IGMS Issue 17 Read Online Free PDF Page A

walls. He'd broken a lamp playing catch with himself against the wall. He'd found a screwdriver and taken apart the toaster. Steve ate his bread untoasted in the morning and didn't complain. Anything, anything was better than relapse.
    Before he'd gotten sick, Matt hadn't been a bird lover. Digging in the dirt, yes. Climbing trees, yes. Dinosaurs, dragons, bugs and blasters, yes and yes. But then they'd found the tumor and given up the house with the yard, given up a hundred other things, so they could come here, where the experts were supposed to make things miraculously better. Instead of miracles, they had had bills and emergency room visits, and an endless wait to see if this round of chemo would take. And now, after all this time, the birds.
    Matt's mother, Sharon, had loved birds.
    "Where was I?" Steve sat down at the bedside chair and picked up the storybook again, unopened.
    "Was it a rat, Dad?" asked Matt. "Or just a bird?"
    "Neither," said Steve. "I just thought I saw something, and it turned out not to have wings
or
a tail. Where was I?"
    He raised his eyebrows. Matt grinned.
    "The skeleton was sitting on the Emperor's chest," said Matt. "Going to grind his bones, or squish him to death." He rubbed his hands together in ghoulish glee.
    Steve grinned back at him. "Right," he said. "Half-dead Emperor, giant spooky skeleton, and then who should come to save him but . . . the nightingale."
    "In a rocket ship!" said Matt.
    "Of course," said Steve. They both made special effects noises, and Steve figured it was just as well that old Hans Christian Andersen wasn't within earshot to hear the addition of the battle scene in the Emperor's bedroom with light sabers and laser cannon while the nightingale sang her love song.
    Finally Matt's night-time meds kicked in. He fell asleep, and Steve tucked him in.
    Lights out - and Steve saw a figure silhouetted by the streetlight against the curtain. A vague and slender misery. A person-shape, sharp and clear, of someone huddled up against the glass, listening. Steve crossed the room and reached for the curtain. But then he abruptly turned around again and left Matt alone and breathing softly, deeply in the dark.
    In the morning, it greatly disturbed him that he hadn't opened the curtain again. While Matt was in the bathroom, Steve went out onto the fire escape. He was half-relieved and half-annoyed to discover how hard it was to wrestle the window open. On the plus side, it meant nobody was coming in without wrestling too and making hell all noise in the bargain. Still, it pissed him off.
    He was wondering whether Matt could wrangle them on his own if there ever was a fire when he began to poke half-heartedly around the fire escape. But whoever had been out there last night hadn't left anything incriminating behind. No cigarette butts or crusty needles. Just rain -- a steady drizzle onto the slick, white-painted metal grating of the landing and the rattling stairs. Only wind, and the concrete-and-damp-oil smell of a city in the thaw.
    He did call the landlord and the super, both of whom insisted that the fire escape was for getting out of the building, not into it. Steve checked it for himself on the way to work. He went around the building, never mind the rain, which by then had turned from a drizzle to a torrential downpour. Back behind the dumpsters, the fire escape came to an end -- at the second story. There was a drop-down ladder, but it was secured in the up position. The only way onto it was from the roof. Or from inside the building . . . That was Steve's next thought, as he sat at work, unable to concentrate on anything else. He knew, just knew, that junkie had been there before. A glimpse of her on the run had not been enough to show him any clear details, but the thought of her sitting on the fire escape had set off a frisson of memory, dozens of other glancing hints of presence -- hair, hand, coat, foot -- that might have been the same, or might simply have been a