Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36

by Eleanor Arnason

  “Nadia,” Rhonda is saying.

  Nadia shakes off all her thoughts like a wet dog shaking itself dry.

  The casting director is motioning to her. “We’d like to see you again,” the woman with the necklaces says.

  “Her?” Rhonda asks.

  When Nadia goes back on stage, they tell her she has the part.

  “Oh,” says Nadia. She’s too stunned to do more than take the packet of information on rehearsal times and tax forms. She forgets to ask them which part she got.

  That night Rhonda and Grace insist on celebrating. They get a bottle of cheap champagne and drink it in the back of the restaurant with the cook and two of the dishwashers. Everyone congratulates Nadia and Rhonda keeps telling stories about clueless things that Nadia did on other auditions and how it’s a good thing that the casting people only wanted Nadia to dance because she can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

  Nadia says that no one can act their way out of a paper bag. You can only rip your way out of one. That makes everyone laugh and—Rhonda says—is a perfect example of how clueless Nadia can be.

  “You must have done really well in that final jump,” Rhonda says. “Were you a gymnast or something? How close did you get?”

  “Close to what?” Nadia asks.

  Rhonda laughs and takes another swig out of the champagne bottle. “Well, you couldn’t have made it. No human being could jump that far without a pole vault.”

  Nadia’s skin itches.

  Later, her boyfriend comes over. She’s still tipsy when she lets him in and they lie in bed together. For hours he tells her about teeth. Molars. Bicuspids. Dentures. Prosthodontics. She falls asleep to the sound of him grinding his jaw, like he’s chewing through the night.

  Rehearsals for the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue happen every other afternoon. The director’s name is Yves. He wears dapper suits in brown tweed and tells her, “You choose what you reveal of what you are when you’re on stage.”

  Nadia doesn’t know what that means. She does know that when she soars through the air, she wants to go higher and further and faster. She wants her muscles to burn. She knows she could, for a moment, do something spectacular. Something that makes her shake with terror. She thinks of her boyfriend and Rhonda and the feel of the nitrous filling her with drowsy nothingness; she does the jump they tell her and no more than that.

  The other actors aren’t what she expects. There is a woman who plays a mermaid whose voice is like spun gold. There is a horned boy who puts on long goat legs and prances around the stage, towering above them. And there is a magician who is supposed to keep them all as part of his menagerie in cages with glittering numbers.

  “Where are you from?” the mermaid asks. “You look familiar.”

  “People say that a lot,” Nadia says, although no one has ever said it to her. “I guess I have that kind of face.”

  The mermaid smiles and smoothes back gleaming black braids. “If you want, you can use my comb. It works on even the most matted fur—”

  “Wow,” says the goat boy, lurching past. “You must be special. She never lets anyone use her comb.”

  “Because you groom your ass with it,” she calls after him.

  The choreographer is named Marie. She is the woman with the necklaces from the first audition. When Nadia dances and especially when she jumps, Marie watches her with eyes like chips of gravel. “Good,” she says slowly, as though the word is a grave insult.

  Nadia is supposed to play a princess who has been trapped in a forest of ice by four skillful brothers and a jaybird. The magician rescues her and brings her to his menagerie. And, because the princess is not on stage much during the first act, Nadia also plays a bear dancing on two legs. The magician falls in love with the bear and the princess falls in love with the magician. Later in the play, the princess tricks the magician into killing the bear by making it look like the bear ate the jaybird. Then Nadia has to play the bear as she dies.

  At first, all Nadia’s mistakes are foolish. She lets her face go slack when she’s not the one speaking or dancing and the director has to remind her over and over again that the audience can always see her when she’s on stage. She misses cues. She sings too softly when she’s singing about fish and streams and heavy fur. She sings louder when she’s singing of kingdoms and crowns and dresses, but she can’t seem to remember the words.

  “I’m not really an actress,” she tells him, after a particularly disastrous scene.

  “I’m not really a director,” Yves says with a shrug. “Who really is what they seem?”

  “No,” she says. “You don’t understand. I just came to the audition because my friends were going. And they really aren’t my friends. They’re just people I work with. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Okay, if you’re not an actress,” he asks her, “then what are you?”

  She doesn’t answer. Yves signals for one of the golden glitter-covered cages to be moved slightly to the left.

  “I probably won’t even stay with the show,” Nadia says. “I’ll probably have to leave after opening night. I can’t be trusted.”

  Yves throws up his hands. “Actors! Which of you can be trusted? But don’t worry. We’ll all be leaving. This show tours.”

  Nadia expects him to cut her from the cast after every rehearsal, but he never does. She nearly cries with relief.

  The goat boy smiles down at her from atop his goat legs. “I have a handkerchief. I’ll throw it to you if you want.”

  “I’m fine,” Nadia says, rubbing her wet eyes.

  “Lots of people weep after rehearsals.”

  “Weird people,” she says, trying to make it a joke.

  “If you don’t cry, how can you make anyone else cry? Theater is the last place where fools and the mad do better than regular folks … well, I guess music’s a little like that too.” He shrugs. “But still.”

  Posters go up all over town. They show the magician in front of gleaming cages with bears and mermaids and foxes and a cat in a dress.

  Nadia’s boyfriend doesn’t like all the time she spends away from home. Now, on Saturday nights, she doesn’t wait by the phone. She pushes her milk crate coffee table and salvaged sofa against the wall and practices her steps over and over until her downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling.

  One night her boyfriend calls and she doesn’t pick up. She just lets it ring.

  She has just realized that the date the musical premieres is the next time she is going to change. All she can do is stare at the little black book and her carefully noted temperatures. The ringing phone is like the ringing in her head.

  I am so tired I want to die, Nadia thinks. Sometimes the thought repeats over and over and she can’t stop thinking it, even though she knows she has no reason to be so tired. She gets enough sleep. She gets more than enough sleep. Some days, she can barely drag herself from her bed.

  Fighting the change only makes it more painful; she knows from experience.

  The change cannot be stopped or reasoned with. It’s inevitable. Inexorable. It is coming for her. But it can be delayed. Once, she held on two hours past dusk, her whole body knotted with cramps. Once, she held out until the moon was high in the sky and her teeth were clenched so tight she thought they would shatter. She might be able to make it to the end of the show.

  It shouldn’t matter to her. Disappointing people is inevitable. She will eventually get tired and angry and hungry. Someone will get hurt. Her boyfriend will run the pad of his fingers over her canines and she will bite down. She will wake up covered in blood and mud by the side of some road and not be sure what she’s done. Then she’ll be on the run again.

  Being a werewolf means devouring your past.

  Being a werewolf means swallowing your future.

  Methodically, Nadia tears her notebook to tiny pieces. She throws the pieces in the toilet and flushes, but the chunks of paper clog the pipes. Water spills over the side and floods her bathroom with the
soggy reminder of inevitability.

  The opening night of the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue, the cast huddle together and wish each other luck. They paint their faces. Nadia’s hand shakes as she draws a new, red mouth over her own. Her skin itches. She can feel the fur inside of her, can smell her sharp, feral musk.

  “Are you okay?” the mermaid asks.

  Nadia growls softly. She is holding on, but only barely.

  Yves is yelling at everyone. The costumers are pinning and duct-taping dresses that have split. Straps tear. Beads bounce along the floor. One of the chorus is scolding a girl who plays a talking goat. A violinist is pleading with his instrument.

  “Tonight you are not going to be good,” Marie, the choreographer, says.

  Nadia grinds her teeth together. “I’m not good.”

  “Good is forgettable.” Marie spits. “Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of.”

  Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she’s afraid of what’s inside of her.

  Finally, Nadia’s cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.

  Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.

  Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She’s so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily—as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.

  Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he’s talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.

  She loves this. She doesn’t want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won’t wait by phone. She’s not a fake.

  When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.

  It happens before she can stop it and then, she doesn’t want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.

  The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.

  The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.

  Roses slip from Nadia’s dentist-boyfriend’s fingers.

  In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.

  There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It’s Saturday night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.

  © 2010 by Holly Black.

  Originally published in Full Moon City, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Darrell Schweitzer.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), The Modern Faerie Tale series, The Good Neighbors graphic novel trilogy (with Ted Naifeh), and her new Curse Workers series, which includes White Cat and Red Glove. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. She currently lives in New England with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret door.

  Leaving the Dead

  Dennis Danvers

  Darwin thought he might be more alive than other people. Not a whole lot, but ever increasingly, until finally, in a checkout line at Target, he was the last person left alive but his checker. Gabriella, her nametag said, and she was drifting off.

  Good for her he was the sort of person who reads nametags. Good for them both.

  “Gabriella!” he shouted, and she opened her eyes, blinking.

  “Nobody calls me that except my mother,” she said.

  He couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad. “It says on your nametag,” he said, pointing.

  She took it off.

  You forget you have it on, that you’re labeled like everything else in the store, as if the red outfit’s not enough. Team Member. That’s what they called you, expected you to call yourself. She used to like wearing red. She liked that her nametag said something nobody ever really called her anymore, like some other person was on the job. “My supervisor made the nametag. She can call me whatever she wants.” She said it like she might call the supervisor a thing or two, but she never would. Sweet child, her mother used to say. She scanned his items: Peppermint Patty. White socks. A Kindle, the cheapest. Seeds (flowers). He was a frail, pale little flower himself. Like a pot of grandma’s pansies.

  “Is that your supervisor over there?” Darwin detected some vague sense of rank in the woman’s red garb, though the point was moot. Her hair swept up; everything else drooped. “She’s dead,” Darwin said, swiping his card, signing the screen with a plastic nub. Dotting the i felt particularly foolish, plastic kissing plastic, leaving a deep blue craggy dot. His illegible signature was approved and vanished, and he was thanked. Who did that? he wondered. It must be automatic. His credit was perfect. He paid everything off. Except for the student loan payments. They would never end.

  Gaby (as everyone but Mom called her) squinted at Karin, her supervisor. The man was right. Still standing somehow on her tree-trunk legs, but dead as a mackerel. Gaby had never seen a mackerel to know one, but Mom had used the expression whenever something dead came up. Mom was her authority on death. She looked around. “Everybody’s dead.”

  “That’s why I shouted at you. You were dropping off.”

  She didn’t remember any shout. Barely audible in her family. One reason she never did. Shout. Whisper quiet was her motto. Her nickname was ironic. Her third grade teacher told her that. Like most of us, Gaby hadn’t changed much since third grade. “Off. You mean dead. Dropping dead.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Everyone else did.”

  “What’s going on?”

  He was thoughtful. Darwin fell into thoughtful like some cats purr, just waiting for your touch. His favorite verb was mull. “I don’t know. It just seemed to happen gradually. You know? Everyone dying a little bit every day. It kind of crept up on me. Then I looked around …” He gestured at all the dead. Some had fallen facedown into their carts. Others were still reaching out for the bottom shelf. Most had dropped where they stood. Dropped phones were dropping calls everywhere. They were dead too. Personal devices without a person.

  The store kept going. The AC roared. The music played. The ads, too. It was all automatic. The dead were told to expect more and pay less, then another song played. Gaby didn’t mind the songs, but the happy yappy woman who did the ads totally got on her nerves. Maybe it was mass hypnosis. The wrong chirp fracked all these people’s brains.

  “Have you checked outside?” Gaby asked. She shut off the light showing she was open, stepped out of the stall. Normally, she could get in big trouble for that. Things obviously weren’t normal.

  “I’m sure it’s the same out there. I was just over at Barnes & Noble, and the people weren’t much more alive than the dead writers on the wall. But we should have a look-see here first, don’t you think?”

  Gaby figured the store was somehow her responsibility, now that everyone else was dead. That’s just how she was brought up. “I’ll do it,” she said, thinking maybe if she left this weird little dude and walked around the store, things might be different. He could be controlling her mind. She could be insane. This could be like the Rapture, and nobody was really dead. Sh
e could be a spy and not know it. Maybe she just killed all these people and not the chirpy PA bitch after all. She’d seen all those movies and more with her brothers. She didn’t know what movie this was, but anything was better than everybody dies. Just like that. For no reason.

  Look-see. Who says look-see? That’s what she was doing up and down the aisles. Look. See: Dead. Dead. Dead. Housewares. Sporting Goods. Electronics. Women’s Apparel. Didn’t matter. Mick Jagger was singing “Wild Horses.” Still. You couldn’t stop him. Somewhere, was Mick dead now? Keith? She couldn’t remember whether they were still alive. There was a stroller parked in Family Shoes. Kid sitting in it seemed to be looking right at her. No. He was dead as a mackerel too. “Yeah. Let’s have a look-see the fuck out of this place.” She strode to the doors—not running—her mother’s voice hollering down the long hallway to the child inside, Gabriella! Don’t you dare run in this house! She burst out of that memory into daylight and stopped in her tracks.

  The automatic doors whooshed closed behind her, then parted again. Darwin stood beside her. She had this weird urge to take his hand. Not a car was moving. It’s not like you had to look inside each one to make sure after seeing that. Anybody stuck in this traffic jam would be screaming if they could, laying on the horn. Something. Six lanes of traffic up and down Broad Street for as far as you could see. Stopped dead. Dead inside. You could see them. The engines had all died too. No point going on, the drivers slumped, their hands slipped from the wheel—destination nowhere. It was quiet.

  Darwin didn’t own a car. Couldn’t afford it. He’d come on the bus. He could see his return bus from here, dead at the top of the hill. There was a lovely woman’s voice that told you where you were. You could hear her still singing but not quite make out the words. It was automatic. GPS, digital recordings. That sort of thing used to interest Darwin. Not so much anymore now that everyone was dead.

  The traffic lights kept going through their automatic cycles. Safety first. Sure as they stopped, some of these cars would start up again, and the city would be on the hook for a major lawsuit. Darwin found the clunk of their relays reassuring. Darwin had temped in the city’s Risk Management Department for a time, known among the workers as Trip and Fall. They were nice people.