New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  “So Bowery is two blocks that way, and the Hell’s Angels club is on the next street over,” Doug said, leading the way to the townhouse next door.

  “Looks small,” Hyde said, and he did have to duck his head to get through the front door, but inside the ceilings were ten feet. He stamped his foot experimentally. “What is this stuff?”

  “Brazilian hardwood,” the selling broker said faintly, staring up at Hyde with rabbit-wide eyes.

  “Maybe let’s take a look at the kitchen,” Doug said, encouragingly. “Do you have an offering sheet?”

  “Uh, yeah,” the broker said, still staring as he backed up slowly. “Right—this way—”

  “All right, now this is fucking something,” Hyde said approvingly, coming into the kitchen. There was a long magnetic strip mounted on the wall with five or so chef ’s knives stuck onto it. He picked off a cleaver and tossed it casually in his hand as the broker edged around him, pointing out the Miele appliances.

  “And granite countertops, as requested,” Doug added.

  “Let’s see the bathroom,” Hyde said. He didn’t leave the cleaver behind.

  The master bath on the second floor had a big soaking tub and another small apparition hanging around outside the window, staring in with miserable empty eyes that spoke of endless despair and horrors beyond the grave. “Get lost,” Hyde told it, and it disappeared.

  “So, the uh, the third floor ceilings,” the broker said, stumbling over his words as they came out back to the staircase, “—a little lower, I’m not sure—”

  “Maybe we could have Mr. Kell take a look?” Doug suggested to Hyde. “Assuming that you like the place so far.”

  Hyde looked around and said, “Yeah, this is decent. But make sure that asshole doesn’t try to negotiate.” He gave his toothy grin to the selling broker, who shrank away. “I’ll handle that part.”

  “Sure,” Doug said, and Hyde’s smile and shoulders curled in on themselves, and Kell was there, wobbling a little in his suddenly too-large clothing.

  He looked around uncertainly and said, “I—I’m not sure. The front windows, on the street—anyone could see inside—”

  “Why don’t we go upstairs,” Doug said, shepherding him onto the third floor.

  Kell paused about halfway up as the built-in bookcases came into view before continuing up. “Well, those are nice,” he said.

  “And the windows look on the cemetery back here,” Doug said. “Of course, I realize it’s a little inconvenient,” he added, and Kell looked at him. “Since Mr. Hyde won’t be able to get up to this floor.”

  “Oh,” Kell said. “Oh.”

  Doug shook the selling broker’s hand as they left the house. “Will you be around later?” he said.

  “Um,” the broker said, “could you—maybe not give my number to—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Doug said. “I’ll handle going between.” The other broker looked relieved. “The seller is totally negotiable,” he added, throwing a look at the cemetery. A gardener was busy nearby, spraying a thin clutching revenant hand that was struggling out of an old grave.

  “Who is the seller?” Doug asked, watching.

  “Investment banker,” the broker said.

  Doug dropped Kell off and took the cab the rest of the way back to the office. Tom had just gotten back, beaming, with celebratory lattes. “What’s this for?” Doug said.

  “We need to order new photos for Tudor City,” Tom said, and showed them the little video clip off his cameraphone. Doug squinted at it: the wall was still moving, but—

  “Are those butterflies?” Jennifer said.

  “Twenty-three varieties, some of them endangered,” Tom said. “I used the catalog from the exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.”

  “Wow,” Doug said. “Tom, this doesn’t call for new photos, this calls for a relisting.”

  They clinked latte cups, then Jennifer shrugged into her coat. “I have to get to Hunter College, Community Board 8 is having a review meeting for a proposed new building next to the Oryx.”

  “Is Angela still yelling at you about that?” Doug said. “You want me to talk to her? We told her before she bought, there’s pretty much no such thing as a protected view.”

  “No worries,” Jennifer said, over her shoulder. “We’re getting a Fair Housing protest in. There’s a sponsor apartment on the thirteenth floor that would be facing the new development, they’re selling it to the vampire. They’ll have to keep the new building below that height.”

  She stopped short with her hand on the door, though, as a thundering knock hit, and then another. She glanced back at Doug and Tom, then shrugged and pulled it open.

  A giant horse was standing outside in the hall gazing down at them, nostrils flaring, a thin trail of smoke rising from them. Glowing red flames shone in its eyes. There was a small pile of paint flakes and bits of wood in the hallway, where it had knocked with a front hoof. People were sticking their heads out of other offices down the hall to watch.

  “Hi,” the pooka said. “Marvin said you could help me.”

  “Marvin?” Tom said, under his breath.

  “The vampire,” Jennifer said.

  The pooka nodded, mane flopping. “I’m looking for an apartment.”

  They all stood and considered. Jennifer suggested after a moment, “Maybe a ground-floor unit?”

  Tom said, “Or a place with a good freight elevator? There’s the Atlantica—”

  Doug eyed the hooves. Parquet and hardwood were definitely out. Marble tile, maybe. He looked up at the pooka. “So, tell me, how do you feel about Trump buildings?”

  There’s an alley in one of the less-affluent neighborhoods of New York that is really a tiny kingdom with a very strange ruler.

  THE HORRID GLORY OF ITS WINGS

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  “Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said, “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”

  —Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

  My mother doesn’t know about the harpy.

  My mother, Alice, is not my real mom. She’s my foster mother, and she doesn’t look anything like me. Or maybe I don’t look anything like her. Mama Alice is plump and soft and has skin like the skin of a plum, all shiny dark purple with the same kind of frosty brightness over it, like you could swipe it away with your thumb.

  I’m sallow—Mama Alice says olive—and I have straight black hair and crooked teeth and no real chin, which is okay because I’ve already decided nobody’s ever going to kiss me.

  I’ve also got lipodystrophy, which is a fancy doctor way of saying I’ve grown a fatty buffalo hump on my neck and over each shoulderblade from the antiretrovirals, and my butt and legs and cheeks are wasted like an old lady’s. My face looks like a dog’s muzzle, even though I still have all my teeth.

  For now. I’m going to have to get the wisdom teeth pulled this year, while I still get state assistance, because my birthday is in October and then I’ll be eighteen. If I start having problems with them after then, well forget about it.

  There’s no way I’d be able to afford to get them fixed.

  The harpy lives on the street, in the alley behind my building, where the dumpster and the winos live.

  I come out in the morning before school, after I’ve eaten my breakfast and taken my pills (nevirapine, lamivudine, efavirenz). I’m used to the pills. I’ve been taking them all my life. I have a note in my file at school, and excuses for my classmates.

  I don’t bring home friends.

  Lying is a sin. But Father Alvaro seems to think that when it comes to my sickness, it’s a sin for which I’m already doing enough penance.

  Father Alvaro is okay. But he’s not like the harpy.

  The harpy doesn’t care if I’m not pretty. The harpy is beyond not pretty, way into ugly. Ugly as your mama’s warty butt. Its teeth are snaggled and stained piss-
yellow and char-black. Its claws are broken and dull and stink like rotten chicken. It has a long droopy blotchy face full of lines like Liv Tyler’s dad, that rock star guy, and its hair hangs down in black-bronze rats over both feathery shoulders. The feathers look washed-out black and dull until sunlight somehow finds its way down into the grubby alley, bounces off dirty windows and hits them, and then they look like scratched bronze.

  They are bronze.

  If I touch them, I can feel warm metal.

  I’d sneak the harpy food, but Mama Alice keeps pretty close track of it—it’s not like we have a ton of money—and the harpy doesn’t seem to mind eating garbage. The awfuller the better: coffee grounds, moldy cake, meat squirming with maggots, the stiff corpses of alley rats.

  The harpy turns all that garbage into bronze.

  If it reeks, the harpy eats it, stretching its hag face out on a droopy red neck to gulp the bits, just like any other bird. I’ve seen pigeons do the same thing with a crumb too big to peck up and swallow, but their necks aren’t scaly naked, ringed at the bottom with fluffy down as white as a confirmation dress.

  So every morning I pretend I’m leaving early for school—Mama Alice says “Kiss my cheek, Desiree”—and then once I’m out from under Mama Alice’s window I sneak around the corner into the alley and stand by the dumpster where the harpy perches. I only get ten or fifteen minutes, however much time I can steal. The stink wrinkles up my nose. There’s no place to sit. Even if there were, I couldn’t sit down out here in my school clothes.

  I think the harpy enjoys the company. Not that it needs it; I can’t imagine the harpy needing anything. But maybe … just maybe it likes me.

  The harpy says, I want you.

  I don’t know if I like the harpy. But I like being wanted.

  The harpy tells me stories.

  Mama Alice used to, when I was little, when she wasn’t too tired from work and taking care of me and Luis and Rita, before Rita died. But the harpy’s stories are better. It tells me about magic, and nymphs, and heroes. It tells me about adventures and the virgin goddesses like Artemis and Athena, and how they had adventure and did magic, and how Athena was cleverer than Poseidon and got a city named after her.

  It tells me about Zephyrus, the West Wind, and his sons the magical talking horses. It tells me about Hades, god of the Underworld, and the feathers on its wings ring like bronze bells with excitement when it tells me about their mother Celaeno, who was a harpy also, but shining and fierce.

  It tells me about her sisters, and how they were named for the mighty storm, and how when they all three flew, the sky was dark and lashed with rain and thunder. That’s how it talks: lashed with rain and thunder.

  The harpy says, We’re all alone.

  It’s six thirty in the morning and I hug myself in my new winter coat from the fire department giveaway, my breath streaming out over the top of the scratchy orange scarf Mama Alice knitted. I squeeze my legs together, left knee in the hollow of the right knee like I have to pee, because even tights don’t help too much when the edge of the skirt only comes to the middle of your kneecap. I’d slap my legs to warm them, but these are my last pair of tights and I don’t want them to snag.

  The scarf scrapes my upper lip when I nod. It’s dark here behind the dumpster. The sun won’t be up for another half hour. On the street out front, brightness pools under streetlights, but it doesn’t show anything warm—just cracked black snow trampled and heaped over the curb.

  “Nobody wants me,” I say. “Mama Alice gets paid to take care of me.” That’s unfair. Mama Alice didn’t have to take me or my foster brother Luis. But sometimes it feels good to be a little unfair. I sniff up a drip and push my chin forward so it bobs like the harpy swallowing garbage.

  “Nobody would want to live with me. But I don’t have any choice. I’m stuck living with myself.”

  The harpy says, There’s always a choice. “Sure,” I say. “Suicide is a sin.”

  The harpy says, Talking to harpies is probably a sin, too. “Are you a devil?”

  The harpy shrugs. Its feathers smell like mildew. Something crawls along a rat of its hair, greasy-shiny in the street light. The harpy scrapes it off with a claw and eats it.

  The harpy says, I’m a heathen monster. Like Celaeno and her sisters, Aello and Ocypete. The sisters of the storm. Your church would say so, that I am a demon. Yes.

  “I don’t think you give Father Alvaro enough credit.”

  The harpy says, I don’t trust priests, and turns to preen its broken claws.

  “You don’t trust anybody.”

  That’s not what I said, says the harpy—

  You probably aren’t supposed to interrupt harpies, but I’m kind of over that by now. “That’s why I decided. I’m never going to trust anybody. My birth mother trusted somebody, and look where it got her. Knocked up and dead.”

  The harpy says, That’s very inhuman of you. It sounds like a compliment.

  I put a hand on the harpy’s warm wing. I can’t feel it through my glove. The gloves came from the fire department, too. “I have to go to school, Harpy.”

  The harpy says, You’re alone there too.

  I want to prove the harpy wrong.

  The drugs are really good now. When I was born, a quarter of the babies whose moms had AIDS got sick too. Now it’s more like one in a hundred. I could have a baby of my own, a healthy baby. And then I wouldn’t be alone.

  No matter what the harpy says.

  It’s a crazy stupid idea. Mama Alice doesn’t have to take care of me after I turn eighteen, and what would I do with a baby? I’ll have to get a job. I’ll have to get state help for the drugs. The drugs are expensive.

  If I got pregnant now, I could have the baby before I turn eighteen. I’d have somebody who was just mine. Somebody who loved me.

  How easy is it to get pregnant, anyway? Other girls don’t seem to have any problem doing it by accident.

  Or by “accident.”

  Except whoever it was, I would have to tell him I was pos. That’s why I decided I would sign the purity pledge and all that. Because then I have a reason not to tell.

  And they gave me a ring. Fashion statement.

  You know how many girls actually keep that pledge? I was going to. I meant to. But not just keep it until I got married. I meant to keep it forever, and then I’d never have to tell anybody.

  No, I was right the first time. I’d rather be alone than have to explain. Besides, if you’re having a baby, you should have the baby for the baby, not for you.

  Isn’t that right, Mom?

  The harpy has a kingdom.

  It’s a tiny kingdom. The kingdom’s just the alley behind my building, but it has a throne (the dumpster) and it has subjects (the winos) and it has me. I know the winos see the harpy. They talk to it sometimes. But it vanishes when the other building tenants come down, and it hides from the garbagemen.

  I wonder if harpies can fly.

  It opens its wings sometimes when it’s raining as if it wants to wash off the filth, or sometimes if it’s mad at something. It hisses when it’s mad like that, the only sound I’ve ever heard it make outside my head.

  I guess if it can fly depends on if it’s magic. Miss Rivera, my bio teacher sophomore year, said that after a certain size things couldn’t lift themselves with wings anymore. It has to do with muscle strength and wingspan and gravity. And some big things can only fly if they can fall into flight, or get a headwind.

  I never thought about it before. I wonder if the harpy’s stuck in that alley. I wonder if it’s too proud to ask for help.

  I wonder if I should ask if it wants some anyway.

  The harpy’s big. But condors are big, too, and condors can fly. I don’t know if the harpy is bigger than a condor. It’s hard to tell from pictures, and it’s not like you can walk up to a harpy with a tape measure and ask it to stick out a wing.

  Well, maybe you could. But I wouldn’t.

  Wouldn’t it be awful
to have wings that didn’t work? Wouldn’t it be worse to have wings that do work, and not be able to use them?

  After I visit the harpy at night, I go up to the apartment. When I let myself in the door to the kitchen, Mama Alice is sitting at the table with some mail open in front of her. She looks up at me and frowns, so I lock the door behind me and shoot the chain. Luis should be home by now, and I can hear music from his bedroom. He’s fifteen now. I think it’s been three days since I saw him.

  I come over and sit down in my work clothes on the metal chair with the cracked vinyl seat.

  “Bad news?”

  Mama Alice shakes her head, but her eyes are shiny. I reach out and grab her hand. The folded up paper in her fingers crinkles.

  “What is it, then?”

  She pushes the paper at me. “Desiree. You got the scholarship.”

  I don’t hear her right the first time. I look at her, at our hands, and the rumply paper. She shoves the letter into my hand and I unfold it, open in, read it three times as if the words will change like crawly worms when I’m not looking at it.

  The words are crawly worms, all watery, but I can see hardship and merit and State. I fold it up carefully, smoothing out the crinkles with my fingertips. It says I can be anything at all.

  I’m going to college on a scholarship. Just state school.

  I’m going to college because I worked hard. And because the state knows I’m full of poison, and they feel bad for me.

  The harpy never lies to me, and neither does Mama Alice.

  She comes into my room later that night and sits down on the edge of my bed, with is just a folded-out sofa with springs that poke me, but it’s mine and better than nothing. I hide the letter under the pillow before she turns on the light, so she won’t catch on that I was hugging it.

  “Desiree,” she says.

  I nod and wait for the rest of it.

  “You know,” she says, “I might be able to get the state to pay for liposuction. Doctor Morales will say it’s medically necessary.”

  “Liposuction?” I grope my ugly plastic glasses off the end table, because