Interfictions

by Delia Sherman

  Tiger, tiger, burning bright. The rain striped his orange sides with sullen smoke. He shook himself, irritable with damp, and stood upright, a cat-man with flowing robes and a turban that was all fringe and flame. He fussed with the set of his coat as he stalked fastidiously through the shaggy grass of the lawn toward my door. His knock was an impatient tattoo. I opened cautiously, thinking of the varnished doorframe and the dark timbers of the ceiling.

  "Madame.” He bowed himself inside, his clothes rustling like starched silk. He wore a scent like sandalwood and burning cedar. I don't know what he smelled when he sniffed the air. “You have had a visitor."

  He spoke as if he had a right to be offended, which put my hackles up. “Alain. A friend."

  "If he were a friend he would know better than to interrupt you at your work."

  "I was not working."

  "Why not?"

  I made an exasperated gesture, already fed up with his peremptory air. He changed his manner, bowed and rubbed his furry cheek against my hand.

  "Madame. Don't scold me, I beg you. I think only of you."

  Threads of smoke and steam rose about him, heady with the scent of dreams. The mutter of the rain outside blurred into the drowsy murmur of flames.

  "I won't scold,” I said, seduced by his warmth. “But—"

  "Say me no buts. Only hear me out, I pray.” The firecat sat opposite me in Ryan's chair, and smoke wove itself into braids and wreaths about the table and the room. “I ask for nothing, I have no needs and no desires. I do not ask for comfort, and I do not hunger for the food laid out for another man's return. But lady, others do. Let me protect you. Let me hide you away—"

  "From what?” I said. I made my tone sharp enough to cut through the insinuating strands of smoke that stroked my face.

  The firecat smiled. “Why, lady, from these interruptions and intrusions, these visitors and telephone calls, these newspapers and—"

  "And this real world?"

  "Real? Is your absent lover more real than I?"

  "Ryan is real.” If I had not been surprised I would not have felt such dismay. My voice was hoarse, my hands curled into fists. “Ryan is real."

  "More real than I? What is he but a memory, an invention, a dream? What do you have of him but an echo in your skull—and what, then, am I? Do you call me less than that?"

  "He is real,” I said again, and as if I could make it true by saying it: “He is alive. He is more alive than you ever were."

  The firecat stood and loomed over me, his paws on the table, flames flickering up from the wood like tiny, incandescent wings. “I will show you what is real,” he purred. “I will show you what is real and what is not. I will show you just how real, and how unreal, you are, for a start."

  But before he could, the silence of that tall, narrow, empty house was shattered by the telephone.

  Don't drop anything, Alain said, it's only me.

  He wanted to take me out to dinner. You need to get out, he said, as if he had found me huddled in a broom closet, soft as a mushroom, pale as a fish in a cave. The trouble is that as wrong as Alain was, he was also right. I am tender and sad. But he was winkling me out of my shell like a raccoon with a snail, and I could not summon the strength of will to say no, even though I knew how it would be. Alain trying to alleviate my loneliness, and me knowing it is impossible. My loneliness has too specific a cause, it requires too specific a cure.

  This evening, not knowing where Alain was taking me, I dressed in what I persist in thinking of as my grown-up clothes—clothes in silk and wool, clothes I bought new. To be honest with you, though I look good in them, I don't like them much. When I wear them I feel as though they are also wearing me. As Ryan says, I prefer clothes that have been beaten into submission before I put them on.

  Oh, let me laugh, let me laugh. If black humor isn't funny at midnight, when should it be? But having thought that phrase, having permitted entry to those words, “beaten” and “submission,” they became a hammer and chisel carving a bloody path of empathy across the inside of my skin. I wanted to tell Ryan, Hold fast to your integrity; if you have to, you can afford to let your dignity go. But is that true? Or is that just the writer in me wanting to be wise?

  If Ryan were a character in a book I was writing, I would peel him like an onion. I would strip away a layer of him for every succeeding stage of his capture and confinement, make him denser, simpler, truer—smaller—for every door he is dragged through, every narrower, darker, harder cell he inhabits, until he is so small and pure he can slip through the bars of his cage, the keyhole of his door. I would leave his captors bewildered, humbled by their own powerlessness and by the weakness of their fortress keep that keeps nothing of worth, all the treasure flown, thin and light and free as a butterfly on the warming breeze.

  And as a writer, I would not do it gently. If Ryan were an invention of mine I would be cruel to him, even savage. His layers of humor, temper, affection, fear would be stripped away—I would strip them away—like layers of skin. I would pare him down to the delicate framework of bone, all the vulnerable leverage points of his being exposed. God, it's too easy to think of ways to torture a human being. I can come up with dozens without effort, it's as if they wait, a noisome crowd of tallow-sweated men, leaning against some unmarked door in the mind. Why is it so easy? Is it only my own fear, the inevitable recognition of my own body's mortal tenderness? Or do we all have a storeroom of horrors in our minds? Perhaps it is only a part of our human legacy, a psychic equivalent to the rusted iron maidens they display in the museums here. Ryan and I saw several of these displays when he played the tourist with me before he was called away. He, too, will have a store of horrors pressing against the doors of his mind. If he were a character of mine, we would share those horrors, neither of us truly alone in the dark as I wrote the story of his ordeal. At least he would have me, even if I were the author of his pain.

  At least I would have my victim, him.

  Alain arrived with a smile hung across the face of his worry and took me to a restaurant so quiet and civilized it was like a Victorian library. The waiters whispered in French and Alain answered in his earthy Gaspesian drawl, which made me smile. We really are all hicks beneath the wool. We are the children of loggers and trappers and cowboys, the grandchildren of the intrepid or disgraceful younger sons, and we are sometimes childlike, I think, in this subtle and sinister ancient world. We are all explorers here. We are voyageurs, and we are Iroquois in the royal court, where the racks are kept well-oiled and ready for use. We'll get them back, Alain said, but I can't help but wonder if this is another case of arrows vs. guns.

  This morning the telephone did not ring.

  I feel as though I have become a character in a novel—or less even than that: a painted icon traced out in tarnished gold. I am Woman Who Waits By Phone. Did I sleep through the ring? I wasn't asleep, I could chart for you the course of my night hour by hour, tell you to the minute the time the garbage truck rumbled by, to the minute when the natural light first overtook the light from the streetlamp outside. I did not sleep—yet, did I dream I was awake? I know I did not, but somehow the knowledge cannot touch my doubt. And then getting up—did the jangling springs of this antique bed drown the electronic burble of the modern phone? did the water thundering into the sink? the growl of the kettle working itself up to a boil? On every other day since Ryan left, the telephone's ring has burst into the house and rummaged through the air of every room, invasive as a policeman or a thief, yet this morning it might have been drowned by the windy rush of air into my lungs.

  I did all the predictable things: checked the dial tone twice, checked that the handset was in its cradle three times, started to call the embassy and stopped. How many times? I don't remember. Don't tie up the line joined forces with Don't ask for news if you are afraid of what you might hear to weigh me down with chains. I wanted to call. I wanted to shower and dress and go out for coffee as if this were just another day of waiting. How is
this different? Because I have not been told that I am still in suspense. I am in suspension about my own suspense. I might be falling and not even know. I find that this is perhaps not unendurable—and is this the real human tragedy, that so little is unendurable? Or is it that we so often have no choice but to endure?—nevertheless, I also find I cannot do anything but endure. It is I who have been stripped to the bone. Without skin I am cold, without muscles I am immobile, without nerves I am numb. I sit in this last, smallest, darkest cell, this cell without a window or a door, this cell without even cracks in its walls, and I am at the end of my inventions. They sit outside the door, powerless and mute. I have carried myself into the dead heart of the maze, and here I sit still alone, waiting to become so small, so light, so close to nothing that I can evaporate into the air. Waiting. The only sound is the sound my blood makes as it marches past my ears. Waiting.

  When the telephone finally rings, it clamors like a bugle, loud enough to shake down the walls. This house is two hundred and eighty years old, and bricks and timbers, floorboards and chimneypots that have stood for longer than my country has had a name are crumbling around my ears. Dust stops up my throat and burns my eyes so that I am blind with tears. There is light, but I cannot see; air, but I cannot breathe. I grope through the crumbs of brick and splinters of oak until I touch the smooth anachronistic plastic of the phone.

  It rings again and lightning flashes through the bones of my hand. Dust glows blue and an ominous ruddy smoke-shadow hovers over the jackdaw piles of shattered beams. I lift the receiver to my ear.

  "Hello,” I say, my voice harsh with dust. “Hello?"

  An unfamiliar voice with a familiar accent says my name.

  "Yes,” I say, a husk of a word.

  "Please hold."

  Hold? There is nothing beneath my feet, I am dangling over a void at the end of this telephone cord, of course I hold! The receiver clicks and hums, and then static bursts over me like a storm of bees.

  "Go ahead,” says a voice as distant as the moon.

  Thinking the voice is speaking to me, I say, “Hello?” and so I miss a word or two, perhaps my name.

  "Is this thing working? Hello? Are you there?"

  Ryan, rescued, is shouting at me from God knows where, a helicopter, a submarine, the far side of the moon.

  "I'm here,” I say. “I'm here. When are you coming home?"

  And suddenly the air is full, not of dust, but of wings.

  * * * *

  I wrote this story in one great and glorious rush when I was visiting Ottawa, my nation's capital and a city that is older by a couple of centuries than my western hometown. I don't have a laptop so I was writing by hand in my notebook, which I haven't done regularly for years. Writing on the computer is my job and the product is (hopefully) destined for public exposure—still creative, still personally meaningful, but certainly the beginning of a communication with the world. Writing “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” by hand seemed to draw out a much more intimate and inward voice than is usual for me, and perhaps it drew more of me into the character, too. The questions raised by the story have certainly always interested me in a very personal way. Where lies the intersection between the inner, imaginative life and that outer life even a writer has to live? How do they interact, the stories we live and the stories we dream? And is the one any more real than the other in the end?

  Holly Phillips

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  A Dirge for Prester John

  Catherynne M. Valente

  I. The Habitation of the Blessed

  We carried him down to the river.

  It churned: basalt, granite, marble, quartz—sandstone, limestone, soapstone. Alabaster against obsidian, flint against agate. Eddies of jasper slipped by, swirls of schist, carbuncle and chrysolite, slate, beryl, and a sound like shoulders breaking.

  Fortunatus the Gryphon carried the body on his broad and fur-fringed back—how his wings were upraised like banners, gold and red and bright! Behind his snapping tail followed the wailing lamia twelve by twelve, molting their iridescent skins in grief.

  Behind them came shrieking hyena and crocodiles with their great black eyes streaming tears of milk and blood.

  Even still behind these came lowing tigers, their colors banked, and in their ranks monopods wrapped in high black stockings, carrying birch-bark cages filled with green-thoraxed crickets singing out their dirges.

  The red and the white lions dragged their manes in the dust; centaurs buried their faces in blue-veined hands.

  The peacocks closed the blue-green eyes of their tails.

  The soft-nosed mules threw up their heads in broken-throated braying.

  The panthers stumbled to their black and muscled knees, licking the soil from their tears.

  On camels rode the cyclops holding out into the night lanterns which hung like rolling, bloodshot eyes, and farther in the procession came white bears, elephants, satyrs playing mourn-slashed pipes, pygmies beating ape-skin drums, giants whose staves drew great furrows in the road, and the dervish-spinning cannibal choir, their pale teeth gleaming.

  Behind these flew low the four flame-winged phoenix, last of their race.

  And after all of these, feet bare on the sand, skirts banded thick and blue about her waist, eyes cast downward, walked Hagia of the Blemmyae, who tells this tale.

  II. The First Moveable Sphere

  When we first found him, he was face-down in the pepper-fields, his skin blazed to a cracked and blistered scarlet, his hair sparse as thirsty grass.

  The pygmies wanted to eat him. He must have been strong to have wandered this far, from whatever strange country—they should have the right to bisect his liver and take the strength, wet and dripping, into their tribe.

  The red lion, Hadulph, nosed his maimed feet, and snuffled at his dark clothes.

  "He smells of salt water and pressed flour,” he announced, “and he who smells of pressed flour knows the taste of baked bread, and he who knows the taste of baked bread is civilized, and we do not eat the civilized, unless they are already dead and related to us, which is a matter of religion and none of anyone's business."

  I looked down at his shape between the black and red pepper plants, in their long rows like a chessboard. It looked like the end of a game to me: I stood over the toppled kingpiece, a big-shouldered knight who has managed, in her jagged L-shaped steps, to finally make forward progress. I rubbed the soft and empty space above my collarbone—like a fontanel, it is silky and pulsating, a mesh of shadow and meat under the skin, never quite closed, and each Blemmye finds their own way with it, but often we are caught, deep in thought, stroking the place where our head is not. I stroked it then, considering the flotsam that the desert wind had washed onto our hard black peppercorns like the sands of a beach.

  "He is wretched, like a baby, wrinkled and prone and motherless. Take him to the al-Qasr, and iron him out until he is smooth,” I said quietly, and the pygmies grumbled, gnashing their tattooed teeth.

  Hadulph took the stranger on his broad and rosy back, where the fur bristles between his great shoulder blades, and that is how Presbyter Johannes came into our lives on the back of one beast, and left on the back of another.

  III. The Crystalline Heaven

  Behind the ivory-and-amethyst pillars of the al-Qasr, which he insisted we rename the Basilica of St. Thomas, I sat with my hands demurely in my lap, fingering Hadulph's flame-colored tail. We sat in rows like children—the pygmies picked at their ears, the phoenix ran sticks of cinnamon through their beaks, carving it for their nests, the monopods relaxed on their backs, wide feet thrust overhead, each toe ringed with silver and emerald. Grisalba, a lamia with a tail like water running over moss, combed her long black hair, looking bored.

  John the Priest tried not to look at me. His hair had grown back, but it was white, whiter than a man his age should own.

  I told him once while he ran his tongue over the small of my back that the sun had taken all
his blood, and left him with nothing in his veins but light.

  He, ever the good teacher, tried to make eye contact with each of us in turn, but he could not look at my eyes, he could not look down to the full curve of my high, sun-brown breasts, and the green eyes that stared calmly from their tips under a thick fringe of lashes. I blinked often, to interrupt his droning, and he tried to look only at where my head might be if I were a woman.

  A-ve.

  He repeated these words as if they had any meaning for us, sounding each syllable. We did not like Latin. It sat on our tongues like an old orange, sweet-sour and rind-ridden.

  A. Ve.

  A-ve Ma-ri-a.

  A. Ve. Mari. A.

  Grisalba yawned and picked at her tail, lazily slapping its tip against the chalcedony floor. Hadulph chuckled and bit into the consonants like elbow joints.

  A-ve Ma-ri-a gra-ti-a ple-na. Ti like she. Ple like play. She plays, gratia plena, Maria plays, ave Maria gratia plena.

  A. Ve. Mari. A. Gra. Tea. A. Plea. Na.

  "I wonder what his sweat tastes like?” Grisalba murmured in my ear. I grinned, but he could not chide me, for that would mean glancing down past my nipple-eyes to the mouth-which-is-a-navel, and he would not risk it.

  No, no. She plays. She; play. Shall we try the Pater Noster instead then?

  Pa. Tear. No. Star.

  IV. Saturn, Cold and Dry

  The strange man lay on one of the fallen pillars in the central hall of the al-Qasr—the smooth tower of violet stone had crashed to the floor one day while the quarter-moon market bustled in the portico—tile-shards of gold and splinters of ebony came tumbling after it, and we could all see the stars through the hole it made, like coins dropped into the hand of heaven. A brace of tigers looked up from arguing with a two-faced apothecary about whether she should be allowed to sell the powdered testicles of greater feline castrati as aphrodisiacs; the lamia paused in their venom-dance; I placed an arm beneath my breasts and lifted my eyes from the scribe-work before me to the ceiling. We all looked back and forth from the fallen pillar to the hole in the roof, up and down, up and down: work to sky to ruined architecture.