aoife's kiss
8th Anniversary Issue
June 2009
Welcome to the 8th Anniversary of Aoife's Kiss. There have been some changes. The most significant change is that there is no longer a separate online issue of the magazine. It's all print now--a fine perfect-bound magazine full of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories and poems and illustrations.
However, Aoife's Kiss will retain an online presence. Below you will find some stories and poems that appear in the print issue. Naturally, these are intended to induce you to buy a copy of the magazine or, better yet, to subscribe. They are also intended to help ease your hunger for good stories and poems online, so . . . welcome back.
Here's the lineup online:
"Changelings," a short story by Melissa Mead
"the endgame sky," a poem by s.c. virtes
"Fortunes Told," a poem by Shelly Bryant
"The Crisis Reversed," by Jason Palmer
Table of Contents for the June 2009 Aoife's Kiss
Ordering link for Aoife's Kiss
The cover art for the print magazine and the door art for the online magazine is "Abstract with Face III" by Eric M. Clark.
As always, you are welcome to post comments on our messageboard, and/or to e-mail me personally at aoifeskiss at yahoo dot com.
Bon reading appetit!
Tyree Campbell
Managing Editor
Sam's Dot Publishing
Changelings
By Melissa Mead
The woodcutter and his wife didn't recognize the changelings at first. The creatures looked just like their own children, down to the freckles across Gretel's nose and the tiny scar on Hansel's forehead.
"Only . . . Hansel's fingers were never so long and crooked," said the mother. "His nails were never so sharp. And Gretel's teeth never looked so pointed."
The woodcutter studied the children, sleeping curled together on the bed.
They've been sick for a long time, Marta," he said at last. "They've gotten thin-but now that the fever's broken they'll get their appetites back, and be their old lively selves in no time."
He was right about one thing. The creatures woke ravenous, greedy for anything that could be remotely called food. All the cakes and fruit that the neighbors had brought vanished within an hour. Within a day, they'd eaten all the bread, meat and milk in the house. The next day they'd found the cellar and devoured all the store of cheeses. By the end of the week the wretched things were still pale and scrawny, but they'd managed to scramble onto the roof and find the eggs in the dove's nest under the eves. These they sucked dry, then crunched on the shells. Marta, frantic, called up to them from below.
"Don't be afraid! I'll get you down. Just sit still."
Hours later the woodcutter came home to find his wife sobbing hysterically and the wretched wraiths still scrabbling about on the roof, pausing to chew on bits of thatch and spit them out again.
“They’re just children, Conrad. I don’t know how they got up there…it's impossible!” She clung to her incredulous husband’s arm, while two fierce tiny faces grinned down from the roof.
“Unnatural, more like,” croaked a voice from behind them. They turned to see an old woman sitting on the rain barrel, watching the ravenous creatures with interest. Beneath her hood, dark eyes glittered in a shadowed face.
“My children are not unnatural!”
“No doubt. But these aren’t your children.”
“They look like our children,” the woodcutter protested.
“They’re changelings,” the old woman pronounced. She creaked to a standing position, leaning on her cane, and hobbled to stare up at the roof. The children shied away from her, and hissed. When she poked at them, Hansel sank his teeth into the end of the stick.
“Changelings, all right.” The old woman nodded sagely. “Older ones, too. And two at once…that’s a first for me, and I’ve seen a lot of ‘em.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Marta looked pleadingly at the stranger. “Can you tell us what’s happened to our children?”
“First of all, I told you, these aren’t your children. They’re Faerie wights, or maybe even logs, enchanted to look and act alive. “Your own children will be in Faerie by now.”
“What will happen to them?”
The old woman shrugged. “Some are pampered and cosseted, I hear. Others are made servants of. I suspect they’re well fed, at least. Others…” She shook her head. “Well, if you’re going to do anything, you’d best do it quickly. The Faerie hold on mortal children gets stronger by the minute. If you ever want to see yours again, you'll have to get rid of these monsters first.”
“What should we do?”
“I’m no Mother of Charity. I know more about changelings than anyone living, and I don’t give away my secrets for free.” She began to stump off into the woods.
“But…” the woodcutter protested.
“What could we give you?” Marta interrupted.
The hooded figure paused.
“Sugar.” Wet smacking sounds came from the depths of the hood. “Sugar, honey, molasses…enough to fill a house, and some over. All the sweets you can find. If this turns out as difficult as I expect it will, we’ll need every grain.”
“But the childr…changelings…have eaten everything in the house!” Marta looked ready to cry.
The hag shrugged. “That’s your affair.”
“We could call the wight-hunters,” Conrad remarked. “They’d have silver arrows, or whatever they use on unseelie monsters.”
The old woman froze, turned, and looked toward the roof, where the changelings growled and wrestled like a pair of puppies.
“I never could resist a challenge,” she said. “Send your man to town, to get whatever sweets he can. Meanwhile, I’ll show you some of the simpler tricks.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“First off, try the basics.” The old woman turned to Conrad. “Take them both with you, on your way to town, and leave them in the woods. I doubt you could just lose them, but it can’t hurt to try.”
“We’d have to get them down first…” Conrad began, but at one look from the strange visitor, the changelings scrabbled to the ground and huddled at her feet.
“How did you do that? Are you sure you can’t just take them yourself?”
The old woman, busy weaving a rope of vines and what looked like strands of her own hair, didn’t reply. When she was finished, she went to each changeling and knotted a loop of cord around one skinny wrist. The creatures never moved. When she handed the rope to Conrad, however, the changelings circled him, sniffing and baring their teeth. Conrad edged backward.
“Afraid of the little tykes?” the old woman cackled. “They won’t harm anyone while the cord’s on them. Get along, now-your children can’t wait forever.”
Conrad kissed his wife and left, with the leashed changelings pulling and tugging behind him. “Hansel” watched a white pigeon fly back to its ruined nest, and smacked his lips. Marta shuddered.
“Eggs,” said the old woman. “And beer.”
“What?”
“Eggs. And beer,” the crone repeated slowly, as though to a stupid child. “Borrow some from your neighbors. We’ll need both come morning, I’m sure.”
Sure enough, at first light the changelings came scrabbling at the cottage door. Each one still had a loop of vine around one scrawny wrist, and gnawing on it had stained their teeth green.
“Now what do we do?” Marta looked up from a mat by the hearth. The crone, lounging in the depths of Marta and Conrad’s featherbed, snorted and sat up.
“What? Oh . . . back already, are they? Do like I told you-break the eggs and boil beer in the shells. They’ll declare they’ve never seen such a thing in a hundred years, and vanish. Don’t waste those eggs! I like them fried, and mind you don’t break the yolks.”
Swallowing her protests, Marta cracked two eggs into an earthenware bowl. She poured beer into the shells, propped each shell in a framework of twigs, and lit the twigs. When the precariously balanced eggshells began to steam, she opened the door and hurried to stir the eggs from behind the safety of the table.
The changelings rushed toward the hearth, and then stopped, sniffing. Marta and the wisewoman froze. Each changeling seized a beer-filled eggshell. . .
. . . swallowed down the whole thing, belched, and came sniffing toward Marta. Marta flattened herself against the wall, holding the bowl above her head. The changelings clawed at her stockings.
“Well,” rasped the crone, “that didn’t work. You could try . . . You devils! Those are MY eggs!”
Hansel stopped trying to climb Marta’s leg, and kicked her in the shin instead. Marta dropped the bowl, splattering both changelings with egg. They lapped it up before a drop had time to hit the floor. Next, the creatures drained the rest of the beer bottles, staggered about for a few moments, and collapsed in a snoring heap.
They were still snoring when Conrad came home-aching, exhausted, and laden with jugs of honey and bags of dried fruit and other sweets.
“Oh. They’re back.” He began piling sacks on the table. “Stuff’s a little old, but there’s plenty of it. Fair’s just ending, and when folks heard what was happening, they gave me their leavings.”
The old woman nibbled a dry cake. Her nose wrinkled. “It’ll have to do,” she said.
Under her direction, the woodcutter and his wife found an abandoned charcoal-burner’s hut and set about transforming it. Slices of dried apple dangled from the roof. Day-old gingerbread men danced along the walls. Daubs of honey caught the last rays of sunlight, bathing the rickety structure in a sugary golden glow. Inside, they set up a plank table and piled it with slightly stale cakes, raisins and crumbling barley sugar. Their benefactor sniffed each item, nibbled, tasted, and sighed.
“Now,” she said, “we wait outside.”
They waited for hours, joints stiffening, fingers chilled. Marta dozed on Conrad’s shoulder, and jerked awake when the old woman whispered “There!”
The changelings came lurching along the path to the hut, sniffing like underfed hounds. They caught sight of the dangling fruit and rushed forward, ignoring the humans in the underbrush. They gnawed their way along the walls until they reached the door, and then rushed inside.
“Now!” Faster than Marta would have thought possible, the old woman bolted forward and slammed the door.
“Give me the torch!” In the flickering light, her gnarled face looked nothing short of demonic.
“What?” Conrad and Marta recoiled in horror.
“Burn the hut! Now, while the changelings are distracted.” When the pair still hesitated, she wrenched the torch from Conrad’s grip and flung it into the thatch. It kindled at once, filling the clearing with red light and the stink of burnt sugar.
“But they’re children!” Marta shrieked.
“Your own children will be waiting for you at home,” the old woman snapped. “The Fair Folk will abandon them there and come to rescue their young. Get out of here before they arrive!”
The woodcutter and his wife stumbled blindly along the path toward home. Predawn light began to filter through the trees. Exhausted, Marta fell behind. A shriek tore through the forest.
“Gretel!” Marta called. “Conrad, our baby. . .” But Conrad was too far ahead. Marta turned and rushed back to the clearing.
The hut was a pile of glowing embers. Three bulky shapes skulked away from it, lumbering toward the forest. As Marta watched, one reached out a scrawny arm and pinched its companion. Someone screamed, high and piercing.
“Gretel?” Marta ran forward. All three specters turned and flung themselves on her, alarmingly solid and heavy. Something bit her arm. Something else clawed her leg. Marta wrapped her arms around a wriggling, kicking body, and held on.
“Let go!” bellowed a deep voice. “Curse you, Peg Powler-you said the humans would be gone!”
“If you two hadn’t been drunk . . .” The voice stopped short. Marta stared. The creature in her arms looked like Hansel-but he was swearing like a demon in a tub of holy water. And he was swearing at the “wisewoman.” Sacks lay at their feet, spilling cakes and candies. “Gretel” shrieked and wailed. Only the old woman’s grip on her arm kept her from bolting into the forest. The crone turned to Marta with a contorted attempt at a smile.
“Marta, my dear. If you could just let go of my boy, there? We were just on our way to your house when . . .”
“Your boy?” Marta gripped the male changeling until it yelped. “What about my children? Where are Hansel and Gretel?”
“Your children. Ah. Yes. We were just cleaning up this mess before bringing them back to you. Sugar attracts ants, you see, and . . .”
“Where are my children?” Marta shook the changeling until its pointed teeth clicked together. It had Hansel’s cherubic face, but an ogre’s voice.
“Cave.” it grunted. “Not hurt; we swore off Human-ask Peg. Go fetch ‘em, Fionn.”
The female changeling looked to the old woman for confirmation, then scrabbled off. Marta bound her captive’s wrist to hers with the silver chain Conrad had given her at their wedding. Changeling and old woman both groaned.
“You’ll go free when I have both my babies back safe, not before,” Marta snapped. “Now, what did the other one mean about “Swore off human?”
“We’re Drowners.” A grin spread over Peg’s green-tinged face at Marta’s involuntary start. “Or were. Got tired of living in swamps, waiting for careless travelers.”
“Thought we’d join the Seelie,” the changeling growled. “Arrogant sons of. . .”
“They wanted nothing to do with us,” Peg Powler interrupted. “But they laid a geas on us all the same. We can’t eat human flesh now. Makes us sick.”
“But nothing else is that sweet,” the changeling groaned. “Except the fine sugar you humans make. That’s all we wanted. Peg would’ve brought your younglings back, once we were safe away. Too tempting, having them around.”
“See?” The old woman pointed. “There they are, safe and sound.”
Marta looked. The female changeling crept through the woods, holding a toddler by each hand.
“Gretel! Hansel! Are you hurt?” Marta dropped the chain and scooped her children up in her arms. The male changeling bolted for the woods, but the female-Fionn- lingered, watching the scene with a look that, on a less sinister face, Marta would have called wistful.
“They ain’t hurt,” she rasped. “Near fell in the river, but I put the Gift on ‘em.”
Peg Powler froze halfway to the safety of the trees. “You did what?”
“They can’t drown now,” the changeling explained to Marta. “Boiling water won’t hurt them, nor ice neither.”
“I . . . thank you.”
Marta had meant to send wight-hunters after the trio the instant she got home. Now she hesitated.
“Why did you do that?”
“You didn’t want to burn us. You said “Stop.” The creature edged toward the woods.
“Wait,” said Marta.
Fionn stopped. Peg Powler froze. Marta saw the other changeling crouched in the shadows of the trees.
“Take your sweets. You did keep my children safe.”
Fionn’s face lit in a smile. The wights gathered up their sacks and crept into the forest. Marta watched the misshapen family retreat until Hansel whimpered, calling her back to herself. She sighed, hoisted her children into a more secure carrying position, and started for home.
the endgame sky
by s.c.virtes
all roads lead to where
the sky-filling red sun
beats down without mercy
where clouds unleash forces
like the angry memory
of superheated rain ...
things slither in the pools
of iron, the cracks of the road,
creatures distantly related
to men, but no more human
than the beings in starships
who come here for orbital
picnics, watching their once
proud home world
boil away.
Fortunes Told
by Shelly Bryant
a limb extended
leaf-lines read
a life shortened
brought to violent end
ash wood irresistible
to sorcerers in need of wands
the line carries on
in lives of offspring
dotting the forest
they likewise
lusted after
for hardwood floors
and the bats by pros preferred
The Crisis Reversed
by Jason Palmer
Jesse clicked off the television. Nothing on the news but the same wobbly home videos of rockets climbing the suburban skies, with the vague suggestion that people watch their neighbors.
Jesse gazed out his window at the corkscrew contrails like tall ivy against the darkling horizon, panning his gaze down the hill, stopping at the big, clean house with the low-water garden. The Hunts.
He sipped coffee while the brown distance fractioned away the sun, and at dark he went upstairs to his telescope.
From his angle up the hill, Jesse was at an ideal angle to see through the little glowing porthole of the Hunts’ garage.
Inside, Mr. Hunt had opened the hood of his Jaguar and begun to fiddle around underneath. The raised hood blocked the view of Hunt’s hands, but the forearms and elbows were slimed with black engine phlegm, and the piano-wire muscles of his fingers and arms kept plucking away.
After two hours, he removed the hood.
Jesse stretched his back, took a sip of cold coffee, and switched to binoculars for a while. He took notes on a Kwik Kopy memo pad without looking at what he wrote. Now ripping apart engine wholesale. Scrapping? Tossing pieces in a corner.
A door opened at the back of the garage. Mrs. Hunt appeared in nightclothes. She did not speak; instead, she put the first knuckle of her right hand against her forehead and raised her index finger. She wiggled the finger as though waving goodbye to a tiny baby.
Jesse thought, we got a live one here. He thought of calling someone immediately, didn’t know exactly who, and kept watching.
He gave a little jump when Mr. Hunt screamed and threw a distributor against the wall. It seemed to be a steam-letting yell provoked by something intolerant his wife had said to him. Jesse heard it very clearly. Yet instead of retreating in the face of the man’s wrath, his wife and their two young children poured into the garage and surrounded him with a great big family hug.
Thoughts of calling the authorities retreated in Jesse’s mind. But he would not forget that finger thing.
Shortly after midnight, Mr. Hunt cut himself. His elbow flew up like a triphammer and set a hanging lightbulb swinging. He pinched the cut on his finger, watching the blood move down his wrist and forearm.
Jesse wrote, Blood: red.
Hunt’s pace quickened, and Jesse didn’t think the next cut could be too far off, especially with the white-knuckled prying Hunt did when he couldn’t figure out how to pull something off.
Desperate?
Jesse did not recall falling asleep. He only knew that he woke up, his telescope knocked over and his cheekbone bruising where he leaned against the wall. The three-quarter moon had risen and lunar light poured into the room. For a moment Jesse forgot that the world was in crisis.
A radio on an end table played the national anthem. It seemed very loud, and Jesse got up irritably to turn it off. Instead he scrolled across the dial, FM then AM, his dialing finger began to tremble a little. The national anthem played on every station.
Ah, except one.
“This,” said the toneless radio voice, “is the emergency broadcast system.”
In that moment the situation began to feel a little more normal, one to which his movie-fed imagination was accustomed. A not-quite-pleasurable tingle flitted through him like a moth.
“The United States Air Force is attempting to block communications signals of unknown origin. The jamming signal will affect electronic devices such as garage door openers and other remote controls, telephones, and television, among others. Military communications centers will continue jamming for forty-eight hours beginning at 1:00AM mountain time. Please remain at home and indoors to await further instructions. This is the emergency broadcast system. The United States Air-“
Jesse clicked the radio off.
He stood in the quiet flicking his toes inside his slippers. Alone with the Hunts for the next forty-five hours.
It was 4:00am.
Jesse returned to his telescope. A remarkable change had taken place since he’d fallen asleep. Mr. Hunt’s car was gone except for the axles, the frame, and the wheels. It was nothing more than a platform. In place of the engine and the chassis were a thin spiderweb of metal wires and the beginnings of a diamond-shaped framework Jesse did not recognize.
Yet he had an idea what Mr. Hunt was building.
Jesse felt cheated — so close but so powerless. Who would believe him? He couldn’t photograph with his telescope.
Hunt’s hands flew. The fingers moved with greater certainty and dexterity than before: now, he was making something he knew, unlike the car he’d taken apart.
In the lefthand drawer of Jesse’s desk was a gluey-smelling tablet of graph paper, a slide rule, and a spill of mechanical pencils. He took them out. He got so excited that he bumped his eye against the telescope when he went to look again. Blinking, he began to sketch.
As his sketch grew, he annotated it with rough dimensions and footnotes. Then he returned to the telescope. Then the pad.
Jesse no longer felt tired.
A cool draft blew through the house from a pair of open windows, and somewhere on the block, a radio blared a staticky national anthem.
An hour passed, and Jesse’s non-telescope eye, the one he kept shut, began to fatigue. He went into his bedroom for a sleep mask which he slanted over his head like a eyepatch. He sketched and watched and sketched as Hunt built his homemade device.
At some point, Hunt had thrown the tarp back from an arc welder and wheeled it over to his work station. He began cutting convoluted joints and waffles of rebar, and Jesse sketched each one in perspective, magnifying certain bits of fine detail with call-out boxes. He eventually ran to his office for the computer. While Hunt produced, Jesse recreated the components in his Computer Aided Drafting program.
The Hunts had moved downhill from the wrong guy.
When Hunt grew tired, Jesse got tired with him. Around seven a.m., Hunt slowed down and started wiping at his eyes as he worked. He looked exhausted. Jesse began doing the same thing. They went on like that for a little while, and Jesse was relieved when Hunt went into the house for a break. He slumped over his desk.
The sun was warm when Jesse woke again. He heard birds and even a few distant cars, but nothing else. It was nine thirty, and he went downstairs to make coffee but didn’t get past the couch. Jesse intended to sit a moment, stretched out, and slept.
About an hour passed.
Jesse tried to figure out what had awakened him. Something had. He had a sense of urgency from a half-remembered half-dream.
The doorbell had been ringing.
He didn’t worry about who it was, just crossed the living room and opened the door. He expected a confused neighbor or someone telling him to repent. But when Jesse opened the door, it took all his presence of mind not to slam it shut again.
It was the Hunt’s little girl, green-eyed and auburn-haired and dressed in cute little jeans and a pink t-shirt. The green ribbon in her hair matched her eyes.
She held out an envelope.
“Mister,” she said, “Is this yours? My mom thinks the mailman gave us your letter by accident.” She never took her eyes off his face.
Jesse took the envelope, also not taking his eyes from the girl’s except to check the name on the mailing address.
“Yes, that’s me,” he said, and smiled. The girl did not smile back. Instead, she just stood there as if expecting a tip or something. Maybe she wanted a cookie. Maybe she wanted whatever they ate where she was going back to. The silence became awkward. Just when Jesse was opening his mouth to say “thank you,” the little girl turned and walked away, the serious expression still on her little face.
Jesse closed the door and went inside. He leaned against the wall, thinking. Everything about the encounter had been wrong. The eyes, the timing. The little girl had looked at him with complete unselfconsciousness when a normal girl would have broken her gaze. She spoke and stopped speaking and left at exactly the wrong moments, talking over him or walking away when he was about to say something. Jesse decided something about the way he felt – he felt subtly but certainly threatened.
We know, the girl’s presence seemed to say. We know where you are. We are very close to you.
Or maybe his utility bill had ended up in the wrong mailbox.
Jesse could not see through Hunt’s garage window with the sun up. Not that it mattered a great deal; last Jesse had seen, Hunt had just begun a fairly repetitive stage of hull construction, mass-producing the same few parts and layering them on.
Jesse went over his computer drafted models of Hunt’s components, cataloguing and classifying them with little notes and educated guesses about what they did.
The most amazing part was the way Hunt thought. It was like following along with some bizarre calligrapher who made the dot before the “i” and the tail before the “Q”. Hunt’s inside-out way of thinking was far more damning than his construction of a machine that any mechanical engineer could follow.
As night came on, Jesse grew eager and excited. He’d gotten a little stir crazy during a day cooped up in the house with no TV and nothing to do. He watched the lights come on in town and the fresh ivy contrails lengthen through the atmosphere and turn into shooting stars high above.
Then Hunt turned on the light in his garage, and Jesse returned to his work station.
He had expected to find the window covered up with a blanket or a piece of cardboard, something to prevent him seeing in. But when he thought about it, not covering up the peepshow made the most sense.
If the Hunts were at least as smart as he was, they would guess the truth: that it was sheer curiosity (and maybe a shred of doubt) keeping Jesse from yelling bloody murder in the streets. As a theory, this was thin, but it was the only thing that made sense.
As Jesse waited for Mr. Hunt to go to work on his now greatly enlarged contraption, he caught movement above the garage. Someone passed by a lit second-storey window. Probably Mrs. Hunt, from the fleeting outline, but-
Jesse would have hesitated to move the perfectly focused telescope, but now he did it compulsively. He adjusted the azimuth and brought things into crystal focus with two fine-adjustment knobs. Then he saw her. All of her.
Jesse swallowed. His mouth felt dry. Somewhere out of sight of the second-storey window a television had begun to flicker. A small chandelier showed Jesse the Hunts’ dining room table, a corner of a bedroom, and Mrs. Hunt, naked and stunning.
Mrs. Hunt wasn’t heart-stopping, but she was good. She stopped a moment in full profile in front of the window. Jesse had not seen her do this before. She walked into the bedroom and laid on her hip and elbow, beginning to follow along with a workout tape.
Jesse zoomed in on her, quickly, not expecting to linger. Yet he scanned every inch of her wild new country. He thought deliciously about how she was so much better than a beauty queen or a bouncing teenage girl. She was the girl next door.
The workout tape went on and on, filled with varied and enticing exercises meant to perfect the figure Jesse saw. He watched, and his mind hummed, and he forgot everything else. Almost.
What ended Jesse’s terminal hard-on was a progression of primitive thought. On the one hand he felt that the Hunts would soon be leaving the planet in a rocket. Another part, optimistic and forgetful, hoped that he would someday see more of Mrs. Hunt, much more, and without a telescope. The combination of these thoughts left his primitive brain cold. Jealous. Upset.
It occurred to Jesse that the whole display was unprecedented, easy, too-good-to-be-true. Out of a sudden mean-feeling curiosity, he aimed the telescope back at the garage.
At last glance, Mr. Hunt had been building some sort of complex module at the workbench. Now the module had disappeared into the larger construct. Hunt had completed the module, probably some advanced navigation or stabilization device, and was installing it. Jesse would never see this step again.
He cursed, still wanting to look back at Mrs. Hunt in spite of himself. Yet when he glanced that way, the window had gone dark.
Jesse returned to his telescope and his pad of graph paper, brooding.
Yet his sense of injury was soon satisfied when he happened to see something that Mr. Hunt did not. As Hunt tightened something deep inside his machine, buried in it up to his head and shoulders, the vibrations sent a small round metal object to the edge of a piece of plating. A few more vibrations sent it to the floor, where it rolled in an arc beneath a tool shelf.
But it seemed unimportant, and he sighed.
Jesse checked the time on the clock radio: twenty-nine hours until communications began again. In his heart, he compromised, deciding that Hunt had exactly that long to take care of his business. The first time Jesse picked up his phone and heard a dialtone, he would call the police.
Jesse and Mr. Hunt worked together through another night. Jesse watched with the strange knowledge that Hunt probably knew he was watching, but he got used to it. Hunt had moved on from heavy work to fine crafting, mostly at his workbench, where he sat on a stool and soldered little bits that he placed with care into panels in the sides of his vehicle.
Jesse might have a working model, yet.
At one point, Mrs. Hunt entered the garage from the kitchen door. Jesse watched her a touch vengefully, but she surprised him. She got her husband’s attention by putting her knuckle against her forehead and waggling the finger. Hunt looked up at her, and she did something very strange. It filled Jesse with the oddest feeling.
Mrs. Hunt opened her mouth as wide as it would go, peeling back her lips for just an instant like a monkey making a silent shout. She could not have formed words or even syllables in that way, and yet she tilted her head back to open her throat. Something hummed ever so faintly in Jesse’s eardrums, tightened his scalp, and he suspected that she made some high-frequency sound he couldn’t hear. Like a dog whistle, maybe.
She left immediately after, whirled away emotionally, and it had an effect on Mr. Hunt. He watched the spot where she’d been for a moment, then turned his gaze up ominously to the ceiling as though seeing the starry sky.
Hunt began working double-time on his project. His fingers moved like a piano player’s, and now and again his fingers slipped. He’d press two pieces together, trying to set them, and they’d slide past each other and skitter across the floor. He cut himself again, even burned himself with the soldering iron.
Damnedest thing, Jesse actually felt a little sorry for him. When the little round piece had gone rolling under the tool chest without Hunt’s seeing, Jesse remembered thinking, “That’s one for America.” He couldn’t remember exactly why.
The craft had meanwhile begun to take on a quite complete look. It appeared more rounded, shielded even, and Hunt now did most of his work by opening panels and connecting male and female ports and wires on finished components. He blazed away at his work bench. He sweated like a horse.
But that’s what you got when you lied to people about who you were and then had to make a run for it.
But why did he have to make a run for it? Still anyone’s guess, Jesse thought, at least for another eighteen hours.
5:00am: when Hunt went inside for a breather, or maybe a pit stop, Jesse ran downstairs on concrete legs to warm up a cup of coffee. He’d been at it two nights and had to admit he felt a little fuzzy, a little nauseous, though neurotic enough to remain awake. He slopped a little extra mayonnaise on his tomato sandwich this time and brought the coffee upstairs.
As the silver sun rose, Jesse spotted Mrs. Hunt and her daughter pressing their hands to the shadowed windows and watching the sky. They appeared pale and unhappy. Twice more Mrs. Hunt made her high-frequency face at the clouds like an indoor cat tittering at birds. Jesse also got the sense that she was trying not to look at him.
Where Mr. Hunt had slowed toward daybreak the previous night, this time he persevered. He started to swipe at his eyes again, pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking himself awake. He soldered and cut metal and tweezed delicate little circuit boards together, planting them deep inside his rocket.
The sun had climbed over the eastern horizon, and as it broke free from a long gunmetal cloud, Jesse stopped sketching. He looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and pressed his fingertips into his eyes. He took a tasteless sip of ice cold coffee with grounds in it.
With the sun on the window glass, it was over. He’d never get the rest. Hunt obviously meant not to stop till he dropped.
Jesse couldn’t sleep.
They didn’t know how right they had been about keeping the peepshow going. Keeping asses in the seats had been the only thing that kept Jesse quiet. Now he felt impatient and irritable.
It occurred to him to make demands. He could demand money, he could demand favors, even favors from Mrs. Hunt. It occurred to him and nothing more. He waited as the sun made its track across the sky.
Jesse pored over his perspective drawings of the rocket. He hoped he could make some sense of it without access to the real thing, but the inside-out engine rebuffed him every time. He couldn’t let Hunt leave.
Around three p.m. (eight hours left), a feral roar erupted from Hunt’s garage. The sound of it was enough to tell Jesse that inside that house, a man was losing some apocalyptic battle, maybe losing his mind. The scream was ululating, frustrated, the release of a tortured world of impotence. What the hell was going on?
At 8:30, with four and a half hours to go, a last chip of the sun snapped below the horizon, and Jesse put his eye to his telescope.
Work had obviously been done on the craft, yet something about it still looked unfinished.
Hunt wasn’t in sight. Jesse panned around looking for him, and eventually found a sliver of his right shoe sticking out from behind the rocket. A bit of white lace lay on the floor. Jesse panned up, saw a rumpled edge of t-shirt sleeve. A twitching elbow with a mole on it.
Hunt sat slumped against the wall. Behind the rocket, perhaps to avoid being seen?
Tools lay scattered around the concrete floor. They lay in clusters: a pile of wrenches here, a screwdriver set there, two hammers, and a ratchet set. Thrown down one toolchest drawer at a time. They clangor must have been awful, and Jesse was surprised not to have heard it.
Maybe Hunt had tried to fire the rocket up and nothing happened. Maybe-
Maybe a single tiny part was…lost? Jesse raised his head in surprise. Surely it couldn’t be the little round metal one. Surely Hunt would have found that by now. It had gone right under the red toolchest. He sat less than three feet from it, if it was still down there.
After a few minutes of moping, Hunt got up and began disconsolately to work again. He banged away at the craft’s shielding – didn’t want to burn up in the atmosphere – but seemed hopeless and wandering in his work. He didn’t care anymore.
An hour later, the kitchen door opened and Mrs. Hunt once again appeared. She stood back a little this time, and ushered her little daughter inside.
She was pretty like her mother, and Hunt picked her up, cradling her against his hip. He held her and seemed to feel better, the color returning to his face and neck, and then he appeared to tell her a little story. She ran inside the house when he put her down, and he looked after her with an expression of hope and worry.
Next came his son, little more than an infant, walking unsteadily as a newborn calf. Mr. Hunt rocked him gently and told him a story about as long as the one he’d told his daughter. Jesse didn’t know how he knew the words were a story, but he knew. The little boy appeared perfectly happy throughout, and remained happy when Hunt set him down again to return to his mother like a wind-up toy.
Mrs. Hunt closed the door with a last blank look at her husband. She appeared on the verge of emotional collapse.
With twenty-five minutes to go before the world’s communications came back online, one of the year’s few lasting rains began, partially obscuring Jesse’s view. First it ticked lightly on the roof, then it pattered, then rain drops heavy as snowballs blasted into mist against the landscape. The mist waved its tentacles around, and the smell of ozone was thick enough to carry a person back to the rains of his youth.
Jesse watched in surprise as the Hunts’ garage door opened and Mr. Hunt emerged in the rain in his t-shirt and jeans, instantly skin-soaked. He looked how Jesse imagined a biblical figure would have looked on the day that Jesus died, wandering away with his shoulders weighted and his head down, wondering how it all had happened. Hunt ambled down to the edge of his driveway and watched the little river flow by in the gutter. Somewhere behind him, the kitchen door opened again.
Jesse looked up from the eyepiece and viewed them with his own eyes.
Hunt swiped a hand through his hair, taking his time, looking everywhere but back at his house where the family waited for him to do something he couldn’t possibly do. He’d tried and tried and could not make their lives go forward. His fists tightened at his sides.
Jesse’s time had come, he decided. Hunt was lost and America needed to understand his ship. If the rockets turned out to be part of a larger picture, the design could be pivotal. He’d waited too long already. Wussed out, he might have said.
Jesse opened a locked book case/bureau in his bedroom and opened the top drawer. He took out an old Glock, made sure it was loaded, and stuck it in his belt. He went into the office for his cell phone, which he put in his pocket.
He needed to nab them just as the jamming pulse ended—the exact moment that he could call and they could, what, navigate again?
Years ago he could to shoot to kill when the order was given, even when the enemy was shooting back. Certainly he could pin down the Hunts in their house until authorities arrived. They didn’t seem to have any powers that could stop him. Just a guess, but he thought it was a good one. He might have to wing someone, that’s all.
Jesse stepped into the rain. He took slow, even breaths as he walked around the block until Hunt’s figure resolved like a photograph out of the rain.
Hunt jumped and raised his hands when Jesse approached. He swiped the water uselessly from his eyes. He held out a hand to tell his wife to stay where she was, stay back.
Jesse peered at him from beneath the hood of his clear rain slicker. He stepped forward with the Glock raised, and Hunt stepped back. They watched each other.
The rain came down so hard and hot on the concrete that it felt like dust blowing around Jesse’s ankles. He moved up on Hunt until the man stopped retreating, uncertain. It dawned on Jesse that this was in fact a moment of contact between two strange worlds, and the thought made him dizzy.
Jesse was about to speak when he spotted a movement over Hunt’s shoulder. He sidestepped to see the little boy walk past his unseeing mother and begin descending the three concrete steps to the garage, carefully, the same leg forward each time.
She finally saw him and screamed. She swooped to pick him up and then fled into the darkness of the house. The little girl’s white face appeared for an instant before the door slammed shut.
Hunt still said nothing. Jesse read the despair in his eyes, the pain, and continued holding the gun on him. Then he lowered it just a hair. Nothing about Hunt’s appearance changed except the quickness of his breath. He expected to die.
Jesse looked at the dark circles beneath the other man’s eyes, remembering the feral scream he’d heard earlier, the frustration and madness it. He had a revelation.
Hunt expected to die, yes. But he expected to die one way or another, and soon. Jesse’s pistol changed nothing for him, was only stage dressing.
In Hunt’s dark eyes was a sadness that made the Glock suddenly seem very heavy and pointless.
Jesse took another step forward and poked the barrel into Hunt’s chest, part of him hoping for a reaction. When there was none, he used the pistol to move Hunt out of his way.
He walked past Hunt into the comparatively bright garage. Mrs. Hunt slowly cracked open the kitchen door, revealing a line of darkness and half of her pale face. Her husband followed Jesse at a distance, wary, ready to lunge if he tried to get into the house.
Jesse stopped in the center of the garage and put his hand on the rocket. He felt its cool reality, running his palm along it and getting its texture. He turned his gaze on Mrs. Hunt and was surprised to find that his eyes felt not reproachful but clear, transparent. Then he turned to the red toolchest, which had been skewed on its casters during a panicked search.
Jesse moved the toolchest clear of the wall.
Nestled at the base of the wall, beneath a sheen of cobweb, was the missing component. Jesse felt Hunt trying to peer around him and see what he was doing but kept his back turned.
He picked up the bit of metal, felt its weight in his hand. He turned to Hunt. He met Hunt’s eyes for a minute, leaving his hand at his side, and approached him.
Hunt didn’t move, just looked at him with a plea in his eyes — a plea to suffer alone. Jesse held out his hand and opened it, palm up.
Hunt did not see a little ball of metal.
He saw the Holy Grail. His creased brow and knotted jaw muscles smoothed like an age progression photo running in reverse. Like his daughter, he never took his eyes from Jesse’s while his hand reached out for the piece. There was gratitude in his face, and confusion.
For the first time since beginning this righteous expedition, it occurred to Jesse to be really afraid of this man. However defeated he appeared to be by his own situation, he was unlike anybody Jesse had ever met. Or anything. Jesse retreated a step. He wanted to be gone.
Yet before he could fade away into the rain again, Mrs. Hunt stepped suddenly out of the doorway and crossed half the distance between them, stopping beneath the eave that overhung the garage. Her children held onto her legs, their little clothes clinging to them like jellyfish where the rain soaked them. They presented their plain selves to him. Vanquished.
Mrs. Hunt looked her tired thanks at him.
The little girl just looked.
“Mmmuh!” said the little boy, grinning.
Mrs. Hunt gave Jesse a private, embarrassed look and went inside with her children.
Mr. Hunt watched him. He wore the bitter face of a man forced to commit atrocity. Finally he sad, “I’m so sorry.”
Jesse knew that Hunt wasn’t just talking about his little ruses. It was obvious from his tone, his face. The one known as Hunt was speaking of something much larger.
“About what?”
A silence while they watched each other across a great gulf.
“It’s not us,” said Hunt. “Please remember that. It’s them. It’s all them.”
“Where are you going?” Jesse’s voice sounded small.
Hunt stared at him for a long time, bitterness toying with his mouth and puckering his eyes. “Good luck to you,” was all he said.
At least he seemed to mean it.
Jesse just nodded. He’d begged to be told why he was being left before, and would not do it again. “To you, too.” He went home.
Jesse continued to watch through his window. He watched Hunt’s face more than his hands. He appeared grimly determined, more scared than before. His hands shook and he dropped what Jesse had given back to him twice more before getting it into place.
Hunt didn’t even bother to close the garage. It stayed open as the rain lightened and then disappeared, giving way to a swollen breeze. Hunt had less than ten minutes left before the world woke up and people came out of hiding.
For all of him, though, Jesse did not think it was the end of the jamming signal that Hunt feared. He probably needed the signal unjammed in order to get where he was going; maybe that’s how he had timed things out.
Hunt was afraid of something else.
The breeze gusted and rattled some wind chimes on Hunt’s porch. The sound was pleasant, if a little lonely, but Hunt jerked his head around like a deer that heard a twig snap in the woods. His eyes locked on the swaying flutes of the chime.
Grey clouds massed in the west and between the gusts of the monsoon breeze, an utter stillness filled everything.
Hunt hooked a rope around the front end of his former Jaguar’s frame and ran it through a pair of rings anchored in the garage wall. He ran the rope around his waist and belayed the whole contraption out into the driveway. The rope pulled tight about halfway down, preventing the rocket from rolling into the street. The rocket was about the size of a coat closet.
Hunt placed a knuckle to his forehead and wiggled his finger at the house. The kitchen door opened and his wife and children filed out like a row of ducks. One by one they entered the craft. When it was her turn to go in, the girl looked up at Jesse, directly at him, and waved. Her mannerisms were somehow still perfectly inhuman, though Jesse couldn’t have said why. Nobody would have been fooled.
Hunt himself looked all around, especially at his empty house and lawn, before stepping inside the rocket and closing the door. At the last instant, he even spared Jesse one final, terrible glance. He was not leaving because he wanted to.
Mere minutes later, as the Hunts blasted off, a cacophony of blastoffs began all over town. The moment the Air Force ended the jamming pulse, dozens of rockets spiraled into the sky all over the place. One of them sputtered, veered sharply to the south and nearly collided with another before it crashed into the painted hills in a plume of dust.
Jesse made the mistake of looking down at the blast that carbonized the top layer of the Hunts’ enameled driveway, and it came close to blinding him. Some part of the fuel consisted of magnesium, lots of it, and the blast was like bolts of lightning circulating beneath the rocket. The vapor trail left a metallic taste in Jesse’s mouth.
Jesse knew why the rockets corkscrewed, now: they weren’t evenly weighted. Perhaps it made them harder for surface-to-air defense systems to target.
Jesse would have felt sad. He would have struggled with a sense of emptiness at the end of an event of historic significance, even the end of human innocence. He would have, if a more immediate feeling did not dominate.
Jesse was afraid.
The Hunts’ windchimes rattled and tinkled on their porch, making the only sound, virtually the only sound.
The air smelled like smoke. As Jesse watched out the window, a lost dog wandered uncertainly down the street wearing a burden of metal address and name tags. A strange, dead wind blew.
Then radios and televisions suddenly came to life up and down the block. It should have been bedlam when the jamming signal ended; it should have been like the Apollo moon landing, every American family glued to their sofas with devouring eyes. Yet for the most part, the grim silence continued.
Jesse heard garage-door motors clicking to life up and down the street. Every garage opened at once.
For some reason, Jesse didn’t move. He may even have held his breath.
A loud noise failed to make him jump. It failed because it started low and rose slow and wide up the Doppler, then started over. In the fifties, when America expected the Russian bomb, air raid sirens had been installed in Phoenix, still a little town back then. They didn’t sound like a warning but like a lament. You’re dead, they seemed to say.
Jesse wandered into the living room, numb with expectation he could not define. He sat on the couch to click through channels until he found some news. A lot of the stations had not gone back on air. Before he quite settled in, he noticed the blue envelope of the utility bill the Hunt’s little girl had brought him.
He hadn’t noticed before that it had been opened.
He picked it up, curious that they would have opened his mail when a sealed envelope would have served their purpose just as well.
He lifted the flap with his finger. He pulled the utility bill out. It almost slipped through his fingers when they turned to stone.
One of the Hunts had scrawled in black magic marker over his hundred ninety-two-dollar bill: DEAR MAN (EYES ONLY): WE CANNOT TAKE YOUR WEIGHT ON OUR TRIAD. FIND ANOTHER SHIP IF YOU WANT TO LIVE FREE. INVASION IMMINENT.
***********
Here's what's inside the June 2009 Aoife's Kiss:
stories
Carol Hightshoe: The President's Meow
Luvia Swanson: Manito, the Mathematician's Son
Matthew Keville: Changeling
Michael John Grist: Killin Jack the Malakite
Selina Rosen: Better Fences
Matthew Johnson: The Ninth Part of Desire
Lawrence R. Dagstine: Before Measured Time
Melissa Mead: Changelings
Michael Swaim: Cosmosis
Mark Allan Gunnells: Dawn
Mercurio D. Rivera: Doubled
Jason Palmer: The Crisis Reversed
Lee Clark Zumpe: Three Coins and the Sword of Mingus
David C. Kopaska-Merkel: Captain Marshmallow
poems
Elissa Malcohn: Frightening the Horses
Jason D. Wittman: Horror Haiku Drabble
Bruce Boston: Endless Summer
Marge B. Simon: The Soul Snatchers
Marge B. Simon: Painting Tomorrow Man
Karen L. Newman: Skyscraper
Shelly Bryant: Under Pressure
Neal Wilgus: Lost Echoes
Sarah Wagner: Crow Queen
s.c. virtes: the4 endgame sky
Angel Favazza: Mirror
Shelly Bryant: Colonizers
Viridian Girl: Dark Father
Shelly Bryant: Fortunes Told
illustrations
Lubov: Daybreak
Marge B. Simon: Silent Conversation
Garret Dechellis: The Convector
Here's where to order a copy of the June 2009 Aoife's Kiss -- or a subscription. Just click on this icon below.
