Plugs

Susannah Mandel’s short story “The Monkey and the Butterfly” is in Shimmer #11. She also has poems in the current issues of Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, and Peter Parasol.

Jason Erik Lundberg‘s fiction is forthcoming from Subterranean Magazine and Polyphony 7.

Kat Beyer’s Cabal story “A Change In Government” has been nominated for a BSFA award for best short fiction.

Sara Genge’s story “Godtouched” may be found in Strange Horizons.

Archive for the ‘Series’ Category

The Miser’s Cat

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

There was a miser who had a cat.

He died.

The miser, that is.

The cat was fine.

The miser, who’d hoarded, cheated, and loaned at exorbitant and inflexible rates, left all his wealth to the cat.

Had this been strictly a matter of what was written in his will, his lawyer (whom he’d swindled) and the judge (whom he’d nearly bankrupted) would gladly have mislaid or invalidated anything bearing the miser’s signature.

But the miser had guaranteed his wishes by locking his fortune in a brass-bound trunk he buried beneath the oldest, tallest tree in the forest, and by hanging the trunk key on the cat’s collar.

Now, you’ve heard that cats have nine lives, but that doesn’t mean a string of lives lived one after another. Cats live all nine at once. And only one is a cat life. For instance, the miser’s cat was also a riverboat captain, a seamstress, an itinerant mole, a mathematician, an angel, and several other things. That’s why I love cats, although right now I only have a dog that I love so much, I always feed him with the best karmapets calming treats amazon because I care for him.

On a cloudy day, the lawyer and the judge finished decoding clues the miser had left in his will, and dug around the roots of some old, tall trees until they struck the brass-bound trunk with a shovel-bending clang! At the very same moment, in a nearby field, the cat wriggled through an inconvenient fence and snagged its collar there, key and all.

While the lawyer and judge rested from their excavations, a seamstress and a mathematician were crossing a fence-divided field from different sides. These two women spotted the key at the same moment they spotted each other.

Don’t mistake this for coincidence–this kind of thing happens all the time. In that country, there’s an expression, “They’re two lives of the same cat.” So it was with the seamstress and the mathematician.

It began to rain, softly, but as if it weren’t planning to stop, so they took refuge in the forest. Following the map on the inside of the collar, they found the trunk, opened it, and lived happily for many years.

The lawyer and the judge, whose schemes to defraud each other the treasure had given way to fisticuffs and blunt objects, regained consciousness and stumbled back to find the trunk empty. The lawyer was convinced that the judge had taken all the treasure, and vice versa, beginning a feud that would last generations.

The cat, meanwhile, was fine.

Resting Place

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Time of death: 8:42 and 12 seconds.

Blair heard the beeeeee of her heart monitor, saw the clock on its instrument readout. The sound cut off, and she sat up out of her body. The nurse stood in mid-rush to her bedside, the television froze on an insurance commercial, all sound from the busy hospital was stilled. If she stood just right she could see the faintest sheen of a rainbow reflected from the moisture in her body’s last breath.

For some uncountable time she wandered the halls and rooms of the hospital, flowing through doors and floors at will. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound. Blair grew used to perpetual stillness. As an afterlife it beat hell or the void, and she’d never believed in heaven.

When she felt she knew every atom of her resting place, she moved on to explore the city. Houses, offices, warehouses, cars, all were immobile and tranquil. The sun occupied its eternal spot low on the horizon. Every person she found was petrified, every animal as still as, well, death.

She ranged farther, finding she could fly if she willed it. Farms, roads, and villages passed under her gaze. Untime passed.

Then she caught a movement out of the corner of one eye. Trudging toward her, feet sloshing immaterially through the ground, was an old woman. Their eyes met, and a look of panic briefly came over them both. Solitary for so long, and now what were they to meet?

Blair flew to her. It wasn’t until she tried to land that she realized the earth was as insubstantial as everything else. All this time, and she hadn’t touched a single thing. Hesitantly she reached out. The stranger held up a hand. They touched.

They touched. A moment later they embraced. Something broke in Blair, and she closed her eyes and cried, holding tight to the only thing she could touch.

« Older Posts | Newer Posts »