Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 (16 page)

The door was latched. Charlotta pounded on it with her fist until it opened. A man in a tuxedo with a wide orange cummerbund stepped out. He shook his head. “American?” he asked. “And empty-handed? That's no way to make a river."

"We're here for the poetry,” Charlotta told him and he shook his head again.

"Invitation only."

And Charlotta reached into the back pocket of her pants. Charlotta pulled out the orange paper given to me by the boy on the train. The man took it. He threw it into a small basket with many other such papers. He stood aside and let Charlotta enter.

He stepped back to block me. “Invitation only."

"That was my invitation,” I told him. “Charlotta!” She looked back at me, over her shoulder without really turning around. “Tell him. Tell him that invitation was for me. Tell him how Senor Brunelle told you you wouldn't get in."

"So?” said Charlotta. “That woman on the street told you you wouldn't get in."

But I had figured that part out. “She mistook me for you,” I said.

Beyond the door I could see Raphael climbing onto the dais. I could hear the room growing silent. I could see Charlotta's back sliding into a crowd of people like a knife into water. The door swung toward my face. The latch fell.

I stayed a long time by that door, but no sounds came through. Finally I walked down the last hundred steps. I was alone at the bottom of the gorge where the rain fell and fell and there was no river. I would never have done to Charlotta what she had done to me.

It took me more than an hour to climb back up. I had to stop many, many times to rest, airless, heart throbbing, legs aching, lightheaded in the dark. No one met me at the top.

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Amelia Beamer
works at
Locus,
where she is responsible for administrative-type tasks involving envelopes and databases, as well as catching watermelons as they fly around the office. She has a Bachelor's in English Literature and enjoys researching science fiction as an independent scholar. Before
Locus,
she worked at Clarion East, taking care of the pros and the students and trying to raise enough money to run the workshop. She attended Clarion in 2004, and was twice a finalist for the Dell Award (previously the Asimov award).

Rose Black
lives by the Union Pacific Railroad tracks in Oakland, CA, where she and her husband operate Renaissance Stone, a studio and supply source for stone sculptors. She has a passion for the prose poem. Some of the publications in which her work has appeared or is forthcoming are
Runes, Spillway, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Hubbub, RiverSedge, Soundings East, Pennsylvania English, Oregon East, Owen Wister Review
and
The South Carolina Review.

David Blair's
first book of poems
Ascension Days
will be available from Del Sol Press in September. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and teaches at The New England Institute of Art.

Gwenda Bond
knows a little too much about public health. She recommends books and posts pictures of pets at www.gwendabond.typepad.com.

Steven Bratman:
a collection of I-once-believed stories, formerly enfaithed this way or that, now hot on the trail of original bamboozlement.

Laura Evans
will cook for you, pour you a glass of dark red wine, lay a linen napkin across your lap, and tell you stories you may or may not want to hear.

Karen Joy Fowler
is the author of two story collections and four novels, including the
New York Times
bestseller
The Jane Austen Book Club.
Her story “What I Didn't See” won the Nebula award in 2003. She has taught creative writing at Stanford, UC Davis, Cleveland State, Alabama University, and numerous summer workshops.

Neile Graham
is Canadian by birth and inclination. She has three published collections of poems, most recently
Blood Memory
(BushekBooks, 2000), and a forthcoming poetry CD,
She Says: Poems Selected and New
. Finishing her novel scares her, but she is bravely doing it anyway despite the skepticism of her spouse and three cats who say they've heard
that
before.

Jon Hansen
is a writer, librarian, and occasional blood donor. Since the birth of his son Ian last summer, he is currently quite sleep-deprived. His wife Lisa thinks he's adorable. His incoherent ramblings can be seen online at logicalcreativity.com/jon.

Michael Hartford
lives in Minneapolis with his wife and twin sons. His stories have appeared online in
Small Spiral Notebook, Failbetter
, and
The Summerset Review
, and in print in
Duck & Herring, Ballyhoo Stories,
and
Going Down Swinging.

Meghan McCarron
teaches English and film at a boarding school in New Hampshire. She would like to take up snowshoeing, but global warming has so far prevented this. Her stories have appeared in venues such as
Strange Horizons, Twenty Epics, Rabid Transit,
and
Say .....
She is working on a YA novel about the downsides of being a girl who kicks ass.

Edward McEneely
was born in 1983, and received a BA in the Humanities in 2003. He has a pet cat and a pet hedgehog, both named after prominent figures from the Great War. This is his first published story, and, by happy coincidence, also his first submission.

Anil Menon
worked for years in the software industry worrying about things like secure distributed databases. Then he shifted to a different kind of fiction. His short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies such as
Albedo One, Chiaroscuro, InterNova, New Genre, Strange Horizons, TEL: Stories
, and
From The Trenches
. He was nominated for the Carl Brandon Society's
Parallax Prize
for his story “Archipelago". His SF novel
The Beast With Nine Billion Feet
is scheduled to appear in 2007 (Wisdom Tree). He is a 2004 Clarion West graduate.

Nathaniel Meyer
is an artist/illustrator living and working out of Portland, Maine. A graduate of Boston Univeristy's School of Fine Arts, he teaches drawing and painting at Lewiston High School. In addition to producing his own work, he also paints collaboratively with his brother, Matthew Meyer. More of his work can be found at www.brothersmeyer.com.

M. Brock Moorer
lives in Lexington, KY, and is one half of the band Lip Kandy.

William Smith
makes spanky new books and sells dusty old ones. Find him at trunkstories.com and hangfirebooks.com.

Marly Youmans
just completed a residency in fiction at Yaddo. Her most recent novel is
The Wolf Pit
, her most recent Southern fantasy for young adults is
Ingledove
(both from FSG), and her first poetry collection is
Claire
(LSU). A limited edition novella,
Val / Orson,
is forthcoming from P. S. Publishing.