So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction

by Christopher Barzak

  "I'm talking about a different evolution," Joe said. "I'm talking about the seals that followed the Scots across the sea when they settled here. The kind that ought to be extinct--"

  There was a silence. Margie said briskly, "Well, I really don't see the relevance--" Then she noticed his face, and stopped. She had only before seen an expression like that on a witness to a recent gruesome auto accident. "What is the matter with you?"

  "Gayle," he said.

  Margie turned, and saw that Gayle had risen out of the ocean like Aphrodite, and stood knee deep in water, naked, with her wetsuit under her arm. "Well, hello, brother," she said. "What brings you to this end of the island?"

  "I'm not your stinking brother!"

  "Stinking cousin, then," she said amiably.

  Joe seemed to lean toward her, like a dog about to bite, while simultaneously recoiling from her nudity. Riveted, Margie struggled not to laugh. "You did this to her!" he shouted.

  Gayle said mildly, "I got the girl, if that's what you mean."

  His head jerked, and he turned on Margie the horrified stare she had always feared. Folding her hands across the belly, she felt the baby give an idle kick. "Yes," she confirmed, and felt a giddy rush of euphoria.

  "But you don't know," he said. "You don't know what she is--"

  Margie said, "I do strongly suspect that she might be a lesbian." The waves crashed. Gayle uttered a snort of laughter. "There's not a thing you can do here, brother--cousin. Go home to the house you stole from me--go home to your warm, safe little fire and your two television stations. You've gotten everything you ever wanted, so go home and enjoy your little life."

  Breathing heavily, as though her contempt had struck him a physical blow, Joe stood swaying. Then, he turned and said weakly, reaching for the arm that Margie hastily snatched out of reach, "Come with me, please. You have no idea what she's capable of."

  Gayle was a dark, still figure, her shape defined by the writhing, vivid sea.

  Margie said, "Don't be ridiculous." She saw him give up, a physical movement, almost like collapse. He walked away.

  Without speaking, Gayle and Margie watched him travel toward the little bastion of house and harbor, where even the boats were anchored. Margie felt an impulse to make a joke, but Gayle's silence was too profound, too strange. Her shadowed face had an unsettling expression: not angry or distant, but simply alien; an expression utterly undomesticated.

  Margie said, "Let's go in." She wanted the light of the lantern, the interplay of clever voices on National Public Radio. "We'll have some corn and peaches with our fish."

  Gayle nodded, distant. From across the restless water, voices seemed to call: Gayle, Gayle, Gayle. She turned and looked out to sea. "A storm is coming. Do you hear the seals?"

  "I'm afraid I haven't really listened to the weather reports."

  Gayle abruptly took Margie's hand; her skin was cold and wet, but she did not seem chilled. "Corn and peaches," she said. "Sounds good."

  ---

  When Margie's contractions began, Gayle was out in the ocean. Margie went down to the beach to look for her, and got herself trapped there, lying among the frosty stones as the contractions washed over her like the sea washing over the beach. October had arrived all of a sudden, and now a bitter wind blew across open ocean, all the way from the Arctic. The trees crowded beyond the beach, shivering in their scarlet costumes. The ocean crashed into shore, and the spray seemed to freeze in the air, suffusing the light with glowing particles of ice. Margie felt lifted out of the cold, out of herself. The ocean drew back, then came rushing forward again, and drew back, now leaving behind a half dozen visitors to land. The seals undulated out of the water, humping their bodies across the stones. More arrived behind them. They surrounded her: gray as salt-aged cedar, speckled with bits of white and black, earless, with deep, human eyes. They enclosed her and ended her solitude, making her one of them. She lay fearless in their midst as the tide of contractions washed over her.

  On a bitter beach, surrounded by the seals, Margie felt the baby break free of its harbor. The seal beside her rolled onto its side and Gayle emerged naked from its belly. The living flesh that had enveloped her fell slack, like an empty costume. She carried the seal skin into the rocks where it would be secure, and returned a woman, though her eyes were still the eyes of a seal. She sat beside Margie, holding her hand as the contractions, nearly continuous now, rolled across her like waves herded before a storm wind. She told her a story:

  Many years ago, an island girl found an injured seal in the harbor, and she began to feed him fish stolen from her father's nets. The island people had long since forgotten that the fin folk were their kin, but still, the selkie came to trust the girl so that he dared to drop his skin, and the girl came to love him, so that one day she turned up pregnant. When her child was born a selkie, she would not give her daughter to the sea, even though the father came for her. Out of revenge, perhaps, he seduced the island girl's sister, and she also bore a selkie child. Both mothers hid their children's sealskins away, and the entire island conspired to forget that they were selkie children, though I suppose that in their dreams the old ones still remember. The two children grew up in the same house, both of them loving the sea, and--this is the part you know--the girl became a competitive swimmer for a time. Still, her heart yearned for the island, and she felt that part of herself was missing, though she did not fully understand why, until one day she came home for her mother's funeral and found the sealskins hidden away in the attic.

  By then, she and her half brother were the last of their family alive. She put on her skin and went home to the sea, but he built a bonfire on the beach and burned, not just his skin, but his soul to ashes. He hates me because he hates himself, and I hate him for his cowardice. So we have been enemies for twenty years.

  But the choice I made was a lonely one, Margie. The seals do not remember that they once were human, and the humans don't remember that they once were seals. Me, I am alone in both worlds: on land or in sea, I am the only selkie. I know now what moved my father to get his children on these island women: human sperm will not kindle in me, and with seals I am fertile but only to bear seals. In one of my many skins, I am a man, and I thought what I did would be no different from what a sea urchin does, when he sends his sperm out upon the waters, to find an egg or die. Margie, I am your baby's father. Margie uttered a shout, for the seal child was emerging: sleek and soft, with ancient, gentle eyes. As it broke loose from her, her old English-teacher self enveloped her. Smothered in this heavy and unyielding skin, she struggled, but she fit the skin so easily and it felt so safe and familiar that she quickly succumbed to it. I am myself again, she thought, and saw the seal child in Gayle's embrace, and she screamed with horror and could not stop screaming.

  ---

  Going mad and running away to a remote island for five months, pedestrian though it had seemed at the time, began to seem rather lurid and romantic in retrospect. Like with most lurid romances, the appeal of it was a mystery to outsiders. So Margie, now an outsider to herself as she lay in Gayle's shack recovering from childbirth, considered the past months with a bewildered embarrassment. What in the world had come over her? Periwinkles and sea lettuce for breakfast? She could not imagine how she could have been so contented in this shabby and most unsanitary shack. And as for Gayle, had she always been so reserved?

  Gayle scarcely left the shack. She kept the fire burning, produced food, changed diapers, and heated water for baths. Margie slept, nursed the red-haired baby, and sang to her sleepily, a lullaby Tennyson had embedded in a longer poem:

  ---

  Sweet and low, sweet and low,

  Wind of the western sea,

  Low, low, breathe and blow,

  Wind of the western sea!

  Over the rolling waters go,

  Come from the dying moon, and blow,

  Blow him again to me;

  While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

&nb
sp; When she was awake, she talked about the spare bedroom in her apartment, which she'd paint and fill with baby furniture, now that she was herself again.

  Gayle was cooking the laundry on the stovetop, stirred it with a wooden spoon and said, almost inaudibly, "There is so much you don't seem to remember."

  Of course, the entire birth was a haze to Margie now, a hallucinatory memory that included peace and fear but not pain. Gayle had been there, though, she remembered that clearly, putting the baby into Margie's arms, saying, "Look, there's nothing wrong with her; she's perfect. Let's get you both inside."

  There had been something wrong with Gayle's face, though. Margie shook her head, unable to remember what had been wrong. "It's a blur," she admitted. "But it's over now, and everything's fine."

  The baby uttered a squawk in her basket by the fire, and Gayle bent over and picked her up. "What, hungry again?" she said to the baby. Her face seemed unutterably sad.

  "You will come back to Somerville with me," Margie said. "I've got plenty of room, and I'll help you find a job--"

  Gayle said, "I think you should name her Ianthe."

  Margie was surprised; she would never have expected that Gayle would be versed in Greek mythology. "Because she was born on the beach?" she said.

  "Because she is a daughter of the sea," said Gayle.

  Margie said, "Isn't it best if we return to the mainland as soon as we can, before the winter storms? I'm sure I should bring her to a doctor, get a birth certificate.... And I should call my mother, for heaven's sake--she probably thinks I've dropped off the face of the earth."

  Gayle said, "But a nor'easter is bearing down on us right now, and it'll be a few days before it'll be safe to make the crossing." Gayle brought the snuffling baby to Margie. Gayle's eyes and the baby's eyes were the same: a blue so dark the iris almost disappeared. The sperm donor also had blue eyes and red hair; Margie had chosen him specifically for that unusual coloring, and because he was an athlete. It was indeed remarkable that Margie's prepartum mania had brought her to this island, to be befriended by this woman who looked so much like the child.

  Margie said, "Why are you so sad?"

  "I'm not sad," Gayle said. "To have a child is such a gift. How could anyone be sad?"

  ---

  At dawn on the day they would be leaving, Margie awoke to a strange sensation of emptiness and silence. Their gear lay in a pile by the door, covered with a tarp lest the storm wind blow rain in through the cracks as was its habit, ready to be hauled to where Gayle's boat waited in the harbor. Sunlight gleamed in the cracks; the sun was well risen. Margie sat up in bed and called, "Gayle?"

  The ocean, still turbulent from the storm now passed, crashed upon the stones. The baby made no sound in her basket. Margie crawled over to the warm place by the stove, and found the basket empty, except for Gayle's Olympic gold medal, laid there deliberately like a payment or a message. Besides the baby and Gayle's wetsuit, nothing else was missing, not even the baby's blanket or the box of disposable diapers.

  Panicked, Margie dressed in haste and went out into the cold sunlight, but no voice returned her shout, and no one moved among the trees or along the shore. Inside the shack again, she threw a few things into the pink bucket: diapers, the baby's blanket, a first-aid kit. She set off, almost running, along the shore to the harbor, but she tired quickly and soon could scarcely walk. In the hour it took her to follow the island shoreline to the settlement, Gayle had surely journeyed far out to sea, and the baby would get hypothermia in this bitter wind.

  She found Joe down at the harbor, working on his boat in dry dock. He didn't have to look at the cluster of bobbing boats moored offshore to be able to answer Margie's question. "No, she ain't been here. Her boat broke its mooring during the storm and washed up on the rocks." He pointed at the lobster boat that lay crazily tilted upon the shore near the harbor entrance, deposited there by the strong winds and storm tide. "It might still be seaworthy, but it'll take the whole town to get it back in the water."

  "Joe, she's taken the baby."

  Joe said, "And now you're surprised."

  "She must still be here on the island, somewhere."

  "She took her skin with her, didn't she?"

  "She's not swimming with a baby! In this rough sea! Unless she's stolen a boat, she's still on the island."

  Joe looked as shocked as Margie's students would have looked if she had uttered an obscenity at the chalkboard. "Steal a boat? Steal a boat?"

  "Are you going to help me find them or not? For god's sake, Joe, I gave birth not six days ago."

  Joe put his hands in his pockets and looked grimly out to sea. "All right. But you listen, Margie. . ."

  She wasn't listening, though. She was a high school English teacher; she could tune out almost anything. Later, she would try to remember what he had said, and to what she had consented, but her memory was like a muted television show. She could see Joe's mouth move, but no sound came out. Instead, she heard her own impatient thoughts: Why had Gayle walked out on her like this, and what did she want with the baby? What was she planning to feed her; with what would she diaper her? If she had some kind of problem with raising the child in a fully furnished room equipped with modern electricity, why hadn't she simply said so? What did Gayle want from her? Surely Gayle had not expected Margie to remain mad forever.

  ---

  It was a gorgeous day, but cold. Margie managed to trail Joe halfway around the island, though she could no longer manage to climb the rocks, to cling to their slippery surfaces while the ocean covered her with its bitter rain, peering over and around the places where ocean meets stone, searching for some sign. Why Joe was so convinced that they would find Gayle and the baby here at the water's edge, Margie couldn't imagine, but she finally gave up the argument when he turned on her and shouted, "Do you think I don't know my own cousin's queer ways? Do you want my help or don't you?" Margie sat beside the trail, which was scarcely wider than a single foot, and waited for Joe to come back. She had never in her life waited for a man before.

  She felt a dull pain in her heart. Her breasts ached, and she knew that more than enough time had passed for the baby to freeze to death. Numbly, she waited, and Joe came, and they walked some more, then he went down to the shore to search again, and she waited again. The sun was setting, and here on the windward side of the island the cold cut to the bone.

  Once, she had almost loved this stalwart, ungenerous island, but she could not remember that now, no more than she could remember how the sea had once courted her favor. She only knew that she had been a fool, and perhaps had been made a fool of. Oddly, she longed for a policeman, though it surely would be mortifying to have to explain what had happened.

  On this side of the island, the wind-driven waves crashed into unyielding stone with shattering explosions of sound. Numbed by cold and misery, Margie was slow to notice the sound of voices, almost inaudible beneath the crash of waves. She came to her feet and ran confusedly through the rocks. Was that Joe's voice, or Gayle's? Or was it the barking of seals carried on the wind? And then she teetered above the shoreline, thwarted by an impassable ledge.

  The light of the setting sun set the maple leaves ablaze behind her, and the ocean aflame before her. Despite all this garish light, the long shadows of encroaching night lay across the shoreline, and the writhing shapes in the water shifted and changed so that Margie could make no sense of them. Perhaps that was Joe, gesturing grandiosely, knee deep in water. Perhaps that was Gayle he struggled with, or perhaps they were only senseless shadows. Perhaps they were seals, all of them, and there was nothing human down there at all. Perhaps that was a gun shot, or perhaps merely a wave crashing. And now the sky went dark, and the dark shapes she might have seen, flailing or fleeing or spasming in death, were gone. The waves drew back, the ocean gave a sigh, the seals fell silent, and nothing was left.

  Laurie J. Marks is the author of Dancing Jack, The Watcher's Mask, and the Children of the Triadâ series, among oth
er works. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in the SF Revu and other journals, and she teaches composition, creative writing, and science fiction at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Laurie has caused a stir in the fantasy publishing world with her unfolding Elemental Logic series, which has earned her a Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Laurie is a third generation California who now lives in a 112-year old Victorian house on the outskirts of Boston with her wife, Deb Mensinger. Visit her web site, LaurieJMarks.com

  Isis in Darkness

  Christopher Barzak

  She called herself Isis, though her real name was Iris, and her last name was even worse. Smith. Nothing doing. How do you wake up with a name like that and be happy for the next sixteen hours? Add a crooked front tooth, a habit of chewing your fingernails, a falling-down drunk father, and an uncanny inability to flunk tests. It couldn't get worse, or else it could. She tried not to think of what might be worse.

  So Isis it was once she reached the city and found herself sleeping in an abandoned church with several other squatters: Lola, Meph, and Rem. They were all kids, really. Isis at sixteen was the youngest. Lola and Meph were a few months older, but Rem was nearly eighteen and that first day he saw her as she stepped down from the bus, he had noticed the strands of light surrounding her, fine filaments of magic. She was an Orphyn, he realized immediately, and although Isis did not know what it meant to be an Orphyn at that moment, she had felt the effects of being one her entire life.

  "You know it's bad luck to look like that around here," Rem said as he approached her. Isis looked from side to side. Are you talking to me? written across her eyes, her cheeks, her trembling bottom lip. "Yeah you," said Rem. He extended his hand.