“His antics gave me pleasure for his lifetime. When he died (mortals are given such a short span of years) I found another.”
“So my being a failure . . . ” Julian began. The Cat just shook his head and smiled a cat’s smile.
6.
Veronessa, in an antique 1940s dress with shoulders that were almost wings, brought Julian (wearing a very nice suit Puss had bought him) to Angelica Siddons’ lunch at Airmail Express where men dressed as stewardesses in long-gone twentieth century U.S. airlines brought airplane dinners and martinis. Earlier that day, Tales That Fairies Tell had named Mrs. Siddons “Fairy Godmother of this Epoch.”
“She certainly has been for you!” Veronessa said on the drive there. “And she’s so anxious to meet you,” she added.
“Why all this with fairy tales?” he asked.
“The craving for fairy tales appears when a world is changing from one of magic to one of science and vice versa.”
“But you don’t believe in them.” They’d slept together a couple of times and it had been fun, but not magic.
“My mother was part Fey.” He narrowed his eyes. She waved a hand and a butterfly appeared. It fluttered around in the back seat of the car. She opened her palm and it landed. She closed her hand and opened it and the butterfly was gone. She was amused by his silence.
Julian was working on a collage and had sent Mrs. Siddons a sketch. It was his stepmother and father standing in their kitchen, Clemenso naked in the midst of his fashion show, Jack Reynard’s deserted townhouse (he had been missing for weeks) but with bricks fallen off and a fox gazing out of a broken window. It was a world poised on the edge of catastrophe. But the colors were lovely, and Mrs. Siddons was especially charmed by the fox.
7.
“How do you get inside my head?” Julian asked the Cat. They sat on a small rise in what seemed to be a late seventeenth century formal garden landscaped in the Dutch manner. The Cat was his size.
“A skill I took from Cassese, the last dragon in France,” was the answer. The image of the monster appeared in Julian’s mind: huge, fire breathing, wings flapping. All this he saw through the eyes of the hawk Puss had become. Cassese reached out and caught the hawk’s mind with his. But by then, Puss was a bee and when Cassese grabbed that tiny brain, Puss had already become a racing dove which moved faster than the dragon could think.
It was as a bat that Puss flew into the darkness of Cassese’s left ear. In the eye of the Cat, Julian saw the smoldering ruin to which Cassese was soon reduced. Puss was a tiger eating the brains.
“The last but, perhaps, not the brightest dragon in France,” said Puss. Julian felt a chill. “Yes, I am a monster, but never to you.” A large paw with its claws carefully retracted brushed his cheek.
A pond beautifully ringed with willows lay not far from them. An avenue of cypress trees bordered a drive that curved towards a chateau. Windows caught the afternoon sun. Birds sang.
Julian had read the story of Puss In Boots a hundred times in the last couple of months. Would Puss order him out of his clothes and into the water as he’d done with his first master? Wary but unwilling to abandon the life he’d been given, Julian wondered how many afternoons he’d have to spend amusing Puss like this.
Aware of the questions Puss smiled and yawned as a cat does.
Richard Bowes lives in Manhattan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Lambda, an International Horror Guild Award, and a Million Writers Award. Even aside from The Queen, The Cambion and Seven Others, 2013 is a busy year. Lethe Press has just republished his 1999 Lambda-winning novel Minions of the Moon (now available for the first time electronically). Lethe has also published his novel-in-stories, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street: tales told by an aging spec fiction writer and set in contemporary Greenwich Village. In September, Fairwood Press will publish his If Angels Fight, a collection of recent stories and previously uncollected award nominees and winners.
Recent and forthcoming appearances include: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Icarus, Lightspeed, Podcastle, and The Revelator; and the anthologies, After, Wilde Stories 2013, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, Handsome Devil, Hauntings, Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds, Daughters of Russ 2013, The Book of Apex, and The Time Traveler’s Almanac.
The way I understand it, fairy tales play two important roles: first, they are meant to provide us with templates of behaviors, and second, to illustrate the values of the society that produced them. When faced with a task of revamping a story to suit modern times, both templates and values had to be drastically adjusted: after all, curses are very different now, and the idea of a magical kiss seems downright reactionary. And the story of pediatric AIDS outbreak in Elista has haunted me ever since it happened—besides the heartbreak, there is nothing else I can think of that showed me that times had changed tragically, dramatically, and irrevocably. So this story is an attempt—however feeble—to extract some comfort from the terror. (I guess there’s one more thing that fairy tales can do!)
Ekaterina Sedia
Sleeping Beauty of Elista
Ekaterina Sedia
And this is how it begins: with a prick of a needle—a sharp point, and the children are too small to understand—infants, they just howl and squirm despite the reassuring hush hush shhhh be quiet of the nurse. So small that crying is just about the only thing they know how to do well. And for these children, soon enough it is the only thing—they do not sleep or eat, they only cry and fade away, they get sick and they cough, and strange white flowers bloom in their mouths and soon enough one by one by one they die. Except . . . but we will talk about her later.
It’s all in a prick of the sharp point, you see; this is how curses work. Of course there is a castle there.
No, a temple. It is new, actually. Because after a curse is enacted, it will spread outward—from an injection site (vaccinations are important) and through the blood vessels and capillaries, to the translucent skin that is already covered in febrile blooms, to the very quiet ward (that just a few weeks ago was filled with weak crying), to the families standing around dressed all in black, so quiet, to the borders of the republic and all the way to the capital, to the pages of the newspaper called Komsomolskaya Pravda. And as people there—so far—shake their heads and whisper about the horrors of the new disease, as the newspaper is congratulating itself for its newfound freedom and bravery—because until very recently no one ever said the word “AIDS” in print, it was all some mysterious virus X—as UNESCO and WHO get involved and outraged, the curse continues to work inside the city.
Elista never had much to brag about, apart from troubled history and the steppes surrounding it, where the grasses grew so green and then abruptly yellowed. There were no thickets to ensconce it, to hide it away from the world—it was just the yellowing of the grass and the distance, the slow falling-apart of everything inside, the hospital growing hollow and echo-filled under the curse.
It is a superstition to believe that the witch who cursed the town had meant it somehow; most curses are not manufactured out of malice or pained outrage, but rather they happen, shaped by the whims of history and coincidence, like when there are drug users dying in the hospital, dying of despair and dissolution, and when there are newborns in need of vaccinations, and when there are not enough reusable syringes because they rust and get lost and are being phased out anyway, and there are too few of the disposable ones to even talk about—things like that, the sort of things that happen in fairy tales because in real life they would be entirely too sad.
And the witch: she is in her forties and Kalmyk, the descendant of those who were once banished but returned later, slightly more frost-bitten, more cynical; the nurse wears flat shoes and has small annoying corns on the balls of her feet, and her breasts that grew heavy with age sag against her gray-buttoned coat; you would mistake her for a kindergarten teacher if you saw her in one of the dusty, sleepy streets, or walking throug
h the parks, or craning her neck to see the face of the bronze Lenin. She looks so tired and yet placid, her dark hair misting over with gray. This is before the Buddha and before the Temple, and even before the curse—before she even knows she is a witch.
Her job is in the pediatric ward, and she loves it—she loves babies and the swirl of their hair at the very tops of their heads, black or blond, the red cheeks, dimpled fists and bent legs. She doesn’t even mind when they cry. She hushes them, gently, like a mother would—with every prick of the needle their gurgling escalates to high-pitch cries which soon die, until the next one starts. She moves from crib to crib to crib, followed by the undulation of wailing. It’s for their own good, she tells herself. Disposable syringes are impossible to boil, but she soaks them in alcohol between her rounds.
The floor in the hospital is blue linoleum, covered in cracks like spiderwebs, or maybe it’s just the pattern. She was never interested enough to look closer. The walls are yellow subway tile, glossy and pale. There are no visitors allowed in the children’s ward, lest they bring some infection with them and get all the children sick. It is only the scrubbed nurses and the doctors, and the quiet humming of the electric plate they use to boil non-disposable syringes. It is lukewarm now.
The vaccinations do not take—or take altogether too well, depending on your perspective: children develop symptoms and ulcers. At first, everyone thinks that the vaccines are defective—that instead of attenuated smallpox, scarlet fever, mumps they contain live viruses. It is the stuff of nightmares, because who wants to tell the parents? And then it gets worse. The Kalmyk nurse is fired for negligence, even though she is neither the only nurse nor the most negligent one; but such is the nature of a curse—it needs a scapegoat. Well, two: the curser and the cursed, the witch and the child, the criminal and the victim. And who is to say who gets it worse? But having one of each makes it easier to keep track: the rest of the nurses continue with their work, albeit with some extra training and the humanitarian syringes sent from overseas by the solicitous George Bush, and the rest of the children die. There is only one left by the time the scandal and the newspaper exposés fall away like dead skin; there is only one girl.
And what about the girl? Indeed, there isn’t much to say about the Sleeping Beauty while she is conforming to her moniker—before or after, when she is awake, maybe. Before: she was one of the children, crying weaker, her limbs growing thinner, losing their caterpillar-like segmentation of baby fat and becoming tapered candles, waxen, melting until there was nothing but a fragile bone wick in the center, barely hidden. Her eyes grew dark as her face receded away, and her mouth filled with thrush, white fungal threads covering the red inflamed tissue underneath.
But she didn’t die. Instead she slipped into a coma, and the doctors debated what to do. They decided against life support—because why extend the suffering of something too small to even understand what suffering was and there was a nobility in it—but she breathed on her own. They disconnected the glucose drip, and the thrush subsided, but the girl didn’t die. She continued to breathe, sleep, and—very slowly—grow.
Her parents took her home when she was two. The hospital didn’t want to keep her, and the doctors had grown uncomfortable with her failure to die despite any source of nourishment—it was as if sleep itself sustained her; and she wasn’t a bad child—quiet, never fussy, never hungry. Almost pretty. She slept at home, on her older sister’s cot, under the billowing of white cheesecloth curtains in the summer and heavy, silver-shot darkness in winter. They changed her clothes only as she grew out of them, because they never got soiled.
She turned sixteen in 2005, the year the Buddhist Temple was built. They don’t tell you that, but she was the reason why the Dalai Lama came to Elista in the first place. The Sleeping Beauty of Elista—the only survivor out of the twenty-seven infamous pediatric AIDS patients—was a secret, but rumors travel. He came to see her when she was a mere child, but by the time the temple he had requested was finished, she had grown too long for her sister’s cot. As soon as the temple was ready, her parents carried the cot with the sleeping girl on it to the hidden room, made especially for her, at the temple’s center.
She sleeps in the temple from then on. Her sleep is a peculiar thing: like the curse, it spreads through the town; others do not sleep like she does, but they are stricken by a particular malaise—timelessness of sorts, the blunting of affect and feeling. It grows and it radiates through the country, where the outrage dims to smirking discontent and fear—to wary mistrust, as things continue to decay and fall into disrepair. Tractors rust. Inflation is a part of this too, I’m sure, and it is difficult not to look to the miraculous sleeping girl as some sort of salvation—and one has to wonder why didn’t the Dalai Lama ever come back to see her again, or to visit the temple built for him.
They talk about practical miracles in Elista—their Buddhism tinged with the terrible shadow of Christianity and its fairy tales—they talk about how some miracles are meant as object lessons, and maybe the Sleeping Beauty is one of those. Maybe the dead children were a lesson too, maybe they were meant to remind us about proper sterilization techniques, although the price seems altogether too high for such a trivial lesson. Maybe there is something deeper in it, too. But no one can agree what the sleeping girl is meant to teach us. In fact, no one seems to agree about her either. Some say she is Kalmyk, and others insist she is Russian, the descendant of the settlers of Stepnoy—the ones for whose benefits the Kalmyk nurse’s ancestors had been exiled to Siberia. There may or may not be some symbolism there, or historic justice, or whatever you want to call it. No one can ask her parents since they had passed away, and her older sister moved to some better city, possibly less decaying, leaving her cot behind. And now the Sleeping Beauty belongs to the town and the temple, floating uprooted and possibly dreaming.
The witch visits her occasionally, and it is assumed that she is there to ask for forgiveness. The more mythically minded citizens of Elista whisper when they see the nurse (the witch) walking through the park, in her flat nurse shoes, with her thick compression hose and gray coat. Her back is bent now, and people whisper about who she is. She doesn’t have the advantage of the usual witch’s disappearance after the curse has been cast and takes over the story; she is left to linger along with it, but with not much else to do, her historical function completed, but to crane her neck and try and discern the inanimate features of the two largest statues: the Lenin is older than the Buddha, and no less enigmatic. Neither offers her solace.
And who knows when the Sleeping Beauty will wake? (There has to be an after, so we know that she will.) There are signs now—she is stirring in her sleep and mumbling occasionally, in the soft gurgle of infants because she never learned another language. So it must be close, the citizens whisper, and disagree about what will happen then. Will she rise and walk across the land, growing gigantic, traveling from Elista to Moscow to Novosibirsk in three steps? Will she multiply herself like a true Buddha, with twin streams of water and fire shooting out of her eyes? Will she teach at the temple?
Or will the mere act of her waking shake the curse away, and the world itself, asleep since 1989, will sit up abruptly, wondering at what had become of it?
The signs are clear now, and the Sleeping Beauty’s eyes are opening, and there is a terrible light behind them; the witch walks into the temple and stands, waiting, her knotted hand resting lightly on the edge of the cot, as if gently shaking the crib to wake a sleeping infant.
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, a
nd Bewere the Night, as well as Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming, was released in December 2012. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.
Fairy tales have informed a great deal of my fiction, both my novels and my short fiction. They’re a wellspring I return to again and again, and sometimes my exploration of them is very overt—as with “The Road of Needles”—and sometimes it’s only subtext. All the various incarnations of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale, those are the ones that have most fascinated me, and so they’re the ones I’ve gone to again and again. But I’d never done the story as science fiction, and, offhand, I couldn’t recall anyone else who had, either. So, when it occurred to me, “The Road of Needles” was born.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The Road of Needles
CaitlÍn R. Kiernan
1.
Nix Severn shuts her eyes and takes a very deep breath of the newly minted air filling Isotainer Four, and she cannot help but note the irony at work. This luxury born of mishap. Certainly, no one on earth has breathed air even half this clean in more than two millennia. The Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Chinese, they all set in motion a fouling of the skies that an Industrial Revolution and the two centuries thereafter would hone into a science of indifference. An art of neglect and denial. Not even the meticulously manufactured atmo of Mars is so pure as each mouthful of the air Nix now breathes. The nitrogen, oxygen—four fingers N2, a thumb of 02—and the so on and so on traces, etcetera, all of it transforming the rise and fall of her chest into a celebration. Oh, happy day for the pulmonary epithelia bathed in this pristine blend. She shuts her eyes and tries to think. But the air has made her giddy. Not drunk, but certainly giddy. It would be easy to drift down to sleep, leaning against the bole of a Dicksonia antarctica, sheltered from the misting rainfall by the umbrella of the tree fern’s fronds, of this tree and all the others that have sprouted and filled the isotainer in the space of less than seventeen hours. She could be a proper Rip Van Winkle, as the Blackbird drifts farther and farther off the lunar-Martian rail line. She could do that fabled narcoleptic one better, pop a few of the phenothiazine capsules in the left hip pouch of her red jumpsuit and never wake up again. The forest would close in around her, and she would feed it. The fungi, insects, the snails and algae, bacteria and tiny vertebrates, all of them would make a banquet of her sleep and then, soon, her death.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 12