Edited by, p.27
Edited By, page 27
Soon, however, my marriage began to sour. Jude’s love-bites became painful nips that broke my skin and forced diamonds past my teeth. He often tried to scare me, hiding in the closet so that I shrieked when he leapt out, grains of white gold spilling from my mouth. One night he put a dead rat in the kitchen sink. I found it in the morning, and platinum rods clattered to the ground as I screamed. I begged him to be kind, but he only growled that we needed more money, that our investments weren’t doing well. I could hear him on the phone late at night, pleading for more time to pay his debts. Often he came home with the smell of liquor on his breath. I grew nervous and quiet. Once he chided me for keeping silent, not holding up my part of the marriage, and I began to sob, withered tulips plummeting down.
“Bitch!” he shouted. “I need more gold, not your damned flowers!” The backhand across my mouth drew blood, but along with two cracked teeth, I spat out sapphires.
From then on, such beatings happened often. It was eight months later—when Jude broke my arm—that I left, taking nothing with me. I moved to a different city. My phone number is unlisted now. I pay all my bills at my bank, not through the mail. A high fence surrounds my house, and the gate is always locked.
Since I have no need to work, my time is my own. I search the folklore databases of libraries all over the world, looking for a spell that will reach the old woman. When I find her, I will beg her to take back her gift, her curse.
My stepmother will not say it, but Cassie is mad, driven to it by the bats and spiders wriggling from her mouth. It’s good that her mother loves and cares for her out on that farm, because all she does is sit and rock and mutter curses, birthing an endless stream of lizards and greasy toads. “It keeps the snakes fed,” my stepmother sighs when she calls with sour thanks for her monthly check. “That way they’re not biting us.” The mother and father who loved me are both long dead, but my stepmother still lives.
When the phone rang, I thought it was her, calling to complain about slugs in her lettuce.
“Hello?” I spat out a nasturtium.
“Precious. It is you.” Jude’s voice was honey dripped over steel. “Why have you been hiding, love?”
I clamped my lips together. I would not give him my words. I listened, though. I always listened to Jude.
“You don’t have to answer, Princess. I can see you quite clearly from here. You must have wanted me to find you, leaving the back curtains open like that. And the lock on that gate wouldn’t keep an imbecile out.”
“Jude, go away, or I’ll call the police.” Deadly nightshade fell from my lips. I paused to spit out the poisonous sap. There was a crash in the living room as Jude came through the sliding back doors. He dropped the cell phone and the heavy mallet he carried when he stepped through the ruined glass. Petrified, struck dumb as a stone, I made it to the front door before he slammed me against the wall, wrenching my arm behind my back. From years of habitual silence, my only sound was a hiss of pain. A copper coin rolled over my tongue, a metallic taste of fear.
“You won’t call anyone, my treasure. You know it would ruin your life if people found out. Think of the kidnapping attempts, the tabloid media following you everywhere. You’d have every bleeding-heart charity in the book breathing down your neck for donations. Let me protect you from all that, jewel. I’m your husband, and I love you, except when you anger me. I only want my fair share.”
Pressed against mine, Jude’s body was as tall as I remembered, cruelly thin, and driven by the strength of his rage. I thought perhaps I could talk my way out by being agreeable. “Let me go, Jude. I won’t fight you anymore. I had to mouth the words around the petals of a dead rose. I carefully tongued the thorny stem past my teeth.
“You’re sure?” He pushed my elbow higher up along my back until I whimpered, grinding my teeth on more dry thorns. I had almost fainted with relief from the pain, when he finally let me go. He grabbed my sore shoulder and pushed me ahead of him into the living room. Then he stopped and turned me to face him. “Okay, darling, you owe me. Left me in one hell of a financial mess back there. So come on, make the magic. Spit it out.”
“Jude, I’m sorry I ran away like that, but I was frightened.” Two silver coins rolled to the ground.
“You can do better than that, Precious.” Jude raised his fist level with my face. My jaw still ached where he had dislocated it the first time he ever hit me. I forced a rush of words from my mouth:
“I mean, I love you, darling, and I hope that we can work this out, because I know you were the one who rescued me from my stepmother, and I’m grateful that you took care of me so I didn’t have to worry about anything…” A rain of silver was piling up around Jude’s feet: bars, sheets, rods, wire. He grinned, reaching down to touch the gleaming pile. I felt a little nudge of an emotion I didn’t recognize. I kept talking.
“It was so wonderful living with you, not like at my stepmother’s, where I had to do all the cooking and cleaning, and my father never spoke up for me…” Semiprecious stones started piling up with the silver: rose quartz, jade, hematite. The mound reached Jude’s knees, and the delight on his face made him look like the playful man I had married. He sat on the hillock of treasure, shoveling it up over his lap. My words kept flowing:
“If Daddy were a fair man, if he really loved me, he could have said something, and wouldn’t it have been easier if the four of us had split the chores?” I couldn’t stop. All those years of resentment gouted forth: emeralds green with jealousy; seething red garnets; cold blue chunks of lapis. The stones were larger now, the size of plums. I ejected them from my mouth with the force of thrown rocks. They struck Jude’s chest, his chin. He tried to stand, but the bounty piled up over his shoulders, slamming him back down to the floor. “Hey!” he cried. But my words flew even faster.
“So I fetched and I carried and I smiled and I simpered, while Daddy let it all wash over him and told me to be nicer, even nicer, and now he’s dead and I can’t tell him how much he hurt me, and the only thanks I got was that jealous, lazy hussy telling me it’s my fault her daughter’s spitting slugs, and then you come riding to my rescue so that I can spend the next year of my life trying to make you happy too, and you have the gall to lay hands on me, and to tell me that you have the right? Well, just listen to me, Jude: I am not your treasure trove, and I will not run anymore, and I shall be nice if and when it pleases me, and stop calling me Precious; my name is Isobel!”
As I shouted my name, a final stone formed on my tongue, soft at first, as a hen’s egg forms in her body. It swelled, pushing my jaws apart until I gagged. I forced it out. It flew from my mouth, a ruby as big as a human heart that struck Jude sharply on the head, then fell onto the pile of treasure. He collapsed unconscious amidst the bounty, blood trickling from a dent in his temple. The red ruby gleamed as though a coal lit its core. I felt lightheaded, exhilarated. Jude might still have been breathing, but I didn’t bother to check. I stepped around him to the phone and dialed Emergency. “Police? There’s an intruder in my home.”
It wasn’t until I went outside to wait for the police that I realized that nothing had fallen from my mouth when I made the telephone call. I chuckled first, then I laughed.
Just sounds, only sounds.
Precious
Silver Birch, Blood Moon is the fifth volume in the retold, adult fairy tale series Terri Windling and I co-edited. It was published in 1999 and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology.
Nalo Hopkinson’s tale “Precious” was the second story of hers that appeared in our series. “Riding the Red,” Nalo’s second published story was in Black Swan, White Raven two years previous, recommended to Terri and me by Chip Delany, her Clarion East instructor.
Daniel’s Theory About Dolls
by Stephen Graham Jones
(FromThe Doll Collection,2015)
I’m twelve when this all starts, and Daniel’s about to be five. And I thought he was like the rest of us, then. I thought he was like I had been, at his age. But he wasn’t. It could be he had been born different, of course. Or maybe one day, walking down the hall on his short legs there had been a click in his head, a deep, wet shift in his chest that made him roll his right shoulder, look at all of us in a colder way. Not just me and Mom and Dad. After that click, he looked at people in a colder way. I should have been watching him the whole time. I should have never slept. Then I could have seen him in his twin bed across from mine one night, when he coughed up a shiny black accretion, studied it in the moonlight sifting through our bedroom window, then wrapped it in a tissue, leaving it on the nightstand for Mom to throw away.
It was his soul.
None of us would know for years.
For our whole childhood he was just Daniel, always the full name. My little brother seven years younger, the accident that almost killed my mom, being born, like he’d been picking at the walls of her womb, latching his mouth onto places not made for feeding. He didn’t talk until he was four. The doctors said not to worry, that some kids just took their time.
This isn’t about him getting all the attention, either. This isn’t about me growing up off to the side, taping and gluing my action figures and trucks back together and starting them on another adventure I was going to have to make up alone.
I’m good with the alone part. Really.
Those first four years when Daniel wasn’t talking, the house was always buzzing anyway. New wallpaper, the trim painted over and over, slightly different shades each time, like a bird’s egg fading in the sun, its inside baked rotten.
Our mom and dad were preparing for our little sister. Trying to make her room at the end of the hall so perfect that she couldn’t help being born. Perfect enough that she wouldn’t listen to the doctors, who told Mom there was no way, that Daniel had messed her up too bad, too forever.
Dad wanted a little princess, see. And our mom would kill herself to give him that princess, if she had to.
So, when the baseboards finally matched the color of the new knobs on the cabinets, when the corners had been sanded off all the coffee table and footboards, when Dad had parked all the tractors in a line by the barn, then reparked them again, it finally happened: Janine.
Our mom and dad named her early so they could coo to her through the tight wall of skin my mom’s stomach became. They named her so they could lure her out, so they could talk her through.
To explain it to us, what was happening, my dad got a black marker with a sharp point and drew the outline of a sideways baby onto Mom, like a curled over bean with fingers and toes and an open eye watching us. If we’d been a family that already had a daughter, we might have had a left over doll to use, to explain this process with, but what we had instead was Dad’s strong bold lines on our mom’s belly.
Years later, at a movie theater, I would see the outline of a person taped off on the street, where they’d died their dramatic movie death, and I would lean forward, away from my date. I would lean forward and turn my head sideways, to see if I could hear that person under the asphalt, whispering.
Daniel told us it’s how he learned to talk: hours on the couch with Mom in her seventh month, his head pressed flat to her bared stomach, Janine whispering to him.
When she died just like the doctors had said she would, Dad had to break down the bathroom door to keep Mom from eating all the soap from the towel cabinet. I remember him carrying her down the hall, bellowing at us to get out of the way. How her mouth was foaming, how her eyes were so blank.
I don’t know if she was trying to choke herself to death or if she thought she was dirty on the inside.
After she was sedated on the couch, and Dad was pouring me cereal at the formal dining room table we never used, I heard Daniel speaking words for the first time.
I stood from my chair, peered over the back of the couch.
Daniel had rolled Mom’s shirt up, had the side of his head pressed to her stomach.
He was talking to Janine.
It was the only time I ever hit him.
Mom’s theory when she checked back into the world, it was that some people are born for a reason. That they’re born to do a specific thing. And, in teaching Daniel to talk, Janine had done that specific thing. It released her from having to be born at all.
We held a private service for her in the woods behind our house. I got dressed up and combed my hair flat and everything.
We walked single-file out to where we’d used to have picnics, under the big tree. It was maybe five minutes past the edge of the pasture. Our dad was trying not to cry. Our mom was squeezing his hand. Daniel was standing on the other side of the hole from me. I guess our dad had dug the hole the night before, or early that morning.
“Will the ants get her?” Daniel asked.
Because they always found our watermelon as soon as we cut it.
My mom shook her head no, not to worry.
The box they had for her was cardboard and waxy and as long as Dad’s arm. It smelled like flowers, and, because Mom’s stomach was still big, that box made less sense than anything else in the history of the world, ever.
They didn’t explain it to us.
We raised our voices, sang one of the children’s songs Mom had been humming down to Janine since the first month.
It was nice, it was pretty, it was good.
Except for that box.
It fit into the hole perfectly, and all four of us used our hands to clump the dirt back in over it. Then my dad pulled a little sharpshooter shovel from behind some tree and scooped a little more on, and tamped it all down into a proper mound.
“No marker,” our mom said, her hand over her own heart, like cupping it. “We’ll be the marker, okay?”
This is how families survive.
“Okay,” Daniel said, trying the sounds out.
Dad rustled Daniel’s mop of hair. It was like a hug, I guess.
“I think he’s had the words in there the whole time,” Dad said.
“My big boys,” Mom said, and lowered herself to her knees, pulled Daniel and me to her and held on, her belly between us, a hard, dead lump.
“Okay,” Daniel said again, quieter.
He wasn’t talking to us.
Three nights later I woke softly, my eyes open for moments before I could see through them, I think.
They were fixed on Daniel’s bed.
It was empty.
I trailed my fingers on the walls, felt my way through the darkened house. Living room, kitchen, utility. Dad’s study, Mom’s sewing room. Their bedroom, the two of them breathing evenly in their musty covers.
Then Janine’s room at the dead end of the hall.
I would get in trouble if the sound woke my parents—Janine’s room was already in the process of becoming a shrine—but I clicked the light on.
It was like stepping into a cupcake. Everything was lace and pink and white-edged, like a thousand doilies had exploded, fell into an arrangement that before had only existed in our dad’s head.
Daniel wasn’t there either.
I turned the light off, trying to muffle the sound in the warmth of my palm, and in that new darkness I saw a firefly bobbing outside the window.
Except it was a yellowy flashlight, moving through the trees.
Daniel.
I pulled my shoes on without tying the laces and crept out the front door, left it open a crack behind me.
Five minutes later, I caught up with him.
He’d seen where Dad put that little sharpshooter shovel. It was just his size.
By the time I got to Janine’s grave, he’d already dug down to the waxy cardboard-box center.
I reached out to stop him—he didn’t know I was there—but it was too late.
He’d already stepped down into the open grave, the box not supporting his weight, the sound of a jumbo staple popping loud in the night.
And then I didn’t say anything.
What he pulled up from that box, holding it under the armpits like a real baby, was the doll Dad had bought for Janine, the doll he hadn’t had to demonstrate the baby in Mom’s stomach.
She’d been stripped naked, of course.
If her eyes rolled open, it was too far for me to see, and too dark.
Because I’d left the door open, when I got back to the house there was something turning in slow deliberate circles on the couch.
A possum. It was following its rat tail around and around, like it had lost something, or was patting down a bed for itself.
It hissed at me, showed its rows of teeth, sharp all the way back to the hinge of its jaw.
I fell back, clutching for the coat rack, to pull it down in front of me, maybe, to hide what was going to be my screaming escape, but what my fingers dug into, it was the shirt of Daniel’s pajamas.
He didn’t even look over at me as he crossed the living room, the shovel held over his shoulder like a barbarian axe.
The possum screamed when he swung the blade into it, and by the time our mom and dad had clambered into the living room, my dad with his pistol held high like a torch, my mom’s silk sleep mask pushed up on her forehead like a visor, the possum was biting at its own opened side, and rasping.
Daniel looked up to Dad, then to Mom.
The shovel was twice as tall as he was.
“Daniel,” our dad said, his voice trying to be stern, I think.
It didn’t work.
“Oh,” Mom said then, and stepped back from the bloody couch. From the dying possum.
The possum’s babies were calving off. They’d been hidden under the dark back fur on her back. They looked like malformed mice.
I clapped my hand to my mouth, threw up between my fingers.
Daniel brought the flat of the shovel down on the fastest of the babies, was, as our dad said later, too young to know better, too young to understand.
