IGMS Issue 28 Read online

  Then his mechanical fist crunches around mine -- snaps my thumb like a twig. I scream.

  "Why bother stealing if you're so bad at it?"

  I roll away, clutching my hand and swearing. Jeb kicks me. Twice.

  "Stop!" I shout.

  "Why should I? I could kill you here. I'm stronger than you, 'specially with my arm." The coals from our fire glow in his eyes. It turns the rest of his blank face the color of ash.

  "You wouldn't kill me."

  "I dream about killing men all the time."

  I grab a bit of dirt with my good hand, ready to fling it and run, but Jeb kicks me in the head, hard.

  When I wake up, he's gone. So are the buttons from my coat - sliced clean off. He left my clothes, boots, and mining pan, though. Too decrepit to sell.

  I beg the other general store owner to loan me some bandages. He turns me out. I make do with a sock, but after a day, it reeks. I try to pan, but it slips from my hand and bangs my shins when I try. Tried to pawn the pan, but no one wants it.

  After three days, my stomach feels like jerky. Every time I get close to a store, the snipers sight down their rifles. All right, they do that for most people to let them know they're there, but I think they'd actually shoot me if I took another step. They know I'm broke.

  My head reels like I'm drunk, except I haven't had the money for that in months. I need food and the only place I can steal from is high-and-mighty Miss Annie's. She probably does have something under that patch -- bones and gears or something worse. But I've got to eat.

  I stroll in. There're two other men, chatting with her and buying boots, but she still curtsies at me. I don't bow in return. Curtsies aren't worth a sniff. The two men actually glare at me, like they're gentlemen. One of them spends every night at the brothel and the other steals horses when he can. They're not better than me and they're not gentlemen just because Miss Annie talks to them like they are. I glare back then slip between the shelves.

  I slug a small bag of corn against my side with my good hand and cover it up with my coat. Miss Annie really wasn't watching. No one shouts as I stride out the front door.

  Then there's a gunshot and a hot searing pain in my side. I slump to the ground. The sniper over the other general store, his rifle trails smoke and he's loading another shot. I'm too shocked-stupid to do anything but stare. He wasted a bullet on me!

  It must have grazed the bag before hitting my ribs because corn spills around me as I fall to the ground. Shouting, now, and Miss Annie's two friends run out and kick me, cussing up a storm about how stealing's wrong. Even though they steal all the time.

  Miss Annie runs after, skirts fluttering. She holds a hand to the sniper, and nice as if tea time had just ended, she asks the men to leave. They tip their real hats at her and shuffle off.

  I sneer up at her, excited to see the hate in her one eye, her perfect composure spoiled.

  Instead, she turns inside. Maybe she'll politely bury my corpse when I'm dead. I try to stand, but my legs feel tingly.

  Miss Annie comes back in a moment with linens and alcohol. She rips off my shirt and cleans the wound.

  "I think you've cracked some ribs, but I daresay you'll live."

  Corn grates into my back. "Are you blind? I just stole from you! I'm not sorry, either."

  Miss Annie's one eye seems sad. "And kicking and cussing at you will make it less stolen?"

  She's an idiot and she should hire a sniper, like the rest of the sensible folk in town. Instead, she helps me into a cot in a back room. Maybe when she lost her eye, she lost her brains, too. "You're supposed to be upset."

  She clucks at me, like she's my mother and has a right to as she pulls a blanket over me. "If you think stealing a bag of corn is the worst thing a man's ever done to me, you're more naïve than I thought. Now lay still and rest up."

  Oddest thing. I wake up in clean clothes -- my own were ruined. And I can see again. Real faces. Miss Annie's got a scar the eyepatch can't cover. Looks like a lash. A whip's what took out her eye. "Why . . . can I see?"

  "No bone money bought those clothes." Then she spoons me broth. Feeds me for weeks, until I'm fit to mine again. Never lectures me, just left a Bible on the bedside table, as if it'd somehow creep into my head in the middle of the night. Fixed my thumb, too.

  When I'm up and ready to prospect again, she doesn't ask for an ounce. But here's the oddest thing: seeing her smile, I want to pay her back. Not because she's pretty. But because if anyone deserves to be paid, it's Miss Annie.

  I head out to my old panning spot. First thing that turns up is a bone.

  I stare at it, all old and chipped. It's a big one, too. Probably a piece of someone's leg.

  Maybe Miss Annie wouldn't like this, exactly, but I can change it for gold at the assay office. I'd be able to pay her back right.

  I pocket the bone. At the assay office, though, the man's face doesn't look right. His eyes are clear, but his nose, his mouth, it's melting away. I've gotten along just fine without seeing faces, though. I trade the bone in for the gold, and keep down the street.

  The sniper's faces are blank. The pair reeling out of the salon, they're just eyes and a patch of color. The gold hangs heavy in my pocket. Why should I give it to Miss Annie? Being a fool and wasting her time on folks gives her a right to my earnings?

  I buy my food at the other general store, then walk around hers with it on my back. She had to see it. I strode all around her store, then left without buying so much as a penny candy. But she doesn't say anything. Even when I leave, she just waves and smiles, nice and sincere.

  I'm too mad to sleep that night. In the morning, I march through her store to the front counter. "What's wrong with you? Was it cheaper to patch me up than pay someone to haul my body into the desert?"

  "Cheaper?" Miss Annie shook her head.

  "You got some crazy bone-and-gear brain behind that patch?"

  "I don't traffic in anything bone-animated." She polishes the counter. I'm glad I can't see the expression on her self-righteous face. "I don't traffic in anything human."

  Now I've found her weak spot. "Slavery left it's mark, eh?"

  But Miss Annie don't crumple to my jibe. She don't cry or hit me. She stops polishing and her eye crinkles with the smile I can't see. "I have a soul. I'd like to keep it that way."

  I spit in her eye. She wipes it away with her rag, eye still smiling.

  I can't stand to look at what of her I can see. I stomp outside. Everyone else in town knows how things work. No one else prattles like she does. Anyone else would've left me to die on their porch, then checked my pockets for change.

  Miss Annie don't belong.

  I still have a bit of flint and the steel edge of my pan. I sneak around back. My sparks catch and run along a dusty piece of tumbleweed, and from there, lick up Miss Annie's store. I sneak to the other side of town and watch. Wood's good and dry. Already, the shop sends up billows of smoke. Any time now, Miss Annie'll stomp out, cursing and swearing.

  Except I can't help but think she might come out, calm and polite as a tea party. She never did manage to get the least bit proper mad that I stole from her. Why would this be any different? No, I'd bet every ounce of my bone money that she'll walk out, eyes crinkled at the corners, with nothing harsher to say that "good afternoon."

  I think that would drive me mad.

  So I skip town.

  There are plenty of towns, but there's only one Miss Annie.

  The Snake King Sells Out

  by Rahul Kanakia

  Artwork by Kevin Wasden

  * * *

  After his abdication ceremony, Norman stayed away from his old kingdom: the dancepits beneath the bridge; the alleys where discarded shells and coils of molted skin hung from streetside stalls; the boiling cauldrons where his people softened their carapaces and anonymously impregnated each other; and, most of all, the huge vacant lot where he'd once held court from atop a tall slab of granite that his subjects had stolen from a const
ruction site.

  Instead, he retreated to the backyard of a former admirer. He found the handsaw that the man had said he owned. Perry put down a blue tarp, slithered onto it, and went to work.

  The spines running down his back snapped off at their hilts. He collected them in a bucket. The interlocking horns emanating in a tangle from his forehead and scalp had been the largest rack in Oakland's Scaletown, where the money that the scale-dealers would pay for a few inches of horn was often the only thing standing preventing a snake from starving. Perry had become king because he'd refused to make those compromises. But now, he carefully sawed off the rack and swaddled it in a blanket.

  When Perry had told his fellow kings what he was planning, the conclave had hissed at him. He was the heaviest and oiliest snake amongst them. His durable carapace had once totaled a Ford Explorer that had tried to run him down. How could someone like that ever go back to being pink, soft, naked? But Perry was firm. He didn't want to spend his life as king of a squat. He knew he was capable of more.

  Finally, even his scales were peeled away, packed in paper, and loaded onto the bed of a borrowed truck. Then he carefully sanded down the last few millimeters of scale with a large file and collected the glittering dust in a jar. He checked himself in a hand-mirror. Perry looked like a human again; he looked like the man his parents had expected him to grow up into.

  Usually, Perry only came to San Francisco to beg money from tourists who went wide-eyed when they saw him. Today he reveled in blending in with those tourists.

  He walked through upscale districts where only yesterday the guards would've hustled him away from storefronts and entrances. He went from shop to shop, carrying his wares on a back that was strong from years of hauling a seventy-pound carapace. Finally he was quoted a price that sang out to him in terms of miles he could travel and meals he could eat . . . he took the money and left a part of himself behind. His horns and scales would go to adorn the bodies and mantels of wealthy women.

  "That's the way to do it," he'd said in all the nests. "None of this dealing with Scaletown ripoff artists. Grow big and then cut everything away. Get a high price from city shops that only trade in high-quality scales."

  Over the last six months he'd talked about it so often that he'd convinced himself it was what he'd planned all along . . . that his entire journey from tiny scaley to secret king of the twining dances under the evening sun in Tilden Park had merely been a search for one big payoff.

  With the registered check in hand, the downtown bank whose Scaletown branch had rejected him with a cold form-letter was all too willing to let him open a checking account. He drove home with the windows down and plastic in his frayed wallet, feeling the wind playing out over his newly bare skin. The air felt strange, like it was flowing down inside his body and through his veins.

  Chicago was torture. He'd gone somewhere cold to prove he was no longer restricted by the need to sun himself on a steaming patch of asphalt. But his blood had grown thick inside that carapace, and despite all the layers of clothing he wore, the cold numbed his arms and legs even when he was inside his apartment.

  He'd used his scale-money to lease a Hyde Park apartment where he stayed holed up inside for weeks. He paced the bare blue carpet of his unfurnished living area for hours, popping back into consciousness every fifteen minutes to congratulate himself on how fast the time was flowing.

  He'd wanted to make a clean break, but he couldn't stop imagining what his former subjects were doing. When he'd left, his fellow king, Arendt, had been fasting in preparation for swallowing a calf, whole, during the solstice festival, so he could hibernate through the winter months with that bulge slowly dissolving inside him. Had he succeeded? Or had his belly split open again, like it did last year? Perry was glad he hadn't told anyone where he was going or how to reach him. At times, a single familiar voice on the phone would have been enough to send him running home.

  Instead, he walked those slowly warming street and tried to remember how human beings acted. Once, when a blockbuster movie came out, he lined up on opening day, bought a ticket, and hoped the show would sell out so that someone would be forced to sit next to him. When the film started, there were men on either side of Perry, and he drowsed between them, pretending that he was back in the nest.

  He pecked out a resume, struggling to remember the date he should have graduated from college. He told the interviewers he'd spent the past few years studying music composition in Italy - or sometimes Spain - and they all laughed together at how his dreams had fallen away. He blackmailed two snakelovers, humans based in big companies back in San Francisco, into acting as his references. He got a job at an insurance company.

  The scale money was invested into the two suits that he wore to work, where he sat behind a desk for nine or more hours a day. His coworkers had no idea that Perry had once commanded hundreds through force of will alone. When he'd hissed, they'd assembled. They'd slithered together at midnight through the shuttered public parks and national forests. They'd made figures in the mud of Sequoia national park, and hunted down mountain lions in the hills of the Sierra Nevadas. Perry had been a king, while the silly, ordinary people he now worked with had been adding and subtracting figures and arranging them in spreadsheets.

  But for all his power, he'd always had to hustle to stay alive. He'd never had this . . . all the food he could eat . . . a place where he could shut the door and be alone . . . and the ability to sit in a safe spot and turn off his mind.

  And the figures and spreadsheets had their own beauty. Sometimes he could get lost in the actuarial tables. Once, he fell into a reverie at his desk and came up with a new product. Snakes were generally held to be degenerate and dirty, but the tables didn't lie. Their risk of death from the violent incidents so common to youth was quite low, perhaps due to their durable carapaces. Their lives were underpriced. He spent a few days drafting a memo. He rewrote it endlessly, trying to decide what term would avoid betraying his past, before finally hitting upon "persons of altered physiognomy."

  He sent the memo to his boss and for a few weeks was CC'ed on emails as it percolated upwards.

  One day, Perry looked to the right and saw a scaley peering over the cubicle partition. Instinctively, Perry hissed. The scaley looked shocked. He was an undergrown one, with just the seeds of scales popping up on his face and arms, and the nubs of horns growing on his forehead. Both Perry and this scaley clipped themselves every day, but this one left a little bit of residue behind: enough to be visible.

  The scaley said hello. He'd read Perry's memo. He went off, quickly, and Perry was satisfied that he'd even managed to fool another snake . . . Perry hadn't gone about the process of reintegration half-assed, like this fool had. Why bother trying to make it in a man's world without looking like a man? Perry asked around about the other scaley. Turned out he was a diversity hire, and actually senior to Perry.

  Perry's memo was garbage-filed somewhere upstairs. He heard that when the other scaley tried to argue for it, he ended up being transferred away from headquarters, to Indianapolis. Perry's boss noticed that he never complained about it, and, after they had a good laugh about the short-sightedness of the guys upstairs, Perry was promoted.

  Within a few years, there were scaleys everywhere. Oh, they were still fairly rare, but Perry could see them creeping into the human world. He spotted one bagging his groceries. He saw one shopping for new speaker cables in the electronics store. He saw the full, vibrant, overgrown rack of a snake bobbing up and down as it led visitors on tours of the Field Museum.

  And they'd crept into his company too. There were four of them right in his building: one in the research division on the third floor, two policy examiners on the floor below him, and one in the call center just down the hall. The latter had a particularly finely formed and gleaming carapace.

  Didn't they know that they were going about things wrong? Perry had an office. He had respect. They didn't have anything. Except for the call center scaley
, they all ate together and disdained the human beings. Perry had heard that they thought he was a bigot because he'd buttonholed the researcher in the elevator. Perry had asked the scaley whether he'd ever considered becoming human again. The researcher had murmured something and then looked forward, its infinite contempt radiating fractally off the polished metal surfaces of the elevator.

  Perry thought they were lazy. Perry had been a king, and he'd given it up for something better. What had they given up? Now, there were Scaletowns everywhere. One had just arisen in Chicago: a bunch of converted warehouses that was specially insulated and heated. But these new Scaletowns didn't have kings; they had landlords. They didn't have dances in the fields; they had gatherings in living rooms. They didn't have boiling subterranean cauldrons; they had tepid bathtubs.

  Perry still filed himself down daily, scraping away the buds of horns and seeds of scales. He didn't sell the pieces anymore; he drove to far-away neighborhoods and left the plastic bags of clippings in foreign garbage cans.

  But these scaleys didn't have to do that. If they wanted, they could grow and grow. The call center snake was heavier than many kings Perry had known. But none of them seemed to care about achieving dominance.

  That's what Perry had wanted for so long. Even before the crosshatching patterns had begun to rise up out of his teenage skin, he had read salacious exposés about the doings of the snakes in the sewers and thought that they were so free and so much more beautiful than anything his world held. And above them all, the kings, with their eyes glinting from atop the writhing forms. The kings held the kind of power that the rest of the world didn't offer anymore. Kings who ruled by personality, by beauty, by every trick except force, how could anyone not want that? Most people couldn't have it, but if you could, then how could you refuse it?