by Paula Guran
It was hot in the kitchen. Perhaps the heat from the stove? Beatrice went out into the living room, wandered through the guest bedroom, the master bedroom, both bathrooms. The whole house was warmer than she’d ever felt it. Then she realized she could hear sounds coming from the outside, the cicadas singing loudly for rain. There was no whisper of cool air through the vents in the house. The air conditioner wasn’t running.
Beatrice began to feel worried. Samuel liked it cold. She had planned tonight to be a special night for the two of them, but he wouldn’t react well if everything wasn’t to his liking. He’d raised his voice at her a few times. Once or twice he had stopped in the middle of an argument, one hand pulled back as if to strike, to take deep breaths, battling for self-control. His dark face would flush almost blue-black as he fought his rage down. Those times she’d stayed out of his way until he was calm again.
What could be wrong with the air conditioner? Maybe it had just come unplugged? Beatrice wasn’t even sure where the controls were. Gloria and Samuel took care of everything around the house. She made another circuit through her home, looking for the main controls. Nothing. Puzzled, she went back into the living room. It was becoming thick and close as a womb inside their closed-up home.
There was only one room left to search. The locked third bedroom. Samuel had told her that both his wives had died in there, first one, then the other. He had given her the keys to every room in the house, but requested that she never open that particular door.
“I feel like it’s bad luck, love. I know I’m just being superstitious, but I hope I can trust you to honor my wishes in this.” She had, not wanting to cause him any anguish. But where else could the control panel be? It was getting so hot!
As she reached into her pocket for the keys she always carried with her, she realized she was still holding a raw egg in her hand. She’d forgotten to put it into the pot when the heat in the house had made her curious. She managed a little smile. The hormones flushing her body were making her so absent-minded Samuel would tease her, until she told him why. Every thing would be all right.
Beatrice put the egg into her other hand, got the keys out of her pocket, opened the door.
A wall of icy, dead air hit her body. It was freezing cold in the room. Her exhaled breath floated away from her in a long, misty curl. Frowning, she took a step inside and her eyes saw before her brain could understand, and when it did, the egg fell from her hands to smash open on the floor at her feet. Two women’s bodies lay side by side on the double bed. Frozen mouths gaped open; frozen, gutted bellies, too. A fine sheen of ice crystals glazed their skin, which like her was barely brown, but laved in gelid, rime-covered blood that had solidified ruby red. Beatrice whimpered.
“But Miss,” Beatrice asked her teacher, “how the egg going to come back out the bottle again?”
“How do you think, Beatrice? There’s only one way; you have to break the bottle.”
This was how Samuel punished the ones who had tried to bring his babies into the world, his beautiful black babies. For each woman had had the muscled sac of her womb removed and placed on her belly, hacked open to reveal the purplish mass of her placenta. Beatrice knew that if she were to dissect the thawing tissue, she’d find a tiny fetus in each one. The dead women had been pregnant too.
A movement at her feet caught her eyes. She tore her gaze away from the bodies long enough to glance down. Writhing in the fast-congealing yolk was a pin-feathered embryo. A rooster must have been at Mister Herbert’s hens. She put her hands on her belly to still the sympathetic twitching of her womb. Her eyes were drawn back to the horror on the beds. Another whimper escaped her lips.
A sound like a sigh whispered in through the door she’d left open. A current of hot air seared past her cheek, making a plume of fog as it entered the room. The fog split into two, settled over the heads of each woman, began to take on definition. Each misty column had a face, contorted in rage. The faces were those of the bodies on the bed. One of the duppy women leaned over her own corpse. She lapped like a cat at the blood thawing on its breast. She became a little more solid for having drunk of her own life blood. The other duppy stooped to do the same. The two duppy women each had a belly slightly swollen with the pregnancies for which Samuel had killed them. Beatrice had broken the bottles that had confined the duppy wives, their bodies held in stasis because their spirits were trapped. She’d freed them. She’d let them into the house. Now there was nothing to cool their fury. The heat of it was warming the room up quickly.
The duppy wives held their bellies and glared at her, anger flaring hot behind their eyes. Beatrice backed away from the beds. “I didn’t know,” she said to the wives. “Don’t vex with me. I didn’t know what it is Samuel do to you.”
Was that understanding on their faces, or were they beyond compassion?
“I making baby for him too. Have mercy on the baby, at least?”
Beatrice heard the snik of the front door opening. Samuel was home. He would have seen the broken bottles, would feel the warmth of the house. Beatrice felt that initial calm of the prey that realizes it has no choice but to turn and face the beast that is pursuing it. She wondered if Samuel would be able to read the truth hidden in her body, like the egg in the bottle.
“Is not me you should be vex with,” she pleaded with the duppy wives. She took a deep breath and spoke the words that broke her heart. “Is . . . is Samuel who do this.”
She could hear Samuel moving around in the house, the angry rumbling of his voice like the thunder before the storm. The words were muffled, but she could hear the anger in his tone. She called out, “What you saying, Samuel?”
She stepped out of the meat locker and quietly pulled the door in, but left it open slightly so the duppy wives could come out when they were ready.
Then with a welcoming smile, she went to greet her husband. She would stall him as long as she could from entering the third bedroom. Most of the blood in the wives’ bodies would be clotted, but maybe it was only important that it be warm. She hoped that enough of it would thaw soon for the duppies to drink until they were fully real.
When they had fed, would they come and save her, or would they take revenge on her, their usurper, as well as on Samuel?
Eggie-Law, what a pretty basket.
Nalo Hopkinson has lived in her native Jamaica, as well as Trinidad, Guyana, and—for the past thirty-five years—in Canada. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, USA. The author of six novels, two short story collections, and a chapbook, Hopkinson is a recipient of the Warner Aspect First Novel Award, the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for emerging writers, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Locus Award for Best New Writer, the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic (twice), the Aurora Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Norton Award. Her collection, Falling in Love With Hominids (Tachyon Publications) was published last year.
One cannot really say Catherynne M. Valente retells or reinvents “Sleeping Beauty” with “The Maiden Tree.” She approaches it from an angle no one else has seen and spins a story: deep and dark and ravishing.
In nineteenth-century horticulture, a maiden-tree is either a tree that has never been cut and thus has a single main stem, or a young tree raised immediately from the seed. Or both. Nowadays it seems to be a more specialized term most often used in reference to fruit trees and the grafting thereof. Perhaps we can see the “rough symbiosis” of this story as a graft of sorts: one that damages rather than repairs; that thwarts rather than grows.
The Maiden-Tree
Catherynne M. Valente
It is remarkable how like a syringe a spindle can be.
That explains the attraction, of course. A certain kind of sixteen-year-old girl just cannot say no to this sort of thing, and I was just that measure of girl, the one who looks down on the star-caught point of a midnight needle, sticking awkwardly
up into the air like some ridiculous miniature of the Alexandrian Lighthouse and breathe: yes. The one who impales herself eagerly on that beacon, places the spindle against her sternum when a perfumed forefinger would be more than enough to do the job, and waits, panting, sweating through her corset-boning, for a terrible rose to blossom in her brain.
Well, we were all silly children once.
They could not get it out. I lie here with the thing still jutting out of my chest like an adrenaline shot, still wispy with flax fine as ash. Eventually the skin closed around it, flakes of dried blood blew gently away, and it and I were one, as if we had grown in the same queen’s womb, coughed into the world at the same moment, genius and child, and I had spent those sixteen years before we were properly introduced chasing it like a dog her own bedraggled tail. My little lar domestici, my household god, standing over me for all these years, growing out of me, the skin-soil of my prostration, as swollen with my blood as everything else within these moss-clotted walls.
And these are the thoughts of a sleeping woman as she breathes in and out in a haze no less impenetrable than if it had been opiate-bred; these are the thoughts of a corpse kept roseate by the rough symbiosis of spindle and maiden, a possibility never whispered of in all the biology texts she ever knew, or hinted at by the alchemists who whittled sixteen years away burning spinning wheels to lead and ash.
I have been arranged here as lovingly as the best morticians could manage, my hair treated with gold dust so that it would lose none of its luster, even as it tangled and grew wild across the linen, and the parquet floor, up to the window-frames and dove-bare eaves. My lips were painted with the self-same dyes that blush the seraphs’ cheeks in chapel frescoes, and injected with linseed oil so that my kiss would remain both scarlet and soft. My skin was varnished to the perfection of milk-pink virginity, violet petals placed beneath my tongue to keep the breath, no matter how thin it might become, fresh. From scalp to arch, I have been tenderly stroked with peacock-feather brushes dipped in formaldehyde (specially treated so as not to offend the nose of any future visitor, of course). The place where my breast joins the spindle has been daubed with witch-hazel and clover-tincture, cleaned as best as could be managed—all this was done with such love, devotion, even, before the briar sprouted beneath the first tower, and the roses put everyone else to sleep with me.
But they were not prepared, and this has become a tomb with but one living Juliet clutching her nosegay of peonies and chrysanthemums against her clavicle, her back aching on a cold stone slab.
You cannot imagine what has happened here.
My father stood behind me at each of the great bonfires—one at midsummer, one at midwinter, every year since my first. He kept me well away while those wide-spoked wheels were piled up like hecatombs in the courtyard, carted in on peasants’ backs and in wheelbarrows, bound up in tablecloths and burlap sacks, dragged behind families in knotted nets. I was transfixed when they blazed and crackled, bright as Halloween, up to the sky in skeins of smoke and fire, sending off clouds of sparks like flax-seeds. The wheels spun the heavens like a length of long, black cloth.
Now you will be safe, he whispered, and stroked my golden hair. Now nothing can hurt you, and you will be my little girl forever and ever, amen.
But Father, I could not help but think, how will they spin without their wheels? There are less of them every year, and everyone is getting holes in their stockings. The sheep will snarl in their pastures, weighted to the mud by unshorn fleece! Folk will clothe themselves in brambles, and the markets will be so silent, so silent!
Hush, now, he sighed. Don’t think on that. You are safe, that is enough. I have done what was required of me.
Will they move to the cities? Will they work in the factories under great windows like checkerboards of glass? Will they stitch a thousand breeches an hour, a hundred bonnets a minute?
No, he said, (and oh, his gaze was dead and cold!) A textile factory is but a spindle with teeth of steel. They, too, will burn before you are a woman grown. Everything, everything, will be ashes but you.
Oh, I whispered, I see.
I see.
And I inclined my head a little, into his great hand.
I remember the blueberries best, I think. How they grew wild beneath my window, and dappled the air with purple.
The roses took them, too.
I lie here, I lie here, and my hands are so carefully tented in prayer, frozen in prayer, but I hear, oh, how I hear, as only the dead can hear. Out of the loamy soil came a little sprig among the fat, dark berries, innocent as oatmeal, and I heard it come wheedling through the earth, sidling up to the stone. They cleared a space for it, watered it with delight, of course, once they ascertained its botanical nature—what could give the sleeping dear sweeter dreams than a rose blooming just here, below her bower?
Nothing, of course.
And it might have been all right, it might really have been nothing but a rose, white or orange or violet, buds sweetly closed up like pursed lips. But it sent out no flowers at all for months, while the gardeners frowned like midwives and buried fish heads in the flowerbed. It grew, upwards and onwards, and it might have been harmless if it had not found its tendrils brushing through my window one night when October was beating the glass in, if it had not crept slowly across the polished floor and grazed—so faintly!—my angelically positioned foot.
It lay against me for a moment, as though it meant only to decorate.
At first I thought it was my mother’s voice—and I cannot recall when, in all these years, I recalled that there had been a witch, and a curse, and that curses generally come from witches, who possess more or less female voices of their own. It is so easy for a certain kind of girl to forget the origins of things.
But at first I did not even understand that I was sleeping. I thought it was the natural result of a spindle-syringe, that the lovely warm feeling of seeping was what my father had meant to hide from me, the niggardly old fool. I lay back on the bed only because my head felt so hot, so hot, full of sound and the weeping of golden meats, and I could not stand, I could not stand any longer. And when I whispered to no one at all that there were all these red, red roses blooming inside me, I thought I was very clever with my turns of phrase, and would have to remember to write that down when I was quite myself again.
I did not feel as though I was falling, but rather that I had failed to fall. I lay there, and lay there, (and now it has become so much my habit to lie that I consider myself a student of the art, an initiate to its mysteries—no mystic with limbs like branches could outlast me) and there was a moment, just before dawn, when I tried to rouse myself to go down and sit at a table which surely held fried eggs and fine brown sausages speckled with bits of apple-peel, and made the inevitable discovery.
Of course I panicked, and thrashed in my scented bed, and shrieked myself into Bedlam—but none of this sounded outside the echoes of my own skull, and soon after my father—his face so haggard!—resigned and so thin, so thin, set his men to preserving my flesh. I was still screaming when they stopped up my mouth with wax, but they heard nothing, and patted my cheek with a refined sort of pity, as though they knew all along I was a bad girl, and would come to some end or another.
At first I thought it was my mother’s voice. But something in the way it vibrated within me—well, a mother whispers in one’s ear, does she not?
You are so beautiful, little darling, like light bottled and sold.
The spindle said it, I know that now, the spindle stuck in me like a husband, and it sang me through sleep with all these black psalms.
Beautiful, yes, but you cannot really think anyone is coming. Do you know what happens to a body in a hundred years? Some bourgeois second-son will hack through the briar—such labor is needed in a world without spindles, in the world your father made with his holocaust of spinning wheels, and there will be no shortage of starving, threadbare boys willing to brave the thorns for a chance at the goods in the
castle—but not you, little lar familiari; he will be looking for the coats off of your aunties’ frozen backs, for the shoes in a dozen closets, for the tableware and the tablecloths—oh, especially the tablecloths! He will be looking for curtains and carpets and scraps of damask, your mother’s trousseau, your sister’s gowns, as much as he can carry—and he will come upon this little room. He will be almost too revolted to enter; the smell of twelve hundred months of menses will wash the hall in red, (it will hardly be a year before you’ll flood the wax stopper there), and then the smell of bed-sweat and bed-sores gone to fester, the smell of formaldehyde having long since conquered its pretty mask of flowers. He will hardly be able to open the door for the press of your grotesquely spiraling toenails. You’ll be a stinking, freakish, blood-stuck frog pickled in a jar, and he won’t see you but for the gold in your hair, and your long, lovely bridal dress, which will not have been white for decades.
He’ll strip you down as though he meant to be your lover after all. He’ll take the dress, and the veils, and the sheets off the bed, he’ll shave your hair to stubble and clip your nails for swords, and leave you naked and alone to rot in this tower until the next desperate prince comes through the roses and cuts you up for meat.
Please, please be quiet. I never did anything to you. I only wanted the needle, and the rose.
No one is coming for you. I am all you have, and I love you better and more loyally than all the princes in Araby. Who else would have stayed with you all this while?
Please. I want to sleep.
Aristotle said it was impossible. (Do not be surprised—girls with no natural defense against spindles are always classically educated.) He stroked a beard like lambswool after a March rain and assured a gaggle of rosy-testicled boys that one cannot bury a bed and expect a bed-tree to grow from that large and awkward seed.
