I put my head down and rode faster.
When I brought my head up, I gasped.
“No!”
Hedges were pushing in at me from all sides, and the sky was quickly blacking out from a lowering cloud of green.
Buds burst from the street below me, snarling the spokes of the bicycle and then stopping it dead.
Branches twined around the handlebars, the seat, yanking the bike out of my grasp.
I felt a cold wet touch slide across my fingers, my face.
When I tried to scream, hedge shoots snaked over and up my body and deep into my mouth.
I was pushed onto my back and lifted in a cocoon of branches and leaves.
I gagged, and then the voice sounded close by my ear.
I continued to thrash, to fight, watching the last glimmer of the world, a tiny hole of blue sky, blotted out above me by a tiny green wet leaf.
“No—!”
And then, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown in my head, I did understand, and I stopped fighting.
“Yes!” I cried.
The hedge enclosed me, into itself.
My fingers are cold and wet, with green fresh buds at the ends.
I belong.
The Silly Stuff
By Al Sarrantonio
“No, I tell you I’m on to something, Bill. You
The voice on the other end of the line said something nasty.
“Oh, yeah? And the same to you!” Nathan Halpern slammed the wall phone back into its cradle. Instinctively he checked the coin return to see if anything had dropped into it. “Damn,” he said, and walked back to the bar.
The bartender smiled. “Almost never works.”
Halpern waved him off, taking a sip of his beer. “That’s not what I’m mad about,” he said. He pulled a crumpled newspaper clipping from the pocket of his equally rumpled sports jacket and pushed it across the bar. “Here,” he said, “look at this.”
It was a slow Wednesday afternoon in the Golden Spoon Tavern, in the dead center of a killing August heat wave. The lunch crowd, what little there was of it, had long gone, and besides Nathan Halpern the only other customers the bartender had to worry about were two regulars at the other end of the bar, each of whom, like clockwork, drank one scotch on the rocks every half-hour; and since it was nearly twenty minutes until the next round was due, the bartender could afford to socialize. He took the clipping and read:
~ * ~
FISH FALL FROM SKY
Copanah, NY (Aug. 12)—Residents of the small town of Copanah, ten miles northeast of Albany, reported a rain of dead fish yesterday. The creatures, which allegedly resembled cod in appearance, were scattered over an area two miles square, and local residents insist that they dropped from the heavens.
One elderly resident of the town, Sam Driller, whose integrity was vouched for by several neighbors including Copanah’s mayor, stated that he had gone out to move some trash cans to the street for pickup when “a whole barrelful of fish dropped right on top of me. I looked up, and the sky’s full of ‘em—they was dropping right out of the clouds. It ain’t natural, but I swear I saw it.”
Two local policemen and the daughter of the town librarian also witnessed the event, and local authorities could offer no explanation. A spokesman for Margolies Air Force Base, thirty miles away, reports that none of its aircraft were in the air at that time.
~ * ~
The bartender folded the clipping and handed it back to Halpern. “So?” he said. “Silly stuff like that turns up in the papers every summer.” He cocked his head toward the telephone on the wall. “I heard part of your conversation. You wrote this?”
“Yeah.” Halpern nodded glumly. “And you don’t think there’s anything to it either?”
The bartender drew Halpern another beer, setting it down in front of him. “That one’s on the house. To tell you the truth, no.”
Halpern leaned across the bar and tapped his finger against the wood. “I checked every one of those witnesses myself.”
The bartender shrugged. “Doesn’t mean a thing. All those people could easily have been lying.”
Halpern nearly knocked his beer over. “No way!” he said excitedly. “I know it’s supposed to be the dog days and all that, but this stuff is for real. I’ve checked it out. It goes on all the time, all over the place. Little clusters of reports here, little clusters there. The only reason you see more stuff in the paper in July and August is because there’s nothing else to print. But these things actually happen all the time, since before newspapers existed. And this time they’re happening here in Albany County.”
The bartender still looked skeptical.
“Look—” Halpern took a sip of beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “—have you ever heard of Charles Fort?”
The bartender scratched his head. “Wrote a bunch of paperbacks, right?”
Halpern nodded. “Something like that. Fort was a kind of journalist. Spent over twenty-five years in the New York Public Library and the British Museum collecting stories from newspapers and scientific journals—stories like the one I showed you. He had thousands and thousands of clippings and articles, and he put them into books like
The bartender laughed. “We are,” he said. “We’re all owned by the IRS.”
Halpern didn’t smile. “Charles Fort was no nut. Hell, after he died back in the thirties, a bunch of people like Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, and Alexander Woollcott got together and started the Fortean Society to continue the work he was doing. It still exists.”
The half-hour chime sounded on the cuckoo clock over the cash register, and the bartender mixed and delivered two more scotches to the regulars. When he came back, he looked thoughtful.
“So you really think there’s something behind it?”
Halpern nodded. “I’ve checked out too many of these stories to think they’re all baloney. I swear there’s a pattern to it all, just like Fort believed.”
“Well, I’m still unconvinced. From what I’ve seen behind this bar, you can find patterns wherever you want to.”
Halpern leaned close, and a conspiratorial tone came into his voice. “Do you know someone named Rita Gartenburg?”
“Sure,” the bartender replied. “I’ve lived down the block from her for twenty years.”
“She a drunk? Or a nut?”
“No way!” said the bartender. “Never seen her in here or any other gin mill in town. And she’s no kook. She’s a nice, steady lady who grows prize roses in her backyard.”
