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

by Anthology

  But she sees: the light fading across his surface, the blanks of his eyes seeking hers. Slowly she rises from the bed, descends the staircase, touches his neck. In his panic he seizes her confusion and her care, pulls hard enough so she must feel it, she jerks back as if burnt—and even when he’s calmed to darkness, until the first light of morning grays the room, she simply sits and stares.

  ***

  The floor shines, its rectangles of sunlit wood glowing unfamiliar gold. Up in the loft Lorenzo’s replenishing trays of snacks and playing ridiculous Italian pop music while Jen, dressed up in a loose wool shift and high heels, greets visitors below.

  Their curious faces flick in and out of Dan's sight. Most only stare; a few touch, surreptitiously; others read his title and mutter opinions to each other, coo compliments and questions to Jen. Over and over she explains tools and methods, talks about the marble, its type and size and weight, its odd shape that gave her the idea of a figure reaching out, pulling itself free of the stone. Like Orpheus out of the underworld, she says to those who ask. Trying to preserve love against death.

  “Classical subject for a classical stone, right?” she says, several times throughout the day, and rests her hand on his shoulder, where her tension burns in heavy lines, belying her smiling exterior. Dan sends her images of herself intent and haloed in the sunstruck dust, sings her the little tune that she hums without thinking when they're alone; her nervous energy soaks into him, and she calms, lets go. She has to explain the other works, too, the smaller figures in wood and stone. But they can’t comfort her, and she returns, always, to him.

  When the evening's settling, the last visitors leaving, a narrow, sparse-haired woman appears. Her gaze travels the length of Dan’s arm, into his half-submerged chest, over his polished forehead and eyes. Her skin’s porous, hanging from her cheekbones like slack dough; her eyes blur in the magnification of thick lenses.

  "Can I answer any questions for you?" Jen asks, as if presenting a menu.

  The woman rubs her lips with bone fingers, twists to appraise Jen. “This marble. What do you know about it?”

  “Oh—the Venato. I got it through an estate sale. A former professor of mine—”

  “Richard Ulster’s estate?”

  “Yes—did you know him?”

  “My former professor, too. But it’s not Venato.”

  Jen's professional hospitality thins. “Actually I’m quite certain it is.”

  “But it wasn’t labeled.”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then you don’t know. But I’ve worked in this marble before, and I do. Now Miss…”

  “Um. Esti. Look, I’m not sure why you think I—”

  “You've lost weight."

  “Excuse me?” Jen’s voice sharpens. Lorenzo turns off the music, drags aside the curtain concealing the lofted bedroom.

  But the woman continues: “I work with a geologist now. He’ll buy it. What’s the price?”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “You’ve been sick, haven’t you? Do you know why?”

  “My health is not your business,” Jen says, but her anger’s a weak flare, damped by confusion.

  “Listen,” the woman says. “I made one. I kept it. For three years I fed it. I know.”

  Jen’s silent, watching Dan’s face, the still white surface of his eyes.

  “You’re the host. You're feeding it and without you it falls apart. It crumbles. In two months it’ll be dust."

  The planes of his face—all those careful hours spent polishing his cheekbones smooth—his hand, so nearly perfect, the long fingers eternally releasing. The chisel-marked shadows of his throat.

  “We take it, we study it until it’s done. We’ll give you twice your cost. You can make another one. In Venato.”

  “Get out,” Jen snaps.

  “It’s a parasite—”

  “Get out.”

  “Okay!” Lorenzo’s voice comes calming down the stairs. “We’re closing now, right?”

  The woman looks at Dan again, her lips wrinkled tight. For a second he can feel her mind, not warm like Jen’s, but sharp and acid like vinegar. In it there’s a picture: a woman, skeletal and still, caged in the brittle-stretched curve of marble arms.

  Jen, he calls, bewildered.

  She turns, reaches without thinking, and the woman slaps her hand down. “Don’t touch it.”

  “Hey hey hey, don’t do that,” Lorenzo says, alarmed, but the woman’s stepping back, retreating.

  “I’m leaving my card here,” she says. “Keep it. Call me when you need to. You will need to. Sooner is better, Miss Esti.”

  The door closes, leaving the studio quiet in her wake. Jen’s staring at Dan, her cheeks flushed. In her right hand she’s holding her left, rubbing its startled surface.

  Lorenzo takes her arm. “Jenny, I don’t understand—"

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t either. Let’s go somewhere. Get some dinner. I’m hungry.”

  “Sure, where—”

  “Your place. Okay?”

  Jen’s already got her jacket and her purse, and even as Lorenzo’s asking shouldn’t they clean up, she’s halfway down the hall, leaving him to close the door.

  ***

  Days and days. Even the sun is muted now, diffused through clouds, and the windows rattle against the gusts of winter. He’s never been so cold. Cracks shiver open, convulsed along faultlines. Everything’s aching. Everything dims.

  Aside from a brief visit from Lorenzo, who came to clean Jen’s kitchen and gather her things, the studio’s been silent, full of shadows and still forms: the bodiless hands, polished wooden birds trapped in flight, stones of all colors warped into stylized shapes. If any of them hear or feel there’s no sign; they’re even colder than he is.

  So when she comes, finally, after all these days—as few as four, as many as forty, he can’t tell—he can feel her outside, at a distance, as an eye trapped in absolute darkness might detect even the faintest light, unsure at first, suspecting some wishful hallucination, some cruel trick of the mind as it’s breaking. He’s too cold to call, can’t waste what little energy he has left. But as she approaches, her warmth grows—in the entry, up the stairs, in the hallway. Outside the door where she hesitates, fumbles with keys before fitting one to the lock. It’s evening, and on the windowglass reflects the open rectangle of light, her figure framed within and then closed into the darkness. This close she’s more like a fire.

  She passes quickly, crouches in the shadow behind the utility light as she searches her shelves.

  Jen.

  “I know,” she answers. Tools chink and thump together. She stands. “I know, Dan. And you can’t help it. I mean, can you see—she showed me pictures—”

  And he can, in her mind, he can see them, too: flesh and stone depleted, twisted and crumbling in their final embrace, human eyes closed and shrunk into sockets, marble mouths broken wide—in mourning or in hunger, it’s impossible to tell.

  “So it’s not really—not like a choice.”

  Jen steps into sillhouette, her hands hidden inside boxy work gloves. In her right she’s holding her largest mallet. In her left her pitching tool, made for roughing out shapes, removing large chunks of rock quickly.

  “And she said it hurts, the cracks—like when teeth crack, so I—” She rubs her eyes against her forearm. “So I decided to do it myself.”

  At that he stretches, with his last reserve of energy, not to call or beg or feed, but only to feel her: as if he could raise his hand, feel the tremble of her lip, the flutter of her eyelid under his fingers—her own fingers, remade by her. And with his effort they shine, a blue light that warms and concentrates in the tips, briefly illuminates her face and its thin stripes of tears. Even without touching, he can feel the dream nascent in her, the one she’ll have tonight, for the first of many nights, for the rest of her life: Galatea, shining warm and marble white, naked as spring sunshine in the newness of her love.
>
  A crack deep in his wrist, a shudder of pain that echoes through all his empty pores; the light goes out.

  The determined line of Jen’s mouth quivers before she snaps a dust mask over her face. She sets the pitching tool at the base of his hand, above the new fracture; she raises the mallet.

  Unlike creation, this work is done fast.

  Allison Mulder

  http://allisonmulder.wordpress.com

  Decay(Short story)

  by Allison Mulder

  Originally published in Crossed Genres Magazine

  He slipped over the sill of the open window, his toes clicking on the hardwood floor before he quickly stepped to the carpet.

  He had crept through many windows, but this was one was new to him. A new house. A new room, though it looked like many others. Glowing plastic stars were stuck to the ceiling, and toys were strewn across the floor too densely to walk around without care.

  He chose not to take the trouble. His feet hovered a few inches above the stuffed animals and toy train tracks as he drifted toward the bed on the right side of the room.

  In the bed, a lump under the Buzz Lightyear covers swelled and diminished. A patch of brown hair was visible at the very edge of the sheets, on the very corner of the pillow. A good sign; many lumps tended to make the space under their pillow as accessible as they could. But the most promising ones were always lolling half-off the bed with their necks twisted at odd angles, as if to get as far as possible from the thing that had come out of their mouth.

  The tooth fairy stood above the bed, watching the lump rise and fall, then slipped his hand under the pillow and coaxed the tooth from its resting place. He held it up to the faint light of the green spaceship nightlight, but that wasn’t the real test. Not every tooth was a seed tooth, not one in a thousand, maybe one in a million. But when he found one, it was easy enough to know it for what it was.

  He pulled the covers back from the lump’s face and cradled the tooth in his palm. He brought his hand closer and closer to the mouth gaped with sleep and held it there, so close the moisture in the child’s breath fogged on the tooth fairy’s skin. The tooth turned, like a magnet toward its twin, and gave the slightest twitch toward the parted lips.

  The tooth fairy clapped his hand over the seed tooth—the lump never stirred—and knelt on the toy-littered floor. He moved the seed tooth two and a half feet down from its former resting place, to the floor beneath the bedframe. He adjusted its position, thought, then wedged it upright between a slim crack in the flooring. Then he opened his own mouth and removed one of the gleaming quarters he kept on his tongue, wiping it off on the bedspread though there was no need. The metal was dry.

  The quarters came from other houses—the ones where parents made the switch before he got there, robbing him of potential seed teeth. He stole the coins and left them at other houses because it encouraged the legend to continue. It kept teeth from going into the trash before he’d had a chance to look at them. It kept kids opening their windows, even if he didn’t really need them to.

  He jabbed the quarter beneath the pillow and the lump’s head lolled further on its side. Its teeth glinted in the night light’s gleam, and the tooth fairy’s finger drifted forward to draw the jaw down and touch a likely canine. Sometimes more than one seed came from the same mouth, and that was always grand. They grew so fast, building off each other, strengthening hour by hour. It would be so much faster to pluck out all the teeth on each trip.

  But no. The stories would die too quickly, the teeth would go in the trash.

  Kneeling again, he moved the quarters into his cheek with the ease of habit and whispered to the seed tooth. Just a few words.

  Then he left by the window, closed it behind him, and drifted down to the front yard.

  ***

  The next house on his nightly rounds was fifty miles away. If he’d taken the sheltered and shadowed routes, he could have been there in ten minutes.

  Instead, he walked like a man through the city streets, past late-night walkers and staggering drunks, past those who didn’t know or care when most people should have been asleep.

  Tonight, he would walk, at least part of the way. It was probably the last time he’d walk like this, and he wanted a reminder of what it felt like. Also, his mood was too good; he needed to prepare for the end of the night, and he couldn’t do that while being pleased about the new seed tooth. He’d been pushing the anger down for so long, a forgettable ache, but that wouldn’t do tonight. He had to remember. It was almost time.

  The tooth fairy walked through the busiest part of the crowd, and people only glanced at him when their shoulders brushed his own, when their jackets rustled and their buttons scraped against his smooth skin. They’d look his direction for a moment, then continue on their way. Sometimes, they turned and walked away from him in a perfectly straight line, taking long steps out of their way before veering back toward their original intentions. Every averted glance was a drill through his core, a spark igniting his temper, and he embraced the anger that flooded through him.

  It wasn’t that they couldn’t see him.

  It wasn’t that he blended in.

  He wore nothing. He carried no tools. The only thing he brought on his rounds were the quarters, and those were held in his mouth, on his tongue, the metal bitter in the back of a throat meant only for speech, not for swallowing. His bare feet on the sidewalk were loud as a dog’s nails on linoleum, and gashed the concrete with scratches that closed up again, one by one, behind him. Even the physical world did not acknowledge him enough to be marked by him.

  He was in the crowd’s midst, and he did not belong, and they rejected him the way the body rejects water in the lungs: reflexively, without a conscious thought.

  The anger built and ate away at him with each averted gaze, and he let it, clenching his jaws around the coins in his mouth so that sounds like grinding stones filled the air. Once, his hand strayed forward just as it had to touch the lump’s tooth, and it grabbed the front of a man’s coat. The man blinked rapidly, raising an arm as if to fight a strong wind, though the gale affected no one around him.

  The tooth fairy relaxed his grip, and the man backed up to get away from him. But their eyes never met. The man never looked straight at him. The man hadn’t seen how close a hard, hooked finger had come to the veins in his neck.

  That was the only way to leave a lasting mark: to spill all the life from them at once, so fast and so sudden that they pumped the blood from their veins before the wound had time to close. There was no coming back from a killing, no matter how strongly the world rejected his actions. It would be so, so easy now—

  “Hey.”

  As usual, it took a moment to process when someone was speaking to him.

  He turned to find one of his kind perched at the base of a fountain, water streaming down his shoulders, the disturbance in the water flow going unnoticed as their kind always went unnoticed. He didn’t look familiar, but that meant nothing; routes only crossed each other occasionally, often by accident. Only once had the tooth fairy been in a large group of them. The memory wasn’t unpleasant, but the results had been…chaotic. Disorganized. Less efficient.

  “I nearly thought you were going to do it,” the other tooth fairy said, rising. Water slipped off him more quickly than it would off most things, and he left no damp footprints as he walked up. “It’s almost your time, isn’t it?”

  Not yet, the tooth fairy reminded himself.

  “Soon,” he said aloud. “Tonight.”

  The other one nodded. “You have successors yet, to take the route?” He looked young, like he’d only just taken over for his predecessor.

  “One.” Or he would have one, by the end of the night. “What brings you here?”

  The other one uncurled his fist to reveal seven gleaming teeth, still and plain, one silvered with fillings. “Duds. Triplets on a farm. Lots of teeth to check, but disposing of them…”

  He turned and absent-minde
dly tossed the teeth into the crowd, easily as if he were tossing bread to pigeons.

  “It’s more fun with lots of people around.”

  They watched with faint smirks as a woman paused on the sidewalk, digging around in her scarf and then holding something up to a streetlight. She shrieked and threw the human tooth away from her, clawing her scarf free to check for more. The process repeated itself several times in mere moments.

  They acknowledged that at least.

  “I’m leaving,” the other one said when the stirrings had stopped. He glanced at the older tooth fairy one last time before melting into the shadow ways. The last thing left behind was his voice. “Don’t build up the anger too soon.”

  That’s right. He’d gotten carried away, thinking of blood already. The night was early yet. There was plenty left to do.

  The secret ways brought him to the next house moments later, and the familiar exterior calmed him. The interior was even more familiar, the same books on the same shelves and the same butterfly border on the wall even though the girl in the room was almost too old for them now. The girl herself sprawled on top of her sheets, one leg hanging off the bed, completely mindless of the thing she’d put under her pillow years and years ago. She was a lump, too, but a lump that didn’t realize it was missing something. A lump that lived like it was more than a lump.

  The tooth fairy knelt by the side of the bed and put his head to the floor, observing the garden of teeth that sprawled across the carpet mere inches from the girl’s foot. Not that she would have been able to see it.

  Not ready yet, but growing well; the heaps of teeth swelled as he watched, leaning from side to side like teetering stalagmites, unstable where they sprouted from decay-ridden bases. Canyons of rot laced the main body of the teeth. Teeth on teeth, growing like a cancer, growing off the tops, the sides, crowding in from below. Some of them already pricked the bottom of the mattress.

  But it wasn’t ready yet.

  He leaned close and whispered heated things under his breath, things too quiet and repulsive for the child above to hear, over and over and over again.