“Can we not, you know, talk about this?”
I stopped talking so I wouldn’t bother him. He was the one who kept talking.
“You think I’m a drip,” he said.
I told him I didn’t.
He said, “People might say so, but I’ve got…I told you: A man needs a great passion for a great art. For me, it happens to be your mother. I worship her as the paragon of women. The paragon. It doesn’t matter whether she cares. You know what? I’m like the knights in the old medieval stories. She’s my courtly lady. I ride into battle with her favor on my crest, okay, and it doesn’t matter whether she ever even stoops to kiss me. I remain faithful until the end. Whatever may come.”
“She tears the letters up,” I said.
He hardly moved his head.
I faced back forward. On one of the boats, some men were playing cards. There was a breeze sometimes, and they held down the discards with their fists.
Mr. Flint was blushing and he kept staring out at the islands.
He was thinking about awful things. Just watching the seagulls. I felt bad, so I told him, “I liked the pun on Boothbay.”
“Hm?” said Mr. Flint.
“Yabtúb,” I said. “The Princess of Yabtúb.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Flint. “Yeah. That’s not a pun. It’s just backwards.”
“In the story, is the place Yabtúb supposed to be like Boothbay Harbor?”
“No.”
“The opposite of Boothbay?”
“No.”
“Like Boothbay backwards?”
“No. It’s nothing like Boothbay.”
I nodded. We sat for a minute. I told him, “You could have called it Robrah Yabtúb.”
He nodded. “Sure. I could’ve.”
He stood up and kicked at the pier. He told me, “I’m going back to my house now. I’ve got some writing to do.”
Ten feet under my shoes, the sea grew and shrank.
“All right?” said Mr. Flint. “It was really nice to meet you.” He smiled at me, even though I could tell it wasn’t a real smile. Mr. Flint held out his hand again like he had in the luncheonette. “It’s been a pleasure. A real pleasure.”
I stood up and I dusted off my pants and I shook R. P. Flint’s hand. I said politely that it was good to meet him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this isn’t what you were expecting.”
I shrugged. “It’s not what you were expecting, either,” I said.
R. P. Flint nodded. “You’re a great kid, pal.” He smiled, and this time it was for real. I smiled back. The sun was bright and we were both squinting. He said, “What’s your name again?”
I told him, “Jim.”
“Jim what?”
I stared at him. For a second he didn’t realize what he’d said.
I said, “The same as my mother’s. You write to her.”
“Oh, sure,” he said.
“So.”
“So, it’s…”
“Hucker.”
“Of course, Jim. I know.” He fumbled with the air. “All right. Great. Good-bye,” he said quickly, and walked away as fast as he could.
I watched him. He moved as fast as a crab on the beach.
He hadn’t known her name. He had no idea. None. He walked up the hill.
I just stared at him. I stood there and watched him go up the road and I wondered how many women Mr. Flint was writing to. I bet there was a list. Probably a monthly calendar, and he went through them all by date. Maybe Mr. Flint wrote to a lot of the women who were girls at his high school. I pictured their legs, their arms in front of Dickie Flint still, white hands sorting cards, writing “DANCE” in block letters, slim fingers held up to answer questions about Uruguay, pale socks twirling past his pimpled face, his slack, stupid mouth where he sat at his desk, scratching his lower lip with his upper—and maybe there were others, too, other women he thought about alone—the teller at Mr. Flint’s bank, the typists at Utter Tales, Ruby at the luncheonette, who knows?—and he wrote his dirty letters in which he loved each one like no one else had ever loved him before, and in each envelope, the future was just beginning, a new future with just him and this girl, and she and he were going to meet in some courtyard with a fountain and wine and flutes, and Mr. Flint was never alone.
That was all. He walked away, trying not to look back at me, because he knew what I was thinking. Then he was gone, around a corner, and I went up and waited for three hours for the next bus back to Portland.
On the bus, Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, returned to do battle with his erstwhile ally, the King of Pelinesse, that he might seize the scepter of that benighted realm, but I couldn’t fix my eyes on the page because the darkness was starting to fall over the salt marshes and towns.
Mr. Flint, I guess, was back at his house. Hunched over, drinking root beer, sleeves rolled up, one lamp. Doing his evening’s work. I pictured him reading out the best passages to himself in a voice as swollen as opera, about the br**sts and the thighs; and there they were; all of them, like women in a sunken kingdom, sitting in his garden with seaweed waving around them, there in his undersea court, his consorts, yielding up thegemof etc., and etc., and etc.
I decided I would have to phone my mother from Portland. I would have to tell her I was okay and I guess I’d have to ask her who she really’d had the affair with, and probably there’d be more stories after that. All the stories of parents that I couldn’t even hardly imagine, all the things that happened to people in houses and hotels in this world, on this Earth, on this stupid Earth.
Caelwin was riding to the north, his demesne expanding; and on the bus, I stared at my own reflection in the window, my own twined legs, until evening came, and all that was left was specks; and then my traces grew so tiny I could not even be seen.
M. T. Anderson’s satirical science fiction novel Feed was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the LA Times Book Award; his Gothic historical novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume One, won the National Book Award and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. He has also written music criticism, picture books, and stories for adults. For many years, he was fiction editor of 3rd bed, a journal of experimental poetry and prose.
As this story suggests, Anderson was (and continues to be) a fan of old fantasy pulp: Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Clark Ashton Smith. Acting as a Dungeon Master for a D&D campaign in his early teen years taught him most of what he knows about creating narratives. As he sees it, an interest in fantasy drives right to the heart of what it means to be a geek: someone who admires barbarians, but who has to avoid swordplay due to really bad asthma.
Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Hope Larson.
THE WRATH OF DAWN
by cynthia and greg leitich smith
“Where’s the dry cleaning?” Mom demands as she opens my bedroom door. “You know your father?—”
“Stepfather,” I say. My mom married him eleven months, two weeks, and four days ago. Worse, he came with a prissy daughter who’s a couple of years older than me and two obnoxious sons who’re a few years younger. I’m outnumbered, and, as if that’s not bad enough, we also had to move to their house.
“—needs his gray suit for a client meeting tomorrow morning.”
I notice the Colonel himself hasn’t deigned to grace me with his presence (no, he doesn’t sell fried chicken—he’s a retired Marine who works as a security consultant).
As Mom’s rant goes on, I minimize the Web page on my PC so she won’t catch a glimpse of the bare-assed fan art beside the Underworld fic I’m reading.
“You know, Dawn, your sister?—”
“Stepsister,” I put in. Megan. The athletic one. She of the chemical blondness. The one whose boyfriends have heavy brow-ridges and square jaws. “Megan took the car before I could run errands.”
“You should have told her you needed it,” Mom replies, because it’s important that everything be my fault.
I don’t point out that I tried but Megan ignored me. I don’t point out that even if I hadn’t told her, she could’ve asked me before taking off.
Mom crosses her arms. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to give her a chance. This adjustment hasn’t been easy for Megan, either.”
I don’t say it, but it bothers me when Mom takes her side. The thing is, I did try in the beginning. When our parents announced their engagement at the Olive Garden, I told Megan in the ladies’ restroom that it was hard for me, too. Out of nowhere, she starts yelling at me that I don’t know anything and that my visiting my dad at his apartment in Round Rock is totally different from her visiting her mom’s grave in Smithville.
Of course it’s different. I get that—I got it then—but Megan’s treated me like a lesser species ever since. Like how she always calls my room “the guest room.” And how she always foists little-brother-babysitting duty on me because I have “no life.”
I offer up a theatrical sigh. “Poor Megan!”
“You’re grounded,” Mom says as she exits.
I don’t bother to shrug. To Mom, “grounded” means not going out, but doesn’t include ’net, cell, or DVD restrictions. By this weekend, she’ll have moved on to another of my allegedly fatal flaws, and it’s not like I’ve got plans on the average Tuesday night.
When Mom leaves, I shut the door behind her. Then I bring my browser back up on screen and begin checking RSS feeds. I read this story about a sixth grader in Wyoming who’s trying to get a new word accepted into The Unauthorized Dictionary of the Klingon Language. It’s kind of cute, so I comment Qapla! Then I happily spend the next hour on the readergirlz boards at MySpace.
My mood is ruined again when Megan bursts into the room.
“You could knock,” I say without turning around.
“Sorry,” Megan replies. Then she says the most shocking thing imaginable: “Want to come with me tonight to the Buffy Sing-Along?”
Megan knows I want to go. I’ve been talking about it for weeks. And she’s just come from speaking to Mom. She’s clearly toying with me.
I shake my head. “Thanks to you, I’m grounded.” I swivel in my desk chair. “Wait. You’re going?”
Megan is not into anything remotely interesting. Her tastes are simple. She watches “reality” television. Worse, she wants to be on reality television. Last week, the Colonel practically pissed a kidney stone when she mentioned driving to San Antonio to audition for So You Want to Marry a Movie Star?
“Ryan’s working the sing-along tonight,” Megan replies. “We’re going out after.”
Ah, Ryan. The second and blander of her great loves. Like her, he rows a skinny boat backward and is into other sports that involve grunting and spandex.
I do have to admit, though, that he’s pretty much gorgeousness personified. His only physical defect is the beginning of what promises to be a severe case of male-pattern baldness.
“He’ll be bald by twenty-two,” I say.
“Who cares what he’ll look like at twenty-two?” She winks like we just shared a moment, which we did. But I don’t think we got the same thing out of it.
“This involves me…why?” I ask, getting back to the Slayer.
Megan’s smile turns brittle. “For reasons I don’t understand, Ryan’s cousin Eric will be joining us, and we need someone to keep him out of our way.”
I’m in no mood to babysit again. “Waterloo doesn’t allow kids under ten.”
Megan steps daintily through the maze of paperbacks and graphic novels on my floor, brushes imaginary lint from my black comforter, and sits, addressing me in the same tone she might use with a cocker spaniel. “I’m not asking you to babysit, Dawn. I’m setting you up on a blind date.”
I make a half-laugh, half-barfing noise. “No.”
Megan lifts her French-manicured nails, examining them. “It won’t kill you. He’s not a troll, and he’s into the same geeky stuff you are.”
I minimize the screen again. “Like?”
“Like, like Buffy!” she replies, glancing at my posters. “Star Trek! Batman! Comic books, and…” Her gaze lingers appreciatively on Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
Despite myself, I’m tempted. I adore Buffy. Well, actually, I like Buffy. I adore Willow and Tara, and I think their love ballad is the most romantic…Wait. Even if Eric is cool and it didn’t mean spending a whole evening with Megan…“I’m still grounded.”
“Carol says it’s okay so long as you’re with us,” Megan replies, standing.
I hate it when she calls my mom “Carol,” and I’m positive the “date” aspect is going to suck. Still, it is Buffy. “Fine, I’m in,” I say. Then I add, “But you’re paying for everything.”
The doorbell rings at seven sharp. I rush to the door. Fortunately, the twins don’t realize a world exists beyond their latest video game, and the Colonel isn’t here to indulge in his usual tactic when a boy comes over (giving him the third degree while ostentatiously cleaning his Winchester thirty-ought-six on the living room coffee table).
“Um, hi,” Eric says.
He’s a little over six feet tall, skinny, generally symmetrical, has fewer than the average number of pimples and a full head of hair. He’s also wearing blue jeans and a green button-down oxford shirt, which is kind of boring and does nothing to set off my black sleeveless T, black tiered knit skirt, and combat boots.