"I trained fleas?"
"In my dream. You were famous for it." His smile was tentative, uncertain. Maybe he realized that it didn't sound like a great career.
Rafe thought of the story he had told Victor about the princess in her louse-skin coat, about locks of hair and all the things he had managed through the eyes of needles.
The faery woman turned away from them with a scowl, walking back to the fading circle of dancers, becoming insubstantial as smoke.
"It didn't go quite like that." Rafe stood and held out his hand. "I'll tell you what really happened."
Lyle clasped Rafe's fingers tightly, desperately but his smile was wide and his eyes were bright as stars. "Don't leave anything out."
Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author, is best known for her Modern Faery Tales series and The Spiderwick Chronicles. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award and a winner of the Andre Norton Award for best young adult speculative fiction. A new series of books for teens begins with the forthcoming The White Cat. She resides in Amherst, Massachusetts in a house with a secret library.
How the Ocean Loved Margie
Laurie J. Marks
Margie had a lot of practice keeping secrets from people. She had taught high school English in Somerville, Massachusetts, for nearly fifteen years without anyone, not even her cappuccino buddies, suspecting that she was a lesbian. When she arranged for a year's sabbatical no one, not even her mother, knew that she was pregnant by donor insemination. And when she disappeared abruptly shortly after the last day of school, no one except she herself suspected that she had gone mad.
Going mad was a very English-teacher-spinster-Victorian-melodramatic thing to do. If she were going to do it, she should have worn a flowing white nightdress with a tucked bodice and ruffled hem. She should have done her hair up like a Gibson girl, with tendrils wisping fetchingly down upon her neck. Then, if she had run down the rocky beach and flung herself into the cold Atlantic someone might have noticed and pulled her out again. But Margie went mad in a pair of blue jeans nearly white with age and an oversized T-shirt that declared Parkfield, California, to be The Earthquake Capitol of the World. It was very undramatic. It was, in fact, pedestrian. She did not hear voices or believe she was Catherine of Aragon or want to kill the president. She simply felt an irresistible compulsion to go to Maine. With her dreams and her every waking thought filled by a restless desire such as she had never before felt, it had taken all her strength to finish the school year. Yet, because she was a woman of more discipline than imagination, she had toughed it out to the last day, cleaned out her
desk and filled out her forms, graded the last papers and turned in her library books, canceled her newspaper subscription and paid all her bills before finally filling her car with camping gear and getting on the Interstate.
She had gotten pregnant out of simple loneliness. Turning forty turns a woman invisible, and forty more years of being dismissed as insignificant by her students, and of having people see her just enough to keep from walking into her began to seem unendurable. For certain, she'd had her last lover, though at the time she hadn't realized it. "It's not shame," she had insisted. "I just don't want to lose my job."
Now she had crossed the Piscataqua River and was in Maine. "Now what?" she said irritably, addressing the creature that swam like a seal in the harbor of her womb. Surely this compulsion was all the fetus's fault, some kind of new psychosis brought on by pregnancy, or a strange kind of toxemia that had altered the chemical balance of her brain. Her answer came only in the form of psychic shocks of overwhelming anxiety that made even stopping at a roadside service area almost unendurable. She continued northward. For more than an hour she felt an easing of tension, but after she had driven through Portland she began to feel wretched again. The psychic shocks drove her eastward to where the coast of Maine frays away into tattered shreds of land.
By sunset, she had been driven to the remote tip of one peninsula, Pemaquid Point, where a lighthouse overlooked the harsh ocean writhing under a red sky. A lobster boat puttered past, the lobsterman standing in the bed of the boat, rhythmically bending and rising to toss his traps overboard. A cold sea wind made Margie wish for the barn jacket left in the car, but she could not go back for it. Waves crashed on the tumbled black boulders of the shoreline, throwing threatening fans of white spray. Suddenly, the Pemaquid light began to flash, and the tourists who had gathered to worship the most photographed lighthouse in the world started clicking their cameras.
Only Margie continued to gaze out to sea. The fetus wanted her to continue eastward, even though it meant throwing herself into the water. This was not the tame Pacific, into which people might lightheartedly fling themselves for pleasure. On her trip to the West Coast several years ago, Margie had been astounded by the fearlessness of California swimmers, for she was accustomed to this bitter northern sea, which was not far, relatively speaking, from the Arctic. Yet Margie's mad desire drove her down onto the rocks, until cold spray slapped her cheek and she stepped back in horror. She wrestled herself into the car, and drove west as far as she could endure, which was about a mile and a half.
Ever since she became pregnant, she had been craving seafood. She bought herself a lobster dinner in New Harbor and ate outside on the wharf where, unfortunately, the cold did not deter the mosquitoes. A small boat-tour company had a boat leaving at 9 a.m. for Monhegan Island, but when Margie looked at her Triple-A map, she knew that the island was too close to the mainland. If she took the boat there, she would only be driven into the sea again.
She cleared away the emptied husk of the lobster and studied her map. Nearby, a dog barked at the edge of a noisy crowd that gathered around the open-air bar. When Margie looked up from her useless map, the dog had taken up a position near her, expectantly, as if it were her duty to give him the inedible remains of her lobster.
"Don't give nothing to the beggar," a man advised. Darkness had settled in, and the wharf's lighting was less than impressive. She could hardly see the map anymore.
"That map's no good," the man said.
"What?" She looked up with a schoolteacher's automatic glare. "But it's a Triple-A map."
"Don't matter how many A's it's got. Half the islands are missing. It doesn't show the Duck Rocks or the Thread of Life Ledges. And look here, the map just ends as if there weren't nothing out here." His blunt forefinger poked the table beyond the map's edge. "As if it was the end of the world. But it's still Maine out here, you know."
Margie restrained her impulse to correct his double negatives.
"Beyond the edge of this no-good map of yours, is Skerry Island, where I come from," he said. "And after Skerry there's truly nothing else, just open sea, until you reach whatever's on the other side of the ocean--some part of Europe, I guess. Now what you need is a good nautical chart, and you'll see every single island, clear as day."
He just happened to have a chart folded up in his pocket, and Margie's silence seemed a sufficient invitation. With his friends grinning and nudging each other over at the bar, he unfolded his chart in the lobster juice. He wore a flannel shirt and jeans. Besides the beer, he also smelled like diesel exhaust and fish. On his chart, the mainland was merely a blank shoreline, but numbers and geometric shapes cluttered the usual empty blue of the open sea. The man's forefinger touched a flake of land some twenty miles due east of Pemaquid Point. "See what I mean?" he said. "Skerry Island. But according to most maps it don't even exist."
Margie sighed, as a profound relief washed over her. "That is the place I'm looking for." Or perhaps it was the fetus who had spoken, for her words were garbled and distorted, as if they had been spoken under water.
The man continued, "Well, it was settled by Scots and they named it after an island about the same size, in the North Sea. A cold, lonely place, hardly more than some rocks sticking out of the water."
Margie didn't ask or care which of the two islands he was describing. "Can I hire you to take me ther
e?"
She had awakened early to a chilly June dawn and had checked out of her hotel before sunrise. Now, her camping gear jostled the boxes of mundane groceries that filled the bed of Joe's lobster boat, and Joe stood at the wheel. A striped buoy was pierced on the radio antenna. By morning light, Joe was a man without mystery; as interesting as a car mechanic with a hangover. He wore the same clothing as the night before and had not shaved. Margie supposed he had slept in his boat. The calm ocean shone like polished aluminum until they entered a fog bank. Wearing the barn jacket over her sweatshirt for warmth, Margie perched on the edge of the boat, sipping sour coffee poured from a thermos.
The water below, suddenly gray and dark, writhed with shadows. The ocean was full of illusions. Margie had become used to them when a sleek figure as long as a woman but shaped like a torpedo swam by just under the water's surface. She did not realize that it was no illusion until it broke the water's surface and peered up at her, solemn and incurious. Then it was gone and she was on her feet, startled, with a swimming, spinning sensation deep in her belly. If she had not known the sensation's source was that restless slave driver in her womb, she might have mistaken the feeling for joy.
"You have seals here!" she shouted, so Joe could hear her over the engine.
He slowed the boat. "Eh?"
"You have seals so far out?"
Joe looked oddly displeased. "You saw a seal?"
"They swim so far from land?"
"Depends on what you mean by land. There's a bit of rock not far from here, where they lie around and holler at each other." Some time later, he slowed the engine again, so Margie could hear the seals barking in the fog. They sounded like a pack of dogs just barking to hear the sound of their own voices, but the seal that had peered into Margie's face had not seemed like an animal at all, but like an intelligent alien.
Skerry Island appeared slowly rather than suddenly, a gray shape in the fog bank that gradually formed into a steep, forested mountaintop. The island's seven houses, each of which had to be at least a hundred years old, clustered near the small harbor on the sheltered western side of the island. A dirt track wound perhaps half a mile uphill from the landing, between the houses, which were mobbed by blooming lupines and walled in by lobster traps. Margie helped Joe unload the groceries and camping gear from the boat into a truck, the island's only vehicle. Joe had been in New Harbor the night before because it was his turn to travel to the mainland for supplies, and now he drove from one house to the next, delivering boxes of groceries directly into people's kitchens. The ancient, weather-beaten front doors had no locks. In one house, three children of various ages worked on correspondence-course lessons, supervised by a woman who gave Joe a loaf of bread hot from the oven. They all stared at Margie as though they had never set eyes on a stranger before. At another house, Joe chatted with an old man rooted in a rocking chair on his porch. No one else was at home; Joe said they were out in their boats.
The road ended at the tiny, unkempt cemetery, where Joe did a U-turn and took Margie back to his house, which was a seeming derelict with sagging roofline and peeling paint. He'd lived there alone for twenty years, he said. She turned down his offer of supper, bed, and assistance in finding a good campsite, insisting that having a guide would take the adventure out of her vacation. In fact, she was worried that the longer she spent with him the more likely he was to notice that she was pregnant, which no doubt would make him feel entitled to interfere when she just wanted to be left alone.
She promised to let him know when she needed more supplies, picked up her backpack and sleeping bag, left the rest of her gear on his porch to come back for later, and set out to explore the island. Within her, the fetus swam peacefully in its sea, home at last.
Margie had been camping near the shore for six weeks before it finally felt like summer, warm enough that when the sun was shining she dared leave camp without even a jacket, though she always carried a heavy duty, bright pink plastic bucket bought at Costco years ago, along with a fishing knife and a small pamphlet on foraging. The bucket's unnatural color guaranteed that she could find it again no matter where she laid it down. Most of the time she simply carried it with her because she never knew when she might stumble across something to eat. Although she had brought a fishing pole, Skerry's entire shoreline was too inhospitable and dangerous for fishing, except in the small harbor, which she avoided. She organized her day around the tide table, so that low tide would always find her at the rocky shoreline, wading through cold water in search of sea urchins, blue mussels, and periwinkles. She would then fill her bucket with whatever else she could find that her foraging book told her was edible: Irish moss and kelp from the water's edge, chickweed, beach peas, and wild strawberries from the windy cliffs and rocky headlands. When her bucket was full, she would go back to her camp and cook and eat whatever it contained; then she would gather and chop wood for her next meal, and go foraging again. She had very little spare time.
It was impossible to get lost, for the ocean surrounded her, and she merely had to follow the sound of the crashing waves to find herself again at the shore which, if she followed it, would inevitably bring her back to her campsite. Though the island was thick with trees, she had set up her camp beyond the edge of the woods, for mosquitoes swarmed in their damp shade. Instead, she camped in the wind, among huge stones that helped to anchor her tent on stormy days. At night, the nearby sea went crashing through her dreams: cold and wild, atangle with wrack and the threatening shapes of stone and shore. In her dreams she lived in those waves, twisting powerfully through the forces that should have crushed her, at home in a body that was designed to slide gracefully between the waves. When she awoke, sometimes she was gasping for breath, and the infant swam wildly inside her, as if it shared its crazy mother's dreams.
The fetus had ceased to torture her, but her days were not as fearless as her nights. Her watch, without which she could not have kept her appointments with the sea, told her that it was mid-July, and that she was six months pregnant. Impregnated in the bitter chill of January, she was due in early October, when, as far as her foraging book was concerned, there would be nothing on this entire island for her to eat.
Sitting on her wild cliff with the ocean wind tugging at her hair, she had a vision of herself, unable to see the ground around the vast swelling of her abdomen, searching desperately through her foraging pamphlet. Because she was mad, she accepted that she could not leave the island until her child was born, but she could not accept that she would starve to death first. Many weeks had passed since she used up the last of her flour, potatoes, and cooking oil, and her ability to hunt shellfish decreased as her belly swelled. This, she thought, was why human females could not bear their children in solitude. Yet she couldn't bring herself to walk to the settlement and give Joe or one of the other lobstermen a shopping list and a couple of traveler's checks, for she doubted that even this insular community would continue to mind their own business once they recognized she was pregnant.
The blackberries and blueberries began to ripen, and between tides she wandered the woods like a wild animal, eating every berry she could find. Still, she lay awake at night, with her stomach growling and the voracious infant twirling joyously in its little sea. The child took from her whatever it needed; she, on the other hand, went hungry.
Then, one day, the ocean threw her a fish. Having gathered periwinkles until the tide turned, she stood in the water, captivated by the glorious sunset. If she wasn't so hungry, she thought, she might almost be happy. Then a fish, a big fish, went flying through the hectic light of the setting sun, flashing silver red-gold, and landed in a frantic, thrashing splash, practically at her feet. She snatched it up and nearly lost her grip on it, but hung on with one hand while she grabbed a rock with the other, and bashed its head in. It was a mackerel, her foraging book told her later: iridescent green by the light of the fire, easy to filet. She had no oil to fry it in, so she poached the filets in sea water, surrounded by h
er favorite seaweed, the one called Irish moss. The summertime mackerel run must have begun. Her book said that during a mackerel run you could catch a fish a minute. But this same book told her that mackerel can't be caught from shore because the schools of fish avoid land.
The next morning, it happened again. And again, in the evening. Twice a day the ocean tossed her a mackerel, as though it knew she was there, waiting, and didn't want her to go hungry. It was ridiculous, declared Margie in her schoolteacher voice, but that didn't stop her from eating the fish. One day, standing ankle deep in water at low tide, she called out, "I don't suppose you can spare some potatoes?"
The next day the ocean gave her five pounds of potatoes. They didn't come flying through the air like the fish did, but she found them at low tide, half sunk in shallow water, where she hardly could have missed them. On subsequent days, the ocean gave her a tub of margarine and several pounds of flour, tightly sealed in a Ziplock bag, and a half-dozen onions, so that she could make fish chowder. When the ocean gave her a box of saltines, she had something on which to spread her sea-urchin roe, which she could only bring herself to eat if it was served like caviar.
She didn't have to work anymore, except to gather edible plants on her way to and from the low-tide potluck. The ocean gave her whatever she needed. Suddenly, almost overnight, she became enormous, and the infant began to struggle inside her at night, as though it were beginning to feel a bit cramped in its rapidly shrinking little sea. She set her watch alarm and dozed between tides with her swollen feet raised on a rock. For the first time since her arrival at Skerry, she had time to read the paperbacks she had tucked into her backpack: Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility. No one ever has a pregnant heroine, she realized, not even the women writers, but she could vaguely remember a pregnant heroine in one of the old ballads, saving her man's life by Ñ as she recalled Ñ simply hanging onto him no matter how ugly he got. "Not me," she said out loud. "I'd have let him go."
So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction Page 18
