Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things - Short Fictions and Wonders

Cats always landing on their feet) claiming he had thought he was marrying her twin sister

Who looked completely different, but had, through a miracle of biology, exactly the same voice

Which was why the judge granted the divorce, closed his eyes and even he couldn’t tell them apart.

So my father walked out a free man, and on the way from the court he was struck on the head

By detritus falling from the sky; there was folks said it was lavatorial waste from a plane

Though chemical examination revealed traces of elements unknown to science, and it said

In the papers that the fecal matter contained alien proteins, but then it was hushed up.

They took my father’s body away for safekeeping. The government gave us a receipt

Though in a week it faded, I guess that it was something in the ink, but that’s another story.

So then my mom announced I needed a man around the house and it was going to be her,

And she worked a deal with that doctor so when the two of them won the Underwater Tango contest

He agreed to change her sex for nothing. Growing up I called her Dad, and knew none of this.

Nothing else interesting has ever happened to me. Another drink?

Well, just to keep you company maybe, another beer, and don’t forget the whiskey,

Hey, make it a double. It isn’t that I drink, but it’s a hot day, and even when you’re

Not a drinking man… You know,

It was just such a day as this my wife dissolved. I’d read about the people who blew up,

Spontaneous combustion, that’s the words. But Mary-Lou-that was my wife’s name,

We met the day she came out of her coma, seventy years asleep and hadn’t aged a day,

It’s scary what ball-lightning can do. And all the people on that submarine,

Like Mary-Lou, they all were froze in time, and after we were wed she’d visit them,

Sit by their bedsides, watch them while they slept. I drove a truck, back then.

And life was good. She coped well with the missing seven decades, and me, I like to think that if

The dishwasher had not been haunted-well, possessed, I guess, would be more accurate-

She’d still be here today. It preyed upon her mind, and the only exorcist that we could get

Turned out to be a midget from Utrecht and actually not a priest at all,

For all he had a candle, bell, and book. And by coincidence, the very day my wife,

All haunted by the washer, deliquesced-went liquid in our bed-my truck was stole.

That was when I left the States to travel round the world.

And life’s been dull as ditchwater since then. Except…but no, my mind is going blank.

My memory’s been swallowed by the heat. Another drink? Well, sure…”

The Fool

“What do you want?”

The young man had come to the graveyard every night for a month now. He had watched the moon paint the cold granite and the fresh marble and the old moss-covered stones and statues in its cold light. He had started at shadows and at owls. He had watched courting couples and drunks and teenagers taking nervous shortcuts: all the people who come through the graveyard at night.

He slept in the day. Nobody cared. He stood alone in the night and shivered in the cold. It came to him then that he was standing on the edge of a precipice.

The voice came from the night all around him, in his head and out of it.

“What do you want?” it repeated.

He wondered if he dared to turn and look, realized he did not.

“Well? You come here every night, to a place where the living are not welcome. I have seen you. Why?”

“I wanted to meet you,” he said, without looking around. “I want to live forever.” His voice cracked as he said it.

He had stepped over the precipice. There was no going back. In his imagination, he could already feel the prick of needle-sharp fangs in his neck, a sharp prelude to eternal life.

The sound began. It was low and sad, like the rushing of an underground river. It took him several long seconds to recognize it as laughter.

“This is not life,” said the voice.

It said nothing more, and after a while the young man knew he was alone in the graveyard.

The Magician

They asked St. Germain’s manservant if his master was truly a thousand years old, as it was rumored he had claimed.

“How would I know?” the man replied. “I have only been in the master’s employ for three hundred years.”

The Priestess

Her skin was pale, and her eyes were dark, and her hair was dyed black. She went on a daytime talk show and proclaimed herself a vampire queen. She showed the cameras her dentally crafted fangs, and brought on ex-lovers who, in various stages of embarrassment, admitted that she had drawn their blood, and that she drank it.

“You can be seen in a mirror, though?” asked the talk show hostess. She was the richest woman in America, and had got that way by bringing the freaks and the hurt and the lost out in front of her cameras and showing their pain to the world.

The studio audience laughed.

The woman seemed slightly affronted. “Yes. Contrary to what people may think, vampires can be seen in mirrors and on television cameras.”

“Well, that’s one thing you finally got right, honey,” said the hostess of the daytime talk show. But she put her hand over her microphone as she said it, and it was never broadcast.

The Pope

This is my body, he said, two thousand years ago. This is my blood.

It was the only religion that delivered exactly what it promised: life eternal for its adherents.

There are some of us alive today who remember him. And some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world.

The Lovers

After she was dead, she began to come to him in the night. He grew pale, and there were deep circles under his eyes. At first, they thought he was mourning her. And then, one night, he was gone.

It was hard for them to obtain permission to disinter her, but they got it. They hauled up the coffin and they unscrewed the lid. Then they prized what they found out of the box. There was six inches of water in the bottom, the iron had colored it a deep, orangish red. There were two bodies in the coffin: hers, of course, and his. He was more decayed than she was.

Later, someone wondered aloud how both of them had fitted in a coffin built for one. Especially given her condition, he said; for she was very obviously very pregnant.

This caused some confusion, for she had not been noticeably pregnant when she was buried.