The Best of Electric Velocipede

by John Klima

  At the center of it all was the clown. She was three inches tall and made entirely of sugar. Her face and hands were coated with white powdered sugar, a sharp contrast to the bright red of her blown-sugar lips and the green and purple of her pulled-sugar dress. She was the seed from which each new carnival was grown, and she was beautiful.

  As each of the sugar creations woke, the clown was there to welcome them to the world and tell them of their destiny. “You will be adored by children,” she told the cotton candy sheep, stroking the wisps of their baby blue wool. “You will delight them with your tumbling,” she told the flexible bubblegum acrobats. And, “You will amaze them with your daring stunts,” she told the gingerbread daredevil. She smiled at everyone, but she smiled her prettiest smile for the daredevil, because she was the tiniest bit in love with him.

  As she woke the carnival, she told tales of children with bright smiling faces, and always added, “In the end you will be eaten, for that is your destiny.”

  When she told them that, her smile sometimes faltered. She had seen a child only once, several cycles ago, the six-year-old niece of the magician who had laughed in delight to see the clown’s dancing routine. That had been a beautiful moment, the defining moment of her existence, the moment that made her the seed. After seeing the joy on the girl’s face, the clown had dissolved blissfully into the warm water in the magician’s cauldron, her sugar becoming the seed crystals from which an entire carnival was grown.

  As the seed, she was the only one who woke up knowing the joy of a child’s laughter. The others would have to wait until the magician took them to whatever party was on the schedule. So she told the others what awaited them, how wonderful children are, and what an honor it was to perform for them. And she told them that they would be eaten, whatever that meant, because when she asked the magician why he grew a new carnival for every party, he told her that the carnival always gets eaten in the end.

  She was generally a happy clown, but it made her sad that she couldn’t go to the parties. As the seed, she was always plucked away by the magician and thrown into the cauldron to grow the next carnival.

  The clown stood at the edge of the carnival, waiting, and when the magician woke up he came to greet her. She asked, as she often did, if she could go to the party with the others. He replied, as he always did, that she was the seed, and could not be spared.

  He picked her up gently and dropped her in his cauldron.

  *

  Over time, the clown changed. She became a sad clown, with streaks of burnt-black sugar running down her face like smeared mascara. Her once vibrant dress of green and purple was still beautiful, but the colors faded, and her sugar lost its glossy shine.

  One morning, the clown peered out from a green-and-yellow candy tent and saw the magician running about frantically, searching for his keys. He looked tired and distracted, and he was late in collecting the carnival. The clown made a decision. Instead of standing at the edge of the carnival, as she usually did, she would hide in the tent and go to the party. She would hear the sound of children’s laughter again, and she would finally be eaten like the others.

  She stayed inside the green-and-yellow candy tent as the magician loaded the carnival into his van, and unloaded it at the party. No one noticed she was there, and soon she heard children’s excited voices all around her. She would finally be eaten!

  One of the children pulled off the roof of the striped-candy tent and broke it into pieces for her guests. The first performer was the gingerbread daredevil. He jumped twelve sugar cookie cars on a motorcycle with licorice wheels and a candy corn seat. The children clapped politely for his act before they ate him. The birthday girl bit off his head, then ripped his arms off to share with one of her guests. Was that what it meant to be eaten? Her beloved daredevil had met his end bravely, without a trace of fear, but being eaten looked far less pleasant than dissolving in warm water, and—a new thought occurred to her—if she didn’t go into the cauldron, would she continue to exist? The others always came back, each time the carnival grew, but they never remembered what had happened at the last carnival, no matter how she begged them to tell her.

  No, being eaten was not the same as dissolving, she decided. Being eaten was an ending. Being eaten was death without rebirth. The clown couldn’t stand to watch any more. She went and visited some of the animals. She patted the backs of the cotton candy sheep and scratched the dark chocolate dancing bear behind his ears.

  “Don’t be so sad,” said the juggler. “We are meant to be eaten.”

  She had told the juggler that very thing this morning, that it was their destiny to be eaten. She had believed it. Because of her, everyone else in the carnival—the daredevil and the zebra, the acrobats and the cotton candy sheep—all of them were content to meet their fate, week in and week out, a never-ending carnival of death.

  No, the clown decided, she wouldn’t do this any longer.

  While the children were busy stuffing sheep into their mouths and watching the juggler toss flaming balls of sugar, the clown snuck to the edge of the carnival, intending to run away—but instead the magician spotted her. He snatched her up and stuffed her into his pocket, and kept her there until evening.

  “I don’t want to do this any more,” she told him.

  “I’m sorry, I truly am. But we have a party tomorrow, and I don’t have time to make another seed.” He dropped her into his cauldron and she melted away.

  *

  The clown woke angry. It was one thing to destroy her when she was willing, but the magician had thrown her in the cauldron even after she protested. Her gown reflected her mood—sugar burnt black with a dusting of granulated sugar sequins. Sour gummy animals replaced the fluffy cotton candy sheep, and dark chocolate elephants balanced on jawbreaker balls. The tents of the carnival were a shiny red, like wet blood, and the gingerbread daredevil wore a biker jacket of black licorice.

  This time she would not tell the others of the joys of children’s laughter. She would warn them of the horror of being eaten, and instead of meeting their so-called destiny, they would work together and escape.

  The clown was busy formulating her plans, and she did not notice that the magician was still awake until he came up behind her and snatched her away. He dropped her into a glass jar on the counter and sealed the lid. She watched from her prison as he poured out a batch of melted sugar and worked it into shape as it cooled. Before long, he had made a figure, a little over three inches tall.

  It was her replacement, a handsome candy clown with pants of candied orange peel and sugar-rainbow suspenders. His face was molded into a dopey grin, and the clown knew that she would have loved him more than the gingerbread daredevil, if they had met when she had first been made. Now, though, all she felt when she looked at him was pity.

  Over on the table, the carnival was waking, but she was not there to greet them. Instead, the magician spoke to them, telling them of the wonders that awaited them and reminding them that it was their destiny to be eaten. Then the magician loaded them up—the carnival and the angry clown—and took them to the party. He did not let the clown out of her jar until after the party had started.

  She tried to warn the others. The animals were hopeless of course, for they understood so little of what was happening. The juggler and the bearded lady did not believe her—and why should they? The magician had been there when they woke, and she was just a clown who joined them at the party. She came too late to save them.

  Her last hope was the gingerbread daredevil, who, she had to admit, looked quite striking in his licorice biker jacket. He listened to her carefully, and even claimed to believe her. But he wasn’t willing to stop the show and run away with her. Her plans of rebellion and escape were crushed. The others didn’t change their minds even as the children ripped the tops off the red-sugar tents. “It is our destiny,” they told her, and “What would we do if we left the carnival, anyway?”

  Even without the others, the clown was de
termined to leave. She gathered up the saltwater-taffy cords from the bungee jumping ride and used them to climb down to the floor. She was sugar, and fragile, so she knew she wouldn’t live long, but at least—for the first time—her life was truly hers.

  She wove around the children’s legs. The magician stood in the open doorway demanding to be paid despite delivering a dark and dismal failure of a carnival. His arguments escalated into shouts, and the clown slipped out the door just before it slammed shut in the magician’s face. He stormed off to his van without ever looking down, and finally the clown was free. With sunshine glinting off her shiny-sugar hair, she walked out into the chest-high grass of the birthday girl’s lawn and never looked back.

  *

  On the side of a dried up drainage ditch, on the edge of an otherwise ordinary suburban neighborhood, there is an odd sort of carnival. Instead of tents there are marshmallow mushrooms in assorted shapes and colors, and instead of performing animals there are caramel deer and birds made up of chocolate-covered pretzels. The animals are not trained, and wander through the carnival as they please. There are no daredevils or jugglers or bearded ladies.

  But there is a clown. She is a peaceful clown, with white-sugar hair and a minty green dress. She knows that somewhere in the city the magician still makes carnivals to be eaten, and she wonders if someday that too-happy clown will come to his senses and make his escape. She knows her carnival is temporary, and it will melt next time it rains. But she also knows that she is a seed, and that she will not be eaten, and every time the sun dries out the puddles, her carnival will grow again.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Gavin Grant and Kelly Link for inspiring me to start Electric Velocipede; this book wouldn’t exist without them. Huge thanks to Patrick Swenson and Fairwood Press for getting behind the project and publishing this book. Thanks to Jim Minz for being a long-time supporter of Electric Velocipede and a huge advocate to others of its merits.

  Along the way a number of people worked on the magazine with me including Damien Angelica Walters, Adam Israel, Jamie Lackey, and Patrick Ward. We had a great group of submission readers including Grant Stone, Christina Vasilevski, KE Bergdoll, Jessica Meddows, Richard Larson, Juliet Ulman, Rachel Swirsky, Selene O’Rourke, and Torin Murphy. Adam Morgan did a phenomenal proofreading job on the anthology. But most importantly, I want to thank Anne Zanoni who worked as our managing editor/advertising supervisor/copyeditor/savior for keeping the magazine and my spirit afloat for many years. She was indispensable to our success.

  I did the first eight covers myself and had a handful of wonderful covers from people like Lisa Snellings-Clark, Carlos Araujo, Jeremy Zerfoss, and Steven Wilson, but it was Thom Davidsohn who set the Electric Velocipede aesthetic. His covers gave people a direct insight to the wonder that would be inside each issue. I’ll miss working with Thom and hope I get a chance to do so in the future (and couldn’t be happier that he did the cover for this book!).

  I can’t begin to thank the contributors individually, and I don’t think I should single any writer out as they all were part of what made this magazine amazing. You can look at the table of contents of this book to get an idea of what we published over the years. If you like what you read in this book, go and seek out older issues to get what we couldn’t fit in here.

  Thanks to my wife Shai, my kiddos Aubrey and Easton, and the rest of my family and friends who supported and put up with me spending WAY too much time working on this magazine (I’m typing this up while they’re waiting for me so we can leave on a family trip!). Your support meant the world to me.

  And finally, thanks to you, the reader. If you weren’t here we wouldn’t be either. I entered this field as a reader and I’m so proud I got to give something to other readers.

  Thank you.

  —John Klima,

  July 26, 2014

  About the Contributors

  KJ Bishop is a writer and artist. The Etched City, her first novel, won the William L. Crawford Award and has been translated into 10 languages. Most of her short fiction and poetry can be found in the Aurealis Award-winning collection That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote.

  Richard Bowes’ most recent novel, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, was a Lambda finalist and is a World Fantasy Award nominee. Recent reprint and original stories appear in Tor.com, The Time Traveller’s Almanac, Handsome Devil, Gaslit Romance, The Revelator, Best Gay Stories 2014, The Book of Dolls, and XIII.

  Darin Bradley is the author of three novels: Noise, Chimpanzee, and Totem. He holds a PhD in English literature and theory and has served in a variety of editorial roles with a number of independent presses and journals.

  Jay Caselberg is an Australian author currently based in Germany. His work has appeared in short form in multiple venues worldwide and in several languages. His latest novel, Empties, a novel of brutal psychological horror is due out any day now. More can be found at http://www.jaycaselberg.com

  Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had a number of books published including Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chomu Press, 2012), Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale, 2013), and The Metanatural Adventures of Dr. Black (PS Publishing, 2014).

  Dennis Danvers has published seven novels, including NYT Notables Circuit of Heaven and The Watch, and Locus and Bram Stoker nominee Wilderness. Short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com; and the anthologies Tails of Wonder and Nightmare Carnival.

  Thom Davisohn makes pictures, if pressed. He used to have a website, but now he doesn’t. If for some reason you’d like to contact him, try tdavidsohn@gmail.com.

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer and a night one as award-winning writer of speculative fiction.

  Alan DeNiro is the author of the short story collections Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead and Tyrannia (both from Small Beer Press) and the novel Total Oblivion, More or Less (Ballantine/Spectra). He lives outside St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Hal Duncan is the award-winning author of Vellum and Ink. Other work includes novels, short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, musicals and collaborations with the bands Aereogramme and The Dead Man’s Waltz. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him “THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (sic) You can find him online at www.halduncan.com, reveling in that role.

  Nashville native Toiya Kristen Finley is a writer, editor, game writer, narrative designer, and game designer. Her fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, Nature, and Fantasy Magazine. She is the founding editor and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate. She is currently co-authoring a book on narrative design for games.

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, some nearly as illustrious as Electric Velocipede. He lives in an ancient farm house in Ohio, amid vast fields of corn and soybeans, 15 miles from a town that boasts three tanning salons and a Beer Cave.

  Since “The Dogrog Phenomenon” appeared in Electric Velocipede in 2007 Richard Howard’s work has been featured in Loki’s Journal, M-Brane, and the legendary Weird Tales. In 2008 he won the Weird Tales spam fiction competition for his five-hundred-word short story “Let Yourself Look Spiny.” He also has an entry in the forthcoming Bestiary edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

  Megan Kurashige is a professional dancer and a writer. She lives in San Francisco where she and her sister, Shannon Kurashige, collaborate on wild and quixotic projects with their dance company, Sharp & Fine. She also performs with Liss Fain Dance. She attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD in 2008. Her fiction has appeared in Unnatural Creatures, an anthology edited by Nei
l Gaiman and Maria Dahvana Headley, Sybil’s Garage, and Lightspeed Magazine. See sharpandfine.com or visit @mkazoo on Twitter.

  Shira Lipkin’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Clockwork Phoenix 4, and other wonderful places, and she has won the Rhysling Award for best short poem. She co-edits Liminality, a magazine of speculative poetry, with Mat Joiner.

  Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  A writer living in Colorado, Heather Martin teaches at the University of Denver and co-curates the Gypsy House Reading Series. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Matter, Cold Mountain Review, and DoubleRoom.

  Originally from Detroit, Michael Constantine McConnell proudly resides in San Marcos, Texas, where he is pursuing a doctoral degree in Developmental Education at Texas State University and singing in degenerate Scots-Irish bands after sundown. He was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize in the essay category. Up the Irons.