Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Seanan McGuire
- Language: English
- Genre: Dragons & Mythical Creatures Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 4 MB
- Price: Free
“Dead people who hang around after they die are people too, and that
means they’re not a monolith. Some of them are awful. Some of
them are pretty good neighbors. None of them like a shotgun full of
rock salt to the face.”
—Enid Healy
A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland,
Oregon
Now
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. That was pretty normal before eight in the
morning, thanks to layers of religious prohibition keeping the mice
from starting their daily exaltations before everyone was out of bed. Things
wouldn’t stay quiet for long. They never did. Each person who woke up
would each add their specific flavor of chaos to the environment, until we
were operating at standard levels. It could have been worse. We were
currently operating well below a full house, with only Kevin, Evelyn,
Annie, James, and Sam in residence—well, them, and several hundred
talking mice who were frustratingly prone to religious mania, which could
break out at literally any moment.
At this point, there’s no one in the family who’s been around the mice
longer than I have, and even I can’t always predict when a massive,
ongoing, and worst of all, loud celebration is going to start up somewhere in
the house. Kevin had started trying to put together a fully comprehensive
calendar of their observances when he was just a kid, and Evelyn took over
maintaining it after they were married, after she noticed he was missing
several of the rituals specifically centered around childbirth, menstruation
(human family members only, as the mice don’t menstruate, and let’s all
pause to be grateful for that, shall we?), and, oddly enough, dusting. There
are apparently things the Aeslin aren’t comfortable sharing with their gods,
but will happily divulge to a priestess.
Their ideas of gender roles are a little outdated, and it can color a lot of
things you might think would be safe from sexism. Life—or death—with
the mice is nothing if not endlessly surprising.
But anyway, Evelyn maintained the master calendar, and even she
sometimes got surprised by festivals that only happened when the
circumstances were right, and thus hadn’t been observed in two or three or
four generations. The rest of us were basically playing guess-the-ritual all
the time, and inevitably getting things wrong.
If I hadn’t known for sixty years and counting that Aeslin mice couldn’t
lie, I would have started to suspect them of inventing new traditions just to
keep the rest of us on our toes.
But I digress. It was about half past seven, and the sun was up, but
nobody else seemed to be. One of the wild roosters in the woods behind the
compound had been crowing its head off for almost half an hour, which was
a good illustration of why wild roosters never lasted long in the woods. If
the coyotes didn’t get it, one of the house residents would go out and shut it
up sooner or later. Silence before coffee was pretty well enforced most of
the time.
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