Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories

by Various

  As if in answer, something giggled softly behind her. She whirled around with a splash. “Who’s there?” she called. No one answered.

  “Please, can you help me?” she said loudly. “I’m lost.”

  “Tee hee, tee hee.” The giggles seemed to come from all around her. “She’s lost . . . she’s lost . . . tee hee . . .” Still whirled around again in the water, peering into the darkness. Suddenly she heard tiny feet scamper across stone, and saw one of the patches of fungus on the wall ripple slightly.

  Glass rats! Glass rats, with diamond teeth and sharp little appetites. Another patch of fungus rippled, and another. There must be dozens of them, all around her!

  “What do you want?” she cried out.

  “Tee hee,” the rats giggled. “Why, oil, of course,” one rat squeaked. “Slippery puppet oil, and crunchy puppet wood.”

  Still floated in the water with rats all around her. “I’m afraid I don’t have any wood or oil to give you,” she said as calmly as she could.

  The little ratty voice spoke up again. “Well, if you won’t give it to us, we’ll just have to take it,” it squeaked, which made the other rats giggle, “Tee hee, tee hee,” once again.

  “But what if I don’t want to give it to you?” Still asked.

  “Give it to us?” the rat squeaked. “Tee hee, tee hee! Why, it’s already ours! Everything that comes down here without a good reason is ours.”

  “But I have a reason!” Still said. “A very good reason!”

  The giggling stopped. “And what reason is that?” the rat squeaked.

  “I’m looking for something,” Still said. “Something I lost. Something very important.”

  “Really?” the rat asked suspiciously.

  Still hesitated. If she told them the truth, they might eat her violin! “Yes,” she said firmly. “I’m looking for Key the Cutter. I have to warn her about something.”

  There was a moment of silence, then the rats began giggling again. “That’s not why you’re here,” the little voice squeaked. “We can tell. Rats can always tell. Now, perhaps if you give us your arms and legs, we’ll let the rest of you go.”

  “All right!” she said. “All right, I lied. I’m looking for—I’m looking for my violin. It fell in the water, and I have to get it back.”

  There was another moment of silence, a longer one, but then the rats began to giggle once more. “Still not the truth, still not the truth,” the little voice said with glee.

  “All right! All right!” Still shouted. “I’m not looking for Key. I’m not really looking for my violin! I’m looking for—for—for me! That’s why I’m here! I put myself somewhere, but now I can’t remember where that was, and I’m trying to find me again. Now, if you want to eat me up, then come and eat me up and get it over with!”

  Silence filled the tunnel. It stretched and stretched until Still thought she would scream, and then the little voice said, “Rats, she figured it out.” Little feet scampered away in the darkness.

  Still waited a moment, then paddled over to the side of the tunnel and pulled herself up onto the walkway. She was safe now, but what did that matter? She had no idea where she was, or her violin either. Drops of oil welled up in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. All of a sudden she felt too weak to keep looking, too weak to walk, too weak to even stand. She slumped down in a heap.

  She had no idea how long she lay there—minutes? Hours? Her next thought came when she realized that something was bobbing up and down in the water in front of her. She blinked. It was still there. She blinked again, then picked it up.

  It was a tiny boat made out of neatly-folded white paper. Neatly-folded paper—now what did that remind her of? She shook her head. Something was written on the side of it. She couldn’t read it—the light was too faint. She stood up wearily and held it up close to the nearest patch of glowing fungus.

  Someone had painted a picture of a puppet on the side of the boat. Written underneath it were the words, “Have you seen our daughter?” Still peered at the picture. The puppet looked familiar somehow. She was wearing black and white—

  “And eight shades of green,” Still whispered, there in the darkness. The paper boat fluttered like a bird trying to escape from someone’s hand. Still realized that she was trembling. She knelt down and gently set the paper boat back in the water. “Go ahead,” she whispered, pushing it out into the current with one finger. “You go ahead, and I’ll follow you.”

  The little boat bobbed up and down as it floated gently away. Still followed it, lost in her thoughts. Black and white, and eight shades of green . . . Eight shades of green . . . She knew that puppet, she was sure of it. But what was her picture doing on the side of a paper boat?

  When the boat reached the split in the tunnel, it turned right. Still followed it around the corner, and stopped dead. A whole flotilla of little paper boats lay in the water in front of her. She knelt and picked one up. The same picture was painted on its side. “Please help us find our daughter,” it said. She picked up another. “If you see our daughter, please tell her that we love her.”

  Her hand was trembling as she picked up a third boat. “Still, please come home,” she read aloud. Suddenly she hugged the little boat to her chest. “Ramble . . .” she whispered. “Elbow . . . Oh, where have I been?”

  She pulled the boats from the water one after another. They spilled out of her arms onto the walkway, but she didn’t care. She was sobbing, but she didn’t care, because she knew what she was going to find.

  And there it was—her violin. The current that had carried the boats to this backwater had brought her violin as well. She picked it up and hugged it close. “Time to go home,” she whispered.

  Still walked out into the dawn with her violin in one hand and the little paper boat in the other. A bird chirrupped nearby, then fell silent, as if embarrassed.

  The streets around her were broad and clean, and the houses were as tidy as Elbow’s creases. Her fear lay in her belly like cold soup, but she kept walking. The streets began to fill with puppets on their way to work, or school, or just out to enjoy the crisp, cold day. A few stared at Still as she strode past, but she paid them no heed.

  The park next to Mister Leaf’s house was just as tidy as she remembered, and the steps leading up to its front door were just as square. The high, hesitant sound of a flute floated through the air from the second-story window.

  Still set the little paper boat on the sidewalk in front of the steps, laid her violin on top of it, and bowed her head. Slowly, she raised her left arm, bent at the elbow. Slowly, so slowly, she tilted her head to one side, and brought her right arm up, the wrist and elbow loose, just as she had been taught. Slowly, silently, she began to play.

  The wind rustled the last few paper leaves on the trees around her. A squirrel with a squeaky tail scampered across a branch. A child’s balloon blew by. All of them were louder than Still’s music. It was as silent as deep snow, and it spread out in waves around her. First the puppets in the nearby houses heard it. They set down their gossip and chores and stared at one another. The streetcars fell silent, and then the children in the playgrounds. Even the roustabouts working on the balloons overhead stopped their chatter and bluster.

  Passersby began to gather around Still. “What’s she doing?” they asked one another, but no one had an answer.

  Finally a police puppet rode up on a shiny blue bicycle. He leaned it against a tree, straightened his serious hat, and scowled. “What’s going on here, then?” he asked. Still just kept playing.

  “Excuse me, miss, but I asked, what’s going on here?” the police puppet repeated. He took a step toward her.

  “Perhaps I can explain,” a warm voice said. Still opened her eyes. Mister Leaf was outside his front door. His student was standing beside him, her flute in her hands, her eyes big and dark. Mister Leaf’s hand was on her shoulder. She looked straight at Still, and Still looked straight back at her.

  “Well, I’d be gratef
ul if you would,” the police puppet said. “It’s a mighty strangeness to me, it is.”

  “This poor thing was one of my students,” Mister Leaf said. “She had an accident—look, you can see the mark on her cheek. She ran away from home several months ago. Her parents have been very, very worried. I’m sure that—”

  But no one ever got to find out what Mister Leaf was sure of. The young puppet at his side shook off his hand and walked down the steps. As Still kept playing, the young puppet set her flute down on the paper boat beside Still’s violin, tucked her elbows in at her sides, raised her hands, and began to play silence as well.

  Someone gasped. “Tsk tsk,” said Mister Leaf, striding down the steps himself. “You really shouldn’t encourage her. She needs—”

  But no one ever got to find out what Mister Leaf thought Still needed, either, because a puppet in the crowd stepped forward. Wiping away the drops of oil on her cheeks, she raised a ghostly trumpet to her lips.

  The silence was deafening. Together, the three puppets played Still’s song all the way to its end. When they were done, Still lowered her arms.

  “I didn’t fall,” she whispered. The world was so quiet that everyone around could hear her clearly. “I didn’t have an accident. I had him.”

  The moment was broken by Elbow and Ramble pushing their way through the crowd. “Still! Oh, Still!” they cried. They hugged her between them.

  “Oh, daffodil,” Ramble finally said, gazing at the nicks and scratches on her daughter’s face. “You’re all grown up now. Are you all right?”

  Then, finally, Still began to cry. “No,” she said, hugging her parents close, “but I will be.”

  It took Still a while to get her story out. When she was done, the police took Mister Leaf away. “Strings are too good for him!” Elbow said harshly as the three of them walked homeward. “After what he did—your violin, that poor girl’s flute, that woman’s trumpet . . . Chains are what they ought to put on him!”

  “Strings will be enough,” Still said quietly.

  It was several days before she could slip back to the little market on the edge of the fog. She bought the biggest, brightest orange scarf she could find, then walked down into the fog. She took three wrong turns on her way to the gargoyle’s warehouse. Finally, she spotted the familiar drainpipe. “Hello,” she called out as she climbed it. “Are you awake? I’ve brought you a present.”

  But when she reached the top, all she found was a worn old statue with the remains of a fierce look carved on its face. She stared at it for a long moment, then wrapped the scarf around its neck, climbed back down the drainpipe, and went home.

  Originally published in On Spec Summer 2010 Vol 22 No 2 #81

  Greg Wilson is a programmer, teacher, and author who lives in Toronto.

  The Asheville Road

  Corey Brown

  Her father had been a railman, cut down in his thirty-fourth year by a castling bent on the £86 cargo on board. Elaine had been eleven, old enough to remember everything about him, but not mature enough to see him as anything less than the ideal man. She had not wavered in her determination to never again attach herself to anyone who rode the rails.

  Lord knew, Devin had tried to sway her.

  He thought of her often on the long pulls from Charlotte to Greensboro, drifting away from the drumbeat of the timer at the front of the engine. He would imagine them walking in the woods near her home in Thomasville, looking out across the village made white by blooming dogwoods. He could always persuade her to give up her resistance in these dreams, and the two of them would sit on a hillside and hold each other close until the foreman’s whip came down across Devin’s shoulders, spraying sweat, and stinging like mad.

  “Get back in time, damn you!” Herman would shout. “You pull your weight or I’ll dump you with the rest of the bastards!” He would point to the sodden glades by the side of the track where the castlings lived, and Devin would shudder despite the heat.

  The mercury rose as high as one hundred on summertime runs, with nothing to stave off the sun but the engine’s tin roof. The breeze blew through, but the summer wind was not one that cooled, and its most valuable function was to keep off the bugs. The plague worked fast under these conditions, and men dropped at their handbars, slumping to the ground while the bars cycled on, up and down, up and down, while a man lay dying below.

  On the King’s birthday, Devin’s team lost two men to sickness. The train was large, with a sixteen-man Walter engine, the Lady Wales; but to lose two men on one pull was rare indeed. Some of the crew muttered prayers as the second man was laid on a stretcher and carried to the rear of the train.

  “The plague’s comin’ back,” Devin’s friend Alan whispered. He had the bar to the right of Devin. Two years older than Devin, Alan was still a hauler too, but would probably never be elevated to railman. He was strong of back but simple of mind, and had never mastered the mechanical skills a railman needed on the road alone. “The plague’s been gone two years,” Devin said, watching over his shoulder as the sick man was helped up into the caboose. The hearse car, it was called by the railmen. “And if it was comin’ back, we’d be the first to know.” News reached those who served the road first, since they roamed the length and breadth of the colony. “Those boys got yellow jack, more’n likely.”

  “I’ve heard of whole crews gettin’ it on one shift,” Alan said. He held his head low so Herman would not see him talking. “They find the train next day with the dead men still on it. They bury ’em right there beside the track.” He looked at Devin with wide eyes. “That could be us.”

  But the sun dropped, and the mercury fell, and by the time High Point fell in their wake they had regained the steady pace of the timer’s drum-beat, pushing their bars up and down, driving the train through wide fields of cotton. Signal towers, maintained by the railroad for the King’s government, appeared every mile, occasionally whipping out some message in a flash of red flags, speaking in a language only the signallers understood.

  The tracks came over the top of a gentle rise, and the bulk of Greensboro station loomed before them, a black octagon with a peaked roof like a witch’s hat. Smoke from a thousand chimneys in the town beyond glowed in the setting sun. It would be dinner time for the villagers, sitting down with family and recounting the day’s events by lantern light. On board the Lady Wales, the whip cracked again, and Devin and his mates swung harder at the bars.

  Herman rang the bell at the head of the engine. A second later, an answering bell came from the station, and the double doors blocking the track swung open, casting a rectangle of yellow on the darkening ground. Beyond could be seen the frantic activity of railmen and mechanics, and here and there, the glint of torchlight on brass. A spider-web of tracks converged on the station, coming from Raleigh, Charlotte, and Durham. Even now, trains headed downhill from the east and north. Devin let his grip on the bar slacken as the Lady Wales slipped through the doors into the heat and light of the station.

  Herman led his charges by hand signals now, as his voice could no longer be heard in the back. The Lady Wales slowed to a crawl, guided to its platform by a yellow-jacketed station boss. The minute she stopped, labourers converged on the flatcars, unloading the cargo onto carts that would soon be on the streets of the town.

  Devin rubbed his aching shoulders and arms as he dropped to the plank floor of the station. A cantina crew ran up, bearing trays of water and food, and Devin snatched an orange.

  “Look at ’em,” Alan said, nodding to the two sick men being carried from the train. “They got it sure. They’ll be dead by morning.”

  “Maybe they didn’t drink enough water,” Devin said, peeling the fruit with aching fingers. “It could be heat stroke. Have you got to be so damn negative?”

  “Devin Barefoot?” The voice brought Devin and Alan up short. A man in a twill suit and spectacles stood before them. This was a manager, one of the men in the offices that overlooked the station floor. Devin swallowed
hard and nodded.

  “Yes sir, that’s me,” he said.

  “Will you come with me, please?” The man turned on his heel and walked away. Devin and Alan exchanged a wary look, and Devin followed after.

  The man introduced himself as Appleton—no first name—and led Devin upstairs, from the noisy floor to the quiet offices. The smell of the air changed from the sharpness of machine oil and sweat to the mustiness of old paper and dust. Devin grew aware of his grimy road-clothes, and looked at the floor whenever one of the other managers passed by.

  When they finally arrived, the office was surprisingly plain. Appleton’s stern demeanour softened, and he motioned Devin to a chair. “You need it,” he said. “You work a lot harder than I do.”

  Devin smiled and eased himself into the chair. Appleton sat behind the desk and tapped a folder lying in front of him. “We’ve got a job that’s come up,” he said, “something of an urgent nature. We need to get a train to a little village called Thomasville.”

  Devin started in his chair, and Appleton gave a little smile. “You’ve heard of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Been there before?”

  “Lots,” Devin said.

  “The road has an arrangement with the King,” Appleton said, “that provides free transportation to people with relatives that are seriously ill or dying.”

  Devin had heard of the provision, and nodded.

  “There is a young lady in Thomasville who has requested our services. Her situation is more extreme than most, so we’ve agreed to meet her at noon tomorrow.” Appleton pulled a slip of paper from the folder and pushed it across the desk at Devin. “Her name is Elaine Pittman.”

  Devin’s heart pounded. He saw Elaine’s name on the paper, but did not move to pick it up. “Is she sick?”

  “It’s her mother,” Appleton said. “She’s dying.”

  Devin remembered now. Elaine’s mother was a consumptive, and had been taken away not long after her husband’s death to a sanatorium in the mountains. Devin looked at Appleton. “But she’s all the way up in—”