Kzine Issue 9

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  SHATTERED

  by Rhonda Parrish

  His wings curved like scythes over his back, reaching the ground behind his heels and swooping up over the horns that crowned his head. Spider web cracks marred their surface, but the lines, oh, the lines. They made her want to growl, press her back against his chiseled chest, and feel him tight against her, his claws digging into her haunches just like last night.

  But it was daylight, and so, even though she was perched at the very top of the cathedral, she daren’t even twitch a toe lest she be seen by someone below. Ever since the curse if one of her kind were seen to move by mortal man they would be shattered to dust and scattered to the winds.

  The night was their time. It was their time to move, to fly, to be together. They stayed far above the streets and the rabble, cloaked by darkness and the population’s apathy, their disinclination to look up. During the day she waited frozen in place, spine arched, mouth open. Often water ran from between her jaws, and birds taunted her by standing or shitting on her. She perched, her claws digging into the soft limestone ledge, straining her eyes to the left to see him in his spot on the corner. Hard. Strong. Hers.

  The shadows of the cathedral were long on the busy, car-filled street below when his scent wafted over her, filling her, suffusing her, but it didn’t come alone. Mixed in with his aroma was that of a stranger. A human. That was odd. Normally she could only scent them when her senses sharpened at night.

  Then she heard it. The man’s laughter was high, hysterical and reminded her of an angry crow. Then came the smash.

  There was a small shack on the roof that housed an air conditioning unit which ran endlessly during the summer, filling the hot air with its incessant hum. The building had one small window, and the smash had come exactly from that window. The human had broken it.

  If she had any doubts about whether it was an accident or intentional they evaporated with the man’s angry growl. “House of God! Where was God while his priest did that to me? Where was he? Watching! Just. Watching.”

  He continued around the roof, slamming something hard into various surfaces, ranting and railing. He screamed about betrayal, coercion. He yelled about revenge and hurt and damage.

  She heard the smash of tin ductwork being banged and twisted mercilessly, the crunch of the shattered glass beneath the man’s feet, and she felt, again and again, the vibrations of something being slammed into the limestone ledges on and around which she and her friends were perched.

  And then, out of the corner of the eye she always kept trained on her love, she saw the human swing an aluminum baseball bat at her lover’s face. Hard. Again. And again. She felt the impact in her heart as though it were she being beaten. Every grain of her being screamed at her to attack, to stop the man who was wailing on her partner, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t last five seconds from take-off. The man would see her and she would be dust before she could do anything to it.

  “Watching and doing nothing. Just like you. Just watching. Well, watch this!” He screamed at her love as he struck, and again, and again.

  His bat crumpled from the impact and, swearing, he hurled it from the roof. She saw it fly, end over end, through the air before falling out of her line of sight. Relief filled her for one terrible moment, and then the man became even more enraged. He pounded his fists against her lover’s wings. She saw smears of blood mar their surface, and willed the sun to sink faster. Under the cover of night, while the man was distracted, she could move, could stop him without being seen. Maybe.

  But the sun didn’t hurry. It continued its pitiless journey, slowly, achingly slowly. It was still above the horizon when the man grabbed her lover’s wings and began to rock him back and forth.

  She saw her mate tighten his grip on the ledge beneath his claws and knew how fearful he must be to take such a risk with a human right there. Right there. Holding onto his wings and rocking him back and forth. Back and forth.

  At first the man’s efforts were for naught, her love didn’t move, but the man redoubled his efforts and with growing horror she watched him begin to gain an effect. Her love moved. At first it was just a hair’s width, but then it was more, and more. The limestone was weak compared to his granite form, and old. It began to loosen beneath him, then a pebble fell, and another. And then he fell.

  That he didn’t spread his wings, didn’t save himself, made her heart ache with pride. She didn’t know if she’d be able to show such willpower, such bravery, but she knew, as did he, that the damage from a fall could be repaired, the damage from utter destruction could not.

  And so he fell.

  Tumbled like a boulder, headfirst, silent and swift, down onto one of the tiny balcony’s that protruded from the middle of the cathedral like a studded belt around its waist, and there he broke.

  Her heart shattered along with his form, and she wondered if it would be as easily put back together as his body. She watched him break into several pieces and despite her best intentions, a sound slipped from her lips. It was low, and guttural, and broken. She felt it rumble through her body and escape from between her fangs.

  And still the sun did not set.

  It’s okay, she told herself. It’s all right. The priests will come and get him, they will put him back together. He was shattered but the pieces were mostly large and humans had repaired those who had been more damaged than he before. The key was that all of him had to be there. All of him or else, it wouldn’t be him, it would just look like him.

  As though her thoughts had cursed him she watched, then, as one piece of him, one piece that had been tottering on the edge of the balcony, slipped over and slid soundlessly to the ground below. She winced, her claws clenching the ledge tighter.

  Again the man above her, the man who had tossed her love off the roof, whooped in joy. “I’m gonna get me a piece!” he shouted and she heard his footsteps retreat back toward the stairs that led into the belly of the cathedral.

  And the sun continued to take its time descending beneath the horizon.

  The seconds felt like hours, the minutes like eons. She could feel her love below her, could sense him. She hoped he wasn’t aware, wasn’t in pain, but she wouldn’t be able to know for sure until the sun was gone. Until darkness. She felt the empathy that radiated off the others like heat, but it didn’t comfort her. Nothing could.

  Finally the last fingers of light retreated from the sky and slunk down below the horizon. In the darkness she stretched her wings and, while the others huddled together, whispering and giving her privacy, she glided down to the balcony.

  He was not aware and so he could not be in pain. He lay, bashed into half a dozen large pieces, his eyes closed, wings still. Though it was night he did not stir, and she was thankful. She would stay with him, until the priests discovered him here. She would shield him from the birds and the voyeuristic gaze of the sun. The priests would wonder how she’d moved there, but they would assume it was the same way he had. She’d be safe from the curse. They’d be together.

  But first she had to get back the piece that had fallen.

  “I’ll be right back,” she whispered, though he couldn’t hear, and swooped down toward the ground, careful, lest a human be lingering nearby.

  There weren’t any humans, but the missing piece of her mate wasn’t there either.

  She could sense its path. His scent clung to it, the scent she’d bathed herself in for year after year. She could feel it, like a mist that drifted in the air, tantalizing and leading her on. His scent, and that of the human who’d knocked him off his perch.

  She followed its trail, pressing herself against the sides of buildings when she heard people approach, crouching in piles of garbage in vile alleys when a car separated itself from the hum of traffic and drew near to her. It was a risk, but one she had to take. He must be made whole. He must. To have a fist sized piece missing from him was unacceptable.

  She found the man in a one-room apartment, the same man who’d broken her
love. The fragrance of her mate came to her through the open window and she hung upside down outside of it. The human could not possibly see out into the darkness from within his brightly-lit room, but she could see in. An olive green refrigerator whined in one corner, beside a counter littered with refuse, food, and a hotplate. The fragment of her partner sat on the greasy table amongst a pile of newspapers, beside a pistol. The man, still distraught, paced up and down the narrow space between the table and a mattress on the floor. He talked incessantly and beat himself about the face and head, while tears ran down his cheeks.

  She felt no empathy for him. She wanted him to die.

  Turn off the light, she willed from where she waited, patient as only one of her kind could be. Turn it off.

  Finally he did as she willed. Flicking the light off he, blind in the dark as she would never be, sat on the edge of his bed, his back to her, head in his hands. Don’t turn around, she whispered under her breath. Don’t. Turn. Around. Her legs tensed beneath her, and her tail swiped angrily at the air. She took a deep breath and leapt. The glass exploded before her as she burst through his window and her claws severed his head from behind. She left it rolling in broken glass and a growing puddle of his own gore, snatched up the stone and, in a flurry of wings and tail, was gone long before any other humans had time to react to the disturbance.

  She reached her love long before dawn, added the stone tenderly to the pile of his broken body. Let the priests wonder about the blood upon her claws. Her lover would be whole again, and that was all that mattered. She curled her wings around his still form and purred words of comfort to him until dawn.

  ESCAPE

  by Michael Haynes

  Carl rattled the ice in his cup and slurped the watered-down dregs of his soda. He walked through Eaton Centre purposelessly, watching as the employees of one store after another closed their gates. It was time to get on the subway and head home. Not that there was anything for him to do there, either. But no security guards would try to roust him out of his parents’ basement, even if his parents sometimes might wish they would.

  He, his sister, his parents… They were all just marking time in a house like all the other houses on his street but it seemed like he was the only one who realized it. Janet was happy to do whatever the other girls her age wanted to do and both of their parents were too busy with work and whatever else it was they did to have any sense of time.

  But Carl always thought about time. One more year of that house and that school and those people and then he’d be off somewhere. College, he supposed, not that he had given any thought to where.

  He pitched the cup into a trash barrel and headed for the train station through the humid mid-July evening. The platform was surprisingly empty. An old woman sat on a bench, talking to herself. All the way at the other end, a girl sat, about Carl’s age. She looked cute, bright red hair tousled atop her head and a short jean skirt. He started to walk towards her, thinking he’d sit beside her and hope that she’d chat him up or maybe he’d think of something to say that wouldn’t sound too terribly inane. He was halfway down there when he heard a shriek. The girl leaned to one side and picked up a toddler; she lifted the child to her lap and made a silly face.

  Carl grimaced and turned away, feeling his face starting to grow hot. He made for the nearest bench, the one with the old woman on it, and sat down.

  “Eleven months,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  He glanced over at the lady; she didn’t look as old as she had seemed at first glance. It was her clothes, he decided, which seemed so old fashioned. Her skin was free of wrinkles but then her eyes… Carl was struck with the feeling, impossible to explain, that those eyes had seen more than his ever would.

  Carl shook his head. “Just talking to myself.” “Funny,” she said. “I figured you could see me sitting here.”

  “No, I meant —”

  “I know what you meant. But what is it about eleven months?”

  He shrugged. “That’s when I’ll graduate from high school. Be able to move on with my life.”

  “Are you that anxious to move on?”

  Now he laughed, a sharp sound that made him feel self-conscious as it bounced off the walls. “I don’t think I’ve been more anxious about anything in my life. School’s a waste of time, the people there and in my neighborhood are drones. I’m ready… No, I’m past ready to break away from living like this.”

  The woman didn’t say anything for a moment. “Eleven months?”

  “Yep. Eleven miserable months. With a trip to look at the crap at the shopping mall as the highlight of the week.”

  Her lips quirked at their ends. “Sounds like you aren’t looking forward to that time at all.”

  “You got that right.”

  She nodded. “Would you give that time to someone else?”

  “What? Like work for a charity or something?”

  Her turn to laugh, but it was a soft laugh. “No. I mean, if you could just skip past that time… Would you do it?”

  “In a heartbeat!”

  She slid a bit closer to him. “Are you certain of that? If you gave the time to someone else, there’d be no taking it back.”

  “They could fu…” He caught himself mid-word and felt his face grow hot again. “Umm… They could have it.”

  She clasped his right hand in both of hers. He wanted to pull away but her grip was strong and her eyes, too, were locked on his. “Do you swear it?”

  The whine of the oncoming train rose in the air.

  “Carl! Do you swear that you would give that time?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Carl’s hair ruffled in the air flowing through the tunnel ahead of the subway cars. The woman smiled, leaned in close, and kissed him. His pulse raced, feeling the warmth of her lips on his.

  The train squealed to a stop and she let go of him.

  “This one’s not mine,” she told him. “But you should get going. You don’t want to be late.”

  He stood up. His mouth felt dry and his heart was still pounding hard. Carl felt like he should say something— this was the first person he’d kissed for real - but he couldn’t think of any words at all. The warning chime came.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, not sure what he was even thanking her for exactly. He darted for the train and got on just before the doors shut.

  All the way home, he could taste her on his lips. He struggled to keep his eyes open on the ride and walked the blocks from the station to his home only half-aware of his surroundings.

  Everything was dark and quiet at home. He thought about going downstairs to play video games in the room his parents had converted from a basement bar to a play room. But he was so tired that he just went up to his bedroom, collapsed in bed, and passed out.

  Carl’s alarm clock beeped and he reflexively reached out to smack the snooze button. He missed, slapping the top of his desk instead.

  Surprised, he looked around and saw that his clock was halfway across the room. He went and shut it off, irritated with whoever had thought it was smart to move his stuff around.

  Irritated, too, that he had been woken up at seven-thirty. He knew that he hadn’t set the alarm for any time that early since summer break had started. His mom barged into his room and looked at him. “Well, come on, Carl! Get a move on.”

  She was fiddling with an earring, trying to get it fixed in place, and she was dressed up, even more than for a regular day of work.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Not funny. We need to be pulling out of the driveway in thirty minutes. They’re not going to let you walk if you get there late and I’ll be damned if I spent the last thirteen years making sure you got your homework in on time and not get to watch you walk across the stage.”

  “The stage?” Thirteen years?

  “Enough, Carl. There’s bacon and pancakes downstairs. I ironed your gown and it and your cap are downstairs. Get some fresh clothes on, get your butt
downstairs, and let’s get going.”

  She left the room without another word. Carl first thought he must be dreaming, but something felt too real about all of this. He grabbed his phone. June 8th, its screen told him.

  And then last night rushed back to him. The woman, her strange questions, her kiss. Even though it made no sense, he was sure now that it had happened.

  Carl let out a whoop. He was graduating— today!— and he hadn’t had to deal with that last year of classes, the last year of cliques and bullies and boredom. It was awesome!

  But now he had to get ready. He threw on jeans and a shirt and took the steps down two at a time.

  Janet was nibbling on a piece of bacon and their mom was cautiously sipping from a cup of coffee.

  Carl piled several pancakes on a plate and doused them in syrup. He dug in to the food enthusiastically.

  “Geez, Carl. Haven’t eaten in a week?” his sister asked.

  He laughed and just waved a hand at her when she asked what was so funny.

  When he finished eating, he grabbed the cap and gown.

  “Ready?” his mom asked.

  “Absolutely!”

  She nodded and grabbed her keys. Janet and his mother headed for the garage door.

  “Hey, what about Dad?”

  Both his sister and mother stopped.

  “What? Did you both forget about him?”

  Carl’s mom turned slowly. Her face was pale and he saw her eyes flick for just a moment to the mantelpiece over their fireplace. A jar sat there, one he didn’t remember seeing before.

  “It’s time to go,” she said, her voice level. She walked away, then, an arm around his sister’s shoulders.

  Carl glanced at the jar… the urn… again. He took a step toward it, hesitated, and then ran after what he realized was all that was left of his family.

  The auditorium was already filling up when they arrived.