Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  But I didn’t want to be in love. I knew what that meant. Sacrifice. Obligation. Perpetuation. Two people pair up and they have to know who they are: forever, unchangeable, as permanent as a photograph, as history.

  Sunshine asked me to move in. Sunshine made room in the flat for me. I brought in my photographs, my imager, my set of recording disks, my gendered wardrobes, my set of photography books, gender-theory books, and sexual evolution books. I carved out my own little corner of Sunshine’s world.

  Sunshine went to jujitsu class twice a week and painted four times a week. Whenever Sunshine was gone, I went through the painting studio in the flat’s spare bedroom. I liked to touch the brushes and dabble my fingers in the paint. I liked handling the things Sunshine had held. The smell of that room always reminded me of Sunshine: wet paint, fresh canvas, watered down color. The paint drippings on the floor made their own unique Sunshine portrait. Whenever I missed my lover I would move quietly through that room, breathing in the scent of Sunshine.

  The government sent me out every year, usually from high winter or low spring to low autumn, which meant that I only spent about half of every year with Sunshine. Sunshine spent odd moments on the Great Work, the one I always heard about when I came back, the one that gave a new pattern to the paint-drippings portrait on the uncovered studio floor. The Work itself, though, Sunshine always spirited away before I came home, and switched to working on smaller projects: half-covered canvases smeared in orange and lavender, smudged photographs and small portraits framed in elegant script. I searched the studio for clues of the larger piece, but found nothing unusual about the new pattern on the floor but the slow, sensual silver arcs of spattered paint by the door.

  So I ignored the Work. Sunshine did not speak much of it in our three years together, and I never brought it up. I didn’t see a need to. There were always other projects, always different conversations.

  “Do you believe being perpetually sexed really means you know who you are?” Sunshine asked me one night after we’d made love. I’d gotten back from another terrible historical imaging in a muddy town called Root whose elders quietly told me they did not believe in “unnecessary technologies”—like plumbing. I’d found myself shivering in an outhouse at fourteen in the morning, wishing I was home. Here. With Sunshine.

  Sunshine and I lay side by side, blankets bunched up around our feet. Our fingers touched.

  “Of course,” I said. “Only perpetuals are part of the historical landscape. Perpetualism and identity precede imaging.”

  Sunshine sighed. He was male that night, and he’d lost weight since I’d last seen him. Blue and silver paint stained his fingertips.

  “You think your friends are waiting to be perpetual, or do they like being like they are, like the eight seasons, cyclical, always changing, always the same?” Sunshine asked.

  “They aren’t the same,” I said, “except Rule. Queer. Changeless.”

  “But they are,” Sunshine said. “Believing that being perpetual precedes identity, you’d be arguing that your friends change identity every night.”

  “Why are you asking?”

  Sunshine toyed with the edge of my pillowcase. “Something I’ve been thinking about. About images and identity. Honestly, Cue, if you were different every time you swapped, I’d be living with two different people. You’re always the same.”

  I sat up, offended. “This is—”

  “Aren’t I always the same?” Sunshine asked.

  “You do it on purpose.”

  “Have you ever dressed like a woman while you were a man?” Sunshine asked.

  “Only with you,” I said.

  “In public?”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “Too political for you?”

  “I just—”

  “I love you.”

  I looked over at him. He had never told me that before.

  “I love you no matter what sex you are,” Sunshine said, “and that changes things.”

  “Let’s not—”

  “I want us to be a couple.”

  I stayed silent for a long while. Then, “I’m not ready to be perpetual.”

  “Let’s not be perpetual. Let’s be an adolescent couple, forever.”

  “You can’t use ‘adolescent’ and ‘couple’ in the same sentence,” I said.

  “I want to be bound to you. Just you.”

  I reached over and took Sunshine’s hand. “Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

  Sunshine pulled his hand away. He stood up quietly, pulled on his robe. I heard the door to his studio close.

  Rule told me I was a fool.

  “You’re telling me a beautiful painter says you’re the love of their life and you blow them off? You’re stupider than Margin gives you credit for.”

  We were, of course, at the Madhattered. Page and Nib were male and female, respectively, arguing about whether or not Nib looked better in Page’s tutu than Page did, which technically wasn’t an appropriately gender-prescribed discussion. Margin was flirting with someone named after a kitchen appliance. Rule was drinking tarls.

  “I’ll never understand what a bright person like Sunshine sees in you,” Rule said. “You can be mewling. A lazy coward, when the mood suits you. Sunshine needs fire. Someone whose thinking works outside the perpetual.”

  I glanced over at Page and Nib and Margin. “You think any of us is ever going to be perpetual?”

  “No, Cue. I think we’re the lost children of history. Perpetually adolescent.”

  Sunshine remained male for almost four months: four seasons, half the year. He spent his nights in his studio. He locked it whenever he left.

  I received my government contract for the year, a detailed itinerary of little towns on the outskirts of the northern province, most of which hadn’t been photographed in almost a decade. I told Sunshine that I’d be leaving the next day. He said nothing. Something was slipping away.

  The day I left, Sunshine walked me to the silver tube of the train.

  “When you get back my project will be done,” he said.

  I nodded. I was female that day. The first town on my itinerary was Lilac, a last resting place for female queers. I wasn’t allowed to photograph the town, of course, because queers can’t legally formulate a self-willed gendered identity—and are therefore outside the realm of history. I was only going there to take a written census for the health authority.

  “I’ve been thinking about being a couple,” I said.

  Sunshine glanced up at me.

  “When I come back I can be perpetually female,” I said, “and you can be perpetually male. We’ll sign the government forms for—”

  Sunshine put his finger to my lips. “You don’t understand, Cue.” He kissed me. He left me.

  I called Sunshine every night, but the operator could never get a connection through. “No one’s picking up the receiver,” the operator said.

  I photographed four women in Evergreen and thirty-two men in Beech. In Coriander, a bridge washed out, and eight men and twelve women died before I could photograph them, erasing them from history forever. I met three men named Stove who took me out for tarls and toast. I slept with a woman named Cup after I photographed her nude, surrounded by her twelve perpetually sexed children.

  “It’s so good to see them all as real people,” she told me.

  I went by mule and rickshaw and carriage and steam car. A town named Magnolia, a blond woman named Comb. A stir of queer men outside a pub in Fern being given handouts and then beaten away with sticks. Mothers now perpetually male, fathers now perpetually female. Neuter children plucking at my imager, tugging at my sleeves. The black, lined face of a person named Ripple whose sex I never knew, because all I saw was the face and hands, gesturing for the imager through the folds of a black robe. Eighteen women in Hyacinth wearing crimson headbands. Two nude men in Willow with bodies lean and sinewy as whips. A man named Rubble. A woman named Stone.

  When I got back to the
train line it was already low autumn, and as the train curled toward the city, the rain started, slow and steady, streaming past my windowpane in ever-changing rivulets. Different patterns, different paths, but always rain.

  I climbed the stairs to the flat Sunshine and I shared, but there were no lights on. I unlocked the door and palmed on the light.

  Sunshine’s paintings were gone. All of Sunshine’s things were gone. I walked slowly through the flat, the living space, our bedroom. Her books were gone, his black suits, her red tutu, the silver scarf I gave him for her birthday. I turned on the light in the studio. The room was bare. The floor had been scraped clean. White walls, white floor, an empty room looking out onto the cloud-heavy bay.

  I stood in the doorway, numb.

  The phone rang.

  I dropped my traveling case and ran to the living area, picked up the receiver.

  “Connected,” the operator said.

  “Sunshine!” I cried.

  “Fuck, no! Why aren’t you here?” Rule said.

  “What?”

  Margin’s voice crackled in through another line. “Sunshine’s opening is tonight! Why aren’t you here? He told you, didn’t she?”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Where else, fool, the Madhattered,” Rule said. “Get over here. You’re missing it!”

  “I’m coming,” I said, and dropped the receiver. The operator yelled at me. I darted down the stairs.

  The Madhattered was crowded, more crowded than it had ever been. Adolescents and perpetuals vied for space. Three extra bartenders tossed drinks. Margin wore a black tunic and four-inch green heels.

  Rule dressed in a snazzy suit with a blue kerchief. Page wore a silver tutu. Nib wore a gold tunic and thigh-high boots. I hadn’t had time to dress up. I wasn’t even sure what sex I was.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  Rule pulled me up to the table. Page and Nib and Margin all leaned in. Rule pointed to the open gallery doors by the bar. “We’ve been in. You have to see it, Cue. This is a good crowd, but it won’t last.”

  “Why not? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Go,” Margin said.

  I pushed my way to the gallery, through the mass of tutus and tunics. In the first room were half a dozen of Sunshine’s paintings, all of which I’d already seen, in one form or another. Sunshine wasn’t there. The second gallery, behind the first, was more crowded, and more people were talking in there, a low rumble of voices. I squeezed my way past the crowd. Someone elbowed me. A drink spilled across the front of my blouse. There was only one work in there, made up of seven canvases. A little rope cordoned it off from the press of people. I was forced up against the rope. I gazed at the paintings, only— they weren’t really paintings.

  They had begun as photographs. Seven canvases. Sunshine and a faceless partner. But when Sunshine added paint, they merged into something else.

  I saw seven paintings arranged vertically along the far wall, two-by-two, progressing closer to one another as they moved inward to frame the final painting mounted below them. The images were of Sunshine, altered photographs of Sunshine’s unmistakable form:

  That final image, that blended image, I realized, was Sunshine, dancing. Just Sunshine; not male, not female, just the person I loved, sexless, genderless, Liquid Sunshine, painting Sunshine’s past, present, future.

  Sunshine had created Sunshine, carved a history of this one image, this one self. No imagers, no photographers. Just Sunshine, painting over the image that photographers like me would have set down as truth. Remaking it.

  I stared. For how long I stared I don’t know. At some point I realized my cheeks were wet. I wiped at my face. My tears.

  A hand on my shoulder.

  I turned.

  Sunshine smiled. “You like it?” she asked.

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “You understand,” she said.

  I understood. I remembered the little villages, the rain on the train window. I remembered Ripple beckoning to me in black robes. Margin and Page, Nib and Rule. My friends, always changing, cyclical, like the seasons, always the same.

  “I wouldn’t have taken those photographs you altered,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I still love you for it.”

  She smiled again. Turned. The stir of people pulled her away.

  I could have reached for her. My fingers and hers, twining together, a merging, too late, of two bodies, two people, just us, not perpetual, not sexed, just people.

  But I did not reach out. I wanted to watch her go, a ripple through the wave of bodies; there, then lost, adrift and then swallowed.

  I went back to the flat. I sat down on the floor of the empty studio and cried.

  Liquid Sunshine—I always thought of the piece that way—drew attention from government authorities and moral purists. Rule told me three months later that Sunshine had disappeared after an exhibition in a neighboring city, Lavender.

  I sat up for three nights wondering if it would have been different if I had reached out for Sunshine’s hand that night, if I had told Sunshine that, I, too am infinitely malleable, that I, too, am capable of painting my own past and future, creating my own image. But I would have been lying to the one person I loved. And to myself.

  Rule and Margin became a perpetual couple. Margin bore three children. Page and Nib never settled, and were lost to history. I have no images of Sunshine but memory. They are fewer and fewer these days, often mixed with more recent faces, freckled women in purple tutus in Flower, a blond man in Lotus named Glass, three brown neuter children in Wisteria with paint-stained fingers. I signed a permanent government contract. I don’t come back to the city much. I don’t like to. It reminds me of my adolescence. I am perpetually female now, and every year I ask for assignments further afield, census trips to remote queer villages. I ask for them because sometimes I think that the farther I go from the city, the farther I will get from Sunshine . . . the farther I will get from myself.

  I longed to create my own perpetual identity for so long that I never stopped to think that perhaps I would not like it when I discovered it. Sunshine was right: we all stay the same, there, in that place that is ourselves, the blending point of sexed identity, gendered existence, infinitely malleable. Sunshine knew that you could find that place where the malleable was your view of the world, your view of yourself, but I never found that. Maybe I don’t believe in it. But Sunshine did. Sunshine believed in everything.

  Even me.

  My Oracles at the End of the World

  So let’s say Macbeth was a post-apocalyptic warlord called Madden, and his right-hand man was a woman named Banan instead of Banquo? Still with me? Good. This one first showed up in a now defunct online magazine called The Boundless Realm back in 1998. It was the second fiction piece I ever published, and I got a whopping $5 for it. It’s the original Brutal Women story, and sorta set the scene for everything I’d write afterward.

  I gave birth to my boy along a barren stretch of the High Way near the King’s hold in Skall, twelve miles from the Hold at Inveress. I squatted in a dusty ditch as twilight neared, a time when spirits of the dead and dying roam free in search of unwilling hosts.

  I pulled on my tattered trousers - patched and bloodied so many times that I’ve lost track of which blood came from whom - and started my walk to Inveress with my son wrapped up in an old black tarp and bits of burlap. I would train him as I wished, I decided, with help from the best teacher of battle and survival I knew.

  The hold at Inveress is not like the King’s hold in Skall. It is not one of the old, burned out structures, built before the cataclysm when men loved their buildings tall and full of large windows. Inveress was built to defend. It resides on a rocky rise called Dunsinane Hill, about four miles from the black square of Birnam Glen.

  The gate’s small peeking portal swung inward, and a pair of sharp, frightened blue eyes peered out at me. My boy sucked contentedly at my breast, wrapped up secure
ly within the tarp. Warm and fed, he kept silent.

  The eyes continued to stare. For a brief moment, I thought perhaps my greeter had been stabbed in the back; his eyes remained so emotionless and still in their glistening. As I reached across my boy for my blade, the man croaked, “Mistress...?” as if it were a question. And, I suppose, it was. I did not look myself. Women do not carry babes at their breast.

  “Come now, get me your Master, the Thane of Glen,” I said. “He will not be pleased to know that his comrade Banan has been kept waiting.”

  The peeping portal snapped shut.

  The gate opened abruptly, and I almost dropped my boy for my blade.

  “Banan!” the figure cried. It was a voice deep and familiar. I had to dart from the doorway to keep the man from crushing my child in his embrace.

  “Clumsy, drunken brute,” I growled.

  The bright gleam - enhanced by much drink - in his eyes faded, and he looked down at me from beneath thick, furrowed brows. A hand strayed to his sword hilt, and I watched his form grow wary and alert.

  “I will ask only one favor of you in this lifetime,” I said. “I want you to train my boy. Here, in Inveress. I cannot raise a boy and command battles. You have servants and a Lady. I do not.”

  He glanced over at me where I stood, deep into the shadows next to the gate, the heavy tarp of burden in my arms, headband dangling from bruised, bloody fingers, the blood smearing crimson between my thighs.

  “Come in, friend Banan,” he said, voice soft, compassionate. I hated it. He made me feel like a flimsy, ill-bred woman; like a Lady.

  I spat at his feet. “Curse you, Madden,” I barked, and walked - and, I admit, painfully - into the hold at Inveress.

  If I would have known then what I was doing when I gave him my boy, when he accepted my plea, I would never have done it; but a woman goes half-mad when she has just birthed, and I did not think about his Lady. That was my greatest mistake. I did not consider his Lady.