Page 52 of Ravished By the Revenant

Clara sniffs. “It’s not witchcraft, it’s a Samsung.”

I hold the black slab at arm’s length, as one holds a serpent. “You said it contains all books. All music. Maps of the entire earth. The accumulated knowledge of mankind.”

“And videos of cats falling off furniture, yes,” she adds.

“And men carry this in their pockets.” I ‘scroll’ too fast, and the glowing page leaps away from my thumb. “And they use it to look at… what did you call them?”

“Memes,” Clara supplies.

“Memes.” I hand the device back before I break it. Or it breaks my mind. “Your civilization was given the Library of Alexandria in a pebble, and you use it to look at cats.” I shake my head. “Schmetterling will be even more insufferable now.”

Clara teaches me to speak to the phone instead of touching it, which suits me. Commanding things is a skill I have retained. I ask it questions late at night when Clara sleeps, knowledge my servants couldn’t bring me. Knowledge from after the last of them were gone. The phone answers everything tirelessly, and I begin to understand why people in this century cannot look away from it.

The automobile arrives on a truck. It’s the color of arterial blood. Clara calls it a Porsche and circles it in the courtyard, making sounds I have previously only drawn from her in bed.

“Look at her,” she whispers.

I cannot hide my confusion. “It is a carriage.”

Clara gasps. “She is a 911, Aldric, show some respect.”

“It has no horses. It is the size of a rowboat. Where do the supplies go?”

“Supplies.” Clara looks at me with genuine pity. “Sweetie. This car isn’t for supplies. This car is for driving twice the speed of good judgment down a forest road while screaming.”

She demonstrates. I ride beside her down the new gravel track with my hand braced against the ceiling and my soul several hundred meters behind us, and Clara laughs like a valkyrie the entire way, silver hair whipping, alive, alive, alive, and I decide the machine can stay.

It suits her. It’s fast and loud and beautiful and entirely too much, and it does not apologize for any of it.

Then comes the evening she returns from town with paper bags that fill the hall with the smell of grease and salt.

“Tonight,” she announces, “we’re having McDonald’s.”

I scratch my head. “Is that a family? Are we expecting guests?”

“It’s food. Sort of.” She unwraps a flat disc of bread containing meat and a yellow substance that could be cheese, and places it in my hands. “One and a half billion of these are eaten every year. It’s the most successful meal in human history. Prepare yourself.”

I examine it. I have eaten roasted swan at an emperor’s table. I have eaten boot leather in a siege. I bite.

I chew. I stop. I stare at the wall.

“Well?” Clara is vibrating. “Verdict?”

“It is terrible.”

Her face falls.

“It is delicious,” I continue, baffled, turning the thing over in my hands. “It is both. Simultaneously. It tastes of nothing found in nature, and I have already decided to finish it, and I want another. What have you people done? What alchemy is this?”

“That’s the correct reaction. That’s exactly right.” She toasts me with a paper cup of something black and fizzing. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, babe.”

Schmetterling leaps onto the table, sniffs what Clara called nuggets, and looks at her with an expression that unambiguously demands his tax. She pays it. Three hundred years of precedent hold firm.

28

CLARA

The farmers market in town has the best raspberries I’ve ever tasted, and I’m buying an irresponsible amount of them when I hear it.