Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler

the junior college level where she taught. And when a woman did find herself in a tight spot as this one had just done—well, what happened then? Women didn’t want heroines. Women wanted heroes, wanted heroes to be such an ordinary feature of their daily lives that they didn’t even feel compelled to stay and watch their own rescue. Wanted heroes who came home and did the dishes at night.
    Harris rubbed his knee and cautiously straightened it. He took the black toad from his case and slipped it into a pocket. He took a tranquilizer gun and, against all orders, a mayonnaise jar containing the doctored Shirley Temple. The ginger ale was laced with bufotenine rather than bufotoxin. Bufotoxin had proved difficult to obtain on short notice, even for a DEA agent who knew his way around the store, but bufotenine was readily available in South Carolina and Georgia, where the cane toad secreted it, and anyone willing to lick a toad the size of a soccer ball could have some. Perfectly legal, too, in some forms, although the two state legislatures had introduced bills to outlaw toad-licking.
    â€œTouch not, taste not, handle not!” The voice was suddenly amplified and accompanied by feedback; perhaps the rap singer had left his mike on. The last time Harris had heard Voudon singing he had been in Haiti, sleeping in the house of a Haitian colonel the DEA suspected of trafficking. He had gotten up and crept into the colonel’s study, and the voices came in the window with the moonlight.
    Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio te! Canga, moune de le! Canga, do ki la! Canga, li!
    The song had frightened him back to his room. In the morning, he asked the cook about the voices. “A slave song,” she said. “For children.” She taught it to him, somewhat amused, he thought, at his rendition. Later he sang it to a friend, who translated. “‘We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.’” The cook had served him eggs.
    Harris felt no compulsion at this particular moment to be fair, but in his heart he knew that, had his wife been there, she would never have let him go into that bar alone.
    The bar was dark; the overheads had all been smashed, and the only light came from something that lay in front of Harris. This something blocked the door so that he could open it just halfway, and he could identify the blockage as Super Mario Bros. 2 by the incessant little tune it was playing. It was tipped onto its side and still glowed ever so slightly. Situated as it was, its little light made things inside even harder to see.
    Deep in the bar, there was an occasional spark, like a firefly. Harris squinted in that direction. He could just make out the vacant bandstand. A single chair for a soloist lay on its back under a keyboard that had been snapped in half. The keyboard was still plugged in, and this was what was throwing off sparks. Harris’s eyes began to adjust. Above the keyboard, on the wall, about spark-high, was a nest of color-coded wires. The wall phone had been ripped out and stuffed into one of the speakers. Behind the speakers were rounded shapes he imagined to be cowering customers. The floor of the bar was shiny with liquor.
    On the other side of the bar were the video games. Street Fighter, Cyberball, and Punch-Out!! all bore the marks of the hatchet. Over the tune of the video, Harris could hear someone sniffling. The mike picked it up. Otherwise the bar was quiet. Harris squeezed inside, climbing over Super Mario Bros. 2. His knee hurt. He bent and straightened it experimentally. Super Mario Bros. 2 played its music:
Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.
    The loa charged, shrieking, from the corner. “Peace on Earth,” she howled, as her hatchet cleaved the air by Harris’s head, shattering the mayonnaise jar in his hand. The loa’s stroke carried her past him.
    A piece of broken glass had sliced across his palm. Harris