Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  Mrs. Green was not interested in Daniel's punishment; she was interested in the black soldier. She asked about his hat and the buttons on his coat. She asked about his sword belt and the buckle there. She asked about his long black beard and his fiery black eyes. She asked about the shotgun hole and his unbeating heart and his rotten teeth and his smell of tobacco. She asked about the footsteps, and how many there had been, and how long it had taken him to get from the window to Daniel's side. Daniel told her about all these things, all the things he thought about when he was inside and all the things he thought about while he was outside and all the things he thought about in between, and even some things he hadn't thought about yet at all but would now haunt him forever. And when Daniel had finished telling Mrs. Green all these things she kissed him on the forehead, told him to get some rest and not to worry, and shooed him off to bed like a good little boy.

  Daniel went to bed, but he did not scoot there like a good little boy; he walked like a man to the hanging tree. He did not get any rest and he did worry. Daniel worried more right then than he had in his previous seven-and-three-quarters years and all the years after that combined. This would be his last night, his last day, his last moment. The black soldier would come and open his fleshy mouth with those rotting teeth and he would swallow Daniel whole, just one big gulp, and whatever was left of Daniel would be consumed in fiery blackness of forevermore. Daniel didn't like forevermore. Daniel liked Green Bottom in the springtime and running through the rooms and on the rooftop and spitting in the river and his old hiding place and his new hiding place and he was pretty sure forevermore had none of these things. It occurred to Daniel to be sad, and the feeling was so foreign it scared him all over again.

  The black soldier opened his stinking rotten mouth, and opened and opened, and his jaw dropped and dropped and his head tilted back and back…and back…

  And then Daniel saw Mrs. Green behind the soldier’s head, her strong knuckly fingers around the hair at the back of his neck. She made mention of his rudeness, and how visitors in a fine house should always introduce themselves properly. And then she tore his face off. Flames engulfed Daniel's hands, but they did not hurt him so he did not scream, but that was okay because the soldier screamed enough for them both. His skin split as if it were made of spun sugar, the halves of it shredding apart at the rend like cobwebs. Despite the blood in his wound there was no blood in the heart of him, nor was there the neverending fiery darkness of forevermore as William the Meanie had suggested. But there were teeth and wiry hair and tentacles. Lots and lots of slimy tentacles, reaching and throbbing and flailing. And suddenly Daniel did know him.

  Daniel had not recognized the face of the soldier, but he recognized the monster inside him. That monster had lived in his closet when he was much younger than his seven-and-three-quarters years. It had lived under his bed, and it had lived in his dreams, and if the Daniel he was now existed because the bricks of Green Bottom had kept a happy memory, how had he brought the irrational fears with him? But there was no time for that now. They could talk about that later when there wasn’t a giant writhing monster full of teeth screaming and roaring and sliming the floorboards and mussing Mrs. Green’s perfect hair.

  Mrs. Green’s other hand reached inside the mass of tentacles and somehow silenced the creature. Daniel could now hear what Mrs. Green was saying. She calmly explained that benevolent spirits were welcome and chaotic spirits were not, and that the monster was free to haunt anywhere as long as that place was not Green Bottom. She reminded the monster never to follow Daniel’s spirit thread back through the ether, and that the ghosts of Green Bottom were going to destroy him now. No hard feelings, of course, it was just the way they did things here. Green Bottom looked after its own.

  The General was the first to appear, both arms intact, and after shooting the monster without hesitation he pulled free his sword and removed whatever tentacles managed to come within reach. The Shawnee came with their arrows. The slaves came with their scythes. The Egyptian Lady clawed at its eyes, when there were eyes. The children amassed behind Daniel and threw marbles at the beast. William pushed a handful of marbles into Daniel’s fist and, with a war cry, Daniel joined them. Piece by piece the monster came apart, and when the black shadows pieced it back together, the ghosts of Green Bottom took it apart again. Daniel wasn’t sure the fight would ever end…and then he heard the horn of the cavalry.

  The horses made quick work of the beast; slime became foam on their nostrils and flesh melted into fog beneath their hooves. Swords sliced tentacles sideways and teeth fell to the floorboards like rain. Soft rain. Happy rain.

  The next day, Daniel enjoyed waking up across from the window in his shadowless room. He lost to Betsy and Suky at scotch hoppers, and beat William soundly again at marbles (though William might have let him win), and when it was time for hide-and-seek he crawled up into his new hiding place in the east chimney. It might not have had a window but he was surrounded by bricks, the bricks of Green Bottom that remembered his happiness so fondly, and he felt safe as houses.

  THE THREADBARE MAGICIAN

  Cat Rambo

  Cat Rambo's story "The Threadbare Magician" involves a trailer park. Trailer parks are special places in America, places that endure despite social stigma. They are small cities with their own neighborhoods and traditions. Why should they not have their own guardian spirits?

  Trailer parks are an American invention. The first trailers to be pulled by car were canvas tents that folded onto a wooden platform. The first patent for such an arrangement was issued in 1914, and by 1916 more elaborate versions, including the hard top trailer, were being mass-produced and sold. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, people started living in their trailers full time. Campgrounds that accepted the trailers were dubbed trailer courts. As trailer courts grew, so did backlash against them, with many cities passing zoning laws that banished the trailers to areas outside the city limits.

  WWII brought a demand for temporary housing for defense plant workers and the trailer industry responded by creating the first house trailer. The government created 8,500 trailer parks to house their 35,000 trailers. During this time, trailers were constructed that could hook up to water, sewer, and electricity services. Trailers were popular with returning GI's at the end of the war, and the first true mobile home parks sprang up all over the country, with discriminatory zoning laws springing up in their wake.

  In the 1960s mobile homes transformed into—well, homes. They were set on foundations. They were widened, often beyond the point where it would be legal to drive them out of the park. In 1974, Congress finally recognized mobile homes as housing. As of 2013, an estimated 20 million people live in mobile homes. While some fit the stereotype of the poverty-stricken trailer park resident, other trailer parks are inhabited by people who are reasonably well off, and who like the combination of freedom and community provided by the parks.

  The American Dream involves two visions: bettering yourself by owning a home, and following the call of the open road. Trailer parks are mocked ruthlessly in the media and pop culture, but in a way they represent America's deepest visions of itself—small, intimate communities in which people both own a home and are never tied down.

  ***

  Old fabric holds smells better than the cloth of more recent decades. New stuff is all chemicals. It rubs the roof of your mouth like steel wool if you sniff too hard, bites like a spell’s sting.

  Older silks, wools, cottons—the organics—hold household odors. Cedar and cinnamon, turmeric and garlic. Perfumes you can no longer find, like L’Origan or Quelques Fleurs. Camphorated moth balls or talcum powder. More rarely the whiff of a person, a smell lingering long after every other scrap of their DNA has vanished from this earth.

  Most often just the lilac assault left by a hasty dry-clean. But the other times make it worth it.

  I pulled the green XL circle aside with my thumb and kept going widdershins, into the Ls
. So far the Value Village’s rack had yielded only two possibilities: an XXL black with a bamboo-patterned weave, cream-colored dragons curled and coiled amid sun-ridden clouds and an XL crimson rayon whose flame-pattern suited it to throw-away magic. A protective cloak perfect for next week’s trip to Portland.

  I fingered through the fabrics, searching for silk among the rayon and cotton. Nope, nope, nope.

  A pretty day outside. One of the last days before summer slanted to the other side of the clock and the days began shrinking into the grey days of Seattle fall. A day for turning up the radio and blasting “Dani California” until the sound came up through your bones. A day for wishing you were in love. Or some reasonable facsimile.

  My own shirt was printed with umbrellas. Parasols really, pinwheeled against a gray sky and white cumulus clouds. Protection, and even though it was newer and untested, I trusted it to ward off anything. Like wearing magic protective gloves, more supple than lead-lined canvas but surely at least that solid.

  Shouldn’t have trusted it.

  The spell struck up from a black background, red serpents, scales lined with scallops as blue as the sky outside. Slashing bites along the outside of my left hand, locking on, tails sticking straight out as they attached themselves.

  I lurched sideways.

  The floor crashed up into my face, thunked against my forehead in painful collision.

  Then I was gone.

  #

  When I awoke, I was in a car’s back seat alone, my cheek pressed to sticky vinyl upholstery. I could not raise my head, couldn’t move other than a slow blink. I found myself fighting for my breath, had to focus entirely on that activity, as though my life depended on it.

  There was a good chance it did.

  “Awake,” a voice said from the front seat.

  Someone else grunted. They weren’t addressing me, just reporting my state.

  Although my body was immobile, my mind raced.

  They could only want one thing. What almost every magic attacker wanted: to strip away all the magic I’d accumulated and take it for their own. Lucky me, most of it was stored in my house. Unlucky me. If I’d had some of it with me, if I’d worn a more powerful shirt than this one, I might have been able to fight this off.

  I tried to gather what clues I could. The beige vinyl smelled of itself and old tobacco. We were in traffic. Whoever was in front wasn’t talking. The radio was on, but tuned to static, a whisper so faint I had to strain to be sure I was really hearing it.

  We were on a busy highway. Perhaps I5? If so, I’d been unconscious a good quarter of an hour, probably longer.

  “Just lie still and be,” the first voice said, presumably to me. “There in an hour. You’re full of poison, man. It’ll kill you soon if you don’t get the cure, so lie back, rest easy.”

  “Why the fuck are you explaining anything to him?”

  “Make him lie quiet, knowing he gotta.”

  An annoyed grunt.

  So perhaps I wouldn’t be devoured. But it couldn’t be anything good they were taking me to. Otherwise why bother preparing a trap?

  I lay there, working on the parasols, understitching each rib, readying my spell. Whatever had paralyzed me was ebbing slowly. Too slowly.

  The rumble underfoot changed quality, became higher-pitched. Time.

  I gathered up my legs. Thumb and little finger of my left hand grinding together for leverage, I flipped up the door lock, fumbling with the handle’s release mechanism.

  “What’s he…” the first voice said from the front seat. The handle popped over and I flung myself out.

  Neon ghosts of parasols surrounded me, slender ribs of flickering magic barely visible, contrails of light and shadow. I used them to bounce myself up from the road. Cars swerved around me, one glancing off the railing in a crescendo of sparks.

  Startled faces gaped at me through windshields. One locked eyes for a split second that seemed an age long. A dark-featured, handsome face not staring like the rest, but, bizarrely, smiling as his eyes met mine.

  Then I sailed over the railing’s metal curve towards the water.

  #

  The Aurora Bridge has seen a lot of suicides. There’s even placards along its rails, directing the desperate to suicide hotlines and support.

  I wasn’t trying to kill myself, though. I was trying to live.

  The parasols let me glide down to the water, let it carry me eastward towards the University. Now that I was away from whatever had deadened my abilities in the car, I could think more freely. I worked at my bonds, rubbed them away on a concrete outcropping as I clung to it.

  I crawled out of the channel under an overpass. A gnarled homeless man had set up camp there, had a tent and an oil drum for his campfire. Two crows waited patiently for leftovers from the pan boiling in a makeshift sling over the drum.

  He watched me warily, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, as I shook myself free of the water. The startled crows flapped away.

  He didn’t speak, but he pointed me towards a trail up through the bank of English ivy to the Montlake station. I took the 545 back to Redmond, digging change out of my pocket and accepting a transfer. The bus driver eyed my dripping clothes unhappily but forbode from saying anything. Other people edged away.

  Half the bus was reading their cell phones, and by the faces, it was unhappy news this late afternoon.

  I didn’t pay much attention. I swayed my way past the middle of the bus and the swivel benches there, went a few seats back to a deserted seat and took it.

  I’d have to catch the bus back in tomorrow to go get my car. As we started over the bridge, I stared out the window at water lilies and assessed my body.

  Something was wrong, terribly wrong, I could tell that. A slow acting magic, I could feel that by the way it had seeped into my bones.

  Not painful. So far, at any rate. Poison, they’d said. Not ordinary poison but something magical. Something that acted slowly.

  Slow, very slow. I had days rather than hours, but how many? Who was the guy they’d meant to take me to?

  They’d try for me again, I knew that. They’d known my patterns well enough to plant a spell on an item calculated to lure me.

  They might be waiting for me at home.

  A crowd jostled onto the bus at Evergreen Station. Someone sat down beside me despite the water dripping from my clothing.

  Middle-aged, dark-haired, muscles rippling under a plain black t-shirt, three silver rings in his left ear, was he selling something?

  His white teeth flashed at me in a smile. Not a false, “I want something from you” smile but a genuine expression, the sort of smile you give someone you love, all the joy at seeing them again, showing in your eyes. It made my heart skip a beat.

  He said, “Didn’t you just move into Friendly Village?”

  “A few months ago,” I said.

  I thought surely he was too young to be living in the same 55+ mobile home park, but he said, “I’m Al Lorca, from Coho Lane, Unit 42. How are you liking it so far?”

  “Roy Macomber. It’s not what I expected of a trailer park,” I said. I wondered when he was going to acknowledge that I was sitting there dripping wet. The puddle I was sitting in was seeping into his jeans but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Mobile homes,” he said, and we both laughed, because that was one of the characteristics of the denizens of Friendly Village, that they eschewed the words “trailer park” at all costs.

  “You’re in that white Merlotte across from the unit with all the gnomes and flamingos? Nice trailer.”

  “The Cadillac of mobile homes,” I said.

  “I’ve been in there, visiting Ed. He put some time in it.”

  “Pergo, central air, and a tankless water heater. Lots of nice little amenities. I was lucky.”

  He nodded. A little smile hovered off and on his lips.

  It made me uneasy. Pretty lure. Pretty, pretty lure, but sure
ly he’s part of this.

  I pulled the cord for the next stop. Lorca looked surprised as I stood up. “Not headed home?”

  “Got to visit a friend.”

  I felt him watching me as I got off.

  I went to Kirkland to see Jason, though it was against my better judgment.

  Still, what better to heal you than a magical spring, like the one he was the hereditary guardian of?

  I could surreptitiously test the water against this poison. Who was to say it’d work?

  I felt defensive about seeing him. I always did. He had a way of seeing through me, of rolling his eyes, that made me impatient and balky as a mule about asking for help. I’d rather beat my head against a wall trying to solve it, and the bloodier it was, the harder it became to make the request.

  Where I can be downright bitchy, Jason was one of those golden folk who are always in a good mood, for whom the half-full glass is near spilling over. Beautiful and holding an advanced degree in anthropology from Princeton, which he’d somehow parlayed into a job as a buyer for a very small, extremely select, and obscenely lucrative gallery.

  How did we meet? I'd like to say it was something significant, but it was a missed connection ad in on Craigslist that he placed. I mistakenly answered, thinking he'd been talking to me. I found out three months into the relationship, or rather I guessed that, and his silence confirmed it.

  I don't know how long he would've let me go on believing he hadn’t been talking to some other lanky blond man he once made eye contact with on the light rail. Maybe all my life.

  But still, that was the linchpin of our meeting, founded on confusion and silent, tactful kindness. There are worse things, I know, or do know now, at least. But back then I was young and stupid and wanted to be cherished for myself, to have been chosen for something I and I alone could provide. Now I'm no longer young.