Supernatural Noir

“Her,” January says, and strokes the pale-pink wooden muzzle under the long, dappled wooden nose.

“Oh, not the middle one,” says Martin. “You can’t catch the brass ring if you’re on the middle one.”

“Brass ring?” January tucks her long, felted-wool skirt around her tights.

“Sure,” Martin says. “This carousel still has brass rings. Catch one, and you get a free ride.”

“But the rides are all free—”

He waves his hand in that airy ma

She rolls her eyes and puts on her best I’m humoring Martin face. Recognizing it, he grins.

“Fine, but I’m riding Buttercup next time.”

“Buttercup? You’re not keeping her—”

He stands aside so she can mount the stallion, but it still looks uncomfortably wide, and she turns to the plain little filly on the inside. She’s stiffer than the others, more plainly made, her seams more apparent. Even her paint looks dull. The bulging glass eyes are more crudely fitted, and this pony has not only a tail of real horsehair, but a mane also, mingled strands of black and white and gray.

“Macabre,” January says, petting it, and swings up into the saddle.

It’s been a long time since she was on a real horse, and she’s never done it in heels—even low heels like these Mary Jane clogs. But once her feet are in the stirrups and she’s remembering how to use the leverage, she finds herself sitting comfortably, legs extended, one hand resting on the spiraling brass sleeve that covers the steel pole the horse hangs from. Her skirt drapes the saddle like a lady’s cloak in a tapestry.

“Brass ring,” she says to Martin, who is watching her from under furrowed brow.

“Brass ring.” He swings onto the stallion, which—at the top of its arc—makes him seem miles and miles taller.

Other riders fill in. The elephant immediately in front of January is occupied by Martin’s freshman-year roommate Andrew. His narrow height is distorted in the middle by a potbelly now, but his colorless hair still sticks out every which way, though there is less of it. He dangles himself over the back of the beast and extends one telescopic arm to pat the dragonfly ornament between the gray filly’s eyes. “You got the ugliest ride in the joint again.”

“But the elephant has the ugliest rider,” she answers, and watches him try to take it as a joke, the way people who camouflage their viciousness as humor generally have to. He manages, more or less, but while he’s arranging his face January rolls her eyes at Martin.

Martin rolls them right back. Andrew must catch the exchange, because he says, “Don’t tell me you two are back together?” in a prickly voice, which makes Martin laugh like he’ll never stop.

January grins at him, and the carousel starts.

——

Ripples of force spread across the girl’s flesh from the clean entry wound, small as a puncture. The impact and transfer of force cause cavitation: shock waves blow the path of the bullet as wide as if a fist were shoved into the injury. The wound collapses again.

Human skin and muscle are elastic; bone and liver are not.

——

January is getting the hang of this brass-ring thing. She’d expected they would be on hooks overhead, so you’d have to stand in the saddle to reach. In retrospect, that strikes her as a silly supposition—imagine the liability issues!—but how was she supposed to know? She’s never seen a carousel that still has them before.

The rings are in long-armed dispensers, one outside and one inside the deck of the carousel, between the i

Andrew, with his long arms and quick fingers, is getting two or three rings at once. He can reach out ahead, swipe the first, and the dispenser has reloaded before he’s out of range. Martin is much more casual about it. He snags his rings as if lifting an hors d’oeuvre from a passing waiter’s tray. Martin is mugging for her, feet out of the stirrups, knees drawn up, sitting high in the saddle of the big carved Percheron as if he were a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. She wants to tell him not to fall and split his head open, but she’s also known him long enough to know better.

There are probably worse ways to die.

The painted ponies don’t just go up and down (sorry, Joni Mitchell)—they travel in geared circles, undulating forward as the carousel spins. The Wurlitzer booms and squeaks and plinks. Inside it, January imagines bellows and hammers and little plinky valves. The bars on the glockenspiel jump when struck, and the swell shutters on its gold-and-white face open and shut, controlling the volume.

“Dixie” is ending and January expects the carousel to slow, but apparently it’s two songs a ride, because the Wurlitzer hiccups and wheezes and swings into “Bicycle Built for Two” as she comes around again. Andrew snags a brown ring, two, and as he palms the second one January sees a gold-bright flash of brass when his hand comes down.

She’s not prepared for the jump of her heart, the surge of adrenaline, the way it feels, for a moment, as if the pony under her stretches warm, real flanks and surges forward. She leans into the stirrup, skirt furling in the wind of her passage, feeling the tension and strength up her leg, and lets her fingers grope forward—

But Andrew’s fingers flash again, there’s the rattle of the springs, and the brass ring is gone, replaced by one dull and lifeless. January settles into the stirrups, balanced again, the strain equalized through both legs. Whatever trick of perception made the gray filly seem to move like a real horse is gone, and she’s just a painted pony again.

After the ride, Andrew tries to give January the brass ring, but she decides she’d rather have a brownie.

——

Before the bullet strikes the girl, it is blown from the muzzle of the pistol at a velocity of some 830 feet per second, pushed before a cloud of hot, expanding gases. Those gases, the product of combustion, are created when the propellant in the bullet’s cartridge undergoes deflagration. Smokeless powder is a solid propellant, and it burns rather than detonating.

Rifling along the barrel of the pistol (a brand-new, i

——

January dangles a paper cup of hot cider by the rolled edges to avoid burning her fingers and listens to Martin talk to Jeff about mortgages and gardening. It’s a better conversation than you’d expect—Jeff is younger, in his thirties, a muscular African American with mobile, elegant hands. He’s a work friend of Martin’s from before Martin owned his own company, and he’s sharply witty and not too impressed with what one of January’s lesbian friends calls the Social Program.

In any case, Jeff is in the midst of an involved history of his attempts to use nonlethal force to keep what he refers to as the Yard Bu

Jeff switches gears effortlessly—“Colors?”—leaving January making a mental note to get the rest of the bu