Stories: All-New Tales

…WHEN IT HAPPENED COULD never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made up as a bed pulled up to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to be the accumulated debris of decades but which may have been materials for artworks or the very artworks themselves of the eccentric artist known as E.W., the elderly Waldman brothers in layers of bulky clothing must have fallen asleep in front of a fire in the otherwise unheated house, the fire must have burnt out in the night and the brothers died in their sleep in a protracted January cold spell: the brother to be identified as Edgar Waldman, eighty-seven, embracing his brother Edward Waldman, also eighty-seven, from behind, protectively fitting his body to his brother’s crippled body, forehead tenderly pressed to the back of the other’s head, the two figures coiled together like a gnarled organic material that has petrified to stone.

WILDFIRE IN MANHATTAN

Joanne Harris

IT’S NOT MY NAME—WELL, NOT QUITE—but you can call me Lucky. I live right here in Manhattan, in the penthouse suite of a hotel just off Central Park. I’m a model citizen in every way, punctual, polite and orderly. I wear sharp suits. I wax my chest hair. You’d never think I was a god.

It’s a truth often overlooked that old gods—like old dogs—have to die sometime. It just takes longer, that’s all; and in the meantime citadels may fall, empires collapse, worlds end and folk like us end up on the pile, redundant and largely forgotten.

In many ways, I’ve been fortunate. My element is fire, which never quite goes out of style. There are Aspects of me that still wield power—there’s too much of the primitive left in you Folk for it to be otherwise, and although I don’t get as many sacrifices as I used to, I can still get obeisance if I want it (who doesn’t?)—after dark, when the campfires are lit. And the dry lightning strikes across the plains—yes, they’re mine—and the forest fires; and the funeral pyres and the random sparks and the human torches—all mine.

But here, in New York, I’m Lukas Wilde, lead singer in the rock band Wild—re. Well, I say band. Our only album, Burn It Up, went platinum when the drummer was tragically killed on stage by a freakish blast of lightning.

Well, maybe not so freakish. Our only U.S. tour was stalked by lightning from beginning to end; of fifty venues, thirty-one suffered a direct hit; in just nine weeks we lost three more drummers, six roadies and a truckload of gear. Even I was beginning to feel I’d taken it just a little too far.

Still, it was a great show.

Nowadays, I’m semiretired. I can afford to be; as one of only two surviving band members I have a nice little income, and when I’m feeling bored I play piano in a fetish bar called the Red Room. I’m not into rubber myself (too sweaty), but you can’t deny it makes a terrific insulator.

By now you may have gathered—I’m a night person. Daylight rather cramps my style; and besides, fire needs a night sky to show to best advantage. An evening in the Red Room, playing piano and eyeing the girls, then downtown for rest and recreation. Not a scene that my brother frequents; and so it was with some surprise that I ran smack into him that night, as I was checking out the nicely flammable back streets of the Upper East Side, humming “Light My Fire” and contemplating a spot of arson.