The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  Esau’s Momma stayed up late, too, sewing buttons until the fire had died and the mending was done.

  * * *

  With three men around her dinner table—five if Cor and Uncle decided to visit, which they did every few nights—Esau’s Momma went even quieter than she’d been since the night Moss made her dance. No more than a few words a day out of her, and those always to voice a worry about the war that wouldn’t end. It was one of those wars that don’t seem to have an aim to them, and no one could quite remember what had caused the whole mess to start up anyhow. It was a thing for women to quietly worry about, and so Esau’s Momma did just that. She quietly worried.

  But not too quietly.

  She served up roasted grouse and mentioned that there weren’t enough brave soldiers leading the fight for the good of the nation, and then she sat back and let the men talk about what they’d do different if they were in charge. She spooned spring peas from a bowl onto five plates and fretted that they just didn’t make heroes like they’d used to, and then she went to the kitchen for fresh bread while Pistol and Esau argued about which of them would make a braver soldier. She butchered a chicken while Cor whittled into a scrap bucket beside her fireplace, and she whispered to Pistol about what a fine marksman he’d make, and didn’t they need boys like that in battle? And then she walked to the yard with fistfuls of bones to feed Moss’s dogs, and she didn’t bother to listen to what Pistol said next because she knew exactly what he was thinking.

  It wasn’t a shock to Moss or Cor or Uncle when the boys came home one day with their hair short and new green duffels over their shoulders. Moss slapped each of them on the shoulder and said he was proud, and Uncle poured good brown whiskey, and Cor beamed, damp-eyed. When Esau’s Momma walked in from feeding the hens, she froze in the doorway, staring at the dog tags around Esau’s neck. She half reached for the shining tags, a smile spreading across her face, and when her fingers touched the metal she burst into half-hysterical laughter. Choking on the words, she shook her head and said she’d known the day would come when he’d leave her, but she hadn’t known it would come so soon. Even as tears began to stream down her cheeks, she laughed like she couldn’t stop.

  Eventually, Moss convinced her to drink a measure of whiskey down, and her eyes drifted shut. They put a blanket over her, one she’d knitted from kitten-soft fur. She slept hard, with her hair braided and her shoes on and Esau’s old baby sling clutched in her fist. Every so often, she’d murmur in her sleep, but the only words the men could make out were “hero” and “freedom” and “mine.”

  * * *

  The telegram about Pistol came home not a year later. Esau’s Momma answered the door, her hands leaving flour streaks on her apron, and she listened to the news that Pistol had caught a bullet with his belly. Her eyes were dry as she took the telegram from the man on her doorstep. She left it on the foot of Esau’s bed, and then she went back into her kitchen to finish cutting the biscuits for that night’s supper.

  She stacked every letter from Esau that came home over the next year on top of that telegram—some opened, some not. She nodded when folks in town told her how much they admired her son’s courage, when they told her how proud she must be to be Esau’s Momma. “What good that boy’s done you,” they’d say. “Settled you right on down.”

  Esau’s Momma would nod, and she would finish buying milk or honey or bread or roses, and she would walk on home in her good leather shoes with her shoulders low and her teeth dug into the soft meat of her cheek. She would bake pies and split wood and scrub the floors, and she would wait.

  * * *

  Two years after Esau and Pistol went to war—a little more than a year since Pistol’s telegram came home—Moss came running into town, tearing through the shops like he hadn’t since the day his boy was born. Not a soul could tell him where Esau’s Momma was, and not a blessed one of them asked Moss why he was looking for her. They didn’t need to ask—the big man was clutching a crumpled piece of paper in one hand, and his eyes were full of the wild fury of a man who never learned how to cry. He ran into the post office and nearly knocked down Cor, who wasn’t young enough to get back up on his own anymore. Cor looked at his son-in-law’s eyes and at the telegram in his fist, and said the words no one had the courage to say.

  “Have you checked the wheat?”

  When the two men got to the wheat field, she was waiting for them, her fists full of thistles and her mouth curved like a cat’s claw. She wore her old red dress and her dancing shoes, and Moss and Cor noticed two things in the same moment. When they told each other the story later, over whiskey and in low voices, neither man could say which was more frightening: the barn owl digging its talons into her shoulder, or the fact that with that red dress on, they could see how she hadn’t aged a minute since the first night she wore it.

  “Come home,” Moss said. “You gotta come home. It’s Esau.” He held out the telegram like it was a half-starved kitten she could nurse back to health.

  “I know it’s Esau,” she said. Her voice was a pat of butter melting over fresh-cut bread. “Did they tell you he was a hero? He was surely a hero. Tell me about how he died a hero, Moss.” The barn owl fidgeted on her shoulder, and the dark red of the dress got a little darker where it held tight to her skin.

  “Come on home, now,” Cor said. “You gotta help us make the arrangements. It’s only right.”

  “Why is it only right?” she asked, and the curl of her smile sharpened.

  “Well, it’s—it’s only right,” Moss stammered, looking down at the telegram in his hand. “You gotta help us lay him to rest.” When she didn’t answer, his shoulders dropped. “Please,” he whispered, and his hand rose slowly to his pocket.

  Thetis’s eyes tracked the movement. Her smile faded as Moss withdrew his pocket watch. He held it out to her, the chain bright in the sunlight. He hadn’t let tarnish touch it, not since the day he’d stood on her front porch.

  “Please,” he said again.

  Thetis took a step forward. The men flinched at the sound of her heels digging into the soil. Her eyes glinted with old firelight. “I’ll come home,” she said, her voice as tense a warning as the crest of a cat’s spine. “But not for that. I’ve had enough gifts. I’ve had enough of made things.”

  “What, then?” he asked, his voice cracking with the attempt at courage.

  Only the thistles were between them, purple and bright, the barbed stems digging deep into the meat of Thetis’s palms. They couldn’t possibly have been the same thistles as the ones that Moss had brought to her so many years before, the gift he’d left on her front porch to declare his intention to trap her.

  They couldn’t have been the same ones, and yet Moss’s eyes couldn’t find a difference between these and those.

  “Eat them,” Thetis said. Cor started to speak, started to say that enough was enough, but Thetis silenced him with a raised index finger that carried the authority of a mother who has silenced her fair share of excuses from the mouths of children. “Eat them, and I’ll come home with you, Moss. Eat them, and I’ll bury that child for you. I’ll dig his grave with my own two hands.”

  Moss took a single thistle from her, the first of the seven in her grip. He raised it to his mouth, looking at her as though he was waiting for her to laugh and say it had been a joke. Her face remained as still as a midwinter river.

  The soft purple petals brushed the back of Moss’s tongue, and his teeth closed over the sharpest thorns on the thistle’s bud. He made a sound like the kind of dog he would have called it a mercy to shoot. Saliva began to well between his lips as he chewed, his jaw working once and then twice, slow and reluctant as a person forcing her feet into her first pair of shoes. His mouth went pink with a froth of blood and thistle-milk, and Thetis watched it run down his chin with the same bright interest she’d once brought to the sight of glass beads and copper pennies.

  Moss managed to chew four times before he choked on blood and thorns, and with
an urgent, visceral coiling of his throat and back, he failed. He spat and gagged and wept. Pulp and petals and blood-tipped barbs fell to the dirt at Thetis’s feet. Moss braced his hands on his knees, his breath coming ragged, his eyes desperate and darting.

  “I can’t do it, Thetis,” he said. “Ask for something else.”

  Thetis dropped the remaining six thistles between them.

  She laid a finger on Moss’s chin, as sweetly as if it were made of crystal, and with terrible patience she lifted it until he was standing upright again. His face was flushed and wet, his shirt stained at the collar with the mess of his weakness. She waited until he was brave enough to look into her eyes. “The only wildness I’ve ever asked of you,” she said, tinting the words with a cruel measure of disappointment.

  “Please,” he stammered, his words soft with pain as he tried to speak around the raw, bleeding thing that was his tongue. “You’re Esau’s Momma.”

  “Esau’s Momma was a name you made me wear,” she said.

  “Haven’t I been kind to you?” His voice carried the same pleading note that it had when he’d asked why Esau couldn’t turn into the kind of boy who would live long.

  “Was any of this kindness?” She let his chin go, and she reached down to undo the buckle of one red shoe. “Was any of this for me?”

  “You’re still his momma,” Cor growled, making as if to step in strong where Moss had shown himself soft. He went to take her elbow, but the owl turned its great eyes on him and he froze like a mouse running across the snow. He swallowed hard. She loosed the buckle of her other shoe and slid it off her foot. She stood with her bare feet in the earth, curled her toes into the loam.

  “I don’t belong to that word anymore. Esau’s dead,” she repeated, the word dead sweet as a promise, and she laid her red dancing shoes on top of the paper in Cor’s hand. One shoe nearly fell, but he caught it before it hit the ground. “And Esau’s Momma is, too.”

  And with that, Thetis returned to the field. She walked away from the men who’d caught her. For the rest of their days, they’d remember the sight of her: the soles of her feet pressing into the earth, the triumphant curve of her back, the set of her shoulders. She vanished into the wheat, and she left them behind with nothing more than a torn telegram, a pair of old dancing shoes, and a hearth full of teeth.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  Who is allowed to fight prophecy? Who is allowed to resist fate? Classically, heroes are often permitted to seek escape routes—but Thetis isn’t. In her myth, the gods force her to fulfill the prophecy that leads to the birth, life, and death of her son, Achilles. At the end of the original Thetis myth, the immortal naiad’s story concludes when her son’s story concludes. In writing “Wild to Covet,” I wondered: why doesn’t Thetis get her own story? After the death of Achilles, Thetis surely lived on, but her identity as a mother is the thing we know about her. I chose to explore that dynamic in “Wild to Covet.” This piece is about the way personal identity is subsumed by social expectations of motherhood. It is about the way people disappear under the weight of the label “mother,” and the way that disappearance comes as a relief to those who fear powerful women. Thetis becomes defined by a son she never wanted, imprisoned by a prophecy that those with authority force her to fulfill; she is fettered by motherhood, and the people around her feel safe in the limitations to which they assume she will submit. But in “Wild to Covet,” Thetis has her own narrative in mind. She recognizes the scope of the prophecy that binds her, and she navigates it with agency. She refuses to lose sight of her own story.

  * * *

  SARAH GAILEY

  ¡CUIDADO! ¡QUE VIENE EL COCO!

  BY

  * * *

  CARLOS HERNANDEZ

  El Cuento de la Brutally Murdered AI

  Usually when we’re diving underwater, the breachdive’s AI, Prudencia, stabilizes our descent. But, well, she’s dead right now, so the Pacific Ocean is having its way with our little vessel. We’re rolling and tipping dangerously as we plunge toward the ocean floor. The hallway’s awash in red emergency lights. Any other time, these wild alarms would make it impossible for me to function.

  But not functioning isn’t an option right now. I’m headed to Prudencia’s control room to try and fix her, now that I’ve checked on my baby girl. She’s fine. Safely tucked in her crib, napping away, as if our uncontrolled freefall wasn’t a disaster, but simply an overengineered way to rock her to sleep.

  And as for her head—well, there’s nothing I can do about that at the moment. First things first.

  The breachdive pitches and yaws; I almost fall. So I take a moment to regain my balance against a corridor wall. Better to be slow and sure right now, to remember all the skills Prudencia and I have been working on for the last half year. First, you tolerate your stressors. They are a part of the world, just as you are, but they are not in you, or of you. They are merely beside you. You grow mindful of the infinite now, of the fractal vastness of which you constitute only the smallest sliver of awareness. Your fear and rage feel so small in the oceanic current of all the information of the universe that you can barely find them at all.

  I have my sea-legs again, and fast-walk the rest of the way to the control room. I pull the manual bypass on the doorjamb to the control room. The lock clicks, and the door slowly swings open. I peer inside.

  Prudencia is smashed through. An access panel’s been yanked out of the wall and thrown to the floor. The metal is crumpled like wadded paper in the two places where he must have grabbed it. Oh, yes. Now I remember: his gigantic, impossible hands, with their sprawling fingers curling and spreading like roots.

  That also explains the ten gashes that have raked through Prudencia’s mainframe, top to bottom. A shattered mess of her motherboards covers the floor. I smell burnt plastic and ozone.

  “Killed you good, didn’t he?” I say to poor Prudencia as I walk in. You never know: some tiny part of her might be able to hear me. “Well, don’t worry, Prudie. I’m here now.”

  And then, brandishing a screwdriver, I get to work. A smashed mainframe’ll knock Prudencia out, sure. But she’s so distributed a mind, her entire soul could be recovered from the smallest corner of the boat.

  I wonder if he knew this. I wonder if he had no intention of killing her, but only of temporarily disabling her while he took my baby girl’s head. Prudencia might have interfered, after all. She most certainly would have recorded him.

  And he couldn’t have that. El Coco comes in the dark of night for a reason.

  El Cuento de la Resurrección de la Brutally Murdered AI

  It’s a matter of four minutes to reroute, reengage, restart. Tightening the last screw, I know Prudencia’s back to life when the lights go back to normal and the sirens fall quiet. The ceiling cameras flail around on articulated arms, desperately looking around. I bet every camera on the ship is similarly flailing. “Nádano!” she screams through every speaker. “What happened? How long have I been offline?” She moans. “Where is Ela? Her RFID chip isn’t responding to me!”

  “First things first, Prudie,” I say calmly, eyes closed. “Have you noticed we’re sinking?”

  Prudencia yells so loudly she almost blows a speaker. “Sinking?!”

  Five seconds later, our stately, tumbling plummet toward the bottom of the world jerks suddenly to an end, and the breachdive’s floor rolls back to true.

  “Good work, Prudie,” I say.

  “All life-support systems normal,” she answers, all business, self-chastisement galvanizing her voice. “No leaks, no external structural damage. Plenty of battery, plenty of air. Engines online. Communications—” She cuts herself off.

  “Wrecked,” I finish for her.

  “Which is why I couldn’t find the RFID chip.” A beat. “How did you know, Nádano?”

  “I guessed. He doesn’t want you guiding us. He wants to lead us where we need to go.”

  Her voice retains its pleasantness, its
equanimity. But I know Prudencia. I know when she’s despairing. “ ‘He,’ Nádano? Who is he?”

  Well. That is going to take some explaining.

  El Cuento de How You Explain the Impossible to Your Highly Logical AI, Who Also Happens to Be Your Psychotherapist

  When Prudencia discovers that my baby girl’s head is missing, she’s going to want to know where it went. Which is understandable. But if I answer her truthfully, she’ll think I’m lying—or whatever fancy psychologist euphemism for lying is in vogue this week—and turn the conversation toward probing into why. My tour abroad the breachdive has been a 24/7 session that started six months ago, when I first boarded, and has gone on ever since. And we’re infamous deceivers, we borderlines. Just ask any TV show ever made.

  Wait, no. That’s not fair to Prudencia. The fact is, I’ve had the most useful therapy sessions of my life with her. And it’s exactly because she isn’t human. Talking to her is a little like being alone, and my symptoms grow less pronounced when I’m alone. Plus, she’s smarter than me. Perfect recall, libraries’ worth of information instantly available to her, calculations at the speed of her quantum processors: I can’t fool her, and I know it, even unconsciously. So it makes me less likely to try. And she’s sleepless, always available, ever patient with her sole patient. Never know when I am going to need a sudden intercession.

  She’s almost ideal. But as much as I love Prudencia, these past months have taught me her limits. There’s no drift to her thinking, no slide, no sideways, no sidelong, no poetry. She uses idioms all the time, because I guess you can program the literal meanings of idioms into an AI’s lexicon. But I’ve never once heard her invent a simile. At some point, I’m going to need more than what her if/then soul can give me.

  “Nádano,” she repeats, “answer me, please. Where is Ela?”