Pasta

I was four when the mom-bot was returned to the Yard. I can remember coming home from school and running into the kitchen excitedly waving my painting around, and skidding to a halt as I realised that the mom-bot wasn't there. I started crying then, because the mom-bot was always in the kitchen when I came home from school. Sometimes it would be stood at sink, irradiating the dishes or the vegetables, and sometimes it would be stood at the cooker stirring things in pots. Often it was pasta, which was my favourite meal. My father hated the mom-bot's pasta though.
I was still crying twenty minutes later when my older brother came in to the kitchen, looked around and then punched me in the ribs. Unsurprisingly that didn't stop me crying, but spurred me on to greater volume, and I found some more tears to dribble down my cheeks.
"Shut it!" he said. "What have you done with the mom-bot? Where's tea?" He scuffed his shoes on the black and white checkered linoleum floor and looked ready to punch me again.
"The mom-bot's gone," said Dad from behind me. "Stop crying, Kirstin, the mom-bot's not coming back."
This time I did stop crying, but mostly out of shock. I turned to stare at him, and he did this funny shrug thing with his shoulders while there was a strange smile on his face. "It was defective," he said. "It didn't do things right. If the Yard can fix it, then we'll get the mom-bot back. Otherwise we'll have to make do without it."

*
The mom-bot never came back. It was odd being the only family on the street without a mom-bot, and at first, quite hard at school. No-one expected you to be missing both a mother and a mom-bot, though it was the lack of a mom-bot that always got attention first.
"You poor thing," murmured teachers when I told them. "It must be very hard for you. My own mom-bot is... well, I couldn't do without her."
That was the first time I noticed that everyone else called their mom-bot her, but we'd always called ours it. I was sixteen before I realised that Dad must have been responsible for that.
At the same time, I'd been taking a lot of mathematics and computer science courses at school, and so when I realised that the Yard had a substantial online presence, I decided to do some snooping. I stole Dad's National Security number and used it to access the Yard as him. His personal questions were easy to answer, and soon I had a record of all of his interactions and requests to the Yard. They were, to my surprise, encrypted, but using a simple Playfair cipher that I cracked in half an hour.
And there is was, in white-on-black on my screen. The reason for the return of the mom-bot.
'It does not make pasta correctly. It consistently adds the sauce to the pasta instead of the pasta to the sauce.'
Below that was a question from the Yard: 'Requested action?'
And Dad's reply: 'Destruction. This is a crime against humanity.'
I laughed, and then stopped, and then laughed again. Surely this was ridiculous? No-one requested destruction of a mom-bot, let alone for the way it made pasta! Then I wondered; why on earth had the Yard complied with Dad's request? A mom-bot was an expensive piece of equipment; most families spent years paying for theirs, it was like a mortgage. All the upgrades came at a cost too, to have a truly up-to-date mom-bot required a high-paying job and a willingness to make personal sacrifices. Dad was just... what was Dad? I suddenly realised I had no idea what Dad did for a living.
Well, I was in his files, all I had to do was call up the personal identity section, which I did. And then I turned the computer off, opened up the case and pulled the memory chips from the board and hacked them apart with scissors. There was no way I wanted any proof I'd looked at Dad's account to be anywhere, even if meant not being able to do my homework until I'd replaced the chips.
At dinner that evening, my brother served up the meal with a smile on his face.
"Pasta!" he said, "Just like mom-bot used to make."
I couldn't bring myself to look at Dad's face, but I heard him whisper, so quietly that he thought we wouldn't hear, "Oh dear, oh dear."

Lemon Juice

"Darling?" My wife's voice came from downstairs, echoing a little through the stairwell.
"Coming, dear!" I called. I pulled my tie from round my neck and tossed it onto the bed, and looked down at my shirt. The blood spatter had pretty much ruined all the bits of it that hadn't been under the tie or my jacket, and though it made an interesting Rorschach pattern, I couldn't see cleaning it being more than a waste of time. I picked up the stiletto from the nightstand and slipped it down the front of the shirt, cutting the buttons off. They pinged onto the bed, with only one escaping to the floor somewhere, and I shrugged the shirt off, discarding it in the third laundry bin – clothes to be burned.
"Coming when?" called my wife. I put the knife back down and hurried down the stairs.
She was in the study, frowning at the computer screen. On it was the text of a document, something academic judging by the number of footnotes I could already see. Next to the computer screen was the ink-jet printer, its little data light flashing, and I could see a couple of sheets of paper sitting on top of it, obviously a recent print-out.
"Were you using this last?" she said, and now there was a tone of accusation in her voice. "Only it doesn't seem to be working."
"Well, I think I might have printed something out." I was hedging, buying myself a little time to try and find out what I might have done before confessing to it. "It's been a bit of a busy day though...."
"I saw you come in," she said. "Jacket buttoned up tightly on a day as hot as today? That means it got messy, doesn't it?"
"A little," I said, realising I'd rather talk about whatever I'd done to the printer than work. "What's not working, it looks like the printer was printing."
"The printer is printing," she said, reaching out and picking up the pages. "But, as you can see, it's not printing anything other than blank pages." She passed me the pages. "And I really need this document for this afternoon, I'm teaching a class on it and – well, students these days. They'll all turn up with a pdf of it on their iPads, marked up and annotated, and I hate having to ask them if I can share."
"Didn't I get you an iPad last Christmas?"
"Yes, but if I take that into a seminar they expect me to network the pdf, and then all of my notes are visible to them, which makes it very hard to set homework."
"I think I can fix that," I said, "when work calms down a little." I sniffed the pages in my hand.
"Ah, yes, I think this is my fault."
"What did you change this time? Is it the printer driver again? I told you, put the new ones in a sensible directory, even if you have to email me where it is."
"I changed the ink cartridge," I said. "There are fresh ones in the desk drawer."
My wife stared at me as though I'd gone mad.
"You changed it for an empty one?" she asked.
"No, one full of concentrated lemon juice," I said. "Your document's here, you just need to iron the pages."
She stared at me again for a long moment, and then smiled. "What if I held a soldering iron near the page? Would that work?"
"Should do," I said. It was my turn to look puzzled now.
"That should make the seminar a little more interesting then," she said. "Let's see how this iPad generation cope with documents you have to cook in order to read! And it'll bring me on to methods of forgery, which is useful."
She took the pages from my hand and gave me a kiss. "You'll have to burn your own clothes this afternoon," she said. "I have a seminar to host."

Auteur

Interviewer: We're here in Café Diavolo with noted Auteur Joaquin Felther, who is currently holding a barrista hostage. Joaquin, is this behaviour entirely normal?
JF: Who's to say what's normal? These people, here, they say that it is not normal to want coffee as black as the souls of men, and they insist on adding milk to it. I will hold out until I receive my coffee the way I like it.
Int: Well, there is some frenzied activity behind the counter now, so perhaps they're seeing to it. The reason we're meeting here today, of course, is not so that I can witness you flirting with arrest, yet again, but to talk about your career to date and your new film.
JF: Ah yes, my new film! Love-song for an Elder Horror. It drove part of the test audience mad, you know.
Int: There were stories to that effect, certainly. Do you think it might be a little irresponsible to release a film that has been shown to induce insanity?
JF: People must always make the decision themselves. I do not conceal the nature of the film, and I make no recommendation that people of a susceptible disposition, or the feeble-minded, should go and see it. Indeed, I feel that these are people who very definitely should not see this film. Or any of my films. I despise these people!
Int: Well, you're no stranger to controversy, certainly. You notably once wrote a love letter to Gabriella Puccilini and published it, if that's the right word, by printing it onto banners that you hung in every public square in Trento.
JF: Yes, it was a beautiful letter and I meant every word of it.
Int: The imagery was stunning, certainly, and led to your arrest and subsequent trial on a charge of 'causing decent people to think indecent thoughts and to suffer a loss of innocence.' You plead not guilty at the time–
JF: And I would plead not guilty now! I did not make people read these words, I offered them up only as an honest depiction of my feelings and let people decide for themselves the truth of my emotion. I stirred the anthracene souls of men and women and invited the noxious vapours of self-awareness to rise.
Int: Gabriella Puccilini had been dead for thirty years when you wrote your letter. There was a discussion during your trial of whether you intended either necromancy, necrophilia, or both.
JF: And as I said at the time, my words do not advocate these things! If this is how you feel after reading my words, then you must ask yourself why you want to do these things.
Int: And recently there has been a repeal of certain laws regarding necrophilia in a number of municipalities. Do you feel that you are somehow contributing to moral decay and turpitude?
JF: Of course not!
Int: You are also famous, of course, for your interpretation of Snow White, in which you cast a prostitute as Snow White and found seven young men whose upbringing had resulted in stunted growth. The film was set in a truly brutal concrete housing estate, and Burberry sued you on release of the film for bringing their brand name into disrepute. What are your feelings about this?
JF: That was the cheapest film I ever made. The dwarves all lived in that housing estate anyway, so much of the action was shot in their own homes, and the prostitute gave us a discounted hourly rate when she realised how many days we were booking her for. Our biggest problem was her insistence on seeing other clients when she wasn't in the scene, but we solved it finally by breaking open an abandoned flat and letting her set up shop there.
Int: Critics suggest that a prostitute cannot truly be 'Snow White' and that you might have got your characters mixed up.
JF: We did consider calling her Rose Red for a while, but then we'd have had to cut the scenes with the apple.
Int: Which caused religious riots due to the biblical imagery....
JF: Hah! The symbology of the scene says even worse things, but only fusty academics noticed!
Int: Ah, your coffee has arrived. Will you let your hostage go now? It's time to conclude this interview anyway; thank-you for your time, and your typically indiscreet comments.

Cracker

That punch knocked Sweet off of his chair and knocks the chair after him and on top of him, but he just pulls himself up off the floor, rights the chair like a man who's just slipped and sits himself back down again. Then he smiles that sweet smile at Cracker, spits his candy out past him, and says,
"Guess you've not had the time yet then."
He leans round Cracker, who's staring at him like a dog that's up and spoken complaining about the food, and waves at the woman in the car; a nice, polite wave, that's almost a salute the way Sweet does it. Cracker's still staring, but he manages in a voice that sounds like someone's strangling him,
"Don't you go waving at my woman."
"As your wanting," says Sweet. "She don't seem much friendly to me anyway."
"That's 'cause you're dirt," says Cracker, his mouth setting into a thin line. "And dirt belongs on the floor."
Sweet might have been expecting another punch, but if he was then he was surprised, because Cracker kicks his chair, breaking a leg and pushing it back, and Sweet lands on the floor again. This time he sits there, pushing the chair aside and tilting his head back to look up at Cracker.
"Seems like that chair must have right upset you," says Sweet, "though it doesn't seem quite right for a man to pick on them that can't fight back like that."
"You keep your thinking to yourself," says Cracker, and his fingers are flexing again, not knowing whether they're hands or fists once more. "What happened to Sheriff Donny's kid then?"
Behind his back, across the road, the good ol' boys are exchanging glances now, and there's little whispers passing back and forth between them. Cracker can't see them, but his woman can, and she calls out from the car in a Yankee screech that can etch glass.
"Cracker!" she yells, sounding like a train entering a tunnel, "Cracker, them boys over by the store know what you're talking about!"
Cracker turns and looks them over, and you can see that he's not scared even though there's six of them and only one of him. Then he pulls this gun from his pocket and points it back behind him so that it's aiming at Sweet, and he says,
"If'n one of you gentlemen doesn't help me out here, then I'm pulling this trigger to make a start, and when I'm finished you'll all be sorry."
That sets up a muttering and a mumbling among the boys, but Cracker has to pull the hammer back on the gun before one of them pipes up and offers as how he might have seen Sheriff Donny's boy back by the fields, working on the harvest. Cracker lowers his head and raises it again slowly, in what might just be a nod if you think he was capable of courtesy, and then he pulls the trigger and the loudest damn bang the town's ever heard goes off, and the bullet speeds away from his gun.

Sweet

They called him 'Sweet' on account of his sweet tooth, seems like there was never a time when he didn't have a candy or six hanging around in his pockets, but Jim Mahan was also the sweetest tempered man you'd ever meet. When Clyde, who'd eat raw onions for his lunch every day and then breath over you when he met you, got right up in his face, Sweet never even wrinkled his nose; just smiled his simple smile and carried right on with business. And when Jessica, who ran the general store back then and had no idea that the good ol' boys out front called her 'Vinegar-knickers' when they thought there was no-one but the kids around, told him that he couldn't have credit no more on account of her having heard tell that he'd kicked a dog, well he just smiled that simple smile and quit his smoking just like that. Even when she relented, after she found out that the dog was rabid and the size of a sheep, Sweet never went back to the store while she was there. And he never smoked a cigarette or cigarillo again, neither. The man had principles.
It was pretty much a good day when Cracker came back to town, driving up the highway in a dusty open-topped car with him at the wheel and a woman that looked cheaper than dirt sitting in the passenger seat, her blouse open and a red bra showing, one leg thrown over the car door all casual like, as though waiting for the next man through the door. The sky was blue, the wind wasn't blowing much, and the grit from the last dust storm was mostly swept away, so as Cracker roars in, the engine throbbing softly, hinting at power, all of the mothers appear from somewhere, and God knows but I never saw them coming, and the children are swept off the street and found tasks to do that'll keep them away from the windows and seeing Cracker and his woman.
Well, Cracker pulls up outside the bar, and Sweet's sat outside on a chair, balancing it on three legs and sucking on some candy or other. On the other side of the road, outside the general store, ol' Vinegar-knickers is closing the door and putting up the shutters and generally doing all that of locking up that means she's just locking up until Cracker's gone away again. The good ol' boys are still sitting there, watching what's going on, and more than one of them had their eye on that woman, though in all fairness she was pretty distracting.
Cracker gets out of the car, walks over to Sweet, and then spits on the floor at his feet.
"Where's the Sheriff?" he says, and Sweet can see that his fingers and clenching and unclenching all the time like he can't make his mind up if he wants a hand or a fist.
"Dead," says Sweet. "Died eight months ago now. Crabs, I think it was."
"What?" Cracker looks taken aback, and his hand settles on fist. "Sheriff Donny? Dead?"
And of course, that's what Cracker's come back for, 'cause of Sheriff Donny being the one who dragged him out of the barn he was hiding in and sent him off to the State for trial there, and they're the ones who locked him up for the last three, and told him to his face that he was a twisted, stub-souled son of a bitch.
"Ayup," said Sweet, mimicking Cracker's accent what he didn't leave town with. He leans around Cracker, peers at the car, and then returns his eyes square to Cracker's face. "Did you go and get yourself married then?" All sweet and innocent, and there's nothing in those words that could get a man all excited like it got Cracker, 'cause Cracker steps forwards and swings, and punches Sweet right in the side of the face.

Hutch cookery

My secretary placed the printout of the email on my desk, front and centre. He stood back, eyed it critically, then nudged one corner a little; I guessed it must not have been quite precisely square. I coughed.
He jumped, his shoulders coming out of their usually rigid level alignment, and only when he'd got himself back under control did he turn round. I smiled from where I was sat, in the armchair behind the door.
"Hello," I said. "Have you ever studied Desert Cookery?" I indicated the book in my lap, taken from the dusty shelves behind me, and my ostensible reason for hiding behind the door of my office. Though in actual fact I was pretty certain that my secretary had been avoiding me and was only coming into my office with mail, post, and parcels when he thought I wasn't there.
"...no," he said, his voice low and shaking very slightly. "Is that a mishearing of Dessert Cookery? Did you – did we publish it?"
"No and no," I said, my smile widening. "It's actually rather rare and is a collection of recipes that the feral chef-author Chihuahua put together after spending eight weeks in the Gobi with a handful of slightly odd tribes there. Not everything in the book sounds edible, but she swears she's seen people eat them."
"...while out in the desert?" He sounded mournful.
"Funnily enough she always evades that particular question," I said. I stood up, carrying the book with me. "Ah, you've brought me a message. An important one, too, by the look of it."
"I should be getting along," he said, "I have other things to be doin–"
"Not at all," I said quickly. "I've not seen you all day," or all week, in fact, I added mentally and I have a number of things I wish to discuss with you."
"I am quite busy," he tried, but I was ready for that.
"And you work for me, so it's me that's keeping you busy," I said. "I've approved your days off, by the way. The funeral's tomorrow."
He nodded, and I left it at that. My mother had died, and his relationship with her had been something I hadn't wanted to know about or even be reminded about so I was pretending to myself that he was just a friend of the family. I was also working quite hard to keep him from finding out that she'd died after trying recipes from our Trench Cookery book. It turned out that the author, in a misguided attempt at WWI authenticity, had included a recipe that released phosgene gas during the cooking process.
"Ah, Hutch Cookery," I said, reading the memo he'd placed on my desk. "How's that coming along?"
"I've sent out the emails and memos," he said, still sounding despondent. "But... are you sure it's a good idea to deliberately get it wrong? Surely Dutch Cookery would be the best thing to tell people."
"Every time so far someone's misheard, or mistyped, or misthought when we gave the a title in this series," I said. "So let's give them the opportunity to mishear it as the title we're actually after. After all, even the nitwits we work with are likely to think twice about 'Crutch cookery' given that crutches don't cook well. Or photograph well." I had a momentary flashback to the Gerbil Cookery tasting session and had to sit down again.
"I'm more worried about 'Putsch Cookery'," murmured my secretary, "and the fact that we're both out of the office tomorrow."
"We're not," I said with a smile. "Just you. I'm not going to the funeral."

The Judas Caste

"'Scuse me, buddy, but can you spare a leg?"
I barely glanced down, I was leaving the station and the entrance hall always had one or two zombies begging there now. The police tended to leave them alone, and though the station staff were under orders to move them on, most of them didn't like going near the zombies so they could stay and panhandle as much as they liked.
"I'm using both of mine," I said in a clear voice. The zombies didn't much seem to like having attention drawn to them, so the best way to refuse was to do so loudly so everyone could hear.
"Timeshare, then?"
That halted me, it was almost a joke. And zombies had no sense of humour at all; one of the things death took permanently was an ability to see the funny side of things. I looked down.
The zombie was a woman, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a flat cap in front of her containing a handful of coins, some bottle tops and a health-care token. One of her legs ended just above the knee, and I could see the end of the bone, with scraps of sinew and tendon still clinging to it. It looked a little chewed, which could be rats, or could be other zombies. Above that she was wearing a blouse that looked new. Her face stopped my breath though. It was Tasha.
"Hi Rube," she said when our eyes made contact. "You're blocking the way."
I shuffled to the side, and held out a hand to help her up. She nearly pulled me over – I'd heard that zombies were strong, but this was the first time I'd ever touched one – and leant on me so that her short-leg was supported.
"Where are you going to take me, Rube?" There was a hint of laughter in her voice.
"There's a café," I said. "Just outside. They'll let you sit at the table so long as I'm ordering."
"How blesséd I am," she said, but left at that until we were sat down and I had two cups of coffee in front of me, the waitress insisting that everyone who had a seat should have a drink.
"What happened, Tash?" I said, staring into the black depths of my Americano. "Last time I saw you you were still dancing."
"I died," said Tasha, staring at me. I suddenly realised that zombies don't blink. "We were doing West Side Story up at the Cotillion and one of the props came lose and hit me."
"What?"
"Yeah, the prop manager was drunk that morning, didn't check all the ties properly. Just my bad luck it was the wrecking ball. Bad for the theatre too, took out a supporting wall and collapsed the east side of the upper circle."
"How did you...." I tailed off, not knowing how to ask the question.
"Become a zombie?"
I nodded.
"I was lucky, the ball hit me and knocked me over instead of pasting me up against the wall, the unlucky bit was being run over by the ambulance when it arrived.
"The Judas Caste?"
She nodded. "Yeah. They were only too thrilled to conceal the evidence of their crime and hand me over to the resurrectionists. Three days on a cross, a tattoo that looks suspiciously like a barcode, and now a lifetime of spite and hatred from the living."
"Don't the resurrectionists like you?"
"Not in ways you'd like to hear about," she said.
"So why are you...." Still here, I wanted to say, but it seemed too cruel.
"Still here? Because I have a bill to pay for my return to this life, and if I kill myself, they'll wake me up again and add the new bill to the old."
"How do you pay the bill?"
"We're back to those things you don't want to hear about," she said. "But, there might be a way out of this, if you could do a thing or two for me?"
I raised an eyebrow and discovered that zombies don't have very good eyesight.
"Well? Will you help me?"
"What do I have to do?" I asked.
"First of all, meet me in the Popham graveyard at midnight tonight."