IGMS Issue 28 Page 5

  Perry hadn't refused. He'd ascended the heights of Scaletown and then he'd walked away. He'd won and now he was winning again, but these scaleys had never even tried.

  Perry wondered whether his old kingdom had continued on without him or whether it had dwindled away - like Perry had - with the new scaleys staying away, and the old ones moving on, clipping themselves down, or worse, becoming freaks out in the human world.

  But in his mind that warren of abandoned buildings, twining sewers, cracked asphalt, and overgrown parks still gave birth to the same hopeless, eternal nests of vipers. Would anyone remember him out there? Was there still a place for him?

  One night, Perry woke up from a dream and realized that he wanted to be anywhere but here. His nascent scales reverberated with energy, and he felt light. That morning his hand paused over the large steel file - he'd worn down more than two dozen files since coming out here - and thought about going in to the management meeting with his heritage proudly showing. But his stomach churned at the thought of that confrontation. That's when he knew he'd never again be a king. He filed away at the scale beds. Then he gave his two weeks' notice.

  As he drove west, his scale beds turned silver. Outside Sacramento, a gas station attendant locked the door as Perry approached. When he reached Oakland, Perry was both elated and disturbed to see that Scaletown looked the same. At its edges there were new condominiums where snakes came and went from holes in the walls, but in the rotting center, the old overgrown kings still sunned themselves on the corners and held court amongst a swirl of little scaleys.

  Perry felt a mix of nostalgia and heartsick desire as he watched one king slowly amble down the block. The king was much larger than Perry had ever been: twenty or thirty feet long, with glossy black scales. It was good that the streets in West Oakland had been built wide to accommodate trucks, because the king was taking up every lane. His long, silver spikes scratched up the pavement and errant sweeps of his tail knocked dents into parked cars.

  A gang of human youths gathered at one corner and threw rocks at the king. Perry's heart lurched. The king could kill them all with a snap of his fangs. But the king looked from side to side, warily. His followers had dissolved into their warehouse nests. He was all alone on the street. In the distance, a siren lit up.

  The youths pressed their assault. One rock bounced off the king's iron hide and smacked into Perry's car. The other cars waiting with Perry had swerved off into side streets or made hasty U-turns. One police car screeched up, and then another. The king had curled up into a ball, but he poked his head up to look at the police. The youths had thrown themselves to the ground in a tableau of feigned victimhood, and were shouting a chorus of pleas for mercy. The balled-up king rocked back and forth.

  Perry blinked twice. The king's worried face contained the briefest outline of someone he'd once known: Arendt. Dozens of police warily approached the king, holding long prods and nets. A few of the cars were equipped with curved rams that slowly jostled at Arendt.

  Not knowing what else to do, Perry pulled out his phone, exited his car, and started recording. His heart ached as he slowly approached the police. The first few steps were torture, but the next ones happened automatically.

  Police attention was so focused on Arendt that Perry came within a dozen steps before they turned around, looked at him, raised their riot batons and shouted for him to back off.

  He stopped, but kept his phone pointed at them.

  "They made an unprovoked assault on him," Perry said.

  "This isn't your place, little scaley," Arendt said.

  Faced with Perry's camera, the police conferred, and slowly lowered their weapons. They dispersed the youths with a few stern warnings, and then settled down to the work of meting out punishments for Arendt.

  The lead officer pulled out a pad and began writing tickets and summons and citations for Arendt: jaywalking, blocking traffic, damaging city property; damaging private property; resisting arrest; obstructing justice. By the time he was done, he'd left a tidy pile of paper next to one of Arendt's claws.

  After the police left, Arendt said, "Who's your king, boy? He'll be sure to hear about your foolishness. I damned well told you to let me handle it."

  "They were about to bring you down."

  "Oh, they can't hurt me. And in jail, they have to feed me." Arendt extended himself and tensed his body. For the first time, Perry saw two nubs of flesh poking out from Arendt's shoulders. The nubs twitched rapidly as Arendt stretched. Was he growing wings?

  Arendt continued, "You're a funny little thing, aren't you? You've got the coloring of a king - a fine, deep black - but your scales are so soft. You look like a king who's been shrunk down to the size of a little scaley."

  Perry's heart palpitated. He mumbled something and looked away, hoping Arendt wouldn't recognize him. When the king got up, the tickets flew off and scattered across the street. Perry ran up and down, collecting them, while the king laughed and stomped away.

  Arendt had been given fines of more than five thousand dollars and several summons to appear in court. Perry took the tickets down to the police station to see if anything could be done.

  In the station, he was shocked to see a bored-looking scaley wearing a uniform and sitting behind a desk. When Perry presented the tickets to the scaley, the officer said, "You shouldn't get involved with those guys. They're trouble."

  "The kings are just trying to live their lives."

  "They're selfish," the police scaley said. "They don't think about the costs they're imposing on the taxpayer - the roads that need repaving, the buildings that need reconstructing, the schools that need enlarging - just because there's nowhere that can fit their overgrown asses."

  Perry paid off the balance on the tickets, and arranged for a lawyer to show up in court on Arendt's behalf.

  With the money saved during his years of work, Perry bought a warehouse in the center of Scaletown. He lined the floor with straw and it didn't take long for a conclave of kings to move in.

  The kings looked upon his warehouse as a human thing, and chuckled about the lessons that Perry tried to teach them. Their comprehension of practical matters--rents, mortgages, bank accounts, wages - was frozen at the level of the children they'd been when they'd left the human world.

  They trusted Perry, and they relied on his help in dealing with human society. But Perry couldn't penetrate the core of their lives anymore, the winding rituals of information, maladaptation and insemination that took them voyaging far into the woods and then back, bearing new egg forms, and sporting broken scales and horns.

  For his part, Perry stopped shaving, but his peak growing years were over. Even though his color was deep and mature, his horns remained short and his scales remained soft.

  Over the coming months, Perry found others like himself. The human world had been full of snakes who had managed to pass themselves off as normal men and women. And now, they were returning.

  They agglomerated around Perry, filling his home with their plans for collectives and legal aid societies and political action. They'd learned from the human world, and they knew how to maneuver amongst the corporate, judicial, and political bureaucracies that left most snakes flat-footed. They formed an impromptu rescue society for the kings: bailing them out from jail and helping them escape from the streets.

  But the kings never stopped treating them like juveniles. To the kings, snakes like Perry were curiosities: little scaleys who'd somehow lost their way. They might accept Perry's help, but they'd never respect him.

  For a time, that rankled at Perry. But he grew to accept it. How could he resent the kings? They were almost obsolete. New generations of snakes had no desire to become kings. To them, unlimited growth was selfish, attention-seeking behavior. Young scaleys preferred to live human-like lives at human-like sizes. Perry's generation would be the first, last, and only generation of kings.

  But it would also be the last generation of returners. No one thought of shaving
himself down completely anymore. The younger generations were quick to claim their serpentine identities. After all - so long as they behaved in a "normal" way - snakes were no longer barred from the human world. The younger generations pitied the returners for the oppression they'd faced, but they also, privately, thought that the returners had been just a little bit cowardly.

  Perry knew that future generations would see both his own confused behavior and the kings' excessive growth as psychoses that sprang from societal oppression. But Perry didn't regret his decisions. He'd known, instinctively, that Scaletown was too small to hold a king . . . he just hadn't known the right way to leave.

  With Perry's help, the kings were safe, fat, and growing faster than ever. Soon enough, they'd unfurl their wings, lift themselves out of this forgotten ghetto, and darken the sky with their serpentine dances.

  And, for one brief generation, no one in the world would be able to ignore those silly, beautiful kings.

  Paper Airplanes Into the Void

  by Terra LeMay

  Artwork by Tomislav Tikulin

  * * *

  The end of the world was pretty much what Jared had been told to expect, which was rather disappointing, all things considered. A thriving little tourist town had blossomed right up next to the place where the world dropped off into nothingness, and kitschy, hand-painted signs pointed the way to the largest overhang and the best view of the void beyond the edge. But the best view of the void was the same as every other view. It was like staring out a fogged window. There was nothing to see. No bottom to it as far as anybody knew, no far side, nothing but an endless expanse of . . . nothingness. With a sound track.

  Noise echoed up from the void. Music, and indecipherable but distinctly human voices. There were people down there. Or out there. Somewhere. They talked to each other. They sang. They argued and cried. They played radios, car stereos, ipods with speakers, or who knew what. Maybe every resident of the deep carried around a well-tuned musical instrument. Nobody knew. Nobody had ever been down and come back to report it.

  People had jumped. With parachutes and without. People had flown aircraft out there, planes, hang-gliders, helicopters. People had thrown ropes over the ledge and attempted to climb down. No one ever returned. It was almost a cliché.

  Jared wasn't special. Why would things be any different for him than they were for everyone else? They wouldn't be. He knew. And yet, he'd come anyway.

  The End - what the kitschy sign called The End, anyway - was really nothing more than a great, green field, fenced off from the town: lateral sides capped by immense, erosion-control barricades formed of school bus-sized concrete blocks. If you tried to reach the barricades from outside the fence - tried to reach the end of the Earth without going through the field called The End - you met the ocean spilling away into nothing, presumably digging out the underside of the shelf the town sat upon. It was unsafe to approach from that direction.

  The rest of the edge of the world was immersed beneath the ocean, which perpetually spilled over into the void, but at The End, you could walk right up and look out over the abyss. Which meant Jared had to buy a ticket. But he knew to expect that. Everybody knew that.

  It cost him ten dollars. Season passes were thirty-five. Family season passes: Seventy dollars. Military and senior citizens: Ten percent discount. Unaccompanied minors not admitted. Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.

  The ticket-taker stamped Jared's hand as he pushed through the turnstile.

  There was a circular aspect to his coming back to The End. He'd been born in the village beside The End (which was also called The End, though locals usually called it The Village to avoid confusion). He'd grown up hearing about it: about how his mother and father had left him, less than a day old, in the nursery at the village's medical center. Ostensibly to take a bit of fresh air, but they'd tucked a note beneath him where a nurse would find it the first time she picked him up. It said nothing of substance, only listed his maternal grandmother's address and phone number. Later, word came from The End: the young couple had exchanged a bucketful of rolled quarters for a hot air balloon large enough to carry them both out over the deep. Like everyone who'd gone before them, they were never seen again.

  Jared had passed the medical center on his way toward the drop. It was smaller and more homely than he'd imagined. A broad, single-story building with clapboard siding and an asphalt-shingle roof, it looked more like a nursing home than a medical center. He'd paused to look, but had not entered. Plenty of time for that once he'd seen what he'd come to see.

  It was early morning. Fog had crept up to lick the crumbling overhang of the drop. Something that sounded like Chopin rose from deep near where Jared approached. He stood and listened - listened for human voices, too, but heard none. When the piece finished, there was a brief moment of silence, then a Mariachi band picked up. Jared began to stroll, keeping inside the rope barrier that indicated where the stability of the cliff face was questionable.

  There was nothing to look at. Nothing to see. Nothing to be learned from his walk that others hadn't already discovered. But he had to do it, at least once. He couldn't make a well-informed decision without examining The End firsthand. Once he had, he retreated back into the field. Just in time, too; the tourist buses had begun arriving, and while most people were still lined up to buy their tickets, a few had already wandered into the park. A family and their dog staked out picnic territory with blankets and lawn chairs. A young couple walked hand-in-hand along the edge, much the way Jared just had. (Was that how his parents had looked, when they'd first walked the drop?) When they reached some predetermined point, they both produced paper airplanes, which they threw with great ceremony out into the void. It seemed kind of silly, at first, until Jared thought of the box of letters he'd brought with him, which were out in the trunk of his car. Hundreds of them. Written to his parents, ever since he'd been old enough to scrawl the alphabet in Crayola erasable marker. He turned away and walked back the way he'd come.

  An old man knelt near the middle of the field, pinning kites to the grass so the wind wouldn't blow them away. He'd tapped a stake into the ground, and a sign stapled to it read: Kites - $20. Hang Gliders - $2000. Jared didn't see any hang gliders, but he stopped to talk to the old man anyway. He'd heard stories of this particular old man, all his life.

  "Do you sell many?" he asked. "Hang gliders, I mean."

  "Oh yes! Yes, many more than you'd expect!" The old man rose, pausing once he regained his feet so he could stretch his back. "It's a one way trip though, you know. You'd think that'd put people off, but no, doesn't seem to. Folks come here from all over the world just to go over. Lots of them do it in my hang gliders."

  Jared gestured at the brilliantly colored kites on the grass, at the obvious lack of hang gliders. "Are you sold out, then? Expecting more soon?"

  The old man scratched his head, looking befuddled, then said, "Oh! No, I've got one out in the truck, matter of fact, but that one's already sold. I require a twenty-four hour waiting period before delivery." He narrowed his eyes and considered Jared carefully. "Payment in advance. No refunds. I like people to have enough time to change their minds, in case they haven't thought things through. You understand."

  Jared nodded.

  "Course, there ain't no stopping some folks. There's 'em that just takes a running leap. With or without a parachute. And there's climbers, sometimes. Come with repelling gear and ropes and the whole nine. But if it's a hang glider you're wanting, I'm your man."

  "What about hot air balloons?"

  "$20,000," said the old man, without pausing even a beat. "I don't keep those on hand. They take three weeks to deliver."

  "$20,000 . . ." repeated Jared, a little stunned.

  "That's right," said the old man. "I used to bring a balloon out here on weekends and rent it out. Just for sightseers, you know. Kept it tethered, never meant no one to take it off into The End. But some while back, I had some dishonest folks
rent it for an hour, take it up into the air, then cut free of my tether. Now it's $20,000, cash in advance. No exceptions." He crossed his arms defensively, as if Jared had already double-crossed him.

  "Yes, sir," Jared said. "That's all right. I was only asking. My parents, uh, rented a balloon here once. That's all."

  The old man gave a tight, unfriendly nod. Jared thanked him and retreated. He spent the rest of the day watching people fly kites. Several vendors sold helium balloons, and he purchased one and set it free. It quickly flew too high for him to see whether it disappeared into The End or not. He thought of going to his car to fetch some of his letters. He could fold them into paper airplanes and throw them, the way he'd seen others doing it, all day. But it was hard for him to reconcile himself with the idea that his parents might not ever receive them. Besides, the signs near the exit warned: "No re-entry" and Jared didn't want to pay the extra admission.

  At lunchtime, he grew hungry and left the park, went to one of the small hotels he'd passed on the way into town. He checked in and called room service to bring him a sandwich and a glass of milk, which he ate and drank. Then he climbed under the covers of his bed and went to sleep. He didn't call anyone or write any letters, though he knew he should've.

  He'd intended to buy a hot air balloon, but there was no way he could justify such an enormous expense, even if he'd had that much money. He was leaving what remained of his savings to Gran, to help pay her senior care expenses. He'd have to buy a hang glider instead. But first he wanted to tour the hospital where he'd been born. He'd have to go back to The End, pay for the hang glider, then go tour the hospital, and wait until tomorrow to go find his parents.

  Somehow it didn't happen. He stayed in bed until nightfall, got up, discovered the entire town more or less shut down in the evenings, then went back to his hotel room.

  He still didn't call anyone or write any letters.