Fantasy Magazine Issue 33, December 2009

Table of Contents

Choke Point by Sarah Totton (fiction) The Tongue of Bees by Claire Humphrey (fiction) The Raccoon’s Daughter by Nicole Kornher- Stace (fiction) The Chrysanthemum Bride by Angela Slatter (fiction)

Author Spotlight: Sarah Totton Author Spotlight: Claire Humphrey Author Spotlight: Angela Slatter

About the Editor

© 2009 Fantasy Magazine www.fantasy-magazine.com Choke Point Sarah Totton

Steve was just north of Chaffeys Lock driving back from Rachel’s house in Ottawa when he saw the snake on the road. If he’d been with Rachel he wouldn’t have stopped. Rachel wouldn’t have noticed it, but if he had pointed it out to her, she would have shut her eyes and ordered him to drive on. But Rachel wasn’t with him, so he pulled the truck onto the soft shoulder and got out. Black rat snakes liked to bask on the road and soak up the warmth there. This one, over a meter and a half in length, lay width-wise across the road. Likely, the driver who had hit it had mistaken it for a line of tar sealing a crack in the asphalt, a narrow band of darkness on the hot blacktop, an insignificant bump under the tires. Or maybe the driver had done it deliberately. Steve listened for traffic. In the marsh across the road, a red-winged blackbird called out conga-ree, flashing its scarlet epaulettes. Otherwise this stretch of road was quiet. Steve crouched down next to the snake. Its body had been crushed about five centimeters behind its head. Its skin had split open, a gaping slit that was bright red inside like the cut pomegranates Rachel ate for breakfast. The asphalt was darkened and tacky under his shoes where the snake had bled. Greenbottle flies studded its body like living jewels. Steve retrieved his work gloves and a plastic bucket from the back of his truck. Carefully, he pulled the snake from the road. It stuck where it had been run over, and he had to lift it delicately to keep it intact. He lowered it reverently into the bucket, coiling the body inside. Once it was all in, he laid a burlap sack over the top to keep the flies off and replaced the bucket on the bed of the truck. Then he headed for home. Home, but not for much longer. As he drove he brushed the back of the passenger seat where Jed usually rode, felt the bristling carpet of black and white hairs that had resisted multiple vacuuming. He looked out the passenger side window, through the smudges of Jed’s noseprints on the glass. He felt the absence like a missing tooth. Get used to it, he told himself. He shouldn’t have picked up that snake; he didn’t have time to deal with it properly. He had other things to do. Packing, for instance. It would have been a waste, though, to have left it there. A pointless, unnatural death. This way, after he’d cleaned the skeleton, it could go to a museum, a university, or to a naturalist, like Steve, who would use it to educate people about local fauna. Steve drove up the long laneway to his house. He saw his house with new eyes each time he came back from a visit to Rachel’s. He didn’t used to think about it; it was just home. After he’d brought Rachel here and seen her reaction, the comments she’d visibly refrained from making, he now saw it as small and shabby. Steve lifted the bucket from the back of the truck. Jed stood at the fence, white tail a blur of motion, his nose with its pale patch of pink, pressed into the chain link. Jed greeted Steve at the gate, sniffing the bucket, then him. Jed followed Steve out to the workshop in the shed at the back of the yard. Steve had to make a decision: how best to deal with the snake. He wanted to clean the skeleton in the most efficient way. Carrion beetles would do the job for him, but that could take weeks, and he’d sold his stock of carrion beetles the week before. Alternately, the carcass could be put into a plastic bag filled with water, tied closed and left for a few months. As long as you made sure you when you opened the bag, you were in a well ventilated area. The third method was to boil the carcass. It was messy and labor-intensive, but it was also quick. As Steve was moving out in two days, this was the only option. As he went to the house, he saw Jed run over to his doghouse and wolf the kibble in his bowl. Steve watched him grimly; he’d paid the neighbor to put out food for Jed in the morning and evening while he was in Ottawa, but obviously, it didn’t matter; Jed refused to eat when Steve wasn’t home. In the house, Steve dug through boxes of his camping gear until he found his hunting knife and a couple of old, banged-up pots. Rachel wouldn’t let anything like those into her kitchen with her ornamental copper pots and marble counter tops. He filled the pots with water and set them on the stove. He did his best to cut away as much of the skin and muscle from the skeleton as he could; the more work he did by hand, the less work the boiling water would have to do. He cut the carcass where it had been flattened and divided the smooth black body between the two pots of water, putting the head aside. Once he’d got the water boiling, he put lids on the pots. Then he emptied spare bedroom and the kitchen cupboards, packing his remaining things into boxes. He kept an eye on the clock. Boil the carcass too long and all the little bones would come apart, and reassembling them would be an exercise in migraine generation. At last, he returned to the stove, turned the heat off under the pots, then he called Jed out to the truck. He drove down to the abandoned CN line. The tracks had been taken up years ago leaving gravel and a road that was decompressing from underneath. He drove carefully, straddling the big sinkhole that had been forming for the past three months. He stopped where the road opened up to either side and below where he had a view of the water. He opened the truck door, and Jed piled out. It was 3pm, the sky a fading blue. For some reason, it was always colder here than anywhere else along the road, no matter what time of year it was. He looked out over the water. Some people were afraid of the enormity of the place when they came out here at night, but Steve felt that it was a privilege to be a part of this. He didn’t have much, but he’d wanted to give this to Rachel, to her children: take them up here to see it. But they hadn’t wanted it. “It’s not us,” Rachel had said, with the implication that he was included in the ‘us.’ That was a strange feeling. He’d been taking Jed out here nearly every day for eight years. Once, they’d seen a coyote standing boldly broadside-on to them on the road not twenty meters away. Jed had gone crazy, barking, and Steve had barely caught him in time, stopping him from lunging forward. A coyote would sometimes lure a dog out to the rest of the pack so that they could kill it. In all the years he’d had Jed that had been the closest he’d come to losing him. Steve had bought him from a kid selling puppies out of a cardboard box at the livestock market. Four of them when Steve had walked by on his way in, a tumble of black and white; one left on the way out—the one no one else had wanted. Small enough to fit in the pocket of his bush jacket. Steve walked down the abandoned road. He could hear the ringing call of a toad, then another. No more walks like this after tonight. No more breathing air that was so clean you drank it like cold water. “You can’t keep living like this forever, Steve,” one of his married friends had said. “Alone in the middle of nowhere. You need a family.” Steve liked children. He brought his specimens to elementary schools sometimes, taught them about natural history. Once they got over their initial squeamishness, most of them took to it. Steve liked Rachel’s daughters well enough too, though neither of them had taken to what he did; Rachel hadn’t really given them a chance. He was moving to a real house in Ottawa. He’d never lived in a city before, but this was what was expected of him, that eventually he would have to grow up and accept responsibility. He was thirty-five; his friends had drifted off, paired off, and gradually, very gradually, he’d gone from seeing them regularly to barely seeing them at all, and the only one he spoke to some days was Jed. He called Jed from wherever he was—he was in the habit of darting into the undergrowth after rabbits; last week he’d found a porcupine in amidst the sumac along the side of the road. Jed came racing back, toenails scattering the gravel. Steve got back into the truck, shut the door. He looked back over the valley. He took a good, long time doing it, because he knew it would be the last time; he couldn’t come here again, not without Jed. “Love is about sacrifice,” Rachel had said. “Love means giving things up for the one you care about.” Steve looked at the keys dangling from the steering column. He felt suddenly like there was a vice grip on his ribs, pain, somewhere so deep he couldn’t point to it. He couldn’t breathe. The feeling passed. He turned the key. When he returned to the house, the smell of boiled snake greeted him. In the pots, loose, white trails of flesh jostled and floated like gauze. He ran cold water over them, fished a chunk out with a pair of tongs. He put it on a plate and took it out to the workshop behind the house. Jed followed at his heels. The shovel stood against the side of the shed, edged with dirt from the grave he’d dug the day before. Setting the plate on the workbench, he realized that he had made a mistake. It would take hours just to clean the bones. Never mind sorting the 400-odd vertebrae in the correct order. He had other things he had to do tonight, before the light faded. Yet he’d gone too far to just throw it all out. The pieces of flesh were slippery and Steve had to be careful with his knife. Jed watched him intently, his chin resting on Steve’s leg. Bones were little miracles. Complete, perfect, formed in the darkness under their blankets of skin and muscle, in the womb or the egg. No one ever saw them, until they were revealed like this. Rachel had been logical. She had custody of the girls, and she was allergic to dogs. Jed was bonded to Steve, wouldn’t even eat when Steve wasn’t there. It would be a subtle kind of cruelty to give him away, one that Steve could never inflict on Jed. Steve disarticulated the ribs from the snake’s backbone. Freeing each one, he dried it with a dishtowel and laid it on his work table to dry. The body of each rib was smooth, perfectly curved. Except when he came to the part of the snake where it had been flattened under the car tire; these ribs were in fragments. Steve set the piece of snake down. Better that he not suffer at all. He turned on his second desk lamp with the magnifier. The rib he’d pulled loose with his forceps had fractured in three pieces. It would be unfair to put broken pieces into the bone box with the rest of the skeleton; Steve ought to repair it first. He rummaged in one of the boxes for some contact cement. He didn’t have time for this; the light was fading, and he needed good light to be sure of his aim. He glanced through the window. The darkness seethed between the trees in the back forty where he’d take Jed out hunting with him. He recalled how in Ottawa Rachel always pulled the curtains closed at the first hint of darkness so that the neighbors couldn’t look in. There was nothing but a wooded hill behind his workshop, multi-coloured in the autumn and silver with snow in the winter. The kind of view that deserved to be painted. He’d dug the grave out there, in amongst the silver birch. It was going to be dark soon; better to do it while the light was good. Steve tapped his forceps on the work table. Fix the broken rib, then do it. He dabbed a bead of contact cement onto the fractured edge of the rib. Then he picked up the second piece and fit it to the broken edge of the other piece. Something caught his eye. He looked at it through the magnifier on the light. An undulating groove ran along the bone—something that had no right to be there. The fracture truncated it. The third and final rib fragment lay on the plate. Using his forceps he held that one in place while it set. The groove now stretched unbroken along the bone, like an inscription: Do not forsake me. Steve put the rib back onto the plate and switched off the desk lamp. His gun was in the locked cabinet back in the house; he’d refrained from packing it, knowing he would need it one more time before he left here. Steve got up, and Jed followed him out of the workshop.

***

Steve packed the last of the boxes into the back of his pickup. He’d sold the house, was due out today; contracts signed, no turning back. He got into the truck, started it up, and drove away from the house, away from Ottawa, away from Rachel and her own responsibilities. Because love means giving things up for the one you care about. He looked over at Jed, and Jed’s tail thumped on the seat.

Sarah Totton’s short fiction has appeared in Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2007 (Rich Horton, ed.), Writers of the Future XXII and Polyphony 5. She is the Regional Winner (for Canada & the Caribbean) in the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her collection, Animythical Tales, is forthcoming in 2010 from Warren Lapine’s Fantastic Books. The Tongue of Bees Claire Humphrey

The children roll in clover on the other side of the hill. On this side, Raymond Holt is eating belladonna. He chews each berry thoroughly. His mouth has not yet gone dry. Between berries he takes care to tongue all of the seeds and skin from between his teeth, and suck his fingers clean. Laughter reaches him: Valeria and Teddy and Mummy, climbing up and tumbling down again. They will be stained with crushed grass and clover nectar. Raymond can smell it from here, a sweet front moving down into the hollow as the air begins to cool. He lies back under the lilac tree; the blooms are all off now, but the brown ghosts of them litter the ground and tangle in his hair. When he has finished eating all five berries he sits up again. He must not be found down here. Upward, then, to the halfway oak. The effort gets his heart going like mothwings on a window-pane. He settles himself among the roots, with his book: nothing that might give anyone a misconception of his state, no Baudelaire or Poe this time, only James Whitcomb Riley. He has been reading it to Teddy for his bedtime. The gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out. He does not think Teddy has been paying attention.

***

The bees come: one, and another, and a swarm. He has no fruit left for them, but when he tries to tell them so, his tongue cleaves to his teeth. They speak to him, in the manner of bees, of the clover and the phlox, the apple-blossoms and the Queen Anne’s lace. They shift places in the air around him, so that he can never tell the speaking bee from another; or maybe it is that they all speak as one. “Get my Mummy,” he says to them, without using his lips. “She will be over the hilltop with my sister and brother, or in the laundry with Maggie.” The bees dart away, one and another and a swarm, and Raymond lies still with his book upon his chest, over his fluttering, buzzing heart.

*** Mummy comes over the hilltop like a galleon, the sail of her apron golden with sunset, white-frocked Teddy a little catboat chasing along in her wake. “Oh, Raymond,” she says. “Dreaming again. Teddy, leave that; it is a bee, darling, it will sting you like this.” And Teddy howls delighted at the pinch on his arm. “Raymond, is that your new waistcoat? You are all over grass; but so are we. Such a lovely afternoon we have had of it, haven’t we, Teddy? Heavens, Raymond, you might rise to greet your mother. Raymond?” Raymond must finish thanking the bees; and then there is the matter of thanking the tree whose roots he has lain upon these last hours, and the clover for its scent, and the berries for their bittersweetness. Mummy does not wait for him; when he listens to her again he finds her saying his name, loudly now. She drags Teddy down beside him. She picks up a hand that lies on the ground, draws it into her lap, and turns it over to touch the wrist. “Teddy,” Raymond says, remembering. “Did the bees sting you?” “No,” says Teddy, laughing. “Mummy stung me like a big bee. Like this.” He pinches the hand in Mummy’s lap. It looks like Raymond’s hand, but it cannot be, for his own is much farther away. His own hand, in fact, has grubbed its way down through the earth and the oak-roots to reach for the world’s heart. “Raymond,” says Mummy, with a trembling in her voice. “Cannot you feel your brother? Cannot you feel this?” She pricks the hand with her sewing-needle, and then she washes it with a tear. Raymond tells her, after the manner of bees, that he can feel it very well; but perhaps Mummy does not speak the tongue of bees, for she sets aside the hand, gently but in a great hurry. She catches up Teddy and presses a distracted kiss to his cheek. “No wriggling, now, my sweet. We are going in to the nursery where Maggie will give you some milk, while I will send Jim for Doctor Radcliff. . .” Her voice dwindles over the hilltop, and the light begins to go with it. She is back in a trifle, though, with a blanket from the stable and a flask of water and a lantern. “To light the way to you, my love,” she says, “for you are too nearly a man for me to carry you inside, and Maggie is watching the babies.” “Who is watching Maggie?” Raymond asks her, for Maggie has been known to burn herself on the copper or scorch Valeria’s curls; but though Mummy bends close, she cannot seem to take his meaning. Now that the bees have all gone the stars begin to come. Raymond wonders if their sting is as sharp. They crowd into the still-blue sky. Closer, brighter, thick as milk, the stars rush toward him in a humming cloud. They swallow him up, stopping his breath so that he begins to tremble, and then to thrash. When the stars recede again, Raymond finds that Mummy is still here, weeping, and pressing down upon his shoulders. He reaches up to stroke a loose curl of hair back from her face. “Mummy, you mustn’t upset yourself so.” She lifts him up and embraces him. “Oh, my dear, to hear you speak! I had feared your reason lost. You are very ill, my love. You have had a spasm. Doctor Radcliff is coming.” She lays his head down gently and tucks the blanket tight about him. “I shall scold you properly when you are better, for lying out here under the trees all day and putting yourself in such a case. Raymond, Raymond, will you speak to me again?” Mummy sobs, a little, and she squeezes his hand tight; it has come back up from the earth and lies now on Mummy’s knee, fingers twined with hers, and so they remain until Doctor Radcliff’s light comes over the hill. ***

In the house the lamps burn very bright. Raymond turns his head to gaze into them as he is carried past. Jim and the Doctor have laid him on a pallet and hoisted him up, so that he rocks with their steps as on a small sea. “Observe his pupils,” Doctor Radcliff says. “The dilation is pronounced.” “I do not know what that means,” frets Mummy. She stands on the landing with a basin and a copper. “Of course you do not,” says Doctor Radcliff. A swoop and a tilt, and Raymond is tipped into his own bed. Under his pillow, he feels the firm edge of his volume of Poe. Jim is sent downstairs again. Doctor Radcliff strips Raymond of his waistcoat and shirt, and holds a light close to his eyes. “Yes, very pronounced.” He listens to Raymond’s heart and breathing, touches Raymond’s head and hands, palpates his abdomen. “The auscultation reveals a heartbeat that is fast and weak. And you say he has had a spasm. One only? I hope you thrust something between his teeth.” “No, sir,” says Mummy. “I had nothing to hand.” Doctor Radcliff glowers. “Should he have another, you must give him something to bite upon, else he might swallow his tongue, or chew it to ribbons. God preserve me from the idiocy of women.” “But why—” “He must have laudanum, to calm his tumultuous pulse,” Doctor Radcliff says, withdrawing the brown bottle from his case, and measuring drops into a glass. Raymond pushes his dry tongue against his teeth in eagerness. This. This. He feels the pace of his heart increase still further. Mummy does not keep laudanum in the house since Teddy’s misadventure. If she did, Raymond would not have had to lay such an unkind trap to draw the Doctor. And he does see, now, how unkind it is in him to frighten Mummy in such a way; but needs must when the Devil drives, as they say, although he does not think it is always meant so literally. Raymond thinks this thought quite clearly. A moment later, another thought. The belladonna—is it wearing off? In a panic he attempts to sit up. The stars come about him again, stifling, so that he throws himself back on the mattress and gags for breath.

*** “—quiet now, I shall remove the strap, and let you wash his face,” Doctor Radcliff says. Something like a horse’s bit is withdrawn from Raymond’s mouth. Cool water trickles in and he swallows weakly. “You have had another spasm, my dear,” says Mummy, bending over him, straightening his pillow, sponging his face, propping up his head. “You must take some drops now.” The chill of a spoon between his lips, and the cloying taste, familiar from childhood agues. Raymond swallows and swallows again. Afterward, more water, as welcome in his parched mouth as anything ever in his life. Doctor Radcliff and Mummy speak together by the door. “. . .reading poetry all afternoon, I would swear to it. I have it here: James Whitcomb Riley. Our Raymond loves poems. Such a gentle lad.” “Delicate, though, I recall. You haven’t a man in the house—have you any one to educate him in masculine pursuits? An uncle to take him riding? He’s too old to be cosseted in this way. Reading poetry all day is hardly a healthy pastime for a lad of his age.” “Doctor, it is only Riley. Rhymes for children, you know. He reads them to his brother.” “Well and good; but when he’s strong again, send him out of doors, and take his books away. If you won’t have him away at school find him a good man for a tutor. He must have the right influence to grow up straight and strong.”

***

The Doctor goes, leaving the brown bottle beside the bed. Mummy sits with Raymond and sighs over him. “I suppose it is my fault, my sweet. It is only that I cannot bear to think of you abroad, hurt perhaps, or alone, and no Mummy to watch over you. Should you like a tutor? Should you like Reverend Phelps to lecture over you, and Mr Broadway to take you hunting?” “I should like a bit more laudanum, please,” Raymond says. His voice comes out husky and weak. Mummy gives him a spoonful, and pats an escaped drop from his lip. “Your heart is not quite so quick, I think,” she says. “Could you sleep, if I turn down the lamp?” “Perhaps.” Raymond’s heart is indeed slowing as the laudanum sinks into him. What it loses in speed, it gains in force, until his whole body pounds with it, until he can even see the beating swell of blood in the capillaries of his eyes. Now comes the test. He breathes as slow and deep as he can, pretending to sleep. By his bed, Mummy is so quiet now he can almost forget she is there, except that he must not make an outward show of what he does. The bees showed him, earlier, the way of their speech; but with only the belladonna, he could not make sense of the way of their flight. Now, with the laudanum, the knowledge coalesces in him. He is sparks, or stars. He is a swarm. He arises within himself and then upward, from his slack body toward the window, and out.

***

Moonlit fields crawl below him. Owls stoop on mice. Deer cross clearings. The river glints, here and there, where the water furrows over rocks. Raymond darts as high or as low as he pleases. Nothing sees him; he cannot see himself. He has neither weight nor form, and he rushes over the wheat without a stalk swaying. He turns about again, back toward town. His own house, a cramped thing huddled against the hill, he passes by; only a single light shows and he knows who lies behind it. Ahead, though, are the steeple and the Town Hall and the livery, all the shops of Main Street, and the Mayor’s own mansion, which even at this hour spills over with revelers and gaslit cheer. When Raymond dips low to enter the house, though, he finds himself balked. He might be a slight bird beating on a window. People eddy just below him but he cannot follow them inside. No hands to pry, no feet to kick, no lock to jimmy; Raymond circles to all the windows and doors, and in each one is the same invisible block to his passage. Nothing succeeds: neither increasing his speed, nor hovering skin-close to a guest of the house, nor flying down the chimney. At last he flies onward to another house, a less enticing house, where the lights have been snuffed but a window remains ajar. This, too, is barred to him. A horrid thought: what if all houses are so, even his own? He flies home all in disorder. If his swarm were made of bees, they would be batting themselves out of the air, bruising each other’s wings. At his window he pauses. Mummy drowses, mouth open just enough to show the tips of her teeth. Raymond does not look at himself, at his body, lying slack in the bed. He arrows through the window and the swarm disperses back into the flesh.

***

“Will you have more laudanum, my love?” says Mummy, touching his cheek. The window shows grey half-light, brighter than it should be, for Raymond’s eyes have not quite recovered. “I am so tired,” he murmurs. “Drink, then, and sleep. I will watch.” The belladonna must have mostly dissipated from his blood, for this time the laudanum, instead of unlocking a secret, sends him off into uneasy dreams.

***

Raymond stays abed the following day. Once Mummy is confident he will have no more spasms, she goes to her own bed, and leaves Raymond a bell to call her. Sometimes he drowses; sometimes he lies half- awake, hearing Valeria on the stairway, singing to her dolls, or Teddy begging for marmalade in the nursery. Outside, afternoon ripens. A bee or wasp bumps against the window and Raymond sits up to watch it. With nothing but the last dregs of laudanum in him, he discovers that his head aches, and his chest, and that he did in fact bite his tongue rather badly at some point last night. And he is weak: a damp, just-mangled shirt thrown over the rack. When Mummy comes to check on him, though, he refuses the brown bottle and asks for tea and toast and a book, and says he is much recovered. “I do hope so, my love. You frightened us all.” “I am sorry for it, Mummy; you know I would not hurt you for the world.” “Of course you would not. You are only careless sometimes, as are all young men. I beg you will lie abed until you are quite rested; and then you must promise to refrain from reading on the cold ground.” Raymond thinks he remembers Doctor Radcliff saying something rather different; but it is not as if he wants a tutor or a riding-companion or any of that nonsense. He holds his peace. While Mummy takes supper in the nursery with the children, Raymond finally dares to open the volume of Poe, and take from within it the folded pages of the grimoire. He lights a lamp against the twilight and props himself up in his bed. He reads again about the preparations for flight. Raymond sees now why witches of old used to infuse the belladonna and poppy into an ointment, which they spread upon their skin. Perhaps if they went into spasms they could simply wipe some of it off, instead of relying upon their Mummies and Doctors to put them to bed. These pages—these browned and torn pages, with their archaic type—are all Raymond has for a master. He cannot write off to anyone for advice without Mummy seeing it. He did ask the proprietor of the bookshop in Ithaca, one of the days he rode in with Mummy. The proprietor stroked his whiskers in a way that said he was covering up a smile, and tried to sell him a book of children’s tales, at which Raymond rather took offense. Raymond redeemed himself in the shopman’s eyes by buying a handsome volume of Wilde: redeemed enough that Raymond found himself accepting the offer of a glass of sherry. “Are you in town for long?” the shopman asked. “Perhaps you might stay for an hour; I have something upstairs you might wish to see.” What it was, Raymond never did discover, as Mummy arrived just then with her shopping, and Raymond had to go back to Stourville. He thinks about his next visit to Ithaca often; it will be before winter, of that much he is sure, and he will visit the bookshop again, for more Wilde and some Chambers and perhaps Bierce. For a fuller grimoire, or another witch, he does not know where to search. He would not quite credit the idea of a witch living here anyway, if he had not just proven the possibility. The very soil of New York feels unmagical and dull when he sets his foot upon it. If only he could avoid setting foot upon it at all: the air is magical enough, peopled with speaking bees and bounded with invisible wards. To fly again, though, Raymond must have another go with the belladonna and laudanum. The very thought exhausts him. He lies back upon his pillows, the folded pages held to his chest. His eyes ache. He lets them close for a moment. ***

Raymond wakes in the deep of night, with his lamp extinguished and the blanket tucked up about his throat. By his bed, Mummy sits, chin on collarbone, breathing softly. Raymond cuddles down into the warm sheets and returns to sleep. In the morning, he realizes his pages are gone.

***

Wrapped in a shawl and seated in an invalid-chair, Raymond takes the air at the bottom of the garden. Teddy sits upon his lap to listen again to the Child-rhymes. Valeria, coming and going, plucking the first goldenrod from the border of the woods, asks for “The Raggedy Man” and then runs off before the end. At last Teddy is called in for bread and jam. Raymond pretends to sleep. When he is alone he goes through his Poe again, and the Riley for good measure, searching for the pages of the grimoire. Under the bed, he thinks. He must have missed them, for when he knelt there to search, his eyes were aching, and his vision might have been blurred. Or in his coverlet, unnoticed, when Mummy turned it up over him. Or tangled in his nightshirt when he took it off this morning. Or none of those places. He knows quite well they are not there. He can only hope Mummy took them for garbage and threw them in the grate. A solitary bee wanders by. He listens to it, if that is enough of a name for the sense he employs. Without his preparation, he only hears a thread of its speech, but he follows it off along the border of flowers until it rounds the house. Doctor Radcliff returns, and gives the verdict that Raymond must keep warm and drink broth, and that he may go abroad again at the end of the week, if he has not suffered any relapse. “That is great news, Raymond,” Mummy says, smiling so widely that Raymond can see the little gap between her front teeth. When she smiles this way she looks like a Gibson girl. In her day she was the beauty of Ithaca, or so he has been told. Mummy leads Raymond inside, supporting him, holding his shawl and books, and instead of taking him to the dinner table she has Maggie bring trays up to Raymond’s bedroom, so that he may sit tucked up with his dinner on his knees. “Like a picnic, Raymond. Do you remember when you were very small, and I used to visit you in the nursery this way? Your father was still alive, then, and when he and the other gentlemen sat over their port, I would slip away to see my favourite boy.” “I am not your favourite any more; Teddy is that, I suppose.” “Teddy is only a baby. A darling and precious baby; but he cannot talk to me yet.” “I am afraid I am very dull company for you, Mummy, for I am still so very tired.” “And no wonder,” Mummy says. “Flying all over the countryside in such a manner.” Raymond, caught with his mouth full of ham, pauses to think of what else, what else on earth, she could possibly mean. “I found your pages,” Mummy says. “Such a wonderful secret! I see now why you kept it so close. When were you going to tell me, my dear? I have supposed from your looks this last day that you were successful; though of course the price is high; but you are well now, or well enough. Perhaps the dose was a bit excessive. When shall we try again?” ***

At the bookshop in Ithaca, Raymond spends Mummy’s dollars on the books he has been coveting. “My, my,” says the proprietor. “You’re growing into quite the little decadent. Do you like these so much? I will look out some more for you.” “Please,” Raymond says. “I suppose you stay up too late reading them. The pallor suits you. Perhaps a little glass of something?” “I cannot. My Mummy is waiting for me.” The proprietor rolls his eyes, ties up the books in a neat package, and slips his card beneath the string, with a wink for Raymond and a quirk at the corner of his mouth. Many times on the long ride home, Raymond holds the package close to his face, breathing the aura of books, and imagining beneath it the scent of bay rum. The next time they fly, perhaps he can persuade Mummy to come here. Perhaps he can dip down quickly and hover for a moment beside the window of the flat at the back of the bookshop. Only for a moment, short enough to escape notice; and perhaps that will be enough, a tiny thing but all his own. ***

Mummy and Raymond go berrying. The season is about to change; oak leaves gather in the hollow, and the lilac tree is bare. The belladonna berries are withered now, but still midnight blue, and they fill a basket. “We will be able to get to Ithaca and back a dozen times,” Raymond says. “We may fly anywhere,” says Mummy, “so long as we are together. We will be a little coven. Just you and me, my love.” From the other side of the hill, Raymond hears the laughter of Valeria and Teddy as they climb up, tumble down, and climb again.

Claire Humphrey writes novels and short stories. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons and subTerrain. She works in the book trade as a buyer for Indigo Books, and she volunteers as a slush reader at Ideomancer. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise. Learn more about her at www.clairehumphrey.ca. The Raccoon’s Daughter Nicole Kornher-Stace

“Define,” says our dauntless tour guide, “vaporized.” “You know,” I tell him. “As in, there one minute, gone the next. As in, I turn to where she was and there’s no she there anymore, there’s just blue flowers, blowing. Vaporized. Or flowerized, I guess the term would be. And there wasn’t even really any wind at—” “Flowerized.” He’s cute, but you’d think the emptyheadedness’d got its hooks into him early, the way he makes me say things twice. Next it’ll be one of those antique hearing trumpet things they used to use, like some old lily-mouthed Victrola sprouting straight out the side of his skull. I squint right back at him, thinking what I’d have to crank to make the records play. Then I compose myself. My diplomatic face. No giggles, no, I squeeze them in. If looks could kill, this one’d be flaying me alive. I say: “You’ve not read much by way of mythology, I’d guess. Folktales? Fables? No?” Heave of big world-weary sigh. “I thought as much. If you had“—schoolmarmish now, mimed spectacles and all, his puzzlement’s delicious—”you’d know that mysterious natural phenomena, albeit enigmatic, are not so rare as you or I or any layman might be given to assume: in short,”—one finger pointing sagely at the emergency exit above my head—”the inexplicable is not unavoidably the improbable.” Oh, they’re all looking at me now, the brace of blue- haired old ladies, the college kids, the pinstriped suits and skirts, the wannabe adventurers with their backpacks and their drool-stained pillows, the pencil-tapping researcher down in front, the scrawny blonde who dresses like she thinks she’s Frida Kahlo; even the brats dragged by their parents the way a kite will drag its tail, crinkling snack wrappers, kicking at the seats, looking fit to perish of ennui. (A piece of mercy to us all.) To a one they’re watching me like they’d much prefer me in a box of bars, where they can hang a big brass plaque over my head engraved with words like droll and quaint and do not feed, and poke at me with sticks. I do my best Queen’s Progress smile, and I give a little wave. There’s one of those brats in the seat right here beside me, by the way, yammering at his beleaguered magazine- thumbing mom across the aisle, launching rather brilliant paper planes at the sandcastly coiffures of our ancients, cackling at his own kindergarten jokes. Chain-smoking is the nearest miss I know for how he’s putting candy bars away. “Cantaloupe,” he shrills around a faceful of caramelly goo. “Can’t-elope! Get it? Get it?” And dissolves. Sprays of sugar slop ensue. Clandestinely I jab him in the ribs. “Good comedians don’t laugh at their own jokes,” I say. “Rule One.” But I think I’ve jabbed him just a bit too hard, delicate little angel as he is, and he starts to squall just exactly with like laser-aimed precision in my ear. Our dauntless tour guide shoots a look at him, then the monster’s mom shoots the same look back at him, and what can I say? He wilts, the pecking order sets back in, he glares at me instead. That’s fine by me. Like I said, he’s cute. Ah. Almost forgot to date this. Again. Never was a girl to keep a diary; I guess that habit stuck with all the rest. Let’s see—May 1. (I’m pretty sure.) May Day. Mayday. M’aidez. Indeed.

*** May 2.

They say the revolution was started by a wedding cake. I wasn’t there to witness it myself, I’m sorry to admit, but when I say I’ve seen all the most famous photos of this instrument of insurrection, the ones that made the rounds of every major newspaper worldwide, you know the ones I mean, and from them, you know enough to make an educated guess that what they say about the revolution is all true, or at least mostly. Right? The panning shots of gathered crowd in party dress, some of them flinching from the flashbulbs but still bent on getting an eyeful of the Event of the Year? The dictator’s child bride led up the steps made out of kneeling peasants’ backs the whole way to the grandstand, trailing orange blossoms on their downcast heads, lisping apologies in the direction of her satined feet, flanked by retainers who look to be treading somewhat heavier than they must? The child bride readying the cake knife like a headman’s axe, while the dictator stands behind her, laboring to look uncleish, his brow beaded with sweat, his knuckles white from gripping at her bony shoulders? Or my favorite: the one that made all the front pages, the covers of the glossy magazines? The one that has the child bride subtracting the first dainty slice from that monstrous cake the height of her, and the swarm of what in the blurred photo looked like a rain of bullets flying out? I hear that even the most dedicated journalists forgot to take their pictures after that. So: You only heard from word of mouth, at first, that what blasted out of that wedding cake were actually bees, hundreds of bees, and that while the audience looked on in I couldn’t say what, all those bees lit on the dictator and stung him to a rather nasty death. You only heard in whispers that the child bride had dabbed some kind of pheromone or something into the brim of the dictator’s hat, the knot of the dictator’s tie, the cuffs of the dictator’s silk shirt, something that made those bees go crazy enough to leave the child bride and wedding guests and even that huge cake alone, and go straight for him instead. You only heard from the horrified retainers, if you were near enough to make out what they sobbed into their sleeves, that the dictator was—had been—violently allergic to bee stings. He’d dropped stone dead of anaphylaxis on the banquet table, and the child bride placed her orange-blossom garland on his brilliantined hair, and the bees gathered up into a thunderhead and flew away northeasterly, and some few retainers went off weeping toward the train tracks, while the new information flew from mouth to mouth, down the staircase made of peasants and then on throughout the crowd, arriving at each port of call a little worse for wear. The dictator’s allergic to bees. The dictator prefers it to peas. The dictator’s unnerved by this breeze. The dictator’s son served us this cheese. And you only heard in the official minutes of the deconstruction of the cake (once these had been declassified, only after of years of bribes and threats and lobbying) that the item in question had been baked so light and airy that it was fuller of big holes and tunnels than an underwater cave; that afterwards, the entrances and exits to these holes had been plugged up carefully with gobs of pastel-tinted buttercream icing; and that before the last hole was barricaded off, the baker of that cake must have put the bees inside. It had been, of course, a fresh cake, baked that very morning—only a baker with a death wish would send a day-old cake to the dictator’s wedding—so while their period of internment would not have put the bees in any mortal danger, it was still plenty of time for them to get good and aggravated. All they had to do was nibble at the tunnel walls and seethe. And wait. In short, it was a clear case of assassination. Despite the month-long manhunt, they never did catch that baker, and the last speculated witnesses to the child bride’s existence swore on their grandmothers’ graves they saw a little girl peeling off an outsized bridal gown as she skipped away into the wet plush of the jungle. It was my mother, who was there, in thought if not in flesh, who told me this.

***

May 3.

So when I woke up today there was this lady in the seat beside me, this grimy wanderer type, with a draggled braid of who-knows-what-color hair and this pair of jeans that’s got dirt layered on it like the geologic strata you see in sheared-off cliffsides. Straight back to the late Mesozoic, this muck of hers, as far as my guess goes. She had fiddler’s fingers and gravedigger’s nails, and an ugly scar that went from her hairline to her jawline, the kind unlucky pirates get from cutlasses in films. All she needed to complete the fashion statement was a machete in her belt, maybe sap-stained, maybe blood-stained, maybe both. And there was something not quite right about her shoes. I thought, at least the kid is gone. That’s good. And if I closed one eye and peeked up along the gap next to the seats, I could just spot our dauntless tour guide, sleeping with his face smushed up against the window, his thumb stuck in his mouth like he was five. Oh, if I’d just had a camera. Blackmail photos, you’ve no idea how far they can get you. We were out of the scrubland now, back onto some major artery, all of us slowly roasting in the midday sun, and through the haze out my window I could see a cloud that looked exactly like one of those dolphins from medieval maps. You know, the ones with catfish feelers and a cocker spaniel’s head, bigger than the ships they breach beside? It crouched over this dead factory town, looking menacing, probably not realizing that there hadn’t been anyone there for fifty years or more. Ghosts don’t scare easy as that, in any case, as far as I can tell. But I noticed all this later. The first thing that caught my eye was the thing in the lap of the lady beside me. The thing that was all bundled in a burlap sack, and squirmed, and gave off a distinct citrus smell that cut through all the bus smells, the sweat and feet and smoke and farts and snacks and cheap and not-so-cheap perfume. Whatever this thing was, our wanderer was gripping at that bag so tight I don’t think she could’ve uncurled her fingers if I had a shotgun trained between her eyes and told her to. I was occupied with formulating a polite enquiry when she turned to me and gave me this huge smile of bad teeth. Worse than mine. And I’ve been out here for a while. “Tangerines,” she said. I readied my I-beg-your-pardon blink-blink and said, “What?” She looked meaningfully at the burlap sack, then back at me. Now that I got a good look at her, I could see she had been pretty once, just worn down to a stub from journeying: her face was alligatored as a fresco, and slightly out of focus, like a long-exposure photo that drags phantoms out of people, wisped and blurred. The bag was all bump and jostle on her lap. She whacked it with a practiced fist. It calmed. “Tangerines,” I parroted, my face a mask. I know to be chary of the mad. All politesse, I pointed toward her filthy denim knees. “In there?” She nodded. “What do you know,” she said all of a sudden, “about iron shoes?” Iron shoes? As in, east of the sun, west of the moon? As in, seven pairs rusted to nothing while you seek what maybe can’t be found at all? I said: “What, like in the story?” “Yeah,” she said. “Well, almost. There’s something in that story they left out.” She left the pause there, hanging, like the gobs of slime that collect in old tunnels, just waiting for some sucker to come stroll by underneath. I strolled. “I’m all ears,” I said. “You learn nothing just from wandering,” she said, without so much as a token pause for breath. From all indications, this was a harangue she’d settled into many times before, and poor me headed straight into its eye. “I’ve tried,” she continued, “and I can tell you, you go tramping the green earth in iron shoes and all you get is tetanus. You have to aim yourself, like archers aim their arrows, or you’ve missed the whole damn point.” Another pause, while she waited for me to say, “What’s the point then?” So I did. “The point,”—and she punched the bag again for emphasis—”is that often you must earn your answers. You must prepare yourself to find them, to be found by them. You must become virtuous. Until then, you’re not ready.” So she was one of those. I decided to feign sleep. But she went on: “I was never all that good at virtue, so I borrowed the old list. Seven virtues, seven pairs of iron shoes. You with me so far?” While I tried to count off virtues on my fingers, she adjusted the bag, hauled her right foot up onto her left knee, and sure enough, her shoe was solid iron, slightly oxidized in places but still sound. I knocked it with my knuckles to be sure. It felt like tapping on a battleship. On the sole she pointed to a faded word etched in: Charity. “This is number four,” she declared. “You see, it’s not enough that you get through all seven. It’s not some shopping list you can cross things off of one by one— bread, eggs, butter—till you can go home. You have to become them, the virtues that is, the way a hunter must become his quarry, in his mind, to understand what it’ll do, where it might be run to ground. These tangerines are my invention. Every seed in every fruit contains a sensor that can detect certain qualities of the expired breath that result from malnutrition, then filter out the source from the surrounding air, and not only lock on to the person who produces it, but once the fruit ripens to maturity, home in on that individual’s location. It’s the same technology that gives us guided missiles, but put to useful ends. And it isn’t only tangerines, of course. I’ve got plans for apples, nectarines, peaches, plums, oranges, lemons, limes, melons, certain pears, any fruit that’s either spherical or ovoid in shape. You know, so it can roll. This batch here,” she indicated the wiggling bag, “are being detained from going where they should. They’re locked on, each to its respective homing beacon, and none of them will deviate from that beacon, and none of them will stop knocking my frickin’ thighs black and blue until I let them go. Which I’ll do, of course, right after I give my presentation. I’m applying for a grant to further research and production. Imagine this thing going global. I can’t imagine it myself. It’s too big for me to see. If not an end to hunger, then at least a dent in its damn juggernaut.” Even I’d been rendered speechless. “Oh,” I said. There was a piece of silence, while the tangerines did pirouettes, or whatever it is they were doing in there. It may as well have been a sack full of puppies, the way it was carrying on. “You never did tell me what you were looking for,” I pointed out. “Iron shoes and all.” “Ah,” she said, and winked. She suddenly looked very, very old. “That’s telling.” But after she’d gazed down at my sneakers for a minute, she added: “I’ll give you this advice, though, because I can see you’re also seeking something, just like me. If you ever find you’re ready to commit to iron shoes, look out for the jagged patches when they start to rust, take plenty of potassium for cramps, and whatever you do, stay the hell out of the bayou. It’s true that iron’s great protection against all kinds of feys and sprites and whatnot, but you need a silver knife to stick a loup-garou, and they don’t wait around twiddling their thumbs while you try to poke them with your earring posts. Okay?” While she said this, she traced a finger down the whole length of that awful scar, eyeing me sidewise, one eyebrow raised. I got the picture. “Okay,” I said. After that I must have dozed off, cause the next thing I knew she was gone, I’ve no idea where. It’s not like this bus is doing much by way of stopping. All I know is sometime in the afternoon I woke myself up saying, My mother was an activist. She would’ve been a big fan of your invention, but I wasn’t talking to a damn thing save an empty seat, a few crumbs of mud, and an orangepeely smell so faint I almost didn’t notice it before it dissipated into nothing.

***

May 4.

Things I remember about my mother.

1. Coffee breath and bloodshot eyes when she’d kiss me goodnight at 4 a.m. 2. A big blue pickup truck, covered with bumper stickers, blaring loud angry music out the windows. 3. Her signature, like a handful of fishhooks. 4. Her combing out my tangly hair and singing. 5. The smell of her, like fresh-turned earth and wild greenery. (When I was nine, I found the jar she kept this smell in, and I almost cried.) 6. Her stories. Including, but not limited to:

1. The one where she took tear gas in Seattle. She’d tell this like a war story, but she never seemed to remember it that well. She wasin a crowd, that crowd got gassed, they broke and ran and some got trampled and some stood their ground with masks and were arrested. I don’t know which she did. I do know she posed no threat of violence. All she’d left with was her sign. I know because I saw her leave. 2. The one where the riot cops in Chicago cracked two of her ribs but broke the skull of the girl standing next to her, so that my mother had to drag her away by her jacket in a near coma to the medics, limping and holding her breath from the pain, just because some idiot way on the other side of the otherwise peaceful demonstration had decided it would be a good idea to start smashing high- end storefront vitrines with a baseball bat. 3. The one where her zine was accused of sedition. She’d tell this one laughing. 4. The one where she and two dozen other volunteers were building schools on a hilltop on the tasseled edge of the jungle not quite thirty miles from the dictator’s wedding to the child bride, so that when they put down their hammers at midday to eat their tortillas, they could sit in the shade of the walls they’d just put up and watch the fireworks bursting like late dandelions out over the trees. She wished on every one of them, the same wish every time, she told me, but never told me what it was. And then the fireworks stopped abruptly, there was a stillness of some minutes, and then a tiny clot of blackish cloud rose up from the valley, just where the fireworks had launched from, and drifted off, against the wind, in a northeasterly direction. From her vantage point, some while later, still sneaking glances at the place where the fireworks had stopped coming up and the strange cloud had long since disappeared, my mother saw, or thought she saw, moving quickly along the ground in the far distance, a speck of white that turned into a speck of brown that threw a speck of white away before the jungle gulped it whole. 5. The one where she became a mom. Where the leathery old lady in bright skirts sidled up to her, pushed a basket into her arms, and hauled my mother down to her height by a handful of her hair. “Please take her,” the woman whispered in her ear. “Take who?” my mother said, still too startled to be annoyed at being accosted in this manner. “In there,” the woman said, and she pulled away a little so my mother could see that her eyes were big as plates with fear, and darted back and forth to pick the shadows clean. (This while the revolution guttered to slow ash off in the middle distance, and all the foreigners were homeward bound. You either left peacefully or were shown the door not so peacefully, and anyone accused of giving shelter or support to “meddling interlopers” was not exactly granted the benefit of the doubt. This old lady’d be a fool not to exercise some caution, seen in public in broad daylight with a blonde American and all, and one who looked so likely to make trouble as my mother likely did.) “It’s the Raccoon’s daughter,” the woman hissed into my mother’s hair, and at that my mother gasped like someone’d set a match to her and almost dropped the basket on the streetstones, which would have been a spectacle for the onlookers and a squishy end of me. But she didn’t, and it wasn’t, as you’ll, I trust, have noticed by this point.

***

May 5.

Our dauntless tour guide doesn’t seem to be getting paid for much apart from sulking and warming his seat and being pretty. I mean, I know the tour guide thing’s a front, but he could at least try to seem convincing. I bet he doesn’t even know where we are. He looks like a hen on a slightly spiky egg. When he’s not asleep, that is, or staring at the seat in front of him like he’s scrying tea leaves for the manner of his death. Not much help to us in any case if we get stopped. He shouldn’t need to ask the tea leaves then. Well, when you want something done right. . . right? I slip in next to him. “Salutations,” I say. He looks at me sidewise, like you’d look at a basilisk that’s blind in one eye and you aren’t quite sure which. “Hello?” he says. I take a deep breath, and then I open fire. “Look,” I tell him. “Maybe they didn’t tell you this when they hired you, but you’ve got a fair number of people’s lives in your hands here. If the army or the paramilitaries decide to stop this bus, they don’t really need a reason to, it’s up to you and the driver to make them believe this is not just some bunch of people trying to trespass in a prohibited area, you and the driver but mostly you. They set up gunners at roadblocks, you know, in some spots, and in some spots they just mine the roads at checkpoints, then tell some people the right way through, some people not. Tourists they let in. Since the revolution, it’s only tourists they let in. You know, to buoy up their faltering industry. To prove a point, though, too. We can quash our peasants’ tantrums any day. Can you? I don’t know how much was spelled out for you when you took this job. Do you know all this already? For instance, do you know what will happen to us if you can’t convince them? Or should I draw a little picture? You think the paramilitaries’ll direct us to the nearest embassy?” He’s silent for some time. Okay, maybe I was a little harsh, a little longwinded, I think I got the tendency for ranting from my mother—but this could escalate into a serious problem if it’s not handled like right now. Maybe I should’ve just stuck with my initial plan, the one where I knock him out, strip him, take his uniform, hide my hair under his hat, lock him in the toilet, and guide this endless tour of ours myself. I’ve got some vague idea where we are, and I’d make up the rest. Somewhere in my head I’ve got this whole piece of countryside mapped out in my mother’s stories, with little mental pushpins, little flags, little doodles in the margins. To your right you’ll see the schoolyard where the army once hanged fifty captive revolutionaries, strung them up on a swing-set one by one, with neither the mercies of a long drop nor a hood, in front of the assembled villages, which to their dismay did not quite crush the spirits of the people. To your left you’ll find the gap between the trees through which the child bride allegedly disappeared, through which the Raccoon, the hero of the revolution, allegedly appeared. Just ahead you’ll notice the arroyo the revolutionaries held for a week against no less than three encroaching regiments of the paramilitary, armed with nothing but an antique cannon, which fired ordnance shaped like wedding cakes to mock at the official statewide mourning, during which all cakes of any kind were banned except when they were thrown in bonfires on the plaza by crowds in funereal attire that tore their hair and clawed their eyes in somewhat exaggerated grief. We’re about to go over the train tracks on which the dictator’s retainers took their lives the afternoon of his assassination, and which to this day are still considered a choice location for the suicides of patriots. That yellow on the horizon is the cornfield where the Raccoon fell, owing to a miscommunication concerning an aborted ambush; in his scarecrow disguise they bore him away, riddled and dripping, nobody knows quite where. The jungle keeps his secrets. See? I might not have what it takes to keep the rifles off us, but damned if I’d not try. Finally our dauntless tour guide looks at me, and his eyes are all pink and wet like a puppy’s nose. For a second I see puppy noses where his eyes should be, and then I shake my head and they turn back to eyes. Ah, I must be serious. This is serious business, what I’m mired to the ears in here. Think of the gunners in the chaparral. Think of the villages buried breathing in the mudslide last July. Think of the mass graves of revolutionaries, dug with children’s hands, laid with roadside weeds and pebbles spelling words like Freedom, Defiance, Avenged. Think of my mother, scattered into azure whirligigs and blown away. “I’m so sorry,” whispers our dauntless tour guide, soft enough that no one but me hears. I don’t press him. Let the boy preserve some rag-end scrap of dignity, says I. Nobody’s after a confession. “I was diagnosed with narcolepsy when I was ten,” he says. “I fell asleep during the job description. I guess nobody noticed. Then I woke up when the man was saying, Do you want to work for us, and I needed the job, any job, so I said Yes. When they gave me the uniform I put it on. When they told me to get on the bus, I got on the bus. I remember looking into buses on the streets when I was little, seeing people in outfits like this one, standing up and talking, pointing out the windows at something, and all the passengers looking where the finger pointed, like there were strings tied tight between the finger and their eyes so they just had to, but I never knew what the finger pointed at, or why. I’m just trying to stay awake. Sometimes it works. I concentrate really hard on the pattern on the seat in front of me. The little dots. I connect them and make pictures in my mind, like the pictures people pull out of the stars. Then I make up stories, saying what the pictures mean, might mean.” Suddenly he stops talking and blushes, giving me that look again, like he’s just realized he’s spilled his guts and his secret to that half-blind basilisk who was probably just politely waiting for an opening. You can’t blindside a basilisk, even if their blind side’s pretty big. “I hope they don’t stop us,” our dauntless tour guide whispers. “But if they do I’ve got a gun. They gave it to me with the uniform. If we have to fight them you’ll help me, won’t you? If it comes to that?” “It won’t come to that,” I tell him. “And fighting them that way can only come to nothing.” “But—” I try to say this gently, but it’s hard: “Listen. They look at us and don’t see anything but trespassers, nothing but a threat to the state of balance they’ve worked twenty years to hammer out in this little corner of the world. We’ve all of us already been warned, and each for our own reason we came anyway. Maybe we want to try and help. Maybe we’ve lost somebody to the fighting. Maybe there’s something we’re looking for down there. In any case, if they catch us, they don’t need to be diplomatic. They’ll just pitch us down some gully, or else in the river. They may or may not waste the bullets first.” I’m tempted to add I’ve seen it done, but I resist. He’s just a scared kid, really, already sleeving at his nose. Still, I can feel his mind hefting the pistol, wondering if it might talk sweet enough to haggle for his life, for other lives. He’s hefting his heart too, for nerve. “You need to know what happened here,” I tell him. “What to point at, what to make us see. What to show them that you’re showing us. And why.” “Okay,” he says. “If I fall asleep, just slap me. Gently. But tell me everything you know.” Everything?

***

May 9.

I dreamed of my mother again last night. I was there again, twelve again, standing there beside her in the market. I hugged her and she went to flowers in my arms. They stained my dress blue and I cried a little. Then I started walking. ***

May 10.

Believe it: 1. From the backwaters of the inbetween, the Raccoon speaks to all who’ll listen:Why is it that people love being beaten in the face with their own history? As if they could thereby cleanly and vicariously atone for all their fathers’ and their fathers’ fathers’ sins, all the killers’ killed, all the deaths of all the dead; as if they could eat the evils of the world like wormy peaches, growing wise in suffering, serene in anguish, exquisitely careworn. But to storytell’s to conjure hindsight’s skinflint phantoms, scarecrows stuffed with words like so much straw: when’s ended, all the gathered bones stay speechless, and the dead are no less dead. We’re yesterday’s spectators and tomorrow’s runaways: in either one direction or the other, once removed. Anachronistic, either way. Either way, displaced. 2. That those who listen do so for they must.

*** May 11.

“And so my poor shining-eyed mother was doomed straight from the start,” I tell our dauntless tour guide. By now others have gathered, too, hanging on the seat backs, leaning out into the aisle, listening. Me on my soapbox, how amused she’d've been. “Or so I’m given to imagine.” “So she joined the rebels?” someone behind me asks. I smile. “She was an idealist,” I say. “What else could she do?” “You say was when you refer to her,” says somebody else. “Not is.” As he says this, I see her in my mind, that long streamer of petals bannering out above the market and the mud roads toward the dark wet prospect of the trees. The child bride disappeared in there, as did the Raccoon, when his people carried him away out of the corn. How do I know she isn’t in there with them now, swapping stories, dancing, having a good belly laugh at her twice- abandoned foundling daughter who still does double- takes at flowers if they’re blue? I don’t. I never have. At this rate I never will. I say: “Out the window to your left you’ll see. . .” ***

May 11, later.

Ah, hindsight. There’s so much else I should’ve said. But now they’re all sleeping, so I can’t. And who knows where we’ll be tomorrow? Here’s what I should have said: The day the Raccoon’s army came out of the jungle, my mother followed them back in. They were trained to walk the jungle silently, and she must’ve sounded more like a marching detachment of two hundred than they did, but they waited till they were well in beneath the trees before the rearguard turned on her and stuck their semiautomatics in her face. She was wide-eyed and sunburned and jeans-clad and blonde, so they took her for a tourist, and lowered their guns to laugh at her, miming clicking cameras at the overgrowth. They were not aware my mother was a black belt. Nor were they familiar with her temper. When she had finally been restrained (they wouldn’t risk an international incident by harming her if they could help it) they trussed her up, blindfolded her, dragged her forward through the ranks, and dumped her at the booted feet of the Raccoon himself, who removed her blindfold personally and peered down his nose into her eyes with something like amusement. “I want to join you,” my mother said, marshaling what dignity her circumstance allowed. The Raccoon watched her closely. He was gauging what little of her spirit could be guessed at in the bearing of her head, the set of her jaw, the bright fixed comets of her eyes. What he saw was like the tip of a deep-rooted iceberg, and he knew it. “This isn’t how these things are usually done,” he said, and shrugged, and helped her to her feet. “But it might be how these things are done today.” I also should have said: It always struck me, when my mother told these stories, what a stupid name ‘the Raccoon’ was for the leader of a revolution. I told her as much, so she explained. Raccoons are smart as hell, she said. And cunning. Thievish too. So she told me a story about the Raccoon’s thievery. We needed boots, she said. Our army needed boots. So someone got wind that the state military had a new shipment of boots coming in, I’m talking like five hundred pairs of boots here, and the Raccoon got it in his head that these boots would be ours. I was part of the group that went to steal them. There were eight or so of us. So we got to where this new shipment was being kept, I guess just prior to its distribution, and to be sure we were stealing the right thing (I hear once they didn’t check and ended up with fifteen dozen fox-fur anoraks. What a military presence needs with anoraks in jungle country I can’t guess. But anyway) we peeked into the crates. And these were combat boots, all right, but bright red combat boots. Who in their right mind would order bright red combat boots? we asked ourselves. When what a sane person might want is black, or maybe camouflage? Anyway, desperate times, you know, so sure, we took them. We could say the color represented the spilt blood of the innocent, which must at all costs be avenged, etc, etc. What we didn’t know was that the whole thing was a trap. Well, the Raccoon took one look at what we’d brought him and immediately thought it was a fishy sort of windfall, so he took a knife to the sole of one red boot and pried it off. And inside he found a computer chip the size of your fingernail, stamped Made in Japan. He took six more boots apart and found the same thing every time. A very fishy sort of windfall, eh? Unfortunately, by this time we’d already sent out a full detachment, thirty strong, men and women both, out into the villages, every one of them wearing these boots, and we had no way to call them back. And the next thing we knew they were dead, all thirty, all but one. We only found out later that those computer chips were remote control devices, and five miles away there was some army official with a control box, you know, just like they have for those annoying little cars kids play with? And those red boots walked our people straight out of the village, up the high road, into the countryside, across fields littered with unexploded ordnance shaped like wedding cakes, around back of a defunct manor house, into the fallen courtyard, and up against a white brick wall, where a firing squad was waiting. We knew this because one young man took his machete to his ankles and dragged himself back by his elbows to report. He heard the gunshots and looked over his shoulder just in time to see a flock of twenty-nine pale birds lifting up into the dawn from the direction of the courtyard, and he knew. I also should have said: Even if the Raccoon fell that day out in the corn, even if he bled to death while they bore him away, he’ll never truly die, for he lives on in us all: in all the surviving revolutionaries, gone to earth but still defiant; in all the villagers they fought for, who will always have, if nothing else, their dignity; in every one of us who’s struggling for whatever reason, in whatever way, for a better world than those who came before have left behind. They can’t run him to ground, not so long as any of us are still out here, alive and kicking, here or anywhere at all. You’ll not hunt his ghost in cornfields but in vain. I didn’t say this cause it sounds so tacky. But it’s true.

***

May 19 (?).

I should have brought more than this notepad. I’m running out of space. The bus went headlong in a pit maybe a week ago. We didn’t even hit a roadblock. No gunners in the chaparral. No bloodshed over politics. No anything except a stupid accident, and those who could still move have long since scattered far on mud-sloshed spokes of road, and I and our dauntless tour guide and the rain have scratched out graves for such as were in need of them, and now I’m out here walking, somewhere, like I’m still in that dream, but maybe waking. Maybe not. This last is to my mother. I know you never questioned what that woman said, when she handed you that basket with the baby inside, told you that I was the Raccoon’s daughter, and begged you to take me home with you, like I was some kitten plucked from drowning, not a dead revolutionary’s orphan. I know that when you went home you bought five years’ worth of back issues of all the big news magazines and spent months scrapbooking the revolution. I remember you pulling out the albums every time you sat me down to tell me stories, pointing at the photos: the child bride slicing the dictator’s cake, the Raccoon’s army emerging from the wilderness, military helicopters banking hard over the trees, children toting rifles, children stitching wounds, children playing kickball under the gaze of paramilitary sentinels, foreigners hastily packing suitcases, statues dragged off pedestals, murals wrecked by fire, old women sending donkey-carts of bread into the jungle, gunners guarding coffee crops, irrigation ditches full of blood, coffins full of flowers, revolutionaries plowing land with rifles on their backs, village children sitting shoulder to shoulder in the classrooms nailed together in the blistering heat by volunteers like you. You had no family stories, no family photos, to bring me up on. Only these. You brought me up on these stories, these photos, because you wanted me to know my history. You wanted me to know where I come from. But I don’t. It’s been ten years and more and I still can’t get rid of the image of you shaken into pieces by a breeze that wasn’t there, two thousand miles from the jungle that was nonetheless reclaiming you right there before my eyes, that then left me behind like I was some throwback fish not even worth the keeping. What I want to know is why. How do you know that there aren’t a hundred other people called “the Raccoon” whose child it might have been, hidden underneath the garlic bulbs in that old woman’s basket? If it had been “the Raccoon’s” child there at all? I’ve run into one man who got that name because of the black eyes he won himself in brawls, and one who called himself that because he thought he was clever, but he was just a horse-eating crop thief who raided the fields of the poor. And at least a dozen who called themselves or called their sons in honor of the revolutionary whose daughter you’ve always told me that I was. How do you know that old woman wasn’t just trying to send her own child, her grandchild, any child, out of that war-torn edge of country, off to somewhere safe? I’ve seen this, even now, desperate mothers begging foreigners to take their babies away elsewhere, that they might be fed, clothed, and protected better than they could possibly be here. With one glance at you she’d've known that you were proud. You’d take the revolutionary’s daughter, in a second, for sheer politics, for solidarity. You did. Or thought you did. And when you looked at her you saw the revolution’s emblem, its relic, and its eulogy. A thing to be the keeper of, like soldiers keep their guns long after the wars they shot them in are gone. Like a standard- bearer hoarding some dead battle’s flag, just because it still retains his sweat and fingerprints and fear. Well, I’m going to keep heading with this notepad as far toward the jungle as I can. To anyone who finds it, if I fail before I get inside: please take it further, if you’re willing; if you’re able, take it in. My mother is in there somewhere. If you see her, put this directly in her hands. You’ll know her from her blonde hair and the fires in her eyes. She may or she may not wish to receive this. Give it to her anyway. But if you should find the Raccoon first, if he’s alive in there to find, give it to him instead. I don’t know how you’ll know him, but my guess is that you will. He may or he may not have been my father, but I’m his revolution’s daughter, and there’s a chance he’ll want to know that I’m still out here, somewhere, walking.

Nicole Kornher-Stace was born in Philadelphia in 1983, moved from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again by the time she was five, and currently lives in New Paltz, NY, with one husband, two ferrets, the cutest toddler in the universe, and many many books. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several magazines and anthologies, including Clockwork Phoenix 3, Best American Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, GUD, Goblin Fruit, Lone Star Stories, and Farrago’s Wainscot, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of one novel, Desideria, and her featured poems from the Summer 2009 issue of Goblin Fruit are collected in the beautifully-illustrated chapbook Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties. For further miscellany, check out her blog at wirewalking.livejournal.com. The Chrysanthemum Bride Angela Slatter

He who tries to express spiritthrough ornamental beauty

will make dead things.

—from an 11th century Chinese treatise on art.

***

“See how the skin glows?” “It’s like a pearl, master.” It is only his second day with Master Wei, and once again the boy congratulates himself on being apprenticed to this man. Li is certain his future is assured. “How did you make it so?” “Soon enough for you to learn that, Li.” The old man walks slowly around his pride and joy, nodding to himself and smiling a private smile. His hair is silver, long, no longer pulled back in a tail; he feels himself free of the constraints of appearance. “This is a work of art, Master Wei.” Li’s eyes slide over the object in question, covetous, amazed, a little afraid. “Yes. Yes, she is very fine.”

***

Mei-Ju studies herself in a bronze mirror. The handle, once carved and intricate, has been worn smooth. It once belonged to her grandmother, concubine to a local warlord. When the warlord died, his wife cast Grandmother out with only the clothes on her back, the child in her belly, the engraved metal combs in her hair, the mirror, and the jewelry she had sewn into her hems as soon as the warlord began to sicken. Mei-Ju has inherited her things. Sometimes, when she regards herself in the highly- polished bronze, she sees a face not quite her own. It is older, more beautiful still; she thinks perhaps the mirror shows who she will become. She does not stop to think that perhaps it holds spirits within. After these occasional visitations, she seems different, subtly changed, lovelier than before. Her family is very poor but Mei-Ju is very beautiful and very ambitious. She is sleek but a little plump; any spare food goes to her, to keep her beauty intact, for her family believe this is how she will save them. If she is lovely enough, a rich man will take her as wife or concubine, then, they pray, prosperity will flow to them, that emptiness will become fullness. This is their fervent hope in all the years of lack, all the years when the groans of their stomachs compete for attention, trying to out-do each other: My hunger is greater! No, mine! Oh, be silent. Mei-Ju thinks only of leaving the hovel, not of what her elevation will mean to her family. She believes that when she at last leaves, she will not look back. Her skin is flawless, a pale yellow, like gold washed to take the harsh shine out of it. Her eyes are black stones surrounded by long lashes. She brushes her hair, which is ebony, a black waterfall, and almost long enough to sit on. Usually, she makes her sister, Chen-Ju, hold the mirror for her, but Chen-Ju is out in the field and their father would not consent to having her play maid to her beautiful sister, not today when they need the harvest so badly. Mei-Ju is spared physical labour—not least because her feet were broken and bound when she was very small; even then they could see how wondrous she would become, how her face would change their lives. Her feet had to be made to match. The concubine grandmother was the one to wield the large rock, to break the bones as her own had been and to bind the soft, crushed things tightly. Mei-Ju’s shoes are tiny and plain, but she dreams of one day wearing something precious, something silken and soft on her misshapen limbs. She cannot run, and walking is painful and slow (one reason why she likes to have her sister on hand), but she knows her golden lotus feet will help her totter to a place she longs to be.

***

“The robes are very rich, master,” observes the apprentice. The golden dragons running up and down the fabric glare fiercely at him. Part of him regrets what some may well see as waste. “Of course, Li. This is for the Crown Prince. It can be nothing less than the best. The Empress would not have it otherwise.” “Her son was away for a long time,” the boy hazards, aware the knowledge he gains here will help him navigate the treacherous paths of the Imperial Court. He is from a poor family, but Li is intelligent and ambitious. “True. For five years the Empress could not do anything, but when her time came, when she finally drove out the usurper, she brought her son and heir back home.” Wei nods sagely, adjusts a sleeve. “Bring me the headdress, Li.”

***

Chen-Ju hates her sister. Her own face is flat and plain; they don’t look alike at all. Some days—all days, really—Chen-Ju would like to rake something sharp down Mei-Ju’s face. Not her nails—she has none, for they crack and split and tear to the quick from her arduous hours of manual labour. Something else, then: one of the engraved combs Mei-Ju uses in her hair, perhaps. The combs that belonged to the concubine grandmother. Yes, they would do the damage nicely. Chen-Ju used them once, wound her own hair up and twisted it thus and thus. She made her eyes lose focus and her face seemed softer, almost pretty. She reached for a hope of beauty, her soul stretched out its fingers, almost had a grip on something she had never known; then Mei- Ju wandered in. She wasn’t angry—she laughed. She laughed so hard she fell over, tickled beyond words at the idea that her flat-faced sister might try to adorn herself, might try to find something lovely in her rough visage. Clenching her fists, Chen-Ju had fought the urge to hit, fought the urge to disfigure. She, too, believed that the cost of a future would be paid in the currency of Mei-Ju’s face. It didn’t mean she hated her sister less, but it stayed her hand. She swings the hoe over her head, the strong muscles of her shoulders and arms forged from years of work, clench. The tool comes down to split the sad earth with surprising force. She pictures Mei-Ju’s face in the brown of the soil. It is not simply the pain of always coming second to her sister, for she is not merely ‘second’—she is last. Her life is a race she can never win against Mei-Ju’s beauty. Chen-Ju will marry a farm labourer, another peasant. Her industrious nature and tenacity will snare a husband, a man who wishes his helpmeet to work by his side, a woman who will bear sturdy children. She will never escape hard work, her face will never elevate her beyond the mud of the field.

***

“The Crown Prince was hurt?” “Beaten, yes.” He fits the headdress carefully onto the perfectly formed head, secures it gently into the elaborate black coiffure. “Nothing I couldn’t fix.” “The Empress must have been grateful.” “Bring me those rings, the jade—and the bracelets. Yes, she has been my especial patron ever since.” He straightens, arches his back, sighing with relief as his vertebrae crack back into place. “When she gave me this latest commission, I considered myself most fortunate. Not that one—the one with the dragon swallowing its tail —bring that.”

***

“I hear your daughter is a great beauty, Wu Tsian.” Mei-Ju’s father nods, his heart barely daring to hope. The harvest has not been good; he never thought to feel so hungry. He tries not to let his desperation show as he looks at the old man whose silver hair floats around his face in a haze. “I am here to negotiate for her hand in marriage.” Wei’s eyes flit around the stark farm, recognising instantly, after a lifetime of judging people at a glance, that this man will be happy to sell his glorious daughter. The old man nods, a gesture Wu Tsian misses. This family will not starve again, the clan who asked for a bride will pay well. Whatever they give these peasants will be nothing compared to the bounty they will gain from a marriage with the Crown Prince, but to this small, ragged herd it will mean life. They discuss terms and Wu Tsian does not waver, does not hesitate when the old man lays out the conditions of Mei-Ju’s good fortune. When Wu Tsian consents, his heart aching at the thought of the price his daughter will bring, he invites the old man inside. Master Wei is gracious, he has been in worse places (was born in one), but not many. The girl comes when called, tottering, doll-like. His face breaks into a smile; he had not hoped for this. “Golden lotus feet! My friend, how wonderful.” “We knew she would be beautiful, that an important man would want her, so we made sure she would be entirely so.” Wu Tsian turns to Mei-Ju, who looks on expectantly. “Mei-Ju, our prayers are answered. This man has asked for your hand in marriage—to the Crown Prince.” Mei-Ju catches her breath; it is more than she could have hoped for. Her grandmother, the concubine, trained her how to behave. She simpers, is modest, but flicks her eyes up, floats glancing blows at the well-dressed man who has come to rescue her. He thinks, if he were younger, she would be a wonderful diversion; as it is he congratulates himself on his choice. The Empress and her son will be pleased, as will the family who are paying him to find a bride. The door opens and Chen-Ju and her mother enter. Wu Tsian is so excited he can barely express their good fortune. His wife weeps for joy and announces Mei-Ju must pack. Her daughter gives a haughty look—what is there for her to take from this place? She will dress in Grandmother’s one remaining outfit. “Everything she needs will be provided, wife of Wu Tsian,” Wei interrupts, thinking that families should not leave each other on bad terms. “Do not worry. All her needs will be met in the Palace.” Mei-Ju’s heart thrills at the word ‘palace’. Chen-Ju’s face darkens, twists. Her salivary glands over-produce and she wants to spit in her sister’s face. But it will not do, she will be gone soon. “We should leave now; it is a long way to Chang’an,” says the old man. Mei-Ju agrees. She disappears into the back room that acts as their only bedroom, gesturing for Chen-Ju to follow, to help her dress. Chen-Ju does so with bad grace, she is not gentle. She tugs at her sister’s old dress, so worn it rips in places. Mei-Ju ignores it, stands still as Chen-Ju removes the silken robe from the old chest. This Chen-Ju handles respectfully, grudgingly. It is one of the things (like her sister) she finds impossible to ruin, something always stops her, some kind of fear. Slowly, she unrolls the dress and slips it over Mei- Ju’s head, her fingers fumbling with the band-knots. Chen-Ju steps away, raising her eyes to the glorious glowing yellow of her sister’s form. The silk, embroidered with lotus flowers, matches the gold wash of her skin. She is a Chrysanthemum Bride, surely her fortune is assured. Chen-Ju averts her eyes; they hurt. Something lands on the floor at her feet. Mei-Ju’s mirror. Chen-Ju catches sight of her own face in its polished surface. She folds beside it and begins to weep.

***

“The family who bought her?” “Had no daughter, merely an over-abundance of sons. But they wanted ties with the Empress. They knew I had been asked to find a bride for her son.” “They paid much for a girl to pass off as their own niece from the provinces. Are you not afraid they will tell someone?” “Who would admit to claiming a peasant as family? Who would admit to sullying their lineage?” the old man chuckles. “They must be very ambitious.” “Very. Always keep some form of insurance, when you deal with the very ambitious, Li. Remember that.” “Yes, master. When they finally met, Mei-Ju and the Crown Prince—did she like her husband?” “Not really, no.”

***

Mei-Ju felt as though she had held her breath the whole way to Chang’an, and the trip from the outer provinces was very long. She rode in the cart alongside the old man, never questioning why she did not have a wedding procession. After a few days the yellow robe showed wear and she could smell the journey embedded into the thick weave. She would, she thought, burn it when she arrived, when she was showered with her bridal gifts, when she had better. Grandmother’s cast-offs were not worth keeping. Perhaps, though, she would send the old hair combs back to her sister. Her mind flitted briefly, dismissively, over the rumours that had reached them in their care-worn village, of the Crown Prince’s disappearance, of the stirrings it had caused. He had been in hiding, obviously; now he had returned and she was to be his bride. When they finally reached the Palace, the old man covered her face as they rattled through the main gates. She was taken into the Palace by secret ways. He left her with three serving women, who bathed her from head to foot, scouring her skin with brushes until she glowed, washing her hair, rubbing oils and perfumes into her skin until she felt intoxicated with the scent of herself. Her wedding robes were rich, royal red, heavily embroidered, long-sleeved, delicately made. Her hair was dressed, held in place with combs of jade and gold. They hung her about with jewelry that had adorned empresses for hundreds of years, and painted her face, until she looked like a doll. Her lotus feet were re-wrapped in clean swaddling, shod with new shoes finer than she had ever imagined. She feels weighted down by her finery but she does not care; it is a burden she embraces, a weight she craves. When the old man reappears she is ready, her excitement sitting in her throat like a ripe plum. He leads her to a large, richly appointed chamber. On a raised platform is a bed and on the bed lies a figure. She approaches slowly, her eyes downcast. “Meet your husband, Mei-Ju.” Master Wei’s voice floats up to her as she mounts the platform. The Crown Prince has a pale, waxy cast to his skin. He is a beautiful boy, not much older than she, and in full wedding robes, golden dragons rampant on the red cloth. His eyes are closed and his chest neither rises nor falls with the motion of breath. Now Mei-Ju realises that he lies not on a bed but on a bier. In spite of the embalmer’s excellent work, there is something about him that speaks of decay; he smells stale and dusty beneath the heavy perfume. Mei-Ju backs away, her tiny crushed feet aching, her heart swelling. She turns to the old man, who is now flanked by two large men. “Minghun,” she breathes, her eyes filling.

***

“He has been dead for five years?” “Yes, beaten to death by enemies of the Empress. I preserved him as well as I could during our time in exile, but the materials to hand were not the best. Still, it was all I could do.” The old man sighs, adjusts Mei-Ju’s jade combs. “When the Empress returned to power recently, this was the first task she gave me, to find him a bride for minghun. An afterlife marriage was all she desired for him—no parent wants their child to go into the darkness alone, unmarried.” His voice is soft, pained by the idea. “But Mei-Ju screamed. She screamed for a long time, and fought. In the end, though, she was too frail. We had to replace her robes, and fix her hair again, she was disheveled by her struggles.” “You covered the bruises well,” observes Li, eying the skin around Mei-Ju’s mouth. “Yes. She would not take the poison willingly, my men had to hold her mouth open, pour it in, stroke her throat like a cat to make her swallow it down.” He points to the places where bruises lurk under the thick makeup. “There is something in the poison that seems to restore the flesh after death; the marks were very much lessened after she had breathed her last. I don’t know why. Perhaps you will find out, when you take my place.” “Ah.” “Come. It’s time for her wedding. The families will arrive soon.” “Did her own family know?” Side by side they stand, surveying their work, the bride and groom in rich red, youth suspended, lying on their joint bier. “Oh yes; well, the father did. Perhaps he told his wife. The girl’s sacrifice has made their lives better. They will want for nothing. One life for the benefit of many.” The old man nods. “I think it was an easy choice. Come.”

***

Chen-Ju keeps the mirror for a month, until the day Mei-Ju’s face appears in it. Chen-Ju is transfixed by her sister’s wild hair, red-rimmed, weeping eyes, her mouth in a constant ‘o’ of despair. It is the day of Chen-Ju’s wedding to a local farmer— the family’s improved fortunes have hooked her a higher rank of husband. She has the mirror propped on a chest as she brushes her dull hair, pinches her pale cheeks for some colour, smoothes down her unadorned scarlet dress, when Mei-Ju fills the silvered surface like smoke. Chen-Ju watches for a while, then wraps the thing in a piece of old cloth. She sneaks out of her parents’ house, makes her way to a field and buries the mirror and her screaming sister as deeply as she can. Chen-Ju’s heart lifts; she does not bear the burden of beauty and for once she is grateful. Angela Slatter is a Brisbane, Australia, writer of speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again, Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales II, Twelfth Planet Press’ 2012, Dirk Flinthart’s Canterbury 2100, and in journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, On Spec, and Doorways Magazine. Her work has had Honorable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies #20 and #21; and two of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Fantasy Short Story category. She is a graduate of both Clarion South and Tin House, and blogs at angelaslatter.wordpress.com. Author Spotlight: Sarah Totton William Sullivan

One of the themes in “Choke Point” is “love is about sacrifice,” which is what Steve remembers Rachel once telling him. How do Steve and Rachel come to interpret this aspect of love so differently?

I’d say it’s because we’re dealing with two different kinds of relationships here: the sexual/romantic relationship between Steve and Rachel, which I think is inherently more demanding and selfish, and the platonic relationship between Steve and his dog, which isinherently unselfish.

The most significant love portrayed in the story is the love between a man and his dog. Your writing seems very informed by life with a dog. Have dogs played an important part in your life?

I was heavily influenced by reading Jack London’sThe Call of the Wild and R.D. Lawrence’s memoir,The North Runner, as an adolescent. In both cases, I think the men in these books considered the dogs their friends, rather than simply pets. I’ve never owned a dog myself, but I’m a vet and I spent 9 months living in India working with stray dogs there as part of a spay/neuter and rabies vaccination program. I interacted with over 1000 dogs in that time.

Your story sets up a strong contrast between life in the city and life outside it. How has rural life shaped Steve’s character and did his rural life play a role in his decisions at the end of the story?

Steve considers the country his home. However, I think that if he didn’t have a dog, leaving his home would have been a sacrifice he would have been willing to make for Rachel. As for how living in an isolated place has shaped Steve’s character—it’s probably made him far more tolerant of solitude and silence than the average city-dweller, and less tolerant of noise, clutter, pollution, etc.

Steve’s finding the snake and working with it show him to be observant of and skilled with nature. His slow and considered processing of the snake’s body shows him to be a patient man. Do you think contact with nature on a regular basis can help a person develop virtues like Steve’s?

I’m not sure I’d say that Natural History is a virtue- inducing field of study. I don’t think that any profession or hobby is. Natural History tends to attract people who love animals, but apart from that, I’d say naturalists are a pretty diverse bunch of people with a range of good and bad qualities, as you’d find in any group of people.

More of the world’s population than ever lives in cities today. What, if anything, do you think humanity is losing in that migration? What, if anything, do you think humanity is gaining?

Well, I think that question is outside my area of expertise. Except when I was doing field research as a Biologist (in Algonquin Park and eastern Ontario) I’ve always lived in cities. I *can* tell you that the first time I worked in Algonquin I really came to appreciate how dark it gets at night and how BIG the wilderness is. It never gets completely dark in the city, and you’re never completely alone there. You’re also a lot closer to emergency services. And less likely to get eaten alive by blackflies. Is there anything else you’d like to tell your readers about “Choke Point?”

It’s included in my short story collection,Animythical Tales, which is coming out in 2010. Author Spotlight: Claire Humphrey Jennifer Konieczny

First, could you tell us a little about your story, “The Tongue of Bees?”

I have a file of notes for future stories; I’ve been keeping it since I was a kid. This story was based on the very first such note: about twenty years ago, a friend of the family told me he’d eaten deadly nightshade, and I asked him what it was like, and wrote down the answer on a bit of envelope. I attended Viable Paradise last year, and one of the workshop assignments was a dark fantasy story with an American setting, and I realized it was finally time for the nightshade. Then I just had to figure out who ate it, and why.

In “The Tongue of Bees” Raymond finds inspiration in Baudelaire and Poe and wants to fly to the exclusion of study or riding. What books inspired you when you were Raymond’s age?

Unlike Raymond, I was encouraged to read whatever I wanted; as a young teen I was into Jack Kerouac, Jim Carroll, Susan Musgrave and William Burroughs. I had a sense they were teaching me things I was still too young to learn, things that would make more sense to me later. (I was right.)

Did you always want to write? When did you start?

I’ve always written. Before I could make words for myself, I would dictate stories to my mother. As a child I wrote fantasy; my first novel, finished when I was thirteen or fourteen, was a hilariously awful quest novel featuring characters who fainted all the time. Since then, I’ve experimented with different forms and genres, but I still seem to find excuses for my characters to lose consciousness more often than is statistically likely. I’m working on that.

Raymond lives in upstate New York with his mother and siblings. He feels that the soil of New York is dull but the air magical. What elements of New York inspired you to set “The Tongue of Bees” there? Are you yourself drawn to visit or write specific places or environments? A friend of my father’s lived near Ithaca; he was an artist and seemed to me to enjoy a sophisticated and hedonistic life, with excellent food and wine and a sprawling library. When we visited him, I was about Raymond’s age, and I remember feeling that sense I mentioned before, that I was just getting a glimpse of a life I was too young to fully understand. I haven’t visited that part of New York as an adult, so it still holds that particular emotional resonance. I like to use places where memorable things have happened to me. Other recent stories have been set in Chicago, a veterinary clinic in Toronto, and a house I rented in university (although the house is disguised as a duelling school). Sensory detail is important to me, so I tend to favour places I can easily revisit or remember clearly.

To follow up on that question, did you always envision the events of “The Tongue of Bees” in a late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century setting? Dr. Radcliff, the local physician, perceives Raymond and his mother as weak and recommends a strong masculine presence, but Raymond and Mummy are the ones who are receptive to witchcraft and who get to fly. The Ithaca-based bookseller introduces yet another type, a meld of the independent man, the occult-oriented enthusiast, and urban merchant. Which characters developed first in your creative process? Was it difficult to navigate turn of the century ideals of masculinity and femininity?

I tend to feel my way through stories without much advance planning, so Raymond was the first character I thought about. His unhappiness with the gender paradigm of his time is something that most of my protagonists have to deal with, one way or another, because I can’t escape it myself. I like to use other time periods as a way to interrogate the present; I don’t believe we’ve actually come as far as we’d like to think. The adults in Raymond’s life are all people who have had to compromise between their identities and their culture, and each of them takes revenge for this compromise by attempting to exercise power over Raymond. I don’t think this phenomenon is unique to the time period of the story, but the period was an easier choice for me because I’ve studied some of its gender discourse.

When Raymond is blocked from entering houses during his flight, he fears he will not be able to return home. Do you think his mother would also be unsettled by the inability to enter other homes?

On the contrary—she’d delight in watching her neighbours secretly from outside, and she wouldn’t even be very concerned by losing access to her family if it meant gaining freedom and a wider sphere. She craves power where Raymond wants understanding and connection.

Raymond and his mother seek special abilities to share between them. If possible, which ability would you like to have: speaking with bees, communing with plant life, flying, or something entirely different?

Bees, please! I have a fascination with bees and wasps... I’ve been stung a lot (seventy times or thereabouts) and I’d really like to be able to ask them to forbear, next time.

Ms. Humphrey, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and for your story “The Tongue of Bees.” Before we conclude, could you tell us what is next for you?

I’m working on a novel about a witch and a former Cossack. In shorter fiction, I’m writing a series about a woman who craves violence (the first one will be in Strange Horizons this winter) and another series about a crippled magician and his protégés. They’re all about people struggling with gender and power. I don’t know if I’ll ever be done exploring those things. Author Spotlight: Angela Slatter Molly Tanzer

What was your inspiration for “The Chrysanthemum Bride?

I read about two men in a remote part of China who had been murdering prostitutes and selling them as brides for afterlife marriage to families who’d lost unmarried sons. The idea was so weird and so grotesque and so strangely juxtaposed in modern society that it stuck in my bowerbird brain. I couldn’t get the story to shift onto the page, though, until a few months later when I was on a visit to Sydney and went to an art gallery and saw the quote that appears at the beginning of the story. I saw that and everything fell into place—I could see the main character and the setting and everything. I actually scribbled the story during a Billy Crystal performance at the Princess Theatre!

Where did you come across the quote for the beginning of the story?

Ah! Answered above. The exhibition was one of art from Imperial China, with beautiful silk paintings and porcelain pieces.

How interested are you in Chinese culture in general? Who are your favorite Chinese authors/authors who write about China?

It’s not my area. The story idea just appealed to me. I do like Chinese mythology, but then I like pretty much all mythology. I find the period when empresses managed to take the throne in China quite fascinating, because women like Empress Wu and the Dowager Cixi were so extraordinary. I don’t see myself writing in it too much more—it’s an incredibly complex cultural history and I don’t think a knowledge of the area as shallow as mine would do justice to the period! My friend Aliette de Bodard is probably the main person who works in this field whose work I read regularly. She’s very, very knowledgeable as well as an awesome writer.

Would you please talk a little bit more about the bronze mirror that shows up in “The Chrysanthemum Bride?” Is that something you invented or does it have a basis in Chinese mythology/culture? Mirrors are a motif in a lot of cultures—they used to be made of bronze in China, Ancient Greece, Egypt, etc, before people worked out how to make ones using mercury and glass. I have a story in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet called “The Girl with No Hands,” in which the Devil uses mirrors to look out onto the world. The mirror is such a symbol of female beauty and vanity, and I liked the idea that it was something inherited and maybe it carried some of its past with it. There’s also the idea that your reflection might be caught in a reflective surface and I thought it appropriate that a soul not at peace might end up trapped there. It’s also about what our reflections tell us about ourselves, what we want to see in the mirror and I guess it also harks back to the idea of the legend of Narcissus. When I write something like the mirror, I don’t necessarily know how I’ll use it later in the story, but when I got to the end I just knew how it should appear in the last scene.

Where did you do the research for the Chinese cultural practices in the story (foot-binding, undertaking, etc.)? Do you have any favorite non- fiction sources that might be fun reads for those interested in reading up on the subject? For what I regard as my “first level” research, I go to the internet. I read a lot there and take notes of things that interest me. Then I go to ‘second level’ research, which involves going to actual books to check facts—because let’s face it, fun as the internet is, it’s not necessarily a reliable academic source for knowledge. I did buy a book from the UK, Burkhardt’s Chinese Creeds and Customs. I admit straight up that I couldn’t work out Chinese naming rules, so the names are pure fantasy on my part— but I figure it’s a fantasy story, when you start writing, fact is your jumping-off point. Anything after that is free rein.

What’s next for you? Do you have any forthcoming projects?

I’m finishing a short story collection (Sourdough and Other Stories), I have a novel, Well of Souls, that I’ll spend 2010 doing a major rewrite on. And there’s another novel called Finbar’s Mother that’s sitting in the back of my head. And I need to finish my PhD. About the Editors

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and information about her popular online writing classes, see www.kittywumpus.net.

Sean Wallace is the founder, publisher, and managing editor of Prime Books. In his spare time he has edited or co-edited a number of projects, including two magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine and Fantasy Magazine, and a number of anthologies, including Best New Fantasy, Japanese Dreams, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, People of the Book, Robots: Recent A.I., and War & Space: Recent Combat. He lives in Germantown, MD, with his wife, Jennifer, and their twin daughters, Cordelia and Natalie.