Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology) Read online

  The other soldier let go of Tesia and scrambled backwards on his heels and hands, fear white on his face. The revolver popped again once and he thrashed away, popped twice and he rolled over with a sigh.

  Adolf, still clutching the pistol, dropped heavily to his knees. Tesia lay still, her dress and blouse ripped, her eyes closed. He reached for her, pulled her to himself and she fought him, kicking and flailing and growling low in her throat. He released her for a moment, then tried again. This time, she let him pull her in and he cradled her, rocking back and forth. He had no idea what to say so he said nothing and let that silence sweep him aside like a giant hand. After a few minutes, shouts from over rooftops brought him back from that quiet place he’d gone to.

  He shook her gently. “Tesia, we have to go.”

  He stood, pulling her up and keeping her close. The revolver dangled in his hand and he looked again at his handiwork. The two soldiers were dead now or soon would be. They lay sprawled like cast away dolls. The realization of what he’d done struck him. Blood on his hands.

  Hanging on to her, he bent as far away as he could and threw up on the ground. When he ran the back of his hand over his mouth he smelled whisky and cordite.

  He heard a quiet cough and looked up. Ernie, Chuck and a few others from the tavern stood there watching him.

  Chuck looked at the bodies and then the girl. “Adolf, what have you done?”

  Ernie stepped forward, snatching the pistol from his hand. He tucked it into his waistband. “I think he did the right thing, Chuck. This is where it starts.”

  One spark, Adolf thought.

  Were he alive today, he would say himself that this monument is not about one man’s struggle but about the struggle of many. Our struggle, as he put it so well. From 1942 to 1952—when the charter was finally signed—he struggled alongside us, raising support and awareness for our cause, never asking for anything for himself. With his wife and his children often by his side, he went from city to city speaking in any venue that would listen. And though originally published in his native German, his book was a shot heard ‘round the world, translated into over forty languages within its first five years in print. I heard him speak shortly before his death: “Well-aimed words will always be more powerful than rifles,” he said. And his words roused a slumbering giant, turning its head towards cruelty and oppression, towards a cry for freedom in a far away land.

  Rabbi Benjamin Levin

  Dedication Speech, Hitler Memorial, Jerusalem, Israel, 1992.

  They told Adolf to take her to the loft and wait for morning. De Gaulle had a nephew who was driving to Calais the next day; they’d hide Hitler and the girl in the back of the truck and hope for the best. He ripped off Tesia’s armband and tossed it away.

  “Listen to me,” he told her. “You are not Jewish. You are my daughter, Klara, and you are ill. We are looking for the hospital. We left your papers at home by mistake. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded. Her eyes were red and she limped now, but she stood on her own.

  “Good.” They set out at a brisk walk. More shouting and sirens punctuated the night, suddenly joined now by occasional gunshots.

  Along the way they saw soldiers running. They saw groups of men and women, some now fighting back. People called news to one another from their opened windows. Two soldiers had been killed raping a girl, someone cried. A band of drunks was storming the police station looking for guns, another shouted. Adolf heard it as if it were far away and kept pushing them towards safety, towards home.

  He locked them inside. He took down half a bottle of schnapps from the cupboard and poured two drinks with shaking hands. Tesia did not speak and did not meet his eyes. He knew she was still in shock, the color drained away from her skin and her face slack. He tucked her into his cot, wrapping his great coat over her and when he pulled away, she clutched at him and mumbled something.

  He bent in closer and heard the words. “You were beautiful,” she said, “and you stood alone.”

  He held her as sobs racked his body. The world had never seemed so grim and despairing and he wondered if it had always been that way, if he’d just never seen it before. He felt the broken girl in his arms, felt her breath against his neck and smelled the sweat and dirt on her. Behind him, in the window, something like Heaven’s light grew beyond his wildest imaginings, filling that cavity in the world’s soul. His tears subsided; Tesia slept.

  After an hour of holding her, he left her side to pack his things. He’d leave his paints, his pallet, his brushes. He knew he’d never use them again. But he did pack his suitcase with clothing, bedding and canned food. He also checked his papers and counted his money. Somewhere, he could buy her the papers she would need.

  On a scrap of paper, Ernie had hastily scribbled a name and an address—a friend of a friend at the U.S. Embassy in London. Ernie had pressed it into his hand before leaving with Chuck and the others to storm the police station and start their Revolution for Democratic Change.

  “Viva la France,” they had said as they went racing down the cobblestones.

  Adolf took down their photograph from the mirror. He looked at it and smiled at his friends.

  If I’m to be a writer, he thought, I should write something about this place, this time. Something so I will never forget.

  He found a pen, turned the photo over, and after a moment’s thought, wrote on the back of it in his pinched, careful, German script: Summer in Paris, Light from Heaven.

  Hitler weighed the pen carefully in his hand and wondered if one man could make a difference. He weighed his destiny carefully in his heart and wondered if the Americans would listen.

  Ken Scholes’ quirky, speculative short fiction has been showing up over the last eight years in publications like Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales and Writers of the Future. Ken’s first novel, Lamentation, debuted from Tor in February 2009. It is the first of five volumes in the Psalms of Isaak series. Ken’s first short story collection, Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Strange Journeys, is available from Fairwood Press.

  TETRIS DOOMS ITSELF

  Meghan McCarron

  Andy kidnaps me at 11:12 PM. I see the time on my microwave. He clamps a hand over my mouth while I’m making a pot of coffee, and I scatter the grounds all over the floor. It’s late, and I have work to do, but that doesn’t matter now. “I have a gun,” he says in a movie-villain voice. He forces a blindfold over my eyes. I giggle.

  When I go to see Catherine, she cuts off my hands. She likes to take off the left one first because it’s more useful to me. She uses a hunting knife that she’s never sharpened, and when she saws into my wrist she hisses, “Sinister! Sinister!”

  When I first came home with a bloody stump, my roommates shrieked, What did she do to you? Now they roll their eyes and go back to playing Scrabble. They like Andy better. It takes a lot of effort to kidnap someone, they say.

  Usually Andy kidnaps me at some bright sunny hour when his wife is at work. But tonight she is sick, “from stress, mostly,” he says. Also from the flu. “She looked so sad tonight,” he says. “So sick and sad.” He tells me this as he tightens my blindfold, and then waves his hands in front of my face to make sure I can’t see. Air fans my cheeks.

  He takes my hand, then changes his mind and takes my wrist instead. He pauses at the door, checking for roommates; the apartment is silent, though sometimes roommates are just hiding. He leads me out the door and down my creaking stairs to a car. It’s not his car; it smells new, or fake-new, a smell achieved only through the relentless application of cleaning products. The seat fabric feels cheap to the touch and the anemic motor sputters and kicks. A rental. Economy size, if I had to guess.

  He buckles me in and says, “Now you’re mine,” but in Andy-voice, not movie-villain voice, leaving me unsure how to take the line.

  Once my roommate Marcia came home with a hunting trap clamped on her leg. We heard her coming all the way up the stairs, step CLANK step CLANK s
tep CLANK. She said she and her boyfriend were playing cops and robbers in the woods, and she stepped in the wrong place. No one asked why her boyfriend didn’t help her home. Other roommates whispered that he must have been the robber. I was not convinced. At the very least, he must have caught her cheating.

  Andy and I drive for a long time, probably in circles, since Andy barely leaves this neighborhood. Not that I blame him—things get weird further out. There’s downtown and mountains and a desert, somewhere. While we drive, he tells me about his latest career developments. He has an agent now, or is it a manager? I don’t understand the music business. I thought it was better than the writer and his prizes, or the lawyer and her golf tournaments, but now they all sound the same.

  I ask Andy about his music, instead. To him it’s a color or a smell or even a different kind of sound, like bees or sandpaper. I love when Andy talks like this. His voice is the color of mahogany. I forget I can’t see where we’re going.

  The car rolls to a stop on what sounds like gravel. My calm breaks, and I clutch my hands on my knees. Why am I nervous? Andy gets out without a word and opens my door. The night air is sharp; it smells like forest fires.

  Every time Catherine cuts off my hands, they come back smaller, so when Andy takes my hand in his, I feel engulfed. I smell rust, and something chemical, in addition to the faint tang of burning wood. It’s the smell of the river. I wish I could take off my blindfold, because I love staring at the river’s concrete expanse, but I’m pretty sure the blindfold is a rule.

  Andy pulls me toward him and kisses me, hard; if someone could hit someone else with their mouth, it would feel like this. He shoves me away and takes off at a run. His footsteps fade, PAT PAT Pat Pat pat pat patpat . . . and I’m out in the open, alone.

  “Bet you can’t find me!” Andy calls.

  “Andy, is this blind man’s bluff?” I say. “That’s so lame.”

  He shoots his gun off, which until now I didn’t believe he had, and I realize it’s something a little different.

  Once, Catherine and I tried to have sex. She bit my nipple so hard I yelped; it took me days to find her clit. There were snippets that approached loveliness, and I could maybe see why people fumbled towards the good parts. But I could still taste her in my mouth when she turned to me and said, “Let’s never do that again.”

  Andy and I have fucked on any number of occasions, but we always set rules ahead of time.

  Andy is shouting and shooting at the same time, which is half annoying and half terrifying. I thought he said, “Take off your shoes,” but when I did he just started shooting again. I throw myself on the ground until he figures out what he wants from this game.

  The shooting stops.

  “Goddamnit! Get up!” Andy shouts.

  “I can’t—understand—you!” I shout back.

  “Oh,” Andy says. Then he gets gruff again. “Take off your shirt!”

  I half-heartedly throw my shirt off and hold my arms against my cold, naked skin. Andy likes strip games. I don’t. I thought he had a better idea than this.

  I’m still on my knees, half-naked, when one of the bullets hits me in the shoulder. The pain explodes outward from the point of impact, I am cold with it, then nothing, then hot hot hot.

  I pop the bullet out of my wound—they were cheater bullets, thank god—and hurl it at Andy. It clatters on the gravel. “Fuck you!” I cry. There is a moment of silence as I double over, panting with pain. Just my breath, my heaving chest, pant pant pant. It is gorgeous, this silence. It is such a relief.

  “Fuck you,” Andy says, and starts shooting again.

  The first time Catherine cut off my hands, it was to free me from handcuffs. I was chained to her refrigerator and we wanted beer. We could have picked the lock, or dislocated my thumbs, but those methods seemed too obvious. Which is funny, because cutting off my hands is really obvious.

  The hunting knife was sharp then, left over from a knife-throwing game with one of Catherine’s exes. When it cut into my skin, pain welled like pleasure. The sensation built as Catherine sliced through muscle and tendon, cracked through bone. When my hand dropped to the ground, I saw white light. I screamed.

  Now the pain is ragged, the relief the barest break. I grunt. I’ve begged her to sharpen the knife, or to get a new one, but she insists that the knife is a rule. My forsaking pleasure is a rule, too. Someday, if she gets her way, it’s just going to hurt.

  When all my clothes are gone, I throw myself on the ground again, by the car. The gravel is gritty against my bare skin. The little pebbles against my nipples are strange and uncomfortable, but uncomfortable like lace panties, not like splinters, or the cuts on my feet. Despite this, I don’t feel remotely turned on.

  The tall, dead grass rustles.

  “Aw, baby, look at you,” Andy says. “Stand up.”

  I pull myself up, and the cool air shocks my bare skin. I hear the wind again. I touch the wound on my shoulder and clean away the gravel, though I let the stones stick to the rest of me. I feel covered, that way.

  Andy takes a few steps towards me, and I can feel the edges of his heat, his halo. His breath washes over my forehead, and his clothing whispers as he takes his gun out of his pocket.

  “You’re all dirty,” he says, like I’m a little girl, brushing the gravel off my breasts. His fingers are light and loving. They flick the gravel off with ease.

  I imagine what we must look like, a naked, blindfolded woman and a clothed man standing in the dead grass. I try to imagine his wife standing here instead of me and almost laugh. I wish I understood why I’m the one who can be blindfolded, stripped, and shot, and then gently cleaned—gently kissed. The standard answer is that wives are boring, but I don’t buy that. Wives will kick your ass if you give them the chance.

  But if you shoot your wife, you have to listen to her toss and turn because her shoulder aches. Or you have to wonder if she’ll pull a gun on you at breakfast. Andy can walk away from me. So maybe the real question is—what about me makes it so easy to walk away?

  He puts the gun against my back and prods me. “Let’s go,” he whispers in my ear. His voice is warm and, again, I’m not sure how to take the line.

  Everyone plays the same game. I’m not just talking about the trends that go around—cartwheel contests, speed eating, naked relay races. Those games are sham games, fakes for people with nothing better to do. But when you find a naked roommate giggling to herself outside your building for the fourth time in a month, and she’s not even running with a baton, or running at all, it’s more like a jog, you get suspicious. If you can play a sham game wrong and it still gets called a game, what the hell kind of system is this?

  I march barefoot towards the sounds of whirring generators and rustling trees. I step on metal, on glass. My feet must be a bloody mess.

  “I didn’t do too good at this game,” I said. “Did I?” It’s a canned line. One he likes. I want to please him, suddenly.

  “No, you didn’t,” Andy says. The gun is getting warm from being pushed against my skin. The sound of rustling is actually water rushing. Where is the water coming from? It builds as we walk towards it, until I lose the sound of my footsteps, of Andy’s footsteps, of anything but this impossible sound.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder and pulls me to a stop. The sound roars below me. It has to be the wind, whistling through the concrete. I can smell the forest fires again.

  “What now?” I say.

  “Take off your blindfold.”

  I’m standing on the edge of the concrete wall, where I expected to see ancient graffiti, cracked concrete, slow, dirty water. Instead, a river rushes below me, dark except for where the moon is reflected in a distorted circle. The river is deeper than the channel ever was, like the concrete was ripped up to expose a secret below. It smells like acid rain.

  “Jump in,” Andy says.

  I look over my shoulder so fast I almost fall. “What?” I say.

  Andy softens his tone and
puts a hand on my ass, cupping it like it’s his favorite thing in the world. “Come on, baby. Jump in.”

  “That’s not even supposed to be here,” I said.

  “I found it last night. A friend sent me photos.” He gazed at it, the midnight-dark water, the splotches of electric light.

  “You’re not jumping in?” I say.

  “Baby,” he says, patting my ass. “You lost the game.”

  The river can’t be real, and yet it looks more solid, more dangerous, than anything that is. The second-to-last thing I’m doing is wasting the river on Andy, and the last is getting shot in the gut for refusing to jump in.

  I turn around and snatch the gun from Andy’s hand.

  I have always known I could do this, but from the look on Andy’s face he hasn’t. He gapes at the gun like I pulled it out of thin air.

  “You jump in,” I say.

  “Me?” he says.

  “You’re the loser now.”

  Andy’s face collapses, then hardens into a glower. “You cheated.”

  I have cheated. If he walks away, I’ll let him.

  “I changed the game,” I say.

  He looks down at his shoes, screwing up his face like this is a huge problem, one that takes mighty effort to solve. He shifts back and forth on his feet and screws up his face. I keep the gun pointed at him. I’m still cold.

  He bends down and unties his shoes. He removes his pants, shirt, shocks. He climbs up on the wall next to me and looks out on the river with his hands on his hips, like it’s his newly conquered domain. Like I’m not even there. The gun is close enough for him to snatch back, but he doesn’t even look at it. He just stands there, staring at the water.