There was one more letter. It came the day after the anvil marriage, after Sean’s birth and Chuchonnyhoof’s death. It was left in front of the door, and there were violets, gathered in a bunch, with it.
November 2
Dear Malcolm,
This is the last time I will write to you. I still hold out hope of Heaven, and I pray that’s where I’ll go.
The Catholics call today the Feast of All Souls. I never held much with their incense and their saints, but I do like the idea that today, we think on our dead. We remember them all, not just the good ones.
I told you before that no one ever dies of grief, but I think I was wrong. I think that Dusha Chuchonnyhoof died of grief. Maybe he deserved to, maybe not. I won’t claim to be the judge of such things.
You can choose to die too, Malcolm, quick or slow, and I can’t say as anyone would blame you. Or you can choose to live and fix what is broken.
Nobody who hasn’t been hurt can work a miracle.
Yours,
Olivia Jones Weyland Chuchonnyhoof
It is said that too much iron in the soil poisons the ground. I can’t imagine how much iron was in Dusha Chuchonnyhoof’s body—an unbearable amount, I think. But things bloom over his grave—wild mint, and violets, and a tree with different fruit on every branch.
It was Lischen who made the marker, one day in the spring. Simple, Dusha’s name. A horseshoe above it.
Below it, the words:
‘Embrace me then, Ye hills, and take me in’.
Acknowledgements
Our gratitude to Bill Schafer for commissioning this novella over convention cocktails at ConFusion, as well as to Yanni Kuznia, Geralyn Lance, and Josh Parker, and to John Scalzi who formalized our contract written on skin by photographing and tweeting it. Also to Joe Monti, who handled the more traditional aspects of contract negotiation.
China Miéville for editing, strong tea & the idea for the prison scene; Olivia, who used to live in Maria’s Brooklyn apartment and gets heaps of letters from prisoners who never knew her; the Oregon Historical Archive and Old Oregon Photos for introducing us to the work of Walter Bowman, and his 1890 portrait of a very small Native American boy with a prosthetic hand; Lischen Miller’s 1899 Oregon ghost story, “The Haunted Lighthouse,” from which the iron door comes; and Maria’s dad, Mark Bryan Headley Sr. from whom she inherited the 200-year-old Headley family anvil.
In addition to those credited above who played a part in commissioning the novella, and who offered bits of reality far stranger than fiction, Kat would like to thank Sarah McCarry, for telling her she looked forward to meeting her monsters, and her Mom, Rebecca Howard, who provided food and sanity during a week of this novella’s writing.
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