Fiction River Read online

  Even the colonel came in and said it was over.

  But hell. To me it felt like shit was just getting started. I was frickin’ famous!

  My box is in a museum in Minneapolis and people pay to look at it. I once heard a kid ask his mama why THIS SIDE UP was written on it sideways. Kids are dumb as grass, you know what I’m saying?

  I can only guess how bad that box reeks. As far as I know they never cleaned up my lo mein. Snootie was confiscated, I guess. I see fakes on the internet all the time.

  Colonel Prickface was promoted to General Prickhead. Rosales left the agency and has a talk show on some news channel.

  Mr. Yarrow let me live at his house for a while and tutored me through high school. I learned a lot from that old man. Owe him a lot. For a while I got to be pretty full of myself. Fame and all. I was tempted to just sit around and drink Coronas and just call it a life.

  But right before Mr. Yarrow died, he got all serious. He told me that just ’cause I’d saved the world didn’t mean I didn’t have work to do. And he was right. There were folks out there in worse places than my old 24.1 Cu. Ft. BOTTOM FREEZER box. I knew how to talk to them, you know what I’m saying?

  I started with the old overpass in Minneapolis, and now I’m trying to save the world one box at a time.

  Movie Boy and Music Girl

  Ron Collins

  Like Eric Kent Edstrom, Ron Collins writes all over the genre map. His fiction can be light or extremely dark. His most recent Fiction River appearance, “Playing God,” in Editor Saves shows why he’s in such demand as a science fiction writer. He frequently appears in Analog and Asimov’s, and won a Writers of the Future award. His space-based series, Stealing the Sun, has garnered all kinds of critical acclaim.

  But Ron’s known for his fantasy stories as well. His fantasy serial, Saga of the God-Touched Mage, tops Amazon’s Dark Fantasy best seller lists. A goodly portion of his eight previous appearances in Fiction River could be classified as fantasy.

  Just like “Movie Boy and Music Girl.” About the story, Ron writes, “I would love to say there was some perfectly drawn-out plan that brought me to Movie Boy and Music Girl, but the truth is that I sat back, closed my eyes, and in the darkness behind my lids just heard the first line and I was hooked. Who was it said by? Who was it said to? Why? From that point, it just kind of wrote itself. I love it when that happens. Perhaps, if I get three wishes, that’ll be one of them. On the other hand, I suppose one should be careful about that kind of thing.”

  INTRO

  (Dark screen, charcoal gray outer falling to pure black at the center)

  (hint of a tunnel to suggest destiny, or endlessness)

  (fade up music: Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle”)

  * * *

  TITLE CREDITS (dissolve each to center):

  * * *

  (fade music to silence)

  (screen goes to full black)

  (four second delay, or until awkward)

  * * *

  VOICE-OVER:

  (Female. Simple Midwestern tone, distant and tired)

  “So, are you here for love, or is it conquest?”

  (delay)

  CUT TO ESTABLISHING SCENE:

  Me, standing in the witch’s den.

  I’m a senior in high school. I don’t look like I do now. I look more like a cross between a hipster and a theater guy, which is totally cool since that’s pretty much what I am. I’m tallish, but over-thin. My face is freckled, but my cheekbones and eyes give you a sense of hope for my future. Girls generally liked me even back then, boys, too, for that matter, but I am, admittedly, more cute than hot, more Duckie than Blane. I’m wearing a black Skyrim T-shirt with the “Detected” logo. My hair is parted on the side in a way I think of as a very hard-edged Zac Efron, but is really more Anthony Michael Hall.

  The witch’s den is a grungy apartment down on Third Street. It’s a small place, three rooms. It smells like the dregs of a cast party—boozy and layered with stale incense.

  The witch is an old woman, (wryly) maybe thirty-five. She’s more Nordic than English.

  She ambles around her apartment with a laundry basket wedged onto her hip. Her hair is shoulder-length, but looks like she’s just gotten out of bed even though it’s a half hour since school let out. She looks tired, though. It’s warm for September in Louisville—high eighties. She’s wearing a pair of frayed shorts and a wrinkled gray T-shirt big enough it makes her look boney. She’s distracted, or hung-over, or maybe just bored. She picks a shirt off a chair, sniffs it, and drops it into the half-full basket. As she comes around the sofa, I see her feet are bare.

  “Pardon me?” I finally reply.

  “All the school boys who come here are looking for love or conquest,” she says. “Or maybe I should say sex or football?”

  She hesitates long enough for me to not respond, then shrugs, reaches a crusty sock from the back of her couch, and uses great caution to turn it backward and forward before dropping it resolutely into the bin.

  “The girls all come for love and beauty,” she says. “But the boys want sex and football.”

  I wipe my palms on my jeans. “Guess that makes sense.”

  She examines me then like she might take in a dirty pair of pants, letting her gaze go from head to toe.

  “What is your name?” she says.

  “Brock,” I say, feeling like my tongue has never said my name before. “Brock Davis.”

  She puts the laundry basket down, and I feel heat from everywhere but her eyes. “So, Brock Davis, are you here for love or for conquest?”

  “Love, I guess.”

  “You guess?” She leans closer, her eyes still cold and testing. A wave of harsh incense burns my eyes. The moment feels like a Hall’s cough drop.

  I take a half-step back. “Love,” I reply. “Definitely love.”

  I’m happy to find this is still the truth. I do love Kelli. The idea makes me stand taller. “I heard you can make potions or something.”

  Her smile is a sardonic twitch of her lips.

  She turns away and sits on the couch, one arm lying along the top cushions. “I can make potions, but I don’t do that for love.”

  “Why not?”

  “Forced love never ends well,” she says.

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “Wishes,” she says. “I think you want wishes.”

  “You’re a djinni? I thought you were a witch.”

  She shrugs and her eyebrow twitches as if to say I’m dumb as a rock, which may well be the case.

  “How is a wish better than a potion?”

  “I can give you three wishes,” she says. “But to use them for love, you have to promise to give up all other loves.”

  Back then I thought she was ignoring the question.

  I know better now.

  “That’s not a problem,” I say.

  “I always give fair warning, Brock Davis,” the witch says. “And this is an important thing. So think about your answer. Think very hard. If you take these wishes, for the rest of your life no one else can ever love you.”

  “She’s the one.”

  The witch’s smile gets wider. Her teeth are whitened. A hair falls into her eye, and the smile becomes a smirk.

  “Yes,” she says. “That is what they all say.”

  DISSOLVE TO BLACK:

  (two second delay)

  VOICE-OVER:

  (fade up music: Slowdive’s “Good Day Sunshine”)

  So that’s how I got the wishes to begin with.

  Now I need to take you to the true beginning of this story, back three weeks earlier to when it all started for real.

  CUT TO MONTAGE—AFTERNOON:

  (empty school hallway, shot from distance so it looks like an infinite tunnel)

  (sunlight in window blots far end)

  (music fades to very low)

  (tone rings, hallway fills with jostling students)

  VOICE-OVER CONTINUES:r />
  Imagine it’s the third day of senior year. I’m crashing through the crowd on a dead run, shouldering my way through the unwashed throngs of hustling kids, bookbag slung over one shoulder, literally racing ahead of my best friend.

  That’s Hashim Reynolds, you know him now, too.

  I call him Hashtag, or Hash, because he’s forever wound up in social media. We’re both theater wonks, and have been since freshman year—which, if you follow us at all, you know is when we first met and when we started making those early crap videos you can still find out on the net. Hash is still the only person I know who loves film more than I do—though he’s more traditional than me (he would hate the entire concept of my diegetic forays in this piece, for example...I can hear him ranting at me even now: “show, dammit, don’t tell”). It works, though. We fit together somehow. Our junior year we made our first real picture using only our phones and some junk software we pulled off the net. It was good. We uploaded it, and even got a showing at the Louisville Arts Fest.

  As you’re watching this, we’ve already decided we’re going to make our own films. We’re going to be like Jennifer Lawrence and get the hell out of Kentucky to go live in L.A. or wherever.

  But that’s all in the future.

  Right now, as we’re running through the hallways of DuPont Manual High School, it is a passing period early in our senior year, and right now, as we are wont to do, we’re playing it as a chase scene.

  Imagine it all.

  Imagine that I come to the bottom of a wide stairwell. See me hugging one side, leveraging the banister with both hands, calling “Maddie! Maddie!” like Jimmy Stewart as he chased Kim Novak in Vertigo.

  Notice Hash behind me.

  Imagine as, three flights later, I make the top and clutch the side of the doorway that leads to the hallway, panting as dramatically as Stewart panted. Imagine me looking to the end of the hallway.

  CUT TO KELLI:

  CAMERA PAN UP:

  (She leans with one shoulder against the wall, beside an old-fashioned window with double-wide sill thrown open. She’s dark. Hip punk. Her jeans are ripped at the knees. Her textured black top lays beneath a leather jacket dark enough to match cascades of hair that fall to cover her face, which is downcast as she thumbs her phone. Her guitar, a beat-up acoustic, is slung upside-down at her side, the neck reaching to the floor. Its strap is macramé and leather with the words “MUSIC GIRL” stitched into it. Her boots are black leather, worn and creased from use.)

  Imagine the expression on my face as I see her,

  slim and backlit against the window,

  her guitar slung over

  one shoulder.

  See my heart

  in freefall,

  outside

  the

  window

  behind

  her.

  VOICE-OVER CONTINUES:

  I loved her from the minute I saw her.

  I’m not alone on that point, of course. Everyone loves Kelli the minute they see her.

  And, yes she was hot. I’m not even going to pretend she wasn’t. Everyone knows Kelli Izidani is eye-shatteringly, blazingly, ten-million-degree, melt-your-face-off-ly, gorgeous.

  But true love is deeper than that.

  And love on first sight is the deepest kind of true love. It has to be, don’t you know? Love on first sight is the unicorn of all love, because it’s the kind of love that’s cherished, but that no one believes in.

  But I believe in it. I know it exists.

  And I can say without reservation, that love on first sight is deeper than anything else that exists or that ever can exist.

  Believe me on this.

  CUT TO HALLWAY—ME, STILL PANTING:

  HASH INTO FRAME:

  (fade music out)

  “Don’t even try,” Hash says.

  “What?”

  “That girl will eat you up, man. She’s only been in school a week and already everyone says she’s a shredder.”

  Aside—Shredder: one who shreds, or in Hash’s and my own little lexicon, a woman or a man who goes through other women or men like they were so many tissues. See: Kardashians and sports heroes. See Swift, Taylor. See Draper, Don.

  I ignore him, of course.

  Instead of walking away, I wave my hand dismissively at him, and walk forward.

  CAMERA: PUSH TO SIDE-VIEW, ME ON LEFT, HER ON RIGHT

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Blister off,” she replies without looking up from her phone. Her fingers are long and graceful as they work a text or a post or whatever.

  “That’s a bit rude,” I say, channeling my inner 007.

  “I don’t want any,” she said, still not looking at me.

  “That’s good, because I don’t have any.”

  Finally she looks up.

  CUT TO CLOSE-IN ON KELLI:

  FREEZE FRAME:

  (two second delay)

  VOICE-OVER:

  This is the exact moment when the rest of my life was defined.

  I remember everything about it.

  The sound of the school as it bled from the background: voices, slamming lockers, feet on tile. Someone was eating popcorn. The breeze coming through the open window was cool. A train was moving on the tracks behind the big yellow Performing Arts building outside.

  I remember the jolt of electricity that hit me.

  I remember her skin, smooth and caramel brown.

  Her lips, thin and dark.

  Then her eyes. Deep chocolate on pools of clear white.

  UNFREEZE, TRANSITION TO ACTION:

  She leans her head against the wall until her chin makes an upward angle. The slender curve of her neck is a river of smooth. She smells like roses.

  “Please go the hell away,” she says.

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Go away,” she says as she rolls her head forward again. “Or I’ll scream so loud your eardrums will bleed for a week.”

  “What?”

  “What do you think the hall guard will do when I tell him you grabbed my ass?”

  “Seriously, I just want to talk.”

  “I’m counting to three.”

  Now those dark eyes are sharp.

  She holds up a hand, index finger raised.

  I chew on the inside of my cheek.

  The second finger goes up.

  “All right,” I say, and I walk away.

  CUT TO HASH STANDING IN THE HALLWAY)

  (I walk into scene, one hand rubbing the back of my neck)

  “See what I mean?” he says, “Shredder.”

  “Yeah,” I reply.

  “Don’t take it bad, Skippy,” he says, elbowing me like he does when I’ve screwed something up. “I’ve seen her work before, man. Guys, girls. She does it to everyone. They all talk her up and come back bloody as a newbie dragon hunter.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But inside I know better. She’s afraid of something. She’s angry, or worried, or maybe even lonely.

  I want to help her.

  That’s how love is, you know?

  Love is impossible. Love is seeing the awesome inside someone who doesn’t even see it inside themselves. Love is being there. Love is wanting to help.

  I just need a chance.

  So I made her a mix tape.

  MONTAGE:

  (film clips, pending permission, me at the computer)

  Well, my version of a mix tape, anyway.

  I’m a movie guy, right? If she can be Music Girl, I get to be Movie Boy.

  I used movie scenes, breathtaking scenes that I spliced up with a series of slick fade-outs and wipecuts. They were scenes that kicked my ass as a filmmaker, but where the music made the moment.

  The opening minute of Paris, Texas, complete with the desert, the derelict man, and Ry Cooder’s mournfully blistering slide guitar that sets you off on a tale of isolation.

  Then 1:37 of “Walking with Gabi,” Christophe Beck’s delicate tonal piece that s
upports Charlie as he explains to Gabi how he can’t stay away from her in The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, and where she tells him that if he returns the next day she’ll give him a kiss.

  Next came a buck-fifty of the elevator scene from Drive where Driver kisses Irene, cut prior to the violence, and which I then offset with a full 3:50 of the gorgeous “Always With Me” from Spirited Away, which is a song that bursts with innocence and joy, and a movie that...well...just is.

  I finished with a clip from “Arrival of the Birds,” an orchestral piece that the director played over the end sequence to The Theory of Everything, a film that asks the basic question of why we fit on the Earth to begin with.

  As a “hidden” bonus cut, I gave her the 8:20 of Explosions in the Sky’s heart-filling “Your Hand in Mine” behind clips from Friday Night Lights, which is about football, yes, but is really about much more than that.

  All right. I’ve seen High Fidelity. I knew it was sophomoric even then.

  But I was talking to her.

  I thought that if I showed her music over film, it would help her see we could be together.

  I burned it all to a jump drive and left it taped to her locker the next day.

  FADE TO BLACK:

  (two second delay)

  * * *

  CONTINUE VOICE-OVER:

  She left the remains on my homeroom desk.

  The jump drive was as charred and smashed as my heart.

  So, no, we didn’t catch each other’s gaze across the cafeteria or wind up running across a flower-strewn glade to fall into each other’s arms. This was real life, not a movie. And in real life all I got was a cold shoulder, a broken-up chunk of plastic, and whole lot of silence.