So my sorrow swam through the wall. She got into the scarlet water which rose all the way up to her eyeballs but she didn’t mind. I rode her like sailing a boat and the red water soaked the train of my red death dress and magenta dolphins followed along with us, jumping out of the water and echolocating like a bunch of maniacs and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said:
“I am beginning to remember who I am now that everything is red again. Why is anything unred in the world? It’s madness.”
Jellyfish hid her lavender face in her watermelon-colored hooves and whispered:
“Please don’t forget about me, I am water soluble!”
I wondered, when the river crashed into the longest wall in the world, a red brick wall that went on forever side to side and also up and down, if the wall had a name. Everything has a name, even if that name is in Latin and nobody knows it but one person who doesn’t live nearby. Somebody had tried to blow up the wall several times. Jagged chunks were missing; bullets had gouged out rock and mortar long ago, but no one had ever made a hole. The Incarnadine River slushed in through a cherry-colored sluice gate. Rosy sunlight lit up its prongs. I glided on in with all the other fisherwomen like there never was a wall in the first place. I looked behind us—the river swarmed with squirrels, gasping, half drowning, paddling their little feet for dear life. They squirmed through the sluice gate like plague rats.
“If you didn’t have that mask on, you would have had to pay the toll,” whispered Jellyfish.
“What’s the toll?”
“A hundred years as a fisherwoman.”
Cranberry-on-Claret is a city of carnelian and lacquerwork and carbuncle streetlamps glowing with red gas flames because the cities of the Red Country are not electrified like Plum Pudding and Lizard Tongue and Absinthe. People with hair the color of raspberries and eyes the color of wood embers play ruby bassoons and chalcedony hurdy-gurdies and cinnamon-stick violins on the long, wide streets and they never stop even when they sleep; they just switch to nocturnes and keep playing through their dreaming. When they saw me coming, they started up My Baby Done Gone to Red, which, it turns out, is only middling as far as radio hits go.
Some folks wore deaths like mine. Some didn’t. The Ordinary Emperor said that sometimes the dead go to the Red Country but nobody looked dead. They looked busy like city people always look. It was warm in Cranberry-on-Claret, an autumnal kind of warm, the kind that’s having a serious think about turning to cold. The clouds glowed primrose and carmine.
“Where are we going?” asked my watercolor unicorn.
“The opera house,” I answered.
I guess maybe all opera houses are skulls because the one in the Red Country looked just like the one back home except, of course, as scarlet as the spiral mouth of a mask. It just wasn’t a human skull. Out of a cinnabar piazza hunched up a squirrel skull bigger than a cathedral and twice as fancy. Its great long teeth opened and closed like proper doors and prickled with scrimshaw carving like my Papo used to do on pony-bones. All over the wine-colored skull grew bright hibiscus flowers and devil’s hat mushrooms and red velvet lichen and fire opals.
Below the opera house and behind they kept the corrals. Blue stories milled miserably in pens, their sapphire plates drooping, their eyes all gooey with cataracts. I took off the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen and climbed down my sorrow.
“Heyo, beastie-blues,” I said, holding my hands out for them to sniff through the copper wire and redwood of their paddock. “No lachrymose quadrupeds on my watch. Be not down in the mouth. Woe-be-gone, not woe-be-come.”
“That’s blue talk,” a boy-story whispered. “You gotta talk red or you get no cud.”
“Say what you mean,” grumbled a girl-story with three missing scales over her left eye. “It’s the law.”
“I always said what I meant. I just meant something very fancy,” sniffed a grandfather-story lying in the mud to stay cool.
“Okay. I came from the Purple Country to find a boy named Orchid Harm.”
“Nope, that’s not what you mean,” the blue grandpa dinosaur growled, but he didn’t seem upset about it. Stories mostly growl unless they’re sick.
“Sure it is!”
“I’m just a simple story, what do I know?” He turned his cerulean rump to me.
“You’re just old and rude. I’m pretty sure Orchid is up there in the eye of that skull, it’s only that I was going to let you out of your pen before I went climbing but maybe I won’t now.”
“How’s about we tell you what you mean and then you let us out and nobody owes nobody nothing?” said the girl-story with the missing scales. It made me sad to hear a story talking like that, with no grammar at all.
“I came from the Purple Country to find Orchid,” I repeated because I was afraid.
“Are you sure you’re not an allegory for depression or the agrarian revolution or the afterlife?”
“I’m not an allegory for anything! You’re an allegory! And you stink!”
“If you say so.”
“What do you mean then?”
“I mean a blue dinosaur. I mean a story about a girl who lost somebody and couldn’t get over it. I can mean both at the same time. That’s allowed.”
“This isn’t any better than when you were saying autarchy and peregrinate.”
“So peregrinate with autarchy, girlie. That’s how you’re supposed to act around stories, anyway. Who raised you?”
I kicked out the lock on their paddock and let the reptilian stories loose. They bolted like blue lightning into the cinnabar piazza. Jellyfish ran joyfully among them, jumping and wriggling and whinnying, giddy to be in a herd again, making a mess of a color scheme.
“I love you,” said my sorrow. She had shrunk up small again, no taller than a good dog, and she was wearing the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen. By the time I’d gotten half way up the opera-skull, she was gone.
“Let us begin by practicing the chromatic scale, beginning with E major.”
That is what the voice coming out of the eye socket of a giant operatic squirrel said and it was Orchid’s voice and it had a laugh hidden inside it like it always did. I pulled myself up and over the lip of the socket and curled up next to Orchid Harm and his seven books, of which he’d already read four. I curled up next to him like nothing bad had ever happened. I fit into the line of his body and he fit into mine. I didn’t say anything for a long, long time. He stroked my hair and read to me about basic strumming technique but after awhile he stopped talking, too and we just sat there quietly and he smelled like sunlight and booze and everything purple in the world.
“I killed the Ordinary Emperor with a story’s tail,” I confessed at last.
“I missed you, too.”
“Are you dead?”
“The squirrels won’t tell me. Something about collapsing a waveform. But I’m not the one wearing a red dress.”
I looked down. Deep red silky satin death flowed out over the bone floor. A lot of my skin showed in the slits of that dress. It felt nice.
“The squirrels ate you, though.”
“You never know with squirrels. I think I ate some of them, too. It’s kind of the same thing, with time travel, whether you eat the squirrel or the squirrel eats you. I remember it hurt. I remember you kissed me till it was over. I remember Early-to-Tea and Stopwatch screaming. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. Anyway, the squirrels felt bad about it. Because we’d taken care of them so well and they had to do it anyway. They apologized for ages. I fell asleep once in the middle of them going on and on about how timelines taste.”
“Am I dead?”
“I don’t know, did you die?”
“Maybe the bubbles got me. The Emperor said I’d get sick if I traveled without a clarinet. And parts of me aren’t my own parts anymore.” I stretched out my legs. They were the color of rooster feathers. “But I don’t think so. What do you mean the squirrels had to do it?”
> “Self-defense, is what they said about a million times.”
“What? We never so much as kicked one!”
“You have to think like a six-legged mauve squirrel of infinite time. The Ordinary Emperor was going to hunt them all down one by one and set the chronology of everything possible and impossible on fire. They set a contraption in motion so that he couldn’t touch them, a contraption involving you and me and a blue story and a Red Country where nobody dies, they just change clothes. They’re very tidy creatures. Don’t worry, we’re safe in the Red Country. There’ll probably be another war. The squirrels can’t fix that. They’re only little. But everyone always wants to conquer the Red Country and nobody ever has. We have a wall and it’s a really good one.”
I twisted my head up to look at him, his plum-colored hair, his amethyst eyes, his stubborn chin. “You have to say what you mean here.”
“I mean I love you. And I mean the infinite squirrels of space and time devoured me to save themselves from annihilation at the hands of a pepper grinder. I can mean both. It’s allowed.”
I kissed Orchid Harm inside the skull of a giant rodent and we knew that we were both thinking about ice cream. The ruby bassoons hooted up from the piazza and scarlet tanagers scattered from the rooftops and a watercolor unicorn told a joke about the way tubas are way down the road but the echoes carried her voice up and up and everywhere. Orchid stopped the kiss first. He pointed to the smooth crimson roof of the eye socket.
A long stripe of gold paint gleamed there.
* * *
Catherynne M. Valente is The New York Times–bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
Our Lady of the Open Road
By Sarah Pinsker
The needle on the veggie oil tank read flat empty by the time we came to China Grove. A giant pink and purple fiberglass dragon loomed over the entrance, refugee from some shuttered local amusement park, no doubt; it looked more medieval than Chinese. The parking lot held a mix of Chauffeurs and manual farm trucks, but I didn’t spot any other greasers, so I pulled in.
“Cutting it close, Luce?” Silva put down his book and leaned over to peer at the gauge.
“There hasn’t been anything but farms for the last fifty miles. Serves me right for trying a road we haven’t been down before.”
“Where are we?” asked Jacky from the bed in the back of the van. I glanced in the rearview. He caught my eye and gave an enthusiastic wave. His microbraids spilled forward from whatever he’d been using to tether them, and he gathered them back into a thick ponytail.
Silva answered before I could. “Nowhere, Indiana. Go back to sleep.”
“Will do.” Without music or engine to drown him out, Jacky’s snores filled the van again a second later. He’d been touring with us for a year now, so we’d gotten used to the snores. To be honest, I envied him his ability to fall asleep that fast.
I glanced at Silva. “You want to do the asking for once?”
He grinned and held up both forearms, tattooed every inch. “You know it’s not me.”
“There’s such thing as sleeves, you know.” I pulled my windbreaker off the back of my seat and flapped it at him, even though I knew he was right. In the Midwest, approaching a new restaurant for the first time, it was never him, between the tattoos and the spiky blue hair. Never Jacky for the pox scars on his cheeks, even though they were clearly long healed. That left me.
My bad knee buckled as I swung from the driver’s seat. I bent to clutch it and my lower back spasmed just to the right of my spine, that momentary pain that told me to rethink all my life’s choices.
“What are you doing?” Silva asked through the open door.
“Tying my shoe.” There was no need to lie, but I did it anyway. Pride or vanity or something akin. He was only two years younger than me, and neither of us jumped off our amps much anymore. If I ached from the drive, he probably ached, too.
The backs of my thighs were all pins and needles, and my shirt was damp with sweat. I took a moment to lean against Daisy the Diesel and stretch in the hot air. I smelled myself: not great after four days with no shower, but not unbearable.
The doors opened into a foyer, red and gold and black. I didn’t even notice the blond hostess in her red qipao until she stepped away from the wallpaper.
“Dining alone?” she asked. Beyond her, a roomful of faces turned in my direction. This wasn’t really the kind of place that attracted tourists, especially not these days, this far off the interstate.
“No, um, actually, I was wondering if I could speak to the chef or the owner? It’ll only take a minute.” I was pretty sure I had timed our stop for after their dinner rush. Most of the diners looked to be eating or pushing their plates aside.
The owner and chef were the same person. I’d been expecting another blonde Midwesterner, but he was legit Chinese. He had never heard of a van that ran on grease. I did the not-quite-pleading thing. On stage I aimed for fierce, but in jeans and runners and a ponytail, I could fake a down-on-her-luck Midwest momma. The trick was not to push it.
He looked a little confused by my request, but at least he was willing to consider it. “Come to the kitchen door after we close and show me. Ten, ten thirty.”
It was nine; not too bad. I walked back to the van. Silva was still in the passenger seat, but reading a trifold menu. He must have ducked in behind me to grab it. “They serve a bread basket with lo mein. And spaghetti and meatballs. Where are we?”
“Nowhere, Indiana.” I echoed back at him.
We sat in the dark van and watched the customers trickle out. I could mostly guess from their looks which ones would be getting into the trucks and which into the Chauffeurs. Every once in a while, a big guy in work boots and a trucker cap surprised me by squeezing himself into some little self-driving thing. The game passed the time, in any case.
A middle-aged cowboy wandered over to stare at our van. I pegged him for a legit rancher from a distance, but as he came closer I noticed a clerical collar beneath the embroidered shirt. His boots shone and he had a paunch falling over an old rodeo belt; the incongruous image of a bull-riding minister made me laugh. He startled when he realized I was watching him.
He made a motion for me to lower my window.
“Maryland plates!” he said. “I used to live in Hagerstown.”
I smiled, though I’d only ever passed through Hagerstown.
“Used to drive a church van that looked kinda like yours, too, just out of high school. Less duct tape, though. Whatcha doing out here?”
“Touring. Band.”
“No kidding! You look familiar. Have I heard of you?”
“Cassis Fire,” I said, taking the question as a prompt for a name. “We had it painted on the side for a while, but then we figured out we got pulled over less when we were incognito.”
“Don’t think I know the name. I used to have a band, back before…” His voice trailed off, and neither of us needed him to finish his sentence. There were several “back befores” he could be referring to, but they all amounted to the same thing. Back before StageHolo and SportsHolo made it easier to stay home. Back before most people got scared out of congregating anywhere they didn’t know everybody.
“You’re not playing around here, are you?”
I shook my head. “Columbus, Ohio. Tomorrow night.”
“I figured. Couldn’t think of a place you’d play nearby.”
“Not our kind of music, anyway,” I agreed. I didn’t know what music he liked, but this was a safe bet.
“Not any kind. Oh wel
l. Nice chatting with you. I’ll look you up on StageHolo.”
He turned away.
“We’re not on StageHolo,” I called to his back, though maybe not loud enough for him to hear. He waved as his Chauffeur drove him off the lot.
“Luce, you’re a terrible sales person,” Silva said to me.
“What?” I hadn’t realized he’d been paying attention.
“You know he recognized you. All you had to do was say your name instead of the band’s. Or ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ He’d have paid for dinner for all of us, then bought every t-shirt and download code we have.”
“And then he’d listen to them and realize the music we make now is nothing like the music we made then. And even if he liked it, he’d never go to a show. At best he’d send a message saying how much he wished we were on StageHolo.”
“Which we could be…”
“Which we won’t be.” He knew better than to argue with me on that one. It was our only real source of disagreement.
The neon “open” sign in the restaurant’s window blinked out, and I took the cue to put the key back in the ignition. The glowplug light came on, and I started the van back up.
My movement roused Jacky again. “Where are we now?”
I didn’t bother answering.
As I had guessed, the owner hadn’t quite understood what I was asking for. I gave him the engine tour, showing him the custom oil filter and the dual tanks. “We still need regular diesel to start, then switch to the veggie oil tank. Not too much more to it than that.”
“It’s legal?”
Legal enough. There was a gray area wherein perhaps technically we were skirting the fuel tax. By our reasoning, though, we were also skirting the reasons for the fuel tax. We’d be the ones who got in trouble, anyway. Not him.
“Of course,” I said, then changed the subject. “And the best part is that it makes the van smell like egg rolls.”
The Long List Anthology 2 Page 39