The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  From this altitude, Darktree can see the zeppelin and Clarice’s own airship. When they reach the apex of the curve, he urges Hannah to fart. The friction of her bumclap ignites the fuse of the cauldron, which acts like the second stage of a rocket, blasting them still higher and faster on the harpy’s egg. They overtake the balloons and Darktree feels warmth on his cheeks from the stars. What shall they do when they gain England? Maybe he will visit his mother in Lancashire, or make another attempt on the virtue of Lucy Reeves. They soar over France and the Channel; chalky cliffs recline like minstrels below. Gradually they dip toward the sea. Will they crash before reaching Essex?

  Luckily, the harpy hatches at that moment and Darktree snares it in his sack as it flaps past. Anchoring his feet in the stirrups, his other hand holding down his tricorne, he hitches a lift with the monster right across the southern counties. Above Chester, however, they fly into some clear air turbulence and the harpy exhausts itself. Darktree’s bag falls limp and he knows the demon has given up the leathery ghost. Like plums, or cabbages from a blunderbuss, they plummet. To die in pink is a shame; he tries to scrape the tint off with the remaining half of the lens. Odd that a fusion of man and myth should end his career this way! He assumed a gallant end was reserved for him: a public gibbet with jokes and wine. He once had a friend who went that way. What was the wight’s name? There is no time to surmise, not in reality.

  Now the landscape beneath them has grown wider than a tablecloth. A plate of houses cools in the middle; the corners are not frayed. Whoever set this supper is expecting an important guest. He prays that it may be him. It is not—it is you, the reader—but his days are not quite over yet. When they strike the ground, Darktree is saved by Hannah, who lands on the discarded sack. Her rump operates a hidden control on the pyramid and the pair are rushed into the past.

  Shelley Jackson (1963– ) was born in the Philippines, grew up in California, and now lives in New York. She is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002), the novels Half Life (2006) and Riddance (2018), several children’s books for which she has been both writer and illustrator, and “Skin,” a story published word by word in tattoos on the skin of 2,095 volunteers. While studying for an MFA at Brown University, Jackson began creating the hypertext novel The Patchwork Girl, which was published as a CD-ROM in 1995 and remains one of the preeminent works of hypertext writing. “Fœtus” was published in the literary journal Conjunctions in 1998 and included in The Melancholy of Anatomy. In an interview with Gavin Grant about that collection, Jackson said, “I am fascinated above all with using [the body] as an object of fantastical transformations, because we care about the body and we know it intimately, and I think that makes it possible to invest bizarre scenarios with very strong, creepy, personal feelings.”

  FŒTUS

  Shelley Jackson

  THE FIRST FŒTUS was sighted in the abandoned hangar outside our town. Just floating there, almost weightless, it drifted down until its coiled spine rested on the concrete and then sprang up again with a flex of that powerful part. Then the slow descent began afresh. It was not hiding. It was not doing anything, except possibly looking, if it could see anything from between its slitted lids. What was it looking at? Possibly the motes of dust, as they drifted through the isolated rays of sun, and changed direction all at once like birds flying together. Or at the runic marks of rust and birdshit on the walls. Maybe it was trying to understand them, though that might be imposing too much human order on the fœtus, who is known, now, for being interested in things for (as they say) their own sake—incomprehensible motive to most of us!

  The fœtus rarely opens its eyes when anyone is watching, but we know they are deep blue-black, like a night sky when space shows through it, and its gaze is solemn, tender, yet so grand as to be almost murderous.

  “We weren’t afraid,” said little Brent Hadly, who with his cousin Gene Hadly made the discovery, and took the first photos—we’ve all seen them—with his little point-and-shoot. “We thought it was Mr. Fisher in one of his costumes.” (Mr. Fisher is one of those small-town loonies affectionately tolerated by the locals. He did indeed don a fœtus costume, later on, and paraded down to the Handimart parking lot—where he gulled some big-city newsmen, to their chagrin.) “Then my daddy came and said, Cut the fooling, Fisher!” But even when the Fisher hypothesis had been disproved, no one felt anything but gentle curiosity about the visitor. Indeed, they scarcely noticed it had drifted near the small crowd while they debated, and trailed after them when they left.

  The fœtus is preternaturally strong. It grabs its aides and knocks their bald heads together. It carries pregnant women across busy streets. It helps with the groceries. These are the little ways it enters the daily life of its parishioners: it turns over the soil in an old woman’s garden. It lifts waitresses on tables to show off their legs. The fœtus has a formal appreciation for old-fashioned chivalry, and expects to be thanked for such gestures.

  The fœtus roved about the town until it found a resting-place to its liking in the playground of the municipal park, among dogs and babies. The mothers and the professional loiterers appointed themselves guards and watched it sternly, heading off the youngsters who veered too near it, but they softened to it over time, began to bring sandwiches and lemonade along and make casual speculations about the fœtus’s life-span, hopes and origins. When the crowds of tourists pressed too close, they became the fœtus’s protectors, and formed a human chain to keep them out.

  Nobody’s enemy and nobody’s friend, it hides its heart in a locked box, a secret stash, maybe a hollow tree in the woods under a bee’s nest, maybe a tower room on a glass mountain on a wolf-run isle in a sea ringed by volcanoes and desert wastes. The fœtus always keeps its balance.

  Someone observed that the land seemed disarranged. Bent treetops, flattened grass, weeds dragged out of their seats, clods dislodged. Tedious speculations about crop circles and barrows and Andean landing strips made the rounds. Of course, we knew the fœtus’s little feet dragged when it walked. We had seen the marks in the sandbox at the park. We should have noticed the resemblance, but we resisted the idea that the fœtus was a municipal landmark. It had put our town on the map and filled it with visitors, so that our children had a chance to envy the latest haircuts, and our adults the latest cars and sexual arrangements.

  Plus, the marks were disturbing. They were careless. They passed over (sometimes through) fences, even when the gate swung close at hand. Mrs. Sender’s oleanders were uprooted and dragged for miles. Even after we knew the fœtus caused the marks, a mystery clung to them. For everything the fœtus did, though, there was someone to praise it. Followers did their following on the paths it left. They said the paths proposed an aesthetic that could not at once be grasped. Some began dragging a foot behind them as they walked, scorning markless movement as noncommittal, therefore cowardly. But why was the fœtus so restless? Was it seeking something? We had all seen it peering through our curtains in the evening, and found the marks in our flower beds in the morning. Was it exercising, or aimlessly wandering? Or was it writing a kind of message on the earth? Was it driven from rest by some torment, a plague personal to it, or a plaguey thought it couldn’t shake: was the fœtus guilty?

  Since the fœtus arrived, none of us has loved without regret, fucked without apprehension, yearned without doubt. We break out in a rash when a loved one comes near because we know the fœtus is there too, waiting for us to prove to it everything it already knows.

  Was the fœtus a fœtus? Indeed it resembled one. But if it was, the question had to be raised: when the fœtus grew up, as it must, what would it become? Perhaps we all breathed a sigh of relief when scientists concluded that the fœtus, like the famous axolotl, was a creature permanently immature. Hence its enormous susceptibility, its patience and its eagerness to please. Like the unicorn, it adored virgins, but it had a raging fascination with sexual doings, a
fascination that drove April Tip and the rest of her gang, the bad girls and boys of our town, to cruel displays under the streetlights around the park.

  At first, though not for long, we believed our fœtus was unique. Of course we speculated about the home it must have had somewhere else, about others. But here on earth it seemed a prodigy, the prodigy. Soon enough, however, more of them began to appear. Some dropped out of the sky, people said, slowly and beautifully, their light heads buoying them up. Commentators waxed eloquent and bade us imagine, on the blue, a dot that grew to a pink dot that grew to a kewpie doll that became the creature we know now. Many were found, like the first one, swaying gently in some warm and secret enclosure—warehouses, high school gyms, YMCA dressing rooms. Publicity seekers claimed to have come across fœtuses in infancy: tiny, playful and virtually blind, like kittens, they bumbled around, falling on their oversized heads, and eagerly sucked on a baby finger, or indeed anything of like size and shape. One was reportedly discovered in a bird’s nest, opening its tiny translucent lips among the beaks. But fœtuses this small have never been held in captivity, nor even captured on film. Whether that is because (their unstable condition exacerbated by lack of experience) the kittens decay from or transcend their fœtal condition, imprinting air, a patch of dirt, a leaf blowing past its nest, or because they never existed in the first place, hardly matters, for the situation remains that none are found, except in stories that are already far from firsthand by the time they reach a credible authority. But we may pause for a minute to wonder whether, if such kittens do exist, they are the offspring of our original fœtus, who for all we know may be capable of fertilizing itself, like some plants, or if they grow from spores that have drifted here from some impersonally maternal comet, or—most mysterious thought of all—whether they spring up in our world self-generated, as sometimes new diseases appear to do, teaching us new pains, just because the world has left a place open for them.

  Behind each other’s eyes, it is the fœtus we love, floating in the pupil like a speck, like a spy. It’s looking over your shoulder, making cold drinks even colder, and it doesn’t care what promises you’ve made. We think we want affection, sympathy, fellow-feeling, but it is the cold and absolute we love, and when we misplace that in one another we struggle for breath. Through the pupil’s little peephole, we look for it: the shapeless, the inhuman.

  Of course with such a company of admirers, sycophants, interpreters, opportunists, advisers, prophets and the like behind it, it wasn’t long before the fœtus was performing many of the offices once seen to by our local pastor: visiting the sick, hosting charitable functions, giving succor to troubled souls. One day Pastor Green simply left town, and no one was very sorry. It was the graceful thing to do, people agreed, and saw to it that the fœtus stood behind the pulpit the next Sunday. At first it held an honorary post; we couldn’t settle on a suitable title, but we did present it with a robe and a stiff white collar, which it seemed to admire. Higher-ups in church office were rumored to be uneasy about this unorthodox appointment, but public feeling was behind it. And there was no question that the fœtus would increase the church’s subscription a thousandfold; no one had ever seen such a benefit potluck as the first one hosted by the fœtus. It wielded the ice cream scoop with tireless arm and paid personal attention to every dessert plate.

  Of course the fœtus preferred to hold services in the sandbox, and the citizens appreciated this gesture as a call to simplicity and a sign of solidarity with regular folk. How the fœtus managed to lead us may be hard to understand. At first, its role was to inspire and chide. But it soon felt its way into the post, and began performing those gestures that mean so much to our town: choosing the new paint color for the courthouse (the fœtus preferred mauve), pouring the first bucket of cement for the new tennis courts. (We could afford it, for money was rolling in: tourists, visiting scholars and zealots continued to come, prepared to shop, and after a short bewilderment we provided all the kiosks, booths and lemonade stands they required.) Our fœtus made the covers of the major newsmagazines, and meanwhile, the copycat fœtuses were turning up everywhere, and the rich were installing them in their homes.

  The fœtus is made of something like our flesh, but not the same, it is a sort of überflesh, rife with potentialities (for the fœtus is, of course, incomplete—always, unfinished—perpetually) it is malleable beyond our understanding, hence unutterably tender, yet also resilient. A touch will bruise the fœtus, the nap of flannel leaves a print on its skin. The fœtus learns from what it neighbors, and may become what it too closely neighbors. Then your fœtus may cease to be; you may find yourself short one member of the household, yet in possession of a superfluous chair, a second stove, a matching dresser. The fœtus sees merit in everything; this is why it brings joy to houses, with its innocence, and is loved by children, but this quality is also its defect. A fœtus will adore a book of matches, and seek to become it; if you do not arrive in time your expensive companion will proudly shape itself into the cheapest disposable. It is one thing to duplicate the crown jewels, quite another to become the owner of two identically stained copies of yesterday’s paper, two half-full boxes of Kleenex, two phone bills.

  We all know the fœtus’s helpfulness and amiability, which became more and more apparent as it grew accustomed to our ways, and admire the dignity of the fœtus, which never fails it even when it is performing the most ignominious of tasks. No one was surprised when it came to be known as, variously, “Servus Servorum,” “Husband of the Church,” “Key of the Whole Universe,” “Viceregent of the Most High” and, most colloquially, “Vice-God”; other nations may find it odd that our religious leader is of the same species that the well-off trendy purchase for their homes, but those who know better see no contradiction: the fœtus is born to serve.

  The fœtus floats outside your window while you are having sex. It wants to know how many beads of sweat collect between your breasts and at what point, exactly, they begin their journey south, it wants to know if your eyes open wide or close at orgasm, if at that time your partner is holding your hand with his hand or your gaze with her gaze. It wants to know if your sheets are flannel or satin, if you lie on wool blankets or down comforters. And when fluids issue from the struggling bodies, with what do you wipe them up: towels? paper products? A T-shirt pulled out of the laundry? It wants to know if the bedside alarm is set before or after the lovemaking, it wants to stay informed, your love is its business.

  The fœtus is here to serve us. If we capture it, it will do our bidding; we can bind its great head with leather straps, cinch its little hips tight. Then the fœtus willingly pulls a plow, trots lovers through a park, serves salad at a cookout. It does not scorn menial tasks for to it all endeavors are equally strange, equally marvelous.

  Only when it is time to make love must you bind the fœtus tight, lock it in its traces, close all the doors and windows. For at that moment the fœtus will rise in its bonds, larger and more majestic, and its great eyes will open and inside them you could see all of space rushing away from us—as it is! it is! The fœtus is sublime at that moment: set guards, and they will respectfully retreat, dogs, and they will lie down with their heads between their paws, blinking. And even if the fœtus is in tight restraint, you will feel it risen in your pleasure bed, the air will turn blue and burn like peppermint on your wet skin, and the shadows under the bed and the corners of the room will take on the black vastness and the finality of space. You will continue loving because that is our human agenda, what is set for us to do, though we know the fœtus whom we also love is suffering in its straps. Indeed, we make the fœtus suffer again and again, though we are full of regret and pity, and these feelings swell in our chests and propel us together with ever greater force, so we seem to hear the fœtus’s giant cry, deafening, every time we slam together, and cruelly love, and in pain.

  Nalo Hopkinson (1960– ) was born in Jamaica and lived as a child in Jamaica, Tri
nidad, Guyana, and the United States before her family moved to Canada, where she lived until 2011, when she moved to California to teach at the University of California, Riverside. Her novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and Hopkinson won the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her other novels include Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon’s Arms (2007), The Chaos (2012), and Sister Mine (2013), which won the Andre Norton Award. “Tan-Tan and Dry Bone” (1999) was first published in Kelly Link and Gavin Grant’s zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and reprinted in Hopkinson’s first short story collection, The Salt Roads, which won the World Fantasy Award. Like much of her fiction, the story draws on folktales, myths, and legends of the Caribbean, but one of the remarkable achievements of Hopkinson’s fiction is its ability to complicate genre traditions—while the story on its own seems clearly to fit within the realm of a reimagined folktale and a work of fantasy, Tan-Tan is the protagonist of Midnight Robber, and the story appears in those pages as well, but the new context changes our understanding of its genre, moving toward science fiction. To the question of whether she is a Caribbean writer, Canadian writer, woman writer, queer writer, etc., Hopkinson has said, “All my identities are very important to me. I don’t need to claim just one,” and the same could be said for her fiction.