Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (4 page)

More shots echo but he can’t see anymore and the sand is so warm, he may just rest there forever. Blackness shrouds his thoughts in tune with his crawling heartbeat and ragged breath. Flash visions of his father drinking and his mother trapped in bed, a young Callahan performing a back-alley abortion, the first girl he kissed, the last girl he kissed, the rainy day he spent performing coin tricks by the canal and his heartbeat is mute and the sand isn’t warm anymore, turned to mushy ice against his skin. His brain offers him one last desperate grasp at beauty: a picture of the faraway city of Mallik, a place he only saw through a postcard pinned to the wall above his bed and at last, Asher Marok, the death juggler, gives up the ghost and understands what it feels like to truly die.

———

Callahan sits across from Carpat. The crime lord’s scorpion tail dangles by his side, swinging back and forth like a poisonous pendulum.

My condolences about your friend, doctor. I wish his plan had worked.

Callahan nods, eyes glued to the carpet. Thank you.

I trust my men did their job?

Yes. Blew the squids to smithereens. Callahan locks eyes with Carpat. Seems this city will have to witness another gang war.

Carpat laughs. It will be a short one, I assure you. Your friend provided some very handy information. I expect Count Voto to be dead within two moons. Of course his numerous friends and family won’t be pleased, but my people can handle them.

I’m glad to hear it, replies Callahan. The gods know this place has seen enough blood. Now, I believe this is for you. 

The doctor removes a stuffed envelope from his jacket. He places it on the coffee table. 

This is Asher’s will and a good chunk of his money. I trust you will make sure his mother will be taken care of. There is more money than needed, feel free to keep the rest as a thank you.

Carpat shakes his head. No need. All the money will go to her. I will make certain she will never starve or have to worry about her living conditions.

Thank you.

As for you, doctor, if you are looking for a new home and a new job, my crew can always use a healing hand.

Thank you, Carpat, but I will have to decline. I am done with this city. 

I understand. I’m sure you can show yourself out. I have a war to take care of. In the next few days, I will leave some flowers on your friend’s grave.

Callahan offers a polite smile, then gets up and leaves.

———

Charcoal clouds leak dirty raindrops over the cemetery. Callahan kneels in front of Asher’s resting place. He places a bouquet of black flowers on the marble. The tombstone reads: 

HERE LIES ASHER MAROK 

MAGICIAN, DEATH JUGGLER, ESCAPE ARTIST 

DEAR FRIEND AND BELOVED SON
 

Twin blue pills down the throat chased by a splash of water and Callahan hopes the sickness won’t get to him. He has no sea legs and the journey will be a painful one. The city of Nualla-Stem is long out of sight and there is nothing now but a flat stretch of grey, the ocean spreading as far as the eye can see. No collapsing buildings, no airships, no industrial chaos, no skyscrapers afire, no rot.

On deck, he passes by families enjoying the journey, fathers crouching next to daughters and pointing at the withering sun and packs of shrieking dolphins following the boat. The doctor smiles at the passengers and opens a door, plunges into the darkness. He makes his way down several flights of stairs bathing in red light. The ship’s bowels growl through the walls. He reaches the lowest deck and walks down the hallway until he faces his room. He opens the door and closes it immediately behind him.

Thirsty, begs the bleeding man in bed. 

The place reeks of maggots and damp earth and stale air. Callahan opens the window. He reaches for the water flask and brings it to his patient’s cracked lips. Grey mutant skin lurks beneath the soaked bandages concealing his face.

There you go.

Thanks, the man croaks.

Callahan sits by his bed and lights up a cigarette. He exhales in the dark and lets the sea air steal the smoke away.

The patient coughs, a ragged thing. He mutters, what’s . . . what’s the damage, doc?

Callahan can’t help but crack up. The damage, he repeats. The usual question. This body is rotting but I can slow it down until we reach shore. Then we’ll need a reality bender or a shaman to cure it for good. Expect a lot of pain for the next thirty-seven days. Longer if we get trapped in a storm.

Sounds peachy.

They don’t trade words for several minutes, until the man coughs again then says, what did you do exactly?

The doctor scratches his beard, gathers his thoughts. Exchanged brains. Bent reality as best as I could. Rewired nerves. Replaced organs that were damaged. Ugly. Didn’t think it’d work. Kept swearing the whole time. Wouldn’t stop shaking. Blood everywhere. The grave robber recommended by Carpat was good, though. Got you a fresh corpse. Minimal stink. Rigor mortis had barely set in. Might feel some stiffness. So it worked, I suppose. I mean, gods, look at you.

I’m a mutant.

Yeah, says Callahan. Like you always dreamed. And Carpat thinks the procedure didn’t work, and Voto will soon be dead. No one’s the wiser.

Another successful death, whispers Asher. Greatest trick of my career.

What about your mother?

What about my mother? She won’t starve. She’ll get better. She’ll heal. Maybe see the sunshine again, burn her wheelchair.

She believes you’re dead, Ash.

I couldn’t afford to let her in on it, and you know that. Think she can handle seeing me like that?

Doesn’t matter what you are now. You’re her only son.

It’s begging for the word to get out, and for Voto’s remaining family to hunt her down, eventually. Bastards wouldn’t stop coming until I was dead. Squids are the best at holding grudges.

Sure, says Callahan, sure. He lights up another cigarette and invites the silence in. When he’s done, he tosses the butt out the window and closes it. Funny thing, though.

What’s that?

I placed your brain and a few organs in this new body, right. Some nerves and transferred some blood. Something’s been bothering me, though.

Asher waits.

No soul, says the doctor. I didn’t transfer no goddamn soul.

So what, replies Asher. You think we have no souls? Just walking bags of flesh with brains and nerve endings?

Callahan gets up and heads for the door. He opens it. The light from the hallway slithers into the room. I’m not too convinced about the rest of us, Ash. But I’m pretty sure about you.

——————————

Click-Clack

by
Caleb J Ross

Some say the train’s click-clack echoed his mother’s escape, that the looming engine overtook and ultimately replaced the sound of her footsteps, leaving Ernie with only the train’s passing heat for warmth and its lumbering weight to serve as the heartbeat he had nestled for the past nine months.

When Jack found the baby, newborn and discarded, webbed among the weeds and other failed carcasses lining the rails, birds pecked and sucked at remaining afterbirth. The infant’s skin sparkled to the rising sun reflecting off bloated insects. Overnight rains had rinsed the mother’s scent from the gravel and railroad ties, leaving the child without a single trail to follow, without a single strain of familiar air to feed its fading breath.

Jack scooped up the body with a shovel he reserved for roadkill. He named it Ernie and called his boss to request leave for the remaining day.

The surgeon met with Jack to discuss options, while Ernie lay in a room many floors away, kept alive by pumps and tubes and the hands of awestruck nurses. Both men folded and rested their hands atop the surgeon’s oak desk, poised like opposite ends of a business negotiation. Ernie hadn’t a hairline yet, so the surgeon agreed to cut and sew where he thought hair might grow. He sketched his plan with a green marker on a whiteboard propped beside the desk. The infant’s head formed at strange angles, and the mother’s apparently hasty drop-off only deepened the crevices, molded the already shifted bones to the difficult shape of rocks and metal tracks. Aesthetics meant little to Jack—his own grooming kit included one razor, a broken toothbrush, and a cracked mirror—so he told the surgeon, “I don’t care how the hair grows. You’re fine to just keep the brain in there however you can. Though honestly,” and he leaned close, breaching the desk’s perimeter with his large, hooked nose, “what are the chances it will ever work again anyway?”

The surgeon capped his marker. He shuffled through photographs taken upon Ernie’s arrival. He rotated particularly strange images, searching to orientate himself to the correct angles among so much realigned skin. He let a long sigh ruffle stray hairs from his mustache. “I’ll try to rebuild the brain back, but more importantly I’ll try to just keep it in there.” The doctor stayed with the photos. He stretched the sigh further. “I know you, Jack. You get paid by the carcass, and you’re not the type to prioritize species. Why did you keep this one?”

“I think it’s mine,” Jack said. “Can’t you see the resemblance?” He smiled for the doctor.

Hours later Jack occupied an emergency room waiting area with a family of three: one mother, two daughters. Between failed attempts to quiet the giggling girls, the mother dabbed her wet cheeks with a napkin. Jack met her glassy eyes twice, retreating quickly both times to his own projected pain. The girls played tag until one stubbed her toe. Only then did she join her mother’s tears.

After the surgery, the doctor pulled Jack from the waiting room back to his office. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the doctor said. “My team swears it too, that he should have died. We laid him out, went through the motions, we basically prepared for a loss. But that sound, the heart monitor, each beep would fuel another, and so on . . .” Each beep-beep, the doctor said, encouraged the boy’s heart to further share the rhythm.

Jack smiled past every superfluous word. “I have a son,” he said.

———

Jack’s home rests at the intersection of a strip of railroad he adopted fifteen years ago and a woody area known for spewing wildlife into the town’s suburban sprawl. He enjoys watching from his window, the animals’ adolescent pilgrimages from birthplace to a home of their own. But often the passages end interrupted. The years have trained Jack’s ears to recognize the subtle thump of an animal cut short over the thundering locomotive beat. Utility bills and rent have their ways of changing the ear’s physiology. The night Ernie dropped to the earth, that subtle thump against the ground woke Jack from a dream in which he cared for a child of his own. He cleared his head of the dream and stepped out into the dewy morning, still feeling the imagined child’s hand in his. “His name was right there on my lips,” he says to the empty field at his front door.

Anticipating no more than a single doe, perhaps a family of raccoons if he were lucky, Jack idled his rusty Ford the short distance to the tracks, letting the image of a son of his own stew in his head. He closed his eyes, let the muscle memory developed by years of traveling this same path steer his truck.

He saw first a foot, recognized from his dream. The leg cascaded down the gravel bank, ending at toes the size of infected mosquito bites. Jack accepted the child’s limp body not as a professional token, but as a realization of the night’s vision. 

———

Home from the hospital, Jack lays Ernie upon the worn living room carpet. Twisted yarns cradle the tiny body, nesting the way weeds and rubbish did just weeks earlier. Unhappy to let the floor have his child, the new father builds comfort himself; he experiments with blankets of various textures and densities, settling on a half-complete afghan that a dead aunt willed to him during her final stages of dementia. The blanket dangles unraveled at one end, but otherwise suits the baby and his bandages. Ernie’s chest pulses to the irregular soundscape of cricket songs and croaking frogs. Jack watches his son survive through the night.

The night’s rhythm breaks with the day. As the sun quiets the crickets and frogs, Ernie quiets too, the faint rise and fall of his afghan slows to a scarcely perceptible blip. Jack, already attuned to the breath of this child, wakes by the silence, jumps from the floor beside the boy, and panics. The blanket soon stops beating. Ernie’s lips blue. Forfeiting the moment, Jack considers the shovel in his truck. “At least you were real for a day,” he says to the body.

A train whistles in the distance. Its wheels grind a familiar click-clack, click-clack, and with that click-clack little Ernie’s lip gathers crimson back, click-clack, click-clack. His valve flaps, whip-whap, then Jack picks at the limp wrap, unrolls the child and holds him close, afraid for what the passing train will leave as the click-clack inevitably dies to silence. Jack wills his own heart to pulse with the rhythm of the train. “Stay with me,” he tells the boy. The new father forces himself into a panic, imagining the worst for his boy, the worst for himself, a life as it was just weeks before, more pulling the dead from the ground without this chance to place the living upon it. He imagines the worst so to fool his body into anxiety, to keep his heart feeding the boy long after the passing train.

As the locomotive whistle grows and the click-clack rattles Jack’s window glass and dusts the carpet with abandoned cobwebs and ancient flakes of ceiling paint, Jack pulls the boy tighter. The sound drowns even their shared beats. The whistle eventually fades, Jack can hear his own heartbeat still drumming from within. He envelopes the boy, coaxing him to transition to Jack’s beat. Ernie opens his eyes for the first time. “Green,” Jack says. “Just like me.”

———

Ernie learns to walk. And soon after, takes to chasing trains. The engines’ laborious and productive rumble mocks Ernie’s own skewed gait. Jack anchors his boy with a shovel and brings him along to scrape fetid flesh from rocks and streets. Jack calls it the family business despite having no reason to fake pride in his work; Ernie’s comprehension tops out at the awe of his own footsteps. Intangibles like pride and family loyalty offer no beat of their own, so are of no use to the boy.

Some say the boy chased his mother’s heartbeat, that the trains’ rumble pounded stronger than Jack’s chest. These whispers, perhaps his own, never spoken outside his head, bring Jack nightly to tears, but still he stays close to the boy, charging the young heartbeat the way his mother never did.

Jack took to scattering his own collected dead animals along the track in hopes of keeping his boy occupied during passing trains. The boy’s misaligned eyes would widen, his crooked smile would stretch, his distressed shirt—a gift from his father’s closet—would throb at the chest as trains approached. “Mom,” Ernie said, six years old, his first word. The following morning, Jack rose early and started planting these bodies of his own.

Ernie scooped. He dumped. Jack retrieved the carcass and returned it to the ground. Ernie scooped. This was the new rhythm, but could sate Ernie only temporarily. The routine weakened Jack’s aging body, but strengthened his son’s. An unfair but inevitable transition. Jack couldn’t fight the train forever.

Ernie learns to wake to night trains. Jack builds alarm systems from rope and antique brass bells to intercept his son’s escape attempts. Years pass. Ernie’s awkward gait muscles to a skip, matures to a gallop, finally qualifies as a legitimate sprint. “Mom,” he said at age six. “I’m coming,” he learns at eight. One night, shaken awake by a railed monolith, larger than Jack had ever seen, he chases his boy, but cannot compete with the mother’s heartbeat. Jack manages a final goodbye, but the deafening click-clack steals even that.

——————————