The Empire of Ice Cream (41 page)

“True,” said the giant. “But I want desperately to escape this prison.”

“You can't leave?”

“My husband, the magician Mar-el-mar, is a jealous man and has put a spell on me so that I cannot descend from this remote ridge. If anyone wants to see me perform, they must travel up the impossibly steep cliffs. He says he does not want me mingling freely with other giants because he does not trust me, but I know the truth.”

“What's that?” asked Anna.

“The art of my song is more perfect than that of his magic. He's jealous, all right.”

“Isn't there anything you can do?”

Here, Ybila gathered herself up into a sitting position, her legs crossed in front of her. She leaned low over Anna and whispered, “I have a plan. A traveling salesman found his way here one day when Mar-el-mar was down in the world creating mischief. This giant was selling magic beans that when planted, sprout stalks that reach into the clouds where the giant giants live. Of course, my husband left me no money, but I used something else to pay for them. There is a type of royal blue thread found here and there floating willy-nilly atop the oceans of the world. It is highly prized, for it is said to give good luck in any enterprise. I had been given three very long strands of it by the human pirate captain of the junk,
Jade Bloom
. He was so entranced by my voice when he traveled here to listen that he made a gift of them in admiration. These I traded to the salesman. At first he was reluctant to take them, but then he said he had considered a foray into the world of men, and each of the three strands of blue thread might stand for one each of the items he wished to acquire there. The deal was made.”

“Have you planted the beans?”

“Yes, but they take years to germinate. Then overnight they will shoot up suddenly into the clouds. All in a night. Mar-el-mar has blocked me from descending, but I, as is only right considering my voice, will ascend.”

“I've heard a recording of you,” said Anna.

“So then you know.”

Anna nodded.

Ybila took a deep breath and sang her signature song, “What Is My Name?” Anna lay back on the ground, staring at the stars, and listened. The power of the giant's voice, the power of the meaning of the lyrics moved around Anna like a strong breeze. Before the first stanza was finished, she was floating above the ground on a cushion of air. She flew back along the Dog Spine to the crest of the enormous dune, and then descended like a feather. As the last phrase ended, she was set gently down at the base, asleep, the ocean sounding in the distance.

On her journey back along the shore to her home the next day, she wondered if her meeting with Ybila had been real or merely a dream brought on by the exhaustion of attempting to climb the huge sand hill, for she had brief flashes of memory in which she would climb a few feet and then slide back to the base due to the drastic attitude of the slope. Her memory of the giant singer's sorrow was much more real, though, and she found she could easily banish any doubts of the journey by merely humming the tune she had heard.

In the evening of the day on which Anna accidentally knocked the mirror off the wall and cracked it, she met herself picking berries in the woods. A miasmatic phantom of exactly
her
met her beside the blackberry bramble. She bowed to herself as a tentative greeting, and she bowed back. The phantom did not speak, but could understand her words. She invited herself back to the shack, where she made a splendid dinner of eel in blackberry sauce. She and herself drank from the keg of grog. They wound up the music box and waltzed to its plinking crystal tune of “The Last Time I Saw Paris” as the tiny dancer at the contraption's center tirelessly pirouetted. When the creepers ceased their chorus, the two retired to the single bed. The next morning, well before sunrise, when even high summer is cool, the phantom departed, traveling a path that was the light of the moon, out across the ocean and back to her apartment in the city.

Years more passed in the small house by the ocean. No need to tell of her startling revelations concerning the metaphorical nature of humans in relation to the citizens of Giant Land or her study of the natural history of the dune rat, the sea gull, the feral dogs that came for scraps to her back door on autumn evenings. It is, of course, indecorous even to mention the petrified log, fallen among the willows, with one perfectly formed nub of a branch severed close to the trunk, that she rode now and then for self-gratification. The scarring caused by her nails against this old log while she moved in the throes of passion, over time, etched a face in the smooth, gray wood—a bearded visage—and eventually she came to realize that it belonged to the necromancer, Mar-el-mar.

From the moment that she recognized the giant magician, he was ever in her thoughts. His enormous black robe flapped like the wings of a bat as he flitted from one end of her mind to another. She could find no peace from him, and she knew he meant to put a spell on her. Every time she tried to conceive of a plan to rid herself of him, his presence was there, in that part of her mind where the plan was being shaped, and he'd step on the spark of an idea and put it out.

One night while sitting in her parlor, the magician's voice boomed from her fireplace.

“Anna,” he said.

“Leave me alone,” she told him.

“Anna, I want to bring you to life.”

“Why?”

“I have journeyed so long in the hold of your imagination, my head encased in a crystal globe, I need to be free.”

“And how will bringing me to life make this so?” she asked.

“It is impossible to explain, but a long, intricate series of events will follow your birth and after a century or two they lead to my being released.”

“I
am
alive,” she said.

“Tomorrow,” said the voice, “you will find a small box in your beachcombing. It will be covered in mother-of-pearl. If you open it, you will find yourself back in your car on the interstate, heading home.”

“This
is
my home,” she said.

“Someone waits for you there,” said Mar-el-mar. Then his voice went silent, and, soon after, she noticed him in her head, circling like a bat.

As the magician predicted, she found the box with the mother-of-pearl facade. She brought it home and laid it on the table in the parlor while all the time he whispered from inside her ear to open it. She was tempted, first in order to remember the past, and secondly to put his persistent presence to rest, but she managed to stay away from it. Days passed, and it became more and more difficult for her to resist the urge to open the box. She knew he was slowly gaining control over her and would eventually have his way.

Then, a week later, the drowned captain's pocket watch that hung by its chain from the mantle in her tiny parlor, suddenly began to tick, and she knew, not in her head where Mar-el-mar could smother the notion, but in her heart, that something remarkable might happen. In her fishing that morning, she had no luck. Cast after cast was reeled in with an empty hook. On her last attempt, she did not bring in a fish, but knotted about the end of the hook was a length of the royal blue thread. She did not think about it, but picked it off, rolled it into a little pill, and swallowed it.

As soon as the blue thread was inside her, Mar-el-mar realized what she had done, but it was too late, for the single shred of lucky blue material made its way to her imagination and bound him like a fly in a spider's web.

All her thoughts circled in a slow, gray twister behind her eyes as she set fire to the shack. With what energy she had left, she stumbled down to the ocean and waded out into the deep water. The waves rose over her and she drowned easily, without fear, like going to sleep. Her body sailed the currents of the Gulf Stream for years, her features more perfectly preserved than those of The Lady of Fashion. Of course, at one point, she was swallowed whole by a whale, and traveled in its gut for decades before being released when the creature finally died within the radius of the Arctic Circle. There was a season on an iceberg, a weeklong beaching on a crab-infested atoll, the brief embrace of a kraken. And smooth sailing from pole to pole, tropic to sea to bay and back, while Mar-el-mar, eyes rolled upward, watched from his crystal prison at the bottom of the world.

She was discovered, floating off the southern shore of the Woven Islands, by pirates of the junk,
Jade Bloom
. They sold her for a small fortune in malachite to a giant who placed her in a glass box on a bed of dried violet petals. Since it was the most beautiful thing he owned, he would open the box at night and pray over it before turning in. He believed the odd curio brought him luck, and he told the other giants her name was
Mother Paradise
. In later years, when the crops of Giant Land failed in spring, as a kind of sacrifice and plea to her spirit, he cut off her ring finger, leaving the beautiful ruby intact, placed the jeweled digit in one of the small brown bottles that had held his heart medication, along with a note that read
HELP!
, sealed the top with wax, and set it adrift on the ocean.

Giant Land

Story Notes

Alex Irvine, author of the novels
A Scattering of Jades
and
One King, One Soldier, got
the independent-press publishing bug a while back, and he and his friend Thom Davidsohn, an illustrator, decided to put out their own anthology
—The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives.
He asked me to send him something for the first volume, and I said I would, but when the deadline drew near, I had nothing. He told me he would be extending the deadline and that I should still send him something. I couldn't come up with a full-fledged story, so instead I wrote him a one-page story that was all just one grammatically correct sentence, titled “Spicy Detective #3,” in keeping with the pulpy concept of the book. The day after I sent him that story, I got an e-mail in which Alex told me that he and Thom liked it, and as they knew I really didn't have anything to do, I should write them a few more. So I did, writing one a day (for a total of four more) after my regular work and sending it off to him in an e-mail each night. They were all in the same format as the first, only after the second one I could no longer vouch for the correctness of the grammar. They each dealt with a different pulp genre—Horror, Westerns, Science Fiction, etc. The anthology, once published, looked great. Thom had done these beautiful black-and-white illustrations for it. If you happen to come by a copy of it, check out Leslie What's “Grease and Sex at the King of Chicken,” one of the funniest stories I've read. In fact there's a bunch of really fine fiction in it. The first installment of
JPPN
sold out and Alex and Thom decided to do a second one. They asked me for another story, and this time I felt I really had to come up with a story, because although some people dug the one-page, one-sentence stories, I'd seen some feedback on them and they had a unique effect of really pissing a lot of readers off. So I wrote a story and sent it to Alex, and then waited for volume two to come out—and waited, and waited, and waited. I think it's been like four fucking years since then. I hear that
JPPN #2
is really coming out next month (from this writing), and if it does, I'm going to be disappointed, because its inability to materialize was such a great opportunity to bust Irvine's stones whenever I'd see him
.

The story of mine he's been sitting on like a hen all of these years, “Giant Land,” had been one that I started writing about fifteen years ago. Over that period, I'd take it out every now and then and fiddle around with it. I remember how I came by it originally. I was in one of those slumps where I just smoke butts and stare at the blank screen. So one night I decided to write anything that came into my head, and the beginnings of the story slowly crawled out onto the screen. It's interesting that one aspect of the story is about the passage of time, that it took so long to write, and that it took so long to be published after it was sold. Things move slowly in Giant Land, but when they actually happen, watch out. Unlike his sizeable fiction output, as a publisher, Irvine works slowly, like the San Andreas Fault. I have faith the anthology will eventually appear and predict it will be great
.

Coffins on the River

Barney and I are getting long in the tooth. We've got bad knees, bad backs, bad eyes, and bad breath. We've got wives and kids and mortgages and car loans, and if that isn't enough to elicit your sympathy, we're both artists of a sort.

Barney's a painter, self-taught over decades. He turns out some very fine landscapes of his local area in deep South Jersey along the Delaware River, where the neighbors still eat muskrat and late June brings so many green flies that yawning becomes a repast, itself. He makes most of his income on scenes of meadows and giant oaks, white heron skimming along the estuaries in violet twilight, but his heart is really in his more expressionistic work—for instance, his series,
Coffins on the River
.

The theme plays itself out in a hundred canvases that show super heroes laid to rest in pine boxes. The viewer sees them from above as they glide in the flow—dark, turbulent waters churning to either side, occasionally a fish breaking the surface in an arc, a bit of the bank, a beer bottle on its way to the ocean. The coffins are missing their lids, and the fallen heroes are sometimes wrapped in colorful capes like winding sheets, or donned in spandex uniforms displaying chest emblems of, say, an hourglass, a vibrator, a thimble …

They are no super heroes you might know, but ones solely from the planets of his imagination, with powers never tested as they were created to lie in state. He has a little notebook with their names—Qua Num, The Ineffable, Biscuit Boy, Six Figures—a brief list of their powers, and how they met their respective ends. One carries a little doll by the neck, one, a ray gun, one, a cell phone, and all of their faces are like beautiful landscapes of frozen anguish or melted wonder.