Deep magic second coll.., p.19
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 19
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
Laurel stared down at her hands in her lap under the table. “What kind of man?” she asked her scabby knees. “What was his name?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He passed her the tiny cap from the glue to hold, and ignored her scrunched face. “What matters is that he was lonely. He lived by himself, worked alone. No else to talk to. So he was lonely.”
The cap rolled across the tabletop under Laurel’s fingers. “So he left something for the river,” she said, and darted a glance at Jason’s face.
He nodded. The tip of the glue bottle traced the jagged rectangle where the boat’s cabin had sheared off. “He didn’t know that was what he was doing. But he planted mayflower down by the water, and left things lying around. Forgotten fishing lures and sandwich crusts, and maybe even a rake. Things the river liked, as it happened. He was still lonely, of course. But he started to have strange good luck, maybe even before he noticed anything was different. Sunshine on his shoulders on a cold day, or a good catch.” He pressed the cabin into the line of glue he’d drawn and held it there. “You have to be careful, Laurel, what you offer the river. Because she’ll take it, whatever it is, whether you mean to offer it or not.” He leaned over the half-mended boat. “Did you know your aunt Kathy left a couple of cigarette butts down by the water the first time she visited us here?”
A scandalized giggle from Laurel. “Dad! Aunt Kathy doesn’t smoke.”
“Not anymore, she doesn’t.” He’d warned Kathy, of course, but she hadn’t listened. He wasn’t sure he would have believed his sister either, if the situation had been reversed. “Now every time she puts a cigarette in her mouth, it’s as soggy as if it’d been lying on the riverbank for a week.”
Laurel didn’t say a word as she processed this, but her feet kicked against the seat of her chair. Finally she said, “Well, why doesn’t she just leave a new offering and ask the river to stop doing that?”
“She’s tried.” Jason twirled the boat’s mast against the tip of the glue bottle until it gleamed. It slid neatly into the jagged slot that it had come from, and he held it there. “If the river doesn’t like your offering, that’s the last one she ever takes from you. Whether you meant it as an offering or not. There’s a kind of . . . symbolism to offerings, things they mean and secrets they hide. And it’s hard for people to really understand what it is they’re saying to the river, or asking her for.” Even when it had been explained to him, he hadn’t really understood. Human ears weren’t made to hear that kind of language, and human eyes weren’t meant to see it. You could get lucky with an offering, certainly. Or you might be left standing by a silent shoreline. His fingertips squeezed the mast, painfully. “I didn’t want to tell you that. To make you afraid that she’d stop listening to you. But I’ve told you a thousand times, Laurel—”
“To be careful what I leave by the river.” Her head was bowed and her messy curls cast her face in shadow. Her hands clutched the seat of the chair, and her feet had stopped kicking. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Terrible silence stretched out between them while Jason fumbled for the right words to say. There’s nothing to be sorry about wasn’t quite right, and I forgive you was too high-handed. Go add superglue to the grocery list was totally unacceptable.
But Laurel saved him from that struggle. She peeked up through her tangle of hair, and he froze under her blue-eyed stare. “Daddy?” she asked. “What did the lonely man leave for the river, so that he wouldn’t be lonely anymore?”
“Ah.” He looked down at the boat. “Well, that’s between the man and the river. But what he gave, the river liked. And so she came to live with him.”
Her mouth hung open, and then she pushed back her chair so that it tilted onto two legs. Her knees kept her anchored to the table while she shook her head at the ceiling. “Dad, that’s silly. This is a made-up story! How could a river live in a house?”
“Well, she didn’t look like a river anymore.” He smiled down at the mast, which held true when he let go. A glossy line of glue had dried on one fingernail too. Now there was just a crack left in the top of the boat. He traced it with the tip of the glue bottle. “She looked like a lady, with eyes like cornflowers and the thickest black hair you’ve ever seen.”
The front legs of Laurel’s chair dropped back to the floor with a one-two clatter. “Was she pretty?” Laurel whispered, and Jason nodded.
“As beautiful as the river. And the man wasn’t lonely anymore. He loved the river. And she probably loved him too.” He squeezed the outside of the boat’s hull to bring the edges of the split together. The boat wouldn’t be fully watertight after this, but it should hold up unless it capsized. It would have to do. “For as long as she could.”
Laurel sat as still as a windless day. “What happened to her?”
“Nothing happened, really. Years went by, and I think maybe it’s not easy for a river to be a person instead of a river.” To be small, to be weak, to eat and hiccup and bleed. He checked the boat over one last time, then slid it across the table. Laurel didn’t pick it up. “Imagine going from being this thundering giant, full of life and power, to being one small person with just one ticking heart inside.” Laurel’s eyebrows drew into a frown, and who could blame her? He didn’t understand it any better than she did. He shrugged, a little jerk of one shoulder. “Well, she managed as long as she could, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she went back.”
“And the man was lonely again.”
He studied her across the table, the familiar dark tangle of curls, those too-bright blue eyes like sunlight on the water. “No,” he said. “He was never lonely again.”
One of Laurel’s hands crept out, then pulled the boat toward her chest. “Thank you for my boat, Daddy,” she said, and slid out of her chair. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Careful with it,” he said automatically, and she fled.
For the next hour or two, soft thumps and padded footsteps came through the kitchen ceiling from Laurel’s room. Jason stayed at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the Sunday newspaper, and tried not to be too curious about what she was up to. Occasionally she emerged on brief excursions: to the bookshelves in the living room, where she grabbed a stack of beloved picture books. To the kitchen, where she stuffed something from the fridge inside her shirt before haring off again. When the sounds grew still, Jason couldn’t pretend to read the letters to the editor any longer. He left his coffee to cool, and padded up the stairs.
Laurel’s door stood a few inches ajar, and he leaned against the jamb to peer inside. On the carpet lay hints of her mysterious project: the spine of her favorite book, a Jazz Age retelling of Cinderella, with only a jagged line down the middle to show where all the pages had been torn out. A Styrofoam tray of hamburger meat, open to the air and oozing reddish-brown. An old bottle of ladies’ perfume, pilfered from the top of the dresser in Jason’s bedroom. And no Laurel.
He came all the way into the room, and peered down through her bedroom window. There she was, sneaking outside in the rain with her secret handiwork clutched close to her heart. She meant to offer something to the river, he realized, purposefully this time, and his heart thundered in his chest like the rain against the windows.
He took the stairs two at a time. The screen door, well oiled, did not screech to announce his approach, and Laurel didn’t turn to look as he followed her several paces back. When his ankle turned on a hidden obstacle, he stifled a curse and looked down to see what had almost given him away. It was Laurel’s toy fisherman, head-down in the grass and the mud—not lost at sea after all. He stuck the little yellow-suited man into his pocket and kept on after Laurel.
She pushed between the riverside shrubberies, and crouched down with whatever treasures she carried. Jason recognized her plastic cup from the bathroom as he watched her dip her finger inside and use the contents to draw on her face. What was she drawing? “Having babies,” she said. “That means blood. I know that.” She had her back to Jason, and he didn’t dare move closer. He couldn’t interrupt her, not now. Next she bent and picked up one of the pages of her Cinderella book. She tore it into strips, and the strips disappeared into her mouth. “Bedtime stories and secrets,” she said. This was the river’s language, Jason knew, could feel it prickling the hairs on the back of his neck. Laurel spoke it unflinchingly and instinctively. What did she think she was asking for, and what exactly did she mean to give?
Now she stood up and shredded the rest of her book’s pages like confetti, letting the wind take them from her hands. One clear laugh rolled through the rain to Jason. And then Laurel took one great step over the edge of the bank and into the river.
He cried out before the sound of the splash even reached him. The grass was slippery under his feet and the tangle of mayflower grabbed at his ankles as he leaped over. Cold water closed over his head like a finished storybook, and with it came panic. Water filled his mouth, but all he tasted was the bitter sting of adrenaline. It was all too familiar and too strange all at once. He’d been here before and shouldn’t have survived to have another go. At least the river was full of warm summer rain this time rather than the last of the snowmelt. It wrapped him in its too-familiar embrace.
No. No time for the drag of memory now. He kicked off his shoes, reached forward, pulled himself through the water. His head broke the surface and there was Laurel, only a few yards out. She struggled to keep her head above water. When he shouted wordlessly to her, she spun, arms thrashing. He dived under once more, reaching, reaching.
She slipped under the surface just as he reached her, and her tiny arms locked around his neck. He yanked her, not gently, around to his back. He wished for a moment to simply hold her—but instead of riding the current, now he had to fight sideways across it to make for the riverbank. Leaden arms pulled against the water, weary legs thrashed. They went under together again, half a dozen times, tumbled relentlessly by the current. In his ear, between sputters, Laurel pleaded for him not to be angry, Daddy, please.
They finally floundered ashore just south of Buckthorn Island. Laurel huddled, small and shivering, under his arm while he tried to get enough air into his lungs to say: What were you thinking, why did you do this, don’t you know what could have happened? But she wrapped her fists into his shirt and said, “Dad, Daddy, it’s all right, don’t be mad! I know what the man offered the river.”
“Laurel,” he said, and now the cold that soaked him was more than physical. Terror had frozen him to a psychological absolute zero, and there was no breath for more words, no movement in his lungs.
“I knew how to ask, just like you said, Daddy. Just like the man did, but not exactly the same. I don’t need the same thing as he did. And I knew what I was asking for.” The weight of her head on his chest, a million miles away, the soft reminder of sunlight on a cold and distant planet. “He offered himself. Maybe he didn’t know that’s what he was doing then, but that’s what he gave her. Isn’t it?”
“Laurel,” he said, and his arms folded around her like a convulsion. She went still against him, holding him as tightly as he held her. “What did you ask the river for?”
“Daddy,” she said. Her voice was small, confused. A little hurt. Close by, the waters of the river had begun to stir and froth. Jason knew the answer even before Laurel spoke it aloud, and his eyes squeezed shut against the burn of tears. “I asked her for my mom. Do you think she’ll listen?”
AIMEE OGDEN
Aimee Ogden lives in Wisconsin with her husband, three-year-old twins, and very old dog. A former software tester and science teacher, she now writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses.
Website: aimeeogdenwrites.wordpress.com
Twitter: twitter.com/Aimee_Ogden
IF A MAN FALLS IN THE FOREST
By Tyler A. Young | 4,600 words
THE AIR WAS still and hot and thick with the greenhouse stink of wet vegetation. Burke stood forty feet in the air, looking down on an expanse of yellow-gold trees arrayed in a geometric grid. From the APC’s cherry picker arm, he could see his entire fourteen-man field crew.
A breeze rustled the ocean of leaves and set the branches dancing. Burke rolled his shoulders to ease the tension and checked his pyro for the twentieth time. Still fully charged and ready for action.
His radio crackled. “Janice in C and C, calling for Burke.”
Burke’s head snapped up and his eyes scanned the horizon. “Movement?” he asked.
“No. But Mr. Hoffman would like you back at command. We have a VIP arriving in a few minutes, and he wants you to be here to greet him.”
Burke muted his line and cursed. He glanced at the two ops men. Between their segmented body armor and thick field goggles, they had a distinctly insectoid look. Both men flashed broad grins at Burke and one gave him a thumbs-up. The message was clear: Better you than us.
“Fine. Coming in.”
Burke secured his pyro’s nozzle to his thigh and swung his body off the metal platform. He had turned fifty last July, but he climbed down the struts easily. He jogged to the back of the APC and hoisted an electric dirt bike out of the rack.
He gunned the throttle, and the bike leaped forward, silent except for the spray of dirt thrown by its tires. Burke flew past row after row of trees. Even after two years working around and among them, he was still struck by the beauty of the Gliricidia omniphala. Growing as high as thirty feet, the trees had smooth grayish trunks topped by enormous branch crowns that were festooned with green-gold leaves. They look so natural, Burke thought, that it’s easy to forget what you’re dealing with.
Burke angled the bike toward the nearest underpass—they had built one every five hundred meters or so—and watched as heavy steel doors slid open to reveal the yawning tunnel mouth. The bike rushed through the aperture and, in a moment, Burke plunged out of the sticky jungle heat and down into the dark utilidor. A ten-foot-tall sign said Now Leaving Enemy Territory.
* * *
Burke stomped into the control room dusted in reddish-brown dirt. The wind had dried most of the sweat.
“Want a fresh shirt?” Janice asked. She was a pudgy fortyish woman with deep frown lines. She was also, in Burke’s opinion, his one truly irreplaceable employee.
“No, I’m not primping for—” Burke paused. “Who am I greeting?”
Janice sighed. “I’m not really sure, Boss. You know how Hoffman is with details. I think he’s some kind of reporter.”
“Hell,” Burke said. Janice held out a bottle of water, and Burke took a huge gulp.
“Does he really think now’s the right time to send a reporter in here? The crews are terrified—” Burke stopped himself midrant.
The main doors slid open and two men walked in. The first was a gray-haired suit with a pinched expression. The second was a twentysomething kid wearing jeans and a T-shirt with some kind of 3-D skull design on it.
Entitled git brought his spoiled kid, Burke thought. Burke held out his hand to the older man. “Hi, I’m Greg Burke. I run the Gaea Installation.”
The older man eyed Burke’s hand with distaste. “I’m Mr. Jensen. This”—he gestured toward the younger man—“is Kevin Downs. He’s here for the tour. I’m his advisor and attorney.”
Burke was glad that his face was red from the sun and the heat; it hid his blush. He turned and held his hand out toward the kid.
“Sorry. They didn’t tell me who was coming. Are you a reporter, Mr. Downs?”
“Just call me Downs.” He slapped Burke’s hand. “Nah, I’m not a reporter. I’m—what are we calling it, Jens?—an enlightenment and lifestyle expert. I’m one of the top twenty-five grammers. I’ve also got the top eco-themed Twitter account.”
Burke glanced over at Janice, who shrugged her shoulders.
Jensen took a half step forward. “Mr. Hoffman asked Mr. Downs to consider endorsing your carbon-offset facility. The statistical models suggest that his endorsement would send fifteen to twenty million additional customers to you, largely from New York, LA, and Paris.”
Burke cleared his throat. “Well, we’d love to have that. What can I tell you about the facility?”
Downs smiled. “Don’t tell me anything. Show me, man.” He held up his phone, a shiny new Samsung Universe that retailed for $5,000, and mimicked taking a holo.
The doors slid open again and a young, pale woman wearing a Ramones tank top and full-sleeve tattoos speed-walked into the room.
Burke gestured toward the new arrival. “This is Lynda Evans. She’s my number two at the facility. She’s very good with computers. Otherwise we wouldn’t tolerate her alternative appearance choices.”
Lynda turned to face the guests. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said with the barest hint of a Savannah twang. Behind her back, she held her middle finger up toward Burke, who chuckled.
“Hey,” Downs drawled, “cool tats.”
“Thanks!” Lynda extended her arms for inspection. “I went with a ‘natural world’ theme, plants on the right arm and animals on the left.”
Downs’s phone buzzed. “Bodhi!” he shouted, and walked away to take the call. Jensen trailed after him, listening intently.
Burke leaned down to whisper into Lynda’s ear. “Your shift’s over. What are you doing here?”
Lynda raised her eyebrows to their apogee. “I thought I would come along on the tour.” She enunciated each word carefully. “With Kevin.” She jerked her head toward Downs to punctuate the last word.
“Oh hell,” Burke moaned. “You’re a fan.”
“Shut up!” Lynda whispered cheerfully.
“Oh, I’m not complaining,” said Burke. “You can talk to Twitterboy.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, the foursome was sitting in an electric observation car atop the fifty-foot perimeter wall.
