Gleanings, p.29
Gleanings, page 29
“Bravo!” they cried. “This is the greatest self-gleaning any scythe has ever achieved! Such a surprising finale! He had us all fooled! Bravo!”
And it occurred to Dalí this had been Gaudí’s plan all along. He had tricked Dalí into self-gleaning. Penélope was planted for the purpose! She was merely a gear in her uncle’s machine.
But if that were true, then why was Penélope crying?
“That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said through her tears. “You’ve ruined your masterpiece.”
“But… but listen to them cheer. I’ve given them exactly what they want.”
“Shut up,” said Penélope. “You’re not dead yet.” Then she reached around and pulled the arrow out of his back. It hurt as much coming out as it had going in—but his nanites were already working to quell the pain. “The arrow hit your shoulder, not your heart….” Penélope said.
“But… I… must die now,” he said. “Anything less would be… would be…”
“Absurd?” said Penélope. “Your Honor, everything about you is absurd—why should this be any different.”
Dalí heaved a weighty sigh. “Damn,” he said. “I should have dipped the arrow in poison.”
But, as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. And unless he now hurled himself from the platform, it seemed increasingly clear that he wasn’t going to die. How awkward. How humiliating. And yet in that moment something occurred to him that gave him a twinge of joy.
“If I am to live, this will not have been in vain. I will take you on as my apprentice,” Dalí told Penélope. “You shall train to be a scythe under my skilled tutelage.”
Penélope laughed. “That will really piss off my uncle.”
Dalí’s mustache twitched into the slightest smile. “Yes, I imagine it will.”
While down below, the crowd expressed their disappointment as they began to realize that Dalí was still alive… and that this was just another one of his failures after all.
Meet Cute and Die
Love fell upon Marni Wittle like a ton of bricks. And it left her in a revival center.
“Hello, Marni,” said the cheery but irritating head nurse of Woolwich Revival, upon Marni’s awakening. “So good to see you again. Wish it were under brighter circumstances!” Which was what Nurse Lucille always said when Marni turned up there. It wasn’t as if Marni was a risk-taker, or careless, or blasé about dying… yet death found her with spectacular regularity.
“Rise and shine, eternity awaits!” said Nurse Lucille, then she snapped up the blinds—which seemed specifically designed to snap like a firecracker while being raised. But perhaps it was just Marni. She always tended to be sensitive to sights and sounds upon revival.
“I have your Neuro-Adeno-Stimulant shake ready for you, as soon as you think you can hold it down.”
“What happened this time?” Marni asked, her voice raspy from days of being deadish. In all honesty, Marni didn’t want to know what happened, as it was always such an embarrassment. But she had to ask.
“A gentleman put the drop on you, so to speak,” Nurse Lucille said. “Fell nine stories just to meet you!” Then she laughed at her own joke.
Marni was actually relieved. “So it wasn’t anything that I did?”
“Not unless walking down the street is a crime.”
“A what?”
“Nothing, dearie, just a mortal expression.” She handed Marni her Neuro-Adeno-stimulant shake, which was, as usual, beyond vile.
“Can’t I skip the NASti-shake this time?”
“Sorry, dearie, it’s the rules. It activates the taste buds and digestive system. It’s good for you!”
Marni knew of no other revival center that forced its patients to drink such sickening swill. But Woolwich claimed to be innovative in their approaches. Marni did suspect, however, that the horrible taste was intentional, as to deter splatters, and others who went intentionally deadish. As an accident victim, Marni should have been given a pass, but no. She couldn’t help but think Nurse Lucille took pleasure in watching her drink it.
After she had swallowed the last fetid drop, Marni asked the question she had been avoiding since the moment she awoke.
“Have you notified my aunt?”
“No way around it,” said Nurse Lucille. “I have strict orders to let her know any time you ‘pay us a visit.’ ”
Marni grimaced. “I know, but couldn’t you have, just this once, forgotten to tell her?”
“And get on your aunt’s bad side? Not a chance, dear. Besides, you’ve been here in revival for more than two days—she would have known something was amiss when you didn’t come home.”
Marni heaved a world-weary sigh. Facing her aunt would be only slightly better than being killed by some plummeting personage.
“At any rate, we’ve let her know you’ve come around,” said the nurse. “She’ll be by to collect you before sundown, I imagine. But for now, why don’t I fetch you a few scoops of rum-raisin?”
“Yes, if you have.”
“Oh, we always have! Not much of a call for it, but I keep it on hand just for you!”
* * *
The plummeting personage in question was a young man by the name of Cochran Stæinsby. He, too, was no stranger to revival. This was his fourteenth. Not that he was tallying them for any particular reason, it was just hard not to. Especially when one kept getting charged for revival. His parents always complained about it—and now that he was on his own, and the bills came straight to him, he understood their frustration.
“Must I still be billed when it was an accident?” he had once asked the Thunderhead. “It’s not my fault that I’m prone to them.”
“It’s not a matter of fault,” the Thunderhead had told him. “It’s the rule in an accident, regardless of who’s to blame.”
This time, however, his death was caused by a malicious act—one of the rare instances in which his revival fee would not be his to pay. It would be charged to the culprits, a pod of local unsavories. They had gone into the hotel that Stæinsby happened to be staying in, then proceeded to loosen the floor-to-ceiling windows in several of the guest rooms. Mr. Stæinsby, while hurrying to dress the following morning, lost his balance while putting on his trousers, leaned against the window, and was the first to discover the unsavories’ prank.
He recalled trying desperately to pull the rest of his trousers up as he fell—because being deadish would be bad enough, without also being deadish on a public street with his pants halfway on. Only at the last moment did he realize that there was someone directly in his gravitational path.
The young woman broke his fall just enough for him to remain alive for a few seconds, and he couldn’t help but notice she was rather pretty. Even with a broken neck.
After Cochran had awakened from revival he asked the nurse about her. “Did the girl I land on survive?”
“Afraid not,” the nurse said, kindly. “She’s a few rooms over—just woke from revival herself.”
“May I… speak to her? I’d like to apologize.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, it’s my fault she’s here, isn’t it?”
“Not unless falling from a sabotaged window is a crime.”
“A what?”
“Never mind. Let me see if she’s up for a visitor.”
* * *
Marni looked up from her ice cream bowl to see a man standing at the threshold. “Can I help you?” Marni asked. It was unusual for strangers to intrude upon recovery rooms.
“Hello, you must be Marni Wittle. I just wanted to stop by and see if you were all right.”
The man was quite handsome, and still seemed to have more boy than man in him. He was around her age, twenty, maybe twenty-one. A young man trying to act older than he actually was. His good looks were of the unassuming sort, and he had the most soulful of eyes.
“Do I know you?” She was still a bit woozy from recovery, and had not yet made the connection as to who this must be. Unlike him, she had been instantaneously killed, so very literally never knew what hit her.
“Well, yes, in a roundabout way,” he said. “I’m the one who fell on you.”
“Oh. So you’re a splatter, then?”
He was taken aback by the suggestion. “No, no, I’m nothing of the sort. It was an entirely unintentional fall.”
“Sorry, I meant no offense.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry, Ms. Wittle, to have made you lose two full days.”
His eyes had locked on hers, and she couldn’t look away. She felt breathless, and it wasn’t just nausea from the NASti-shake. This was something else entirely.
Marni offered him a smile. “Well, time away from our lives can be a good thing now and then.” She held out her spoon to him. “Some rum-raisin?”
“Rum-raisin? It’s my favorite. They never have it at revival centers.”
“This one does!”
He accepted a spoonful, and his eyes rolled with delight.
“The nurses once told me the secret,” she whispered to him. “Revival center ice cream is infused with nanites that go straight to the brain’s pleasure center. It’s intended to combat Revival Depression Syndrome.”
“There’s such a thing?”
“Not anymore,” Marni said. “Thanks to this stuff.”
He smiled at her. She expected the moment to grow awkward, but it didn’t.
“I’m Cochran. Cochran Stæinsby,” he said. “But you can call me Ran.”
“What a curious nickname.”
“Well, the first half of Cochran is a bit problematic for a nickname, isn’t it? So I grew up being called by the second half. I’ve been Ran, Ranny, even Rando.”
Marni considered it. “A fine name like Cochran deserves its due. So that’s what I’ll call you. Unless you prefer ‘Mr. Stæinsby.’ ”
He smiled warmly. “Cochran is just fine.”
Then from downstairs they heard a voice bellowing with practiced displeasure.
“Where is she?” the voice roared. “Where’s my niece? Take me to her straightaway! My patience hangs by a tether today and God help anyone who makes it give way.”
“That’s my aunt,” Marni said. “You’d better go—you don’t want to be in her sights when she’s in a mood.”
“Sounds like she’s the type of person who’s always in a mood.”
That made Marni giggle. “You don’t know the half of it!”
“May I… may I see you again, Marni? Lunch perhaps? To make up for all this?”
Marni didn’t have to think twice. It might have been proper to appear more coy, but she wanted to see him again, and she wanted him to know it.
“How about tomorrow?” she said. “Noon?”
“Where?”
“Where we first met.”
Cochran smiled. “I’ll be sure to approach from a different direction.”
* * *
Marni’s aunt tended to get her way. Scythes generally did. She was Scythe Boudica, named after a legendary hero of early Britannia, long before it was Britannia. And while the original Boudica was known to be a tall and commanding woman of broad vision, Scythe Boudica was none of those things. She was small of stature, and of even smaller mind, overly concerned with middling things. Her greatest pleasure in life was the endless airing of complaints. If whinging could be a method of gleaning she would have happily employed it.
Her distinctive robe was made of an authentic medieval tapestry featuring a unicorn that looked like a goat, a lion that looked like a golden retriever, and fancy ladies with oblong, undersized heads. The tapestry-robe was enormously heavy and Scythe Boudica complained of the weight on a regular basis, but bore it nonetheless.
“It is the unending burden of a scythe to suffer the stifling weight of humanity,” she once proclaimed. “And humanity certainly does chafe.”
Boudica had not been her first choice of Patron Historic. Originally, she had planned to be Scythe Beatrix Potter, since the beloved writer’s stories not only reminded her of her childhood, but had also led to a lifetime love of rabbits. But as with Mr. Stæinsby, the name “Beatrix” did not make for flattering nicknames. She was worried people would call her Trixie—which might be a fine name for a dog, but certainly not a scythe. Boudica, on the other hand, was a regal-sounding name.
Only when other scythes began calling her “Boo” did she realize her folly.
* * *
Marni didn’t tell her aunt about Cochran, or their upcoming lunch date. Instead, she sat quietly at dinner when they arrived home from the revival center, as her aunt engaged in an all-too-familiar harangue.
“Marni, you must be more cognizant of your surroundings. Had you been, you never would have been caught unawares by some falling miscreant.”
“He’s not a miscreant, Auntie Boo—he was the victim of an unsavory prank.”
Her aunt waved a dismissive hand. “Of course he’d say that—he’s trying to get out of paying for revival. How could you be so gullible?”
Marni endured this lecture, as she did all her aunt’s discourses. She had long since learned to let her aunt’s ramblings roll off her back. It wasn’t as if she needed to curry favor. Marni, as a close blood relative, had immunity as long as her aunt lived, whether they resided together or not, so that wasn’t the reason why she stayed. She stayed because Auntie Boo needed her. Who else would run the castle? Who would be there to talk her aunt out of gleaning the housekeeper, or the groundskeeper, or the cook, when she lost her temper? And although Severndroog Castle was nothing special as far as scythe residences go, it was a pleasant enough place to live.
Besides, if Marni left, where would she go? Her own parents had moved on, as many people do, devoting themselves to new families and new lives. But Auntie Boo was a creature of habit and wasn’t going anywhere. Life with her was stable—and, truth be told, as much as Marni hated her aunt showing up at the revival center, it would be worse if no one came at all.
* * *
Marni had never been on a date. Scythe Boudica made it clear that suitors were forbidden, and that a girl of Marni’s tender years ought to make her own way in the world before entangling with a partner.
“Know yourself,” she would pontificate. “Stand in your own two shoes, or you may find yourself crushed like a bug beneath his.” Whether she truly advocated this advice, or just said it to keep Marni’s attentions entirely on her, Marni didn’t know. But either way, she wasn’t about to tell her aunt about her date with Cochran Stæinsby.
They met at the appointed place at precisely the appointed time. Cochran had made reservations for them at a nice Franco-Iberian bistro. It was a place in which Marni had never eaten. There were only ever three places she dined with her aunt. The Criterion, Kettners, and Simpsons-in-the-Strand; all lavish affairs dating back to mortal days. Ancient and musty, like the drafty castle where they lived. So lunch with Cochran was exceptional by virtue of it being a new experience. And although the conversation was small and somewhat circular, there was something charming about speaking of nothing with someone you only barely knew.
He told her that he lived in Manchester, which, while not all that distant, felt amazingly far to Marni, who couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out of London.
“I go to conventions,” Cochran said, when she asked about his profession.
“What sorts of conventions?”
“All sorts.”
“I mean, what is your line of business?”
“Conventions,” he said again. “I’m a professional attendee.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m not surprised—it’s a niche trade.”
Marni, her life being as sheltered as it was, had never been to a convention. She knew that they were large events where people displayed new products and socialized with others in their field. But according to Cochran, most of those products were outrageously dull. So much so that few people came to conventions of their own accord anymore.
“That’s where I come in,” explained Cochran. “In order to keep the convention floor from being a sad and sorry place, the Thunderhead hires professional attendees to fill the void. It’s my job to walk around and act as if I’m interested.”
“It sounds positively awful.”
“Not at all. People are grateful to have someone to talk to. I brighten their day—and all I have to do is pretend to be fascinated by bathroom fixtures and doorknobs!”
Then he asked her about herself, as she knew he would. Marni decided there was only so much he needed to know.
“I run my aunt’s estate.”
“Really! An estate!”
“Not much of one. But it fills up most of my days.”
Then the main course came, and she was able to redirect the conversation away from herself. Eventually he’d want to know more, but for now, Marni enjoyed being a woman of mystery.
* * *
They arranged to meet every time he was in town, which was often—but couldn’t be often enough for Marni. Feelings grew, and soon what began as an unfortunate accident became very purposeful.
“Perhaps someday you could come up to visit me,” he suggested more than once.
“Yes, someday,” she would wistfully reply, knowing her aunt never left home long enough to allow it.
After their fourth date, things took a bad turn—or more accurately a bad step. It was after dinner at a trendy, fashionable restaurant. Marni had worn her finest dress, and heels—which her aunt did not approve of, so she rarely wore them. Marni had to plan quite a ruse to be out this late without her aunt asking questions. As it would turn out, the heels were a mistake, because after they left the restaurant, while waiting for a publicar, Marni hit some uneven pavement, and began to fall off the curb. She reflexively grabbed for Cochran, but rather than him keeping her from falling, her momentum pulled him down after her.
And the approaching truck was moving much too quickly to stop.
