Eclipse 4: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Jonathan Strahan

  “That stands to reason,” Cliffert finally said, “only if the wet paint is as old as the dry paint, so we know they started at the same time.”

  Mr. Fulmer folded his arms. “Now you talking sense. When you last paint your side porch?”

  “I myself ain’t never painted it, nor the front porch nor no other part of the house. It don’t look like it’s been painted since God laid down the dirt to make the mountains.”

  “That might be the original paint, sure enough, so you’re out of luck. I don’t stock no seventy-five-year-old paint.”

  “How old you got?”

  Mr. Fulmer blew air between his lips like a noisemaker. “Ohh, let’s see. I probably got paint about as old as Louvenia.”

  “Well, even Mr. Ford started somewhere. Let me have a gallon of the oldest you got.”

  Mr. Fulmer asked, “What color?” And before he even could regret asking, Cliffert said:

  “Whatever color’s the slowest, that’s the one I want.”

  Mr. Fulmer laughed. “I know you chasing your tail now. The hell you goin’ tell what color’s slowest? I been pouring paint for thirty years, and it all pours and dries the same.”

  Cliffert opened his mouth to say he-didn’t-know-what, but the sound they heard was a little-girl voice from the next aisle over, stretching out her “I” all sassy like.

  “I-I-I-I know how,” Louvenia said. “I-I-I-I know how to tell.”

  Cliffert looked at Mr. Fulmer, and Mr. Fulmer looked at Cliffert, and when they got tired of looking at each other, they looked over the top edge of the shelf and saw Louvenia sitting on the plank floor, calico skirt spread out like a lilypad, and all around her a briar-patch of nails, tenpenny and twopenny, dozens of them, all standing on their heads and ranged like soldiers.

  “Tell us, Louvenia honey,” Cliffert said.

  “Watch for when a rainbow comes out,” she said, “and see which color comes out the slowest.” She scooped up a handful of twopennies and sifted them through her fingers back into the nail keg, plip plip plip.

  “That’s good thinking, Louvenia,” Cliffert said. “I thank you kindly.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “You put those back when you’re done, now, Louvenia,” Mr. Fulmer said as he and Cliffert pulled their heads back. “I swear, ever nail in this town will be handled by that child before she’s done.”

  “It is a good idea,” Cliffert said, “but my eyes ain’t good enough to make it a practice.”

  “Mine, neither,” Mr. Fulmer said. “I see a rainbow all at once, or I don’t see it.”

  Cliffert opened his mouth again, but nothing came out. Mr. Fulmer waited. He wasn’t in no hurry. If it hadn’t been a slow day, he wouldn’t have been standing there jawing about dry paint and rainbows. Finally Cliffert turned his hand edgewise and chopped the air seven times.

  “They are the same order, ever time, in a rainbow,” Cliffert said. “Read Out Your Good Book In Verse. Red the first, violet the last.”

  “Or the other way around,” Mr. Fulmer said. “You going left to right or right to left?”

  “Has to be one end or the other,” Cliffert said. “Gimme a gallon of red and a gallon of violet.”

  “I call it purple,” Mr. Fulmer said, “and paint don’t come in purple. But I can sure mix you some red and blue to make purple.”

  “Well, I thank you,” Cliffert said.

  Mr. Fulmer whistled his way into the storage room, happy because he had helped solve a little hardware problem and because since the Crash he had about given up on ever moving another gallon of paint.

  So Cliffert worked through Christmas adding dibs and dabs of paint to his mix, and after New Year’s he threw in some January molasses ’cause those are the slowest, and then he shot off the results back of his house, bang bang blim bang. “It’s the Battle of Atlanta,” his neighbors cried, and beat the young’uns who walked too near Cliffert’s fence. He didn’t get close to satisfied till the first of June, and only then did he take his gun and his custom-made cartridges over to the hoodoo woman’s house to show her what he had.

  “Mmmph, mmmph, mmmph,”said the hoodoo woman. The second “mmmph” meant she was impressed, and the third meant she was flat impressed.

  “That’s good, Cliffert Corbett,” she said, “but hold on here, I got one more idea that might make her better still. Now, where’d I put that thing?” She rummaged her right hand through her apron pockets while holding her left hand out in the air stiff and flat, like she was drying her nails in the breeze, only there was no breeze and the nails were black and broken on her knobbed and ropy hand, and Cliffert didn’t like the look of it. Then the hoodoo woman laughed a croupy laugh and pulled forth a corked bottle the size of her thumb, full of a pale green sloshy something. “If it was a snake it woulda bit me,” said the hoodoo woman.

  “What is it, Miz Armetta?”

  “Money Stay With Me Oil. I reckon if it slows down the money, it might slow down your bullet, too. Here, unstop it for me while I reach out my dropper. Don’t let none get on you, now! This is for fixing, not anointing.”

  Cliffert thought the bottle was powerful heavy for such a tee-ninchy dram of liquid, and was glad to hand it back to her when she was done plopping one sallow green blob onto the tip of each cartridge, then wiping them down with a bright red cloth. They should have gleamed brighter then, but instead they looked even duller, like their surface light was being sucked inside to die. “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Get to writing. We need some name paper. Write your full name nine times in red ink.”

  “You got any red ink, Miz Armetta?”

  She snorted. “Does Fulmer’s have nails?”

  Cliffert’s hand hurt him by the time he was done—he couldn’t make the Fs to suit her, and had to keep doing them over—but he had to admit, when they tried out the test bullet, that a little Money Stay With Me oil had gone a long way.

  So on the appointed day, everybody in town who was interested in bets or guns or lies, or who was hanging around the gas station on that fateful day the year before, or who was related to any of those, all turned up at the gas station to see whether Cliffert actually would be there to admit to his lie and pay the man. Everyone was half surprised to see Cliffert limping across the lot, about five minutes to noon, and plumb surprised to see him wearing his daddy’s gun belt. It was cinched to the last hole and still he had to hold it up with both hands, and the holster went down practically to his knee. But sticking out of the holster was a shiny silver gun butt that suggested Cliffert was open for business.

  “Cliffert Corbett, you here to outrun a bullet today?” asked Isiah Bird.

  “I will sure do that thing, Isiah Bird,” said Cliffert in return.

  “Do it, then,” said Dad Boykin. “I got corn to shuck and chicken to pluck. I got obligations.”

  Cliffert planted his feet on the asphalt and looked down the side of the station toward the back of the lot, and hollered at the crowd, “Y’all make way so’s a man can work!” But that little bantyweight holding up his belt looked just like a young’un playing gunfighter after a cowboy matinee, and we all just laughed at him. Lord, how we laughed! And didn’t nobody budge an inch until he drew that gun—all slow and solemn-like—and pointed it at us with the steadiest hand you ever saw, and then we all found reasons to get behind him and beside him and up against the walls and otherwise out of the man’s way. So in a few seconds there was nothing between Cliffert’s gun and that shot-up old fence post at the back of the property, the last piece of the fence that separated the gas station from the woods behind. It was right splintered up, though not as much as you’d think, since the men of our town weren’t the greatest shots in Florida, not even drunk.

  “On three,” Cliffert said, and he brought that gun up two-handed and squinted down the barrel, and without his hand on it, his gun belt slipped down to his knees. Nobody laughed, though, because that gun was steady, man, steady.

  “One,
” Cliffert said.

  We didn’t say nothing.

  “Two,” Cliffert said.

  We didn’t breathe.

  Then he fired, and we all jumped about a foot in the air. It wasn’t just that the shot was three times as loud as any gunshot has any right to be. It also sounded… wrong. It sounded interrupted. It sounded like a scream that lasts only a half-second before someone claps a hand across your mouth. And the smoke coming out of the barrel was wrong, too. Instead of puffing away in an instant, it uncoiled slow in solid gray ropes, like baby snakes first poking their heads from a hidey-hole in springtime. And the fence post looked just the same as before.

  “Misfire,” someone said.

  “Wait for it,” Cliffert said, still sighting down the barrel and holding her steady.

  The smoke kept on curling. And then, amid the smoke, something dark started pushing forth, like the gun itself was turning wrong side out. Lord have mercy, it was the tip of the bullet sliding into view, and nobody said a word as it eased on out of the barrel. It must have taken a solid minute just for that bullet to clear the gun. And just as we could see daylight between the bullet and the barrel, Cliffert stepped back a pace and raised the gun and blew across the tip. I never saw smoke so loath to be gone. A scrap of it snagged his lip and hung there awhile like a sorry gray mustache before it slid off into nothing.

  “Move the gun too quick, you mess up the aim,” Cliffert said. “I was days figuring that out.”

  Then I went back to watching the bullet, which was about a foot away and moving steady but no faster than before. In fact, I reckon it was moving even slower, since all its charge was blown, and from here on gravity takes over—in any normal Christian bullet, that is. You ever craned your neck to look up at an airplane that just seems to be making no progress at all? Watching that bullet was like watching that airplane, one about at the level of the tobacco pouch in my shirt pocket. Even Cliffert just stood there, gun still on his shoulder pointing at the top of the chinaberry tree, staring at the bullet he had made, as hypnotized as anyone.

  Someone yelled, “Look at the shadow!”

  The bullet’s shadow was crawling along the ground, sliding in and out of every chip and crack in the asphalt, in no bigger hurry than the bullet it was tethered to above, and somehow that shadow was even worse than the bullet.

  A shudder went through the crowd, and a few folks bust out crying, and they weren’t all women neither, while some others started hollering for Jesus.

  Cliffert sort of shook himself all over and said, “Look at me! I near forgot the bet.” He holstered the gun and ambled forward. He was noways in a hurry, but in only a few steps he’d caught up to that bullet he had loosed, and in a few steps more he had walked past it, and as he walked he pulled a wrinkled paper from his pants pocket. He unfolded it and smoothed it out a little and turned around and held it up as he walked. Drawn on the paper in red ink was a bull’s-eye target about six inches across, and Cliffert stumbled a little as he walked backwards, trying to gauge how high the target ought to be for the bullet to hit it square.

  Now we had two things of wonderment to look at, Cliffert’s bullet and Cliffert himself, and we all was so busy staring at one and then the other that we hadn’t paid any mind at all to a third thing: Lou Lou Maddox’s toothless mangy old collie dog, the one that was blind in one eye and couldn’t see out the other, and had so much arthritis that she wouldn’t have been walking if she hadn’t been held up and jerked along by the fleas. That old dog had crawled out from under the Maddox porch next door and stood up all rickety and hitched her way across the side yard headed toward the gas station, maybe because she smelled the peanuts boiling, or because she wondered what all the fuss was about, and when we finally noticed her walking into the path of Cliffert’s bullet, we all hollered at once—so loud that the damn dog stopped dead in her tracks and blinked at us with milky eyes, and that bullet not six inches from her shackly ribcage and inching closer.

  “Salome!” screamed Lou Lou. “Get out of there, Salome!”

  The dog blinked and looked sideways and saw that bullet a-coming. Salome yelped and hopped forward twice, so that the bullet just missed her hindquarters as it headed on.

  Now Cliffert had finally got his target situated where he wanted it, by jamming it down on a splinter on that highest fence post at the back of the lot. And by the time the bullet was finally about a half-inch from the bull’s-eye, everyone had had time to go get some supper and find a few more relations to tell about the marvel and bring them on back to the gas station, so the whole damn town was standing gathered around the target in a half-circle, all watching as the bullet nosed into the paper… and dented it a little… and then punched through (we all heard it)… and then kept on going, through the paper and into the fence post (we all heard a little grinding noise, eckity eckity eckity eck, like a mouse in the wall, but all continuous, not afeard of no cat or nothing else in this world, just doing its slow steady job of work)… and then the sawdust started sifting out of the back of the post… and here came the bullet, out the other side (we had flashlights and lanterns trained on it by then), and we all watched as the bullet went on into the brush and into the woods, and then it was so dark we couldn’t see it no more. We thought about following it into the woods with our lights, but then we thought about getting all confused in the dark and getting ahead of it, and how it would be to have that bullet a-nosing into your side, so we decided not to hunt for it but say we did.

  “Just imagine,” said the hoodoo woman, the only person in town not at the gas station. Still a-sitting on her porch, she struck a match and fired her pipe and told the shapes gathering in the dirt, “Imagine having nothing better to do all day than watch a man shoot a fence post.” She pointed her pipe stem at a particularly lively patch of ground. “You stay down in that yard, Sonny Jim. I got my eyes on you.”

  What happened next?

  Well, that was about when I left. So I ain’t any too clear on the rest of it. I know Cliffert collected him some money, off of me and a lot of the others. It was enough to set him up for life in the style to which he was accustomed, not that he was accustomed to much. Someone told me he took the train to Pensacola that week and tried to sell the U.S. Army on what he had done, but the U.S. Army said thank you just the same, it couldn’t see no point, no strategic advantage, in a bullet that even a colicky baby could crawl out of the way of. Not that the U.S. Army had any plans to actually shoot any colicky babies. That was just a for-example. They weren’t aware in Pensacola of any immediate colicky baby threat, although they would continue to monitor the situation. So the U.S. Army hustled Cliffert out of the office, and he went on home and lived out his days a richer and more thoughtful man, but if he ever made any more slow bullets, the news ain’t reached me yet. So that’s more’n I know.

  Except no one ever did see that bullet come out of them woods.

  Maybe it finally come to rest in a tree, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe it finally run out of juice, and dropped to the ground and died, and maybe it didn’t. Maybe it’s still in there someplace, a-looking around for something to shoot. Maybe it found its way out of them woods long ago. Could be anywhere by now. One day you might be going about your business, pestering the life out of some hopeful old man with that notebook of yourn, and his eyes might get wide and he might say, “Hey!” But it’s too late, because you can’t even get turned ’round good before eckity, eckity, eck, Cliffert Corbett’s bullet is drilling into the back of your head, and next thing you know, there you is, dead as McKinley on the cooling board.

  Why ain’t you writing that down?

  What? Call yourself educated and can’t even spell eckity, eckity, eck? Shit. I could spell that myself, if I ever needed it done.

  TIDAL FORCES

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

  Charlotte says, “That’s just it, Em. There wasn’t any pain. I didn’t feel anything much at all.” She sips her coffee and stares out the kitchen window, squinting at the
bright Monday morning sunlight. The sun melts like butter across her face. It catches in the strands of her brown hair, like a late summer afternoon tangling itself in dead cornstalks. It deepens the lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She takes another sip of coffee, then sets her cup down on the table. I’ve never once seen her use a saucer.

  And the next minute seems to last longer than it ought to last, longer than the mere sum of the sixty seconds that compose it, the way time stretches out to fill in awkward pauses. She smiles for me, and so I smile back. I don’t want to smile, but isn’t that what you do? The person you love is frightened, but she smiles anyway. So you have to smile back, despite your own fear. I tell myself it isn’t so much an act of reciprocation as an acknowledgement. I could be more honest with myself and say I only smiled back out of guilt.

  “I wish it had hurt,” she says, finally, on the other side of all that long, long moment. I don’t have to ask what she means, though I wish that I did. I wish I didn’t already know. She says the same words over again, but more quietly than before, and there’s a subtle shift in emphasis. “I wish it had hurt.”

  I apologize and say I shouldn’t have brought it up again, and she shrugs.

  “No, don’t be sorry, Em. Don’t let’s be sorry for anything.”

  I’m stacking days, building a house of cards made from nothing but days. Monday is the Ace of Hearts. Saturday is the Four of Spades. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. Thursday night is, I suspect, the Seven of Diamonds, and it might be heavy enough to bring the whole precarious thing tumbling down around my ears. I would spend an entire hour watching cards fall, because time would stretch, the same way it stretches out to fill in awkward pauses, the way time is stretched thin in that thundering moment of a car crash. Or at the edges of a wound.