Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  “Your sister is dead.”

  The man’s face became cold, hard, like the stone. Thick brows knitted.

  Faylle stood solidly, feet planted slightly apart, jaw set. She clutched the stone in her fist and shoved it back into her pocket. She bore no weapons, nothing with which to defend herself.

  “You murdered her,” the man said, and stepped toward her. One step, no more.

  Faylle held her ground. “I did. It was the least she deserved, after what the two of you did to us. All of us. I’ll murder you as I did her. Will you beg as she did? Will you scream as she did? Will you give me her lifestone, as she gave me yours?”

  He stared at her. “What will you do with that, Faylle?”

  “I promised my father something, a long time ago, when he still held his wits and the whole pack of them was ready to tear down onto this tower and end your lives. I promised him that I would kill the both of you.”

  The man didn’t flicker an eyelid, and remained silent for some time. Then he said, “We can come to an agreement, beautiful Faylle. You and I.”

  “You said I’m ugly. I’ve outlived my use to you,” Faylle spat.

  He licked his lips. “You misunderstand.”

  “Why?”

  Hesitation. “Because I can set your family and kinsmen free. What has been done can be undone. I’ve nearly finished with the valley, Faylle. My work is nearly complete. I’ve stripped these lands of their magical properties. Bottled them up. Carted them away. I can leave now, today, if this suits you. Think of it, Faylle. All as it was.”

  “You stole my life from me.”

  “I’ve stolen many things.”

  “You stole everything.” Faylle pulled the stone from her pocket, opened up the handkerchief again. Blue light painted the room.

  “Faylle, please -”

  “They would be wolves in men’s bodies, if you brought them back. I’ve learned that from you.”

  “Faylle, my Wolf Lady, let us be reasonable.”

  “I’m a dead woman here. A dead Wolf Lady, a woman who can speak with wolves because she should have been one. There’s no magic anymore. Only heat and death and wolves.”

  She leaned down, set the stone on the floor. Rising, she said, “I used to love the wolves. There were real wolves here, once. And you drove them away. I made a promise, and I keep my promises, even if you do not.” She looked over the table at her right, found a fist-sized rock being used as a paperweight, and picked it up.

  Promises.

  She crouched close to the floor and raised her arm. The man let out a wail.

  “Spare me!”

  Faylle’s deep brown eyes met his clear blue. “My father asked that of you. What was your answer?”

  Her arm came down.

  The man cried out as his lifestone shattered into a hundred pieces, scattered across the floor as his body fell. She watched as the flesh pulled back from his face, and his eyes grew milky white. His body lay thin and wan, blotchy skin pulled taut over rickety bones. Wisps of white hair fell from his skull and face, surrounded him in snowy puffs.

  Faylle stood, went to his corpse. She kicked it with one foot, listened to the dull thump. Outside, in the hall, she heard something crumbling, thudding to the floor. She spent no time lingering around the body, as she always thought she would.

  Instead, she went to the door, opened it, and stared into the hall. The marble encasing the bodies of her family and kinsman had crumbled to the floor. Lying atop the rubble were their inert bodies, devoid of spirit.

  She started into the hallway, walked past the empty shells, stared into one face, then another. The noise had ceased, and only silence met her as she walked, surveying her people, saying good-bye one last time.

  Down the steps she traveled. One, two, three flights. The lamps were still lit, and lighted her way to the oaken gate. She pulled open the sally port and stepped out onto the drawbridge. All three moons lit up the sky this night, the big, red moon full, the other two mere white slivers against the night sky. She stared out across the plains, lifted her nose to smell the wind.

  A wolf howled, close.

  She gazed toward the sound, toward the top of the ridge of the valley. There they were, twenty-seven large, black, tan and gray shapes, sitting on their haunches and gazing toward her with soft yellow eyes. The howling started, a chorus of howling that broke the night air, wrapped her in stillness.

  They would never know why they were drawn here, and would not think of it after they dispersed. By tomorrow, their gathering would be nothing but a dim memory in their wolf minds.

  Wolf Lady.

  She started, looked again up onto the rise of the hill. It was the male she had spoken with; the wolf who had once been her father.

  Where do you go? he asked.

  Only when he asked did she make up her mind. I go north.

  Humans live in the north. A pause, maybe confusion, then, But you are human, aren’t you, Wolf Lady? Yes, humans should go north.

  Faylle closed her eyes, felt tears spill over.

  I kept my promise.

  Curiosity, then interest. This thing, this promise. It was important. You are my kinsman, so I hope you are satisfied with the keeping of this thing, this promise.

  I am.

  Then I wish you well.

  Faylle watched the wolf pack turn away, lope off into the rolling hills and plains beyond.

  With her back to the tower, Faylle stepped onto the old plank road and began jogging back the way she had come. I will never see this tower again, I swear it, she thought, and glanced back only once. There, on the third floor of the tower, she could still see the yellow candle glow burning from the window.

  You will steal nothing from us again, she thought, or anyone else. This, I promise.

  Bare feet slapped smooth planks. Cold night air felt good in her chest, blowing past her, through her tunic. On either side, dark grass flanked her, concealed the world from view.

  She closed her eyes and dreamed of a land still soaked in magic.

  Behind her, the world howled.

  Canticle of the Flesh

  Now we get into unpublished story territory (that’s really why you downloaded this collection, right?). There are all sorts of reasons stories don’t get published. Mostly, it’s because they’re really, really bad. Occasionally it’s because there’s just no market for them. And every once in a while, a story is picked up and dropped and picked up and dropped again for half a dozen other random reasons. That’s what happened with Canticle of the Flesh, which sat on magazine editors’ desks for years with vague updates about it getting through round one or two or three and “maybe the next issue” and then the magazine would go defunct, or they couldn’t afford it, or it was just “too weird.” Ultimately, everybody passed. But you get to read it anyway! Lucky, lucky you. This was one of the most uncomfortable stories I’ve ever written, with some of the most unlikable people (or, what passes for people) in the universe.

  The bodies you speak of, the bodies of my first memory, are those that danced naked on the hard, black earth around the fires our keepers allowed us. Our fires threw coals into the thick, hot air; coals that flared and darkened and died and drifted down upon us, coating our hands, our faces, our brown bodies, in black soot that made us darker than the earth.

  Whenever I tried to join the dancers, the woman who called herself my mother would clutch me to her with her claws.

  “Keep here, keep here, Anish,” she would say. The lids never closed over her bulging eyes. Her mouth was cut wide, so wide that her face was all mouth and lips and teeth. I dream about her still, about her devouring me whole.

  She was so beautiful.

  “Don’t you join that, don’t dance that,” she would say. “You dance that and you’ll be like the rest of us. A mistake, a burned thing. Not made, not used, just nothing.”

  When the stack of synthetic logs burned down to a fine black dust, the woman who called herself my mother released me. I ra
n across the earth to join the dancers outside the covered sleeping pens. Here, they told me the stories of their bodies.

  When I think of my first conception of a written record of the past, I think of a body called Senna who had a burn-scarred face with burned-shut eyes. It was this body that showed us how the sky burned when the keepers came; the rivers ran red as the ripple of welts that ran down across the body’s throat, over the breasts, ending in a pool of scarred flesh that was once the navel. Senna went mad before the keepers finished writing on her. She screamed and cried and begged to be taken to the pens, to live out her life among the other partially perfected texts that the keepers could not bear to throw away.

  I was the most hideous of these texts. I knew it even then, when the woman who called herself my mother could still pick me up into her arms. The other texts had traces of unwritten flesh – smooth, incomplete, ugly – but I, I was completely untouched. The whole of my body remained as it had been birthed. I was grotesque, obscene. They were merely incomplete.

  These incomplete texts told me I was placed there because the woman who birthed me was a violent body, a mad thing that marked her own history upon her body. She cut open the contents of her self and spilled them onto the cold metal floor of the birthing center… including me. She died in her own blood and entrails and my afterbirth.

  I was the living text of my mother’s existence, the other bodies said. That is why the keepers saved me…. But knowing that did not make me any more beautiful.

  The other body-memories of my life are later, much later, and these bodies, yes, these are the bodies that led me to Chiva, Chiva… the one you asked me about.

  I think of them often, these bodies. Their hideously smooth skins, their ugly round faces, the thick, dark hair of their heads and arms and legs. When I see these empty bodies, I remember the burning of the partial texts.

  I remember the burning of my kin.

  These obscene texts arrived through the circular gate of the compound under the heat of a summer sun that looked flat and orange against the blue, blue sky. They told me the keepers had sent for me. They loaded me into their vehicle and locked me inside.

  The others they herded together at the center of our dustry compound. Hundreds of partial texts.

  The bodies clung to one another. Clawed hands tipped in crescent-moon nails, twisted torsos wrapped in triangular blue welts, flattened palms fused to splayed hips, gaping mouths without teeth. These precious, beautiful bodies gripped their neighbors so tightly they rent flesh, drew blood.

  I pressed my palms to the transparent window of the vehicle and called out to them. I screamed. And screamed.

  But the vehicle was a closed box. I heard nothing but my own screaming.

  The empty texts sprayed the bodies of my kin with a thin, reddish liquid that coated their faces, torsos, limbs. One of the empty texts ignited a flare. The red fire hurt my eyes.

  Fire crawled across my kin like a living thing. Bodies bubbled and melted and charred.

  I saw the terrified open mouths of my kin, but heard nothing. Those bodies that pressed against me at night, those bodies that probed my flesh with curious delight and hunger; bodies I had touched, caressed, held; bodies I had so envied and admired. Bodies perfected as mine would never be. Bodies I loved.

  Before the sun touched the horizon, all the fire left of my kin was a fine grayish ash.

  The empty texts strode back to the vehicle, put their flammable fluid into the back where I sat.

  “You are called Anish?” one of them asked.

  I nodded.

  “Are you a dumb body, Anish?”

  “Better hope you are,” the other said. “If you’re lucky they’ll breed you and write on you. But if you’re smart they’ll make you an archivist. Better hope they don’t, Anish. Better hope they just feed you so you fuck.”

  I did not know then what an archivist was. But I knew my mother had been chosen to breed, and had committed the most horrific of acts. Now only I remained to record the history of her existence.

  I am most comfortable speaking of the archives, of written history. Here is truth that I touched and altered as necessary. Understand the archives, and you will understand the text of my unmaking.

  I passed the tests that said I was not a dumb body, the tests all empty texts must take in the compounds by the sea. The older empty bodies moved me and the other students to the archives. There, they kept us in separate rooms just big enough to lie down in. The keepers designated those bodies that acted as our overseers, all of them smooth and empty texts like me and the other students. These overseers locked us in our rooms at night.

  The night terrified me. I heard nothing through the thick walls. No bodies lay next to me. No flesh. I wanted skin pressed against mine, arms wrapped around me. I missed sighs and snores and the sound of mumbled conversations. I missed the feel of another’s breath on my skin. I ached to be near the beautiful bodies of my youth.

  When the overseers opened my cell each morning I eagerly followed the other students to the archives. A little group of seven of us stood in observance of a text, listening to the body tell the story of those events written upon its body. The archivists said this was not called storytelling – storytelling could be untrue, could be lies. Bodies narrated. Bodies told only truth.

  The only bodies the overseers allowed us to touch were the texts. I remember the first real text I touched, the exquisitely complete form that I did not recognize as a body. I learned in that moment just how partial the texts at the compounds had been, how plain, how lacking.

  Our little cluster of students stood in the text’s allotted area of residence, a niche in one long wall in the Era of Exile corridor. Tubes embedded in the skin, connected to the floor, regulated the body’s excretions. It received its food in a similar manner, twice a day, administered by the archivists.

  The body existed solely as an organic text capable of narration. It bore no discernable face, only a slit for a mouth, and across the rest of the flat flesh where a face should have been rose fist-sized circular growths. Its hands were soldered to its knees. The skin stretched off the arms in one smooth flap, like wings. A length of silver wire wound around the throat, and the flesh had begun to grow around it.

  I stood transfixed. The body spun my favorite tale of past truth in a pleasant, articulate voice that flowed smoothly from the slit of its mouth: the story of the keepers’ voyage in exile.

  I fell in love with its body.

  I heard thousands of other texts in my years at the archives. I heard how the keepers found our world, a lonely planet seeded long ago by human beings who had forgotten what they were. The keepers’ sailing ship burned down from the sky, and our kind went to them. The keepers freed themselves of their casings. They selected those bodies that they would communicate with and fitted them with inorganic devices that allowed the keepers to direct them.

  “You were simply our curiosities in the beginning,” my own keeper later told me at one of our dictation sessions, one of the last it held with me. “We took such delight with you and your kind. Such delight. You had bodies that we did not, and we used you to enact that which we could not. Ah, Anish, our preoccupation with your kind was so much more delightful then. So base it was, our delight and your perversion.”

  Often I lay awake at night and closed my eyes, remembering those bodies that once surrounded mine. I ran my hands along my own flesh, across my throat, down my smooth chest, flat stomach, the insides of my thighs, and caressed my penis. I thought of another’s body pressed against mine, so close I felt their breath. I often pushed myself up against the cold wall and lay there with my arms wrapped around myself, longing for the morning. I did not weep anymore. I found warmth and closeness with my own body, my mother’s text.

  And during the day, I had the archives.

  I frequented the niches I knew the others had no interest in. I stood in front of those texts illustrating the unmaking of the bodies who ruled the world before the ke
epers came. No one wanted to view these texts; these twisted, angry figures that wept blood and cried out for a freedom their flesh still remembered. Many of the archivists wanted to burn them. I knew that as more keepers began to die, more texts would be purged, and these would be the first destroyed. So I spent my days with them. I wanted to remember them.

  One day I found the body text of the keepers’ emergence from their sailing ship, and their linking with the first bodies. I stepped up into the niche containing the text.

  “Don’t narrate,” I told it. “I just want to touch you.” But the body could not be silent. None of them could. It existed to narrate.

  As the open scream of its mouth moved to form words, I ran my gaze across its form. The body lay flat on the floor, both arms raised up as if to shield itself from harm. From the torso downward, the body seemed to liquefy and spill across the floor. A section of the scalp and skull was missing on one side so you could see the shiny little chip embedded into the soft tissue. The eyes were always open.

  My hands trembled. I knelt down beside the body and traced the jagged blue tattoos on its flesh with my fingers.

  I wondered if it could feel pleasure, or anything at all. Anger? Loneliness? Or did the keepers order the archivists to deaden that too, as they deadened the body’s flesh?

  “So sad,” I said. I moved my fingers down the torso, to the mass of featureless flesh. I stared at the wide glassy eyes, brown as dust.

  A gorgeous text.

  I pulled my hands off the body and fumbled at the knot on my robe. I struggled out of the robe, and I was already erect. I wanted to be inside the body, to join my flesh to the body’s, to become one text, the altered and the empty.

  Only the mouth was open to me, wide and wet and full of teeth. My body shook with fear and anticipation. I wanted to silence the text.

  I entered gently, and the text cupped its lips around me, permissive.

  The words stopped. History stopped.

  I spilled myself into the body, into the history of the keepers. I fell back onto the floor and was dizzy. Giddy. Terrified.