“Why me? Why choose me?”
There is no answer but the gentle pulsing of television light.
I once again have the sense that I am being watched, or perhaps maneuvered by hidden personalities: writer and director, linking up for a final collaboration, something that will eventually reach out across the cosmos towards a brand new audience . . .
“I’m not important. I have nothing to offer . . . I have no story to tell.”
My words break off into the darkness, a trail of confusion I will soon follow towards my annihilation. These words, I now realize, are no longer part of the shooting script.
I stare at the screens that are really eyes; they are suspended in the void, hung from unseen stars and the tails of strange comets that remain invisible to my eyes. I turn around and grab the armchair, hauling it across to the window, where I sit and stare out at the digital congregation, waiting for the often-tricky third act to unspool.
Calmly, I wonder which of the screens will be big enough to contain my soul.
About the Author
Gary McMahon’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, and How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different Skins, Pieces of Midnight, Hungry Hearts. He has edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey. Forthcoming are several reprints in “Best of” anthologies, a story in the mass market anthology The End of the Line, novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things from Angry Robot/Osprey, and The Concrete Grove trilogy from Solaris. His Web site: www.garymcmahon.com.
Story Notes
The narrator says: “I’m not important. I have nothing to offer . . . I have no story to tell.”
Perhaps we all should hope this is true because—to my mind—at the end of this story, one gets the feeling that he will soon have all too many stories to offer . . . and they will be tales we might not survive the telling of.
A DELICATE ARCHITECTURE
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
My father was a confectioner. I slept on pillows of spun sugar; when I woke, the sweat and tears of my dreams had melted it all to nothing, and my cheek rested on the crisp sheets of red linen. Many things in my father’s house were made of candy, for he was a prodigy, having at the age of five invented a chocolate trifle so dark and rich that the new emperor’s chocolatier sat down upon the steps of his great golden kitchen and wept into his truffle-dusted mustache. So it was that when my father found himself in possession of a daughter, he cut her corners and measured her sweetness with no less precision than he used in his candies.
My breakfast plate was clear, hard butterscotch, full of oven-bubbles. I ate my soft-boiled marzipan egg gingerly, tapping its little cap with a toffee-hammer. The yolk within was a lemony syrup that dribbled out into my egg-cup. I drank chocolate in a black vanilla-bean mug. But I ate sugared plums with a fork of sparrow bones; the marrow left salt in the fruit and the strange, thick taste of a thing once alive in all that sugar. When I asked my father why I should taste these bones along with the sweetness of the candied plums, he told me very seriously that I must always remember that sugar was once alive. It grew tall and green and hard as my own knuckles in a far-away place, under a red sun that burned on the face of the sea. I must always remember that children just like me cut it down and crushed it up with tan and strong hands, and that their sweat, which gave me my sugar, tasted also of salt.
“If you forget that red sun and those long, green stalks, then you are not truly a confectioner, you understand nothing about candy but that it tastes good and is colorful—and these things a pig can tell, too. We are the angels of the cane, we are oven-magicians, but if you would rather be a pig snuffling in the leaves—”
“No, Papa.”
“Well then, eat your plums, magician of my heart.”
And so I did, and the tang of marrow in the sugar-meat was rich and disturbing and sweet.
Often I would ask my father where my mother had gone, if she had not liked her fork of sparrow bones, or if she had not wanted to eat marzipan eggs every day. These were the only complaints I could think of. My father ruffled my hair with his sticky hand and said:
“One morning, fine as milk, when I lived in Vienna and reclined on turquoise cushions with the empress licking my fingers for one taste of my sweets, I went walking past the city shops, my golden cane cracking on the cobbles, peering into their frosted windows and listening to the silver bells strung from the doors. In the window of a competitor who hardly deserved the name, being but a poor maker of trifles which would hardly satisfy a duchess, I saw the loveliest little crystal jar. It was as intricately cut as a diamond and full of the purest sugar I have ever seen. The little shopkeeper, bent with decades of hunching over trays of chocolate, smiled at me with few enough teeth and cried:
‘Alonzo! I see you have cast your discerning gaze upon my little vial of sugar! I assure you it is the finest of all the sugars ever made, rendered from the tallest cane in the isles by a fortunate virgin snatched at the last moment from the frothing red mouth of her volcano! It was then blanched to the snowy shade you see in a bath of lion’s milk and ground to sweetest dust with a pearl pestle, and finally poured into a jar made from the glass of three church windows. I am no emperor’s darling, but in this I exceed you at last!’
The little man did a shambling dance of joy, to my disgust. But I poured out coins onto his scale until his eyes gleamed wet with longing, and took that little jar away with me.” My father pinched my chin affectionately. “I hurried back home, boiled the sugar with costly dyes and other secret things, and poured it into a Constanze-shaped mold, slid it into the oven, and out you came in an hour or two, eyes shining like caramels!”
My father laughed when I pulled his ear and told him not to tease me, that every girl has a mother, and an oven is no proper mother! He gave me a slice of honeycomb, and shooed me into the garden, where raspberries grew along the white gate.
And thus I grew up. I ate my egg every morning, and licked the yolk from my lips. I ate my plums with my bone fork, and thought very carefully about the tall cane under the red sun. I scrubbed my pillow from my cheeks until they were quite pink. Every old woman in the village remarked on how much I resembled the little ivory cameos of the emperor, the same delicate nose, high brow, thick red hair. I begged my father to let me go to Vienna, as he had done when he was a boy. After all, I was far from a dense child. I had my suspicions—I wanted to see the emperor. I wanted to hear the violas playing in white halls with green and rose checkered floors. I wanted to ride a horse with long brown reins. I wanted to taste radishes and carrots and potatoes, even a chicken, even a fish on a plate of real porcelain, with no oven-bubbles in it.
“Why did we leave Vienna, Papa?” I cried, over our supper of marshmallow crèmes and caramel cakes. “I could have learned to play the flute there; I could have worn a wig like spun sugar. You learned these things—why may I not?”
My father’s face reddened and darkened all at once, and he gripped the sides of the butcher’s board where he cut caramel into bricks. “I learned to prefer sugar to white curls,” he growled, “and peppermints to piccolos, and cherry creams to the emperor. You will learn this, too, Constanze.” He cleared his throat. “It is an important thing to know.”
I bent myself to the lesson. I learned how to test my father’s syrups by dropping them into silver pots of cold water. By the time I was sixteen I hardly needed to do it, I could sense the hard crack of finished candy, feel the brittle snap prickling the hairs of my neck. My fingers were red with so many crushed berries; my palms were dry and crackling with the pale and scratchy wrapping papers we used for penny sweets. I was a good girl. By the time my father gave me the dress, I was a better confectioner than he, though he would never admit it. It was almost like magic, the way c
andies would form, glistening and impossibly colorful, under my hands.
It was very bright that morning. The light came through the window panes like butterscotch plates. When I came into the kitchen, there was no egg on the table, no toffee-hammer, no chocolate in a sweet black cup. Instead, lying over the cold oven like a cake waiting to be iced, was a dress. It was the color of ink, tiered and layered like the ones Viennese ladies wore in my dreams, floating blue to the floor, dusted with diamonds that caught the morning light and flashed cheerfully.
“Oh, Papa! Where would I wear a thing like that?”
My father smiled broadly, but the corners of his smile were wilted and sad.
“Vienna,” he said. “The court. I thought you wanted to go, to wear a wig, to hear a flute?”
He helped me on with the dress, and as he cinched in my waist and lifted my red hair from bare shoulders, I realized that the dress was made of hard blue sugar and thousands of blueberry skins stitched together with syrupy thread. The diamonds were lumps of crystal candy, still a bit sticky, and at the waist were icing flowers in a white cascade. Nothing of that dress was not sweet, was not sugar, was not my father’s trade and mine.
Vienna looked like a Christmas cake we had once made for a baroness: all hard, white curls and creases and carvings, like someone had draped the city in vanilla cream. There were brown horses, and brown carriages attached to them. In the emperor’s palace, where my father walked as though he had built it, there were green and rose checkered floors, and violas playing somewhere far off. My father took my hand and led me to a room which was harder and whiter than all the rest, where the emperor and the emperor sat frowning on terrible silver thrones of sharpened filigree, like two demons on their wedding day. I gasped, and shrank behind my father, the indigo train of my dress showing so dark against the floor. I could not hope to hide from those awful royal eyes.
“Why have you brought us this thing, Alonzo?” barked the emperor, who had a short blond mustache and copper buttons running down his chest. “This thing which bears such a resemblance to our wife? Do you insult us by dragging this reminder of your crimes and hers across our floor like a dust broom?”
The emperor blushed deeply, her skin going the same shade as her hair, the same shade as my hair. My father clenched his teeth.
“I told you then, when you loved my chocolates above all things, that I did not touch her, that I loved her as a man loves God, not as he loves a woman.”
“Yet you come back, begging to return to my grace, towing a child who is a mirror of her! This is obscene, Alonzo!”
My father’s face broke open, pleading. It was terrible to see him so. I clutched my icing flowers, confused and frightened.
“But she is not my child! She is not the emperor’s child! She is the greatest thing I have ever created, the greatest of all things I have baked in my oven. I have brought her to show you what I may do in your name, for your grace, if you will look on me with love again, if you will give me your favor once more. If you will let me come back to the city, to my home.”
I gaped, and tears filled my eyes. My father drew a little silver icing-spade from his belt and started toward me. I cried out and my voice echoed in the hard, white hall like a sparrow cut into a fork. I cringed, but my father gripped my arms tight as a tureen’s handles, and his eyes were wide and wet. He pushed me to my knees on the emperor’s polished floor, and the two monarchs watched impassively as I wept in my beautiful blue dress, though the emperor let a pale hand flutter to her throat. My father put the spade to my neck and scraped it up, across my skin, like a barber giving a young man his first shave.
A shower of sugar fell glittering across my chest.
“I never lied to you, Constanze,” he murmured in my ear.
He pierced my cheek with the tip of the spade, and blood trickled down my chin, over my lips. It tasted like raspberries.
“Look at her, your majesty. She is nothing but sugar, nothing but candy, through and through. I made her in my own oven. I raised her up. Now she is grown—and so beautiful! Look at her cinnamon hair, her marzipan skin, her tears of sugar and salt! And you may have her, you may have the greatest confection made on this earth, if you will but let me come home, and make you chocolates as I used to, and put your hand to my shoulder in friendship again.”
The emperor rose from her throne and walked toward me, like a mirror gliding on a hidden track, so like me she was, though her gown was golden, and its train longer than the hall. She looked at me, her gaze pointed and deep, but did not seem to hear my sobbing, or see my tears. She put her hand to my bleeding cheek, and tasted the blood on her palm, daintily, with the tip of her tongue.
“She looks so much like me, Alonzo. It is a strange thing to see.”
My father flushed. “I was lonely,” he whispered. “And perhaps a man may be forgiven for casting a doll’s face in the image of God.”
I was kept in the kitchens, hung up on the wall like a copper pot, or a length of garlic. Every day a cook would clip my fingernails to sweeten the emperor’s coffee, or cut off a curl of my scarlet hair to spice the Easter cakes of the emperor’s first child—a boy with brown eyes like my father’s. Sometimes, the head cook would lance my cheek carefully and collect the scarlet syrup in a hard white cup. Once, they plucked my eyelashes, ever so gently, for a licorice comfit the emperor’ new daughter craved. They were kind enough to ice my lids between plucking.
They tried not to cause me any pain. Cooks and confectioners are not wicked creatures by nature, and the younger kitchen girls were disturbed by the shape of me hanging there, toes pointed at the oven. Eventually, they grew accustomed to it, and I was no more strange to them than a shaker of salt or a pepper-mill. My dress sagged and browned, as blueberry skins will do, and fell away. A kind little boy who scrubbed the floors brought me a coarse black dress from his mother’s closet. It was made of wool, real wool, from a sheep and not an oven. They fed me radishes and carrots and potatoes, and sometimes chicken, sometimes even fish, on a plate of real porcelain, with no heat-bubbles in it, none at all.
I grew old on that wall, my marzipan-skin withered and wrinkled no less than flesh, helped along by lancings and scrapings and trimmings. My hair turned white and fell out, eagerly collected. As I grew old, I was told that the emperor liked the taste of my hair better and better, and soon I was bald.
But emperors die, and so do fathers. Both of these occurred in their way, and when at last the emperor died, there was no one to remember that the source of the palace sugar was not a far off isle, under a red sun that burned on the face of the sea. On the wall, I thought of that red sun often, and the children cutting cane, and the taste of the bird’s marrow deep in my plum. That same kind floor-scrubber, grown up and promoted to butler, cut me down when my bones were brittle, and touched my shorn hair gently. But he did not apologize. How could he? How many cakes and teas had he tasted which were sweetened by me?
I ran from the palace in the night, as much as I could run, an old, scraped-out crone, a witch in a black dress stumbling across the city and through, across and out. I kept running and running, my sugar-body burning and shrieking with disuse. I ran past the hard white streets and past the villages where I had been a child who knew nothing of Vienna, into the woods, into the black forest with the creeping loam and nothing sweet for miles. Only there did I stop, panting, my spiced breath fogging in the air. There were great dark green boughs arching over me, pine and larch and oak. I sank down to the earth, wrung dry of weeping, safe and far from anything hard, anything white, anything with accusing eyes and a throne like a demon’s wedding. No one would scrape me for teatime again. No one would touch me again. I put my hands to my head and stared up at the stars though the leaves. It was quiet, at last, quiet, and dark. I curled up on the leaves and slept.
When I woke, I was cold. I shivered. I needed more than a black dress to cover me. I would not go back, not to any place which had known me, not to Vienna, not to a village without
a candy-maker. I would not hang a sign over a door and feed sweets to children. I would stay, in the dark, under the green. And so I needed a house. But I knew nothing of houses. I was not a bricklayer or a thatcher. I did not know how to make a chimney. I did not know how to make a door-hinge. I did not know how to stitch curtains.
But I knew how to make candy.
I went begging in the villages, a harmless old crone—was it odd that she asked for sugar and not for coins? Certainly. Did they think it mad that she begged for berries and liquors and cocoa, but never alms? Of course. But the elderly are strange and their ways inexplicable to the young. I collected, just as they had done from me all my years on the wall, and my hair grew. I went to my place in the forest, under the black and the boughs, and I poured a foundation of caramel. I raised up thick, brown gingerbread walls, with cinnamon for wattle and marshmallow for daub. Hard-crack windows clear as the morning air, a smoking licorice chimney, stairs of peanut brittle and carpets of red taffy, a peppermint bathtub. And a great black oven, all of blackened, burnt sugar, with a yellow flame within. Gumdrops studded my house like jewels, and a little path of molasses ran liquid and dark from my door. And when my hair had grown long enough, I thatched my roof with cinnamon strands.
It had such a delicate architecture, my house, that I baked and built. It was as delicately made as I had been. I thought of my father all the while, and the red sun on waving green cane. I thought of him while I built my pastry-table, and I thought of him while I built my gingerbread floors. I hated and loved him in turns, as witches will do, for our hearts are strange and inexplicable. He had never come to see me on the wall, even once. I could not understand it. But I made my caramel bricks and I rolled out sheets of toffee onto my bed, and I told his ghost that I was a good girl, I had always been a good girl, even on the wall.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 27
