Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “When I think about leaving, I mostly imagine living on a beach somewhere warm, where nobody would bother us.” There would be sunshine and sand and shimmering bright blue water. Maybe a hammock. Definitely lots of books. Learning to read again had rekindled Alice’s rich fantasy life, so she liked to imagine a world where books were easy to come by.

  “You would,” Kei said, smiling. She pushed her shoulder against Alice’s. “My grandma saw the ocean once, back before they built the wall. I bet it’s not as great as everybody says.”

  “I’ve read about it, though. It’s supposed to be beautiful.”

  “I bet it’s cold. I bet fish are slimy,” Kei said. “And what would we do with ourselves all day? It sounds boring.”

  “I could think of a few things,” Alice murmured, and Kei laughed and kissed her cheek.

  “Come on. At least here, we’re doing something important. We’re gonna figure it all out,” Kei said. “We can go see the ocean after we teach everyone to read again, take down the government, and rebuild society from the ground up.”

  “Sure,” Alice said. “No big deal. I’ll get right on it.”

  That night, as Alice unlocked the door to her building and slipped in as quietly as possible, she thought back to the night that Lani had saved her from Hodge, all those weeks ago. She padded up the stairs and saw a sliver of light underneath Lani’s door. On impulse, she knocked quietly.

  “Do you ever sleep?” Lani said testily. She was in her dressing gown.

  “I could ask you the same. Can I come in?”

  Lani stepped aside, and Alice went in. The tiny one-bedroom apartment was identical to Alice’s, right down to the empty bookshelf built into the living room wall. It was a little neater than Alice’s, since the only stray object on Lani’s couch was an embroidery hoop. Alice stood just inside the doorway, too uncertain to go any farther. She waited for Lani to latch the door before speaking.

  “You used to teach language.”

  “And literature,” Lani added. “Back before we decided we’d be better off without it.”

  The words were in line with the law, but the tone was not. Alice repressed a smile, and said cautiously, “What if we could have it again?”

  Lani raised an eyebrow and then shuffled toward the couch. “I’m old,” she said. “You have to speak close to my ear.”

  Lani sat down on the couch, arranged her dressing gown, and put the embroidery hoop in her lap. Alice followed, glancing at the newly begun work that was stretched on the hoop.

  “I have something to share,” Alice said, feeling more and more sure that she had made the right choice. Lani still had permission to teach her students to build and sew. That was where she got all her funny stories about her students’ artistic impulses and the triumph of the human spirit. A rusty nail or a sewing needle, she’d said. So many things could be writing implements, if you knew how to write.

  “What are you smiling at?” Lani said.

  “That’s a very beautiful color you’re using,” Alice said, touching the embroidery thread. It looped over and under the fabric in neat lines, following some invisible map. Against the white cloth, the thread was bright blue.

  WHEN ARONOWICZ MARRIED the demon, she was seven years old.

  She was not supposed to be in her grandparents’ attic, hunting for toys among the shrouded furniture and folded clothes of relatives she had never met, opening brass-cornered chests and closing them on books with block-lettered pages and peeling spines; she was hiding by exploring and it had never occurred to her that the slant-ceilinged, sweetly dusty space above the guest room would be full of old theater posters and boxes of glass slides and more china plates than she had ever seen even when her cousins came up from New York for the holidays. She unzipped a small square velvet bag and peered at the silk fringes and spilling coils of leather inside, glazed her eyes to make the sepia-tinted halves of a stereo card cross and pop into three-dimensionality. Here and there the floor was beams instead of boards and when she reached to pull down the sheet from the great gilt-framed mirror propped against a dining table with its leaves folded down, the small hands that met to help her were not as much of a surprise as the suddenness with which her reflection swam out at her, as if through a tree-shadowed, silty pond. Beside her, the other child was a thin candleflame, vague and luminous at once. Its hair was dark and, when they shook hands, its grip was stronger than Aronowicz’s, who even at seven years old did not quite think of herself as Rokhl, her parents’ throwback gift. The other child had an ordinary name. She said it was lucky and it shrugged. “Everybody’s parents are weird,” it said, with grade-school world-weariness, and Aronowicz knew then that she had made a friend.

  She never remembered how they came to the marriage, except it seemed as sensible a game as any. She was the one to propose it.

  In the bare incandescent light and the creaky silence of old houses, she crowned the child with a table napkin of linen as cracked ivory as piano keys. Pretending to pour from a grey-glazed earthenware pitcher, it gave her to drink from a tarnished silver cup with a peacock engraved on the side. Arms around one another’s waists, they stared into the freckled, shadowy glass that tilted like a fallen skylight within its time-battered frame, reflecting the dark beams of the attic and the crowded squares of sheet-draped chests and chairs and dressers like the blocks of a miniature city, fading away behind them into dim avenues and an indistinct skyline. The rings they had exchanged slipped and clinked on their fingers, heavy with stones Aronowicz said confidently were paste: a ruby like a smoldering feather, an emerald like a storm-coming sunset sky. She put a bracelet of seed pearls around the child’s wrist and a watch with a crystal face and a band of dark leather around her own. “There,” she said, and her newly wedded stranger grinned, and they spun in circles laughing until they fell to the dusty boards in a tangle of embroidered tablecloths and dust mice, costume jewelry and bright-eyed, breathless hearts.

  When her mother called, Aronowicz flailed under the dining table, hastily unwinding herself from her grandparents’ inheritance as she hissed for her co-conspirator to get out of sight. She dragged the tablecloth from around her shoulders and the child stepped back into the mirror. The emerald ring was still on its finger; it was the last thing she saw fade into the sudden spill of light up the stairs as the attic door opened, into the city of silhouettes.

  WHEN ARONOWICZ WAS twenty, she kissed a girl and told a boy she had to be on top if anything was going to happen. He asked what she thought she was, a dominatrix? She asked what he thought he was, clever? He left her alone on the narrow bed in her cinderblocked dorm room with the clanking radiator and the loose-springed shade that never quite shut out the sodium streetlight buzzing outside her window and she stared at the mirror on the back of the door, wondering if she should have let him lie over her, weighing her breath down, pushing at all the wrong angles, just to see if she liked it as much as he had kept saying she would. She kept kissing the girl who liked her wrists held instead, who liked to be made to come slowly, struggling and shivering, helpless against the quick of Aronowicz’s fingers and her slow, deliberate, withholding tongue. One night she went to her knees for Aronowicz, and Aronowicz bound her wrists with her own hair, a knee-whisking braid like a wheatsheaf from poems they had read in translation. She dreamed that night of the demon, a dark-haired figure sitting within the frame of her grandparents’ mirror like a student reading in a window, a black-bound book as small as a siddur open between its hands. And she lives to this day on the shores of the Red Sea, it read aloud, with her consort the king of the demons, and every day their children are born from the wishes and impulses of humankind, on the other side of the mirror where all that is left-handed is right. It turned a vellum-stiff page; behind it she saw the twilight shadows of towers and the emerald in its silver setting glinted like a winking eye.

  WHEN THE DEMON came back, Aronowicz was thirty-six years old. She had stopped dyeing her hair in grad school, although it was st
ill shaved up the back and spiked out half from bedhead and half from intention; she had three piercings and a doctorate and no tattoos, but there were brandy-blue falls of wisteria growing up the fire escape and a seal-pointed cat sleeping among the books in the bay window and the gallery had sold two of her paintings, the small ones in oils, and she had not thought anyone would ever buy her art. Against red skies and the sandbars of a redder sea, black wings lifted into the air, a spiraling storm of feathers like outstretched hands. In the fiery blue-black of space, a thin pearl of atmosphere sheltered letters of light, its iridescence as delicately crazed as morning ice. Lately she was painting a window in an empty house with her ex-boyfriend’s face half-reflected in the panes, the white-and-black lines of his nose and mouth almost the cracks in the frame. They had been together for three years, argued ceaselessly for two; he sent postcards from London because he remembered she loved stamps, little passports crossed with ink. At the corner of her eye, she saw the demon moving in the glass-fronted cabinet where she kept treasures away from the cat: the brown-stained bones of a fossil fish, an American steel penny, an iris-grey split of flint, a sea-worn lump of Roman glass as blue as Mediterranean water; its reflection traveled over each of them and was gone, skimming on like the shadow of a seabird winging over the sea.

  It was still dark-haired, when it stood beside her at the easel; its hands were still thin and strong, its face a white burning space that Aronowicz could look at and never recall the features of, though she knew it at once. It wore pearls at its wrist and a smoky, storm-green emerald on its left hand, to match the ruby—bright as a cracked ember—that Aronowicz only took off to wash dishes and shower, talismanic as her grandfather’s watch or the thin chain under her shirt where an ancient, soft-profiled coin warmed against her breastbone. It said it liked the painting.

  Aronowicz said, because she had never been quite sure, “You are a demon.”

  “Of course.” Its bare feet were the talons of a bird of prey, clenched and clawed; its shoulders were winged, trailing feathers as dusty as the floorboards of an attic; then it was only a slight, shrugging person about Aronowicz’s height, nondescriptly dressed, the most vivid thing she had ever seen. It was looking at one of the other canvases, the violin player whose shadow was playing, over his shoulder, a melody that trailed away like smoke into a crack in the wall. “And your husband. Or your wife. Or neither. But yours.”

  She had not thought she would ever see a shy or diffident demon, but if it was human, she would have said that the way it did not look at her was yearning, uncertain: the girl with the wheat-plaited hair, offering Aronowicz her strength to master; the man who sent her postcards now, who had once cried out for her in the bedroom with birds and vines and the ten spheres of the universe painted around all the walls. She was still holding a brush, cobalt-pointed. The demon glanced around at her and looked away again, studying her art instead. The glass-fronted cabinet showed a reflection as terraced and shadowy as the skyline of a city seen through rain.

  Aronowicz laid the brush down, so that she could slide her hands into her pockets where the demon could not see them shake. “Is this where,” she said carefully, “you take me away into the mirror with you?”

  The demon put down a book it had picked up, on the little side table overflowing with a spider plant that Aronowicz’s anti-green thumb had not yet managed to kill.

  “If you want.”

  “And if I don’t want to?”

  “Then I will still be yours.”

  In the mirror of the cabinet doors, the air glittered like a cloud of fireworks and a thousand fragments flew together into a glinting mosaic, a glass whole in the demon’s hand. Colors moved through it like Aronowicz’s oils, from the green of hummingbirds to the yellow of butterflies, blue as a shirt, red as the sun. She did not see it where it filled from, but there was liquid inside, rippling dark as a wet street at night, and the demon was holding it out to her.

  “You won’t be the only one,” she told it. She wanted to be clear.

  Formless as it was, the demon’s face was not blank at all. “I know.”

  She kissed it then, and for a long time neither of them pulled away.

  She took a sketchpad and pencils; she took her oldest jacket, the leather hand-me-down with the old flight patches; she took the wineglass from the demon’s hand and it bowed its head to her, though she had nothing to crown it with but the flicker of desire. In the sunlit afternoon and the warm silence of a sleeping cat, they stepped into the mirror. Behind them they left the cabinet door ajar, reflecting books and paintings, posters and chairs, the feather-scrolled door to her bedroom where someday she would show the demon how painstakingly she had painted each flame-scripted name and letter its own among them, left hand to right; the china from her grandmother and her grandfather’s tefillin; the city beyond her window, broken and bright.

  ONLY AFTER THEY scrape and buff me, after they shuck me with the razor until the hair I’d striven to grow is just a clump of, oh nothing, just the sum total of my physical masculinity clogging the drain, after they tug and lube and paint me, only after my makeover do they allow me to approach the Residence.

  My grandmother and her goons make sure I’m never alone. Lolli perp-walks me from the town car to the door of the Residence. On the way she palms me her business card, as heavy as a hotel key, and when I feel its weight I know at once why Lolli, post-starvation-diet post-punk with six empty piercings like antimatter freckles dotting her face, chops wood and carries water for my grandmother. I am realizing the full extent of my grandmother’s power. I am realizing that seeking her help was a mistake.

  Lolli leans in and whispers that it’ll be okay but I know it won’t; so what if I am melodrama itself? It feels like my skin’s been taken off my body and had all kinds of shit done to it before being smoothed back on, and I refuse to look at her.

  At the entrance, my grandmother meets us. “Better,” she says. My hairiness had been a personal affront. Grandmother is as smooth as a Brancusi, her hair molded against her skull like something engraved. She claims me with a finger on my shoulder and leads me through the lobby of the Residence.

  My jailer Ms. Lanphear and my grandmother sway toward one another, long and columnar women with thick waists and chic ankles. They whisper about me.

  Not many people know the true name of The H______ Residence for Friendless Ladies. The sign on the outside of the building reads “THE H_____ RESIDENCE” in an intimidating serif. Only on the plaque outside of Ms. Lanphear’s office can people see the rest of the name, like the title to a sequel: “…for Friendless Ladies.” I may not have known that’s what I was, but once I see the second sign, I figure it out. This is what they want to make me. While my grandmother’s people chipped away at me and spackled on and erected false fronts, this is what has been awaiting me all along.

  Ms. Lanphear folds her hands and looks me over, up, and down, as if I am a menu and everything on me is an allergen. “Welcome to the Residence,” she says. “You will form lasting connections with the other women in this house. And when you emerge again, it will be into a new world as a better person.”

  Then she tells me the rules of The H_____ Residence for Friendless Ladies:

  1. Men Are Not a Constant Here. Men may stop by during certain specific visiting hours. Men are not allowed above the first floor. You may entertain male visitors in one of our beau parlors. I look at them in disbelief, but they don’t see me; they see a bobblehead of a girl, nodding complaisantly. But I’m here, I want to say. I don’t. They will be angry with me, and worst of all, they will laugh.

  2. No Cooking. No cooking in one’s room. No private cooking. Would you want to start a fire, burn up all of the women, stock this city with yet more female ghosts? I don’t listen to her dumb joke about how refreshing it is to be released from the female obligation of cobbling together hot meals, and then she and my grandmother laugh together, even though the most food preparation they’ve ever done in their lives
is to steady a toppling hors d’oeuvre before popping it into their mouths.

  3. Don’t Answer the Knock. Ha ha ha ha ha, a quirk of this place, let’s call it, ha ha. Late nights, you may hear a certain kind of knocking at your door. Whatever you do, don’t answer. I can tell you’re about to ask, How will you know not to answer? You will just know. You will be able to tell the difference between those knocks and regular knocks from people who want to see you. Most people are charmed by this. Not you?

  BEFORE SHE LEAVES, my grandmother leans toward me. Will she kiss me? She hasn’t seen me since I was a baby, but perhaps she can reconstitute some trace of my mother from my dilute materials. Her lips.… But no, the results are in. No kiss, just a hiss for my eardrums only.

  “Behave,” she says. “Or I will let those strangers ship you to Jamaica.” She tugs my hair as if she could make it longer. “Jamaica,” she hisses, and this could have been hilarious in another life, this elegant woman whispering the name of a destination spot like an ancient curse. I am so numb, my head a drifting balloon that I keep as distant from the rest of my body as possible, that I can recognize potential funny in the direst of situations, except that Grandmother knows I am terrified by the prospect of Jamaica. My real parents have been dead for years so no one fears even their memory, and the Non-Parents are having me hunted by shiny-faced Christians, private investigators, evil school administrators, so they can ship me to a juvenile-detention facility in Jamaica where maladjusted teenagers get whipped (starved/brainwashed/abused) into shape (a cower/a crawl/a catalepsy). The name of the Non-Parents is precious to them, and they will not have me destroy it. Upon figuring out the Non-Parents’ plans for me, I escaped into the city and slept in a park for five days. On the fifth day, I spied a woman with terrifyingly great posture searching the bushes near my encampment. This I knew: her arms were lean and strong from bending the limbs of bad kids backward. It was then that I ran to Grandmother’s house. It was my last option for a reason.