“What will change this path? We must make this better!”
She stared. “I just built a well.”
Marco smirked. “What’s the use of that?”
Fred tried to summon enthusiasm. They all missed Major even if she was the only one who admitted it. “It’s on the army now, not the government. We remove the high command, destroy their headquarters perhaps—”
Marco said, “What, you think we can make earthquakes?”
“No, we create cracks in the foundation, then simply shift them—”
Clare shook her head. “I was never able to think so big. I wish—”
Fred sighed. “Clare, it’s been two years, can you please—”
“It feels like yesterday,” she said, and couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just yesterday, according to the clock her body kept. But she couldn’t trust that instinct. She’d lost hours that felt like minutes, studying dust motes.
“Clare—” Gerald said, admonishing, a guru unhappy with a disciple. The thought made her smile, which he took badly, because she wasn’t looking at him but at something the middle distance, unseen.
He shook his head, disappointment plain. The others stared at her with something like fascination or horror.
“You’ve been tired. Not up to this pressure,” he explained kindly. “It’s all right if you want to rest.”
She didn’t hear the rest of the planning. That was all right; she wasn’t asked to take part.
***
She took a piece of charcoal from an abandoned campfire. This settlement was smaller than it had been. Twenty fires had once burned here, with iron pots and bubbling stews over them all.
Eight remained. Families ranged farther and farther to find food. Often young boys never came back. They were taken by the army. The well had gone bad. They collected rainwater in dirty tubs now.
And yet. Even here. She drew a pattern on a slab of broken wood. Watched a young man drop a brick of peat for the fire. Watched a young woman pick it up for him and look into his eyes. He smiled.
Now if only she knew the pattern that would ensure that they survived.
***
When they launched the next plan—collapse the army high command’s headquarters, crippling the RLP and allowing the PTP to fill the vacuum, or so Gerald insisted—she had no part to play. She was not talented enough, Gerald didn’t say, but she understood it. She could only play with detritus from a kitchen table. She could never think big enough for them. Major hadn’t cared.
She did a little thing, though: scattered birdseed on a pool of soapy water, to send a tremor through the air and warn the pigeons, rats, and such that they ought to flee. And maybe that ruined the plan for the others. She’d nudged the pattern too far out of alignment for their pattern to work. The building didn’t collapse, but the clock tower across the square from which Fred and Marco were watching did. As if they had planted explosives and been caught in the blast.
Too direct, of course.
***
She left. Escaped, rather, as she thought. She didn’t want Gerald to find her. Didn’t want to look him in the eye. She would either laugh at him or accuse him of killing Major and everyone else. Then she would strangle him, and since they were both equally out of history she just might be able to do it. It couldn’t possibly be too direct, and the rest of the world couldn’t possibly notice.
Very tempting, in those terms.
But she found her place, her niche, her purpose. Her little village on the edge of everything was starting to build itself into something bigger. She’d worried about it, but just last year the number of babies born exceeded the number of people who died of disease, age, and accident. A few more cook fires had been added. She watched, pleased.
But Gerald found her, eventually, because that was one of his talents: finding people who had the ability to move outside the world. She might as well have set out a lantern.
She didn’t look up when he arrived. She was gathering mint leaves that she’d set out to dry, putting them in the tin box where she stored them. A spoonful of an earlier harvest was brewing in a cup of water over her little fire. Her small realm was tucked under the overhang formed by three walls that had fallen together. The witch’s cave, she called it. It looked over the village so she could always watch her people.
Gerald stood at the edge of her cave for a long time, watching. He seemed deflated, his cloak worn, his skin pale. But his eyes still burned. With desperation this time, maybe, instead of ambition.
When he spoke, he sounded appalled. “Clare. What are you doing here? Why are you living in this . . . this pit?”
“Because it’s my pit. Leave me alone, I’m working.”
“Clare. Come away. Get out of there. Come with me.”
She raised a brow at him. “No.”
“You’re not doing any good here.”
She still did not give him more than a passing glance. The village below was full of the evening’s activities: farmers returning from fields, groups bustling around cook fires. Someone was singing, another laughing, a third crying.
She pointed. “Maybe that little girl right there is the one who will grow up and turn this all around. Maybe I can keep her safe until she does.”
He shook his head. “Not likely. You can’t point to a random child and make such a claim. She’ll be dead of influenza before she reaches maturity.”
“It’s the little things, you’re always saying. But you don’t think small enough,” she said.
“Now what are you talking about?”
“Nails,” she murmured.
“You have a talent,” he said, desperately. “You see what other people overlook. Things other people take for granted. There are revolutions in little things. I understand that now. I didn’t—”
“Why can’t you let the revolutions take care of themselves?”
He stared at her, astonished. Might as well tell him to stop breathing. He didn’t know how to do anything else. And no one had ever spoken to him like this.
“You can’t go back,” he said as if it was a threat. “You can’t go back to being alive in the world.”
“Does it look like I’m trying?” He couldn’t answer, of course, because she only looked like she was making tea. “You’re only here because there’s no one left to help you. And you’re blind.”
Some days when she was in a very low mood she imagined Major here with her, and imagined that he’d be happy, even without the games.
“Clare. You shouldn’t be alone. You can’t leave me. Not after everything.”
“I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. Major saw a man with a weapon and acted on instinct. The grenade might have gone off and he’d have died just the same. It could have happened to anyone. I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact, maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”
“You can’t do any good alone, Clare.”
“I think you’re the one who can’t do any good alone,” she said. She looked at him. “I have saved four hundred and thirty-two people who would have died because they did not have clean water. Because of me, forty-three people walked a different way home and didn’t get mugged or pressed into the army. Thirty-eight kitchen fires didn’t reach the cooking oil. Thirty-one fishermen did not drown when they fell overboard. I have helped two dozen people fall in love.”
His chuckle was bitter. “You were never very ambitious.”
“Ambitious enough,” she said.
“I won’t come for you again. I won’t try to save you again.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She did not watch Gerald walk away and vanish in the swoop of his cloak.
Later, looking over the village, she reached for her tin box and drew out a sugar cube that had been soaked in brandy. Crumbling it
and licking her fingers, she lifted a bit of earth, which made a small girl trip harmlessly four steps before she would have stumbled and fallen into a cook fire. Years later, after the girl had grown up to be the kind of revolutionary leader who saves the world, she would say she had a guardian angel.
© 2013 by Carrie Vaughn
CHRISTOPHER BARZAK
b. July 21, 1975
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English in suburban and rural communities outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His most recent book is Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories. Forthcoming is Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.
Paranormal Romance, by Christopher Barzak
This is a story about a witch. Not the kind you’re thinking of either. She didn’t have a long nose with a wart on it. She didn’t have green skin or long black hair. She didn’t wear a pointed hat or a cape, and she didn’t have a cat, a spider, a rat, or any of those animals that are usually hanging around witches. She didn’t live in a ramshackle house, a gingerbread house, a Victorian house, or a cave. And she didn’t have any sisters. This witch wasn’t the kind you read about in fairytales and in plays by Shakespeare. This witch lived in a red brick bungalow that had been turned into an upstairs/downstairs apartment house on an old industrial street that had lost all of its industry in Cleveland, Ohio. The apartment house had two other people living in it: a young gay couple who were terribly in love with one another. The couple had a dog, an incredibly happy-faced Eskimo they’d named Snowman, but the witch never spoke to it, even though she could. She didn’t like dogs, but she did like the gay couple. She tried not to hold their pet against them.
The witch—her name was Sheila—specialized in love magic. She didn’t like curses. Curses were all about hate and—occasionally—vengeance, and Sheila had long ago decided that she’d spend her time productively, rather than wasting energy on dealing with perceived injustices located in her—or someone else’s—past. Years ago, when she was in college, she had dabbled in curses, but they were mainly favors the girls in her dorm asked of her, usually after a boyfriend dumped them, cheated on them, used them as a means for money and mobility, or some other power or shame thing. A curse always sounded nice to them. Fast and dirty justice. Sheila sometimes helped them, but soon she grew tired of the knocks on her door in the middle of the night, grew annoyed after opening the door to find a teary-eyed girl just back from a frat party with blood boiling so hard that the skin on her face seemed to roil. Eventually Sheila started closing the door on their tear-stained faces, and after a while the girls stopped bothering her for curses. Instead, they started coming to her for love charms.
The gay couple who lived in the downstairs rooms of the apartment house were named Trent and Gary. They’d been together for nearly two years, but had only lived together for the past ten months. Their love was still fresh. Sheila could smell it whenever she stopped in to visit them on weekends, when Trent and Gary could be found on the back deck, barbequing and drinking glasses of red wine. They could make ordinary things like cooking out feel magical because of the sheer completeness they exuded, like a fine sparking mist, when they were near each other. That was pure early love, in Sheila’s assessment, and she sipped at it from the edges.
Trent was the manager of a small software company and Gary worked at an environmental nonprofit. They’d met in college ten years ago, but had circled around each other at the time. They’d shared a Venn diagram of friends, but naturally some of them didn’t like each other. Their mutual friends spent a lot of time telling Trent about how much they hated Gary’s friends, or telling Gary about how much they hated Trent’s. Because of this, for years Trent and Gary had kept a safe distance from each other, assuming that they would also hate each other. Which was probably a good thing, they said now, nodding in accord on the back deck of the red brick bungalow, where Trent turned shish kabobs on the grill and Gary poured Sheila another glass of wine.
“Why was it probably a good thing you assumed you’d hate each other?” Sheila asked.
“Because,” Gary said as he spilled wine into Sheila’s glass, “we were so young and stupid back then.”
“Also kind of bitchy,” Trent added over his shoulder.
“We would have hurt each other,” said Gary, “before we knew what we had to lose.”
Sheila blushed at this open display of emotion and Gary laughed. “Look at you!” he said, pointing a finger and turning to look over his shoulder at Trent. “Trent,” he said, “Look. We’ve embarrassed Sheila.”
Trent laughed, too, and Sheila rolled her eyes. “I’m not embarrassed, you jerks,” she said. “I know what love is. People pay me to help them find it or make it. It’s just that, with you two—I don’t know—there’s something special about your love.”
Trent turned a kabob with his tongs and said, “Maybe it’s because we didn’t need you to make it happen.”
It was quite possible that Trent’s theory had some kind of truth to it, but whatever the reason, Sheila didn’t care. She just wanted to sit with them and drink wine and watch the lightning bugs blink in the backyard on a midsummer evening in Cleveland.
It was a good night. The shish kabobs were spiced with dill and lemon. The wine was a middlebrow Syrah. Trent and Gary always provided good thirty-somethings conversation. Listening to the two of them, Sheila felt like she understood much of what she would have gleaned from reading a newspaper or an intelligent magazine. For the past three months, she’d simply begun to rely on them to relay the goings-on of the world to her, and to supply her with these evenings where, for a small moment in time, she could feel normal.
In the center of the deck several scraps of wood burned in a fire pit, throwing shadows and orange light over their faces as smoke climbed into the darkening sky. Trent swirled his glass of wine before taking the last sip, then stood and slid the back door open so he could go inside to retrieve a fresh bottle.
“That sounds terrible,” Sheila was saying as Trent left. Gary had been complaining about natural gas companies coming into Ohio to frack for gas deposits beneath the shale, and how his nonprofit was about to hold a forum on the dangers of the process. But before Sheila could say another word, her cell phone rang. “One second,” she said, holding up a finger as she looked at the screen. “It’s my mom. I’ve got to take this.”
Sheila pressed the answer button. “Hey, Mom,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Where are you?” her mother asked, blunt as a bludgeoning weapon as usual.
“I’m having a glass of wine with the boys,” Sheila said. Right then, Trent returned, twisting the cork out of the new bottle as he attempted to slide the back door shut with his foot. Sheila furrowed her brows and shook her head at him. “Is there something you need, Mom?” she asked.
Before her mother could answer, though, and before Trent could slide the door shut, the dog Sheila disliked in the way that she disliked all dogs—without any particular hatred for the individual, just the species—darted out the open door and raced past Sheila’s legs, down the deck steps, into the bushes at the bottom of the backyard.
“Hey!” Gary said, rising from his chair, nearly spilling his wine. He looked out at the dog, a white furry thing with an impossibly red tongue hanging out of its permanently smiling face, and then placed his glass on the deck railing before heading down t
he stairs. “Snowman!” he called. “Get back here!”
“Oh, Christ,” Trent said, one foot still held against the sliding door he hadn’t shut in time. “That dog is going to be the death of me.”
“What’s going on over there?” Sheila’s mother asked. Her voice was loud and drawn out, as if she were speaking to someone hard of hearing.
“Dog escaped,” said Sheila. “Hold on a second, Mom.”
Sheila held the phone against her chest and said, “Guys, I’ve got to go. Gary, I hope your forum goes well. Snowman, stop being so bad!” Then she edged through the door Trent still held open, crossed through their kitchen and living room to the front foyer they shared, and took the steps up to her second floor apartment.
“Sorry about that,” she said when she sat down at her kitchen table.
“Why do you continue living there, Sheila?” her mother said. Sheila could hear steam hissing off her mother’s voice, flat as an iron. “Why,” her mother said, “do you continue to live with this illusion of having a full life, my daughter?”
“Ma,” Sheila said. “What are you talking about now?”
“The boys,” said her mother. “You’re always with the boys. But those boys like each other, Sheila, not you. You should find other boys. Boys who like girls. When are you going to grow up, make your own life? Don’t you want children?”
“I have a life,” said Sheila, evenly, as she might speak to a demanding child. “And I don’t want children.” She could have also told her mother that she was open to girls who liked girls, and had even had a fling or two that had never developed into anything substantial; looking around the kitchen, however, Sheila realized she’d unfortunately forgotten to bring her wine with her, which she would have needed to have that conversation.
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