Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - By Neil Gaiman Page 0,90
darkness from the night.
I stand in shadows, staring at her stone:
Undead, my lover. . . O, undead my love?
I dreamt you while I slept today and love
meant more to me than life—meant more than blood.
The sunlight sought me, deep beneath my stone,
more dead than any corpse but still a-dream
until I woke as vapor into night
and sunset forced me out into the world.
For many centuries I’ve walked the world
dispensing something that resembled love—
a stolen kiss, then back into the night
contented by the life and by the blood.
And come the morning I was just a dream,
cold body chilling underneath a stone.
I said I would not hurt you. Am I stone
to leave you prey to time and to the world?
I offered you a truth beyond your dreams
while all you had to offer was your love.
I told you not to worry and that blood
tastes sweeter on the wing and late at night.
Sometimes my lovers rise to walk the night . . .
Sometimes they lie, cold corpse beneath a stone,
and never know the joys of bed and blood,
of walking through the shadows of the world;
instead they rot to maggots. O my love
they whispered you had risen, in my dream.
I’ve waited by your stone for half the night
but you won’t leave your dream to hunt for blood.
Good night, my love. I offered you the world.
MOUSE
They had a number of devices that would kill the mouse fast, others that would kill it more slowly. There were a dozen variants on the traditional mousetrap, the one Regan tended to think of as a Tom and Jerry trap: a metal spring trap that would slam down at a touch, breaking the mouse’s back; there were other gadgets on the shelves—ones that suffocated the mouse, others that electrocuted it, or even drowned it, each safe in its multicolored cardboard package.
“These weren’t quite what I was looking for,” said Regan.
“Well, that’s all we got in the way of traps,” said the woman, who wore a large plastic name tag that said her name was BECKY and that she LOVES WORKING FOR YOU AT MACREA’S ANIMAL FEED AND SPECIALTY STORE. “Now, over here—”
She pointed to a stand-alone display of HUN-GREE-CAT MOUSE POISON sachets. A little rubber mouse lay on the top of the display, his legs in the air.
Regan experienced a sudden memory flash, unbidden: Gwen, extending an elegant pink hand, her fingers curled upward. “What’s that?” she said. It was the week before he had left for America.
“I don’t know,” said Regan. They were in the bar of a small hotel in the West Country, burgundy-colored carpets, fawn-colored wallpaper. He was nursing a gin and tonic; she was sipping her second glass of Chablis. Gwen had once told Regan that blondes should only drink white wine; it looked better. He laughed until he realized she meant it.
“It’s a dead one of these,” she said, turning her hand over so the fingers hung like the legs of a slow pink animal. He smiled. Later he paid the bill, and they went upstairs to Regan’s room . . .
“No. Not poison. You see, I don’t want to kill it,” he told the saleswoman, Becky.
She looked at him curiously, as if he had just begun to speak in a foreign tongue. “But you said you wanted mousetraps . . . ?”
“Look, what I want is a humane trap. It’s like a corridor. The mouse goes in, the door shuts behind it, it can’t get out.”
“So how do you kill it?”
“You don’t kill it. You drive a few miles away and let it go. And it doesn’t come back to bother you.”
Becky was smiling now, examining him as if he were just the most darling thing, just the sweetest, dumbest, cutest little thing. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll check out back.”
She walked through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. She had a nice bottom, thought Regan, and was sort of attractive, in a dull Midwestern sort of way.
He glanced out the window. Janice was sitting in the car, reading her magazine: a red-haired woman in a dowdy housecoat. He waved at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.
Becky put her head back through the doorway. “Jackpot!” she said. “How many you want?”
“Two?”
“No problem.” She was gone again and returned with two small green plastic containers. She rang them up on the cash register, and as he fumbled through his notes and coins, still unfamiliar, trying to put together the correct change, she examined the traps, smiling, turning the packets over in her hands.