My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories! She is a good fiction writer. I am not. But sometimes I get inspired to write a response. This is one of them.

Original Story: Lament

My Story

I knew her the moment she walked in, of course. Her glamours are literally the source of the word, but she has absolutely no tolerance for error. When a woman that perfect enters your bar, you’re in danger.

So I kept on serving the three girls who’d been there all afternoon. They’d started with mimosas at lunch and just kept going. They were easy money for someone like me—a smile here, a wink there, keep the sleeves rolled up just enough that they could see I’m mostly muscle—and I was sure my bed would be warm tonight. It almost always was.

The man in the leather duster kept staring at me like he knew something, but didn’t quite know what. He stared at the beer, too—a brown ale, served too cold at his request—and didn’t say much.

The woman took an easy seat at a table, speaking low to one of our waitresses, presumably a drink order.

I was still trying to work out what she could possibly order when she stood up to take the stage. Tuesdays are spoken word open mic nights here at Goodfellow’s, and it was always fun to see who worked up the courage to walk up front and pour out their notebook into the mic.

Always some English majors, and some wannabe English majors, and some dropout English majors. Sometimes one of the overachieving STEM kids who couldn’t stand not being good at everything. Usually a few loners who really did want to be poets.

No one like this had ever taken our stage. Every eye followed her—mine included. How could you not stare at that perfect ass?

I don’t mean Venus de Milo or Jessica Alba or Flo-Jo. I mean, the cosmic ideal of ass. Yes, her heels were stunning, as were the legs they supported. Somehow even the muscles of her back through the blue off-shoulder top were captivating. And her shock-white hair competed for attention with her sinuous neck. But that ass… one flexed buttock could have sent the whole room into an orgy.

She didn’t, of course. Her control was total.

Her voice was what surprised me the most. It sounded… normal. Almost relaxed. When you’ve known her as long as I have, you kind of get used to the intense radiating power of her voice, even when she’s speaking in a whisper.

But tonight was like she’d found a new gear. A lower one.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, I want to give a longwinded shoutout to my man, Mercutio.

ahem…

She did not need to clear her flawless opal-jeweled throat.

She’d been practicing.

I was in trouble. We were all in trouble.

Could steal your girl But he doesn’t want her, Tarnish his honor But don’t squander the love scholar. The original bad bitch A casual curse witch…

Her poem wasn’t great. I mean, it was delivered with the kind of vocal skill usually reserved for EGOT winners and Morgan Freeman. But the Bard she ain’t.

Not that it mattered; between her body and her voice, I’m not sure anybody but me could hear the words. Well. That guy in the duster—something told me he didn’t miss much.

She finished, accepted the polite applause and ubiquitous catcalls, and glided to the bar.

I turn on the charm, playing up the part of bartender, hoping she’ll leave me alone. Believe me, you don’t want her attention.

“What’ll it be, my rhyming mademoiselle?”

That’s the ticket, overboard on the flirting; nobody in their right mind would flirt with her.

“A friend of mine recommended something, but I can’t quite remember the name,” she purrs, leaning in more than necessary, “it’s a bubbly one, with a country in it.”

Dangerous. She’s just as dangerous from the front as the back—more so, with those damn eyes—and she’s leaking power. She must have enjoyed herself up there to slip like this. I feel myself drowning in her, and only centuries of practice and a wrenching act of will keep me breathing.

“A whole country? I don’t know if I can fit that in a glass,” I say as I pray she’s too distracted to notice my brief hiccup. Probably every male she’s ever met has had that problem and she’s used to it. Every female, too.

I start making the drink she’s obviously referring to as she politely chuckles at my joke.

We are playing a terrifying game. One that I can’t win. Only survive.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see the man in the duster suddenly attentive to our conversation, a hand reaching below the bar. Stay calm, man, you can’t handle this one.

“You’re looking for a French 75, I believe,” I say, sliding it into her hand and winking.

“Yes! That’s…”—she starts her next rehearsed line a moment before realizing that I’ve skipped a step and already given her the drink.

Not smart. I should have played along. But I couldn’t help myself. It’s who I am.

“I’ll be back to hear how perfect it is,” I croak, and race back to those giggly girls, suddenly desaturated in comparison. At least none of them will kill me in my sleep.

I wait for her to take a sip, appearing to focus all my attention on the ladies in front of me. The moment she turns back to the back, I’m in front of her. Can’t leave her alone for long.

“You’re becoming a bit of a regular,” I venture, thinking she might take the bait and tell me what the hell she’s doing here. Again. “I can add you to the local’s tab lists if you’d like. Gets you, ah, 10% off on Thursdays.”

A vulpine look fades as she finishes turning from studying the crowd, identifying and dissecting my hook, analyzing the opportunities, and eventually deciding not to play tonight.

“Sure, put me in there, big guy.”

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. One more try.

“Lucky for us! And what’s the pretty name of the pretty lady?”

She answers, and the power of her answer rocks me back a bit. I stutter, pretend I couldn’t hear over the idiot up on stage.

“Mag? As in Maggie?”

Please don’t say your name again.

“Mab, my dear Puck. As in Queen.”

Shit.

My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories! She is a good fiction writer. I am not. But sometimes I get inspired to write a response. This is one of them.

Original Story: Fatigue

My Story

She was old, these days. Not that you’d know it to look at her. Fewer did, too, these days, but she supposed that was to be expected. It wasn’t the streak of gray she kept carefully hidden out of respect for the bartender, who was still denying the existence of hers. It wasn’t the remnants of a bright pink applied in a fit of misdirected youthful energy—not hers, this time; that waitress had been removed the next day, along with as much of the pink as she could.

No, fewer people looked at her because fewer people looked for her. Didn’t they know what she could do? How she had stocked everything just so, using local ingredients wherever she could, but sending out across the world if she ran out of options. How she had brought in only the very best bartenders, the ones who understood what she was trying to do here? The ones who didn’t question when the six-foot-nine thug got a peach mangonada, the alluring goth chick got a single finger of whiskey (neat, but always slightly pine-flavored) for the third time this month, or the Clint Eastwood wannabe got—well, he got a finger of whiskey, too, but without the pine.

Ms. Harliot poured another drink, a tea for a man in a black bowler who could have been from the 1920s or the 2020s, a tea with perhaps a little too much matcha for a true connoisseur, but which he would only remember as delicious. The O’Harliots—they lost the O in those same 1920s when Ellis Island would let the Irish into the country but New York wouldn’t welcome them any further—had always been her favorite bartenders, even back to the first grandame O’Harliot who carted her around by hand before she had found a permanent home. No cockles or mussels, but they all got what they needed.

Every couple of decades she tried out another family, someone promising, someone who had been in before, maybe a few times. They’d last somewhere between a few hours and a few years, and then she’d find herself reaching out to another Harliot cousin who inexplicably found themselves staring at the labels above the bar, realizing that if they just mixed a little of this with a drop of that, the lanky boy who’d been staring into the middle distance since he took a seat against the wall an hour ago would feel a little better when he left.

They all felt a little better when they left. (Most of them felt better on their way up to the bar.) A little lighter. A little… like maybe that weight wasn’t quite so heavy today. Almost as if the emotional gravity in here were a little weaker than it had been on the doorstep.

As he left, the thug almost forgot he was carrying—almost forgot why he was carrying.

As she walked out, the woman with lustrous black hair, a bit too much eyeliner, way too much (or maybe too little) leather, and skin a whiter shade of pale didn’t think of those girls once. Or those guys. She thought about a bass guitar and the boy who played it.

As he retreated, the man with the painstakingly manicured five-o’clock shadow didn’t think the word “emasculated” once.

The awkwardly tall boy had left years ago, trench coat waving in the wind, a bit worse for wear but looking forward to graduation for the first time in his life.

She could do this forever. She’d been doing it for years, and she’d keep it up until she couldn’t any more. She could feel Christina—sorry, Ms. Harliot—feeling her age, feeling the world, but she could also feel a man who had just turned up her street, fuming about his ex, his lawyer, his ex’s lawyer, the judge, the clerk, and every happy man, woman, and child he’d seen in the last three weeks…

The Grudgery was old, these days. Not that you’d know it to look at her. But the people who needed her found her, looked at her, looked again, stepped across the threshold, and, invariably, felt a little lighter.

My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories! She is a good fiction writer. I am not. But sometimes I get inspired to write a response. This is one of them.

Original Story

Mislaid

My Response

It was always the same. A trudge down a clean, brightly-lit path, a longing gaze up at the dead thing as if it could somehow hold the warmth that the living thing once had.

People are weird that way, I’ve noticed. They have all these memories of something alive—a father, a sister, a lover, a dog—and yet instead of sifting the memories to find the love they believe has left, they look at dead things instead: drawings, statues, tapestries, as if somehow the pressed and dried trees or rocks or wool marked with crushed flowers and snails have some sort of meaning that their own spirits don’t.

At least this one can tell the difference. I watch them inspect a marble face that isn’t right and dim stony eyes that never held light, clearly comparing the vibrance of memory to the icon of legacy.

Should I tell them? They’ve believed so long they probably wouldn’t understand; that’s another thing I’ve learned about people. They get an idea in their heads, and then they make choices based on that idea, and then they make choices based on those choices, and soon it’s impossible for the idea to have been wrong. They call it “belief,” which I suppose is as good a name as any.

But I shall tell you, since this one seems lost in thought staring at that door again.

There was never a chosen human. Thousands of years of “prophecy” of a Chosen One from a people that believed they were just barely younger than the dust of the ground. There’s that belief again; would it matter if they had all been born just as the latest war was starting? Was it important that they be old?

(They are not old. I am old, although there are many who would laugh at my youth. But this isn’t about me.)

There is a land, they say, where the people climb up mountains for fun. Just to do it. And in this land is a particular mountain that is the tallest. And as if there is more to see at the top of the tallest mountain than there is in a cup of hot tea, these people climb it.

It turns out they’re quite bad at it. Their lungs are not adapted to the altitude, and their fur is too thin and light for the cold, and their legs are really meant for distance running, not mountain climbing. For one thing, their knees go the wrong way.

But there are some other people who live near the mountain, whose lungs and hair are adapted for the mountain (although their knees still go the wrong way). When they climb the mountain, these two groups always go together: the adventure-seekers and the locals.

When they get to the top, who has climbed the mountain?

The one who saw it as a triumph to be achieved? Or the companion who made it possible to accomplish? The latter would never have left their home without the former; the former would never have reached the top alive alone.

Now that I’ve told you this fable, and you are to them as I to you, what prophecy would you write of these opposites who go up in the cold? Light and dark, thin of hair and rich of mane, backward of knee and—seriously, if you want to climb a mountain, look at a goat. Which way do their legs bend?

Anyway, I wrote that prophecy, and I said there would be a Chosen One. And there was. But who is to say which was which? The one who is dead or the one who mourns the dead thing by staring at a rock?

Their lives cannot be pulled apart any more than the threads of the tapestries depicting them could be unwoven and the image still stand. Their prophecies are not just intertwined, they are the same.

But for some reason, this allegedly wise old culture decided in the unremembered past that there can be only one, and they believed it so hard that they made it come true.

Well, sort of. One is remembered, and one remembers.

Humans are weird that way.