Free The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories by Kit Reed Page B

Happy remembers. The big, square teeth are white, whiter than Timbo’s fangs. Even the eyes are a fresh, technically augmented color. Blue shirt, open at the collar. Throat exposed, as wolves will do when they want you to know that they do not intend to harm you. Nice suit, although Happy has no way of knowing.
    “Son,” he says in a smooth, glad tone that has sealed deals and gotten meetings with major players all over Greater Los Angeles. “You know your father loves you.”
    This is nothing like love.
    Caught between then and now, between what he was and what he thinks he is, Happy does what he has to.
    He knows what all wolves know. If you are male and live long enough, you will have to kill your father.
    It doesn’t take long.
    Brent finds the door locked when he comes upstairs to find out how it’s going. He says through the closed door, “Everything OK in there?”
    Although Happy has not spoken in all these days, he has listened carefully. Now he says in the father’s voice, “This is going to take longer than I thought. Reschedule for tomorrow. My place.”
    There is a little silence while Brent considers.
    Happy is stronger than Timbo now. Louder. “Now clear out, and take everybody with you.”
    It is night again. The mother knocks. Happy has mauled the body, as Timbo would, but he will not eat. There is no point to it.
    “Can I come in?”
    He allows it.
    There will be no screaming and no reproaches. She stands quietly, studying the body.
    After a long time she says, “ OK . Yes. He deserved it.”
    When you remember old hurts you remember them all, not just the ones people want you to. Therefore Happy says the one thing about this that he will ever say to her:
    “He wasn’t the only one.”
    “Oh, Happy,” she says. “Oh God.” She isn’t begging for her life, she is inquiring.
    It is a charged moment.
    There are memories that you can’t prevent and then there are memories you refuse to get back, and over these, you have some power. This is the choice Happy has to make but he is confused now by memories of Sonia. Her tongue was rough. She was firm, but loving. This mother waits. What will he do? She means no harm. She wants to protect him. Poised between this room and freedom in the woods, between the undecided and the obvious, he doesn’t know.
    What he does know is that no matter what she did to you and no matter how hard to forgive, you will forget what your mother did to you because she is your mother.
    — Asimov’s SF , 2007

Automatic Tiger
     
    He got the toy for his second cousin Randolph, a knobby-kneed boy so rich he was still in short trousers at thirteen. Born poor, Benedict had no hope of inheriting his Uncle James’s money but he spent too much for the toy anyway. He had shriveled under his uncle’s watery diamond eyes on two other weekend visits, shrinking in oppressive, dark-paneled rooms, and he wasn’t going back to Syosset unarmed. The expensive gift for Randolph, the old man’s grandson, should assure him at least some measure of respect. But there was more to it than that. He had felt a strange, almost fated feeling growing in him from the moment he first spotted the box, solitary and proud, in the dim window of a toy store not far from the river.
    It came in a medium-sized box with an orange-and-black illustration and the words ROYAL BENGAL TIGER in orange lettering across the top. According to the description on the package, it responded to commands which the child barked into a small microphone. Benedict had seen robots and monsters something like it on television that year. Own It With Pride, the box commanded. Edward Benedict, removed from toys more by income than by proclivity, had no idea that the tiger cost ten times as much as any of its mechanical counterparts. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have cared. It would impress the boy, and something about the baleful eyes on the box attracted him. It cost him a month’s salary and seemed cheap at the price.