Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #6

by Robert Reed

  He still stood close to me, and I was acutely aware of his presence. His expensive fragrance was far removed from the whiff of paint and white spirit I thought an artist should exude. The chrome abstract loomed before us, its mirrored concavity exaggerating his stature. Behind our own reflections, the party guests circulated in a whirl of shape and colour.

  I pointed at them. "You've already conquered most of the art world. Do you really need to mop up the resistance?"

  Clark said, "They hitch a ride on every passing bandwagon, but do you think I care for the crowd's roar? Seducing tarts is no challenge. I crave approval that's harder to win. I long to convert your cold rebuffs into passion."

  As he said this, he leaned into me until he was almost whispering into my ear. His warm breath on my cheek made me shiver. Although the party still laughed and whooped around us, we had stepped into another space, a still centre invisibly framed. This was the core of his success: he convinced everyone that he cared about their good opinion, and they gave it. His patter was convincing, his body-language sincere—and what a body.

  "But if you conquered me, what motivation would you have left?" I barely managed to keep my voice level.

  He stepped back. "Weasel words. Surrender or stand firm, but spare me the hypothetical."

  Already I felt his attention drifting away. Freed from his captivating gaze, I recovered some composure. "I'm a critic," I said. "Weasel words are my stock-in-trade. If you want another answer, I can only reply with Morrissey's." I waved my hand, encompassing the whole tawdry show in an offhand gesture. "'You just haven't earned it yet, baby.'"

  "Who's Morrissey?" he asked. "You should stop attaching other people's quotes to other people's shows, and look closer to home. Critic, review thyself."

  Clark placed the green spectacles back on my head. He pushed me toward the nearby sculpture, forcing my head close to the chrome. I saw my distorted reflection, filtered through the percept overlay. The sticker covered one lens, creating a vast blot on my outlook. In the mirror stood a nervous boy with a lump in his throat.

  That must be where I've swallowed a dictionary, I thought. I knew that sometimes my criticism was convoluted, too clever-clever. I turned back to Clark to say something more basic, but he had vanished into the melee of patrons and groupies, who all wore sheepskin coats.

  My eyes ached from the shiny mirrors and the distorting effect of the glasses. Inside I had another painful feeling that I refused to analyse. I was an art critic, not an agony aunt. I walked out of the party, and composed reviews in my head all the way home.

  "Mirror, mirror, in the show—who's the lowest of the low?"

  Too personal, I thought. Attack the art, not the artist.

  "Mirror, mirror, in the show—should not have left the studio. Yet again Oliver Clark proves that art is whatever you can get away with. He substitutes fame for form, and intent for content. The Old Masters had to be able to draw, paint, sculpt, or something; but modern art mainly requires a talent for notoriety, and Clark has always excelled at that.

  "They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but here goes…"

  Stuck in my glass cage, I realise that this tableau is Clark's revenge for my splenetic reviews, my green glasses and insulting stickers. I can see him across the gallery, talking to his sponsors, sharing a joke. He radiates celebrity and charisma. Has any artist ever shone as he shines now? He is feted by the world, and his chief critic languishes in an exhibition case, ignored by everyone. How the columnists will chortle over his latest coup!

  Am I just going to let that happen? After a while, when my skin stops crawling with humiliation, my brain starts working. No matter what, I'm still a critic. I can still have my say, even cooped up in here.

  In here? I originally interpreted the clear walls as enclosing an exhibit: myself. Yet if I'm the critic, surely I'm on the outside. Inside, neatly encased in glass, is the show, the party, the art world that Clark has conquered. All I have to do is review it.

  What do I say? Do I change my mind and recant? I did have some positive thoughts about the show, so I could praise it while claiming—in the weasel words of a convert—that the New Nihilism has 'developed' and 'matured' since my earlier flak, and is now the dominant mode of the post-postism era. I could say that Clark's prank on me is a brilliant use of his own medium to answer criticism. Yes, I could join the gang.

  Clark strides by, en route from one worshipful cluster to another. As his radiant smile illuminates the area, the glass cube feels hotter. Is he looking at me? Did he wink at me?

  It would be so easy to surrender.

  But I won't. Clark's work says nothing. It tries to be about its own emptiness, about the impossibility of novelty when everything has been done before, but that's defeatist. I believe it's still possible to be original, to be meaningful, to be non-ironic.

  I lean against the barrier, dig out my notebook, and start drafting a critique of the party as installation art. "A work in mixed media: artists, hangers-on, drunken hacks; sponsors and publicists; pseudo-nibbles, fashionable drugs, oceans of free booze; lies, flattery, and hype, hype, hype. Talent?"

  Turning round slowly, I give the whole room an appraising stare. Then I write, "The word is much in evidence, as are the words 'genius', 'masterpiece' and 'more drinks, anyone?' But of the thing itself there is no sign. How can there be, when everyone is too busy partying to ever work? Clark knocks something up in five minutes, delegating any hand-dirtying tasks, then spends the rest of his day schmoozing. Soon the hacks will have their own assistants to file copy, so that neither artist nor critic has to pause to make art or review it. Then the cocktail circuit can revolve friction-free-until everyone wakes up with a hangover and winces at their gullibility while drunk on cheap nihilism."

  I feel better for that. I could go on, but there's no point in elaborating when no-one's paying attention. I'll have to get used to being disdained. At every outbreak of laughter I flinch inside, thinking it must be at my expense. How long will I be invisible? The stretching hours are a foretaste of the years of irrelevance lying ahead.

  I'm not going to stand here and take this. I'm not going to be ignored. I'm going to… what?

  First, I'm going to find a way out of this glass cage. How? I could try clambering over the wall—assuming there's no ceiling—but that would involve undignified scrabbling, and I might not manage it. Even if people are supposedly ignoring me, I don't want to look any sillier than I already do.

  If only I really was Captain Contempt, armed with vitriol and demolition-job reviews. Then I'd soon blast my way out.

  I should at least give my critical armoury a trial. I delve into my pocket for the sticker I took to Clark's last show. Seeking inspiration, I dial from 0/10 to 10/10, and two icons catch my eye-five: a thumb pointing down, and six: thumbs-up.

  I dial back to five, then place the sticker on the glass wall. I reach in and grasp the thumb, moving it from down to up-turning it like a doorknob-while pushing the glass as if I expect it to open.

  And it does. I prefer to think it works because gallery automation has to allow pretty much anything, though Clark might have programmed the exhibit to free me if I gave it a sufficient approval rating. Whatever. At least I'm out of the cage. I walk into the party, find a chair—with some difficulty, as it's transparent like everything else—and slump into it.

  No-one appears to have noticed my escape. I'm still officially invisible. That's Clark's conceit, as he put me in his exhibition of nothingness, and his sycophants don't dare break the illusion by acknowledging me.

  I steal someone's drink. There's no resistance, no cry of outrage. I drink the gin and tonic at one gulp. God, I needed that! I knock back another. Sipping a third, I watch Clark as he gracefully turns to each guest, smiles, charms, and moves on to the next. I tap my feet to the Networking Waltz. I'm getting tipsy. Being invisible gives me a feeling of power. I can do anything now.

  I slip through a gap in Clark's halo of courtiers, and walk r
ight up to him. I hug him and give him a big wet sloppy kiss.

  He gives me a startled look that mirrors my own surprise. "Is this your new reviewing style? I must say it's an improvement on the old."

  I step back. "Er… it was more for you than the show," I say. "Just to show there's no hard feelings," I add hastily. Now that Oliver has spoken to me, everyone's staring at us. I feel even more exposed than I did in the exhibit.

  "Then what do you think of the show?" he asks.

  I remember all my caveats, but I don't want to repeat the same old quibbles yet again. I feel as if I've changed, broken out of something else as well as the glass cage. Yet I'm not going to recant: I'm not such a pushover. I bring out the glasses I wore at the last show, and select a new colour. Wearing rose-tinted spectacles, I make great play of peering round the room. As everything's invisible, and obscured by party-goers anyway, my painstaking inspection gets a bit of a laugh from the onlookers.

  "Genius!" I declare.

  "Is that all?" he asks teasingly.

  "You'll have to wait for the full review," I say. I take off the rosy spectacles and give an exaggerated double-take, though Oliver looks just as gorgeous with or without them.

  "I look forward to seeing it," he replies. He moves on, dismissing me. It hurts to see his gaze move away and light up someone else, but the sun has to shine on everyone.

  I head for the door. Despite having made an exhibition of myself, I'm strangely elated. On my way home, I keep trying to think about the show and how to review it, but I can't stop thinking about Oliver Clark, and myself, and how feelings influence opinions.

  Maybe that's the function of art and artists: to show us ourselves.

  © 2003 by Ian Creasey

  First published in Alternate Species, February 2003.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  * * *

  Ian Creasey was born in 1969 and lives in Yorkshire, England. He began writing when rock & roll stardom failed to return his calls. So far he has sold fifty-odd short stories to various magazines and anthologies. His debut collection, Maps of the Edge, was published in 2011.

  My Brother's Keeper

  Beth Cato

  Half the county figured my big brother Samuel had bricks for brains. There was mighty good evidence in favor of that, like the time he decided to walk through downtown naked simply cause it was a hot day and clothes just plain didn't feel good. But I knew Samuel wasn't a dummy, just quiet, with his mind in a different place than the rest of us.

  So when I heard him with two speakers of dark words, I knew to hunker down and listen. Here by the barn was the most private spot on our property—or would be, if I wasn't up in the rafters.

  I smelled the bad guys before I heard them. Mama didn't get to teach me much, but she did teach me to heed my nose when it came to good and evil and all the grey in between, and those men stank like the septic tank being sucked out on an August afternoon. I gagged against my wrist to keep quiet, Mama's old chain bracelet warm at my lips.

  "I want to kill Macaulay," said Samuel.

  That name made me inhale with a hiss. Kill Macaulay?

  "It's easy to kill someone you hate that much," said one of the men. "But if you want to join our circle, you can't simply kill for vengeance. It's too easy."

  There was a long pause. "He's got a wife and kid," said Samuel. I recognized the scuff of his bell bottom jeans dragging against the dirt.

  "Three," said a deeper voice, "There's power in that."

  "Yes," agreed the other man. "You must kill the entire family, on the equinox, with this knife. Then you can join our circle."

  "I want them books of yours." Samuel's drawl was slow, every word dragged out like his puffs from a cigarette.

  "You'll have access to our knowledge in stages. It takes time."

  "I can do it," Samuel said.

  When Samuel took that knife blade in his hand, I felt the wrongness of it rattle down my spine. That knife was an ugly, cursed thing. The other men left, heading back down the trail towards the base of the hill. Samuel stood there, holding that thing, assessing it in his quiet way. I barely breathed. I kept a pencil frozen in my hand, same as it was when I first smelled them come my way.

  After a while, Samuel thudded back down the hill. The stink of evil faded. Why was Samuel doing such a stupid thing? If Mama knew, she'd whip his hide. She'd been the only one to ever keep him in line, the only one who understood he was so smart underneath all that stupid. But Mama was dead and gone and beneath feet of red iron dirt, and now Samuel was set out to kill the whole Macaulay family tomorrow night, and for magic, too.

  Anger got all tight in my chest. At least Samuel had some magic, had some words to go by.

  I stared down at my half-done math homework. I hated math. All those numbers danced around in my mind and the answers never came out right, but I'd rather do a full fifty pages of algebra than save those Macaulays.

  Old man Macaulay was the one who killed Mama, blowing past the stop sign at Templeton Hill and crunching our car flat as a griddle. They said in town that Macaulay had enough whiskey in him to pickle him like a frog for science class, but he hadn't been the one who died.

  I scampered up and left my math for the mice to nibble on.

  Given my druthers, I'd rather help Samuel out than save those Macaulays, but Mama loved everyone. She used to be close to Grandma Macaulay, too.

  Mama wouldn't want Samuel to meddle with darkness, wouldn't want that blood on his hands. I just had to ignore whose blood it was.

  Most all the other men around came back from Vietnam and fell into the bottle, but not my Papa. Nope, he fell straight into Jesus's arms.

  Papa had the table covered with books for his seminary course and was all hunched over, muttering to himself. He didn't notice me going by, or flinch when I opened up a can of cola. But the second I headed towards my room, his pencil stopped scratching.

  "Deborah?"

  "Yes, Papa?" I turned around, the cola fizzling on my tongue.

  "We're out of bread."

  "I can go by the Pig later."

  His head bowed over his work, and I moved on. I didn't have any kid brothers or sisters underfoot. Didn't need them. I had Papa and Samuel, and the fact that I was twelve didn't matter a doodle. I cleaned, I cooked. If it wasn't for the fact that I made Sunday dinner just like Mama, Samuel might have never visited the house at all.

  I can't even say I held any fondness for Papa, not anymore. He was more like an extra piece of furniture around the house, something to take care of because it'd always been there. Just looking at him made that anger rise up again, all because of what he did the day after Mama's funeral.

  He burned her books. The family books.

  Mama never said that what she did was magic. It was as natural as breathing. The words were all for focus, she said. So she wrote down what she learned, just as her mama had, and her grandfather, and her great-grandmother. From the way Mama told the tale, her great-grandma was all sneaky about learning to read and write as a slave, and did it all so she could preserve the words and pass them along.

  Papa burned every last shred of those books, a full century of songs about growing okra in a day, warding away mosquitoes, making babies form all perfect, and calling on rain. Papa sobbed as he did it, said that it was an awful thing that Mama was burning in hell right now, but he'd save us kids. I woke up because I felt the flames itching along Mama's old ink; it woke up Samuel, too. Mama had already started teaching Samuel. Me—she said I was too young.

  Now I'd never know how to focus or sing the words, not unless Samuel taught me, and he didn't know much.

  But I had been learning from Papa. Not that he knew those kinds of words, of course, but he had been writing down his experiences from Vietnam. Called it his "spiritual cleansing." Course, those weren't the kinds of things a girl my age should be reading, but it was an education in the ways a man could die and the way eating half-cooked chicken could make him pray for de
ath as he spewed out his guts for days and days. I had the latest book tucked under my mattress, and just the other day I read something that would come in mighty useful.

  Samuel was a big fellow at seventeen. I couldn't overpower him. I didn't even know where to find him now, though I guessed he was sleeping somewhere in the woods, somewhere within easy walk of our place.

  Keeping Samuel away from the Macaulay's house would require some military strategy.

  It would have been a brilliant plan if it hadn't involved math.

  I spent the rest of that Saturday gathering supplies, so I headed out after dark to set everything up. I figured I had to establish a perimeter around the backside of the Macaulay shack, which would be the most direct way for Samuel to sneak up on them. Any car on the drive would be too loud. So, I snuck a full reel of fishing wire from Darrel Craigshead's garage, and a pop cap gun from Lewis David's back shed, and I dragged myself through the woods to make a tripwire.

  See, Samuel had this thing about particular loud noises—the pops of guns or firecrackers or car backfires. He'd cover his ears and hunker down and freeze. I figured that I could rig this tripwire and scare him away, and I could do it far enough from the Macaulay house that they might not notice. Turns out that farther away means a bigger perimeter, and big reels of fishing wire aren't so big as they look.

  Also, it's cussed hard work in the dark, in September. My skin was sticky as a swamp.

  I was so busy muttering that I didn't hear Ralph Macaulay till he was five feet away. He had a shotgun in his hands aimed straight at my head.

  "Deborah Kinsey." His mouth gaped. The porch light from his house gleamed off his glasses. "What are you doing out here?"

  Now I'd known Ralph my whole life but barely said more than a grunt. That's because from the very start of kindergarten, when I could barely count to ten, Ralph Macaulay knew his multiplication tables. Since 3rd grade, each afternoon he'd gone to the high school across the way to sit in on the advanced coursework. I hated him long before I hated the rest of his family.