The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (14 page)

We had alighted from the carriage and were proceeding on foot, when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications
and fossil remains – the head of an
Ichthyosaurus
, beautiful ammonites, etc. – were exhibited in the window. We entered and found the small shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast …

He asked Mary Anning for her name and address, which she wrote in his notebook. “I am well-known throughout the whole of Europe,” she told him since he seemed not to know
this already.

In 1833, an entry in Anna Maria Pinney’s diary alludes to a deep sorrow, given in strictest confidence and too delicate to set down in its details. Whatever it was, Pinney kept the secret, noting only that, eight years earlier, Mary had hoped to see herself raised from her low situation and had seen those hopes cruelly dashed.

The world dislikes a story in which a woman is merely
accomplished, brave, and consequential. Eight years before, Letitia De la Beche had sought a legal separation from Henry alleging ill treatment, which may have simply been his long years without her in Jamaica. A year later, she’d taken up residence with her lover, Major General Wyndham. We’ve no reason beyond the faint hint of Pinney’s diary to believe that Mary wanted Henry. If she did, like
Anne Elliot, she’d had this second chance. But Henry took off for the continent to escape the scandal and Mary found a pterosaur, the first in England, instead.

In 1830, Henry had come to Mary with an offering. He’d painted a watercolor for her entitled
Duria Antiquior, A More Ancient Dorset
. This crowded Jurassic landscape, largely underwater, included every creature Mary had found, and most
of them trying to eat each other. It was an astonishing act of imagination, beautifully rendered.

But it was not the painting that was Henry’s chief gift. Mary had lost her money in a bad investment; the market for fossils had slowed, and once again her finances were precarious. Lithographic prints had been made from Henry’s painting and were being briskly sold. All the proceeds were to be Mary’s.
Henry hoped her fossil sales would be boosted as well by the advertising.

Meanwhile her old friend William Buckland persuaded the
British Association for the Advancement of Science to grant her an annuity of £25 a year. No other woman had ever been half so acknowledged. When secured, it was enough to keep her and her mother, too, even if she never made another great find.

A decade passed and
a few years more. Mary Anning continued to uncover fossils – ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs, but also the
Squaloraja polyspondyla
, the fish
Dapedius
, the shark
Hybodus
. In 1839, she wrote a letter to the
Magazine of Natural History
, part of which was published. She was correcting a claim made in one of their articles, that a recent
Hybodus
fossil was the first of its kind, a new genus,
since she had already discovered several others. She was among the earliest to recognize coprolites for what they were – petrified feces – and sold sketches made from the ink she discovered still in the ink sacs of belemnite fossils.

She narrowly escaped a drowning. She was nearly crushed by a runaway carriage. She was only a few feet away from the cliff collapse that killed Tray, her constant
companion.

Prominent scientists such as Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen continued to seek her out, to, in Owen’s words, “take a run down to make love to Mary Anning at Lyme.” Owen routinely omitted her role when discussing her finds, but in the early 1840s, Agassiz named two fish fossils for her –
Acrodus anningiae
and
Belenostomus anningiae
. He was the only person to so acknowledge her while
she was still alive to enjoy it. He even threw in
Eugnathus philpotae
, for her good friend, the collector Elizabeth Philpot. Both women had impressed him enormously.

Mary was part now of the great debates, even if only from the counter of her fossil shop. The theory of catastrophism waned in favor of uniformitarianism, geological change coming slowly and uniformly rather than in a series of catastrophes.
Biblical stories fell beneath Agassiz’s glaciers and Lyell’s recurring cycles of climate change. Darwin was about to speak.

Henry De la Beche was named director of the British Geological Survey. As such he was more interested in finding the materials to fuel the British Empire – tin, iron, and coal – than in fossils. William Buckland was named Dean of Westminster, and occupied with problems of
cholera and sewage. Lyme was hit,
first with disastrous landslips that caused whole houses to fall from the cliffs, and then with fire. Mary lost her dog and then her mother. She found a lump in one of her breasts.

These things Mary Anning and Jane Austen shared: that they made their own way in the world, and that they are remembered. Tourists come to Lyme to see the inn where Austen stayed or
the place where Mary Anning’s shop once stood, and some, like Lord Tennyson, come to see the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell. They shared this, too, that they both died young: Austen at forty-one and Mary at forty-seven.

Austen’s death came in 1817, the same year Mary’s first ichthyosaurus was named, the same year
Persuasion
was published. Austen had worked on Anne’s story until illness
prevented her and would have worked on it more had she been able. Its publication was posthumous.

Mary Anning made it into Jules Verne’s books in the guise of her monsters, but never into Austen’s. She wouldn’t have made sense there with her bits of gothic history, her lightning, her science, her creatures. She wouldn’t make sense in any story until the story changed.

Austen’s story does not.

Anne Elliot is standing in the shelter of the Cobb, her cloak pulled tightly around her. The seagulls float above on currents, glide with their wings outstretched through the air. The day is cloudless, but the sun is thin. Anne is certain that Captain Wentworth no longer loves her and yet, Austen tells us, she is coming into a second bloom. She has recently been admired by a young man in passing
who will propose to her before the story’s end. All Anne has to do to see young Mary approaching in her curious clothes with her curious rocks is turn.

But the moment is already past. Austen is tired; she is dying. Her pen moves and Anne’s mouth opens in fear and horror. Into the charming setting of Lyme Regis, just as Austen remembers it from her visits long ago, Louisa Musgrove falls.

THE OTHER GRACES

Alice Sola Kim

See: I don’t even need to wake you up anymore. Maybe you’re exhausted, your eyeballs feeling tender and painful and peeled of their membranes, but when the alarm goes off at 6:00 a.m., you jump out of bed and skitter across the chilly floor to the bathroom.

Every morning is thrilling; every morning you make an effort because this might be the day. It is April
and you are a high school senior. Very soon you will be getting the letter that tells you that you’ve gotten into an Ivy League college. Any Ivy! Who gives a shit which one?

It wasn’t easy to get in. You’re all wrong for them. Your parents didn’t put on identical polo shirts and take you on winding car tours through the Northeast to check out Princeton and Yale. No, you’re part of the special
category, species, family, genus,
thing
known as yellow trash. Yellow trash aren’t supposed to go Ivy League – you’ve fooled them all, you cheater, you fake! Get ready for your new life.

It’s all so thrilling. Too bad you thought you couldn’t write about that in your college application essays. All of the things that make you what you had decided should be called yellow trash – the shouting matches
in motel courtyards, the dirty hair, the histories of mental illness, the language barriers, the shoes, the silver fillings.

Grace, didn’t you know? They eat that shit up. But you wanted a real do-over. You didn’t want to be admitted only because they knew what you were. You like to think there’s some honor in that.

Even though you may or may not have cheated on the SAT.
Breakfast is last night’s
dinner of chilly white rice and kimchi, which keeps your stomach full and your breath nasty, good things for a city girl on the go without a car. You like to think that this blast of prickly, fermented stink-breath might someday protect you from the next weirdo at the bus stop who sidles up to you to ask, “China or Japan?” So far, the most you’ve been able to do is flick up a middle finger in
conjunction with a spat-out
“America
, asswipe!” And even that you’ve only been able to pull off once, but hey – good for you. If you were born unable to be pretty and quiet, then be loud and smelly. Own it.

When you leave the house for the day, your mother is gone and your brother is still at work. When you return, your brother will already be perched on the couch, watching TV. You pause at the
door and rest your head on the jamb. The house is so quiet, all yours for now, and you will miss it.

Catch the bus, Grace! The bus!

It takes two city buses to get to your high school. You had started there right before your parents got divorced. You could walk seven blocks to go to a nearby, similarly shitty high school, but faced with the choice of shitty-familiar and shitty-new, you chose
shitty-familiar.

Running across the street, you jam the hood of your sweatshirt over your damp head, creating tropical conditions under which your hair will steam and saran-wrap itself to your skull before giving up and drying itself. Why do people even use hair-dryers? They make you go deaf. You’re just happy to have shampoo. It was not that long ago when your family could not afford shampoo
and so used soap. People – as in, other ten-year-old girls – noticed. Perhaps being poor either turns one into an animal or a classy ascetic with eye-popping cheekbones; it made you into an animal, the fur on your head as oily and felted as a grizzly’s.

The bus comes; you lunge inside, stepping tall; the doors slide shut like folding arms. On the sweating brown seat, you pull out a book to read
– a little volume titled
Science Fiction Terror Tales –
but instead you wedge it under your thigh and close your eyes.

Last night you dreamed a familiar dream, so familiar that all you have to do is drift off in order to call it back. It’s a Grace convention up in there, populated with girls and women who look exactly like you. GraceCon always meets in a different location
– in hammocks that
don’t connect to anything you can see, a rainforest, the bottom of a swimming pool. Last night was the swimming pool. Graces were turning somersaults, sitting crosslegged on the bottom of the pool, knifing through the water. You just hung there, inhaling as if the heavy blue water was both fresh air and a nice cold drink.

Always, in the dreams, the Graces look at you and go, “대황. 대황 대황 대황.” You
ask them, “대황?” Your accent is perfect. You sound like an ingénue on one of those K-dramas that your mother is addicted to. “대황,” they answer. In the dreams, you understand every word.

On the bus, when you jerk awake, your face feels tired. It’s the same way your face always felt after elementary school slumber parties – your eyebrows were unused to being hoisted so high, and your mouth-corners
felt as though they had been pushed wide and pinned. Back then, your face didn’t move much; when anyone in your family smiled, your pops got paranoid. He thought the joke was on him; now it is; it is.

Origin story. You first figured out that you were yellow trash when you were thirteen and attended a summer music day camp two hours away, in a nice neighborhood with a good school district. We
both know that you’re not that good at the violin. But already you were thinking about college applications, and searching for cheap and easy ways to make yourself appealing to admissions officials.

Anyway, you were getting off the bus in that nice neighborhood when the handle of the violin case slipped out of your hand. You stopped to wipe your sweaty hand on your t-shirt. Someone pushed up
behind you and said, “Out of my way, chink.”

Who does that? Surely the dickhead utterer of such words must have been green-skinned, a thousand feet tall, dragging a spiked club behind it as it picked and ate its own boogers. But, no, it was just some pretty white girl, a little older than you, highponytailed and tall. She didn’t even look at you as she walked past. It was all so very racist that
you felt as though you were watching a movie of yourself. A movie about racism! Oh, but for you it was playing in Extreme Feel-O-Vision, in that you felt everything, all the hurt and shock, and that despite your best efforts to blend in,
to embody a Whiter Shade of Asian, this thing just happened to you, it had happened before, and it would happen again.

It was unfair how everyone could look
at her and not see a – let’s be blunt, Grace, a
racist asshole
– but just about anyone could look at you and see a chink.

You walked to the middle school where the music camp met, and spent a few minutes in quiet shock as everyone around you chattered and warmed up. Ann Li, who played the cello, asked you what was wrong.

“Someone called me a chink on the way over here,” you said.

Ann opened
her mouth, so you felt encouraged to spill. You said, “I didn’t even do anything to her. I hate people.”

“Wow,” she said. She gave you a look of pity. “No one’s ever called me a chink before.”

At this, you crumpled like a soda can.
Never?
Bitch please! You thought: if you believe
that
then I have a very lovely, like, pagoda or whatever to sell you. Admit it, you wondered how it could be that
you got chinked about once a month but Ann never had in her entire life. Wasn’t there enough racism to go around?

It was then you realized that there are many different kinds of Asian girls. One kind is yellow trash; that is what you are. No matter how you brush your hair and wear Neutrogena lip shimmer and speak perfect English with nary a trace of fobbiness and play a string instrument like,
say, Ann Li, you are not like her and you will never be like her, because you are yellow trash and
people can tell
. Even if it takes them a while.