Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 31

By Small Beer Press

We’re almost sure this issue of LCRW is made up of more than a 100,000 letters and can guarantee that most are in the right place. Two huge stories anchor the issue, Nicole Kimberling explains that CSA means Crazy-Sexy Agriculture, and zombie hordes, vampires, cannibals, and many other ghouls tried to slip under the door. But it's not all monsters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781618731067

Book preview

You Don’t Even Have a Rabbit

Jessy Randall

At first it was just something to keep her occupied while Beetz was in Arizona for a week. The software didn’t say you could use the iScreen to adjust facial expressions, but it turned out you could—or anyway Gilder discovered she could, messing around with it at work. If she brushed the tip of one of her fingers ever so lightly against the lips of an actor, she could get rid of the accidental smiles in the live comedy sketches. Or, conversely, she could add in smiles for a better blooper reel. The download numbers for the blooper reels were always higher than for the regular shows.

She experimented with a few more tricks and improvements. She wondered if she could turn one big emotion into another. She’d never liked the ending of Hake and Hurk Got Married, so she changed it. Just for herself, you know, and maybe she’d show it to Beetz when he got back. In her new version, the video ended just as Hurk left Hake at the altar. It was an easy fix—all she had to do was freeze the scene at the altar and make Hake’s sad face a little sadder and woebegone. She cut out the last five minutes, when Hurk changed his mind and came back. A virtual snip and the show had a totally different feel to it. It was an art film now.

She liked what she’d done, but it still wasn’t quite right. She decided to attempt something a bit more sophisticated. She shopped in a smile for a frown on Hake’s face, alone at the altar, suggesting Hake was actually glad Hurk left. Then she took out the tears, dabbing at the screen gently with her fingertips. It was delicate work and took a long time, which was perfect—she needed something to distract her from missing Beetz while he was away.

She didn’t tell Trith what she was doing at work, since she wasn’t sure it was allowed, but Trith learned pretty fast that Gilder’s clean-up jobs were producing the best images and therefore the most emotion-laden scenes. And that’s what the customers were after with these old shows, the emotion. Especially if there was crying. People were having trouble crying in real life, and the old shows were being prescribed as crying-aids now. So Trith kept assigning the rom-coms to her, anything with a wedding or a kiss in the final scene.

Beetz came home, but not for long. The day he got back from Arizona, Gilder showed him her new version of Hake and Hurk. He was like, Why are you showing me this? I’ve seen this show at least twice before. And she was like, Because I think you’ll like my new version better. You know I always hated Hurk. And Beetz was like, Right, and that’s why you liked the ending, but you know I’ve seen the show because I saw it with you at the theater.

And she was like, But I changed the ending, didn’t you notice?

And he was like, No, what did you do? Did you sharpen it?

And she couldn’t convince him that the movie had originally ended happily, or anyway happily to those who liked Hurk. He remembered the movie the way she’d changed it, without the last-minute airport scene and the elopement. But his mind wasn’t on their conversation, she could see that. Because out of nowhere, Beetz was breaking up with her, saying he’d found enlightenment in Arizona or some such crap, when actually, Gilder suspected, what he had found was that girls in Arizona thought he was awesome, or at least more awesome than she thought he was after three years of living together, or at least temporarily he was awesome to them, just exactly as he’d been to her in the beginning.

She fell apart a little bit. When she woke up the next morning she felt all right for a few seconds and then she remembered he was gone. Bed was a good place to cry.

All the time they’d lived together she’d gone around saying, smugly, that they didn’t believe in marriage and that they were as good as married and stuff like that. But apparently they were not as good as married, because Beetz could leave without any fuss or financial obligation, and she couldn’t afford the rent on her own.

The crying in the morning thing kept happening. She’d wake up okay, but then, kablooey. She’d cry into her pillow for ten minutes, and then start worrying about finding a new place. Maybe she should move out of the city altogether, go back home to her mom. No. That was a terrible idea. She just needed to get some extra cash.

She asked around, looking for freelance work. At one point, discussing her samples, a potential client was like Oh, I’ve always loved Hake and Hurk, it’s so real, that’s what’s so great about it. It doesn’t have that Hollywood fakery.

So she was like, I know, right? But when she got off the phone she was like, What?

Gilder asked a colleague at work if he remembered the show and he was like, Oh yeah, it was so sad when Hake got left at the altar. He even teared up a little bit, remembering, and thanked her for the memory, the little dose of sorrow. Better than a cup of coffee, he said. She noticed he was using his stylus to do his iScreen work, and asked why he preferred that. He was like, What are you talking about? She reached out and touched his screen, to demonstrate, but she couldn’t make anything move or change. She was just poking his screen like an idiot.

She went to her desk and downloaded the vid from the library cloud and it had the sad ending, her ending, which was impossible. Was this an elaborate prank? If so, it wasn’t funny.

She must have gotten mixed up. Really, it was the filmmakers’ fault, she thought, gently brushing movie star faces with her fingertips, getting the expressions just right. So many shows always have to have the last-second turnaround, the airport chase, the misunderstanding that gets cleared up just before the credits rolled. Oh, that girl was your sister! Oh, the message was in your spam folder all this time! Most of the shows were totally forgettable, so it was no wonder she’d gotten mixed up about Hake and Hurk Got Married. Or rather, Hake and Hurk. But she could remember getting into arguments about the show when it came out. She remembered arguing with Beetz about it, once on the subway, once at the apartment.

Another possibility, Gilder thought, was that she was going insane. She couldn’t have changed the master copy of a show from two years ago. It made no sense. She would simply have to run some experiments. She downloaded a cry-fest of a show, The Cancer Story, and placed multiple copies of the original in various locations: the shared server at work, a portable hard drive at her apartment, her phone, her tablet, and of course the iScreen.

She used the iScreen version to make some changes. She was systematic. She kept a chart, checking the saved vids after each change. At first, everything was normal—the saved copies stayed the same. Well, of course they did! That thing with Hake and Hurk Got Married, or rather, Hake and Hurk, that was just a fluke, an oddity, a one-time bit of weirdness probably caused by her breakup with Beetz, some kind of unconscious pre-breakup brain tornado.

She sent the mini-files of her improved versions of scenes from The Cancer Story to some friends, and they were impressed with her iScreen expertise. How did you do that, they asked. How did you change the color of the shirt, the speed of the car? Thanks for taking out that one stupid scene.

So it had been just a mistake, the thing with Hake and Hurk. Maybe she should go to the doctor, get a prescription for a memory aid. She knew she was getting enough crying, that’s for sure. Every morning, ten minutes, without fail.

But then, to complete the chart, she made a change involving tears. She copy/pasted tears from one famous face to another, checked the untouched, stored vids, and they matched her new version. She had forever altered the storyline. Now it was Burge who cried over the cancer results, and Flink who was stoic and accepting, and that’s how it had always been, and the version of the file on the server, and the one on the portable hard drive, all the originals, they were the new version, which was now, apparently, the original version, the only one anyone had ever known.

This time she knew she wasn’t imagining it, because she’d documented everything on paper, and the writing on the paper hadn’t changed. So she marked up the chart and sat and stared at it for a while.

MY VID         ORIGINAL VID

new color of house    no change

added snow      no change

new background music    no change

decreased smiles    no change

increased smiles    no change

added tears      CHANGED

removed tears      CHANGED

deleted scene      no change

sharpened sound effects  no change

She wondered if she’d be able to do it with rea-lity shows. She downloaded an episode of Top Chef Season 30. There was a judge, she remembered, who teared up from eating spicy food. On one half of her iScreen, Gilder called up the Wikipedia entry for that season. In the other half, she fast-forwarded to the judging, removed the tears from the eyes of a spice-sensitive judge, and then fast-forwarded to the end. Now the episode had a new winner, and that winner had always won. The Wikipedia entry changed before her eyes.

Huh.

She opened a new tab and pulled up some FBook vids Beetz had made of his fire-walk in Arizona, his spiritual journey. She’d looked at them before. Girls were in the background of these vids, girls with bare shoulders and little halter tops. One of them, Inge (pronounced to rhyme with hinge), laughed so hard at Beetz’s jokes that tears came from her eyes. Those have got to go, she thought, and she used the iScreen to take them out.

Three days passed, and nothing happened. It hadn’t been enough. So she went into FBook again and took a screenshot of Beetz’s current profile pic. They were still friends, though he was now in a complicated relationship. She opened up a vid of a scene from Jane Eyre with little girls crying in an orphanage. She painstakingly moved all their tears, one by one, and stuck them onto Beetz’s profile pic. Now she’d made a lot of little orphans happy, or happier than they had been, so really she was doing a good deed, she thought.

That night she got a call from Beetz. He sounded pretty choked up. She expected him to talk about how hard an orphan’s life was, how difficult to live without a