KELLY LINK is the author of three other collections, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners and Get in Trouble. Her stories have won three Nebula awards, a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question ‘Why do you want to go around the world?’ (‘Because you can’t go through it.’)
Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
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Copyright
The paperback edition published in 2010 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books
canongate.co.uk
Copyright © Kelly Link, 2008
Decorations copyright © Shaun Tan, 2008
Title page art by Will Staehle
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States of America in 2008 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
‘The Wrong Grave’ first appeared in The Restless Dead: Ten Original Stories of the Supernatural, edited by Deborah Noyes, published by Candlewick Press, 2007
‘Monster’ first appeared in Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out, edited by Ted Thomson, published by McSweeney’s, 2005
‘The Faery Handbag’ originally appeared in The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, published by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004
‘The Wizards of Perfil’ originally appeared in Firebirds Rising: An Anthology of Original Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Sharyn November, published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006
‘The Specialist’s Hat’ first appeared in Event Horizon in 1998; reprinted by permission of Small Beer Press, 2001
‘The Surfer’ originally appeared in The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, edited by Jonathan Strahan, published by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008
‘The Constable of Abal’ originally appeared in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, published by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007
‘Magic for Beginners’ originally appeared in Magic for Beginners, published by Small Beer Press, 2005
‘Pretty Monsters’ is original to this collection.
‘The Cinderella Game’ originally appeared in Troll’s-Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, published by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009
All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 784 6
eISBN 978 1 84767 820 1
Book design by Jim Hoover
Contents
The Wrong Grave
The Wizards of Perfil
Magic for Beginners
The Faery Handbag
The Specialist’s Hat
Monster
The Surfer
The Constable of Abal
Pretty Monsters
The Cinderella Game
Anyone might accidentally dig up the wrong grave.
ALL OF THIS happened because a boy I once knew named Miles Sperry decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, who had been dead for not quite a year. Miles planned to do this in order to recover the sheaf of poems he had, in what he’d felt was a beautiful and romantic gesture, put into her casket. Or possibly it had just been a really dumb thing to do. He hadn’t made copies. Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front.
He’d tucked the poems, handwritten, tear-stained and with cross-outs, under Bethany’s hands. Her fingers had felt like candles, fat and waxy and pleasantly cool, until you remembered that they were fingers. And he couldn’t help noticing that there was something wrong about her breasts, they seemed larger. If Bethany had known that she was going to die, would she have gone all the way with him? One of his poems was about that, about how now they never would, how it was too late now. Carpe diem before you run out of diem.
Bethany’s eyes were closed, someone had done that, too, just like they’d arranged her hands, and even her smile looked composed, in the wrong sense of the word. Miles wasn’t sure how you made someone smile after they were dead. Bethany didn’t look much like she had when she’d been alive. That had been only a few days ago. Now she seemed smaller, and also, oddly, larger. It was the nearest Miles had ever been to a dead person, and he stood there, looking at Bethany, wishing two things: that he was dead, too, and also that it had seemed appropriate to bring along his notebook and a pen. He felt he should be taking notes. After all, this was the most significant thing that had ever happened to Miles. A great change was occurring within him, moment by singular moment.
Poets were supposed to be in the moment, and also stand outside the moment, looking in. For example, Miles had never noticed before, but Bethany’s ears were slightly lopsided. One was smaller and slightly higher up. Not that he would have cared, or written a poem about it, or even mentioned it to her, ever, in case it made her self-conscious, but it was a fact and now that he’d noticed it he thought it might have driven him crazy, not mentioning it: he bent over and kissed Bethany’s forehead, breathing in. She smelled like a new car. Miles’s mind was full of poetic thoughts. Every cloud had a silver lining, except there was probably a more interesting and meaningful way to say that, and death wasn’t really a cloud. He thought about what it was: more like an earthquake, maybe, or falling from a great height and smacking into the ground, really hard, which knocked the wind out of you and made it hard to sleep or wake up or eat or care about things like homework or whether there was anything good on TV. And death was foggy, too, but also prickly, so maybe instead of a cloud, a fog made of little sharp things.