El Capitan appeared in the doorway, holding two sacks of groceries in one arm and a twelve-pack of Molson in the other. “Oh, should have left you a note,” El Cap said. “He tries to escape every time you let him out of the box. What happened to your face?”
“Turns out, Tiny Tim’s dad is an asshole.”
El Cap frowned. “I’ll put these away, then put him away.”
“Thanks, man.” Tindal walked down the hallway, leaving the boy to creep slowly toward the doorway. He was thinking of taking a shower before switching to his funeral T-shirt. What day was it, Friday? Not too early in the week for a quick wash-down, and it would be a sign of respect to Rolfe. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing the extent of his bruises, though.
The girl lay on her side on the bathroom floor, a sponge in her hand. Her eyes were closed.
Tindal squeaked and threw himself down beside her. “Hey . . . you!” He’d never learned her name, a definite drawback in the resuscitation department. “Are you okay? Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.”
He turned her face toward him. The collar of her shirt fell open, fully revealing the necklace of bruises. Fucking Shovel Hands, Tindal thought. He tried to remember how mouth-to-mouth worked. Okay, mouth on mouth, obviously, but after that?
“Cap! I need you!”
He heard a thunk! from the living room. “Darn it,” El Capitan said.
Tindal shouted, “The girl’s passed out!”
A moment later El Cap was there, the boy in his arms again. “So’s this one,” he said. “She’s breathing, right?”
“I don’t know! Wait. Yeah.” He’d just seen her chest move. In fact, now it was clear that she was breathing deeply. How had he missed that? He sat back against the tub, sick with relief. They were sleeping. Only sleeping.
“I’m going to put him down in your room,” El Cap said.
In a few minutes they had both of the kids tucked into Tindal’s queen-size bed. “Should we surround them with pillows?” Tindal asked. “So they don’t roll off?”
“They’re not babies,” El Capitan said.
“I know,” Tindal said with a sigh. “But they’re so beautiful when they’re sleeping.”
The Captain put his arm around Tindal. “So what are we going to do with them?”
“Can’t go back to their parents,” Tindal said. “They’re horrible.”
“Well, we can figure them out in the morning. Tonight we have a party to throw.”
Rolfe’s friends and clients—a Venn diagram of two circles that overlapped almost completely—started rolling in before seven and soon filled the house. Tindal recognized the heavily tattooed plumber, a pair of shock-haired assistant professors, an award-winning pet groomer, half a dozen unpublished poets . . . and those were just the Ps. The weepy wept, and the stoic nodded with the wincing frowns of those who were not only familiar with tragedy but had its private number. Tindal hugged them, told the story of the suicide note again and again, and waited for them to notice the paper-covered walls.
“You just printed . . . everything?” asked an unlicensed Reiki therapist. “Without labeling them?”
“I think it’s more true this way,” Tindal said. “Like life. Random.”
“But isn’t it kind of dangerous?” she said.
He didn’t like her judge-y tone. “This is art,” he said. “For adults. You don’t have to have any.”
The wake accelerated from there, at least subjectively. Tindal had started eating some of his own handiwork, and the recipes were busily redirecting all neuronal traffic into complicated patterns. One of the pages was evidently that old favorite MirrorMaster, because suddenly half a dozen El Capitans—Los Capitans!—were ferrying trays of Bagel Bites out to the living room. Interestingly, each copy wore a different apron. “I meant to have pizza pockets,” Tindal explained to a squad of Antonias, who’d kindly returned to pay their respects, if not pay back the sheets Antonia-prime had taken from the deceased’s lab. “Rolfe always got so angry when I burned them.”
“True, true,” they said, eyeing the walls.
“Goddamn it, Tindal!” a voice shouted.
“I can almost hear him now,” Tindal said.
The crowd, now a thousand strong, parted biblically. At one end of this new path was a trio of Rolfes. They stood in the doorway, holding backpacks and roller bags.
Tindal burst into tears and dropped to his knees. Then thought, Wait, what if I’m hallucinating this? Before he could decide, the lead Rolfe seized him by the T-shirt. “I told you, no parties!”
“You’re alive,” Tindal said, wiping at his cheek.
“Of course I’m alive. I went to visit my parents in Decatur. Didn’t you get my note?”
“It was delicious,” Tindal said.
All eyes of the mob were on Tindal and the Rolfes, beaming so many emotions at them: confusion, joy, confusion, anger. Mostly confusion.
The Rolfes were looking around now. “Tindal?” they asked in soft three-part harmony.
“Yes?” he answered.
“What’s that on the walls?”
Suddenly, there was one chief emotion hammering at his psyche, drowning out all the others: Rolfe Rage. The screaming went on for some time, until suddenly one of the Rolfes tapped the shoulder of another and said, “Who the hell is that?”
Tindal glanced behind him. The boy and the girl were awake, or almost: the waifs were sleepy and bewildered and frightened. Also sober, judging from his ability to walk and her ability to ignore the trash already littering her carpet.
“Are those minors?” Rolfe shouted. “Are you fucking crazy? You want to get me sent to prison?”
Tindal, still kneeling, said, “I can explain.”
The Rolfes swept past him and screamed at the siblings, “Get the hell out of my house! Both of you!” The kids, shocked, didn’t move. A Rolfe seized the girl’s arm, and she yelped in pain.
“HEY!” Tindal said, and scrambled to his feet. He pushed through two of the Rolfes and yanked at the shoulder of the one who’d grabbed the girl. “Don’t touch her! Or him!” He placed his body in front of the kids. “They’ve had a really rough day.”
“You brought them into my house?”
“That depends,” Tindal said. “Can you lure someone accidentally? Or does ‘lure’ imply an intent to—”
“Get them out,” Rolfe said. “Now.”
Tindal turned to the boy and girl. They looked at him with wide eyes. “Children?” he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. “Come with me.”
He put his arms around their shoulders and walked with them to the front door. The pack of Rolfes followed behind, barking the whole way.
On the porch, Tindal turned to the Rolfes and said, “Can I just say again how glad I am that you’re all okay?”
“And stay the fuck out!” They slammed the door, but it bounced open again. That door was always trouble. The Rolfes were forced to close it slowly.
Tindal stood on the lawn, feeling . . . what was the word? Hungry. He’d forgotten to eat again. The funeral party—now a resurrection party, after the stoned Tindal had been rolled away—resumed at even greater volume.
“We’ll be going now,” the girl said.
“Are you going to call our folks again?” the boy asked. This was the first indication that he remembered anything from his life as a micro human.
“Are you kidding?” Tindal said. “They’re the worst parents in the world.”
“They beat you up,” the girl said, studying his face.
“I get the feeling they do that a lot,” Tindal said. “Look, you can’t go back to them. You’ll stay with me till you find a place. No arguments. End of story.”
The boy raised his eyebrows. “You’re kinda homeless, too.”
“Who, me? Rolfe will forgive me. He always does. We just need to let him cool off. He’ll love having you.”
The siblings exchanged a skeptical look. The boy started to say something but was interrupt
ed by a single Capitan storming out of the house. “What did I miss? Is everybody okay?”
“We’re going to get something to eat,” Tindal said.
“Oh,” El Cap said. “Kebab?”
The four of them walked through the nighttime streets under the light of twin moons, following a white bird that guided them to the second-best döner kebab in the city. I should really ask the children their names, Tindal thought. Then the food arrived, and the thought evaporated in a haze of steam and spice.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Daryl Gregory: I’m not the first person to realize that the main villains of the Hansel and Gretel story are those awful parents. As a father myself, I’ve sometimes wanted to ditch my children in the forest—but to actually do it? Twice? It seemed to me that it was time the witch got to be the hero of the story. Maybe she wasn’t a monster but a person with terrible judgment in home decoration. Once I decided to set the story in the same drug-addled near future of my novel Afterparty, Tindal the kindhearted stoner was born.
THE SUPER ULTRA DUCHESS OF FEDORA FOREST
Charlie Jane Anders
here is a perfect valley, nestled near the foot of the Sherbet Mountains and bordered by the River of Middling Ideas. It’s just a two-day ride away from the Lazy Geyser, which grants good luck to anyone who throws a coin in its path at the very moment when it finally gets around to erupting. There, in that valley, in the shelter of the fedora trees, is the most splendid place in the whole world to make your home.
Once, that valley was home to a small cottage, in which there lived a mouse, a bird, and a sausage. They were the best of friends, with the perfect partnership.
Every day, the bird would fly into the forest and collect wood. The mouse would carry in water from the well, make a fire, and set the table. And then the sausage would cook their dinner, slithering around in the fry pan to coat it with grease for their vegetables or grains.
The sausage had fled the Republic of Breakfast Meats, during one of High Commodore Gammon’s occasional campaigns to purge the realm of improper “meatizens.” (It usually started out with the Canadian bacon, which wasn’t even proper bacon at all, and then spread to those accursed chicken-fried steaks, and then turned into just a general massacre.) The sausage heard the sounds of trucks and loudspeakers, and barely managed to pack up her few precious belongings (such as an MP3 player that contained all of her beloved EDM tunes, which she loved to listen to and dream of becoming a DJ someday).
The sausage had barely made it through the border from the Republic of Breakfast Meats to the Federation of Circus Animals, thanks to some help from a kindly blood pudding who forged some traveling papers for the sausage. Once in the land of Circus Animals, the sausage had found shelter in a trailer with a friendly balloon elephant, who was best friends with an actual elephant. (“People can never tell us apart,” the balloon elephant had said, making a squeaky-squocky noise with his laughter. The flesh-and-blood elephant had just snorted through her trunk.) From there, the sausage had traveled south, skirting the edge of the Monster Truck Preserve.
Once, this land had been home to men and women. People had built the houses and roads, and they had made places for all the creatures of the forest and all the food items of the table. Even the balloon animals and monster trucks had known exactly where they belonged. That had been paradise, and now the men and women were gone, and everyone lived in a fallen state.
That, at least, was what the cartoon Blanketsaurus standing on a sardine crate was saying, on the day when the sausage had met the bird and the mouse. The Blanketsaurus, whose skin was a beautiful soft fluffy wool-cotton blend, had stood facing a crowd of every kind of person you could imagine, in the market square of the town of Zay!. “We’re just all jacked up,” the Blanketsaurus insisted. “Our shiz is a mess, brothers and sisters and others. We can’t ever even have any purpose at all without the humans.”
The sausage had made a dismissive noise, like a sausage makes when she’s getting a bit steamed. “Who needs humans?” she had whispered. “I never even saw a human. Never saw a need for one, neither.”
That was when the mouse had spoken up. “I just don’t know. I sometimes have the feeling that my life has no organizing principle, ya know? I’m living with a bird, in this cottage in the valley, and we’re just playing house. What are we even doing with our lives? Some days, I just want a human to chase me into the wainscoting. And I don’t even know what a wainscoting is.”
“A wainscoting is a sort of musical instrument,” according to a nearby cactus, who was kind of a know-it-all. “It plays mournful sounds, like the wind on a lonely, moonless night.”
“We don’t need any crunking humans,” the sausage had insisted. “We don’t need anybody besides one another. We can make our own rules. You and that bird can figure it out, all on your own.” And the more the mouse had told the sausage about her life with the bird, the more the sausage had piped up with ideas about how to make it work, and how they could get everything set up just right.
So that was how the sausage ended up living with the mouse and the bird, and the three of them had a perfect system. They were able to salvage enough valuable artifacts of the former human world to sell in the town of Zay!, and soon they had amassed a great many fine possessions. Meanwhile, the sausage finally had a place to practice her DJing, and she started spinning at some of the smaller raves and warehouse parties, over near Confetti Canyon. Her DJ rig included a big mic, with various cool effects, and a built-in speaker on wheels, for outdoor parties.
For years, the mouse, the bird, and the sausage lived merrily together. In the evenings, they played video games and worked on their dance routines. The mouse, who had grown up in a barn full of serious square dancers, was learning to throw it down. (The mouse hailed from a farm many miles away, and she always told the bird and the sausage that if you wanted to see serious drudgery, try farm work. Farms were like a chore wheel with a million spokes, man.)
“You guys are the best friends I’ve ever known, man,” the bird said to the mouse and the sausage one night, when they were kind of crunked up on aromatic bark that the bird had brought back from the town market earlier that day. “I’m serious. I never really felt like I belonged with the other birds. But you guys, you are my sisters. I never thought I would find my place in the world with a mouse and a sausage.” The bird was perched on his usual chair back but kept wobbling.
“You too, absolutely,” the mouse said, wrinkling her nose. “I feel like I just always had a sausage-and-bird-shaped hole in my life, and I never even knew.”
“Awww, I love you guys,” the sausage said, greasy tears rolling down her face.
Nobody knew what kind of bird the bird was. He was just “a bird.” People would sometimes try to identify his actual species: like, maybe he was a bluebird because his wings were kind of blue, or maybe he was a robin because his breast was reddish. But the bird would get grumpy whenever anybody tried to label him. Why wasn’t it enough just to be a bird? One reason why he liked being the only bird in the neighborhood was because you could ask, “Hey, where’s the bird?” and everybody would know you were talking about him.
So they went on: the bird fetching wood, the mouse fetching water and setting the table, the sausage making the food and seasoning it with her body. A perfect system!
A few times a month, the bird, the mouse, and the sausage would venture into the town to sell their wares (and to get more DJ gigs lined up for the sausage). They knew everyone: all the scrap dealers, and farmers’ market stall keepers, and truck whisperers, and sno-cone motivational speakers. Everybody had a friendly word for their little makeshift family.
Except, as time went by, they kept hearing whispers. “Things are changing,” said this one scrap-metal dealer, who was a big roast turkey leg. “Good old High Commodore Gammon from the land of Breakfast Meats signed a treaty with Grand Marshal Ruffles from the Circus Animal country, and they’ve both entered into a confederation with the Dandelion
Lady.”
“What does that mean?” the bird asked, with a toss of his wings.
“It means, be careful about traveling if you don’t have identity papers and letters of transit,” said the turkey leg, quivering with indignation. “It means, honest businesspeople like myself get to have our goods searched and seized for no reason, unless we pay bribes to the border guards. It means that they’re forming an army and preparing to go to war against the Insect Principality. I would just keep your heads down.”
“But why?” the mouse asked.
“It makes no sense,” the sausage said. “People just want to have a simple life. Gammon should stick to what he’s good at, arresting good innocent salami slices for being too Continental a breakfast item.”
A month or two after that, the sausage saw the big vermilion Blanketsaurus again, once again addressing the townsfolk of Zay!. Only this time, the Blanketsaurus had a fancy uniform with big epaulettes, and his title was Admiral Blanketsaurus. (There was no ocean anywhere nearby, even if you counted the Root Beer Sea, but the Blanketsaurus explained painstakingly that the word “admiral” meant that you had lots and lots of secret admirers.) And now, the Blanketsaurus was accompanied by a few dozen people, all of them wearing uniforms as well.
“Brothers, sisters, and others,” the Blanketsaurus told the crowd in the town square. “Our lives were empty and without purpose. Our creators were gone, and we were living in their world without them. The human race decided to endow a great many things and creatures with higher awareness, and then they were wiped out by a flu virus that had gotten a PhD in linguistics. As a result, we were left behind, possessing consciousness without context. But now, at last, we can prove ourselves worthy of our heritage. We can re-create civilization!”
The Blanketsaurus wanted everyone to swear loyalty to the Confederation and to its leaders, like High Commodore Gammon and the Dandelion Lady. And if you originally hailed from one of the member states—like, say, the land of Breakfast Meats—you would be required to travel home and register there. This was a mere bureaucratic trifle, after which you would be free to carry on as before.
The Starlit Wood Page 6
