Forever Magazine Issue 71 by Vandana Singh & Ray Nayler & Carrie Vaughn

Author:Vandana Singh & Ray Nayler & Carrie Vaughn [Singh, Vandana & Nayler, Ray & Vaughn, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novella, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2020-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Of Love and Other Monsters, Aqueduct Press (Conversation Pieces #18), 2007.

Mutability

Ray Nayler

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon

Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was an almost perfect café. It was in a red brick building built sometime in the early twentieth century: a mass of art deco, faux-Moorish and Russian influences, punctuated with stained glass and onion domes. You entered through an Arabian Nights archway into an anteroom of cracked hexagonal tiles and robin’s-egg plaster. Here, you could take off your coat and hang it on one of the brass hooks along the right-hand wall. Turn left through another arch—this one crawling with chipped plaster grapevines—you were in the main room. This room had a domed ceiling like a mosque or a Turkish bath house, blue Byzantine tiles on the floor, and layers of crumbling posters on the walls interspersed with framed pictures and notes signed by customers. The age-spotted mirrors and dusty bottles of an ancient, hand-carved bar dominated one side of the room.

The bar was where the owner was always to be found, rubbing his shaved head, staring at a game of chess. He always played against one of three different opponents. Opponent One was a gaunt man in a dirty collared shirt who chewed, repulsively, on a piece of string hanging from the corner of his mouth. Opponent Two was a heavy, slope-shouldered man. He kept his coat on and played quickly and impatiently. Opponent Three was a girl, thirteen or so, with a nose she was trying to grow into and blonde hair that looked like it had been rubbed in ashes. One so rarely saw children these days. Very serious, she always came in with a book—a real book. Where was she getting them?

It was unclear who won any of the long, silent games. Once they were over, Opponent One or Opponent Two would get up and leave, with no hint of triumph or desolation. Opponent Three would stay and read her book for hours, accepting the occasional cocoa on the counter nearby while the owner busied himself with other things. His child? Who knew? The owner never spoke to the café’s customers, with the exception of these three.

The rest of the room was filled with tables, chairs, and light. The tables were an assortment of round café tables, square or rectangular tables from restaurants or offices long since gone, high tile-topped wrought-iron tables of the kind you might find in a garden or on a balcony somewhere, big scarred oaken slabs that might have come from a warehouse or factory. The chairs were also a mix: some straight-backed, some cane, some wicker, some just plain stools. All were defective in their unique way, and all demanded different techniques for getting comfortable. The chairs and tables were never to be found in quite the same configuration when Sebastian came in in the mornings. The light

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