Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

Skinny loves animals. Birds, mice, lizards and turtles, pythons (small ones), baby alligators. Right now it’s golden hamsters. Of course her father running a pet shop is a big help. Sometimes it builds way up and gets to be a sort of balanced economy… the mice ate the birdseed and the blacksnake ate the mice. Once Skinny had twenty-three birds. They were kind of enjoyable flying around, except when they buzzed you, but they started pulling off the wallpaper in little ribbons and they made everybody sort of uneasy about the smorgasbord. Eventually she cut down to seven parakeets.

Some animals she has no luck with. Twice she has cats but they got out fast. The spaniel slipped its leash and we never saw him again… that was my fault. Once she had two Samoyeds. They were just her style… big and white and woolly and fierce looking. She liked to walk them. But one got run over and the other bit some people. Skinny right away had me drive the dog into the next county and sell it. The people never found out who it belonged to.

We had the same trouble with the baby alligator. Skinny left it outside one night in a puddle under a washtub to give it a little nature and it worked its way out. It bit two neighbors who were weeding their gardens before we stopped hearing about it. It had bitten me too, before I found out how fast it could move. A baby alligator’s bite is the funniest thing when it’s fresh… a little crescent of red drops on your hand with two bigger drops for the eyeteeth.

The boa constrictor… it was only five feet long… just lost its appetite and sort of faded. Skinny thought a vacation in Mother’s garden would refresh it, but Mother refused.

Of course the animals are a lot of work, sometimes more than the plants. But Skinny gets a big kick out of them. Skinny’s wonderful. Why, she…

All right, gentlemen, I’ll subside. I can see that Skinny is too much for you. Especially Skinny and animals. That’s all right; She’s sometimes too much for me. I understand. I’ll just have one more beer at the end of the bar and quietly talk to myself.

Skinny loves me too. She really does. She tries to make something out of me and that’s the test. She’s done everything she could to give me ambition and sober me up. She’s had me take antabuse and join AA and her father gives me dianstic therapy. She’s really worked on me. She loves me, all right. Of course there was that screenwriter… he said… and the time she started to Constantinople with the Turkish medical student and those three months she just disappeared, but those were exceptions. And of course she gets mad at me sometimes and talks about murdering me, but I know it’s just a gag when she asks people at parties about undetectable poisons and how do you induce a heart attack in someone who refuses to exert himself.

Yes, that’s for me. I’ll take it. Hello, Skinny. Yes, I’m here. Well, I don’t know how long. All right, right away. I said right away. Yes, I’ll keep an eye out for golden hamsters the last couple of blocks. What? Look, Skinny, I can’t handle that slab all by myself… George and Fred were going to help, they said they would, remember? Well, that’s too bad. Yes, I suppose a taxi would help, but not enough and the driver probably wouldn’t allow it. You can still use the old coffee table top for the party tonight. I know the new one’s going to look nicer but you’ll have all the rest of your life to enjoy it. Well, it may be only three inches thick but that’s still damn heavy. I don’t care if the cutter has to get rid of all his samples. He can hold onto it a day longer… it isn’t the sort of thing a person can toss in the trashcan. I absolutely refuse… Oh I can, Can I? Well, you know where you can shove it!

Draw me one more beer, will you, one for the road? Yes, that was Skinny. Better give me a shot too, this time. I’m going to need it. On the way home I got to pick up a gravestone.

The oval bedroom and boudoir rocked with the wind and shook with the thunder. The curving, tempered glass of the continuous-view windows strained, relaxed, strained again. The lightning flashes showed outside only the lashing tops of the big pines against inky night. Inside they regularly drowned the clusters of rosy lights and blanched to bone the quilted, pearl-gray satin upholstery. At one end of the oval, the silvery, spiral stairway leading up to the flat roof and down to the elevator floor cast momentarily flaring, fantastic shadows across the tufted floor and the great central bed with its huge silk pillows and pearl-gray comforter.

The old lady occupying an edge of the bed looked like the bent-waist mummy of a girl freshly wrapped and hurriedly fitted with a shaggy blonde wig and blonde silk nightgown. But the brown human claw did not tremble, holding the antique-inspired, pearl-gray phone greedily close to ear and lips, while the wrinkle-webbed eye gleamed with the lightning and without it, like jewels of obsidian or black onyx.

OLD LADY: Haven’t you got the doctor yet, you bitch?

ANSWERING SERVICE: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm is interfering with short-wave telephony.

OL : I know all about the storm. Haven’t you arranged yet for my medicine to be delivered, you incompetent slut?

AS : No, madam. The copters of all regional taxi and delivery services have been grounded by the storm. There have been two deaths by frightening—excuse me, lightning. I have your Cardinal pills here now. If the madam’s phone were equipped with a matter-receiver—

OL: It isn’t. Stop tormenting me by holding those pills just out of reach. Haven’t you got the doctor yet?

AS : No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm—

OL: That tape is beginning to bore me. You are just a bunch of tapes, aren’t you? All very cleverly keyed to whatever I say, but still just a bunch of tapes.

AS: No, madam. I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age 23, name Doris. It’s true, I sometimes think I’m just a tape. I’m surrounded by miles of them, which do answer routine inquiries. Alongside my matter-transmitter and keyboard I have a tape-writer for punching out more tapes. I have a long scissors and a pot of cement for editing them. But I am truly not a tape myself, though once I took a small bottle of sleeping pills because I thought—No, no, I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age 23…

OL :… name Doris. Yes, I got that on the first spin past the transmitting head. So now we have tapes with biographies, tapes that attempt suicide and ask for sympathy, tapes that play on the customer’s feelings. How charming. Here I am, an old woman, all alone in a storm, and without a single servant, ever since the government with its red tape and its oversell of democracy made it possible to hire them, or even private nurses. An old—

AS: You haven’t a robot nurse, madam?

OL : Shining horrors! No! I’m just an old, old woman, all alone, dying for lack of a doctor and medicine, but privileged to listen to tapes making excuses.

AS: Please, madam, I am not—

OL : Ooooh… my heart… please, nurse, my Cardinal pills… please, tape…

AS: Madam! Madam?

OL :… my heart… I’m going… ooooh…

AS: Madam, I’m breaking the rules to say this, but if you’re having a heart attack, it’s essential that you relax, make no effort or outcry, waste no strength on—

OL : Oooh… yes, and tapes to help you die quietly, to leave your tortured body without making a fuss that might embarrass the powers that be. Oh, don’t worry, dear tape,—and let’s not have any sympathetic-anxiety spools. I’m over that spasm now and merely waiting for the next. Just an old woman alone in the midst of a dreadful storm—hear that crash?—listening to tapes and waiting to die for lack of one Cardinal pill.