I didn’t recognize Eddie at first. He got on the train at Division, sat down opposite me, and every time I glanced up from my book he was staring at me. He wore a trench coat over a bluish gray polo shirt and khakis. Sweat stood out on his brow.
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The needle buzzes, setting up a whine in my back teeth. Under her careful hand, a spatter of stars—midnight blue—arc from the curve of my hip-bone to the soft flesh of my inner thigh. Sarah moves my penis aside, dispassionate, getting exactly the right angle to complete the sweep of her constellation.
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“Señora?” The man standing at my screen door is travel stained. Migrant, up from Mexico. The dogs haven’t heard him come up, but now they erupt in a frenzy of barking to make up for their oversight. I am sitting at the kitchen table, painting a doll, waiting for the timer to tell me to get doll parts curing in the oven in the work shed.
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Maureen McHugh is a Hugo-winning short story author and award-winning novelist. She has published four novels, of which her novel China Mountain Zhang won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous Year’s Best anthologies.
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Her distant, ill-formed memories held tears
And shouting, thrown objects shattered,
Threats, and finally an ultimatum
That echoed for years
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Someone clever once said, apropos of the Justice League, that the only thing sillier than an adult dressing up in colorful tights to fight crime, was a whole roomful of such folk. That’s a good analogy for films, TV shows and books that posit elaborate secret societies of vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures that operate just below the radar of human awareness.
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