Before you moved in, your landlord promised to replace the old windows and repaint the dirty walls, and also to take care of the lopi problem. The windows are done, the walls now a tasteful eggshell color, but the lopi remain, and really, it’s not worth calling the landlord about them. They’re not that bad. They replace the pictures you don’t hang. The whirring of their wings is a white noise that conceals the silence.
And there are nights when you are alone in the full-sized bed in the single bedroom in the new apartment, everything so much smaller than your old life, and just as you fall asleep, you feel their feet on your face, delicate as antennae or memories.
The Louet
No one wants a louet, and yet, here you are with one. It has no great love of incense. It eats cantaloupe and the germ of corn, which it painstakingly chews from the kernels with its tiny scooplike teeth. It likes being read to, especially Henry James’s lesser works. It frowns intelligently at certain places in his travel writing, but you are pretty sure it is faking it; your own appreciation of Henry James is shaky; how can something the size of a kitten be more esthetically enlightened than you?
And yet, it is the louet that suggested you not get the retro haircut; the louet that suggested you stay away from Cheever’s later work; and your most recent boyfriend. The louet is always right, and you are always wrong, and it is the despair of the louet that you never seem to figure this out before it’s too late.
The Mume
The great thing about your mume is how it never makes you feel bad about anything. It loves the food you eat, the movies you watch, the clothes you wear. Feathers ruffled in excitement, it sits on your shoulder when you play computer games. It never gets bored. It never has needs. It sleeps on your pillow if you let it, but if you don’t, that’s okay too. You’re never wrong. You get the feeling that if the mume could speak, everything would end with an exclamation point. How many things in life make you feel as though you just won a trophy for general awesomeness?
It also doesn’t care in the least that you were kind of an asshole to your last girlfriend. She didn’t care at first either, but by the end she would call you on your shit, which you didn’t want to hear, which is maybe the reason why she is gone and you have a mume instead.
The Orco
Most nights, you fall asleep while reading, and your book and your glasses end up in bed beside you, along with your phone, just in case, and your orco. You were always someone who liked to sleep touching, so sometimes in the night you reach across and feel the wand of an earpiece, the book’s hard spine, the ruffle of the orco’s hair against your palm, its warm breath on your hand. As long as you don’t wake up all the way, it’s like all the pieces of someone.
The Hooded Quilliot
You bring your new hooded quilliot home in a cardboard carrier and let it out in the living room. At first you see only the top of its head and then its eyes glaring up, and then the quilliot leaps out of the carrier and onto your coffee table.
Your hooded quilliot has lived better places than this, with nicer people who made more money and they all adored, adored it. It had its own room. It ate oysters flown in from the coast and bruschetta. A professional groomer came every two weeks to trim its nails. This—the cute teak coffee table you got for fifteen bucks at an amazing garage sale last year, and the rest of it, too: your friends bringing home-made salsa and crab dip for card parties that last ’til four, and the shoes piled by the back door because everyone here goes barefoot—this is not what your quilliot is used to and, to be frank, it is all very, very disappointing.
But then, you’re not the one that was in a little steel cage back at the shelter, with a yellow sheet of paper clipped to the bars that said “Abandoned.”
The Ravock
There’s all sorts of information about it online, post-mortum predation. First they eat your lips, your ears, the end of your nose. Your eyelids. The flare of your nostrils. Fingertips. All the places a girlfriend would kiss you first.
Their weak paws and small teeth cannot make a way into your body until you are already dissolving. When is that, like a week after death? Would someone find you before then, and why? Would your absence be noted? When your friend Jason got dumped by his boyfriend, it was almost a week before you realized you hadn’t seen any texts from him lately. You assumed he was talking to other people, and anyway, you’re always getting busy or distracted, and so is everyone else.
You imagine it: a stroke, maybe, since you’re not the overdose type; you, slumped over your dead laptop. Would there be shit? You look down at your ravock, curled into a tight ball on the rug by your feet where it’s sleeping off dinner. It’s making that little dreaming growling noise it does sometimes. How long would it wait?
The Grey Regia
Your regia hated your old boyfriend, the one who came over after you had your surgery to read children’s books to you when you couldn’t sleep. He used funny voices for the different animals and you would start laughing and then it would start hurting and you would tell him to stop. And he would stop, that was the amazing part. Most guys would have kept on reading, just for a moment or two, teasing maybe or just that little streak of meanness that all men have. He was even really nice to your regia, though it was pretty obvious what it thought of him.
But it didn’t work out. You talked about moving in together but then there was an amicable sort of breakup, neither of you quite sure what was happening but both pretty sure it was the right thing. Maybe one of you just lost interest? Anyway, you have the new boyfriend. He would have kept reading, but your regia likes him better and maybe your regia knows what you deserve.
The Sandnes Garn
You knew you had a Sandnes garn at your old place, but it didn’t bug you or anything. It’s a pest, sure, but you learned to make some noise as you walked into your bedroom to give it time to hide. Under the bed? In the closet? The occasional glimpses were kind of cute, little furry horns and beady eyes peeping from behind the dresser you got from IKEA.
When you decided to move in with your girlfriend, your friends offered to help with the lifting. “Does your apartment still have that Sandnes garn?” one said. You nodded. “You need to set some traps or fumigate or something, ’cause otherwise you’ll spread them to her place and she’ll be pretty pissed. I’ll take that dresser if you’re not going to want it,” he added.
He did take the dresser but you didn’t fumigate, and when you got settled in you realize he was right. You see it sometimes, when she’s fallen asleep, half spooned against you, her hair a grapefruit-scented tickle in your face. The Sandnes garn sits on the chest of drawers that came from her mother’s house, next to the picture of all her brothers. Its eyes gleam in the hall light. Your Sandnes garn is patient. It can wait. You’ll fuck this one up, too.
The Skacel
There are close to a hundred species of skacel. While some can be easily distinguished by the casual observer, others may only be differentiated behaviorally or through DNA analysis. People, it seems, make a hobby of identifying their skacels, and a surprising number get the test, which costs between sixty-nine and just under two hundred dollars.
You’re not willing to go that far, but you have spent some Friday nights clicking through the internet looking for your skacel, which is small, short-beaked, and rose-colored. The Short-beaked Skacel is a sandy-olive color with a burgundy head and green eye markings. The Roseate Skacel has a narrow beak with a slightly hooked tip. The Lesser Skacel eats roaches, spiders, and other vermin but is neither roseate nor short-beaked; plus, your skacel tends not to eat them so much as kill them and leave them in the bathtub.
The Eastern Skacel drinks cold coffee from a saucer on the floor, which your skacel does not. The Kansas Skacel can eat and digest styrofoam take-out containers. The Blue-faced Skacel nests most often in linen closets, especially among the guest towels. Given short walks outside and plenty of toys, the Norway Skacel can live happily in even the smallest apartment. The King Skacel ca
n be trained to retrieve items but resents neglect. Burney’s Skacel would prefer it if you stopped bringing girls over. So would the Noro (a variety of skacel), plus it has some feelings about post-modernism.
Your old girlfriend probably wishes you had spent this sort of time on her. She has a skacel too, with an unmemorable beak but vivid yellow markings along the wingtips. You haven’t been able to find that one, either.
The Smerle
You could take your smerle outside and people were always very impressed—an actual smerle, with the long feet and the outrageous tail and everything. Where did you get it? Was it imported? If you didn’t mind telling, how much did it cost? It was like baking your own bagels or driving a 1960s car: a lot of work, but generally worth it.
But then things changed. It started to droop and its colors faded. “Get another smerle,” one of your friends advised. “Smerles love company.”
“I’m company,” you said, but you got another one anyway, this one chestnut colored. Your smerle perked up and now you had two to walk on matching leashes: two smerles that played together, twined about one another; a pair that pretty much ignored you.
The Tatamy
“One tatamy grows lonely,” your grandmother always says, like, “Troubles come in threes,” and you figure that’s about right. You started with the one. You were getting dressed for work one morning and there it was, curled tight into a gladiator sandal you’d almost forgotten you had. A week later, there was one in the other sandal, and then a few days later, two more peeked from your Uggs from college, and then there were what seemed like dozens, tucked into all the pairs of out-of-date shoes and boots you’d meant to take to Goodwill. They leave your sensible shoes, the work pumps and trainers, alone. You’re not sure whether this is a judgment.
You have no idea what they eat, and you’re not sure what they do with themselves when they are not tucked into your shoes like hermit crabs. All night you hear them rustling in your closet, often making small rhythmic bumps, as if they’re mating or dancing to house. You don’t mind that you are the only one in the apartment who is going to bed early or sleeping alone. But there are times when you imagine turning on the light, stepping into your old shoes, and dancing.
The Wolle
It’s hard to pull the trigger on an apartment. The one-bedroom on Massachusetts Street has a southern exposure and tall windows that look down onto cute shops and busy sidewalks, though you wonder whether that would get on your nerves. It’s small. If someone came, they wouldn’t have anywhere to stay. There’s no pet deposit if you get a begitte. Maybe later; right now you can’t see making a commitment like that.
On the other hand, the two-bedroom out on California is cool and shady. It’s a beautiful neighborhood, right next to a park with a really good disc-golf course. There is nothing on the hardwood floors and no curtains in the windows, so the rooms echo. Guests could stay in the second bedroom, if you bought a bed—but the rest of the time? You think you’ll have a hard time filling that space. There are probably lopi.
Or you could just keep sleeping on the couch in Cortney’s living room in her place on Vermont Street, and then you don’t have to choose anything at all. It’s a comfortable couch. She says she doesn’t mind, says you’re a great houseguest, says you’re not a pain in the ass the way some people are. You take out the trash. If you borrow her car, you fill the tank. The two of you order takeout and watch television shows a season at a time. Her wolle curls up between you, dozing.
It occurs to you that in another life, you might very well be the begitte, the lopi, the quilliot.
About the Author
Kij Johnson is the author of several novels, including The Fox Woman and Fudoki, and a short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award, and has also won the Hugo, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Crawford Awards. In the past she has worked in publishing, edited cryptic crosswords, waitressed in a strip bar, identified Napa cabernets by winery and year while blindfolded, and climbed an occasional V-5. These days, she teaches at the University of Kansas, where she is associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. This is her fourth Clarkesworld story, unless you count it as seventeen stories.
Ether
Zhang Ran
1.
All of a sudden, I’m thinking about an evening from the winter when I was twenty-two.
A pair of pretty twin sisters sat to my right, chattering away; at my left sat a fat boy clutching a soft drink that he kept refilling. My plate contained cold chicken, cheese, and cole slaw. I don’t remember how they tasted, only that I’d reached for the macaroni and dropped some on my brand-new pinstripe trousers. I spent the entire second half of the meal wiping at the crescent-shaped stains on my trousers as the chicken cooled in my plate, untouched. To hide my predicament, I tried to strike up a conversation with the twins, but they didn’t seem very interested in college life, and I wasn’t knowledgeable about ponytail-tying techniques.
The dinner seemed to last forever. There was one toast after another, and I would raise my long-stemmed glass with whomever was standing, and drink my apple juice, perfectly aware that no one was paying attention to what I did. What was the banquet for, anyway? A wedding, a holiday, a bumper crop? I don’t recall.
I sneaked peeks at my father, four tables away. He was busy chatting and drinking and telling dirty jokes with his friends, all his age, with the same thick whiskers and noses red from too much alcohol. He didn’t glance at me until the banquet was over. The fiddler tiredly packed his instrument, the hostess began to collect the dirty dishes and glasses, and my inebriated father finally noticed my presence. He staggered over, his bulky body swaying with every step. “You still here?” he slurred. “Tell your ma to give you a ride.”
“No, I’m leaving on my own.” I stood, staring at the ground. I scrubbed at the stain on my trousers until my fingers were numb.
“Whatever you want. Did you have a good time talking with your little friends?” He looked around for them.
I said nothing but clenched my fists, feeling the blood rush to my head. They weren’t my friends. They were just kids, eleven or twelve years old, and I was about to graduate from college. In the city, I had my friends and my accomplishments. No one treated me like a little boy there, seating me at the children’s table, pouring apple juice into my long-stemmed glass in the place of white wine. When I walked into restaurants, a server would promptly take my jacket and call me mister; if I dropped macaroni on my trousers, my dining companion would wet a napkin and gently wipe it clean. I was an adult, and I wanted people to talk to me like one, not treat me like a grade schooler at some village banquet.
“Fuck off!” I said at last, and walked off without looking back.
I was twenty-two that year.
I open my eyes with effort. The sky is completely dark now, and the neon lights of the strip club across the street fill the room with gauzy colors. The computer screen flashes. I rub my temples and slowly sit up on the sofa. I down the half glass of bourbon resting on the coffee table. How many times have I fallen asleep on the sofa this week? I ought to go online and look it up: what does holing up at home in front of a computer and falling into dreams of bygone youth mean for the health of a forty-five-year-old single man? But the headache tells me I don’t need a search engine to know the answer. This aimless way of life is murder on my brain cells.
I close the chat window and sign into a few literary and social network sites, hoping for something interesting to read. But just as my online friend said, everything seems to grow duller by the day. When I was young, the Internet was full of opinion, thought, and passion. Exuberant youths filled the virtual world with furious Socratic debate, while the brilliant but misanthropic waxed lyrical about their dreams of a new social order. I could sit unmoving in front of a computer screen until dawn as hyperlinks took my soul on whirlwind journeys. Now, I sift through front pages and notifications and never find a single topic worth clicking on.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100 Page 7
