I blinked back tears, sick. Such injustice should make me angry, not teary. The situation sounded unreal except her scarred visage gazed at me from a pace away. Worse than the violence to her face was what her words said about her inner workings.
“It isn’t your fault. You are not gone because of what was done to you.” I tried to imagine why, hidden in her parents’ house, she’d bartered trinkets to neighborhood children for copies of superhero trading cards.
Her healthy skin flushed. “You are a superhero. Can you make me beautiful again?”
Of course. I, who could change even the curve of my eyelashes. Injustice silenced me. I shook my head.
A tear trickled from Aisha’s brown eye. She pulled her burka back into place and retreated to scraps of fabric and cheap beading, slumping on the stool.
I never expected this. I’d caused this woman more suffering. As a superhero, it went against everything I fought for. I’d never questioned why Aisha hid. Even if I had, I’d never have conceived of something so awful.
“Please leave.”
I hesitated.
“Do my wishes mean nothing, just because you are stronger than me?” Sensing my resistance, she added, “Can you remember what it is to be powerless?”
Apologizing, I slipped from the room. The doorknob to the back door of the mud room rattled in my sweaty grip. Locked, of course. Aisha couldn’t leave, not that she would allow herself to want to.
Cursing in English, I thinned a finger to make a key and slipped out the door, struggling to hold myself together. The headscarf snarled around my shoulders like a deadly snake. I shook free and stomped it flat on the doorstep. The shalwar kameez tore beneath my clutching fingers, leaving me free. Quivering, I shot into the welcoming sky. There had to be help somewhere else.
And I believed it, as long as I ignored the weight in my belly that said I’d be back.
• • • •
The small village hadn’t changed over the last four months. Dogs barked. Someone spoke on a cell phone a few streets over. The moon wasn’t out, and alleys hung with shadows. The pregnancy had progressed so far I could no longer shape-change from neck to knees. Fortunately, I could still fly.
I eased to the window above Aisha’s workbench and tapped a pane. Swirling color signaled movement behind the warped glass. Since I knew she couldn’t open the back door, I slipped to the front of the building and peered around the corner wearing Vixen’s face, even if I couldn’t wear her body. Unlike last visit, I was thankful for the excuse to dress in layers of fabric instead of my bodysuit.
Aisha waved me in, looking fearful. “Why have you come back? My family will hear!”
Keeping to the shadows, I drifted after her. I’d spent months searching for help but found only three other Supers. One had been a baby, one senile, and the last wasn’t trustworthy. He’d had such a criminal mind I couldn’t bring myself to train him. I pressed a thumb against the bridge of my nose, wondering if he’d join the ranks of supervillains.
A pang shot through my abdomen, compressing muscles and stealing breath. I’d hoped my uneven contractions would slow or stop; each pain heightened my urgency.
Aisha gravitated to the stool in her narrow workroom, but I lingered outside the doorway. Strips of fabric hung from every surface, embroidered and beaded in a cheerful burst of energy reminiscent of a circus tent. I pressed a hand to the doorframe, belly outside her view, panting for breath.
“Have you reconsidered?”
Aisha pulled off her burka, reminding us both of the savage scars on the left side of her face. “There is no such thing as a half-blind superhero.”
“This is my fault,” I admitted.
My teeth started to chatter, the way they had the moment Aisha pointed to the girls on the cards, but I hadn’t confessed my mistakes. I had let her down, and it was time to face up to it. “Do you still have those cards?”
Aisha dragged herself off the stool, pulling forth the cards. Seeing she hadn’t thrown them out, as I’d feared, buoyed my spirit.
I waddled into the room. When she spied my stomach, Aisha muffled a gasp.
I took the cards and stacked the men, leaving the women lined up. “It is my fault you don’t see yourself in them. Look—you still have one good eye and that’s all anyone needs to see what I’ve done.”
She watched me, not the cards, sensing my distress.
I placed my hand over each card, covering masks and colored outfits to reveal facial features that were just variations on a theme, shuffled like a child’s three-piece flip book of separate mouths, eyes, and noses.
Aisha straightened, gulping. “They’re all you.”
“I was wrong to choose to be tall, and white, and young. Even I’m not what I tried to be, it just seemed more heroic. I’m sorry I bought into that. I’m not that ideal either. I’m like her, Quijin.” My blunt nail pointed to the first superhero. Short and Asian, though from the very beginning I’d enhanced my bust and added big round eyes.
“She punishes the wicked.” Aisha recited. “She is the Chinese unicorn.”
“All me.” I pointed from one to the next. “But I need help. I was able to split myself, for short times. I’d limit myself to a few powers and give myself another name and shape. I let the world think there were many superwomen when there was only me. The guys formed the League, but they’ve left on a mission while I hold down the fort. I can’t do it by myself anymore.”
Aisha shook her head. “My powers are small, like me.”
“You haven’t tried to be big! You cut without scissors, make holes without needles, string wire and bend them closed with your mind. Can you weld them shut? You have many gifts.”
“I’m not a superhero.”
“None of us are, until we choose to be. Women with powers are out there but they’ve kept quiet. I wanted the world to think there were more of us. But if I made other women think they can’t be superheroes because they must fly like I do, or look like I tried to look . . . then I’m part of a grave injustice . . . and. . . .”
I hissed, muscles involuntarily clenching. “Can we talk about this another time? I’m here because I need your help. It’s time to deliver this baby and I’m scared.”
A labor pang rippled through my lower half, not ending like the others but increasing in waves. “The father was a Super, too, but from another world. He says we’ll have a son. I don’t know what kind of baby it’ll be—or if it’ll even be human, but I want him and he probably can’t get out of me . . . I just don’t expect it to be a normal birth!” I gritted my teeth over a scream and gripped the workbench.
Aisha shied away. “You should go to a hospital!”
“I did. They couldn’t see or hear through me . . . They were useless!”
The workbench splintered beneath my grip. Trading cards tipped off the shattered tabletop and fluttered to the ground.
Aisha dragged her pallet into the open and helped me onto it. “I’ll get my father.”
“No!” I gripped her arm, careful not to rip it from her socket.
“He is a doctor.” Aisha pulled away.
I panted, imagining delivering my baby inside this small hallway. For weeks, vivid dreams of alien births and demon spawn had scared me awake, praying they were imagination and not intuition.
The older man who returned with Aisha moved me into a seated position and his daughter supported my back. He checked my progress and urged me to push. The baby didn’t budge. Despite being a shapeshifter, I was no longer stretchy on the inside. Quite the reverse, I was rigid.
I might not make it. Always invulnerable to outside threats, I found the thought shocking.
“If the baby survives and I don’t, you must protect him until his dad returns,” I said.
“I?” Her hand fluttered to the left side of her face, which even now, she kept turned away from me.
“Aisha, what happened to the men who attacked you?” During our meeting, I’d felt ignorant. But since then I’d do
ne my research. I already knew the answer. “Please, just answer.”
“My father was the doctor in the village, and important. He insisted they be arrested. They were found guilty.”
“And sentenced to have acid put in their eyes. To suffer as you did.” I concentrated on my breathing, trying to hold the pain back long enough to hear Aisha’s answer.
“But when the day came, I stopped it, because no one should suffer as I did.”
Another pang rose by degrees. I gritted my teeth, turning my prepared speech into just a few guttural words. “You were always a hero.” Then the scream took over.
Time passed in a horrible stream of rising and falling agony.
Aisha’s father said, “I fear the baby is too large. There is no progress.”
Aisha held my hand. “He will cut the baby out.”
I suffered too much to argue with any plan that might end my pain. “He can try.”
The doctor brought out a kit of shiny instruments. He angled a blade toward my beached-whale, bared stomach. Social conventions, whatever they might have been, no longer applied and my shalwar kameez resided somewhere around my armpits.
Aisha’s sweaty face nestled beside mine as she eased me back. Her cheek pressed mine. She’d apparently forgotten about her scars as she helped.
Lying flat, I turned my head away from the blade hovering over my belly. Trading cards scattered on the floor seemed to mock me with the perfect forms I’d created. Worse, they highlighted the sad reality of life as a woman that not even a superhero could escape—biology. Whether cancer, a splash of acid, or a difficult birth, bodies could derail the most carefully laid plans. But I was more than a physical body, powers, or a womanly shape. I claimed to have courage, when things were going my way. Now I had to prove it.
Metal clattered as Aisha’s father dropped a bent tool and reached into his bag for another blade. I exhaled my fears, and watched the last scalpel twist uselessly against the steep curve of my abdomen.
I licked my dry lips. “Aisha must do it.”
Aisha blanched. Her cloudy eye flickered in time with her good one, as if seeking a path of escape.
Her father lifted the bent blade but didn’t offer it to his daughter. He studied her. “I remember how we worried after the attack. We gathered everything sharp while you were in the hospital and kept them from you.”
“You would not even give me a needle so I might embroider.”
They shared a long look. He opened his hand, urging her to take the bent scalpel. It slid into her shaking grip.
Aisha fingered the blade. “You were right to do it. I would have harmed myself. But my powers developed so I might work with fabric again, contribute to our shop, and lessen the burden of my presence.”
She grimaced at the dull blade and said to her father, “This will not work any better for me than for you. Perhaps if I were to think of her as fabric? Can I part her and sew her as if she were cloth?”
Their discussion fragmented as another pang swept through me. “ . . . have never tried anything but cloth . . . what if she comes apart, but my power is not to bring her together? . . . skin is nothing like beads and embroidery . . . kill her and blame yourself? Better to do nothing and let nature take its course . . . Inshallah.”
The heaviness of my child pressed my hips painfully into the thin mat. My muscles clenched once more in pointless effort to push. The child would not budge. “Save him.”
Aisha moved from my sight. Warm hands slid over the taut skin of my swollen stomach. My belly parted like the papery skin of a lychee fruit. Searing pain jolted through me and I screamed.
Aisha gagged. The girl’s father worked quickly, then instructed her to seal the layers.
At the thin cry, my body relaxed of its own accord, as if whatever came next no longer mattered. Aisha smoothed a hand along my stomach. Pain dissolved. I sagged with relief. Across the room, Aisha’s father worked over the baby, cooing.
“It’s done.” Aisha sounded amazed.
“You did it,” I said.
Aisha’s father wrapped the baby in blankets and handed the large infant to me, grinning. “A boy.”
Smiling, I heaved onto my side, too tired to do more than cuddle my son. My eyes wanted to drift shut, but I resisted the urge. “Aisha, thank you. Without you—”
Once again the girl cut me off, as had happened so often before, and my heart sank until her words registered. “I’ll do it. Teach me to use all my gifts. You have given me back what I had lost.”
“I did?” I smiled in muzzy wonder. “Your heart and your voice?”
“My worth.”
You never lost that, Aisha. You only thought you did.
But that argument could wait. I would rest, and when I woke in the morning I would train my maternity leave replacement.
© 2014 by H.E. Roulo.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
H.E. Roulo is a Pacific Northwest author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Her stories have appeared in over a dozen magazines, anthologies, and podcasts. In 2009 her science fiction podcast novel Fractured Horizon was a Parsec Award Finalist and she received the Wicked Women Writers award from HorrorAddicts.net. Recent publications include Nature and InfectiveInk. The first book in her Apocalypse Masters series will be available in 2015. Find out more @hroulo, facebook.com/heroulo, or heroulo.com.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
The Dryad’s Shoe
T. Kingfisher
Art by Tara Larsen Chang
Author’s Note: Tufted titmice are exclusively North American birds. The geography of Hannah’s country is of questionable archetype.
Once upon a time, in a land near and far away, there was a girl whose mother died when she was young.
Her mother had been merry and loving and devoted, but these things were no proof against fever. She died and was buried in a grave at the edge of the forest, past the garden gate.
In the way of young children, the girl (who was named Hannah) mourned for her mother and then forgot her. She visited the grave dutifully with her father, but her attention strayed more and more often to the garden fence, to the tall poles of beans and the thin green tentacles of the onions.
She loved the garden, which her mother had tended, and which was now under the care of an old man from the village. He showed her how to chit out fat nasturtium seeds and the importance of soaking peas before planting, how to prepare a bed with well-rotted leaves and break up the soil so that the plants could slip their slender roots inside it. He showed her how to keep a hive of bees without being stung too often—for a beehive was, in that time, considered a vital part of any garden—and when she did get stung, the gardener put dock leaves on it and patted her shoulder until the sniffles went away.
It was perhaps not a normal occupation for a young lady of moderate birth, but Hannah’s father had little to say about it. He had little to say about anything since his wife had died. Hannah was ten years old before she realized that her friend’s name was not simply “the Gardener,” because her father never spoke to him.
The garden kept them well fed and Hannah was very proud on the days when the cook used her beets and her beans and her cucumbers to feed the household.
On her eleventh birthday, a bird flew down and landed atop a beanpole in front of her. The bird was gray above and white below, with a fine dark eye, no different than the other birds that flocked to the garden in the morning.
“Woe!” cried the bird. “Woe, child, what a state you’ve come to!”
Your mother’s dead,
Your hands are dirty,
Your father’s away—
Hannah picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it underhand at the bird, who dove out of the way.
It eyed her balefully, then settled back atop the beanpole, smoothing down its feathers.
“That wasn’t very nice,” said the bird.
“You started it,” said Hannah. “It’s not very polite
to go around reminding people that their mothers are dead. And my hands are dirty because I’ve been thinning carrots, thank you very much.”
The bird had the grace to look ashamed of itself. “It’s the magic,” it said. “It, um, comes over you. No offense was intended.”
Hannah dusted off her hands. “I thought you might be magic,” she said, “because you’re talking, and birds don’t, generally. But then I thought maybe you were a parrot, and I’ve heard that parrots can talk.”
“I’m not a parrot,” sighed the bird. “Don’t I wish! Parrots are gloriously colored and they live halfway to forever. No, I’m only an enchanted titmouse, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sure you’re as good as any parrot,” said Hannah, who was basically tenderhearted toward animals when they weren’t insulting her.
The titmouse preened a little. “Well,” he said (Hannah was nearly sure that it was a he) “I have been enchanted. It’s a great honor, if you’re a bird.”
“Who enchanted you?”
The titmouse stood on one foot and waved his other one toward the garden gate. “A mother’s love,” he said. “Also the tree just behind the grave, which is inhabited by a particularly sentimental dryad.”
“Can you get seeds from a dryad tree?” asked Hannah, with professional interest.
“No,” said the titmouse shortly. “They get very annoyed if you ask. It’s very personal for them.”
“Oh, well.” Hannah sat down on the edge of one of the beds. “What’s it like to be enchanted?”
“It’s marvelous,” said the titmouse. “You’re very focused all the time when you’re a bird, you know. Here’s a seed, there’s a seed, this is my seed, give me back my seed.” He fluffed up his feathers. “But when you’re enchanted, all of a sudden you can see everything. Hello, independent cognition! It’s a transcendent experience. Pity it doesn’t last long.”
Hannah had understood perhaps one word in three of that, but said politely, “It doesn’t last?”
“No,” said the bird sadly. “Only until my message is delivered. Would you mind? It’s very important to the dryad.”
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 4