Fantastic Metropolis

Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.

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“Take a playboy Zeus with issues; a New-Age Hera; an idiot boy: another who’s half-bug, half-bat; an artist who walks backwards; and a woman who lived inside a door for 2000 years… You’d think, with this melange, no one but Eudora Welty could have made a moving and magical novel. You’d be wrong. Leslie What has.”

—Howard Waldrop

In this scene, Igor, who believes he is the offspring of Hera and Zeus, learns what it is like to be different.

—Leslie What

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Igor took Horsie and went outside in the yard to play in the sandbox behind the cabin. He spent some time clearing away damp leaves and garbage before smoothing the sand flat and making a road with plastic blocks. He brought out a box filled with his trucks and put Horsie in one of them to deliver sand to the barn. His clothes were too tight and his wings hurt from being crushed by his shirt. He did not wear shoes because he thought the shiny hard skin of his feet looked just like army boots. His feet never got cold, either, though sometimes he found it difficult to walk. They were sort of small, compared to the rest of him, but his mother told him not to worry because his father had small feet and that hadn’t kept his father from getting a job as king of the gods.

The little girl from next door came out and stood at the side of the yard. She wiggled around and looked at him with bright eyes that made him feel funny. She had very long black hair and a pink dress. She ran toward him and sat on the edge of the sandbox.

“Can I play with you?” she asked.

“Sure,” Igor said, as if he did this all the time. She was pretty and she smelled sweet, like milk. He sat with his legs curled beneath him, so that she could not see his feet.

He had seen her several times from his window, always running to his room the moment she noticed him and waved. Now he didn’t want to run away.

“I go to first grade,” said the little girl. “Where do you go?”

“I’m home-schooled,” Igor said, remembering what his mother had told him to say.

The little girl told a joke. “What has two legs and flies?”

“I don’t know.”

She laughed. “A dead guy.”

At first, he didn’t get it.

“My mom owns your house, you know,” said the little girl.

“So?” Igor replied, but the little girl looked pleased with herself just the same.

They played with Igor’s trucks for a while, but then the little girl started to pout and said that since she had played his game for a while it was time to play hers. “I want to play house,” she said. “You be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy.”

“Okay,” said Igor, though he didn’t really want to.

They made a sand baby and then made sand food for all of them to eat: sand salad and sand pudding and sand cookies served on polished stones.

The little girl tried to serve the food in Igor’s trucks, but everything fell apart. “That’s okay,” she said. “It all falls apart in your stomach, anyway.”

They washed the dishes in the sandbox. They forgot about the sand baby.

The little girl yawned. “Time to go to bed,” she said. She took off her shirt right there in front of him and lay down on the sand.

Her chest was flat, not at all like his mother’s, but somehow different from his. He wanted to be close to her.

“Aren’t you going to put on your pajamas?” she asked.

“I don’t have any,” he said.

“Then you’ll have to pretend. Like me.” She closed her eyes. “It’s okay. I won’t look till we turn out the lights.”

He unbuttoned his shirt and stretched out beside her. He gave her a dry kiss on the cheek.

“Can I look now?” she asked.

“No!” Igor cried. “Not yet!” He gave her another kiss. And then another one.

“I’m cold,” said the little girl. “Wish we had a blanket.” He was scared, but hoped against hope that she wouldn’t make fun of him. Igor took off his shirt and unfurled his wings. He wrapped them around her.

The little girl smiled and put her arms around him. That was when she noticed that the blanket grew from his back. She sat up abruptly, stared at him and screamed. Then she ran away.

He didn’t dare tell his mother because he worried she might hurt the little girl or turn her into a lobster. Igor decided then that he would never again try to make friends. And he would try never again take off his shirt in front of anybody.

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Olympic Games by Leslie What will be published by Tachyon Publications in May 2004.