by S. T. Joshi
Willie wants to see the Machine bleed.
The Machine has grown again. Metal gears churn steam where Willie used to sleep, and pumps clang up and down where Willie walked fourteen hundred and twenty-nine paces to his family’s hole. Numbers. Bolts vibrate and chains lash out, and one strikes the Baron’s legs, and he falls. Willie tries to help him, but the Baron’s legs are broken.
Steel bulges and splits into multiple beams. Pistons thrash against cables and wood, gears and wheels balloon and then hover over Willie like the black clouds of morning over the city. Willie grabs the Baron’s collar and drags him toward the door. Bolts pop, metal multiplies, and the limbs of the Machine push against Willie’s head and stomach, forcing him closer and yet closer to the open door. Oh, he wants out, that’s just fine with Willie, and he rolls to his other side and shoves the Baron into the street. Willie crawls after him, sees the Baron’s matches and takes them. But now claws dig into his shoulders and wrench him onto his back, and Willie can’t breathe, the air is too thick with burning steam and molten metal.
The Machine, it’s on him. Willie flails, tries to scream, but the Machine clamps him down, and tendrils of steam flare in the bowels of the building. The claws pierce his shoulder muscles, his chest, his neck. His clothes are soaked in blood, and hot metal cools and pastes his blood to his flesh. It burns him right down to the bone.
He twists his neck, watches the Baron roll into the gutter, where the sewage burbles. The Baron’s arms are limp on the gravel, and blood and dirt streak his face. A bone pops from the Baron’s left leg, the pants tattered and sopped.
Shivering now, and is this the end of Willie’s life? Is this all there was, Protector and now this? And please let it be quick, let Willie join Hattie and the baby.
His teeth chatter. His body is cold. He needs whiskey. His bloody fingers clutch the matches, and his thumb breaks a match free.
Hot metal and shadows, the yellow piss of sun, the Baron in the gutter with the buildings crouched low as if frightened: this is Willie’s city, spawned by Willie’s Machine.
It’s a blotch, this city, and if not for the Protectors, it wouldn’t be this way, would it? Willie and his father, and before that, his grandfather and great-grandfather, they kept the Machine alive.
Willie was a good Protector. The problem was, he was a good Protector of the Machine.
Shadows slink from the Machine’s vents. Liquid steel splits, fireworks over Willie, and the others come, they pour by the thousands from the crevices of the Machine. Shadows merge with liquid steel, and Willie sees claws and suckers and holes.
Willie strikes the match against cement and flicks it over his head right into the fireworks, and he sees the weird symbols and the numbers blazed into the bone of his right arm.
300000 946 1012 197 207 82 79 5 8
The last thing Willie sees is a metal sucker. And the last thing Willie smells is bloody meat.
Miranda's Tree
Hannes Bok
The old house on the hilltop, where the paved road ended on oiled dirt, had been remodelled so long ago that it had become old again—like a rejuvenated lady in need of another bit of plastic surgery. Above the newer, smaller homes, it loomed like a medieval castle over a small village, and was set apart from them by vacant lots, in one of which spread a gigantic oak.
The mistress of this house, Edna Thorpe, rocked restlessly on the battered porch swing, pulling on the pillows behind her, shifting uncomfortably about, her nose wrinkling disgustedly at her inability to achieve complete ease. She was a short, dumpy woman, dressed at present in a limp slack-suit which had been stretched beyond mere bagginess at the elbow, knees, and seat. Except for the assistance of eyebrow pencil, mascara, and lipstick, her features were as indefinite as though her face had been modelled of dough and then baked. Her frizzy sand-colored hair had been unimaginatively parted in the middle and then dragged back over her ears.
She squirmed toward the screen-door and shouted into the house, “Elaine!” There was no prompt reply, and she called again, this time with a note of menace, “Elaine!”
“What, mama?” The little girl’s voice was a reluctant wail.
“Come out here when I call you; don’t just stay in there and ask what!” her mother cried sharply. There was a silence, then several loud and hollow thumps as though someone within the dwelling were kicking the furniture about. Seven-year-old Elaine tiptoed out on the front porch, her round face too innocent to be credible. Hugged to the front of her soiled dress was a book. The screen-door slapped smartly shut behind her.
“All right,” the cold-eyed mother said. “Go into the house and come out again, and see that you don’t slam the door this time!”
The child eyed her parent as if to gauge the extent to which disobedience might proceed unpunished, then turned, went into the house, emerged, and carefully closed the door.
“That’s better,” Edna conceded, relaxing. “The postman’s coming up the hill. I want you to get our mail, if he has anything for us.” She looked away as though expecting contempt in the child’s eyes, writhed uneasily, and wrenched the corner of a pillow. “I’m too tired to get up,” she added in explanation.
Elaine peered down the street. “He’s stopping in at the Johnsons’,” she said.“Mamie Johnson gets letters sometimes from her brother in the army. She does, because I saw one once!” She glanced at her mother as though awaiting a denial.
“What’s that book you’ve got?” Edna Thorpe peered narrowly.
Elaine apprehensively scanned her book’s red cover, and clutched it more closely. “It—it’s just a book,” she evaded weakly.
“I mean, what’s the name of it?” Edna’s eyes were hardening with suspicion.
Elaine’s gaze was hunted. She affected to look at the title. “Why, it’s just a book I got from the school library,” she said at length.
Her mother put out a peremptory hand. “Bring it here.”
Elaine hesitated; Edna’s hand wavered ever so slightly, significantly, and the child hurried across the porch, laid the book on her mother’s palm, and stepped back as though cowering from a blow, her eyes wide with anxiety, her mouth a circle of worry.
Edna read, “‘Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales,’” and looked up at her daughter. “Well!” She inhaled deeply. “And what have I told you about reading fairy tales?”
“But Miss Davidson said I should read ‘em—” Elaine murmured ineptly. “I didn’t ask you who said to read them. I asked, what did I tell you about reading fairy tales?”
“You said they’re lies,” the abashed child breathed.
“If you want to do any readin’, you get something true to life, like ‘Elsie Dinsmore,’” Edna Thorpe said. “No child of mine’s going to fill her head with such asinine truck. I wasn’t ever allowed to read such trash when I was a little girl like you.” She thumped the book down beside her on the swing, and pushed back Elaine’s worried and possessive hands. “You leave it lay right there! Here comes Mr. Markey. Go on now, and get the mail!”
The child’s eyes clung to the book. Sighing, she turned away, but as she clattered down the porch steps, the tragedy was already forgotten.
“Elaine! Pick up your clumsy feet!” Edna scolded. She spread a practiced smile over her face, waving coyly to the mailman.
“Hello, there, Mr. Markey! Have you something for me? Just give it to Elaine, will you? It’ll save my walking down to the box.”
The postman saluted her indifferently, offered some envelopes to Elaine, and trudged across the street to the opposite houses. The little girl scrambled up the porch steps, the wood resounding hollowly. She was curiously thumbing through the letters.
“Give those things to me!” Edna Thorpe snarled, snatching them away from the child and smacking the back of a hand on the girl’s cheek. “How many times have I told you not to pry—”
She skimmed over the writing on the envelopes
, important and speculative while her daughter stood with downcast eyes, pudgy fingers feeling the smarting cheek.
Elaine began to cry—not soft sobs, but the bawl of a siren.
“If you want to cry,” Edna said, “go into the house and do it. I don’t want the neighbors to see you making a spectacle of yourself, a great big girl like you!”
She pushed her daughter away. Elaine hesitated in the middle of a wail, deciding whether it would be more interesting to see what the letters contained, or to go into the house and cry. She preferred crying, and almost screamed her woe as she stamped sonorously into the house. Edna looked after her, a frown drifting across her forehead and away like a shadow as she tore open an envelope, smoothed out the folds of a paper by creasing it wrong-side out, and read, the paper so close to her face that she might have been smelling it.
There was a noise of furniture being tumbled about. Edna pictured her daughter, banging things around to transfer grief to them. “You cut that out!” she bellowed through the screen door, and calmly continued reading.
After a while, Elaine stepped out on the porch, her eyes reddened, but her cheeks rounded in a cherubic smile. “Who’re the letters from, mama?” she asked sweetly, pushing the fairy tale book aside to sit next to her mother. She slipped an arm as far as it would go around her mother’s waist, and leaned affectionately on Edna’s flabby side.
“Here’s one from your Aunt Miranda,” Edna said, tapping the sheet with a forefinger. The name meant nothing to Elaine, who lifted her head and craned at delicate Spencerian handwriting, like a diagram for a will o’ the wisp’s dance. “I took you to see her a long time ago when you were just a baby, but you probably don’t remember. She was living in Hanover, taking care of your grandma.” She mused over the paper.
A scrawny boy of twelve had walked his bicycle up the hill; he wheeled it up the sloping grassy lawn and leaned it against the porch steps.
“Junior!” Edna glared at her son. “How often have I told you not to ride your bicycle over the grass?”
“I wasn’t riding it, I was pushing it, and besides if I come up the steps, it’ll bump, and that’s bad for the tires.”
“That’s no excuse! Now take it back to the walk and come up the steps as you should!”
“Aw—” He pressed dirty fists on his hips, spreading wide his legs, his face a rebellious sneer.
“Junior!” Edna stirred as though about to arise, her head thrust forward like a snake’s from its coils. The boy stepped back, nervously moistening his lips, dropping his hands at his sides. Mother and son stared eye to eye. Junior quailed. He lifted his wheel, bounced it down the steps and dragged it up again with unnecessary violence, as though desperately attempting to achieve a blowout—then he would raise pathetic eyes and cry, “Now see what you’ve gone and made me do!”
But the tires were unharmed. He rested the bicycle against the porch steps a second time, sheepish with frustration.
“What’re y’ readin’?”
“A letter from your Aunt Miranda.”
“Wha’ does she say?”
Edna’s eyes skimmed the letter for an item of possible interest. “She’s lonely ever since Grandma died and left her in the big house all by herself.”
Elaine pawed her mother’s arm. “Is she pretty, mama? Is she pretty?”
Edna considered. “I suppose so. Your daddy almost married her instead of me!” She laughed a little at the preposterousness of it.
“But you got him first, didn’t you, huh?” Elaine questioned hurriedly, with the sly look of a conspirator. Edna scowled at her, annoyed.
“Your father married me because he loved me,” she said with dignity. “There wasn’t any question about getting him first.” She scrutinized the letter.
“If she’s lonely,” Junior said, “are you going to ask her to come and stay with us for a while?” He eased himself down on the top porch step and drew out a pocket knife, his finger-nail squeaking as he tried to pull out a blade.
Edna reflected. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d better speak to your daddy first.”
Elaine’s plump fingers stole over the porch swing’s cushions to her fairy book, lifted it secretly over the back of the swing, and laid it on the window ledge beyond. She turned back to her mother, her eyes round with purity of soul. “I’d better go in and see if my sick dollies are any better,” she said. When she was tired of playing with her dolls, they were sick. She jumped from the swing to the floor, pushing with such vigor that the swing jerked wildly from side to side, Edna looking up angrily at the chains shrieking on the ceiling hooks.
Elaine closed the door very softly behind her, and catfooted through the disorder of the living room to the window overlooking the porch. Edna was opening another letter, and Junior was testing the blade of his knife by paring the edge of his shoe sole.
Elaine, her tongue protruding from the side of her mouth with effort, slowly slipped her hand through a tear in the screen, careful not to scratch it on the ragged wire. She lifted her fairy book inside, and pressed it to her chest again in triumph. She made a frightful face at her absorbed mother and carried the book upstairs to the dubious sanctity of her room.
In the glow of a floor lamp, Ralph Thorpe sat in his usual chair. Once he had been handsome and vital; now he was haggard and listless. He did not say anything critical as he searched for his unfinished serial story in one of the magazines which Edna had crammed, bending its corners, in the magazine rack. He read silently.
Edna was on the sofa, her work-basket overflowing beside her. She was sewing a lace collar on a dress, which she held up. “Oh, damn! It still isn’t on straight! Well, I don’t care. I’m going to leave it just like it is. Nobody’ll notice, anyway.” Ralph turned a page of the magazine, and laid it down. Elaine had seen fit to cut paper dolls from the last page of the serial’s installment. “What did the children mean about Miranda at the dinner table?” he asked.
Edna gazed at him. There was no trace of emotion in their eyes, no love nor hate. “A letter came from her today. She says she hasn’t any money left from Mother’s insurance, and doesn’t know where to turn. Of course, she’s hinting that she’d like to come here to stay with us—and there’s really no reason why she shouldn’t, is there?”
Ralph was silent, staring past her, his face softening with memories. Edna was perturbed. “Perhaps she’s still got a crush on you!” she fleered. “I remember seeing your picture still up in her room the time I took Elaine to see her over in Hanover.” She smiled amusedly, but her eyes were secretive and hard.
Her husband’s lips tightened. “Besides,” Edna said, plucking at the lace collar, “there’s the children: I can’t take care of them and still do all the housework. I’m not getting any younger, and it’s about time that I had a little rest so’s I can enjoy myself.”
Ralph was disconcerted by her calculating gaze. He raised his magazine, peering at the print, hiding his face.
“I’ve always said that you ought to get a hired girl,” he murmured mildly.
“Yes, I know. But I’ve been trying to save money by doing everything for myself. I thought you’d appreciate that.” Her husband’s fingers twitched on the magazine. “But now I realize that I can’t go on, any more. So—well, I thought we could save money and still have help around the house if I told Miranda to come. She can use the attic room—it’s just full of old junk now, anyway, and it’ll keep her away from us if we want to do any entertaining.”
“What’s wrong with letting her have Elaine’s room, and putting Elaine up in the attic?”
Edna raised her hands in horror. “Why, Ralph Thorpe, to think of doing such a thing to your own child!”
“Why do it to Miranda, then?”
Edna colored, and lowered her eyes to her sewing. “That’s different. She’s older—the heat won’t bother her as much as it will Elaine. Elaine’s delicate.” She looked up defiantly. �
�Well— shall I tell Miranda to come?”
He shrugged, a trace of hurt in his eyes. “Do whatever you like.”
Edna’s triumphant smirk annoyed him. He arose and started out of the room, but at the door he paused. He turned. “You rather like the idea of having her here under your thumb, depending on us for her bread and butter, don’t you?”
Edna stared at him, her face a mask of righteous indignation.
Ralph brought Miranda to the old house in a taxi, Junior accompanying him. As the car whirred up the hill, Elaine darted away from the little girls with whom she was playing, knocking over a tiny table and a chair in her hurry, sending tiny tin dishes clinking on the ground, disrupting a dolls’ tea party.
She darted up the sidewalk, racing the taxi. “Daddy! Yoo hoo, Daddy!” Junior made a dreadful grimace at her from the car.
The taxi stopped with a jerk in front of the Thorpe house. Edna had been waiting on the porch, and now she came down to the boulevard-strip, her heavy steps jouncing the sagging folds of her chin. A door of the car flew open, and Junior tumbled out, banging a Gladstone bag on the grass. “Hello, Mama! We brought Aunt Miranda,” he announced importantly and unnecessarily.
Ralph Thorpe stepped from the car, helping Miranda, who was clutching the handle of a newspaper-covered wicker basket. Her eyes were wide on the big house, and she clung to Ralph’s fingers longer than Edna liked.
Elaine panted up to them, and leaned against her mother, her hands clutching her mother’s dress, her eyes fascinated on the newcomer. She was noisily chewing candy, a rivulet of chocolate wending from her mouth down her chin.
“Elaine! Don’t touch me! Just look at your hands!” Edna exclaimed, tearing her gaze from Ralph’s hand still linked with Miranda’s. Elaine snatched away her hands, hiding them behind her, backing away from her mother. Her interest swerved to Miranda, who stood as short as Edna, but was very thin and seemed much older. Her gentle eyes were grey, her hair streaked with white. She wore the dull clothing of a very old woman.