Free INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 by Andy Cox Page A

and dentistry.
    I rebooted the modeling field and loaded the sculpture. The memorial. I played the history file as a loop, watching the thing take form, shift and grow. Saw it erupt into chaos as Faith demolished the base.
    It was finished, but it wasn’t static. Each form led logically, inevitably, to the next. It had to be animated, a loop, which I completed by finishing the destruction that Faith had started, and morphing that cloud of star speckled dust back into the starting state as an orrery of black and silver spheres.
    People come to sculpture for permanence, understand. For something that stands against time. There was no paying market for this kind of thing. No bank would want this for the office lobby. Too distracting. Disturbing. Messy.
    It was undoubtedly the best thing I’d ever made. But it was only for me.
    Faith woke up screaming.
    Second best. I powered down the field.
    “I dreamed about Mommy,” she said. “She was dead and bloody. There were monsters. Monsters! Where were you? Where were you?”
    “I was there.” I brushed the fine blonde hair out of her eyes. “I’m always there. There aren’t any monsters,” I told her. “Just assholes.” Faith cried at that, and I tried to hold her. She didn’t want to be held, and bit my arm, hard enough to inscribe a little semicircle of marks, leaking blood in places. I backed off and waited, sitting cross-legged a few feet away on the bed.
    She kicked and punched the futon for awhile, wailing like a banshee, and finally lay, sobbing and shuddering amidst the twisted sheets. These tantrums were coming farther and farther apart. I’d actually graphed them out, so I knew for sure.
    I’d considered dosing Faith with metaprogrammers and telling her to forget her mother and be happy. Amazing, what we think to do to the people we love.
    “I’m hungry,” she wailed, finally.
    I arranged her clothes, and patted her hair down a little. Good enough. “Let’s go eat, then.” There was a cafe we both liked down the street, EM shielded. You couldn’t even get a phone call there. I loved the place.
    Faith’s eyes looked very blue, rimmed with red still, but she’d stopped crying. She smiled her perfect teeth, and snorted.
    “You’re a good monster,” Faith said. She’d probably be crying again in a little while. And happy again, sometime later.
    I wiped her nose. “You’re a good little girl,” I said.
    She shrugged. She knew that.
    So we went out and ate.

    ***

    Jay O’Connell lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife, two teenage children, cats, books, and computers. He’s been a construction worker, market researcher, fast-food slave, tech boom software executive, graphic designer, GLBTQ activist, and serial entrepreneur. You can find him on the web at  http://www.jayoconnell.com , and read his fiction in recent issues of Asimov’s , The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , Fantastic Stories , and a smattering of worthy small press and web-based publications.

BONE DEEP
    S.L. NICKERSON

    The world inside of Manaia’s Tattoory is dim. I smell paint, the old-fashioned kind that can still be smelt. Framed watercolours drape from nails driven into the brick walls. I stare longest at the painting of a woman; above her hips she is whole, but her skin blows away from the bones of her legs like dandelion fluff. It makes me glad for my own skin. My skeleton is laced with knobs and scarred by surgeons’ saws, a thing best hidden beneath flesh.
    The tattooist sits alone in the lamplight. She paints a triceratops reaching for the branches of a willow on an otherwise empty canvas, bringing out the scales from quick flicks of her wrist. A menagerie of barrettes and tufts studs her skull. Through the quietness I hear my uneven gait all too loudly as I approach her. I cannot walk anywhere without the reminder of my deformed toes. She pulls her glasses over her eyes and swirls her brush in the water of an old jam jar. “What do you have for me,