Over dinner, the witch was still not speaking to her brother. The meal was cooked perfectly—Bertrand is a fine cook—and the meat flaked easily from the tiny soft bones. The bones were so soft you could bite right through them to the tiny squirt of marrow, which is sweet and salty all at once. The wine was a deep ruby red that looked beautiful in the corners of her brother's mouth after he took a drink. Suddenly the witch rose and kissed him on the lips.
"I forgive you, Bertrand."
And the meal was so much nicer after that.
It is June twenty-first, the equinox, and the witch's brother is upstairs. The witch sits on the settee, hugging a pillow to her chest. She can hear him moving about up there without her and it makes her angry. Suddenly she tosses the pillow across the room and scampers to the foot of the stairs where she pauses, listening. Her hands are clenched into fists; her ragged nails leaving little white half-moons in her red palms. She hears him laugh, and then the sound of something heavy falling to the floor. With a suppressed growl of fury she scrambles up the stairs, past the locked room where his shadow flickers under the door and his sharp yelp of release sounds loud above the rustling of the bedclothes, and on up to the attic. She hides there for hours, pulling the wings off bats, biting the heads off mice. Her cats squirm around her and howl, sharing her pain.
When she comes back downstairs, covered in bits of fur, her face sticky and red, he's in the study reading poetry. He's wearing their father's gray smoking jacket with the hole in the left breast and the stained lapels. Their father's fez sits jaunty on her brother's head.
"I wasn't born to be a skeleton,” he quotes at her.
"Yes, you were, you little shit.” She spits a bit of gore at him, it's a tail, maybe, and stomps to her room. He turns the pages idly, letting her spittle dry on his face.
Bertrand is obsessed with dental hygiene. He uses a different toothbrush every day and there is never blood when he rinses. He keeps dental floss in his waistcoat pocket. The witch is indifferent to her own teeth, which are naturally sharp (she suspects her brother of filing his).
"You must take better care of your teeth, Clothilde."
"When I am a hag, Bertie, I'll need ragged, rotten teeth. Whoever heard of a hag with good teeth?"
"When you're a hag, Clotty, you'll need good teeth. Do you want to gnaw bones with your gums? Or will I just have to boil them soft for you?"
She glares at him. She's twenty minutes older—he's not supposed to get the better of her. He knows she hates soft-boiled bones.
"I suppose I could get dentures.” She warms to the idea. “I could have different sets made. I could have a set made like tusks. I'll root for truffles under the oak trees like a great wild pig!” She flounces from the room in a whoosh of gray silk. He pulls the floss from his pocket and begins to worry at a gristly bit stuck behind a back left molar.
* * * *
There's a particularly deadly variety of inky cap that is so small it can only be seen properly with a magnifying glass. It grows in clumps about the size of a quarter. This little mushroom is extinct except for a few acres of land around a palace near Strasbourg and a carefully tended box in the witch's basement.
The hag who sent the inky cap spores to the witch and her brother made provisions in her will for them to be shipped one box of manure each month from the herd of Pere David's deer raised on the palace grounds. Without it the tiny mushrooms would die.
The miniature inky caps are very special. The Zionist underground in the Soviet Union used just one of them to assassinate Stalin. A whole quarter-sized clump could drop a bull elephant in about eighteen seconds.
While Bertrand is out of the house, Clothilde brushes their older sister's hair and massages lotion into the stretching skin of the girl's belly. It is August twenty-eighth and the sun is shining. The girl's hair is very long but the witch keeps it well tended. It takes her an hour to wash it all and two hours to brush it. The raven cocks a beady eye at her from the doorway. “Piss off, bird,” hisses the witch. Shirley croaks at her and hops away. She hopes her brother doesn't come home before she has time to finish the job. She's not supposed to be in the second bedroom.
When she got fat, Clothilde was terribly unhappy; her silk dresses didn't fit right. Her feet looked swollen like dead fish left too long in the water. Her rings caught painfully on her knuckles. In the early afternoon on April the third, the witch drank a special tea that smelled bad and tasted worse. It made her feel dizzy, then sleepy, and she sweated through her dreams. Her brother sat beside her, mopping her brow and worrying. Within a few days of drinking the special tea, the witch woke up and was fat no longer. Her dresses, shoes and rings all fit. The witch was happy once again.
When she finishes brushing her sister's hair, the witch runs her hands slick with lotion over the girl's swollen belly and wonders when her brother will bring the girl the tea. It will probably be in October. Bertrand loves to cook for Halloween.
The witch and her brother sleep in their parents’ bed. She wears her mother's nightgown, even though it's torn and bears old stains. They're nestled together like spoons and she clutches his arm to her chest, even in sleep. His breath stirs the small hairs at the back of her neck when he exhales. He draws in her dreams when he inhales. The witch's foot twitches in her sleep. Her brother whispers “ his eyes moving quickly behind their lids.Tuber melanosporum,"
One afternoon in late September, a little boy comes up to their porch on a dare. A little clot of other children stand across the street, egging him on. As he opens the gate, his bowels begin to churn in a horrible cramp. Fearing the ostracism that comes with failure, he grits his teeth against it and walks to the stoop. On the first step, his nose begins to bleed, once on the porch, his breath comes in gasps and he begins to gag. When the index finger of his left hand touches the center panel of the door he is flung back as the cramp engulfs him, head to foot. He shits himself violently and vomits blood and bile all over himself, rolling from the porch while trying to scream through the mess roiling from his throat. The other children scatter, leaving him there on the ground in his filth while the witch and her brother giggle madly at the dormer window, high at the top of the house. After a cruelly long while, the cramp leaves him and he crawls home.
It's Halloween and Bertrand is cooking them a feast. Clothilde can hear him singing in the kitchen, can hear the snick of his sharpest knife working against bones, the slap of scrap meat hitting the garbage pail. His happiness is almost infectious, but she has something serious to do. Her cats twine around his legs, yowling for scraps.
"Distract him, my darlings,” whispers the witch.
First she creeps down to the basement, being careful not to let the door slam behind her. She hears the boards creak above her head and can feel the heat from the stove. She does not risk a light but knows exactly where she's going. The smell of roasting meat from above tickles her nostrils and she can hear the oil sizzle as the morels and oyster mushrooms hit the pan. She can picture them releasing their sweet moisture into the hot oil. She can picture the look on her brother's face over the heat of the stove, the sweat on his brow and lip, his narrowed eyes, his lips slightly parted, breathing steam. His look of concentration disturbs her and she almost stumbles in the dark.
Having secreted her prize in a pocket of her dress, the witch scampers back up the creaking wooden stairs to the kitchen where she pours a glass of milk. Bertrand smiles absently at her through the steam, his hands a blur as he crushes garlic with the French knife, then sweeps it into the hot pan. Then some dill, some white pepper. Clothilde barely registers in his consciousness. He doesn't notice the tiny bit of deer shit she has tracked into his spotless kitchen.
The witch floats to the foyer and up the hall stairs, being careful not to spill the milk. On the landing she whispers a spell to unlock the bedroom that used to be hers. Her brother doesn't know that she's mastered this spell. He thinks he has the only key. She sets the milk on the nightstand next to the empty teacup and
then goes to the bathroom to fill a basin with warm water. Returning with her hands full, the witch forgets to lock the bedroom door behind her and begins to wash her sister. On a shelf by the door, two dry old skulls, one with long hair still clinging to its crown, the other with what may have been a mustache over its bared yellow teeth, look down wisely on this operation.
The witch carefully bathes the tattered mess between the scarred stumps of the girl's legs and her newly small belly. She washes the bite marks on the stumps where the girl's arms once were; the thumbprint bruises on her throat. Her sister's lips are chapped, so the witch squeezes some water from the cloth onto them to ease the dryness. The girl can't lick away the pink liquid because she has no tongue.
The witch crumbles one tiny mushroom into her sister's milk. The girl on the bed is still groggy from the tea but she watches the witch's fingers and begins to cry with relief. She knows what's going to happen. The witch stirs the milk with a spoon—there's an oily black film on the top of the milk from the mushroom. Slowly, patiently, she tips the milk into her sister's mouth. The girl gulps the milk eagerly, being careful to swallow every drop.
At the foot of the stairs, Bertrand wipes the fourteen-inch long French knife, his favorite, on his apron and calls for the witch: “Clothilde? Dinner is ready."
The milk is gone and her sister's breathing is slowing. When Bertrand's tread sounds on the stairs, the witch begins a spell to make fire. It plays blue and orange over her fingertips.
Mercifully, the girl on the bed is dead before Bertrand reaches the top step. He calls to the witch, “Clothilde? What are you doing? Clothilde!” A note of panic and maybe even rage creeps into his voice when he sees the door to the second bedroom ajar; his knuckles whiten around the handle of the knife. His hurried steps are loud on the landing and he hits the door at a run, but the witch is ready for him, flames dancing in her palms.
* * * *
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Contributors
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David Blair's poems have appeared in AGNI, The Greensboro Review, International Poetry Review, and Chicago Review.
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Gwenda Bond is not a senior administration official. Her website is at bondgirl.blogspot.com.
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Hannah Wolf Bowen is a Philosophy major. Would you like fries with that?
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Philip Brewer speaks Esperanto and uses it to communicate with people all over the world. He graduated from Clarion in 2001.
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E. L. Chen works hard for the money, so you'd better treat her right. She has been previously published in On Spec and Challenging Destiny. Everything else that she doesn't mind you knowing can be found at www.geocities.com/elchensite.
F. Brett Cox is co-editor, with Andy Duncan, of Crossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic (Tor, 2004). He used to live an hour from the Gulf Coast in Alabama. He now lives an hour and a half from the Canadian border in Vermont. It's a good thing.
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Eliot Fintushel is an itinerant showman now living in Santa Rosa, CA, hard by the fairgrounds and between the transmission shops and the horse stalls. He has written many stories, published mostly in Asimov's. His work has been nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards. He has twice received the NEA Solo Performer Award. His current touring show, employing masks and ancient music in the original tongues, is Apocalypse, a solo performance comprising the entire Book of Revelation word for word in the translation commissioned by King James in 1611!
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Geoffrey Goodwin is a generous man who works in a bookshop outside Boston, MA. This is his second story for LCRW. He is not worried by this.
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Spencer Keralis grew up in Wyoming but now lives in Minneapolis, which is colder. His written work has appeared in The Dry Crik Review of Contemporary Cowboy Poetry, The Owen Wister Review, STET Magazine, and The Plastic Tower, among others. In another life he co-authored a textbook on Asynchronous Transfer Mode circuits now in use at a major telecommunications corporation, but that's a long story and really not very interesting.
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Mario Milosevic's poems and stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and in the anthology Poets Against the War. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, novelist Kim Antieau.
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Sarah Monette collects ghosts in books, pressing them between the leaves like dried flowers. She has sold stories to LCRW, Alchemy, Tales of the Unanticipated, All Hallows, and Lovecraft's Weird Mysteries. Her story “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” from LCRW 11, won the 2003 Gaylactic Spectrum Award.
K.Z. Perry's stories have recently appeared in MOTA 3: Courage, Talebones, Book of More Flesh, The Urban Bizarre, and Problem Child. She lives in New York.
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George Plimpton will be greatly missed.
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Rick Polney is an adjunct professor of English and Humanities, a former Army officer, a sometimes performance artist, and an unrepentant risk-taker. He is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop and studied writing under Chip Delany at Temple University. He has been published in TurboCharged Fortune Cookie and Schuylkill.
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Tim Pratt's first collection, Little Gods, will be dropping through your ceiling sometime soon. He is a frequent contributor to a host of magazines and has joined the publishing party as co-editor of Flytrap.
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Veronica Schanoes is from New York City. She won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Prize from the Academy of American Poets. This is her first non-academic publication. She's very, very pleased.
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David J. Schwartz is the reincarnation of a famous dancing bear who once entertained thousands of Bolivian mine workers. He is indigenous to the Midwestern United States, and traces of his spoor have appeared in On Spec and Flashquake.org. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop and prefers tea, thank you. He keeps a reading journal at snurri.blogspot.com, and he would be humbly pleased if you would read it.
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Lucy A. Snyder lives in Columbus, OH. Her writing has appeared in Chiaroscuro, Snow Monkey, Strange Horizons, The Midnighters’ Club, and Cumberland House's Guardian Angels anthology.
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Jason Stewart lives between the toes of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. With his two cats, he watches a tiny door in his living room which he has never opened, for fear of finding greebles. When he's not consumed by these fears, he spends his time at Colorado University where he works in the library and is finishing his BA in English. His work has appeared in Almagre, Riverrun, and BLAH.
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Karina Sumner-Smith is fairly sure you've never heard of her. That's okay. She forgives you.
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M. Thomas is a writer and teacher in Austin, Texas. She is a short story editor and contributor for the ezine Deep Magic. Her fiction has previously appeared in Deep Magic, Abyss & Apex, and Strange Horizons. She dabbles in magic realism, humor, and young adult fantasy. She maintains a website for writers at www.found-things.com, and welcomes your visit.
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Leslie What is a Jell-O artist and writer from Oregon. Her writing has won awards for drama, nonfiction, and fiction, including a Nebula Award for short story. Her comic novel, Olympic Games, will be published in 2004.
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Mieke M. Zuiderweg is a photojournalist in Western Massachusetts who is trying to work up the courage to walk away from taking pictures of angry mourners and burning buildings to pursue a career solely based on her photo illustrations and picture experiments. She resides in Northampton but is originally from the Netherlands. Hence the unpronounceable name.
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Website links and richer, deeper, more meaningful bios can be found on this page: lcrw.net/issues/lcrw13.htm
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Visit www.lcrw.net for information on
additional titles by this and other authors.
Table of Contents
Kukla Boogie Moon
Lunar Fate
The Changeling
The Faith of Metal in Ghosts
Home and Security
The Greebles
Dear Aunt Gwenda: Advice from a Better Time & Place
The Poor Man's Wife
Rowboats, Sacks of Gold
White Rabbit Triptych
Salesman
Legacy
Serpents
A Last Taste of Sweetness
Pinned
Sidhe Tigers
The Guest Film Column
The Magnificent Dachshund
Mama's Special Rice Tin
The Meat and the Mushrooms
Contributors
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Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 13 Page 14