a hand, a bone boat, and ghosts

[sergebroom]

October 2010's issue of "Realms of Fantasy" was quite good. There was Alan Smale's "Saint's Paw", in which a young woman's curiosity about anatomical research has her accused of witchcraft and on the run, until she finds refuge in a church where resides a relic, the hand of a saint. Jay Lake's "The Fall of the Moon" has a man building a boat using his grandfather's bones. Well written, as is usually the case with Lake, although I don't think I 'got' the ending. The problem probably is with me.

I especially liked Daniel Hood's “Cutter in the Underverse”, in which Cutter, a Manhattan cop, is part of a secret elite that deals with the ghosts that have been accumulating throughout the island's fabric over the years.

So he was a ghost, trapped like all of them by some compelling urge or overwhelming emotion. Most ghosts, though, didn’t get it; the trap was permanent for them, because they couldn’t see it was a trap. They thought it was just their life, and so they lived it over and over again, a losed loop of obsession or paranoia, fear or doomed love. They littered the Underverse, thousands upon thousands of frustrated lives trapped in glimmering sepia, and Cutter had long since stopped paying them any attention.

One of the ghosts though has been paying attention to him though, and has been buying Cutter's horse-racing IOUs to force him to do some work for him that involves the ghost of the man who killed him.

I hope this isn't the last I've seen of Cutter.