The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Amy understood perfectly. She often wished there were more women players in traditional music. She was sick to death of going to a music session where she wasn’t known. All too often she’d be the only woman in a gathering of men and have to play rings around them on her pipes just to prove that she was as good as them. Irish men weren’t exactly noted for their liberated standards.

Which didn’t mean that either she or Lucia weren’t fond of the right sort of a man. “Au contraire,” as Lucia would say in the phony Parisian accent she liked to affect, “I am liking them too much.”

Amy made her way to the bar where she ordered a beer on her tab, then took the brimming draught glass through the crowd to Lucia’s table, trying to slosh as little of the foam as she could on her new jeans.

“Bet you thought I wouldn’t come,” Lucia said as Amy sat down with her stein relatively full. The only spillage had joined the stickiness of other people’s spills that lay underfoot.

Lucia was older than Amy by at least six or seven years, putting her in her midthirties. She had her hair in a wild spiky do tonight—to match the torn white T-shirt and leather jeans, no doubt. The punk movement had barely begun to trickle across the Atlantic as yet, but it was obvious that Lucia was already an eager proponent. A strand of safety pins dangled from one earlobe; others held the tears of her T-shirt closed in strategic places.

“I don’t even remember telling you about the gig,” Amy said.

Lucia waved a negligent hand towards the small poster on the wall behind her that advertised the band’s appearance at Feeney’s Kitchen this weekend.

“But you are famous now, ma cherie,” she said. “How could I not know?” She dropped the accent to add, “You guys sound great.”

“Thanks.”

Amy looked at the tabletop. She set her stein down beside a glass of white wine, Lucia’s cigarettes and matches and a half-filled ashtray. There was also an empty teacup with a small bright steel teapot on one side of it and a used tea bag on the lip of its saucer.

“Did you come alone?” she asked.

Lucia shook her head. “I brought a foundling—fresh from who really knows where. You probably noticed her and Matt making goo-goo eyes at each other all through the last piece you did.” She brought a hand to her lips as soon as she’d made the last comment. “Sorry. I forgot about the thing you used to have going with him.”

“Old history,” Amy said. “I’ve long since dealt with it. I don’t know that Matt ever even knew anything existed between us, but I’m cool now. ”

“It’s for the better.”

“Definitely,” Amy agreed.

“I should probably warn my little friend about him,” Lucia said, “but you know what they’re like at that age—it’d just egg her on.”

“Who is your little friend? She moves like all she was born to do was dance.” “She’s something, isn’t she? I met her on Wolf Island about a week ago, just before the last ferry—all wet and bedraggled like she’d fallen off a boat and been washed to shore. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and I thought the worst, you know? Some asshole brought her out for a quick wham, bam, and then just dumped her.”

Lucia paused to light a cigarette.

“And?” Amy asked.

Lucia shrugged, blowing out a wreath of blue-gray smoke. “Seems she fell off a boat and took off her clothes so that they wouldn’t drag her down while she swam to shore. Course, I got that from her later.”

Just then the door to the club opened behind Lucia and a gust of cool air caught the smoke from Lucia’s cigarette, giving it a slow dervishing whirl. On the heels of the wind, Amy saw Matt and the girl walk in. They seemed to be in the middle of an animated discussion—or at least Matt was, so they had to be talking about music.

Amy felt the same slight twinge of jealousy watching him with the dancer as she did in the first few moments of every one of the short relationships that came about from some girl basically flinging herself at him halfway through a gig. Though perhaps “relationship” was too strong a word, since any sense of responsibility to a partner was inevitably one-sided.

The girl laughed at what he was saying—but it was a silent laugh. Her mouth was open, her eyes sparkled with a humored appreciation, but there was no sound. She began to move her hands in an intricate pattern that, Amy realized, was the American Sign Language used by deaf-mutes.

“Her problem right then,” Lucia was saying, “was finding something to wear so that she could get into town. Luckily I was wearing my duster—you know, from when I was into my Sergio Leone phase—so she could cover herself up.”

“She took off everything while she was in the water?” Amy asked, her gaze returning to her friend. “Even her underwear?”