Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

the princess and a palace made of pearls.
Watch now, the dark magician’s coming back:
“New lamps for old,” he’s singing in the street.
Just when Aladdin has lost everything,
she stops.
He’ll let her live another night.
Her sister and her husband fall asleep.
She lies awake and stares up in the dark
Playing the variations in her mind:
the ways to give Aladdin back his world,
his palace, his princess, his everything.
And then she sleeps. The tale will need an end,
but now it melts to dreams inside her head.
She wakes,
She feeds the kids
She combs her hair
She goes down to the market
Buys some oil
The oil-seller pours it out for her,
decanting it
from an enormous jar.
She thinks,
What if you hid a man in there?
She buys some sesame as well, that day.
Her sister says, “He hasn’t killed you yet.”
“Not yet.” Unspoken waits the phrase, “He will.”
In bed she tells them of the magic ring
Aladdin rubs. Slave of the Ring appears…
Magician dead, Aladdin saved, she stops.
But once the story’s done, the teller’s dead,
her only hope’s to start another tale.
Scheherazade inspects her store of words,
half-built, half-baked ideas and dreams combine
with jars just big enough to hide a man,
and she thinks, Open Sesame, and smiles.
“Now, Ali Baba was a righteous man,
but he was poor…” she starts,
and she’s away, and so her life is safe for one more night,
until she bores him, or invention fails.
She does not know where any tale waits
before it’s told. (No more do I.)
But forty thieves sounds good, so forty
thieves it is. She prays she’s bought another clutch of days.
We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN An American Gods Novella

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

ANGELA CARTER, “The Lady of the House of Love”

I

“If you ask me,” said the little man to Shadow, “you’re something of a monster. Am I right?”

They were the only two people, apart from the barmaid, in the bar of a hotel in a town on the north coast of Scotland. Shadow had been sitting there on his own, drinking a lager, when the man came over and sat at his table. It was late summer, and it seemed to Shadow that everything was cold and small and damp. He had a small book of Pleasant Local Walks in front of him, and was studying the walk he planned to do tomorrow, along the coast, toward Cape Wrath.

He closed the book.

“I’m American,” said Shadow, “if that’s what you mean.”

The little man cocked his head to one side, and he winked, theatrically. He had steel gray hair, and a gray face, and a gray coat, and he looked like a small-town lawyer. “Well, perhaps that is what I mean, at that,” he said. Shadow had had problems understanding Scottish accents in his short time in the country, all rich burrs and strange words and trills, but he had no trouble understanding this man. Everything the little man said was small and crisp, each word so perfectly enunciated that it made Shadow feel like he himself was talking with a mouthful of oatmeal.

The little man sipped his drink and said, “So you’re American. Oversexed, overpaid, and over here. Eh? D’you work on the rigs?”

“Sorry?”

“An oilman? Out on the big metal platforms. We get oil people up here, from time to time.”

“No. I’m not from the rigs.”

The little man took out a pipe from his pocket, and a small penknife, and began to remove the dottle from the bowl. Then he tapped it out into the ashtray. “They have oil in Texas, you know,” he said, after a while, as if he were confiding a great secret. “That’s in America.”

“Yes,” said Shadow.

He thought about saying something about Texans believing that Texas was actually in Texas, but he suspected that he’d have to start explaining what he meant, so he said nothing.

Shadow had been away from America for the better part of two years. He had been away when the towers fell. He told himself sometimes that he did not care if he ever went back, and sometimes he almost came close to believing himself. He had reached the Scottish mainland two days ago, landed in Thurso on the ferry from the Orkneys, and had traveled to the town he was staying in by bus.

The little man was talking. “So there’s a Texas oilman, down in Aberdeen, he’s talking to an old fellow he meets in a pub, much like you and me meeting actually, and they get talking, and the Texan, he says, Back in Texas I get up in the morning, I get into my car-I won’t try to do the accent, if you don’t mind-I’ll turn the key in the ignition, and put my foot down on the accelerator, what you call the, the-”

“Gas pedal,” said Shadow, helpfully.

“Right. Put my foot down on the gas pedal at breakfast, and by lunchtime I still won’t have reached the edge of my property. And the canny old Scot, he just nods and says, Aye, well, I used to have a car like that myself.”

The little man laughed raucously, to show that the joke was done. Shadow smiled and nodded to show that