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Praise For Sing Me Your Scars
Sing Me Your Scars revolves in the mind’s eye in a kaleidoscope of darkness and wonder. Walters is impressive.
—Laird Barron, author of The Croning and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Damien Angelica Walters writes prose as sharp as a scalpel. With surgical precision, she slices through her characters’ veneers to lay bare the secret scars underneath, the knots of fear and desire twisting them. The women and men in these stories struggle against their own, oddly-beautiful damage, and even when they succumb to it, the narrative is never less than compelling. Anatomist of dreams and nightmares, Walters is a writer to watch.
—John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
This anthology is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Sing Me Your Scars
ISBN: 978-1-937009-28-1
Copyright © 2015 by Damien Angelica Walters
Cover Art and Layout © 2015 by Ange
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, K.Y. 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com
“Girl, With Coin” © 2013 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Shimmer); “Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion)” © by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Interzone)*; “Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods” © 2012 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Electric Velocipede)*; “Running Empty in a Land of Decay” © 2011 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Niteblade)*; “Scarred” © 2012 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Fireside Magazine)*; “Always, They Whisper” © 2013 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine)*; “Dysphonia in D Minor” © 2013 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Strange Horizons)*; “Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” © 2013 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Shock Totem, and reprinted in the 2014 Year’s Best Fiction, Volume One); “Melancholia in Bloom” © 2013 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction)*; “Like Origami in Water” © 2011 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction)*; “They Make of You a Monster” © 2012 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies)*; “Grey in the Gauge of His Storm” © 2013 by Damien Angelica Walters (Originally appeared in Apex Magazine).
“Sing Me Your Scars,” “All the Pieces We Leave Behind,” “Sugar, Sin, and Nonsuch Henry,” “The Taste of Tears in a Raindrop,” “Immolation: A Love Story,” “Iron and Wood, Nail and Bone,” “And All the World Says Hush,” and “Paper Thin Roses of Maybe” are new to this collection.
*Published as Damien Walters Grintalis
For Jeremiah and Chloe
Table of Contents
PART I: HERE
Sing Me Your Scars
All the Pieces We Leave Behind
Girl, With Coin
Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion)
Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods
Sugar, Sin, and Nonsuch Henry
PART II: AND THE NOW
Running Empty in a Land of Decay
Scarred
The Taste of Tears in a Raindrop
Always, They Whisper
Dysphonia in D Minor
Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?
Immolation: A Love Story
PART III: AND AWAY
Melancholia in Bloom
Iron and Wood, Nail and Bone
And All the World Says Hush
They Make of You a Monster
Paper Thin Roses of Maybe
Grey in the Gauge of His Storm
Like Origami in Water
Acknowledgements
When Maurice Broaddus approached me at Killercon to talk about a possible collection, I confess I didn’t believe him at first. Oh I believed his intent, but my dark little pessimistic heart said really, do you think anyone would want a collection from you? Sorry, Maurice.
I believed him when he emailed me after the convention. Mostly.
So, Maurice, I owe you a huge thank you for setting the ball in motion. And to Jason Sizemore and Linda Epstein, thank you for making this a reality.
I love short fiction. I love reading it and writing it. It’s a playground of possibility that gives me the freedom to write in any genre, style, tense, or voice. Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some fantastic editors, and I’d like to thank those who originally published the reprints in this collection: John Joseph Adams, Scott Andrews, Andy Cox, John Klima, Jonathan and Michele Laden, Brit Mandelo, An Owomoyela, Rhonda Parrish, Julia Rios, Lynne Thomas, Elise Tobler, Brian White, and Ken Wood.
To my beta readers: Elise, Jake, Ken, Brenda, Rhonda, and Peter. Thank you a gazillion times over. My stories wouldn’t be the same without your input. If I’ve left anyone out, the mistake is mine, not yours.
Thank you to Laird Barron and John Langan for reading the collection in its early stages and for offering your words of support. Beyond measure, you have my gratitude.
And to Al, thank you for your love and support. It means the world to me.
So, the stories… Are they any good? That’s not for me to decide. My ownership of these tales is done. They belong to you, the reader, now. Thank you for walking through the playground with me. Good or bad, these were the stories I had inside me at the time of the telling.
Damien Angelica Walters
2014
Sing Me
Your Scars
This is not my body.
Yes, there are the expected parts—arms, legs, hips, breasts—each in its proper place and of the proper shape.
Is he a monster, a madman, a misguided fool? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. But this is not my body.
§
The rot begins, as always, around the stitches. This time, the spots of greyish-green appear on the left wrist, and there is an accompanying ache, but not in the expected way. It feels as though there is a great disconnect between mind and flesh, a gap that yearns to close but cannot. I say nothing, but there is no need; Lillian’s weeping says it with more truth than words.
The hands are hers.
“Please don’t show him yet. Please,” she whispers. “I’m not ready.”
“I must,” I say. “You will be fine.”
“Please, please, wait until after the party.”
I ignore her. I have learned the hard way that hiding the rot is not acceptable, and while the flesh may be hers, the pain is mine and mine alone. I remember hearing him offer an explanation, but the words, the theories, were too complex for me to understand. I suspect that was his intention.
Lillian will still be with us; she is simply grasping for an excuse, any excuse at all. I understand her fear, but the rot could destroy us all.
My stride is long. Graceful. Therese was a dancer, and she taught me the carriage of a lady. I pass old Ilsa in the hallway, and she offers a distracted nod over the mound of bed linens she carries. All the servants are busy with preparations for the upcoming annual party, which I’m not allowed to attend, of course.
I wonder what sort of fiction he has spun to the servants. Am I an ill cousin, perhaps, or someone’s cast-off bastard that he has taken in? Either way, I’m certain they call him the good doctor, but they’re not here at night. They don’t know everything.
They never speak to me, nor do they offer anything more than nods or waves of the hand, and none of them can
see my face through the veil I must wear when I venture beyond my rooms. All my gowns have high necklines and long, flowing sleeves; not a trace of flesh is exposed.
For my safety, he says. They will not understand. They will be afraid and people in fear often act in a violent manner. His mouth never says what sort of violence he expects, but his eyes do.
When I knock on the half-open door to his study, he glances up from his notebooks. I shut the door behind me, approach his desk slowly, and hold out Lillian’s hand.
“Oh, Victoria,” he says, shaking his head. “I had hoped we were past this. This configuration is as close to perfect as I could hope.”
I bite my tongue. Victoria is not my name, simply a construct.
I asked him once why he had done such a thing; he called me an ungrateful wretch and left his handprint on my cheek. I wonder if he even knows why. Perhaps the answer is so ugly he has buried it deep inside.
Without another word, he leads me to the small operating theater, unlocks the door, and steps aside to let me enter first. The room smells of antiseptic and gauze, but it’s far better than the wet flesh reek of the large theater. My visual memories are vague, but the smell will not leave, no matter how hard I try to forget.
I sit on the edge of the examination table without prompting. His face is grim, studied, as he inspects the wrist, and even though his touch is gentle, I watch his eyes for signs of anger. I know the rot is not my fault, but innocence is no guard against rage.
He makes a sound deep in his throat. Of sorrow? Condemnation?
Lillian weeps, then begs, then prays. None of which will make any difference.
The rot binds us to him as the stitches bind them to me. A prison, not of bars, but circumstance. I have entertained thoughts of the scissors and the thread, the undoing to set us free, but I have no wish to die again, and neither do the others. While not perfect, this existence is preferable. And what if we did not die? What if our pieces remained alive and sentient? A crueler fate I cannot imagine.
He scrapes a bit of the rot away, revealing a darker patch beneath. When he lets out a heavy sigh, I note the absence of liquor on his breath.
He busies himself with the necessary preparations, and Lillian begins to cry again. The others remain silent. He paints the wrist with an anesthetic, which surprises me. My tears have never stopped him from his work. I close my eyes and feel pressure. Hear the blades snipping through the stitches. Smell the foul scent of decay as it reaches out from beneath.
He places the hand in a small metal tray, then coats the remaining flesh in an ointment that smells strongly of pine and wraps it in gauze.
“We shall know in a few days.”
Diana’s worry is as strong as mine. Lillian tries to speak but cannot force the words through her sorrow and fear.
§
When the anesthetic wears off, the skin gives a steady thump of pain from beneath the gauze and I do my best to ignore it.
“At least it was only the one,” Grace says.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Lillian snaps.
“What if it spreads?” Diana asks.
Molly mutters something I cannot decipher, but it makes Lillian weep again.
“Hush,” says Therese. “Remember Emily? She had reason to weep. You do not.”
Sophie laughs. The sound is cruel. Hard.
“Stop, please, all of you,” I finally say. “I need to sleep. To heal.”
Heal is not the right term, perhaps remain would be better.
“I’m sorry, Kimberly,” Lillian says softly.
The sound of my real name hurts, but not as much as the false one. At least Kimberly is, was, real.
The rest apologize as well, even Sophie, and fall silent. I toss and turn beneath the blankets and eventually slip from my bed. The others say nothing when I open the small door hidden behind a tapestry on the wall. The passageway is narrow and dusty, and spiders scurry out of my way; it travels around the east wing of the house—the only part of the house where I’m allowed—then leads to the central part, the main house. There are small covered holes here and there that open to various rooms, to carpets my feet will never touch and sofas I will never recline upon. The passageway also goes to the west wing of the house, but the rooms are unused and the furniture nothing more than cloth covered shapes in the darkness. The only doors I have found lead to bedrooms—mine, his, and one other designed for guests, although we never have guests stay—and one near the music room.
There is, as always, a race in the heartbeat, a dryness to the mouth, when I creep from the passage and make my way to the servants’ entrance. The air outside is cold enough to take my breath away as I follow the narrow path that leads to the gate in the outer wall. There is another path that leads down the hill and into the town, but the gate is locked.
I pretend that one day I will walk through the gate and down that path. Leave this house behind; leave him behind for good. But if I ran away and the rot returned, who would fix me? The rot would not stop until it consumed me whole.
I know this for truth because he left it alone the first time to see what would happen, and the rot crept its way up until he had no choice but to remove the entire arm. Her name was Rachael, and he removed both arms so he could then attach a matching set.
Most of the windows in the town are dark. The church’s steeple rises high, a glint of moonlight on the spire. I have heard the servants talk about the market, the church. Beyond the town, a road winds around a bend and disappears from sight.
My parents’ farm is half a day’s travel from the town by horse and carriage. It would be a long, difficult walk but not impossible.
I wonder if Peter, my eldest brother, has asked for Ginny’s hand in marriage yet. I wonder if Tom, younger than I by ten months, has stopped growing (when I fell ill, he already towered over all of us). I wonder if my mother still sings as she churns butter. And my father…the last thing I remember are the tears in his eyes. I hope he has found a way to smile again; I wish I could see them all once more, even if only from a distance.
I wait for someone to speak, to mention escape and freedom, but they remain silent. After a time, I return to my bed and press my hand to Molly’s chest. The heart belongs to someone else, someone not us. Sometimes I think I feel her presence, like a ghostly spirit in an old house, but she never speaks. Perhaps there is not enough of her here to have a voice. Perhaps she simply refuses to speak.
I wish I knew her name.
§
Although the stump shows no more signs of rot, he doesn’t replace Lillian’s hand. It makes dressing difficult at best, but I manage.
After supper, when all the servants have gone, I join him in the music room. I sing the songs he has taught me. Melodies which were strange and awkward at first now flow with ease; foreign words that fumbled on my tongue now taste of familiarity.
He accompanies me on the piano he says belonged to his mother. Only two songs tonight, and after the second, he waves his hand in dismissal, and I notice the red in his eyes and the tremble in his fingers. Perhaps he is worried about the party.
When he comes to my room in the middle of the night, I hide my surprise. He usually doesn’t touch me unless I’m whole, but by now I know what is expected, so I raise my chemise and part Therese’s legs. When he kisses my neck, I pretend it belongs to someone else. Anyone else. The others whisper to me of nonsense as a distraction. Thankfully, he doesn’t take long.
After he leaves, I use Lillian’s finger to trace the stitches. They divide us into sections like countries on a map. The head, neck, and shoulders are mine; the upper torso, Molly’s; the lower torso, Grace’s; Diana, the arms; Lillian, the hand; Therese, the legs and feet; Sophie, the scalp and hair.
I make all the pieces of this puzzle move, I feel touches or insult upon them, but they never feel as if they belong completely to me. He may know how everything works on the outside, but he doesn’t know that they are here with me on the inside, too. We plan to keep
it this way.
§
Once a week, in the small operating theater, he has me strip and he inspects all the stitches, all the parts. He checks my heart and listens to me breathe. I hate the feel of his eyes upon me; it’s far worse than enduring his weight in my bed.
Not long after he brought me back, I tried to stab myself with a knife. At the last moment, I held back and only opened a small wound above the left breast. Stitches hold it closed now.
He says the mind of all things, from the smallest insect to the largest animal, desires life, no matter the flesh. He says I am proof of this.
But it was Emily’s doing. She was with me from the beginning, and she was always kind, always patient. She helped me stay sane. Like a mother, she whispered soft reassurances to me when I cried; told me I was not a monster when I insisted otherwise; promised me everything would be all right. She taught me how to strip the farm from my speech.
He tried hard to save her, carving away at the rot a bit at a time, but in the end he could not halt its progress. She screamed when he split apart the stitches. I did, too. Sometimes I feel as if her echo is still inside me and it offers a small comfort. Therese is kind, but I preferred my walk when it carried Emily’s strength.
§
“I will unlock your door when the party is over,” he says.
I nod.
“You will stay silent?”
“Yes.”
“I would not even hold this party if not for my father’s insufferable tradition. I curse him for beginning it in the first place, and I should have ended it when he died.”
I know nothing of his father other than a portrait in the music room. He, too, was a doctor. I wonder if he taught his son how to make me.
The key turns in the door. I sit, a secret locked in with the shadows.
§
Even from my room, I can hear the music. The laughter. I creep in the passageway with small, quiet steps, extinguish my lamp, and swing open the spyhole. The year before, I was recovering and did not know about the passageway; the year before that, I was not here.
Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Voices Book 3) Page 1