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Overview
- Tim Pratt's debut collection brings together fifteen stories, including the Nebula-nominated "Little Gods" and a previously unpublished novelette, "Pale Dog." Within these pages you will encounter a train to the underworld, a feral bicycle, a thief with peculiar eating habits, an amnesiac superhero, a haunted zoot suit, star-crossed monsters, fallen angels on vacation and other wonders. From fast-paced sorcerer-punk to weird Westerns, from the loss of childhood innocence to the heat death of the universe, these stories will delight, surprise and move you.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781894815833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prime Books |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2004 |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
LITTLE GODS
"I wish I could be a little goddess of cinnamon," my wife Emily says, closing her eyes and leaning in close to the spices. I'm used to Emily saying things like that, so I don't take any notice, just nod and pick up a bottle of peach nectar off the shelf, slosh it around, wrinkle my nose. I know all the gunk in there is supposed to be fresh natural goodness, but to me it just looks like gunk. Emily says that I deny the truth of natural origins. Emily likes peach nectar, so I put the bottle in the basket.
"A little goddess of cinnamon," Emily repeats. "Or brown sugar." She crosses her arms, her silver-and-brass bracelets tinkling together.
"As opposed to a big goddess of cinnamon?" I move on down the aisle with my basket over my arm.
"Little things get little gods," Emily says. "It's only natural." She trails after me, running her finger along the shelves, pausing to sniff at the black teas, to open the lid on a jar of sugar-free gumdrops. Emily is always prodding, smelling, caressing--she says that she is experiencing the world.
"So big gods are for big things, then? Like, say, whales?"
Emily sighs behind me. "Big things like ... I don't know ... love."
"How about hate? Jealousy?"
"Sure. But I wouldn't want to be one of those, nothing so big." She squeals in delight. "Ooh! Chocolate-covered espresso beans!"
"I didn't realize those were in season," I say dryly, but she isn't paying attention to me, has darted off to get a plastic bag to fill with candied caffeine. She'll be up all night, and she'll keep me up with her. That might be nice. Sometimes she likes to make love all night when she's had a lot of caffeine; other times shegets jittery and talks wistfully of the days when she smoked cigarettes.
Emily dances down the aisle, long skirt swaying, silver bells around the hem jingling. She shakes her bag of espresso beans like a maraca.
"Goddess of chocolate?" I say. "Would you go for that?"
"Sure. But I'd be even more particular. Goddess of dark chocolate. Goddess of Mexican hot chocolate. Goddess of hot fudge on a wooden spoon."
"Those are awfully small gods. It'd take a lot of them to keep the world running."
"Well, sure." She looks around the otherwise uninhabited aisle in an amusingly furtive way, then opens the plastic bag, removes a bean, and pops it into her mouth. "The big gods--the gods of abstractions and ideals--they're like CEOs, figureheads, upper management. I mean, the goddess of joy may get paid well, but where would her operation be without the god of hot showers, the goddess of hot sex, the avatar of angel food cake? I'd be just as happy to have one of those lower-level positions, one with nice, clearly defined responsibilities, a comprehensible mission."
"I love you," I say, feeling warm toward her all of a sudden, my Emily with her corkscrew black hair, her squinched-in-thought features, her clothes she's made mostly with her own hands, sewn all over with suns and moons. My flaky angel who reads the stars and knows how to make bread rise, bring flowers to life, tune a mandolin, make my heart beat beautifully along with her own. My Emily, who believes in little gods of tuna casserole and stained glass.
She takes my hand and squeezes it. We go toward the checkout. There is some commotion up front, I can't see what--a crowd milling around, someone talking hurriedly and sharply. I don't pay attention, just push through toward the front, Emily's hand in mine, tugging her along--she can be distracted ten times in ten seconds, and I want very much to get her home, to get into the hot tub with her, to talk about the little gods of kissing-her-belly, rinsing-her-hair, touching-her-face.
When I get to the checkout I see him, just a boy really, not even seventeen. He wears a mask like the Lone Ranger's, but his is just cheap black plastic with a rubber band to hold it on, something picked up from the 99-cent bin at an after-Halloween sale. He has a gun, though, and it jerks all over as he aims it here and there, warning people away from the exits, threatening the cashier, who just stands perfectly still, as if her brains have been scooped out or drained off. Emily doesn't see the boy, the robber-boy; she is looking off to the side at a display of kiwi and passion fruit, oblivious, she can sometimes be so oblivious. "Ooh," she says, and pulls her hand away from me and starts toward the fruit, moving on a course tangential to the boy-thief, the gun-boy.
"Emily, no," I say, and she turns toward me with her eyebrows raised, and in turning she bumps into a dump-bin full of suckers and packs of gum, her hip thumping the display hard and making a little candy avalanche. The boy with the gun jerks his arm up, startled by my voice or the movement or the sound of falling candy or perhaps just strung too tightly with the frustration of the motionless cashier who won't goddammit put the money in the bag like he told her. I don't know if the boy means to do it or if it happens by accident but the gun goes off with a crack and a stink (small god of lead, small god of expanding gases) and Emily goes down, goes over, tumbles into the candy display and it falls down with her. She hits the ground in a rain of neatly-wrapped sugar, the little bag of espresso beans falling from her hand, and she doesn't move, and the front of her is all red.
The boy-thief, killer-boy, runs away. Someone screams. Someone says something very calmly about calling an ambulance.
I drop my basket. The bottle of peach nectar tumbles out. It hits near my feet and explodes. Small god of the sound of breaking glass. Small god of small wet fragments.
Two days after Emily's funeral, with her parents finally gone and everything settled except for the pain in my head, I put a chair out on the back deck and sit looking at the birdhouse Emily made last year. A family of jays lived there for a while, but they're gone now, nothing left inside but bits of straw and sticks and string. My chest seems sometimes as empty as that birdhouse, and other times I think I've been filled with something hot and foul and gooey, cough syrup heated on the stove, thickened with molasses or blood.
I have trouble with time and living. Clocks don't make sense. I cry. I'm too hot, or too cold. The covers stultify me, and I can't sleep on my bed (our bed), so I stay in the living room on the couch, with my eyes closed so that I can't see anything, not the watercolors Emily hung on the redwood walls, not the flowers she cut the morning we went to the grocery store, now dying in the vase. Nothing but the inside of my eyes.
It's better outside, with just the natural world pressing around me, rather than the substance of the life Emily and I made together. Emily used to call this house our haven, our safe place, and I thought it would be so always. I never expected it to become a bleak museum of grief.
I watch the sky for a while, the sun moving, and gradually realize that my throat is dry; I haven't had anything to eat or drink since Emily's parents left. I get up and go to the door, part of my mind wondering why I bother, why I waste time keeping body together when soul is sundered. But it's easier just to go along, to move without thinking. I go into the house, into the kitchen, and the first thing I notice is the smell of divinity fudge cooking, that sweetness that is almost too cloying, a sweetness that Emily loved far more than I did. Then I see the woman standing at the stove and think for a bright leaping moment that it is my wife, my Emily, somehow returned to me--but this woman is too tall, and her dress is too black--raven's-wing black, slice-of-night black--with no designs or silver threads. Emily would never wear anything so dark, and anyway, she is dead.
I move closer, wondering who this black-dressed, black-haired woman is, why she is in my kitchen, but I don't really care--I am not ultimately very interested. Perhaps she is a friend of Emily's. Perhaps she is a thief.
She turns toward me, and her face is pale, white as sugar. She holds a wooden spoon. A large pot stands on the stove, empty and gleaming, and yet she moves the spoon inside as if stirring something, and the smell of divinity fudge rises up. I am suddenly furious (and even that feels strange, because I have felt nothing at all for days now, except sometimes a dull ache with sharp edges). Who is this woman, to come into my home, to touch Emily's things?
I snarl at her and she drops the spoon with a clatter, her mouth opening in surprise as if I'm the one who should not be here. I step forward, not knowing what will happen, whether I'll grab her or hit her or just firmly take her arm. Before I can touch her I am blasted in the face with a wave of hot air, and that air carries smells--divinity fudge, vanilla cookies, incense, rainwater, cinnamon, Emily's skin. Emily's skin. A hundred other smells, too, all of them keying instantly to memories of my wife, all of them bringing up fragments of images and moments. Memories that a week ago would have been sweet now twist like corkscrews, jabbing like knives, reminding me of all I've lost. I go down on my knees, my eyes closed against that scented wind, my chest twisting and contracting as if there's some horrible crab behind my ribcage, writhing. I put my forehead on the cold linoleum and sob.
The smell, the storm of smells, fades. I lift my head, blinking, looking for the pale woman in black.
She is gone. There is no pot on the stove, no spoon. The kitchen smells like dust and nothing else at all.
I check the doors and windows, somewhat surprised to find that they are locked. I don't remember locking them, but perhaps Emily's father did so before he left. He is a large and capable man, slow-moving and sad, like a great and ponderous planet in erratic orbit. He would have locked the doors and windows for me. But that means no woman could have gotten in, and that means my mind is coming loose, not just hiding under a stone but actually coming loose, imagining things, imagining even the scents of grief.
I sit on the couch again and lean my head back, my eyes closed. I feel smothered, as if a wet curtain has been draped over me, stifling my breath. It's not enough that my wife dies in a grocery store on a springtime afternoon; I have to lose my mind, too. But why do I need my mind, with my mind's closest best companion gone?
I hear something like the movement of a bird and open my eyes. There is something on my ceiling, above the rafters, something like a black cloth pinned up at the corners and center--a drape, a canopy. I look at it blankly, trying to understand it with my eyes. After a moment I realize it is not just cloth but a woman in a long black dress. The woman is suspended somehow in the center of the ceiling, looking down, and her impossibly long skirts are spread out all around her, covering the ceiling. I did not see the woman at first because her skin is nearly as black as her dress, and her eyes are dark too, and she is not smiling, so I cannot even see her teeth. This is of course not the same woman I saw in the kitchen, but for some reason my first thought is: They're sisters. Which makes no sense, as the other was white, and this one is black.
The woman's skirts begin to sag, billowing, falling down toward me, and I feel my sense of suffocation double, now it is like lying facedown in the mud while wet, mildewed mattresses are piled on top of me. I gasp and struggle to my feet, staring up at the woman on my ceiling. I grope blindly and my hand finds a paperweight on the end table, a lump of volcanic glass that Emily picked up on our honeymoon in Hawaii. It seems terribly heavy, but I am angry now, angry beneath the wet burlap suffocation, and I manage to lift the weight.
I hurl the chunk of rock at the woman on the ceiling. It hits her in the stomach and bounces off, landing on the coffee table with a crack. She squawks like a blackbird. Her skirts draw in quickly like windowshades snapping shut, and then she's gone, nothing on my ceiling but abandoned spiderwebs.
I sit back down, the oppressive weight suddenly gone, making me feel impossibly light by comparison--as if I could float away, as if no one I loved had ever died, as if the sun were filling my veins. But that thrill leaches slowly away, returning to me to the grayness, the neutrality, that I've felt since Emily died.
I fall asleep, which is really only another flavor of oblivion.
I wake to find a man dressed in a threadbare black suit sitting on the edge of the hearth, cleaning his fingernails with a folding pocketknife. I immediately think of him as a preacher, as he resembles somewhat the country preacher of the small church my family attended when I was young, though he is clearly not the same man. He has black hair, a bit mussed, and a single heavy eyebrow that looks almost too hairy to be real. His face is middle-aged, hale and hearty, and when he looks up at me his eyes are blue and twinkling.
"Boo," he says, softly.
"Who are you?" I demand, irritable from being just-awake, irritable at all these incomprehensible intrusions, all these distractions from the grayness of my first week without Emily, the first of who knows how many weeks I'll be able to bear.
"I'm here to help," he says, sounding sure and self-satisfied. "A couple of the girls told me there was something funny about you, that you could see them, so I came to investigate things personally. And here I am, and here you are, seeing me." He stands up, folds his knife, taps it against his palm. He makes a peculiarly medieval sort of bow. "I'm the King of Grief, Gatekeeper of the Dead Places, and a Gambler of Bad Fortunes."