Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 17 Read online

  Belching, yawning, Barth announced. “Time for something new."

  He turned on his koala woman accusingly. “Something new!"

  Then he strapped on one of the parachute packs he'd brought, still howling. “New! New! New! New!—"

  Barth's voice trailed away as he bailed out over what had once been Silver Spring. Someone shouted, someone else laughed, scrambling for the parachutes.

  "Patty?"

  But she was gone too. Only Cam remained, licking the spilt liquor on the bar counter, ignoring her.

  "Where to?"

  The stars overhead throbbed in time with Joan's head. She held a finger up to the navigator—just a minute—and fumbled in her purse for the vial. For a few seconds, she pressed it to her lips, sucking in its warmth, before she uncorked and emptied the tube. Just a minute. She would know what she wanted in just a minute, just as she always did.

  But not this time. The liquid's heat dissipated and left her body cold.

  "What do you see?” The navigator shook his head and whispered something in his assistant's ears. Joan pulled up her blouse, studied her wrists, got out a mirror to check her back. “Tell me! What do you see? What!"

  She was covered from crown to toe by the same fine web of lines as before. Try as she might to focus, Joan couldn't spot anything new appearing on her body. For the first time in years, she felt empty. Desolate, she began to rock back and forth, heaving dry sobs.

  * * * *

  It took her some time, but Joan managed to track down Armitage's stall in the parking lot of the old RFK stadium, just north of the river. Since the disintegration of the Mall market, his stall had moved around the few common points left in the city, and clients could only find their way there by postcards tacked to their door at night by one of Armitage's army of mappers.

  The air around the stall shook with sound of the stadium's never-ending concert. In the early days, it had alternated between a few groups—the Beatles, the Grateful Dead—but in the thick noise now, there must have been a thousand groups performing at once. Armitage was still wearing the Bon Jovi T-shirt and Joan wondered if they were playing inside as well.

  "I drank the vial but nothing happened, I did what I always did, but it didn't work, it's not working anymore, it's—"

  "That's because you're close to the edge."

  She started breathing less heavily. “The edge of what?"

  "Your heart.” Armitage picked some food from between his braces. “See, the first few times you use it, it's like a spotlight, you'll only see a few things. Someone new you fancy. Maybe a house you'd like to live in. But the more you use it, the more you get used to it, you start to see so much more. Only then can you see everything. You can see the shape of your whole heart."

  "Please. I can't stand—I feel so empty."

  "But are you ready, ma'am? Do you really want to know all you'll ever want?"

  "Please—yes. Give it to me—yes. Yes."

  "Good.” Armitage clapped his hands and his assistant, Twy, limped forward. Again Joan couldn't bring herself to look at the creature. “But to get what she wants, the princess has to kiss the frog."

  "Kiss—you're joking."

  Armitage looked away from her. “It's what I had to do."

  "You did this too?"

  He placed a paternal hand over Twy's head, actually caressed the thing's skin. “Trust me. It'll never hurt again."

  Never hurt again. Joan repeated the words to herself as she closed her eyes and bent down to kiss Twy on the lips. Its touch was freezing, a numbness that spread like ice flowers from her mouth, down her neck, through her veins. By the time she opened her eyes again, the map lines had disappeared from the backs of her hands. They were gone all the way up her elbows, across her stomach, everywhere she could see.

  Twy jerked back, coughed. Shivering at first, then wracked, the creature doubled up in agony and retched several times. Huddled over itself, its back starred with the needle points where Armitage had siphoned off blood for his customers. A thin snake of drool dripped towards the ground. Armitage reached down and tugged the line—not saliva, but a meaty length of string, still dangling from Twy's mouth. Its teeth worked furiously, spitting out the string as it backed away from Armitage in short hops, then in explosive exhalations of tangles, turning as it began to flee across the parking lot.

  "Give Twy two hours, then follow the string."

  Joan watched Twy scrabble across the top of a car. “The map's gone from my skin. I've got nothing to give you."

  There had always been a price before: in exchange for the vials, Joan had to let Armitage copy out the new places forming on her body. As he did with all his clients, Armitage had carefully transferred the markings to his master-map. The layered paper was worn by notations and corrections, but stiff as a winding sheet with the glue solution that held it together. Stretched like a tent across the whole of the stall, it was so large there wasn't space for the other maps he'd kept.

  "The only price is you promise you go through with it."

  Armitage came close to her and began winding the string around her wrist. If she was all emptiness, he was all stone, solid, compacted.

  Joan waited the two hours in a nearby small garden, where the wicker gazebo and the sound of robins held back the noise inside the stadium. Then she began following the line left by Twy, down alleyways, under bridges, through hallways, across vehicles and around trees. The city changed around her, abrupt twists in light and smell, but Joan refused to be distracted and only focused on the line, a shining crack that seemed to split the world.

  Later—how much later she couldn't guess, except that she was tired and thirsty—Joan reached the end of the string. Horribly thin, its skin pulling between ribs with every breath, Twy sat on a kerbside, waiting.

  This time, she forced herself to look at it, this thing of anti-desire. “Thank you."

  Twy grunted, rolled painfully to its feet. Chewing slowly, it sucked up the string and gradually started to make its way back to Armitage. Only after it had disappeared around the corner of the brownstone edge of building did Joan look around.

  She knew this place.

  Opposite her was a small square, rusting monkey bars in the middle of a weedy patch, surrounded by apartments holding their breaths in cramped spaces. Hardly any light fell on the park and trash was clumped along the half-painted railings. But there was a tree, a grand, twisted, unstoppable chestnut that rose straight out of the middle of the square, its leaves turning the sky into something more fantastic than sky by dappling and shadow. Joan and her heart followed the tree up just as she had when she was a small child of four, catching that brief glimpse as her mother tugged her towards kindergarten.

  Scraping on the street behind made her turn suddenly. A boy in a black corduroy jacket raced by on a beat-up Chopper, braking slightly to look back over his shoulder at her standing there dumbfounded. And yes, he still looked as cool and unattainable as when, in her early teens, she first saw him on TV.

  On the radio somewhere, a Lemonheads song, “Different Drum,” only more immediate, as if Evan Dando was behind one of the windows, rehearsing.

  In a shop window flaring with sunlight, the pair of crimson Doc Martens she'd stolen because she knew she couldn't save enough before they'd be gone.

  Beside the shop, a front door with a dragon-headed knocker.

  Yes—Joan knew this place. As she gazed around her, they came out to greet her: ten-year old Bobby, her cousin Ollie, her father, Frank the jock at high school, Calypso Jim, Evan Dando, Montgomery Clift, boys she'd only seen once, Barth, Derrick, the rag boy, all the others she could barely remember on down to Cam, all standing in the doorways and windows, smiling, welcoming her.

  And the ones she didn't know yet—wild men and women, creatures, strangers who shocked her with recognition, people Joan could barely imagine now but knew that one day she would, would be drawn towards, a whole community, a new world, all mined out of her heart, waving, ready to wait t
heir turn.

  Everyone she would ever—everything she could ever—

  Then she smelt it—a faint foulness, slightly stinging. And she heard it, like a roomful of TVs left on after the channels had gone to sleep. It drifted from behind the apartment buildings, so Joan finally began to move, stumbling as Twy had, in small convulsions that propelled her forward. The roar resolved into memory first, then something real. She was running, and ahead of her the road disappeared, tumbling into a horizon that turned into sand beneath her feet.

  The horizon was a long way away, but she could still make out the magnificent plume of water breaking it, the water bursting as the huge tail divided the sea like a divine judgement. At the edge of the beach, a man with a reconstructed jug for a face was waiting by a longboat with his crew.

  "It's the most beautiful thing in the world."

  She was whispering, almost unable to breathe, but the captain heard her. “Yes, it is."

  "Can I touch it?"

  "Is that what you want?"

  But Joan wondered why we always destroy the things we love. And immediately answered herself: because they can never satisfy us.

  So she shook her head. He handed her the harpoon.

  * * * *

  She didn't know how long it lasted. Armitage did, but she never asked.

  He did try to explain to her. “The thing is, once you find the edge of your heart, there's nowhere else to go, is there. And then all that's left is hunger."

  Hunger. It's what had once made her shudder, scratching at hands, rubbing her eyes, the feeling of a huge hole inside that only got bigger the more she tried to fill it—but not anymore.

  "Believe me, I know.” Armitage reached inside his vest pocket, touched his talisman. “You understand, I did get to Kansas eventually. But it wasn't enough. That's the point—it's never enough. So that's when I went looking for Twy. You look hard enough, you'll always find Twy. And Twy helped me find things I never realized I wanted. Twy showed me all the things I could possibly want. Least, until I ran out of them."

  He was holding Kansas in his hand the way she'd held the matches, standing at the base of the chestnut. Eventually, worn out by the lack of longing, she'd started the fire with petrol siphoned from the gorgeous sea-green Bentley she'd seen in an airline magazine on her first trip to Europe. Her lovers had watched from their apartments until the reflection of the flames and the smoke obscured the glass.

  "I just didn't want to be the only one."

  She nodded. She couldn't forgive him, but she could at least understand, and that was all he needed.

  So Armitage finally unfolded the winding sheet and showed her his work. She joined in with his helpers, the others like her, breaking up and setting out the stall, preparing the syringes for Twy, copying out the cravings from the skin of new customers, erasing streets, reapplying names, clarifying the city. Armitage had said there was nothing else to find, but he didn't really believe that—he couldn't, not if he wanted to carry on. He never said aloud, but she knew he believed that once everyone's appetites had been mapped out, once all possible terrains were made known, they would see the map's heart, the place in the city where all desire came from, their final hope of renewal.

  It was a blank spot now, un-territory. Sometimes it took the shape of Kansas, sometimes the shape of a great fish, but she knew it was the shape of something she'd never be able to name.

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  You Accept What You Get When You're Eating with Death

  by Christien Gholson

  Memory is an empty Greek restaurant on a Tuesday night. The cook and his brother, the lone waiter, are about to close when a group of five cousins walk through the door. The cousins haven't seen each other in years. They are all in town for a family reunion. They live in huge cities that have so many Greek restaurants they never bother to eat Greek. Now they desperately want Greek food and this is the only place they can find in the phone book.

  They all have fantastically loud staccato laughter. It makes the waiter wince. He wants to go home, talk to his wife. Five years in the Midwest and listening to English all day still exhausts him. The cousins don't bother catching up on each other's lives. They've heard the news through the grapevine. One's recently divorced. The one who used to dance is now a nurse. One has a child graduating from high school. Some of them haven't seen each other since high school. The one who used to be so serious—always writing about loneliness, forgetting & Buddhist concepts of the void—her husband died in a car accident last year. Now she has no time to be serious. One's a raving alcoholic, though he thinks that part of his life has been kept a brilliant secret. Everyone else knows and doesn't care.

  Instead, they tell jokes. They are telling death jokes. Which is appropriate because Death himself is sitting at the table with them, invisible as usual. It's not as heavy as you might think. None of them are going to die in the near future. It's just that Death loves Greek food. Especially dolmathes that have soaked in a tin of brine so long they taste like paint-thinner. He loves Greek food and good death jokes.

  The cousins order saganaki because they want the waiter to come out and light the cheese, shouting “Oopah!” They want something as dramatic and absurd as telling death jokes while sitting next to Death himself. Death orders a whole bottle of retsina. He looks around the restaurant. Curling airline posters of Greece on the walls. Deep blue Aegean sea, clear skies. Tiny roads winding up a rocky hillside, lined with brilliant white stucco houses. Death laughs. It's the Greece you remember if you've never been there. The Acropolis. Ruins of Apollo's gorgeous body. Youths leaping over bull horns on the side of a vase. The cradle of a vacationing civilization.

  It takes a long time for the food to arrive. The cousins don't notice the time. They're with Death and he doesn't wear a watch. After seven cigarettes by the back dumpster, the waiter comes out with the saganaki. They watch him fumble with his lighter, his fingers stained yellow from years of rolling a blend of Turkish tobacco. He smells of nicotine. He snaps the lighter four times before it ignites. He mutters a tired “oopah” as he lights the cheese. No emotion. A bored monotone. As if he is responding to his brother's endless nagging about his smoking with his usual “whatever"—the only English word he finds useful. The flame dies before he puts the platter on the table. He shrugs, walks off. Dead silence from the cousins. They look at one another, raising eyebrows, tilting their heads, smiling dumb-founded. Before the waiter even hits the kitchen door, Death and the cousins burst out laughing. It was the best joke of the night! Everyone at the table is exhilarated. The waiter didn't fake a thing! He didn't even try!

  The cousins love the waiter. The waiter hates the cousins. Death drinks his retsina and looks around, content. He likes the place. It's the kind of place that really just wants to go sit outside on the front steps, watch traffic at the end of the day. Like a grandmother who's finished washing all the clean windows in her daughter's house. Her grand-daughter finds her on the stoop, puts her small head in the old woman's lap. The old woman strokes the girl's hair. Time begins ticking for the girl. Time stops for the old woman. Her hand smells of washrags and pickles.

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  The Mushroom Duchess by Deborah Roggie

  The Dowager Duchess of Turing had made a lifetime's study of mushrooms. It was an odd occupation, perhaps, for one of her age and station in life; but even Duchesses must have their little hobbies, and fungal botany was hers. Her nurse, many years ago, had piqued her interest in mycology by teaching her what mushroom lore she'd known, and the Duchess supplemented that with field study and close questioning of peasant women, whenever her duties allowed.

  Mushrooms are funny things. They can please or poison, cause flying dreams, or wake a sleeping man with a bellyache. One type of mushroom grows as large as a village, spreading stealthily underground until one damp morning, after a heavy storm perhaps, a ring of pale toadstools springs up to mark its boundaries. Some glow, some emit the foulest odo
rs, and some develop so quickly that a patient observer can see them sprout, extend their gray umbrellas to the sun, and disappear, all in a single day.

  So, in between hosting formal receptions and supervising the servants, the Duchess studied the most arcane mushrooms she could find. She tracked down one unusually tough, acidic variety of mushroom cap, which, worn internally, prevented conception. And she discovered a rare morel that could impregnate a woman. (Regrettably, she found, the children resulting from such pregnancies were severely impaired.) Her studies turned up species of toadstools that inhibited certain brain functions: speech, for example, or sight.

  A particular spotted tree-mushroom, when harvested in autumn and used within two days, caused permanent memory loss. A nondescript puffball, dried, powdered, and added to saffron broth, gave the user the power of understanding animals’ speech. However, as an unfortunate side effect, the subject lost all ability to communicate with humans.

  The Duchess was careful and systematic when testing the properties of various mushrooms. She recorded the age of the specimen, its weight and condition, the dosage administered, the phase of the moon, and the species of her subject. The bulk of her experiments were done on animals, but as they were limited in their ability to communicate their experiences, eventually the Duchess turned to human subjects. In twenty-seven years of tests, she had lost only two maids, a groom, and a stable boy. A scullion or two had gone quite mad, and a footman had committed suicide, but she was quite sure that no one connected her to their unfortunate fates.

  She was unaware that in the immediate neighborhood “taking tea with the Duchess” had become synonymous with risky behavior.

  Her husband, the Duke of Turing, had had mixed luck. He had lived for quite a number of years after succumbing to an overdose of greenblanket chanterelles; the Duchess told everyone he'd had a stroke, and saw that he had the best of care. He wanted for nothing except health and mobility.

  Once he was decently buried, the Dowager Duchess turned to the problem of her son's marriage. Eldred presented no opposition: he quite depended on his mother. It was finding the girl that provided the challenge. In time she found a suitable daughter-in-law who would be decorative and obedient, and who seemed likely to produce an heir. The dowry was negotiated, the bloodlines investigated, the girl inspected, and the contracts signed. Their wedding was splendid, as befit a son and heir of the ducal house of Turing.