This is the thirteenth tale in a year and a day of weekly short stories set in The Split Worlds. If you would like me to read it to you instead, you can listen here.  You can find links to all the other stories, and the new ones as they are released here.

The Wishing Book

Monica dropped the boxes outside the bedroom door. The procrastination had to stop; the removal company would be there first thing in the morning. Her fingers hovered above the doorknob, the fluttering in her chest making her breathe rapidly. She shut her eyes as her hand fell to her side, clammy. She’d start on it after lunch.

After making packet soup using the only mug and spoon left unpacked, she perched on a box full of cooking books and stirred, imagining moving out with the small bedroom left as it had been for the last six months. In her fantasy, no-one new moved in and the house was soon cocooned in ivy, spiders filling the corners with epic silken landscapes. The room would stay as it was forever, even as the city crumbled around it, even as the house decayed and was slowly taken apart by nature’s assault, the pink, purple and white would remain perfect.

The phone rang, she jumped and lumpy pseudo-soup sloshed over the edge of the mug and burnt her fingers. Swearing, she hunted for the handset in the cardboard labyrinth.

“Monica? Are you moving house?”

“Hi Carrie.”

“Well? Are you?”

“Yes.”

“And when were you going to tell me?”

There was a long pause as various acerbic responses came to mind.

“I was going to ask if you needed any help,” Carrie added. She never could stand silences.

“Really?” Monica knew all her sister wanted was a chance to nose through her stuff and see how dusty it was beneath the bed and the sofa.

“Why didn’t you tell me you sold the house? I didn’t even know you’d put it on the market.”

“Slipped my mind,” Monica inspected the red skin on her finger. “I’ve been busy.”

“But it’s only been six months. Are you sure this is a good idea? They say you shouldn’t make life-changing decisions for at least a year after-”

“They?”

“The experts.”

“The ones on daytime TV?” Monica looked up at the ceiling, feeling her edges fraying. “Look, I’ve got stuff I need to do. I’ll call with the new address when I’ve moved in.”

“Have you packed her room yet?”

“I’ve got to go, there’s someone at the door.”

Monica stabbed the red button, shaking. “I didn’t tell you I was moving because I knew you’d have something to say about it,” she said to the dead handset. “And I knew it would be bullshit.”

She went back to the mug, the lumps had joined and formed a thick crust. She wasn’t hungry anyway. For a long time she stood there, looking out on the back garden, the grass so high she couldn’t see the plastic anymore. There was no way she was going to find the toys and pull them from the places they’d been left. She didn’t want her hands to be the last to touch them.

The tears drummed on the draining board. She’d made the right decision. Living there wasn’t living at all, it was noticing the silence, it was walking past that room at night and not going in to check on her. It was life cast in negative, everything defined by what didn’t happen there anymore. The kitchen table was now just the place where she once coloured and made dresses for her dolls. The sofa was merely something no longer jumped on, the bathroom a tiled box, bereft of squirted water and squeals.

“Just get it over with!” she shouted at herself.

As she climbed the stairs, Monica tried to remember the last time she went into the room but there was nothing. Instead, she remembered being six and running to the bathroom and yanking out the tooth that had been wobbling for days because she just couldn’t stand the build-up any more. Blood in the sink turned into blood on the pavement outside, six months before.

She opened the door.

Hesitantly, she stepped in, relieved and devastated in equal measure that it no longer smelt of her. There was a cardboard box on the sheepskin rug she’d forgotten. It had been there for weeks, full of things from around the house that had been scooped up and dumped inside. Her colouring pencils, the dolls which had been in the living room, pictures she’d drawn that Monica had taken off the fridge on one of the blackest days. On top was the book.

She lifted it out gently, smiling at the hundreds of hand-drawn stars decorating the cover. “Happy birthday Mummy!” she could hear her now, so clearly. She’d asked what it was. “A wishing book. A fairy gave it to me. I put the stars on it.” She’d asked how it worked. “You write a wish in it and it comes true!”

That was the day before she died.

Sometime later, Monica dried her face and got an empty box. She picked a bear off a shelf, laid it in reverently, then, sobbing, swept the rest in with one frantic sweep of her arm. Once loved toys were stuffed brutally into square brown prisons and she moved through the room like a mad thing, tearing the bedding off and trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. Her throat was raw, awful animal noises of pure grief filling the space.

When it was done she rushed into the bathroom and vomited. As she brushed her teeth, she decided to go to a hotel for the night, come back in the morning, unlock the door for the removals men and then just wait in the car until they’d emptied the place. The decision made her feel like she could make it through the rest of the day.

The book was lying in the doorway, presumably toppled in the madness, its stars glittering. She picked it up and without thinking why, got a pen from her handbag and opened it.

I wish you were still alive.
I wish that driver had seen you.
I wish you didn’t run into the road.
I wish I hadn’t left you by the car when I went back inside.
I wish it had been sunny.
I wish I hadn’t forgotten my umbrella.

She looked at the words until they were just nonsensical scrawls. The hallway grew dark, her back ached, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the page. A pressure built in her forehead until it throbbed, her fingers became numb and cold, the pen tumbled onto the carpet. The paper was eventually cast in an orange glow from the lamppost outside. An owl hooted and she wished and wished until it felt like her chest would split open and her heart would be sucked into the book.

Then the front door opened. Monica held her breath, waiting for her daughter to call up the stairs as if she’d just been playing outside.

“Mon? Are you still here?”

Carrie. The wishing book slid from her lap and closed, Monica slumped, spent. What had possessed her? There was no magic in the world. Not anymore.

—

Thanks for hosting Gareth!

I hope you enjoyed the story. If you would like to find out more about the Split Worlds project, it’s all here: www.splitworlds.com. If you would like to host a story over the coming year, either let me know in the comments or contact me through the Split Worlds site. Em x

Click on the following link to download:

The Bigger The Star The Faster It Burns by Gareth L Powell

You are most welcome to save a copy of this story for your own enjoyment, to share it with with your friends, and to link to it from Facebook or wherever — just as long as you don’t alter the text, don’t take my name off it, and don’t use it for commercial purposes.

I hope you enjoy it!

The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns by Gareth L. Powell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

• Mary Robinette Kowal “Birthright”
• Sheila Finch “The Persistence of Butterflies”
• Randy Henderson “A Shelter for Living Things”
• Jason S. Ridler “Showing Light”
• Ernest Hogan “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs”
• David Lee Summers “The Revelation of Thought”
• Jeff Spock “Teh Afterl1fe”
• Emily Devenport “If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies”
• Cat Rambo “Therapy Buddha”
• Jack Mangan “Dead Rookies”
• David Boop “Organ Cloning While You Wait”
• Spencer Ellsworth “The Black Plague of Our Generation”
• Gareth L. Powell “The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns”
• Alethea Kontis “Pocket Full of Posey”
• Alex Wilson “Nervewrecking”
• David Gerrold “Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists”

You can buy 2020 Visions via Amazon.com. At the moment there’s no sign of it at Amazon.co.uk, but I’m sure it will be available there soon.

As well as stories by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kim Lakin-Smith and Jennifer Williams, the new issue of Dark Fiction Magazine contains an audio file of me reading my short story What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done? This was recorded by Del in a side room at the recent BristolCon conference, hence the distant crowd noise.

Here’s what he wrote:

2020 Visions Author #13 – Gareth L. Powell

By Rick Novy

Although we are both members of the Codex writers group, I know Gareth L. Powell mainly by reputation.   In addition to being a fiction writer, he is a freelance copywriter and PR consultant, and is a former software marketer.  His fiction has appeared in Interzone and in the Shine anthology from Solaris (2010).  His story Ack-Ack Macaque won the 2007 Interzone Reader’s poll for best short story.  Gareth also has a regular interview and review gig with a music magazine out of the UK called Acoustic.

While I can say this about everything in the 2020 Visions anthology, Gareth’s story is a bit different from the other titles in the collection.  His submission came in during my open call for optimistic fiction, and it is optimistic, but that isn’t what sets it apart.

His story is different in the sense that at first I had a bit of trouble suspending disbelief.   After reading it once, I set the story aside and came back to it later.  Upon reading it a second time, I decided that the story doesn’t necessarily need to be taken at face value, and that the ending was meant to be more symbolic than an account of actual events.  With that perspective, the whole story became something greater than perhaps even Gareth intended.

Gareth is from the United Kingdom.  His story takes place in the United Kingdom, and it uses British English conventions like spelling and phrasing.  When I asked him how he would feel about changing the story to Americanize it, he was open to the idea.  However, after giving it some thought, I decided to leave the story as submitted.  The story is written by a Brit and takes place in Britain,  so why change an author’s natural language?  Besides, I rather like British English.

Another reason I decided to leave the story in that style is that I originally wanted something of an international and inter-cultural flavor to the anthology.  I managed to get a little bit of that, but not as much as I had hoped.  (As a side note, I did have the opportunity for a story by Charles Tan of the Philippines, but the only story he had available would have been a reprint and I wanted all original material.)

So Gareth’s story, The Bigger the Star, the Faster it Burns, is the only story written British style, but that only helps to expand the diversity of the fiction between these covers.  The story itself has to do with the discovery of alien artifacts, but like almost all the stories in the collection, it is really a story about people.  It’s a fun story and a welcome respite from some of the darker fiction that appears in the anthology.  Read it with an open mind and soak up the deeper meanings of this story.

1. Mary Robinette Kowal – Birthright
2. Shiela Finch – The Persistence of Butterflies
3. Randy Henderson – A Shelter for Living Things
4. Jason S. Ridler – Showing Light
5. Ernest Hogan – Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs
6. David Lee Summers – The Revelation of Thought
7. Jeff Spock – Teh Afterl1fe
8. Emily Devenport – If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies
9. Cat Rambo – Therapy Buddha
10. Jack Mangan – Dead Rookies
11. David Boop – Organ Cloning While You Wait
12. Spencer Ellsworth – The Black Plague of Our Generation
13. Gareth L. Powell – The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns
14. Alethea Kontis – Pocket Full of Posey
15. Alex Wilson – Nervewrecking
16. David Gerrold – Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists

I made a lot of good friends at that convention; but the one thing that really sticks in my mind is the suprise I felt in the art show, when I came unexpectedly face-to-face with a portrait of the aforementioned Macaque.

Although the story had been sold to Interzone, I had no idea that it had already been illustrated. The picture, which was done in strikingly colourful inks, depicted the titular monkey in the cockpit of his biplane, and the American photographer Lola Lush standing behind him, fending off shuriken throwing stars with the tripod of her camera. The whole thing measured roughly the size of a sheet of A4 and was mounted in a clip frame. Coming across it unawares gave me a visceral shock. The room seemed to spin around me. It was as if the characters from the story had escaped from my dreams and sneaked out to invade the real world.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the functioning of convention art shows, and I didn’t have much money to spare, so I left the convention without putting in a bid for the painting. Six months later, Ack-Ack Macaque appeared in Interzone, accompanied by the illustration. It looked great in print and I regretted not purchasing the original when I’d had the chance.

Another six months after that, and I was back at Eastercon, held this time at a Heathrow hotel. Unfortunately, the 2008 event proved memorable for all the wrong reasons. Within hours of arriving at the hotel, I contracted a vicious stomach bug which more-or-less confined me to my hotel room for the entirety of the Easter weekend, only allowing me to occasionally venture out to buy bottled water and rice cakes.

On one of these forays, I met my future co-writer Aliette de Bodard for the first time, and was informed by Martin McGrath that Ack-Ack Macaque was performing well in the annual Interzone Readers’ Poll. Cheered by this news, I stuck my head into the art show on the off-chance and there it was!

The picture looked even more vibrant than I remembered. I wasted no time in putting in a bid, and somehow managed to control my illness long enough to attend the art auction, where I bought the picture for roughly half the amount I’d earned from selling the story in the first place. I also found myself standing next to the artist, SMS (now also known as “Smuzz”). He asked me if I knew the story the picture came from. “Yes,” I said, showing him my name badge, “I wrote it.”

After the convention, I took the picture home and it now hangs in pride of place at the foot of my stairs, where to this day its staring yellow eye greets visitors to the house as they step through the front door.

The story Ack-Ack Macaque eventually went on to win the Interzone Poll and was named as the readers’ favourite story of 2007. This was in no small part due, I’m sure, to the striking illustration which, coupled with the story’s catchy title, helped it stick in people’s minds.

Click here to visit the artist’s website.