Let me, said Rawhead, and the ungainly body was suddenly graceful, rolling to its feet and shaking all over.
“So that’s the trick of it,” said Sal. “Lord. Not used to being down here on four legs.”
It’s easier than two.
It did seem to be. Her vision wasn’t so good, but things smelled strong, and the smells sort of worked with her eyes in a way she hadn’t expected.
“We’re in a barn, aren’t we?”
Think so, ma’am. Rawhead turned in a circle and then looked up.
There were three dead hogs hanging from hooks overhead, their throats opened up to drain into a gutter in the floor. A fourth hook hung empty.
“Huh!” Sal stared at them. “Surprised there was any blood left in us. Must be the magic. I’ll give her this, Elizabeth Gray’s no slouch with the knife.”
Those three were my friends, said Rawhead. We ran around the mountain together.
“I’m sorry,” said Sal, suddenly shamed. “I didn’t think. I’m sorry for your friends.”
It’s all right. They’ll go on. We all go on. He dropped her—their—head, startling Sal again. I’ll miss them.
There was nothing that a human could add to that eulogy. She didn’t try.
The hog’s body was huge and powerful. Sal tried moving it, walking unsteadily toward the door.
It was exhausting. It moved more or less as she asked—it worked better if she didn’t concentrate too much on how the legs were moving—but the beating of their dead heart did nothing to revive her.
She got them around the corner of the barn. It was dim and noisy with crickets. She could smell turned earth and blood.
Their legs started to shake, and she had to sit down.
This was madness, she thought, trying to keep her thoughts away from Rawhead and not sure if she was succeeding. I’ve trapped us both in this dead body, and for what? Revenge?
A witch should have known better. Now what? Even if I kill that bastard hunter, what then? Lay down and rot until there’s not enough left of the body to hold us here?
It was not a pleasant thought. Even less pleasant was the thought that the hog’s body might rot away and their souls would be left chained to its bones.
Witches generally feel that there’s plenty of work to be done here and now, but I never met one that wasn’t secretly hoping to put their feet up for a while in the afterlife.
Now, though …
Poor sort of friend I am. Silas only killed his body, but I may have made him into a ghost.
You’re a good friend, ma’am, said Rawhead staunchly. Sal realized that he’d been listening to her think the whole time. It would have been embarrassing if he was anybody else. She scuffled their trotters in the dirt.
“Did I hold you back from heaven, Rawhead?”
Doesn’t work like that for us, ma’am. We just go on to the next thing.
“What’s the next thing?” asked Sal. She was exhausted and felt like dying again.
Oh, you know. We go around again. Think I was going to be a bird this time, said Rawhead. All curled up in an egg, with someone tap-tap-tapping on my shell. I like being a bird. It’s good to fly.
Sal wished that she could weep. Their mouth gaped open in distress. “What happened to that bird?”
Won’t hatch, I guess. It happens, ma’am. Don’t worry. It was hard to comfort herself in only one body. Hogs would normally go shoulder to shoulder, lean on one another, but with only one body between them, Rawhead had to settle for leaning against the barn wall and rubbing their jowls against their forelegs. I don’t mind coming back. We’ll die again sooner or later, and I’ll be a different bird.
He paused and added generously, You can come be a bird with me if you like, ma’am. I wouldn’t mind.
Humans are different from hogs in that kindness can break their hearts. Sal moaned through the dead razorback’s throat.
“What the hell is that racket?” yelled a voice from inside the barn.
The boar’s body jerked itself up and made a short bark of surprise before Sal quite realized what she was doing.
It was Paul Silas. Well, who else would it be?
“Damn it,” she muttered, and “Damn it!” said Silas. She heard the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. It was practically under her ear, on the other side of the wall.
Rawhead wisely took over at this point, backing them into the thicket of dog fennel and Queen Anne’s lace that surrounded the barn. A beam of light came out of the barn, jangling crazily as the hunter carried the lantern. Sal saw the green gleam of spider eyes in the grass as the light moved over it, and a red flash from a whippoorwill blinking in the ditch.
“Who’s there?” shouted Silas. “Who’s sneaking around my—ah, goddamn!”
“Found we were gone,” said Sal silently.
Rawhead sank more deeply into the thicket. The light went flashing by, through the cracks between boards, and lit up the pebbles at the dead hog’s feet.
Silas’s footsteps paused by the empty hook, and then he walked to the mouth of the barn. The whippoorwill flew up and away into the trees.
“You a bear?” asked Silas. “You a bear out there, taking my meat? Or you a man?” He turned in a circle, and Sal saw the rifle outlined against the lantern light.
• • • •
There’s a whole story people tell when they’re telling the story of Rawhead and Sal. It’s a little bit like Little Red Riding Hood—the hunter says, “My, what big eyes you got!” And Rawhead supposedly says, “The better to see your grave.” And the hunter says, “What a bushy tail you got.” And Rawhead says, “The better to sweep your grave.”
Well, a talking hog is one thing, but I never heard of a hog with a bushy tail. They say he took it off a dead raccoon, but if you can tell me why a boar would need a rotten raccoon tail to kill someone with, I’d dearly love to hear it.
No, what happened was that Silas stood in the circle of lantern light, holding his gun, looking for a bear or a thief, and Sal looked at him and heard his whining voice, and she remembered why she was mad.
That bastard killed Rawhead. He’d killed Rawhead’s friends. In a roundabout way, he’d killed Sal herself.
And Sal remembered other things—the way Silas had treated a woman living alone, the way he’d come sniffing around like a dog after a bone, offering charity and more than charity, even when she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in the likes of him. She remembered a couple conversations on the porch that she’d rather not have had.
She thought of how those conversations might have gone if she’d been only a woman alone and not a witch. She remembered how they’d almost gone anyway, and a couple of nights spent with the door barred and her own rifle across her lap.
“I believe that man needs killing, Rawhead,” she said.
Yes, ma’am, said Rawhead.
He moved.
The dead heart hammered in their chest, and Sal threw herself on the pain and took it all. When Rawhead charged, he was as quick on his hooves as a living razorback, and that is very quick indeed.
Silas heard the charge and turned. He got the gun halfway to his shoulder and fired.
The impact knocked the dead boar back a step—but only a step. He did not get time for another shot.
Their jaws closed over his thigh. Silas screamed, but not for very long. Humans die easy compared to hogs.
And then there was quiet.
After awhile the crickets started in again. The fireflies spread themselves out under the trees. The lantern guttered and went out.
Sal sighed. She felt ancient. The bullet in the dead boar’s neck burned and she had no way to pick it out.
“Well,” she said. “Well. I guess that’s that.”
Yes, ma’am.
• • • •
The story that got around was a ghost story, so there’s a proper ghost story end to it. They say Rawhead still rides around on the hunter’s horse, and sometimes his head comes off and he holds it up
to scare people with. They say he’s still haunting these hills to this day, one more leftover thing from the old days, like the foundations you find in the woods sometimes, or the bits of barbed wire that turned up rusted in the fields.
But it wasn’t like that, not in the end.
Sal and Rawhead walked. They walked clear back to her house, and that was a long and weary way. Rawhead heaved that dead body up on the porch for the last time and laid it down on the boards.
“Well,” said Sal. She didn’t have any regrets about Silas. She was so tired that regret couldn’t get much foothold. It was more like a list in her head, checking off boxes—die, tick, take revenge, tick, come home, tick.
She felt like she was seeing the world from a long way away. Only Rawhead’s voice was clear in her mind, as if he was standing right at her shoulder. “I … I don’t know what to do now.”
Come with me, suggested Rawhead. We’ll go be birds together.
It sounded good to Sal.
They died again, on the porch. Rawhead knew the way. The dead heart, which had beaten so faithfully for so long, shuddered into stillness.
Madeline found the body the next day, and she knew enough about witches to cry over it. But Sal and Rawhead were long gone.
There’s people who say that witches don’t go to heaven. That sort of person acts like they’re in charge of who goes in and out, though, and I don’t know if God holds with that sort of thing. Maybe Sal did, maybe she didn’t. It’s not for me to say.
But me, I like to think that they found themselves curled up warm in an egg together, to sleep and dream of flying.
* * *
Ursula Vernon is the author of the Hugo-award winning comic Digger, as well as multiple children’s book series. She writes for adults under the name T. Kingfisher. Her work has won the Nebula, Mythopoeic, Coyotl, and WSFA Awards. She lives in North Carolina. You can find more of her short stories and novels at Tkingfisher.com.
We Have a Cultural Difference,
Can I Taste You?
By Rebecca Ann Jordan
I’m licking the bronze key with its tiny hook, enfolded into myself. The key is only for emergencies and I’m trying to decide whether this counts.
Then I’m at the door, slipping the thin peg into the emergency keyhole. I know the mechanism well. It clicks, jumps, and I’m in her room.
My appendages linger in piles of half-clean clothes, letting the wall of scent—uneven parts sour-sweet girl-musk, sharp dry cheese, the erasers and graphite and evenly-distributed-mark-makers and something all Nina’s—surround me, and then I’m in: licking little hems and the dry wheaty-taste of threads, rubbing myself across synthetic wood and trying to fit its bulky corners in, pulling whole pens and compasses and rulers through gelatinous openings to puzzle their parts inside of me. Nina’s space is filled with rubbery textures and bitter metallic barriers and pages and pages of paper. In my frenzy I forget that they get offended at the taking of books into oneselves; I tear through An Intergalactic Traveler’s Guide to the Far Reaches, Vol. 4; Extra-Terrestrial Artmaking; and Constructing the 23rd Century: A Brief Discourse into the Age of Progress.
By now I’m feeling weighted down and remembering why I’m here while I suck on Nina’s blanket. There must be something here to explain why Nina’s been low-energy. The pulsations rolling off of her human body are not as enjoyable when she’s sad, and she’s been sad for a while now. Maybe something’s wrong with her fish? I vibrate to echolocate her fish tank on the desk and pull within me the briney droplets of water, then the waxy plasticness of the decorative leaves, then the teacup abyssal grouper, all ruffled-sharp scales and teeth. Its little heart speeds inside my higher viscosity. It nibbles at my insides. I wriggle, delighting in all of these things in me. I want to digest them all.
A yelp from the door pulses against my membrane. The atmosphere shifts, letting in a breeze and also a mixture of soft sweat and graphite and the oil of Nina’s makeup.
I fall very still. I don’t vibrate, not even a little.
In my proprioception, the room’s pressure shifts again—enough to accommodate my other roommate’s, Tinequert’s, softly whirring AI head and her artificial solid-state brain matter. A click. “At least it went for your things this time.” I know what the words mean, but, as usual, can’t comprehend her tone. The pressure from Tinequert’s head in the room disappears as she churns away into the hallway.
In a rush Nina’s short, dense body pushes into the room, snatching away her things and throwing them across the room. There are slams and crashes and ripples in the air, and I burble with the sensory input. I have come to associate this behavior with human rage, but it feels so good against my semi-permeable skin.
“Are you seriously laughing?” squeals Nina. Air presses against me, whirls around me; Nina is on the move. “You have no regard for personal space, Filo/Gee! For common . . . decency! I can’t believe I have to deal with this, with my grandmother…” Her voice goes high and tight, and after a grunt she says: “Can you please carefully take Shakesfeare out of your . . .” I almost feel her lips purse. “Put Shakesfeare back in his tank.”
The grouper wriggles and thrashes as I extend to drop him into what unclean water remains. I miss him already. “I’m sorry!” I say. “We have a cultural difference!” That magic phrase, I’ve come to learn, can usually make Nina smile and forgive me before she lets me taste her old graphite-filled sketches.
This time, waves of flushed rage roll off of Nina. She doesn’t mean to reward me, so I begin to surreptitiously expel the now-slurry particles of fiber, plastic, pigment, paper, and splinters onto the floor. “We’ve been roommates for a year and a half,” comes her boiling voice, so soft normally (I know the softness of her tongue from experience—just once! An accident!). “That’s not an excuse anymore.” And quite abruptly, the pressure in the room dissipates.
I pursue her into the common area. “Where are you going?”
“File a report.” Her tone has quieted again, back to her normal, simmering self. In her methodical way she packs her bag back up, tucking away anything that I could potentially have access to.
This quietness depresses me. I slump against the wall, which tastes of concrete and paint and titanium and bolts. I take no pleasure in it. “About me?”
“Yes, Filo/Gee.” A clearing of her throat, which tickles me. “I thought I was doing a good thing, volunteering to room with you and all. But clearly we just . . . can’t live together.” I feel her skin soften through the air between us. “It’s not your fault. It’s just—cultural differences.” Her voice falls off and she is silent.
I twist inside myself. She doesn’t want to live with me. My Cultural Sensitivity across Species classes have taught me that much, even though I’m not the best student. “Okay,” I say.
Nobody understands. Just because I can’t see doesn’t mean I can’t feel them in the room, their miniscule movements, the turns of their heads and the wringing of their hands. I know she’s there, though when she leaves she tries to close the door quietly.
The key that’s only for emergencies turns inside of me.
• • • •
By the way, I have a lawyer! The AI was assigned to me when I first enrolled, the first of my kind to go to an intergalactic school. So now, even though the administration asks me a few questions, my lawyer whirrs up from the South Fourth Quadrant to tell me the station can’t bring any charges against me regarding the incident. She’s working on getting me upgraded from endangered species to protected class.
So they quietly move my things into a space of my own when Nina is in Structural Integrity IV and Tinequert is in Applications of Advanced Theoretical Physics. I have few items, because even though I’ve had plenty of money donated to me, it is too delicious to part with. And the things I do have are well-turned-over and worn, absorbed into me and licked many times.
After some hours, the delight of the new walls and chair and rug start to leave a bad taste; I’m us
ed to a palate-cleanser of Nina’s pigments after such romps. A doctor comes to let me absorb my antibiotics, which he says helps me counteract the bacteria I ingest while living among humans and other extraterrestrials. The station pumps more highly pressurized air into my room, which calms me down some. Still I wrap the worn blanket around me and then pull it inside to suck on its bare threads.
• • • •
In Cultural Sensitivity across Species 350, it’s my turn to give a presentation. I’m great at speaking now! Ever since I learned to pull some of myself concavely inward, then vibrate the lower palate against the upper, it’s not difficult to shape human sounds into words.
Still, I don’t understand them. Just like they don’t understand what it is to feel everything.
“Whatever is on your desk,” I’m saying, “put it in your mouth.”
There’s the usual mixture of awkward laughter, the turning of feathered and furred and leafed heads to face others, perhaps to exchange some sort of wordless understanding, and outright objection. I pulsate pleasantly with the attention as sounds and words bounce around the room, as the stillness turns to a raucous chorus of sharp bark-sounds, sweat-smells, gases and sound waves and movement all pulsating toward me.
The matter that I am most attuned to is toward the back of the room in a quiet corner. Nina smells today of musk and ink, paper and coffee and sleep still hanging over her, as if she rushed out of the dorm without showering.
The air around her shifts. She puts the cap of an expensive artist’s pen, plastic and metallic, in her mouth and closes her lips.
Nobody notices but me.
The professor tells me to get to my point, and prompts everyone else to quiet down and indulge me because I might just surprise them. They do it, even the AIs who theoretically don’t have taste sensory input (at least on this model). Most put paper in their mouths, or else food, which is cheating, but I don’t mind. “Now,” I say, all my nerves alive, “imagine your mouth is a stomach, and your stomach is the whole of your body. Also, it can smell things. And it’s liquid. Turn it over with your tongue. Describe how it tastes, with your words. How big it is. How thin or thick. . . .”
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 7