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closet in the master bedroom in the backpack. There's a late-night horror movie on TV, but no one is there to watch it. The girl in the dress on the lawn is gone. If there's someone in the pool, they're keeping quiet.
    Wolverine and Leo get in Wolverine's car and drive away.
    Carly is dreaming that she's the President of the United States of America. She's living in the White House—it turns out that the White House is built out of ice. It's more like the Whitish Greenish Bluish House. Everybody wears big fur coats and when President Carly gives presidential addresses, she can see her breath. All her words hanging there. She's hanging out with rock stars and Nobel Prize winners. It's a wonderful dream. Carly's going to save the world. Everyone loves her, even her parents. Her parents are so proud of her. When she wakes up, the first thing she sees—before she sees all the other things that are missing besides the oil painting of the woods that nobody lives in, nobody painted, and nobody stole—is the empty space on the wall in the bedroom above her parents' bed.
     
     

Death And Suffrage
by Dale Bailey
Dale Bailey is the author of the novels The Fallen , House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.) . His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Amazing Stories , and SCI FICTION . He has also written a non-fiction book, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction . This story won the International Horror Guild Award, and was adapted into an episode of the television series Masters of Horror . Bailey has also twice been nominated for the Nebula Award.
 
In his collection, The Resurrection Man's Legacy , Bailey says that due to the real-world events that mirrored the events of this story, "Death and Suffrage" seems to confirm the dictum that the writer of fiction can no longer compete with the strangeness of contemporary reality. "It's also an example of how completely a writer's intentions can go awry. In keeping with the pun in the title, I intended this one to be short and light," Bailey says. "But somewhere along the way it turned long and very dark indeed."
     
     
    It's funny how things happen, Burton used to tell me. The very moment you're engaged in some task of mind-numbing insignificance—cutting your toenails, maybe, or fishing in the sofa for the remote—the world is being refashioned around you. You stand before a mirror to brush your teeth, and halfway around the planet flood waters are on the rise. Every minute of every day, the world transforms itself in ways you can hardly imagine, and there you are, sitting in traffic or wondering what's for lunch or just staring blithely out a window. History happens while you're making other plans, Burton always says.
    I guess I know that now. I guess we all know that.
    Me, I was in a sixth-floor Chicago office suite working on my résumé when it started. The usual chaos swirled around me—phones braying, people scurrying about, the televisions singing exit poll data over the din—but it all had a forced artificial quality. The campaign was over. Our numbers people had told us everything we needed to know: when the polls opened that morning, Stoddard was up seventeen points. So there I sat, dejected and soon to be unemployed, with my feet on a rented desk and my lap-top propped against my knees, mulling over synonyms for directed . As in directed a staff of fifteen . As in directed public relations for the Democratic National Committee . As in directed a national political campaign straight into the toilet .
    Then CNN started emitting the little overture that means somewhere in the world history is happening, just like Burton always says.
    I looked up as Lewis turned off the television.
    "What'd you do that for?"
    Lewis leaned over to shut my computer down. "I'll show you," he said.
    I followed him through the suite, past clumps of people huddled around televisions. Nobody looked my