Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Nate smashed his face into his pillow until it hurt, then rolled over again to stare at the ceiling-shadows. He listened to her make another far-away swoop at something, gleeful and quick. Probably an owl. She always went after brown owls when she could find them. It was a vivid picture to him, her dropping free out of the air to snatch things into her claws or beak, But so was the frenzied screaming picture of her being held down while Eric or Jackson took handfuls of feathers, or took a ride, and Dash laughed and threw clods of dirt and wine cooler bottles, and Nate did nothing.

  But she wouldn’t hold still for it like that, would she? There was always that funnier, fainter, more horrible picture of the big cat in her suddenly rearing up and deciding she’d had enough, that she wasn’t going to tolerate strangers…Nate laughed. The puke came back up in his mouth. He rolled over again.

  He would have to make the party part, the fun, tromping camping-trip part all there was. He’d have to lead them off into some different woods, some bigger woods (he didn’t know where) where they could all laugh loud, and drink, and whack trees with sticks, and make a campfire out of piles of leaves, and roast the random things they found in their pockets, and no one would even remember what it was they were supposed to be looking for. Other kids in class seemed to be able to do this sort of thing all the time, without thinking or planning. The bright, lazy adventure that wasn’t meant to end up anywhere or accomplish anything. That was what kids without Griffins in their backyards did with all their Saturdays.

  But Eric wouldn’t forget, Nate knew. He’d come into the woods grinning wide, expecting not to find her. And when he didn’t find her, it would be the beginning of a very long joke, and the end of everything else. From then on, whatever he said, whatever he did, there would only ever be one thing to talk about. It would be worse than Princess Zelda. Longer, and worse.

  Nate laughed a burbling laugh, and choked on it, and laughed again and choked. He kept laughing, and kept choking, until he got up out of bed and puked, a real, great big awful puke in the bathroom sink. Then, he went to lie down again, and stared some more at the ceiling.

  ***

  He must have fallen asleep, because he woke, shivering in his sweat, to the soupy grey light of morning. He lay there, shivering, listening to a big-lunged bird pipe out a long, low scrap of song. When his alarm clock went off, he let it ring, and ring, until his mom came in to see what was what, and he told her with genuinely chattering teeth that he didn’t think he could go to school.

  Once she left for work, and the house was nice and empty, Nate began to feel better. He lie half-sleeping in bed for a while, trying to think of nothing, listening to the song of the bird, drawling and persistent and repetitive. Finally, he sat up, shook himself, shook the windowpane to shut the bird up, and went downstairs.

  He sat in a square of sunlight at the kitchen table and ate a whole box of cereal out of a metal mixing bowl. And while he ate, he thought about his griffin. Why had he been so sure how everything would be, last night? Why should he even think she’d let herself be looked at by strangers at all? Didn’t she hide well enough from everybody but him? Probably, he thought, she would just be able to keep her distance. Disappearing here, reappearing there, a strange, enticing furry, feathery flash in the trees. Eric and Jackson and Dash could troop along with their eyes glued to the treetops, hooting and hollering and pointing, while Nate behaved like an expert trapper, finding feathers, and droppings, and telling them which kind of claws were which. That wouldn’t be unsafe at all.

  And even if he did lead them to her. Even if he did. There was no telling what they would do. They might stand there with their mouths open while her cat muscles rippled and her eyes flashed. They might stand there holding their breaths, until Nate stepped forward, and the griffin ate a steak out of his hand. That was just as easy to picture. Nate the lion-tamer. Eric and Jackson and Dash as the audience, eyes and mouths popping, brows up. “Fucking hell!” Eric would say.

  Nate stood up and went to the screen door, smiling out at his woods, for a moment. He mouthed the words over. Fucking hell! Fucking hell, Nate! What, do you have a death wish or something? You’re one crazy mofo!” And then he went to watch TV.

  ***

  It was late in the afternoon when the cordless phone rang.

  Nate forgot to sound sick when he answered it.

  “Hey, Faker, where the hell are you?” said Eric on the other end of the line. At least Nate thought he said Faker.

  “I didn’t go to school today,” said Nate.

  “No shit.”

  “I didn’t sleep,” he added.

  “Well, punch yourself in the face or something. We’re on our way over. We wanna see your bird-lion. You still have one, or did you shoot her and eat her?”

  (There were some snorts and matching cackles behind him, much louder and shriller through the phone).

  “Maybe a different day,” said Nate, licking his lips. “I’m…she’s sleeping already.”

  “Wake the lazy bitch up! Tell her we’ll bring her a whole dead horse, or something!”

  A full minute went by of nothing but laughter, high and distorted. Eric’s voice barely came over the top of it. “…on our way! You still live in the same house, right?”

  And then a click. The call was over.

  Nate swallowed a hard, dry swallow. He exploded out of the screen door toward the woods, the cordless phone still clutched in his sweat-slick hand. His ears pounded. His legs pounded. He breathed in flurries of hot dust and leaves and pollen. I wasn’t serious, he wanted to telegraph to her. I wasn’t really going to let them. I wasn’t.

  But Eric’s words kept coming in over the top of his: Wake the bitch up! Wake the bitch up! Shake her awake!

  He didn’t go in deep to look for her. He planted himself under the first skinny cluster of trees, in a spot where he could see the front door, and waited. When they came, they made noise like a biker gang. The sound of their skateboards on the sidewalk was a long, slow, thundering sound. It didn’t drown out the shouts and whoops and curses. They had brought other kids, like he thought they would. Kids from other schools, and street corners Nate had never even been on.

  The first one he saw was Eric, sliding up to the door, and ringing the doorbell three times. Then three times more. “Wake up, Faker!” Eric hollered up to the bedroom window he thought was Nate’s. “Time to get your ass out here! Time to go lion hunting!”

  There were a bunch of high-pitched laughs. Dash banged on the door with both fists. Then Jackson. Then two or three others. “Get your ass out here! Get your ass out here!” The door screamed a little bit on its hinges.

  Still staring up at the bedroom window, Eric pulled out a cell phone. The cordless phone chirped in Nate’s hand. Nate answered it, quick.

  “Hey, we’re here. Where are you?”

  “Who is this?” swallowed Nate.

  Eric scowled. “It’s Eric, Faker, did you fall back asleep?”

  Nate paused. There was a kid throwing those tiny, sulphery snap-pellets at the ground. The kind you throw at the cat when you want to make it scream.

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” he said, and hung up.

  Eric craned his neck, confused. Nate tensed to stay still. The phone chirped again. Nate picked it up, and hung it up, before Eric could speak. The kid with the snap-pellets, and another one with something plastic under his arm (an airsoft gun?) stretched their necks around the corner, toward the back of the house.

  The phone rang again. Nate let it ring twice, then picked up the call.

  “What the hell’s going on, man?” said Eric, maybe louder than he’d meant to. “Let us in. It’s a hundred-and-fuck degrees out here! Hello?”

  “You better go the fuck home,” said Nate, dead as air. “She’s pissed because you woke her up, like I told you she’d be. If you try to come back here now, she will rip your fucking throats out, I swear to God.”

  And he ended the call.

  It worked. They al
l milled around for a few minutes longer, looking squirmy, and spinning the wheels on their skateboards, and trying not to look too far around the other side of the house. And then Eric shouted “Psycho!” up to the window and skated off, with most of the others following him.

  “They’re all gone,” Nate called out to her. “I didn’t let them past. You can come out, now. If you want.”

  There was a rustle somewhere in a bigger, darker clump of trees. It might’ve been her. Or it might’ve been the wind.

  ***

  That night was still. There weren’t even the regular night-noises at Nate’s window. The shadows were all stationary. He had hours to lie there, and think, and blink, and wait for it to get light outside.

  The next morning, he lied there like a dead person until his mom stopped feeling his forehead and went to work. And then Nate got out of bed and went to the garage. He took two ice cream bars, and two bloody steaks from the freezer in there, and a camping lantern, and an old dirty pup tent from a big jumble of camping equipment. And then he went into his woods. Her woods.

  He went further in than yesterday—to a clump of thick old broken trees he’d seen her scratch her back on before—but not too far to see the front door in case Eric and them decided to come back and hop the wall into the backyard. He set up the pup tent, and sat very still in the open flap, holding one of the steaks out so she’d smell it.

  There was a rustle. He waited. Another rustle. He waited. But then it was completely still again.

  “There’s no one here,” Nate told her, or the breezes. “I didn’t let them.”

  There was a rustle, so far away it could have come from anywhere, so small it could have been anything, and then nothing.

  And nothing, and nothing and nothing. Nate ate one ice cream, and then the other. Inside, the tent got hot, and then cold. And the steaks got hot, and then cold, and then started to stink.

  Eric did come to the front door again, and he and Jackson and Dash skated up and down the sidewalk, and rang the doorbell five or six times. But they didn’t shout, or bang on the door. They just skated up and down, back and forth, with their eyes on the bedroom window, until Eric was satisfied that Nate wasn’t going to come out. And then they thundered away.

  “They’re gone, now.” Nate told her, “and they’re never coming back. So please come out.”

  When all he heard was more of that low, drawling birdsong, Nate crawled miserably into the pup tent and played on his Nintendo DS until he was almost asleep.

  When his mom came home from work that evening and found him in his tent in the backyard playing video games, she told him he was obviously well enough to go to school the next day, and screamed at him for ruining two good steaks.

  Nate didn’t even try to argue with her.

  ***

  It was easy enough to avoid them the first part of the day. There were classes to go to, and at Nutrition, Nate just sat by himself on a bench somewhere and didn’t look at anybody. Probably Eric and all of them were giving him looks from the handball court, but that didn’t matter as long as he sat there pretending he couldn’t see them. Nobody sat next to him. Nobody talked to him. Nobody asked him any questions. He might as well have died, or never existed.

  It wasn’t until hours later, at lunchtime that Jackson finally broke Nate’s barrier of non-existence and came over to where he sat. “So what’s wrong with you, anyway?” he asked.

  Nate looked up from his DS. “What’re you talking about?” he said.

  Jackson blinked aggressively. “You’re full of shit,” he said. “You’re so full of shit, everybody knows it.”

  “About what?”

  “About the other day!”

  Nate looked blank. Jackson’s mouth split into a combative grin. “Stupid-ass story. There’s no half-eagle, half-lion going to tear our throats out. You made that shit up. There’s nothing there.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Nate, twisting out his own smile, “that. I didn’t think you thought I was serious about that.”

  Jackson stared.

  “What, did I scare you or something?” Nate asked him.

  “No,” he snorted. “Was that what you were trying to do, scare people?”

  “I mean, did you think I was serious?”

  “No one thought you were serious,” He said, caustic, and triumphant. “It was a stupid-ass story. I knew there was nothing could eat a dog.”

  And he went back to the handball court, scowling and grinning. For the rest of lunchtime, Dash stared at him with a partly-opened mouth, and Eric watched him with a strange, close look, slamming the same ball over and over again on the same piece of wall.

  Princess Zelda passed by him several times, so many times it had to be on purpose, smiling her smirky smile every time. But Nate had his head in the DS. He could ignore her at least until it ran out of batteries.

  ***

  It was out of batteries by the time Nate made it to the bus stop. He had to stand there on the curb with nothing in his hands, staring straight and hoping that the blonde kid who looked like Eric’s older brother wasn’t Eric’s older brother. So he didn’t even see her coming. She’d been standing there not blinking at him for a crazy long time before he saw her.

  “So what is wrong with you?” she asked him, cheerfully.

  Nate felt like throwing something at her. “Nothing,” he said.

  “I tried to bring you your homework yesterday, but you were asleep in your tent.”

  “Oh,” said Nate. “Sorry.”

  Princess Zelda blinked, finally. “I don’t care if you do your homework. I was trying to see if you were sick or something.”

  “Yeah. Sick.”

  “With what?”

  Nate shrugged.

  Princess Zelda tilted her head at him so that all her pale hair waterfalled off to one side. “She’ll come back, you know,” she said.

  It was a split-second too long before Nate answered. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No, I don’t. She can’t come back, I made her up,” said Nate.

  “She’ll come back,“ Zelda said, and went back to not blinking. Her large, light eyes were brighter up close, one a silvery kind of blue, the other a silvery kind of green.

  She chewed the nail on her left pinkie finger. “Why’d you tell them about her, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” He glared at her. “Why does anyone tell anyone anything?”

  “I mean, why did you tell them about her? They don’t even know what she is. Why didn’t you just tell them something else if you needed a story so bad?”

  Nate sputtered, chewed his lip. “Something else like what?” he asked, finally.

  She shrugged. “Tell them your dad’s a racecar driver who died in a huge car-crash. Tell them you swam with sharks and punched one in the face, just to see if you could. Tell them you saved like, five babies from a burning Baby Gap and that’s why you don’t have to pay for stuff at the mall anymore. Tell them whatever you want. But for God’s sake, Nate, don’t tell them anything that means anything. Don’t tell them anything true.”

  Nate studied her face. He tried to hold her not-blinking.

  “They’re not better than nothing, you know,” she finished suddenly.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her. “No one knows what you’re talking about.”

  Princess Zelda smiled at him, not her little smirky smile, but a wide, laughing one, with bright, slightly crooked teeth. “Anyway, like I said, she’ll come back. She’s still singing for you, right? That’s her I heard singing?”

  And she turned and walked away toward a dry little hedge, where she would probably sit happily not talking to anyone until the bus came.

  Nate watched her for a minute. And then ran all the way home.

  He did not stop running until he’d reached his pup tent. But he didn’t shut himself inside.
He sank to his knees in the leaves and grass, and wispy forest air.

  And listened. And waited.

  Sofie Bird

  http://www.sofiebird.net

  A' is for Alacrity, Astronauts and Grief(Short story)

  by Sofie Bird

  This story was previously published in the anthology TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, released by the small press Zombies Need Brains LLC.

  Becca hadn’t even meant to show Sam the typewriter. It had sat in the crate in the attic with the other things she and Julie had played with as children that their mother, Candice, hadn’t gotten rid of yet. Becca had flown in to Heathrow, thrown her bag on the lower bunk of her childhood room and driven to the hospital to collect her nephew from Candice’s arms.

  She’d had to turn her face away from Julie’s battered face on the bed, unable to look at the tubes and bruises and swelling. The doctor’s prognosis had stuttered through static.

  You know she’s not in there anymore. Becca hadn’t dared say the words. There’s a reason they offered to up the morphine, they just can’t say it. She might wake up, but she’s not coming back.

  Work had given her two weeks’ bereavement leave. A luxury, with the project already overdue. She’d used up two days just getting here, walked out on salvaging six years with Rick with four words that had burned into her mouth like acid. My sister is dying.

  Now she couldn’t even look at her.

  Candice had sat haggard in the only chair next to the bed, Sam hunched and silent in her lap. When Becca lifted him from Candice’s strong grasp, neither of them stirred. She’d driven Sam back to the house in silence and trawled through the attic for something for him to do while she worked out how in the hell you explained to a seven-year-old about comas and car accidents and orphans.

  It would be different if Sam’s father were alive. If Candice had had anyone else to call but the daughter who’d crossed oceans to get away from her. Candice had barely said a word since that phone call, not even when Becca had hired a car against her instructions after twenty-six hours on a plane.

  It would be okay. It would all be okay. Becca hugged her elbows like they could fill the hole in her stomach. Julie’s not going to wake up, how can that be okay?