The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  She didn’t answer. That was a step forward.

  “Everything isn’t good, good. Look around at all the dead trees. Dead and half-dead. Well, that’s what this planet is, half-dead, and we’re a half-dead people. Tell that to your crowd up there on the so-called lesser worlds. Tell them all they have to do is wait and they can have the whole planet for nothing, though by then who would want it?”

  “What about sex?” she said. “I thought we were going to have some fun with that. I thought you people did that a lot here.”

  “It’s not for you,” I said.

  “But that’s what makes everybody and everything grow and come to be.”

  “It’s not for you.”

  She sat quietly, seeming to think, but who knows what went on in her big, lumpy head. Then she began banging on the ground with her left hand. “I want,” she said. That big hand could make a thumping noise as though to call a herd of elephants. I could feel the vibrations of it where I lay back under the boulders. She shook the whole mountain. There was no sense asking her to stop, I’d told her not to do what I said anymore, but I did ask her anyway, just to see if she would. She wouldn’t.

  I began to hear little trickling-down sounds and then the thump and clatter of larger stones. She was starting an avalanche or, rather, a lot of little ones. I worried about where I was, under these boulders. I’d have to come out.

  She wasn’t paying attention to me. She was pounding, now, with both hands, and making a low, singing sound. I came out just in time. My boulders toppled over and started down with the rest of the stones. But she was paying attention to me, because just then a head-sized stone rolled right at me from above and she reached out, seeming not to be looking, and stopped it. Others, too, larger ones, came down toward me. She saved me, over and over, even though she was pounding at the same time, making them come down. Finally she stopped. “Now we go back,” she said, “you and I.” And she started down, mostly falling, and sliding, and setting off more little avalanches.

  I followed her. Keeping well behind, though. I didn’t know if I should be afraid that she’d hurt me or if I should count on her to keep me safe. I didn’t know if it was good or bad that she seemed to be taking charge, that she had such confidence that I would follow. And I wanted to follow. Like seeing something to its ending or seeing that it does end. And I was responsible for her and for how it would end—if end. I was being paid to be courageous. I wouldn’t get paid at all if I didn’t stick by her.

  When I came into our clearing, she was already back on her crutches and props, stumbling around putting her picture frames up on stands. “We won’t be caring what or who is half-dead now,” she said.

  Then she moved fast. I wasn’t ready for it. She turned and caught me again over the head with a long, narrow picture frame that looked made for the purpose of catching people. She threw me down and put one big thigh over me. Then she twisted around so she was lying alongside me and began to take my clothes off. Very slowly, brushing my skin lightly with her fingertips every so often. You wouldn’t think someone so big and so gross could stroke so exquisitely gently. She leaned over me as she did this, and her big breasts moved as though filled with water—milk, I should say—brushed over me, undulated over me, big nipples rising.

  Then she pulled my jeans off. “I see,” she said. There was no keeping it from her. After that I lost track of things, only knew I was enmeshed, enveloped, lost, just as I’d feared, except I wasn’t afraid. Everything was fat, rippling, jiggling, pulsing. I mean everything. I was on top, but mostly in, a breast on both sides of me, her stomach a great sea I floated on. With my ear pressed against her chest, I heard (again) the great waterfall of life, all the more impressive in the reality of it this time-beating for me, it seemed, as much as beating for her sake, keeping me alive as well as her—making me live. Everything’s not quite dead yet, I thought, even in the midst of it. Everything is still possible.

  When she got up, finally, and left me, it was as though the great sea of life—la meré, the mother, the mare—had left me. I had ridden the mother-horse of the sea—of the world—and suddenly I knew what all those sappy words of hers meant and why she said them.

  But she… it was as if she’d gone crazy. She was smashing all the frames and throwing them in the lake. She was stamping on the last remaining iris. She pulled down the tent with just one sweep of her arm. After that she took two steps out on the dock and broke it. I was already backing away toward the mountain again when I saw her pull up three young spruce trees by the roots and throw them in the lake, too.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I go, but not to you. Make things dead now. You said, crush. I do that now, but not you. You’re already crushed, only now you know how good we have sex on our lesser world so you know one good thing. We wouldn’t like this place. It has great beauty, but it’s all squash, squash. There’s no really real love in you or in any of you.”

  Then she left, skirting the lake. I came back and walked out over the sunken, broken part of the dock to the end of it where part was still above the water and sat down.

  They would probably get to her before she did much damage, though her damage wouldn’t make much difference anyway. I hoped she would know enough to hide, and I thought, with her gray coloring and whitish spots, she could hunch down and look like just one more lichen-covered granite boulder. They would come for me this evening. There was supposed to be a flyby when I was to signal them to pick me up or not. I thought maybe I wouldn’t tell them which direction she’d taken, though it would probably be clear. I’d tell them we were safe now—that I had managed it so that the creatures of the lesser worlds didn’t want to come here anymore, but it didn’t feel to me like much of a victory.

  I sat and listened to her go until the crashing sounds faded away and everything was quiet again, and the bird and the bug sounds started up and the things that were mating went back to their mating, and I thought, good, good. I love. I love.

  The Start of the End of It All, Mercury House 1991

  Mrs. Jones

  CORA is a morning person. Her sister, Janice, hardly feels conscious till late afternoon. Janice nibbles fruit and berries and complains of her stomach. Cora eats potatoes with butter and sour cream. She likes being fat. It makes her feel powerful and hides her wrinkles. Janice thinks being thin and willowy makes her look young, though she would admit that—and even though Cora spends more time outside doing the yard and farm work—Cora’s skin does look smoother. Janice has a slight stutter. Normally she speaks rapidly and in a kind of shorthand so as not to take up anyone’s precious time, but with her stutter, she can hold people’s attention for a moment longer than she would otherwise dare. Cora, on the other hand, speaks slowly and if she had ever stuttered would have seen to it that she learned not to.

  Cora bought a genuine Kilim rug to offset, she said, the bad taste of the flowery chintz covers Janice got for the couch and chairs. The rug and chairs look terrible in the same room, but Cora insists that her rug be there. Janice retaliated by pawning Mother’s silver candelabras. Cora had never liked them, but she made a fuss anyway, and she left Janice’s favorite silver spoon in the mayonnaise jar until, polish as she would, Janice could never get rid of the blackish look. Janice punched a hole in each of Father’s rubber boots. Cora wears them anyway. She hasn’t said a single word about it, but she hangs her wet socks up conspicuously in the kitchen.

  They wish they’d gotten married and moved away from their parent’s old farm house. They wish… desperately that they’d had children, though they know nothing of children—or husbands for that matter. As girls they worked hard at domestic things: canning, baking bread and pies, sewing… waiting to be good wives to almost anybody, but nobody came to claim them.

  Janice is the one who worries. She’s worried right now because she saw a light out in the far corner of the orchard—a tiny, flickering light. She can just barely make it out through the misty rain. Cora says, “Nonsense.” (She’s a
ngry because it’s just the sort of thing Janice would notice first.) Cora laughs as Janice goes around checking and re-checking all the windows and doors to see that they’re securely locked. When Janice has finished, and stands staring out at the rain, she has a change of heart. “Whoever’s out there must be cold and wet. Maybe hungry.”

  “Nonsense,” Cora says again. “Besides, whoever’s out there probably deserves it.”

  Later, as Cora watches the light from her bedroom window, she thinks whoever it is who’s camping out down there is probably eating her apples and making a mess. Cora likes to sleep with the windows open a crack even in weather like this, and she prides herself on her courage, but, quietly, so that Janice, in the next room, won’t hear, she eases her windows shut and locks them.

  In the morning the rain has stopped though it’s foggy. Cora goes out (with Father’s walking stick, and wearing Father’s boots and battered canvas hat) to the far end of the orchard. Something has certainly been there. It had pulled down perfectly good, live, apple branches to make the nests. Cora doesn’t like the way it ate apples, either, one or two bites out of lots of them, and then it looks as if it had made itself sick and threw up not far from the fire. Cora cleans everything so it looks like no one has been there. She doesn’t want Janice to have the satisfaction of knowing anything about it.

  That afternoon, when Cora has gone off to have their pickup truck greased, Janice goes out to take a look. She, also, takes Father’s walking stick, but she wears Mother’s floppy, pink hat. She can see where the fire’s been by the black smudge, and she can tell somebody’s been up in the tree. She notices things Cora hadn’t: little claw marks on a branch, a couple of apples that had been bitten into still hanging on the tree near the nesting place. There’s a tiny piece of leathery stuff stuck to one sharp twig. It’s incredibly soft and downy and has a wet-dog smell. Janice takes it, thinking it might be an important clue. Also she wants to have something to show that she’s been down there and seen more than Cora has.

  Cora comes back while Janice is upstairs taking her nap. She sits down in the front room and reads an article in the Reader’s Digest about how to help your husband communicate. When she hears Janice come down the stairs, Cora goes up for her nap. While Cora naps, Janice sets out grapes and a tangerine, and scrambles one egg. As she eats her early supper, she reads the same article Cora has just read. She feels sorry for Cora who seems to have nothing more exciting than this sort of thing to read (along with her one hundred great books) whereas Janice has been reading: How Famous Couples Get The Most Out Of Their Sex Lives. Just one of many such books that she keeps locked in her bedside cabinet. When she finishes eating, she cleans up the kitchen so it looks as if she hadn’t been there.

  Cora comes down when Janice is in the front parlor (sliding doors shut) listening to music. She has it turned so low Cora can hardly make it out. Might be Vivaldi. It’s as if Janice doesn’t want Cora to hear it in case she might enjoy it. At least that’s how Cora takes it. Cora opens a can of spaghetti. For desert she takes a couple of apples from the “special” tree. She eats on the closed-in porch, watching the clouds. It looks as if it’ll rain again tonight.

  About eight-thirty they each look out their different windows and see that the flickering light is there again. Cora says, “Damn it to hell,” so loud that Janice hears from two rooms away. At that moment Janice begins to like the little light. Thinks it looks inviting. Homey. She forgets that she found that funny piece of leather and those claw marks. Thinks most likely there’s a young couple in love out there. Their parents disapprove and they have no place else to go but her orchard. Or perhaps it’s a young person. Teenager, maybe, cold and wet. She has a hard time sleeping, worrying and wondering about whoever it is, though she’s still glad she locked the house up tight.

  The next day begins almost exactly like the one before, with Cora going out to the orchard first and cleaning up—or trying to—all the signs of anything having been there, and with Janice coming out later to pick up the clues that are left. Janice finds that the same branch is scratched up even more than it was before, and this time Cora had left the vomit (full of bits of apple peel) behind the tree. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed it. Apples—or at least so many apples aren’t agreeing with the lovers. (In spite of the clues, Janice prefers to think that it’s lovers.) She feels sorry about the all-night rain. There’s no sign that they had a tent or shelter of any kind, poor things.

  By the third night, though, the weather finally clears. Stars are out and a tiny moon. Cora and Janice stand in the front room, each at a different window, looking out towards where the light had been. An old seventy-eight record is on, Fritz Kreisler playing a Bach Chaconne. Janice says, “You’d think, especially since it’s not raining….”

  Cora says, “Good riddance,” though she, too, feels a sense of regret. At least something unusual had been happening. “Don’t forget,” Cora says, “the state prison’s only ninety miles away.”

  Little light or no little light, they both check the windows and doors and then recheck the ones the other had already checked, or, at least Cora rechecks all the ones Janice had seen to. Janice sees her do it and Cora sees her noticing, so Cora says, “With what they’re doing in genetic engineering, it could be anything at all out there. They make mistakes and peculiar things escape. You don’t hear about it because it’s classified. People disapprove so they don’t let the news get out.” Ever since she was six years old, Cora has been trying to scare her younger sister, though, as usual, she ends up scaring herself.

  But then, just as they are about to give up and go off to bed, there’s the light again. “Ah.” Janice breathes out as though she had been holding her breath. “There it is, finally.”

  “You’ve got a lot to learn,” Cora says. She’d heard the relief in Janice’s big sigh. “Anyway, I’m off to bed, and you’d better come soon, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I know what’s good for me,” Janice says. She would have stayed up too late just for spite, but now she has another, secret reason for doing it. She sits reading an article in Cosmopolitan about how to be more sexually attractive to your husband. Around midnight, even downstairs, she can hear Cora snoring. Janice goes out to the kitchen. Moves around it like a little mouse. She’s good at that. Gets out Mother’s teakwood tray, takes big slices of rye bread form Cora’s stash, takes a can of Cora’s tunafish. (Janice knows she’ll notice. Cora has them all counted up.) Takes butter and mayonnaise from Cora’s side of the refrigerator. Makes three tunafish sandwiches. Places them on three of Mother’s gold-rimmed plates along with some of her own celery, radishes and grapes. Then she sits down and eats one plateful herself. She hasn’t let herself have a tunafish sandwich, especially not one with mayonnaise and butter and rye bread, in quite some time.

  It’s only when Janice is halfway out in the orchard that she remembers what Cora said about the prison and thinks maybe there’s some sort of escaped criminal out there—a rapist or a murderer, and here she is, wearing only her bathrobe and nightgown, in her slippers, and without even Father’s walking stick. (Though the walking stick would probably just have been a handy thing for the criminal to attack her with.) She stops, puts the tray down, then moves forward. She’s had a lot of practice creeping—creeping up on Cora ever since they were little. Used to yell, “Boo,” but now shouts out anything to make her jump. Or not even shouting. Creeping up and standing very close and suddenly whispering right by her ear can make Cora jump as much as a loud noise. Janice sneaks along slowly. Has to step over where whoever it is has already thrown up. Something is huddling in front of the fire wrapped in what at first seems to be an army blanket. Why it is a child. Poor thing. She’d known it all the time. But then the creature moves, stretches, makes a squeaky sound, and she sees it’s either the largest bat, or the smallest little old man she’s ever seen. She’s wondering if this is what Cora meant by genetic engineering.

  Then the creature stands up and Ja
nice is shocked. He has such a large penis that Janice thinks back to the horses and bulls they used to have. It’s a Pan-type penis, more or less permanently erect and hooked up tight against his stomach, though Janice doesn’t know this about a Pan’s penis, and, anyway, this is definitely not some sort of Pan.

  The article in Cosmopolitan comes instantly to her mind, plus the other, sexier books that she has locked in her bedside cabinet. Isn’t there, in all this, some way to permanently outdo Cora? Whether she ever finds out about it or not? Slowly Janice backs up, turns, goes right past her tray (the gleam of silverware helps her know where it is), goes to the house and down into the basement.

  They’d always had dogs. Big ones. For safety. But Mr. Jones (called Jonesy) had only died a few months ago and Cora is still grieving, or so she keeps saying. Since the dog had become blind, diabetic, and incontinent in his last years, Janice is relieved that he’s gone. Besides, she has her heart set on something small and more tractable, some sort of terrier, but now she’s glad Jonesy was large and difficult to manage. His metal choke collar and chain leash are still in the cellar. She wraps them in a cloth bag to keep them from making any clanking noises and heads back out, picking up the tray of food on the way.

  As she comes close to the fire, she begins to hum. This time she wants him to know she’s coming. The creature sits in the tree now and watches her with red glinting eyes. She puts the tray down and begins to talk softly as though she were trying to calm old Jonesy. She even calls the thing Mr. Jones. At first by mistake and then on purpose. He watches. Moves nothing but his eyes and big ears. His wings, folded up along his arms and dangling, are army-olive drab like that piece she found, but his body is a little lighter. She can tell that even in this moonlight.