“You thought me a soft creature,” she would hiss, “You thought me dull of tooth. You thought me sweet of tongue. I am an eater of meat. I crave the taste of metal.”
To Ereškigal she would brag, “Weren’t they surprised.”
V.
My husband’s new wife was born from his flesh and all of their children were born toothless.
VI.
“There is no need,” she said to me. “This world is soft,” she said. “It is soft, as fruit is soft. We don’t need fangs to taste its juice.” The way her thumb carved a shallow bruise into the fruit reminded me of my son’s head. I curled my nails against her knee and leaned over her; I licked the tangy juice from the groove beneath her lips. I found the dimpled flesh inside her thighs and rested my thumbs there, pierced the vein with loving precision and watched her eyes go black. Listened to the keening noise that fluttered inside her throat.
But when I licked the tangy blood from the groove beneath my thumb, she made no sounds.
VII.
“Ishtar is careless,” Ereškigal said to me, “Ishtar is salacious. Ishtar is unsubtle. When Ishtar speaks, I claw my ears raw and bloody. Ishtar would war on mortal men. She would have them war upon each other for her amusement.”
Ereškigal slept inside my ribcage and whispered such things directly into the thin skin of my lungs.
“What would you have us do?” I asked, “In Ishtar’s stead, would you have us hide?”
“No,” Ereškigal replied, “I have no interest in Adam’s world. I would have us do nothing at all. I would sleep until they were all dead and their rotting flesh made a blanket of filth for me to wash my feet in. They will not last.”
VIII.
So I put a tooth into the fruit.
IX.
When he found out what I had done, my husband came for me. He came for me with a hundred of his soft sons and a hundred of their spear-teeth to pierce the places where my flesh had grown hard and thorny. They pried the plates of bone and hair from my belly and found where the flesh was stretched taut over my bloated womb, spongy thin and quivering like the membrane of an egg. I lay in the dirt and laughed as my skin burst and the black blood bubbled out of me—bog-thick, sharp on the tongue—and washed over their feet.
X.
For I am the mother of monsters and when they split me open, weren’t they surprised.
XI.
My monsters did not hide their teeth. A tooth in the eye would turn a man to stone, feet first and then his veins. It would feel like a hard wedge of metal running along the length of his arteries, like a blunted knife sawing at the place beneath his knee. A tooth in the eye would leave Adam’s sons hollow, with dust-filled hearts.
A tooth for her tongue would thirst for light and blood. She would ask, “Which does a man need more?” Adam’s sons will always choose light.
A tooth in her hand would make her a trickster. She would hold it out for Adam’s sons and they would grab for her eagerly. They would make a pact with her and tear each other to strips for bloody gold. They would not see that her face was a beast’s.
A tooth in her belly would spawn sons with scales and a crocodile’s maw. It would spawn sons with a deep and horrible hunger for pale flesh. A tooth in the belly would give her a hunger to swallow the world whole.
XII.
Be careless, my daughters.
Be salacious.
Be unsubtle.
When you speak let the world claw itself bloody.
XIII.
When my womb was empty, Adam and his sons peeled the rest from me. They took the entire length of my mud skin and stripped my bones bare.
“No more monsters from your poison womb,” my husband said. “From your corpse I will grow wheat to feed my children.”
He took my skin and stretched it over the world like the rind of an orange.
XIV.
Ereškigal wished to sleep. She went to Ishtar and said to her, “Our mother has been killed. Our father has fed her body to his sons.”
“Then I will eat his sons,” Ishtar replied.
“Then you will be killed as well, and your heart will be used as kindling for their sun.”
“Then I will eat their sun,” Ishtar replied.
“You will burn from the inside and never stop burning.”
“Then I will eat myself,” Ishtar replied.
“Sister,” Ereškigal said. “Have you ever seen my tooth?”
“No,” Ishtar replied, “You hide it away as if you are ashamed. You would bow to Adam’s sons. You would allow them to tame our savage world as you have been tamed. You were born tamed.”
Ereškigal reached behind her eye. She found the place in her skull where she hid her tooth and twisted it free with two pointed fingers. She held it up to the light and wanted for the fear in her sister’s eyes when she placed it between her lips.
“A disease of the feet against your feet,” she said, and Ishtar’s feet curled into clubs and she fell to the ground.
“A disease of the hand against your hands,” she said, and Ishtar’s fingers withered to ribbons.
“A disease of the eye against your eyes,” she said, and Ishtar’s eyes turned black and wept blood.
“A disease of the mouth against your mouth,” she said, and Ishtar fell silent.
Ereškigal stroked her sister’s hair and cleaned the blood from her face. “We will sleep,” she whispered, “We will sleep until their soft bones turn to water. We will wait until their corpses make the earth a throne.”
XVI.
All my princes are gone. But my daughters.
Oh, my daughters.
HARVESTING LOST HEARTS
Louisa Howerow
After the first frost, the old woman stoops
over rotting logs, pushes apart clumps
of fanshaped moss, uncovers clenched hearts
that beat so erratically she knows
they’ve forgotten how fierce they once were.
She untangles their roots, tugs gently
to draw them free. No brushing away
dirt or grubs. No scolding or
reminding them their eagerness was all wrong,
this losing themselves to sweet mouths,
unhurried hands. When dusk slips into itself
and moths flurry from balsam firs,
she nestles her harvest in a faded brown sling
retraces her way past sword ferns, burial stones
and enters unlatched doors.
BY HIS THINGS WILL YOU KNOW HIM
Cory Doctorow
I thought that Mr. Purnell was a little young to be a funeral director, but he had the look down cold. In the instant between his warm, dry handshake and my taking my hand back to remove my winter hat and stuff it into my pocket, he assumed the look, a kind of concerned, knowing sympathy that suggested he’d weathered plenty of grief in his day and he was there to help you get through your own. He gestured me onto an oatmeal-coloured wool sofa and pulled his wheeled office chair around to face me. I hung my coat over the sofa arm and sat down and crossed and uncrossed my legs.
“So, it’s like I said in the email—” was as far as I got and then I stopped. I felt the tears prick at the back of my eyes. I swallowed hard. I rubbed at my stubble, squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them.
If he’d said anything, it would have been the wrong thing. But he just gave me the most minute of nods—somehow he knew how to embed sympathy in a tiny nod; he was some kind of prodigy of grief-appropriate body language—and waited while the lump in my throat sank back down into my churning guts.
“Uh. Like I said. We knew Dad was sick but not how sick. None of us had much to do with him for, uh, a while.” Fifteen years, at least. Dad did his thing, we did ours. That’s how we all wanted it. But why did my chest feel like it was being crushed by a slow, relentless weight? “And it turns out he di
dn’t leave a will.” Thanks, Dad. How long, how many years, did you have after you got your diagnosis? How many years to do one tiny thing to make the world of the living a simpler place for your survivors?
Selfish, selfish prick.
Purnell let the silence linger. He was good. He let the precisely correct interval go past before he said, “And you say there is insurance?”
“Funeral insurance,” I said. “Got it with his severance from Compaq. I don’t think he even knew about it, but one of his buddies emailed me when the news hit the web, told me where to look. I don’t know what his policy number was or anything—”
“We can find that out,” Purnell said. “That’s the kind of thing we’re good at.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why don’t you have a desk?” He shrugged, tapped the tablet he’d smoothed out across his lap. “I feel like a desk just separates me from my clients.” He gestured around his office, the bracketless shelves in sombre wood bearing a few slim books about mourning, some abstract sculptures carved from dark stone or pale, bony driftwood. “I don’t need it. It’s just a relic of the paper era. I’d much rather sit right here and talk with you, face to face, figure out how I can help you.”
I’d googled him, of course. I’d googled the whole process. The first thing you learn when you google funeral homes is that the whole thing is a ripoff. From the coffin—the “casket,” which is like a coffin but more expensive—to the crematorium to the wreath to the hearse to the awful online memorial site with sappy music—all a scam, from stem to stern. It’s a perfect storm of graft: a bereaved family, not thinking right; a purchase you rarely have to make; a confusion of regulations and expectations. Add them all up and you’re going to be mourning your wallet along with your dear departed.
Purnell gets good google. They say he’s honest, modern, and smart. They say he’s young, and that’s a positive, because it makes him a kind of digital death native, and that’s just what we need, my sister and I, as we get ready to bury Herbert Pink: father, nerd, and lifelong pain in the ass. The man I loved with all my heart until I was 15 years old, whereupon he left our mother, left our family, and left our lives. After that, I mostly hated him. You should know: hate is not the opposite of love.
I was suddenly mad at this young, modern, honest, smart undertaker. I mean, funeral director. “Look,” I said. “I didn’t really even know my father, hadn’t seen him in years. I don’t need ‘help,’ I just need to get him in the ground. With a minimum of hand holding and fussing.”
He didn’t flinch, even though there’d been no call for that kind of outburst. “Bruce,” he said, “I can do that. If you’re in a hurry, we can probably even do it by tomorrow. It looks like your father’s insurance would take you through the whole process. We’d even pay the deductible for you.” He paused to let that sink in. “But Bruce, I do think I can help you. You’re your father’s executor, and he died intestate. That means a long, slow probate.”
“So what? I don’t care about any inheritance. My dad wasn’t a rich man, you know.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant to imply. Your father died intestate, and there’s going to be taxes to pay, bills to settle. You’re going to have to value his estate, produce an inventory, possibly sell off his effects to cover the expenses. Sometimes this can take years.”
He let that sink in. “All right,” I said, “that’s not something I’d thought of. I don’t really want to spend a month inventorying my father’s cutlery and underwear drawer.”
He smiled. “I don’t suppose a court would expect you to get into that level of detail. But the thing is, there’s better ways to do this sort of thing. You think that I’m young for a funeral director.”
The non sequitur caught me off guard. “I, uh, I suppose you’re old enough—”
“I am young for this job. But you know what Douglas Adams said: everything invented before you were born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything after your fifteenth birthday is new and exciting and revolutionary. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. The world has changed a lot since you were born, and changed even more since I was born, and I have to tell you, I think that makes my age an asset, not a liability.
“And not in some nebulous, airy-fairy way. Specifically, the fact that I’m 27 years old is how I got onto the beta-test for this.” He handed me his tablet. I smoothed it out and looked at it. It took me a minute to get what I was seeing. At first, I thought I was looking through a live camera feed from some hidden webcam in his office, but then I noticed I wasn’t in the picture. Then I thought I might be seeing a video loop. But after a few experimental prods, I understood that this was a zoomable panoramic image of the room in which I was sitting.
“Pick up one of the sculptures,” he said. I zoom-dragged to one of them, a kind of mountainscape made of something black and nonreflective. It had pleasing proportions, and a play of textures I quite admired. I double-tapped it and it filled the screen, allowing me to rotate it, zoom in on it. Playing along, I zoomed way up until it became a mash of pixellated JPEG noise, then back out again.
“Now try the white one,” he said, pointing at a kind of mathematical solid that suggested some kind of beautiful calculus, behind him and to the left. Zooming to it, I discovered that I could go to infinite depth on it, without any jaggies or artefacts appearing. “It’s so smooth because there’s a model of it on Thingiverse, so the sim just pulled in the vectors describing it and substituted a rendering of them for the bitmap. Same with the shelves. They’re Ikea, and all Ikea furniture has publicly disclosed dimensions, so they’re all vector based.” I saw now that it was true: the shelves had a glossy perfection that the rest of the room lacked.
“Try the books,” he said. I did. A copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead opened at a touch and revealed its pages to me. “Book-search scans,” he said.
I zoomed around some more. The camel-coloured coat hanging on the hook on the back of the door opened itself and revealed its lining. My pinkie nail brushed an icon and I found myself looking at a ghostly line-art version of the room, at a set of old-fashioned metal keys in the coat’s pocket, and as I zoomed out, I saw that I was able to see into the walls—the wiring, the plumbing, the 24 studs.
“Teraherz radar,” he said, and took the tablet back from me. “There’s more to see, and it gets better all the time. There were a couple of books it didn’t recognize at first, but someone must have hooked them into the database, because now they move. That’s the really interesting thing, the way this improves continuously—”
“Sorry,” I said. “What are you showing me?”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Got ahead of myself. The system’s called Infinite Space and it comes from a start-up here in Virginia. They’re a DHS spinout, started out with crime-scene forensics and realized they had something bigger here. Just run some scanners around the room and give it a couple of days to do the hard work. If you want more detail, just unpack and repack the drawers and boxes in front of it—it’ll tell you which ones have the smallest proportion of identifiable interior objects. You won’t need to inventory the cutlery; that shows up very well on a teraherz scan. The underwear drawer is a different matter.”
I sat there for a moment, thinking about my dad. I hadn’t been to his place in years. The docs had shown me the paramedics’ report, and they’d called it “crowded,” which either meant that they were very polite or my dad had gotten about a million times neater since I’d last visited him. I’d been twenty before I heard the term “hoarder,” but it had made instant sense to me.
Purnell was waiting patiently for me, like a computer spinning a watch cursor while the user was wool-gathering. When he saw he had my attention, he tipped his head minutely, inviting me to ask any questions. When I didn’t, he said, “You know t
he saying, ‘You can’t libel the dead’? You can’t invade the dead’s privacy, either. Using this kind of technology on a living human’s home would be a gross invasion of privacy. But if you use it in the home of someone who’s died alone, it just improves a process that was bound to take place in any event. Working with Infinite Space, you can even use the inventory as a checklist, value all assets using current eBay blue-book prices, divide them algorithmically or manually, even turn it into a packing and shipping manifest you can give to movers, telling them what you want sent where. It’s like full-text search for a house.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. “Do you know anything about my father?”
For the first time, his expression betrayed some distress. “A little,” he said. “When you showed up in my calendar, it automatically sent me a copy of the coroner’s report. I could have googled further, but. . . .” He smiled. “You can’t invade the privacy of the dead, but there’s always the privacy of the living. I thought I’d leave that up to you.”
“My father kept things. I mean, he didn’t like to throw things away. Nothing.” I looked into his eyes as I said these words. I’d said them before, to explain my spotless desk, my habit of opening the mail over a garbage can and throwing anything not urgent directly into the recycling pile, my weekly stop at the thrift-store donation box with all the things I’d tossed into a shopping bag on the back of the bedroom door. Most people nodded like they understood. A smaller number winced a little, indicating that they had an idea of what I was talking about.
A tiny minority did what Purnell did next: looked back into my eyes for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry.”
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