Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (48 page)

Armand wasn’t a lumberer. But he wasn’t killed in his home, either. One of the survivors had seen him pull his mother out of the house and run into the night, but their bodies were never found. Like so many others, they were part of the ash and rubble. The fire was so hot it consumed everything.

That he was dead, Gabby had no doubt. Otherwise he would have come for her.

She shook her head slowly, aware of the child watching.

“It was bad, very bad. A lot of people died. And a lot of dreams. Let it go at that.”

They were memories she hadn’t wanted to relive. They tasted like dust. Like blueberries.

Day after day Gabby expected to hear the bell at the door and see Mandy’s picket fence smile again, but she didn’t come. Gabby made an excuse to drive into the new town and dropped in to the library. Marjorie looked surprised to see her. And something more. She said Amanda hadn’t been feeling well—probably too many berries—but her smile wasn’t quite comfortable on her face.

Gabby thanked her and left. She knew what had happened. Marjorie had kept the little girl away, afraid to entrust her any longer with a lonely old woman who might be going senile. And maybe she was right. It wasn’t sensible to believe that things like knowledge, or language, or talent could be ingested like sugar and salt. The sign of an unsound mind—it had to be.

So she felt the summer slip away. The blueberry plants would soon be barren once more, their profusion of tiny pointed leaves turning rusty at the edges. Good riddance. Maybe that was the real message: that it was time for Gabby to be going too. Perhaps she should sell the store and move south. Somewhere. Anywhere. As she’d wanted so desperately to do all those years ago after the fire, but hadn’t. Was it simply life’s inertia that had held her back? Or because, by then, going anywhere at all had seemed so very pointless?

Then suddenly Mandy was back. With a jingle like a fairy’s laugh, she appeared as if she’d never been away.

“Gramma said I shouldn’t come here and bother you so much. You’re busy. But I didn’t think you’d be busy all the time. Are you?”

“No, child. I’m not busy at all. How have you been? How are the blueberries?”

“Not so many anymore. You have to look for them. I ate a lot this morning from some bushes at the farthest corner of the farm, where the fire didn’t go. There are some very old trees there.”

“Yes, very old.”

“I was thinking it would have been a wonderful place to put a library and town hall. With a beautiful clock tower. Grand and tall, with a clock face you could see from anywhere in town. And especially from a house on top of the hill. On a fancy porch with carved posts and a wrought iron railing, you’d look across a sea of rooftops under a starry sky, and catch a glimpse of the clock face in the moonlight just as the bell chimed twelve.” Her brown eyes shone with the vision.

Gabby gasped.The child sounded just like Armand with his lofty dreams. Armand on the evening before the fire, holding her in his arms on the porch of his mother’s house and talking, talking with the fervour of the true believer. Just before Gabby had finally confessed that she didn’t
want
to stay there, in a house on the hill or anywhere else in Manqueville. That she felt trapped in such a small town with its small minds. Hated it, and begged for God to free her. Begged to God.

She looked at the child in wonderment.

“Amanda,” she said. “Do you remember where to find those bushes you ate from this morning? Could you take me to them? I . . . I have a craving.”

“Sure.” The girl held out her hand and Gabby took it gratefully.

The tinkling bell fell silent as the door closed behind them.

Originally published in On Spec
Spring 2012 Vol 24 No 1 # 88

A radio broadcaster for more than thirty years now living in Sudbury, Ontario,
Scott Overton’s
short fiction
has been published in
On Spec
,
Neo-opsis
,
Penumbra
and several anthologies including
Tesseracts Sixteen: Parnassus Unbound
.
His first novel
Dead Air
(a mystery/thriller about the radio industry) is published by Scrivener Press.

F.J. Bergmann

You can’t understand the words, of course, but you feel it

singing, one note that lasts beyond remembrance.

You will preserve that thought, decant it in the years to come,

when you are old and wooden, when you are at rest.

This is a good day; it will be like sweet juice from ripeness

that you can savour again and again after it has fermented

inside your brain, long after you forget who you are.

Your pension and savings would only go so far; the

health plan informed you there was still no fix in sight

for some of the iffy genes you carried, making rebodying

or rebooting “unachievable at this time.” You envisioned

the unfinished autobiography inscribed inside your skull

erasing itself page by page. Already there were tunes

you could not finish, unexpected sputters of silence.

You kissed your world goodbye. Said farewell to shadows

cast by your native sun for the last time. Lovers had left

you years before, moving youthward like leaves unfalling, spiralling back up to greening branches and an absence

of seasons. So what if they had become nothing more

than collections of altered molecules, the organic bolted

to the mechanical, in a slurry of fuel and volition?

You learned to live in the moment, to travel light. Always

there was room in the immense star freighters for another

useful, small creature to disappear. Bells rang, summoning

you to service, as the ship caromed between planets

with names you couldn’t pronounce, a cosmic pinball,

silver shifting to red. Beings with unimaginable capabilities

for kindness excused your frailties and failings.

They asked to hear your music, wanted to know everything

about you. Their choral harmonies encompassed and joined,

a metaphor for communion turned into sound. As you stand

on the glassy beach on the far side of a distant galaxy,

listening to something like a vast chime create its tremendous

resonances, you realize that the journey is endless,

its destination a place where you have not yet been born.

Originally published in On Spec
Summer 2012 Vol 24 No 2 #89

F.J. Bergmann
writes poetry and speculative fiction, often simultaneously, appearing in
Black Treacle, Lakeside Circus, Silver Blade,
and elsewhere. Editor of
Star*Line
and poetry editor of
Mobius: The Journal of Social Change
; recent awards include the 2012 Rannu Prize for poetry and the 2013 SFPA Elgin chapbook award
.

Sarah Frost

The sun sat on the horizon like a fat red egg. Kaainka squinted into the light, trying to fix every detail of this moment in his mind. Wings folded and spread. Long beaks stabbed the air. Feathers painted yellow and red burned in the sunset. This could be his last night among the People. The camp’s elders danced, singing the Song of the Ancestors. Tomorrow, Kaainka would leave the People and walk north. He would return as an adult, or not at all.

That night, after the camp had finished singing the sun down from the sky, Kaainka found a place to rest by the campfire. The People walked all around him, dark and graceful shapes in the firelight. No one spoke to him. A red-dyed twist of antelope gut tied loosely around his neck set him apart: No longer a child, but not yet an adult, Kaainka would leave before dawn while the People slept. Until then he was only a traveler resting for the night.

Kaainka looked up at the sky. Even dimmed by the firelight, the stars were glorious. His eyes traced the great arc of light that hung over his head. The stories said that shining path was made by the River of Death where it spilled out into the sky. He spotted one of the wandering stars as it glided by, slower than a falling star but faster than the moon. It faded as he watched, flashed, and faded again. Kaainka looked away. A wanderer was an unsteady omen with which to begin a journey.

Footsteps brought his mind down out of the sky. Eikss walked up to Kaainka where he sat by the fire. Fire-light shone on the scales of her legs and the fine blue skin of her face. She held a waterskin in her beak, the last of its stitching still undone. Eikss set the waterskin down and pulled her needle free of the tough goat hide. Holding the skins together with her feet, she stitched up the side with quick, even strokes of the needle.

“The desert is fierce and wide,” she said as she worked. “You will need to carry as much water with you as you can, and drink sparingly. Walk in the cool of the morning, and in the evening as the sand loses its heat. Do not walk in the dark, or you’ll fall and break your leg. Then you will never come back, and I will owe Airk the entrails of my next kill.”

“He thinks I won’t come back?” Kaainka said. Eikss had made the journey last year. When she returned, she had been wiser, full of stories and unexpected stillness. Kaainka longed for her, but dared not say anything. He would think about courtships when his journey was over. He couldn’t afford the distraction, and children couldn’t go courting in any case.

“He thinks I will be impressed with the guts of the next slimy thing he pulls from a mud-pool.” She laughed, and tied off the last stitch on the waterskin. Eikss took the skin in her beak and proffered it to Kaainka. He took it, and tucked it under his wing.

“Thank you,” he said. Then, on impulse, he added, “You shouldn’t be talking to me.”

“Mind how you speak in my camp, traveller.” She snapped, and then laughed. She turned her head to the side, fixing him with a one-eyed stare. “Walk in the Ancestors’ footprints,” she said, and then huddled down by the fire to sleep.

Kaainka set out under the night’s last stars. The waterskin hung around his neck, next to a new grass bag for his fire-saw and his food. He had packed some
chok
, a hard, oily seed that would not spoil and would fill his belly when food was scarce. They tasted like fat and dung-dust, and he hoped he would not need them. A slim stone knife rested in a sheath tied to his leg.