Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  “Liar!” The word blazed out before Osheoan could block it.

  The amber gaze hardened. “Foolish. We never lie.”

  There was a world of warning in the suddenly cold voice, but the dam of Osheoan’s self-control had already shattered. Unable to stop himself, he felt all the years of pent-up bitterness come pouring out in a torrent of words. “Oh no, you never lie. You are too far above us poor little human folk for that. Too far above us for mercy, or pity— Standing by and watching a woman die…” But the first anguished frenzy was already ebbing. “Why?” Osheoan asked softly. “She was young, lovely, happy. Why did you take my Power from me just when I needed it the most?”

  “We never did that.” Was that the faintest touch of sympathy in the wry non-voice? “Come, use your head, man. Remember your training. Were you ever taught that, even with Power, you could save everyone?”

  “No, of course not. Some folk come sooner than others to the end of their life thread, no matter what a Spirit-Speaker may do to…”

  Osheoan trailed to a stop. The fox laughed as a dog laughs, tongue lolling.

  “So now! The man shows the dawning of wisdom.”

  “It… was Seshawa’s appointed time? Is that what you’re saying?” Shaking, Osheoan gasped out, “Are you trying to tell me I didn’t lose my Power, but— myself?”

  The fox shook itself impatiently. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. Go ahead.” It gestured toward Mi-kasha with its head. “Your son is waiting.”

  A wave of renewed fear surged through Osheoan. “I—I can’t, I don’t have—”

  “Keep saying that often enough, and you’ll make it true.” The fox gave a long, gaping yawn. “Seems to me,” it said, fixing Osheoan with a suddenly chill stare, “that all I’ve heard from you is %‘ T, ”I.“ You like being Spirit-Speaker, don’t you? You like Being Someone.”

  With an effort, Osheoan wrenched his gaze away. “I take pride in what I do. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Did I say there was anything wrong? So now, here is a riddle for you: What if saving Mikasha here meant giving it all up, stopping being Spirit-Speaker now, totally, forever? What would you do?”

  “What do you think?” Osheoan snapped. “I’d save my son!”

  “Would you, now? Go ahead, then. Save him.”

  Trying to ignore the mocking amber stare, Osheoan turned to his son and picked up his knife, studying Mi-kasha’s wound, forcing himself to decide where and how to begin. If he cut there… No. Too risky, too near the throat. There, then… No, no, if his hand slipped it would—His hand was sure to slip, shaking as it was, and—

  “Stop staring at me!” he shouted at the fox.

  “I?” the spirit-animal said blithely. “I am doing nothing. I am only here.”

  Osheoan turned fiercely to his son again. But the fox’s riddle had insinuated itself into his mind, repeating tauntingly over and over: “What if saving Mi-kasha meant giving up being Spirit-Speaker forever? What would you do?”

  Osheoan looked down at Mikasha’s pale face, seeing the unfinished softness of boy still hinted at beneath the firm lines of man, remembering that boy, all youth and earnestness, bubbling with laughter till his father had to laugh with him. And such a rush of warmth swept over Osheoan that he could have wept, thinking of the wasted years after he’d driven Mikasha away…

  And yet, and yet… To Osheoan’s horror, he found himself remembering the people of the Clan watching him in awe, heeding every word he spoke, worshiping him, their wonder warm as love. To give it all up, to see folk eyeing him in scorn, despising him for being nothing—

  As they had once despised Mikasha.

  And I did nothing to stop them. Ah no, Osheoan cried in sudden silent agony, no more! I’ve hurt my son enough. I will not sacrifice his life to me!

  “Guide my hand,” he prayed, and began.

  And Power rushed up to enfold him.

  * * *

  Osheoan slowly came back to himself, trembling with exhaustion, drained of Power, wondering dimly if it would ever return. Mikasha—

  “It is done,” said a quiet non-voice, and Osheoan turned to see the fox, all mockery gone from its eyes. “The poison is drained, the wound healing. Your son shall live.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I?” The fox sat abruptly and scratched its ear with a busy hind claw. “I did nothing. You chose, Spirit-Speaker. You chose.” It scrambled to its feet, laughing. “Now, choose again. Your son will make a fine Spirit-Speaker. If he is trained. Finish his training.”

  “Or?”

  “Or not.”

  “Will I lose my Power if I don’t?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Who can say? Does it matter to you?”

  Osheoan looked down to where Mikasha lay deep in healing slumber and thought of the difficult time ahead. He would be truthful to his son; he must. But would Mikasha understand? Could he forgive his father for the long, bitter lies of the past?

  To his surprise, Osheoan heard himself give a soft, joyous laugh. Whatever happened, whether his Power ever returned, whether Mikasha forgave him or not, at least there was this: his son would live.

  The fox, unnoted, had faded into empty air. But its final question still hung lightly in the air: Does the loss of Power matter to you?

  “No,” Osheoan said softly, and knew he spoke the truth. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

  No Refunds

  Phyllis Eisenstein

  I’m sure Phyllis Eisenstein, living in Chicago as she does, has seen the leaflets. Solemn children hand them out on street corners or stick them into the advertisements tacked up on buses or rapid transit: Mrs. So and So, or Madame X, or Sister Y—“readers and advisers” to tell your future, solve your problems, stop your pain.

  Or she’s seen the Tarot readers sit in parks and in shabby-curtained rooms two floors up, visited by women (mostly) in suits out for an evening’s fun, who giggle about rip offs as they wait to hand over their palms and their money for a peek into a magic they don’t really believe in.

  But maybe, just maybe, these readers have other clients, too, slipping in quietly. They believe—or they’re desperate. And who knows what price they pay for their fortunes?

  In many ways, “No Refunds” reminds me of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi.” Is it more blessed to give than to receive? As Phyllis Eisenstein shows, the blessing is never unmixed.

  She knew he was a junkie before he opened the door. She knew that he lived on the street, cadging change from strangers, eating out of garbage cans, shooting up with people who were his friends when they had the junk and his competition for returnable bottles the rest of the time. She knew because knowing was what she was, and what she purveyed—knowing what had been, what was, what would be. The small sign in the curtained plate glass window said reader and adviser, but that was only because the police would arrest anyone who bluntly claimed to tell fortunes.

  The junkie opened the door, and the Utile bell above his head jangled to announce him.

  “Madame Catherine?” he said in a hoarse, uncertain voice. He squinted toward the drapery of beads that half-obscured the rear two-thirds of the narrow room.

  She waited a moment, letting him take in her carefully cultivated ambience—the floor covered with worn, grayed-out tiles; the walls and ceiling festooned with dusty silks and velvets; the small table draped with faded satin, the pitted crystal ball sitting on a brass pedestal at its center; the gypsy fortune-teller swathed in skirts and scarves and junk jewelry. This was the decor she kept going back to, far better than the wood-paneled high-rise office and the chic suit, or the black-and-white New Age studio and the designer jeans. Clients came most readily to this shabby storefront, their basest carnival expectations confirmed by it. The right kinds of clients.

  She raised a hand toward the junkie. “Come in, Steven,” she said.

  He pushed a few strings of beads aside and leaned into the inner sanctum. “You know my name.”

  “Of course.” F
inding his name among the myriad voices he had heard in his life hardly took any effort at all. His mother had used it, his father, his friends, his wife, a vast, echoing chorus of Steven. Catherine gestured toward the overstuffed chair on the far side of the table. “Won’t you sit down?”

  He hesitated another moment, then slipped sideways through the beads and slowly limped to the chair. He dropped to its worn cushions and sat there in silence, his head, his whole body, drooping. He was painfully thin, the skull visible behind the papery skin of his face, the cheeks deeply hollowed above a short straggling beard, the sunken eyes rimmed with dark circles. Multiple layers of clothing partly camouflaged his frailty, hanging slack at shoulder and hip, so that he looked a little like a child trying on an older brother’s discards; but above his shirt and sweater collars, every cord of his neck was visible, and his Adam’s apple stood out like a half-swallowed peach pit. And he stank of sweat and rotten teeth, with a sharp overtone of bleach.

  He had cleaned a needle with that bleach an hour ago, she knew. Volunteers from the local settlement house had been showing the junkies how to do it, to protect themselves from AIDS. Too late for Steven, of course—she saw that the doctors had told him so weeks ago—but there was kindness in his doing it for others. He had not lost his humanity on the street, along with everything else.

  She brushed a twinge of pity aside. Her business had nothing to do with pity or kindness. The kindly and the pitying died along with the wicked when the plagues came; that had always been the way of the world. Only the careful and the lucky survived. And Catherine.

  When he had sat in the chair for a minute without speaking, she said, “What brings you to me, Steven?”

  “Don’t you know that, too?” he muttered.

  She made a sweeping gesture with her open palm. “I read events, not thoughts, Steven. There is a difference. You must tell me what you want.”

  He looked up at her then, and there was despair in his bloodshot eyes. “I’m ill, Madame Catherine. I’ve been down to County Hospital, in and out, lately. They say there isn’t much they can do for me.”

  She waited for him to go on.

  He sighed again. “I’ve heard… that you can do things.”

  She stroked the pitted surface of the crystal ball. “I can’t cure you,” she said quietly. “I give people advice about their lives, nothing more.”

  “I’ve heard… that you tell people how to get money.”

  She inclined her head slightly. “Sometimes.”

  He took a deep breath, as if gathering courage to speak, then suddenly pressed his elbow against his side. He made tight fists of both his hands, and then slowly, slowly opened them, over the course of a long exhalation.

  “Perhaps you should be back at the hospital,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’ve heard about the price for the money. I’m willing to pay it.”

  She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table and steepling her fingers under her chin. “And what do you think the price is, Steven?”

  “Time,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “It’s pretty obvious that if you can tell other people how to get money, you can get it for yourself, too. You don’t need to collect it from your customers. But time ... that makes sense. You take years of life and give money in return. It’s a bargain a lot of people would jump at.”

  “It is,” Catherine said softly.

  “Then you must be very old.”

  “I am.” She watched him search her face for signs of that age, but she knew all he would see was a woman in her early forties, with crow’s-feet crinkling her eyes and a touch of gray in her dark hair. A woman not much older than himself. She had looked that way for a very long time.

  He eased forward in his chair. “Someone I know won the lottery. Not the big prize, but a good one. Good enough to get him off the street. You gave him the number, two months ago. His name was Charlie.”

  She thought back for a moment. A tall man, sallow with incipient jaundice, jobless, and without prospects. He had been living on gin, in a cardboard box, for quite some time before he found her. “I remember Charlie.”

  “He said he traded you six months for it.”

  She nodded.

  “He got twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars, precisely.”

  “And he’ll live six months less than he would have if he hadn’t come to you?”

  She let her fingers interlace on the crystal ball. “It’s a little more complicated than that. If he stops drinking and starts taking proper care of himself, he could live quite a long time. Perhaps even the span he would have lived if he had never started drinking. Less the six months he traded to me. If he stays on the booze, his liver will kill him six months sooner than it would have if he’d never come to me. So this life span depends on his own behavior.”

  “But you get that six months.”

  “Yes.”

  Steven’s knobby throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Is that your standing offer? Twenty grand for six months?”

  “There are many offers, Steven,” she said.

  “Tell me about them.”

  “The basic rate is five dollars an hour. The number of hours involved is up to the client. For a day, a hundred and twenty dollars; for a year, forty-three thousand eight hundred; for twenty years, eight hundred and seventy-six thousand.”

  He was staring at her. “Has anyone ever given you twenty years?”

  “You might be surprised, Steven,” she said, thinking of one evening in the high-rise office, and a man who wanted to be rich more than he wanted to have an old age.

  “And how much will you give me?” Steven asked.

  She looked down into the crystal ball, as if there were something inside to see, but there was only glass, and the familiar effects of reflection and refraction. The surface was pitted and scratched from years of being knocked about, moved from city to city, country to country. Several times, she had dropped it, but it hadn’t smashed. Good quality glass, but still only glass. The answer to Steven’s question was inside Steven, waiting to be found.

  The future was always harder to know than the present or the past. It was a changeable thing, and she herself had changed it for many a client, simply by giving away money via lotteries, racetracks, casinos, and the stock market. Catherine took almost a full minute to find Steven’s future.

  “How much?” he repeated.

  She looked up into his eyes. The whites were yellowing, the rims reddened and watery. She knew the doctors had asked him to stay in the hospital. But he had limped his way out and come to her. “Steven,” she said quietly, “I can’t give you anything.”

  He straightened slowly in the chair.

  “Not anything,” she said.

  He opened his mouth, but for a moment no sound emerged, then in a strangled voice he said, “Are you telling me that I don’t have any time left?” He pressed his elbow against his side once more, and he clutched it with his other hand. “Am I going to die here, now?”

  She shook her head. “You have a little time—a few days. But if I take them, what good will the money do you?”

  “How many days?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes!”

  She hesitated for just a moment, and then she said, “Six.”

  His throat bobbed again. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and covered his face with his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  When he lowered his hands, they quivered. “Do you have a piece of paper and a pencil?” he whispered.

  She drew a memo pad and a ballpoint pen from a pocket of her skirt and passed them over. Shakily, he scribbled a name and address.

  “Take the six days and send the money to her,” he said.

  Catherine looked at the name. “Your wife?”

  He nodded.

  She t
ore the sheet off and pushed it across the table toward him. “No. I won’t take the time you have left.”

  “It’s all I have to give her,” said Steven.

  She looked into him again and saw that three years had passed since he had last seen his wife. She saw their final moments together—Steven looking long at the sleeping woman and then leaving without waking her. She saw farther back, to tears and poverty, to job loss and home loss. It was a familiar story: half the people who lived on the street could tell something like it.

  “Listen to me, Steven,” she said. “I’m an Adviser as well as a Reader. Take my advice and call her. Tell her you love her. It will mean more to her than a few hundred dollars.”

  He stood up. “You won’t give me the money?”

  She shook her head.

  “Damn you,” he muttered, but without force. Then he turned and limped out, leaving only the jangling bell to show that he had been there. In a moment, even that sound was gone.

  Catherine closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the cool surface of the crystal ball. She was tired. Looking inside people was wearing, especially when there was no compensating gain of lifetime. Merely dealing with the kinds of clients who came to the storefront was wearing—the desperate, the destitute, the bottomed-out. Yet the high-rise office and the New Age studio were not better, just different— they delivered the debt-ridden rich who didn’t want to lose their lifestyles, the entrepreneurs who would rather pay her in time than pay interest to a bank or venture capital company, the embezzlers, the market manipulators, the wheeler-dealers temporarily out of the wherewithal to wheel and deal. They were fewer than the clients of the shabby storefront, but wearing, too, in their way. Sometimes she felt like chucking them all, top to bottom. But she couldn’t, because in all these long years, she had never stopped wanting to live.

  Madame Catherine no longer remembered precisely when she was born, or where. It hadn’t been much of a time and place anyway—a winter between wars in some duchy or principality that was always changing hands. Her mother had been the village wisewoman, using her skill at knowing to help others sow and reap, endure storm and drought, and find lost lambs. She had been well-respected… until some of her neighbors decided it would be a good idea to burn her. The family had fled then, to become itinerant peddlers, wagon menders, tool sharpeners, any means her father could find to put bread in their mouths. Finally, in the great city of Genoa, where he had thought to find his fortune, he died of the plague, leaving Catherine and her mother to fend for themselves. Catherine did remember the gorgeous blue of the Mediterranean at Genoa, and the fish-stink of its docks. And she remembered the year as well, the first year whose number she had any awareness of—1348, the year of the Black Death.