Selected Short Stories Featuring Cinderella Shoes

by Nicolas Wilson

ticket they had purchased in the name of his new false identity, that they had learned from mistakes of years past. The explosive device was hidden on his person, but its location was uncomfortable, and made him walk as if one leg was a few inches taller. And that was when he saw it. It flashed across a screen between toothpaste advertisements, in the red of blood, an image of the Prophet. His heart raced; had the infidels broken the law of his faith and shown images of the Prophet, or had Allah revealed the Prophet to him, encouragement for the sacrifice he intended to make?

  In the ticket line, he spoke with a woman who was terse, but seemed to want to be friendly. She asked irrelevant questions, and Ehud realized he was sweating profusely. Then she asked, “Are you carrying any explosive devices in your luggage or on your person?”

  Ehud stopped, and blinked at her. He did not believe he’d heard the question correctly. He was trying to figure out a way to ask her to repeat it that didn’t sound like he was avoiding the question, when she said it again, and he was as taken aback now, knowing that he had not misheard her. “No, no.” She smiled, and sent him through.

  Immediately beyond her desk he was met by a line of security. The man in front was older, but still large and muscular; the men behind him were armed and armored like soldiers. “I need you to come with me, sir.”

  “My name is-”

  “No, it isn’t. But that’s part of what we’re going to talk to you about.”

  The man took him into a small room. It had a single camera in the corner, and a monitor on a cart. Beyond that, there was a table and two chairs, and Ehud was pointed towards one of them.

  The other man walked over and dropped into his own.

  “Let me explain why we pulled you out of line. That image of Mohammed, yeah, you didn’t dream that, but your reaction, fear, excitement, a little bit of rage, that lit you up like a Christmas tree on our scanners; the Israelis who designed that little system really have your number. All that meant is we’d talk to you, put you through the more vigorous exams. Hell, even some of the tranquil Muslims get pissed off if they think we’re incorporating Mo into our interior decorating- or we could be getting blowback from you having a fight with your wife. But call it strike one.”

  “Then you walked up to the ticket line. They asked the standard bio information, age, home address, the shit I’m sure you memorized. They ask a few of the curveball questions, what kind of fruit you’d be, your favorite local sports team, happiest moment. And you lied your balls off. Bioscanners nearly passed a stone measuring all the creative tap-dancing and stress you put your poor head through, because rather than using the normal creative parts of the brain, you had to filter everything through deception, too. Strike two.”

  “Now this, I’m still all kinds of excited about this one, so much I had them wheel a monitor into the room. Now, according to your ID, you’re from Ghana, with a Congolese mother. Database points to a largely pure ethnographic line from those two sources, going back as far as records, anyway- and as far as fake IDs go, it’s pretty solid.” An image of Ehud, taken minutes before, came up on the screen, partway obscured by flashing red shapes outlining each of his features. “But look what the Profiler says; you see all that red flashing across the screen? That is you physically deviating from the mean you’d expect to see from that lineage.” The red changed to green and stopped flashing. “That green, now, that is you matching up, with an error rate in the hundreds part of the decimal point, to a Nigerian origin. Goddamn, I love science. We also pulled a family record, put you up against profile pictures, and you look nothing like anyone in the family, again, going back as far as we have records. What that all this technomasturbatory talk means is strike three.”

  “Of course, you were on our radar the moment you walked in our door. See, according to the BehāvMod system you don’t exist. That raises a bigger red flag than someone walking around with an illegal tech mod; that just usually means you’re a junky here to steal bags or a chimo looking to get his rocks off brushing by kiddies at the luggage wheel. Beyond that, you’re mumbling to yourself in a thirty-year-old dialect; what that usually means is that somebody learned the language late in life from a crap secondary source, which points to somebody looking to lie about who they are.”

  “But everything about you is outmoded, grooming, clothing, hair, down to your ridiculous ass-explosives; yeah, the sniffer managed to find those even past your smelly colon and poor hygiene. Now let me peer into my crystal ball: trigger is an altimeter, similar to the one built into your watch; just as you were approaching whatever the ceiling was, you were to go to the shitter and drop the bomb in the lavatory. Once the bomb was outside of your body cavity where it wouldn’t be muffled by you, you’re free to sit back and count your virgins. Sound about right?”

  “You have the time? Of course you don’t. We EMPed you as you went through that door. Your watch and whatever passed for a detonator are caput.”

  Ehud blinked stupidly at the man; he could not believe Allah had forsaken him so completely.

  “So what year are you back from? Unfortunately, you’re not the first of these ridiculous time bombers. So what year did they put you on ice?”

  Ehud’s eyes dropped to the table. “Nineteen ninety-nine.”

  “You know what depresses me the most? Al Qaeda have apparently figured out how to send messages back in time, but the most constructive thing those fucktards can think to do with it is more half-baked terrorist plots. I’ve been saying it since that underpants bomber asshole, that that’s what all of you terrorist shits deserve: to have your balls roasted. Poetic justice, that every time you grope yourself all you feel is an overcooked tofu dog. It is a goddamned travesty that the bill of rights prevents me from kicking the shit out of you for trying to murder a few hundred people.”

  “Bomb techs will be here in another minute to disarm your anus. Sniffer puts it at about a pound of plastique in your colon, about the equivalent of an angry con giving it to you in the prison yard- which is a feeling you ought to get used to- all for this jihad nonsense. I’ve never been big into religion, anyway, but nobody’s God is that big an asshole.”

  Table of Contents

  Death Echoes

  My eyelids are old strips of overcooked bacon, my eyes rotting tomatoes threatening to burst every time I blink. Either my coffee is too strong or there isn't enough whiskey in it; I'd use Bailey's for taste, but whiskey is what's in my flask. The eggs in this diner are always burned, and sunny side invariably comes back scrambled, but before there was a big metal hotdog of a restaurant here, there was an Irish church; it keeps all but the most devout of the dead away. I ask for a refill with holy water, and since my waitress used to be a nun here, I ignore when it looks like she flips me off in the mirror.

  It’s ten thirty before I leave, way past shift meeting; the graveyard captain doesn’t complain so long as I keep closing unsolved cases. And as long as I’m being stalked by the dead, that won’t be an issue. I’m mobbed before I hit the street corner. There’s a woman in a pantsuit, with her hair in a fresh bun. There isn't a mark on her, except maybe discoloration around the neck; if I couldn't see through her I might think she were alive. “You. You’re my assistant for the day." She starts to glare, and pout. “Don’t. At the end of the day, I guarantee I’ll see to your case. Everyone else has to get through you to get to me.” She perks up at that. “Start with homicides, prioritize by amount of evidence, and try to weed out people wasting my time.” I light a cigarette but there’s a man with a smoking hole in his throat who stares at me; I’ve spoken to him before, and I know it’s a bullet wound and not a trach ring, but I’m in no mood to stare down his bloodshot eyes, so I ground it out on my shoe.

  I cross the street, but a few of them are stupid enough to follow. I stop in the middle of the crosswalk and yell to myself that I’ll only help those who talk to my assistant. Most of them stare at me dumbly; a few of them have forgotten how to speak and moan and click their tongues in a despo
ndent nonlanguage. On the other corner is a pub, and I duck in to use the head. A sixty year old with bald eye sockets rises out of the murky toilet cavern, and I turn to keep from pissing in him and spatter urine on the wall. “You should have to mop this up," I tell him as I gather paper towels. He only opens his tongueless mouth in a silent scream in reply.

  Even after using the bathroom I couldn’t kill my erection. It had been three months since I had the privacy to masturbate, and nearly a year since I’d been with a woman. I was being stalked by drowned triplets who blamed their mother for their death. But she was meticulous and cautious, and aside from anger they had little to contribute to the case. I’d managed to talk the library clerk back to my place when they found me. We were having sex when they started popping up and down through her breasts like a perverse game of whack a mole, but it was ludicrous enough I could laugh it off. Then the third phased up through her pelvis, raking her incorporeal teeth across me. That ended it.

  My followers crossed the street and my assistant was caught up in them like a tide that broke against me. “Who’s first?” She pointed at a black woman in her late thirties, early forties, with flecks of gray