Djenne and Nalia made their way up the spiral stairs to their dormitory. “I hate the dark,” Djenne said softly. “I was more scared than you were out there last night.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Nalia paused on the stairs. “Why are you afraid of the dark?”
“I don’t know.”
“In the fog, I realized . . . I couldn’t see what was coming. The worst was, I couldn’t see what was Kari and what was a Shadow.”
“How did you tell, in the end?”
“We touched hands. She was warm.”
Hesitantly, Djenne held out her own hand. In the dark stairway, the two girls clasped hands in friendship.
***
TYPING THAT BACK in was painful.
It’s painful to read my old stories because I’ve gotten better, I think, and because I am congenitally incapable of extending the sort of generosity of spirit that I would extend to any other 15-year-old writer to myself as a 15-year-old.
The first thing I noticed was my fixation on giving certain words dramatic freight by capitalizing them. On Darknight, the Masters (including the High Master) protect the Land from Shadows. (If you haven’t read Diana Wynne Jones’s Rough Guide to Fantasyland she has some truly hilarious things to say about fantasy novels where the Capital Letters tell you which things are Important Things you need to Pay Attention To.) Admittedly, the advantage to this technique was that I didn’t have to come up with a name for the place where they live. One of the important and difficult lessons I learned around this time was to be selective about the information I included in short stories—and, in fact, I mostly nailed that. There are twelve girls in this story, but only four get names: Nalia, the protagonist; Kari, the person who falls down the metaphorical well and needs rescuing; Djenne, the antagonist-turned-friend; and Meg, who’s the stand-in for all the nameless girls whenever I need someone else in the story. The Masters don’t get named, which is perfect because you really don’t need to know much about them.
The second thing I noticed was all the important things I left out. Darknight is the day when the Shadows come out to play—are they not a threat any other time? It sounds like light drives them away, so are nights always kind of dangerous? I was picturing “Darknight” as being the winter solstice, but the night of the new moon actually makes a bit more sense. For that matter, what is it Shadows do, other than freak you out and maybe possess your body if you were foolish enough to vacate it? What are they? There are lots of dark hints about the danger they pose, but we don’t actually see them do all that much other than loom threateningly. They possess Kari, but all Nalia has to do is lure Kari’s soul back into her body to reclaim it. While they’re possessing her, she lies limply on the ground—she doesn’t attack her friends, or run away, or do anything that might make it difficult or impossible for Nalia and Djenne to help her.
It’s possible to write a good story where the details are never fully spelled out for the audience, but the stakes should be fairly clear. I’m pretty sure that even at the time I was writing this, I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions.
As I tried to mentally fill some of this in, typing it, I started coming up with some theories that make this a rather more interesting world. Why are there Shadows, and why is it that Sorcerers can offer protection? Well. The obvious answer to me now is that there are Shadows because the Sorcerers opened the door to death that somehow lets them in. But it seems clear from the story that this is a secret. The High Master knows, and probably some of the other Masters, as well, but Nalia’s father clearly does not. He views the Sorcerers as the solution to the problem, not the cause.
Perhaps the real significance here is that Nalia can journey into the land of the dead—the source of the Shadows—and return unscathed, despite her lack of training, twice. That’s the “innate gift” the Sorcerers note when they take her in. Perhaps she’s the one who can journey into the land of the dead and close the door, shutting out the Shadows once and for all. What would that mean, in this world? Well, one thing it would mean is that they wouldn’t need Sorcerers anymore, so they probably would no longer be supported in their more-luxurious-than-most lifestyle, not unless they came up with other useful tasks that people would appreciate them doing. Does the High Master in this story realize the danger Nalia poses? Perhaps she was set up (probably not: too much that happens here was not predictable) but perhaps the Masters wanted to see precisely what she could do instinctively, before proper training.
The story as it stands is fairly formulaic, in part because I wrote it according to a formula suggested repeatedly in the introductions to the Sword and Sorceress anthologies: “Joe has his fanny in a bear trap, and this is how he gets it out.” What I realized about ten years after writing this story was that a better framework, at least for me, runs like this: “Joe has his fanny in a bear trap, and this is how he is changed by his attempts to get it out, whether or not he actually succeeds in extracting it.” Nalia is changed by the end of the story, but the character change isn’t central. She needs to do more than rescue Kari: she needs to learn something. And this is a huge missed opportunity, seeing as it’s her second time on this trip. Last time it was all new and she didn’t know what to expect. This time, as terrified as she is, she knows where she is, so what does she notice now? What secret does she find that she’s not supposed to know?
For that matter, Kari was exiled for “rudeness.” On a night when apparently the Sorcerers are so important that they literally can’t spare anyone to keep an eye on their youngest novices, they cast Kari out for something as trivial as mouthing off? Perhaps she asked the wrong question. Or reached the wrong conclusion. Perhaps her defiance of the Masters was not the pointlessly reckless act it seems like, but an attempt to test her hypothesis about the secrets that are being kept from her.
On the plus side, the story flows well and the writing is reasonably solid. There are some vivid turns of phrase, and the class-warfare theme made me grin.
THE MANUAL
This is more an extended joke than a short story, which came out of some verbal riffing on the idea of God as a computer engineer, Jesus as technical writer, and Holy Spirit as user support.
***
CAST
GOD: Lord and Creator of Heaven and Earth. A somewhat nerdy engineer type.
JESUS: Savior of Mankind. A dynamic speaker, someone who might have been to Franklin-Covey training.
THE HOLY SPIRIT: Inspiration and Guidance to Mankind. A flustered woman who has dealt with one too many idiot users today.
(The Scene: an office. JESUS is working at a computer when GOD enters, carrying a huge blue binder.)
GOD: Jesus, we’ve got to talk.
JESUS: (swiveling in his chair) God! It’s great to see you. Pull up a chair.
GOD: Jesus— (waving the binder) —it’s about this—this—the manual you wrote for my Creation.
JESUS: (smiling broadly) What did you think?
GOD: It’s not going to work.
JESUS: (smile vanishes) Why? What’s wrong with it?
GOD: Well—take a look at this. (Flips open binder.) You wrote, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let their be light’; and there was light.
(Jesus is smiling at the sound of His own prose; God slams the binder shut.)
GOD: But that’s WRONG.
JESUS: Wrong? What do you mean, wrong?
GOD: You know perfectly well how creation started off. There wasn’t any ‘deep,’ and there certainly weren’t any waters. All matter existed in an infinitely compact state. Then I separated gravity from electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak interaction forces. What about the quarks? You didn’t even mention the quarks combining to form particles!
JESUS: God, now, hold on a minute—
GOD: And this. (Opens binder ag
ain.) You wrote, “God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. God called the dome Sky.” (Slams binder shut.) Now, just give me a break, Jesus, okay? The earth formed out of a solar nebula and the sky isn’t water!
JESUS: You have no appreciation for poetry, do you?
GOD: (Opens binder again.) And then—“God said, Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” (Slams binder shut.) Where are the eurobacteria? Where’s the blue-green algae? Where are the prokaryotes???
JESUS: (Taking binder away from God.) Okay. You need to calm down, God, okay? This isn’t a manual for the Creator. You don’t need a manual, do you? You already know how things work. This is a manual for the users.
GOD: What’s your point?
JESUS: Humanity only just developed literacy, and you want to dump a bunch of stuff on them about prokaryotes? They won’t get it. Just trust me on this, okay? I covered all the important bases—universe, ocean, sky, fish—I just put it in terms they’ll understand.
GOD: But it’s wrong.
JESUS: It’s not wrong. It’s symbolic.
GOD: But—but— (grabs binder out of Jesus’s hands again and flips it open). “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.” You make it sound like the earth was around before the rest of the universe!
JESUS: That’s just where all that stuff fit in. I had to say something about the stars.
GOD: They’ll figure it out. (Takes binder back.) I gave them a brain, didn’t I? (Waves hand over binder and desk.) There! Fixed.
(The HOLY SPIRIT enters. She’s also holding a blue binder, which she slams down on the desk.)
HOLY SPIRIT: (Mad enough to spit nails.) God, I have a bone to pick with you.
GOD: What? What did I do?
HOLY SPIRIT: This! (shakes her binder at him, then flips it open) “And at 10 to the -10 seconds, God separated weak interaction and electromagnetic force. Then, at 10 microseconds, quarks combined to form particles.” (Slams binder shut.) Are you crazy?
GOD: (indignant) What? It’s all perfectly accurate.
HOLY SPIRIT: (really furious now) Accurate!! (Throws binder down) You’re not the one who has to support this stuff. I can inspire somebody to write down one week of flora and fauna and sky. I am not going to be able to inspire microseconds and quarks!!
JESUS: You should listen to her, God. (picks up binder, flips through it) She’s the one who has to deal with the users, day in, day out. You should use my version. (Pulls additional binder out of desk drawer and holds it out).
GOD: (takes binder and sighs) I suppose next you’re going to tell me that the instructions are too complex.
(JESUS and the HOLY SPIRIT exchange looks)
JESUS: Well . . .
GOD: (flipping through binder) You took out all my instructions!
JESUS: I didn’t take them out. I just compressed them a little bit.
GOD: A little bit! (Holds out binder to read from it) “Be nice to each other.” (Looks up) Be nice to each other?
JESUS: I could change it to “do unto others as—”
GOD: What happened to the instructions about shellfish? I liked those instructions.
JESUS: I wanted to compress it down to the essentials, you know?
GOD: The shellfish are essential. Do you have any idea what sorts of nasty things you can catch from eating improperly cooked shellfish?
JESUS: You gave them a brain, right? They’ll figure it out sooner or later.
GOD: Sooner or later? Jesus. Put the shellfish back in.
JESUS: Fine, okay, fine.
GOD: And the bits about nocturnal emissions. Put those back in, too.
JESUS: Fine. (Taking notes.)
GOD: And the part about coveting your neighbor’s ox—oh, for crying out loud. (waves hand) All the instructions go back in.
JESUS and the HOLY SPIRIT: But—
GOD: I’ll compromise on that first part—you can make it the week of fauna and separation of waters. But the instructions stay in.
JESUS: (opens mouth to argue, then changes his mind) Okay, so long as we’re not getting any more argument about prokaryotes.
GOD: I promise. No more argument about prokaryotes. (Hands binder back to Jesus.) You two should probably get back to work.
(GOD exits)
HOLY SPIRIT: Well, that’s a relief. Inspiring people with those instructions is going to be a pain in the keister, but better that than quarks.
(HOLY SPIRIT exits)
(JESUS leafs through the binder, sighs deeply.)
JESUS: (to no one in particular) Why do I have a bad feeling that sooner or later, I’m going to be the one who pays for this mess?
BLACKOUT
KITCHEN MAGIC, WITH RECIPES
I NEVER TRIED to sell this story.
That’s because the custody battle, as I wrote about it, is not plausible. There’s a specific federal law in place that is supposed to prevent the exact situation I’m writing about here.
There’s other stuff wrong here, too. The real individual that “Doug Phillips” is based on (you’ll know him when you see him) will rant and rave, but he never makes physical contact with anyone (because he’d be in jail, if he did.)
There are a lot of stories out there that get key facts wrong, and although I try to be conscientious with my research there are almost certainly stories in here that get some key fact wrong. Still, it drives me crazy enough in other people’s stories when I spot some major mistake of fact, that I could never bring myself to market this one. Even though Lyda loved it and nagged me repeatedly to send it out.
But now, I can tell you that I know I’m wrong, and then share the story. So here it is, for the first time. You should know that all the recipes are real recipes (the cookie recipe was created by Henry Horn, the father of a friend of mine), and the story is set in 1993.
***
I. The Milk and Cookies of Human Kindness
CALL THE QUARTERS, light candles, and make other ritual preparations as necessary. Turn off the ringer on the phone; the lawyers will leave a message and the social workers won’t call this late. Clear off the counters so that you can focus your mind. Put on your apron and wash your hands. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In the large pottery mixing bowl, put:
¾ cup white sugar
¾ cup brown sugar
1 cup butter
Mix the above, creaming the butter. Use your fingers; the heat from your hands will help it to melt. Then add:
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp water
Mix again. This time use a sturdy wooden spoon. Then add:
2 ½ cups unbleached flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cocoa
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp salt
Mix once again, using the spoon or your hands or both. Then add:
1 package real dark chocolate chips
Pick up the dough in a teaspoon and drop it onto ungreased cookie sheets, leaving each cookie plenty of space to spread out. Bake them in the oven until two minutes after you start to smell them, when they’re golden but not truly brown. Best when eaten hot, but of course they’re still good for as long as they last.
When the ritual is over, thank the Goddess for coming, blow out the candles, and ground out the energy. Share the cookies with others.
***
“THIS WON’T WORK,” Elaine said.
Shira shrugged her off, pulling the last cookie sheet out of the oven and putting it onto a wooden cutting board so it wouldn’t scorch the counter. “I’m going to try to do this the civilized way. Write David a letter, and tell him that I would really like to see Lecie.”
“And casually point out that since he took Lecie out of the state ill
egally, there isn’t exactly any question about who has legal custody of her?” Elaine said. Her voice was tight; Shira knew that Elaine wanted to pound the walls, not write a polite letter. Shira could sympathize; in all honesty, she also felt more like pounding the walls. Or getting on the phone again, to her lawyer, even though she’d asked all the questions before: “Can he do this?” No, not legally. “But I’m supposed to have custody of Lecie.” Yes, but the Texas court ruled that you’re an unfit mother. “Because I’m a lesbian.” Of course, why else? “But does the Texas court even have jurisdiction?” No, of course not—but try telling that to Texans. We’ll get her back for you, Ms. Leavitt. Be patient. This sort of thing takes time.
Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories Page 18
