Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 Read online

  Thanks—

  Blue State Blues

  * * * *

  A: Well, obviously, Blue State Blues, whatever you did, it wasn't enough. But really, this had to happen, in order to bring about the impending doom mentioned above. What you should do now is sharpen your weapons, secure your barricades and buy lots of bottled water.

  * * * *

  Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda:

  How about that veggie burger with bacon?

  * * * *

  A: Vegetarianism has many strange permutations. The use of cloned pigs for guilt-free bacon is a perfectly acceptable one. I prefer facon and have it every damn morning when I get up and contemplate how after the apocalypse comes I'll be too busy shooting at interlopers to go to the abandoned grocery store and steal facon. Or perhaps that the fake pigs will be freed by some misguided hippie type and there won't even be facon anymore.

  * * * *

  Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda:

  My future in-laws would like to present us with a silver cutlery set. Foregoing the easy lycanthropic excuse, how can I persuade them this is not what my future husband and myself would most appreciate?

  Lycanthropically Yours

  [Name withheld by request]

  * * * *

  A: I just got married and I would have loved a silver set. Not to keep, mind you, but there's got to be a place to return it for hard, cold moolah or a black market on which to fence it. You pretend the movers stole it, or your covetous friend from high school who should never have been invited over in the first place. Alternately, embrace the silver set and realize that you'll be able to use it to barter for more practical goods during the post-apocalyptic Road Warrior/28 Days Later/Anna Nicole Smith Show-esque days ahead. You may want to keep certain items as weapons.

  * * * *

  Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

  I held an intimate soiree (cocktails, dinner, a seance) and someone, a friend from long ago happy school days, H., brought someone whom I'd rather not have seen at all—never mind too much of them too little covered—in the comforts of mine own compact and bijou home. I'd love to keep my friend H., but would like to ensure my not seeing his partner again. Advice? Plots?

  * * * *

  A: Well, this just goes to show that you should never have happy school days to begin with, and certainly never, ever keep in touch with people from them. H. and his baggagey partner are just going to slow you down when you are fleeing the lycanthropes and carpetbaggers after The Great and Final Collapse. You seem to actually perceive that you are in danger of passing the end days with someone you hate. However, since this is the situation in which you find yourself, make the most of it. Once social mores becomes meaningless, you can kill and eat this person. The sweet, sweet taste of human flesh will be far more satisfying than either cloned pig bacon or fake pig facon.

  * * * *

  Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

  The mice are chewing at the corners of my flour sacks. What should I do?

  * * * *

  A: I commend you on the foresight of having stocked up on flour. Obviously, you are not someone who needs my advice. But remember: mice skins can be sewn into lovely jackets when fabric becomes hard to get ahold of. Go on with your bunker-dwelling bad self.

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  The Future of Soul to Soul and other Sound Systems We Loved and Then Which Disappeared Or Became Somewhat Uninteresting (is Outside the Scope of These Notes)

  Missing on the ad for the wunnerful-wunnerful reading experience Trunk Stories is the bit about the super limited edition available to the smart, the $7-rich, the quick off the mark. What's limited about it? Is it, like the future Small Beer (ooh, another ad for the “sponsor” of this paper thingy, ooh) limited editions on lovely paper with illos and all kinds of “special” things? Is it signed by the author and illustrator? No. But, if you're really smart you'll ask the editor/creator Mr. William Smith to sign it for you. Each of the numbered and limited-to-one-hundred-copies of the zine has a hand-made pop-up in the center which will provide you with hours of amusement and no small amount of hours of how-did-he-do-that-type wonder. We are serious. We might sell some of these on our website or perhaps we will hoard them.

  The Small Beer limited editions of Kelly Link's second collection and Maureen McHugh's debut collection will be fun and no doubt will also take up more time than even we expect. They are due in May and June. Golly.

  In the new year we'll be heading up to a printer in Vermont to talk about paper and cloth—no leatherbound editions here, yay! (unless we use something like that facon mentioned by the ever so sharp and wise Aunt Gwenda). We'll get to use the types of materials we always want to but can't afford to use for the trade editions. (Hand-pressed Italian paper? Cloth made from Spanish cotton harvested by well-paid farmers only working on warm but breezy days? Ink milked from wild squids whose pay is donated to the Nature Conservancy?) We'll also be seeing if we can get some of the illustrations letterpress printed. This is probably silly and beyond what can be done even for one hundred dollar books—we'll know soon.

  Six books next year, Whoopee! Editing The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. Looking for editing, designing, teaching, and/or writing work. [See our non-existent ad in the trade mags.]

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  Nicholas

  Mark Rich

  Joy of the world. It begins here, beside the stately pines (rushing down with that cold, early December air comes the scent of old things, the needles, the oak leaves with the look of the skin of a hundred-year-old still alive by the grace of dark tea and rye bread) where only I walk.

  This, Nicholas thinks to himself. The world will come to its ruin behind the steering column of the four-wheeled car, adrift in a flat landscape with painted lines leading far from these oak leaves on this sidewalk. “I can turn the wheel atop the steering column,” says the man knocking at the iron gates. “I can turn it quite well.” And he is let in. The policeman in his 1950s-revival black and white sedan sails by and then waits at the corner, stopping and ticketing no one for missing the oak leaves on the sidewalk. Not even the policeman knows these oak leaves. Ride by on your chariots, multitudinous asphaltophiliacs. Carried on tires. Rubber being an insulator. Electricity of life cannot pass that barrier.

  Nicholas carries two cloth bags, both marked with the faded logo of the food co-op, although where he walks from now is the grocery store north of the nunnery, past these pines, past these oak leaves, past this street where numbed folks ride by, halfway to living death, upon spring-cushioned and double-axled couches.

  No, he thinks, it begins not here on this sidewalk, the joy, but back in the store, standing in line while the overburdened clerk helped the woman before him, the stately lady who shed no pine needles and who said, “Plastic,” when asked if she wanted plastic or paper. The clerk, working her eighth hour standing in one place, started putting the groceries in a paper bag. “I said I wanted plastic,” said the woman, who then stood there, stock still, while the clerk then put the groceries in a plastic bag.

  The lady stood there, shedding not a needle and not an oak leaf, no cool air coming down from her treetops, and why did I think she was a stately graying woman, Nicholas thinks.

  Nicholas bagged his own two cloth bags: the box of Point beer, in one; and the meat and cheese, bread, green tea, can of tomato paste, and box of mushrooms, in the other. What a strange shopping trip to the grocery store, thinks Nicholas. I bought four kinds of meats, and I do not even always buy meat. Sliced corned beef, since a life needs some corned beef in it, even a life that has been sometimes of the vegetables-only variety. A slab of bacon from a local smoke shop. Sealed, so it will keep. Some smoked sausages, from the same shop, also sealed, so they will also keep. A package of lamb cut up for stew. Even though he just made a stew with lamb two days before, he rarely sees the lamb stew meat. So he bought it. Four kinds of meat: what a rarity. On top of that he bought three kinds of bread. Sourdough rolls form California: ridiculous. Greek b
read, not from Greece. Two packages of frozen bagels from out East. This is Wisconsin. Some local bakery should have established its name across the country by now for its fine Polish rye bread. Does anyone in town make a fine Polish rye bread? The last he remembers came from Chicago.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  The man next to him at the deli counter, volunteering: “She's next,” meaning Nicholas standing there with his long, curling hair, in his dark leather jacket, still zipped tight from having walked in from the cold. The man corrected his pronoun, hearing Nick's voice ordering corned beef, half-pound, thank you. Still these mistakes, more than thirty years after the long-hair season of the children's revolution. Making the sex call by length of hair. Another man driving by, blind to the oak leaves on the sidewalks. Or that balding Mr. Pippin at the art opening, walking up to Nicholas and Nell and protesting, “I can't decide which of you has the more beautiful hair,” and then returning, only minutes later, to Nick, with eyes wide, saying, “I've decided. It's you.” Ah, Mr. Pippin, who is in an uneven groove with respect to the world. Easily offended, that man is, Nicholas thinks. Prickly Mr. Pippin. May our hair smooth over our rough spots.

  It may have been that moment, in the cashier's line, when light bathed the world. Nicholas stood there, feeling as conspicuous as ever in the dark leather jacket, a jacket that by itself intimidated weak souls who saw things within its dark folds Nicholas never carries. Between the flayed cow at the slaughterhouse and the man carrying his thirty-five dollars of groceries and beer down the street, past the pines: there lies the shadow. Is this not true, old skin and bones Eliot? In that moment, in the cashier's line, he felt the wideness and tallness of life in the world. He amazed himself, watching the clerk leave her station to tend to that pillar of useless plastic-please ladyness, the woman who could not help herself. It amazes him he lacked an ounce of impatience, in that moment. He stood and admired the bustling world. He helped out the bustling world by bagging his own groceries when his time came: you help where you can. Nicholas believes this. You help where you can. The world may not help you. Help, and help yourself. All these motions of the universe are for you, dear lady in the stiff jacket and imprisoned mind. Please carry them out, these motions, with you to your car, in that plastic bag. Then leave the plastic bag at home, and leave it behind next time, because the store might give you a nickel for the effort of bringing it back. Almost as bad as helping bag your own food.

  It is already yours, after all. You have paid, and have accepted the receipt, and here you still have the clerk act as though the food is still owned by her employer.

  Nicholas grows enraged at this in an amused way, without being truly mad at anything or anyone. Everyone has been a stiff, upright lady, awaiting service, at some time. That lady may even have worked the store aisles herself, in a decade gone by. An unlikely thought, but possible. Strange things happen to people, ironing them flat before they can be properly laid out flat. They forget who they are. Or discover something else to be, that involves forgetting who they were.

  Nicholas stood there waiting for the clerk to return from her bagging duty. That may have been the moment. He minded this not at all, was perfectly happy, and ignored the others in line behind him: they had bottles of Impatience out, ready to spray on their necks for a bit of end-of-shopping cologne. They could watch him through the mists of the scented spray as he stood there smiling. All he wanted to do at the moment was stand there smiling. He figured he might as well do what he wanted to do.

  Or before that, as he walked down Portage Street past the building that once held a soda-pop company, when he met Jake, the mailman: a tall spindle of a man Nicholas knows as a fellow walker on the mostly empty sidewalks and, too, as one of the likewise few souls who would sit around an open-mike evening, enjoying local players and singers. “Nicholas! A Merry Christmas to you if I don't see you before,” came the voice from across Portage Street. When Nicholas looked up to see Jake, he emerged from his walking reverie and crossed the street.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  "I haven't been out as much,” Jake said, standing at the place where the sidewalk met the walk up to a front door. “I've been on the wagon. Haven't been drinking for six months. I was starting to have a little bit too much fun. Six months, in January. That doesn't mean I can't get off the wagon now and then, like for Lizzie's birthday. Had to go out for Lizzie's birthday."

  Merriment, at drink and at music. Strange, the concourse of minds, and then the falling apart of relations that seem fixed, because they are so simple. Leaves on sidewalks, iced snow on sidewalks: blow away, melt away. Endings. A face not to be seen in smoky bars, for some time. A man reclaiming something for himself, putting a simple thing together again that had failed and fallen apart.

  These thoughts still with him, now, in the night, in the pew at the Episcopal church, through whose doors he passed only once before, to shop for old things at a rummage sale. Here now for Haydn, not for church; and only here in the church, so late in the day, does it strike him. It is St. Nicholas’ Day. The church is putting on the mass by Haydn Nicholas has never heard, nor heard of. A Mass in Honor of St. Nicholas: kyrie, gloria, credo, sanctus, benedictus, agnus dei, the common Latin of the mass-singer, pronounced without rolled liquid consonants. Agreeable voices in the choir, dissonant string players valiantly hoping for consonance against their own inadequacies. The music rolls to its starts and finishes, with the never uncertain grandness of Haydn throughout, in its weight, in its fleeting shapes. A church that holds St. Nicholas as its central saint, founded on the saint's day. It is the day.

  We came for the music, says Nicholas to the vaulted ceiling. Here, in the open chamber ribbed like the whale. Thank the uncaring stars I am not a saint nor saintly, he says, for if I dwelled in joy how would I know it, for what it is. How could it arrive, being there, always. Glorious, the fact music ends. Haydn, messenger from a time when neither mass nor symphony sought grandeur through massive occupancy of clock-time. Twenty minutes of evocation and memory. Notes, voices, flat violins.

  My day, without really being my day: strange not to think of it before, he thinks. The fact before your face, the fact not seen by eyes.

  Off with Nell for a beer, then.

  Cold air over snow-crusted sidewalks.

  Beer, companionship: of the world.

  Night.

  Simple.

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  gray's boadicea: unlikely patron saints, no. 4

  Amy Sisson

  so 1 day gray told me i could come along on 1 of his midnight runs, he wanted 2 show me something. i didn't know what he wanted but i was glad & i knew the other girls would b jealous if they found out. anyway me & gray had already been IMing 4 a few weeks but in school he didn't act like he knew who i was & maybe he didn't. sometimes people aren't who u think they r. anyway he asked if i could sneak out at night & i said sure my mom never wakes up after she's gone 2 bed.

  gray had a motorbike, not a real big 1 like a harley but somewhere between a dirt bike & a real motorcycle. he even had a green helmet 4 me that matched his. i rode w/my arms around his waist & thought about him & what my mom would say if she knew. she'd freak over his eyebrow ring or his long hair, which was pretty dumb considering the greaseballs she dated.

  we rode down 2 the beach near katyville. it was pretty warm being may & all but it was almost 1 in the morning so we were the only 1s there. i didn't say much b/c i got the feeling gray didn't want 2 talk. i was a little nervous at 1st, i mean i hardly knew him so he could have turned out 2 b a nutcase or something, but then he took my hand & i just kind of knew i could trust him.

  "remember in bio when we talked about endangered species?” he asked. “i'm kind of in2 all that. especially turtles, u know? u kind of looked like u were in2 it 2."

  "yeah,” i said. “that was kind of cool. i mean, not cool that they're endangered or anything but u know."

  "look, there,” he said real quiet,
pointing.

  i looked but at 1st i couldn't c anything b/c there was hardly any moonlight even. then i saw a wide track like some1 had dragged a box thru the sand. i looked at gray but he didn't say anything so i just followed the track. i can't c great in the dark, so i almost fell over it b4 i saw it. her, i mean.

  "she's nesting,” gray said real quiet. “her name's boadicea. i found her 3 years ago. i came out here 1 night after a fight w/my old man & i found her track & followed it & there she was. i didn't know what she was doing at 1st, but then these 2 college students came riding up in a jeep & told me she was nesting. the students dug up the eggs when she was done & took them back 2 their lab 2 make sure they hatch. if they leave them, dogs dig them up & people walk on them or seagulls eat them. & even the few that hatch, they have 2 make a run 4 the water & most of them get picked off by seagulls. anyway, they said i could name her since i found her 1st so i named her boadicea. c that big gash in her shell? they told me she must have got hit by a boat propeller. i figured she was like an old battle-scarred warrior queen, & that's who boadicea was."

  that was more than i'd ever heard him say all at once. while he talked he stroked the turtle's shell. the poor thing looked exhausted. she'd scrape the sand w/her flippers 4 a few seconds & then just lie there again w/out moving. but she didn't seem scared of us.

  "anyhow, the students, they try 2 find the turtles when they lay but sometimes they miss a couple. that's no good—they miss 1 turtle & that's like 100 babies that won't hatch, or a few that hatch but only live a few hours. it's not their fault, the college students i mean. they can't b everywhere at once so i try 2 help them a little."

  we backed away & sat down, close enough 2 watch boadicea but far enough 2 give her some privacy.

  "where'd u get the name gray?” i asked.

  "my real name's gary,” he said. “but i didn't think it fit. i think there's a lot more gray in the world than black & white, u know?"