Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 38

by Kelly Link

  Lady Churchill’s

  Rosebud Wristlet

  number 38, the second issue of 2018

  This is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 38, July 2018. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731487.

  Print edition text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. (On your ereader you can probably choose your own font.)

  LCRW has sometimes been subtitled An Occasional Outburst aand is usually published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw · twitter.com/smallbeerpress

  The print edition is printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414).

  Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 45 of the print edition for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.

  This issue is the first to be available at Moon Palace Books (3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis MN 55406 · moonpalacebooks.com) yay & thanks, mighty indie booksellers!

  Contents © 2018 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration “Metsona” © 2018 by Joamette Gill (joamettegil.com). Thank you, generous authors and artists.

  In among these dark days we celebrate Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American: Stories winning the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Debut Award for Speculative Fiction. Yay! Also: Jeffrey Ford’s A Natural History of Hell: Stories was a finalist for the Ohioana Award and Sofia Samatar’s Tender: Stories is a finalist for the British Fantasy Award.

  Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. Peace.

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  Thank you!

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is a twice yearly burst of fantastic fiction in all its glories, poetry, and a cooking column—and for some people it comes with a chocolate bar. Even more subscriptions available & order back issues at smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. Send a check/money order to: Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027. Thank you.

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  The Remaining

  Ellen Rhudy

  The couple say they visit every year, though this is the first time they have stayed with Goran. They are tourists in early June, their slow season. Goran lets them describe a black bear they saw on the mountain, sharing their bottle of Skopsko with a shepherd, their plans to take a kombi to the monastery, while patting his dog Metchka and watching them tap their cigarettes against the ashtray Lidija wipes out every morning after they leave. He finds that he cannot remember their names, that he has to return to the web café up the road and log into his email to find their booking and his start of recognition at their family name. They are so thin he can see their ligaments shifting and popping beneath their skin when they chew, and though he never sees them smile they have settled creases indicating that this is something they have in their lives done.

  Later in the summer, after this couple have left and when the rains still have not come, the church will slip completely from its waters. Without fail the few tourists do not notice it at first, the week or so when its cross begins to reveal itself. Then the waters pull back further and he points it to the tourists, how the cross stands still and unmoving above the lake. The couple say they have seen it before, but still they stand and listen to him describe what he can’t in fact remember, when the village stretched down into what is now the lake, when they encircled the church with their families at Easter, taking careful steps in the heavy dark.

  In winter, too, the church will stand there fully revealed, a hill above the dammed waters, moss gripping up the gray stone, snow draping the arms of the cross. You would think you could walk across the snow-topped lake to open its door and find sanctuary. Goran poses the tourists here in their ski gear, the men serious and women pouting for his camera, shifting himself so he can capture the full of the building behind them. If you look just right the flash of a winter coat in the bell tower. When he has sent them for their days of skiing, he retreats to the village café where he can sit with the other men sipping white rakija, their phones spread on the tables before them as they wait for a call from the ski guides that they are on their way back.

  Mostly the guests don’t ask much more than this. They want to photograph Lidija bent over the stove using a corner of her skirt to pull out the shallow banitsa pan of crisp baked rice. They want to photograph Goran pouring out their shots of rakija, they want to see themselves before this drowned church, they want to film themselves hanging on to the rope tow as it jolts them up the mountainside. Each year Goran hopes for a longer winter than the last, for the extra weeks of income when the tourists who thought they’d missed their chance drive out for a final taste of winter, for the extra weeks when the village is unburdened by the presence of the two children in their decayed coats and trailing scarves.

  In the summer, sometimes, they have hikers, but more go to the other villages. It is rare to have a couple like they have now, paying full-price for their private room and bath on the ground floor of Goran’s home. Mostly, in the summer, it is just the locals—Lidija, Goran, their neighbor Goce, who works for the park service in a new wood frame building just off the main road. Goran often takes Metchka there, a Sharplanina weighing almost fifty kilos and with a rough gray coat good for digging your hand into, a settling and stabilizing presence.

  The couple, who Goran guesses are close to his age, have booked a week at his house using one of the websites his younger son manages for them. The husband asks if he can arrange a trip to the monastery today. Tomorrow they plan on hiking, to the village they grew up in; it isn’t one Goran’s ever heard of, the name flitting from his mind before he can seize it. He asks if he can borrow their map, thinking that this village may be sitting at the back of his brain and with the right focus he can draw it out and place it, can advise on the best trail or arrange a driver. He walks them to the café.

  Dragan agrees to taxi them to the main road for the kombi to Sveti Bigorski. Goran asks them to tell him what it looks like, to take photos of the progress. He last visited in October, touching his fingers to the walls when no one was looking. He had his car then and found after ar
riving that the boy and girl had burrowed themselves in the wheel well. They pulled themselves squelching and greasy from its hold and trailed him as he walked the grounds. They seemed unconcerned to be in a holy place. That night the fire came, officially the result of faulty wiring in the kitchen. For weeks the film of the mountainside with its shimmering flame ran on local news, and the police went repeatedly to investigate. A week later Goran’s car died, simply refused to start. Remembering the children dripping out of the wheel well, he decided not to replace it.

  When Dragan hasn’t returned in fifteen minutes the men know he has talked the couple into paying all the way to the monastery and it will be afternoon before they see him again. If Goran owned a car he would have made the offer himself and enjoyed the afternoon roaming the monastery’s grounds, standing out before its entrance for a cigarette, trying not to follow too close as the couple investigate the tapestries in the church. Instead, he unfolds the map over the table and asks his friends about this village the couple are sure sits up in the mountains.

  The best they can think of, after working through the known and mapped villages, are a few decaying homes far up the mountain, above where the shepherds graze their sheep for the summer. They debate what ghost of a village you might find in those homes, but never mention all they would find tangled in the waters beneath the church if they were just to look. Dozens of homes, doors sewn shut by persistent weeds, windows smeared black by algae and mud. Goran’s own brother, Dushko, and his childhood friend Ljuba. Their booted feet caught in the swaying grasses, scarves unwrapping from their necks and drifting in the dense green murk, mittens dissolving from the backs of their linked hands.

  By the time the couple returns they have split six liters of Skopsko and the sun has begun to drift from overhead. Sit down, join us! they tell the couple, but they refuse and only Dragan sits. Goran stands, shakes out their map and shows them the homes he has penciled in high on the mountainside. Their lips and hair are colorless, and they shrug their drooped shoulders when he asks if this looks like the right village to them. They ask for the map back, and drift into the dark while Goran watches, glass between his palms.

  Dragan tells Goran that there is not so much progress on rebuilding, that there are tarps stretched across much of the monastery, hiding anything touched by the fire. They went also to the nunnery, closer to Debar, where a single peacock roams the grounds and they have a saint’s finger on display. Dragan holds his fingers apart to show how small the finger was, how it had shrunk within its miniature coffin. It was his first time to the nunnery. They sit late into the night. The sun drops beneath the trees, and the lake ashes over until it is black. Goran ignores the scattered, single rings of his phone as Lidija tries to get in touch.

  The couple leave before he is awake the next morning. Goran’s younger son Bojan arrives that day with his wife, and she stays with Lidija while the men walk up the path to Goce’s office. Lidija is angry; last night while he was enjoying himself at the café with his friends, she tells him, she was sitting in their house by herself with that boy and girl in the corner watching her eat her dinner. Just standing there, leaning forward each time she served herself a ladle of soup or tore from the loaf of bread, as if they were anticipating that she would serve them as well. Their presence in every bite until she had to push away the food and leave the room, praying they would stay there, holding hands and looking at the walls with mouths open and a thin straggled weed hanging from the boy’s lower lip. She spent the morning as he drank his coffee kneeling in the corner, scrubbing at the damp patch that had fallen from their shadows. She follows Goran out as he sits by the front door, lacing his boots. You are lucky our guests weren’t here to see that, what would they say, it’s a disgrace. Goran, for a moment, is confused; he had thought they came back here, from the café.

  In any case, Goran has never been so bothered by the children, though he knows others sense them as some type of unnerving presence. You knew that boy and girl once, he says, don’t forget, and he and Bojan take Metchka on their walk. Goce is wandering the internet when they arrive, hunched over his green metal desk. He pours out three glasses of rakija and tells Goran he saw his couple early that morning, walking near to the road as they searched for the trail entrance. They found it, he says, waving his hand when Goran asks if he didn’t think to leave his office and help. You know I am always ready to serve a tourist in true need. Just how I think of you, Bojan says, very accurate, always where you’re needed.

  They sip rakija through the morning. Snezhena and I entered the green card lottery, Bojan tells them. They have been entering every year for as many years as Goran can remember, since they met and married.

  And how are your odds looking, he asks, lighting a cigarette. When will you be leaving us.

  Bojan reaches down to pet Metchka. Same as ever, maybe, he says. But Snezhena’s cousins won the lottery last year, and now they’re in Staten Island. Maybe we’ll join them next year, who could say.

  As he does every year, Goce gets a look. He gets the look of a man thinking he is better than he is. Don’t go thinking you are moving too, Goran tells him. You have it good here, you have no idea.

  Goran and Bojan walk back to the village after lunch. They leave Goce standing at the watchtower positioned above the dam, a circular cement construction looking over the terraced hill at its rear. Bojan strips pine needles as they walk, veers off the road in pursuit of blackberries. As the church steeple draws into view Goran becomes aware of the children trailing them, silent and leaving a string of footprints that dry a step or two in their rear. Why do you try every year to leave, he asks. Is it so bad here?

  Everyone leaves, says Bojan. There’s opportunity there, more than here. He pauses and shakes his handful of berries, each no larger than a fingernail. Snezhena is pregnant.

  So you leave your child’s grandparents behind? He stops and turns, watches his brother and Ljuba weaving in their wake, eyes blank and flat black pebbles. Bojan seems only faintly aware of them, squinting his eyes a moment and then relaxing them into the expanse of dust-brown road. Goran’s brother should be sixty-seven years old this winter but when he was a boy, when Goran was too young to have a real memory, he and Ljuba decided to slide over the ice to the newly drowned church. When Goran turned eight, he saw his brother’s mittened hand, turned dark brown by the water, waving to him from the church tower. The next week there was an avalanche, the entire mountain of snow crushing over the dam and smothering fifty men constructing the new electric plant. Snow, rocks, trees, crumpled at its base like a wave hitting the shore. By some miracle it halted itself before reaching the village, pressing to the church’s back and no farther.

  You would do the same, says Bojan. For us, I think you would have. And probably we won’t win anyway. Probably you’ll never see us go farther than Gostivar.

  They walk home, through the village center where Goran waves to his friends at the café but stops only a minute to talk, no time for drinks today, then climb the sloped street to their house. Lidija and Snezhena are out front, plastic table pulled into the shade. It is dry and hot. Lidija asks how long it will take the couple to hike up and back, will they be back in time for dinner does Goran think. No telling, he decides. Part of him hopes they will turn back before they reach the abandoned homes, which cannot be what they meant to look for and therefore can only be a disappointment. Metchka rolls in the dirt at his feet and he scratches her belly while Bojan and Snezhena tell his wife she is about to be a grandmother, and he keeps rubbing her belly, scratching her ears, because better for Lidija to be first to know. Months from now, when Snezhena’s ankles have swollen and overflow her shoes, he will ask Lidija if she doesn’t think it would be better for them to move home, to raise the baby in their good clean air. She will count for him on one hand the number of children who live here. She will tell him to walk by the school one day, serving three villages now, and see how the classes are combined and st
ill have only three or four students.

  When the sun slides behind the mountain Lidija tells him to check for their guests, and he walks down to the pebbled lakeside. He finds Goce there, watching the church. I haven’t seen them today, says Goce, so I thought maybe they’d gone back early. It has been a dry spring, so the bell tower is not fully submerged in the lake. Goran has never been clear on whether the other men can see the children, but with Goce it has been obvious since he was a boy and stood stricken at the waterside. Goran had looked up from his drink and there was Ljuba, the boy’s aunt, looking back out over the water.

  After they drowned, their bodies were left through the winter under water that had frozen itself back over them, sealing them in their flooded town. Goran’s old family home, which he remembers only as the faint outlines of a dream, curling next to his mother on the sofa which was moved to their second home, windows cut from the bondruk construction of cable wires and mud, the water trough settled just to the right of the door. He imagines his brother and Ljuba sliding over the ice in their winter boots, holding hands, pushing the snow aside to glimpse their homes under the water. What it must have been to see the bare roof beams, the clay tiles pulled away for the new houses above the waterline. The children seem to want to evade the water; for the months the church is drowned their damp footprints appear in the corners of rooms and cross the path before the café. Goran imagines only the joy of wending through the water’s silence, pushing from room to room and across the preserved lanes of their old village, stream of bubbles pebbling out behind you as you swim down the streets.

  They were with us earlier, Goran tells him. At the house, and walking down the road. They haven’t gone anywhere.