“Oh. So you do—”
Eleanor didn’t hear the rest.
A wave of déjà vu enveloped her. She didn’t belong here. This conversation had happened before, everything all too recognizable. She wasn’t standing in an art gallery holding a wine glass. She was in her flat holding a chipped juice glass and staring at something she couldn’t quite recall.
No, she could smell the short man’s cheap cologne. Feel the cool London air slip through an open window. Hear the pretentious conversations.
And she could see Vashti herself.
Vashti was striking. A tall, lithe woman in a tailored dark green suit. The lower half of her face was obscured by a red veil. She moved like a memory, effortless, yet not in a distinct enough manner to describe. That veil, her posture, the graceful way she greeted the guests, all seemed as if Eleanor had experienced this before.
She watched Vashti scrutinize the crowd. The sculptress’ perfectly shaped face refused to be fully hidden by her veil. Flawless skin meant whatever age her voice and body language suggested, her complexion reduced the years considerably. Straight silver hair fell to her waist. She was beauty and artistic genius personified.
Eleanor was certain she’d seen her before, and recently at that. They’d been close at some point. Had she passed her in the tube station?
Vashti’s eyes conveyed such an intense beauty Eleanor had to consciously keep herself from stepping back. Vashti stood near her sculptures. Eleanor walked over.
A glass fell, shattered against the floor.
Laughter.
Eleanor casually lowered her gaze down to a rock object. It looked like a fossilized internal organ.
Vashti touched her arm.
The corners of Vashti’s dark eyes wrinkled at an unseen smile. She leaned in close to Eleanor. Her veil rippled, “Imagine we’re all templates of one personality. Everything we are, everything that makes us what we are?” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, “Simply the slight tweak of the predetermined. All set in stone.”
Eleanor didn’t know how to respond. She said the first thing that came to mind, “I love your sculptures. They’re beautiful.”
“You’re too kind. You like this one?” Vashti laid her long hand on the organic rock.
“It’s remarkable.”
“It’s mine.” Vashti said.
“I came here to see your work specifically.”
“No. I mean this is mine.” She emphasized.
“Yes?” Eleanor was confused.
The sculptures seemed restless. Shadows teased.
Eleanor’s hands were hard with dried clay and the bust before her was shaped into something so terrible she never imagined she was capable of sculpting such a thing. She needed a drink, but her glass of wine had something dark floating in it and there was squash in the small fridge but it didn’t sound appealing. Someone was sobbing outside her flat’s window.
She was mistaken. She was in the gallery, conversing with Vashti. She looked at the sculpture. It was labelled LITHOPEDION XXIV.
“It’s mine.” Vashti whispered. “All of them are mine.”
The gallery filled with the musk of snakes deep underground.
This had all already happened.
Eleanor thanked Vashti, excused herself, turned towards the exit.
A newborn screamed.
Eleanor was back in her flat, staring at the smudge of face on her wall.
She wasn’t sure how she came to be here. Some internal clock told her hours had passed, or perhaps hours had yet to pass. She remembered heads teetering like hardened clay busts on rickety armatures. Calcified hands losing their grip on wine glasses.
Guests toppling, shattering into powdery segments on the floor.
The ominous possibility that she hadn’t left the flat in weeks, if not months, slithered at the back of her brain. This thought was distant, hysterical delirium, a miasma of divine dreaming. An omnipresent gaze locked on the never-ending gaze that stared the world frozen. Eleanor was so tired, her limbs unnaturally heavy. Where was Lydia?
She could hear what she hoped was the fox rummaging around in the dustbin in the alley. She knew it wasn’t her old furry friend. The sound wasn’t delicate enough; it was the raucous noise a heavy body makes undulating across the ground.
And that incessant crying, that damned crying, so sorrowful, omnipresent, as if it would be there even after death.
How long had she been here in her flat? Why was she so thin? Why was she ravenous? She’d closed the blinds when she’d left earlier. Someone had opened them.
No, the blinds had been removed and lay in a crumple on the floor.
She was mistaken. The window was gone.
A gaping hole connected her flat to the alleyway to the neighbor’s sparse flat and the drapes were coiling around and over themselves in humps forming a torso that rose and tapered into a terrible yet delicate face perched daintily up top like an obscene ornament.
The face was no longer wearing a veil. She spoke in a lovely voice,
I am the sorrow in beauty.
Eleanor didn’t have to glance at her sculptures to know that they all wore her own countenance. She looked to the face-stain on the wall. It was as if she were looking into a mirror. All I ever dreamed of was to be the one to determine how to attain happiness.
She inhaled before her lungs were fully ossified, exhaled before her body became too stiff to speak,
“If my heart turns to stone, I won’t feel it shatter.”
She managed a wan smile.
The stain smiled back.
Marian Womack
ORANGE DOGS
Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit
They warn that they are poisonous,
—from a German treatise on butterflies.
Looking through the threshold of the front room, his wife’s bedroom now, he caught a glimpse of her gigantic silhouette. The swollen pregnant belly seemed about to explode. The mountain of flesh, hidden under a knitted bedspread, lifted and sank, lifted and sank, to the faltering rhythm of her breathing.
He put the kettle on and ran upstairs. He took his time shaving, allowing the blade to flick water at the mirror with a dull spatter. He rinsed it and towelled his face dry before heading downstairs; the kettle was whistling. In the kitchen, the stagnant air of last night’s work met him, heavy and sickly-sweet. On the counter sat the fruits of his labours: six jars of shining golden marmalade. He held one of them up to the light. It did not move. The liquid had set. He allowed himself a slight smile of relief.
After cutting two slices of bread and rubbing them with tarragon he breakfasted standing up, sipping at his hot tea. It was the day of the barter market, or rather the day the militia turned a blind eye to non-official transactions, which was the same thing. He looked at the marmalade and ate hurriedly, worrying that he’d miss the best offers.
He liked getting to the market when they were still setting up the stalls, putting together planks and wooden boxes protected by rusty metal frames and oilcloth. He would look at everything. Only then would he decide where to trade, and with whom.
The map on the kitchen wall was a stain of purples and reds, drawn on top of the furrows of the canal system and the river. The river was a curve that surrounded the city from the north, squeezed it, hugged it like a drowning lover. The river was the danger. The purple patches showed the areas that had been flooded in the last two years; the red dots marked possible danger zones. It was with a mixture of apprehension and defiance that he had started to study the river. Grief for what had happened with his wife’s last pregnancy, alongside a furious certainty that he would not let it happen again. He forced himself to take another sip of tea, which burnt his tongue and tasted mouldy.
The noise from the back garden took him to the window. He allowed himself to imagine fox cubs, leverets. He hadn’t seen any for ages. But neither had he lost hope that they would reappear, and he continued greasing and recalibrating the traps which he had
set several months ago.
The garden was an abandoned muddy square. Guilt squeezed his chest again. He couldn’t do anything about this. His wife had looked after the garden. That’s how it had always been.
He saw a woman bent over a sort of bramble of aromatic herbs, grown up all by itself after the garden had been left to rot. She was wearing a brown cotton tunic, army boots, and her hair was dyed blue. Several amulets were clinking round her neck, little jars of cures for almost all illnesses. The woman stood up slowly, sniffed at the herbs she had just gathered, and turned to walk towards the back door. She entered the kitchen, and directed her steps to where the kettle still was steaming.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
The woman moved round the room as if she were walking round her own house. Without hesitating, she opened the little cupboard where the cups and saucers and teapots were kept, washed the herbs at the sink, smashed them into a one-person teapot, and poured hot water on top of them.
He watched her without saying anything.
The doula had been with them for almost four months, during which time he had been able to go to work every morning feeling the pain in his chest relax a little.
“It’s the barter market today,” the doula said.
“That’s right. And I need to pay you for the week.”
He held a jar of marmalade out to the woman. She frowned.
“Is that real marmalade?”
“Yes.”
“From real oranges?”
The man nodded.
“It’s not synthetic?”
“Can’t you smell it?” he said, waving vaguely at the air in the kitchen. The doula shrugged.
“I don’t remember how anything smells any more.”
He couldn’t stop his lips curling up a little. The doula was still young, childbearing age. He felt the guilty pang all of a sudden and composed his face. The woman accepted the jar, still disbelieving.
“This would be enough for the whole month.”
“It’s for a week.”
“But…”
“I insist.”
The woman stroked the jar.
“In the black market…”
“I’m going to be late,” he said.
Before he left the house, he went through into the front bedroom.
###
It took ten minutes by bicycle to reach the market square. He had to add in five more for the morning river inspection. He decided to push himself, to get this time down to thirteen or even twelve minutes. He took Ferry Path at full speed and came up onto the Fort St George, stopping in the middle of the small bridge. The bicycle halted with a slight jingle from the jars of marmalade in the wooden box on the back.
What came down the river was a vague brown stain of liquid mud, which brought to mind the thick blood of an enormous animal. The opaque water led to only one conclusion: the river was rising.
It would be impossible to imagine another outcome than the eventual flooding; he knew the signs. The mud-lie water was punctuated by rubbish, stems and stalks, branches, trash, clothes, cardboard—all from who knows where—that floated on the bright oily surface, showing where the accursed water was flowing, and how fast.
If he shut his eyes he could still see the bundle of stained towels falling from that same railing a year ago; he could even hear the phantom cry of a newborn baby. He forced his mind to compose a different image: at the last moment the child had taken flight, had headed up to a clean blue sky.
The cold snapped him back to reality: a sky filled with storm clouds, hanging over him, and an air so thin and cruel that it had turned everything into a lifeless swamp.
###
After leaving his bicycle in the patch that served as a parking lot he crossed the deserted street in the direction of the market. The proceedings were only just coming to life. He went past the stalls, looking at the goods still packed in their boxes, the pedal-powered carts, the eel-baskets. He rummaged among the bicycle spare parts, and the scraps of old clothes, all in their characteristic indeterminate drab colour. He noticed sadly that there was hardly any food. Almost no one traded the food from their own gardens any more.
A group at one of the corner posts excited his curiosity. The larger the number of customers, the more likely it was that there would be something to eat. His instinct was right. They were selling eatables. At a distance he could see ducks and coots hanging from a rope, covered in tar to preserve them. As best he could he made his way through the crush, until he got to the side of an old man who was staring open-mouthed at the goods on offer. He stood stock still, and almost dropped the box with the jars of marmalade.
In a large metal washtub, the stallholder had five or six giant swallowtail butterflies, huge and tarnished yellow-brown, each with a blue eye on its wing. He calculated that each butterfly must measure more than twenty inches across. And they were fresh, no doubt about that. Fresh but frayed. The bottom of the washtub was a muddy pit of water and earth and the remains of those bright wings, ruined by death and by the hunt. Those broken wings were beautiful: the deep blue eyespots, which seemed to be staring straight at him, were nothing more than a chance discrepancy, but they almost provoked the old familiar pain in the pit of his stomach, mixed with some other emotion.
“Orange dogs! Orange dogs! Ducks, coots!” cried the stallholder.
“Where did you get them?” he found himself asking. There had not been butterflies like these for several years: he had only seen dissected specimens.
“They’re not mine, I didn’t catch them. I’m only selling.”
“It’s very important that you tell me, I need to know,” he insisted. The man lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“Mate… I only sell them. I don’t know anything else.”
He managed to convince himself that his interest had been purely professional, and he walked away from the stall, from time to time turning back to look at it, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he had just seen, the old man he had been standing next to following him with his eyes.
###
The morning went by much as expected. In exchange for his preserves he got supplies and parts to fix the door of the wood-burning stove in his kitchen. But the biggest prize was the medical supplies that the jars had managed to win him. When he only had one left, the old man came up to him.
“Excuse me… Is that real marmalade?”
“Yes,” he muttered. He was exhausted, and only wanted to leave. His eyes kept on wandering to the insect stall. “Do you want to make a trade?”
“I haven’t seen marmalade since I was a kid… Much less eaten it. May I ask how…?”
“I work in the Old University Natural History Museum. We have a pass to go to London twice a year, to the National Museum.” He didn’t normally explain so much about his life, but he only wanted the old man to shut up. “Do you want to trade or don’t you?”
The man’s face clouded over. His little eyes were the only things that still shone, reflecting this liquid gold.
“I don’t have anything.”
“Goodbye, then.”
But as he was turning to go, the man said: “The only thing I can offer you is information, perhaps something you want to hear.”
Had he heard right? Information? Who was this man, and what did he know about him? What did he know about his wife and his dead son?
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
“The butterflies…”
Everything clicked.
“I know where they’ve got a nest.”
The old man was trying to string him along, for sure.
“Listen, my job is studying the Papilionidae… I know they don’t live in nests. So you can get lost.”
“These ones do.”
He realised that he was in fact intrigued.
“All right. Okay. I’ll give you my last jar in exchange for whatever it is you want to tell me.”
The old
man smiled like a child.
“But I must warn you that if you’re lying to me then I’ll denounce you to the militia. I am a third rank specialist worker, and they will listen to me.”
This was just a bluff. His rank had been no use at all when she needed medical assistance. They hadn’t even deigned to come and pick up his son’s body after the child had been stillborn in the sixth month. They walked off to an alleyway, and made their exchange, a fairly common exchange, all in all: information for food.
###
He cycled furiously. In the early dusk, the water was as dark as the sky, and shone with spectral glints.
After a time he realised the impossibility. The disused lock the old man had spoken of was several miles away, and night was falling. He would have to try again tomorrow.
He turned round and went home, following the river, which kept twisting and twisting, and he was incapable of making himself look to see if the water had covered the greenish marks of its last high point.
###
After his careful additions, the map looked the next morning like a grotesque purple and red stain.
If his predictions were correct, then the floods could be worse than in previous years. He wondered if anyone else had spent the last few months watching the water, making calculations on a plan of the town. It was clear that the authorities had not foreseen the consequences of a possible new rise in the water level. There had been no official announcements, or advice about what to do in that case; the people were once again abandoned to their fate.
He spent the first part of the morning examining the map. Bates Lock was quite a long way for him to go and come back after work.
Just as he was about to leave, the doula asked to speak to him.
“You have to be ready,” she said. “It could be any day now.”
He looked straight at her for a few seconds; he wanted to thank her. To tell her that they wouldn’t be where they were without her. But he froze. His tongue felt dry and scratchy inside his mouth.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 8