Last Drink Bird Head Read online

  The cat eased closer.

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. She found she was angry at being the last. Why couldn’t another have been to blame for all the deaths? Fear pulsed through her glass body. Would it be painful, dying? Would she live on in another form?

  The cat’s bulk blotted out the light.

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-

  THERESE LITTLETON

  Therese Littleton is a biologist, writer, and curator living in Seattle, Washington. She can be found online at thingsiwontdo.blogspot.com

  I loved that damn pigeon. So when I got home and found out that he was missing, I was steaming mad. But Gerald said that Billy had flown away. Birds’ll do that, he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, like to comfort me. But I knew Billy hadn’t flown. He wasn’t that kind of bird. Smartest, most useful pigeon you ever met. I found him a couple years ago in an attic and he had lived with us ever since. A pet, but more like a friend in these troubled times. Now he was gone. I brought some food, I said, looking at Gerald but looking past him, too. He grinned and said let’s see, so I showed him the jar of peanut butter, only a little moldy. He dug right in, leaving half for me like he always did. Billy’s part usually came out of my ration. I didn’t have the heart to eat, thinking of his pretty feathers. I got something else, I said to Gerald. What, he said, smacking his lips. I pulled out the bottle of Wild Turkey that had got kicked under a shelf down at the liquor store so that no one had noticed it all this time. Probably the last booze in the city. I pulled out our two rickety chairs, and that’s when I saw it. A small, dark ball in the garbage can, half-hidden under some rags. Billy’s little head with the yellow beak. I shook for a minute, looking at it. But then I pretended like I hadn’t seen nothing and poured two glasses of brown bourbon. We sat there sipping like it was old times at some bar. I kept refilling Gerald’s glass but just playing at drinking mine. I was getting really, really hungry, but I let Gerald scoop up and eat the rest of the peanut butter. His eyes finally closed and as he passed out I said to him if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s friends eating friends. And you ain’t no friend of mine.

  BETH ADELE LONG

  Beth Adele Long is a web developer, actress, writer, reader. Occasionally she updates her own website: bethadele.com

  Tea. Tea! Tea would make it better. Tea made everything better. She fled to the kitchen.

  Her favorite cup, the one with the romantically incomprehensible Chinese characters—where was it? Where was it? Great Osprey above, where had she—oh no, no no no, none of that. She stilled her mind, found the cup, washed it with trembling fingers. When she clicked the burner on, the gas flames leapt up blue-white and laughing at her cephalic substitution. She slammed the kettle atop their merriment.

  She opened the tea cupboard and hopped up to perch on the counter—damn you! Get down off there! No perching! She scolded herself back down to the floor, where she planted her bare feet on the Pergot, resolutely simian.

  When she wasn’t careful, her long beak smacked against the cupboard door.

  She peered at the boxes and canisters with one eye. Jasmine green tea. Yes. That would calm her. Help her to think this through. Which she might have done in the first place. Hadn’t she read the books? Heard the tales? Hadn’t she known what happened when one did this sort of thing?

  But of course, she had.

  The kettle screamed its readiness and she let the tea ritual take over her body. She cursed herself for a fool, knowing that even now she would have done the same thing again.

  She took her tea in search of a place to sit and think. No mirrors, great gods no mirrors. She needed a thoroughly non-reflective room in which to reflect. Of course the only one in the house was… .

  The vial sat where she had left it, the rest of the clear liquid winking in the lamplight. She folded down to the floor. Through trial and error she discovered how to ingest the tea, though it involved setting the cup on the floor and tapping around till she found it with the horrifying (graceful) beak.

  And these feathers! Her (naked) skin faded at the collarbone into awful (radiant) feathers!

  She stood and opened the curtains. A glorious day, by any standards. Sun, breeze, air sweet as requited love. The great sky opened like a book, asking to be read.

  She turned her back and finished the tea as best she could before picking up the vial. She sighed. She supposed birds didn’t cry, so shedding a melodramatic final tear was really out of the question.

  She opened the window. Raised and lowered her arms, experimenting. Preparing. Then she set the vial on the floor and began tapping around till her beak found it.

  DUSTIN LONG

  Dustin Long is a PhD student at Indiana University and the author of the novel Icelander. He lives in New York City.

  “The body lies exactly as I found it. Nothing has been touched.”

  “Except the floor and the phone,” I said. “Your wingtips have trod this floor, Lieutenant. From the rug, trailing port across the tile, and over to the phone.”

  “The port was unavoidable. It’s all over the place. And I was careful not to disturb the prints when I called you. Is it important, Rikard?”

  “That is what we shall determine.”

  The old man’s body lay supine in the middle of the rug. Turkmenistani, soaked through from an empty bottle clutched in the man’s right hand. Another empty bottle sat on his desk. His eyes were open. So was his mouth, flecked with spittle in the corners. Left hand at his side. An antique dagger still protruding progressively outward from heart, chest, jacket and note:

  To Rikard,

  Last Drink Bird Head

  I had already solved the case, but the note intrigued me.

  Was it a message or a signature? Bird head… . A jab at my nose?

  I leant down to sniff his breath.

  “What do you make of it?” the Lieutenant asked me.

  “The most obvious solution is that the ‘last drink’ was port. Bird head is more difficult. Horus, perhaps? Falcon-headed Egyptian sun god. A clumsy substitution for ‘Horace,’ the culprit’s name? Or a destination where we might find him, perhaps.”

  “Port Horus? I don’t recall ever seeing such a place on any map. The murderer trying to misdirect us, then?”

  “Hmm, yes, misdirection indeed,” I replied, looking back to the note and admiring the penmanship. “For even if there is such a place as Port Horus, there is no murderer. This man committed suicide. Port and laudanum. The dagger was inserted afterwards. But why, Lieutenant? Why did you stab him?”

  “Excuse me?” He straightened his posture.

  “No games, Lieutenant. As you’ve pointed out, the port is unavoidable. Yet your shoe prints are the only ones leading from the rug.”

  After a moment of silence, he began to laugh. “Amazing,” he sputtered. His jowls quaked. “How many cases have you solved in the blink of an eye that would have befuddled a lesser man for months?”

  “By my count, this is the seventeenth time that you have drunk from the font of my wisdom.”

  “You see things that no one else can.”

  “So?” I asked. I rubbed my fingers over the fiber of the note. Thick and perfumed. “Why?”

  “As you say, Rikard, this man wasn’t the victim. He was merely the method.”

  I looked up again to see that he had pulled a revolver on me in my distraction.

  “Professional jealousy, or something more personal?” I asked.

  “You’re an arrogant ass. Always with your ‘How can you be so blind, Lieutenant?’”

  “Personal, then,” I nodded. “But the note? You’ve managed to intrigue me. What is the meaning of the note?”

  “If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m afraid you never will.”

  And so saying, he cocked the hammer and placed the gun’s barrel right between my eyes.

  J. M. MCDERMOTT
r />   J. M. McDermott’s first novel, Last Dragon, was shortlisted for the Crawford Prize. He lives north of Atlanta, where he writes for video games.

  I work at this gay bar called Last Drink, Birdhead. A big, white clay sculpture sleeps in a business suit in a corner booth. It’s shaped kind of like a bald, brutish thug or maybe an albino cigar-store Indian. The skin feels like clay but it’s a whitish color like dried cement. A piece of paper nailed to its forehead reads Last Drink, Birdhead.

  People slip notes into the thing’s pockets, unsigned. When the pockets fill up, we pull out all the notes and read them out loud to the whole bar. We laugh and laugh at those crazy, drunk love letters. Anyway, this hulking statue in a business suit has been here forever. I learned what it is.

  One night, a fellow came in. He was just as weird looking as the statue, in a different way. He was long and thin, with a face the same color as a prosthetic limb, sunglasses at night, and a walk like a gangling bird. He wore a long, black overcoat – freaks always wear overcoats—and a big hat, too. He limped in with that slight metallic whisper that hinted at bouncer-scaring mysteries beneath his coat.

  He came straight to me, smiling. I asked for his ID.

  His was a fake, but it gave his name as “Richard Birdhead”.

  You’re new, he said to me, when I held the ID. I had been there for eight months, but I didn’t tell him that.

  Even with the fake ID, the freak looked old enough for a drink.

  I poured the best whiskey in the house. I watched him carry it over to the statue. He gently poured a drop of whiskey between the clay lips.

  I ran over to stop him. I didn’t want freaks pouring whiskey everywhere. James, the other bartender, stopped me.

  Mr. Birdhead’s the owner, said James. He does that sometimes.

  The robot strutted back to me like a pimp king.

  I renamed it with the last note it wrote to me before I poisoned it, said Mr. Birdhead. Golems cannot handle strong drink. A sip of whiskey kills them for a year.

  The robot opened its coat. I saw the steel and wires through its sheer silk clothes. I saw—and this I remember clearly—a vial of blood on a leather string around the robot’s neck.

  I would rather use my existence for pleasure. I always carry the blood I was built to clone and to raise. A rabbi made that golem with the white mud of Auschwitz before dying. I was built by the golem to birth the rabbi, again. The robot closed his coat. I’m nobody’s bitch.

  I looked into its sunglasses, and its mysteries.

  The robot touched my hand. You’re cute, new boy. What’s your name?

  I pulled my hand back. Nobody’s bitch, I cooed.

  After the robot left, I hid my own message in the golem’s pockets.

  Want to know what I wrote, loverboy? The best whiskey? Why not borrow a hammer?

  NICK MAMATAS

  Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels and over sixty stories, many of which were collected in the short story collection You Might Sleep... His website is cleverly located at www.nick-mamatas.com

  Ever hear that old saw about that whoop’n’wail church down South somewhere, where they all meet in tin trailers three nights and two mornings a week? You know, they’re against having sex standing up, because it might lead to dancing? And dancing leads to Negro music? And Negro music leads to hell?

  Well, the Last Drink Bird Head is a peculiar sexual act that we can place somewhere on this continuum between Negro Music and hell.

  First, take a man. Place him up against a chilly wall to give his buttocks a little shiver. Not a corner, mind you, just along a wall, with plenty of room on either side. His erection should be parallel to the floor. Then take a woman. Have her stand on her hands, in front of the man, with her back and backside to him, her legs parallel to the floor and sticking outward. Insert the penis into her anus.

  Then take another man, and hypnotize him. The ol’ “light as a feather, stiff as a board” routine will do, as this is also Satanic, just like Little Richard. Once he is stiff, and also stiff, lift him up and wedge him, penis first, between the woman’s legs. His forehead should be balanced on top of the first man’s skull, creating an A-shape of sorts.

  These three people are not performing Last Drink Bird Head. Instead, this is a preliminary position, one called The Handicapped Parking Space Inexplicably Placed Right Outside The School For The Blind.

  Last Drink Bird Head, my friend, involves you. You, who have found these people and have so carefully placed them in this position.

  How’d you manage it, by the way? I mean, I tried to get Estelle to get her friend Mimi into bed with us once—Mimi’s a wild girl, tan like a clay mug, some guy makes her car payments for her, she’s always off to the Bahamas or something, and she has tits you just want to bang together like cymbals all night long—and it was a month on the couch for me. But, anyways, Last Drink Bird Head.

  Go to the kitchen. Get some butter. Take off your clothes. Grease yourself up good. Like a Channel swimmer.

  I should add at this point that it doesn’t matter what gender you are, but women tend to have an easier time completing the El Dee Bee Haitch, because they’re less likely to get their genitals snagged on something.

  All glistening and slippery in your kitchen now? Good. Walk back to the room where you’ve placed the trio. Be careful, you might slip and fall right on your ass. Walk like a heron, knees high and footfalls deliberate. There ya go.

  Walk off to the side of the room where the trio waits, entwined and afraid to thrust, but so anxious to do so. Get in the corner.

  On your mark.

  Get ready.

  Get set.

  GO!

  Run right at them then fling yourself at and throoooough the opening between the three sexual partners! The butterlube will send you slipping right through the gap, unless you’re a man with an erection, then you might get snagged. (Feel free to use peanut butter to temporarily spackle your penis to your belly if you’re very worried.) You’ll fly in, through, and past your three sex partners and slam, head first, right into the opposite wall. The night will be a cherry bomb behind your eyes.

  The next morning, you’ll have a pretty good bump on the top of your noggin’. That’s the Last Drink Bird Head.

  SARAH MONETTE

  Sarah Monette wanted to be a writer when she grew up, and now she is. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com

  Their names don’t translate.

  We can look at the symbols of their language, and we can identify them.

  Last.

  Drink.

  Bird.

  Head.

  We can open the doors with our machines, and we can investigate what we find: the dust, the bones, the leathery remnants of skin, the stains of spilled blood.

  They were oxygen-breathers, like us.

  There was a disaster. We can read those symbols, too: the adult body sheltering the child, the petrified carnage in what was once a control room, the bodies piled at exits which failed to open.

  They were hardwired with the fight-or-flight response, like us.

  We don’t know who they were. We don’t know how long they’ve been dead. Their species doesn’t seem to have survived. Lots of species don’t.

  Last Drink Bird Head—or, at least, that’s what the symbols on its coverall say—died trying to defend a piece of equipment we cannot identify. We can’t identify any of their equipment; it’s been all but pulverized, and there is no hope of recovering data from any of it.

  And then we find another Last Drink Bird Head; this one died trying to open one of the doors. We wince away from our own reconstruction, but the evidence is clear. It died clutching a tool; it died crushed against the edge of an access panel. It was killed by the panic of those it was trying to help.

  Another Last Drink Bird Head, in what we guess must have been a communications booth. Its head is a horrible pulp of bone and gray matter, and the corresponding mess on the jagged remains of what might have been comm
unications equipment tells us more than we want to know about its death.

  A fourth Last Drink Bird Head, this one strapped in a chair in the ruined control room. Its manipulative appendages have been hacked off, not by accident. We can see that it died screaming, and for a moment the sound of our programmed alarm is like the echo of its death.

  Our time is up. We have collected all the information we can in the grace period allotted to us. There are valuable resources here; some other species’ ancient disaster may be interesting, but it is hardly profitable, and we cannot even pretend that anything of their technology might be salvaged. We return to our vessel, upload frantic notes of everything we saw and measured and thought, try not to watch the ponderous machines move in.

  Understanding comes belatedly, as we find ourselves increasingly unable to look away from this last stage of those poor dead creatures’ deaths. Last Drink Bird Head was their vessel. They wore its name to mark them as its employees or symbiotes or however the relationship was understood in their culture.

  In the end, we did not even know the symbols of their names.

  KARI O’CONNOR

  Kari O’Connor lives and works in Las Vegas, and is finishing her first novel. Her website is www.karinotvery.net

  I heard her at a reading. This was a few years ago, when they let us smoke inside while we drank coffee. Of course, I don’t smoke, and wouldn’t normally include myself in the smokers’ group, but there’s something about smoke and coffee that makes the world right.

  Anyway, it was a reading. The last reading, ever. We could’ve looked out the window, and maybe seen the water falling off the edge of the world, or get too close to a star to read it a sestina.

  The room was silent, and filled with so much smoke you couldn’t see the walls anymore. Or the ceiling, or the floor, or even a hand in front of you. The smoke was almost as dense as the silence between the words of the poets.