Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9781607013617
Google: li3QuQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1607013614
Barnesnoble: 1607013614
Goodreads: 13603362
Publisher: Prime
Published: 2012-10-29T13:00:00+00:00

The building was emptied, the block closed, the deaths and the evacuations blamed on a chemical spill. Other Prometheans would handle the detox. Matthew, returned to his habitual body, took the shivering black cockerel to a veterinarian with Promethean sympathies, who—at Matthew’s insistence and Jane’s expense—amputated his wing and cleaned and sewed shut his eye. Spared euthanasia, he was sent to a farm upstate to finish his days as a lopsided, piratical greeter of morning. He’d live long, with a little luck, and father many pullets.

Matthew supposed there were worse deaths for a chicken. Marion did the paperwork. Matthew took her out to dinner. She didn’t make another pass, and they parted good friends. He had a feeling he’d be seeing her again.

There were memorial services for his students, and that was hard. They were freshmen, and he hadn’t known them well; it seemed . . . presumptuous to speak, as if his responsibility for their deaths gave him some claim over their lives. He sat in the back, dressed in his best black suit, and signed the guest book, and didn’t speak.

Katherine Berquist was to be buried in Appleton, Wisconsin; Matthew could not attend. But Regina Gomez was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Flushing, her coffin overwhelmed with white waxy flowers, her family swathed in black crepe and summer-weight worsted, her friends in black cotton or navy. Melissa Martinchek was there in an empire-waisted dress and a little cardigan. She gave Matthew a timid smile across the open grave.

The scent of the lilies was repellent; Matthew vomited twice on the way home.

Melissa came to see him in the morning, outside of his regular office hours, when he was sitting at his desk with his head in his heads. He dragged himself up at the knock, paused, and sat heavily back down.

Thirty seconds later, the locked door clicked open. It swung on the hinges, and Melissa stepped inside, holding up her student ID like a talisman. “The lock slips,” she said. “Gina showed me how. I heard, I heard your chair.”

Gina’s name came out a stammer too.

“Come in,” Matthew said, and gestured her to a dusty orange armchair. She locked the door behind her before she fell into it. “Coffee?”

There was a pot made, but he hadn’t actually gotten up and fetched any. He waved at it vaguely, and Melissa shook her head.

He wanted to shout at her—What were you thinking? What were you doing there?—and made himself look down at his hands instead. He picked up a letter opener and ran his thumb along the dull edge. “I am,” he said, when he had control of his voice again, “so terribly sorry.”

She took two sharp breaths, shallow and he could hear the edge of the giggle under them. Hysteria, not humor. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what happened.” She held up her hand, and his words died in his open mouth. “I don’t . . . I don’t want to know. But it wasn’t your fault.

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