by Larry Niven
Christopher advanced on me, his hands looking like claws.
“You leave Carol out of this,” he hissed. “Look, Matt. You’ve got one choice. Turn yourself around and never come back this way again. If you do, I will know, and I will stop you. I sent you back once, I can send you forward too.”
“Against my will?”
“Damn right, against your will.”
“I wonder what He would have to say about that,” I said.
Just then the light for 15 popped on, and the door came open.
The Nechronomator turned and watched himself saunter out of his condo, boxers disheveled and a long-necked beer in his hand.
“What the fuck?”
Young Chris’s eyes focused on his older, dead self, and it was like a silent lightning bolt passed in the air between them.
“Chris,” I yelled from my chair, “I’ve got to talk to you! You’ve got to call off the climbing trip! You’ve got to—”
The Nechronomator spun and lunged for me. I reflexively rolled my chair in reverse. Just as Chris’s dead hands reached for me, the chair caught on the curb at the end of the sidewalk and flipped over. I slammed hard on my back and toppled out, the Nechronomator hitting the chair’s legs and pitching over me. Dead, brittle bones crunched as he came down in a heap. With my arms—made strong over forty years of wheeled effort—I righted myself and ignored the pain where my head had impacted the asphalt.
Young Chris had jogged out and knelt by me.
“Are you okay, man? I should call the cops.”
“Chris,” I wheezed, “listen to me. Sunday, you and I are going on a trip up the canyon. You’ve got to call it off. I’m going to break my back when I fall. Don’t let me convince you otherwise.”
“Jesus … Matt? What’s going on? You look—”
Dead Chris rose up from where he’d fallen, left leg and arm twisted grotesquely. He shouldn’t have been able to stand at all. Whatever he was tapping from the After, it was potent stuff.
“Desist!”
Young Chris looked like he was going to throw up, and took a few steps backward.
“Oh my God, what is this?” he said.
“It’s me,” I said to young Chris. “Remember the talk we had about you and Carol? She wanted you both to be back in church. For the baby. She’s right.”
“Chris?”
Carol stood in the doorway of the condo, her nightgown wrapped tightly around her very-pregnant abdomen. Casey was about six months, give or take. I remembered that his birthday always came around Thanksgiving. Shit, he would be a handful by the time he was ten.
Young and dead Chris both looked at his current/former wife.
When Carol saw the Nechronomator, she screamed and backed into the wall behind her, hand up to her mouth.
I turned and looked up at my dead friend. His mouth had drawn open, gaping inhumanly wide. Dead eyes were rolled back into their sockets and a rising groan had begun in his throat. Not air being pushed out, but air being drawn in. His chest was expanding like a balloon, and the groan quickly rose to a howl. A satanic, hair-raising howl that made the windows rattle. I felt an electric charge flow over my skin and though the asphalt.
Something was changing. Had changed.
I waited, turning back once to see Carol clutched to Chris’s chest.
“Stay together, dammit!” I yelled as loudly as I could.
Then everything vanished at once.
* * *
It was almost midnight when Chris pounded on my door. Nancy and I had been relaxing after a good, long, end-of-the-week screw, and she was dozing on the bed. I threw on my terrycloth bathrobe and went to the door to find Chris and Carol fully-dressed and looking worried.
I invited them in, woke Nancy, and we talked over cans of soda.
I wanted to say Chris was crazy. I wanted to tell him I didn’t think the joke was very funny. Only, I couldn’t make myself believe that he was joking. And with Carol there as an eye witness—serious Carol, who had never pulled a prank in her serious life—the air was stone-cold sober.
Suffice to say, I grudgingly let us cancel the climbing trip. In fact, we never did go climbing again. Chris wouldn’t hear of it. Kept telling me how horrified he was to see me in the wheelchair.
Nancy and I were present for Casey’s baptism.
When Chris and Carol moved back east for the university job, Nancy and I followed.
By the time Casey was in high school Chris and I both had tenure.
We had good lives, the two of us.
Chris was a grandpa six times over when Carol finally went. It was Alzheimer’s. Ripped Chris in two to see her go out like that, but we were both glad when it was over. Chris had helped me through Nancy’s passing a few years before, and I wasn’t surprised to see Chris in my living room, day after day, in the weeks following Carol’s.
We talked about God a lot in those final days. A couple of odd ducks in our department at the U. I still have the photo from when Chris debated Dawkins on the quadrangle. I’d thought they were going to punch each other out, they were so angry. We wondered what it would be like, when we crossed over. If we crossed over. Neither of us spoke much of that night anymore, when Chris and Carol showed up and told me the story. Sometimes I still wonder if it wasn’t just in Chris’s imagination. But Carol had remained firmly convinced, to her deathbed. She’d said she’d never forget watching the zombie swell up like a bloated deer, then pop into nothingness with a flash like that of a camera bulb. Disabled, older me had vanished too, though the wheelchair had remained behind. Chris still had it in his garage on the day he died, and weeks later when I went over with his kids to begin cleaning things out, I found the wheelchair.
It was covered in dust, and rusty.
Chris had died on April 22, 2016.
The peeling manufacturer’s label on the chair said 2018.
I peeled the sticker off, put it in my pocket, and told Chris’s kids to send the chair to Goodwill.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 7
Copyright © 2014 by Brad R. Torgersen. All rights reserved.
Today I Am Nobody
by Tina Gower
I am Amber when I see him again. I wake with auburn hair and green eyes, freckles across my skin, and decide to be Amber. The name fits the face in the mirror, and all day I do Amber things. Amber would love picking daisies in the meadow behind the reservation. Amber would wear her hair in two French braids. Amber would have a boyfriend with blond hair and one unruly lock that covers his left eye. When I see him, that perfect boy for Amber, I want him.
He works in the village, on the dusty grimy road that leads from the reservation to the back of the tannery. I am able to watch him scraping a hide for sale because he does not know Amber. He knew Rose. When I was Rose, I had olive skin with black hair. The roses were budding and I put one in my hair.
“How long will you be in town?” he had asked.
“Only until the roses bloom,” I said. Truthfully, I didn’t know then how quickly I would shed and change and become a new girl. The shaman didn’t tell me how the medicine would work.
The corners of the boy’s mouth twitched and his smile fell flat. “That’s too bad. I like dark-skinned brunettes. Everyone in town is blond.”
Amber doesn’t have dark skin, so today I only watch while the young man (who is perfect for Amber) hangs the skins to dry. I hear wagon wheels squeak into the village with supplies from the East. The traders bring tea and preserves, waxes for candles when the long nights come. One trader hands a package of sweets to a girl my age. Her name is Nola. She will always be Nola, poor thing. The other girls do not recognize me anymore, although they knew me once.
* * *
I walk home and cut through the glen. My hand skims along the wild grains and I pick one to chew absently. When I reach my tent by the creek, my pots and pans are scattered, my food supply is shredded and strewn along the bank.
I’m cleaning the mess when I hear the grum
ble of a bear. He swipes his paw at me before I see him, and I fall to the ground. The gravel smashes into my elbows and knees. The smell of pine and dust brings me to my senses. He swings at me again, and his paw leaves a scrape down my leg.
The injury burns. My breath is frozen in my chest and my palms are damp with sweat. I clutch a cast iron skillet and, with no other weapon, throw it at his head. While he rubs his face with a paw, I scamper and trip my way to the tallest pine and climb. He paces below.
My skin tingles and I feel an itch. The sensation multiplies until it’s like a thousand insects burrowing into me. My skin peels. A wave of nausea crashes into me like the river against the rocks a few feet away. The change is happening too quickly. I hug the trunk, panting. A clump of Amber’s hair falls to the bear. He bats at it and sniffs. Pieces of Amber melt away. When Amber is gone, the bear is gone, too.
I crawl back to the ruined tent and look in my mirror. A crack runs down the middle, but I can still see my new face in the reflection. I’m still pale, but my freckles are gone and I have blond hair.
The shaman’s medicine doesn’t work. I’m only half tribe and half white. Maybe I should never have agreed to the medicine. I don’t fit in either world.
I stay at my campground on the reservation for the next few days. A blond will not do. The tanner sees too many blonds. “Everyone in town is blond,” he told Rose. I spend the time cleaning the mess from the bear.
* * *
Today I am Mia. My skin looks like porcelain and my eyelids look swollen. I have straight black hair. I run to the village to watch the young man in the tannery. Mia should have a boyfriend who works at the tannery, but he doesn’t look at her. I am not Rose.
“Can I help you, Miss?” He asks.
“My name is Mia.”
“Can I help you, Mia?” His eyes never leave the saddle he is brushing.
“No,” I say, because I know now I’m not who he is looking for today.
I leave a rose for him at the table. The last one of the season. I watch him from a safe spot outside the window. He never touches the rose. I go back the next day and the next, but the rose doesn’t move from its spot. It wilts and dries. One day it is gone.
* * *
The bear comes to me in a dream and when he lifts his face I see the shaman. Her grey hair blends into the white patch of hair on the bear’s neck and it is as if she is holding the bear up for me to see.
“I’ve brought you a bear,” she says.
“I don’t need a bear. I need friends, people to talk to. I’m lonely, and your medicine does not work.”
She moves around me to light a fire and the bear flops to the ground like a pile of the tanner’s skins. “Animal medicine takes a long time to work.”
The wood smokes for a minute before the first flames lick the chilly night air. The pines that surround the campsite glow, but the forest beyond remains black.
“I asked for someone to love me and accept me. I didn’t ask for animal medicine,” I say.
My voice sounds muffled. My lips feel smashed against my teeth. I’m confused to find I’m talking into my arm. I rise and blink in the darkness of my tent. Outside the campfire smokes as if a fire was lit and died hours ago.
* * *
Today I am Abigail. My skin is so dark it’s black. My hair is also black, but curly and coarse. The tanner notices Abigail. His eyes follow me around the tannery, but his shoulders are tense, his lips are turned down in a frown. I finger a design on a small leather bag for sale. It is of a rose.
“Put that down.” His hand is gripping a hammer so tight his knuckles are white. “That is not for you. Put that down.”
He stomps towards me and I fumble the bag back to the display and run to the reservation. My heart beats so hard my throat hurts. My fingers feel numb where I held the bag meant for me. No, I remember, now. The tanner is correct; it’s not for me. It’s for Rose.
* * *
Today I am nobody.
I do nothing. I sit and let the sounds of the creek drown out my thoughts. The leaves fall and regrow many times while I am nobody, doing nothing things. Every morning I am not Rose I am nobody. Some days I do not even check my mirror, searching for her.
* * *
The roses are in bloom today, and I gather a few supplies to trade in town. Wild herbs and berries overflow in my baskets. The tanner is selling his hides two booths down from me. He stops for a moment to pick through my selection, and finds a few herbs to his liking. The sun streams through his blond hair, and I see one strand of silver. When he smiles I expect to feel warmth, but there is none. I wonder as he walks away who I am today. I never looked in the mirror.
* * *
Today, I am Amber again. If I can be Amber then I can be Rose. I’m excited to discover this, and I dance around my camp. Maybe the medicine is working. Maybe I can force my body to change like I did with the bear. Maybe I can find a way to stay Rose.
I make plans.
* * *
“Girl of many faces,” the shaman called me. I walk the line between worlds. I schooled in the village, and the girls complimented me for my hand at mixing herbs to make pleasing scents, but no one bought them. In the reservation the women relied on me to plant the seeds for the next harvest, but criticized me for not planting in rows. Liked by all and loved by none. I was invisible in my efforts and visible only in my failures. So I became whatever people wanted me to be, and still nobody loved me. The shaman promised me the attention I deserved.
“You try to please everyone and you please no one, not even yourself,” she said, and handed me a mirror. “The animal spirits have chosen to heal you and retrieve a lost part of your soul.”
Then the day came when the people of the reservation moved to the South to follow the seasons. The shaman said I should stay behind and wait for my spirit animal’s medicine.
The day after they left, I awoke to see Rose. Her hair shone a rich black-cocoa, not like my dull light brown. Her figure curved like a road that moves with the land, not like my straight narrow lines that short-cut to the ground.
I thought the spirit animals had made me into the woman I was meant to be. I thought the medicine had worked. But then I became sick: my skin peeled, my hair fell, and the part of me I thought of as “Rose”—the part of me I would learn to be—wilted away.
* * *
Today I am finally Rose.
My hands tremble. This makes the basket quiver and the herbs shake. To be Rose, I jumped from a cliff by the river. After a dozen times and a dozen girls, fear of the height no longer changed me. I had to find a new danger. I fought a wolf, a badger, and thieves along the road. In the end, nothing scared me more than never being Rose again. She crept into me in my sleep.
I look in the broken mirror to be sure, but it’s true. I am finally Rose.
I head straight to town, herb basket in hand. I do not stop until I’m at the tannery.
He brushes the skin of an animal and sees Rose.
“Hello,” he says, smiling. “Can I help you?”
I smile and take a breath. I can finally give him back his Rose. I try to remember Rose. How did she smile? How did she hold her body? How did she speak? Was it soft or loud?
“I am Rose,” I say.
He frowns. “Do I know you?”
The answer catches on my tongue. He looks at me, his forehead wrinkles, his eyelids lower to slits. He doesn’t recognize Rose.
“I’m sorry, your name doesn’t sound familiar,” he says. “Do you have a request to place? I’m afraid I don’t have any orders for Rose.”
For the first time I notice the lines on his face around his mouth. When I come into town he is always here.
I nod, my voice deserting me. I want to hide and not be Rose. The tanner doesn’t know Rose anymore.
He doesn’t know me. He never knew me.
* * *
When I arrive the camp is a mess. The bear has returned and shredded my tent beyond repair.
; That night I sleep in the rain, huddled under a few gathered branches. The tanner is gone to me, so I wonder who I am supposed to be. I plant herbs for the harvest and find no pleasure in it. I gather a few seasonal plants to make tea and find no pleasure in that either.
The only thing that brings me pleasure is watching the rain drain into the river, and speculating where it leads. I’m soaked in water. I’m connected to the water and the water to the river and the river to the ocean, and I feel relief to be part of something.
* * *
Today I am me. I do not know my hair color or the tone of my skin.
I’ve always wanted to see the ocean, so I pack. I’ve wanted to see the leaves turn in the valleys below the mountain. I’m planning things I’ve never planned before because I didn’t know my life was my own. I feel whole; the animal medicine is working.
I stop by the tannery on my way out of town and leave a gift.
I peek through the window before turning away, and I see him glance in the broken mirror. I wonder who he will see. What animal will the spirits bring to the tanner?
The road out of town is damp from a mist of rain over the night. I walk until my feet are tired, and then I rest. I stare into the sky, finding shapes in the clouds. I see a rabbit. When I look again it’s a dog, then a cow with horns, and, last, a bear. I fall asleep gazing at the clouds, assured that when I wake, no matter what shape or color I wear, I will still be me.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 2
Copyright © 2013 by Tina Gower. All rights reserved.
God Walks Into a Bar
by Larry Niven
Sixth Principle’s shortboat dropped down the sky, lightning curling around its squat conical shape, and settled in Mount Forel’s icy foothills. This was a bigger vehicle than most I’d seen. A newsman and two anthropologists at the bar, all human, watched gape-jawed.
I started a load of glasses and test tubes in the dishwasher. I’d seen all this before.