Fiction River Page 4

  It was Hash who turned me on to the witch.

  Or the djinni.

  Whatever.

  Which brings me back to where we left off the last time.

  CUT TO ME—NIGHTTIME

  (walking on decaying city street, under dim streetlight)

  (music, low: Rachael Yamagata’s “I Wish You Love” [Instrumental track only])

  I feel more than a little stupid as I walk down the street from the bus stop. It’s getting cold now. The sun has just set and the sky is bitter gray. The wind is picking up with rain that will come later. Dented-up cars pass in the street, their headlights turned on. I press my balled fists deeper into the pockets of my windbreaker.

  Wishes? Seriously?

  Am I actually insane enough to think this will work? The closer I come to the time I’ll need to make that first wish, the dumber I think I am.

  But I love Kelli Izidani, and I want her to love me.

  She’s playing at the Garage, which is a dive on the tough side of town, half grill, half bar, the kind of place that smells like charbroiled grease and watered-down beer from a block away.

  They let me in on the grill side.

  I take a two-seat table toward the back of the room.

  “Burger and fries,” I say to the waitress as Kelli takes her seat on stage.

  It’s just her and that guitar.

  She wears a gray jersey with long blue sleeves. The front has a worn stencil that reads “Hazardous Material Inside.” Her hair is wild, and she’s pinned three long feathers into it that trail down her back on the right side.

  Some people applaud before she even gets started.

  At that point I have no idea how good she is. I’ve never heard her signature guitar sound, and I have no idea she can sing.

  Then she hits a chord.

  (music: Kelli Izidani’s “I’ll Break Your Heart”)

  Her booted foot stomps.

  And her fingers crawl over the fretboard like a spider on meth, they crab-walk up and down the neck, lifting one at a time to spin a web of sound that sticks itself to the back of my head like it’s come from some deep well of time itself. Then she opens her mouth and, Holy Mother of Jesus, the sound is raw and deep, a voice that’s like the ethereal child of Adele and Billie Holiday.

  The entire world comes to a stop.

  CUT-SHOTS (MUSIC MONTAGE, INDICATE TIME PASSING)

  (fade music to: Kelli Izidani finishing Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads”)

  (robust audience applause)

  “Thank you,” Kelli says into the microphone as she puts the guitar onto the stand to her left. “I’ll be taking a break now. Back in,” she looks at her bare wrist, “well, let’s just say twenty minutes, all right?”

  She goes to the bar, where she’s not old enough to be, except she’s working. I’m surprised to find a cold burger at my table. The ice in my nearly full glass of soda has melted.

  I’m not hungry.

  I follow her to the bar where three older men are already gathered around her. She’s pushing one of the guys’ arm from around her waist.

  “Thank you, but no,” she’s saying as I approach.

  She looks at me and I nearly disappear into those eyes again.

  “I wish you would let me talk to you,” I say before she can react.

  The tingle that comes to the base of my spine is like sitting on one of those furniture store recliners with the vibration unit built-in. It feels good for a moment, but something lodges at the base of my gut, too.

  Kelli, though—her head whips around, and it’s as if her jaw has come out of joint. Her lips pull back and she blinks her eyes.

  “All right,” she says.

  My smile is a million miles wide. One wish, one score. It’s all I can do to keep myself from cheering out loud.

  “Wait just a goddamned minute,” the guy says. He’s about fifty pounds overweight and wearing a Kentucky Wildcats sweatshirt that stretches out over his belly. You can tell he’s a smoker. He grabs her elbow. “The lady is with us.”

  Kelli wrenches it away. “I am not with you.”

  She touches my shoulder. The contact is electric.

  “Let’s go outside,” she says.

  “All right.”

  We proceed across the open floor, and Kelli is stopped by another guy and then a girl, both of them obviously looking for something more than Kelli is willing to give. Just as I’m getting ready to step between them, Kelli shreds them both with lines of profanity that would make my grandfather blush.

  We walk into the back alley.

  The chill in the air is sharp here. It smells like rain and concrete underneath the reek of the grill. Someone is playing hip hop in the distance. Small tufts of sawgrass grow from the base of a pole set for powerlines, and the alley itself is lined with dilapidated wooden fences and a pair of rusted-out tool sheds.

  She turns on me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I reply. “I just wish we could go out sometime.” The vibration happens again. One more to go.

  Her reaction is muted this time, but I can tell it got through.

  “Stop it.”

  “Will you go out with me?”

  “I don’t have a choice, now, do I?”

  Suddenly I feel crappy. The idea of wishing she would talk with me didn’t seem like much of an affront, but forcing her to date me seemed like a much better idea before I actually said it. I feel like a creeper, now. I’m getting ready to apologize when she speaks.

  “You’ve been to see her,” she says.

  My heart gives a double-clutch because it understands what’s happening before my brain does.

  “See who?” I say, but my brain is already catching up. I know what she’s going to say. “The witch,” I say, beating her to the punch.

  Kelli takes three steps into the darkness of the alley, and puts her hand to her forehead. Then everything about her deflates.

  The growl of a diesel engine comes from the other side of the building.

  A cop car rolls past the alleyway in the distance.

  She turns back to face me, shivering, clutching her arms around herself to keep warm.

  “My dad took me to see her back when I was thirteen. Mom had just moved out and things weren’t going so good. A thirteen-year-old girl can be a handful for a guy who pours concrete for a living—especially if he loves her. He asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I said I wanted to get my fortune told.”

  “But she’s a witch, not a fortune teller.”

  Kelli laughed. “Is there a difference?”

  I shrug. “So?”

  “He paid his money, and I got three wishes.”

  I wait. The music in the distance changes into something techno and trippy. Despite the situation, I find I’m just sick enough to be happy she’s actually talking to me.

  “The first thing I wished for was to be awesomely beautiful.”

  “Awesomely beautiful?”

  “I was thirteen.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s okay to tell you it worked.”

  She gives the least self-aggrandizing nod I’ve ever seen.

  “And I loved Taylor Swift, so I asked to be the best singer and songwriter that ever lived.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken you for a Swifty.”

  “I loved her,” she says. “Still do.”

  “She’s okay.”

  “She’s better than okay. She’s the freaking apex, and that’s not going to change no matter how many wishes you send my way.”

  I raise both hands in surrender. “No reason to get defensive.”

  Her glare burns through the darkness.

  “Sounds like a cool enough wish, though.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “Well, you’re freakin’ great.”

  “But how much of it is me?”

  “All of it. It’s all you.”

  “No.” Her voice is harsh as the concrete below our feet.
“I’m sure it seems like that to you, but this thing...it’s different than you think.” She pulls her arms in tighter, but this time I don’t get the idea that she’s cold. “How much of this is mine?” she says. “Could I have done it without the wish?”

  She shrugs in the darkness.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  It seems like it might be the right time to give her a hug, but she backs off.

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I say, feeling awkward.

  “At least I know the guitar-work is mine.”

  “It’s really incredible, too,” I say.

  “Thanks.”

  Perhaps I’m making things up, but I think she actually glows for a moment. I take a step closer to her again, and again she backs away.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I say.

  “I just can’t,” she replies, putting a hand up.

  She laughs, but it’s a laugh that’s full of irony and that’s pointed at herself. She swallows, then, and looks at me.

  “My dad said that if I was going to be beautiful and talented the paparazzi would be all over me, so in my thirteen-year-old brilliance, I fixed that problem by wishing that everyone would love me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  But then I do.

  I see her at school, alienating a hundred kids a day. I see the audience cheering for her before she’s even played, the three letches at the bar looming over her, and the two admirers trying so fervently to pick her up on our way out here.

  “You literally wished everyone would love you?”

  She nods. “Stupid, right?”

  “So you’re getting buried with attention.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “You piss off everyone you meet just to get them to leave you alone.”

  “I can’t stand it,” she says. “I can’t trust anyone.”

  My heart clutches. It feels like a crack in the concrete has opened inside me. I put my hand toward her, and she backs off again.

  “But I do love you. It’s not the wish.”

  She shakes her head.

  Panic rises as I understand her situation. Kelli Izidani will live out her entire life uncertain if anyone truly loves her. “I do love you, Kelli. You have to believe me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe you can just let me be with you anyway.”

  “It matters, Brock.”

  Despite myself, hearing her say my name makes me smile. The first time you hear the love of your life say your name, it is like a new kind of music.

  “I promise you that the not knowing is a horrible thing,” she continues, oblivious to my foray into ecstasy.

  I see her here in the alleyway then, and I realize why we’re here.

  “You’re only talking to me because I wished for it, aren’t you?”

  “What do you think?”

  I look at her.

  She’s beautiful. She’s afraid, and sad, and alone. She doesn’t trust me. She will never be able to trust me. Her die is cast. Wishes come with a no take-back-sie policy, and the witch (or djinn or fortune teller) was quite clear that something set with one wish cannot be undone by another.

  Kelli Izidani will always be encircled by people who love her, but will always be alone.

  “You’re going to wish that I love you, aren’t you?” she says.

  I don’t have to tell her she was right.

  “Not tonight,” I say.

  But we both know that’s not the right answer. Eventually it would come down to it, and eventually I would do it.

  We stand like that until it becomes awkward.

  “I need to do my next set,” she says. She moves to the doorway.

  “You’re not going to stop me?”

  “Nobody can stop a wish except the person who wishes it.”

  Then the screen door slams behind her and I’m alone with the nighttime chill and the smell of rotting hamburgers.

  CLOSE-UP: ME

  (fade up music: [instrumental, trippy] Portishead’s “It’s Only You”)

  VOICE-OVER:

  When Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo kills himself, it is a sacrifice to love. He cannot bear to live in a world without her. When Claire Danes does the same, it, too, is a gift to love.

  If only I had it so good.

  I stood in the alley for a long time that night.

  Should I do it anyway? Knowing what I did, should I wish for Kelli Izidani to love me?

  If I did, she would comply, but then I would see her just as Kelli sees her own gift and her own audience—coerced, happily so, but blind to the fact that their loyalty is untrue. I would know it, though. I would know her love was a wished love, a driven love. And worse, she would know it, too. She would love me and stay with me, but at some level she would know, and somewhere under the surface she would grow resentful.

  How could she not?

  And me? What would I be in that case? How would I see myself?

  Yet, I loved her with a love that was as deep and true as any that had ever existed, a love that would be there even without her wish. I know this is true.

  I am different from the rest. I care.

  I want to help her.

  Standing there in the alleyway, I realized there was one way—a single thing that I could do to prove that my love was powerful beyond her magic. Yet to do that was to accept a life alone—because, as you’ve seen, I gave up claim to any and all other loves when I accepted the witch’s wishes.

  That’s what I was thinking as I stood in the alleyway behind the Garage.

  Wish for Kelli Izidani to love me, or commit myself to a life knowing that I would be alone forever.

  (closes eyes, blinks, looks up into the gray sky)

  (fade to silence)

  I stare into the dark sky.

  “I wish I didn’t love Kelli Izidani,” I say.

  Then I lower my gaze and walk down the alleyway, head down, fists shoved in my cold pockets.

  CROSSFADE TO HIGH END RESTAURANT: NIGHTTIME

  (faint piano music in background)

  I’m thirty-two years old now.

  We are on a date, you and me. I don’t really know you, and I don’t care to. The tabloids will follow us, you in that remarkable dress and me in my sport jacket and shirt unbuttoned to show my collarbone. That’s all right. Part of the game. Part of the brand, you know?

  Brock Davis, movie boy. Brock Davis, womanizer.

  You ask about the movie.

  I say it’s great, and it is. Hash and I are a hell of a team.

  I can see you’re not exactly like the rest, though.

  You smile with a sense of honesty. You’re not interested in a role, or leveraging me for anything else. So, it’s true that I’m not sure why you’re here. Maybe it’s because you’re exploring. Maybe you’re just looking for someone interesting to talk to.

  I don’t know.

  All I can say for certain, is that you are like everyone else in one very important way.

  You do not love me.

  And you never will.

  FADE TO BLACK:

  (fade up music: Kelli Izidani’s “I Can’t Wish You Back”)

  END CREDITS:

  Upon_a_Starship.pgm

  Brigid Collins

  It’s no coincidence that Ron and Brigid Collins share a last name. Brigid is Ron’s daughter, and she inherited his love of fiction. She’s a major storyteller in her own right (write?), and we’ve been proud to feature Brigid’s work in seven different volumes of Fiction River, including our previous YA volume, Superpowers.

  Her short stories have appeared in Fiction River, Chronicle Worlds: Feyland, and Uncollected Anthology Volume 13: Mystical Melodies. You can also pick up three books in her fantasy series, Songbird River Chronicles.

  About “Upon a Starship.pgm,” Brigid writes, “When my dad teaches writing, he uses “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” so that, among other valuable lessons, he can hammer h
ome the point that the words don’t matter in storytelling. How can they, when the one telling the story is mute? But I, like any apprentice, thought I had risen above these simple lessons at one point. And yet, when I struggle with my storytelling, I always come back to the fundamentals he taught me. I guess, in a way, this retelling is a way for me to show my due diligence.”

  The other kids, the pilot students in their not-that-cool Academy uniforms (totally unsuitable for the chilled air of a real space-faring vessel), gaped as Mom demonstrated a perfect U-dive maneuver in the transport ship they’d called “boring” and “unwieldy.” I’d even heard one of them use the word “ungraceful,” and my fists had clenched around the cold rim of my pocket texter to keep from signing the bad signs at him. I’d never get away with behaving that way, even though I’d heard the Academy kids saying disgusting words during the three days they’d infested our home. It was the straight and narrow for me with my mother as the captain of Karma Dancer.

  Mom’s sharp, disapproving gaze always fell on me more often when we had students on board. “Shanti,” she’d say, her voice low and firm in that way that pressed against the back of my head until my neck ached with the effort of keeping eye contact, “I expect more of you. Just because the other children don’t understand your sign language doesn’t mean it’s all right for you to call them names behind their backs. Use your pocket texter to make friends with them.”

  It wasn’t my fault the Academy kids unfailingly turned out to be class-A jerkzoids, so I’d make vague gestures of agreement I didn’t intend to act on and change the subject to my own flight lessons.

  /The Academy students spend a whole semester just reading manuals for all the ships they’ll fly before ever boarding one. I’ve lived on Karma Dancer all my life. I’ve mastered the two drills you let me do. Why can’t I fly her alone?/ I’d sign.

  Not that I would need to read her outdated manual. I knew Karma Dancer like I knew my own body. The sign I’d invented for her summed up everything she was: solid, dependable, graceful. I’d be a natural at pulling off the smooth maneuvers Mom did, if I ever got the chance.