The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  These are not copies. These are her original writings.

  He set the book aside and took another from the pack. This one contained poems from several years later, after Tanja Duhr had established her place as the Empire’s reigning poet. Again, the pages were marked with lines struck out, corrections scribbled in the margins, and once, the notation, Rewrite. Cowardly poets do not thrive.

  Asa read through the night, lighting candle after candle. He came to the years when Adele and the Empress’s poet had first met, the poems that inspired, and those from when they became lovers. Then came the ones from days and weeks after Adele left for the border.

  …when you are gone, I feel more than absence. The moon dims. The summer warmth recedes. The air itself grows thin….

  Asa paused and laid the volume on the table, shivering. I loved her too much. I never understood how much she loved me as well.

  It took him many, many moments before he could go on. Then, the revelations continued. The years after Adele died, the poems took on a formal tone. Grief, said his heart. She could not stop writing, but she no longer dared to write everything. The cowardly poet does not thrive. She had survived, yes, but he could tell those were not her strongest poems.

  By dawn, he came to newer works, ones she’d clearly written in the past few months. The handwriting was not as firm, but there were far fewer corrections. She wrote, he thought, as if the words poured like water from her heart and mind.

  …and so I join the great dance, the step and tripping step of lights across the galaxy, from void to void, from life to life. I ask you not to grieve. You will. I ask you to rejoice. You cannot now, but again, I say, you will. You will. Believe me in this one thing, beloved….

  Beloved. His heart paused, only to race forward, too fast for comfort. Perhaps later he could bear these words, as she claimed, but not yet. Not yet.

  He took up the last book, telling himself he must read everything or he could not sleep that night. But this volume contained nothing except blank pages and a loose sheet of paper, folded and tucked underneath the cover. Asa took out the sheet and felt the prickle of magic as it unfolded.

  You were once a guardian of the Empire. I ask you now, unfairly perhaps, to be the guardian of my words. One day we shall find each other again. —Tanja.

  Underneath the letter was a rose petal, pressed and limp and nearly black, with a trace of its scent when he held it close.

  Acquired and edited for Tor.com by Melissa Ann Singer.

  Copyrights for author Beth Bernobich

  Cover artist Matthew Stawicki

  Books by Beth Bernobich

  Ars Memoriae (PS Publishing)

  A Handful of Pearls and Other Stories (Lethe Press)

  THE ERYTHANDRA SERIES

  Passion Play (Tor – forthcoming)

  Queen’s Hunt (Tor – forthcoming)

  Allegiance (Tor – forthcoming)

  THE LÓNG CITY BOOKS

  Fox and Phoenix (Viking – forthcoming)

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  They were on the run and forgetting how not to be. He wore his flowered shirt and she wore her straw hat so they could always spot each other in a crowd. The goons were a few steps behind them—had been since that day at the empty house by the sea—but they made friends where they needed friends, they bought bus tickets and street maps, and sometimes they stopped long enough for a movie or a beer, or for a quickie in a borrowed room. They were far from home, but they didn’t know how far. They figured everything would turn out all right in the end.

  “Everything will turn out all right in the end,” she told him.

  He was having a dark moment, crouched on the sidewalk with his hands on top of his head. At the bus stop on the corner, two boys wearing bulky backpacks exchanged a look.

  “See,” she said, “it’s kind of like Los Angeles here.”

  Only this Los Angeles had too many doors: doors in the sidewalks, doors on every side of every house, little doors in the trees. Most doors didn’t have anything behind them. They’d checked a few.

  “Your aunt Meg probably thinks I kidnapped you,” he said. “She’s going to be so angry.”

  She crouched behind him, ignoring the looks from those kids, and put her arms around his middle. “My aunt Meg is always angry about something,” she said.

  They stayed like that for a while, she with her hair falling over his shoulders, he slowly unclenching. Then a bus pulled up to the curb, and the driver threw down a rope ladder. The two boys climbed aboard, and the babies in their backpacks woke and went wide-eyed at the ascent. Babies, fat and shining, grinning, everything new to them.

  Because that was the other thing about this Los Angeles. Everyone here had babies.

  “I need a drink,” he said.

  * * *

  They’d seen a town where powdered wigs were strictly required. A town where the laws were made by observing how the alpacas grazed on a particular meadow. A town that was just a train station. They’d been in the country, and then in the mountains, and then in the desert. They learned to stop asking where they were, because people here didn’t understand that question, mistook it for a joke. A big grin and “Why, you’re right here!” was the typical reply.

  What they wanted was to get home in time for the wedding—their wedding. They held hands as often as they could. They got used to not getting used to things. They knew that his name was Jim and that her name was Laura, and sometimes that was all they needed.

  In the Set-It-Down Saloon, the bouncer bounced a baby on his knee. At every table, in every booth, at least one baby lolled. The bartender had a baby slung over his chest and a second laid out on a blanket next to the taps. “I’ll tell you what you kids need,” he said to Jim, and Jim thought he was going to say a baby, but what he said was “You need a sure thing. My cousin Louis, for example. This guy has a sure thing. Have you ever heard of muffins?”

  “Muffins, yes, I’ve heard of muffins,” said Jim.

  “Louis is in the muffins business. It’s going to be huge, you know? When people get a taste of these muffins, they’re all going to want in on them. They’re going to eat these things until they burst. Standing room only. There’s a sure thing right there.”

  “I’ll be right back,” said Laura, and went off to find the restroom.

  Jim took a long sip of his beer. “There are these goons,” he said.

  “Goons?”

  “Thugs. Pinstripe suits, shiny black shoes. You can smell them when they get close. They smell like fried eggs.”

  “Fried eggs,” the bartender said, wiping down the bar. “Never heard of fried eggs.”

  The baby on the bar—a boy baby—started peeing. The stream of urine splashed over the bar and over the baby’s own legs. The bartender waited until it was done, then lifted the baby’s legs, cleaned up underneath, and cleaned the baby, too, all with the same rag.

  “A window or a small box,” Jim said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  It was a fortune teller in Phoenix (except it wasn’t really Phoenix) who’d said it to them. She lived in a little white house with a very green lawn and a sign out front with a picture of a crystal ball on it. She was out front, too, on a lawn chair, sunning herself in a two-piece. She was maybe nineteen. “You look lost,” she’d said dreamily, and they were lost, and feeling
a little desperate, so they followed her inside, and she’d gazed into her crystal ball and told them: “Your way home lies through a window. A window or a small box.”

  “I’ve got plenty of boxes out back,” the bartender said. “Take all you need.” The baby on the bar was crying now, so he swapped it for the one slung over his chest.

  “I don’t know if we’re getting any closer,” Jim said. And then, though he knew how this would probably go, he asked, “Hey, can you tell me where we are?”

  “Now there’s the first sensible question you’ve asked all night,” the bartender said. “You’re sitting at my bar, kid. It’s called the Set-It-Down Saloon, and people come here to set things down, usually themselves. I’ve worked here for thirteen years, and sometimes I think it must be the absolute center of the universe.” He looked around. “You smell something? I’ve never smelled anything like that. Like something frying in butter.”

  Jim rose from his stool and said, “Where’s Laura?”

  * * *

  Laura had found too many doors at the back of the bar, none of them labeled women or men, ladies or gents. No helpful pictograms. So she’d picked a door at random and opened it on to darkness.

  When she felt for the light switch someone grabbed her wrist, pulled her in, and closed the door. “Hi,” someone said.

  She reached for the doorknob, but the man in the dark got ahold of her other wrist and danced her deeper into the room. Then she was in a chair, and a lamp was on, and on the table next to the lamp was a half-eaten sandwich on a white plate. The man sat beside her. He was big in his big pinstripe suit, and he had big blond hair and a handsome smile.

  “How’d you know which door I’d pick?” she asked.

  “Didn’t,” he said. “But things usually go my way. Hungry?”

  They were in a storage room, surrounded by open crates of promotional materials from breweries: neon signs, pint glasses, coasters, baby bibs.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  The man shrugged and took a bite of the sandwich. Cheese, it looked like. “So, you still with that guy?” he said. “What a loser.”

  “Guess how many,” she said.

  He stopped chewing. “How many what?”

  “Tents. Guess how many tents we rented for the wedding.”

  He blinked his big blue eyes. “I don’t want to guess.”

  “Three,” she said. “One for the ceremony, one for the dinner, and one for the dancing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about dancing,” said the man, the man who was the leader of the goons, the goons who were out to get them, though he seemed to be alone this time. “I want to talk about love.”

  The room felt colder now.

  “Do you love him?” the chief goon asked. “Do you really love that loser out there?”

  “Guess how many guests,” she said.

  He threw his sandwich onto the plate. “I hate your questions. Your questions bring me to the very edge of doing something terrible.”

  “One hundred eighteen guests,” she said. “Do you know how difficult it is to herd that many people? To make sure they all have a place to stay? To make sure they’re seated at tables with people they don’t hate?”

  “Do you love him?” the chief goon asked again.

  Laura thought of Jim on the sidewalk, thought of him weak and needy, and the only thing she felt was a hollow kind of anger. “I don’t know if I love him,” she said, and then she heard him outside, calling her name.

  She ran for the door, but the chief goon moved faster, pinned her against the wall, and held her face in his big white hands, very gently. She screamed.

  * * *

  They were just two kids from upstate New York. Before, he’d been working for an agency that tracked fish populations. Seven hours each day, in a room he and his coworkers called “the dungeon,” he sat at a window with a view on to a streambed, watching for flashes of silver in the murky light. He kept a counter in each hand, clicking one for shad, one for lampreys. Sometimes a lamprey would attach itself to the glass with its mouth and stay there for hours. Jim would try not to look at it, at its rings of teeth, at its flat yellow eyes.

  “Weird as anything we’ve seen here,” she’d said to him a few days after they’d crossed over (and this was how they referred to their arrival in this place, which they didn’t remember, didn’t understand).

  “There were turtles sometimes,” Jim said. “It always felt good to see turtles.”

  She’d been commuting into the city to work for a company that predicted trends in film, television, fashion. She’d earned a promotion and a measure of fame among her peers for her work on a report titled “The New Escapism,” which proved to be about 90 percent accurate. The interns referred to her as “the seeress” and competed for the right to do her photocopying. Whenever someone asked her what she saw coming next, she usually said, “Me getting fired,” and knew she sounded a little hopeful when she said it.

  “I’ll fire you if you want,” he’d told her one night. They were alone on his parents’ porch with a candle and bottles of beer.

  “It would be kind of hot if you fired me,” she said.

  “You’re fired, then. Completely, totally terminated. Don’t even clean out your desk.”

  “Mm, nice,” she said, sipping from her bottle.

  “Don’t stop by the water cooler. Don’t try to take any interns with you. Your life is one big pink slip.”

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. “That’ll do, boss.”

  “Welcome to the real world,” he said. “It’s hell out here, and you’re part of it now.”

  “Jim, that’s enough,” she said.

  He was shaking and he didn’t know why. He licked the tips of his thumb and index finger and pinched out the candle flame.

  * * *

  When Jim came through the door with a bottle in his fist, the chief goon let go of Laura and backed away. They all looked at one another for a moment, then Laura went to Jim. He smashed the bottle over the edge of a crate. The glass shattered and fell from his hand, useless.

  The chief goon chuckled, and swept back his big blond hair. “People are placing bets, you know. On how long before I catch you. I give you another day or two, tops.”

  They ran. Out in the bar, everyone was crouched low at their tables and booths, leaning protectively over babies. A half dozen goons, rubbery in their pinstripe suits, slid like jellyfish from vents in the ceiling, through the windows, from under the jukebox. They shifted in their shiny black shoes, ankles wobbling as they solidified.

  Laura grabbed her backpack from the bar and pulled Jim toward the door.

  “Trouble at six o’clock!” the bartender cried, which was strange, Jim thought, because no one here told time that way, but apparently six o’clock still meant right behind you, because there was one of the goons, smiling and ready to pounce.

  Jim swung at him. His punch connected, but Jim’s fist sank into the still-gooey head. The goon’s face bulged, looking like a balloon that’s been squeezed on one side. His smile stretched and swelled.

  Jim hollered and pulled back, but his hand was stuck fast, somewhere just below the goon’s left eye. The goon was laughing now, and so were all the other goons. Jim’s hand felt warm and tingly in there. It didn’t feel good.

  “Kid, I don’t know what to tell you,” the bartender said.

  Laura swung her backpack at the goon’s head. He was solid enough now that the impact meant something, and the goon’s eyes fluttered shut. He fell against the bar, and Jim was free.

  Free, but he only stared at the fallen goon, his face blank. Laura grabbed him by the arm, pulled him from the bar, pulled him down the sidewalk past the goons’ black sedan, all the way to the closest monorail station, because this Los Angeles had a monorail. A train pulled in just as they passed through the turnstile. They hopped aboard, keeping low, and found two empty seats between a puppeteer and a woman with a basket of bananas on her head.

&nbs
p; “At moments like this,” Laura said to him, “I need you to work with me. And to move a little quicker, okay?”

  Jim didn’t look at her; he was staring at his right arm. Which ended, Laura now saw, just past the cuff of his flowered shirt—nothing where his hand should have been. The flesh was smooth and rounded, as though he’d never had a hand there.

  Laura took his arm and held it between them, then held him close so he couldn’t look at it.

  The puppeteer, who had hissing snake heads on his fingertips, was watching. He leaned close and wagged the fingers of his right hand. “Can’t take any chances,” he said. “That’s why I got these puppies insured.”

  * * *

  They bought tickets for an afternoon show and sat in the back row. There were no movies in the city, only live theater. Jim stared at the spot where his hand used to be, ran the palm of his left hand over the stump. “Maybe this one will get more dexterous over time,” he whispered.

  At first he’d wondered how he was going to count shad and lampreys when he could hold only one clicker at a time. Then he wondered whether Laura would want to marry someone with one hand. There were things he did with that hand that she liked.

  “This play is one of my favorites,” she said, as though she’d seen it before. The play, as far as Jim could tell, was about stones that dreamed they were turtles.

  “Could we trade seats?” he said.

  “Why?” she said, then understood: he wanted to hold her hand, but he couldn’t now unless she was on his left. She said, “Let’s just watch the play, all right?” She kept her hands in her lap, under her straw hat.

  He glanced toward the door, still expecting the goons to burst in. No sign of them, and not a trace of fried eggs, so he watched the play.

  The stage, lit with blue and green lights, was covered with stones, most of them round and smooth. It reminded him of the bottom of the stream back home, the stream he’d come to think of as his stream. Offstage, someone played a zither. Turtle puppets with slowly moving limbs swung suspended in the light. From his perch on a bridge above, a curly-haired boy reached for them with an enormous net. When he caught a turtle, people in the audience clapped and bounced their babies on their knees.