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

by A. M. Dellamonica

  One star trembled in the sky and fell. I felt horrified. I felt ecstatic. I eased open my squeaking window and squeezed out onto the windowsill, shimmying down the drainpipe. I spat to ameliorate the breaking of the rosemary ward, flipped Mar the bird, and went to find the bride.

  The town was subdued by the night. Puddles of soapy water from the laundromat were filled with sprats. The star had fallen over by the eastern suburbs, and I pulled my hoodie up as I passed the hard glare of the gas station. It was as though even the houses were withering, dying of fright like prey. I bought a Coke from the dollar machine.

  I sipped my Coke and let my feet wander up street and down street, along alley and through park. There was no fear. A Blake knows better. I took to the woods behind people’s houses, meandering until I found speared on one of the young birches a dead shark.

  It was huge and hideous with a malformed head, pinned with its belly facing whitely upwards and its maw hanging open. The tree groaned beneath its weight. It was dotted all over with an array of fins and didn’t look like any shark I’d ever seen at an aquarium. It was bracketed by a sagging inflatable pool and an abandoned Tonka truck in someone’s backyard. The security lights came on and haloed the shark in all its dead majesty: oozing mouth, long slimy body, bony snout.

  One of the windows rattled up from the house. “Hey!” someone called. “It’s you.”

  It was the girl with shiny hair, the one who’d danced like an excited puppy in the rain of salt. She was still wearing a surfeit of glittery eye shadow. I gestured to the shark. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s been there all afternoon. Gross, right?”

  “Doesn’t this strike you as suspicious?” I said. “Are you not even slightly weirded out?”

  “Have you ever seen Punk’d?” She did not give me time to reply. “I got told it could be Punk’d, and then I couldn’t find Punk’d on television so I had to watch it on the YouTubes. I like Punk’d. People are so funny when they get punk’d. Did you know you dropped your cereal? I have it right here, but I ate some.”

  “I wasn’t aware of a finder’s tax on breakfast cereal,” I said.

  The girl laughed, the way some people did when they had no idea of the joke. “I’ve seen you over at Jamison Pond,” she said, which surprised me. “By yourself. What’s your name?”

  “Why name myself for free?”

  She laughed again, but this time more appreciatively and less like a studio audience. “What if I gave you my name first?”

  “You’d be stupid.”

  The girl leaned out the window, hair shimmering over her One Direction T-shirt. The sky cast weird shadows on her house and the shark smelled fetid in the background. “People call me Rainbow. Rainbow Kipley.”

  Dear God, I thought. “On purpose?”

  “C’mon, we had a deal for your name—”

  “We never made a deal,” I said, but relented. “People call me Hester. Hester Blake.”

  “Hester,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth like candy. Then she repeated, “Hester,” and laughed raucously. I must have looked pissed-off, because she laughed again and said, “Sorry! It’s just a really dumb name,” which I found rich coming from someone designated Rainbow.

  I felt I’d got what I came for. She must have sensed that the conversation had reached a premature end because she announced, “We should hang out.”

  “In your backyard? Next to a dead shark? At midnight?”

  “There are jellyfish in my bathtub,” said Rainbow, which both surprised me and didn’t, and also struck me as a unique tactic. But then she added, quite normally, “You’re interested in this. Nobody else is. They’re pissing themselves, and I’m not—and here you are—so…”

  Limned by the security lamp, Rainbow disappeared and reappeared before waving an open packet of Cruncheroos. “You could have your cereal back.”

  Huh. I had never been asked to hang out before. Certainly not by girls who looked as though they used leave-in conditioner. I had been using Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears since childhood as it kept its promises. I was distrustful; I had never been popular. At school my greatest leap had been from weirdo to perceived goth. Girls abhorred oddity, but quantifiable gothness they could accept. Some had even warmly talked to me of Nightwish albums. I dyed my hair black to complete the effect and was nevermore bullied.

  I feared no contempt of Rainbow Kipley’s. I feared wasting my time. But the lure was too great. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, “to see if the shark’s gone. You can keep the cereal as collateral.”

  “Cool,” she said, like she understood collateral, and smiled with very white teeth. “Cool, cool.”

  Driver’s licenses and kissing boys could wait indefinitely, for preference. My heart sang all the way home, for you see: I’d discovered the bride.

  THE NEXT DAY I found myself back at Rainbow’s shabby suburban house. We both took the time to admire her abandoned shark by the light of day, and I compared it to pictures on my iPhone and confirmed it as Mitsukurina owstoni: goblin shark. I noted dead grass in a broad brown ring around the tree, the star-spoked webs left empty by their spiders, each a proclamation a monster dwells. Somehow we ended up going to the park and Rainbow jiggled her jelly bracelets the whole way.

  I bought a newspaper and pored over local news: the headline read GLOBAL WARMING OR GLOBAL WARNING? It queried alkaline content in the rain, or something, then advertised that no fewer than one scientist was fascinated with what had happened on Main Street. “Scientists,” said my companion, like a slur, and she laughed gutturally.

  “Science has its place,” I said and rolled up the newspaper. “Just not at present. Science does not cause salt blizzards or impalement of bathydemersal fish.”

  “You think this is cool, don’t you?” she said slyly. “You’re on it like a bonnet.”

  There was an unseemly curiosity to her, as though the town huddling in on itself waiting to die was like a celebrity scandal. Was this the way I’d been acting? “No,” I lied, “and nobody under sixty says on it like a bonnet.”

  “Shut up! You know what I mean—”

  “Think of me as a reporter. Someone who’s going to watch what happens. I already know what’s going on, I just want a closer look.”

  Her eyes were wide and very dark. When she leaned in she smelled like Speed Stick. “How do you know?”

  There was no particular family jurisprudence about telling. Don’t appeared to be the rule of thumb as Blakes knew that, Cassandra-like, they defied belief. For me it was simply that nobody had ever asked. “I can read the future, and what I read always comes true,” I said.

  “Oh my God. Show me.”

  I decided to exhibit myself in what paltry way a Blake can. I looked at the sun. I looked at the scudding clouds. I looked at an oily stain on our park bench, and the way the thin young stalks of plants were huddled in the ground. I looked at the shadows people made as they hurried, and at how many sparrows rose startled from the water fountain.

  “The old man in the hat is going to burn down his house on Saturday,” I said. “That jogger will drop her Gatorade in the next five minutes. The police will catch up with that red-jacket man in the first week of October.” I gathered some saliva and, with no great ceremony, hocked it out on the grass. I examined the result. “They’ll unearth a gigantic ruin in…southwestern Australia. In the sand plains. Seven archaeologists. In the winter sometime. Forgive my inexactitude, my mouth wasn’t very wet.”

  Rainbow’s mouth was a round O. In front of us the jogger dropped her Gatorade, and it splattered on the ground in a shower of blue. I said, “You won’t find out if the rest is true for months yet. And you could put it down to coincidences. But you’d be wrong.”

  “You’re a gypsy,” she accused.

  I had expected “liar,” and “nutjob,” but not “gypsy.” “No, and by the way, that’s racist. If you’d like to know our future, then very soon—I don’t know when—a great evil will make itself kno
wn in this town, claim a mortal, and lay waste to us all in celebration. I will record all that happens for my descendants and their descendants, and as is the agreement between my bloodline and the unknown, I’ll be spared.”

  I expected her to get up and leave, or laugh again. She said: “Is there anything I can do?”

  For the first time I pitied this pretty girl with her bright hair and her Chucks, her long-limbed soda-colored legs, her ingenuous smile. She would be taken to a place in the deep, dark below where lay unnamed monstrosity, where the devouring hunger lurked far beyond light and there was no Katy Perry. “It’s not for you to do anything but cower in his abyssal wake,” I said, “though you don’t look into cowering.”

  “No, I mean—can I help you out?” she repeated, like I was a stupid child. “I’ve run out of Punk’d episodes on my machine, I don’t have anyone here, and I go home July anyway.”

  “What about those other girls?”

  “What, them?” Rainbow flapped a dismissive hand. “Who cares? You’re the one I want to like me.”

  Thankfully, whatever spluttering gaucherie I might have made in reply was interrupted by a scream. Jets of sticky arterial blood were spurting out of the water fountain, and tentacles waved delicately from the drain. Tiny octopus creatures emerged in the gouts of blood flooding down the sides and the air stalled around us like it was having a heart attack.

  It took me forever to approach the fountain, wreathed with frondy little tentacle things. It buckled as though beneath a tremendous weight. I thrust my hands into the blood and screamed: it was ice-cold, and my teeth chattered. With a splatter of red I tore my hands away and they steamed in the air.

  In the blood on my palms I saw the future. I read the position of the dead moon that no longer orbited Earth. I saw the blessing of the tyrant who hid in a far-off swirl of stars. I thought I could forecast to midsummer, and when I closed my eyes I saw people drown. Everyone else in the park had fled.

  I whipped out my notebook, though my fingers smeared the pages and were so cold I could hardly hold the pen, but this was Blake duty. It took me three abortive starts to write in English.

  “You done?” said Rainbow, squatting next to me. I hadn’t realized I was muttering aloud, and she flicked a clot of blood off my collar. “Let’s go get McNuggets.”

  “Miss Kipley,” I said, and my tongue did not speak the music of mortal tongues, “you are a fucking lunatic.”

  We left the fountain gurgling like a wound and did not look back. Then we got McNuggets.

  I HAD NEVER met anyone like Rainbow before. I didn’t think anybody else had, either. She was interested in all the things I wasn’t—Sephora hauls, New Girl, Nicki Minaj—but had a strangely magnetic way of not giving a damn, and not in the normal fashion of beautiful girls. She just appeared to have no idea that the general populace did anything but clog up her scenery. There was something in her that set her apart—an absence of being like other people—and in a weak moment I compared her to myself.

  We spent the rest of the day eating McNuggets and wandering around town and looking at things. I recorded the appearance of naked fish bones dangling from the telephone wires. She wanted to prod everything with the toe of her sneaker. And she talked.

  “Favorite color,” she demanded.

  I was peering at anemone-pocked boulders behind the gas station. “Black.”

  “Favorite subject,” she said later, licking dubious McNugget oils off her fingers as we examined flayed fish in a clearing.

  “Physics and literature.”

  “Ideal celebrity boyfriend?”

  “Did you get this out of Cosmo? Pass.”

  She asked incessantly what my teachers were like; were the girls at my school lame; what my thoughts were on Ebola, CSI and Lonely Island. When we had exhausted the town’s supply of dried-up sponges arranged in unknowable names, we ended up hanging out in the movie theater lobby. We watched previews. Neither of us had seen any of the movies advertised, and neither of us wanted to see them, either.

  I found myself telling her about Mar, and even alluded to my mother. When I asked her the same, she just said offhandedly, “Four plus me.” Considering my own filial reticence, I didn’t press.

  When evening fell, she said, See you tomorrow, as a foregone conclusion. Like ten-ish, breakfast takes forever.

  I went home not knowing what to think. She had a bunny manicure. She laughed at everything. She’d stolen orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine, even if everyone stole orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine. She had an unseemly interest in mummy movies. But what irritated me most was that I found her liking me compelling, that she appeared to have never met anyone like Hester Blake.

  Her interest in me was most likely boredom, which was fine, because my interest in her was that she was the bride. That night I thought about what I’d end up writing: the despot of the Breathless Depths took a local girl to wife, one with a bedazzled Samsung. I sniggered alone, and slept uneasy.

  IN THE DAYS to come, doom throttled the brittle, increasingly desiccated town, and I catalogued it as my companion caught me up on the plot of every soap opera she’d ever watched. She appeared to have abandoned most of them midway, furnishing unfinished tales of many a shock pregnancy. Mar had been sarcastic ever since I’d broken her rosemary ward so I spent as much time out of the house as possible; that was the main reason I hung around Rainbow.

  I didn’t want to like her because her doom was upon us all, and I didn’t want to like her because she was like other girls, and I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to like her because she always knew when I’d made a joke. I was so angry, and I didn’t know why.

  We went to the woods and consolidated my notes. I laid my research flat on the grass or propped it on a bough, and Rainbow played music noisily on her Samsung. We rolled up our jeans—or I did, as she had no shorts that went past mid-thigh—and half-assedly sunbathed. It felt like the hours were days and the days endless.

  She wanted to know what I thought would happen when we all got “laid waste to.” For a moment I was terribly afraid I’d feel guilty.

  “I don’t know.” The forest floor smelled cold, somehow. “I’ve never seen waste laid en masse. The Drownlord will make his presence known. People will go mad. People will die.”

  Rainbow rolled over toward me, bits of twig caught in her hair. Today she had done her eyeliner in two thick, overdramatic rings, like a sleep-deprived panda. “Do you ever wonder what dying’s like, dude?”

  I thought about Mar and never seeing fifty. “No,” I said. “My family dies young. I figure anticipating it is unnecessary.”

  “Maybe you’re going to die when the end of this hits,” she said thoughtfully. “We could die tragically together. How’s that shake you?”

  I said, “My family has a pact with the All-Devouring so we don’t get killed carelessly in their affairs. You’re dying alone, Kipley.”

  She didn’t get upset. She tangled her arms in the undergrowth and stretched her legs out, skinny hips arched, and wriggled pleasurably in the thin and unaffectionate sunlight. “I hope you’ll be super sad,” she said. “I hope you’ll cry for a year.”

  “Aren’t you scared to die?”

  “Never been scared.”

  I said, “Due to your brain damage,” and Rainbow laughed uproariously. Then she found a dried-up jellyfish amid the leaves and dropped it down my shirt.

  That night I thought again about what I’d have to write: the many-limbed horror who lies beneath the waves stole a local girl to wife, and she wore the world’s skankiest short-shorts and laughed at my jokes. I slept, but there were nightmares.

  SOMETIMES THE COMING rain was nothing but a fine mist that hurt to breathe, but sometimes it was like shrapnel. The sun shone hot and choked the air with a stench of damp concrete. I carried an umbrella and Rainbow wore black rain boots that squeaked.

  Mar ladled out tortilla soup one night as a peace offering. We ate companionably, with
the radio on. There were no stories about salt rain or plagues of fish even on the local news. I’d been taught better than to expect it. Fear rendered us rigidly silent, and anyone who went against instinct ended up in a straitjacket.

  “Why is our personal philosophy that fate always wins?” I said.

  My aunt didn’t miss a beat. “Self-preservation,” she said. “You don’t last long in our line of work fighting facts. Christ, you don’t last long in our line of work, period. Hey—Ted at the gas station said he’d seen you going around with some girl.”

  “Ted at the gas station is a grudge informer,” I said. “Back on subject. Has nobody tried to use the Blake sight to effect change?”

  “They would’ve been a moron branch of the family, because like I’ve said a million times: it doesn’t work that way.” Mar swirled a spoon around her bowl. “Not trying to make it a federal issue, kid, just saying I’m happy you’re making friends instead of swishing around listening to The Cure.”

  “Mar, I have never listened to The Cure.”

  “You find that bride?”

  Taken aback, I nodded. Mar cocked her dark head in thought. There were sprigs of gray at each temple, and not for the first time I was melancholy, clogged up with an inscrutable grief. But all she said was, “Okay. There were octopuses in the goddamned laundry again. When this is over, you’ll learn what picking up the pieces looks like. Lemon pie in the icebox.”

  It was octopodes, but never mind. I cleared the dishes. Afterward we ate two large wedges of lemon pie apiece. The house was comfortably quiet and the sideboard candles bravely chewed on the dark.

  “Mar,” I said, “what would happen if someone were to cross the deepwater demons who have slavery of wave and underwave? Hypothetically.”

  “No Blake has ever been stupid or saintly enough to try and find out,” said Mar. “Not qualities you’re suited to, Hester.”