Her baby-fingers trickle across my shoulder. “Right here. It will not hurt much.”
A hysterical laugh bubbles up inside me. I am standing naked in the hold surrounded by mermaids, talking to a magic fish. What am I afraid of? I have had worse injuries; I can handle a single bite. I am an adult now.
I open my mouth to ask her for enough money to get off this stinking boat, enough gold to drown a sailor in, to drown all of the sailors in. I open it to ask about my mother, if she knows her or can find her or bring her back. If my mother is alive or dead. Whether she was human or fish, truly.
But then I think of my sisters: Iris, shaking beneath her blankets and clutching the biology textbook like a magic charm, and May, who had given me hers to protect me at sea. I remember that there are more important things. I think about the people who hurt my sisters, who could hurt them, about the boy in the broom closet and Sunan in the hold. About my father on landing, his eyes bitter cold.
I tell the mermaid my real wish.
She grants it.
There are many versions of this story, each with a different ending.
In one, I swim away with the brown mermaid. The sun wavers in a jagged disk overhead, glinting in strange scintillations. The water is cold, the pressure enormous. It pushes in on my billowy body, still tender, pressing it into a tighter, sleeker shape. Our tiny, delicate hands are locked tight as we dive deeper into the ocean.
In another, a large storm scuttles Pakpao, along with all the other fishing boats in the area, on the reefs by Teluk Siam. The hold cracks, allowing the mermaids to escape. Everyone survives and is discovered days later. The rest of the story is fairly uneventful, equally implausible, and made up by people who care more for happy endings than truth.
But here is what really happens. The brown mermaid disappears and Pakpao makes it safely home with a hold full of live mermaids. If the crew looks a bit dazed and disoriented, if they are not quite themselves and walk as if they are not used to having two legs, it is just the result of sunstroke. If the mermaids in the hold swim in frantic circles, their eyes rolling wildly in their heads and their wails ricocheting through the hold, it is just what fish do. After all, mermaids are fish, not people. The Japanese traders find the catch acceptable and the mermaids are transported by tank to restaurants across Hokkaido. We make a huge profit.
With the exception of yours truly, every member of Pakpao’s crew drowns within a week of returning home. Though I live, our family does not escape this tragedy unscathed; my father’s body is found floating in the nets behind the house. A joint funeral is held. Sunan’s widow speaks tearfully about how her late husband stopped talking after his last fishing trip and had spent the days before his death trying to walk into the river, a story that resonates with the families of the recently deceased.
My sisters weep, their futures secure. I weep, too, licking the salt from my tears. There is a bandage on my shoulder and a bite beneath that will not heal.
NEBULA AWARD WINNER
BEST SHORT STORY
“JACKALOPE WIVES”
URSULA VERNON
Our Nebula Award winner, Ursula Vernon, has previously won the Hugo Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. “Jackalope Wives” was published in Apex.
The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced.
They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their fill of cactus-fruit wine.
They were shy creatures, the jackalope wives, though there was nothing shy about the way they danced. You could go your whole life and see no more of them than the flash of a tail vanishing around the backside of a boulder. If you were lucky, you might catch a whole line of them outlined against the sky, on the top of a bluff, the shadow of horns rising off their brows.
And on the half-moon, when new and full were balanced across the saguaro’s thorns, they’d come down to the desert and dance.
The young men used to get together and whisper, saying they were gonna catch them a jackalope wife. They’d lay belly down at the edge of the bluff and look down on the fire and the dancing shapes—and they’d go away aching, for all the good it did them.
For the jackalope wives were shy of humans. Their lovers were jackrabbits and antelope bucks, not human men. You couldn’t even get too close or they’d take fright and run away. One minute you’d see them kicking their heels up and hear them laugh, then the music would freeze and they’d all look at you with their eyes wide and their ears upswept.
The next second, they’d snatch up their skins and there’d be nothing left but a dozen skinny she-rabbits running off in all directions, and a campfire left that wouldn’t burn out ‘til morning.
It was uncanny, sure, but they never did anybody any harm. Grandma Harken, who lived down past the well, said that the jackalopes were the daughters of the rain and driving them off would bring on the drought. People said they didn’t believe a word of it, but when you live in a desert, you don’t take chances.
When the wild music came through town, a couple of notes skittering on the sand, then people knew the jackalope wives were out. They kept the dogs tied up and their brash sons occupied. The town got into the habit of having a dance that night, to keep the boys firmly fixed on human girls and to drown out the notes of the wild music.
Now, it happened there was a young man in town who had a touch of magic on him. It had come down to him on his mother’s side, as happens now and again, and it was worse than useless.
A little magic is worse than none, for it draws the wrong sort of attention. It gave this young man feverish eyes and made him sullen. His grandmother used to tell him that it was a miracle he hadn’t been drowned as a child, and for her he’d laugh, but not for anyone else.
He was tall and slim and had dark hair and young women found him fascinating.
This sort of thing happens often enough, even with boys as mortal as dirt. There’s always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him.
Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt’s so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction. It’s part of a dance as old as the jackalopes themselves.
But in this town at this time, the girls hadn’t learned and the boy hadn’t yet worn out his interest. At the dances, he leaned on the wall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes glittering. Other young men eyed him with dislike. He would slip away early, before the dance was ended, and never marked the eyes that followed him and wished that he would stay.
He himself had one thought and one thought only—to catch a jackalope wife.
They were beautiful creatures, with their long brown legs and their bodies splashed orange by the firelight. They had faces like no mortal woman and they moved like quicksilver and they played music that got down into your bones and thrummed like a sickness.
And there was one—he’d seen her. She danced farther out from the others and her horns were short and sharp as sickles. She was the last one to put on her rabbit skin when the sun came up. Long after the music had stopped, she danced to the rhythm of her own long feet on the sand.
(And now you will ask me about the musicians that played for the jackalope wives. Well, if you can find a place where they’ve been dancing, you might see something like sidewinder tracks in the dust, and more than that I cannot tell you. The desert chews its secrets right down to the bone.)
So the young man with the touch of magic watched the jackalope wife dancing and you know as well as I do what young men dream about. We will be charitable. She danced a little apart from her fellows, as he walked a little apart from his.
Perhaps he thought she might understand him. Perhaps he fo
und her as interesting as the girls found him.
Perhaps we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.
And the jackalope wife danced, out past the circle of the music and the firelight, in the light of the fierce desert stars.
Grandma Harken had settled in for the evening with a shawl on her shoulders and a cat on her lap when somebody started hammering on the door.
“Grandma! Grandma! Come quick—open the door—oh god, Grandma, you have to help me—”
She knew that voice just fine. It was her own grandson, her daughter Eva’s boy. Pretty and useless and charming when he set out to be.
She dumped the cat off her lap and stomped to the door. What trouble had the young fool gotten himself into?
“Sweet Saint Anthony,” she muttered, “let him not have gotten some fool girl in a family way. That’s just what we need.”
She flung the door open and there was Eva’s son and there was a girl and for a moment her worst fears were realized.
Then she saw what was huddled in the circle of her grandson’s arms, and her worst fears were stomped flat and replaced by far greater ones.
“Oh Mary,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Oh blessed Saint Anthony, you’ve caught a jackalope wife.”
Her first impulse was to slam the door and lock the sight away.
Her grandson caught the edge of the door and hauled it open. His knuckles were raw and blistered. “Let me in,” he said. He’d been crying and there was dust on his face, stuck to the tracks of tears. “Let me in, let me in, oh god, Grandma, you have to help me, it’s all gone wrong—”
Grandma took two steps back, while he half-dragged the jackalope into the house. He dropped her down in front of the hearth and grabbed for his grandmother’s hands. “Grandma—”
She ignored him and dropped to her knees. The thing across her hearth was hardly human. “What have you done?” she said. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing!” he said, recoiling.
“Don’t look at that and tell me ‘Nothing!’ What in the name of our lord did you do to that girl?”
He stared down at his blistered hands. “Her skin,” he mumbled. “The rabbit skin. You know.”
“I do indeed,” she said grimly. “Oh yes, I do. What did you do, you damned young fool? Caught up her skin and hid it from her to keep her changing?”
The jackalope wife stirred on the hearth and made a sound between a whimper and a sob.
“She was waiting for me!” he said. “She knew I was there! I’d been—we’d—I watched her, and she knew I was out there, and she let me get up close—I thought we could talk—”
Grandma Harken clenched one hand into a fist and rested her forehead on it.
“I grabbed the skin—I mean—it was right there—she was watching—I thought she wanted me to have it—”
She turned and looked at him. He sank down in her chair, all his grace gone.
“You have to burn it,” mumbled her grandson. He slid down a little further in her chair. “You’re supposed to burn it. Everybody knows. To keep them changing.”
“Yes,” said Grandma Harken, curling her lip. “Yes, that’s the way of it, right enough.” She took the jackalope wife’s shoulders and turned her toward the lamp light.
She was a horror. Her hands were human enough, but she had a jackrabbit’s feet and a jackrabbit’s eyes. They were set too wide apart in a human face, with a cleft lip and long rabbit ears. Her horns were short, sharp spikes on her brow.
The jackalope wife let out another sob and tried to curl back into a ball. There were burnt patches on her arms and legs, a long red weal down her face. The fur across her breasts and belly was singed. She stank of urine and burning hair.
“What did you do?”
“I threw it in the fire,” he said. “You’re supposed to. But she screamed—she wasn’t supposed to scream—nobody said they screamed—and I thought she was dying, and I didn’t want to hurt her—I pulled it back out—”
He looked up at her with his feverish eyes, that useless, beautiful boy, and said “I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought I was supposed to—I gave her the skin back, she put it on, but then she fell down—it wasn’t supposed to work like that!”
Grandma Harken sat back. She exhaled very slowly. She was calm. She was going to be calm, because otherwise she was going to pick up the fire poker and club her own flesh and blood over the head with it.
And even that might not knock some sense into him. Oh, Eva, Eva, my dear, what a useless son you’ve raised. Who would have thought he had so much ambition in him, to catch a jackalope wife?
“You goddamn stupid fool,” she said. Every word slammed like a shutter in the wind. “Oh, you goddamn stupid fool. If you’re going to catch a jackalope wife, you burn the hide down to ashes and never mind how she screams.”
“But it sounded like it was hurting her!” he shot back. “You weren’t there! She screamed like a dying rabbit!”
“Of course it hurts her!” yelled Grandma. “You think you can have your skin and your freedom burned away in front of you and not scream? Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.”
She stood up, breathing hard, and looked down at the wreck on her hearth. She could see it now, as clear as if she’d been standing there. The fool boy had been so shocked he’d yanked the burning skin back out. And the jackalope wife had one thought only and pulled on the burning hide—
Oh yes, she could see it clear.
Half gone, at least, if she was any judge. There couldn’t have been more than few scraps of fur left unburnt. He’d waited through at least one scream—or no, that was unkind.
More likely he’d dithered and looked for a stick and didn’t want to grab for it with his bare hands. Though by the look of his hands, he’d done just that in the end.
And the others were long gone by then and couldn’t stop her. There ought to have been one, at least, smart enough to know that you didn’t put on a half-burnt rabbit skin.
“Why does she look like that?” whispered her grandson, huddled into his chair.
“Because she’s trapped betwixt and between. You did that, with your goddamn pity. You should have let it burn. Or better yet, left her alone and never gone out in the desert at all.”
“She was beautiful,” he said. As if it were a reason.
As if it mattered.
As if it had ever mattered.
“Get out,” said Grandma wearily. “Tell your mother to make up a poultice for your hands. You did right at the end, bringing her here, even if you made a mess of the rest, from first to last.”
He scrambled to his feet and ran for the door.
On the threshold, he paused, and looked back. “You—you can fix her, right?”
Grandma let out a high bark, like a bitch-fox, barely a laugh at all. “No. No one can fix this, you stupid boy. This is broken past mending. All I can do is pick up the pieces.”
He ran. The door slammed shut, and left her alone with the wreckage of the jackalope wife.
She treated the burns and they healed. But there was nothing to be done for the shape of the jackalope’s face, or the too-wide eyes, or the horns shaped like a sickle moon.
At first, Grandma worried that the townspeople would see her, and lord knew what would happen then. But the jackalope wife was the color of dust and she still had a wild animal’s stillness. When somebody called, she lay flat in the garden, down among the beans, and nobody saw her at all.
The only person she didn’t hide from was Eva, Grandma’s daughter. There was no chance that she mistook them for each other—Eva was round and plump and comfortable, the way Grandma’s second husband, Eva’s father, had been round and plump and comfortable.
Maybe we smell alike, thought Grandma. It would make sense, I suppose.
Eva’s son didn’t come around at all.
“
He thinks you’re mad at him,” said Eva mildly.
“He thinks correctly,” said Grandma.
She and Eva sat on the porch together, shelling beans, while the jackalope wife limped around the garden. The hairless places weren’t so obvious now, and the faint stripes across her legs might have been dust. If you didn’t look directly at her, she might almost have been human.
“She’s gotten good with the crutch,” said Eva. “I suppose she can’t walk?”
“Not well,” said Grandma. “Her feet weren’t made to stand up like that. She can do it, but it’s a terrible strain.”
“And talk?”
“No,” said Grandma shortly. The jackalope wife had tried, once, and the noises she’d made were so terrible that it had reduced them both to weeping. She hadn’t tried again. “She understands well enough, I suppose.”
The jackalope wife sat down, slowly, in the shadow of the scarlet runner beans. A hummingbird zipped inches from her head, dabbing its bill into the flowers, and the jackalope’s face turned, unsmiling, to follow it.
“He’s not a bad boy, you know,” said Eva, not looking at her mother. “He didn’t mean to do her harm.”
Grandma let out an explosive snort. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It doesn’t matter what he meant to do. He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn’t do that, he should have finished what he started.” She scowled down at the beans. They were striped red and white and the pods came apart easily in her gnarled hands. “Better all the way human than this. Better he’d bashed her head in with a rock than this.”
“Better for her, or better for you?” asked Eva, who was only a fool about her son and knew her mother well.
Grandma snorted again. The hummingbird buzzed away. The jackalope wife lay still in the shadows, with only her thin ribs going up and down.
“You could have finished it, too,” said Eva softly. “I’ve seen you kill chickens. She’d probably lay her head on the chopping block if you asked.”
“She probably would,” said Grandma. She looked away from Eva’s weak, wise eyes. “But I’m a damn fool as well.”
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