What Sanie likes above all things when she’s there is interpreting the picture various ways. Making up stories about the woman. She’s more vital, more alive, when she’s so engaged. Post-apocalyptic farm wife; widowed farm wife; a farm wife who murders her family with the poisoned batter she’s mixing in the bowl; she runs through the most obvious, pulpiest interpretations and then creates a storyline about a farm wife who’s married to a man she doesn’t love, who doesn’t want to be a farm wife, but can’t figure out how to be anything else. Her dreams and hopes seem unattainable, yet she believes she would attain them if she could bring herself to drive down the road that cuts across the field. The road isn’t in the picture, but Sanie knows it’s there, otherwise no one could reach the house…then maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the dark line in the distance is, in fact, a wall, an impenetrable wall the farm wife helped to build, and now she can’t leave unless she discovers the secret that will penetrate it, a special key, a piece of magic that will destroy the wall, cause it to dissolve into mist and let the world flood in. That’s what the farm wife wants. She wants to divorce her husband and marry the world, she wants the world to come inside her, to flow through and around her, she wants to breathe in its currents. Sanie’s disappointed that she can’t get beyond this point in the story. She’d hate to believe it’s the end, that the farm wife is trapped. She thinks if she could write it down, if she had a pen, she could write her way out of this corner and arrive at a proper ending. But she has no pen. She assumes pens are not allowed and she chafes at this regulation. She determines to say something to the man about it when next he appears, although she doubts he’ll be able to do anything.
Lacking a pen, she wishes she could turn the page on the calendar. December might offer a picture less bleak than November’s and more open to interpretation. But she senses that if she attempts to turn the page, to break her routine the least bit, she will be sent back upstairs. This rule, she’s certain, is a strict rule, one that may not and, possibly, cannot be broken. It may be that it’s for her own good. December’s picture might not be to her liking. And so she sits, puzzling over the image of the farm wife and the barren field. She thinks that it may be a test. If she can create a satisfactory ending to the farm wife’s story, she will be released, pronounced well and fit to travel. She chips away at the task, fitting an ending to the story and tossing it aside, fitting and tossing aside, fitting and tossing. They don’t seem organic outgrowths of the plot, too hastily carpentered, absurdly Pollyanna-ish, or else they involve ridiculous Deus ex Machinas, but she keeps at it despite the eternally lowering overcast of her mood, a hint of nervousness creeping into her efforts, worry eroding her ability to reason, hoping that she can finish before she’s whisked back upstairs and the man goes to calling her name and it starts all over again. It’s so awful there. The people she can’t see are pressing in on her, peering over her shoulder, and the man won’t ever let her be. She’d give anything for a pen. And a notebook. With a notebook, she might be able to work on the story when she’s away from the kitchen. She knows she has to work fast, she knows it can all be taken away from her at any moment. One second she’s there, and then she’s not.
L U C I U S S H E P A R D
has been honored by various awards, among them the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Locus Award. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.
Talk online with Lucius Shepard at
www.nightshadebooks.com/discus
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