Bewere the Night

stared back at him without Danny inside it.

But Jedward knew he was there, cheery and managerial, pulling the mental levers from inside. The paw on his arm felt warm again, articulated and alive, and the claws were real enough to lightly tear his shirt where they touched it. The legs were basically the same, though bright red fur now ran down Danny’s chest and belly and thighs. It wasn’t quite thick enough to hide his genitals when he was standing, so with a very unwolflike gesture he plucked a few leaves and soft green stems from the bushes around them and wrapped them around his waist. They’d have loincloths on in Wildhaus, though some of them not for very long.

Jedward offered his arm again once his friend was covered, then on an impulse threw the arm up around Danny’s fuzzy shoulders, feeling the new muscles tensing. Standing side by side, facing the road, they listened.

The rumble died away into a heavy quietness. Then a howl rang out, far off, and another answered it. Shrieks followed, coming closer as the Wildhaus partiers fled stupidly towards the woods, because that was what they always did before if the cops crashed in. Faster and stronger now, they reached the edge of the trees in just a few minutes, and Jedward hugged Danny closer as they heard crashing and stumbling all around them. Then another howl, this one taken up almost instantly by a pack that was clearly now unified and on the move. Jedward had sold two or three of his new masks to some of the stragglers, to hand out to their friends, so he figured the real wolves would well outnumber the plastic ones, since there were always more people outside than in.

Finally they saw one, and Jedward felt floaty with pride. It was beautiful, seamless and soft, flowing as it ran like a soft bead of black mercury with fur and white jaws. Nearby they heard plastic wolf-people trying to force unfamiliar, stiffened limbs to climb trees, and another shriek as someone fell from one. The black wolf that had just run by them pounced, but the Herks were thick and tough especially now, and its jaws could only pull away long gooey strands of furry morphic rubber, many of which snapped back onto the owner in warped crisscrosses and ugly lumps.

Danny, watching this, made the noise which Jedward recognized as a human laugh coming out of a mask- warped mouth. “Right,” he said, muffled but clear enough, uncannily. He sounded relieved, as if he’d been a little worried his friend might have finally snapped. “Okay, it’s funny. But these are good, really good. You can’t even see that they’re masks.”

“That’s because they aren’t anymore,” Jedward said, tightening his arm on Danny’s shoulders in his excitement. “The masks are gone once triggered. One-use.”

Danny’s mask stared at him as the futile chaos of growls and shrieks and scampering around them in the dark woods continued. “Do you realize,” he said finally, “how stupid rich we’re going to be?”

“No.” Jedward didn’t mind; he knew this was how it would go. He’d been there too at first. Danny would come around, though. He would get it, and maybe Kay would too. Once she tried one, and maybe went on a run with him. Then she’d understand that he didn’t think he was better than anybody. He just wanted things to be fair.

“No? Why? You … we made it, right?”

“Yeah,” Jedward said. “But it’s really one-use. One time. After that, it just happens on its own. Every full moon. For anythat wants to.”

Two more wolves ran by them, heads up with pleasure at the chase. They ignored Danny, who was funny and always remembered names. The masked who’d managed to get into trees were clinging and whimpering above, and Jedward knew some of them would wait there until morning rather than risk ruining their genuine Herks, not yet understanding that they were worthless now.

“I don’t know, buddy, if you want us to make a living you might want to change the formula,” Danny said slowly, doing math in his head and finding the brick wall at the end of the figures. “I don’t think it’ll work.”

Jedward took a flashlight and a rope ladder from his bag and began sweeping it through the trees, looking for Karolin’s beads shining in the white beam. She might be really scared, and if he helped her down, she might be really pleased.

“It’s already working,” he said.

THIRST by Vandana Singh

In the dream there were snakes coiling about her, dark and glossy as the hairs on her head, and an altar, and the smell of sandalwood incense, her mother’s favorite kind. When her eyes opened she could not remember for a moment who she was. Even the familiar room, with the whitewash peeling off the walls and summer dust on the sill of the open window, the sag of the bed, the curve of the man’s shoulders as he lay in sleep with his back to her—all that seemed imbued with remoteness, as though it had nothing whatever to do with her. Slowly her name came to her: Susheela, and with it the full weight of her misery returned. Her husband stirred in sleep, but he did not turn towards her.

Then she remembered (as she sat up very carefully so as not to wake her husband) that tomorrow was the day of Naag Panchami, the Snake Festival, and that was why the dream had come. The monsoons were late, and this was the hottest summer ever. Perhaps it would rain tomorrow. A Festival day rain would be a good thing. She slipped out of bed, bathed quickly using an inadequate half a bucketful of water and dressed in a pink cotton sari. An early morning hush lay deep over the house; the ceiling fans had wound down during the night (another power failure) and even the birds in the bougainvillea outside the window seemed reluctant to break the silence. As Susheela entered the kitchen she heard the creak of her mother-in-law’s bed from the other end of the house, and the old woman’s plastic slippers slapping the bare floor as she shuffled to the bathroom. Susheela’s son was very likely still asleep in his grandmother’s bed; she could see him in her mind’s eye, forehead beaded with sweat, plump hands closed into fists, cheeks flushed with heat, lips tremulous with the passage of some childish dream. For a moment she wanted desperately to see him and hold him, but she could not face the old lady just yet. Instead she put the tea water on to boil and turned on the taps so that when the water came (one precious hour in the morning and one in the evening) the buckets would begin to fill for the day’s use. Now the tap only belched warm air; heat came in from the small window like the breath of a hungry animal.

She stood at the window, looking out into the courtyard and the untended garden behind it. The drought had reduced the back garden to a mass of dead, spiny shrubs dotting withered grass. Only the little harsingar tree stood proud, its young, leafy branches dotted with tiny orange and white flowers. It had survived on a daily cupful of water and her love.

Afterwards, as she rolled paratha dough for her husband’s breakfast, hoping she would not (again) make him late for office, she heard the household stir; and the water came gurgling out of the taps. She felt the old hunger in her as though she was waiting for something. As the earth waits for rain, she thought, licking her dry lips.

She thought of the lake in the park, and—despite herself—the thin face of the gardener who worked there, and the way he said “namaste” so respectfully while his eyes looked at her in a way that dissolved all distance between them, all barriers of class and caste and propriety … She really shouldn’t go there so often. But Kishore loves it, her mind said rebelliously, and she thought of how her little boy loved to walk under the trees and watch the parakeets eat the neem berries. She would make up stories for him about imaginary people who lived in the ruins around the lake and ate nothing but milk-sweets all day. The park was on the way to the vegetable market that came up in the late afternoon like a miniature city on the sidewalks, complete with towers of jewel-toned purple eggplants and cascades of coriander leaves and citadels of fat, shiny little onions. The market was her excuse for surreptitious visits to the lake in the park, with her boy (poor, innocent boy!) as chaperone and protector. Sweat rolled off her temples; she dabbed at it with the free end of her sari and thought of the translucent coolness of the lake, the lips of the water against her bare toes. I am a cursed woman, she thought to herself with a shudder. My mother-in-law is right, the water draws me and draws me, to what other thing but death. Curses do run in families. She thought of her own mother, and her maternal grandmother, and she resolved that today she would not go to the lake, even though that would make Kishore cry.

In the end she broke her promise to herself, as she had done many times before. In the dry, breathless heat of the day, Susheela felt as though the air in her lungs had turned solid. She went blindly about her tasks, cooking