can win your class and make me proud.” I gave her a little push. “I have classes to get ready for myself, you know.”

  “Okay.” Sheila half-ran to her own table across the room, looking troubled.

  My next class was a precision aerobatics competition, one I’d been training Ruby for months to compete in. Ruby had red-tipped wings, and I snapped my fingers and tossed her a piece of sausage. She did a half-roll-and-loop through the air, catching the meat on her stomach. “Show-off,” I said fondly. She wiggled like a puppy and settled on my shoulder for the walk to the ring.

  Alec had a faerie in this class as well, and he was first. His faerie bobbled a few maneuvers, ending with eighty-five points out of a possible hundred, which was a non-qualifying score. His expression furious, he sent the little creature into her tote with a brusque wave of his hand. No one would dare shout at a faerie at a show, but I could tell that he really wanted to.

  I studied the course outline sheet I’d been given with my packet. The courses are a secret until the morning of the show. I had confidence in Ruby, however, and refused to be intimidated by the double eight-point-spin loop. I shoved Amethyst to the back of my mind and concentrated on my current class.

  Ruby was the fourth faerie up, but I was surprised that no one ahead of us had a qualifying score. These competitors were usually in the top echelon, all hugely respected, but every single one of them made major mistakes. Puzzled, I gave Ruby one final piece of sausage and sent her off.

  Faerie Aerobatics is a complex contest that tests the link between faerie and trainer. Not only does the faerie have to perform the maneuvers consistently and precisely, but she also has to pay attention to her handler to find out what the next maneuver is. The entire performance is something of an aerial ballet, and it’s always been one of my favorite parts of a show.

  Ruby performed beautifully until her last pass, when she pulled up into a hover, sniffing the air. I gave her the signal for a split-S turn, but Ruby was completely distracted, turning her head this way and that. She focused on Alec and flitted over to him, then buzzed around the tote his faerie was in before landing on it and pulling at the door in the lid. “Go away,” Alec said between clenched teeth. “Get out!”

  “Ruby!” I was scandalized. “I’m sorry,” I said to the judges. “She’s never done this before. “Ruby, sausage.” Ruby ignored me. “Ruby, big sausage!” That finally got her attention, and she flew to me and landed on my shoulder.

  I had a dawning, horrible suspicion. “Alec, what have you done to your faerie?”

  “Done to her?” Alec sputtered. “I don’t know what—”

  “I think you do.” I crossed my arms. “Just what have you been spritzing them with all day?”

  “Spritzing?” But the innocent look wasn’t working, and the rest of the competitors eyed him mistrustfully.

  “Don’t think we didn’t see you. What is it?”

  “You can’t prove—”

  “Oh, I think we can. Pheromones.” I drummed my fingers on my biceps. “Know how I know? Because Ruby wasn’t affected until the end of the routine—when the smell from the sausage I gave her before she started wore off.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “You did. And denying it now only makes you look more venal than you actually are.” I shook my head. “I think this will finally be enough to get you suspended, Alec. What a shame.”

  ¤

  Alec packed up and slunk out the door, with the rest of the show abuzz with what he’d done. Sending a faerie soaked in pheromones into a show ring will disrupt every other faerie in the class, an offense guaranteed to get anyone caught doing it expelled for at least five years. He could still breed faeries, but none of the progeny would be registered by the governing body, and non-registered faeries aren’t allowed to compete. A five-year suspension is the practical equivalent of a lifetime ban, unless a person wants to start over from scratch once the suspension is lifted.

  “And good riddance,” said Greg, when I told him what Alec had done. “I knew he was up to something.”

  “We all did.” I sighed. “It’s one thing to use questionable methods in your breeding stock. It’s quite another to try to handicap your competitors in the ring.”

  “Well, at least we know for sure that he didn’t take Amethyst.” Alec had been searched quite thoroughly before being allowed to leave.

  “There is that.” I checked my watch. “I’ve got another class coming up, and then I should go watch Sheila and Yarrow.” The Solo Dance class was huge; Sheila needed to be ringside for it, but her turn wouldn’t be for awhile yet.

  “Good luck.”

  Grabbing Sapphire, and still worried about Amethyst, I headed over to the ring for the fireball competition. Targets were set up at various distances and the fireballs were judged on speed, accuracy, and intensity. Sapphire disdains the beauty-contest aspects of showing, but he loves this class.

  Ring stewards stood around with fire extinguishers in case of accidents. Sapphire, however, was his usual enthusiastically perfect self. He garnered the blue and his FCX (III) title, and I gave him a gobbet of sausage nearly as big as he was as a reward. He sat on my shoulder, munching it, while I found a seat next to the ring where Sheila’s class was.

  Yarrow, I saw, was acting strangely. Sheila’s faerie usually enjoyed this class, but I wondered if the girl’s case of the jitters was having an effect on Yarrow, too. The faerie kept looking toward her table, and Sheila had to speak sharply to her to get her to pay attention.

  Yarrow’s distraction hurt her dance routine, and they ended up with a non-qualifying score and no ribbon. Sheila was nearly in tears when I met her at the ring entrance and gave her a hug. “It’s not the en
d of the world, dear,” I said.

  Yarrow made a beeline for their setup, not waiting for Sheila, and dove under the cloth covering their table. Tommy chose that moment to walk up to them. “I talked to some of the activists,” he said. “And they told me—”

  “Oh, what do they know?” Sheila snapped.

  He lifted a cool eyebrow, and I noticed that he wasn’t as shy around Sheila as before. This, it seemed, was a day for outlandish behavior. “They have eyes,” he said mildly, going with us to Sheila’s table. “And some of them saw you dump the tote and put the note on Grandma’s windshield. So you might as well ‘fess up.” He lifted the tablecloth.

  Sheila screamed. I was both pleased and aghast. Pleased, because Amethyst was sitting complacently in a critter tote, picking her teeth with—

  Well, that’s why I was aghast. “Amethyst!” Yarrow was beating on the side of the tote with her tiny fist. Amethyst smiled at her in a toothy fashion, and Yarrow backwinged frantically and popped back into her own aquarium.

  “Sheila, what did you do?” I demanded.

  Sheila sat in a chair and buried her face in her hands. “I should have known that nothing would go right today,” she sobbed. “Oh, Imli...”

  I pulled the critter tote from under the table and opened it. Amethyst flew out and landed on my shoulder with a loud burp. What was left of Imli lay in a sad little heap of swallowtail wings, feathery antennae, and scraps of bright cloth.

  I shook my head. “You know why we don’t put the dragonfly-winged faeries together with the butterfly-winged ones! Most of us don’t even breed both—it’s one or the other. What in the world were you thinking?”

  “Imli was in love with Amethyst,” Sheila said into her hands. “I had to do something. He was moping around, losing his appetite. Drooping.”

  “Well, he’s done drooping now.” I shook my head. “Amethyst has a remarkable amount of self-control, but you put her in an intolerable situation. You ridiculous girl, why didn’t you say something?”

  Greg had noticed the drama, and he strode over to see what was happening. His face broke into a grin when he saw Amethyst. “Hey, great, you found her! Um, what’s wrong?”

  “Sheila was the one who took her,” Tommy said.

  I waved at the critter tote. “And locked her in with Imli. Who she promptly ate.”

  “Well, yes.” Greg gave Sheila a look of mingled disbelief and horror. “What were you thinking?”

  Sheila wailed. “I thought love conquered all! Star-crossed faeries...”

  It was Tommy’s turn to stare at her. “You know that Romeo and Juliet both died at the end, right? Or were you absent that day?”

  “All right, all right,” I interrupted. I felt as if they were piling on. The poor girl had just lost her favorite faerie, after all, even if it was her own fault. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Sheila.”

  “I have.” Sheila sniffled. “Love bites.”

  ¤

  No one was more surprised than I was when Amethyst laid four eggs a week later.

  ¤

  Sheila almost disappeared, holing up in her house after school and refusing to socialize. The show officials had taken a dim view of her actions, but I told them that she’d been punished enough with the loss of her faerie, so they only suspended her for the duration of that show. This didn’t make her feel any better.

  I managed to coax her out of her shell by promising her a baby—as long as she wouldn’t do anything so foolish as kidnapping a faerie ever again. Even Tommy’s attitude softened toward her. He still thought she was, as he put it privately, “less than brainy”—but now that the crisis was over, he wanted to at least be friends.

  ¤

  Greg, Tommy, Sheila, and I gathered around an aquarium at my house. Amethyst’s eggs were due to hatch, so we all settled in with snacks and soda.

  One of the eggs rocked, cracked, and burst apart. An inch-tall baby stretched to its full height. I held my breath. The wings were still crumpled from the shell and would take a few minutes to fill out. In the meantime, the other three eggs hatched as well. The babies fanned their wings, flapping them gently.

  “Oh. Oh, my.” I covered my mouth, transfixed. Tommy and Sheila grasped hands, their differences, if not forgotten, back-burnered for the moment.

  The wings were formed like a dragonfly’s, although a little broader than normal, with a swallowtail at the base of the lower pairs. But the pattern on them was the same as Imli’s—only in a rich iridescent purple with deep black veins and edges, and a yellow stripe running through the center.

  “Looks like I’ll have some serious competition in the next show.” Greg grinned. “It’s about time.”

  Julie Frost lives in the beautiful Salt Lake Valley in a house full of Oaxacan carvings and anteaters, some of which intersect. Her work has appeared in Cosmos, Azure Valley, and Plasma Frequency. She whines about writing at agilebrit.livejournal.com, or you can follow her on Twitter via @JulieCFrost.

  Ms Frost is not happy with any of her recent photos, so you’ll have to imagine what she looks like.

  INDIGENE

  By Lawrence Buentello

  On THE OCCASION of visiting Dr. Trafoire’s apartment for business reasons, Windom Crispin was surprised to see an apparition peering from the partially opened doorway of the entry hall closet.

  This fleeting observation removed him for a moment from the urban reality surrounding him; the little man stared back at him, half his face hidden by the door, but clearly visible. He seemed very thin, his face angled like a clamshell, barely four feet tall and bearing long strands of matted gray hair combed back over a grayish pate. Gnomish, and faintly ugly, but possessing beautiful green eyes, the little man’s gaze met his for an instant before the door quickly closed and left him speechless.

  Crispin remained where he sat on the sofa, occasionally glancing at the papers in his hand, before laughing quietly and muttering that he was seeing things.

  Dr. Daniel Trafoire, having turned from the enormous aquarium by the window of the room, smiled pleasantly and asked, “What did you say, Windom?”

  “I said, I believe I’m hallucinating,” he said, finally placing the papers on the table and rubbing his eyes. “If you were a medical doctor I might ask you to examine me.”

  “You’re not hallucinating,” Trafoire said, turning back to the aquarium and tapping the glass, “if you’re speaking of the entity in the closet.”

  Crispin again fell speechless. What could he possibly say of the matter? There, in the upper Manhattan apartment of the renowned university professor, he had seen an apparition. One doesn’t expect to see apparitions in the course of the day, and he had only come over to deliver the revised will Trafoire had drafted with his firm the previous summer. Trafoire would be traveling to the Middle East in a few weeks and wished to have a ready instrument should anything happen to him while overseas. A very practical matter, really.

  But there seemed nothing practical, let alone rational, in what Crispin had witnessed.

  He watched the portly doctor, whose own hair was graying with age, as he studied the exotic fish drifting among the coral and aquatic plants, amazed at his nonchalance. He glanced again toward the closet, found it firmly shut, then shook his head.

  “If you know there’s an entity in the closet,” Crispin said, “then can you tell me what he’s doing there?”

  Trafoire turned away from the aquarium, this time completely, and sat across from Crispin in his favorite chair. The smile he offered suggested mysteries, or perhaps he was amused by the lawyer’s confusion. He, too, glanced toward the closet, and then his gaze fell on Crispin and he nodded.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said, reaching for the pipe in the ashtray on the table. He tapped at the bowl thoughtfully, then continued. “That may sound odd to you, but it seems to be in the natural course of things. I was fairly startled myself the first time I saw him. Shocked, actually. But for some reason I wasn’t afraid, merely curious.”


  Trafoire surrendered his ambitions for smoking and laid the pipe in the ashtray again. He regarded Crispin seriously.

  “Of course I wondered who this man was,” he said. “I approached the closet door and reached to open it—but found I couldn’t, it seemed as if I was invading someone’s privacy. I can’t really explain the feeling.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A couple of months, I believe.”

  “Months? Do you mean to say this man, or whatever he is, has been inside your closet for months?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know how long he’s been there. I’ve only been living here for a few months myself, since the beginning of the year. I only noticed him those two months ago.”

  “I don’t understand. Haven’t you tried to find out who he is?”

  “After a fashion. You see, I simply couldn’t open the door unannounced, so after a few days I found the nerve to knock. I felt that if he came out of his own accord to answer, then I would be within the limits of common courtesy. Unfortunately, when I knocked, he didn’t open the door or reply in any way. I stood waiting for a while, began feeling foolish, and then gave up. Over the next couple of weeks I saw him again, one or two times, peering from the door, before closing it. My curiosity got the better of me, so one day I decided to simply stand outside the door and ask him who he was, and what he was doing in my apartment.”

  “Did he reply?”

  Trafoire shook his head slowly.

  “Again I stood there feeling foolish, waiting for him to reply to my questions. But he refused, so I left him alone. But the next morning I found a piece of paper by the threshold, as if someone had slid it under the door from the other side. Well, I read the message on the paper, decided it was a significant effort at communication, and from that morning to this have left the little man in peace.”

  “And that was good enough for you?”