Martha called. She took a step and the pain shot through her leg. She gasped, stumbled.
Johnny paused. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay any longer.”
“But why?” she cried.
“Purgatory isn’t a place, it’s a process. You have to work off your debt.” Then he turned and hopped down from the stage, melting off into the darkness. His voice seemed to carry back like an echo of an echo. “Remember…”
By the time Martha reached the aisle, the theater was deserted.
* * * *
She limped back to her apartment and collapsed in her overstuffed armchair, all her shattered dreams coming back to haunt her. Broadway Bound, closed in mid-run because of her accident. Her canceled contract with Sam Goldwyn. All her ruined plans.
A tear traced a path down the creases of her cheek. Angrily she brushed it away. I don’t owe them anything she thought. They never came to see me. They never wrote. They just swept me under the carpet and kept going with their lives like nothing had happened, nothing had changed.
She stabbed the remote control with one finger. The television flickered to life.
And she found herself looking at Johnny’s face.
“—dead tonight, Johnny Devlin, head singer of the heavy metal rock group, Cruel Blade. A drug overdose is suspected, and an autopsy has been ordered. Fans are already mourning Johnny’s loss. Cruel Blade’s first album, a groundbreaking mix of heavy metal, jazz, and reggae, is currently topping the charts in both the U.S. and England—”
Martha hurriedly flicked the television off. Johnny’s words came back to her, and she shuddered. That’s the way of things when you’re working off your debt.
Martha poured herself a brandy, downed it, had a second. Her hands were shaking again. You get some, you share some.
She spent a sleepless night wondering.
* * * *
The next morning, bright and early, she donned her good dress—the one she always wore to funerals—and had another drink. Then, spirit girded, she set off for the theater.
Rather than sliding her trusty old butter knife into the firedoor’s lock, lifting the latch, and sneaking in the way she usually did, she went straight to the stage entrance.
Adam Lipshitz, the manager, saw her coming and came out to meet her. “For the thousandth time, Miss Peckinpah,” he began, “I don’t want you coming here and—”
Martha cut him off with a curt gesture. “I watched the show last night. Your dancers are good this time, Lipshitz. Really good. But their routines stink.”
“I choreographed it myself!”
She snorted. “It shows! You need a professional. How long till opening? A week?”
He nodded.
“Then there’s still time…” She smiled and focused on him once more. “I want to help you,” she said kindly, in her best grandmotherly voice. “I think this time you could really have something here, something important, something great instead of merely adequate. Will you let me restage the routines for you?”
“Why should I listen to you?”
“I’m the best.”
“You were the best.”
“I still am,” she said. “I still remember…”
“How much will it cost?” he asked, eyes narrowing.
“You really don’t understand, do you? I’m an old woman. I don’t need more than I already have. This isn’t for money, Lipshitz, it’s for art. For tap. That’s why you couldn’t get it right.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, already! It doesn’t hurt to look. Come in, I’ll get the dancers. Then we’ll see what you suggest.”
Martha followed him, cane tap-tap-tapping the way to the stage. She began to smile. Backstage, with the smell of makeup, with the tiny dressing rooms and the clutter of props—it felt like coming home. How long had it been? Too long.
And when Lipshitz opened the curtain onto the side of the stage, when she saw the dancers fumbling their way through routines that should have come like water flowing down a river, she finally knew that this was good, this was right. Perhaps she’d been meant for this in the cosmic order of things. Perhaps her accident had happened merely to guide her here, to this particular moment, to make her a director instead of a star.
When Stardust Whammy opened, it would be magic, it would be art, and it would be beauty.
And she knew she’d be happy for the first time in forty years.
“This is for you, Johnny,” she whispered. “Thank you…I do remember.”
TO BECOME A SORCERER, by Darrell Schweitzer
Surely Surat-Kemad is the greatest of the gods, for he is lord of both the living and the dead. The Great River flows from his mouth; the River is the voice and word of Surat-Kemad, and all life arises from the River.
The dead return to Surat-Kemad, upon the waters or beneath them, borne by some secret current, back into the belly of the god.
We are reminded of Surat-Kemad daily, for he made the crocodile in his own image.
I, Sekenre, son of Vashtem the sorcerer, tell you this because it is true.
I
That my father was a magician I knew from earliest childhood. Did he not speak to the winds and the waters? I heard him do so many times, late at night. Could he not make fire leap out of his hands, merely by folding and unfolding them? Yes, and he never burned himself, for the fire was cold, like river water in the winter.
Once he opened his hands to reveal a brilliant, scarlet butterfly, made of paper and wire but alive. It flew around the house for a month. No one could catch it. I cried when it died and the light went out of its wings, leaving it no more than a trace of ash.
He made a different kind of magic with his stories. There was one in particular that went on and on, about a young heron who was cast out of his nest by the other birds because he had short legs, and no beak or feathers. He could pass for human, for all that he wasn’t. So he wandered in a lonely exile and had many adventures, in far lands, among the gods, among the ghosts in the land of the dead. Every evening for almost a year, Father whispered more of the story to me as if it were a special secret between the two of us. I never told it to anyone else.
Mother made things too, but not fire out of her hands, nor anything that truly lived. She built hevats, those assemblages of wood and wire and paper for which the City of the Reeds is famous, sometimes little figures that dangled from sticks and seemed to come alive when the wind struck them, sometimes great tangles of ships and cities and stars and mountains which hung from the ceiling and turned slowly in a vastly intricate, endless dance.
Then a fever came
