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9 January—Feast of Saint Jeanne of the Knife
Saint Jeanne is always depicted in the white garment of the Sacred Blades. The broken blade of Saint Ignatius Loyola lies at her feet, on top of a formal challenge, rent in two. Her breast is pierced by a misericorde. Saint Jeanne is claimed as patron by scientists, bastard born children, and unbelievers.
Copyright © 2011 Kat Howard
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Kat Howard is a former competitive fencer who is exceedingly glad dueling to the death was not a requirement of the sport. Her short fiction has previously appeared in the anthology Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, as well as Apex and Fantasy Magazine. She currently teaches fantastic and medieval literature at Stony Brook University, and has no desire to be a saint.
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A SPOONFUL OF SALT
by Nicole M. Taylor
This is not the story that Naomi told when Dr. Benjamin and the story men came to collect all of our memories. Instead, she told about her granny and the blue cookie jar. Marco was a dead man and a sore point by then.
Marco was Naomi’s first and only love from the time she was fourteen, which might seem young to you. It might have been kinder, though, had she started going with him a bit sooner. They only got three years of hand-holding and walk-taking and four months as man and wife before he passed. Even here, where lives are often mean little things, it didn’t seem fair.
Marco was a sailor, which is the usual occupation for our men. He crewed on his uncle’s rig and he died there with the rest of them when it went down during a late November squall. Of course, Naomi was hundreds of miles away and had no way of knowing about that when she walked into the kitchen one morning and found her husband sitting at the table.
Now, Naomi had been without Marco for going on a month and a half and her own daddy was a sailor as well. She was well used to being alone, as all us women are. It can be frightening. The island is small and we know the men, their names and the names of their mommas and sisters. But that didn’t stop the fearing, not altogether. It was a kind of ticking, a working like a machine in the back of your head. Each woman on the island kept a running tally of each sharped-edged, deadly thing in her home. For Naomi, it was the long rifle in the back of the closet, the six wooden handled knives in the kitchen draw, even the heavy carriage clock that her daddy’d made her for a wedding present.
And so when she saw Marco sitting there, she was just standing still, but her mind was zipping away all “how am I going to get to the closet?” or “how am I to open the knife draw without his hearing?” Because, by all rights, Marco should have been weeks away across the water right at that very moment (indeed, right at that very moment, Marco was floating in the cold ocean making dinner for the fish, but of course Naomi didn’t know that.)
But he was just there, Marco. He was just sitting and staring down at his hands like he was noticing them for the first time. He didn’t look particularly dangerous. He looked like her husband, the good boy she’d known her whole life.
“Marco?” she said, with her hand resting but not moving on the knife draw. He turned to look at her, but he did it real slow, and when he saw her, he didn’t seem to know her at all.
Naomi pulled out the draw, and it made a little wheely creak. Marco’s face didn’t move at all.
“Naomi,” is what he said finally, and it said it like she was some old friend he hadn’t seen in years. Like he was proud of himself for remembering her name.
Naomi was a practical sort. You see a lot of antsy girls get married before they’re ready; still too young and feckless to keep a house, let alone a husband. Naomi wasn’t like that; you could eat off her floors and, though he wasn’t around long, you never caught Marco complaining. Being like she was, Naomi couldn’t help but wonder if she weren’t seeing things. Women did that sometimes, when they was too lonely or too worn out from the waiting. Naomi didn’t think of herself as no weak woman, prone to fits or crazies, but it seemed more likely than her husband up and appearing like magic at her kitchen table, right next to a piece of blueberry pie wrapped in waxy paper.
She backed out of the kitchen without saying a word and went across the way to Elia DuPree’s place. Elia was about five years older than Naomi and was in the habit of giving Naomi advice, as is often the case in the friendships of women.
This was a Saturday, so Elia was doing her baking and she was flour-white up to her elbows. “Well, I dunno,” she told Naomi, who was pacing around the kitchen like a needy cat. “My daddy died when I was young, and my mama was always telling about how she saw him the night his ship went down upstairs in our house, going from room to room and checking on us kids.”
“You think Marco’s dead?”
Elia didn’t answer for a real long time. “That’s not what I said,” she told Naomi. But it sure sounded like that was what she had meant. You might think Elia was scaring Naomi for no reason, just being superstitious. And maybe she was, but she’d thought about it, and between Naomi Smalls going off her head and a sailor dying at sea with a bit of funny business, she knew which was more likely.
Naomi had prepared herself for the idea that Marco might not come back to her; or she thought she had. Listening to Elia, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had known, somewhere in the hidden parts of her heart, that something terrible had happened.
She started crying, right there in Elia’s kitchen, and Elia came right over and held on to her, though she left white dust on her shoulders and her back.
Naomi didn’t go home for another forty minutes and she didn’t expect to find anything when she did. It was a blessing, she supposed. This way she’d have time to prepare for the funeral and for the pitiful looks she’d get around town. She’d looked that way herself at those sad little widows with their teenage faces.
But when she got back, Marco was still there. He’d moved into the sitting room and he was just standing in the corner, looking down at the unfinished cradle that sat there.
Naomi had been hoping hard for a baby, but her monthlies had stubbornly come just as regular as rain in the spring. Hating to see her so down in the mouth, Marco had started work on the cradle. He told her he had to get a move on, because when he got back, he was going to give her a little baby boy to take care of.
Feeling silly, Naomi started crying again.
“I made that,” Marco declared, pointed at the cradle. He didn’t seem troubled by her tears.
“Mmm-hmn,” was all Naomi could manage.
“But I didn’t finish it.”
Naomi crossed the room slowly until she was right up close to him. She could see his chest rise and fall. He smelled like he always did, dirt and briney water and the dusky dried-leaves of his hair.
“You said you would when you came back.”
Marco turned to look at her. He smelled just the same, but his eyes were all wrong. “I’m sorry,” is what he said. Naomi looked at the cradle, touched it with her fingertips. It was supposed to rock back and forth, but Marco hadn’t gotten to the little mechanism that allowed it to do that. It was stuck, always in-between.
“I missed the way you smell,” the Marco told her, and he gathered her up in his arms, and Naomi let him because he looked just like her husband. “Ocean only smells one way,” he muttered into her hair. “All sorts of smells on you. I can smell the blood in your heart. In here.” He laid one hand flat against the little rises and falls of her rib bones.
He tasted of salt. Not human sweat-salt, but like a spoonful of it. Naomi half-expected to see him melting in the places where her mouth had been.
He took her into the bedroom she had shared with her husband. Naomi began to lift her housedress over her head, but she stopped when she saw he was just standing there, not undoing his shirt or trousers like he usually would. He was waiting for her, she realized. As if he didn’t know how.
“I’m sorry,” he said
again, as she unhooked button after button, concentrating on them real hard because her hands had started shaking.
He was very cold. His skin was cold; his breath made clouds in the air. She felt frozen underneath him. She watched her own skin turn bone white and then pale blue, like it was happening to someone else. Her body didn’t know him; she didn’t open up and welcome him. It wasn’t like with Marco at all.
When he was done, he lay still on top of her, his arms spread out over hers. For a moment, she was afraid he was going to want to stay like that all night. Marco had been terrible about stealing the covers and he used to throw his leg over hers in the night. But Naomi didn’t know how she was going to sleep with all that cold heaviness on her. She could hardly breathe.
She reached out, touched his hair and grazed her fingernails over the place where his hairline vanished into his neck. When she used to do that to Marco, he would shiver all over. And she, lying close, would be able to feel the brittle gooseflesh that rose up on him. “What are you?” she asked him.
“I’m... a wish,” he answered. And then she must have slept, because the next thing she knew, it was morning and the sun was coming in orange through the windows. She’d slept away a whole afternoon and night.
Sixteen days later, the letter came, telling all about when and how Marco had died. Nine months later, Naomi’s only daughter Mala was born.
There was all sorts of nasty talk in town about Marco’s best friend Eli or the teacher up to the school, Mr. Brubaker. But those of us that knew Naomi and had heard the story firsthand, we never did but believe her. The strangest thing, she said, was how in the morning there was no sign of the man-shaped thing. Except for a little pile of white salt on the undisturbed quilt next to her. I saw it for myself: almost a handful of big, coarse grains. It looked like sea-salt.
* * *
I am sad to say that Mala never got much love from this island or the folks on it. Not even when she was just a little thing. In school, she got a reputation for hissing like a cat, and for biting, even though she only did that the one time. At lunchtime, she sat alone on the low slope of the outhouse roof reading something stolen from the school library. Once or twice some shiny young teacher would try to pull her down, but all they ever got was pine cones thrown at their heads.
Most every day, a group of tough boys, mean-mouthed boys, used to chase her all the way home. But they were noisy, beating the underbrush with hasty-cut switches and they were slow. They seldom caught her.
When they did, Mala went to her mother and submitted to her tender doctoring. It probably wasn’t right, but Naomi almost relished those days. Normally, Mala was prickly as a burdock and it was only in the cleaning of scrapes, the bandaging of cuts, that Mala allowed her mother to touch her at all.
Naomi was a sad woman. She still missed Marco every day, and it was so fierce even after all those years that she sometimes wondered if a person could have an abscess in their heart as her grandfather had in his leg. Something that only pretended to heal for a little while but always opened up once again and wept. Sometimes, she went down to the shore and did watercolor pictures of the water and lighthouse, and she missed Marco while she hung them up and she missed Marco while she stirred the stew for dinner and she missed Marco when she kissed their baby goodnight and then she crawled into her empty bed and missed him all night long.
If Mala had been more like other children, if she had given hugs and kisses and laughed more and frowned less, Naomi might well have been a bit more cheerful. If Mala had been a little easier to understand, Naomi might have loved her easier. But no one could ever love a child more. And as Mala grew up and Naomi grew older, Naomi learned to be grateful for her odd girl. Mala, after all, would never marry and leave her alone. Mala wouldn’t ever leave the island for a job in the cities. Mala wouldn’t ever get so old that she didn’t still need her mother to take care of her, even if it was only in the smallest ways.
And the years went on and Mala wasn’t a child no more and they lived together in that little cottage and made an island of themselves. That, more or less, was how things were going along before the story men came.
Dr. Benjamin wasn’t a real doctor. Not the kind that heals people, though we could have used one of that sort. He was just another man writing things down in notebooks, but “Doctor” was how he introduced himself and that’s how his men always called him, so didn’t none of us argue with it.
By then, we were used to people like him coming to the island to study it. Sometimes it was the birds or the trees or the sand or even the tides. As if there was anything to know about tides that any one of us couldn’t have told them. But Dr. Benjamin came to the island to study us.
We took to calling it the Story Eater, that machine he brought along with him. It had a metal horn on one end, like the blossom of a lily flower and a big wheel of yellowed wax around the bottom. “Going down to the shore,” we’d say to one another, “gotta feed the Eater.” And then we’d take the skinny black path down to the water’s edge, where Dr. Benjamin and his people were living in their white tents, stakes drove deep into the ground like they meant to stay.
From me, Dr. Benjamin got a story about Mama Lavalie, who steals the breath from the lungs of babies, among other things. Naomi gave him the one about the cookie jar, like I said. Others told about witches and ghosts and their own lives, whatever he wanted to hear. And Dr. Benjamin wanted to hear everything. The Eater was always hungry.
It was curiosity that drove most people down the shore to him, and perseverance. Look at any manner of strangeness long enough and it starts to become the shape of the land. By the time Dr. Benjamin had been camped out for half a year, those tents might have grown there or washed in from the sea.
Dr. Benjamin came in the spring, an odd and gentle one for us. He stayed on through the summer and into the fall and, after a while, we stopped expecting him to leave. He got to be such an accepted sight that we was all just as surprised as him when the first big squall of winter came in and near washed him out to sea.
It poured miserable, dashing, sideways rain for hours on end. The sky boomed and lit up yellow with lightning. Dr. Benjamin’s tents collapsed under the weight of that water, spilling and gathering in them like in a woman’s burdened apron. Or else they just blew right out of the sand. Dr. Benjamin, he was running, running, running back and forth from one tent to another, trying to save his Story Eater and those pasty wax circles he’s spent so long collecting. He was piling them all up in an alcove on the sea wall and, once, he looked up. Mala was sitting there on the top of the wall. She wasn’t wearing a rain slicker or even shoes and she was just looking at him like he was a rat, like he was a bug. Like he was something with too many eyes and too many legs and all she wanted to know was what ridiculous thing he was going to do next.
“Can you help me?” he shouted over the wind. His men were running forward and backward around him, like water flowing around a stone. Later, he would think it was funny how no one seemed to take notice of the girl on the wall.
Mala didn’t say anything to him. He stayed too long, looking up at her studying face. Eventually, he ran back to his tent, filled up his arms with more stories and tried to protect them with his own body as he ran. Mala on the wall didn’t move.
In the end, it wasn’t so great a loss as it might have been. A few of the wax wheels were ruined but most survived. And in those days after the storm, Dr. Benjamin spent most of his time writing lists of everything he was missing and making plans to build shelters more stout and more permanent. There was nothing gone that could not be replaced.
He called up on Bethel Ellison special, asked him to come down and “sit for him.” It was because Ellison’s wax wheel had been destroyed, of course we knew that. But Bethel still walked with a bit of a spring in his step down the black rock way. He was the only one, after all, that Dr. Benjamin had asked back personally. It must have been a memorable story.
When he got there, it was almost exac
tly like before. They’d set up the tent again and Dr. Benjamin had his little wooden desk (the wood was soft and splitting down by the legs now, though). All the wax wheels were stacked up behind him still, but now they were uneven and jumbled, listing into each other. And there was Mala. She was just standing in the corner, not looking at anything in particular. Dr. Benjamin didn’t say anything and Bethel didn’t say anything and it was like she was a lamp or a table.
Dr. Benjamin said what he always did: “what would you like to share today?”
But of course old Bethel knew that he wanted the story he’d lost. It was the one about him and his father and the little drowned boy that they found in the harbor. More than forty years out from it, and Bethel still remembered the way the boy’s shirt had slid and slid against his hands. And the sick swooping in his stomach when he realized that it wasn’t just the boy’s clothes, but his skin that had come undone and was sliding around.
He tried to tell his tale just as he done before. It was one he had shared often enough to have a bit of a speech for it. He knew the edges of it the way he might have learned to understand a table or a chair that had sat in his home for a lifetime.
When he was done, he turned and walked past Mala on his way out, and he was none too happy with that. Island folk didn’t see much of Mala and, even those of us kindly disposed towards her would have admitted that we liked it that way. More unsettling still, as he passed her by, Mala stuck out her hand like the two of them had just done a deal. Too surprised to do anything else, Bethel shook her hand. He made a choked noise in his throat, though, and dropped it quick like a burning thing. Bethel left without looking back. When he was gone, Mala turned to Dr. Benjamin. “Do you want to know a better story about him?” she asked.
“Pardon me?” asked Dr. Benjamin. Two days earlier, Mala had become a regular in the tent. She came in the mornings with the first light and left around sunset. She wouldn’t answer any of Dr. Benjamin’s questions and she just watched while they filed in, told their stories, filed back out again. At first, he was surprised that we was all speaking so frank in front of her like that. But then Dr. Benjamin realized that Mala was like his white tents. We’d had a lot of practice putting her aside in our minds.
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