Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (36 page)

“It’s beautiful.”

Louise looked down at herself. “Yeah,” she said; she sounded almost surprised. “Yeah, it is.”

The world returns slowly to the glass beach.

There is a graduate student writing her dissertation on the ecological effects of dragon incursions; she has a grant, and she walks out to the beach every day and takes notes and samples and pictures. She measures the craters; sends the ashes to be analyzed and compared with the ashes from the most recent California wildfire, with the ashes from Mount St. Helens, with the ashes from other American dragon incursions, all the way back to the dragon of 1869, the first dragon for which such samples had been kept. She walks out with white-knuckled care to the obsidian bones and only once lays her hand open on their merciless edges.

She is lonely, but she doesn’t mind. Her work is important.

On the day she sees the first cautious returning kildeer, she comes back after dark with a bottle of tequila. She pours a libation—not to the dragon, for the dragon is destruction and death and needs no homage—but to the Earth who heals herself if given half a chance, and then proceeds to get royally hammered.

After the dragon, she put things back together as best she could.

From her mother, Megan had learned to judge herself by marking points off from perfection. But now, looking at herself in the fractured, crazy-quilt mirror she’d made, perfection didn’t make any sense. She wasn’t sure what did.

“What do you like about yourself?” Louise said one day at the gym.

“What do I
like
about myself?” Megan said blankly.

“Yeah,” Louise said, not pausing in the steady rhythm of the rowing machine.

“Louise, have you
seen
me?”

“Megan,” Louise said back, just as snippy, “did I say anything about your
looks
?”

Megan didn’t have an answer to that, and she went to swim laps with the question still bouncing around inside her head. Later, when she joined Louise in the jacuzzi, she said, “My mother always said it was a good thing I was pretty because what else did I have to offer a husband?”

“So your mother is who? June Cleaver in hell?”

Megan felt guilty about laughing, but god, there was no way she could stop herself. And Louise just grinned.

“I’ll tell you what I like about myself,” Louise said. “I like my tattoo. I like that I’m strong. I like that I’m entering a marathon next year, and I don’t think I’m gonna place, but I know I’m gonna finish. I like that my sister’s kids hug me hard, and I hug ’em back. I like that I don’t give a shit anymore how my hair looks.”

She raised her eyebrows at Megan. For a moment, Megan didn’t think she had anything to say, and then she blurted, “I like my legs.”

“They’re cut,” Louise agreed. “You gonna take that tai chi class?”

“Maybe,” Megan said, and they finished their soak and walked back to the locker room lazily arguing the pros and cons.

Megan showered, put her street clothes on. T-shirts now, always T-shirts, because as awkward as it could be pulling them on, it was better than the humiliation of fumbling with buttons. And it wasn’t like she had anything left she could win by being chic and femme and a copy of Nancy. She looked in the locker-room mirror and saw somebody who was so far from perfect the word didn’t make sense. Somebody who was going to have to live with it.

Somebody who
could
live with it.

She waited, awkwardly, until Louise was dressed, and then said in a rush, before she could change her mind, “Louise, will you introduce me to your tattooist?” And when Louise looked at her, clearly startled, she said, “I want . . . I like the fact that my body is still alive. And I want it to know that.”

“Of course,” Louise said, and in her smile Megan saw beauty that no mother, no dragon could touch. “Of course.”

Many of my short stories, including the title piece of this collection, come from necklaces or earrings made and named by my friend Elise Matthesen . Elise’s work is gorgeous, inspiring, thought-provoking . . . there’s a reason this collection is dedicated to her.

Draco Campestris

“
Draco Campestris
” took me a long time to write because it only unveiled itself slowly and in non-contiguous pieces. The tipping point, though, was when I realized it was about a taxonomist. (It is also, like my stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, about my slightly uneasy love for museums.) But the intertwined stories of the taxonomist, the lady, the tithe-children, and the Museum itself were never either complete or linear strands in my head; they were always fragmentary and jumbled, as they are in the story itself.

“
Draco campestris
” is also the first story in a series that Elizabeth Bear and I seem to be . . . I don’t know whether the right word is “writing” or “playing,” because it’s the closest to jazz improvisation that I think writing can come. I wrote “
Draco campestris
”; Bear wrote “Orm the Beautiful” ; I wrote “After the Dragon (which is the last story in this collection, and, yes, that’s a deliberate framing choice); Bear wrote “Snow Dragons” ; and there are further stories, unpublished, unfinished, unwritten. But each story plays off the others, and each story comes from something Elise Matthesen has made. It’s fun and it’s challenging; I love each story, mine and Bear’s, separately, and I love the sequence they make when you put them together.

Queen Of Swords

“Queen of Swords” is an early story, and I think it’s pretty clear I’d been reading Angela Carter. I love stories that work with fairy tales, either retellings or subvertings or using the language of fairy tales to tell a different kind of story, and this is my attempt at that form.

Letter From a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day

This was the first short story I ever successfully finished. It comes from an Elise Matthesen necklace, so it also marks the beginning of my friendship with her. It is also the story of mine that is most explicitly about the part of America in which I grew up: all the place names are real.

I have a theory that the category of “things you can do with words” lies on a spectrum from poetry to novels, and that short stories wobble back and forth across the tipping point. Some of them are like very short novels; others are like unpacked poems. This is one of the ones that is like an unpacked poem, and it may be the story of mine of which I am most proud.

It was a
bitch
to write.

Under the Beansidhe’s Pillow

This one’s even farther toward the poetry end of the spectrum, and it comes from a pair of Elise’s earrings with wooden skulls and tiny silver acorns.

I like to believe that we are all capable of transcending human nature, and I see no reason why I should not extend that belief to those whose natures are not human.

The Watcher in the Corners

This story, on the other hand, is more like a small novel.

Lilah Collier started out as a very minor character in a piece of juvenilia, and this story was originally a spin-off: what happened to her when she escaped her father’s house and her psychopath of an older sister. But the juvenilia never managed to fledge into an adult story, and the spin-off put down good strong roots and bloomed.

(And if that’s not a mixed metaphor, I don’t know what is.)

I’d love to know what happened to Lilah after she left Mississippi, but she’s never come back to tell me.

The Half-Sister

What happens after the story’s over?
is probably the question my stories most persistently return to and wrestle with. I’m always more interested in what happens after you save the world or slay the dragon and about who has to pick up the pieces when you’re done. I’m interested in costs and consequences. And I’m interested in the people who aren’t heroes, the people who stay home and keep the lamps clean.

Ashes, Ashes

Four stories of mine come from a single one of Elise’s necklaces. The necklace is called
Why Do You Linger?
and so is one of the stories (in press, as of this writing, with
Subterranean Magazine
). Another story is “Wait for Me,” which can be found in
The Bone Key,
my collection of interrelated stories featuring the character of Kyle Murchison Booth. The third story is “Katabasis: Seraphic Trains,” which I’ll talk about a little later on. And the fourth story is “Ashes, Ashes,” which I think it’s fair to call my Daphne du Maurier homage.

The woods behind the narrator’s house are the woods behind my childhood home; I can remember consciously visualizing the dry creek bed when I was writing this story. The history of those woods, however, is purely imaginary.

Sidhe Tigers

This is another story that is very close to being a poem. It comes from a necklace of the same name, of very pale green beads.

A Light in Troy

I was thinking about the fall of Troy (you know, like you do). More specifically, I was thinking about Euripides’
The Trojan Women
, which is about what it’s like to be a woman on the losing side of a war. And I was thinking about Andromache and the various stories told about what happened to her after the fall of Troy.

And then I was thinking about feral children.

Why these two trains of thought should have collided to produce this story, I don’t know. But, as best I can reconstruct it, that’s what happened.

Amante Dorée

A little alternate history here . . . a little genderfuck there . . . And somehow it came out a spy story.

Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home

The Field Museum in Chicago has a collection of figureheads which are beautiful and slightly sad. Elise made a necklace called Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home. The selkie was originally in a different story, but it turned out she needed to be in this one. If you’re getting the idea that short stories generally happen by virtue of two or three random things colliding in my head, you’re not wrong.

Darkness, as a Bride

There was a challenge involved in the genesis of this story. I know it had something to do with rocks, because the challenge also produced Elizabeth Bear’s excellent “Love Among the Talus” <
Strange Horizons
: strangehorizons.com/2006/20061211/talus-f.shtml>. I was obviously thinking about the rock that Andromeda was chained to and about what happens if Perseus never shows up. I was also obviously thinking about the ballet
Coppélia
—and about the Hoffmann stories it’s based on—and what that story looks like from the doll’s point of view.

Also, I love the sea monster in this story with all my heart.

Katabasis: Seraphic Trains

Every writer gets one Orpheus story. This is mine.

It’s also a Tam Lin story, and an urban fantasy—in the literal sense that it is a fantasy about a city. The moment that sparked the story was riding the El from the outskirts of Chicago into the city itself, and seeing how close it comes to the houses along its path. It was also a chance to nest several tiny stories inside the larger one.

The section headers are lines from the song “Why Do You Linger?” Like the sections themselves, they are not in linear order, but you can put them together to find the outline of the song, which is itself one of those tiny nested stories.

Fiddleback Ferns

I don’t write much science fiction, and I don’t write satire at all, but this story turned out to be both. I love some of the turns of phrase in it, and I like the fact that it gets in, gets the job done, and gets the hell out of Dodge.

Three Letters From the Queen of Elfland

Another Elise necklace: this one turned into my first published and most successful story. It is my most reprinted story, and it won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Short Fiction in 2003.

Night Train: Heading West

Believe me, no one is more surprised than I am that I wrote this poem. But the twined images—reincarnation and Solitaire—didn’t have a story around them, which pretty much means you’re stuck with a poem, and I did the best I could.

The conversation on the train really happened, but it was about UFOs, not past lives.

The Séance at Chisholm End

I write a lot of old-fashioned horror, because I love it. This story is old-fashioned horror, with the séance and its off-stage aftermath; it’s also, very quietly, alternate history.

And from a different angle, it’s as close as I’m ever likely to get to writing like Georgette Heyer. Which is to say, not very close at all.

No Man’s Land

I get many of my stories from my dreams, which tend to be very vivid and also very narrative. This is one of those stories, although it took a lot of reworking and polishing to get it into the shape of a story. It originally started out in a sort of stock fantasy setting, with swords and kings and suchlike, and had to be rewritten from the ground up because all the fantasy trappings kept getting in the way of what the story was
about
. So it ended up as one of my very rare science fiction stories. Really, I’d call it science fiction magical realism, which surely puts it in a subgenre of its own.

National Geographic on Assignment:
Mermaids of the Old West

Mermaids of the Old West
is one of Elise’s necklaces. I’d been reading a lot of
National Geographic magazine
s (where by “reading,” I mostly mean “looking at the pictures”). You wouldn’t think the two would go together, and yet, they do.

A Night in Electric Squidland
&
Impostors

. . . I don’t even know how to begin to explain Mick and Jamie.

There are three stories about them: these two, and a third, “Blue Lace Agate,” which is, as of this writing, in press with
Fantasy Magazine.
I also have a bunch of other ideas about Mick and Jamie that are just waiting for me to get around to them.