Except Trent and Gary, of course. Not that they were romance for Sheila. But they did love her. They cared about her. They didn’t make her feel like she had to be anyone but who she wanted to be, even if who Sheila wanted to be wasn’t entirely who Sheila was.
Sheila washed her hands under the faucet and dried them with the air dryer, appreciating the whir of the fan drowning out the voice in her head. She would walk out on Lyle, she decided. She’d go home and call her mother and tell her, “Never again,” then hang up on her. She would sit in front of the blank television screen, watching her shadowy reflection held within it, and maybe she would let herself cry, just a little bit, for being a love witch who couldn’t make love happen for herself.
“Are you okay?” a voice said over the whir of the hand dryer. Sheila blinked and turned. Behind her, Corrine the server was coming out of a stall. She came to stand beside Sheila at the sinks and quickly washed her hands.
“You’re a witch,” Sheila said stupidly, and realized at that moment that two martinis were too many for her.
Corrine laughed, but nodded and said, “Yes. I am. So are you.” Corrine reached for the paper towel to dry her hands, since Sheila was spellbound in front of the electric dryer. “What kind?” she asked Sheila as she wiped her hands.
“Love,” said Sheila.
“Love?” said Corrine, raising her thin eyebrows. “That’s pretty fancy.”
“It’s okay,” said Sheila.
“Just okay?” said Corrine. “I don’t know. Sounds nice to be able to do something like that with it. Me? I can’t do much but weird things.”
“What do you mean?” Sheila asked.
“You know,” said Corrine. “Odds and ends. Nothing so defined as love. Bad end of the magic stick, maybe. I can smell fear on people, or danger. And I can open doors. But that’s about it.”
“Open doors?” said Sheila.
“Yeah,” said Corrine. “Doors. I guess it does make a kind of sense when I think about it long enough. I smell danger coming, I can get out of just about anywhere if I want to. Open a door. Any old door. It might look like it leads into a broom closet or an office, but I can make it open onto other places I’ve been, or have at least seen in a picture.”
“Wow,” said Sheila. “You should totally be a cat burglar.”
Corrine laughed. Sheila laughed with her. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“It’s okay,” Corrine said. “It was funny. I think you said it because it was funny.”
“I guess I better get back out there,” said Sheila.
“Date?” said Corrine.
“Blind date,” Sheila answered. “Bad date. Last date.”
Corrine frowned in sympathy. “I knew it wasn’t going well.”
“How?” Sheila asked.
“I could smell it on you. Not quite fear, but anxiety and frustration. I figured that’s why you asked for the second martini. That guy comes in a lot. He seems okay, but yeah, I couldn’t imagine why you were here with him.”
Sheila looked down at her hands, which were twitching a little, as if her fingers had minds of their own. They were twitching in Corrine’s direction, like they wanted to go to her. Sheila laughed. Her poor fingers. All of that love magic stored up inside them and nowhere to go.
“You need help?” Corrine asked suddenly. She had just taken off her name badge and was now fluffing her hair in the mirror.
“Help?” said Sheila.
Corrine looked over and said, “If you want out, we can just go. You don’t even have to say goodbye to him. My shift’s over. A friend of mine will be closing out your table. We can leave by the bathroom door.”
Sheila laughed. Her fingers twitched again. She took one hand and clamped it over the other.
“What are you afraid of?” Corrine asked. Her eyes had started to narrow. “I’m getting a sense that you’re afraid of me now.”
“You?” Sheila said. “No, no, not you.”
“Well, you’re giving off the vibe,” said Corrine. She dropped her name badge into her purse and took out a tube of lipstick, applied some to her lips so that they were a shade of dark ruby. When she was done, she slipped the tube into her purse and turned to Sheila. “What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.
Sheila was still fidgeting. “I think,” she said. “I think they like you.”
Corrine threw her head back and laughed. “Like?” she said, grinning. “That’s sweet of them. You can tell your hands I like them too.”
Sheila said, “I’m so sorry. This is embarrassing. I’m usually not such a weirdo.” For a moment, Sheila heard her father’s voice come through—Creepy weirdoes. Whatever the hell else is out there—and she shivered.
“You’re not weird,” said Corrine. “Just flustered. It happens.”
It happens. Sheila blinked and blinked again. Actually, it didn’t happen. Not for her. Her fingers only twitched like this when she was working magic for other people. Anytime she had tried to work magic for herself, they were still and cold, as if she had bad circulation. “No,” Sheila said. “It doesn’t usually happen. Not for me. This is strange.”
“Listen,” said Corrine. “You seem interesting. I’m off shift and you have a bad blind date happening. I’m about to leave by that door and go somewhere I know that has good music and way better food than this place. And it’s friendly to people like you and me. What do you say?”
Sheila thought of her plans for the rest of the evening in a blinding flash.
Awkward moment before she ditched Lyle.
Awkward and angry moment on the phone while she told her mother off.
The vague reflection of her body held in the screen of the television as she allowed herself to cry a little.
Then she looked up at Corrine, who was pulling on a zippered hoody, and said, “I say yes.”
“Yes?” Corrine said, smiling.
“Yes,” said Sheila. “Yes, let’s go there, wherever it is you’re going.”
Corrine held her hand out, and Sheila looked down at her own hands again, clamped together as if in prayer, holding each other back from the world. “You can let one of them go,” Corrine said, grinning. “Otherwise, I can’t take you with me.”
Sheila laughed nervously and nodded. She released her hands from one another and cautiously put one into the palm of Corrine’s hand, where it settled in smoothly and turned warm in an instant. “This way,” Corrine said, and put her other hand on the bathroom doorknob, twisted, then opened it.
For a moment, Sheila could see nothing but a bright light fill the space of the doorway—no Lyle or the sounds of rock and roll music spilled in from the dining area—and she worried that she’d made a mistake, not being able to see where she was going with this woman who was a complete stranger. Then Corrine looked back at her and said, “Don’t be afraid,” and Sheila heard the sound of jazz music suddenly float toward her, a soft saxophone, a piano melody, though the doorway was still filled with white light she couldn’t see through.
“I’m not,” said Sheila suddenly, and was surprised to realize that she truly wasn’t.
Corrine winked at her the way she had done at the table, as if they shared a secret, which, of course, they did. Then she tugged on Sheila’s hand and they stepped through the white light into somewhere different.
© 2013 Christopher Barzak.
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English in suburban and rural communities outside of Tokyo, Japan, whe
re he lived for two years. His most recent book is Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories. Forthcoming is Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.
Game of Chance
Carrie Vaughn
Once, they’d tried using sex to bring down a target. It had seemed a likely plan: Throw an affair in the man’s path, guide events to a compromising situation, and momentum did the rest. That was the theory—a simple thing, not acting against the person directly, but slantwise. But it turned out it was too direct, almost an attack, touching on such vulnerable sensibilities. They’d lost Benton, who had nudged a certain woman into the path of a certain Republic Loyalist Party councilman and died because of it. He’d been so sure it would work.
Gerald had proposed trying this strategy again to discredit the RLP candidate in the next executive election. The man couldn’t be allowed to take power if Gerald’s own favored allies hoped to maintain any influence. But there was the problem of directness. His cohort considered ideas of how to subtly convince a man to ruin his life with sex. The problem remained: There were no truly subtle ways to accomplish this. They risked Benton’s fate with no guaranteed outcome. Gathering before the chalkboard in their warehouse lair, mismatched chairs drawn together, they plotted.
Clare, sitting in back with Major, turned her head to whisper, “I like it better when we stop assassinations rather than instigate them.”
“It’s like chess,” Major said. “Sometimes you protect a piece, sometimes you sacrifice one.”
“It’s a bit arrogant, isn’t it, treating the world like our personal chess board?”
Major gave a lopsided smile. “Maybe, a bit.”
“I think I have an idea,” Clare said.
Gerald glanced their way and frowned.
Much more of this and he’d start accusing them of insubordination. She nudged Major and made a gesture with her hand: Wait. We’ll tell him later. They sat back and waited, while Gerald held court and entertained opinions, from planting illegal pornography to obtaining compromising photographs. All of it too crass, too mundane. Not credible. Gerald sent them away with orders to “come up with something.” Determined to brood, he turned his back as the others trailed to the corner of the warehouse that served as a parlor to scratch on blank pages and study books.
Clare and Major remained, seated, watching, until Gerald looked back at them and scowled.
“Clare has a different proposal,” Major said, nodding for her to tell.
Clare ducked her gaze, shy, but knew she was right. “You can’t use sex without acting on him, and that won’t work. So don’t act on him. Act on everything around him. A dozen tiny decisions a day can make a man fall.”
Gerald was their leader because he could see the future. Well, almost. He could see paths, likely directions of events that fell one way instead of another. He used this knowledge and the talents of those he recruited to steer the course of history. Major liked the chess metaphor, but Gerald worked on the canvas of epic battles, of history itself. He scowled at Clare like she was speaking nonsense.
“Tiny decisions. Like whether he wears a red or blue tie? Like whether he forgets to brush his teeth? You mean to change the world by this?”
Major, who knew her so well, who knew her thoughts before she did, smiled his hunting smile. “How is the man’s heart?”
“Yes. Exactly,” she said.
“It’ll take time,” Major explained to a still frowning Gerald. “The actions will have to be lined up just so.”
“All right,” he said, because Major had proven himself. His voice held a weight that Clare’s didn’t. “But I want contingencies.”
“Let the others make contingencies,” Major said, and that made them all scowl.
Gerald left Clare and Major to work together, which was how she liked it best.
She’d never worked so hard on a plan. She searched for opportunities, studied all the ways they might encourage the target to harm himself. She found many ways, as it happened. The task left Clare drained, but happy, because it was working. Gerald would see. He’d be pleased. He’d start to listen to her, and she wouldn’t need Major to speak for her.
“I don’t mind speaking for you,” Major said when she confided in him. “It’s habit that makes him look right through you like he does. It’s hard to get around that. He has to be the leader, the protector. He needs someone to be the weakest, and so doesn’t see you. And the others only see what he sees.”
“Why don’t you?”
He shrugged. “I like to see things differently.”
“Maybe there’s a spell we could work to change him.”
He smiled at that. The spells didn’t work on them, because they were outside the whole system. Their spells put them outside. Gerald said they could change the world by living outside it like this. Clare kept thinking of it as gambling, and she never had liked games.
They worked: The target chose the greasiest, unhealthiest meals, always ate dessert, and took a coach everywhere—there always seemed to be one conveniently at hand. Some days, he forgot his medication, the little pills that kept his heart steady—the bottle was not in its place and he couldn’t be bothered to look for it. Nothing to notice from day to day. But one night, in bed with his wife—no lurid affair necessary—their RLP candidate’s weak heart gave out. A physician was summoned quickly enough, but to no avail. And that, Clare observed, was how one brought down a man with sex.
Gerald called it true. The man’s death threw the election into chaos, and his beloved Populist Tradition Party was able to hold its seats in the Council.
Clare glowed with pride because her theory had worked. A dozen little changes, so indirect as to be unnoticeable. The perfect expression of their abilities.
But Gerald scowled. “It’s not very impressive, in the main,” he said and walked away.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clare whispered.
“He’s angry he didn’t think of it himself,” Major said.
“So it wasn’t fireworks. I thought that was the point.”
“I think you damaged his sensibilities,” he said, and dropped a kind kiss on her forehead.
She had been a normal, everyday girl, though prone to daydreaming, according to her governess. She was brought up in proper drawing rooms, learning how to embroider, supervise servants, and orchestrate dinner parties. Often, though, she had to be reminded of her duties, of the fact that she would one day marry a fine gentleman, perhaps in the army or in government, and be the envy of society ladies everywhere. Otherwise she might sit in the large wingback armchair all day long, staring at the light coming in through the window, or at sparks in the fireplace, or at the tongue of flame dancing on the wick of the nearest lamp. “What can you possibly be thinking about?” her governess would ask. She’d learned to say, “Nothing.” When she was young, she’d said things like, “I’m wondering, what if fire were alive? What if it traveled, and is all flame part of the same flame? Is a flame like a river, traveling and changing every moment?” This had alarmed the adults around her.
By the time she was eighteen, she’d learned to make herself presentable in fine gowns, and to arrange the curls of her hair to excite men’s interest, and she’d already had three offers. She hadn’t given any of them answer, but thought to accept the one her father most liked so at least somebody would be happy.
Then one day she’d stepped out of the house, parasol over her shoulder, intending a short walk to remind herself of her duty before that evening’s dinner party, and there Gerald and Major had stood, at the foot of the stairs, two dashing figures from an adventure tale.
“What do you think about, when you look at the flame of a candle?” Gerald had asked.
She stared, parasol clutched in gloved hands, mind tumbling into an honest answer despite her learned poise. “I think of birds playing in sunlight. I w
onder if the sun and the fire are the same. I think of how time slows down when you watch the hands of a clock move.”
Major, the younger and handsomer of the pair, gave her a sly grin and offered his hand. “You’re wasted here. Come with us.”
At that moment she knew she’d never been in love before, because she lost her heart to Major. She set her parasol against the railing on the stairs, stepped forward, and took his hand. Gerald pulled the theatrical black cape he’d been wearing off his shoulders, turned it with a twist of his wrists, and swept it around himself, Major, and Clare. A second of cold followed, along with a feeling of drowning. Clare shut her eyes and covered her face. When Major murmured a word of comfort, she finally looked around her and saw the warehouse. Gerald introduced himself and the rest of his cohort, and explained that they were masters of the world, which they could manipulate however they liked. It seemed a very fine thing.
Thus she vanished from her old life as cleanly as if she had never existed. Part of her would always see Gerald and Major as her saviors.
Gerald’s company, his band of unseen activists, waited in their warehouse headquarters until their next project, which would only happen when Gerald traced lines of influence to the next target. The next chess piece. Clare looked forward to the leisure time until she was in the middle of it, when she just wanted to go out and do something.
Maybe it was just that she’d realized a long time ago that she wasn’t any good at the wild version of poker the others played to pass time. She sat the games out, tried to read a book, or daydreamed. Watched dust motes and candle flames.
The other four were the fighters. The competitive ones. She’d joined this company by accident.
Cards snicked as Major dealt them out. Clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair, he was dashing, military. He wore a dark blue uniform jacket without insignia; a white shirt, unbuttoned at the collar; boots that needed polishing, but that only showed how active he was. Always in the thick of it. Clare could watch him deal cards all day.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37 Page 21
