The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  The guide.

  I had almost forgotten about him and about where he had gone to deal with some personal business. Perhaps I did need a guide, if only to assist me with my understanding of why I needed a guide in the first place. There was a peculiar term—“brainwright” wasn’t it?—which lingered in a vacuum: a mental process that seemed to belong to someone other than myself.

  The two men quickly established themselves—lounging on my bed, as if it belonged to them. Claura was sewing up the bedspread which had become unhemmed the previous night.

  “You haven’t ventured out of Bonnyville,” asserted the guide, staring hard at anybody but me.

  “No…I’ve not been able to sort out the whereabouts of everything.”

  I intended to say the whereabouts of the outside doors but did not want to appear too foolish. I would never admit, also, that I had yet to discover a window with a sea view, although I simply knew that Bonnyville must have boasted several such.

  6

  The guide’s mother—who, he later reminded me, was the reason for his absence from my side at Bonnyville—had recovered as well as could be expected. Claura—who had left a prurient taste in my mouth—was off upon some business concerned with laundry—which was a pity as the glimpse I had caught of her that day hinted at the skimpiest clothes yet and, indeed, not a maid’s uniform.

  Thomasina’s casts-off, I thought to myself.

  “It was only a bad cold,” explained the guide, thankfully interrupting my dubious revery.

  I remembered—although I hadn’t noted it at the time—that Thomasina’s Mother (the landlady), upon my first viewing of Bonnyville, was also suffering from what I considered to be a blocked-up nose and an intermittent bark.

  The footman interrupted, in his turn, the guide’s explanation of his absence:

  “We should show you today where the black gulls are kept.”

  I nodded, as if I understood the footman.

  “Yes why not?” perked up the guide, the brainwright, the armsman, the eyepiece, call him what you will. And I gave up calling him anything.

  7

  The three of us crowded off—like a gang of children with some secrets overlapping, others not. Yet, there is something more important to recount. I have just remembered: something that came later in the chronology of my time at Bonnyville but is vital to the understanding of everything that preceded it. This was the fact that Thomasina had returned without me realizing it. She disguised herself as Claura—in low-cut frocks more suitable as evening-wear of film stars who knew they were about to be snapped for a fashionable magazine. I saw her kissing the guide. I felt incredibly jealous, because I thought she should have kissed me, bearing in mind the quick glances and unmistakeable sweet smiles she had shed in my direction ever since returning to Bonnyville. And it was not an ordinary kiss, but a long lingering peck. I wondered why she didn’t wear brighter clothes. I feared the tabloid reporter was due to arrive that day and I wanted her to appear at her best.

  Another day, I spotted her and the footman strolling across the end of the very corridor which I was currently negotiating in my continuous search of an outside door. Why be at the seaside, if one couldn’t enjoy the sea and all its accoutrements? This was the nagging question my mind ever asked itself. Indeed, Thomasina and the footman were carrying beach buckets and sand spades and tiny flags on sticks.

  I placed a finger on my lips and decided to follow them, even if that meant that I betrayed myself into believing that I was indeed trapped at Bonnyville and required a sufficient guide to escape its calling.

  8

  “How are you today?”

  I smiled up at Claura. She was demurely dressed in a high-buttoned uniform. Too early for evening-wear, I guessed, even though I had been awake for unconscionable hours, it seemed.

  I was on the point of answering when I spotted that the guide had followed her into the room. He carried his nose aloft, so that I could see it owned no nostrils: perhaps snubbing me or betokening the previous day’s self-betrayal on my part, when the pair of them had led me—with their saucy hats and candy floss and salt airs and side-eyes and under screeching—into a part of Bonnyville I had not before visited: a bathroom decorated like a beach, with Jacuzzi sea and a pier mural—and a three-dimensional Punch-and-Judy show with pregnant hand puppets. The latter were very realistic but simultaneously stylized. I was allowed to dip my toes in a rock pool of crabs and sting-fish—and build sandcastles with the paraphernalia I had seen being carried. I was so enthusiastic, I soon forgot I was now an adult—to the point of incontinence. At which time, I was spanked and returned to the parts of Bonnyville I knew.

  “Better,” I said in immediate answer to the question.

  9

  At the point where two prayers cross

  “How can you fight in more than one war at a time?” I asked myself as I watched the creatures on the bedroom floor (pets, by another name, if it weren’t for their long claws and vicious eyes) as they turn and turn about, fought each other to the death. Grounded gulls. Bed-ridden dreams. Housebound horrors. I could not bring myself to use their true name. I just prayed that someone would return to care for me. And my now stifled mouth ceased to screech—as the seat of my heart’s fire became a creature with sleek black wings which started gnawing its way out towards my tidal vent.

  I wouldn’t last the winter…

  The pen’s claw-nib scored through the characters it had created.

  The only true torture is loneliness…sans smells, sans sounds, sans season.

  Kelly Link (1969– ) is an American writer, editor, and publisher whose short fiction has been collected in Stranger Things Happen (2000), Magic for Beginners (2005), Pretty Monsters (2008), and Get in Trouble (2015). Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Her stories have won Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, James Tiptree, Jr., Shirley Jackson, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards; and Get in Trouble was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. She and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, have coedited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. They recently opened a bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts. With Grant, she is the cofounder of Small Beer Press and coedits the long-standing, influential, and irregularly published zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, where “Travels with the Snow Queen” originally appeared in the first issue in 1996 and went on to win the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award for gender-bending fiction.

  TRAVELS WITH THE SNOW QUEEN

  Kelly Link

  PART OF YOU is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to stay the night, and even as you are falling into the bed at the inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustache that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn’t ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it.

 
Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.

  There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the shards of the Snow Queen’s looking-glass out of your feet, you remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when Kay’s eyes, Kay’s heart were pierced by shards of the same mirror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.

  Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?

  So this is the story so far. You grew up, you fell in love with the boy next door, Kay, the one with blue eyes who brought you bird feathers and roses, the one who was so good at puzzles. You thought he loved you—maybe he thought he did, too. His mouth tasted so sweet, it tasted like love, and his fingers were so kind, they pricked like love on your skin, but three years and exactly two days after you moved in with him, you were having drinks out on the patio. You weren’t exactly fighting, and you can’t remember what he had done that had made you so angry, but you threw your glass at him. There was a noise like the sky shattering.

  The cuff of his trousers got splashed. There were little fragments of glass everywhere. “Don’t move,” you said. You weren’t wearing shoes.

  He raised his hand up to his face. “I think there’s something in my eye,” he said.

  His eye was fine, of course, there wasn’t a thing in it, but later that night when he was undressing for bed, there were little bits of glass like grains of sugar, dusting his clothes. When you brushed your hand against his chest, something pricked your finger and left a smear of blood against his heart.

  The next day it was snowing and he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. You sat on the patio drinking something warm and alcoholic, with nutmeg in it, and the snow fell on your shoulders. You were wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt; you were pretending that you weren’t cold, and that your lover would be back soon. You put your finger on the ground and then stuck it in your mouth. The snow looked like sugar, but it tasted like nothing at all.

  The man at the corner store said that he saw your lover get into a long white sleigh. There was a beautiful woman in it, and it was pulled by thirty white geese. “Oh, her,” you said, as if you weren’t surprised. You went home and looked in the wardrobe for that cloak that belonged to your great-grandmother. You were thinking about going after him. You remembered that the cloak was woolen and warm, and a beautiful red—a traveler’s cloak. But when you pulled it out, it smelled like wet dog and the lining was ragged, as if something had chewed on it. It smelled like bad luck: it made you sneeze, and so you put it back. You waited for a while longer.

  Two months went by, and Kay didn’t come back, and finally you left and locked the door of your house behind you. You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It’s hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren’t quite ready to give him up yet. You told yourself that the woman in the sleigh must have put a spell on him, and he was probably already missing you. Besides, there are some questions you want to ask him, some true things you want to tell him. This is what you told yourself.

  The snow was soft and cool on your feet, and then you found the trail of glass, the map.

  After three weeks of hard traveling, you came to the city.

  No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every step was like walking on knives. And where did it get her? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Then there’s the girl who put on the beautiful red dancing shoes. The woodsman had to chop her feet off with an axe.

  There are Cinderella’s two stepsisters, who cut off their own toes, and Snow White’s stepmother, who danced to death in red-hot iron slippers. The Goose Girl’s maid got rolled down a hill in a barrel studded with nails. Travel is hard on the single woman. There was this one woman who walked east of the sun and then west of the moon, looking for her lover, who had left her because she spilled tallow on his nightshirt. She wore out at least one pair of perfectly good iron shoes before she found him. Take our word for it, he wasn’t worth it. What do you think happened when she forgot to put the fabric softener in the dryer? Laundry is hard, travel is harder. You deserve a vacation, but of course you’re a little wary. You’ve read the fairy tales. We’ve been there, we know.

  That’s why we here at Snow Queen Tours have put together a luxurious but affordable package for you, guaranteed to be easy on the feet and on the budget. See the world by goosedrawn sleigh, experience the archetypal forest, the winter wonderland; chat with real live talking animals (please don’t feed them). Our accommodations are three-star: sleep on comfortable, guaranteed pea-free box-spring mattresses; eat meals prepared by world-class chefs. Our tour guides are friendly, knowledgeable, well-traveled, trained by the Snow Queen herself. They know first aid, how to live off the land; they speak three languages fluently.

  Special discount for older sisters, stepsisters, stepmothers, wicked witches, crones, hags, princesses who have kissed frogs without realizing what they were getting into, etc.

  You leave the city and you walk all day beside a stream that is as soft and silky as blue fur. You wish that your map was water, and not broken glass. At midday you stop and bathe your feet in a shallow place and the ribbons of red blood curl into the blue water.

  Eventually you come to a wall of briars, so wide and high that you can’t see any way around it. You reach out to touch a rose, and prick your finger. You suppose that you could walk around, but your feet tell you that the map leads directly through the briar wall, and you can’t stray from the path that has been laid out for you. Remember what happened to the little girl, your great–grandmother, in her red woolen cape. Maps protect their travelers, but only if the travelers obey the dictates of their maps. This is what you have been told.

  Perched in the briars above your head is a raven, black and sleek as the curlicued moustache of the guardsman. The raven looks at you and you look back at it. “I’m looking for someone,” you say. “A boy named Kay.”

  The raven opens its big beak and says, “He doesn’t love you, you know.”

  You shrug. You’ve never liked talking animals. Once your lover gave you a talking cat, but it ran away and secretly you were glad. “I have a few things I want to say to him, that’s all.” You have, in fact, been keeping a list of all the things you are going to say to him. “Besides, I wanted to see the world, be a tourist for a while.”

  “That’s fine for some,” the raven says. Then he relents. “If you’d like to come in, then come in. The princess just married the boy with the boots that squeaked on the marble floor.”

  “That’s fine for some,” you say. Kay’s boots squeak; you wonder how he met the princess, if he is the one that she just married, how the raven knows that he doesn’t love you, what this princess has that you don’t have, besides a white sleigh pulled by thirty geese, an impenetrable wall of briars, and maybe a castle. She’s probably just some bimbo.

  “The Princess Briar Rose is a very wise princess,” the raven says, “but she’s the laziest girl in the world. Once she went to sleep for a hundred days and no one could wake her up, although they put one hundred peas under her mattress, one each mo
rning.”

  This, of course, is the proper and respectful way of waking up princesses. Sometimes Kay used to wake you up by dribbling cold water on your feet. Sometimes he woke you up by whistling.

  “On the one hundredth day,” the raven says, “she woke up all by herself and told her council of twelve fairy godmothers that she supposed it was time she got married. So they stuck up posters, and princes and youngest sons came from all over the kingdom.”

  When the cat ran away, Kay put up flyers around the neighborhood. You wonder if you should have put up flyers for Kay. “Briar Rose wanted a clever husband, but it tired her dreadfully to sit and listen to the young men give speeches and talk about how rich and sexy and smart they were. She fell asleep and stayed asleep until the young man with the squeaky boots came in. It was his boots that woke her up.

  “It was love at first sight. Instead of trying to impress her with everything he knew and everything he had seen, he declared that he had come all this way to hear Briar Rose talk about her dreams. He’d been studying in Vienna with a famous Doctor, and was deeply interested in dreams.”

  Kay used to tell you his dreams every morning. They were long and complicated and if he thought you weren’t listening to him, he’d sulk. You never remember your dreams. “Other people’s dreams are never very interesting,” you tell the raven.

  The raven cocks its head. It flies down and lands on the grass at your feet. “Wanna bet?” it says. Behind the raven you notice a little green door recessed in the briar wall. You could have sworn that it wasn’t there a minute ago.