by Libba Bray
This medieval convent did have big stone walls. It also had a tall forest of marble columns within its inner courtyard, among the crumbly ruins of many small cells. Here the wimpled nuns had passed their sunlit days and their starry nights, in solemn prayer. Quietly reading Holy Scripture, and growing heaps of pretty flowers. Peaceful Italian women, entirely free of the bellowing demands of Italian men.
Farfalla had to envy this quiet life of female spiritual contemplation. Farfalla had grown up all over the world, mostly in Brazil. Farfalla had always lived out of her suitcase. Farfalla had never had one spot on Earth to truly call her own.
Worse yet, although Farfalla was spiritual—very, very spiritual—her spiritual life was not very Italian. Farfalla’s spiritual life was mostly Brazilian.
Farfalla knew that she would have to work hard inside in this futuristic-medieval-ancient venue, so she had a good look around the place. This convent had a stone chapel, the one major part of the ruin that was still standing up decently. This big chapel was the speaker’s venue for the Capri futurist conference. The government of Capri was an official conference sponsor. The Capri state government had to stuff big events into big empty buildings that Capri had handy.
The chapel’s gloomy stone walls featured half-decayed plaster murals of Biblical prophets. The chapel’s ceiling swarmed with cherubs, or rather “putti.”
Farfalla despised Italian putti. Putti were flying winged baby heads. Sometimes the putti had a baby body attached. Putti were supposed to be the sweetest, cutest, most harmless things in the world, sort of like Hello Kitties. But Farfalla had never trusted cherubs. Never. Because cherubs were baby ghosts.
Cherubs were spirits who would never grow up, never become men and women. Cherubs were fossil babies frozen forever in time. How could that possibly be good? There was something ghastly about that.
Thanks to her Brazilian heritage, so there were aspects of Italy that Farfalla had never taken for granted. Evil aspects of Italy, mostly. Farfalla had a very keen sense of evil. Mostly because she had so much of it inside herself.
Italy had whole evil swarms of sweet rosy-cheeked cherubs. Italian cherubs always appeared in the places in Italy where truly dark and awful things had happened in history. The dreadful sites of martyrdom, massacres, torment and hideous slaughter. It took a while to catch on to this creepy fact about Italian cherubs, but it was the truth.
Farfalla studied the chapel’s faded blue ceiling. These nunnery cherubs, buzzing around up there like so many bluebottle flies, had a king cherub. He was some kind of cherub-mafia mob boss. This decaying angel was obviously very old. He looked older than Italian dirt. Yet he had a perky, scary, juvenile-delinquent smirk on his ancient face.
Farfalla plucked her iPhone from her bargain Versace purse. She examined the dozens of applications that she had downloaded and installed. She found one that told her the absolutely correct, atomically registered time. The local time was ten minutes and eleven seconds past six pm. Ten minutes past time to start the big Futurist Congress, and to get on with the serious business of foretelling some future.
This Futurist Congress would be a very grand event, or so she’d been promised. It had high-tech “thought leaders,” who were American Internet types. It had modish European fashion celebrities. It featured pop-stars, mostly trendy Brazilian ones. This was a dazzling crowd fit to do Capri proud.
None of them were here yet, though. Because none of them had shown up on time.
All these futuristic beautiful-people were in Capri already, but none of them were doing any honest work. Instead, they were off having a Campari somewhere. Gossiping with each other. Dawdling over the cashews in their five-star hotel bar. Her futurist chapel was as empty as a vampire’s tomb.
Farfalla was all alone.
Farfalla felt miffed and bitter. Why was her life always like this? Why? Here she was, all the way from Milan, after untold risk and trouble to get here. Her nails were done, her teeth brushed, and her hair was done. She was ready. No one else was.
Farfalla was also dressed in a particularly creative and appropriate Milanese outfit. Farfalla’s new silk dress featured a vibrant and beautiful Futurist print by Fortunato Depero. Nobody was noticing Farfalla’s extremely apt and tasteful choice of this thematic clothing. Maybe three random German tourists. In Capri, three random German tourists counted as nobody.
Farfalla thought wistfully of the years she had spent in the United States. Farfalla often dreamed about distant America. America was a grand country, where people drove huge cars and ate colossal meals. Better yet, Americans always showed up on time. If you said “six,” Americans came at six. In Italy, “six” meant six thirty. In Capri, it was worse. In Capri, “six” was printed on some useless tourist brochure that nobody even bothered to read.
Farfalla stalked across the chapel’s stage, with its pale translucent plastic podium and its giant projection screens.
The niche behind the stage was a scene of total chaos. The Web people had taken over, back there. The backstage was crammed with cascades of colored cables and blinking media boxes.
The Web people were the worst. Farfalla went to a great many tech conferences, because they paid their translators a lot to suffer through all the computer jargon. It paid pretty well, but it was awful.
Every year, there were more Web people at conferences. Every year, the Web people said crazier things. Every year, more people watched conferences on the Web. So that the conference became mostly ghosts, watching on the Web. Even undead baby cherubs were pretty wholesome, compared to the Web people.
The Capri Trend Assessment Congress would be live-streamed over the Web. Not a good omen, thought Farfalla.
A pasty-faced Web geek emerged from his unruly heap of glowing hardware. Farfalla put her hands on her hips. “Che cosa è successo a tutte quelle casse vecchie che sono state qui?”
“I’m from Brazil! Do you speak any English?”
“OK, dude, no problem, onde estão os fones de tradução para o grande evento?”
The Brazilian geek grinned in surprise at her Portuguese, and he shrugged. “Eu também gostaria de saber. Estou tentando conseguir os projetores pra essa atividade!”
How useless! Worse and worse! With a clouded brow, Farfalla left.
Premonitions were crawling all over her now. She sensed a mounting wave of bad vibrations. Why had she ever agreed to come to Capri? She could have stayed safe in Ivrea, in her abandoned typewriter factory.
Farfalla felt her head swimming. Something was coming that was bad, big and bad. Had they poisoned that apple that she stole from the hotel? Was a thunderstorm about to break? Something awful was about to happen.
Farfalla trusted her premonitions. She had no choice about that, because her premonitions were always right.
A stranger had arrived in the chapel. He was the first from the incoming crowd of futurists. He folded his tall frame into a conference chair, in a slanting beam of golden Capri sunlight. This glow fell on him like a blessing.
The stranger was tall and handsome. He was ominous and fatal.
He was the One! Here he was, yes, him, the One! He had burst into her life out of nowhere, like a golden mushroom.
Farfalla had been expecting the One since the age of twelve. In São Paulo, a fortune-teller had read Farfalla’s fate. This witch had told Farfalla all about the One. She had known what to expect!
When you met the One—her mentor the witch told her—well, that man was your One. That man was your only One. That was why he was the One. He was the only One you would ever truly love! He was yours, and you were his. And that was destiny!
It was the most beautiful story in all the world. And a very popular story, too. Women adored that story. Unless you were a fortune-teller, the kind of woman who could see her way through a beautiful story. That was the worst part of being with a witch. When she really started telling you how witchcraft worked, how stories put their spells on people.
Yes, he is your One! B
ut consider this, the wise woman urged: after that, all other men become useless to you! You have your One. He’s the only One you care about. Huge armies of useless men inhabit your world, suddenly. That’s a setback in a fortune-teller’s business, to say the least.
Because the poor fortune-teller also had a One of her own. She loved her One with a passion, she was the slave of her One, and she had no other One. That was why she was a miserable fortune-teller, instead of having some kind of real, paying career.
Now the fortune-teller’s prophesy had come true, as Farfalla had always known that it would. That feeling was very ominous, huge and cloudy and fatal. It lived in the beating core of her heart.
Farfalla turned her back on the One, pretended to study the speaker’s podium, which was made of sleek high-tech plastic. She turned around again, to sneak another look at her One. Yes, she felt just the same way about him. This One was indeed her destiny.
This was a terrible thing to know. Her destiny. Something terrible about that very word.
Now, another even worse sensation emerged. The extremely creepy feeling of having been here before. Of having lived this already, somehow.
Her premonitions of futurity had left her now. The déjà vu had her, cold and numbing, right to the bone, like a snakebite. Farfalla was extremely given to déjà vu. Her déjà vu was her personal curse. She’d suffered déjà vu for twenty years before anybody got around to telling her what déjà vu was.
Farfalla knew in her soul that she had already met this man. She hadn’t “met him” yet, because he didn’t know that she existed. Yet he had somehow, terribly, always been around her. He had always been in her life, and until this strange moment in Capri, she had never been able to perceive him.
He had to be her One. He wasn’t just some normal guy. She wasn’t normal, either. A normal woman’s One was some lovable guy that she fell for, and did anything for, and just had to be with. Farfalla had it figured that she could probably handle a romance like that. She’d told herself that, probably, it wouldn’t be so bad! Because even if she was struck with complete, heart-choking fits of true love over him, her One would just be some dumb everyday guy. While she, Farfalla Corrado, was a woman who could foretell the future. So, probably, she would be able to deal with him. Somehow.
But this guy wasn’t like that at all. This guy was much worse than that.
The two of them had a future together, because they already had a past together. Farfalla couldn’t quite seem to remember their very personal history, but it lurked in her like a recurring nightmare. It was very deep in there. It was heartache-deep. Deep in her soul like a buried splinter, too deep to get her mental fingertips around.
She and this tall man in his pretty beam of sunlight, they had a long, colorful history together. They had a too-long, too-colorful history. They had a history like Italian history.
Thank the Madonna, he hadn’t seen her. Not yet. Thanks to her clairvoyant spiritual powers, Farfalla had foreseen this trouble before it had happened to her. She had felt a premonition about it. Her romance hadn’t actually happened to her yet. Her burning, flaming, abject, passionate love was not going on. So far, she was still being spared.
Her knees trembled with the urge to flee.
The One did not realize that she was standing there, trembling, and staring. He did not know or care about her. He did not even bother. He had his tourist camera in his hand, and he was snapping shots at the host of evil cherubs bustling on the convent’s peeling ceiling. He looked like any other Capri tourist. He looked happy and thoughtless and slightly stupefied.
Farfalla made one dainty move to creep out of the place unseen. But it was too late. Suddenly, like a tide, futurists were arriving for the conference. They were crowding through the church doors in a mass.
A damp-faced, gangly creep of a Goth girl slouched into the chapel, along with the crowd. She saw the One, and she moved at once to join him. She flounced down in a shadow next to his beam of light.
From the tender look on his face—he was blond, slightly sunburned, quite good-looking, though kind of big, with a big nose—he worshipped this hopeless Goth girl. He was all urgent and attentive about her. In response, she had this insufferable, teenager, eye-rolling look. She was a mess.
Suddenly the two of them looked up at Farfalla. They both took full, surprised notice of her. They were a brother and a sister, because they had the same fatal blue eyes. They had four eyes that pierced her like four blue ice-picks.
Farfalla was pinned to the stage.
She found her willpower, and she ran to hide.
Catastrophic Disruption
of the Head
Margo Lanagan
Margo Lanagan has published four collections of short stories—White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes and Yellowcake—and a novel, Tender Morsels. She is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner for best collection, short story, novel, and most recently for a novella, “Sea-Hearts”, which she has since expanded into a novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island (Sea Hearts in Australia), to be published in 2012. Two of her books are Michael L. Printz Honor Books, and her work has also been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and twice been placed on the James Tiptree Jr Award honor list, as well as being shortlisted for Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Stoker, Seiun, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson awards. “Catastrophic Disruption of the Head”, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Tinderbox”, was first published in Isobelle Carmody and Nan McNab’s two-volume collection of modernized fairy tales, Tales from the Tower, published by Allen & Unwin. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia.
Who believes in his own death? I’ve seen how men stop being, how people that you spoke to and traded with slump to bleeding and lie still, and never rise again. I have my own shiny scars, now; I’ve a head full of stories that goat-men will never believe. And I can tell you: with everyone dying around you, still you can remain unharmed. Some boss-soldier will pull you out roughly at the end, while the machines in the air fling fire down on the enemy, halting the chatter of their guns—at last, at last!—when nothing on the ground would quiet it. I always thought I would be one of those lucky ones, and it turns out that I am. The men who go home as stories on others’ lips? They fell in front of me, next to me; I could have been dead just as instantly, or maimed worse than dead. I steeled myself before every fight, and shat myself. But still another part of me stayed serene, didn’t it. And was justified in that, wasn’t it, for here I am: all in one piece, wealthy, powerful, safe, and on the point of becoming king.
I have the king by the neck. I push my pistol into his mouth, and he gags. He does not know how to fight, hasn’t the first clue. He smells nice, expensive. I swing him out from me. I blow out the back of his head. All sound goes out of the world.
I went to the war because elsewhere was glamorous to me. Men had passed through the mountains, one or two of them every year of my life, speaking of what they had come from, and where they were going. All those events and places showed me, with their color and their mystery and their crowdedness, [perhaps this doesn’t matter; I can’t think of a better way, even with ‘what a simple existence I had... I love the cadences as they are.] how simple an existence I had here with my people—and how confined, though the sky was broad above us, though we walked the hills and mountains freely with our flocks. The fathers drank up their words, the mothers hurried to feed them, and silently watched and listened. I wanted to bring news home and be the feted man and the respected, the one explaining, not the one all eyes and questions among the goats and children.
I went for the adventure and the cleverness of these men’s lives and the scheming. I wanted to live in those stories they told. The boss-soldiers and all their equipment and belongings and weapons and information, and all the other people grasping after those things—I wanted to play them off against each other as these men said they did, and gather th
e money and food and toys that fell between. One of those silvery capsules, that opened like a seed-case and twinkled and tinkled, that you used for talking to your contact in the hills or among the bosses—I wanted one of those.
There was also the game of the fighting itself. A man might lose that game, they told us, at any moment, and in the least dignified manner, toileting in a ditch, or putting food on his plate at the barracks, or having at a whore in the tents nearby. (There were lots of whores, they told the fathers; every woman was a whore there; some of them did not even take your money, but went with you for the sheer love of whoring.) But look, here was this stranger whole and healthy among us, and all he had was that scar on his arm, smooth and harmless, for all his stories of a head rolling into his lap, and of men up dancing one moment, and stilled forever the next. He was here, eating our food and laughing. The others were only words; they might be stories and no more, boasting and no more. I watched my father and uncles, and some could believe our visitor and some could not, that he had seen so many deaths, and so vivid.
‘You are different,’ whispers the princess, almost crouched there, looking up at me. ‘You were gentle and kind before. What has happened? What has changed?’
I was standing in a wasteland, very cold. An old woman lay dead, blown backwards off the stump she’d been sitting on; the pistol that had taken her face off was in my hand—mine, that the bosses had given me to fight with, that I was smuggling home. My wrist hummed from the shot, my fingertips tingled.
I still had some swagger in me, from the stuff my drugs-man had given me, my going-home gift, his farewell spliff to me, with good powder in it, that I had half-smoked as I walked here. I lifted the pistol and sniffed the tip, and the smoke stung in my nostrils. Then the hand with the pistol fell to my side, and I was only cold and mystified. An explosion will do that, wake you up from whatever drug is running your mind, dismiss whatever dream, and sharply.