The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [100]
The dead rat hangs from a hook on his chest, beneath the sheet that covers him. He will get out of bed. He will draw a picture of the rat. He will flush the rat down the toilet. He will find his fishline and knot the pieces together, so as to continue to collect keys. He will not collect keys until the rats are dead, but he will collect keys.
The sheets cling tightly to him. They are tucked under his body. He rocks back and forth until the sheets loosen. He frees his hands.
He rolls over onto his side, looks over the edge of the bed to see on the floor below a mound of keys.
He feels his body. Except for the rat, the hooks are empty.
He rolls his legs out of the bed, brings his feet to the floor. He pushes his body upright, steps away from the bed. Without keys, his movements are awkward and extreme, his balance tenuous.
He rests one hand against the headboard for balance. Reaching down, he untangles a ring of keys from the pile and hangs it on his harness. He takes another ring, and another, and another, the heap beside him diminishing, his body growing hard under the weight.
He falls into bed. He pulls the sheet up to his neck. The door opens. "How are you feeling, Brey?" says his father. "Feeling?" says Brey.
His father shakes his head. His father comes to the edge of the bed. His father leans over him. He leans down into Brey's body. He presses his mouth to Brey's mouth.
Brey tastes the taste of his father taking away his breath. His father is all powerful. His father is a myriad-minded man. Brey will be lucky to survive.
The Art of Dying
K. J. BISHOP
MONA SKYE, the duellist and poet of lately tragic fame, lay where her friends had placed her, on brocade cushions in a corner of the smoking room beneath the Amber Tree cafe.
Illness, allowed to run rampant, had repaid the favour with curious gifts. Fever made her long, austere face beautiful. It reddened her lips and made her grey eyes sparkle like stones. As her lean body wasted towards frailty it had come to exhibit the strange liberal grace of a strong thing weakened and perversely unashamed of its new tenderness. Even her pale hair appeared softer and brighter then before.
The disease turns her into that old cliche, the beautiful and beloved thing that can live only a short while... Vali Jardine could taste her own anger as if it were in the mildly opiated smoke she inhaled through the pipe of the narghile that stood on the carpet between them.
Anger had been Vali's closest companion since the night, back in summer, of the Sending of Sins, when Mona had drunkenly sworn to let Death catch her at last. She would face the grinning bastard, she said; seduce him by being more ardent than he, so that when the end came she would take him, rather than the opposite. She had made this announcement to discomfited onlookers in the crowd gathered on the bank of the Leopold Canal at Jubilee Point to place paper lanterns in the water and watch them float away down the long dark stream, past the porches of the old slumbering floodlit mansions and the new sleepless factories. The next morning she rejected her medicines, throwing all her tonics and powders out onto the little courtyard below the apartment she and Vali shared.
A male voice came out of the gloom on Mona's other side. "She's asleep." A black damask sleeve reached across the cushions and pale fingers lifted the pipe out of her hand. The man's features were visible as faint mouldings in the shadow under a curtain of long black hair. His name was Gwynn. A sometime adventurer from Falias in the snow-swept north of the world, he and Mona had once been comrades in arms and sweethearts down in the canyon country west of the Teleute Shelf. The love affair had been uncomplicated and brief and their friendship had endured. Parted by circumstances, separate routes had brought them to Sheol, where