He would not go down to the lake. He would not go into Tina’s room, where she was steering herself into oblivion. He would sit down and be calm. It was easy.
He went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the pantry. He left the one in the freezer for Tina; unlike her, he liked to feel the burn.
A couple of hours passed. Sarah stayed gone. He killed half the bottle. The TV show became something else, then something else again, and his thoughts blundered about until they found Mitch. Tina had told him about Mitch while he was in jail. She started seeing him after he’d been in about four years, well after Sarah stopped coming to see him. He’d received the news stoically—he was proud of himself for that, even to this day. He inflicted operatic violence on some guy later that day, sure, but no one who wasn’t going to get it anyway. On the whole he thought he handled it all exceptionally well. And good news: Mitch got dumped after about six months.
Grady told himself he could live with it, and he did.
But it ate at him. Just a little bit.
Now seemed as good a time as any to explore his feelings on this matter with his wife. To have an intimate discussion with her. It would bring them closer together.
Grady lifted himself off the couch and plotted a course to the bedroom. He placed his hand on the wall to steady himself; the floor was trying to buck him. He would show it. He took a few lurching steps and halted, one arm held aloft for balance. When it seemed that doom had been skirted, he took a few more steps and reached the far wall. There was a window there, and he cracked it for some fresh air. The sun was failing, little pools of nighttime gathering beneath the trees. He smelled something faintly sweet riding the air, and he breathed deeply and gratefully before he realized it must be the moldering corpse of the monster. Shaken, he pulled away from the window and went into the bedroom.
Tina was awake, lying flat on the bed and staring at the ceiling. A photo album was open at her feet; some of the pictures had been removed and spread atop the covers. When he came in she rolled her head to look at him, and flopped an arm in his direction. “Hey babe,” she said.
“Hey.”
He sat heavily on the bed. The room was mostly dark, with only a faint yellow light leaking through the curtains. He picked up one of the loose photos: It was a picture of her father standing by the lake, holding up a big fish. “What the hell are you looking at?”
She plucked the picture from his hand and tossed it to the floor, laughing at him. “‘What the hell are you looking at?’” she said, rolling her body onto his legs.
“Don’t do that.”
“‘Don’t do that.’”
He laughed despite himself, grabbing a handful of her hair and giving it a gentle tug.
“Ain’t you mad no more?” she asked, her fingers working at the button of his pants.
“Shut up, bitch,” he said, but affectionately, and she responded as though he’d just recited a line of verse, shedding her robe and lifting herself over and onto him, so that he felt as though he were sliding into a warm sea. He closed his eyes and exhaled, feeling it down to his fingertips.
They moved roughly, urgently, breathing in the musk of each other, breathing in too the smell of the pines and the lake and the dead monster, this last growing in power until it occluded the others, until it filled his sinuses, his head, his body, until it seemed nothing existed except that smell and the awful thing that made it, until it seemed he was its source, the wellspring of all the foulness of the earth, and when he spent himself into her he thought for a wretched moment that he had somehow injected it with the possibility of new life.
She rolled off of him, saying something he couldn’t hear. Grady put his hand over his face, breathed through his nose. Tina rested her head on his chest, and he put his nose to her hair, filling it with something recognizable and good. They lay together for long moments, their limbs a motionless tangle, glowing like marble in the fading light.
“Why couldn’t you wait for me?” he said quietly.
She tensed. For a while he could hear nothing but her breath, and the creaking of the trees outside as the wind moved through them. She rubbed her fingers through the hair on his chest.
“Please don’t ask me that,” she said.
He was quiet, waiting for her.
“I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know a whole lot about that time. But I just don’t ever want to talk about it. I wish it never happened.”
“Okay,” he said. It wasn’t good enough. But he was just drunk enough to realize that nothing would be. He would have to figure out whether or not he could live with it. It was impossible to say, just now. So he lay there with her and felt the weight of her body against his. When he closed his eyes he imagined himself beneath deep water, part of some ruined structure of broken gray stone, like some devastated row of teeth.
“I should make dinner,” Tina said. “Sarah’s probably hungry.”
Her name went off inside him like a depth charge. He lurched upright, ignoring the swimming sensation in his brain. “Sarah,” he said. “She went out.”
“What?”
“To that thing. She went out to that thing.”
Tina seemed confused. “When?”
“Hours ago.” He swung his legs out of bed. “Goddammit. I’ve been drunk!”
“Grady, calm down. I’m sure she’s fine.”
He hurried through the living room, his heart crashing through his chest, a fear he had not believed possible crowing raucously in his head. He pushed her door open.
She was there, illuminated by a slice of light from the living room, lying on her belly, her feet by the headboard. Her arms were tucked under her body for warmth. Her suitcase was open, and the pictures he had destroyed were on the floor beside it.
“Sarah?” he whispered, and stepped inside. He placed his hand on her back, felt the heat unfurling from her body, felt the rise and fall of her breath. He crept around the bed and looked at her face. Her eyes were closed and gummed by tears, her mouth was slightly parted. A little damp pool of saliva darkened the blanket underneath. The rings in her ears caught the light from the living room.
He stroked her hair, moving it off of her forehead and hooking it behind her ear. Anything could have happened to her, he thought. While I was drinking myself stupid in the other room, anything could have happened to her.
Tina’s voice came in from the other room. “Grady? Is she all right?”
Christ. I’m just like her. I’m just as fucking bad. He went to the door and poked his head out. “Yeah. She’s sleeping.”
Tina smiled at him and shook her head. “I told you,” she said.
“Yeah.” He went back into the room. He pulled off Sarah’s shoes and socks, slid her jacket off her shoulders. After a lot of careful maneuvering he managed to get her turned around and underneath the covers without waking her. He leaned over to kiss her on the forehead, and smelled the vodka on his own breath. Self-loathing hit him like a wrecking ball. He scrambled into her bathroom and barely made it before puking into the toilet, clutching the bowl with both hands, one leg looking weakly for purchase behind him. He’d had nothing but vodka and coffee all day, so there wasn’t much to throw up.
When he felt able, he flushed the toilet and headed back to the bedroom. He leaned over and picked up the torn pictures, so he could throw them away. Beneath them he found the new ones, the ones she’d spent all day working on.
He didn’t recognize them at first. She’d used colored pencils, and he initially thought he was looking at a house made of rainbows. Upon closer inspection, though, he realized that she’d drawn the dead monster: as a kaleidoscope, as a grounded sun. His mind reeled. He dropped it to the ground and here was the monster again, rendered larger than it was in real life, its mouth the gaping Gothic arches of a cathedral, its eyes stained glass, ignited by sunlight. There was another, and another, each depicting it as something beautiful, warm, and bright.
Why couldn’t she get it? Why
was she forever romanticizing vileness? His breath was getting short. He rubbed his temples, his body physically rocking as waves of anger rolled through him. She was just stupid, apparently. It was too late. Maybe he’d fucked her up, maybe Tina did, but the damage was done. She’d have to be protected her whole goddamned life.
Might as well start now, he thought.
Tina was in the living room as he walked through it, shrugging into his jacket.
“Where are you going?”
“Is the shed locked?”
“What?”
“Is the shed fucking locked?”
“I, no, I—”
“Good. Stay here.”
When he opened the front door the cold slammed into him like a truck. The temperature had dropped precipitously with the sun. He paused to catch his breath, then jumped down the stairs and headed around back to the shed. He slid the door open and flipped on the light. Inside was a dark, cobwebby tomb of stacked wood and garden appliances with the untroubled appearance of dead Egyptian kings. No chain saw was evident, but he did find an ax leaning against the wall behind a rusting lawn mower. He reached gingerly through a shroud of webs, wary of spiders, and grasped the handle. He pulled it out, trailing dust and ghostly banners.
It had changed since this morning. It actually was shedding light, for one thing, though it was a dim phosphorescence, the result of some strange fungus or bacterium running amok through its innards. The creature looked like some ghastly oversized night-light. The gash that was either a mouth or a wound had borne fruit: A weird and vibrant flora spilled from it like fruit from a cornucopia, pale protuberances with growths like outstretched arms listing this way and that, a dozen vegetable christs. Life abounded here: Small chitinous animals hurried busily to and fro, conducting their miserable business in tunnels and passageways in the body, provided for them by nature or their own savage industry; a cloud of insects, drunk on the very perfume that had driven him into fits, alternately settling on its carcass and lifting away again in graceful curtains, like wind blowing through a wheat field.
Grady raised his ax and took a few tentative steps toward it.
Something moved near him: a raccoon startled from its feast and gone crashing into the underbrush. The flesh around where it had been eating sloughed away and more light spilled into the forest: Hundreds of small insects, their backs coated with the glowing fluids of this dead thing, moved about the wound like boiling suns.
The ax was heavy, so he let it drop. He couldn’t process what he was seeing. He had to figure it out. He sat down in the mud several feet away from all that moving light and stared at it for a while. Maybe there was beauty in there somewhere. Maybe you just had to look at it the right way.
He looked at the palms of his hands. They cast light.
All Washed Up While Looking for a Better World
Carol Emshwiller
Carol Emshwiller grew up in Michigan and in France and currently divides her time between New York and California. She is the winner of two Nebula Awards for her stories “Creature” and “I Live with You.” She has also won the Life Achievement award from the World Fantasy Convention.
She’s been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two New York State grants. Her short fiction has been published in many literary and science-fiction magazines; her most recent books are the novels Mister Boots and The Secret City, and the collection I Live with You.
Emshwiller’s whimsical tone sometimes disguises the seriousness of her themes. Here, a woman’s search for an exotic escape from her mundane existence takes her to an island with some unpleasant surprises.
I wanted to be washed up on a foreign shore, but this can’t be it. I wanted, first, a long, long beach, so I could lie there and recover for a while. After all, I’d be tired. I’d have fought the waves for, maybe, days. Or it certainly would have seemed like days. I am tired. I must have rowed for hours but one can’t judge time at a time like this.
I didn’t want to fight a surf and then sharp rocks. I wanted beauty, palm trees, coconuts, a freshwater stream flowing down not far from where I would have collapsed. And natives of course. They would find me and bring me to their huts or caves. Nurse me back to health.
But there doesn’t seem to be anybody here.
As far as I can see this is all beach. More like a desert. It is. I may have to walk for miles before I can get help. If there is any help.
I won’t start yet. I have to rest first. I’ll just lie here, my cheek on wet sand and sharp little shells. Periwinkles. I know you can eat them, but it’s a lot of work. It takes half a dozen to make one decent bite.
Actually, I liked it well enough back where I was. I liked my boss and my fellow workers, but I’d been there ten years. I’d turned forty. I thought it was time for something different, but not this different.
I should say my job was in a huge windowless library, pillars all across the front. Greek Revival pediment and all. Wide steps up to the colonnade. Inside, the offices were small, the stacks huge. There were no windows except little high ones in the basement. In the spring we could look out at the forsythia in bloom. At other times it was just a little bit of green.
I must have slept or passed out, my nose down with the crabs. And then I hear someone say, “What sort of creature is it?”
First I think they must be talking about some odd shell. I’m curious, too. I roll over to see what they’re looking at and it’s me.
“Never saw anything like it before.”
“Look, it’s wearing clothes.”
“What’s it worth?”
“A pitcher or two.”
I say, “No,” and, “No, no, no.”
“Hear that? It thinks it’s talking.”
“Sounds almost human.”
Far as I can see they look just like me, or more or less. But it’s foggy. They might not be here at all. I’m thinking it would be nice if they weren’t.
This isn’t the kind of thing I wanted. Where are the palm trees and the kind brown natives with their little grass huts and soft springy beds of reeds? These people are as pale as city folk. Even their eyes and hair are pale. How can you be so pale on a desert island? If that’s what this is. Or maybe it’s always foggy.
I try to sit up. I’m dizzy and my leg hurts. I reach to touch it. What if it’s broken?
“Look, it can sit.”
“It’s a her.”
“Yup.”
I look at myself and see that I’m still wet and my blouse is clingy.
“Maybe it’ll get up and walk.”
“Won’t that be funny? If it does, it’ll be almost just like us.”
“We could take it home and show Ma.”
“Wonder what it eats.”
“How about sheeshoosh?”
That makes them laugh.
I’m thirsty, but I don’t think I’ll get anything from these…people. Even so I make a gesture to my mouth. I say, “Drink. Please.”
“Listen to that. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was speech.”
I say, “It is speech.”
“Did it say it’s speaking speech?”
“Couldn’t have.”
“Do you think it has a name?”
“We could name it.”
“How about Jo or Bo. Those are easy ones. It could even call itself to come to itself if it wanted to.”
At that, they all flop down on the sand laughing.
It’s still foggy out though the sun is well up—a murky gray ball. You’d think it would have burned off the fog by now.
They’re not paying any attention to me. I feel at my leg again. I can’t tell if it’s broken or sprained or what. I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed home even though I was so tired of never being out in nature. We didn’t even have windows. What little bit of nature I saw was when I walked home…bits of flowers or weeds around the bottoms of the trees. Pigeons. Not that I don’t like pigeons.
Well,
trust nature to give you a broken leg and make you so thirsty you can hardly stand it.
I pick up a periwinkle and pull out the sliver of sandy meat and eat it. I do it again. I look at the creatures. There are five. Still laughing. They look leggy—long arms, too. Adolescents? Preadolescents?
One says, “Let’s name it Rex.”
“Does it look like a Rex?”
The creatures roll onto their stomachs and stare up at me.
“So that’s what it eats.”
“A lot of bother for nothing much. Must take all day. You’d think it wouldn’t be so fat.”
I’m not fat, just fat compared to them.
“Let’s get it going.”
They prop me up and I try to take a step or two, but then I go down on all fours.
I say, “I can’t walk unless you help me.”
“Come on Jo, Bo…”
“Rex.”
“…we have to get on home.”
“Give it a couple more shell things.”
One comes close and peers into my face and I peer into its. Its hair is pale and long and lank. I can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl. Its eyes look sleepy because of their droopy lids.
It says, “Ugh,” and hands me two tiny shells.
I say, “Thank you.”
“Listen to it try to talk. Ma will like it.”
“Maybe, but you never know with Ma.”
They pull me up again and I take a couple of steps, but I just can’t. Three of them have already started off and are way ahead. I drop down on all fours and start to crawl.
“Look how it’s going.”
“It’s too slow.”
They yell for the others to “Wait up!” and off they go.
I follow. Not hard. I mean it’s hard crawling, but not hard to see where they’re headed. They’ve left a trail in the sand much wider than need be.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 12