Jackalope Wives And Other Stories

by T. Kingfisher

  Shows what you know, thought Grandma, vague and indignant. She didn’t think she could stand up, but she wasn’t done yet. She’d hurt that bastard plenty.

  She would … she would …

  She had no idea what she was going to do.

  She had lost her knife. She put her hand in her pocket, looking for something else—a weapon, a seed, she didn’t know what—and found something smooth and leathery under her fingers.

  The cold-king flicked Marguerite off as if she were a fly. She landed on her shoulder, and the roadrunner-boy ran to her and crouched over her, fierce and futile.

  Grandma Harken pulled the leathery thing out of her pocket. It was the scale from the dragon.

  The cold-king turned his head, snorting. “What is that?” he said, sounding surprised, and it occurred to Grandma for the first time that he might not know that she had freed the monster.

  He lifted his hand. She could not flee, and she could not dodge, and she was already against the wall. The next blow would likely kill her, for her bones were no longer as strong as they had been.

  For lack of anything better to do, she put the scale in her mouth and bit down hard. The musty reptile taste mixed with the salt of blood, a thin, acrid stew.

  There was another crack of thunder, like the sound of the shackles breaking, and something struck the wall of the old adobe.

  The cold-king turned, startled. Pebbles rattled from the ceiling.

  It occurred to Grandma Harken that she should probably get up before the ceiling came down.

  She rolled sideways, slowly, onto her knees. She did not seem to be dead yet.

  The wall shuddered under another impact. There were cracks in the wall now, running in all directions.

  She stood up. Her back felt like an open wound.

  The wall fell.

  Through the gap came sunlight, thin and hazy as it was in this place. She saw the blunt wedge of the Gila dragon’s head, and then it drew back and slammed forward like a hammer.

  The cold-king blinked in the sudden light. His face was fish-belly white under the coat of hair.

  She looked around for something to throw at him—it didn’t have to be large, just a distraction, anything to buy the dragon another few moments—and then the roadrunner-boy charged.

  The sound he made was half-human, half-bird.

  The cold-king slapped at the air, and another wave of power washed over them, but differently.

  The roadrunner-boy fell down and was a roadrunner. Marguerite’s cry became the harsh scold of a mockingbird. And Grandma Harken, who had been hunched over, searching for a weapon, dropped back to all fours, her body twisting into a shape at once forgotten and familiar.

  Her ribs heaved. Her ears were as long as her arms. Two sickle horns rose up on her brow. Her fur was white with age, but her legs quivered with the memory of speed.

  Well. Well. It’s been a long time.

  She would have laughed then, but jackrabbits don’t.

  The cold-king stared at her. “You were supposed to be a bird,” he said, sounding baffled. For a moment he sounded less like a monster and more like a man. “They’re always birds.”

  The dragon hit the wall again and it fell down and took part of the roof with it.

  Grandma stamped. She couldn’t help it. She had no other way to shout a warning. The roadrunner ran for the open doorway, and the mockingbird fluttered, dodging falling stone.

  The cold-king spun around as masonry struck him, and the Gila dragon reached in and closed its jaws over him.

  Grandma winced.

  The poison of a Gila monster is greatly exaggerated. The bite is not. It clamped down on the cold-king and no power on earth could have freed him.

  The cold-king sagged like a puppet with its strings cut. There was no blood at all.

  Grandma stamped again, because the deathless do not die so easily. From the doorway, the roadrunner and the mockingbird looked in.

  The body heaved. Around the edge of the dragon’s teeth, the flesh gaped open and something fell out.

  It was a hare, but it looked unfinished. It was hairless, though its eyes were open. It staggered as it tried to walk, and its legs wobbled.

  Until I finish growing back, the cold-king had said.

  Not quite finished, then, thought Grandma, and launched herself at the hare.

  She was old but her claws were still sharp. She struck the hare hard and rolled it over, biting at its throat.

  Its flesh was soft and spongy, slick with fluid. She could not get purchase on it. It did not fight back but squirmed against her, trying to escape, leave a trail of slime like a slug over her paws.

  It wiggled a little way free and the mockingbird struck at its eyes. Grandma ignored the screaming of old bones and grappled with it again, kicking for its belly.

  Her claws found purchase at last, and tore into the swollen skin. Again, there was no blood. The hare’s body went limp and something feathered fought its way free from the open belly.

  She did not know what kind of bird it was—some sort of water fowl, with a harlequin mask of green and cream over its face. She struck at it, tearing strips from its wing, but it was in the air before she could bring it down.

  It made it nearly to the open doorway and the mockingbird slammed into its head.

  Marguerite, in bird form, was barely a third the size of the fowl, but she fought like a creature possessed, battering the creature’s face with its wings, keeping it out of the air. The fowl hissed like a snake, trying to get into the canyon and more open air.

  Grandma dragged herself forward. If she leapt, she could knock it out of the air—if she could even leap. It did not seem likely. Kicking the hare open had done things to her hips that would be a long time healing.

  The roadrunner slammed into the fowl’s back, driving its long beak into the fowl’s neck. It went limp.

  And is that all?

  No. It never is, is it?

  Its bill opened and the neck worked as if the corpse were vomiting. A serpent with tiny, poisonous eyes slithered free, tail whipping as it fled.

  The roadrunner pounced before it had gotten three feet away. Of all the prey in the desert, it was snakes that they loved the most. It seized the beast behind the head and whipped it back and forth against the canyon wall.

  Grandma sat back on her haunches, tense and trembling, waiting for the next form.

  The snake’s body split open and a white egg flew out.

  It traced a pale arc in the air, glistening. The roadrunner dropped the snake. The mockingbird flung herself into the air after it. The ancient horned jackrabbit lunged forward.

  And the coyote with cold-moon eyes caught it neatly out of the air and swallowed it in two bites.

  “What?” it said, licking its lips. “Were you going to eat that?”

  The air shivered. The folds fell away as three worlds snapped back into place. The sky was blue and hard instead of hazy green. Grandma was an old woman sitting on the side of a hill, with her legs tucked up beneath her. Marguerite fell heavily out of the air and the roadrunner boy helped her up.

  “Well,” said Grandma. “Well. How about that?”

  The coyote sat down, looking pleased with itself, which is the natural state of coyotes.

  Marguerite’s skin and eyes were brown, no longer gray and white. She reached into her mouth and pried the silver cuff out of her tongue. Her young companion, no longer feathered, spat blood. He was older than Grandma had thought. It was his wounded eyes that made him look so young.

  His name was John, Marguerite told her. (Privately Grandma suspected that was nothing like his name, but she wouldn’t have given her real name to the cold-king either.) He had been captured not long after Marguerite. His people were to the south and east. “I’ll see him home,” she said, looking at Grandma, as if she expected her to argue.

  It did not matter in the least to Grandma, so long as she didn’t have to deal with it. “Go into town and talk to Tomas,”
suggested Grandma. “Tell him I sent you. He’ll loan you a mule.”

  They nodded together and stood, leaning against each other, the only two people in the desert who knew what it was like to be tongue-cut birds.

  John spoke to Marguerite, and she translated. “Is the old man gone?”

  “Don’t know,” said Grandma. “Things like that don’t die easy. But I’ve never heard of anything coming back alive from inside a coyote.”

  The coyote looked, if possible, even more pleased. “My stomach is very dreadful,” it said. “I eat carrion and dung, when I can get it.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be back for awhile, at least,” said Grandma. “And if it is, you and John will know how to defeat him. You’ll need a different third, though. I’m too old for this.”

  “Thank you,” said Marguerite, and “Thank you,” said John, pronouncing the words slowly and carefully.

  “Weren’t nothing,” said Grandma, which was a lie and a half.

  After they were gone, Grandma fell backward and just breathed for awhile. The shadows were growing very long. A whole day could not have passed in the ruins of the used-up people, but perhaps time had folded a little oddly too.

  She heard the tracks sing, as if there was a train somewhere nearby, but it did not pass this way after all. That was just as well. She did not think she could deal with a god just now.

  “Are you dead?” asked the coyote with interest.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” snapped Grandma. “I ain’t dying just yet,” and that may or may not have been a lie. She wasn’t quite sure.

  “Then you had better get up,” said the coyote. “And I will walk a little way home with you, just in case you die along the way.”

  It took her a long time going home. The coyote walked her nearly all the way, keeping up a string of nonsense, and since she refused to show weakness in front of a coyote, she walked faster than she might have otherwise.

  She refilled her water bottle at the last wash, and drank deeply. When she lowered the bottle, the coyote was gone.

  “All right, then,” she said. Not being grateful, because you never show gratitude to a coyote. But not being ungrateful, either. Just in case.

  She walked until she saw the fence around her garden, and then she stood and looked and thought that perhaps she hadn’t lied to the coyote about dying after all.

  She went the last little way and opened the gate.

  The cholla-bone girl sat on the back steps, carefully petting Spook-cat. She looked up at Grandma, her face very serious.

  “My great-grandmother sent me,” she said.

  “I know,” said Grandma wearily. She leaned against the gate-post.

  “She says you’re supposed to teach me,” said the girl.

  Grandma was silent. Wondering what an old jackalope wife could teach to a girl with bones made of cholla ribs. Wondering if there was anything she knew worth learning, after all.

  She thought of the lessons in the desert, and thought that this girl probably knew them all already. They would have been written on the inside of her skin since the day before she was born.

  Still, there was one thing she had worth passing on.

  “Come on,” said Grandma, pushing herself away from the fence. “We’ll clean out the back room for you. But first, I’ll teach you how to make a really good tomato sandwich.”

  IN QUESTIONABLE TASTE

  People ask if gardening is hard

  but that's not the problem

  the problem is it's easy

  and it really ought to be impossible.

  What is this

  putting stuff in dirt and expecting to get food back

  what are you, a communist?

  You bought a bag of cowpeas

  not even a proper seed packet with a glossy picture on it

  and shoved a couple in the ground.

  You know it can't work.

  Even fairy tales know better

  everybody laughs when Jack trades a cow for beans

  a cow is worth something, after all.

  The whips that twined up into the hydrangeas have three green leaves

  so they must be poison ivy

  that's probably it

  the things that look like bean pods are a coincidence

  it's a new kind of poison ivy

  you'll probably be even more allergic to this one.

  And the funny thing is that I know this

  when they come for me and say "You have to stop now—

  you know people aren't allowed to do this sort of thing,"

  I'll bow my head and say "I know."

  It was much too easy

  it had to be illegal

  or at least in very questionable taste,

  thinking you could put almost nothing into dirt

  and get everything back

  almost for free.

  ORIGIN STORY

  My friend Jared wrote synopses for several fake fairy tales. It was a joke, but I wanted to read some of those stories, and what with one thing and another…

  The last of the fairies worked in a charnel house, taking apart the beasts that came dead under her hands. In her youth, she had been the last and least of three; now she was the only living one, and even fairies must earn their keep.

  At night, when the knackermen went home, she made creatures out of meat and bone and scraps of skin. It was an act of creation to balance out the destruction in her days. When she had stuffed the little puppets full, she licked her fingers and wrote their names on the outside of the casing in blood and spittle.

  The smallest ones would come alive immediately and toddle out through the massive doors. Eyeless, they looked around at the city before them; lungless, they squeaked and squalled their delight; mindless, they scurried into the shadows, to spread malice and alarm.

  I never said she was a good fairy, you know.

  The first of her charnel children were small and held together mostly with magic. But, as she learned the way that animals fit together, the way sinew embraces bone and organs entwine under ribs, they grew more complex. She sewed them together with needle and thread, murmuring to herself. They took longer to wake up, and they lasted longer once they did.

  She spent months making birds or bats or something in between the two. The slaughterhouse did not do birds, but she found a winter-killed crow and studied how it fitted together, the delicate keelbone and the folded wrists of wings. (She had little interest in feathers, but scraped sausage casings made excellent wing membranes and were more easily sewn up.)

  The first dozen or so were flightless. Not by design, but from ignorance. They tried to fly and fell to earth, where they rolled and flopped like rabid bats, and the fairy grumbled because she knew that she had not quite got it right.

  One morning, in the gray light before dawn, she launched one out the door and it spread its wings and flew.

  It had no head—heads were, to the fairy’s way of thinking, largely superfluous—but it had immense wings and it flapped them like a goose. It soared across the city and was caught by the wind. She saw it rolling in midair, struggling to steer, and then it was swept away out of sight.

  The fairy smiled in the shadow of the great killing chute.

  The next bird she built had a tail studded with sow’s ears for a rudder. It churned the air like a slave galley, wallowing on the wind, but it rose and fell and corrected itself and rose again.

  She built many more after that, and came back to them whenever she was feeling particularly cross. The people in the poor part of the city began to whisper of things that crawled across the thin roofs, making wet, rubbery sounds, of piles of offal found in the gutter that not even the dogs would touch.

  When she had mastered the art of flight, the fairy began to branch out. She made river swimmers and great undulating serpents and many-legged things that scurried on feet of pointed bone.

  She made human-like ones too, of course. Fairies find that sort of thing amusing. Sh
e made charnel children that walked on two legs and she put pig tongues in their mouths to make them speak.

  In the poor part of the city, they began to talk of things that passed the doors in the night, calling nonsense to each other in papery voices.

  Yes, she did once make a beautiful one. Do you think I don’t know how to tell a story? She made one with translucent skin and the eyes of a stillborn calf, and she taught it to sing and to sigh.

  But this is not that creature’s story.

  Eventually, the slaughterhouse workers figured out that something strange was going on. It took longer than it might have, because the fairy’s glamour could still haze mortal minds, but they began to notice that more scraps were going missing than could be explained by simple theft. And it occurred to some of them, slowly, that she was always there, that she did not seem to go home at night. At first they might have thought that she had no home to go to, which had no shame in it, but gradually they learned differently.

  Nevertheless, the fairy was allowed to continue. She was an enormously skilled worker, and if you believe that butchery is unskilled labor, you have never tried it for yourself. And to give her credit where it is due, when she worked, the beasts walked calm to their deaths instead of fighting. When the ancient horses came to be knackered, she stood beside them and then they did not fear the smell of blood, and they died tired but easy, and went on to whatever waits for old horses on the other side.

  Goats respected her. Goats respect very little, but they recognized some of themselves in her, and so they gave her what courtesy goats give to each other. (This is hardly any, of course, but a trifle more than none at all.) The Judas goat that worked in the slaughterhouse considered her a colleague instead of a necessary annoyance.

  The human workers may not have wanted to consider her a colleague, but between fear and respect, they grew used to it. Jobs were not so plentiful that many could afford to lose theirs. And everyone knew, of course, that the owner would side with the fairy…the owner, and his strange mistress with translucent skin and huge calf eyes, who could only sing and sigh.