Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

  By Kameron Hurley

  www.kameronhurley.com

  Tables of Contents

  Introduction Bought and Paid

  The Women of Our Occupation (2006)

  If Women Do Fall they Lie (2001)

  Holding Onto Ghosts (2003)

  Wonder Maul Doll (2006 and 2009)

  Genderbending at the Madhattered (2004)

  My Oracles at the End of the World (1998)

  Once, There Were Wolves (1997)

  Bonus

  Canticle of the Flesh (unpublished) (2003)

  In Freedom, Dying (unpublished) (2005)

  Women and Ladies, Blood and Sand (unpublished) (2000)

  What the Hell is This?

  “Women are not inherently passive or peaceful.

  We’re not inherently anything but human.”

  - Robin Morgan

  These are not particularly good stories. What you see here is what you get: a struggling writer’s juvenilia, from the first clunking story I published when I was 17 to to the bizarre women-and-war story that got me into Year’s Best SF 12, and all the crazy stuff in between.

  Writing stuff is easy. Writing stuff people actually want to read is infinitely harder. Much of it is simply finding your audience. And not sucking at your craft. The lumbering old SF/F mags never did like any of my stuff. It wasn’t until the gender-bending slipstream Strange Horizons Magazine started gaining steam that I discovered the stuff that I wrote actually had an audience.

  I collected my first rejection slip at fifteen. The editor had scrawled a note across the top of the manuscript saying that cockroaches put her off her lunch, and there were far too many cockroaches in the story for her taste. I still have that rejection slip, and about a hundred others, fifteen years later.

  I’ve always written violent stories. Not always stories with a focus on exploring feminist themes (in fact, many of my stories can be seen as anti-feminist, particularly the early ones, much to my chagrin). The times I’ve tried to write about other things – painters and princesses and cockroaches, oh my – I didn’t have very much fun doing it. And I didn’t publish any of those crappy stories with any more frequency than my brutal women ones.

  At some point my princesses starting hacking off people’s heads. The painters had same-sex love affairs. And the cockroaches developed a taste for human flesh.

  I had a lot more fun writing those.

  And I finally started selling them.

  Women & Violence

  In my early writing life, I wrote what I’d call “Sword and Sorceress” type stories. This type was popularized by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies and her eponymous fantasy magazine. The stories had strong female protagonists who ran around in skimpy armor and/or did magic while engaged in some kind of quest or revenge or McGuffin-type plot.

  I worked very hard at emulating these (see Once, There Were Wolves). It wasn’t until I’d received five years of rejections from the magazine and the anthologies that I finally threw in the towel. The problem was, I didn’t understand plot. I didn’t understand tension. And I really hated writing about syrupy nice heroines who were expected to save their children and/or tribes and/or kingdoms.

  It wasn’t until I went to the Clarion West writers’ workshop in 2000 that I got up the courage to write stories I was really interested in. The story that got me into the workshop was about some defective clones that had been tailored to terraform a world, and whose programming was starting to unravel. My female protagonist was a passive blank slate goaded into action by her revolutionary brother. I kept wondering why she wasn’t more interesting.

  At Clarion, I decided to write something different. I liked the idea of a desert country where the sand ate your blood. Sounds cool, right? And maybe women were immune to it somehow? And maybe you could, like, literally control the world with blood? And it was women’s blood that gave them power? It gave me an “excuse” to write a story with mostly female characters in it.

  I dashed off a story about a knife-weilding nomadic military leader who had joined with a foreigner to topple her beloved desert matriarchy (see Women and Ladies, Blood and Sand). I wanted somebody who had joined with the “bad guys” against her former way of life. Somebody who had sold out. That seemed like an interesting person – much more interesting than the princess who just blindly goes off to save her kingdom the way she’s expected to.

  At the end of the workshop session of my story, author Geoff Ryman, our instructor for the week, looked at me from across the critique circle and said, flatly, “I find this story personally offensive… I think it suffers from a failure of the imagination.”

  It was both the best and worst thing I’d ever heard about anything I’d written. I wrote syrupy, forgettable stories that barely invited a single personal scrawl from overworked magazine editors, not stuff that offended people.

  I wanted to inspire something in people. I just wasn’t sure loathing was it.

  Power

  Where this obsession with violence comes from, I don’t know, but after Clarion I started to delve deeply into real-life applications of violence and the history of violence across many cultures, which formed the basis of my undergrad and graduate work at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. Strength and violence is how people gained, took, and maintained power, and that fascinated me. Argue that it’s actually wealth that gets you the power and you’ll find that that wealth is generally amassed through strategic applications of strength and violence.

  What I must have internalized early on is that in order to have and wield power, people needed to be physically strong. Scary. Those who aren’t physically strong should be wealthy or wily enough to be able to control strong people.

  I find this idea fascinating. Not because it’s a revolutionary idea (it’s pretty obvious), but because I wanted to know if the world would be different if power was meted out differently. What would happen when a traditionally oppressed group got a lot more physical power? Would they be just as bad as the old guys? And if they had all this physical power, where did it come from? How did they maintain it? One group can’t maintain power over another without enslaving itself.

  This led to the inevitable.

  How would that look if women had the power?

  So, what the hell?

  So I started writing other types of stories. Stories about war and death and bugs and women. Strong women, angry women, powerful women, bloody women, brutal women. They’re the gritty fighters and morally fucked-up wretches that we’ve seen battling it out on other worlds for eons… as men. They have their own non-standard genders, prejudices, fears, and morals. And they aren’t generally ours.

  Every one of us is capable of great violence. Great mercy. Great kindness. Great despair. What we choose to tell people is an acceptable expression of these characteristics varies by culture and class and race, and gender, and a hundred other things. But collectively, we as a culture decide just how much (and in what ways) we’re allowed to emote before we’re no longer loved. Before we’re shunned. Before we cut the odd ones away from the herd so we can start building it into whatever image of “the way things are” we desire.

  In these stories, the herd has been culled in an entirely different way. And the why and the how of it is what made writing these stories so damn fun.

  I hope you enjoy reading them at least half as much as I enjoyed hacking them together.

  The Red House

  Dayton, Ohio

  December, 2010

  God’s War

  January 2011

  Night Shade Books

&nb
sp; Nyx had already been to hell. One prayer more or less wouldn’t make any difference...

  On a ravaged, contaminated world, a centuries-old holy war rages. Fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians, and conscripted soldiers, the origins of the war are shady and complex, but there’s one thing everybody agrees on...

  There’s not a chance in hell of ending it.

  Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx’s ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war -- but at what price?

  The world is about to find out.

  Amazon | Borders | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

  The Women of Our Occupation

  This story first appeared in Strange Horizons Magazine in 2006. It was re-printed in 2007 in Year’s Best SF 12 and also translated into Swedish and Romanian. Over the years, I’ve also received emails from fans who read the story as part of their Women/Gender Studies curriculum at several universities. I’ve never understood why this story was so popular – switch out the gender pronouns, and it’s a fairly standard SF dystopia. Maybe that’s the creepy part. That it only takes a pronoun switch to change one’s reading of the story.

  The drivers were big women with broad hands and faces smeared with mortar grit, and they reeked of the dead. Even when we did not see them passing through the gates, ferrying truckloads of our dead, they came to us in our dreams, the women of our occupation.

  My brother and I did not understand why they had come. They were from a far shore none of us had ever seen or heard of, and every night my father cursed them as he turned on the radio. He kept it set to the resistance channel. No one wanted the women here.

  My brother got up the courage to ask one of the women, “Who stays at home with your kids while you’re here?”

  The woman laughed and said, “You’re our children now.”

  But I knew the way to conquer the women. When I was old enough, I would marry them. All of our men would marry them, and then they’d belong to us, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.

  We woke one night to the sound of a burst siren. The scream was only a muffled moan in the heavy, humid air.

  My mother bundled up my brother and grabbed the house cat. My father made me carry the radio. We hid in the cellar under the house, heard the dull thumping of bursts.

  “They’re looking for insurgents,” my father said. He turned on the radio, got only static. “You know they castrate them.”

  “Hush, Father,” my mother said.

  My brother started crying.

  The death trucks and the mortar trucks came the next morning. The women loaded up the bodies. They shoveled away the facades that had come off the houses. Our house was all right, but the one next door had been raided. The yeasty smell of spent bursts clung to everything. The house had fallen in on itself.

  I saw them bring out a body, but I couldn’t tell who it was. My mother pulled the curtains closed before I could see anything else. She told me to stay away from the windows.

  “Why are they here?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No one knows.”

  One night, many months into the occupation, two women came to our door.

  My mother answered. She invited them in and offered them tea and bloody sen. The sen would stain their tongues and ease their minds, and the tea was said to warm women’s souls. If they had them.

  The women declined.

  I stood in the doorway of the kitchen and peered out at them. My brother was at the table eating cookies.

  The women asked after my father.

  “Working,” my mother said. “Men’s work. He’s an organic technician.”

  One of the women stepped over to the drink cabinet. She flicked on the radio.

  My mother stood very still. She gripped her dishrag in one hand, so tightly I thought her fingernails would bite through it and cut her palm.

  The radio played—a slow, easy waltz. Someone had tuned it back to the local station.

  “Your husband’s study, where is it?” the other woman asked.

  “This way,” my mother said. My mother looked straight at me. They would have to come through the kitchen.

  I ducked back into the kitchen and slipped into the study. I pulled open the top drawer. My father’s gun was heavy. Blue and green organics sloshed in the transparent double barrels. I’d never held it before. I didn’t know where to put it. Father’s papers were there, too, papers about the resistance that he said we weren’t supposed to touch.

  My brother had followed me in. He waddled up to the desk, stared at the gun.

  “You’re in trouble,” he said.

  “Quiet,” I said. “We’ll play a game. Sit here. I’ll give you more cookies.”

  When the women came in behind my mother, my brother and I were sitting up on the big leather sofa by the window. I opened up father’s screes board. My brother stared at the women.

  The women went right to the desk. I tried not to look at them. They opened up the gun drawer.

  The largest woman turned to me. She wore a long dark coat, even in all the heat. Sweat beaded her big face.

  “Come here,” she said.

  “He’s only—” my mother began.

  “Here,” the woman said.

  I got up. She put her big hands all over me, patted me down. She looked around the room. Looked back at us.

  “Get out,” she said. “We’re cleaning this room.”

  I took my brother by the hand. The three of us went to wait in the living room. My mother kept staring at me. I gave my brother more cookies. We sat and listened to the sounds of the crashing and tearing coming from my father’s study.

  After a long time, the women came out. They stood in front of us and put their hats back on.

  “Good evening,” they said.

  “Good evening,” my mother said.

  When they were gone, my mother held out her hand to me. I pulled up the back of my brother’s shirt and took out the gun and the papers. My mother cried. She pulled us both into her arms.

  My father did not come home that night. Or the next night. We got a telegram from the women. They had taken my father away for questioning. He would be kept for an undefined period.

  We were alone.

  With father gone, we had no money. The lab he worked for wouldn’t send us anything. They were afraid that the women would accuse my father of something.

  The neighbors came and brought over food and ration tickets. My mother went to each house afterward and asked if they needed laundry done, or shirts mended, but they all said the same thing. They were saving their own money.

  No one could help us.

  “What about the women?” I said. “Who mends their shirts?”

  My mother frowned at me. “Certainly not their husbands,” she said.

  So my mother allowed the women into our house, and she mended their shirts. She cleaned and pressed their dress pants, their stiff white collars. My brother and I shined their boots.

  It was strange, to have the big women in the house, wearing their long dark coats and guns. My mother did not speak to them any more than she had to. When they came in she held herself very stiffly. She pursed her mouth. Her eyes seemed very black.

  I tried to hate the women, too. They always greeted me like the man of the house, because they had taken my father. If I was the one who answered the door, they always asked my permission to see my mother. They were very polite. Sometimes they would talk to each other in low voices, in their own language. It was soft and rhythmic, like the memory of my mother’s voice before I could understand the words.

  After a month of this, one of the women said to my mother, “It will be a shame when your husband returns. We will have no clean shirts.”

  My mother just stared at her. I had never seen her look so angry.
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br />   When my father did come back, red dust filled the seams of his face. His hair had gone white. The spaces under his eyes were smeared in sooty footprints, a dark wash against his sallow skin.

  He had no marks or scars that I could see. He still had all of his fingers. But he walked with a limp that he had not had before, and he could not close his left hand into a fist. He became very quiet. He spent most days sitting in a chair by the big window, staring out. He did not speak to us. He could not go to work.

  My mother had to keep mending shirts. When the women came, my father moved his chair into his study and shut the door. He started smoking opium.

  The air inside the house was heavy all the time. My mother sent me out more often to run errands for her. She didn’t have time to go to the market herself. Father never left the house. My brother tried to go with me, but mother made him stay behind to shine the boots.

  On the street, I met other boys with homes like mine. Their fathers had all been taken in as well. I went out with a group of them to throw rocks at the windows of a women’s barracks. But the women were waiting for us. They grabbed the oldest boys. They shot them in the head.

  I didn’t leave the house for a while, after that. I hated the women. I hated them, and I dreamed of them.

  The women were making changes. They draped their country’s colors over ours. They did it first at the police buildings, then the government buildings. Fewer trucks of bodies and mortar rubble passed through the gates. There were fewer night sirens.

  After a year, I noticed something else, though my mother said I imagined it, said I was giving the women more power than they had. The summers were not as hot. The air wasn’t as humid. The women were changing the weather, too.

  My mother tried to make things normal. She tried to get me and my brother to go to the new schools, the ones the women opened after shutting down ours. In those schools, all of the teachers were teenage girls. Our girls, but girls just the same.