“Narn didn’t send me to feed you,” I said through the pain, the falling snow. “She sent me to kill you.”
“Kindred ones!” she shrieked. “No kin to me.”
It was working. She was changing. Still Sasha on the outside, but Sasha as she really was, behind the mask of beauty and art that blinded me to her charms—withering, rotting before my eyes. Something skittered in the trees—getting as far away from this as it could. The Lots River meandered more freely here. I could hear the faint rush of water.
“I was the beautiful one,” she wailed. “My fury drove men to madness.”
“Men like the Father?” I was beginning to falter, the poison working in me. “I wouldn’t brag about it.”
She brought down the lash again. It cut me across the breast, broke my nose and ribs. I turned my head so I wouldn’t choke on my tongue. Not yet.
“I’m starving,” I gurgled. “Aren’t you?”
“I would bend the chase to my will, never bending to its.”
“Let me know how that works out for you,” I said, gagging on blood and teeth. “I got a little lost in mine.”
“My sisters gave power away!” The Tiff-thing snarled, baring pointed yellow teeth. “Without consulting me! Seduced by the younger gods. What do the younger gods know from blood? What does the law know about mother-killers, and father-slayers? The law is blind. It sees everything and nothing.”
I see you see me.
My stomach doing forward rolls as the poison coursed through me. “Your sister told me to tell you she was sorry.”
The effect was instantaneous. Whatever remained of the Fury’s purloined humanity fled at those words. Rearing out of Sasha’s form emerged the real Tiff, flayed abomination, older than old, sister from a no-good mister. Massive, fluid, she crouched over me on all fours, half obscured by shadow. Trails of luminous decay ran down her limbs. Rank heat plumed from a fanged mouth. Her breasts swung and snakes reared from her head. The snow swirled.
“Look at you,” I panted. “All those years of taking the law into your own hands, truthfully? That was just an excuse, like any other bid for power. You’re like the Father—he sees himself in you. And when that happens you’re a goner.”
She took my notebook and tore it in two. Pages fluttered against the dark branches.
The goddess bayed. “I’ll hound him down. Scorch him with reek of fire, waste him!”
Again I braced against the roller-coaster lurch of the poison. “You’ll rot and fester, Tiff. Slow and ugly. Toxic sludge splashing around the Forever Father’s dumpster. Oh Kai.” The pain was white. I tried not to puke. I did puke.
She raked her talons down my chest, brought my flesh to her mouth and messily sucked the blood off. Of course, I screamed. It seemed like the right thing to do.
“Eat,” I panted—buying seconds with my words, a language I didn’t know I knew, my tongue twisting around the clicks and glottal. “Feast, sister.” The snowflakes unfurled like blossoms. Talking was too hard so Kai had to do it for me. “Mag knew one broken word that spelled home—S-T-A-R-V-E-L-I-N-G—it would lure you here even as it triggered Sasha, the two of you made for each other. Then, acting alone as the extreme situation demanded, they magicked themselves here and crawled up from under the bridge in their true form—at first Meera didn’t know it was them. But you did. And Mag scared the hell out of you, Tiff—the only being in any world that ever could, because they are multiple, fluid, a murder, a kindness. And there is power in that beyond anything you will ever know. And so you ran. Because it’s the only game you know.”
“But Mag can’t save the Made this time, Tiff. It’s too late. You have to be quick. Eat. You must be starving.”
So finally the beast sunk its teeth into my chest. I screamed in agony and it ate, my flesh its food. And it wasn’t Tiff anymore. And it wasn’t Sasha.
I smelled him before I felt him.
The Father. Three’s a crowd. Tiff in Sasha, the Father in Tiff. Of course. With my final shreds of thought I remembered Marvin’s detective work. The Father’s nemeses eliminated with extreme prejudice. Paving the way for his return through a goddess’s futile lust for eternal life. Coded on her atrophied soul, her endless memory. He’d digitally entered her—I guessed some kind of Forever Code on steroids—and sent her to the Slant as insurance should anything happen to him. Like a flock of killer ravens.
And now I had him. Oh Father.
“He becomes you, Tiff! And not in a good way.”
My dying heart pumped for joy. I panted for blood—the pain was a trip because the creature was eating for three.
“Oh my Father, beware Mades bearing gifts.”
Snowflakes on my face, so cold. So cutting. So perfect. Are you seeing this Narn? Me, the crappy twin! Unmaking the Father who’d already unmade Tiff who’d consumed Sasha—three is the charm. And I’m doing it—just like you hoped I would. Don’t be sad, witch. I do it for you—because I love you and you saved me—and I’m going to see my sister now. I’m going to be . . .
Kaimeera.
I felt, and it seemed almost funny now, the Father’s white teeth in another’s head—not having one of his own—gnawing, tearing, hungry, so hungry. He couldn’t get enough, knowing that if he ate me, he’d become me, Meera, and then he’d go back to the Starvelings and destroy everything I’d ever loved. Never, Father, because a Made’s love is the Maker’s poison. My shame its food. How my scrawny flesh wobbled in those teeth, blood dribbling down its chin. Funny, I thought. Funny how the bait takes longer to work when it’s working for two. And funny now, the frothing at its mouth, the vermillion spume. Funny, the roar of surprise, the eyes cracking at the corners, the black tongue lolling. Unholy spasm as the wolfsbane crosses the brain barrier and funny the spray of the yellow-green bile. Are you seeing this Kai? How it eats? And eats?
The last thing I knew was Mag’s huge wings beating above me, too late finally to scare the ravening mister-sister off, and too late to save it too. The demon as furious in death as in life—the death-rattle and the way the red light pulsed and then faded from its two-faced eyes. And I lay in a lake of my own poisoned blood, while Mag knelt beside me. The snow slanted down and the world turned white. They took my hand and tried to explain with shrieks and sobs—the tattooed markings forming and reforming across their face—how the three sisters’ timeless fury against blood crimes tragically transformed into a crusade against one of their own, a twisted sister gotten too big for her boots.
ANAMNESIS
Marvin isn’t a god. But he makes a good witch. The bush people like coming to him because for one, he doesn’t sic Eric on them, and two, he’s always up for a chat. He’s a quick study. He has even managed to decode Narn’s grimoire, in which he’s already made several new entries. After my long recovery, we spend hours hiking on the lookout for rare lichen. Sometimes we stop at the rocky outcrop to share a bit of lunch with the goannas and the watchful ravens.
He and Corby live in Narn’s old room. I have the bed I shared with my dead sister, and Mag still hunts for our food and sleeps wherever they sleep, and together we tend the graves, taking turns to scrape the golden-eye lichen off Kai’s and the raven shit off Narn’s. I’m sorry, I say to her. I wish that we hadn’t had to kill your sister in order to kill the Father. I hope you can forgive me for it, love me for it even. I hope that in the end you were glad you didn’t throw me away. When a fresh gust of blossoms blows down from the bloodwoods like an impossible snowfall, I tell myself she’s heard me, worlds away, like she did on the bridge. Because when I listen very hard, I can hear her too—the flowing waters of that ancient song—always changing, always new.
I have never found the words to thank Mag for trying to keep up with Tiff’s Father-fueled rampage against the Mades in Wellsburg, for infusing the poison from my veins, and for their silent doctoring back in the Starvelings. The scars on my back and belly
are my pride.
Lately Mag has taken to stepping up onto the porch of an evening to take a swig of moonshine. I watch them settle onto the seat beside me, adjusting the sharp angles of wings beneath the high hood, a sorcerer’s headdress. I put the rescued notebook down—the stories miraculously rearranging themselves to make room for more—and slide the pencil in its ring. The cover is permanently sticky. There are torn and missing pages, words overwritten so thickly that they look to be floating above the page. Eric sits on his haunches, his ears pricked and his spear-tail patchy with mange.
“You knew your lost sister would find her way home if she could,” I say above the song of the cicadas.
Mag lifts the jar and I get a glimpse of black wing.
“And you couldn’t let that happen because she wasn’t your sister anymore. She was mostly the Father by then.”
They nod.
“That’s why you scrawled out Norman and put the real place on the form, right? To draw her out—what was left of her?”
Mag passes me back the jar and rummages in a pocket. They pull out a scrap of lined yellow paper and a small begrimed wooden case. From it they take one of three ink-stained reed pens and a block of dried ink. Mag scrapes the tip of the calamus into the block of ink and on the paper carefully writes something and passes it to me.
“Starvelings,” it says in the same dark hand as on the Redress Form, and as the self-inked map that covers every inch of their body.
Mag sits back in the chair. Eric unhinges his oversized jaw in a yawn and settles down with his muzzle on my feet.
“It’s okay to write it down now?”
They shrug. The sister of second chances.
“That map all over you. Can you do one on me maybe one day?”
They look at me in disbelief.
I laugh. “Okay. It’s a lot. Maybe a mini version. Just so I can find myself next time I get lost, too.”
Mag nods and we sit there for a while, the old thylacine watchful between us. We have two now. He has a sister—Marvin’s first successful experiment with necromancy. Eric is slowing down but I know I can never replace him.
Sometimes I drive into Norman to have a drink at the Five-Legged Nag. The Excelsior has shut down. Haunted they say. The green-haired waitress and I play word games from the newspapers lying around the pub and she says I remind her of someone but she can’t say who.
“Memory is tricky like that,” I say, because she reminds me of the same person.
She spells out a nine-letter word from the grid: “ANAMNESIS.”
When I ask her, she counts out the possible meanings on three fingers. In medicine, she tells me, it can refer to the history of a patient’s immune response. In religion, to a tripartite ritual remembrance, and in philosophy, she says, “To the closest human reasoning can come to knowing the previous existence of the soul. Your turn, Meera.”
I think about it as I ponder the grid. I wonder aloud if the reasoning that can know that, is really human or maybe something else?
“Maybe both,” she says.
We agree it’s a question for another day.
Three Way’s saving up to buy the Excelsior to take people through it, like those witches’ burial grounds in Upper Slant, or our very own Blood Temple if it had not burned down, or any other man-made structure haunted by the hungry ghost of shame.
It’ll eat you alive if you let it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent Matt Bialer and my publisher and editor, Tricia Reeks of the mighty Meerkat Press.
The Bridge was born from a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, and I’d like to thank the Thorbys Writers Workshop for their initial feedback on both the story and the work as it grew. Likewise to Sarah Klenbort and Seb Doubinsky for reading early drafts and especially Angela Slatter for her generosity, her game-changing criticism and ongoing support. At the eleventh hour, Jack Breukelaar jumped in to help with proofreading, to weigh in with boardgame and plant taxonomy expertise and to him I send love and thanks especially for his sustaining late-night pep talks.
Thank you to H. Morgan-Harris and everyone at The Aerie for providing me with the shared solitude I needed to complete this project. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge a grant from CreateNSW for conference attendance and readings—much-needed support and flexibility during these weird times.
I would like to acknowledge Marie-Hélène Huet’s 1993 analysis of maternal fancy, The Monstrous Imagination. I bumped up against this work while finishing my dissertation in 2007, and knew that it would one day find its way into my fiction. To it I owe the Father’s sections ascribing prodigal births to an adulterous female imagination seduced by false imagery. Behind my twisted triplets, Narn, Mag and Tiff, readers will recognize the myth of the Furies conjoined to a bunch of other Wyrd Sisters—the Three Graces, the Valkyries, Gorgons—the whole concept monstrously stitched together with whatever I thought I could make up and get away with.
The inscription in the Founder’s Cemetery, “We shall soon enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell, Trodden under our feet,” belongs to Cotton Mather, and can be found in his 1693 treatise, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Observations as Well Historical as Theological upon the Nature, the Number and the Operations of the Devils.
I paraphrased Kai’s conjuring salvo, “The soul confessor of my tale of dread has passed. No one knows that once . . .” from Mary Shelley’s 1831 short story, “The Transformation.”
One more thing. In the box of material I compiled for this book there is a cutesy picture of my two sisters and me mugging before the Three Sisters, a rock formation in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, shortly after we moved here. It is one of my most treasured possessions. Partly because our mother took it and partly because behind our adolescent smiles there is grown-up damage in our eyes.
Finally, thank you to my family—John, Isabella, Jack and Troy, always and forever. Honestly, I pinch myself every day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.S. Breukelaar is the author of Collision: Stories, a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and winner of the 2019 Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Previous novels include Aletheia and American Monster. Her short fiction has appeared in the Dark Magazine, Tiny Nightmares, Black Static, Gamut, Unnerving, Lightspeed, Lamplight, Juked, in Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy 2019 and elsewhere. She currently lives in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches writing and literature, and is at work on a new collection of short stories and a novella. You can find her at thelivingsuitcase.com and on Twitter and elsewhere @jsbreukelaar.
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1: TOWER
CHAPTER 2: HORNS
CHAPTER 3: TWISTED SISTER
CHAPTER 4: A GOOD BEGINNING IS HARD TO FIND
CHAPTER 5: KILL ZONE
CHAPTER 6: NOTEBOOK
CHAPTER 7: FIFO
CHAPTER 8: DIRTY BERT’S
CHAPTER 9: REAL DEAL
CHAPTER 10: SISTER-ACT
CHAPTER 11: WIN-WIN
CHAPTER 12: PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE
CHAPTER 13: GATHERUM
CHAPTER 14: CHIMERA
CHAPTER 15: FRESH MEAT
CHAPTER 16: STINKY SISTER
CHAPTER 17: BIG MADE ON CAMPUS
CHAPTER 18: WHICH WITCH?
CHAPTER 19: SWEENEY'S
CHAPTER 20: THE BRIDGE
CHAPTER 21: DROWNING
CHAPTER 22: LAST CALL
CHAPTER 23: SWEET SIXTEEN
CHAPTER 24: THREE WAY
CHAPTER 25: LAST SUPPER
CHAPTER 26: LOST AND FOUND
ANAMNESIS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Landmarks
Cover
The Bridge Page 28
