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[bathtubfullofbullets]

Those Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973)

Ursula K. Le Guin

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no long. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but imdestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating lightsources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas— at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don't think many of them need to take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his bands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope... ." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

______

Originally published in Volume 3 of New Dimensions, this short story was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Short Fiction in 1974 and awarded the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974.

#ursula k le guin #ursula le guin #omelas #those who walk away from omelas #short story

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Birthmark (1843)

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over Nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

"Georgiana," said he, "has it never occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?"

"No, indeed," said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his manner, she blushed deeply. "To tell you the truth it has been so often called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so."

"Ah, upon another face perhaps it might," replied her husband; "but never on yours. No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection."

"Shocks you, my husband!" cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. "Then why did you take me from my mother's side? You cannot love what shocks you!"

To explain this conversation it must be mentioned that in the centre of Georgiana's left cheek there was a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as it were, with the texture and substance of her face. In the usual state of her complexion--a healthy though delicate bloom--the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied exceedingly, according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some fastidious persons--but they were exclusively of her own sex--affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty, and rendered her countenance even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw. After his marriage,--for he thought little or nothing of the matter before,--Aylmer discovered that this was the case with himself.

Had she been less beautiful,--if Envy's self could have found aught else to sneer at,--he might have felt his affection heightened by the prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart; but seeing her otherwise so perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.

At all the seasons which should have been their happiest, he invariably and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary, reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable trains of thought and modes of feeling that it became the central point of all. With the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife's face and recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.

Late one night when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray the stain on the poor wife's cheek, she herself, for the first time, voluntarily took up the subject.

"Do you remember, my dear Aylmer," said she, with a feeble attempt at a smile, "have you any recollection of a dream last night about this odious hand?"

"None! none whatever!" replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in a dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real depth of his emotion, "I might well dream of it; for before I fell asleep it had taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy."

"And you did dream of it?" continued Georgiana, hastily; for she dreaded lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say. "A terrible dream! I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to forget this one expression?--'It is in her heart now; we must have it out!' Reflect, my husband; for by all means I would have you recall that dream."

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana's heart; whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.

When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in his wife's presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace.

"Aylmer," resumed Georgiana, solemnly, "I know not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before I came into the world?"

"Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject," hastily interrupted Aylmer. "I am convinced of the perfect practicability of its removal."

"If there be the remotest possibility of it," continued Georgiana, "let the attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,--life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep science. All the world bears witness of it. You have achieved great wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little mark, which I cover with the tips of two small fingers? Is this beyond your power, for the sake of your own peace, and to save your poor wife from madness?"

"Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife," cried Aylmer, rapturously, "doubt not my power. I have already given this matter the deepest thought--thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a being less perfect than yourself. Georgiana, you have led me deeper than ever into the heart of science. I feel myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will be."

"It is resolved, then," said Georgiana, faintly smiling. "And, Aylmer, spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my heart at last."

Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek--her right cheek--not that which bore the impress of the crimson hand.

The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan that he had formed whereby he might have opportunity for the intense thought and constant watchfulness which the proposed operation would require; while Georgiana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect repose essential to its success. They were to seclude themselves in the extensive apartments occupied by Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toilsome youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of Nature that had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in this laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the profoundest mines; he had satisfied himself of the causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano; and had explained the mystery of fountains, and how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure, and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth. Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling recognition of the truth--against which all seekers sooner or later stumble--that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten investigations; not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them; but because they involved much physiological truth and lay in the path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.

As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory, Georgiana was cold and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with intent to reassure her, but was so startled with the intense glow of the birthmark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could not restrain a strong convulsive shudder. His wife fainted.

"Aminadab! Aminadab!" shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer's underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he executed all the details of his master's experiments. With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man's physical nature; while Aylmer's slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

"Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab," said Aylmer, "and burn a pastil."

"Yes, master," answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form of Georgiana; and then he muttered to himself, "If she were my wife, I'd never part with that birthmark."

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds. And Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his chemical processes, had supplied its place with perfumed lamps, emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a soft, impurpled radiance. He now knelt by his wife's side, watching her earnestly, but without alarm; for he was confident in his science, and felt that he could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.

"Where am I? Ah, I remember," said Georgiana, faintly; and she placed her hand over her cheek to hide the terrible mark from her husband's eyes.

"Fear not, dearest!" exclaimed he. "Do not shrink from me! Believe me, Georgiana, I even rejoice in this single imperfection, since it will be such a rapture to remove it."

"Oh, spare me!" sadly replied his wife. "Pray do not look at it again. I never can forget that convulsive shudder."

In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen. The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, yet indescribable difference which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the original. When wearied of this, Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a vessel containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest at first; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant shooting upward from the soil. Then came the slender stalk; the leaves gradually unfolded themselves; and amid them was a perfect and lovely flower.

"It is magical!" cried Georgiana. "I dare not touch it."

"Nay, pluck it," answered Aylmer,--"pluck it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself."

But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of fire.

"There was too powerful a stimulus," said Aylmer, thoughtfully.

To make up for this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her portrait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal. Georgiana assented; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted to find the features of the portrait blurred and indefinable; while the minute figure of a hand appeared where the cheek should have been. Aylmer snatched the metallic plate and threw it into a jar of corrosive acid.

Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures. In the intervals of study and chemical experiment he came to her flushed and exhausted, but seemed invigorated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language of the resources of his art. He gave a history of the long dynasty of the alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and base. Aylmer appeared to believe that, by the plainest scientific logic, it was altogether within the limits of possibility to discover this long-sought medium; "but," he added, "a philosopher who should go deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it." Not less singular were his opinions in regard to the elixir vitae. He more than intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps interminably; but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find cause to curse.

"Aylmer, are you in earnest?" asked Georgiana, looking at him with amazement and fear. "It is terrible to possess such power, or even to dream of possessing it."

"Oh, do not tremble, my love," said her husband. "I would not wrong either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects upon our lives; but I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is the skill requisite to remove this little hand."

At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as if a redhot iron had touched her cheek.

Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former he showed her a small vial, in which, he remarked, was contained a gentle yet most powerful fragrance, capable of impregnating all the breezes that blow across a kingdom. They were of inestimable value, the contents of that little vial; and, as he said so, he threw some of the perfume into the air and filled the room with piercing and invigorating delight.

"And what is this?" asked Georgiana, pointing to a small crystal globe containing a gold-colored liquid. "It is so beautiful to the eye that I could imagine it the elixir of life."

"In one sense it is," replied Aylmer; "or, rather, the elixir of immortality. It is the most precious poison that ever was concocted in this world. By its aid I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at whom you might point your finger. The strength of the dose would determine whether he were to linger out years, or drop dead in the midst of a breath. No king on his guarded throne could keep his life if I, in my private station, should deem that the welfare of millions justified me in depriving him of it."

"Why do you keep such a terrific drug?" inquired Georgiana in horror.

"Do not mistrust me, dearest," said her husband, smiling; "its virtuous potency is yet greater than its harmful one. But see! here is a powerful cosmetic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water, freckles may be washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed. A stronger infusion would take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the rosiest beauty a pale ghost."

"Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my cheek?" asked Georgiana, anxiously.

"Oh, no," hastily replied her husband; "this is merely superficial. Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper."

In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute inquiries as to her sensations and whether the confinement of the rooms and the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions had such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjecture that she was already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed in with the fragrant air or taken with her food. She fancied likewise, but it might be altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up of her system--a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins, and tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart. Still, whenever she dared to look into the mirror, there she beheld herself pale as a white rose and with the crimson birthmark stamped upon her cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana turned over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old tomes she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the works of philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves to have acquired from the investigation of Nature a power above Nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual world. Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought.

But to Georgiana the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her husband's own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment than heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume, rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius in whatever sphere might recognize the image of his own experience in Aylmer's journal.

So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that she laid her face upon the open volume and burst into tears. In this situation she was found by her husband.

"It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer's books," said he with a smile, though his countenance was uneasy and displeased. "Georgiana, there are pages in that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep my senses. Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to you."

"It has made me worship you more than ever," said she.

"Ah, wait for this one success," rejoined he, "then worship me if you will. I shall deem myself hardly unworthy of it. But come, I have sought you for the luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest."

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit. He then took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gayety, assuring her that her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and that the result was already certain. Scarcely had he departed when Georgiana felt irresistibly impelled to follow him. She had forgotten to inform Aylmer of a symptom which for two or three hours past had begun to excite her attention. It was a sensation in the fatal birthmark, not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her system. Hastening after her husband, she intruded for the first time into the laboratory.

The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was the aspect of Aylmer himself.

He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and hung over the furnace as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which it was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or misery. How different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had assumed for Georgiana's encouragement!

"Carefully now, Aminadab; carefully, thou human machine; carefully, thou man of clay!" muttered Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant. "Now, if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all over."

"Ho! ho!" mumbled Aminadab. "Look, master! look!"

Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first reddened, then grew paler than ever, on beholding Georgiana. He rushed towards her and seized her arm with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.

"Why do you come hither? Have you no trust in your husband?" cried he, impetuously. "Would you throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over my labors? It is not well done. Go, prying woman, go!"

"Nay, Aylmer," said Georgiana with the firmness of which she possessed no stinted endowment, "it is not you that have a right to complain. You mistrust your wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch the development of this experiment. Think not so unworthily of me, my husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink; for my share in it is far less than your own."

"No, no, Georgiana!" said Aylmer, impatiently; "it must not be."

"I submit," replied she calmly. "And, Aylmer, I shall quaff whatever draught you bring me; but it will be on the same principle that would induce me to take a dose of poison if offered by your hand."

"My noble wife," said Aylmer, deeply moved, "I knew not the height and depth of your nature until now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then, that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp into your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception. I have already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except to change your entire physical system. Only one thing remains to be tried. If that fail us we are ruined."

"Why did you hesitate to tell me this?" asked she.

"Because, Georgiana," said Aylmer, in a low voice, "there is danger."

"Danger? There is but one danger--that this horrible stigma shall be left upon my cheek!" cried Georgiana. "Remove it, remove it, whatever be the cost, or we shall both go mad!"

"Heaven knows your words are too true," said Aylmer, sadly. "And now, dearest, return to your boudoir. In a little while all will be tested."

He conducted her back and took leave of her with a solemn tenderness which spoke far more than his words how much was now at stake. After his departure Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the character of Aylmer, and did it completer justice than at any previous moment. Her heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love--so pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection nor miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment than that meaner kind which would have borne with the imperfection for her sake, and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the actual; and with her whole spirit she prayed that, for a single moment, she might satisfy his highest and deepest conception. Longer than one moment she well knew it could not be; for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant before.

The sound of her husband's footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be the draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the consequence of a highly-wrought state of mind and tension of spirit than of fear or doubt.

"The concoction of the draught has been perfect," said he, in answer to Georgiana's look. "Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot fail."

"Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer," observed his wife, "I might wish to put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mortality itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, methinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die."

"You are fit for heaven without tasting death!" replied her husband "But why do we speak of dying? The draught cannot fail. Behold its effect upon this plant."

On the window seat there stood a geranium diseased with yellow blotches, which had overspread all its leaves. Aylmer poured a small quantity of the liquid upon the soil in which it grew. In a little time, when the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the unsightly blotches began to be extinguished in a living verdure.

"There needed no proof," said Georgiana, quietly. "Give me the goblet I joyfully stake all upon your word."

"Drink, then, thou lofty creature!" exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid admiration. "There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy sensible frame, too, shall soon be all perfect."

She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand.

"It is grateful," said she with a placid smile. "Methinks it is like water from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of unobtrusive fragrance and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst that had parched me for many days. Now, dearest, let me sleep. My earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset."

She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required almost more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and lingering syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect with the emotions proper to a man the whole value of whose existence was involved in the process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood, however, was the philosophic investigation characteristic of the man of science. Not the minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush of the cheek, a slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a hardly perceptible tremor through the frame,--such were the details which, as the moments passed, he wrote down in his folio volume. Intense thought had set its stamp upon every previous page of that volume, but the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon the last.

While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand, and not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse he pressed it with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very act, and Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep, moved uneasily and murmured as if in remonstrance. Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor was it without avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana's cheek, now grew more faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but the birthmark with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out the sky, and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.

"By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!" said Aylmer to himself, in almost irrepressible ecstasy. "I can scarcely trace it now. Success! success! And now it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of blood across her cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!"

He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the light of natural day to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek. At the same time he heard a gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his servant Aminadab's expression of delight.

"Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!" cried Aylmer, laughing in a sort of frenzy, "you have served me well! Matter and spirit--earth and heaven --have both done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses! You have earned the right to laugh."

These exclamations broke Georgiana's sleep. She slowly unclosed her eyes and gazed into the mirror which her husband had arranged for that purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized how barely perceptible was now that crimson hand which had once blazed forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their happiness. But then her eyes sought Aylmer's face with a trouble and anxiety that he could by no means account for.

"My poor Aylmer!" murmured she.

"Poor? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored!" exclaimed he. "My peerless bride, it is successful! You are perfect!"

"My poor Aylmer," she repeated, with a more than human tenderness, "you have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!"

Alas! it was too true! The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark--that sole token of human imperfection--faded from her cheek, the parting breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight. Then a hoarse, chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the immortal essence which, in this dim sphere of half development, demands the completeness of a higher state. Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

____

'The Birthmark' is included in Hawthorne's collection of short stories Mosses from an Olde Manse.

#Nathaniel Hawthorne #birthmark #mosses from and olde manse #short story

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Pedestrian (1951)

Ray Bradbury

To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o'clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of pavement in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D., 2053 or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar.

Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden grey phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open.

Mr Leonard Mead would pause, cock his head, listen, look, and march on, his feet making no noise on the lumpy walk. For long ago he had wisely changed to sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings if he wore hard heels, and lights might click on and faces appear and an entire street be startled by the passing of a lone figure, himself, in the early November evening.

On this particular evening he began his journey in a westerly direction, towards the hidden sea. There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside; you could feel the cold light going on and off, all the branches filled with invisible snow. He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satis­faction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, examining its skeletal pattern in the infrequent lamplights as he went on, smelling its rusty smell.

'Hello, in there,' he whispered to every house on every side as he moved. 'What's up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?'

The street was silent and long and empty, with only his shadow moving like the shadow of a hawk in mid-country. If he closed his eyes and stood very still, frozen, he could imagine himself upon the centre of a plain, a wintry, windless Arizona desert with no house in a thousand miles, and only dry river beds, the streets, for company.

'What is it now?' he asked the houses, noticing his wrist watch. 'Eight-thirty p.m.? Time for a dozen assorted murders? A quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?'

Was that a murmur of laughter from within a moon-white house? He hesitated, but went on when nothing more happened. He stumbled over a par­ticularly uneven section of pavement. The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass. In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time.

He came to a clover-leaf intersection which stood silent where two main highways crossed the town. During the day it was a thunderous surge of cars, the petrol stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions. But now these highways, too, were like streams in a dry season, all stone and bed and moon radiance.

He turned back on a side street, circling around towards his home. He was within a block of his destination when the lone car turned a corner quite suddenly and flashed a fierce white cone of light upon him. He stood entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination, and then drawn towards it.

A metallic voice called to him:

'Stand still. Stay where you are! Don't move!' He halted.

'Put up your hands!' 'But-' he said.

'Your hands up! Or we'll shoot!'

The police, of course, but what a rare, incredible thing; in a city of three million, there was only one police car left, wasn't that correct? Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one. Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets.

'Your name?' said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn't see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.

'Leonard Mead,' he said.

 'Speak up!'

'Leonard Mead!'

'Business or profession?'

'I guess you'd call me a writer.”

“No profession,' said the police car, as If talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

'You might say that,' said Mr Mead. He hadn’t written in years. Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the grey or multi-coloured lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.

'No profession,' said the phonograph voice, hissing. 'What are you doing out?'

'Walking,' said Leonard Mead.

'Walking!'

'Just walking,' he said simply, but his face felt cold.

'Walking, just walking, walking?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Walking where? For what?'

'Walking for air. Walking to see.'

'Your address!'

'Eleven South Saint James Street.'

'And there is air in your house, you have an air conditioner, Mr Mead?'

'Yes.'

'And you have a viewing screen in your house to see with?'

'No.'

'No?' There was a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation.

'Are you married, Mr Mead?'

'No.'

'Not married,' said the police voice behind the fiery beam. The moon was high and clear among the stars and the houses were grey and silent.

'Nobody wanted me,' said Leonard Mead with a smile.

'Don't speak unless you're spoken to!'

 Leonard Mead waited in the cold night.

“Just walking, Mr Mead?'

'Yes.'

'But you haven't explained for what purpose.'

'I explained; for air, and to see, and just to walk.'

 'Have you done this often?'

'Every night for years.'

The police car sat in the centre of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.

'Well, Mr Mead,' it said.

'Is that all?' he asked politely.

'Yes,' said the voice. 'Here.' There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide.

'Get in.'

'Wait a minute, I haven't done anything!'

'Get in.'

'I protest!'

'Mr Mead.'

He walked like a man suddenly drunk. As he passed the front window of the car he looked in. As he had expected, there was no-one in the front seat, no-one in the car at all.

'Get in.'

He put his hand to the door and peered into the back seat, which was a little cell, a little black jail with bars. It smelled of riveted steel. It smelled of harsh anti­septic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic. There was nothing soft there.

'Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi,' said the iron voice. 'But - '

'Where are you taking me?'

The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes. 'To the Psychiatric Centre for Research on Regressive Tendencies. '

He got in. The door shut with a soft thud. The police car rolled through the night avenues, flashing its dim lights ahead.

They passed one house on one street a moment later, one house in an entire city of houses that were dark, but this one particular house had all of its electric lights brightly lit, every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness.

'That's my house,' said Leonard Mead.

 No-one answered him.

The car moved down the empty river- bed streets and off away, leaving the empty streets with the empty pavements, and no sound and no motion all the rest of the chill November night. 

___

Originally published in The Reporter, it's included in the collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.

#ray bradbury #short story #pedestrian #the golden apples of the sun

[bathtubfullofbullets]

A Mild Attack of Locusts (1955)

Doris Lessing

The rains that year were good; they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them—or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about a simple thing like the weather needs experience, which Margaret, born and brought up in Johannesburg, had not got. The men were her husband, Richard, and old Stephen, Richard’s father, who was a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours over whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. She still did not understand why they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the government. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmers’ language. And she noticed that for all Richard’s and Stephen’s complaints, they did not go bankrupt. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing comfortably.

Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, in the wet months, steamy with the heat that rose in wet, soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky in the city. So that evening, when Richard said, “The government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up north,” her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Insects, swarms of them—horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the nearest mountaintop. “We haven’t had locusts in seven years,” one said, and the other, “They go in cycles, locusts do.” And then: “There goes our crop for this season!”

But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day, when they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, old Stephen stopped, raised his finger, and pointed. “Look, look!” he shouted. “There they are!”

Margaret heard him and she ran out to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kitchen. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-colored air. Locusts. There they came.

At once, Richard shouted at the cookboy. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin cans—any old bits of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamor of the gong, and the laborers came pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry.

And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farmlands. When the government warnings came, piles of wood and grass had been prepared in every cultivated field. There were seven patches of bared, cultivated soil, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film of bright green over the rich dark red, and around each patch now drifted up thick clouds of smoke. The men were throwing wet leaves onto the fires to make the smoke acrid and black. Margaret was watching the hills. Now there was a long, low cloud advancing, rust-colored still, swelling forward and out as she looked. The telephone was ringing—neighbors to say, Quick, quick, here come the locusts! Old Smith had already had his crop eaten to the ground. Quick, get your fires started! For, of course, while every farmer hoped the locusts would overlook his farm and go on to the next, it was only fair to warn the others; one must play fair. Everywhere, fifty miles over the countryside, the smoke was rising from a myriad of fires. Margaret answered the telephone calls and, between them, stood watching the locusts. The air was darkening—a strange darkness, for the sun was blazing. It was like the darkness of a veldt fire, when the air gets thick with smoke and the sunlight comes down distorted—a thick, hot orange. It was oppressive, too, with the heaviness of a storm. The locusts were coming fast. Now half the sky was darkened. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guard of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black clouds, reaching almost to the sun itself.

Margaret was wondering what she could do to help. She did not know. Then up came old Stephen from the lands. “We’re finished, Margaret, finished!” he said. “Those beggars can eat every leaf and blade off the farm in half an hour! But it’s only early afternoon. If we can make enough smoke, make enough noise till the sun goes down, they’ll settle somewhere else, perhaps.” And then: “Get the kettle going. It’s thirsty work, this.”

So Margaret went to the kitchen and stoked up the fire and boiled the water. Now on the tin roof of the kitchen she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratching slither as one skidded down the tin slope. Here were the first of them. From down on the lands came the beating and banging and clanging of a hundred petrol tins and bits of metal. Stephen impatiently waited while Margaret filled one petrol tin with tea—hot, sweet, and orange-colored—and another with water. In the meantime, he told her about how, twenty years back, he had been eaten out, made bankrupt by the locust armies. And then, still talking, he lifted the heavy petrol cans, one in each hand, holding them by the wooden pieces set cornerwise across the tops, and jogged off down to the road to the thirsty laborers.

By now, the locusts were falling like hail on the roof of the kitchen. It sounded like a heavy storm. Margaret looked out and saw the air dark with a crisscross of the insects, and she set her teeth and ran out into it; what the men could do, she could. Overhead, the air was thick—locusts everywhere. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off—heavy red-brown creatures, looking at her with their beady, old men’s eyes while they clung to her with their hard, serrated legs. She held her breath with disgust and ran through the door into the house again. There it was even more like being in a heavy storm. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamor of beaten iron from the lands was like thunder. When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighted to the ground. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Toward the mountains, it was like looking into driving rain; even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of the insects. It was a half night, a perverted blackness. Then came a sharp crack from the bush—a branch had snapped off. Then another. A tree down the slope leaned over slowly and settled heavily to the ground. Through the hail of insects, a man came running. More tea, more water were needed. Margaret supplied them. She kept the fires stoked and filled tins with liquid, and then it was four in the afternoon and the locusts had been pouring across overhead for a couple of hours.

Up came old Stephen again—crunching locusts underfoot with every step, locusts clinging all over him—cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. At the doorway, he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the clinging insects and throwing them off, and then he plunged into the locust-free living room.

“All the crops finished. Nothing left,” he said.

But the gongs were still beating, the men still shouting, and Margaret asked, “Why do you go on with it, then?”

“The main swarm isn’t settling. They are heavy with eggs. They are looking for a place to settle and lay. If we can stop the main body settling on our farm, that’s everything. If they get a chance to lay their eggs, we are going to have everything eaten flat with hoppers later on.” He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted inside with eggs. “Imagine that multiplied by millions. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the march? No? Well, you’re lucky.”

Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. Outside, the light on the earth was now a pale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving insects alternately thickened and lightened, like driving rain. Old Stephen said, “They’ve got the wind behind them. That’s something.”

“Is it very bad?” asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, “We’re finished. This swarm may pass over, but once they’ve started, they’ll be coming down from the north one after another. And then there are the hoppers. It might go on for three or four years.”

Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it’s the end, it’s the end. What now? We’ll all three have to go back to town. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this country and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and become a clerk in the city. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from nose to mouth. Poor old man. He lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, and held it in the air by one leg. “You’ve got the strength of a steel spring in those legs of yours,” he told the locust good-humoredly. Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them in great mounds into the fires to burn, he nevertheless took this one to the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. This comforted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. She remembered it was not the first time in the past three years the men had announced their final and irremediable ruin.

“Get me a drink, lass,” Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him.

In the meantime, thought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of insects, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the insects clung all over him. She shuddered. “How can you bear to let them touch you?” she asked Stephen. He looked at her disapprovingly. She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. Now she was a proper farmer’s wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. She might even get to letting locusts settle on her, in time.

Having tossed down a couple of whiskeys, old Stephen went back into the battle, wading now through glistening brown waves of locusts.

Five o’clock. The sun would set in an hour. Then the swarm would settle. It was as thick as ever overhead. The trees were ragged mounds of glistening brown.

Margaret began to cry. It was all so hopeless. If it wasn’t a bad season, it was locusts; if it wasn’t locusts, it was army worms or veldt fires. Always something. The rustling of the locust armies was like a big forest in a storm. The ground was invisible in a sleek brown surging tide; it was like being drowned in locusts, submerged by the loathsome brown flood. It seemed as if the roof might sink in under the weight of them, as if the door might give in under their pressure and these rooms fill with them—and it was getting so dark. Through the window, she looked up at the sky. The air was thinner; gaps of blue showed in the dark moving clouds. The blue spaces were cold and thin; the sun must be setting. Through the fog of insects, she saw figures approaching. First old Stephen, marching bravely along, then her husband, drawn and haggard with weariness, and behind them the servants. All of them were crawling with insects. The sound of the gongs had stopped. Margaret could hear nothing but the ceaseless rustle of myriads of wings.

The two men slapped off the insects and came in.

“Well,” said Richard, kissing her on the cheek, “the main swarm has gone over.”

“For the Lord’s sake!” said Margaret angrily, still half crying. “What’s here is bad enough, isn’t it?” For although the evening air was no longer black and thick but a clear blue, with a pattern of insects whizzing this way and that across it, everything else—trees, buildings, bushes, earth—was gone under the moving brown masses.

“If it doesn’t rain in the night and keep them here,” Stephen said, “if it doesn’t rain and weight them down with water, they’ll be off in the morning at sunrise.”

“We’re bound to have some hoppers,” said Richard. “But not the main swarm. That’s something.”

Margaret roused herself, wiped her eyes, pretended she had not been crying, and fetched them some supper, for the servants were too exhausted to move. She sent them off to the compound to rest.

She served the supper and sat listening. There was not one maize plant left, she heard. Not one. They would get the planting machines out the moment the locusts had gone. They must start all over again.

What was the use of that, Margaret wondered, if the whole farm was going to be crawling with hoppers? But she listened while they discussed the new government pamphlet that told how to defeat the hoppers. You must have men out all the time, patrolling the farm, to watch for movement in the grass. When you find a patch of hoppers—small, lively black things, like crickets—then you dig trenches around the patch or spray them with poison from pumps supplied by the government. The government wanted every farmer to cooperate in a world plan for eliminating this plague forever. You must attack locusts at the source—hoppers, in short. The men were talking as if they were planning a war, and Margaret listened, amazed.

In the night, it was quiet, with no sign of the armies that had settled outside, except that sometimes a branch snapped or a tree could be heard crashing down.

Margaret slept badly, in the bed beside Richard, who was sleeping like the dead. In the morning, she woke to yellow sunshine lying across the bed—clear sunshine, with an occasional blotch of shadow moving over it. She went to the window. Old Stephen was ahead of her. There he stood, outside, gazing down over the bush. And she gazed, astounded—and entranced, much against her will. For it looked as if every tree, every bush, all the earth, were lit with pale flames. The locusts were fanning their wings to free them of the night dews. There was a shimmer of red-tinged gold light everywhere.

She went out to join the old man, stepping carefully among the insects. The two stood and watched. Overhead the sky was blue—blue and clear.

“Pretty,” said old Stephen with satisfaction.

Well, thought Margaret, we may be ruined, we may be bankrupt, but not everyone has seen a locust army fanning their wings at dawn.

Over the slopes in the distance, a faint red smear showed in the sky. It thickened and spread. “There they go,” said old Stephen. “There goes the main army, off south.”

And now, from the trees, from the earth all around them, the locusts were taking wing. They were like small aircraft maneuvering for the takeoff as they tried their wings to see if they were dry enough. Off they went. A reddish-brown steam was rising off the miles of bush, off the farmlands—the earth. Again the sunlight darkened.

And as the clotted branches lifted, the weight on them lightening, there was nothing left but the black spines of branches and tree trunks. No green—nothing. All morning they watched, the three of them—Richard having finally got up—as the brown crust thinned and broke and dissolved, flying up to mass with the main army, now a brownish-red smear in the southern sky. The lands, which had been filmed with the green of the new, tender mealie plants, were stark and bare. A devastated landscape—no green, no green anywhere.

By midday, the reddish cloud had gone. Only an occasional locust flopped down. On the ground lay the corpses and the wounded. The African laborers were sweeping them up with branches and collecting them in tins.

“Ever eaten sun-dried locust, Margaret?” asked old Stephen. “That time twenty years ago when I went broke, I lived on mealie meal and dried locusts for three months. They aren’t bad at all—rather like smoked fish, if you come to think of it.”

But Margaret preferred not even to think of it.

After the midday meal, the men went off to the lands. Everything was to be replanted. With a bit of luck, another swarm would not come travelling down just this way. But they hoped it would rain very soon, to spring some new grass, because the cattle would die otherwise; there was not a blade of grass left on the farm. As for Margaret, she was trying to get used to the idea of three or four years of locusts. Locusts were going to be like the weather from now on—always imminent. She felt like a survivor after a war; if this devastated and mangled countryside was not ruin—well, what then was ruin?

But the men ate their supper with good appetites.

“It could have been worse” was what they said. “It could be much worse.”

___

Firstly published in The New Yorker, 'A Mild Attack of Locusts' is included in Lessing's short story collection The Habit of Loving.

#doris lessing #a mild attack of locusts #short story #habit of loving

[bathtubfullofbullets]

Ask Me If I Care (2010)

Jennifer Egan

Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in the front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Mutants, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in the back, where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty crests the hills. Still, if it’s Bennie and me I hope for the back, so that I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.

The first time we go to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she points up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and says that her old school is up there: an all-girls school that her little sisters go to now. K through six, you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, “Can we see them?” and Alice goes, “My uniforms?” but Scotty says, “Your alleged sisters.”

Alice leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her. They’re both fascinated by Alice, but it’s Bennie who entirely loves her. And Alice loves Scotty, of course.

Bennie’s shoes are off, and I watch his brown heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick that it muffles every trace of us. Jocelyn and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes she’s smoked. I can’t smell the gin we drank at the beginning of the night, taking it from my dad’s hidden supply and pouring it into Coke cans so that we could drink it on the street.

Jocelyn goes, “Watch, Rhea. They’ll be blond like her, the sisters.”

I go, “According to?”

“Rich children are always blond,” Jocelyn says. “It has to do with vitamins.”

Believe me, I don’t mistake this for information. I know everyone that Jocelyn knows.

The room is dark except for a pink night-light. I stop in the doorway and Bennie hangs back, too, but the other three go crowding into the space between the beds. Alice’s little sisters are sleeping on their sides, the covers tucked around their shoulders. One looks like Alice, with pale wavy hair; the other is dark, like Jocelyn. I’m afraid that they’ll wake up and be scared of us, in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. I think, We shouldn’t be here. Scotty shouldn’t have asked to come in. Alice shouldn’t have said yes, but she says yes to everything that Scotty asks. I think, I want to lie down in one of those beds and go to sleep.

“Ahem,” I whisper to Jocelyn as we’re leaving the room. “Dark hair.”

She whispers back, “Black sheep.”

1980 is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old. They blew their brains on acid, and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are as thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.

At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit. It’s not a pit, in the strictly speaking sense; it’s a strip of pavement above the playing fields. We inherited it from last year’s Pitters, who graduated, but still we get nervous walking in if other Pitters are already there: Tatum, who wears a different color Danskin every day, or Wayne, who grows sinsemilla in his actual closet, or Boomer, who’s always hugging everyone since his family did est. I’m nervous walking in unless Jocelyn is already there, or (for her) I am. We stand in for each other.

On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildos gigs but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty actually built this instrument—bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around; there’s no way not to when Scotty plays. One time the entire J.V. soccer team climbed up to listen, all of them looking around in their jerseys and long red socks like they didn’t know how they’d got there. Scotty is magnetic. And I say this as someone who does not love him.

The Flaming Dildos have had a lot of names: the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs, the Flaming Spiders, the Black Widows. Every time Scotty and Bennie change the name, Scotty sprays black paint over his guitar case and Bennie’s bass case, and then he makes a stencil of the new name and sprays it on. We don’t know how Bennie and Scotty decide if they’re going to keep a name, because they don’t actually talk. But they agree on everything, maybe through E.S.P. Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty. We sing with them in rehearsal, but we don’t like being onstage. Alice doesn’t, either—the only thing we have in common with her.

Bennie transferred here last year from a high school in Daly City. We don’t know where he lives, but some days we visit him after school at Green Apple Records, on Clement, where he works. If Alice comes with us, Bennie will take his break and share a pork bun in the Chinese bakery next door, while the fog gallops past the windows. Bennie has light-brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair into a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin LP. He’s usually looking at Alice, so I can watch him as much as I want.

Down the path from the Pit is where the Cholos hang out, with their black leather coats and clicky shoes and dark hair in almost invisible nets. Sometimes they talk to Bennie in Spanish, and he smiles at them but never answers. “Why do they keep speaking Spanish to him?” I go to Jocelyn, and she looks at me and goes, “Rhea, Bennie’s a Cholo. Isn’t that obvious?”

“That’s factually crazy,” I go, and my face gets hot. “He has a Mohawk. And he’s not even friends with them.”

Jocelyn goes, “Not all Cholos are friends.” Then she says, “The good part is: rich girls won’t go with Cholos. So he’ll never get Alice, period-the-end.”

Jocelyn knows that I’m waiting for Bennie. But Bennie is waiting for Alice, who’s waiting for Scotty, who’s waiting for Jocelyn, who’s known Scotty the longest and makes him feel safe, I think, because even though Scotty is magnetic, with bleached hair and a studly chest that he likes to uncover when it’s sunny out, his mother killed herself three years ago with sleeping pills. Scotty’s been quieter since then, and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.

Jocelyn loves Scotty back, but she isn’t in love with him. Jocelyn is waiting for Lou, an adult man who picked her up hitchhiking. Lou lives in L.A., but he said he would call her the next time he comes to San Francisco. That was weeks ago.

No one is waiting for me. Usually the girl in a story that no one is waiting for is fat, but my problem is more rare: I have freckles. I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face. When I was little, my mom told me that my freckles were special. Thank God I’ll be able to remove them, when I’m old enough and can pay for it myself. Until that time I have my dog collar and my green rinse, because how can anyone call me “the girl with freckles” when my hair is green?

Jocelyn has chopped black hair that looks permanently wet, and twelve ear piercings that I gave her with a needle, not using ice. She has a beautiful half-Chinese face. It makes a difference.

Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes. She’s seen my dad puking into the hedge outside our building, and I was with her on Polk Street the night she recognized one of the leather boys hugging outside the White Swallow—it was her dad, who was on a “business trip,” back before he moved away. So I still can’t believe that I missed the day she met Lou. She was hitchhiking home from downtown and he pulled up in a red Mercedes and drove her to an apartment that he uses on his trips to San Francisco. He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a baggie of cocaine dropped out. Lou did some lines off Jocelyn’s bare butt and they went all the way twice, not including when she went down on him. I made Jocelyn repeat every detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so that we could be equal again.

Lou is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver record albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars.

The Flaming Dildos rehearsal is on Saturday, in Scotty’s garage. When Jocelyn and I get there, Alice is setting up the new tape recorder that her stepfather bought her, with a real microphone. She’s one of those girls who like machines—another reason for Bennie to love her. Joel, the Dildos’ steady drummer, arrives next, driven by his dad, who waits outside in his station wagon through the whole practice, reading books about the Second World War. Joel is A.P. everything, and he’s applied to Harvard, so I guess his dad isn’t taking any chances.

Where we live, in the Sunset, the ocean is always just over your shoulder and the houses have Easter-egg colors. But the second Scotty lets the garage door slam down we’re suddenly enraged, all of us. Pretty soon we’re screaming out the songs, which have titles like “Pet Rock” and “Do the Math” and “Pass Me the Kool-Aid,” but when we holler them in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Every once in a while a kid from band or orchestra pounds on the garage door to try out with us (invited by Bennie). Today we audition a sax, a tuba, and a banjo, but sax and banjo keep hogging the stage and tuba covers her ears as soon as we start to play. Practice is almost over when there’s another bang on the garage door and Scotty ropes it up. An enormous pimpled kid in an AC/DC T-shirt is standing there, holding a violin case. He goes, “I’m looking for Bennie Salazar?”

Jocelyn and Alice and I stare at one another in shock, and it feels for a second like we’re all three friends, like Alice is part of “us.”

“Hey, Marty,” Bennie says. “Perfect timing. Everybody, this is Marty.”

Marty plugs in his violin and we launch into our best song, “What the Fuck?”:

You said you were a fairy princess  You said you were a shooting star  You said we’d go to Bora-Bora  Now look at where the fuck we are. 

Bora-Bora was Alice’s idea—we’d never heard of it. While everyone roars the chorus (“What the fuck? / What the fuck? / What the fuck?”), I watch Bennie listen, his eyes closed, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and grins. “I hope you got that, Al,” he goes, and Alice rewinds the tape to make sure.

Alice takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Bennie and Scotty drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, on Broadway, where all the punk bands play. We go there every Saturday night, after practice. We’ve heard the Dead Kennedys there, and Eye Protection, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. The bar is expensive, so we drink from my dad’s supply ahead of time. Jocelyn needs to drink more than me to get buzzed, and when she feels the booze hit she takes a long breath, like she’s finally herself again.

In the Mab’s graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop and find out how Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, how Joe Rees, of Target Video, is making an entire movie of punk rock, how two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this takes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?

During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage. We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks’ sweat and our skin has touched their skin. Bennie does less of this than the rest of us. I think he actually listens to the music.

One thing I’ve noticed: there are no real punk rockers with freckles. They don’t exist.

One night, Jocelyn answers her phone and it’s Lou, going, “Hello, Beautiful.” He says he’s been calling for days and days, but the phone just rings. “Why not try calling at night?” I ask, when Jocelyn repeats this.

That Saturday, after rehearsal, she goes out with Lou. The rest of us go to the Mab, then back to Alice’s house. By now we treat the place like we own it: we eat the yogurt her mom makes in glass cups on a warming machine, we lie on the living-room couch with our sock feet on the armrests. One night, her mom made us hot chocolate and brought it into the living room on a gold tray. She had big tired eyes and tendons moving in her neck. Jocelyn whispered in my ear, “Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.”

Tonight, maybe because Jocelyn isn’t here, I ask Alice if she still has those school uniforms she mentioned the first time we came over. She looks surprised. “Yeah,” she goes. “I do.”

I follow her up the fluffy stairs to her actual room, which I’ve never seen. It’s smaller than her sisters’ room, with blue shag carpeting and crisscross wallpaper in blue and white. Her bed is under a mountain of stuffed animals, which all turn out to be frogs: bright green, light green, Day-Glo green, some with stuffed flies attached to their tongues. Her bedside lamp is shaped like a frog, plus her pillow.

I go, “I didn’t know you were so into frogs,” and Alice goes, “How would you?”

I haven’t really been alone with Alice before. She seems not as nice as she is when Jocelyn is around.

She opens her closet, stands on a chair, and pulls down a box with some uniforms inside: one of the green plaid one-pieces she wore when she was little, a sailor-suit two-piece from later on. I go, “Which did you like better?”

“Neither,” she says. “Who wants to wear a uniform?”

I go, “I would.”

“Is that a joke?”

“What kind of joke would it be?”

“The kind where you and Jocelyn laugh about how you made a joke and I didn’t get it.”

My throat turns very dry. I go, “I won’t. Laugh with Jocelyn.”

Alice shrugs. “Ask me if I care,” she says.

We sit on her rug, the uniforms across our knees. Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn’t a real punk, either.

After a while I go, “Why do your parents let us come here?”

“They’re not my parents. They’re my mother and stepfather.”

“O.K.”

“They want to keep an eye on you, I guess.”

The foghorns are extra loud in Sea Cliff, like we’re alone on a ship sailing through the thickest fog. I hug my knees, wishing so much that Jocelyn was with us.

“Are they right now?” I ask, softly. “Keeping an eye?”

Alice takes a huge breath and lets it back out. “No,” she goes. “They’re asleep.”

Marty the violinist isn’t even in high school—he’s a sophomore at S.F. State, where Jocelyn and I and Scotty (if he passes Algebra II) are headed next year. Jocelyn tells Bennie, “The shit will hit the fan if you put that dork onstage.”

“We’ll find out,” Bennie says, and he looks at his watch like he’s thinking. “In two weeks and four days and six hours and I’m not sure how many minutes.”

We stare at him, not comprehending. Then he tells us: Dirk Dirksen, from the Mab, gave him a call. Jocelyn and I shriek and hug onto Bennie, which for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I can remember every hug I’ve given him. I learn something each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Scotty even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I feel his heartbeat on my palm when I hold his back. Jocelyn goes, “Who else knows?”

Scotty, of course. Alice, too, but it’s only later that this bothers us.

I have cousins in Los Angeles, so Jocelyn calls Lou from our apartment, where the charge won’t stand out on the phone bill. I’m two inches away from her on my parents’ flowered bedspread as she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a man’s voice answer and it shocks me that he’s real, that Jocelyn didn’t make him up, even though I never supposed that she had. He doesn’t say, “Hey, Beautiful,” though. He says, “I told you to let me call you.”

Jocelyn goes, “Sorry,” in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, “What kind of hello is that?” Lou goes, “Who the Christ am I talking to?” and I tell him, “Rhea.” Then he goes, in a calmer voice, “Nice to meet you, Rhea. Now, would you hand the phone back to Jocelyn?”

This time she pulls the cord away. Lou seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Jocelyn hisses at me, “You have to leave. Go!”

I walk out of my parents’ bedroom into our kitchen. There’s a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for a science project. After a while, Jocelyn comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.

Later she tells me that Lou said yes: he’ll come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe he’ll give us a record contract. “It’s not a promise,” he warned her. “But we’ll have a good time anyway, right, Beautiful? Don’t we always?”

The night of the concert, I go with Jocelyn to meet Lou for dinner at Vanessi’s, a restaurant just down Broadway from the Mab, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited Alice, but Jocelyn goes, “Her parents probably take her to Vanessi’s all the time.” I go, “You mean her mother and stepfather.”

A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Lou. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy blond hair and he’s handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.

Lou actually does say, “C’mere, Beautiful,” and he lifts an arm to Jocelyn. He’s wearing a light-blue denim shirt and some kind of copper bracelet. She slides around the table and fits right under his arm. “Rhea,” Lou goes, and lifts up his other arm for me, so instead of sliding in next to Jocelyn, like I was just about to do, I end up on Lou’s other side. His arm comes down around my shoulder. And, like that, we’re Lou’s girls.

A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi’s and saw linguine with clams. All week long I’ve been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and, after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies’ room. It’s a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There’s a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and closes her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I’ve got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we’ve done before this wasn’t really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band we’ve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn’t completely stop at the stations—it just slowed down so that people could jump off or on. I go, “I want to see Africa!” and Lou goes, “Maybe we’ll go together, the three of us,” and it seems like this really might happen. He tells us, “The soil in the hills is so fertile it’s red,” and I go, “My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil,” and Jocelyn goes, “What about the mosquitoes?” and Lou goes, “I’ve never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon,” and I realize that I’m beginning my adult life right now, on this night.

When the waiter brings my linguine I can’t take one bite. Only Lou eats: an almost raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. He’s one of those people who never stop moving. Three times people come to our table to say hello to him, but he doesn’t introduce us.

Back on Broadway he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people into the Casbah, the strippers lounging in the doorways of the Condor and Big Al’s. Traffic pushes along Broadway, people honking and waving from their cars like we’re all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like I’m a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.

The door guy at the Mab recognizes Lou and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Nuns, who are playing later on. Inside, Bennie and Scotty and Joel are onstage, setting up with Alice. Jocelyn and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Lou’s already introducing himself to the band. Bennie shakes Lou’s hand and goes, “It’s an honor, sir.”

The Flaming Dildos open with “Snake in the Grass.” No one is dancing or even really listening; people are still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they’re here for start playing. Normally Jocelyn and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand back, leaning against a wall with Lou. He’s bought us both gin-and-tonics. I can’t tell if the Dildos sound good or not. I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Lou’s face, he’s grinding his teeth.

Marty comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he crouches to replug it, with his plumber’s crack showing. I can’t even look at Bennie, it matters so much.

When they start playing “Do the Math,” Lou yells in my ear, “Whose idea was the violin?”

I go, “Bennie’s.”

“Kid on bass?”

I nod, and Lou watches Bennie for a minute and I watch him, too. Lou goes, “Not much of a player.”

“But he’s—” I try to explain. “The whole thing is his—”

Something gets tossed at the stage that looks like glass, but, when it hits Scotty’s face, thank God it’s only ice from a drink. Scotty flinches but keeps on playing, and then a Budweiser can flies up and clips Marty right in the forehead. Jocelyn and I look at each other, panicked, but when we try to move Lou anchors us. The Dildos start playing “What the Fuck?” but now garbage is spewing at the stage, chucked by four guys with safety-pin chains connecting their nostrils to their earlobes. Every few seconds another drink strikes Scotty’s face. Finally he just plays with his eyes shut. Alice is trying to tackle the garbage throwers now and they shove her back and suddenly people are slam-dancing hard, the kind of dancing that’s basically fighting. Joel clobbers his drums as Scotty tears off his dripping T-shirt and snaps it at one of the garbage throwers, hitting him right in the face with a twangy crack—snrack—like my brothers snapping bath towels, but sharper. The Scotty magnet is starting to work—people are watching his bare muscles shining with sweat and beer. Then one of the garbage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Scotty kicks him in the chest with the flat of his boot—there’s a kind of gasp from the crowd as the guy flies back. Scotty’s smiling now, grinning like I almost never see him grin, wolf teeth flashing, and I realize that, of all of us, Scotty is the truly angry one.

I turn to Jocelyn, but she’s gone. Maybe my thousand eyes are what tell me to look down. I see Lou’s fingers spread out over her black hair. She’s kneeling in front of him, giving him head, like the music is a disguise and no one can see them. Maybe no one does. Lou’s other arm is still around me, which I guess is why I don’t run, although I could. I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyn’s head against himself again and again until I don’t know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like she’s not even Jocelyn but some kind of animal or machine that can’t be broken. I force myself to look at the band, Scotty snapping the wet shirt and knocking people with his boot. Lou is grasping my shoulder, squeezing it harder, turning his head into my neck, and letting out a hot, stuttering groan that I can hear even through the music. He’s that close. A sob cracks open in me. Tears leak out from my eyes, but only from the two in my face. The other thousand eyes are closed.

The walls of Lou’s apartment are covered with electric guitars and gold and silver LPs, just like Jocelyn said. But she never mentioned that it was on the thirty-fifth floor, six blocks away from the Mab. She didn’t even tell about the green marble slabs in the elevator. I think that was a lot to leave out.

In the kitchen, Jocelyn pours Fritos into a dish and takes a glass bowl of green apples out of the refrigerator. She’s already passed around quaaludes, offering one to every person except me. I think she’s afraid to look at me. Who’s the hostess now? I want to ask.

In the living room, Alice sits with Scotty, who is wearing a Pendleton shirt from Lou’s closet and looks pale and shaky, maybe from having stuff thrown at him, maybe because he now understands for real that Jocelyn has a boyfriend and that it isn’t him and never will be. Marty is there, too; he’s got a cut on his cheek and an almost black eye and he keeps saying, “That was intense,” to no one in particular. Joel got driven straight home, of course. Everyone agrees that the gig went well.

When Lou leads Bennie up a spiral staircase to his recording studio, I tag along. He calls Bennie “Kiddo” and explains each machine in the room, which is small and warm, with black foam points all over the walls. Lou’s legs move restlessly and he eats a green apple with loud cracking noises, like he’s gnawing rock. Bennie glances out the door toward the rail overlooking the living room, trying to get a glimpse of Alice. I keep being about to cry. I’m worried that what happened in the club counts as having sex with Lou—that I was part of it.

Finally I go back downstairs. Off the living room I notice a door partly open, a big bed just beyond. I go in and lie face down on a velvet bedspread. A peppery incense smell trickles around me. The room is cool and dim, with photographs in frames on both sides of the bed. My whole body hurts. After a few minutes someone else comes in and lies down next to me, and I know it’s Jocelyn. We don’t say anything—we just lie there side by side in the dark. Finally I go, “You should’ve told me.” “Told you what?” she goes, but I don’t even know. Then she goes, “There’s too much,” and I feel like something is ending, right at that minute.

After a while Jocelyn turns on a lamp by the bed. “Look,” she goes. She’s holding a framed picture of Lou in a swimming pool surrounded by kids, the two littlest ones almost babies. I count six. Jocelyn goes, “They’re his children. That blond girl, she’s almost twenty.”

I lean close to the picture. Lou looks so happy, surrounded by his kids like any normal dad, that I can’t believe the Lou with us is the same man. He comes into the bedroom a minute later, rock-crunching another apple. I realize that the bowl of green apples is completely for Lou—he eats them non-stop. I slide off the bed without looking at him, and he shuts the door behind me.

It takes me a second to get what’s going on in the living room. Scotty is sitting cross-legged, picking at a gold guitar in the shape of a flame. Alice is behind him with her arms around his neck, her face next to his, her hair falling into his lap. Her eyes are closed with joy. I forget who I actually am for a second—all I can think is how Bennie will feel when he sees this. I look around for him, but there’s just Marty peering at the albums on the wall, trying to be inconspicuous. And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once—the couch, the walls, even the floor—and I know Bennie’s alone in Lou’s studio, pouring music around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down.” Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”:

I am the passenger  And I ride and I ride  I ride through the city’s backsides  I see the stars come out of the sky. 

Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

I notice Marty looking over at me kind of hesitantly, and I see how this is supposed to work: I’m the dog, so I get Marty. I slide open a glass door and step out onto Lou’s balcony. I’ve never seen San Francisco from so high up: it’s a soft blue-black, with colored lights and fog like gray smoke. Long piers reach out into the flat, dark bay. There’s a mean wind, so I go in for my jacket then come back out and curl up tight on a white plastic chair. I stare at the view until I start to feel calmer. I think, The world is actually huge. That’s the part no one can really explain.

After a while the door slides open. I don’t look up, thinking it’s Marty, but it turns out to be Lou. He’s barefoot, wearing shorts. His legs are tanned, even in the dark. I go, “Where’s Jocelyn?”

“Asleep,” he says. He’s standing at the railing, looking out. It’s the first time I’ve seen him be still.

I go, “Do you even remember being our age?”

Lou grins at me in my chair, but it’s a copy of the grin he had at dinner. “I am your age,” he goes.

“Ahem,” I go. “You have six kids.”

“So I do,” he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didn’t have sex with this man. I don’t even know him. Then he says, “I’ll never get old.”

“You’re already old,” I tell him.

He swivels around and peers at me huddled in my chair. “You’re scary,” he goes. “You know that?”

“It’s the freckles,” I go.

“It’s not the freckles, it’s you.” He keeps looking at me, and then something shifts in his face and he goes, “I like it.”

“Do not.”

“I do. You’re gonna keep me honest, Rhea.”

I’m surprised he remembers my name. I go, “It’s too late for that, Lou.”

Now he laughs, really laughs, and I understand that we’re friends, Lou and I. Even if I hate him, which I do. I get out of my chair and walk to the railing, where he is.

“People will try to change you, Rhea,” Lou goes. “Don’t let ’em.”

“But I want to change.”

“Don’t,” he goes, serious. “You’re beautiful. Stay like this.”

“But the freckles,” I go, and my throat gets that ache.

“The freckles are the best part,” Lou says. “Some guy is going to go apeshit for those freckles. He’s going to kiss them one by one.”

I start to cry. I don’t even hide it.

“Hey,” Lou goes. He leans down so our faces are together and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, “The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me.”

And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

Two weeks later, Jocelyn runs away. I find out at the same time as everyone else.

Her mother comes straight to our apartment. She and my parents sit me down: What do I know? Who is this new boyfriend? I tell them, “Lou. He lives in L.A. and has six children. He knows Bill Graham personally.” I think that Bennie might know who Lou actually is, so Jocelyn’s mom comes to our school to talk to Bennie Salazar. But he’s hard to find. Now that Alice and Scotty are together, Bennie has stopped coming to the Pit. Before, he and Scotty didn’t talk because they were like one person. Now it’s like they’ve never met.

I can’t stop wondering: if I’d pulled away from Lou and fought the garbage throwers, would Bennie have settled for me the way Scotty settled for Alice? Could that one thing have made all the difference?

They track down Lou in a matter of days. He tells Jocelyn’s mom that she hitchhiked all the way to his house without even warning him. He says that she’s safe, he’s taking care of her, it’s better than having her on the street. He promises to bring her home when he comes to the city the next week. Why not this week? I wonder.

While I’m waiting for Jocelyn, Alice invites me over. We take the bus from school, a long ride to Sea Cliff. Her house looks smaller in daylight. In the kitchen, we mix honey with her mother’s homemade yogurts and eat two each. We go up to her room, where all the frogs are, and sit on her built-in window seat. Alice tells me that she’s planning to get real frogs and keep them in a terrarium. She’s calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can’t tell if she’s real, or if she’s just stopped caring whether she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

I wonder if Lou’s house is near the ocean. Does Jocelyn look at the waves? Do they ever leave Lou’s bedroom? Are his children there? I keep getting lost in these questions. Then I hear giggling, pounding from somewhere. I go, “Who’s that?”

“My sisters,” Alice goes. “They’re playing tetherball.”

We head downstairs and outside, into Alice’s back yard, where I’ve been only in the dark. It’s sunny now, with flowers in patterns and a tree with lemons on it. At the edge of the yard, two little girls are slapping a bright-yellow ball around a silver pole. They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms.

____

Published in The New Yorker and a part of Egan's collection of intermingled tales A Visit from the Goon Squad.

#jennifer egan #ask me if i care #short story #a visit from the goon squad

[bathtubfullofbullets]

A Haunted House (1944)

Virginia Woolf

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure — a ghostly couple.

“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”

But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling — what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room . . . ” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.

“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning —” “Silver between the trees —” “Upstairs —” “In the garden —” “When summer came —” “In winter snowtime —” The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years —” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure —” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

____ 'A Haunted House' is included in Woolf's collection A Haunted House and Other Short Stories.

#haunted house #virginia woolf #short story

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Lottery (1948)

Shirley Jackson

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 20th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.

Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother’s grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother.

The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program—by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him because he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called. “Little late today, folks. ” The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three-legged stool, and the stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool, and when Mr. Summers said, “Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?” there was a hesitation before two men. Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.

The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything’s being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put them in the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr. Summers’ coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’s barn and another year underfoot in the post office. and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.

There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists to make up–of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this p3rt of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans, with one hand resting carelessly on the black box, he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.

Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. “Clean forgot what day it was,” she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. “Thought my old man was out back stacking wood,” Mrs. Hutchinson went on, “and then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running. ” She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, “You’re in time, though. They’re still talking away up there. “

Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her husband and children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through: two or three people said, in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd, “Here comes your, Missus, Hutchinson,” and “Bill, she made it after all. ” Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully. “Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie. ” Mrs. Hutchinson said, grinning, “Wouldn’t have me leave m’dishes in the sink, now, would you, Joe?” and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson’s arrival.

“Well, now. ” Mr. Summers said soberly, “guess we better get started, get this over with, so’s we can go back to work. Anybody ain’t here?”

“Dunbar. ” several people said. “Dunbar. Dunbar. “

Mr. Summers consulted his list. “Clyde Dunbar. ” he said. “That’s right. He’s broke his leg, hasn’t he? Who’s drawing for him?”

“Me. I guess,” a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. “Wife draws for her husband. ” Mr. Summers said. “Don’t you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?” Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.

“Horace’s not but sixteen yet. ” Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. “Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year. “

“Right. ” Sr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked, “Watson boy drawing this year?”

A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. “Here,” he said. “I m drawing for my mother and me. ” He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things like “Good fellow, lack. ” and “Glad to see your mother’s got a man to do it. “

“Well,” Mr. Summers said, “guess that’s everyone. Old Man Warner make it?”

“Here,” a voice said, and Mr. Summers nodded.

A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. “All ready?” he called. “Now, I’ll read the names–heads of families first–and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?”

The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said, “Adams. ” A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. “Hi. Steve. ” Mr. Summers said, and Mr. Adams said. “Hi. Joe. ” They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand.

“Allen. ” Mr. Summers said. “Anderson… Bentham. “

“Seems like there’s no time at all between lotteries any more. ” Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back row.

“Seems like we got through with the last one only last week. “

“Time sure goes fast” Mrs. Graves said.

“Clark… Delacroix. “

“There goes my old man. ” Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.

“Dunbar,” Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the women said. “Go on, Janey,” and another said, “There she goes. “

“We’re next. ” Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hand, turning them over and over nervously Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.

“Harburt… Hutchinson. “

“Get up there, Bill,” Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near her laughed.

“Jones."

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery."

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. ‘ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody."

“Some places have already quit lotteries,” Mrs. Adams said.

“Nothing but trouble in that,” Old Man Warner said stoutly. “Pack of young fools. “

“Martin. ” And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. “Overdyke… Percy. “

“I wish they’d hurry,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. “I wish they’d hurry.”

“They’re almost through,” her son said.

“You get ready to run tell Dad,” Mrs. Dunbar said.

Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip from the box. Then he called, “Warner. “

“Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,” Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd. “Seventy-seventh time. “

“Watson. ” The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, “Don’t be nervous, Jack,” and Mr. Summers said, “Take your time, son. “

“Zanini. “

After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers, holding his slip of paper in the air, said, “All right, fellows. ” For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saving. “Who is it?,” “Who’s got it?,” “Is it the Dunbars?,” “Is it the Watsons?” Then the voices began to say, “It’s Hutchinson. It’s Bill,” “Bill Hutchinson’s got it. “

“Go tell your father,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.

People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair!”

“Be a good sport, Tessie,” Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, “All of us took the same chance. “

“Shut up, Tessie,” Bill Hutchinson said.

“Well, everyone,” Mr. Summers said, “that was done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurrying a little more to get done in time. ” He consulted his next list. “Bill,” he said, “you draw for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?”

“There’s Don and Eva,” Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. “Make them take their chance!”

“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie,” Mr. Summers said gently. “You know that as well as anyone else. “

“It wasn’t fair,” Tessie said.

“I guess not, Joe,” Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. “My daughter draws with her husband’s family; that’s only fair. And I’ve got no other family except the kids. “

“Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it’s you,” Mr. Summers said in explanation, “and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that’s you, too. Right?”

“Right,” Bill Hutchinson said.

“How many kids, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked formally.

“Three,” Bill Hutchinson said.

“There’s Bill, Jr. , and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me. “

“All right, then,” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you got their tickets back?”

Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. “Put them in the box, then,” Mr. Summers directed. “Take Bill’s and put it in. “

“I think we ought to start over,” Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. “I tell you it wasn’t fair. You didn’t give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that. “

Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box, and he dropped all the papers but those onto the ground, where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.

“Listen, everybody,” Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.

“Ready, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked, and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife and children, nodded.

“Remember,” Mr. Summers said, “take the slips and keep them folded until each person has taken one. Harry, you help little Dave. ” Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly with him up to the box. “Take a paper out of the box, Davy,” Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed. “Take just one paper. ” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you hold it for him. ” Mr. Graves took the child’s hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.

“Nancy next,” Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box “Bill, Jr. ,” Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, near knocked the box over as he got a paper out. “Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.

“Bill,” Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.

The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.

“It’s not the way it used to be,” Old Man Warner said clearly. “People ain’t the way they used to be. “

“All right,” Mr. Summers said. “Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave’s. “

Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr. , opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.

“Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.

“It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. “Show us her paper, Bill. “

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

“All right, folks. ” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly. “

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up. “

Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you. “

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone. ” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

____

Firstly published in The New Yorker, 'The Lottery' is today one of the most famous American short stories. A highlight to Jackson's novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

#the lottery #shirley jackson #short story #we have always lived in the castle

[bathtubfullofbullets]

Hinterlands (1981)

William Gibson

When Hiro hit the switch, I was dreaming of Paris, dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. The pain came oscillating up from the floor of my skull, exploding behind my eyes in a wall of blue neon; I jackknifed up out of the mesh hammock, screaming. I always scream; I make a point of it. Feedback raged in my skull. The pain switch is an auxiliary circuit in the bonephone im- plant, patched directly into the pain centers, just the thing for cutting through a surrogate's barbiturate fog. It took a few seconds for my life to fall together, icebergs of biography looming through the fog: who I was, where I was, what I was doing there, who was wak- ing me. Hiro's voice came crackling into my head through the bone-conduction implant.- "Damn, Toby. Know what it does to my ears, you scream like that?" "Know how much I care about your ears, Dr. Nagashima? I care about them as much as " "No time for the litany of love, boy. We've got business. But what is it with these fifty-millivolt spike waves off your temporals, hey? Mixing something with the downers to give it a little color?" "Your EEG's screwed, Hiro. You're crazy. I just want my sleep. . . ." I collapsed into the hammock and tried to pull the darkness over me, but his voice was still there. "Sorry, my man, but you're working today. We got a ship back, an hour ago. Air-lock gang are out there right now, sawing the reaction engine off so she'll just about fit through the door." "Who is it?" "Leni Hofmannstahl, Toby, physical chemist, citi- zen of the Federal Republic of Germany." He waited until I quit groaning. "It's a confirmed meatshot." Lovely workaday terminology we've developed out here. He meant a returning ship with active medical telemetry, contents one (1) body, warm, psychological status as yet unconfirmed. I shut my eyes and swung there in the dark. "Looks like you're her surrogate, Toby. Her pro- file syncs with Taylor's, but he's on leave." I knew all about Taylor's "leave." He was out in the agricultural canisters, ripped on amitriptyline, doing aerobic exercises to counter his latest bout with clinical depression. One of the occupational hazards of being a surrogate. Taylor and I don't get along. Funny how you usually don't, if the guy's psychosexual profile is too much like your own. "Hey, Toby, where are you getting all that dope?" The question was ritual. "From Charmian?" "From your mom, Hiro." He knows it's Charmian as well as I do. "Thanks, Toby. Get up here to the Heavenside elevator in five minutes or I'll send those Russian nurses down to help you. The male ones." I just swung there in my hammock and played the game called Toby Halpert's Place in the Universe. No egotist, I put the sun in the center, the lumiary, the orb of day. Around it I swung tidy planets, our cozy home system. But just here, at a fixed point about an eighth of the way out toward the orbit of Mars, I hung a fat alloy cylinder, like a quarter-scale model of Tsiolkovsky 1, the Worker's Paradise back at L-5. Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth's gravity and the moon's, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilo- meters from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it's our anchor. We use it to tack against the photon stream, hanging here beside the thing the point, the singularity we call the Highway. The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river, but subway won't carry the distance, and river, for Americans, can't carry quite the same loneliness. Call it the Tovyevski Anomaly Coor- dinates if you don't mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway. Hiro didn't trust me to get up on my own. Just before the Russian orderlies came in, he turned the lights on in my cubicle, by remote control, and let them strobe and stutter for a few seconds before they fell as a steady glare across the pictures of Saint Olga that Char- mian had taped up on the bulkhead. Dozens of them, her face repeated in newsprint, in magazine glossy. Our Lady of the Highway. Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, youngest woman of her rank in the Soviet space effort, was en route to Mars, solo, in a modified Alyut 6. The modifications allowed her to carry the prototype of a new airscrubber that was to be tested in the USSR's four-man Martian orbital lab. They could just as easily have handled the Alyut by remote, from Tsiolkovsky, but Olga wanted to log mission time. They made sure she kept busy, though; they stuck her with a series of routine hydro- gen-band radio-flare experiments, the tail end of a low- priority Soviet-Australian scientific exchange. Olga knew that her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer. But she was a diligent officer; she'd press the buttons at precisely the correct intervals. With her brown hair drawn back and caught in a net, she must have looked like some idealized Pravda cameo of the Worker in Space, easily the most photo- genic cosmonaut of either gender. She checked the Alyut's chronometer again and poised her hand above the buttons that would trigger the first of her flares. Colonel Tovyevski had no way of knowing that she was nearing the point in space that would eventually be known as the Highway. As she punched the six-button triggering sequence, the Alyut crossed those final kilometers and emitted the flare, a sustained burst of radio energy at 1420 mega- hertz, broadcast frequency of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to stations in the southern Urals and New South Wales. For 3.8 seconds the Alyut's radio~image was obscured by the afterimage of the flare. When the afterimage faded from Earth's monitor screens, the Alyut was gone. In the Urals a middle-aged Georgian technician bit through the stem of his favorite meerschaum. In New South Wales a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT. The elevator that waited to take me up to Heaven looked like Hollywood's best shot at a Bauhaus mummy case a narrow, upright sarcophagus with a clear acrylic lid. Behind it, rows of identical consoles receded like a textbook illustration of vanishing perspective. The usual crowd of technicians in yellow paper clown suits were milling purposefully around. I spotted Hiro in blue denim, his pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt open over a faded UCLA sweat shirt. Engrossed in the figures cas- cading down the face of a monitor screen, he didn't notice me. Neither did anyone else. So I just stood there and stared up at the ceiling, at the bottom of the floor of Heaven. It didn't look like much. Our fat cylinder is actually two cylinders, one in- side the other. Down here in the outer one we make our own "down" with axial rotation are all the more mundane aspects of our operation: dormitories, cafe- terias, the air-lock deck, where we haul in returning - boats, Communications and Wards, where I'm care- ful never to go. Heaven, the inner cylinder, the unlikely green heart of this place, is the ripe Disney dream of homecoming, the ravenous ear of an information-hungry global economy. A constant stream of raw data goes pulsing home to Earth, a flood of rumors, whispers, hints of transgalactic traffic. I used to lie rigid in my hammock and feel the pressure of all those data, feel them snaking through the lines I imagined behind the bulkhead, lines like sinews, strapped and bulging, ready to spasm, ready to crush me. Then Charmian moved in with me, and after I told her about the fear, she made magic against it and put up her icons of Saint Olga. And the pressure receded, fell away. "Patching you in with a translator, Toby. You may need German this morning." His voice was sand in my skull, a dry modulation of static. "Hillary " "On line, Dr. Nagashima," said a BBC voice, clear as ice crystal. "You do have French, do you, Toby? Hofmannstahl has French and English." "You stay the hell out of my hair, Hillary. Speak when you're bloody spoken to, got it?" Her silence became another layer in the complex, continual sizzle of static. Hiro shot me a dirty look across two dozen con- soles. I grinned. It was starting to happen: the elation, the adrenaline rush. I could feel it through the last wisps of barbiturate. A kid with a surfer's smooth, blond face was helping me into a jump suit. It smelled; it was new- old, carefully battered, soaked with synthetic sweat and customized pheromones. Both sleeves were plastered from wrist to shoulder with embroidered patches, mostly corporate logos, subsidiary backers of an im- aginary Highway expedition, with the main backer's much larger trademark stitched across my shoulders the firm that was supposed to have sent HALPERT, TOBY out to his rendezvous with the stars. At least my name was real, embroidered in scarlet nylon capitals just above my heart. The surfer boy had the kind of standard-issue good looks I associate with junior partners in the CIA, but his name tape said NEVSKY and repeated itself in Cyrillic. KGB, then. He was no tsiolnik; he didn't have that loose-jointed style conferred by twenty years in the L-5 habitat. The kid was pure Moscow, a polite clipboard ticker who probably knew eight ways to kill with a rolled newspaper. Now we began the ritual of drugs and pockets; he tucked a microsyringe; loaded with one of the new euphorohallucinogens, into the pocket on my left wrist, took a step back, then ticked it off on his clip- board. The printed outline of a jump-suited surrogate on his special pad looked like a handgun target. He took a five-gram vial of opium from the case he wore chained to his waist and found the pocket for that. Tick. Four- teen pockets. The cocaine was last. Hiro came over just as the Russian was finishing. "Maybe she has some hard data, Toby; she's a physical chemist, remember." It was strange to hear him acous- tically, not as bone vibration from the implant. "Everything's hard up there, Hiro." "Don't I know it?" He was feeling it, too, that special buzz. We couldn't quite seem to make eye con- tact. Before the awkwardness could deepen, he turned and gave one of the yellow clowns the thumbs up. Two of them helped me into the Bauhaus coffin and stepped back as the lid hissed down like a giant's faceplate. I began my ascent to Heaven and the home- coming of a stranger named Leni Hofmannstahl. A short trip, but it seems to take forever. * * * Olga, who was our first hitchhiker, the first one to stick out her thumb on the wavelength of hydrogen, made it home in two years. At Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan, one gray winter morning, they recorded her return on eigh- teen centimeters of magnetic tape. If a religious man one with a background in film technology had been watching the point in space where her Alyut had vanished two years before, it might have seemed to him that God had butt-spliced footage of empty space with footage of Olga's ship. She blipped back into our space-time like some amateur's atrocious special effect. A week later and they might never have reached her in time; Earth would have spun on its way and left her drifting toward the sun. Fifty-three hours after her return, a nervous volunteer named Kurtz, wearing an armored work suit, climbed through the Alyut's hatch. He was an East German specialist in space medicine, and American cigarettes were his secret vice; he wanted one very badly as he negotiated the air lock, wedged his way past a rectangular mass of airscrubber core, and chinned his helmet lights. The Alyut, even after two years, seemed to be full of breathable air. In the twin beams from the massive helmet, he saw tiny globules of blood and vomit swinging slowly past, swirling in his wake, as he edged the bulky suit out of the crawlway and entered the com- mand module. Then he found her. She was drifting above the navigational display, naked, cramped in a rigid fetal knot. Her eyes were open, but fixed on something Kurtz would never see. Her fists were bloody, clenched like stone, and her brown hair, loose now, drifted around her face like seaweed. Very slowly, very carefully, he swung himself across the white keyboards of the command console and secured his suit to the navigational display. She'd gone after the ship's communications ~gear with her bare hands, he decided. He deactivated the work suit's right claw; it unfolded automatically, like two pairs of vice- grip pliers pretending they were a flower. He extended his hand, still sealed in a pressurized gray surgical glove. Then, as gently as he could, he pried open the fingers of her left hand. Nothing. But when he opened her right fist, something spun free and tumbled in slow motion a few centimeters from the synthetic quartz of his faceplate. It looked like a seashell. Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thin- ner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine; at the Plesetsk laboratories alone, she was represented by more than two million tissue slides, racked and numbered in the subbasement of a bomb-proof biological complex. They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Ol- ga's seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of . . . Olga's seashell. The initial findings on the shell made two things clear. It was the product of no known terrestrial biosphere, and as there were no other known biospheres in the solar system, it had come from another star. Olga had either visited the place of its origin or come into contact, however distantly, with something that was, or had once been, capable of making the trip. They sent a Major Grosz out to the Tovyevski Coordinates in a specially fitted Alyut 9. Another ship followed him. He was on the last of his twenty hydrogen flares when his ship vanished. They recorded his depar- ture and waited. Two hundred thirty-four days later he returned. In the meantime they had probed the area constantly, desperate for anything that might become the specific anomaly, the irritant around which a theory might grow. There was nothing: only Grosz's ship, tum- bling out of control. He committed suicide before they could reach him, the Highway's second victim. When the towed the Alyut back to Tsiolkovsky, they found that the elaborate recording gear was blank. All of it was in perfect working order; none of it had functioned. Grosz was flash-frozen and put on the first shuttle down to Plesetsk, where bulldozers were already excavating for a new subbasement. Three years later, the morning after they lost their seventh cosmonaut, a telephone rang in Moscow. The caller introduced himself. He was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. He was authorized, he said, to make a certain offer. Under certain very specific conditions, the Soviet Union might avail itself of the best minds in Western psychiatry. It was the understanding of his agency, he continued, that such help might currently be very wel- come. His Russian was excellent. The bonephone static was a subliminal sandstorm. The elevator slid up into its narrow shaft through the floor of Heaven. I counted blue lights at two-meter intervals. After the fifth light, darkness and cessation. Hidden in the hollow command console of the dummy Highway boat, I waited in the elevator like the secret behind the gimmicked bookcase in a children's mystery story. The boat was a prop, a set piece, like the Bavarian cottage glued to the plaster alp in some amuse- ment park a nice touch, but one that wasn't quite necessary. If the returnees accept us at all, they take us for granted; our cover stories and props don't seem to make much difference. "All clear," Hiro said. "No customers hanging around." I reflexively massaged the scar behind my left ear, where they'd gone in to plant the bonephone. The side of the dummy console swung open and let in the gray dawn light of Heaven. The fake boat's interior was familiar and strange at the same time, like your own apartment when you haven't seen it for a week. One of those new Brazilian vines had snaked its way across the left vlewport since my last time up, but that seemed to be the only change in the whole scene. Big fights over those vines at the biotecture meetings, American ecologists screaming about possible nitrogen shortfalls. The Russians have been touchy about biodesign ever since they had to borrow Americans to help them with the biotic program back at Tslolkovsky 1. Nasty problem with the rot eating the hydroponic wheat; all that superfine Soviet engineering and they still couldn't establish a functional ecosystem. Doesn't help that that initial debacle paved the way for us to be out here with them now. It irritates them; so they insist on the Brazilian vines, whatever anything that gives them a chance to argue. But I like those vines: The leaves are heart-shaped, and if you rub one between your hands, it smells like cinnamon. I stood at the port and watched the clearing take shape, as reflected sunlight entered Heaven. Heaven runs Ofl Greenwich Standard; big Mylar mirrors were swiveling somewhere, out in bright vacuum, on schedule of a Greenwich Standard dawn. The recorded birdsongs began back in the trees. Birds have a very hard time in the absence of true gravity. We can't have real ones, because they go crazy trying to make do with centrifugal force. The first time you see it, Heaven lives up to its name, lush and cool and bright, the long grass dappled with wildflowers. It helps if you don't know that most of the trees are artificial, or the amount of care required to maintain something like the optimal balance between blue-green algae and diatom algae in the ponds. Char- mian says she expects Bambi to come gamboling out of the woods, and Hiro claims he knows exactly how many Disney engineers were sworn to secrecy under the Na- tional Security Act. "We're getting fragments from Hofmannstahl," Hiro said. He might almost have been talking to him- self; the handler-surrogate gestalt was going into effect, and soon we'd cease to be aware of each other. The adrenaline edge was tapering off. "Nothing very coher- ent. `Schone Maschine,' something . . . `Beautiful machine' ... Hillary thinks she sounds pretty calm, but right out of it." "Don't tell me about it. No expectations, right? Let's go in loose." I opened the hatch and took a breath of Heaven's air; it was like cool white wine. "Where's Charmian?" He sighed, a soft gust of static. "Charmian should be in Clearing Five, taking care of a Chilean who's three days home, but she's not, because she heard you were coming. So she's waiting for you by the carp pond. Stubborn bitch," he added. Charmian was flicking pebbles at the Chinese bighead carp. She had a cluster of white flowers tucked behind one ear, a wilted Marlboro behind the other. Her feet were bare and muddy, and she'd hacked the legs off her jump suit at midthigh. Her black hair was drawn back in a ponytail. We'd met for the first time at a party out in one of the welding shops, drunken voices clanging in the hol- low of the alloy sphere, homemade vodka in zero grav- ity. Someone had a bag of water for a chaser, squeezed out a double handful, and flipped it expertly into a roll- ing, floppy ball of surface tension. Old jokes about passing water. But I'm graceless in zero g. I put my hand through it when it came my way. Shook a thou- sand silvery little balls from my hair, batting at them, tumbling, and the woman beside me was laughing, turn- ing slow somersaults, long, thin girl with black hair. She wore those baggy drawstring pants that tourists take home from Tsiolkovsky and a faded NASA T-shirt three sizes too big. A minute later she was telling me about hang-gliding with the teen tsiolniki and about how proud they'd been of the weak pot they grew in one of the corn canisters. I didn't realize she was another surrogate until Hiro clicked in to tell us the party was over. She moved in with me a week later. "A minute, okay?" Hiro gritted his teeth, a hor- rible sound. "One. Uno." Then he was gone, off the circuit entirely, maybe not even listening. "How's tricks in Clearing Five?" I squatted beside her and found some pebbles of my own. "Not so hot. I had to get away from him for a while, shot him up with hypnotics. My translator told me you were on your way up."~ She has the kind of Texas accent that makes ice sound like ass. "Thought you spoke Spanish. Guy's Chilean, isn't he?" I tossed one of my pebbles into the pond. "I speak Mexican. The culture vultures said he wouldn t like my accent. Good thing, too. I can't follow him when he talks fast." One of her pebbles followed mine, rings spreading on the surface as it sank. "Which is constantly," she added. A bighead swam over to see whether her pebble was good to eat. "He isn't going to make it." She wasn't looking at me. Her tone was perfectly neutral. "Little Jorge is definitely not making it.'' I chose the flattest of my pebbles and tried to skip it across the pond, but it sank. The less I knew about Chilean Jorge, the better. I knew he was a live one, one of the ten percent. Our DOA count runs at twenty per- cent. Suicide. Seventy percent of the meatshots are automatic candidates for Wards: the diaper cases, mumblers, totally gone. Charmian and I are surrogates for that final ten percent. If the first ones to come back had only returned with seashells, I doubt that Heaven would be out here. Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. We may never find out where or how he got it, but that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thou- sand years. Charmian says we're like those poor suckers on thier island, who spend all thier time building land- ing strips to make the big silver birds come back. Charmian says that contact with "superior" civiliza- tions is something you don't wish on your worst enemy. "Ever wonder how they thought this scam up, Toby?" She was squinting into the sunlight, east, down the length of our cylindrical country, horizonless and green. "They must've had all the heavies in, the shrink elite, scattered down a long slab of genuine imitation rosewood, standard Pentagon issue. Each one got a clean notepad and a brand-new pencil, specially sharp- ened for the occasion. Everybody was there: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Skinner rat men, you name it. And every one of those bastards knew in his heart that it was time to play his best hand. As a profession, not just as representatives of a given faction. There they are, West- ern psychiatry incarnate. And nothing's happening! People are popping back off the Highway dead, or else they come back drooling, singing nursery rhymes. The live ones last about three days, won't say a goddamned thing, then shoot themselves or go catatonic." She took a small flashlight from her belt and casually cracked its plastic shell, extracting the parabolic reflector. "Krem- lin's screaming. CIA's going nuts. And worst of all, the multinationals who want to back the show are getting cold feet. `Dead spacemen? No data? No deal, friends.' So they're getting nervous, all those supershrinks, until some flake, some grinning weirdo from Berkeley maybe, he says," and her drawl sank to parody stoned mellowness, " `Like, hey, why don't we just put these people into a real nice place with a lotta good dope and somebody they can really relate to, hey?' " She laughed, shook her head. She was using the reflector to light her cigarette, concentrating the sunlight. They don't give us matchs; fires screw up the oxygen carbon dioxide balance. A tiny curl of gray smoke twisted away from the white-hot focal point. "Okay," Hiro said, "that's your minute." I checked my watch; it was more like three minutes. "Good luck, baby," she said softly, pretending to be intent on her cigarette. "Godspeed." The promise of pain. It's there each time. You know what will happen, but you don't know when, or exactly how. You try to hold on to them; you rock them in the dark. But if you brace for the pain, you can't function. That poem Hiro quotes, Teach us to care and not to care. We're like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport; some of us actually manage to blunder onto flights to London or Rio, maybe even sur- vive the trip and make it back. "Hey," say the other flies, "what's happening on the other side of that door? What do they know that we don't?" At the edge of the Highway every human language unravels in your hands except, perhaps, the language of the shaman, of the cabalist, the language of the mystic intent on map- ping hierarchies of demons, angels, saints. But the Highway is governed by rules, and we've learned a few of them. That gives us something to cling to. Rule One: One entity per ride; no teams, no couples. Rule Two: No artificial intelligences; whatever's Out there won't stop for~a smart machine, at least not the kind we know how to build. Rule Three: Recording instruments are a waste of space; they always come back blank. Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga's wake, ever more bizarre and more elegant heresies, each one hoping to shoulder its way to the in- side track. One by one, they all fall down. In the whis- pering quiet of Heaven's nights, you imagine you can hear the paradigms shatter, shards of theory tinkling into brilliant dust as the lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and all in the time it takes your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark. not Flies in an airport, hitching rides. Flies are advised to ask too many questions; flies are advised not to try for the Big Picture. Repeated attempts in that direc- tion invariably lead to the slow, relentless flowering of paranoia, your mind projecting huge, dark patterns on the walls of night, patterns that have a way of solidify- ing, becoming madness, becoming religion. Smart flies stick with Black Box theory; Black Box is the sanctioned metaphor, the Highway remaining x in every sane equa- tion. We aren't supposed to worry about what the High- way is, or who put it there. Instead, we concentrate on what we put into the Box and what we get back out of it. There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who've followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). The Black Box theorists assure us that our primary concern is to optimize this exchange. We're out here to see that our species gets its money's worth. Still, certain things become increasingly evident; one of them is that we aren't the only flies who've found their way into an air- port. We've collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. "More hicks," Charmian calls them. We're like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports. Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city. Keep it simple, a matter of In and Out. Leni Hof- mannstahl: Out. We staged the homecoming of Leni Hofmannstahl in Clearing Three, also known as Elysium. I crouched in a stand of meticulous reproductions of young vine maples and studied her ship. It had originally looked like a wingless dragonfly, a slender, ten-meter abdomen hous- ing the reaction engine. Now, with the engine removed, it looked like a matte-white pupa, larval eye bulges stuf- fed with the traditional useless array of sensors and probes. It lay on a gentle rise in the center of the clear- ing, a specially designed hillock sc~slpted to support a variety of vessel formats. The newer boats are smaller, like Grand Prix washing machines, minimalist pods with no pretense to being exploratory vessels. Modules for meatshots. "I don't like it," Hiro said. "I don't like this one. It doesn't feel right. . . ." He might have been taiking to himself; he might almost have been me talking to myself, which meant the handler-surrogate gestalt was almost operational. Locked into my role, I'm no longer the point man for Heaven's hungry ear, a specialized probe radio-linked with an even more specialized psy- chiatrist; when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else, something we can never admit to each other, not when it isn't happening. Our relationship would give a classical Freudian nightmares. But I knew that he was right; something felt terribly wrong this time. The clearing was roughly circular. It had to be; it was actually a fifteen-meter round cut through the floor of Heaven, a circular elevator disguised as an Alpine minimeadow. They'd sawed Leni's engine off, hauled her boat into the outer cylinder, lowered the clearing to the air-lock deck, then lifted her to Heaven on a giant pie plate landscaped with grass and wildflowers. They'd blanked her sensors with broadcast overrides and sealed her ports and hatch; Heaven is supposed to be a surprise to the newly arrived. I found myself wondering whether Charmian was back with Jorge yet. Maybe she'd be cooking something for him, one of the fish we "catch" as they're released into our hands from cages on the pool bottoms. I imag- ined the smell of frying fish, closed my eyes, and imag- ined Charmian wading in the shallow water, bright drops beading on her thighs, long-legged girl in a fish- pond in Heaven. "Move, Toby! In now!" My skull rang with the volume; training and the gestalt reflex already had me halfway across the clear- ing. "Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. . . ." Hiro's mantra, and I knew it had managed to go all wrong, then. Hillary the translator was a shrill undertone, BBC ice cracking as she rattled something out at top speed, something about anatomical charts. Hiro must have used the remotes to unseal the hatch, but he didn't wait for it to unscrew itself. He triggered six explosive bolts built into the hull and blew the whole hatch mechanism out intact. It barely missed me. I had instinctively swerved out of its way. Then I was scrambling up the boat's smooth side, grabbing for the honeycomb struts just inside the entranceway; the hatch mechanism had taken the alloy ladder with it. And I froze there, crouching in the smell of plastique from the bolts, because that was when the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time. I'd felt it before, the Fear, but only the fringes, the least edge. Now it was vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species. It made me cringe, whining. I was shaking, groveling, crying. They lecture us on it, warn us, try to explain it away as a kind of temporary agoraphobia endemic to our work. But we know what it is; surrogates know and handlers can't. No explanation has ever even come close. It's the Fear. It's the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards. Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear, bloodying her hands to destroy her ship's broadcast capacity, praying Earth would lose her, let her die.... Hiro was frantic, but he must have understood, and he knew what to do. He hit me with the pain switch. Hard. Over and over, like a cattle prod. He drove me into the boat. He drove me through the Fear. Beyond the Fear, there was ~ room. Silence, and a stranger's smell, a woman's. The cramped module was worn, almost homelike, the tired plastic of the acceleration couch patched with peeling strips of silver tape. But it all seemed to mold itself around an absence. She wasn't there. Then I saw the insane frieze of ballpoint scratchings, crabbed sym- bols, thousands of tiny, crooked oblongs locking and overlapping. Thumb-smudged, pathetic, it covered most of the rear bulkhead. Hiro was static, whispering, pleading. Find her, Toby, now, please, Toby, find her, find her, find I found her in the surgical bay, a narrow alcove off the crawlway. Above her, the Schone Maschine, the surgical manipulator, glittering, its bright, thin arms neatly folded, chromed limbs of a spider crab, tipped with hemostats, forceps, laser scalpel. Hiliary was hysterical, half-lost on some faint channel, something about the anatomy of the human arm, the tendons, the arteries, basic taxonomy. Hillary was screaming. There was no blood at all. The manipulator is a clean machine, able to do a no-mess job in zero g, vacuuming the blood away. She'd died just before Hiro had blown the hatch, her right arm spread out across the white plastic work surface like a medieval drawing, flayed, muscles and other tissues tacked out in a neat symmetrical display, held with a dozen stainless-steel dissecting pins. She bled to death. A surgical manipula- tor is carefully programmed against suicides, but it can double as a robot dissector, preparing biologicals for storage. She'd found a way to fool it. You usually can, with machines, given time. She'd had eight years. She lay there in a collapsible framework, a thing like the fossil skeleton of a dentist's chair; through it, I could see the faded embroidery across the back of her jump suit, the trademark of a West German electronics conglomerate. I tried to tell her. I said, "Please, you're dead. Forgive us, we came to try to help, Hiro and I. Understand? He knows you, see, Hiro, he's here in my head. He's read your dossier, your sexual profile, your favorite colors; he knows your childhood fears, first lover, name of a teacher you liked. And I've got just the right pheromOne5~ and I'm a walking arsenal of drugs, something here you're bound to like. And we can lie, Hiro and I; we're ace liars. Please. You've got to see. Perfect strangers, but Hiro and I, for you, we make up the perfect stranger, Leni." She was a small woman, blond, her smooth, straight hair streaked with premature gray. I touched her hair, once, and went out into the clearing. As I stood there, the long grass shuddered, the wildflowers began to shake, and we began our descent, the boat centered on its landscaped round of elevator. The clear- ing slid down out of Heaven, and the sunlight was lost in the glare of huge vapor arcs that threw hard shadows across the broad deck of the air lock. Figures in red suits, running. A red Dinky Toy did a U-turn on fat rub- ber wheels, getting out of our way. Nevsky, the KGB surfer, was waiting at the foot of the gangway that they wheeled to the edge of the clear- ing. I didn't see him until I reached the bottom. "I must take the drugs now, Mr. Halpert." I stood there, swaying, blinking tears from my eyes. He reached out to steady me. I wondered whether he even knew why he was down here in the lock deck, a yellow suit in red territory. But he probably didn't mind; he didn't seem to mind anything very much; he had his clipboard ready. "I must take them, Mr. Halpert." I stripped out of the suit, bundled it, and handed it to him. He stuffed it into a plastic Ziploc, put the Ziploc in a case manacled to his left wrist, and spun the com- bination. "Don't take them all at once, kid," I said. Then I fainted. Late that night Charmian brought a special kind of darkness down to my cubicle, individual doses sealed in heavy foil. It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear. It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents' car, on a rainy night when you'.re five years old, warm and secure. Charmian's a lot slicker that I am when it comes to getting past the clipboard tickers, the ones like Nevsky. I didn't ask her why she was back from Heaven, or what had happened to Jorge. She didn't ask me any- thing about Leni. Hiro was gone, off the air entirely. I'd seen him at the debriefing that afternoon; as usual, our eyes didn't meet. It didn't matter. I knew he'd be back. It had been business as usual, really. A bad day in Heaven, but it's never easy. It's hard when you feel the Fear for the first time, but I've always known it was there, waiting. They talked about Leni's diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer. We'll probably never know what she met out there; we'll probably never know the details of the transaction. We might be sorry if we ever found out. We aren't the only hinter- land tribe, the only ones looking for scraps. Damn Leni, damn that Frenchman, damn all the ones who bring things home, who bring cancer cures, seashells, things without names who keep us here wait- ing, who fill Wards, who bring us the Fear. But cling to this dark, warm and close, to Charmian's slow breath- ing, to the rhythm of the sea. You get high enough out here; you'll hear the sea, deep down behind the constant conch-shell static of the bonephone. It's something we carry with us, no matter how far from home. Charmian stirred beside me, muttered a stranger's name, the name of some broken traveler long gone down to Wards. She holds the current record; she kept a man alive for two weeks, until he put his eyes out with his thumbs. She screamed all the way down, broke her nails on the elevator's plastic lid. Then they sedated her. We both have the drive, though, that special need, that freak dynamic that lets us keep going back to Heaven. We both got it the same way, lay out there in our little boats for weeks, waiting for the Highway to take us. And when our last flare was gone, we were hauled back here by tugs. Some people just aren't taken, and nobody knows why. And you'll never get a second chance. They say it's too expensive, but what they really mean, as they eye the bandages on your wrists, is that now you're too valuable, too much use to them as a potential surrogate. Don't worry about the suicide attempt, they'll tell you; happens all the time. Perfectly understandable: feeling of profound rejection. But I'd wanted to go, wanted it so bad. Charmian, too. She tried with pills. But they worked on us, twisted us a little, aligned our drives, planted the bonephones, paired us with handlers. Olga must have known, must have seen it all, somehow she was trying to keep us from finding our way out there, where she'd been. She knew that if we found her, we'd have to go. Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go. I never will. But we can swing here in this dark that towers way above us, Charmian's hand in mind. Between our palms the drug's torn foil wrapper. And Saint Olga smiles out at us from the walls; you can feel her, all those prints from the same publicity shot, torn and taped across the walls of night, her white smile, forever.

_____

'Hinterlands' can be found in Gibson's collection of short stories Burning Chrome (1986).

#william gibson #hinterlands #short story #science fiction #burning chrome

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Tale of the Unknown Island (1998)

José Saramago

A man went to knock on the king's door and said, Give me a boat. The king's house had many other doors, but this was the petitioning door. As the king spent all his time sitting at the fawning door (this means it was where people came to fawn over the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking on the petitioning door, he pretended not to understand, and it was only when the continuous hammering of the bronze knocker went beyond being notorious and became scandalous by disturbing the peace in the neighbourhood (people would start to grumble, What kind of a king do we have who never answers the door), that he would order his first secretary to go and find out what the petitioner who refused to be silenced was petitioning for.

The first secretary would then call for the second secretary, who would send for the third secretary, who would order the first adjutant, who in turn would order the second adjutant, and so on all the way down to the cleaning-woman who, having no one to order about, would open the door a crack and call out through the slit, What do you want. The supplicant would state his business, or rather, he would ask for what he had come to ask for, then he would settle himself in a corner of the doorway, waiting for his petition to work its way up again, from person to person, until it reached the king. As the king would be very busy with his fawnings, his answer would always take time, and it was no small indication of his concern with the well-being and happiness of his people that he would then decide to ask the first secretary for confirmation of the request in writing. The first secretary would then, needless to say, pass on the message to the second secretary, who would pass it on to the third, and all the way down the line, until it reached the cleaning-woman again, who would issue a yes or a no according to the mood she was in.

However, in the case of the man who wanted a boat, things didn't happen quite like this. When the cleaning-woman asked him through the slit in the door, What do you want, instead of asking, as everyone did, for a title, a medal, or simply money, the man replied, I want to speak to the king. You know jolly well that the king can't come, he's at the fawning door, answered the woman. Well then, go and tell him that I shall not go away until he comes in person to find out what it is I want, retorted the man with finality, and he laid himself down along the threshold of the door, covering himself with a rug against the cold. He would have to be stepped over whenever people went in or out.

Now this created a problem, considering that, according to the protocol of the doors, only one supplicant could be dealt with at a time, which meant that as long as there was someone there waiting for an answer, no one else could get close and try to put forward his needs or his ambitions. It would appear at first that the person who had most to gain from this clause of the regulations was the king because, as he had fewer people bothering him with their complaints, he had more time and leisure to receive, consider and savour his fawnings. On second thoughts, however, the king was the loser, and very much so, because, when people realised that his answer was taking longer than was fair, public protest would greatly increase, and this, in turn, would have an immediate and adverse effect on the influx of fawnings. In this particular case, the outcome of his weighing what was to be gained against what was to be lost was that three days later the king, in royal person, went to the petitioning door to find out what it was that the mischief-maker, who had refused to convey his petition through the correct bureaucratic channels, wanted to ask for.

Open the door, said the king to the cleaning-woman, and she asked, All the way, or just a little. The king hesitated for a moment, for the truth was that he did not like to be exposed to the air of the streets very much. But then he thought it would be unseemly, apart from being unworthy of his grandeur, to speak to a subject through a slit as though he were afraid of him, especially with the cleaning-woman watching the exchange, as she would go off at once and say God knows what. Wide open, he ordered. When he heard the bolts being drawn, the man who wanted a boat stood up from the doorstep, rolled up his rug, and waited.

The unexpected arrival of the king (never had such a thing happened since he had been wearing a crown upon his head) caused tremendous surprise, not only amongst the aforementioned applicants, but also amongst the neighbours who, drawn by the sudden commotion, had appeared at their windows, in the houses on the other side of the street. The only person who was not unduly surprised was the man who had come to ask for a boat. He had guessed, and had been right in his estimation, that even if he did take three days the king was bound to be curious to see the face of someone who, with amazing audacity, had sent for him, with no explanation. Torn therefore between his irrepressible inquisitiveness and his dislike of seeing so many people gathered together, the king, somewhat rudely, asked the following three questions, What is it you want, Why didn't you say what you wanted straight away, and Do you think I have nothing better to do. But the man replied only to the first question. Give me a boat, he said.

The king was so shocked and taken aback that the cleaning-woman rushed a straw-seated chair over to him, the same chair that she herself sat on whenever she needed to work with a needle and thread since, besides cleaning, she was also responsible for little sewing jobs at the palace, such as darning the pages' socks. Sitting awkwardly because the straw- seated chair was much lower than his throne, the king was looking for the best position to put his legs in, either pulling them in or stretching them out to the sides, while the man who wanted a boat waited patiently for the next question. And what do you want a boat for, can you tell me, was what the king did ask once he had finally settled down in tolerable comfort on the cleaning-woman's chair. To go and look for the unknown island, replied the man. What unknown island, asked the king, trying to suppress a peal of laughter, as though he had a complete madman before him with a mania about sailing, and whom it might not be a good idea to vex straight away. The unknown island, the man repeated.

Nonsense, said the king, there are no longer any unknown islands. Who told you, king, that there are no longer any unknown islands? They are all on the maps. Maps only show the known islands. And what is this unknown island that you want to go and look for? If I could tell you, then it would no longer be unknown. Who has told you about it, asked the king, more soberly now. No one. In that case, why do you insist on saying that it does exist? Simply because it is impossible that an unknown island should not exist. And you have come here to ask me for a boat. Yes, I came to ask you for a boat. And who are you, that I should give you one? And who are you not to give me one? I am the king of this realm, and all the boats in the kingdom belong to me. You probably belong more to them than they to you. What do you mean, asked the king, troubled. That you, without them, are nothing, and that they, without you, can always sail. Only on my orders, with my pilots and my sailors. I am not asking you for pilots or sailors, I am only asking you for a boat. And this unknown island, should you find it, would be for me? You, king, are only interested in known islands. I am also interested in unknown islands when they are no longer unknown. Maybe this one will not let itself be known. Then I shall not give you the boat. You will.

At these words, spoken with calm assurance, the applicants at the petitioning door, who, since the beginning of the conversation had been growing more and more impatient with each passing minute, and more because they wanted to be rid of him than to show kindred solidarity, decided to intervene in favour of the man who wanted a boat, shouting out, Give him the boat, give him the boat. The king opened his mouth to tell the cleaning-woman to call the palace guard to come and restore public order and enforce discipline, but just then the neighbouring women who had been watching from their windows joined the chorus with gusto, shouting out with the others, Give him the boat, give him the boat. Faced with such an unequivocal expression of popular opinion, and worried about what he had already missed at the fawning door, the king raised his right hand to demand silence and said, I will give you a boat, but you will have to gather the crew yourself, I need my sailors for the known islands.

The screaming cheers of the crowd smothered the thanks of the man who had come to ask for a boat and anyway, his lips could just as easily have mouthed, Thank you my lord, as, I'll manage. But what was clearly heard was the king's utterance, as follows, Go to the docks, and when you're there, ask for the harbour-master, tell him that I sent you, and that he is to give you the boat, take my calling card. The man who was to be given a boat read the calling card. Underneath the king's name it said King, and the following words he had written leaning on the cleaning-woman's shoulder, Give the bearer a boat, it does not need to be large, but should sail well and be safe, I do not want my conscience to be troubled should things go wrong. When the man raised his head, he might have been about to thank the king this time, but the king had already withdrawn, there was only the cleaning-woman watching him thoughtfully. The man stepped back from the threshold of the door, thus signalling that the other applicants could come forward. Needless to say the chaos was indescribable, everyone wanted to be first, but it was too bad, as luck would have it the door was already closed again.

Again the bronze knocker called for the cleaning-woman, but the cleaning- woman was not there, she had gone round and left with her mop and bucket through another door, the decisions door, which is seldom used though when it is, it is. This explains why the cleaning-woman had been deep in thought. It was that she had just then decided to follow the man when he left for the harbour to see to the boat. She had been thinking she'd had enough of scrubbing and cleaning palaces, that the time had come for her to change jobs, that her true vocation lay in cleaning and scrubbing boats, at least she would never run out of water at sea. Little did the man realise that, without yet having started to gather a crew, he was already being followed by the future overseer of his deck-scrubbing and other cleaning. This is indeed how destiny tends to behave. It is right behind us, it has already stretched out its hand to touch us on the shoulder, and still we declare, It's all over, it doesn't matter.

After quite a walk, the man reached the harbour, went to the docks and asked for the harbour-master. And while he was waiting for the man he started to wonder which one of the many boats that were there would be his. He already knew it would not be a large one, the king's calling card was quite clear on that point, so that ruled out passenger ships, cargo ships and warships. Neither would it be so small that it could not withstand the force of the winds and the rigours of the sea, the king had been adamant on this point too. It should sail well and be safe, those were his actual words, thus implicitly excluding rowing-boats, barges and launches, although these sail well and are safe, each suited to its particular purpose. But they had not been born to plough the seven seas, which is where unknown islands are to be found. A little way away from there, hidden behind some barrels, the cleaning-woman cast her eyes over the boats that were moored there. If I could chose, it

would be that one there, she thought. However, her opinion did not matter, she hadn't even been recruited yet, let's wait and see what the harbour-master will have to say. The harbour-master came. He read the calling card, looked at the man from top to toe, and asked the question that the king had forgotten to ask, Do you know how to sail, do you have a sailing licence, to which the man replied, I shall learn at sea. The harbour-master said, I would not advise you to do that, I am a captain, and I would not venture off in just any boat. Give me one that I can venture off in then, no, not one of those, I'd rather you gave me a boat that I can respect and that will come to respect me. You are talking like a sailor, but you are not a sailor. If I talk like one, I might as well be one.

The harbour-master read the king's calling card again, then he asked, Can you tell me what you want the boat for. To go and look for the unknown island. There are no longer any unknown islands. The king told me the same thing. All he knows about islands, he has learnt from me. It's strange that you, being a man of the sea, should say such a thing, that there are no longer any unknown islands, I am a man of the land, and I am not unaware of the fact that all islands are unknown until we land on them. But if I understood correctly you are going off to look for one where no one has ever landed. I will find out when I get there. If you get there. Yes, sometimes one can be shipwrecked on the way, but, if this happened to me, you could write in the annals of the harbour that this was as far as I got. Do you mean to say that when it comes to getting there, one always gets there. You wouldn't be who you are if you didn't know this already.

The harbour-master said, I am going to give you a vessel to suit your needs. The man said, Which one? It is a boat with lots of experience, from back when everyone was looking for unknown islands. Which one? It even found some, I believe. Which one? That one.

As soon as the cleaning-woman realised where the harbour-master was pointing, she ran out from behind the barrels and shouted, That's my boat, that's my boat. She must be forgiven for her extraordinary and seemingly inappropriate claims of ownership, but that was the boat she had liked, that's all. It looks like a caravel, said the man. More or less, the harbour-master explained, it was a caravel to start with, then it underwent repairs and adaptations that changed it a little. But it is still a caravel. Yes, on the whole it has kept its old looks. And it has masts and sails. When you go looking for unknown islands, this is the best sort of boat.

The cleaning-woman couldn't hold back. As for me, I do not want any other. Who are you, asked the man. Don't you remember me? Not at all. I am the cleaning-woman. What do you mean? From the king's palace. The one who opened the petitioning door? None other. And why are you not at the king's palace cleaning and opening doors? Because the doors that I really wanted have already been opened and because from today onwards I am only going to clean boats. So you have made up your mind to come with me to look for the unknown island? I left the palace through the decisions door. In that case, go to the caravel, see what it is like, after all this time it must need a thorough cleaning, and mind the seagulls, they are not to be trusted. Don't you want to come with me and get to know your boat inside? You said it was yours. I'm sorry, it was only because I liked it. Liking is probably the best way of having, having must be the worst way of liking.

The harbour-master interrupted the conversation. I have to hand the keys over to the owner of the boat, either to one or to the other, make up your minds, it's all the same to me. Do boats have keys, asked the man. Not to go into them, they don't, but there are cupboards and lockers, and the captain's desk with the logbook. She can take over everything, I am going to find a crew, said the man, and he walked away.

The cleaning-woman went to the harbour-master's office to collect the keys, then she boarded the boat. Two things came in useful there, the mop from the palace and the warning about the seagulls. She was still crossing the gangplank that connected the bulwarks to the quay when the cursed birds attacked her furiously, screeching, with wide-opened beaks, as though they wanted to devour her there and then. They did not know who they were dealing with. The cleaning-woman put down her bucket, dropped the keys down her cleavage, stood firmly on the gangplank, and, brandishing her mop like a sword in the olden days, she disbanded the murderous flock. It was only when she got into the boat that she understood the seagulls' fury. There were nests everywhere, many of them abandoned, others containing eggs, and a few holding chicks with gaping beaks, waiting for food. Well, she said, a boat that is going to look for the unknown island cannot look like this, as though it were some kind of chicken-coop. She threw the empty nests into the sea, and as for the others she left them alone, to wait and see. Then she rolled up her sleeves and started scrubbing the deck. When she had finished this strenuous task she opened the sail-lockers and carried out a detailed examination of the state of the seams. They had not gone to sea for so long, had not borne the wholesome tugging of the wind. The sails are the muscles of the boat, you only have to see how they swell when they strain, but, and the same thing happens with muscles, if you do not use them regularly they weaken, grow flabby, and lose their nerve. And the seams are the nerves of the sails, thought the cleaning-woman, delighted to be learning the art of seamanship so quickly. She found some hems that had come apart, but she merely marked them, seeing that this work could not be done with the needle and thread with which she used to darn the pages' socks before, in fact, just yesterday.

As for the other lockers, she saw at once that they were empty. She did not mind at all that the gunpowder locker was bare apart from a little black dust on the bottom, which at first looked to her more like rats' droppings. Indeed there is no written law, at least as far as a cleaning- woman can know, saying that looking for an unknown island necessarily means going to war. But she was most annoyed by the total lack of provisions in the food lockers, not on account of herself, as she was more than used to the meagreness of the palace table, but because of the man to whom this boat had been given. The sun will set soon, she said to herself, and he will turn up saying he's hungry, which is what all men say the minute they get home, as though only they have stomachs and only they need to fill them. And if he brings back sailors for the crew, then I don't know how we'll manage, as they eat like horses, she said.

She needn't have worried so much. The sun had just disappeared into the ocean when the man who had a boat appeared at the end of the quay. He was carrying a parcel, but he was alone and crestfallen. The cleaning- woman went to wait for him by the gangway, but before she could open her mouth to find out how the rest of his day had gone, he said, Don't worry, I have brought food for both of us. And the sailors, she asked. As you can see, no one came. But did they at least promise to come, she asked again. They told me there were no more unknown islands, and that, even if there were, they wouldn't drag themselves away from the comforts of home and the good life they have on board passenger ships to set off on ocean-bound adventures, searching for the impossible, as though we were still in the days when the sea was obscure. And what did you tell them? That the sea is always obscure. And didn't you tell them about the unknown island? How could I talk to them about an unknown island, if I do not know one? But you are sure it exists. As sure as I am that the sea is obscure. Right now, looking from here, the sea the colour of jade and the sky like a burning fire, I cannot see anything obscure about it. It's just an illusion, even islands sometimes seem to float above the waters. What are you going to do, if you have no crew? I don't know yet. We could stay and live here, I could offer to clean the boats that come to berth, and you must surely have a trade, a job, a profession, as they say nowadays. I do, I did and I shall do if need be, but I want to find the unknown island, I want to know who I am when I am on it. Don't you know? If you do not get out of yourself, you will never find out who you are.

When he had nothing to do, the cleaning-woman said, the king's philosopher would come and sit next to me and watch me darning the pages' socks, and sometimes he would say that every man is an island, but as that was nothing to do with me, me being a woman, I paid no attention. What do you think, that you must leave the island to see the island, that we cannot see ourselves unless we ourselves leave. Unless we leave ourselves, you mean. It is not the same thing.

The fire in the sky was dying down, the water suddenly turned purple, and now not even the cleaning-woman could doubt that the sea can indeed be obscure, at least at certain times. The man said, Let's leave philosophy to the king's philosopher, that's what he is paid for, we'll eat now. But the woman did not agree. First, you have to see your boat, you only know it from the outside. What did you think of it? Some of the hems on the sails are in need of reinforcement. Did you go down to the hold, was it leaking? There is a little water at the bottom, mixed with ballast, but it seems that's the way it should be, it's good for the boat. How did you learn these things? Just like that. Just like what? Like you, when you told the harbour-master that you would learn to sail while at sea. We are not yet at sea. But we're already on the water. I always thought that in sailing there were only two real masters, one the sea, the other the boat. And the sky, you are forgetting the sky. Yes, of course, the sky. The winds, the clouds, the sky, Yes, the sky.

It took less than a quarter of an hour for them to finish their tour, one cannot go for long walks on a caravel, even when it has been transformed. She's beautiful, said the man, but if I cannot find a big enough crew to man her, I shall have to tell the king that I no longer want the boat. You give up at the first setback? The first setback was having to wait three days for the king, and I didn't give up. If you cannot find any sailors who want to come, the two of us will manage. You're insane, two people on their own couldn't sail a boat like this, I would always have to be at the helm, and as for you, well there's no point even trying to explain it to you, it's madness. We'll see, right now we must eat. They climbed up onto the quarterdeck, the man still complaining about what he considered madness. The cleaning-woman opened the food basket she had brought with her, a loaf of bread, some hard goat's cheese, olives, a bottle of wine. The moon was already rising over the sea, the shadows of the yard-arm and the main mast came to lie at their feet. She's truly beautiful, our caravel, said the woman, and she at once corrected herself, your caravel, yours. I fear the boat will not be mine for much longer. It is yours, the king gave it to you. I asked him for it so that I could look for an unknown island. But these things cannot be done on the spur of the moment, they take time, my grandfather used to say that whoever goes to sea has to get ready on land, and he wasn't even a sailor. Without a crew we cannot sail. So you said. And the boat needs to be supplied with the thousands of things required on a journey such as this, when we don't even know where it will lead us to. Of course, and then we'll have to wait for the right time of year, and leave when the tide is right, and people will come to wish us bon voyage. You're making fun of me. I would never make fun of someone who made me leave through the decisions' door. I'm sorry. And I shall not go back through it again, whatever happens. The cleaning-woman's face was completely bathed in moonlight. She's beautiful, she is truly beautiful, thought the man. As for the woman, she didn't think anything, she must have thought it all out during those three days, when she opened the door a crack every now and then to see if that man was still out there, waiting.

There was not a crumb of bread or cheese left over, nor a drop of wine. The olive stones had been thrown into the sea, the floor was as clean as when the cleaning-woman gave it its last scrubbing. The foghorn of a passenger ship that was going out to sea let off a mighty roar, probably sounding just like the leviathan did, and the woman said, When it is our turn, we shall make less noise. Although they were inside the docks, the water rippled a little as the passenger ship went by, and the man said, But we shall sway much more. They both laughed, then they were quiet. After a while one of them suggested that they had better go to bed, Though it's not as if I am tired, and the other agreed, Nor me. Then they were quiet again, the moon went on rising, and at one point the woman said, There are bunk beds below. The man said, Yes, and that's when they stood up and went below deck. There the woman said, See you in the morning, I'm going this way, and the man replied, And I'll go this way, see you in the morning. They didn't say port or starboard, probably because they were still novices at sea. The woman turned back. She took two pieces of candle from her apron pocket. I nearly forgot, she said, I found them when I was cleaning, but what I don't have are any matches. I do, said the man.

She held the candles, one in each hand. He lit a match. Then, sheltering the flame under his curled fingers, he took it with the utmost care over to the old candlewicks, the flame caught, the light grew as slowly as the moonlight, and bathed the cleaning-woman's face. No need to say what the man was thinking, She's beautiful, but what she was thinking does need to be said, You can tell he only has eyes for the unknown island. This is how people make mistakes about what certain looks mean, especially at first.

She gave him a candle, and said, See you in the morning, sleep well. He wanted to say the same thing in a different way. Sweet dreams, was what he did say. When he was down below, lying on his bunk, he thought of other things he might have said, things that would have been more amusing and, most of all, more meaningful, such as could be expected from a man when he is alone with a woman. He was wondering if she was already asleep, if she had taken a long time to fall asleep, when he found himself looking for her and he couldn't find her anywhere, they were both lost on a huge boat. A dream is a crafty magician. It changes the proportions of things as well as distances, it separates people when they are together, it brings them together when they hardly see each other, the woman was asleep just a few yards away and he didn't know how to reach her, yet it is so easy to go from port to starboard.

He had wished her sweet dreams, but he was the one who spent the whole night dreaming. He dreamt that his caravel was out at sea, with its three triangular sails billowing magnificently, cutting across the waves, while he manned the helm and the crew rested in the shade. He couldn't understand how the sailors could be there, when in town, back on land, they had refused to set sail with him to go and search for the unknown island. They probably regretted the scornful disdain they had shown him. He saw animals all over the deck, chickens, ducks, rabbits, all the usual domestic livestock, pecking at grains of corn or nibbling at cabbage leaves that a sailor was throwing them. He couldn't remember when he had brought them on board, but it was quite natural that they should be there. Just imagine that the unknown island should turn out to be, as had happened so often in the past, a desert island, it was best to play it safe, we all know that to open the door of a rabbit hutch and grab a rabbit by the ears has always been much easier than chasing it up hill and down dale. From the depth of the hold, there arose a chorus of horses whinnying, oxen lowing, donkeys braying, the voices of the noble beasts needed for heavy work, and how did they get here, how can they be on a caravel where there is hardly enough space for the human crew. Suddenly the wind veered, the mainsail rippled and flapped, and from behind it appeared what couldn't be seen before, a gathering of women. Even without counting they could be estimated to number as many as the sailors, and they were busying themselves with womanly things, the time had not yet come to busy themselves with anything else.

Of course this can only be a dream, in real life no one has ever travelled like this. The helmsman's eyes are searching for the cleaning-woman and don't see her. Maybe she is in the starboard bunk, having a rest after scrubbing the deck, he thought, but it was a deceptive thought, because well he knew, although again he didn't know how, that at the last minute she hadn't wanted to come, that she had jumped on to the quay, saying from there, Good-bye, good-bye, as you only have eyes for the unknown island, I'm leaving. And it isn't true. Even now his eyes are searching for her and cannot find her.

Just then the sky clouded over and it started to rain, and after the rain innumerable plants began sprouting from the rows of bags of earth lined up along the bulwark, not because there might not be enough soil on the unknown island, but because, this way, time could be saved, on the day we all get there all we'd have to do is transplant the fruit trees, sow the grains of the small harvest that will ripen here, and decorate the flower-beds with the flowers that will burst forth from these buds. The helmsman asks the sailors who are resting on the deck if they can see any uninhabited island, and they reply that they can see neither one kind nor the other, but they are thinking of disembarking at the first inhabited land they come across, as long as there is a harbour in which to anchor, an inn in which to drink and a bed in which to frolic. Because this is unbearable, all these people together in one place. And what about the unknown island, asked the helmsman. The unknown island is something that does not exist, it is no more than an idea in your head, the king's geographers have looked at the maps and stated that islands awaiting discovery are a thing of the past. You ought to have stayed in town instead of coming and interfering with my sailing. We were looking for a better place to live and decided to take advantage of your trip. You are not sailors? We never have been. I shall never be able to navigate this boat on my own. You should have thought of that before asking the king for it, the sea doesn't teach you how to sail.

Then the helmsman sighted land in the distance. He wanted to sail past it, to pretend that it was the mirage of another land, an image that had arrived through space from the other side of the world. But the men who had never been sailors clamoured, saying that this was exactly where they wanted to disembark. This island is on the map, they shouted, we shall kill you if you do not take us there. Then, of its own accord, the caravel turned its bow towards land, entered the harbour and came to rest alongside the quay.

You may go, said the helmsman. At once they streamed ashore, first the women, then the men. But they did not leave alone, they took with them the ducks, the rabbits and the chickens. They took the oxen, the donkeys and the horses. Even the seagulls, one after the other, flew off and left the boat carrying their little chicks in their beaks, a feat that they had never performed before, though there is always a first time. The helmsman watched the rout in silence. He did nothing to hold back those who were abandoning him. At least they had left him with the trees, the wheat and the flowers, with the creepers winding round the masts and hanging from the gunwale like festoons. Because of the stampede on the way out, the sacks of earth had ripped and spilled so much that the deck looked like a field that had been ploughed and sown, all it would take was a little more rain for this to be a good year for the crops.

Since the beginning of the journey to the unknown island, the helmsman hasn't been seen to eat. It must be because he is dreaming, only dreaming, and if in his dream he should feel like a piece of bread or an apple, it would be an imaginary meal, nothing more. The roots of the trees are already reaching into the timbers. Soon these hoisted sails will no longer be required. All the wind will have to do is to blow through the tree- tops and guide the caravel towards her destiny. She is a floating forest that sails and sways over the waves, a forest in which, who knows how, birds have started to sing. They must have been hidden somewhere and have suddenly decided to come out into the light, probably because the harvest is ripe and ready for reaping. The man locked the wheel and went down to the field holding a scythe, and it was when he had cut the first stems that he saw a shadow next to his shadow. He woke up clinging onto the cleaning-woman, and she onto him, their bodies as one, their bunks as one, and there was no knowing whether this bunk was the port or the starboard one. Then, as soon as the sun had risen, the man and the woman went to the prow of the boat to paint, in white letters on either side, the name that still had to be given to the caravel. At the midday hour, the Unknown Island went off to sea with the tide, looking for itself.

____ This short story was published shortly after Saramago won the Literature Nobel Prize.

#josé saramago #tale of the unknown island #short story

[bathtubfullofbullets]

A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948)

J. D. Salinger

There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women’s pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun - or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left—the wet—hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and—it was the fifth or sixth ring—picked up the phone.

"Hello," she said, keeping the fingers of her left hand outstretched and away from her white silk dressing gown, which was all that she was wearing, except mules—her rings were in the bathroom.

"I have your call to New York now, Mrs. Glass," the operator said.

"Thank you," said the girl, and made room on the night table for the ashtray.

A woman’s voice came through. "Muriel? Is that you?"

The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. "Yes, Mother. How are you?" she said.

"I’ve been worried to death about you. Why haven’t you phoned? Are you all right?"

"I tried to get you last night and the night before. The phone here’s been—."

"Are you all right, Muriel?"

The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. "I’m fine. I’m hot. This is the hottest day they’ve had in Florida in --."

"Why haven’t you called me? I’ve been worried to - -."

"Mother, darling, don’t yell at me. I can hear you beautifully," said the girl. I called you twice last night. Once just after - -."

I told your father you’d probably call last night. But, no, he had to – Are you all right Muriel? Tell me the truth."

"I’m fine. Stop asking me that, please."

"When did you get there?"

"I don’t know. Wednesday morning, early."

"Who drove?"

"He did," said the girl. "And don’t get excited. He drove very nicely. I was amazed."

"He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of-."

" Mother," the girl interrupted, "I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact."

"Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?"

"I said he drove very nicely, Mother. Now, please. I asked him to stay close to the white line, and all, and he knew what I meant, and he did. He was even trying not to look at the trees - you could tell. Did Daddy get the car fixed, incidentally?

"Not yet. They want four hundred dollars, just to--."

"Mother, Seymour told Daddy that he’d pay for it. There’s no reason for --."

"Well, well see. How did he behave—in the car and all?"

"All right," said the girl.

"Did he keep calling you that awful--."

"No. He has something new now."

"What?"

"Oh, what’s the difference, Mother?

"Muriel, I want to know. Your father--."

"All right, all right. He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948," the girl said, and giggled.

"It isn’t funny, Muriel. It isn’t funny at all. It’s horrible. It’s sad, actually. When I think how--"

"Mother," the girl interrupted, "listen to me. You remember that book he sent me from Germany? You know, those German poems. What’d I do with it? I’ve been racking my-."

"You have it."

‘Are you sure?" said the girl.

"Certainly. That is, I have it. It’s in Freddy’s room. You left it here and I didn’t have room for it in the—Why? Does he want it?"

"No. Only, he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I’d read it."

"It was in German!"

"Yes, dear. That doesn’t make any difference," said the girl, crossing her legs. "He said that the poems happen to be written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should’ve bought a translation or something. Or learned the language, if you please."

"Awful. Awful. It’s sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night—."

"Just a second, Mother," the girl said. She went over to the window seat for her cigarettes, lit one, and returned to her seat on the bed. "Mother", she said, exhaling smoke.

"Muriel. Now, listen to me."

"I’m listening."

"Your father talked to Dr. Sivetski."

"Oh?" said the girl.

"He told him everything. At least, he said he did—you know your father. The trees. That business with the window. Those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away. What he did with all those lovely pictures from Bermuda—everything."

"Well?" said the girl.

"Well. In the first place, he said it was a perfect crime the Army released him from the hospital – my word of honor. He very definitely told your father there’s a chance – a very great chance, he said, that Seymour may completely lose control of himself. My word of honor."

"There’s a psychiatrist here at the hotel," said the girl.

"Who? What’s his name?"

"I don’t know. Rieser or something. He’s supposed to be very good."

"Never heard of him."

‘Well, he’s supposed to be very good, anyway."

"Muriel, don’t be fresh, please. We’re very worried about you. Your father wanted to wire you last night to come home, as a matter of f—."

"I’m not coming home right now, Mother. So relax."

"Muriel. My word of honor. Dr. Sivetski said Seymour may completely lose contr—."

‘I just got here, Mother. This is the first vacation I’ve had in years, and I’m not going to just pack everything and come home," said the girl. "I couldn’t travel now anyway. I’m so sunburned I can hardly move."

"You’re badly sunburned? Didn’t you use that far of Bronze I put in your bag? I put it right—."

"I used it. I’m burned anyway."

"That’s terrible. Where are you burned?"

"All over, dear, all over."

"That’s terrible."

"I’ll live."

"Tell me, did you talk to this psychiatrist?’

"Well, sort of," said the girl.

"What’d he say? Where was Seymour when you talked to him?"

"In the Ocean Room, playing the piano. He’s played the piano both nights we’ve been here."

"Well, what’d he say?"

"Oh. Nothing much. He spoke to me first. I was sitting next to him at Bingo last night, and he asked me if that wasn’t my husband playing the piano in the other room. I said yes, it was, and he asked me if Seymour’s been sick or something. So I said –."

"Why’d he ask that?"

"I don’t know, Mother. I guess because he’s so pale and all," said the girl. "Anyway, after Bingo he and his wife asked me if I wouldn’t like to join them for a drink. So I did. His wife was horrible. You remember that awful dinner dress we saw in Bonwit’s window? The one you said you’d have to have a tiny, tiny—."

"The green?"

"She had it on. And all hips. She kept asking me if Seymour’s related to that Suzanne Glass that has that place on Madison Avenue - the millinery."

"What’d he say, though? The doctor."

"Oh. Well, nothing much, really. I mean we were in the bar and all. It was terribly noisy."

"Yes, but did - did you tell him what he tried to do with Granny’s chair?"

"No, Mother. I didn’t go into details very much," said the girl. "I’II probably get a chance to talk to him again. He’s in the bar all day long."

"Did he say he thought there was a chance he might get - you know - funny or anything? Do something to you!"

"Not exactly," said the girl. "He had to have more facts, Mother. They have to know about your childhood - all that stuff. I told you, we could hardly talk, it was so noisy in there."

"Well. How’s your blue coat?"

"All right. I had some of the padding taken out."

"How are the clothes this year?"

"Terrible. But out of this world. You see sequins – everything," said the girl.

"How’s your room?"

"All right. Just all right, though. We couldn’t get the room we had before the war,"’ said the girl. "The people are awful this year. You should see what sits next to us in the dining room. At the next table. They look as if they drove down in a truck."

‘Well, it’s that way all over. How’s your ballerina?"

"It’s too long. I told you it was too long."

"Muriel, I’m only going to ask you once more - are you really all right?"

"Yes, Mother," said the girl. "For the ninetieth time."

"And you don’t want to come home?"

"No, Mother."

"Your father said last night that he’d be more than willing to pay for it if you’d go away some place by yourself and think things over. You could take a lovely cruise. We both thought –."

"No, thanks," said the girl, and uncrossed her legs. "Mother, this call is costing a for-"

"When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war - I mean when you think of all those crazy little wives who—."

"Mother," said the girl, "we’d better hang up. Seymour may come in any minute."

"Where is he?"

"On the beach."

"On the beach? By himself? Does he behave himself on the beach?"

"Mother," said the girl, "you talk about him as though he were a raving maniac - "

"I said nothing of the kind, Muriel."

"Well, you sound that way. I mean all he does is lie there. He won’t take his bathrobe off."

"He won’t take his bathrobe off? Why not?"

"I don’t know. I guess because he’s so pale."

"My goodness, he needs the sun. Can’t you make him?"

"You know Seymour," said the girl, and crossed her legs again. "He says he doesn’t want a lot of fools looking at his tattoo."

"He doesn’t have any tatoo! Did he get one in the Army?"

"No, Mother. No, dear," said the girl, and stood up. "Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe."

"Muriel. Now, listen to me."

"Yes, Mother," said the girl, putting her weight on her right leg.

"Call me the instant he does, or says, anything at all funny – you know what I mean. Do you hear me?"

"Mother, I’m not afraid of Seymour."

"Muriel, I want you to promise me."

"All right, I promise. Goodbye, Mother," said the girl. "My love to Daddy." She hung up.

  "See more glass," said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. "Did you see more glass?"

"Pussycat, stop saying that. It’s driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please."

Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on Sybil’s shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, wing-like blades of her back. Sybil was sitting insecurely on a huge, inflated beach ball, facing the ocean. She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.

"It was really just an ordinary silk handkerchief -you could see when you got up close," said the woman in the beach chair beside Mrs. Carpenter’s "I wish I knew how she tied it. It was really darling."

"It sounds darling," Mrs. Carpenter agreed. "Sybil, hold still, pussy."

"Did you see more glass?" said Sybil.

Mrs. Carpenter sighed. "All right," she said. She replaced the cap on the sun-tan oil bottle. "Now run and play, pussy. Mommy’s going up to the hotel and have a Martini with Mrs. Hubbel. I’ll bring you the olive."

Set loose, Sybil immediately ran down to the flat part of the beach and began to walk in the direction of Fisherman’s Pavilion. Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle, she was soon out of the area reserved for guests of the hotel.

She walked for about a quarter of a mile and then suddenly broke into an oblique run up the soft part of the beach. She stopped short when she reached the place where a young man was lying on his back.

"Are you going in the water, see more glass?" she said.

The young man started, his right hand going to the lapels of his terry-cloth robe. He turned over on his stomach, letting a sausaged towel fall away from his eyes, and squinted up at Sybil.

"Hey. Hello, Sybil."

"Are you going in the water?’

"I was waiting for you," said the young man. "What’s new?"

"What?" said Sybil.

"What’s new? What’s on the program?"

"My daddy’s coming tomorrow on a airplane," Sybil said, kicking sand.

"Not in my face, baby," the young man said, putting his hand on Sybil’s ankle. "Well, it’s about time he got here, your daddy. I’ve been expecting him hourly. Hourly."

"Where’s the lady?" Sybil said.

"The lady?" The young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. "That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room." Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. "Ask me something else, Sybil," he said. "That’s a fine bathing suit you have on. If there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit."

Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. "This is a yellow," she said. "This is a yellow."

"It is? Come a little closer."

Sybil took a step forward.

"You’re absolutely right. What a fool I am."

"Are you going in the water?" Sybil said.

"I’m seriously considering it. I’m giving it plenty of thought, Sybil, you’ll be glad to know."

Sybil prodded the rubber float that the young man sometimes used as a head-rest. "It needs air," she said.

"You’re right. It needs more air than I’m willing to admit." He took away his fists and let his chin rest on the sand. "Sybil," he said, "you’re looking fine. It’s good to see you. Tell me about yourself." He reached in front of him and took both of Sybil’s ankles in his hands. "I’m Capricorn," he said. "What are you?"

"Sharon Lipschutz said you let her sit on the piano seat with you," Sybil said.

"Sharon Lipschutz said that?"

Sybil nodded vigorously.

He let go of her ankles, drew in his hands, and laid the side of his face on his right forearm. "Well," he said, "you know how those things happen, Sybil. I was sitting there, playing. And you were nowhere in sight. And Sharon Lipschutz came over and sat down next to me. I couldn’t push her off, could I?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no. No. I couldn’t do that," said the young man. I’II tell you what I did do, though."

"What?"

"I pretended she was you."

Sybil immediately stooped and began to dig in the sand. "Let’s go in the water," she said.

"All right," said the young man. "I think I can work it in."

"Next time, push her off," Sybil said.

"Push who off?"

"Sharon Lipschutz."

"Ah, Sharon Lipschutz," said the young man. "How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire." He suddenly got to his feet. He looked at the ocean. "Sybil," he said, "I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Well see if we can catch a bananafish."

"A what?"

"A bananafish," he said, and undid the belt of his robe. He took off the robe. His shoulders were white and narrow, and his trunks were royal blue. He folded the robe, first lengthwise, then in thirds. He unrolled the towel he had used over his eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then laid the folded robe on top of it. He bent over, picked up the float, and secured it under his right arm. Then, with his left hand, he took Sybil’s hand.

The two started to walk down to the ocean.

"I imagine you’ve seen quite a few bananafish in your day," the young man said.

Sybil shook her head.

"You haven’t? Where do you live, anyway?"

"I don’t know," said Sybil.

"Sure you know. You must know. Sharon Lipschutz knows where she lives and she’s only three and a half."

Sybil stopped walking and yanked her hand away from him. She picked up an ordinary beach shell and looked at it with elaborate interest. She threw it down. "Whirly Wood, Connecticut," she said, and resumed walking, stomach foremost.

"Whirly Wood, Connecticut," said the young man. "Is that anywhere near Whirly Wood, Connecticut, by any chance?"

Sybil looked at him. "That’s where I live," she said impatiently. "I live in Whirly Wood, Connecticut." She ran a few steps ahead of him, caught up her left foot in her left hand, and hopped two or three times.

"You have no idea how clear that makes everything," the young man said.

Sybil released her foot. "Did you read ‘Little Black Sambo’?" she said.

"It’s very funny you ask me that," he said. ‘It so happens I just finished reading it last night." He reached down and took back Sybil’s hand. "What did you think of it?" he asked her.

"Did the tigers run all around that tree?"

"I thought they’d never stop. I never saw so many tigers."

"There were only six," Sybil said.

"Only six!" said the young man. "Do you call that only?"

"Do you like wax?" Sybil asked.

"Do I like what?" asked the young man.

"Wax."

"Very much. Don’t you?"

Sybil nodded. "Do you like olives?" she asked.

"Olives - yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without ‘em."

"Do you like Sharon Lipschutz?" Sybil asked.

"Yes. Yes, I do," said the young man. "What I like particularly about her is that she never does anything mean to little dogs in the lobby of the hotel. That little toy bull that belongs to that lady from Canada, for instance. You probably won’t believe this, but some little girls like to poke that little dog with balloon sticks. Sharon doesn’t. She’s never mean or unkind. That’s why I like her so much."

Sybil was silent.

"I like to chew candles," she said finally.

"Who doesn’t?" said the young man, getting his feet wet. "Wow! It’s cold." He dropped the rubber float on its back. "No, wait just a second, Sybil. Wait’ll we get out a little bit."

They waded out till the water was up to Sybil’s waist. Then the young man picked her up and laid her down on her stomach on the float.

"Don’t you ever wear a bathing cap or anything?" he asked.

"Don’t let go," Sybil ordered. "You hold me, now."

"Miss Carpenter. Please. I know my business," the young man said. "You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish. This is a perfect day for bananafish."

I don’t see any," Sybil said.

"That’s understandable. Their habits are very peculiar. Very peculiar." He kept pushing the float. The water was not quite up to his chest.

"They lead a very tragic life," he said. "You know what they do, Sybil?"

She shook her head.

"Well, they swim into a hole where there’s a lot of bananas. They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I’ve known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas." He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon. "Naturally, after that they’re so fat they can’t get out of the hole again. Can’t fit through the door."

"Not too far out," Sybil said, "What happens to them?"

"What happens to who?"

"The bananafish."

"Oh, you mean after they eat so many bananas they can’t get out of the banana hole?"

"Yes," said Sybil.

"Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die."

"Why?" asked Sybil.

"Well, they get banana fever. It’s a terrible disease."

"Here comes a wave," Sybil said nervously.

"We’ll ignore it. Well snub it," said the young man. "Two snobs." He took Sybil’s ankles in his hands and pressed down and forward. The float nosed over the top of the wave. The water soaked Sybil’s blond hair, but her scream was full of pleasure.

With her hand, when the float was level again, she wiped away a flat, wet band of hair from her eyes, and reported, "I just saw one."

"Saw what, my love?"

"A bananafish."

"My God, no!" said the young man. "Did he have any bananas in his mouth?"

"Yes," said Sybil. "Six."

The young man suddenly picked up one of Sybil’s wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed the arch.

"Hey!" said the owner of the foot, turning around.

‘Hey, yourself! We’re going in now. You had enough?"

"No!"

"Sorry," he said, and pushed the float toward the shore until Sybil got off it. He carried it the rest of the way.

"Goodbye," said Sybil, and ran without regret in the direction of the hotel.

  The young man put on his robe, closed the lapels tight, and jammed his towel into his pocket. He picked up the slimy, wet, cumbersome float and put it under his arm. He plodded alone through the soft, hot sand toward the hotel.

On the sub-main floor of the hotel, which the management directed bathers to use, a woman with zinc salve on her nose got into the elevator with the young man.

"I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when the car was in motion.

"I beg your pardon?" said the woman.

"I said I see you’re looking at my feet."

"I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor," said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.

"If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don’t be a God-damned sneak about it."

"Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.

The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back.

"I have two normal feet and I can’t see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the young man. "Five, please." He took his room key out of his robe pocket.

He got off at the fifth floor, walked down the hall, and let himself into 507. The room smelled of new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover.

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

_____

'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' was originally published in The New Yorker and later on Salinger's collection Nine Stories.

#a perfect day for bananafish #J. D. Salinger #short story #nine stories #the new yorker

[bathtubfullofbullets]

Boys and Girls (1964)

Alice Munro

    My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders. These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to hang, one on each side of the kitchen door. Against a background of cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers, plumed adventures planted the flags of England and or of France; magnificent savages bent their backs to the portage.      For several weeks before Christmas, my father worked after supper in the cellar of our house. The cellar was whitewashed , and lit by a hundred-watt bulb over the worktable. My brother Laird and I sat on the top step and watched. My father removed the pelt inside-out from the body of the fox, which looked surprisingly small, mean, and rat-like, deprived of its arrogant weight of fur. The naked, slippery bodies were collected in a sack and buried in the dump. One time the hired man, Henry Bailey, had taken a swipe at me with this sack, saying, "Christmas present!" My mother thought that was not funny. In fact she disliked the whole pelting operation--that was what the killing, skinning, and preparation of the furs was called – and wished it did not have to take place in the house. There was the smell. After the pelt had been stretched inside-out on a long board my father scraped away delicately, removing the little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat; the smell of blood and animal fat, which the strong primitive odor of the fox itself, penetrated all parts of the house. I found it reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles.      Henry Bailey suffered from bronchial troubles. He would cough and cough until his narrow face turned scarlet, and his light blue, derisive eyes filled up with tears; then he took the lid off the stove, and, standing well back, shot out a great clot of phlegm – hss – straight into the heart of the flames. We admired his for this performance and for his ability to make his stomach growl at will, and for his laughter, which was full of high whistlings and gurglings and involved the whole faulty machinery of his chest. It was sometimes hard to tell what he was laughing at, and always possible that it might be us.      After we had sent to be we could still smell fox and still hear Henry's laugh, but these things reminders of the warm, safe, brightly lit downstairs world, seemed lost and diminished, floating on the stale cold air upstairs. We were afraid at night in the winter. We were not afraid of outside though this was the time of year when snowdrifts curled around our house like sleeping whales and the wind harassed us all night, coming up from the buried fields, the frozen swamp, with its old bugbear chorus of threats and misery. We were afraid of inside, the room where we slept. At this time upstairs of our house was not finished. A brick chimney went up on wall. In the middle of the floor was a square hole, with a wooden railing around it; that was where the stairs came up. On the other side of the stairwell wee the things that nobody had any use for anymore – a soldiery roll of linoleum, standing on end, a wicker bay carriage, a fern basket, china jugs and basins with cracks in them, a picture of the Battle of Balaclava, very sad to look at. I had told Laird, as soon as he was old enough to understand such things, that bats and skeletons lived over there; whenever a man escaped from the county jail, twenty miles away, I imagined that he had somehow let himself in the window and was hiding behind the linoleum. But we had rules to keep us safe. When the light was on, we were safe as long as we did not step off the square of worn carpet which defined our bedroom-space; when the light was off no place was safe but the beds themselves. I had to turn out the light kneeling on the end of my bed, and stretching as far as I could to reach the cord.       In the dark we lay on our beds, our narrow life rafts, and fixed our eyes on the faint light coming up the stairwell, and sang songs. Laird sang "Jingle Bells", which he would sing any time, whether it was Christmas or not, and I sang "Danny Boy". I loved the sound of my own voice, frail and supplicating, rising in the dark. We could make out the tall frosted shapes of the windows now, gloomy and white. When I came to the part, the cold sheets but by pleasurable emotions almost silenced me. You'll kneel and say an Ave there above me —What was an Ave? Every day I forgot to find out.       Laird went straight from singing to sleep, I could hear his long, satisfied, bubbly breaths. Now for the time that remained to me, the most perfectly private and perhaps the best time of the whole day, I arranged myself tightly under the covers and went on with one of the stories I was telling myself from night to night. These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older; they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that presented opportunities for courage, boldness, and self-sacrifice, as mine never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back).  Rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the Orangemen’s Day parade). There was always riding and shooting in these stories, though I had only been on a horse twice — the first because we did not own a saddle — and the second time I had slid right around and dropped under the horse's feet; it had stepped placidly over me. I really was learning to shoot, but could not hit anything yet, not even tin cans on fence posts.      Alive, the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them. It was surrounded by a high guard fence, like a medieval town, with a gate that was padlocked at night. Along the streets of this town were ranged large, sturdy pens. Each of them had a real door that a man could go through, a wooden ramp along the wire, for the foxes to run up and down on, and a kennel — sometimes like a clothes chest with airholes — where they slept where they slept and stayed in winter and had their young. There were feeding and watering dishes attached to the wire in such a way that they could be emptied and cleaned from the outside. The dishes were made of old tin cans, and the ramps and kennels of odds and ends of old lumber. Everything was tidy and ingenious; my father was tirelessly inventive and his favorite book in the world was Robinson Crusoe. He had fitted a tin drum on a wheelbarrow, for bringing water down to the pens. This was my job in the summer, when the foxes had to have water twice a day. Between nine and ten o'clock in the morning, and again after supper. I filled the drum at the pump and trundled it down through the barnyard to the pens, where I parked it, and filled my watering can and went along the streets. Laird came too, with his little cream and green gardening can, filled too full and knocking against his legs and slopping water on his canvas shoes. I had the real watering can, my father's, though I could only carry it three-quarters full.      The foxes all had names, which were printed on a tin plate and hung beside their doors. They were not named when they were born, but when they survived the first year’s pelting and were added to the breeding stock. Those my father had named were called names like Prince, Bob, Wally, and Betty. Those I had named were called Star or Turk, or Maureen or Diana. Laird named one Maude after a hired girl we had when he was little, one Harold after a boy at school, and one Mexico, he did not say why.      Naming them did not make pets out of them, or anything like it. Nobody but my father ever went into the pens, and he had twice had blood-poisoning from bites. When I was bringing them their water they prowled up and down on the paths they had made inside their pens, barking seldom — they saved that for nighttime, when they might get up a chorus of community frenzy--but always watching me, their eyes burning, clear gold, in their pointed, malevolent faces. They were beautiful for their delicate legs and heavy, aristocratic tails and the bright fur sprinkled on dark down their back — which gave them their name — but especially for their faces, drawn exquisitely sharp in pure hostility, and their golden eyes.      Besides carrying water I helped my father when he cut the long grass, and the lamb's quarter and flowering money-musk, that grew between the pens. He cut with the scythe and I raked into piles. Then he took a pitchfork and threw fresh-cut grass all over the top of the pens to keep the foxes cooler and shade their coats, which were browned by too much sun. My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. In this he was quite different from my mother, who, if she was feeling cheerful, would tell me all sorts of things – the name of a dog she had had when she was a little girl, the names of boys she had gone out with later on when she was grown up, and what certain dresses of hers had looked like – she could not imagine now what had become of them. Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions. Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride. One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, "Like to have you meet my new hired hand." I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure.      "Could of fooled me." said the salesman. "I thought it was only a girl."      After the grass was cut, it seemed suddenly much later in the year. I walked on stubble in the earlier evening aware of the reddening skies, on entering silence of fall. When I wheeled the tank out of the gates and put padlocks on. It was almost dark. One night at this time I saw my mother and father standing talking on the little rise of ground we called the gangway, in front of the barn. My father had just come from the meathouse; he had his stiff bloody apron on, and a pail of cut-up meat in his hand.      It was an odd thing to see my mother down at the barn. She did not often come out of the house unless it was to do something – hang out the wash or dig potatoes in the garden. She looked out of place, with her bare lumpy legs, not touched by the sun, her apron still on and damp across the stomach from the supper dishes. Her hair was tied up in a kerchief, wisps of it falling out. She would tie her hair up like this in the morning, saying she did not have time to do it properly, and it would stay tied up all day. It was true, too; she really did not have time. These days our back porch was piled with baskets of peaches and grapes and pears, bought in town, and onions and tomatoes and cucumbers grown at home, all waiting to be made into jelly and jam and preserves, pickles and chilli sauce. In the kitchen there was a fire in the stove all day, jars clinked in boiling water, sometimes a cheesecloth bag was strung on a pole between two chairs straining blue-back grape pulp for jelly. I was given jobs to do and I would sit at the table peeling peaches that had been soaked in hot water, or cutting up onions, my eyes smarting and streaming. As soon as I was done I ran out of the house, trying to get out of earshot before my mother thought of what she wanted me to do next. I hated the hot dark kitchen in summer, the green blinds and the flypapers, the same old oilcloth table and wavy mirror and bumpy linoleum. My mother was too tired and preoccupied to talk to me, she had no heart to tell about the Normal School Graduation Dance; sweat trickled over her face and she was always counting under breath, pointing at jars, dumping cups of sugar. It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important.      I wheeled the tank up to the barn, where it was kept, and I heard my mother saying, "Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you'll have a real help."      What my father said I did not hear. I was pleased by the way he stood listening, politely as he would to a salesman or a stranger, but with an air of wanting to get on with his real work. I felt my mother had no business down here and I wanted him to feel the same way. What did she mean about Laird? He was no help to anybody. Where was he now? Swinging himself sick on the swing, going around in circles, or trying to catch caterpillars. He never once stayed with me till I was finished.      "And then I can use her more in the house," I heard my mother say. She had a dead-quiet regretful way of talking about me that always made me uneasy. "I just get my back turned and she runs off. It's not like I had a girl in the family at all."      I went and sat on a feed bag in the corner of the barn, not wanting to appear when this conversation was going on. My mother, I felt, was not to be trusted. She was kinder than my father and more easily fooled, but you could not depend on her, and the real reasons for the things she said and did were not to be known. She loved me, and she sat up late at night making a dress of the difficult style I wanted, for me to wear when school started, but she was also my enemy. She was always plotting. She was plotting now to get me to stay in the house more, although she knew I hated it (because she knew I hated it) and keep me from working for my father. It seemed to me she would do this simply out of perversity, and to try her power. It did not occur to me that she could be lonely, or jealous. No grown-up could be; they were too fortunate. I sat and kicked my heels monotonously against a feed bag, raising dust, and did not come out till she was gone.      At any rate, I did not expect my father to pay any attention to what she said. Who could imagine Laird doing my work – Laird remembering the padlock and cleaning out the watering dishes with a leaf on the end of a stick, or even wheeling the tank without it tumbling over? It showed how little my mother knew about the way things really were.      I had forgotten to say what the foxes were fed. My father's bloody apron reminded me. They were fed horsemeat. At this time most farmers still kept horses, and when a horse got too old to work, or broke a leg or got down and would not get up, as they sometimes did , the owner would call my father, and he and Henry went out to the farm in the truck. Usually they shot and butchered the horse there, paying the farmer from five to twelve dollars. If they had already too much meat on hand, they would bring the horse back alive, and keep it for a few days or weeks in our stable, until the meat was needed. After the war the farmers were buying tractors and gradually getting rid of horses, that there was just no use for any more. If this happened in the winter we might keep the horse in our stable till spring, for we had plenty of hay and if there was a lot of snow – and the plow did not always get our roads cleared – it was convenient to be able to go to town with a horse and cutter.      The winter I was eleven years old we had two horses in the stable. We did not know what names they had had before, so we called them Mack and Flora. Mack was an old black workhorse, sooty and indifferent. Flora was a sorrel mare, a driver. We took them both out in the cutter. Mack was slow and easy to handle. Flora was given to fits of violent alarm, veering at cars and even at other horses, but we loved her speed and high-stepping, her general air of gallantry and abandon. On Saturdays we went down to the stable and as soon as we opened the door on its cozy, animal-smelling darkness Flora threw up her head, rolled her eyes, whinnied despairingly, and pulled herself through a crisis of nerves on the spot. It was not safe to go into her stall, she would kick.      This winter also I began to hear a great deal more on the theme my mother had sounded when she had been talking in front of the barn. I no longer felt safe. It seemed that in the minds of the people around me there was a steady undercurrent of thought, not to be deflected, on this one subject. The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me. Once Laird and I were fighting, and for the first time ever I had to use all my strength against him; even so, he caught and pinned my arm for a moment, really hurting me. Henry saw this, and laughed, saying, "Oh, that there Laird’s gonna show you, one of these days!" Laird was getting a lot bigger. But I was getting bigger too.      My grandmother came to stay with us for a few weeks and I heard other things. "Girls don't slam doors like that." "Girls keep their knees together when they sit down." And worse still, when I asked some questions, "That's none of girls’ business." I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free.      When spring came, the horses were let out in the barnyard. Mack stood against the barn wall trying to scratch his neck and haunches, but Flora trotted up and down and reared at the fences, clattering her hooves against the rails. Snow drifts dwindled quickly, revealing the hard gray and brown earth, the familiar rise and fall of the ground, plain and bare after the fantastic landscape of winter. There was a great feeling of opening-out, of release. We just wore rubbers now, over our shoes; our feet felt ridiculously light. One Saturday we went out to the stable and found all the doors open, letting in the unaccustomed sunlight and fresh air. Henry was there, just idling around looking at his collection of calendars which were tacked up behind the stalls in a part of the stable my mother probably had never seen.      "Come say goodbye to your old friend Mack?" Henry said. "Here, you give him a taste of oats." He poured some oats into Laird’s cupped hands and Laird went to feed Mack. Mack's teeth were in bad shape. He ate very slowly, patiently shifting the oats around in his mouth, trying to find a stump of a molar to grind it on. "Poor old Mack," said Henry mournfully. "When a horse's teethes gone, he's gone. That's about the way."      "Are you going to shoot him today?" I said. Mack and Flora had been in the stables so long I had almost forgotten they were going to be shot.      Henry didn't answer me. Instead he started to sing in a high, trembly, mocking-sorrowful voice. Oh, there's no more work, for poor Uncle Ned, he's gone where the good darkies go. Mack's thick, blackish tongue worked diligently at Laird’s hand. I went out before the song was ended and sat down on the gangway.        I had never seen them shoot a horse, but I knew where it was done. Last summer Laird and I had come upon a horse's entrails before they were buried. We had thought it was a big black snake, coiled up in the sun. That was around in the field that ran up beside the barn. I thought that if we went inside the barn, and found a wide crack or a knothole to look through, we would be able to see them do it. It was not something I wanted to see; just the same, if a thing really happened it was better to see, and know.      My father came down from the house, carrying a gun.      "What are you doing here?" he said.      "Nothing."      "Go on up and play around the house."      He sent Laird out of the stable. I said to Laird, "Do you want to see them shoot Mack?" and without waiting for an answer led him around to the front door of the barn, opened it carefully, and went in. "Be quiet or they'll hear us," I said. We could hear Henry and my father talking in the stable; then the heavy shuffling steps of Mack being backed out of his stall.      In the loft it was cold and dark. Thin crisscrossed beams of sunlight fell through the cracks. The hay was low. It was rolling country, hills and hollows, slipping under our feet. About four feet up was a beam going around the walls, we piled hay up in one corner and I boosted Laird up and hoisted myself. The beam was not very wide; we crept along it with our hands flat on the barn walls. There were plenty of knotholes, and I found one that gave me the view I wanted – a corner of the barnyard, the gate, part of the field. Laird did not have a knothole and began to complain.      I showed him a widened crack between two boards. "Be quiet and wait. If they hear you you'll get us in trouble."      My father came in sight carrying the gun. Henry was leading Mack by the halter. He dropped it and took out his cigarette papers and tobacco; he rolled cigarettes for my father and himself. While this was going on Mack nosed around in the old, dead grass along the fence. Then my father opened the gate and they took Mack through. Henry led Mack away from the path to a patch of ground and they talked together, not loud enough for us to hear. Mack again began searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not found. My father walked away in a straight line, and stopped short at a distance which seemed to suit him. Henry was walking away from Mack too, but sideways, still negligently holding on to the halter. My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.      Mack did not collapse at once but swayed, lurched sideways, and fell, first on his side; then he rolled over on his back and, amazingly, kicked his legs for a few seconds in the air. At this Henry laughed, as if Mack had done a trick for him. Laird, who had drawn a long, groaning breath of surprise when the shot was fired, said out loud, "He's not dead." And it seemed to me it might be true. But his legs stopped, he rolled on his side again, his muscles quivered and sank. The two men walked over and looked at him in a businesslike way; they bent down and examined his forehead where the bullet had gone in, and now I saw his blood on the brown grass.      "Now they just skin him and cut him up," I said. "Let's go." My legs were a little shaky and I jumped gratefully down into the hay. "Now you've seen how they shoot a horse," I said in a congratulatory way, as if I had seen it many times before. "Let's see if any barn cats had kittens in the hay." Laird jumped. He seemed young and obedient again. Suddenly I remembered how, when he was little, I had brought him into the barn and told him to climb the ladder to the top beam. That was in the spring, too, when the hay was low. I had done it out of a need for excitement, a desire for something to happen so that I could tell about it. He was wearing a little bulky brown and white checked coat, made down from one of mine. He went all the way up just as I told him, and sat down from one of the beam with the hay far below him on one side, and the barn floor and some old machinery on the other. Then I ran screaming to my father. "Laird’s up on the top beam!" My father came, my mother came, my father went up the ladder talking very quietly and brought Laird down under his arm, at which my mother leaned against the ladder and began to cry. They said to me, "Why weren't you watching him?" but nobody ever knew the truth. Laird did not know enough to tell. But whenever I saw the brown and white checked coat hanging in the closet , or at the bottom of the rag bag, which was where it ended up, I felt a weight in my stomach, the sadness of unexorcised guilt.      I looked at Laird, who did not even remember this, and I did not like the look on this thing, winter-paled face. His expression was not frightened or upset, but remote, concentrating. "Listen," I said in an unusually bright and friendly voice, "you aren't going to tell, are you?"      "No," he said absently.      "Promise."      "Promise," he said. I grabbed the hand behind his back to make sure he was not crossing his fingers. Even so, he might have a nightmare; it might come out that way. I decided I had better work hard to get all thoughts of what he had seen out of his mind – which, it seemed to me, could not hold very many things at a time. I got some money I had saved and that afternoon we went into Jubilee and saw a show, with Judy Canova, at which we both laughed a great deal. After that I thought it would be all right.      Two weeks later I knew they were going to shoot Flora. I knew from the night before, when I heard my mother ask if the hay was holding out all right, and my father said, "Well, after tomorrow there'll just be the cow, and we should be able to put her out to grass in another week." So I knew it was Flora's turn in the morning.      This time I didn't think of watching it. That was something to see just one time. I had not thought about it very often since, but sometimes when I was busy, working at school, or standing in front of the mirror combing my hair and wondering if I would be pretty when I grew up, the whole scene would flash into my mind: I would see the easy, practiced way my father raised the gun, and hear Henry laughing when Mack kicked his legs in the air. I did not have any great feelings of horror and opposition, such as a city child might have had; I was too used to seeing the death of animals as a necessity by which we lived. Yet I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new weariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work.      It was a fine day, and we were going around the yard picking up tree branches that had been torn off in winter storms. This was something we had been told to do, and also we wanted to use them to make a teepee. We heard Flora whine, and then my father's voice and Henry's shouting, and we ran down to the barnyard to see what was going on.      The stable door was open. Henry had just brought Flora out, and she had broken away from him. She was running free in the barnyard, from one end to the other. We climbed on the fence. It was exciting to see her running, whinnying, going up on her hind legs, prancing and threatening like a horse in a Western movie, an unbroken ranch horse, though she was just an old driver, an old sorrel mare. My father and Henry ran after her and tried to grab the dangling halter. They tried to work her into a corner, and they had almost succeeded when she made a run between them, wild-eyed, and disappeared round the corner of the barn. We heard the rails clatter down as she got over the fence, and Henry yelled. "She's into the field now!"      That meant she was in the long L-shaped field that ran up by the house. If she got around the centre, heading towards the lane, the gate was open; the truck had been driven into the field this morning. My father shouted to me, because I was on the other side of the fence, nearest the lane, "Go shut the gate!"      I could run very fast. I ran across the garden, past the tree where our swing was hung, and jumped across a ditch into the lane. There was the open gate. She had not got out, I could not see her up on the road; she must have run to the other end of the field. The gate was heavy. I lifted it out of the gravel and carried it across the roadway. I had it half way across when she came in sight, galloping straight toward me. There was just time to get the chain on. Laird came scrambling though the ditch to help me.      Instead of shutting the gate, I opened it as wide as I could. I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I did. Flora never slowed down; she galloped straight past me, and Laird jumped up and down, yelling, "Shut it, shut it!" even after it was too late. My father and Henry appeared in the field a moment too late to see what I had done. They only saw Flora heading for the township road. They would think I had not got there in time.      They did not waste any time asking about it. They went back to the barn and got the gun and the knives they used, and put these in the truck; then they turned the truck around and came bounding up the field toward us. Laird called to them, "Let me go too, let me go too!" and Henry stopped the truck and they took him in. I shut the gate after they were all gone.      I supposed Laird would tell. I wondered what would happen to me. I had never disobeyed my father before, and I could not understand why I had done it. I had done it. Flora would not really get away. They would catch up with her in the truck. Or if they did not catch her this morning somebody would see her and telephone us this afternoon or tomorrow. There was no wild country here for her, we needed the meat to feed the foxes, we needed the foxes to make our living. All I had done was make more work for my father who worked hard enough already. And when my father found out about it he was not going to trust me anymore; he would know that I was not entirely on his side. I was on Flora's side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even to her. Just the same, I did not regret it; when she came running at me I held the gate open, that was the only thing I could do.      I went back to the house, and my mother said, "What's all the commotion?" I told her that Flora had kicked down the fence and got away. "Your poor father," she said, "now he'll have to go chasing over the countryside. Well, there isn't any use planning dinner before one." She put up the ironing board. I wanted to tell her, but thought better of it and went upstairs and sat on my bed.      Lately I had been trying to make my part of the room fancy, spreading the bed with old lace curtains, and fixing myself a dressing table with some leftovers of cretonne for a skirt. I planned to put up some kind of barricade between my bed and Laird’s, to keep my section separate from his. In the sunlight, the lace curtains were just dusty rags. We did not sing at night any more. One night when I was singing Laird said, "You sound silly," and I went right on but the next night I did not start. There was not so much need to anyway, we were no longer afraid. We knew it was just old furniture over there, old jumble and confusion. We did not keep to the rules. I still stayed awake after Laird was asleep and told myself stories, but even in these stories something different was happening, mysterious alterations took place. A story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals, and for a while I might rescue people; then things would change around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me. It might be a boy from our class at school, or even Mr. Campbell, our teacher, who tickled girls under the arms. And at this point the story concerned itself at great length with what I looked like – how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on; by the time I had these details worked out the real excitement of the story was lost.      It was later than one o'clock when the truck came back. The tarpaulin was over the back, which meant there was meat in it. My mother had to heat dinner up all over again. Henry and my father had changed from their bloody overalls into ordinary working overalls in the barn, and they washed arms and necks and faces at the sink, and splashed water on their hair and combed it. Laird lifted his arm to show off a streak of blood. "We shot old Flora," he said, "and cut her up in fifty pieces."      "Well I don't want to hear about it," my mother said. "And don't come to my table like that."      My father made him go wash the blood off.      We sat down and my father said grace and Henry pasted his chewing gum on the end of his fork, the way he always did; when he took it off he would have us admire the pattern. We began to pass the bowls of steaming, overcooked vegetables. Laird looked across the table at me and said proudly distinctly, "Anyway it was her fault Flora got away."      "What?" my father said.      "She could of shut the gate and she didn't. She just open’ it up and Flora ran out."      "Is that right?" my father said.      Everybody at the table was looking at me. I nodded, swallowing food with great difficulty. To my shame, tears flooded my eyes.      My father made a curt sound of disgust. "What did you do that for?"      I didn't answer. I put down my fork and waited to be sent from the table, still not looking up.      But this did not happen. For some time nobody said anything, then Laird said matter-of-factly, "She's crying."      "Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humor the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said      I didn't protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true. 

____

'Boys and Girls' is part of Munro's collection of short stories Dance of the Happy Shades.

#alice munro #boys and girls #short story

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

And what can one do?

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

But what is one to do?

I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the house.

The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.

There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.

That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.

I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.

I am glad my case is not serious!

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him.

Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,—to dress and entertain, and order things.

It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!

And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous.

I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!

At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental."

"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."

Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.

It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.

I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.

Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.

Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.

I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.

But I find I get pretty tired when I try.

It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.

I wish I could get well faster.

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had!

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store.

I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.

I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.

The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.

The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.

But I don't mind it a bit—only the paper.

There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.

She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!

But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.

There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.

This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

There's sister on the stairs!

Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.

Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.

But it tired me all the same.

John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.

But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!

Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.

I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.

And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.

So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal.

I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps BECAUSE of the wall-paper.

It dwells in my mind so!

I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.

It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.

It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.

I don't know why I should write this.

I don't want to.

I don't feel able.

And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!

But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.

John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.

Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.

He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.

He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.

If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise,—but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.

It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

But I tried it last night.

It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.

I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.

John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy.

The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.

I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper DID move, and when I came back John was awake.

"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that—you'll get cold."

I though it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away.

"Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.

"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you."

"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!"

"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"

"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.

"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"

"Better in body perhaps—" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.

"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"

So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately.

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.

That is, sometimes!

There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

When the sun shoots in through the east window—I always watch for that first long, straight ray—it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.

That is why I watch it always.

By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn't know it was the same paper.

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.

I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.

Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.

It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.

And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake—O no!

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.

It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,—that perhaps it is the paper!

I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him several times LOOKING AT THE PAPER! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.

She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper—she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry—asked me why I should frighten her so!

Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!

Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.

John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.

I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.

I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough.

I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.

In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.

There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.

I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.

It gets into my hair.

Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!

Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.

It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.

In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.

It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell.

But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOR of the paper! A yellow smell.

There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even SMOOCH, as if it had been rubbed over and over.

I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round—round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!

I really have discovered something at last.

Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.

The front pattern DOES move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.

Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.

And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.

They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!

If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

I think that woman gets out in the daytime!

And I'll tell you why—privately—I've seen her!

I can see her out of every one of my windows!

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once.

And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.

But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.

And though I always see her, she MAY be able to creep faster than I can turn!

I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.

I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much.

There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes.

And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.

She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.

John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!

He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.

As if I couldn't see through him!

Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.

It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.

Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over night, and won't be out until this evening.

Jennie wanted to sleep with me—the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.

That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.

I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.

And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would finish it to-day!

We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before.

Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.

She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.

How she betrayed herself that time!

But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me—not ALIVE!

She tried to get me out of the room—it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner—I would call when I woke.

So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.

We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.

I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.

How those children did tear about here!

This bedstead is fairly gnawed!

But I must get to work.

I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.

I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.

I want to astonish him.

I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!

But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!

This bed will NOT move!

I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.

Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.

Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.

I don't like to LOOK out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.

I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?

But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don't get ME out in the road there!

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.

For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.

But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

Why there's John at the door!

It is no use, young man, you can't open it!

How he does call and pound!

Now he's crying for an axe.

It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!

"John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"

That silenced him for a few moments.

Then he said—very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"

"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"

And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.

"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

___ This well-known story was firstly published in The New England Magazine. Worth a look at is the lesser known novel Herland (1915), a female separatist utopia, which portrays Gilman's visions concerning how a perfected society could take form.

#Charlotte Perkins Gilman #yellow wallpaper #short story #feminism #herland

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Tale of the Apple (1997)

Emma Donoghue

The maid who brought me up told me that my mother was restless. She said I had my mother’s eyes, always edging towards the steep horizon, and my mother’s long hands, never still. As the story went, my mother sat one day beside an open window looking out over the snow, embroidering coronets on a dress for the christening of the child she carried. The maid warned her that she’d catch her death if she sat in the cold, letting snow drift in and sprinkle her work. My mother didn’t seem to hear. Just then the needle drove itself into her finger, and three drops of blood stained the snow on the ebony window frame. My mother said to her maid, The daughter I carry will have hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow. What will she have that well save her from my fate?

The maid had no answer, or not one that she could remember.

Then the pains seized my mother and carried her away.

Though I was so much smaller that she was, I was stronger; I had no reason not to want to live.

It was the maid who cared for me as I grew. Every autumn in her pocket she brought me the first apple from the orchard. This was not the mellow globe they served my father a month later, but the hardly bearable tang of the first ripening, so sharp it made me shudder.

Let it be said that my father did grow to care. After the maid, too, died in her turn, he found me wandering the drafty corridors of the castle and took me up in his stiff ermine arms. In the summertime he liked to carry me through the orchard and toss me high in the air, and then swing me low over the green turf. He was my toyman and my tall tree. As I grew and grew, he bounced me on his lap till our cheeks scalded.

But the day there was a patch of red on my crumpled sheet, my father brought home a new wife. She was not many years older than I was, but she had seen one royal husband into the grave already. She had my coloring. Her face was set like a jewel in a ring. I could see she was afraid; she kissed me and spoke sweetly in front of the whole

court, but I could tell she would be my enemy. There was only room for one queen in a castle.

Yes, I handed this newcomer the ring with its hundred tinkling keys, the encrusted coronet, the velvet train of state, till she was laden down with all the apparatus of power. But it was me the folk waved to as the carriage rattled by; it was me who was mirrored in my father’s fond eyes; mine was the first apple from the orchard.

I know now that I would have liked her if we could have met as girls, ankle deep in a river. I would have taken her hand in mine if I had not found it weighted down by the ruby stolen from my mother’s cooling finger. I could have loved her if, if, if.

Her lips were soft against my forehead when she kissed me in front of the whole court. But I knew from the songs that a stepmother’s smile is like a snake’s, so I shut my mind to her from that very first day when I was rigid with the letting of first blood.

In the following months she did all she could to woo my friendship, and I began to soften. I thought perhaps I had misread the tight look in her eye. Eventually I let her dress me up in the silks and brocades she had brought over the mountains. It was she who laced up my stays every morning till I was pink with mirth; last thing at night it was she who undid the searing laces one by one and loosed my flesh into sleep. With her own hands she used to work the jeweled comb through my hair, teasing out the knots. Not content with all this, she used to feed me fruit from her own bowl, each slice poised between finger and thumb till I was ready to take it. Though I never trusted her, I took delight in what she gave me.

My father was cheered to see us so close. Once when he came to her room at night he found us both there, cross-legged on her bed under on her bed under a sea of velvets and laces, trying how each earring looked against the other’s ear. He put his head back and laughed to see us. Two such fair ladies, he remarked, have never been seen on one bed. But which of you is the fairest of them all?

We looked at each other, she and I, and chimed in the chorus of his laughter. Am I imagining in retrospect that our voices rang a little out of tune? You see, her hair was black as coal, mine as ebony. My lips were red as hers were, and our cheeks as pale as two pages of a book closed together. But our faces were not the same, and not comparable.

He let out another guffaw. Tell me, he asked, how am I to judge between two such beauties?

I looked at my stepmother, and she stared back at me, and our eyes were like mirrors set opposite each other, making a corridor of reflections, infinitely hollow.

My father grinned as he kissed me on the forehead, and pushed me gently out of the room, and bolted the door behind me.

But as the full of a year went by and my stepmother stayed as thin as the day he had first brought her to the castle, my father’s mouth began to stiffen. He questioned every doctor who passed through the mountains. He made his young wife drink cow’s blood, to strengthen her, though it turned her stomach. Finally he forbade her to go walking in the orchard with me, or lift a hand, or do anything except lie on her back and wait to find herself with child, the child who would be his longed-for son.

My stepmother lay on her back and grew so limp I could see the bone below her eyes.

When I brought her red-bound books and jewelled earrings, she turned her face away. I took to walking in the orchard on my own again, and once or twice boredom drove me a little way into the forest that lay beyond the castle walls. Fear enlivened those afternoons; I kept my back to the light and turned my head at every creak of wind. The forest was like a foreign court, with its own unspoken rules. The birches moved to music only they could hear; the oaks wanted for nothing, needed no touch.

As another year stretched into spring it was not my stepmother who lay swollen and sick, but my father. He curled up on his side like a bear troubled by flies. I stood by his bed, on and off, but he was past caring. He cursed the doctors, he cursed his enemies, he cursed the two wives who had failed him, and finally with a wet mouth he cursed the son who had never come.

My stepmother had me called to the throne room where she sat, huddled in ermine, fist closed around the scepter.

Say that I am queen, she said.

You are my father’s wife, I replied.

I will be queen after he is dead, she said.

I made no reply.

Say that I am queen, she repeated, her fingers whitening around the scepter.

If you really were, I told her, it would need no saying.

She stood on the pedestal above me. The moment I am a widow, she said, I could have you cast out.

Indeed.

If you cross me in this, she said confidingly, I could have a huntsman take you into the forest, chop out your heart, and bring it back on a plate.

Strong meat, I murmured.

I can do it, she howled. I have the power.

I said nothing.

She lashed out with the scepter, but I stepped back, and it crashed to the floor. I was gone before it tolled to a halt.

That night I heard many feet hammer a track to my father’s room. I flattened my face into my pillow. I waited. No sound, cutting through the dark castle; no final word for me. The linen lay against my eyelids, still dry.

I decided not to stay to see what the day of the funeral would bring, which courtier’s eyes would shine with flattery, and which glitter with violence. I decided to leave it all to her, and leave her to it. I filled my hems with gold pieces and slipped away.

If it had been winter still, that first night would have finished me; only the mid air was my salvation. Wider than I imagined, the forest was home to creatures I couldn’t put names tom things with silver eyes and audible teeth; for all my furs, I didn’t sleep a wink that night. By sunrise I was more lost than any nestling. All my plans came to nothing: I never found the family of the maid who had raised me, nor an empty cottage to live in. Everything I put my tongue to tasted like poison.

After wandering half starved and half crazed for more days than I can remember, I had the good fortune to taken in by a gang of woodsmen.

They put water to my stained lips and asked who I was. The truth was quicker than a lie so I told it. They nodded. They had had heard of the death of the king. One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again.

That first night they fed me, and every other night I fed them. Though squat and surly, with earth in every line of their faces, these were not bad men, and considering how little my condition entitled me to, they treated me royally.

I guessed how to cook the food they threw on the table, gathering together from the shattered jigsaw of memory everything I must have seen the castle servants do ten thousand times. Gradually I learned how to keep hunger at bay and disease from the door: all the sorcery of fire and iron and water.

Hard work was no hardship to me; it kept the pictures at bay. Whenever I slackened or stopped to rest by the fire, I was haunted by the image of my stepmother. My father was only a tiny picture in my mind, shut away like a miniature in a locket. But his young widow stalked behind my eyes, growing tall or wide as I let my mind dwell on her, now smiling, now spitting, ever stretching like a shadow against a wall. I pictured her life as the queen of the castle, and it was strangely familiar: long days in charge of fire, and iron, and water. Her hands would stay smooth as lilies while mine were scrubbed raw day by day, but we were living much the same kind of life.

The men never asked what was in my mind, not even when I got lost in daze and let the broth burn. They let me dream by the fire like a cat.

This was only a lull, a time out of time. You see, I knew my stepmother would find me. The thread between us was stretched thin, wound round trees and snagged in thickets, but never broken. Somehow I trusted she would track me down and kill me.

But when she came at last she seemed to have changed. I looked out over the half door one summer day and there she stood in the clearing, hitching her horse to a tree. There was nothing of the wife about her when she smiled. May I come into your house? she asked.

I said no and turned away. But when I had stoked up the fire and boiled the shirts and chopped the turnips, I went back to the door, out of curiosity, and she was still there, with her back to the tree.

I let her in for a minute. She said how thin I had grown. I said I was well. We said not a word of what was past. She said, I keep breaking mirrors.

Sitting by the fire with her I shut my eyes and it felt like old times. She stood behind me and laced up my stays tightly, the way I could never lace them on my own.

When they came home that night the men found me alone in a sort of stupor. First they were anxious, to hear my breath come so quick and shallow, and then they were angry, to see the turnips curling on the table and no food in the pot. They said my stepmother had to be a sorceress, to find me so deep in the forest.

Some weeks went by and I was myself again, scrubbing and mashing and earning my keep. The visit began to seem like another on my daydreams.

One afternoon I was resting on a tree stump outside the cottage, snatching a moment of sun on my back, when I heard the jangle of her harness. This time, she knelt beside me, and there was nothing of the queen about her. I haven’t had a night’s sleep since you left, she said; it feels like dancing in shoes of red hot iron. Will you come home now?

I said, No, and turned my head away. She took out her jeweled comb and began to draw it through my hair, patient with all the burrs and knots my new life had put in it. I shut my eyes and let the points of the comb dig into my scalp, scraping down to the kernel of memory.

When they came home that night the men found me curled around the tree stump on the damp grass. They lifted me up and told me that my stepmother must be a witch to put such poison of idleness in my head. They warned me to stay inside and shut the doors to all comers.

For some weeks I did as I was told, kept house, kept quiet. My hair knotted again, my stays hung loose.

But one afternoon in early autumn I was troubled by a whiff of a scent of overpowering sharpness. I could not remember what it was; all I knew was that I could hardly stand it. I turned, and there at the half door my stepmother stood, an apple in her upturned hand.

Stepmother, yes, that was the word, but there was nothing of the mother about

her.

The apple was half ripe. One side was green, the other red. She bit into the green side and swallowed and smiled. I took the apple from her without a word, bit into the red side, and began to choke. Fear and excitement locked in struggle in my throat, and blackness seeped across my eyes. I fell to the ground.

It was all white, where I went; like warm snow, packed into the angles and crevices of my body. There was no light, or noise, or colour. I thought I was treasure, stowed away for safekeeping.

When I came to I was jolting along in an open coffin. Sunlight stabbed my eyelids. The woodsmen were bearing me down the mountain, out of the woods. I gagged, coughed, sat up. How their eyes rounded; how they laughed to see me breathing. But lie down, one said, you are not well yet. Until you were poisoned we had been forgetting who you are, said another; now we’re taking you to another kingdom, where they’ll know how to treat a princess. Lie down and rest, little one, said a third; we have a long way to go.

My head was still swimming; I thought I might faint again. But my mouth was full of apple, slippery, still hard, vinegary at the edges. I could feel the marks of my own teeth on the skin. I bit down, and juice ran to the corners of my lips. It was not poisoned. It was the first apple of the year from my father’s orchard. I chewed till it was eaten up and I knew what to do.

I made them set me down, and I got out the box, deaf to their clamor. I stared around me till I could see the castle, tiny against the flame-colored forest, away up the hill. I turned my face toward it, and started walking.

____ This short story is part of Donoghue's collection of retellings Kissing the Witch and is a retelling of 'Snow White'.

#tale of the apple #emma donoghue #short story #kissing the witch #snow white #retelling

[bathtubfullofbullets]

Happy Endings (1983)

Margaret Atwood John and Mary meet.

  What happens next?

  If you want a happy ending, try A.

  A.

  John and Mary fall in love and get married. They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging. They buy a charming house. Real estate values go up. Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children, to whom they are devoted. The children turn out well. John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends. They go on fun vacations together. They retire. They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging. Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.

  B.

  Mary falls in love with John but John doesn't fall in love with Mary. He merely uses her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind. He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you'll notice that he doesn't even consider her worth the price of a dinner out, and after he's eaten dinner he fucks her and after that he falls asleep, while she does the dishes so he won't think she's untidy, having all those dirty dishes lying around, and puts on fresh lipstick so she'll look good when he wakes up, but when he wakes up he doesn't even notice, he puts on his socks and his shorts and his pants and his shirt and his tie and his shoes, the reverse order from the one in which he took them off. He doesn't take off Mary's clothes, she takes them off herself, she acts as if she's dying for it every time, not because she likes sex exactly, she doesn't, but she wants John to think she does because if they do it often enough surely he'll get used to her, he'll come to depend on her and they will get married, but John goes out the door with hardly so much as a good-night and three days later he turns up at six o'clock and they do the whole thing over again.

  Mary gets run-down. Crying is bad for your face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can't stop. People at work notice. Her friends tell her John is a rat, a pig, a dog, he isn't good enough for her, but she can't believe it. Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.

  One evening John complains about the food. He has never complained about her food before. Mary is hurt.

  Her friends tell her they've seen him in a restaurant with another woman, whose name is Madge. It's not even Madge that finally gets to Mary: it's the restaurant. John has never taken Mary to a restaurant. Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find, and takes them and a half a bottle of sherry. You can see what kind of a woman she is by the fact that it's not even

whiskey. She leaves a note for John. She hopes he'll discover her and get her to the hospital in time and repent and then they can get married, but this fails to happen and she dies.

  John marries Madge and everything continues as in A.

  C.

  John, who is an older man, falls in love with Mary, and Mary, who is only twenty-two, feels sorry for him because he's worried about his hair falling out. She sleeps with him even though she's not in love with him. She met him at work. She's in love with someone called James, who is twenty-two also and not yet ready to settle down.

  John on the contrary settled down long ago: this is what is bothering him. John has a steady, respectable job and is getting ahead in his field, but Mary isn't impressed by him, she's impressed by James, who has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. But James is often away on his motorcycle, being free. Freedom isn't the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John. Thursdays are the only days John can get away.

  John is married to a woman called Madge and they have two children, a charming house which they bought just before the real estate values went up, and hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging, when they have the time. John tells Mary how important she is to him, but of course he can't leave his wife because a commitment is a commitment. He goes on about this more than is necessary and Mary finds it boring, but older men can keep it up longer so on the whole she has a fairly good time.

  One day James breezes in on his motorcycle with some top-grade California hybrid and James and Mary get higher than you'd believe possible and they climb into bed. Everything becomes very underwater, but along comes John, who has a key to Mary's apartment. He finds them stoned and entwined. He's hardly in any position to be jealous, considering Madge, but nevertheless he's overcome with despair. Finally he's middle-aged, in two years he'll be as bald as an egg and he can't stand it. He purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target practice-- this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later--and shoots the two of them and himself.

  Madge, after a suitable period of mourning, marries an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A, but under different names.

  D.

  Fred and Madge have no problems. They get along exceptionally well and are good at working out any little difficulties that may arise. But their charming house is by the seashore and one day a giant tidal wave approaches. Real estate values go down. The rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave and how they escape from it. They do, though thousands drown, but Fred and Madge are virtuous and grateful, and continue as in A.

  E.

Yes, but Fred has a bad heart. The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies. Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A. If you like, it can be "Madge," "cancer," "guilty and confused," and "bird watching."

  F.

  If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you. Remember, this is Canada. You'll still end up with A, though in between you may get a lustful brawling saga of passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times, sort of.

  You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

  The only authentic ending is the one provided here:

  John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

  So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

  That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Now try How and Why.

  ___ This story was firstly published in Atwood's collection of short fiction Murder in the Dark.

#happy endings #margaret atwood #short story

[bathtubfullofbullets]

A White Night (1903)

Charlotte Mew

            ‘The incident’, said Cameron, ‘is spoiled inevitably in the telling, by its merely accidental quality of melodrama, its sensational machinery, which, to the view of anyone who didn’t witness it, is apt to blur the finer outlines of the scene. The subtlety, or call it the significance, is missed, and unavoidably, as one attempts to put the thing before you, in a certain casual crudity, and unessential violence of fact. Make it a mediaeval matter – put it back some centuries – and the affair takes in its proper tone immediately, is tinctured with the sinister solemnity which actually enveloped it. But as it stands, a recollection, as experience, a picture, well, it doesn’t reproduce; one must have the original if one is going to hang it on one’s wall.’

            In spite of which I took it down the night he told it and, thanks to a trick of accuracy, I believe you have the story as I heard it, almost word for word.

              It was in the spring of 1876, a rainless spring, as I remember it, of white roads and brown crops and steely skies.

            Sent out the year before on mining business, I had been then some eighteen months in Spain. My job was finished; I was leaving the Black Country, planning a vague look round, perhaps a little sport among the mountains, when a letter from my sister Ella laid the dust of doubtful schemes.

            She was on a discursive honeymoon. They had come on from Florence to Madrid, and disappointed with the rank modernity of their last halt, wished to explore some of the least known towns of the interior: ‘Something unique, untrodden, and uncivilised,’ she indicated modestly. Further, if I were free and amiable, and so on, they would join me anywhere in Andalusia. I was in fact to show them round.

            I did ‘my possible’; we roughed it pretty thoroughly, but the young person’s passion for the strange bore her robustly through the risks and discomforts of those wilder districts which at best, perhaps, are hardly woman’s ground.

            King, on occasion nursed anxiety, and mourned his little luxuries; Ella accepted anything that befell, from dirt to danger, with a humorous composure dating back to nursery days – she had the instincts and the physique of a traveller, with a brilliancy of touch and a decision of attack on human instruments which told. She took our mule-drivers in hand with some success. Later, no doubt, their wretched beasts were made to smart for it, in the reaction from a lull in that habitual brutality which makes the animals of Spain a real blot upon the gay indifferentism of its people.

            It pleased her to devise a lurid Dies Irae for these affable barbarians, a special process of re-incarnation for the Spaniard generally, whereby the space of one dog’s life at least should be ensured to him.

            And on the day I’m coming to, a tedious, dislocating journey in a springless cart had brought her to the verge of quite unusual weariness, a weariness of spirit only, she protested, waving a hand toward our man who lashed and sang alternately, fetching at intervals a sunny smile for the poor lady’s vain remonstrances before he lashed again.

            The details of that day – our setting forthe, pur ride and our arrival – all the minor episodes stand out with singular distinctness, forming a background in one’s memory to the eventual, central scene.

            We left our inn – a rough posada – about sunrise, and our road, washed to a track by winter rains, lay first through wide half-cultivated slopes, capped everywhere with orange trees and palm and olive patches, curiously bare of farms or villages, till one recalls the lawless state of those outlying regions and the absence of communication between them and town.

            Abruptly, blotted in blue mist, vineyards and olives, with the groups of aloes marking off field boundaries, disappeared. We entered on a land of naked rock, peak after peak of it, cutting a jagged line against the clear intensity of the sky.

            This passed again, with early afternoon our straight, white road grew featureless, a dusty stretch, save far ahead the suntipped ridge of a sierra, and the silver ribbon of the river twisting among the barren hills. Toward the end we passed one of the wooden crosses set up on these roads to mark some spot of violence or disaster. These are the only sign-posts one encounters, and as we came up with it, our beasts were goaded for the last ascent.

            Irregular grey walls came into view; we skirted them and turned in through a Roman gateway and across a bridge into a maze of narrow stone-pitched streets, spanned here and there by Moorish arches, and execrably rough to rattle over.

            A strong illusion of the Orient, extreme antiquity and dreamlike stillness marked the place.

            Crossing the grey arcaded Plaza, just beginning at that hour to be splashed with blots of gaudy colour moving to the tinkling of the mule-bells, we were soon upon the outskirts of the town – the most untouched, remote and, I believe, the most remarkable that we had dropped upon.

            In its neglect and singularity, it made a claim to something like supremacy of charm. There was the quality of diffidence belonging to unrecognised abandoned personalities in that appeal.

            That’s how it’s docketed in memory – a city with a claim, which as it happened, I was not to weigh.

            Our inn, a long, one-storeyed building with caged windows, most of them unglazed, had been an old palacio; its broken fortunes hadn’t robbed it of its character, its air.

            The spacious place was practically empty, and the shuttered rooms, stone-flagged and cool, after our shadeless ride, invited one to a prolonged siesta; but Ella wasn’t friendly to a pause. Her buoyancy survived our meal. She seemed even to face the morrow’s repetition of that indescribable experience with serenity. We found her in the small paved garden, sipping chocolate and airing Spanish with our host, a man of some distinction, possibly of broken fortunes too.

            The conversation, delicately edged with compliment on his side, was on hers a little blunted by a limited vocabulary, and left us both presumably a margin for imagination.

            Sí, la Señora, he explained as we came up, knew absolutely nothing of fatigue, and the impetuosity of the Señora, this attractive eagerness to make acquaintance with it, did great honour to this much forgotten, much neglected town. He spoke of it with rather touching ardour, as a place unvisited, but ‘digno de renombre illustre,’ worthy of high fame.

            It has stood still, it was perhaps too stationary; innovation was repellent to the Spaniard, yet this conservatism, lack of enterprise, the virtue or the failing of his country – as we pleased – had its aesthetic value. Was there not, he would appeal to the Señora, ‘una belleza de reposo,’ a beauty of quiescence, a dignity above prosperity? ‘Muy bien.’ Let the Señora judge, you had it there!

            We struck out from the town, perhaps insensibly toward the landmark of a Calvary, planted a mile or so beyond the walls, its three black shafts above the mass of roofs and pinnacles, in sharp relief against the sky, against which suddenly a flock of vultures threw the first white cloud. With the descending sun, the clear persistence of the blue was losing permanence, a breeze sprang up and birds began to call.

            The Spanish evening has unique effects and exquisite exhilarations: this one led us on some distance past the Calvary and the last group of scattered houses – many in complete decay – which straggle, thinning outwards from the city boundaries into the campo.

            Standing alone, after a stretch of crumbling wall, a wretched little venta, like a stop to some meandering sentence, closed the broken line.

            The place was windowless, but through the open door an oath or two – the common blend of sacrilege and vileness – with a smell of charcoal, frying oil-cakes and an odour of the stable, drifted out into the freshness of the evening air.

            Immediately before us lay a dim expanse of treeless plain: behind, clear cut against a smokeless sky, the flat roof lines and towers of the city, seeming, as we looked back on them, less distant than in fact they were.

            We took a road which finally confronted us with a huge block of buildings, as old church and convent, massed in the shadow of a hill and standing at the entrance to three cross-roads.

            The convent, one of the few remaining in the south, not fallen into ruin, nor yet put, as far as one could judge, to worldly uses, was exceptionally large. We counted over thirty windows in a line upon the western side below the central tower with its pointed turret; the eastern wing, an evidently older part, was cut irregularly with a few square gratings.

            The big, grey structure was impressive in its loneliness, its blank negation of the outside world, its stark expressionless detachment.

            The church, of darker stone, was massive too; its only noticeable feature a small cloister with Romanesque arcades joining the nave in its south-western wall.

            A group of peasant women coming out from vespers passed u as went chattering up the road, the last, an aged creature shuffling painfully some yards behind the rest still muttering her

‘Madre purisima,

Madre castisima,

Ruega por nosotros,’

in a kind of automatic drone.

            We looked in, as one does instinctively: the altar lights which hang like sickly stars in the profound obscurity of Spanish churches were being quickly blotted out.

            We didn’t enter then, but turned back to the convent gate, which stood half open, showing a side of the uncorniced cloisters, and a crowd of flowers, touched to an intensity of brilliance and fragrance by the twilight. Six or seven dogs, the sandy-coloured lurches of the country, lean and wolfish-looking hounds, were sprawling round the gateway; save for this dejected crew, the place seemed resolutely lifeless; and this absence of a human not was just. One didn’t want its solitude or silence touched, its really fine impersonality destroyed.

            We hadn’t meant – there wasn’t light enough – to try the church again, but as we passed it, we turned into the small cloister. King, who had come to his last match, was seeking shelter from the breeze which had considerably freshened, and at the far end we came upon a little door, unlocked. I don’t know why we tried it, but mechanically, as the conscientious tourist will, we drifted in and groped round. Only the vaguest outlines were discernible; the lancets of the lantern at the transept crossing, and a large rose window at the western end seemed, at a glance, the only means of light, and this was failing, leaving fast the fading panes.

            One half-detected, almost guessed, the blind triforium, but the enormous width of the great building made immediate mark. The darkness, masking as it did distinctive features, emphasised the sense of space, which, like the spirit of a shrouded form, gained force, intensity, from its material disguise.

            We stayed not more than a few minutes, but on reaching the small door again we found it fast; bolted or locked undoubtedly in the short interval. Of course we put our backs to it and made a pretty violent outcry, hoping the worthy sacristan was hanging round or somewhere within call. Of course he wasn’t. We tried two other doors; both barred, and there was nothing left for it but noise. We shouted, I suppose, for half an hour, intermittently, and King persisted hoarsely after I had given out.

            The echo of the vast, dark, empty place caught up our cries, seeming to hold them in suspension for a second in the void invisibility of roof and arches, then to fling them down in hollow repetition with an accent of unearthly mimicry which struck a little grimly on one’s ear; and when we paused the silence seemed alert, expectant, ready to repel the first recurrence of unholy clamour. Finally, we gave it up; the hope of a release before the dawn, at earliest, was too forlorn. King, explosive and solicitous was solemnly perturbed, but Ella faced the situation with as admirable tranquillity. Some chocolate and a muff would certainly, for her, she said, have made it more engaging, but poor dear men, the really tragic element resolved itself into – No matches, no cigar!

            Unluckily we hadn’t even this poor means of temporary light. Our steps and voices sounded loud, almost aggressive, as we groped about; the darkness then was shutting down and shortly it grew absolute. We camped eventually in one of the side chapels on the south side of the chancel, and kept a conversation going for a time, but gradually it dropped. The temperature, the fixed obscurity, and possibly a curious oppression in the spiritual atmosphere relaxed and forced it down.

            The scent of incense clung about; a biting chillness crept up through the aisles; it got intensely cold. The stillness too became insistent; it was literally deathlike, rigid, exclusive, even awfully remote. It shut us out and held aloof; our passive presences, our mere vitality, seemed almost a disturbance of it; quiet as we were, we breathed, but it was breathless, and as time went on, one’s impulse was to fight the sort of shapeless personality it presently assumed, to talk, to walk about and make a definite attack on it. Its influence on the others was presumably more soothing, obviously they weren’t that way inclined.

            Five or six hours must have passed. Nothing had marked them, and they hadn’t seemed to move. The darkness seemed to thicken, in a way, to muddle thought and filter through into one’s brain, and waiting, cramped and cold for it to lift, the soundlessness again impressed itself unpleasantly – it was intense, unnatural, acute.

            And then it stirred.

            The break in it was vague but positive; it might have been that, scarcely audible, the wind outside was rising, and yet not precisely that. I barely caught, and couldn’t localise the sound.

            Ella and King were dosing, they had had some snatches of uncomfortable sleep; I, I suppose, was preternaturally awake. I heard a key turn, and the swing back of a door, rapidly followed by a wave of voices breaking in. I put my hand out and touched King, and in a moment, both of them waked and started up.

            I can’t say how, but it at once occurred to us that quiet was our cue, that we were in for something singular.

            The place was filling slowly with a chant, and then, emerging from the eastern end of the north aisle and travelling down just opposite, across the intervening dark, a line of light came into view, crossing the opening of the arches, cut by the massive piers, a moving, flickering line, advancing and advancing with the voices.

            The outlines of the figures in the long procession weren’t perceptible, the faces, palely lit and level with the tapers they were carrying, one rather felt than saw; but unmistakably the voices were men’s voices, and the chant, the measured, reiterated cadences, prevailed over the wavering light.

            Heavy and sombre as the stillness which it broke, vaguely akin to it, the chant swept in and gained upon the silence with a motion of the tide. It was a music neither of the senses, nor the spirit, but the mind, as set, as stately, almost as inanimate as the dark aisles through which it echoed; even, colourless and cold.

            And then, quite suddenly, against its grave and passionless inflections something clashed, a piercing intermittent note, an awful discord, shrilling out and dying down and shrilling out again – a cry – a scream.

            The chant went on; the light, from where we stood, was steadily retreating, and we ventured forward. Judging our whereabouts as best we could, we made towards the choir and stumbled up some steps, placing ourselves eventually behind one of the pillars of the apse. And from this point, the whole proceeding was apparent.

            At the west end of the line of light was turning; fifty or sixty monks (about – and at a venture) habited in brown and carrying tapers, walking two and two, were moving up the central aisle towards us, headed by three, one with the cross between two others bearing heavy silver candlesticks with tapers, larger than those carried by the rest.

            Reaching the chancel step, they paused; the three bearing the cross and candlesticks stood facing the altar, while those following diverged to right and left and lined the aisle. The first to take up this position were quite young, some almost boys; they were succeeded gradually by older men, those at the tail of the procession being obviously aged and infirm.

            And then a figure, white and alight, erect – a woman’s figure – struck a startling note at the far end of the brown line, a note as startling as the shrieks which jarred recurrently, were jarring still against the chant.

            A pace or two behind her walked two priests in surplices, and after them another, vested in a cope. And on the whole impassive company her presence, her disturbance, made no mark. For them, in fact, she wasn’t there.

            Neither was she aware of them. I doubt if to her consciousness, or mine, as she approached, grew definite, there was a creature in the place besides herself.

            She moved and uttered her successive cries as if both sound and motion were entirely mechanical – more like a person in some trance of terror or of anguish than a voluntary rebel; her cries bespoke a physical revulsion into which her spirit didn’t enter; they were not her own – they were outside herself; there was no discomposure in her carriage, nor, when we presently saw it, in her face. Both were distinguished by a certain exquisite hauteur, and this detachment of her personality from her distress impressed one curiously. She wasn’t altogether real, she didn’t altogether live, and yet her presence there was the supreme reality of the unreal scene, and lent to it, at least as I was viewing it, its only element of life.

            She had, one understood, her part to play; she wasn’t, for the moment, quite prepared; she played it later with superb effect.

            As she came up with the three priests, the monks closed in and formed a semi-circle round them, while the priests advanced and placed themselves behind the monks who bore the cross and candlesticks, immediately below the chancel steps, facing the altar. They left her standing some few paces back, in the half-ring of sickly light shed by the tapers.

            Now one saw her face. It was of striking beauty, but its age? One couldn’t say. It had the tints, the purity of youth – it might have been extremely young, matured merely by the moment; but for a veil of fine repression which only years, it seemed, could possibly have woven. And it was itself – this face – a mask, one of the loveliest that spirit ever wore. It kept the spirit’s counsel. Though what stirred it then, in that unique emergency, one saw – to what had stirred it, or might stir it gave no clue. It threw one back on vain conjecture.

            Put the match of passion to it – would it burn? Touch it with grief and would it could, contract? With joy – and could it find, or had it ever found, a smile? Again, one couldn’t say.

            Only, as he stood there, erect and motionless, it showed the faintest flicker of distaste, disgust, as if she shrank from some repellent contact. She was clad, I think I said, from head to foot in a white linen garment; head and ears were covered too, the oval of the face alone was visible, and this was slightly flushed. Her screams were changing into little cries or moans, like those of a spent animal, from whom the momentary pressure of attack has been removed. They broke from her at intervals, unnoticed, unsupressed, and now on silence, for the monks had cessed their chanting.

            As they did so one realised the presence of these men, who, up to now, had scarcely taken shape as actualities, been more than an accompaniment – a drone. They shifted from a mass of voices to a row of pallid faces, each one lit by its own taper, hung upon the dark, or thrown abruptly, as it were, upon a screen; all different; all, at first distinct, but linked together by a subtle likeness, stamped with that dye which blurs the print of individuality – the signet of the cloister.

            Taking them singly, though one did it roughly, rapidly enough, it wasn’t difficult at starting to detect varieties of natural and spiritual equipment. There they were, spread out for sorting, nonentities and saints and devils, side by side, and what was queerer, animated by one purpose, governed by one law.

            Some of the faces touched upon divinity; some fell below humanity; some were, of course, merely a blotch of book and bell, and all were set impassively toward the woman standing there.

            And then one lost the sense of their diversity in their resemblance; the similarity persisted and persisted till the row of faces seemed to merge into one face – the face of nothing human – of a system, of a rule. It framed the woman’s and one felt the force of it: she wasn’t it the hands of men.

            There was a pause filled only by her cries, a space of silence which they hardly broke; and then one of the monks stepped forward, slid into the chancel and began to light up the high altar. The little yellow tongues of flame struggled and started up, till first one line and then another starred the gloom.

            Her glance had followed him; her eyes were fixed upon that point of darkness growing to a blaze. There was for her, in that illumination, some intense significance, and as she gazed intently on the patch of brilliance, her cries were suddenly arrested – quelled. The light had lifted something, given back to her an unimpaired identity. She was at last in full possession of herself. The flicker of distaste had passed and left her face to its inflexible, inscrutable repose.

            She drew herself to her full height and turned towards the men behind her with an air of proud surrender, of magnificent disdain. I think she made some sign.

            Another monk stepped out, extinguished and laid down his taper, and approached her.

            I was prepared for something singular, for something passably bizarre, but not for what immediately occurred. He touched her eyes and closed them; then her mouth, and made a feint of closing that, while one of the two priests threw over his short surplice a black stole and started audibly with a Sub venite. The monks responded. Here and there I caught the words or sense of a response. The prayers for the most part were unintelligible: it was no doubt the usual office for the dead, and if it was, not finer satire for the work in hand could well have been devised. Loudly and unexpectedly above his unctuous monotone a bell clanged out three times. An Ave followed, after which two bells together, this time muffled, sounded out again three times. The priest proceeded with a Miserere, during which they rang the bells alternately, and there was something curiously suggestive and determinate about this part of the performance. The real action had, one felt, begun.

            At the first stroke of the first bell her eyelids fluttered, but she kept them down; it wasn’t until later at one point in the response, ‘Non intres in judicium cum ancilla tua Domine,’ she yielded to an impulse of her lips, permitted them the shadow of a smile. But for this slip she looked the thing of death they reckoned to have made of her – detached herself, with an inspired touch, from all the living actors in the solemn farce, from all apparent apprehension of the scene. I, too, was quite incredibly outside it all.

            I hadn’t even asked myself precisely what was going to take place. Possibly I had caught the trick of her quiescence, acquiescence, and I went no further than she went; I waited – waited with her, as it were, to see it through. And I experienced a vague, almost resentful sense of interruption, incongruity, when King broke in to ask me what was up. He brought me back to Ella’s presence, to the consciousness that this, so far as the spectators were concerned, was not a woman’s comedy.

            I made it briefly plain to them, as I knew something of the place and the people, that any movement on our side would probably prove more than rash, and turned again to what was going forward.

            They were clumsily transforming the white figure. Two monks had robed her in a habit of their colour of her order, I suppose, and were now putting on the scapular and girdle. Finally they flung over her the long white-hooded cloak and awkwardly arranged the veil, leaving her face uncovered; then they joined her hands and placed between them a small cross.

            This change of setting emphasised my first impression of her face; the mask was lovelier now and more complete.

            Two voices started sonorously, ‘Libera me, Domine,’ the monks took up the chant, the whole assembly now began to move, the muffled bells to ring again at intervals, while the procession formed and filed into the choir. The monks proceeded to their stalls, the younger taking places in the rear. The two who had assisted at the robbing led the passive figure to the centre of the chancel, where the three who bore the cross and candlesticks turned round and stood a short way off confronting her. Two others, carrying the censer and bénitier, stationed themselves immediately behind her with the priests and the officiant, who now, in a loud voice, began his recitations.

            They seemed, with variations, to be going through it all again. I caught the ‘Non intres in judicium’ and the ‘Sub venite’ recurring with the force of a refrain. It was a long elaborate affair. The grave deliberation of its detail heightened its effect. Not to be tedious, I give it to you in brief. It lasted altogether possibly two hours.

            The priest assisting the officiant, lifting the border of his cope, attended him when he proceeded first to sprinkle, then to incense the presumably dead figure, with the crucifix confronting it, held almost like a challenge to its sightless face. They made the usual inclinations to the image as they passed it, and repeated the performance of the incensing and sprinkling with extreme formality at intervals, in all, I think, three times.

            There was no break in the continuous drone proceeding from the choir; they kept it going; none of them looked up – or none at least of whom I had a view – when four young monks slid out, and, kneeling down in the clear space between her and the crucifix, dislodged a stone which must have previously been loosened in the paving of the chancel, and disclosed a cavity, the depth of which I wasn’t near enough to see.

            For this I wasn’t quite prepared, and yet I wasn’t discomposed. I can’t attempt to make it clear under what pressure I accepted this impossible dénouement, but I did accept it. More than that, I was exclusively absorbed in her reception of it. Though she couldn’t, wouldn’t see, she must have been aware of what was happening. But on the other hand, she was prepared, dispassionately ready, for the end.

            All through the dragging length of the long offices, although she hadn’t stirred or given any sign (except that one faint shadow of a smile) of consciousness, I felt the force of her intense vitality, the tension of its absolute impression. The life of those enclosing presences seemed to have passed into her presence, to be concentrated there. For to my view it was these men who held her in death’s grip who didn’t live, and she alone who was absorbently alive.

            The candles, burning steadily on either side the crucifix, the soft illumination of innumerable altar lights confronting her, intensified the darkness which above her and behind her – everywhere beyond the narrow confines of the feeble light in which she stood – prevailed.

            This setting lent to her the aspect of as unsubstantial, almost supernatural figure, suddenly arrested in its passage through the dark.

            She stood compliantly and absolutely still. If she had swayed, or given any hint of wavering, of an appeal to God or man, I must have answered it magnetically. It was she who had the key to what I might have done but didn’t do. Make what you will of it – we were inexplicably en rapport.

            But failing failure I was backing her; it hadn’t once occurred to me, without her sanction, to step in, to intervene; that I had anything to do with it beyond my recognition of her – of her part, her claim to play it as she pleased. And now it was – a thousand years too late!

            They managed the illusion for themselves and me magnificently. She had come to be a thing of spirit only, not in any sort of clay. She was already in the world of shades; some power as sovereign and determinate as Death itself had lodged her there, past rescue or the profanation of recall.

            King was in the act of springing forward; he had got out his revolver; meant, if possible, to shoot her before closing with the rest. It was the right and only workable idea. I held him back, using the first deterrent that occurred to me, reminding him of Ella, and the notion of her danger may have hovered on the outskirts of my mind. But it was not for her at all that I was consciously concerned. I was impelled to stand aside, to force him, too, to stand aside and see it through.

            What followed, followed as such things occur in dreams; the senses seize, the mind, or what remains of it, accepts mechanically the natural or unnatural sequence of events.

            I saw the grave surrounded by the priests and blessed; and then the woman and the grave repeatedly, alternately, incensed and sprinkled with deliberate solemnity; and heard, as if from a great distance, the recitations of the prayers, and chanting of interminable psalms.

            At the last moment, with their hand upon her, standing for a second still erect, before she was committed to the darkness, she unclosed her eyes, sent one swift glance towards the light, a glance which caught it, flashed it back, recaptured it and kept it for the lighting of her tomb. And then her face was covered with her veil.

            The final act was the supreme illusion of the whole. I watched the lowering of the passive figure as if I had been witnessing the actual entombment of the dead.

            The grave was sprinkled and incensed again, the stone replaced and fastened down. A long sequence of prayers said over it succeeded, at the end of which, the monks put out their tapers, only one or two remaining lit with those beside the Crucifix.

            The priests and the officiant at length approached the altar, kneeling and prostrating there some minutes and repeating ‘Pater Nosters,’ followed by the choir.

            Finally in rising, the officiant pronounced alone and loudly ‘Requiescat in pace.’ The monks responded sonorously, ‘Amen.’

            The altar lights were one by one extinguished; at a sign, preceded by the cross, the vague, almost invisible procession formed and travelled down the aisle, reciting quietly the ‘De Profundis’ and guided now, by only, here and there, a solitary light. The quiet recitation, growing fainter, was a new and unfamiliar impression; I felt that I was missing something – what? I missed, in fact, the chanting; then quite suddenly and certainly I missed – the scream. In place of it there was this ‘De Profundis’ and her silence. Out of her deep I realised it, dreamily, of course she would not call.

            The door swung to; the church was dark and still again – immensely dark and still.

            There was a pause, in which we didn’t move or speak; in which I doubted for a second the reality of the incredibly remote, yet almost present scene, trying to reconstruct it in imagination, pit the dream against the fact, the fact against the dream.

            ‘Good God!’ said King at length, ‘what are we going to do?’

            His voice awoke me forcibly to something nearer daylight, to the human and inhuman elements in the remarkable affair, which hitherto had missed my mind; they struck against it now with a tremendous shock, and mentally I rubbed my eyes. I saw what King had all along been looking at, the sheer, unpicturesque barbarity. What were we going to do?

            She breathed perhaps, perhaps she heard us – something of us – we were standing not more than a yard or so away; and if she did, she waited, that was the most poignant possibility, for our decision, our attack.

            Ella was naturally unstrung: we left her crouching by the pillar; later I think she partially lost consciousness. It was as well – it left us free.

            Striking, as nearly as we could, the centre of the altar, working from it, we made a guess at the position of the stone, and on our hands and knees felt blindly for some indication of its loosened edge. But everywhere the paving, to our touch, presented an unevenness of surface, and we picked at random, chiefly for the sake of doing something. In that intolerable darkness there was really nothing to be done but wait for dawn or listen for some guidance from below. For that we listened breathless and alert enough, but nothing stirred. The stillness had become again intense, acute, and now a grim significance attached to it.

            The minutes, hours, dragged; time wasn’t as it had been, stationary, but desperately, murderously slow.

            Each moment of inaction counted – counted horribly, as we stood straining ears and eyes for any hint of sound, of light.

            At length the darkness lifted, almost imperceptibly at first; the big rose window to the west became a scarcely visible grey blot; the massive piers detached themselves from the dense mass of shadow and stood out, immense and vague; the windows of the lantern just above us showed a ring of slowly lightening panes; and with the dawn, we found the spot and set to work.

            The implements we improvised we soon discovered to be practically useless. We loosened, but we couldn’t move the stone.

            At intervals we stopped and put our ears to the thin crevices. King thought, and still believes, he heard some sound or movement; but I didn’t. I was somehow sure, for that, it was too late.

            For everything it was too late, and we returned reluctantly to a consideration of our own predicament; we had, if possible, to get away unseen. And this time luck was on our side. The sacristan, who came in early by the cloister door which we had entered by, without perceiving us, proceeded to the sacristy.

            We made a rapid and effectual escape.

            We sketched out and elaborated, on our way back to the town, the little scheme of explanation to be offered to our host, which was to cover an announcement of abrupt departure. He received it with polite credulity, profound regret. He ventured to believe that the Señora was unfortunately missing a unique experience – cities, like men, had elements of beauty, or of greatness which escape the crowd; but the Señora was not of the crowd, and he had hoped she would be able to remain.

            Nothing, however, would induce her to remain for more than a few hours. We must push on without delay and put the night’s occurrences before the nearest British Consul. She made no comments and admitted no fatigue, but on this point she was persistent to perversity. She carried it.

            The Consul proved hospitable and amiable. He heard the story and was suitably impressed. It was a truly horrible experience – remarkably dramatic – yes. He added it – we saw him doing it – to his collection of strange tales.

            The country was, he said, extremely rich in tragic anecdote; and men in his position earned their reputation for romance. But as to doing anything in this case, as in others even more remarkable, why, there was absolutely nothing to be done!

            The laws of Spain were theoretically admirable, but practically, well – the best that could be said of them was that they had their comic side.

            And this was not a civil matter, where the wheels might often, certainly, be oiled. The wheel ecclesiastic was more intractable.

            He asked if we were to leave Spain immediately. We said, ‘Perhaps in a few days.’ ‘Take my advice,’ said he, ‘and make it a few hours.’

            We did.

              Ella would tell you that the horror of those hours hasn’t ever altogether ceased to haunt her, that it visits her in dreams and poisons sleep.

            She hasn’t ever understood, or quite forgiven me my attitude of temporary detachment. She refuses to admit that, after all, what one is pleased to call reality is merely the intensity of one’s illusion. My illusion was intense.

            ‘Oh, for you,’ she says, and with a touch of bitterness, ‘it was a spectacle. The woman didn’t really count.’

            For me it was a spectacle, but more than that: it was an acquiescence in a rather splendid crime.

            On looking back I see that, at the moment in my mind, the woman didn’t really count. She saw herself she didn’t. That’s precisely what she made me see.

            What counted chiefly with her, I suspect, was something infinitely greater to her vision than the terror of men’s dreams.

            She lies, one must remember, in the very centre of the sanctuary – has a place uniquely sacred to her order, the traditions of her kind. It was this honour, satisfying, as it did, some pride of spirit or of race, which bore her honourably through.

            She had, one way or other, clogged the wheels of an inflexible machine. But for the speck of dust she knew herself to be, she was – oh horribly, I grant you! – yet not lightly, not dishonourably, swept away.

  ____

'A White Night' was originally published in the magazine Temple Bar, having most recently been republished in Elaine Showalter's wonderful anthology Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle (1993).

#Charlotte Mew #short story #fin-de-siècle #a white night

[bathtubfullofbullets]

So Much Water So Close to Home (1981)

Raymond Carver My husband eats with a good appetite. But I don’t think he’s really hungry. He chews, arms on the table, and stares at something across the room. He looks at me and looks away. He wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs, and goes on eating.

"What are you staring at me for?" he says. "What is it?" he says and lays down his fork.

"Was I staring?" I say, and shake my head. The telephone rings.

"Don’t answer it," he says.

"It might be your mother," I say.

"Watch and see," he says.

I pick up the receiver and listen. My husband stops eating.

"What did I tell you?" he says when I hang up. He starts to eat again. Then throws his napkin on his plate. He says, "Goddamn it, why can’t people mind their own business? Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen! I wasn’t the only man there. We talked it over and we all decided. We couldn’t just turn around. We were five miles from the car. I won’t have you passing judgment. Do you hear?"

"You know," I say.

He says, "What do I know, Claire? Tell me what I’m supposed to know. I don’t know anything except one thing?’ He gives me what he thinks is a meaningful look. "She was dead," he says. "And I’m as sorry as anyone else. But she was dead."

"That’s the point," I say.

He raises his hands. He pushes his chair away from the table. He takes out his cigarettes and goes out to the back with a can of beer. ~ see him sit in the lawn chair and pick up the newspaper again.

His name is in there on the first page. Along with the names of his friends.

I close my eyes and hold on to the sink. Then I rake my arm across the drainboard and send the dishes to the floor.

He doesn’t move. I know he’s heard. He lifts his head as if still listening. But he doesn’t move otherwise. He doesn’t turn around.

H E and Gordon Johnson and Mel Dorn and Vern Williams, they play poker and bowl and fish. They fish every spring and early summer before visiting relatives can get in the way. They are decent men, family men, men who take care of their jobs. They have sons and daughters who go to school with our son, Dean.

Last Friday these family men left for the Naches River. They parked the car in the mountains and hiked to where they wanted to fish. They carried their bedrolls, their food, their playing cards, their whiskey.

They saw the girl before they set up camp. Mel Dorn found her. No clothes on her at all. She was wedged into some branches that stuck out over the water.

He called the others and they came to look. They talked about what to do. One of the men-my Stuart didn’t say which-said they should start back at once. The others stirred the sand with their shoes, said they didn’t feel inclined that way. They pleaded fatigue, the late hour, the fact that the girl wasn’t going anywhere.

In the end they went ahead and set up the camp. They built a fire and drank their whiskey. When the moon came up, they talked about the girl. Someone said they should -keep the body from drifting away. They took their flashlights and went back to the river. One of the men-it might have been Stuart-waded in and got her. He took her by the fingers and pulled her into shore. He got some nylon cord and tied it to her wrist and then looped the rest around a tree.

The next morning they cooked breakfast, drank coffee, and drank whiskey, and then split up to fish. That night they cooked fish, cooked potatoes, drank coffee, drank whiskey, then took their cooking things and eating things back down to the river and washed them where the girl was.

They played some cards later on. Maybe they played until they couldn’t see them anymore. Vern Williams went to sleep. But the others told stories. Gordon Johnson said the trout they’d caught were hard because of the terrible coldness of the water.

The next morning they got up late, drank whiskey, fished a little, took down their tents, rolled their sleeping bags, gathered their stuff, and hiked out. They drove until they got to a telephone. It was Stuart who made the call while the others stood around in the sun and listened. He gave the sheriff their names. They had nothing to hide. They weren’t ashamed. They said they’d wait until someone could come for better directions and take down their statements.

I was asleep when he got home. But I woke up when I heard him in the kitchen. I found him leaning against the refrigerator with a can of beer. He put his heavy arms around me and rubbed his big hands on my back. In bed he put his hands on me again and then waited as if thinking of something else. I turned and opened my legs. Afterwards, I think he stayed awake.

He was up that morning before I could get out of bed. To see if there was something in the paper, I suppose.

The telephone began ringing right after eight.

"Go to hell!" I heard him shout.

The telephone rang right again.

"I have nothing to add to what sherirn"

He slammed the receiver down.

"What is going on?" I said.

It was then that he told me what I just told you.

I sweep up the broken dishes and go outside. He is lying on his back on the grass now, the newspaper and can of beer within reach.

"Stuart, could we go for a drive?" I say.

He rolls over and looks at me. "We’ll pick up some beer," he says.. He gets to his feet and touches me on the hip as he goes past. "Give me a minute," he says.

We drive through town without speaking. He stops at a roadside market for beer. I notice a great stack ofpapersjust inside the door. On the top step a fat woman in a print dress holds out a licorice stick to a little girl. Later on, we cross Everson Creek and turn into the picnic grounds. The creek runs under the bridge and into a large pond a few hundred yards away. I can see the men out there. I can see them out there fishing.

So much water so close to home.

1 say, "Why did you have to go miles away?"

"Don’t rile me," he says.

We sit on a bench in the sun. He opens us cans of beer. He says, "Relax, Claire."

"They said they were innocent. They said they were crazy."

He says, "Who?" He says, "What are you talking about?"

"The Maddox brothers. They killed a girl named Arlene Hubly where I grew up. They cut off her head and threw her into the Cle Elum River. It happened when I was a girl."

"You’re going to get me riled," he says.

I look at the creek. I’m right in it, eyes open, face down, staring at the moss on the bottom, dead.

"I don’t know what’s wrong with you," he says on the way home. "You’re getting me more riled by the minute."

There is nothing I can say to him.

He tries to concentrate on the road. But he keeps looking into the rear-view mirror.

He knows.

Stuart believes he is letting me sleep this morning. But I was awake long before the alarm went off. I was thinking, lying on the far side of the bed away from his hairy legs.

He gets Dean off for school, and then he shaves, dresses, and leaves for work. Twice he looks in and clears his throat. But I keep my eyes closed.

In the kitchen I find a note from him. It’s signed "Love." I sit in the breakfast nook and drink coffee and leave a ring on the note. I look at the newspaper and turn it this way and that on the table. Then I skid it close and read what it says. The body has been identified, claimed. But it took some examining it, some putting things into it, some cutting, some weighing, some measuring, some putting things back again and sewing them in.

I sit for a long time holding the newspaper and thinking. Then I call up to get a chair at the hairdresser’s.

I sit under the dryer with a magazine on my lap and let Marnie do my nails.

"I am going to a funeral tomorrow," I say. "I’m sorry to hear that," Marnie says. "It was a murder," I say.

"That’s the worst kind," Marnie says.

"We weren’t all that close," I say. "But you know?’

"We’ll get you fixed up for it," Marnie says.

That night I make my bed on the sofa, and in the morning I get up first. I put on coffee and fix breakfast while he shaves.

He appears in the kitchen doorway, towel over his bare shoulder, appraising.

"Here’s coffee," I say. "Eggs’ll be ready in a minute?’

I wake Dean, and the three of us eat. Whenever Stuart looks at me, I ask Dean if he wants more milk, more toast, etc.

"I’ll call you today," Stuart says as he opens the door.

I say, "I don’t think I’ll be home today."

"All right," he says. "Sure."

I dress carefully. I try on a hat and look at myself in the mirror. I write out a note for Dean.

Honey, Mommy has things to do this afternoon, but will be back later. You stay in or be in the backyard until one of us comes home.

Love, Mommy

I look at the word Love and then I underline it. Then I see the word backyard. Is it one word or two?

I drive through farm country, through fields of oats and sugar beets and past apple orchards, cattle grazing in pastures. Then everything changes, more like shacks than farmhouses and stands of timber instead of orchards. Then mountains, and on the right, far below, I sometimes see the Naches River.

A green pickup comes up behind me and stays behind me for miles. I keep slowing at the wrong times, hoping he will pass. Then I speed up. But this is at the wrong times, too. I grip the wheel until my fingers hurt.

On a long clear stretch he goes past. But he drives along beside for a bit, a crewcut man in a blue workshirt. We look each other over. Then he waves, toots his horn, and pulls on up ahead.

I slow down and find a place. I pull over and shut offthe motor. I can hear the river down below the trees. Then I hear the pickup coming back.

I lock the doors and roll up the windows.

"You all right?" the man says. He raps on the glass. "You okay?" He leans his arms on the door and brings his face to the window.

I stare at him. I can’t think what else to do.

"Is everything all right in there? How come you’re all locked up?"

I shake my head.

"Roll down your window?’ He shakes his head and looks at the highway and then back at me. "Roll it down now."

"Please," I say, "I have to go."

"Open the door," he says as if he isn’t listening. "You’re going to choke in there."

He looks at my breasts, my legs. I can tell that’s what he’s doing.

"Hey, sugar," he says. "I’m just here to help is all."

The casket is closed and covered with floral sprays. The organ starts up the minute I take a seat. People are coming in and finding chairs. There’s a boy in flared pants and a yellow short-sleeved shirt. A door opens and the family comes in in a group and moves over to a curtained place off to one side. Chairs creak as everybody gets settled. Directly, a nice blond man in a nice dark suit stands and asks us to bow our heads. He says a prayer for us, the living, and when he finishes, he says a prayer for the soul of the departed.

Along with the others I go past the casket. Then I move out onto the front steps and into the afternoon light. There’s a woman who limps as she goes down the stairs ahead of me. On the sidewalk she looks around. "Well, they got him," she says. "If that’s any consolation. They arrested him this morning. I heard it on the radio before I come. A boy right here in town."

We move a few steps down the hot sidewalk. People are starting cars. I put out my hand and hold on to a parking meter. Polished hoods and polished fenders. My head swims.

I say, "They have friends, these killers. You can’t tell."

"I have known that child since she was a little girl," the woman says. "She used to come over and I’d bake cookies for her and let her eat them in front of the TV."

Back home, Stuart sits at the table with a drink of whiskey in front of him. For a crazy instant I think something’s happened to Dean.

"Where is he?" I say. "Where is Dean?"

"Outside," my husband says.

He drains his glass and stands up. He says, "I think I know what you need."

He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other hand he begins to unbutton my jacket and then he goes on to the buttons of my blouse.

"First things first," he says.

He says something else. But I don’t need to listen. I can’t hear a thing with so much water going.

"That’s right," I say, finishing the buttons myself, "Before Dean comes. Hurry?"

____ This is the firstly published version of the short story, published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. This version is heavily edited by Carver's then-editor Gordon Lish. The original version was later on published in Beginners (2009), but the marvellous oddity of the Lish version is amiss. Therefore, this is my preferred version.

#so much water so close to home #raymond carver #gordon lish #short story #what we talk about when we talk about love

[bathtubfullofbullets]

The Snow Child (1979)

Angela Carter

Midwinter--invincible, immaculate. The Count and his wife go riding, he on a grey mare and she on a black one, she wrapped in the glittering pelts of black foxes; and she wore high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels, and spurs. Fresh snow fell on snow already fallen; when it ceased, the whole world was white. 'I wish I had a girl as white as snow,' says the Count. They ride on. They come to a hole in the snow; this hole is filled with blood. He says: 'I wish I had a girl as red as blood.' So they ride on again; here is a raven, perched on a bare bough. 'I wish I had a girl as black as that bird's feather.' As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her. The Count lifted her up and sat her in front of him on his saddle but the Countess had only one thought: how shall I be rid of her?

The Countess dropped her glove in the snow and told the girl to get down to look for it; she meant to gallop off and leave her there but the Count said: 'I'll buy you new gloves.' At that, the furs sprang off the Countess's shoulders and twined round the naked girl. Then the Countess threw her diamond brooch through the ice of a frozen pond: 'Dive in and fetch it for me,' she said; she thought the girl would drown. But the Count said: 'Is she a fish, to swim in such cold weather?' Then her boots leapt off the Countess's feet and on to the girl's legs. Now the Countess was bare as a bone and the girl furred and booted; the Count felt sorry for his wife. They came to a bush of roses, all in flower. 'Pick me one,' said the Countess to the girl. 'I can't deny you that,' said the Count.

So the girl picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls.

Weeping, the Count got off his horse, unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl. The Countess reined in her stamping mare and watched him narrowly; he was soon finished.

Then the girl began to melt. Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped; a bloodstain, like the trace of a fox's kill on the snow; and the rose she had pulled off the bush. Now the Countess had all her clothes on again. With her long hand, she stroked her furs. The Count picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife; when she touched it, she dropped it.

'It bites!' she said.

_____

'The Snow Child' is part of Angela Carter's collection of short stories��The Bloody Chamber and is a retelling of the classic fairytale of the same name.

#angela carter #snow child #bloody chamber #short story #retelling