Free Indexing by Seanan McGuire Page A

landmark the stories only ever know as “home.”

Honey Do

    Memetic incursion in progress: tale type
171 (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”)
    Status: UNRESOLVED/POSTPONED
    Jennifer
Lockwood didn’t so much “open the door” as “collapse against it while
scrabbling vaguely at the doorknob” until gravity took pity on her and allowed
her to stumble into the front hall of her small rental home. Working three
shifts in a row at the diner was a good way to pay the bills, but a bad way to
take care of her physical needs. Sleep, for example. Sleep had been discarded
as a luxury at some point in the previous day and a half, and she wasn’t sure
she’d ever be getting it back. She was equally unsure that she would be able to
make it to the bed before passing out.
    Her
cat, a gray tabby with the uninspired name of “Puss,” came and twined around
her ankles as she walked, making it even harder to traverse the hall into the
darkened living room and onward to her bedroom. Jennifer struggled to keep her
eyes open. If she let them close, she knew that she was going to wake up on the
floor again, with a crick in her neck and the alarm in her bedroom ringing too
loud to let her sleep and too late for her to get to work on time.
    “Look
out, Puss,” she mumbled, after the third time she kicked the cat. Puss purred
and plastered against her leg again. Jennifer dropped her purse and kept on
walking.
    There
was an art to removing clothing while remaining in motion. Teenagers mastered
it effortlessly, creating endless trails of fabric leading to their lairs.
Adults tended to lose the skill, but Jennifer had worked hard to retain it.
Between her job at the diner and her classes at the university, she needed to
cut corners wherever possible, and that included the three minutes it would
have taken her to remove her clothing in the usual way. So her pants and
underwear wound up on the living room floor, while her apron and shirt were
discarded in the hall. The bra was the hardest part—undoing those little hooks
without slowing down never got easier—but practice made perfect, and she dropped
it just as she stepped into her bedroom.
    The
window shade was open again. “Stupid cat,” she mumbled, and half-walked,
half-stumbled across the room to pull it down. The last thing she wanted was
for the sun to rise and wake her up before she was ready.
    Amazingly—considering
her condition—she actually noticed something large and brown just outside the
window, blocking her view of the backyard. Jennifer paused, squinting as she
tried to figure out what it was. She was still squinting when the bear turned
around, pressing its round black nose against the glass.
    Jennifer
had time for one good scream before she passed out, which was something like
sleep, at least.
    The
bear stayed outside her window for a good long time before it rose and walked
away, and when she woke up to the sound of two alarm clocks ringing stridently,
it was easy to convince herself that the whole thing had been a dream. It was
simpler that way.
    At least until the next night, when the
bear came back … and brought a friend.
#
    ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
    “Good
morning,” I grumbled as I walked into the bullpen, a bag of donuts in one hand
and a tray of coffee cups in the other. If I didn’t sound all that
enthusiastic, well, maybe the breakfast offering would make up for things. “How
is everyone today?”
    “I
dropped out of college,” said Demi glumly, not lifting her head out of her
hands. She had her fingers laced so tightly through her bark-brown hair that I
wasn’t sure she could lift her hands.
Not without getting a pair of scissors. “The registrar’s office sent the
confirmation that I am no longer enrolled in any classes. I am a failure.”
    “Mike
and I had a fight last night about how much of my job I’m not allowed to discuss with him,” said Andy, although he at least
reached over and took one of the coffee cups. “He still