FutureImperfect by Stefan Petrucha

doll, a thing of cloth and stuffing instead of flesh and blood. The sight was so totally ridiculous, a pained laugh burst from her throat. It was Harry. At least he was alive; at least there was a chance someone would reach him.
    But her strange smile soon vanished as she saw him tug at his pants, pull at the only thing keeping him alive, as if trying to tear himself free.
    â€œNo, Harry! Don’t! Harry!” she cried. She hopped, still unable to move her arms. For a moment, he stopped his busywork. She thought he’d somehow heard her, but then he just fell.
    Siara twisted her frail form against the thick, unyielding bodies that braced her, crazily thinking she might somehow catch him. As she struggled, all she said was, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”
    The body of the strange boy Siara loved and sometimes thought she might be in love with plunged down the side of the building, turning in the air. Harry knocked against the stone siding hard and crashed into a flagpole, looking like a broken puppet. The pole flung him across the building’s corner, where she just couldn’t see him anymore.
    As she stared at the empty spot where she’d seen him last, her hands reached out and squeezed Jeremy’s arm so hard she was sure she must be hurting him.
    â€œIt wasn’t his fault,” she said, voice cracking. The Daemon got him.
    â€œI know,” Jeremy answered.
    After that, she just kept screaming. The shocked but fascinated crowd rushed around the corner, hungry to see where the body landed. As the crowd thinned, she found she could move her arms again and breathe.
    But she didn’t want to.
    So that was death, the consequence of time, as Harry had called it long ago. It wasn’t anywhere near as magic or mythic as she’d once imagined, based on poems by Emily Dickinson (“ Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me” ). It was too real, too gross, and too horribly, horribly ugly.
    She found herself imagining the details, wondering if he’d broken his neck when he hit the building, if he’d suffocated on the way down, or if he’d still been alive for a moment after he’d hit bottom, living in a broken-up body. She wondered if it had hurt for long. She wondered if he’d been thinking of her.
    Picturing Harry’s body crushed from the fall, she thought of the two gerbils she had as a young girl for some reason, Beckett and Joyce, a mated pair. She always thought it was sweet, romantic that gerbils mated for life. But then Joyce grew sick and died and Beckett, rather than mourn her loss, ate her corpse. When Siara tried to stop him, Beckett, for the first time in his life, bit her, latching on to her index finger, burying his teeth deep inside her flesh, holding on so tightly she had to pry him off. Even now, years later, her finger tingled at the site the wound. She later read it was another gerbil instinct to eat their dead, to prevent predators from smelling the rotting body and attacking the nest.
    So much for sentimentality. So much for gerbils.
    Before Harry, that was the closest she’d come to death. Now he was dead. And her stomach twisted tighter than a gerbil’s bite.
    She vaguely felt Jeremy pull her through the police cordon. She heard him try to talk to the police, to explain who they were, how they knew Harry. They still weren’t allowed any closer, not while the police recovered the body, which, they assured him, they didn’t want to see anyway. She heard them say the remains would be at the hospital within an hour. If they really wanted to, Siara and Jeremy could talk to the doctors there.
    Another hospital. Poor Harry was always in and out of hospitals, Siara thought; then she started to cry. Jeremy protectively wrapped himself around her, as if he were still her boyfriend, and walked them away from what remained of the crowd. They kept walking awhile, away from the Valis building. People