"Why are you telling me this, Dory?"
"I just thought you ought to know. I saw your car was still parked in the lot last night when I locked up, figured you were sleeping over. Folks do that sometimes before hitting the road. I was hoping you'd still be here this morning. Had a feeling you would be. Look, I don't know if he did it on purpose or not, but that preacher left something behind when he moved on from here. We hung on to it over the years, but he never passed this way again. I left it in your car. I hope that's alright."
"Thank you, Dory.” Impulsively, I took her face in my hands and kissed her cheek near the scar tissue that shrouded her lifeless eye. We just looked at each other a minute, then she smiled and left me standing there in the rain. I never saw her again, but I swear, for just a moment, I thought I saw a glimmer of light stirring in that eye, and a hint of surprise in her smile. In the passenger seat of my car sat my father's old bible. I hadn't seen it in twenty years, but there it was, his name and the births and deaths of our family recorded right there on the front page.
* * * *
And now another seventeen years have cycled by; the cicadas have returned again and I am still on the road. The darkness has followed me all these years. Sometimes it washes over me like a tidal wave, and when it recedes, my world has been altered in small ways, like signs in the wreckage that only I can see. There have been moments of grace, when someone lost has found comfort in my words, or a hurt child has been soothed by my touch, times when I have been able to fix in others what once was broken. There is life in my hands as well as death.
All these things and more are mine. At the end of each day I search the roads as night approaches, looking for that dark blank face in the twilight. We have unfinished business, he and I. And this time, I think, I am ready.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Two Variations by Jeannette Westwood
I saw you in a meadow, in the city park. You lay on your back, wind playing with your hair, and I thought you were beautiful. You were tired, discouraged—student, then barista, then sales clerk wasn't working for you. But you had always loved backgammon, so instead you dreamed of that, of ivory and spotted black-brown pieces, of turning the betting die, clinking, two, four, eight, sixteen. Grass stalks pricking between scales, I slid through the meadow to you.
The ruby above my eyes reflected pomegranate to the ground. I split my tongue for that color. Your lips hold that color, and I stare.
* * * *
There was another girl like you. There was another boy like you. You're all the same, yet different.
* * * *
Together we played backgammon. You frowned over the pieces, I flicked my tongue tasting them. Late afternoon became early evening and the sun set with orange and purple, framing tall buildings with color. I worried the night might be cool, but the sticky city summer continued and the air remained warm, remained humid. A bead of sweat trickled down your face as you glared at the board, thinking, praying?
* * * *
I wish dice loved me. They love you, they chatter so much in your cupped hands before you fling them to the board. You will win with any combination but one, and I will lose with any combination but one. I have not lost before. This is strange, and I wonder. Your face is half lit by the moon, and you bite your lip as the dice spin through the air to rattle on the board.
I taste the air, my tail tingles, my ruby throbs.
1.
You will lose, and I will almost wish you had not. You will stare at the board. Your fingers will be limp as you put away pieces, and you will stand up once you are done. I will watch you leave, considering the air and disliking the taste. Your hair will drift in the breeze but it won't be as golden as I had thought. You will hate me, and I will feel it and hate you in return.
I will be your Naga King.
You'll dream of me, biting you, killing you. You'll dream of me, biting him, killing him. Tomorrow you will find a lover, you will find Him, the one who you think is for real.
In a year from tomorrow I will slip between sheets. My ruby will glimmer once, twice, in your romantic candle light, but neither you nor your lover will see it. He will suddenly stop moving on top of you, and you'll think he's playing some sort of joke but it won't be a joke, and you'll soon realize that and scream.
I will do this again and again and eventually I'll find you weeping. You will recognize me from our game and I will tell you what I have done. You'll try to kill me, try to run from me. You'll promise me anything, everything, for tiny slivers of time.
I'll smile and flick my tongue, and you'll die with only me for company, dead before you feel my poison.
2.
You will win, and your laugh will stop my anger. You will touch my head, thank me for a wonderful game. Your fingers will be warm and they will enchant me. I will wonder if you really see me, or if you've created a fa?ade for me to wear. It's usually the latter, but you will compliment me on my beautiful tongue and scales and I will love you.
I will be your Naga King.
The ruby in my forehead will be as yours. Tomorrow you will find a lover, and he will stroke your golden hair and caress your pomegranate lips and laugh when you laugh. I will bless you both, and you will remember me and I you.
Your lover-husband will die. He will love to walk the streets at night, and though you know it's not safe, not here in the city, you'll find that you like it too. But one night you will be sick and he will go out alone. He'll be gone two hours and you'll be beginning to worry when you'll hear something stagger up the steps and collapse to the ground.
You'll drop your book and run, scramble to unlock the door and throw it open. It's him, your lover-husband, his white shirt red. When you lift his limp body he'll leave a bloody print on your porch. He'll gasp that there was shooting, that he was caught in the crossfire.
You'll drag him inside. His shirt will be soaked, and it will make a slippery mess all over you and your couch. You will stare at him for a minute, then touch him. He won't move under your fingers as you caress his face. His eyes will be open, staring just past you without blinking.
I'll find you there, weeping, and slide up your leg to your lap and gaze at your lover-husband. My ruby will pulse. You will stroke my head and my tongue will flick over your tears.
I will heal him for you. You enchanted me, with your golden hair and backgammon dreams and pomegranate lips.
I'll bow my rubied head to his throat. Your lover-husband will choke and cough up nothing, but there will be no shattered bones, no holes from back to front, no lead deep inside.
You'll kiss him and then me too, and I'll twine around your neck and face.
Your lover-husband will be weak but he'll get better, and when he's not around I'll slip out from under the floorboards and we will play backgammon again.
* * * *
I am not looking at the game but at you. The dice still dance across the board. They have not yet come to rest. You squint, hoping, praying? but squinting means nothing. I'm not sure if you know what this dice roll means. I want to tell you so that you might roll again with full knowledge, but there are no second chances, no second rolls. I wish I could stop the dice and tell you this, let you understand, but I can't and I won't.
[Back to Table of Contents]
A Primer on New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan by Mamoru Masuda
The following is a list of panelist biographies from a “New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan” panel at the 2007 World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, and could be considered to be a reading list for those interested the best and weirdest writing in Japan in the last thirty years or so.
Besides the writers, the panel included Grania Davis and translator Mamoru Masuda.
* * * *
Grania Davis is an author and editor of science fiction and fantasy. She was introduced to Japanese science fiction in the early 1970s by Judith Merril, who welcomed her as a co-editor for a projected anthology of JSF. During 1979
-80 she was resident in Zama, Japan, where she worked with members of the Nihon SF Honyaku Benkyo Kai on a number of translations for the anthology.
Novels:
1980 The Rainbow Annals
1980 The Great Perpendicular Path
1986 Moonbird
In collaboration with her former late-husband Avram Davidson:
1988 Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty
1998 The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil
Yoshio Aramaki, born in 1933 in Hokkaido, is a novelist. His works are like surrealistic fantasies, brilliant and stylish, filled with picturesque images. He stopped writing speculative fictions and started to write virtual war chronicles in 1990s.
Collections of short novels:
1973 Shinseidai (Sanctozoic Era)
1975 Toki No Ashibune (Reed Boat of Time)
1978 Yawarakai Tokei (Soft Clock)
1980 Aru Haretahi No Uiin Wa Mori No Naka Ni Tatazumu (One Sunny Day Vienna Stands in the Forest)
Novels:
1976 Shirokihi Tabidateba Fushi (Setting Out on a White Day Leads to Immortality)
1981 Abandandero no Kaikikai (The Pleasure Machine of Abandandero)
Kouichi Yamano, born in 1939 in Osaka, is a novelist and critic. He is also known as a horse race commentator. His works are somewhat mainstream and filled with literary sensibility and culture. But now he doesn't write novels at all.
Collections of short novels:
1965 X Densha De Ikou (Take the X Train)
1971 Tori Ha Ima Doko Wo Tobuka (Where Does the Bird Fly?)
1976 Satsujinsha No Sora (The Sky of the Murderer)
1978 Za Kuraimu (The Crime)
Novel:
1981 Hana to kikai to geshutaruto (Flowers, Machines and Gestalt)
Chiaki Kawamata, born December 4, 1948 in Otaru, Hokkaido, is a Japanese science fiction writer and critic. His style is surrealistic and very sensitive, like Langdon Jones. He stopped writing SF novels in the 1990s and now he is writing mainly virtual history novels and game books.
His works:
1972 Yumeno Kotoba (c) Kotobano Yume (Words of Dreams (c) Dreams of Words)
1980 Kaseijin senshi (Prehistory of the Martian, Seiun Award winner)
1985 Genshi Gari (Hunting Phantapoetry, Nihon SF Taisho Award winner)
1978 Hanzaisha no Kagami (A Mirror of Anti-Present-men)
1986 Kasei Koukaku dan (Martian Crusted Army)
Hirotaka Tobi, born in 1960 in Shimane, is a Japanese science fiction writer. His novels are very stylish and we could see some influences of American New Wave writers. For example, the Derelict Garden is a virtual resort in a virtual space where virtual people are waiting in vain for the coming of visitors.
Short Novel:
1981 Polyphonic Illusion (Sanseido SF Short Story Contest winner)
Novels:
2002 Grand Vacance—Haien no Tenshi 1 (first of the Angels of the Derelict Garden series)
Collections of short novels:
2005 Katadorareta Chikara (Carved Power, Seiun and Nihon SF Taisho Award winner)
2006 Ragged Girl—Haien no Tenshi 2 (second of the Angels of the Derelict Garden series)
Mamoru Masuda, born in 1949 in Miyagi, is a translator.
Main translations:
1979 334 (Thomas.M. Disch)
1981 The Unlimited Dream Company (J. G. Ballard)
1988 Under Heaven's Bridge (Ian Watson & Michael Bishop)
1989 Good News from Outer Space (John Kessel)
1990 Fevre Dream (George R. R. Martin)
1991 A Talent for War (Jack McDevitt)
1994 Paradise Motel (Eric McCormack)
1995 The Gate to Women's Country (Sheri S. Tepper)
1995 Dead Girls, Dead Boys (Richard Calder)
2006 Rushing to Paradise (J. G. Ballard)
[Back to Table of Contents]
Clay by Kirstin Allio
As boys Jerome and George Mueller climbed all over the gabled roof of the row house. Arla was the girl they watched through a skylight. They wiped pigeon crap off the glass so they could see her dancing to her records, combing her grassy hair in front of her face after she washed it. She never noticed their flushed faces blocking the light. The cathedral, rising behind them, absorbed what light there was, anyway.
She flirted with Jerome, always taller, always weaving a ball around his ankles, but George would sit on the step waiting for her to come back under the hood of evening. She smelled like almond soap, covering the cigarettes, or the inside of the Chinese Fare restaurant. Standing before him on the step she blocked his view of the cathedral.
The sky over their town was locked into place by its struts and turrets and ramparts. Touring groups spilled from buses with state-of-the-art German suspension, tinted windows, engines left running. The cathedral even drew Americans, waddling through the passageways like puddleducks—the town was also the origins of Beatrix Potter.
"Muellerstein,” Arla's dad habitually teased him. Muellerberg, Muellerschmidt, Muellerheimerschmidt. That was a good one. Muellerhauserschnitzaldick!
"Get off it,” said Arla. “Georgie's English as pudding.” George hated the way his name was a nursery rhyme—the way it satisfied Arla's father. Arla's mother was ironing a shirt with piss-colored rings in the armpits. George stood braiding his hands behind his back, his balls as small as berries.
Outside, he would punch the air, one-two—like his brother Jerome did when their dad was mentioned. Arla's dad had a plushy, florid nose like a bull's eye. Weekends he played flaming darts in the clammy stairwell. “Don't take it personal, Georgie.” Personal always meant something about George's father, who had run away with a sailor.
But the first universe, the hub within concentric circles, was Arla from the row house.
"Well I suppose that means you'll never show your wotsit around, doesn't it,” she said matter-of-factly.
By the time George and Arla were seventeen Arla had already given up her dream of being a singer. She was middling on the keyboard. Her hair was short and spiky, dyed Chinese persimmon. Her scalp had a wet, raked-over look like an early spring garden. She had laddish habits like keeping her socks on in bed, drinking in the morning. But if he were to save enough, Arla would quit her job racking used records in a minute. To her, a cathedral next door, a bloody national monument, was like sharing a toothbrush with the Prime Minister. She stuck her finger down her throat, gagging. She wanted to go to London.
* * * *
One night Arla's father let himself into the cathedral yard just before midnight. The paving slabs were spongy with age—George couldn't hear his own footsteps, let alone Arla's father's. The old man tipped his bowl-shaped head back to see the black spires pressed in a putty cloudbank. George's own head spun, and coned like cotton candy. The sky roared in his ears. Likely God Himself was an island that had once been a meteor, a raised welt in the white neck of the ocean. All those stars and planets looked silvery, but you saw the close-ups, the satellite photography, and they were pumice.
Arla's dad's eyes showed up like bits of glass from a brown bottle. There was a white band across his shirt, a sporty detail that glowed like the stripe on a skunk. George's foot rested lightly upon his tools on the ground beneath him.
Well, thought George. Certainly no rendezvous. Eyes only for the cathedral. George knew it was a mainstay of the old man's imagination, the little ancestors building it. Like one of those dioramas, hundreds of bandy-legged dolls, the paddy slaves or whoever it was they made to do the heavy lifting, with blocks of tiger-striped stone lashed to their plaster-of-Paris shoulders. Give it a few sage-colored trees dipped in sugar by schoolchildren, and the museum was fit for Yanks and Krauts by the busload.
George could hear the old man saying, “You'd want to be close by the cathedral when your number's up, Georgie.” His wheezy laugh doubled as pertussis.
The shadows were thick as paint. Even if he weren't just back from the pub he wouldn't have spotted “Geor
gie.” He was a bulky man with shoulders like loose bricks. George watched him stumble backward, catch his foot on a protruding cobble. The night soaked up the sound of his falling.
George walked across the paving and put two fingers on the old man's pulse. The front of the trousers was dark. The neck was still humid to the touch, and boozy.
George gathered up his tools quickly. As a rule, he avoided the night watchman. If Arla's dad's idea of death was to keel over in the arms of the cathedral, well George, too, wanted something from their place of worship. He wasn't there to spy on a drunkard who pissed himself as he crumbled. To pray? He didn't need the go-ahead from any Father to love Arla. George Mueller wanted the secrets of the stone they used to build it. The night gave him cover to run his tools over the cathedral's body.
At first he had leaned against a pillar behind a group of flat-shoed tourists. The vaulted, cave-dank interior smelled like blood. He squinted at a Madonna who had the face of a twelve-year-old child. He counted the exact folds in the fall of her dress, calculated the breadth of her tranquil eyelids relative to the twin grooves between her mouth and slightly flared nostrils. He began to imagine the points of release and pressure. He studied Arla's legs with his hands; they were dry like onions, rather grainy at the knees, warm on the inside, thighs like matching narrow vases.
* * * *
Normally he would have dropped through Arla's skylight when he was finished working. George liked to imagine she was smiling in the dark, amorphous in the bed, wet tar, lava. His cold, musty clothing smelled of stone dust, and it was white on his palms like talcum. Her nose twitched when she smelled him, her teeth were sharp as shale. She wasn't morbid, thought George, just curious.
She made his stiff jeans, powder coated jumper disappear in the bed as if she ate them.
In the lovemaking George too became formless. Although as he touched her he plotted how he might carve them, entwined, in marble or granite.
* * * *
A delegation from the diocese came to see about Arla and her mother. George knew Arla's mother had made the parishioners sit for tea after they told her.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 21 Page 6
