Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow Read Free Book Online

quieter still, that last part. So much so that, in the end—no matter how long, or hard, he considered it—Goss eventually realized it was impossible to tell if it had been meant to be the angel’s thought, or his own.
    Doesn’t matter
, he thought, closing his eyes. And went back to sleep.

THE ATLAS OF HELL
NATHAN BALLINGRUD
    “He didn’t even know he was dead. I had just shot this guy in the head and he’s still standing there giving me shit. Telling me what a big badass he works for, telling me I’m going to be sorry I was born. You know. Blood pouring down his face. He can’t even see anymore, it’s in his goddamn eyes. So I look down at the gun in my hand and I’m like, what the fuck, you know? Is this thing working or what? And I’m starting to think maybe this asshole is right, maybe I just stepped into something over my head. I mean, I feel a twinge of real fear. My hair is standing up like a cartoon. So I look at the dude and I say, ‘Lay down! You’re dead! I shot you!’”
    There’s a bourbon and ice sitting on the end-table next to him. He takes a sip from it and puts it back down, placing it in its own wet ring. He’s very precise about it.
    “I guess he just had to be told, because a soon as I say it? Boom. Drops like a fucking tree.”
    I don’t know what he’s expecting from me here. My leg is jumping up and down with nerves. I can’t make it stop. I open my mouth to say something but a nervous laughs spills out instead.
    He looks at me incredulously, and cocks his head. Patrick is a big guy; but not doughy, like me. There’s muscle packed beneath all that flesh. He looks like fists of meat sewn together and given a suit of clothes. “Why are you laughing?”
    “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I thought it was supposed to be a funny story.”
    “No, you demented fuck. That’s not a funny story. What’s the matter with you?”
    It’s pushing midnight, and we’re sitting on a coffee-stained couch in a darkened corner of the grubby little bookstore I own in New Orleans, about a block off Magazine Street. My name is Jack Oleander. I keep a small studio apartment overhead, but when Patrick started banging on my door half an hour ago I took him down here instead. I don’t want him in my home. That he’s here at all is a very bad sign.
    My place is called Oleander Books. I sell used books, for the most part, and I serve a very sparse clientele: mostly students and disaffected youth, their little hearts love-drunk on Kierkegaard or Salinger. That suits me just fine. Most of the books have been sitting on their shelves for years, and I feel like I’ve fostered a kind of relationship with them. A part of me is sorry whenever one of them leaves the nest.
    The bookstore doesn’t pay the bills, of course. The books and documents I sell in the back room take care of that. Few people know about the back room, but those who do pay very well indeed. Patrick’s boss is one of those people. We parted under strained circumstances a year or so ago. I was never supposed to see him again. His presence here makes me afraid, and fear makes me reckless.
    “Well if it’s not a funny story, then what kind of story is it? Because we’ve been drinking here for twenty minutes and you haven’t mentioned business even once. If you want to trade war stories it’s going to have to wait for another time.”
    He gives me a sour look and picks up his glass, peering into it as he swirls the ice around. He’d always hated me, and I knew that his presence here pleased him no more than it did me.
    “You don’t make it easy to be your friend,” he says.
    “I didn’t know we were friends.”
    The muscles in his jaw clench.
    “You’re wasting my time, Patrick. I know you’re just the muscle, so maybe you don’t understand this, but the work I do in the back room takes up a lot of energy. So sleep is valuable to me. You’ve sat on my couch and drunk my whiskey and burned away almost half an hour