The sounds of the orchestra were extinguished. Then we arrived at the factory where, formerly, old Mimi Yourakane and her assistants made anthills with human faces.
The building was lit up. There were air currents rushing through the large door and the factory windows. At the back of the space, we saw Big Katz, from behind, looking like a grayish disk and floating a meter above the ground, near Alfons Tchop. The latter, immobile and massive, completely ovoid as is always the case with kwak eggs, gave him no advice.
Everywhere above, fish heads were protruding from the walls. They chatted among themselves and released numerous cubic bubbles. The cubes rose toward the ceiling, they grouped together and were completing the already well-developed form of a bluish and gigantic sheriff.
“The Great Mimille!” exclaimed Pamelia Obieglu.
“Emilio Popielko!” rumbled Iponiama Oshawnee.
The two arctic she-wolves bared their teeth. This fabrication of a giant sheriff absolutely did not please them. Me neither. We approached, all three of us, the place where the police were in the process of being formed. The Great Mimille already had a body and a uniform, he wasn’t missing much before he could detach himself from the ceiling and begin to lay sheriffs. He lacked only a head and two feet, and a part of the stomach. As for the rest, everything was already in place.
“Let’s not lose time,” said Iponiama Oshawnee.
We went to look outside for clumps of snow to make the infusion of Algonquin myrica, aquatic myrica, sweet myrica, dream pepper, and polar currants. There were empty buckets in a closet. We didn’t look to see if they were clean or not, if they had served in the past to make anthills or human faces, and if there were, stuck to the bottom, the remnants of ants or faces. We melted the snow by blowing on it, and we plunged in the herbs, mixing the mixture as best we could. There was a little camp stove in the workshop. I scraped away the mushrooms that had bred on top of it and placed pans full of herbs on the burners. The flame was miniscule, it was nothing more than a crumb of fire, but, all the same, it produced an effect. The myrica leaves began to smoke, after a moment. They gave off their aroma.
In the factory, an herbal tea smell began to spread. Soon, the smell in the factory was the same as that which pervaded Mimi Okanagane’s shop.
“What are you doing?” asked a voice.
I turned around. My friend the wooly crab approached us. He floated and he drifted slowly. Nobody could have confused him with the moon, but it’s true that he wasn’t touching the ground and that he emitted a glow. In a sense, he had already achieved a result.
“You’re making moon progress,” I said.
Big Katz is a friend. I wanted to please him.
“Bah,” said Big Katz. “You think so?”
The arctic she-wolves started howling a little, they wanted to please him too. They wanted him to imagine himself sliding along midair, above snow-covered landscapes, with magnificent wolves and magnificent she-wolves howling and singing toward him, as they have a tendency to do in winter, when the full moon brushes against the tops of the trees.
Big Katz puffed himself up. He was proud. He started to blush contentedly, which ruined his lunar appearance. He looked less and less like a celestial object, and more and more like a crustacean covered in curly wool, strangely suspended above the ground.
“We have to stop the Great Mimille,” I said.
“I’m in the middle of some exercises,” said Big Katz. “I can’t take a break. If I were to take a break, my professor would punish me.”
The arctic she-wolves went to Alfons Tchop’s side. They sniffed him.
“He isn’t yet close to hatching, this one,” said Pamelia Obieglu.
“I don’t have the impression that he’s as good as all that, this professor,” observed Iponiama Oshawnee. “He looks like he’s in a bad moon—er, mood.”
“Don’t say bad things about my professor,” protested Big Katz.
Above us, the Great Mimille quivered a little, like a headless sheriff who wants to complain about something. The gelatinous cubes forming him had already changed color.
The Great Mimille was distinctly less blue than a little earlier.
“It’s working,” I said.
“What’s working?” asked Pamelia Obieglu.
“The red flags, the rags, the herbal tea,” I said.
I scattered the rags and the old clothes throughout the factory, and we started to come and go with our flags, the arctic she-wolves and I. The red fabric flapped behind us in the wind. The smells of currants and herbs whirled along the walls. Carried by the blasts of air that we were producing as we moved around, Big Katz drifted from side to side.
The fish heads had stopped their chatting. They sniffed the smells that snaked under their snouts. I think that they were worried and that, if they hadn’t had such lifeless eyes, they would have cast angry looks at us. The bubbles they had halfway chewed between their flabby lips no longer managed to grow. They stayed there, at the corners of their mouths, not very blue, neither round nor cubical, and, when they detached, they no longer went toward the ceiling. They went down to pop against the ground.
“Look out!” suddenly warned a tarpon’s head, very big and very pointed. “Warning! They are attacking our Great Mimille!”
It had yellow eyes with enormous, glazed pupils. Its snout was deformed by rage.
“Emilio!” cried a cod. “Hurry up and lay! Make the police!”
“Popielko!” said another head. “Send your sheriffs!”
“They’re trying to dissolve you!” bawled a salmon head. “Lay, Popielko! Lay urgently!”
Their voices reverberated in the workshops of the abandoned factory. This disturbed Big Katz.
“Why are they making that ruckus?” asked the wooly crab.
I explained the whole story to him. Around us, the confusion was great. The fish heads screamed. The arctic she-wolves, magnificent, silvery, white, continued to scamper along the walls. They brandished their red flags and let out long howls. In the containers that we had placed throughout, the arctic currants infused. The herbs of the Algonquins released invisible fumes. The smell of aquatic pepper, very intense, whirled in curls of smoke throughout the factory. On the ceiling, the Great Mimille shuddered. It began to lose some cubes. It lost more and more of them. The cubes crumbled on the rags, exploding with a sound like a plastic sandal on the tiled floor, then volatilized. From time to time, the Great Mimille tried to make the police from its body already clothed in a uniform, but incomplete, since it lacked a head, feet, and part of the stomach.
“I, too, don’t want the fish to transform the world into an aquarium,” said Big Katz.
As he was concentrating much less on his moon exercises, he abruptly stopped floating. He touched the ground with the end of one leg and he tried to maintain his balance for several seconds, but, inexorably, he veered backward, and, finally, fell down. He stayed there, a little sleepy, lying on his back, as if he were thinking. I believed that he had hurt himself, or that he had felt humiliated by his ungainly fall, and that he was going to remain motionless for a moment.
But no.
Pamelia Obieglu and Iponiama Oshawnee had just passed near him, letting out she-wolf howls. Behind them flapped the large rectangles of red cloth. Everywhere, the fish heads bawled out incomprehensible exclamations. With this confused rumble, these movements, these flags, there was the mood of a protest inside the factory. Now that was one of Big Katz’s specialties, protests. He revived, he agitated his legs to put himself back onto his stomach and, a few seconds later, he was standing in front of me.
“No to the reestablishment of the police!” he cried. “Immediate arrest of the Great Mimille!”
He borrowed my red flag and he waved it. The fabric occupied the space splendidly, it hummed like a sail in the midst of the air currents. I don’t know how y
ou would react, but me, when a wooly crab takes a flag in his pincer and prepares to stride up and down an anthill factory, I have the impression of having entered a story whose heroes are formidable. I was suddenly very proud of being Big Katz’s friend.
“Dissolution of Emilio Popielko!” cried Big Katz.
The she-wolves howled, the fish heads clamored for sheriffs, the aroma of the herbal teas swelled minute by minute. Since I no longer had a flag, I had grabbed some rags. Running beside the she-wolves, I made them undulate behind me. Big Katz tossed out slogans.
“No more, no more, no more bubbles for the police!” he cried.
Progressively, above us, the Great Mimille was disintegrating. It had lost its uniform, then a leg. The bubbles that formed it were shriveling up, they became round and gray. They dripped onto the ground hissing, and, immediately, they evaporated without leaving a trace.
“No, no, no—to the Great Mimille!” cried Big Katz.
There were a few hours of brouhaha, then the wall fish put an end to their protestations. Minds saturated with the emanations from the herbal tea of the Algonquins, their mood had changed. You heard them sniffing, and, now, they were no longer obsessed with the idea of the Great Mimille. They recounted horrible dreams to each other, but they no longer had the intention of imposing their dreams on the non-fish world. They were now mainly interested in the herbal teas that we had prepared in the buckets and basins. They inhaled them. Seeing nothing outside of the walls no longer distressed them.
“Is it a dream, or what?” asked a shark’s head.
“What are you talking about?” asked a trout’s head.
“This story of the Great Mimille.”
“What Great Mimille?” interrupted a barracuda’s head.
“A sheriff that we were constructing out of our bubbles,” said the shark’s head.
“That has all the appearance of a dream for me,” affirmed an iceflow sculpin’s head.
“In any case, if it isn’t a dream, it resembles one,” intervened a monkfish’s head.
All night, we had waved our cloths and kept the smells and the fumes of the herbal teas in the factory going.
The fish heads took to talking peacefully. They seemed now to be of an overall genial nature, for fish heads. They no longer had at all the aggressiveness of the previous nights, when they had been shouting out spitefully at those who had crossed their blind gaze. They were soothed. Even the monkfish had vocal inflections that were almost friendly. I don’t know what had been most effective, the emanations of the rags, the wind from the red flags, the scent of the currants, or the vapors of the Algonquin myrica, or the combination of all these elements at the same time. But already the fish were dismissing their police projects like one dismisses an unrealizable dream. They were no longer speaking of Emilio Popielko and of the eggs that he had to lay throughout town. I even think that if they had had shoulders and if someone had spoken of putting sheriffs outside the walls, they would have shrugged them, these shoulders.
Above our heads, the Great Mimille had diminished, it had retracted itself, then the last cubes had melted. The Great Mimille no longer existed.
“All danger is averted,” I said.
It was morning.
Everyone was tired.
Big Katz had gone back beside Alfons Tchop and he was speaking to his professor. The latter sulked inside his shell. Big Katz apologized for having interrupted his moon exercises, but his professor wasn’t listening to his excuses.
The arctic she-wolves had sat down to rest on the doorstep of the factory. The light of day bathed them, they were very white, with a snowy, absolute beauty. They got to their feet, made a little sign to me, trotted off in the direction of the estuary, and disappeared.
I looked one last time at the fish heads. The majority had already left for home, inside the walls. The others dozed while sniffing the smells of the herbal tea.
I placed a red flag on my shoulder and I went home.
Karin Tidbeck (1977– ) is a Swedish writer, translator, and teacher who debuted in 2010 with the Swedish short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? Her first English-language book, the 2012 collection Jagannath, won the Crawford Award in 2013 and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award as well as honor-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her first novel, Amatka, was published in Sweden in 2012 and in English translation in 2017. “Aunts” first appeared in Swedish in 2007 and in English in the ebook anthology ODD? from Cheeky Frawg Books in 2011. In a 2012 interview with Strange Horizons, she said the story “ ‘Aunts’ is about just that: a trio of sacred, enormous women who exist in a loop of life, death, and self-cannibalization….I wrote the story to explore their world, and also what would happen if the rules of their universe were broken.”
AUNTS
Karin Tidbeck
IN SOME PLACES, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles.
The orangery is one such place. It is located in an apple orchard, which lies at the outskirts of a garden. The air is damp and laden with the yeasty sweetness of overripe fruit. Gnarled apple trees with bright yellow leaves flame against the cold and purpling sky. Red globes hang heavy on their branches. The orangery gets no visitors. The orchard belongs to a particular regent whose gardens are mostly populated by turgid nobles completely uninterested in the orchard. It has no servants, no entertainment. It requires walking, and the fruit is mealy.
But in the event someone did walk in among the trees, they would find them marching on for a very long time, every tree almost identical to the other. (Should that someone try to count the fruit, they would also find that each tree has the exact same number of apples.) If this visitor did not turn around and flee for the safety of the more cultivated parts of the gardens, they would eventually see the trees disperse and the silver-and-glass bubble of an orangery rise out of the ground. Drawing closer, they would have seen this:
* * *
—
The inside of the glass walls were covered by a thin brown film of fat vapour and breath. Inside, fifteen orange trees stood along the curve of the cupola; fifteen smaller, potted trees made a circle inside the first. Marble covered the center, where three bolstered divans sat surrounded by low round tables. The divans sagged under the weight of three gigantic women.
The Aunts had one single holy task: to expand. They slowly accumulated layers of fat. A thigh bisected would reveal a pattern of concentric rings, the fat colored different hues. On the middle couch reclined Great-Aunt, who was the largest of the three. Her body flowed down from her head like waves of whipped cream, arms and legs mere nubs protruding from her magnificent mass.
Great-Aunt’s sisters lay on either side. Middle Sister, her stomach cascading over her knees like a blanket, was eating little link sausages one by one, like a string of pearls. Little Sister, not noticeably smaller than the others, peeled the lid off a meat pie. Great-Aunt extended an arm, letting her fingers slowly sink into the pie’s naked interior. She scooped up a fistful of dark filling and buried her face in it with a sigh. Little Sister licked the inside clean of the rest of the filling, then carefully folded it four times and slowly pushed it into her mouth. She snatched up a new link of sausages. She opened and scraped the filling from the skin with her teeth, then threw the empty skins aside. Great-Aunt sucked at the mouthpiece of a thin tube snaking up from a samovar on the table. The salty mist of melted butter rose up from the lid on the pot. She occasionally paused to twist her head and accept small marrow biscuits from one of the three girls hovering near the couches.
The gray-clad girls quietly moving through the orangery were Nieces. In the kitchens under the orangery, they baked sumptuous pastries and cakes; they fed and cleaned their Aunts. They had no individual names and were indistinguishable from
each other, often even to themselves. The Nieces lived on leftovers from the Aunts: licking up crumbs mopped from Great-Aunt’s chin, drinking the dregs of the butter samovar. The Aunts did not leave much, but the Nieces did not need much either.
* * *
—
Great-Aunt could no longer expand, which was as it should be. Her skin, which had previously lain in soft folds around her, was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters, who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright. As she lay back, Great-Aunt began to shudder. She closed her eyes and her mouth became slack. A dark line appeared along her abdomen. As it reached her groin, she became still. With a soft sigh, the skin split along the line. Layer after layer of skin, fat, muscle, and membrane broke open until the breastbone was exposed and fell open with a wet crack. Golden blood washed out of the wound, splashing onto the couch and onto the floor, where it was caught in a shallow trough. The Nieces went to work, carefully scooping out organs and entrails. Deep in the cradle of her ribs lay a wrinkled pink shape, arms and legs wrapped around Great-Aunt’s heart. It opened its eyes and squealed as the Nieces lifted away the last of the surrounding tissue. They cut away the heart with the new Aunt still clinging to it, and placed her on a small pillow where she settled down and began to chew on the heart with tiny teeth.
The Nieces sorted intestines, liver, lungs, kidneys, bladder, uterus, and stomach; they were each put in separate bowls. Next they removed Aunt’s skin. It came off easily in great sheets, ready to be cured and tanned and made into one of three new dresses. Then it was time for removing the fat: first the wealth of Aunt’s enormous breasts, then her voluminous belly, her thighs; last, her flattened buttocks. The Nieces teased muscle loose from the bones; it needed not much force, but almost fell into their hands. Finally, the bones themselves, soft and translucent, were chopped up into manageable bits. When all this was done, the Nieces turned to Middle and Little Sister who were waiting on their couches, still and wide open. Everything neatly divided into pots and tubs; the Nieces scrubbed the couches and on them lay the new Aunts, each still busy chewing on the remains of a heart.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 158
