The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three (64 page)

Zeb falls asleep with them that night, between them in the bed. When she wakes up in the morning, he's back in his cage with his favorite toy. He doesn't wake up. The monkeys cluster at the bars peeking in.

Aimee cries all day. "It's okay," Geof says.

"It's not about Zeb," she sobs.

"I know," he says. "It's okay. Come home, Aimee."

But she's already there. She just hadn't noticed.

Here's the trick to the bathtub trick. There is no trick. The monkeys pour across the stage and up the ladder and into the bathtub and they settle in and then they vanish. The world is full of strange things, things that make no sense, and maybe this is one of them. Maybe the monkeys choose not to share, that's cool, who can blame them.

Maybe this is the monkeys' mystery, how they found other monkeys that ask questions and try things, and figured out a way to all be together to share it. Maybe Aimee and Geof are really just houseguests in the monkeys' world: they are there for a while and then they leave.

Six weeks later, a man walks up to Aimee as she and Geof kiss after a show. He's short, pale, balding. He has the shell-shocked look of a man eaten hollow from the inside. She knows the look.

"I need to buy this," he says.

Aimee nods. "I know you do."

She sells it to him for a dollar.

Three months later, Aimee and Geof get their first houseguest in their apartment in Bellingham. They hear the refrigerator close and come out to the kitchen to find Pango pouring orange juice from a carton.

They send her home with a pinochle deck.

Rachel Swirsky holds a Masters degree in Fiction from the University of Iowa, and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including
Subterranean Magazine
,
Weird Tales
,
Interzone
,
Best American Fantasy
, and
Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008
. She edits
PodCastle,
the world's first audio fantasy magazine, which puts up readings of great fantasy stories every week at http://podcastle.org.

The wedding went well until the bride caught fire.

Bridget's pretty white dress went up in a whoosh, from train-length veil to taffeta skirt to rose-embroidered bodice and Juliet cap with ferronière of pearls. The fabric burned so hot and fast that it went up without igniting Bridget's skin, leaving her naked, singed, embarrassed, and crying.

Of these problems, nudity was easiest to cope with. Bridget pulled the silk drape off the altar and tied it around her chest like a toga.

"That is it," she said. She pried the engagement ring off her finger and threw it at the groom. The grape-sized diamond sparkled as it arced through the air.

Gathering up the drape's hem, Bridget ran back down the aisle. She flung open the double doors, letting in the moonlight, and fled into the night.

The groom sighed. He opened his palm and stared down at the glittering diamond, which reflected his fiery nimbus in shades of crimson, ginger, and gold. His best man patted him on the shoulder—cautiously. The bride's father gave a manly nod of sympathy, but kept his distance. Like his daughter, he was mortal.

"Too bad, Helios," said Apollo.

The groom shrugged. "I gave it my best shot. I can't keep my flame on low all the time. What did the woman want? Sometimes a man's just got to let himself shine."

Apollo clapped him on the back. "You said it, brother."

Bridget went down to the reception hall. She let the hotel clerk gawk at her knotted drape, and then told him they'd be cancelling.

"The hall or the honeymoon suite?"

"Both," said Bridget.

The clerk rapped a few keys on the keyboard. "I'm sorry, but we can't accept cancellations this late. I'll have the staff take down the decorations in the hall, but we'll have to charge you."

Bridget felt too drained to argue. "Fine."

She went down the corridor to the reception hall. She at least wanted to see the chocolate fondue fountain and the ice sculptures, even if they were going to waste. Caterers and hotel staff ran back and forth, clearing away cups of fresh summer fruit and floral arrangements of birds of paradise and yellow tulips.

Bridget approached the six-tiered cake with the tiny bride figurine standing next to a brass sun. She plucked the bride out of the butter cream frosting. "What was I thinking?" she asked the little painted face.

"Don't we all wish we knew the answer to that question?"

Bridget looked up. Her matchmaker, the goddess of childbirth Eilethyia, leaned against the wine bar, tidy in a burgundy pantsuit and three-inch heels.

"I heard what happened," said Eilethyia.

"He couldn't hold it in, even on our wedding day?"

"Isn't that what you wanted? Someone dazzling, someone out of the ordinary, someone who could light a dark room with his smile?"

"But being dazzling isn't just what he is, it's something he does
to
other people. He can't just shine, he has to consume."

Eilethyia sipped her 1998 Chablis. "Good thing you found out before your vows, at least. The pre-nup you signed's a bitch."

Helios and Apollo settled in at the hotel bar. Floor-length windows overlooked the river where streetlights cast golden ripples on dark water. The scene was twinned in the mirror behind the bar.

Apollo improvised a sonnet about the cocktail waitress and got a free drink. Not to be outdone, Helios earned a shower of applause by lighting a vixen's cigarette from across the room.

Helios still wore his tuxedo, untied ascot draped across his chest like a scarf. He spun on his barstool to face his drink. "I thought she was different," he said.

Apollo had stopped to change into dress shirt and slacks, chic and metrosexual. He waved Helios's point away, marquise cut topaz and agate rings sparkling on his fingers. "They're all the same. I could have told you that."

"How helpful and droll," said Helios.

"It's true. It's the beauty of mortal women. Sure, they're unique, like snowflakes are unique, but who catches a snowflake to marvel over geodesic ice crystals? That's missing the point of snowflakes."

"Which is?"

"All the power and loveliness of the snow birthing this intricate, astonishing thing that's gone in an instant." Apollo winked at the brunette by the piano. "And they melt on your tongue, too."

Helios lifted his index finger, inspiring a tuft of flame on the brunette's bosom. As she beat it out with her cocktail napkin, Helios shaped the smoke above to spell out the phrase
Hot Stuff
. The brunette giggled, averting her eyes coquettishly.

Helios turned back to his friend. "That's not why I go with mortal women."

"Pray tell."

"They have a better understanding of things like joy and grief because their lives are difficult. They appreciate what they get. They make you feel real."

"Be honest, you just like having all the power in the relationship."

"That's not true!"

"If you say so."

Helios went on, "I like being with mortal women because of how different we are. Fire and water is more interesting than fire and fire."

"Interesting if you're fire. Fatal if you're water."

"Fire and earth, then." Helios lit a flame in his palm. He shifted its composition so that it burned rose and then gold and then iris. "The problem is, most mortal women don't get that. They think being with a god is going to make them more than human. They want to be special. They want to be anointed. I thought Bridget was different than that. She was grounded. She knew she was just an ordinary girl. I thought she was happy with who both of us were. But it turns out she wanted me to be just as dishwater dull as she is."

"We should turn them all into laurel trees," said Apollo, draining his drink. He rose from his barstool and ran his fingers through the loose wheat-colored curls of his Caesar cut. "Come on. If we can't find any nymphs, let's at least get us a couple nymphomaniacs."

Bridget remembered the day she realized the world was populated with gods. Really, it was an old suspicion, stemming from playground hierarchies and high school lunchrooms. Some people just seemed more
there
than others. They gleamed, they glittered. While Bridget and her peers stumbled through adolescence with scrapes and bruises,
they
floated through life without so much as a detention slip.

Wasn't it something everyone sensed? People watched the godly among them raise waves with a pitchfork, inspire love with an arrow, win track meets in winged sandals. Later they were remembered in a jeweled blur, details fuzzy but gist intact: the dare devil surfer, the counselor who saved my marriage, the kid who could run like nothing you ever saw.

But Bridget didn't really figure it out until she was finishing the fifth year of her Ph.D., tabulating data on a thesis few people outside her field could really understand.

Bridget was one of the world's foremost experts on the sun. Parts of the sun, at least. She studied sunspots, the patches of relative cold that blot the sun's surface like tears. She spent her hours in the laboratory, calculating the frequency of coronal loops, and checking them against the predicted occurrence of solar flares.

"The sun is a romantic metaphor," she was fond of telling friends over drinks, back when she had friends, and went out for drinks. "These little dark patches are caused by intense magnetic activity. It's all about attraction and repulsion. It can make the sun burn hot, or blow cold, or eject solar flares so vast they leave traces in Greenland."

Bridget had the kind of mind that thrived on solitude and data, or so she convinced herself in the absence of anything but solitude and data to thrive upon. By the fifth year of her Ph.D., the last of her undergraduate friends had gotten jobs and moved away, not that she had much in common with them any longer anyway. Her father lived in a rental house three states away with two bachelor friends, and while he claimed he wanted updates on Bridget's life, Bridget heard the flat grieved tone of his voice when he picked up the telephone. Bridget had her mother's dark, sunken eyes, and hair the hue of corn sheaves. She knew that, to her father, she was one more reminder of her mother's illness and death. It had been hard on him, being a widower. He dealt with grief by making himself a new life. Bridget was part of the old one. She mostly stayed away.

Daily, Bridget woke at dawn. She showered and brushed her teeth and rode her bike onto campus where she grabbed a cup of coffee from a vendor in the student union. She sat in her lab, watching the sun's arc through the office's high window that let in baking heat during midafternoon, until the sun sank and the room grew dark, and then she sat there some more. She rode her bicycle home around two in the morning, and went to bed in her clothes.

One afternoon, as Bridget sat in her lab on a day when heavy snow had piled on the campus's hills, sparkling under a bright but distant sun that lacked the power to melt it, Bridget looked down at her keyboard and realized she couldn't feel her fingers. They'd been typing for an hour without her conscious command. They felt more like part of the machine than part of her.

Red and blue lines criss-crossed the screen, mapping her data. Bridget recognized none of it. She pulled her hands away from the keyboard and fanned her fingers in front of her eyes. Slowly, she began to feel the ache of her cold, unheated office settle in her fingertips.

She tried to remember the last time she'd spoken to anyone for more than two sentences. It had been over three weeks. She was twenty-nine years old and she couldn't fathom why she'd ever thought that mapping sunspots was worth the utter lack of human company.

She fled the office early, ignoring the queries of professors and students as she unlocked her bike from the rack outside the building and rode away down the snowy road. When she reached her house, she found an unfamiliar woman standing there, her outfit and coiffure so immaculate that at first Bridget thought she was selling Avon.

"I've been sent by a secret admirer," said the woman, introducing herself as Eilethyia.

Bridget couldn't imagine any student or professor, the only two groups of people she interacted with, hiring this elegant woman to make a suit on their behalf. "Oh, yes?" she asked.

"Indeed," said Eilethyia, unruffled. "My client prefers to woo via a mediator, someone who understands human culture better than he does."

"Human culture?" asked Bridget, wondering what prank was being pulled on her. "Tell this admirer, whoever he is, that I don't go on blind dates."

"It's not a blind date, exactly," said Eilethyia. "You've met before."

"Who is he?" asked Bridget.

A sly smile crossed Eilethyia's lips. She turned and pointed toward the summit of the noontime sky where the sun blazed through the cold air, dazzling. Somehow, Bridget was unsurprised.

"I daresay you're as enamored of him as he is of you," said Eilethyia. "That's probably what he likes about you. Never forget that gods are narcissists. Why do you think we want everyone to worship us?"

Bridget laughed, not at the fact of her admirer's godhood, for that she had already strangely come to accept. She laughed at the frank and unabashed admission of narcissism. At the time, she thought it was a joke.

Most gods dabbled with mortals the way most mortals dabbled with self-love. It was entertaining, it was convenient, it was a way of releasing tension when nothing better presented itself. The chief deity himself liked to season his love life by seducing mortal maidens as a white bull or swan. But it was like an hors d'oeuvre to a gourmet meal. Once the champagne framboise and lobster bisque had been sampled, he wasted no time in slipping back into his natural godly form to hightail it home for an entrée of duck Martiniquaise with his lady wife.

Rarely, a god found mortal love affairs becoming not an aperitif, but something altogether too alluring: a fetish.