You don’t see why a dog would try so hard to be human. Being human doesn’t look that remarkable to you.
A kid pretending to be a dog, that’s eccentric. But a kid pretending to be a dog pretending to be a kid? To coin a phrase, that’s barking mad.
So, you tire of Snoopy and his anthropomorphistic ways. You want to be a real dog.
You try to tell Charlie Brown. But real dogs don’t have thought balloons. You bark, you wag your tail in urgent manners. Charlie Brown looks very confused, but then, that’s a default setting for Charlie Brown. You find a leash, drop it in front of him on the floor. At last he gets the hint.
He puts your leash on warily. He’s waiting for the punchline. He’s waiting for your ironic sneer, the little bit of humiliation you’ll make him suffer. “Good grief,” says Charlie Brown. His hands are shaking.
He takes you out to the park. That’s where most people take their dogs, but he’s never done it before. Now you’re there, he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do.
In your mouth you pick up a stick, and offer it to him. He takes it suspiciously.
His hands are still shaking.
You realize he’s scared of you. Not scared that you’ll bite him, like an ordinary dog might. But that you’ll bully him. That you’ll point at him and laugh. He was once the star of his own comic strip, and the wacky dog took that away from him, and reduced him to a stooge.
He throws the stick for you.
And, as Snoopy, so many options come into play. You could bring him back the stick, but have already fashioned it into some exciting piece of woodwork, a model boat, maybe, or a pipe rack. You could bring him instead an entire branch, an entire log, an entire tree. You could just roll your eyes, say “Good grief,” and walk away. That would be the most hurtful.
You bring him back the stick. And not in your paws, as if you’re a human. And not with a little gift bow on top, in sarcastic overenthusiasm. You bring it back properly, as a loyal dog would.
He takes the stick from you. He doesn’t trust you. He’s still waiting for the joke.
There is no joke. And each time he throws it, you bark, and race after it, and bring it back to your master. And each time, Charlie Brown’s face breaks into an ever larger smile, and the smile is sincere and free, and it’s not a smile for the newspaper readers at home, it’s a smile for you, just for you, his faithful canine pal.
The supporting cast come back to see you again. Lucy Van Pelt says, “What are you doing, you blockhead?” and then she starts on about wanting to slug you again. Linus tells of how selfish it is that you are putting the needs of one above the livelihood of many, and finds some bit of scripture to emphasize the point. The truth is, the Peanuts readership is dwindling fast. No one wants to read about Snoopy, if Snoopy’s just an ordinary dog. No one wants to read about a Charlie Brown who’s happy.
It’s easy to ignore Lucy and Linus, because you’re a dog, and dogs aren’t supposed to understand what humans say.
And not everyone minds. All the kids at school, the ones who never got names, the ones who never felt valued—they’re free now, they can do whatever they want. Maybe they’ll become proper kids now, with real lives, and real futures, and dreams that they have the power to fulfill. Maybe they’ll find some other comic strip to knock about in. It’s up to them.
And Charlie Brown one morning is excited to find something growing on his chin. “Look, boy, it’s stubble! I think I’m growing a beard!” He’s spent so many years trapped as an eight-year-old, and now even the banalities of ageing seem wondrous to him.
You wrap up your storylines. Snoopy the would-be novelist puts aside his typewriter; he finally has to admit that he was never good enough to get published. Snoopy throws away his tennis racquet, his Joe Cool sunglasses, his stash of root beer.
You put on your goggles for the last time, and climb aboard your kennel. It’s time you put an end to the Red Baron once and for all. The engines roar into life, and you can feel the Sopwith Camel speeding up into the clouds. Kill the Red Baron, shoot him in cold blood if you need to, and the war will be over. You circle the sky for hours, but you can’t find anyone to fight. There’s no enemy aircraft up there. Because the First World War was such a long time ago. And the Red Baron, if he even existed, is dead, he’s already dead—maybe he was a dachshund, or a German shepherd, and he was a dog in Berlin who used to climb aboard his own kennel and fantasize about being a hero—and by now the poor animal will be long dead, maybe he died of old age, maybe he died peacefully in the arms of some round-headed little German boy all of his own.
Panel one. And you’re indoors. And your head is on Charlie Brown’s lap. And he’s scratching at your ears, and you like that. It makes you feel dizzy, it makes you feel you could just let go of this world altogether and drift off somewhere magical. And Charlie Brown says to you, “It was never what I wanted. I didn’t want fame. I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. I was just a little kid. What’s a little kid to know? And do you sometimes feel that you just want to change, to be a different person, but you can’t be? Because you’re surrounded by people who know you too well already, and they don’t mean to, but they’re going to hold you down and keep you in check, there’ll be no second chances because you can’t escape their expectations of you—and the whole world has expectations of me, they’re looking at me and know who I am and how I’ll fail at every turn. And then the second chance comes. Impossibly, the second chance is there. I never wanted a dog who was extraordinary. I wanted a dog who was ordinary to the world, but extraordinary to me, who’d love me and be my friend. I didn’t want a dog like Snoopy. I wanted a dog like you.” And this was all far too much to fit inside one speech bubble, but it didn’t matter, this is what Charlie Brown said to you.
Panel two. And he’s still scratching at your ears. But, no, now he’s tugging. He’s tugging at your ears. He’s tugging at your head. And you want to say, no, Charlie Brown, no, you blockhead! Because he’s going to ruin everything. Because Charlie Brown was never supposed to be happy, because this isn’t the way it’s meant to be—and he should leave your fake dog head alone, the two of you work like this, it’s nice like this, isn’t it? It’s neat. And if he pulls your head off and reveals the girl beneath there’s no going back, it’ll all change forever—and maybe the head won’t come off anyway, maybe it isn’t a costume any more, maybe at last you’ve turned into a real dog—but still he tugs, he just keeps tugging, and there’s give, you can feel the weight lift from your shoulders—oh, you want to shout out, tell him to stop, good grief, Charlie Brown!—but you can’t speak, a dog can’t speak, you can only bark.
Panel three. And the head’s off. The head’s off. The head’s off. And there’s your hair everywhere. It’s spilled out all over the frame, there’s so much of it, how it has grown, how ever did you manage to stuff it all away? And its color is so vivid, bursting out of a black and white strip like this, it’s wrong, it’s rude. Rude and red, the brightest red, the reddest red, red hair everywhere. You stare up at Charlie Brown. And he stares down at you. The round-headed kid, and the little red-haired girl.
You stare at each other for a long time.
You wonder whether you’ll move on to panel four. What the punchline will be, the thing that’ll bring you both crashing down to earth. But there doesn’t have to be one. There never has to be.
REINDEER MOUNTAIN
KARIN TIDBECK
Born in 1977 in Stockholm, Sweden, Karin Tidbeck [www.karintidbeck.com] lives in Malmö where she works as a project leader and freelance creative writing instructor. She has previously worked as a writer for role-playing productions in schools and theatres, and written articles and essays on gaming and interactive arts theory. She’s an alumna of the 2010 Clarion San Diego Writers’ Workshop. She has published short stories and poetry in Swedish since 2002, including a short story collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?, and the recent novel Amatka. Her English publication history includes the short story collec
tion Jagannath, as well as stories in Weird Tales, Shimmer Magazine, Unstuck Annual and the anthologies Odd? and Steampunk Revolution.
Cilla was twelve years old the summer Sara put on her great-grandmother’s wedding dress and disappeared up the mountain. It was in the middle of June, during summer break. The drive was a torturous nine hours, interrupted much too rarely by bathroom- and ice cream breaks. Cilla was reading in the passenger seat of the ancient Saab, Sara stretched out in the back seat, Mum driving. They were travelling northwest on gradually narrowing roads, following the river, the towns shrinking and the mountains drawing closer. Finally, the old Saab crested a hill and rolled down into a wide valley where the river pooled into a lake between two mountains. Cilla put her book down and looked out the window. The village sat between the lake and the great hump of Reindeer Mountain, its lower reaches covered in dark pine forest. The mountain on the other side of the lake was partly deforested, as if someone had gone over it with a giant electric shaver. Beyond them, more shapes undulated toward the horizon, shapes rubbed soft by the ice ages.
“Why does no one live on the mountain itself?” Sara suddenly said, pulling one of her earphones out. Robert Smith’s voice leaked into the car.
“It’s not very convenient, I suppose,” said Mum. “The hillside is very steep.”
“Nana said it’s because the mountain belongs to the vittra.”
“She would.” Mum smirked. “It sounds much more exciting. Look!”
She pointed up to the hillside on the right. A rambling two-storey house sat in a meadow outside the village. “There it is.”
Cilla squinted at the house. It sat squarely in the meadow. Despite the faded paint and angles that were slightly off, it somehow seemed very solid. “Are we going there now?”
“No. It’s late. We’ll go straight to Aunt Hedvig’s and get ourselves installed. But you can come with me tomorrow if you like. The cousins will all be meeting to see what needs doing.”
“I can’t believe you’re letting the government buy the land,” said Sara.
“We’re not letting them,” sighed Mum. “They’re expropriating.”
“Forcing us to sell,” Cilla said.
“I know what it means, smartass,” muttered Sara and kicked the back of the passenger seat. “It still blows.”
Cilla reached back and pinched her leg. Sara caught her hand and twisted her fingers until Cilla squealed. They froze when the car suddenly braked. Mum killed the engine and glared at them.
“Get out,” she said. “Hedvig’s cottage is up this road. You can walk the rest of the way. I don’t care who started,” she continued when Cilla opened her mouth to protest. “Get out. Walk it off.”
They arrived at Hedvig’s cottage too tired to bicker. The house sat on a slope above the village, red with white window frames and a little porch overlooking the village and lake. Mum was in the kitchen with Hedvig. They were having coffee, slurping it through a lump of sugar between their front teeth.
“I’ve spoken to Johann about moving him into a home,” said Hedvig as the girls came in. “He’s not completely against it. But he wants to stay here. And there is no home here that can handle people with… nerve problems. And he can’t stay with Otto forever.” She looked up at Cilla and Sara and smiled, her eyes almost disappearing in a network of wrinkles. She looked very much like Nana and Mum, with the same wide cheekbones and slanted grey eyes.
“Look at you lovely girls!” said Hedvig, getting up from the table.
She was slightly hunchbacked and very thin. Embracing her, Cilla could feel her vertebrae through the cardigan.
Hedvig urged them to sit down. “They’re store-bought, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, setting a plate of cookies on the table.
Hedvig and Mum continued to talk about Johann. He was the eldest brother of Hedvig and Nana, the only one of the siblings to remain in the family house. He had lived alone in there for forty years. Mum and her cousins had the summer to get Johann out and salvage whatever they could before the demolition crew came. No one quite knew what the house looked like inside. Johann hadn’t let anyone in for decades.
There were two guest rooms in the cottage. Sara and Cilla shared a room under the eaves; Mum took the other with the threat that any fighting would mean her moving in with her daughters. The room was small but cozy, with lacy white curtains and dainty furniture, like in an oversized doll’s house: two narrow beds with white throws, a writing desk with curved legs, two slim-backed chairs. It smelled of dried flowers and dust. The house had no toilet. Hedvig showed a bewildered Cilla to an outhouse across the little meadow. Inside, the outhouse was clean and bare, with a little candle and matches, even a magazine holder. The rich scent of decomposing waste clung to the back of the nose. Cilla went quickly, imagining an enormous cavern under the seat, full of spiders and centipedes and evil clowns.
When she got back, she found Sara already in bed, listening to music with her eyes closed. Cilla got into her own bed. The sheets were rough, the pillowcase embroidered with someone’s initials. She picked up her book from the nightstand. She was reading it for the second time, enjoying slowly and with relish the scene where the heroine tries on a whalebone corset. After a while she took her glasses off, switched off the lamp and lay on her back. It was almost midnight, but cold light filtered through the curtains. Cilla sat up again, put her glasses on and pulled a curtain aside. The town lay tiny and quiet on the shore of the lake, the mountain beyond backlit by the eerie glow of the sun skimming just below the horizon. The sight brought a painful sensation Cilla could neither name nor explain. It was like a longing, worse than anything she had ever experienced, but for what she had no idea. Something tremendous waited out there. Something wonderful was going to happen, and she was terrified that she would miss it.
Sara had fallen asleep, her breathing deep and steady. The Cure trickled out from her earphones. It was a song Cilla liked. She got back into bed and closed her eyes, listening to Robert sing of hands in the sky for miles and miles.
Cilla was having breakfast in the kitchen when she heard the crunch of boots on gravel through the open front door. Mum sat on the doorstep in faded jeans and clogs and her huge grey cardigan, a cup in her hands. She set it down and rose to greet the visitor. Cilla rose from the table and peeked outside. Johann wasn’t standing very close to Mum, but it was as if he was towering over her. He wore a frayed blue anorak that hung loose on his thin frame, his grime-encrusted work trousers tucked into green rubber boots. His face lay in thick wrinkles like old leather, framed by a shock of white hair. He gave off a rancid, goatlike odor that made Cilla put her hand over her nose and mouth. If Mum was bothered by it, she didn’t let on.
“About time you came back, stå’års,” he said. He called her a girl. No one had called Mum a girl before. “It’s been thirty years. Did you forget about us?”
“Of course not, Uncle,” said Mum. “I just chose to live elsewhere, that’s all.” Her tone was carefully neutral.
Johann leaned closer to Mum. “And you came back just to help tear the house down. You’re a hateful little bitch. No respect for the family.”
If Mum was upset, she didn’t show it. “You know that we don’t have a choice. And it’s not okay to talk to me like that, Johann.”
Johann’s eyes softened. He looked down at his boots. “I’m tired,” he said.
“I know,” said Mum. “Are you comfortable at Otto’s?”
Cilla must have made a noise, because Johann turned his head toward her. He stuck out his hand in a slow wave. “Oh, hello there. Did you bring both children, Marta? How are they? Any of them a little strange? Good with music? Strange dreams? Monsters under the bed?” He grinned. His teeth were a brownish yellow.”
“You need to go now, Johann,” said Mum.
“Doesn’t matter if you move south,” Johann said. “Can’t get it out of your blood.” He left, rubber boots crunching on the gravel path.
Mum wrapped her cardigan mor
e tightly around herself and came inside.
“What was that about?” Cilla said.
“Johann has all sorts of ideas.”
“Is he talking about why we have so much craziness in the family?”
“Johann thinks it’s a curse.” She smiled at Cilla and patted her cheek. “He’s very ill. We’re sensitive, that’s all. We have to take care of ourselves.”
Cilla leaned her forehead against Mum’s shoulder. Her cardigan smelled of wool and cold air. “What if me or Sara gets sick?”
“Then we’ll handle it,” said Mum. “You’ll be fine.”
What everyone knew was this: that sometime in the late nineteenth century a woman named Märet came down from the mountain and married Jacob Jonsson. They settled in Jacob’s family home, and she bore him several children, most of whom survived to adulthood, although not unscathed. According to the story, Märet was touched. She saw strange things, and occasionally did and said strange things too. Märet’s children, and their children in turn, were plagued by frail nerves and hysteria; people applied more modern terms as time passed.
Alone of all her siblings, Cilla’s mother had no symptoms. That was no guarantee, of course. Ever since Cilla had been old enough to understand what the story really meant, she had been waiting for her or Sara to catch it, that, the disease. Mum said they weren’t really at risk since Dad’s family had no history of mental illness, and anyway they had grown up in a stable environment. Nurture would triumph over nature. Negative thinking was not allowed. It seemed, though, as if Sara might continue the tradition.
Sara was sitting under the bed covers with her back to the wall, eyes closed, Robert Smith wailing in her earphones. She opened her eyes when Cilla shut the door.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 64