Sisters of the Revolution

by Ann VanderMeer

  2 Though the Margaret A. Amendment does not prevent the press from reporting on publicly available facts on the conditions of Margaret A.’s internment, the major U.S. media have never addressed the startling data about the high turnover in personnel assigned to Margaret A.’s “security.” Considering how fascinated the public would be by such details, what then keeps the media from openly reporting such facts? Surely the entire industry cannot share the reason I had for hiding my interest in Margaret A.!

  3 It is a matter of public record that in one case a monitor incurred a felony charge for attempting to smuggle a Margaret A. surveillance tape out of the listening post at Vandenberg.

  4 Informed readers may recall that the Bureau of Prisons initially eliminated all verbal communication between Margaret A. and all other human beings until the Supreme Court ruled that such treatment would virtually amount to perpetual solitary confinement, a condition they judged unnecessary for obtaining reasonable observance of the Margaret A. Amendment.

  5 Technically speaking, Margaret A. is considered to be held in preventive detention—since even one word spoken by her would legally constitute a violation of the Margaret A. Amendment. Though constitutional scholars have argued that the amendment itself violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution, its solidly reactionary composition ensures the U.S. Supreme Court’s ongoing adherence to its earlier ruling against judicial interference in security measures undertaken jointly by the Executive and Legislative branches. For a brief summary of the legal peculiarities of Margaret A.’s incarceration, see the ACLU’s pamphlet When the Rule of Law Breaks Down: The Executive, Judicial and Legislative Conspiracy Against Margaret A.

  6 Anxious to preserve a clean profile that would stand up to Justice Department scrutiny, I did not make the inquiries that would have informed me of these concessions before observing them with my own eyes. For a complete log of Margaret A.’s battles for these concessions, contact Elissa Muntemba, her principle attorney, through the California branch of the ACLU.

  7 My reconstruction of our conversation with Margaret A. is, unfortunately, not verbatim. Neither my producer, myself, nor the crew have eidetic memories (and if any of us had it is likely the Justice Department would have discovered such a fact and consequently disqualified us from contact with Margaret A.), and thus all recollections of Margaret A.’s words have come through a concerted effort by the group to remember, though even this was hampered by our separation from one another for the first forty-eight hours following contact with Margaret A. in accordance with the Justice Department’s debriefing procedures.

  8 For most of the time of my contact with Margaret A. I wondered, disillusioned, how I could have spent so many years yearning after a meeting that was proving to be such a letdown. Margaret A. did not stir me, she did not even warm me toward her, personally: I not only found it impossible to pity her—even though for the entire time I was in her quarters I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye the steel fence confronting the room’s single window and constantly snatched covert glances at the rifles the guards carried—but several times felt a flare of resentment toward her. Margaret A. has not a charismatic cell in her body.

  9 And indeed our joint attempt to reconstitute this answer resulted in such acrimony that in the end we finally agreed not to discuss it at all.

  10 The BOP has a rule that prohibits media personnel from more than one contact with Margaret A.

  11 It would have been pointless for me to have attempted serious analysis in the interview, for anything “radical” would have been cut, or the interview itself trashed. I consciously chose to toe the invisible line because I considered it important to get out the word that Margaret A. still had juice in her, that far from having been discouraged by her silencing, rather she took it as sign that she was on the right track.

  12 Like other journalists who have crossed the invisible line of self-censorship, I now face the choice of changing professions or emigrating, and choose the latter.

  LEONORA CARRINGTON

  My Flannel Knickers

  Leonora Carrington was a famous English-born surrealist painter and writer who lived in Mexico for most of her life. “From a very young age,” Carrington has said, “I used to have very strange experiences with all sorts of ghosts [and] visions.” Although her art has overshadowed her fiction, Carrington’s odd stories have been important to many writers, including Angela Carter. Collections include The Seventh Horse and The Oval Lady. “My Flannel Knickers” brings to mind how women, creative women in particular, are marginalized and hidden, yet, in another context, put on display at the same time for everyone to see. It was first published in The Seventh Horse in 1988.

  Thousands of people know my flannel knickers, and though I know this may seem flirtatious, it is not. I am a saint.

  The “Sainthood,” I may say, was actually forced upon me. If anyone would like to avoid becoming holy, they should immediately read this entire story.

  I live on an island. This island was bestowed upon me by the government when I left prison. It is not a desert island, it is a traffic island in the middle of a busy boulevard, and motors thunder past on all sides day and night.

  So …

  The flannel knickers are well known. They are hung at midday on a wire from the red green and yellow automatic lights. I wash them every day, and they have to dry in the sun.

  Apart from the flannel knickers, I wear a gentleman’s tweed jacket for golfing. It was given to me, and the gym shoes. No socks. Many people recoil from my undistinguished appearance, but if they have been told about me (mainly in the Tourist’s Guide), they make a pilgrimage, which is quite easy.

  Now I must trace the peculiar events that brought me to this condition. Once I was a great beauty and attended all sorts of cocktail-drinking, prize-giving-and-taking, artistic demonstrations and other casually hazardous gatherings organized for the purpose of people wasting other people’s time. I was always in demand and my beautiful face would hang suspended over fashionable garments, smiling continually. An ardent heart, however, beat under the fashionable costumes, and this very ardent heart was like an open tap pouring quantities of hot water over anybody who asked. This wasteful process soon took its toll on my beautiful smiling face. My teeth fell out. The original structure of the face became blurred, and then began to fall away from the bones in small, ever-increasing folds. I sat and watched the process with a mixture of slighted vanity and acute depression. I was, I thought, solidly installed in my lunar plexus, within clouds of sensitive vapour.

  If I happened to smile at my face in the mirror, I could objectively observe the fact that I had only three teeth left and these were beginning to decay.

  Consequently I went to the dentist. Not only did he cure the three remaining teeth but he also presented me with a set of false teeth, cunningly mounted on a pink plastic chassis. When I had paid a sufficiently large quantity of my diminishing wealth, the teeth were mine and I took them home and put them into my mouth.

  The Face seemed to regain some of its absolutely-irresistible-attraction, although the folds were of course still there. From the lunar plexus I arose like a hungry trout and was caught fast on the sharp barbed hook that hangs inside all once-very-beautiful faces.

  A thin magnetic mist formed between myself, the face, and clear perception. This is what I saw in the mist. “Well, well. I really was beginning to petrify in that old lunar plexus. This must be me, this beautiful, smiling fully toothed creature. There I was, sitting in the dark bloodstream like a mummified foetus with no love at all. Here I am, back in the rich world, where I can palpitate again, jump up and down in the nice warm swimming pool of outflowing emotion, the more bathers the merrier. I Shall Be Enriched.”

  All these disastrous thoughts were multiplied and reflected in the magnetic mist. I stepped in, wearing my face, now back in the old enigmatic smile which had always turned sour in the past.

  No sooner trapped than done.

  Smiling horribly, I
returned to the jungle of faces, each ravenously trying to eat each other.

  Here I might explain the process that actually takes place in this sort of jungle. Each face is provided with greater or smaller mouths, armed with different kinds of sometimes natural teeth. (Anybody over forty and toothless should be sensible enough to be quietly knitting an original new body, instead of wasting the cosmic wool.) These teeth bar the way to a gaping throat, which disgorges whatever it swallows back into the foetid atmosphere.

  The bodies over which these faces are suspended serve as ballast to the faces. As a rule they are carefully covered with colours and shapes in current “Fashion.” This “fashion” is a devouring idea launched by another face snapping with insatiable hunger for money and notoriety. The bodies, in constant misery and supplication, are generally ignored and only used for ambulation of the face. As I said, for ballast.

  Once, however, that I bared my new teeth I realized that something had gone wrong. For after a very short period of enigmatic smiling, the smile became quite stiff and fixed, while the face slipped away from its bonish mooring, leaving me clutching desperately to a soft grey mask over a barely animated body.

  The strange part of the affair now reveals itself. The jungle faces, instead of recoiling in horror from what I already knew to be a sad sight, approached me and started to beg me for something which I thought I had not got.

  Puzzled, I consulted my Friend, a Greek.

  He said: “They think you have woven a complete face and body and are in constant possession of excess amounts of cosmic wool. Even if this is not so, the very fact that you know about the wool makes them determined to steal it.”

  “I have wasted practically the entire fleece,” I told him. “And if anybody steals from me now I shall die and disintegrate to tally.”

  “Three-dimensional life,” said the Greek, “is formed by attitude. Since by their attitude they expect you to have quantities of wool, you are three-dimensionally forced to ‘Sainthood’ which means you must spin your body and teach the faces how to spin theirs.”

  The compassionate words of the Greek filled me with fear. I am a face myself. The quickest way of retiring from social Face-eating competition occurred to me when I attacked a policeman with my strong steel umbrella. I was quickly put into prison, where I spent months of health-giving meditation and compulsive exercise.

  My exemplary conduct in prison moved the Head Wardress to an excess of bounty, and that is how the Government presented me with the island, after a small and distinguished ceremony in a remote corner of the Protestant Cemetery.

  So here I am on the island with all sizes of mechanical artifacts whizzing by in every conceivable direction, even overhead.

  Here I sit.

  KIT REED

  The Mothers of Shark Island

  Kit Reed is an American author of novels and short fiction. She is a resident writer at Wesleyan University. Many of her stories are considered feminist science fiction and have been published in such diverse places such as the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Yale Review and the Kenyon Review. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and her stories have been nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. “The Mothers of Shark Island” gives a different perspective on motherhood, and the story’s publication in Weird Women, Wired Women in 1998 was not without controversy.

  On Shark Island the prisoners are free to roam the courtyard in the daytime; the walls are high and the cliffs precipitous. Nobody escapes the Chateau D’If. The few mothers who try are never seen again—devoured by the schools of sharks running in the channel or dashed to bits on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

  By night guards stalk the parapets, but from moment to moment the faces of our captors change. Are we them? Are they us? Sometimes it is we who march in yellow arm bands—slit-eyed trustys, collaborating in our own imprisonment; we patrol with leather billy clubs, grimly keeping the other women in line. Unless we are the prisoners here, watching the guards from the high windows of our cells.

  Who are the kept and which are the keepers among us here?

  Who decided we had to be interned? When did we start being in the way?

  Was it our randy, eager sons who sent us up the river—no remaining witnesses to prove that they are not self-invented?—Mom, you look tired. Or was it our images, the new improved version—our daughters with their sweet, judgmental smiles?—Mom, let me do that.

  Is it in our stars that we are jailed, or is it something we did? Oh God, is it something we said that they can’t forgive? This is the terror and the mystery. Why they put us here after everything we did for them.

  Years of snowboots and school clothes and lopsided cakes and guitar lessons and tuition and trying not to pressure them—all that effort and now our young run free and use up the earth while we are here.

  By day we pace and ponder. By night we tap out messages on the pipes. Cour—age—Syl—vi—a. Per—se—ver—ence—Maud. Rev—o—lution is near. New—prisoner—in—Block—Nine.

  Unlike pneumonia, motherhood is an irreversible condition.

  Like Edmund Dante I am close to the woman in the cell next to mine although I’ve never seen her face. We whisper through the crevice I have made over months—no. Over years, gouging the stone with my fingernails, swallowing the dust and moving the bed in front of the hole to hide any trace. The unknown mother and I keep each other afloat, although like our guards she is not always the same person.

  How many women have come and gone in the cell next to mine? We do not exchange names. But at night we spin stories for comfort and number the details; what we did for them on our way to the Chateau D’If. How cruel it is that we are here.

  But our work lives are over. What else would they do with us? The nights are colder than the stones we sleep on and we are lonely here and sad, and if we could go back and change the past so that our children still needed us, we would not do it.

  We wouldn’t know how. We had to let them grow up. Now they intern us for war crimes.

  Friends! We were never the color our children have painted us. We are innocent, I tell you. Innocent!

  The prisoners speak.

  REBA: I am the Mother Goddess, dammit. What I says goes.

  I was a prisoner in my own house, trampled flat by the three of them: Gerard, who made me a mother in the first place. Demanding little Gerry. Whiny June. All day on the road, you know the story, practice, lessons, car pool, late nights folding wash and when I finally crawled into bed big Gerard’s hands on me, yeah fine, but spring up at dawn to unload that dishwasher, drop kids at school on the way to work, where the men in my law firm—men with wives at home to do these things for them leapfrogged my spent body on their way to the top.

  And Gerard! He said, “Starched shirts wouldn’t be such a problem if you’d only quit your job.” Said, “This house is a mess!”

  After a while you just get tired. Too wasted ever to make partner. I quit my job. At first it was almost nice. Plenty of time to clean and wash and fold and cook and make the house nice and drop the kids at school, art lessons, team practice, plenty of time to lie down with Gerard who said, “That’s more like it, you smell so good.” I liked having his nose in my neck.

  But when I got up again I was the one who had to change the bed and iron the sheets and drive the children everywhere while their hair got glossy and their teeth white and strong and they? What did they think of me? They said, “What do you know? You’re just a Mom.”

  Life conceived as endless stovepipe, or is it Mobius strip. He wants less starch in his shirts, more in the collars; kids say cut my sandwiches cut this way, cut them that way. All that and when you walk down the street your children hang back so people will think they’re walking with somebody else; he puts his nose in your hair and says “I can’t understand it, we used to have so much to talk about.”

  Crying makes you ugly so you drop a hundred bucks on Victoria’s Secret but he isn’t interested in yours; instead of punching your shoul
der and climbing on he rolls away and goes to sleep, smelling of somebody else.

  Right, I got depressed, I did Pillsbury Ice Box Cookie rolls straight from the fridge, gnawing while I ironed in front of the soaps. Gerard complained—kids squabbling, trash piling up because the more you do around the house the more there is to do, try perpetual mess machine and here’s the man who made you a mother in the first place going, “Is that all you have to do with your time?”

  Talk about couldn’t go on like that. Talk about couldn’t stand another day. Oh I did everything they wanted okay, fixed this, bought the kids clothes for that, but I schemed. A few purchases and I was ready.

  One day I was miserable, reviled.

  They came down the next morning and I was wearing the cape. “I am the mother goddess, dammit, and you are going to do what I say.”

  June snarled, “I didn’t want cereal, I wanted Pop Tarts.”

  I pointed my finger and lightning came out.

  Gerry whined, “Where’s my Exo-skeleton T-shirt?”

  Zot! He never whined again.

  Gerard came in and sat down in front of his plate without even looking up from the paper. “What’s to eat?”

  I bopped him with my staff. He was sniveling. “Reba, I love you. What did I ever do to you?”

  “Not enough!” I rose up and rumbled down on him like thunder. I gnashed my teeth and lightning struck. My family looked at me and they trembled. “I am the mother goddess, dammit. This is my kingdom now.”

  They fell down and worshiped me.

  Didn’t they pay tribute then? Presents for me, sweets; sniveling Gerard begged for my smile. I ran a taut ship: hot breakfast, wash and ironing before Gerard could leave for work, the kids vacuumed and scoured the tub; KP at night, “Nothing thawed or nuked, Gerard, something French.” We ate well. When he balked I banished him to the dungeon. He tried to kite out a message to the Battered Men’s shelter. I called the cops. Who’d believe a little thing like me could do things like that to a big guy like Gerard? He got ten years.