Everything’s not all right. You can smell Jonathan’s desperation, can taste your own, and you should be stronger than he is but you can’t breathe, and he’s saying, “Jessie, don’t bite me, it will be worse if you bite me, Jessie,” and the screams of horror still swirl from the building and you’re at the door now, someone’s opened the door for Jonathan, someone says, “Let me help you with that dog,” and you’re scrabbling on the concrete, trying to dig your claws into the sidewalk just outside the door, but there’s no purchase, and they’ve dragged you inside, onto the linoleum, and everywhere are the smells and sounds of terror. Above your own whimpering you hear Jonathan saying, “She jumped the fence and threatened my girlfriend, and then she tried to bite me, so I have no choice, it’s such a shame, she’s always been such a good dog, but in good conscience I can’t—”
You start to howl, because he’s lying, lying, you never did any of that!
Now you’re surrounded by people, a man and two women, all wearing colorful cotton smocks that smell, although faintly, of dog shit and cat pee. They’re putting a muzzle on you, and even though you can hardly think through your fear—and your pain, because Jonathan’s walked back out the door, gotten into the car, and driven away, Jonathan’s left you here—even with all of that, you know you don’t dare bite or snap. You know your only hope is in being a good dog, in acting as submissive as possible. So you whimper, crawl along on your stomach, try to roll over on your back to show your belly, but you can’t, because of the leash.
“Hey,” one of the women says. The man’s left. She bends down to stroke you. “Oh, God, she’s so scared. Look at her.”
“Poor thing,” the other woman says. “She’s beautiful.”
“I know.”
“Looks like a wolf mix.”
“I know.” The first woman sighs and scratches your ears, and you whimper and wag your tail and try to lick her hand through the muzzle. Take me home, you’d tell her if you could talk. Take me home with you. You’ll be my alpha, and I’ll love you forever. I’m a good dog.
The woman who’s scratching you says wistfully, “We could adopt her out in a minute, I bet.”
“Not with that history. Not if she’s a biter. Not even if we had room. You know that.”
“I know.” The voice is very quiet. “Wish I could take her myself, though.”
“Take home a biter? Lily, you have kids!”
Lily sighs. “Yeah, I know. Makes me sick, that’s all.”
“You don’t need to tell me that. Come on, let’s get this over with. Did Mark go to get the room ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. What’d the owner say her name was?”
“Stella.”
“Okay. Here, give me the leash. Stella, come. Come on, Stella.”
The voice is sad, gentle, loving, and you want to follow it, but you fight every step, anyway, until Lily and her friend have to drag you past the cages of other dogs, who start barking and howling again, whose cries are pure terror, pure loss. You can hear cats grieving, somewhere else in the building, and you can smell the room at the end of the hall, the room to which you’re getting inexorably closer. You smell the man named Mark behind the door, and you smell medicine, and you smell the fear of the animals who’ve been taken to that room before you. But overpowering everything else is the worst smell, the smell that makes you bare your teeth in the muzzle and pull against the choke collar and scrabble again, helplessly, for a purchase you can’t get on the concrete floor: the pervasive, metallic stench of death.
CAROL EMSHWILLER
Boys
Carol Emshwiller is an American writer of short stories and novels of speculative fiction. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards ranging from the Nebula Award to the Philip K. Dick Award. She was honored with the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement award in 2005. Ursula K. Le Guin has called her “a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.” Her short fiction was recently collected in two volumes: The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vols. 1 and 2. A controversial story, “Boys” takes the idea of gender roles to its extreme with surprising results. It was originally published in Scifiction in 2003.
We need a new batch of boys. Boys are so foolhardy, impetuous, reckless, rash. They’ll lead the way into smoke and fire and battle. I’ve seen one of my own sons, aged twelve, standing at the top of the cliff shouting, daring the enemy. You’ll never win a medal for being too reasonable.
We steal boys from anywhere. We don’t care if they come from our side or theirs. They’ll forget soon enough which side they used to be on, if they ever knew. After all, what does a seven-year-old know? Tell them this flag of ours is the best and most beautiful, and that we’re the best and smartest, and they believe it. They like uniforms. They like fancy hats with feathers. They like to get medals. They like flags and drums and war cries.
Their first big test is getting to their beds. You have to climb straight up to the barracks. At the top you have to cross a hanging bridge. They’ve heard rumors about it. They know they’ll have to go home to mother if they don’t do it. They all do it.
You should see the look on their faces when we steal them. It’s what they’ve always wanted. They’ve seen our fires along the hills. They’ve seen us marching back and forth across our flat places. When the wind is right, they’ve heard the horns that signal our getting up and going to bed and they’ve gotten up and gone to bed with our sounds or those of our enemies across the valley.
In the beginning they’re a little bit homesick (you can hear them smothering their crying the first few nights) but most have anticipated their capture and look forward to it. They love to belong to us instead of to the mothers.
If we’d let them go home they’d strut about in their uniforms and the stripes of their rank. I know because I remember when I first had my uniform. I was wishing my mother and my big sister could see me. When I was taken, I fought, but just to show my courage. I was happy to be stolen—happy to belong, at long last, to the men.
Once a year in summer we go down to the mothers and copulate in order to make more warriors. We can’t ever be completely sure which of the boys is ours and we always say that’s a good thing, for then they’re all ours and we care about them equally, as we should. We’re not supposed to have family groups. It gets in the way of combat. But every now and then, it’s clear who the father is. I know two of my sons. I’m sure they know that I, the colonel, am their father. I think that’s why they try so hard. I know them as mine because I’m a small, ugly man. I know many must wonder how someone like me got to be a colonel.
(We not only steal boys from either side but we copulate with either side. When I go down to the villages, I always look for Una.)
TO DIE FOR YOUR TRIBE IS TO LIVE FOREVER. That’s written over our headquarters entrance. Under it, NEVER FORGET. We know we mustn’t forget but we suspect maybe we have. Some of us feel that the real reasons for the battles have been lost. No doubt but that there’s hate, so we and they commit more atrocities in the name of the old ones, but how it all began is lost to us.
We’ve not only forgotten the reasons for the conflict, but we’ve also forgotten our own mothers. Inside our barracks, the walls are covered with mother jokes and mother pictures. Mother bodies are soft and tempting. “Pillows,” we call them. “Nipples” and “pillows.” And we insult each other by calling ourselves the same.
The valley floor is full of women’s villages. One every fifteen miles or so. On each side are mountains. The enemy’s, at the far side, are called The Purples. Our mountains are called The Snows. The weather is worse in our mountains than in theirs. We’re proud of that. We sometimes call ourselves The Hailstones or The Lightnings. We think the hailstones harden us up. The enemy doesn’t have as many caves over on their side. We always tell the boys they were lucky to be stolen by us and not those others.
When I was first taken
, our mothers came up to the caves to get us back. That often happens. Some had weapons. Laughable weapons. My own mother was there, in the front of course. She probably organized the whole thing, her face, red and twisted with resolve. She came straight at me. I was afraid of her. We boys fled to the back of the barracks and our squad leader stood in front of us. Other men covered the doorway. It didn’t take long for the mothers to retreat. None were hurt. We try never to do them any harm. We need them for the next crop of boys.
Several days later my mother came again by herself—sneaked up by moonlight. Found me by the light of the night lamp. She leaned over my sleeping mat and breathed on my face. At first I didn’t know who it was. Then I felt breasts against my chest and I saw the glint of a hummingbird pin I recognized. She kissed me. I was petrified. (Had I been a little older I’d have known how to choke and kick to the throat. I might have killed her before I realized it was my mother.) What if she took me from my squad? Took away my uniform? (By then I had a red and blue jacket with gold buttons. I had already learned to shoot. Something I’d always wanted to do. I was the first of my group to get a sharpshooters medal. They said I was a natural. I was trying hard to make up for my small size.)
The night my mother came she lifted me in her arms. There, against her breasts, I thought of all the pillow jokes. I yelled. My comrades, though no older than I and only a little larger, came to my aid. They picked up whatever weapon was handy, mostly their boots. (Thank goodness we had not received our daggers yet.) My mother wouldn’t hit out at the boys. She let them batter at her. I wanted her to hit back, to run, to save herself. After she finally did run, I found I had bitten my lower lip. In times of stress I’m inclined to do that. I have to watch out. When you’re a colonel, it’s embarrassing to be found with blood on your chin.
So now, off to steal boys. We’re a troop of older boys and younger men. The oldest maybe twenty-two, half my age. I think of them all as boys, though I would never call them boys to their faces. I’m in charge. My son, Hob, he’s seventeen now, is with us.
But we no sooner creep down to the valley than we see things have changed since last year. The mothers have put up a wall. They’ve built themselves a fort.
I immediately change our plans. I decide this will be copulation day, not boys day. Good military strategy: Always be ready for a quick change of plan.
The minute I think this, I think Una. This is her town. My men look happy, too. This is not only easier, but lots more fun than herding a new crop of boys.
Last time I came down at copulation time I found her—or she found me, she usually does. She’s a little old for copulation day, but I didn’t want anybody but her. After copulation, I did things for her, repaired a roof leak, fixed a broken table leg … Then I took her over again, though it wasn’t needed, and caused my squad to have to wait for me. Got me a lot of lewd remarks, but I felt extraordinarily happy anyway.
Sometimes on boys night I wonder, what if I stole Una along with boys? What if I dressed her as a boy and brought her to some secret hiding place on our side of the mountain? There are lots of unused caves. Once our armies occupied them all, but that was long ago. Both us and our enemies seem to be dwindling. Every year there are fewer and fewer suitable boys.
Una always seems glad to see me even though I’m ugly and small. (My size is a disadvantage for a soldier, though less so now that I have rank, but the ugliness … that’s how I can tell which are my sons … small, ugly boys, both of them. Too bad for them. But I’ve managed well even so, all the way up to colonel.)
Una was my first. I was her first, too. I felt sorry for her, having to have me for her beginning to be a woman. We were little more than children. We hardly knew what we were doing or how to do it. Afterwards she cried. I felt like crying myself but I had learned not to. Not just learned it with the squad, but I had learned it even before they took me from my mother. I wanted to be taken. I roamed far out into the scrub, waiting for them to come and get me.
The pain in my hip started when I was one of those boys. It wasn’t from a wound in a skirmish with the enemy, but from a fight among ourselves. Our leaders were happy when we fought each other. We’d have gotten soft and lazy if we didn’t. I keep my mouth shut about my injury. I kept my mouth shut even when I got it. I thought if they knew I could be so easily hurt they’d send me back. Later, I thought if they knew about it, I might not be allowed to come on our raids. Later still I thought I might not be able to be a colonel. I don’t let myself limp though sometimes that makes me more breathless than I should be. So far it doesn’t seem as if anybody’s noticed.
We regroup. I say, “Fellow nipples and fellow pillows …” Everybody laughs. “When have they ever stopped men? Look how womanish the walls are. They’ll crumble as we climb.” I scrape at a part with the tip of my cane. (As a colonel, I’m allowed to have a cane if I wish instead of a swagger stick.)
We’re not sure if the women want to stop copulation day or boy gathering day. We hope it’s the latter.
Boost up the smallest boy with a rope on hooks. The rest of us follow.
I used to be that smallest boy. I always went first and highest. Times like this I was glad for my size. I got medals for that. I don’t wear any of them. I like playing at being one of the boys. Being small and being a colonel is a good example for some. If they knew about my bum leg I’d be an even better example of how far you can get with disabilities.
We scale the walls and drop into the edges of a vegetable garden. We walk carefully around tomatoes and strawberry plants, squash and beans. After that, raspberry bushes tear at our pants and untie our high-tops as we go by. There’s a row of barbed wire just beyond the raspberries. Easy to push down.
I feel sad that the women want to keep us out so badly. I wonder, does Una want me not to come? Except they know we’re as determined as mothers. At least I am when it comes to Una.
Una has always been nice to me. I often wonder why she likes me. I can understand somebody liking me now that I’m a colonel with silver on my epaulets, and a silver handled cane, but she liked me when I was nothing but a runty boy. She’s small, too. I always think Una and I fit together except for one thing, she’s beautiful.
We swarm in, turn, each to our favorite place, the younger ones to what’s left over, usually other young ones. But then here we are, swarming back again, into their central square, the place with the well, and stone benches, and their one and only tree. Around the tree are the graves of babies. The benches are the mourning benches. We sit on them or on the ground. There’s nobody here, not a single woman nor girl nor baby.
Then there’s the sound of shooting. We move from the central square—we can’t see anything from there. We hide behind the houses at the edges of the gardens. Our enemy stands along the top of the wall. We’re ambushed. We flop down. We have no rifles with us and only two pistols, mine and my lieutenant’s. This wasn’t supposed to be a skirmish. We have our daggers, of course.
Those along the wall don’t seem to be very good shots. I raised my pistol. I’m thinking to show them what a good shot really is. But my lieutenant yells, “Stop! Don’t shoot. It’s mothers!”
Women all along the wall! And with guns. Hiding under wall-colored shields. Whoever heard of such a thing.
They shoot, but a lot are missing, I think on purpose. After all, we may be the enemy, but we’re the fathers of many of their girls and many of them. I wonder which one is Una.
The women are angrier than we thought. Perhaps they’re tired of losing their boys to us and to the other side. I wouldn’t put it past them not to be on any side whatsoever.
Our boys begin to yell their war cry but in a half-hearted way. But then … one shot … a real shot this time. Good shot, too. One wonders how a woman could have done it. One wonders if it was a man who taught her. The boys are stunned. To think that one of their mothers or one of their sisters would shoot to kill. This is real. We hadn’t thought they’d harm us any more than we ever really ha
rm them.
It was my lieutenant they killed. One bloodless shot to the head. For that boy’s sake I’m glad at least no pain. He was wearing his ceremonial hat. I wasn’t wearing mine. I never liked that fancy heavy hat. I suppose they really wanted to kill me, but had to take second best since they couldn’t tell which one I was. Una would know which one was me.
The boys scatter—back to the center square with its mourning tree. The women can’t see them back there. I stay to check on the dead lieutenant and to get his dagger and pistol. Then I limp back to where the boys are waiting for me to tell them what to do. Limp. I relax into it. I don’t care who sees. I haven’t exactly given up, though perhaps I have when it comes to my future. I’ll most likely be demoted. To be captured by women … All twenty of us. If I can’t get out of this in an efficient and capable way, there goes my career.
I hope they have the sense to come rescue us with a large group. They’ll have to make a serious effort. I hope they don’t try to fight and at the same time try to save the women for future use.
But then we hear shooting again and we look out from behind the huts near the wall and see the women have turned their guns outwards. At first we think it’s us, come to rescue us, but it’s not. That’s not our battle cry, not our drum beats … We can’t see from behind the walls so some of us go up on the roofs. There’s no danger, all the rifles are facing outwards, but our boys would have braved the roof without a word, as they always do.
It’s not our red and blue banners. It’s their ugly green and white. It’s the enemy come to take advantage of our capture. We wish the women would get out of the way and let us go so we could fight for ourselves. Those women are breaking every rule of battle. They’re lying flat along their wall. Nobody can get a fair shot at them.
It goes on and on. We get tired of watching and retreat to the square. We reconnoiter food from the kitchens. We eat better than we usually do. The food is so good we wish the women would let up a bit so we can enjoy it without that racket. Where did they get all these weapons? They must have found our ammunition caves and those of our enemy, too.
Sisters of the Revolution Page 31