Fiction Vortex - July 2014 Read online

  Shelley’s eyes darted to the floor of the lift as bars of daylight slowly passed over her. “I heard a rumor that he wanted to duel. Only a rumor. I can’t remember who told me…”

  “What do you reckon? Guns or knives?” Gail asked bluntly. She had no time for Shelley’s whimperings, but somebody had to act as her seconds.

  The doors opened on John Guy’s floor but Gail did not get out. “Tell him I’ll be on the roof.”

  Shelley held out a hand to stop the doors closing. “What’s your preference?”

  “What are my choices?”

  “Guns, knives, swords. Normally.”

  “Knives.”

  The lift doors closed.

  A swathe of London was visible from the roof. The gothic towers and white brick piping of the St. Pancras Hotel and the railway stations beyond. The pinnacles of the Royal Courts of Justice. Canary Wharf. Even the tops of Tower Bridge. The rain had stopped but a damp grey wind had got up. She hoped this would be over quickly.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind her. John Guy, Lodeon, and lastly Shelley stepped out from an access door. John Guy grinned. Lodeon looked blank.

  Shelley carried a knife over to her director. Burden felt its weight in the palm of her hand. It had a good balance. Her inside knotted at the thought that she was adjudging such things.

  “I’ve informed Friedmann,” Shelley said. Friedmann was the company doctor.

  “You fill me with confidence. How do go about this?”

  “The first to draw blood.”

  “I know that. I meant the etiquette.”

  Shelley was flustered. “I don’t know. Maybe I should drop a handkerchief or something.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that was a stupid idea then. John,” she called, “How do we do this?”

  Lodeon was helping him off with his jacket. “On your seconds’ mark, we fight until blood is drawn.”

  Gail took a deep breath. “Just say, ‘one, two, three’ or something.”

  John Guy was in his shirtsleeves, crouched, knife balanced and ready. Burden felt woefully under-prepared, not even sure how to stand let alone fight.

  “Ready?” Shelley never sounded less ready. “One, two, three, fight.”

  John Guy shot Shelley a sarcastic glare and lunged at Burden who took a step backwards, heels scraping in the gravel. She wondered whether she ought to have taken them off.

  He shuffled forward, keeping his balance, moving like a cat, lithe shoulders swaying. For a big man he was agile, mobile. His tie caught in the wind.

  And then he lunged. Gail felt the swish of metal not far from her face. She leaned away from the blade, stumbling backward against a cooling duct. She expected a flurry of arms and legs, cold metal biting hotly into flesh. But her opponent did not go in for the kill as she thought he might. He would probably call it gallantry.

  She wiped her palms clean of sweat on her suit. It would no doubt be ruined by the conclusion. Blood was screaming in her ears, pulsing, pounding. Her breathing was labored.

  John Guy came at her again, knife dully glinting. The duel was finding its rhythm. A frantic few moments between glares and heavy breathing. He stabbed but the blade caught in cloth. Their faces were inches apart. His eyes were like coals. She made a swing at him, but he broke free too quick for her.

  John Guy laughed. This was easy for him. Gail Burden had been lucky so far, or maybe he had just been toying with her, teasing.

  “You can concede, Gail. There’s no shame.”

  “You know my feelings about dueling, but I don’t think that’s how it would be seen.”

  “I’ll try not to scar you where it shows, but I can’t make guarantees. In the heat of the moment, you might lose an eye. All over this petty, peripheral issue. Think about it.”

  “Are you conceding, John? Is that what you want to tell me?”

  There was no answer. Instead John Guy dropped to his trademark crouch. He grinned up at Gail. It was obvious to both of them what it meant. This time he would make it count. After this exchange the fight would be over. He took a deep, audible breath and came at her.

  And as he did so Gail swung her knife at him and let go.

  Almost on top of her, John Guy swung his knife at Gail. But he was falling. His eyes registered shock as his target seemed to tumble away. But he was the one slithering into the gravel.

  He looked down at where Gail’s knife quivered in his thigh. It had buried itself by a good four inches. John Guy’s hand came away bloody.

  “That’s not in the rules. You can’t throw the bloody thing.”

  “Why not? We used knives, and I was the first to draw blood.”

  Karl Friedmann was by John Guy’s side, slitting open the trouser leg of his suit, staunching the quiet flow of blood.

  “Because… Because…”

  His face creased up in pain as the knife was extracted.

  “I don’t think anything major’s been severed, but you’re going to need to go to A and E.”

  John Guy’s face was almost as red as his leg. “You can’t throw the bloody thing!”

  “Why not?” said a deeply resonant voice behind them. The Old Man. “Gail’s quite right. She was the first to draw blood.”

  John Guy was on his feet, one arm over the shoulder of Lodeon. “But you can’t throw it…”

  “Enough,” the Old Man barked. He held himself stiffly, like a butler. There was something of Noel Coward about him. In one hand, instead of a silver platter he held the mahogany box. With it he advanced toward Gail. She found herself easing backward as he unclipped the lock.

  “Cigar?”

  A dozen thick Havanas stared up at her from the box. “Don’t partake myself, but I understand that following a dueling victory there is nothing quite like a real cigar.

  As John Guy limped off the roof with Friedmann and Lodeon, she rolled her chosen cigar slowly under her nose, taking in the honey sweet scent of the tobacco. She had never smoked a cigar before. But she had never fought before, either. It felt good. It made her feel powerful. Sensual. Sexual.

  “Welcome to the Board,” the Old Man grinned.

  ~~~~~

  ~~~~~

  Robert Bagnall is an English writer and sometime management consultant and property developer. He is currently in the process of moving from a doubly landlocked county to the coast to renovate a rambling Victorian house. He has had short sci-fi and crime fiction irregularly published over the last twenty years, a list of which together with his science fiction musings can be found at meschera.blogspot.co.uk. 

  (Back to Table of Contents)

  Black Friday

  by Caren Gussoff; published July 8, 2014

  Winner of the Editor's Choice Award, July 2014

  Tillie Montgomery couldn’t hold it any longer.

  She pulled her mother by the arm, like when she was an impatient kid, toward the closest exit, between the hot pretzel counter and the beauty supplies.

  Her mother tugged back.

  “Please, mom,” Tillie said. “Quickly.”

  The voice of the all-pink Elvis vendor seemed to follow them from the atrium the whole way to the exit, alternating between “Hunka Burning Love” and the exclusive features of the microphone, available that day for a special Wednesday price — even though everyone everywhere knew retailers started the serious sales two days later, on Black Friday.

  I feel my temp’rature rising

  “I’ll find a bathing suit tomorrow,” Tillie said.

  “The mall’s going to be infinitely more crowded tomorrow,” her mother said. “And worse the next day.”

  But yours won’t, with this easy plug-and-play unit

  Tillie tried to imagine infinitely more crowded, shoppers standing on shoppers, legs and arms and shopping bags heaving with a single breath, until it made her a little sick. It wasn’t worth retorting about the fundamental illogic of her mother’s statement to begin with.
/>   My fever’s a hundred and nine

  “We can order a suit online,” Tillie said. “Overnight shipping.”

  “And if it doesn’t fit?” her mother asked.

  Her mother was waiting for a response, but Tillie couldn’t think about anything but reaching the exit, the smell of yeast from the holiday ham pretzels, the roar of other conversations, a single baby’s wail, reaching the exit before the freezing-burning in her finger and toe tips swallowed her.

  Tillie walked faster, steering her mother around the salesgirl from the wholesale salon products, who was pushing coupons for a conditioner that ‘specially attacks and reduces hair’s frizzogens.

  “You are not going to mope in the hotel the entire time we are in Florida,” her mother continued. “I forbid it.”

  Tillie’s mother already said to Tillie all the things that everyone everywhere knew were true but that do not feel true: It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; no one’s looking at you; everyone has their own problems. She’s worked her way through all the angles in the book of mothering, trying camaraderie and coercion until she was finally onto forbidding.

  And kids from nine to a hundred and nine will love the noise-cancelling technology built right in

  “We are finding you a bathing suit. We are going to Florida. You will swim and have fun.” Her mother stopped and tried to hold her ground.

  Tillie wanted to scream. She was surprised she didn’t. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she promised. She would have promised anything. “No matter how bad it gets. I won’t come home without a bathing suit.”

  “That’s what you say now,” her mother said.

  I might turn to smoke but this mic makes me feel fine

  The exit was just ahead, but the freezing-burning already turned electric and consumed her. The fine hairs on her cheeks and arms thickened into fur. Antlers pushed their way through the soft skin on her scalp. “I told you,” Tillie said. “I couldn’t hold it.”

  ~~~~~

  When Tillie was a child, she would cross her eyes, scowl, stick out her tongue. Her mother would warn her that one day, if she wasn’t careful, her face would freeze like that. That would make Tillie screw up her face tighter, hold the grimace as long as she could, daring her face to set in that expression.

  It never did.

  Eventually her mother and Tillie would dissolve into laughter. At the time, Tillie thought they laughed because she was hilarious, a natural-born comedian. She thought they were laughing at the silliness of the faces. Now, she understood it was the glee and joy of an obedient body, reflexively docile, subservient meat. Reveling in a body that changed with time, only.

  Since Tillie had dropped out of college, she sat at home and watched a lot of news. All the channels churned out special report after special report.

  Her mother tried to keep her busy, but Tillie would spend hours clicking between investigative updates, expert commentary, and live feeds.

  Doctors hypothesized on the unforeseen long-term effects of lifestyle, commonly prescribed medications, insulin resistance, and gluten intolerance.

  Scientists speculated about accelerated evolution, mutation-enhanced biodiversity, fast-tracked speciation, new branches sprouting on the phylogenic tree. Radiation, they said. Viruses. Random chance.

  Weirdoes quoted Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus, and Mother Shipton. They welcomed the Age of Aquarius. They blamed aliens, covert government experiments, vaccinations, genetically modified food, hormone-laced meat, and Western medicine.

  Zealots held hands and prayed, blaming the occult books available at any Barnes & Noble or public library, the increased popularity of yoga, witches, the doctors, the scientists, and the weirdoes. They welcomed the new Eden; they awaited Armageddon.

  Everyone had a theory, but the point was something was happening.

  It was not happening to everyone everywhere, but to enough of them that it seemed like soon enough it might.

  The point was humans sometimes changed into giant animals.

  The point was Tillie sometimes changed into a giant animal, and there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.

  It was Thursday. Tillie flexed and unflexed her claws, kneading the chenille bedspread. She didn’t know why she did this, only that it seemed to calm her down. The bed groaned beneath her weight.

  Tillie’s mother came in and pushed in next to her on the bed, scratched Tillie’s head and behind her ears. Tillie plopped down and rolled her belly towards her mother.

  “A kitty,” her mother said, absently. “I always said we should get a kitty cat.” Then she rubbed Tillie’s belly hard. “Maybe not a giant one, but a kitty nonetheless.”

  The rubbing was too hard. Tillie thumped her tail, nipped lightly at her mother’s hand. Then she head-butted her mother’s arm until she began scratching Tillie’s head again.

  Tillie laid her head on her mother’s lap as she sat and watched a rebroadcast of the President pardoning a turkey. Tillie had trouble staying awake.

  “Oh well. No mall for you today,” her mother sighed. “Maybe it won’t be as crowded as I think tomorrow.”

  ~~~~~

  People dug deep for answers. Environmentalists blamed climate change, toxic dumps, high levels of lead, fracking. Wiccans explained how the goddess wished humans to reconnect with their animal brothers and sisters. When asked about what he thought, the Dalai Lama just pushed his palms together and smiled at the reporter.

  On Friday morning, Tillie read an investigative report about specialty shape shifter brothels popping up all around the outskirts of Vegas.

  Then she watched footage of a woman, shifted into a hippopotamus the size of an M1 tank, knocking through the concrete barriers of the Maple Leaf reservoir, causing flood damage to the North Seattle neighborhood estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars.

  Tillie rubbed her temples and watched live footage of the aftermath, homeowners in rubber gaiters emptying buckets of water from their basements, DOT workers clearing gutters.

  Tillie tried not to remember the first time she shifted, but did. It was just like that. Only she became an elephant during her Fundamentals of Calculus class, destroyed most of the lecture hall, and trampled a priceless frieze donated by the class of 1958.

  “Tillie Montgomery, turn that crap off,” Tillie’s mother said. “It’s not doing you any good.”

  Tillie laid her head on her hands.

  “It could be worse,” her mother said. “You’re young; you have people who love you. So, you’ve got a chronic…” she paused to carefully consider her word, “…condition.”

  Tillie looked at her mother. “Diabetes is a chronic condition,” she replied. “Arthritis is a chronic condition.”

  “Exactly,” her mother said. “And people use insulin or take medication and they live their lives. There are support groups now, you know.”

  “Yeah, and brothels,” Tillie replied. “They said on the news.”

  “Well,” her mom said, shaking her head. “That doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  “What am I going to do, mom?” Tillie asked.

  Her mother picked up the remote, flipped the TV off. She patted Tillie’s shoulder. “Come on. There’s a big world out there.”

  Tillie stood up and looked out the window at the neighbor kids tossing a Frisbee to their golden retriever, Vinnie. His tongue hung out of his mouth, long and pink as a hot dog. He was happy. Tillie could imagine herself there, also happy, grabbing the Frisbee between her own teeth, rolling in the cold mud, panting. She wanted that. She tried to make her fingers and toes cold-burn, but they wouldn’t.

  “What am I going to do?” she repeated.

  Her mother opened the hall closet and pulled out Tillie’s coat. She draped it on Tillie’s shoulders, then wrapped a scarf around her neck. She tucked the ends of the scarf inside the neckline of the coat. “Today, you are going to buy a bathing suit. Tomorrow, we go to Florida. In a few months, you’ll return to college. You will graduate. Yo
u’ll go on. You’ll see.”

  “I can’t just—” Tillie started, but her mother cut her off.

  “You’ll see. If you can handle the mall on Black Friday, you can handle anything.” Her mother hustled her by the arm to the front door. “Go on.”

  ~~~~~

  Tillie drove herself down to the waterfront, the opposite direction from the mall. She parked near the aquarium, bought a hot cocoa from a street vendor, and sat on the cement embankment of a deserted pier. Tillie drank her cocoa, looking down into the black water and the soapy-looking waves.

  She hadn’t been a fish yet. A few days before, she’d seen a news clip of one shifter that became a van-sized beluga sturgeon in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. The sturgeon flipped, gasped, while some kindly onlookers poured their personal bottles of water on his gills until paramedics and ichthyologists rushed 500 gallon tanks to the scene. Tillie didn’t know what became of that shape shifter.

  Her phone vibrated from inside her coat. She pulled it out and looked at the screen. It was her mother. She didn’t want to pick up, but she knew her mother would just keep calling and calling. “Hi, mom.”

  “Come home. I was being insensitive. I keep pretending everything is normal like that is going to make it normal.”

  “Mom—” Tillie started, but her mother talked over her.

  “You can swim in a tank top and cut-offs,” her mother said. “The important thing is that we are together and that you’re happy and have fun on this trip. It’s okay.”

  “No,” Tillie said, crumpling her empty cup. “You are right. Everything is normal. This is normal, now. I’m going to do this.”

  “We’ll do it together, then,” her mother said. “Come get me.”

  ~~~~~

  The mall parking lot was like a malicious game of Stratego. Cars funneled down into standstill chokepoints, carefully laying tactics of misdirection and subversion as they leapfrogged and curb-jumped to open parking spaces. When Tillie finally slammed her car into a spot, a father in a minivan that had been edging around her flashed her the finger.

  “So much for holiday spirit,” her mother said, returning the gesture.

  Tillie grabbed her mother’s arm as they weaved their way to the entrance.

  “Keep breathing,” her mother said. “In your nose, out your mouth.”

  Going in was like jumping into a fast-rushing river. The air was scented with gingerbread candle smoke, and the current snaked in time to the tinny, instrumental carols from the overhead speakers.