Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing

by Delia Sherman, Theodora Goss

  I arrive in my loincloth and bow to the nuns. They shout prayers to God to strike me with a holy bolt.

  Giulio hobbles up on his crutch with heaving breath, berries of sweat rolling down his chest. Nico waves hello.

  "This cow smells rather ripe,” I say. “Are you sure you want me to bring it to life?"

  "No!” screech the nuns. “No, Giulio, don't let him! He is the servant of Satan!"

  "Yes,” wheezes Giulio, sinking down beside God on the fallen stone. The squirrel bites into the acorn's bitter meat and chitters.

  I withdraw a small pouch from an unsanitary place among the limited folds of my garment. I open it up, and tip out some fine yellow powder into my palm. This I sprinkle on the corpse.

  "What is that powder?” Giulio asks.

  "Yellow curry,” I say, “imported from Ind by my mother long ago."

  "Is it magic?"

  "No."

  As the yellow curry settles, the dead cow's wrinkled, sagging flesh wrinkles and sags further still. Her bones crumble; her big, liquid eyes shrink away into dry dust and soon she's no more than a pile of earth. A thicket of thorns shoots up out of it, sprouting yellow roses.

  "Dio mio!” the nuns exclaim, crossing themselves.

  "A miracle!” cries Nico.

  "What the hell good is that?” demands Giulio. “Now we'll just have to weed it again!"

  "It's the best I can do,” I try to explain.

  "I knew it!” Giulio shouts. “He's a fraud! I knew from the start!"

  "I am not,” I protest. “I did as you asked: I brought her to life. Just not the same kind."

  "You couldn't at least have made something to eat?"

  "It's a matter of faith—of belief. I can only get roses.” I admit I am not the greatest Sorcerer this village has seen. After all, Aquinas himself dwelt here for a time. But I do what I must.

  "Ha!” cries Mother Concetta. “You see, you nasty boy? You mess around with God and the Devil, you see what you get!” She lifts her yardstick. Nico cringes. She slaps Giulio hard on the wrist.

  "Ai!” wails Giulio. “God damn it!"

  "Blasphemy!” Mother Concetta whacks him again.

  Giulio covers his mouth with his arm. Huge tears roll down his cheeks.

  Thunder rumbles over Fecondita. The first few drops of rain come down the size of pomegranates, smashing craters into the soft, black earth. The ground squirrel clamps its teeth on its nut and scurries off home—but God waits. So shall we.

  "What are all of you doing there trampling my field?” A woman wearing a squash-yellow dress and a bright purple scarf on her head comes along the Roman Road from Torino, leading a giant black bull.

  "Mama!” says Nico, running to give her a hug. “We are using the Sorcerer's magic curry to bring Grazia back to life!"

  "Isn't that nice, Nico? But you see, we don't need Grazia anymore.” The bull bellows greeting, nodding its blunted horns. “His name is Ferdinando. I bought him in Torino, with the money from selling my wig. So now you can all go home."

  "Mama, your wig? But your wig was your favorite thing in the world!"

  "I know, Nico.” She pats his head. “But we needed a bull. And besides, I am getting too old for such things."

  Giulio hobbles forward, cradling his wounded wrist to his chest. “You went to Torino? But Mama, the war! You weren't killed?"

  "Does it look like I was killed, Giulio, you fool? The war is over. It has been for years."

  Now the skies open up. The nuns shriek and run off towards the convent, whispering hosannas for fear of drowning. The swallows flit out of their bathroom window to swing the shutters closed. Ferdinando the bull grunts and pulls at his rope. Nico tries to shield his mother with his body.

  "And now, my good boys,” she announces, putting an arm around each, “I think we had better go home."

  "Not yet!” I, the Sorcerer, shout, already soaking, holding my loincloth to keep it from slipping. A wrack of thunder tears the sky; the ground shudders as God protests on my behalf. “Not yet. Our bargain isn't finished, Giulio."

  "And who is this?” asks Signora Parrucca.

  "Mama, this is the Sorcerer Sancto."

  "The Sorcerer! WHAT?” She drops the bull's rope, wrests Giulio's crutch from under his arm and advances, swinging. “Back! Back to your forest, before you get a black eye! Stay away from my boys. And quit helping my rats!"

  "Moo,” says Ferdinando, and lumbers away up the oxcart path.

  "Wait, Mama!” Nico cries. “He isn't evil! He works miracles. See? He made these roses grow from Grazia's corpse."

  "Well, in that case—.—.—.” Signora Parrucca picks one. “How lovely! See how it matches my dress!” She tucks it behind her ear. “What's this he says about a bargain, Giulio?"

  "I offered to be his apprentice, but he turned out a fraud and a coward. Give me my crutch. I'll hit him for you."

  She cuffs him. “Insensato! Four years of school with those nuns, and now this. The next time I want a field plowed, I'm putting your brother in charge!” She pokes me with Giulio's stick. “What have you to say for all this?"

  "Signora, I vowed to prove my power to bring Grazia back to life. This I have achieved."

  "You have not!” shouts Giulio. The Signora shushes him.

  "I vowed also that Nico would be able to sow your field and grow corn. This I have not."

  "What do you mean, Stregoné Sancto? Of course he can sow the field. What do you think I bought Ferdinando for?"

  "He can, with Ferdinando's help. But my wish is that he do more. Signora Parrucca, have you got any spices?"

  She looks into the corners of her apron pocket. “Let's see. Some salt. Some ground pepper. What is this? Oregano?"

  "Which do you like best, Nico?"

  "The pepper, Sorcerer!"

  "The pepper—give him a pinch of that. Careful not to wet it. Now, Nico. There is nothing magical or special about that pinch of pepper—save that God is in it, just as He is in this yellow curry, these raindrops, and every rock and tree, every munny-grape-filled bathtub, rat-infested cellar and empty campanile in all of Fecondita. Do you believe it?"

  "Of course! God is everywhere! Everyone knows that!"

  "Not everyone, Nico."

  I make each of the others take a bit of spice. The Signora picks oregano. Giulio scowls and chooses the salt.

  "Now sprinkle it over the field. You first, Signora."

  She spills the oregano out of her fingers. Several budding dandelions at her feet shoot up into flower, then spill out into fuzzy balls of seed. A gust from the storm, and a thousand seeds burst into the air and scatter, each one then knocked to the earth by a falling drop of rain. A thousand little sprouts pop up across the field.

  Signora Parucca covers her mouth. Giulio growls.

  "Your turn, my apprentice."

  Giulio scatters his salt. He grinds it into the dirt with the heel of his withered foot. Nothing happens. The weeds don't even wilt.

  "You see? I told you He had it out for us, Nico.” Giulio snatches his crutch from his mama and shakes it at the clouds. “If God is hiding in every rock and tree, it is only the better to laugh when we stumble over a root!"

  Except for another rumble of thunder, God ignores him. I pat Giulio's shoulder, and say to his brother: “Now, Nico."

  Nico throws his pinch of pepper in the air. It catches the storm wind just right, somehow dodging the raindrops, spreading wide across the last tilled field that remains in Fecondita, settling like ashes to the rich, black earth.

  Now the ground really does begin to shake. Giulio drops his crutch. He and Signora Parrucca cling to each other to keep from falling. Ferdinando paws and snorts. I don't bother to resist, but fall on my back—and the long, green stalks of new corn that arise from the black, rumbling earth spring up around me, beneath me, lifting me into the air, as high as a man, then higher. Corn fills the field, all the way from the broken cobbles of the Roman Road to the packed earth of the oxcart path, from th
e forest edge with its hundred flailing limbs to the fallen standing stone. It grows so fast and thick that when Ferdinando charges, the shoots grow back even as he tramples them, and at last leave him caught, mooing forlornly, half a dozen feet above the ground. And Nico the Simpleton, now the Sorcerer, dances round and round it all, laughing like a drunken madman.

  I laugh too—and not from madness. You see, it was not an apprentice that I sought, but a replacement.

  On the morning after the rain, the drops of dew glisten like cherries on the fat husks of the corn. Giulio and I reach the end of the oxcart path and turn north, along the Roman Road that leads to Torino, and beyond it Milan, and Padova, and the rest of the world. We leave Fecondita as we would have wished seven years ago—not as soldiers, off to die, but as scholars, seekers of wisdom. God and a flock of swallows follow us almost to the border.

  Giulio the cripple walks without a crutch; his brother Nico cured him. And I, mere Cecilio Sancto again, walk without fear—for I know the war is over, and Fecondita now has a greater protector. Nico is Sorcerer now.

  And that, my friends, is the real reason why neither you nor I shall ever again find Fecondita. Unless it is his will.

  Thank God for fools and cripples.

  * * * *

  I wrote “The Utter Proximity of God” in the midst of a war between my ambitions and the expectations of genre, which occurred at the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in 2005. The peace I found came from filling my head with early Calvino and late García Márquez. What was it about the magic realists? For me, they offered a way to bring back to the fantastic the experience of the sublime. The more “magical” a fiction becomes, the duller our capacity for wonder. Fantasies keep getting bigger; augmented reality encroaches on the real. I wanted a way to break that cycle. Magic realism gives me an escape: a less constricting set of tropes, in whose context the notion of parable doesn't seem quite so tired, and a fiction of ideas not so laughable: a means to find God, to find magic, in something as simple as a field of weeds.

  Michael J. DeLuca

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Alternate Anxieties

  Karen Jordan Allen

  mortal anxiety: anxiety based in the fear of death mortal anxiety: anxiety rooted in/stemming from the uncertainty of life rooted, stemming—significance of organic metaphors?

  Possible Book Titles:

  Mortal Anxiety by Katherine Smith

  The Anxiety of Mortality by Katherine Smith

  BIO (or introduction?)

  Katherine Smith's life has been profoundly affected by mortal anxiety. She traces this back to the age of four, when the family beagle broke its leash while Katherine's mother was walking it. The dog ran in front of a dump truck and was flattened. The family got another dog, a docile and middle-aged shelter mutt, but thereafter Katherine gave herself the job of making sure the leash was in good repair and properly fastened before the dog got out the door. She didn't trust her mother, who had already proved herself incompetent in Katherine's eyes; she didn't trust her father, who claimed not to be a “dog person” and had grumbled about the new dog; and certainly her little brother, who was only one-and-a-half, couldn't be expected to keep the family dog safe. Thus Katherine appointed herself: She Who Makes Sure Bad Things Don't Happen.

  But her anxiety was such that even when she grew old enough to walk the dog, she refused, because she did not think she could bear the pain if something happened to the dog while she was on the responsible end of the leash. Still, she inspected the leash and collar every time her mother (or father, or, later, her brother) took the dog for a walk. At least, she thought, if the dog gets away and gets hurt, it won't be my fault. I've done all I can.

  This continued through a succession of family dogs.

  mortal anxiety comes from:

  1. the impossibility of knowing whether from moment to moment we (or our loved ones) shall continue to exist—how can I relax and wash dishes, knowing that I could die any moment of a burst brain aneurysm, or that a stray undetected asteroid could kill me and most other life on Earth, or that one day the Earth will burn to cinders in the death throes of the Sun?

  —note micro-concerns (personal death) vs. macro-concerns (fate of the Earth/Universe)

  2. the impossibility of knowing when the simplest of daily choices (e.g. to leave the house at 4:04 instead of 4:03 or 4:05) is a life-or-death decision—I could die in a car accident at the treacherous Outer Ave. blinking light at 4:08 that I might have missed at 4:07 or 4:09

  —so how do I/we know when to leave the house? (consider relationship to agoraphobia)

  Better title: Living with Life's Great Impossibilities by Katerina Smythe could choice of title could be a life-or-death decision?

  —I could get up from this chair now and fall down the stairs and break my neck, whereas if I ponder titles for five seconds longer I might successfully negotiate the stairs to make a cup of coffee—likely both trips will be safe; 9,999 times out of 10,000, I won't fall, but who knows when that 10,000th time will be?

  (opening chapter: “Lessons from a Dead Squirrel")

  A TRUE ANECDOTE

  One Thursday morning the squirrel with the broken tail, surely the same that frolicked for weeks in my back yard, dove under my Honda's right front tire as I hurried to Deer Run Community College to give a lecture on apocalypticism to my World Religions class. The squirrel met its personal apocalypse with a sickening thump. I said “oh!” in a pained voice, and glanced into my rearview mirror, hoping that the gray lump on the pavement had suffered no mortal injury, and after a stunned moment would leap up and run into Mrs. Healy's lilac bushes. But no. I could see, even as they receded in the distance, four little paws, motionless, straight up in the air.

  If only I had taken my usual route to work. Normally I pulled out from my driveway and turned right, but this morning a large semi-trailer had filled most of the street in that direction, and while I likely could have gotten by it, I decided instead to go left and around the block, and I was directly opposite my own house (though with three houses and their yards between) when the doomed squirrel threw itself under my radials.

  The bright sunlight that had so lifted my spirits when I stepped out of the house suddenly fell flat and harsh, illuminating both happiness and tragedy with indifference. If I had taken my usual route, the squirrel would still be frolicking, I would still be smiling to the lively Haydn sonata playing on public radio, and all would be well in my world. At least as well as it ever was. But the event shadowed my day.

  Just as the beagle's escape forever shadowed my life.

  the eternal moment the moment out of time when the universe held its breath when the universe stopped

  definition of word to be coined: that pause identified only in retrospect, immediately before the life-altering/ending event, the point or fulcrum upon which all turns, before the phone call, the knock on the door, the breaking of the leash, the leap of a squirrel, when one feels certain that the disaster could have been averted had one just been alert enough to perceive that moment and turn it aside

  BIO/INTRO cont'd.

  Years later Katherine would awaken in the middle of the night, remembering the moment when the beagle strained at the leash, just before the leash snapped and the dog leapt away. That she could not go back and fix the leash, stop the disaster, change the story, seemed not only unfair but wrong—as if she had been shoved in error into a fake world, a counterfeit world, a world that was a mistake. Somewhere, somehow, she thought, the dog must still be alive and happy.

  the alternate universe theory: in some science fiction (and some science), it is posited that events may have more than one outcome, with each outcome spinning off its own universe, so that millions of universes are generated each day; perhaps the squirrel with the broken tail and/or the flattened beagle frolic still in some of those universes—equally possible: I lie dead, having noticed the squirrel a half-second earlier, twisted my steering wheel to avoid it, and rammed myse
lf into a tree am I in an “alternate” universe? alternate to what?

  A DISTRACTION/DISLOCATION

  Mother called, told me to sit down. “They” found a lump (I didn't even know she was going for her mammogram); “they're” going to do a biopsy. But it's small, don't worry, it's a long way from Maine to California, it would be expensive. Your father and brother and his wife are all here, they'll look after me, I'll be fine. (But what about me? I'm not fine with this at all, I want to be there. No, that's not true, I don't want to be there, I don't want to be in this universe. But if I have to be, I want to be there, not here, not alone, waiting.)

  the moment: there it was, before I answered the phone, distracted, absorbed in making my coffee, contemplating my book

  I might have turned it aside, but I missed it—what if I determine to be alert to those moments, those fulcrum moments (ah! a name!), those pauses in existence before the universe bifurcates, and bifurcates again?

  eternal bifurcations eternal, infinite bifurcations

  take this universe back, please, I would like another—

  (chapter title: “The Fulcrum Moment")

  ANOTHER MOMENT MISSED

  At the Goodwill store the skirts are jammed so tightly I can hardly wedge my hand between them. The metal skirt clips on the hangers catch on one another, locking all the skirts into a long, solid row. I wonder who hangs them, how they think customers can possibly browse with pleasure when they risk physical injury just getting the damn clothes off the rack.

  Irritated, but determined not to be defeated, I claw at the hangers with both hands and force open a few inches of space. I jam my elbow against the skirts on the left and check the size of one on the right, a pretty thing of peach-colored chiffon. Yes, a 10. Just the thing to match a jacket I found here last week.

  Then I see the blood well up under a flap of skin on my right index finger. It oozes out, trickles down my nail, and hangs perilously, a swelling crimson droplet.