The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “What was in it, exactly?”

  “Little of this, little of that.” Sharkey takes a seat across from her. He picks up the butcher knife Duluth was using on the ham and cleans under his fingernails with the pointed tip. “You mean you never had it before?”

  Swanny notices the letters tattooed on his knuckles: FUCK FIRE. She considers most body modifications unseemly, but this one charms her. Such bravado. It rather reminds her of the glittering battle cry of her mother’s brooch—which makes her wonder again, what has he done with her coat?

  “Mr. Sharkey, I’m but a simple country girl, all alone in the big city. You seem to take me for someone with experience.”

  He curls his lip. “Said the future murderess.”

  “Revenge isn’t murder, I resent the insinuation. I’ll do what I plan to do with honor, or not at all. Now, do you also sell guns?”

  “As it happens, I’m expecting a shipment.”

  “I’ll barter my services as shopgirl for the proper armament.”

  “It’s gonna cost you,” he says through the steam rising from his cup. “Couple weeks of work just for the piece. Couple more to put bullets in it.”

  “And I take it you’re not willing to budge on those terms?”

  “I don’t negotiate.”

  She swallows a bite of blood sausage. “Then it seems you’ve left me no choice.”

  “Finish your food. I wanna show you the shop.”

  When Swanny steps into the Chaw Shop showroom for the first time, it feels like home. Like the estate in Wonland, it is decrepit and elegant, secondhand glamorous, from the tarnished brass spittoons in the corners to the dusty velvet curtains to the cobwebbed electrolier hanging from the ceiling, like a convolution of illuminated trombones. Library ladders reach the highest of the built-in shelves, though no books are here, only mason jars with sticky coils of drug piled within. A carved mermaid, sawn from the prow of a ship, looms in one corner of the room, as sensual and imposing as the marble caryatids on either side of the Dahlberg hearth. Swanny breathes in deeply. Perhaps the room brings back memories because of its scent, loam and toffee mixed together—which in fact smells nothing like Swanny’s home, but which is the scent of nostalgia itself: sweetness shot through with corrupting experience.

  “As you can see, I run a classy establishment,” says Sharkey. “Which means there are certain guidelines dictating the daily operations of my business. So before we go any further I’ll need you to sign a standard Contract of Employ. Just a formality, nothing personal. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course. Business is never personal.”

  “Good.” Sharkey goes behind the counter and retrieves a one-pager from a drawer. “Take your time reading it over.”

  Swanny touches the paper. It’s actually typewritten; the words are punched deep into the vellum with the ancient violence of a brute machine.

  The undersigned will have the right and privilege to call himself an agent of the Chaw Shop on any and all occasions when this is of benefit to him, and enjoy the associated protections.

  The undersigned will be due payments in live currency or merchandise in the verbally agreed upon proportions at the first of each week.

  In return, the undersigned acknowledges and agrees to the following restrictions as fair and just Conditions of Employ.

  Killing Offenses:

  1. The undersigned is forbidden to taste the retail.

  2. The undersigned is forbidden to convey to outsiders any information that could compromise the secrecy of Sharkey or the Shop.

  3. The undersigned is forbidden to remove any items from the premises of the Shop without express permission.

  4. The undersigned is forbidden to go off and leave without reporting his intended whereabouts to Sharkey in advance.

  5. The undersigned is forbidden from threatening harm or using physical force against Sharkey or any other agent of the Shop.

  Swanny looks up from the paper skeptically. After a lifetime of study, she knows what’s legally binding. This isn’t. “You intend to murder me if I don’t obey your rules?”

  “That ain’t murder. That’s punishment. You of all people should understand that.”

  “And what gives you the authority to dole out this punishment?”

  “Because I’m the boss. And I’m warning you now.”

  “So, how will you punish me?”

  He clicks a ballpoint pen and hands it to her. “I’ll probably stab you with a knife.”

  “You’ll stab me?” The unease she’s feeling suddenly strikes Swanny as hilarious. Her death has already been decreed by the dread gods of Mutation and Heredity. This funny little man cooked her lunch and now he’s asking her to fear him. “You’ll stab me?”

  “Or drown you in that bathtub upstairs you seem to like so much.”

  “Drown me?”

  But Sharkey’s smirk shows he’s in on the joke. He leans across the counter and continues, softer, as though he’s revealing a confidence: “Or maybe I’ll wrap my hands around your neck and squeeze till all life has left you, then throw your body down an empty elevator shaft right before the building burns to the ground.”

  Swanny matches his tone: “That’s quite a lot of trouble.”

  “If I’m in a hurry, I could choke you with a piece of piano wire.”

  “Would that really be faster?”

  “Yeah. Usually.” He turns around to open a small closet in the wall behind him, and Swanny sees her chinchilla on a hook inside, the diamonds’ glint on its lapel. Sharkey takes down a shoulder holster from the upper shelf and hooks it on before slipping back into his sharkskin jacket. “I’d shoot you, but I like to save my bullets for emergencies. What’s so funny?”

  Swanny dissolves at last into giggles. “You won’t kill me. You’re a perfect gentleman. You even hung up my coat.”

  “I’ve killed before and I’ll kill again.”

  “Mr. Sharkey, you may feel obligated to pose as a reprobate to impress your colleagues around here, but you needn’t do it for my sake. I simply don’t believe you.”

  “Believe whatever you want, but don’t try me.”

  “All right, all right.” Swanny signs at the bottom of the page. “Will I get a fully executed copy for my files?”

  He scrutinizes her. “You’re a hard girl to scare.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Ring the bell if you need me.” He gestures at a tasseled pull just beneath a cloudy porthole, the room’s only window. “I’m going downstairs to make some chaw.”

  * * *

  Without any customers to greet or chores to do, Swanny doesn’t know how to pass her time in the Chaw Shop. Of course, the drugs attract the bulk of her curiosity. She strolls around the perimeter of the room behind the counter, gazing up at the mason jars with their typewritten labels. Some suggest a flavor—CRÈME DE MENTHOL, DUMP-TRUCK SALAD, UNICORN JERKY. Others are more enigmatic—FOSSILATOR, SUPER KLOUD, WIDOW’S PEAK, CUCKOO CLOCK, LONELY MOUNTAIN’S HEART, QUEEN OF THE NIGHT. She picks up a jar marked CORDIAL GOODBYE, pops open the lid, and holds it to her nose: Sharkey never told her she wasn’t allowed to smell. The scent is like that of an ambrosial liqueur made from cherry pits, decay and loss and candy, all at the same time. Fascinating. With some reluctance, she returns the jar to its place on the shelf and continues her perusal of the wares.

  She has no notion of how to operate the cash register, which looms on the counter like an enormous klangflugel. But on the shelf just below it, under the counter, she spies a tattered, dog-eared paperback marked in the middle with a strand of twine. What a relief, something to read! She picks it up. SLAKELESS, screams the title, spelled out in raised, ballooning red letters. Beneath the swollen word, a dark-cloaked malefactor crouches over a young woman asleep in bed, his lips parted, his teeth nearly kissing her moonlit swanlike throat. Swanny eagerly takes a seat on a nearby stool, flips to the first page, and falls into the book.

  SLAKELESS tells the tale of
Luther Crowswallow, a man who gives up his soul in exchange for everlasting life, albeit everlasting with a catch. He is reborn as a drinker of essences, a monster who, like the fiends of old, consumes the vital forces of others to replenish his own insufficient store. Discovered at the grisly trade by townsfolk, who plot against him en masse at a tavern aptly christened the Brandished Pitchfork, he flees across the ocean, arriving in port accompanied only by corpses and a few depleted rats.

  All this Swanny anticipated, and devours with relish, but as she reads on, the narrative takes an unexpected turn for the melancholic. As Crowswallow lives on, year after dizzying year, time in his perception speeds up. At first he hardly notices, but as decades turn to centuries, the rate exponentially increases, until the fiend can barely glimpse the fevered events zooming past. Now, from his perspective, human life is so fleeting, so inestimably brief, that no moral distinction exists between violence and nonviolence. Ending a life prematurely shaves off, at most, an eyeblink of consciousness, nothing worth worrying over. He compares drinking the essence of a beautiful woman to cutting a flower from his garden for a vase inside the house. “In the elements, it will perish a little later, perhaps, but without the benefit of my appreciation. And for a brief bloom to go unappreciated upon the Earth is the greater tragedy for the connoisseur.” Unfortunately, most of his thrashing victims disagree, and he realizes at long last the true nature of his curse: “Immortality is a prison for the friendless.” It’s at this point in the novel that he decides to embark on a desperate worldwide quest for a mate of his own kind.

  “Sharkey sent me for you.”

  Swanny startles back to life, nearly capsizing the barstool. Duluth is standing at the entrance to the shop, jingling a set of car keys around one finger. Hours have passed; outside the room’s lone porthole, only darkness shows.

  “He said you’d wanna go out, when you was done with your shift. Go ‘investigating.’ ”

  “Oh yes, certainly.” Swanny makes a mental note of the page she’s on (264) and returns the book to its cubby. She gets her coat from the closet. “Where is Sharkey?”

  “Business.”

  The limo is parked on the street outside, right next to a fire hydrant where an alligator stands chained. At first, Swanny assumes it’s some form of taxidermy, but as they approach, the creature waddles lazily to the farthest extension of its clanking leash and grins up at them. Duluth gives the gator a wide berth and Swanny follows suit.

  The backseat of the limo is even bigger than she remembers, seemingly too spacious for the outside of the vehicle to contain. Perhaps it’s just because she’s occupying it alone this time. Swanny looks out the window, that changeful tinted glass, as the streets of Torchtown scroll along beside her. No one walks the sidewalks near the Chaw Shop, but as the car rounds the corner to another block, a rising tide of foot traffic floods into view.

  The first thing Swanny notices is how young everyone is. At eighteen and a half, she’s never met a single person her junior—excepting the little urchins outside her window this morning, and those twins seemed a different species entirely, otherworldly guttersprites, not simply “kids.” But the pedestrians she’s glimpsing now are adolescents and even pre-adolescents, without doubt or exception. She can see it in the way they move: their provocative displays of affection and anarchic patterns of foot traffic disrupt the very air.

  A bored shirtless boy trawls a vacant lot strewn with rubble and still-warm embers, gathering rat bones in a coffee can. A filthy matchgirl chases a scrawny, half-plucked chicken. Delinquents too young to shave beat the sides of a dumpster with bats and broom handles. A teen mom and her hip-slung infant shriek expletives at a cutpurse scaling a fire escape; another pregnant, underage waif looks on glassily, skeletal except for her protuberant middle. A seedy hotel bares its rooms like a dollhouse, its façade eaten away by late-quenched flames; inside, young lovers make use of the mattresses. A scuttling prepubescent hefts a chain saw half his size on a crabbed sciatic back. He glances at the limo, then dodges into the throng. Swanny slides around the banquette and opens the privacy divider to speak to Duluth.

  “Stop the car! That boy is armed with a chain saw, just like the perpetrators. I must question him immediately.”

  Duluth shakes his head. “It ain’t him you’re looking for.”

  “How could you possibly know?”

  “Trust me, sparker like that ain’t never gonna get Outside. You’ve gotta show promise to get hired on a raid.”

  “Hired by whom?”

  “That’s what we’re looking to find out, innit?”

  Torchtown. This is the place Swanny didn’t know she was searching for, the dead city’s telltale heart. These children are clad in rags and bandages, their skeletons visible through temporary flesh, their souls through haunted eyes. A hand reaches out from a sewer grate. A bottle falls off a roof. A funeral procession tromps past, the small cardboard coffin drawn along in a rickshaw by a lone pallbearer, while mourners clear the way by banging cymbals made of garbage can lids. For the first time since she saw the X-rays, Swanny feels less alone. At least she isn’t the only one here dying young.

  The limo parks at the curb by a storefront that appears no different from any of the others they’ve just passed. Duluth opens her door as a gentleman or a servant might. She follows him inside.

  From the outside, the building appears intact, but once Swanny crosses the threshold, she sees that it is in fact a hollowed-out shell, with floors, staircases, insulation all burnt away inside. The building’s scorched brickwork rises all around her like the inside of a chimney, open to the air above. As she looks up, a dragon glides high across the starless sky, eclipsing the night’s sliver of moon. The yellow one this time: she can tell by its snub-nosed profile. It’s too far up to do any damage now, but Swanny understands. She’ll find no protection here.

  It’s as though she’s wandered backstage in a vaudeville house at the end of the world. This saloon attracts a mature clientele compared to the streets outside. Most of the patrons appear to have reached their early twenties, but the years have come at some apparent cost. At one table, a bored ingenue clad in feathers looks on as her companion plays five-finger filet with a straight razor. At the next, a shirtless ogre with an eye patch breathes louder than seems strictly necessary. Two broad-shouldered young women, sporting chain mail and chonmages, stand like statues in the back, flanking a curtained alcove beyond whence exotic music drifts. Other surly characters mill about, personifications of all the major sins and vices. Swanny glances to Duluth for reassurance—he offers none—then affects nonchalance as she saunters to the bar.

  “I’ll have a vodka martini with two olives,” she tells the mixologist. He’s a splinter of a fellow, and there’s something odd about his face. She realizes after a moment that his eyelashes are missing, and most of his eyebrows too—singed away in a phenomenon so common, she’ll later learn, it’s nicknamed the Close Shave.

  The mixologist looks at Duluth.

  “She’s with Sharkey,” Duluth says.

  The mixologist looks back to Swanny. “What’d you say you want again?”

  “A vodka martini with two olives. Very dry.”

  “Tonight we got Rotgut, Embalming Fluid, and Rubbing Alcohol.”

  “Which do you recommend?”

  “They all taste the same.”

  “Surprise me.”

  The mixologist pours a cloudy, pale liquid into a jelly jar and hands it to her. It’s room temperature and tastes like turpentine smells.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Swanny tells him, forcing down a second sip. “Someone who’d have information about a raiding party.”

  The mixologist and Duluth exchange a complicated series of facial expressions so quickly it seems paranoid to notice.

  “I don’t know nobody,” says the mixologist. Then, unsettlingly, he mimes walking down steps until he completely disappears. Swanny cranes her neck over the bar and sees that he’s actually desce
nded into a cellar through an open hatch. Torchtown’s defining architectural feature must be the trapdoor.

  “Didn’t like talking to you, I guess,” Duluth offers placidly.

  “How extremely rude.”

  “You wanna go now?”

  Swanny scowls. “You must think I’m easily discouraged. I haven’t even finished my drink.”

  Duluth sighs and pulls up a stool next to her. Swanny swigs with revulsed determination.

  “How long have you worked for Mr. Sharkey?” she asks.

  “Almost eight years.”

  “That’s a very long time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you always his driver?”

  “Nah. I got promoted.”

  “From what?”

  “Running errands.”

  The trouble with inferior liquor is that it makes one inferiorly drunk—not less drunk, just less pleasantly. “You must like him a great deal. To work there for so long.”

  “It’s dangerous, but he treats me all right.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  Duluth shrugs. “Killing offenses.”

  “But he isn’t serious about that.”

  “Mmm.”

  “No.” Swanny’s ventricles stutter. “Has he really?”

  Another shrug. “That’s what it means to be a boss around here.”

  Swanny considers. She touches the EAT SHIT & DIE pin on her chinchilla lapel. Her secret muscles still. “In my world, I suppose it means more or less the same.”

  “Times are tough all over.”

  “Yet I feel there’s something else about Sharkey. Some other mystery. Something you’re afraid to reveal”—a moue—“even to me.”

  Duluth looks at her guiltily, and she feels a surge of pride for following up on her hunch with empty flirtation. She isn’t so bad at detective work after all. When Duluth speaks again, his voice is low and serious.

  “I ain’t supposed to talk shop to outsiders.”