Mommy Issues of the Dead (Marla Mason) Read Free Page B

the hill on a combination of tanklike treads and spidery articulated multi-jointed legs. “College girl. Give me the snow globe, and I’ll kill you fast.”
    “How about you let me go, or I smash the globe?”
    “It’s magical , fool. You can’t just crack the glass.”
    Marla lifted her metal-wrapped hand. “Not even with brass knuckles enchanted for extra smashy-ness? I can punch through a bank vault with these.”
    “Try it.”
    Uh oh. Marla smashed her fist into the top of the snow globe, and, predictably, nothing happened except the tink of metal tapping glass. “Huh.” So that was no good. But now that she looked closer, this was clearly not a mass-produced snow globe, with the glass top glued on – it was more homemade looking, and the base appeared to just be a jar lid painted black, which meant maybe...
    Marla twisted the glass top one way, and the base the other way, and at first it didn’t want to give, but she was a champion opener of pickle jars, so she strained, and then –
    “No!” Watt screamed, and the woods filled with swirling whiteness, deadening sound and reducing visibility to no more than a foot or two at most.
    “You rescued me.” A woman dressed in ragged black furs stood before Marla, who still held both pieces of the now-empty snowglobe in her hands. She was tall, black-haired, black-eyed, still strikingly beautiful despite being at least twice Marla’s age, and when she spoke, arctic puffs of air emerged from her mouth. She shivered. “I’ve been walking in that snowstorm for... how long? Time is strange in there. What year is it?”
    Marla told her. The woman’s lips quirked in a half-smile. “That means I missed the 1936 World Series then. I don’t suppose you know who won?”
    “Uh. I don’t really follow sports.”
    “No matter. I can look it up.” She waved a hand in front of her face, and the snow that filled the air sizzled and turned to steam, replacing the opaque whiteness with merely misty vapor, and allowing them to see Savery Watt, who was trying without much success to trundle his way back up the hill.
    “Son,” the woman said, and Watt stopped, then slowly rolled backwards and rotated on his treads to face her.
    “Mother,” he fluted.
    “Oh hell,” Marla said. “Did I step into a family thing?”
    The woman approached her son and touched his robot face. “Oh, Savery, you naughty boy. What have you done with your body?”
    “I... it was destroyed in a fire, mother. An explosion in a, uh, factory I owned.”
    “That breaks my heart, baby. I carried that body in my own body, I gave birth to it, and you let it be destroyed? In a fire , no less? I take that as a personal insult.”
    “It was an accident.”
    “How about trapping me in a jar for all those decades? Was that an accident?”
    “I didn’t do that! It was Leland! I just held onto –”
    “Do you remember the Robert Frost poem I read to you when you were a boy?” she said. “The one that starts ‘Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice’? Do you recall how it ends?”
    “No, mother.”
    “It ends, ‘I think I know enough of hate / To know that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”
    “Please, mother,” Watt said.
    She shook her head, sadly. “You had your fire already, my darling. And now...” Ice flowed from her fingers, covering him in a frosty shell, and his amber lights dimmed. She glanced at the two terrified meth monkeys, waved her hand casually, and they froze in place, transformed into ice sculptures of themselves.
    She turned to look at Marla, smiling. “Now, dear, what’s your name?”
    “Uh. Marla Mason. And you are...?”
    “I call myself Regina Queen.”
    Marla blinked. “Doesn’t that mean, like, ‘Queen Queen’?”
    She smiled indulgently. “Some people need to be told things twice before they understand them, dear. I’ve been married to two men – bore them both sons – but I didn’t want to keep either of their