Stories for Chip (27 page)

We need to get you some proper britches, he says.

◊

She is three in one, Karya, a trinity of sisters, English walnut flanked by hazelnut and sweet chestnut,
Juglans regia
flanked by
Coryllus avellana
and
Castanea vesca
, wearing the same name in all three guises to the Greeks who harvested from all three types of nut tree, this triune aspect an echo perhaps of the two sisters who schemed viciously to thwart a Lakonian maiden's dalliance with Dionysus, and were driven mad for it, fled up the scree slopes of Mount Taygetos where they were turned to stones, while she herself, dying, was changed into a deciduous tree growing twenty-five to thirty-five meters tall, her male flowers drooping catkins which fruit in autumn with green fleshy husks around the edible nut, her summer canopies now lining the Avenue K. Leslie Steiner, shattering the sunlight as Susurrus dances her, to dapple Jaq and Puk and a gaggle of skimbooted kidsters who zip past them, whooping.

The goddess Artemis told her dad Dion of the unfortunate affair, insisted that he found a sanctuary in honor of Artemis Karyatis. So, at Karyai in Lakonia, in her sacred grove of walnut or hazelnut trees, she had priestesses known as Karyatides, this sisterhood of the nut tree immortalized: in the porch of the Erechthion on the Acropolis in Athens, in stone canephora carrying baskets on their heads full of sacred foods for the goddess's feast, each pillar of individuality carved with its own face, hair, drapery, and stance; and in similar stone caryatids down the ages, in Classical Rome, Renaissance Italy, Northern Mannerism.

As if every walnut tree were not a caryatid, and each tree unique, as here, along the whole length and on both sides of the avenue of shops and stalls the lovers stroll, these stately rows of verdant pillarings a ceremonial sorority in procession, leading back the way erastes and eromenos came, to the little dogleg of Stroedeker and the culvert off it, to the townhouse doorstep and a newly dedicated sanctuary more sacred than the grandest temple in its modest unpretension, as a home.

◊

I'm not really much for cooking, says Ana.

She slices the ends off an onion and peels, brown flakes of dry papery crunkle falling away, retaining curvature on the counter where they're tossed, the smoother layer beneath stripping bit by bit under a thumbnail and scowl, to naked pearl white. She halves the whole now, lays each half flat, and slices, this half first—each knifecut through the pale crump of strata as crisp as the air is, sharp acidic waft watering eyes—then the next. Rough methodical chopping of the fanning slices, and the odd stray chunk firing out tiddlywinks from beneath the blade, serve as a
No comment
on her self-assessment. Satisfied, she grabs a wooden spoon and takes the plateful to the pot, swipes the lot into a sizzle of olive oil, stirs.

Renart, as she stirs up the sizzle to a slowly richening aroma, as the onions shift imperceptibly gradually toward translucence, is still pottering on about his work, lumping gubbins dumped in Puk's room or the hall, sometimes the kitchen, through to the master bedsuite, rapt in his task to a
Scoobedy-doop-doop, bibbedy-bap
absent and elsewhere mode of focus. In his element, it seems.

She dumps the diced steak in, to another sizzle, stirs, stirs, and returns to the chopping board.

One sweet red pepper, one orange pepper, both cut vertically from the stem, down and around and back up, to be cracked open and have the seeds stripped and shaken and teased out with a finger. She returns to tumble the browning beef roughly with the spoon, flick a morsel over here or there.

Scoob, scoobedy-doobedy-doo-bow.
Smells nice.

Four jalapeños, two green, two red, one of each finely diced, one of each sliced. These she takes to the pot and adds. Another stir, digging under with the spoon to shovel, fold, checking for blood-red, turning.

Off in the bedsuite again, Renart folds togs and shelves them, carving some cunning system, no doubt, that will put all to hand, as she dresses of a morn, with the precision of some antique knight's squire sprung to buckle armor; but Susurrus leaves him to it, is more attentive to the cooking, relishing the shift of it in him, the tickle of air currents spiraled from the heat, the tang of oniony steam that seeps him, swirls in him through the kitchen with the open window that invited him inside.

At the cooker, Ana cracks a can of some cheap carbonated drink, full of sugar and spice, pours it gluggling and hissing into the pot—her secret ingredient.

Tum-ti-tum, ti-tum-tum-tum!

Dried chili flakes sprinkled liberally from a bag. A crush of crimsons and terracottas, seeded with dark and light ochres, it looks like it belongs in the pestle of some ancient artist, to be ground for pigment, mixed with egg yolk and applied to a church wall in tempera fresco, or daubed with a finger on the ceiling of a cave to conjure a bison in silhouette.

The tail of the turkey-cock turns to the sun!
Sander of Tempe channeling Stevens.

A carton of chopped tomatoes. A carton of kidney beans. A stir. A step back, a release of breath, halfway a stance of satisfaction at a dusted job, halfway a momentary daze, as if at a loss as to what to do now, or in suspicion of loose ends left. She looks at Renart, who stands in the kitchen doorway.

Well, she says, it just has to simmer now. Won't be done for a yonk.

◊

What do you think? Am I prepped for action?

Jaq in Puk's skivvies, pinging waistband and thumbing thighbands straight, rootling pod to set his bollocks, shift cock to the left. To the right.

I don't know which way I dress, he says. These are yanked.

He settles on upright as fated outcome anyway given stirrings to the novel cling and intimacy of frottage by proxy, or loinspace incursion, or whatever it is that's scrunching ballsack and rousing yen in his pintle. Yen that earns dints of esteem from other browsers in the togstore, an invite from a gazing ageling girl over by the hats, which he dints thanks and apologies to, sorry, he forgot to update his publics with his tweaked kinsey, which she missives a shame, them both being sixers, but sweet that he'd do that for his beau, shift his hanker to fit so snug, and no need to apologize at all. Also: his gambit to unspotlight Puk is
adorable
, if he doesn't mind her saying.

Puk having been blithe to strip in the store, since Erehwynan nonchalance was on display throughout among the browsers—no different to the sauna, really—but unprepped for the sprucer that aforesaid browsers were politely nudged to cleanse with before trialing summer-sweaty skin in whatnot. Heads turned to his yelp of startle, from the cubicle, at the blasts of high-pressure vapor from all angles, and hot air to dry, and focused particularly on nooks of flesh most like to be ripe. And of course the door opened auto the click it was done, so there Puk stood, mortified by the pricking of his pintle at the sprucer's intimacies. Whereupon Jaq, fingersnap pronto, tossed him the first britches to hand, (navy blue) nimble as could be, and dropped his own in a grand diversionary show of trialing this quaint custom of underwear, with a quick stride down the aisle a few steps, as if to optimize Puk's view of his twirl, but in fact to set a precise distance whereby they weren't a duo drawing more attention now, but rather a soloist and his singular but backgrounded audience.

Try the paisley, he says, the black on silver. It'll be like a flip of your Geister synthe, a Fourier Harmony.

It's not about transforming Puk to a native, Jaq explains as the Earther slips out of one set of britches and into the other, or painting him as a sham of such, but about finding the permutation of him for this new domain.

How about these ones? says Puk.

The same pattern in crimson and jade.

Even better, says Jaq.

◊

Herbaceous, rhizomatous, perennial,
Mentha spicata
(or
viridis
) sprouts well in most any temperate climate, from her fleshy rhizome spreading wide and down into the soil—unless some spoilsport gardener captures her invasive roots in pots or planters—stretching her variably hairless to hairy stems from thirty centimeters to a meter tall in limber abundance. She does prefer partial shade, she has made it clear to Susurrus, but will thrive in anything from mostly shade to full sun, flourishing soft leaves with serrated margins, five to nine centimeters long, one-and-a-half to three centimeters broad, the oil of spearmint chewed from her tender pale green flesh by Puk now, from a soggy leaf lipped from a straw, rich with the dextro-carvone which imbues her aromatic foliage with that scent so unmistakably fresh it was only natural to use her on the bodies of the dead, to hold the line valiantly (if vainly) against the stench of rot. Used as a treatment for hirsutism in women too, spearmint produces flowers in slender spikes, each flower pink or white, a slight two-and-a-half to three millimeters long and broad.

She has always been pretty, in sight, scent, taste. The god Hades loved his Minthê for that, and she basked in his affections, blithe until the day she boasted in her pride that she was
so
much better than his queen Persephone, at which the goddess, or her mother Demeter perhaps, transformed the nymph into the mint plant they'd then use to flavor the sacred barley-drink of their Eleusinian Mysteries, as she would one day flavor also, in far western lands of slaves, mint juleps and mojitos, which taste much better here, in a tavern on Boulevard Hovendaal, in the mouths of dark and golden-eyed lovers. Taste best in each other's mouths as they kiss in the recessed booth, Jaq fumbling with the tash on Puk's trews, unbuttoning the ballop, because when the tumblespace cast danced focus from a pairing in the New Davenport outlet to frame the snugged lushes, Puk gave an
Oh! oh!
and a grinning handflap, and pounced to mash lips, to whoops and whistles of esteem.

◊

Dawnlight through the door of the treehouse.

The fuzzled canoodling that inflamed, via gropes and giggles, opposed by half-hearted remonstrations from Jaq that he was far too soused, advanced, by resolute demonstrations from Puk that Jaq's tadger was not, through frolic to hard fuckery is now reprised as mawmsey croodling, the two well-fucked and well-fadged in the after, snuggling still socketed. Warm breath on the back of his neck, canty in Jaq's couthy embrace, Puk yawns as he drumbles how their socketing feels designed.

Getting back is a blur: a stumbling carouse along Steiner to cadge a hitch, Jaq's brainpop scheme, from one of the nightcarters offloaded now at Bradshaw Market, headed back out through the subrurals, and ever resolute to grant passage on request, ever a seat kept free in their skimcart, in memory of the flight from Phobos's shattering, a custom deep as oath: never again to have no room for one asking transport; Puk on Jaq's lap squirming drunk and hyper to grope and clumse Jaq's doublet free from a ferntickled shoulder, to show it—see?—his Phobian ancestry; midway in the weavy stagger after being dropped, along the long empty winds through forestry pitch black either side, paths carved in the gleam of asphalt below, the star-strewn and fob-scythed vault above, stumbling and tumbling in a crash into thick burdock, lying on his back, looking up at the vastation of that abyss, atramentine and asparkle; puking at the side of the road; being
Nearly there, nearly there
; taking a slug of rum from a flask magicked by Jaq from who knows where; being recovered and rannigant again enough, when at last they made it to the stead, that he flailed free of sensible steerage toward Jaq's room, and went crash splashing prancing off in a run through undergrowth like a kidster in surf, to their oak and elm, calling Jaq to him like a mutt, cracking up at it; and the two clambered up into the treehouse to flop in a tangle, frisky Puk wrappling Jaq back out of laze and into lusty yen.

So they fucked wild, Puk astride at first, then turned, to his hands and knees, to be tupped under Jaq's hunching thrusts, hips and shoulder and fists of hair yanked back, for the prick to ram jam bam and cram him, till he felt it fill him, and he'd swear to Cock, the jism spouted into and through him and out his own spurting prick.

And now, here they lie on their sides, snuggling still socketed, Puk blissed to feel Jaq inside and around him as he gazes out at dawnlight through the door of the treehouse.

Yen is, Jaq has savvied him, the hacceity of the human. Spinoza by way of Davenport by way of Sifu Renart.

L. Timmel Duchamp

The stories a discipline or genre tells about itself reflect its values and anxieties as well as determine the shapes and even limits of its future.
¹
Four particularly vexed nodes of controversy pervade the stories that writers, critics, and fans tell about science fiction, surfacing constantly in its discourse at cons, in print publications, and online, particularly in the SF blogosphere. These four points of controversy include a preoccupation with the question of SF's legitimacy; an obsession with establishing a monolithic definition of set texts for patrolling the genre's border; the search for a definitive story of SF's origins and lineage; and the failure to integrate the work of women into the genre's narratives about itself. Over the years, Samuel R. Delany has weighed in on all four; but to date, his analyses bearing on them have not been significantly heeded, perhaps because doing so would entail a radically different way of thinking and talking about the genre. In this paper I will discuss these points of controversy and then examine Delany's insights into them and his outline for a radically different story of SF that would lay these issues to eternal rest.

The first two points of controversy seem to be permanent features of the landscape for most writers, fans, and critics of SF; hardly a day goes by when one or the other of them is not hotly discussed in the SF blogosphere.
²
Although the legitimacy and definition and labeling issues are typically treated as separate, they are implicitly connected. On the one hand, anxiety about the perceived illegitimacy of science fiction vis-à-vis “mainstream literature,” (as it is called in the genre) and, often, ressentiment toward those who dismiss SF as a “ghetto” frequently manifest themselves in attempts by fans and writers to exclude and expel and keep tight control over definitions and labels. On the other hand, groups of writers within the genre often create new labels for characterizing their own and their friends' fiction, either to position it as a high(ly) literary—and thus more legitimate—exploitation of the forms of SF, or to distinguish it as radically new and more sophisticated than previous SF texts. Similarly, critics, as Delany noted in his “Exhortation to SF Scholars,” use the proposal of a system of definition “as an initializing mark of mastery that empowers all further discourse to proceed”—as critics “in every other area of literary-critical studies” rarely do. (“Exhortation” 5)