The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade

by Aimee Bender

  “I see.”

  “Do you? The graves I told you about. They’re just down the hill. You see, they were bad people, but sometimes, even good people end up down there, if they know things they shouldn’t, and there have been a few.”

  “Oh,” Jim said, as if he had no idea what the bear was talking about.

  “I don’t make friends easily, and I may seem a little insincere. Species problems, all that. Sometimes, even people I like, well...It doesn’t turn out so well for them. Know what I’m saying?”

  “I...I don’t think so.”

  “I think you do. That motel room back there, those whores. I been at this for years. I’m not a serial killer or anything. Ones I kill deserve it. The people I work for. They know how I am. They protect me. How’s it gonna be an icon goes to jail? That’s what I am. A fuckin’ icon. So, I kinda get a free ride, someone goes missing, you know. Guys in black, ones got the helicopters and the black cars. They clean up after me. They’re my homies, know what I’m saying?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Let me nutshell it for you: I’m pretty much immune to prosecution. But you, well...kind of a loose end. There’s a patch down there with your name on it, Jimbo. I put a shovel in the car early this morning while you were sleeping. It isn’t personal, Jim. I like you. I do. I know that’s cold comfort, but that’s how it is.”

  The bear paused, took off his hat and removed a small cigar from the inside hat band and struck a match and took a puff, said, “Thing is though, I can’t get to liking someone too good, ’cause—”

  The snapping sound made the bear straighten up. He was still holding his hat in his paw, and he dropped it. He almost made a turn to look at Jim, who was now standing right by him holding the automatic to the bump on the bear’s noggin’. The bear’s legs went out. He stumbled and fell forward and went sliding down the hill on his face and chest, a bullet snuggling in his brain.

  Jim took a deep breath. He went down the hill and turned the bear’s head using both hands, took a good look at him. He thought the bear didn’t really look like any of the cartoon versions of him, and when he was on TV he didn’t look so old. Of course, he had never looked dead before. The eyes had already gone flat and he could see his dim reflection in one of them. The bear’s cigar was flattened against his mouth, like a coiled worm. Jim found the bear’s box of matches and was careful to use a handkerchief from the bear’s paw to handle it. He struck the match and set the dry grass on fire, then stuck the match between the bear’s claws on his left paw. The fire gnawed patiently at the grass, whipping up enthusiasm as the wind rose. Jim wiped down the automatic with his shirt tail and put it in the bear’s right paw using the handkerchief, and pushed the bear’s claw through the trigger guard, and closed the bear’s paw around the weapon so it looked like he had shot himself.

  Jim went back up the hill. The fire licked at the grass and caught some more wind and grew wilder, and then the bear got caught up in it as well, chewing his fur and cackling over his flesh like a crazed hag. The fire licked its way down the hill, and then the wind changed and Jim saw the fire climbing up toward him.

  He got in the car and started and found a place where he could back it around. It took some work, and by the time he managed it onto the narrow trail, he could see the fire in the mirror, waving its red head in his direction.

  Jim drove down the hill, trying to remember the route. Behind him, the fire rose up into the trees as if it were a giant red bird spreading its wings.

  “Dumb bear,” he said aloud, “ain’t gonna be no weenie pull now, is there?” and he drove on until the fire was just a small bright spot in the rearview mirror, and then it was gone and there was just the tall, dark forest that the fire had yet to find.

  ZOMBIE SHARKS

  WITH METAL TEETH

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  It’s supposed to be like killing a mouse, killing this mouse, that’s what Ronald said, but it isn’t.

  ‘Ronald,’ I say, trying to make my voice loop over my shoulder to him.

  He’s in his chair by the specimen refrigerator.

  ‘Just do it,’ he says.

  ‘He’s looking at me, though.’

  Ronald’s chair scrapes, air hisses through his teeth, and then he’s there, with me.

  ‘You’re supposed to be a research assistant,’ he says, taking the mouse from me, the syringe riding from its back like a tranquilizer dart, ‘not a trainee.’

  The mouse. I was thinking about naming him Mr. Cheese. Or Danger Bob, from his trick with the wheel.

  Ronald slams the plunger down and it doesn’t even have to be sodium pentathol. There’s enough of it that it could be water, or even more blood: it floods Danger Bob’s internal organs, stretches his skin taut so that it’s pink under his white hair, like an old man going bald.

  Sodium pentathol isn’t really standard for mice, but neither’s what Ronald had been doing to it for the last week.

  He holds it up to his face, watches it die, and I think maybe Danger Bob is going to whisper something to him finally, some secret of biology, of rodent psychology, but then, instead, all we get is a drop of sodium pentathol seeping out Danger Bob’s right nostril, spidering down to the end of a whisker.

  Ronald drops the mouse cadaver— his term, like with everything— into the red biohazard bag and looks around the lab for the next great experiment, his eyes narrowing on each station, each cage, each device.

  I hate my job.

  In the supply room after work I mouth a silent prayer for Danger Bob, and nod again like I’m watching his trick on the wheel.

  The next morning Ronald gets to the lab before me, leaves the door chocked open. I walk in slow, trying to see everything all at once, and Ronald’s in his chair by the fridge, watching me.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  I nod, shrug, tell him to tell me, please.

  He’s already smiling.

  It’s Danger Bob, back from the afterlife.

  I take a long step back.

  “He was sleeping by the door to his cage,” Ronald says.

  “This isn’t Bob,” I say.

  “Ask him.”

  I watch his eyes after this, not sure I heard right.

  “Ask Bob?”

  Ronald nods.

  “You could have just painted that on his back,” I say.

  Ronald agrees.

  “Ask him,” he says again.

  I don’t want to but I do.

  “Louder,” Ronald says, like it should be obvious.

  “Are you Danger Bob?” I say, again, and it’s only because I’ve been here for four months now that I notice Ronald’s right hand is behind his back. His trigger finger. The vein in his neck rises with the tendons in his bicep when the mouse who isn’t Danger Bob shakes his head no, and Ronald can’t help laughing now.

  There’s a little white-furred, radio-controlled servo collar around Imposter Bob’s neck, its copper leads wired into the neck musculature. So he can shake his head no.

  “Quit fucking around,” Ronald says, still smiling. “I’ve got something new for us today.”

  Some days I’m not sure who’s the lab mouse.

  The project Ronald was working on when he hired me involved applied telekinesis. What we would do is anesthetize gophers and moles and whatever else we could buy, sever their spinal cords up near their brain stems, then try to condition them to use their own bodies as puppets, lurch across the stainless steel exam table.

  The servo collars were what Ronald had to finally use when the financial backers sent their people to check on their investments. It was then that Ronald told me the secret of funding: never do enough to make money, just do enough to get people to give you more.

  He thinks when I empty the red biohazard bag, I empty it into the small green medical waste dumpster in the parking lot. But I don’t. Instead I fill my pockets with dead rodents then go up onto the roof during break, lay the limp bodies in the white gravel. The hawks s
cream with delight, fall all around me, and take the moles and gophers and rabbits away. For the mice, because they’re white, I have to push all the white gravel away, frame them against the tar. I tried standing them up with toothpicks at first, for dignity, but finally had to just lay them on their sides, their forelegs curled up against their chests.

  We’re going to hell, of course, me and Ronald. Not just for the animals we kill with truth serum and electricity and surgery, but for the birds that fall sick from the sky into the lives of ordinary people, far, far away, wherever they are.

  What Ronald has for us today that’s new is beyond telekinesis, beyond Danger Bob’s faux-prehensile tail.

  I watch him and listen and feel my face making expressions of doubt, then curiosity, then think of a green butterfly for a while, because now he’s practicing his pitch on me. Everything bullet points, something Edison would have thought of if he’d had access to the formative experiences of Ronald’s childhood.

  Or if he’d hated mice.

  The green butterfly is an angel, of course. She has the face of a girl I knew in high school.

  I nod for Ronald, and for her.

  What we’re doing today is removing a late-stage mouse fetus from its mother then immersing it in the oxygen rich solution left over from the experiment with the two squirrels. Immersing it in there so it can breathe.

  “Nutrients?” Ronald asks, as if I’d said it.

  I nod, as if I’d just been about to say it, yes.

  “They’re in there,” he says, dismissing my lack of education, staring at me to be sure I get the point.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Go on.”

  He smiles, does.

  After the mouse— I’m already calling him Zipper Boy— after the mouse is successfully transferred to his glass womb, the fish tank the squirrels had died in, too stubborn to evolve gills, after the mouse is in there, that’s when the real science begins: his arms in the long rubber gloves, Ronald will remove Zipper Boy’s cartilage skull, exposing the still-developing brain.

  He touches the side of his own head to be sure I’m following, not picturing myself on the roof, holding Zipper Boy up in my palm, eyes cast down, a great, moist shadow darkening around me, the underside of her wings iridescent.

  I touch my own head back, right in the temple, and Ronald stares at me, looks away.

  “The folds,” he says, “it’s the basic mammalian characteristic, right? Why are they there, though?”

  “So the brain can fit,” I say back.

  He nods, smiles, says it again: “So the brain can fit. Because, if it didn’t fold, then the mother’s pelvis would break and there would be no rearing of the young, and it wouldn’t matter how smart we were, how many tools we could eventually make.”

  I tell him okay.

  He shrugs, like I’m challenging him. “So what do you think we could accomplish without that limitation?” he says, low, still paranoid that the bats that were delivered by accident are actually industrial spies.

  I’m supposed to be catching them, but keep not doing it.

  “Anything?” I say.

  He nods.

  “Anything,” he says back, and then for the rest of the morning I have to hold the suction tube to Zipper Boy’s head while Ronald performs minor surgery. I’m supposed to catch the blood, keep the water clear, cycle in more.

  “Scuba Mouse,” Ronald says, through his mask.

  I shake my head no.

  Two weeks later, Zipper Boy’s brain blooms open in the tank like the enhanced pictures you see of distant, exploding galaxies.

  I find myself holding my breath each morning in my car, before I walk in. It’s not enough.

  By the forty-second day, the investors want to see what they’re paying for. I lay on the roof looking over the edge. Their cars pull up just before lunch. The only thing different for them about Ronald is how he’s bald now, shaved. The eye solution he uses to hide the red around the rims is his own compound. He offers it to me on a regular basis, and on a regular basis I decline.

  I walk down the metal stairs in time to hear his latest pitch for time travel, how of course you can’t send living tissue through any kind of disintegrating field then expect it to be reassembled properly on the other end. But inert matter, yes. Ronald’s solution is typically elegant: the time traveler should simply offer to be killed moments before passing through the field, moments after his team has pushed through all the medical equipment and information brochures the people on the other end will need to revive this dead man from the future, or the past.

  I see one of the investors holding his chin, nodding, thinking of the tactical uses this could provide, but when he sees the way I’m looking at him he stops, rubs his cheek.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Ronald says about me.

  They don’t.

  Eight minutes later— the same amount of time it takes sunlight to get here— Ronald is demonstrating what they all saw last time: the modified television set he’s learned to tune the future in with. One hour in the future, anyway. For the area right around the specimen table. He’s not showing them the modified set so much, though, as what’s on it’s screen: the investors, all signing checks. It’s really a tape of them from last time.

  “Show us why, though,” one of them says.

  Why they’ll sign. Ronald smiles, nods, is already standing amid all the bent silverware before Zipper Boy’s tank, waiting for them to see it.

  “Like he’s a god?” one of the investors says, looking around for support. Like Zipper Boy’s a god is what he’s saying. One we bring offerings to.

  Ronald shushes him, his teeth together.

  “I don’t think so . . . “ another investor says, staring hard at Ronald, as if reading his eyes. “You didn’t leave this for him did you, son?”

  Ronald shakes his head no, his dimples sucking into a smile he’s trying hard to swallow.

  “No way,” the third and final investor says.

  Ronald shrugs, is a carnival barker now, holding his hand out for the third investor’s stainless steel, monogrammed pen.

  Zipper Boy bends it into a nearly perfect circle with his unfolded mind, then, bored with it, allows it to clatter to the ground.

  The milky surface of his water bubbles.

  He could live forever in there.

  The girlfriend I choose, because I want this all to be over but for it not to be my fault, she’s ASPCA. Militant, probably a vegetarian even. I wear leather to get her to introduce herself, then lure her to my car, to lunch, a series of dinners and movies and phone calls, until one day, not on accident, I leave an expired rodent in my right hand pocket, plan to pull it out to open my car door with, only notice it’s a mouse when its nose won’t fit into the keyhole.

  The movie we see that night is about a submarine family chosen, for obvious reasons, to be astronauts. Which is all good and fine until the mother has her third child, her first in space. The amniotic fluid floats through the space station and into the ventilation system, then, with the help of alien spores or cosmic rays— a movie device— transforms the whole station into a womb in which the family gestates, emerging nine months later to look down on earth’s blue sphere, and cry, the vacuum of space wicking their tears away. Finally, the firstborn son flares the new membrane around his neck out and it catches the solar wind and the family holds hands, retreats into the outer reaches of the solar system, still together.

  My girlfriend— Mandy, I think, if I heard right— cries with the aliens, holds my hand, and I hold onto the armrest.

  Afterwards, by the water fountains, I try to tell her about Ronald but fail, just lead her out to the parking lot for my charade, which fails too when I open my pocket and, instead of a dead mouse, pale green butterflies flutter up around us.

  Mandy starts to catch one but I stop her, and my hand firm around her wrist is the beginning of the end for us: that I would deny her that.

  The next morning Ronald asks me how my experiment
went?

  I’m tapping vitamins into Zipper Boy’s tank when he asks it, and I’m not sure if his lips move, or if they move with the words he’s saying.

  On the surface of the water, dead, is a pale green butterfly.

  Love is a spoon, Zipper Boy says to me in my head.

  Across the room, Ronald waits for me to answer, to agree.

  Zipper Boy’s brain is seventeen times the size of his body now.

  We’re not sure what he can do if he really wants to.

  The thing I notice about the silverware on the ground that afternoon is that it’s real silver. Which should be less of a challenge, really. An insult. Another thing is that it’s straight, all of it. I bend down to it, know instantly without wanting to that this is Ronald’s mother’s mother’s silverware. And that the only reason it would be straight, now, on the ground, is that Ronald brought it to Zipper Boy bent.

  Across the lab, Ronald is hunched over the circuit board of the echolocation device he’s retroengineering from the dolphin head he had delivered in a cooler of ice. It cost four thousand dollars, is supposed to locate the bats for us somehow. When I opened the cooler, the dolphin was smiling. But maybe that’s all they know how to do.

  I don’t care about the bats, really.

  But the silverware. The swimming goggles Ronald’s wearing now, each lens sloshing with his compound.

  Love is love, Zipper Boy says in my head, like he’s finishing an argument.

  Without looking at his tank I think back that he was never even born.

  The surface of his water undulates with thought, and either he speaks back to me through Ronald or Ronald speaks back himself: “A mother’s love for her unborn young is the purest love there is,” he says. “Because it hasn’t yet fallen victim to the large eyes of infancy.”