A Blink of the Screen

the bushes. It was just twigs and wire and junk. And eggs, only you never touch the eggs, we know that, some of those eggs give you a shock, like electricity. ’Cos you never asked me before, that’s why. Yeah, I kicked it over. Because there was this chicken inside it, okay, but when I went up close there was this flash and, like, a clap of thunder and it went all wavy and disappeared. I ain’t taking that from no chicken.’
    Thus far we have been unable to reassemble the Assemblage (Photos A thru G). There is considerable doubt as to its function, and we have dismissed Mr X’s view that it was ‘a real funky microwave oven’. It appeared simply to have been a collection of roadside debris and twigs, held together with cassette tape. 1 It may have had some religious significance. From drawings furnished by Mr X, there appeared to have been space inside for one chicken at a time.
    Document C contains an analysis of the three eggs found in the debris. As you will see, one of them seems normal but infertile, the second has been powering a flashlight bulb for two days, and a report on the third is contingent on our finding either it or Dr Paperbuck, who was last seen trying to cut into it with a saw.
    For the sake of completeness, please note Document B, which is an offprint of Paperbuck and Macklin’s
Western Science Journal
paper: ‘Exaggerated Evolutionary Pressures on Small Isolated Groups Under Stress’.
    All that we can be certain of is that there are no chickens in the area where chickens have been for the last seventeen years.
    However, there are now forty-seven chickens on the opposite verge.
    Why they crossed is of course one of the fundamental riddles of popular philosophy.
    That is not, however, the problem.
    We don’t know how.
    But it’s not such a great verge over there, and they’re all clustered together and some of the hens are laying.
    We’re just going to have to wait and see how they get back.
    Cluck?
    A UTHOR’S N OTE: In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of the busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world. Some chickens escaped and bred. They survived – are surviving – very well, even in the hazardous atmosphere of the roadside. But this story is about another Hollywood. And other chickens.
    1
The Best of Queen

THE SECRET BOOK OF THE DEAD

    N OW W E A RE S ICK
, ED . N EIL G AIMAN AND S TEPHEN J ONES , D REAM H AVEN B OOKS , M INNEAPOLIS, 1991
    Given the title of the anthology in which this was to appear, I tried to write this as though I were thirteen years old, with that earnest brand of serious amateurishness. This is possibly not a long way from how I write at the best of times …
    They don’t teach you the facts of death,
    Your Mum and Dad. They give you pets.
    We had a dog which went astray.
    Got laminated to the motorway.
    I cried. We had to post him to the vet’s.
    You have to work it out yourself,
    This dying thing. Death’s always due.
    A goldfish swimming on a stall,
    Two weeks later: cotton wool,
    And sent to meet its Maker down the loo.
    The bottom of our garden’s like a morg-you
    My Dad said. I don’t know why.
    Our tortoise, being in the know
    Buried himself three years ago.
    This is where the puppies come to die.
    Puss has gone to be a better cat
    My Dad said. It wasn’t fair.
    I think my father’s going bats
    Jesus didn’t come for cats
    I went and looked. Most of it’s still there.
    They don’t teach you the facts of death,
    Your Mum and Dad. It’s really sad.
    Pets, I’ve found, aren’t built to last;
    One Christmas present, next Christmas past.
    We go on buying them. We must be mad.
    They die of flu and die of bus,
    Die of hardpad, die of scabies,
    Foreign ones can die of rabies,
    But usually they die of us.

ONCE AND FUTURE

    C AMELOT
, ED . J ANE Y OLEN , P HILOMEL B OOKS , N EW Y ORK, 1995
    There’s a lot more of this deep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in
Camelot,
edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I’d wanted to write it for nearly ten years. I really ought to dig out those old discs 1 again …
    … when matins were done the congregation filed out to the yard. They were confronted by a marble block into which had been thrust a beautiful sword. The block was four feet square, and the sword passed through a steel anvil which had been struck in the stone, and which projected a foot from it. The anvil had been inscribed with letters of