FSF, August-September 2009

by Spilogale, Inc

  I slump back in the chair by the old man and hold on to the edge of the table.

  "Iris hasn't been gone long as you think, see. But she feels bad as you figured on. She's afraid you saw the scars. If she tells you about that, she's worried sick what else she'll have to tell you. And after you start talking about some of the ugliest shit in the world, people start sidling away from you.” The old man scratches his shiny forehead. “You think about it. I got to head on out."

  He's almost to the door.

  I shout, “Wait a minute. Hold on."

  He waits for me to cross the room.

  "Who are you?” I say, although it's not the only question I have or even the most important one.

  "I'm the goddamned tooth fairy,” he says. But he says it gentle like. He sounds tired, too.

  I don't know how to answer him. I watch him leave. I'm standing right by the guy who flips chicken wire boy the bird. Chicken wire boy puts his hand where the basket of fries used to be and snaps a piece of pure air across the room. Nothing hits the calendar this time.

  Nerves shot to hell, I go back to the table me and Iris had been sitting at. What else could I do? I didn't want to try that door out of the Thrill Grill and find I couldn't open it.

  I count eight seconds of silence after the Doors finish their parable of roadkill.

  Nine.

  Grace Slick is singing about pills.

  "Shit,” the chicken-wire guy says. “How'd I do that?"

  He picks up the french fry basket, cursing.

  I let out a long breath that I didn't know I was holding in. I look over at the table where the old man had been. There's no newspaper on it, but I don't remember him taking it with him. I shiver.

  Iris gets back and, holy fuck, I feel like blood's running through my veins again. I make damned sure I talk to her. About anything. I think I rattle on about Callie's fascination with some kids’ TV show for ten minutes or so, but Iris is smiling again.

  She gets a serious, scared little look on her face and says, “Can I ask where Callie's mom is?"

  "Sure. She hasn't moved around much lately.” I try to laugh. “She's dead. Jenny died when Callie was just a few months old.” I know Iris is going to want to know more than that, so I launch into the short version.

  "We were in our sophomore year at college when we met. Fell in love. Got married after we found out she was pregnant. Jenny said she'd sit out school until I had a good job and the baby was a few years old. We didn't have much money and moved into a run-down apartment building with some weird characters living in it. One day some nut from next door broke in, and Jenny must have fought with him because the place was a wreck. He dragged her out on the street and beat her to death with a piece of copper pipe. There were witnesses. Nobody stepped in. Afraid, I guess."

  I stop and focus on the traffic light you can see from the glass front of the grill. It's staining Dodge Street with the only three colors it knows. I watch it turn to yellow and take a deep breath.

  "He just walked away after she stopped moving. Went to this bar down the street called Subby's. I got back from class right after the ambulance left. Some old woman told me they'd said Jenny was dead. My Jenny, my girl of spitfire and sweetness."

  Iris's eyes are bright, watching me. This time the traffic light paints the street with its palette twice before I can go on. Iris just waits. A willingness to allow some white space in a conversation is rare in a woman. Yellow. Red.

  "The old lady described the guy with the pipe. When she mentioned this funny long scarf, I knew who it was. The guy wore that everywhere. Even in summer. His door was standing wide open, apartment empty. I took a chance he might be at that bar I'd seen him in a lot. Tried to wrap that scarf so tight around his neck he'd choke. He ran when a bunch of guys pulled me off, but the cops chased him down. I moved back home after that. Bagged groceries in this town that's got one traffic light. And you know what? Shitty things happen there, too."

  I refill the sugar caddy that I hadn't even realized I'd been emptying down to the last packet. I stack them back up again. Sugar in white on one side, something that promises it's sweeter than sugar in a pink wrapper on the other. Finally I smile at Iris the best I can. It's not a story I like to tell. But I'm glad it's out of the way.

  Iris doesn't say anything even then for a minute. Then she says, “God, that's awful, Ute."

  We finish up our meal talking about stuff that's safe—kids, work, TV.

  She pulls her car into the parking lot at my place, switches off the ignition, and slips her hands around the wheel like she's still driving.

  I want her to tell me about the scars on her arms. I don't want to ask. Jenny was so full of life and she was killed. Iris, somewhere along the way, didn't want to live. Nothing makes sense to me. The only peace I ever get is when I admit to myself nothing makes sense and from what I'd studied of history nothing ever has made sense. People keep living and dying in a world where the facts don't add up to a Grand Unified Theory of jackshit.

  When you get lucky, though, the facts are pretty, the way Dark Iris was pretty, partly because the old man told me about the dog, partly because Iris was with me, partly because Dark Iris accidentally came in first. But what kind of luck are you having when a jukebox gets stuck on the same song? A hamburger joint gets stuck on the same three minutes while some ugly old geezer dishes out advice you don't want to hear?

  "I'm so sorry,” Iris says.

  "What?” I say.

  "About Jenny."

  "Well, it was a long time ago,” I say. “I'm just thankful Callie was such a little baby that she didn't remember anything."

  Iris jangles the keys in her hand and sighs. “Yeah, it's funny how memory works. Your cells are supposed to completely change in seven years’ time, except for brain cells. So you're carrying around memories of a body that doesn't exist anymore. I read that somewhere.” She laughs. “I don't remember where."

  A man out walking his dog goes by the car. The dog's sniffing every spot of grass that's been peed on this week and the man's wearing a Walkman. The black cord hangs down his chest like a dropped leash.

  "What I don't get, if that's true,” she says, “is why scars don't disappear. If cells are gradually replaced, that is, with new ones."

  Taking the time to think on that for a minute, I crack my knuckles and then catch myself. Most women I've met would rather listen to their cat hack up a furball than hear a guy make his hands sound like they're breaking. Iris doesn't act like it bothered her. I get the feeling she's this close to telling me about her dance with death if I don't blow it.

  I clear my throat. “Maybe the scars are replaced with cells that remember what it is to be scarred. New body, new person, but a history recorded in the skin,” I say. “The scars are like home movies, proof that it happened, embarrassing to have somebody else see, but not very important to what you are five, ten years later."

  Iris starts taking her bracelets off. “I shouldn't do this. I should wait until I'm sure you like me—"

  "I like you, Iris—"

  "—before I tell you, but then I'll just dread you finding out."

  Bracelets fill the dashboard, and she reaches over my head, flips on the courtesy light. She matches her wrists together, both with their old, wide scars.

  "You meant business, huh?” I say.

  Her wrists are so small they fit in the palm of my hand.

  "I was seventeen and I was mad at the world. My mom had remarried this jerk, I didn't have any friends I could talk to, and nothing looked like it'd ever work out. I did it one night when they went out to dinner, but Mom came back for theater tickets she'd forgotten and decided she had to pee before she left."

  "Saved by a full bladder,” I say.

  Iris starts laughing and covers her mouth with a hand. I want to cover her mouth with mine.

  She sobers up again. “Yeah, I guess I was. Saved. And you're right about the home movie part—because this,” she turns her wrists out and up
in a motion that's graceful as a swan turning its head, “isn't me anymore."

  She sifts through the bracelets on the dashboard until she finds one made out of that blue and black shell. “Give this to Callie for me, would you? Maybe I don't need all these bracelets."

  I kiss her on her right ear. It's warm from her hair falling over it, warm like the underneath of a bird's wing. I want to hold her. I don't know how to get from here to where I want to be. But I think Iris is patient. The old man said Iris was my best chance. He was right about Dark Iris crossing the finish line. The odds are better than even, me and Iris can find a way together. It's all in your perspective. How hard can it be? Up close and far away, the little stick figures of the people you love and the people you'd like to kill, the boat and the big sun on the horizon, evil shit and good things, all mixed up on that same sheet of paper like a kid's drawing of reality.

  When I get back from walking Shawna home, there's one thing left to do before calling it a night. In Callie's bedroom of little girl frills, I sneak up to her pillow like a thief. Only I'm going to leave the big handful of change and the bracelet Iris gave me for Callie and steal nothing more than a kiss. I slide my hand over the cool sheet, blue in the dark, but white with pink flowers in the light, and lodge the bounty near her head.

  Something colder than the fabric touches my palm and my fingers find it. Maybe Shawna hadn't trusted the tooth fairy to do her job tonight and had left a trinket after Callie had fallen asleep.

  I pull the thing out, a locket trailing a long chain.

  A heart locket.

  The street light edging its way around the lacy curtains glints on the silver. Every hair on my head prickles. I slip behind the curtain to see better, wedging the locket open with a thumbnail.

  When I'd buried Jenny, she wore a locket like this around her neck. It was the only piece of jewelry I'd ever gotten her aside from her wedding band. She loved it, wore it all the time.

  I get the locket open and breathe a sigh of relief—inside was a picture of me and Callie. Not the baby picture of Callie that had been in Jenny's locket. A picture of Callie now. Asleep. A beautiful photo. The nightgown has a bow on it, a little worn, a little catty-cornered.

  I know it before I lean over to check. I know it. Callie's got on the gown that's in the photo. I've never taken a picture of her in that nightie. I tilt the locket to see the photo of me—I'm in a plaid shirt. I usually am. A big smile. I never smile like that when I got a camera gunning me down. To the side of my head is the white curve of something. It takes me a minute to puzzle it out. Looks like a giant tea cup. The coffee cup billboard at Bluffs Run. My hand is shaking like I've just downed a whole pot of coffee. I manage to pry up an edge of the photo. A tiny inscription is on the back of the white heart—love, the goddamned tooth fairy.

  For a long time I stand there with my forehead touching the glass of Callie's window, watching nothing happen in the alley, holding that locket like a fat silver ticket.

  Novelet: THE BONES OF GIANTS by Yoon Ha Lee

  Yoon Ha Lee's last F&SF story was “The Unstrung Zither” in our April/May issue. Now she regales us with an exotic and elegant fantasy.

  Whatever else might be said of the sorcerer who ruled the rim of the Pit, he had never been able to raise the bones of giants. The bones lay scattered in the rimlands, green-gray with moss and crusted with crystals, whorled with the fingerprints of desperate travelers. The bones did not easily surrender fingerprints. The locals considered it bad luck to leave their marks on the giants’ bones.

  Tamim was sitting in the lee of a rock and had raised his gun to his head when the giants’ bones embedded in the hill shook themselves free of earth. He knew that the gun wasn't going to be of any use against the bones. He knew of only two ways to destroy ghouls: lure them past the rimlands’ borders so they would crumble into dust, or pierce them through the heart with jade.

  The border was days away. Tamim had used the last of his jade bullets escaping a vulture patrol.

  His finger hesitated on the trigger.

  "You shouldn't do that,” a girl's voice, or a young woman's, called from the other side of the rock.

  He shouldn't have let his guard down, even for a suicide attempt. Maybe especially for a suicide attempt. The sorcerer's Vulture Corps was always happy to collect corpses.

  Tamim edged around the rock. He didn't like leaving bones at his back, but they were taking their time assembling themselves, as though unseen ligaments were growing at each joint. Their clattering made him jumpy. Assess the threat, he reminded himself, then decide.

  The girl was in plain sight. She had brown skin like Tamim's own and long black hair in tangles down to her waist, too long to be practical, the kind an aristocrat might have. No aristocrat, however, would have been caught in that high-collared black coat.

  Tamim knew the rimlands’ sumptuary laws, knew what the black coat meant: vulture, and necromancer besides. He aimed and fired.

  He must have made some noise to alert her. She ran toward him, ducking at the right moment. The bullet missed her by inches; a lock of hair drifted free. “I'm not what you think, boy,” she said breathlessly. She barely came up to his shoulder. Her hand, surprisingly strong, caught his and twisted the gun to point at the ground between them.

  Five bullets left, but he wanted to save one for himself. Admittedly, at this range he was more likely to shoot himself if he tried again. That wasn't even taking into account the girl's reflexes. “What are you, then?"

  "I'm no vulture,” she said. “I'm alone out here. I need help, and I'll take what I can find, whether it comes in the shape of a giant or a boy who looks half-ghoul himself.” She stared directly into his eyes as she released her grip on the gun.

  Tamim made a frustrated noise and holstered the gun. A soldier wasn't supposed to feel curiosity, but today he had forfeited any claim to being a soldier. “You're the one raising the bones,” he pointed out.

  He had been wrong about the skeleton. There were two of them, not one, entangled oddly from aeons in the earth's embrace.

  The girl took her attention off Tamim for a moment. She laced her fingers together, then pulled them apart. In a rush, the bones separated into two skeletons. Loam, uprooted grass, and glittering gravel showered both Tamim and the girl. Dust swirled in the shape of grinning skulls, then settled. The girl paid it no heed. Apparently she was as accustomed to the rimlands’ behavior as he was.

  "There,” she said with evident satisfaction. “What do you think? One's yours, of course."

  He stared at her stonily.

  "It's not like I can ride two of them at once,” she said, as if she made perfect sense and he were the slow one. “You haven't run screaming yet. That's always useful."

  Clearly the world had plans for him other than suicide today. “I was reared by the undead,” Tamim said. His mother, a woman with a brilliant smile and an aristocrat's long, slender hands, had given him into the care of a company of ghouls, reasoning that it would prepare him to survive in the rimlands and eventually take up her cause. But one by one his caretakers had fallen apart, rotting teeth and decaying eyes, a toe here and a loop of shriveled intestine there.

  His mother had died attempting to assassinate the sorcerer when Tamim was a child. The undead did not fall apart immediately upon their creator's death, but lingered for a span of years proportionate to the creator's skill. Tamim's mother, for all her ambitions, had not been a particularly skilled necromancer. He had a dim memory of crying when the last of his caretakers ceased to move, even the mindless, instinctive creeping of a rotted finger toward the hand. It had been the last time he cried.

  The girl nodded as though his childhood was unremarkable. Perhaps it was, from a necromancer's point of view. “Right or left?” she said.

  Involuntarily, Tamim looked up at the giants. The one on the left had a long, narrow skull and cracked teeth. Curiously, spurs extended from the back, as though wings had been broken off. The one on the right had
a broader visage and no spurs, and its left arm was longer than the right.

  "I don't know your name,” Tamim said. “Why should I take up with a necromancer?” He hadn't known that any necromancers remained in the rimlands who did not serve the sorcerer. The Pit was death, and the sorcerer controlled the Pit: ergo necromancers served he who ruled death. The rest had fled to the lands beyond the Pit, or died in a hundred small rebellions. The sorcerer was not notable for his sense of mercy.

  "I'm Sakera,” she said. “Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. I'll make you a bargain, O soldier"—her eyes alighted briefly on the gun—"who wishes to die. Help me bring down the sorcerer, and at the journey's end I will give you the death you desire."

  The gun was an unbalancing weight at his hip. He had lived with such things all his life. “How long a journey?” Then, realizing that he was actually considering it, he added, “I don't need your help to kill myself."

  "Months,” Sakera said. “But I've seen what happens when you miss with a gun. You might live out the rest of your days as a mangled thing with less mind than a ghoul. With a necromancer, death can be certain. It can even be swift."

  "I'm not that incompetent.” He had long years of practice killing.

  "No, I imagine not.” Her voice was brisk. “Let's put it another way, then. There can't be many necromancers left in the rimlands. If you're no vulture-friend, I may be your best chance of getting rid of the sorcerer."

  "I don't trust you,” Tamim said. Tact had never been one of his strengths. Among other things, it was wasted on ghouls.

  "You don't need to trust me,” Sakera said. “You just need to believe me."

  It disappointed him that she wanted to kill the sorcerer. Tamim had no fondness for the man's reign, but he suspected that Sakera meant to replace the sorcerer. Some traitorously sentimental part of Tamim had expected better from this girl, for all that he had met her only minutes ago.

  Sakera made a fist, rotated it, then opened her fingers. The lopsided skeleton knelt before her. She clambered up the bones and sat on one of the kneecaps, legs dangling. “Or I could leave you to die in the giants’ shadow, before I take this one away,” she said. “Your choice. But I hope you come with me. It will be a lonely journey to the sorcerer's palace otherwise."