Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  “She wanted me to bring nuclear bombs to life,” he said. “I run a hobby store. I paint miniatures. I don’t want to be involved with things like that.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Marla looked around. “Did you have a horse?”

  “Statue of a horse,” he said. “It clanged when it walked. I tried to ride it, but it made my butt go numb. I think it wandered off.”

  “Sounds right. Come on out, and I’ll try to fix you.”

  He patted the cave wall and said something soothing, and the mouth opened, the spiky teeth withdrawing. Marla approached him. “I’ve got this thing, it’s going to remove your power. It shouldn’t hurt.”

  “Oh dear,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What are you—oh gods.” Marla’s clothing began slithering off her, buttons popping, pants wriggling down, and in seconds she stood naked before Life. He had his eyes cast firmly skyward. “It just happens,” he said. “Not to my own clothes, thank goodness, but other things....”

  Marla’s hair began to writhe, and the melon baller twisted in her hand, so she darted forward and swung the tool through his chest. She felt a fleeting moment of resistance, and then looked down at the pale yellow glowing sphere of power.

  Life collapsed, and her clothes did too, and the landscape went still.

  Marla got her clothes back on—she’d had a cloak that came to life, once, and it wasn’t a nice thing to be reminded about—and dropped the ball of divinity in her pocket. Then she lifted Life and took him to the trunk, which obligingly opened.

  After he was on his way, the Wendigo opened its doors and Marla climbed in.

  “Where’s my divinity?” Elsie demanded.

  “You’ll get it at the end of our mission, if you’re good.”

  “Hmph. Maybe I should scoop out a chunk of your godhood.”

  “Try it and you’ll spend the rest of your immortal life short a few fingers,” Marla said. “Who’s next?”

  “Plenty,” Elsie said. “You’re going to hate him. He’s dreadful.”

  “Coming from you, that’s saying something.”

  Plenty

  “I was in this restaurant, one of the terrible ones named after a celebrity’s boat or whatever, and there was a guy complaining about everything and sending dishes back, and his food must have been seven-eighths spit by volume when he finally agreed to eat it, and then he just obliterated the food with salt. Like, every bite, it was just salted spit. I empowered him on a whim. His name was, whatsit, Ron Jarrell, yeah, I saw it when I stole his credit card. He was the first horseperson, but originally I intended it as a Tantalus thing, like he’d be surrounded by food he couldn’t eat? Except the changes I made did something different and he became... Plenty.” Elsie did a little pirouette and knocked over a wooden drying rack covered in dangling links of sausages.

  This part of the Briarpatch was indoors, which made no sense, but there it was: they stood in the foyer of a vast mansion scaled for giants, with many windows that showed only a blackness that was not night, but simply an absence of outside. The Wendigo had driven easily through the front door, though the door hadn’t survived the process.

  The air stank of rotting meat, which made sense, because there was rotting meat everywhere—heaps of turkey carcasses, towers of steak, coils of snakemeat, whole roasted pigs buzzing with flies. Rotting fruit and heaps of uncooked grain and stinky piles of leafy vegetables offered some variety.

  The wreckage of food continued through the hall, and up the oversized stairs (every riser taller than Marla herself), and down the corridor Marla picked her way along, moving carefully past the slime of spilled pudding, over the fuzzy-with-mold melons, around the dented cans of peaches in heavy syrup. “Why does he live like this?” Marla said.

  “He can’t exactly help it.” Elsie stomped on rotting melons gleefully as she followed Marla down a corridor hung with paintings of giants in formal garb with the heads of various animals. “The idea was, he’d go to starving places, and Thanksgiving dinners would fall from the sky.”

  “I thought the idea was Tantalus.”

  “Yes, okay, but the second idea was what I said. The opposite of Famine! My first horseperson! I almost called him Feast but that sounded too much like a C-list Marvel supervillain.”

  “I assume you made him a horse, too?”

  “Meat golem. Vaguely horse shaped, yes. Started to rot before the band even broke up and abandoned me. Should’ve used more smoked country ham in its composition, I guess. That stuff lasts forever, even if you don’t refrigerate it.”

  Marla edged between two pillars made of heaped wheels of cheese. She found the dining room, with a long table that stood far higher than her head, and approached a makeshift staircase made of hundreds of stacked cases of beer and soda. “Plenty!” she called, mounting the stairs. “I’m here to help! I can take away your power!”

  She dodged a rotten tomato. A rather unhinged voice shouted, “I love my power! I just want to go home and get my business going! All this food is going to waste when I could be making a killing!”

  Marla groaned. Peace had told her Plenty was going to be a problem. “Where does the food come from, Elsie?” Marla asked.

  Elsie shrugged. “Someplace. Restaurants, warehouses, people’s pantries, orphanages? There’s some freeze-dried ice cream over there, that could’ve come from a space station even. Fun!”

  “So Plenty doesn’t generate food. He steals it.”

  Elsie sniffed. “He redistributes it. To himself, unfortunately, but that’s because he’s an asshole.”

  Marla mounted the steps and reached the expanse of table top, vast as a plateau, set for a giant’s feast. Plenty had built himself a hut out of oversized candlesticks, plates, and white napkins the size of mainsails. More rotten fruit came hurling at her from the hut’s front opening, and she dodged it all easily. “I’ll take you home,” she said. “Why did you come here if you didn’t want to?”

  “To get away from her!” Plenty said. “She hit me on the head and put me in a crate with some kind of living meat-monster and dropped me in a village in Africa!”

  “See?” Elsie said. “I’m a do-gooder, like you, Marla.”

  “Remedy said they could get me out, beyond Elsie’s reach, and I asked if they could take me somewhere I could make money, and they said they could, but the jerk never said they would. I ended up here, and the people who live in this house have been sleeping upstairs as long as I’ve been here. I think time moves funny in this place, and I had to use a butter dish for a toilet, and I tried to go outside, but there’s not any outside, and—”

  While Plenty was babbling, his diatribe punctuated by hurled fruit, Marla slipped around to the side of his makeshift hut, ducked under a napkin wall, and snuck up behind him. He wore a sharp suit, very Wall Street, heavily stained with what Marla devoutly hoped was chocolate. She melon balled him in the back of the head and he dropped to the tabletop.

  “Do you think we could strap one of these big gravy boats on top of the Wendigo?” Elsie said when Marla came out. “I could go boating in an actual gravy boat, it could be my new dreadnought, the HMS Saucière—”

  “Get. In. The. Car,” Marla said.

  Remedy

  “So Remedy was the one who led the escape?” Marla watched the road, made of shimmering silver, unspool before them as they traveled through a land of mist.

  Elsie reclined the driver seat, displacing heaps of paper in the backseat, until she was staring up at the ceiling. “Remedy was the last one I made. The best. Such power! Power I wish I had, but so it goes. See, Remedy can tell when something is wrong, and Remedy can fix it. Whatever the solution is, Remedy can do it. Cure cancer. Clean up pollution. Fix your busted marriage. But not with some reality-altering reweaver stuff, oh no. Remedy concocts medical cures in a basement laboratory. Remedy puts the right mind together with the right money to get a project off the ground. Remedy says the right thing at the right moment to shift your mind. Remedy co
uld genuinely save the world. They were a grad student studying philosophy, and their specialty was the problem of human suffering! They had a very philosopher-sounding byline too: Q Fortier. Doesn’t that sound like someone who’d create a systematized system of something? The horse I gave them was an actual horse, a super nice one I stole from some rich lady. But at the first all-hands meeting to plot world domination, I mean, salvation, what did Remedy do? Figured out a way to escape and took the other horsepersons with them. I was baffled. I couldn’t find them at all, not even a whiff, until the Wendigo appeared in my driveway honking its horn and demanding I come deal with their infestation in the Briarpatch.”

  The car made a terrible, brake-squealing noise then. Marla had assumed Elsie was lying—Elsie did that—and the Wendigo was clearly irritated with the trickster god, but Marla didn’t exactly know the contours of the lie. They’d probably be revealed in time.

  “Once the Wendigo brought me into its domain, I could sense my darlings again,” Elsie went on. “They have little bits of me in them, after all. I know where they are like I know where my arms and legs are.”

  The Wendigo blurred through a transition and they emerged on a sterile salt flat. Marla and Elsie climbed out when the car stopped, and they stood under a clear night sky that had only six stars in it—Marla counted. The air was cold, but not as cold as it should have been in a salt desert night. She looked across the white plain and saw the only feature on the landscape: a campsite with two tents, a cooler, and some folding chairs.

  “I’ve got this one,” Elsie said. “You did the last two.”

  “Why did Remedy run away?” Marla asked. “What kind of problems did you want them to solve?”

  “You’re so suspicious. Who knows why mortals do things?”

  “The mortals, occasionally. I’ve got this one, Elsie.”

  Elsie sighed. “If you talk to Remedy, you’re going to think less of me.”

  “Not much chance of that.”

  “Ha, ha, ha ha ha.” She just said “ha”—she didn’t actually laugh. “I want you to remember that I didn’t intend for their powers to work exactly this way. When I figured out what Remedy could do, I encourage them toward noble self-sacrifice for the betterment of the world, which is a good-person thing.”

  “Encouraging others to sacrifice themselves isn’t necessarily good, Elsie, especially when you aren’t willing to sacrifice anything yourself.”

  “This is why I love spending time with you, Marla.” She sounded totally sincere. “You expand my moral worldview.”

  Marla walked to the tents. The first one was full of food and supplies. The second one had a couple of sleeping bags, some books and clothes, and a man hogtied and gagged. She recognized him. Marla bent down and wiggled the gag out of his mouth. “Hi, Darrin,” she said.

  “Marla, right? Please tell me you’re here to save me.”

  Elsie crawled into the tent too. “She’s death and I’m chaos,” Elsie said. “We don’t really rescue people. But you might be able to sort of...” She fluttered her hands. “Escape during the confusion.”

  “Yes, we’ll rescue you,” Marla said. “I’m pretty sure that’s been the whole point of this exercise.” She drew a knife and cut the camping line he’d been tied up with, and he rolled over and groaned. “Isn’t that right, Elsie? I know Darrin. He’s the cartographer who travels with the Wendigo.”

  “A cartographer, huh? I bet you could use some new maps of Hell.” Elsie grinned. “That was a literary reference. I wouldn’t expect you to get it.”

  “I read,” Marla said.

  “The obituaries of your enemies, sure, but I didn’t think anything else. It’s also a musical reference. There’s a Bad Religion album with that name. Which is appropriate for us. Because we’re gods. Arguably bad ones. Bad as in, bad for people, not bad as in, bad at being gods. We’re great.”

  “Is the Wendigo here?” Darrin stood up.

  “It is. It wanted to rescue you.” Marla sighed. “It didn’t care about the other horsepersons at all, did it? Just the one who took Darrin.”

  “The Wendigo wasn’t sure which of my darlings had the mapmaker,” Elsie said. “Their auras are really intertwined, and magically speaking, they look like a single unit, blurred together with me, so they really stymie divination. I figured Remedy was the kidnapper, but, well, why not pick up the others first? I don’t like leaving bits of my divinity unattended.”

  “They were all miserable and wanted their powers taken away, except for Plenty, who was a jerk,” Marla said. “You could have told me the truth. It probably wouldn’t have changed my actions. Much.”

  Elsie made a face. “But then we wouldn’t have had a twist for the last act.”

  “So where’s Remedy?” Marla said.

  “Hiding from me. I’ll go back to the car. You can do the old scoop-and-carry without me. Come on, Darrin. I’ll protect you.”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “I’m Elsie.” She linked arms with him. “I was thinking, wouldn’t it be neat if you had a magic map, where if you changed something on the map, it changed that bit of the terrain in reality....”

  Marla sat in the tent for a while. She picked up some of the paperback books scattered around. Philosophy books, novels in French, a couple of graphic novels in Dutch. After a little while, Remedy crawled in. They wore all black, had a floppy brown undercut, and their eyes were deeply shadowed beneath thick glasses. “Hi,” they said. “I’m—I’m—I have to say ‘Remedy.’ She took my real name from me.”

  “I think it’s Q,” Marla said. “You really can’t say your own name? Sounds like a problem. I thought you could solve those?”

  “I can. I’m solving it right now. You’re the solution.”

  Marla nodded. “Right. I figured that out... but to be fair, only about ten minutes ago. Your problem was having these powers. You figured out how to enter the Briarpatch, to kidnap Darrin, to get the attention of the Wendigo, who would strong-arm Elsie into tracking you down, but she would fuck around because she can’t help herself, so then the Wendigo would bring me in to actually take care of things. Right?”

  “I see the solutions in more abstract terms, actions to be taken to form links in a chain of consequences, but.... yes.” Remedy nodded, eyes owlish behind the glasses. “You’ll take my power away now?”

  “I will,” she said. “But why? The others, I can see the downsides, they’re maybe mostly downsides, but you.... You could make a difference in the world. Really help people. Why not?”

  Remedy bowed their head. “The first step to solving a problem is being aware of the problem. I’m aware of all the problems. I was in New York City when Elsie changed me. Do you know how many problems there are in New York City?”

  “As many as there are people?”

  “More. Because people have more than one problem. I feel them all. Pain. Addiction. Sickness. Disappointment. Jealousy. I feel them like they’re happening to me. I tried to hide in the woods, but even then, I felt pollution, loss of habitat, the fear of the prey, the hunger of the predators. This is the only quiet place I’ve found, because nothing lives here at all. Even so, having Darrin here was almost unbearable, and his only problem was that I’d kidnapped him. Can you imagine how that feels?”

  Marla, who was the death of the world, and who could sense the lives being born and being snuffed out all across her domain, nodded. She could handle that ocean of suffering, but she was a god. As a mortal, it would have killed her.

  “This is the complicated solution,” Remedy said. “The simple one, killing myself, wouldn’t have helped the others Elsie changed, so I decided to hold on longer, to help them too. So I was selfless. As much as I could stand to be.”

  “You were. Hold on.” She lifted the melon baller, then paused. “If you don’t mind... just, one thing... How do you solve a problem like Elsie?”

  Remedy shook their head. “There is no solution to Elsie, but I will say this—problems like her t
end to take care of themselves.”

  “So you’re saying eventually she’ll disrupt something bad enough that it kills her?”

  “I can’t see the future,” Remedy said, “but I can figure the odds.”

  Marla took their pain away.

  The Fifth Horseperson

  The Wendigo dropped them off on the doorstep of Hell. “That was fun,” Elsie said. She sighed. “I always thought there should be a fifth horseperson, to ride along with War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death: Chaos.”

  “Terry Pratchett wrote a novel about that,” Marla said.

  Elsie frowned. “I know. It was another literary reference. I was going to do the comedy rule of threes thing. This time I was going to say I know you read actuarial tables for fun, but nothing else. You ruined it.” She grinned. “I love it when people ruin things. It means I’m doing my job. So tell me, Death: when are you going to mount your pale horse and go out riding? Because, you know... I might want to come along.”

  “Go away, Elsie.”

  “You and me, side by side! Laying waste! Getting wasted! Getting laid!”

  “Go to... the opposite of Hell, Elsie. Get the hell out of Hell. Please.”

  Elsie sauntered off toward a river of fire that marked the boundary of the underworld just there just then. “You know you’d enjoy it. It’s good for you to get out of the underworld sometimes.”

  “It’s better when you get out of the underworld for all time.”

  Elsie snorted. “Road trip, Marla! Road trip!”

  Marla watched her go, until she was sure Elsie was gone, then returned to her palace to check on her wife and her life and her work.

  But she smiled as she walked.

  Part Two: Everybody Else

  Down with the Lizards and the Bees

  I wrote this story as a standalone, but later, when I needed a Bay Area psychic character in my novel Blood Engines, I thought of B, and decided to bring him back... never dreaming that he’d go on to appear in many other novels and stories. This is where Bradley Bowman began.