The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Yes?” she said, looking into my eyes.

  I did not know how to begin and sat long minutes simply staring at her beautiful face. From out across the veldt came the sound of thunder, and then an instant later the rain began to fall, tapping lightly at the parlor window.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came forth. She took this as a sign and moved her face close to mine, touching her lips against my own. We were kissing, passionately. She wrapped her arms around me and drew me closer. My hand moved along the thin material of her dress, from her thigh to her ribs to her breasts. She made no protest for she was as hot as I was. We fondled and kissed for an unheard of length of time, more true to the manner of the twentieth century than our own. When I could stand it no longer, I reached beneath her dress. My hand sailed along the smooth inner skin of her thigh, and when I was about to explode with excitement, my fingers came to rest on the cold steel of her exhaust spigot. I literally groaned.

  The suit makers, in all of their art and cunning, had left out that which may be the most important aspect of human anatomy. Think of the irony, a suit made to enhance a commerce dealing ultimately in sex, but having no sex itself. At the same moment I groped her steel pipe, she was doing the same to mine. We released each other and sat there in a state of total frustration.

  “The box,” she said. “Tomorrow we will go to town, to the box.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “We have to,” she said.

  “But can you afford it? I haven’t the money,” I said, still slightly trembling.

  “No, I can’t afford it either, but there is something that Stootladdle wants that I can trade for a half-hour in the chamber,” she said.

  Then it struck me, just like in Gloriette’s movie, love would prevail. She was going to trade the film for me, and I would live and not be found out by her. Frank Capra himself couldn’t have conceived of anything more felicitous.

  Vespatian woke me from a warm, bright dream of summer by the sea. “Mrs. Lancaster is waiting for you in the truck,” he said. I hurriedly got dressed and went downstairs.

  As I climbed into my chair, I saw that Gloriette was holding the movie tin in her hand. She tapped it nervously against her knee.

  “Good morning, Joseph,” she said. “I hope you are well rested.”

  “I’m ready,” I said with a lightness in my heart I had not felt since landing on the bug planet.

  She wore a yellow dress and a golden bee pendant on a thin cable around her neck. Her hair was done in braids, and she shone more vibrantly than the veldt itself.

  “Exo-Skeleton Town,” she called to Vespatian.

  “As is your pleasure, madame,” said the grasshopper, and we were off.

  We rode in silence through the dark. Somewhere, after we had left the veldt far behind and I couldn’t see two feet in front of me, I felt her hand touch mine and we intertwined our fingers. All went well until we reached the outskirts of Exo-town, and there, beneath a streetlamp, we witnessed a despondent Judy Garland, in blue gingham, put a stinger gun to her head and pull the trigger. Her exo-skin must have been poorly made because, instead of her leaking out, it blew apart like a bursting balloon, spewing blood and guts of her true self across the passenger door of our truck.

  Gloriette covered her eyes with her hand. “I wish I hadn’t seen that,” she said. “This is surely Hell.”

  “It’s alright,” I told her. “She’s better off.”

  The bluebottles immediately appeared and began devouring the remains.

  “Drive faster, Vespatian,” she called.

  The grasshopper hit the gas pedal and we were driving down the main street of Exo-Skeleton Town no more than three minutes later.

  Stootladdle was beside himself with cordiality when he finally understood the deal that Gloriette was putting before him.

  “An old movie and not well known,” he said, taking the film tin from her. “But, in deference to your late husband, and because you are so delightful, I will take this token in exchange for a half-hour in the box for you and your friend.”

  “When you see me in the scene at the end of the film, where I am in the bar,” she said to him. “Always remember that at that moment, as I am saying my final line, my left high heel is flattening a roach beneath my bar stool.”

  “It will thrill me to the very thorax,” said the mayor.

  “The box,” she said.

  “Yes, follow me,” said the flea. As we left his office, he turned to me and whispered, “Cotten, you damn rascal.”

  The box was in an otherwise abandoned building down the street from the mayor’s office. He unlocked the door with the end of a long thick hair that jutted from his cheek. We stepped into the deep shadows behind him. There before us, almost indistinguishable from the rest of the darkness, was a large black box, ten by ten by ten. Stootladdle moved to the front of it and appeared to be pressing some buttons. There was a sound of old gears turning slowly, and a panel slid back revealing bright light, as if from my dream of summer.

  “Remember,” said the flea, “you must wait until the gong sounds inside before you can molt your outer skin. Also, when the gong sounds for the second time, you must replace your skin within five minutes or you will die when the door opens again. All this was told to me by the dear Earth man who invented it.”

  “Joseph?” asked Gloriette.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “This is surely paradise,” said Stootladdle as he swept out his arms to usher us into the box of light.

  I could hear the door slowly closing behind us but could see nothing, my eyes temporarily blinded. It was warm, though, and there were sound affects—a stream running, birds singing, a tinkling wind chime, and the rustling of leaves.

  Just as my vision cleared, I heard the gong sound.

  “Isn’t it perfectly lovely,” said Gloriette.

  “The most beautiful place I’ve ever been,” I said. I looked around and there was nothing inside, just the floor and walls padded with deep foam rubber covered in crimson silk.

  “Come, Joseph, make me forget about the veldt,” she said.

  I put my arms around her. She gently pushed me away. “Let’s molt,” she said with a nervous laugh.

  Four successive taps at the center of the forehead made the exo-skin peel down like the sectioned hide of an orange. We reached out and tapped each other.

  Imagine wearing a pair of ill-fitting shoes, shoes far too tight. Imagine walking for months in them with no relief. And then imagine finally taking them off, and you will know one hundredth the relief of shedding an exo-skin. This sensation itself verged on orgasm. Cotten fell away and lay rumpled around my ankles. I kicked him into a corner of the box. When I looked back at Gloriette, she had her back to me. I was pleased to see her real hair was a perfect color match for that of the actress. Stepping up behind her, I put my hands on her shoulders.

  “Scratch my back,” she said, and I did.

  “That feels so good,” she said, with a sigh.

  Then she turned and I took a step away from her. My eyes went wide as did hers. I noticed a sudden hollow feeling in my chest. She wasn’t beautiful anymore, and she wasn’t homely by any means, but she was different. That difference thoroughly chilled me even in the warm light of the box. What was more, I saw from the look in her eyes the reflection of her own grave disappointment. All of my pent-up desire vanished, leaving me limp inside and out. I saw her bottom lip begin to tremble and the sight of this brought tears to my eyes.

  “I’m not Gloriette Moss,” she said.

  “I know,” I told her and stepped forward to put my arms around her once again.

  For fifteen minutes of our precious time in paradise, we stood holding each other in silence, not as lovers but as frightened, lost children. The notion of sex was as distant from that box as we were from the true sun. Like a desperate confession, she began frantically to whisper into my ear her life story. Born on Earth as Melissa Bower to a mi
litary man and his wife, she married very young to a career diplomat, who forced her to accompany him to the bug planet. In choosing her exo-skin, he would not allow her to become anyone of any recognition. She had wanted Jane Mansfield, but instead was allowed only Gloriette Moss. His main desire was to achieve great wealth for himself. The ambassador, it turns out, was as abusive a species of vermin as Stootladdle. It was she who did Lancaster in with a hatpin to the eye. “I used something so very thin, so there would be no evidence and he would suffer longer as he turned to jelly,” she said. “The smoke was my only friend.”

  Her honesty made me feel as naked within as without. I told her the truth about how I had come to her house and why. As I explained, I heard her give a brief groan and then felt her slump in my arms as if she were now no more than an empty exo-skin. When I finished, I eased her onto the floor and lay beside her. She did not cry, but stared vacantly into the corner of the box.

  “We have each other now,” I told her. “We can help each other beat the smoke, and if we sell all the things in your house, we can return to Earth. We might even come to love each other.” I kissed her on the cheek, but she did not respond.

  I talked and projected and promised, rubbed her arm and ran my open palm the length of her hair. Then the gong sounded, waking me suddenly from the dream of the future I was spinning.

  I immediately began fitting my suit back on. “It will be fine,” I said right before I momentarily died and was revived. When I was again Cotten, I looked down and to my horror, she hadn’t moved.

  “Come on, hurry!” I yelled. “There are only minutes left.”

  She lay motionless, staring. I tried to slip her suit onto her—an impossible task unless the wearer is standing—but she was curled in a fetal position. Those few minutes were an eternity, and when I thought they should have long been over, I lifted her and held her to me.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why?”

  She slowly turned her face to me. “You know why,” she said.

  Then the door slid open, and she turned to rain in my arms.

  This story got turned down more times than my Visa card. What’s not to like? It’s got giant alien bugs, Hollywood stars, balls of aphrodisiacal insect shit, drug consumption through a spigot in the crotch, and Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, shooting herself in the head. Anyway, at least I thought it was great. The story finally met a kindred spirit in Dave Truesdale, editor of the first issue of Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

  I got the idea for this story from a book my son bought about the history of Japanese monster flicks titled Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! by Stuart Galbraith. Before looking through it, I was unaware that the great actor Joseph Cotten had done a bunch of low budget monster movies in Japan near the end of his career. I never saw any of them, but the book had plenty of pictures. “Exo-Skeleton Town” is told in the melodramatic fashion of the black and white movies I watched on TV in the afternoons when, as a kid, I’d skip school, which was pretty often.

  The name of the movie that is coveted by the mayor of the bug world, The Rain Does Things Like That, came from a deranged guy who wandered the streets of South Philly when I lived near Marconi Plaza, only a stone’s throw from Monzo’s Meatarama. I’d see this guy at least once a week, and he never tired of repeating that same phrase.

  I’ve often thought that someday I’d like to write the story of the rise to power of Stootladdle, the flealike mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town. Thanks go out to Dave Truesdale and John O’Neill (Black Gate publisher) for bringing this creature feature to a theatre near you.

  The Honeyed Knot

  About ten years ago I had a student in a composition course I was teaching who, upon my giving the class a writing assignment, raised his hand and, with a monotone voice, asked, “Mr. Ford, what if we don’t have any rhymes?” I looked up to see if he was joking, but what I saw was a worn leather jacket, an ageless face, a sinister Dutch-boy haircut and eyes that stared so intently they seemed to be seeing all the way around the world to the back of his own head.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re not writing poetry. Just tell a story.”

  “But I have no rhymes,” he insisted.

  He sat there for the entire class and did nothing but stare. I didn’t understand his dilemma, but it was college, he was paying, and as long as he wasn’t obstreperous, I figured I’d let him sit there and work through it.

  After teaching for another ten years, though, his statement eventually became clear to me. Hundreds of students and thousands of papers later, I too had begun to feel a conspicuous lack of rhymes. At first, I thought perhaps it was my age. Long gone were the days when the students would mistake me for one of their own. I felt out of touch at work, as if I had been hollowed out and were sleepwalking through my duties. It was eerie, otherworldly, and I had a vague presentiment that it had to do with the residual power of all those papers I’d read and the authors’ minds behind them. Make no mistake, words have magic. They are contagious. In delving so deeply into other individuals’ writing processes, I had come in contact with secret machinations. I had witnessed inexplicable instances of the uncanny.

  I remember one woman who wrote that her husband’s ex-wife had placed a Santería spell on her. She was surprised on a particular Sunday morning to find dinner plates of dry rice and human hair positioned at the four corners of the outside of her house. Under the advisement of an aunt, who was also an adept of the mysteries of that religion, she suspended a bowl of water with an egg in it from the ceiling. Three days later, when she broke open the egg, she found it contained a blood spot. This is how she discovered the true nature of the curse. Before finally going to New York and hiring a bruja to sacrifice a chicken for her, she met with all manner of accidents and mishaps, some of which I had seen the proof—bruises from her fall down a flight of stairs, her car dented in the parking lot, the aftermath of a fire that had started spontaneously in her pocketbook.

  Another young woman, a favorite student of mine, divulged in an essay that she was a witch and, later in the semester as a favor to me, cast a spell to cure some trouble I was having with my vision. The night she worked her magic, she came to class in a pure white outfit, like a child’s party dress, and white patent-leather shoes. She never said a word and left before the class was over. Three days later, my sight had improved.

  I remember a young African-American student who had traced his lineage, with green crayon on a piece of cardboard, back to Leif Ericsson, the Viking explorer, on one side of his family, and, on the other, to Geronimo. He believed he was constantly being watched by the infrared eyes of satellites. Who was I to tell him he was mistaken? Perhaps even more pathetic was a girl who wrote that she had a disease that caused exotic flowers to grow in her lungs. When I inquired further about it, she said, “Like a garden. When they blossom, I will suffocate to death.”

  Then there was the meek, bespectacled young man who spoke only in whispers, and ended up raping and murdering a child in his neighborhood during the time he was a student of mine. All of his stories and essays revolved around a dragon named Flamer, and when I saw my student on CNN, manacled and accompanied by two U.S. marshals, I blamed myself for having failed to decipher the obscure symbolism of his tales and ward off the tragedy. That little girl’s death haunted me for years.

  But the most unnerving incident of my career had to do with a forty-seven-year-old woman with a metal plate in her head. Her story proved to be a prism that focused all the disparate narratives of all of my hundreds of students together into a lesson I will never forget.

  Mrs. Apes came to my class in that fall semester so devoid of rhymes I had considered quitting. She was very soft spoken, and although her face was scarred and her hair somewhat spotty in front, she had a look of simple kindness about her that I immediately liked. The other students, all much younger, were at first put off by her questions and encouragements because she was unabashed in her expression of emotion and would touch them lightly on their s
houlders when talking to them. By the third class session, though, they were treating her like the mother they wished they had.

  Her writings were neither stories nor essays. “Visionary testaments” is the best way I can think to describe them. I hadn’t seen anything like them since the dragon stories of that doomed young man, Kevin Wheast. They had no official beginning or ending, and their purpose was elusive. Birds turned into wolves that leaped into the sky to reside in a magical cloud realm where the tears they cried became a rain that washed terror out of lonely children. Deer knew the secrets of creation, crows lived inside men’s minds, dogs harbored the souls of dead saints. And the loving spirit Avramody watched over this strange and complex cosmology.

  I knew it was best to work with what I was given by the student at first and then try to move on to different things as the semester progressed. She was an atrocious speller, and her sentence structure was, at times, bizarre, as if she were translating from another language. Paragraphing was out of the question. When I would mention these problems to her and possible strategies to overcome them, she would laugh softly and look into the distance as if remembering the amusing antics of a long-dead relative.

  Then one day, when I was having a conference with her at my desk at the front of the classroom, I asked her to write a story about some incident that happened in her life. She was silent for some time before blurting out that her husband had brutally beaten her and broken her skull. “The police had to shoot him,” she said. “And when they took me to the emergency room, I came out of my body and flew around the hospital, seeing everything. I saw people’s true colors, like a glowing ball of light, right here,” she said, pointing to her solar plexus. “With each soul I encountered in this form, their color would shoot out a beam at my head. Finally, I met up with a little girl down in the hospital morgue in the basement who called me to her and kissed me between the eyes. She told me to return to my body and that I would live. Now I have the metal up there.” And she knocked on her head as if it was a door.