Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 32 by www.clarkesworldmagazine.com & Nnedi Okorafor & Alex Dally MacFarlane & Brian W. Dow

Author:www.clarkesworldmagazine.com & Nnedi Okorafor & Alex Dally MacFarlane & Brian W. Dow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2009-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

4. The chandelier, amber-eternal

The girl was a kaleidoscope, a patchwork quilt, a mosaic pieced together from tiles of multiple sets. So Ambri had thought, fifty years ago when they first met at the liquid-limned counter.

That first time, the girl’s hair drew Ambri’s eye before anything else. Part-stained pale with lemons, part-stained black with soot, with a streak tinted brown-red and smelling of a spice market, her hair hung in disorderly lengths over her broken nose, her bare left shoulder, her left ear with its seven piercings and her right ear with its one glass sphere dangling from the edge of the lobe. Then Ambri noticed her clothes: a blue skirt chopped to uneven lengths and a left trouser leg beneath it that fell to her grubby ankle; the right sleeve of a green dress; a waistcoat covered in beads and oddments. Among them Ambri saw empty-centred coins from China and Denmark, bright red beads from the Serengeti, ivory and jade amulets. Rings, and the finger of a black velvet glove on her right thumb, covered the girl’s pale hands. Her eyes were one-blue, one-amber, like those of certain cats.

“Stop,” she had said to Ambri, who tapped her fingers to a popular tune on her thin-stemmed glass of water flavoured with wine. “Tha-at annoys me, stop it!” Her voice dipped into half a dozen accents, like bread into a platter of oils: Scottish and Indian, Russian and Thai, Turkish and Moroccan. “Fingers. Fi-ingers are too loud!”

She pulled the glass out of Ambri’s hands.

“You were tapping.”

“Good evening,” Ambri said, bemused.

“Too many rhythms. Pat-terns. I don’t like them.”

Ambri turned to the man behind the counter and said, “Can I have a glass of water, please, with the rim of the glass chipped for a third of its curvature, and with unevenly chopped pieces of carrot floating in it.”

When Ambri looked back at the girl, she was staring, her mouth ajar like a door.

“Here,” Ambri said, giving her the drink. “I hope you like this.”

“You…” Six of her fingers curled tightly around the glass. “No one has ever…”

Ambri smiled. “You are far from the strangest person to find your way inside this pub.” Less than a minute later she said it, after inviting the girl to sit down, take a long around, stay: “Welcome to the Devonshire Arms.”

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