Boarding Instructions Read online

  Table of Contents

  Grocery List

  My Eyes, Your Ears

  Over Here

  Human Subjects

  The Wages of Syntax

  A Funny Smell

  The Button

  Chain

  Cold Comfort

  Dead Girlfriend

  Fired

  Gas

  Intercontinental Ballistic Missle Boy

  Glinky

  Jumping

  The Library of Pi

  Love Leans In From the Left

  The Rescue

  Love Story

  Magic Makeup

  Morning Meditation

  My Shoes

  Some Other Time

  Strong Suits

  A Note From the Future

  Superpowers

  Take the Stairs

  Tongues

  Suddenly Speaking

  Tubs

  Duck

  Practice

  The Two of Me

  In the Flesh

  About the Author

  BOARDING

  INSTRUCTIONS

  RAY VUKCEVICH

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  BOARDING INSTRUCTIONS

  A Fairwood Press Book

  November 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Ray Vukcevich

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

  by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

  or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Front cover and book design by

  Patrick Swenson

  ISBN13: 978-1-933846-23-1

  First Fairwood Press Edition: November 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-192-4

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  Also by Ray Vukcevich

  The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces

  Meet Me in the Moon Room

  Publication History

  “Grocery List” first appeared in Fortean Bureau (April 2004)

  “My Eyes, Your Ears” first appeared in The Los Angeles Review (Fall 2009)

  “Human Subjects” first appeared in Amazing (September 2004)

  “The Button” first appeared in Hobart

  “The Wages of Syntax” first appeared in SCIFICTION (October 2002)

  “Some Other Time” first appeared in SCIFICTION (July 2002)

  “Chain” first appeared in Time After Time (DAW Books 2005)

  “Cold Comfort” first appeared in F&SF (July 2007)

  “Gas” first appeared in F&SF (April 2004)

  “Glinky” first appeared in F&SF (June 2004)

  “Dead Girlfriend” first appeared in Rosebud (2002)

  “The Rescue” first appeared in Rosebud (2003)

  “Fired” first appeared in Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction (Fairwood Press 2003)

  “Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Boy” first appeared in Strange Horizons (May 2002)

  “Magic Makeup” first appeared in Strange Horizons (April 2004)

  “Jumping” first appeared in Witpunk (Four Walls Eight Windows 2003)

  “The Library of Pi” first appeared in Polyphony (Wheatland Press 2006)

  “Love Story” first appeared in Polyphony (Wheatland Press 2002)

  “Morning Meditation” first appeared in Polyphony (Wheatland Press 2003)

  “Tongues” first appeared in Polyphony (Wheatland Press 2005)

  “Love Leans In From The Left” first appeared in Lost Pages (Dec 2003)

  “My Shoes” first appeared in Flytrap (May 2007)

  “Strong Suits” first appeared in Lust for Life (Vehicule Press 2006)

  “Suddenly Speaking” first appeared in Flash Fiction Online (September 2009)

  “Note from the Future” first appeared in Flash Fiction Online (December 2009)

  “Superpowers” first appeared in Monkeybicycle.net (September 2005)

  “Take the Stairs” first appeared in Talebones (Summer 2005)

  “Tubs” first appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (2006)

  “Duck” first appeared in Night Train (Spring 2006)

  “The Two of Me” first appeared in Interfictions 2 (Small Beer Press 2009)

  “A Funny Smell” first appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly (June 2009)

  “Over Here” (appears here for the first time)

  “Practice” (appears here for the first time)

  “In The Flesh” first appeared in The Infinite Matrix (February 2002)

  For Vincent

  Grocery List

  My Eyes, Your Ears

  I don’t know if I’ve told you this story before, because you all have black bars over your eyes, and I cannot tell who you are. I can see one of you is a police officer. I don’t know whose blood this is we’re standing in. Please, God, don’t let it be Caroline’s.

  I realize now the trick I pulled on Caroline back in high school was a desperate attempt to get her attention. She was so perfect, so strawberry blond, so well-dressed and groomed. You could signal a rescue helicopter by bouncing sunlight off her teeth. She was just so totally Barbie it made you want to grab and squeeze her to see if she’d squeak. Her mother drove her to school. The bumper sticker on her mother’s car said, “My Child is a National Honor Society Student.”

  I replaced it with one that was almost identical but said, “My Child Has Enormous Ears.”

  And then people were honking and grinning and children were giving her the Dumbo ears with their hands up along the sides of their heads, and Caroline and her mother were thinking they’d made some horrible social blunder like coming out in favor of atheism or something, but then one day Caroline spotted the bumper sticker, and you could hear her outraged cry all the way down the block and across the street, and that would have been the big payoff of my prank, if it had really been a prank an not an adolescent attempt to get her to notice me.

  It didn’t take her long to figure out I’d done it. I’d made no effort to cover my tracks. What’s the fun of a practical joke if no one knows you did it? But after a couple of fits of yelling and shaking her fists at the sky and kicking the bumper of her mother’s car, she went all good-sport on me. She accepted my apology, and I scraped off the bumper sticker. Incredibly, she started smiling at me in the high school hallways. One thing led to another, and she went to the senior prom with me. We fooled around a little, but not too much, in the back seat of my car. I almost asked her to marry me. I couldn’t think of how to put it. I considered a bumper sticker that said, “Marry me, Caroline!” But the moment passed in silence.

  I got into a pretty good college, and she went off to an even better one, and I figured that was that. I would drink tequila and read the Beat poets. Sadder, wiser, world-weary, maybe I’d grow a mustache, but then one day, she was back and asking me out for tea. For tea? Yes, tea, you know tea, in a teahouse, with little cakes, oh, I suppose you could have coffee. No, tea is fine. It’s wonderful to see you again, Caroline. Oh look over there, she said, and I looked, and she put something in my tea. I didn’t see her do it. She told me about it a little later, because what fun is a practical joke if no one knows you did it?

  She had let her hair grow big around her ears, no more perky ponytails. Nice hair, I said. You mean, thank god you can’t see my huge, ugly ears, she said.

  There is nothin
g whatever wrong with your ears, Caroline. I love your ears, I said. You’re just saying that, she said. Jesus, I had given her some kind of complex about her ears all those years ago with the bumper sticker.

  Here’s looking at . . . your ears, kid, I said, toasting her with my tea.

  Always the jokes. She turned her head away and then turned back, and I saw there was a black bar over her eyes. She was a photograph of someone you shouldn’t know about. All of the people in the teahouse had black bars over their eyes.

  I see you’re getting it, she said, and the kicker is it’s retroactive!

  And it is so true! I have always seen a black bar over the eyes of everyone! It hasn’t been easy. I am not so much blind as unrecognizing. Nevertheless, I have always loved Caroline’s ears. She has nothing to hide when it comes to her ears.

  Oddly, I also see black bars over the eyes of domesticated animals. Dogs and cats, cows and horses. Ferrets. No mice. What would be the point? Whoever worried about an unidentified mouse?

  A server approaches. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him before because of the black bar over his eyes. You should assume the crash position, he tells us. It’s going to be tricky, but our captain thinks she can set this teahouse down with not so many casualties.

  Later in the smoke and shouting and running on the tarmac, I lose track of Caroline. No, no, I tell the rescue helicopter, I’ve got to find Caroline. Is that you? Is that you? I can see that might be you, because you are a woman of a certain width and depth and height, and your hair has red highlights that are subtly reflected an octave higher in your fingernails and an octave lower in your toenails. Nice knees. If you were Caroline, I could see you wearing that frilly white top, that pale green skirt, those brown sandals, that green glass bracelet on your left wrist.

  Who is shooting?

  Why does there always have to be shooting?

  I suddenly see that I’m standing in someone’s blood, and then the policeman drags me away for interrogation. Did you see whose blood I was standing in? Was it a woman of a certain width and depth and height? I’ll ask the questions, he says. Actually her width and depth vary as you move your eyes up and down her height which is generally consistent.

  He wants to know about the shooting. We are Americans, I tell him, and for us, after 9/11, everything is about shooting and screaming and standing in blood, even when it’s not. We do not appreciate that kind of talk at a facility like this, he tells me. He pushes me down onto a hard wooden chair.

  A woman runs up and shoulders the policeman aside and drops down on her knees in front of me. Caroline, is that you? It’s okay, she says, I’m here. How can I know that’s you? She leans in and flips her hair away from the side of her face, and I see her left ear in extreme close-up. She turns quickly and shows me the other one. Her ears are beautiful pink seashells in the sunshine. They fill my world with joy. They really are, I feel compelled to report, enormous.

  Over Here

  For MAJ Benjamin Buchholz, US Army

  Megumi

  I suspect my daughter Amelia and that man she married named my granddaughter after a character from Japanese animation. I never did press the point, and now we’ll never know for sure. She is my Megumi who is even now hiding in the yard. Right over there. Under the big Douglas fir tree. She is holding so very still like a cautious rabbit. She is afraid I will call her inside to play the clavichord.

  Megumi is all eyes squatting on her heels and looking over her knees. She knows that I’m looking right at her so she is not moving her eyes at all. I wonder how long she’ll be able to hold off blinking. I wonder if losing her parents and coming to live with her grandfather is making her weird. Are you weird Megumi? I make a funny face at her through the big window. She doesn’t respond.

  Maybe I should get a professional opinion about her weirdness?

  I can see her sneakers, which are black with pink cartoons and yellow laces. High tops. She doesn’t play basketball. But she might some day. Blue jeans with the cuffs turned way up. I should get some advice on what modern six-year-old orphan girls like to wear when they are not playing the clavichord.

  Can you even buy dresses these days?

  I could lure her inside with the promise of a story about Layla, the desert princess. Someday I am going to have to tell Megumi the bad news about Layla.

  Not today.

  Layla

  I wonder what Layla was wearing when the truck ran her down yesterday. It isn’t the kind of question I can ask our friend who wants us to call him “Abu Yusef.” That probably isn’t his real name. It might be dangerous for him if it got out he was using his computer to post messages on the international clavichord list. We are, generally speaking, a contentious bunch on the clavichord list, but we understand and are sympathetic when our friend and colleague in Iraq tells us he is reluctant to reveal his real name or identify his real town in the south where there are many Persian influences.

  And speaking of Persian influences, Abu Yusef believes the clavichord is a direct descendant (by way of the cymbalum) of the Persian santur, a hammered dulcimer. Hey, it’s a theory and might even be true. Not everyone agrees. There has been some online heat on this subject. With any group you’re going to have some people who take things too seriously. No one will admit to hurt feelings. Often it’s a good thing we are not all in the same room or there would be fistfights over matters like tuning, for example. Never mind origin theories.

  Abu Yusef does not say the dead girl is his granddaughter. He is keeping a stiff upper lip. For weeks he talked about finding his perfect student. Too bad she’s a girl, he said. We don’t know if he was joking about that. Yesterday she was killed in a pointless accident.

  Layla and her friends were outside watching a US convoy go by. So many trucks all going north. It was like they would keep coming until they filled the country up with trucks and tanks and guns and foreign soldiers, and there would be room for nothing else. Where would they all stay when they got to where they were going?

  One of the drivers tossed Layla a bottle of water and a smile. The bottle bounced off her hands and rolled into the road. When she ran out to get it, a truck coming in the other direction ran over her.

  So, some of the trucks and soldiers must have been going south.

  By the time Abu Yusef came onto the scene, someone had covered Layla with a blanket. Everyone was talking at once. The whole town and all the foreign soldiers who were not in their trucks had gathered around the small body. He didn’t say so, but I imagine the people made way for Abu Yusef since he is the mayor. I get the idea that he is proud to be the mayor, but also that he sometimes feels like a front man since it is the deputy town council president, a Shi’a religious functionary of some kind, who has all the power. I detect no resentment about this on Abu Yusef’s part. That is simply the way of things.

  Like Megumi, Layla had been six years old. The two girls were destined to be animated superheroes and fight evil together. There is nothing like a couple of six-year-old girls to bring peoples and cultures together. Who could have foreseen that one of them would be a ghost? Well, that’s the kind of plot twist Megumi’s mother must have anticipated when she came up with Megumi’s name in the first place. I wonder if my daughter had imagined the name of the show the two girls would be starring in. If so, she didn’t pass that name down to us. I will have to name the show myself. Here are some of my ideas.

  “The Strings of Doom!”

  Where the strings are clavichord strings, of course.

  “Megumi, Layla, and the Legend of the Twangs.”

  The Twangs could be these guys you think are the bad guys, but then they turn out to be only misunderstood. The Twangs are proud and stern and have many baffling customs, but they are basically good guys. Megumi and Layla come to understand the Twangs after many adventures, hurt feelings, kissing and making up, giant robots, evil eyebeams, talking woodland creatures, and martial art clavichord playing.

  “Princess Layla and the Twan
gster.”

  This time Megumi turns out to be the twangster which is (but only superficially) like a gangster. She wears a fedora, and she’s adorable. Princess Layla comes to the rescue in the end, and the twangster finally comes out of her shell and is able to make a pretty sound.

  “The Twangsters.”

  This time both Megumi and Layla can be twangsters — a couple of six-year-old girls who save the world on a weekly basis with transcendental early music. The joke being they can’t actually make such music yet, and that’s why they’re called twangsters. It really isn’t easy to make pleasant sounds with a clavichord.

  In any case, there will be some kind of rat spider sidekick who is also very cute — maybe it makes wisecracks, and the girls pretend to be angry or exasperated. Maybe it turns into a clavichord when drenched in water.

  Amelia

  We did not name Megumi’s mother after a cartoon character. We named her after Amelia Earhart, the aviator, because we thought she would soar, but whenever the subject came up, she acted like she literally could not believe it — you named me after someone who crashed and burned or drowned or otherwise just disappeared? You’d like it if I just disappeared, too, wouldn’t you? And it was true, just then, I would have been happy if she’d just wandered off to the mall or something, but I couldn’t very well say that, and I didn’t have anyone to talk the problem over with after Karen died leaving me with Amelia who had been thirteen and who would be in and out of rehab for years. Even so, I would never have guessed she’d go on to get herself gunned down so stupidly.

  I blame the authorities. Yes, they probably had to kick down the door and go in with guns drawn, but no one was armed in the house. Okay, they didn’t know that. But they should have been able to tell an assault rifle from a soup ladle even in the dim light. At least they minimized the collateral damage when it came to Megumi who is so quiet now. And trembling, she is all the time trembling just below the surface. You can’t really see it, but if you pull her into your arms where she stands stiff and silent, you can feel her trembling.