Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (3 page)

I went back to the living room.

“You’re fine with me, Mouse,” Gramma said as I went back into the room. She had moved and she was facing toward me.

I kept my mouth shut but shied away from her, edging around the room against the ridges of the wood paneling toward the windows. Mom liked the windows and the front side of the house was full of them. Gramma wanted to be able to look out from the La-Z-Boy recliner that sat off near the side right in arm’s length of the bookcase. The sofa was butted up right against the windows. I never did understand why she wanted to look out over the asphalt or see the occasional drunk staggering toward his car.

“Come sit here,” Gramma said. “We can make the time go faster until your parents get back.”

But I hung back. You know that kindly grandmother that folks talk about? I didn’t have that kind of relationship with my grandmother. My hand went over my brooch and then sat down next to her, her scent of Ben Gay and convenience store rose lotion stifling my nose.

“Can I open a window?” I asked

“It’s windy and gusty out there. You don’t want the water to get in the house.”

“Just a little bit?”

“OK,” she said and then she patted me on the head. My hair was still in French braids one on each side so my mom didn’t have to do my hair that much, just once every two or three days. “but be careful.”

I nodded and then reached behind us, opened the latch and shoved the window open. A bedraggled soul was walking along the sidewalk in front of the house. Probably someone from the bar up the street. It was hard to tell with the sheets of rain pouring down.

The air circulated in the room. “That is better,” she said.

That guy on the sidewalk. There was just something about him I didn’t like. “Gramma, can we turn off the porch lights?”

“Keep them on,” she said. The game show “Tic Tac Dough” was on. I glanced at the clock. Just twenty-five minutes left.

The cool air came into the room, but with it also came the pin drops of rain against my neck. Gramma hugged me to her shoulders. She might have been fluffy, but she was brittle and held me lightly. I pulled away as much as I could so that I could breathe.

The doorbell rang. I looked out and saw it was that same soaked soul I’d seen walking on the sidewalk, now standing on our porch. Which meant that he had gotten from the street to the porch and walked up the steps. I could see him clearly now underneath the porch lights. His bald head contained beads of rain. His white t-shirt was soaked, pressed against his skin. The studded leather jacket and the scuffed combat boots labeled him as a regular to the neighborhood, but the type of person I hadn’t gotten used to seeing yet. My old world had been full of plaid shirts and denim overalls.

Gramma released my shoulders, pulling herself up with her cane.

“Don’t answer it,” I said.

“It’s OK,” she said. Then she ran her fingers along the brooch. “It’s all right.” She took her cane and she hobbled the few steps to the door. I fingered the brooch and stood right there behind her.

“Was just wondering if I could use your phone,” he said and then he looked down at me. I shrunk further away. I didn’t like him. The images of those dead boys came back to me and then the rationalizations began. They were boys. They were found in other parts of the city, further west. They were away from people and they were alone. I was not alone.

But none of that made any sense to me right now and I felt little protection except for the brooch from my Aunt Lou who wasn’t the strongest in the family and a woman whose powers were draining.

If we were back home—

The truth, though, is that we weren’t. We were here in this world of concrete and steel and even though I was a mouse, a person without power in her family, I felt the difference. I knew magic even if I didn’t wield it. It had a certain feeling to it, a shimmer, a warmth that had been the underlying tone of my life now ripped away.

So that on a Friday night I was facing a stranger who could kill both of us in the twenty minutes it would take for my parents to come back home.

“You’re welcome to ride out the storm on the porch,” Gramma said. “Or I can call someone for you, but you cannot come in.”

She took a step back and pushed me in front of her gripping her fingers into my shoulders to hold me steady. I shrunk back against her skirts, the open door let all the power of the storm rush through the door.

He reached out to us, his hand stopping at the doorsill. Where his hand stopped, energy waves formed circles around it like when you throw a rock in a pond. He tried again and again it was stopped.

Gramma nodded. “You had best be on your way,” she said. “If you need me to call someone I still would be happy to do it.”

He already backed off the porch stumbling and then down the stairs.

She patted my shoulders. When she spoke her breath held the regular stink of someone twelve hours from their last brushing. “I think we can still catch the end of Tic Tac Dough.”

I blinked watching him go. She had already hobbled around me and sat on the couch.

She left me standing there. I watched until the man made it to the sidewalk where he started running.

“We aren’t supposed to use magic here.”

“I’m not leaving my grandbaby here unprotected. So the house is warded. It only keeps those out who you don’t allow in and only at the door. Anyone can come up to the porch. We want to be able to get the mail. You don’t think I really came here to see a doctor, did you?”

“You didn’t?”

She sighed, settling into the couch. “I don’t see where they can do anything else for me that the folks back home can’t,” is all she said. “And don’t tell your parents, but I also bumped up the protection spell on that brooch you carry around so much. Your Aunt Louisa didn’t know you’d like it that much but I figured you’d look for something to remind you of home.”

But I’m just a Mouse—a mute—a normal. “But I would know the magic was around. Mom and Dad would know.”

“They don’t know everything,” she said. “It’s subtle. You appreciate the subtleties as you get older, Mouse, and you’ll learn how to pick up on them. That’s what I would have taught you if you grew up at home when I knew for sure what you were going to be.”

She took my hands in hers. “You have magic. Everyone does. You just have a subtle source of magic that it took me a while to get used to seeing. You knew enough to protect yourself didn’t you? You’ll learn. You’ll grow it in this strange world. This Big Town.” She sighed. “But I guess you do have a better chance here.”

She turned to the television.

I took my place next to her on the couch. The contestant Bob was taking his turn at the Xs and Os. I scooted so that my pajama legs touched the skirt of her day dress and laid my head on her shoulder. We rode out the storm together.

Introduction to “
Shaman”

For more than a decade now, I have adored the work of Leslie Claire Walker. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines, from
Electric Velocipede
to
Fantasy Magazine.
Other anthologies have snapped up her stories as well. You can find a lot of her work in e-format, including her wonderful novel,
Skin and Bone
.

She writes that a week in Peru inspired “Shaman.” She fell in love with the country, but also saw its darkness. She shares both here.

Shaman

Leslie Claire Walker

Dad stepped into the doorway of the doctor’s consultation room. Newly grown-in, prematurely gray hair. Blue blazer. White dress shirt. Jeans and loafers. No socks. January Friday casual for the office where he should be lawyering for wrongly convicted felons under, you know, normal circumstances. Whatever that word meant anymore. He hadn’t worked since his diagnosis a year ago. The firm made an excuse. Laid him off.

He slipped his fists into his jean pockets and pushed down, which shoved his shoulders up close to his ears. Still, his eyes shone. Bright brown with hope. A little sarcastic humor. He glanced over to where I sat in the waiting area and grinned as he disappeared inside.

Everything’s gonna be all right
. He wanted me to believe that. He wanted to believe it himself.

I sat in the cheap vinyl chair, one leg tucked under me and one black boot scuffing the tile. I thumbed through a fashion mag because the office didn’t have anything better to read. Which was torture, but better than watching the courtroom reality show on the screen bolted to the wall or staring at said wall or listening to the phone conversation of the old woman in the corner. Besides, her bright green sweater made my eyes hurt and I overheard her saying something nasty about sick people. Not just any sick people, either. People like my father.

I thought about Vince, the guy at school who I’d been crushing on for two whole days and his amazing hazel eyes. And how my best friend Amber had a plan to uncover whether he liked me, too. And the likelihood that the zit forming on my chin could be stopped by will alone.

But then Dad shuffled out of the consultation, hands fisted in his hair. His eyes looked a lot redder than when he’d gone in. And I figured out in that moment that hope was a lie they fed you to keep you in line.

The doc had told him there was nothing more they could do. His options were

a) more chemo, which was not designed for this disease but they were using it anyway because they had nothing else to offer, and maybe it would give him a few more weeks to live;

b) no more chemo, with fewer weeks and hospice care at the end; or

c) stick a gun in his mouth.

He deserved better than that. He wasn’t the only one.

This particular disease had a name I refused to say out loud, although every syllable haunted my dreams. It started in the bones. It affected the blood. It made its victims weak. They couldn’t keep food down. They had episodes where they lost consciousness while they were awake—blackouts—near the end. They died in agony.

The doctors who saw the first cases couldn’t do much to help. Eventually, the government got involved. The Centers for Disease Control. Its counterparts in other countries.

None of them knew what caused the disease, only that it came to affect an enormous amount of people in the course of a decade, that it wasn’t communicable, and that it had no known cure.

We all got tested. It used to be a guideline, the testing. Then it became the law. A crappy law passed with lots of grandstanding. From fear. People said the disease could be a terrorist plot (paranoia). They said the sick deserved it because they’d done something to offend God (if Jesus had a grave, he’d officially be rolling in it). They said the government was building internment camps to keep the sick ones and their families away from everyone else (conspiracy theory, but one I kind of believed).

So anyway my dad wasn’t the only one. But he was my dad. And he never gave up on anything or anyone without a fight.

I drove us home. I watched my speed. Stopped in all the right places. Didn’t reach for the radio even when the silence got to be scream-worthy uncomfortable. He went inside while I parked the car in the garage. I caught sight of him as he slowly climbed the stairs. Heard his unsteady steps in the upstairs hall and the door to his bedroom snick shut.

Only then did I slip on my headphones and turn up the sound as loud as I dared and brace myself against the kitchen sink. I peeled potatoes for soup. My method of salting them was unconventional and unstoppable for a while. I wiped my eyes with a paper towel. It came away smeared with mascara and black eye shadow.

I left the soup simmering on the stove. It filled the house with the scents of butter and starch and chives.

I couldn’t help the memories that arose in my mind’s eye. Everywhere I looked, I saw them. The spot on the threadbare living room rug where our Lab Charlie used to lay. He’d been the first of us to die, though in his case it’d been death by the front grill of a Suburban.

Dad’s collection of old movies. As in at least twenty-five years old and a lot of them way more than that.
Breakast at Tiffany’s
.
Shane
. The entire Harry Potter series. He had weird taste, which he preferred to call eclectic. He made excellent caramel popcorn. We’d seen all the flicks at least twice, all of them on Friday nights or sick days, snuggled on the oversized sofa.

The photo albums on the coffee table. Before I came along, he and Mom traveled everywhere. Europe. South America. They took a zillion pictures, half of them starring their thumbs in addition to the scenery. They’d insisted on printing them out. Weird, but okay. That way, they could look at them whenever they wanted.

Mom left before I turned two. Just disappeared. But Dad still kept the photos out like that. Pored over them every night after I went to bed, when he thought I wouldn’t know. I sat on the stairs and watched him do that more than once.

I leafed through them myself. Not the first time I’d done it. I mean, they had all these adventures I would never have. Not with Dad in such a bad way. If he died, I had nowhere to go. No relatives. No chance in hell of finding my mom, and no way I would go live with her even if she begged me to. I was sixteen. I’d end up in foster care and I’d rot there until I turned eighteen. No healthy family would ever take me in.