by Sean Wallace
This story is also true. My head struck the wall, knocking down two frames. The DC’s wife stared up from one of them, pale, trussed in cotton up to her chin. The DC muttered. He didn’t touch me twice. I twisted and scrambled, I dashed from the room on all fours. Out on the road, I tore off the cotton dress.
I ran. I ran through the cutting grass without feeling anything. When I jumped in the river all the tiny cuts on my legs sang out in pain. I sank to the bottom, through water brown and clotted like a huge fungus. Then I kicked my way to the surface and came out gasping.
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers, Strangers are eating oil there. That’s a true story, too. What comes up from under the ground of the Site, but oil? Stones, you say; but the DC wants them, the DC eats them like groundnuts. They are as delicious as oil in the world beyond the glass.
The DC eats children. I learned this for myself.
Here is a truth for you: I stole the DC’s eyeglass, but the DC stole my sister. When I came up from under the river I ran sobbing into the forest, fleeing toward Minisare, craving her strength. The branches of her clearing rang with sound. Children bounced up and down on the bags she’d sewn, each blast of air adding heat to the fire. My sister stood beyond the flames, blurred by the heat as if by tears, and her arm bulged black as she struck a piece of iron.
“Minisare!” I cried.
She did not answer me. A leather mask hid her face, a visor pulled over her eyes like a heavy scab.
“Minisare!”
I ran to her, and then I saw what she had made, out there in the forest. I saw the iron. I saw the beast.
The creature moved. It shook. Its bowels rumbled. It had no eyes. Its whole body bristled with claws of every size. They were made of old knives, hoes, ragged sheets of iron, sharpened sticks. Its bloated hind parts breathed an obscene white wind.
“Minisare,” I breathed. And my sister shook her head. She shook her head at me. She motioned me away with one iron-ringed arm. She had no time to spare. The beast absorbed all of her attention: this beast that stank of smoke, of the DC, of the Site. My hand tingled, as if she were drumming on it, and I thought of the way she tapped without listening to my words, without seeing my tears. I knew then that her strength was no longer for me, but for something else. She had gone through the glass and left me here, on the other side.
That night Ture came to me in a dream.
He was strutting around the Site with his belly stuck out. His elephant-skin bag hung heavy on his shoulder. I crawled on the ground, hiding under a banana leaf, and whispered: “Ture!”
“Oho!” he grinned. “Pai-te, are you there?”
“Ture, it isn’t safe here!” I whispered, shrinking under the leaf in terror as machines buzzed overhead. “The DC will find you and put you in prison!”
His smile was so wide it cracked his face like an egg. “Ha! Ha!” he roared, slapping his skinny thighs.
Just then a little dog trotted by, almost under his feet, and he stumbled over it. The dog gave a yelp of pain.
Ture’s eyes widened. “Ah!” he said, delighted. “Music!” He took his feathered hat out of his elephant-skin bag and put it on his head. Then he began to leap and trip over the dog, always finding his footing at the last moment, and when the dog cried out he sang with it in a high voice:
I am he who looks up
I look down, all men die.
Ture has stumbled-o,
Ture is dancing!
As Ture danced, the DC strode toward us, his eyeglass tight in his eye, and a fire came out of it and scorched the earth all around him. I screamed to warn Ture, but Ture only laughed more uproariously than ever and cried: “Do you think I’m afraid of my friend the DC? I’ve taught him all he knows!” And he sang:
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers; Strangers are eating oil there.
Then he stopped dancing and looked at me sadly. The DC stood beside him. And Minisare in her rough jewelry came and stood on the other side, and all three looked down at me with eyes like salt.
“Once,” said Ture, “you fought with your sister. You were very young, and you bit her finger. Is that blood in you still, or have you spat it out?”
“I don’t know,” I sobbed.
Ture beamed. “Music!” he cried, adjusting the set of his hat. And then he kicked sand in my eyes and woke me up.
* * *
The next Sunday evening I took my mother’s digging stick and went behind the house to the termite mound. I broke off two branches, one from the dakpa tree, the other from the kpoyo tree. I dug two holes in the mound with the digging stick and put one branch in each. The sky was pale red, the ants drowsy in the cold grass.
“Dakpa,” I said. “Dakpa I keep my sister. If I keep my sister, eat dakpa. Kpoyo I lose my sister. If I lose my sister, eat kpoyo.”
I went to help my mother with the evening meal. Children laughed somewhere, at someone else’s place, and the piping sound came toward us in broken pieces. A sound like a whistle to call the birds. In the morning, when it was just daylight, I woke up and crept out to the termite mound. The termites had been listening to the future, and they had eaten some of both branches. I took the two branches out and measured them on the ground. I thought the dakpa branch was shorter. I still think the dakpa branch was shorter. I woke my mother and told her: “Minisare must be married.”
We came for her two weeks later.
My mother had agreed at once that we must find Minisare a husband. “Haven’t I been saying so?” she cried. My father was uncertain: he worried that her madness was too well known, and no one would take her. “That’s why we must do it now,” I countered, “before it gets worse.” He hung his head, then shrugged, and that day he began to look for a groom. And he found one: the man who now strode beside my mother, snapping off twigs when they touched him. A noisy crowd followed: relatives, neighbors, friends and trading partners, and then the hangers-on looking for Sunday excitement and hoping to smell food.
I knew, you see, that she would not hear me if I went alone.
My mother gasped and clutched my arm as we entered the clearing. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her, tense as wood. The groom looked startled, the strange scene piercing the layers of drunkenness he wore like a cloak. Minisare’s fire was ashes today, the stones of her forge a ruin. Only her familiar, the clawed beast, gave off heat. Minisare was flinging charcoal into its anus. The children helping her cheered and skittered toward the crowd when they saw their elders.
“Look!” crowed a little boy. “Look what we made!”
The noise of the crowd swelled to a groan. My father stepped forward, his face grey. His crooked back gleamed with sweat. “Minisare,” he said sternly. “Minisare, come with us. We have brought you a husband.”
A foolish plan. I see this now. But I believed the termites, who had eaten dakpa, who had said I would keep my sister.
Minisare pushed up her leather visor and flashed her spirit eye. Then she tore the beast’s skin wide, stepped into its body and closed the skin up again.
People were running, screaming.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” my mother sobbed. “It’s too late, it’s too late now to save her.”
She shrank to the ground. Minisare’s groom shambled away in panic, crashing into trees, fleeing his demon-bride. And I stood lost, the air thickening around me, until my father seized my arm.
“They’ve gone to fetch the soldiers,” he panted.
When I didn’t move, he slapped me. “Run, Pai-te.”
When I still didn’t move, he ran away without me. The children had scaled the trees, their cries snagged in the branches.
Everywhere people were crashing away through the undergrowth, and the shadows of the great flying-machines closed over us, and all the trees rattled their arms, and the side of Minisare’s monster split like a wound, and Minisare leaned out and shouted: “Pai-te, run! They’re going to start firing!”
She saw that I wasn’t moving. She put a leg ou
t of the monster’s side.
Death striped the forest, clots of molten blood.
When her foot touched the ground, something leapt up in my throat.
“No!” I shouted, waving frantically. “No! Just go! I’m all right!”
My pulse beat under my jaw, so strong it almost made me sob, a voice singing: Door in the clouds, open-o! I knew that voice: it was Minisare’s blood talking to me, the blood I had swallowed long ago and forgotten.
“Go!” I shouted.
By this time, there was too much noise for her to hear me. But she understood. Show me a child who can’t read lips.
She looked at me from her creature’s side, her eyes human now, lonely and radiant. Then she closed the skin, and the beast spun its claws and sank into the ground.
Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
That is how heroes are made. At night mothers say: “I’ll tell you of Minisare, who stole a lamp from heaven.” They whisper into their husbands’ hair: “Wait until Minisare returns.” They say she’s gone underground, across the lines, to unite the clans. They say she’s stamping the dust somewhere, her iron anklets jangling, her face masked, and everywhere she steps a puff of smoke flies up. Each smoke cloud puts out teeth. Someday the mines will collapse, and Minisare will burst from the ruins with an army of iron dogs.
And that is also how villains are made. I sat quiet under my mother’s shouts as she ordered me to go back to the DC’s house. When she ran out of breath I curled up on my mat, Minisare’s unfinished mat. I stroked the strands of unwoven straw as my mother mourned by the fire. “Minisare was like me,” she often tells me now. “You are your father’s child.” I don’t mind these words. I know that grief is all my mother has in the place where Minisare used to be, and that all the love she had for Minisare must now be lavished on this grief which she carries about like a stillborn child. Also, she’s telling the truth about my sister for the first time. The neighbors comfort her while she weeps and tells the truth. Minisare was everything, everything worth having on this earth: defiance, honor, dawn, tomorrow. She was the rain.
And Ture, traitor, thief, where is he? He’s hiding behind this story, trying to coax it toward him. He wants to make it his own. Or no, he’s not here, he went out of the tale at the same moment as my sister, the moment our history became too small to tempt him. For Ture has no interest in the small. He stumbles over them, sings along with their cries and then moves on. Some people say that he’s living with the DC, that the two of them drink from the same bottle, that the DC hides him and uses his power. This may be true. Foolish, clever Ture has always delighted in fire, in iron, in risk, in grand schemes leading to glory or despair. His language is song, not story. He is dancing in the mines and among the flying machines. He will not remember me.
But I stole the DC’s eyeglass. I have that. Wherever my sister is, she’s warm, she has light to keep demons and leopards away, she’s not afraid. And I’ll do more. I have done more. I went to the witch woman of the lake and squirmed under the thatch of her sinking roof and asked her to teach me drum. The darkness smelled of snails and her hand was as stiff and rough as a hunk of dried fish when I tapped out the rhythm Minisare taught me. A gurgle came out of the gloom: the witch woman was laughing. She knotted her fingers in my hair and pulled me to her and told me secrets.
I dream of learning more, of teaching others. I dream of you, old man. They say you made drums in secret, in the old days. I dream you’ll make me a drum. I dream of a clearing on a dark night, and the drum-voice spreading out, crossing the line between the clans.
Ask the termites. They never lie. Come, give me your hand, and I’ll prove it to you. I’ll pass you the words my sister drummed into my hand. Forgive me, the drum beats say. Do you feel it? That’s a true story, too, a small story that’s slowly growing bigger: I keep my sister.
Wait while I play you the rest of her message, a gift without weight or outline, invisible until you make it happen, like fire.
Pai-te, it says. Yes, it says my name, my actual name.
Watch your step, it says. I’m coming back for you.
The Colliers’ Venus (1893)
Caitlín R. Kiernan
1.
It is not an ostentatious museum. Rather, it is only the sort of museum that best suits this modern, industrious city at the edge of the high Colorado plains. This city, with its sooty days and dusty, crowded streets and night skies that glow an angry orange from the dragon’s breath of half a hundred Bessemer converters. The museum is a dignified, yet humble assemblage of geological wonders, intended as much for the delight and edification of miners and mill workers, blacksmiths and butchers, as it is for the parvenu and Old Money families of Capitol Hill. Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy, both founder and curator of this Colectanea rerum memorabilium, has always considered himself a progressive sort, and he has gone so far as to set aside one day each and every month when the city’s negroes, coolies and red Indians are permitted access to his cabinet, free of charge. Professor Ogilvy would – and frequently has – referred to his museum as a most modest endeavor, one whose principal mission is to reveal, to all the populace of Cherry Creek, the long-buried mysteries of those fantastic, vanished cycles of the globe. Too few suspect the marvels that lie just beneath their feet or entombed in the ridges and peaks of the snowcapped Chippewan Mountains bordering the city to the west. Cherry Creek looks always to the problems of its present day, and to the riches and prosperity that may await those who reach its future, but with hardly a thought to spare for the past, and this is the sad oversight addressed by the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities.
Before Professor Ogilvy leased the enormous redbrick building on Kipling Street (erected during the waning days of the silver boom of 1879), it served as a warehouse for a firm specializing in the import of exotic dry goods, mainly spices from Africa and the East Indies. And, to this day, it retains a distinctive, piquant redolence. Indeed, at times the odor is so strong that a sobriquet has been bestowed upon the museum, Ogilvy’s Pepper Pot. It is not unusual to see visitors of either gender covering their noses with handkerchiefs and sleeves, and oftentimes the solemnity of the halls is shattered by hacking coughs and sudden fits of sneezing. Regardless, the Professor has insisted, time and again, that the structure is perfectly matched to his particular needs, and how the curiosity of man is not to be deterred by so small an inconvenience as the stubborn ghosts of turmeric and curry powder, coriander and mustard seed. Besides, the apparently indelible odor helps to insure that his rents will stay reasonable.
On this June afternoon, the air in the building seems a bit fresher than usual, despite the oppressive heat that comes with the season. In the main hall, Jeremiah Ogilvy has been occupied for almost a full hour now, lecturing the ladies of the Cherry Creek chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs Belford and her companions sit on folding chairs, fanning themselves and diligently listening while this slight, earnest, and bespectacled man describes for them the reconstructed fossil skeleton displayed behind him.
“The great anatomist, Baron Cuvier, wrote of the Plesiosaurus, ‘it presents the most monstrous assemblage of characteristics that has been met with among the races of the ancient world’. Now, I would have you know it isn’t necessary to take this expression literally. There are no monsters in nature, as the Laws of Organization are never so positively infringed.”
“Well, it looks like a monster to me,” mutters Mrs Larimer, seated near the front. “I would certainly hate to come upon such a thing slithering toward me along a riverbank. I should think I’d likely perish of fright, if nothing else.”
There’s a subdued titter of laughter from the group, and Mrs Belford frowns. The Professor forces a ragged smile and repositions his spectacles on the bridge of his nose.
“Indeed,” he sighs and glances away from his audience, looking over his shoulder at the skillful marriage of plaster and stone and welded steel armature.
“However,”
he continues, “be that as it may, it is more accordant with the general perfection of Creation to see in an organization so special as this—” and, with his ashplant, he points once more to the plesiosaur “—to recognize in a structure which differs so notably from that of animals of our days – the simple augmentation of type, and sometimes also the beginning and successive perfecting of these beings. Therefore, let us dismiss this idea of monstrosity, my good Mrs Larimer, a concept that can only mislead us, and only cause us to consider these antediluvian beasts as digressions. Instead, let us look upon them, not with disgust. Let us learn, on the contrary, to perceive in the plan traced for their organization, the handiwork of the Creator of all things, as well as the general plan of Creation.”
“How very inspirational.” Mrs Belford beams, and when she softly claps her gloved hands, the others follow her example.
Professor Ogilvy takes this as his cue that the ladies of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union have heard all they wish to hear this afternoon on the subject of the giant plesiosaur, recently excavated in Kansas from the chalky banks of the Smoky Hill River. As one of the newer additions to his menagerie, it now frequently forms the centerpiece of the Professor’s daily presentations.
When the women have stopped clapping, Mrs Larimer dabs at her nose with a swatch of perfumed silk and loudly clears her throat.
“Yes, Mrs Larimer? A question?” Professor Ogilvy asks, turning back to the women. Mr Larimer – an executive with the Front Range offices of the German airship company, Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt – has donated a sizable sum to the museum’s coffers, and it’s no secret that his wife believes her husband’s charity would be best placed elsewhere.