Apples Out of Season

When he dies, the family comes out of the woodwork by the hundreds. A firm believer in the virtue of his genetics, and, also, that he would, somehow, eventually, cheat death, he didn’t just have offspring, he seeded himself across the western hemisphere like a white Temujin. The immortality never came, of course, but the children do, drawn by the promise of his vast fortune and the human need to see him lying dead to know for sure, blood and bone, that he was truly gone and would not threaten to return.

In the high school auditorium the attorneys reserved for the reading of the will, they crowd the bleachers, eye each other warily, half-siblings all, with no connection save of blood. Which of them finally caught up with him? How had they done it? He wasn’t smart but he was paranoid. Had it been poison? A knife in the dark? A plausibly malfunctioning car? Had they bribed a servant, cozened his latest child bride into mixing something extra in with his pills? Speculation is rampant, a deep rumbling through the gym, loud enough to drown out the lawyer as he tries to take the stage.

When he has their attention at last, he coughs and reads a short statement: “Per the wishes of the deceased, the doors have been locked and the building wired to explode. There shall be no inheritance, nor heir; if I have gone, I will take you all with me.”

They howl, and howl, and, when the building fails to explode, turn on each other in fury. When the police arrive to unlock the doors, they wade through blood and viscera three feet deep to arrest the sole survivor.

In Transit

Days pass in the gentle glow of the monitor; there is evening and there is morning.

Streetlights flickers on amid the raucous calls of hundreds of crows; the setting sun catches her eyes and breaks the reverie just enough to reawaken Petra to her body. Lord, she aches, in every sinew and every member, eyes burning, throat scraped dry and raw, stomach hollow and bladder dangerously full. She stands and the room sways around her, starts to grow dim and iris in. Deep breaths, bend over, let the blood rush to her head and clear it. She grabs a juice pack on her way to the toilet, drains it in one long pull, desperate to get her blood sugar up.

What does she remember? Fragments only: mission statements, annual revenue and expenditures, cost of goods sold, desalinization figures, an outbreak of privatization somewhere down east, the latest season of The Chirurgeon’s Journal, an unexplained fishkill in the lake that left translucent shrimp corpses rotting along the shore, distant helicopters, the roar of traffic, synthetic gunfire from someone’s open window competing with authentic gunfire echoing from the trainyards, tits and ass, succulent food, sympathetic parents, love that never fades and sales that never end.

It’s too much for her waking mind to recall, so she doesn’t try. Cooks rice, slices eggs, chews on fruit, lets it ferment somewhere back of her conscious mind. It’ll be there when she needs it, or it won’t.

Who Sleeps in the Woods Must Expect Rain

Lancelot’s in disguise again and it’s fooling absolutely no one. He keeps flittering around the fringes of the melee or the lists, trying to act all sinister with his muffled escutcheon, but this is the fifth time he’s pulled this exact trick this year alone and the man moves like a panther with depression. Even Kay has picked up on it, which is downright embarrassing.

“So,” he says, voice too gruff and too casual, “who do you think’s going to win this one?”

Bedivere squints at the rising sun, then side eyes “the stranger” pretty hard. “Gawain.” There’s a chorus from everyone, including Tristan and Palomedes, which is pretty flattering. Gawain rubs his face to hide the smile, the traitorous blush.

“Oh, ho, pretty cocky, eh!” His hand tings flatly against Gawain’s shoulder. “Guess it’s lucky for all of us that Lancelot isn’t here today, everyone knows he’s the one to beat.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” drawls Gawain, “he’s not a patch on Kid Galahad. Now there’s a knight to aspire to! And noble? You want to talk about noble? Lancelot can’t even hold a candle to him.”

So of course he’s getting absolutely trounced in the melee later, but that moment of shocked silence is so, so worth it.

Helle

The gods are sometimes merciful, but they are never kind.

I do not begrudge you your cunning, o my mother, nor your bloodlust. Child of another cradle, what was I to you? Lions, they say, will likewise build atop a child’s bones, and rabbits in a fury consume their young; so I have been told, and with my own eyes have I seen. Understanding is not forgiveness, as you know, but what of that? You won your prize, even if the knife slipped sideways at the fatal moment. Child-rearing Hera, protector of women, what whimsy took your heart that day? To save the daughter from the mother, and the mother from the daughter? But alas, my hands grew weak and my eyes grew heavy, and I slipped from Allmother’s ram, down through the sky, past cliffs and clouds, down to the winedark sea.

There I should have died, but a gift given cannot be returned: I was doomed to be saved. The sea gave way before me, bore me away to his drowned kingdom within the unlit depths, to kneel before before his throne, the upstart king, and his court of luminescent slaves and eyeless singers. He took me as his own, child that I was, not as a bride, nor even as a cupbearer, but as a toy, a bauble, bright as that traitor fleece, an idle plaything against an unproductive hour.

Here I shall remain, o my son, breathless in this airless kingdom, but you shall not. I give you to these currents and to fate; may you find a better life than you deserve.

Kneel, Son, If You Can

No one has ever been more divorced.

West Berlin, with an apartment that overlooks the Wall, a job that calls him across that impermeable line, wife and toddler son left to warm the bed at home. Solon is young, so young; impossibly young. Young and slim and alienated, a human hand grenade, fiercely devoted to home and hearth and Sea World. Not that he knows any of those things, except as abstract concepts, but what does it matter? He speaks English, because speaking English means he is still himself, but he hasn’t heard English from anyone except his family in years. His son speaks German. His wife? She greets him at the door to their winding apartment with an accent he doesn’t recognize, an inflection he does not know.

In the subways, her uterus spasms.

The pain is beyond what she can bear, beyond standing. Her knees buckle, the breath thumps out of her lungs with the weight of a sledgehammer driving into her ribs. Quiana screams in blood, in milk, in celery; throws herself against the cool blue tiles of the wall in search of some relief. No one comes, no one hears her, no one bears her witness. She soaks herself, eyes black with rage, all the blood driven to her core by distress. She is haunted by her doubles, a blonde, a German, a Croatian, a Turk. She absconds, from her husband, from her job, from her lover. What do they know of her? What can they know of her? She has been flattened like a sheet of paper, all the moisture pressed from her.