September 17, 2078

RE: DISCONNECTION ISSUES ARISING FROM NON-PAYMENT OF FEES

Dear Mr TempID#701536,

As per our recent correspondence, we reiterate that your identity has been revoked. You have now exhausted all avenues of legal appeal and we wish to remind you of the following:

• Your rights to the identity known as Cyrus J Willard have been onsold to a new client, along with all subsidiary rights (domicile, domestic partnership, employment and credit history).
• Following a number of highly inappropriate confrontations, please find enclosed a Restraining Order forbidding you from contacting or approaching Cyrus J Willard, Stacey Willard and Cyrus J Willard Jr.
• Any further attempted contact with Stacey Willard may be considered grounds for a fault-based divorce, in which instance Cyrus J Willard will automatically receive 100% of the marital assets as per the pre-nuptial agreement signed by yourself.

Following the IMMEDIATE and FULL payment of your outstanding debt, we can provide you with a new identity. You can choose from the following packages:

a) Basic – The Basic package locks in your TempID for a low monthly fee, allowing you to access basic government services, membership of financial institutions and voting rights.
b) FreshStart – With a FreshStart account you can begin life anew, under the (available) name of your choice! Live the old way, establishing relationships, employment and credit.
c) LuckyDip – The LuckyDip package provides you with a pre-loved identity. Want to be a doctor, sanitation technician or public servant? You will be provided with all aspects of a random defaulter’s identity.

Please note that your TempID has been provided to you gratis during this difficult time of transition, but will expire in one month. Non-identity is a federal offence.

Sincerely,

Customer Care,
Identicaticorp

“Perfect present for Junior.” A man wearing a bedraggled Santa suit stood behind a table on the sidewalk. A row of bright plastic phones lined the front of the table.

“How’d you know I have a son?”

“You do, don’t you?” the man asked, opening his eyes wide.

Martyn glanced down to avoid the man’s eyes, and was arrested by the bizarre dials. A rotary phone dial, but with the entire alphabet in small letters, instead of groups of numbers. Above: a small display screen, like on a cell phone.

“Try it.”

“OK.” Martyn dragged the dial around, let go. It spun quickly, stopped abruptly. The display showed “S is for Sale.”

–

Chuck tore open his last present. Martyn had almost forgotten the weird telephone.

“Turn the dial,” he said, at Chuck’s evident frustration. When the dial stopped moving, the display lit up with “B is for Bee.” Clarice raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t know. For some reason it seemed cooler when I bought it.” Martyn was distracted by a deep rumble, which quickly grew loud enough to shake the house. He ran out the door and looked around. It was so loud…. Then Mrs. Robinson across the street raised a trembling arm, pointing at his roof. He whirled and looked up. A black and yellow striped bee perched on the roof. It was nearly the size of the house. The breeze he was feeling came entirely from the bee’s idling wings.

He ran back in, slammed the door, and took his wife and son to the cellar.

“What?!” she demanded, jerking out of his arms and crossing hers under her breasts.

“Twistr? Twister?” Chuck asked.

“It’s OK, Kid,” Martyn said. “You have some things to play with while we’re down here.” He tossed two plastic balls past his son, who ran shrieking after them.

He leaned over to Clarice’s ear, which was hot with anger. “The rumble is a giant bee, perched on the roof. It’s as big as the house. Don’t…” But she was running past him, up the stairs, and out the door. “Clarice!” He was right behind her, caught up when she stood open-mouthed in the yard, hair blown back by the breeze from the bee.

“It was true!” she breathed.

The wings blurred and the bee took off, followed or chased by two news copters. They disappeared behind the Merton’s big oak just before Chuck emerged from the house.

“Hey Dad! R is for robot!”

end

Always refuse food or drink twice, but then take more than you want, because that compliments your host’s generosity. It’s OK to stare, but then you have to stare at everything equally. Always answer a question with a question, and never be surprised by the answer.

The green-cake was excellent, loaded with raisins, the way she liked it, so piling a second and third piece on her plate was no trouble.

“Is it good?” said her host, who had said his name was Hjelmer.

“What could be better?” she said.

He’d offered her a chair in the corner, and she couldn’t remember if that meant anything. On the wall was a flat chip of gray stone, about the length and width of her thumb, set in a gilt frame. A cross-hatching of fine lines covered the stone.

“That’s a fragment of the Khozoghoaqil,” said Hjelmer, “an epic rune-poem. Very famous.”

“One of the nine sagas?” Freya blushed, realizing she’d preempted his host’s right to ask questions.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said Hjelmer, which didn’t sound any more like a proper half-riddle than her question-answering question had.

“The runes are all packed together like that?” She tried to phrase it as a statement, but couldn’t quite keep the question from her voice.

“It’s actually part of a cave floor that’s about a few standard leagues square,” said Hjelmer. “Couple thousand years ago, scribes untangled and deciphered thousands of lines written in a style that was already ancient back then.”

“Supposed?”

“Recent research suggests the marks are tracks left by a certain species of sightless cave centipede scuttling around in the silt at the bottom of a shallow pool that dried up millennia ago.”

Freya wasn’t sure if she should laugh. Hjelmer seemed unlike what she expected dwarves to be, but still, her grandmother had always said how sensitive they were about anything historical. Seeing the glint in his eye, she risked another question.

“So what’s it about — supposedly?” she said.

“The origin of the sun, the fate of the moon,” he said. “The usual. But there’s one ironic thing.”

Freya stayed silent, but thought her expression was probably question enough.

“Ghoaqil, the hero, is described as armored, many-armed, and blind.”

*

He wakes to the cry of his own name. Fans are legion outside his hotel. They dog his shoot. They break onto his sets and caress him. He has retreated. He has locked himself away from the world. Perry, his PA, makes urgent calls. His agent is on line one.

“Get out there and pimp it, baby.”

“No.”

“Breach of contract, darling.”

He swears at Perry. It is easier to curse Perry than to curse himself, his own face. He doesn’t deserve this, he knows. His beauty is skin deep. No one else knows.

*

She comes to him in his dreams. Monstrous. Hideous. Beloved. She takes his beauty from him. His face. His famous pectorals. He is nothing before her. That is everything.

*

They call his name louder. He is the epicenter of the world. Perry brings him advil and prozac. Perry squeezes his shoulders. He shakes Perry off. Why is Perry even here? Perry is better looking than he is. He tells Perry this. Perry doesn’t understand.

He has already rejected suicide. That way lies martyrdom, and then even his memory would be lost to the fable of his fame.

*

She comes to him again that night, bestial and low. She buries her face in his abdomen. Sweetly she eviscerates him.

*

He wakes sweating. He is not alone. Perry is there. Perry has him bound. Even Perry has failed him, has succumbed to the power of the myth. Perry wants his pound flesh.

He closes his eyes. And in this invasion of nightmare into reality, he calls to her, his monster, his lover, his beast.

Somehow she hears him. Somehow she unfurls from dreams and hotel furniture. Bathroom tiles are her spine, bed posts are her ribs, shattered glass is her claws and teeth.

She takes Perry. Takes him apart. She leaps from the window down to the baying crowds, and she rids him of them. She defiles his myth in viscera and blood. She is slaughter in his name.

She leaps back up to his room, swollen with the limbs of her victims. And he feels free, finally free of it all. And she advances while he dances. And he smiles as she opens her jaws.

The Luftwaffe owns the skies to the east of our position. At any moment I expect bombers to drop those compound words that have so flattened the cities of Poland. But then our proud Spitfires appear and harry them from the sky in bursts of disconnected phonemes.

We cheer, and advance on a bunker, hardened with layer on layer of incomprehensibly jumbled adjectives. A machine gun spits guttural consonants. We assemble a mortar, and lob explosive monosyllables at it. When it crumples we call it a good day’s work and dig in for the morrow’s siege.

Word comes that the Americans have officially declared war. There are rumors of a sneak attack on their naval base in Hawaii. I try to imagine blocky ideograms filling the sky.

Darkness falls, pierced here and there by spotlights. Ack-ack will likewise pierce our dreams.

_____________________________________

This story takes place in the same universe as ‘Subtext‘.

Scared her bowels loose the first time. I got a laugh out of that.

“You’re allowed one question a year, granddaughter,” I said out of the air beside her.

When she got her breath back she said, “I’m not your granddaughter. She must be gone long ago.”

“I know that. I spoke with her for years after; she’s moved on now. I stay. And so does the customary name.”

“Well then,” she said, drawing herself up. She asked grimly, “There’s a man I want. How do I get him?”

Oh, the living.

“The answer is in the question you asked, and the way you asked it.”

“What do you mean?”

“One question a year,” I answered, and went for the honey wine and apples.

“I hate you,” she announced, and went down the hill.

She was back again the next year with a bigger plate.

“You were right,” she said sadly. “This year’s question. There’s a man who wants me. Should I have his child?”

“Certainly not.”

“You were right,” she said next year, holding the baby, a little girl with her same lively eyes and three-cornered smile. But I’d said no because she’d put no value to herself. I’m not all-wise; how was I to know that a baby would help her do that, instead of making the matter worse?

“There’s a job, overseas,” she told me ten questions later. “I want it. They want me. A good job. Will you hear me across the ocean?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “We used to stay at home, your family. Try. The baby and her father going with you?”

She smiled. “Sarah’s eleven. And his name is Ian; I’ve come to love him.”

“I’m glad.”

This year I was up early, moving things around in the grave, scaring birds off the stone, nervous. Well after dark came the scent of honey wine and flowers, candles and apples, drifting across the salt sea, and I climbed up out of my old bones for a taste of it. I heard her voice clearly, but with a sound of waves in it.

“Are you there?” She asked.

“Yes, I am,” I replied.

Mr Bumble, the beadle, looked down upon with disdain, as a gentleman might were he to find the rotting corpse of a mouse lurking in his salad.

“Yes, boy?” he said.  “What is it, boy?”

“P-p-p-please, sir,” Oliver’s voice wavered.

“What is it, boy?  Out with it boy!”

“P-p-please sir,” Oliver’s failing voice, hitched, paused, then continued, “may I have some more?”

“More?” roared Mr Bumble.  “MORE?”  He swelled with indignation.  That a boy in his care, one with the good fortune to benefit from the graces of he, the Beadle, should ask for more, more than God Himself had seen fit to give the boy, why the thought angered him beyond all reason.  He built up for one more explosive ejaculation of the word-

However, he got no further, for at that precise moment, the boys leaped up as one, fell upon his and feasted upon his brains.

THE END

Bewildered, she gazed wide-eyed at the surrounding forest of sere arbor, the slate-colored skies, the ashen soil and the cinereal sun, and tried to block from her ears the faint staticky background hum of the place, as if a myriad radios were tuned to dead air. Her equilibrium slightly unsettled, as though the ground was quaking beneath her feet. The air tasted faintly of charcoal.

From a tree branch above descended a Corgi-sized spider on a silken line, landing gracefully at the little girl’s feet. Eight crimson eyes blinked in unison as the spider took in her face.

“Such pretty eyes,” said the spider with a husky feminine lilt. “They match the color of this place. And who might you be?”

“My name is Anya,” said Anya. “Where am I?”

“You are in the world, under. Are you lost?”

“Yes, ma’am. Could you show me the way home?” The little girl rooted in the pocket of her jeans for something with which to barter, and produced two greenish iridescent scales, vaguely fish-like, which shimmered in the low light. She didn’t remember how the scales had gotten into her pocket, but they were pretty enough. “I can give you these in return for your help.”

The spider scrutinized the scales for a moment, passing two of its forelegs lightly over them, then nodded.

“Indeed. Quite unusual. I wonder how you came across them. Catoblepasi are very rare in any realm, and their scales tend to stay on.”

Anya said nothing, protective of the scales’ origin and slightly embarrassed by her unintentional theft. Though the spider seemed friendly enough, Anya knew about not giving away too much information to strangers.

“Fine,” said the spider, taking the scales in two of its arms. “I will show you the way.”

Abruptly, the spider cast out its filaments and ensnared the little girl in a cocoon of white fiber. Snug tight in her swaddled capture, the little girl closed her eyes and lost consciousness. Then, without another word, the spider pulled her effortlessly upward, into the treetops.

Before dawn, the GPS said he’d found his old backyard — he wouldn’t have recognized it. Across the valley, the milky borealis of city sky-glow behind the dark of the hills and, nearer, the unburnt side of town with lighted houses warm yellow like paper lanterns.

Growing up, this had never felt like home. Coming back had always been awkward as wrong-fitting clothes.

He risked a light, found the trunk of the tire-swing tree, cinderwood glinting like beetles. Below, the old patio’s charred pavers. He counted squares in a chess knight’s move, and levered the stone up with his walking stick. Pill-bugs scurried; ants evacuated their exposed gallery. A few inches under the dirt, the metal box still there, heavier than expected.

He unzipped the lid: pressure hiss and a smell like stale cooking oil and burnt circuits. 30 petabytes of neural storage, a project from the summer of his first college year, a big wobbly cube of shadow-colored jello full of archived teenaged e-mail, backups of favorite games, the complete Louvre in ultra-high resolution, all the Wikipedia entries in eight languages — two decades out of date now — everything he could think of to test the capacity.

He had a couple of wires in his pocket. He could sink them in the gel, sync them to the leads in his fingertips, load it complete to the Q-memory in the phone that ticked at his throat in time to his pulse. The summer was in there, whole days, weeks, of everything he’d heard and seen.

He dumped it onto the patio with a shlupp. The ants would take care of whatever the coydogs left.

On the bottom of the box, sealed in a baggie, a photo. Steve, Oscar, Lili, and — what was his name? — Des, all holding up his sister Ana, a pixie in oversize sunglasses and a rainbow-striped swimsuit. Ana before the war, the crash, the medals; a completely different Ana, with a completely different smile.

Miguel peeled the photo up, put it in his pocket, continued downhill.

“Angie!” she shouted, stepping down. Angie poked her head in from the home office, formerly a pantry.

“Hmm?”

Laura walked over and put both her hands on Angie’s cheeks. “Sweetie, did we or didn’t we talk about the light bulbs?”

“Light bulbs … ?”

“About if one of us used the last one, we would write it on the grocery list.”

“Oh that! Sure we did. Do I get to call you anal again?”

“No, you do not. Because one of us–not me–used the last light bulb and didn’t write it on the list.”

Angie took both of Laura’s hands in hers, kissed her, then turned back to her computer. “Not guilty, sorry.”

“It wasn’t me,” Laura said. “I replaced a bulb three days ago, and there were still two left.”

“Still not me.”

“You know you don’t always pay attention to these things–and this is the third time we’ve been out since Christmas!”

“Maybe your Mom cursed the closet. She said she was a witch.”

“My mother is not a witch, she’s mentally ill. Remember when we caught her with that mouse?”

“Relax … your blood pressure! Now, please let me work.”

Laura stood for a moment in stupefaction, then shoved the kitchen chair back into place and shut the closet door with unnecessary force. She left the kitchen with her arms crossed over her chest.

“Blood pressure!” Angie sang out.

Behind the closet door, past the top shelf, through a gap in the ceiling that led to a crawlspace, in a long gallery only a foot high, a mouse sighed in relief. She nosed her two new prizes into place, wrapped bare wire around each of their bases, then connected the terminals. Finally she went back and reconnected a bit of insulated wire. The crawlspace lit up with dozens of light bulbs: Christmas tree bulbs, floods, standard lamp bulbs, frosted globes, and more. Many were masked with bits of colored paper and fabric over toothpick frames, so the mouse was surrounded with glowing colors, varied and warm and mixing subtly where they overlapped. The mouse sighed and lay down to sleep in her fairyland, soothed by the faint tapping of the human woman’s fingers on her computer keyboard below.