The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  And she was, in her way, nice to me then. To show her gratefulness, she bought me a little book on bees. The next night she threw it at me while I sat, again, in her chair and she lay on her bed. “It’s nothing,” she said, “but you might like it.”

  “I do,” I said, “I really do,” because I knew she needed me to say it and I did like it.

  “I’m going to give a program all my own,” she told me then. “It’s at school, but it’s for everybody in town and they’re charging for it and I’m to get a hundred dollars even though it’s a benefit for band uniforms. It’s already beginning and I haven’t even tried. I just sat here and didn’t do my homework and everything’s beginning to come true just as I’ve always wanted it to.”

  I began to feel even more frightened thinking of her giving a whole program. We’d never had the mite sing more than about forty minutes at a time at the very most. “Well, I won’t be there,” I said. I had never challenged per . directly before, but now I said, “And I won’t let you do this, but if I can’t stop you, I won’t be there.”

  “Give me back that book,” she said.

  I was sorry to lose it, but I gave it back. I would be sorrier to lose her. It was odd, but the higher she went with this artist business, and the higher she got in her own estimation, the more she, herself, seemed to me like the mite: torn wings, broken legs, sick, matted fur…

  “It’s just like you,” she said. “This is my first really big moment and you want to take my pleasure in it from me.” But I knew that she knew it wasn’t at all like me. “You’re jealous,” she said, and I wondered, then, if that were true. I didn’t think I was but how can you judge yourself?

  The mite inched along her desk as we spoke and I had in mind that I should squash it right then. Couldn’t she see the thing was in pain? And then I saw that clearly for the first time. It was in pain. Maybe the singing was all a pain song. I couldn’t stand it any longer, but she must have seen something in my face for she jumped up and pushed me out the door before I hardly knew myself what I was about to do… pushed me out the door and locked it.

  I thought about it but there was no way that I could see how to stop her. I could tell everybody about the mite, but would they believe me? And wouldn’t they just go and have the concert anyway even if they knew it was the mite that sang? Maybe that would be an even greater draw. I had lost my chance to put the creature out of its misery. My sister wouldn’t let me near it again. Besides, I wasn’t sure if what she said wasn’t true, that she’d die if she couldn’t sing… if she couldn’t, that is, be the artist she pretended to be.

  She was going to call her program MOON SONGS. There would be two songs with a ten-minute intermission between them. I decided I would be there, but that she wouldn’t know it. I would stand in a dark corner in the wings after she had already stepped on stage.

  The concert began as usual, but this time I was changed and I could hear the pain. It was a pain song. Or perhaps the pain in the song had gotten worse so that I could finally understand it. I didn’t see how my sister could bear it. I didn’t see how anyone in the audience could bear it, and yet there they sat, eyes closed already, mouths open, heads tipped up like blind people. As I listened, standing there, I, too, tipped my head up and shut my eyes. The beauty of pain caught me up. Tears came to my eyes. They never had before, but now they did. I dreamed that once everything was sun, but now everything was moon. And then I forced my eyes to open. I was there to keep watch on things, not to get caught up in the song.

  We… she never made it to the intermission. After a half hour, the song became more insistent. It was louder and higher pitched and I could see my sister vibrating as though from a vibrato in her own throat that, then; began to shake her whole body. Nobody else saw it. Though a few had their eyes open, they were looking at the ceiling. The song rose and rose and I knew I had to stop it. My sister sank to her knees. I don’t think she pricked the mite at all any longer. I think it sang on of its own accord. I came out on the stage then and no one noticed. I wanted to kill the mite before it shook my sister to pieces, before it deafened her with its shrieking, but I saw that the string that held it to her earlobe was turned and led inside her ear. I pulled on it and the string came out with nothing tied to it. The mite was still inside. My sister was gasping and then she, too, began to make the same sound of pain. The song was coming from her own mouth. I saw the ululations of it in her throat. And I saw blood coming from her nose. Not a lot. Just one small trickle from the left nostril, the same side, where the mite had been tied to the left ear.

  I slapped her hard, then, on both cheeks. I was yelling, but I don’t think anybody heard me, least of all my sister. I shook her. I hit her. I dragged her from the stage into the wings and yet still the song went on and the people sat in their own dream, whatever it was. Certainly not the same dream we’d always seen before. It couldn’t be with this awful sound. Then I hit my sister on the nose directly and the song faltered, became hesitant, though it was still coming from her own mouth and nowhere else. Her eyes flickered open. I saw that she saw me. “Let me go,” she said. “Let us go. Let us both go.” And the song became a sigh of a song. Suddenly no pain in it. I laid her down gently. The song sighed on, at peace with itself and then it stopped. Alive, then dead. With no transition to it… both of them, my sister and the mite, stopped in the middle.

  I never told. I let them diagnose it as some kind of hemorrhage.

  In many ways my life changed for the better after that. I lived for myself, or tried to, and, the year after, I became tall, and thin, and pale, and dark like my sister and nobody called me Twinkie ever again.

  The Start of the End of it All, The Women’s Press, 1990

  Acceptance Speech

  NOBLE POETS of the consortium: You have conferred upon me your highest honor, you have called me, in your own words, Most Noble of the Noble (though “words” is hardly the proper way to refer to what you call your parts of speech, so, rather, your syllables, your prefixes, your signs and signals), and I have already made the accepting gestures as well as I can manage them.

  Now, in order to know your strange yet “Humble Master” better, you have asked for my alien view of the story of how I came to be your leader. I will tell you.

  I came here, as you all know, as a mere specimen—a spot—a “speck,” as you have called me; kidnapped from my world. I jumped through the right door on the first try—ran the maze, jumped to the proper ledge, escaped pain (at least for the moment). Though our noses are not as keen as yours, I could smell the rot behind that door—the sea-like rot that seemed to me might mean freedom. It turned out to be a feeding trough. I did not eat. At least not then.

  But I have come to be a new meaning in your land, which is sweet to me to be, and even more so because I will eat, now, nothing but the roots of lilies and the blossoms of squash, or, rather, what, on my world, would seem to be the equivalent of these things.

  Here, not everything is strange to me. There are small things that might as well be cats. There are fish. The only difference is that they can fly as well through air as through water, so one sees fish sitting in the trees, preening themselves, which is a strange sight to me. The trees are not unlike those from my own home world, though I’ve seen none taller than a tall man. The land, at least in this area, is flat, and every few yards there is another stream to cross. This I’ve seen, though not experienced. Before, I wasn’t important enough to walk the land, and now I’m too important for it, and will be carried along in a sort of upright barrel with a little tent over it in case it rains, which it often does.

  It was my curls that started you off about me. Curls are rare among you. You call them “curls of the dreamers that come from having dreamed. Curls,” as you say, “of creativity.” It is by my curls that I came to be in the magnificent fat state I’m in now. It is by them that I have been raised up to this point. Now it will be my poems that will fly from your mastheads, hang over your doorways, be carried throug
h your streets on banners, and worn across the tops of your caps.

  You hadn’t noticed my curls at first, but they grew long in my captivity, so that after a few months you knew that I must be a creature to be reckoned with. (I paid for a cool, perfumy drink—my first taste of such things as you drink every day—with my first poem, not knowing, then, its true value. Not even knowing that it was a poem.)

  Suddenly you started with different sorts of tests, though whether tests or initiation, I’m still not sure. You don’t speak to me of that other time before I wore the robes and ribbons of my station. Perhaps it’s beneath my dignity to speak about it now, but now you’ll not fault me for it because I have already had a poet’s full share of punishment.

  You began the new stage by throwing mud and rocks at me. I couldn’t guess why. Sometimes it seemed inadvertent—almost like a tic of some sort. You weren’t even looking toward my cage when you did it. Or I wasn’t looking. Once I was hit on the head and didn’t know it until I came to with a lump behind my ear. Why, I wondered, this change from mazes to cruelty?

  And you were saying, “Confess,” over and over. (I knew by then the syllables for it.) Confess what? Then there came a series of small annoyances: Tacks on the floor of my cage, crumbs on my pallet, rotten things in my soup, shells in my nuts, hulls in my grains. “Confess. Admit,” is all you would say. I had no idea what to confess to, and, as my curls grew yet longer, you became more and more frantic. I began to be able to tell your moods by the way your ears lay (flat against your hair if you were angry) and by the way your tails flipped from side to side.

  Being a poet is knowing when to stop.

  Being a poet is knowing when to begin.

  (You said these.)

  I finally discovered, through dint of your training, that I did, after all, have the knack of the contemplation of the absolute. Though at first the concept of the absolute escaped me utterly, you lived by it every day. The syllables for it were your favorite syllables. The absolute, you said, is where and what all science comes from. It took me many hard lessons to come to terms with that and to answer, as was so often called for: “Absolutely.”

  But I began with: “Ab, baa, baa, ab, ab, baa,” and after those first bits I got myself the drink, but then my cage was tipped up over a puddle, and I fell out and landed in the mud. Unwashed, just as I was, I was tied to a pole and carried to the poets’ palace and taken in through a small back door. Hooded poets came. “Sing,” they said. All I knew was my, “Ab, baa, baa,” but now it wasn’t enough. I tried: “Cha, poo, tut,” and was told to go back to ab, and yet ab was wrong. I was pinched and pulled and slapped at until, three days later, I could answer properly with: “Ab-so-lu-la-la,”and when I could answer with the “word” for poet in all its syllables, as we, in my homeland, might say: “Po-et-ti-ca-la-la”—when I could say these two, I was taken to the president, Humble-Master-of-the-Poem, he who is called The Uncertained-Among-the-Certained, and also sometimes The Certained-Among-the-Uncertained. Not as I was, all muddy and red, but washed and dressed in a backless robe of your form of silk, with the worms that made it still attached here and there so that all could see what it was woven of and marvel. I didn’t know then why it had no back to it.

  I was not allowed… of course not allowed to actually see the president of poems, who talked to me from behind a screen. He, however, could see me, and from there could reach out with his whip and snap it over my head with a great snap, or let it fly onto my back, in which case it made, instead, a flat, slapping sound.

  “Sing,” he would say, and I would answer, “Ab-so-la-la,” but by then that was wrong.

  In this manner I learned your syllables and syntax. I learned the prefix for the poem, and the suffix for happiness, and I learned to call the president of poems sometimes: Humble-Master-of-the-Names of-Things, or sometimes: Humble-Master-of-the-Thingness-of-Things-that-Objects-Should-Speak-Through-Him. And I learned, whatever I wore, to bare my back in his presence or in the presence of any of you poets of the palace as a temptation to the whip. Yet I must confess it, I still, even at this moment… I still don’t know what a poem is, or how to find one, or which syllables make one up, or whether a syllable is part of one or belongs to a part of another entirely different poem.

  The first poem of mine that hung from the flagpoles (and I still don’t know why) was:

  Look for the tender. The tenders of the stock. Flocks of fish fly. By now they nest in the poet’s curls. Whirl his thoughts like fish. Oh fly them by. And by.

  After that poem, the screen was removed, and I was allowed to see, at last, the president, Humble-Master-of-the-Poem, his head of black curls going gray, his yellow eyes, his ears set forward in greeting…. It was he, then, who taught me to snap the whip, “Because,” he said, “your syllables will travel at the speed of sound, sounding out over the whole world.” “Snap,” he said, and I would snap. “Sing,” he said, and I would sing, and many’s the time he stole my syllables and took them as his own and only let, as you would call them, the lesser of my syllables be taken as said by me, though, neither then nor now, do I know which are the lesser of my syllables, and many that you say are lesser, I think otherwise, while those on the banners are those I would deny.

  “Don’t think,” he would tell me. “That way lies the false madness and not the true madness of the poem.” But sometimes he said, “Think! Think, think, think,”and I still don’t know, I confess it, when to think and when to not think.

  First, then, the poet’s whip lashing out at me, and, afterward, a long time afterward, the bed where he mothered me as only (as you say) poets can mother, fed me blossoms and let me recover, for a while, from poetry. By that time I had learned better than to repeat myself. By that time I was scarred and bruised but knew not to stop talking when poems were being called for—not to let any line that might be turned and twisted and hooked onto another line or divided in that strange way of yours into even more nonsense than I’d thought it had—I learned not to let any such lines stay unsaid.

  It was a long rest he (and you) gave me. And for all that time, not one single, little poem or even syllable, not one suffix or prefix, was allowed from me, though I had been beaten to the point that, when ever my vigilance relaxed, poetry would pop out of my mouth at random. The president, Humble-Master, shushed me, and yet, even so, I saw him pressing down what I had said into his little clay tablet, quickly, with the long nails of his paws. (You had let my nails grow, too, by then, so that I could do that, though I was clumsy at it.)

  Then it was that he (and you) were all kindnesses, but especially he, the Humble-Master, waiting on me hand and foot (ear and tail, as you would say), held the wine glass to my lips, brushed back my curls. His ears always pricked forward now and his tail moved in a slow, contented back and forth. He waited by me even all night long. I could see his eyes glow when he was awake and watching me. I felt he liked me, perhaps even loved me, and I began to like him, too, though I could make out nothing about him. I could speak your syllables, but I understood nothing of anything, neither of poetry, nor of love, nor of liking. It seemed that, as I learned more, I understood less and less.

  But I lay back and rested, grateful for the care, and only woke out of my happy dream of no more whipping, no more groveling, not even, anymore, to answer: “Ab-so-lu-la-lat-ly”—only woke up to my thoughts again the day he shaved my head…. Cut off my curls and then shaved me. He did it. My (I thought of him as mine now) my president, my Humble-Master-of-the-Poem, did it all gently, as, now, he always was with me. Then he turned away and did the same to himself, cut his curls and shaved his head. After that he gave me the lick that was his kiss (on each of my eyelids) and motioned me to do the same to him. I felt the soft vulnerability of his closed eyes. Then he brought out a box for me and left me, for the first time—the first time on this world—completely alone. I had been watched and studied from the moment I came here and then tortured and then kept awake and kept talking and only now left alone, wit
h a few blossoms strewn about the table (whether for decoration or a snack, I couldn’t guess).

  I knelt by the box and opened it. At first I couldn’t tell what it was except that it was something to wear and that what lay on top of it was a helmet. The helmet was covered with a glassy, red enamel, and the sign of the poet was on the front—not just the sign of any poet, but the sign of the president, Humble-Master-of-the-Poem… his sign was on the front of it, but one of my own short poems was writ-ten—embroidered, actually, along the red and white flag that feathered from the top and unfurled as I took the helmet from the box. My poem, all there in a long line: If the sound of the snap, then no pain therefore joy. The helmet exactly fit my now bald head. The ear holes had been moved from the top to the side in order to fit my ears. Under the helmet was a breastplate exactly right for my strange, flat chest, jointed mitts that would fit my hands only, under them: Penis sheath, leg guards. At the bottom of the box curled a whip, longer than any I had seen, and under it was a dagger, curved, with the sharpness on the inside, like a sickle. On the hilt was the sign for joy and the sign for the power of sparkling mirrors, and I knew that, just as the president, Humble-Master, was the poet called Uncertainties, I was to be the poet called Joy. I had never heard, among your poets, of a poet ever called Joy, and I have since learned that that is true, there are none, which is odd, for it seems to me that the joy when the sound of the whip comes snapping over your head is as much as any joy I’ve experienced here on your world, because when the blows fall upon your back it makes an entirely different sound. One would think it would have been written about, and often, but I suppose that’s not your way.