Unmasked
Page 31
But I am not safe. I cannot forget the First Queen’s memories, which the gendarmes would surely kill me for having, and more, I cannot erase the beseeching question in Pena’s eyes.
I tear off her mask. It’s not the unmasking hour, but I don’t care. I’m weary of masks, even a blameless one without an oversoul. Pena’s death burdens me with shame and guilt—like being flayed again, but with the pain inside.
I am surrounded by masks. Each is a player in some fabricated theater—artist, victim, rake, entrepreneur, lover, spouse, friend. None of them is real, but I can put them on and escape these feelings.
But I won’t.
One after the other, I destroy my masks. The ones that shatter are the easiest. I hurl them at the floor and shards spill across the tile. The ones that burn, I commit to fire. But the metal ones I must work at, smashing one upon another until they are twisted out of all recognition.
I save the sable mask for last out of a sense of propriety. Although it is metal, it is oddly malleable, and it crumbles between my hands. The lenses fall out of the eyeholes and tumble among the broken bits of ceramic and glass on my floor.
I stand amidst the debris that was my life and don the only mask I spared, Pena’s green and toffee one.
My lover glances at me in her cerulean-with-voile mask and lets me in. She thinks I am her servant girl.
“Where did you go?” she demands. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? And where is my suitor?”
Her quarters are much like mine, much like every citizen’s. There is a mask room, a kitchen, and a bedchamber. I brush past her and she follows, continuing to scold as we enter her kitchen. I find what I need in one of the drawers: a tenderizer mallet, heavy and solid. Even when I turn with it upraised, she doesn’t relent.
“Are you ignoring me, you slut?” she shouts. “How dare you!”
Only when I yank off her mask does she become afraid, and by then, it’s too late.
I smash the mallet into her face. She stumbles, and I ride her as she goes down, hammering the metal tool into her face over and over. Bones and flesh mash together into pulp, and still I persist. I must be thorough.
Pena did not have time to teach me the secrets of her league of named. But through her, I have learned enough. I have seen how the gendarmes kill. I do not have their loops or their strength, but I know how to murder so that my victims will not wake.
Pena also taught me to know who I am.
I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen’s eternal river.
After receiving her master’s degree in psychology, Eugie Foster retired from academia to pen flights of fancy. In addition to receiving the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, she was named the 2009 Author of the Year by Bards and Sages. Her fiction has also received the 2002 Phobos Award; been translated into seven languages; and been a finalist for the Hugo, Black Quill, Bram Stoker, and BSFA Awards. Her publication credits number over one hundred and include stories in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Cricket, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Fantasy Magazine; podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and PodCastle; and anthologies Best New Fantasy and Best New Romantic Fantasy 2. Her short story collection, Returning My Sister’s Face: And Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, is available from Norilana Books. Eugie lived in Atlanta with her husband Matthew Foster until her passing in 2014. Each year at Dragon Con, the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction is presented to an “irreplaceable” work of short fiction.
Additional Copyright Information
Additional Copyright Information
Anthology copyright © 2021, WordFire Press
Introduction © 2021 by WordFire, Inc.
“Pygmalion” © 2021 by Seanan McGuire
“La Marionnette” © 2021 by Alicia Cay
“Speakeasy” © 2021 by Keltie Zubko
“Framing Marta” © 2021 by James Romag
“The Green Gas” © 2021 by Liam Hogan
“Death by Misadventure” © 2021 by John M. Olson
“The Fog of War” © 2021 by Edward J. Knight
“Faces of Death” © 2021 by Ed Burkley
“The Quota” © 2021 by Tom Howard
“Wa-Ha-Ya (The Wolf)” © 2021 by JL Curtis
“I Have No Name” © 2021 by Shannon Marsh
“Beauty is Lifted from Its Face as a Mask” © 2021 Eric James Stone
“Pagliacci’s Joke” © 2021 by Travis Heermann
“A New Purpose” © 2021 by Rebecca M. Senese
“Eyeless” © 2021 by Gamaliel Martinez
“In Defiance of Death” © 2021 by Rebecca E. Treasure
“Qualia” © 2021 by Russell Davis
“Shot in the Dark” © 2021 Brennen Hankins
“The Hibakusha” © 2021 by Michael Scott Bricker
“Mope Not for the Mighty” © 2021 by Michael Nethercott
“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” © 2009 by Eugie Foster, originally published in Interzone, February 2009.
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