Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

I opened the bathroom door, and a stench cloud of sulfurous green smoke wafted out. Choking and gasping, I peered in, and there was the fortyish man, clad only in a towel, smiling at me apologetically. He looked apprehensive. He had a big raw scrape on one knee, and a swollen lump on his forehead. He said, “Silver Lady, I never would have left you like that, but . . .”

“You were teleported away by your archrival,” I finished.

He said, “No, not teleported, exactly; this involved a spell requiring a monkey’s paw and a dozen nightshade berries. But they were last year’s berries, and not potent enough to hold me. I had a spell of my own up my sleeve and . . .”

“You blasted him to kingdom come,” I guessed.

“No.” He looked a little abashed. “Actually, it was the ‘Incessant Rectal Itch’ spell, a little crude, but always effective and simple to use. I doubt that he’ll be bothering us again.” He paused, then added, “As I’ve told you, magic isn’t what it used to be.” Then he sniffed a few times and said, “Actually, I’ve found that Pine-Sol is the best stuff for getting rid of spell residues . . .”

So we cleaned up the bathroom. I poured hydrogen peroxide over his scraped knee and he made gasping noises and swore in a language I’d never heard before. I left him doing that and went into the kitchen and began reheating the hot chocolate. A few moments later he came out dressed in a sort of sarong he’d made from one of my bedsheets. It looked strangely elegant on him, and the funny thing was, neither of us seemed to feel awkward as we sat down and drank the hot chocolate and shared the plum pudding. The last piece of plum pudding he took, and borrowing some cream cheese from my refrigerator, he buttered a cabalistic sign onto it.

Then he went to the door and called, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

The neighbor’s cat came at once, and the ratty old thing let the fortyish man scoop him up and bring him into my living room, where he removed two ticks from behind its ears and then fed it the plum pudding in small bites. When he had done that, he picked it up and stared long into its yellowish eyes before he intoned, “By bread and cream I bind you. Nevermore shalt thou shit upon the threshold of this abode.” Then he put the cat gently out the door, observing aloud, “Well, that takes care of the curse you were under.”

I stared at him. “I thought my curse had something to do with me working at Sears.”

“No. That was just a viciously cruel thing you were doing to yourself, for reasons I will never understand.” He must have seen the look on my face, because after a while he said, “I told you, the magic is never quite what you think it to be.”

Then he came to sit on the floor beside my easy chair. He put his elbow on my knee and leaned his chin in his hand. “What if I were to tell you, Silver Lady, that I myself have no real magic at all? That, actually, I climbed out my bathroom window and sneaked through the streets in my towel to meet you here? Because I wanted you to see me as special?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What if I told you I really work for Boeing, in Personnel?”

I just looked at him, and he lifted his elbow from my knee and turned aside a little. He glanced at his own bare feet, and then over at my machine. He licked his lips and spoke softly. “I could get you a job there. As a word processor, at about eleven dollars an hour.”

“Merlin,” I said warningly.

“Well, maybe not eleven dollars an hour to start . . .”

I reached out and brushed what hair he had back from his receding hairline. He looked up at me and then smiled the smile where he always looked aside from me. We didn’t say anything at all. I took his hand and led him to my room, where we once more disproved Lindholm’s Rule of Ten. I fell asleep curled around him, my hand resting comfortably on the curve of his belly. He was incredibly warm and smelled of oranges, cloves, and cinnamon. Misplaced Dreams tea, that’s what he smelled like.

And that night I dreamed I wore a peacock feather gown and strolled through a misty garden. I had found something I had lost, and I carried it in my hand, but every time I tried to look at it to see what it was, the mist swirled up and hid my hand from me.

In the morning when I woke up, the fortyish man was gone.

It didn’t really bother me. I knew that either he would be back or he wouldn’t, but either way no one could take from me what I already had, and what I already had was a lot more magic than most people get in their lives. I put on my ratty old bathrobe and my silver ladies and went out into the living room. His sarong sheet was folded up on the easy chair in the living room and the neighbor’s cat was asleep on it, his paws tucked under his chin.

And my Muse was there, too, perched on the corner of my desk, one knee under her chin as she painted her toenails. She looked up when I came in and said, “If you’re quite finished having a temper tantrum, we’ll get on with your career now.”

So I sat down at my machine and flicked the switch on and put my fingers on the home row.

Funny thing. The keys weren’t even dusty.

And here is yet another of my stories that gets a bit too close to the bone.

Some stories, I feel, are written because the writer has a point to make. The writer knows something, or thinks he or she knows something, and intends to inflict that knowledge on the reader. At their worst, those stories turn into polemics or badly disguised fables with the moral shouting at the reader from the final paragraph.

I hope and pray that I do not do that.

Rather, I like to think (and please don’t disabuse me of this notion!) that I write stories because I have a question. Not the answer, mind you, but just the question. The question at the core of this story is, Who owns the body? Is my body my own, to modify with tattoos and piercings? May I color my hair or shave it off, enlarge my breasts, or starve myself into bony submission?

And if the answers to all those questions is, Yes, you may, then at what point is society allowed to interfere with what I do? At what point do those decisions belong solely to me? When I am twenty-one or when I am twelve? May I make those sorts of decisions for my child, for religious or aesthetic reasons? Now we are on shakier ground, are we not? Do you immunize your child, straighten his teeth, correct a club foot, radiate his cancer, and circumcise him?

Or not?

Patsy sits on a bar stool at my breakfast counter. She is sipping a glass of soy milk through a straw. I glance at her, then look away at my rainforest cam on the wall screen behind her. My granddaughter had an incisor removed so that she could drink through the straw with her mouth closed. She claims it is more sanitary and less offensive to other people. I don’t know. It offends the hell out of her grandmother.

“So. SATs next week?” I ask her hopefully.

“Uh-huh,” she confirms, and I breathe a small sigh of relief. She had contemplated refusing to take them, on the grounds that any college who wanted to rate her on a single test score was not her kind of place anyway. She swings her feet, kicking the rungs of her stool. “I’m still debating Northwestern versus Peterson University.”

I try to recall something about Peterson, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. “Northwestern’s good,” I hedge. As I set a plate of cookies within her reach, I notice a bulge in the skin on her shoulder blade just above the fabric of her tank top. An irritated peace sign seems to be emblazoned on it. “What’s that? New tattoo?”

She glances over her shoulder at it, then shrugs. “No. Raised implant. They put a stainless steel piece under your skin. Works best when there’s bone backing it up. Mine didn’t come out very good. Grandma, you know I can’t eat those things. If the fat doesn’t clog up my heart, sugar will send me into a depression and I’ll kill myself.”