With blood dripping from her mouth, the ghost-girl mouthed, “He didn’t deserve you.”
When it was all over, when Bentley was torn to pieces, when the ghost-girl had divided his remains evenly on the four tables surrounding us, when the dark seemed somehow more oppressive, when a fuzz of static from my walkie-talkie broke the stillness, I waved a hand in front of Nevaeh’s face.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t blink. She didn’t move.
I approached the ghost-girl, the only person—thing—creature in the world who had done something unselfish for me.
“Will I ever see you again?”
She pressed her hand to my heart.
“You’re right. I don’t need anyone but myself. But did he really have to die?”
She pulled back, smoothed a bloody finger over the scar on her forehead. She nodded.
“Who are you?”
She shrugged, tilted her head downward.
I clicked off my walkie-talkie, patted my key ring, and across the room. As I reached the door, I looked behind me, past the mess that had been someone I had thought I loved, past a shocked Nevaeh, past the cereal dispensers and juice jugs.
The room was dark and empty, the ghost-girl gone.
I looked down. I was holding something small and round in my hand. A peach, like on that first night, perhaps? I bit into it.
“He was right,” I whispered. “Everything tastes better in the dark.”
B is for Bad Boy
C.S. MacCath
Metal Crow flexed one silvery wing, flexed the other. Feather-shaped solar panels clicked into place. Tilting his head, he peered down from the port side railing at the girl, sunburnt and rocking with the waves. Small, dirty arms encircled small, dirty knees. A pink tongue worried the groove of a cracked lower lip. Cracked fingers worried the hem of a faded, yellow dress. Metal Crow fixed his ebony eyes upon the pulse at her throat, let his black beak fall open and tasted the air above her. Slow. Foetid. He lifted first one foot, then the other, tapping them on the railing in frustration. They had all gone like this, one after the other, of heat and hunger and thirst. A few had drowned themselves in the hot, dying ocean while he scouted as he had been programmed to do, out and back again until he found the settlement. The captain had died yesterday in a delirium, muttering about her soul until it departed her body. Now Metal Crow was all the girl had left.
Ghost Crow hovered beside his brother in the ghost land, black feathers fluttering in a ghost breeze. “You must help her come to me,” he warbled, soft in the way of conversation between corvids. “I know there is a poison on the boat, swift and painless. Her father used it to spare food for his wife and child.”
The girl gazed up at them both, wide dark eyes seeing the true land and the ghost land together. Her lips rounded as if she might speak, but nothing emerged from her throat but a sound like whispering sand.
Ghost Crow flew down to pretend he was perching upon her knee and warbled again, pensive and sad, while the girl passed her fingers through his body in weary wonderment. “It would be cruel to leave her like this, and they will not take her in at the settlement.”
“They will take her in,” Metal Crow grumbled. “You would take me in if I had a soul like the captain; I am made, and you were alive, but we are near enough the same.” Solar panel feathers unfurled from an argent body, and he added, “She is like them. You will see.”
Up he sprang into the dull, yellow day. A hazy stream of sunlight beat upon his wings, energizing the lubricated motors of his body and the synthetic synapses of his brain. Living birds were a rarity anymore; few ensouled creatures were left in the land, sea, and sky. Alone in the heights, Metal Crow wondered if the Earth Herself had a soul and decided She probably did.
A great stone wall rose between the beach and the settlement, and beyond them both the crumble of a long-abandoned city gave way to distant mountains. Metal Crow landed on a weathervane in the commons; a sturdy pole topped with a steel rooster that called the time and temperature as he settled beside it. “Fifteen hundred hours and thirty-eight degrees Celsius!”
When the rooster finished, Metal Crow followed in a loud, clear voice. “PRS Unity, Smart Assistant Navigator, requesting emergency medical assistance for one survivor, a girl five years of age, Nathalee Mera. Coordinates are 48.911689 by -125.949934.”
Below him in the commons, people hurried between houses painted white to reflect the heat; an old man tucked under a pink umbrella, a beautiful woman in billowing cotton, a smartly dressed little boy sucking on a frozen lolly as it melted into his hand. Metal Crow brightened in his bearing and expression. They valued children! It was a good sign.
A door creaked open. Squinted eyes in a pinched face peered up at the weathervane. A woman’s voice shouted, “What was that?”
The old man stopped, tilted his umbrella to look up at Metal Crow, and croaked a reply. “Pacific Rescue Ship’s AI navigator.”
Another door opened as they spoke. A cluster of people emerged, perhaps a family. First among them was a young man in a linen shirt with gold buttons that gleamed in the sunlight. He descended the porch steps, shielding his eyes to stare up at the weathervane. “What does it want?” he asked. “I heard they’re programmed to say anything it takes.”
The beautiful woman in billowing cotton smirked up at Metal Crow and inquired, “How many refugees are you not telling us about?”
“None.” Metal Crow proffered an anxious bob of his head. “There were forty-two souls when the PRS Unity left San Diego.” There was that word again, ‘soul’. “But Nathalee Mera is the only survivor, and she needs emergency medical care.”
“We could strip the boat for parts,” the old man said to the young one.
“You don’t really believe they’re all dead, do you?” the beautiful woman asked in a tone that suggested the men might be stupid.
“We can’t feed forty-two people.” The squinting woman stepped around her front door and strode down to the commons in a silk dressing gown and slippers. “We’d be completely over-run.”
“One girl.” Metal Crow interjected, bewildered now and frightened for Nathalee. He warbled the words again in what he hoped was a pleading tone. “One girl.”
The beautiful woman bent down, picked up a stone, and threw it at him. The stone missed and hit the weathervane. “Go back to your boat,” she snapped. “Tell the captain we said ‘no’ and to move on. Don’t come back, or the next time, I won’t miss.”
Metal Crow squawked, clattered his feathers, and wished he could weep. Instead, he took to the air and traveled back to the Unity; over the settlement, over the great stone scar of its wall and gate, over a poisonous plume of algae near the shore, and out across the quiet ocean.
When he arrived, Ghost Crow was perched on the ladder well in the shade of the forecastle, his ghost talons pretending to grip the edge of a rung. Nathalee had dragged herself to the open hold and peered down into it now, smiling as a drop of blood fell from her split lip into the darkness.
“There once was a crow who lived in a time of thirst, as you do now,” Ghost Crow said, and the hold brightened with the image of a story crow, her mouth hanging open. “She found a pitcher with a measure of water in the bottom, but it was tall and slender, and she was short in the neck and broad in the body.” A vessel appeared, painted seafoam green with pale starfishes. “But this crow was a clever bird. Filling her beak with pebbles again and again, she dropped them into the pitcher until the water level rose, and she could drink her fill.” The vessel vanished. A rain-spattered valley took its place. The crow plashed in a puddle there. “Because of her cleverness, the crow lived to see the land grow green and fertile again.”
Nathalee’s eyes drooped, and she faded into unconsciousness; one hand reaching for the crow, the puddle of water, the verdant valley, and a world that would never be again.
“Someone threw a rock at me.” Metal Crow grumbled as he tottered to her body and l
aid his beak against her neck, checking for a pulse he could not otherwise detect now. It was faint and thready.
“They are not who you think they are. They never were.” Ghost Crow floated through Nathalee’s body to hover beside his metal brother and tilted his head in the girl’s direction. “She wouldn’t be if she lived long enough to grow up.”
“They cannot all be the same. The navigator treated me well, and the captain gave Nathalee the last of the water...” Metal Crow paused, recalling the captain’s concern for her soul, weighing it against the beautiful woman’s petty cruelty. At length, he asked, “Why is it living things have souls, but made things do not?”
Nathalee rolled onto her back, uttered a faint moan, and fell silent again.
“You must help her come to me,” Ghost Crow said, but Metal Crow was already in flight, winging his way back to the settlement.
When he arrived, there were many people in the commons, perhaps all who dwelt behind the wall. They watched the gate, the sky, each other. Metal Crow made his descent, remembering the story crow and her thirst. This time he would be clever and say the right words. This time there would be humans like his navigator and captain.
Several hands raised. Several fingers pointed at the sky.
The beautiful woman in billowing cotton lifted a pistol and shot him.
Metal Crow registered the shatter of solar panel feathers, the sparking short in his shoulder and eye, the grief in what a living crow would call his heart. He flapped and fell away from the commons, over a cluster of small but splendid houses, and clattered to the ground in a garden. There he lay through the late afternoon and early evening, his little body twitching, his one good eye pressed against the dark soil.
The sun set and took with it some of the heat. Metal Crow heard the snick of scissors, a woman’s voice humming a wordless tune, a murmured, “Well, well. You’ve had better days, haven’t you?” A warm, tomato-fragrant hand closed his wings and lifted him up. The dirt fell away from his eye to reveal a pair of bony feet moving barefoot between the cabbages and cucumbers toward a shed, where they slipped into sandals.
“Brenna’s a mean-spirited bit of plastic with too much lipstick and too many bullets, and the rest of them ain’t any better.” The woman placed him gently on a workbench cluttered with tools, good eye down. “I’m sorry, little bird. Let me see what I can do.”
Metal Crow tried to thank her, but all he could say was, “Error, error, error,” before the woman turned his feet to put him in maintenance sleep.
He woke standing, and the first words out of his mouth were “PRS Unity, Smart Assistant Navigator, requesting emergency medical assistance for one survivor, a girl five years of age, Nathalee Mera. Coordinates are 48.911689 by -125.949934.” The second words were the ones he hoped were story crow-clever and right. “Please help Nathalee. She’s a child, and I don’t want her to go with Ghost Crow into the ghost land.”
“So that’s why she shot you.” The woman had been smiling when he woke, but she was frowning now, and the lines of her face were gathered into the corners of a mouth already lined with many years of sun and wind. She poked a slender screwdriver into the black and silver braid at her crown and rose from the workbench. “I can steal the settlement’s rowboat. Can you lead me out to the Unity?”
Metal Crow blinked, one eye at a time. He could not blink them together anymore, but he could see out of them both, and that was enough. Three of his solar panel feathers were gone as well, replaced with the same aluminum used to patch his shoulder. He lifted into the air and made a tentative sweep of the shed while the woman rushed to gather a medical kit, water, food, and clothes. Metal Crow perched on a windowsill and answered, “Yes. I can see, and I can fly, so I can lead you to Nathalee.” He paused to preen his new aluminum feathers. They were shiny, he decided, and they held him in the air. That was enough, too. “Thank you for trying to save her, and thank you for saving me.”
The woman arched her brow in a shrewd expression. “Just how smart are you, smart assistant navigator?”
“I can perform any navigation function upon command, and I can act as a search and rescue coordinator in the absence of a human crew.” It was a response Metal Crow knew to provide humans who asked what he could do, but it was too simple for the love, and grief, and fear he carried now. “But I’m not a living crow.” He shifted back and forth on his feet. “So I don’t have a soul.”
“Well, I’m just a gardener here, and I’ve been working at the pleasure of the folks you’ve already met since they founded this awful place. Tell the truth, I don’t think they’ve got a soul to split between them.” The woman beckoned for him to follow her out of the shed. “No, I think the Good Lady got distracted one day and sewed up a great big soul for you out of the ones she forgot to give them.”
Metal Crow followed her out of a creaking garden gate, down a sloping hillside under a starry night, and onto a beach where a rowboat was tethered to a dock. Along the way, he thought about what she had said and flew more easily because of it. When they reached the boat, he asked, “Why did you say I had a soul?”
The woman cast off and clambered inside. “Because you care about things like souls to begin with, but mostly because you want Nathalee to live so much you risked yourself for her sake.” She began to row, passing through the plume of poisonous algae. It stuck to the oars and stank. “I just hope we’re not too late.”
Metal Crow hoped the same thing, and he also hoped the woman was right about souls.
When they arrived at the Unity, he flew straightaway to Nathalee, who was still unconscious. But the press of his beak against her throat revealed the same thready pulse. Relieved, he flapped his wings and called, “She’s here! She’s alive! She’s here! She’s alive!”
The woman rushed to Nathalee, dropped to her knees on the deck, and pressed a wetted cloth to the girl’s parched lips. Nathalee stirred, and a moment later her cheeks narrowed to suck the water from it.
“Good girl. Meg’s got you now, and everything’s gonna be all right.” Meg lifted Nathalee into her lap and glanced up. “Well done, little silver soul.”
Metal Crow hopped over to stand in Nathalee’s open hand, still resting on the deck, and felt her fingers curl toward his talons in response. She would live, and Meg had just called him ‘little silver soul’. He felt as if all the pebbles were in the pitcher now, and he could finally drink his fill.
Meg interrupted his reverie. “Go set a course northwest. There’s a way station two days out. We’ll resupply there and pick up a crew. I’ve heard of a town in the far north where it still snows. Maybe we’ll find better people there.”
She spoke with a captain’s authority, so Metal Crow flew at once to the bridge, where he carried out her command. Afterward, he perched on the wheel and gazed across the boat’s bow at the expanse of dark water ahead.
Ghost Crow floated in from the shadows to perch beside him in the ghost land under ghost stars. “You asked the wrong question,” he declared with gentle certainty. “What was the right one?”
Metal Crow tilted his head, settled his wings, and preened his aluminum feathers while he thought about the matter. At last, he replied, “What is a soul, and why is it some beings have them but others do not?”
“Just so,” Ghost Crow said, and evanesced into the night as if he had never been there at all.
C is for Crows
Alexandra Seidel
To watch Dionysia dance is to be enchanted. To watch her and feel nothing is to be frightened. Every time she dances, I do not feel a thing.
Before I met her, I was a man of many sins. Money delighted me, other things that should never delight a grown person delighted me even more. Indulging as I did gave me enemies, I knew that, but I bought my safety and my sleep with the latest alarm system, with the police in my pocket, with pretty walls all around my house. To this day, I don’t know who sent me the urn, and Dionysia, through all my begging, will not tell me.
It arrived in an inconspicuous parcel, neatly wrapped, the sender’s name common and forgettable. The cleaner signed for it, and put it on the mahogany dining room table. I found it sitting in the slanting light of a September evening. There were roses on the table, I remember their sickly sweet smell and their thorns invisible in the crystal vase.
I left my jacket on the back of a chair and got a knife from the kitchen to open the parcel. Ever since I was a little boy I loved unwrapping things. Frill and laces are my favorite. But this parcel was just the size of a shoe box.
The knife bit into the paper, and I slashed with a satisfying sound. Beneath, there was a wooden box, finely made, dark and polished with the faint, lingering smell of sandalwood. I thought that it was probably a gift from one of my more obscure business associates, the ones that prefer not to be mentioned on paper. The ones that delighted in sins and indulged overly, as did I.
A small silver clasp held the box shut. It shone in the fading light, and I ran my right thumb over it. It was a pretty thing, and I had always loved pretty things. It opened with a small click, but the lid unfolded noiselessly.
The urn did not look like an urn. It’s a small container made of white jade. The lid fit snugly but not too tightly. It had the aura of an antique. Silk cushioned it, and there was a card, exquisite copperplate: Open me.
The O alone was shaped like desire, and everything about this presumable gift made my think it was the prelude to something greater, something more satisfying, a scavenger hunt of sorts. It is something that is done among a certain elite group of my more obscure acquaintances, the ones that delight in darkness and indulge in sins. The prize is usually lace-wrapped, and satisfying.
I felt excitement mount inside of me, and so I pulled the lid off the urn. That single act was unavoidable. It was the tragic culmination of a life that had never known restraint.
G is for Ghosts Page 4