Read Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 for Free Online Page A

this trick before. He was pogoing on his toes, grinning like a chimp, and quietly repeating "so sweet so sweet so sweet so sweet so sweet!" under his breath.
    Taylor tossed the grapefruit in the air once, like a big league pitcher testing the ball's weight, then unceremoniously thrust his arm into the hanging pool of fire, which neatly severed it at the elbow.
    Rob-o clapped. Matilda screamed a hysterical little laugh before clapping both hands over her mouth, and John-john shrieked girlishly and jumped into his chair, shielding his face against the books. I realized that my heart—which had been beating a little quickly—suddenly seemed silent, and I wondered
Did I just die?,
the thought as clear and concrete as a jagged pebble in my shoe.
    Taylor seemed unimpressed by having lost his good right arm. "Man," he said, "I
love
the impact of that gag. It always
kills."
Rob-o leaned forward so that he and Taylor could slap a high five, and then Rob-o spun on his heel, doing a giddy little schoolboy dance.
    Taylor stepped back, his arm materializing as it pulled out of the fiery pool. Once his arm was clear, the portal dissipated like time-lapse footage of a pond evaporating. When it was gone, I realized it
had
made a sound, a sort of crackling, like running your hand through the cushion of static electricity on the screen of a big ole TV that's been running for hours.
    Taylor looked at his watch. "Let's no one move for sixty seconds or so, just in case. Like I said, the resolution isn't great on these old-ass GPSes, and I'm not really sure how the portal handles the fact that it wants more significant digits than Magellan can offer." John-john unwound, bashfully stepping down from his perch, but no one else moved.
    "I, um, don't usually do a demo in such a little place," Taylor explained. He was talking just to fill the dead air, I think. I wasn't really processing. "No offense," he added, "This is a really swell bookshop, but, um, FYI: This business model isn't super solid. What are you studying?" It took a beat or two before I realized he was looking at me.
    "Comp Lit," I said automatically. Guys asked my boobs this question daily when I was working the register. "I'm into alternative feminist recasting of traditional narratives."
    "Comparative literature?" He nodded his head appraisingly. "Cool," and he actually seemed to think it was cool—most guys just told my breasts they thought that was "really cool," and then they asked my breasts if they'd like to go get coffee, and presumably be grabbed afterward. Oddly, Taylor focused all of this chit-chat at my actual face, behind which I keep my brain, within which I wondered why I was going deep into hock just to argue semantics in the morning, buy back unopened women's studies textbooks in the afternoon, and torch ATMs at night. When his eyes finally wandered down, they seemed more into what was on my shirt than what was in it.
    "You did 4-H?"
    "Yeah." I still couldn't feel my heart beating. "As a kid. My family raises sheep outside Paxton. I raised and showed goats."
    "You should totally consider starting a petting zoo," he said wistfully, "whisk me away from all this."
    And then Taylor's portal returned. He dipped his arm into the fiery water-light again, despite John-john weakly gasping "
Don't!",
then rooted around for a moment, like a guy trying to fish his car keys out of a koi pond.
    Taylor pulled a dingy tennis ball out of the shifting, hanging puddle, which again evaporated, leaving only the dim shadow of its crackling.
    But, of course, it wasn't a tennis ball. It was the grapefruit, covered in mold, desiccated with age, as though it had spent a month at the back of a dorm-room mini-fridge.
    "Ta da!" he said, gingerly holding it aloft between thumb and index finger. I could clearly see Bill's black scrawl under the mold.
    "That's a trick," militantly skeptical Matilda said with absolutely no conviction. Buffalo Bill had taken the grapefruit from Taylor and was