The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List (The Long List Anthology Series Book 1)

by Annie Bellet

  A game, he tells himself, and lies. He only learns he’s lying later, though, after she emerges from the bus and he tracks her three blocks to her studio apartment and she drops her keys on the stoop and kneels quick and tense as a spooked rabbit to retrieve them, after she enters her apartment and he delays, debates, and finally retreats across the river to the schoolhouse where he dons his oxfords and inspects himself in a deli window and pats his hair into place and brushes dust off his slacks and jacket—only learns it when his wife asks him why there’s dust on his collar and he shakes his head and says something about a construction site. His round teeth he returns to their cup of coffee, and he lies naked on their bed, curled around her like a vine. His wife smells of sweat and woman and dark woods, and smelling her reminds him of another smell. Teeth peek through his gums, and his wife twists pleased and tired beside him, and he lies there lying, and relives the last time he killed.

  • • • •

  The first step taken, the second follows, and the third faster. As when he taught Paul to ride a bicycle: easier to keep balance when moving.

  He’s no longer stiff in their weekly meetings. He jokes about the old country and lets his accent show. Her laughter relieves the lines on her face.

  “You and your wife both work,” she says. “I know tutoring Paul takes time. Could his grandparents help at all?”

  “His mother’s family is far away,” Vlad says. “My parents are both dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  His father died in a Turkish assault when he was fourteen; his mother died of one of the many small illnesses people died from back then. “It was sudden, and hard,” he says, and they don’t speak more of that. He recognizes the brief flash of sympathy in her eyes.

  He follows her home again that night, hoping to see something that will turn him aside. She may visit friends, or call on an old paramour, or her father in the hospital. She may have a boyfriend or girlfriend. But she changes little. She stops at the drug store to buy toothpaste, bottled water, and sanitary napkins. She fumbles the keys at her door but does not drop them this time.

  He leaves.

  Paul, that night, is too tired to study. Vlad promises to help him more tomorrow. Paul frowns at the promise. Frowns don’t yet sit well on his face. He’s too young. Vlad tells him so, and lifts him upside down, and he shrieks laughter as Vlad carries him back to the bedroom.

  Work is a dream. He is losing the knack of normalcy. Numbers dance to his command. He walks among cubicles clothed in purpose, and where once the white-collared workers forgot him as he passed, now they fall silent and stare in his wake. Management offers him a promotion for no reason, which he turns down. Silences between Vlad and Angela grow tense. He apologizes, and she says there is no need for an apology.

  He and his wife make love twice that week. Ravenous, she pins him to the bed, and feasts.

  Paul seems cautious in the mornings, silent between mouthfuls of cereal. At evening catch, Vlad almost forgets, almost hurls the ball up and out, over the park, over the city, into the ocean.

  He can’t go on like this. Woken, power suffuses him. He slips into old paths of being, into ways he trained himself to forget. One evening on his home commute he catches crows flocking (murdering?) above him on brownstone rooftops. Black beady eyes wait for his command.

  This is no way to be a father. No way to be a man.

  But Vlad was a monster before he was a man.

  Again and again he follows her, as the heat of early autumn cools. The year will die. Show me some danger, he prays. Show me some reason I cannot close my fingers and seize you. But she is alone in the world, and sad.

  Paul’s grades slip. Vlad apologizes to Angela. He has been distracted.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “It happens. Don’t blame yourself.”

  He does not blame her. But this must end.

  • • • •

  He makes his wife breakfast on the last morning. Bacon. Eggs, scrambled hard, with cheese. Orange juice, squeezed fresh. The squeezing takes time, but not so much for Vlad. He wakes early to cook, and moves at his own pace—fast. Fat pops and slithers in the pan. Eggs bubble. He ticks off seconds while he waits for the bacon to fry, for the eggs to congeal after. By the time his wife steps out of the shower, breakfast’s ready and the kitchen is clean. He makes Paul’s lunch, because it’s his turn. He cannot make amends.

  His wife sucks the strip of bacon before she bites. “Delicious.” She hums happily, hugs him around the waist. “So good. Isn’t your dad a good cook?”

  Paul laughs. Vlad only thinks it a knowing laugh because he is afraid.

  “It’s not mother’s day,” his wife says. “That’s in March.”

  “I love you,” Vlad answers. Paul makes a face like a punchinello mask.

  Crows follow him to work, hopping sideways along the roofs. When he reaches midtown they perch on streetlamps and traffic lights. Red, yellow, and green reflect in their eyes in turn. The Times reports power outages in suburbs last night from unexpected vicious wind. Asylums and hospitals brim with madmen, raving, eating bugs. Vlad is over-empty, a great mounting void, and the world rushes to fill him.

  He breaks a keyboard that day from typing too hard. Drives his pinkie finger through the enter key into his desk, embedding a sliver of plastic in his skin. He pulls the plastic out and the wound heals. I.T. replaces the keyboard.

  Vlad finishes his work by three and sits in his cubicle till sunset. Thunderclouds cluster overhead by the time he leaves the building. Heat lightning flickers on his walk uptown. Fear shines at each flash from the eyes of the peasants he passes. Peasants: another word he has not thought or used in years.

  All this will be over soon, he tells himself. And back to normal.

  Whatever normal is.

  He meets her in the classroom, though they do not talk long. The time for talking’s past. She is all he remembered: sunlight and marble, camellia and mint. The ideal prey. Blood throbs through small veins in her fingers. He feels it when they shake hands. He smells its waves, rising and falling.

  “I must thank you,” he says, once she’s gone over Paul’s assignments for the next week. “For your dedication. You have given Paul so much. I appreciate your work.”

  “It’s nothing.” She may think he cannot hear her exhaustion, or else she trusts him and does not care. “I’m glad to help. If every father cared as much as you do, we’d be in a better world.”

  “I am fortunate,” he says, “to be in a position to care.”

  He follows her from the school, as before. After sunset the crows stop hiding. In masses they descend on the city and croak prophecy in its alleys. Currents of crows rush down Broadway, so thick pedestrians mistake them for a cloud, their wingbeats for the rumble of traffic or a train. Bats emerge from their lairs, and rats writhe on subway steps singing rat songs. Grandmothers remember their grandmothers’ whispered stories, and call children to urge them to stay inside.

  Better this way, Vlad thinks as he follows Angela across the bridge, down the dirty deserted street from her stop to her apartment. She does not notice him. She notices nothing. The rats, the crows, the bats, all keep away from her. They know Vlad’s purpose tonight, and will not interfere.

  She’s young, her life still a web of dream, her love just touched by sadness. This world holds only pain for her. Better, surely, to leave before that pain bloomed, before tenderness roughed into a callous.

  His gums itch. He slides the false teeth from his mouth, places them in a ziploc bag, closes the seal, and slips the bag into his jacket pocket. Crouched atop the roof of the building across from Angela’s, he sees her shuffle down the street. The weight of her shoulder bag makes her limp.

  His teeth, his real teeth, emerge, myriad and sharp. He tastes their tips and edges with his tongue.

  She opens the door, climbs the steps. He follows her heartbeat up four floors, five, to the small studio.

  He leaps across the street, lands soft as shad
ow on Angela’s roof beside the skylight. Below, a door opens and light wakes. Though she’s drawn curtains across the glass, there are gaps, and he sees her through them. She sags back against the door to close it, lets her bag clatter to the ground and leans into the scuffed dark wood, eyes closed.

  Her apartment looks a mess because it’s small: a stack of milk crates turned to bookshelves, overflowing with paperbacks and used textbooks. A small lacquered pine board dresser in stages of advanced decay, its side crisscrossed with bumper stickers bearing logos of bands Vlad does not recognize. A couch that slides out to form a bed, separated from the kitchenette by a narrow coffee table. Sheets piled in a hamper beside the couch-bed, dirty clothes in another hamper, dishes in the sink.

  She opens her eyes, and steps out of the circle formed by the shoulder strap of her fallen bag. Two steps to the fridge, from which she draws a beer. She opens the cap with a fob on her keychain, tosses the cap in the recycling, and takes a long drink. Three steps from fridge around the table to the couch, where she sits, takes another drink, then swears, “Motherfucker,” first two syllables drawn out and low, the third a high clear peal like those little bells priests used to ring in the litany. She lurches back to her feet, retrieves her bag, sits again on couch and pulls from the bag a thick sheaf of papers and a red pen and proceeds to grade.

  Vlad waits. Not now, certainly. Not as she wades through work. You take your prey in joy: insert yourself into perfection, sharp as a needle’s tip. When she entered the room, he might have done it then. But the moment’s passed.

  She grades, finishes her beer, gets another. After a while she returns the papers to their folder, and the folder to her bag. From the milk crate bookshelves she retrieves a bulky laptop, plugs it in, and turns on a television show about young people living in the city, who all have bigger apartments than hers. Once in a while, she laughs, and after she laughs, she drinks.

  He watches her watching. He can only permit himself this once, so it must be perfect. He tries to see the moment in his mind. Does she lie back in her bed, smiling? Does she spy him through the curtains, and climb on a chair to open the skylight and let him in? Does she scream and run? Does she call his name? Do they embrace? Does he seize her about the neck and drag her toward him while she claws ineffectually at his eyes and cheeks until her strength gives out?

  She closes the laptop, dumps the dregs of her beer in the sink, tosses the empty into the recycling, walks into the bathroom, closes the door. The toilet flushes, the water runs, and he hears her floss, and brush her teeth, gargle and spit into the sink.

  Do it. The perfect moment won’t come. There’s no such thing.

  The doorknob turns.

  What is he waiting for? He wants her to see him, know him, understand him, fear him, love him at the last. He wants her to chase him around the world, wants a moonlit showdown in a dark castle.

  He wants to be her monster. To transform her life in its ending.

  The door opens. She emerges, wearing threadbare blue pajamas. Four steps back to the couch, which she slides out into a bed. She spreads sheets over the bed, a comforter on top of them, and wriggles under the comforter. Hair halos her head on the dark pillow.

  Now.

  She can reach the lightswitch from her bed. The room goes dark save for the blinking lights of coffee maker and charging cell phone and laptop. He can still see her staring at the ceiling. She sighs.

  He stands and turns to leave.

  Moonlight glints off glass ten blocks away.

  • • • •

  His wife has almost broken down the rifle by the time he reaches her—nine seconds. She’s kept in practice. The sniper scope is stowed already; as he arrives, she’s unscrewing the barrel. She must have heard him coming, but she waits for him to speak first.

  She hasn’t changed from the library. Khaki pants, a cardigan, comfortable shoes. Her hair up, covered by a dark cap. She wears no jewels but for his ring and her watch.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, first.

  “I’ll say.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Dust on your collar. Late nights.”

  “I mean, how did you know it would be now?”

  “I got dive-bombed by crows on the sidewalk this morning. One of the work-study kids came in high, babbling about the prince of darkness. You’re not as subtle as you used to be.”

  “Well. I’m out of practice.”

  She looks up at him. He realizes he’s smiling, and with his own teeth. He stops.

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that already.” Finished with the rifle, she returns it to the case, and closes the zipper, and stands. She’s shorter than he is, broader through the shoulders. “What made you stop?”

  “She wasn’t you.”

  “Cheek.”

  “No.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I was strong enough to be normal. But these are me.” He bares his teeth at her. “Not these.” From his pocket he draws the false teeth, and holds them out, wrapped in plastic, in his palm. Closes his fingers. Plastic cracks, crumbles. He presses it to powder, and drops bag and powder both. “Might as well kill me now.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m a monster.”

  “You’re just more literal than most.” She looks away from him, raises her knuckle to her lip. Looks back.

  “You deserve a good man. A normal man.”

  “I went looking for you.” She doesn’t shout, but something in her voice makes him retreat a step, makes his heart thrum and almost beat.

  “I miss.” Those two words sound naked. He struggles to finish the sentence. “I miss when we could be dangerous to one another.”

  “You think you’re the only one who does? You think the PTA meetings and the ask your mothers and the how’s your families at work, you think that stuff doesn’t get to me? Think I don’t wonder how I became this person?”

  “It’s not that simple. If I lose control, people die. Look at tonight.”

  “You stopped. And if you screw up.” She nudges the rifle case with her toe. “There’s always that.”

  “Paul needs a normal family. We agreed.”

  “He needs a father more. One who’s not too scared of himself to be there.”

  He stops himself from shouting something he will regret. Closes his lips, and his eyes, and thinks for a long while, as the wind blows over their rooftop. His eyes hurt. “He needs a mother, too,” he says.

  “Yes. He does.”

  “I screwed up tonight.”

  “You did. But I think we can work on this. Together. How about you?”

  “Sarah,” he says.

  She looks into his eyes. They embrace, once, and part. She kneels to lift the rifle case.

  “Here,” he says. “Let me get that for you.”

  • • • •

  The next week, Friday, he plays catch with Paul in the park. They’re the only ones there save the ghosts: it’s cold, but Paul’s young, and while Vlad can feel the cold it doesn’t bother him. Dead trees overhead, skeletal fingers raking sky. Leaves spin in little whirlwinds. The sky’s blue and empty, sun already sunk behind the buildings.

  Vlad unbuttons his coat, lets it fall. Strips off his sweater, balls it on top of the coat. Stands in his shirtsleeves, cradles the football with his long fingers. Tightens his grip. Does not burst the ball, only feels the air within resist his fingers’ pressure.

  Paul steps back, holds up his hands.

  Vlad shakes his head. “Go deeper.”

  He runs, crumbling dry leaves and breaking hidden sticks.

  “Deeper,” Vlad calls, and waves him on.

  “Here?” Vlad’s never thrown the ball this far.

  “More.”

  Paul stands near the edge of the park. “That’s all there is!”

  “Okay,” Vlad says. “Okay. Are you ready?”

  “Yes!”

/>   His throws are well-rehearsed. Wind up slowly, and toss soft. He beat them into his bones.

  He forgets all that.

  Black currents weave through the wind. A crow calls from treetops. He stands, a statue of ice.

  He throws the ball as hard as he can.

  A loud crack echoes through the park. Ghosts scatter, dive for cover. The ball breaks the air, and its passage leaves a vacuum trail. Windows rattle and car alarms whoop. Vlad wasn’t aiming for his son. He didn’t want to hurt him. He just wanted to throw.

  Vlad’s eyes are faster even than his hands, and sharp. So he sees Paul blink, in surprise more than fear. He sees Paul understand. He sees Paul smile.

  And he sees Paul blur sideways and catch the ball.

  They stare at one another across the park. The ball hisses in Paul’s hands, deflates: it broke in the catching. Wind rolls leaves between them.

  Later, neither can remember who laughed first.

  • • • •

  They talk for hours after that. Chase one another around the park, so fast they seem only colors on the wind. High-pitched child’s screams of joy, and Vlad’s own voice, deep, guttural. Long after the sky turns black and the stars don’t come out, they return home, clothes grass-stained, hair tangled with sticks and leaves. Paul does his homework, fast, and they watch cricket until after bedtime.

  Sarah waits in the living room when he leaves Paul sleeping. She grabs his arms and squeezes, hard enough to bruise, and pulls him into her kiss.

  He kisses her back with his teeth.

  * * *

  Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and twice nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. Tor Books published LAST FIRST SNOW, the fourth novel in Max’s Craft Sequence (preceded by THREE PARTS DEAD, TWO SERPENTS RISE, and FULL FATHOM FIVE) in July 2015. Max’s game CHOICE OF THE DEATHLESS was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine.