Small Magic: Collected Short Stories Part 16

"Yes," he growled. "Yes you can. We've been practicing, yes?"

She rolled away from him.

"Hey."

Nothing.

Arkady backed away from the bars and reared to his hind legs. With his forepaws folded across his chest, he began to shake slowly, back and forth. His snout t.i.tled toward the sky and opened, his teeth folding back too far until his mouth split and collapsed on either side. A head poked through the opening, a human head. A man's head with dark hair. The paws fell limp as the man pulled his arms from the bear's skin. His new fingers freed, Arkady pushed the bear down, sliding his torso, hips, and legs from the ever-widening maw of his former body. Naked and s.h.i.+vering, he regarded his new skin. The remnants of bear melted away.

"See, Nadia? So easy."

No answer.

Arkady reached through the bars of his cage, cold metal stinging against his naked flesh, and pulled open the latch, a task which the bear found impossible. He padded across to the other cage. "Nadia?"

Her head lifted toward him and her eyes widened. "Oh, Arkady. You were always a quick learner."

"You'll come with me. I'll show you how."

She shook her head. "I can't do it. I've never been as smart as you."

His hands fumbled at his sides, fingers twitching. "But-you should come anyway. We'll hide until you can change." He touched the cold metal bars. "Stay in the forests."

"Go alone, Arkady. I'm sick."

He didn't move.

The she-bear snarled at him, baring her yellow fangs.

"I won't leave," he said despite an unfamiliar, human fear.

She sniffed. "They'll catch you. Looking silly like that. Naked. You don't know what they'll do to you."

He looked at his new hands. "I needed to work the latch. We can blend in better this way."

"Just go...now."

He sank to his haunches, watching through bleary eyes as Nadia's side rose and fell with her breath. Voices tumbled into tent from without, laughter and boisterous stories. The men of the circus drank themselves into a stupor as they always did the last night in town. He worked the latch on Nadia's cage and stepped inside. She didn't move. Arkady swallowed the new, human fear. He brushed the stiff fur of her bear's coat, feeling the thick, stiff fibers, remembering its warmth as a cub when he wandered through pine boughs in the foothills of the Koryak Mountains. He couldn't go back, now.

"If this is what you want," he whispered.

She turned her snout. Bear's eyes met human. There was a quick nod.

Arkady sat next to Nadia for a long while, and then moved quietly, leaving her cage hanging open and slipping under the tent skirt away from the drunken circus men. He stumbled in his unfamiliar body.

Outside, the moon caught him with its bright face full of blemishes that bear eyes could only imagine. Arkady s.h.i.+vered in the cold, his human body covered with gooseflesh. His eyes gradually dropped to the dark line of trees in the distance, a black-smudge beneath a range of mountains not unlike his precious Koryaks. He patted his upper arms to beat away the chill. The lack of scent on the breeze surprised him, and he wondered if freedom always tasted so empty.

The new Arkady did not hear the sounds behind him, the lumbering footfalls of a great brown bear. He jumped when the paw dropped on his shoulder. But, after he fell to the ground, he saw Nadia's snout, her eyes. He could recognize those eyes from ten-thousand circus bears.

"Y-you've come," he said.

Nadia pushed close to him, sharing the warmth of her fur.

"I'll learn," she said. "For you, Arkady, I'll learn. You give me hope."

Chapter 75: Acknowledgements.

Stories which originally appeared in Every Day Fiction:.

"How to Burn a House"

"Faith"

"Billy Boy"

"Soul Marbles"

"The Sub-Bas.e.m.e.nt"

"Better Lessons"

"To Make Things Right"

"Blue Collar Boys"

"Inked"

"Donuts of the Living Dead"

Stories which originally appeared in Everyday Weirdness: "Gary Sump's Hidden City"

"Courts.h.i.+p"

"The Long Contract"

"Bona Fide King of His Realm"

Stories which originally appeared in Flashes in the Dark: "Communion"

"Fuzzy".

"Bleeding the Trees"

"Daddy's Touch"

Stories which originally appeared in Northern Haunts: "The Ox-Cart Man".

"Old Water"

Stories which originally appeared in other venues: "A Little Bit for Braz" Eclectic Flash "Enough" Necrotic Tissue "Manning Up" Misfit Magazine.

"Full Count" Eschatology "Dinner" Macabre Cadaver "Everything in its Place" 10Flash "Policy Woes" Hypersonic Tales.

"Different Strings" Whidbey Island Student Writers' Choice Award "Melons" Alienskin "The Man in the Hallway" Blood Moon Rising "Why Susie McTavish Believes in Angels" A Flame in the Dark.

"Watching the White Blossoms" The Foliate Oak "Night Lights" Niteblade: Nothing to Fear "Small Magic" (as "The Ballad of Arkady and Nadia") 100 Stories for Queensland.

Thanks especially to Robert Swartwood and Cate Gardner for several story t.i.tles.

end.