Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller, Mort Castle (Ed)

performed as though part of a ritual. “I think something important has happened this day. Irony is a powerful force, is it not? You came to this place in search of something you didn’t know you even needed. It is something I fear I’ve lost, and yet I am still able to give it to you. Does that make sense?”
    Jim grinned his schoolboy grin. This time he understood perfectly. “I came here looking for one thing, but I found something else.”
    “As did I.” Phillips nodded gravely. “The tragedy of life is not that men die, but rather that most allow their dreams to expire while they still live.”
    Jim felt transformed by this exchange, as well as an odd connection to this strange, feeble man. Signaling the waiter to refill their cups, Jim felt himself smiling at the man he now considered a friend.
    He was certain they still had much to discuss.
     
    About “The Exchange”
    Okay, so I took liberties with reality (at least the one with which we’re most familiar) and postulated an encounter that never happened. Which is one of the simplest functions of fiction, right? How else are we ever going to slip our tethers and check out the nightlife in any of the infinite parallel universes? The real concern for me is why I even tried to make this story work.
    And I think it’s pretty simple, really.
    During my formative years I received a couple of literary two-by-fours to the head, delivered by the doppelgängers of Jim Holloway and Phillips Howard. When I read Something Wicked This Way Comes , the characters of Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway were instantly familiar to me—because they were me . Bradbury became one of my favorite writers because I believed that, somehow, he knew me. In a dissimilar but equally powerful way, when I read my first collection of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s stories, he became one of my seminal writers because he knew how to scare me.
    In totally different ways, both Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft showed me the power of language and the sheer, raw energy of imagination. To say they inspired me seems silly and inadequate—rather, they both demanded something of me. They forced me to face the silly ideas I entertained about someday doing something unique . . . and to do something about it.
    I’d like to think both of them made an exchange with me as well, and while I didn’t do as well as either of my trading partners, I’m humbled and honored to be here right now.
    Thanks, Ray. It would have never happened without you.
     
    —Thomas F. Monteleone

CAT ON A BAD COUCH
    Lee Martin
    I ’ll admit I was drunk when I bought it, so I shouldn’t blame anyone else for my error in judgment, my lack of taste, my total disregard for the aesthetics of fabric and color and design necessary to what my wife, Vonnie, used to call the healing home. She got that from a book she read, one that encouraged her to use aromatherapy, light, feng shui, color, and natural materials to create a space where she and I would feel connected to earth, air, and each other. It was our last chance, though of course we didn’t know it then. All we knew was that we’d started to lose sight of what first brought us together—I couldn’t even have said what that something was—and still we were tongue-tied and dumb. If there were words that might have made a difference, we were having trouble finding them.
    “A healing home is a happy home,” Vonnie said one day, and I agreed I’d give it a shot.
    Then we got Henry, and everything went to hell in a hurry.
    He showed up at our house in late October, just as the days were starting to cool and winter was in the air. A long, skinny tabby with a notch bitten out of his ear, a limp to his roll, a smirk on his face—yes, I swear a cat can smirk—and the most pitiful meow you’d ever want to hear. A croak that made Vonnie fall in love.
    “Poor baby,” she said. “Where’s your house? Do you have a house?”
    He was winding himself in and out around her legs,