IGMS Issue 17 Read online

  Uncle Fritz really should have been a more responsible driver.

  His cell phone's ring interrupted his studying. He didn't recognize the number. "Hello?"

  "Brad, this is Denise's mom. She was driving home from work and . . ." Her voice broke. "I'm at the hospital with her. You'd better come down."

  Brad's heart lurched as he stood and headed for the door. "How is she?"

  "She's in a coma, but . . . the doctors say she could die at any time."

  "I'll be there as soon as I can." He rushed down the steps, yanked open the Mustang's door, climbed in, and put the key in the ignition.

  And froze.

  The magic of the Mustang could get him to the hospital before Denise died, he was sure of that. But he didn't want to arrive just in time to see her die.

  He had a sudden memory of Uncle Fritz in the car, the night he almost drove drunk. Uncle Fritz had patted the dashboard and said, "Good thing we happened to drive by. You could have been killed."

  Had it really just been a coincidence that Uncle Fritz arrived just in time to stop him?

  How powerful was the magic?

  "Hey, baby," Brad said, patting the dashboard. "Let's go pick Denise up before she leaves work and take her out for a surprise romantic dinner."

  "I must say, I like the new, prompt Brad," said Denise after the waiter took their orders.

  Brad just grinned at her, grateful that she was here with him, alive. And he finally understood what Uncle Fritz meant by the curse: now that he had this power to save people he cared about from tragedy, he had the responsibility to use it.

  I trust you will be a responsible driver, the note had said. Brad would live up to that trust.

  Denise let out an exaggerated sigh. "But I guess I can't say you'll be late for your own funeral any more."

  "No," said Brad. "No, I'll be early."

  Sparrowjunk

  by Margit Elland Schmitt

  Artwork by James Owen

  * * *

  The first time Steve saw the junkie - really saw her - she was on the fire escape outside his son Matt's room, sitting next to the bird feeders and looking like she was drowning in the rain. He crossed to the window and had a fleeting impression of a thin face beneath pale, draggled hair, and the flying tail of a long, dark coat. Then she took off, vanishing in a clatter of feet down the stairs, and Steve found himself with both hands pressed cold against the window, his breath fogging the glass.

  "Dad?" said Matt. "What is it, Dad?"

  Matt. Sitting up in bed with his sandy hair sticking out at all angles. He wore fuzzy, footie pajamas, and had a faded pillow case safety-pinned round his shoulders for a superhero cape. Matt was only five. Steve didn't want to scare him. He could see that the window was still locked; ran his fingers over the mechanism to be sure. He closed the curtains to shut out the rain, the junkie, and the night in one swift motion, and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  "Thought I saw something in the bird feeders," he said. "Probably a sparrow."

  "A really big sparrow? Or maybe it was a rat," said Matt, more intrigued than horrified.

  That was part life in the city, where pigeons and rats, alley-cats and squirrels, were what passed for wildlife. Matt didn't get outside much these days. The room was littered with picture books and building blocks, with one corner entirely devoted to the dirty laundry Steve kept telling himself he needed to get to. A domino trail led from a Lego castle guarded by a stuffed dragon, back and forth to the mysterious shadow-world under the bed, and out into the hall.

  There were binoculars on the night table next to the medicine bottles. Matt had decided that if he was stuck inside, he was going to watch birds through the windows. The bird-feeders had gone up the next day and drew plenty of visitors.

  Most days, Steve came home from work and Matt had some story or other about a rare crested blue jay or pigeon sighting. Leah, the sitter had a copy of the Birds of America, and Steve tried to throw as many birds as he could into bedtime stories. Matt could go on about feathers and beaks, nests and eggs for hours on end.

  Steve thought of it as a good luck charm. Since the bird feeders had gone up, Matt had started responding to the medication. He had energy now, enough to be restless and cranky, to be bouncing off the walls. He'd broken a lamp playing catch with himself against the wall. He'd found a screwdriver and taken apart the toaster. Steve ate his bread untoasted in the morning and didn't complain. Anything, anything was better than relapse.

  Before he'd gotten sick, Matt hadn't been a bird lover. Digging in the dirt, yes. Climbing trees, yes. Dinosaurs, dragons, bugs and blasters, yes and yes. But then they'd found the tumor and given up the house with the yard, given up a hundred other things, so they could come here, where the experts were supposed to make things miraculously better. Instead of miracles, they had had bills and emergency room visits, and an endless wait to see if this round of chemo would take. And now, after all this time, the birds.

  Matt's mother, Sharon, had loved birds.

  "Where was I?" Steve sat down at the bedside chair and picked up the storybook again, unopened.

  "Was it a rat, Dad?" asked Matt. "Or just a bird?"

  "Neither," said Steve. "I just thought I saw something, and it turned out not to have wings or a tail. Where was I?"

  He raised his eyebrows. Matt grinned.

  "The skeleton was sitting on the Emperor's chest," said Matt. "Going to grind his bones, or squish him to death." He rubbed his hands together in ghoulish glee.

  Steve grinned back at him. "Right," he said. "Half-dead Emperor, giant spooky skeleton, and then who should come to save him but . . . the nightingale."

  "In a rocket ship!" said Matt.

  "Of course," said Steve. They both made special effects noises, and Steve figured it was just as well that old Hans Christian Andersen wasn't within earshot to hear the addition of the battle scene in the Emperor's bedroom with light sabers and laser cannon while the nightingale sang her love song.

  Finally Matt's night-time meds kicked in. He fell asleep, and Steve tucked him in.

  Lights out - and Steve saw a figure silhouetted by the streetlight against the curtain. A vague and slender misery. A person-shape, sharp and clear, of someone huddled up against the glass, listening. Steve crossed the room and reached for the curtain. But then he abruptly turned around again and left Matt alone and breathing softly, deeply in the dark.

  In the morning, it greatly disturbed him that he hadn't opened the curtain again. While Matt was in the bathroom, Steve went out onto the fire escape. He was half-relieved and half-annoyed to discover how hard it was to wrestle the window open. On the plus side, it meant nobody was coming in without wrestling too and making hell all noise in the bargain. Still, it pissed him off.

  He was wondering whether Matt could wrangle them on his own if there ever was a fire when he began to poke half-heartedly around the fire escape. But whoever had been out there last night hadn't left anything incriminating behind. No cigarette butts or crusty needles. Just rain -- a steady drizzle onto the slick, white-painted metal grating of the landing and the rattling stairs. Only wind, and the concrete-and-damp-oil smell of a city in the thaw.

  He did call the landlord and the super, both of whom insisted that the fire escape was for getting out of the building, not into it. Steve checked it for himself on the way to work. He went around the building, never mind the rain, which by then had turned from a drizzle to a torrential downpour. Back behind the dumpsters, the fire escape came to an end -- at the second story. There was a drop-down ladder, but it was secured in the up position. The only way onto it was from the roof. Or from inside the building . . . That was Steve's next thought, as he sat at work, unable to concentrate on anything else. He knew, just knew, that junkie had been there before. A glimpse of her on the run had not been enough to show him any clear details, but the thought of her sitting on the fire escape had set off a frisson of memory, dozens of other glancing hints of presence -- hair, hand, coat,
foot -- that might have been the same, or might simply have been a dream. It was enough that Steve was sure he'd know her if he saw her again.

  "Somebody's been sitting on my fire escape!" he said to himself in the car, laughing with a new appreciation for Papa Bear and his family's plight. All this over what was probably nothing -- some neighbor's kid sneaking out to party with friends on a school night, for all he knew.

  When he got home, Matt was drawing pictures of birds -- brown and blue blobs with wings, most of them. Matt was hungry, so they had macaroni and cheese for dinner, and hot dogs, too. Matt ate maybe three bites of each, and, feeling guilty for being such a bad dad as to feed his sick kid junk food, Steve tried everything including bribery to get him to eat a handful of grapes for their token nutrition.

  "I don't need nutrition," said Matt. "I got vitamins and my medicine."

  Steve felt he had a moral obligation not to cave in on the important stuff -- like grapes -- just because the fear of losing his only son made him want to break down and cry. He pulled the ultimate Dad card instead: "No grapes," he said. "No dessert."

  After cookies and milk, there were video games while Steve looked over Matt's homework -- the bird drawings, and a detailed explanation of how much bird seed Big Bird would eat if he, like the sparrows and jays at the birdfeeder, chomped down on seven times his body weight every day. Matt and Leah had put together some alphabet work in a bold, red crayon, and Matt showed off his skill with a new math puzzle, racing the clock and winning. It was good. Outside the rain fell and the wind rattled the fire escape, but inside, it was all light and warm. They sat on the sofa and watched one of Matt's DVDs. Matt dug in with bony elbows and knees every time the bad guys took a punch. Steve was sure he'd be covered in dollar-sized bruises in the morning. If only Sharon had been there . . . if only bath time hadn't been followed by medicine time . . . it would have been perfect.

  Matt got tucked in. Then, it was story time.

  Cinderella, the very grim, Grimm version, because that was what Steve could tell out of memory. There were other versions, cleansed of violence. They sat wrong in his mind, twisted and somehow false. Liars on the page. Now, he told the story to Matt the way that felt right. The book, as always, sat unopened on his lap. He didn't need it, except as a place to put his hands. He knew the story. It was the version he liked best, the one with golden slippers instead of glass, and a golden gown shaken down out of the leafy, salt-watered, graveside tree. With the ambitious sisters limping on bloody, mutilated feet, and Cinderella's rescue coming on the wings of dozens of birds. No godmother fairy at all.

  Matt's medicines kicked in and he fell asleep before the end. Steve sat for a long, quiet moment, just watching his son's narrow chest rise and fall with each laborious breath. He could set the storybook aside then, and reach out to touch Matt's hair, his cheek, his hands. It wasn't to check for fever, but just to touch, to remind himself of what was real, what mattered.

  Steve rose then, tucked the blankets carefully up around Matt's narrow shoulders, crossed to the window, and opened it.

  There.

  The junkie stood as if she'd been waiting for him, a slim figure hunched against the fire escape, while the wind grabbed and tossed at the oversized, black coat she wore, so the tails of it flew out into the night like wings. She looked strangely as though she'd been both hoping and dreading he would appear. The two emotions beat back and forth across her face with the give-and-take of a pulse, as though she couldn't hold on to either feeling long enough for it to settle.

  He thought at first she was the teenager he'd expected, but there was something in the way she moved, the glance of her eye that said otherwise. She might, he thought, be any age at all. Her unlined face did not speak of youth. No, she looked as though she had been sitting in the winter dark since before there was winter.

  She looked, he thought, like something carved from memory, something that had been extravagantly beautiful once. But the unending rain and wind had worn everything away to bare essentials. She had a long, thin nose centered in a pale, thin face in which her eyes gleamed, overlarge, out of skull-dark hollows, and over which fair hair was plastered in long, lank, streaks.

  She looked cold and wary and very much alone.

  He did not invite her inside.

  It was dark out but for the streetlight and the light coming from his own window, and cold. He could see the warm air spilling out in rolling clouds all around them while they stood on opposite sides of the barred window. She did not shiver -- in a very deliberate way that implied steely pride rather than immunity from the cold.

  There was something unquestionably inhuman about her, and Steve did not want this beautiful, ageless woman-thing to set one ice-cold toe in Matt's room.

  "Who are you?" he asked.

  "I am the evening shade," she said. Her voice was soft, but the wind carried it to him. His ears seemed to quiver, animal-like, trying to stretch themselves to catch that sound. A husky, low-pitched voice that reminded him of water, though not of rain, or of music in some undefined way that had very little to do with singing. "I am a haunted melody half-remembered. I am summer's regret. I am the last hope of an unlucky man. I am a bishop's curse and a beggar's blessing. I am the dream of flowers in winter. I am the woken nightmare. I am moonlit laughter and starlight tears. I am seen with the eyes and believed with the heart."

  Steve rolled his eyes, feeling a surge of irritation at her nonsense, at his own fears. She was high, he thought.

  "Tell me who you are," he said.

  "A sparrow, living off the crumbs you let fall."

  "What are you doing here?" he made his voice harsh. "What do you want?"

  "Tell me a story," she said.

  Steve shook his head and backed away. He closed the window. Locked it. He made sure of the bars, and drew the curtains. His hands were like ice, but they didn't shake until he turned round and saw Matt, still sleeping, undisturbed.

  He believed her.

  "Tell me a story," she said on the next night, when he only stared at her through the window. He watched her through the glass and did not even open it. Her lips moved. The sound was muffled, but Steve could tell what she said.

  "Tell me a story."

  He started moving the bedtime rituals to the living room, away from that big, benighted window and the harmless-seeming shape that lurked just outside it. Steve made sure all the curtains were shut, that not a chink of darkness could get inside. He tried giving up on story time altogether, but Matt rebelled.

  "I liked it better the old way," he said, his face flushed in a way that presaged a tantrum . . . or a fever. "Why do you always have to change everything?"

  Steve didn't have the heart to keep it up after that. There wasn't anything left in his life but Matt. Maybe there was a little pride left, too, enough to keep Steve from admitting his fears, even to himself. A woman on the fire escape. It was easy, in the warmth and light to remember she was small and thin. Matt still slept in the same room. That was only a problem if Steve believed that what waited outside the window was a monster.

  Steve believed in monsters. He did not think the junkie was one.

  He tucked Matt into bed, and told him the story of Mother Holla. Matt thought the heroine, who dropped diamonds and pearls from her mouth like an exploding jewelry box whenever she spoke, was liable to choke to death if she talked in her sleep. He laughed hysterically at the fate of the unkind daughter, too. For Matt, it was a short jump from imagining frogs and snakes falling out of his own mouth, to demanding a burping contest. Matt won, shortly before the night meds kicked in again, and he settled into the pillow, closing his eyes in drowsy triumph.

  Steve set the unopened book aside and reached over. He touched Matt's cheek and hand, both too warm, but what could he do? The chemo had hollowed Matt out, eaten away the good with the bad. All they could do was wait and see which would come back strongest, but in the mean time, Matt was prey to every germ, every chance infection. They couldn't live
inside a bubble . . .

  "Tell me a story," said the junkie on the fire escape.

  Steve didn't remember crossing the room or even opening the window, but he must have.

  The night was clear and very cold. He was standing in it, watching the frost form on the fire escape, while the thin, pale junkie huddled in the wings of her thin, dark coat.

  She, too, had not been well. Her skin was stretched like tissue over the bones beneath, and her lips were dry and chapped. There was nothing alluring about her; he could all too easily believe she was dying of addiction and neglect. His insides twisted in a strange mix of pity and anger.

  "What happens then?" he asked. "Tell you a story, and what then? How is that going to help anything?"

  Her shadow-filled eyes opened and shut. She moved her head a little from one side to the other. It was not negation, but rather like the way a bird moves when it considers a choice of seeds on the ground.

  "I could help him," she said. She lifted one long, bony finger, and, instinctively, Steve stepped in her way, blocking Matt from her line of sight. Her eyes flickered, bright and dark together, and searched Steve's face. "There is sickness in him, and he is weak. I could keep the fever at bay. I have that much power."

  Steve could feel his heart plunge and shudder, so that his ears rang with the sudden, eager beat. Power. It was hard to connect that word with this fragile, frostbit woman; yet he could sense the strength of her will beneath the brittle ruin of her body. Power? He believed her. He believed the universe had in it some force -- call it miracle or magic -- which could do what medicine alone had not. There would be a price, though. In the stories, there was always a price. Steve believed in those stories.

  "You will keep . . ." he wouldn't give her Matt's name, "my son from getting sick?"

  "I will drive away the fever," she said.

  "And all I have to do in return is . . ."