The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  Beneath your head I found your notebook, your words, your discoveries, inked now in red, the pen of your thoughts and desires broken; the ink runs.

  My heart sinks like a heavy stone to the bottom of the lake, to the mud;

  There it burns and eats the lake from below, its jaws of flame consume

  the water, the fish and every living thing.

  Many waters cannot quench my love; rivers cannot wash it away. It devours

  and drinks and is never satisfied.

  Oh, Brothers, the one who pursues you,

  the one who studies you,

  who traces your shadow on the grass you left behind,

  he is the one that loves you.

  Love is a hard-fought, hard-run pursuit,

  the sweat of desire,

  the work of the heart.

  Lover

  I long to walk with you and the night will wrap its stars around us,

  enrobe our souls in mysteries, in mysteries of pursuit, as stars chase stars chase

  stars. Come, come, come

  away with me.

  Beloved

  Come, come, come back. The night empties its stars into the lake.

  Acknowledgements

  If you look behind this book, you’d see a trail that stretches back, winding through people who encouraged, helped, promoted, taught and pushed me. My trail was EPIC.

  Thank you, Brett and Sandra, Sister Sam, and Michael, for believing in me and my writing.

  Thank you, Terrence M. Green, who read my work and told me to send “Lemmings” to the editors of Tesseracts 9, Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman, resulting in my first sale. I owe a debt to Brian Hades and Janice Shoults at Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing for believing and encouraging my writing, editing, and ideas, at an early stage. I want to thank Marcelle Dube and Barb Dunlop for hosting and running some awesome Yukon Writers’ Conferences and Workshops for our isolated community of writers up in the far north. Without them, and people like them, writers would have to leave the territory to be trained. Patricia Robertson, Erling Friis-Baastad, Miche Genest, Dianne Homan, Marie Carr, Claire Eamer, Lily Gontard, and Jo Lilley encouraged and advised and wrote alongside me, and damn, I appreciate that. Thank you, Steve Slade, master musician who ran the Arts in the Park for many years, who pushed me to write for performance. Keep all those people who ask you for more. To Bev Brazier and the folks at Whitehorse United Church for being open to love without reservation, and started a writing group in their church. Thank you, Yukon artists Joyce Majiski, Suzanne Paleczny, Neil Graham, Margriet Aasman, Sandra Storey, Jeanine and Paul Baker, and many, many others for helping me develop my art. To the many artists and musicians of the Yukon who are my friends—your inspiration and friendship helps artists in any genre. To Jaime and Dave Strachan, Steve Parker, and David Wesley who read early drafts of many of these stories and offered good advice. Thank you, Susan Zettell for being one of my first writer friends in the Yukon and staying with me even as we both moved around the continent. I would also like to thank the Touring Artist Award administered through Yukon Tourism and Culture and the Yukon Cultural Industries Training Fund for funding writers to leave the Yukon and network with others. (Go to the Yukon—it will love up the artist in you.) And especially Laurel Parry, Michele Emslie, and Ross Burnet: you show the way out and back.

  Thank you, Lambda Literary Writers Retreat and Samuel R. Delany who taught me to be fearless in writing LGBT characters. Everywhere. We deserve a little adventure too.

  Thank you, Clarion (Greg Frost, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Karen Joy Fowler, Cory Doctorow, Ellen Kushner, and Delia Sherman—my teachers—and Kim Stanley Robinson for enjoying Lemmings so much). To Kater Cheek, Justin Whitney, Julie Andrews, and the rest of my Clarion class for being great readers. To editors Cory D and Holly Phillips, Brett Savory and John Robert Colombo, Kevin Chong, Steve Berman, and Nancy Kilpatrick—for choosing some of these stories for anthologizing or publishing. Thank you, Naomi Hirahara for your continued friendship and encouragement to keep submitting work, as well as Virginia Stem Owens, Essie Sappenfield, Bryan Dietrich for the Milton Center and beyond—you took a chance on me that we could talk about faith and speculative literature together. We did.

  Thank you, literature teachers and thinkers, in colleges and universities: Arch Mayfield, Geoff Wells, Don Cook, Reta Carter, Christa Smith, Tom Ray, Marti Runnels, Jill Patterson, Stephen Graham Jones, Carol Anshaw. Thank you, Maneater, the newspaper of the University of Missouri-Columbia, for hiring me to write a comic strip about talking bears in the Arctic for $20 a strip. And for Dad who helped me self-publish those strips in a book.

  Thank you, Ray Bradbury, who told me it wasn’t enough to write stories if you weren’t going to send them out, one a week, where the statistics would then be better that you could get something sold. Thank you, Madeleine L’Engle, for giving me your advice and a second interview—delighted that I wasn’t one of the Baptists who taunted your early books.

  Thank you, Sandra Keith, who offered me in my junior year of high school a directed study class in Creative Writing when all that was offered to juniors and seniors in the whole school was Small Engine Repair. (I went to a high school of twelve people in Bledsoe, Texas). She also midwifed a tangled novel over two summers after I graduated high school. I used to go to her house and she would critique three chapters at a time. She started this belief that I was a writer. I guess I couldn’t shake it. I owe so much to her for changing my life at sixteen.

  Finally, thank you, Mom and Dad, for doing so well with a weird science fiction-loving kid. Thank you, Dad, for going with me to the Hollywood Wax Museum and standing with me on either side of Mr. Spock, for buying me subscriptions to Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comic books, for buying “action figures” of superheroes and Star Trek. Thank you, Mom, for reading the Chronicles of Narnia to us in the hallway before bedtime. Thank you for endless Safari Cards, indulging all my reading of gods and goddesses and dinosaurs and wildlife, picking me up when I bombed and bailed the Writer’s Digest School of Writing like an asteroid (Mort Castle, I figured it out). Thank you for going to every comic book store and 7-Eleven during our yearly vacations across the United States (sometimes at 6 a.m.), for the heroic church Bible stories and for the weird ones. Thank you for supporting me as my doodles became pictures, and I became a portrait artist in front of Piggly Wiggly’s and at festivals. You always believed that somehow I could find a way to put it all together.

  Mom and Dad, I put it all together.

  Author Bio

  Jerome W. Stueart is a writer, cartoonist and illustrator from the Yukon Territory by way of Missouri and Texas. A Clarion graduate, Lambda Literary fellow, and Milton Fellow, he has had work appear in Lightspeed, Geist, On Spec, Fantasy, Joyland, Icarus, Geez and various anthologies, including three from the Tesseracts series. He was co-editor of Wrestling with Gods (Tesseracts 18) and Imaginarium 4. His novel, One Nation Under Gods, is forthcoming from ChiZine in 2017. His work has been runner-up to the Fountain Award and John Haines Poetry Award. He has worked as a vaudevillian, a reporter for the Arctic Institute of North America, a trolley conductor, a tour guide to Theodore Roosevelt’s home and has written several successful radio series for CBC North. His heart is still in the Yukon where he lived for nine years, but he now teaches writing, graphic literature, and science fiction at the University of Dayton.

  Publication History

  An earlier version of “For a Look at New Worlds” placed 2nd in the 2015 Little Tokyo Short Story Contest sponsored by the Little Tokyo Historical Society and appeared on the Japanese American National Museum’s Discover Nikkei website.

  “Sam McGee Argues with His Authentic Box of Ashes” was written and performed as part of the Arts in the Park Heritage sessions, sponsored by Music Yukon, Yukon Historical Society, and Yukon Heritage, Whitehorse, Yukon, August 2014.

  “Et t
u Bruté” was a finalist to the Geist Postcard Story Contest, April 26, 2010 and later appeared in Geist, Fall/Winter 2010.

  “The Song of Sasquatch,” previously appeared in Joyland, June, 2010, and then in Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction, Lethe Press, Summer 2010.

  “How Magnificent is the Universal Donor” previously appeared in Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, March 2010.

  “Bondsmen” previously appeared in Metazen, October 12, 2009.

  “Moon Over Tokyo Through Fall Leaves” previously appeared as “The Moon Over Tokyo Through Leaves in the Fall” in Fantasy Magazine, September 2009.

  “Bear With Me” previously appeared in Tesseracts Eleven: Canadian Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy, November 2007.

  “Brazos” previously appeared in Strange Horizons, July 3, 2007.

  “Why the Poets Were Banned from the City” previously appeared in OnSpec, Spring 2007.

  “Old Lions” previously appeared in Redivider, Spring 2005.

  “Lemmings in the Third Year” previously appeared in Tesseracts 9: Canadian Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy, May 2005, and was runner up to the Fountain Award given by the Speculative Literature Foundation 2005.