by Ellen Datlow
Tommy opened the door of his shotgun house, clad only in boxer shorts, and Brian greeted him with a blow to the face. Tommy staggered back into his house, due more to surprise than the force of the punch; his foot slipped on a throw rug and he crashed to the floor. The small house reverberated with the impact. Brian had a moment to take in Tommy’s hard physique and imagine his wife’s hands moving over it. He stepped forward and kicked him in the groin.
Tommy grunted and seemed to absorb it. He rolled over and pushed himself quickly to his feet. Tommy’s fist swung at him and he had time to experience a quick flaring terror before his head exploded with pain. He found himself on his knees, staring at the dust collecting in the crevices of the hardwood floor. Somewhere in the background a television chattered urgently.
A kick to the ribs sent Brian down again. Tommy straddled him, grabbed a fistful of hair, and slammed Brian’s face into the floor several times. Brian felt something in his face break and blood poured onto the floor. He wanted to cry but it was impossible, he couldn’t get enough air. I’m going to die, he thought. He felt himself hauled up and thrown against a wall. Darkness crowded his vision; he began to lose his purchase on events.
Someone was yelling at him. There was a face in front of him, skin peeled back from its teeth in a smile or a grimace of rage. It looked like something from hell.
He awoke to the feel of cold grass, cold night air. The right side of his face burned like a signal flare, his left eye refused to open. It hurt to breathe. He pushed himself to his elbows and spit blood from his mouth; it immediately filled again. Something wrong in there. He rolled onto his back and lay there for a while, waiting for the pain to subside to a tolerable level. The night was high and dark. At one point he felt sure that he was rising from the ground, that something up there was pulling him into its empty hollows.
Somehow he managed the drive home. He remembered nothing of it except occasional stabs of pain as opposing headlights washed across his windshield; he would later consider his safe arrival a kind of miracle. He pulled into the driveway and honked the horn a few times until Amy came out and found him there. She looked at him with horror, and with something else.
“Oh, baby. What did you do. What did you do.”
She steered him toward the angel’s room. He stopped himself in the doorway, his heart pounding again, and he tried to catch his breath. It occurred to him, on a dim level, that his nose was broken. She tugged at his hand, but he resisted. Her face was limned by moonlight, streaming through the window like some mystical tide, and by the faint luminescence of the angel tucked into their son’s bed. She’d grown heavy over the years, and the past year had taken a harsh toll: the flesh on her face sagged, and was scored by grief. And yet he was stunned by her beauty.
Had she always looked like this?
“Come on,” she said. “Please.”
The left side of his face pulsed with hard beats of pain; it sang like a war drum. His working eye settled on the thing in the bed: its flat black eyes, its wickedly curved talons. Amy sat beside it and put her hand on its chest. It arched its back, seeming to coil beneath her.
“Come lay down,” she said. “He’s here for us. He’s come home for us.”
Brian took a step into Toby’s room, and then another. He knew she was wrong; that the angel was not home, that it had wandered here from somewhere far away.
Is heaven a dark place?
The angel extended a hand, its talons flexing. The sheets over its belly stirred as Brian drew closer. Amy took her husband’s hands, easing him onto the bed. He gripped her shoulders, squeezing them too tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Once he began he couldn’t stop. He said it over and over again, so many times it just became a sound, a sobbing plaint, and Amy pressed her hand against his mouth, entwined her fingers into his hair, saying, “Shhhh, shhhhh,” and finally she silenced him with a kiss. As they embraced each other the angel played its hands over their faces and their shoulders, its strange reedy breath and its narcotic musk drawing them down to it. They caressed each other, and they caressed the angel, and when they touched their lips to its skin the taste of it shot spikes of joy through their bodies. Brian felt her teeth on his neck and he bit into the angel, the sudden dark spurt of blood filling his mouth, the soft pale flesh tearing easily, sliding down his throat. He kissed his wife furiously and when she tasted the blood she nearly tore his tongue out; he pushed her face toward the angel’s body, and watched the blood blossom from beneath her. The angel’s eyes were frozen, staring at the ceiling; it extended a shaking hand toward a wall decorated with a Spider-Man poster, its fingers twisted and bent.
They ate until they were full.
That night, heavy with the sludge of bliss, Brian and Amy made love again for the first time in nearly a year. It was wordless and slow, a synchronicity of pressures and tender familiarities. They were like rare creatures of a dying species, amazed by the sight of each other.
Brian drifts in and out of sleep. He has what will be the last dream about his son. It is morning in this dream, by the side of a small country road. It must have rained during the night, because the world shines with a wet glow. Droplets of water cling, dazzling, to the muzzle of a dog as it rests beside the road, unmenaced by traffic, languorous and dull-witted in the rising heat. It might even be Dodger. His snout is heavy with blood. Some distance away from him Toby rests on the street, a small pile of bones and torn flesh, glittering with dew, catching and throwing sunlight like a scattered pile of rubies and diamonds.
By the time he wakes, he has already forgotten it.
Inelastic Collisions
ELIZABETH BEAR
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and very nearly named after Peregrine Took. She is the recipient of the John W. Campbell and Locus Awards, and she currently lives in southern New England, where she is engaged in murdering inoffensive potted plants and writing science fiction and fantasy.
Her most recent books are a science-fiction novel, Carnival, from Bantam Spectra; an urban fantasy, Whiskey and Water, forthcoming from Roc; and—with Sarah Monette—a Norse heroic fantasy called A Companion to Wolves, forthcoming from Tor.
Too easy by half, but a girl had to eat.
Tamara genuflected before the glistening white sphere, a black one peeking over its top. She bent over the felted slate table like a sacrifice—a metaphor more ironic than prophetic—letting her shirt hike up her nubby spine. The balls were round, outside her domain, but that was a detail too insignificant to affect Tamara’s understanding of the geometry involved.
All that mattered were the vectors.
bored, Gretchen murmured, as the cue stick slipped curveless through Tamara’s fingers. bored bored bored bored bored.
The cue stick struck the cue ball. The cue ball jolted forward, skipping into the eight ball and stopping precisely as its momentum was transferred. An inelastic collision. Thump. Click. The eight ball glided into the corner pocket, and Tamara lifted her head away from the table, shaking razor-cut hair from her neck. She showed her teeth. To her sister, not to the human she’d beaten.
Gretchen leaned her elbows on the pool table, pale bones stretching her skin gorgeously. Tendons popped as she flexed her fingers. The shape she wore was dough pale, sticky and soft, but hunger made it leaner. Not enough leaner.
“You lose,” Gretchen said to Tamara’s prey.
The male put a gold ring on the edge of the table, still slick inside with fat from his greasy human skin. Gretchen slipped a fingernail through the loop and scraped it up, handling it by the edges. She was dirty herself, of course, dirty in a dirty human body. It didn’t make human grease any nicer to touch.
Gretchen tucked the ring into her pocket. She nagged. hungry.
Tamara, reaching for the chalk, stopped—and sighed, though she could not get used to the noises made by the meat—and let the blunt end of her cue stick bump the floor
. “Play again?” the human asked. “I’d like a chance to win that back.” He pointed with his chin at Gretchen’s pocket.
He was dark-haired, his meat firm and muscular under the greasy toffee-colored skin. Disgusting, and looking at him didn’t help Tamara forget that she too was trapped in an oleaginous human carcass, with a greasy human tongue and greasy human bones and a greasy human name.
But a girl had to eat.
“Actually,” she said—and showed her teeth to the human, willing him to snarl back. No. Smile back—“how do you feel about dinner?”
Gretchen was furious. Tamara felt it as from twitching tail-tip to shivering pricked ears. Her human cage had neither, but she still remembered what it was to be a Hound. Gretchen’s flesh-clotted legs scissored to crisp ninety degree angles. Her razor-cut hair snapped in separate tendrils behind her.
you’re angry, Tamara said, finally, desperately. It was wrong to have to ask why, wrong to have to ask anything. Between sisters, between terrible angels, there should be consensus.
Gretchen did not answer.
The May night was balmy. Tamara wrapped her fingers around her shoulders and pressed them against the ridge of bone she could feel through cloying meat. She set her heels.
Gretchen stalked ten steps further and halted as sharply as if someone had popped her leash. An inelastic collision. Her heeled shoes skittered on parking lot gravel.
Tamara waited.
you knew I was hungry, Gretchen said. you let him get away.
i didn’t!
But Gretchen turned toward her, luminous green-brown eyes unblinking above the angles of her cheekbones, and Tamara looked down. Wrong, wrong, that she could not hear what her sister was thinking. i didn’t, she insisted.
you showed your teeth.
i smiled at him.
sister, Gretchen said sadly, they can tell the difference.
They sold the ring at a pawnshop and took the money to another bar. While Gretchen thumbed quarters into the pool table, Tamara worried. Worry was a new thing, like distance from her sister. Exile on this round spinning world in its round spinning orbit was changing them; Tamara had learned to count its revolutions and orbits, as the humans did, and call them time now that she could no longer sense the real time, the Master’s time, inexorable consumption and entropy.
She had been its warden, once. The warden of the real time, immaculate and perfect, as unlike the messy, improvisational sidereal time of the meat puppets as a diamond crystal was unlike a blown glass bauble. But she and her sister had failed to bring to justice a sorcerer who had upset the true time, and unless they could regain the Master’s favor, they would not rejoin their sisters in Heaven.
All the painful curves of this world—the filthy, rotting, organic bodies that stayed fleshy and slack no matter how thin the sisters starved them; the knotted curves of roots and veins and flower petals—were slow poison.
Tamara had lost her home. Exile was costing her her sister, as well.
She hunched on the barstool—her gin and tonic cradled in her right hand, gnawing the rind of the lime—and watched Gretchen rack the balls. The second bar was a smoky little place with canned music and not much of a crowd. Some male humans sat at the bar nursing beers or boilermakers, and a female whose male companion wasn’t drinking fiddled with a plate of hot wings and a cosmopolitan in a booth on the wall. Gretchen rattled the rack one last time and lifted it with her fingertips. A human female’s hands would have trembled slightly. Gretchen’s stayed steady as if carved.
She turned away to hang the rack up, and when she looked back, she bared her teeth.
She didn’t care what Gretchen said; Tamara couldn’t tell the difference. She shredded the rind of the lime between her teeth and washed its bitterness down with the different bitterness of the gin and tonic. When she got up to go to Gretchen, she left her glass on the bar so somebody might offer to buy her another one.
It was hard, playing badly. Hard to miss once in a while. Hard to look like she was really trying, poking a sharp triangle of tongue between taut lips, narrowed eyes wrinkling the bridge of her nose. Gretchen, walking past, patted her on the haunches.
Tamara sucked her tongue back into her mouth, smiled against the cue stick, and broke.
She had to let Gretchen win two games before they attracted any interest. The squeak of rubber on the wood floor caught her ear, but she didn’t raise her head until the human cleared his throat. She straightened and turned, already alerted by her sister’s posture that something unusual was happening.
The male paused before her sat in a wheelchair, his hands folded across his lap. He was ugly even by human standards, bald and bristly and scalded-looking, with heavy jowls and watery eyes that squinted through thick thumbprint glasses. He pointed to the rack of cues over Gretchen’s shoulder and said, “There’s only one table. Mind if I play the winner?”
His voice was everything his body wasn’t. So rich and comforting, full of shadowy resonances like the echoes off of hard close planes. Tamara recognized him: he was the male who had been with the dark-haired female eating the chicken wings. Tamara glanced toward the door, but his companion seemed to have left. He smelled of salt water and beer, not grease and rotten meat the way most humans did. “I’m Pinky Gilman,” he said, as if Tamara had answered, and extended his hand.
crippled, Gretchen murmured. weak. Tamara made sure to keep her teeth covered when she smiled. prey, she answered, and felt Gretchen laugh, tongue lolling, though her human cage remained impassive. “Tamara,” Tamara said. She reached out and gingerly squeezed thick human fingers. “Gretchen is my sister.”
“I see the resemblance,” he said. “Am I interrupting?”
“No.” Gretchen turned to reach another stick down. “I was going to take a break.”
Tamara disentangled her fingers from the meat-puppet’s, and stepped back. Her tongue adhered to the roof of her weird blunt-toothed mouth. “Can you? …”
“Well enough,” he said, and accepted the cue stick Gretchen extended across the table at arm’s length.
Gretchen patted Tamara on the arm as she went by. “Do either of you want a beer?”
Tamara was learning so many new emotions in her cage, and so many nuances on the old ones. Worry, discontent, and now another: surprise.
Because she didn’t have to try not to beat Pinky Gilman too easily. Rather, he was making her work.
The first game, she let him break, and never chalked her stick. In fact, Tamara handled Pinky’s cue more than her own, because he passed it to her to hold while he manipulated the wheelchair.
He sank three balls on the break, chose solids, and proceeded to clear the table with efficiency and a series of small flourishes, mostly demonstrated when he spun his wheelchair into position. By the time he reached the eight ball, though, he looked up at her and winked.
Gretchen had just returned with the beer. She pushed her hair behind her shoulder with the back of her fingers and handed Tamara a drink. i don’t believe it.
can meat puppets do that?
shoot pool?
win at pool. Gretchen leaned her shoulder on Tamara’s so her bones bruised her sister’s cage’s flesh. Tamara sighed, comforted.
apparently, she answered, some can.
The male, leaning forward in his wheelchair to peer the length of the cue stick, did not glance at them. His eyes narrowed behind the glasses and the stick flicked through his fingers like a tongue. It struck the scuffed white ball, and the white ball spun forward, rebounding from the wall and striking the black at an angle. Click. Hiss. Clunk.
Eight ball in the corner pocket.
Pinky laid his stick across the table, spun the wheels of his chair back six inches, and turned to Tamara, holding up his hand. “Shark,” she said, and put the beer into it instead of accepting the greasy clasp.
Pinky smiled at her and swallowed deeply as Gretchen passed her a second bottle. She was thirsty. She was always thirsty. “Go again?”
>
Beer was bitter in her mouth, cold and foaming where it crossed her tongue. She swallowed and rubbed her cage’s tongue against its palate for the lingering texture, then gulped once more. The cold hurt the teeth of her cage. “Gretchen,” she said, stepping backwards, “you play.”
Gretchen beat him, but just only, and only because she broke. He laughed like a drain as she sunk the smooth, black eight ball, and raised his cue stick in his hands, holding it overhead as if it were a bar he meant to chin himself upon. He had blunt nails, thick enough that Tamara could see the file marks across them, and the tendons of his forearms ridged when he lifted them. “So,” he said, “how would you feel about playing for forfeits?”
Gretchen smiled, and Tamara could see the difference. “What do you have in mind?”
The human lowered his cue stick and shrugged. “If I win, you come back to my place and let me feed you dinner.” Tamara started, and he held up his hand. “Never fear; I don’t have improper designs. And there are two of you, and only one of me, after all.”
Tamara looked at Gretchen. Gretchen looked at Tamara, her luminous eyes huge, the pupils contracted to pinpricks. “Not to mention the wheelchair,” Tamara said.
“Not to mention the wheelchair,” he agreed. “And if you win, you can make me dinner.” He let his cue stick fall forward so that it rested on the edge of the table.
Tamara smiled at him.
Tamara lingered in the bathroom, scraping her fingertips across pungent white soap to fill the gaps so her nails would stay clean. Through the wallboard, she could hear the clink of dishes and the rumble of the human’s voice, the occasional answering chirp of Gretchen’s. She turned the water on with the heel of her hands and cupped it to her mouth in brimming palm-fuls. It tasted faintly of Dial and made her blunt human teeth ache, her throat stretch and hurt when she gulped.