The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (36 page)

The world is a steamroller.

She stands alone in the seaward lee of the great wall and knows that its gates have been forever shut against her
and
all the daughters of men yet to come. This hallowed, living wall of human bone and sinew erected to protect what scrap of Paradise lies inside, not the dissolute, iniquitous world of men sprawling beyond its borders. Winged Cherubim stand guard on either side, and in their leonine forepaws they grasp flaming swords forged in unknown furnaces before the coming of the World, fiery brands that reach all the way to the sky and about which spin the hearts of newborn hurricanes. The molten eyes of the Cherubim watch her every move, and their indifferent minds know her every secret thought, these dispassionate servants of the vengeful god of her father and her mother. Neither tears nor all her words will ever wring mercy from these sentinels, for they know precisely what she is, and they know her crimes.

The starving, ragged woman who stole an apple. Starving in body and in mind, starving in spirit, if so base a thing as she can be said to possess a soul. Starving, and ragged in all ways.

And as is the way of all exiles, she cannot kill hope that her exile will one day end. Even the withering gaze of the Cherubim cannot kill that hope, and so hope is the cruelest reward.

“Take my hand,” the girl says, and Ann Darrow feels herself grown weightless and buoyed from that foul brook, hauled free of the morass of her own nightmares and regret onto a clean shore of verdant mosses and zoysiagrass, bamboo and reeds, and the girl leans down and kisses her gently on the forehead. The girl smells like sweat and nutmeg and the pungent yellow pigment dabbed across her cheeks. The girl is salvation.

“You have come
home
to us, Golden Mother,” she says, and there are tears in her eyes.

“You don’t see,” Ann whispers, the words slipping out across her tongue and teeth and lips like her own ghost’s death rattle. If the jungle air were not so still and heavy, not so turgid with the smells of living and dying, decay and birth and conception, she’s sure it would lift her as easily as it might a stray feather and carry her away. She lies very still, her head cradled in the girl’s lap, and the stream flowing past them is only water and the random detritus of any forest stream.

“The world blinds those who cannot close their eyes,” the girl tells her. “You were not always a god and have come here from some outer, dissolute world, so it may be you were never taught how to travel that path and not become lost in All-At-Once time.”

Ann Darrow digs her fingers into the soft, damp earth, driving them into the loam of the jungle floor, holding on and still expecting
this
scene to shift, to unfurl, to send her tumbling pell-mell and head over heels into some other
now
, some other
where
.

And sometime later, when she’s strong enough to stand again, and the sickening vertiginous sensation of fluidity has at last begun to ebb, the girl helps Ann to her feet, and together they follow the narrow dirt trail leading back up this long ravine to the temple. Like Ann, the girl is naked save a leather breechcloth tied about her waist. They walk together beneath the sagging boughs of trees that must have been old before Ann’s great-great grandmothers were born, and here and there is ample evidence of the civilization that ruled the island in some murky, immemorial past – glimpses of great stone idols worn away by time and rain and the humid air, disintegrating walls and archways leaning at such precarious angles Ann cannot fathom why they have not yet succumbed to gravity. Crumbling bas-reliefs depicting the loathsome gods and demons and the bizarre reptilian denizens of this place. As they draw nearer to the temple, the ruins become somewhat more intact, though even here the splayed roots of the trees are slowly forcing the masonry apart. The roots put Ann in mind of the tentacles of gargantuan octopuses or cuttlefish, and that is how she envisions the spirit of the jungles and marshes fanning out around this ridge – grey tentacles advancing inch by inch, year by year, inexorably reclaiming what has been theirs all along.

As she and the girl begin to climb the steep, crooked steps leading up from the deep ravine – stones smoothed by untold generations of footsteps – Ann stops to catch her breath and asks the brown girl how she knew where to look, how it was she found her at the stream. But the girl only stares at her, confused and uncomprehending, and then she frowns and shakes her head and says something in the native tongue. In Anne’s long years on the island, since the
Venture
deserted her and sailed away with what remained of the dead ape, she has never learned more than a few words of that language, and she has never tried to teach this girl, nor any of her people, English. The girl looks back the way they’ve come; she presses the fingers of her left hand against her breast, above her heart, then uses the same hand to motion towards Ann.

By sunset, Ann has taken her place on the rough-hewn throne carved from beds of coral limestone thrust up from the seafloor in the throes of the island’s cataclysmic genesis. As night begins to gather once again, torches are lit, and the people come bearing sweet-smelling baskets of flowers and fruit, fish and the roasted flesh of gulls and rats and crocodiles. They lay multicolored garlands and strings of pearls at her feet, a necklace of ankylosaur teeth, rodent claws, and monkey vertebrae, and she is only the Golden Mother once again. They bow and genuflect, and the tropical night rings out with joyous songs she cannot understand. The men and woman decorate their bodies with yellow paint in an effort to emulate Ann’s blonde hair, and a sort of pantomime is acted out for her benefit, as it is once every month, on the night of the new moon. She does not
need
to understand their words to grasp its meaning – the coming of the
Venture
from somewhere far away, Ann offered up as the bride of a god, her marriage and the death of Kong, and the obligatory ascent of the Golden Mother from a hellish underworld to preside in his stead. She who steals a god’s heart must herself become a god.

The end of one myth and the beginning of another, the turning of a page.
I am not lost,
Ann thinks.
I am right here, right now – here and now where, surely, I must belong,
and she watches the glowing bonfire embers rising up to meet the dark sky. She knows she will see that terrible black hill again, the hill that is not a hill and its fetid crimson river, but she knows, too, that there will always be a road back from her dreams, from that All-At-Once tapestry of possibility and penitence. In her dreams, she will be lost and wander those treacherous, deceitful paths of Might-Have-Been, and always she will wake and find herself once more.

“The Steam Dancer (1896)” ~ I strongly suspect this is the most reprinted of the recent crop of “steampunk” stories. Fortunately, I’m extremely fond of it. “The Steam Dancer (1896)” originally appeared in the June 2007 (#19) issue of my monthly e-zine,
Sirenia Digest
, and has since been reprinted in
Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy
(2008),
Steampunk Reloaded
(2010),
The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
(2012), and
Lightspeed Magazine
(2012) where it can be found as in both prose
and
audio format. Frankly, I think this story deserved a Nebula. Or a Hugo. Either one. Probably not both, though; I’m not greedy. It was written in June 2007.

“The Maltese Unicorn” ~ Here’s a story that began as a joke. Ellen Datlow had invited me to write a story for
Supernatural Noir
, an anthology of, well, supernatural noir. I’m a huge fan of noir – film and prose – but had a lot of trouble coming up with a story I wanted to write. In my blog (5/6/10), I wrote, “Last night, trying to sleep, thinking about potential stories, the title ‘The Maltese Unicorn’ popped into my head. Gagh. No, I will
not
be writing a story called ‘The Maltese Unicorn.’ I wanted to punch myself in the face just for
thinking
of it.” But then, the next day, the title lingered, and a plot involving a dildo carved from a unicorn’s horn began to take shape. I sheepishly pitched it to Ellen. She said, “Go for it!” So, I did. The homages to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are, of course, obvious. The story was written in May and June of 2010.

“One Tree Hill (The World As Cataclysm)” ~ This is the newest of the stories included in this collection, written in July 2012 for Issue #80 of
Sirenia Digest
. It has a sort of quiet wrongness – weirdness – about it that I’m almost always striving for, but rarely achieve. 

“The Collier’s Venus (1898)” ~ Few short stories have given me as much trouble as this one did. I’m pretty sure it actually did not
want
to be written. But it was, in October and November 2008, for Ellen Datlow’s
Naked City
anthology. It’s one of five stories I’ve set in the fictional frontier town of Cherry Creek, Colorado. I wanted the title to be “The Automatic Mastodon,” but the story, it had other plans.

“Galápagos” ~ Jonathan Strahan asked me to write a story for
Eclipse Three
, but I can’t recall much about this story’s genesis. I do, however, recall the title had originally been intended for a different story entirely, and that “Galápagos” was a bitch to get started. It earned a place on the Honor List for the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, for its exploration of gender, and of that I am very, very proud. 

“Tall Bodies” ~ Another story from
Sirenia Digest
#80, and like “One Tree Hill,” this one went right where I wanted it to go. The feat of capturing the inexplicable and knowing that it must
remain
inexplicable, or there was no point in writing the damned thing. I suspect this story was, at least in part, inspired by Richard A. Kirk’s beautiful, disarming endpapers to mine and Poppy Z. Brite’s 2001 collaboration,
Wrong Things
.

“As Red As Red” ~ Written in March and April of 2009, for Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas’
Haunted Legends
anthology, it was inspired in part by a couple of miserably cold, slushy days in Newport. And, too, by pretty much everything that inspired
The Red Tree
, which I’d finished the previous October. In a sense, “As Red As Red” is a sideways footnote to the novel, exploring a few bits of Rhode Island folklore that didn’t make the final cut. But it also presages some of the major themes of
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
, and so acts as a sort of bridge between those two novels. The story was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. 

“Hydraguros” ~ This story originally appeared in
Sirenia Digest
#50 (January 2010), and was then reprinted in
Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2.
It’s a prime example of the sort of science fiction story that I most enjoy writing. I’m not sure what to call it, though. Near future neo-noir? David Bowie’s
Outside
(1995) first led me to discovering this voice, this approach, which I have also employed in tales like “In View of Nothing” and “A Season of Broken Dolls.” Two years on, “Hydraguros” remains a personal favorite. 

“Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins” ~ And here’s another sort of science fiction entirely. This story was written in August 2011, for
Sirenia Digest
#69. I keep going back to Mars. This story bears the mark of my frustration with the way that almost all science fiction ignores the reality of linguistic evolution, largely, I suspect because working out and employing the results of such phenomena as unidirectional short-term drift and cyclic long-term drift is simply to much trouble. Add to that my suspicion that most readers don’t want to have to work that hard, and, unfortunately, the end product is a lopsided undertaking. Writers imagine radically new technologies and cultures, but ignore that most fundamental aspect of story: the language by which it is conveyed. With “Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins,” I only begin to superficially address the problem; I’ve done so to much greater degrees in some of my (not surprisingly) more obscure sf. Also, I should probably mention this story shares quite a bit in common with an earlier piece, “Bradbury Weather.”

“Tidal Forces” ~ Another story that first appeared in
Sirenia Digest
(#55). It was later reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s
Eclipse Four.
I wanted to write something about individual dissolution, something about a personal apocalypse, and about intimacy and the lengths that may be necessary to save the ones we love. It’s an odd tale, as mine go, in that it has, I think, a “happy ending.” Also, only after finishing “Tidal Forces” did I realize that I’d already written almost the exact story twice before: “Sanderlings” (2010) and “The Bone’s Prayer” (2009). It was an eerie realization. Regardless, I finally got it right with “Tidal Forces,” which was written in June 2010, and was chosen for Jonathan Strahan’s
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six
(Jonathan really liked this story!). 

“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” ~ I was approached by Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan to write a sword and sorcery story, which was a thing I’d never even attempted. After a bit of dithering, a sort of feminist retelling of
Beowulf
occurred to me (I very rarely consider my stories to have any sort of sociopolitical slant, so this one is also unusual in that respect). The original title was “Wormchild,” though I discarded that almost immediately. Written in June and July of 2009, it first appeared in
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery
(2010), and was later reprinted in
The Sword and Sorcery Anthology
(2012). Truthfully, this is a story that I believe deserved a lot more attention than it received. Yeah, I do say so myself. And, while I’m at it, “The Sea Troll’s Daughter” should have at least been
nominated
for a World Fantasy Award.

“Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash” ~ Anyone familiar with my work should also be familiar with one of my recurring characters, a fairy-tale obsessed artist named Albert Perrault, who first appeared in “The Road of Pins,” written way back in 2001. Though the story included his death, he subsequently played a crucial role in several stories, culminating with his pivotal part in my novel
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
(2012). The narrator concludes with a section labeled “Back Pages” (thank you, Bob Dylan), and though “Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash” was written in March and April 2011 for
Sirenia Digest
#64, and subsequently reprinted in
Subterranean Magazine
(Spring 2012), I got it in my head that this rather long piece belonged in “Back Pages.” Peter Straub quickly and firmly pointed out that it didn’t, and it was removed from the manuscript before publication. Thank you again, Peter, for stopping me from breaking the book. Also, “The Magdalene of Gévaudan” was written by Sonya Taaffe, and is the only part of “Random Notes Before a Fatal Crash” that
was
included in
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
. The title
Last Drink Bird Heard
, blame Jeff VanderMeer for that.

“The Ape’s Wife” ~ This story was written in April 2007 for
Clarkesworld Magazine,
and was voted “readers’ favorite” for that year. It was also chosen for Stephen Jones’
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Volume 19)
. As with “Emptiness Spoke Eloquent” and “From Cabinet 34, Drawn 6” before it, “The Ape’s Wife” is the result of my occasional desire to play around with how stories might have ended in some alternate universe or another.
King Kong
was one of the many things that, as a child, fostered my love of paleontology, and it was wonderful repaying that debt.

Black Helicopters
(included only with the limited edition) ~ Having just finished the only genuinely wretched novel of my career (title tactfully withheld), I needed to write something I would love, something that would allow me to sink back into the dense and slippery language that is natural to me. That and a nonlinear narrative. A nonlinear narrative that preserved the
in
explicable, instead of making it
ex
plicable. That said,
Black Helicopters
doesn’t feel finished. I suspect I could easily expand it to 50,000 words. However, this would be an unfurling of events (earlier and later events) within story that remain currently unspoken, not the elucidation of that which has been written. I can’t help believe it should be a short novel, not a novella. There’s too much of it still rattling about my head.