Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (19 page)

“No, ma’am,” says Ruby.

“Very well. Dinner at six. Set two places. Mary Louise will eat with me.” Mary Louise hears the sound of Kitty’s heels marching off, then the creak of the stairs going up. There is a moment of silence, and the basement door opens.

Ruby looks at Mary Louise and takes her hand. At the bottom of the stairs she sits, and gently pulls Mary Louise down beside her.

“Miss Mouse? You got somethin you want to tell me?”

Mary Louise hangs her head.

“You been in your Daddy’s liquor?”

A tiny nod. “I didn’t
drink
any. I just gave my bag a little. The Vernor’s was flat and I was afraid the magic wouldn’t work. I put the key back. I guess I forgot to lock the door.”

“I guess you did.”

“I’ll tell Kitty it was me,” Mary Louise says, her voice on the edge of panic. “You don’t have to be fired. I’ll tell her.”

“Tell her what, Miss Mouse? Tell her you was puttin your Daddy’s whiskey on a conjure hand?” Ruby shakes her head. “Sugar, you listen to me. Miz Kitty thinks I been drinkin, she just fire me. But she find out I been teachin you black juju magic, she gonna call the police. Better you keep quiet, hear?”

“But it’s not fair!”

“Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t.” Ruby strokes Mary Louise’s hair and smiles a sad smile, her eyes as gentle as her hands. “But, see, after she talk to me that way, ain’t no way I’m gonna keep workin for Miz Kitty nohow. It be okay, though. My money hand gonna come through. I can feel it. Already startin to, maybe. The Ford plant’s hirin again, and my husband’s down there today, signin up. Maybe when I gets home, he’s gonna tell me good news. May just be.”

“You can’t
leave
me!” Mary Louise cries.

“I got to. I got my own life.”

“Take me with you.”

“I can’t, sugar.” Ruby puts her arms around Mary Louise. “Poor Miss Mouse. You livin in this big old house with nice things all ’round you, ’cept nobody nice to you. But angels watchin out for you. I b’lieve that. Keep you safe till you big enough to make your own way, find your real kin.”

“What’s kin?”

“Fam’ly. Folks you belong to.”

“Are you my kin?”

“Not by blood, sugar. Not hardly. But we’re heart kin, maybe. ’Cause I love you in my heart, and I ain’t never gonna forget you. That’s a promise.” Ruby kisses Mary Louise on the forehead and pulls her into a long hug. “Now since Miz Kitty already give me my pay, I ’spect I oughta go up, give her her dinner. I reckon you don’t want to eat with her?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. I’ll tell her you ain’t feelin well, went on up to bed. But I’ll come downstairs, say good-bye, ’fore I leave.” Ruby stands up and looks fondly down at Mary Louise. “It’ll be okay, Miss Mouse. There’s miracles every day. Why, last Friday, they put a fella up in space. Imagine that? A man up in space? So ain’t nothin impossible, not if you wish just hard as you can. Not if you believe.” She rests her hand on Mary Louise’s head for a moment, then walks slowly up the stairs and back into the kitchen.

Mary Louise sits on the steps and feels like the world is crumbling around her. This is not how the story is supposed to end. This is not happily ever after. She cups her tiny hand around the damp, sticky bag under her arm and closes her eyes and thinks about everything that Ruby has told her. She wishes for the magic to be real.

And it is. There are no sparkles, no gold. This is basement magic, deep and cool. Power that has seeped and puddled, gathered slowly, beneath the notice of queens, like the dreams of small awkward girls. Mary Louise believes with all her heart, and finds the way to her mouse self.

Mouse sits on the bottom step for a minute, a tiny creature with a round pink tail and fur the color of new rust. She blinks her blue eyes, then scampers off the step and across the basement floor. She is quick and clever, scurrying along the baseboards, seeking familiar smells, a small ball of blue flannel trailing behind her.

When she comes to the burnt-orange coat hanging inches from the floor, she leaps. Her tiny claws find purchase in the nubby fabric, and she climbs up to the pocket, wriggles over and in. Mouse burrows into a pale cotton hankie that smells of girl tears and wraps herself tight around the flannel ball that holds her future. She puts her pink nose down on her small pink paws and waits for her true love to come.

Kitty sits alone at the wide mahogany table. The ice in her drink has melted. The kitchen is only a few feet away, but she does not get up. She presses the buzzer beneath her feet, to summon Ruby. The buzzer sounds in the kitchen. Kitty waits. Nothing happens. Impatient, she presses on the buzzer with all her weight. It shifts, just a fraction of an inch, and its wire presses against the two lye-tipped nails that have crossed it. The buzzer shorts out with a hiss. The current, diverted from its path to the kitchen, returns to Kitty. She begins to twitch, as if she were covered in stinging ants, and her eyes roll back in her head. In a gesture that is both urgent and awkward, she clutches at the tablecloth, pulling it and the dishes down around her. Kitty Whittaker, a former Miss Bloomfield Hills, falls to her knees and begins to howl wordlessly at the Moon.

Downstairs, Ruby hears the buzzer, then a crash of dishes. She starts to go upstairs, then shrugs. She takes off her white uniform for the last time. She puts on her green skirt and her cotton blouse, leaves the white Keds under the sink, puts on her flat black shoes. She looks in the clothes chute, behind the furnace, calls Mary Louise’s name, but there is no answer. She calls again, then, with a sigh, puts on her nubby orange outdoor coat and pulls the light string. The basement is dark behind her as she opens the door and walks out into the soft spring evening.

W
illiam Sanders makes his home in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but his formative years were spent in the hill country of western Arkansas, where this story is set. He appeared on the SF scene in the early eighties with a couple of alternate-history comedies,
Journey to Fusang
(a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award) and
The Wild Blue and the Gray.
Sanders then turned to mystery and suspense, producing a number of critically acclaimed titles. He credits his old friend Roger Zelazny with persuading him to return to SF, this time via the short-story form; his stories have appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
and numerous anthologies, earning himself a well-deserved reputation as one of the best short-fiction writers of the last decade, and winning him two Sidewise Awards for Best Alternate History story. He has also returned to novel writing, with books such as
The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan
and
The Bernadette Operations,
a new SF novel,
J.,
and a mystery novel,
Smoke.
Some of his acclaimed short stories have been collected in
Are We Having Fun Yet? American Indian Fantasy Stories.
His most recent book is a historical study,
Conquest: Hernando de Soto and the Indians: 1539-1543.
Coming up is a new collection,
Is It Now Yet?
(Most of his books, including reissues of his earlier novels, are available from Wildside Press, or on
Amazon.com
.)

About “Dry Bones,” he says:

“I can’t think of anything that needs to be said about this story. Either it works on its own or it doesn’t.

“About the only thing I would point out is that this is an example of a long-established but seldom-seen subcategory of science fiction: the Great Lost Scientific Discovery. Kipling did it with ‘The Eye of Allah’; Waldrop did it with ‘The Ugly Chickens. ’ In between, examples have been pretty rare; I can’t think why.

“I would like to thank those people who voted for the story, and assure them that the videotapes will be destroyed as promised.”

I
t was a hot summer day and I was sitting under the big tree down by the road, where we caught the bus when school was in, when Wendell Haney came up the road on his bike and told me somebody had found a skeleton in a cave down in Moonshine Hollow.

“No lie,” he said. “My cousin Wilma Jean lives in town and she came by the house just now and told Mama about it.”

I put down the Plastic Man comic book I had been reading. “You mean a human skeleton?” I said, not really believing it.

Wendell made this kind of impatient face. “Well, of
course
a human one,” he said. “What did you
think?
”

He was a skinny kid with a big head and pop eyes like a frog and when he was excited about something, like now, he was pretty funny-looking. He was only a year younger than me, but I’d just turned thirteen last month and a twelve-year-old looked like a little kid now.

He said, “Gee, Ray, don’t you want to go see? Everybody’s down there, the sheriff and all.”

Sure enough, when I looked off up the blacktop I saw there was a lot of dust hanging over the far end of Tobe Nelson’s pasture, where the dirt road ran down toward Moonshine Hollow. Somebody in a pickup truck was just turning in off the road.