The Hand is Quicker

The Hand is Quicker

By Elizabeth Bear

Everything changed at midnight.

Not my midnight, as if honoring the mystical claptrap in some dead fairy tale. But about the dinner hour, which would be midnight Greenwich Standard Time – honoring the mystical claptrap of a dead empire, instead. I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere. The world is full of the markers the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.

I was thinking about that poem as I crossed Henderson – with the light : I knew somebody who jaywalked and got hit by an unskinned vehicle. The driver got jail time for manslaughteer, but that doesn’t bring bback the dead. Ot was a gorgeous October evening, the sun just setting and the trees stil full of leaves in all shades of gold and orange. I barely noticed them, or the cool breeze as I waited, rocking nervously from foot to foot on the cobblestones.

I was meeting my friend Numair at Gary’s Olympic Pizza and I was running a little late, so he was already waiting for me in our usual corner booth. He’d ordered beers and garlic bread. They waited on the table top, the beers shedding rings of moisture into paper napkins.

The Hand is Quicker. Photo by Elena

I slid onto the hard bench opposite him, trying to hide the apprehension souring my gut, The vinyl was artistically cracked and the rough edges caught on my jeans. It wasn’t Numair making me so anxious. It was finances. I shouldn’t be here, by rights – I knew I couldn’t afford even pizza and beer – but I needed to see him. If anything could clear my head, it was Numair.

One of the things I liked about Numair is how unpretentious he was. I didn’t skin heavily – not like some people, who wandered through underwater seascapes full on sentient octopuses or dressed up as dragons and pretended they kufe ub Elfland – but he was so down to earth I’d have bet his default skin looked just like him. He was a big guy, strapping and barre-bodied, witch curly dark brown hair that was going gray at the temples. And he liked his garlic bread.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.