The Inner City Read online

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  The Inner City © 2012 by Karen Heuler

  Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design © 2012 by Samantha Beiko

  Author photo © Tracey Sides Photography

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-92746-934-7

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited and copyedited by Stephen Michell

  Proofread by Samantha Beiko

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FishWish

  The Inner City

  Down on the Farm

  The Great Spin

  The Escape Artist

  The Large People

  After Images

  Creating Cow

  Beds

  How Lightly He Stepped in the Air

  The Difficulties of Evolution

  Thick Water

  The Hair

  Ordinary

  Landscape, with Fish

  Publication History

  About the Author

  More Dark Fiction from ChiZine Publications

  FISHWISH

  Celia picked up a whole fish at the market, and she laid it out on the cutting board when she got home and looked at it closely. It had golden gills and silver fins, and copper scales and garnet eyes. “You’re quite beautiful,” she said. “I never noticed how beautiful a fish was before.”

  “Don’t eat me,” the fish cried. “Throw me back in the sea and I will give you what you want.”

  “I’ll do it,” she said, “because you’re beautiful and I don’t wish to see you die.”

  She wrapped the fish up and took the subway to Coney Island, which was dark with rain and empty because of the chill. She walked along the boardwalk until she saw a pier and then walked out to the end, where the wind whipped the sea up into whitecaps and greencaps. She knelt down and unwrapped her fish, whose scales were brighter because it was near the sea. The garnet eyes turned ruby and hypnotic, the scales shone and the fins flashed and she felt as if she were riding the waves, rushing up and rushing down.

  She had felt this way once before. “I can’t let you go,” she said. “I’m in love with you.”

  “I will give you three wishes if you let me go,” the fish said. “It’s the lure of wishing that you mistake for love. Beware of lures; I myself keep mistaking hooks for love.”

  “Three wishes?” she said, drawing back on her knees. Her eyes looked out at the water, which rose and swelled towards her; everything was coming towards her.

  “I don’t know what to wish for,” she said.

  “It’s easy as can be. Wish for wealth, wish for purpose, wish for love,” the fish cajoled her.

  “But which is better?” she wondered. “Wealth or purpose or love? Or I could wish for immortality. Or something else I can’t quite think of now, that will seem to me so obvious later on. I’m always thinking of things later on.”

  “You don’t have forever,” the fish said, and it flashed its scales and thrilled its fins. “There’s a time limit, as there is in everything. You have only two more hours, and then I’ll die and the wishes will die too. Do you want me to die?”

  She lowered her head and closed her eyes. “Oh no, dear fish, I won’t let you die. I’ll wish for something by then; I’ll think of something, I swear. But for now, for now, I want to look at you and hold you and think of everything you can promise me.” And she picked the fish up and held it to her chest and began to walk back down the pier and onto the sand and along the shore, where the water rushed around her ankles and threatened to knock her down.

  “Be careful,” cried the fish. “Drop me in the water, not the sand. I can’t live in the sand.”

  She let the water wash around her ankles. She loved the feel of it, the way it lunged at her and wanted her. “This is the happiest I’ve been, with the waves at my legs and the roar of the water and the sound of your voice. This is what I crave, I think; I’m happy now.”

  “You don’t have much time left,” the fish said. “If you don’t release me I shall die and all your wishes will too. Think of what you want. Ask for what your heart craves. What do you want most of all?”

  Celia looked at the waves and looked at the fish in her arms. “I want to be you,” she said. “Why not be what I love the most? I wish to be you!”

  At that her body stumbled back against the sand and the fish leaped from her arms and dove into the ocean. At once Celia felt the waves against her like a beautiful wall parting. I am a fish! she cried to herself and opened her mouth and wiggled her tail and plunged forward, her heart pumping wildly. Around her everything moved slipping around and up and down, silvering, pointing, scuttling. How extraordinary the sea is, she thought, because it was crowded with life, schools of fish, gnarled heads behind shells and rocks, long snouts and broad snouts. I must be careful, she thought; what kind of fish am I after all—am I good to eat? I should have asked.

  She swam low where the water was coolest, but steered away from shadows where eyes and teeth might hide. Farther out, she slipped in among the schools of fish that rippled around her like skirts of fish, clouds of fish, shelves of fish, filling up the water. She picked up speed, just enjoying the momentum of being one in the pattern of fish, following the fish movements around her, quick drops, quick turns, the irresistible dash after a dash beside her. There was such a deep pleasure in it, in the riding of impulse, in the deciphering of sensation, although she was beginning to feel something else, a deep-rooted wish for, desire for . . . and then a small fish raced past her and she opened her mouth and gulped.

  It glanced against her throat! She could feel a last wriggle in her gut! Even now she felt it swill around with the burst of water she’d taken, and there was no remorse! This was right, and this was so. She looked around at the school of fish moving away from her, darting industriously, and she caught the nervous stare of their fish eyes on her, round and focused, and it was an immense feeling, a new feeling, righteous and benign even as the little gasp within her died.

  Fortified, she swam forward, moving to left and right, sighting future meals and watching for what might be dangerous. She knew there must be danger because new motions caused her to jump away from them, shadows from above caused an instant panic; reefs disturbed her with their possibilities in nooks and caverns. She saw, far off
, creatures heading for her.

  She thought: I know my second wish. It is to be a bigger fish, and she was stunned by the rightness of it, and how silly she had been not to think of it. A large fish, she thought, I know its name, I know its speed and the sharpness of its teeth, now what is it called again? She chased a small fish and gulped it. What is it called? I will merely say, I wish to be a larger fish, with larger teeth, and that will be it, she thought. Now I must go back and ask for the wish.

  She flicked her tail easily, leaning into her fin and slicing through the water as if it were air—easier than air, much easier. She twitched to the left and then to the right, keeping her body in a curve, and she felt a great sense of power until she saw a bigger fish scattering other fish before him, and she remembered she must get back to the shore and ask for her second wish before it was too late.

  She raced, then, flicking her head left and right, scooting down and then up to keep in sight all the directions where bigger fish could come for her.

  She loved the way her body bent and moved, quick and accurate, and delighted in the look of a smaller fish as it drove away or as she caught it automatically, soothed by the feel of its ultimate wriggle. She hastened now back to the beach, to the sands where she had parted from her old life and become the fish. She expected it to be waiting there, for her, waiting to hear her second wish, and as she surfaced once or twice, locating herself along the first pier, and then following the trail she had taken along the sand, she saw her old body propped up against a piling, staring blankly at the ocean, and she leaped as far as she could leap into the air in recognition.

  “I wish to be bigger!” she cried. “I wish to be as big as the biggest, sharpest fish! This is my second wish!” and she dropped herself down again in the water and wriggled closer to the shore, but not too close because it was shallow and as a bigger fish she might get stranded, even a fish with sharper teeth.

  Of course size was relative, and she might already be a bigger fish, so she surfaced again, her eye above the water peering at her old body; she seemed no closer or farther than when she had announced her wish; she seemed no bigger or smaller. “My second wish!” she cried again, but the body propped up along the piling had no answer for her and she crept a little closer, rocked by the narrowness of the waves.

  Her old self leaned limply and had no sparkle, no lustre at all. Her old body was drab and knobby and graceless; she didn’t miss it; all she thought of was getting her second wish and being off again.

  “My wish!” she insisted and spun around in the shallows, ploughing up a massive splash of water to wake the nasty thing against the piling. The waves she made rushed towards it and it spilled over, fell over, into the shallows and she thought with relief that that would wake it, the ugly thing, but instead it lay there, washing a little back and forth as the sea came in and took a long scrape of water back out with it.

  “My wish!” she cried again even then realizing what it was, that thing upon the beach, a dead thing creeping towards her with the backwash of the waves. “My second wish!” she cried again, furious that she had been so baldly cheated of a chance to be bigger, and sharper, and faster, and grim.

  She swam up to it and nipped its lips; she wove around it and bit its chin. She nudged the eyes and flipped her tail between its hands, but all to no avail.

  And while she swam back and forth, a bird swooped down at her and cried, “Another wish! I want another wish!” and she swam furiously away from it and away from its vile beak, nearing a yacht with a young man at the helm who called: “I know my third wish now, I want a seaplane, not a yacht, with golden wings and pearly seats, I want it now,” and he turned the boat and headed for Celia, who wriggled back ahead of him, getting close again to the shore, where another woman called out, “Fish, fish! You promised me a life of wealth and beauty but I am not happy, fish. That’s the last wish I have, I wish for happiness for I cannot go on like this, in misery!”

  And Celia darted back and forth, trying to escape the cries of wishes all around her. Was it too much to ask, to have her wishes first and foremost? Was it too much to ask, to be relieved of all this urgent chatter? She raised her own cries to the wind: “My second wish! My second wish!” she cried, and all around her other wishes raised their voices too and came at her with hooks and nets and the willful madness of desire.

  THE INNER CITY

  Lena Shayton is reading the newspaper, looking for a job, when she hears a knock on her door. It’s the guy who lives below her, on the first floor. He wants to know if her apartment is shrinking. He has a notebook with measurements in it, and he says his apartment on the first floor is getting smaller each month. Is hers?

  She considers the possibilities. If it’s a come-on line, it’s interesting. If he’s serious, he’s either artistic or crazy. This might be the way to make a new friend, which is what she needs right now. The love of her life, Bill, left her for Denise; she just lost her programming job; and there’s a bad smell in the kitchen that she hasn’t been able to track down.

  Maybe it’s the sewage treatment plant; the paper says there’s a problem there that no one seems able to fix. Maybe it’s Bill; maybe there’s some weird thing happening where Bill tried to crawl back to her, got stuck under the sink, and died. But it’s not likely; what would he be doing under the sink?

  She lives over on Weehawken Street, which is a block from the river, at the westernmost part of the West Village. She read in a book that in the old days of New York, Weehawken Street was almost on the river, before the landfill added another street. There used to be tunnels from Weehawken to the docks, for smuggling. She doesn’t remember what they smuggled, but it adds to the possibility that Bill might have taken some sneaky secret way into her apartment and gotten stuck and died. She used to be the kind of person who wouldn’t have thoughts like that, but now they give her pleasure.

  She doesn’t want to deal with this guy’s mania. She tells him she measured yesterday, and it’s definitely the same.

  Lena goes through all the newspapers, looking for a job or for the inspiration for a job. There’s a lot of news. Stuyvesant Town is complaining that their water pressure has practically disappeared; they coordinate shower schedules by floor.

  The mayor warns the city of possible brownouts in the coming hot weather. Electrical usage is up 20% and has reached capacity. The mayor blames computers. “Turn off your printers,” he demands. “Don’t leave your computers on all the time. Conserve or we’ll have an electric shortage like we once had a gas shortage. I’m not saying we’re going to ration electricity out to people on alternating days like we did then.” (And here, the reporter notes, his jaw got very firm.) “But we don’t have infinite resources. If you blow the grid, it’ll take a while to fix it.”

  Blow the grid! Lena thinks as she walks around the Village, and just because of all the fat and selfish people out there, the ones who take and give. Like the people who drop litter everywhere, which really annoys her. It doesn’t take much to control litter—just put it in the trash cans on the corner. She sees a bunch of folders and papers beside an empty trash can, for instance. Some of it is even leaning against the empty can, that’s how bad it is.

  She picks up a handful of that paper. She tells herself that if she finds a name, she’ll turn them in—however you do that, whoever you call. There’s such a thing as accountability, after all. Though she’s never “turned” anyone “in.” Maybe it can’t in fact be done. Nevertheless, she picks up a handful of papers.

  It looks like someone’s home office has been tidied up and dumped in the street. No, it must be a small business, because there’s an inter-office memo from Harry Biskabit on garbage. “All paper must be shredded,” it says. “We recently discovered some of our own letterhead fluttering down West Street. Needless to say, this could be disastrous. From now on, all paper of any kind must be brought to 151S3, where it will be listed, tallied, signed for and shredded before being put out. Foodstuffs and non-identifiabl
e garbage can be handled as usual.”

  This is very funny, this guy Biskabit demanding that all the garbage be handled properly—and he can’t handle his own!

  A few memos look confidential. There’s a job review and what looks like a warning about the poor work quality of someone named Philip Tarrey, who’s always making mistakes and sending the wrong things to the wrong rooms. He’s late with reports, he’s poor at programming . . .

  That’s very interesting.

  These papers could be a gold mine. They look a lot like a personnel file, and it looks like Philip Tarrey’s been fired, and that means they need a programmer.

  But who needs this programmer? She pages through the folder, finally finding some letterhead that reads “Assignment Specialties, 3 Charles Lane S3C, 77-33x14.”

  Charles Lane is only a few blocks away from where she stands. It’s one block long, with a narrow cobblestone street running from Greenwich Avenue to West Street. There are blind storefronts along the southern side of the lane—concrete walls with steel doors. Trees with thin trunks press themselves against the walls. Everything on the north side is either a fenced-in garden or the back wall of row houses.

  The only entrance doors are on the south side of the lane, but none of them have numbers. Where is 3 Charles Lane? Some kids come through on bicycles, followed by what she thinks might be NYU students doing something with cameras, posing each other and checking lighting. She can’t find the address and there’s no resident to ask.

  Of course it’s only three in the afternoon; maybe they’re all at work with the doors closed. She decides to come back later, at five o’clock, and walks over to the park they’re building by the river. They started about five years earlier, put in some trees, that kind of thing. It’s nice for a block or two—there’s even some grass and some bushes, but that seems to be all there is, despite all this talk about a pedestrian path going all the way uptown. Instead, there’s mesh fencing blocking off the new paths, and lots of signs about construction. The signs are dirty; there’s even a bush growing from construction debris.