Heiresses of Russ 2015

by Jean Roberta

  June shook her head furiously. “You don’t understand.”

  “I do,” I insisted, amazed at how calm I suddenly felt. “Better than anyone. You and me…everybody pushes us around. But we’re made of iron underneath. There’s a part of us that won’t bend.”

  June looked at me and I saw how helpless she must have felt. I remembered feeling like that…just before I changed my life forever.

  “I did it,” I said. Behind June and Sheldon was blue sky and bright sun. “You can, too.”

  June turned to her mother. “I’m gay, Mom,” she said softly. “I am. I am.”

  June’s mother huffed miserably. “I figured that out, genius. So what? See if I care. You’re still my daughter.”

  Chills ran down my spine. So what? my mother had said, all those years ago. See if I care. You’re still my child.

  June gave her mother a long, hard hug, then turned to me. She seemed to be standing straighter.

  “Iron,” I said.

  “Nice job,” said Janet, trying to be charitable.

  June laughed. She had this perfect voice; she was so beautiful in all the ways I wasn’t. And she had Sheldon. My heart cracked a little more.

  “I don’t suppose there’s one of you in my world?” she said to Janet.

  “Can’t hurt to check around,” said Janet. She pulled me close, possessive. “But I’m taken.”

  The sunlight began to dim, and June, Sheldon and June’s mother started fading.

  “Sarah,” said June. She looked more ghostly now. “If you want a baby…have one.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t even know if that’s what I want.”

  “It is,” said June, her voice the whisper of wind through the trees. “If you’re anything like me.”

  And then they vanished completely, leaving us alone in the rain.

  •

  Janet rubbed my back as we drove home. “You okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “Is it over?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I was certain. “She got what she wanted.”

  “You didn’t, though,” said Janet nervously.

  “I…think I did, though,” I said. “Somewhere in there I stopped wanting to be her. She has Sheldon, she’s short and pretty, but she doesn’t have you. And I like having you.”

  We drove on as the rain started coming down harder. I turned the wipers up to maximum.

  “We can talk it over, if you want?” Janet said hesitantly. “The, uh, baby thing.”

  I couldn’t say anything for a moment. “Really?”

  “Really,” said Janet. “I mean, I don’t hate the idea. I just hated the idea of having to, you know? And being pregnant….” She made a face. “I guess I can do it.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said quickly.

  “Yeah, but we can’t exactly adopt,” she said. “We’re a weird couple on a number of fronts.”

  “I know. But I’d rather have you than a baby.”

  Janet laughed, eyes bright. “That kind of talk makes me wish you had banked sperm. I’d bear your children right now.”

  “Maybe I can scrape out an old gym sock,” I said. She laughed again. I loved that sound. I loved how easy we were with one another.

  Janet snuggled against my arm. I was shocked; she almost never did that, even when I wasn’t driving through a rainstorm.

  “I’m glad you’re you, too, you know,” said Janet. “I didn’t like June. Too many lingering straight girl hang-ups, you know?”

  “Thanks, I think,” I said.

  “What I’m saying is…let’s just take it a little at a time. We’ve got time, right? We can have time.” She groaned in frustration. “I’m saying that wrong.”

  I slipped an arm around her. “I know what you mean,” I said as we drove south through the rain and back to our lives. “I know just what you mean.”

  One time I dreamed I had a son named Sheldon. I could never have any sons of my own, or daughters. But I did have Janet, and better, I had myself. I wasn’t like June. I was like me.

  It was enough, and then some.

  •

  Seven Commentaries

  on an

  Imperfect Land

  Ruthanna Emrys

  1

  It Is a Tree of Life

  The land of Tikanu spread from Dinah’s garden along with the wild mint. Neighbors on either side kept it in check with their pesticides, but it crept up the back porch and into the kitchen. After work, she would come home and bake bread, leaving crumbs by the anthill in exchange for tiny jewels.

  Miriam begged for a cutting from the garden. She loved the lights that flickered in the dusk, the blue and silver wings that embraced the house on Friday nights. Dinah warned her three times, as the law required, then instructed her in the ways of magic.

  Miriam took the seedling to her home by the ocean, and planted it in the backyard. Soon strange footprints appeared in the dunes, and a tree grew by the doorstop: perfectly symmetrical, young twigs curling in intricate fractals. Mint grew around the base. Within a year, garrisons of dolphins began to mass just beyond the sandbar. Miriam’s husband found books in the attic, musty and leather-bound. He made careful notes, and at low tide the children brought them to the dolphins. So they learned together how to defeat Leviathan.

  When Miriam’s company closed their local offices, the family had to move. They sold the house, at a loss, to a family they knew would care for the tree and treat the dolphins with respect. In the city, they could only afford a small apartment, cramped and lacking a yard, let alone an ocean—but on the balcony, in a little pot, they planted a sprig of mint.

  2

  Songs of Solomon

  Judy’s child lay in her crib, pale and feverish. Within the land of Tikanu, Judy had earned three names beyond her birth-name. In the outside world, she was a professor of mathematics, a woman of renown in her field. But parenthood was new to her. Doctors and books gave her no answers, and still the child sickened. So she turned to the library.

  The stewards of Tikanu do not sneer at modern technology. The wood golems who tend the library’s collection type swiftly with their gnarled hands, more at ease answering patrons’ questions by e-mail than with their own grating voices. Their response to Judy came swiftly: they easily recognized the sign of trespassing lillim.

  Tikanu is a land of laws, they explained, of names and patterns. The rebel spirits reject all these things. Sometimes in the chaos of their existence, though, they grow cold, and steal life and form from others to fill their own formlessness. Infants, rich with the energy of new growth, are the most vulnerable. The theft can never last, but can be deadly if left to run its course. Strong patterns, full of meaning, will force the lillim back to their proper place at the edges of the created world. The librarians recommended a Seal of Solomon—a treatment as common as aspirin, and as trusted.

  Many books had appeared in Judy’s study over the years, and she found a diagram of the Seal easily enough. She copied it onto the crib’s headboard and waited. Still the child sickened. She thought then of pattern, and meaning, and considered what tools were at her disposal. The Seal is a symbol: ancient and well-practiced, to be sure, but its creators of old could have easily used other symbols, in other combinations. There are stronger patterns, stronger names, embedded in the fabric of creation.

  She chanted her own mantras, then: the digits of pi as far as she could remember, the prime numbers, the Fibonacci sequence. She saw the child’s eyes clear a little, but the fever did not abate. Not pausing in her chant, she knelt and began to draw on the floor around the crib. With markers and pens and fine-haired paintbrushes, she inscribed the painstaking lines of the Mandelbrot set. Leaves curled into their miniature selves in endless permutation: parent and child and grandchild, ever-changing and unchangeable.

  By morning, the child’s fever had broken. Judy slept on the floor, holding tight to her pen, curled around the pattern she had remade.


  3

  Other Nations

  Even in the city, Miriam could always see the moon from her balcony. It rose and set in its proper courses—no magic in that—but clouds broke apart as it passed between apartment buildings, the city’s harsh brightness faded, and for a few precious minutes silver light poured down. Sometimes, on Friday evenings, she found it draped with aurora, green and indigo streaming around the silver.

  City dwellers treasure their private scraps of outside air, and the balconies around hers were often occupied. Laughter wafted from late-night parties. Tobacco and marijuana and grill smoke insinuated themselves into her contemplation. But she never saw anyone else looking at the moon, and presumed that no one outside her private scrap of nation could see it.

  One Friday her husband came in, and told her of a silhouette two balconies over, leaning upward with delight. The figure had seen him and fled, but hadn’t there been a moving van parked on the street?

  Miriam baked bread on Saturday—the best rest she knew—and walked nervously down the hall with the still-steaming loaf.

  The woman who opened the door wore a head scarf and veil, and Miriam felt a pang of disappointment before the woman asked shyly, “Did you see the moon the other night?”

  Inside she found the lingering smell of grilled lamb, and a platter of rose-water pastries drizzled with honey. Two young boys crouched on the floor. A wisp of fog skittered away from their snatching hands, then returned to curl catlike around their shoulders. A bearded man watched them over his book. He glanced at Miriam and smiled, then returned to his observations.

  The mint never sent tendrils between their balconies. But they took pleasure in telling each other of their private wonders, and quietly shared library books. When an ifrit took up residence in Samira’s wiring, Miriam hurried over with a stack of references. Samira’s entire family helped repel the flock of flapping spirits, all wing and teeth, that tried to nest on Miriam’s balcony. And often, on quiet days, they shared bread. In a strange city, surrounded by strangers, it was a comfort simply to find someone else who could see the moon.

  4

  All Who Are Hungry

  In the Old Country, they say, winters were hard. Summers too, in their own way, but for the practical necessities of food and warmth, difficulty was seasonal. Tikanu, though its patches and pots are separated by great distances, has its own seasons, complementary to the cycles of snow and leaf and the turning world. And some of those seasons are hard.

  It was spring in the north and autumn in the south. Winter pressed close around the pot of mint at McMurdo Station, and summer parched the brilliant orange gardens of leonotis blossoms in Addis Ababa, when the season of trials came upon Tikanu.

  Dinah’s yard grew brown and dry while her neighbors’ waxed verdant. They would say, she knew, that she did not care for it properly, and it was true that she neglected the fertilizers, herbicides, and endless sprinkler cycles that others wielded against their lawns. It had never mattered before. But the mint and creeping charlie were as brown as the Kentucky bluegrass. She consulted with the ants, through slow conversations of pebbles and twigs, and learned only that their hill was troubled as well. She increased her tithe of crumbs, even though shopping lists led her to mysterious gaps on store shelves, and whatever groceries she purchased anyway spoiled in her fridge.

  She made phone calls, first to friends, then to the library. Tikanu is a land of laws, they all agreed, and one of them is this: in hard times, set a feast. But the traditional celebrations that herald new growth had already passed. Attempts to gather what was needed fell short: bitter herbs absent from produce sections and wilted in gardens, wine gone to vinegar in every bottle.

  And so there were quests and journeys. The children of one household hunted among their neighbors for oranges. They wrapped them in consecrated silks scribed with the symbols of life, so they would not spoil. A call for horseradish went out in an online classified ad, resulting in rude responses from uninitiated trolls, and two small roots. Dinah visited Miriam in the city, and in the land and kitchen of her neighbors made flatbread of water and flour, racing the prescribed time limit from mixing to baking so that it could be made sacred.

  The feast was such that it could only be held in the library. The people of Tikanu traveled there using scrimped and borrowed money, sleeping on each other’s couches and sharing each other’s cars, some converging on the few precious shortcuts through closets and trellises, but most traveling overland. The golems welcomed them awkwardly, voices harsher from the drought.

  They ate scavenged oranges and roots gifted by strangers, and they sang with whatever voices they had. They cobbled together rituals from the gleanings of older traditions, from the library records, and from the truths they had found in their own corners of the land. And with food and song and prayer, they opened doors to welcome in the change they had invited.

  The laws of Tikanu may be added to, but never lost. So it is that holidays grow, like mint, from the new crises of each season. Returning home to green buds and larders waiting to be filled, the people of Tikanu marked the Feast of Doors on their calendars for celebration in years to come.

  5

  In Every Generation

  Judy’s child grew, quiet and bold. She could vanish between one glance and the next, always returning with a polished stone or the shed skin from a tiny dragon’s wing, which she would hold out silently for approval and explanation. Judy gave her answers and taught her how to draw out more with the right questions, and further, taught her what questions should and should not be asked outside her own nation.

  When she was thirteen, she took a summer internship in the library. On her third day, she and three other interns became lost in the stacks. They wandered among forests of shelves and pools of ink. They found there strange creatures, born as descriptions in the cryptozoology section, who had taken on tenuous life from the golems’ exhalations. Judy’s daughter was able to draw on her mother’s lessons to create patterns that would let the creatures inhabit the library freely, without leeching from the books. And together they slew the chimera that, given such life, threatened them all.

  When the interns returned, they found that Tikanu now granted them the status of men and women. Judy’s daughter took Lily for her newest name, to go along with her birth name, which was Yael in memory of her great-grandmother. It was a daring name, even though she liked the flower. She had always thought, secretly, that the lillim had left her a legacy of hunger for the world. She was pleased to give them this half-hidden honor in spite of the danger.

  At fifteen, Lily took a boyfriend, gangly and orange-haired, who impressed her with the intensity of his arguments in Ecology Club and his willingness to pick up the more revolting trash during Beach Clean-Up Day without squirming or demonstrating sophomoric humor. She put on lipstick and blush for their first school dance, pleased with the effect. Judy had taught her about lovers too, and she’d read more in the library. Those had been uncomfortable conversations, but when he began complaining of her dreaminess and boasting of his own hard-headed skepticism, she was relieved to be able to set him by without worrying that he might leave her some permanent taint.

  In college, Lily discovered girls, and skeptical thinkers who could still appreciate the nuances of late-night spiritual debates. She kept a box of mint on her windowsill, hoping thereby to pick out her fellow citizens, but none of her visitors made note of it other than to chew on its leaves, thoughtfully, during post-coital philosophical discussion.

  She had been dating Amber for six months when she asked, nervously, “Have you ever thought that there could be hidden places—magical ones, around us everywhere—and people don’t notice because they don’t know what to look for?”

  Amber hugged her, and said that she’d thought so sometimes, but hadn’t found anything so far. It was probably just the sort of idea kids have when they want a place to not be lonely. Are you sure that’s mint, and not some other plant?

  �
��It’s mint,” Lily said. And then, “I could give you a pot of it to grow in your room. I think you’d like it.”

  6

  The Stranger in the Camp

  Two months after Lily gave Amber the mint, she left her, for reasons that she would not explain and Amber did not understand. Amber considered throwing the mint from her dorm room window, but ultimately she decided that one green thing was more than she got out of most relationships. She watered it from the sink in the hall’s shared bathroom, and felt virtuous for forgiving the plant its source.

  Three months after Amber received the mint, she slid her curtain aside to discover a tiny snake sunning itself on the ledge outside her window. It was black, spotted in gold and bronze, shorter than her forearm and narrower than her pinky finger. When she opened the window, it stirred itself and crawled inside.

  She picked the snake up and held it in her palm. Tiny muscles flexed against her skin, warm from the morning light.

  Where are you from, asked the snake.

  After a moment of shock, Amber admitted to being from Cincinnati.

  No, said the snake, what nation. Somehow, Amber realized that it wasn’t asking about the United States. She told it about her childhood fantasies, about worlds reached through secret doors, and the children special enough to find those doors, about quests for rings and battles to save the world. About friendship, and power, and duty, and sacrifice, writ in bold and beautiful colors.

  I don’t think you’re from around here, said the snake. But you might like it anyway.

  Amber knew that snakes were not to be trusted. But she also knew that invitations to strange worlds were not to be turned away. Walking around campus with the snake in her jacket pocket, she found books of lore in odd corners of the library, bright purple toadstools in the woods, symbols scribed delicately in spiderwebs.

  When she knocked on Lily’s door, late at night, her ex-girlfriend seemed neither offended by her presence nor surprised by what she told her. The next weekend, they went on a picnic behind the gym, among the toadstools.