Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36

by Eleanor Arnason

  INTERVIEWER: Why did you break it off?

  EMMA: We weren’t in sync. He liked all that boomer music, rock and roll and Frank Sinatra and stuff. And we couldn’t exactly fall in love, because he was so different.

  He was always nice to me afterwards. He wasn’t one of those guys who just ignores you.

  We were all hanging out at the park next to the library after school. It was the end of the year, school was almost over. Kamar was hanging out with Brenda. He wasn’t exactly her boyfriend because she was also hanging out with this other guy named Anthony and one weekend she’d be with Kamar and the next weekend she’d be with Anthony.

  Everybody was talking and something Terry said made DC really mad. I don’t know what it was. It really surprised me, because DC always acted like Terry didn’t even exist. When Terry was around, he’d ignore him. When he wasn’t around, DC would hang with Kamar. But DC started screaming, stuff like, why don’t you have any friends! You loser! You fucking loser! You have to hang around with us because you don’t have any friends! Well, we don’t want you, either! So why don’t you just go die!

  Terry had this funny look on his face.

  A couple of guys pulled DC away and calmed him down. But everyone was looking at Terry, like it was his fault. I don’t know why, I mean, he didn’t do anything.

  That evening I was supposed to stay at Denise’s house, for real, not like when I told my mom I would be at Denise’s and then went out. So I took my stuff over to her house, and then my brother, who was home from Duke, took us and dropped us off at Pizza Hut so we could get something to eat and then we wandered over to the steps outside the CVS because we saw people hanging out there.

  Lindsey was there and she told me that DC was looking for Terry. That DC said he was going to kill Terry. Kamar got arrested, she said. Which meant there was nobody to calm down DC.

  Kamar had gotten arrested before, for shoplifting, but he got probation. But this time he got arrested for possession. Partly it was because Kamar is black.

  Everybody was talking about Kamar getting busted and DC going off the deep end.

  Lindsey kept saying, “Oh my God.” It really got on my nerves. I mean, I knew DC hated Terry. DC just hated Terry. He said Terry was a poser and was just using people.

  INTERVIEWER: Were you friends with DC?

  EMMA: I knew DC, but we never really talked, but Lindsey had been seeing him for a couple of months, so she knew him better than Denise and me.

  Lindsey thought DC and Kamar were really friends. I thought Kamar just hung around with DC because he had money. Kamar was something like three years older than DC. But Lindsey said Kamar was just using Terry, but he and DC were really close.

  I don’t know what was true.

  After a while Terry showed up. I didn’t know what we should do, if we should tell him or not, but finally I thought I should. Terry was sitting with his car door open, talking to some people.

  I told him Kamar got arrested for possession.

  He wanted to know what happened, and I didn’t know anything but what Lindsey had told me.

  Terry wanted to know if he had a lawyer?

  I never thought about a lawyer. Like I said before, mostly it was easy to forget that Terry wasn’t just a kid like everyone else.

  Terry called the police station on his cellphone. Just punched up the information and called. He said he was a friend of Kamar Wilson’s. They wouldn’t tell him anything on the phone, so he hung up and said he was going to go down.

  I felt really weird suddenly, talking to him, because he sounded so much like an adult. But I told him DC was looking for him.

  “Fuck DC,” Terry said.

  I thought Terry would take off right then and there to go to the police station. But he kept talking to people about Kamar and about what might have happened, so I gave up and I went back to sit on the steps with Denise and Lindsey. We were working on our tans because it would make us look more Egyptian and Indian. Not that I would even think of doing that now, even though skin cancer isn’t one of the types of cancer.

  So finally DC came walking from over towards the hardware store and Denise saw him and said, “Oh shit.”

  I just sat there because Terry was an adult and he could just deal with it, I figured. I’d tried to tell him. And I was kind of pissed at him, too, I don’t know why.

  DC started shouting that Terry was a loser.

  I don’t remember if anybody said anything, but Terry didn’t get out of the car. So DC came up and kicked the car, really hard. That didn’t do anything, so he jumped up on the hood.

  Terry told him to get off the car, but DC wanted him to get out of the car and talk to him. After a while, Terry got out of the car and DC said something like, “I’m going to kill you, man.”

  DC had a knife.

  Denise wanted us to go inside the CVS. But we were pretty far away. And the people inside the CVS are creeps anyway. They were calling the police, right then. Terry stood right by the door of his car, kind of half in and half out.

  Lindsey was going, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” She was really getting on my nerves. I didn’t think anything was really going to happen. Terry kept saying stuff like, “Calm down man.”

  DC was ranting and raving that Terry thought that just because he was older he could do anything he wanted.

  Terry finally got in his car and closed the door. But DC didn’t get off the hood. He jumped up and down on it and the hood made this funny kind of splintery noise. Terry must have gotten mad, he drove the car forward, like, gunned it, and DC fell off, really hard.

  Terry stopped to see if DC was okay. He got out of his car and DC was lying there on his side, kind of curled up. Terry bent over DC and DC said something … I couldn’t see because Terry was between me and DC. Matt was one of the kids up there and he said that Terry pulled open his jacket and he had a gun. He took the gun out in his hand, and showed it to DC and said to fuck off. A bunch of kids saw it. Matt said that Terry called DC a fucking rich kid.

  INTERVIEWER: Have you ever seen a gun?

  EMMA: I saw one at a party once. This kid I didn’t know had it. He was showing it to everyone. I thought he was a creep.

  INTERVIEWER: When did you see Terry next?

  EMMA: I never saw Terry after that, although I told the clinic about him, so I’m sure they contacted him. He was where the disease came from.

  I wasn’t the only one to have sex with him. Brenda had sex with him, and this girl I don’t know very well, JaneAnne. JaneAnne had sex with some other people, and I had sex with my boyfriend after that. I don’t know about Brenda.

  *

  JaneAnne and Brenda’s interviews. JaneAnne was interviewed from her home in Georgetown, MD, where her family moved six months ago. Brenda is still living in Charlotte, with her mother.

  *

  It taught me something. Adults are different. I don’t know if I want to be one.

  INTERVIEWER: Why not?

  EMMA: Because DC was acting stupid, you know? But DC was a kid. And Terry really wasn’t, no matter how bad he wanted to be. So why would he do that to a kid?

  INTERVIEWER: So it was Terry’s fault?

  EMMA: Not his fault, not exactly. But he was putting himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  INTERVIEWER: Should he have known better?

  EMMA: Yeah. No, I mean, he couldn’t know better. It was my fault, in a way. Because most of the time if, like, we’re at the bowling alley and a couple of geezers come in trying to be young, we just ignore them and they just ignore us. It’s just instinct or something. If I hadn’t talked to Terry, none of this would have happened.

  Terry has different rules than us. I’m not saying kids don’t hurt each other. But Terry was always thinking, you know?

  INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

  EMMA: I don’t know. Just that he was always thinking. Even when he wasn’t supposed to be, even when he was mad, he was always thinking.

  (Music—“Solitu
de” by Duke Ellington.)

  EMMA: When my parents found out, they were really shocked. It’s like they were in complete denial. My dad cried. It was scary.

  We’re closer now. We still don’t talk about a lot of things, though. We’re just not that kind of family.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you still go to parties? Still drink?

  EMMA: No, I don’t party like I used to. When I was getting the antivirals, I was so sick I just stopped hanging out. My parents got me a PDA with a minder, like Denise’s. But I wasn’t doing anything anymore. Lindsey still sees everyone. She tells me what’s going on. But it feels different now. I don’t want to be an adult. That must have been what Terry felt like. Funny, to think I’m like him.

  (Music—“My Old School” by Steely Dan.)

  © 2001 by Maureen F. McHugh

  Originally published in Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Maureen F. McHugh was born in what was then a sleepy, blue-collar town in Ohio called Loveland. She went to college in Ohio, and then graduate school at New York University. She lived a year in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first book, Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang, was published in 1991. Since then, she has written three novels and a well-received collection of short stories, Story Prize finalist Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has attempted to sell her soul to Hollywood.

  Author Spotlight: Eleanor Arnason

  Moshe Siegel

  In an interview given prior to the publication of your novella “The Garden,” you mentioned that hwarhath culture grew, in part, from your desire to infuriate outspoken social conservatives with a culture that embraced homosexuality as a function of stable society. Do you feel some vindication in the recent progress of the equality movement? Do you think you would have been driven to make such an extended literary statement as your hwarhath series, had the concept occurred to you in today’s social climate?

  I have been writing hwarhath stories for twenty years now, which is scary. I don’t feel vindicated by the changes in society during this period, but I’m glad to see them. There is still plenty to change: human treatment of women and children and the poor is horrifying, and human ideas of the sanctity of life are insane. Why on Earth would anyone insist that foetuses be born because life is sacred, and then have no interest in caring for children and women and the poor? Look at what the English government is currently doing, cutting back support for severely disabled people and demanding that people who are sick, barely holding onto life, look for jobs they cannot possibly find. This is evil, and it’s being done by “respectable” Tories, not by religious wingnuts. Don’t tell me that life is sacred among humans.

  The hwarhath have no problem with euthanasia and abortion, they are not invested in keeping badly damaged people alive, but they believe absolutely that healthy women and children must be cared for. And their families—which are huge—care for all members, which means there aren’t poor as we understand the term, except for those tossed out of their kinship group. Hwarhath society does outcasts and criminals. There is an underworld, though I haven’t written much about it.

  At some point I have to write more about the hwarhath and disability/different ability. In many ways, they are not kind and they may not be entirely wise.

  Hwarhath society draws from many different human cultures, while also possessing unmistakably alien characteristics (distinct physiology, philosophy, etc.). “The Garden” features one human character (the famous Nicholas Sanders), yet by the time he shows up, he is as alien to the reader in appearance and behavior as the hwarhath appeared at the start of the tale. Would you say it’s vital to lend a taste of humanity or human culture (such as the concept of honorable suicide, the bonds of familial relationships, or the simple pleasure of gardening) to an alien society, to coax the reader into a sense of connection?

  The hwarhath stories are a way to talk about our society. If I made them too alien they wouldn’t serve this purpose. So I’ve borrowed from human cultures to create their society. Some of this was deliberate and planned. Hwarhath drama is based on Japanese Noh plays, and I read all the Noh plays I could find in translation while working on Ring of Swords. Hwarhath drinking cups and jars are based on Japanese pottery, which I know from working in art museums and from collecting 20th century American pottery. (Japan had a huge influence on American potters.) The sexual division in hwarhath society reminds me of human countries such as Saudi Arabia, except the hwarhath women control their own lives and reproduction and child care; and hwarhath families resemble the clans that exist in many parts of Earth, though not in Europe and America. This just happened. I did not study human clans or human cultures that separate the sexes.

  I do have some strange aliens in the two hwarhath novels: the giant jellyfish in Ring of Swords and the Burrowers in Ring’s sequel. They are there to give some richness and complexity to my future biology.

  Akuin’s passion for gardening, for nurturing growth while warding off predators, parallels the larger male hwarhath mission: to protect the female population and scour the stars for enemies. As well, you describe the galaxy in botanical terms many times over the course of this novella—did you set out writing “The Garden” with such a micro/macrocosm in mind, or did it evolve in the process?

  It evolved. I could say it grew.

  In the end, there is no place for Akuin among his people, Thev’s splotchy coloration—if not for the prestige of his family’s intellect—might have resulted in his death as an infant, and the final footnote reveals this story was likely written by a hwarhath woman circuitously advocating for female liberation from the home world (complete with a tongue-in-cheek reference that this is science fiction, after all, not fantasy). Do you think the implication is that any society, no matter the comparatively progressive attitudes it may boast, will inevitably develop prejudice and biased gender roles?

  I’m not sure about biased gender roles, but I suspect prejudice is likely to be common. It’s a way—not a nice way—of enforcing social norms. Much of my writing is about people who refuse to conform and the price they pay. Akuin pays a huge price for his garden. But in the end, it’s a price he is willing to pay.

  What of yourself can be found among your character’s strong personalities? Thev, like many hwarhath, seems to have an appreciation for irony: As noted, “A pious man will always enjoy the Great Mother’s tricks.” Do you share Thev’s wry amusement, or, perhaps, tend towards Akuin’s introspection?

  My bet is, I am more like Akuin than anyone else here. I certainly love gardens, though I don’t have one right now, except for potted plants. My beloved hoya is currently blooming.

  Gardens can be a metaphor for life or art. At the end of Candide, Voltaire tells us that it is necessary to cultivate our garden, and the American poet Marianne Moore tells us that it’s necessary to put real toads in our poetic gardens.

  Akuin follows Voltaire’s advice and devotes his life to his garden. While he does not have real toads, he does manage to find a real alien.

  Do you have any other projects upcoming or in the works that you would like to share with us?

  Big Mama Stories, a collection of science fiction tall tales, is due out from Aqueduct Press in May of 2013. Hidden Folk, a collection of fantasies based on Icelandic sagas and folk tales, ought to come out late in 2013 from a new press that doesn’t have a name yet. I continue to work on the sequel to Ring of Swords, which will be published by Aqueduct Press when I finally finish revising it. And I have a novelette—“Kormak the Lucky”—coming out from Fantasy and Science Fiction in the fall.

  Moshe Siegel proofreads and interviews for Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House author, and works as a freelance editor, hither and yon. His overladen bookshelf and smug e-reader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, with a cat somewher
e between. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.

  Author Spotlight: Richard Parks

  Jude Griffin & Kevin McNeil

  “The Man Who Carved Skulls” was first published in Weird Tales (2007). Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process and what inspired this story?

  Most cultures want to memorialize, if not actually venerate, those who have died, and we do it mostly with cemeteries. But in an agrarian society with a limited amount of arable land like the one in my story, wasting so much valuable farmland on a graveyard makes no sense. I considered all the cultures that preserve their dead in such a way as to keep them visible and, in a way, part of the living community, and combined that with a society with an almost instinctive need to make the best use of space and resources. In that context, the role of the skull-carver made perfect sense.

  All that sounds coldly calculated, but in truth the rationale came mostly after the fact. I had an image in my head of an elaborately carved human skull, and worked backward until I had the context that would have produced it, and thus the story. A lot of my stories come from a seed image, rather than an “idea” as such.

  You noted elsewhere that “in his introduction to The Ogre’s Wife, my first collection of stories, Parke Godwin says my themes are ‘… the nature of our humanity and the inescapability of what we are, the choices we make and the price we pay for each, right or wrong.’” “The Man Who Carved Skulls” seems like an excellent example: Why do you think this theme is still so compelling for you?

  If you don’t believe in either fate or predestination—and I don’t—then we’re left with the inescapable fact that what we do matters. That is, actions almost by definition have consequences. Choosing A excludes B. Maybe A was the right choice, made for the right reasons and the best will and information to hand. That doesn’t mean that all the effects of that choice are going to be good. Sometimes the best you can do is to take the least destructive course of several bad options, but you’re still not excused from making that decision, nor from the consequences of it. That’s at once empowering and scary as hell. Akan can choose not to help fulfill his father’s promise or his mother’s greatest wish, and who would have blamed him? Maybe he would have been happier that way. Maybe it would have destroyed him. Akan drew his own conclusions, and acted accordingly.