The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  I resisted the urge to let my body fall down the stairs and upon him. Not only upon him, but upon the innocent Poe. Their blood and bones, their organs like bright ink on a page made of snow. I would write the story of Thule with their flesh, I would —

  Darkness slithered over my eyes, and I held them wide, trying to keep from doing what Night wanted me to do. I tasted metal where I'd bitten my tongue, and I heard myself hiss. A sound a dreamer might make whilst wandering a long passage, the way a scream might transform, in the voice of that sleeper, into a song. All these nights of invisibility, a wandering swath of stars falling upon the unlucky, all these nights, a woman made of nothingness.

  There was a crashing sound, and there, before me, was Poe, his face pale as the moon, his eyes no longer anguished, but purposeful.

  “TO ME,” he roared, and lurched up the staircase, his hands reaching for mine. He spun to face the camera as the shutter closed, his ungloved hand still clasping my own.

  I felt the stowaway leave my body and rush out, into the air, into the camera, away.

  The thunderclouds fled the sun, and the sky brightened. Night receded. I drew in a ragged breath.

  The daguerreotypist withdrew the plate from the camera and darted to the developing room, donning a set of India rubber gauntlets as he went, but I could only look at Poe. He would not meet my gaze. What had he done?

  Manchester emerged from the developing room.

  “View it,” he said, and gestured us into the room. “It is not as you imagined it would be, and yet.”

  A gleaming tray of mercury, held over a spirit lamp, and fumes that felt golden upon inhaling. The plate rested above the heated mercury, an image emerging in salt on its face, delicate as dust on a butterfly's wing.

  I watched it, praying that I'd see what ought to be in the daguerreotype and not something else. Hoping to see my image containing the stowaway, and all of it trapped within this plate of glass.

  But as it emerged, I did not see the creature, nor did I see my own face. It was dark shadows appearing and then shifting through red and blue to black again, the eyes first and then the rest.

  I saw Edgar Allan Poe, and within him, all around him, Night. The image was of the poet, suspended in the darkness of the background, and I could see myself in ghostly silhouette behind him, my face covered in stars, my eyes glittering, my fingers laced in his own.

  The poet looked at me, and reached into his jacket. He removed a pot of ink, looked at me tenderly, and opened it. I watched him, uncertain, and then, suddenly, he flung it over me.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Darkness. A blotting out, a removal from view.

  The Thule Daguerreotype

  The original Poe portrait, taken in desolate circumstances in the year eighteen forty-eight, the year before the poet's death, is, over the years, lost and found, discovered in the possession of a traveling hypnotist, fallen from a drawing room wall, set on fire. It lives in legend, copied and etched, discussed, tattooed, made the subject of academic texts.

  After the image was taken, the subject wandered the streets, visiting the home of a woman he had proposed to, and raving that he was doomed, that he was done for good. He screamed for his soul.

  The daguerreotype depicts a man in a half-buttoned black dinner jacket, a rumpled white shirt, an ascot tied and wrapped tightly enough to suggest that it is keeping his head from tumbling off. He has a high white forehead, a dark mustache, tousled hair, and eyes sunk deep in a face lined with grief. He is a year from dying, but in the Ultima Thule portrait, he appears to have emerged from his tomb, and indeed, the image depicts the poet four days after his failed suicide by laudanum.

  If one looks closely, with the proper knowledge, it is possible to see the figure behind him, a spectral form, a radiance draping over one of the man's shoulders, an image of the missing, left in dust on a silver plate. Perhaps it is a woman, or perhaps it is something else entirely.

  The business of portraiture is one of silver and gold by the ton, and the miserable face of the poet is immortalized in precious metal. The presence behind him is a stain rendered in darkness, silver nitrate, an abyss that reflects light.

  This is a saint's icon, Edgar Allan Poe's image pressed like a kiss to a ground glass windowpane, and the form holding him is a glittering ghost, mutable as frost over a view of a city at night. Does it hold him as a lover or as a captive?

  What is left inside this portrait?

  That is one way to look at a photo of a ghost. Another way is to look at both figures, this portrait, this imaginary kingdom and its creator flickering in and out of the light, and see it as a record of more than one event, the moment when a poet's soul was removed, the moment when a man counted down the seconds remaining in his life.

  He counts them in syllables. He counts them in sentences. He counts them in stories. All that we see or seem, he writes. Is but a dream, within a dream.

  Open the glass panes that house the portrait and blow, a single breath, and the image is only imagined again. Press a finger to the face of this ghost and watch him become thin air.

  The Lady's Last Tale

  I felt myself disappearing, but I remained scored into the world, my skin a page with lines on it, my hair streaked with silver, my dress still as bright as it had been, but now obliterated.

  The photographer faded as I faded, and the studio as well, whether they had been there or no. An imaginary Providence or a true one, I could not say. The blue wallpaper was night, and I was part of it now, and the mercury bath was stars, and I was part of that as well.

  Thule was before me then, a white landscape of cliffs and women shrouded, a body — was it my body? — washing up on a coastline made of bones. I was the sea and I was a ship, and I was a city of ghosts.

  I did not disappear from the world, though it seemed I might. I stayed, and this kingdom by the sea stayed. I climbed the stairs in a tower, I in my black dress, its lining like the inside of a redbird's wing, my magpie-feathered stripes, my bosom spattered in ink. There was a throne there, and then there was myself seated in it, reigning over the great and frozen unknown.

  I ruled over a kingdom I had not made, but would not surrender, and out there, in the mist, there was no ship and there was no sinner. There was no poet with his quill, writing my world.

  Here in Dream-land would I love and live forever. Here would I contain the soul of the poet, transferred to me in silver and in ink, even as I traded to him the creature I'd harbored.

  I was Annabel Lenore Virginia MacFarlane, and no one would ever find me again.

  Astronaut

  She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. Miss Baker was on a mission to defy gravity.

  It was 1959. The world was pencil skirts and kitten heels, stenographers following scientists in suits, and it was no different in Florida. Miss Baker had thirteen competitors for the single spot on the voyage, and they were all male.

  If you keep trying to rise, one of them whispered to Miss Baker during training, no one will ever want to marry you. No one likes a girl who tries to climb over everyone else. To that, she spat in the dust, and went to find herself some lunch, doing stretches all the way. She had no time for their shit.

  The Navy thought they'd chosen her randomly, but she'd been planning this since her birth in Peru and childhood in Miami, placing herself in line for a path to the stars, each moment of her existence a careful step toward a shuttle.

  By day, the academy was all lustful glances, pinches, and indecent proposals. By night, Miss Baker slept with gritted teeth, curled tightly into her bunk. She was busy, slowing her heart rate, stabilizing her blood pressure, meditating, in preparation for her voyage. The training was necessary. There'd been seven failed astronauts before her, all but one of them named Albert. They'd died of suffocation, parachute failures, and panic. If any of the Alberts had seen the world from above, they hadn't told anyone about it. T
he most recent Albert had gone into space with a crew of eleven mice, but died waiting for his capsule to be retrieved. What had he told the mice? No one knew.

  But Miss Baker was no Albert. She was herself.

  She lowered her heart rate still more, impressively. The others were being eliminated. One by one they went, cursing her and insisting that she'd be alone forever, that she would never find a home or a husband.

  You'll die, they told her. You'll fall into the ocean and they'll never find you. Or you'll fly into the sun. You'll die alone eaten by fish, or you'll die alone eaten by birds. You're not even pretty, they said, as a last resort, but Miss Baker did not care.

  She hummed to herself in her isolation capsule as her competition melted down, hearts racing, teeth chattering.

  Assssstronaut, hissed her second-to-last competitor, as though her dreams could be used to taunt her. He raised his fist to throw something foul, but she was too quick, up and over his head, doing a backflip on her way into the next room.

  Pendejo! she shouted over her shoulder.

  He didn't have her discipline. If he went up, he would die of fright. None of the women of Miss Baker's family suffered from nerves. They'd climbed together up the highest volcano and looked into the boiling belly of the earth.

  She felt a grope on her way to the galley, kickstepped into the groin of the grabber, and hightailed into her own quarters to practice weightlessness.

  Astronaut, she whispered in her bunk. Astronauta, she said, in Spanish. Then she said it a third time, in her mother's tongue.

  The next day, her last two competitors were dismissed.

  The supervisors commissioned a shearling flight jacket and a flight helmet lined with chamois, a necklace with her name on it, and a national announcement that she'd been chosen to rise.

  Miss Baker remembered her first sight of destiny. She'd seen a shuttle go up, from a window facing the Cape. She'd stood at that window, staring, as something small and bright broke the rules of the known world, and from then on she'd been certain.

  Astronaut.

  Now she was that bright thing.

  Into the jacket and helmet she went, into the capsule and shuttle at Canaveral. Her companion from the Army's parallel program, Miss Able, was tall and dignified, no doubt as hardworking as Miss Baker herself.

  She nodded at Miss Able, and at the crew — not mice this time, but provisions. Miss Baker's crew consisted of vials of blood, samples of E. coli, of corn, of onions and of mustard seeds. Sea urchin eggs and sperm. Mushroom spores of the genus Neurospora, fruit fly pupae, and yeast. Who knew why those items had been chosen? Miss Baker did not, but she treated them respectfully. That was the mission.

  She zipped her jacket with her own hands, and was closed into her capsule.

  Two thirty in the morning. Cape Canaveral was dark. They jeered, her competitors, as Miss Baker rose, up, up, over the ocean and into the sky, but she didn't care. They were earthbound, and she was a pioneer. Out the window, she could see fire and hoopla. Miss Baker was alive as she ejected from Earth's gravity, alive as she returned to the sea. She was a star in a leather jacket, fetched from out of the Atlantic, healthy and grinning.

  Flashbulbs and a press conference. What did the astronaut want? What could they bring her?

  What is it like in space? they asked.

  She asked for a banana.

  Later that same day, she smiled for Life magazine, stretching her tail to its full length. Miss Baker posed with her medals and certificates, then went about her business as a private citizen.

  She was married twice, first to a monkey named Big George, and then to another called Norman. She didn't take their names, nor did she become a Mrs. For the second wedding, she wore a white lace train, which she tore off and waved at hundreds of spectators. If she was not wearing her flight uniform, she preferred to be naked.

  She celebrated her birthdays with balloons and Jell-O, and she persisted in setting records.

  To herself, and to her husbands, and to anyone who came near, she only said one word, in several languages: Astronaut.

  It was their own fault if they didn't understand.

  * * *

  In 1984, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day Miss Baker slipped the bonds of gravity, the Navy gave her a rubber duck as a retirement gift.

  When the reporters asked for an interview, she made no comment, but she thought about it.

  For nine minutes in 1959, Miss Baker had been weightless. She'd pressed her fingers to the glass, and looked out into the glittering dark, a squirrel monkey in a capsule the size of a shoe box, floating in triumph three hundred miles above the world of men.

  The Earth from afar was exactly the size of an astronaut's heart. Miss Baker might eat it, or hold it, fling it into the sun or roll it gently across the dark.

  She sat calmly in her flight suit and medals, holding her duck. She smiled for the cameras.

  She asked for a banana, and it was delivered to her on a platter, as bright and sweet as victory, as golden as the sun.

  Black Powder

  The rifle in this story is a rifle full of wishes. Maybe all rifles seem to be that, at least for a moment, when they're new, before any finger has touched any trigger. Maybe all rifles seem as though they might grant a person the only thing they've ever wanted.

  At the beginning of this story, there are no bullets. At the end of this story, there are no more bullets left. In the middle of this story, there are enough bullets to change the world into something entirely different.

  This rifle is full of anything anyone could want, each bullet a captive infinity, each an ever after.

  Bullets may be made, in the old way, of a thin cylinder of any animal's gut packed full of black powder and attached to the back of the projectile with glue. They may be made of bronze points, of buckshot, with tiny arrows  —  fléchettes  —  embedded in them to maximize damage on entry. Rifles may shoot anything from orbs to thorns, which may be propelled, in antique weapons, by a mixture of charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulfur, or, in certain situations, by the motions of something else entirely.

  Thus may one fire a wish. Thus may one shoot a star.

  That's a story people tell, in any case. Like all stories, this one contains lies, and like all old rifles, this one contains the dust of its history.

  Perhaps the story begins with a kid behind the wheel of a truck, this same stolen rifle beside him.

  This kid  —  call him the Kid, why not?  —  has big plans. Here at the base of the mountains, he's been looking up too long, seeing only girls who want nothing to do with him. He stole the rifle from the dumb old man at the pawnshop, who never even saw him coming.

  The Kid shot the rifle once, and then  —

  The Kid's nothing special. He's gangle, denim, pustule, and pouch. Back pocket of his jeans is full of stolen chew, and his hands are covered in corn-chip ashes like he's been elbow deep in a Dorito crematorium.

  Something weird happened when he pulled the trigger, something he's not thinking about.

  Something asked him a question.

  The something is in the back of the Kid's pickup truck now, on the dog's blanket. Maybe real, maybe imagined, maybe a flashback to some cartoon reality seen when he was little. He's decided not to think about it.

  Out here, near the remnants of the reactor, there's a marker for a massacre of trappers, and there's a historical designation for the place, their possessions enough to identify them.

  In the summer, poison mushrooms leap from the shadows, shape of skulls. The spot is surrounded by cliffs that glow green at sunset, and the hollow in the center feels seen. It's been declared safe enough, the radiation dispersed, though most people would never come here. It's a bad place.

  The Kid imagines the fire flooding up from it; pictures the pale blue sky when the meltdown happened, tree branches shaking, studded with black squirrels. The way ash fell from the heaven
s, and his mother walked out from the trailer and filled her hands with it, filled her mouth with it, rolled in it like a dog in snow.

  “I didn't know no better,” she says. “Lot of people didn't. We thought it was some kinda miracle.”

  Then she was pregnant, and she swears she doesn't know how it happened, doesn't know who the Kid's father ever was.

  He veers left on the highway and drives on the wrong side a while, singing along with the hum inside him. In the seat, the rifle sings too, bullets rattling, each a distinct tone.

  The Kid feels stars inside his chest, burning novas, sparks flitting through his body. He's a man on a mission, to spread the word of the dead.

  He thinks about his future: a hero's journey through the flat earth of high school. He's readying himself to graduate from childhood and into legend.

  * * *

  Drop back in time to another part of the story, a hundred and fifty years ago, long before the Kid's even born.

  Out here in these woods, at that time, there's a notorious freetrapper who takes all the pelts and all the women. He pays in plague as well as in trade goods, taking the beaver, the mink, the wolves, taking the daughters of chieftains and the wives of warriors.

  He's a bringer of disaster, and in the years he walks the woods, he takes wife after wife, never for long. Some die in childbirth, and some die in rapids, and some die by bear. One leaps from a cliff. They walk ahead of him and ride behind him. They are the starwatchers he uses when he can't see a way out of the wild and the warmth he relies upon in winter. The animals hate him, and the wives hate him, and he carries a black-powder rifle, an ax, and a bottle of whiskey. Anything else he needs, he steals. Every time he takes a new wife, he's cursed by all the inhabitants of the places he passes through. There are babies left behind after each wife dies, and he gives some to the animals and puts others out to be collected by anyone who lives in the trees. The trapper wants only wives, not children.

  The rifle in this story is the one that once belonged to this trapper.