Summer 2007 (22 page)

He winked at her, and she crowed. “I knew it!”

“You’re not frightened,” he said, his voice unmuffled by
the bit.

She straightened his mane again. He dropped his head and
ambled forward. His unshod hooves thumped on stone rather than clattering.

She stretched her legs into the stirrups. She understood
the basics, he thought, but her balance wasn’t fluid. Knowledge without
practice. “What have I to fear?”

“Death by drowning,” he answered, and she didn’t laugh.
He hadn’t thought she would; the sort of girl who laughed at literary jokes
didn’t tumble her books into the Clyde without a hesitation.

The walk became a trot, which she posted over awkwardly,
wincing, and out of pity he began to canter. The river walk wasn’t long, but he
planned to take Bell’s Bridge near the science center and bring her across the
river, among the scrubby trees in the dawn-cold park.

Where they could find a little privacy.

The rising sun was at their backs, stretching their
shadow long across the cobbles, and the river walk was all but deserted. One
man, in a long coat and a hat, waved as they passed, and the girl waved back.

“You shouldn’t canter that beast on cobbles,” he called,
but they were already past by the time the girl answered, “He’s cantering me!”

Whatever her bravado, and though she clung gamely to the
saddle, the stallion could smell her fear. A gallop, he thought, might lose
her.

If he had never thrown a rider he didn’t want thrown.

She’d abandoned the reins. They bounced against his
neck, and her hands were fisted one in his mane and one on the pommel. She
leaned forward, precariously, so he had to hitch his stride to throw her back
into balance, and called into his ear, “Aren’t you supposed to look like a wild
horse off the moors? And yet here you are under saddle, careering along a tame
riverside.”

“Where the river goes harnessed,” he said, “so go the
river-spirits.”

Through all the Isles, in these times.

Besides, she’d never stay on him if his back were bare,
though he missed the grip of legs around his barrel, the drum of bare heels
against his sides.

There had been another. He’d worn her soul for a time,
chain and change, and lived in hunger while he’d done so. She had owned
him–altered him–but he had won free at the last.

And though he
had
changed…a predator needs meat.

They cantered past brick condominiums, startling a
red-clad woman who had been fishing in her bag, and came to the place where the
riverwalk curved back to rejoin the road. Here there was construction on the
north side of the street and–between the road and the river–trees
and grass and ratty flowers amidst the litter on the south. They moved with the
sparse early traffic but faster, threading around cars he didn’t dare jump for
fear of losing the girl.

They passed between a white hotel and a round
restaurant, under the shadow of an enormous crane and past the auditorium
called the Armadillo for architecture like a sectioned shell. And then they were
on the bank of the river again, and running now, the girl laughing in his ear
as the bridge came into sight, with its center suspension spire and its
walkways covered with arches like a seagull’s wings.

The bridge was named for a whisky sponsorship, and the
stallion thought it a fine irony. “Duck,” he said, and lowered his own head so
the girl could lean forward along his neck.

And so they passed across the bridge, and she stayed
with him, while supports stippled her face with moving light and the arch blurred
by above. His hooves a hollow thunder on the span. The river gave back a moving
echo.

They burst out under the streaky sky again. The clouds
were torn and moving; there would by rain by dusk.

She laughed, and kept on laughing. She’d found the rhythm–a
gallop is not so hard to ride–and their wind and his mane stung tears
from her eyes.

On the off side lay the shining silver arcs of the
science center, like half-moons reflecting the rising sun. The stallion veered
away, across sand and then grass and soft earth where his hooves pressed
crescents as if in answer.

And then the road, the hard jar up his forelegs, the
girl shivering and urging him on. A trail they did not follow: instead, he took
them among the winding band of trees.

There, he threw her, head down and rump high, and turned
his body and turned his form at once and caught her as she was falling. His
intervention knocked the scream right out of her, and she clung, breathless,
against his chest. The scent of blood wreathed her, the scent of blood and the
scent of woman.

His stomach rumbled.

She pressed closer into his arms, her eyelashes
fluttering against the hollow over his collarbone. With blunt-nailed hands, he
tipped her chin up and inspected her face, her mouth, the watery green of her
eyes under hair tangled by their wild ride.

She winced. And when he touched the top button on her
cardigan, she flinched.

“Run from me,” he said. “Go on; I don’t mind. I’ll catch
you.”

Her lashes were dusted with gold. “There’s no point in
running. You never get away, and where’s there to run to?” She laid her pale
hands over his, the bitten nails and the torn, inflamed cuticles. She helped
him unbutton her collar.

When the cardigan fell open, he saw the bruises on her
throat. She swallowed under tender blue-veined skin, and he touched her softly.
The hands that had made the bruises were smaller than his own, but most hands
were.

“Did you want that?” he asked her.

She didn’t answer, as such. She lowered her eyes, and
shook her head.

“My dad called me a whore,” she said. “He said I needn’t
come home again.”

“Your father choked you?”

He was new. He was changed, like the changeless sea. It
wasn’t pity he felt, for he was pitiless.

But he recollected pity. He had carried it for a time,
and though he’d laid it down since, the memory lingered.

The sea is also capricious.

“You were raped,” he said.

“So? My
dad
told me he
loved
me. That
makes what he did better? And you. You’re going to drown me. What makes you so
fucking superior, water-horse?”

He had no answer, so he sang–

I’ll go down by Clyde and I’ll mourn and weep

For satisfied I never can be.

I’ll write him a letter, just a few short lines

And suffer death ten thousand times.

–and watched her eyebrows rise. And when he had
finished, he cleared his throat and said, “You knew the cost when you came with
me.”

“I did,” she said, fists on her hips. “And if I hadn’t,
you would have taken me anyway.”

He dipped his head. It was true.

She sighed. “I don’t have anywhere to go. It doesn’t
matter. Do you know what a sin-eater is?”

“I have been called one,” he answered. “But I am not. I
cannot absolve you.”

“I don’t need absolution,” she said. “Will you put your
sin on me?”

“I can’t sin,” he answered. He toed the earth nervously.
“I haven’t a soul.”

She rolled her eyes, arms crossed, shaking her hair
across her shoulders. “If you fuck me, will you say it’s my fault?”

The stallion was as old as the sea; he’d loved and
killed and diced with the kings of Faerie, and–for a while–he had
carried a mortal woman’s soul. He could not recollect a conversation that had
befuddled him as much as this one.

“Of course it’s not your fault,” he said. “I’m a
monster.”

“Oh God!” She shook her head so hard it turned her body
from the waist. Her hair was a tempest all around her, and he wanted to reach
out and smooth it. “A monster who admits it. I can die happy now.”

How he loved these bold young women, their flounces and
their storms. He had to touch her hair, and so he did, stroking it smooth as
best he could with callused hands. He held her face between his palms, and she
let him.

“Did you think I’d be impressed by your stoicism? Did
you think you would be different, that you could change me?”

“No,” she said. “I know I’m not that special. I just
wanted to ride.”

“Run,” he said. He let his hands fall. “Fight me. You
might live.”

“I don’t like kissing,” she said, and buttoned her
cardigan down.

#

This time, no saddle. Her skin cool on his warm hide,
naked as Godiva, but her hair hiding nothing. He ran, hard, exultant. If she
wanted a ride, he would give one.

She rode better without the saddle. She left her blood
upon white hide.

They galloped between parking lots and along the
waterfront, people turning to stare. A man in a green hat; a woman in a
flowered dress not warm enough for the morning. Someone snapped a photo; the
stallion tossed his mane. They came up to the fence in a headlong plunge, and
she called into his ear.

“It’s not a new story, is it?”

“No,” he called back. “It’s as old as the sea.”

He gathered himself and leaped the sunlit silver rail.

They splashed hard, his legs flailing, hers slipping
along his sides though she clung with clenched fingers to his black-white,
seaweedy mane.

She gasped in cold, clinging. “Your name. What’s your
name, Kelpie?”

“Uisgebaugh.”

There is no point in keeping secrets from the dead. But
her name, he asked not. And she did not offer.

Her fingers spasmed on his
mane and stayed locked there, entangled, when he rolled and took her down.

Fiction:
Coat by Joe R. Lansdale

When James saw the man in the streetlights, he hated him
on sight because of the coat. It wasn’t fashionable. If the man had been
unfashionable in all other ways he could have ignored it, but no, this was a
man who should have known better. He was a man with a good shirt and slacks and
fine tie, and the best shoes available, and yet, he wore a coat out of style
and certainly one that did not make for a proper appearance. It was an odd coat
of undetermined color and absolutely no substance. It had all the grace of a
car wreck. It flopped in the winter wind at the lapels like bat wings flexing,
caught up in back and whipped backwards like the tail of a swallow.

There was no excuse for it really.

Sure, he saw plenty of unfashionable people, but this
fellow must know better, having acquired the most fashionable and best clothes
otherwise. It was not a matter of being uninformed, he was flaunting a
disregard for the proper and the respectable, and was therefore insulting the
very business James was a part of. Fashion design.

There was no use calling him on it, James was certain. A
man like that knew how things ought to be. A man with his hair perfectly cut
and perfectly combed, and perfectly dressed, except for that horrid coat.

Still, James found himself following the man, deeply
bothered by it all. He was a man that understood fashion, and loved it, and
believed it was more than an expression of self. That it was in fact, a kind of
religion, and here was an insult to his religion.

The man moved out of the street lights and into a dark
alley near a stairwell, and James knew this was a bad place to be walking, but
if the man was dull enough to do so, and in that horrid coat, then he would be
brave enough to do so and call him on the matter after all. He found he just
couldn’t let it rest.

James followed as the man took the dark stairs, and when
the fellow was halfway down, James called out, “Sir, that is an awful coat. I
don’t mean to be rude, but really.”

The man, nothing but a shadow on the stairs now, paused,
looked back. “My coat?”

“Of course,” James said. Do I have on a horrid coat? I
think not, and nor should you, this is the finest and best of this year’s
fashion that I’m wearing. Perhaps last year, next year, it will be out of
favor, but it is all the rage for now, and you, sir, have plenty of fine
fashionable coats to pick from, though I, of course recommend my own brand of
coat..”

“What?” said the man in the shadows.

“The coat,” James said. “Your coat. It’s hideous.”

The man came up the stairs and stopped only a few feet
from James, looking up at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I think not. That is one hideous coat.”

The man sighed. “I can’t believe you’re concerned about
my coat.”

“It’s just…how shall we put it, an atrocity against
fashion and against mankind.”

“It was once fashionable.”

“And, I’m quite sure that fig leaves over the testicles
were once fashionable, but in our modern society, in our world, fashion is all,
and it changes. Someone once thought the tie died tee-shirt and bell bottoms
were fashionable, but, times change. Thank goodness.”