That night, I wasn’t going to read. I usually read a new poem every week: some magic trick of metaphor about fear or death, or the fear of death, depending on the week. But this week, before the end, I just stopped. The words had walked out like so many lovers.
She was the last one to read. I couldn’t see the stage, and wanted a glance. All I heard was the crumple of paper and the sigh right before she spoke.
Her voice was a river, words running smooth through the smoke, but unsteady, scared, currents shifting between stanzas. She read with a shaky cadence, but couldn’t stop.
I heard the crackling of fire. Her voice tried to run faster, but she couldn’t put the fire out. When the heat came, I got up, stumbling through the smoke to the crisp night air, exhaling smoke from my lungs. I just ran. I ran until I couldn’t remember her words or what she’d said to make the fire stop.
I found the edge and fell.
BEN PEEK
Ben Peek is the author of Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth and Black Sheep. His website is www.benpeek.com.
What am I looking at here?
A Swiss Guard.
I can see that it is a Swiss Guard.
Tell me that we don’t fund this.
This is our inside man at the Vatican City, Sir.
…
You’re shitting me?
No, Sir.
Our inside man is a Swiss fucking Guard?
Yes, Sir.
Christ.
What nationality is he?
A mix, according to his file. Mother was born in China to a Chinese man and Swedish woman, and his father was Russian, Samoan, and a bit of Koori, it seems. However, the nationality of both their parents include German, American, Japanese, Chinese again, and Iraqi. The list does go on, I’m afraid.
So he’s a mongrel?
I prefer to think that he’s a product of the globalised world.
I ain’t saying it’s a bad thing.
Just the term you used, sir.
We’re a progressive organization, right?
That’s our charter.
That’s why being a mongrel ain’t bad.
That’s why I fund someone to watch the Vatican City.
There’s nothing progressive about this place. It’s a tiny, isolated country that’s supposedly sitting on sacred dirt. Fucking stupid idea that is. What’s worse is that the six hundred people who are the citizens of this sacred dirt are living behind a fucking wall—which in itself is a big metaphor put into reality that points to the world wide influencing thought coming out of the place.
I’m afraid you’re losing me, sir.
I’m just talking aloud.
He religious?
Yes.
What kind?
He claims to be a Buddhist-Islamic-Jewish-Catholic-Pagan living the honest Agnostic-Humanitarian world.
What, no atheism?
It’s not a faith, apparently.
Oh.
…
Well, he sounds like a fucking nut. I should definitely approve to continue his funding in such an important area.
Psychological profiling claims that he is both highly intelligent and creative, sir, with a pathological dislike for being compartmentalised.
Apparently forms are a part of that.
So all that shit’s a lie?
Hmm.
Apparently not, according to his file.
Huh.
Jesus, tell me he does his job right?
He’s brilliant at it, sir.
Nothing happens in Vatican City without his knowledge. It was he who brought us the transcripts of the Cardinals in the last Pope election.
Didn’t he transcribe that in Latin?
Yes, sir.
What else has he got going for him?
He speaks thirteen different languages, is proficient in small arms and explosives, has killed sixteen men, three women, and forty-two children that were born to virgins. We’re currently trying to verify the last one there, sir.
It is perhaps also of interest to note that, according to his profilers, he would turn upon us in an instant if we made him obsolete.
In an instant?
Yes, sir.
How’d my predecessor view him?
With utter fear, sir.
Shit, huh?
He ever given us problems?
No, Sir.
Model employee outside his eccentrics.
Approve the fuck for the year, then.
Very good, sir.
One last question, though, before we move on.
Yes?
The name?
Something his mother used to say, I believe.
HOLLY PHILLIPS
Holly Phillips is the author of In the Palace of Repose and The Engine’s Child. She is Canadian. www.hollyphillips.com
Last Drink Bird Head lifts her iron beak from the dry-dust lakebed that lies white as parchment under the waning moon. She lifts her head, the long chain rattling, and looks at the moon; the moon looks back at the pitted earth and sees nothing but an iron figure bowing amidst a frozen iron crowd. She bows, lone and lonely, and the chain rasps down, its rattling sigh the only sound besides the dry-joint groans of Last Drink Bird Head herself. She bows, she bows.
The dead lake is a flat-bottomed crater rimmed in by bare stone hills; they make a pale and ragged barricade against the stars. There is no emptier place in the world. Last Drink Bird Head’s dead flock stand around her, closed beaks chained to the dust, changeless as the hills. They are untouched by rust in this rainless graveyard; they are even polished by the dust-laden wind when it blows. Rough black monuments under the moonlight, someday they will shine under the relentless sun, dull iron rubbed up to a subtle gleam of blue. A fortune of metal bones, a treasury no one is left here to spend.
Last Drink Bird Head rears up against the stars. Again she rears, again she bows, rattle and groan. The dead city stands far off on its dry islands, tile roofs painted a dried-blood black by the thin light, but with its plastered walls still shining. Silent as the dead lake, silent as the dead world impaling itself on the peaks of the western hills. The moon casts its last shadows across the dust. Last Drink Bird Head feels the chill of her dead neighbor’s shade. It is the only touch she has known for an uncounted number of rising suns and setting moons, the hot shadow of evening, the cold shadow before the too-quick dawn. So different from the stroke of oil, the clench of wrenches, the fleeting warmth of hands.
She bows. The chain rattles into its housing. The piston falls the long fall into the earth. She bows her iron bird’s head to the dust, and with the cold iron heart of her captivity, touches life. She rears, raising her head to peck at the falling moon, the turning indifferent stars, and water rises like blood pumped into a vein, and chuckles like a second silvery chain spilling out of the broken pipe and into the vanishing dust. A slender chain, too fine to hold her, and she knows it has a broken end. Soon that end will spill itself onto the dry earth and vanish. Soon there will be nothing in the world but the rasp of the iron chain, the groan of the iron joints. And then? Will she bow her head a last time and stop there like all her kind, kissing dust?
Or will she rear her head, and stand tall against the stars? Will she break her chain at last, and walk, her iron feet printing the dust? Will she claim the world she has drained dry?
LOUIS PHILLIPS
Louis Phillips’ latest book—Fireworks in Some Particulars—will be published by Fort Schuyler Press this fall.
Last Drink Bird Head was the name of a pub outside of Manchester, so when the owners migrated to the United States and started life anew in our town of Waverly, they opened a restaurant (no liquor allowed in our dry state) with the same god-awful name. It was in the Last Drink Bird Head that the Waverly School Board met twice a month, on Thursday evenings, to thrash out the problems of the day. The five men (actually four men and one woman) also thrashed out the problems of the week, the month, the year. I am Edward H. Hodgman, and I head the board. I own th
e Hodgman Hardware Store, so you can readily see I am not as good at naming things as the English are. The other members are Joan Drinkwater, the postmistress; Albert Garment, the grocer; Somers Weaver, the owner of Last Drink Bird Head; Pastor Oliver Mannix, who heads our Baptist Church.
On the second Thursday in November, Joan Drinkwater entered the restaurant, clutching a small black book. She was obviously distraught and it did not take long to discover why. “”My daughter Olivia brought this book home from our high school today and I could not be more mortified, more embarrassed,” she said as she peeled off her raincoat and took her seat.
“What’s wrong with the book?” asked Somers. It was his job to distribute the Last Drink Bird Head menus. It was, after all, his restaurant. No bar allowed.
“Look at it!” She almost shouted the words. “It’s filth. Absolute filth. Whoever ordered this book and recommended my daughter read it should be fired. This book will never return to the school as long as I am alive.”
Naturally, we were eager to see the book. Because I enjoy seniority, I took the book first and could see right away that Joan was correct. There were obscene drawings upon every page. Women. Naked women!
Pastor Mannix practically tore the hardbound volume from my hand. He turned the pages rapidly, his head nodding up and down like a jackhammer.
“Listen to this,” he said. “‘The woman took her lover in her arms and gasped, “I want you. I want you.”’ I ask you: is this fit reading for our students?”
“Who’s the author?” asked the restaurant owner.
“Does it matter?” asked Joan. Her hands trembled as she poured herself some water.
“No author is listed,” the Pastor replied. “No title page.”
“No wonder,” Joan said. “He knew he’d be arrested.”
“Let me look,” the grocer asked. The book was reluctantly passed his way. Albert touched his forefinger to his tongue, then touched his finger to the book. He slowly turned the pages. “Terrible! Terrible!” he moaned. “There are photographs here. Men and women doing things with animals that should not be done. Disgusting. And here is a poem that starts, ‘Did Helen show her naked breast to Menelaus to woo him back?’”
“Disgusting.”
“Filth.”
“What shall we do?” asked the Pastor.
“Fire the librarian, of course.”
“Of course,” added the grocer. “But the teachers who assigned it must be brought to account.”
I took a few notes. “We need to go through the library and burn all inappropriate books,” I suggested.
Somers, the owner of Last Drink Bird Head, took the book from the table and studied it.
“Yes. I always hated seeing The Grapes of Wrath on the shelf,” Joan said.
“And Catcher in the Rye.”
“This will be our chance to do right, to get our children back on the straight and narrow.” the Pastor announced. He ordered the roast chicken. He always ordered the roast chicken.
“Wait,” said Somers. “Something’s not right.”
“What’s not right?” asked Joan. She closed the menu. “I am too upset to eat.”
“All the pages of this book are blank.”
“What?”
“Look,” Somers stood up and riffled the pages. “There is nothing on these pages. This is a sketch book used in art classes.”
There was a long pause. As we waited for our dinners, each of us took turns studying the book.
Indeed the pages were devoid of writing and pictures. No photographs. “Well, this is much worse than we thought, “ I said.
“Yes,” Joan added, “Now our students will imagine even more terrible things.”
“Then we must ban it,” the Pastor said.
Although Somers hesitated, he too was brought around to our way of thinking.
TIM PRATT
Tim Pratt is a writer of various things. He lives in Oakland, California and has a website: www.timpratt.org
With Darla gone there was nobody to save me from myself, so I sat on the last stool in Doubleshot Henry’s bar downing girlie drinks—chocolate martinis, fuzzy navels, strawberry-kiwi mojitos, all that stuff Darla liked. Henry never asked, just poured what I ordered. Tuesday night with a near-empty bar, and if Henry ever hollered last call I didn’t hear, but when I asked for a blue bird—that’s a drink with a cherry in it—Henry said “Nope, sorry, bar’s closed, and this is the only bird you’re getting.”
He dropped a dusty gray thing the size of a football on the bar. “Last drink bird head,” he said, and I thought I’d had a stroke and picked up aphasia like Darla’s mother got, where one word sounds like another and everybody jabbers nonsense. “Take it and get the fuck out of here.”
My belly swirled from all the cream and fruit and sweet, but I said “Wha?” and staggered back.
“You come through that door, and you’re the last one drinking, you take the bird head for the night, that’s the rule.”
I squinted at the bird head. Beak like a scythe blade and eyes I hoped were black glass. It usually hung up behind the bar with the snowshoes and signs advertising obsolete soap and other stuff from the nail-old-crap-to-the-wall school of bar decoration. I’d heard some of the other regulars mutter about the bird head, but me and Darla just popped in for drinks during happy hour, when mojitos were half-price and beer was cheap if you didn’t mind Pabst. But quiet Henry was yelling at me, so I didn’t ask, just scooped up the bird head and carried it out.
Home was up a sidewalk and around a corner to an apartment with no couch or TV or Darla, and I thought about throwing the bird head into the bushes, but didn’t, since Henry had forearms like a cartoon superhero. I fell into bed with the bird head in my arms, dusty musty smell in my face. I dreamed I was chained to a rock, with a giant bird dipping its beak into my guts and tearing off hunks of my liver, then flying around in drunken circles. I didn’t like it much on that rock.
I woke up with a hangover and clarity, and called in sick to work again.
I carried the bird head up to Doubleshot Henry’s as soon as it opened.
Henry was behind the bar, and I put the bird head down. He nodded and hung it back up on the wall somehow.
“Henry, I had this dream—”
“I don’t care,” he said, putting both hands against his ears. “When will you people understand that I don’t care?” He glared at me until I guess he figured I wasn’t going to say anything more, then said “What are you drinking?”
I thought about it a minute and said “A beer and a shot.”
CAT RAMBO
Cat Rambo’s collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, was recently published by Paper Golem Press. She lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.
I knew two of them, you know. Improbable as that may seem.
One I’d known back when he was just a down-headed youth, gawky and big-eyed. He hung around down near the shoreline, looking for sand fleas and chasing piperbirds. In the summer, when there were too many tourists, he went into the marsh and tried to find caves that would lead to the Underworld. Disappointed and covered with mosquito bites, he’d wash up and spend the muggy evenings drinking tomato beers and watching the sippy toy behind the bar bob up and down, up and down. They said he’d stay past the last drink, that was how he got the name. Bird Head—who knows.
The other was a mechanical man, his head covered with brass pinions, clattering feathers that rustled like a pangolin’s when he walked. He was a guide, but a bad one. People said you’d be taking your last drink in the swamp, if you trusted yourself in his clockwork fingers. It got so tourists would flee the sight of him. He never talked about either name, but you could see the flat plates and gears of his skull grinding underneath the bells of his plumage, shaping a subtle music that meant nothing.
Maybe they were the same—I get confused sometimes. Maybe there was flesh underneath the metal scales, or ironmongery underneath the glove of his blotchy, insect-marked skin. Or
layers upon layers, all the way down, and only the sound of his thoughts at the core. Maybe one imagined the other.
Maybe they imagined me.
MARK RICH
Mark Rich is author of C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, as well as several collections of short fiction. He and lifemate Martha and Scottie-dog Lorna live, garden, and go antiquing in the Wisconsin Coulee region.
Old times. Sleep. Meals of chicken and cabbage, and the smell through the house: cranberry sauce cooking. Slicing oranges. Maybe all memory: antique Santa figures hanging from the door frame. And you remember that dark-haired girl was behind the bar now working, looking away with saddened eyes: and you thought of her there closing the bar and going home in the dark. And, well, Nick, you left because you spent your two dollars; you had your beers; you drifted off into the night yourself, finished. In too many ways, finished. You stayed finished for what was it? For years. Ever speak to her again? Not that you ever did in the first place. So, no, you did not: and such wonderful foolishness leads to years such as this, brightness and cold over the village, Nell at her chicken soup, an improbable contentment having settled over life in general. The Christmas carol plays from the Lutheran church tower and it is that same tune again you heard at two in the dark morning when you thought dawn must be cloaked in full guise of deep-winter stretching-into-day night: only it was an error in the stupid electrical gizmos controlling their tolling bell-chime fakery of carillons spreading medieval Wenceslas over the village that should be sleeping and was sleeping but for the wakeful fool Nicholas awaiting sleep’s return and finding himself ticking through dreams of the past that are no longer regrets, just bricks; just folded-over grass on an afternoon after the geese have left; just some dust to be swept up; just some dust and hair.
BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS
Bruce Holland Rogers is the author of the novel Ashes of the Sun, the nonfiction book Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer, and multiple collections of short stories, including the World Fantasy Award-winning The Keyhole Opera. He has also won a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, two Nebula Awards, and the World Fantasy Award for his story “Don Ysidro.”
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