Free Bone Dance by Joan Boswell

warning from the police, both boys ended their contest. In future they’d stick to real bird watching.
    Besides, after Zoë’s thank you kiss, Harry decided looking at girls up close was way better.
    R.J. Harlick ,
an escapee from the high-tech jungle, decided that solving a murder or two was more fun than chasing the elusive computer bug. This is her second story to be published in the Ladies’ Killing Circle anthologies. Another story, “Lady Luck”, won third place in the 2002 Bony Pete Awards
.

I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
Lou Allin
    When Bill opened the grocery bags Myrna had tossed onto the kitchen table, he knew his paycheque hadn’t vanished at the supermarket. A dozen boxes of Kraft Dinner, several cans of no-name peas and one head of rusty lettuce.
    â€œFinally, the discus are getting their own display,” she said, setting up the new hex tank in the only open corner of the living room. All of the chairs and the sofa had been shoved into the basement storeroom. “Their spectacular colours disappear when they’re cluttered up with the rest.”
    Bill squinted through his bifocals at the receipt on the table. Four hundred dollars. Every set of breeders had a separate home: mollies, swords, catfish, characins and angels. The fifty-gallon tank was reserved for Bubbles, the African clown knifefish, too fond of her fellows.
    Five nights later, while his wife ate her noodles directly from the pot in order to watch the fish feed, Bill decided he couldn’t stomach another supper of ersatz cheese sauce and mushy vegetables. What could he make? He recalled taking Myrna to Pancho Villa’s on her fiftieth birthday. “Flaunting poverty. A cuisine based on tortillas and beans!” she had snorted after the meal, forbidding him to leave a tip.
    His taste buds tingling, he drove to the supermarket foringredients, then dared to toss together a hot chili: pintos, tomatoes, onions, jalepeños and a handful of five-alarm powder. The redolence filled the house, and he was stirring home-made cornbread for the private feast when a shriek came from the living room. “You idiot! Look what your stinky food is doing!”
    He put down his Corona beer, saved from a Christmas splurge, and joined Myrna to inspect the tank. The fish, normally passive at night, were swimming up and down. “Don’t think they can’t smell that foul air when the pump is spewing it all over. Are you trying to poison them? Open a can of Spam and make a sandwich.” And she rushed to the kitchen, grabbed the boiling pot and hustled it outside, where she dumped the contents contemptuously into the garbage can, slamming the lid like a cymbal. Then she arranged a portable fan and opened all of the doors. After anticipating the chili, Bill didn’t feel like anything else, so he took another Corona and sought refuge in Bret Harte’s
The Luck of Roaring Camp
. Too bad they didn’t live near a major dam site, he thought. Flash floods had their good points.
    Later, in a rare social gesture, Myrna subjected Bill to fish imitations. While he read, she peeked out from behind a chair and then retreated when he looked over. “Guess who?” Spot, of course, the shy catfish. Then she rubbed her knuckles over Bill’s close-cropped grey head like Bubbles scratching herself on the coral. Building to a climax, she concluded with a pantomime of the meanest small fish in the tank, the bumblebee cichlid, aka the Terminator. Her breath hot with sherry, she rushed at Bill and butted him in the chest, cackling like a demented parrot.
    Myrna rarely spoke to Bill except about the daily problems with the fish. “Bubbles is outgrowing her tank again. We’ve got to get that one-hundred-gallon job,” she wailed as Billlimped in from the 37°C record Toronto heat. Buses had broken down, the fans were off at work, and his ancient Aries needed new ball joints.
    â€œWhy not give her back