“I’m going to be a ballerina,” Anna says.
Lizzy does not know the answer, and she does not like that. Besides, she is going to be last, and all the right ones will be gone. She crosses her arms and scowls down at the hem of her plaid skirt.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” Herbie says.
Fireman. Doctor. Policeman. Teacher. Mailman. Nurse. Baseball player. Mommy. Lizzy thinks about the lady jobs. Nurses wear silly hats and have to be clean all the time, and she is not good at that. Teacher is better, but two people have already said it. She wonders what else there is.
Tripper takes a long time. Finally he says, guess I’ll be in sales.”
“Like your father? That’s nice.” Mrs. Dickens nods. “Carol?”
Carol will be a mommy. Bobby will be a fireman.
Timmy takes the longest time of all. Everyone waits and fidgets. Finally he says he wants to drive a steam shovel like Mike Mulligan. “That’s fine, Timmy,” says Mrs. Dickens.
And then it is her turn.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Lizzy?”
“Can I see the menu, please?” Lizzy says. That is what her father says at the Top Diner when he wants a list of answers.
Mrs. Dickens smiles. “There isn’t one. You can be anything you want.”
“Anything?”
“That’s right. You heard Andrew. He wants to be president someday, and in the United States of America, he can be.”
Lizzy doesn’t want to be president. Eisenhower is bald and old. Besides, that is a daddy job, like doctor and fireman. What do ladies do besides mommy and nurse and teacher? She thinks very hard, scrunching up her mouth—and then she knows!
“I’m going to be a witch,” she says.
She is very proud, because no one has said that yet, no one in the whole circle. She looks up at Mrs. Dickens, waiting to hear, “Very good. Very creative, Lizzy,” like she usually does.
Mrs. Dickens does not say that. She shakes her head. “We are not using our imaginations today. We are talking about real-life jobs.”
“I’m going to be a witch.”
“There is no such thing.” Mrs. Dickens is frowning at Lizzy now, her face as wrinkled as her braids.
“Yes there is!” Lizzy says, louder. “In ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and ‘Snow White,’ and ‘Sleeping—’ ”
“Elizabeth? You know better than that. Those are only stories.”
“Then stupid Timmy can’t drive a steam shovel because Mike Mulligan is only a story!” Lizzy shouts.
“That’s enough!” Mrs. Dickens leans over and picks Lizzy up under the arms. She is carried over to the chair that faces the corner and plopped down. “You will sit here until you are ready to say you’re sorry.”
Lizzy stares at the wall. She is sorry she is sitting in the dunce chair, and she is sorry that her arms hurt where Mrs. Dickens grabbed her. But she says nothing.
Mrs. Dickens waits for a minute, then makes a noise and goes back to the circle. For almost an hour, Lizzy hears nursery school happening behind her: blocks clatter, cupboards open, Mrs. Dickens gives directions, children giggle and whisper. This chair does not feel right at all, and Lizzy squirms. After a while she closes her eyes and talks to Maleficent without making any sound. Out of long repetition, her thumb and lips move in concert, and the witch responds.
Lizzy is asking when she will learn to cast a spell, how that is different from spelling ordinary W-O-R-D-S, when the Recess bell rings behind her. She makes a disappearing puff with her fingers and opens her eyes. In a moment, she feels Mrs. Dickens’s hand on her shoulder.
“Have you thought about what you said?” Mrs. Dickens asks.
“Yes,” says Lizzy, because it is true.
“Good. Now, tell Timmy you’re sorry, and you may get your coat and go outside.”
She turns in the chair and sees Timmy standing behind Mrs. Dickens. His hands are on his hips, and he is grinning like he has won a prize.
Lizzy does not like that. She is not sorry.
She is mad.
Mad at Mommy, mad at the baby, mad at all the unfair things. Mad at Timmy Lawton, who is right here.
Lizzy clenches her fists and feels a tingling, all over, like goosebumps, only deeper. She glares at Timmy, so hard that she can feel her forehead tighten, and the anger grows until it surges through her like a ball of green fire.
A thin trickle of blood oozes from Timmy Lawton’s nose. Lizzy stares harder and watches blood pour across his pale lips and begin to drip onto his sailor shirt, red dots appearing and spreading across the white stripes.
“Help?” Timmy says.
Mrs. Dickens turns around. “Oh, dear. Not again.” She sighs and calls to the other teacher. “Linda? Can you get Timmy a washcloth?”
Lizzy laughs out loud.
In an instant, Lizzy and the chair are off the ground. Mrs. Dickens has grabbed it by the rungs and carries it across the room and out the classroom door. Lizzy is too startled to do anything but hold on. Mrs. Dickens marches down the hall, her shoes like drumbeats.
She deposits Lizzy with a thump in the corner of an empty Sunday School room, shades drawn, dim and chilly with brown- flecked linoleum and no rug.
“You. Sit. There,” Mrs. Dickens says in a voice Lizzy has not heard her use before.
The door shuts and footsteps echo away. Then she is alone and everything is very quiet. The room smells like chalk and furniture polish. She lets go of the chair and looks around. On one side is a blackboard, on the other a picture of Jesus with a hat made of thorns, like the ones Maleficent put around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
Lizzy nods. She kicks her feet against the rungs of the small chair, bouncing the rubber heels of her saddle shoes against the wood. She hears the other children clatter in from Recess. Her stomach gurgles. She will not get Snack.
But she is not sorry.
It is a long time before she hears cars pull into the parking lot, doors slamming and the sounds of many grown—up shoes on the wide stone stairs.
She tilts her head toward the door, listens.
“ . . . Rosemary? Isn’t she adorable!” That is Mrs. Dickens.
And then, a minute later, her mother, louder. “Oh, dear, now what?”
Another minute, and she hears the click-clack of her mother’s shoes in the hall, coming closer.
Lizzy turns in the chair, forehead taut with concentration. The tingle begins, the green fire rises inside her. She smiles, staring at the doorway, and waits.
Ellen Klages was born in Ohio, and now lives in San Francisco. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Black Gate, and Firebirds Rising. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won the Best Novelette Nebula Award. Several of her other stories have been on the final ballot for the Nebula and Hugo Awards. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. Her young adult novels—The Green Glass Sea and sequel White Sands, Red Menance—were both award winners and her collection, Portable Childhoods, was nominated for a World Fantasy award. She has also written four books of hands-on science activities for children (with Pat Murphy, et al.) for the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.
There weren’t supposed to be any of his kind anymore, though. Them and the dragons, they were on the extinct list, right? . . .
WELCOME TO THE REPTILE HOUSE
Stephen Graham Jones
It didn’t start the way you might think.
This is where I kind of pause, look off, bite my lip into my mouth so I can come up with the next big lie. With what my dad, talking loud for my little sister, would call Jamie Boy’s next big excuse.
Let me try it again: it started pretty much exactly the way you’d think a thing like this would get going.
I was twenty-two, still flashing my high-school diploma at job interviews. Still doing stuff like stealing an extra bag of ice from the cooler if the clerk’s not eyeballing me. Hiding a litter of mismatched puppies for the wee
kend for my friend Dell, and not asking any questions. Bumming smokes outside the bars, but sometimes having my own pack.
I was just getting into tattoos, too. Not on me—my arms had been choked blue not four months after I moved into my own place—but from me. That was the idea, anyway. I wasn’t officially apprenticing anywhere, and nobody’d offered their skin to me yet, but I’d always been drawing. My notebooks from junior high are like a running autobiography in doodles, and I’d worked one summer applying decals and pinstriping at my uncle’s bodyshop, and finally graduated to window tint before he trusted me with the front-door keys.
He should have known better.
But, tats, they were kind of the same as those junior high notebooks. They were the one thing I could concentrate on. Just for hours. Planning, sketching, tracing. For now I was practicing on the back of my right calf, the side of my left I could reach. Snakes and geckos mostly, though I could feel a dragon curled up inside me, waiting for the right swatch of skin. I’ve talked to the grizzly old-timers, the real gunslingers of the wild west of body art, and they say you go through phases. You get stuck on something, and talk all your clients into it. What you’re trying to do is get it right, what’s in your head. You want to get it right and make it permanent, and then watch it walk away.
Like I say, though, tattooing was strictly a sideline, and, as I couldn’t afford supplies, it probably wouldn’t have been just superhygenic for me to draw on anybody, either. It was just me so far, so I guess that didn’t matter too much. But I could already see myself ten years down the road. My own shop, a girlfriend with my ink reaching north out of her bra, circling her shoulder, everybody but me having to imagine what the full image was.
Anyway, where it started: one night, to pay me back for the thing with the puppies, Dell’s on my phone, has a shiny new job.
“Seriously, morgue attendant?” I said, turning away from my living room of three people with names I hadn’t all-the-way caught.
“Different,” he said.
I told him maybe, sure, but was there two hours after midnight all the same, a cigarette pinched between my thumb and index finger.
“Leave it,” Dell said, opening the door on me and looking past in his important way. Into the parking lot.
Saddleview Funeral Chapel and Crematorium.
I rubbed my cherry out on the tall ashtray, followed him in.
On the way through the maze of viewing rooms to get to the back, Dell told me how his uncle got him this gravy gig. His uncle had worked here forever and a day ago, sitting up with dead soldiers mailed back from war. Or, not sitting up, but sleeping in the same room with, like a guard. It was because there had been some political vandalism or something. Anyway, the boss man now had been the boss man then, and remembered Dell’s uncle, so here Dell was. His job was to buzz the alley door open for deliveries, and not touch anything.
He was Dell, though, right?
We toured through the cold room. It was slab city, naked dead people everywhere, their usually covered parts not nearly so interesting as I’d kind of been hoping. We put those paper mouth-masks on and felt like mad scientists drifting through the frost, deciding who to bring back, who to let rot.
“Hell yeah,” I said through my mask, and, ahead of me, Dell nodded that he knew, he knew.
I told him about who-all’d been at my place earlier, maybe lying a little, and in return, like I owed him here, he asked me for the thousandth time for my little sister’s number. Not permission, he’d always assumed he had permission to do what- and whoever he wanted. But he wanted me to middleman it.
“Off limits,” I told him, about her, trying to make my voice sound all no-joke. Because it was.
“Fruit on the limb,” Dell said, reaching up to pluck her. Except more graphically, somehow. With distinct pornographic intent.
“She’s not like us,” I said, but before we could get into our usual dance where my sister was involved, the lights dimmed. A second later, a painful buzz filled the place, coming in from all sides, like the walls were speakers.
“Delivery,” Dell said. “Hide.”
Alone in the room with the dead moments later, I looked around, breathing harder than I was meaning to. All fun and games until one of those bright white sheets slithers off, right? Until somebody sits up.
Finally I held my breath and crawled in under one of the tables, onto that clangy little shelf, some guy’s naked ass not two feet over my face, his body bloated with all kinds of vileness.
After ten minutes in which I got terminally sober, the double doors slammed back. They were the same kind restaurants have, that are made for crashing open, that don’t even have handles.
A gurney or whatever was rolling through, no legs pushing it. Just exactly what I needed, yeah. Finally it bumped into a cabinet, stopped. I breathed out but then its wheels started creaking again. It lurched its way over to right beside me, parked its haunted self inches from my face. Just far enough away for a hand to flop down in front of my face. It was pale, dead, the beds of the fingernails dark blue.
I flinched back, fell off my shelf, and Dell laughed, stepped off the belly of the new dead dude he’d been using like a kneeboard.
I flipped him off, pushed him away and lit up a cigarette. Not like anybody in there was going to mind. Dell took one too and we leaned back against stainless steel edges, reflected on our lives.
Another lie.
What he did was haul a laser tag kit up from his locker.
It was the best war ever, at least until, trying to duck my killshot, he crashed a cart over, a dead lady spilling out, sliding to a stop at a cabinet.
I read her toe tag, looked up to her face.
On her inner thigh was a chameleon.
Everything starts somewhere, Dad.
Before you get worried, no, this isn’t some necro-thing about to happen. I never asked Dell what those puppies were for, but I’m pretty sure he’d nabbed them from about twelve different backyards—people in the classifieds give their addresses over so willingly—and would guess he sold them from a box in the mall parking lot. Meaning they all have good lives now. He wasn’t sacrificing them out on some lonely road or anything. He wasn’t trying to conjure up a buddy to rape dead women with.
However, if what he was looking for was somebody to trade him rides and cigarettes and ex-girlfriends’ numbers for some quality time alone in his cold room with a tat gun, well: there I was.
When you’re looking to hire onto a parlor, to rent a booth—hell, even just to lure a mentor in—one thing you’ve always got to have, it’s an art book. A portfolio. What you can do, your greatest hits, the story of your craft.
Problem is, every two-bit dropout can pull something like that together.
But. What if, say, you’d moved to the city only a couple of months ago. And had always just done ink for friends, but were looking to go legit, now. And, what? Did I snap pics of any of those mythically good tats?
Yeah, yes, I did.
Here.
Play with the hue a bit on your buddy’s computer, and a gecko crawling up a dead guy’s shoulder, his skin will look so alive. And there won’t even be any rash, any blood. Like you’ve got that light of a touch.
At first Dell would only let me practice on the bodies that were queued up for the oven, as that would erase evidence of our non-crime, but one night he left me alone to make a burger run—it’s cliché that morgue attendants are always eating sloppy food, but I guess it’s cliché for a reason—and I unplugged my gun, plugged it back in under the table of this woman I was pretty sure had been a yoga instructor. And recently.
Her skin was tight, springy. Most of the dead, I was having to really stretch their flesh out, then get Dell to hold it tight while I snapped the pic, so that night’s lizard wouldn’t look like it was melting off.
With her, though. I was just halfway through the iguana’s tail by the time Dell got back.
He had to let me finish, because who conks with
only ten percent of a tattoo done, right?
It was a beauty, too. Just like in my head, I made the tongue curl the opposite direction the tail was, for symmetry. And where it was reaching, only her boyfriend would ever know.
Pretty as it was, though, I didn’t get any burgers—this was Dell’s punishment (like I would want to eat something his hands had been touching on)—and, to make him laugh, I inked X’s over the eyes of the guy at the front of the line for the oven. He was skinny, pale with death, still cold from the freezer, his two gunshot wounds puckered up like lips. He looked like a punk reject from 1977.
Dell shook his head, walked away smiling. I could see his reflection in all the stainless steel, and, as it turned out, Dell’s uncle’s reference didn’t mean much when the boss man’s just-dead, honor-student, choir-singing, yoga-bunny niece he’d been saving for the morning to embalm personally turned up with an evil bug-eyed lizard of some kind trying to crawl up her side, its tongue reaching up to circle her nipple in the most lecherous fashion.
Some people got no sense of art, I mean.
Dell in particular.
Like he had to, he came over, did what he needed to do to my face, to my television and my lamp. The television wasn’t mine, but I wasn’t saying anything. And then, so I would remember, he dug my tattoo gun up from my backseat, came back in and pulled me off the couch by the shirt I wasn’t wearing, sat on my arms with his knees so he could drill some bathroom-wall version of a penis into my chest. Or maybe it was a novelty sprinkler, or a leaky cowboy hat, I don’t know.
Chances are I could have bucked him off, but I kind of deserved it too, I guessed. Though if he’d been a real friend, he would have lit a cigarette for me. And maybe done a better job.
When he was done he threw my rig into the corner, slammed through my screen door, told me to forget his number if I knew what was good for me.
I spent the next two days turning his punishment tattoo into a Texas bluebonnet, because that’s where I’d been born. At least that was the new story I was going to have ready.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 24
