Behind the Mask

by Link, Kelly; Rambo, Cat; Vaughn, Carrie

“I told you I don’t want to know!”

  That’s it, I’m dead.

  At least I won’t have to face my parents.

  He twists the cap off his soda, and I jump at the hiss of escaping gas. I’m overwhelmed by the urge to run, as if I can flee my own undoing, outdistance the transformation of my life into paper and ink.

  “I have to go,” I mumble. I slide off the stool, and my messenger bag upends. The gun clatters out, skitters across the wooden floor, and comes to a stop between us.

  “Well,” Martin Tucker’s soda bottle freezes halfway to his mouth, “that’s a thing.”

  “I came to kill you.” It comes out more like a question that I would have liked.

  “You’re certainly taking your time.”

  I should leap for the gun, but I don’t.

  He takes a drink. The sound of him swallowing is surprisingly loud.

  “But I don’t think I can do it,” I admit.

  He looks down the neck of his bottle. “I don’t think I can, either. Not to someone in my kitchen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He regards the floor. “Your appearance today is an opportunity for me. All the other superheroes are gone. I’m out of material. If I know your story, I can write another comic.”

  “I’d rather you not do that.” Emma, Master Negotiator.

  He smiles, and his eyes wrinkle the way I remember Outsider’s did. A sad smile. “Don’t worry, I’ve already written my last work.”

  “The story about Focus,” I say.

  “No. That’s already done. I’m talking about one more tale, just waiting for me to hit ‘send.’”

  I begin to understand why he hasn’t tried to grab the gun.

  “You?” I ask. “You’re erasing yourself?”

  “I think the fans will really love this one. It’s about an unlikeable man who discovers how to spin reality into fiction. He’s revered by fans, called a genius by people much smarter than he is. He soaks it up, and all the while he despises himself for it, knowing himself to be the worst fraud imaginable. Corrupted by his desire to be loved, of all things. Eventually, he tells the truth, and vanishes.”

  He slumps, wrinkling the cartoon manatee’s face in a way I might find funny under different circumstances. The room seems darker, although the sky outside the windows is as bright as ever.

  “I’m sure there’s another way,” I offer.

  “There is,” he nods. “But I’m not the one to write it. Outsider’s people were right about one thing. All stories end.” He looks at his watch. “Speaking of which, don’t you have somewhere to go?”

  “Uh, yeah.” I hesitate. “No. Not really. Just home.”

  He arches an eyebrow. And, without planning it, I decide to tell him how I’m probably going to get arrested, sent to an institution, and disowned by my exhausted parents. He holds up a hand as if to stop me, but I go on with the story. I might be giving him enough information to fictionalize me, but I tell him anyway.

  “Why did you share that?” he asks when I’m done. “You know what I could do with it.”

  I wait until he meets my eyes. “I think you want one person to remember you.”

  He nods, retrieves the gun, and hands it back to me. “It was nice to meet you. I have to put some finishing touches on my story before I send it off.”

  He walks me to the door.

  “You never answered my question,” I remind him, “about renaming the city.”

  “Oh, that. Reality and the story sometimes switch places,” he says, leaning against the doorframe. “While the main character’s life becomes fiction, little details from the story become true in the real world. I’ve used it to alter my identity a few times.”

  I shake my head. “Not how you changed it. Why.”

  “I was on a tight deadline. The publisher suggested setting the story in a fictional city. I forwarded some ideas for names to my assistant. She misunderstood, put New York into the draft, and the rest is, literally, history.”

  “Wait,” I hold up a hand. “Are you telling me you changed the city’s name by mistake?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why didn’t you change it back?”

  “People seemed to like it.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  He points at me, suddenly serious. “It’s not a vote. You don’t get a say. That’s the way it will always be while people like us are around.”

  It’s awkward for a second.

  I have a strange thought. “So if you become fiction, who will be the author of the comic book in the real world?”

  He nods and smiles, as if he approves of the question. “I don’t know. Do you want it to be you?”

  I shake my head. “No way. Leave me out of it.”

  He pushes the elevator button.

  “Come back by the building when I’m gone,” he says. “It would be nice to be remembered.”

  “I’ll say hi to whoever lives here.”

  “Oh, I was going to have the character’s apartment remain empty after he disappears. The fans like the suggestion of a sequel.”

  The elevator rattles like an approaching train.

  “You should have a name,” Martin Tucker says.

  “Emma,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes. “No, a superhero name. Something befitting your powers. You alone remember how the other heroes fell to human weaknesses and were destroyed by a lesser man. You could be the Storyteller.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Just Emma.”

  The doors open, and I leave him standing, like Outsider on the verge of his wormhole. I descend into the streets of a changed city, walking halfway in memory.

  I’m back on the train when I notice that my bag feels lighter, almost weightless. The gun is gone.

  Of course it’s gone, because I never took it. It’s back in the safe where it belongs, and only I remember any differently.

  Martin Tucker has changed the story. When the comic comes out, I suspect his character will be visited by a mysterious stranger. No name, no backstory—and no gun.

  Something jingles in the bottom of the bag: two keys on a plain metal ring. The apartment will be waiting for my return, its wide windows regarding a mundane and beautiful sky.

  For now, I watch the people sway to the long, slow song of the train, letting myself move with them, enjoying, for now, my secret identity.

  Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, as well as a fiction writer, hiker, and cook. His work has been shortlisted for an Aeon award and appeared in Morpheus Tales and the SFFWorld anthology You Are Here: Tales of Cryptographic Wonders. He and his wife live in Virginia, where they care for an affable German Shepherd, occasional foster dogs, a free-range toad, and a colony of snails who live in an old apothecary jar. His website and blog are at AdamRShannon.com.

  Origin Story

  Kelly Link

  “Dorothy Gale,” she said.

  “I guess so.” He said it grudgingly. Maybe he wished that he’d thought of it first. Maybe he didn’t think going home again was all that heroic.

  They were sitting on the side of a mountain. Above them, visitors to the Land of Oz theme park had once sailed in molded plastic balloon gondolas over the Yellow Brick Road. Some of the support pylons tilted back against scrawny little opportunistic pines. There was something majestic about the pylons now that their work was done. Fallen giants. Moth-eaten blue ferns grew over the peeling yellow bricks.

  The house of Dorothy Gale’s aunt and uncle had been cunningly designed. You came up the path, went into the front parlor, and looked around. You were led through the kitchen. There were dishes in the kitchen cabinets. Daisies in a vase. Pictures on the wall. Follow your Dorothy down into the cellar with the rest of your group, watch the movie tornado swirl around on the dirty dark wall, and when everyone tramped up the other, identical set of steps through the other, identical cellar door, it was the same house, same rooms, but tornado-tipped. The parlor floor now
slanted and when you went out through the (back) front door, there was a pair of stockinged plaster legs sticking out from under the house. A pair of ruby slippers. A yellow brick road. You weren’t in North Carolina anymore.

  The whole house was a ruin now. None of the pictures hung straight. There were salamanders in the walls and poison ivy coming up in the kitchen sink. Mushrooms in the cellar, and an old mattress someone had dragged down the stairs. You had to hope Dorothy Gale had moved on.

  It was four in the afternoon and they were both slightly drunk. Her name was Bunnatine Powderfinger. She called him Biscuit.

  She said, “Come on, of course she is. The ruby slippers, those are like her special power. It’s all about how she was a superhero the whole time, only she didn’t know it. And she comes to Oz from another world. Like Superman in reverse. And she has lots of sidekicks.” She pictured them skipping down the road, arm in arm. Facing down evil. Dropping houses on it, throwing buckets of water at it. Singing stupid songs and not even caring if anyone was listening.

  He grunted. She knew what he thought. Sidekicks were for people who were too lazy to write personal ads. “The Wizard of Oz. He even has a secret identity. And he wants everything to be green, all of his stuff is green, just like Green Lantern.”

  The thing about green was true, but so beside the point that she could hardly stand it. The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. She said, “But he’s not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and more powerfuller. She’s got flying monkeys. She’s like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like Kryptonite to her.” She’d always thought the actress Margaret Hamilton was damn sexy. The way she rode that bicycle and the wind that picked her up and carried her off like an invisible lover; that funny, mocking, shrill little piece of music coming out of nowhere. That nose.

  When she looked over, she saw that he’d put his silly outfit back on inside out. How often did that happen? There was an ant in her underwear. She made the decision to find this erotic, and then realized it might be a tick. No, it was an ant. “Margaret Hamilton, baby,” she said. “I’d do her.”

  He was watching her wriggle, of course. Too drunk at the moment to do anything. That was fine with her. And she was too drunk to feel embarrassed about having ants in her pants. Just like that Ella Fitzgerald song. Finis, finis.

  The big lunk, her old chum, said, “I’d watch. But she turns into a big witchy puddle when she gets a bucketful in the face. Not good. When it rains does she say, Oops, sorry, can’t fight crime today? Interesting sexual subtext there, by the way. Very girl on girl. Girl meets nemesis, gets her wet, she melts. Screeches orgasmically while she does it, too.”

  How could he be drunk and talk like that? There were more ants. Had she been lying on an ant pile while they did it? Poor ants. Poor Bunnatine. She stood up and took her dress and her underwear off—no silly outfits for her—and shook them vigorously. Come out with your little legs up, you ants. She pretended she was shaking some sense into him. Or maybe what she wanted was to shake some sense out of him. Who knew? Not her.

  She said, “Margaret Hamilton wouldn’t fight crime, baby. She’d conquer the world. She just needs a wet suit. A sexy wet suit.” She put her clothes back on again. Maybe that’s what she needed. A wet suit. A prophylactic to keep her from melting. The booze didn’t work at all. What did they call it? A social lubricant. And it helped her not to care so much. Anesthetic. It helped hold her together afterward, when he left town again. Superglue.

  No bucket of water at hand. She could throw the rest of her beer, but then he’d just look at her and say, Why’d you do that, Bunnatine? It would hurt his feelings. The big lump.

  He said, “Why are you looking at me like that, Bunnatine?”

  “Here. Have another Little Boy,” she said, giving up, passing him a wide mouth. Yes, she was sitting on an anthill. It was definitely an anthill. Tiny superheroic ants were swarming out to defend their hill, chase off the enormous and evil although infinitely desirable doom of Bunnatine’s ass. “It’ll put hair on your chest and then make it fall out again.”

  • • •

  “Enjoy the parade?” Every year, the same thing. Balloons going up and up like they couldn’t wait to leave town and pudding-faced cloggers on pickup trucks and on the curbs teenage girls holding signs. We Love You. I Love You More. I Want To Have Your Super Baby. Teenage girls not wearing bras. Poor little sluts. The big lump never even noticed and too bad for them if he did. She could tell them stories.

  He said, “Yeah. It was great. Best parade ever.”

  Anyone else would’ve thought he was being one hundred percent sincere. Nobody else knew him like she did. He looked like a sweetheart, but even when he tried to be gentle, he left bruises.

  She said, “I liked when they read all the poetry. Big bouncy guy / way up in the lonely sky.”

  “Yeah. So whose idea was that?”

  She said, “The Daily Catastrophe sponsored it. Mrs. Dooley over at the high school got all her students to write the poems. I saved a copy of the paper. Figured you’d want it for your scrapbook.”

  “That’s the best part about saving the world. The poetry. That’s why I do it.” He was throwing rocks at an owl that was hanging out on a tree branch for some reason. It was probably sick. Owls didn’t usually do that. A rock knocked off some leaves. Blam! Took off some bark. Pow! The owl just sat there.

  She said, “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “Sorry.”

  • • •

  She said, “You look tired.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still not sleeping great?”

  “Not great.”

  • • •

  “Little Red Riding Hood.”

  “No way.” His tone was dismissive. As if, Bunnatine, you dumb bunny. “Sure, she’s got a costume, but she gets eaten. She doesn’t have any superpowers. Baked goods don’t count.”

  “Sleeping Beauty?” She thought of a girl in a moldy old tower, asleep for a hundred years. Ants crawling over her. Mice. Some guy’s lips. That girl must have had the world’s worst morning breath. Amazing to think that someone would kiss her. And kissing people when they’re asleep? She didn’t approve. “Or does she not count, because some guy had to come along and save her?”

  He had a faraway look in his eyes. As if he were thinking of someone, some girl he’d watched sleeping. She knew he slept around. Grateful women saved from evildoers or obnoxious blind dates. Models and movie stars and transit workers and trapeze artists, too, probably. She read about it in the tabloids. Or maybe he was thinking about being able to sleep in for a hundred years. Even when they were kids, he’d always been too jumpy to sleep through the night. Always coming over to her house and throwing rocks at the window. His face at her window. Wake up, Bunnatine. Wake up. Let’s go fight crime.

  He said, “Her superpower is the ability to sleep through anything. Origin story: she tragically pricks her finger on a spinning wheel. What’s with the fairy tales and kids’ books, Bunnatine? Rapunzel’s got lots of hair that she can turn into a hairy ladder. Not so hot. Who else? The girl in Rumpelstiltskin. She spins straw into gold.”

  She missed these conversations when he wasn’t around. Nobody else in town talked like this. The mutants were sweet, but they were more into music. They didn’t talk much. It wasn’t like talking with him. He always had a comeback, a wisecrack, a double entendre, some cheesy sleazy pickup line that cracked her up, that she fell for every time. It was probably all that witty banter during the big fights. She’d probably get confused. Banter when she was supposed to POW! POW! when she was meant to banter.

  She said, “You’ve got it backward. Rumpelstiltskin spins the straw into gold. She just uses the poor freak and then she hires somebody to go spy on him to find out his name.”

  “Cool.”

  She said, “No, it’s not cool. She cheats.”

  “So what? Was she supposed to give up her k
id to some little guy who spins gold?”

  “Why not? I mean, she probably wasn’t the world’s best parent or anything. Her kid didn’t grow up to be anyone special. There aren’t any fairy tales about that kid.”

  “Your mom.”

  She said, “What?”

  “Your mom! C’mon, Bunnatine. She was a superhero.”

  “My mom? Ha ha.”

  He said, “I’m not joking. I’ve been thinking about this for a few years. Being a waitress? Just her disguise.”

  She made a face and then unmade it. It was what she’d always thought: he’d had a crush on her mom. “So what’s her superpower?”

  He gnawed on a fingernail with those big square teeth. “I don’t know. I don’t know her secret identity. It’s secret. So you don’t pry. It’s bad form, even if you’re archenemies. But I was at the restaurant once when we were in high school and she was carrying eight plates at once. One was a bowl of soup, I think. Three on each arm, one between her teeth, and one on top of her head. Because somebody at the restaurant bet her she couldn’t.”

  “Yeah, I remember that. She dropped everything. And she chipped a tooth.”

  “Only because that fuckhead Robert Potter tripped her,” he pointed out.

  “It was an accident.”

  He picked up her hand. Was he going to bite her fingernail now? No, he was studying the palm. Like he was going to read it or something. It wasn’t hard, reading a waitress’s palm. You’ll spend the rest of your life getting into hot water. He said gently, “No, it wasn’t. I saw the whole thing. He knew what he was doing.”

  It embarrassed her to see how small her hand was in his. As if he’d grown up and she just hadn’t bothered. She still remembered when she’d been taller. “Really?”

  “Really. Robert Potter is your mother’s nemesis.”

  She took her hand back. Slapped a beer in his. “Stop making fun of my mom. She doesn’t have a nemesis. And why does that word always sound like someone’s got a disease? Robert Potter’s just a fuckhead.”

  • • •

  “Once Potter said he’d pay me ten dollars if I gave him a pair of Mom’s underwear. It was when Mom and I weren’t getting along. I was like fourteen. We were at the grocery store and she slapped me for some reason. So I guess he thought I’d do it. Everybody saw her slap me. I think it was because I told her Rice Krispies were full of sugar and she should stop trying to poison me. So he came up to me afterward in the parking lot.”