* Author : Greg van Eekhout

* Narrator : Gregory Austin

* Host : M.K. Hobson

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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Originally appeared in Flytrap Issue #11, May 2014.

Rated PG-13.

The Authenticator

by Greg van Eekhout

My face surprises her when she opens the door to her trailer, but I’m not surprised by hers. I know what I look like. I’ve got the best nose money can buy, but rubber’s no match for bone and flesh. I used to wear glasses so the frames would cover the seam where the nose meets the little bit of bridge I have left, but glasses are a pain in the butt since I lost my ears, so I don’t bother with them anymore.

“Ms. Bradford?” I say. I use my most charming smile, which is still pretty charming. The tension in her shoulders releases and she offers me a handshake. I return it with my left hand, which has the most fingers.

“It’s Edelle, as long as you’re Barrett Mink and not some brush salesman.” She smiles with her mouth and her eyes and steps back to let me in.

Now it’s my turn to be surprised. The homes of thrift shop queens no longer phase me. I’ve met collectors and pack rats and hoarders, and I’ve seen walls so covered by commemorative dishes and tobacco-stained oil paintings that you couldn’t find so much as an inch of plaster between them. But Edelle Bradford’s trailer is something else. It’s a cave of bone. The walls are a mosaic of leg bones and knuckles and teeth and knobby bits. More of the same in curio cabinets, mixed in with the pots and pans in the kitchen, everywhere my eye falls. The bones are stained dark, coffee brown, the color of bones from the La Brea Tar Pits, the richest source of magic bones in Los Angeles. I have to duck under a chandelier of ribs to enter the room, and I am not a tall man. Her coffee table is an arrangement of tusks with a plywood slab on top.

She offers me a cigarette from a pack beside an ashtray fashioned from the crown of a skull.

“Do you mind if I?” she asks when I decline.

“Not at all.”

A suspicious squint. “It won’t mess with your ability to smell? I thought that’s what you guys relied on.”

“Magic has very distinct smells. I can filter out the non-osteomantic ones.”

The squint doesn’t go away entirely, and she puts the pack down without taking a cigarette.

I breathe and try to take it all in.

I smell her unfiltered palm cigs, and chamomile, bacon, windowsill dust warmed by the sun, Edelle’s lilac perfume, and, somewhere in this mess, a cat.

But not magic.

Magic is a finite resource, because the bones of extinct magical creatures are a finite resource. And the bones I’m seeing didn’t come from osteomantic creatures. Moving along a wall, I see dog, cat, possum, squirrel, chicken, pigeon, rat, coyote, epoxy, and wood.

I turn to give Edelle the bad news, but she waves a hand at me, like she’s swatting a fly. “I know it’s all a bunch of junk. I never spent more than ten crowns on any of it. I just like the way they look, is all. When I was a girl I used to think this is what castles looked like, and I don’t care what nobody says, I like my castle.”

“Okay.” The trailer seems warmer now that I know she isn’t deluded about the value of her counterfeit bones.  On the other hand, I fought through an hour of canal traffic to get here, and it’ll be rush hour by the time I head back,