Last Drink Bird Head Read online

  LAST DRINK BIRD HEAD

  flash fiction for charity

  Edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

  Assistant Editor, Selena Chambers

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  All work © 2009 by the individual authors

  All rights reserved by the individual creators

  Interior Design © 2009 by John Coulthart

  EBook Design © 2010 by Neil Clarke

  Covert art © 2009 by Scott Eagle

  Cover Design © 2009 by Jacob McMurray

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-890464-12-7

  A Ministry of Whimsy Book,

  an imprint of Wyrm Publishing.

  Wyrm Publishing

  P.O. Box 172

  Stirling, NJ 07980

  www.wyrmpublishing.com

  www.lastdrinkbirdhead.com

  Portions of K.J. Bishop’s contribution were generated with the aid of www.comroepelting.org.

  Special thanks to Matt Staggs for his help in compiling this collection.

  Dedicated to all the people who tirelessly continue to teach others to read and who share their love of books.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  LDBH: NO MORE BIRD MASKS!

  Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer

  Daniel Abraham, Michael A. Arnzen

  Steve Aylett, K.J. Bishop

  Michael Bishop, Desirina Boskovich

  Keith Brooke, Jesse Bullington

  Richard Butner, Catherine Cheek

  Matthew Cheney, Michael Cisco

  Gio Clairval, Alan M. Clark

  Brendan Connell, Paul Di Filippo

  Stephen R. Donaldson, Rikki Ducornet

  Clare Dudman, Hal Duncan

  Scott Eagle, Brian Evenson

  Eliot Fintushel, Jeffrey Ford

  Richard Gehr, Felix Gilman

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Rhys Hughes, Paul Jessup

  Antony Johnston, John Kaiine

  Henry Kaiser, Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Tessa Kum, Ellen Kushner

  Jay Lake, Tanith Lee

  Stina Leicht, Therese Littleton

  Beth Adele Long, Dustin Long

  J.M. McDermott, Nick Mamatas

  Sarah Monette, Kari O’Connor

  Ben Peek, Holly Phillips

  Louis Phillips, Tim Pratt

  Cat Rambo, Mark Rich

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Nicholas Royle, Eric Schaller

  Ekaterina Sedia, Ramsey Shehadeh

  Peter Straub, Victoria Strauss

  Michael Swanwick, Mark Swartz

  Alan Swirsky, Rachel Swirsky

  Sonya Taaffe, Justin Taylor

  Steve Rasnic Tem, Jeffrey Thomas

  Scott Thomas, John Urbancik

  Genevieve Valentine, Jeff VanderMeer

  Kim Westwood, Leslie What

  Drew Rhys White, Conrad Williams

  Liz Williams, Neil Williamson

  Caleb Wilson, Gene Wolfe

  Jonathan Wood, Marly Youmans

  Catherine Zeidler, Derek Ford

  Title Page & Credits

  Cover

  LDBH: NO MORE BIRD MASKS!

  Like most insane ideas, Last Drink Bird Head came about as a result of some creative play between friends. My long-time partner in crime, or at least illustration, Eric Schaller had sent me the amazing art pictured above. It was titled “Last Drink Bird Head”. At the time I was creating the re-imagined version of my Secret Life story collection, Secret Life Redux: Select Fire Remix, and it seemed the perfect opportunity to include Eric’s art. So I wrote a short-short to accompany Eric’s LDBH, and then happened to mention the name to another mutual friend, Matthew Cheney, who jokingly created his own LDBH, which began, “Last Drink Bird Head was last seen stumbling out of a bar in Athens, Georgia, muttering something about R.E.M. and selling out.” As when Allen Ruch, who went by the moniker “The Great Quail,” emailed to say he had Mad Quail Disease—thus sparking the craziness that was The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases—Matt’s email was the catalyst for the anthology you hold in your hands.

  However, just as Last Drink Bird Head changes from story to story in this anthology, so too does the backstory of its inception, apparently. When he read my version of events, Cheney wrote to add this anecdote:

  A few months before I sent you my little squib, I was working as an adjunct professor at the Lehrer Institute of Ornithological Exasperation, spending most of my nights performing experiments in animal husbandry…until, unfortunately, the authorities discovered what I was doing. I had to flee with little more than a wool blanket and a cup of warm milk. I began research on the effects of spirits on morality, and it was during this time that the great singer-songwriter Mojo Nixon wrote a ballad I, inadvertently, helped inspire: “Are You Drinkin’ with Me, Jesus?” Somewhere along the line, you emailed me, worried that I might be mixing drinks in aviaries, and I had a debilitating attack of precognitive deja vu—I was certain I would remember something similar to all this in the future. Thus, having reached the lowest point of my life, I decided I would write about what my existence felt like, trying to capture in prose my experiences of the previous months, because when it’s impossible to get any lower, one can always be a writer. And so I was. And so I am.

  Eric, meanwhile, had a totally different perception of the timing of the catalyst, which just goes to show that I am a very observant person…

  Some years ago I was involved in making illustrations for Jeff’s City of Saints and Madmen. Some these illustrations included festival celebrants whom I usually depicted wearing bird masks with elongated beaks. At a certain point, perhaps a little concerned that readers would think the citizens of Ambergris did nothing but wander around in bird costume, Jeff said to me, almost apologetically, “No more bird masks, alright?”

  Skip forward several years. I’m working on another project with Jeff and, for this, I make an illustration I call Last Drink. In the illustration, a man is slumped across a table with an upended wine glass and something is crawling out of his ear. Now, in the original version that something had a skeletal bird head, Damn, I thought, Jeff doesn’t want any more bird heads. I’ve got to change that. So I changed the something into cadaverous female form and sent it to Jeff. The name of that image file was LastDrink.

  Skip forward another couple of years. Jeff and his lovely wife Ann are up in New Hampshire for New Year’s Eve (no, don’t ask why anyone would come up from sunny Florida to New Hampshire in mid-winter). At some point, I get out my portfolio and show Jeff and Matt Cheney some of my artwork. Among the pieces I show is the original ink work for Last Drink, the one in which the something coming out of the man’s ear has a skeletal bird head. “Ooooh, I like that!” says Jeff.

  The name of new image file, after I make the revisions and send it down to Jeff: LastDrinkBirdHead.

  Soon thereafter, I started emailing the guidelines around to a few writers, figuring we’d do some sort of chapbook for charity. Unlike for the fake disease guide, the guidelines I sent were deliberately vague, with the subject line “Last Drink Bird Head: Don’t Think, Just Write” and usually were sprung on the unsuspecting recipient without warning:

  Last Drink Bird Head

  Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head?

  He, she, or it.

  Description, anecdote, or story.

  Under 500 words.

  Proceeds to go to literacy charities.

  Don’t ask—just write.

  Jeff

  (First rule of Last Drink Bird Head club: Do not discuss LDBH with others. Second rule: Do not share this email with anyone. Pleas
e.)

  I wanted the writers to engage, if possible, in some sort of automatic writing—to get the guidelines and, without thinking, sit down to write. Ann and I are big fans of surrealist games, and this seemed to promise the best way to solicit a bunch of short-shorts. Of course, it also confused more than a few writers. Some didn’t respond, and others wanted clarification, which I was perversely unwilling to give.

  Still, as usual, and in a kind of haphazard, flailing way the project grew and grew until, with over eighty contributors, we clearly had a book rather than a chapbook. The result is this lovely hardcover meant for dipping into and arranged in alphabetical order by author. You’ll find a good mix of new and established writers, and if you discover someone whose work you really love but hadn’t read before, you should go check out their books.

  All proceeds from the anthology go to ProLiteracy.org. We are not taking an editorial fee. The cover has been donated by artist Scott Eagle, the cover design donated by Jacob McMurray and the interior design donated by John Coulthart. In addition to Eric’s frontispiece, Derek Ford has contributed a wonderful ending piece that also captures the spirit of Last Drink Bird Head. We hope you enjoy this quirky little anthology, and be sure to check out www.lastdrinkbirdhead.com in the coming months, as we’ll be launching an additional fundraising effort for charity from that site.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  DANIEL ABRAHAM

  Daniel Abraham is the author of The Long Price Quartet, a couple dozen short stories, a third of a book called Hunter’s Run, and some stuff by M. L. N. Hanover. He received the International Horror Guild award for his short fiction.

  From dawn to sunset, Last Drink Bird Head is a tackle shop and bait store on the edge of the bayou about 30 miles east of the memory of New Orleans. From sundown until everyone falls asleep, it’s a gentleman’s drinking club (buy yourself a glass, you’re a member of the club) that has made itself famous in a subterranean way among blues and rock musicians. It takes its name from an old sign—a Mallard duck’s head with “Last Drink for 80 Miles of Swamp” stenciled in gold spray paint—out by the road.

  Well, the last time I was out there was 1993. The place wasn’t much to look at, even then. Distressed and rustic looks a lot like half-rotten and falling down when you don’t slap a $500 price tag on every plank chair. Anyway, I was there with this girl I was seeing at the time; a senator’s daughter with long, brown hair and more than just a touch of the wild child about her. I fell for her pretty hard, and she thought I was amusing enough to keep around for a while.

  We were in a Yugo with the back window shot out (long story), so highway driving was problematic. We got there about two hours later than we’d planned, so we missed the set-up. I remember making the last turn and seeing the place; windows and doors open and light shining out into the darkness like it was a lantern. The trees seemed to be leaning in toward it, just to hear a little better. I pulled the Yugo up close to the north wall, and we went in. I’m from the high desert, so between the moisture and being at sea level, the air was pretty thick for me. Tom Waits (no shit) was playing the piano and croaking out a love song that I’ve never heard him record. The place was wall-to-wall people, maybe thirty in a space the size of my studio apartment; it smelled like seafood and black pepper, and it was sweating hot. The senator’s daughter and I squeezed in, and Morton, the guy who owns the place, handed us back a couple of plastic picnic glasses of cold beer. If I close my eyes, I can still remember more or less what her body felt like, pressed against mine for want of space, with real music in the air and no cell phone service.

  I am an atheist so I don’t believe these stories, but I have heard this theory more than once from people whose experience of Last Drink Bird Head was much like mine and whose understanding of God is more intimate and so I’ll pass it on here: It may be that in the supernatural balance of good and evil some places exist so sublime and at the same time so authentic that the angels and the demons come together there, drink with each other, slow dance, and weep, and if afterwards they go out to fight in the parking lot it’s with a hollowness in their bestial souls that comes from knowing that the moment of communion has passed them by and that they are once again only angels and demons when for a moment they had been something greater and more complex and so lovely that a stupid, love-drunk boy and a senator’s daughter and the shadow-soaked trees themselves all leaned in a little closer, just to listen.

  MICHAEL A. ARNZEN

  Michael A. Arnzen is the author of 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, among many others. He teaches full time in the Writing Popular Fiction MFA program at Seton Hill University. Visit him online at www.gorelets.com

  The final DrinkBird head dropped down onto the conveyor, and as it made its way toward me, the workers peeled away from their positions like show planes rolling off a squadron. I prepped my tools, ready to smear my gun along the gummy pink sneer of its inner beak. I was the denture man. After me, all DrinkBird heads went to the robots in packaging and distribution.

  But today was the end of the line. We’d all be out of work tomorrow. Even the robots. DrinkBird heads typically stared forward as stupidly as decapitated hat mannequins. But the last DrinkBird head, the very end of its species, had an air of defiance etched into its avian skull. Some workers preened a tuft of feathers here, or sprayed an extra swoosh of tinting there, signing off in their own special ways—but at the end of the conveyor, I was in the unique position to see what can only be called a “soul” manifesting in the DrinkBird as it approached me on the rolling rubber. She was like some Egyptian princess being outfitted by a slavish entourage for her awaiting betrothed.

  Or the sarcophagus.

  I drizzled a sticky line of glue down an ivory row of razor-sharp incisors. They glinted in my hand like pearls, and I imagined her as a queen to the others we’ve made, a mother DrinkBird commanding her flock. I could see them clouding the sky in an outrageous spectacle of flying decapitation.

  She arrived. I inserted her mouthpiece and then pressed her beak closed with a gentle pinch. I took comfort in the sensation and then let go, watching the lips of her beak gently lift apart, kissing air.

  She chirruped, just as I was about to send her off to distribution. I grabbed her up by the temples and she cawed and struggled in my grip, begging in DrinkBirdspeak for freedom.

  I obeyed, tucking the last DrinkBird head under my coat and rushing into the locker room. I nested her inside my black gym bag and pale eyelids slid down her glazed eyes as I zipped it shut.

  As I waited in line for severance, DrinkBird mewled in the bag, but a few machines still chortled their final gasps around us, providing camouflage.

  I took her to the nearest park and sat on a secluded bench. I scooped her out of the bag, gently, like lifting the heavy head of an infant. Her scalp’s down spread soft and scratchy between my fingers.

  DrinkBird awakened, pecking air.

  Then she clasped her beak over my thumb. I could feel her teeth grinding my knuckle as the squishy mouth worked with its stiff tongue. Her ears soon unfurled like fetal wings, freaked purple with veins.

  I gave her my other thumb. It hurt, but I didn’t mind giving the last DrinkBird head her very first drink.

  I craned my head and waited. Above, a dark cloud.

  STEVE AYLETT

  Steve Aylett is author of LINT, Slaughtermatic and other books, and is creator of The Caterer comic. www.steveaylett.com

  Viewed from the side he looked normal but from the front it was clear his head was less than an inch wide across, as if he’d been slammed from both sides by a steam-hammer. So in the bar he always held a pint glass directly in front of his face—the view through the glass magnified his features and made him look normal. But he had to keep the glass constantly raised and keep a steady supply of drink within the glass to maintain the magnification, though his tiny mouth caused most of it to spill down his front. He couldn’t stand up to buy a round because people might see his sliver-of-a-head from be
hind. So, despite his miniscule lips, he told riotous stories, the most entertaining man alive, which served to get people buying him a steady stream of drinks but also made him the painful centre of attention. As the evening neared its end and time was called, the stress would mount. He kept a small obedient dog by his side so that he could pick it up, kiss it, say “I love ya,” and pretend that it had suddenly started scrabbling all over his head and face in a chaotic way as he ran shouting from the bar into the night. He did this for twenty-seven years until he was flattened by a truck upon leaving the pub. Peer pressure is a terrible thing.

  K.J. BISHOP

  K.J. Bishop is the author of the Crawford award-winning novel The Etched City. She is currently working on another novel and a short story collection.

  1)

  Last Drink Bird Head didn’t fit in at school. When the others were candles, she was lemons. When doors closed she was on the wrong side. She hated the flavour of milk and cellophane. When she jumped rope she was a merry-go-round horse with an orange face. She couldn’t sit down anywhere, not even on the toilet, without saying “Last Drink Bird Head” three times. When it was her turn to feed the goldfish she fed them glitter and they died.

  Last Drink Bird Head didn’t walk, she rolled. She screamed at baseball games because she felt sorry for the ball. Wherever she was she always wanted to go home.

  Last Drink Bird Head knew how she was going to die. The 10 of Diamonds, the one with the lions coming around all 40 corners, was going to get her.

  When it happened just like that the other kids fell silent over their beers and stopped reading their form guides, until Miss Axelrod called last drinks, so that no one saw how at the very end the smile broke her face like a horse breaking the gate before the race.