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

by Various

The goat’s name is Camo, and he has eight thin scars lined beneath the coarse hair at his throat. Parallel, pale, and fading with age, smooth as handle-worn wood.

  Jeremy’s father calls out from the house, “You’ll take cream in your coffee won’t you?”

  “No, Red, thank you. Black’ll do it. Wife says my heart won’t tolerate cream any more.”

  “I got skim milk,” Red calls out. “Powdered.”

  “It’d just make me sadder.” The sheriff shakes his head, and the goat bleats softly at him.

  Jeremy smiles and loves the goat, laughs at himself for a faint twinge of jealousy towards the sheriff. Jeremy was ten when Camo was born, which would make the goat sixteen now; well within and maybe beyond the range of a goat’s death by old age.

  “Why you keep this old boy around?” the sheriff asks Jeremy.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well you ain’t allowed to use him any more. And there’s no milk in the tits on a billy.”

  “Camo’s a good goat,” Jeremy says.

  The sheriff stands and wipes his hands on the seat of his pants.

  “Dad keeps him around to bark strangers off the lawn.”

  Clotted white scraps of cream surface on Jeremy’s coffee. He sniffs the carton, faintly sour behind its sweetness.

  He can hear his father and the sheriff talking in the next room clearly enough through the paneling. There are dishes in the kitchen sink a week old, peeled beer labels decorating the refrigerator. A line of ants describes a curve in the corner of the room. He pours the cream into the sink and runs the tap.

  “Can’t keep the wife away,” the sheriff is saying, “woman’s a hellhound for a bargain.”

  “I thought it was already closed,” Jeremy’s father says.

  “They stopped stocking it, now they’re letting the vultures pick it dry. She came home with four plungers yesterday. Four of ’em. We ain’t got but two bathrooms, and nobody we dislike enough to give ’em a plunger for a present.”

  They’re talking about the Wal-Mart out by Catskill. Driving in, Jeremy had seen the dying superstore, gargantuan polyethylene tarps draped across its name reading “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS,” “STORE-WIDE SALE,” and most prophetically, “EVERYTHING MUST GO.”

  “Well I do appreciate you coming out to remind me about those parking tickets,” Jeremy’s father says.

  “It would pain me to take it to the state,” the sheriff says, “truly.”

  “I’ll send a check in on Wednesday.”

  Social Security payments arrive on Tuesdays. Jeremy leans against the counter and listens, holding the mug of fouled coffee between his hands for its warmth.

  “So Jeanie said she saw you out there, at the Wal-Mart.”

  “You worried I been buying tampons and DVD’s when I ought to be paying my parking tickets?”

  “No, no, shit, Red. I’m just saying.”

  “I guess I can go to the Wal-Mart.”

  The wind moves the few tenacious leaves still holding on to the iron-black trees outside, and a glimmer of light winks from the kitchen table, something small and brighter than glass among the crumbs, piled magazines, and murky glasses ringed at the bottom with the hardened remnants of half-finished drinks.

  Jeremy finds a sheet of paper, torn on two ends to make a square slightly smaller than the palm of his hand. A piece of scotch tape affixes to its center the diamond from his mother’s engagement ring. It’s small and flawed, pinks and blues dancing in its interior like the reflections in the back of a cat’s eye.

  Jeremy’s mother left a little more than ten years ago. She married an orthopedic surgeon in New Mexico, who discovered his own homosexuality and made her rich in her second divorce. She lives now with a painter she would never marry, a man who sends Jeremy hideously suggestive portraits of his own mother for Christmas every year.

  He wonders if his father could have pawned the gold from his mother’s ring without the diamond, pried loose the jewel to keep for some strange sentiment, or simply could not barter for it an acceptable price.

  “Jeanie said you were buying shotgun shells,” says the sheriff in the next room.

  Jeremy’s father doesn’t answer.

  A small jar rests on one corner of the diamond-taped paper. It was once a spice jar, papery scraps remaining where the label was peeled away. Jeremy lifts and tilts it, shifting a thin layer of golden sand on the bottom of the jar, a ring’s worth of precious metal, filed into powder.

  “Shit,” Jeremy says aloud.

  “Turkey season’s over, Red. Deer season’s a month off.”

  His father’s footsteps approach, the sheriff’s behind him. Jeremy slips the jar into his pocket and tries to find something natural to do with his empty hands.

  “I know you were a hunter in your day,” the sheriff says. “Hell, I mean, how much’d you get for the rack you sold to that rich hippy hotel down in Woodstock? Six, seven thousand?”

  “Fifty-four hundred,” says Red, and Jeremy watches his eyes fall upon the space on the table where the jar was, then go to his own eyes. He nods at his son and Jeremy feels a shock of complicity, a surge in his blood for the crime he’s already agreed to.

  “Figured I’d buy some shells while they’re on sale,” Red tells the sheriff, taking the half-empty mug of coffee from his hands and putting it in the sink. “And I do appreciate you stopping by.”

  “You were quite the hunter yourself,” the sheriff says to Jeremy.

  “I’ll walk you to your truck,” says Red.

  “You keep an eye on your old dad.”

  “I’m gonna let you fire the gun this time,” his father said.

  It was shortly after midnight before the morning of the hunt, and Jeremy was wiping the excess glue from the sides of the air candles with a damp rag. He looked at his father with an open-mouthed smile, throat thick as if with impending tears.

  “You think you can handle it?” His father’s voice was a little slippery with alcohol.

  “I’ll do good,” Jeremy managed to say. He was fifteen years old.

  They had been preparing the air candles for several hours. They had crimped, skimmed with glue, and inserted one into the next, plastic drinking straws to form hoops as big around as spare tires. They had laid out sheets of newspaper and drawn stripes of glue across them, then rolled the hoops against them at eight-inch intervals, paper skin around a frame. They had folded other sheets of newspaper into narrow wedges, then cut a soft arc across the wide end, unfolding them to reveal near-perfect circles. They laid a hoop in the center of each newspaper circle and cut wedges in the edges to where the points met the straw. These sheets cut into cartoon suns had been laid atop the cylinders of newspaper, and the radiating triangles glued downward. They had made eight of them, paper silos closed on one end and open on the other, half as big as a rain barrel, light as two sheets of newspaper and a few straws.

  Red hung baskets made from the cut-away bottom quarters of Bud Light cans from the open end of the paper silos, fixing them in place with aluminum wire.

  Jeremy drank Dr Pepper and made rough icons on the air candles’ newspaper skins. Christian and Celtic crosses, pictures of men with arms and legs outstretched. The headlines beneath his permanent marker were a mystery to him, describing killings in East Timor and Kosovo, photographs of old men in suits shaking hands and laughing. Jeremy carefully drew thick black lines through the eyes of each man pictured.

  The day before, they had gone shopping at the Wal-Mart, Jeremy following along and crossing off items from the list he had written to his father’s dictation:

  Goldshot shells, 12 gauge

  box cutter

  Styrofoam cooler

  2 cases Bud Light

  paint brushes

  cotton balls

  lighter fluid

  drinking straws

  baby wipes

  Throughout the list were items already crossed off, things they had found by rooting through the kitchen and bathrooms: sewing ki
t, nylon rope, tarp, permanent markers, glue.

  The rope had been retrieved from the station wagon, beneath the passenger-side seat. Jeremy had looked between his mother and father, she silently smoking in the yard, staring with open distaste at the man’s ass bobbing from the yawning car door.

  It was now one o’clock in the morning and the air candles were finished.

  “Well,” Red said, looking at his bare wrist, “you got two hours ’fore we head out. Oughta chase down a little sleep.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Jeremy said, grinning.

  His father winked at him, grinning back, and tiptoed grotesquely across the kitchen with exaggerated looks towards the room where his wife, the boy’s mother, slept. He pulled a bottle of Jim Beam from beneath the sink, unscrewed the cap, filled it to brimming. Jeremy took it reverentially and downed the foul stuff, grimacing. Red, already poach-eyed with Bud Light, put the bottle to his lips and bobbled the apple in his throat. He lowered the bottle and exhaled like an exhausted horse, and father and son smiled at each other through tears that rendered them alike into something like stained glass.

  Hours passed in seeming moments before his father’s alarm clock nagged him awake from the next room.

  Bird-thin in his BVDs, Jeremy pushed open the door to his parents’ room. His mother was sitting upright on her side of the bed, staring hatefully at the alarm clock. His father slept with one arm across his eyes, chest rising and falling with a sound like the dregs of a milkshake sucked through a split straw.

  His mother stood without looking at him, crossed the dark floor silently, and kneeled, pulling Jeremy against the polyester slickness of her slip and squeezing him. “You be careful up there,” she said. Her hair smelled like cigarettes.

  His father looked like something that died on the line being fished from a dirty river, eyes set desperately on the cone of road revealed by the truck’s headlights. Jeremy watched the passing woods, the sporadic deer hanging in darkness from their glowing eyes, watching the man and boy in the truck pass, a death that would come for them in their season.

  They bought Styrofoam cups of gas station coffee. Jeremy took his with eight plastic tubs of half-and-half and eight packets of sugar.

  “Why don’t you just buy that boy a jug of milk?” the heavy woman behind the counter said, picking at her teeth with her nails, or at her nails with her teeth.

  Eleven miles farther up the mountain, they pulled onto a gravel road in the trees. The truck climbed another three miles, Red gunning the engine through the narrow streams that crossed their path, humming tonelessly at his anxiety.

  It was nearly five in the morning and still dark when they reached the end of the road.

  Red unloaded the goat, Camo, from the back of the truck, and Jeremy carefully lifted the seven air candles by the loop of string that bound them together. He laid them on rocks, above the damp, dead leaves. He pulled his backpack from behind his seat, and the plastic sack of cooking wine and Wonder bread from the floor. His father tied Camo’s leash to a tree, then hobbled the goat with a few feet of twine. Jeremy put the two canvas-wrapped shotguns and the box of 12-gauge Goldshot on the rocks by the air candles.

  “Let’s have that box cutter,” Red said to his son.

  Jeremy pulled the green plastic knife from his backpack.

  Red clicked the blade out and murmured to Camo, stroking his broad nose and forehead.

  “There’s a goat, there’s a goat,” he said, then covered Camo’s eyes and made a quick incision in the animal’s throat, no longer than Jeremy’s thumb. Blood poured down the animal’s chest.

  Red put the box cutter into the back pocket of his Carhartts and pressed his hands against the wound. Camo bleated pitifully.

  “Come here,” Red said.

  Jeremy shuffled over to his father. Red smeared his hands over Jeremy’s face, the goat’s blood black in the moonless predawn.

  “Your arms.”

  Jeremy held his arms up and Red smeared blood down them, and over the backs of his hands.

  “Get the glass on the truck,” Red said.

  Jeremy pushed his hands against the wound on the goat’s throat and felt the warm blood push back. He jogged over to the truck and smeared the sticky warmth on the windows and the side-view mirrors.

  Red smeared the goat’s blood over the canvas wrapping their shotguns.

  Jeremy climbed onto the hood of the truck and smeared blood over the windshield.

  Red pushed the edges of Camo’s wound together.

  “I need a goddamned . . .” Red was lost for the words. Jeremy wiped his hands on his pants and pulled the sewing kit from his bag. The needle was already threaded and he handed it to his father, who passed it back and forth through the goat’s neck, grunting with the effort of puncturing the skin, and pulled it tight. Camo looked at the sky, unconcerned. Jeremy scratched behind his ear and the goat bleated at him.

  They cleaned the palms of their hands with baby wipes and his father poured the cooking wine over a slice of white bread. They each ate a half, grimacing; it was terrible to chew and hard to swallow.

  Jeremy shrugged into his backpack and lifted his gun. Red took his own gun and the air candles. They hiked up the mountain without a trail to follow, only heading upwards. Camo bleated mournfully behind them, more frightened of being alone than of keeping company with men who would injure and bleed him.

  “It’s gonna get light soon,” Red said, and walked faster. Jeremy began to jog a few steps at a time, then walk again, then jog and then walk, trying to match his father’s long-legged pace. Steam rose off of them. Jeremy could feel the shape of his lungs in the cold air.

  The top of the mountain was all but bald, a few ragged plants clinging poorly to the rocks.

  They loaded Goldshot into their guns and then wrapped them back in their bloody canvases. They emptied the box and divided the eight shells between their jacket pockets. Red set fire to the Goldshot box, turning it in his hand until it burnt down to scraps, then dropped it to the rocks and blew on his fingers.

  He gave Jeremy the box cutter, sticky with Camo’s blood, and the boy cut the air candles free and spread them among the rocks.

  They put cotton balls into the beer-can baskets and sprayed them with lighter fluid.

  Jeremy lifted an air candle, his hands pressed gently to the sides of its delicate newspaper skin. Red kneeled and flicked his lighter to the basket. It caught flame, and after a few seconds, Jeremy could feel the candle tugging upwards. He let go, and the cylinder of paper floated.

  As quickly as they could, they repeated the procedure with the other six candles; the first was no more than fifty feet in the air by the time the last was released.

  Jeremy stared upwards, smiling, until Red shoved him into motion and father and son scrambled over the rocks and into the trees where they had left their guns.

  The paper balloons flickered and tilted in the still air, steadily rising.

  Red looked east, where the night sky was a deep blue with the coming dawn.

  Jeremy watched the candles rise.

  “Try not to think of anything,” Red said. Jeremy nodded and closed his eyes.

  They heard them before they saw them. The wings abusing the air like you would beat a rug, enormous and slow. They lowered themselves through the sky, child shaped but tall as a man, enormous wings as pure white as the rest of them. Jeremy knew from the corpses of the angels he had watched his father process that the white “fur” covering their bodies was, in fact, tiny feathers, almost like soft pine needles. They had no eyes, nor nose, nor ears, mouths alone splitting nearly in half their horse-like heads.

  Their wings flung the air candles sideways, spilling their fuel. Five extinguished and two caught flame, dancing and tumbling through the air, burning into the damp canopy of trees.

  There were only two angels, but they sounded like an army, each of the creatures’ doubled wings vibrating in complicated resonance, like the purring of some enormous beast ins
ide Jeremy’s chest. The sound and sensation made it difficult to breathe.

  Jeremy’s hands shook, sliding beneath the canvas and finding the stock of the blood-sticky shotgun.

  The heavier angel descended nearly to the ground, its flesh twitching like a horse’s, casting its head back and forth sightlessly. The other stretched its head skyward and rose, stirring the treetops with the force of its wings.

  Red was crying. Jeremy shrugged the canvas off of his shotgun and looked at his father. Red nodded, and said, “not yet.” The nod registered more than the words, and Jeremy raised the shotgun and braced it into the crook of his arm.

  The angel turned towards him and spread its powerful arms.

  Jeremy fired. The angel’s legs spun away and the creature pitched forward, its wings frantically pawing at the air for purchase. Blood leapt from the shattered limbs and splattered against the rock.

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” his father said and hit Jeremy openhanded. Indignation leapt upwards in Jeremy’s chest before the pain of it, before the shock even.

  The second angel was looking at them, slowly spreading its arms.

  Red pulled the gun out of Jeremy’s hand and flung it back into the woods. He shoved his son into motion, stumbling around the edge of the clearing.

  The second angel folded its wings and fell from the sky, screaming like an ocean of shattering glass. It waded into the trees after Jeremy’s shotgun, splintering a stand of locusts and uprooting an oak.

  The wounded angel crumpled to the ground, its wings flipping it back and forth on the rocks, throwing blood in stained-glass arcs across the sky. Blood, purple, red, and moonlight black, splattering down onto white rock.

  Jeremy felt the earth shake through the soles of his sneakers. He looked back through tear-blurred eyes and saw the second angel fling his shotgun upwards, a rapidly diminishing black stick vanishing against a starless sky. He would find it only after two days of searching, a half mile down the mountain.

  An oak tree slammed against the ground and shattered. Jeremy’s feet wilted beneath him and he stumbled. Red grabbed him by the jacket, lifting and shoving him forward, into the brambles at the clearing’s edge.