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

by A. M. Dellamonica

  THUS ENDS MY only chance to escape Jamaica. Tomorrow morning, my grandmother’s town car will await, ready to ferry me away in the arms of someone bigger, stronger, more reliable than Lolli. Upstairs I go without fear. In front of my mirror I go without fear. I look at my whole self and I do not recognize any of it. I lean toward the girl to speak frankly with her. Her eyes are monstrously huge, her lips pale. She nods. She is ready to hear me.

  I have a mouth on me; I used to do debate; if anyone can cut a deal with this place, it’s me. Let me into your arms and let me not emerge a woman. You don’t have to make me a woman. I am a man—any kind of man you want me to be. I will work very hard for you. I will do anything for you. I whisper at the mirror until my mouth is dry. My image freezes in place. The air around me forms a dark, permeable wall. There is a shape cut out for me to walk through, a promise, a passage. I wedge my hand into it, and the shape squeezes it comfortingly before dissipating into nothing. In the mirror, my lips are open; my hand is raised to my chest. I dance, screw up my face, wave my arms. But the mirror doesn’t show any of that. The Residence is telling me, That is what you were. It is telling me, You can be something else now.

  What a balm for this pain. What a sweetness and a comfort. I look around, as if seeing my room again with new eyes. It is late. For a few minutes, I wait for the knocking to begin. My door, never locked, swings open of its own accord.

  I peer into the hallway. Despite all the noise of my return, it is silent and empty.

  My feet slide past the threshold. I have been told over and over again that what I needed was impossible. That who I wanted to be was impossible. Life itself became impossible. So I allow the impossible to happen to me. As I drift down the corridor I am happy, giddy with inspiration. We don’t have to stay here. None of us has to stay here. I will collect the women from their rooms.

  We will form a joyous conga line! We will rumba through the Residence, joined together up and down the stairs as if we are a glittering necklace worn by the house itself, and when we emerge, we will emerge into a new world as better people.

  My knuckles scrape and skid along the walls until they find a door.

  IN THE TIME of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed fun-sized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.

  That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.

  Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.

  “There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.

  My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively: “What kind of omen, kid?”

  “Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries—”

  Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”

  We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.

  We’d left tribute on the porch. Pebbles arranged in an Unforgivable Shape around a can of tuna. My aunt had argued against the can of tuna, but I’d felt a sign of mummification and preserved death would be auspicious. I was right.

  “Presence of fish en masse indicates the deepest of our quintuple Great Lords,” I said, squinting over notes hundreds of Blakes past had scrawled. “Continuous appearance over days... plague? Presence? What is that word? I hope it’s both. We ought to be the generation who digitizes—I can reference better on my Kindle.”

  “A deep omen isn’t fun, Hester,” said Mar, violently rearranging her eggs. “A deep omen seven hundred feet above sea level is some horseshit. What have I always said?”

  “Not to say anything to Child Protective Services,” I said, “and that they faked the Moon landing.”

  “Hester, you—”

  We recited her shibboleth in tandem: “You don’t outrun fate,” and she looked settled, if dissatisfied.

  The eggs weren’t great. My aunt was a competent cook, if skewed for nicotine-blasted taste buds, but tonight everything was rubbery and overdone. I’d never known her so rattled, nor to cook eggs so terrible.

  I said, “‘Fun’ was an unfair word.”

  “Don’t get complacent, then,” she said, “when you’re a teenage seer who thinks she’s slightly hotter shit than she is.” I wasn’t offended. It was just incorrect. “Sea-spawn’s no joke. If we’re getting deep omens here—well, that’s specific, kid! Reappearance of the underdeep at noon, continuously, that’s a herald. I wish you weren’t here.”

  My stomach clenched, but I raised one eyebrow like I’d taught myself in the mirror. “Surely you don’t think I should go home.”

  “It wouldn’t be unwise—” Mar held up a finger to halt my protest, “—but what’s done is done is done. Something’s coming. You won’t escape it by taking a bus to your mom’s.”

  “I would rather face inescapable lappets and watery torment than Mom’s.”

  “Your mom didn’t run off and become a dental hygienist to spite you.”

  I avoided this line of conversation, because seriously. “What about the omen?”

  Mar pushed her plate away and kicked back, precariously balanced on two chair legs. “You saw it, you document it, that’s the Blake way. Just…a deep omen at sixteen! Ah, well, what the Hell. See anything in your eggs?”

  I re-peppered them and we peered at the rubbery curds. Mine clumped together in a brackish pool of hot sauce.

  “Rain on Thursday,” I said. “You?”

  “Yankees lose the Series,” said Aunt Mar, and went to tip her plate in the trash. “What a god-awful meal.”

  I found her that evening on the peeling balcony, smoking. A caul of cloud obscured the moon. The treetops were black and spiny. Our house was a fine, hideous artifact of the 1980s, decaying high on the side of the valley. Mar saw no point in fixing it up. She had been—her words—lucky enough to get her death foretokened when she was young, and lived life courting lung cancer like a boyfriend who’d never commit.

  A heatherback candle spewed wax on the railing. “Mar,” I said, “why are you so scared of our leviathan dreadlords, who lie lurking in the abyssal deeps? I mean, personally.”

  “Because seahorrors will go berserk getting what they want and they don’t quit the field,” she said. “Because I’m not seeing fifty, but your overwrought ass is making it to homecoming. Now get inside before you find another frigging omen in my smoke.”

  DESPITE MY AUNT’S distress, I felt exhilarated. Back at boarding school I’d never witnessed so profound a portent. I’d seen everyday omens, had done since I was born, but the power of prophecy was boring and did not get you on Wikipedia. There was no anticipation. Duty removed ambition. I was apathetically lonely. I prepared only to record The Blake testimony of Hester in the twenty-third generation for future Blakes.

  Blake seers did not live long or decorated lives. Either you were mother of a seer, or a seer and never a mother and died young. I hadn’t really cared, but I had expected more payout than social malingering and teenage ennui. It felt unfair. I was top of my class; I was pallidly pretty; thanks to my mother I had amazing teeth. I found myself wishing I’d see my death in my morning cornflakes like Mar; at least then the last, indifferent mys
tery would be revealed.

  When Stylephorus chordatus started beaching themselves in public toilets, I should have taken Mar’s cue. The house became unseasonably cold and at night our breath showed up as wet white puffs. I ignored the brooding swell of danger; instead, I sat at my desk doing my summer chemistry project, awash with weird pleasure. Clutching fistfuls of malformed octopodes at the creek was the first interesting thing that had ever happened to me.

  The birch trees bordering our house wept salt water. I found a deer furtively licking the bark, looking like Bambi sneaking a hit. I sat on a stump to consult the Blake journals:

  THE BLAKE TESTIMONY OF RUTH OF THE NINETEENTH GENERATION IN HER TWENTY-THIRD YEAR

  WEEPING OF PLANTS

  Lamented should be greenstuff that seeps brack water or salt water or blood, for Nature is abhorring a lordly Visitor: if be but one plant then burn it or stop up a tree with a poultice of finely crushed talc, &c., to avoid notice. BRACK WATER is the sign of the MANY-THROATED MONSTER GOD & THOSE WHO SPEAK UNSPEAKABLE TONGUES. SALT WATER is the sign of UNFED LEVIATHANS & THE PELAGIC WATCHERS & THE TENTACLE so BLOOD must be the STAR SIGN of the MAKER OF THE HOLES FROM WHICH EVEN LIGHT SHALL NOT ESCAPE. Be comforted that the SHABBY MAN will not touch what is growing.

  PLANT WEEPING, SINGLY:

  The trail, movement & wondrous pilgrimage.

  PLANTS WEEPING, THE MANY:

  A Lord’s bower has been made & it is for you to weep & rejoice.

  My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate.

  Underneath in ballpoint was written: Has nobody noticed that Blake crypto-fascist worship of these deities has never helped?? Family of sheeple. Fuck the SYSTEM! This was dated 1972.

  A bird called, then stopped mid-warble. The shadows lengthened into long sharp shapes. A sense of stifling pressure grew. All around me, each tree wept salt without cease.

  I said aloud: “Nice.”

  I hiked into town before evening. The bustling of people and the hurry of their daily chores made everything look almost normal; their heads were full of small-town everyday, work and food and family and maybe meth consumption, and this banality blurred the nagging fear. I stocked up on OJ and a sufficient supply of Cruncheroos.

  Outside the sky was full of chubby black rainclouds, and the streetlights cast the road into sulfurous relief. I smelled salt again as it began to rain, and through my hoodie I could feel that the rain was warm as tea; I caught a drop on my tongue and spat it out again, as it tasted deep and foul. As it landed it left a whitish buildup I foolishly took for snow.

  It was not snow. Crystals festooned themselves in long, stiff streamers from the traffic signals. Strands like webbing swung from street to pavement, wall to sidewalk. The streetlights struggled on and turned it green-white in the electric glare, dazzling to the eye. Main Street was spangled over from every parked car to the dollar store. My palms were sweaty.

  From down the street a car honked dazedly. My sneakers were gummed up and it covered my hair and my shoulders and my bike tires. I scuffed it off in a hurry. People stood stock-still in doorways and sat in their cars, faces pale and transfixed. Their apprehension was mindless animal apprehension, and my hands were trembling so hard I dropped my Cruncheroos.

  “What is it?” someone called out from the Rite Aid. And somebody else said, “It’s salt.”

  Sudden screams. We all flinched. But it wasn’t terror. At the center of a traffic island, haloed in the numinous light of the dollar store, a girl was crunching her Converse in the salt and spinning round and round. She had long shiny hair—a sort of chlorine gold—and a spray-on tan the color of Garfield. My school was populated with her clones. A bunch of huddling girls in halter tops watched her twirl with mild and terrified eyes.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” she whooped. “Isn’t this frigging awesome?”

  The rain stopped all at once, leaving a vast whiteness. All of Main Street looked bleached and shining; even the Pizza Hut sign was scrubbed clean and made fresh. From the Rite Aid I heard someone crying. The girl picked up a handful of powdery crystals and they fell through her fingers like jewels; then her beaming smile found me and I fled.

  I COLLECTED THE Blake books and lit a jittering circle of heatherback candles. I turned on every light in the house. I even stuck a Mickey Mouse nightlight into the wall socket, and he glowed there in dismal magnificence as I searched. It took me an hour to alight upon an old glued-in letter:

  Reread the testimony of Elizabeth Blake in the fifteenth generation after I had word of this. I thought the account strange, so I went to see for myself. It was as Great-Aunt Annabelle had described, mold everywhere but almost beautiful, for it had bloomed in cunning patterns down the avenue all the way to the door. I couldn’t look for too long as the looking gave me such a headache.

  I called in a few days later and the mold was gone. Just one lady of the house and wasn’t she pleased to see me as everyone else in the neighborhood felt too dreadful to call. She was to be the sacrifice as all signs said. Every spider in that house was spelling the presence and I got the feeling readily that it was one of the lesser diseased Ones, the taste in the milk, the dust. One of the Monster Lord’s fever wizards had made his choice in her, no mistake. The girl was so sweet looking and so cheerful. They say the girls in these instances are always cheerful about it like lambs to the slaughter. The pestilences and their behemoth Duke may do as they will. I gave her till May.

  Perhaps staying closer would have given me more detail but I felt that beyond my duty. I placed a wedding gift on the stoop and left that afternoon. I heard later he’d come for his bride Friday month and the whole place lit up dead with Spanish flu.

  Aunt Annabelle always said that she’d heard some went a-cour

  The page ripped here, leaving what Aunt Annabelle always said forever contentious. Mar found me in my circle of heatherbacks hours later, feverishly marking every reference to bride I could find.

  “They closed Main Street to hose it down,” she said. “There were cars backed up all the way to the Chinese takeout. There’s mac ’n’ cheese in the oven, and for your info I’m burning so much rosemary on the porch everyone will think I smoke pot.”

  “One of the pelagic kings has chosen a bride,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Evidence: rain of salt at the gate, in this case ‘gate’ being Main Street. Evidence of rank: rain of salt in mass quantities from Main Street to, as you said, the Chinese takeout, in the middle of the day during a gibbous moon a notable distance from the ocean. The appearance of fish that don’t know light. A dread bower of crystal.”

  My aunt didn’t break down, or swear, or anything. She just said, “Sounds like an old-fashioned apocalypse event to me. What’s your plan, champ?”

  “Document it and testify,” I said. “The Blake way. I’m going to find the bride.”

  “No,” she said. “The Blake way is to watch the world burn from a distance and write down what the flames looked like. You need to see, not to find. This isn’t a goddamned murder mystery.”

  I straightened and said very patiently: “Mar, this happens to be my birthright—”

  “To Hell with birthright! Jesus, Hester, I told your mom you’d spend this summer getting your driver’s license and kissing boys.”

  This was patently obnoxious. We ate our macaroni ’n’ cheese surrounded by more dribbling heatherbacks, and my chest felt tight and tense the whole time. I kept on thinking of comebacks like, I don’t understand your insistence on meaningless bullshit, Mar, or even a pointed Margaret. Did my heart really have to yearn for licenses and losing my French-kissing virginity at the parking lot? Did anything matter, apart from the salt and the night outside, the bulging eyes down at Jamison Pond?

  “Your problem is,” she said, which was always a shitty way to begin a sentence, “that you don’t know what bored is.”

  “Wrong. I am often exquisitely bored.”

  “Unholy matrimonies are boring,” said my aunt
. “Plagues of salt? Boring. The realization that none of us can run—that we’re all here to be used and abused by forces we can’t even fight—that’s so boring, kid!” She’d used sharp cheddar in the mac ’n’ cheese and it was my favorite, but I didn’t want to do anything other than push it around the plate. “If you get your license you can drive out to Denny’s.”

  “I am not interested,” I said, “in fucking Denny’s.”

  “I wanted you to make some friends and be a teenager and not to get in over your head,” she said, and speared some macaroni savagely. “And I want you to do the dishes, so I figure I’ll get one out of four. Don’t go sneaking out tonight, you’ll break the rosemary ward.”

  I pushed away my half-eaten food, and kept myself very tight and quiet as I scraped pans and stacked the dishwasher.

  “And take some Band-Aids up to your room,” said Mar.

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to split your knee. You don’t outrun fate, champ.”

  Standing in the doorway, I tried to think up a stinging riposte. I said, “Wait and see,” and took each step upstairs as cautiously as I could. I felt a spiteful sense of triumph when I made it to the top without incident. Once I was in my room and yanking off my hoodie I tripped and split my knee open on the dresser drawer. I then lay in bed alternately bleeding and seething for hours. I did not touch the Band-Aids, which in any case were decorated with SpongeBob’s image.

  Outside, the mountains had forgotten summer. The stars gave a curious, chill light. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking too closely, but despite the shudder in my fingertips and the pain in my knee I did anyway; the tops of the trees made grotesque shapes. I tried to read the stars, but the position of Mars gave the same message each time: doom, and approach, and altar.