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

by A. M. Dellamonica

  I wondered if this was meant to sting, because it didn’t. I felt no pain. “Your next question’s going to be, How do we let other people die?” she said and pulled her evening cigarette from the packet. “Because I’m me, I’ll understand you want a coping mechanism, not a Sunday School lecture. My advice to you is: It becomes easier the less you get involved. And Hester — ”

  I looked at her with perfect nonchalance.

  “I’m not outrunning my fate,” said Aunt Mar. She lit the cigarette at the table. “Don’t try to outrun other people’s. You don’t have the right. You’re a Blake, not God.”

  “I didn’t choose to be a Blake,” I snapped, and dropped the pie plate on the sideboard before storming from the room. I took each stair as noisily as possible, but not noisily enough to drown out her holler: “If you ever get a choice in this life, kiddo, treasure it!”

  RAINBOW NOTICED MY foul mood. She did not tell me to cheer up or ask me what the matter was, thankfully. She wasn’t that type of girl. Fog boiled low in the valley and the townspeople stumbled through the streets and talked about atmospheric pressure. Stores closed. Buses came late. Someone from the northeast suburbs had given in and shot himself.

  I felt numb and untouched, and worse—when chill winds wrapped around my neck and let me breathe clear air, smelling like the beach and things that grow on the beach—I was happy. I nipped this in its emotional bud. Rainbow, of course, was as cheerful and unaffected as a stump.

  Midsummer boiled closer and I thought about telling her. I would say outright, Miss Kipley. (“Rainbow” had never left my lips, the correct method with anyone who was je m’appelle Rainbow.) When the ocean lurker comes to take his victim, his victim will be you. Do whatever you wish with this information. Perhaps she’d finally scream. Or plead. Anything.

  But when I got my courage up, she leaned in close and combed her fingers through my hair, right down to the undyed roots. Her hands were very delicate, and I clammed up. My sullen silence was no barrier to Rainbow. She just cranked up Taylor Swift.

  We were sitting in a greasy bus shelter opposite Walmart when the man committed suicide. There was no showboating hesitation in the way he appeared on the roof, then stepped off at thirty feet. He landed on the spines of a wrought-iron fence. The sound was like a cocktail weenie going through a hole punch.

  There was nobody around but us. I froze and did not look away. Next to me, Rainbow was equally transfixed. I felt terrible shame when she was the one to drag us over to him. She already had her phone out. I had seen corpses before, but this was very fresh. There was a terrible amount of blood. He was irreparably dead. I turned my head to inform Rainbow, in case she tried to help him or something equally demented, and then I saw she was taking his picture.

  “Got your notebook?” she said.

  There was no fear in her. No concern. Rainbow reached out to prod at one mangled, outflung leg. Two spots of colour bloomed high on her cheeks; she was luminously pleased.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” My voice sounded embarrassingly shrill. “This man just killed himself!”

  “The fence helped,” said Rainbow helplessly.

  “You think this is a joke—what reason could you have for thinking this is okay—”

  “Excuse you, we look at dead shit all the time. I thought we’d hit jackpot, we’ve never found a dead guy....”

  Her distress was sulky and real. I took her by the shoulders of her stupid cropped jacket and gripped tight, fear a tinder to my misery. The rain whipped around us and stung my face. “Christ, you think this is some kind of game, or…or a YouTube stunt! You really can’t imagine—you have no comprehension—you mindless jackass — ”

  She was trying to calm me, feebly patting my hands. “Stop being mad at me, it sucks! What gives, Hester—”

  “You’re the bride, Kipley. It’s coming for you.”

  Rainbow stepped out of my shaking, febrile grip. For a moment her lips pressed very tightly together and I wondered if she would cry. Then her mouth quirked into an uncomprehending, furtive little smile.

  “Me,” she repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “You really think it’s me?”

  “You know I know. You don’t outrun fate, Rainbow.”

  “Why are you telling me now?” Something in her bewilderment cooled, and I was sensible of the fact we were having an argument next to a suicide. “Hey — have you been hanging with me all this time because of that?”

  “How does that matter? Look: This is the beginning of the end of you. Why don’t you want to be saved, or to run away, or something? It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters,” said Rainbow, with infinite dignity, “to me. You know what I think?”

  She did not wait to hear what I imagined she thought, which was wise. She hopped away from the dead man and held her palms up to the rain. The air was thick with an electrifying chill: a breathless enormity. We were so close now. Color leached from the Walmart, from the concrete, from the green in the trees and the red of the stop sign. Raindrops sat in her pale hair like pearls.

  “I think this is the coolest thing that ever happened to this stupid backwater place,” she said. “This is awesome. And I think you agree but won’t admit it.”

  “This place is literally Hell.”

  “Suits you,” said Rainbow.

  I was beside myself with pain. My fingernails tilled up the flesh of my palms. “I understand now why you got picked as the bride,” I said. “You’re a sociopath. I am not like you, Miss Kipley, and if I forgot that over the last few weeks I was wrong. Excuse me, I’m going to get a police officer.”

  When I turned on my heel and left her—standing next to a victim of powers we could not understand or fight, and whose coming I was forced to watch like a reality TV program where my vote would never count—the blood was pooling in watery pink puddles around her rain boots. Rainbow didn’t follow.

  MAR HAD GRILLED steaks for dinner that neither of us ate. By the time I’d finished bagging and stuffing them mechanically in the fridge, she’d finished her preparations. The dining room floor was a sea of reeking heatherbacks. There was even a host of them jarred and flickering out on the porch. The front doors were locked and the windows haloed with duct tape. At the center sat my aunt in an overstuffed armchair, cigarette lit, hair undone, a bucket of dirt by her feet. The storm clamored outside.

  I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”

  My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”

  “Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.

  “Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”

  My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.

  “Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”

  “First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning — your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you... not knowing.”

  I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.

  The goblin shark in
Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.

  I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.

  “Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”

  Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”

  “If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”

  “You badass,” she said, and before I could retort she leaned out past the windowsill. She made a soft white blotch in the darkness.

  “I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” said Rainbow. “I think you’re really funny, and you’re interesting, and your fingernails are all different lengths. You’re not like other girls. And you only think things are worthwhile if they’ve been proved ten times by a book, and I like how you hate not coming first.”

  “Listen,” I said. My throat felt tight and fussy and rain was leaking into my hood. “The drowned lord who dwells in dark water will claim you. The moon won’t rise tonight, and you’ll never update your Tumblr again.”

  “And how you care about everything! You care super hard. And you talk like a dork. I think you’re disgusting. I think you’re super cute. Is that weird? No homo? If I put no homo there, that means I can say things and pretend I don’t mean them?”

  “Rainbow,” I said, “don’t make fun of me.”

  “Why is it so bad for me to be the bride, anyway?” she said, petulant now. “What’s wrong with it? If it’s meant to happen, it’s meant to happen, right? Cool. Why aren’t you okay with it?”

  There was no lightning or thunder in that storm. There were monstrous shadows, shiny on the matt black of night, and I thought I heard things flop around in the woods. “Because I don’t want you to die.”

  Her smile was lovely and there was no fear in it. Rainbow didn’t know how to be afraid. In her was a curious exultation and I could see it, it was in her mouth and eyes and hair. The heedless ecstasy of the bride. “Die? Is that what happens?”

  My stomach churned. “If you change your mind, come to West North Street,” I said. “The house standing alone at the top of the road. Go to the graveyard at the corner of Main and Spinney and take a handful of dirt off any child’s grave, then come to me. Otherwise, this is good-bye.”

  I turned. Something sang through the air and landed next to me, soggy and forlorn. My packet of Cruncheroos. When I turned back, Rainbow was wide-eyed and her face was uncharacteristically puckered, and we must have mirrored each other in our upset. I felt like we were on the brink of something as great as it was awful, something I’d snuck around all summer like a thief.

  “You’re a prize dumbass trying to save me from myself, Hester Blake.”

  I said, “You’re the only one I wanted to like me.”

  My hands shook as I hiked home. There were blasphemous, slippery things in each clearing that endless night. I knew what would happen if they were to approach. The rain grew oily and warm as blood was oily and warm, and I alternately wept and laughed, and none of them even touched me.

  My aunt had fallen asleep amid the candles like some untidy Renaissance saint. She lay there with her shoes still on and her cigarette half-smoked, and I left my clothes in a sopping heap on the laundry floor to take her flannel pj’s out of the dryer. Their sleeves came over my fingertips. I wouldn’t write down Rainbow in the Blake book, I thought. I would not trap her in the pages. Nobody would ever know her but me. I’d outrun fate, and blaspheme Blake duty.

  I fell asleep tucked up next to Mar.

  IN THE MORNING I woke to the smell of toaster waffles. Mar’s coat was draped over my legs. First of July: The Deepwater God was here. I rolled up my pajama pants and tiptoed through molten drips of candlewax to claim my waffle. My aunt wordlessly squirted them with syrup faces and we stood on the porch to eat.

  The morning was crisp and gray and pretty. Salt drifted from the clouds and clumped in the grass. The wind discomfited the trees. Not a bird sang. Beneath us, the town was laid out like a spill: flooded right up to the gas station, and the western suburbs drowned entirely. Where the dark, unreflective waters had not risen, you could see movement in the streets, but it was not human movement. And there roared a great revel near the Walmart.

  There was thrashing in the water and a roiling mass in the streets. A tentacle rose from the depths by the high school, big enough to see each sucker, and it brushed open a building with no effort. Another tentacle joined it, then another, until the town center was alive with coiling lappets and feelers. I was surprised by their jungle sheen of oranges and purples and tropical blues. I had expected somber greens and funeral grays. Teeth broke from the water. Tall, harlequin-striped fronds lifted, questing and transparent in the sun. My chest felt very full, and I stayed to look when Mar turned and went inside. I watched like I could never watch enough.

  The water lapped gently at the bottom of our driveway. I wanted my waffle to be ash on my tongue, but I was frantically hungry and it was delicious. I was chomping avidly, flannels rolled to my knees, when a figure emerged at the end of the drive. It had wet short-shorts and perfectly hairsprayed hair.

  “Hi,” said Rainbow bashfully.

  My heart sang, unbidden.

  “God, Kipley! Come here, get inside—”

  “I kind’ve don’t want to, dude,” she said. “No offense.”

  I didn’t understand when she made an exaggerated oops! shrug. I followed her gesture to the porch candles with idiot fixation. Behind Rainbow, brightly colored appendages writhed in the water of her wedding day.

  “Hester,” she said, “you don’t have to run. You’ll never die or be alone, neither of us will; not even the light will have permission to touch you. I’ll bring you down into the water and the water under that, where the spires of my palace fill the lost mortal country, and you will be made even more beautiful and funny and splendiferous than you are now.”

  The candles cringed from her damp Chucks. When she approached, half of them exploded in a chrysanthemum blast of wax. Leviathans crunched up people busily by the RiteAid. Algal bloom strangled the telephone lines. My aunt returned to the porch and promptly dropped her coffee mug, which shattered into a perfect Unforgivable Shape.

  “I’ve come for my bride,” said Rainbow, the abyssal king. “Yo, Hester. Marry me.”

  THIS IS THE Blake testimony of Hester, twenty-third generation in her sixteenth year.

  In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, the God of the drowned country came ashore. The many-limbed horror of the depths chose to take a local girl to wife. Main Street was made over into salt bower. Water-creatures adorned it as jewels do. Mortals gave themselves for wedding feast and the Walmart utterly destroyed. The Deepwater Lord returned triumphant to the tentacle throne and will dwell there, in splendor, forever.

  My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate, because when the leviathan prince went, I went with her.

  IF A STORM cell had not taken up residence over the Channel and grounded half a fleet of solar steamers in Port Geddes that winter, I would undoubtedly not be telling this story, or be doing anything else for that matter.

  But it did, and I am. And it’s too late to
stop me.

  I AM SPYING on my father and it’s not working out very well.

  It’s his own fault; if he lies all the time, what does he expect me to do? Am I meant to just not notice the sudden influx of spare credit? It’s no use asking him, though, he’ll only lie some more. Hence, spying.

  His supervisor has taken the duties of overseer to a zealous extreme and if I hang around in Dad’s sector much longer I’ll get caught. When I look around for the hiding place the supervisor is most unlikely to disturb, I spot the depot. That part of the docks is a restricted access point, with the yellow hazard signs to prove it, but this is Port Geddes we’re talking about, not Glasgow or Southampton. I grew up sneaking around the docks; I know the blind corners of the system as well as any long-term employee. It also helps that I’m wearing a pair of my father’s old overalls and spent all night rewiring his security logo for universal access. The doors think they should let me inside, so they do.

  I stop dead and stare.

  The depot is roughly the size of an aircraft hangar and might have been one, once—there are so many in disuse these days; most planes were taken apart for scrap long ago, when the fuel shortages were at their worst. The current contents are probably on their way to meet a similar fate, but that doesn’t make the depot any less of a wonderland.

  Robots. Robots everywhere. I’ve seen ones like this in public parades, but the closest I’ve ever come was a cleaning drone broken down on the street, and it was a huge clunky thing. These are government service ‘bots, deactivated for one reason or another and thrown carelessly onto vast heaps until they can be taken to the mainland for dismemberment and recycling. Some are minimalist outlines, others boxy and durable. A few could pass for sleeping humans in the right light. I crouch down to run my hand reverently along an exposed silvery arm, but jerk back when I see the insignia branded into its shoulder. Only an idiot would mess with Her Majesty’s artificial legions, deactivated or not.