The image within the ’phone’s glass faceplate was no centuries-dead conquering horse warrior of the steppes. Dead, yes.
I was not a disobedient daughter. Stubborn, surely, headstrong—no doubt my indulgent mothers and fathers simply failed ever to ask of me any action I did not care to perform. Nevertheless.
Nor had I fled Defre and Aveng. There was no scandal to be attached to my or my family’s name. Sjolussa had been my goal since childhood—that fabulous city and nation which gave my own nation and city so much yet took more, before retreating into itself like a sulky tortoise.
“This is unreasonable,” I said as Naï stepped out of the fog. “This is unfair and…unseemly.”
“Beloved,” she said, the dead playmate of school days. My first lover. My dearest friend until she chose to bewitch me. That stupid, stupid girl.
She was of Sjolussene extraction: her grandparents had chosen to stay on after divestiture although the restored government nationalized most of their holdings. Naï was raised in near poverty, circumstances made more unpleasant by bias against scions of the former colonial power. Taller than every other child our age, her hair white-gold and her skin pink, she could not disguise her ancestry. A crowd of unruly boys and girls had driven her to tears in the schoolyard with their insults when with unwarranted noblesse oblige I chased them away and dried her eyes.
As we grew up and I continued her protector, she grew beautiful in my eyes. Had she been born in Sjolussa, I expect, she would have dyed that pale hair any number of colors. I never loved her—have I loved any person?—but desire her I did. I desired several other people as well, a few more suitable than Naï, a few less, but she was nearest by.
By the time we completed our schooling, I was…not weary of her, precisely, but weary of lying to her. Like her namesake in my tale of the chuei, she would not countenance sharing me so I had no choice but to lie. There were other girls momentarily more fascinating. There was the now-and-then-delicious novelty of a handsome boy. There were lies, arguments, tears, more lies, refreshingly savage but ultimately unsatisfying lovemaking. I, of course, would matriculate at university—she, of course, would not. I travelled a distance that was short for me, nearly impossible for her, to Folau, Aveng’s second city, where I discovered, in addition to scholarship, more delicious girls, two or three fascinating boys.
In Defre, Naï pined. For myself, when I returned home on holidays, I delighted in her, her familiar ardor, for it was brief, temporary, bittersweet. And of course I lied to her.
She lied to me.
She had taken a position with a bi-national trading concern. I was not curious enough to ask what goods they traded—motorinos, perhaps—nor what her position entailed. It paid well enough, apparently: her wardrobe improved markedly. Occasionally on my visits she insisted on buying the takeaway meal, cigarettes, bottles of beer we would hurry to my private rooms. She gave me, at the terminal as I was about to board a train back to Folau, a bauble I found inexplicably exquisite when she fastened its cheap silver chain around my neck. The little wooden ball, carved and pierced and polished, tapped against my breastbone when she released it, but immediately I lifted it again to breathe in the muddled fragrances of resins, barks, dried leaves and flowers. The whole way to Folau I cradled the pomander between my palms, gazing blindly out the carriage windows past stretches of forest, past rice fields and wheat fields and corn fields, villages and larger towns, shrines, temples, distant monasteries. “Beloved,” I whispered at the countryside, seeing Naï’s blue eyes only.
At the Folau station, my chief amusement of the previous term met me. I did not recognize him when he called after me as I passed in a daze—a ridiculous happenstance for his family stood on the third step below the Jade Stool, everybody recognized him. As I generally preferred other women, he preferred other men, making us nearly a perfect match if only our ranks matched up more neatly. Put out, he called my name again and grabbed my shoulder. My hands fell from Naï’s pomander. “Oh!” I said.
“What is this ugly thing?” he asked, snapping the chain from my neck.
My eyes had turned at once to his pleasant, familiar brown eyes. I did not wish to look again at Naï’s gift now I knew what it was. “A terrible, terrible, disastrous mistake,” I said, slipping the chain from his fingers without touching its vulgar burden, and tossed the whole wicked thing off the platform onto the tracks. “I’m so sorry, I was distracted. How kind of you to meet me. Shall we go?”
He narrowed his eyes. He knew what it was as well as I now did. “Shall I—?”
“No, it’s nothing, it’s over.”
He knew as well as I we were over, as little as there was between us to be over, no tragedy of any degree. I was drowsy in his arms, content, late that night when my kindest, most tactful father ’phoned with news he understood I would find sorrowful: my old schoolmate Naï, the Sjolussene girl, had run mad, murdered the witch to whom she had apprenticed herself a year before, and drowned herself in Kittan-e-Chuei. I wept a little, not entirely for form’s sake, before asking the sweet boy to comfort me.
Now I looked from the image of Naï on my ’phone to the image of Naï which had solidified from the uncanny fog. “You are not that girl,” I said, firmly and reasonably. “She drowned herself in the lake. She chose to become the chuei’s bride. Her soul, if soul she had, cannot leave her husband’s waters.” I erased the photo.
For an instant the figure appeared worried. Then it changed again. The sweet boy I would have married happily enough if his family asked (it could never happen) gazed at me with yearning eyes. I laughed. Our circles still grazed, I had had drinks with him and his boyfriend not long before: he was no longer a boy. Since his marriage he had devoted a good deal of time, effort (and, I suspected, thaumaturgical intervention) to remaking his body in the mold of a mythic hero or mighty wrestler, nearly unrecognizable except for his eyes, very handsome, undesirable.
I laughed and raised my ’phone again as if to preserve this visitation from a pleasant memory. The thing quailed again, but I saw that I had somehow acquired a strong enough signal, so I ran quickly through the directory until I found the name I choose not to record. She chose not to answer. I left a message: “My dear. I was abrupt, I fear. Shall we meet next week? I’ve discovered a delightful Avengi bistro—allow me to buy you dinner.”
Slipping the ’phone back into my bag, I kicked the moto off its stand, grasped the handlebars, and wheeled it into the thinning, empty fog. I was entirely confident the engine would start up again as soon as I reached the far side of the other bridge. I had every intention of standing the ridiculous woman up.
•
Love
Over Glass, Skin
Under Glass
Penny Stirling
The seasick lover becomes a saltwater cistern.
She built her first lover out of glass.
“I was often disappointed,” she said, as she showed her creation around her gallery, “that the things I make with such skill cannot admire my handiwork. Now at last I have made something that can look on itself with wonder.” But, she had to admit, she liked it even better when the lover looked upon her with wonder.
Her lover’s skin was glass, her lover’s touch was soft.
The nights were fine since she was skilled enough at glassblowing to give her glass lover skill enough, but soon she began to dread the mornings. More often than not when the sun had risen and they roused from their sleep, her lover would turn to her and say something like, “I dreamed the ocean bore down on me, rubbing and grinding me down until I was nothing but the finest fragments scattered all around the world.”
One morning the smith entered the kitchen to find her lover holding a mug to one of the ears she had so painstakingly carved and polished. “I pretend it is a seashell,” said the glass lover, with a smile the smith had often seen while her lover was asleep.
When she realised she had only ever seen it so, she took the mug and dashed it upon the ground.
I can do the same to you, she did not say, but her lover was quiet that day and recoiled from her touch that night. She never caught the lover listening to mug-echoes again, but suspected it still happened.
The lover’s voice was melodic, tuned exactly to A-minor. The glass-smith began to hate it. She offered her lover a tongue piercing and, though the lover’s mistrust was as plain as the smith’s intentions, after many days of coaxing the lover acceded to the accessory.
When the smith’s fingers twitched and the chisel slipped the lover knew it was neither her skill nor her attention that had waned. Ever unable to cry tears and now unable to voice contempt, the lover screamed and lunged at the smith, trying to tear out her flesh in reprisal.
But the glass-smith had skill enough to easily kill what she had ceased loving. She shattered the glass lover’s limbs, filled the corpse’s chest with seawater, and used it as a fish tank.
•
Metal deals welts.
She had a friend who worked metal. She beat her lovers into shape in the forge and then they would whip her into submission in her bedroom.
She offered the smith sterilised metal with which to adorn her flesh, but she was a lover of glass and thus preferred her skin smooth and unbroken. She gifted her friend with glass beads and rods to sit beneath her skin after she promised that they would not be shattered under the caress of her lovers.
“Just because glass is fragile,” said her friend, “doesn’t mean it must break.”
•
A pre-abused becomes post-rebelled.
She built her second lover out of glass as well. But she had been burned and she had learned. There would be no room for home-longing or sand-lusting or seadreaming.
There would just be her and her glass lover.
The smith sourced factory-made sand so that her lover could remember nothing before her. She used broken shards for her lover’s eyes so her lover could see nothing other than her. She chipped at the whorls in her lover’s ears so her lover could only hear her voice’s pitch. She fused her lover’s ankles and knees rigid so her lover could not leave the basement.
But her glass lover still learned that they were not a glass lover loved, and the glass lover’s mouth could argue and despise as well as it could love, and the glass lover’s hands could scratch and slap as well as they could love.
She who had made the glass lover might not have loved, but she could break as well as she could make.
The second glass lover housed freshwater fish.
•
Wood suffers wounds.
She had a friend who shaped wood. Ey carved and sanded eir own lovers and would then tell her of fire or warping or splinters. In the end ey found lasting happiness with her help: she crafted glass genitalia, orifices and fingers for eir lover to wield. Without the constant anxiety of injury their relationship blossomed like the maple trees of the mostly-wooden lover’s childhood did every spring.
As thanks, ey carved a gumtree heart for her next lover. The smith was polite but though glass appended had bettered her friend’s life, dilution could not improve her own.
“For all its beauty and versatility, glass is too transparent and empty,” said her friend.
•
The violet-stained becomes a lover disdained.
Her third lover she also made from glass. She didn’t have patience for a new craft.
Sometimes she said it was an accident. Sometimes she said she was drunk. Some other times she said she’d experimented, despite the glass lover never asking why.
This lover would neither speak of the ocean or emotional desires, nor ask for explanations of their purple body, for the smith had been clever this time and given the glass lover’s mouth only the option of pleasure.
Still, there were problems.
It was like trying to make love to someone with hypothermia. Even if she warmed the glass lover over fire—or turned out the lights or put red and orange quilts on the bed—it still felt wrong, like a corpse gone to cold instead of glass blown to come. She tried painting the glass lover a shade closer to life but the paint flecked off as they fucked and left too much mess.
“I can’t,” she said, as the glass lover stared. It was dark; she could neither see her lover nor help but see her lover as bruised, bloated flesh rather than glass.
Her lover’s skin was blight, her lover’s touch was bilious.
“I have no more room for fish,” she said, and sold the glass lover to a fetishist.
•
Clay gives copy.
She had a friend who turned and pushed clay into all manner of household and handheld goods and fired and glazed them into works of art and tools of love. They often exchanged vases, offered excuses to stay and watch each other create.
He helped the smith make an asymmetrical mess of a bowl on the pottery wheel.
While it sat in the kiln she helped him make moulds from his body and wheelchair with wax and quick-drying clay. Carefully, slowly, she prised and slid them from skin and prostheses and wondered whether he did this for the clay reflections or the clay embrace.
“I think it’s more fun together,” said her friend.
•
Praise and compromise brings an apprentice’s peace.
She gained an apprentice when the woman who delivered her groceries did not return home. “Please teach me your craft,” she said, and spoke of the wonderful works—conscious and inanimate both—she had heard of, the desire to heat and mould and blow she had cultivated, the services she could trade for the experience. The smith heard the fervour but saw that while the woman spoke of glass and mastery, it was the smith and not her work that was observed and caressed.
Her skin was not glass, her touch was not cool.
But she was pleasant and crafty in her own appreciable ways. In appraising this diversion from her despondency the glass-smith allowed reluctance to be overcome as she came and buckled under the woman’s pressure and persuasiveness. While the new apprentice attended to the smith in the bedroom she also proved attentive in the workshop, learning first the methods of fusing and slumping and then, as skill and pride and the smith’s admiration grew, delight of the trade.
As well as her workshop and her bed, the apprentice filled the glass-smith’s life with distractions from love and house with delicate glass fish modelled after her favourites in the aquaria.
•
Paper bears patience.
She had a friend who folded paper and gave her bright decorations and lanterns every holiday. He made his lover from thousands of sheets of paper. Unlike most crafted lovers, his came to be in stages and was conscious even when only a head. He added to his lover’s body as his lover watched: torso, arms and beyond. The origami lover’s body was fragile and often he had to re-attach some limb or digit. Going outside or strenuous movement was forbidden, as was any physical expression of love beyond light, dry, touches.
Her friend commissioned sets of stained glass windows and glass songbirds to keep his lover entertained. She offered to make cages too but he preferred to let them fly free around his home, alighting wherever and singing whenever, as long as they did not make a nest from his lover.
“Sometimes,” said her friend, “you are a bit abusive and demanding.”
•
One given free will to love becomes one finally given leave.
She next made not another glass lover, but a glass being who could choose love.
The smith crafted every inch of the glass body as carefully as she had her previous lovers, but instead of the cruelties and frailties she had worked into them, this time she gave freedom and control. She let the apprentice watch but not touch, and though she said the glass was no replacement, her apprentice saw how she touched it.
She finished the glass being while the apprentice slept. It was difficult not to caress the glass skin she had spent so long perfecting. She kept her distance and smiled.
“I made you,” she said to the glass being, “but I wi
ll not make you do anything. You are free to love or hate, to live or destroy yourself.”
The glass being was free to speak as well but it was many days before the smith was answered. Her fingers twitched and her smile glazed as silence lingered. She kept patient distance from her creation and filtered her frustrations through the apprentice’s ministrations.
But one morning, finally: “If you did not make me for a purpose, then I am meaningless and may as well not exist, but if you did make me with a purpose then I am obliged and might never differentiate choice and duty,” said the glass philosopher, and then said many things more.
All the smith had wanted to receive was consent and sweet nothings, but every day she was given metaphysical questions she couldn’t answer and theoretical conditions she couldn’t comprehend. All she had wanted was a lover as keen as her apprentice and as sleek as her work, but every day she watched apprentice and philosopher talk near her fish tanks. She wondered about the closeness she at first thought polite, what had been shared when her creation only listened.
Her creation’s skin was glass. It was not touched.
Every day the glass philosopher’s musings became deeper and broader, the look in their eyes needier, the pitch of their voice and the curl of their hands full of more and more yearning and desire. But their attention and demands lay not in lying with the glass-smith, neither in playing with her skin nor plying her with flattery. The philosopher lived only for answers, loved only epiphanies.
The smith could not give what the philosopher needed and she would not receive what she wanted. She could have taken many things from her creation, but the glasssmith chose to provide supplies, maps and directions to the nearest university.
That night the apprentice comforted her, as she had every night the philosopher had not, and the smith did not tell her she was no replacement.
•
Paint begs perfection.
She had a friend who painted landscapes for the walls of the wealthy. Their watercolour fields and lakes and sunset wharves brought them fame and took them further and further afield, clients funding their supplies and travel for them to bring them back a beautiful scene as if sliced from the world and fixed on a canvas.
Heiresses of Russ 2014 Page 5