The End Is Now

Did she want to tell him she’d made a mistake, that she wished she was dancing with him?

I don’t want this lie between us.

The words came to Ray so clearly it was as if Eileen was speaking them. She’d said them right after her confession. Ray had been too shocked and confused to register much of what she was saying at the time, but he remembered the words now.

I don’t want this lie between us, she’d said, and then,

If you want me to leave right now, I will. That was what she’d said, wasn’t it? What he’d heard was, I want to leave you right now. I want to face this with Justin, not with you. Will you let me off the hook? Will you let me go? But that wasn’t what she’d said. The words were important. If Eileen didn’t want a lie between us, she’d still thought there was an us.

She hadn’t wanted him to leave; she’d wanted him to forgive her. If he’d only put his arms around her and told her that he still loved her, they’d be dancing together now, without Justin, without Helen. Helen was a kind and wonderful woman even if she didn’t realize it, but she wasn’t his Batgirl.

Ray tried to answer Eileen. He tried to tell her he forgave her, he loved her, that he understood it all now and wished he hadn’t pushed her away. He tried to say all of this with his eyes, and could only hope it was reaching her, as night fell, and Tears in Heaven gave way to I’ll Take Care of You.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and Nebula finalist whose debut novel,

Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for a Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award. His latest novel is Defenders (May, 2014; Orbit Books), an alien apocalypse novel with a twist. It has been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film. Along with four novels, he has published dozens of short stories in venues such as Lightspeed, Asimov’s (where he won the 2010 Reader's Award), and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Will was a psychology professor for two decades before turning to writing full-time. He lives in Williamsburg with his wife and their five year-old twins.

BY THE HAIR OF THE MOON

Jamie Ford

May 1910

Dorothy Moy stared at the silver dime in her palm for five solid minutes. She touched the tiny inscription, the word LIBERTY, with her soiled fingertips, debating whether or not to spend her last ten cents on a taste of yen shee, or on a jitney cab ride to take her as far away from here as possible. Her mouth watered while she debated, as she dreamed of chewing that ball of resin, savoring the dottle scraped out of the bottom of an opium pipe. She came here to kick the gong around but hadn’t been outside for more than a week. She’d barely been upright all that time and now the morning—at least she thought it was morning—seemed bleak, hopeless, even before she discovered, through a moment of sobriety, that the world was ending all around her.

“Diezen?” She asked the female attendant as she sensed the building gently rocking. Then she heard a muffled booming, like the sound of distant thunder. The Black Candle Inn was little more than a basement warren, thirty feet below the streets of Seattle’s Chinatown, hidden in the center of the newly built Milwaukee Hotel.

“Not an earthquake. It’s okay. Probably just the passenger Zephyr rolling by or a freight train,” the attendant said as she twirled a slender punk, causing the burning joss stick to flare so she could light the pipes of patrons, nursing their flames back to life.

Dorothy could have sworn the building was rocking.