IT TOOK ME (Nick Wood) a good few years before I plucked up the courage to write the ‘Other’, i.e. to me, someone who was not white and male. I firstly wrote as a ‘white woman’ in ‘God in the Box’ (2003), set in an increasingly familiar London. Phew – that was picked up, published – and I wasn’t scorned as a ‘sexist imposter’! The leap to crossing the ‘colour’ divide took a bit longer for me though – part of my fear was that, given South Africa’s history, it would be seen as a form of colonization of experience. Then, one day, I sat down and thought long and hard about it.

Slowly, a series of thoughts dawned. In not writing about characters of colour, I was in essence deleting them from my stories, replicating an apartheid mindset. Furthermore, I was holding on to an implicit internalized belief that perhaps the ‘gap’ between us was so large, I would get it completely and catastrophically ‘wrong’. Again, apartheid had taught us that the ‘racial’ gap was an unbridgeable chasm – which in essence meant we needed to be kept apart.  I realized with some degree of horror that, in excluding characters of ‘colour’ in my writing, I had thus been – at least partly – colluding with an apartheid mindset.

So in 2004 I wrote about ‘Kerem’ in ‘The stone chameleon’ (Young Africa imprint; Maskew Miller Longman), a so-called ‘coloured’ character in a futuristic Cape Town. The book ‘passed’ the test read of several selected township readers. Phew again – but this time, I knew it was right to write about the Other – as long as it was with respect. Further, as long as I checked the voices I was using with someone from within that culture – and if the characters felt ‘right’ for that particular story.

I eventually came across Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s (2005) book on ‘Writing the Other’, which has also proved a useful tool. However, even in that book, there was what sounded like an inauthentic white South African character’s voice included in a story excerpt. I wrote a query about this to one of the authors, but have not to date received a reply. The book itself uses an acronym – ‘ROAARS’ – which covers what the authors see as central potential areas of difference to be considered in your characters, i.e. Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion and ‘Sex’ (gender): http://booklifenow.com/2010/03/nisi-shawl-and-cynthia-ward-on-roaars-and-the-unmarked-state/

As a South African, I think class and culture are additional important considerations too. I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I was at (then an all-white) school, there was an acute awareness about the relative richness of where people came from. This was such, that there was overt snobbery shown towards perceived ‘poorer’ whites, coming from a less affluent nearby white suburb in Cape Town.

Lauren Beukes wrote a great guest blog on ‘Writing the Other’ for The World SF Blog: http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/guest-blog-lauren-beukes-on-writing-the-other/

I’m not going to repeat it, you can read it for yourself, but one of the points that particularly resonated with me was her idea that anyone you write about is ‘Other’. That is, at some level, we are all ‘Other’ to each other – and one way to bridge that ‘gap’ of difference is to ask.

There has also been some interesting genetic-cultural research which suggests that in certain places, variation within cultures is much wider than variations across cultures – i.e. we may be more different to someone we perceive as similar to ourselves, than someone we see as completely different. Also, perhaps not surprising given Africa as the ‘cradle’ of humankind, variation within Africa is wider than variations in the rest of the world combined; Africa is indeed the original and the richest, most subtle ‘stew’ of people.

So, although I stand partly outside now, I am still proud to be (South) African – and to continue to write stories about where I come from, trying ever harder to get them to reflect the richness of the people there/here. When I anxiously handed my story ‘Of Hearts and Monkeys’ to an amaXhosa reader, Zandile Mahlasela, I had an irrational fear it would be full of inaccuracies, because I was no longer resident in South Africa. I was extremely relieved when Zandile eventually replied that it was fine. I asked her what the process had been like for her :

“Well, for me, what caught my attention in the story was the fact that a male WHITE writer thought about the issues normally thought about by black population. The content of the story is really amazing, I must say. Upon request to look at the story, many things came to mind, I was nervous, excited and yet anxious to begin with it, I thought to myself, this challenge I have to take. I did not know what feedback I will get back from the writer though, hence the nervousness:). At the end, the story turned out to be exciting. Again, for me, this has been a great life experience, it gave me hope that, I, one day shall write my own book.”

This cultural consultation around ‘Of Hearts and Monkeys’ has been a good experience for both of us it seems, although we were both also obviously anxious about the process! I also know that I (Nick Wood) will always need a cultural advisor or editor. I am thrilled to have an amaZulu psychiatric nurse reading my current work in progress, a book set in Kwa-Zulu Natal – chunks of it in a psychiatric hospital familiar to us both, although she (Busisiwe Siyothula) has a much more current and ongoing experience of it, which will be interesting indeed. I know I will have lots of stuff to correct, but it’s all great learning experience too.

Finally, on the dangers of Internet translations and cultural-linguistic context. I consulted a Zimbabwean of Shona heritage about a short story I’d written recently. ‘All fine,’ he said, ‘But why on Earth have you got your main character saying in Shona: “Oh, excrement!”‘

‘I was trying to making her swear,’ I said lamely, to his laughter.

He gave me a much better word Duzvi! (Eng. transl.=Shit!) Unfortunately, I have to finish now.

Copyright © 2012 by Nick Wood and Zandile Mahlasela

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Taken at Silvermine From Issue 18 (Feb 2012)

Where is home?
I’m increasingly accepting of being a ‘soutie’ (perhaps in clarification for some readers, it’s an Afrikaans term which is short for ‘soutpiel’ = referring to an English (white) South African male, his right foot in England, left foot in South Africa and penis dangling in the salty Atlantic Ocean in between).

Do you write full time?
No, although I’ve heard a lot of stories as a clinical psychologist and continue to do so as a narrative psychology researcher. All great fuel for writing, but I can only grab what time I can.

What inspired this story?
Watching a news report on ‘corrective rape’ that outraged me. Although it’s seemingly only a small part of the story, it’s a central kernel. Other stories spun outwards from that one – and especially once I’d heard MamBhele’s voice, while walking along a path in the Silvermine reserve in Cape Town – then, it almost wrote itself.

You’re based in the UK now (?), are you originally from Cape Town? Do you regard yourself as a South African storyteller?
To continue the ‘soutie’ metaphor, the weight is currently on my right foot (London), but I’m hoping to shift it at least partially to the left (Cape Town) in less than a decade – as that’s where both my and my partner’s families of origin are. I’ve lived longest out of a good few places now in Cape Town (21 years), where I also spent my formative years – although I was born and raised on the Copperbelt in Zambia until I was ten. Still, I am a naturalized South African and continue to self-identify as a South African writer.

Where did the stories within this story come from – e.g. the story of Monkey, the story of Machelanga and the story of Nongqawuse?
The direct source of Machelanga I can’t remember off hand, I’m afraid; it’s a Khoi-San myth if I’m remembering correctly and it may have been in Penny Miller’s book on South African myths. The story of Monkey was in Grainger’s book on ‘Stories Gogo Told Me’ – that one gave me a kick, as it was recorded not far from where I was born. Nongqawuse, of course, is based on a true and tragic story, which I first learned in history at school and is covered in Peires’ book ‘The Dead Will Arise’. There was a beautiful, multi-layered and fictionalized rendering of this in Zakes Mda’s ‘The Heart of Redness’.

What research did you need to do for this story?
My favourite sources, books and people. I do look at the ‘Net too, but there’s a lot of low-quality information out there that needs careful sifting. I have taught some township writing classes on behalf of SAEP (South African Education and Environmental Project: http://www.saep.org/). I was thus pleased when they put me in touch with Zandile Mahlasela, one of their writing graduates, to help check the veracity of MamBhele’s voice. I was nervous about that as I was aware it’s culturally-loaded subject matter, but I also knew from my clinical work in South Africa, that homosexuality has no cultural or ‘racial’ borders. The website ‘Behind the Mask’ does in fact exist too: http://www.mask.org.za/

The story and its characters are poised between worlds – the ancient and the modern, the real world and the spirit world, the natural and the man-made – as well as cultures. Does this reflect how you see South Africa?
Yes – there’s a tension with all of these things I think, although I’m aware my view may be marginalised to some, as I no longer live there. I remember meeting a young, depressed amaZulu male for therapy some years ago now – he was seemingly very Westernised, but it took a good few sessions before he felt he could tell me he thought he’d been bewitched. However, a similar thought process operates for so many of us, ‘Western’ or otherwise – wherever we live. For example, we perhaps like to think there is a personal external Order to the universe, even if it’s not an explicit belief. ‘Luck’ is one such notion; the Universe smiles at us when it’s good, frowns at us when it’s ‘bad’. But who’s to deny the reality of such spirit worlds? I think we need to know and respect our joint and ancient (African) roots, but without reifying anything as absolute, either.

In the end, everything changes too, including culture and the stories we tell. But I also hope our stories start to embrace more fully our co-inhabitants of the Earth, our fellow animals too, while we still have them – says he, a guilty carnivore! (Wendy Woodward’s ‘The Animal Gaze’ looks at Southern African narratives around this theme.) I also strongly hope that the hard-won right to free speech in South Africa will remain entrenched, as we need to keep our diverse voices and stories alive.

It’s South Africans versus the apocalypse. Who would you put your money on?
South Africans all the way – the country has been through so much shit – and I know it still struggles in some ways – but I have lived and worked with so many wonderful South Africans that I believe that through it all, in the words of Gloria Gaynor, we will ‘survive’. I also hope that eventually, nearly all of us will end up thriving too – although that’s still some time off!

Are you working on anything right now?
A book based on a short story of mine called ‘Bridges’, which was published in the Irish SF magazine, AlbedoOne. The novel is provisionally entitled ‘Azanian Bridges’ and is set in an alternative world where apartheid endures.

Where might we find more of your work?
I have links and material at http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/.

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We are amongst the last of the last, the ‘do-not-dies’ as the dead now call us. They follow us, the dead do, whispering and pulling at our ears and hair. The other two don’t notice, although they do see and comment on the occasional cock of my head, as I listen without comprehension to dry and meaningless whispers from shadowy lips, the occasional repetition of that one phrase, all I can make out – ‘do-not-dies…’

We make our way down the mountain slope to the dense bush and protea trees below, the draw-string bag bumping on my back. I laugh at their comments about me – my niece and her partner; for I’m old enough to have earned the right to be called mad.

But why do the dead follow me? I am not an amagqirha or traditional healer, nor have I drunk ubalawu to make contact with them either here, or in my dreams. I carry very little knowledge of the old ways within me anymore. Perhaps this is why they harry me so? None do I recognise; none seem tied to my birth. Their shapes change like the shifting smoke on the horizon, their features blunted and blurred.

The path branches through thick grass both left and right at the bottom of the slope; the fork to the right is more heavily trampled and leads between two large boulders. The bushes, laced with yellow-flowered sour fig creepers and the blackened cone protea trees, crowd the paths more than Bontebok high, scratching and pulling at our skins with a greater intensity than the dead can muster. The foliage releases a wet, oily smell that seems to suck the sweat from our bodies too. Bongani turns, with a relieved hunch to his shoulders, onto the well-flattened path to the right.

He stops at my whistle.

Four of the dead are dancing and waving in warning on top of the large boulders ahead.

I point left and immediately regret it.

Bongani stiffens and shouts, “I’m in charge, you silly old woman. You’d both be dead if it weren’t for me.”

I am still (just) the good side of sixty. His words hurt a little, even though there may be some truth there; he is quick on his feet and good at herding dam and river fish into the shallows, me, my bones are slow and stiff, but I have caught a few. Penny, she always just likes to sit and watch.

(Still the dead dance.)

I place my hands together in supplication and bow to him, showing ukuthoba. His face softens a bit, but he shakes his head. “I’ve had enough of fighting this bush, MamBhele,” he says, “We’ve earned ourselves an easier path for now.”

The dead obviously don’t think so, but can you really trust them – especially when you can’t hear what they have to say? I have asked them about Janet, but they just gape at me and whisper to each other.

I have nothing to give them in sacrifice, whoever they might be, apart from dragging a thorny branch across my right wrist to gouge a weal of blood. One of the dead prods at it with suspicion, but I feel nothing. The other four have left the boulders.

Perhaps it is enough. Perhaps we are indeed safe now.

Bongani and Penny are almost through the boulders as I follow them down the path.

Penny’s scream freezes me. Bongani is lying on the path, his body crumpled. An umlungu, a white man, stands over him with a broken branch in his hand. Penny’s scream rips shut as strong brown arms grab her mouth and body from behind one of the rocks and pull her back, out of view. Hairy, muscular arms… at least two men, two young and strong-looking men.

The man with the branch looks up at me and smiles, his hair wild and bushy. The blood on my wrist curdles and stings. I turn and run, back up the path, crashing through the thickened grass that slices my ankles beneath my shorts, before realising I’m still in sight to anyone chasing. I stop and duck under the branches of an acacia tree, cowering behind the rough, wide base of the trunk; seeking shelter behind thorns.

It is long moments before I can hear anything other than pounding blood. Then there is just stillness and the distant bark of a baboon.

My ears stay good and I would hear a chase. Of course, I am old and they have caught enough now for a good few days of sex, whatever their fancy.

But why did the dead stay behind with them?

I cry.

I had promised my brother I would take care of his pale daughter for him, even as he lay and haemorrhaged his life quickly away on his bed. I was the only one there to speak to him, his white wife already two days dead. All over town, all over the land, all over the world, people lay dying to the final deadly twist of Umbulalasizwe, this Nation-Killer virus, which takes to the winds like an Invisible Angel of Death. At the end of a week of global carnage, very few were still there to watch and share the dying. There is just a sprinkling of us left now, spared by God for an unknown reason. Bongani says it is as if we were born of the tough survivors, those who developed a resistance to HIV during the days the government refused to roll out anti-retroviral treatment to its people, when it was an older and kinder virus. He always was a clever one, that Bongani, but now he may be a dead man too – with his words, like his body, dust.

Why spare me, God? I am just an old woman.

So many have died and yet I still live. Why me?

Yes, I am a do-not-die, but I fall asleep with my wet face crusted against a hard tree-bark, endlessly saying sorry to my brother.

The cold wakes me, cramping the bones in my hips. I see the sun is down, the night and an early autumnal mist stealing in. Light enough still to see, but I know I must move if I am to stay alive.

I stand with aching difficulty and stretch stiffly, raw hunger and thirst pulling me back into a hunch. I strip a few tough leathery brown figs from the succulent sour fig creepers, bite the barky stem and sip the sour, sticky moisture from within. The wound on my wrist itches but has scabbed. I haul the bag off my bag and unpack the last of the dassie meat, cooked and still smelling fine. It was killed by my lucky stone as it lay sun-bathing on a rock amongst its faster brothers and sisters.

But why should I eat? Why should I go on? Alone, I am nothing.

Even Janet’s shade avoids me and she is now more than six lunar cycles dead. It must be rising seven months since I was last held in a loving rather than a dying embrace by her. The dead don’t hug and even they have left me, chased away by this damp and creeping fog… or perhaps something else? No, I will not think more on this and yes, why should I raise this food to my lips, even though my stomach begs me to?

Because… at least for now, I still can.

It tastes good, seasoned by my prayer for Janet’s shade. I leave the scraps for morning… none can I spare for my ancestors, I only hope they understand.

So I follow the path less travelled, winding its way along the flank of a mountain peak, somewhere south of Silvermine I think, a ways from old habitations where a few of the do-not-dies, Cape leopards and caracals, vultures and baboons still look for easy pickings. The stench of death and rotting flesh used to be a good guide to when you were getting close enough, but it’s all disappeared since the Big Burn tore through Cape Town and across the Flats, reducing so much to blackness and charcoal. The fynbos is used to fire though, growing rapidly again to strangle everything on the slopes. There is even some dryer and thornier vegetation like the acacias, marching in from the Karoo, now that the people are almost all gone.

All I want is cover for the night – somewhere high, in a tree perhaps. I could strap myself against the trunk with the elastic exercise bands from Penny’s aerobics classes, which I’ve been keeping for her in my bag. To tie myself onto a tree trunk on high would be the safest thing to do now that I am alone – above and beyond ground scavengers.

My wrist burns so I wipe it with the last of the sour, soothing juice from a plucked fig.

Cries hang on the air. A child’s cries. I’d recognise them anywhere, despite never having had any of my own.

I follow the shrill sound of a young and miserable voice.

I’ve played mother to quite a few, even though my preference for women’s company meant my family wanted little to do with me. But I was faithful to Janet for twenty years. Thankfully, people’s need for work usurped the stiffest of their principles and I was good with stories and playing with their children, spinning a good few rand from child-care. Janet, though, was the real businesswoman behind it all, sharp as hell. (Paper money is only good for wiping your bum with now. At least coins can still be used to open rusted food cans.)

Dead babies still hurt the most to look at.

This child is very much alive, deep in the underbrush and trees, in the flats away from the mountain slope. I creep in through the bush, slowly and carefully – a live child is bound to have adult carers and I age this one by its cries as between five and ten.

The sobbing stops and there is a low murmur of adult voices so I slow my creep to a careful hands-and-feet crawl, testing the ground gingerly ahead of me before placing my weight, praying there are no sleeping snakes.

Ahead, a small clearing opens up and I hear and smell the crackling bite of a smoky fire – have they a golden stock of matches too? A middle-aged woman sits and cuddles a listless looking child awkwardly in her arms; a second, older child of preteen years – a girl in a tattered green dress – stands and looks on helplessly. A small man circles the clearing suspiciously, thankfully on the opposite side of the clearing, so I pull back slowly into the deeper shadows of the trees. They have a small tent. It is an organised family; I can smell insect repellent.

I can also smell the younger child’s sickness.

The man comes near and I play musical statues to the thump in my chest and head.

He returns to poke the fire.

The child retches and vomits, the woman holds her wrong, some of the vomit may stick in her throat.

I have had enough of death…

“Molweni, hello my friends.” I enter the clearing, hands raised.

The man turns and points a gun at my head.

I struggle to hold my water in, despite there being so little left in my bladder.

The woman recoils. The child in her arm coughs and keeps coughing. She is choking, face up in the women’s clutch of fright.

The man cocks the gun, a noise that cracks through my head and wets my legs.

But I cannot stand still if a child might die.

“Let me help you with her,” I say, holding my arms out.

The man lowers his gun-hand and I can breathe again. The woman stands up, but does not hold her child out.

“Turn her over,” I say gently, “and pat her back.”

She does so, watching me warily, and her child coughs the last of her sick from her mouth onto the ground and begins breathing a little easier, though still panting a bit.

I breathe a bit easier too as the man sticks his gun into a belt around his waist after carefully un-cocking it. He has a sallow, flat face, as if he has distant San or Khoi ancestry.

The woman is brown but not as dark as me – her girls are paler still. The older one smiles at me, but says nothing.

Her mother speaks in Afrikaans: “Wat is jou naam?”

“Noluthando,” I tell her, relieved and more relaxed, “Noluthando Ngobo Bhele.” Only the worst of the skollies and tsotsis ever ask for names from those they intend to kill, as if it gives them further power over their quaking victims – and they certainly don’t look after children. Still, the virus has been no discriminator of moral character; I have seen that.

The man holds his hand out to me: “Are you on your own, gogo – do you want to join us?”

I smile and nod gratefully, blinking tears away, even though I am no grandmother.

The older girl shows me a space by the fireside. They have some meat on a spit of wood over the fire and it looks (thankfully) like chicken.

I wipe my legs discreetly with a scented wild mint leaf from my bag before sitting down.

They give the little one some moistened, crushed buchu leaves for her stomach.

One by one they introduce themselves – Habib and Marlene, Shannon and Tracy. Marlene talks for Shannon. The older girl herself still says nothing. They’d had to move, and move fast, when the Big Burn swept through everything, lit by God or someone who was hoping to purge the world of death’s stink. The Mountain had been wet with late winter rains; so like us… like me, they’d found refuge in the woods alongside rivers and the larger dams.

Tired of just surviving, Habib has finally decided to head west and north, where he says some of his family may still live – way up the West coast, deep into dry Nama country. He says the names of his family with a spattering of clicks.

“Cousin,” I nod, for us amaXhosa learned our linguistic clicks from much shared history deep in back-time with the Khoi-San people.

He looks at me with narrowed eyes. Is it that my comment was over-familiar? Or perhaps he is one of those who think we have taken everything from them since the white man finally gave power over to us; one of those who claim they are the sole indigenous people of this area and country? If so, it’s a silly squabble to hold onto, with such a large and empty space now left for so few.

And it would indeed be a long, long walk, but I have nowhere else to go. Although I have not seen the shades of any of my family, deep down I know they are all dead. Yet my ancestors have not told me this – I have nothing to give them, apart from my own life, is this why they do not come and why they show me nothing?

I voice this belief of mine and our words dry up.

Behind me, I hear the whispers of voices and turn quickly. There is a cloud of children, hanging in the bushes, talking much, saying little. I do not know them. Why are they here? What do they want?

Habib stands next to me, peering into the bushes, holding his swaying gun in front of him. “What is it, gogo? What do you see?”

“Nothing,” I sigh, turning back to the last flickering coals of our fire.

Shannon watches me. In her eyes, I can see she has seen them too.

We settle for the night, them in their tent, me on a rolled mat from my bag.

The dead children quieten their whispering when I wave an angry arm at them. I have not yet died and so I fall asleep with some little hope.

I wake to find something sniffing at my face.

In my vanishing mist of dream, I imagine it is Janet at first – until it grunts and flashes teeth from its grey, hairy face, backing off with my bag in its deft, dark hands.

I sit up, knobkierie straight and stiff with shock, biting back a scream.

The baboon has found the last of the dassie and is cramming the meat into its mouth, grimacing at me. I look around, but it is alone – it must be a single male, probably roaming the bush in search of a new mate, in the hope of starting a new troop.

I avoid eye contact, careful not to raise a challenge and slowly stand up, backing even further away. Despite myself, I let out the slightest, fearful whimper.

The baboon throws my bag down and turns to lope off into the bush. Behind me, I hear a little chuckle. It is Marlene, stretching her arms wide from the flap of the tent-door, as if embracing the new day.

“You’ve already had a visitor,” she says. “Did he take everything you had left to eat?”

I retrieve my bag and feel inside, nodding shamefully.

“Families share,” she says simply, turning to pop her head back into the tent. “Get up you lazy lot, it’s getting late.”

She has a working watch, I notice; to me the sun is only just creeping over the bushes. The child shades have gone, as if driven away by the sun.

We eat the last of the chicken, sip and splash sparsely from a water jug, pack our goods.

“Forty-three minutes,” she says. “It’s now seven twenty-five.” She hitches up her Y-frame back-pack. Habib smiles mildly. The girls move easily and quickly, as if in a well-rehearsed routine. Shannon takes my hand. Tracy looks a lot brighter herself in the day’s gathering heat.

“How will you find your way?” I ask Habib. “By the sun?”

He grins and holds out a scratched compass. “I also have a Slingsby map. Once we get to the Atlantic, we just keep it on our left.”

And so it is that we set off west, heading for the sea. Habib leads the way, with Marlene taking up the rear with Tracy. Shannon walks behind me, occasionally skipping ahead as the mood takes her and if the vegetation allows, but still saying nothing. Marlene tells me she has said nothing since almost her entire class died around her, including her three best friends. Instead, Tracy behind me has all the words. Eight years of age she is, chatting about how she finally realises she does actually miss her school – she’d been in her third year at Muizenberg Primary, although perhaps it is her own best friend she misses most – Shireen, who liked dappled ponies…

Habib takes up the theme before we drown in Tracy’s words. “So what do you miss most about life before the Week of Invisible Death, gogo?” he asks.

“My partner,” I say shortly, thinking too of my online sisters on Behind the Mask.

“Oh…” He is suitably quiet for a while. “I miss the soccer – Man U, Ajax Cape Town, those were my teams – maybe with the odd Castle Lager for company.”

“Or Jack Daniels, you old hypocrite,” shouts Marlene from behind. “I just want a supply of tampons at the right time of the month and some birth control pills.”

Perhaps being an old woman is not all bad.

We stop for lunch in the heat after making our way up and along another slope that affords us a view of a glittering beach in the distance. “Noordhoek,” says Habib. The Atlantic coast indeed.

The children groan when he hauls another chicken out of his rucksack, salted and sealed.

“I was a chicken farm manager,” he says to me. “I have a map of all the company’s free-range farms as well as their security access codes in the Western Cape, all the way up the coast. But the remaining chickens get less, tougher and harder to catch and eat, anyway. There are fewer farms after Saldanha, so we will need to learn to catch fish and eat mussels and perlemoen on the way.”

“Hooray for fish,” shouts Tracy, suddenly turning to look at me. “Can you tell us a story, gogo?”

The flies are buzzing now and we are all well-pasted with insect repellent, the birds quiet in the mid-day warmth as we shelter under a pincushion protea, still charred but having burst its seeds. I try to think of a story that fits our plight and remember our morning visitor. Ah, ‘The Day Monkey Saved his Heart’ – not an amaXhosa tale from my own culture, but a Bemba tale from Zambia that my Aunt Mams told me when I was around Shannon’s age.

So I launch into the story of how God created the world of Man and the world of Animal as separate, and they had never seen each other, until Monkey was elected by the Animals to visit Man, as he was both clever and quick. Once Monkey saw Man from a distance, all fur-less and carrying shiny tools that were planting and harvesting strange foods in the field, he was not so sure it was wise to meet them, however. So he waited until it was night and then he stole into the field and ate the wonderful food until he was stuffed like a melon. As he was about to head home, a Man leaped out with a net to catch him, saying: ‘In my culture, we take the hearts of all who steal from us. I know not what manner of creature you are, but I want your heart…’.

“And?” asks Tracy, her eyes big.

“More tonight,” I say. “At bedtime.”

“That’s not fair! I want a whole story.”

“Endings don’t come in one easy telling,” I say. “It is good to learn to wait for them.”

There is a grumble behind me. Turning, I spot a few vague and shifting child shapes in the bush. Some dead still follow – what would they have of us?

We head off again, Tracy moaning until her tired legs eventually still her mouth. It is sticky hot but cooler in the blustery South-Easter moments as the wind swirls through the reeds and bushes around us. Three children pace alongside in the nearby bush, as if herding us.

Marlene calls the evening camp within sound of the surf thumping through wild dune vegetation ahead of us. She was P.A. to a middle-manager of a local lumber company and a good one at that, it seems.

She looks at the plant ground-cover beneath us with some curiosity; a strange mix of thick, succulent creeper leaves with thorny aloe edges, trailing from the bushes we’ve just gingerly negotiated. “Better put plenty of soft reed bedding underneath, this fynbos is deurmekaar — weird man, true’s God, I don’t know this plant. It’s like things have changed since it’s re-grown from the Big Burn.”

Habib snorts. “Evolution doesn’t work that fast, ‘Lene.”

She looks at him severely. “I’m talking God and devil stuff here, ‘Bib, not science.”

He’s another man of intelligence, with words like that. He shades his face from her and rolls his eyes at me, smiling. I’m not sure though — I’m not a plant person, but I’ve never seen anything like it before either. Habib sighs. “Fynbos is the most diverse range of plants per area in the world – do you claim to know every one of the thousands of species here?”

He is right. I heard a tourist guide say the same thing about fynbos once, a good few years back now.

I make sure the bedding is very thick, spending the better part of an hour, according to Marlene, collecting both wood and restio reed bedding to put between our mats and the spiky creepers.

Night comes in fast and some baying noises hover momentarily on the dying breeze, curdling my blood, for I do not recognise the sound either. I scratch my itchy wrist as Habib gets the fire going. He is aiming to char the last of the chicken and says he is hopeful that we will reach another company farm by tomorrow evening, Hout Bay way, on the coastal path along the ridges of the Twelve Apostles that spine Table Mountain.

“Please finish my story, gogo,” asks Tracy. Shannon comes to sit next to me. She gives a little discreet wave and I look up. The three dead children sit on a protea bush, as if settling down to listen too.

“So the Man had caught Monkey and wanted his heart. Monkey thought quickly. He told the Man that animals don’t keep their hearts in their bodies but their Lion king keeps their hearts for them. Could the Man row him to the king so that he could get his heart? he asked. The Man agreed. But as he rowed the Monkey to the forest shore, Monkey started singing, calling on the Crocodiles to help him. The Man could not understand the animal language and so the Crocodiles surrounded them, forming a bridge from the boat to the land. The Monkey ran across their backs and shouted back from the safety of the jungle: ‘Foolish Man, don’t you know that Animals keep their hearts in the same place that Men do, and feel pain as strongly as you do?’ Today, if you see a Monkey, watch what they do to their chests. They beat their fists in the place their heart lives, as a reminder to man they have hearts also.”

“Wow!” says Tracy. “So do chickens have hearts too?”

I laugh and nod, wondering if my answer will put her off chicken even more. Still, hunger always tells in the end.

Aunt Mams stands before me and a chill trickles through my body. I feel I have almost told her story well, but the words have perhaps slipped a little too easily off my tongue and sound both strange and detached from the twilight-burnt bush around us. Mams puts a finger to her lip, pointing her left arm behind me. The hairs on my neck tingle as I turn.

The thick vegetation is quiet and still. I move towards Habib, who raises a questioning eye. He startles with alarm when I reach in and pull out his gun from under his nearby jersey.

With a rustle of leaves  two men stand in the twilight, one wielding a treebranch, the other a knife. They have big tog-bags on their backs and wild hair and thick muscular arms. The one I have not yet fully seen from yesterday stands both darker and shorter than the other. Habib leaps up, small and fierce, with a large panga in his hand that I had not noticed before, big enough to gut an ox.

They laugh and step forward as if two to one, but I level the gun to stop them. It is heavier than I expect, waving a little as I try to steady it in their direction.

“Where is Penny? Where is my niece?” I ask the white man with the tree branch and the wildest hair. He hears me, his glance flickering to his companion. I see her death in the shorter man’s eyes.

With horror that feels like cold vomit in my bowels, I pull the trigger.

But the gun is not cocked.

They laugh and both move now as if to flank us, for I am just an old woman, I can see it in their smiling faces.

I drag the hammer back with a loud and vicious click. I rest the gun on my upper left arm and spread my legs to brace for the recoil, aiming squarely at the taller and bolder one. (I have dealt with a few men before, who would correct my sexuality.)

He frantically waves the other man to stop, but it is too late.

I hear screams behind me.

And Janet hovers like a ghost over both the men, shaking her grey, pony-tailed head.

My finger freezes. The men turn and run clumsily, crashing through the woods, scratching themselves silly in the process, no doubt. I wish the creeper spines were laced with puff adder venom, to give them a slow and painful death.

With sudden stillness, they are gone.

As is Janet, not even a drifting mist on the breeze.

She didn’t even stay one moment to say goodbye. The gun is a block of pain in my hand and Habib takes it quietly from me, un-cocking it, while I sink to my knees with a salty blurring in my eyes.

Shannon cradles my head in her wiry, bony arms.

I cry like a baby, ashamed, but unable to stop.

I feel her small hand in my trouser pocket. Child, my pockets are empty, I have nothing to give you.

It seems as if the dead have all gone too. Do they still have their hearts?

(A glimpse of Janet is not nearly enough. Why did you come for them, killers and monsters, but not for me, Janet le Grange?)

The others sleep, but not me.

I feel the pull of the sea. I walk over the dunes and down towards the water, feet straining through sand in the bright moonlight. The surf churns out at me like froth from space and my ankles chill with the cold ache of its touch. There is no one riding the surf-foam that batters my body and steals my breath – not the dead, nor my ancestors, nor Janet herself. The night and the sea are numbingly empty ahead of me.

I carry on walking, although I cannot swim. It will be quick then, I hope.

The water burns the wound on my wrist and I stop, waist high. Wait. Perhaps my clothes might still be of use to them.

Marlene has isandla esishushu, a warm hand indeed underneath her brusque manner, and the oldest girl feels kind, hanging on my words as if she has none of her own. (Habib himself refused to put down his gun and gave me a warning look before sealing their tent for the night.)

I turn back to shore, unzipping my track-top and folding it neatly on the wet sand. The tide is on the way out; my clothes should be safe here for a while. I feel in my shorts pockets to empty them first, in case there is anything of use to leave lying in sight there, like a coin or two.

There is indeed something, a little hard and feathery. I cup my palm and hold it up against the half-moon’s light. It is a flower-head – dark and heart-shaped, translucent, papery petals wet and fraying from its edges. An everlasting it’s called. I remember seeing them sprouting from a few of the bushes along our march to the coast.

I remember Shannon’s thin fingers in my pocket.

Gingerly, I put the flower-head back in my trouser pocket. Shivering, I zip on my damp top.

I look up at the sky.

Above me flies the half-moon, bounced along on scudding clouds.

The moon is an alien world, scarred, old and barren. There must be dead men and women there too, I think, the lunar base now filled with emaciated corpses rotting in the diminishing air; supply rockets from China and America stranded like huge, empty steel candles on Earth.

But I can’t see them in my mind’s eye. The moon blinks down at me, white and cold.

The wind howls like Machelanga’s cries for the moon, long let loose from his pot by one of his children, Machelanga who falls and dies trying to get the moon back. The moon is too far gone now and there’s no going back, it’s above and beyond his failing reach, drifting ever further away.

And I can’t see Machelanga either. The stories in my head are harder to piece together, the meanings of the words dry and crack further with each telling and retelling.

A voice calls my name from the sea; parched and thin, but twenty years familiar. I step forward until the waves are round my ankles and knees, tugging me in. A cloud of shadow and vague shape spins before me but I can smell it’s her. She always had a slightly minty smell on her skin.

“It’s good to see you, ‘Thando, but the dead ask me why you pursue them, sister.”

“I don’t, they pursue me!” I try to think of something else to say, but there is nothing in my throat, my heart is squeezing sore. I am no sister.

“They ask why then came you so deep in water when you cannot swim?”

Ah, I understand. I hold out my hand, but the shape spins away from me. Her smell recedes, leaving a trace of sadness in the air. “I can’t stay, ‘Thando. For now, there can be no more.”

“Why?” I plead.

“I may not find you if you walk to your death – even now, old lives and memories fade, new spaces and new lands call… so please stay… and you’d better learn to swim, Thandietjie.”

I cannot say anything, but she is gone anyway. She leaves me the last of her tart comments, sweetened by that Afrikaner miniaturisation of my name, which was always a sign she wished to repair things.

But what is there to repair? She has gone… but ‘for now,’ she said, and I can still smell her sadness hanging in the salty air. The dead do have hearts, it seems, but I am left alone in the here. How long is ‘for now’ – what is time to the dead? Where has she gone? And why did she die before me; after twenty years of love and strife and love again? Questions fly through me but I know better than to ask them of this cold wind.

I breathe the last faint whiff of mint on the breeze and pull on my numbed ankles, my feet locked under wet sand from the retreating tide. There is only the sharp stink of seaweed. Janet is gone. I do not know if I will ever see her again.

I turn from the sea, but stop when I glimpse a huge, dark woman with fiery eyes rearing out of the ocean, an army of living dead and massed cattle spattering out of the waves behind her. Her name ripples through me -Nongqawuse, the prophetess of old who claimed the living dead would sweep the British into the sea, provided the amaXhosa all had faith and slaughtered their cattle.

More than a hundred thousand died for their faith. (Perhaps now, a hundred and seventy years later, she has finally repaid their dead doubts?)

Her blazing red gaze sweeps the land, but she doesn’t see me. Perhaps I am too small.

Small is good. I feel the tiny, fragile cone and leaves of the damp everlasting in my pocket.

Me, I would live.

Yes, there is someone I would see still. I have looked into her brown eyes. Shannon, they call her, but she deserves a new name in a new world. She is building a story inside her and I want to be there when her mouth opens to speak, for it will be a strange and terrible story indeed.

Shrieks, cries and howls erupt from further along the shore to the north. I don’t know what they mean, but still I shiver… we must go that way tomorrow. We must learn the words of the monkeys and the crocodiles if we are to survive in this burnt but flowering world.

I walk over the dunes, looking back just once to see the empty and pounding shore.

I walk down the slope to my new family. As my amaZulu brothers and sisters say ‘umuntu ungumuntu ngabanye abantu.’ We are only human through sharing our being with others.

Ow. I am indeed glad the creeper thorns do not have puff adder venom.

A host of dead children stands on the edge of our camp, a few turning to glance as I pass, if only briefly. (They no doubt wait to share the young girl’s story when she finally finds her new voice and learns her new name.)

As for me, my name is Noluthando Ngobo Bhele and I am still alive.

We shall see what stories the new day brings.

Copyright © 2010 by Nick Wood

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From Issue 18 (Feb 2012)

Where is home?
Pittsburgh, in a small brick house—I moved here for college and fell in love with the city (mostly because I fell in love, period. Pittsburgh is where I met Sonja).

Are you a full-time writer?
Unfortunately…not even close. Maybe someday. For the past ten years I’ve worked at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped as a “reader’s advisor”—basically talking books all day. We circulate audiobooks, mostly, but also large print and Braille, and since we’re a public library, the service is free. It’s a national program, so if anyone out there knows someone who’s struggling to read standard-sized print, head on over to www.loc.gov/nls for more info. I think Canada, England and South Africa have similar programs!

What inspired this story?
Like a lot of my stories, this one showed up one morning as a fully-formed image: of a man in overalls disintegrating as he’s shuffling down the street. Figuring out who that man was and what was happening to him created the story.

The concept of a Disposable Man is brilliant. Where did that idea come from?
Thanks! I’ll try not to get mired in politics here, but the idea of him being “disposable” was most definitely a reflection of my post-9/11 pessimism, when America found itself in two wars without clear purpose, every evening saw updates of the color-coded “terrorist threat levels,” and xenophobia simmered beneath the national debate. There seemed to be little concern for the effects of our country’s actions globally, and meanwhile the economy tanked—the richer getting richer while the poor got poorer…and more numerous. It seemed like we were willing to make certain values and individuals “disposable” in exchange for…what? Patriotism? A false sense of security? The mandated age-limit is, of course, a reference to Logan’s Run. The plot really snapped into place, though, thinking of Rudolph Maté’s classic noir D.O.A.—a man’s been poisoned and he only has a few days to figure out the crime. The movie has a tremendous opening: Edmond O’Brien walking into a police station to report his own murder.

Why Presidents? And why specifically McKinleys and Palins?
The idea of “memorializing” Presidents (all from a certain political persuasion) as a way to fill menial jobs which, in conjunction with “the gainful employment act” mentioned in the world of the story (one character calls this law the “spic act,” knowing full well it was intended to push non-whites from the country), seemed a fitting metaphor for the jingoism and xenophobia that often colors our politics. As for McKinley…I was raised in Canton, Ohio—William McKinley’s hometown, so his specter has always loomed large in my imagination. Canton has the tremendous hillside McKinley Monument/mausoleum where the city gathers to watch 4th of July fireworks. He’s a sympathetic figure—married to (and stayed faithful to) a beautiful woman, Ida, who lost her sanity, frothing at the mouth and suffering psychotic delusions. He was a good man, it seemed—too pro-business, maybe, and some say a puppet to more powerful interests, but a sympathetic character. I’ve written about him a few times.

Why do you think SF is so effective as a medium for social commentary?
It has the ability to operate as metaphor and to imaginatively push our current cultural trends to their logical, and often absurd, ends.

Why British currency?
I love Burgess’s infusion of Russian into Nadsat, and how that detail hints at some unspecified cultural influence or tangled global political scenario for his future England. While certainly not as brilliantly executed or as nimble as Burgess’s writing, the British currency and occasional “Britishness” in my story is an experiment in creating a similar effect.

Tell us about the closing images of the story.
The ecstasies of love, death, sex and God have been stripped away from these “disposable men”, their dying thoughts instead a pre-programmed concoction of, essentially, “mom, apple pie and the 4th of July”—I kind of like how, despite the bleak and critical tone of the story, these last thoughts still operate as a happy ending of sorts.

Are you working on anything right now?
Yes! By early summer I’ll have put the finishing touches on a manuscript for a novel, and I’m always trying to keep up with my short stories.

Where can we find more of your work?
I have a short story called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the current issue of Icarus Magazine and you can follow me on Twitter @LetterSwitch for updates

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	Issue 18 (Feb 2012)

Ashen drizzle. Black sky. Christ, thought McKinley – nothing like the fucking rain. It collected in muddy drifts. It pooled at the curbs. Already the streets were slicked with wet soot. McKinley lifted his boot from the accelerator and hit the emergency flashers. The bald tires of his Ford Focus fishtailed. It was bad enough on clear days when the ash was like fucking snow, but when it rained everything just turned greasy. It collected like plaque on the hoods of parked cars. It filmed over windows and all but blotted out the neon lights of the Baum Boulevard corridor. The lit names flashed past: Cricket Gentlemen’s Club, Li-Yang’s Electronics, Hot-Hot Tandoori, Mr. Bulge’s Slut Capital, Lizzie’s Knickers—but three a.m. was a dead hour and the sidewalks were barren except for clusters of immigrants ducking out of the rain in bus kiosks, deep-set doorways and under awnings – Indians mostly, but Arabs, Chinese, and Mexicans shared the corners, fondling stacks of glossy handbills advertising white women ready for sex, or stripping, handjobs, blowjobs, golden showers, glass-bottomed boats, bdsm, Russian Girls, Israeli Girls, Japanese school girls, even corn-fed Americans. But who would come out in this shit? McKinley slid to a stop at a red light at Aiken. A skeletal Sikh, dark-skinned with sunken yellowish eyes, jogged from the corner and pressed a handbill against the windshield. whatever U want it—XXX—st. lucy gets it. discreet businesses. hotels. The gibberish was printed over a public domain image that McKinley had seen several times before: a pig-tailed blonde wearing a Union Jack tank top and cut-off jeans. Thirteen years old? Fourteen? She smiled like she was at a family picnic, her dimples cute, leaning over a wooden fence in some sun-drenched field. It was the sun-drenched field that caught McKinley’s eye—now where the hell might that be? Video screens looped mute advertisements: sunshine blondes drinking Lemon Zesty, smiling, spilling Zesty over ice like it didn’t cost twelve quid per can. The drizzle stained the adverts, making the girls look like they suffered from skin disease. While McKinley watched, the Sikh touched his door handle and McKinley didn’t wait for the light to change. He pushed through the intersection, spraying sludge.

Two minutes later and Ritter’s Diner was an oasis of light just off to McKinley’s left. He pulled into the chain-link fenced lot. Fried Green Tomatoes EVERY D4Y. Blueberry Hotcake special. Fresh pies. Ritter’s was concrete and glass, a squat box decades older than the surrounding buildings. A few cars cluttered the lot, but not the gunmetal blue Lexus he’d been told to expect. From where he was parked, McKinley could see the entire diner—straight through into the kitchen through the open pass doors, the cooks in white, the waitresses in pastel scrubs. A couple of lone diners or drunks sobering up with coffee sat at the bar. Otherwise, the place was empty. McKinley watched the ghostly faces illuminated by the harsh interior lights, wondering who he’d kill, whose photograph was in the envelope on the passenger seat beside him. He felt nauseous. They all looked so dull and lonely, he couldn’t plausibly imagine any one of them representing a threat to anyone, let alone the UPMC, but who was he to judge? He was just a fucking McKinley. For the first time all night, the murder seemed real—seeing those faces, imagining the shot. McKinley’s gut lurched and his mouth went cottony. He was afraid he’d piss himself. His palms were sweating. Fielding knew McKinley’s palms would sweat.

“Now let me get this fucking clear,” Fielding had told him two nights ago in the back of the ambulance. “One rule about the gun: don’t touch it without gloves—”

“Right, right—”

“Are we fucking clear?”

“Don’t touch the gun without gloves,” McKinley had said. “I got it—”

“If you’re not wearing gloves it might misfire and blow your fucking hand off. You ever see that? It’s a fucking stump. Your fingers are fucked—”

“I got it—”

“Dry,” Fielding had told him. “Keep it dry—”

The envelope was manila—document sized. It was puffed out like a pillow and McKinley knew that Fielding had wrapped the gun in cotton. McK, r-17, 7th floor was scrawled in Sharpie across the front. Fucking rain, he thought. He stuffed the envelope down the front of his coat and zipped back up to his neck. The rain came down in torrents. He thought of his crew without him—Willy, Mick, William and Mix—probably wondering where the hell he was, navigating the garbage lorry down the narrow, twisting avenues of Polish Hill, huddled in the cab with thermoses of Irish coffee, mackintoshes slicked with the sticky rain. It wasn’t too late, he reminded himself. He could leave right now, find them already on shift and punch back in later that morning as if nothing had happened. No, he realized. It was much too late.

McKinley slid from the car, hunched over in the rain. The rain battered him. Oily and frigid. He jogged across the gravel lot and up the front steps into Ritter’s lobby. A Bear Claw machine stood just inside the front door, a pound for a play, the gleaming metal hook tantalizingly poised over a jumble of stuffed toys. Pornographic handbills littered the floor, crisscrossed with muddy boot tracks. The British teen climbing her wooden fence stared out from nearly half a dozen of them.

The diner stank—cigarettes, air freshener, grease. An Empire’s Forge clock with a glowing hologram of the Eliza Furnace hung above the register: 3:25 am. One of the waitresses sat alone at the near booth eating a bowl of chili sprinkled with goldfish crackers. She wore scrubs patterned with pastel lambs, a ratty gray cardigan and searing white Adidas sneakers. She was young, maybe early twenties, McKinley thought, her dishwater blonde hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She looked up at McKinley, gaping at him, her buggy eyes taking him in, her mouth half open, ready to receive the spoonful of steaming chili poised inches from her lips.

“McKinley,” she said.

“Can I sit anywhere? How about one of those booths? You serve McKinleys, don’t you?”

“You know this is cash only,” said the waitress, after eating her spoonful of chili. “We don’t do those eye scans or thumb scans or whatever the hell else you scan—”

“I’ve got cash,” said McKinley. “I’m an adult, right? Twenty-nine, if you can believe that. Tonight’s my thirtieth birthday—”

“Jesus Christ,” said the waitress.

“I have cash,” said McKinley. “Anyway, I’m just getting pie and a coffee. Cheap stuff—”

“Sit where you want,” said the waitress. “Anywhere’s free—”

McKinley took a booth. He caught his reflection in the glass—the rain had smudged him, like mascara streaking down his forehead and cheeks. Twenty-nine years old and he looked fifty, or sixty. His reflection depressed him. He’d declined so swiftly, so suddenly. He unrolled his napkin and wiped the smudges from his prominent forehead, inspecting his receded hairline. His eyes were cloaked in shadows from the overhead lights and the acne craters covering his cheeks cast shadows as well. Unlike the rest of his face, however, his nose was still elegant, like a raptor’s beak. McKinley turned three-quarters profile and admired his nose in the window reflection. The rest might look like shit, he thought, but I’ll always have my nose. McKinley slid the envelope to the table. He pulled a pack of Kools from his pocket and hung his coat on the back booth hook.

A few moments later, the waitress poured him a glass of water and a cup of coffee.

“Cream and sugar’s over there,” she said. “You wanted pie?”

“Yeah,” said McKinley. “Yeah, I do—”

“Chocolate, chocolate cream, strawberry, key lime, rhubarb, pecan, pecan walnut, pecan supreme—”

“Apple?” asked McKinley. “How about Dutch Apple?”

“Dutch apple,” she said. “A la mode?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means with ice cream—”

“Why not?” said McKinley. “A la mode—”

“I’m Jaime,” said the waitress. “Give a holler if you need anything—”

“Will do—”

At the far end of the bar a middle-aged man sat with a newspaper. A traveling salesman, McKinley thought. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened. He sat without moving, almost without blinking. He stared at the newspaper to distant thoughts. Smoke curled up from the cigarette in the tray and disappeared into the lights. His hair was sandy blonde, cut short. His lips were plump and pouting. After a moment, he languidly picked up the cigarette and took a drag. He replaced it in the tray. Nearer to McKinley was the drunk he’d seen from outside, slumped over, probably asleep, a plate of hotcakes half eaten and probably cold on the counter near his elbow.

McKinley unsealed the manila envelope—two pairs of latex gloves, a tri-fold brochure, several pills, a wad of cotton, and an 8 x 10 glossy of his mark: an older man, white hair shaved close to his skull, vivid blue eyes. Fielding had written Councilman Rutherford Ockley in Sharpie beneath the man’s face, but McKinley already recognized the man. Local news broadcasts, the immigration debate, the Public Trust. What have I gotten myself into? Even seeing Ockley’s photograph, knowing he would kill the man, triggered nausea and McKinley chewed and dry-swallowed two of the white pills. The nausea abated.

McKinley slid the photograph back into the envelope and pocketed the rest of the pills, in case he needed them during the kill. He hadn’t seen Rutherford Ockley in the diner. McKinley took the envelope with him but left the brochure on the table. He took a quick walk around Ritter’s, scrutinizing the two men’s faces as he passed them. The drunk was an older man with white hair, but nothing like the man in the photograph. The traveling salesman was decades too young. McKinley checked all the booths, but found them empty.

“Fuck,” he said, making his way back to his booth. “Fuck me—”

He glanced again at the Empire’s Forge clock: 3:32.

“Happy Birthday, McKinley,” said Jaime, plopping down a steaming slice of Dutch apple heaped with vanilla ice cream. The ice cream had already started to melt, running like cream in rivulets between the apple chunks. She’d put a candle in the ice cream, pink and blue stripes.

“Make a wish,” she said.

McKinley wished. He blew. The candlelight disappeared in a puff of fragrant smoke, but sparked and flickered back into light.

“Got ya,” said Jaime.

McKinley snorted a laugh. He plucked out the candle and dropped it in his water glass.

“Very funny,” he said.

“You know, I dated a McKinley once,” said Jaime. “The Protocol Board made me break it off—”

“Everyone slums with McKinleys—”

“It wasn’t slumming,” said Jaime. “I really liked him—”

“How old are you?” asked McKinley.

“Twenty-one—”

“Don’t take it so hard. Your boyfriend’s probably already starting to look like me—”

“He already was looking like you,” she said. “Just a younger you—”

“Thanks for the pie—”

“It’s on the house,” said Jaime. “Thirty’s a big year—”

“That’s mighty swell,” said McKinley. “Thanks a lot—”

“So, how long do you have? To live, I mean—”

“Depends,” said McKinley. “I’m healthy, I work out. I might get a week, a week and a half at the outside—unless something miraculous happens. Unless I get the right kind of medication—”

“They don’t have anything to help you,” said Jaime. “It would be banned, anyway—”

“They have it,” said McKinley. “And it is banned. That’s why I need a miracle—”

“Yeah, well, like I said. Happy Birthday—”

“You never know,” said McKinley as she walked away. “Maybe my birthday wish will come true—”

McKinley scooped a bite of pie and a bit of ice cream. The Dutch apple was good—cinnamon and brown sugar, a crisp crust. The apple filling wasn’t fresh, but what could you hope for? Fresh apples would bankrupt a place like this. He ran his hand through his hair and saw black, curly strands flutter down onto the white ice cream. Fuck, he thought, picking out the hair. The hair’s the first thing to go.

Headlights pierced the window and McKinley looked outside. The gunmetal Lexus had turned from Baum and pulled into Ritter’s lot. McKinley went tingly. His heart fluttered. Keep it together, McKinley, just calm the fuck down. His hands shook, but he slid on a pair of the gloves, snapping the latex over his wrists. His forehead broke out in a cold sweat, as did his armpits and back, but he was careful not to wipe his forehead with his gloves. Keep the gun dry.

The Lexus doors opened and two figures hurried across the gravel lot, sharing an umbrella. McKinley only saw their legs—a man’s in dark trousers, the other’s a woman’s, in heels. He watched them hurry up the walk then lost them around the front corner of the building. A moment later, he heard the front bells ring.

“The two of you?” asked Jaime. “Sit anywhere you want—”

“Thank you,” said the man, his voice graced with a lilting Welsh accent.

McKinley swiveled in his seat and saw the man from the photograph: Rutherford Ockley. He was taller than McKinley would have guessed, and much thicker, more muscular. His eyes were even more piercing than the blues in the photograph. When he and McKinley’s eyes met, McKinley felt pinned to his seat, exposed.

“Good morning,” said Ockley as he passed. “How’s the pie?”

McKinley grunted, clutching his gloved hands beneath the table. Ockley wore a charcoal-colored suit and an overcoat, a brimmed hat clutched in his hand. He exuded charismatic plasticity. Snuggled beside him was a lean blonde, a quarter of his age if not younger. Her hair was curled, parted over the left eye in a tight zigzag. She wore a crimson dress that clung to her, a modest neckline in front but cut low enough behind to expose her pale back all the way to the shapely curve at the base of her spine. Rutherford Ockley’s hand was inside the dress, around her bare waist. She wore crimson pumps at the end of her milky, long legs, her calf muscles shapely and defined. The drunk lifted his head as if he could sense her presence and stared at the woman as she passed. Even the traveling salesman broke his pose, ogling the woman’s legs until she’d tucked herself out of sight into the far corner of her booth.

McKinley slid a cigarette from his pack. He lit up with a stray match left over in the porcelain ashtray. Ockley and his girlfriend laughed over some joke Jaime made. They ordered pie. Jaime went to the kitchen and Ockley’s girl slid from the table. McKinley sucked his cigarette and watched her. She made her way to the jukebox, slipping between the empty tables. She leaned over its glass to see the selections. She’s posing, thought McKinley. Bending over like that on purpose. The salesman couldn’t keep his eyes off her. McKinley wondered if she was a hooker, or a dancer from one of the clubs. He wondered if he could find her picture on a handbill if he asked on enough street corners, or peeked into enough dives. She heightened the tension in the room, but McKinley’s lust was dull—had he not been impotent from a lifetime’s worth of Sterilites in his mashed potatoes, she might have done something for him. As it was, he watched her like a butcher, wondering if he’d have to kill her.

“You don’t mind if I play a song, do you?” she asked the salesman.

“Lady, you can do whatever you want—”

McKinley’s stomach spewed acid up his throat and into his mouth. Eckstein’s Mr. Saturday Night sounded from the jukebox and the woman started dancing, just enough motion of her hips to suggest something, just enough movement to let the men know. Her eyes were almond-shaped, emerald green. She locked eyes with the salesman and laughed.

“Come on over here and sit down,” said Ockley. “Come on, baby—”

“Why don’t you dance with me?” she asked the councilman.

“Let’s have some pie instead—”

The show was over. The woman pouted, but returned to the booth. McKinley lowered his eyes, inspecting the brochure from the envelope. It was a travel brochure for the Kingfisher resort in Haiti—the cover photograph showing a beach at sunset with two silhouettes jogging together, hand in hand beneath palm trees. Haiti by morning, Flights and Hotels starting at £499. Inside the brochure, the pictures showed the Kingfisher’s interior—a deluxe bedroom with an ocean vista, two women sharing drinks at a bar near the fireside, one a brunette, the other a Haitian, her skin a rich mahogany. The opposite page showed the same women wearing bikinis in an outdoor Jacuzzi, palm trees ringing the outer dark. We’re waiting for you, it read. The idea of Haiti calmed McKinley. He’d always wanted to go to Haiti. In Pittsburgh, he’d never been able to truly see the sun. Whenever he looked at the sky, even on the brightest afternoons, he could stare at the sun and it was only a pale white disc because of the soot and ash. In Haiti, he’d be able to see the sun, to squint at it, to feel its light burning his skin.

McKinley pulled the cotton wad from the envelope, glancing at the others in the diner, wondering if they’d turn towards him, if they’d somehow sense what he was doing, but no one looked his way. He unwrapped the gun. It came in two shrink-wrapped pieces, the gun itself and a magazine pre-filled with bullets. The gun was compact, blunt, and both it and the magazine looked like beige plastic, Braddock Firearms embossed on the grip. McKinley cut into the shrink-wrap with his car key and opened the package, carefully removing each piece. The world was receding from him. His ears were ringing, they couldn’t hear quite right—like they were stuffed up with wax. He checked the clock: 3:45. The magazine slid into the grip with startling ease and clicked into place. He held the gun beneath the table, wondering if anyone had heard the click of the magazine, but no one had noticed, no one had heard. McKinley chambered a round. There was no safety on the Braddock.

He lowered his head and stared dumbly at his melting ice cream, wanting to pray for strength, but there was nothing and no one he could pray to. He pulled the white pills from his pocket and ate a few more with another bite of pie.

McKinley slid from his booth, the Braddock semi-automatic at his side. Eckstein switched to Como’s Some Enchanted Evening on the jukebox. McKinley stopped at Ockley’s booth. McKinley’s tongue felt too swollen to speak. He breathed heavily, inhaling, exhaling, feeling flush, and nearly hyperventilating. Spittle frothed at the corners of his lips and mucous dripped from the tip of his elegant nose.

“Well, what is it?” said Ockley, his Welch accent curling around the words.

“Are you Rutherford Ockley?” McKinley managed to say.

“Councilman,” said the woman.

McKinley raised the gun, a thin stream of blood trickling from his nostril.

“Calm down,” said the salesman. “Hey, we’re ok. It’s all right, calm down—”

“Waitress?” shouted Ockley. “Waitress? Get this McKinley away from me. He’s malfunctioning—”

McKinley fired. The sound was a sharp clack and Ockley’s forehead exploded into blood, his vivid blue eyes rising confusedly to the ceiling. The woman squealed. McKinley took a step forward and grabbed the councilman’s throat, steadying him. He put the barrel of the gun against Ockley’s temple and fired again. Ockley’s brains sprayed the window and the woman. She screamed and McKinley panicked. He raised the gun to her.

“No, no,” she said, “You don’t understand who I am—”

He shot her in the chest to quiet her. The woman slumped forward and slid from the leather booth to beneath the table, her dress hiked up past her thighs. Empty the clip, Fielding had told him. Be sure to empty the fucking clip. The air smelled sharp.

The traveling salesman was on his knees, hands raised. The drunk was passed out cold. Jaime cried from behind the bar, “Don’t shoot me, oh please God, don’t shoot me, don’t kill me, oh God—”

“I’m sorry,” said McKinley. “Fucking Christ—”

Time was like syrup. McKinley’s ears rang. His head pounded. He felt like he was choking. McKinley turned back to Ockley’s corpse and raised the gun with both hands, targeting the councilman’s face. McKinley emptied the clip—clack, clack, clack—until Rutherford Ockley was an unrecognizable slur of cartilage, bone, brains and blood. Even over the waitress’s screams, McKinley heard the corpses bubble and suck, the blood plashing beneath the table in a pool, running into the aisle. McKinley dropped the gun and nearly fainted, his vision dimming. He breathed. His head cleared and his senses returned to him. He picked up the gun.

Ritter’s men’s room was down a narrow hall that ran alongside the kitchen. It smelled of vomit and urinal cake, the floors linoleum tile, the walls covered in graffiti. McKinley filled his palm with lilac-scented foam soap from the sink dispenser then knelt in the stall in front of the stainless-steel toilet. The walls were covered with phone numbers and names, a few detailed sketches of genitals. McKinley lathered the gun with soap then plunged his hands into the toilet water, scrubbing vigorously. Spit pooled beneath his tongue and he felt like he was going to cry or puke, or both, but he scrubbed until finally the gun started to come apart in his hands, dissolving, turning into a blackish lump, then to paper pulp floating on the surface of the water. He broke down the larger clumps with his fingers and flushed. The foamy pulp swirled to the center but went down. The water came up clean. McKinley rinsed off his gloves in the sink. He hurried back through the dining room.

Jaime and the salesman stood near the corpses, gawking at the blood.

“I called the cops,” said Jaime, almost distractedly.

McKinley shoved the Haitian Kingfisher brochure and the shrink-wrap trash back into the manila envelope before putting on his coat.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

McKinley rushed past the front register. He slipped on the handbills littering the lobby. Half his boot track was blood, the other half dirt. He looked back through the diner and saw his boot tracks stamped out in blood. McKinley ran into the night. The rain had weakened into a sooty mist. The cold spray felt fresh against his face. “Christ Jesus,” McKinley muttered. Sirens blared in the distance. McKinley sprinted to the parking lot. He knew full well the police could be responding to any number of crimes along the Baum corridor. Once in his car, he turned the ignition and for a brief, heart-sickening moment, worried that the cold engine wouldn’t turn over, but it started smoothly. McKinley backed out from the lot, speeding past the dead man’s Lexus.

“Answer, damn it. Answer—”

He was at an AT&T pay phone bolted to the wall of the Lawrenceville Quick Stop. McKinley stood under the awning, out of the rain, lit by shop lights and cigarette adverts, his boots in a muck of slush. The line rang. Twenty times. Twenty-one. He slammed the phone to its cradle and his £2 coin belched from the slot—a profile of Queen Elizabeth II. Headlights raked him when cars pulled into the lot. McKinley fed the coin, dialed the number a third time. Ringing. He was panicky. Beads of sweat rolled over his belly and greased his back. A minute’s worth of ringing before he gave up and picked out his coin.

“Where are you, Fielding?” McKinley muttered, pulling up his sweatshirt hood to avoid stares. When he ducked inside the Quick Stop, he cringed at the fluorescent glare of the convenience store aisles.

“Welllllllllcome to Quick Stop, pardner!!!” Okie twang from cartoon cowpokes in red, white and blue leather chaps, holo-fluttering in and out of McKinley’s sightlines as he scanned products on the aisle. Animated labels blinked 3D eye-kicks and blared tinny jingles as he passed. A bored Mex-American clerk slouched in a bulletproof cubicle, the glass pocked white with shatter patterns. The clerk watched news on the flat screen bolted above the Slushie machine. A Reagan on KDKA:

“…from earlier tonight. Police believe the suspect to be a twenty-nine year old William McKinley, serial coded R-17, delinquent from garbage 343 in Polish Hill. Others in his class have already been apprehended and questioned. Breaking news from overnight: Councilman Rutherford Ockley, pursuing antitrust legislation against the United Pittsburgh Medical Conglomerate, has been assassinated by a lone gunman in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood. Footage from the assassination has already become the number one download on LibertyTube, reaching three million hits faster than even Uncle Charley’s sausage-wrapped dancing cats. His legacy…”

McKinley nuked an Ugly Dog and grabbed a Big Slurp Pepsi as footage of the killing filled the screens: The woman slumping; McKinley emptying the clip; Ockley bucking from bullets like a spasmodic. McKinley dug into his pocket and pulled out more white pills. He swallowed them with the Big Slurp and the sudden nausea at the violence on TV abated.

“Are you one of those fucking Dollar Bills?” asked the clerk. “You must be fucking giddy—”

“Come on, man, I have nothing to do with this,” said McKinley, dropping coins on the counter, head lowered to skew the recognition software. “I just haul trash. I’m not happy when a man dies. I can’t be—”

The clerk slid the coins to his side of the bulletproof glass. Black hair in cornrows, forearm tattoos wrapped in dress-code appropriate ace bandages. Stitched on his Quick Stop shirt: Ernesto.

“My cousin hauled trash,” he said. “Until the city passed the spic laws and the Dollar Bills took his job. Scabs. The City deported him under the Gainful Employment Act—”

Breaking News on TV—an impromptu funeral procession for Ockley. Hundreds of people—immigrants and illegals, mostly, but families of illegals joined with white leftists, teenage anarchists and hippy sympathizers—gathered near Ritter’s. City of Pittsburgh Police in riot gear were already on hand, but keeping a distance. An armored truck emitting sound blasts to disperse the crowd was ineffective. Some of the activists threw rocks, which pinged off the officers’ helmets or were easily parried with their clear shields. The funeral rally disturbed the crime scene. Ritter’s was flooded with immigrants. A group of Indian Muslims took Ockley’s body and wrapped it in linen. They carried him above the crowd, shouting and near tears.

“I didn’t ask to haul trash,” said McKinley. “One day I just woke up in a tube, the next I’m emptying dumpsters—”

“My cousin had valid documentation, man, but they kicked him out because he couldn’t find a qualifying job. You know what happened to him? He was a mule in Tijuana and a cartel cut his fucking head off. UPMC created you Dollar Bill mother fuckers to take his job, and then he dies crossed up with the narc they pumped into Mexico—”

“That’s conspiracy bullshit—”

“Bullshit? Then why’s Ockley dead? You dumb fuck. Ockley was going to fix this. He was going to break those fuckers apart—”

McKinley didn’t stick around for his change. Back in his car, the dash clock told him he was turning thirty years old. He watched the digits flip from 4:59 to 5:00am.

“Happy fucking birthday,” he said.

McKinley drove. Aiken was closed by police barricade—officers in gasmasks and helmets, black riot armor and submachine guns directing traffic away from the funeral procession. McKinley could see firelight from the rally and heard gunshots fired into the air. He followed detours through Friendship and East Liberty, behind snowplows scraping paths through the sludge rain. What have I done?

East Liberty and Highland. McKinley spotted another pay phone at a defunct Sunoco—boarded windows, tattered plastic bags shrouding the pumps. McKinley pulled around back and hunched in the rain to make his call—another £2 coin, another twenty unanswered rings.

He’d met Dr. Fielding at Big Jim’s in the Run—a Dollar Bill bar, down in Greenfield near the train trestle. Big Jim’s décor was grease: grease-saturated faux wood panels, grease-stained carpets, grease-shined tabletops. This was three months ago, McKinley celebrating the thirtieth of a Milhous Nixon he knew from finishing school. The place was crawling with Nixons and friends of Nixons, rowdy drunks every one of them, a few McKinleys, a W. or two. The Steelers were on the 27-inch above the bar. McKinley sipped Drambuie. The place was overcrowded, thick with tobacco smoke. A line of men sat at the bar downing beers and groaning at the quarterback play, but most of the room was teeming with Presidents. The few Citizens at the party had picked out their Palins and snuck away to dim corners, slow dancing and groping the girls. Fielding collapsed into McKinley’s booth, making like he needed a break from the party.

“Fucking Logan’s Run in here,” he said. “This is depressing. I’m Fielding, by the way—”

“Oh, shit, I know who you are,” said McKinley, recognizing the man from the monthly newsletters. “You’re the director of the program—I think I have your signature tattooed on my ass—”

Fielding laughed, “You probably do—”

“You knew Nix?”

“I helped him out from time to time,” said Fielding. “I’m a chemist, remember. Nix liked certain cocktails. Are you interested? You’re about twenty-nine, aren’t you? Maybe a bit younger? We could party—”

Fielding was close to sixty, McKinley guessed—a mythical age, as far as he was concerned. The doctor’s hair was curly but ashen gray, his face pocked and somewhat ruddy—almost elfin in its features, with long smile lines creasing the corners of his bright eyes.

“Twenty-nine,” said McKinley.

“Twenty-nine? Come outside with me,” said Fielding. “This place is too crowded for old men like us. I can give you an early birthday present—”

The Steelers closed into halftime and McKinley needed to piss anyway.

“Fine,” he said. He downed the last watery sips of his Drambuie and chewed the ice. The two men threaded through the crowd and left the bar. Outside was quiet, with snow drifting from the black sky in fat, grayed flakes. Snow piled in blackish drifts, ice caked in mud with a sheen of oil. McKinley pissed against Big Jim’s wall and followed Fielding around back, between houses lit by the Steelers on television, into a gravel field, the security lights busted out.

“Here,” said Fielding, and McKinley smoked.

They passed the joint without speaking, watching the blur of lights on the 376 overpass as if they were stars. Fielding rubbed his hands for warmth and shivered.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Fielding asked. “I know how it’s supposed to work, but I’ve never really asked a President before. We’re terrified of dying—normal citizens, I mean. We’ve spent years trying to break the Biblical Barrier, and even now that a person with good healthcare can break 140 or 50 easily, nothing’s changed. Life blinks by just as fast. We’re just as fucking scared of dying as we used to be and still regretful about all the years we’ve wasted. But look at you—calm, even though you’re almost 30—”

“I don’t think I’m afraid of dying, but there’s a dream I get from time to time,” said McKinley. “I’m riding a horse—this black horse, shiny with sweat and muscles. I realize I’m in a war—wearing a blue wool jacket. I have a musket and something happens—it differs depending on the dream—either a musket shot flies past, or an explosion. The horse stumbles and I’m falling. I wake up. I’m sweaty and nauseous. I guess that might be a fear of death, but it dissipates. After that, I don’t feel a thing, brother. I can’t—”

“Well, what if you could?” said Fielding. “What if I could fix you? What if I had the drugs to block out your Sterilites and dampen your genetic restrictors? What if you could discover the ecstasies of religion? What if I could help you have sex? What if I could let you live a little bit longer? I can’t let you live forever…but maybe another five years?”

“That’s a big what if—”

“Not fucking what if,” said Fielding, laughing. “I work for the UPMC.”

“What are you trying to sell me?” said McKinley.

“I’m not selling you a damn thing, Mr. McKinley,” said Fielding. “Come with me. There’s something I’d like to show you—”

The Run was unplowed and McKinley trudged through snow, following Fielding in silence. Small houses in a valley of shadow, the lights from the overpass unable to reach this far into the Run, the sounds of a thousand cars nothing more than a distant whisper. Fielding led McKinley up the block toward the Orthodox Church that had once prayed over the corpse of Andy Warhol, its onion domes catching streetlamp light and glinting gold. An ambulance was parked on the street, Three Rivers EMS.

“In here,” said Fielding.

“You want me to get in there?” asked McKinley.

“Come on,” said Fielding. “What are you scared of?”

McKinley took a last pull of the joint before flicking it away—a burning arc of light falling into snow. “I guess nothing—”

The back of the ambulance was cramped, but with enough room for McKinley on the bench and Fielding in a swivel chair. They squinted in the sudden florescent glare of the truck, their faces pallid and drawn with shadows. Fielding pulled shades over the rear windows.

“Cozy,” he said, removing a leather satchel from beneath the driver’s seat. He unzipped the bag and lifted a syringe and vial. He filled the syringe with liquid.

“You have a girlfriend?” asked Fielding.

“Sure,” said McKinley. “An occasional Palin—”

“Presidential romances are sweet,” said Fielding. “Chaste like perfect teenagers—holding hands and going out to dinner on your meager allowances. You and your Palin feel companionship, but you can’t feel love. You can’t fuck. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt her up or would even want to, but I know your sex drive is abysmally low. And that’s not all, Mr. McKinley. You have some emotional sensitivity, but you’ve been programmed to feel extreme nausea at the thought, let alone the intention, of violence. The idea of God has been stripped from you, even though platitudes have been programmed into your genes. You go to church every Sunday by genetic compulsion, but I know damn well you’ve never had a religious experience. The reason you don’t fear death is partly biological…it’s partly the way we’ve programmed you…but it’s partly because your lives are already a living death. You are deadened slaves. I want to give you life, Mr. McKinley. I want to give you freedom. Roll up your sleeve—”

“What is that?” said McKinley. “We do drug testing, man. Listen, they take urine samples from us. I can’t—”

Fielding tapped a vein, pressed the fluid into McKinley’s forearm.

“Holy shit,” said McKinley, his eyes widening, his mouth gasping for breath. “Oh my God, oh my God—”

“That’s life,” said Fielding. “That’s what citizens feel every moment of every day. That feeling is nothing more than having the veil lifted, my friend. I can give you life. I can give you freedom. I can give you pleasure. We have gene therapy that can extend your life a solid five years, if not a bit more: imagine, a William McKinley celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday. I can give you the therapy, and I can get you out of the country to enjoy it. UPMC has resources—”

“Haiti,” said McKinley. “I want to go to Haiti. I want to see the sun—”

Fielding’s plan had seemed simple: Kill the councilman. Make a payphone to payphone call to Fielding after the kill. If everything went smoothly, Fielding was to tell him a location, a place where McKinley could ditch his car. Fielding was to meet him there with the ambulance. The gene therapy was to be immediate, conducted en route to the airport. At parting, McKinley was to receive: a flight ticket, a passport, a room key to the Kingfisher resort in Haiti, a wad of cash.

“How do you know your councilman will come to Ritter’s?” McKinley had asked.

“I have someone working for me. She’ll get him there, it’s no problem—”

But it was a real fucking problem—a double –homicide, sparking citywide riots. McKinley already pegged as the killer, his face and serial code flashed on every TV and Mobile. Fielding nowhere. McKinley let the payphone ring, huddled against the oozing rain. Thirty times, thirty-five. No one answered.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, slamming the phone against the cradle until the hooks broke. “Shit—”

A heavier rain left oily slicks with a variegated sheen on sidewalks and the Sunoco parking lot. In the car, the Demagogue spoke: And the savages—all the inferiors of the world that come to our great nation like parasites to suck our blood and infect the fat of the land. They riot, murder, loot and burn the very neighborhoods where we’ve let them live—

McKinley coughed—a deep, wet rattling in his chest—and he knew his thirty years on this earth were almost up, that his innards, as he’d seen in countless instructional videos, were beginning to jellify and break apart. His eyes locked onto ambulances as he drove, sirens whirring past despite the rain-spattered streets.

A body on the street. Anarcho-kids, faces covered with handkerchiefs, beat it with baseball bats. McKinley sped past the scene, catching that the victim was a W. Bush, his body torn apart like tissue paper from the violence and the lubricating rain. McKinley fished out the last two white pills, chewed and swallowed—the nausea softening. These riots sparked from time to time, he knew, and Presidents were attacked—unable to defend themselves because of their anti-violence reflexes. Millions in city property lost, millions in personal property lost if the riots reached into Shadyside, where families owned Hoovers for butlers.

McKinley threaded through a police line set up to contain the riots. He drove into Shadyside, through the United Pittsburgh Medical Conglomerate main campus; the sprawling structure of interconnected glass lit hospital-white, gleaming despite the drizzling sludge. Every inch of surface was covered with light projection adverts—women’s eyes with Versace diamond-lashes, Vuitton by Murakami cartoons gorging on handbags, Ralph Lauren blondes playing croquet in shimmering sundresses. Forty-foot Burberry close-ups of women’s feet in plaid high heels. Armani, Cartier, Miu Miu.

McKinley parked where he could, blocking a hydrant near Ellsworth and St. James. He hunkered in his jacket, coming out of the rain into the Galleria and the Emergency Room entrance, hiding his face from the commercial scanners that plied him with coupons and sales, trying to pin his identity—What’s your name? Anything you want, the UPMC has it. What are you looking for?—runway models carved from light walking with him, directing him to boutiques. Nurses in tailored white suits wheeled patients through the ER receiving doors and down the Galleria halls. The mall teemed with Presidents bloodied in riot violence. McKinley scrolled through a hospital roster until he found him, the man’s photograph a smiling, airbrushed publicity still from ten years ago, maybe twenty: Fielding, Richard Felix. Bioinorganic Procedures, Director.

Near the Cancer Ward, a commercial scanner caught McKinley’s retina: an alarm sounded even as the commercials adjusted themselves to suit his profile. McKinley ran, but American Eagle Outfitters’ personalized window display caught his attention: a blonde with vanilla skin, impossibly gorgeous, with dimples and radiant blue eyes. She climbed on a wooden fence wearing cut-off jeans and a Union Jack t-shirt. McKinley coughed, gagging on fluids he kicked up from his lungs. He coughed again, sprayed slurries of bloodied vomit on the display window. Tears streamed like molten iron from his eyes, blurring his vision. One of the nurses approached him and asked if he needed to be admitted to the ER.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m dying—”

He followed the nurse, Galleria stores layering displays to appeal to him. All around, nurses hustled battered and vandalized Presidents onto gurneys or in wheelchairs. McKinley wondered what the other Presidents saw when they looked at the Galleria stores—what sorts of advertisements vied for their attention and plied their vestigial dreams.

Once into triage, McKinley left the nurse and wandered white hospital halls. He swallowed down a mouthful of mucous-thickened blood, scanning room numbers as he made his way from department to department. Patients convalescing, televisions tuned to broadcasts of the funeral procession. The riots surrounding the funeral were gaining momentum. In the processional’s wake, cars burned or were overturned, windows broken. Presidents lay dead in the streets.

McKinley found the doctor in his office.

“Fielding?” he said.

Doctor Fielding sat at his desk, flipping through paperwork, his bifocals perched on the bridge of his nose. At McKinley’s voice, the man looked up and smiled.

“William,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d show up. Come in, have a seat—”

“I came for my tickets,” said McKinley. “Why didn’t you pick up the phone? I killed that guy—”

“You did a lot more than fucking kill that guy,” said Fielding. “You also killed a woman. She was a colleague, a damn promising colleague. You weren’t supposed to kill anyone but Ockley, you dumb fuck. You’re not getting anything from me—”

“We had a deal,” said McKinley, coughing. He searched his pockets for any more of the white pills, but he’d used them all.

“I’ve already given you more than any President deserves,” said Fielding.

Fielding turned back to his paperwork. McKinley lunged at him, to kill him if he could, but waves of nausea flooded him and he crumpled to the carpet. Doctor Fielding never looked up from his paperwork, even as McKinley struggled to rise. He stumbled and crawled from the room, the world spinning, running the white halls away from the doctor. McKinley gagged, and a stream of cold fluids poured from his mouth and nostrils.

“Christ,” he said. “Fucking Christ.” But further down the hallway he vomited again—more blood and the soggy remains of organs. He made his way back through the Galleria, the flashing adverts hazy through his bloody tears. McKinley swayed and staggered, the storefronts again layering adverts for his attention. He passed Gap, the models in bikinis, healthy and clean, all climbing into a hot tub together at the Kingfisher resort and spas, looking out into the starry vista of the Haitian night.

McKinley stumbled outside, gasped for air—but the rain damped in his lungs and he choked, spitting watery blood. His skin flaked before fissuring, covering him with snowy dandruff. Blood ran into his eyes from fissures opening over his scalp and stung him. He wandered vaguely towards his car, but forgot where he had parked.

Sirens, but what did it matter. The rainwater leaking through his boots eroded his feet to clumps and McKinley fell to his knees. Instinct. He crawled, whimpering. He found a hedgerow and slid between the branches, burying his head in his arms. He squirmed from his clothes, naked like a pale worm in the mud. His skin melted in the rain and rinsed to the gutters. He was a smooth white lump, featureless except for the more resistant bones—elbows, knees—jagged and poking through the membrane.

The torchlight funeral for Ockley crashed through the night like a rolling scream of prayer and gunfire. McKinley’s eyes floated wide in his bald face, unable to blink and staring at the procession as it passed. It flowed like a poisoned river, threatening property violence to the manicured lawns of Shadyside. Scared citizens watched from dim upstairs windows, hiding their Presidents in basements or garages until the unpleasantness might pass.

Traffic patrol discovered McKinley’s Ford Focus when they ran the plates for the hydrant violation. Police searched for him, hoping to find him intact for the papers, but they were far too late. When they found what little remained of McKinley, he looked like a bloated white worm, dried and sun blanched. The police let a Reagan take photographs for the morning broadcasts and copied the images for their internal paperwork. Officially, Doctors at the UPMC recommended further studies into what might have blocked the nausea response to violence in this particular McKinley. Assaults, sex crimes, and murder charges committed by Presidents were spiking slightly this year, but were still very low against general statistics for a population of this size.

Once Homicide gathered the evidence they needed from the hedgerow, they called in a group of apprentice McKinleys for cleanup. As the McKinleys, a half dozen young men in Municipality of Pittsburgh coveralls, shoveled away the body and sprayed down his deathbed with chemicant, McKinley’s brain ticked through its final programmed stages—constitutionally mandated thoughts and reveries meant to appease the consciences of the legislators who had dreamed up or supported the President Program. McKinley remembered his mother, sweet Nancy, serving him Apple Pie on the Fourth of July. He remembered growing old with the ravishing Ida Saxton, and remembered the jewel-colored feathers of the parrot he’d named Washington Post, his favorite. As McKinley’s brain jellified, he thanked the Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of his eternal soul, and terminated with an image of the American Flag rippling in the sunlit wind, unfurled over waves of autumn grain and the purple mountains, which were painted in majesty.

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Carl Sweterlitsch

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From Issue 18 (Feb 2012)

EVERY NOW AND THEN a sci-fi geek needs a little reassurance that the path he’s chosen is a righteous one. While it’s true that there’s a certain portion of them – sorry, us – that are completely immune to any ridicule being slung their way (for they know their detractors could be silenced with but a wave of the hand and the utterance of a level four banishment spell), there’s a number of geek guys – and girls, of course – who, every now and then, wonder if they’re not just a wee bit old to be learning Klingon, or creating a mini-army of daleks in their basement, or preparing for the day they’ll be picked up by the Xyrilian mothership they’ve been signalling to for the past decade.

I myself am about to face yet another birthday, and so I find myself, somewhat involuntarily, doing a little soul-searching… is it still okay to be a sci-fi geek, or should I buckle down and get back to the ‘real’ world? Send me a sign, oh Universe…

Well, a sign I wanted, and by golly, a sign I received: Star Wars Uncut.

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, I’ll quickly explain. Star Wars Uncut (SWU) is the brainchild of one Casey Pugh, who in 2009 called on Star Wars fans the world over to select a fifteen-second section of Episode IV: A New Hope, recreate it in any way they liked – any way at all – and send it to him so that he could edit it into a full ‘remake’ of the whole film that would be made freely available online. That’s 473 snippets in total, and the scope of imagination, talent and creativity that went into all of them just completely blew me away.

I don’t know where to start when it comes to describing the good things about this project, and what it represents. Everything’s good about it. Even the ‘bad’ clips are good, but these are in the minority. It really can be as easy or as complicated as you want to make it. Some of the clips were no doubt shot in a couple of hours, yet some of the animation scenes must have taken ages. Some people scrutinized every pixel of the original to produce some pretty eye-popping backgrounds for their live-action scenes (the shootout before going into the trash compactor immediately springs to mind), and yet a simple office corridor doubles effortlessly for the Storm Trooper attack on the Tantive IV.

The only rule that seemed to govern the whole project was this: there are no rules. The majority of the movie sticks close to the original – sometimes with truly admirable results – but every now and then a section will veer off into abject silliness, such as during the holochess game on the Falcon… Divine is apparently alive and well, ladies and gentlemen. There are dozens of ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-them’ cameos by characters such as Robocop, Captain Kirk, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Teletubbies, and several Indiana Joneses (for obvious reasons), not to mention homages to other films that are too numerous to fit in here – besides, I really don’t want to spoil it for you. If, from my description so far, it sounds like an unholy mess, then I apologise – but I can assure that the whole thing has been put together superbly, and completely deserved the accolades it received, namely four Creative Arts Emmy Awards for Pugh and his three co-producers.

It’s safe to say that the more times you’ve watched the original Episode IV, the more you’re going to enjoy this version, as most of the snippets carefully recreate the small things that we love to look out for (sadly, we don’t get the Storm Trooper fracturing his skull on the door in the Death Star, but there are plenty of other great moments).

Quite a few times I found myself thinking ahead to certain scenes (like the Mos Eisley Cantina) and wondering ‘how are they going to do that?’ and then watching with delight as a handful of wildly different styles came together to bring it all about. During some of the more technical scenes (a great example is the TIE dogfight after escaping the Death Star), I realised that essentially there was little difference between these ‘ordinary Joes’ putting it all together with vacuum cleaners and computer software, and Lucas’ fledgling ILM team, back in ’75 and ’76 (budget notwithstanding, obviously). Every day they faced challenges that started with the question ‘How are we going to make this work?’ and somehow found a way to bring it to screen. All of the SWU contributors have arguably done the same, only in miniature – but that’s not to say that their creativity and passion were any less.

It’s now well known that with the increasing availability of simple film-making equipment, and its user-friendliness, just about anyone can make a movie, and SWU is the epitome of that concept. There’s really no excuse anymore – if there are people out there who can rope in a business of ferrets for the trash compactor scene, and still make it as enjoyable as the rest of the movie, then nobody at all can say they don’t have the resources. One guy used a French loaf for a lightsabre, for Christ’s sake.

Yet another marvel about this movie is the number of kids involved, speaking dialogue that was written when their own moms and dads were their age. These kids are truly lucky to have parents cool enough to be Star Wars fans, and you know they’ve got plenty to look forward to in life. Sometimes, you just need to hear the words “Great, kid! Don’t get cocky!” spoken by a twelve-year-old to truly appreciate their impact.

Please, do yourself a favour and watch this project. You may not enjoy every second of it; you’ll probably think some of the acting stinks, or that the Lego version of General Motti didn’t fully convince us that he was being choked by Vader. And if you think that some of the sets look like a ten-year-old made them, keep in mind that that’s probably the case. Remember, these people aren’t actors, or set designers, or directors… yet. I wonder, possibly in as little as ten or twelve years’ time, how many wunderkind filmmakers are going to burst onto the scene with the next Matrix or District 9 and tell us in their first interview that the reason they got into filmmaking in the first place was because they had so much fun making a fifteen-second clip for SWU? Bets are on.

And soon the scramble will start, to claim a precious snippet of the magnificence that is Episode V, because it’s only a matter of time before Casey Pugh confirms that he’s going ahead with his next venture (and wouldn’t you, if your efforts had won you a freakin’ Emmy?). But with the first movie approaching two million views on YouTube at the time of writing, I predict that there are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who’ll just have to wait yet another year, for when Episode VI goes up for grabs. Just don’t be surprised if Phantom Menace gets the same treatment, and there’s a distinct dip in enthusiasm… the Force ain’t so strong with that one.

For more information on this project, go to www.starwarsuncut.com, or watch the movie in its entirety at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ezeYJUz-84

Image from Star Wars © 1977 – Lucasfilm Ltd.

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From Issue 18 (Feb 2012)

Where is home?
I live in Michigan with my husband and obligatory, yet very well loved, cats, but my heart will always belong to the rolling hills of Upstate New York.

Do you write full-time?
I’m a full-time writer, but I would be remiss if I didn’t disclose that this is in part due to how hard it is to find a job right now, especially when you don’t want to pursue the career you have work experience in.

What work do you do? Have you worked in a research lab?
I’ve worked in three different research labs with rats, mice, pigeons and monkeys. Since quitting that line of work, I’ve done the proverbial one-eighty and am now an animal rights advocate.

What inspired this story?
Long, sleepless nights in the white, florescent-lit halls of animal holding areas.

What other genres have you written in?
I write fantasy novels but when it comes to short stories I’ve written sci-fi, fantasy and mainstream.

Would you rather be a rat or pigeon?
That’s tough because I’ve always wanted to fly, but there are many ways in which rats are much smarter than pigeons. That isn’t to say pigeons don’t have their strengths, like a near-photographic visual memory and the ability to sense the earth’s magnetic pull. Even though I like rats better and would rather have a rat as a pet, I have to choose pigeon because I can’t pass up the chance to fly.

Are you working on anything right now?
I just finished the first draft of a fantasy novel about two siblings torn apart by the machinations of a charismatic usurper, so I’ll be editing that and writing something new. I’m always writing something new.

Where can we read more of your work?
My short story, ‘Super Killer’, will be in Aoife’s Kiss this summer. Updates on my progress as a professional writer will appear on my website, www.summerhanford.com.

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How Satan Died

One unremarkable, breezy September morning, a graduate student was cleaning rat cages. Now, most of her rats were housed individually in fine 9 x 12 x 9 inch highly durable plastic bins, but four of them lived together in a colony cage. These four rats were naive Long Evans males, recognizable as 19, 20, 21 and 22 by their earmarks, and were currently on water deprivation in preparation for a study.

It happened that as this student was moving her rats from a dirty bin to a clean one, she glanced up and saw a fifth rat poised on the stainless steel shelf of the cage rack. It was also a Long Evans male and appeared to be observing her with great interest.

“I’ve come to inform you that your cruel exploitation of these creatures has landed you a spot in Hell,” squeaked the rat. “However, if you will consent to do my work on earth for the rest of your mortal life, I shall see that Hell isn’t so bad for you.”

“Nonsense,” replied the graduate student, unperturbed at finding an extra rat on her shelf. “This is science.” And she tossed him in the bin with the others.

Don’t be misled into thinking that Satan didn’t try to jump right back out, but the graduate student was accustomed to recalcitrant rats and caught him firmly by the tail. Grabbing up the stainless steel cage top, she plunked the stunned Satan once more into the bin and snapped it closed.

“Don’t you realize who I am?” squeaked the rat as loudly as it could, but she had already headed down the hallway to dispose of the trash bag full of dirty shavings.

Several weeks passed and Satan tried at every opportunity to escape his confinement, but a quick hand on his tail always yanked him back. He spent his spare time cowing his cage mates into submission, which involved a fair amount of eye gouging and genital nipping, since they too failed to recognize his inherent right to dominate them. Of course, he had an advantage over them since his claws and teeth were eternally razor sharp and he did not succumb to fatigue.

Once they had been properly subjugated, Satan proceeded to lead his subordinates in several escape attempts, which involved the clever plan of eating as much food as possible off the cage cover and then trying to push it open. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to eat a lot of dry food pellets when you have no water, and the other rats didn’t really put their hearts into the effort.

They would ask him, “Why would we want to escape? We have food, and fifteen milliliters of water a day, and humans to provide it and keep our home clean.” Then they would return to digging about in the shavings.

Trying a new strategy, Satan regaled them with tales of the horrors their human was likely to perpetrate upon them. The other rats shook their heads.

Number 21 disagreed. “We’re for some odor detection task. She won’t do any of that to us.”

“Why don’t you give up all this escape stuff?” asked number 19.

“Here she comes!” squeaked 22, running to the front of the cage and waving his paws through the bars in the top.

“Come have some water!” suggested 20 as he tried to squeeze his nose through the hole for the waterspout. Satan sighed, stepping forward to jostle with the others for access to a drinking tube.

Constrained by the laws of the universe to keep his rat form until he either escaped or accomplished his mission on earth, Satan was obliged to form a new plan. He would ask for a single cage. This, he hoped, would have a lighter top. The next time the graduate student came to clean, Satan moved to the back of the cage, waiting until her attention fell on him.

“Come here, little Satan rat,” she soothed, reaching toward him.

“I want my own cage,” he proclaimed. “One of those individual ones.”

“Your own cage?” she repeated, frowning. “Why?”

“This cage is too full, and the Vet won’t like it.” Satan had considered his arguments and presented this one first, deeming it the most effective.

“True,” she drawled, obviously unconvinced that the rat didn’t have other, more selfish motives. “And?”

“And I don’t see why I have to be on water deprivation!” Satan put a lot of feeling into this, trying to be convincing. Of course, he was Satan and didn’t actually need water, but he hoped she would take pity on him.

“Hmm, well, I guess you’re right.” She paused, considering. “I’ll get a cage, and hold it right next to this one. I want you to jump in, and none of your escape attempts!”

She departed, presumably to get a scoop of shavings for his new cage. Satan was elated. Now he would have his chance!

When the new cage was presented, Satan jumped in and immediately tried to jump back out the other side, mostly for show. Escape that way wasn’t his plan. As he expected, she slammed the lid in place, admonishing him.

SLAP. A bright green tag was affixed to the outside of the container. It read #13, as his earmarks denoted him, and Class: Practice HRP. BAM! A scoop full of food came down on the lid, and a bottle of water slid into place. To keep up the act, Satan rushed over and pretended to drink feverishly. He felt the cage being lifted and slid onto a shelf. He could hear his former cage mates talking in happy relief about his departure, but he was so elated at the prospect of his now certain freedom that he didn’t care. Wait until he secured his release and could resume his true form. That girl was going to be the main course at his next banquet in Hell!

Satan peered about the small chamber, trying to discern if she was still present. He regretted not specifying that he wanted a clear cage, but that may have seemed suspicious. To be safe, he waited for the loud click of the timer that preceded the sudden darkness of a laboratory night. He was stronger at night.

In the darkness, Satan moistened his mouth and began gnawing away at the food that weighed down the cage lid. Even though he worked with fervor, it took until nearly dawn for him to clear it. Bracing his back legs, he pressed his nose against the top.

It didn’t budge. He frowned, turning to place the flat of his head against the bars, and pressed harder. The lid didn’t even shift. Frantically, he cocked his head to one side, peering upward. There was no food left!

The water bottle, he realized. It was too full, adding weight. He reached for it, placing one paw against the tube and allowing the lukewarm liquid to run down his arm, dampening the cage floor. It was intolerably slow. Satan dug his claws into the rubber stopper, yanking it free. Water rushed out, soaking him and flooding the cage. He shook his head, flipping water from his eyes and off his whiskers. Once again, he pushed at the top with all his might.

It was fastened tight. Satan sank into the shavings-water slop that now coated the floor of his prison. He had miscalculated. The tops on the individual cages fit much more tightly than those of the colony cages. He was trapped.

A dripping and sullen Satan didn’t even try to escape the next morning as he was gently placed in a dry cage.

“I know you were thirsty,” reprimanded the graduate student, “but you could have shown more restraint.” She placed a new scoop of food on the top, and provided a full, tightly-stoppered water bottle.

Satan didn’t answer. He lay limply at the bottom of his prison. The graduate student shrugged and left. Later, she checked on him again, providing a spoonful of peanut butter to cheer him up. Satan sat, eyeing the peanut butter malevolently and sulking. So caught up was he in this new emotion, depression, that Satan did not bother to maintain his rat body and, over the next few weeks, he became thinner.

By this time September had ended. October had come and gone. Now, as November came around, it happened that the graduate student needed an extra rat to practice her newly acquired HRP skills on. The HRP, or horseradish peroxidase, was injected into various locations so neural connections could be tracked. It wasn’t the most fun for the rats, because the only way to find out where the HRP got to was to put thin slices of their brains under a microscope, but the graduate student was sure the skills she was acquiring were very important to the future of mankind. Looking over her rats, she spied the Satan rat, pining away.

“Here, cheer up,” she told him, removing his cage from the shelf and looking down into it. “It will all be better soon.”

Satan peered up at her through the bars. “You are going to free me?” He felt a painful twinge of hope.

“Well.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say that I’m sending you on to a better place. You’ll be free of this life.”

“What do you mean?” Satan asked suspiciously. “Be careful what you do to me, I’m Satan!”

“Yes, I know,” sighed the graduate student, by this time a little tired of the rat’s boasts. Really, she thought, I’m sure Satan would appear as an albino rat, with beady red eyes. Still, I better be careful injecting him, just in case. Who knows, if he is Satan, puncturing him might let out all sorts of nasty stuff.

She weighed Satan, put him in a fresh container lined only with a paper towel, and headed into the surgery room.

Later, with Satan successfully injected and the top of his head shaved, she placed him firmly in the stereotaxic head holder and reached for a scalpel. There were some black wriggly things that dodged away from beneath the blade as the incision was made, but she scraped them impatiently aside, searching for the bregma, a landmark on the surface of the skull. Amongst the strange tangle of cracks that covered the exposed skull, she selected the one that looked right and moved the drill into place, anterior to the bregma and slightly posterior to the eyes. Zzzzz, the drill chased away dark purple crawly things, etching a line in the skull. Setting the drill aside, she reached for the scraper, but hesitated and instead first administered some local anesthetic. After pausing for a moment to allow the anesthetic’s effect to spread, she placed the scraper against an offending piece of muscle.

“If possible, scrape, don’t cut,” she muttered to herself. “Causes less tissue damage.”

She retrieved the drill. Zzzzzz. After revealing an olfactory bulb, the graduate student moved the stereotaxic holder into place, reaching for the HRP where it lay on its bed of ice cubes. With saline-soaked gauze, she wiped away the strange greenish ooze that kept welling up to obscure her target.

“Must have hit a bleeder,” she sighed, as the green stuff reappeared almost as soon as she wiped it away. Still, she made a small hole in the durra covering the bulb and inserted the micropipette.

After the injection was made and sufficient time had elapsed, she extracted the pipette and closed the suture. Satan was removed from the head holder. Pulling out his tongue with a pair of forceps, she injected HRP into it as well. Finally, Satan was returned to the paper-lined bin and placed on the heating pad.

When Satan awoke, his groggy brain registered that he was someplace warm and dark and he sighed contentedly, knowing he was home. Well-satisfied, he fell back into sleep, only to be rudely awakened seemingly moments later by gloved hands.

“Don’t fight, little Satan rat,” the graduate student recommended. “There, there. Time to go to sleepy land.” And he did.

Interlude in Heaven and Hell

Thus it came to pass that Satan stopped attending his weekly chess matches with God. For several years, God was quite pleased with this. He rather fancied that Satan had caught wind of the increased prowess with which God was playing. God had beaten all of his angels, after all, and they had been under strict orders not to let him win. Yes, chortled the Almighty to himself, Satan is afraid to come to our chess matches lest he lose in the sight of All that is Holy. Anyway, admitted God, he always sends his minions out when he knows I’m distracted by a good chess game and wreaks chaos and evil across the lands, so perhaps it is best if we skip a match or two.

So it was that God did not think much about Satan’s absence for the first two or three years.

In Hell, things continued to run smoothly unsupervised. Being an accomplished CEO, Satan had his domain arranged so well, it could practically run itself, barring any major emergencies or the occasional apocalypse.

Beelzebub was not sure where the master had gotten to, but after several millennia of devoted service to the Lord of Evil, he didn’t much care. Beelzebub found that being top dog in Hell was infinitely better than being second in command. He had his choice of any succubus that caught his eye. He could send the lesser demons to do his bidding. Best of all, no villainous-looking man in a single-breasted black blazer would appear every now and then to torture him, “just in case he’d forgotten who the Devil was around here.” Now that Satan was gone, Beelzebub had eliminated suit-wearing all together. Satan liked to keep up with the times, but Beelzebub was a demon of tradition and deemed loincloths the only suitable garb for a demon of Hell.

One dark afternoon in Hell, just about the time Beelzebub had stopped looking over his shoulder in stark terror every time there was a large puff of smoke near him, a searing ray of light blasted down, bathing him in vile radiance.

“Beelzebub!” boomed the voice of God.

Beelzebub winced, rubbing his forehead and wishing he had not over-indulged the night before.

“Beelzebub!!” The voice boomed more impatiently.

The demon considered pointing out that he was in the middle of lunch, but put the notion aside in view of how the white light was starting to make his skin smoke.

“Um, yes, Oh Lord God?” Not recently having occasion to speak directly to the master of Heaven, Beelzebub wasn’t sure of the current proper form of address.

“Vile child of Hell, where is thy master?”

The air around him seemed to vibrate with each syllable God spoke. Beelzebub tore his gaze from his arm, where he was sure the skin was beginning to blister from all that holy radiance, and squinted upward. “Well, that is, um, I’m not really sure, Lord God,” he stammered. Was or was God not supposed to be all-knowing? Beelzebub frowned.

“Find your master, Cretin of Hell, and remind him that we are due to play chess this Friday,” boomed the imposing voice of the Almighty. “Fail in this and ye shall know the wrath of God!”

With an ear-shattering peal of thunder, the white light was gone. Beelzebub sat staring at his lunch for a moment and rubbed his arm. Sighing, the great demon rang a small gold bell, calling several succubi to him.

“You there!” He pointed at the first one, who bobbed her head enthusiastically, setting her exposed bosom to bouncing. “Go get me a sinner to torture.” The creature hissed and scurried away. A good torturing after lunch always soothed his digestion. “You, get me fresh food.” He pointed to the one with the largest fangs. The light of Heaven had completely flattened his soufflé-of-the-flesh-of-murderers. “You!” One black-nailed finger snaked out toward a particularly round-looking little hellion. “Rub my neck, and you,” to the last, who stepped forward eagerly, her eyes darting about. “Get me something for these blisters! Damn holy light,” he muttered, scowling at the wound on his arm. Beelzebub relaxed into his neck massage, summoning his flies while he waited for the other succubi to return.

As it happens, flies tend to frequent places such as animal holding areas, so the minions of Beelzebub discovered where Satan had last been seen long before God returned the next Friday. Beelzebub was again eating lunch, but this time, he put up an umbrella over his chair to keep from acquiring any more burns. The ones he already had were healing poorly and kept him awake with their insistent itching. Looking up from his steak and kidney pie, Beelzebub once again found himself confronted by the voice of God, and this time, the Almighty seemed to be in an even worse temper, as Satan had missed yet another match.

“Beelzebub!” the voice of the Lord boomed. “Where is thine Master?”

“Well, that is, Oh Mighty God –” Beelzebub paused, for in truth, he did not know exactly where Satan had gotten to and God had asked a direct question.

“Tell Me now or feel the wrath of God!” the voice boomed testily.

Beelzebub fidgeted, wiping his hands on the tablecloth.

“Well, you see, Oh God, we don’t exactly know right now,” the demon began. The light of God intensified, causing the air to crackle around Beelzebub and setting his umbrella on fire. “But we know where he was last!” Beelzebub cried, throwing his hands up to shield his face.

The light dimmed slightly. The fly lord lowered his arms, continuing. “And we know who he was going to corrupt,” he added hopefully.

This seemed to satisfy God, for the light dimmed to an even more bearable level.

“Tell me, and I shall spare you, Child of Hell,” the voice boomed. And Beelzebub did, sighing slightly as he observed the smoking shambles of his lunch.

The Imprisonment of God

The next blustery November morning, on which the sun shone fiercely as it tried to convince everyone they did not really need warm hats, found the graduate student cleaning pigeon cages. Her pigeons had lovely stainless steel cages with stainless steel grating to poop through on the bottom and stainless steel grating to look through on the top. The removable trays beneath the birds had been designed to make cleaning them easy, but pigeons often found it more entertaining to smear the walls of their cages with filth, so each one had to be removed while the whole cage was washed in the sink.

Removing pigeons from their cages was actually a rather entertaining undertaking for the graduate student because she had trained them to jump out of the cages head first into green plastic pitchers. They were beautiful White Corneu pigeons, and their clipped tail feathers stood out brightly against the green plastic as they balanced heads down in the pitchers on a shelf above the sink.

Reaching up for the soap, she noticed one of the birds was free of its pitcher and was looking down at her.

“Here now,” she said to the bird. “Get back in your bucket!”

If she spoke a little harshly to the bird, it was understandable as she did spend two hours a week scraping bird feces off stainless steel cage walls and had never received much appreciation from the pigeons in return. The graduate reached for a clean bucket and held it out to the bird. The pigeon, however, did not jump immediately in.

“This is the voice of God!” it cooed, strutting up and down the shelf.

“Oh bother,” muttered the graduate student, drying her hands on a paper towel. “Come here, you!”

With this, she grabbed the pigeon, expertly wrapping his own wings around him to keep him from flying away and to put a buffer between his sharp claws and her hands. Tucking him firmly under one arm, she reached out and opened an empty clean cage.

“There you go,” she soothed, depositing the struggling bird and locking the door shut. “Let me just get you food and water.”

Returning with these, the student hooked them to the outside of the door. Turning back to her cleaning, she frowned in perplexity at the shelf above the sink on which the other pigeons still waited, tails sticking up from their pitchers.

“I dare say you are new,” she told the bird, counting the number of tails on the shelf. “Well, that makes you number seven.” And she wrote out a tag for him.

“Thy impudence is beyond measure!” ranted the pigeon, flapping its wings about and shaking its cage, but the graduate student did not appear to be listening.

“How much do you weigh, then?” she asked the bird as she wrote.

“Four hundred and eighty-three grams,” replied the pigeon, flaring his tail feathers in agitation. “But you must let me out, for I am The Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth!” This the bird cooed as loudly as he could manage, puffing out his chest importantly.

“Yes, well, All Fatty would be more fitting,” she replied, frowning at him. “You are going to need to lose twenty-five grams so I will be taking this back.” And she removed the food tray once more.

God looked mournfully after the disappearing seeds of corn, for he had found that as a pigeon, he was nearly always ravenous.

All night, God rattled around in his cage, filling the room with noise as he tried vainly to pry open the door, for none is so tightly bound by God’s rules as God, so he would have to keep his new form until he escaped or accomplished his mission. The ruckus he made kept the other birds awake, and they were not appreciative.

“I will not be able to concentrate well enough tomorrow to choose between the green and the blue keys!” complained 4.

“Listen, 7, why can’t you leave off and let us sleep?” demanded 5.

“I am not really a pigeon!” exclaimed God, rattling his cage all the more. “I am The Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth, and I cannot stay here in this cage!”

“You will not have to,” temporized 3. “I am sure tomorrow, you will get to come out just like the rest of us.”

God looked suspicious, but he settled down to wait for tomorrow and the other pigeons finally got some sleep. He awoke the next morning to the sight of a green pitcher obscuring the entrance to his cage, which was now open. As any inexperienced pigeon might, God immediately thought to take the opportunity to try darting beneath the pitcher instead of into it, to gain his freedom. The graduate student, however, was not inexperienced, and had been waiting for just such a ploy. SLAM! God’s head rammed into the bottom of the bucket as the student moved it down to intercept him.

“The other birds tell me you were agitated last night,” commented the student. “While you’re working today, I will put a toy in your cage for you.”

Along with the other birds, God was carried down the hall and dumped into a dimly lit chamber. Facing him was an array of colored keys and an empty black square. He eyed these dolefully.

“What in the name of Heaven is all this?” God wondered aloud, his stomach rumbling.

“Peck the keys,” one of the other birds cooed from nearby. It sounded like 1.

So God pecked the keys. He found that some keys did nothing, while others did something, and he soon became engrossed in trying to discover what combinations of keys would cause food to appear momentarily in the black square.

“This is nearly as fascinating as chess,” he observed to himself, and so God passed several pleasant days pecking at the keys and trying to decode their meaning. In addition, he found that there was indeed a toy in his cage now. It was a collection of colored trapezoids with a bell at the bottom. The bell made a fine tinkling sound.

By the middle of his second week as a pigeon, however, God began to feel the need to return to his duties in Heaven. Additionally, he needed to find that fiend Beelzebub and punish him, for he saw no evidence of Satan in this place. He was God, after all, and would not be given the run-around by a lowly minion of Hell. The next time the graduate student cleaned cages, he decided to discuss it with her.

“Ahem,” he cooed from inside his pitcher, trying to get the graduate student’s attention. “I say, My Child, this has been rather entertaining, but I will need to be getting back to Heaven soon.”

The water in the sink turned off, and his pitcher was taken from the shelf.

“What do you mean?” she asked, removing him and holding him up in two hands, his wings wrapped around him. “Getting back?”

“Well, yes.” He frowned, preening his neck feathers.

“But, you’re in my study now!” exclaimed the graduate student, looking distressed. “You can’t go yet! I have too few subjects for attrition. I mean, one does not factor in having one’s pigeons just up and leave!”

The pigeon blinked up at her, considering. “Study? What are you studying?” God asked, trying to assess the importance of the situation.

“Why, whether or not increasing the work rate required for a specific reward forms a monotonic or a bitonic work rate response curve,” she replied, as if it should be obvious. “I would only need you to stay until I graduate,” she added hopefully. “Then I am going to donate all you pigeons to the zoo, and I am sure you will be happy there.”

God considered this carefully, looking up into her pleading eyes. He knew how hard the student was working on this project, for he had been working on it too, seven days a week, right along with her.

“I do not want to go to the zoo,” he countered. “I am The Almighty Himself and I will need to be set free to go back to my domain in Heaven.”

She pondered this. “Well, what if I promise to set you free on the way to the zoo?” she suggested. “Just stay until I get my PhD, and I will free you. You have my word.”

She did seem a nice sort, God observed. Perhaps he would continue to find enjoyment in deciphering the keys. Furthermore, he had become aware, since she worked all day Sunday, that she was not a religious person, and indeed appeared to be an outright atheist. Did it not behoove him to spend at least some time trying to convert her? How many years could one PhD take anyhow?

“All right, then,” he agreed, fixing his red pigeon eyes on her. “I will stay for the duration of your degree, and you will free me when you are done, and,” he added firmly, “in return, you will listen to all I have to say about the pursuit of a more God-Fearing lifestyle for yourself.”

The graduate student let out a happy exclamation, nodding. “Oh yes, of course,” she replied. “That sounds only fair!”

Smiling, she placed him back in his pitcher. He heard the water in the sink turn on. Contentedly, God snuggled down in the green plastic and began to speak of the beginning.

Epilogue

And so it was that Beelzebub continued as lord of Hell and the angels made sure Heaven ran smoothly, not letting each other win at chess, and humankind continued on, oblivious, being just as good or evil as they always had been.

Copyright © 2012 by Summer Hanford

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Cover Illustration by Vianne Venter

Tell us about the image on this issue’s cover.
When we started thinking about cover images for this issue, I was keen to create a new image for one of the stories but the deadline was against us. Then Joe hauled this picture I did for Richard Kunzmann’s story ‘Lost In Recollection’ (from Issue 8), out of the archives of his brain – he thought it would work perfectly for ‘The Disposable Man’, by Thomas Carl Sweterlitsch. And I had to agree. It has all the darkness of the story’s sooty rain, and the sense of flight that drives McKinley… even the blurry, disintegrating edges of the figure itself work with the story. I’m a huge fan of reinventing and reinterpreting art. In fact, for most art forms, I don’t think the work is complete until it’s subjected to the interpretive gaze of the audience. So I love that this piece has gotten a second life, a second story. It’s like an actor taking on a new role.

What was your medium?
Joe and I actually collaborated on this one. I drew the original on paper using pencil and ink, and Joe overlaid the vertical lines of the rain digitally. My feeling tends to be that the piece needs to be realised by whatever means necessary – I do in some sense think the image has a right to life, or that it’s waiting to be born, and that my job is to serve as conduit to make that happen. So I’m all for using what ever medium and mix of techniques is needed to get the job done. That goes for collaborating too. The piece was good before Joe got involved, but it wasn’t finished. The rain was part of where it wanted to go. For this reincarnation, Joe tinkered with the colour and contrast a bit too, and I’m really happy with the results. This gives me a sense that the piece is still alive, in progress, evolving. Which makes me very happy.

Is this typical of your work?
Most of my stuff is figurative, though I occasionally do very realistic renderings of faces or objects. My principal subject is figures, and then usually female, though male faces are drawing me quite strongly at the moment. So yes, this is typical, though the biggest complaint I get when people look at my portfolio is that my work varies too much and they can’t latch onto a style. And my response to that kind of has to be, ‘Ag shame’. I pretty much feel the same way about that that authors like Lauren Beukes and Sarah Lotz feel about being categorised – like, could you just try to enjoy the product without worrying so much about what box to put it in?

What are you working on at the moment?
It’s been a while since I was really in the routine of drawing consistently, so I’m trying to get back to basics – figure studies and portraits, just to get the muscles used to working again. But really most of my recent work has been abstracts – mostly done in pencil or wax crayon while trying to convince my 18-month-old to put more colour on the paper than in her mouth.

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	Issue 18 (Feb 2012)

Editor’s Note Feb 2012

Well 2012 is gaining momentum, and so are we.

Our subscriber base is steadily growing and we thank you all for supporting our little mag.

In Issue 18 of Something Wicked we have some astounding stories for you.

First up is a bit of dark humour in Summer Hanford’s extremely wry and funny “The Death of Satan and The Imprisonment of God”.

Next is a fantastic piece of near-future SF-noir in Thomas Carl Sweterlitsch’s “The Disposable Man”.

We follow that with our reprint for this issue, Nick Wood’s “Of Hearts and Monkeys”, an African post-apocalyptic story set in Cape Town.

And we close off the issue with a tale by David McCool about an old man recollecting the story of “Billy Bogroll” and the missing choldren.

We introduce a new book reviewer with this issue; Deon van Heerden, who starts off his tenure with us with a review of The Recollection by Gareth L Powell, and the graphic novel, Mazeworld by Alan Grant & Arthur Ranson.

In expectation of the release of Blue Remembered Earth next month we’ve decided to reprint our Issue 7 interview with Alastair Reynolds.

All in all an awesome issue, as I hope you’ll agree.

In Issue 19 expect some more great fiction with SF from RWW Greene and some horror from Chris Stevens, Nick Scorza and Peter Damien.

Thanks, as usual, to our lovely subscribers without whom, well, let’s not go there…

‘Til next month.

Joe

Editor

12:08am 29 Jan 2012

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