Her daughter smiled. “Maybe it runs in families.”
Grandma Harken got up before dawn the next morning and went rummaging around the house.
“Well,” she said. She pulled a dead mouse out of a mousetrap and took a half-dozen cigarettes down from behind the clock. She filled three water bottles and strapped them around her waist. “Well. I suppose we’ve done as much as humans can do, and now it’s up to somebody else.”
She went out into the garden and found the jackalope wife asleep under the stairs. “Come on,” she said. “Wake up.”
The air was cool and gray. The jackalope wife looked at her with doe-dark eyes and didn’t move, and if she were a human, Grandma Harken would have itched to slap her.
Pay attention! Get mad! Do something!
But she wasn’t human and rabbits freeze when they’re scared past running. So Grandma gritted her teeth and reached down a hand and pulled the jackalope wife up into the pre-dawn dark.
They moved slow, the two of them. Grandma was old and carrying water for two, and the girl was on a crutch. The sun came up and the cicadas burnt the air with their wings.
A coyote watched them from up on the hillside. The jackalope wife looked up at him, recoiled, and Grandma laid a hand on her arm.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I ain’t got the patience for coyotes. They’d maybe fix you up but we’d both be stuck in a tale past telling, and I’m too old for that. Come on.”
They went a little further on, past a wash and a watering hole. There were palo verde trees spreading thin green shade over the water. A javelina looked up at them from the edge and stamped her hooved feet. Her children scraped their tusks together and grunted.
Grandma slid and slithered down the slope to the far side of the water and refilled the water bottles. “Not them either,” she said to the jackalope wife. “They’ll talk the legs off a wooden sheep. We’d both be dead of old age before they’d figured out what time to start.”
The javelina dropped their heads and ignored them as they left the wash behind.
The sun was overhead and the sky turned turquoise, a color so hard you could bash your knuckles on it. A raven croaked overhead and another one snickered somewhere off to the east.
The jackalope wife paused, leaning on her crutch, and looked up at the wings with longing.
“Oh no,” said Grandma. “I’ve got no patience for riddle games, and in the end they always eat someone’s eyes. Relax, child. We’re nearly there.”
The last stretch was cruelly hard, up the side of a bluff. The sand was soft underfoot and miserably hard for a girl walking with a crutch. Grandma had to half-carry the jackalope wife at the end. She weighed no more than a child, but children are heavy and it took them both a long time.
At the top was a high fractured stone that cast a finger of shadow like the wedge of a sundial. Sand and sky and shadow and stone. Grandma Harken nodded, content.
“It’ll do,” she said. “It’ll do.” She laid the jackalope wife down in the shadow and laid her tools out on the stone. Cigarettes and dead mouse and a scrap of burnt fur from the jackalope’s breast. “It’ll do.”
Then she sat down in the shadow herself and arranged her skirts.
She waited.
The sun went overhead and the level in the water bottle went down. The sun started to sink and the wind hissed and the jackalope wife was asleep or dead.
The ravens croaked a conversation to each other, from the branches of a palo verde tree, and whatever one said made the other one laugh.
“Well,” said a voice behind Grandma’s right ear, “lookee what we have here.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
“Don’t see them out here often,” he said. “Not the right sort of place.” He considered. “Your Saint Anthony, now . . . him I think I’ve seen. He understood about deserts.”
Grandma’s lips twisted. “Father of Rabbits,” she said sourly. “Wasn’t trying to call you up.”
“Oh, I know.” The Father of Rabbits grinned. “But you know I’ve always had a soft spot for you, Maggie Harken.”
He sat down beside her on his heels. He looked like an old Mexican man, wearing a button-down shirt without any buttons. His hair was silver gray as a rabbit’s fur. Grandma wasn’t fooled for a minute.
“Get lonely down there in your town, Maggie?” he asked. “Did you come out here for a little wild company?”
Grandma Harken leaned over to the jackalope wife and smoothed one long ear back from her face. She looked up at them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
“Shit,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Never seen that before.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “What did you do to her, Maggie?”
“I didn’t do a damn thing, except not let her die when I should have.”
“There’s those would say that was more than enough.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.
“She put on a half-burnt skin. Don’t suppose you can fix her up?” It cost Grandma a lot of pride to say that, and the Father of Rabbits tipped his chin in acknowledgment.
“Ha! No. If it was loose I could fix it up, maybe, but I couldn’t get it off her now with a knife.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Now I see why you wanted one of the Patterned People.”
Grandma nodded stiffly.
The Father of Rabbits shook his head. “He might want a life, you know. Piddly little dead mouse might not be enough.”
“Then he can have mine.”
“Ah, Maggie, Maggie . . . You’d have made a fine rabbit, once. Too many stones in your belly now.” He shook his head regretfully. “Besides, it’s not your life he’s owed.”
“It’s my life he’d be getting. My kin did it, it’s up to me to put it right.” It occurred to her that she should have left Eva a note, telling her to send the fool boy back East, away from the desert.
Well. Too late now. Either she’d raised a fool for a daughter or not, and likely she wouldn’t be around to tell.
“Suppose we’ll find out,” said the Father of Rabbits, and nodded.
A man came around the edge of the standing stone. He moved quick then slow and his eyes didn’t blink. He was naked and his skin was covered in painted diamonds.
Grandma Harken bowed to him, because the Patterned People can’t hear speech.
He looked at her and the Father of Rabbits and the jackalope wife. He looked down at the stone in front of him.
The cigarettes he ignored. The mouse he scooped up in two fingers and dropped into his mouth.
Then he crouched there, for a long time. He was so still that it made Grandma’s eyes water, and she had to look away.
“Suppose he does it,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Suppose he sheds that skin right off her. Then what? You’ve got a human left over, not a jackalope wife.”
Grandma stared down at her bony hands. “It’s not so bad, being a human,” she said. “You make do. And it’s got to be better than that.”
She jerked her chin in the direction of the jackalope wife.
“Still meddling, Maggie?” said the Father of Rabbits.
“And what do you call what you’re doing?”
He grinned.
The Patterned Man stood up and nodded to the jackalope wife.
She looked at Grandma, who met her too-wide eyes. “He’ll kill you,” the old woman said. “Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don’t have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it’s over, you’ll be all the way something, even if it’s just all the way dead.”
The jackalope wife nodded.
She left the crutch lying on the stones and stood up. Rabbit legs weren’t meant for it, but she walked three steps and the Patterned Man opened his arms and caught her.
He bit her on the forearm, where the thick veins run, and sank his teeth in up to the gums. Grandma cursed.
“Easy now,” said the Father of Rabbits, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s one of the Patterned P
eople, and they only know the one way.”
The jackalope wife’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged down onto the stone.
He set her down gently and picked up one of the cigarettes.
Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.
The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”
The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”
“Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said.
“Could be that, too.”
The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.
“How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.
“As long as it takes,” she snapped back.
The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half-full, half-new, halfway between one thing and the other.
“She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Man had left behind and offered one to Grandma.
“She doesn’t have a jackalope skin any more.”
He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”
“I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”
The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark.
“It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”
They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.
“I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”
The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.
From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.
“It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.
“Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once—must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it . . . Unless you want it?”
He held it out to Grandma Harken.
She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands.
“You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.
It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose—and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.
The Father of Rabbits let out a long sigh. “Still are,” he agreed.
“It’s different when you got a choice,” said Grandma Harken.
They shared another cigarette under the standing stone.
Down in the desert, the music played and the jackalope wives danced. And one scarred jackalope went leaping into the circle of firelight and danced like a demon, while the moon laid down across the saguaro’s thorns.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST NOVELETTE
“SLEEP WALKING NOW AND THEN”
RICHARD BOWES
Richard Bowes has won two World Fantasy Awards and the Lambda Literary Award. “Sleep Walking Now and Then” was first published on Tor.com.
Rosalin Quay, the set and costume designer, stood in a bankrupt Brooklyn warehouse staring at the rewards of a long quest. Inside a dusty storage space were manikins. Stiff limbed, sexless ones from the early 20th century stood alongside figures with abstract sexuality (which is how some described Rosalin) from the early 21st.
But the prime treasure of this discovery was dummies from a critical moment of change. Manikins circa 1970 were fluid in their poses, slightly androgynous but still recognizably male or female. The look would be iconic in the immersive stage design, which she had been hired to assemble.
The warehouse manager, Sonya, was tall, strong, and desperate. Rosalin, who had an eye for these things, placed her on the wrong side of thirty but with a bit of grace in her movements. Sonya brought up computer records on the palm of her hand. The owner of the manikins had stopped paying rent during the crash of 2053. The warehouse would shut down in two days and was unloading abandoned stock at going-out-of-business prices.
A pretty good guess on Rosalin’s part was that Sonya came to New York intending to be a dancer/actor, had no luck, and was about to be unemployed: a common tale in the city everyone called the Big Arena.
“These pieces are for my current project,” Rosalin said, and sent her an address. “I consider finding you and the manikins at the same moment an interesting coincidence. It would be to your advantage to deliver them personally.”
She believed she saw a bit of what was called espontáneo in the younger woman.
ONE
Jacoby Cass awoke a few days later in the penthouse of a notorious hotel. The Angouleme, built in 1890, had stood in the old Manhattan neighborhood of Kips Bay for a hundred and seventy years. Its back was to the East River and sunlight bounced off the water and through the uncurtained windows.
Cass rose and watched tides from the Atlantic swirl upstream. Water spilled over the seawall and got pumped into drainage ditches. In 2060, every coastline on earth that could afford floodwalls had them. The rest either pumped or treaded water.
Like many New Yorkers, Jacoby Cass saw the rising waters as a warning of impending doom but, like most of them, Cass had bigger worries. None are as superstitious as the actor, the director, or the playwright in the rehearsals of a new show. And for his drama Sleep Walking Now and Then, which was to be put on in this very building, Jacoby Cass was all three.
Weeks before, his most recent marriage had dissolved. She kept the co-op while he slept on a futon in the defunct hotel. Most of his clothes were still in the suitcases in which he’d brought them.
All was barren in the room except for a rack holding a velvet-collared frock coat, an evening jacket, silk vests, starched white shirts and collars, opera pumps, striped trousers, arm and sock garters, a high silk hat, and pairs of dress shoes sturdy as ships. He was going to play Edwin Lowery Nance, the man who had built this hotel. And this was his wardrobe for Sleep Walking.
Cass’s palm implant vibrated. Messages flashed: Security told him a city elevator inspector was in the building. His ex-wife announced she was closing their safe-deposit box. A painting crew for the lower floors was delayed. His eyes skimmed this unpleasant list as he tapped out a demand for coffee.
An image of the lobby of The Angouleme popped up. The lobby looked as it had when he’d run through a scene there the week before. Relentless su
nlight showed the cracks in the dark wood paneling, the peeling paint and sagging chandeliers. The place was bare of furniture and rugs.
Then an elevator door opened and Cass saw himself step out with two other actors. The man and the woman wore their own contemporary street clothes and carried scripts. Cass, though, wore bits of his 1890s costume—a high hat, a loosely tied cravat. He was Edwin Lowery Nance showing wealthy friends the palace he’d just built, where he would die so mysteriously.
“My good sir and lovely madam,” he heard himself say, “I intend this place to be a magnet, attracting a clientele which aspires to your elegance.” They played out the scene as he’d written it, in that shoddy space devoid of any magic. The other two actors were still learning their lines. But Cass found his own rendition of the lines he’d written flat and ridiculous.
Irritated, wondering why this had been sent to him, Cass was about to close his fist and erase the messages when he heard Rosalin’s voice, with its traces of an indefinable (and some said phony) European accent.
“Not an impressive outing. But I believe if you try again this evening, you will find everything transformed.”
Rosalin and Jacoby Cass had worked together over the years without ever becoming more than acquaintances. But Cass found a ray of hope in the message and decided to grasp it.
His coffee was delivered by the new production assistant, a tall and tense young lady. Cass noted her legs in pants down to the shoe tops, though autumn fashion had decreed bare legs for women and long pants for men. Quite a reverse of the styles of the last few years.
He could imagine her life in the Big Arena with multiple aspiring artists/roommates all scraping by in a deteriorating high-rise. This was Rosalin’s protégé. He thought her name was Sonya but wasn’t positive. At the outset of his career, almost forty years before, he had learned to be nice to the assistants, because one never knew which of them would end as a huge name. So he smiled the smile that had made him a star and took the coffee into the bathroom.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 Page 12