The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  On the way home from the picnic, with the ring of mortar fire still in our ears or the stink of gorillas or gun powder in our noses, we steal glances at our sleeping children in the back seats of our station wagons and minivans. Typically, we are bandaged from some close brush with the massacre, our arms in slings improvised out of our torn and battered Remember Louise T-shirts. Our lips split, our noses are bloodied, our palms, sweaty on the steering wheel. We recall the first moments of the massacre, the first explosion, the first gunshot, the first creeping hum of the planes, the earth moving beneath our feet. We watch our children sleeping in the rear-view, moonlight passing over their peaceful faces. Through the unsightly globs of paint, we catch a glimpse of how our children seemed before the picnic endowed them with such an eager, selfish spirit.

  When it comes time to leave the highway, as we drift slowly toward our exit, we are tempted to jerk the wheel in the other direction and speed off to some distant city, a place untouched by picnics. We know our husbands and wives wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t ask for an explanation, wouldn’t even turn their heads to watch our exit as it passes, but would keep their eyes forward, like ours, a look of exhilaration on their faces.

  However, these fantasies are as appealing as they are unlikely, and so our hope remains tied into our children. Our children, who took their first steps while waiting in line for the boats, who muttered their first words to the face painters and jugglers, who lost their first teeth in the picnic’s salt water taffy and red-rope licorice. Our children, who, as they grow older, begin to explain the picnic to us as if we don’t understand it. Our children, who have begun to scorn and mock us if we so much as mention Frost Mountain, snap their gum and laugh with their friends, as if our old age and presumed irrelevance threatens the very existence of the picnic.

  A horn sounds, signaling the line to move forward. No matter how long we wait for the boats, or how eager we might seem, there is always a slight pause between the sounding of the horn and the eventual lurching forward of the crowd. It is a moment in which we recall the year some of the boats sank as they left the picnic, how everyone aboard trusted the surprisingly bulky lifejackets and sank to the bottom of the river like stones. It is a moment of looking from side to side, a moment of coughing and shrugging.

  On the opposite shore, a small orchestra of men in dark suits begins to play the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica. Assembled under a large carnival tent, the men play expertly, ploddingly. Those whose parts have not yet come stand perfectly still or adjust the dark glasses on the bridge of their noses or speak slowly into the sleeves of their suit coats. The music sounds strange over the noise of the river and weighs heavily in the air.

  It is a moment of clarity and anxiety, in which we hope that something will deliver us from our sense of obligation toward the picnic, the sense of embarrassment that would proceed from removing our children from the line, evoking tantrums so fierce as to be completely unimaginable. It is a moment in which we wait for some old emotion to well up in us, some passion our forefathers possessed that made them unafraid of change, no matter how radical or how dangerous or—the deckhands gesturing for us to move forward, their faces suddenly angry and impatient—how impossible.

  About the Author

  Seth Fried’s stories have either appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, One Story, Tin House, Vice Magazine, and many others. He also has a bachelor’s degree in Latin from a state university, and can therefore pretty much write his own ticket. He is the recipient of the William Peden Prize in Fiction and “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” won a Pushcart Prize. His debut short story collection will be published next year.

  Story Notes

  The folks who are annually obliged to attend the Frost Mountain picnic seem incapable of changing the inevitable fatal pattern of their lives. But then aren’t most of us are more afraid of change than we’d like to think? Is there an ominous unknown something in Fried’s story that keeps the townspeople from breaking away? Or is it simply the same inertia that can ultimately bind us all?

  SEA-HEARTS

  MARGO LANAGAN

  There’s never silence, is there? There’s always the sea, sucking and sighing. However many doors you like to close between yourself and it, when all other bustlings and conversations cease or pause, always it whispers: Still I am here. Hear me?

  “That oul witch Messkeletha is down there again,” said Raditch.

  “ ’t’s all right. We’re plenty,” said Grinny.

  “We’re plenty and we have business,” James said with some bluster—he was as scared of her as anyone. He shook his empty sack. “We have been sent by our mams. We’re to provide for our famblies.”

  “Yer.”

  “Hear.”

  And down the cliff we went. It was a poisonous day. Every now and again the naughty wind would take a rest from pressing us to the wall, and try to pull us off it instead. We would grab together and sit, then, making a bigger person’s weight that it could not remove. The sea was gray with white bits of temper all over it; the sky sailed full of different clouds, torn into strips, very ragged.

  We spilled out onto the sand. There are two ways you can fetch sea-hearts. You can go up the tide-wrack; you will find more there, but they will be harder, dryer for lying there, and many of them dead. You can still eat them, but they will take more cooking, and unless you bile them through the night more chewing. They are altogether more difficult.

  Those of us whose mams had sighed or dads had smacked their heads for bringing them went down the water. Grinny ran ahead and picked up the first heart, but nobody raced him; we could see them all along the sea-shined sand there, plenty for all our families. They do not keep, once collected. They can lie drying in the wrack for days and still be tolerable eating, but put them in a house and they’ll do any number of awful things: collapse in a smell, sprout white fur, explode themselves all over your pantry-shelf. So there is no point grabbing up more than you need.

  Along we went, in a bunch because of the witch. She sat halfway along the distance we needed to go, and exactly halfway between tideline and water, as if she meant to catch the lot of us. She had a grand pile of weed that she was knitting up beside her, and another of blanket she had already made, and the knobs of her iron needles jittered and danced as she made more, and the rest of her was immovable as rocks, except her swiveling head, which watched us, watched the sea, swung to face us again.

  “Oh,” breathed James. “Maybe we can come back later.”

  “Come now, look at this catch,” I said. “We will just gather all up and run home and it will be done. Think how pleased your mam will be! Look at this!” I lifted one; it was a doubler, one sea-heart clammed upon another like hedgehogs in the spring.

  “She spelled Duster Kimes dotty,” he whimpered.

  “Kimeses are all dotty,” I said. How like my dad I sounded, so sensible, knowing everything. “Duster is just more frightenable than the rest. Come, look.” And I thrust a good big heart into his hands, sharp with barnacles to wake him up.

  The ones as still floats is the best, most tender, though the ones that’s landed, leaning in the wet with sea-spit still around them, is still good, and so even are those that have sat only a little, up there along the drying rime, beginning to dry themselves. The others were dancing along the wrack, gathering too much, especially lad Cawdron. He was too little; why hadn’t Raditch told him? We would have to tip most that sack out, or he’d stink up half the town with the waste.

  “They’ll not need to go as far as us,” said Grinny at my elbow.

  I dropped a nice wet-heavy heart in my sack. “We can call them down here, make us up some numbers . . . ”

  No more had I said it than Grinny was off up the beach fetching them. He must have been scareder than he looked.

  I preoccupied myself catching floating ones without sogging my trouser-edges. Some people eat the best ones raw, particularly mams; they
drink up the liquor inside, and if there is more than one mam there they will exclaim how delicious, and if not they will go quiet and stare away from everyone. If it is only dads, they will say to each other, “I cannot see the ’traction, myself,” and smack their lips and toss the heartskin in the pot for biling with the rest. If you bile the heart up whole, that clear liquor goes curdish; we were all brung up on that, spooned and spooned into us, and some kids never lose the taste. I quite like it myself, but only when I am ailing. It is bab-food, and a growing lad needs bread and meat, mostly.

  Anyway, the wrack-hunters came down and made a big crowd with us. Harper picked up a wet heart and weighed and turned it, and emptied his sack of dry ones to start again. Cawdron watched him, in great doubt now.

  “Why’n’t you take a few o’ these, Cawdron?” I said. “ ’Stead of all them jaw-breakers. Your mam will think you a champion.”

  He stared at the heart glistening by his foot, and then came alive and upended his sack. Oh, he had some dross in there; they bounced down the shore dry as pompons.

  I picked up a few good hearts, if small, to encourage him. “See how all the shells is closed on it? And the thready weed still has some juice in it, see? Those is the signs, if you want to make mams happy.”

  “Do they want small or big?” he says, taking one.

  “Depends on her taste. Does she want small and quicker to cook, or fat and full of juice? My mam likes both, so I take a variety.”

  And now we were quite close to the witch, in the back of the bunch, which was closer, quieter, and not half so dancey as before, oh no. And she was fixed on us, the face of our night-horrors, white and creased and greedy.

  “Move along past,” I muttered. “Plenty on further.”

  “Oh, plenty!” says Messkeletha, making me jump and stiffen. “Naught want to pause by oul Messkel and be knitted up, eh? Naught want to become piglets in a blanket!” Her eyes bulged in their cavities like glisteny rockpool creatures; I’d have wet myself had I had any in me to wet with.

  “We is only c’lecting sea-hearts, Messkeletha,” says Grinny politely, and I was grateful to him for dragging her sights off me.

  “Only!” she says, and her voice would tear tinplate. “Only collecting!”

  “That’s right, for our mams’ dinners.”

  She snorted, and matter flew out one of her nostrils and into the blanket. She knitted on savagely, the iron needles noising as would send your boy-sacks up inside you like started mice to their hole. “That’s right. Keep ’em sweet, keep ’em sweet, those pretty mams.”

  There was a pause, she sounded so nasty, but Grinny took his life in his hands and went on. “That’s what we aim to do, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, sprogget!”

  We all jumped.

  “Move along, all ye, and stop your gawking,” spat the witch. So I’m ugly and unmanned! So’s I make my own living! What’s the fascination? Staring there like folk at a hanging. Get out my sight, ’fore I emblanket youse and tangle you up to drown!”

  Well, we didn’t need her to tell us twice.

  “You can never tell which way she’ll go,” muttered Grinny.

  “You did grand, Grin,” said Raditch. “I don’t know how you found a voice.” And Cawdron, I saw, was making sure to keep big Batton Baker between himself and the old crow.

  “Sometimes she’s all sly and coaxy? Sometimes she loses her temper like now.”

  “Sometimes all she does is sit and cry and not say a word or be frightening at all,” says Raditch. “Granted, that’s when she’s had a pot or two.”

  We collected most efficiently after that, and when we were done we described a wide circle way round the back of her on our way to the foot of the path. “From behind she ain’t nearly so bad,” I said, for she was a dark lump almost like a third mound of weed, only smoother-edged, and with her needle-knobs bobbing beyond her elbows.

  It was wintertime when we ruined everything. It was Cawdron, really, but he would not have said it had we not put a coat on him and got him overexcited.

  The weather was all over the place: that was why we were back of the pub. The first snow had fallen, but that was days ago, and it lay only little rotten bits in the shade of walls, nothing useful. We had made a man of what was available in the yard at back, but he was more of a snow-blob, it had gone to such slop—although he had a fine rod on him made of the brace of a broken bar stool Raditch’s dad had put back for mending, so you knew at least he was a man-blob.

  Anyway, it was beastly cold and the wind had begun to nip and numb us, so we came in the back, and it felt like heaven just the little heat that had leaked out into the hall from the snug, and there was no one to tell us to hie on out again before our ears turned blue from the language we might hear, so we milled there thawing out and being quiet.

  And then Jakes Trumbell found the coatroom door unlocked.

  “How is that?” he said, the door a crack open in his hand. He looked up and down it as if it must be broken somewhere.

  We were all standing just as shocked. The sea-smell came spilling out the crack, sour and cold.

  “Wholeman must have left it,” said Raditch. “Wholeman must store other stuff in there.”

  “What other?” said Baker. “Would there be food, mebbe? Would they notice a little gone? Crisps or summink?”

  At the word “crisps” the door went wider and our fright dissolved into hope and naughtiness. And as none of us had ever seen in there we went in, several at a time because there was not much room; the coats crowded it up pretty thorough.

  “Ain’t they strange?” said Angast ahead of me. “Like people theirselves.”

  “They’re thick,” said Raditch. “Have a feel. And smooth.”

  “Just like a mam,” said Jakes from the door, and some giggled and some jumped on him and started quietly fighting.

  “I wish I could see,” said Raditch, because it was afternoon and the most we could make out was glooming shapes, and hung up very tall. “I want to know how the heads go.”

  “Bring one out,” suggested Angast, “to the better light.”

  I was glad to go out ahead of him; that room was too much for me, the heavy things pressing at us, hung so closely they pushed out wide at the bottom. And the smell was the smell my mam got when she lay abed unhappy. It was like being suffocated.

  We managed to get one of the smaller ones out, and each tried it on awhile, except Cawdron, who would not.

  “How do they swim in these things?” said Raditch, lifting his sealie arm.

  “It is all bonded to them, proper,” said Angast. “And the water holds them up, you know.”

  Jakes was the only one put the hood over, and we made him stop when he looked out the eyes and lurched at us—he has dark mam-type eyes, and it was too eerie.

  “It smells,” he said, taking it off. I sniffed the arm of my woolly to see if the smell had stuck. I was worried Mam would smell it on me later, and go into a mood. It was hard to tell. The whole air, the whole hall there, was greenish with that sad smell.

  “Cawn, Kit,” said Jakes to Cawdron, “let us see you in it; you will make a great little mam, you’re so pretty.”

  “Not on your nelly,” Cawdron said. “It’ll flatten me, that will.”

  “We will hold up the weight of it, from the shoulders, so you can stand. Come on; it will suit you so well.”

  And seeing as there was nothing else to do but persuade him, we set to it, and Jakes hauled out another bigger coat and put it on, and urged some more, and before too long we had weakened the poor lad sufficient to drape the thing dark and gleaming and—I cannot describe to you the feeling of putting it on. It was as if you found yourself suddenly swimming right down the bottom of the sea, a weight of black water above you.

  The snug door opened and there was a scramble. Somehow the coatroom door got pulled and the coats got hid behind legs and we were all lounging idle and innocent when Batton Baker’s dad passed us on his wa
y out the back pisser.

  “What you lads brewing?” he says, swaying back when he sees all our eyes.

  But none of us need answer, ’cause he opens the yard door then, and the wind hits him to staggering.

  “It’s perishin’ out there, Mister Baker,” says Grinny in just the right voice, dour and respectful.

  “I’ll freeze my man off, pissing in that.” He squints into the darkening yard. “I see a chap who’s frozen out there already,” he adds jocular. “A fine upstanding chap, if I’m not mistaken.”

  And he laughs and out he goes, leaving the door banging.

  “He sees so much of a sleeve-edge, we are beaten,” says Grinny, into the quiet of our relief. “Beaten and put in our rooms and no suppers for ever—and our mams so disappointed.”

  We had time to hide them better before Baker came back. He swayed and looked at us, all in our same places. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he finally said, and tapped his nose and went off.

  And that might have ended it there and then, and all been tip-top and usual.

  Except, “Come, Kit,” whispers Jakes. “You looked the perfect mam.”

  So we lumped the coat on Cawdron again, and Jakes put the other one on, and then they made us laugh, trying to walk about like mams, trying to move their hands all delicate and their heads all thoughtful. Cawdron was the best at it, of course, being so delicate anyway, and with the coloring. Jakes was funnier, though, being more dad-like, all freckles and orange hair and hands like sausage-bunches.

  “I of been abed for days, so mis’rable, Missis Cawdron,” he said, and the way he leaned and rolled his eyes, and his voice trying and failing to trill and sing—we were holding each other up, it was so funny.