This Month's Meeting

Don't forget we are meeting this Thursday at the Morrison Regional Library. Be sure to bring something to read. I'll be at a workshop tomorrow so I should have a poem ready by Thursday. No wait, I mean that I'm sure the workshop will be the coolest thing ever.

A Comic About How to Use the Semicolon

It's pretty good and it's helpful. You can read it here.

I Love Lists

It's been a while since I've posted a list or a link to something science fiction-y. How about both? Here's one person's list of the 100 Greatest Science Fiction Novels.

I need to read for Gene Wolfe and go back and re-read some Le Guin that I read when I was younger and it was over my head. Has anyone ever read any of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series? I read the first one last year and I may have to go back and read it again just so I can figure out what the heck I read.

I just stayed up until 1 in the morning working on this story. Somebody tell me what you think, so this night won't just be a complete waste of sleep.

The Shadows Under Miles Street

“Ever kissed a stranger, baby?”

In the shadows under Miles Street, I heard my voice beckon to me three more times. Stranger, baby…stranger, baby…stranger, baby…

Her face was a mess of dark shades in the fading light of the subway station. Still, I swear I could see her eyes shining at me. “You don’t look like a stranger to me,” she said. “I think we’ve met. Somewhere…”

“Close your eyes and pretend” was all I could say. My arm slipped around her, just tight enough to keep her close, and I felt her lips against mine before I could give her a smile. Kitty…damn. The silky-voiced girl from next door with rosewater for blood, who decided to stumble in on me the day before I would have left town. The one always by my side…for a few more weeks at the most. These things don’t last, I thought to myself, They never last. The best you can hope for is someone to lay beside you long enough to make you forget the lonely nights. She’ll leave me soon, even if she won’t say it now. But none of that mattered. All that mattered was the silvery blue of her eyes and the velvety musk of her perfume filling my nostrils. Just a little while longer…

“We were going somewhere, I assume.”

“Right, I didn’t forget. Take the A-line subway under Miles Street, six stops to the West, and then a cab ride to JFK. Then the plane leaves at 8, and we wake up tomorrow morning in Cleveland. Then there’s Mary, waiting at the airport to drive us to her place. Simple as that.”

“Right. Simple as that.” The subway stayed dark. She couldn’t see the worry in my face.

“And where are we now?”

She stayed silent for a moment or two. “We’re under Miles street. And the train’s ten feet…that way…”

There was no train. There was a brick corridor, stretching into the distant shadows, and a half-dead light bolted to the wall. But not a whisper filled the station, and not a footstep echoed off the walls. Just as I had stopped listening, the steady chatter of quick-handed gamblers and street corner sax players had died out into emptiness.

“Why are we alone in here?”

How I thought Kitty could ever know the answer to that question, I had no idea. But I had to ask.

Kitty’s voice trembled, maybe shivering from the cold New York night, maybe about something else. “Slow night, I guess. Don’t give me any ideas, Cal.”

I nodded. “No time for the slasher-movie shit, baby. We find the train, or we get out of here and stop wasting our time.” My voice echoed again. Get out…get out…get out.

“I’m sure it’s here…” I’m…here…I’m…here…I’m…here. “Just around the corner. Just around the corner.” And we turned the corner. Still no train, but this station wasn’t empty. Someone was making his way towards me, and I couldn’t turn away if I wanted to. There was no stare, and there were no eyes to meet. Just a mask of formless shadow where a face should have been, in a body that gave off no breath, no footsteps, and no shadow. It wore a long, weather-beaten trench coat the color of graveyard dirt, and a dusty hat that sat atop the empty space that should have been a head. Only his hands could be seen. They were bony, shrunken things, trembling from one too many nights in the cold, one hand gripping the other for warmth.

Was it fear or awe that kept me standing there, unable to turn and run? Maybe both? Hell, if I had to die in an empty subway station, maybe I’d take something that no one had ever seen with me to my grave.

Silently, in one lithe movement like the first wind of spring, the faceless man turned away. Drifting, just one more shadow under Miles Street, it moved farther down the passageway. I turned my head, and my eyes met Kitty’s for a heartbeat’s time. Without a word, she nodded to me, and her warm, quivering fingers closed around mine. Our echoing footsteps the only sound under Miles Street, we moved forward.

The next face I saw came drifting out of the dark of a corner, as light spread just enough to reveal the next thing that the night had to show me: a man sat, sunken onto the floor, leaned into the space where two walls met, burying his face where the light didn’t reach. And as the sound of our feet against brick drifted into his little space, his head turned toward us.

Jesus…before, I wished I could meet another man’s gaze. This time, I wished I didn’t have to. His eyes were dull scarlet with veins like spider webs, in a face bleached white from one too many days in a lightless tunnel. A trench coat sprawled over his bony frame, left with empty spaces from the kind of hunger that made him a little less than a man, a little more than a skeleton. He didn’t cry out with pain, or beg for just one scrap of food. He didn’t move up from his spot on the ground, or shed a tear in self-pity. But those faded, bloodshot eyes never left mine for an instant…then the dull shuddering of his breathing went silent, and his eyes shut. They didn’t open again.

I peered over my shoulder, and there, I saw the faceless figure standing in the glow of a cracked wall-lamp, without a word of sympathy for me or the other man. That shadowy, silent wanderer…who wore the same torn set of clothes as the dead man in the corner, and had a pair of bony, trembling hands that could have been reflected in a mirror. “You…” I silently mouthed.

And then, the space changed. There was no flash of light, and no thunderous boom, but the space changed. In an instant, the dirt-flecked concrete and faded lamps were gone. And in their place, I was in a jazz club at the stroke of midnight, lit by a hundred crystalline table lamps and flickering cigars. Smoke drifted from the mouths of a crowd of sleepless city folk, like a set of dolls in their velvety evening gowns and crisp black suits. And the buzz of their voices filled the space as it merged into one…but they weren’t for conversation. They saw a shape moving toward to stage from behind a wine-colored curtain with gold braided cord, and their eyes moved to him like staples drawn by a magnet.

A lamp flicked on above the stage, and its light hit me straight in the eyes. For a moment, I was blind. The man on stage was a silhouette against a flood of pure, brilliant white light, and it caught an object clasped in his hand that shone gold like Sir Galahad’s sword: a trumpet, rubbed ragged by one too many nights of blasting out song after song for all to hear, but not yet ready to go quiet. And he brought the trumpet to his lips lazily, his eyes going hazy as he remembered a song. One song that might keep the crowd singing just long enough to forget the cold night wind and the bitter aftertaste of the sludge that passed for beer in that place.

I thought the first note would last forever. For just an instant, I forgot the glow of Kitty’s eyes and the flight to Cleveland that had to have left by now. And as the steady blast of sound began to melt into the Byzantine dance of a late-night song, I forgot the day (maybe soon, maybe distant) that this man would find his grave in the faded light under Miles Street.

And the man with the shadowed face strode into the crowd, not a soul tilting up to meet his gaze, as he stared into the shining visage of the man that he had once been. In my memory, I saw all three of them for just a moment: a jazzman in a glowing spotlight, a without a home sleeping in a dead tunnel, and a man without a face drifting wherever he cared to go. Life, Death, and the nameless thing that came after.

The song ended, and in the silence before the applause, I saw a tear roll down Kitty’s cheek and settle on the scuffed wood of a table. On stage, the jazzman smiled.

· · ·

And the night ended, like a magic trick that passes when your eyes are too slow to catch it. By the time I remembered to look around and check my surroundings, I was in the seat in an airplane, with Kitty leaning against me as she drifted off into peaceful sleep. The hum of its engines like an old lullaby, the plane drifted up through the clouds like the souls of the dead. And I wondered how long I could stay here, with the gentle scent of Kitty’s hair passing over me like a warm wind.

Before sleep took me, I remembered a little bit of wisdom that a buddy of mine had passed on during beer night, when a talk about sex and autos had somehow given way to a theological discussion. “Heaven? Please. The lights and clouds and shiny gates and guys with wings is just bullshit. I don’t need none of that to make me happy. But everybody’s got just one of those moments when…when you forget everything. When nothing else matters, and you’d give the world to make it last forever. It never does, right? But if there is a heaven…what if you could just live through that moment without it ever stopping? Even if it’s just that one moment when the right girl looks at you in a way that makes you go numb, or laughing your ass off on your front porch with a guy who you’d die for. If that could last forever…that’d be enough for you, right?”

In the plane, I smiled to myself. “Yeah. It would.”

Kitty’s soft face, framed by dark hair that curled like a twisting river, was the last thing I saw before sleep took me.

Just a little while longer…I thought. Just a little while longer…

Poem. About Kittens. NOW.

I think Emily drew this. I've been meaning to post it for a while. It makes me smile. It simultaneously expresses sentimentality and anger. In the hands of a lesser artist this would not work.