by Paula Guran
Franny closes the window and sleeps until dawn. When she wakes, she is still weary, but busies herself with ordinary chores, reads a magazine, listens to Roosevelt on the radio. The map must dry completely. By late afternoon she is ravenous. She walks down the hill into North Beach, the Italian section, and dines at Lupo’s, where she drinks raw red wine and devours one of their flat tomato pies. Late on the third night, when at last the foghorn lows out over the water, she climbs the spiral stairs.
She stands over the map, murmuring now in a language not used for conversation, and takes a deep breath. When she is as calm as a still pond, she lights a candle and sits in her canvas chair. She begins the final sequence, folding the map in half, aligning the edges, precise as a surgeon, burnishing the sharp creases with her pale bone knife. The first fold is the most important. If it is off, even by the tiniest of fractions, all is lost.
Franny breathes, using the knife to move that flow through her fingers into the paper. Kinesis. The action of a fold can never be unmade. It fractures the fibers of the paper, leaving a scar the paper cannot forget, a line traversing three dimensions. She folds the map again on the diagonal, aligning and creasing, turning and folding until she holds a larger version of the angular bird’s beak.
When the fog has dissolved the world and the cupola is cocooned, Franny inserts her fingers into the folded map. She flexes her hands, revealing one of the tiny holes, and opens the portal.
Now she stands, hands and body rigid, watching from the open window high above Caligo Lane. She sees nothing; soon sounds echo beneath the banyan tree. Shuffling footsteps, a whispered voice.
Motionless, Franny holds her hands open. She looks down. Beneath the street lamp stands an emaciated woman, head shorn, clad in a shapeless mattress-ticking smock, frightened and bewildered.
“Elzbieta?” Franny calls down.
The woman looks up, shakes her head.
Three more women step into view.
Beyond them, through a shimmer that pierces the fog, Franny sees other faces. More than she anticipated. Half a dozen women appear, and Franny feels the paper begin to soften, grow limp. There are too many. She hears distant shots, a scream, and watches as a mass of panicked women surge against the portal. She struggles to maintain the shape; the linen fibers disintegrate around the holes. Three women tumble through, and Franny can hold it open no longer. She flexes her trembling hands and reveals the other hole, closing the gate.
After a minute, she calls down in their language. “Jestes teraz bezpieczna.” You are safe now. She reverses the ori-kami pattern, unfolding and flattening. This work goes quickly. A fold has two possibilities, an unfolding only one.
The women stand and shiver. A few clutch hands.
Franny stares at the place where the shimmer had been. She sees her reflection in the darkened glass, sees tears streak down a face now lined with the topography of age.
“Znasz moją siostrę?” she asks, her voice breaking. Have you seen my sister? She touches the corner of the depleted map to the candle’s flame.“Elzbieta?”
A woman shrugs. “Tak wiele.” She holds out her hands. So many. The others shrug, shake their heads.
Franny sags against the window and blows the ash into the night air. “Idź,” she whispers. Go.
The women watch the ash fall through the cone of street light. Finally one nods and links her arm with another. They begin to walk now, their thin cardboard shoes shuffling across the cobbles.
Slowly, the others follow. One by one they turn the corner onto Jones Street, step down the shallow concrete steps, and vanish into the fog.
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 & 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, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards, and have been reprinted in various “year’s best” volumes. Her young adult novels—The Green Glass Sea and sequel White Sands, Red Menace—were both award winners and her collection, Portable Childhoods, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
Bordertown is a city on the border between our human world and Elfland. Nothing there is ever quite what it seems. Neither magic nor technology follow any rules. Runaway kids from both sides of the border come there to find adventure and to find themselves—and usually find both harsh reality and incandescent magic.
Socks
Delia Sherman
Socks got her name from her feet. There was something wrong with them, or at least with the skin on them, and had been for as long as she could clearly remember—since she’d been in Bordertown, anyway. When Bossman had asked her how old she was, she’d guessed twelve, and when he’d asked her name, she’d looked down at her bare feet that were all scaly and yellow-white and murmured, “Socks.” Bossman had laughed and patted her on the shoulder.
“You can stay tonight,” he said in a soft drawl, “maybe tomorrow—any longer’s up to squat meeting. But you gotta do something about them feet. They stink.” And he took Socks and her feet, as he took all problems, to Queen B.
The squat was the second floor of an abandoned apartment building. A year or so earlier, Bossman and Queen B. had chased out the rats and the resident ghost, and gradually furnished the place with scavenged mattresses, a table, a few broken chairs, and eight scrawny kids who had washed up on the doorstep from time to time.
Bossman was the drummer in a band called Goblin Market. He was a handsome boy, his bright brown hair skinned back into a tail, his eyes a clear pale blue, his long body loosely jointed and carelessly graceful. Socks liked that he didn’t seem to know it, that he didn’t dress up his looks like the musicians and gang members did, though she did wonder about his rings. His right hand was heavy with them: two wide silver bands on his forefinger, a silver braid on his middle finger, and on his ring finger, a real knuckleduster an inch wide, chased and knobbed. Sometimes, when things got really tight, Queen B. would eye Bossman’s rings and he’d shrug and say, “I’d sell them in a minute, babe. But we’d be in deep shit without them. You know that.”
Queen B. ran the place, handled the money, cooked, made deals, dispensed justice, kept the peace. Queen B. was a year or two younger and would look younger yet as they both grew older.
He was human, and she was a halfie, for all the good it did her: a lovely, tall, billowy girl with white-gold hair and a body like the rolling hills of Elfland. Before Queen B. opened her mouth, Socks thought she was the most comfortable woman she’d ever seen, all lap and breasts and soft, enfolding arms. Then she spoke, and Socks knew that Queen B. might be a lot of things, but comfortable wasn’t one of them.
“Foot rot,” said Queen B. in a voice like a wind instrument.
“She’ll have to wrap them in rags and put plastic bags over them if she’s going to stay. They’re ugly and they stink.”
“What if it makes them worse?” asked a small boy who was sitting on the floor beside her, folding little cranes out of paper.
“Well, Hand, then they’ll fall off, and Eye will carve her pretty wooden ones.”
Alarmed, Socks looked at Bossman, who gave a don’t-mind-her shrug and led her away to the kitchen. There he gave her a bowl of watery soup from a big pot, some rags, two plastic bags, and two pieces of string.
“Never quite know when Queenie’s bullshitting and when she ain’t,” he said apologetically. “Better put these on in case she wasn’t.”
Socks wound the rags around her feet and covered them with the plastic bags, which she tied around her bare ankles with the string. The plastic made her slip and slide as she walked, but since walking fast hurt a lot, that didn’t bother her. It also made the skin weep and itch fiercely, so about once a day, usually just before bedtime, she’d go outside someplace and remove the bags and the dirty rags. With the ooze dried to a yellow crust, her feet really did look lik
e a pair of socks, their ragged pink hems pulled up over her ankle-bones. She’d scratch at the hems lightly because she couldn’t help it, then wrap her feet up again in clean rags. Her feet didn’t improve under this treatment, but they didn’t get much worse either.
Over the next few days, Socks met the rest of the children. They were all weird in some way, although Eye and Map were the only ones whose weirdness showed. Map had a dark red blotch like a map covering half his face, and Eye was so walleyed that Socks could never tell whether he was looking at her or at someone behind her and to her right, or maybe at both. Hand was blind, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at him any more than you could tell that Baby wasn’t as quick on the draw as she could have been or that Christie never spoke, or that her bosom shadow Pet walked in her sleep. The twins, Art and Science, were almost not real, except for looking like a pair of identical toy bears, tawny and round.
Socks was terrified of Art and Science, who also had identical deep voices and identical thin shadows on their cheeks, and also of Map, who dyed his hair blue and called her “Baggie girl.” All the boys frightened her, except Hand, who was small and blond and pointy-eared and folded squares of paper into bright animals that he sold outside Taco Hell or The Dancing Ferret. Among the girls, she liked Christie best because she had hair the color of a deep red rose and rainbow hands from her dye vats. But she was much too shy to speak to her.
Everyone had to work to keep the place going. Goblin Market didn’t bring in much money. Queen B. said it was because there were so many bands in Bordertown that the new ones had a hard time getting gigs. After hearing them rehearse, Socks thought it might be because they weren’t very good.
She couldn’t exactly remember hearing music before, certainly not the loud, tumbling discords Goblin Market favored, but from the bottom of her soul she knew what it ought to sound like. It should sound peaceful as the hush of her pulse in her ears at night, free as distant horns, wild as the Bloods on a rampage, secret as a bird’s nest. She felt what Goblin Market wanted to play, and the space between that and the noises they actually produced made her throat ache with frustration. She could do better. She knew that, too.
But when Queen B. asked her at the Squat Meeting what she could do to bring in money, she only ducked her head and shrugged.
“Speak up, girl,” said Queen B. “You have to be able to do something. Sew?”
Socks shook her head. The squat made most of its bread and butter from the old clothes Christie sold from a barrow on Ho Street. Since Christie didn’t talk, Pet did the actual selling. But it was Christie who made the business work, Christie with her long, deft fingers and her magical sense of fashion. She knew just when slumming Highborns would want jackets embroidered with ribbons or skirts with unevenly ripped hems, crazy-quilt shirts, or mirrored tunics. And she supplied them. Art, Science, Map, and Eye scrounged, scavenged, and begged inventory; Queen B. and Baby washed their gleanings; Hand, Pet, and Christie mended and modified them. There was always a pile of work to be done.
Pet snorted. “I’ll just bet,” she said. “Baggie girl.” Socks rested her chin on her chest and blinked against tears.
They’d never let her stay if she couldn’t contribute. And then what would she do?
“Lay off her, Pet,” said Bossman. “Poor kid’s hardly got here yet. Let her help wash. Any idiot can wash. Oh. Sorry, Baby.”
Baby smiled up from the bundle of rags she was nursing in her arms. “Wash,” she said. “Rub-a-dub. Baggie girl.”
“Okay,” said Queen B. “It’s not much, but it’ll do for now.” She took Socks by the chin, forced her head up to meet her eyes.
They were almost colorless—a crystalline blue-white with black pupils, impossible to read. “You’d better put your thinking cap on, though. Helping Baby wash is perilously close to getting a free ride, and I don’t believe in free rides.”
Socks shivered, and then she saw that Queen B. was smiling, her full mouth curved and warm. She’s not as hard as she talks, Socks thought.
Queen B. gave her chin a shake. “Don’t look so frightened,” she said softly. “I’m not going to eat you or throw you out, either. It’s just that all of us have a job, and mine’s taking a hard line. You understand?”
“I understand,” said Socks.
So Socks went to work washing second-hand clothes. The experience taught her something about Queen B.’s sense of humor, because washing clothes wasn’t any way a free ride. The boys brought in their finds in huge bundles and dumped them in the pantry, where there was a big sink. Some of them stank worse than Sock’s feet, and the wash water had to be lugged in from the kitchen. Socks was only grateful that one of the priority expenses was a heating spell.
Baby, who was a young woman to look at, anyway, was good at hauling water and wringing out heavy cloth, which was just as well, since Socks was neither very big nor very strong. But she was quick and responsible enough to be trusted with the strong-smelling solutions Science had invented to get out spots and lift the dye from things that Christie wanted to re-color. She had a good eye, too, and after a couple of days, Christie let her help with the dyeing.
That’s what Socks was doing when the stranger girl arrived at the squat—hanging out a batch of freshly dyed silk shirts as Christie handed them to her. They were blue, “elf blue,” Pet called it, a misty, elusive shade that was very in just now. Socks was leaning out the kitchen window, arms full of wet shirt and mouth full of clothespins, when she heard shouting.
If Baby hadn’t come crowding up behind her to see what the noise was about, Socks wouldn’t have seen the girl at all. She would have been behind the stove, hiding from the shouting, which had an angry music to it that sang to her of blood, of rending, and of death. But Baby was crushing her over the windowsill, squealing, “Elf-pack! Elf-pack!” in high hysteria, and so Socks had to watch the girl turn the corner of the alley, slide, recover, and glance wildly around her. The shouting swelled behind her, triumphant and shrill.
She must have been running a long time, long enough to outrun her street-smarts anyway, to turn so foolishly down an unfamiliar alley. She was very thin and elvin-tall. Her hair was dark and lank, her face brown and shadowed above a tight leather jacket and shredded jeans.
The girl stumbled forward a few steps as if hoping that the blank walls she saw all around her were an illusion. Then she shrugged, wrapped her arms tight around her ribs, faced the alley mouth, and waited.
An elf skidded around the corner, took in the girl and the blind alley, and grinned. His chains, the scarlet streak in his hair, the row of golden rings lining one pointed ear probably revealed to the initiated which pack he ran with. Socks knew only that he was not alone.
The elf said something at once liquid and harsh, and took a step forward. The girl backed up, which seemed to amuse him.
The rest of the gang had appeared by now, scarlet streaks like blood among their white hair, faces feral with anticipation of the kill. The girl dropped her arms to her sides and lifted her chin.
As if the gesture had released her, Socks screamed. The girl spun around, her eyes flying up to Socks and the kitchen window and the drainpipe running down the side of the old tenement. A second later, she was pelting towards it.
Everything seemed to happen at once. The gang came out of their blood-daze; the girl reached the drainpipe and began to scramble up it as the gang swarmed under her, furiously getting in each other’s way. Socks leaned farther out the window to see the girl clinging just below the sill, wide-eyed and shaking, clearly unable to make the last effort that would bring her to safety. Socks wrapped her arms under the leather-clad shoulders, but she hadn’t the strength to haul her in. They were cheek to cheek, the girl’s rat-tailed hair blinding her eyes. The world shrank to a wild, sharp smell in Socks’ nose, a panicked breathing in her ear, a bony body quivering in her grasp.
Just as Socks thought she’d have to let go, she heard a grunt and felt a heave, and she was sprawled on the kitc
hen floor with the girl, listening to Queen B. shouting out the window, her woodwind voice brassy with rage. Socks didn’t recognize any of the words.
Bossman shut the kitchen window with a bang while Queen B. glared down at the girl, who pulled her feet under her and crouched as if ready to leap up and run.
“I suppose you want shelter,” said Queen B.
The girl gave a tiny shrug. “Don’t do me any favors,” she said.
“We already done you one,” Bossman pointed out reasonably.
“Yeah,” said the girl. “Thanks.” She unfolded herself from her crouch. “I’ll be going now.”
“Whoa,” said Bossman. “You can’t go out there. They’ll be waiting for you.”
“What do you care?”
“We rescued you. That makes us responsible for you.”
“Will you stop feeling responsible if I pay you off?” Her lips parted and the tip of her tongue showed between them. Since her lips were cracked and one eye discolored and swollen, the effect was more goblinesque than seductive. “I know some tricks will make us more than even.”
Bossman lowered his eyes to his rings. “Shit,” he said.
“You look like chopped liver, girl,” said Queen B. “And he’s spoken for.”
The girl looked Queen B. over. She took her time about it, her hands clasped behind her and her nose high, arrogant as an elflord. When the silence had begun to drag, she shook her head.
“He’s yours? You sure must have something heavy on him. He’s pretty enough to get a woman who won’t squash him when she rolls over in bed.”
Queen B.’s hand bunched itself into a fist and her eyes narrowed. “Easy, babe,” said Bossman. “Little shitface is just scared, that’s all. It takes some people that way, makes ’em nasty.” He turned to the girl. “That right, ain’t it? You didn’t mean to badmouth Queen B. here. You just scared and mad about it, ain’tcha?”
