“No, though that’s very smart to think so. No, hurricanes have women’s names because women can call the storms out at sea, where hurricanes are born. They can whistle up the wind to make a storm wild, or they can bare their breasts to the storm, and send it back to sleep.”
I liked the storms that whipped the waves into white and terrible foam, that washed all sorts of interesting things—dull-eyed dead fish that looked far stranger than anything I’d ever seen in an aquarium, large twists of driftwood like some great underwater forest, pieces of glass made smooth—up onto our beach. And I was eleven, and didn’t understand hurricanes, not then.
I whistled. Loud and hard as I could, running to the window, so that I could get closer to the storm, so that the ocean would hear me.
My mother rushed to my side and clapped her hand over my mouth. “Mara, no!”
I relaxed my lips, waiting for her to take her hand away. “Why not?”
“Because you are my ocean girl. If you call the storm, it will come in, and where would we put it, in this house?” She smiled as she gestured at the walls, and I agreed that it didn’t seem like a storm would fit, not without breaking the dishes anyway, though a part of me longed to try. To whistle and wait for the storm to answer. I pursed my lips as I stood by the window, but kept silent.
I remember one other thing from that storm. I remember waking because the howling of the wind had stopped. Everything had grown quiet—so quiet that absence of sound was its own roar.
I crept from my bed. I wanted to go outside, to see what had happened to the hurricane, to Abigail. I wanted to whistle her back up. But there was my mother, standing at the edge of our property, where the straggly grasses turned fully into sand. She had slid the top of her nightgown off, so that it gathered around her waist, and stood, her bare breasts facing the ocean. Facing the now-quiet storm.
She didn’t seem like my mother, standing like that. She seemed like something else. Something great and terrible.
My mouth opened, and I drew breath in to call to her, but instead I stepped backwards, as quiet as I could, and crept back into bed. I didn’t sleep. Not until I heard the door creak open, and my mother’s feet on the wooden floor.
• • • •
The wind picks up. I hear it, whistling through the night, through the cracked windows and gaps in the shingles. I whistle back. I want a storm. I want to raise my voice to the wind and howl along with it.
I open the windows wider. There is a splash as I step, a skittering. My footprint is a tide pool on the wooden floor, a spiral-shelled hermit crab running sideways from it.
There is a tide inside me, too—a pulling at my blood, the moon calling the salt water that courses in my veins.
Another splash, and another tiny piece of ocean where I step. The water runs out, toward the beach.
• • • •
“I don’t like that story,” I tell my mom. “Being a human is stupid and boring. Being a mermaid is cool. She shouldn’t have traded.”
“But she loved the prince. She loved him very much, and the only way they could be together is if she was a human. So she changed because she loved him.” Mom closed the book and set it on my nightstand.
“Why couldn’t he turn into a mermaid?” I asked. “I mean, if they loved each other and so someone had to change, why did she have to become human? Mermaids are cooler.”
“It doesn’t always work like that,” Mom said. “Sometimes people only have one shape. Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough.”
“Well, I still think that if he couldn’t become a mermaid, she should have stayed one. She could have found a mermaid to love. That would have been okay, too.”
“It doesn’t always work like that, either, Mara,” she said. “Sometimes you love someone so much, it changes the very shape of you, whether you want it to or not.”
• • • •
My hair is soaked with salt water. It feels like kelp, like sea-wrack plastered against my skin. The scent of the ocean, mineral sharp and heavy, fills the air.
I never knew my father. He was a tide that went only in one direction, and that was away from us. So I don’t know if it’s from him that I am what I seem to be becoming—a small ocean bound in skin, a tide going out—or if this sea change is some other thing. I don’t know if he was a human who just didn’t want to stay, or if he was a selkie my mother wept over, more than seven tears, as she gave him back his sealskin, or if he was a storm, calmed at the sight of her.
I asked. Of course I asked. It’s so much more interesting to think of a father who is a merman or a sea monster or a tide than to think of him as a man who walked away.
I never thought to ask my mother what she was. She was there, after all.
A gust of wind blows through my chest, and flings open the door in front of me. The moon silvers a path across the surface of the ocean. I walk toward it.
• • • •
Here was one story my mother told me: “Once upon a time, there were two monsters who each lived on either side of a narrow bay. One who had many tentacles that could grab a ship and drown it. Another who was so enormous that she could drink down the entire ocean and swallow everything in it. And there was a ship, trying to sail home, and the only way to get home was to pass between the two monsters.”
“But how did the ship leave?” I asked. “It must have gotten past the monsters once.”
“Sometimes they hide,” she said, “and so you don’t know there’s danger until it’s too late.”
Here was another: “Once upon a time, there was a sailor who set out to discover the edge of the world, where the water poured over into nothingness.”
And another: “Once upon a time, there was an island full of beautiful voices, so enchanting that no sailor could go past it, but would instead steer their boat onto the rocks.”
So many of her stories were of someone lost at sea, someone never coming home. I didn’t realize at the time that they were also stories of the sea stealing someone away. Luring them onto the rocks, trapping them between monsters, drowning them, even, if that was what was necessary to keep them on the waves, and not on the sand.
• • • •
I walk out past the sea grass and onto the beach, into the wind. The roar of the waves is a summons—no, a welcome. Here, here, here, the waves say to me as they break upon the beach.
I cough, and a fish slides, silvery and finned, into my hand, flopping and gasping now that it is here in the air. I drop it in one of the pools of salt water that have formed behind me.
I am a tide pool myself. My bones are corals beneath my skin. Here, here, here, I tell the ocean. I am coming.
• • • •
This is the story that my mother told me the most. It was about mermaids—all of my favorite stories were about mermaids. I wanted nothing more than to be able to live under the sea.
It was about a mermaid who sang, and the sound of her voice was so beautiful that anyone who heard it would follow it into the waves.
“But not drown?” I asked, even when I knew the answer, because that was the magic part to me.
“No, not drown. The mermaid’s song was so beautiful that it turned the person who heard it into the sea.”
“To be salt water and waves.”
Mom nodded. “To be salt water and waves and to be just like an ocean.”
“Except …”
“Except if someone called out, and interrupted the mermaid’s song, then the person wouldn’t turn into an ocean. Then they would drown.”
I shivered with delight under the covers. It seemed so perfect, so perilous.
• • • •
After my mother disappeared, even though by then I was eighteen and too old for games, I would play a game I called mermaid. I would walk into the ocean, and then swim out as far as I could. Then I would float, singing songs to myself, pretending that I was a mermaid, that I could sing to myself and turn into salt water and waves. Eventually, if I didn’
t hear anyone, I’d turn and swim home.
But if I heard a voice, and I would swim down deep. I would sit on the bottom of the sand, watching the sun streak through the water like stained glass above me. I would sit down there until my lungs ached, until my head felt like it would burst from lack of breath. Until my rise back to the surface and air would feel as if I had drowned because it hurt so much to breathe.
I did it because sometimes when I stayed down there long enough, I felt like I was hearing voices. Like maybe, just maybe, there was a mermaid singing to me. Like maybe, just maybe, the mermaid was my mother.
On those days, I would weep at least seven tears, bitter as salt, into the sea.
• • • •
I wasn’t there when my mother disappeared. I came home from work, two days after my eighteenth birthday, a Wednesday in that hot sticky summer between high school and college, whistling, and telling myself that the anemic breeze that I felt was the beginning of a storm I was calling up.
The house was quiet. There was a slick of water in the kitchen, iridescent scales floating on its surface.
“Mom?”
No answer.
The back door, the one that lead out to the beach, was open. There were … there were what looked like drag marks, leading down to the waves.
“Mom?” Barely a whisper this time, as if something had stolen my voice.
And then I ran, and I ran to the shore and I ran into the water and I swam out as far as I could, calling for her, tears running salt down my face.
They were kind. They called it a disappearance, and not the other word that gets used when a woman goes into the water alone and doesn’t come back. I tried to tell them about the marks on the sand, but I had run through them, and the only marks were my own.
I didn’t tell them that I heard my mom’s voice on the wind, singing in the storm.
Or that she’d left the copy of The Little Mermaid by my bed. That she’d scrawled a message inside the front cover: I stayed as long as I could. I love you, my Mara. My ocean girl.
• • • •
I am whistling up the wind and the tide is pouring from my hair and I am weeping pearls and when I look down into the moon-streaked water, I cannot see my feet. I am salt water and I am tide and then, above the storm, I hear my mother’s voice.
“Mara,” she says, and it is bitter as salt, bitter as the sea, but she is a mermaid and I am the ocean, and she is singing, singing.
*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kat Howard is the author of Roses and Rot, named one of the best SFF books of Summer ’16 by Publishers Weekly. Saga Press will also be publishing her next novel in late summer ’17, and a short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, in early 2018. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, is available from Subterranean Press. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and performed on NPR.
*
Daddy Long Legs of the Evening
Jeffrey Ford | 3632 words
It was said that when he was a small child, asleep in his bed one end-of-summer night, a spider crawled into his ear, traversed a maze of canals, eating slowly through membrane and organ, to discover the cavern of the skull. Then that spider burrowed in a spiral pattern through the electric gray cake of the brain to the very center of it all, where it hollowed out a large nest for itself and reattached neural pathways with the thread of its web. It played the boy like a zither, plucking the silver strings of its own design, creating a music that directed both will and desire.
Before the invasion of his cranium, the child was said to have been quite a little cherub—big green eyes and a wave of golden hair, rosy cheeks, an infectious laugh. His parents couldn’t help showing him off at every opportunity and regaling passersby with a litany of his startling attributes, not the least of which was the ability to recite verbatim the bedtime stories read to him each night. Many a neighbor had been subjected to an oration of the entirety of “The Three Rum Runtkins.”
A change inside wrought a change outside, though, and over the course of a few months the boy’s eyes bulged and drained of all color to become million-faceted buds of gleaming onyx. His legs and arms grew long and willowy, but his body stayed short with a small but pronounced potbelly, like an Adam’s apple in the otherwise slender throat that was his form. Although a fine down of thistle grew in patches across his back, arms, and thighs, he went bald, losing even brows and lashes. His flesh turned a pale gray, hinting at violet; his incisors grew to curving points and needed to be clipped and filed back like fingernails.
Horrified at the earliest of these changes, the boy’s parents had taken him, first, to the doctor’s, but when the medicine he was given did nothing but make him vomit and the symptoms became more bizarre, they took him to the clinic. The doctors there subjected him to a head scan. Photos from the process showed the intruder in negative, a tiny eight-legged phantom perched at the center of a dark, intricate web. It was determined that were they to remove the arachnid, the boy could very possibly die. The creature had, for all intents and purposes, become his brain. The parents, confessing they feared for their lives, pleaded with the physicians to operate, but the ethical code forbade it, and the family was sent home.
Not long after the trip to the clinic, the boy’s mother opened his bedroom door one morning and beheld him suspended in the eye of a silver web that filled the room from floor to ceiling. She meant to scream but the beautiful gleaming symmetry of what he’d made stunned her. She watched as he turned slowly round to face away, and then from a neat hole cut in the back of his trousers that she’d never noticed before came a sudden blast of webbing that smacked her in the face and covered half her body. The door slammed shut as she reeled backward, and this time she did scream, tearing madly at the shroud whose sticky threads seemed spun from marshmallow.
Unable to bear the boy’s presence any longer, his parents took him for a hike out into the forest. “I know a place where there are flies as big as poodles,” his father said, and the boy drooled. They took him deep into the trees, marking the trail as they went, and somewhere miles in, next to a lake, they bedded down on pine needles. While he slept, they quietly rose, tiptoed away, and then, once out of earshot, ran for their lives. They never saw the boy again. Although no one in town could blame them, including the constable, and they faced no charges for their actions, the memory of their fear burrowed in a spiral pattern to the center of their minds and played them like zithers for the rest of their days.
Fifteen years later and a hundred miles from where he’d been born, the boy appeared one evening at the height of summer, not a man but something else. A woman living in an apartment of an otherwise empty building on the east side of the city of Grindly woke suddenly and looked up.
“There was enough moonlight to see him clearly,” she said. “He hung above me, upside down, his hands and knees on the ceiling. He wore a jacket with short tails, and the long legs of his satin trousers were striped blue and red. I don’t know how that hat—a stovepipe style—stayed on, as it had no chin strap. His feet were in slippers. The moment I saw him, he looked directly into my eyes. It didn’t matter that he wore round, rose-colored glasses. Those evil blackberries that lurked behind still dazzled me. I screamed, he shrieked, and then he scuttled across the ceiling and out the open window. I heard him on the roof, and then everything was silent.” The woman told her friends, and her friends told their friends, and word that something bizarre had come to Grindly spread like disease.
The Gazette put out a double edition, a whole four pages, its entirety devoted to speculation concerning “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening,” a moniker invented by the editor in chief. The name stuck, and over the course of a few more days was shortened by the populace, first to “Daddy Longlegs” and then to simply “Daddy.” “Watch out for Daddy,” neighbors said as a salutation when they parted. Before people bed
ded down at night, they practiced a ritual of checking closets and basements, the dark corners of attics, and under beds, latching all windows and gathering crude weapons on their nightstands—a mallet, a wrench, a carving knife, a club.
After a few more sightings that he had scrupulously arranged, allowing himself to be spotted, crawling to the top of and then into a silent mill’s crumbling smokestack, or traversing the soot-ridden mosaic of God’s face on the inner dome of the railway station as the midnight train passed through, he was in their hearts and minds, and what was even more important to him, in their dreams. Of course, he meant to drain the citizenry of Grindly of their bodily fluids, but first, to enhance nourishment, it needed to be filtered, flavored, by nightmare.
When there wasn’t a soul within the confines of the city wall who did not, in their dreams, flee slow, heavy, and naked before him, or writhe in the coil of their blankets, mistaken in sleep for his web, he struck. It was deepest night when he entered the home of the haberdasher, Fremin, through the unlocked coal chute. The hinges on the iron door creaked a warning, but that noise was transformed, by the dreams of the sleeping husband and wife, into the triumphant laughter of Daddy Longlegs. They never woke when he bit them at the base of the skull. They never cried out as their fear-laden essence left them.
“Like old worn luggage,” the newspaper said, describing the condition of the corpses discovered two days later. When the medics tried to move the haberdasher’s body to a stretcher, it split with a whisper like a dry husk and out of it poured thousands of tiny spiders. Police Inspector Kaufmann, the medics, the Fremins’ neighbors who were present, all ran out of the building, and the inspector gave orders for the place to be torched at once. As the fire raged, the crowd that had gathered belabored the inspector, Grindly’s sole lawman, with inquiries as to what he was prepared to do.
Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Page 9