New Decameron Fourteen: Sherwood Smith (Patreon)

Commando Bats

Sherwood Smith

When I was young, aging women were interchangeable. Ugly, slow, annoying with their unwanted opinions. It seemed impossible that I’d ever be one. The first proof that the universe has a sense of humor? I’m half of one.

Since the stroke that wiped out my livelihood, I’d taken to tooling my electric scooter along the Venice boardwalk, or out to the Santa Monica pier. I was on the pier that day when the second proof happened.

My goal was to work at training my left hand to mix colors, but when too exasperated by juggling paints, paper, and water in the fitful ocean breeze, I sat back and watched the fishers, patient and still, the flirting young couples, and a man with his little boy tossing bits of bread up in the air to the seagulls swooping and diving over the choppy green waters.

Then this compelling, melodic female voice spoke intimately, as if right beside my ear.

“Excellent. You are what I want.”

That couldn’t possibly be me. I turned. Nearby stood two other sixty-plus women. The tall, thin silver-haired one in the elegant clothes, with the wedding ring the size of a Volkswagen, looked quickly away from the sensibly dressed, solid black woman with the salt-and-pepper hair; she, in turn, glanced from Lady Gotrocks to me in my motorized wheelchair, and then away with an air of this has nothing to do with me. 

“Yes. You.” The speaker sounded like an opera singer I'd once worked with, back in my waitress days, when she was putting herself through music school and I was studying art. The unmusical cadences of everyday speech could not hide the melody intrinsic in her tones. It was just this way with this woman: she did not shout, or even speak very loud, but her voice rang.

I turned my scooter. The speaker was tall, with high piled curly dark hair, and large dark eyes. She wore a kind of caftan thing with stylized peacocks embroidered around the hem, and she carried a bag with cleverly made overlapping fabric that looked like lotus leaves. I wondered how much she had paid for it.

She stared straight at me. People usually don't. They see the scooter and my lifeless right arm and the droopy right side of my face, and look away quickly.

Peacock Lady gestured imperiously to the three of us. “Reach into my bag.” That resonant, musical voice was so commanding I grabbed the stick to move my scooter forward and then I thought, Wait a minute.

“Who are you?” the black woman asked, not quite hostile, but definitely a challenge. “I don't touch anyone's handbag.”

“Excuse me,” Lady Gotrocks said in a Malibu drawl, as she wiped her eyes on a linen handkerchief of the type I hadn’t seen since my grandmother was alive. “I was just leaving.”

Peacock Lady held up a hand, palm out. She loomed, dark eyes compelling under her cloud of curly hair, her complexion a warm bronze: she was the archetype of beauty and majesty. "I have chosen you three to receive my gift. Now, reach into my bag, or suffer my ire!”

I swear there was an echo from the Hollywood Hills.

“I know you all, for you come within my governance. I am Hera. Now I order you for the third and last time: Reach into my bag.” She fixed on me, as I was now closest. 

The woman's ringing tones shivered through my nerves. I reached up from my scooter to slip my fingers over the lotus leaves—which were not fabric, after all, but cool and alive. “Your name?” she commanded.

“Nancy Litvak Fiala.” My voice came out a croak as my fingers found what felt like a jumble of costume jewelry, some of which had to have been kept in her freezer, for it was icy cold.

“Ahhhh,” Hera murmured. “That one. It is just.”

My forefinger touched a warm circle of metal, which slipped on of its own accord. I yanked my hand out, staring. Was that a ruby on my finger, or just sun-dazzle? I blinked, and the image was gone.

Hera held out the bag to the black woman next. Moving slowly, bristling with suspicion, she stretched out her hand.

“Your name?” Hera— I may as well call her that—demanded.

“Bettina Wilson.” Bettina slipped her hand in and almost immediately withdrew it. Something winked with a diamond glitter on her finger and then vanished.

“Come,” Hera said to Lady Gotrocks, who turned away from the railing with obvious reluctance. I noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. “Your name?”

“Cecile . . . Schuyler.” The hesitation before the last name sounded odd. Suspicious? Definitely hauteur. When Hera imperiously shook the lotus bag (the leaves actually rustled) Cecile reached in with the air of one about to touch an extremely dead fish. She gave a little gasp, pulled her hand free, and wrung it.

“Hephaestus, Herakles,” Hera said to me and Cecile, then smiled at Bettina. “And Zeus. Ah ha! Judicious choices.” That compelling voice belled with an undertone of laughter. 

Bettina rubbed furiously at her hand, her fingers sparkling in the sun.

“The male gods,” said Hera, “have displeased me. I have taken all their powers." She hefted the lotus bag, and the leaves fluttered in the wind, sending out an aroma of pungent greenery. "Perforce they must watch. Perhaps they will learn something about the exigencies of power."

"Who’s going to teach what to whom?" Bettina asked, still suspicious.

"You," Hera stated. "Will teach them. Long have I listened as crones are made the butt of japes. If the fools listened to those who have the least power yet the most wisdom, would not the world be in better case? Prove me right." 

Sunlight flashed off the seawater, dazzling our eyes. I caught a confusion of whirling wings, and then all the noise of the pier—whose absence I had not noticed until then—closed around us: the wash-splash of the waves, the cry of seabirds, the chatter of tourists and the clatter of fishing poles.

The three of us were no longer isolated. We were joined in a shared emotion of horror, disbelief, and a complete inability to know what to do next. 

Cecile was the first to react. She turned her back on Bettina and me and headed for the stairway to the upper level of the pier. As she passed one of the sturdy benches looking out over the water, she hit the back of it, either accidentally or in an expression of frustration. Then she recoiled as a corner of the iron-bound back support about the size of a dinner plate broke free with a loud crack and hurtled up into the air some hundred feet, spinning crazily.

I was staring in total disbelief, so I didn’t see exactly what Bettina did, but I sneezed as a beam of hot, electric air shot by me and intersected that spinning piece. Light glowed around it for a nanosecond, then vanished, leaving a puff of ash to float down to the ocean water below. 

My head whipped around in an Exorcist neck twist; there was Bettina in the act of wringing her fingers violently. Only instead of water dripping off, light zapped, splashed, and shot around crazily in a fireworks display that made my eyes hurt.

She froze. I rubbed my eyes as dozens of tiny fires sent white smoke twirling lazily upward on the sea breeze.

“What the hell?”

“Hey—”

“It’s a bomb!”

The voices broke out behind me. Once again I did a Linda Blair, in time to catch Cecile bracing her hands on that bench support as if she were trying to will it whole again. The result? The thing broke into splinters, and as she recoiled, her hands jerking to her shoulders, fingers spread, the splinters shot skyward, a whole bunch of spinning shards of iron and stone that were going to come down and cause a world of hurt.

“Halt.”

The voice, unlike Hera’s imperial ring, was soft as fog, cooling as rain, a whisper that somehow seized time. The smoldering fires all winked out. The lethal shards overhead reversed their trajectories in a flash, reassembling seamlessly. The ashes even swooped up from the water below like a clump of tiny mites, blurring together into a chunk that reattached to its parent bench back with a definitive thok.

Cecile, Bettina, and I swung around. Another woman stood on the steps to the upper level, wearing a golden helmet, a white peplum, and sandals that tied up to her knees. A huge owl sat on her shoulder. She held an honest-to-ancient-days spear in one hand. In spite of these outlandish details, the people around us blinked, turned to one another with questions that no one listened to, then slowly wandered away, without paying her the least attention.

She smiled at them out of a young-old face, then beckoned to us with her free hand.

This time, Cecile didn’t try to walk away. Bettina still looked hostile and suspicious, but she waited. I put my good hand to my scooter joystick. When my fingertips touched the metal, a schematic bloomed behind my eyes, and I, who could barely work a cell phone, and who could not figure out the TV remote, saw the structure of my chair right down to the movement of electrons. I let out a squawk, and this time the newcomer laughed out loud. It sounded like the chuckle of a stream.

“Use the senses you have been given,” she said, snapped her fingers, and the owl launched upward with a great flapping of wings, then poof! It vanished, leaving behind a brief scent of cinnamon and cedarwood. 

Cecile coughed, then said in a faint voice, “Excuse me.”

“Believe the evidence.”

People streamed around us as if we were not there. I thought, this better not be another stroke. I pinched my nose. Hard. Tears burned my eyes. The woman in the helmet—Pallas Athena?—was still there.

Bettina said, “What are we supposed to be doing?”

“Anything you like,” said Athena. “But Hera will be most displeased if you take her gift and do nothing. She is going through the world dispersing gifts to women like you, past the change of life.” She raised her spear, indicating the people around us. “You know what most men would do, given these powers.” Athena brought the spear down with a crack that reverberated like thunder— though again, none of the people around us reacted. “Disappoint her at your peril.”

She vanished in a wink of light.

And there we were, three totally unconnected women standing in an uncomfortable triangle on the crowded Santa Monica Pier. 

Cecile looked away, body language broadcasting her desire to be anywhere else. Bettina the same. 

Me? If I could have, I’d be whooping with amazement and thrill; half a century ago I’d been wearing Spock ears to conventions, and until my stroke I’d spent decades drawing wizards, witches, elves, ghosts, warriors, and every other kind of supernatural being writers imagined. Though at age ten I’d reluctantly given up believing I was going to find magic when I’d rapped my last closet back in hopes of finding Narnia behind it, I’d done the next best thing: illustrated it for comics and book covers.

Cecile said, “I can’t deal with this now.”

Bettina shrugged. “Better we should exchange phone numbers. In case.”

She didn’t say in case of what. But Cecile nodded, and rattled off her digits. Bettina and I followed suit, then we all separated, them to the stairs, and I hit the joystick on my scooter, and trundled up the ramp to head for home.

“Home” for me is a garage converted into a single-room apartment behind a beautiful Craftsman house ten blocks inland from the pier. I got there without mishap, plugged in the scooter, toiled through getting my zombie half from scooter to chair, and then I sat there gazing from object to object as I tried to get the old reality and the new to mesh. It didn’t help when I remembered that I’d sat in exactly the same spot the day I came home from the hospital after the stroke, trying to mesh decades of ageless labor into the jolt of the new me. When had I turned old? Inside, I was the same age I’d always been.

My only mirror was in the tiny bathroom and shower annex. My big, spacious room was filled wall-to-wall with books and artwork, lit by the big skylight in the roof overhead, which was the reason I had rented the place back in the 70s.

I put my hand over the controls of my chair, and once again a kind of 3-D display overlaid itself on my retinas. I’d picked this chair because it had a lift that brought me up standing, but it was an older model — all I could get — and as I stared at the schematic, I began to see where the makers had taken money-saving shortcuts.

If they had just… If I could…

I can’t really explain it, except in terms of art. When I compose a picture, the image and the means of building it are there in mind, a cohesion somewhat like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle, in 3-D, all at once. When I draw it, I have to reverse the process, fitting it together on the page one bit at a time.

But this schematic? I had the cohesion in a flash, without having to pull it apart to work it out on paper with pencil, chalks, and acrylic. A shock ran through me, a frisson of excitement as the schematic rippled into a new configuration and the hum changed under my hand, moving the chair smoothly into the bathroom. With my hand still on the control panel, I used my mind to alter the schematic so that the lift would bring me upright.

It worked.

I stared into the mirror. Looking back at me was the same sallow-olive blob of a face that had looked back at me all my life, gradually sagged by time and gravity, unnoticed until the stroke pulled down the right side of my mouth. Plain brown hair, brown eyes — my Aunt Abby had said when I turned sixteen that I got the worst of both sides of the family: Italian olive and Middle Eastern saffron. Mix that with my granddad’s stolid Dutch farmer build, and the result was roughly the shape and coloring of a potato. My saving grace in school had been my drawing, wherein I could escape the dingy, boring everyday tread of reality into flights of fantasy and magic.

I’d chosen escapism because it was fun, and finally a way to earn bread and rent. But I didn’t believe any of it. The world was too dull and predictable for surprises. All it was good for was horror, and that was largely human-caused, except when nature opened a random can of whoop-ass.

So what kind of world was this? Hera and Athena? Olympian gods? Powers? 

“Come on, Nancy,” I slurred to my blob of a face, only the left side of my mouth moving. “Reading science fiction and fantasy since you were eight. You can handle this!”

I looked down at the chair, and issued a command: “Turn into a hover chair.”

Nothing happened. 

I put my hand over the control and impatiently tried to wish the chair into flying. The electricity hummed fretfully, and a faint smell of metallic burn hit my nose. I jerked my hand away from the control. Shut my eyes. Carefully put my hand over the controls again, and once more saw the schematic. Oh. I’d overloaded the wiring here . . . 

Another, more subtle ripple of changes, and the lift lowered with a quiet hum. It was a different hum, indicating a more efficient flow of electrons.

Okay. Whatever I was doing seemed to adhere in some way to the laws of physics. 

Still keeping my hand over the controls, I used that mental schematic to propel the chair back into the room, where I put in some time doing chair dancing: back-and-forth, around, lift, turn, lower, slow. Fast. In this way, I got a sense of how much stress the framework could take, and I also discovered how much electricity I could move. Basically, it seemed to be the limit of whatever power source I could tap into, as long as I didn’t let too much friction or heat build up. I might not be able to write an equation to save my life, but my nose could detect heat, and the hum would change to the rough sound of angry bees.

I loved the idea of a flying chair, but a jet-chair would mean mega-hot fires inches below my butt. Not practical!

Hovercraft use blowers to produce a large volume of air below the hull that is slightly above atmospheric pressure. The pressure difference between the higher pressure air below the hull and lower pressure ambient air above it produces lift, but those things don’t get very far above the ground. Could I really make this thing fly?

After testing the chair various ways, I figured out how to get the electricity to lift it directly into the air without falling apart. Two, three seconds I hovered an inch or two off the ground, then THUMP! 

The framework jolted threateningly, and the battery, which had been full when I got home, hit zero hard. Okay, I needed a sturdier framework and a bigger schematic— a way to tap into more electrical power.

First things first. With all my piddly strength I hand-wheeled the chair a yard to the plug, got it recharging, caught my breath and shifted into my old trusty wheelchair. Then I took another deep breath and looked around.

The sun was going down, and I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for hours. Even two-handed, I had never been much of a cook, and my little corner kitchen was not conducive to complicated preparation even if I had had the patience. Since the stroke, one of my landlords in the front house, a professional chef, had taken it upon himself to prepare me a bunch of healthy but delicious meals that I could zap.

As I picked out my favorite tilapia cooked in white wine, onion and garlic, with brown rice, and yellow squash sprinkled with dill, I thought, do I tell James and Kenneth? They’d been my landlords since the hippies sold the place in the mid-80s. They were excellent landlords — it was they who’d upgraded the place and fixed the leaky skylight, which I suspect the hippies had installed during one of their many chemical explorations during the drug-hazed seventies. They’d also had my shower redone so that I could get in and out on my own. They were my substitute family, as my brother was somewhere in Africa.

I wheeled into the yard, then stopped. If I started babbling about Hera and powers, they’d think I’d gone round the bend, and if they asked me to prove it . . . what then?

Yeah, what then?

Hera (or whoever she was; I still couldn’t get my mind around Ancient Greek Goddess. Easier to believe she was an alien in that guise) hadn’t said anything about secrecy. What she had said, was she wanted proof that old women were wise. How wise was it to invent a flying wheelchair?

I knew a whole bunch of fellow wheelers who would give me a big thumbs up on that one.

I began the turn when a familiar cheery caw caught me: “Nancy!”

It was my neighbor, Twila Dewey.

“Where you going like a house on fire?”

Twila was ninety-two, and lived in the apartment over the garage next-door. She often sat out on her balcony, and though she didn’t seem to have a cell-phone, judging by the loud ring from her place, she didn’t need one. She ought to be at the NSA giving them lessons on espionage, Kenneth had said once.

“Plumbing,” I lied.

“Stay on it,” Twila advised. “Though I will say for those two fellas, no slouches as landlords. Which is more than I can say for Mr. Mingus across the street. Did you know he raised the rent on the Tolberts again, just because they got a kitten? Two hundred simoleons for a kitten! Imagine! Wonder what he’d charge if they got a horse?” She cackled at her own wit.

The “ding” went off on the microwave. Saved by the bell! “My food. Bye, Twila!” I called as I retreated.

Her cracked voice followed me. “Remember your PT, Nancy. You’ll be walking in no time, just don’t slack off!”

I shut my door, and sat down to eat. Before I finished, my cell rang. 

There was Bettina’s alto voice, her precise consonants. “Is this Nancy? We’ve got to talk.”

#

We met at a coffee shop on PCH, as I don’t have a car. I got there first, not having to deal with traffic or parking, which meant they didn’t have to stand around awkwardly while I wrestled myself from my half-charged scooter to walker to booth.

They arrived about thirty seconds apart. Bettina took over with the brisk assurance of a veteran high school teacher—which it turned out she was. Thirty-five years. She’d clearly decided to make the best of this situation as she greeted us by name, told us the above, then asked what we both do.

“Artist,” I said, leaving out the verb “was.”

That got a flicker of interest from Cecile, until Bettina asked what medium, and if my work was on display anywhere. “On the science fiction and fantasy shelves of bookstores” got a noncommittal expression from Bettina, and from Cecile the faint, wrinkled upper lip of the grand lady picking a dead spider out of her foie gras terrine périgourdine. 

Bettina turned to Cecile. 

“I never worked,” she said, that goose-egg of a diamond flashing on her left hand.

By then I pretty much hated her, sitting there so poised in her eight hundred dollar haircut, even more expensive clothes and matching bag and shoes. 

I bet she votes Republican, I thought with totally non-bigoted charity, when Bettina said, “So what did you two do when you got home? As near as I can figure, what I do is a plasma channel,” and seeing incomprehension in Cecile and me, “where lightning and lasers intersect. I shorted out every circuit in my house. In fact, I am pretty sure I took down the entire block, and that was after I burned a hole through my kitchen wall, cutting a chunk from the oak tree out front. My husband’s in Israel on a dig, which is good. But I’m going to have to tell him something.”

“I think I can fix it,” I said. “Not the tree. The juice.”

My words slur. I sound drunk. People tend to look away when I speak, so having two pairs of eyes skewer me caused my head to turtle into my shoulders. I added wimpily, “I think.” 

I explained in two sentences about my first experiments, then, “On my way here. Waiting at a corner for a red. Touched the traffic light pole. Schematic, local power grid. Found four burned out traffic lights. Fixed ‘em. At least, I think so. Didn’t actually see them.” I hadn’t talked so much in weeks. My lips and jaw felt overworked.

Bettina said to Cecile, “So what did you learn? Or did you try anything?” 

Cecile’s perfectly lip-sticked mouth contracted again, and I thought she was going to ignore Bettina altogether, when a cheerful young guy with a shock of red hair bounced up. “May I take your order?”

We all ordered something we didn’t want—lemonade for me, with a straw—and when he went away, Cecile glanced from Bettina, who was still waiting, to me, to the big window looking out at the nighttime traffic, then she said, “I destroyed my condominium.”

“What?”

“What?”

Cecile gave a shifty look at the other tables, whose occupants clearly felt no interest whatsoever in three old women. After a long pause, the wait-person reappeared with all our various liquids.

When he was gone, Cecile seemed to come to a decision. She squared her elegant shoulders and said, “I am a walking cliché. Today my husband of forty-two years informed me that he is feeling old and stale, and he needs a fresh start.”

Bettina sat back, and all my annoyance zapped away, leaving a pool of guilt sloshing inside me with the unwanted lemonade as Cecile said, “What he meant was that I’m the old and stale part of his life. It seems he has fallen in love.” She made air quotes. “He wouldn’t tell me her age, but made a lot of promises about how he would take care of me— I would get my half of everything— how much he appreciated my support and . . . .” Her voice went husky and uneven. She caught herself up, and her smile turned bitter. “When I tell you that he is bald, fat, and looks his age— four years older than I am— then I feel I am justified in wondering if this May and December romance is really May and Money. Our money.”

She picked up her coffee spoon, poured in a delicate dollop of soy milk, and stirred the spoon around and around as she said, “I guess I should have seen it coming. I wondered why he bought a sports car, when he would never let our sons drive it. Went on a diet, for the first time in his life. Stopped going to church— he had more cases to review— he said he was at the courthouse— and all those late nights.” She paused, then burst out, “I can just see her twining his tie around her finger like some Fanny Dashwood in Prada, and I will end up with nothing.”

She paused, as if she didn’t expect the black woman and the half-zombified geek to understand the Jane Austen reference (or maybe it was Prada?), and I got annoyed with her all over again.

Bettina said dryly, “I’ve been teaching Sense and Sensibility to high school honors students for thirty years.”

“And I’ve seen the movies,” I said. “That includes the one about Prada.”

Cecile gave me a funny look, and I felt a pulse of guilt for my leaden irony, then she whirled that spoon faster in the cup, scrape, scrape, scrape. “We married the week I graduated from USC. I’ve never had a job. If he takes everything to give it to her . . .” Scrape, scrape, scrape. Then she said so low I almost didn’t hear her, “I don’t know what to do.”

“First thing you do, girl,” Bettina stated, “is get your own lawyer. Do not let him sweet-talk you into using one of his friends.”

Cecile looked startled. “I—” She reddened. “Jack Pennington is an old family friend. We and the Penningtons are godparents to each others’ children, and attended all their weddings. Ralph suggested I use him, and I thought, at least he’d keep it discreet . . .” She trailed off as Bettina rolled her eyes. “What?” Cecile asked, looking wary, her tone affronted.

“If everybody in your world isn’t already gossiping, then I will eat that spoon you keep swishing around. The wife is always the last to know.” 

I stuck my oar in. “Fanny doesn’t get you, the good old boys will.”

Bettina said, “So tomorrow you call a shark. A female shark.”

Cecile looked up into space. I could practically see her rapidly re-evaluating all the lawyers in her world of law and politics. Sure enough, her lips thinned. “There is one he really, really hates— a liberal feminist—”

“That’s the first one you call.”

Cecile dipped her chin in that ladylike nod again, then she said without the cultured drawl, “Back in 1973, a Sociology degree was what we all did in our sorority. Then we married right after graduation, and my parents bought us our first house, out in Sierra Madre. Entertaining was so important back then, when he was a junior partner . . . well, in any case, I have spent my entire life fighting getting old. We adopted so I wouldn’t ruin my figure, I had my first facelift at forty-two. Is that wise?” Her voice was really bitter on that last word as she stared down into her cooling coffee. “After he did that, I couldn’t think. Just left our place and started walking.” 

Walking to the pier? I had a feeling ‘our place’ was a four thousand square foot condo on Ocean Front.

“Then that woman did what she did, and I went home, and . . . what I did wasn’t wise. But it felt great.”

What she did? Uh oh, I thought. Here it comes.

I slipped my tablet out of my bag and put it in my lap. Experimentally, I focused, and there was its schematic.

Cecile stopped stirring the coffee, tapped the spoon with delicacy on the side of the cup, and said in a stronger voice, “He was gone, so I went into our bedroom and yanked open the doors to his closet. I guess I wanted to see if he had any of her things, though he is the adulterer. The doors ripped off the hinges. I threw one of them at the floor to ceiling mirror in his bathroom . . . and, well . . .” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It just felt so good when it broke into a million pieces. So I smashed everything of his, and threw all his furniture over the balcony onto our private beach. His furniture, his precious suits from London, everything.”

(I knew it, Ocean Front Walk, I grumped to myself.)

On the tablet, my search turned up a row of entries on Hephaestus.

Cecile went on. “I was starting on his study when you called. He should be getting home soon. I’m afraid he’ll have me arrested, or committed. Or if that Hera woman is real, she’ll come around and turn me into a tree, or whatever they do.” She put her hands over her face. “Maybe all this is hallucination and I have a brain tumor.”

Swell, Hephaestus was crippled. Joke’s on me, Hera! 

I looked up, finding Cecile staring at me. “Tell the hubs it was a break-in,” I said, trying to sound friendly and helpful. “Gang hoodlums.”

I could see them both contemplating the likelihood of a bunch of hulking young guys in tats and hoodies driving unnoticed up Ocean Front, which has enough private security to run the secret police of a small country, just to break in and trash an old guy’s New England wing chairs and Gieves & Hawkes suits.

“Or not,” I said.

Bettina shrugged. “He probably won’t believe that you could do it. But if that Hera was serious, you’re right, we’ve got a bigger problem. How do you think we look to Them so far?”

I could hear the capital T, and after all, if we could be given superpowers, we could be watched by all the gods.

It was then that I got to Hephaestus’s attributes. Blacksmith . . . metal worker . . . Inventor, Holy crom! Metal automotons? Hephaestus had robots as his minions!

Cecile’s expression had reverted to the remote hauteur we first saw. That’s how she looks when she’s scared. “I want to give it back,” she whispered.

“Doesn’t look like that’s an option.” Bettina set her coffee cup down. “So here we are. Either we go our separate ways, in which case, good luck. Or we deal with this together. She did put us together.”

Cecile said, “She picked out three people our age who happened to be standing at the end of the pier.”

“Cosmic joke,” I said.

They both ignored me. Bettina said to Cecile, “You don’t think she couldn’t have separated us out if she wanted to?”

I couldn’t get my mind off those robots. I felt the art itch, for the first time since the stroke that poleaxed me while standing in line at the post office. “Going home,” I said, beginning the exasperating struggle to shift myself from bench to walker to scooter. “Experiment.” To Bettina, “You want me to fix your house, call. Morning.” In addition to everything else, I was talked out.

I put down my share of the bill, and exited.

On my way home, I touched every pole, wall, fence, and other kind of structure that might have electricity. I discovered that I had to have some kind of metal under my fingers to get a schematic, but it didn’t have to be much. A few electrons through my fingers could find their way in picoseconds past shielding— the world is filled with EM. And the larger the power source, the better schematics I could command.

Living on social security means being very careful with money. I stopped at a 99c store to pick up some cheap toys to experiment with, ones that contained at least a bit of conducting metal.

When I reached the gate at home, the motion detectors put on the lights. As I rolled into the yard, which was warm and still and full of the scent of jasmine, Twila Dewey’s voice startled me.

“Nancy, what you doing out so late? Got a fella at last?”

“Hobby shop. Supplies,” I called, holding up my bag of toys.

“Good for you! You just keep at it, you’ll be drawing unicorns again in no time!”

Unicorns? I’d never been in Twila’s place, nor she in mine. How did she know what I drew? I shook my head as I rolled in and shut my door firmly. The NSA could save a bundle on cyberspy equipment just by hiring her.

Since I couldn’t build robots, I’d hoped that toys would suffice, and I was right. Toys could be my minions, interfaces between my hand and other sources of electricity, as long as I was careful not to break or burn out the flimsy toys with too much juice. 

I crash-landed into bed.

It felt like I’d just fallen asleep when my phone went off beside my ear. It was Bettina, who said she’d taken a personal day from school, and wanted to know if I was good for my promise— if so, she’d be right over to pick me up, as the city hadn’t been able to restore power to their block.

She lived a couple miles inland in West L.A., on a pleasant block full of jacaranda trees, currently in brilliant lavender bloom. 

There on the front lawn was a sturdy California oak, a shocking hole in one side, like a bite from some kind of energy dragon. 

“My nephew works for a contractor,” she said when she took me into her living room, which like mine, had wall to ceiling bookcases. Scorch marks scored the ceiling, and there was a hole in the wall between living room and kitchen, a perfect circle about the size of a baseball, with burn marks around the edge. “The damage to the house, I can get fixed. I hope the tree survives.”

She took me through to a typical back yard except for some bricks piled up beside the cement-block wall. These were covered with various types of laser burns. A bunch of red fragments lay scattered, obvious remnants of explosions.

Bettina said, “I’m getting there.”

I’d told her a little about my robot minions on the drive over, and she’d admitted she was also experimenting. She held up one hand, fingers poised as if she held something invisible against the length of her forefinger. “Harry Potter was my model,” she admitted.

“Wand!” I exclaimed.

“A knitting needle. At first I actually used one of my metal number 4s, but it got hot. Now I know the feel of it in my hand, so I see it there, and aim.” 

She pointed her hand as if she held a wand. A thin beam sizzled across the yard, and punched into a brick.

“That’s got to be fun,” I exclaimed and for the first time, she smiled a little. 

Then she indicated the back wall. “Here’s the fuse box.”

I carefully placed my hand on the metal plate, and shut my eyes. There was my schematic of the house, the underground cables, and then the local power grid.  

This was my first really big challenge. The schematic took over my entire brain. For a time it felt like I’d fallen into it, and I couldn’t find my way out. But when I made the mental shift to seeing myself inside, rather than outside— racing along with the electrons— well, the nearest comparison I can think of it playing a 3-D video game, only I was driving with my brain instead of my fingers on a joystick.

I stayed there refusing burned lines and straightening snarls until the whole was clean and crisp again, humming like a hive of a million contented bees. 

I flexed, and felt the entire block light up.

Getting back to myself was tougher, a little like pulling out of a wallow of sucking mud. But I made the shift . . . and found Bettina hovering anxiously over me, as a faint “Finally!” reached us from one of the neighboring houses.

Bettina smiled with relief. “I was debating whether I ought to call 911.” And at my no-doubt puzzled look, “You have been sitting there for almost three hours. I held off only because I could see your eyes moving.”

“Tired,” I admitted. 

“I’ll get you right home.” With a thoughtful look, as she began to pace beside me, she said, “What did you take away from our discussion last night?”

“Robot minions. You?”

“Until about five minutes ago, I thought someone was setting us up to fail.” 

“Because we’re old?” I asked.

“Maybe. It was more that of the three of us, two were given powers of destruction, and yours was in question until now. Then there was whom she picked.”

“Cripple?” I held up my left hand.

Bettina’s eyelids flickered, which made me wonder if I’d come close, but she said, “Cecile Schuyler has bigger problems on her mind than trying to be Hercules. And I put in a sixty-hour work week during the school year, so even if we wanted to, who’s got the time to run around the city playing superhero, if that’s what Hera wants?”

“Athena said to be different.”

Bettina opened the gate. “Different,” she repeated. “I don’t know what to expect, outside of my hope of waking up to discover it was a bad dream.” She reached up to touch a low branch of the oak with the laser hole burned into it. “Are Titans going to come stomping through Los Angeles, and we are to battle them?”

“Can’t fight cyclops and minotaurs with electricity,” I said— my lips getting a real workout on cyclops and minotaurs.

She gave me a wintry smile. “I would rather cruise around blowing up crack houses and everything else that spreads so much misery, if that’s what we’re to be doing. Righting wrongs, I can do that. I’d like to do that. But how do I find them? Advertise on Craigslist?”

“Athena hid us, on the pier,” I said.

“Yes. The urge to keep this strictly to myself is so strong that I lied to my daughter last night. She was going to take me to some new play one of her friends is staging, and I begged off, because I don’t want her to see the house. I have never lied to my daughter before, ever. I lied to school this morning, claiming a dental procedure.”

We got into her car. “Sorry about all this driving,” I said.

“You cleaned up my mess, and incidentally rescued a block or two of very unhappy people. Since I do have a day, before I go back to learning to control my lightning bolts, I’ll go to the pier, my favorite place when I want to clear my head. That’s why I was there the other day.”

“Kids these days?” I asked.

“Not the kids. I like the kids, though there are some troubled ones. It’s the Administrivia— people who have never taught a day in their lives, who can’t spell, don’t know basic grammar. The closer I get to retirement, the less patience I have— and the faster they want to push me out.” 

She shut up then, and drove in silence until she let me off. When I reached the yard, there was old Twila again, calling from her shady balcony, “Nancy! You’ve quite a social life these past couple of days, eh? Is it a fella? It’s never too late!”

I waved, and shut the door on her cackles. 

Shorted sleep and my morning’s exertions had done me in. I napped for the rest of the day, then played around some more with my robots, experimenting with driving them by their schematics until metal touched metal. Then I could flash to the new schematic. 

In this way I reached the front house’s wiring system, and then, through that, the local power grid. I sussed out some incipient problems in our aging Los Angeles infrastructure, then, sensing another world overlying mine— the world of computers, internet, surveillance—pulled back. I had no idea if I had an electronic footprint, or what to do about it if I did.

It was late, so back to bed.

Next morning, being Saturday, was my day for the laundry room at the house. I pushed my stuff into the yard, half-expecting Twila to be peeking out to inspect my dirty clothes, but she wasn’t there. Though I liked her— and loved her stories about World War II era Los Angeles— I didn’t relish the thought of the neighbors hearing about the elderly state of my underthings.

And that gave me an idea.

My wash chugging away, when I got back to my place, I dithered about whether or not I should call the other two. Smart or stupid? I was still dithering when my phone rang. To my surprise, it was Cecile.

She wanted to meet, suggesting a very trendy but expensive cafe not too far away in distance, but a thousand miles from the reach of my budget. However, she ended with, “My treat,” leaving me nothing to say but, “See you at noon.”

I showered then wrestled into my best linen drawstring pants and tunic-top as my laundry finished. The cafe was near Wilshire and Ocean Avenue, and this time they got there first, choosing a table that looked out into the street. I enjoyed the linen napery and the pretty silverware and dishes, all of which seldom come my way, as we went through greetings and ordering. 

That done, Bettina said, “What’s on your mind?”

Cecile leaned in. “I’ve been learning something about strength. It impresses people, but it also scares them.”

“Power,” Bettina said, “makes the powerless angry.”

Cecile flicked a look. “Ralph didn’t make a peep about my hoodlum story.” Her diamond flashed as she turned her palm up toward me. “I didn’t know what else to say. When I got home the other night, I found him standing in the middle of the mess, staring around like he’d been shot. I was afraid to tell him the truth, that he’d use it as an excuse to lock me up in some mental ward.”

I thought, you could bend him into a pretzel. But I guess she still saw herself as weak.

“So I told him the hoodlum story, and he nodded, but he kept looking at my hands.”

While Cecile spoke, Bettina had been gazing out the window at a bunch of teenage boys moving along in that typical teenage-boy drifting slouch. 

Cecile was too busy talking to notice. “Yesterday I got up and left early, so I wouldn’t have to talk to him. I did some shopping, and my mother wanted to meet in Westwood for brunch. I told her about Ralph wanting a divorce, and she was so angry that she insisted we drive straight to Beverly Hills so she could change her will. After that, I went to see Jack,” she said. “Because I know him.” She faced Bettina. “I remembered what you said, and I asked him straight out. He gave me a typical lawyer’s noncommittal reply, but yes, he knew. But there was something else. He was on the alert. He and Ralph— all of them—I usually only see them like that with other men. Ones they are up against, I mean.”

Bettina said, “You think he heard about the furniture.”

Cecile said, “Yes. He took me to Spago for a late lunch, and was full of reminiscences and aren’t-we-old-friends, but he didn’t offer to represent me. Instead, he recommended someone else, about whom he thinks highly, blah-blah-blah-de-blah. I think he was afraid of me. Just a little.”  

Bettina was staring out the window again, still watching those teenagers. Surprised at her rudeness, I said to Cecile, “You have to clean up the mess?”

“That’s just it. When I got home, it was nearly six. I found the place looking like a showcase. Not a speck of glass anywhere. New furniture, even. And there was Ralph, offering to take me out to dinner, so we could talk things over. Hearty and smiling, like he talks to that hotshot district attorney he hates. I don’t know what to think.”

Bettina hadn’t looked away from the window. Before the pause could stretch into silence, I said, “I might have an idea.”

They both turned my way, but then Bettina said in a low, urgent voice, “I am sorry to be rude, but I think I saw one of my students. One of the ones I worry about. I need to walk over to that bank, just to put my mind to rest.”

“Bank?” Cecile said in a sharp tone. 

With a quick “We’ll be right back,” to the wait person, we left, me doing my Lurch routine from walker to scooter.

At the bank, the thick glass made the inside indistinct. I perceived someone frantically motioning us away.

Bettina yanked the door open. I got a glimpse of ski-masked figures holding guns, and bank customers all standing around with hands high when Bettina snapped, “Marcus Clark, what is going on here?”

From one of the ski masks a shocked teenage voice exclaimed, “Miz Wilson?”

Silence. Then one of the figures swung a pistol toward the boy who’d spoken, and another whipped his weapon toward Bettina.

Someone else inside the bank screamed, splintering the robbers’ and the customers’ attention alike. In that moment Bettina made her knitting needle hand and a thin beam zapped out, hitting a waving pistol. Her second zap went too high, and a shot rang out, shattering a decorative clock on the wall.

Everybody started yelling and running, or hiding behind the desks. From the back came a loud male voice, every other word a curse, the gist being, “Get back! Get back! Down on the ground!”

Cecile shoved the receptionist’s massive desk. It skidded across the smooth floor like a runaway train, catching two of the masked boys squarely in the backs of their legs. Both hit the ground hard, and were promptly dogpiled by angry customers.

Budda-budda-budda! The shocking stutter of an automatic weapon froze everybody. A woman’s low sob was the only sound, then the guy who’d been cursing yelled in a harsh voice (freely inserting the F-bomb as verb, adverb, and adjective), “I will kill this broad if you all don’t shut up and lay face down on the ground.” 

“Lie,” Bettina said, sinking with dignity to her knees. “You lay things down—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” And to the woman he was holding against him, “Now open the vault!”

The customers had all prostrated themselves. The masked guys slowly got up and began to sort themselves out.

I crouched over in my scooter, with my left hand in my bag. I quietly pulled out my little robot copter, shut my eyes to get its schematic, and then let it go, my heart pounding.

It seemed impossible the robbers wouldn’t see it, but they were either looking in the direction of the vault or glaring downward at the people lying on the floor as my minion shot up to the ceiling. I kept my eyes on it as I flew it toward the vault . . . Ah.

It crashed into the massive door, then one of the guys said, “What’s that?”

The toy hit the ground, a robber stepped on it, and Nasty Voice said, “Who did that? Who did that?” He followed with escalating threats which I didn’t hear, because I had the entire bank’s schematic.

Things happened really fast after that. I triggered the silent alarm as the vault swung open, and Nasty Voice forced the woman inside.

Then I cut the overhead lights and slammed the vault door, shutting off the commander from the rest.

From the floor, Bettina sent out four beams the thickness of a knitting needle, and four guns went flying. At that point, a bunch of men plus the security guard began tackling the robbers again.

Cecile whispered, “Open the vault.” 

I caused the vault door to open. The robber inside swung around with his weapon— and then the massive chair Cecile had hurled torpedoed him smack in the chest.

“Thought he’d put the woman on the floor,” Cecile murmured.

The woman scrambled out, rubbing her bruised neck as she stabbed repeatedly at something behind the counter. Already done, I thought as I slammed the vault door shut on the groaning robber.

Then Bettina emerged out of the crowd. “I hear sirens.”

Nobody was looking at three old women. They were all talking adrenaline-spiked questions and comments at each other as they hovered around the men who’d subdued the robbers, waving cell phones around as they filmed the robbers, the men, the robbers, the rest of the room.

Cecile swung the bank door open and I scooted out, Bettina behind me.

We reached the cafe two seconds before a fleet of cop cars drove up, effectively cutting off the street. Inside the cafe, customers were all staring past us through the windows at the street, exclaiming and wondering, as we sat down. 

Our food was there— the whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes max. My heart juddered against my ribs, paying no attention to its daily dose of blood pressure medicine; Cecile pressed her hands against her face. Her fingers shook. Bettina stared out in the street, her profile grim.

Presently, Cecile dropped her hands, and I saw that she was laughing silently. Hysterical laughter bubbled up inside me, and I pressed my napkin to my face, as Cecile said in a tiny voice, “I threw a chair. What is it with furniture?”

Nobody answered. I got control of myself, then said, “Do we tell anyone?”

“No.” Bettina’s voice was short.

I said, “That boy—”

“I expect that all Marcus will remember is seeing me come in. He probably thinks I was a customer.”

“Security cams?” Cecile whispered.

Bettina turned her way. “Didn’t you see? Smashed. The boys must have done it right before we got inside.” She glanced down at her lunch, and began eating.

Taking our cue, Cecile and I did the same. It was delicious, and food helped to re-establish a sense of normality.

But nothing was normal anymore. Maybe would never be again. The first one to speak was Cecile. “Is that what we should be doing?”

Bettina said to me, “You said you had an idea?”

It took me a little time to get it all out, as I have to concentrate on my enunciation (and try not to drool), but I told them about Twila Dewey, ending with, “If we want to find wrongs to right, who better to ask about problems in their local community than old women? Maybe we could start a network.”

Bettina said slowly, “I’m still trying to adjust to the idea that there might be a hidden world overlapping ours. What are these other women doing, who received Hera’s gifts? Are they fighting demons?”

Cecile tapped her spoon against her cup. “What I still want to know is, what is wisdom? Why didn’t Hera fly her broomstick out to USC and corral a group of PhDs? But I admit, that was fun. I don’t think I’ve had fun like that since I was small.”

Bettina said, “It was fun, but everything has consequences. Those boys were just hoodlums to you, but every one of them is some mother’s son.” She nodded at the bank, around which police and detectives swarmed, yellow tape extending every which way, and TV cameras filming everything. “Marcus Clark used to sit in my classroom drawing diagrams of motors. I want to find out what made him do that. And fix it, if I can. That is my definition of wisdom.”

A small silence ensued, as people chattered and forks clinked and outside, police began to roll away, one by one.

“I like that,” I said. 

Bettina raised her water glass.

“I feel that I must begin with me,” Cecile said. “Fixing. But I agree.”

I lifted my water glass, and so did Cecile. We clinked them together, and I thought, Commando bats, a new beginning.

Did I hear unearthly laughter?

******************************************************************

"That's so much not the kind of person stories are usually about, but she's awesome," Maya says. "Robots. Fixing things. I wish they were real and really fixing things, the world would be so much better."

"Do you know any old women like that?" he asks.

"My grandmother. She was just like that. She was fierce! She wouldn't let anyone -- But she died last year. And there's one of the librarians here who walks with a cane and knows everything that's going on. She bought me gelato once when she was coming out of Perche No! and I was... well, anyway she just took me straight back in and bought me gelato without asking what was wrong or making a fuss of anything. Straciatella, and lemon, and frutti di bosco. And after that all the librarians let me stay here as long as I wanted."

"That's good," he says. The cat rubs his head into Maya's palm, and she pets him.

"Time for another story?" he asks.

"What's next?"

"Caroline Stevemer --"

"Oh wow. Another favourite. I loved When The King Comes Home. And the Kate and Ceci books. What's this one?"

"It's the first chapter of The Glass Magician and the book is coming out on April 7th, so there's really not very long to wait for it at all." He reaches awkwardly over the head of the cat to hand her the book, and they read.