Last Drink Bird Head

by Jeff VanderMeer

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Michael Swanwick has been awarded the Nebula, Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards for his fiction. He has also written several hundred pieces of flash fiction.

  The avicephalus walked into the bar, its frill ruffled and its beak clacking, the way they do when they’re spoiling for a fight. It acted like it owned the place. Which it didn’t. Not literally. But we both knew what the score was.

  I smiled blandly. “What’ll you have?”

  “Gimme a Singapore sling, ape face.” The avicephalus went over to the aquarium, eyed its contents skeptically, and then speared a neon tetra. The strike was so fast it barely made a splash. It threw back its head and swallowed. “Not much of a selection,” it grumbled.

  “Mostly, they’re just decorative.”

  The avicephalus took a stool. Their bodies were enough like ours that they could do that.

  I finished mixing the drink and set it down in front of the alien. Then I glanced at the clock. 9:57 a.m. Avicephali were early drinkers. This one drank down the first glass in a single gulp. “Another.”

  I made a second drink, set it down. Taking a chance, I said, “That’ll be twelve bucks. No charge for the fish.”

  The avicephalus drew itself up, outraged. Its frill narrowed and lay down low on its head, the way they do just before they strike. It fixed me with those crazy orange eyes. “Do I look like a fool, monkey nose? Do I look like somebody who thinks we conquered this backwater planet just so I can take lip from some hick hominid bartender?”

  “No, sir,” I said. Everybody knew that arguing with an alien was a good way to lose an eye. It was 9:59 now.

  “Damn straight, I don’t. So from now on I expect you to—why do you keep looking at the time?”

  “For that,” I said. It was 10:00 on the dot.

  Outside, a bright light blossomed. It was the Planetary Control HQ going up.

  While the avicephalus gawked, unable to process the extent of the changes that had just occurred, I put the lid over the fish tank. No more free lunch for this guy.

  Then I smiled, not at all blandly. “Last drink, bird head.”

  MARK SWARTZ

  Mark Swartz is author of the novels Instant Karma and H2O. He lives in Queens with his wife, Jennie Guilfoyle, and two daughters.

  Bird head’s last drink wasn’t the fatal one. It was the drink before that, the rusty nail spiked with almond-scented bye-bye juice. Bird head felt fine at first—mighty fine. He slid five bucks into the jukebox and requested “Turn Turn Turn” ten times straight. Then he started revolving, chirping along with Roger McGuinn. To everything there is a season. Then he ordered the last drink, a Woodpecker Cider, which as I said was clean.

  ALAN SWIRSKY

  Alan is an undergraduate student of poetry. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he attends Florida State University. Alan keeps a blog at iamvoss.livejournal.com

  The curtain lifts like a veil. A gangly man, mid-30’s-50’s, stands with his head bowed, his arms crossed, feet together, and his nose hooked so far it almost seems to point to the brick backdrop behind him. A record player to his left scratches static for a moment before groaning out a mournful silhouette of some long-dead violinist, as though the song he played and died for belonged to this moment, sharing the stage with a hideously stringy man in a discolored coat and slender top hat.

  The man bows to his right, to someone who is not there, and gestures to the nothingness to take his hand. He pulls it in, catches it, holds it by the waist and begins to sway and wander in a one-man-waltz. He caresses the woman who is not there, whispers sweetly into her ear, compliments her dress and tells her that her eyes are like the sun.

  The needle of the record player jumps and begins to skip, looping the same andante measures ad nauseum. He cordially apologizes to the lady, removes his hat and bows to her as he steps to the side and gently replaces the needle, never ceasing to gaze deeply into her eyes, and never so much as even pretending anything is less than perfect.

  He regains her hand as he nods to the violinist and resumes circling the small stage.

  The dust in the air, illuminated by the small yellow lights above the stage, dance with the couple, swinging around them in joy, and patting the violinist on the shoulder as the music plays on. The crescendo approaches. Hat in hand, he swoops down over his beloved, and leans in for a kiss.

  His lips press to hers. For a moment, the music stops, waiting.

  Their eyes open; the song rows steadily to a close. The man kneels, still holding her hand, and she smiles to him. The audience cheers.

  He will walk her home this evening.

  The curtain draws.

  RACHEL SWIRSKY

  Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. Her spouse bought her a drinking bird for Christmas last year.

  Drinking birds are composed of two glass bulbs joined by a tube, often decorated with painted eyes, top hats, and tail feathers. Drinking birds demonstrate the laws of: combined gas, ideal gas, Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, heat of vaporization, torque, center of mass, and capillary action.

  Dad bought the first drinking bird on the day his mother had her stroke. It was red as polished apples. He brushed away papers to set it on the table. “Do you know how it works?”

  Before I could answer, he rubbed its felt beak and set it in motion.

  “It’s a heat engine. Water evaporates from the head, cooling it. Vapor in the bulbs condenses; pressure drops in the head, and presto! Liquid is pushed from base to top. The head gets heavy, and the bird tips over.”

  The bird bowed forward to drink, black-painted eyes flat. Dad beamed.

  Dad forgets what I know. When I was five, he read me science papers at bedtime. Now I’m twelve, and he still asks if I can define inertia.

  Mother says, “Physics professors have trouble expressing their emotions.” She shakes her head, her frown indulgent. “You should have seen him during his midlife crisis. He bought a telescope and lectured me about the finite lifespans of stars.”

  Mother sells appliances at a department store. When she comes home from work, she cooks while Dad grades papers. I help her chop vegetables.

  “We need people like your father,” she explained to me once, wiping down the counter and tossing the used dishrag onto the laundry heap. “The washing machine is a prime example of how scientists have improved modern life.”

  Dad looked up from the stack of tests, the end of his red pen between his teeth. “Not really,” he said, pulling out the pen. “Washing machines made more work for housewives. Before washing machines, middle class women sent their laundry out.”

  Mother laughed. “Of course,” she said, but underneath her smile, her face went pale and drawn. Later, she told me, “He’s right. Things that look good aren’t always good. I have to keep relearning that… .”

  Three months passed. Grandma’s prognosis got better, and then worse again. She stopped recognizing us when we came to visit. Dad bought twenty drinking birds and evicted mother’s plants from the garden window.

  Six months passed. Grandma was two years shy of Medicare. Her medical bills exceeded her insurance. The house filled with tense silences and fifty birds drinking in tandem, sixty birds, eighty birds.

  Drinking birds are also called happy birds, dippy birds, dipping birds, tippy birds, tipping birds, sippy birds, sipping birds, or dip-dip birds.

  Mother poured herself a glass of wine and danced around the house. “Thirsty birds!” she called them. “Pretty, tipsy birds! Like me!”

  She glanced at Dad who sat at the table, polishing a midnight-hued bird with tender swipes of his rag.

  “Not that you’d know it.”

  Through the house echoed:

  Defaulting the mortgage.

  Repossession.

  Ending aggressive care.

  Dad bought the hundredth drinking bird. Mother watched it, hard and angry. “I called a bankruptcy lawyer today,” she s
aid to me as if Dad wasn’t there. “Your father must have a credit card he hasn’t told me about.”

  The bird perched between textbooks, glaring as it bowed to drink.

  Dad stood in the kitchen. His hands moved nervously in the pockets of his jacket. “Do you know how it works?” he asked. “It’s a heat engine. Water evaporates… .”

  Mother snatched the bird, her nails rapping against the glass. Dad’s explanation halted suddenly as the words seemed to catch in his throat. Mother turned the bird over in her hands, her eyes hurt and perplexed.

  “What’s in it again?” she asked, and dashed it to the floor.

  Drinking birds are dangerous toys. The vapor they contain irritates skin and lungs. Owners should take care not to break them. Like other things, I suppose.

  Dad didn’t yell. He closed his eyes, firmly, and then he opened them again and turned to get the broom.

  I breathed. The glass had shattered, and yet we still stood, a family, Dad humming as he swept, Mother’s eyes pressed closed.

  “I’ll return them,” Dad said. “Or sell them on eBay.”

  Mother sighed. “Don’t bother.”

  Slowly, like choreographed dancers, they turned. Their eyes met. A smile crinkled like exhaustion over Mother’s lips.

  “My suitcase is up in the rafters in the garage,” said Mom.

  Dad nodded, no surprise in his expression. “I’ll get it down.”

  In that moment, I understood how low pressure can make things fall. I felt like a drinking bird, noxious vapor swirling through my head, liquid pouring into my gut. I sank down, longing for a cooling sip.

  SONYA TAAFFE

  Poems and short stories of Sonya Taaffe’s have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and been reprinted in such anthologies as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2006, Best New Romantic Fantasy 2, and You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories.

  The house of darkness, smothered in the dust: the last stair of descent, where the dead gods lie. My hands on the flute were sliding with sweat, lapis sheened under salt like a weeping eye. I had tried wearing the ring, carnelian carved tightly with seated gods and winged demons, and even on my thumb it dangled like a stolen safe-conduct. But the shadows rustled with the dry-mouthed dead, and defense was no more than another delusion to be stripped; I would have bowed before the judges, but their minister met me first.

  On his hands, my brother, dragged down screaming in his finery, and the hounds had bayed to one another in mockingbird imitation. On his hands, the blood of the ones I had killed, too few and too slow, that ran milk-white and faintly luminous and dried tautly as semen, but nothing sprang up from its shedding: among crocus and aconite, I had cleaned the knife on the cold earth and known how it would tear itself open for me; who would greet me in the desolate courts below. He wore agate on every finger like a lidless stare. The lenses of his glasses were blind. His wry and weary, hieratic face that could still have been a stranger’s, but he called to me, softly, “Martu,” and I was never any daughter of his.

  I could have said, They laughed at you in the halls of heaven. I could have said, You are not a dead god, who cannot die. But my mouth tasted like beer, burned bread, a smoke of incense; fear; and no other words would have brought my brother back. I held out the only ones I had. “I will drink. I will eat. Let the mourners come up with him.” The ring, the flute, myself that descending had torn as bare as bone: all I had brought with me, and he took it from me, name-sealed, the last circle of law. In my right hand, a pitcher of dust. In my left hand, a platter of clay. Between the mud-cracked lintel and the threshold without garlands, I swallowed and there was only dryness in my throat before the darkness bowed me down.

  It is there still, like an unopened door; shadows settled on me like a sediment of time, one feather for each year that my brother did not walk in the light. Which of the bird-faced ghosts he had been, I do not know. Perhaps I wear his discarded death, gathered up from the dust like the treasures I did not ransom him with: the love-gift of a ring, the flute he played as he left, already like a shepherd in springtime. But someday there will be pursuers and no one to flee to, a dark man with pale hounds, and all the earth will gape thirstily for him. All death’s children are corpses. And in my father’s house, I will wait for his son, until I am mortal again and it rains.

  When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces…

  —Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon

  JUSTIN TAYLOR

  Justin Taylor is the author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial, 2010) and co-editor of The Agriculture Reader, an arts annual. www.justindtaylor.net

  Code-name, was my first thought. Government, as in shadow. I theorized locations: Razor wire in the desert, yes. Then I thought, don’t overestimate the degree to which you, a person prone to overestimation, may in fact be overestimating what the thing we’re talking about really is. Maybe just something a child says, or said, or would say. Who was it that said childhood stays with us and haunts discourse? Who would know who said it? Gordon would know. I called Gordon.

  “Gordon,” I said. “Who said?” and then I said the thing I was trying to remember. I said it best as I remembered.

  I said it all to Gordon’s machine. He wasn’t there. So, okay.

  Acronym, I thought next. Take the first letters from the words and put them together and then look up what are some things that those letters. 8cm DVD lens cleaner.

  Resolving common connection speed errors.

  …tractions after interruption of its functional connection…

  And then I realized I was back to codes. All I had done, I realized, was to take the idea about the words being a code and change it to an idea that was basically the same idea except with first letters from the words, which, admittedly, implied a better-thought-out code but honestly who would do such a thing? That’s what I wanted to know, yes. The thing I wanted to know was just what I said which is who would do such a thing as put those letters into a kind of code just to talk about 8cm DVD lens cleaner.

  Anyway, don’t get all blown over with conspiracies and codes. That’s what I told myself. Don’t fly off the handle. Wait and see if Gordon calls. You can count on Gordon, I have counted on Gordon and if there’s one thing a guy can count on it’s that Gordon can be counted on. Don’t even think about the thing again. Forget the, uh, what’s the word? Gordon would know it, yeah but Gordon is out somewhere, okay, so look it up vicissitudes. Yes! Forget the vicissitudes of the problem. Unless the thing is that the letters need to be switched around. Like if after you get the four first letters they’re not already in the right order where you can plug them in in that order and then figure out the thing to which the acronym refers, i.e. the code-name of the secret program.

  Custom deluxe high back chair.

  In-depth information, departures and arrivals…

  Bloodhound.

  Bloodhound?

  Bloodhound!

  In a certain arrangement it could seem like the letters could be a way of abbreviating for Bloodhound. Not an acronym but more like a shorthand, a shorthand for Operation Bloodhound which I just made up but it sounds so realistic. It sounds like deep cover, like blackest ops. Government, as in shadow! These guys, they don’t mess around. Scrambling the jets right now, for all we know about it.

  Phone rings. Gordon?

  Gordon, please be you.

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s new projects include Invisible, a 6 CD audio collection from Speaking Volumes LLC, and in March, In Concert, the collected short fiction collaborations of Steve & Melanie Tem from Centipede Press. His website: www.m-s-tem.com

  Last drink. Bird head.

  I decided it would be my last. I decided. No 12-step, not even a 2-step, cha cha cha! No AA no AAA no rehab no high
er power than me! I climbed my way into this mess I’ll crawl my way out.

  You drink to dull the pain but let me tell you life is pain. You dull that and there’s not much point, but we already know that. Twenty-five years a drinker and at the end of it there’s no point at all. A dull nub, that’s me. Not enough nub left to sign all the I-O-U’s I owe to pretty much everybody in my pain.

  Serve it up, bartender! 2 parts vermouth, 12 parts lime. A jigger of this and a jigger of that. 4 parts hair of the dog, any old dog will do. 3 parts my baby’s breath cause 3 breaths was all she ever had. Didn’t matter I wasn’t there but I should’ve been. Approximately 8 parts my baby’s momma’s spit in my eye and whatever else she could reach. The rest of it you make up because I figure you’ve got the right idea. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

  But don’t scrimp on the strychnine. A part or two will do. I once bit the head off of a flapping bird for a shot—I deserve my due.

  Do do, do do do, dew. You must remember the tune. Big hit amongst those who can’t sing for themselves. Last drink. Bird head. Say what you will about bills, they always come due. My darling wife to be, she sang like a bird until her bills came due. A baby was all she wanted. She figured it was her last chance to have something before the buzzards came down and pecked her clean. The baby was her insurance policy against taking that long slow trip alone.

  Don’t scrimp on the limes, either. I need something sourer than me if I’m going to make it through. I need something worse than me before I can feel any good at all. I’ve got a navy of the dead crawling in and out of my belly and sweet won’t cut that taste at all.