Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.

John Kessel teaches creative writing and literature at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, his books include Good News from Outer Space , Corrupting Dr. Nice , and The Pure Product. His story collection, Meeting in Infinity , was named a notable book of 1992 by the New York Times Book Review .

Kessel co-edited Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology with James Patrick Kelly. His recent collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories contains the 2008 Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-winning story “Pride and Prometheus.”

About “Every Angel is Terrifying” he says: “The cat was the only survivor of the family in Flannery O’Connor’s harrowing short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,’ so it was natural for me to carry it along into this story. But being a long-time student of cats (and having been the subject of their indifferent gaze in return), I can believe that they have the power to alter reality in metaphysical, if not physical, ways.”

Railroad watched Bobby Lee grab the grandmother’s body under the armpits and drag her up the other side of the ditch. “Whyn’t you help him, Hiram,” he said.

Hiram took off his coat, skidded down into the ditch after Bobby Lee, and got hold of the old lady’s legs. Together he and Bobby Lee lugged her across the field towards the woods. Her broken blue hat was still pinned to her head, which lolled against Bobby Lee’s shoulder. The woman’s face grinned lopsidedly all the way into the shadow of the trees.

Railroad carried the cat over to the Studebaker. It occurred to him that he didn’t know the cat’s name, and now that the entire family was dead he never would. It was a calico, gray striped with a broad white face and an orange nose. “What’s your name, puss-puss?” he whispered, scratching it behind the ears. The cat purred. One by one Railroad went round and rolled up the windows of the car. A fracture zigzagged across the windshield, and the front passenger’s vent window was shattered. He stuffed Hiram’s coat into the vent window hole. Then he put the cat inside the car and shut the door. The cat put its front paws up on the dashboard and, watching him, gave a pantomime meow.

Railroad pushed up his glasses and stared off toward the woodline where Bobby Lee and Hiram had taken the bodies. The place was hot and still, silence broken only by birdsong from somewhere up the embankment behind him. He squinted up into the cloudless sky. Only a couple of hours of sun left. He rubbed the spot on his shoulder where the grandmother had touched him. Somehow he had wrenched it when he jerked away from her.

The last thing the grandmother had said picked at him: “You’re one of my own children.” The old lady had looked familiar, but she didn’t look anything like his mother. But maybe his father had sown some wild oats in the old days—Railroad knew he had—could the old lady have been his mother, for real? It would explain why the woman who had raised him, the sweetest of women, could have been saddled with a son as bad as he was.

The idea caught in his head. He wished he’d had the sense to ask the grandmother a few questions. The old woman might have been sent to tell him the truth.

When Hiram and Bobby Lee came back, they found Railroad leaning under the hood of the car.

“What we do now, boss?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Police could be here any minute,” Hiram said. Blood was smeared on the leg of his khaki pants. “Somebody might of heard the shots.”

Railroad pulled himself out from under the hood. “Onliest thing we got to worry about now, Hiram, is how we get this radiator to stop leaking. You find a tire iron and straighten out this here fan. Bobby Lee, you get the belt off’n the other car.”

It took longer than the half hour Hiram had estimated to get the people’s Studebaker back on the road. By the time they did it was twilight, and the red-dirt road was cast in the shadows of the pinewoods. They pushed the stolen Hudson they’d been driving off into the trees and got into the Studebaker.

Railroad gripped the wheel of the car and they bounced down the dirt road toward the main highway. Hat pushed back on his head, Hiram went through the dead man’s wallet, while in the back seat Bobby Lee had the cat on his lap and was scratching it under the chin. “Kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty,” he murmured.

“Sixty-eight dollars,” Hiram said. “With the twenty-two from the wife’s purse, that makes ninety bucks.” He turned around and handed a wad of bills to Bobby Lee. “Get rid of that damn cat,” he said. “Want me to hold yours for you?” he asked Railroad.

Railroad reached over, took the bills, and stuffed them into the pocket of the yellow shirt with bright blue parrots, that had belonged to the husband who’d been driving the car. Bailey Boy, the grandmother had called him. Railroad’s shoulder twinged.

The car shuddered; the wheels had been knocked out of kilter when it rolled. If he tried pushing past fifty, it would shake itself right off the road. Railroad felt the warm weight of his pistol inside his belt, against his belly. Bobby Lee hummed tunelessly in the back seat. Hiram was quiet, fidgeting, looking out at the dark trees. He tugged his battered coat out of the vent window, tried to shake some of the wrinkles out of it. “You oughtn’t to use a man’s coat without saying to him,” he grumbled.

Bobby Lee spoke up. “He didn’t want the cat to get away.”

Hiram sneezed. “Will you throw that damn animal out the damn window?”

“She never hurt you none,” Bobby Lee said.

Railroad said nothing. He had always imagined that the world was slightly unreal, that he was meant to be the citizen of some other place. His mind was a box. Outside the box was that world of distraction, amusement, annoyance. Inside the box his real life went on, the struggle between what he knew and what he didn’t know. He had a way of acting—polite, detached—because that way he wouldn’t be bothered. When he was bothered, he got mad. When he got mad, bad things happened.

He had always been prey to remorse, but now he felt it more fully than he had since he was a boy. He hadn’t paid enough attention. He’d pegged the old lady as a hypocrite and had gone back into his box, thinking her just another fool from that puppet world. But that moment of her touching him—she’d wanted to comfort him. And he shot her.

What was it the old woman had said? “You could be honest if you’d only try… Think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time.”

He knew she was only saying that to save her life. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be a message.

Outside the box, Hiram asked, “What was all that yammer yammer with the grandmother about Jesus? We doing all the killing while you yammer yammer.”

“He did shoot the old lady,” Bobby Lee said.

“And made us carry her off to the woods, when if he’d of waited she could of walked there like the others. We’re the ones get blood on our clothes.”