Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  A coyote ran past him toward Maribel and he grabbed its tail. It turned in a moment and bit through the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

  David rolled and crushed away the coyotes on his back. Another sunk its teeth into his shoulder and David bit the dog’s neck, grinding his teeth until it released him.

  He flailed and swung and fell inside and kicked the door closed.

  “Lock it,” he said, “and shutter the windows.”

  She did, and he pushed more bullets into the rifle until it was full. He bled all over the floor and kitchen table.

  Claws scraped on the porch and at the door. They heard a coyote climb the propane tank to the tool shed to the roof and pace above.

  She wiped the blood away until she could see his wounds. He screamed when she poured rubbing alcohol into them, loud enough that the coyotes outside paused to listen. He gasped and wept while she taped pieces of towel over the holes ripped in his skin.

  “You’re not strong enough to kill them all, are you?” Maribel asked.

  “You’re a hard woman to be in love with,” David said.

  “Thank you.”

  “What in hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Maribel said.

  “You knew they were coming?”

  “My family is cursed,” she said.

  “Okay,” David said. “So we got that going for us. Will they go away?”

  She looked toward the sound of claws scraping on wood outside the door and shook her head.

  They sat through the night and all the next day listening to the coyotes outside, pacing, growling, leaping to tear pieces from the half-butchered doe.

  Beyond their breath and their claws, the coyotes were silent.

  David passed in and out of sleep, tongue thick in his head. He woke twice to Maribel pouring melted snow down his throat, chewing deer meat and expelling it into his mouth and rubbing his throat until he swallowed. It was raw and sweet-tasting with her saliva.

  Every other time he woke, she was standing by the kitchen table and eating as if filling a hole. She watched the door and listened to the coyotes pace.

  He slept for fourteen hours and dreamed about a shaggy deer rubbing its head violently on the trees to wear away its scalp and expose its horns.

  Five

  The howling woke him. He startled to his feet and spun drunkenly around. He thought first of a hurricane or avalanche, a sound scaled like weather. Dozens of coyotes yelled at the sky.

  Maribel stood with one hand on the bloody kitchen table, the other at her belly, thick water dripping from between her legs.

  “Here they come,” she said, smiling.

  “What do I do?” he said.

  “Help me.”

  He put his arm under hers and helped her walk to the bed.

  The coyotes kept howling.

  “Shut up,” David yelled.

  Maribel moaned and it sounded like pleasure.

  He added the last of the wood to the fire and filled a pitcher with water and washed his hands. Maribel peeled off her shirt and panties and lolled ponderously on the bed. The coyotes howled and scraped at the walls.

  David washed his hands again and again, but the water kept sheeting off coppery red.

  A small body slammed against the door. The pitch of scraped claws against lumber deepened, teeth gouging at wood.

  “Fuck,” David said.

  Maribel moaned and David went to her and squeezed her hand.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  David flinched each time the coyotes threw themselves at the door. The wood shook, the hinges rattling. The howling never stopped.

  Maribel clawed at the amulet at her throat like it was burning her, pulling until the piercings at her clavicles broke and bled. David tried to take her hand away and she tore the skin from his ring finger with her teeth.

  He yelled and pulled back and she ripped the piercings from her chest and threw the bloody chain across the room.

  “Now,” she said.

  David watched her heave, drawing ragged breaths through tiny, sharp teeth.

  “Don’t let them have the babies,” Maribel said.

  David pulled the rifle close to the bed.

  Time unmoored. The smells of animal blood and birthing saturated the deep animal crevices of David’s brain and all the pretenses of humanity slept. He held Maribel down and let her tear at his skin while the pains wracked her. She cursed him and laughed and begged him to make it stop and keep the dogs away. The coyotes howled. They scraped the wood of the door thin enough that David could hear the ragged hiss of their breaths in between Maribel’s contractions.

  Just before dawn, she passed a tooth, a tiny canine triangle in a slick of blood between her legs. David picked it up and held it between his thumb and forefinger.

  Maribel screamed and lifted from the bed so that only her heels and the back of her head touched the blood and sweat-stained linens.

  David wrapped his arms around her and tried to push her down and a dozen tiny teeth snapped into his arm. Her belly bulged in four different directions, a starburst with rounded edges. Teeth punctured the drum-tight skin from inside, bright red spots centering vascular stains of burst vessels. David held tighter, trying to push her down, and their children tore upward through the skin of her belly and snapped at his arms and face.

  He fell deeper into her as she fell apart, and scrambled for purchase, trying to keep his face out of the blood and fur.

  The pups squirmed in their mother’s gore, tiny and sightless, as she died.

  The door cracked inward and a snout and paw wormed through the splintered wood. The coyote growled and whined and the wood broke and he ran for the bed. Coyotes poured like water through the hole and surrounded the bed, snapping at David’s heels.

  He drew his legs up onto the bed, curled up as if in a kiddy pool filled with coyote pups, blood, and bones. The tiny, nearly hairless dogs nipped at him and struggled to rise from the slick.

  The adults put their forepaws on the edges of the bed and gently lifted pups from the slurry by the napes of their necks.

  “No,” David said.

  The adult trotted with the pups back through the shattered door.

  An adult bit his face and when he rolled away, lifted a pup from beneath him.

  In moments all the pups were gone but one, scrawny and blood-soaked, pushing against David’s chest.

  He grabbed the pup and held her close.

  Three adults remained. They growled and snapped at David. The pup squirmed in his arms.

  “She’s mine,” he said.

  The dogs leapt onto the bed and took his flesh in their teeth and shook their heads. David curled tighter, holding on to the pup, screaming.

  He let them chew on his back and arms and neck until the sun reached in through the broken door and the others began howling from deep in the woods.

  The three raised their bloody snouts and looked toward the sound and then jumped off the bed and were gone.

  David uncurled and looked down at his pup. Blind and gore-slicked, she huddled against her father and licked at a wound on his chest.

  “Baby,” David said, and closed his eyes and slept.

  He named the puppy Sheila, after his mother.

  He healed and took Sheila to Mexico, where a grotesquely scarred Gringo was no stranger than a grotesquely scarred Gringo with a pet coyote.

  David watched her closely, waiting for Sheila to become a human girl, and wondering how long it would take her kind to find her.

  © 2012 J.T. Petty.

  J.T. Petty is a writer and director of movies, video games, and books. His movies include horror-western The Burrowers, released by Lionsgate, and documentary-horror S&Man (Sandman), released by Magnolia. His best-known work in video games is Splinter Cell and several of its sequels. His most recent work includes the exorcism-comedy Hellbenders (Toronto International Film Festival 2012) and the graphic novel Bloody Chester.

  Cats
kin

  Kelly Link

  Cats went in and out of the witch’s house all day long. The windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.

  Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

  The cats trotted and slunk and leapt and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.

  The witch had three living children at this time, although at one time she had had dozens, maybe more. No one, certainly not the witch, had ever bothered to tally them up. But at one time, the house had bulged with cats and babies.

  Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way—their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers—the witch had acquired her children by other means: She had stolen or bought them.

  She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic), although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

  One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.

  Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

  Are you still reading? The witch, up in her bedroom, was dying. She had been poisoned by an enemy, a witch, a man named Lack. The child Finn, who had been her food taster, was dead already and so were three cats who’d licked her dish clean. The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge. Once the question of this revenge had been settled to her satisfaction, the shape of it like a black ball of twine in her head, she began to divide up her estate between her three remaining children.

  Flecks of vomit stuck to the corners of her mouth, and there was a basin beside the foot of the bed, which was full of black liquid. The room smelled like cats’ piss and wet matches. The witch panted as if she were giving birth to her own death.

  “Flora shall have my automobile,” she said, “and also my purse, which will never be empty, so long as you always leave a coin at the bottom, my darling, my spendthrift, my profligate, my drop of poison, my pretty, pretty Flora. And when I am dead, take the road outside the house and go west. There’s one last piece of advice.”

  Flora, who was the oldest of the witch’s living children, was redheaded and stylish. She had been waiting for the witch’s death for a long time now, although she had been patient. She kissed the witch’s cheek and said, “Thank you, Mother.”

  The witch looked up at her, panting. She could see Flora’s life, already laid out, flat as a map. Perhaps all mothers can see as far.

  “Jack, my love, my birds nest, my bite, my scrap of porridge,” the witch said, “you shall have my books. I won’t have any need of books where I am going. And when you leave my house, strike out in an easterly direction and you won’t be any sorrier than you are now.”

  Jack, who had once been a little bundle of feathers and twigs and eggshell all tied up with a tatty piece of string, was a sturdy lad, almost full grown. If he knew how to read, only the cats knew it. But he nodded and kissed his mother’s gray lips.

  “And what shall I leave to my boy, Small?” the witch said, convulsing. She threw up again in the basin. Cats came running, leaning on the lip of the basin to inspect her vomitus. The witch’s hand dug into Small’s leg.

  “Oh, it is hard, hard, so very hard, for a mother to leave her children (though I have done harder things). Children need a mother, even such a mother as I have been.” She wiped at her eyes, and yet it is a fact that witches cannot cry.

  Small, who still slept in the witch’s bed, was the youngest of the witch’s children. (Perhaps not as young as you think.) He sat upon the bed, and although he didn’t cry, it was only because witch’s children have no one to teach them the use of crying. His heart was breaking.

  Small could juggle and sing and every morning he brushed and plaited the witch’s long, silky hair. Surely every mother must wish for a boy like Small, a curly-headed, sweet-breathed, tenderhearted boy like Small, who can cook a fine omelet, and who has a good strong singing voice as well as a gentle hand with a hairbrush.

  “Mother,” he said, “if you must die, then you must die. And if I can’t come along with you, then I’ll do my best to live and make you proud. Give me your hairbrush to remember you by, and I’ll go make my own way in the world.”

  “You shall have my hairbrush, then,” said the witch to Small, looking, and panting, panting. “And I love you best of all. You shall have my tinderbox and my matches, and also my revenge, and you will make me proud, or I don’t know my own children.”

  “What shall we do with the house, Mother?” said Jack. He said it as if he didn’t care.

  “When I am dead,” the witch said, “this house will be of no use to anyone. I gave birth to it—that was a very long time ago—and raised it from just a dollhouse. Oh, it was the most dear, most darling dollhouse ever. It had eight rooms and a tin roof, and a staircase that went nowhere at all. But I nursed it and rocked it to sleep in a cradle, and it grew up to be a real house, and see how it has taken care of me, its parent, how it knows a child’s duty to its mother. And perhaps you can see how it is now, how it pines, how it grows sick to see me dying like this. Leave it to the cats. They’ll know what to do with it.”

  All this time, the cats have been running in and out of the room, bringing things and taking things away. It seems as if they will never slow down, never come to rest, never nap, never have the time to sleep, or to die, or even to mourn. They have a certain proprietary look about them, as if the house is already theirs.

  The witch vomits up mud, fur, glass buttons, tin soldiers, trowels, hat pins, thumbtacks, love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read), and a dozen regiments of red ants, each ant as long and wide as a kidney bean. The ants swim across the perilous, stinking basin, clamber up the sides of the basin, and go marching across the floor in a shiny ribbon. They are carrying pieces of Time in their mandibles. Time is heavy, even in such small pieces, but the ants have strong jaws, strong legs. Across the floor they go, and up the wall, and out the window. The cats watch, but don’t interfere. The witch gasps and coughs and then lies still. Her hands beat against the bed once and then are still. Still the children wait, to make sure that she is dead, and that she has nothing else to say.

  In the witch’s house, the dead are sometimes quite talkative.

  But the witch has nothing else to say at this time.

  The house groans and all the cats begin to mew piteously, trotting in and out of the room as if they have dropped something and must go and hunt for it—they will never find it—and the children, at last, find they know how to cry, but the witc
h is perfectly still and quiet. There is a tiny smile on her face, as if everything has happened exactly to her satisfaction. Or maybe she is looking forward to the next part of the story.

  The children buried the witch in one of her half-grown dollhouses. They crammed her into the downstairs parlor, and knocked out the inner walls so that her head rested on the kitchen table in the breakfast nook, and her ankles threaded through a bedroom door. Small brushed out her hair, and, because he wasn’t sure what she should wear now that she was dead, he put all her dresses on her, one over the other over the other, until he could hardly see her white limbs at all beneath the stack of petticoats and coats and dresses. It didn’t matter: Once they’d nailed the dollhouse shut again, all they could see was the red crown of her head in the kitchen window, and the worn-down heels of her dancing shoes knocking against the shutters of the bedroom window.

  Jack, who was handy, rigged a set of wheels for the dollhouse, and a harness so that it could be pulled. They put the harness on Small, and Small pulled and Flora pushed, and Jack talked and coaxed the house along, over the hill, down to the cemetery, and the cats ran along beside them.

  The cats are beginning to look a bit shabby, as if they are molting. Their mouths look very empty. The ants have marched away, through the woods, and down into town, and they have built a nest on your yard, out of the bits of Time. And if you hold a magnifying glass over their nest, to see the ants dance and burn, Time will catch fire and you will be sorry.

  Outside the cemetery gates, the cats had been digging a grave for the witch. The children tipped the dollhouse into the grave, kitchen window first. But then they saw that the grave wasn’t deep enough, and the house sat there on its end, looking uncomfortable. Small began to cry (now that he’d learned how, it seemed he would spend all his time practicing), thinking how horrible it would be to spend one’s death, all of eternity, upside down and not even properly buried, not even able to feel the rain when it beat down on the exposed shingles of the house, and seeped down into the house and filled your mouth and drowned you, so that you had to die all over again, every time it rained.