2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  The first thing he did was break the green globes that hung on the nearest complications. A single tap and they shattered and went dark. Then he smashed the black gears that connected into the polished wheels.

  Under the truncheon, they broke like hard, stale candy, pieces scattering everywhere. He climbed up the shaft, smashing black metal as he went. The metallic buzz of wings was everywhere now.

  Climbing up into the top, he came to the Grande Complication itself. This took the longest, but he pounded at it until the pieces rained down like broken glass. Locusts landed and worried at his clothing but he flicked them away, unafraid. They had plenty to eat all around him. Each iron wheel he smashed revealed polished gold underneath. He worked until he stood upon the golden compass rose of the true Grande Complication. As he wiped the sweat from his brow, he noticed that the golden arbor rose through the center, but it did not connect.

  He’d never had much of his father’s gift for seeing how things fit together, but this time he felt the missing piece as if it were his own heart. Neil drew out the black iron key.

  He picked up the truncheon and smashed the key until it cracked. He drew the small gold pinion ever so carefully from the key head and slipped it into place.

  The World Clock rang, gears slamming into a tension he could feel in his bones. The chronophage buzzed around him. Neil stood, trying to keep his balance.

  “Jack? Jack!” called Neil. He looked about and saw the bird preening his tail on the broken globe above, looking plumper than before.

  “We’ll leave the rest to the chronophage, Jack. They will take care of it now.” Neil tucked Jack inside his jacket and ran. The clanking grew louder. Shattered ironwork began to rain down through cracks as the clock strained to move.

  Clockwork teeth bit at his fingers as he squeezed himself down through the narrow gap. A gear ripped into his jacked cuff. He let go in order to free himself, tumbling down. His hands latched onto the arbor and he slid down through the gap as if it were a fireman’s pole.

  Neil landed next to Mister Harrison. Beyond his body, the portal had begun to shrink. The crowd on the platform inched slowly forward. The train engine loomed so close that it blocked out the sun.

  Neil ran, not looking at the great eye of the engine. He leapt from the edge of the hole toward the distant platform.

  The world filled with so much sound and movement that Neil screamed louder than when the world had stopped. His knees hit the platform edge and he rolled onto his side. The engine plowed past just as all trace of the portal disappeared.

  Neil touched his chest where he had cradled the bird. It was gone. A hand reached down and grabbed him by the arm, yanking him up.

  Miss Dutton towered above Neil, shaking with rage. His father’s watch was still looped around her fingers, the gold chain dangling against the leather handle of his suitcase.

  “The orphanage has switches for defiant little boys,” she raged.

  “I am not a little boy.” He lunged for the watch. Miss Dutton yanked it from reach and wrenched his arm till it felt close to breaking.

  “It’s mine now, for the trouble you’ve caused. I’m going to teach you to be a proper—”

  Neil drew in a breath and let out a clear high whistle that turned the heads of the closest passengers.

  “What,” said Miss Dutton, “do you think you—”

  Jack flapped into her face, pecking violently at her nose. Miss Dutton screamed. As she let go of his arm, Neil kicked her smartly in the shin and grabbed for the watch.

  For a moment they struggled, Jack flailing wildly at her head, then Miss Dutton turned and ran screaming down the platform, chased by the black pigeon.

  Neil walked outside the station with his father’s watch and stood on the steps where the earth had first stopped. For a moment, he was the only thing not in motion as the world flowed around him.

  A familiar weight landed on his shoulder and cooed softly.

  Neil gazed south, toward where home used to be, and then all around at the wide world.

  He could see lines of power where he had never noticed them before. Places where the edges of the world didn’t match up quite right: A flock of geese pushed too far west by an uncomfortable fold in the sky; an errant ley line that made the closest hilltop unusually devoid of trees; a billowing smokestack that would allow the wind sweep the haze from Greenwich Park if only it was broken down. He touched the truncheon in his pocket and wondered if he might be good at fixing certain kinds of things after all.

  He strode east along the bank of the Thames toward the rising sun, Jack riding high on his shoulder. A growing chorus of frog song began to fill the world around them, masking beneath it the soft, ticking heartbeat of time.

  SAY GOODBYE TO THE LITTLE GIRL TREE

  by Christopher Reynaga

  First published in Giganotosaurus (Jan. 2013), edited by Rashida J. Smith

  • • • •

  THIS IS NOT about stitching a straight line through cloth like a seamstress. Not about the tight suture of a surgeon closing a wound. This is an art. This is about interweaving patterns of the fold and musk. An intricate lacework of innocence. Each tailor creates his own signature stitch unlike any other.

  “Hand me the needle, girl,” said Papa. He took the curved steel from me, wetting the silvered thread through his lips to make it lie flat in the eye. “Now, hold her leg apart for me.”

  He already had her other thigh parted with one callused hand and gripped the needle delicately with the other. The steel glinted under the oil lamps. My elbow wrapped around the girl’s knee and held the leg against me firmly. She was sixteen, a bit older and stouter than I, but I knew how to brace against her so she wouldn’t kick out in fear and rip the stitches. My other hand took her damp fingers. She looked at me, eyes wide and glistening. Her mouth squeezed shut, trying to be brave. Her family’s womenfolk surrounded her, the gelded aunts and sisters. Her mother wiped a damp rag across her forehead. The women stood in the back, singing the chants of celebration and maidenhood.

  “It’s alright,” I said to her, pressing her hand against the upturned hem of her calico dress. The folks of Leedsville had pitched in, bought her such a pretty dress—cornflower blue with a bit of lace. “My papa’s the best tailor there is,” I said. “He’ll make you safe.”

  The girl looked at me hard when I said it, and Papa’s eyes paused on me, needle poised just over her vulva.

  “You’re no danger, Anna,” the mother said to her daughter, “You’re going to be a woman. You’re a woman and you’re not going to hurt anyone ever.”

  The girl choked back a sob. “Please Mama, I don’t want to kill. Sew me up… Do it.” Tears ran as her mother squeezed her hand, hushed at her.

  “Do it!” she screamed at Papa.

  Papa slipped the sharp steel through her vaginal lips and began to sew shut her womb. Her body jerked as the silver thread tugged through. I had that leg locked against me good, but something in her sobs shook me until I looked away from her face. Papa ran his thumb down her labia as he worked, wiping the blood away. He was a very good tailor.

  • • •

  When you sew shut a virgin-mother’s womb you use a polished, steel, taper-cut needle with a fishbone curve. The eye is threaded with silvered silk that holds a bend yet moves like butter.

  A blacksmith’s son once told me what his father’s trade was like. I tried to imagine my hands forging the crude, silver rings. Piercing the blunt edge through the foreskin of a boy’s penis and sealing it tight. Tucking it around the scrotum and driving the metal through the hanging tendon until it was bound like a snake eating its own tail.

  I reckon blacksmithing has its own grace and artistry, like tailoring, but both trades serve the same purpose. They keep the virgin-bound safe and all other folks from dying of their curse. The original sin of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Life. The curse the chapel priests say would strike if a virgin-mother and virgin-father had sex the way that a
nimals do. A wrathful curse that kills everyone and swallows towns whole, leaving nothing but vast, haunted woods in their wake.

  Woods like these.

  Papa walked the edge of the path ahead, reaching his hand to brush a mossy trunk. My feet stayed in the center of the road, well away from the dark tangle of branches. Papa never was scared of the trees the way most folk were. As a tailor it was as much his job as a wood-cutter’s to keep the dark heart of the forest at bay. I trailed behind, slower than I’d usually walk in such a cursed place. I was in no hurry to get where we were going.

  I saw the tumbledown walls of houses ahead in the trees. A splintered gray signpost tilted under the roots grown around it. Lexington. The root-tangled trunk that bound the sign was shaped like a woman, as if the tree had burst up and swallowed her. There was no face in the head-like burl, but the perfect grey lips of a hollow stretched in a surprised “O", collecting the shimmer of dark rainwater.

  “Papa?” I asked, stepping up next to him.

  “What is it girl?” He shifted his gray felt hat to keep the dapple of sun out of his eye.

  “I… don’t want to go to Portsmouth to see Tom.”

  Papa’s face hardened and he started walking ahead, “I’m not arguing Elana. Jed Wayland’s son is a good man, from a good family of blacksmiths.”

  “He’s only fourteen and I hardly know him,” I said, catching up.

  “He’s a man of sixteen, and bound as a virgin father. His brothers have already left to take up their trades, and Tom’s ready to marry. Most firstborn girls your age are already sewn and married.”

  “I don’t like him. He’s… he’s burnt across his face and can’t see out of one eye.”

  “The boy knocked over a forge, Elana. It’s not his fault, any more than its your fault that you are what you are.” He stopped by a black oak with the vague shape of a woman gripping a misshapen burl as if it were a child. “You think this is easy, trying to find you a match when we have to pretend you’re gelded? Most towns we travel through would drive us out if they knew you were my firstborn. They’d look at you and see walking death. I can’t help that there’s no town or kin left to guard you. Sacramento is dead and gone, taken just like this place,” he said waving his hand at the trees.

  “I don’t want to be…” I swallowed. “I’m scared Papa.” The fear burned the inside of my belly. I glanced quickly at the dark silhouettes in the trees.

  Papa’s face softened. “Look, this…” he looked around at the dark woods, “none of this is ever going to happen to you. It’s not a curse to be firstborn, Elana. It’s a blessing. You should have been raised in a town with all the honors and protection that a family gives to its virgin-mothers. We may have lost that home to the woods, but you still have the chance to marry out of this life of tailoring and hard roads. The road killed your mama, Elena, and I will not let it kill you.”

  “Mama,” I whispered to myself. I reached up and touched her pendant on my neck, fingers tracing the way papa had etched her face into the wood with his needles. I could remember the stories he told of the way she would charm horses and pick their hooves and sing. Sometimes I could almost remember the sound of her voice, though her face was lost to me beyond this bit of wood. I felt the ache in my belly return, and the fear that chased it.

  “You said Mama liked the freedom of the road,” I said.

  “She thought she would,” said Papa, “but it was harder than she’d been raised to expect. She passed on that first hard winter, God bless her.” Papa looked away. I could hear the quake in his voice. “I never should have dragged you across the West Union territories like this,” he said at the trees, and then looked back at me. “But we do what we must to survive, and you must marry, Elana.”

  “I just—Tom, he’s not the one, Papa.” The words caught in my throat. “Just give me one more season helping you with the needles and the girls. There’s time to find the right man—I haven’t had the change yet,” I tried to hide the quake in my own voice.

  “No,” he said, and his voice carried the weight of a mountain. “It was easier to hide your secret when you were young, but you are growing up fast. You’re almost sixteen and your fertility is coming. I know it came late in your mama, but I won’t wait anymore—it’s dangerous.”

  We passed a tangle of trunks like people clinging together. I put my hand on my belly and cringed. Papa pressed my head against him.

  “If you come into your fertility on the road,” said Papa, “we’d be lucky to get you gelded before you were driven off to die. Not even Tom’s kin would have you if you were far enough along. The best you could hope for would be my own gelded fate. I don’t want you to become a tailor, Elana. Girls and their mothers screaming at you. Cold looks whenever you pass through town. Blacksmiths have it bad I’d wager, but no one likes knowing that you drew steel needles through their daughters. The world needs tailors and no one wants to live with us. It’s a hard life.”

  Don’t leave me behind. My lips formed it, but I gave it no breath. I wanted to tell him a tailor’s life was all I’d known. That I liked the feeling of a needle in my hand far better than the feeling inside my belly. I wanted to tell him I would be gelded and stay. But I knew what things to push with him and which to leave be.

  We passed the center of town. The shells of houses caved from the weight of limbs. The chapel’s roof was broken outward from the branches of a massive black maple twisted up with the curtain roots of a strangler fig. A tangle of faces had sprouted from the bark.

  My eyes looked to a little tree below it in the town square, a smooth white birch. The milk-white body stretched slender and perfect with the eyeless face of a young girl. Her arms lifted into branches as if in prayer. Her smile was ecstasy. I shivered and looked away.

  We walked past a well overflowing with roots to where the road south should have been. One of the great old trees had fallen, crushing a few others. It blocked the road with a tumble of dying branches taller than our heads, leaving a great blue hole for the sun.

  “Can we go around it, Papa?” I said, searching for a break in the thicket.

  “Stay to the road, Elana,” said Papa, putting down his carpet bag and testing a trunk with his foot. “These trees won’t hurt us, but there are things out in that underbrush that might. Now, you hand up that bag when I’m ready.” I held the bags in my hands, but I stopped short of touching the pale bark, wrinkled like dead skin.

  He stepped up on two branches and glanced back. “You don’t need to be afraid of them, Elana,” said Papa. “The curse has gone from them. They’re just trees that drop seeds like any other now.” He leaned against the wide trunk at the top, trying to see a foothold over.

  “I think,” he said as he put his foot out. His other foot thrust downward suddenly with the crack of a branch breaking. He gave a sharp cry as he dragged his bleeding leg up. He gripped his ankle.

  “Papa!” I shouted. I dropped the bags and clambered up the branches. “Are you alright?”

  Breath escaped his teeth. He nodded and looked at the deadfall above him like it was some dog that had turned on him. He glanced back at the long way we’d come through the woods.

  “Let’s go back to Leedsville, Papa. We can’t stay here.”

  “There is a town…” he said, “not far east of the river from here. Applington. We can make it by nightfall if we hurry.”

  “I ain’t heard of it Papa. The Eastland’s not our route.”

  “You wouldn’t have. I don’t much like it, but there’s a road back down to Portsmouth from there.”

  My heart weighed when he said it, but it was a few more days between us and Portsmouth to bide my time. His arm went round my shoulder and we hobbled past the tree-filled chapel until a weathered trail opened up, barely more than a path in the forest’s green light.

  • • •

  A tailor’s stitch needs a flex against the skin that never loses pattern. The stitch must allow for the flow of urine out, and when it’s time
for children, allow the straw head of the surgeon’s seeding rod in. It doesn’t take much of a man’s seed to do it. Just the smallest green drop.

  Green, like the sap that comes from a virgin-mother when she becomes fertile. The green of grass and heartwood. The color of life. The stitch anticipates this change, allows for its constant flow. It guides the sap through to the pads of cloth that a virgin-mother wears always, except for those times she’s pregnant with child.

  When I go down to the streams to wash the blood from the linen bandages we use when we sew the girls, I wash the small green spots from my own.

  • • •

  Papa limped drag-step by the time we passed the clear-cut fields of weathered tree stumps and entered the apple orchard on the edge of town. Smoke painted the twilight, and I saw the flickering of some bonfire on the southern edge of the village. Voices cried out in the distance and I could hear a concertina and a fiddle over the laughter. Two boys leapt around the corner of the slump-roof barn, chasing each other. The smaller one slowed to look at us. He had a fat frog impaled on a stick, and its long hind legs twitched as he ran.

  My head pressed against Papa’s shoulder and I moved forward, but he shushed me with a finger over my mouth and pointed his head off to the right.

  “Up through that way,” he said, nodding between the barn and the shadow of the tall, dark chapel. He stopped me with a fierce grip when we stepped off the road and pressed his mouth to my ear.

  “Listen and listen well. We’re leaving as soon as I get my foot bound up. Don’t you leave my side and don’t talk to anyone. The ways are different in the east, Elana. They don’t suffer firstborn strangers. If they found out you weren’t gelded, they wouldn’t drive you from town—they’d kill you.”

  I stood, stunned, until he nudged me forward. We shuffled around the barn until we came to a tall white house on the edge of the orchard. A weathered surgeon’s pole curled its red and white ribbon up one of the front porch pillars. My feet balanced up the steps until my hand could slip away from his back and rap hesitantly on the front door.