Last Drink Bird Head

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Surely you can hear the flapping, louder than the laughing and the dancing, louder than the do do do? Hair of the dog, breath of the dragon, feathers like razors coated in quicklime? Eye of a drunken sinner, staring at the end of his time?

  Beak like two scythes coming down?

  Thanks for too much of your time—I can’t say it’s ever been a pleasure. But a mite better than what I’m looking at this evening.

  Last drink. Bird head.

  JEFFREY THOMAS

  Jeffrey Thomas has written of Punktown before, in such books as Health Agent, Blue War, Deadstock, Everybody Scream!, Monstrocity, Punktown: Shades Of Grey, Voices From Punktown, and, of course, Punktown. His website is at www.jeffreyethomas.com/blog

  Pre’tu hated holidays to begin with. Holidays reminded him of his wifelessness, childlessness, his pennilessness in having to buy presents for others who–with mocking grins of joy, or at least drunkenness–embraced each holiday only too readily, like birds enticed by any bright bauble however broken and petty.

  This was a Tikkihotto holiday, but becoming even more insidiously widespread. Pre’tu lived in the Earth-established colony Punktown. If only merging with other races could have diluted and dissolved such grotesque customs, but in the interest of political correctness school children who were not even Tikkihottos were encouraged to read about the holiday, paint or sculpt the gaping, too hungry chicks.

  “Pre’tu! Pre’tu!” the others chanted, like infant birds in a nest, screeching for their glistening worms of pleasure. Birds translucent and frail, eye feelers groping blindly. It was the prevailing image of this Spring festival, celebrating the cycle of death and rebirth, the emergence of new life.

  “I’ll give you a worm,” Pre’tu muttered. “A worm to choke you mindless punch-swillers.”

  Family, friends, priests strutting like peacocks, and the homeless invited in for a charitable meal (some of whom weren’t even Tikkihottos, but willing to embrace any culture that put punch in their bellies). Pre’tu glared at an Earther who was shaking his metal drinking straw in the air like a little spear, fermented amniotic fluid dripping from its end.

  “Drink up, Hotto!” he shouted.

  He was the last. As always! Last child born to his family, drowned in the wake of his siblings. Last to marry (though first to have his wife desert him; that was something!).

  And now, because he had been mired in Punktown’s traffic, he was last to enter the festival hall and join the celebration. As tradition dictated, the last must drink bird head.

  He approached the mother beast, strapped to the table before him as if she might rise from the dead, squawking at the holes punched in her body, made thin-skinned and soft from a special steaming process; a bag of gelatin in the form of a woman-sized fowl. Her eye tendrils hung flaccid. Pre’tu’s own tendrils swarmed, taking in the avian Eucharist. Someone had left their metal straw still punctured in her swollen belly, inside which Pre’tu could see the shadowy suggestion of a litter. He imagined the babies still alive, gurgling. Trapped, like himself.

  “Last drink bird head! Last drink bird head!”

  “Drink from my ass,” Pre’tu mumbled, but what choice did he have? They were the flock, and he was nothing but a failure; a fool to drink the dregs that even the transients had avoided.

  Pre’tu leaned over the carcass and inserted his straw into one of the nests of ocular tendrils. It pierced the socket, on into the morass that was all the bird had left for a brain (she, and everyone else in this room). Pre’tu bent lower, and sucked.

  They cheered. Cherished fool!

  And Pre’tu swallowed the bitter, bitter brains.

  SCOTT THOMAS

  Scott Thomas writes in a smallish upstairs room painted in 18th century colors. The room is in coastal Maine, in a house he shares with cats and his girlfriend Peggy.

  Poor John Burnham died alone and unloved with no wife, no children and only a fever to keep him warm. He had wandered to a field where the hay had been harvested and morning frost made a brittle silver. A bead of sweat lent a glittery eye to the birthmark above his brow—a plum-colored silhouette of a bird’s head in profile. The bachelor had simply stretched out on his back with pale hands folded on his chest, as if waiting for sleep.

  An old man sat in his “best room,” with its bay leaf-green wainscot, hearing the rain of a New England night. There were other noises as well, noises so uncanny that the farmer gathered musket, lantern and dog before heading out.

  In a field made wider by the dark, the old man found young John Burnham, the blacksmith. The body had been there for an indeterminable amount of time, long enough for the eyes to hollow. Rain collected in these sockets and the birds of the field converged to drink from them. Ash and white finches paced across the soggy corpse like bankers with plump vests, and a sparrow chased a cricket into a coat pocket, which fluttered briefly as if a heart.

  That night the birds and the old man dreamt of lovely young women.

  JOHN URBANCIK

  John Urbancik, author of a few novels and novellas and short stories, can be found at www.darkfluidity.com; however, you must decide the wisdom of such a visit yourself. The site was properly named.

  A meandering highway leads to the place called Last Drink. Long and narrow, the highway is harrowing at those times it looks down deep cliffs at water crashing on rocks. Last Drink teeters at the very end of the world. A favorite haunt of unknown celebrities, fallen heroes, and missing children who have grown to middle and old ages, it also happens to be the home of Last Drink Bird Head.

  He lives in the bird’s nest, of course, which is actually the entire flat roof over Last Drink. He watches the sun rise in the east and set in the west, and he’ll converse with anyone who drops in.

  But there are no stairs.

  The birds bring him gifts and food. He has quite the collection of bottle caps, baseball cards, and precious gems. He gives something to everyone who visits.

  The only way up to Last Drink Bird Head’s home is to climb the walls. Make use of the ivy, if you think it’ll hold. Or the little stone gargoyle outcroppings, if you trust such things not to crumble to dust. Many, quite obviously, have suffered exactly that fate.

  If you could fly, of course, it’d be easy, but the ospreys don’t appear inclined to help, the magpies aren’t strong enough to lift you, and the hummingbirds won’t slow down enough to try.

  Fortified with half a bottle of whiskey from Last Drink, I made up my mind to visit Last Drink Bird Head and see what he had to say. I won’t reveal my secret. I’ll tell you only I’m a better climber than I look like I should be—and determination and inspiration are as important as skill and luck.

  I got there shortly before dawn. Last Drink Bird Head sat on a beach chair sipping a fruity frozen cocktail, his face protected from the sun by a Jets cap that had seen better days. I asked, in my stupidity, if he was a fan. He smiled and shrugged and told me a story.

  The story included magicians and princesses, lost treasure, forgotten prophecies, magnificent palaces in the clouds, and a boy named Oscar. I won’t endeavor to retell the tale, as I could not possibly do it justice. By the time he finished, I was sober, and smarter, and perhaps even cleverer. We discussed ancient Chinese philosophies and the failings of emperors. We played a dozen games of chess, in each of which I made a single error that cost me my king. We created riddles, and solved some of them.

  Eventually, Last Drink Bird Head turned his chair, and together we watched the sunset. Then he gave me a hand-sized chunk of asphalt. “From Times Square, this,” he said. “Trod upon by both prostitutes and politicians.”

  Then he sent me on my way.

  Getting down from Last Drink Bird Head’s perch is not as easy as you might think.

  GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

  Genevieve Valentine’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and others, and her first novel is forthcoming from Prime Books. She has terrible taste in movies, a tragedy she trac
ks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com

  “To a Dear Friend, on Her Departure”

  18 September

  My dear Imogen,

  Though I know how it hurt you to lose Charles, I find myself baffled and wounded by your insistence on traveling to the Silver City.

  I am flattered you saw fit to inform me of your going, of course. Take this letter as my talisman, then, and memorize it before the ship sets down; you should not be seen reading this language in the Silver City.

  Customs there are complicated, but this is paramount: never refuse. (I know how you take pleasure in refusing, but it is impolitic there.)

  It will take place at a table (all negotiations do), and you must gain the advantage. Eat all you can of the bird. Begin with the feet; it is a sign of good breeding.

  All the innards are well-cooked, and so it is only a matter of managing the bones. If you suck the marrow first, they are easier to chew.

  The feathers will stick in your teeth. Pay no mind.

  Imogen—think about what waits for you if you are foolish enough do this. Charles is gone. I wish you would believe me. From the chair in which I am now confined I have the leisure of revisiting dark memories. Do not go. A stout heart and a pair of trousers profit a dead woman nothing. If you would only accept my proposal

  No, rest easy; of all the pains I have suffered, that is the one I have the least desire to revisit. You know your own mind, as you have often reminded me. So be it.

  The skull is sugared, the brains warmed in syrup. Tip the brains into the throat all at once, and then take the beak in two fingers to give an anchor for biting the skull. Don’t fear; the skull has been properly baked and will crumble to dust in your mouth.

  I wish you luck, Imogen; you have sore need of it. May you be as successful as you hope, though I suspect a woman’s childish optimism is at play here, and it will fail you.

  Your humble friend,

  John Case

  20 September

  Imogen—

  I pray this reaches you before the ship takes off—please God—

  I lied—you must not touch the head—it is a sign of war to drink the brains or bite the skull—they will kill Charles the moment you touch it—they will kill you too—I was so angry at your deafness—

  I am sorry—

  JEFF VANDERMEER

  Jeff VanderMeer has been known to yell “squid!” at passersby from a moving vehicle, but spends most of his time writing fiction and nonfiction from his special amphibious Command and Control module. For more information visit jeffvandermeer.com

  Last Drink Bird Head ecleets marnfully at the emptied glissando, jecklated postportal. Sometimes the waste of roilatimus begreaves in him a kind of largesse that throatens and bogrotes into a rainful quertiness. Nothing flumefilled may grain him full. Nothing annihilarge can discrete him from that watch biorthed him. But every tale and stale Last Drink Bird Head cannot hurlerp but forge. And, forging, link. In the underboards, in the overthink, he has no hunkersafe. Once, the forge-link spake s/tale at him, and, earing, must sorb. It never sorbed outside of Last Drink Bird Head, so inpath he grew throaty and thrubb in the earing of it, exempt not scrying: “Pale blue with death, wreathed in seaweed and prawn, the detective climbs from deep beneath a gray ocean where fishermen grope through darkness for bony fish and sharply grotesque creatures swim ever forward in languid menace and from the depths the false promise of phosphorescent light. Above, the wavery thin disc of the sun, radiating weak light across the undersides of waves, becomes brighter with every step. The bubbles of his breathing erupt from his mouth, reach the surface before him, so that his whimpering voice echoes as they pop into air. ‘Please. Please. It was not me. I am not myself,’ they whisper. The sun is a defining circle; by the sharpness of its definition, he measures his progress toward the light. The first steps make him grimace, for here the deep and turgid water fights him, his thighs churning against it. He can hear the tongues of the water pushing at him, screaming out against him. But then, the sun beats hot on him and his struggle becomes easier, until, entering the shadows, his head finally above water so that he can exhale his last breaths recklessly, he runs up the last few steps onto the stage. There to have the roar of waves replaced with the roar of the crowd. To die in bliss. To soak up the sun, basking in it, while shaking the last drops of water and death from his body. Animated. Fully alive. His scalp tingles; he can feel his blood no longer thick and cold in his body, but singing to him, singeing his fingertips. The energy from the gathered audience fibrillates in his bones so that he spins, arms outstretched, for the joy of it, under a sun only inches from his face. He could touch it, kiss it, if he wished. It is a kind of story.” Not mast whorlds cud Last Drink Bird Head, yet thrubb he did to the scree of it and oh how his birnet coiled to forge that in this link there is such a lingering, a thronging, that he links tense. He links large. But he is Last Drink Bird Head. Last Drink Bird Head has only the forge and the link. While founder is dark, Last Drink Bird Head is light. While founder is light, Last Drink Bird Head is dark. No whorld shall ever exchange such a link-forge. And so Last Drink Bird Head sentinels in absynth of relief, ever sorbed, ever sorbering.

  KIM WESTWOOD

  Kim Westwood lives in Canberra, Australia. She is an Aurealis Award finalist and winner for a number of her short stories. Her first novel, The Daughters of Moab, was published by HarperCollins in 2008.

  Last I saw, you were

  punctured by Drink and leaning over the mezzanine rails

  of your international animal gallery.

  I asked is the Bird—a sad pink and grey galah (they pair for life

  and this one was hunched alone in its cage)—

  really smuggled all the way from earth in a sock?

  And you said well yes but before you get on your high horse

  remember they can’t survive in the wild, what with the explosions and

  ozone holes, and here it gets the best care universal coinage can buy.

  Looking from the smooth uranium of your airship, its slick roll-out

  cupboards pocketed with creatures, to the rhinoceros Head

  jutting from its plaque

  I saw in my mind’s eye the last bellying gasps of that

  flare-nosed wild-eyed beast, and began to plot the trajectory

  of your international demise.

  LESLIE WHAT

  Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning writer and the author of Crazy Love, one of Booklist’s top ten SF books of 2008. www.lesliewhat.com

  “Another?” asks the bartender, Mick, wiping down the bar with rags soaked in yesterday’s hot water and enough memory of bleach to take down any germs.

  Funny how Bennett knows Mick’s name, while forgetting his daughter’s first grade teacher. He tilts his glass to get the last drops of JD, drums three fingers on the bar. Mick takes the hint; his tip’s on the line. But Bennett’s a generous man, especially to those he sees only at night. He’s on his fifth shot, and concentrates to keep from showing it. Mick pours heavy, God bless him.

  Some people are dreamers. Some gamblers. But Bennett’s an inventor. It’s a difference as big as the world. All he needs is more time, more money, a worthy lab. “Get a real job,” Shelley had warned, then today, packed her bags, and poof! She should have given him more time. Married ten years—she owed him that.

  Jack Daniels is everything a drink should be: a tingle and burn at the lips, the slow simmering journey down the gullet, warmth lingering briefly in the belly.

  The bar is named “The Bird Brain.” Swiss cuckoo clocks hump the walls, tweeting every fifteen minutes. A sculpted clay hand gives the finger in perpetuity. A glass dipping bird guards the register, its bulb-ass filled with red-tinted water and vapors, funneling into a skinny tube neck that connects to a fuzzy head and long hummingbird beak. Plywood legs straddle a base. Tip the head, the water drains, changes the center of gravity. Cool the head in a water glass and tip the bird back. Water evaporates, water dra
ins like blood. Back and forth. Pressure equalizes. The cycle continues. No miracles here, just parlor science.

  “One more,” Bennett says, knocking over his glass. “Oops.”

  Mick’s expression is stern. “You sure?” he asks.

  “Sure,” Bennett says. “I’ll take a cab.” A lie, but who will know?

  Bennett peers into his glass like it’s a JD crystal ball. His head droops.

  He snaps it back, but the muscles in his neck ignore his command.

  He abandons trying to lift the glass. Elbows splayed for purchase on the bar, he bows forward to drink. His nose gets there first.

  His eyes sting. JD shoots through his nostrils. His head jerks. He coughs, gasps, and mashes his face against the bar. His cheek floats amidst JD vapors. He licks his lips, sucks the bar dry. Laughter forms like bursting bubbles, and he manages to sit up, briefly, until gravity takes over, and he plummets.

  He’s figured it out. Perpetual motion. It’s been here the whole time. If only he can remember this in the morning.

  “Last call,” says Mick.

  Bennett raises one finger, but his words are a slur. In frustration, he flips Mick the bird.

  He’s kicked out to the street, where he stumbles, takes a dive, and hugs the ground until dawn, until he’s fit to stand upright and walk away.

  DREW RHYS WHITE

  Drew Rhys White lives in Philadelphia where he recently helped produce Philadelphia’s first Hidden City Festival. His band dot dot dot is tacitly acknowledged as a leader of the silentcore movement.

  The terrain will become increasingly rocky; the weather gloomy, sodden. You have entered the home range of the Macilvane Cave Swift. Observe the swifts as they cloud the air above you; note the white V on their faces: the distinct “reverse mask.” Note also their divided tails, barbed at each end that they may strike twice before dying. Take heart. You have endured sharper stings than these.