by Tim Pratt
"I don't get it."
Robert turns to look at me. "How's she going to get back?"
"Same way she went away--right?"
He answers with a shrug and then I get a bad feeling. It's like what happened with Malicorne and Jake, I realize. Stepped away, right out of the world, and they never came back. The only difference is, they meant to go.
"She won't know what to do," Robert says softly. "She'll be upset and maybe a little scared, and then he's going to show up, offer to show her the way back."
I don't have to ask who he's talking about.
"But she'll know better than to bargain with him," I say.
"We can hope."
"We've got to be able to do better than that," I tell him.
"I'm open to suggestions."
I look at that guitar in his hands.
"You could call her back," I say.
Robert shakes his head. "The devil, he's got himself a guitar, too."
"I don't know what that means."
"Think about it," Robert says. "Whose music is she going to know to follow?"
The stranger laid his guitar case on the grass and opened it up. The instrument he took out was an old Martin D-45 with the pearl inlaid "CD MARTIN" logo on the headstock--a classic, pre-war picker's guitar.
"Don't see many of those anymore," Staley said.
"They didn't make all that many." He smiled. "Though I'll tell you, I've never seen me a blue fiddle like you've got, not ever."
"Got it from my grandma."
"Well, she had taste. Give me an A, would you?"
Staley ran her bow across the A string of her fiddle and the stranger quickly tuned up to it.
"You ever play any contests?" he asked as he finished tuning.
He ran his pick across the strings, fingering an A minor chord. The guitar had a big, rich sound with lots of bottom end.
"I don't believe in contests," Staley said. "I think they take all the pleasure out of a music."
"Oh, I didn't mean nothing serious. More like swapping tunes, taking turns 'till one of you stumps the other player. Just for fun, like."
Staley shrugged.
"'Course to make it interesting," he added, "we could put a small wager on the outcome."
"What kind of wager would we be talking about here?"
Staley didn't know why she was even asking that, why she hadn't just shut down this idea of a contest right from the get-go. It was like something in the air was turning her head all around.
"I don't know," he said. "How about if I win, you'll give me a kiss?"
"A kiss?"
He shrugged. "And if you enjoy it, maybe you'll give me something more."
"And if I win?"
"Well, what's the one thing you'd like most in the world?"
Staley smiled. "Tell you the truth, I don't want for much of anything. I keep my expectations low--makes for a simple life."
"I'm impressed," he said. "Most people have a hankering for something they can't have. You know, money, or fame, or a true love. Maybe living forever."
"Don't see much point in living forever," Staley told him. "Come a time when everybody you care about would be long gone, but there you'd be, still trudging along on your own."
"Well, sure. But--"
"And as for money and fame, I think they're pretty much overrated. I don't really need much to be happy and I surely don't need anybody nosing in on my business."
"So what about a true love?"
"Well, now," Staley said. "Seems to me true love's something that comes to you, not something you can take or arrange."
"And if it doesn't?"
"That'd be sad, but you make do. I don't know how other folks get by, but I've got my music. I've got my friends."
The stranger regarded her with an odd, frustrated look.
"You can't tell me there's nothing you don't have a yearning for," he said. "Everybody wants for something."
"You mean for myself, or in general, like for there to be no more hurt in the world or the like?"
"For yourself," he said.
Staley shook her head. "Nothing I can't wait for it to find me in its own good time." She put her fiddle up under her chin. "So what do you want to play?"
But the stranger pulled his string strap back over his head and started to put his guitar away.
"What's the matter?" Staley asked. "We don't need some silly contest just to play a few tunes."
The stranger wouldn't look at her.
"I've kind of lost my appetite for music," he said, snapping closed the clasps on his case.
He stood up, his gaze finally meeting hers, and she saw something else in those clear blue eyes of his, a dark storm of anger, but a hurting, too. A loneliness that seemed so out of place, given his easy-going manner. A man like him, he should be friends with everyone he met, she'd thought. Except....
"I know who you are," she said.
She didn't know how she knew, but it came to her, like a gauze slipping from in front of her eyes, like she'd suddenly shucked the dreamy quality of the otherworld and could see true once more.
"You don't look nothing like what I expected," she added.
"Yeah, well, you've had your fun. Now let me be."
But something her grandmother had told her once came back to her. "I tell you," she'd said. "If I was ever to meet the devil, I'd kill him with kindness. That's the one thing old Lucifer can't stand."
Staley grinned, remembering.
"Wait a minute," she said. "Don't go off all mad."
The devil glared at her.
"Or at least let me give you that kiss before you go."
He actually backed away from her at that.
"What?" Staley asked. "Suddenly you don't fancy me anymore?"
"You put up a good front," he said. "I didn't make you for such an accomplished liar."
Staley shook her head. "I never lied to you. I really am happy with things the way they are. And anything I don't have, I don't mind waiting on."
The devil spat on the grass at her feet, turned once around, and was gone, vanishing with a small whuft of displaced air.
That's your best parting shot? Staley wanted to ask, but decided to leave well enough alone. She gave her surroundings a last look, then started up fiddling again, playing herself back into the green of summer where she'd left her friends.
Robert's pretty impressed when Staley just steps out of that invisible door, calm as you please. We heard the fiddling first. It sounded like it was coming from someplace on the far side of forever, but getting closer by the moment, and then there she was, standing barefoot in the grass, smiling at us. Robert's even more impressed when she tells us about how she handled the devil.
After putting her fiddle away, she boiled up some water on a Coleman stove and made us up a pot of herbal tea. We take it out through the woods in porcelain mugs, heading up to the top of the field overlooking the county road. The car's still there. The sun's going down now, putting on quite a show, and the tea's better than I thought it would be. Got mint in it, some kind of fruit.
"So how do I stop this from happening again?" Staley asks.
"Figure out what your music's all about," Robert tells her. "And take responsibility for it. Dig deep and find what's hiding behind the trees--you know, in the shadows where you can't exactly see things, you can only sense them--and always pay attention. It's up to you what you let out into the light."
"Is that what you do?"
Robert nodded. "'Course it's different for me, because we're different people. My music's about enduring. Perseverance. That's all the blues is ever about."
"What about hope?"
Robert smiled. "What do you think keeps perseverance alive?"
"Amen," I say.
After a moment, Staley smiles. We all clink our porcelain mugs together and drink a toast to that.
A Reversal
of Fortune
Holly Black
Nikki opened the refrigerator. There was nothing in
there but a couple of shriveled oranges and three gallons of tap water. She slammed it closed. Summer was supposed to be the best part of the year, but so far Nikki's summer sucked. It sucked hard. It sucked like a vacuum that got hold of the drapes.
Her pit bull, Boo, whined and scraped at the door, etching new lines into the frayed wood. Nikki clipped on his leash. She knew she should trim his nails. They frayed the nylon of his collar and gouged the door, but when she tried to cut them, he cried like a baby. Nikki figured he'd had enough pain in his life and left his nails long.
"Come on, Boo," she said as she led him out the front door of the trailer. The air outside shimmered with heat and the air conditioner chugged away in the window, dribbling water down the aluminum siding.
Lifting the lid of the rusty mailbox, Nikki pulled out a handful of circulars and bills. There, among them, she found a stale half-bagel with the words "Butter me!" written on it in gel pen and the crumbly surface stamped with half a dozen stamps. She sighed. Renee's crazy postcards had stopped making her laugh.
Boo hopped down the cement steps gingerly, paws smearing sour cherry tree pulp and staining his feet purple. He paused when he hit their tiny patch of sun-withered lawn to lick one of the hairless scars along his back.
"Come on. I have to get ready for work." Nikki gave his collar a sharp tug.
He yelped and she felt instantly terrible. He'd put on some weight since she'd found him, but he still was pretty easily freaked. She leaned down to pat the solid warmth of his back. His tail started going and he turned his massive face and licked her cheek.
Of course that was the moment her neighbor, Trevor, drove up in his gleaming black truck. He parked in front of his trailer and hopped out, the plastic connective tissue of a six-pack threaded between his fingers. She admired the way muscles on his back moved as he walked to the door of his place, making the raven tattoo on his shoulder ripple.
"Hey," she called, pushing Boo's wet face away and standing up. Why did Trevor pick this moment to be around, when she was covered in dog drool, hair in tangles, wearing her brother's gi-normous t-shirt? Even the thong on one of her flip-flops had ripped out so she shuffled to keep the sole on.
The dog raised his leg and pissed on a dandelion just as Trevor turned around and gave her a negligent half-wave.
Boo rooted around for a few minutes more and then Nikki tugged him inside. She pulled on a pair of low-slung orange pants and a black t-shirt with the outline of a daschund on it. Busy thinking of Trevor, she stepped onto the asphalt of the self-service car wash--almost to the bus stop--before she realized she still wore her broken flip-flops.
Sighing, she started to wade through the streams of antifreeze-green cleanser and gobs of snowy foam bubbles. They mixed with the sour cherry spatter that fell from the trees to make the summer smell like a chemical plant of rotten fruit.
There were only a couple of people waiting on the bench, the stink of exhaust from the highway not appearing to bother them one bit. Two women with oversized glasses were chatting away, their curled hair wilting in the heat. An elderly man in a black-and-white hound's tooth suit leaned on a cane and grinned when she got closer.
Just then, Nikki's brother Doug's battered grey Honda pulled into the trailer park. He headed for the back--the best place to park even though you sometimes got a ticket. Her brother anticipated a big winning in another month and seemed to think he was already made of money.
Nikki ran over to the car and rapped on the window.
Doug jumped in his seat, then scowled when he saw her. His beard glimmered with grease as he eased himself out of the car. He was a big guy to begin with and over 400 pounds now. Nikki was just the opposite--skinny as a straw no matter what she ate.
"Can you take me to work?" she asked. "It's too hot to take the bus."
He shook his head and belched, making the air smell like a beach after the tide went out and left the mussels to bake in the sun. "I got some more training to do. Spinks is coming over to do gallon-water trials."
"Come on," she said. It sucked that he got to screw around when she had to work. "Where were you anyway?"
"Chinese buffet," he said. "Did 50 shrimp. Volume's okay, I guess. My speed blows, though. I just slow down after the first 5-8 minutes. Peeling is a bitch and those waitresses are always looking at me and giggling."
"Take me to work. You are going to puke if you eat anything else."
His eyes widened and he held up a hand, as if to ward off her words. "How many times do I have to tell you? It's a 'reversal of fortune' or a 'Roman incident.' Don't ever say puke. That's bad luck."
Nikki shifted her weight, the intensity of his reaction embarrassing her. "Fine. Whatever. Sorry."
He sighed. "I'll drive you, but you have to take the bus home."
She sat down in one of the cracked seats of his car, brushing off a tangle of silvery wrappers. A pack of gum sat in the grimy brake well and she pulled out a piece. "Deal."
"Good for jaw strength," Doug said.
"Good for fresh breath," she replied, rolling her eyes. "Not that you care about that."
He looked out the window. "Gurgitators get groupies, you know. Once I'm established on the competitive eating circuit, I'll be meeting tons of women."
"There's a scary thought," she said as they pulled onto the highway.
"You should try it. I'm battling the whole 'belt of fat' thing--my stomach only expands so far--but the skinny people can really pack it in. You should see this little girl that's eating big guys like me under the table."
"If you keep emptying out the fridge, I might just do it," Nikki said. "I might have to."
Nikki walked through the crowded mall, past skaters getting kicked out by rent-a-cops and listless homemakers pushing baby carriages. At the beginning of summer, when she'd first gotten the job, she had imagined that Renee would still be working at the t-shirt kiosk and Leah would be at Gotheteria and they would wave to each other across the body of the mall and go to the food court every day for lunch. She didn't expect that Renee would be on some extended road trip vacation with her parents and that Leah would ignore Nikki in front of her new, black-lipsticked friends.
If not for Boo, she would have spent the summer waiting around for the bizarre postcards Renee sent from cross-country stops. At first they were just pictures of the Liberty Bell or the Smithsonian with messages on the back about the cute guys seen at a rest stop or the number of times she'd punched her brother using the excuse of playing Padiddle--but then they started to get loonier. A museum brochure where Renee had given each of the paintings obscene thought balloons. A ripped piece of a menu with words blacked out to spell messages like "Cheese is the way." A leaf that got too mangled in the mail to read the words on it. A section of newspaper folded into a boat that said, "Do you think clams get seasick?" And, of course, the bagel.
It bothered Nikki that Renee was still funny and still having fun while Nikki felt lost. Leah had drifted away as though Renee was all that had kept the three of them together and without Renee to laugh at her jokes, Nikki couldn't seem to be funny. She couldn't even tell if she was having fun.
Kim stood behind the counter of The Sweet Tooth candy store, a long string of red licorice hanging from her mouth. She looked up when Nikki came in. "You're late."
"So?" Nikki asked.
"Boss's son's in the back," Kim said.
Kim loved anime so passionately that she convinced their boss to stock Pocky and lychee gummies and green tea and ginger candies with hard surfaces but runny, spicy insides. They'd done so well that the Boss started asking Kim's opinion on all the new orders. She acted like he'd made her manager.
Nikki liked all the candy--peanut butter taffy, lime green foil-wrapped "alien coins" with chocolate discs inside, gummy geckos and gummy sidewinders and a whole assortment of translucent gummy fruit, long strips of paper dotted with sugar dots, shining and jagged rock candy, hot-as-Hell atomic fireballs, sticks of violet candy that tasted like flowery chal
k, giant multi-colored spiral lollipops, not to mention chocolate-covered malt balls, chocolate-covered blueberries and raspberries and peanuts, and even tiny packages of chocolate-covered ants.
The pay was pretty much crap, but Nikki was allowed to eat as much candy as she wanted. She picked out a coffee toffee to start with because it seemed breakfast-y.
The boss's son came out of the stock room, his sleeveless t-shirt thin enough that Nikki could see the hair that covered his back and chest through the cloth. He scowled at her. "Most girls get sick of the candy after a while," he said, in a tone that was half-grudging admiration, half-panic at the profits vanishing through her teeth.
Nikki paused in her consumption of a pile of sour gummy lizards, their hides crunchy with granules of sugar. "Sorry," she said.
That seemed to be the right answer, because he turned to Kim and told her to restock the pomegranate jellybeans.
Nikki's stomach growled and, while his back was turned, she popped another lizard into her mouth.
The glass-enclosed waiting area of the bus stop was full when Nikki finished her shift. Rain slicked her skin and plastered her hair to her face and neck. By the time the bus came, she was soaked and even more convinced that her summer was doomed.
Nikki pushed her way into one of the few remaining seats, next to an old guy that smelled like a sulfurous fart. It took her a moment to realize he was the hound's tooth suit-and-cane guy from the bus stop that morning. He'd probably been riding the bus this whole time. Still jittery from sugar, she could feel the headachy start of a post-candy crash in her immediate future. Nikki tried to ignore the heavy wetness of her clothes and to breath as shallowly as possible to avoid the old guy's stink.
The bus lurched forward. A woman chatting on her cell phone stumbled into Nikki's knee.
"'Scuse me," the woman said sharply, as though Nikki was the one that fell.
"I'm going to give you what you want," the man next to her whispered. Weirdly, his breath was like honey.
Nikki didn't reply. Nice breath or not, he was still a stinky, senile old pervert.
"I'm talking to you, girl." He touched her arm.
