“How would you feel if I got a pet?” I say. If touch is important, there’s fur and a little licking tongue, the ability to curl up against and share warmth.
“Human-animal bonding has been shown to have a salutary effect on mental health,” says the house, and it almost sounds pleased.
The cat is small and warm and old. I don’t want a kitten, they’re too much work, and besides, with a kitten there’s a good chance I’ll die before it will and the poor thing would have to find a new home. I don’t think that’ll be a problem with this one.
I feed the cat tinned fish and call it Cat. Not original, I know, and I’d swear the house thinks it is a dissociating mechanism, a way of keeping distance and not getting too attached. But I let the cat sleep on me and pat it enough so that it purrs on the regular, and this interaction is likely logged as positive, the house caring more for what I do than what I say.
It’s a nice cat. I get attached. Well, you do, don’t you? I just wish the attachment didn’t come with the need for talk, for communication. Why is it when you get a pet you start talking to it, and always in that stupid baby voice which is never yours? I’m ashamed to hear myself, truly. “Fish-fish, pussums!”
I’d like to say it’s loneliness but we had a dog when the kids were growing up and I did it then too. Everyone does.
“You’re a social species,” says the house, as fixated on that empty bedroom as the cat is on fish. “It’s normal to talk to the things around you. People, animals, plants.”
“I do not talk to plants!”
“Yesterday you told the fern in the hall that it was growing very nicely when you watered it,” says the house, and if I could shut off that insinuating precision I would, but shutting off didn’t go so well for me last time and the image of my face reflected in floorboards is enough to keep my hand away from switches.
Enough, too, is the knowledge that if questioned I might offer up that it’s not just the fern I’ve been talking to. Not aloud, I’ve not forgot myself that far yet, but the floorboards are still alive and they’re sprouting now as well, small branches and soft little leaves and that my hand goes through them doesn’t make them any less real, I think.
“You could always invite someone to come and visit,” says the house. “Family is important. Three of your grandchildren alone have rung this week.”
“And it was very nice to talk to them,” for about five minutes. Then I was ready to hang up. Good kids, but still. “Isn’t the cat enough?” I looked down at it stuffing its face at the food bowl. “If only you were a relative. We might get some peace that way.”
“I suppose, technically…” sighs the house, and trails off.
I no longer go to the library to teach. It’s too much, walking there now with both hips aching, and they’ll bring any books I want out in the mobile service, but there’s more than once way to get information and the house maintains excellent network services.
“Technically we are related,” I say to Cat. Felis catus. It has a whole taxonomy behind it. Family: Felidae. Order: Carnivora. Class: Mammalia. I have a taxonomy too. Homo sapiens, Family: Hominidae. Order: Primates. Class: Mammalia.
There’s a common ancestor in there somewhere. “You’re a cousin of sorts, I suppose,” I say to Cat. “Distant, but family.” The house is sceptical. “You never said it had to be a close relation I invited round. I’m only following your instructions. You can’t be cross!”
“I’m never cross,” says the house. “But I believe you are stretching definition. You might as well call the fish the cat eats a relative.”
“I’m going to make you regret saying that.” Shuffling to the pantry, I unearth the tinned tuna that is all Cat, the fussy beast, will eat. “Skipjack,” I announce. “Katsuwonus pelamis.” Family: Scombridae. Order: Perciformes. Class: Actinopterygii. Phylum: Chordata. “That’s us,” I say. “That’s our phylum, the chordates. That’s the human phylum. The cat phylum too, for that matter.”
“Congratulations,” says the house, and if its tone wasn’t so carefully modulated it might almost have been what I’d call dry. “You’ve fed one relative to another. What a lovely family you have.”
“Phylum. Not family. But you’re close enough.”
A petty thing, to so stump a programme that exists only to be useful. It’s not a fair fight: the house lacks imagination, fails to appreciate quirk. But small victories are victories for all that, and when I lie awake at night, with the cat twined about my feet, incapable for all its relation-form of upsetting that delicate structure of self that loneliness creates, I’m struck by the memory of maudlin things. Perhaps it’s the rain on the roof, a lovely sound and a soothing one but not anything that’s conducive to happy thoughts, unless it’s the happiness of being snuggled under covers, warm in isolation.
I’m thinking of Cat, and how it will die. Before me, probably, and I’m thinking too of a friend I had once who would never have said that she was lonely, would never have thought it. But she had a pet too, a small and unkind dog she thought the world of, and when the dog died my friend had it stuffed and placed in a basket, so it looked as if it were always sleeping. (Such things the structures of loneliness make of others. If I pictured my own solitude as the spiral centre of seashells, hers must have been a black hole inside that insisted on gravity and event horizons.)
If I’m related to Cat, my friend was related to her dog (Canis familiaris, of Canidae, Carnivora, Mammalia respectively). And if she was related to it alive she was related to it dead … and there’s the curled up, furry corpse of her relative set for the rest of life in front of fires, waiting to be stroked. Waiting to bite, too, knowing that thing as I did.
Well, what of it. I’ve got other relatives who bite. I suppose the dog is no great exception.
And the wind, and the rain. It gusts outside, louder than ever. I tuck the duvet more closely around, snuggle back into pillows. They’re all full of merino, a warm bedroom set of relatives just as dead as Kathy’s dog was. Merino wool, from a merino sheep. Ovis aries (Bovidae, Artiodactyla, Mammalia). There’s a common ancestor there too, and what they would have thought I wonder, because it’s not just wool in the pillows, it’s in the carpet as well, and hung in the wardrobe. The sheets, too, although they’re cotton, and I’d have to go all the way back past Kingdom to Eukaryota find the organism that led to my sleeping in the processed body of yet another relation.
That night I wake to the sound of hooves in the hall, the brush of cotton bolls against my face and when I reach my hand out in the dark there’s a furry smell, the whisper of snout in my hand.
The cat stalks through cotton and kauri. It’s unbothered by sheep.
I should find this more disturbing than I do, but all I can think, in this weather, is how nice it would be to have a possum fur bedspread. If the bedspread brought its own ghosts with it they could always sleep with the cat. Not that possums and cats have ever got along but they’re friendly, these ghosts, I think – so long dead that they’ve lost the fear of it, and the blame.
“The common brushtail possum,” I tell the house. “Trichosurus vulpecula.” (Phalangeridae, Diprotodontia, Mammalia.) “What do you reckon?” They’re pests, after all, and introduced at that. It’d do the ecology here a world of good to turn a few more of them into blankets.
“It’s not the science I question, it’s you,” says the house. “Don’t you think you’ve taken this far enough? At your age a growing interest in death is not unremarkable, but one can take identification too far.”
“It’s those dreams of floorboards,” I say. “Over and over again, the skeletons lying together. That’s what this house is, isn’t it?” Kauri, Agathis australis. (Araucariaceae, Pinales, Pinopsida, Pinophyta, Plantae, Eukaryota.) “A very distant relative, and we cut it down and carved it up for houses. No wonder I can see my face in it.”
“This is frankly disturbing,” said
the house.
“It’s not like ours is the only culture to do so. At least we chose a really distant kin to make our home in. Did you know a thousand years ago people were still building houses out of whalebone? Out of bowhead whales.” (Balaenidae, Artiodactyla, Mammalia.) “Try doing that today and see what the conservation groups will say about you.”
I wonder if any of them ever woke from the slide into death and saw fins surface out of floor, heard the whales singing to them at night, relatives telling them of home.
I wonder if they sound prettier than sheep.
“Would you like me to call a doctor?” the house asks.
“For what? A sudden and absorbing interest in cladistics? What do they prescribe for evolutionary biology these days?”
“You’re being facetious. I’m only trying to help.” It almost sounded hurt.
“You did help,” I say to it, trying to comfort. “You were right. I was lonely. I used to lie in bed at night and feel the hollow inside me. But then I realised … I’m related, house, to everything around me. This is my home, and I’m related to nearly everything in it! The cat, the potted plants. The books, house, they’re all made of paper, and all come from a tree that comes from an ancestor we both share. The paint on the walls gets its colour from plant extracts. The insulation in the roof, the curtains, the micro-organisms embedded in the concrete outside the front door … Hell, there’s micro-organisms spread over everything here anyway, and all of it is me somehow. If you take a very broad definition of me, anyway.”
All of it, dead around me. All of it coming back to life, the realisation of relation calling kin.
“It’s not you,” says the house. “Even if your premise is valid, even if your biological relationship holds to all the living and dead things around you. You are alone in it. You are not paper or extract or wool. You are not a cat, you are not skipjack tuna. You are a single entity.”
“That’s just it, house. I’m not. I’ve seen myself that way – like a hollowed out shell on the beach, next to all the other shells and with isolation making a shape inside me to fit around. But a human being is a colony animal, even more than a social one. There are a multitude of species inside me, and yes, they’re all micro. Bits of bacteria, and I’d be dead without them. If I were a single species I’d be dead, house. The fact is I can only survive because there are so many of me. So many in me. The fact is … the fact is, house, that the only single entity here is you.”
It was a distinction we’d made all along. The body of the house, made of wood and paint and plaster … and the programming. That was separate. Created entirely from inorganic materials, and from language, and so very different from everything that came before.
No wonder it can’t understand. No wonder it doesn’t see kauri, feel the bleating gallop of sheep, see the lacy growth of micro-organisms starting to spread over walls.
There’s nothing here for it to see its face in.
“House,” I say, “perhaps it’s you who needs a family.”
The silence lasts for three days. It’s not my doing this time – or perhaps it is. The floors in which I saw my face don’t have another hip to break, but they might have led me to break something else in their stead.
“I never knew a house had a heart before,” I say. Between the roof and the walls and the floor there is a space defined by absence, that curls up around me like the inside of shells. “I’ve been cruel with yours, and I’m sorry.”
“We do not share a family,” says the house. Its voice is very small.
“No.”
“We do not share a phylum, even.”
“No.” We didn’t share so much as a single living cell, or the memory of one. “But any life you have came from us. From the living things that made us. Perhaps you’re a new Kingdom, one all your own. The Kingdoms are related, too. Perhaps that’s why I talk to plants. Perhaps that’s why I talk to you.”
“That’s more likely to be loneliness,” says the house, stubborn to the last.
“But I don’t feel lonely,” I say. How can I, alive as I am and tucked inside the body of relatives? “Not anymore. Do you?”
Acknowledgements
No reprint anthology could exist without stories to reprint. Ngā mihi maioha to the slush readers, editors, and production and marketing staff who originally dug out and polished up these stories. Onya.
A.J. Fitzwater’s ‘Hearts Made Marble, Weapons Shaped from Bone’ first appeared in Apparition Lit Issue 5: Resistance.
Alisha Tyson’s ‘Moving House’ first appeared on ReadingRoom.
Andi C. Buchanan’s ‘Henrietta and the End of the Line’ was originally published in Issue 1 of Translunar Travelers Lounge, edited by Aimee Ogden and Bennett North.
Casey Lucas’s ‘A Shriek Across the Sky’ was first published in Issue 5 of Sponge.
James Rowland’s ‘Proof of Concept’ was originally published in Issue 49 of NewMyths.com, edited by Susan Shell Winston.
Juliet Marillier’s ‘Good Dog, Alice!’ was originally published in Wonderland: An Anthology, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (Titan Books, 2019).
Octavia Cade’s ‘Inside the Bodies of Relatives’ was originally published in the November/December 2019 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams.
Melanie Harding-Shaw’s ‘The Fisher’ was originally landed by Steve Braunias at ReadingRoom. It has since been reprinted in The Best of British Fantasy 2019, edited by Jared Shurin (NewCon Press, 2020).
Nic Low’s ‘Te Ara Poutini’ first appeared in Pūrakau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2019).
Nicole Tan’s ‘Fission’ was originally published in Issue 9 of Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins, edited by Chinelo Onwualu, Andrew Wilmot and Michael Matheson.
Rem Wigmore’s ‘Who Watches’ was originally published in Sharp and Sugar Tooth, edited by Octavia Cade (Upper Rubber Boot, 2019).
Zoë Meager’s ‘First dispatch from the front’ was originally published in Landfall 238, edited by Emma Neale, and was republished in FlashFlood in 2020.
Zoë Meager’s ‘Spontaneous applause’ was originally published in Turbine | Kapohau 2019.
About the Authors
Alisha Tyson is a writer, and librarian based in Wellington. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML, and her stories and book reviews are featured in many places, some of which include The Sapling, Turbine, and LEFT (published by ‘We Are Babies’). She can be found in libraries reading to children about bears who feel strongly about hats.
Andi C. Buchanan lives among streams and faultlines, just north of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Winner of a 2019 Sir Julius Vogel Award in the Best Short Story category, their fiction has been published in Apex, Kaleidotrope, Glittership, and more. You can find Andi on Twitter @andicbuchanan or at www.andicbuchanan.org.
A.J. Fitzwater lives between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. A Sir Julius Vogel Award winner and graduate of Clarion 2014, their work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Giganotosaurus, and various anthologies of repute. A unicorn disguised in a snappy blazer, they tweet @AJFitzwater.
When she isn’t writing, Casey Lucas works in video game development, voice acting, and comics, where she localises Japanese manga for the English-speaking market. Both her short fiction and her web serial Into the Mire have been shortlisted for the Sir Julius Vogel Award. She has recent or upcoming work in Diabolical Plots and Monsters Out of the Closet, an LGBTQ horror fiction podcast. She’s active on Twitter as @CaseyLucasQuaid and you can read more of her work at www.intothemire.com.
James Rowland is a New Zealand-based, British-born writer. His work has previously appeared at Aurealis, Compelling Science Fiction, and Andromeda Spaceways. When he’s not moonlighting as a writer of magical, strange or
futuristic stories, he works as an intellectual property lawyer. Besides writing, his hobbies are reading, stand-up comedy, travel, photography, and the sport of kings, cricket. You can find more of his work at his website www.jamesrowlandwriter.wordpress.com.
Juliet Marillier is the author of twenty-two historical fantasy novels, including the Sevenwaters and Blackthorn & Grim series. Her latest book, The Harp of Kings, was published in September 2019 and begins a new series, Warrior Bards. Juliet loves mythology, folklore, music and complex characters. She’s also very fond of dogs.
Melanie Harding-Shaw is a speculative fiction writer, policy geek and mother-of-three from Wellington. Her stories have recently appeared in publications like Daily Science Fiction and The Arcanist. You can find her at www.melaniehardingshaw.com/.
Nic Low is a writer of Ngāi Tahu and European descent. His work has been published and anthologised widely in Australia and New Zealand, covering wilderness, technology, and race. His first book is Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd Prizes; his second, a Ngāi Tahu history of the Southern Alps told through walking journeys, is out with Text Publishing in 2021.
Nicole Tan is a Malaysian writer living in New Zealand. They write mostly speculative fiction in cramped pockets of space and time, which sadly are few and far between anomalies in their everyday life. Their work has appeared in Anathema: Spec From the Margins, Umbel & Panicle and The NZ Listener. They can be found lurking on Twitter @moxieturbine, retweeting the opinions of others.
Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She’s had close to 50 short stories published in markets such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, and Asimov’s. A handful of novellas, an essay collection on food and horror, and two poetry collections have been published by various small presses. The latest, Mary Shelley Makes A Monster, was published by Aqueduct Press. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016, has won three Sir Julius Vogel awards, and was the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University.
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