Fantasy Magazine, Issue 3 by Fantasy Magazine

Author:Fantasy Magazine [Fantasy Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Short Stories
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2006-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

M. Thomas is a teacher and author in Texas. Her short fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Aeon, Fortean Bureau, Lone Star Stories, and OnSpec, among others. Her stories and info can be found at www.found-things.com.

There Is No Rice Pudding In the Sea

Anna Tambour

The cat surveyed the city from the roof’s spine. Though its fur pierced the gilded evenset, only two eyes noticed such beauty. They belonged, of course, to an itinerant. His eyes were busy, having surveyed this square from the gutters up while their owner rested one foot against the inside of a knee, his long staff making its footprint in an oddsods swirl of fluro-coloured muck.

“Hyu!” A curse on him, as his staff caught the edge of a coat. His stillness was a nuisance here, where the end of day brought out as much movement as in a kitchen at night.

The itinerant uncrooked his leg. He had noticed in particular, one river in the crowd. He dove into it with a determined stride, making such a splash of noise with his bright-tipped staff and hobnailed clogs that two squeaky-soled hurriers slowed enough to notice him and frown.

The river flowed around the corner and through a doorway. A smell he had thought he’d prepared for shoved itself up his nose and down his throat, suffocating him to dizziness. Retching and wheezing, he was pushed all the way into the place where the food was dished out into shiny red rubbery bowls.

Then the river flowed to the eating area, standing room only. Each person to a space wide enough to eat with one elbow out.

He ate with his staff held tight against his side.

It tasted as it smelt — of dishcloths. The texture was worse. It took all his willpower to keep it down. There was a technique to eating here. No utensils. Gulping it down, a gob went down the wrong way. Exclamations puffed around his ears.

There was nothing to drink. The itinerant tried to remember: Do they drink with their meal? But he could only remember the words of a song of theirs. Cocoa at sleepityme.

You had to eat fast. Some of the stuff sloshed on him when his bowl collapsed. Like everyone else, he ate it and wiped his hands. They had white kerchiefs. He had his clothes. The bowl taste was hooves and something more indefinably horrible.

The river moved on and around, and dispersed into another square where he looked up and around, and there! That cat, stark in the moonlight.

A bell clanged once, and again, and again and he checked against his timepiece, and the last clang rang out at three minutes and forty-two seconds after seven o’clock. Sloppy time here.

Around the edges of the square, booths were being set up. These people with the slow clock were keen rushers about, and they often jostled. He found a nook where he could watch, undisturbed and undisturbing.

By the third clang at something after eight o’clock, the booths were ready for

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