Jackalope Wives And Other Stories

by T. Kingfisher

  The jackalope wife let out another sob and tried to curl back into a ball. There were burnt patches on her arms and legs, a long red weal down her face. The fur across her breasts and belly was singed. She stank of urine and burning hair.

  “What did you do?”

  “I threw it in the fire,” he said. “You’re supposed to. But she screamed—she wasn’t supposed to scream—nobody said they screamed—and I thought she was dying, and I didn’t want to hurt her—I pulled it back out—”

  He looked up at her with his feverish eyes, that useless, beautiful boy, and said “I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought I was supposed to—I gave her the skin back, she put it on, but then she fell down—it wasn’t supposed to work like that!”

  Grandma Harken sat back. She exhaled very slowly. She was calm. She was going to be calm, because otherwise she was going to pick up the fire poker and club her own flesh and blood over the head with it.

  And even that might not knock some sense into him. Oh, Eva, Eva, my dear, what a useless son you’ve raised. Who would have thought he had so much ambition in him, to catch a jackalope wife?

  “You goddamn stupid fool,” she said. Every word slammed like a shutter in the wind. “Oh, you goddamn stupid fool. If you’re going to catch a jackalope wife, you burn the hide down to ashes and never mind how she screams.”

  “But it sounded like it was hurting her!” he shot back. “You weren’t there! She screamed like a dying rabbit!”

  “Of course it hurts her!” yelled Grandma. “You think you can have your skin and your freedom burned away in front of you and not scream? Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.”

  She stood up, breathing hard, and looked down at the wreck on her hearth. She could see it now, as clear as if she’d been standing there. The fool boy had been so shocked he’d yanked the burning skin back out. And the jackalope wife had one thought only and pulled on the burning hide—

  Oh yes, she could see it clear.

  Half gone, at least, if she was any judge. There couldn’t have been more than few scraps of fur left unburnt. He’d waited through at least one scream—or no, that was unkind.

  More likely he’d dithered and looked for a stick and didn’t want to grab for it with his bare hands. Though by the look of his hands, he’d done just that in the end.

  And the others were long gone by then and couldn’t stop her. There ought to have been one, at least, smart enough to know that you didn’t put on a half-burnt rabbit skin.

  “Why does she look like that?” whispered her grandson, huddled into his chair.

  “Because she’s trapped betwixt and between. You did that, with your goddamn pity. You should have let it burn. Or better yet, left her alone and never gone out in the desert at all.”

  “She was beautiful,” he said. As if it were a reason.

  As if it mattered.

  As if it had ever mattered.

  “Get out,” said Grandma wearily. “Tell your mother to make up a poultice for your hands. You did right at the end, bringing her here, even if you made a mess of the rest, from first to last.”

  He scrambled to his feet and ran for the door.

  On the threshold, he paused, and looked back. “You—you can fix her, right?”

  Grandma let out a high bark, like a bitch-fox, barely a laugh at all. “No. No one can fix this, you stupid boy. This is broken past mending. All I can do is pick up the pieces.”

  He ran. The door slammed shut, and left her alone with the wreckage of the jackalope wife.

  She treated the burns and they healed. But there was nothing to be done for the shape of the jackalope’s face, or the too-wide eyes, or the horns shaped like a sickle moon.

  At first, Grandma worried that the townspeople would see her, and lord knew what would happen then. But the jackalope wife was the color of dust and she still had a wild animal’s stillness. When somebody called, she lay flat in the garden, down among the beans, and nobody saw her at all.

  The only person she didn’t hide from was Eva, Grandma’s daughter. There was no chance that she mistook them for each other—Eva was round and plump and comfortable, the way Grandma’s second husband, Eva’s father, had been round and plump and comfortable.

  Maybe we smell alike, thought Grandma. It would make sense, I suppose.

  Eva’s son didn’t come around at all.

  “He thinks you’re mad at him,” said Eva mildly.

  “He thinks correctly,” said Grandma.

  She and Eva sat on the porch together, shelling beans, while the jackalope wife limped around the garden. The hairless places weren’t so obvious now, and the faint stripes across her legs might have been dust. If you didn’t look directly at her, she might almost have been human.

  “She’s gotten good with the crutch,” said Eva. “I suppose she can’t walk?”

  “Not well,” said Grandma. “Her feet weren’t made to stand up like that. She can do it, but it’s a terrible strain.”

  “And talk?”

  “No,” said Grandma shortly. The jackalope wife had tried, once, and the noises she’d made were so terrible that it had reduced them both to weeping. She hadn’t tried again. “She understands well enough, I suppose.”

  The jackalope wife sat down, slowly, in the shadow of the scarlet runner beans. A hummingbird zipped inches from her head, dabbing its bill into the flowers, and the jackalope’s face turned, unsmiling, to follow it.

  “He’s not a bad boy, you know,” said Eva, not looking at her mother. “He didn’t mean to do her harm.”

  Grandma let out an explosive snort. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It doesn’t matter what he meant to do. He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn’t do that, he should have finished what he started.” She scowled down at the beans. They were striped red and white and the pods came apart easily in her gnarled hands. “Better all the way human than this. Better he’d bashed her head in with a rock than this.”

  “Better for her, or better for you?” asked Eva, who was only a fool about her son and knew her mother well.

  Grandma snorted again. The hummingbird buzzed away. The jackalope wife lay still in the shadows, with only her thin ribs going up and down.

  “You could have finished it, too,” said Eva softly. “I’ve seen you kill chickens. She’d probably lay her head on the chopping block if you asked.”

  “She probably would,” said Grandma. She looked away from Eva’s weak, wise eyes. “But I’m a damn fool as well.”

  Her daughter smiled. “Maybe it runs in families.”

  Grandma Harken got up before dawn the next morning and went rummaging around the house.

  “Well,” she said. She pulled a dead mouse out of a mousetrap and took a half-dozen cigarettes down from behind the clock. She filled three water bottles and strapped them around her waist. “Well. I suppose we’ve done as much as humans can do, and now it’s up to somebody else.”

  She went out into the garden and found the jackalope wife asleep under the stairs. “Come on,” she said. “Wake up.”

  The air was cool and gray. The jackalope wife looked at her with doe-dark eyes and didn’t move, and if she were a human, Grandma Harken would have itched to slap her.

  Pay attention! Get mad! Do something!

  But she wasn’t human and rabbits freeze when they’re scared past running. So Grandma gritted her teeth and reached down a hand and pulled the jackalope wife up into the pre-dawn dark.

  They moved slow, the two of them. Grandma was old and carrying water for two, and the girl was on a crutch. The sun came up and the cicadas burnt the air with their wings.

  A coyote watched them from up on the hillside. The jackalope wife looked up at him, recoiled, and Grandma laid a hand on her arm.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I ain’t got the patience for coyotes. They’d maybe fix you up but we’d both be stuck
in a tale past telling, and I’m too old for that. Come on.”

  They went a little further on, past a wash and a watering hole. There were palo verde trees spreading thin green shade over the water. A javelina looked up at them from the edge and stamped her hooved feet. Her children scraped their tusks together and grunted.

  Grandma slid and slithered down the slope to the far side of the water and refilled the water bottles. “Not them either,” she said to the jackalope wife. “They’ll talk the legs off a wooden sheep. We’d both be dead of old age before they’d figured out what time to start.”

  The javelina dropped their heads and ignored them as they left the wash behind.

  The sun was overhead and the sky turned turquoise, a color so hard you could bash your knuckles on it. A raven croaked overhead and another one snickered somewhere off to the east.

  The jackalope wife paused, leaning on her crutch, and looked up at the wings with longing.

  “Oh no,” said Grandma. “I’ve got no patience for riddle games, and in the end they always eat someone’s eyes. Relax, child. We’re nearly there.”

  The last stretch was cruelly hard, up the side of a bluff. The sand was soft underfoot and miserably hard for a girl walking with a crutch. Grandma had to half-carry the jackalope wife at the end. She weighed no more than a child, but children are heavy and it took them both a long time.

  At the top was a high fractured stone that cast a finger of shadow like the wedge of a sundial. Sand and sky and shadow and stone. Grandma Harken nodded, content.

  “It’ll do,” she said. “It’ll do.” She laid the jackalope wife down in the shadow and laid her tools out on the stone. Cigarettes and dead mouse and a scrap of burnt fur from the jackalope’s breast. “It’ll do.”

  Then she sat down in the shadow herself and arranged her skirts.

  She waited.

  The sun went overhead and the level in the water bottle went down. The sun started to sink and the wind hissed and the jackalope wife was asleep or dead.

  The ravens croaked a conversation to each other, from the branches of a palo verde tree, and whatever one said made the other one laugh.

  “Well,” said a voice behind Grandma’s right ear, “lookee what we have here.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

  “Don’t see them out here often,” he said. “Not the right sort of place.” He considered. “Your Saint Anthony, now…him I think I’ve seen. He understood about deserts.”

  Grandma’s lips twisted. “Father of Rabbits,” she said sourly. “Wasn’t trying to call you up.”

  “Oh, I know.” The Father of Rabbits grinned. “But you know I’ve always had a soft spot for you, Maggie Harken.”

  He sat down beside her on his heels. He looked like an old Mexican man, wearing a button-down shirt without any buttons. His hair was silver gray as a rabbit’s fur. Grandma wasn’t fooled for a minute.

  “Get lonely down there in your town, Maggie?” he asked. “Did you come out here for a little wild company?”

  Grandma Harken leaned over to the jackalope wife and smoothed one long ear back from her face. She looked up at them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

  “Shit,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Never seen that before.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “What did you do to her, Maggie?”

  “I didn’t do a damn thing, except not let her die when I should have.”

  “There’s those would say that was more than enough.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.

  “She put on a half-burnt skin. Don’t suppose you can fix her up?” It cost Grandma a lot of pride to say that, and the Father of Rabbits tipped his chin in acknowledgment.

  “Ha! No. If it was loose I could fix it up, maybe, but I couldn’t get it off her now with a knife.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Now I see why you wanted one of the Patterned People.”

  Grandma nodded stiffly.

  The Father of Rabbits shook his head. “He might want a life, you know. Piddly little dead mouse might not be enough.”

  “Then he can have mine.”

  “Ah, Maggie, Maggie…You’d have made a fine rabbit, once. Too many stones in your belly now.” He shook his head regretfully. “Besides, it’s not your life he’s owed.”

  “It’s my life he’d be getting. My kin did it, it’s up to me to put it right.” It occurred to her that she should have left Eva a note, telling her to send the fool boy back East, away from the desert.

  Well. Too late now. Either she’d raised a fool for a daughter or not, and likely she wouldn’t be around to tell.

  “Suppose we’ll find out,” said the Father of Rabbits, and nodded.

  A man came around the edge of the standing stone. He moved quick then slow and his eyes didn’t blink. He was naked and his skin was covered in painted diamonds.

  Grandma Harken bowed to him, because the Patterned People can’t hear speech.

  He looked at her and the Father of Rabbits and the jackalope wife. He looked down at the stone in front of him.

  The cigarettes he ignored. The mouse he scooped up in two fingers and dropped into his mouth.

  Then he crouched there, for a long time. He was so still that it made Grandma’s eyes water, and she had to look away.

  “Suppose he does it,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Suppose he sheds that skin right off her. Then what? You’ve got a human left over, not a jackalope wife.”

  Grandma stared down at her bony hands. “It’s not so bad, being a human,” she said. “You make do. And it’s got to be better than that.”

  She jerked her chin in the direction of the jackalope wife.

  “Still meddling, Maggie?” said the Father of Rabbits.

  “And what do you call what you’re doing?”

  He grinned.

  The Patterned Man stood up and nodded to the jackalope wife.

  She looked at Grandma, who met her too-wide eyes. “He’ll kill you,” the old woman said. “Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don’t have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it’s over, you’ll be all the way something, even if it’s just all the way dead.”

  The jackalope wife nodded.

  She left the crutch lying on the stones and stood up. Rabbit legs weren’t meant for it, but she walked three steps and the Patterned Man opened his arms and caught her.

  He bit her on the forearm, where the thick veins run, and sank his teeth in up to the gums. Grandma cursed.

  “Easy now,” said the Father of Rabbits, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s one of the Patterned People, and they only know the one way.”

  The jackalope wife’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged down onto the stone.

  He set her down gently and picked up one of the cigarettes.

  Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.

  The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.

  She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”

  The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”

  “Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said.

  “Could be that, too.”

  The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.

  “How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.

  “As long as it takes,” she snapped back.

  The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half-full, half-new, halfway between one thing and the other.

  “She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Ma
n had left behind and offered one to Grandma.

  “She doesn’t have a jackalope skin any more.”

  He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”

  “I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”

  The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark.

  “It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”

  They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.

  “I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.

  “Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”

  The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.

  From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.

  “It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.

  “Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.

  “Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once—must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it…Unless you want it?”

  He held it out to Grandma Harken.

  She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands.

  “You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.