Edited by, p.37
Edited By, page 37
And the girl, the one who had taken the newcomers’ flowers, roses dark and red, and dumped them in the battered trashcans behind the church hall’s kitchen—she was just fine now. Or as well as could be expected. She was actually some second or third cousin of his, in those ways that could only be figured out by his grandmother or one of her sisters poring, mumbling, over a sepia photograph album, was just fine now. Or as well as could be expected. The girl had come back, tanned and loud-voiced, from a long vacation with her aunt and her uncle who ran a construction business in far-off Tempe, Arizona. The girl had only stayed around long enough to show how healthy she was now, that none of what had happened to her really mattered, that everything, her brief marriage and pregnancy and what had happened in the delivery room, that had all been something like a dream. From which she had wakened with a Reno divorce certificate and a cantaloupe webbing of stretch marks across her stomach, that just meant she couldn’t wear two-piece bathing suits any more. Then the girl had gone with her barking, brittle laugh into the city, to work as a secretary in another uncle’s import-export company and sleep with negro musicians. There were enough of her friends left behind who envied her, that the widow could say now that no one had been hurt and it would be true enough.
It was only the men who knew, and the older boys who knew, and those like himself who were caught between those estates, who dreamed and let their waking thoughts be troubled by such things, that were women’s business and none of their own. They all knew, even though they had seen nothing of what had happened to the girl. Fool that he was, fool that both he and the widow knew him to be, as all women know all men are; he could close his eyes, like the point of his tongue unable to resist prodding an aching tooth, and see a chrome and white-tiled room, the girl’s feet up in the stirrups, a hospital-green sheet over her enormous belly. And then another tongue poke, and he would see more of what he didn’t want to see and couldn’t keep from seeing: the doctor’s sweat soaking through his mask as he shouted at the nurses and anesthesiologist to get out, to get out of the delivery room and leave him alone here. Then the doctor had turned back to his task, lifting the sheet above the girl’s spread-apart knees with one gloved hand, while the sharpest scalpel from the tray glittered in his other hand. Bringing the metal close enough to reflect the idiot round eyes peering from the small darkness, the webbed claws braced to keep it inside the wet sling of flesh it was so reluctant to leave.
How did these pictures get inside their heads, if they were of things the men had never seen, never been told about? But they all knew, after a night of bad dreams they could see it in each other’s eyes; he had seen it in the way his father had bent over the broom, sweeping off the sidewalk in front of the store, counting the money into the till to get ready for the morning’s first customer. And silence, the silence that lay behind the words even when someone spoke, silence that had looked at and then turned away from the cruel necessities of women’s business. All the men, the priest included, had been grateful that the war of the altar flowers had ended, that this truce both grudgeful and admiring had been achieved.
And he, the butcher’s son, had been grateful, because by that time he had already begun sleeping with the dark-eyed widow.
In her kitchen, the night velvet behind the steamy windows, he sat leaning across the table toward her. She loosened another button at the front of her dress, and his hand fell of its own weight, almost without will, to cup her breast.
“You’re so stupid,” she murmured and smiled, her own eyes half-lidded now. He knew she meant not just him, but all of them.
There was one more picture inside his head, that he turned his face down toward his plate to see, as though ashamed of this weakness. But he had to, so he could forget for a while, or long enough. Her heartbeat rocked inside his palm even louder now. His arm felt hollow into his chest, where his own pulse caught in time with hers.
Inside his head, in that other night, the doctor still wore his surgical scrubs from the delivery room. As he walked across the field behind the hospital’s parking lot, the high grass silvered by the moon. Carrying something wadded up inside the green sheet, something that leaked through red upon his bare hands. Until the doctor flung open the sheet from where he stood upon the high bank of a creek, and heard a second later the pieces drop into the water. He threw in the red-edged scalpel as well, and it disappeared among the soft weeds like the bright flash of a minnow. In that picture, the doctor looked over his shoulder at the hospital’s lights, face hardened against what he’d come to know about the business of women. The doctor and the priest were brothers apart from other men, and the same as all men. They all knew, but could not speak of these things.
He felt the widow kiss him on the side of his face. He looked up and saw her, and nothing else. Nothing at all.
She wore a black nightgown to bed, or what would have been black if her skin hadn’t shone so luminous through it. To him it looked like smoke in her bedroom’s darkness, smoke across a city of a thousand doors, the shadow across the crypt deep in the white stone where Our Redeemer was both born and buried.
The black nightgown felt like smoke as well, if smoke could have been gathered into his hands. He lay with her in his arms, her eyes closed now, the sheets molded with sweat to his ribs.
“She likes it very much that way.” Her husband’s awkward English came from above them, from the side of the bed. “To be held, and held just so.”
He turned his head and looked up at the dead man. The Cracow dandy. Half of the man’s face was gone, from the first bullet that had struck him in the eye, then the rest that his murderer had poured like water from an outstretched hand, feet spread to either side of the man’s shoulders upon the pavement. Not murder really, but a business disagreement between the Cracow dandy and his dark-eyed brothers; it was the business of men to know the difference. Just as it had been the business of the butcher, every other Friday, to ring NO SALE on the cash register and count again the thin sheaf of fives and tens in the plain white envelope that he set beside the Saint Vincent de Paul charity jar. So that the Cracow dandy, when he’d been alive, or one of his elegantly tailored associates, could come in, smile and talk to the butcher, and buy nothing and leave, the envelope somehow magically transported into the dandy’s coat pocket without his ever having shown his soft, manicured hands. Then nodding to the butcher’s son with the pushbroom and smiling, all of them knowing that this was how the business of men was done. So much so, knowledge passed from one generation to the next, from the old world to this, that he had known what to do without being told, to wait upon the rest of the day’s customers, to wrap chops and stew bones, and make change and finally lock the shop up, turning the sign in the door from OPEN to CLOSED, all while his father sat on the alley stoop and knocked back thimbles of schnapps with a heavy, brooding scowl on his face.
“I know,” he told the dead man. “I know what to do next. You don’t have to tell me.”
“You know…”
But that wasn’t the dead man who spoke, who whispered, it was the widow with the dark eyes and the black nightgown, the stuff of smoke and silk, pushed above her hips. His hand passed from there to the curve of her thigh, and it felt like laying his palm upon his mother’s stove, if anything in the world could be both that soft and yet as hot as heated iron. Hot enough to burn the tongue in his mouth until he was as mute as dead men should be.
“Like this…”
He knew that her dead husband stood by the bed, an angel in an elegant suit. A Cracow dandy, a rose with splinters of bone for white thorns where his right eye and cheekbone had been. He felt the dead man’s fingers curve around his hand, the way his father’s had when he had first been shown how to bring the cleaver between the compliant ribs. Now he let the dead man cup his palm around the widow’s breast.
I’m not such a fool, he thought. I know all this. I was born knowing.
But he let the dead man show him anyway. Because that was what she wanted. He knew that as well.
“Kiss her.” The dead man whispered in his ear. “While you hold her. Press tight and don’t be afraid. Be a man…”
I’m not afraid. He hadn’t been afraid the first time he had been in her bed—their bed—and he had looked over his shoulder and seen her dead husband with the ruined face. How could anyone lying in bed with a woman ever be afraid? And with her clad only in a nightgown of black smoke and silk…
That was what women didn’t know. For all their mysteries and secrets, for even the youngest girls’ knowing smiles—they didn’t know that when men trembled in this place, in the grave of desire, it was not from fear.
He opened his eyes and looked down. Looked down and saw what the dead man above him saw. He saw her with her eyes closed, lips slightly parted, her naked arms reaching…
For her husband.
His face burning with shame, he looked over his shoulder to the one who the dark-eyed widow loved, who she would always love.
“Don’t feel bad.” The Cracow dandy’s voice was the kindness of one man to another. “It’s not that she doesn’t care for you. She might even have loved you, or someone like you, if she hadn’t loved me first.”
“I know. I know that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Here…
He no longer knew whose voice it was, that told him what to do. It could have been his own.
Like this…
Or hers. He watched his hand, or that of her dead husband, stroke her dark hair upon the pillow. She turned her face toward that touch.
And smiled.
“You see?” said the dead man. “Just like that. Just like that. Just like that.”
He closed his own eyes. And kissed her. The tear between his lashes and her cheek burned like fire, if fire were salt.
As he knew would happen—as none of them told him, but he knew anyway—a year passed, from the time a sealed coffin was lain in earth, to the time when he knocked upon her door, his hands smelling of blood from his father’s shop, no matter how much he scrubbed them with soap and vinegar. A year passed from the Cracow dandy’s death, he knew it had, but he still came and knocked at her door.
The dark-eyed widow opened the door just wide enough that he could see the others inside, the bottles of wine upon the table, and hear their bright laughter. She looked out upon him, standing there in the darkness that came so early in the winter. She smiled with enough sadness to break his heart, then shook her head and silently closed the door. He could still hear the laughter and singing on the other side.
He turned away and saw the cardboard box at the curb, the box of her old clothes, for the trash collectors to pick up and carry away. All the black dresses that she had worn for the last year. The black with which she had mourned her dead husband. A year had passed and she didn’t need them anymore.
He knelt down and pushed his hands through the contents of the box. Until he found, at the bottom, something of silk and smoke. He drew it out and held it against his face, breathing in the scent that was part her and part the perfume of ancient roses that she had used.
He knew. He had always known. A year would pass, and she would forget about both of them, the butcher’s son and the Cracow dandy. She was still young, and a year had passed.
He heard steps running on the sidewalk. They halted, and he looked up and saw one of the youngest girls watching him without smiling, a coil of jump rope in her hand. It got dark so early, this time of year.
The little girl ran past him, toward her home and supper. He let the nightgown slip from his hands, drifting across his knee and a corner of the box like smoke, if smoke could fall.
Black Nightgown
Little Deaths was commissioned by Deborah Beale for Millennium in the UK and it’s a big one: 464 pages of twenty-four stories, almost all of them new. It won the World Fantasy Award. Then Millennium sold “foreign” rights to a U.S. publisher, whose editor insisted on cutting nine stories, and adding one “name” reprint.
In 1988, K.W. Jeter wrote what I later discovered was his first short story, for one of my commissioned themed groupings of “short-shorts” (now called flash fiction) in Omni. If you’ve read his 1994 classic Dr. Adder, you know how over the top and twisted his fiction can be. “Black Nightgown” is relatively subtle but still—of course—twisted.
A Delicate Architecture
by Catherynne M. Valente
(From Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainess Tales, 2009)
My father was a confectioner. I slept on pillows of spun sugar; when I woke, the sweat and tears of my dreams had melted it all to nothing, and my cheek rested on the crisp sheets of red linen. Many things in my father’s house were made of candy, for he was a prodigy, having at the age of five invented a chocolate trifle so dark and rich that the new emperor’s chocolatier sat down upon the steps of his great golden kitchen and wept into his truffle-dusted mustache. So it was that when my father found himself in possession of a daughter, he cut her corners and measured her sweetness with no less precision than he used in his candies.
My breakfast plate was clear, hard butterscotch, full of oven-bubbles. I ate my soft-boiled marzipan egg gingerly, tapping its little cap with a toffee-hammer. The yolk within was a lemony syrup that dribbled out into my egg-cup. I drank chocolate in a black vanilla-bean mug. But I ate sugared plums with a fork of sparrow bones; the marrow left salt in the fruit and the strange, thick taste of a thing once alive in all that sugar. When I asked my father why I should taste these bones along with the sweetness of the candied plums, he told me very seriously that I must always remember that sugar was once alive. It grew tall and green and hard as my own knuckles in a far-away place, under a red sun that burned on the face of the sea. I must always remember that children just like me cut it down and crushed it up with tan and strong hands, and that their sweat, which gave me my sugar, tasted also of salt.
“If you forget that red sun and those long, green stalks, then you are not truly a confectioner, you understand nothing about candy but that it tastes good and is colorful—and these things a pig can tell, too. We are the angels of the cane, we are oven-magicians, but if you would rather be a pig snuffling in the leaves—”
“No, Papa.”
“Well then, eat your plums, magician of my heart.”
And so I did, and the tang of marrow in the sugar-meat was rich and disturbing and sweet.
Often I would ask my father where my mother had gone, if she had not liked her fork of sparrow bones, or if she had not wanted to eat marzipan eggs every day. These were the only complaints I could think of. My father ruffled my hair with his sticky hand and said:
“One morning, fine as milk, when I lived in Vienna and reclined on turquoise cushions with the empress licking my fingers for one taste of my sweets, I went walking past the city shops, my golden cane cracking on the cobbles, peering into their frosted windows and listening to the silver bells strung from the doors. In the window of a competitor who hardly deserved the name, being but a poor maker of trifles which would hardly satisfy a duchess, I saw the loveliest little crystal jar. It was as intricately cut as a diamond and full of the purest sugar I have ever seen. The little shopkeeper, bent with decades of hunching over trays of chocolate, smiled at me with few enough teeth and cried:
‘Alonzo! I see you have cast your discerning gaze upon my little vial of sugar! I assure you it is the finest of all the sugars ever made, rendered from the tallest cane in the isles by a fortunate virgin snatched at the last moment from the frothing red mouth of her volcano! It was then blanched to the snowy shade you see in a bath of lion’s milk and ground to sweetest dust with a pearl pestle, and finally poured into a jar made from the glass of three church windows. I am no emperor’s darling, but in this I exceed you at last!’
The little man did a shambling dance of joy, to my disgust. But I poured out coins onto his scale until his eyes gleamed wet with longing, and took that little jar away with me.” My father pinched my chin affectionately. “I hurried back home, boiled the sugar with costly dyes and other secret things, and poured it into a Constanze-shaped mold, slid it into the oven, and out you came in an hour or two, eyes shining like caramels!”
My father laughed when I pulled his ear and told him not to tease me, that every girl has a mother, and an oven is no proper mother! He gave me a slice of honeycomb, and shooed me into the garden, where raspberries grew along the white gate.
And thus I grew up. I ate my egg every morning, and licked the yolk from my lips. I ate my plums with my bone fork, and thought very carefully about the tall cane under the red sun. I scrubbed my pillow from my cheeks until they were quite pink. Every old woman in the village remarked on how much I resembled the little ivory cameos of the emperor, the same delicate nose, high brow, thick red hair. I begged my father to let me go to Vienna, as he had done when he was a boy. After all, I was far from a dense child. I had my suspicions—I wanted to see the emperor. I wanted to hear the violas playing in white halls with green and rose checkered floors. I wanted to ride a horse with long brown reins. I wanted to taste radishes and carrots and potatoes, even a chicken, even a fish on a plate of real porcelain, with no oven-bubbles in it.
“Why did we leave Vienna, Papa?” I cried, over our supper of marshmallow crèmes and caramel cakes. “I could have learned to play the flute there; I could have worn a wig like spun sugar. You learned these things—why may I not?”
My father’s face reddened and darkened all at once, and he gripped the sides of the butcher’s board where he cut caramel into bricks. “I learned to prefer sugar to white curls,” he growled, “and peppermints to piccolos, and cherry creams to the emperor. You will learn this, too, Constanze.” He cleared his throat. “It is an important thing to know.”
