The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  But the children didn’t pay them no mind. The grasswoman’s baskets were too full of songs to forget to play. One little girl, more hardheaded than most, disobeyed the edict and devoted herself to the enigmatic grasswoman. Her name was Mema, a big-eyed child with a head like a drum. She would wake early, plant her eyes on the cool windowpane, waiting for the grasswoman to walk by. When the woman would come into view, Mema would rush down the stairs, skip hop jump. Bare feet running, she’d fly down the road and disappear among the swarm of grasshoppers spilling from the great leaf baskets. The Sun would sink, a red jack-ball sky, and still no word from Mema. Not a hide nor a hair they’d see, and at Mema’s home, the folk would start pulling out their worries and polishing them up with spite.

  Running barefoot, wild as that other.

  Her daddy picked his switch and held it in his hand. Only her mama’s soft words brought relief to the little girl’s return. Hours later in the fullness of night, her daddy insisted on a reason, even if it was just the chalk line of truth:

  Where she stay? Did you go to her house? Do she even have a house?

  Her dwelling was an okro tree. She laid her head in the empty hollow of its great stone trunk. Mema told them the tree was sacred, that God had planted its roots upside down so they touched sky.

  Daddy turned to his wife, pointing the blame finger at her. See, the white’s been filling her head. That tree ain’t got no roots. Whole world made of stone, thick as your head. Couldn’t grow a tree to save your life.

  The girl spoke up, hoppers hidden all in her hair. It’s true, Mama, it’s true. The tree got a heart and sometime it get real sad. The old woman say the okro tree can kill itself, say it can do it by fire. Even if nobody strike a match.

  Mama just shook her head. Daddy roll his eyes. Stone tree dead by fire?

  Child say, It’s true.

  What foolishness, the mama say, and she draw her daughter close to her, tucking her big head under her chin, far and away from her daddy’s reach. Then the man left, taking his anger with him, and he handed it over to the other settlers. At the lodge they all agreed: the grasswoman’s visits had to end. They couldn’t kill her—to do so would offend the land and the children and the women, so whatever was done, they agreed to give the deed some thought.

  Next day, the grasshopper seller returned. The drumbeats-of-joy wings and legs swept through the air. Even the settlers stopped to listen. Spite was in their mouths, but the rhythm took hold of their feet. After all, that white was bringing with her such beauty none had ever seen. None could resist her grasshoppers’ winged anthem, nor their blue-greened glory, shining and iridescent as God’s first land. The sight was like nothing else in this new and natural world. They’d left their stories in that other place, and now the grasshopper peddler was selling them back.

  The folk began to wonder: where in the name of all magic did she get such miraculous creatures? Couldn’t have been from this land where the soil was pink and ruddy and no grass grew anywhere save for under glass-topped houses carefully tended by the science ones. They had packed up all their knowledge and carried it with them in small black stones that were not opened until they’d settled on this other shore with its two bright stars folk just looked at and called Sun ’cause some habits just hard to break.

  And where indeed? Whoever heard tale of grasshoppers where they ain’t no grass? Where, if they had already brought the most distant of their new land to heel?

  The grasshopper peddler only answered with a chuckle, her two cheeks puffed out like she ’bout to whistle. But she don’t speak, just smiling so, skin all red and blistered, folk wonder how she could stand one Sun, let alone two. They began to weigh their own suspicions, take them apart and spread them in their hand: could it be that white gal had a right to enter a world that was closed to them? And how she remember, old as she is, if they forget? But then they set about cutting her down: the woman lived in trees, nothing but grasshoppers as company, got to be crazy, laying up there with all them bugs. And where they come from anyway?

  Whether it was ’cause folk couldn’t stand her or folk was puzzled and secretly admired her strangeful ways, the grasswoman became the topic of talk scattered all over the town. Her presence began to fill the length of conversations, unexpected empty moments, great and small. The more people bought from her, dipping their hands in the great leaf baskets, the more their homes became filled with the sweet songs of wings, songs that made them think of summers and tall grass up to your knees, and bushes that reach out to smack your thighs when you walk by, and trees that lean over to brush the top of your hand, soft like a granddaddy’s touch—land that whispered secrets and filled the air with the seeds of green growing things.

  Such music fell strangely on the settlers’ ears that bent only to hear the quickstep march of progress. In a land of pink soil as hard as earth diamonds, it was clear that they held little in common with their new home. And could it be that the grasswoman’s hoppers were nibbling at the settlers’ sense of self, turning them into aliens in this far land they’d claimed as their own? Or was it that white gal at fault, that nonworking hussy who insisted on being, insisting on breathing when most of her seed was extinct, existing completely outside their control, a wild weed of a thing, and unaware of the duties of her race? The traitors who traded her singing grasshoppers for bits of crust and crumbs of food hidden in pockets, handed out with a sidelong glance, should have known that after all that had been given, as far as they had traveled, leaving the dying ground of one world, to let the dead bury their dead, there was no room for the old woman’s bare-toed feet on their stone streets.

  The head folk were annoyed at such disobedience, concerned at the blatant disrespect for order and decorum, blaming it on the times and folks giving in to the children’s soft ways, children too young to remember the hardness of skin, how it could be used like a thick-walled prison to deny the blood within. Too young to remember how the Sun looked like wet stars in morning dew, and how it walked on wide feet and stood on the sky’s shoulders, spreading its light all over that other place. How it warmed them and baked them like fresh bread, until their brown skins shone with the heart of it.

  But the grasswoman was overstepping her bounds, repeating that same dance, treading on sacred ground that she did not belong to. Not enough that her folk had stolen the other lands and sucked them dry with their dreaming, not enough that they had taken the names and knowledge and twisted them so that nobody could recall their meaning, bad enough that every tale had to be retold by them to be heard true, that no sight was seen unless their eyes had seen it, no new ground covered unless they were there to stake it, no old herb could heal without them finding new ways to poison it. Now she had stolen their stories, the song-bits of self, and had trained grasshoppers, like side-show freaks, to drum back all the memories they had tried to forget.

  Even the children, thanks to her gifting, were beginning to forget themselves. They hummed strange tunes that they could not have remembered, told new lies that sounded like cradle tales of old, stories ’bout spiders they called uncle in a language nobody knowed, and hopped around like brown crickets, mimicking dances long out of step. They were becoming more like children of the dust than of the pink stone of their birth, with its twin Sun and an anvil for sky.

  And a small loss it was. They had traded the soft part of themselves, their stories and songs, the fingerprints of a culture, for that deemed useful. Out went the artifacts that had once defined a people. Only once did they yearn for the past, when creatures could be swept away depending on their appearance. The grasswoman had even took hold of their dreams. The parents were determined to stop this useless dreaming. They knew if they were to live again, to plant new seed, they had to abandon all thoughts of their past existence. What they wanted were new habits, new languages, new stories to mine in this strange borderland in the backbone of sky. So the command was clear: the stone streets were
off-limits. You couldn’t go out anymore. Curtains were drawn, and the houses shut their great eyelids.

  * * *

  —

  Order seemed to rule again, but it didn’t last long. That’s when things began to happen. Doors covered with strange carvings and cupboards filled with stones. Furniture was arranged in circles and drawers mismatched and swapped round.

  At the Kings’ house:

  Who been in this cupboard?

  No one, none had. Grandmama King got mad; everybody in the house knew that her teeth were kept there. Now the little glass dish was full of stones, and from every shelf the stones grinned back at her like pink gums.

  At the Greenes’ house:

  Who scattered grasshopper wings ’cross my desk?

  No one, nobody, not anyone, none was the reply. Daddy Greene choked back disgust. Grasshoppers all in my cup, he muttered, Damn crickets.

  At the head folks’ offices:

  Who let them bugs in?

  Nobody had. The bugs had filled the bottoms of file drawers and hid in official-looking papers, fresh piles of pellets and grasshopper dung on settler documents stamped with official seals, the droppings among the deeds for land with their names scrawled across them like spiderwebs.

  On the tail of all this, a general uproar gripped the settlement. The settlers held a straighten-it-out meeting, hoping to make a decision. They’d held off on the grasswoman’s fate for too long, and now it was time to come to the end of it. They assembled at the home of Mema’s daddy. The girl slipped out of her bed and stood at the door, listening to the groans and threats. She didn’t even wait for their answer. She rushed off down the stone streets and slipped through a crack in the glass, in the direction of the grasswoman’s stone tree. There, she found the old woman settling herself by the okro’s belly, a dark stone cavern that swallowed the light. Her great leaf basket rested in her lap. Another one at her side toppled over, empty.

  They gon’ get you, the child say.

  Mema was gasping for breath. The air was much thinner outside the settlement’s glass dome. But the grasswoman didn’t act put out. She seemed to know and had gathered her two great baskets and released the blue-green winged things. But Mema could not see where they had gone, and she wondered how they would survive without the grasswoman tending them.

  The little girl tried harder. She scratched her drumskull and tilted her head, staring into the old woman’s face with a question. Never before had the grasswoman meant so much.

  Run away, the child cried. You still got time.

  But the grasshopper peddler just set herself at ease, didn’t look like she could be bothered. Her hair and skin looked gray and hard, like the stringy meat on a bone. She pushed the baskets aside, pressed her palms into the ground, and rose with some effort. She stood, sucking a stone, patting her dirt skirt, and smoothing the faded rags with gentle strokes. Her hair hung ’bout her eyes in a matted tangle. She seemed to be looking at the horizon. Soon the Sun would set and only a few night stars would remain peering through a veil of clouds.

  Go on, child, the grasswoman said. Fire coming soon.

  Mema hung back afraid. She glanced at the grasswoman, at her tattered clothes that smelled like the earth Mema had never known, at her knotted hair that looked like it could eat any comb, and her sad eyes that looked like that old word, sea. If only the grasswoman could be like that, still but moving, far and away from here.

  Why don’t you run? They gon’ hurt you if they catch you, Mema said.

  The old woman stood outside the hollow of the tree, motionless, as if time had carried her off. She stared at the child and held out her withered hand. Mema reached for it, slid her fingers into the grasswoman’s cool, dry palm.

  Mema, there is more to stone than what we see. Sometime stone carry water, and sometime it carry blood. Bloodfire. Remember the story I told you? Mema nodded. The grasswoman squeezed her hand and placed it on the trunk of the stone tree. In this place you must know just how and when to tap it. Only the pure will know.

  The girl bowed her head, blinked back tears. The tree felt cold to her touch, a tall silent stone, the color of night.

  Now you must go, the grasswoman said. She released Mema’s hand and smiled. A tiny grasshopper with bold black and red stripes appeared in the space of her cool touch. Its tiny antennas tapped into her palm as if to taste it. Mema held the hopper in her cupped palm and watched the old woman, standing in her soiled clothing among the black branches of the tree. To the child, the grasswoman’s face seemed to waver, like a trick in the fading light. Her skin was the wax of berries, her tangled hair as innocent as vine leaves.

  Mema pressed her toes against the stone ground, reluctant to go. She looked up at the huge tree that was not a tree, as if asking it for protection, its trunk more mountain than wood, its roots stabbing at the sky, the base rising from what might have been rich soil long ago.

  Can you hear the heart? asked the old woman.

  The child recalled the grasswoman’s tale. The heartstone was where the tree’s spirit slept, in the polished stone the color of blood, the strength of fire. Whoever harmed the okro tree would bear its mark for the rest of their life. Mema stood there, her face screwed up, shoulders slumped, as if she already carried the okro’s stone burden. With gentle wings, the grasshopper pulsed in her cupped hands.

  * * *

  —

  The settlers began their noisy descent. They surrounded the stone clearing, outside their city of glass. The little girl fled, her heart in her drum, hid, and watched from the safety of a fledgling stone tree. She saw the grasswoman rise and greet the folk with open palms, an ancient sign of peace. The curses started quick, then the shouts and the kicks, then finally, a stone shower. Tiny bits of rock, pieces scraped up in anger from the sky’s stone floor were flung up, a sudden hailstorm. The old woman didn’t even appear to be startled, and her straight back, once curved with age and humility, showed no fear. The stones came, and the blood flowed, tiny drops of it warming the ground, staining the black stone. They crushed her baskets with their heels and bound her wrists, pushed her up the long dark road. A group of settlers followed close behind, muttering, leaving the child alone in the night. The girl hesitated, her drumskull tilted back with thought, her neck full of tears. After a long silence, she stepped forward, facing the empty stone tree. Then it happened: the heartstone of the okro crumbled, black shards of stone shattered like stardust. She stepped gingerly among the colored shards. The dark crystals turned to red powder under her feet, stone blood strewn all over the ground. With a cup-winged rhythm, the hopper pulsed angrily in her shaking hand.

  Suddenly, the child made up her mind. She dashed off through the stone clearing the children now called wood, crushing blood-red shards beneath her feet. The hopper safely tucked in her clasped hand, she noiselessly scurried behind the restless, shuffling mob of stonethrowers. Her ears picked up the thread of their whispers. They were taking the grasswoman to a jail that had not been built. The well, someone had cried, a likely prison as any. Mema shuddered to think of her friend all alone down there. Would she be afraid in the cold abandoned hole that held no water? Would she be hungry? And then it struck her: she had never seen the grasswoman eat. Like the hoppers, she sucked on stone, holding it in her mouth as if it were a bit of sweet hard candy. What did she do with the food they had given her, the table scraps and treats stolen and bartered for stories woven from a dead-dying world?

  The grasshopper thumped against the hollow of her palm as if to answer. Mema stroked the tiny wings to calm its anxious drumbeat. Maybe the hoppers ate the crumbs, the child thought as she crouched in the blackness beside the old woman’s walled prison. The well had gone dry in the days of the first settlers, and now that massive pumping stations had been built, the folk no longer needed stone holes to tap the world’s subterranean caverns. Hidden in darkness, the grasshopper tr
embling in her palm, Mema began to suffocate with fear. The grasswoman had taught her how to sing without words, without air or drum. Was there any use of dancing anymore, if the grasswoman could not share the music? If the world around her had been stripped of its beauty, its story magic? And in the sky was silence, just as in the stone tree, no heartstone beat its own ancient rhythm anymore.

  The grasswoman’s voice reached her from within the well, drifting over its chipped black stone covered with dust. Now Mema could see the soft edges of her friend’s shape, her body pressed in a corner of darkness. If she peered closely, letting her eyes adjust to the shadow and the light, she could just barely make out the contours of the old woman’s forehead, the brightness of her eyes as they blinked in the night. Voices made night, is what she heard, felt more than saw—the motion of the old woman’s great eyelids blinking as she called to her. The grasswoman’s voice sounded like a tongue coated in blood, pain rooted in courage, the resignation of old age. Mema drew back, afraid. What if someone saw her there, perched on the side of the well, whispering to the unhappy prisoner in the belly of night? Footsteps called out, as if in answer.

  Quickly, the child jumped off the wall and fell, bruising a knee as she crawl-walked over to hide behind a row of trash cans. One lone guard came swinging his arms and shaking his head. He leaned an elbow on the lip and craned his neck to peer into the well.

  May I? the grasswoman asked, and she put her stone harp to her lips and tried to blow. But the notes sounded strained, choked out of her bruised throat and sore lips, where the settlers had smacked and cuffed her. The guard snorted, became suspicious. Throw it up, he ordered, and the harp was hurled up and over the well’s mouth with the last of the old woman’s strength. The guard tried to catch it, but it crashed on the ground. The dissonant sound made Mema gasp and cup her ears. There’ll be no more music from you, ’til you tell us where you come from, the guard said, but in his heart, he didn’t really want to know. Truth was, none of them did. They feared her, the grasswoman who came like a flower, some wretched wild weed they’d thought they’d stamped out in that other desert and fled like a shadow, disappearing into their most secret thoughts. The well was silent. The guard glanced at the little broken mouth harp scattered on the street. They’d probably want him to get it, as evidence, something else they could cast against the old woman, but he wasn’t going to touch it. No telling where the harp had been, and he certainly didn’t want nothing to do with nothing that had been sitting up in her mouth. So he turned on his heel and headed for the dim lights down the street, leaving the grasswoman quiet behind him.