Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline by Amanda C Davis

Author:Amanda C Davis [Davis, Amanda C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dieselpunk, historical fantasy, World War I fiction, fairy tales, World Wars, World War II fiction, alternate history, fairy tale retellings
ISBN: 9781732254664
Publisher: World Weaver Press
Published: 2019-09-03T06:00:00+00:00

Easy as Eating Pie

Amanda C. Davis

Eddie stood in front of the basement shelves in his undershirt, fists on his hips and suspenders slipping down over his shoulders. There were rings in the dust marking where jars of food had once stood. He swiped the empty shelf in disgust.

“My own fault,” he muttered. “‘Come live with me,’ I says. ‘You married my dead sister, you’re like family.’ What do I get? Big dumb deadweight name of Chuck that snores and eats my food when I ain’t looking. Some family. This ain’t exactly a land a’ plenty, you know. Folks is starving to death in Oklahoma.” He raised his voice in the direction of the basement stairs. “Hear that, Chuck? Starving!”

He grabbed a quart jar of green beans and plodded upstairs. In point of fact, the Depression hadn’t hit Eddie very hard at all—not the way it would have if he’d ever had money. His garden still produced, his apple trees thrived, and he knew how to cook a groundhog until the tough flesh grew soft and sweet. It helped that his old mother had died with a cellar full of canned food. And that he had no particular ambitions. Eddie was on friendlier terms with idleness than he was with Chuck.

He was at the top of the stairs when Chuck burst through the kitchen door with a child’s collar clutched in each hand and, beneath each collar, a dirty-faced fair-haired child.

Eddie leapt back so far he nearly fell into the basement again. “Geez a’mighty, Chuck! Where’d you get those?”

“Out back,” said Chuck. “I told you it wasn’t me eating all them apples.”

The children did not look like they’d had their fill of apples in a long time. The boy, the smaller, stood limp in Chuck’s grip, with his eyes down. The girl, however, wouldn’t stop struggling.

“Let us go!” she said, her eyes bright with hate. She couldn’t have been older than nine. “We don’t want your rotten apples.”

Eddie settled himself onto the corner of the kitchen table. “We let you go, two days later you’ll be back robbin’ us of the hard-earned fruits of our labor.”

Chuck grew uncertain. “What else we supposed to do with ’em?”

“I dunno,” said Eddie thoughtfully. “I mean, look at ’em. Ain’t a hundred pounds between ’em. If they was horses you couldn’t sell ’em for glue.”

The boy went rigid with fear. The girl raised her chin. “You can’t do that!”

“Like I said. Nobody’d take you.”

“We can do tricks,” whispered the boy.

The girl hissed sharply, but Eddie perked up. “Yeah?” he said. “What kinda tricks?”

“Magic tricks.”

Eddie looked from one small, dirty face to the other. “Okay,” he said. “I like magic. Show me what you’ve got, and maybe you can stay for dinner.”

Chuck let go of their collars, and the children flew at each other like magnets. Clutching her brother, the girl said, “We need a cigarette.”

Eddie’s eyebrows flew sky-high. “At your age?”

“For the trick.”

“Hehn.” Eddie pulled his papers and tobacco from his back pocket and made a big show of rolling a thin cigarette.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.