by Paula Guran
“You’re the bride, Kipley. It’s coming for you.”
Rainbow stepped out of my shaking, febrile grip. For a moment her lips pressed very tightly together and I wondered if she would cry. Then her mouth quirked into an uncomprehending, furtive little smile.
“Me,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“You really think it’s me?”
“You know I know. You don’t outrun fate, Rainbow.”
“Why are you telling me now?” Something in her bewilderment cooled, and I was sensible of the fact we were having an argument next to a suicide. “Hey—have you been hanging with me all this time because of that?”
“How does that matter? Look: This is the beginning of the end of you. Why don’t you want to be saved, or to run away, or something? It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” said Rainbow, with infinite dignity, “to me. You know what I think?”
She did not wait to hear what I imagined she thought, which was wise. She hopped away from the dead man and held her palms up to the rain. The air was thick with an electrifying chill: a breathless enormity. We were so close now. Color leached from the Walmart, from the concrete, from the green in the trees and the red of the stop sign. Raindrops sat in her pale hair like pearls.
“I think this is the coolest thing that ever happened to this stupid backwater place,” she said. “This is awesome. And I think you agree but won’t admit it.”
“This place is literally Hell.”
“Suits you,” said Rainbow.
I was beside myself with pain. My fingernails tilled up the flesh of my palms. “I understand now why you got picked as the bride,” I said. “You’re a sociopath. I am not like you, Miss Kipley, and if I forgot that over the last few weeks I was wrong. Excuse me, I’m going to get a police officer.”
When I turned on my heel and left her—standing next to a victim of powers we could not understand or fight, and whose coming I was forced to watch like a reality TV program where my vote would never count—the blood was pooling in watery pink puddles around her rain boots. Rainbow didn’t follow.
Mar had grilled steaks for dinner that neither of us ate. By the time I’d finished bagging and stuffing them mechanically in the fridge, she’d finished her preparations. The dining room floor was a sea of reeking heatherbacks. There was even a host of them jarred and flickering out on the porch. The front doors were locked and the windows haloed with duct tape. At the center sat my aunt in an overstuffed armchair, cigarette lit, hair undone, a bucket of dirt by her feet. The storm clamored outside.
I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”
My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”
“Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”
I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.
“Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”
My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.
“Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”
“First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning—your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you . . . not knowing.”
I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.
The goblin shark in Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.
I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.
“Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”
Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”
“If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”
“You badass,” she said, and before I could retort she leaned out past the windowsill. She made a soft white blotch in the darkness.
“I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” said Rainbow. “I think you’re really funny, and you’re interesting, and your fingernails are all different lengths. You’re not like other girls. And you only think things are worthwhile if they’ve been proved ten times by a book, and I like how you hate not coming first.”
“Listen,” I said. My throat felt tight and fussy and rain was leaking into my hood. “The drowned lord who dwells in dark water will claim you. The moon won’t rise tonight, and you’ll never update your Tumblr again.”
“And how you care about everything! You care super hard. And you talk like a dork. I think you’re disgusting. I think you’re super cute. Is that weird? No homo? If I put no homo there, that means I can say things and pretend I don’t mean them?”
“Rainbow,” I said, “don’t make fun of me.”
“Why is it so bad for me to be the bride, anyway?” she said, petulant now. “What’s wrong with it? If it’s meant to happen, it’s meant to happen, right? Cool. Why aren’t you okay with it?”
There was no lightning or thunder in that storm. There were monstrous shadows, shiny on the matt black of night, and I thought I heard things flop around in the woods. “Because I don’t want you to die.”
Her smile was lovely and there was no fear in it. Rainbow didn’t know how to be afraid. In her was a curious exultation and I could see it, it was in her mouth and eyes and hair. The heedless ecstasy of the bride. “Die? Is that what happens?”
My stomach churned. “If you change your mind, come to West North Street,” I said. “The house standing alone at the top of the road. Go to the graveyard at the corner of Main and Spinney and take a handful of dirt off any child’s grave, then come to me. Otherwise, this is good-bye.”
I turned. Something sang through the air and landed next to me, soggy and forlorn. My packet of Cruncheroos. When I turned back, Rainbow was wide-eyed and her face was uncharacteristically puckered, and we must have mirrored each other in our upset. I felt like we were on the brink of something as great as it was awful, something I’d snuck around all summer like a thief.
“You’re a prize dumbass trying to save me from myself, Hester Blake.”
I said, “You’re the only one I wanted to like me.”
My hands shook as I hiked home. There were blasphemous, slippery things in each clearing that endless night. I knew what would happen if they were to approach. The rain grew oily and warm as blood was oily and warm, and I alternately wept and laughed, and none of them even touched me.
My au
nt had fallen asleep amid the candles like some untidy Renaissance saint. She lay there with her shoes still on and her cigarette half-smoked, and I left my clothes in a sopping heap on the laundry floor to take her flannel pj’s out of the dryer. Their sleeves came over my fingertips. I wouldn’t write down Rainbow in the Blake book, I thought. I would not trap her in the pages. Nobody would ever know her but me. I’d outrun fate, and blaspheme Blake duty.
I fell asleep tucked up next to Mar.
In the morning I woke to the smell of toaster waffles. Mar’s coat was draped over my legs. First of July: The Deepwater God was here. I rolled up my pajama pants and tiptoed through molten drips of candlewax to claim my waffle. My aunt wordlessly squirted them with syrup faces and we stood on the porch to eat.
The morning was crisp and grey and pretty. Salt drifted from the clouds and clumped in the grass. The wind discomfited the trees. Not a bird sang. Beneath us, the town was laid out like a spill: flooded right up to the gas station, and the western suburbs drowned entirely. Where the dark, unreflective waters had not risen, you could see movement in the streets, but it was not human movement. And there roared a great revel near the Walmart.
There was thrashing in the water and a roiling mass in the streets. A tentacle rose from the depths by the high school, big enough to see each sucker, and it brushed open a building with no effort. Another tentacle joined it, then another, until the town center was alive with coiling lappets and feelers. I was surprised by their jungle sheen of oranges and purples and tropical blues. I had expected somber greens and funeral greys. Teeth broke from the water. Tall, harlequin-striped fronds lifted, questing and transparent in the sun. My chest felt very full, and I stayed to look when Mar turned and went inside. I watched like I could never watch enough.
The water lapped gently at the bottom of our driveway. I wanted my waffle to be ash on my tongue, but I was frantically hungry and it was delicious. I was chomping avidly, flannels rolled to my knees, when a figure emerged at the end of the drive. It had wet short-shorts and perfectly hairsprayed hair.
“Hi,” said Rainbow bashfully.
My heart sang, unbidden.
“God, Kipley! Come here, get inside—”
“I kind’ve don’t want to, dude,” she said. “No offense.”
I didn’t understand when she made an exaggerated oops! shrug. I followed her gesture to the porch candles with idiot fixation. Behind Rainbow, brightly colored appendages writhed in the water of her wedding day.
“Hester,” she said, “you don’t have to run. You’ll never die or be alone, neither of us will; not even the light will have permission to touch you. I’ll bring you down into the water and the water under that, where the spires of my palace fill the lost mortal country, and you will be made even more beautiful and funny and splendiferous than you are now.”
The candles cringed from her damp Chucks. When she approached, half of them exploded in a chrysanthemum blast of wax. Leviathans crunched up people busily by the RiteAid. Algal bloom strangled the telephone lines. My aunt returned to the porch and promptly dropped her coffee mug, which shattered into a perfect Unforgivable Shape.
“I’ve come for my bride,” said Rainbow, the abyssal king. “Yo, Hester. Marry me.”
This is the Blake testimony of Hester, twenty-third generation in her sixteenth year.
In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, the God of the drowned country came ashore. The many-limbed horror of the depths chose to take a local girl to wife. Main Street was made over into salt bower. Water-creatures adorned it as jewels do. Mortals gave themselves for wedding feast and the Walmart utterly destroyed. The Deepwater Lord returned triumphant to the tentacle throne and will dwell there, in splendor, forever.
My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate, because when the leviathan prince went, I went with her.
Tamsyn Muir is from New Zealand, but also spends time in Oxford, England. A graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, her fiction has appeared in Fantasy, Weird Tales, Nightmare, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and a couple of other “year’s best” volumes. Her work has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Nebula Awards.
Then I saw it, a long tank along the back wall. The snake was magnificent, from the pale skin on her belly to the brown scales on her back.
FABULOUS BEASTS
Priya Sharma
“Eliza, tell me your secret.”
Sometimes I’m cornered at parties by someone who’s been watching me from across the room as they drain their glass. They think I don’t know what’s been said about me.
Eliza’s odd looking but she has something, don’t you think? Une jolie laide. A French term meaning ugly-beautiful. Only the intelligentsia can insult you with panache.
I always know when they’re about to come over. It’s in the pause before they walk, as though they’re ordering their thoughts. Then they stride over, purposeful, through the throng of actors, journalists, and politicians, ignoring anyone who tries to engage them for fear of losing their nerve.
“Eliza, tell me your secret.”
“I’m a princess.”
Such a ridiculous thing to say and I surprise myself by using Kenny’s term for us, even though I am now forty-something and Kenny was twenty-four years ago. I edge past, scanning the crowd for Georgia, so I can tell her that I’ve had enough and am going home. Maybe she’ll come with me.
My interrogator doesn’t look convinced. Nor should they be. I’m not even called Eliza. My real name is Lola and I’m no princess. I’m a monster.
We, Kenny’s princesses, lived in a tower.
Kath, my mum, had a flat on the thirteenth floor of Laird Tower, in a northern town long past its prime. Two hundred and seventeen miles from London and twenty-four years ago. A whole world away, or it might as well be.
Ami, Kath’s younger sister, lived two floors down. Kath and I went round to see her the day that she came home from the hospital. She answered the door wearing a black velour tracksuit, the bottoms slung low on her hips. The top rose up to reveal the wrinkled skin that had been taut over her baby bump the day before.
“Hiya,” she opened the door wide to let us in.
Ami only spoke to Kath, never to me. She had a way of ignoring people that fascinated men and infuriated women.
Kath and I leaned over the Moses basket.
“What a diamond,” Kath cooed.
She was right. Some new babies are wizened, but not Tallulah. She looked like something from the front of one of Kath’s knitting patterns. Perfect. I knew, even at that age, that I didn’t look like everyone else; flat nose with too much nostril exposed, small eyelids and small ears that were squashed against my skull. I felt a pang of jealousy.
“What’s her name, Ami?”
“Tallulah Rose.” Ami laid her head on Kath’s shoulder. “I wish you’d been there.”
“I wanted to be there too. I’m sorry, darling. There was nobody to mind Lola. And Mikey was with you.” Kath must have been genuinely sorry because normally she said Mikey’s name like she was sniffing sour milk. “Where is he now?”
“Out, wetting the baby’s head.”
Kath’s expression suggested that she thought he was doing more than toasting his newborn. He was always hanging around Ami. Just looking after you, like Kenny wants, he’d say, as if he was only doing his duty. Except now that there were shitty nappies to change and formula milk to prepare he was off, getting his end away.
Ami wasn’t quite ready to let Kath’s absence go.
“You could’ve left Lola with one of my friends.”
Ami knew better. Kath never let anyone look after me, not even her.
“Let’s not fight now, pet. You’re tired.”
Ami’s gaze was like being doused in ice water. It contained everything she couldn’t say to me. Fucking ugly, little runt. You’re always in the way.
“
You must be starvin’. Let me get you a cuppa and a sandwich and then you can get some sleep.”
We stood and looked at the baby when Ami had gone to bed.
“Don’t get any ideas. You don’t want to be like your aunt, with a baby at sixteen. You don’t want to be like either of us.”
Kathy always spoke to me like I was twenty-four, not four.
Tallulah stirred and stretched, arms jerking outwards as if she was in freefall. She opened her eyes. There was no squinting or screaming.
“The little scrap’s going to need our help.”
Kath lifted her out and laid her on her knee for inspection. I put my nose against the soft spot on her skull. I fell in love with her right then.
“What do you wish for her?” Kath asked, smiling.
Chocolate. Barbies. A bike. A pet snake. Everything my childish heart could bestow.
Saturdays were for shopping. Kathy and I walked down Cathcart Street towards town. We’d pass a row of grimy Victorian mansions on our way that served as a reminder of once great wealth, now carved up into flats for social housing or filled with squatters who lay in their damp dens with needles in their arms.
After these were the terraces, joined by a network of alleyways that made for easy assaults and getaways. This model of housing was for the civic minded when everyone here had a trade, due to our proximity to the city of Liverpool. The ship-building yards lay empty, and the 1980s brought container ships that did away with the demand for dockers. The life inside spilled out into the sun; women sat on their steps in pajama bottoms and vest tops, even though it was lunchtime. Fags in hand, they’d whisper to one another as Kathy passed, afraid to meet her gaze. A man wore just shorts, his pale beer belly pinking up in the sun. He saluted when he saw Kathy. She ignored him.
I followed Kathy, her trolley wheels squeaking. The sound got worse as it was filled with vegetables, cheap meat shrink wrapped on Styrofoam trays, and bags of broken biscuits.
Kathy stopped to talk to a woman with rotten, tea-stained teeth. I was bored. We were at the outskirts of town, where the shops were most shabby. House clearance stores and a refurbished washing machine outlet. I wandered along the pavement a way until something stopped me. The peeling sign over the shop window read RICKY’S REPTILES. The display was full of tanks. Most were empty, but the one at the front contained a pile of terrapins struggling to climb over one another in a dish of water.