Interzone 251 Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the key, and gives it to me. It’s as warm as a kitten.
    I let myself in. The place is just as I remember it. All my books and CDs are just where I remember them being. My laptop opens up the internet with a password I haven’t used in years. The laundry basket has socks and underpants in it that smell freshly dirty. There are friendly personal messages on my answerphone from people I don’t remember ever having met.
    None of them is from Dverna.
    None of them is from Lindsay.
    All of a sudden I am far too sober. I wish I’d bought myself a bottle of the hard stuff on the way home.
    But, prithee, what is this?
    In the cupboard over the fridge I find there’s still a three-quarters-full bottle of Cutty Sark. I know where the glasses are, of course.
    Dverna.
    Where are you?

    ***

    When I wake up the next morning with a head like a building site, I reach out my foot thinking it’ll stroke Dverna’s leg. Instead, it sticks out the side of a single bed into cold air.

    ***

    How inevitable, as we look back on it, the past can be made to appear. Yet, when we were living through it, inevitability was the last characteristic it seemed to have: life is an endless succession of resolved uncertainties. I’ve come to conclude that, as this universe of ours expands along its time axis, what it’s doing is telling itself its story. Like any other author, though, it never gets things quite right the first time, so it’s constantly having to readjust itself to iron out the minor inconsistencies in its tale. Ordinarily we never notice this continual process of self-editing; we remember the newly created past, not the one we actually lived through.
    But every now and then, because of that same habit the universe has of not getting things quite right, someone’s lucky enough to be aware of one of the changes the universe is making.
    Or unlucky enough.
    I wish I could persuade myself there’s a neighbouring universe where my doppelgänger and Dverna have found each other and their own happiness, but I don’t think there is. I think both of them, Dverna and the other me, were just minor errors that the universe, without trace of compunction, simply tidied away.
    Today Lindsay and I took the kids to the beach. Alice tromped up and down along the line of the breakers, squealing with delight whenever an extra big wave bowled her over. Ronnie is still young enough to be frightened by the sea’s sound and fury, so he spent the afternoon holding his mother’s hand and looking very solemn as he sucked his thumb. Then it was home for high tea, and bathtime and bed for the kids and finally the house was quiet.
    Much later, Lindsay and I crept up the stairs to our bedroom at the top of the house, and into the moonlight that comes streaming in the big bay windows, so that it seems like, as we make love, we’re doing so as characters in an old black-and-white movie. And as I run my hands over all the planes and folds of my strangely lovely wife – over a body that is by now more familiar to me than my own and yet still so mysterious – where my heart really is, despite everything deep I have for Lindsay and our two adored weans, is with a nutbrown maid who now never was, whose robe was never decorated with pink cauliflowers, and whose crazily grinning face never appeared in my digital photo frame.

    ***

    John Grant’s most recent book,
A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir
– the largest noir encyclopedia yet written – came out last October. His next book, provisionally titled
The Young Person’s Guide to Bullshit
, is due out later this year.

ASHES
KARL BUNKER
    illustrated by Jim Burns

    The little box was heavy. The word “ashes” makes us think of wood ash, paper ash: light, fluffy, black and gray flakes that can float on a breeze. Human ashes aren’t like that. My apportioned share of Lucia’s ashes was a few tablespoons of gray-white powder that sat leaden in my hand, in a little plastic bag that was in a little