Category: Fiction

DP FICTION #60A: “Invasion of the Water Towers” by R.D. Landau

The water towers never showed up on film. That should have been a sign. In the before times, there were water towers on every rooftop. They were highly visible, distinct from the rest of the landscape, cylindrical bodies with conical heads and long spindly legs. Maybe if we hadn’t been so busy whining about work and finding the perfect brand of deodorant and wondering if that cute barista was flirting with us (They weren’t. It is literally their job to smile and draw hearts in foam and have perfect hair. We as a society need to get over ourselves) we would have asked ourselves why the water towers didn’t want us to see them represented in the movies. Maybe if we hadn’t sharpened those not-thinking skills by not thinking about global warming and drone strikes and the asbestos in the ceiling that coated our hair like dandruff, we would have asked the right questions before it was too late.

Three days before the invasion, my barista, Zed (not the barista I mentioned earlier, that was a hypothetical barista and anyways, their eyes are way too green, like who has eyes that green, it’s obviously colored contact lenses and I could never date someone who puts colored pieces of plastic in front of their eyes) said, “I think the water tower on my building moved last night.” 

“Oh really?” I said, my pulse beating at a normal tempo for a pulse to beat.

On the day of the invasion, I was waiting for Zed to turn around so I could put milk and sugar in my coffee, when the radio cut off the Inoffensive Station suddenly: “We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast to report that the water towers are moving. We do not know what they are, where they came from or what their intentions may be. All citizens of New York and New Jersey are required to stay indoors.”

We all checked Twitter, desperate for more news, but the water towers had destroyed the internet. Stripped of our dignity and our Wi-Fi, we sipped in stunned silence until Zed said, “free drinks for anyone who helps barricade the doors,” in a voice so confident and commanding and melodious and mellifluous and pleasing, that everyone obeyed instantly. We hauled tables and chairs and sacks of beans against the door.

Then a water tower shuffled past. I could see its long spindly legs through the advertisements for Basilisk Frappuccino that covered the window. Zed held a chair out legs first as a weapon. The other barista thrust a customer in front of him as a shield. I did… something badass and heroic. But the water tower passed us by, paying no attention. Afterwards, everyone sat on the floor drinking caffeine because what we really needed during an alien invasion was a faster heart rate.

“I thank you, fine purveyor of caffeine,” I told Zed, who was leaning on the counter, exhausted.

“Thanks,” said Zed with a tired smile that did not make me imagine massaging their shoulder blades while they lay naked in a bed of coffee grounds. 

After the water towers seized control of the banks, the city government and the bagel shops in that order (according to the radio which might have been controlled by the water towers), after we huddled in the Starbucks for 72 hours, living off soymilk and increasingly stale lemon poppy seed muffins, after we cried and wet our pants and said our prayers (we meaning everyone but me – my pants and eyes stayed dry), after we gave up hope of seeing our families or our friends or our safety-code-violating apartments ever again, we ran out of food. Various solutions were proposed: cannibalism, shoe-eating, waiting for the government to save us. While we voted, the other barista chewed on an elderly customer’s hair.

“STOP,” said Zed, in a booming voice like a sexy sea captain. “It’s way too early to turn to cannibalism.”

“Hair is dead cells,” said the other barista. “So it isn’t technically cannibalism.”

“We have to go out and get food,” said Zed. 

The (probably-water-tower-controlled) radio had warned us that if we went outside, we would be captured by the water towers. Rumor had it that the water towers drank their prisoners. So everyone avoided eye contact with the same intensity as when an accordion player asks for money on the subway (everyone including me.) 

Zed sighed. “I’ll go alone then.” They removed the barricades, while the rest of us huddled in a pile on the opposite corner. They opened the door.

A water tower crawled in, then a second, then a third.

“We have come for the coffee,” said the water tower.

Zed brandished the blade of a dismantled coffee grinder. “We can’t let them take our coffee! Who’s with me?”

No one said anything.

The three water towers surrounded Zed, sloshing angrily. “You will make us coffee, or you will be eliminated.”

Zed was beautiful and flawless and perfect in every way but they were only a barista. What good is a barista against a water tower?

“What can I get for you?” said Zed.

© 2019 by R.D. Landau

R.D. Landau recently fled New York. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Heavy Feather Review and tl;dr among others. Her hobbies include watching musicals, making truffles and hiding under the bed. 

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DP FICTION #59C: “Gorilla in the Streets” by Mari Ness

He’s hairy. He grunts a lot. He can be – there’s no kind way to put this – a little clumsy, and even his best friends say his table manners could use a little work.

But at barely the age of 30, he’s become Wall Street’s best performing hedge fund manager, with an estimated fortune of $36 billion, and with bankers, CEOs and even – it’s rumored – a United States president and several prime ministers jumping at the mere twitch of his finger.

Despite being a – there’s no way to put this politely – a gorilla.

How, exactly, a lowland gorilla managed to claw his way to the top of the financial industry is one question that’s brought me here today, to this charming New York café overlooking Central Park. Trees have a calming effect on Magot Stanton, I’ve heard, and “calming” is definitely the mood you want when you are about to meet up with a five foot, 10 inch gorilla who can easily rip your arms off, if he wants. At the suggestion of one of his extremely efficient personal assistants, I’ve ordered one of the café specials for both of us: a New York version of a full British high tea. The assistant has assured me that Stanton is particularly fond of the finger sandwiches created with freshly baked banana bread, with strawberries and cream for dessert.

It’s impossible to miss his entrance, marked as it is not just with his signature thumping gait, but the sudden hush, followed by small gasps and whispers. New Yorkers may claim to be used to the presence of a gorilla at their establishments, but the reaction suggests otherwise. Even William and Kate might not get this sort of reception.

Then again, Stanton is said to rarely leave the Wall Street area before 5 pm on weekdays, and although this is Friday, it’s also Central Park.

Stanton doesn’t appear to notice the looks, the gasps, or even the surreptitious attempts to casually point cell phones in his direction, despite his notorious dislike of pictures. (His attorneys note that although social media has linked Stanton to multiple assaults on photographers, none of these allegations have ever been independently verified, and no charges have been made. Indeed, an independent review of records made by The Financials shows that Stanton has a remarkably clean legal record: every lawsuit made against him has been dismissed, and he has never even received so much as a parking ticket.) He stalks through the room on all fours, his knuckles leaving a sharp clang with each step – a clang I later realize is coming from the rings that deck his hands. He can walk on two feet – YouTube once had video evidence, since taken down, but nothing ever quite vanishes from the internet – but for this café, at least, he’s chosen his more natural gait.

I’m calm – at least, I tell myself I’m calm – when he finally reaches the table, sitting down with surprising grace for one so, well, big. Which is when I realize: it’s one thing to see this on TV; it’s another to sit across the table from a talking gorilla.

His suit is impeccably tailored: the three rings that gleam on his hands surprisingly restrained, not just for a gorilla, but for a Wall Street titan. He smiles, and it’s both more charming and alarming than I expected. He begs my forgiveness in advance for any lapse of table manners – he’s recently hurt his left hand, he explains, without offering any further details, and forks and knives are difficult for him at the best of times.

He pours the tea – a delicate oolong, his favorite – and splashes in cream and sugar with, it must be admitted, rather less of that surprising grace. Quite a bit of that cream lands on the table cloth; the sugar ends up going even further. I say nothing as I take the tea pot from him, pouring my own cup. Just now, the café is full of people with far worse table manners; from the corner I can see several people giving us what they seem to believe are surreptitious glances.

That’s hardly uncommon when you’re interviewing a celebrity, but still, something seems, well, different, about this. The waitress assures us that scones, followed by the finger sandwiches, are coming right up. I take a sip of the tea and pull out my tablet. Unlike other interviewees, Stanton didn’t just agree to have the interview taped; he insisted on it. His own tablet, I realize, is out on the table, filming us both.

We are supposed to be discussing his rumored interest in one of Hollywood’s large conglomerates. But since he’s more or less opened the topic, I decide to go ahead and raise the question: how did a lowlands gorilla end up running a powerful hedge fund?

Under the fur, I think his shoulders tense. But he answers the question easily enough, as if he’s prepared for it.

His inspiration, he says, was Tarzan.

“I watched those films over and over. The Disney one, the earlier ones, that really boring British one – I was inspired. I even hunted down the books, and I gotta tell you, reading wasn’t my thing. But the way I looked at it, if a rich white baby could turn himself into a gorilla and lead a tribe – well. This gorilla could turn himself into an ultra-privileged Hamptons brat. The stockbroker stuff was more for something to do.”

And so, as a young gorilla, he swung his way into the hearts – and the home – of a Hamptons family. He readily admits that the family money was a help, although he notes that sometimes getting that money wasn’t easy. Stanton says he found himself regularly challenging and challenged by his father – “one of those natural dominance things, you know? Happens to everyone.” When not fighting with his father, he took class after class, immersing himself in books, languages and mathematics studies. He had plenty of spare time, since he was not allowed to join regular Phys Ed classes (“I scared everyone,”), was not, at the time, much of a partier, and only had a few close friends as distractions. His one hobby, apart from languages (Stanton claims to speak fluent English, French, Portuguese, German, Umbuntu and “some” Arabic, and plans to start learning Mandarin “the second I have a chance”), was music, something he studied mostly alone.

A stint at Yale – completed in three, not the usual four years (“they wanted me off campus as quickly as possible, and I was delighted to comply”) and an MBA from Harvard polished him off, and he was almost ready for his first job at a Wall Street bank. Almost.

“I couldn’t fit through the doorway.”

I spill a bit of my tea. “What?”

“Couldn’t get through the doorway. They’d interviewed me at Harvard, so no one had really thought about this. I showed up, got up the narrow stairs – building looked like it was from the Middle Ages, I swear – and then I come in, and it’s like, one half the size of normal American doors, which are already hard for me to squeeze through.”

I’m fascinated. “No one thought of this?”

“No one.”

“So what did you do?”

“Punched through the door.”

Our scones arrive at just that moment; his large fist closes over one of them and moves it to his mouth before the plate even reaches the table.

“Broke down the door and a bit of their wall.” His mouth widens, showing all the crumbs inside. “God, that felt good. Shortest employment of my life, but damn.”

His next job was a bit more of a success – at least, he said, he could get through the door, although finding a chair that could fit him, and a keyboard he could use comfortably, proved more difficult. He refused to ask for disability accommodations. “I’m not disabled. I’m a gorilla.”

He soon had a bigger problem: at the time, that investment firm was pushing a “soft touch” approach. “And I’m a gorilla.” He could manage this – barely – on the phone, but not, apparently, in person. He says he lasted only three months at the job – the firm’s corporate records say six weeks – and needed about eight solid months of wallowing in banana liquor before he could try again.

“Of course part of the problem was that I really hadn’t done that in college, you know. Much less during my MBA program. Gone on a drinking spree, that is. I was trying to work, to prove to everybody that I could be serious, could be intellectual, could do it. And it worked. Earned two college degrees in four years.” (Yale records confirm that Stanton did earn enough credit hours to make him eligible for two BAs, although he was granted only one, with a triple major in mathematics, history and accounting.) “Which meant I really didn’t do the other things. The human things. I didn’t connect.”

The banana liquor binge did something to help that, as did re-establishing ties with his few friends from Yale, and his family members back in the Hamptons, all of which helped center and stabilize him.

“I went back and watched Tarzan again over and over. I drank. I watched the ocean. I climbed into a few trees. Talked to friends. Sulked, if we’re going to be honest about it.”

At the end of this, he found yet another job at another Wall Street firm. “They were hesitant. Very hesitant. By that time, the story of me and the door had gotten around, and well, I didn’t really have that great of a reputation. Nobody wanted to explain me to an insurance company. But Cutter Holdings thought I might be useful in certain negotiations.”

Useful how?

“Hmm. Er. Well – I think they thought I might intimidate people.”

And did he?

Just at that moment, our finger sandwiches – including a large pile of cream cheese on banana bread – arrive. Stanton’s lips stretch. He swoops up a stack of the sandwiches and crams them into his throat. His hand comes thumping down on the table.

I don’t repeat the question.

After five years at Cutter Holdings, Stanton decided to stake out his own firm. He is legally unable to disclose the terms of his exit from the company, he explains, almost apologetically. I don’t press the issue; a Cutter Holdings spokesperson had said something similar when I was researching this article.

Whatever the circumstances, his exit – and his founding of his new firm – were soon complicated by the unexpected death of his father in what three separate police and a later independent federal investigation determined was absolutely, positively an accident.

That accident is also something I decide not to ask about now; Stanton has just broken a tea cup. It’s swiftly replaced, along with our excellent pot of oolong tea, but still, not the best moment to bring up accidents.

His father’s death left Stanton with a Hampton estate, a waterview home on Palm Island, Miami, and a luxury condo in Aspen, Colorado. Stanton rarely uses the Aspen condo, preferring to lend it out to friends or preferred clients; he doesn’t like the cold. Unlike most other billionaires with Miami homes, he doesn’t own a boat – he reportedly gets seasick – but that cold intolerance does mean that he makes frequent trips to that private estate, startling boaters who see him lounging on his deck.

Both the Hampton estate and the Miami home are, rumor has it, equipped with small hidden jungles under hothouses, where Stanton can retreat from the world and relax. The Hampton estate also contains several large trees which Stanton is rumored to take shelter in, along with several ever-present tablets constantly running different apps and videos. He does not confirm or deny these stories, saying only that watching the sea calms him.

Whatever the three homes – and a Swiss estate purchased just a few years ago – might suggest, Stanton is swift to deny the rumors of women, cocaine, and otherwise high living. “Everyone thinks it’s just like that movie. Wall Street. When the truth is, you just don’t have the time. I’m on my computer, my phone, basically 24/7. You can’t just do this lightly. You have to research. Plan. Calculate. And I’ve got these huge thumbs.”

To help, he’s had specialized keyboards, computer screens and office furniture made to accommodate his bulk and physical limitations. He has six personal assistants to handle “virtually everything” right down to peeling bananas for him – “Living with humans, you learn to dislike the skin. And then, one day, I started calculating just how long I was spending peeling bananas, and I was horrified. Horrified. So it’s a budget thing for me.”

As are several other seeming luxuries: the custom hanging beds in every one of his houses – “I get a bit sick of saying it, but, gorilla –”. Professional masseuses charge additional for gorillas, and the ability to fall asleep immediately is worth millions on its own, Stanton says. The private limousines and drivers – Stanton can drive, but finds most vehicles uncomfortable for his size; getting driven also allows him additional time to speak with clients. The private jet – “Seats are way too small, and I can’t get into those bathrooms, either.” Followed by a short laugh. “And since I own a small percentage of some of those planes – well, damaging those isn’t in my best interest.”

Using a private jet also allows Stanton to avoid most airport security procedures, something not really designed for gorillas. “We have to send out a few warnings in advance – I usually can’t go right through one of those X-Ray machines, for instance, and those new ones – what dy’a call them? The scatter things? You know? Forget it.” He has to be wanded. “Which is fine, but most people aren’t really ready to wand a gorilla, and I just don’t have time for that, you know? Every minute I waste on that is literally one million, easy, gone until I can get back on my phone. At a certain point, you have to look at those millions, and say, enough.”

His tea cup breaks in his hand. A watching waitress is there in an instant, replacing it and offering us a complimentary fresh pot of oolong tea, and assures us that the strawberries and cream and champagne are coming right up, along with more of the banana bread sandwiches – and some additional chicken curry sandwiches for me. I could use the sustenance, and I thank her politely.

A mention of another rumor – that he keeps a small family of gorillas hidden either on his Hampton estate or on a small island in Long Island Sound, depending upon who’s telling the story, complete with a small yet palatial customized jungle – is greeted with a snarl and a mention of his latest major acquisition: a large, near controlling interest in fruit supplier Apes For Fruit. Stanton also refuses to discuss what he eats when not talking to interviewers – a diet said to feature Kobe beef, civet cat coffee, and Hostess Twinkies – or discuss his religion. “Again. Gorilla. We’ll leave it at that.”

We do discuss other things, including his cutthroat reputation for really not liking competition – “I know it gets other folks motivated, but I really really don’t like competition. If there’s too many others after the same thing, either they’re eliminated or I’m out. More often the former –” his rumored upcoming takeover bid of a major media conglomerate – “Really can’t discuss that –” how he chooses his targets – that is, acquisitions – “Research. Research. Research. Sometimes lunch conversations like this –” the layoffs he’s orchestrated – “I’m proud to say that we’ve offered outstanding severance packages to employees who, in the course of events, Stanton Enterprises have determined to be non optimal to the future performance of our assets –” his purchase of six different internet sites focusing on cute animal pictures – “Not ready to discuss where we’re going with that, and it may be a failure – but I can’t resist those things.”

Cute animals?

“The otters get me. Every time.”

We’ve gone through five tea cups and a first round of strawberries before I ask what really, is it like, to be a gorilla working on Wall Street.

His eyes narrow. He pops some strawberries in his mouth before answering.

“It depends.”

Depends?

“On whether or not we’re meeting in person, or via email or phone.”

I stab a strawberry with a fork and gesture at him to keep explaining.

“People I just talk to on the phone, or via text, or email – they know I’m a gorilla, but then again, they don’t know.” He puts the sixth tea cup down. This time it doesn’t break. “People who interact with me in person – well. They know. It’s hard to explain. But there’s a difference.”

And maybe some awkwardness.

“Awkwardness?”

With so many of his fellow – I choke a little on the word – gorillas – remaining either in the jungles, or in zoos.

“Well. Yes.”

He seems to be waiting for a question. I take another sip of champagne.

Does he ever think about them?

“I’ve got a lot of respect for them. They work, you know, 24/7. 24/7. I think that’s something most people don’t appreciate. They go to a zoo, see one of us sleeping there, and they think, yeah, lazy gorilla – but sleeping right there? That’s performing. That’s work. I respect that.”

One of us.

“One of us, yeah.”

Still, it must make it awkward, interacting with people who usually see gorillas in zoos.

“Many of your fellow humans remain in even more degrading conditions.”

It’s a point I can’t deny.

Still. I should pursue this. I remember Stanton’s comment – echoing comments that he’s made to other media – that he really, really doesn’t like competition. I don’t know if that means other business moguls, or other gorillas, or humanity in general. I’ve talked to people: I know this is one of their biggest questions. Is Stanton unique? Or will Wall Street soon by overrun by gorilla billionaires? Is he planning on freeing gorillas from zoos and from their few, swiftly diminishing enclaves in Africa?

If he is planning something – or even contemplating something – it’s probably my responsibility not just as a journalist, but as a human, a Homo sapiens, to find out.

But I also can’t help looking at the pieces of shattered tea cups on the table, or remembering his growl from earlier when I mentioned the rumors of hidden enclaves of gorillas on his estates.

In any case, he’s standing. From the neck down, he almost looks elegant, in his tailored Brooks Brothers suit, now a bit stained from the remains of our tea. If I just look at his chest, I can almost – almost – convince myself he’s human, the way I did when setting up this interview with that so remarkably efficient personal assistant. I look up, at his giant face, now back to the mild expression he wore earlier in the interview, at his large teeth, now red and dripping. From strawberry juice, I remind myself. The interview is clearly over. I stand up and extend my hand, thanking him.

He takes it, but only for the briefest of moments. I wonder if I’ve offended him, tell myself it’s just a gorilla thing. I hope it’s just a gorilla thing. Because – as much as the fragments of china might say otherwise – there’s been a certain thrill to this tea, a thrill I’d like to feel again.

And then he’s off, lumbering past the powerful, the once powerful, and a few stray tourists. Chairs shift out of his path; I fancy I hear small sighs of relief. At the departure of a gorilla, or a Wall Street titan?

Impossible to tell. I don’t try. Instead, I grab my tablet, to start prepping for my next interview – with a name who remarkably didn’t come up in this interview: another multi-billionaire allegedly interested in that same Hollywood conglomerate, a woman who – they say – is really a big, bad wolf. I make reservations at a steakhouse for the two of us, all while wondering just what doors Magot Stanton will break next.

© 2019 by Mari Ness

Author’s Note: Most writers will tell you that Twitter is a distraction – a tempting distraction, but a distraction. And they are right. But every once in awhile Twitter gives me an idea – as here, when a conversation about Tarzan and the apes got me thinking about talking gorillas. I originally had something much sillier in mind – thus the use of the celebrity interview format – but this was the end result. I suppose you can also blame a bad habit of regularly reading celebrity interviews. But sometimes bad habits can lead to something. Sometimes.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida, near a lake filled with hidden alligators. Her fiction has previously appeared in multiple venues, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Nightmare, Daily Science Fiction, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her poetry novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, appeared in 2017 from Papaveria Press. For more, see her occasionally updated blog at marikness.wordpress.com, or follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.

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DP FICTION #59B: “Beldame” by Nickolas Furr

I never had a driver’s license, you see. Instead I was born blessed with epilepsy. The doctors said it was bad form to put a two-ton vehicle into the hands of a young man who could seize at any time, medication be damned. Grand mal, tonic-clonic—whatever you wanted to call it, it was the big one, and I grew up afraid to be responsible for running off the road and killing someone because of it. I tell you this simply to explain that I was completely at the mercy of the bus line when we stopped at the small town in Kansas where all the houses faced west and I met the whispery old crone who sat at the intersection of two worlds.

At the time I was suffering through a crisis of identity and ennui. It was more than just the listless, relentless boredom of youth. The side effects of the Dilantin I popped to keep the seizures at bay made me irritable, anxious, and dark—sometimes at different times, sometimes all at once. I came from a good family in Kansas City, with two parents who loved me and supported me and a sister who put up with me. I was holding down a 3.88 grade point average at the University of Kansas, and I’d just met a guy.

James was from Pueblo, Colorado. We met at school and were looking into whether or not we wanted to pursue a relationship. He brought a beautiful pair of stark blue eyes, a lingering echo of the English R.P. accent he’d developed during the first 10 years of his life, and a tolerance for my nervous flutters. We weren’t exactly dating, but there was something between us. He wasn’t the first guy I fell for, or the first that I’d had sex with, but he was the first I really started to love. When you’re already pharmaceutically primed for nervousness, anxiety, and agitation, worrying about falling in love really adds to the stress.

James tolerated the stupid things I did, even if it meant he stopped talking to me for weeks at a time and didn’t make it easy to see him. The summer after we’d started peeking into the odd parts of each other’s lives, he told me that he was going to have to spend the rest of his vacation at home, with his family. If I wanted to see him, I’d need to come to Pueblo. I’d also need to find a place to stay while I was there, because even though they knew he was gay, they wouldn’t have any of that going on in their house.

I decided he was worth it and I found a way.

One of my friends dropped me at the bus station in Wichita. Wearing my backpack and leather-and-bead epilepsy bracelet, I boarded the bus and pushed toward the back. To get an aisle seat, I wedged myself in next to a large woman who smelled like cats and baby powder. Before we’d even left the station, she was telling me about her aches, pains, and grandkids. Not wanting to offend, I nodded along, muttering things like, “really,” “no kidding,” and “kids these days.” At most I could only be eight or ten years older than those kids, but she seemed to enjoy what I had to say.

After we’d put a few miles behind us, she grew quieter and started to mumble. Near Cheney, her mouth fell open and the snoring escaped. I slipped on headphones to listen to Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine” instead.

A bus in the summer is hot and noisy, and reeks of body odor, passed gas, pets and baby powder. My hard-won aisle seat meant I couldn’t see the unchanging wheat fields outside the windows. From my perch on the right side of the bus, I tuned out the world and turned up the trip-hop. The last thing I remember seeing was construction in Greensburg, Kansas before I feel asleep.

*

The bus swung around a corner and started to slow. I woke with that fuzzy, disoriented feeling waking from a sudden midday nap invariably causes. I didn’t know where we were, but most west Kansas towns all looked the same—railroad, grain elevator, grocery store, diner, and farmhouses. If it was big enough, it would have a school and a post office. None were big enough for a train station; the lines carried freight only. People without cars of their own—a rarity in this part of the country—came and went by bus only.

I leaned over the sleeping woman beside me to try and see the town. The front doors of the houses on this side all were no more than a few yards from the curb. Each had a small porch and patches of grass. Some had an oak or dogwood tree.

An American flag flew above one small stone building. I guessed the town was big enough for a post office, but I couldn’t reach close enough to the window to see the name over the door.

A couple blocks later, past a small hardware store and a Rosie’s Café, the bus stopped in front of a small grocery. Hydraulics hissed. The bus settled in place and the driver opened the door.

“Ten minutes, folks!” he said. “Don’t be late. Bathrooms are around the side, sandwiches and sodas in the store.” He stepped down and hurried around the side of the building.

About half of us got off. Most just went to the bathroom. A few went inside. I just wanted to stretch. Pulling off the headphones, I stepped into the middle of the street and let the sun warm my face. After a few moments, I opened my eyes. Across the street something was not quite right.

All the houses faced away. On the west side of the road beyond the double yellow line, there were no front doors or porches. Instead, there were fences, patios, swing sets, and barbecue grills. Not one house across the road faced me. Each faced west, away.

A few houses down, a little girl swung on a squeaky swing set. She sang the ABC song again and again, slightly louder than the metal squeaked. An unseen dog barked and I heard one of my fellow passengers ask how much longer we had.

“Seven minutes,” the bus driver answered.

A soda and sandwich would be nice, I decided, and turned to go inside. As I reached the door, someone reached out and tapped me on the arm.

“You’ll want to know this,” she said. I stepped back. A faded crone sat on a bench next to the door, smiling slightly.

“Excuse me?”

“You will want to know this,” she repeated.

Know what?

“I need to go inside,” I said, beginning to walk away.

“Buy a lottery ticket and go out the back door,” she said.

“What?” I stopped.

“Buy a lottery ticket from the man at the counter and then walk out the back door,”

“Why?”

“Because on the far side of the door, things are different.” Her slight smile became a crinkled grin. “Over there life is both great and dear. Outside that door is a world of monsters, a world of heroes. A place of great risks and greater rewards. No longer will you suffer mundane plagues of this world. No more seizures—”

I stepped back.

“No more school,” she said, continuing. “There you’ll learn if you can find someone to teach you. You’ll worship the gods of your choosing in your own place, in your own way. No more travel by bus. You’ll find other ways to travel from city to village to shire.” Her grin melted. “You’ll not have to worry about things you ought not worry about.”

I stared at her a moment.

“What do you know about my seizures?”

“Five minutes,” the driver announced as he walked past and boarded the bus.

“I know nothing,” she said. “Except that if you buy a lottery ticket and walk out that back door, you’ll step into a world where all the houses face east. And may never want to come back to this place.”

I backed away from her completely and stepped into the store. At the far end, the back door stood open, with only a battered screen door blocking the gap. Dim, gray light seemed to ooze through the aged, east-facing screen. It was not a tableau to inspire. I glanced back over my shoulder. Outside, the old crone was probably having a chuckle at my expense. Mentioning seizures was a good trick, but she could easily see the bracelet on my wrist and read the E word stitched into it.

I grabbed a bottle of Coke from a cooler and waited on a guy to buy beer and Copenhagen. The ticking clock in my head told me I had two and a half, maybe three minutes left. The guy behind the counter glanced at it and entered the price on an antique cash register.

“Buck and a quarter.”

I gave him a five and glanced around the counter—no lottery display anywhere. No tickets; no signs.

“Anything else?” He held the five.

The bus blew its horn.

“A lottery ticket,” I said. Why not? The ticket itself would make a decent conversation piece.

The cashier nodded and produced a ticket from under the counter. He didn’t push a button on a computer or tear it from a roll of tickets. He nodded and smiled. I glanced around, but nobody was watching us.

“Three and a quarter,” he said.

I took the ticket while he counted change. I thanked him and turned to face the back door.

Warm, rosy light now shone through the doorway. I slowly moved toward it until I could touch the wood frame. My fingers caressed the door. Eastern afternoon sun shone through the exhausted, dirty screen, warming my fingers. The smell of roses and jasmine tickled my nose. And when I concentrated, I could just barely hear something like a fiddle playing something happily mournful. A few seconds later the melody evaporated as the bus horn sounded again.

Fact to her fantasy. My breath fell still as my gaze finally reached the horizon and the vast mountain at its center, blued by distance. I stared at the creature in flight above the horizon and leaned into the door. It swung ajar just a few inches. Rose and jasmine grew bolder, joined by the odors of pine and something peppery. I pressed another inch or so. Tingling moisture condensed around my fingers, turning to haze.

On the other side, things are different, she had said. Life both great and dear, a world of heroes and monsters, with great risks and greater rewards. It could be the storybook life, a life in Middle-Earth… or maybe it was life somewhere darker.

What if there was no coming back, if this was a one-way trip? My folks, my sister would never know what had happened to me. I had a few good friends who would stay up at night and try to figure out what had happened, but no one would ever guess that I got off the bus somewhere in western Kansas and left this world for another.

Unless this was some sort of weird local custom or way to trick the occasional tourist, there was another world outside this door. I held up my hands to see fog drifting out from them. I felt like I should hear the slight hissing of steam.

If I couldn’t come back, I’d never see James again or speak to him. But if I could, I’d have a great story to tell everyone…. Oh. Maybe she hadn’t seen my bracelet and known. Maybe she did. But maybe there was no epilepsy and no tonic-clonic seizures on the other side.

The rosy-hued horizon beckoned through the screen door. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see that now…

…But not enough to leave everything and everyone behind.

I looked through the door once more. The misty haze threatening to pull me away from my world drifted away as I pulled the door closed and walked away. The bus horn blew one last time and the hydraulic brakes hissed. I was about to be left behind.

The first few steps back toward the counter were noiseless, not quite in touch with this world, I think, but by the time I nodded my thanks to the cashier, my shoes thumped on the wooden floor again. I handed the ticket to the beldame on the bench outside.

“I’m not sure this one’s a winner.”

“It could’ve been,” she said, and plucked it from my fingers.

I ran toward the bus, slapping at the door. It swung open resentfully and the driver swore at me to hurry up.

I glanced back and smiled, then climbed up and took my seat on the bus.

As I leaned back in my seat, I focused on my seatmate’s complaints—what she actually said about her damaged knee and ungrateful granddaughter. With the bus whining and roaring around and under us, I did more than nod alone. I listened. I needed something mundane to unravel the spell that had captured me.

She chatted as wheat fields rolled by. Only after she had fallen asleep again did I let myself remember the massive jagged mountain I’d seen through the screen door, high enough that clouds had pooled around the summit. I smiled as I remembered the winged reptilian form, soaring through those clouds.

*

Fourteen years I searched for the small Kansas town because I never learned its name. No one on the bus seemed to have caught it. I didn’t even know for certain that we were in Kansas until we passed the primary-colored “Welcome to Colorado” sign. I think I would have recognized Dodge or Garden City, but the woman sitting next to me told me I’d slept right through them.

I told myself that I’d ask the driver about that mysterious stop when we arrived in Pueblo, but during one of my dozy moments in Lamar, Colorado, another driver replaced him. When I reached my destination, the new one said she knew nothing about the Kansas route.

James didn’t understand either, but he tolerated my interest in it, considering it one of my foibles. A few years ago, I switched meds again to Depakene. Two years after I’d had my last seizure, he convinced me to get my driver’s license. For four years, he didn’t even mind too much when I started driving all over the plains, searching for that grocery.

For fourteen years, it hadn’t occurred to me that surrendering to the bus line was, in fact, a necessity. Not until now.

Fourteen years, one month, and eighteen days after I’d last been here, I awoke as the bus rounded a corner and began to slow. Still unable to read the name over the post office, I watched all the front yards to the right and the back yards to the left.

Slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I was one of the first ones out the door. I didn’t see the beldame on the bench. Unsurprised, I turned to look up into the afternoon sun. I listened for the sound of a squeaky swing set and a young girl singing the ABC song again and again. I stood silent until the dog barked.

I turned. She was sitting on the bench, as unchanged as the song.

“I want to buy a lottery ticket,” I said.

Her face cracked and a smile broke free.

“I thought as much. It’s rare for someone to come back. Not unique, mind, but rare.”

“I would have been here earlier, but I had a hard time finding you again.”

“Of course you did. What’s easy isn’t worth having. What are you waiting for?”

“I need to know: can I buy two tickets?”

“Why—ah!” She looked past me, where James waited just outside the bus door. He wore a heavy backpack of his own.

“I see.” The crone looked back at me. “Of course you may.”

Inside, we shared a last Coke while watching the rosy sun of another world shine through the aged screen door. Only after we heard the hissing, growling sound of the bus leaving did I step back outside. The old woman was gone, as I had thought she would be.

“Let’s go,” I said. I took his hand and motioned toward the door and the mountain, rising high in the distance, staccato behind the screen. We rushed across the room, the sounds of our shoes on the floor fading as we ran, before flinging open the door and leaping out into the world where all the houses faced east, the same way children bang open a door while running outside to meet a new morning.

© 2019 by Nickolas Furr

Author’s Note:  My family lived in Kansas when I was younger, and we lived in a small town southwest of Wichita for a few years, until I graduated high school. After that, we moved south, but I have always felt a connection to those small prairie towns in that part of the state, as well as similar ones in other states. We drive everywhere on vacations. I don’t fly anymore, though I used to. We have crossed the country, coast to coast, several times, and we have on several occasions gone out of our way to travel through these kinds of places. Each town is different, but there are similarities that simply can’t be ignored. In fact, that small town where I graduated high school has become a sort of defining touchpoint in my brain—this is what all the small towns I would ever write about would come from.

Nickolas Furr is a writer of dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His recent fiction has appeared in the anthologies California Screamin’, Morbid Metamorphosis, and A Darke Phantastique. He is a former journalist and freelance writer who is working towards teaching English at the college level. He has a fondness for prairie towns where the houses all face one way and the older women know all the secrets. He is a member of Horror Writers Association and San Diego HWA. He lives with his girlfriend, Liza, and their dogs, Liam and Jack, in a small mountain town east of the city which will almost certainly show up in a story at some point in the future.

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DP FICTION #59A: “This Is What the Boogeyman Looks Like” by T.J. Berg

This is what the boogeyman looks like.

It has white eyes with no pupils and no irises. Just white all the way through. But it can see you. So I must not fall asleep as I wait outside this closet door in an empty room, in an empty house with a derelict For Sale sign in front of it, everything smaller than I remember, baseball bat gripped in my hands.

*

This is what the boogeyman sounds like.

Short, huffing breaths, almost snorts, like your boss calling you into his office for a chat, because you got yet another email by accident that was supposed go to the CEO, who shares your name. “And you understand,” huff huff huff, “that you obviously didn’t get the whole story with just that one email,” huff huff huff, “and the engineers are definitely going to address that problem before the product goes to market.” Huff. “We understand each other, right?” And you’re too scared of losing your job to do anything but understand.

*

This is how the boogeyman gets you.

It has six arms. The first set has hands, much like yours. The second set ends in razor-tipped claws. The third set have some kind of suction on the ends. They take your soul. Like your ex-wife when she crossed her arms and said, “I can’t be with you if you’re too scared to even have kids.” When she said, her eyes pinched with that sympathy face, “I know you blame yourself for your brother.”

*

This is what the boogeyman looks like. Eyes white, all the way through. But he can see you. When he lifts up the blankets to peer under the bed. When those wide, wide nostrils in that too-small nose flare and breath you in. When he reaches his razor-clawed hands under the bed and sinks their points into your screaming little brother’s arms. This is what he looks like.

He looks like your ex-wife sitting on the bed with her hands in her lap, stretching a hair tie over and over again, saying, “This could have worked, it still could, if you weren’t so damned scared of everything. Too scared to ride a bus. Too scared to climb a tall hill. Too scared to ask for a raise, too scared to ask for a promotion, too scared to have kids, too scared to even have a bedroom with a closet. I can’t live like this.”

The boogeyman has a flat voice, like your wife giving up on you. Like when it’s dragging your little brother from under the bed, telling him he’ll do nicely. When you’re screaming, “Nate!” and he’s screaming, “Aiden!” And you scramble out after him. It is hunching toward the open closet, pincered arms bent backward, holding your little brother pinned to its back. The closet is pure darkness. A bad place. It is taking him there, where the boogeyman comes from. You dash. You dash right across and jump, thinking, you don’t know what, thinking you’ll grab its feet, hold it here. Your fingers out, wrap around a boot, but it kicks you away as it leaps into the darkness of the closet, Nate’s screams cutting off as if someone hung up the phone on him.

It was, finally, my wife’s leaving that sent me to the psychiatrist. The one that tells me, “The boogeyman is a classic symbol of fear, one you’ve put in the place of the man who took your brother, since neither of them were ever found.” I listened, but was also looking at the door behind his desk, wondering if it was a closet door. “In twenty-six years you’ve never once slept in a room with a closet?”

A shake of the head, eyes on the door.

“You need to confront this. The best way would be to go back to that house, the very house it happened in. If that’s possible. And face that closet. Barring that, try any closet for that matter. You’ll see. There’s no boogeyman. Just your fear.”

“And if the boogeyman is there? If he does come?”

He shook his head. “If it would make you feel better, bring a weapon.”

“What, like a gun?”

“That’s a terrible idea. No. A baseball bat. That’s what I keep by my bed.”

I wondered what his boogeyman looked like.

*

My boogeyman, just now, looks like a closet door in an empty room, in an empty house with a derelict “For Sale” sign in front of it, everything smaller than I remember. It’s chilly and the floor is hard and the baseball bat is clutched tight in my hands and my heart empties and fills with every tiny noise. A creak. A crack. A loud cricket. A tiny groan. Will he come? Is he still there? Still in that closet? Would he face an adult? Do I stand a chance?

What if he doesn’t come? What if he isn’t real?

A scratch. A soft thump. The cricket again. Shadows across the moon. Phantom movement in corners, across bare floors. The damned cricket, even noisier. And every time, the booming heart. The sense that my body empties and refills in an instant of stopped breath and terror. Will he come? What will I do if he does? What will I do if he doesn’t?

The closet door swings open. The darkness lies behind it. I raise my bat. The boogeyman steps out. I swing.

*

This is what the boogeyman looks like.

He is short. He wears goggles and a tattered wide brimmed hat. Something cloaks his lower face. His clothes fit like someone wearing a glove on their foot. Bits are tied up with string. He rolls over. Springs up. Ready to fight, hands in the air in front of him.

“Aiden?” he says.

He doesn’t huff. He lifts off his goggles, pulls the mask from the bottom half of his face. And he has blue eyes, eyes like mine. “Aiden?” he says again, questing voice. A little rough at the edges.

I raise my bat.

“Is it you?” he asks. “Is it? I was sure . . .”

I shake my head, but I say, “Yes.”

“It’s . . . Aiden, it’s me. Nate.” He coughs.

“Nate?”

“Nately mately hate me lately?” The silly rhyme we once made.

“Nate?”

His hand goes to his chest. He looks afraid. “I can’t stay.” Voice getting hoarser. Breathing heavy. Looking disappointed. “The air here, it’s hard to breath.”

“How? How are you here?”

“I escaped. And I remembered you, my brother, how brave you were.” Cough. Huff. “So as I got older, living there, in that place . . . I started to hunt them. The boogeymen.” Huff.

“You’re the boogeyman . . .”

“To the boogeymen.”

We are silent a while. Behind him the darkness in the closet remains opaque.

“Mom and dad?” he asks.

“Dead.” I can’t tell him how. Dad’s suicide. Mom’s fading away.

“I could feel you,” he said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever found my way back here.” Huff huff. “But I don’t think I can stay. I think I’ve breathed the air there too long.”

His eyes are blue, but very pale. Watery. The skin pale and pink where the goggles clung. Nostrils flare with each labored breath.

“You hunt them?” I ask. “The boogeymen?”

He grins, sheepish, a little proud. “Try to be brave, like my big brother.” He looks like he wants a hug.

I want to hit him with the bat again.

I want to shove him through the door and out of my life. I want to close the door and keep him here and watch him suffocate and die.

“I need to go back,” he says. “Will you come again? Please? I’ve been so lonely, there.” His breathing is desperate now. His back is to the blackness. “I don’t know why I’ve never sensed you before.”

Because I wouldn’t sleep in that room. Because I was too scared to go near a closet, ever again. Because this, this is what the boogeyman looks like. He looks like your little brother. He looks like you nodding a promise you’ll never keep, as your little brother steps back into the darkness.

 

© 2019 by T.J. Berg

 

Author’s Note: I was convinced of the existence of the boogeyman as a child, and closets still creep me out as a result.  I think this story was just carrying that fear into reality.

 

T.J. Berg is a molecular and cellular biologist working and writing in Sweden.  She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and was a member of the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle.  When she isn’t writing or doing science, she can be found stravaigin the world, cooking, eating, or playing dinosaurs, princesses, and super heroes, sometimes with her son.  She (and pointers to her other stories) can be found on the web atwww.infinity-press.com.

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #58B: “The Problem From Jamaica Plain” by Marie L. Vibbert

I was waiting for the teakettle to boil, and the office wasn’t due to open for, oh let’s say three minutes. The phone blinked and I considered not answering, what with those three minutes of leisure ahead of me, but I needed every client I could get. I put on my phone voice and chirped, “Jasmine Alexa, Attorney at law.”

The voice on the other end trembled with fear and flat, Bostonian vowels. “I’m not shuh, but Ah think I might have killed someone.”

That was as good as a shot of straight caffeine. “Excuse me? Wait… right now?”

There was an unsettling long pause. “No?” It was a woman’s voice, rough and deep, but definitely feminine.

You are no doubt thinking exactly what I was thinking at this point: This person is a murderer. After years of handling divorces and wills, I was suddenly transported into an episode of Law and Order: Special Weird Calls Unit.

Before my brain could decide if murderers paid well, my mouth said, “I’m sorry, this is a civil law office. I don’t do criminal cases.”

“Crap. Wrong number.” She hung up.

I stared at my phone. Should I call the police? Report the call? The number? The time? I was still writing down the digits when my phone lit up again. The same number. I let it ring once, but oh, I was too curious to let it go to voicemail.

“Jasmine Alexa.”

“Yeah, you said you were a lawyah?”

I propped the phone on my shoulder and wrote down the rest of the phone number, and the times for both calls. “Civil law,” I said.

“I wanna ask you about a custody problem.”

I set my pencil down. “What about the person you might have killed?”

A pause. “Aw, I don’t need a lawyer for that. So, uh… lemme ask you, and does it cost money just to ask? What happens if someone leaves a baby on your doorstep, say like in the movies, in a basket with a note and all that? Is that your baby?”

“Uh… no. You’re under no legal obligation, but you should call the authorities. The police will try to find whoever abandoned it. If the baby ends up a ward of the state, you’ll have to apply for adoption the same as anyone.”

“Thanks,” she said, and hung up.

What the hell?

This time I called her. She answered the phone with, “This is Elle.”

“This is Alexa. Did someone leave a baby on your doorstep?”

Elle sighed, long and heavy. “I guess ya better come over.”

The teakettle whistled. I looked at my note for the police. I picked up my car keys. You don’t go into business for yourself as a lawyer unless you’re more curious than smart.

*

Elle’s apartment was a walkup above a consignment shop, so the story about doorsteps was probably fabrication.

From her accent on the phone I expected a husky white woman with a cigarette permanently attached to her lip. Elle was skinny and very, very black. Almost blue. Never assume. Elle had a short afro pushed back by a yellow daisy headband, bright pink lipstick and a yellow shift dress. Glam.

Her deep voice sounded warmer than on the phone. “My girlfriend Veronica and I were arguing. Nothing serious! It got maybe a little heated, and she fell.” Elle backed into the apartment, twisting the hem of her dress between nervous fingers. “I mean… I pushed her,” she said, like a caught-out child. “But it wasn’t that hahd, I didn’t even expect her to fall but… anyway, that’s what’s left.” She lifted her chin to the right.

This was the moment when I could turn around, head back down the rickety steps, and forget the whole thing. I closed my eyes as I turned, picturing splattered blood and gore. I opened my eyes.

An adorable baby, about six months old with Asian eyes and drool-wet lips, looked up at me from a pile of rumpled laundry.

Before I could censor myself, my mouth blurted out, “But where’s the body?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Elle groaned. She stomped over to just to the left of the baby. “I was here. Veronica was there.” She gestured at the air over the baby. “I pushed, she fell. She didn’t move or nothing. I got scared. You were the first lawyer in the phone book. Then while we were talking, she just…” Elle waggled her fingers in the air. “Melted or something. So I’m looking at this pile of her clothes, and that – that kid crawls out!” Fat tears spilled down her cheeks. “Did I kill Veronica? Did I make her a baby? Gawd, I never even step on bugs. She just… I just…”

“This is not the sort of problem I’m trained to deal with,” I said. Understatement of the Month.

Elle walked around the baby, reaching out like she was afraid to touch it or to let it crawl away. “So what do I… do I call the cops? What if that’s not a baby?” She bit her lower lip. “What if this is Veronica?”

“I’m not following.”

Elle squatted down, peering at the baby, who stared back with an adorable “oo” expression. “It… it kinda looks like Veronica. I’m afraid to pick it up and check its parts to see if it’s a girl.”

“However it got here,” I said, “you are now the proud finder of a lost infant.”

“I should just treat it like that?” She looked at me like I was her mom and could solve all this for her.

I get that look a lot from potential clients. “Want me to call for you?”

Her skinny, anxious face bloomed into this relieved smile. “I’ll get ya some cake,” she said.

I didn’t believe Veronica was from Mars or whatever. I believed there was a logical, if odd, explanation. Elle produced a slice of cinnamon pound cake and a mug of Red Rose tea for me. She didn’t act like she’d recently had a head injury. The baby picked at Veronica’s discarded clothing with baby-like intense scrutiny. We made awkward small talk until the police came.

Elle paid me for my time, which was nice of her, and I wrote it all off as an unexplained mystery I’d enjoy telling at parties.

Not so lucky. Two days later, Child Protective Services called.

“Yeah, we got you as a witness to a foundling recovery in JP two nights ago?”

I knew right then it wasn’t going to be good. “What about it?”

“There’s a problem.”

“Did you find the birth mother?”

“Lady, you have got to be kidding me.”

“I… really am not kidding you. What’s the problem?”

“Your ‘foundling’ is a teen and asking for her lawyer.”

“I’m not…”

“Yeah, well, her much older girlfriend says you’re their lawyer, so you better come down here and talk to your client because she ain’t in the system and we aren’t in the habit of letting kids walk out of here without a legal guardian.”

I took one longing look at my lunch – fresh pesto on shells from the market up the street – and sighed. “I’m on my way.”

*

Veronica Wong, if you believed that was her name, was a coltish teen with shaggy, short hair. She wore oversized sweats and sprawled on the sofa in the front parlor of the Forbes Home for Wayward Youth.

In my briefcase I had a Xerox of Veronica Wong’s Massachusetts driver’s license proclaiming her to be twenty-five and a resident of Jamaica Plain. The photo was uncannily similar, but older, with longer hair.

“You’re sure this is the kid you brought in?” I asked the social worker.

She was a thickset black woman and she looked about one second away from flipping out. The whites showed all the way around her irises. “We get a lot of kids in and out,” she said, “but we tend to notice if one grows five years every night.”

Veronica blew a tuft of hair out of her face. “I want my lawyer,” she said.

The social worker asked, “You want to back out?” She asked it like she was asking if I wanted to stab her in the back.

I stepped forward, hand out. “Veronica? I’m Jasmine Alexa. We… may have met at your apartment, when you were…?” I stopped myself short of saying “destroyed and reformed as a baby.” It’s bad to assume things.

Veronica gave me a quick once-over. “Elle trusts you,” she said. “Is she still mad?”

I retracted my hand. “I don’t know what you were fighting about.”

Veronica rolled her eyes. “She thinks I’ve changed. Like I’m not the same person. She’s the one who changed! I’m me. I’ll always be me.”

“Well, right now that’s not as important as the question of your custody. You are… you appear to be a minor.”

“I know that. I’m adolescent, not stupid.” Veronica sank deeper into the couch, her legs spread wide. “They wouldn’t even let me see Elle until an hour ago. Tell Elle to stop freaking out and I’ll come home. And tell her I’m not going to replace her in her sleep! Jeeeeez. Why do people always think that about us, huh? We don’t go replacing any old person just to do it.”

I looked to the social worker for some help. She held her hands up and backed out of the room.

I sat down. “Right, so if you agree to have me represent you, I can hold anything we talk about in confidence. If your legal guardian—”

“I’m not an orphan. I told them, my parents live on Long Island.”

“Yes,” I said. I opened the file CPS had given me. “And those parents are a little confused how their college graduate daughter ended up in a home for minors.”

Veronica examined the ceiling through her bangs. “This sucks,” she said.

“Well, what do you expect me to do about it?” It wasn’t the tone I usually take with my clients, but this was getting unreal.

“Can’t you get them to release me into Elle’s custody? What if my folks wrote a note?”

“You can’t get Herbert and Julia Wong to come fetch you, why would they write you a note?”

Veronica flicked a hand dismissively. “They just hate taking the expressway.”

“I don’t think you understand: your claimed parents are officially denying you.”

She looked wrecked. After a long minute staring at her own sneaker digging holes in the carpet, she said, “Yeah, I guess they would.”

“Veronica, are Mr. and Mrs. Wong really your parents?”

Morosely, to her feet, she said, “I’ll be twenty-five in a couple more days and it’ll all smooth out. Guess I just gotta wait.”

“I’m not sure this will smooth itself out. I think we’re about five minutes away from black helicopters coming in to take you away.”

She half-grinned. “Guess I really need a lawyer, then.”

“My first question, as your lawyer, is: are you going to persist in being Veronica Wong? Even if everyone who knows Veronica Wong denies you?”

Hands clasped between her knees, every inch a vulnerable teen, she said, “I don’t know how to be anyone else.”

“Okay. Okay, so, Veronica, um… was there an original, other Veronica I should be concerned about?”

She rolled her eyes, and in almost exactly the inflection of Elle, but with a distinct Long Island lockjaw, said, “I don’t need a lawyer for that.”

*

The social worker stopped me with a hand on my chest as I tried to leave the building. “Look, we processed her as an infant two days ago. We got the paperwork all in place – we had adoption people breathing down our necks – but suddenly she was too old to be a newborn. Had to re-process as a toddler. The hospital bracelet had to come off. Three times. That’s a re-admit, full paperwork. Then there were the vaccination questions at each age landmark. You want to explain to the state why you can’t vaccinate a five year old because it hasn’t been twenty-four hours since their two-year-old vaccinations? I’m losing my marbles and no one is helping. District, City won’t touch her with a forty-foot pole. We don’t have procedures for this. The fourth time they asked me to re-do the paperwork, I put her in as school-age, which incidentally is loads worse with extra considerations, but I figured if we jumped a few years ahead we’d be in the clear. We are NOT in the clear.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that, regardless of what CPS is saying right now, she’s going to look eighteen soon enough and I’d really like to release an eighteen year-old into her lawyer’s custody. We’ll say she aged out of the system. It won’t be a lie.”

I didn’t think adults could get their eyes that round and puppy-like. “This is asking a lot.”

“You’re a civil lawyer. I’ll owe you a favor and I’m sure you’ll be back to collect before too long. You do divorces? Custody disputes?”

“Wouldn’t I love to,” I said.

*

Elle stood at the base of the stairs up to her apartment, arms crossed tight across her chest. “I don’t want her in here.”

“She lives here,” I said.

“That isn’t Veronica. I don’t know what that is, but it is not my girlfriend!”

Veronica groaned. “I’ve been Veronica as long as you’ve known me.”

“And how do I know that?”

It was drizzling – that soft, fuzzy drizzle that you hardly notice but that soaks you through after a while. “Look,” I said, “I got her out of official custody, but I’m not taking her home like an abandoned kitten. My landlord would kill me. Veronica has to live somewhere.”

“Veronica does,” Elle said, lifting her chin.

I said, “You’re accusing your girlfriend of being an illegal alien and identity thief. That involves contacting Immigration. That involves criminal charges. I’d be required to report that to the police. If they arrest her and can’t find a record of her citizenship, what do you think will happen?”

Elle took a step back, into the shelter of the covered stair. “I don’t want anybody deported, but come on – she’s a damned pod person! Or, or that thing from that movie in the Artic with the dogs and whatshisname. That… what was that thing called?”

“The Thing,” I provided. “Veronica, you can weigh in on this at any time.”

Veronica stepped forward, chin down, hands clasped before her. “I’m the same girl you met on the red line, Elle.”

“Your folks don’t say that. Your folks are more pissed than I am.”

Veronica’s contrite posture evaporated. She balled her fists on her hips. “You’ve been talking to my folks behind my back again?”

I said, “Can we please have this argument indoors?”

Elle gave in. She kept shooting glares at Veronica, but she let us follow her up into the apartment.

“Have a seat,” she gestured at the couch.

“I’m not a guest. I live here,” Veronica said. “I bought that couch.”

“A pod person bought my couch,” Elle said, disgusted.

Veronica started crying, helpless, wracking sobs, standing there in the middle of the room.

It was an ugly couch: tomato-soup red tweed. I charitably assigned the disgust and the tears to it. I said, “Veronica, she’s not trying to hurt you; she really wants to know who you are. Elle, she’s trying to tell you who she is. Be patient and listen. If she was going to melt your brain and use it to destroy the Earth, I think maybe she’d have done it by now.”

Elle frowned hard, but she turned to look at Veronica. “Who are you?”

Veronica sat down on the couch. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I’m not the original Veronica Wong, but it’s not like I killed her. My parents – my real parents, my pod parents – put an ad on Craigslist, looking for someone who would want to trade identities, get away. Veronica answered, and they sent her my pod.” Veronica shrugged. “That’s the way we do it. The real Veronica put my pod on her bed and slept next to it for a week, until I formed. Like I’m re-forming now. We grow to adulthood fast, then we age normal. So I… I will look a few years younger now. Because I kinda got re-set. It’s my stem, see… we’re like plants?” Turning to me, she said, “The real Veronica is in Nevada, driving a truck. We keep in touch on Instagram. You never met her. I mean… she’s not me. She’s straight, and she likes pro wrestling.” Veronica wrinkled her nose.

“I’m relieved I won’t have to recommend you a criminal lawyer for her murder.” I reconsidered my Understatement of the Month.

There was an awkward pause. I found myself listening for black ops helicopters. Perhaps, in the real world, there’s no funding for Mulder and Scully.

Elle squinted. “Wait. But how old was Veronica when you took her place? If she, like, consented and all? She can’t have been younger than… how old are you?”

“It was seven years ago, but…”

“Holy crap!”

“…but that’s like thirty in human years! Come on! I’m a pod person, remember? You see how fast I grow back. Oh, and thanks for killing me, by the way.”

Elle’s lips trembled, her eyebrows canted high. “I… I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Well, you did. And now you know what happens when you break my plant stem. It gets weak in the winter and I don’t move backwards so good, and then you stepped on my toe and SNAP. Do you know how much it sucks being a baby again?”

“But… seven? V, I can’t date some child!”

“In pod years. Jeez, it’s not like I had to spend a whole year growing up! Figure year one is actually eighteen years, development-wise.”

I raised my hand and held it in the air until they remembered they had an audience. “So,” I said, “to recap: Veronica is a pod person who replaced another girl who was over the age of consent. None of us have ever met Veronica the First, and she is not a party in this dispute. Elle did not know of Veronica’s non-human nature, a fight broke out, and, if I’m hearing this correctly – Elle, you actually did kill someone that morning when you called me?”

“Aw gawd,” Elle said, and fell down on the couch next to Veronica, twisting her fingers together.

“Not, like, permanently,” Veronica said. She reached out like she wanted to put her arm around Elle but wasn’t sure it would be accepted. “Didn’t even hurt all that much. I was just… startled. And a baby.”

“I didn’t… I don’t wanna be that kind of girlfriend,” Elle sniffled. Now they were both wet-faced.

I said, “Do we need to do something about this? We’re talking about deadly assault.”

Veronica gestured wide. “I’m not pressing charges or anything. Elle didn’t know I’m more fragile than a normal human.”

“I’m so sorry!” Elle threw her arms around Veronica. They hugged each other tight, sobbing together. “I’ll never walk again if it means not stepping on your adorable little toes. Oh gawd!”

“No, Elle. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, about your mother.”

“She is a bitch. Oh, honey. I shouldn’t have let her pressure you.”

“No, no, she’s right. I mean… it’s been four years. Maybe we are taking things too slow.”

I was beginning to feel like a fifth wheel, but I still had some things to clear up. “So, if you don’t mind, I’ll charge this as a one-hour consult?”

They looked up like they were shocked to remember I was still there.

Elle sniffled, and grasped my hand. “Thank you, Ms. Alexa. Really. I don’t know how we’ll ever pay you back.”

I said, “Consider getting a prenuptial agreement and filing power of attorney writs. You never know what will happen.”

Elle quickly said, “Oh, no… I mean, I asked, but she…”

Veronica pulled her girlfriend back and looked her in the eyes. “Yes,” Veronica said.

Elle said, “Oh sweetie, no, you’re all emotional and with all this…”

“Shut up, Elle. I’m saying ‘yes,’ and you can’t take it back now.” She glared sternly at her girlfriend, who melted – in the normal, romantic sense.

They kissed, and I saw myself out. When I got back to the office, I sent them my standard prenup packet and a note to pass my name along to anyone who needed special legal attention as a pod-American. There were identity theft issues, legal status, citizenship – gallons of delicious, charge-by-the-hour paperwork.

I think those two crazy kids – and my business – are going to make it.

© 2019 by Marie L. Vibbert

Author’s Note: My friend Alexandra, a lawyer, related to me a puzzling wrong number she’d received.  The first phone call is verbatim from her memory.  I found myself trying to come up with an interested reason why this person wasn’t sure if they’d killed someone.  Then I decided to set it in Boston because, well, I hadn’t set anything in Boston yet, and two of my Clarionmates were living there at the time.  Shout out to Christian and Thom!

Marie Vibbert’s writing has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF, among other places.  She is a computer programmer and played tackle football for the Cleveland Fusion for five years.

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DP FICTION #58A: “Consequences of a Statistical Approach Towards a Utilitarian Utopia: A Selection of Potential Outcomes” by Matt Dovey

Maximised Total Happiness

Michelle smiled, exhausted, as her baby’s cry filled the hospital room. The lights above her were harsh and cold, and the sheets beneath her were tangled and scratchy, soaked in her sweat and stinking of iodine, but none of that mattered against such a beautiful sound. She heard it so rarely—just once a year.

“Congratulations, Mrs Bergeron,” said the midwife. “It’s a girl.”

“Oh, thank you so much! I’m ecstatic!” She looked over at Nathan, cradling baby Danielle face down in his strong arms. A Happiness Moderator stood by them, uniformed with the usual black suit and easy smile; he lined up a large needle at the base of Danielle’s skull and implanted the HappyChip with a swift movement. Danielle’s cries quieted, then turned to a happy giggle.

“You should be very proud,” said the midwife, smiling. “What number is she?”

“My 22nd!”

“Well, congratulations again. I look forward to seeing you next year for number 23.”

Highest Possible Mode

Raj stepped into the kitchen and the welcoming arms of Alejandro. The air was heavy with spice and the sizzle of frying pork, the promise of a celebratory dinner as only Ali could prepare.

“I knew you could do it,” whispered Ali, embracing him. “Team manager!”

This, more than the promotion, was what made Raj happy: that he had made Ali proud. Falling in love with him had made everything click for Raj, and he understood, at last, what it meant to call someone your other half: not just a casual joke, but an honest statement that I am not me without them. Seeing Ali’s pride made him swell. It meant more than anything.

A firm knock sounded at the door, and Raj all but floated down the hallway to open it.

Pain flared in his toes. Raj crumpled, grasping at his right foot. He looked up; a Happiness Moderator stood in the doorway, already filling out his worksheet on a tablet. The Moderator had stamped on Raj’s foot as soon as the door had opened, breaking two, maybe three toes by the feel of it.

“Why?” gasped Raj.

The Moderator didn’t look up from his monitoring tablet. “Your level of happiness had risen to be equal to a large number of other citizens, but was nonetheless lower than the current societal mode. As such, your happiness threatened to establish a lower level as the new mode, undermining government targets.”

“Couldn’t you have given me some flowers or something? Made me even happier and lifted me above the others?”

“Sorry sir,” said the Moderator. “Pain is easier to invoke, and longer lasting. Have a happy day!

Highest Possible Mean

Roger cackled as he switched the traffic lights to red again, having let only three cars through the intersection. He was watching the drivers on an array of video monitors that glowed in the dim control room, displaying an orchestra of impatience rendered in drumming fingers and revving engines.

“Sir,” said a Happiness Moderator, stepping up to the desk. “Please be careful not to cause too much irritation. As soon as their combined frustration outweighs your delight…”

Roger looked up, a manic, almost hysterical grin on his face. He hadn’t had this much fun in years! Lights go green… lights go red! Pedestrians cross now… and again… and again! But not for too long—got to make them run once they’re halfway across! He laughed uproariously.

“Never mind, sir,” said the Moderator, stepping away.

Smallest Possible Standard Deviation

Cecile clicked the plastic lid onto the latte and passed it across the counter with a smile. The businesswoman smiled back with the same easy contentment and stepped away into the chatter of the airport, merging seamlessly into the efficient flow of foot traffic.

A cry went up from the arrivals line: Delphine! Oh Delphine! Two silver-haired women ran towards each other and embraced, clinging to each other with a frantic longing, their shoulders shaking as they sobbed on each other’s shoulder.

Cecile’s eyes welled up. She suddenly missed Nicole desperately, a huge hollow of longing opening up beneath her heart. It had been two months now, and Cecile still had no idea when the Venezuelan dig would be completed and Nicole would be home again, curled up on the sofa with Cecile under blankets and cushions and Henri the cat purring between them, a shared bottle of merlot by candlelight…

Happiness trickled across Cecile’s body like warm water, flowing out from the base of her skull, dampening her sadness and leaving it as an academic awareness of loneliness to be acknowledged with a smile. The two women in arrivals broke apart, arms dropping to their sides and broad grins smoothing down to gentle smiles. The same gentle smile as Cecile. The same gentle smile as everyone. Easily-maintained, easily-controlled, for everyone everywhere, always.

Highest Possible Median

Moderator Laidlow looked up from her monitoring tablet into the crying man’s puffy eyes. He stood in his doorway, dressed in a grey, ratty dressing gown, his hair unkempt and face unshaven. His bottom lip wobbled as he explained.

“Honestly, I’ll be fine again in a couple of hours. It’s just—my cat died overnight, and I might be a little down now, but I’m getting over it, I promise!”

He danced a sad little jig in the sour morning light as if to demonstrate, but he only made it four beats before sagging in defeat.

It wouldn’t have mattered. The tablet had already confirmed his status: he was the saddest person in the local area, with the least chance of improving above the median before the end of the day, judging by his current emotional trajectory.

She nodded at Moderator Rence, who reluctantly drew his HappyTaser. Laidlow had noticed his increasing reticence through their recent duties, though she struggled to understand it. She took great pride and satisfaction in her work; in knowing that she was improving society. Rence’s mood was completely at odds with her own approach to the work.

Without ceremony, he pressed the HappyTaser to the man’s forehead and executed him. He stood for a moment as the body crumpled, jerking slightly with the electric discharge, then slowly lifted the Taser and examined it.

“Do you ever wonder,” he said, “if what we do actually helps? Does it fix anything, or are we just papering over cracks? Does our work merely hide society’s ills behind an artificially inflated number, not only doing nothing to help directly but actively preventing greater self-examination of the true causes of our problems? Does the work not, in fact, burrow under your skin and eat away at you in the cold hours of the night, leaving you filled only with doubts and a raw, jagged uncertainty? Having walked out of the darkness of ignorance and come to find the truth beneath the façade, I do not know as I will ever be truly happy again.”

Laidlow said nothing. She swiped about on her monitoring tablet, looking for the next unhappiest person in the vicinity now that this job had been completed.

Moderator David Rence said the display.

She raised her HappyTaser to his temple and executed him.

Well! she thought, smiling. That was efficient! What an excellent day!

© 2019 by Matt Dovey

Author’s Note: I can’t recall precisely what triggered the combination of utilitarianism and statistics in my mind—just the general everyday mush that is my brain, one supposes—but I never expected anyone else to find it funny. There’s not much more to be said for it than that, perhaps, except perhaps it shows the absurdity of taking any system to its logical extreme without constraint. I wonder if that will ever occur to the free market adherents selling off all the public infrastructure in Britain. Special thanks must go to Ric Crossman (@SquidFromSpace) for his statistical consultancy, in particular pointing out a far more efficient method for maintaining the optimum median value, an idea that will surely make him a hero come the revolution.

Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He once got too happy after finding a packet of Golden Crunch Creams at the back of the cupboard, and has a scar on his arm where the Moderators intervened. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife & three children, and despite being a writer he still hasn’t found the right words to fully express the delight he finds in this wonderful arrangement. His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He’s an associate editor at PodCastle, a member of Codex and Villa Diodati, and has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place, including all four Escape Artists podcasts, Flash Fiction Online and Daily SF. You can keep up with it all at mattdovey.com, or follow along on Twitter and Facebook both as @mattdoveywriter.

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DP FICTION #57B: “The Train to Wednesday” by Steven Fischer

Charlie Slawson sat alone in the transit station, watching a set of empty train tracks and wondering why the train was late. Truth be told, he hadn’t known until just then that temporal trains even could be late. 

He looked around the underground station—its old, brick walls lined with gaudy digital displays, advertising exciting trips to next year, next century, and beyond—before noticing a man stepping onto the platform from a little door beside the tracks. He wore navy blue coveralls and a tall pair of work boots. His close-cropped, grey hair was half hidden beneath a faded baseball cap.

“Excuse me,” Charlie called. “Any idea when the train will arrive? I think it’s running late.”

The man stopped and frowned, then walked over to the bench. “You sure you’re in the right place, son? Which train are you waiting for?”

Charlie nodded and motioned to the marquee above the tracks. “Train to Wednesday. Just like it says.”

“Hmmph,” the old man grunted. “Wednesday’s never been one of our peak destinations. Especially not a Wednesday that’s just a few days away. What’d you want to do a thing like that for?”

Charlie turned the tablet in his hands so the old man could see the picture on the screen. That day, years ago, when Dad took him fishing out west of Cambridge. The first time he’d ever been to the train station. 

Dad tried to keep the trip going every year after Charlie left home, but life got busy, then they drifted apart. Charlie had always assumed they’d have time to catch up later, but he would give anything to have that day back, now.

“Your father?” the man asked.

Charlie nodded. “His funeral is this Wednesday.” He thought of the tearful video message he’d received this morning from his mother, his siblings already bickering in the background over funeral venues and seating arrangements. 

It was foolish, all of it. It would make no difference to Dad if the memorial dinner served chicken or beef, or if the service was held at the church on High Street or Main. What Dad would have appreciated was more time with his son, but Charlie hadn’t given him that. And no memorial, however perfectly it was planned, could do a thing about it. 

More time at home would just mean more time to feel guilty. More awkward conversations with distant relatives, more photographs and memories, more reminders that Dad had always been there for him, but he hadn’t done the same. 

“I loved my Dad,” Charlie said. “Even if I wasn’t the best at showing it. I wouldn’t miss his funeral for the world, but I’d just rather skip all the mess in between.”

The man nodded and fished a hand into his coveralls, coming up a moment later with a small, silver pocket watch. Inscribed on its cover was the looping infinity symbol of the Temporal Transportation Administration. 

The man opened the watch and tilted it so Charlie could see. Dials and arms littered the watch face, twisting together in an intricate dance that Charlie struggled to make heads or tails of. The man tapped the glass faceplate and made a sound which fell somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh. 

“Well would you look at that,” he said. “Seems you’re right. Train should’ve been here at least thirty seconds ago.”

“Is that normal?” Charlie asked.

“Nah. But it ain’t unheard of either.” The old man bit his lip. “These tunnels have been around almost as long as I have. Every once in a while the track is bound to run a little slow.”

Charlie looked down at the screen in his hands and sighed. “Okay. Any idea how much longer it’ll be?”

“Doesn’t work like that.” The old man shook his head. “A little hiccup on the other end might mean just a few extra minutes here, or it could mean a few days, or more. No way to tell without heading down the tracks and finding where the train is stuck.”

“Christ,” Charlie mumbled, staring down into the empty tunnel at the end of the station. “Is that safe?”

The old man shrugged. “Life ain’t safe. But there’s no reason it should be especially dangerous, provided we’re careful.” He turned and started to walk towards the tracks.

“We?” Charlie asked.

“Course.” The old man climbed down onto the railway and motioned for Charlie to follow. “Any extra delays stack up real fast down the line, so once we get her going again, the train won’t stop until the next station. You’ll have to board wherever we find her.” 

“You’re joking,” Charlie muttered, glancing down at his dress slacks and new oxford shoes, then at the puddles and mud waiting for him beside the tracks. 

Then he thought of his father, and the nightmare the next two days would be without him. He grabbed his briefcase and jacket and hopped over the edge of the platform.

*

Charlie tiptoed along the rail line, as close to the man and his flashlight as he could manage. Above their heads, aging brickwork dripped water and something much darker in thick, black droplets that clung to the floor. 

“You sure it’s safe to be in here?” Charlie asked. “These walls don’t look like they’re holding up so well.”

The old man grunted in agreement. “Been around a long time. It’s a wonder they’ve held up as long as they have.”

Somehow, that didn’t comfort Charlie. “Why hasn’t anyone bothered to replace them?”

“Ha!” The old man laughed, then turned back to face him. “When are you from, son?”

“When?” Charlie asked, shielding his eyes from the beam of the flashlight. “Don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“Course you don’t,” the old man replied. “Because you don’t remember when they put these things in.” He patted the brick wall with obvious affection, then turned down the tunnel and started to walk again. “It ain’t just something you can go and replace. Takes a lot of time, and a lot of lives to dig a set of tunnels through spacetime. To pull the two apart so that you can move through one by moving through the other. It also took a lot of problems to make men and women willing to take that risk. Problems that you couldn’t just hop on a train and skip.”

Charlie grimaced. He wasn’t skipping the problem, just the mess. “So how does this work?” he asked, hoping to change the subject. “Aren’t we traveling back in time?”

The man laughed again, like Charlie was a child. “Course not. Trains can only go forward and so can we. Can walk down the tunnel as long as you want, but you’ll never reach a previous station.”

“And what if you managed to get outside the tunnel?”

“Wouldn’t want to do that.” The man pointed his flashlight at a pool of ink-black liquid. “The tunnel’s old enough here that some of the outside’s dripping through. All you’d find out there is a big sea of black.”

“Unless you found another tunnel?” Charlie asked.

The old man shrugged. “Suppose so, but you wouldn’t last that long. Just the tunnels and trains that can survive in the void.”

As they walked down the tracks, the dripping grew more frequent and louder, until the darkness spilled from the walls in neat little rivulets. 

“Careful now,” the old man muttered. “Better keep your feet on the tracks and avoid them puddles altogether.”

“Otherwise?” Charlie asked.

The man’s voice was stern for the first time since they’d met. “Otherwise I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

*

The train was near wrecked when they finally found her. That much was clear the moment the old man’s flashlight beam fell onto her engine’s crumpled exterior. 

“Well that doesn’t look good,” Charlie managed to mutter.

The man shook his head and wandered closer to the engine. He pointed his flashlight down onto the ground, stepping carefully around the small, black stream which poured from the brickwork where the train had collided with the wall. The engine was lodged halfway through the wall itself, the only thing plugging a massive hole to the void.

The old man crouched beside the damaged tunnel and ran his hand along the bowing stone. Little waterfalls of thick, black liquid flowed from the brick around the sides of the train, pooling into a narrow brook which ran both ways along the tracks.

“Well?” Charlie asked. “What do you think?”

The old man grimaced. “I think we’ve got a big problem to deal with.”

Charlie looked at the line of train cars behind him. Aside from the engine, the rest of the train was largely undamaged. Passengers milled about inside, uninjured, pressing their faces up against the small, dark windows. A woman in a floral dress and an ancient-looking hat leaned her head out of one of the passenger car doors and began to climb down the emergency ladder. A young, mustachioed man in a charcoal-grey suit followed closely behind.

“The train doesn’t seem so bad to me,” Charlie said. “Just needs a new engine, probably.”

The old man nodded, then noticed the couple exiting the train. He wagged his finger like a grandfather scolding a pair of children. “And what exactly do you think you’re doing?” he called.

A guilty smile crossed the woman’s face. “Just coming to have a look. Maybe see if we could fix whatever’s the matter.”

The old man sighed and dipped a finger into one of the pools of black. The liquid crawled quickly up his hand, until he withdrew it from the puddle. He held his arm in the air a moment before pressing it against the edge of the train. The blank, dark space where his hand had been simply passed through the metal as if nothing was there.

He fixed the couple with a glare. “And what exactly are you going to do about that?”

The woman’s smile vanished and she mumbled a half-hearted reply.

“Exactly,” he replied. “Now you two get back inside and close that door, and let the experts handle this.”

Charlie chuckled. He certainly didn’t feel like an expert.

The old man frowned at him, then pulled a small, silver rag from his coveralls and wiped his hand clean. The black which had coated his palms seemed to simply fade into the fabric. “It ain’t the train that I’m worried about. This wall gives any further and the whole tunnel will be swimming in the black. Station too. Maybe the next station down the line. Nothing to stop it moving forward once it reaches that point.”

“Christ,” Charlie muttered. “What can we do about it? I imagine there’s someone that we’ll have to call?”

The old man glanced at his pocket watch. “No time for that. It’d take ‘em at least as long as it took us to get down here. But we can start by getting this engine out of the way.”

“What?” Charlie asked, feeling the knot in his stomach tighten at the idea. “The engine is the only thing plugging the hole. If we pull the plug, the entire tunnel will flood.”

The old man shook his head. “Don’t work like that, kid. The tunnel isn’t any happier about it being broken than we are. Given the chance, the hole would seal itself right up. As is, the train’s the only thing keeping it open.”

He pointed at the spiderwork cracks running through the tunnel wall. “It’s like a knife in a wound. Might bleed worse for a minute when we pull it out, but the longer it’s in there, the more damage it does.” 

The cracks seemed to grow even in the short time the man spoke, new drips and defects popping up around them. “Well that’s easy then,” Charlie replied. “We just put the train in reverse and pull the engine out.”

“Mmhmm,” the man replied. “Provided she’s still working.”

*

Charlie sat in front of the train’s aging control board, horrified that humans had ever trusted their safety to technology so primitive. Although digital networks had replaced the engineers running the rails decades ago, the engines were built in a time long before then and still sported a panel of manual backups, littered with dials, levers, and other relics of the past. Charlie glanced over his shoulder at a small, dim screen that showed a live feed of the passenger cars. Come to think of it, most of the train’s passengers were relics as well.

Out the cabin’s small side window, the old man stared at Charlie and gave him two thumbs up. He’d stayed outside to make sure the hole sealed shut, his hands full of minor patching equipment which Charlie was entirely sure would be insufficient if actually needed.

Initially, he thought he’d gotten the better end of the deal. But now that he was inside the engine room, with only inches of glass separating him from the horrible emptiness which stared back through the front windshield, he wasn’t so certain. The darkness in front of him swirled and writhed like a pile of living shadow, feeling and squirming its way towards the cracks in the tunnel wall. Charlie couldn’t see it, but he felt it. Felt it the same way he felt this might not end well. But what choice did he have?

He could climb back outside the engine and tell the man he’d had enough. Walk straight to the station and wait out the rest of a painful week at Mom’s. That wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be tearful and frustrating, but certainly not deadly. 

But it had taken nearly an hour to walk this far down the tunnel, and there were no guarantees the wall would hold long enough for him to get back. Besides, if the man was right, and a spill on this end of the track could creep into the future, who was to say he’d make it to the funeral at all?

At the end of the day, those thoughts didn’t matter. The only one that mattered was of Dad, standing on the train platform all those years ago, bending over to pick up a piece of crumpled paper from beside the trash can.

“Never walk past a mistake, Charlie,” he’d said, his quiet, certain voice rising over the sound of the station’s bustle. “Not when it’s in your power to fix.”

Dad had lived his life by those words, and Charlie would be damned if he couldn’t live up to them, especially today. It was the least he could do.

“Alright, Dad,” he muttered, staring down at the large, red lever on the control panel. He glanced out the window and gave the man a thumbs up in return, then threw the lever into reverse. 

Behind him, the engine whirred to life, rumbling and shaking as it struggled to throw the massive weight of the train backwards. Charlie gripped his seat and stared out the window at the man beside the tracks, but the train didn’t move.

The man shouted something that Charlie couldn’t hear, but he knew what it must mean by the waving of the man’s arms. Turn the engine power up. Charlie nodded and spun one of the dials to full. 

The knot in his stomach tightened even further as he felt the train start to shift backwards. Its metal walls screeched and scraped against the brickwork as it pulled itself back from the hole. Then, just as soon as it had begun, the train slammed to a halt.

“No, no, no,” Charlie mumbled, spinning dials left and right. Despite his attempts, the train wouldn’t budge. Outside the window, the man motioned madly for him to kill the engine, rushing out of the way of a sudden onslaught of black liquid. 

Charlie stared at the river and raced through his odds. A portion of the wall must have broken loose as he reversed, lodging itself behind the rear wheels and holding the train in place. The void was coming in, even if he stopped the engine. 

He looked at the growing stream of black with mounting certainty. Even if he stopped now, it would be enough to flood the tunnel. The only chance to stop it was to get the engine out, so the hole could close. 

Through the windshield, the void tumbled over itself with anticipation. Nothing but black in its horrible depths. Nothing but black…and was that a streak of silver?

Charlie stood up from his chair and pressed his face to the windshield, struggling for a better look. Somewhere below, in the sea of emptiness, a small line of silver glimmered brightly. Charlie traced its path until it ended in a box, so far below it only looked like a little dot. 

But it wasn’t a dot, of that Charlie was certain. In that moment, he knew it was a train station—some other year, some other century, lingering in the darkness below. 

It was a train station, and he had a plan.

Charlie sat back in his seat and took a deep breath, then one final peek out the small side window. The black stream had grown into quite a torrent already, pouring both ways down the tunnel. The old man still motioned for Charlie to stop the engine, but he was standing pressed up against the opposite wall to avoid the darkness as best as he could. 

Charlie tapped a small red button on the dashboard, feeling a clunk behind him as the engine detached from the rest of the train cars. 

“Alright, Dad,” he muttered. “I’ve never been one for walking anyways.” With that, he gripped the engine’s lever and shoved it towards the waiting void. 

The engine lurched forward with a tremendous screech, and Charlie turned around in time to see the wall snap closed behind him and the world vanish from view.

*

The engine crashed through the station ceiling some time later. How long, exactly? Charlie wasn’t certain, and he doubted he ever would be. It felt as if he’d spent no time at all in free fall, and yet it felt as if he’d spent his whole life. All he knew was that he was happy when the collision threw him forward against his restraints and he was suddenly staring into someplace bright and living again.

The moment the engine came to a rest on the empty platform, Charlie unclipped his restraint and scrambled to the door. He climbed awkwardly out of the twisted, tilting vehicle, prepared to shout at any bystanders about the need for evacuation. Instead of spotting a stream of black liquid behind him, however, he noticed that the engine had fallen straight through the ceiling, which had, indeed, sealed itself right up behind him. 

The few commuters on the platform stared at him with surprise, but not dismay, until a middle-aged man wearing dark blue coveralls shouted at him from a across the platform. 

“Hey! Hey you!” he called. “What the hell is going on?”

Charlie stared at the brightly colored baseball cap atop the man’s head and smiled. He ran across the platform and wrapped the man in a tight embrace.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the man grumbled, shoving him away with a confused frown.

“What year is it?” Charlie asked suddenly, catching sight of the posters which lined the station walls. He remembered seeing them years ago.

“Oh Jeez,” the man muttered. “Don’t tell me you got yourself lost somehow.”

Charlie felt the knot return to his stomach as he shook his head and grabbed the man by the shoulders. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I just need to know the date, or at least the day of the week.”

The man stared at him for a moment without answering, but Charlie already knew the answer. On the tracks, a train was waiting, its doors preparing to close. Inside, a young boy and his father were too busy staring at the fishing guidebook they’d brought along to notice the commotion outside.

“Wednesday,” the man muttered, but Charlie was already running towards the train.

© 2019 by Steven Fischer

Author’s Note: I spend most of my life waiting for moments. Counting down the days to big events like graduation, or the minutes to small ones like the end of a shift. Too often, I’m so busy looking forward that I forget to look around, and I find myself wishing later I could have those moments back. Time-travelling trains might make for fun scifi, but even in fictional worlds time only moves one direction, and in real life you can’t cheat your way around that. 

Steve is a resident physician in the Pacific Northwest. When he isn’t too busy cracking open a textbook (or a patient’s thorax), you can find him exploring the Cascades by bike, boat, or boot. His stories have appeared in places like F&SF, Grimdark Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. You can read more of his work at www.stevenbfischer.com, or find him on twitter @stevenfischersf. 

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DP FICTION #57A: “Consider the Monsters” by Beth Cato

Jakayla crouched in front of her dark closet. She hadn’t turned on the light because that was an awfully rude thing to do when trying to talk to the monster hidden inside.

“You gotta listen to me,” she whispered. “The news is saying really bad things, like rocks are gonna fall out of the sky and a lot of people are gonna die. You can’t stay in my closet. You gotta go to the basement. There’s dark spaces down there for you to hide in. I won’t tell no one you gone there.”

“Jakayla!” She turned to find Grandma leaning into the bedroom. “I got to run to your auntie’s house. The phone network’s down.”

“The phones don’t work?” Jakayla gasped. “Why? I didn’t think anything had fallen yet?”

“Nothing has, yet. Everyone’s trying to talk to everyone on the phone, and the system can’t handle that. Listen, girl.” Grandma waddled forward to cup Jakayla’s face. “We’re going to be just fine, you hear me? Don’t you worry. Just stay here. We’ll have everyone here together in the basement tonight.”

Jakayla nodded, wide-eyed.

“I love you. You be safe.” Grandma took a few deep breaths and planted a quick kiss on her forehead. A moment later, she was gone. The walls shuddered as the front door closed.

Jakayla whirled to face the closet again. “She don’t want me to worry, but I’m not worrying. Grandma wants to save all our family, and I’m trying to save you, too. Just ’cause you’re a monster don’t mean you don’t count.” She paused, head tilted with hope of an answer from her closet. “I can’t wait ’til night for you to talk. Just go to the basement, okay? If you get scared, bring Fluffinator the Stuffed Unicorn from the box right there. She always helps me feel braver.”

Jakayla hurried through the apartment. Grandma’d left on the TV. Jakayla would have gotten yelled at if she did that. A big red “BREAKING NEWS” banner filled the bottom of the screen. One woman talked in front of a big computer-made graphic of Earth with a lot of lines going all over and a whole bunch of colors, words everywhere like “projected impact zone” and “tsunami risk” along with countdown timers.

She knew all about tsunamis because her cousin had this one video game where a tsunami happened. Those scenes had scared her a lot until Grandma told her she shouldn’t worry because they couldn’t even see the water from their apartment.

“Plus, we’ll be in the basement,” Jakayla said to the TV. “Grandma said that’s the safest place to be. It don’t even leak like it used to.”

She rushed onward. Out the sliding door, their tiny backyard held a big pile of black garbage bags. Grandma’d said she’d throw out all Uncle Jerry’s belongings unless he paid what he owed in rent. This was as far as she’d thrown everything. Now weeds grew on some of the bags.

Jakayla nudged a sack with her foot. Further back in the pile, something rattled.  “Hey, monster. I know you won’t come out or talk in daylight. You’re worse than the closet creature like that. But you can hear the television from here, right? You know what’s coming?”

She waited for a reply, because it was a polite thing to do. Somewhere nearby, sirens wailed and dogs howled like bad back-up singers.

“Here’s the thing,” she continued. “I know you got a good home in these bags, but you should come to the basement. I’ll be there with a bunch of people and the closet monster, too. There’s room for you.”

An odd clicking sound caused Jakayla to glance indoors. The living room was dark, the room quiet. “Oh. The power went out. No more TV.” Her voice suddenly sounded high-pitched. Scared. But she had to be brave so the monsters stayed calm. She took a few deep breaths, like Grandma did before she left.

“I need to go,” she told the pile of bags. “I want you to be okay. You live in Uncle Jerry’s trashed stuff, so you’re kinda like family.” A pop-pop-pop sound like fireworks carried from way off in the distance.

How soon until the rocks fell near here? She pictured the map from the news. The news lady had said something about her city being in a red zone. Red was Jakayla’s favorite color, but a red zone didn’t sound so good. That meant she needed to be fast, “lickity-split, zoom-zoom!” like the bird in her favorite cartoon. She had to go to the old church down the block to warn the gargoyles, then dash to the park on Howard Street to tell the shadow in the sewer pipe, then get home, all before Grandma got back.

She ran through the house. First of all, she had to visit the closet again. She hoped the monster there wouldn’t mind if she borrowed Fluffinator the Stuffed Unicorn. She needed her favorite unicorn with her as she warned her other friends about the awful things to come.

The basement would be crowded tonight, with lots of family and monsters, but that was okay. Grandma said they’d all be together. They’d make it through. In the end, that’s what mattered.

 

© 2019 by Beth Cato

 

Author’s Note: I wrote this story as part of a Weekend Warrior flash writing contest on Codex. I don’t recall the exact prompts that inspired this story, but I really wanted to show a child’s compassion in the thick of a terrible crisis.

 

Nebula-nominated Beth Cato is the author of the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth Trilogy from Harper Voyager. She’s a Hanford, California native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cats. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #56B: “Save the God Damn Pandas” by Anaea Lay

My job? Purity shaming pandas. It’s great. You loom over a living, breathing, talking embodiment of the international fixation on world peace and you shout, “Why won’t you fuck, you lazy motherfucker?” And then you play them some porn.

Okay, it’s not actually like that.

At all.

Really, my job kind of sucks.

*

“You. Purity shame. Pandas?”

The dinner entrées have just arrived. There’s a real wax candle, with fire and everything, on the table. Tinny speakers are playing pretentious string music. Wine which came from some sort of grape a hippie read bedtime stories to every night through the long summer fills our glasses. And my date is judging me. Hard.

“Why would you do that?” she asks.

Her name is Samantha. She’s wearing a red dress which, if we were animals, would mean she wants to get laid. Maybe she did want to get laid, five minutes ago, when all she knew about me was that I ordered the wine made from happy grapes. Now that she knows what I am, I may not make it to dessert. I am in serious trouble. “We have to do something. They’re going extinct.”

She gapes at me. If I made that face, my mother would be all ‘Don’t do that, Jason, you look like a carp. Are you a carp?” I don’t know much about carp. My job is pandas. “Can’t you use artificial insemination or something?”

Because that’s better. The pandas won’t even fuck, but how do you think momma panda is going to feel when a few weeks after she has a weird close encounter with a zookeeper she finds out she’s in the family way. Shit like that is where alien abduction stories come from, but the minute a cuddly furball with good PR is involved, the public is all over it. “Some of us think that wouldn’t be the best for Fen Fen’s mental health.”

Samantha is not following.

“Gestation and the eventual cubs have better outcomes if the mother agreed to the act that led to the pregnancy. We’re pretty sure Fen Fen would get very depressed if we inseminated her. She’s basically said as much. So we’re counting on Lan Lan to work some panda seduction.”

I clearly should have brought worms to my date, because I spent the rest of the main course trying to pry conversation from a carp. And no, dessert did not happen.

*

It was hard enough to get those fuzzy fuckers to breed before they could talk. But some jackass had the bright idea that if we used these new neural implant things that had been developed for stroke patients, we could give panda bears the ability to speak and we could explain the gravity of their lack of gravidity. Also, they were hoping for insights into the deep wisdom of the panda, or something.

What they got was Lan Lan the fat ass complaining about the tenderness of the bamboo we feed him, and Fen Fen the would be career woman with a penchant for writing memoir. Meanwhile I, Jason Constans, the Breeding Encouragement Specialist assigned to the fat ass, am basically a glorified sex therapist turned pimp.

So yes, I spend most of my working hours wanting to punch a panda in the face. That is not unreasonable.

*

“Sorry, man,” Cory, my roommate and best bud from way back in our collegiate days, says when I collapsed on our couch. “Bad date?”

I give the universal primate grunt of utter defeat.

“Was it her, or you?”

“Lan fucking Lan. It’s not enough for that celibate bastard to take down his whole species. He’s wrecking my life, too.”

Cory hands me a beer as he plops down on the couch next to me. We’ve had that couch since our first place, senior year of college. It’s part of the family. “Just don’t tell them what you do. You don’t have to open with the pandas-not-fucking thing.”

“It’ll come out eventually and then I’ll have another Rachel. I can’t do another Rachel, man.” Broke my heart. We were engaged. I was living the dream, ready for the picket fence and 2.5 kids and all of it. But she just had to meet Lan Lan, and what kind of monster has daily access to those cute! adorable! overgrown raccoons and won’t hook his fiancée up with an interview? Ten minutes of conversation with Lan Lan, and I was one sad sack of a dumped Breeding Encouragement Specialist.

Actually, it’s unfair to raccoons to compare pandas to them. Raccoons are ambitious little fuckers, and they can sense light with their hands. That is bad ass. Fen Fen’s incisive memoir aside, pandas are useless.

Cory takes a swig from his beer. “They won’t all turn out to be Rachel.”

“I was with her for two years. I can’t waste two years again. I’m getting old. My biological clock is ticking. If they aren’t going to survive finding out they’re dating a panda pimp, I need to get them out of the way in a hurry and look for the one who will.”

“Michael liked that I live with a panda pimp.”

“Michael was a nutcase, as evidenced by his idiotic life choices, first in dating you, then in not dating you.” I glance at Cory to see how he’s taking the ribbing. It’s only been a couple weeks since he and Mike broke up, and I’m pretty sure we’re to the teasing and ragging on the ex stage, but I haven’t tested it out yet.

Cory rolls his eyes and punches me in the arm. I called it right.

“Maybe we should go out and look for dates. Right now. You’re getting old, too. We are on the road to becoming the dude version of platonic cat lady roommates.”

He grimaces. “There’s nothing wrong with cat ladies, and I’ve got work in the morning.”

I do, too, but I’m not looking forward to it.

*

The problem with pandas, aside from everything, is all that bamboo. They’re bears who eat grass. Bears. Eating woody grass. Think about that for a minute. It’s basically the same as if we decided to subsist entirely on popcorn and stuck to it so hard that after a few generations our gut bacteria went, “Okay, fine, I guess we’ll do something with this, but you’re never going to be happy about it,” and so we were tired, sleepy, useless fucks all the time. But damn if we don’t like popcorn so much that we’re not going to bother looking for anything else. Yum, popcorn.

Do not talk to me about the nobility and enlightenment implied by an essentially carnivorous species going vegan so hard they subsist on glorified grass. I don’t care how eloquently Fen Fen writes about it. That is shit. And I would know; I’ve scooped plenty of her shit in my time.

*

The day after Samantha’s aborted red dress, I do my zombie strut into the panda enclosure at my usual cheery dawn-o-clock in the morning, quadruple mocha caramel caffeine fest clutched in my hands. Everything is soft and quiet like things are when the sun hasn’t even bothered to crawl its ass out of bed yet. Lan Lan, the fuzzy mother fucker, is curled up in his custom designed rock cave built by some Swedish company that specializes in harmonizing Feng Shui principles with Scandinavian minimalism, all while authentically replicating nature. What that means is that the cave is made out of stones that were very precisely cut and fit together like an Ikea jigsaw castle, and somebody apologized to the rock the whole time they shaped it.

I’m still tetchy about the date with Samantha, so I don’t hesitate before firing up the projector and starting the day’s therapy right then and there. The enclosure is immediately transformed from a finely honed replica of perfectly balanced authentic nature, into an immersive theater experience. In this particular case, we’re immersed in a very authentic replica of Antarctic winter. The cave is overlaid with images of a wall of emperor penguins squinting against the wind and huddling together like the paragons of bad ass dedicated fatherhood they are.

Lan Lan opens one eye and harrumphs. “Bad date?”

“She wore red.”

“Then you should be more cheerful.”

“I would, except you ruined it again.”

“You could quit your job,” Lan Lan says. He’s said that before.

“Then I’d be the guy who walked away and let the glorious panda go extinct. That’s not going to win me any blushing brides, either.”

“You’re perverse.” Then he closes his eye and goes back to sleep. I’m tempted to have them install industrial fans so we can blast him with a fraction of the Antarctic winter. Or maybe we could give an emperor penguin the neuro-enhancement hardware we’d installed in Lan Lan and Fen Fen and let a real, dedicated member of a popular and thriving species talk some sense into our pig-headed mascots of peace.

I sip at my liquid confection, waiting for the sugar to hit and make me jittery, as I watch the movie. After twenty minutes we get to my favorite part, when the wind eases up and the sun breaks through. All the dads turn their tuxedo faces up and blink at the light. They look so god damned bewildered, like they’ve gotten into the groove of hellacious winter misery and had forgotten it was going to end. “Oh, right, spring! That’s a thing,” their beady little eyes say.

Then the penguin moms come swimming in from the ocean and waddle across the ice and dad gets his first meal in six months and falls over exhausted and they’ve got their little chick and it’s like the perfect triumph of the nuclear family on the world’s largest desert and the sugar finally hits which is the only reason my eyes got misty even though I’ve seen this movie something like five hundred times.

“Have you ever considered that I’m not the one who needs therapy?” Lan Lan asks, his voice rumbling through his chest because he doesn’t even bother to move his face from where he’s buried it in his paws. Parents would shit diamonds to let their kids see that pose this close. They deserve hemorrhoids.

“Do you see what they go through? And that’s just for one egg. You guys usually get twins out of the deal. Why is this so hard for you to get behind?”

“I’m not the family type. And neither is Fen Fen. There’s not enough penguin footage in the world to change that.”

“As far as we can tell, there isn’t a single member of your species who is the family type.”

“So we go extinct. Big fucking deal.” His butt waggles as he shifts to get more comfortable.

“You are the living, breathing embodiment of the symbol of peace. We can’t let that go extinct. What would that say about us?”

The long silence Lan Lan answers me with might be commentary if I didn’t know he was too lazy to work up the effort necessary to judge us. At long last he grumbles, “Make the penguins your symbol of peace.”

*

The dick thing about Michael and Cory splitting is that Cory wants to settle down and have kids as much as I do. I was honestly getting a bit jealous of him because it looked like Michael was going to be the one. My consolation was that I could be the weird straight uncle, like maybe Cory’s kids could be methadone to my raging paternal instincts or something. Dude has seriously let me down by letting that relationship fall apart.

*

“Bad day at work?” Cory asks when I got home. He’s already offering me a beer. All he needs is a string of pearls and he’d be a queer-guy Mrs. Beaver.

“I got sniffly over the penguins again.”

He sighs, withdraws the offered beer long enough to take the top off for me, then hands it back.

“Thanks,” I say, and take a long swallow. Then, “Is it cool if Kim comes over? We want to have a work confab thing, but keep it casual.” Kim is Fen Fen’s assigned Breeding Encouragement Specialist. Super sweet, with three-year-old twin girls who are constantly doing adorable things that get posted to Kim’s Facebook page. She was married before she got the job and her approach so far consists mostly of being utterly and jealousy-inducingly happy for all the world to see. She doesn’t seem bothered that Fen Fen isn’t getting the hint.

“Panda pimps unite?”

“If you cook for us, we’ll let you have one of the team T-shirts.”

“Deal.”

Cory does mysterious things to food objects in the kitchen while I bust ass cleaning up the apartment to make it presentable for company. Kim shows up with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread.

We uncork the bottle right away and she and I hover near the kitchen island while Cory works. The bottle is nearly defeated, and Cory is serving something gloopy that smells like garlic and obesity when Kim gently steers the conversation toward work. “No, I’m serious. Fen Fen really has something good going on. She’s going to be a star.”

“A stand up panda act?” Cory asks as he grinds black pepper over the bowls. “Don’t they only have one punchline?”

“Exactly!” Kim says. “But she uses it really well. Even Jason will like this one.” She nudges me in the ribs to make sure I’m braced for it. “What does the female panda say when her sex therapist asks why she has low expectations for intercourse?”

I wince and bury my face in my hands.

Cory snickers. “Because he just eats, shoots, and leaves.”

“See. Brilliant!” Kim and Cory chortle.

I give the primal ape groan of abject despair. “You’re encouraging her.”

“Of course I am,” Kim says. “She’ll come around in her own time. And when she does, I want to make sure she’s as happy and fulfilled as she can be. That will lead to the best outcomes.”

“Don’t mind him,” Cory says as he hands Kim a bowl. “He’s bitter because he struck out at dinner last night.”

*

Kim waits until dessert to break the news that she and her husband are trying to get pregnant again. Twenty minutes later I’m on the couch trying not to bawl while Cory sees her out. He brings me an extra slice of Marie Callender’s calories-in-lieu-of-happiness pie, puts the plate on my knee, then sits down at my side. “You’ve got to get a handle on this.”

“I’m sorry. I know. It’s just…I’ve always wanted kids and the whole world has always been telling me I’m not supposed to care and even my job is telling me that but Kim’s just, whatever, guess I’ll have another one. It’s not fair. I feel like I’m running out of time.”

Cory picks up the fork from the plate, opens my hand, then manually closes my fingers around the fork. “Shut up. Shovel pie into your mouth until I’m done talking.”

I raise an eyebrow at him, but take a bite of the pie.

“Michael and I split up – ”

“Because he’s an idiot,” I jump in to say. Cory stabs a threatening finger toward my pie. I shut up and take another bite.

“We split up because he wasn’t ready to settle down and I was tired of waiting for him.”

I…hadn’t known that part of it. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. You didn’t say – ” I stop when he slaps the back of my head. A brotherly slap, not a domestic abuse slap. A hey-dipshit-you’re-supposed-to-be-eating slap.

“I’m sick of waiting around for you, too. Catch up to the 21st century. Let’s have a baby.”

It’s a really good thing I don’t follow instructions well, because otherwise I’d be strangling on a bite of Marie Callender. “I’m not gay.”

“I wasn’t planning to get you pregnant. We’ve been living together forever, we throw a mean dinner party on short notice, and we both want kids. Either you can wake up and face the facts, or you can keep getting weepy about penguins. Your call, but I’m done living with a mopey sex-pusher.”

I take a moment with that.

Cory takes my hand, steers the fork to scoop up a piece of pie, then delivers it to my mouth. Which is hanging open. Apparently I learned carp impersonation from Samantha.

“Our kids don’t get to play football. Concussions are serious bad news.”

“Fair deal,” Cory agrees.

*

So, adopting has a fuck-ton of paperwork and takes forever. At the rate we’re going, we could have gestated a baby elephant. But whatever. We’ve got it. It’s not like we’re balancing an egg on our feet all winter.

I still want to give Lan Lan a black eye more often than not, but I’ve switched him over to some great footage of seahorse dads. It’s kind of peaceful to watch them bouncing along in the water.

Fen Fen’s got a Facebook page now to support her self-published memoir, so she’s getting inundated with the photos of Kim’s twins and her ecstatic baby bump updates. Cory and I are trying to keep pace by posting selfies with stacks of paperwork, but it’s not quite the same. Not going to lie, though; it’s still fucking awesome.

The new strategy for Team Panda Pimp is to conspicuously have so much fun, Fen Fen breaks down and asks for insemination, if nothing else, to get material for her next memoir. It might even work. The international symbol of world peace won’t lift a paw to save itself from extinction, but humanity will bend over backward to perform test tube miracles on their behalf. There’s got to be some inspiring symbolism in there somewhere.

And it really hammers home Cory’s point: fucking is not required to make a family.

© 2019 by Anaea Lay

Author’s Note:One of my very good friends is extremely frustrated by pandas, to the point where he’ll happily go on at length about what a waste of space they are, and how we ought to let them go extinct.  Frankly, he has a point.  I was thinking about him while watching a documentary on emperor penguins, one thing led to another, and here we are.  This story was more on than I realized though, as demonstrated by a pair of would-be penguin dads in Berlin.

Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she is engaged in a torrid love affair with the city.

She’s the fiction podcast editor for Strange Horizons, where you can hear her read a new short story nearly every week.  She’s the president of the Dream Foundry, an organization dedicating to bolstering and nurturing the careers of nascent professionals working with the speculative arts.

Her fiction work has appeared in a variety of venues including Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Pod Castle.  Her interactive novel, Gilded Rails, was released by Choice of Games in 2018.  She lives online at anaealay.com where you can find a complete biography and her blog.  Follow her on Twitter @anaealay.

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The Horowitz Method: A Metrics-Based Approach to Rank-Ordering Musical Groups

written by David Steffen (and no one else, alas)

INTRODUCTION

Since time immemorial, one of the perennial topics of humankind has been to compare music.  Whether pop is better than country, whether this band is better than that band, or this song better than that song.  Before the invention of writing, one can imagine heated arguments about who was the best drummer.

(ANGELICA, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. For everything. But most of all I’m especially sorry for taking what we had for granted. Don’t worry, the parts that are bold-and-italicized are only visible to you, keyed off of your IP address. I can only hope that even though you’ve changed your number and email address that you might have left this one thing unchanged. I know you would be mortified if this were public, and wouldn’t hear the end of it from Maurice. I wouldn’t do that to you!)

Arguments are powerful things.  Relationships have formed and relationships have ended over this subject matter (because some of us become complete assholes on the topic and don’t think about other people), and we believe that many relationships can be saved if we can apply some elements of scientific rigor.  The subject matter as it has been historically framed is inherently too subjective and therefore is a breeding ground for disputes and hard feelings.  Even scientists, we who pride ourselves on being able to set aside our emotions and think rationally, have been known to make this mistake, though we of all people should know better. 

We posit that our mistake has been rushing into the discussion without agreeing upon criteria (and also about using absolute statements in combination with invectives, statements like “Anyone who likes 98 Degrees more than The Four Seasons is a complete @*&@#$ @#*@! have no place in a laboratory”. I was not lying, but I should have considered your feelings. I didn’t know how hard you would take that until you replied to say that One Direction was better than Third Eye Blind. That still stings.), and so have entered the debate in bad faith with the conclusion in mind ahead of the evidence.  We considered what criteria might be used for the judging of musical bands.  As with the objective comparison of so many other types of subject matter, we have come to the conclusion that the answer lies in mathematics.  When we sent Voyager to journey beyond our solar system, we wrote our message to the universe in the languages of music and mathematics.  If it’s good enough for aliens, it’s good enough for resolving disputes with our fellow music-loving humans. (I would send you a gold record!)

PROPOSAL

Therefore, I propose The Horowitz Method (I hope you’re not upset that I named it after you. I know it’s traditional for the founder/inventor of a scientific method or discovery to be its namesake, and while you didn’t propose the method nor write this article to propose it to the public, I wanted to acknowledge the role that you played in its instantiation. You are the best research partner that I’ve ever had, so rigorous and well-spoken and hilarious when you want to be, and while yes I have at times been jealous of your success, that success was earned and anyone is lucky to work with you. I also admit that another factor in choosing your name was that I hoped you would hear about the proposed method via mutual colleagues and would be curious enough to visit this page where you could read these messages. If you’re upset about the naming, I promise I am willing to change it), an objective method of rank-ordering musical groups in a metric-based approach that is thus subject to peer review.


But what mathematical measure?  If we were talking about comparing one song with another, it might be easier, for the music itself is inherently mathematical–meter, tempo, time, number of notes, pitches.  But a single musical group could have any number of songs, and the number could grow every day–what particular songs would one use to judge a group?  Their newest?  The whole body of their work?  And some bands release songs so regularly that any conclusion drawn would have to be re-examined very frequently. And that’s not even to speak about what particular measure to use which, we know from personal experience, becomes a dispute of its own.

No, if we are going to compare musical groups and expect a somewhat stable outcome, we must not compare their songs, we must compare traits of the group themselves.  The genre?  The style?  Again, too subjective, one could argue that a group is one or another or maybe both or something entirely new.  We need to focus in on something entirely indisputable. 

The band name.  (Please hear me out and look at the data. And I look forward to seeing your refutation in a prestigious journal instead of publishing it on your own site)

And, in order to apply mathematical rigor to it, the dataset we will work with will be band names with numbers in them. (yeah, I know, but I figured we had to start somewhere)

“My favorite musical group doesn’t have a number in it,” (Black-Eyed Peas) some of you are declaring at this very moment (Faust, Lionel Richie, Adele).  Then take heart in knowing that your favorite band is incomparable, in the mathematical sense.  If you want to compare your group with others, I’m afraid you’re out of luck, at least for the time being.  You may as well try compare (8/0) to (10/0), or compare a walrus to a the clock speed of Pentium processor, or a raven to a writing desk, the question inherently has no meaning, and if you don’t like the system, propose an alternative. (I dare you. You know you want to!)

By using a mathematical system, we can define and rank and draw some mathematical conclusions about the dataset.  This system doesn’t define which band is the “best” because that is an inherently subjective concept, but it does define which is the GREATEST, mathematically speaking. (That’s right, that’s how sorry I am, I am resorting to PUNS . In PUBLIC. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster forgive me. )

CORNER CASES

Even in something so simple as numerical ordering, there were some corner cases that are worth noting, especially when other researchers consider peer review.

Only groups that had a number clearly as part of the name were included in the dataset. Groups that clearly had numerical etymology but did not contain what we would recognize as the word we commonly use for the number were not included. This excluded, for instance, Pentatonix, which was a corner case in itself, but if we included root words then we felt it would have to include any other names that include root words, which might not always be easy to determine in every word that it may not be common knowledge that they are numerically based, such as “quarantine”.

But a number may be part of a larger word and still be included as long as the number itself is clearly visible and appears to clearly refer to the number. So, Sixpence None the Richer was included as the number 6 and Oneohtrix Point Never was included as the number 1, but Bone Thugs and Harmony was not included because “Bone” clearly is not meant to refer to the number “one” even though it contains the letter sequence.

At first, ordinal were included, like Third Eye Blind, as its integer number (in this case, 3). But, after considering the earlier decisions about not allowing words with number etymology in them, this seemed inconsistent with that. In an attempt at greater consistency, these were still included in the dataset, but as fractions whenever the word was correct–so Third Eye Blind was included as 1/3 rather than as 3. We expect that this will be a point of contention in peer review and we welcome the debate. (Note that I didn’t do this just so that One Direction would be greater than Third Eye Blind, and how dare you suggest I would undermine my own scientific integrity)

Roman numerals were included, but only when the numeral clearly referred to a number. So, King’s X was excluded even though the X might be considered a 10, because that doesn’t appear to be how it’s used. But Boyz II Men was included, because it is spoken as the number representation, rather than being pronounced “Boyz Eye Eye Men”.

Musical groups with more than one number in their name, like The 5,6,7,8’s, or Seven Mary Three, were treated as a dataset, included once for each number. This means that Seven Mary Three is both greater than and less than The Four Tops.

STATISTICAL RESULTS

Many of the results of this dataset are illustrative of the problems inherent in trying to summarize a dataset with extreme outliers. At the same time, the usual methods for excluding outliers seemed inappropriate for this particular application, because if we are to determine which band is greater than another, but exclude the greatest bands in the dataset, this would undermine. Note that, among other things, this means that the GREATEST band is also the ONLY band that’s above average.

The Greatest (Maximum): Six Billion Monkeys

The Least (Minimum): Minus Five

Average: 28,846,316.88

Standard Deviation: 416,025,135.8

Median: 5 (see data list below to see the bands with value 5)

Mode: 3

Again, note how the average and standard deviation in particular were skewed very high by the high outliers in the dataset, particularly the number of 6,000,000,000, when the majority of the rest of the numbers were less than 100.

HISTOGRAM

While the dataset as a whole is very spread out to make a displayable histogram, since 90% of the datapoints are between the values of 0 and 100, that a histogram of the data within this range could be interesting.

FURTHER STUDY

If this measure were widely adopted, it is possible that it would have the consequence of encouraging musical groups to be more likely to pick names with numbers in them, or to add numbers to existing names. We see this as a positive result in itself, though it could make future results require more peer reviews as bands try to pick the greatest number to improve their placement, which may bias the data.

Although we explicitly avoided ranking individual songs here, the same method has potential for that as well as albums or movie titles or books (i.e. 1984 is greater than Slaughterhouse Five) or really anything else that has titles that might include numbers in them.

(And the most important under the topic of further study is whether you will see this as the olive branch it is meant to be. My research is lesser without you, and I hope you feel the same way about me. You know how to reach me, and I hope you do contact me. Most of all, and you know that I’m not good at the touchy-feely stuff, is that I miss you as a person. You are an incredible human being.)

THE DATA

Here is a list of the complete set of datapoints used in this study. While this is meant to be as complete a list as possible, it is recognized that this is likely not a comprehensive list, as with the Internet publishing where it is it can be hard to define whether a band is a band or not–i.e. what if there is a musical YouTube channel with a numerical username, or what if someone self-publishes a CD on their own website that no one has heard of. Further studies can propose methods of defining what exact musical groups should be included and which ones should not.

Six Billion Monkeys
10,000 Maniacs
Powerman 5000 (Yeah, I know, but numbers don’t lie)
Andre 3000
B2K
Death From Above 1979
The 1975
1349
1000 Homo DJs
999
MC 900 Foot Jesus
702
Galaxie 500
Appollo 440
311
Front 242
Blink 182
112
Zuco 103
The 101ers
100 Flowers
Haircut One Hundred
Ho99o9
98 Degrees
Old 97’s
Revenge 88
Combat 84
M83
Link 80
EA80
Seun Kuti & Fela’s Egypt 80
Resistance 77
JJ72
SR-71
69 Eyes
Sham 69
65daysofstatic
Eiffel 65
The Dead 60s
Ol ’55
2:54
The B-52’s
50 Cent
45 Grave
Loaded 44
*44
June of 44
Level 42
Sum 41
UB40
E-40
38
36 Crazyfists
Thirty Seconds To Mars
Apartment 26
Section 25
23 Skidoo
22-Pistepirkko
Catch 22
Twenty One Pilots
Matchbox Twenty
East 17
Heaven 17
16 Horsepower
13 & God
Thirteen Senses
13 Enginers
Thirteen Senses
d12
12 Stones
Finger Eleven
T-11
Ten Seconds Over Tokyo
Ten Years After
10cc
10 Years
Nine Inch Nails
Sound Tribe Sector 9
Ho99o9
The 5,6,7,8’s
DT8
The 5,6,7,8’s
Seven Mary Three
Zero 7
School of Seven Bells
Avenged Sevenfold
School of Seven Bells
L7
7 Seconds
7 Year Bitch
Shed Seven
The 5,6,7,8’s
Six Organs of Admittance
Slow Six
Appollonia 6
Eve 6
Sixpence None the Richer
Three Six Mafia
Sixx:AM
Six Feet Under
Nikki Sixx
Vanity 6
V6
Delta 5
The 5,6,7,8’s
Five
Pizzicato Five
Five Finger Death Punch
Maroon 5
Five Iron Frenzy
Ben Folds Five
The Jackson Five
MC5
Family Force 5
US5
Dave Clark Five
Section 5
B5
Count Five
5 Seconds of Summer
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Jurassic 5
John 5
We Five
The Five Satins
five star
Gang of Four
Four Tet
The Four Seasons
The Four Tops
The Brothers Four
The 4-Skins
The Four Pennies
The Fourmost
4 Non Blondes
4 Jacks and a Jill
Funky 4*1
Unit 4 + 2
The Three O’Clock
Dirty Three
Fun Boy Three
Seven Mary Three
3 Leg Torso
Bike For Three!
Three Mile Pilot
Dirty Three
Mojave 3
Opus III
Alabama 3
Three Dog Night
Three Doors Down
3 Mustaphas 3
3 Mustaphas 3
Three Six Mafia
Three Days Grace
3LW
The Three Degrees
Spacemen 3
Timbuk 3
The Juliana Hatfield Three
3T
Fun Boy Three
The Big Three
3 Colours Red
Secret Chiefs 3
Two and a Half Brains
Boyz II Men
Two Gallants
U2 (Sorry Bono)
Soul II Soul
Two Door Cinema Club
The Other Two
Aztec Two-Step
M2M
Two Man Sound
2 Live Crew
Unit 4 + 2
2 Chainz
Secondhand Serenade
2 Minutos
1-2 Trio
2wo
RJD2
The Other Two
2:54
Faith + 1
Oneohtrix Point Never
Doseone
One Republic
One Night Only
One Direction
KRS-1
The Only Ones
The Lively Ones
Funky 4*1
1-2 Trio
One Dove
Third Eye Blind
Third Ear Band
The Sixths
Eleventh Dream Day
13th Floor Elevators
Zero 7
Remy Zero
Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros
Authority Zero
Zero Boys
The Minus Five