Happily Never After

by Kristen Duvall

  “Are you hurt? Hungry? What do you eat, I wonder?” She glanced around, but couldn’t see anything. She remembered what the man had said about rodents. There were still rodents, of course. Rats and mice and sometimes shrews. She saw that there was a bowl in the sink, and the tap was dripping. She poured some water into it, and took it close to the animal. Leaving it close enough to tempt it, but far enough to not be threatening.

  “Thirsty?”

  The animal stared at her for a while, then unfolded and moved to the water, lapping it up. In the comparative light of the kitchen she could see its fur was matted, and its ribs stuck out like it was starving. This wasn’t that unusual. Most people looked like that too these days. Somewhere under the muck though she could imagine it sleek and powerful.

  “Poor thing. This doesn’t seem like a good place for you. If I can find a way to help you, I will.”

  The animal stared at her as if it understood. Then it ran its tongue over its lips once. This made her realise that being the tastiest morsel in the room was probably not the best idea, so she retreated, closing the door behind her. She ran, then, up the stairs to the seventh floor. She didn’t stop until she was standing at the door to apartment 6.

  She took a deep breath and opened the door. This apartment was bigger than the ones she had seen already. Like the others, though, it was dusty.

  It was also cluttered. Every corner, shelf and surface was covered with things. Candlesticks, snowglobes, small statues of kittens. There was a giant display board full of medals. There were hundreds of books. The bassoon-man had been right. The General sure had liked knick knacks.

  She was just wondering how she was going to find the star-heart in here, when she saw it. In pride of place on the mantelpiece of a fake fireplace. It was large enough to fill her hand, it was beautiful, and it was glowing in the dim light. Not a lot, which was why she hadn’t noticed it right away, but just enough. A small light in its heart, pulsing. Like it was sending out a signal, trying to attract attention.

  Carefully, almost reverently, she picked it up. It was warm in her hands. She watched the light pulse for a moment, and then, suddenly aware of the importance of the thing she was holding, she turned and ran, out of the room, and down the stairs, flight after flight, with no more thought then to get it to the Pilot as soon as she could. She ran, out into the light, out of Gone, the first person, she believed, to ever come back, and back to where the Pilot was waiting.

  oo00oo

  He told her she was very brave. Before he left, she asked him about Gone.

  “We were all so scared of it, of what we thought was in there. But it’s just an old abandoned building. The Mayor doesn’t even exist. My father is definitely not there.”

  He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “People need myths. Sometimes when things are bad, we want someone to blame. Maybe that’s why you had Gone.”

  She didn’t understand. But his voice smiled at her as he said goodbye, and then there was a huge shaking, and cracking and creaking, and the Thing rose up into the air, slowly, slowly, like it was fighting gravity. It got higher and higher, until she was straining to see it, shielding her eyes from the vicious sun through her visor.

  And then, suddenly, it was gone. She looked around, waiting for the world to get better. But nothing happened.

  And then something did. Right on her nose.

  A raindrop. And another, and another.

  She walked home, through the rain, watching people come out and stare at the sky like a miracle had happened.

  Somewhere in a building among many buildings, no more dangerous than any other, a bassoon started a jolly tune, and a tiger stopped pacing like a caged thing, and stared out of the window at the sky.

  About Jax Goss

  Jax Goss is an editor and writer. She is a wandering South African who has settled in New Zealand. She lives in Dunedin, for the moment. She is currently employed full time as the mother of a very small human, and writes and edits on the side. She expects this situation to stay the same for a while, but she has long ago learnt that nothing ever goes the way she expects.

  She spends a large amount of her time gathering tales and poems and art and sending them out into the world in various forms, and thinks that this may be her vocation. She has edited a number of anthologies for Solarwyrm Press, and her stories have appeared in a variety of places. You can follow her wayward journey at her website: jaxgoss.wordpress.com.

  Glass Fifty-Three

  by Craig Pay

  “Ashy-slut! Ashy-slut!” Zezolla's two older sisters have turned their taunts into a song as they dance around the bedroom. Anna is holding the vacuum cleaner canister above her head, covering the room in a settling layer of dust. “Your room's covered in ash!” Pru cries. They both laugh, continuing their dance.

  “Stop it!” She yells at them. “Just stop it!”

  The vacuum cleaner is confused, trundling around, trying to suck up all the falling dust. It keeps butting into their ankles, apologising every time it does so.

  Zezolla tries standing on her tiptoes, making a grab for the canister, but she can't reach it. Her sisters are too tall. They just shove her away. Their father must have been fair-haired and tall, narrow-framed, certainly an Anglo. Her own father was obviously dark-haired and short, probably an Ethnic. This is as much as they all know. Never any names. Their mother has always refused to give them anything more.

  Both fathers, however, share one similarity: a mutual absence. And this single connection seems to be enough for the sisters to hate her. Devise, each and every day, some new torment to apply.

  Her sisters leave once the canister is empty. Standing there in her room, sneezing and wiping her nose, Zezolla watches the dust settle.

  Her eyes are itching. She blinks.

  It isn't quite ready yet, but when it is, they'll be sorry.

  oo00oo

  Detective Bezaubern Prinz hooks a pencil into the pistol's trigger guard and lifts it up for a closer look. The gap is barely large enough for the pencil to fit through. The pistol looks something like an old world Derringer with two barrels, one over and one under, heavy calibre, at least a .44. But it's nothing like any kind of gun that he's ever seen before. He uses the pencil to turn the pistol around, watching the light bounce and refract. Glass. The pistol is made from some kind of glass.

  The body is lying face down on the marble steps with an exit wound in its back the size of his clenched fist. A narrow trail of blood has dripped away down the stairs. The hole is large enough that he could easily slide his hand in without touching the sides, perhaps poke a finger through to the cool stone beneath. He decides not to do that, not after the last time.

  The butler. At least he can cross that name off his list of suspects, which makes a change.

  He hears the echo of a door opening and closing again somewhere beneath him, down in the entrance hall. Then the sharp clicking of footsteps, pausing for a moment, before coming up the stairs towards him.

  Later, he will wonder why he did what he is about to do. He slides the pistol off the end of the pencil and into the palm of his hand. Slips the gun inside his jacket pocket.

  oo00oo

  Zezolla ordered the pattern from a friend of a friend of someone they knew who was, in turn, a friend of someone else. And so on. The image of the old woman's face that hovered in her room was so grainy that the colour of her eyes and hair were indistinct. Zezolla couldn't even tell whether the woman was Anglo or not. Given the nature of the purchase that she made that day, this was, perhaps, the point.

  She told the old woman what she wanted and the pattern arrived just a few moments later: an old world scroll bearing a plain wax seal which flew in through the window and settled on her outstretched palm. Zezolla took the scroll over to her old three-dee and stared at the faux wax seal until it broke. The scroll then vanished in a blocky burst of pixels.

  Nothing for a moment. Then the print-head began to move, creeping back and forth, making a low g
rinding noise. After a while, she picked up the heavy machine and hid it away in the back of her wardrobe where her sisters would never find it. With the wardrobe doors shut she could barely hear it still working away.

  That first day she checked every hour. The print-head carried on moving, but it didn't seem to be doing much of anything at all. The next day she checked it three times: morning, afternoon and then again later that evening. Still nothing. After a few more days she became bored and forgot all about it for a week or so. Her sisters continued their torture. Again and again she helped the vacuum cleaner clear all the dust from her room, her sisters' taunts still hanging in the air: “Ashy-slut! Ashy-slut!”

  She went to her wardrobe. The three-dee was covered in a fine layer of dust and for a moment she wondered whether it had finally stopped working altogether. Then the print-head snapped to one side before beginning another pass. There, on the plate, she could see the faint outline of a barrel, grip and trigger.

  She topped up the liquid in the print-head.

  And waited.

  oo00oo

  “Hey, Bez.” A woman's voice from behind him.

  He grunts in return. She always calls him that. Never his full name. She probably can't even pronounce it; none of them can.

  “Messy,” she says eventually, standing next to him on the stairs, looking down at the body.

  He grunts again.

  “No weapon?”

  He makes a non-committal noise. Somehow this is easier than lying.

  “Crime-scene guys here any moment,” she says.

  “I know,” he says.

  She turns to leave and hesitates. “Well, come on then. They'll need to scan the place. Get their bugs down.”

  They walk down the stairs together. The pistol feels huge in his pocket, knocking against his ribcage, though not as hard, he supposes, as the bullet that knocked against the butler's.

  “You know you shouldn't be here,” she says. “Contamination.”

  He shrugs. They both know that the bugs will ignore his DNA. Scan all other traces for correlation with the Citizen Register. She knows that he knows, but she still likes to make the point. Three years out of Academy to his ten and she's already his boss, because she's Anglo and he's not.

  That's why they're here: an Anglo house in an Anglo suburb. If this was the city, where all the Ethnics live stacked up on top of one other, then no one would care. It's a wonder that they let an Ethnic like him out this far, beyond the city bounds. They must be short on numbers tonight.

  oo00oo

  Zezolla has to use her right hand to clean away the greasepaint and dust from her face because her hand is still hurting from the pistol. With every sweep of cotton wool her face becomes less Anglo, more Ethnic, though it will never be more than half of each no matter how hard she scrubs (and she's tried).

  With the dress and the paint her sisters hadn't recognised her at the party she followed them to. Their gaze met hers, they nodded and frowned, recognising something but certainly not putting two and two together, even when she spoke to them to tell them they were wanted upstairs.

  That part of the plan had worked. She'd bought the dress from the grainy-faced woman hovering in her room. The woman said that the dress would arrive the following day and it did.

  Before she left for the party, she had visited the sisters' room and watched the vacuum cleaner as it rolled around. She removed the canister, held it above her head and upended it. She held her breath as the dust settled in her hair and cascaded down her face and body. Finally, she shook her head and took a breath. Sneezed. A lot.

  DNA bombing. That's what the old woman called it. So when the Polizei bugs scanned the room -- the room where the two sisters would be lying with a bullet lodged in each of them -- the bugs would only see the two sisters and no one else. That was the theory.

  But the butler stopped her on the stairs. Saw who she was -- what she was. His eyes narrowed and he called out: “Hey, you're an Ethnic! What you doing here?” He was going to start yelling.

  So, she had to shoot him. Tight where it hurt: in the heart, out the spine.

  But the pistol, it turned out, didn't like her. It bucked and bit and jumped from her grip. So she ran, leaving the pistol behind. Down the marble steps and out of the front door of the grand Anglo house, her plan in tatters.

  Rather like the butler's cummerbund. Not to mention his ribcage.

  oo00oo

  Polymer-acrylic frame, custom .53 caseless over-and-under. One barrel empty, one still loaded. No metal. Deliberately undetectable.

  Bez is standing in his single-room city apartment. He turns the pistol over in his hands. It's cold. Ice. Making sure that the safety is on, he tries to squeeze his forefinger through the trigger guard, but it won't fit. He tries each of his sausage fingers in turn. None of them will fit, not even his pinky. A woman. An Anglo woman at an Anglo party with dainty little fingers.

  The phone buds in his ears begin to buzz and, after a moment, he takes the call.

  A young female voice. His boss. “Hey, Bez.”

  He grits his teeth.

  “The bugs found four traces,” she says. “The butler--”

  “Obviously,” he says.

  She hesitates for a moment before continuing. “The butler, two sisters who went to the party together, and you Bez. You should be more careful.”

  He sighs.

  “I'll send you the address for the sisters. Meet me there.” She cuts the call.

  oo00oo

  Zezolla hears voices downstairs: her mother, her sisters and another voice, a man. She feels excitement for a moment. Her missing father, perhaps? She hopes so. Or she will need to buy another gun that will hold more bullets.

  Making her way down to their musty kitchen-come-lounge-come-diner, she sees her mother and her sisters as well as a man and now another woman, a young Anglo woman. The man is certainly not the sisters' father -- he's Ethnic for starters -- in fact he's too young to be the father of any of them. He holds up a Polizei ID card. The Anglo woman shows a similar card of her own.

  They start to explain why they're here. They all sit down, except Zezolla, who's ignored and left standing.

  “Who's she?” The woman looks over at her standing there. “Your maid?” She makes a shooing motion with one hand. “You can go now. We need some privacy.”

  “Oh no!” Pru says.

  “She's our sister--” Anna says.

  “Half-sister,” Pru adds, giving Anna a frown.

  Anna smiles. They both titter.

  The Anglo Polizeiwoman asks all the questions. The Ethnic Polizeiman keeps staring at Zezolla. She would feel uncomfortable at this attention if he didn't have such nice eyes.

  The twins start to become upset. Zezolla hasn't really been paying attention but it would seem that the Anglo woman is accusing them of something. Ah yes. The butler at the house. Their DNA all over his body. This could turn out quite well after all.

  Then the Ethnic Polizeiman says, “They didn't do it.” He reaches inside his jacket and brings out the pistol. The Anglo woman demands to know what's going on. He says, “I found it, right next to the body, so . . .” He shrugs. “I kept it.”

  The Anglo woman stares at him. “That's it Bez, final straw! You're out after this.”

  Bez. Such a nice name. To go with his eyes.

  He passes the pistol to each of the sisters in turn, first Pru and then Anna. He asks them to hold it, to try and get a finger on the trigger. They can't, not with their big fingers. “See,” he says to the Anglo woman, “they couldn't have.”

  Zezolla feels his eyes on her again. He hands her the pistol. She slides a finger through the loop of the guard, resting a finger on the trigger.

  The Anglo woman nods. “I see.'”She stops smiling when Zezolla points the pistol in her face. The woman slides a sideways look to the Ethnic Polizeiman -- to Bez. “It's not loaded, is it?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe.”

  She sighs. “Idiot! Well, no
w you're both screwed once we get out of here.”

  Zezolla feels a hand on her shoulder. “Come on.” It's Bez. He pulls her towards the door. Outside, he bundles her into a car. Not a Polizei car, which is disappointing, just a normal car like everyone flies.

  Up, away from the city, into the sky, with the countryside rolling away beneath them. They don't say anything to each other. They fly for what feels like hours. She's still holding the pistol when a yellow light begins to flash on the dash and the car drifts down to land in a field.

  “We're out of gas,” Bez says. “We'll have to walk.”

  So they walk, across one green field after another, scrambling over rough stone walls or picking their way through old razer-wire fences. They finally get around to talking. She tells him about her missing father, being treated badly by her sisters. He tells her that it's been pretty much the same for him all these years.

  After a while, she can hear sirens in the distance. They head for a nearby oak tree with a great canopy which reaches right down to the ground. He suggests, “We can hide up here.”

  “But what about their cameras?” she asks. “Won't they just see us?”

  Bez is already climbing. He helps to pull her up. They sit there on a branch next to each other.

  He takes her hand -- the empty hand without the gun -- and peels back her fingers to drop some bullets into her open palm. “I printed these for you.”

  She lets herself lean in towards him. His smell settles around her like some kind of kindred memory.

  The sirens get closer.

  Bez and Zezolla,

  sitting in a tree,

  locking and loading,

  their fifty-three.

  About Craig Pay

  Craig Pay writes crossover literary/genre fiction. His short stories have been published in various magazines receiving positive reviews from the Guardian newspaper, Interzone and Strange Horizons. In 2011 he won the NAWG David Lodge trophy. In 2012 he completed a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at Bolton University receiving a distinction and the Vice Chancellor’s Prize. Craig runs a writing group in Manchester and he enjoys Chinese martial arts. He sometimes dreams in Chinese.