Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear Page A

answer.
    Time went by, and people drifted in and out of the parlor. By three on the big grandfather clock by the library door, the last of the johns had either done his business and gone out or settled in for the night with the girl of his dreams. Those picketers we’d had earlier apparently didn’t stay up past ten, so they was long gone, too, and in their absence custom had picked up a bit. Me, I was just starting to think about some supper—I could smell the mutton with garlic and the huckleberry sauce wafting out from Connie’s cookpots every time the hall door was opened—when, muffled through the brick walls, I heard Pollywog start in to screaming out in the alley.
    I say I heard, but we all did. “Christ, what now?” Miss Francina said, heaving herself up from the chair where she’d been bootless, toasting her socks by the parlor fire. Crispin was already on his feet, grabbing up an old train signal lantern we keep beside the door. Miss Bethel ducked under the bar pass-through with her shotgun ready. Effie jumped up beside me, and so did Miss Lizzie. Madame’s office door creaked and I heard the thump of her cane, but Crispin was already out the door and I wasn’t letting him and Polly face whatever it was alone for as long as it might take for Madame to get down the stairs. If Polly needed rescuing, then by God we were there to effect her rescue.
    I bolted out behind him, in between Miss Francina and Miss Bethel.
    Pollywog’s real name is Mary, from which comes Polly and therefore, by the irrefutable logic of affection, Pollywog. She’s got that straight blond hair like I described, and maybe not a whole mess of common sense, but she ain’t in general a screamer. She’s got a lot of regulars; the johns who want her usually only want her, and I think it is as much to do with her big blue eyes and her listening expression and her trick of petting their hair back as it is to do with her trick hip.
    There weren’t nothing in sight from the front stoop. I looked this way and that—and up the ladder, for good measure—but them red lamps burned steady in the still air and there was nobody in any direction. Polly screamed again—breathier this time, like a balloon running out of air—and I caught sight of the colored-glass glow of Crispin’s signal lantern vanishing around the corner to my right.
    I lit out after him, Miss Francina and Miss Bethel on either flank, Effie at our heels. Miss Francina was still stocking foot, but that didn’t seem to slow her none.
    “Aw, shit!” Crispin’s voice, and I braced for a crash or a thud of fist on flesh, but all that came was Pollywog’s sobbing. I rounded the corner in time to see that it muffled as Crispin pulled her face into his coat. In the light of the gas lamp beside the kitchen door, I could make out the dustbins we lined up against the scaffold holding the street fill back. There also was a pile of rags and a spilled pail of peelings—Pollywog must of dropped it—beside them.
    We lot all planted our heels and piled to a halt like characters in a funny strip. Fortunately, it was Miss Bethel who bounced off my back, not Miss Francina. And fortunately, she did it with her forearm and not the shotgun. Half-carrying Pollywog, Crispin started drawing her the way we’d come, back toward the front door. Her face never came out of his shoulder.
    “She hurt?” Miss Francina asked as they passed our little huddle by.
    “Look to the girl on the ground,” Crispin said. “If there’s any use to it.”
    “Fucking shit,” said Effie, echoing and enhancing Crispin’s sentiments. I didn’t say it myself because my mouth had dropped open and was hanging there as if I was a hooked fish, gasping.
    The dustbins were dustbins. The dropped pail of peelings was exactly that. The pile of rags …
    It was a girl. Or a woman.
    Miss Francina, unsurprisingly, got herself together first. She darted forward, heedless of the peelings and her stockinged feet, and dropped