• • • •
A plate. A bologna sandwich. A sliced apple. A little girl looked up and smiled at her mother's pretty face. Her mother in a white dress with a white flower over her ear. Her mother with a smudge of mud on her cheek and a shovel in her hand.
When she woke, she was trapped, heaviness around her body, her hands stretching. There was a ceiling made of wood. Her parents were gone. She'd banished them somehow. She cried in the dark, but it didn't get light.
She cried for days and nights, perhaps for weeks, and above her, the sound of a record player, and then a baby crying, and then a song. Above her, the sound of a rolling toy, but she was below it, beneath the cellar floor, in the dark and grime, in the underneath.
High-heeled shoes danced around the kitchen, and the leather soles shuffle-stepped, and the bare feet of the little pretty one learned to walk.
She cried for something, and finally something came.
It dug around her with its long claws and shoveled the dirt away from her face and hands. She discovered her finger was gone, chopped off by a careless shovel. The awful thing licked her face and brought her food. It curled around her and comforted her.
Later, she'd emerge, in the night, into the kitchen. Later, she'd leave muddy prints across the tile. Later, she'd run from the house and into the street, covered in mud, her clothing rotted from the dirt, her hair in tangles, her eyes flicking across every face. Later, no one would see her or know her. Later, she'd put up a flyer to earn food by helping the things she knew from her time in the dark out into the light.
All this was a very long time ago.
Now its claws scrabble on the planks. Its eyes are large as plates. The nevermore's been down here twenty years.
The Banisher wraps the nevermore in a blanket and carries it up the cellar stairs, up and through the cellar door. It's as large as she is. It's the only one who knows her. She gives it milk and bread. She gives it her hand to hold.
The most beautiful words in the English language are well known to those who know them, but they are not the most beautiful words to everyone.
She bundles the nevermore into the front seat of her car and drives it to a night market. She and the rest of the ugly city roam, the ivory awful things grown large as men now, their joints stitched with sinews stolen from wild animals, their jaws rattling when they see her, the wood-gnawing fairies selling carvings of bees and hummingbirds. The Banisher barters for Christmas roses gathered into a bundle of burgundy and black. She buys her nevermore a cup of hot milk, and her nevermore buys her an abyss contained inside an acorn.
• • • •
She looks for them now, though they've never looked for her. They're still here, of course, though they abandoned their house.
One day, the husband went down and saw a hole in the floor, a hole without a bottom. They filled the cellar with mud and moved to the other side of town.
It's twenty-five years since the December day her parents married, and they're having a party. The whole town's invited. There're lights strung up around the center of the city, and under the town there're cellars and more cellars, and beneath every building, secrets. Buildings were built to hold the dead down. There are no ugly children here, no ugly young couples. There's only light and sunshine and padding. There're only nurseries full of pretty songs.
The Banisher saw them as she banished. Little skeletons in the dirt beneath the cellar floors, one or two, or sometimes more, planted there. Houses built atop them, and the houses bloomed with flowers and the families were more lovely, and the little children sang the rhyme to keep the things from screaming, though the dead were done with screaming. All the things beneath the ground came here. All the fell were called by the sorrow of dying children, but the Banisher is the only one they found in time. They brought her out into the light.
It's snowing, and the Banisher drives, her nevermore beside her. In the backseat, there's a bouquet. The car's filled with creatures, all of them things from the dark and damp.
The Banisher walks into the kitchen in her coverall, and the kitchen staff rustle nervously. None of them are for viewing. They're not from this town. The ivory accompanies her, a troupe of netsuke with scavenged fox teeth, and the kitchen staff consults with itself and departs out the back door.
The band's playing, and all the guests are giving speeches about beautiful and handsome, and all the townsfolk on the dance floor are spinning on their toes. The two of them are there in the middle, a white dress on her, a white tie on him. They are no less beautiful, though her hair's brighter and his is streaked with silver.
The Banisher looks at them for a moment. There is their other daughter, a pretty little lovely with her pretty little love. All of them are wearing shades of pale. All of them have had all of these years, and none of them are different.
Beneath the dance floor where every lovely couple whirls in their fancy dresses and tuxedos, awful things are singing in the tunnels, sweeping out the dust that holds the ground together, planning for a festival, planning for a parade.
The cake's in the kitchen spinning too, in the center of a susan, lazily turning, twenty-five layers filled with strawberries out of season. The Banisher decorates it. There's a table stacked with glasses of pink champagne, all of them poured, and the Banisher and her brownies garnish them with petals.
And later in the evening, when the town eats hellebore, when the dancers fall to shambles through the broken dancing floor, when deep beneath the city, there is heard a horrid roar, all the something-awfuls come up to settle their score.
Her creature holds her hand and whispers, and the word it says is, “More.”
It is a fell thing with a tail, and she's the one the fell adore.
Solder and Seam
There was a man who built a whale out of wood.
He built it in the middle of a field out in the dry country, where nobody bothered him but birds and a couple of farm cats. The whale was white, and it took two years to build. He made it out of planks from old barns, which he stole in the night. He didn't steal them from anyone who'd miss them. Most people were gone. There were a lot of things falling down. Nobody made a living at farming anymore. He was new to the place, and so he stayed. He didn't mind. His own home was obliterated and all his friends were dead.
A hundred years earlier, there'd been a city in this spot, but they'd mined the ground until there wasn't any gold left, and so the city picked up its buildings and took them down the river. Before they went, they buried the town under piles of dirt, and that dirt was what the man built his whale in now. Sometimes he dug and found old things, teacups, whiskey bottles, and he sorted them and looked at the way the glass had changed color underground. He had a heap of green bottles and one of purple, a smaller one of blue. He had a pile of tin cans dating from the middle of the last century, before most of the world had fled the world, some of them swollen with poison. All these things were going into the whale's body.
A few thousand years before the city had died, there'd been a lake, and the man found things in the dirt from that too, fossilized freshwater fish. Before the lake, there'd been an ocean, and deep in the ground, far beneath everything else, there were bones of saltwater swimmers larger than the whale.
The man took rusted tractor parts and twists of metal, and loaded them into his truck. His hound sat in the front seat and crooned at the sky every time they drove to a new barn, every time he used his tools to pry off more planks and bits of silo. Some of the silos were full of rats, and others mice. If he stood his whale on end, it would be as tall as a silo, and even look like one. He might fill it with grain and use it to keep things safe from the weather.
The cats rode along and hunted, and the dog hunted too, and when they went back to the field where the whale was, they brought ratskins and mouseskins, and the man nailed the skins into the whale's interior to make a soft place for himself to live when the whale began to swim. He'd made plans.
He was caulking his whale's devilseam with pitch. He had white marine paint, which he'd brought hundreds of miles inland. The whale would be albino. There was a carpet for its tongue, and he'd enter through the teeth. The man had diagrammed the whale. There was a neat bunk inside, a clever piece of carpentry that folded down from the wall, just wide enough for one. There was a portal with a ladder in case he wanted to climb on to the whale's head and look out over the sea while he fished.
Some afternoons, on the highway to the north of the field, a school bus passed the whale, and the remaining kids leaned out the windows, screaming and pointing because there it was, a whale swimming through the wheat, twice as long as their bus. Not even the kids thought the whale was likely to actually swim. It was a roadside attraction, but no one cared about it. It wasn't in guidebooks. Whales were dead.
The man sat on his heels looking at his whale. He hadn't had any kind of dream of angels. No one had told him about a flood. He'd come out his front door one morning and thought it was time to do something. It wasn't a summons, not the kind he'd been waiting for, but he felt like he'd been called.
There were windfarms around him, and oil wells. He could see their spigots pouring out the black blood of dinosaurs, and at the horizon, the mills gobbled the sky, grabbing it bit by bit, tugging it out of place and chewing it. The sun had developed a ring of red around it, and one day a flock of geese fell out of the clouds, each one of them nothing but bones and feathers. He harvested their skeletons and added them to the whale, feathering the inside with their wings.
A long time before all this, he'd been a revolutionary. He'd overthrown a government and gone on the run for thirty years. No one knew his real name. He'd been married twice to women who thought he was somebody else. He had a son he'd lost track of. He was that kind of father, and maybe he was that kind of man. It was hard to say. No one ever thought of themselves that way, but statistically, it had to be true that some people were exactly what they thought they weren't.
He cleaned himself up time to time and drove out to a casino, bet on something, drank a drink at the bar, ignored the people who thought he didn't speak their language. He spoke their language. He spoke eleven languages, though he was out of practice. He'd had a life before this one. His neighbors thought he was a farmer, but his cellar was full of weapons. He grew grain because he could. At night, he assembled and disassembled. Sometimes he built a bomb, because he could do that too. Sometimes he built other kinds of firearms, ones less known here, and then broke them down again.
In daylight, he built his whale.
The afternoon he painted the whale, there was a storm. It wasn't raining where he was. It'd stopped raining on the dirt. Now storms took place above the ground and if you were watching, you could see rain disappearing fifty feet above you, sputtering out like it had hit some invisible drought. He watched the storm roll across the sky like his first wife had rolled across his bed and out the other side. He'd done that one wrong. He probably could have told her who he was, but he had a new face, and why take responsibility for his old soul when he looked like someone who hadn't been born into it?
The government he'd helped to overthrow was far away. It'd been corrupt. Thousands had died before his part in the revolution, and thousands died during his part, and thousands died after it. At night, even in his new identity as a farmer of failures, he still saw faces that belonged to the dead.
He saw one of his soldiers running, turning to look back at him, calling him to come, another shuddering as he aimed at the head of the President. He saw the details of their jawlines, the spaces beneath their eyes, the way their hands moved quickly and then slowly on their weapons.
He saw a footprint sometimes, right before he slept. He could see it very clearly. A bare foot, just one, printed in blood on a white floor. The foot had eight toes.
That revolution took place in the winter and everyone bled into the snow the occupiers had manufactured when they took the city. The cabarets were full of the occupier's women wearing red satin, and drinking champagne. The occupier's men wore white tie and drank Bordeaux, and when they spilled, it didn't matter to them. They threw their clothes off and someone from the city picked them up and cleaned them.
There were three snow leopards in the entryway of the palace, brought from Earth, kept in cages. There was a table in the center of Great Room made of the many-limbed skeletons of murdered nuns from the mountains, and in one of the cabinets there was a collection of mummified babies, stolen from their mothers, each of their hands eight-fingered.
After the triumph, he and his rebel faction — they were not all men; some of them were women — sat in the occupier's palace exhausted, and drank tea out of cups made of solid gold. They thought they'd won their country back. It wasn't wrong to kill the people who'd stolen power. It was necessary.
The man painted his whale white. The carpet that led into its interior was red, something claimed from a movie theater gone out of business. Moth-eaten, but moths would eat everything in the end. Moths could be found at sea and on land. Weevils in the flour. He had a manual of seafaring necessities, and a series of novels about ships.
“The lesser of two weevils,” he muttered to himself, but he didn't understand why it was funny. It was supposed to be. Everyone in the book laughed when it was said.
The man worked his brush along the planks, and the whale paled before him, until, as the moon rose, the whale came into being beneath it, a yellowish silver shape in the center of miles of wheat.
For a moment, the man looked up, not at the moon but at one of the bright planets, embedded there like a white monogram in a sail made of black. It looked like a name to him, but it was only a lonely light.
• • • •
The whale was dry by dawn, and the man embarked. He hitched it to the back of his truck and attached a set of wheels. He wouldn't ride in his compartment, not yet. He watched the sun rising as he drove out of the place he'd been all this time, through what had been Oklahoma and was now part of Texas, through the dividing line between New Mexico and Colorado, where he was pulled over, his whale searched for drugs, though who was smuggling what these days, and how, he didn't know. He didn't feel afraid of police catching him. His new face bore no resemblance to any photos that'd ever been taken. The compartment in the whale's head wasn't found. No one knew anything about whales. No one even knew how to open its mouth.
The freeways were nearly empty. People had left in the last few years, on ships, en masse, but the man hadn't considered it. There was nothing up there but night. He'd been on one of the outgoing ships once, and it had comforting screens showing images of the history of Earth. There was an idea that the world that had already been would be again, that a flag planted in a new planet would mean everything could comfortably stay the same.
He looked at himself in a filling station mirror, his face completely tattooed with a language that had been eradicated, his eyes the color of nicotine. He'd almost died back there and it had been enough for him. Coming down had been a peril. None of the other revolutionaries had made it. Eventually the government he'd lost everything in order to overthrow had taken power again.
It was women in red dresses and men in white tie, and though that had been in another place, the man drove through the cities in this country and didn't stop. He was going to the ocean, as everyone always tried to do. He knew it was foolish. The land was dry and the water dead, but he went anyway. There was still gasoline. There were still cars. There were still radios that played music and on them he listened to people singing, even if he saw no people on the sides of the roads.
In the sky above him there was a storm, and along with the storm, a fleet of ships taking another set of occupiers up. They weren't called occupiers. They were called colonists. Not everyone wanted to go. The dark station rumors had the place up there full of disease, no immunity to germs, poxes, and plagues, epidemics where skin turned from pink to green to red to purple, wher
e lungs liquefied.
There was life on the planets, the news said, and the life was wet and gleaming. There was ice so cold that human skin burned at half a mile. The sun was the same, but that was all.
It seemed to the man that all this exploration of the universe was like putting the population of Earth into a catapult and shooting it into the sky. It was an act of war, humans substituting for flaming arrows being shot into enemy tents. There was no reason for exploration without an enemy. He knew that much. The humans weren't the only ones dying of plagues. No one had immunity to everything. All creatures in the universe were like poisonous insects. They stung and bit and killed one another.
He'd been the enemy in his time, but now he was here on Earth, driving a whale along the highway, faster, faster, the whale catching wind and propelling him along. There were few other cars. The people in them looked out the windows, curiously, watching him go. He didn't acknowledge them.
In a snowbound diner in Nevada he drank a cup of something hot. A waitress looked at his face and said, “How come I'm not going with you?”
“Don't know,” he said, summoning the right language with only a little effort.
“I like that big fish you got,” she said. She was as old as he was, a wide mouth with a scar beside it. An arrow pointing toward her ear.
She ran a finger over the tattoos on his cheek, and started when she felt things beneath them moving.
“What's that?” she asked.
“Everyone left,” he said, being honest. He was never honest.
She leaned back and looked at the pie case. “I guess I hear that,” she said. “My family's all up there. My kids are with their dad. I don't know what I'm doing except waiting to see what happens. You been up?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I figured,” she said and went back to filling ketchup. “You got the look of one of those.”
He was surprised. No one else thought so. He passed. Everyone had tattoos here now. Not everyone's tattoos contained their armies and families, their old loves and old enemies, the ones they'd been able to find. His were special down here, though where he was from, they weren't anything unusual. Memories of grief were kept on display back home. He'd taken great pains to make himself look as humans did.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 44
