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The Queen's Eyepatch
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
It was said of the queen’s eyepatch that beaver-bees wove it, meshing the finest and most pliant twigs -- more like hair than kindling -- and fastening them into that characteristic square with honey.
It was said, occasionally, that a man with an ocean in his belly removed it from a fish’s jaw and delivered it by rainfall into the queen’s private orchid garden.
It was said by many in the city that a lone merchant appeared out of the desert, bearing a stilted house on her back, and from it withdrew all manner of artifacts in the palatial square to woo the young, half-blind queen. The eyepatch, golden-white and strung on minute beads of jade -- so small that only close examination revealed that it was not a soft green thread -- secured the merchant’s place in the young queen’s bed. Their heirs fluttered out on ruby wings.
One disgruntled suitor commonly muttered that the rear side of the eyepatch, when pressed to the queen’s empty socket, each day showed a different breathtaking panorama from the merchant’s wandering years. In this way the merchant secretly taunted her lover. That barbed foreigner!
The merchant’s name was Lixhi and her eyes, amber-orange, reminded everyone of her unknown origins.
The city loved its queen nonetheless. Eventually, the sensible men said, she would stop knitting ruby bird-girls with her womb and take a man to bed, producing the regular four-limbed boy-children of the land. The merchant-woman would wander again.
It was said that if the queen removed the eyepatch, the merchant-woman would forget their heady lovemaking.
It was said that the queen made it herself, from the wonders gifted to her temple, to woo the exotic visitor unloading fine merchandise in the palatial square.
To speed this along, an attendant was bribed.
The scissors snipped, the string snapped, the tiny jade beads rattled into cracks on the floor. The empty socket, exposed, made the queen cry. She hated the feel of air against it.
“Men are idiots,” the merchant-woman said, kissing that ruined hole, after shouting at guards to capture the fleeing attendant. “I’ll make you a new one, if you want? I found beads made of parrot beaks, fabrics made of seal-silk.”
“And I’ll make a boy-heir for them: seven-winged and beaked, jade-feathered, in love with tigers,” the queen said, embracing her lover. “Can you imagine their faces when we all step out tomorrow?”
The Diamond Finger
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Every day the man Nonthook washed the feet of the gods on their way up Mount Krailat: a task that brought him merit, a respectable income, and the daily jokes of the gods. They knocked on his head as they passed, thunk-thunk, and now Nonthook was bald in the centre of his scalp despite being only twenty-eight years old.
The day that his wife murmured about meeting an attractive young rice farmer, Nonthook stomped up Mount Krailat to the god Issuan and made his complaint.
“Changing their ways is not within my power,” the god said sadly, “but I can offer you a gift in compensation.”
Nonthook thought for a moment, then smiled. “I will have a diamond index finger that kills instantly on touch.”
§
The gods knocked on Nonthook's head, one after the other, and dropped like flies.
§
“He broke the terms of the gift,” Issuan said to a gathering of the remaining gods.
“You might have expected that,” one murmured, but was ignored. Who expects a man to kill gods when he promised to kill mosquitoes and fish? No other man had shown similar stupidity. The other gods shared suggested punishments among one another like a bowl of spicy chicken cooked in a banana leaf. Finally the god Nurai made one they agreed upon.
§
Nonthook’s diamond finger had brought him great pleasure, killing gods on the mountainside, but hadn’t returned his youthful looks or his wife’s attentions. So on the night of a great festival, when a beautiful young woman approached and asked if he might dance, Nonthook smiled broadly and took her hand. The young woman led him through a series of dance features: a woman stringing flowers for a garland, a deer wandering in the forest, the goddess lighting swords of light, the banana leaves in the wind, the naga twisting its tail--
At this phase, she pointed her index finger at her knee.
Absorbed in the dance, Nonthook pointed the diamond finger at his own knee.
He died like a god.
The Origin of the Blue Bay
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Long ago there was a man called Keha, the finest kite-maker in the kingdom. In his house was a small workshop, where he taught children how to make kites: how to assemble the wooden frame and cover it with handmade paper that he painted for them in intricate designs.
When Keha was an old man, he told the children to stay away from his house while he built them a surprise. They waited impatiently in their village until the day he invited them back. Daydreaming of kites, they ran through the rice fields to where he lived, but they found only one wall of his house remaining. The others had been knocked down to make space for his surprise.
Smiling broadly, Keha greeted them from the side of the largest kite ever built: larger than his house, painted blue like a clear, deep lake, with all manner of creatures swimming across its surface. Great fish with bright scales of red and yellow bared pointed teeth or held a wide tail above the waves. Serpents with green scales and wicked smiles waited beside small, fragile ships. Women with bare breasts and gold crowns around their topknots, and each with the tail of a fish, sat on rocks and held out lotus flowers to passing sailors.
The best thing about this kite, as far as the children were concerned, was not its beautiful decorations: this kite was magical and, with the right wind, the children and Keha could fly on it.
Many joyous days passed on its back, flying over the rice fields and jungles of the kingdom, even glimpsing the capital with the shining gold chedis and the multicoloured roofs of its palace and temples.
Then, on a day when the children were working for their parents, Keha watched fearfully as a great wind blew up. His massive kite tugged on its ropes, snapping one and then another. Not wanting it to tear apart under the strain, he cut the other ropes. He watched as the kite flew away and never saw it again.
But people from the far south of the kingdom are known to say that, once upon a time, a kite larger than a house fell, ripping apart the ground where it crashed, and that a great blue bay filled with fish and other creatures was formed.
The Patron Saint of Spring
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Blossom covers the courtyard like snow, knee-high. The four trees cluster so closely together and their branches have grown so numerous, and the courtyard is so small, that the petals have nowhere else to fall.
The walls on either side are crumbling. The cherry trees grow without any person to witness them.
A folktale current in the land fifty miles south of the courtyard with the cherry trees tells of a woman who wandered the deserted northern countryside two hundred years ago. It goes like this:
She wore snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and tulips in her hair, every day of her life. No one knew where she came from -- no woman admitted to birthing or raising a child with her yellow eyes. On a cold midwinter’s day, she walked out of the woodland with her hair full of colour, with only a flimsy dress the colour of newly budded leaves covering her pale body.
At first the townsfolk did not trust her. Fey creatures lived in those woods -- all sensible people knew that. Her unnatural eyes and the unseasonable flowers in her hair confirmed their suspicions.
One girl was not so fearful. When every door was barred shut to the strange woman, this girl held out a handful of stale bread.
They ate it together under an ice-limned tree.
By the time they finished the tiny meal, all the snow around the base of the tree had melted. The woman ran thin, pale fingers over the snow. It withered under her. The soil softened. A single snowdrop grew, unfurling its green stem like a swan raising its head.
Two men accused her of witchcraft. Another gently took her hand and led her to his shed where ice had ruined stores he feared to hold a torch near. An old woman led her to the lake so that a boy’s body could be brought above the ice for the proper rituals, and a younger woman showed her the earth to thaw so he could be buried.
Every step she took in the town brought snowdrops.
Crocuses followed, quicker than usual, and the first tiny daffodils as bright as her eyes.
It drained her. On the day a field of tulips flowered as red as fresh strawberry jam, she fell to the ground as cold as the snow she had melted. The townsfolk buried her in a separate courtyard on the edge of the church grounds.
The cherry trees that grew there never stopped blossoming.
The Bridges of Ramesh
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
The architect Tir wrote the following footnotes on his submitted designs for the bridges of Ramesh.
1. I appreciate the cost of curtaining the windows of the upper eastern side of the third bridge with woven saffron, but it is essential: this bridge is in honour of those with exquisite tastes. It would be equally diminished if the walkways of cushions were removed. Likewise, the three domed roofs in the centre of the bridge must be constructed (respectively) with silk, gold and the scales of the rarest goldfish.
2. It is critical that the materials used to construct the sixth bridge are not of poor quality. Though the simplicity of the bridge’s design and the crowded dwellings along its length are in honour of (and for use by) the city’s less wealthy people, I do not wish to symbolise a future for them that is bereft of high quality architecture. As Your Highness has indicated, the crushing of our enemy means that the royal and city coffers can be dedicated to the people of the city.
3. The trade bridge will be difficult to build, but it is one of the most important: the flowers and spices, silks and cottons, pottery and jewellery and all the other wares attached to the bamboo lattice of the bridge will remind the people of the city and people from far away what Ramesh offers to the world from its position at the centre of trade.
4. It may be useful to include in the city-wide notices that -- except for the carved sandstone memorial walls -- the second bridge is exactly like the old bridges. Any people who find the new bridges too extraordinary may use the second bridge until they become more accustomed to the new city.
5. Some people will no doubt protest at the construction of the first bridge from the bones of people and animals fallen in the war, but they should be reminded of the price we pay to live on this land, under this sky.
For Two Years
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
It is said that when Captain Widal recovered from his mysterious disease, he would not talk to anyone about what had happened. But he was a kinder man. ... He never married, though he was seen once or twice with a beautiful young woman whose name was never known. ... Neither did he ever wear short sleeves in public.
- Widal: A History
§
I put spices on your tongue for two years, night after night. I folded my fingers into yours and I pulled the sheets over us.
And you did not blink.
You did not notice -- even when I pulled up your shirt, just a little, to the elbows.
Captain, Captain, I am writing on your body.
You did not notice, night after night.
We met in a café in the narrowest street, but you do not remember me. You sat at the table and ordered hot water with a lemon squeezed into it, and I poured it for you with hands that you took into yours, saying, “My mother’s looked better when we exhumed her. Girl, do you eat?”
“Sometimes,” I replied.
“Take this,” you said, “and eat more often.”
I brought flowers to your window, day after day. I sat with my harp in my lap and I played for you.
When you collapsed in front of a small group of townsfolk, none carried you away. None remained in the street to check your pulse, but me.
You fell asleep, my mother later said.
An enchantment, my father said, and good riddance.
I brushed your hair. I polished your buttons. I gave my parents all the money I made with your coin and I bought what I needed to care for you.
I took your coin to the races and I brought back handfuls of gold.
And you did not blink for two years.
Bottled and Un-bottled
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Five bottles on a shelf, they sang songs to me on a cold winter’s night: songs of lips against snow, of roots, of tusks and of gold and of all that piled in the room, spoils of my father’s travels. They always found a way into his pockets, those oddments.
And I, their un-bottled sister, was their ear.
And I, their ten-fingered sister, stood on tiptoes in the kitchen to take dried peach slices from the wooden boxes, to take cardamom and cloves from the dispenser. I stood in front of the shelves and dropped my fruits and spices into the bottles.
They murmured thanks, every one.
Eyes and mouths and four finned limbs grew from them in haphazard ways, puzzle ways, and I watched them as if they would move just-so in their bottles and make a neat pattern.
“Have you seen fish in the water?” one whispered -- or was it two? I couldn’t follow all their mouths.
I tilted my head to the right, looking at the dried blowfish behind one of the bottles.
They swam around it in the toilet bowl, pressing their lips to it -- like fingers, I thought, to learn how it felt -- and they swam down when I flushed, down through the pipes that curled like my hair, down to the underground rivers.
I’d stolen my father’s oddments before. If he noticed, it was only to see an empty space on his shelf for another travel-token, another spade-shaped coin or intricately carved statue of a mermaid.
A week after I emptied the five bottles, he filled them with shells and sand from a black beach in the Aegean.
And I, growing older, saw the five un-bottled boys on warm nights when I walked alone by the river.
Notes for a Film Review
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
There's still a little behind-the-scenes turbulence here at the cabal in the aftermath of a server migration. (Which would be why you're seeing Alex's story for a second day.) Please bear with us for another day or two while thing settle down.
I’ve heard so many comments about The Glass Flames in past months, all opinion without substance: “so strange, so sexy, you must see it.” But my curiosity eventually sent me to the marketplaces where homemade films are sold on DVDs with purple backs.
The opening scene is of a prostitute lying on her back, wearing only jewellery. The camera is from the viewpoint of the person having sex with her, who must be crouching. This continues long enough for me to notice small, red and orange pieces of glass tied into her black hair. The glass flames of the title? And there is a word tangled in jewels around her throat.
After she has come, the scene changes: a drabby block of flats with the title painted on the side. ‘this is a true story’ appears in small letters under the title. (I love fake true stories.)
More instances of the word. I still can’t read it.
The story unfolds: a break-up, a mutual turn to prostitutes, except it’s always the same one. When the girl visits her, they use a two-way glass dildo with small, smooth-tipped flames sculpted up its sides.
Why this repetition of images? A pretence at heat? Hot and fragile at once?
Halfway through the film, I’m thinking that the quality of the film-work speaks of webcams and cameras fastened to necklaces: low quality visuals, shaky camera movements, poor focus. And the dialogue ranges from brilliant to the banality of everyday life.
“I like fire,” she says during one sex scene, and it must be a trick of light but it looks like there’s a brief flame in her hair.
No wonder so many people watch this film: it’s half sex.
Near the ending. She’s masturbating to a camera (on a shelf?). Someone bangs on the door, over and over, shouts in a foreign language. She looks frightened.
She takes the glass flames from her hair and arranges them in a circle around her bed. They turn into fire. (This bit can’t be real.)
“My name is,” she whispers to the camera, and the repeated word comes into focus when spoken: a strange mess of sounds, ‘cz’ and ‘kh’ and ‘fl’, and I can’t say it properly.
She smiles as the flames burn brighter, higher, consuming her bed. Shouts, “I’m running away!”
The final scene: a fireman enters the room and finds no body, only the glass flames and a glass woman-shape, completely hollow.
During the credits, there are photographs: the flames on sale in a charity shop, the hollow woman-shape on display in a gallery, an orange-winged bird perched on a wall. (The bird, like the glass turned to flame, is a marvellous piece of visual fakery, made to seem more real by the lack of CGI/illusion elsewhere in the film.)
Seeking the Manticore
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
He first saw a manticore in the pages of a children's bestiary: bright colours in a cartoon outline, with a smile on her face that made him doubt the text's description of the manticore as ferocious. Amid the chaos of his sister's playing, he sat with the book in his lap and ran a finger across the manticore's bright red lion's body, the scorpion tail, the face of a woman with long hair like his mother's.
For many years he did not see the manticore again. Textbooks passed under his eyes -- geography, history, biology, chemistry -- and every one dealt with the real.
Then, in his twentieth year, he saw her three times. A girl in his politics lecture doodled her in the margins of her notebook. A boy he loved and lost across the marketplaces of Turkey carried her in a tattoo on his dark hip. Finally, in a quiet temple, he looked up at a bell hanging from the roof and saw the flick of her tail, the smile on her face.
Something in the tilt of her eyebrows convinced him that this was the same manticore, staring at him from these varied media across the world.
He looked for her, afterwards -- peering inside stray books, examining murals, watching the movements of a painted woman. He saw her more frequently.
In a London market, after sampling a row of wines as pale as his hair, he thought he glimpsed a scorpion tail disappearing into an alleyway. Abandoning the final glass, he ran into the alleyway and saw it again: a tail flicking around a corner. He followed, not even noticing the burst rubbish bins under his clean shoes.
Five streets later, he cornered her.
Baring her teeth like a lion, raising her tail as if she would strike, she faced him. “Leave me!” she shouted, a wild voice from her woman’s mouth.
"I... you're real!"
"I won't be caged, I won't be held up like a trophy. Stop following me! Leave me alone!"
"That was never my aim," he managed, and took a step back. "I was only curious."
"And then you'll want to look at me always, keep me by your knee like a good little cat." Her tail flicked. "Go away!"
He stammered, more confused than he’d ever been. "I will, I will. I didn't expect to find you. I... I'm sorry people cage you. Can I... stop that happening?"
With narrowed, untrusting eyes she said, "Tell everyone I am a story. Never real, never. Never something to look for while I seek out your nice food."
"I will."
He did better than that: he never mentioned her, except to tell excited children that it was only an old story and that manticores never existed. Whether they believed him, he never knew.
He kept the memory of her to himself.
The Most Precious House
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
A long time ago, when I was a girl, I found a house made entirely of pearls. From afar it looked like a cloud. Closer, it looked like sugary sweets piled one atop the other.
I was a child. I was foolish.
I ran up the hill to it, I pulled one of the pearls from its side and had it in my mouth before I realised the house was collapsing and there was no sugar in my mouth at all.
Further along the hill was a village, and when the house fell down all the villagers ran out — pulling their hair, wailing, leaking tears from their eyes like a gutted pig loses blood. I spat out the pearl and waited to be told how terrible I was, how stupid.
They were tiresomely predictable.
All except one, a girl with bright yellow paint stains around the egdes of her fingernails, who climbed up to the window of the room I’d been given while the villagers decided what to do with me. “Pssst,” she said, like water falling on the hot plate of a stove. “Pssst.”
I pried open the window and we looked at each other in momentary silence, girl to girl.
“I’m building a house of yellow leaves,” she said. “I need someone to help me paint them.”
I climbed out of the window and we walked down the other side of the hill, through a vineyard and a patch of wild, tangled undergrowth and small trees, until we reached a clearing. Dug deep into the ground were the house’s foundations, yellow against the dirt. The girl told me that the finished house would only be ankle-high — only the roof poking above the ground, like a pile of regular leaves.
“There’ll be a house down here and it’ll be better than dumb pearls and they won’t see it, not at all.” She grinned possessively across her paint pots. Then, bending over to open a pot, she added in a practical tone, “Besides, the wind would blow it all away if it was above ground.”
He Carried Manuscripts in Curious Languages
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
On the shore of an island made entirely of sand, I met a man waiting for the same ship as I. We stood on the jetty and, to the rhythmic wash of waves against wood, we talked.
I told him of my desire to see the world’s most curious places. “That is why I am waiting for the ship,” I told him. “The island it journeys to is meant to be quite remarkable: trees bearing garnets and sapphires as fruit, parrots with beaks on their feet, people born with metal rings growing from their ears.”
“I have heard that their people speak and write a language known only by them.” As he spoke, he shifted the two baskets on a pole that he rested across his shoulders.
“What do you carry in those? Your clothes?”
“Some. But most of their weight is made up of manuscripts.”
“What are they about?”
He smiled, then -- a curve of his lips and a crease of his eyes that made him beautiful. “One manuscript is a collection of poems about the rain. Another is a bestiary. A third, as small as my hand, is a story of travelling through time; a fourth is a collection of floral paintings with mutterings about astronomy on the petals. As for the other then, I do not know. I cannot read their scripts.”
“Why do you carry them?” I asked, fascinated.
“I am rich and bored. I bought them at auction, and now I travel to isolated or unique places in the hope that they will be able to read the texts for me. When they can, oh, it is the most marvelous thing.”
The ship arrived then, with its dark green sails and only one cabin.
He was a curiosity, and it was a night’s sailing to the island. I showed him the tattoos curling around my broad brown nipples and he demonstrated the feel of a foreskin-piercing inside both of my lower orifices.
Afterwards, I asked him to let me see his manuscripts. “I am from a far-away place. Perhaps I can read one.”
I could, and I read it to him: a geography lesson of islands that grew from the sea like sores.
He thanked me, and pleaded with me to travel with him for a while, but I declined. I do not like to stay long with curiosities -- they too quickly become normal.
The Lephir
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“Do not scoff, child. Do not tell me how your great-aunt sailed through a mid-winter storm and only lost one of her crew.
“Mid-winter storms are not the Lephir.
“You can imagine going into a strong wind, I’m sure. You can imagine the beat of the drum almost lost to the crashing waves, you can imagine the shouts of the oarsmen as they keep each other motivated.
“I was one of those oarsmen, my throat sore and salty, my back and arms aching as we bore closer and closer to the western end of the Strait. Yes, I rowed the Strait as a younger man.
“Can you imagine the oarsmen weakening? Can you imagine the ship beginning to move back the way it had come? Probably. Can you imagine what happened next?
“The Lephir whips the waves, and those waves hide whirlpools. Now, our captain knew about these whirlpools. He knew the places they most commonly formed. With his outstretched arm as our guide, we rowed close to the rock walls of the Strait.
“We thought our captain wise.
“As we tired, as we began drifting backwards -- slowly, for we still rowed with all the strength we could muster -- we heard screams from the bow. Twisting on my bench, I saw the torso of an oarsman fall to one side, missing his shoulders and head. Only the legs remained of another man.
“The creatures, long-necked and dog-headed, stretched out again from their caves a drumbeat later. Our arrows could not stop them from taking two men closer to the mast, and two more after that.
“They feasted -- and do not say that we should have fought harder, aimed truer, rowed faster. They moved quicker than your great-aunt's tongue set foolhardy challenges for herself and others.
“When our captain was devoured, we rowed harder. And we put up the sail, so that the Lephir would help to carry us east. We had learnt our lesson.
“There’s a reason only the foolhardy attempt the Lephir, child. The wind is not all they face.”
Handbags and Spices, Bath Toys and Jewellery
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
A Maneki Neko with a woman’s face beckoned me in. I can admit it now: I was drawn by her colours -- her creamy skin, her short black hair, the bright red insides of her ears.
I went into her shop first. Stationery covered the walls like tiles and murals, cartoon-gaudy. The quantity confused me as much as it delighted me; I left with three pens clutched in my hand, smiled at the Maneki Neko and started walking.
Shop fronts crowded the narrow street, and in front of them lay tables and racks packed full with wares. Three friends walking side-by-side struggled to pass between them. Overhead, sheets of metal and glass made an imperfect roof. I walked slowly; it was busy, but not uncomfortable. Occasionally I ducked aside as a street vendor rattled past, shouting and trailing the smell of curry, or when a motorbike drove slowly down the centre of the street with boxes loaded on its back.
On one of these occasions, I stepped inside a shop selling medicine. Jars of dried seahorses and testicles sat on a shelf by my elbow.
I found handbags and spices, bath toys and jewellery, fabric and fruit. I turned corners, I took side streets that flooded when it rained -- the narrow, shop-lined streets circled back on themselves, over and over.
I kept walking, my senses like the sponges arranged on one table.
Vendors kept me in curries and fried bananas. A woman let me help run her shop for a small bag of green notes at the end of each week. A few men and women let me share their beds.
I didn’t see the Maneki Neko again. Sometimes I thought of her, of walking past her raised paw, past the gold shops that appeared every few buildings on that road like stitches, until I found the skytrain and another part of the city. Then I turned a familiar corner, saw a familiar face or skein of silk, and I turned my feet away from the places where the roads unfolded.
The Lioness in her Abdomen
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
If the single remaining mural from her palace is to be believed, the first queen of Umer was born with a metal cage in place of her abdomen. At the bottom of the cage curled a tiny brown kitten.
As Eshi grew from babe to girl, the kitten became a miniature lioness with a long tail and sharp claws. The lioness never outgrew its cage; throughout Eshi’s life, as depicted in the mural, the cage gave it ample space to pace and curl.
The second panel of the mural shows all sorts of people gathered around the girl -- old and young, bearded and bare-breasted, modestly dressed and clean-shaven -- examining the cage and the feline. Their confusion is painted clearly on their faces.
The girl silently bore it.
When she became queen, and the people of Umer gathered at her bare feet in obeisance, she cast those people in the second panel out from the city walls and did not let them return. Words engraved at the base of the mural record her words to them: “The lioness is a part of me, like a heart, and I will not have you prod her like a beast at market.”
Eshi ruled for two decades, and the lioness prowled and purred in her abdomen.
In none of the panels is the lioness shown eating. Perhaps it took scraps of meat from the table like a pet. Perhaps, as one historian has inferred from the way it licks the bars of its cage in three of the eight panels, it gained its sustenance in a more unusual manner. Eshi is shown eating twice: putting flatbread and beans into her mouth like a regular person.
The intricacies of the connection between woman and lioness were never understood, although its importance to their wellbeing was illustrated on the day that Eshi went hunting with some of her relatives and friends, when her drunken sister misfired and her arrow pierced the lioness.
As the lioness’ blood pumped from its body, Eshi clutched her abdomen and moaned in pain. Physicians rushed to her side but found no wound except that in the lioness.
They could only watch as the lioness bled out and their queen died with it.
According to some historians a textual fragment contradicts the mural, saying that Eshi died from an arrow through a vital organ. According to others, the two versions of the tale are in very close agreement.
The Child and the Raspberry: A Prairie Fable
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
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In a house near the prairie town of Anntown there lived a small child who liked to pick raspberries from the plants growing around the house.
The family cultivated the fruits with wires and careful grooming and nets to keep the birds away. The child, still too small to do more than pull weeds from the soil when directed by an adult, spent some time each day wandering through the plants and plucking the fattest raspberries from the green branches. This was permitted, provided the child ate every one for lunch. But each day, the child took too many, and one of the adults took the rest for pudding and scolded the child, saying, “You should not be so greedy!”
The next day, the child had forgotten the words and again plucked too many fat, red berries to eat.
On one of these days, the child found a particularly large raspberry lying on the soil near one of the plants. This raspberry was so large that it covered over half of the child’s palm. Imagine how many sweet mouthfuls it would provide! Crying out in excitement, the child picked it up and examined it. No other raspberry had ever grown so large on the green branches!
Then the child saw another raspberry on the ground, equally large, and grabbed at it, imagining how delicious lunch would be.
But the child’s small fingers only splashed against water, over and over.
The second raspberry was a reflection, the child realised.
And while the child had fumbled in the water for a raspberry that didn’t exist, a bird had snatched the real one and flown away. If only the child had not been so greedy, lunch that day would have been more than four un-exceptional berries.
Iri's Work
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Exhibit 1.a: The lines are a millimetre deep and three times as wide, and milky white compared to the pine-brown skin surrounding them. They line up like pale railings against a wall.
The placard underneath the image says that the woman painted is twenty-two.
Paper lanterns hung outside the gallery’s high windows, shedding patches of their colour -- blue and yellow, red and seaweed-green -- onto Turme’s white dress. She stood with her back to the lanterns, staring at the row of foot-wide paintings.
The pale lines matched so neatly those on her own thighs.
Exhibit 2.a: Look closely to see the lines, barely darker than the skin. Look closely to see how they cross the small breast, how they stretch between side and nipple.
The placard underneath says that the woman painted is nineteen.
Turme remembered the reviews: A gallery of that which is hidden away -- for good reason! and What next, will artists paint the deformed and claim to be showing beauty?
“These are beautiful paintings,” she said.
“There’s a trend among artists to conceal the marks left by natural growth,” the gallery’s owner replied. “Iri, the artist, feels that concealment is un-necessary.”
She wanted to raise a hand and run her fingers over the paintings. Would they dip like the marks on her thighs? The paint looked textured enough for it.
When had she last seen artwork so honest?
Exhibit 2.c: Dark lines curve over soft skin, like half-bracelets, on the side of the girl. They point to the small of her back. They point to the lowest part of her stomach.
“I’ve been to six galleries today,” Turme said, “and seen a lot of paintings of nudes with flawless skin like glass from the Suresh Quarter. The ones with blue and green hair were interesting, I suppose. This, however...” She looked along the wall, at arms and legs, breasts and stomachs, covered in pale and dark lines.
“Would you like to meet Iri?” the gallery’s owner asked.
“I suppose I should, as I intend to sponsor his work.”
Notes for a Successful Transformation
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
First shed your clothes. Be sure to do this lying on the ground. Be sure to wriggle from your clothes all at once, as if from a singular garment. If you fail at first, dress and try again. This is necessary practise for the next step.
(Julian Nae, the first person to attempt the transformation, achieved this perfectly in only one attempt. A tragic supplier of over-confidence, in his case.)
You must then shed your skin. It is useful to rub yourself against an abrasive surface -- small stones, roots that break through the ground -- in order to loosen your human skin from the body underneath. Be careful, though, not to cut your skin.
Not everyone is capable of this transformation. If you cannot shed your skin after four afternoons spent straining on the ground, you are not made for changing into this body.
(Do not, as Julian did, turn to extreme measures in your frustration. Do not take up a knife and cut yourself from forehead to groin. Do not expect this to achieve anything but your death.)
You will be smaller in your new body than in your previous one, but not as small as the snakes you have seen under patios and bushes. There will be four to six more sheddings of your skin -- depending on your breed -- until you reach your final size. To facilitate this process, you must make a nest somewhere you will not be disturbed. You need not eat.
You will emerge eight months to a year later, a snake. You will mate, eat and grow in small amounts as is natural to these animals.
There is no changing back into a human so be sure, before you start, that this is truly what you want.
The Knitted Octopus and the Book
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
“Book,” said the knitted octopus, reaching a white and teal-striped limb over the hard cover, “will you not accompany me to the postcards leaning against the wall, so we can admire forest-lined lakes and red spiralling staircases together?”
After a pause, the attractively illustrated book said, “Very well.”
~
They jumped from the hi-fi speaker on which they sat, they crossed the desk side-by-side, and the small journey made with the book made a smile crease the knitted octopus’ face under its black bead eyes.
From atop a letter handwritten on green paper and bordered with cartoons, they looked at the postcards.
“Those are very fine red staircases,” the book said after a time.
“Yes,” said the knitted octopus, its smile un-creasing.
“It is nice to be away from the chatter of the vitamins.”
“Yes.”
The knitted octopus glanced at its companion and wished the book would find better words than this empty commentary. Perhaps it will, when I offer it more than postcard-views.
“Book, I have something I would like to say.”
“Mmm?”
“I want to go exploring. Off the edge of the desk is a vast sweep of wood, where there are more constructions. There are corners that might hide secrets. I will take the cables lying across the desk and fashion a ladder, and use it to descend. And then... exploration!”
The book remained silent.
“And book, I... I have enjoyed our journeys to the other end of the desk, where jewellery and paper make a landscape that changes from day to day. I would like it very much if you were to accompany me in my journey.”
“I see.” Then, before the knitted octopus could think of a reply: “The world is not just full of lakes and staircase. There are dangers. I know this, from the stories inside me.”
Quietly the knitted octopus said, “Wouldn’t you like to see some of the wonders?”
“I would rather not be eaten.” Worry edged its voice like glue binding.
“I see.”
~
But on the morning when the knitted octopus lowered its ladder of cables, the book shuffled across the desk and said, “The vitamins are awfully loud. And dull too.”
“You are coming?”
“I have never been very good at finding the right thing to say to those whose company I particularly enjoy. Perhaps on this journey, I shall. Are you ready to descend?”
How The Cactus Got Its Flowers
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
"Listen. This is one of the tales told to explain the details of our world.
"When the prairie-people first came to the desert, they did not understand it. They tried to be cautious, to approach the new things with care.
"But among the people of one caravan was an over-curious child. Disobeying orders to stay near the wagons, this child slipped away during the late evening and walked on small legs over rocks, through crevices and along a fox-trail. Then, ahead, the child saw something new: a green plant covered in spines, a little like a thistle, but flowerless. It was far larger, with thicker limbs that grew up in three prongs from a main stem, like a fork. The child approached it, ever curious, and held out a finger to one of the spines, wondering if it would be soft or hard.
"The spine pierced the child's skin. Blood welled up from the wound, bright red, and dropped down the cactus' dust-muted limb.
"So striking were the stains left by the blood, a neighbouring cactus burst into red flowers in imitation, like a cockerel ruffling up his comb in response to another cockerel. All across the desert this happened, to the marvel of the prairie family and the native dwellers. Some cacti threw up flowers in different colours, as the exact nature of the stains being imitated was not communicated among the cacti, only the shape of the imitation. Within days, the desert was a stunning display of colour.
"But growing flowers drained the cacti. They could not do this all the time. So when their first flowers withered and fell, they waited for rainfall, when they filled with energy, before erupting into brightness once more. Gradually, each type of cactus settled on a type of flower it preferred -- the tall, three-pronged cacti now blooms white, while others bloom pink, orange, yellow.
"As for the child, well, the family-leaders had several ear-fulls of displeasure to give, but gave no great punishment. The scar left by the spine eventually faded. The flowers, however, remain to this day, blooming when it rains."
The City's Skirts
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
The skirt was the reddish brown of cinnamon with white circles, as varied in diameter as the city Koti's coins, clustered in the bottom right-hand corner of its front. "It grew this morning in my garden," the old man said.
Bganti needed only a bird's cry of time to translate it.
"Thank you," he told the old man. When the man had gone, with the skirt neatly folded and thinking, no doubt, of how he would possibly sell such a plain garment, Bganti reached for his stack of thick notesheets.
'A brief fall of hail in the south-east of the city' he wrote, and had a boy take it to the Council-Head, who wanted every skirt-message that grew across the city -- even trivialities like the previous night's weather.
Bganti, Master Translator for the city Koti -- only translator of the city's skirt-sent communications -- reclined in his chair and schooled a carefully neutral expression as he flicked through his lie-filled records.
~
A week later the apple crop failed, as the city had known it would. A sudden chemical imbalance in the soil.
~
"This grew in the night. Looks like a complicated one."
"Bring it closer."
The woman with a crescent moon birthmark on her cheek did so, allowing him a thorough look: a discord of colours and patterns, triangles tessellating into stars and squares, smears of black like spilled ink across the spice hues of the rest.
Bganti's whole body stiffened, as if petrified.
"Bad news, Translator?" the woman asked.
"Ah… yes. Trouble at the market today. Perhaps another of those earth tremors."
"Not a bad one, is it?" Her voice went soft, worrying.
"I'll have the Council-Head put a warning out."
~
Sturdy travelling clothes, a few treasured books, a thumbnail painting of his mother -- Bganti packed them as fast as he could behind the concealment of pulled-down blinds. He'd expected more time than this, but natural forces did not follow a man's desired timetable.
The city bells rang the tenth hour of morning. He needed to leave.
But outside, in every street of the city, people hurried towards the southern gates carrying packs and loose possessions, and Bganti saw the woman with a crescent moon birthmark shouting through a megaphone. Pointing at the mountain to the city's north, warning of fire and super-hot smoke.
He had been promised so much money to conceal this.
"Working for the Abani, I take it," said a voice -- the Council-Head's -- as a pair of men seized Bganti, held him still. "Surely you didn't think my failures to train another Translator would continue forever. She's rather good."
As the men dragged Bganti back inside, the woman looked at him just once, with anger as visible on her body as her clothes.
Notes on a Series of Bathroom Tiles Popular c.50 years ago
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
First tile.
A four-pointed star: the city of Ramne, simplified for the sake of ceramic representation.
Second tile.
A willow with six thick branches that keep pale cats on one side and dark cats on another; the latter cats are in a smaller space. The artist's choice of cats to represent the people of Ramne can likely be traced to her childhood at her mother's cattery, where the animals were kept in willow-wood pens, and perhaps also to the enduring popularity of cats with the people of Ramne.
Third tile.
A cat neither dark nor pale curled at the willow's base. Knowledge of Adne's actions makes the meaning of this tile clear: the cat is dead, self-poisoned, and its proximity to the tree means it too will die, just as Madar did from Adne's touch. A deceptively peaceful tile, but these are for popular consumption.
Four tile.
A triad of drooping willows, and in each corner of the tile is the Ramne-star. The stars' positioning signify that the drooping willows occur with Ramne. In truth it took longer for Adne's rebellion to have the small effect it had. The artist's need to hide meaning in trees and cats, almost a century later, indicates this.
Though it is sad to see Adne's sacrifice rendered as bathroom tiles, its presence during a daily cleansing ritual makes up for this somewhat.
Water Bodies
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Marcius watched the slow movements of condensed water on the window, and didn't know what to do.
Behind him, a dead woman lay on a bed. She lay as if asleep -- but too empty of life for that mistake to be made for long. "I see no marks of injury external or internal," Cimber said. "She'll have to be thoroughly scanned at a morgue. Most likely heart failure."
Not an improbable conclusion, given the white of her hair.
Except for the water on her window and the secret words it made. Marcius glanced between them and Cimber, torn. If he revealed the truth, he risked seeing another artist contained. In her condensation-words a trusted water interpreter might find a clue to the artist's identity -- and that would mean containment, imprisonment
of another man or woman who could help Marcius. But every case he
helped solve earned a reduction of his debt to Cimber.
As Cimber requested a pick-up for the body, his eyes moving across the screens embedded inside them, Marcius said, "That's not why she died."
Cimber looked directly at him.
"She bought a water body," Marcius continued, glancing at the window. "Those are her words on the window. She says that she was bored, and now she's leaving in her new body. Soon she'll be floating through the city, playing with the rain, the rooftops, the undersides of weather balloons."
He could not keep longing from his voice. Neither could he ignore the look of displeasure on Cimber's face.
Cimber had not approved of his little brother's decision. And when he realised that Marcius had left without repaying a debt, disapproval had turned to action.
Running down metal roof-tiles, along drainage pipes, gutters -- like slides at a child's amusement park. He remembered it with painful clarity.
Some people worried that too many citizens bought water bodies, and made the act illegal. Marcius worried that too many artists would be contained before he'd repaid his debt.
Later, outside the apartment, Cimber acknowledged the debt reduction. "Another forty-six cases to go," he said. "And I see you haven't changed your mind."
"I'd go back now, if I knew you wouldn't return me to a human body again and again."
Forty-six, he thought as Cimber began silently walking home, until I can be water, until I can play with the rain again.
He hoped that the artists taught their techniques faster than they were caught.
In Oranges
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
To celebrate our first anniversary, each of us here at the Cabal has come up with a story beginning with a line provided to us by the illustrious Jay Lake. Alex Dally MacFarlane starts us off with the tale below, and tomorrow Daniel Braum will take us somewhere else entirely...
“Zoli liked to hang around psychiatrists’ waiting rooms to hit on the low self-esteem chicks.”
The altered citrus sinensis’ comment barely made Roland pause. Even when it waggled a branch heavy with oranges near her face, she refused to look at it.
“He also liked to kick puppies.”
“Now you’re lying.” She planted a final passiflora edulis seedling in the flower bed, which was covered by a knee-high glass structure to protect the plants inside from the chilly nights. Hopefully these seedlings would not be as troublesome as the last batch. I hope the brothel-boys keep their windows closed at night, she thought, and couldn’t prevent a smirk. Passion fruits are passionate when allowed to express themselves. Why am I surprised?
Brushing soil from her fingers, Roland turned to the orange tree that grew in a nearby bed. Its flower-mouths moved in a way that looked rude, even if she couldn’t quite tell why.
“My brother was an opportunist. You act as if I didn’t know this. But I do know that he didn’t kick puppies. Or kittens, before you suggest that.”
“You act as if you knew him better than I did,” the citrus sinensis retorted, trying to mimic her voice.
Its words stung, a little.
“Then tell me why he went, if you knew him so well.” When the plant offered no reply, she shuffled along the wooden walkway between beds to another batch of seedlings that needed planting out. “You enjoy being smug. You don’t actually know anything, at least not anything important.”
“I’ll know when he dies,” it said curtly.
She wanted to ignore its games, its cruel streak--which had made her brother so fond of the plant, she knew. But this was new. “Oh?”
“He let me bite him,” the citrus sinensis said, smug-toned. “And now I have a part of him inside me. It will tell me when he dies.”
Glancing at it sideways, Roland murmured, “I didn’t know you could do that.”
And she lunged up, running and jumping for one of its branches before it could swing them away. It thrashed at her, shouting rage-filled nonsense. She plucked an orange and dropped to the ground. “An orange every now and then,” she told it, “and if you’re telling the truth, I will also know when the war kills Zolinder.”
“I won’t let you,” all the flower-mouths said, loud and shaking.
Laughing unpleasantly, Roland peeled aside the orange skin. “Even you sleep.”
She tasted bitterness, soil, sweat, pain. Life.
Tasting, also, anger at the tree for withholding this, she said, “You’ll grow more. And you’re a fool if you think I don’t care about my brother enough to hurt you.”
Only For Today
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
I'm red pen-marks on three orange post-it notes, but only for today. Yesterday I was a yoghurt carton, discarded on a roadside and licked clean by foxes. Tomorrow I could be anything--your staple-remover, perhaps, or a cobweb in a farmer's barn.
I gave up trying to control the changes when I was seven. After two years of daily becoming something new, despite my concentration on the mental image of 'little girl, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin,' I had to realise the truth.
It's been six years now. I've been more things than I remember.
I wish I hadn't sneaked a drink of one of my mum's potions. All those bright liquids, some of them polka-dotted or striped, lined up in jars along the wall of her study--they looked like sweeties. The stripy green and blue one tasted like liquorice and I went and sat outside, feeling light-headed, and thought I would like to be a balloon so I could float above the village and see it laid out like a map.
And I became a balloon, and I saw the village.
The next day, I was a button on a telephone. I haven't seen my village since.
I want to see my mum again. But I never shape-change into a painting in the living room, a cushion on her bed or a note written in lipstick across her bedroom wall.
Sometimes, though, I can pass on messages. Like today. I hope that someone will find one of these messages and take it to her, quickly, before I shape-change into something else, and she'll take one of her potions from the shelf and pour it over me and I'll be a girl again.
She lives at 3 Berrey Close, Windyham, W Sussex, England. Please hurry!
Dinner at 'Gaststätte des Flußmädchen'
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Our food arrived quickly. My wife, still not quite well, had only ordered bread and water. For me, the waiter presented a plate of spaghetti with fish in a creamy sauce.
I twisted a mouthful onto my fork and, on eating it
--saw a woman, pale hair falling waist-long down a tall figure, standing atop a cliff with a fair-haired man. They argued. The river rushed past below them, frothed white by rocks. The woman shouted of secret wives and lies, and threatened exposure.
The man pushed--
tasted something good, I think, but barely remembered it after the strength of the hallucination. Trying to ignore the residual unsettled feeling, I ate a chunk of carp.
--and she fell, screaming. Cold struck her hard, so hard, or was that the rock? Flailing in the water, light and dark playing havoc in her eyes, her mind, and pain spreading from her chest. Water against her.
Water wrote eddies of curiosity across her skin as the pain slipped away. A whisper in her ear. A greeting.
The water is home now and the rock your seat, said the river. Sing for me, maiden, sing sweet songs, sing to fill me--
"Rob, are you all right?"
I realised it was Susan talking. "I... don't know. I think I might have your flu."
Concern coloured her voice. "You should try to eat a bit more. Then we'll go back to the hotel."
Nodding, I ate more of the pasta.
--A song on a stormy evening. A small fishing boat tossed by waves, fighting the white.
The teenaged boy paused in his terror-screams. The song laced his ears, stirred thoughts of home, bed, love.
He felt nothing as the rocks sliced his boat to pieces, as the river tongued him downwards. As the maiden wept.--
"We should go," Susan said, and called for the bill.
Several minutes later we left. I stumbled into the street, as if feverous. The husband's face lodged in my mind. And I thought of the woman, trapped in the river.
"Tomorrow," I said, "we need to visit the Rhine."
Left in her Cupboard
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
12 Feburary, 1914 --
The following items were found in a cupboard in Elsa Greer's house, two days after she was discovered missing:
1 x empty box for an orrery
1 x copy of popular children's novel A Travel Guide to the Solar System with the section on Mercury torn out
Assorted cut-offs and shavings of wood
Assorted scraps of fabric
Assorted lengths of piano wire
1 x note, which reads "Gone to find my sister."
Overheard in a Countryside Inn
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
"The moon," said the man with carrot-orange hair, "is the toenail of a god."
"Eh?"
"Look at it. Thin and curved, pale off-white, grows broader and longer until it must be trimmed back again. It's a nail."
His drinking partner, a fellow local man of middle age, swigged from his pint of dirt-dark bitter and said, "Nah, it's more likely to be a pie."
"Made by the cloud-dwellers, I assume?" asked a peculiarly dressed stranger, who stood so close that they could smell the dust on him. He wore tanned cowhide over his body and, atop his head, a string-fastened cap and goggles.
When he received a murmured "Well, yes" in reply, he sighed and shook his head.
"It is neither of your assertions. It is a mystery. Which I intend to solve, by flying there in my latest invention."
"Ah," the local men said, looking at one another with bemused expressions.
"The cloud-dwellers died out long ago, before either of you were scrabbling around the marketplace. And they did not possess the technology for creating a permanent light fixture so high up."
"Aye," the bartender butted in, "a light fixture, like the candles on my wall. The sky is an upturned bowl, aviator-historian, and you'll smash into it with your flying contraption and create a great mess all over our fields."
"So you say."
The men looked at one another, across beer mugs and the sticky, stained counter. Fights had come of smaller disagreements. But they shared shrugs rather than fists -- the moon was too far away to be of consequence while there was still beer coming from the taps, and each privately felt the truth of his own judgement without any great need for validation through violence.
"A drink for you, sir?" the bartender asked the aviator-historian, and by the time he had made up his mind which bottled beverage he would like, the other two men were discussing the particulars of sheep-raising.
On The Stairs, She Realises
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Follow the pieces of me down -- yes, yes, bare-footed and leaving toe- and heel-marks behind you like a carpet -- follow my steps, let your hand slide down my rail. Don't stop. Don't climb, don't reclaim the things you left behind.
"It is a long way down," she said quietly, lingering on a step engraved with sirens. "Such a long way."
Had Suriyen known it would take this long? Had he told her? She could not remember -- but that was the point. The spreading gaps in her past made truth of the tales sung by the mountain-dwellers about their magical staircase.
She still remembered Suriyen, and that meant she had descended not nearly far enough.
You're a feast of stories, my pale-ankled lady. The scandals of a court are variations on motifs -- but oh, they entertain!
I will devour the reports your lover-spy shouldn't have told you, I will help you keep him safe.
Her legs and feet ached, but she continued down. Here the steps were painted yellow and slick with moisture that ran down the side of the mountain. One bore wedge-shaped markings, indecipherable.
She had been ordered to do this. Though she could not remember why, she knew there had been an order, a secret journey from her bedroom to the top of the mountain, a threat followed quickly by a promise.
"If I am ordered," she said to the stairs, "then I must obey."
They did not respond. Of course they could not; metal had no mouths. "What is it like to be so silenced?"
So full of your life -- I am gorged, pale-ankled lady, crammed with you.
Ahead of her lay grass and tall trees, a stream, and a man standing beside the water. A broad, tall man, scar-faced and smiling, who called out to her.
It took a moment for her memory-stripped mind to process the words. The stairs had left her language, at least. "But so much else is missing."
"Come on!" the man shouted. "You're almost done! Four more steps, darling, and we can be together again!"
"But why is so much gone?" Tears ran down her face. She could not remember the reason -- just that she felt so empty, stripped of things she had cherished, and it hurt.
"You had to do it, it was for your own good, oh Iya, no!"
Her legs hurt with each step that she climbed, leaving the man -- Suriyen, her lover -- behind, re-learning her self.
Will you leave me something? You were delicious before I ate too much.
"I will carve mouths into you, stairs," she panted, almost collapsing onto a step as long and wide as a table.
And I will speak.
Notes - 29/14/106
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Name: Beeotter
Exterior description: A thin creature a metre long, with another metre's length in its forearm-thick tail. The whole body is covered in fur striped yellow and black. Its head is flat on the end of the body, with no discernable neck, and is dominated by a pair of black many-faceted eyes. A double pair of translucent brown-orange wings is its primary means of transportation, although the six stumpy legs suggest some motility when it has landed.
I saw the beeotter from afar, resting on the statue in the centre of the Square. I approached it cautiously. If I had learnt anything since my arrival in this place an unclear time ago, it was to never assume benevolence from its peculiar inhabitants.
Gravel crunched under my shoes; it was impossible to walk quietly in this corner of the world, when the crumbled remains of the buildings that stood around the Square lay thickly across the ground. As I approached the beeotter, a spindle-thin building fell and, seconds later, another sprouted up in its wake, like a stone flower growing at accelerated speeds.
When I reached less a metre's length from the statue, the beeotter leapt from its perch and, wings flapping, buried its sting in my thigh. It moved so quickly I had no time to react. I merely collapsed to the gravel, gasping in shock.
And I heard a voice.
It said: I am a clue.
The beeotter died, stuck into me. I awoke, agonised but with my mind afire.
It occurred to be that this was probably another of the world’s tricks, but I had not entirely given up on hope.
I did what a biologist does when faced with an unknown creature. I laid out my tools from the pack on my back and I dissected.
Interior description: Its innards are laid out in a mess of lines, circles, squares. They intersect, merge, divide--as I watch I see new roads form, old buildings fall. They are confusing. They are a map of this place. There is no exit, no way back into my old world. That door long ago crumbled. But there are places I might like to go.
I pulled the sting from my thigh, cleaned and bandaged the wound. Several days passed where I could walk only far enough to gather stone-fruits from the buildings surrounding the Square. In that time I worked hard to preserve the beeotter--plucking a hollow glass-fruit from the plants around the buildings, filling it with a mix of water and concentrates from my pack.
And then I began walking, holding my map out before me and choosing my path.
The Storyteller is Swallowed
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Rajab stood still while the monster approached, despite the way its dun and ochre hide blocked the view of pastures and trees behind it, despite the size of its maw as it spread dark brown lips wide. That's larger than any of the arches in the palace, he thought. It must have come from far into the mountains. And he thought, also, about the pain in his legs from running so quickly from the palace and from the city. He couldn't go any further. The soldiers chasing him had stopped too, but did not stand still. Fearful gibbering filled the air in-between the monster's thudding steps; two of the men fled. Their captain didn't call them back. "It is right that you should die in such a filthy manner!" he called out to Rajab, his voice shaking. "And then the city guards will come to destroy the beast, and you will be twice-killed. Just as you twice broke into the harem, twice distracted the women with your presence. I am sure the Sultan will agree that this is more fitting than any death a lowly captain could have devised, and he will clap his hands in delight!" A moment later the monster was upon Rajab, its great lips around him, its tongue drawing him inside.
In the mouth of the monster, Rajab told the story of the first spice farmer to the broad, dark uvula. It quivered in delight and only let him pass to the oesophagus when he had told it another tale. On the way down that long passage to the stomach, he spoke of dark-eyed wizards who together raised the first city from the sand--a long, convoluted tale with monologues on the making of laws and the design of plumbing, and nested anecdotes about the people who came to live in the pale houses. And in the stomach, where he came to rest, he told many tales. He entertained the walls and the acid with stories about djinn, animated carpets, sand-beasts such as the creature in whose stomach he rested, palaces that teleported and palaces that were no larger than a peppercorn, and countless more.
The city guards never did destroy the beast. Instead they joined Rajab in the stomach, along with women and children and livestock. Though some passed through to the intestines, many remained with Rajab, and their numbers were replenished regularly. Rajab, who had won the favour of the stomach and was not digested, was content. He possessed what he had been seeking all along: greater audiences for his tales.
The New Language of Masks
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
In the city of sticks and glass, a girl sits bridgewise and trails images through the air with bone-thin fingers. Under her stony seat, gondoliers steer the city's hidden ways, singing hexes for safe passage. Past her step the city's people and the world's people come to visit, unseeing of her fingers' work. Their bodies brush the air-patterns, send them folding eyewards, and in bursts like the flashed sun-reflection of a coin dropped to the ground she sees their masks.
Alphabets of colour and shape, a language of dreams and futures, paint their faces.
"Beware spiders," the girl whispers, sibylline, to a woman whose silvery hair clings silken to her neck.
A hitch in the woman's step, the only indication that she heard more than wind, kicks other air-patterns into spirals.
"I see…"
Something new. The girl blinks. "Music on your face, sir." New language, of quavers and halves, written barwise across polished white cheeks-paper. She reads, and does not like it. "Bad music, sir." Fingers draw handkerchiefs in the air, and the two men with music on their faces pause and stare at her until the church clock's chime draws them onwards.
~
She sees it everywhere, now she has noticed; it baritones into masks and the skin beneath, trebles in the air between shoulder and shoulder.
At twelve chimes the architect comes to her, bearing a plate of food and a question: "What do you see?"
"Music."
But not in her images. Laughing suddenly, she twitches her fingers in curves and in their wake forms a cat, mirror-image of the one hopping after a butterfly across the bridge. Then she sees a semi-quaver sneaking up the tabbied tail and looks away. "Too much music."
The architect is smiling.
Fingers shaking, she tugs her hip-long hair in front of her face. Black curtain. She doesn't want to look at him. Music stains his face, his clothes, his hands.
"It's in my food. You've put music in my food."
"Tell me what it tastes like."
Fingers tangle a quilt of No into her hair. She tips the plate, watches spaghetti twist and fall and plop into the canal. "Bad music, sir."
He laughs and walks away.
~
There is music in the water, too. The gondoliers' songs are different.
The girl sits bridgewise, trailing images from her fingers, and waits.
New Year's Wishes
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Wishes fluttered around us with the snow. I held out my hands, cup-curved, and tried to catch one. Throughout the square, men, women and children did the same--hoping they would catch their own, which was the best luck of all, or that theirs would fall into the hands of someone who would understand, someone who would say Yes and grant it.
I had little to wish for this year. My son grew strong, my husband’s back had recovered and when the ground thawed he would return to our spice fields. War had not come to our province in five years. Perhaps I should have wished for my sister to fall pregnant again with a baby that would not die only days out of the womb; but no, that was her wish to make.
War would come and go regardless of wishes. We all knew that.
Looking down at my snow-flecked and spice-stained hands--red and orange and yellow between the grooves in my palms, and the colours would not fade no matter how hard I scrubbed--I saw a wish. Black letters in the curves and dots of our script covered the paper-scrap.
A final kiss, before I depart for Aratavi.
My hand shook, a little.
I imagined the person who might have stood in line earlier in the day, waiting to write his or her wish so that it could be scattered by our town’s priest. Knowing that soon the journey to Aratavi must be begun--a journey to search for the remains of a loved one. People went to Aratavi during peace-time for no other reason. And in the marshes and pools, rife with the stream-women and algae-men who had killed so many of us, many found only their own grave.
Yes, I thought.
I rubbed paprika on my lips.
One by one, I kissed every person in the square. I left red marks in my wake. That way, I knew who I had yet to step up to, smiling kindly before I pressed my lips against their cheek, their brow.
An hour after the priest scattered our wishes, the bell tolled again, signifying that the previous year had transitioned into the current. I had kissed every man, woman and child.
I would never know whose wish landed in my hands. There was the man who touched my hair, briefly, before I moved on; the woman who whispered Thank you when I kissed the fist-shaped bruise on her chin; the man who wept silently through the hour. Perhaps it was one of them, but perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. I granted the wish.
And my own wish, also: Happiness, in whatever dose possible.
Bear
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
In the amusement park, the rollercoaster roared like a bear. Each twist, each pretzel-like loop, each sudden plummet -- on all of these, the wheels went over the track and out came that wild-creature sound. That roar.
~
I stood beside the empty seats and my dress was the same bright red as the straps’ buckles.
My torch flickered once, almost went out. Stupid brother, I thought. He’d said they were new batteries when he gave them to me, clenched in his fist like the coins I gave him to make sure he wouldn’t tell our parents.
The metal shapes of the rollercoaster jutted out of the dark, their lines straight, narrow. They looked like bars.
~
So distinctive, that roar, that children and adults from miles away came to listen to it. Some sat in the seats of the rollercoaster, feeling the roar through their backs and chests and legs. Others stood below and felt it in their ears. They said that it sounded like fresh snow and pine needles, a mate and her cubs, pink fish, blackberries and discarded cans.
They said these things, but they did not think.
~
After that roar lapped against my ears and my skin, tongue-rough, I couldn’t stop thinking about the bear. Couldn’t they hear how much it wanted to go home? On every corkscrew it cried for its mate, on the final plummet it pined for scales and a wriggling tail beneath its paw.
~
“We are lucky,” people said, “that Old Man Rickernell built us such a profitable thing.”
~
In my great-grandfather’s house, buckles covered the walls like sculpted patterns. Some were silver, some gold, some wooden. Some were plain, others carved with complex designs that I couldn’t follow.
I remember touching a half-made one in his workshop, and it felt like an insect bite.
“There’s power in a good buckle,” he once said.
And so I cut them all off, one by one, from the straps on the rollercoaster. They clanged on the floor, chain onto metal, until I reached the last one and the bear burst out of the metal and plastic, breaking its cage into a thousand pieces. Part of a chair hit my arm and I fell, dropping the torch, and tried not to cry into the black night. The bear ignored me.
I heard his roar, triumphant into the night as he ran through the turnstiles and down the steps, and it sounded like the stars and the moon, and trees on the horizon.
The Switches You Have To Search For
by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Pieces of furniture hide their switches inside.
If you can find its switch, hidden in whorls and rings and knots, your table will shake off its ornaments, tear off its clothes--its paint or wax or finish--and dance naked for you, limber like a contortionist.
You did not think its pose was its natural state, did you?
Watch your cabinet dance, its drawers pounding the earth like athletes' feet, swirling its frame like a discus. Watch your wardrobe break-dance on its doors. Watch your bed serenade your floor, watch them recount sordid tales to one another, watch them make love--a shifting labyrinth of planks and slats.
You could get lost watching them.
And if you do not hunt again for their switches, if you do not dash in with your shield and turn them back off, you could stand motionless, staring, until they take hold of you and swing you into their dance. They will weep resin and glue while they do it, but they will not stop; their compulsion runs deeper than pity, so deep they cannot know its motive. Your bones will clack against one other like drawers sliding shut.