Free Commando Bats by Sherwood Smith Page B

its
parent bench back with a definitive thok.
    Cecile, Bettina, and I swung around. Another woman stood on
the steps to the upper level, wearing a golden helmet, a white peplum, and
sandals that tied up to her knees. A huge owl sat on her shoulder. She held an
honest-to-ancient-days spear in one hand. In spite of these outlandish details,
the people around us blinked, turned to one another with questions that no one
listened to, then slowly wandered away, without paying her the least attention.
    She smiled at them out of a young-old face, then beckoned to
us with her free hand.
    This time, Cecile didn’t try to walk away. Bettina still
looked hostile and suspicious, but she waited. I put my good hand to my scooter
joystick. When my fingertips touched the metal, a schematic bloomed behind my
eyes, and I, who could barely work a cell phone, and who could not figure out
the TV remote, saw the structure of my chair right down to the movement of
electrons. I let out a squawk, and this time the newcomer laughed out loud. It
sounded like the chuckle of a stream.
    “Use the senses you have been given,” she said, snapped her
fingers, and the owl launched upward with a great flapping of wings, then poof!
It vanished, leaving behind a brief scent of cinnamon and cedarwood.
    Cecile coughed, then said in a faint voice, “Excuse me.”
    “Believe the evidence.”
    People streamed around us as if we were not there. I
thought, this better not be another stroke. I pinched my nose. Hard. Tears
burned my eyes. The woman in the helmet — Pallas Athena? — was still there.
    Bettina said, “What are we supposed to be doing?”
    “Anything you like,” said Athena. “But Hera will be most
displeased if you take her gift and do nothing. She is going through the world
dispersing gifts to women like you, past the change of life.” She raised her
spear, indicating the people around us. “You know what most men would do, given
these powers.” Athena brought the spear down with a crack that reverberated
like thunder — though again, none of the people around us reacted. “Disappoint
her at your peril.”
    She vanished in a wink of light.
    And there we were, three totally unconnected women standing
in an uncomfortable triangle on the crowded Santa Monica Pier.
    Cecile looked away, body language broadcasting her desire to
be anywhere else. Bettina the same.
    Me? If I could have, I’d be whooping with amazement and
thrill; half a century ago I’d been wearing Spock ears to conventions, and
until my stroke I’d spent decades drawing wizards, witches, elves, ghosts,
warriors, and every other kind of supernatural being writers imagined. Though
at age ten I’d reluctantly given up believing I was going to find magic when
I’d rapped my last closet back in hopes of finding Narnia behind it, I’d done
the next best thing: illustrated it for comics and book covers.
    Cecile said, “I can’t deal with this now.”
    Bettina shrugged. “Better we should exchange phone numbers.
In case.”
    She didn’t say in case of what. But Cecile nodded, and
rattled off her digits. Bettina and I followed suit, then we all separated,
them to the stairs, and I hit the joystick on my scooter, and trundled up the
ramp to head for home.
    “Home” for me is a garage converted into a single-room
apartment behind a beautiful Craftsman house ten blocks inland from the pier. I
got there without mishap, plugged in the scooter, toiled through getting my
zombie half from scooter to chair, and then I sat there gazing from object to
object as I tried to get the old reality and the new to mesh. It didn’t help
when I remembered that I’d sat in exactly the same spot the day I came home
from the hospital after the stroke, trying to mesh decades of ageless labor
into the jolt of the new me. When had I turned old? Inside, I was the same age
I’d always been.
    My only mirror was in the tiny bathroom and shower annex. My
big, spacious room was filled wall-to-wall with