Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors Page 337

by Anthology


  She reminded herself that Kathy's spider was dead and she could not hurt Sook Yee now. She had been forced into silence for the next few weeks.

  Silent during the last days of her mother's funeral. Now that it had become reality the wrongness of it all was beginning to sink in. The look on Pa's face. The fact that John was unruffled by all this. What had she done?

  Sook Yee found the door to her room unlocked. "Sis," she said softly as she pushed the door in, "I've brought breakfast."

  Kathy lay on her bed in her darkened room. It was as cramped as the rest of the house, thickly lined wall-to-wall with cupboards and cabinets. Sook Yee put the breakfast tray down on the desk and drew back the shades. Grey dawn sun streamed into the room, casting its weak light over glass-protected shelves of trophies and certificates, tacky ceramic figurines, and framed pictures. A decorative plate said "Happy Birthday To A Beloved Daughter". Sook Yee scanned the shelves. There had to be dozens of pictures, a hundred even. A entire childhood was contained in the musty confines of Kathy's cabinets.

  Some of them caught Sook Yee's eye. A picture of young Pa and his wife, in wedding dress, perched on the old sofa in the house's living room, stiff-backed for posterity. Bubble-cheeked little Kathy and her mother posed sternly in front of the old piano in one of the study rooms. Kathy grew bigger in successive birthday cake pictures, while the house's tiled kitchen remained unchanged around her. Out in the garden, on one of the ugly chairs, a toddler John sat astride his older sister's rigid knees. Each picture that followed was a picture of Kathy and John as the latter grew taller and the former grew thinner. And then one of Sook Yee and John in their own wedding finery, in the living room, holding the tea ceremony.

  Kathy remained on her bed, unmoving. "Sis," Sook Yee said again, but she was met by a silence larger than houses. She was too afraid to go over and touch her sister-in-law, to shake her out of her stupor, to make that connection. Instead she just stood, waiting, while around her the sealed, curved lips of a life past smiled silently down at her, like rictuses.

  Temporary Saints(Short story)

  by JY Yang

  Originally published by Fireside Fiction in October 2015

  I hate it when it's kids. I hate it when a new saint is wheeled in and it's an eight-year-old hollowed out by their sanctity and turned monstrous with growths. I hate it when I know outside there are parents with heads bowed and throats tight and when I'm in here in this mortuary with its scorched walls and smell of formaldehyde. I hate it because I know how they feel and I know they don't deserve it. I didn't deserve it either, when it happened to me.

  It's mostly kids who get called to sainthood. Nobody knows why; we've had so many in our little nowhere town that our nurseries and schoolrooms are nearly empty. I passed the park the other day and it was like a graveyard. How many miracles can one town stomach?

  Today's saint is named Lilith. Not irony, she just has that kind of parents. She's covered in crocodile scales, running from the top of her feet to her neck. Her parents want her in her favourite sundress for the funeral. I put the double gloves carefully over the sharp knobs of bony keratin pushing through my hands, and pull at one of the scales on her belly with the forceps. It comes off smoothly; the skin underneath is untouched.

  Lilith's gift was in finding lost things. Her mother tried to save her by locking her in the house to stop her from talking to anyone. But once sainthood sets in your child isn't really your child anymore. This I know too well. They're just children, after all. You can't expect them to resist the call of their gift like adults can. No-one knows how hard it is to block your ears to its whispering, to sit on your hands and pray no flames shoot out of it. I couldn't stop my Clara, even though I tried. Lilith here slipped from the house like salmon every time someone wanted to find their wedding ring, their car keys, their long-lost cousin. She didn't last long.

  I pull off all the scales on Lilith's neck and shoulders. This one is easy. The town's first saint, Annie, had grown a magnificent pair of wings, dark as shiny as a rook's. People called her Angel Annie, and she healed the sick for forty-nine days until she suddenly collapsed. I had to cut off her wings with a bone saw so that she would fit in the casket. I didn't know what to do with the wings, so I asked her parents if they wanted them. They did not.

  My hands hurt as I work. It's like teething: I can feel the keratin lumps growing through my skin all the time. A constant reminder. I wear gloves and long sleeves everywhere, even at home, even in egg-frying temperatures. I'm not sure what people will do once the turtle-shell lumps reach my face and I can't hide what I am any longer. What can they do?

  People ask me, is sainthood contagious? I say no, but I think I was chosen only because of Clara. I shouldn't have prepared my daughter's body myself, it's bad form, but none of the neighbouring towns wanted to take a body of a saint. They were afraid our town's curse would come along.

  My dear Clara, my sweet-cheeked bright-eyed little miracle, my baby girl. She died covered in golden fur, telling the fortune of some sap who came from six counties away. I wanted to cremate her body, but her birth father wanted an open casket. So that was that. I had to shave the fur off her face. When I got home after the funeral I found the first lumps pushing through the skin of my back in the bathroom mirror. They looked like an accusation, a proof of guilt.

  I don't know if my gift is what it is because of what I didn't get to do for Clara. I'm lucky the summonses for fire are few and far between. I've learned to combat them. They don't hold sway over me.

  I finish doing Lilith's makeup. She looks like she's just asleep on the cold metal table. Gloves off, time for cleanup. Blue flames lick up my fingers as I sterilize my equipment in a small blaze. It's taken so long, but I've finally managed to get it under control. Now I know it's there when I need it, and I can use it as I wish.

  Somedays I wonder about burning it all down—this workroom reeking of preservative, this building and its overgrown carpark, the whole damn town with its rows of houses filled with grieving parents. But then who would be left to tend the dead? Who would be left to cut off horns and hide extra teeth and disguise claws as fingernails? I've seen the parents' faces when they see their child again. They look so much like before, they tell me. Like it never happened.

  It's things like that which get me out of bed in the morning, when I can feel the creep of bony protrusions spreading further across my skin, when I can feel the phantom fire ravaging my insides. I still get up and go. Because the saints need me. And I will continue getting up and going until I cannot anymore.

  Lilith looks perfect now, a job well done. I draw the sheet over her and wait for the next saint to come in.

  Song Of The Krakenmaid(Short story)

  by JY Yang

  Originally published by Lackington's, November 2015

  The krakenmaid invaded Fennel's dreams unasked. Deep in the treacherous REM landscape she appeared, sliding through her vast seawater tank, short silver hair waving like anemone fronds. Fennel watched the hypnotic pattern of her movements as she pumped all eight tentacles rhythmically, milkweb light refractions dancing over her speckled skin, belly muscles rippling under fat and supple skin that turned ridged and wiry where mammalian waist gave way to cephalopod. Look at me, look at me, Fennel thought, and as though she could hear in a dream, the krakenmaid obeyed. Her mercury-coloured eyes, unusually wide-set, fixed on Fennel. Then her lips parted and the she began to sing, filling the dream with the same low, melodious noises that wrapped around Fennel's days at work.

  In her dream Fennel understood what the krakenmaid was singing about immediately, but the song's meaning slipped away the moment she thought about it. Ursula, Ursula, Fennel whispered in her head. Come to me, Ursula. Tell me I'm pretty. Ursula’s body hovered, heavy and inviting, in the water. Fennel desperately wanted to touch her, but the krakenmaid was unreachable light-years away in her dream, separated from her by a gulf of dimensions.

  Fennel woke with a tide pulsing heavy and slow
between her legs and a mixture of shame and terror in her chest at the images her unconscious mind had shown her. On the pillow beside her Yan-yan slumbered still, her slackened face unaware of the desire that had accumulated within her partner. Fennel was afraid to shatter this stillness by slipping one thigh over Yan-yan's hips, pressing their mounds of Venus together. She refrained from cupping a hand over one of Yan-yan's applelike breasts, or from kissing the lines around her mouth and eyelids. The clock on the wall blinked some measure of 3AM, and Yan-yan would wake at six-thirty for an important meeting at eight. Fennel considered slipping her hand downwards to relieve the ache there, but she knew the noise would wake Yan-yan. So she curled her hands to herself, shut her eyes and counted herself into a dreamless sleep.

  Yan-yan made breakfast in the morning, filling the steel-capped kitchen with the smell of frying bacon, a Westerner's smell. It was Yan-yan who had to do the cooking, always. It was a point of pride for her. Fennel sat crumpled in a chair, wiping sleep from her eyelids. If she kept her mind fuzzily blank, she could almost forget the contents of last night's dream.

  Look at me, look at me, tell me I'm pretty.

  All Yan-yan wanted to talk about was the dead krakenmaid. Yesterday Ariel, the younger and smaller of the two, had succumbed to the injuries she sustained from the fishing nets, despite the best efforts of the scientists. Accusatory headlines had filled local news all day. Ocean Park Hong Kong had barely recovered from the salmonella deaths of two dolphins last month, and now a rare, newly-discovered sea creature had died in the tanks of a premiere research institution. Moral outrage had suffused the chatter on Hong Kong public transport.

  "I heard someone on the late-night radio say it was stress," Yan-yan said. "What nonsense! What did it have to be stressed about in that big tank. No sharks, no boats, people feed it everyday, what stress? It's a good life."

  "Being kept in a strange environment stresses animals," Fennel said, as Yan-yan made a dismissive noise. "She was a wild creature. She preferred the sea."

  It was Fennel who had discovered Ariel facedown in the bottom of the tank, arms slack, tentacles trailing limp. When the scientists arrived it had been a wet-suited Fennel they sent into the water to retrieve the corpse. Inert and lifeless, Ariel had been surprisingly heavy for a creature so nimble and graceful in life. Ursula, the survivor, had darted back and forth a distance away, her face unreadable to Fennel under the snorkel glass.

  "It's a pity I didn't get to see them both," Yan-yan said, scraping fried bacon and eggs onto plates. "Too bad I had that meeting Tuesday night!"

  "You were supposed to come see them since last week," Fennel said as Yan-yan set a plate in front of her.

  Yan-yan froze. "What's that?"

  "Nothing."

  Yan-yan turned away to put the frying pan in the sink. When she turned back to Fennel the smile had returned to her face. "Let's do it tonight. I'll go over to your place after work. I want to see the last krakenmaid before it dies."

  She laughed at the expression her words drew up on Fennel's face. "Well, if one's gone, what's to say the other won't?" She sat down. "I'll be there around eight at night. Okay?"

  Fennel pushed at sunny side-up on her plate. It slid around, unappetisingly wet with grease, rubber-like surface trembling.

  "Okay?" Yan-yan repeated.

  Fennel nodded. Yan-yan leaned across the table and kissed her on the cheek. "That's great. We'll see each other tonight then."

  Fennel turned down Yan-yan's offer of a lift to work and chose instead a hot, rumbly bus that needed forty-five minutes to reach its destination. This time, she would turn up after the scientists had arrived.

  The entrance to the research institute was clogged with protesters, as it had been for the past two weeks. Students and retirees with signs and flyers and slogans, calling the scientists murderers and monsters, invoking Sook Ching and the Holocaust. Ariel's death had given them the ammunition they needed. Two of them, dressed in tentacle suits, lay chained and gagged on the ground, framed by chalk lines. Men from the press crawled all over the scene with their cameras and microphones.

  A boy with hair striped blue and green lunged at her, sign in hand. "There's blood on your hands," he accused.

  Flecks of his saliva speckled her face. His breath was closer and louder than she'd like. "Leave me alone," she said, trying to get past. "I only work here."

  "You chose your job," he shouted, shaking the sign at her. She walked away from him as fast as she could, gritting her teeth. The work day had barely started, and she was already in a bad mood.

  Indoors it seemed a different world from the heat and chaos outside. The tank chamber's wetsalt smell had become formaldehyde-suffused, clinging deep to the back of her throat. In the fifty-thousand-gallon tank Ursula swam back and forth, still alive. The krakenmaid watched Fennel as she descended the metal stairs to the lower floor. There, working with gloves and masks over Ariel's corpse, was Prof Lam and his assistant.

  Prof Lam greeted her, gloved hands busy and dripping. "You're late. Slept in?"

  She nodded. She didn't feel like talking now: The encounter with the sign-boy had left a long shadow of irritation, and she felt that if she opened her mouth, only that irritation would pour out like black smoke. Prof Lam was dissecting Ariel's body, putting her viscera into separate labelled jars. Fennel tried not to look at the cut-open torso, the skin grey with exsanguination and chill; she tried to ignore the face with its half-lidded, rolled-up eyes, and slack-lipped jaws.

  Prof Lam was the one who had given the krakenmaids their names. The institute was just ten minutes away from Disneyland, and one corner of Prof Lam's office was filled with round cuddly character plushes. He always said, "It's my daughter, she's a big fan of Disney," but the careful way he stacked the plushes said otherwise. He was meticulous, Prof Lam, and that extended to his precise filing of Ariel's organs into neatly labelled jars. Heart. Liver. Ovaries. Lungs.

  In the tank Ursula swam in circles, her throat working as she sang her mournful song, a sound powerful to transmit through foot-thick glass. A language expert at HKU was working to decipher the vocalisations they had recorded, but it might take years. Fennel wondered what was going through Ursula's mind, watching her companion being cut to pieces by strange land-bound men. No-one knew what the relationship between them was. Were they mother and daughter? Relatives in the same pod? Prof Lam had decided that Ursula was in her late thirties or early forties, while Ariel had been in her early twenties. Fennel couldn't help but match those age ranges that of Yan-yan's and her own.

  Ursula's gaze, focused laser-like on Fennel, unnerved her. The krakenmaid would often ignore the two PhD students who were observing her, but Fennel was clearly an object of constant interest. "She likes you," one of the grad students had said to her the day before. It hadn’t entirely been a joke.

  Fennel turned away. She spent the day cleaning tanks and tending to the other animals housed in the institute while the researchers grad students were all distracted. Some days it was good to be a lowly research assistant. A blessing not to have made it as a scientist.

  Prof Lam was second-last to leave that evening. Ariel was back in the morgue freezer; tomorrow they would begin preserving the main part of her body. "I'll leave you lock up," he said, by way of good evening to Fennel. "Don't stay too late, alright?"

  Fennel nodded, and settled in for a long wait. She kept in the office area, a floor up and encased in concrete, away from the tanks. Yet she imagined she could still hear Ursula's song coming through the walls, like the single notes of a distant foghorn.

  Yan-yan showed up at eight forty-five, nearly nine. The protesters outside were still at it, the sound of their chants wafting in as Fennel let Yan-yan slip in through a side door. "How was your day?" Fennel asked.

  "As expected, won't bore you with the details." She gave Fennel a quick kiss on the cheek. "Come, come, where is this amazing creature?" Without invitation she marched down the fluorescent-lit corridors of the ins
titute, Fennel trailing her.

  A sound of surprise and delight escaped her as she entered the main tank chamber. "Wow, this is wild," she exclaimed, tapping the side of the tank all the way down the curved metal staircase. Ursula watched her, warily, her tentacles at pause. "Look," she said, grabbing Fennel's arm and pointing, "she's looking at me! It's almost like a monkey or a trained dolphin. Can they talk?"

  "We don't know."

  "She looks so human. Look at her face!" Yan-yan pointed, and pointed, and then laughed, a wicked sound. "Those tentacles, though. Do you think they use them during—?"

  "We don't know."

  Yan-yan scoffed. "What do you know, then?" She looked around. "What did you do with the other one?"

  Fennel banished images of Ariel sliced up like livestock, lying in a dark freezer box. "Prof Lam is studying the remains."

  "Can I see?"

  "I don't think you should."

  Yan-yan made an irritated noise. "You're never any fun."

  Ursula had swum close to the glass where they were standing. "Look, she is watching us. How coy."

  Playfulness tugged at the corner of her lips, and Fennel knew what was coming next. A messy, tongue-filled kiss found its way into her mouth. Yan-yan pulled away, looked at Ursula in the tank and laughed. "I think she likes it."

  Yan-yan's blouse smelled of strange perfume. As her mouth left wet marks on jawline and neck Fennel had the strange feeling that Yan-yan was repeating actions that she had performed earlier that day. Yan-yan tried to get Fennel down onto the floor, the sticky floor that formaldehyde and krakenmaid innards had been dripped on. Fennel shook her head and pointed to the metal stairs.

  The stairs made no sound of protest as Yan-yan got to work on Fennel. The unforgiving, rough press of them against Fennel's bare skin should have been enough to stop her cold, but there was something about the situation that turned her insides molten. The brazenness of it, the salt-smell in the air, the way the noises she made echoed in the vastness of the room. The girlfriend between her legs, who had probably been between some other woman's legs at some point earlier. On the other side there was Ursula, watching, fingertips pressed to the glass. As Fennel's legs shook and her hands clamped on stair-edge she tilted her head back as far as it would go and let sound out through her open throat.

 

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