Magic for Beginners: Stories Read Free

manager, and Batu walked
back across the road to wait for the next store manager.
    Eric bathed standing up at the sink and put on his uniform. He
brushed his teeth. The closet smelled like sleep.
    It was the middle of February, and there was snow in the
All-Night parking lot. Batu was clearing the parking lot, carrying
shovelfuls of snow across the road, dumping the snow into the
Ausible Chasm. Eric went outside for a smoke and watched. He didn’t
offer to help. He was still upset about the way Batu had behaved in
his dream.
    There was no moon, but the snow was lit by its own whiteness.
There was the shadowy figure of Batu, carrying in front of him the
shadowy scoop of the shovel, full of snow, like an enormous spoon
full of falling light, which was still falling all around them. The
snow came down, and Eric’s smoke went up and up.
    He walked across the road to where Batu stood, peering down into
the Ausible Chasm. Down in the Chasm, it was no darker than the
kind of dark the rest of the world, including Eric, especially
Eric, was used to. Snow fell into the Chasm, the way snow fell on
the rest of the world. And yet there was a wind coming out of the
Chasm that worried Eric.
    “What do you think is down there?” Batu said.
    “Zombie Land,” Eric said. He could almost taste it. “Zomburbia.
They have everything down there. There’s even supposed to be a
drive-in movie theater down there, somewhere, that shows old
black-and-white horror movies, all night long. Zombie churches with
AA meetings for zombies, down in the basements, every Thursday
night.”
    “Yeah?” Batu said. “Zombie bars too? Where they serve zombies
Zombies?”
    Eric said, “My friend Dave went down once, when we were in high
school, on a dare. He used to tell us all kinds of stories.”
    “You ever go?” Batu said, pointing with his empty shovel at the
narrow, crumbly path that went down into the Chasm.
    “I never went to college. I’ve never even been to Canada,” Eric
said. “Not even when I was in high school, to buy beer.”
     
    All night the zombies came out of the Chasm, holding handfuls of
snow. They carried the snow across the road, and into the parking
lot, and left it there. Batu was back in the closet, sending off
faxes, and Eric was glad about this, that Batu couldn’t see what
the zombies were up to.
    Zombies came into the store, tracking in salt and melting snow.
Eric hated mopping up after the zombies.
    He sat on the counter, facing the road, hoping Charley would
drive by soon. Two weeks ago, Charley had bitten a man who’d
brought his dog to the animal shelter to be put down.
    The man was bringing his dog because it had bit him, he said,
but Charley said you knew when you saw this guy, and when you saw
the dog, that the dog had had a very good reason.
    This man had a tattoo of a mermaid coiled around his meaty
forearm, and even this mermaid had an unpleasant look to her:
scaly, corseted bottom; tiny black dot eyes; a sour, fangy smile.
Charley said it was as if even the mermaid were telling her to bite
the arm, and so she did. When she did, the dog went nuts. The guy
dropped its leash. He was trying to get Charley off his arm. The
dog, misunderstanding the situation, or rather, understanding the
situation, but not the larger situation, had grabbed Charley by her
leg, sticking its teeth into her calf.
    Both Charley and the dog’s owner had needed stitches. But it was
the dog who was doomed. Nothing had changed that.
    Charley’s boss at the shelter was going to fire her, anytime
soon—in fact, he had fired her. But they hadn’t found someone to
take her shift yet, and so she was working there, for a few more
days, under a different name. Everyone at the shelter understood
why she’d had to bite the man.
    Charley said she was going to drive all the way across Canada.
Maybe keep on going, up into Alaska. Go watch bears pick through
garbage.
    “When a bear hibernates,” she told Batu and Eric, “it sleeps all
winter and