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Self Story
Carol Emshwiller
How did this begin? We must have thought she'd be a good choice. We should have checked her out first. We should have spent a few hours with her to see how it was going to be, spending the whole summer shut up here in the middle of nowhere. We'd have seen in half a day how soon we'd tire of her smiling. Nobody smiles this much except out of fear and embarrassment and there's not a moment when she's not embarrassed. Embarrassed to be herself I suppose. Whoever she is.
Well, the summer will be over, and thank goodness. We'll go back to our regular lives. And better that she go back to living by herself as she's used to. Back to running in place or riding her stationary bike, lifting those little weights that she never does often enough to get any better at it.
If we'd seen her home before, we never would have taken her class. Piles and piles of papers on every flat surface! We'd have known her mind has got to be just as cluttered. People are always all of a piece.
She's called the class a title with no dignity: SUMMER FUN WITH FICTION ... as if it was for children. Fun! We're not here for fun. Except ... well, it could have been. Maybe. With anybody else but her.
We won't say who it is. Suffice it to say her initials are C. E.
She's old. At her age you can't help but be out of date. But she doesn't suspect it. Hasn't she, she says (and she says it over and over): “Haven't I always been right on the cutting edge of everything? Haven't I even gone beyond the so-called New Wave? On into the new old things? Back to the old rules, but back in an entirely new way?"
She says, “A story should be this and this and not that and that and the other. A story should curve and stop and struggle, turn around in the middle and tell the opposite. Have guts and sweep and go somewhere with gusto. élan,” she says. “A story should always be more than itself. A story should end only a few inches from where it began. A story should fall over the edge. A story should be a bundle of foreshadowings. Should vouchsafe itself to the reader from the very beginning that it is, in fact, a story."
She never would say, “Write what you know,” like everybody else does. She never would say, “Write, write, write, and keep on writing.” If she doesn't say that, we guess she thinks she knows more about it than Hemingway. Well, she says she does right in front of us. What she says instead is, “Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent."
She thinks she might have already written the very twenty-five words that could change the whole history of writing but she knows, as we do also, that nobody will ever read them.
She says she knows nothing about poetry but she doesn't mean it. You can tell that, inside herself, she's absolutely sure she's right. It's that appeasement thing that makes her say she knows nothing about it. She's even afraid to appear to be too knowledgeable about fiction. It's part of trying to be nice all the time.
So many rules! Other teachers don't have rules. Other teachers say there are no rules, or, if there are, that a good writer will break them all. Besides, we're used to those classes where you feel things. Where you go deep inside yourself and dig things out.
On the other hand, she likes to write from things that embarrass her. It's embarrassment instead of deep feelings.
Embarrassed for her, we look out the window. We think about what we'll write about later. Though there might not be much of the day left after she gets through talking.
Not that we want to be writers, anyway. Just a poem or two full of feelings. Of course it's nice to have a class here, “under the trees and sitting on the grass” (as was advertised), but this is the desert and there's no grass and few trees. She does take us up into the mountains sometimes, but she's so slow. We can hardly walk that slowly.
* * * *
She says one can write compassionately without being so, simply by following the rules (rules again), the tricks—"tricks!” she says—of compassion. “It's all in the technique.” She says, “It's not your job to feel things, it's your job to make the reader feel things."
Does she ever feel anything? Or is her whole being nothing but technique?
On the other hand, there's her constant smiling.... It's insecurity that's hidden under all that friendliness and phony sincerity. She's afraid not to smile. We get tired of it.
But, truth is, we appease her almost as much as she appeases us. We say, “Yes, yes.” We say, “Of course,” when it's more a matter of “Certainly not."
We save our laughing for after she's hobbled off to bed. And we do mean hobble. You can't be that old without hobbling. “Did you hear what she said about picaresque? Did you hear about hurdles vs. dominos?"
* * * *
She pretends to be happy, but we don't believe it. You can't be that old and happy, too. Only a few years left to her at the most, but she starts a novel anyway. How can she be so stupid?
She laughs too much and too loud and in all the wrong places. A sure sign of terror.
Being around her hasn't helped our own depression ... our own desperation. Why did we ever think it would? And this place. We thought being out in the country would help, too, but we all have nose bleeds from the dryness, and we look out at nothing but sand and lizards and sagebrush.
* * * *
She says a story has an arc, up and up and then down, perhaps a loop, sometimes a set of steps, always rising. Always moving faster. Rhythmically, the beginning should never be like the end.
She says, “Don't let other teachers tell you to put everything in conversations. It's the slowest way of all for telling your story. Summarize your conversations or mix it up, a little summary and a little direct conversation. Dialogue should do three things at the same time—maybe four."
She says if you write about the preparation for a dinner party and it goes on and on for four pages, then, in fiction, it had better turn out to be a disaster because, in fiction, all that preparation is a clue to something bad going to happen.
She says, I believe in ending up with a plotted story, but I don't plot ahead of time. Your subconscious is smarter than you are. Let it lead.
She says that when she writes—and even when she doesn't—she believes in nothing but what the characters believe in. That she has no right and wrong, other than what the characters and the story itself may have.
* * * *
Her mind wanders as we read our stories to her. You can see it on her face. Her mind even wanders when she reads from her own things.
* * * *
She talks to herself out loud all the time. Now and then she argues with dead people—long dead! Her husband, her mother-in-law.... She still wants to prove to them she was right all along. Also she remembers past slights—long-past slights—and feels bad about them even after all these years.
Once, when she heard on the radio that Betty Davis was “a demonstration of the human spirit,” we heard her say to herself, “Why aren't I a demonstration of the human spirit."
She thinks she's poorer than she is. Even things she can afford she doesn't buy. God forbid she'd have to take a taxi or go out to eat. We've even heard her say out loud to herself, when looking at a filet mignon while shopping, “You can't have that."
* * * *
Now and then she has a puzzled look. As if: What's going on? As if the whole world looks peculiar.
* * * *
Her autobiography is full of errors. Mostly she doesn't realize it, but she forgets. Hardly a single date she'll tell you is right. And she keeps forgetting our names.
But she has one memory she never forgets. One of her first. It's of her little brother and her mother saying how cute he was. Her mother said that over and over. She kept thinking, “Why aren't I cute, too?” But, actually, she wasn't, so why keep wondering and wondering after all these years? Also, and anyway, you can't be her age and be cute.
You can tell by the way she dresses that she always wanted to be a boy. Probably because of her “cute” little brother.
*
* * *
She's sitting at the computer looking as if she's working, but we peeked. She's really playing solitaire.
* * * *
She insists she's not a feminist. She says we don't notice the nasty things she writes about women, only what she writes about men.
* * * *
Writing teachers always say, “Cultivate your idiosyncrasies.” She tries so hard to be different, else why would she write such a thing as this right here?
* * * *
But look what she's doing now. She shouldn't be out there on the cliffs in the wind. We told her already not to go by herself. We shout, Stop! But off she goes. She's so deaf she can't hear us. We gesticulate. She nods and smiles. That's what she always does whether she hears us or not.
We follow her up into the hills. Somebody has to. Nobody else here but us. If she falls, it won't be the first time.
She has said she wants to be the body discovered in a glacier two thousand years from now. We wonder if she's decided now is the time to go out to lie down on the ice. She wants to be the one they study in the future, and write up in all the science magazines ... if there are science magazines two thousand years from now.
She wore the things she wants to be discovered in by the people of the future: polypropylene underwear, Gortex boots with special insoles, moleskin on the blistered spots.... She knows they always study every little detail to find out about us of the past. She brought her arthritis pills and vitamins, and her bird book. We suspect she might have one of her own books in her knapsack. Though she hates to carry heavy things. Maybe it's just a copy of one story.
Her carefully chosen last meal was eggs and bacon. You can tell she wants to be a true representative of her time and place.
She has an apple, a little carton of juice, and a breakfast bar. We wonder if she'll keep them for the people of the future or if she'll eat them.
But why should she get to be the one preserved in ice for two thousand years? We'd like that, too, and with our own books in our backpacks. But then we remind ourselves that the glaciers are melting. There soon may not be any, anyway.
We don't tell her the glacier won't last—that even the North Pole is melting, that she'll have to find a different way. We just lure her back home with the promise of apricots.
* * * *
The class is finally over. We wave goodbye. I'll bet she's saying, “What a relief, they're finally going. I don't have to smile anymore."
And there's that puzzled look again. As if: What's going on? As if the whole world looks peculiar.
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Snowdrops
Alex Dally MacFarlane
Snowdrops painted the forest floor white. Smeared across them, Adriet's blood stood out like a red gown against Mother's icy skin. She would wear Adriet's death, I thought, just like one of her dresses: a garment to turn seasons to hers so that another part of her ambition might freeze into place.
* * * *
The ice was her midwife and wet nurse. Like the sky's tongue, winter's winds licked her mother's carriage, sent it tumbling over a precipice onto the icy plains. Her mother's body, already rippling with the pangs of birth, tore open in the fall and out rolled Mother—out into the frozen fields and streams, a silent babe who suckled on icicles and curled up with drifts.
She crawled in from the plains several springs later, her skin almost as translucent as the ice clothing it, her white hair speckled with snow and her irises the vivid blue of a winter sky.
They called her mad, a demon, a ghost and all things in between; they did not call her a girl, and she did not care. Why would winter's daughter wish to be compared to the feeble, frail things known as girls?
Shard by shard, she froze together her ambition in the circuses and caravans of the warm beings.
* * * *
Whispers brushed my ankles, indistinct like the breath of wind through a cluster of icicles. I sensed only faint, far-off possibilities of emotion—hunger, perhaps. Then the whispers grew louder, like something faraway becoming more visible through a thinning mist, until I heard them clearly, not with my ears but with a different sense lodged in the core of my mind.
You must bury him.
"How?” I spoke softly. The heat of my breath curled upwards to the naked stems and twigs of the black trees. Under my bare feet I could feel the frozen earth, as solid as the Towers, not likely to yield to a girl's soft hands.
* * * *
She took the snowdrops as her first subjects. Whimsical, flighty things, they swooned at her elegant turns of phrase, her beautiful dreams of a world covered in snow and filled with its children; she bound them to her and they did not understand the terms of the contract until many winters later. Too late, by then, for they were as bound to her as blood to any warm creature, as enslaved to her will as limbs.
With their leaves like blades, they helped Mother spread her empire of ice across the world.
* * * *
They parted, revealing rich, brown earth as fluffy and soft as the froth on a mug of cocoa. I knelt and began pulling clods aside with my bare hands, ignoring the dirt gathering under my nails and staining my dress.
I watched their knife-leaves glistening in the faded-yellow wintry sunlight as they crowded on the rim of the deepening hole; I watched them and did not know how to avenge my brother.
* * * *
Father passed in and out of her life like an autumn wind, all bright colours and fleeting shadows and fierce brevity. For a handful of days the pale curls of ice froze no further as she flung herself into his warmth, suddenly desperate for his touch, intoxicated like a girl with her first glass of wine. And then he swept away, taking his colours and shadows with him. The warmth faded quickly from her skin but grew deep inside her, in a place she had thought frozen long ago. It became twins: Adriet and Laurill.
* * * *
My hands hurt and my nails broke and pain laced my back like ribbons in a corset, but I continued digging.
* * * *
We grew quickly, Adriet and I.
We were not like her; that was quickly apparent. But neither were we like other children. Our bodies could blend into any season, hot or cold, but we preferred winter, loved the feel of snow crunching under our bare feet, snowflakes settling on our bare arms and icy water flowing over us, soaking us until it froze like the ice garments Mother always wore in those days.
Before long, she realised a use for us.
Our white skin possessed a glow hers didn't and our blue eyes held hints of summer; if we wore clothes of cloth and combed the ice from our hair we looked like any other boy and girl.
"You will help me,” she said, her voice feather-light as the first fall of snow, “convince them not to fear me."
Ambassadors of Ice, we went among the spring, summer and autumn corners of the world, spreading chilly whispers of false portent.
"In truth,” she said to me one day, her voice crisp as the first frost, “I need only one of you."
* * * *
When the pale sun slipped below the horizon, I lowered Adriet's body into his shallow grave. With the love only a sister can feel I stroked his pale hair, leaned forward to brush my lips against his—and, so close, I saw the faint stain of green nestled in the corners of his mouth. I pressed my nose against him, breathed in softly, and smelt a tang reminiscent of my poison chamber.
"I see."
* * * *
My Tower started life as a tree, one of the godtrees worshiped by summer-dwellers for the girth of its trunk, the wide spread of its branches, and the thick vibrancy of its green leaves.
Mother froze it, as she froze all things in her path.
I fell sick upon touching its frozen sap, but my unusual heritage granted me immunity to things that would kill a true being of warmth; with time I grew well again. It was my first encounter with poison. I cut chinks of the sap, stored them in a jar, used them to help Mother conquer those who rebelled. Then, as Ambassador of Ice, I encountere
d molten and gaseous poisons, and hoarded them also; and when I grew to understand and love warm things, I wondered if any of their poisons would harm Mother's subjects.
Adriet visited me often, flying on wings of ice to see me, and we spent many hours in my poison chamber. “What does this do?” he would ask, and I would reply with such-and-such detail I had learnt from my experiments.
Of course he noticed when my experiments increasingly concerned ice things. The gentle-grim curve of his pale lips told me his approval.
* * * *
The snowdrops whispered, alarmed by the tone of my voice, but constrained by Mother's intent. She still needed me, even if she had ordered her floral subjects to dispose of my brother.
* * * *
"And this will poison the snowdrops?” he asked, holding up a glass vial filled with liquid the green of spring's first leaves.
I lay on a wooden couch, my white body clothed in half-frozen vines, and toyed with the frond stretching between my dress and Adriet's identical one. “Yes,” I said, “but it requires an anchor in the ground, a living thing whose power will spread the poison far and wide."
The vial clutched in his hand, he walked back to me and tugged on the vine, drawing me to him. “Would it harm us?"
"No.” I curled a twist of his snowy hair around my finger.
"I think I know of an ... opportunity,” he said, weighing his words carefully, like a squirrel hopping cautiously from one thin branch to another. “They cannot kill me, even if Mother thinks otherwise."
Before I could voice my confusion, he pulled me closer.
* * * *
I packed the earth around his body, flattened it atop him, and when he was covered I stepped back, smiling, and watched the snowdrops wilt.
"Mother,” I whispered to the wind, knowing it would carry my message to her white ears, “I hope you are afraid. We have only just begun."
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The Honeymoon Suite
Jodi Lynn Villers
I'm just here with my mother, but the guest book scares me off the bed so I have to sleep on the floor next to her: Seventy-two hours of you know what, one page says. Recipe for romance, another says, light the fire, steam shower, music, and then make love under the skylights (PS—we left a copy of our wedding CD for everyone to enjoy). These are fresh sheets, my mother says above me. No one has had sex on these; they're clean.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Page 7
