“I’ll say they were a gift,” Carl said. “They were.”
“You’ll look like you looted the Vatican. I don’t think jewels like those are going to be so easy to sell.”
“Jen, I don’t have to put them up for auction at Sotheby’s. There are private buyers, and I’ll find ’em. My days of worrying about money are finito!”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “If you were just a little more careful, you wouldn’t have to worry—”
“I’m not careful,” Carl broke in. “You’ve known me for two years and you still don’t get that, do you? You’re the one who’s careful. I don’t like worrying about details. I want to go where and when I feel like it, buy whatever I goddamn well please and not even think about how I’ll pay for it tomorrow. I like living on the edge. And now that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” His voice softened. “I told you everything was gonna be all right, Jenny-o. You just didn’t believe me.”
Jenny knew that there was nothing she could say that he would hear. She wondered if there ever had been. “It’s kind of weird that none of the cats followed you out of town.”
“The cats are fine,” Carl assured her. “Cats always are. They don’t worry about tomorrow either.”
“I’m going to check on them,” Jenny said.
“Oh, now you want your sack of jewels, too, don’t you?” Carl jeered. “Instead of some little leather purse that only gives you forty thousand at a shot.”
“Oh, shut up,” Jenny muttered. She started for the bridge, stopping to pull a wild, white rose from the side of the stream, a final gift for the Lady. And that’s when she heard it, the sound of an ass braying. It came up near the cemetery. Livio’s flea-bitten donkey must have gotten loose.
She kept her eyes on the flower — circle within circle of pale white petals surrounding a delicate center of gold — until the braying stopped.
Carl, though, hadn’t looked away. He was staring at the cemetery where Sasha stood among the gravestones, her pale hair blown back by wind. This time she was dressed for Carl’s world, wearing a short, tight black dress; her long, perfect legs in spike heels and black fishnet stockings. “Carlo,” she said, one hand beckoning.
Carl stood transfixed, like a starving man who’d suddenly found a banquet table laden with food.
Jenny stepped between them, deliberately placing herself in Carl’s line of sight. “For God’s sake, Carl, listen to me now even if you never listen to me again. She’s not what you think. She’s dangerous!”
If Carl heard her, he gave no sign. He was mumbling something about “being together without end.”
“Grazie, Jenny,” Sasha said, “molte grazie. I knew you’d bring him to me. I told you we were alike. He’s scorned you, so now you’ll see to it that he gets what he deserves.”
“No one deserves you,” Jenny said. “He’s a mess, but he’s not evil and—”
“So you do still love him. I told you. L’amour dure sans fin.”
“No,” Jenny said, flustered. “Maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t want to see him hurt.”
Sasha gave her a pitying look. “An unrealistic expectation from one who’s normally so practical.” As she spoke, Sasha’s voice rose, becoming light and cool and sickeningly familiar. It was as though her voice were the same cold wind that had blown through Jenny earlier, the wind that Jenny so welcomed, that had severed her from Carl.
“You see, I helped you, Jenny-o. Because I knew that you would help me.”
“Help you? I wouldn’t—”
“You already have,” Sasha assured her. Her voice became a command, “Carlo, adesso! Now!”
Carl’s trance broke at Sasha’s words. He dropped the sack of gems and ran toward the cemetery. He didn’t even bother to climb the gate; he scaled it with a leap. Jenny had never seen him move so fast, so fluidly.
Where’s his angel now? Jenny wondered as she started after him. She didn’t want him anymore. She knew that. But she couldn’t leave him to—
“You have to.” The black and white appeared so suddenly that Jenny could have sworn he materialized from the twilight. “Let him go,” the cat said. “You didn’t give him to her and you can’t save him. Carl has made his choice, and goes willingly to his fate.”
“You don’t understand!” Jenny was nearly hysterical. “I felt her inside me today. It was when I finally let go of Carl, and now she—”
“She is strega,” the black and white said firmly. “It is her gift to make you believe what is not true. She will live inside you only as a memory, as we all do. No more.”
Jenny felt tears streaming down her cheeks. “But Carl—”
The cat nodded toward the two figures in the cemetery, already ethereal against the darkening sky. “There she told the truth. They always have been intertwined. You must let him go.”
The sun was sinking beneath a row of cypress trees on the hill as Sasha opened her arms and Carl stepped into her embrace.
Jenny never saw her arms close around him, never saw the expression of agony on Carl’s face, never saw him struggling to free himself as he breathed his last. She never saw the two fantasme fade into the dusk. Her view was blocked by an old farm truck with huge rounded fenders and a merry horn. It cruised slowly down the road and rolled to a stop directly in front of her. Livio was at the wheel, a jaunty tweed cap on his head. He leaned out the open window and said something in Italian to the tuxedo cat.
The black and white rubbed his leg against Jenny’s thigh and purred. “Ah, Jenny,” he said, sounding pleased. “Livio would like to offer you a ride. He says he is going to Firenze.”
— to those who shared Giogalto, Spring 1995; and with gratitude to all feline friends, especially the cats of San Martino.
“The Cats of San Martino” is based on an Italian fairy tale that is found in Italo Calvino’s collection. An English version appears in collections by Andrew Lang and Katherine Briggs. In its original form, the story features a good sister who goes to “live with the cats” (an old expression that once referred to girls who had run away from home), and the bad sister who follows her. Steiber’s modern version of the tale was inspired by a spring sojourn in an old farmhouse in Tuscany, and the lively four-footed denizens of the village of San Martino.
The Golem
SEVERNA PARK
Severna Park, a Lambda Literary Award nominee, is the author of three novels: Speaking Dreams, Hand of Prophecy, and The Annunciate. Her short stories have been published in Realms of Fantasy and in the online magazine, Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. She lectures for the women’s Studies Department at the University of Maryland, and has contributed articles to the program’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Feminist Newsletter. Park also reviews short fiction for Tangent, and for the Lambda Book Report. She lives with her partner in Frederick, Maryland, where she is at work on the sequel to The Annunciate.
The sound of shooting at Easter should not have surprised her, but this year it was early, a week before Good Friday. Crack. Judith’s withered fingers slipped on the brown earthen water jar. Crack. The spring air echoed with gunshots, then thin screams and hoofbeats. Judith clapped her hands over her ears and the water jar fell, splitting over the black river stones. Crack. The ground trembled under galloping horses, and the smell of smoke drifted through the line of dense trees between Judith and her village, the shtetl called Zebbe.