“It all began with the chicken in the end of the road,” she said.
“Pardon?” I gestured. “Could you say that again?”
Miss Sanderson reached out and tapped the translation device on the table, then picked it up and fiddled with its settings. She was the ugliest female of her species I’d ever seen– obscenely symmetrical features, pale hair and complexion, long limbs–and yet forever twirling a finger in her hair like she was trying to proposition me.
Disgusting!
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John was born with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and he often wondered why. But as a boy, it was simply wonderful to have those abilities. He could lift his father’s tractor overhead before he learned to read. He could outrace a galloping horse. He couldn’t be cut or bruised or burned. He could fly…
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Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started pounding on the door.
“Bert!” the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.
“Gol Dang!” said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.
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This week, we listen to Jay Lake’s “Over the Walls of Eden.”
If you listened to Clown Eggs and thought, “I need more stories like THAT,” you are in for a treat. Stick around at the end and hear a brief discussion of the story the author.
“Why do you remember the books?” he finally asks.
She smiles again. “O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere, Till pride and worse ambition threw me down…”
Enjoy!
Call her Anlic.
The first time she woke, she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine. At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole’s gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.
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My boss, Danny, liked to brag that El Corazon was the best Tex-Mex restaurant just off the Vegas Strip. “Because of you, Bescha,” he’d say to me. “You keep the customers happy. You keep me out of trouble.”
I won’t say which part of my job was harder. I kept an eye on the help-wanted ads, in case something better came along.
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Author Jay Lake knew about the devil and he knew about the clowns. When his story, Clown Eggs, first appeared on the Drabblecast, listeners said things like “This might be, hands-down, the weirdest story I’ve ever heard on [The Drabblecast]. I think I’m going to have nightmares forever. Can I send my therapy bills to you guys?” (Thanks, Talia)
In other words, people loved it.
Since then, the Drabblecast has produced three other outpourings from Jay’s singular vision of the world (or a world – or some worlds, but hopefully not our own). In fact, Jay’s last professional sale was “The Goat Cutter,” Drabblecast 321, the story from last April about the Devil in Texas. You remember that story- you can’t forget it, even though you’ve tried.
Jay lost his battle with cancer on Sunday, June 1, 2014. In tribute to Jay, we’re kicking off Drabbleclassics with several weeks of Jay Lake’s stories.
And now: Episode 115, Clown Eggs, first published May 25th, 2009.
The spring tide rolled across Momus Beach, tossing the flaccid corpses of clowns like so many torn balloons. Weathered to a dispirited pallor, they twisted in the foamy surf with the eternally surprised expressions of the dead..
The Drabble describes either an apocalyptic event, or a simple machine. The feature introduces us to old “bull” clown Uncle Swarmy. It’s not just another day at the beach. Learn more about the clown life cycle than you’re comfortable with!
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An oral history, recorded in the annals of sentientkind, spoken by Sven Al’bedo di’Cantara, on the eve of the ninth flying.
1. The Tree
And so it came to pass, in the years past reckoning, when I served as a scribe in the court of the king, that there stood the last and only tree.
It is not known how this came to be the only tree. For a time there were disputing theories; it could hardly have happened by chance. As for me, I favor a hypothesis rooted in the fallacy of infinite halves. For in the strange world where we lived, it was once widely known that if you cross half a distance every day, forever and ever, you shall never reach your destination. Thus, if you consume half the riches of the world, every day, forever and ever, you shall always have some riches left. This truth was a fallacy. It is not possible to cut down half a tree.
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Hunger has made you reckless. You track the sound of human voices through the woods until you find a man and a woman. They are shouting at each other. The woman slaps the man’s face. He presses his hand to his cheek for a moment, and then lunges at the woman, knocking her to the ground. He squeezes his hands tight about her throat. The noises she makes are ugly.
Your nostrils flare. You smell food. It is in the pack on the man’s back. You come closer to the couple, deliberately snapping a twig underfoot. The man whirls around, almost losing his grip on the woman. You point at the back pack.
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The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced.
They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their fill of cactus–fruit wine.
They were shy creatures, the jackalope wives, though there was nothing shy about the way they danced. You could go your whole life and see no more of them than the flash of a tail vanishing around the backside of a boulder. If you were lucky, you might catch a whole line of them outlined against the sky, on the top of a bluff, the shadow of horns rising off their brows.
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I’m not employed by the store. They don’t pay my wages. I’m with a security firm, but we’ve had a contract here for a long time, and I’ve been here for most of it. This is where I know people. I’ve been a guard in other places—still am, occasionally, on short notice—and until recently I would have said this was the best place I’d been. It’s nice to work somewhere people are happy to go. Until recently, if anyone asked me what I did for a living, I’d just tell them I worked for the store.
It’s on the outskirts of town, a huge metal warehouse. Full of a hundred little fake rooms, with a single path running through them, and all the furniture we sell made up and laid out so you can see how it should look. Then the same products, disassembled, packed flat and stacked high in the warehouse for people to buy. They’re cheap.
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I still remember that cold October afternoon in 1936 when Whitey McFarland’s old coonhound Maggie dragged herself out of the forest, whimpering and yowling. Her skin hung off her sides in red flaps and her eyes rolled wildly. She collapsed on the ground and howled.
All us kids loved Maggie, but not one of us dared go near her, not while she was baring her teeth and snarling. Benny Carper dropped the bat and ran off; Ira Schmidt just stood there staring at the half-dead animal as it pawed the frozen dirt. I tugged on Whitey’s sleeve and told him to stay with Maggie while I got my dad—Whitey’s dad was a drunk and never easy to find. When he finally nodded in understanding, I took off running.
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Lawson was already regretting the decision to go shopping by the time he was standing in line waiting to buy a ticket for the tube. All but one of the time- and labour-saving automatic ticket dispensers was either closed or unable to give change, and it was all he could do not to let out yelps of irritated despair at the inability of those in front of him to understand the process of getting the machine to yield up its wares. The station seemed to be unusually full of squalling children and jabbering mad people, and the flu which he’d thought in decline was thriving in the damp mildness of the winter afternoon. All in all he was beginning to feel like death cooled down, and he was barely on step one of the afternoon.
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A man in a wrinkled, black suit entered the fairgrounds. He was tall and lean, his skin the color of drying leather. He wore a faded sport shirt underneath his suit coat, white with yellow stripes. His hair was black and greasy, parted in the middle and brushed back flat on each side. His eyes were pale blue. There was no expression on his face. It was a hundred and two degrees in the sun but he was not perspiring.
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The magician’s table was covered by a sheet of plywood, four feet square, completely wrapped up in aluminum foil. Sugar magic was messy magic, and the foil made for easier cleanup. Scattered across the aluminum were misshapen chunks of candy, the seeds from which the carnival would grow. And grow it did.
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