Free Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift by Fiction River Page B

home had shifted. It no longer mattered if she was a she—a jiniri—or a he—a jinn. She was genie, and she loved it.

 
     
     
     
    Introduction to “ Still Red”
     
     
    Oregon writer Kara Legend grew up in the Midwest where she read so much her mother pushed her to go outdoors more. She writes that she “took to reading under the piano; fortunately, it was not an upright.” This marvelous story marks Kara’s first appearance in print. I’m certain it won’t be her last.

 
     
     
     
    Still Red
    Kara Legend
     
     
    The stench from a stinking hulk filled Emily’s nose, thick and deep with rot. Her throat closed and her overtaxed lungs screamed for air. She halted, panting a little while she surveyed the thing. Nature had been busy. It was hard to tell now exactly what sort of critter had decided to die on this stretch of Oregon beach. Seal probably. It was losing shape and starting to liquefy. Grayish slabs of fat and flesh slid down thick yellow bones that jutted skyward like flagpoles. The smell had an overlay that was fishy and ordinary, but beneath the surface scent floated rich streamers of decay.
    Familiar scents.
    She’d learned the smells of death before she could draw her ABCs. Long ago and far away it had been, in the woods with the hunters in the time of stories. She remembered that, and she was grateful for that fact. There was so much she’d forgotten, days and weeks, entire stretches of her long life had vanished into the treacherous depths of her mind.
    But not the story, never that.
    She had lived with the story so long she’d forgotten where it ended and she began, or if there were such a thing as a borderland between story and history, between fantasy and reality. Her story was the singular constant of her lonely life, the thing that gave her purpose.
    She clung to the memory as fiercely as she gripped her walking stick. The doctors said mini-strokes were erasing her memories bit by bit, that it was only a matter of time now before she forgot even her own name. What did they know? They were little boys and girls in white coats who thought they could protect people with charts stuck to clipboards because science explained everything.
    Fools .
    They knew nothing of the way the world truly worked. She knew that life—the whole crazy mess of it—was made of bits and bobs of this and that, cut apart with round-tipped scissors and thrown high in the air only to settle to the tile floor where clever little hands sorted the pieces, arranged them on wide sheets of colored construction paper and pasted everything, taking care to press out each and every bubble until it was smooth and dry and flat.
    What a pretty picture, Emily! I love all the colors you used. Is that you with your doggie?
    No, bitch. Don’t you know a fucking wolf when you see one?
    No, they never did.
    That was another lesson of her long life: wolves offered death on a platter, all gleaming fangs and lethal claws. Most fools never recognized the danger until the very last second, when it was too late to do anything but scream and bleed and die. She’d seen that too often, and hated the way they bargained for their lives, all dignity abandoned in a frantic bid to save their cowardly skins. Critics could say what they wanted, but Emily had never begged—or, God forbid— blubbered .
    Never that.
    Blubbering was not only useless; it wasted precious energy. If, through sheer dumb luck, the fools managed to escape the wolf, they were still not safe because a hunter would track them down. Wolves and hunters: one followed another and that was the way of things.
    Thighs burning and her feet sinking deeper into the sand with every step, she trudged toward the rocks at the foot of a sheer basalt cliff. About twenty feet away, the beach turned shiny with hard-packed sand where the tide rolled and foamed. She wouldn’t sink there, but she’d be closer to the water, closer to danger from the sneaker waves the activities’ director