CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (36 page)

“Human beings?” Elaine laughed. “You know, I always thought you two were wizards, superheroes, magical beings, something like that. Not like anybody else’s parents. Not like anybody else at all. All of us kids did.”

My wife closed her eyes and sighed. “I think we did, too.”

Over the next few weeks we had the rest of our children over to reveal something of our intentions, although I’m quite sure a number of unintentions were exposed as well. They brought along numerous grandchildren, some who had so transformed since their last visits it was as if a brand-new person had entered the room, fresh creatures whose habits and behaviors we had yet to learn about. The older children stood around awkwardly, as if they were reluctant guests at some high school dance, snickering at the old folks’ sense of décor, and sense of what was important, but every now and then you would see them touch something on the wall and gasp, or read a letter pasted there and stand transfixed.

The younger grandchildren were content to straddle our laps, constructing tiny bird’s nests in my wife’s gray hair, warrens for invisible rabbits in the multidimensional tangles of my beard. They seemed completely oblivious to their parents’ discomfort with the conversation.

“So where will you go?” asked oldest son Jack, whom we’d named after the fairytale, although we’d never told him so.

“We’re still looking at places,” his mother said. “Our needs will be pretty simple. As simple as you could imagine, really.”

I looked out at the crowd of them. Did we really have all these children? When had it happened?

I suspected a few strangers had sneaked in.

“Won’t you need some help with the moving, and afterwards?” Wilhelmina asked.

“Help should always be appreciated, remember that children,” I said. A few of them laughed, which was the response I had wanted. But then very few of our children have understood my sense of humor.

“What your father meant to say was that moving help won’t be necessary,” my wife said, interrupting. “As we said, we’re taking very little with us, so please grab anything you’d care to have. As for us, we think a simple life will be a nice change.”

Annie, always our politest child, raised her hand.

“Annie, honey, you’re thirty years old. You don’t need to raise your hand anymore,” I told her.

“So what are you really telling us? Are we going to see you again?”

“Well, of course you are,” I said. “Maybe not as often, or precisely when you want to, but you
will
see us. We’ll still be around, and just as before, just as now, you’ll
always
be our children.”

* * *

We didn’t set a day, because rarely do you know when the right day will come along. We’d been looking for little signs for years, it seemed, but you never really know what little signs to look for.

Then one day I was awakened early, sat up straight with eyes wide open, which I almost never do, looking around, listening intently for whatever might have awakened me.

The first thing I noticed was the oddness of the light in the room. It had a vaguely autumnal feel even though it was the end of winter, which wasn’t as surprising as it might normally have been, what with the unusually warm temperatures we’d been having for this time of year.

The second thing was the smell: orange-ish or lemon-ish, but gone a little too far, like when the rot begins to set in.

The third thing was the absence of my wife from our bed. Even though she always woke up before me, she always stayed in bed in order to ease my own transition from my always complicated dreams to standing up, attempting to move around.

I dressed quickly and found her downstairs in the dining room. “Look,” she said. And I did.

Every bit of our lives along the walls, hanging from the ceiling, spilt out onto the floors, had turned the exact same golden sepia shade, as if it had all been sprayed with some kind of preservative. “Look,” she repeated. “You can see it all beginning to wrinkle.”

I’d actually thought that effect to be some distortion in my vision, for I had noticed it, too.

“You know what you want to take?” she asked.

“It’s all been ready for months,” I said. “I’ll be at the door in less than a minute.”

I ran up the stairs, hearing the rapidly drying wooden steps crack and pop beneath my shoes. When I jerked open the closet door it seemed as if I was opening the door to the outside, on a crisp Fall day, Mr. Hopkins down the street is burning his leaves, and you can smell apples cooking from some anonymous kitchen. I brushed the fallen leaves from the small canvas bag I had filled with a notebook, a pencil, some crackers (which are the best food for any occasion), and extra socks. I looked up at the clothes rod, the rusted metal, and nothing left hanging there but a tangle of brittle vines and the old baseball jacket I wore in high school. It hardly fit, but I pulled it on anyway, picked up the bag, and ran.

She stood by the front door smiling, wrapped in an old knit sweater-coat with multi-colored squares on a chocolate-colored background. “My mother knitted it for me in high school. It was all I could find intact, but I’ve always wanted to wear it again.”

“Something to drink?” I asked.

“Two bottles of water. Did you get what you needed?”

“
Everything
I need,” I replied. And we left that house where we’d lived almost forty years, raised children and more or less kept our peace, for the final time. Out on the street we felt the wind coming up, and turned back around.

What began as a few scattered bits leaving the roof, caught by the wind and drifting over the neighbor’s trees, gathered into a tide that reduced the roof to nothing, leaving the chimney exposed, until the chimney fell into itself, leaving a chimney-shaped hole in the sky. We held onto each other, then, as the walls appeared to detach themselves at the corners, flap like birds in pain, then twist and flutter, shaking, as the dry house chaff scattered, making a cloud so thick we couldn’t really see what was going on inside it, including what was happening to all our possessions, and then the cloud thinned, and the tiny bits drifted down, disappearing into the shrubbery which once hugged the sides of our home, and now hugged nothing.

We held hands for miles and for some parts of days thereafter, until our arthritic hands cramped, and we couldn’t hold on any more no matter how hard we tried. We drank the water and ate the crackers and I wrote nothing down, and after weeks of writing nothing I simply tore the sheets out of the notebook one by one and started pressing them against ground, and stone, the rough bark on trees, the back of a dog’s head, the unanchored sky one rainy afternoon. Some of that caused a mark to be made, much did not, but to me that was a satisfactory record of where we had been, and who we had been.

Eventually, our fingers no longer touched, and we lost the eyes we’d used to gaze at one another, and the tongues for telling each other, and the lips for tasting each other.

But we are not nothing. She is that faint smell in the air, that nonsensical whisper. I am the dust that settles into your clothes, that keeps your footprints as you wander across the world.

The Authors

Claude Lalumière
(
http://lostmyths.net/claude/
) is a Montreal writer and editor. His first collection,
Objects of Worship
, is a 2009 release from ChiZine Publications. Claude has edited eight anthologies, including
Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic,
Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction
, and
Tesseracts
Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
. His fiction has been featured in the “year’s best” series
Year’s Best Fantasy
,
Year’s Best SF
, and
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica
.

About “Three Friends,” Claude writes: “Being an editor as well as a writer (and, as many writers will tell you, a nitpicky editor who often makes his writers work through multiple drafts), I’m always a bit wary when a story of mine is accepted but then simply published as is, with no editing. Surely, my stories can’t be as perfect as I think they are. It’s the editor’s job to correct me of that self-satisfied assumption and highlight all those blemishes that I was too close to see. Any good editor should do at least that. Sometimes, it’s only a question of careful copyediting. But sometimes . . .

“For me, it’s always a thrill when I find an editor who truly gets, at a gut level, what I’m trying to do. Such an editor is not merely a glorified copyeditor but, rather, a collaborator. Such an editor will lead me to push my stories as far as they really need to go, will spot when I—despite my best efforts—took a shortcut but shouldn’t have, will not let me get away with anything, will show me where I faltered and did not do my story justice, will say exactly the right thing to make me understand my own work better.

“I was fortunate enough that ‘Three Friends’—a story I’d been struggling with for many years—found such an editor in the talented and keenly insightful Mike Allen, whose perspicacious comments and steadfast enthusiasm allowed me to finally mold my long-suffering ‘Three Friends’ into a satisfying shape.”

To which the editor shuffles his feet, grins and says:

“Aw, shucks.”

Leah Bobet
lives and works in a little apartment in Toronto built on consecrated ground. Her fiction has appeared in
Interzone
,
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy
, and
Realms
of Fantasy
, and her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling and Pushcart Prizes. Other information, miscellany, and trivia can be found at
http://www.leahbobet.com
.

Talking about “Six,” Leah says the story “was started mostly to play with one of my favourite apocalypse plans: how, after the fall of civilization, I might turn my apartment building into a vertical farm. The idea of sixes—drawn from a themed writing challenge run with friends every spring—brought in what life would be like for the sixth child of a seventh son and, with it, what life might be for children in the usually adult fantasy-of-competence genre of apocalyptic fiction.”

Marie Brennan
is the author of four novels, including the
Onyx
Court
series of historical faerie fantasies. The most recent book,
In Ashes Lie
, came out from Orbit in June, and features the destruction of most of seventeenth-century London. She has also published nearly two dozen short stories, in magazines such as
Talebones
,
On Spec
, and
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
. More information can be found on her website,
www.swantower.com
.

Here’s how she describes the origins of “Once a Goddess”:

“I’ve said before that I pillage my academic fields (anthropology and folklore) for material; this is a more direct example than most. In the summer of 2001, while cataloguing articles for the index Anthropological Literature, I came across a piece by an Indian scholar, regarding the living goddess Kumari. There are a number of Kumaris in Nepal, of which the Kathmandu one is the most prominent, but I can’t tell you a lot about them; what stuck with me was not the specifics of that religious situation, but the problem of what happens to those girls after they cease to be Kumari. You grow up as the living avatar of a goddess, and then one day, you’re a normal person again—with no idea how to live as one. That loss, and the question of what one does afterward, lodged powerfully in my brain. I had the title almost immediately , but it took me seven years (and five aborted drafts) to get from that to a working story.”

Ian McHugh
lives in Canberra, Australia, but would rather be closer to the beach. He is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop and the 2008 grand prize winner in the Writers of the Future contest. A list of his fiction publications is available at
ianmchugh.wordpress.com
, including links to stories available free online. His big writing projects for 2009 are a graphic novel of his Writers of the Future story with Bob Hall (hallhammer.deviantart.com), who illustrated it in the
Writers
of the Future 24
anthology, and a novel set in the same fantastical alternate Australia.