The sausage heard this and nearly cooked in her skin. There was no way she was ever going home, to be subject to the cruel whims of Gammon and his sort. She slipped away while everyone else was cheering for the new, more organized government, and ran home.
“I just don’t get it,” said the mouse, making a fire and setting the table for their dinner as usual. “I mean, why should anybody care what we do with our lives? Isn’t the whole point that everybody gets to live happily ever after in our own way?”
“Well,” said the bird, “they’re just trying to do the same thing we’re doing here, man. We’ve got our perfect civilized setup, right? Each of us has our tasks. The wood gathering, the water, the cooking—we have an order to everything. They just want the same kind of thing, on a larger scale. Right?”
“It’s not the same thing,” said the mouse.
“We’re a family,” said the sausage.
“Sure, sure,” said the bird. But his feathery brow wrinkled a little bit.
A couple of weeks passed, and they all forgot about Blanketsaurus and about the conversation they’d had afterward. Until one day, the bird came home from fetching wood, and his wings were fluttering with anger. He scratched at his chair back as he glowered at his two friends. “It’s an honest disgrace,” the bird grumbled.
“What’s wrong?” asked the mouse, wide-eyed.
The bird kept just muttering and glaring, until he finally explained. When he was out in the woods, he’d met up with another bird who lived a few miles away and had come over here to flutter around and hunt for gumdrops. You know, bird stuff. And the bird—our bird—had started bragging about his situation, and how good he had it, with his friends the mouse and the sausage. They had everything locked down. Everybody had a job to do, and it all ran smooth as butter. And then they played video games and danced to EDM!
But the other bird just fluffed his bright tail feathers and said that it sounded as though the bird was being straight-up taken for a ride. After all, the bird had the toughest job of the three of them. He had to go into the forest and collect the wood, and carry it all the way back to the cottage. Meanwhile, the mouse only had to carry some water and set the table, and a few other chores, and then she could just lounge around. The sausage just had to climb into the pan for a little while and season it. Of course they were happy: they’d suckered the bird into doing all the real work! “I’m glad I don’t have to get bossed around by a rodent and a piece of meat,” said the other bird with a chortle, before flying away.
Now the bird was back at home, spitting mad at his friends. “You think I’m just a chump,” he squawked. “You think you can just treat me like your fool forever. You guys just loaf around here, putting on your fancy airs, while I’m out there dragging wood in from the forest. It’s exploitation, is what it is.”
“But I mean, you’ve never complained before,” said the mouse, her fur standing on end.
“And that’s how you knew I was a sucker!”
The mouse and the sausage tried to reason with the bird, pointing out that each of them had the task that she or he was most suited for. They weren’t trying to exploit anybody, just use their shared resources in the best possible way. And so on.
But the bird was having none of it. He kept insisting that the free lunch was over, and it was about time they shared the workload more equally.
“What do you have in mind?” the sausage asked, trembling with nervousness, but also with the fear that she had lost her friend forever.
“How about we trade jobs tomorrow?”
So it was that the sausage went out to the forest to fetch wood, in spite of all her protests. And meanwhile, the bird would get the easy job of fetching water and setting everything up, while the mouse threw herself into the hot frying pan to get it greased up. If this worked out as it should, the bird had said, maybe they could have a chore wheel from now on.
The sausage felt naked and exposed, moving through the trees with the delicate marbling under her skin visible in the sunlight filtering through the big hats above. She tried to hum a David Guetta song to steady her nerves, but every sound in the woods made her jump. The fear, the uncertainty, were like a lump of gristle in her brain. And meanwhile, she kept arguing with the bird in her head, coming up with more and more reasons why this was unfair and a dreadful mistake, and surely the bird had to see that the sausage was much too delicate to carry wood every day, or even once every three days.
The sausage got so worked up, arguing with the bird in her mind, that she didn’t hear the dog coming up behind her until its hot breath and slobbery tongue were right behind her. She tried to run, but the dog’s jaws closed around her.
“Hey,” the sausage protested weakly, “let me go.”
The dog did let go of her for a moment, just so he could talk. “You’re a mighty juicy sausage,” he whuffed. “But you’re a long way from the Breakfast Meats country. I don’t suppose you have any valid travel papers?”
“Uh—” The sausage fumbled around in her pockets. “I do, I do. I have some right here.”
And she produced the papers that the blood pudding had made for her, so long ago. The dog picked them up in his front paws and inspected them. Now that she wasn’t in the dog’s mouth, she could see that he was a big brown hound, like a hunting dog, with a slobbery mouth and flat ears.
“Hmmm,” the dog said. “This is certainly most interesting. But it’s clearly a forgery. You see this smudging around the great seal of High Commodore Gammon, here? And also, even if this was real, it’s no longer valid. You would have had to return to your home and get updated papers for the Confederation. In any case, you’re carrying forged papers, and thus you are free booty.” He leaned his head in a graceful movement and scooped the sausage up again.
The shout came from behind the sausage: “Let go of my friend!”
The sausage would never know why the bird came looking for her. Maybe the bird felt guilty? Or maybe he just wanted to come and gloat. Either way, he arrived just in time to see the dog carrying her away, and try to intervene.
“Oh, hi.” The dog let the sausage go again so he could address the bird. “Unfortunately, your friend here is carrying forged letters. Which is like ten kinds of a crime. So I was about to carry her off and eat her, maybe not in that order.”
“That’s . . . that’s barbaric!” The bird’s wings shook with outrage, and his feet scraped the forest dirt. “You can’t go around eating people!”
“Civilization has certain rules,” the dog growled. “You break them, you get eaten. This isn’t up to me. I have to follow the same rules as everybody else.”
“You don’t have to eat anybody. That’s not in any rules,” the sausage said, gaining a bit of courage from having her friend there by her side.
“That’s true,” the dog said. “I mean, I could take her all the way back to the Republic of Breakfast Meats, where they would execute her. But that’s a lot of bother, and the end result is the same. And I can tell just by smelling her that she’s got bits of fennel and wild boar in her. She’s going to be delicious.”
“But,” the bird said. “But—but—we’re friends with the Super Ultra Duchess of the Fedora Forest! She has a great army and immense power. She’ll be mega pissed if you kill our friend here. She’ll probably hunt you down and make an example of you.”
“What?” the dog said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The sausage was about to say the exact same thing as the dog. But when she glanced at the bird, he rolled his eyes and poked forward with his beak, as if to say, Just work with me here.
So the sausage chimed in. “Yes! The Super Ultra Duchess. You didn’t even know this forest had its own ruler, did you? And we’re under her protection. She’s so powerful, even the Confederacy leaves her alone.”
“I’ve never heard of any Super Ultra Duchess,” the dog grumbled, “and I’m on all the message boards.”
“Well, you obviously don’t come to t
he Fedora Forest too often,” the sausage said huffily.
“In fact,” said the bird, “I think I saw her just a little while ago.” He was gesturing at someone whom the sausage couldn’t see, and she realized that their friend, the mouse, must be someplace nearby. The bird kept talking, trying to stall the dog. “She makes all the rules hereabouts, and in fact, you better watch out, because I think you’re violating a bunch of her regulations and ordinances and statutes. For reals.”
“I don’t know.” The dog sniffed the air. “I think I would have smelled it if there was any such authority around here. Authority has a very distinct scent.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s right around here,” the bird said, looking around in a panic.
“This is your last warning,” the sausage said, with zero conviction.
“Nah,” the dog said. “I think I’m going to eat this sausage now, and then there won’t be any evidence left anyway.”
He bent his head to scoop the sausage up in his jaws, ready to gobble her up once and for all.
“WHO DARES?” came a thundering voice through the forest.
The dog dropped the sausage, his tail going between his legs by some instinct.
“UNMOUTH MY SUBJECT,” said the voice. And the source of the voice came close enough for the sausage to see. It was the mouse, riding on top of the sausage’s mobile DJ rig, using the microphone on its highest reverb setting. The mouse had found a big mushroom, which she was using as a hat, and had covered herself and the DJ rig with a big velvety red blanket.
“Hey,” the dog said, with a bit of a whimper in his voice. “I found her. She had forged papers. She’s free booty, man.”
“YOURS IS THE BOOTY THAT WILL BE FREE,” said the mouse, “IF YOU MOLEST MY SUBJECT. GO NOW! BEFORE I BRING MY MIGHTY ARMIES DOWN UPON YOU.”
The dog hesitated one moment longer, but the mouse bellowed, “GO!” He turned his lowered tail and ran off into the forest with his legs flailing. The sausage was so amazed and relieved, she fell on her back, wobbling as if she was being grilled.
“That was a near thing,” the sausage said.
“That dog will be back, I bet,” said the mouse, disentangling herself from the DJ rig, the mushroom, and the blanket.
“We’ll just have to make the Super Ultra Duchess more convincing next time,” said the bird. “We’ll all have to work together on it, since she’s like our insurance policy.”
“Ow.” The mouse cringed as it exposed its patchy fur to the open air. “I am actually in pain, all over my whole body. I tried to get into the hot frying pan to season the food with my body, and my fur did not like it at all. That’s why I was here in the woods when that dog attacked you. I came here to ask you for advice on what I was doing wrong. I burned my poor feet, so I had to ride here on your DJ rig, and it’s lucky that I did, too.”
“There’s a whole art to wriggling around in a frying pan and seasoning it with your body,” the sausage said, still expanding with relief.
“Really?” the mouse said.
“No, not really,” the sausage said, with an exasperated laugh. “You just have to be a sausage, dude.”
“Oh,” the bird said. “That actually makes total sense.”
After that, they carried on more or less as they had before. Except that now, they had a house meeting once a week or so, just to make sure they were all happy with the arrangement of the jobs. Some days, the bird skipped fetching wood and went flying off to look for cool stuff that they could sell to the scrap merchants in town. The sausage’s DJ gigs started bringing in enough money that they could hire some part-time help. The mouse got better at pretending to be a Super Ultra Duchess, until they finally received an embossed invitation to join the Confederacy. They framed the invite and put it on the mantelpiece, over their PlayStation’s big screen.
“It just proves,” said the bird, who would not stop extolling his own cleverness for a minute, “anybody can be a big deal, if they just have a posse.”
“Yeah,” the mouse said, curling up between her friends. “It just makes me wonder. Why doesn’t everybody just invent their own nation?”
“I think maybe they do,” said the sausage. They were playing a side-scrolling shooter, and the sausage had just gotten to the Final Boss, so nobody talked for a while after that. Until it was time to climb into the frying pan and make dinner.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Charlie Jane Anders: “The Bird, the Mouse, and the Sausage” is one of the strangest Grimm Brothers fairy tales. It’s incredibly bleak and unbelievably strange. There’s no plucky hero who triumphs in spite of doing the thing that he (or she) was told not to do. There’s no hint of a reward for doing the right thing, whatsoever. There’s just hubris and death.
If you haven’t read the original version of this fairy tale, you really ought to. It’s very short and intensely odd. Just Google “Grimm bird mouse sausage” and it’ll be the first hit. And once you’ve read the original fairy tale, you’ll see why I was so obsessed with it. And why, when I was asked to contribute to this volume, I couldn’t think of any story I’d rather do.
On one level, the original tale is clearly about division of labor, and the importance of sticking to your assigned task and not trying to challenge the established Order of Things. But on another level, it’s about an unconventional family, and what happens when they pay too much attention to the opinions of outsiders.
But once I started pulling at the threads of this story, it got more complicated. There are plenty of Grimm tales with talking animals—but this is a world where there’s a talking sausage, too, and nobody bats an eye. And the dog in the story attacks the sausage, not just because the dog likes sausages, but because the sausage is carrying forged letters. Who issues documentation to a sausage? The more I thought about this, the more confused I became.
My first few stabs at expanding and transforming this fairy tale were too literal minded. I described a laboratory where foolish scientists imbued a sausage with sentience, and how their experiments gradually went wrong. I imagined a world slowly overrun by talking animals and self-aware pieces of food. It wasn’t clicking. It was only when I decided to go fully postapocalyptic and turn this story into, basically, a kind of Adventure Time fanfic that it started to click for me. And that had the bonus of giving me a sausage that not only talks but wants to be a club DJ.
FAMILIARIS
Genevieve Valentine
mean, if you don’t want to have one,” he says, that single line down the center of his forehead like his face is about to peel.
“Someday,” she says. His hand is too tight in her hand. One of them is sweating.
The prince and princess had no child.
Eventually, wolves.
Long ago, a woman in Bavaria had to peel some potatoes. She had to do the washing. She had to check on the soup that simmered on the stove and was never quite thick enough. She had to watch her smallest child where it lay wrapped near the fire and sweating, and watch her oldest daughter tying back her hair to look finer when she went to trade the day’s milk for some woolens from the merchant with the unmarried son. She wanted to tell a story that could lock the door.
The prince and princess had no child. The princess insulted a peasant mother as unfaithful for having triplets; as punishment, the princess bore seven sons in seven days. She sent them to be killed. (Mothers in stories are hateful and unkind; they never peel potatoes for the soup.) The prince found them and saved them and let them grow, and as soon as they were men of eighteen, they appeared in the feast hall to swallow the princess whole.
Wolves, the mother calls them, when she speaks of young men. Oldest daughters don’t fear much anymore—they don’t fear enough—but a wolf can still make a girl pause at the window and glance into the woods, just in case.
Fairy tales are collected by the scholars who show up in the center of town with neat coats darned at the cuffs, with pen and ink and paper, but they begin with a woman at the fireside, looking
out the open door and fearing the worst.
She wants the lock to sit fast, even if it’s too late. She wants to make her daughter listen to the story of a princess who couldn’t bear children and then suddenly, horribly could; who saw only a wolf when her husband forced her to look in her mirror; who was ruined the moment she insulted the farmer, because women are doomed if they open their mouths, and that mountain’s so steep it can ruin a queen.
You tell stories because your fears have no easier name. The merchant’s son smiles, but he’s tall, and when his father is gone to sell near the cathedral, the son offers to show girls the woolens they store upstairs and keeps them there too long. The soup is going to sour any minute, and your daughter needs to come home.
“How can she have so many?” she says, looking at the woman who can barely push the double stroller, one older child dragging on her shirttail. One of them is shrieking. It won’t stop. The mother looks like she hasn’t slept in a hundred years; her anger flaps empty and worn-out every time she opens her mouth.
Her husband says, “We should be so lucky,” and for a moment she looks at him like his tongue has turned into a salamander before she remembers that the last time she mentioned she was doing well at work, his smile was thin. (He still hasn’t assembled the desk in the room that’s supposed to be her office; she does her work at the dining table, as her mother did the darning. He’s gotten adamant that they clear it before dinner. “We’re a family,” he says, “we should get in the habit to make it easier when we have children,” and she thinks about what he looked like the first time he told her he wanted to marry her and what her mother says about the Holy Spirit alive in the home, and makes her work disappear.)
Her stomach goes rancid. He doesn’t see it—what’s there to see, in an empty space? He has an office in a company that matters, with windows on two sides. She’s going to go to the doctor and slap her feet in the stirrups and vomit for months and swell and lose her job and her wits in the mud of pregnancy, and she’ll expel a child from a body that’s been wrecked by an intruder (she knows what that’s like; she’s lived with her husband long enough).
The Starlit Wood Page 7