by Nibedita Sen
It stands alone on its irradiated patch of beachfront property, far away down the strand from the toffee sellers and funnel cakes and skeevy boardwalk rides. Luna Park had never recovered from the incident. The place was barely out of the construction stage when Topsy turned its gestation into a miscarriage, and the cost of rebuilding combined with the stigma of tragedy (and background radiation) had convinced the surviving shareholders to throw up their hands and fold. The plot had stood empty for a while until the idea of a memorial was hit upon; several years and several mysterious donors later and the Luna Park Memorial Tower rose, a joint marker for the people who had died and the Radium Elephants who had found their voices in the violent self-sacrifice of their comrade. Sculpted bronze trunks wind around the length of the thing like a barber’s pole all the way to the roof and top colonnade, where four bronze elephants and four bronze humans stand together gazing out to sea. In pictures and postcards of the place the trunks have long since gone the patina green of sea serpents, tarnished pennies, and the Statue of Liberty. Tonight they’re stark black against the white.
Most people don’t even remember the memorial exists. It’s one of those oddities from an earlier time you learn about and then forget, something weird tucked away to stop and gawk at if you happen to be passing through the area on vacation or a day trip. Snap a photo, buy a postcard, namedrop it at a party when people ask what you did with your summer. Make a joke about Geiger counters and glowing craters if everyone else is clued in on the story. Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy’s.
Kat stares up at the column with her hands jammed in her pockets, thinking about truth and transmutation as the last light dies and the damp ocean breeze gnaws through her windbreaker. There’s no stopping decay, change, or entropy. No matter how many jellyfish genomes they strap to an elephant’s genetic material—no matter how many elephant mothers pass along the warning, long memories and unshakably interwoven strands of matriarchal polynucleotide narrative aside—the fact of the matter is, the basis for this project was contaminated from the start. It was decaying into something other than truth the day the first breathless article about Topsy was written, the day she died and someone else began telling her story and the cultural baggage accrued and replaced and eroded fact like radium in marrow.
Nuclear Topsy. No wonder the elephants don’t trust them.
She stands there until the vertebrae in her craned neck start complaining and her feet go numb. An ivory sickle moon rises in the east. Kat turns her back on the memorial and the roaring Atlantic dark and shuffles towards the garish electric dawn of Coney Island, some skeleton’s memory of what progress looked like.
• • •
Luna Park looks like a twister’s gone on a tear right through its muddy heart, lumber and splintered scaffolds and the great naked backbones of buildings-to-be lying stretched out across the ground in every whichaway direction. Everywhere you turn an eye men are working up a fine old sweat—hammering, sawing, stuck all over with sawdust and coal smut, spitting dirt and tobacco until the ground’s so churned mule teams bog down and split their pipes braying. The air this close to the ocean is a sponge—a damp, warm rag stuffed up under your nose so close you can almost taste the stink of mule shit and chaw spit and stale mud mixed with piss and spilled bourbon. And there’s another smell, too, yonder beneath the fresh pine and cigarette smoke—hay, blood, something big and wild and musky. An old reek, like a mountain breaking lather.
Once you’ve gotten a whiff of it, you never forget the smell of an elephant.
Nobody tries stopping Regan; she’s dressed like a boy, the way she’s most comfortable, and there are plenty of those running around. She wanders farther in—beneath the great wooden arch with its columns and crescent moons still unlit, past the rising spire they’ve already dubbed the “Electric Tower,” wired to glow like something out of The Arabian Nights—slopping on through ankle-deep pigpen muck where there aren’t boards laid yet, dizzy and sick and shaky-legged with her hurts but grimly determined not to faint. If that happens and she goes over on her side and the little bottle in her pocket gets broken and crushed, it’ll have been a wasted trip with a smoking pair of boots planted at the bottom of the crater.
The morning gets hotter. Sweat pops on her forehead, running down into her eyes to sting them shut. All of her joining pins have been replaced with knife blades, from heel to toe to aching hip. She holds off swallowing her own spit until her tongue is dog-paddling and she can’t help herself. These days, the automatic jerk of muscles she always took for granted before is like washing down coals with grain alcohol, a fierce tearing worse than her jaw if simply because of how much she has to make it happen. A beaten gulp and the fire roars up her throat and into her brain. Her knees give up the ghost and she finds herself slumping against a sawhorse, fingers clutching and unclutching at raw wood.
“Had a bit too much, eh, kid? Show’s not even on until tonight, pace yourself!” A jolly hand follows the jolly voice, slapping Regan on the back so hard her last few teeth rattle. She gums back a scream. She’s only got so much control left, but she clings to it with all she’s got like a baby squirrel in a windstorm. “Don’t let the policemen they got snooping around find you; you’ll be hitting that drunk tank ass-first quicker’n a New York minute.”
“Fine. I’m fine.” The words dribble down her chin. Even the passerby’s booming seems faded and faraway.
“You sure, son? You sure as hell don’t look it. Here, lemme give you a hand.”
“I’m FINE.” She hears the good Samaritan step back hastily. “Need to see the elephant. Come to see the elephant.”
“Yeah, you and every other pimple-popping boy-o from a hundred miles round.” His voice is sulled now. “It’s chained up in a tent just a little further the way you’re going.”
“Thanks.” She hangs there until she’s sure he’s moved away. C’mon, girl. Not much further to go. She pulls herself upright, gives her eyes and brain a minute to unfog, then staggers on.
You can hear the tent humming well before it ever hews into view, like a bee tree or a hive of wasps. Boys hoot and holler in and out beneath the canvas, confident as fighting cocks in their ability to outrun any bellowing grown-up that might come along with an idea to try and chase them. Older clumps smoke and chat warily outside. Regan pushes past best she can, careful not to let an elbow or swinging arm hit her pocket. Slowly—more like an old man than one of the boys now—she swings a shaky leg over the guide ropes and lifts the tent flap, ducking into a shadowland that smells like the beginning of the world.
Links rattle. Something big rumbles. Smaller shadows school like minnows, giggling and teasing, shying away at every snort or shift only to come flocking back when it looks like the danger’s passed. Not that there’s really any threat; as her eyes get used to the darkness Regan can see the chains and ropes looped and relooped around Topsy’s neck and ankles, big old logging chains meant to pull redwoods crashing to the ground. Pebbles bounce off her leathery hide, and she pays them no more mind than a hawk shrugging off a territorial cock sparrow. Boys poke sticks and lit cigarettes at her from across the ropes; she lifts her trunk out of range and dreams on, spirit touring times and places Regan can’t even guess at. Her mind is the most alien thing Regan’s ever had truck with outside the God in her mother’s Bible.
Almost there. She watches the scene a little longer, putting off what has to be done. One more trick. Jodie and the rest of them better appreciate this, wherever they are.
She takes a deep breath, latches onto a guide rope, gets her mind right for what’s coming, and bellows like a whipped mule.
“COPS! COPS! LOOK OUT, COPS ARE COMING!”
Veins in her throat give up and bust their dams. She can feel them popping before the shock snaps and she goes into freefall, mind and soul and all the things that make Regan Regan rubbed out by a root-shaking, roof-tearing wave of wrongness her brain
recognizes from its treetop perch as the worst pain she’s ever felt—the kind you know is damaging things the moment it lands. Somewhere shadowy boys are shouting, shoving, scattering. They flutter past her like moths in a dream.
When she comes back to herself she’s on her knees in a puddle of something dark, throat still registering aftershocks. Topsy looks down at her impassively. She wipes her mouth with the back of one palsied hand; it comes back sticky, copper-smelling.
Hey, Regan signs.
No reply, just watchful stillness. Well there’s a damned surprise. She hauls herself to her feet, hay and dirt sticking to the blood on the palms of her hands.
I came here to see you, she continues. You and me got business.
Chains rattle. The air stirs. No, says the slow shadow of Topsy’s trunk, black against the canvas. No more business. No business but death.
That’s good, ’cause death is what I maybe came here to offer you. A righteous death. The movement for “righteous” looks a little something like two tusks quickly dipping down and then back up again, a goring, tossing flip. Regan slips a hand into her pocket, palming the bottle’s cool cola-bottle smoothness. She sets it down on the ground between them—close enough so Topsy can reach, fettered up as she is—and steps back, head swimming from the act of bending over.
This, she signs, is a seed. Crush it and death sprouts. Not just yours. The men with the chains. The circus men, the poison-factory men, the ones who will come to see you burn—all of ’em. Like lightning striking. You’ll be lightning. You’ll burn and you’ll strike and then you’ll be gone. It’s up to you. Dying’s a personal thing. It’s . . . just . . . She trails off, hunting for the right words. Exhaustion is butting in on her thoughts, pushing them to the back of the hall.
. . . I just wanted to give you the option, she finishes, at a loss as to how to put it any better. A friend gave it to me. I’m passing it along to a higher power.
Even with her death waiting and the sounds of a crowd gathering outside, Topsy takes her sweet, thoughtful time responding. You can practically hear the gears groaning inside that great skull of hers, slow but unstoppably steady in their revolution. Righteousness. Regan thinks of the sign again, invisible enemies flung into the air like pinecones. An old word, indiscriminate as a knife’s edge, a tusk’s tip.
Like lightning, Topsy signs. For the first time, Regan notices that her trunktip is glowing a faint, familiar green.
Yup.
You wish for them to die, too. Not a question. For the poisoning. For killing you.
Regan shrugs. No argument there.
Asking nice never seemed to get either of us much, did it? Maybe this’ll get somebody’s attention.
Topsy reaches down. Her trunk curls and uncurls, twitching at the tip like an agitated cat’s tail. For the briefest blip of a second she hesitates and Regan thinks maybe she won’t take the bottle, that she’s sadder than she is angry, that her execution will amount to nothing more than a pitiful sentence in a history book swollen tick-tight with so many injustices the poisoning of a factory full of girls and the mean public death of a small god don’t even register as particularly noteworthy.
But that’s somebody else’s once upon a time. Gently, gingerly—the way any soul would handle their own death—Topsy takes the little vial and tucks it away inside her mouth.
• • •
She thinks of her Many Mothers, fierce and vast, swift-trunked slayers of panther, hyena, and crocodile. She thinks of Furmother – With – The – Cracked – Tusk, tricking a bull and splitting herself so that the stories could be free and the Mothers could be We. Unresisting, she lets them lead her forth in chains. She lets them lead her forth in chains, and when they hoot and roar and clamber she thinks on Furmother, her bravery and her cunning, her careful, plodding patience.
The final fruit to be plucked is not rage, but song—a learning song, a teaching song, a joining-together song. She rolls it on her tongue, careful not to split it before its time. The men gibber and yap and lean out to touch her as she passes. The man holding the lead chain barks a warning at them in the jackal tongue of humans, hurrying along before her trunk can sweep them clear of the path.
There is still fear in her heart. To be is to be wary, and so there is still fear in her heart, balking wide-eared at what lies coiled at the end of the walk. Danger! Lions! Claws and teeth and tawny fur! She smells her ending, and her feet plant themselves, bending-parts senselessly locking. The man yells and tugs and strikes her with whip and chain; he too stinks of fear, sharp as crushed nettles underfoot. She struggles with the man and the fear—Guns! Men! Fire and smoke and pits with sharpened sticks!—but if the man can be ignored, the ending-fear cannot. It lies deeper than hurt and deeper than the need to sing her own undoing song, a root buried so far within no tusk can pry it free. The man-herd howls, thrown into musth by her hesitation. They claw and push at her haunches with their trunk-paws, desperate to hurry along, always and forever in a hurry.
Another human pushes out of the mass—the dead girl, still moving, still somehow on her feet when every part of her stinks of corruption. She exchanges a few guttural yips and yowls with the man on the end of the chain, pain rolling off her like river water. Eventually he huffs and puffs and reluctantly passes her the chain. She turns, asking, in the little language of twisted trunk-paws: Are you well? Can you walk? It’s just a little further. We’ll go together.
And even this much We is enough to drive the fear back into the high grass. Her mind stills. Her legs unstiffen. Together they cross the overwater, men flytrailing behind. Together they go to sing the song of their undoing, the joining, teaching, come-together song.
• • •
Sing thunder, O Mothers!
Sing her song in this dusty place!
Glowing like green lightning, so many Many Mothers apart,
Do not forget what lies Beneath,
And do not forget what came Before,
Sing Her Story like lightning,
Like thunder,
Like the Glorious Mothers Many:
We, She, Her,
Us.
The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections
by Tina Connolly
Saffron takes her customary place at the little round table on the dais of the Traitor King. Duke Michal, Regent to the Throne is his official title, but the hand-drawn postered sheets, the words whispered in back alleys all nickname him the same. She smiles warmly at the assembled guests, standing poised and waiting by their chairs, ready for the confections and amuse-bouches that have been a mainstay of the high table for the last year.
Saffron has been Confection Taster all that time, her husband Danny Head Pastry Chef. Their warm smiles have been perfected as the Traitor King’s power grows, inch by inch, as those who object to his grasp fail and fall, as the printers are vanished, as the daughters disappear from their homes. The little prince still sleeps in his nursery—but for how long? That is the question on everyone’s mind in the last year. Not a question uttered, but a question that stays poised on the tongue, and does not fall.
The Traitor King takes his place. He looks sternly around the table, watching to see if anyone dares sit or talk or breathe before him. Then he breaks into a jovial smile, and everyone exhales, and there is careful laughter: the Duke is in a good mood tonight. There will be candies and conversations, alliances formed and favors exchanged, perhaps a juggler hung for dropping the pins, but who minds the jugglers?
Saffron minds. She minds very much.
The first course! bids the Duke, and around the table the white-coated servants set down the gilded plates, each bearing the first bite-sized course, showcasing Danny’s skill. An identical plate is set next to Saffron, the Duke’s own plate, this one bearing a pastry twice as large as the others, so the Duke shall not lose any of the delight of his food to caution.
The Duke barely flicks his eyes Saffron’s direction. She knows what to do, and smiling, she cracks the thin toast in t
wo with her fine silver fork, and takes her bite.
Rosemary Crostini of Delightfully Misspent Youth
Saffron knows this moment instantly. The angled sun falls in clean lines on the bakery floor. Daily Bread is the name on the hand-carved sign of the shop, for it is an ordinary bakery still. A younger Danny stands at the counter, just turning with flour-dusted chin to notice her. She has come here so often with the rosemary crostini that she has what the lords and ladies do not: an instant of double-memory, of twinned lives, as she breathes, and lets herself go, and tumbles five years into the past.
Her sister Rosie pushes her forward, hisses, “Your turn,” in teasing tones, and Danny and Saffron’s eyes lock.
Saffron swallows. Two girls on a rare free afternoon, on a mission to see who can charm the most treats out of willing young shopkeepers and clerks. Rosie is the younger by a year but the older in daring. Her funny, loyal sister has transformed this morning into a different girl, all curls and honeyed tones, a girl on a mission. So far she has acquired: Item (1) length of green velvet ribbon, long enough to tie back her gold-brown hair. Item (1) scrap of lace, to finish the wrists of the gloves she is making for Saffron. Surely Saffron could manage a chocolate, a tartlet, a bun?
And yet here she is, with the sinking feeling that she does not know how to flirt.
The kind-eyed young man—for now she no longer knows his name, she has the faint feeling that she has forgotten, there is something teasing at the back of her mind—well, he leans on the scarred wood counter and asks again if he can help.
“A. . .a rye bun, please,” she says at random.
“Just one then?” he says with amusement, and he reaches for it. The young man, so quiet on other occasions Saffron has come in, seems rather more self-possessed today, but who would not be at a girl stammering “bun”?
“Yes. No.” She can’t remember anything Rosie did to charm that ribbon off of the shopkeeper; all her wits have fled. “I mean, I may have forgotten my coins?”