Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (4 page)

Horse had cleaned up and looked completely
unfazed by today’s events as he made himself a sandwich.

Curious wore a charcoal gray suit, and had
shaved. His blue eyes no longer looked so tired, nor haunted,
though there was still a slight glow of something like dreaming
around him. It was faint enough, the bosses might overlook it.
Especially since there just was no reason to suspect a warden of
dreaming.

“Do you think we can do this?” she asked.

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “But you’d better
do the talking.”

Mary nodded. She made a cup of tea to keep
busy.

The leaves had steeped for less than a minute
when the
tink
of scraping realities snapped in the
kitchen.

Mary would have known the bosses had arrived
even without the sound. She always sensed them the way one does a
predator hidden in the shadows. A cold chill slipped down her spine
and her heartbeat picked up.

She carefully hid her fear behind an
unbreakable wall of calm, and turned.

“Good day, sirs,” she said. “Welcome to post
four thirteen, we are prepared for inspection.”

Three bosses stood in the room—all men in
their mid-sixties, and all in black suits and long black jackets.
The man in the front was darker skinned than the rest and taller,
while the man to his left was heavy, and finally, the man to his
right was albino-pale. They wore sunglasses, which they removed in
unison.

She wondered if they practiced that move, or
if they were just naturally creepy.

Mary was careful not to allow any change in
her expression. Everything was riding on this. Riding on her
ability to lie straight to the boss’s faces—which she had never
done before.

Their eyes were hard, clever, and completely
soulless. Somewhere in the fifty plus years of serving as wardens,
these men had lost that irreparable thing that made them human.

Mary was staring into her future, the future
of every warden.

Even Horse put his sandwich down and stood,
straight and attentive. Curious at her left clasped his hands
behind his back, breathing easily like he wasn’t still sporting
injuries and hadn’t just had an army of terrors and imaginings use
his head for a subway tunnel.

“There were terrors and imaginings here,” the
tall man in the front said.

“Yes,” Mary said. Short answers meant less of
an opportunity for them to sense the lie.

“Explain.”

“They followed Curious when he came back
today.” Mostly true.

“Where was warden Curious?” The heavier boss
to the left asked in the same dead monotone as the first.

“He was across edges.”

“Why?”

“He—”

“No,” the first boss said. “Tell us, Warden
Curious. Why were you gone six months across edges?”

Oh God. This was it. Curious might be many
things—amazing and frustrating things—but he was not a good
liar.

“I was looking for something,” he said.
“Looking for a solution to a problem.”

“What problem?”

Mary stayed outwardly calm, but her mind was
racing. Should they run? Wardens with souls are fast but the bosses
without souls could cross edges even faster and had eyes
everywhere.

Fight? They couldn’t kill the bosses—well,
technically, they could, but it would be immediately sensed by the
other bosses down the link they shared, and then she, Curious, and
Horse would all be dead.

“I was looking for this.” Curious put his
hand in his suit pocket and pulled out a beautiful steel music box
comb.

Mary gasped. “That’s the comb I need for the
Regina I’m fixing.”

“I know.” Curious chanced a glance away from
the bosses to throw her a smile.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Well, it was a surprise.”

“Enough,” the heavier boss said. “We do not
condone such actions, but as it has caused no hardship across
realities and provides a cover for operating the outpost, we will
not discipline you for such.”

“Thank you, sirs,” Curious said.

“You have also returned in time to continue
as warden of outpost four thirteen,” the first boss said. “Do you
accept your duty from this day onward?”

Mary held her breath, waiting for his
reply.

“Yes, sir, I do,” Curious said.

“Then it shall be so.” The boss turned his
drill-point gaze to Mary. “Are your records in order?”

She nodded, trying not to show her relief.
They weren’t out of the fire yet. “Yes, sir. Except for the recent
job, which I will input after this inspection.”

“Very well. Why are you here, Warden
Horse?”

“Ms. Still asked me over,” Horse said
smoothly. “I stayed to settle a monetary debt between Mr. Curious
and myself. And when the t’s and i’s showed up, I lent a hand, as
is protocol.”

None of that was a lie. None of it was the
full truth either. But Horse delivered it with such easy authority
that Mary made a note to pay more attention to what the old man
said in the future.

“We will inspect the outpost for stability,”
the second boss said.

The bosses spent the next half hour looking
through the living areas, then the antique shop, and finally strode
out to the garage where Mary had been working on the old music box
just an hour ago.

Curious handed her the steel comb and she set
it carefully on a piece of soft cloth next to the box. The bosses’
sharp eyes missed no detail. They could see the comb was indeed the
item she was missing.

“Our inspection is complete,” the first boss
said.

Mary tried to dampen the hope that they might
have made it through this safe, together, and still partners. Hope
was dangerous and made a person sloppy.

They followed the bosses out of the garage.
Once they reached sunlight, the bosses paused.

“Is there anything else?” Mary asked.

“Everything is as it should be,” the first
boss said.

“I agree,” the second boss said.

Mary waited for the third boss to speak. He
hadn’t said anything this entire time. Now he studied them, and
smiled enough to show teeth.

It was a cold expression—a wolf baring fangs
for the kill.

“Why do you glow, warden Curious?” He said it
softly, but it stopped them all as surely as an explosion.

“What do you mean, sir?” Curious said.

Mary lifted her hand toward her lodestone.
She might be able to grab Curious and get them both off-reality
faster than the bosses would follow. Might.

“You glow as if you dream,” the third boss
said again. “But a warden never dreams.”

Curious shut his mouth and glared at the
bosses.

This wasn’t good. Wasn’t good at all. There
was no half-truth to hide this, no way to deny what he had
done.

“It’s my fault,” Mary said.

Three soulless gazes shifted to her.

“Nonsense,” Horse said.

“Horse,” Mary warned.

The old guy was still behind them, and
planted his hand on both of their shoulders. Mary was going to
regret breaking his arms across edges when she slid out of here,
but he should know better than to try and keep them pinned for the
bosses to kill.

“It’s not
just
your fault,” Horse said
cheerfully.

“Bad decision,” Curious said.

“It is both of their fault,” Horse said a
little louder, “because they refuse to admit it to each other.”

Mary frowned. Curious didn’t take his eyes
off the bosses, but she could tell he didn’t know where Horse was
going with this either.

“Explain,” the third boss said.

“They’re in love,” Horse said. “Been dancing
around it for months now. It’s what sent Tom out across edges for
that music box bit, and what made Mary hold on until the last
minute for him to come home.”

“Love?” the third boss sneered.

“You know how it messes with the sight,
Glass,” Horse said. “Throws off light that looks like dreamer
light. And, beg your pardon, but you bosses are color-blind when it
comes to the subtleties between love and dream.”

Had he seriously just insulted the bosses and
called one of them by name?

Mary held her breath, fingers poised to tap a
sequence to get them out fast.

“I see.” The third boss, Glass, seemed
disappointed. “Is this true? You are in love?”

“I—,” Curious started.

“Yes,” Mary interrupted. She didn’t know if
it were true or not, but it didn’t sound like a lie. Didn’t feel
like one either.

The bosses held her gaze for a long, painful
moment. Then they put sunglasses over their eyes again, turned, and
walked toward the highway.

“We do not condone love,” the first boss
said.

“But as long as it does not interfere with
your jobs, warden Curious, warden Still, we will not forbid it,”
the second boss said.

“Yet.” That was from Glass.

The bosses tapped fingers, cracked reality,
and were gone.

Mary spun to face Horse. “How did you know
they’d fall for that?”

His eyebrows hitched up. “I am an old man,
Mary. There’s very little in this world I don’t know. You ought to
keep that in mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go finish
my sandwich.”

He strolled off to the house, whistling a
show tune.

Mary stared after Horse and waited for her
heart to stop racing. They had survived.

“So we don’t have another inspection for six
months,” she said. “By then we should be able to figure out a
long-term solution for this dream thing you have going.”

“Mary?”

She turned at Curious’s quiet tone.

He was waiting, every line in his body tense
with doubt. Maybe with hope too; dangerous, dangerous hope. “Were
you telling the truth? About us being in love?”

She could lie to him. It would make
everything easier. But they were partners. They were in this
together.

“I think I was, yes.”

He nodded and looked down at his boots. When
he looked back up, he gave her that smile that turned her inside
out. “So where do we go from here?”

“Anywhere we want to,” she said.
“Together.”

“To the end.” He held his hand out to
her.

“To the end,” she agreed.

She took his hand and held tightly to him as
they walked beneath the antique shop sign above trans-dimensional
outpost four thirteen, to start their life together again.

Introduction to “Finally
Family”

Ray Vukcevich won’t say exactly what
inspired “Finally Family,” but evidence points to the local crows.
“I bet this story came from me looking out the big windows at the
lawn below,” he writes, “and my crows scratching around for
breakfast. When I walk out there on the way to the post office,
they all look around like oh, it’s just him again. While I’m gone,
they flutter up into the trees above my parking space and decorate
my car. I know they do that on purpose just to demonstrate who is
really in charge.”

Whoever might be in charge, let’s hope
they provide more inspiration for Ray, whose latest collection,
Boarding Instructions
, recently appeared from Fairwood Press.
His other books include
Meet Me in the Moon Room
and
The
Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces
.

Finally Family

Ray Vukcevich

1

Bug Boy

Bug Boy couldn’t tell them that he was really
a Bulgarian and had been blown into Japan by the crows during the
earthquake in Pernik last year. He didn’t speak a word of Japanese,
and no one he met recognized the language he did speak, so he quit
talking.

Everyone did the best they could when it came
to Bug Boy—a place to sleep, stuff to eat, even English lessons
from that young woman, Kameko who was actually an orphan from
America and had no more Japanese than Bug Boy had himself. Whenever
she spotted him, she always turned a big smile on him like she was
searching his face with a flashlight. That made him blink his big
black eyes.

The day the next big quake shook Japan, Bug
Boy was riding a bicycle very early in the morning. Was he
delivering newspapers? No, he was not. In fact, if the Newspaper
Boy saw him, he would be in some trouble. There is no way Bug Boy
could be mistaken for anyone else, and the Sisters would be very
interested to hear that he had been out on Bicycle Number Two when
the sun wasn’t even quite up yet. The Newspaper Boy rode Bicycle
Number One, of course.

Bug Boy was naturally nocturnal, and it was
unusual for him to be out in the sharp, new air when there were so
many black birds gathering and looking for something to eat.

Not that the birds could make a meal of Bug
Boy who was the size, if not exactly the shape and smell of a
regular boy like oh, say, the Newspaper Boy who was not quite five
feet tall but solidly built with serious eyes and a scar on his
left cheek shaped like the letter I if the letter I were bowing at
his nose. Bug Boy’s eyes were black, not exactly faceted, but you
might say “reflective” in certain lights. Some Sister might flip on
the cellar light and yikes there would be that gleam in the black
eyes of Bug Boy who would be down there looking for tasty bits
stunned stupid and slow from the stuff the Sisters sprayed around
the baseboards which had almost no effect on someone as big as Bug
Boy.

Or another of those Sisters might be doing a
bed check with a flashlight which was a different flashlight from
the smile of the English teacher. Yes, that bed was occupied, check
and check again for this one and for that one, and here we are
coming up to Bug Boy’s nest pushed away from the others, and yes,
he’s really in it tonight, but then the beam would cross his face
and those black eyes would sparkle when they should have been
closed and him sailing some dreamy sea in a little boat not much
bigger than a rowboat but with a little sail like a pale blue
triangle. Go to sleep, Bug Boy!