Jackalope Wives And Other Stories

by T. Kingfisher

  “If I’d been thinking, I would’ve worn waders,” she said.

  Death laughed Maggie’s grandmother’s laugh.

  The bottom of the sundew pool was made of mud and sphagnum moss, and it wasn’t always sure if it wanted to be solid or not. Every step she took required a pause while the mud settled and sometimes her heels sank in deep. She started to worry that she was going to lose her shoes in the pool, and god, wouldn’t that be a bitch on top of everything else?

  At least the god floated. Her shoulders weren’t up to much more than that.

  In the middle of the pool, Death stopped. She let go of the possum’s feet and came around to Maggie’s side. “This ought to do it,” she said.

  “If we leave the body in here, it’ll stink up the pool something fierce,” said Maggie. “There’s things that come and drink here.”

  “Won’t be a problem,” Death promised. She paused. “Thought you were tired of taking care of things?”

  “I am,” snapped Maggie. “Tired isn’t the same as can’t. Though if this keeps up…”

  She trailed off because she truly did not know what lay at the end of being tired and it was starting to scare her a little.

  Death took the possum’s head between her hands. Maggie put a hand in the center of his chest.

  They pushed him under the water and held him for the space of a dozen heartbeats, then brought him to the surface.

  “Again,” said Death.

  They dunked him again.

  “Three times the charm,” said Death, and they pushed him under the final time.

  The body seemed to melt away under Maggie’s hands. One moment it was a solid, hairy weight, then it wasn’t. For a moment she thought it was sinking and her heart sank with it, because fishing a dead god out of the pond was going to be a bitch of a way to spend an hour.

  But he did not sink. Instead he simply unmade himself, skin from flesh and flesh from bone, unraveling like one of her flies coming untied, and there was nothing left but a shadow on the surface of the water.

  Maggie let out a breath and scrubbed her hands together. They felt oily.

  She was freezing and her boots were full of water and something slimy wiggled past her shin. She sighed. It seemed, as it had for a long time, that witchcraft—or whatever this was—was all mud and death and need.

  She was so damn tired.

  She thought perhaps she’d cry, and then she thought that wouldn’t much help, so she didn’t.

  Death reached out and took her granddaughter’s hand.

  “Look,” said Death quietly.

  Around the pond, the fat trumpets of the pitcher plants began to glow from inside, as if they had swallowed a thousand fireflies. The light cast green shadows across the surface of the water and turned the sundews into strings of cut glass beads. It cut itself along the leaves of the staggerbush and threaded between the fly-traps’ teeth.

  Whatever was left of the possum god glowed like foxfire.

  Hand in hand, they came ashore by pitcher plant light.

  Death stood at the foot of the steps. Maggie went up them, holding the railing, moving slow.

  There were black stains on the steps where the god had oozed. She was going to have to scrub them down, pour bleach on them, maybe even strip the wood. The bindweed, that nasty little plant they called “Devil’s Guts” was already several feet long and headed toward the mint patch. The stink of dying possum was coming up from under the steps and that was going to need to be scraped down with a shovel and then powdered with lime.

  At least she could wait until tomorrow to take an axe to the Devil’s rocking chair, though it might be sensible to drag it off the porch first.

  The notion of all the work to be done made her head throb and her shoulders climb toward her ears.

  “Go to bed, granddaughter,” said Death kindly. “Take your rest. The world can go on without you for a little while.”

  “Work to be done,” Maggie muttered. She held onto the railing to stop from swaying.

  “Yes,” said Death, “but not by you. Not tonight. I will make you this little bargain, granddaughter, in recognition of a kindness. I will give you a little time. Go to sleep. Things left undone will be no worse for it.”

  Death makes bargains rarely, and unlike the Devil, hers are not negotiable. Maggie nodded and went inside.

  She fell straight down on the bed and was asleep without taking off her boots. She did not say goodbye to the being that wore her grandmother’s face, but in the morning, a quilt had been pulled up over her shoulder.

  The next evening, as the sun set, Maggie sat in her rocking chair and tied flies. Her shoulders were slowly, slowly easing. The pliers only shook a little in her hand.

  She had dumped bleach over the steps, and the smell from under the porch had gone of its own accord. The bindweed…well, the black husks had definitely been bindweed, but something had trod upon it and turned it into ash. It was a kindness she hadn’t expected.

  Her whiskey bottle was also full, with something rather better than moonshine, although she suspected that a certain cloven-hooved gentleman might have been responsible for that.

  The space on the porch where the other rocking chair had been ached like a sore tooth and caught her eye whenever she glanced over. She sighed. Still, the wood would keep the fire going for a couple of days, when winter came.

  The throats of the pitcher plants still glowed, just a little. Easy enough to blame on tired eyes. Maggie wrapped thread around the puff of feather and the shining metal hook, and watched the glow from the corner of her eyes.

  A young possum trundled out of the thicket, and Maggie looked up.

  “Don’t start,” she said warningly. “I’ll get the broom.”

  The possum sat down on the edge of the pond. It was an awkward, ungainly little creature, with big dark eyes and wicked kinked whiskers. It was halfway hideous and halfway sweet, which gave it something in common with witches.

  Slowly, slowly, the moon rose and the green light died away. The frogs chanted together in the dark.

  The possum stood up, stretched, and nodded once to Maggie Gray. Then it shuffled into the undergrowth, its long rat-tail held behind it.

  I will give you a little time, Death had said.

  She wondered what Death considered ‘a little time.’ An hour? A day? A week?

  “A few weeks,” she said, to the pond and the absent possum. “A few weeks would be good. A little time for myself. The world can get on just fine without me for a couple of weeks.”

  She wasn’t expecting an answer. The whippoorwills called to each other over the pond, and maybe that was answer enough.

  Maggie poured two fingers of the Devil’s whiskey, with hands that did not shake, and raised the glass in a toast to the absent world.

  IT WAS A DAY

  Tor payed me money for this poem once. I always wanted to be published by Tor, I just didn’t expect it to be for something with a line about phone-sex with Pierson’s puppeteers. Still, that, too, was a day.

  It was a day a little bit like today

  the way the clouds threw shadows over the hill

  the day you realized that you weren’t going to find your future.

  You were never going to go to Mars

  or Pern

  or Krynn

  You were never going to open the door that led, inexorably, to Narnia

  (or even Telmar, you weren’t picky, and you were confident of your ability

  to lead the revolution.)

  Inigo Montoya was not going to slap you on the back

  and invite you to take up the mantle of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  There would be no sardonic Vulcans or Andorians;

  you would never be handed an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

  That was a strange day.

  It ranked up there with the day that you realized that everybody else saw the you in the mirror, not the you inside your head. Not the you that was lean and toug
h and clever, not the you with perfect hair and a resonant voice that never said “Um….?”

  Not that you.

  No, they got the one that was fat and wobbly and stiff inside with terror, the one who was a little scared of eye makeup, the one who wore black because it was better to be freaky than pathetic.

  You were never terribly fond of that you.

  It was a day not at all like today

  a day where the sun shone very brightly around the edges

  that you realized that you could write that future.

  You could blot out all those old arguments in your head by asking each character “What happens next?”

  “And what do you say?”

  “And are there ninjas?”

  It wasn’t the old future, but it was close.

  (Besides, by that point, you’d realized that Inigo probably bathed once a month and that when people stuck you with swords, you’d fall down and shriek, and also that your feet hurt. And writers get indoor plumbing

  and birth control pills if they can get them.)

  It was a rather odd day

  though not entirely unexpected

  when you met the people who were angry with you.

  It took awhile to figure out. Much more than a day, in fact.

  Eventually, it came to you that those people had a future, too,

  but they hadn’t quite realized they weren’t going to find it

  and they blamed you for the fact it wasn’t here.

  You were not the sort of person that lived in their future.

  You were still too fat and too wobbly and much too weird, and you laughed too loudly

  like a good-natured hyena

  and you were not supportive of their high and lonely destiny.

  And if you were here and their future wasn’t

  it was probably your fault

  and if you went away

  maybe they’d get to go to Mars after all

  pal around with Tars Tarkas

  have phone-sex with the Pierson’s Puppeteers.

  They got very mad about it.

  You pictured them hopping,

  arms and legs going up and down

  like angry puppets

  when somebody pulled the string coming out of their crotch.

  It was all very strange.

  It was a day sort of like last Tuesday

  or maybe the Friday before last

  when somebody came up

  with a copy of your book

  it was dog-eared and they looked like they might cry

  and they said “Thank you.”

  It was a day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is for all the editors who bought some of these stories, the readers who enjoyed them, and the dogs who laid at my feet and produced extraordinary smells while I was writing them.

  Most particularly, however, I must mention my dear friend Mur Lafferty. The year “Jackalope Wives” was winning awards, there were some rather dramatic political upheavals and infighting surrounding the Hugo Awards. The end result was that George R. R. Martin gave out his own awards, called “The Alfies” to the stories who would have been first on the short list of nominations if not for shenanigans. “Jackalope Wives” was one of these.

  From my friend Mur’s perspective, however, she was attending the post-Hugo party thrown by Mr. Martin when people in the next room began shouting for her. She entered an enormous ballroom to find Mr. Martin up on a balcony, waving an award she’d never heard of, and a huge crowd demanding a speech she hadn’t written. She said the trip up the stairs to the balcony was like a nightmare where she forgot what classes she had and whether she was wearing pants, until someone explained that she was accepting on my behalf, whereupon she was thrilled (except for a vague, persistent fear that “The Rains of Castamere” would start playing and everyone in the hall would be horribly slaughtered, because it was George R. R. Martin’s party.)

  From my perspective, I woke up hungover after toasting all my friends who did win awards, drove to Waffle House for hangover hashbrowns, and then Mur began texting me this story and sending photos of my Alfie, being held by many of my dear friends in the science fiction community. I am not ashamed to admit that I broke down crying. Yes, at Waffle House. These things happen.

  I treasure my Alfie, but I treasure Mur’s friendship far more.

  T. Kingfisher

  Pittsboro, NC

  April 2017

  OTHER WORKS

  As T. Kingfisher

  Nine Goblins (Goblinhome Book 1)

  Toad Words & Other Stories

  The Seventh Bride

  Bryony & Roses

  The Raven & the Reindeer

  Summer in Orcus

  As Ursula Vernon

  From Sofawolf Press:

  Black Dogs Duology

  House of Diamond

  Mountain of Iron

  Digger Series

  Digger Omnibus Edition

  It Made Sense At The Time

  For kids:

  Dragonbreath Series

  Hamster Princess Series

  Castle Hangnail

  Nurk: The Strange Surprising Adventures of a Somewhat Brave Shrew

  Anthologies:

  Comics Squad: Recess!

  Funny Girl

  Best of Apex Magazine

  The Long List

  Peter S. Beagle’s The New Voices of Fantasy

  T. Kingfisher is a pen-name for the Hugo-Award winning author and illustrator Ursula Vernon.

  Ms. Kingfisher lives in North Carolina with her husband, garden, and disobedient pets. Using Scrivener only for e-books, she chisels the bulk of her drafts into the walls of North Carolina's ancient & plentiful ziggurats. She is fond of wombats and sushi, but not in the same way.

  You can find links to all these books, new releases, artwork, rambling blog posts, links to podcasts and more information about the author at

  www.tkingfisher.com