by Neil Gaiman
“Silly girl, acushla,” said her mother. And then she said, “I was thinking of your father.” She spoke the truth, and the March winds blew madness about them.
April Tale
YOU KNOW YOU’VE BEEN pushing the ducks too hard when they stop trusting you, and my father had been taking the ducks for everything he could since the previous summer.
He’d walk down to the pond. “Hey, ducks,” he’d say to the ducks.
By January they’d just swim away. One particularly irate drake—we called him Donald, but only behind his back, ducks are sensitive to that kind of thing—would hang around and berate my father. “We ain’t interested,” he’d say. “We don’t want to buy nothing you’re selling: not life insurance, not encyclopedias, not aluminum siding, not safety matches, and especially not damp-proofing.”
“ ‘Double or nothing’!” quacked a particularly indignant mallard. “Sure, you’ll toss us for it. With a double-sided quarter . . . !”
The ducks, who had got to examine the quarter in question when my father had dropped it into the pond, all honked in agreement, and drifted elegantly and grumpily to the other side of the pond.
My father took it personally. “Those ducks,” he said. “They were always there. Like a cow you could milk. They were suckers—the best kind. The kind you could go back to again and again. And I queered the pitch.”
“You need to make them trust you again,” I told him. “Or better still, you could just start being honest. Turn over a new leaf. You have a real job now.”
He worked at the village inn, opposite the duck pond.
My father did not turn over a new leaf. He barely even turned over the old leaf. He stole fresh bread from the inn kitchens, he took unfinished bottles of red wine, and he went down to the duck pond to win the ducks’ trust.
All of March he entertained them, he fed them, he told them jokes, he did whatever he could to soften them up. It was not until April, when the world was all puddles, and the trees were new and green and the world had shaken off winter, that he brought out a pack of cards.
“How about a friendly game?” asked my father. “Not for money?”
The ducks eyed each other nervously. “I don’t know . . . ,” some of them muttered, warily.
Then one elderly mallard I did not recognize extended a wing graciously. “After so much fresh bread, after so much good wine, we would be churlish to refuse your offer. Perhaps, gin rummy? Or happy families?”
“How about poker?” said my father, with his poker face on, and the ducks said yes.
My father was so happy. He didn’t even have to suggest that they start playing for money, just to make the game more interesting—the elderly mallard did that.
I’d learned a little over the years about dealing off the bottom: I’d watch my father sitting in our room at night, practicing, over and over, but that old mallard could have taught my father a thing or two. He dealt from the bottom. He dealt from the middle. He knew where every card in that deck was, and it just took a flick of the wing to put them exactly where he wanted them.
The ducks took my father for everything: his wallet, his watch, his shoes, his snuffbox, and the clothes he stood up in. If the ducks had accepted a boy as a bet, he would have lost me as well, and perhaps, in a lot of ways, he did.
He walked back to the inn in just his underwear and socks. Ducks don’t like socks, they said. It’s a duck thing.
“At least you kept your socks,” I told him.
That was the April that my father learned not to trust ducks.
May Tale
IN MAY I RECEIVED an anonymous Mother’s Day card. This puzzled me. I would have noticed if I had ever had children, surely?
In June I found a notice saying, “Normal Service Will Be Resumed as Soon as Possible,” taped to my bathroom mirror, along with several small tarnished copper coins of uncertain denomination and origin.
In July I received three postcards, at weekly intervals, all postmarked from the Emerald City of Oz, telling me the person who sent them was having a wonderful time, and asking me to remind Doreen about changing the locks on the back door and to make certain that she had canceled the milk. I do not know anyone named Doreen.
In August someone left a box of chocolates on my doorstep. It had a sticker attached saying it was evidence in an important legal case, and under no circumstances were the chocolates inside to be eaten before they had been dusted for fingerprints. The chocolates had melted in the August heat into a squidgy brown mass, and I threw the whole box away.
In September I received a package containing Action Comics #1, a first folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and a privately published copy of a novel by Jane Austen I was unfamiliar with, called Wit and Wilderness. I have little interest in comics, Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, and I left the books in the back bedroom. They were gone a week later, when I needed something to read in the bath, and went looking.
In October I found a notice saying, “Normal Service Will Be Resumed as Soon as Possible. Honest,” taped to the side of the goldfish tank. Two of the goldfish appeared to have been taken and replaced by identical substitutes.
In November I received a ransom note telling me exactly what to do if ever I wished to see my Uncle Theobald alive again. I do not have an Uncle Theobald, but I wore a pink carnation in my buttonhole and ate nothing but salads for the entire month anyway.
In December I received a Christmas card postmarked THE NORTH POLE, letting me know that, this year, due to a clerical error, I was on neither the Naughty nor the Nice list. It was signed with a name that began with an S. It might have been Santa but it seemed more like Steve.
In January I woke to find someone had painted SECURE YOUR OWN MASK BEFORE HELPING OTHERS on the ceiling of my tiny kitchen, in vermilion paint. Some of the paint had dripped onto the floor.
In February a man came over to me at the bus stop and showed me the black statue of a falcon in his shopping bag. He asked for my help keeping it safe from the Fat Man, and then he saw someone behind me and he ran away.
In March I received three pieces of junk mail, the first telling me I might have already won a million dollars, the second telling me that I might already have been elected to the Académie Française, and the last telling me I might already have been installed as the titular head of the Holy Roman Empire.
In April I found a note on my bedside table apologizing for the problems in service, and assuring me that henceforward all faults in the universe had now been remedied forever. WE APOLOGIZE OF THE INCONVENIENTS, it concluded.
In May I received another Mother’s Day card. Not anonymous, this time. It was signed, but I could not read the signature. It started with an S but it almost definitely wasn’t Steve.
June Tale
MY PARENTS DISAGREE. IT’S what they do. They do more than disagree. They argue. About everything. I’m still not sure that I understand how they ever stopped arguing about things long enough to get married, let alone to have me and my sister.
My mum believes in the redistribution of wealth, and thinks that the big problem with Communism is it doesn’t go far enough. My dad has a framed photograph of the Queen on his side of the bed, and he votes as Conservative as he can. My mum wanted to name me Susan. My dad wanted to name me Henrietta, after his aunt. Neither of them would budge an inch. I am the only Susietta in my school or, probably, anywhere. My sister’s name is Alismima, for similar reasons.
There is nothing that they agree on, not even the temperature. My dad is always too hot, my mum always too cold. They turn the radiators on and off, open and close windows, whenever the other one goes out of the room. My sister and I get colds all year, and we think that’s probably why.
They couldn’t even agree on what month we’d go on holiday. Dad said definitely August, Mum said unquestionably July. Which meant we wound up having to take our summer holiday in June, inconveniencing everybody.
Then they couldn’t decide where to go. Dad was set on pony trekkin
g in Iceland, while Mum was only willing to compromise as far as a camelback caravan across the Sahara, and both of them simply looked at us as if we were being a bit silly when we suggested that we’d quite like to sit on a beach in the South of France or somewhere. They stopped arguing long enough to tell us that that wasn’t going to happen, and neither was a trip to Disneyland, and then they went back to disagreeing with each other.
They finished the Where Are We Going for Our Holidays in June Disagreement by slamming a lot of doors and shouting a lot of things like “Right then!” at each other through them.
When the inconvenient holiday rolled around, my sister and I were only certain of one thing: we weren’t going anywhere. We took a huge pile of books out of the library, as many as we could between us, and prepared to listen to lots of arguing for the next ten days.
Then the men came in vans and brought things into the house and started to install them.
Mum had them put a sauna in the cellar. They poured masses of sand onto the floor. They hung a sunlamp from the ceiling. She put a towel on the sand beneath the sunlamp, and she’d lie down on it. She had pictures of sand dunes and camels taped to the cellar walls until they peeled off in the extreme heat.
Dad had the men put the fridge—the biggest fridge he could find, so big you could walk into it—in the garage. It filled the garage so completely that he had to start parking the car in the driveway. He’d get up in the morning, dress warmly in a thick Icelandic wool sweater, he’d get a book and thermos-flask filled with hot cocoa, and some Marmite and cucumber sandwiches, and he’d head in there in the morning with a huge smile on his face, and not come out until dinner.
I wonder if anybody else has a family as weird as mine. My parents never agree on anything at all.
“Did you know Mum’s been putting her coat on and sneaking into the garage in the afternoons?” said my sister suddenly, while we were sitting in the garden, reading our library books.
I didn’t, but I’d seen Dad wearing just his bathing trunks and dressing gown heading down into the cellar that morning to be with Mum, with a big, goofy smile on his face.
I don’t understand parents. Honestly, I don’t think anybody ever does.
July Tale
THE DAY THAT MY wife walked out on me, saying she needed to be alone and to have some time to think things over, on the first of July, when the sun beat down on the lake in the center of the town, when the corn in the meadows that surrounded my house was knee-high, when the first few rockets and firecrackers were let off by overenthusiastic children to startle us and to speckle the summer sky, I built an igloo out of books in my backyard.
I used paperbacks to build it, scared of the weight of falling hardbacks or encyclopedias if I didn’t build it soundly.
But it held. It was twelve feet high, and had a tunnel, through which I could crawl to enter, to keep out the bitter arctic winds.
I took more books into the igloo I had made out of books, and I read in there. I marveled at how warm and comfortable I was inside. As I read the books, I would put them down, make a floor out of them, and then I got more books, and I sat on them, eliminating the last of the green July grass from my world.
My friends came by the next day. They crawled on their hands and knees into my igloo. They told me I was acting crazy. I told them that the only thing that stood between me and the winter’s cold was my father’s collection of 1950s paperbacks, many of them with racy titles and lurid covers and disappointingly staid stories.
My friends left.
I sat in my igloo imagining the arctic night outside, wondering whether the Northern Lights would be filling the sky above me. I looked out, but saw only a night filled with pinprick stars.
I slept in my igloo made of books. I was getting hungry. I made a hole in the floor, lowered a fishing line and waited until something bit. I pulled it up: a fish made of books—green-covered vintage Penguin detective stories. I ate it raw, fearing a fire in my igloo.
When I went outside I observed that someone had covered the whole world with books: pale-covered books, all shades of white and blue and purple. I wandered the ice floes of books.
I saw someone who looked like my wife out there on the ice. She was making a glacier of autobiographies.
“I thought you left me,” I said to her. “I thought you left me alone.”
She said nothing, and I realized she was only a shadow of a shadow.
It was July, when the sun never sets in the Arctic, but I was getting tired, and I started back towards the igloo.
I saw the shadows of the bears before I saw the bears themselves: huge they were, and pale, made of the pages of fierce books: poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear-shape, filled with words that could wound with their beauty. I could see the paper, and the words winding across them, and I was frightened that the bears could see me.
I crept back to my igloo, avoiding the bears. I may have slept in the darkness. And then I crawled out, and I lay on my back on the ice and stared up at the unexpected colors of the shimmering Northern Lights, and listened to the cracks and snaps of the distant ice as an iceberg of fairy tales calved from a glacier of books on mythology.
I do not know when I became aware that there was someone else lying on the ground near to me. I could hear her breathing.
“They are very beautiful, aren’t they?” she said.
“It is aurora borealis, the Northern Lights,” I told her.
“It’s the town’s Fourth of July fireworks, baby,” said my wife.
She held my hand and we watched the fireworks together.
When the last of the fireworks had vanished in a cloud of golden stars, she said, “I came home.”
I didn’t say anything. But I held her hand very tightly, and I left my igloo made of books, and I went with her back into the house we lived in, basking like a cat in the July heat.
I heard distant thunder, and in the night, while we slept, it began to rain, tumbling my igloo of books, washing away the words from the world.
August Tale
THE FOREST FIRES STARTED early that August. All the storms that might have dampened the world went south of us, and they took their rain with them. Each day we would see the helicopters going over above us, with their cargoes of lake water ready to drop on the distant flames.
Peter, who is Australian, and owns the house in which I live, cooking for him, and tending the place, said, “In Australia, the eucalypts use fire to survive. Some eucalyptus seeds won’t germinate unless a forest fire has gone through and cleared out all the undergrowth. They need the intense heat.”
“Weird thought,” I said. “Something hatching out of the flames.”
“Not really,” said Peter. “Very normal. Probably a lot more normal when the Earth was hotter.”
“Hard to imagine a world any hotter than this.”
He snorted. “This is nothing,” he said, and then talked about intense heat he had experienced in Australia when he was younger.
The next morning the TV news said that people in our area were advised to evacuate their property: we were in a high-risk area for fire.
“Load of old tosh,” said Peter, crossly. “It’ll never cause a problem for us. We’re on high ground, and we’ve got the creek all around us.”
When the water was high, the creek could be four, even five feet deep. Now it was no more than a foot, or two at the most.
By late afternoon, the smell of woodsmoke was heavy on the air, and the TV and the radio were both telling us to get out, now, if we could. We smiled at each other, and drank our beers, and congratulated each other on our understanding of a difficult situation, on not panicking, on not running away.
“We’re complacent, humanity,” I said. “All of us. People. We see the leaves cooking on the trees on a hot August day, and we still don’t believe anything’s really going to change. Our empires will go on forever.”
“Nothing lasts forever,” said Peter, and he poured himse
lf another beer and told me about a friend of his back in Australia who had stopped a bushfire burning down the family farm by pouring beer on the little fires whenever they sprang up.
The fire came down the valley towards us like the end of the world, and we realized how little protection the creek would be. The air itself was burning.
We fled then, at last, pushing ourselves, coughing in the choking smoke, ran down the hill until we reached the creek, and we lay down in it, with only our heads above the water.
From the inferno we saw them hatch from the flames, and rise, and fly. They reminded me of birds, pecking at the flaming ruins of the house on the hill. I saw one of them lift its head, and call out triumphantly. I could hear it over the crackling of the burning leaves, over the roar of the flames. I heard the call of the phoenix, and I understood that nothing lasts forever.
A hundred birds of fire ascended into the skies as the creek water began to boil.
September Tale
MY MOTHER HAD A ring in the shape of a lion’s head. She used it to do small magics—find parking spaces, make the queue she was in at the supermarket move a bit faster, make the squabbling couple at the next table stop squabbling and fall in love again, that sort of thing. She left it to me when she died.
The first time I lost it I was in a café. I think I had been fiddling with it nervously, pulling it off my finger, putting it on again. Only when I got home did I realize that I was no longer wearing it.
I returned to the café, but there was no sign of it.
Several days later, it was returned to me by a taxi driver, who had found it on the pavement outside the café. He told me my mother had appeared to him in a dream and given him my address and her recipe for old-fashioned cheesecake.
The second time I lost the ring I was leaning over a bridge, idly tossing pinecones into the river below. I didn’t think it was loose, but the ring left my hand with a pinecone. I watched its arc as it fell. It landed in the wet dark mud at the edge of the river with a loud pollup noise, and was gone.
