by Nick Mamatas
She kept thinking of the way he’d spoken the name Lydia. She’d heard that note—the longing for his absent wife—his loneliness, alone with his daughter in the wilderness. But he’d chosen this life for them—to live undisturbed by others. Free.
Her kerosene lamp gave little light in the attic. It was early March. The windows were shuttered for the season. Overhead the wind blew across the roof. A blizzard, she knew—no, it wasn’t her knowing that. The deep instinct told her. She hated the blizzards, hated the way they buried the house and trapped her inside. If he were home when it started, he’d stay—but otherwise, he dug shelter where he could, and she was alone.
She tugged on an onion string. All winter, she’d thought about him—as they slept in their beds, and as they sang together. She saw how he looked at her. He was thinking it too, and probably hating himself. A father and daughter—no, that couldn’t be. But she wasn’t his daughter. She was Amanda Barnes, whether he believed her or not.
The string broke. Onions tumbled to the floor. One rolled behind the cornmeal barrel. Amanda hunted it down and scooped it up like a runaway softball. She used to play softball—when was that? In her past, which was now her future. She felt shaky as the wind howled. The blizzard was coming. He would take shelter somewhere, and she was alone.
Amanda cradled the rough onion in her hand. Every crop was hard-fought. Each onion grew from his sweat, as he worked to feed them both. Tears ran down her face. Winter was driving her mad—hands scratching inside her, a voice trying to shout, a feeling colder than snowdrifts. Something hateful rose inside her like a ghost, until she thought she would burst.
She threw the onion against the wall. It’s March that does this to me, she thought, only March. She wanted to vanish into the snow with this magic body. A wish—but wishes were powdery snow melting in sunlight, gone before a season ended. If she could wish herself into happier times—but she knew no spells, and the body only seemed to do household magic. The things it knew, perhaps, from when Lydia was here.
But now it was Amanda’s body. She was stuck in this house, this time. This life was hers—to suffer through, or to find happiness. She picked up the onion. “My name is Amanda Barnes,” she said aloud. That man was not her father, and she could do as she pleased. No one would stop her.
The wrong wish is a dangerous spell, cold like ice. It traps the careless. It freezes you under the surface and never melts. I made a mistake. I need my body back.
Downstairs, the door crashed open. Amanda dropped the onion. Lydia’s father stumbled in with a swirl of snow, his arm clutched across his coat. His hand pressed bloody snow against his shoulder.
“Lydia,” he called, “I’ve shot myself.”
The girl scrambled down the attic ladder. He staggered to his chair and shrugged his coat off. He tore his shirt away, ripping the stitches like paper. The wound was more blood than injury. She grabbed strips of cloth and put water on the stove. He would live—but her body was cold, like the blizzard had swept inside the house.
“An accident,” he said. “My own fault—careless. So distracted—aahh!”
He sucked in his breath as she cleaned his wound with water. “No. Bring whiskey.”
She fetched the bottle from the shelf. He poured it over his shoulder, hissing when the alcohol burned the wound. The brown liquid mixed with blood and ran down his arm. He took a swig of whiskey. He swirled the liquor in the bottle, and drank three more times.
She took the whiskey. Her hands shook. The wind rattled the shutters. Behind his back she took a drink herself. The liquid burned her throat and warmed her, like she hadn’t felt for months. She drank again, to drive away March, and loneliness, and the dark hatefulness inside her.
“More,” he muttered, and she handed it back. He drank deeply, leaving the bottle half-full. He set it down. “I’m fine. Help me wrap the wound.”
The girl obeyed, and the magic worked—her hands knew where to put the cloth, where to tighten or leave loose. The whiskey burned inside her like a kerosene lamp flame—banishing darkness, past, and future. There was only this moment, touching his skin, easing his pain. His breathing slowed, and his muscles relaxed. When she finished, she pulled her chair over and leaned on his good shoulder. She might have lost him, she realized, and she would have been alone—with the blizzard, and the cabin, and a lifetime stretching ahead of her.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he said. He took her hand and squeezed it. Her heart raced. She leaned over to kiss his cheek. He turned his head to say something—and she brushed against his mouth.
I can do what I want, Amanda thought fiercely. She kissed his lips, her tongue exploring their closed line. He moaned once, then opened to her. Their tongues fought inside him, tasting of whiskey.
Amanda stroked his hair. The room floated around her. “Shh,” she said, moving her mouth away. “It’s all right.” The instinct inside her screamed no, you can’t—and she silenced it. This was her life now.
He grabbed her waist and pulled her onto his lap. He plowed into her mouth like a starving man. Amanda’s breath quickened. His hardness pressed through his workpants against her leg. She wondered if this body could hex him. Her hand slid up his thigh, brushing against—
He shoved her away. She tumbled to the floor, bruising her hip. He reeled against the chair and clutched his forehead. “Oh, God, oh Mary, Jesus—” he muttered.
Amanda crawled away. The room spun. His voice rang over the crackling fire: “We can never do that again, do you hear me? Never.” He yanked the door open. Blizzard winds swirled in. He swore and slammed the door, not looking at her. “Go to the attic. Stay away. Go away.”
“I’m not your daughter!”
“Stop it!”
“My name is Amanda Barnes—”
“Stop it!”
She couldn’t. The words poured out like blood, staining the space between them. “Don’t you see how I’ve changed? I’m not her anymore. I love you. Look at me—you know I’m not her!”
He whirled around, and she read doubt in his eyes. For a moment, she dared believe. Then his expression hardened, like he’d built a barrier against her—against himself. “It’s not possible.”
“I swear it’s true. You know it’s true.”
“We can never be that way. No matter what we want.” He pulled the Bible off the shelf and went to his bed. He faced the wall and opened the book. He didn’t turn the pages.
Never. She could never have what she wanted, never leave, never hope. Deep inside her, something clawed to get out. It was that instinct, that voice—the one she’d trusted until now. Amanda glanced at the attic ladder, but it was too hard to climb. She stumbled to her bed and collapsed, drunk and exhausted. Her stomach heaved, but she kept its contents down. Even when she closed her eyes, she was spinning out of control. She couldn’t fight anymore. The darkness would bury her—like this damned cabin under ten feet of snow.
No, you can’t—I won’t let you—
She was fighting for her life, the girl: only one body for both of them, two minds in the same magic flesh—one born there, and one summoned against her will. It should have been an exchange—Lydia’s wish come true. The spell should have let her escape her hated life. It had been the wrong wish. The wrong wish could kill.
Lydia’s spell failed, and she had paid for it. Trapped under Amanda’s presence, she’d waited, cold as burial, imprisoned inside her own flesh. Somewhere in the future was a soulless body—Amanda’s body, the one Lydia wanted. She knew now: her magic couldn’t take her there. But it could still free her from this self-made prison.
She waited until Amanda was weak. The fight was brief—the body’s magic ran deep like a well, and Lydia knew how to tap it. Amanda did not, and was defenseless. Lydia rose from the icy place inside and summoned power from her own blood. She started with her fingertips, the muscles clenching at her command, and worked her way into the body’s organs. She wrapped Amanda in tendons and bile before pushin
g her into darkness. Lydia buried her in the body, grieving. Her guilt was a stain she would never scrub out. But she felt her life returning, once she controlled her body again.
Lydia woke in her familiar bed. It was night. Her head felt fuzzy, like she’d woken from a bad dream. Her tongue was cotton-dry. She looked toward her father’s empty bed. A candle stub cast its light across the patchwork quilt. Next to it stood the empty whiskey bottle, reflecting the flame into a shining stripe.
She sat up, wondering where he might be. Then she knew—by instinct, like breathing. She knew where he was, the way she knew what he wanted.
A shadow crossed in front of the flickering candle. A breath touched her face, smelling of liquor. His hands pressed her shoulders against the bed. “No,” Lydia whispered, sick with whiskey and buried desire. Her stomach lurched as her fingers curled toward him. “No, we can’t—we can’t—”
He said, “Oh God.” The candle went out.
Vylar Kaftan’s fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, ChiZine, and Abyss & Apex. She lives in northern California and volunteers as a mentor for teenaged writers. She blogs at www.vylarkaftan.net
URCHINS, WHILE SWIMMING
Catherynne M. Valente
On the third day the ardent hermit
Was sitting by the shore, in love,
Awaiting the enticing mermaid,
As shade was lying on the grove.
Dark ceded to the sun’s emergence;
By then the monk had disappeared,
No one knew where, and only urchins,
While swimming, saw a hoary beard.
—Aleksandr Pushkin
Rusalka, 1819
I: Snail Into Shell
Rybka, you have to wake up.
At night she always called me rybka. At night, when she shook me awake in my thin bed and the dirt-smeared window was a sieve for the light of the bone-picked stars, she whispered and stroked my temples and said: rybka, rybka, wake up, you have to wake up. I would rub my eyes and with heavy limbs hunch to the edge of the greyed mattress, hang my head over the side. She would be waiting with a big copper kettle, a porcelain basin, the best and most beautiful of the few things we owned. She would be waiting, and while I looked up at the stars through a scrim of window-mud and window-ice, she would wet my hair.
She was my mother, she was kind, the water was always warm.
The kettle poured its steaming stream over my scalp, that old water like sleep spreading over my long black hair. Her hands were so sure, and she wet every strand—she did not wash it, understand, only pulled and combed the slightly yellow water from our creaking faucet through my tangles.
Rybka, I’m sorry, poor darling. I’m so sorry. Go back to sleep.
And she would coil my slippery hair on the pillow like loose rope on the deck of a ship, and she would sing to me until I was asleep again, and her voice was like stones falling into a deep lake:
Bayu, bayushki bayu
Ne lozhisya na krayu
Pridet serenkiy volchok
Y ukusit za bochek
In the morning, she called me always by my name, Kseniya, and her eyes would be worry-wrinkled—and her hair would be wet, too. While she scraped a pale, translucent sliver of precious butter over rough, hard-crusted bread, I would draw a bath, filling the high-sided tub to its bright brim. We ate our breakfast slick-haired in the nearly warm water, curled into each other’s bodies, snail into shell, while the bath sloshed over onto the kitchen floor, which was also the living room floor and the bathroom floor and my mother’s bedroom floor—she gave me the little closet which served as a second room.
In the evening, if we had meat, she would fry it slowly and we would savor the smell together, to make the meal last. If we did not, she would tell me a story about a princess who had a bowl which was never empty of sweet, roasted chickens while I slurped a thin soup of cabbage and pulpy pumpkin and saved bathwater. Sometimes, when my mother spoke low and gentle over the green soup, it tasted like birds with browned, sizzling skin. All day, she sponged my head, the trickle ticklish as sweat. The back of my dress clung slimy to my skin.
Before bed, she would pass my head under the faucet, the cold water splashing on my scalp like a slap. And then the waking, always the waking, and hour or two past midnight.
Rybka, I’m sorry, you have to wake up.
My childhood was a world of wetness, and I loved the smell of my mother’s ever-dripping hair.
One night, she did not come to wet my hair. I woke up myself, my body wound like a clock by years of kettles and basins. The stars were salt-crystals floating in the window’s mire. I crept out of my room and across the freezing floor like the surface of a winter lake. My mother lay in her bed, her back turned to the night.
Her hair was dry.
It was yellowy-brown, the color of old nut-husks—I was shocked. I had never seen it un-darkened by water. I touched it and she did not move. I turned her face to me and it did not move against my hand, or murmur to me to go back to sleep, or call me rybka—water dribbled out of her mouth and onto the blankets. Her eyes were dark and shallow.
Mama, you have to wake up.
I soaked up the water with the edge of the bedsheet. I pulled her to me; more water fell from her.
Mamochka, I’m sorry, you have to wake up.
Her head sagged against my arm. I didn’t cry, but drew a bath in the dark, feeling the water for a ghost of warmth in the stream. It was hard—I was always so thin and small, then!—but I pulled my mother from her bed and got her into the tub, though the water splashed and my arms ached and she did not move, she did not move as I dragged her across the cold floor, she did not move as I pushed her over the lip of the bath. She floated there, and I pulled the water through her hair until it was black again, but her eyes did not swim up out of themselves. I peeled off my nightgown, soaked with her mouth-water, and climbed in after her, curling into her body as we always did, snail into shell. Her skin was clammy and thick against my cheek.
Rybka, wake up. It’s time to wet my hair.
There was no sound but the tinkling ripple of water and the stars dripping through the window-sieve. I closed my mother’s eyes and tucked my head up under her chin. I pulled her arms around me like blankets. And I sang to her, while the bath beaded on her skin, slowly blooming blue.
Bayu, bayushki bayu
Ne lozhisya na krayu
Pridet serenkiy volchok
Y ukusit za bochek
II: The Ardent Hermit
I met Artyom at university, where I combed my hair into a tight braid so that it would hold its moisture through anatomy lectures, pharmacopeial lectures, stitching and bone-setting demonstrations. At lunch I would wait until all the others had gone, and put my head under the spotless bathroom sink. Pristine, colorless water rushed over my brow like a comforting hand.
There were no details worth recounting: I tutored him in tumors and growths, one of the many ways I kept myself in copper kettles and cabbage soup. This is not important. How do we begin to remember? One day he was not there, the next day his laugh was a constant crow on my shoulder. One day I did not love a man named Artyom, the next day I loved him, and between the two days there is nothing but air.
Artyom ate the same thing every day: smoked fish, black bread, blueberries folded in a pale green handkerchief. He wore the spectacles of a man twice his age, and his hair was yellowy-brown. He had a thin little beard, a large nose and kept his tie very neatly. He once shared his lunch with me: I found the blueberries sour, too soft.
“When I was a girl,” I said slowly, “there were no blueberries where we lived, and we would not have been able to buy them if there were. Instead I ate pumpkin, to keep parasites from chewing my belly into a honeycomb after the war. I ate pumpkin until I could not stand the sight of it, the dusty wet smell of it. I think I am too old, now, to love blueberries, and too old to see pumpkins and not think of worms.”
Artyom blinked at me. His book lay open to a cross-
section of the thyroid, the green wind off of the Neva rifling through the pages and the damp tail of my braid. He took back his blueberries.
When there was snow on the dome of St. Isaac’s and the hooves of the Bronze Horseman were shoed in ice, he lay beside me on his own thin mattress and clumsily poured out the water of his tin kettle over my hair, catching the runoff in an old iron pot.
“You have to wake me in the night, Artyom. It is important. Do you promise to remember?”
“Of course, Ksyusha, but why? This is silly, and you will get my bed all wet.”
I propped myself up on one elbow, the river-waves of my hair tumbling over one bare breast, a trickle winding its way from skin to linen. “If I can trust you to do this thing for me, then I can love you. Is that not reason enough?”
“If you can trust me to do this thing, then you can trust me to know why it must be done. Does that not seem obvious?”
He was so sweet then, with his thin chest and his clean fingernails. His woolen socks and his over-sugared tea. The sharp inward curve of his hip. I told him—why should I not? Steam rose from my scalp and he stroked my calves while I told him about my mother, how she was called Vodzimira, and how when she was young she lived in a little village in the Urals before the war and loved a seminary student with thick eyebrows named Yefrem, how she crushed thirteen yellow oxlips with her body when he laid her down under the larch trees.
Mira, Mira, he said to her then, I will never forget how the light looks on your stomach in this moment, the light through the larch leaves and the birch branches. It looks like water, as though you are a little brook into which I am always falling, always falling.