IGMS Issue 45 Read online

  I turn away from her, afraid that she'll steal my bag with all the evidence in it.

  "We can stop it. The animals can't reproduce."

  "We can always make more," she says, laughing again like it's the biggest joke in the world. "The company's resources are larger than you could ever imagine."

  The bus pulls up, but I don't walk forward to get on and neither does Margie. We stand for a while in the warm summer wind. Finally, I speak. "Why did you ask me?"

  "Huh?"

  "Ask me to be your assistant. When you knew what you were doing, and knew you weren't going to tell me anything about it. Until it was too late."

  "Because I wanted to study you, Kimmy. I wanted to see for myself if you were capable of more than handing out mail and fetching coffees. You passed, more or less. Plus, I needed the company. I was hoping you might keep me from snapping. Instead, you reminded me I'm just as horrible as the company."

  "Thanks," I reply. "Well, since you say the plan is meaningless, I guess I'll just go to work. The least you could do is give me a ride."

  "Back to Nature's Helpers? You're going to sell out like that?"

  "At least I still have a job."

  She grunts. "Come on, take the day off. Remember, I read your personnel file, I know you have the days." She gestures toward the diner at the corner. "I'll buy you a soy-patty."

  I look at the bus stop, then back at Margie. "Okay."

  But I keep one hand on the suitcase, and I don't let go, not even much later when we say our goodbyes. Somewhere out there is a person who isn't as scared of the world as I am, and they're going to need this.

  Lost and Found

  by Christian Heftel

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  When Forrest Long was 33, things that he had lost long ago began to return to his life. That day, he and his crew were trashing out foreclosed homes. They usually did construction, but ever since the recession, this was the only work they could find.

  They'd just reached the last house of the day. From the outside, it looked like it was in decent enough repair, but that was no guarantee of what he'd find inside. Last home he'd done, the family had left food sitting in an open, powerless refrigerator for weeks. The whole house had smelled of it, and the kitchen had been full of mold and maggots.

  The bank hadn't given Forrest a key, so he had to find his own way in. He called over Pete, who had worked for him longest. "Have a couple of the boys check the windows. Get the rest working on the yard."

  Pete nodded and called out to the men, once in English and once in Spanish.

  Forrest watched as the men carried lawn ornaments and potted plants to the dumpster. He sighed. This was going to be a big job. The yard was full of crap -- lawn gnomes, bird feeders, wind chimes, suncatchers, ceramic toadstools -- and people with cluttered yards had cluttered houses. You sometimes found hoarders with immaculate yards, but you never found a cluttered yard and an immaculate house. Ah well. Maybe he'd find some interesting stuff at least.

  There was a call from the back of the house. Someone had found a way in.

  Forrest wandered around the side of the house, looking in the windows. The curtains were all drawn tight, and they were made of sun-faded fabric that looked like it was decades old. Coming around the back of the yard, he saw Pete standing with the back door open.

  "Wasn't even locked," Pete said.

  Forrest nodded and walked in. It was hot and muggy and dark inside the house, but at least it didn't smell like feces or vomit or rotting food. It didn't seem like squatters or hobos had been here, or like some abandoned dog had been forced to fend for itself in the house since its owner was evicted.

  Forrest pulled out his camera and started taking the "before" pictures for the bank. He'd been right. The house was packed. In every room, there was one piece of furniture too many, and every available surface was covered with knick-knacks of some kind or another. Shelves overflowing with books lined the walls. He reached out a hand and touched a chair. It was sturdy, made of heavy wood, not like the modern furniture that was all pressboard and padding. It'd be hard to carry to the dumpster, and even harder to break and carry out in pieces. The boys were going to love this.

  The house began to grow lighter as the boys started pulling the curtains off the windows. Forrest walked to the bookshelves and confirmed that there was nothing of worth. There were old books, but nothing that looked really rare or collectible. It was all new age crap, with titles about crystals and chakras and sex magicks.

  "Junk everything on this floor," Forrest called. "There's nothing worth saving."

  Forrest walked up the stairs to check the second floor. Here things were stranger. A large mural had been hand-painted on the wall in the upstairs hallway, showing a white skeleton and a black woman curled around each other to form a yin-yang. The numbers of the clock ran around the outside in a circle. Gold lines connected the numbers, creating a 12-pointed star. They'd definitely need new paint.

  There were only two rooms upstairs. Forrest entered the first. The main floor had been full, but there had been an order to it. Here, there was only chaos: shells and crystals and bird's eggs filled the shelves and littered the floor. He ascertained that there was nothing of value, then moved out of the room. From downstairs, he could hear the crashes, tinkles, and rustles as the boys shoveled trash into bags.

  One room left. One last chance to find something worth taking. Forrest opened the door. A sea of dreamcatchers hung from the ceiling. The wind from the door set the dreamcatchers gently moving like tree branches in a breeze. There was something hypnotic about their movement, and light from the doorway glinted off of their beads like eyes.

  Forrest felt his skin rise in goose bumps. He stood in the doorway until the dreamcatchers stopped. Then he blinked and shook his head. Weird house. But he'd seen weirder, and at least this place didn't have fleas.

  Forrest entered the room. A four-poster bed with white sheets sat in the middle of the floor. To the side of it, he saw a dresser. Maybe there'd be some jewelry in there, something that would actually be worth trying to sell.

  Hunched over, Forrest passed to the dresser and began opening drawers. In the first, there was only a small twig that had grown into a knot. Who kept that in their dresser? He shook his head, tossed the twig aside and looked in the second drawer.

  Success. In the dim light, Forrest saw something small and yellow against the black background of the drawer. Even if it was just another piece of new age crap, if it was a gold piece of new age crap, there might be some worth to it. He reached in to grab it, then startled back and cried out. Whatever he'd touched was soft and rough, and it moved. What on earth was that?

  "You okay, boss?" Pete called from downstairs.

  Forrest didn't reply, just strode to the window and pulled down the curtains. Wincing at the strong light, he returned to the dresser. What was it that he had touched?

  Looking into the drawer, Forrest saw a small yellow toad. He blinked. How strange. How long had the toad been in that drawer? What had it been eating? How had it stayed alive? The toad moved, crawling slowly along the black velvet of the drawer.

  Forrest looked more closely at it. It was so familiar.

  The stomping of boots up the stairs heralded Pete's arrival.

  "Hey," Pete said.

  Forrest turned and saw Pete's head sticking in through the doorway.

  "Everything all right?" Pete asked. "I heard you yell."

  "Yeah," said Forrest. "I'm fine. Just got startled."

  "Okay," said Pete. He looked around the room.

  "I'm fine," said Forrest. "Back to work."

  "All right," said Pete. He went back downstairs.

  Forrest turned back to the toad in the drawer, then brought his head down to get a closer look. It looked exactly like the toad he'd had way back when he was a kid.

  Forrest had found it in the back yard, where it shone gold in the green grass. He picked it up, held it to his
eye as it croaked and its legs waved in the air. He studied its black, empty eyes, and discovered that it was missing a toe on one of its back legs. Then he took it carefully into the house, moving quietly so Dad wouldn't hear him. Dad would just tell him he couldn't keep it, would yell at him and say that he lost everything anyway and the last thing that they needed was an amphibian loose in the house.

  Forrest grabbed a jar from the kitchen and carried it up to his room, where he shut the door. He punched holes in the lid and put the toad inside, then collected worms and crickets and bits of grass, because he didn't know what toads ate. He kept the jar under his bed for several days, each day putting in new food and water, until the toad sat perched on a mound of food. Each night, he pulled it out and held it in his hands. At first, it croaked every time, and Forrest turned on the fan in his room to mask the noise. But eventually, the toad stopped croaking when Forrest held it.

  Then one day, Forrest fell asleep holding the toad, and in the morning, it was gone. He searched his room, and then the house. He didn't want Dad finding the toad and killing it, then yelling at Forrest. But he never found it.

  That had been so many years ago. Now Forrest sat and stared at the toad. He could swear that it was the same one he had found before. As far as he could remember, the markings on its back were identical, as were the black eyes. After a moment's hesitation, he picked it up and inspected its back legs. The right foot was missing a toe.

  It had been twenty years. Toads didn't live that long. His toad had probably just crawled behind the couch and died, and they'd never found its dehydrated carcass. There was no way this toad could be the same one. But even though Forrest knew that, he still smiled. It was a nice thought, wasn't it? That he'd found his toad again after all these years. And even though it wasn't actually the same one, it was the same type, a type that he'd never seen since.

  Forrest looked into the toad's eyes. They were just like he remembered. The toad waved its arms and legs and watched him silently.

  The toad still in his hands, Forrest quickly checked the other two drawers for valuables, more for form's sake than anything else. Finding nothing, he turned and walked down the stairs. The first floor was pretty well gutted now. All of the knick-knacks were gone from their shelves and standing places. The couches had been taken out to the dumpster, and the bookshelves were empty. Should be done and out of here in an hour.

  Forrest stopped and looked at the toad again. He wondered how late the pet stores were open. He could get a better cage this time, and maybe buy some food from the pet store. He found Pete standing in the kitchen, dumping bottles of alcohol down the sink.

  "There's unopened jello if you want any," Pete said. "Orange."

  "Thanks," Forrest said, grabbing a packet from the counter. "Hey, I need you to stay after and take the 'after' pictures for me."

  "You leaving, boss?" Pete asked, turning to face Forrest.

  "Yeah," said Forrest. "I got a really bad migraine and I need to get home."

  Pete eyed him for a moment. "Okay."

  "Tell the boys to junk everything upstairs, too," Forrest said.

  "All right," Pete said. "If you've gotta go, go."

  Forrest turned to leave, then stopped.

  "Hey," he said. "You notice anything strange in that room upstairs?"

  "You mean besides the three hundred dreamcatchers?" Pete asked.

  "Yeah," Forrest said. "I mean, did you feel anything up there?"

  Pete unstopped a bottle, then spun and upended it in one quick movement, sending the liquid inside smoothly vortexing down the drain. "Nope," he said. "I don't dream."

  Forrest drove back toward his house, but stopped at a pet store along the way. He grabbed a cage, showed the toad to the blue-haired clerk, and asked her what he should feed it.

  The worker raised a pierced eyebrow: "Never seen that kind before. It's so bright! I have no idea how to keep it alive, or even whether or not it's poisonous. If I were you, I'd put it back where you found it. You want a pet, buy one of our fire-bellied toads or Pac-man frogs. Those I know how to take care of."

  Forrest took the cage, asked for a bag of crickets, and returned home. He unlocked the door and walked in. He placed his keys and wallet on their shelf, then put the orange jello away in his pantry between the packets of lime and strawberry. Then he walked to the kitchen and put the toad's cage in the middle of the table. This time he didn't have to hide it. The toad wandered around the cage on stubby legs, exploring the edges of its confinement. Forrest dropped a cricket in. He thought he'd read somewhere that toads ate bugs. Hopefully he was right.

  Forrest made a simple dinner, then sat down to watch TV. He'd picked up the flatscreen at a house a year or so back. He couldn't believe that anyone would just leave something behind like that. Losing a house was unthinkable, but just leaving your valuables behind was even worse. Forrest pulled The Sandlot from his stack of rescued DVDs and watched until he fell asleep.

  Forrest awoke when it was still dark, with the DVD menu endlessly looping its 30 seconds of title music. Something was digging into his back. He reached under him and pulled out an action figure. He stared at it for a moment, then shut off the TV. He mechanically ejected the DVD, put it back in its case, then put it back in alphabetical order. He walked through the kitchen, dropped the action figure on the table, then wandered off to bed, where he fell asleep within moments.

  When he awoke the next day, he'd forgotten the action figure, but when he came down for breakfast, he saw it again. Where had that come from? His collection was in a box in storage, and he could swear that he hadn't unpacked any of them since the day he'd moved out of his parents' house.

  Forrest moved to the table and picked up the figure, then almost dropped it in surprise. It was the one with the bazooka, and it had been his favorite. When he'd played as a kid, it had taken out whole platoons of his other figures.

  But he had taken this figure to school one day in third grade, and a bully pushed him down and took it, and he never got it back. Forrest cried and told his Dad, but Dad just told him to stop whining. He didn't have enough time to solve all of Forrest's problems, and if Forrest had things that were really important to him, maybe he should take better care of them.

  Now Forrest turned the figure over and saw "F.L." in Sharpie on its foot. It was his all right. Forrest was confused and a little scared. He stood quickly and went to the front door, checking the lock. Well, that was stupid. Did he really think that someone had broken into his house and, instead of taking something, had returned a toy to him that he had lost decades before?

  Forrest fingered the toy. He must have just remembered wrong. It had been some other toy that the bully had taken.

  But he knew that he wasn't remembering wrong. It had been this figure, not another, and now somehow it was back. But that was absurd. Clearly, he'd gotten the toy back before, and it had slipped his mind. Then it had ended up in the couch somehow. Strange things happened during moves.

  The clock in the kitchen chirped a series of rising and falling whoops. Forrest had collected the Audubon singing bird clock from a house back when he'd just started up. He could never remember which call went with which bird, but he did know that this particular call meant that there was no time for breakfast. He was due to trash out another house in fifteen minutes. He tossed the toy back on the table and went out the door.

  It was a hard day's work. One house had vagrants that needed to be evicted. Another had been actively sabotaged by the previous owners. All the mirrors were broken, hammers had been taken to the walls, and all of the faucets had been left on until the utilities were disconnected. At a third house, the floors were littered with cigarettes, condoms and hypodermic needles. Forrest worked hard, and he mostly forgot about the strangeness of the morning and the toy that had inexplicably returned.

  But when Forrest came home from work, he saw something black in the gutter. He stooped and looked at it. It was a wallet, and the old, beaten leather looked strangely
familiar. It couldn't be. He picked it up out of the gutter and opened it. A sixteen-year-old version of himself smiled vacantly from the driver's license. In the back section, there was a thick wad of bills, an old video store membership card, and an ancient, lonely condom still in its wrapper.

  Forrest remembered losing this wallet. It had happened just after a big payday at his first job. He meant to deposit the money at the bank, but had gone to the movies with a date. The wallet must have slipped out of his pocket, because when he got home, he didn't have it. He called the theater and retraced his steps, but he never found it. Dad never yelled at him about that one, because he never found out. Forrest chewed himself out pretty well, though, and for years afterward, whenever he found something that he wanted but couldn't afford, he found himself thinking of the wallet and the money he'd lost.

  How strange it was to find it now. Forrest carried it inside and sat down by the kitchen table to count the money. Four hundred and fifty-two dollars. Not a single bill was missing. He'd always assumed that someone had picked up the wallet in the theater and kept it for his own. Clearly he'd been wrong.

  What were the chances of its ending up in the gutter by his house all these years later, with all of the money still intact? Maybe the hordes of movie-goers had inadvertently kicked it out into the street. Although in that case, the odds against its randomly being kicked and tumbled and blown right in front of Forrest's house were astronomical. And even assuming that that happened, the leather would have worn away more over the past fifteen years. It would have been scuffed with every kick and soaked in every rainstorm. There'd hardly be anything left of it to recognize. But it looked no more worn than the day he'd lost it.

  Maybe someone had taken it. But then after a decade and a half, the thief had grown a conscience and had decided to return the wallet, which he apparently still owned for some reason. He'd replaced an identical number of worn bills in the wallet, looked up Forrest's current address, come to return the wallet and then . . . dropped it in the gutter? None of it made any sense.