Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

Besides, the city’s so big, he’s never going to find us, even if he does come looking. It’s not like we run in the same circles or anything.

So I get in the cab, say something that I hope sounds calming to the cats, and we drive away.

I’ve got a different place now, a one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment which gives me access to a backyard. It’s not much, just a jungle of weeds and flowers gone wild, but the cats seem to like it.

I sit on the back steps sometimes and watch them romp around like… well, like the cats they are, I guess. I know I hurt the man who had them under his power, hurt him bad. And I know I walked into his house with a woman and came out with a cat. But it still feels like a dream.

It’s true the cat seems to understand everything I say, and acts smarter than I think a cat would normally act, but what do I know? I never had a pet before. And anybody I talk to seems to think the same thing about their own cat or dog.

I haven’t told anybody about any of this, though I did come at it from a different angle, sitting around the fire in the junkyard with Hank one night. There were a half-dozen of us. Moth, Hank’s girlfriend Lily, and some of the others from their extended family of choice. The junkyard’s in the middle of the city, but it backs onto the Tombs and it gets dark out there. As we sit in deck chairs, nursing beers and coffees, we watch the sparks flicker above the flames in the cut-down steel barrel Moth uses for his fires.

“Did you ever hear any stories about people that can turn into animals?” I ask during a lull in the conversation.

We have those kinds of talks. We can go from carbs and engine torques to what’s wrong with social services or the best kind of herbal tea for nausea. That’d be ginger tea.

“You mean like a werewolf?” Moth says.

Sitting beside him, Paris grins. She’s as dark-haired as Luisa was and her skin’s pretty much covered with tattoos that seem to move on their own in the flickering light.

“Nah,” she says. “Billy Joe’s just looking for a way to turn himself into a raccoon or a monkey so he can get into houses again but without getting caught.”

“I gave that up,” I tell her.

She smiles at me, eyes still teasing. “I know that. But I still like the picture it puts in my head.”

“There are all kinds of stories,” Hank says, “and we know one or two. The way they go, the animal people were here first and some of them are still living among us, not looking any different from you or me.”

They tell a few then—Hank and Lily and Katy, this pretty red-haired girl who lives on her own in a school bus not far from the junkyard. They all tell the stories like they’ve actually met the people they’re talking about, but Katy’s are the best. She’s got the real storyteller’s gift, makes you hang onto every word until she’s done.

“But what about if someone’s put a spell on someone?” I say after a few of their stories, because they’re mostly about people who were born that way, part-animal, part-human, changing their skins as they please. “You know any stories like that? How it works? How they get changed back?”

I’ve got a lot of people looking at me after I come out with that.

Nobody has an answer.

Moth gives me a look—but it’s curious, not demanding. “Why are you asking?” he says.

I just shrug. I don’t know that it’s my story to tell. But as the weeks go by I bring it up again and this time I tell them what happened, or at least what I think happened. Funny thing is, they just take me at my word. They start looking in on it for me, but nobody comes up with an answer.

Maybe there isn’t one.

So I just drive my cab and spend time with these new families of mine—both the one in the junkyard and the cats I’ve got back home. I find it gets easier to walk the straight-and-narrow, the longer you do it. Gets so that doing the right thing, the honest thing, comes like second nature to me.

But I never stop wondering about what happened that night. I don’t even know if they’re really cats who were pretending to be human, or humans that got turned into cats. I guess I’m always going to be waiting to see if they’ll change back.

But I don’t think about it twenty-four/seven. Mostly I just figure it’s my job to make a home for them and keep them safe. And you know what? Turns out I’m pretty good at doing that.

Michael Marshall Smith is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter, writing under several different names, including Michael Marshall. His first novel, Only Forward , won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. Spares and One of Us were optioned for film by DreamWorks and Warner Brothers, and the Straw Men trilogy— The Straw Men , The Lonely Dead , and Blood of Angels —were international bestsellers. His Steel Dagger-nominated novel The Intruders is currently in series development with the BBC.

Smith is also a three-time winner of the British Fantasy Award for short fiction, and his stories are collected in two volumes— What You Make It and More Tomorrow and Other Stories (which won the International Horror Guild Award). His most recent novels are Bad Things and The Servants (a short novel published under the new pseudonym M. M. Smith).

“Not Waving” is a story about love, guilt, and the choices that sometimes trap us. Smith comments on the story’s most unusual—and one of its most painful—aspects, “I wrote about bulimia because a friend of mine was a sufferer—though I stress she bore no relationship whatsoever to the character in the story. I guess I wanted to try to capture the strange combination of strength and weakness that the condition seems to confer on people, without making it the sole focus of the story; not least because that combination of strength and weakness is in all of us. Also, that it is the condition of which one appears to be trapped—much like the relationship of the narrator.”

Sometimes when we’re in a car, driving country roads in autumn, I see sparse poppies splashed in among the grasses and it makes me want to cut my throat and let the blood spill out of the window to make more poppies, many more, until the roadside is a blaze of red.

Instead I light a cigarette and watch the road, and in a while the poppies will be behind us, as they always are.

On the morning of 10th October I was in a state of reasonably high excitement. I was at home, and I was supposed to be working. What I was mainly doing, however, was sitting thrumming at my desk, leaping to my feet whenever I heard the sound of traffic outside the window. When I wasn’t doing that I was peeking at the two large cardboard boxes that were sitting in the middle of the floor.

The two large boxes contained, respectively, a new computer and a new monitor. After a year or so of containing my natural wirehead need to own the brightest and best in high-specification consumer goods, I’d finally succumbed and upgraded my machine. Credit card in hand, I’d picked up the phone and ordered myself a piece of science fiction, in the shape of a computer that not only went like a train but also had built-in telecommunications and speech recognition. The future was finally here, and sitting on my living room floor.

However.

While I had £3000 worth of Mac and monitor, what I didn’t have was the £15 cable that connected the two together. The manufacturer, it transpired, felt it constituted an optional extra despite the fact that without it the two system components were little more than bulky white ornaments of a particularly tantalizing and frustrating kind. The cable had to be ordered separately, and there weren’t any in the country at the moment. They were all in Belgium.