by Kelly Link
Dorian Gray’s laugh is like a bark, and it reverberates in her chest.
The wolf tells the woodcutter, “In exchange for stealing my rose, you will bring me your most beautiful possession.”
The woodcutter trembles. He wishes he had not left his axe back among the tree stumps. He could split the wolf into equal halves, had he enough force behind his swing.
The wolf says, “My vanity makes me patient, woodcutter. I have waited many years for beauty.”
The woodcutter lies through his sharp teeth. “I have no beautiful possessions. I am a poor woodcutter.”
“What?” says the wolf, “No wife? No daughter?”
The first time Dorian Gray asks Juliet to marry him, she looks at his cratered skin, firm but flaking, and she says no. The next day when he proposes again, he wears his wolf mask, and watches her through the excavated eyes as she rejects him again.
On the twentieth day, he pushes her up against his cottage wall, an arm crushed to her throat, and she spits her “no”, saliva filled with brown-blood hate, into his face.
Between the fortieth and sixtieth proposal, Dorian Gray falls in love. He cooks for Juliet venison, and goat-milk cheesecakes, and stews that fill her with temporal heat. He presses rose-petal kisses to her hands, warm fingers into her palm.
On the seventy-third day, Juliet says yes.
Her beauty becomes his.
The first time he comes home with blood on his lips, Juliet seeks a reasonable explanation. She whispers to the cat that he would never hurt them. After all, he loves her.
The friar says, “Juliet, I thought you were the moon goddess come to collect my soul.” Then he sees the blood on her hands. He sees it smeared across her pale lips. She breathes through her mouth; her warm breath grazes his cheek and smells of cinnamon and burning. There is a tingling beneath his scalp. He says, “My dear, what has happened?”
She says, “I killed the woodcutter. He was a wolf all along.”
The friar barks a laugh, and splutters hot spittle onto her cheek.
On the night of her second wedding, the woodcutter’s wife goes into the woods. She wears a deerskin shawl over her wedding dress, which is not white. She chops wood for hours, feeling sweat chill against her skin.
It is this night that she meets the fairy.
She is naked as the moon, a slender sliver. Her hair floats on the humid air. She says, You are tired, let me hold your axe.
Juliet is indeed tired, she is not often up so late. She holds the axe out, head down, and watches as the translucent fingers of the fairy grasp it. She notices rough divots in the skin, like craters. The silver blade glints in the moonlight as the fairy lifts it over her head. She swings it forward to meet with Juliet’s white rose crown. The axe splinters bones, slow with shyness, as flesh and golden hair quiver away from the blade. Black guts splatter fairy feet. Juliet tumbles to both sides as separate halves.
Dorian Gray lies in bed and ponders the fickleness of women. The strangled screech of a crow that cawed back to the cat seeps in with the wind through the sweltering walls. The cat’s tail quivers.
About God(s)(desses), Part 1
Neile Graham
The big ones, why are they so hard to love?
They’re the vast stuff—love, war, death—the caustic abstractions eat
them alive, black & white, right & wrong, all strife & fear & jealousy
they see the outlines
only, never within.
Do the gods fear human happiness?
Yes, on the day you receive recognition for 17 years of tough work
they will tell you your mother is dying. You knew she’d already lost herself,
but now she’s
dying fast.
Do the gods have a sense of humour?
No.
Do they dream of electric sheep?
Human sheep.
But the household gods, can they be loved?
How can you not? They’re the fire in the hearth, finding your keys,
a parking place, your mittens, a summer breeze, a seedling,
the shelter of home
a tree’s shadow.
Do they fear human happiness?
No, it is all their construction, built out of small blessings they offer
day by day: the sun on your back, the moon’s glow on night snow,
the scent of
a newborn’s nape.
Do these gods have a sense of humour?
They created laughter.
Do they dream of electric sheep?
Plastic sheep. Piled on each other, making stonehenges, making waves,
waltzing, tipped over, under the couch, unearthed in a garden, so joyful
you could fall
on your knees to them.
About God(s)(desses), Part 2
These daily gods, these gods of small things, these
gods of paperclips, of papercuts, of paper
etched with ink, what do they tell you to seek?
They tell me to seek the ugly beautiful terrifying truth.
They show it to me in grains of sand, searing in heat,
beautiful in magnification, debriding in storm and choking
in deluge.
What is it that they whisper in your ear?
Sweet everythings.
What all have they done to you?
Put spiders in my bed. Put lovers. Put friends. Put
a husband. A cat. Have pulled the earth out
from under my feet. Have picked me back up,
bleeding and determined. Shown me everything
terrifying, ugly, beautiful. All and everything
What can you say about what they have shown you
about life, about love, about friends
discovered by circumstance?
Ugly. Terrifying. Beautiful.
No, what can you say about what they have shown you?
Ugly. Terrifying. Beautiful.
True.
The Oracle of Abbey Road (Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night)
Sarah Monette
The basement is clean and dry and windowless.
It could be anywhere, except that it has to be under Abbey Road.
It has to be. We all know this.
The animatronic George Harrison (ca. 1966), skinny and scowling, is eerily realistic. It shivers in the aggressive climate control and looks like it needs a cigarette.
It’s programmed with the lyrics. It gives a daily status report, recorded in an exercise book. The reports are reviewed monthly by a constantly changing rota of programmers, each of whom signed a work-for-hire contract with an NDA thick enough to use as a pillow. They note on a tally sheet which lyrics the oracle answers in response to a set question: WHAT ARE YOU?
Over one year, the tallies recorded are:
The man with the foolish grin is keeping
perfectly still. 70/365
I never needed anybody’s help in any way. 78/365
Take these broken wings and learn to fly. 124/365
Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease. 35/365
There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. 5/365
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly. 53/365
The programmers don’t make eye-contact with the oracle.
The oracle answers the questions that school children and old widows of both sexes and people who share the secret knowledge of London tuck in the base of the street lamp beside the zebra crossing.
(Yes. That zebra crossing.)
The questions are mostly sad, mostly dull. The oracle writes its answers (cheap black ball-point, George Harrison’s round half cursive, half print hand) in a duplicate receipt book, each duly numbered and dated. At the end of the day, a bored janitor takes the finished slips and throws the
m off the roof.
They’ll reach the right person, even if it isn’t the person who asked.
I’m afraid I have prostate cancer, writes one petitioner
Mr K performs his tricks without a sound, answers the oracle.
I love him, but he hurts me, writes another.
The King of Marigold was in the kitchen, answers the oracle and, oddly, adds a second verse, Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?
I LOST TEDDY AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE HE IS, writes a child.
Friday night arrives without a suitcase, answers the oracle.
Sometimes, when she takes that last look ’round before she leaves, the janitor makes eye-contact with the oracle—even though she tries not to. Sometimes, she thinks she sees something, something that shouldn’t be there. Something she’s been told repeatedly she does not see.
Sometimes, she leaves a cigarette where the oracle, chained as it is to a ring in the floor, trapped as it is by the chair and the table, can reach it.
The cigarette is always gone in the morning, and there may or may not be a faint hint of smoke in the recycled air.
Take these broken wings, the oracle writes in the exercise book, and learn to fly.
Stone, Paper, Stone
Joanna Ruocco
Before you were born, and I was dead, this story was told at night on the green.
Once, a man lived in the town who did nothing but harm. His name was Carrick Cark, and, of course, a woman loved him. The woman was Sara Kasp. This town where they lived lay in a narrow, dark valley with trees pressing in from both sides. It was known for its limestone, which the quarrymen split into blocks and rolled down the mountain in carts of thick timber. Those blocks found their way far and wide, to bright and big towns, on the plain, on the coasts. They were fit into the walls of white towers that Sara Kasp, from a child, saw in her dreams. From a child, she worked down in the quarry alongside her father and mother, alongside the grown men, and she worked harder and better than any. They said of Sara Kasp in the town that she had only to look at the limestone for the limestone to cleave.
Carrick Cark lived in a house in the pines at the top of the valley, a strange wooden house, too tall and too thin. He was just four years old when his parents were killed. There were many who saw it but were afraid to go near: Broc and Dell Cark crying out in a storm of small stones, running through the town and up the long road toward their house, stones striking again and again their hands, their arms, their shoulders, their heads. When they went down to their knees, the stones came harder and thicker, and many at that moment had to cover their eyes.
It was a strange thing, they said, but the Carks had always been strange, and worse than strange. For generations they had had their own share in the quarry, one of the largest in town, and done little with it in the way of splitting stone blocks. But other things, yes, they had done. Hadn’t Broc Cark’s father been at the winch when it failed and Jes Sen and Tam Conn were both crushed? And hadn’t Broc and Dell Cark laid the fuses when the blast missed its mark and Rogan Niles was blown back off the ledge? Those two on the road, people said, battered by stones that seemed to come from the sky, it was what they deserved. It was the recompense of the limestone itself.
At the time this story really begins, Carrick Cark was grown, and grown idle and wild, a young man in a green coat walking up and down the long road. Sara Kasp too was grown, and grown strong and unsmiling, a young woman with hair whitened by limestone always lifting and dropping the sledge on white stones. She lived with her mother and father, although girls younger were married, and her father had begun to speak at night in the house of what her marriage could bring: another pair of hands, a strong back, more blocks in the cart. For the Kasps had the greatest share in the quarry of all, and the only limit to wealth their own labor. No one worked longer in the quarry each day than Jorn Kasp, unless it was Sara, his daughter, or Lisle, his wife. Yet work all they could, they still fell behind. The larger families quarried more stone.
Gravin Dammersen was soon much at Sara Kasp’s elbow. She knew that it was he whom her father had chosen. His skill with the chisel and wedge was praised by quarrymen two times his age, and once, when a horse died in its traces on the way to the market, he had himself hoisted the chains and pulled with the team. Why not Gravin Dammersen? Sara Kasp had no reason to give. Every day in the quarry, she moved deeper and deeper into the ground. Far off, to the east and the west, along the road that crossed the road that came down from the valley, on the plain, on the coast, there were towers with the white stones Sara Kasp had split in their walls. Was this why? She did not know and stayed silent. Gravin Dammersen brought her a pendant he had made out of quartzite and clay, a sledge the size of her thumb to wear around her neck on a cord. Her mother wore something like it. When no one was looking, Sara Kasp let it fall from the ledge down, down, down into the odd quarry water, pale green, which sometimes cast up what it swallowed and sometimes did not.
It was not long after that Carrick Cark appeared between the cranes on the edge of a long shelf of stone. Sara Kasp was the first one to see him. She was on that same shelf, breathing hard, turning the winch. The day was foggy and wet, a treacherous day, a day when the ground moves from under your feet. She kept turning but watched to see what he did. He went even closer to the edge of the shelf and looked down and looked over. He came to where she stood at the winch. If she had let go the winch, she might have reached out and touched the sleeve of his coat, but good men would have died. It was hard, though, to hold on. Her whole life she had seen Carrick Cark but in glimpses. He was rounding a bend in the road, or jumping down from a stone wall in a field. He was running up a slope into woods. He seemed, when he stopped there beside her, as though suited for glimpses. He seemed made of wrong angles that deflected the eye. Sara Kasp turned and kept turning, yet her desire to let go of the winch exerted a force so strong she started to tremble. She wanted to trace Carrick Cark head to toe with her finger, to understand where his body divided from everything else. She didn’t hear Gravin Dammersen run up behind her. He caught the handle as her hands finally slipped. Down below, the block swung on its chains but kept rising as Gravin Dammersen turned with all of his strength. A general shout went up. Quarrymen ran about in the fog, and Jansen Witt took a false step and was gone. No one could see through the fog to the spot where he had landed but all could hear the sounds that he made, from low groans to high whistles, like wind across the cracked rim of a jar. Jorn Kasp led the search down the stoneface to ledge after ledge. Sara Kasp remained still. She watched Carrick Cark until he was once more a glimpse, a shadow threading the treeline. Gravin Dammersen came to the Kasp home that evening to eat and to drink and to ask Jorn Kasp for Sara’s hand, her hand which had slipped from the winch, which Jorn Kasp said was his to have and high time.
And so, the story begins at night in midsummer, the moon high and bright at the top of the valley. The town’s unmarried women had gathered beneath a tree on the green. Sara Kasp was among them. It was not in her nature to feel ease with any and she felt it least with those women. She had played with them as a very young child, before she went down to the quarry and they stayed above and learned to weave, or picked beets. They knew what none in the quarry would ever believe: that Sara Kasp was more fearful than the smallest and weakest, that she was afraid of close spaces and afraid of the dark. Once, playing otters, the girls crawled one at a time in and out of a hollow log by the river but Sara Kasp had frozen with her head in the dark mouth of the log and did not move until the other girls pulled her out. Another time, they stole kits from a large underground den, each girl squeezing through the long tunnel and wiggling back, pulling a kit by the scruff. Sara Kasp took instead from a low branch a bird too young to fledge and joined in the game, until Luma Muns fed the bird to her kit. Only because her true self was so fearful could Sara Kasp lock her up in a dark box inside and keep her quiet and still while she worked
. Sometimes she forgot this true self was there, and then the sight of Luma Muns would remind her. Over the years, she had hurried by the girls when she saw them outside the shop or filling buckets at the pump on the green, but for this, there was another and better reason. Sara Kasp had no time for a word. Her life moved between the stone ledge and the narrow bed in her room. Even a nod slowed her more than Jorn Kasp allowed.
But that night was different, warm as day, and the trees and high mountains, as though outlined in white upon black. In the center of town, the moon filled every window. No one could sleep. Everywhere they could, people lingered, drinking the shopkeeper’s beer, or whispering in their yards, in the streets. The morning’s work seemed far off, or did to all but Jorn Kasp, who walked through the town, peering over this fence and that, in search of his daughter and wife.
Sara Kasp’s wedding was in one week and one day. She stood among the unmarried women and Luma Muns said: The moon is just right. Come along.
The moon was so bright the girls cast shadows on the road, and Sara Kasp, coming last, studied each one. Her own was broad as a block. The long road rose up the valley with pastures behind the stone walls on both sides, and the sheep with the moon on their wool seemed to float above the dim grass.
Here, said Luma Muns. They had reached the part of the road where the pines came in close, and Luma Muns paused between two iron posts. Here, years ago on the road, Broc and Dell Cark had gone to their knees with the stones raining down and been killed by those stones and after dragged to the road side and put in the earth and these two iron posts driven down. Luma Muns went between them and all the girls followed her into the pines. It was darker in the pines, and the girls stumbled over roots and caught their skirts and loops of their hair on thorns and thin branches, and then the pines pulled back in a ring.
