Magic for Beginners: Stories by Kelly Link Read Free Book Online

be
fired out of the cannon. The cannon serves no other purpose. A man
may accidentally fall asleep in a cannon, or take shelter from a
rainstorm, or hide from his enemies inside a cannon, but in the
end, the cannon must be fired.
    I once fornicated with a married woman inside the Sweet Mouth.
She was agoraphobic. I said I was agnostic.
    I said, “Yes, like that, don’t wriggle so much,” and she said,
“How do you like this?” and “Watch your head,” and while we were
fucking, her husband came up and lit a match, and then we were
flying. We sailed out like grappling shot. My lover yelled back at
her husband, “Cock her up a bit, master gunner!” and we watched him
get smaller and smaller.
    I held on to her hips and the tails of her hair and fucked her
as we passed over the countryside, and she wrapped her legs around
my waist and fucked me back. When we were finished, we flew along
side by side, and she remarked that she was grateful to me and the
cannon and her husband. The affair had cured her of her
agoraphobia. We fucked some more, to celebrate, and then we came to
a town and I grabbed on to the steeple of an Episcopal church. She
kept on going along. She wasn’t ready to go back down again. I had
a long walk home. I haven’t seen her since.
     
    Q: Did your brother have a happy childhood?
    A: Why don’t you ask him? He used to sit on my head. Once he set
off firecrackers in my closet. He substituted
toothpaste-and-cucumber sandwiches for my lunch. He ripped out the
last pages of his comics before he gave them to me to read. He
saved up his allowance and paid Josepha Howley and her four sisters
to chase me around the neighborhood. When they caught me, they took
off my shorts and tied them to a tree branch.
     
    Q. Did the cannon have a happy childhood?
    A. A long time ago, before all the wars were over and done with,
when large artillery still had other uses, there was a master
gunner who loved the cannon. Wherever he traveled he took her with
him. She was his mascot, his victory, his confidante, his clock.
For love of the master gunner she took Odruik. She took Prague,
Famagusta, Seringapatam, Bajadoz. She took Cairo, she took dancing
lessons, she took Beethoven’s hearing and Napoléon’s arm. She took
and took and the master gunner gave and gave. He tickled her with
his
funis ignarii
and his wands and his wormers, he wooed
her with Valturio’s patented incendiary shells, with fireworks and
grapeshot, lead, granite, and bronze; he anointed her with costly
scents—saltpetre, serpentine, sulfur, charcoal, antimony. When the
master gunner was old and rich and tired of going to war, he
retired to the Riviera and built a castle. He married the cannon
and he tied up her muzzle in a bonnet of white silk so that she
would look like a lady. On Sundays the master gunner harnessed his
wife to four ex-cavalry horses and rode her down the road to the
chapel.
    His wife was too stout to fit through the doors, though, and
when the priest turned down the master gunner’s offer to pay for a
new set of doors, the gunner left her tied up next door in the
cemetery. The horses cropped the grass and the gunner paid a small
boy to watch and make sure that no one took his wife to melt down
for scrap. After services, the younger members of the congregation
used to go pick through the cemetery for rocks and small bits of
masonry, for the master gunner to fire off.
    Inside his castle the master gunner built a ramp so that when he
went up to bed, the cannon went with him, and when he came down in
the mornings for his breakfast, the cannon went too. To their great
sorrow, they never had children and when at last the master gunner
died, the undertakers dressed him in his traveling clothes and
placed him inside his wife, the cannon. This was consummation. But
the charge was inadequate, and when the master gunner left his wife
at last, he got only as far as the next town over. They found his
boots in an irrigation ditch, his johnnie in