Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  Flora patted Small on the head. She said, “What do I want? That’s easy enough! To never have to worry about money. I want to marry a man and know that he’ll never cheat on me, or leave me.” She looked at Jack as she said this.

  Jack said, “I want a rich wife who won’t talk back, who doesn’t lie in bed all day, with the covers pulled up over her head, weeping and calling me a bundle of twigs.” And he looked at Flora when he said this.

  The Witch’s Revenge put down the sweater that she was knitting for Small. She looked at Flora and she looked at Jack and then she looked at Small.

  Small went into the kitchen and opened the door of the hanging cage. He lifted out the two cats and brought them to Flora and Jack. “Here,” he said. “A husband for you, Flora, and a wife for Jack. A prince and a princess, and both of them beautiful, and well brought up, and wealthy, no doubt.”

  Flora picked up the little tomcat and said, “Don’t tease at me, Small! Who ever heard of marrying a cat!”

  The Witch’s Revenge said, “The trick is to keep their catskins in a safe hiding place. And if they sulk, or treat you badly, sew them back into their catskin and put them into a bag and throw them in the river.”

  Then she took her claw and slit the skin of the tabby-colored catsuit, and Flora was holding a naked man. Flora shrieked and dropped him on the ground. He was a handsome man, well made, and he had a princely manner. He was not a man that anyone would ever mistake for a cat. He stood up and made a bow, very elegant, for all that he was naked. Flora blushed, but she looked pleased.

  “Go fetch some clothes for the Prince and the Princess,” The Witch’s Revenge said to Small. When he got back, there was a naked princess hiding behind the sofa, and Jack was leering at her.

  A few weeks after that, there were two weddings, and then Flora left with her new husband, and Jack went off with his new princess. Perhaps they lived happily ever after.

  The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, “We have no wife for you.”

  Small shrugged. “I’m still too young,” he said.

  But try as hard as he can, Small is getting older now. The catskin barely fits across his shoulders. The buttons strain when he fastens them. His grown-up fur—his people fur—is coming in. At night he dreams.

  The witch his mother’s Spanish heel beats against the pane of glass. The princess hangs in the briar. She’s holding up her dress, so he can see the catfur down there. Now she’s under the house. She wants to marry him, but the house will fall down if he kisses her. He and Flora are children again, in the witch’s house. Flora lifts up her skirt and says, see my pussy? There’s a cat down there, peeking out at him, but it doesn’t look like any cat he’s ever seen. He says to Flora, I have a pussy, too. But his isn’t the same.

  At last he knows what happened to the little, starving, naked thing in the forest, where it went. It crawled into his catskin, while he was asleep, and then it climbed right inside him, his Small skin, and now it is huddled in his chest, still cold and sad and hungry. It is eating him from the inside, and getting bigger, and one day there will be no Small left at all, only that nameless, hungry child, wearing a Small skin.

  Small moans in his sleep.

  There are ants in The Witch’s Revenge’s skin, leaking out of her seams, and they march down into the sheets and pinch at him, down under his arms, and between his legs where his fur is growing in, and it hurts, it aches and aches. He dreams that The Witch’s Revenge wakes now, and comes and licks him all over, until the pain melts. The pane of glass melts. The ants march away again on their long, greased thread.

  “What do you want?” says The Witch’s Revenge.

  Small is no longer dreaming. He says, “I want my mother!”

  Light from the moon comes down through the window over their bed. The Witch’s Revenge is very beautiful—she looks like a Queen, like a knife, like a burning house, a cat—in the moonlight. Her fur shines. Her whiskers stand out like pulled stitches, wax and thread. The Witch’s Revenge says, “Your mother is dead.”

  “Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me back my mother,” he says.

  “Oh, my darling,” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s Revenge, “I can’t do that. I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of me.”

  Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”

  His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with you.”

  “Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says. He pulls at the sheet on the bed, as if it were his mother’s catskin.

  The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head. She trembles and beats her tail back and forth. She says, “How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for? Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night.”

  And Small has to be satisfied with that. All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he’ll creep inside her mouth, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he’ll help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again and come and live in the world with him, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t, either. He’ll live there, the way that sailors learn to live, inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.

  This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?

  © 2003 Kelly Link.

  Originally published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Kelly Link is the author of three collections, Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners, and Stranger Things Happen. Her short stories have won three Nebula Awards, a Shirley Jackson Award, a Hugo, a Locus, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”) Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

  Family Teeth (Part 6): St. Polycarp’s Home For Happy Wanderers

  Sarah Langan

  One: Getting Kissed up to God

  Sheila Halpern got her looks from her Momma, who died pushing her out. Died before, even, but still kept pushing.

  “You’re the prettiest thing in the whole darn world,” her daddy told her the day he put her on the train for the St. Polycarp’s Home for Happy Wanderers, his age-soft teeth all chipped so everything sounded muffled. She was eight years old, lice riddled, and 90% liar like her daddy. He was beat-up and down and sideways—an egg with a broken yolk.

  The day before, he’d killed two howlers with just his hands. Pressed his thumbs plumb-through their eye sockets and mushed their brains. Now the rest of the pack was after them, and so were the New Mexico Staties. Roadblocks and night creatures left them no time to vanish south of Juarez.

  “I don’ wanna,
” Sheila said. The ticket her daddy’d pinned to her t-shirt was starting to crinkle. Nobody’d be able to read it. They’d boot her right off the train and then she’d be solo forever.

  “You gotta,” her daddy told her. He was looking all around the empty station, his jagged hands like cattle prods. Those hands had been through every violation—torn up by bull-drawn rope, split apart with corn lye, chewed by dogs and wolves and coyotes. By now they were swollen to the size of oven mitts, and she sometimes caught him rubbing them with wintergreen oil just to numb the hurt.

  “Go now,” Daddy said, still prodding.

  Up ahead were stairs that nobody was climbing. Past that, a lonesome ticket agent, sweltering in a red three-button coat. Nobody traveled or worked or did anything out here in the West unless they had to, and even then, they mostly rolled over and died instead. She and Daddy were different. They had each other, plus Momma watchin’ over them from heaven.

  The train pulled into the station. Gnarly and sun-pruned travelers from Tucson looked out their dusty windows. To the north, lightning flashed. You could see it for miles, like a yellow cottonwood falling branches-first from the sky. Soon, hard rain would come. The kind that doesn’t cool nothing but the Joshua Trees.

  “All aboard!” some guy shouted over a muffled speaker that echoed across the flat, dry West.

  Sheila itched her lice. She and Daddy had been through this before—close calls, heated races into new towns, dyed hair and phony names. This was gonna be the same. He’d back down, hug her, tell her she was his one and only. No way he’d kept her alive all these years, just to kiss her up to God.

  “Who’s gonna save me from the howling?”

  He wiped his leaking hands on the backs of his jeans. “It’s a nice place for a good girl. You hide there. Don’ talk to nobody. Don’ trust nobody. I’ll git you when it’s safe.”

  The engine started up. “Scat, Puppy,” Daddy said.

  Sheila’s ears pricked. Even though it was broad daylight, she heard howlers on the hunt. It’s an empty sound that kinda sonics through your innards ’til your bowels shake loose.

  “They’re here,” Sheila whispered. “No use my leavin’ now. You and me’ll just have to fight ’em to the death.”

  Daddy didn’t have her good ears, but he trusted her when it came to the howlers. He shoved her on the train, then stood in her way so she couldn’t get out.

  A hand clamped down on her shoulder. “Ticket?” a sweating man in red asked.

  The sky darkened. The howlers took shelter under the mean clouds, loping on four legs toward the station.

  The train pulled away. Sheila didn’t have it in her to scream. This was Las Cruces, a baby shithole in the giant outhouse of the West. So she just watched as four howlers circled her poor Daddy, and the whole, used-up world got small.

  Two: Three Foster Homes, a Drowned Lady, and a Bad Habit

  The trip East took four days and she slept with her face pressed to the glass, eating just peanut packets that came free and water from the bathroom sink. Her ninth birthday happened in the plains of St. Louis. “Dear Daddy and Momma,” she whispered once she figured out that nobody was gonna stop the train and surprise her with Hostess cupcakes, “You’re the worst parents in the whole world and this is the worst day in my whole life, even including the real day I was born and you died on me, Mom.”

  Then she cried for a while and felt sorry for herself, which wasn’t her nature. By Portland, Maine, the conductor was happy to get rid of her. He pushed her off her seat like shaking Serano chile seeds loose from their fruit.

  Sister Rita was waiting near the Amtrak Dunkin’ Donuts, holding a sign that read Sheila Halpern. She was skinny as pulled jerky and her pale cheeks and neck flapped like empty clothes.

  “Sheila?” she asked.

  “Susannah,” she answered, because that was the name she’d used in Yuma, where her Daddy taught her to catch trout with just her hands.

  Sister Rita looked her up and down, smiling sweetly, fingers weaved so tight they looked like albino worms. “Orphan cowgirl, you’ll be my special challenge,” she said.

  You get a feeling about people the first time you see them that later, you forget. Susannah had a feeling: Sister Rita was bat-shit nuts.

  Overcrowded wasn’t the word. St. Polycarp’s Home for Happy Wanderers had thirty beds and a hundred kids, with busloads more every day. Most got fostered out to trailers and lean-tos where they made some lady’s payday. The rest ran away, or else or became Rita’s house-broke pets, which probably wasn’t worse than death, but came close.

  Susannah’s first foster was with Bonnie Sleeper on Winter Street in Sanford. Bonnie sold used books and clothes. She dated the guy at Jenny’s Garden next door, so her whole house was forever full of baby’s breath flowers, basically for free.

  Susannah liked the set-up, especially because it was an easy walk to Sanford Elementary. The other six foster kids were a fun pack that stuck tight. She didn’t even mind Bonnie’s newborn twins that squawked all night.

  But then her foster brother Mike climbed into her cot one night. “My own’s too cold,” he said. His hands jabbed at her like mechanical dough kneaders. The other fosters watched, like this was normal.

  Susannah told herself it was no big deal. Easy peasy, dream of wheezy. But her skin had its own ideas. It started crawling like it was mixed with lice. When he got to her panties, the lice went crazy.

  At the free clinic emergency room that night, nobody would believe it was Susannah—the bite marks were too sharp. “Canine,” the hand surgeon said. “Definitely dog.”

  The next day, her skin and mind got into harmony. She stole two boxes of Ex-Lax and put them into the Bisquick pancakes she fried up for everybody’s lunch. They ate them and all got sick, even Bonnie’s sweet baby twins. “I did it,” Susannah declared, just so there wasn’t any confusion.

  So she got returned to St. Poly’s, like one of those Barbie Dolls that’s supposed to be good until you take it out of the box and find out its elbows are bent forever.

  “Of course you stuck up for yourself. You’re a fighter. The kind that doesn’t bend. Only breaks,” Sister Rita said when Susannah told about the touching. Then Rita scratched the hidden neck skin under her habit—all red and flaky like fish scales.

  Back at school, the foster siblings spread word that Susannah was bad news. Worse, she couldn’t stop lying, even when nobody believed her. “My family’s ancient, like from the days Gods used to walk around like normal people, stealing fire,” she told Carole, the most popular girl in class, who pinned her hair back with ribbon barrettes and never talked much, just kinda sneered. “Did you know coyotes aren’t even animals? They’re cursed murderers and birth-defected. My Daddy hunts ’em.”

  Pretty soon, Carole’s friends were listening, too. All those cool kids who walked together to the Mobil station and went sledding instead of doing afternoon chores. “You know how they have vampire hunters? Well, my family’s like that, only with tricksters,” Susannah said.

  By now, the whole class was quiet. This was lunch time—napkins unfolded over desks, everybody sitting like their seats had glue. Even Mrs. Solomon was listening. Susannah could hear the titters. The excitement. She had them. They liked her.

  “So basically, this is a warning. You keep teasing me, and I’ll feed ya to the werecoyotes.”

  Everybody got quiet. A full two-seconds of awe. Mrs. Solomon started to say something, but then Carole snickered. The sound echoed like thunder in a desert. Then everybody was laughing. Even Mrs. Solomon.

  Next thing, the kids were shoving her into her locker just for fun, then throwing a Medico up for a nonstop riot. She came home with a note taped to her back that Sister Rita pulled off. It read: “I’m an ugly Gaylord.”

  Sister Rita squeezed Susannah’s shoulder, offered her enough sympathy to get her waterworks going, then said. “It’s okay to like girls. You just can’t act on it. We’ll hang this up, to remember our prostrations a
nd humility.”

  So there it went, Scotch taped to Sister Rita’s office door: I’m an ugly Gaylord. Only now, underneath, Sister Rita had written: Susannah Halpern.

  That night Susannah wrote an entry in her school diary she was supposed to keep. It read like this:

  Every thing I told you guys 2day is tru. You should know that no thing will ever hurt me because Im all ready sick in my heart for my Daddy-Momma. When I cried in the locker it was an acident. Its like flies on a broke horses ass—he swings his tail, shure, but only outta habbit.

  I hope you drop ded for laughin at me, Missus Solomon.

  Good night diahrea diary,

  Susannah Halpern, wich isn’t even my real name, you jerks

  Four months after Los Cruces, Sister Rita found Susannah a second foster home. By then, she’d been thinking about running away. But she kept hoping her daddy was alive. Sister Rita was the only way they’d find each other again.

  The new house was in Camden with rich people. Everybody smiled on the outside and dressed pretty, but when you talked to them, you got the feeling they hated you. The parents were always whispering about the kids. Always disappointed or looking to find out who’d spilled juice or tracked dirt or left open a window. All that contention felt like somebody playing steel guitar with Susannah’s organs.

  She knew it was rabid stupid, but her nervous teeth got the better of her brain and she started biting herself—hands at first, then arms, too. Her tiny canines punched through below-skin bloodwebs to make red bruises, which her foster sister reported, so her foster parents made her stand in the corner, which didn’t stop her from biting, so they always made her stand in the corner, which made her always bite herself, which got her returned, because she was bringing everybody else down.

  Because it used to be a mill town, Sanford had this river called the Mousam that Susannah sometimes sneaked out at night to visit. The sound it made was laughing during full moons, crying the rest of the time. Once, she saw an older version of herself inside it—baggy eyed with a beat-up face. In the reflection, she was wearing a nun’s habit.