Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  The bottle, replenished with newly extended substance every year at Thanksgiving, had reputedly been in the Coldharp family since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the story was that the original quantity of otherworldly water had been wrung from Dante Alighieri’s cloak after he returned from his comedy.

  Biscuit could hear Jasper in the living room complaining to his mother about her, and then Amelia telling him, “Be quiet or I’ll give you something to be quiet about!”

  A moment later Amelia stepped into the kitchen, carrying a Saran Wrap-covered pot of mashed potatoes and shaking her head. “You slapped him?”

  “No. Pulled him away from the stove by his shirt, and then—oh yes, I did, I slapped his hand. He wanted to drink some of that.” She nodded toward the pasta pots.

  Amelia nodded and set her pot on the stove. To Biscuit she always looked as if she had just got out of bed in spite of having a bad cold—her nose and eyes looked as if she’d been rubbing them, and her lips seemed stretched to cover her prominent teeth. And today her thin blonde hair did look as if someone had been tying it in knots. As always, she was wearing a sweater that hung down to her knees.

  “I wish you’d let him,” she said. “He wouldn’t be able to watch that damned TV if he spent the evening in the bathroom.”

  The TV set in the living room was analog, and when broadcasting switched to digital in 2009, Shortstack had taken the aerial antenna down from the roof and sunk it into the ground in the yard. Now the TV worked, but only got grotesque black-and-white cartoons with characters nobody ever heard of.

  Biscuit shrugged. “It’s just for one night a year.”

  “But he dreams about it for months after.” Amelia looked at the two big pots on the counter. “We should get the accommodations out; the sun’s going down. Oh—does Shortstack still have his gun?”

  “Your son asked me that. Why?”

  “Jackalyn’s parakeet starved to death, and she won’t admit it—she insists it’s just real sick, and she wants your brother to put it out of its misery.”

  Biscuit opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “Its nonexistent misery. With a .44 magnum.”

  “Whatever it is. Better than beating the thing with a shovel. Let’s get the accommodations.”

  The door to the garage was on the other side of the stove, and Biscuit crossed to it and pulled it open. Six boxes were stacked on the cement floor by her Chevy Blazer, and Amelia opened one and lifted out a two-gallon fishbowl on her spread-fingered hand.

  “Heavy,” she said.

  “Ten bucks each on Amazon,” said Biscuit, hoisting another box. “But you remember a couple of the cheap ones broke last year when . . . everybody got too excited.”

  “You mean Jackalyn. She’s better now.” Amelia touched her tangled hair with her free hand. “Mostly.”

  Biscuit nodded dubiously and stepped back into the kitchen.

  Amelia hefted the fishbowl in both hands and followed her. “Oof,” she said, adjusting her grip. “Where are all the cats? I’d think the smell would have ’em all in here.”

  “Out in the yard, on the roof. They’ll be back in tomorrow, but they’re scared of the accommodation water.” Biscuit set her box on the floor, lifted out the fishbowl and slid it onto the counter beside the big pots. “Sometimes I think the cats are smarter than we are.”

  She dipped the fishbowl into the strange water and lifted it out full. “Jasper!” she called. “Jackalyn!”

  Jasper came running in and Biscuit handed the bowl to him. “Put this on the dining room table, and do not play with it,” she said firmly, and when he had shuffled out of the kitchen she went to the garage to fetch another box as Amelia was handing her filled bowl to young Jackalyn.

  Biscuit heard Amelia say, “Oh, that’s nice, that’s mature. I just hope somebody spits in your accommodation one day, young lady.”

  They had finally got all six of the fishbowls filled and arranged at various places on the long dining room table, and Biscuit had shed her apron and was uncorking the last of four bottles of Zinfandel wine, when she heard a car pull up outside; it roared in neutral for a moment, and then went silent.

  “That’ll be Judith,” Biscuit said. She set down the bottle and hurried through the living room to the front door. Peering through the screen, she saw her older sister, Amelia’s mother, unfolding her lean frame from a middle-aged Honda and looking closely at Amelia’s Volkswagen. She must have known that it was her daughter’s car, but Judith had had a Volkswagen of her own stolen years ago, and, on the assumption that the thieves had changed the look of the car, had ever since viewed every Volkswagen with suspicion.

  Biscuit was dismayed to see that Judith was now opening the trunk of her car and lifting out a foil-covered casserole dish, even though Biscuit had called her earlier and told her not to bother. Looking over her shoulder, back into the living room, she called, “Everybody remember the napkin routine!”

  Various voices from the dining room acknowledged her.

  Shortstack was just now shambling into the living room from the hall, his gray hair slicked down and, even from across the room, smelling sharply of Vitalis. He was wearing shorts and buttoning a long-sleeve shirt. “One day,” he said, pausing to yawn, “I’m going to actually eat one of Judith’s casseroles.”

  “Better you should drink the accommodation water,” said Biscuit. “Jackalyn wants you to shoot her parakeet with your magnum, by the way.”

  “Good, good. You noticed a cushion missing from the back porch sofa? I cut it up and made a silencer with the foam rubber. Nobody’ll hear a thing.”

  Biscuit shook her head tiredly. “That’s swell. Judith!” she added then, for her burdened older sister had kicked open the screen door. “We’ve already got the accommodations set out, and the turkey should be ready any minute.”

  “Excuse me for not being here to help,” snapped Judith. “I had a colitis attack.”

  Shortstack nodded. “I daresay. When is Nana likely to—”

  “People arriving!” came a nervous call from young Jasper.

  Biscuit left Judith to take her casserole to the kitchen and hurried into the dining room.

  The prisms hanging at the western window were revolving on their strings, casting spots of colored light across the walls and over the tense faces of Amelia and her two children, and the water in the fishbowls was glowing pink. As Biscuit watched, grimacing faces formed in the bowls, and she tried to identify them.

  There was Uncle Scuttle, who Amelia refused to sit next to because he had wrecked her Barbie town when she was eight; and across the table two emerging faces were recognizable as Judith’s husband Hanky and his sister Anemone.

  Down the table a face was rapidly opening and closing its mouth in another of the fishbowls, and Biscuit guessed it was her father, John, called Papa by everyone. He had died only three years ago, at the age of eighty-seven, and even though he had been increasingly vague during his last years, it was still disturbing for her to see him like this. She walked slowly down the room, hesitated, and then set her cell phone on the tablecloth next to him, marking her seat.

  By the window a gray face with enormous eyes coagulated into view in another fishbowl, and even from the far end of the room Biscuit recognized Grandpa Coldharp. He had died more than a decade before she was born, and though everybody said he had been a fine man, his ghost was able and inclined to remotely goose and pinch women, and Biscuit was glad she’d be seated far away from him. She saw that Amelia apparently felt the same way, for she had set her purse on a chair at this end of the table.

  “Jackalyn too,” said Biscuit. “We don’t need that.”

  Amelia nodded, her closed lips looking tighter than usual. “Old beast.”

  “I cast a horoscope today,” announced Judith from the living room doorway, her narrow hands twisting the front of her long black dress. “The stars are all in an uproar.”

  “They’ll have to wait,” said Biscuit, hurrying back to th
e kitchen to turn on the microwave oven. She punched in two minutes, which ought to be enough time to reheat the rolls and gravy, and then she pulled open the oven door.

  Shortstack wandered into the kitchen then, and he obligingly lifted the wide aluminum pan with the turkey in it onto a table against the wall. He opened his mouth, but whatever he intended to say was forgotten when a loud metallic clattering echoed from down the hall.

  Nana’s stair-traverse wheelchair platform was evidently misbehaving. Biscuit ran down the hall to the base of the stairs just in time to see the platform clank to an abrupt halt at the bottom of its track, throwing her mother forward against the restraining bar. The whole apparatus shook for a few seconds, then fell still.

  “Don’t tell me,” gasped the old woman, “they’re here, aren’t they?” When Biscuit nodded, her mother went on, “All of them together radiate—over-amp the damn motor.”

  Shortstack had followed Biscuit down the hall, and he wrestled the restraining bar up as Biscuit pulled the wheelchair forward.

  “Your father too?” growled Nana. “Tell him to leave the silverware alone.”

  Biscuit nodded, and rolled her eyes at Shortstack as she got behind the wheelchair and began pushing it down the hall. Their father had liked to demonstrate his psychokinetic ability to bend spoons without touching them, though to be fair he had not done it since his death.

  Shortstack veered off to the kitchen to bring in the turkey as Biscuit wheeled her mother straight down the hall into the dining room. Young Jackalyn was agitated, muttering to herself about the absence of ice-cream this year, and Biscuit warily eyed the plates on the table, ready to hustle the girl out of the room if they started rattling.

  Judith was still standing in the doorway. “The stars indicate that we won’t all be here next year,” she said, speaking more loudly, for Jasper had turned on the TV in the living room behind her.

  The surfaces of several of the accommodation bowls vibrated into conflicting rings, producing faint voices that said, “What, what?”

  “I said we won’t all be here next year!” said Judith, more loudly still.

  Amelia had fetched the rolls and set them on the table, and Judith told her, “Not by my chair, please! I’m gluten intolerant.”

  “What, what?” piped a couple of the ghosts, and another answered, “She says she’s hootin’ and hollerin’.”

  “My illnesses,” Judith went on determinedly, “make me wonder if it’s me whose chair will be empty. But we’re all together tonight. I—”

  “She sure is,” agreed another of the ghosts. “Who are these people?”

  Shortstack had found a platter to slide the turkey onto, and now he shuffled in and clanked it down on the table.

  “I pray for you every night,” Nana told Judith. “You should pray.”

  “I say affirmations,” Judith told her.

  “Half of ’em are Asians!” exclaimed another of the ghosts.

  Biscuit had heard some of Judith’s affirmations, on occasions when her older sister had spent the night at the house—I am overflowing with joy, and I live in balance and harmony—and Biscuit was tempted to suggest one or two new ones for her.

  She pushed her mother’s wheelchair to a place on the other side of Papa Coldharp’s fishbowl.

  “Oh,” said Nana, glancing up and down the table, “not my good napkins!”

  Judith was looking elsewhere, so Biscuit gave her mother a sympathetic look, then said, “I’ll go get Jasper,” and stepped away.

  The lights hadn’t been turned on in the living room, and Jasper was sitting only a yard from the television screen, his face white in the glow.

  Biscuit paused to look at the screen. Awkwardly drawn figures with exaggerated heads and triangular bodies that diminished down to tiny feet waved and moved their heads repetitively; the only sounds, at the moment, anyway, were grunts and an occasional giggle.

  Behind her, Judith strode into the kitchen, her footsteps sounding angry.

  “Jasper,” Biscuit said, “come on, we’re going to start eating.”

  The boy looked up at her; his mouth sagged open and a giggle exactly like the one from the television shook out of it.

  “Stop it!” she said, louder than she had meant to, and she barely stopped her raised hand from slapping him.

  He laughed in his normal voice then, and said, “Aunt Biscuit’s scared of the cartoons!”

  “Get in there,” she said, bending down to shake his arm. He got to his feet, still laughing at her, and she pushed him ahead of her into the dining room. Judith was right behind them, and when Biscuit crossed to her place beside Papa Coldharp’s fishbowl she saw that Judith was carrying the casserole she’d brought.

  Beside Biscuit, Papa Coldharp’s bowl vibrated softly, and she heard his voice say, “Hi, Biscus.” It had been his jocular greeting to her for years, before he had forgotten everything.

  Surprised at this evidence of alertness, she turned to blink at his fishbowl. “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  Shortstack had hacked the turkey into uneven pieces with a butter knife. Amelia had brought in her bowl of mashed potatoes, and she helped herself to a big spoonful and passed the bowl to Jackalyn, who pushed it across the table toward Biscuit without taking any.

  “What was the yelling in there?” Amelia asked Biscuit.

  “Aunt Biscuit’s scared of the cartoons!” said Jasper again, then popped a whole roll into his mouth and made grunting noises.

  “I wish you wouldn’t watch that junk,” Amelia said to him, and Nana shook her head in stern agreement.

  “Moron dreams of buried people,” she said. “David should shoot that TV set.”

  Shortstack raised a glass of wine. “Right after I shoot a parakeet, Ma!”

  Biscuit glanced anxiously at Jackalyn—the girl was frowning at Shortstack, but the dishes were still motionless.

  Amelia and Shortstack and Nana had served themselves spoonfuls of Judith’s casserole, and Biscuit gave each of them a meaningful glance as she took a serving of it herself and then ostentatiously unfolded her napkin and laid it in her lap. She sighed, remembering her mother’s exclamation: not my good napkins!

  “Ulna’s not here!” said her mother then, staring at a fishbowl on the other side of the table from her; its accommodation water was clear, with no face in it. Ulna was her younger sister, who had died six years ago at the age of sixty-eight.

  “And the sun’s down,” noted Judith. “She’s not coming.”

  Biscuit bit her lip and reached across her father’s fishbowl to touch her mother’s hand in condolence. Sometimes the relatives just stopped being able to come back, and there wasn’t really any consolation in the customary statement that the person had moved on.

  “She’s moved on,” spoke the water in her father’s fishbowl.

  Uncle Scuttle’s fishbowl jittered wordlessly, and Shortstack got up and crossed to the telephone. When he had returned to his seat and sat down, he leaned back and closed his eyes, his right hand holding a pen over the message pad. After a few seconds his hand began moving, dragging the pen over the pad, though he still had his head against the back of his chair and his eyes were still closed. Uncle Scuttle’s bowl went on churning.

  “Are you going to put my parakeet out of its misery,” said Jackalyn in a low voice, “or shoot the TV?”

  Without moving or opening his eyes, Shortstack said, “We’ll dispatch your bird right after dinner, sweetie. I made a silencer for the gun, it’ll be very quiet.”

  Jackalyn’s fist was white on her fork. Biscuit guessed that she didn’t like being called sweetie.

  Judith was frowning down the table at the girl, and Biscuit saw Nana sigh and then surreptitiously slide half of her serving of the casserole off her plate and into her lap. Aromatherapy was one of Judith’s enthusiasms, and she was so devoted to it that she used the aromatic oils in her cooking, which, Shortstack had once observed, was like cooking with transmission fluid. Biscuit had taught her relatives
how to make noise with cutlery and then, when Judith wasn’t looking, slide half of whatever she had cooked into the napkins on their laps, and presently do it again with the other half. Later on they could ball up the napkins and one by one make some excuse to leave the table briefly, and step outside and toss the napkins onto the roof. Every year Shortstack had to climb up on a ladder and take them down.

  “So what does my brother say?” Nana asked Shortstack. Uncle Scuttle had been mute since his death, never having got the trick of vibrating the water surface like a speaker diaphragm, and could only communicate by way of Shortstack’s automatic writing.

  Shortstack lowered his head and opened his eyes. “Uh . . . make a shrine for Ulna,” he read off the pad. “Forgive and forget, bygones be bygones.”

  Amelia scowled down the table at Scuttle’s fishbowl, and Biscuit knew she was remembering how Scuttle, Nana’s younger brother, had wrecked her Barbie town more than a quarter of a century ago and to this day had never apologized.

  Judith too was now looking toward Uncle Scuttle’s fishbowl, possibly holding a grudge about the Barbie town debacle on her daughter’s behalf, so Biscuit slid half of her own serving of the casserole off her plate onto her lap. Immediately the fishbowl of Judith’s husband, Hanky, began vibrating.

  “Hibiscus!” came his frail voice, “what do you—what do you think you’re—Judy, she—”

  Judith’s head whipped around. “What did you do?”

  “I—spilled some food,” Biscuit said, “is all.”

  “Judith,” began Nana, “Don’t—” but Jasper interrupted her.

  “They all do it!” the boy said. “They all dump your casserole into their napkins!”

  Judith shoved Amelia’s shoulder back and peered at the napkin on her lap.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I—” Amelia began, but Judith silenced her with a wave.

  “Don’t try to apologize unless you’ve got a lot of time,” she said. She looked past her daughter at Jackalyn. “Has your brat done it too?” Turning her glare back on Amelia, she added, “Where did you get that Volkswagen?”