The Taxidermist’s Other Wife

Kelly Barnhill

1.

Not one of us has ever stepped inside the Taxidermist’s house. We have no need to do so. We already know what we’ll find.

2.

The Taxidermist has a mounted Howler Monkey in his office. Its mouth is open, lips curled outward like the rim of a trumpet. Its head is cocked sweetly to one side, as though reconsidering what it was just about to say. Its knees are bent, toes pigeoned inward in the classical stance, and — though this is a violation of protocol and is generally frowned upon by most who practice the art of taxidermy — its left hand is curled, poised just above the ape’s bum, as though about to scratch.

Or, perhaps it does scratch. Really, who’s to say?

In any case, it is a useless, frivolous gesture, but so furiously ruddy with life (or the side-effects of life), that it takes the viewer aback. People have petted the Howler Monkey. Spoken to it. Loved it. They’ve checked its body for nits. They’ve found themselves unaccountably wanting to scratch themselves — and they do, when they think no one is watching.

The Taxidermist is always watching.

And later, at night, when they’ve left the office, when they’ve left the Howler behind and returned home, they toss and shiver in bed, dreaming of that lonely howl across the empty fields. And sometimes, they howl in return.

The Howler makes them forget why they came to the Taxidermist’s office in the first place. They wander away, complaints un-filed, petitions un-delivered, pieces of mind un-given.

The Taxidermist loves his Howler Monkey. His secretary, on the other hand, does not.

“Sir,” his secretary says, bringing in a file. “For the meeting.” She says the word “meeting” with a certain accusation. She lets the file hover over the desk before fanning her fingers, letting the thing hit the desk with a slap.

“Did you know”, the Taxidermist says, “that when Pliny attacked Carthage, he entered the temple of Astarte and found it filled with no less than thirty mountain gorillas? Each one was exquisitely mounted,  painstakingly preserved, and, apparently, terrifying. The poor man turned on his heel and ran from the temple, claiming it had been seized by Gorgons.” He sits at his desk, ancient books opened to different pages and stacked spine to open spine for ease of access. The secretary presses her lips into a tight, long line. She is the former librarian, first working, then simply volunteering for the former library. She disapproves of the wanton opening of books. She shudders at the open splay of tight spines, the casual rustle of unloved pages like the whisper of lifting skirts.

The Taxidermist presses his fingers to his mouth to suppress a burp, though he pretends to clear his throat. He continues. “It is, they believe, the first indication that the art of specimen preservation is not a modern passtime as previously thought. I wonder if the Carthagian priests thought to recreate the minutia of the mundane as we do now. I wonder what they thought they were preserving?”

The secretary flares her nostrils, forcing her gaze away from her employer. The Taxidermist closed the library. Everyone knows this. Everyone blames him. The secretary answers his phones and files his documents and maintains his correspondences and organizes his meetings. But she hates the Taxidermist. Hates him.

“I’m not certain your research is correct,” the secretary says. “But gorillas have nothing to do with your meeting tonight.”

“My dear Miss Sorensen,” the Taxidermist says, peering into a heavily diagrammed book, its ancient dust rising from its pages like smoke, “it has everything to do with the meeting tonight. You’ll see.”

3.

The Taxidermist is the mayor, and has been for the last fifteen years. We did not vote for him. We’ve never met anyone who has. And yet he has won, term after term. A landslide. We do not offer our congratulations nor do we bring casseroles or homemade bars to his house, nor do we come to his Christmas parties or summer barbeques (we already know what’s in that house. We know.).

This, we are sure, hurts the Taxidermist’s other wife. What wife wouldn’t be wounded by such a snub? She is a sweet, pretty thing. Young. Large eyes. Tight, smooth skin. She grew up four towns over, or so the story goes. Each day she pushes open the large, heavily carved front door and stands on the porch. She brushes a few tendrils of shellacked hair from her face with the backs of her fingers. She adjusts her crisp, white gloves.

She is perfect. Too perfect. Her symmetry jostles the eye. Her body moves without hesitancy, without the irregular rhythm of muscle and bone.

She walks from their house at the center of town, past what used to be the butcher shop and what used to be the hardware store and what used to be the Shoe Emporium and what used to be the offices of our former newspaper until she reaches her husband’s office at the Town Hall. She wears high heels, even in winter, that click coldly against the cracked sidewalk. She doesn’t trip. She doesn’t break stride. She wears a skirt that skims her young thighs and flares slightly at her bending knees. She used to smile at us when she passed, but she doesn’t anymore. We never smiled back. Instead, she keeps her lovely face porcelain-still, her mouth like a rosebud in a bowl of milk. A doll’s mouth.

We want to love her. We wish we could love her. But we can’t. We remember the Taxidermist’s first wife. We remember and remember and remember.

4.

Taxidermy is more than Art. It is more than Love. The Taxidermist has explained this to us, but we have closed our ears. We change the subject. We scan the sky for signs of rain.

Still, words have a way of leaking in. Of desiccating the will. Of freezing the mind in a single perfect moment. A state of Bliss.

“If the artisan does not love the expired subject on his table, it is true, the final product will be a cold, dead thing. A monstrosity. A hideous copy of what once was unique and alive and beautiful.”

We told ourselves we weren’t listening. Still, we found ourselves nodding. We found ourselves agreeing. It is hideous when a thing isn’t loved.

“But the love is not enough,” the Taxidermist insisted. “Desire, friends. Desire. When God leaned against the riverbank, when he pressed his fingers into the warm mud and pulled out a man, what was the motivation? Desire. God saw mud and made it Man. He made Man because he wanted Man. We see death, and desire Life. Love isn’t enough. You have to want to make it live.”

5.

There was no funeral for Margaret, the first wife.

We learned she was sick by accident. It was a secret. We whispered about it in the bar and murmured on porches, but in public we pretended we didn’t know. We learned she was dead in the “Fond Memories” section of the newspaper. That was when we had a newspaper. We tried to grieve. We wanted to drape our arms around the Taxidermist, to feel his tears wetting the shoulders of our shirts, to wrap his hand with our hands and squeeze. We left frozen hotdishes and flowers in pots and sliced ham on the porch when the Taxidermist refused to open the door.

“Here,” we shouted at the jamb. “We’ve brought food. Wine. Whiskey. We brought our presence and our ears and our love. Let us in and we’ll feed you. We’ll share a drink and share a song and make you live again. And she will live in the spaces between word and word, between breath and breath, between your tears and our tears. She will live.”

But the Taxidermist would not open the door. During the night, he gathered his gifts and threw them in the trash.

6.

We listened to the old men in Ole’s Tavern suck down shots and chasers and fuss over the meeting in the school. Or the building that will soon not be a school.

“Not much use pretending we’re still a town if the school’s gone.”

“We stopped pretending we were a town after the grain elevator closed.”

“And when the butcher shop shut its doors. Can’t call yourself a town if you can’t get a fresh hock for supper. If you don’t have a locker to put your winter’s buck.”

“Taxidermist’s got a lot of damn gall closing the school mid year. If he was any sort of a man, he’d set aside his own salary rather than pull the rug out from underneath a bunch of little kids.”

“Not much of a bunch. Just fifty. On a good day. When was the last good day?”

“We stopped pretending we were a town when the hardware store closed. And the seed store. And the gas station. And the green grocer. And the shoe shop. At least we still can pickle ourselves at Ole’s. Soon, he’ll just shove each one of us into a bunch of damn mason jars and line us up on the shelf. He’ll keep us topped up with nice, clear vodka so we can see. Folk’ll come in looking for the town and find it looking right back at ‘em, shelves and shelves of blinking eyes.” Arne says this. He’s always been a morbid fellow.

“The Taxidermist’ll like it though,” Zeke Hanson says. “He’ll like it very much.”

We agree.

7.

Night falls early in November. In those waning moments of light, the sky paints its face like a harlot (overripe rouge, stained lips, unbuttoned taffeta spreading outwards like wings), before opening itself wide to the void of space. Each jagged shard of light in the darkness is a tiny message sent from the recesses of time. “You are alone,” the stars say. “You are alone. You are still alone.”

We pull our coats tightly against the howl of the wind and start our cars.

The school is slightly outside the town, and it sits on a small rectangle cut out of Martin Hovde’s sod farm. The school yard is packed earth with a single metal swingset for the children to play on. The yard is dusty from their feet, every speck of green crushed by the insistence of play. Nothing grows. Just outside the schoolyard is the endless grass of the Hovde farm. He steamrolls it twice a year to keep it as flat as any floor and then he burns it, again and again, to give the grass a good, rich start. It is green as snakes, and softer than a lie. The children are not allowed to play on it. Indeed, if they so much as set one foot upon that green, green grass, they will be sent home with a note explaining the rules of their suspension.

Once, a year ago, the children broke free in one large mass, moving in a joy of arm and leg and muscle, feeling the gooey give of the sod under their feet. They were all suspended. They spent their day off home and in bed, vomiting bile and blood. Martin Hovde denied that the fertilizer had sickened the children. He said, most likely, it was guilt.

We park our cars next to the school but do not lock them. No one locks their doors. This is a small town. A good town. Or it was, anyway. We hold our coats closed tightly at our throats and bend our backs against the wind. The stars are cold and sharp above our heads and the wind howls across the wide, empty fields.

8.

Taxidermy must embrace imperfection. It is a weak practitioner who feels the need to extend the leg of a lamed cougar cub, or repair the jagged scar above the eye of an ancient wolf. Taxidermy, in its soul, is the celebration of life, the recreation of a single moment in a sea of moments. The taxidermist must build motivation, history, consequence, action, reaction, into one, perfect gesture.

The taxidermist’s diorama is a poem.

A song.

A short story.

“We are all just a collection of faults,” the Taxidermist told us once. “A myriad of imperfections through which shines divine Perfection. You see? It is our flaws that make us beloved by heaven. It is our scars and handicaps and lack of symmetry that proves that we are — or once were — alive. The more we attempt to force our corrupted idea of the Perfect and the Good upon what is actually and deeply perfect and good, the farther we are from the divine. Reveal the subject as the subject was, and you reveal the fingerprints of God.”

We have shut our ears to the Taxidermist. We have stopped listening to his hypocrisy.

We cannot bear to tell him that this is the very reason why we can never love his other wife.

9.

The Taxidermist’s other wife greets us while we come in. Her eyes light upon each coming person and dim when they pass. Her lips spread open into a smile. We shudder at those straight, white teeth. We turn our gaze from that flawless skin. She tilts her head to one side and blinks her large eyes.

(There! We gasp. We grab one another’s shirts and pull. We whisper in one another’s ears. Did you hear that? The whir of metal. The click of motor. She doesn’t clear her throat. She doesn’t sigh. She doesn’t lick her lips, or adjust her skirt. She doesn’t pass gas, or snort when she laughs, or cough.) We have examined her skin. We have watched her pass. We’ve looked for clues but have come away with nothing.

“The efficient preservationist leaves no trace of his hand,” the Taxidermist told us once. “It is a dim fellow who has the tools of the trade, who has centuries of experience to guide his practice, and still leaves evidence of stitching. Who still leaves a seam to mar the life that he sets out to create. Do not repeat the blunder of that poor fool in Austria. Do not let the Doctor’s mistakes be your mistakes.”

We would not expect to see scars.

We would not expect to see seams.

The Taxidermist’s other wife lays her hand upon our arms as we pass. We shiver. Even through our coats we can feel the stony cold of those fingers. Even through our scarves, we can smell the formaldehyde on her breath.

10.

The Taxidermist takes the podium. His other wife sits in a folding chair just behind. She crosses, then uncrosses, then crosses her legs again. She rests her hands, one on top of the other, on her knees. She cocks her head to one side. A studied look of wifely admiration on her face.

(We know! We know what she is. Look in her eyes. Look under her skin. We know what we’ll find.)

The Taxidermist taps his microphone three times. He smiles at the audience. The audience does not smile back.

“My friends,” the Taxidermist says.

(You are no one’s friend. You closed the library. You’re closing the school. We are pickled with memory, preserved on porches and church basements and bars. We blink through worlds of liquor and mason jars. You have frozen us in time.)

“This isn’t easy for me to say,” the Taxidermist says easily. “We are down to fifty students. That’s all. What we get from the state isn’t enough to cover the heat for the building. It doesn’t cover the health insurance for the employees. Our school, once the pride of the county, is falling apart. It is dying.”

(We are dying. We are dying and we don’t know why.)

“Now, I recognize that, with the school closed, we will be forced to bus our children all the way to Harris, and I recognize that it is a long ride for little ones, but I’m afraid it cannot be helped. Those who do not want their children going so far away can consider homeschooling. We can all come together to help make that happen. This is a community.”

(It was a community. Now it is a cold, dead thing. We are alone, we are alone, we are so alone.)

“It is true that we loved the school.”

(No. We loved Margaret.)

“And it is true that we will mourn its passing.”

(We wanted to mourn her. We wanted our grief to prove that we aren’t alone. We wanted our grief to show that we are — or were — alive.)

“But we now have an opportunity. Preservation, my friends. The dead are not gone when we preserve what is left.”

The Taxidermist’s other wife lifts her hands, preparing to clap. Her lips unfurl in a mechanical smile. Our eyes dazzle and spin in the glare of those perfect teeth. She splays her fingers out and brings her hands together.

But once her palms are a half an inch apart from one another, they stutter and halt. The lights behind her eyes flicker and dim. Her lips freeze in that lovely smile — pink lips insinuating themselves into the white mounds of her cheeks. She is porcelain. She is glass. She is petal and stone and milk. She doesn’t move. The Taxidermist doesn’t notice.

“We, right now, are sitting on holy ground. How many of us first fell in love on this very schoolyard? And here in these halls, how many of us first discovered the tools that would make us the men and women that we are today? Our lives are written on memory. We preserve the memory — in its perfection, in its state of bliss, and we preserve ourselves.”

The Taxidermist’s other wife does not move. She does not blink. She is lifeless, breathless, perfect. She is memory and history and longing.

There are stitches hidden under her collarbone.

(We know! We know what’s in there! We know what we’ll find!)

There are seams sliding along the curve of her spine.

(A gesture. A moment. Proof of life, or the memory of life.)

Margaret.

(We wanted to mourn you. We wanted to grieve. We wanted his tears on our shoulders, his hands in our hands. We wanted to sing songs and tell stories and let you live in the spaces between word and word, between breath and breath.)

“My wife,” the Taxidermist says.

(Margaret)

“Thinks I’m crazy.”

(She doesn’t think. She simply is. A memory. A state of bliss.)

“But it can work. We can preserve what we have. We can turn our loss into a single perfect moment. We can turn this school into a memory of a school. A moment in time. The fingerprints of a thousand hands, and the mingling of a thousand breaths. And it will be proof forever that we are not alone.”

(We are alone.)

“We are not alone.”

(We are alone. We are still alone.)

The Taxidermist’s other wife does not move.

(Margaret.)

She does not clap.

(Margaret.)

And we feel ourselves lifting. We feel our souls unfurling like wings. We feel the howl of the wind and the vastness of space and the tiny voices of the distant stars. We feel our stitching and our seams, the clean line of empty bones, the weight of plaster and spun glass. We taste arsenic and salt, the grease of leather, the dust of hair. We feel the beat and the longing of our broken, paper hearts. And we love the Taxidermists’s other wife.

Love her.

About the Author

Kelly Barnhill’s work has appeared in Postscripts, Weird Tales, Fantasy, The Sun, Sybil’s Garage and other publications. She also writes high-interest nonfiction books for children (the fact that she has written books about sea monsters, sewer systems, eyeless salamanders and pee, has made her very popular at children’s parties). Her first novel The Mostly True Story Of Jack, a middle grade fantasy set in rural Iowa (a lonely boy, and avenging girl, a mysterious house, two possibly murderous cats, a remarkable skateboard, and a nasty bit of magic) will be released next summer by Little, Brown. She is, by all accounts, ridiculously excited about it. She is a former schoolteacher, a former bartender, a former janitor, a former receptionist, a former park ranger, a former wildland firefighter, and a former waitress. The sum of these experiences have prepared her for nothing save freelance writing, which she has been happily doing for the past six years. She lives in Minneapolis with her brilliant husband, her three evil-genius children, and her emotionally unstable dog.

The Children of Main Street

A.C. Wise

The first thing the children of the colony learned after the ship landed was how to change genders.

They’d been born in the long dark between the stars; not one had ever set foot on Earth, on good, solid ground. They’d never known a fixed sky, just the star-shot dark tumbling past the ship’s portholes as they hurtled towards a new world.

They’d grown like weeds in the cracks of the ship, playing quiet games. Laughing and running were forbidden, making them always too loud, and too much in the way.

When the ship finally touched down, when the doors hissed open, they ran. They ran under an alien sky, under twin moons, and breathed the dome-filtered air while their parents hid behind walls and fretted about creating Earth-like homes. A new world turned under their feet, and though they didn’t understand with their conscious minds, the children sensed in their bones that things were different here. The old rules did not apply. So they changed.

The colony doctors ran tests. They drew blood, hooked the children up to electrodes, and flashed them with x-rays — all to no avail. As a last resort, the grown-ups broke down and finally asked the children. The children simply looked at each other and smiled, some with secrets tucked in their cheeks, but most with pity in their eyes.

For better or for worse, the adults realized, this was the way of the world now — twin moons, an oddly colored sun, life under a giant dome, and children who flickered and changed as quick as passing storms. Some days the cul-de-sac at the end of Main Street would be filled with nothing but little boys, some nothing but little girls, and others the genders would be split evenly with no rhyme or reason.

Tiffany Webster stood in the kitchen doorway, gathering her nerve. Her son…no, her daughter now, sat at the kitchen table wearing a pink dress, head bent and face hidden by a curtain of silky brown hair. Pink shoes that matched the pink dress swung under the table, the little girl’s heels thumping the chair railing in an irregular rhythm.

The dress and shoes had been a present from Tiffany’s husband George, no doubt. George had had a much easier time adjusting. Despite the fact he’d always wanted a son, he seemed delighted to occasionally have a daughter now, too. He called it the best of both worlds.

Tiffany edged closer, peering over her daughter’s shoulder. Dust-laden sunlight, just a shade different from the sun back home, slanted through the window and illuminated the scatter of construction paper, crayons, glitter and glue spread across the table. Michael…Michaela…was making a Mother’s Day card. A sob lodged in Tiffany’s throat.

I’m a horrible mother.

The thought was stark, cutting-sharp, but true. She’d been avoiding her son, now her daughter, for weeks. She couldn’t stand the sight of the quick-silver changeling who’d taken the place of her precious, little boy. She couldn’t be around her.

Tiffany didn’t trust herself not to grab the little girl by the shoulders, shake her until her head snapped back and forth on her slender neck, and demand to know where Michael had gone. The violence of the thought shocked her, it made her hands shake, but it wouldn’t go away.

Ever since Tiffany could remember, she’d wanted a child. She and George had talked about it on their honeymoon; he’d wanted it as much as she had. They’d spent nights lying in bed together, his stomach fitted against the curve of her spine, coming up with baby names.

It had been so hard, waiting as they went through the colony application program. They wanted that, too — a fresh new world, a place of their own. They’d been patient. Then, almost the moment they’d woken from cryo-sleep, ten years from planet-fall, they’d started trying for a baby.

Tiffany had gotten pregnant almost right away. When Michael was born, she’d been so happy. She’d been so proud, watching her son grow. Then she ship landed, and everything changed. A stranger — a girl with long, brown hair looked at her with Michael’s bright blue eyes and called her mommy.

Tiffany plastered a smile across her face, cheeks pulling so tight they hurt, and crossed the room. She touched her daughter’s silky hair, proud she could do so without flinching.

“Michaela, honey, what do you want for breakfast?”

“I’m Michael today, Mommy.” The little boy in pink turned, crayon poised mid-scribble. He had Michael’s face, Michael’s blue eyes and rounded cheeks, but he had Michaela’s long hair and wore Michaela’s clothes.

“Oh.” Tiffany’s hand flew to her mouth, covering an absence of words. Her eyes ached, hot, stinging, and dry.

Tiffany stepped back, and continued backing away, shaking her head. She’d tried, she really had, but she couldn’t handle this stranger with her son’s eyes, her son’s face.

Michael continued to watch her. Tiffany couldn’t tear her gaze away from her son, from the crayon in his hand, and the litter of paper hearts around him. Instead of hurt and confusion, Tiffany saw calm acceptance, an alien stillness she couldn’t fathom. It was as though he’d known this moment would come.

Tiffany bumped into the door, fumbling for the knob without turning around. The motion jarred loose tears, blurring Michael and Michaela into one. She slammed the door, and put both hands over her mouth again.

Standing on the porch, Tiffany listened for footsteps. She imagined Michael’s chubby hand pressed against the other side of the door, still smelling of wax from gripping the crayon, fragments of color caught under his nails. She jerked away, took a deep breath, and turned around. Squaring her shoulders, Tiffany walked down Main Street.

Children ran shrieking around the cul-de-sac, laughing. Little Bobby Mercer had blonde braids, and little Becky Simmons had torn jeans and a bloody nose from a fight with another boy. Tiffany had known these children since they’d been born, and now they were strangers to her, all of them.

Tiffany left the cul-de-sac behind. Perfect houses lined the street, set on neat squares of lawn, planted with flowers and trees. It looked like home, but it was a lie. The dome arched between her and the sky, curving around their settlement like a parent’s protective arms. Beyond the dome lay gray dust; beyond the thin veil of sunlight lay darkness and cold stars.

She knew the same vastness, the same vacuum, surrounded earth, but she could feel it here. She was a long way from home, crushingly small, terrifyingly alone. It hurt. The distance wound out from her heart, a thread of physical pain, but she couldn’t follow it back home, not ever again.

They’d left earth during Kennedy’s second term, under the threatening shadow of war, but that was a lifetime ago — several lifetimes. Every one she knew back home was long dead. Her sister’s children, maybe even their children’s children, were bones and dust. For all she knew, there was no earth anymore. The sun might be an ember by now, its light winked out of the sky, taking the blue-bright ball of the earth with it. She and the other colonists might be the last humans in existence. And even they were barely human anymore.

Pressure built, pushing against her temples, filling the space around her lungs. Tiffany’s pulse kept time with her steps, which carried her to one of the gates where the four-wheel exploration vehicles, encased in protective plastic bubbles, passed through the dome and out onto the alien terrain.

Tiffany hid, watching the guards check each vehicle through. Her pulse slowed; the pressure eased. She memorized the timing, the way the inner gate locked, unable to open until the outer door completed its cycle. When the guard waved the next car through, Tiffany darted in behind it.

The gate hissed shut, muffling the guards’ shouts, dampening the sound of fists pounding on the door. The opposite end of the gateway opened onto the killing cold and the poison air. The four-wheeler drove out onto the alien terrain, and Tiffany Webster followed calmly behind it.

Sarah Beth Dolan stood at the sink, staring through the window at her son Timmy — who was sometimes her daughter Tamara — playing in the yard. Bubbles melted, the breakfast dishes forgotten under them, while the water cooled. Sarah Beth held a dripping plate in one hand, a dishtowel limp in the other.

Timmy kicked a soccer ball against the fence, diving to save against an imagined goal as the ball bounced back. Grass stains smudged his bare knees. His hair, a brown mop, hid his eyes. Sarah Beth couldn’t remember what color those eyes were.

She remembered the doctor placing a squalling baby in her arms. Its face had been red and mashed, wisps of dark hair plastered against its still-soft skull. Its eyes were screwed up tight against the ship’s lights, its fists clenched, flailing at the unfairness of being born. It screamed.

Sarah Beth remembered thinking the baby didn’t look like her or her husband Mark; it didn’t really look like anything at all. She couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or a girl, not until the doctor told her. Now, she couldn’t remember what the doctor had said.

She knew the gap in her memory should frighten her, but Sarah Beth felt strangely calm. A sense of peace wrapped her like a warm blanket on a cold day. Maybe it was something in the light, or something in the air, slipping in despite the dome. Sarah Beth couldn’t give it a name, but things were different here.

All her life, she’d dreamed of going up among the stars. She’d followed the saga of the first colonists, the ones who’d built this place, and longed to be one of them. She’d watched, rapt, full of terror and awe as reports of the colonists’ disappearance began to filter in. But even that gave her hope. There were those who believed that the colonists hadn’t disappeared, they’d simply changed.

When she’d been accepted into the colony program, Sarah Beth had been ecstatic. Deep down, she’d wanted to do more than see alien places; she’d wanted to be alien.

She’d never told anyone, not even Mark. But ever since she was little, Sarah Beth had known there was a seed buried deep in her chest, waiting to bloom. It filled her with a wanting she couldn’t name, a restlessness that manifested as a feeling of drowning on dry land. There had to be something more.

She wanted to be like the superheroes in comic books — the books her father had always said weren’t for girls; books she’d had to sneak into her brother’s room to read when her parents weren’t looking. An alien with a destiny, who didn’t belong on earth, but who was special somehow — Sarah Beth wanted to be more than just flesh and blood and bone.

Sarah Beth set the dripping plate on the counter and walked outside. She stood on the deck, and touched her cheeks; they felt hot and flushed against her palm. She took a deep breath, in and out.

They’d come so far across the stars, to a brand new land full of promise…and they’d tried to replicate the world they’d left behind. The perfect houses and gardens replicating Earth-life cloyed; they were ghastly. Looking at them day in and day out broke Sarah Beth’s heart. This wasn’t the life she’d dreamed. She couldn’t go on like her husband, pretending to care about the things that had been important back home. Accounting, tax laws, chat around the water cooler — those things meant nothing here.

“Timmy?”

The boy looked up. He stopped the soccer ball expertly with one foot. Sarah Beth crouched, touching Timmy’s arm to assure herself of his solidity, as if he might shift before her eyes. With her other hand, she brushed the mop of hair from his eyes. They were blue-gray.

“Can you teach me to how to change?”

Mark Dolan came home to find a strange man sitting on his couch. The man jumped up as Mark entered, released like a coiled spring.

“Who…?” Mark faltered.

The ship that carried them across the stars left no room for strangers. Mark knew every person under the dome, but this man, he’d never seen before.

“Where’s Sarah?”

“Mark, it’s me.” Sarah stepped forward.

Mark stared. The man’s cheeks appeared fresh-shaved, but a hint of stubble, like a shadow underneath the skin, persisted. He wore one of Mark’s suits, the gray jacket too large on his short, compact frame — the sleeves hanging past his wrists, the pant cuffs pooling over the polished wingtip shoes Mark wore to meetings.

“Mark?” The man who claimed to be Sarah moved closer, nervously clasping his hands in front of him. Mark watched the man’s adam’s apple bob.

“Mark, it’s me.” The man touched Mark’s chest, thick, square fingers resting against Mark’s lapel. The stranger’s eyes begged for understanding; they were Sarah Beth’s eyes. “It’s okay, Mark.”

“But you’re my wife!” Mark stepped out from under the man’s touch, staring. His left arm tingled.

“I’m still your wife.” The stranger’s voice was deep and quiet.

“But you can’t…I can’t…” Mark’s ears rang; his mind reeled. The words came all at once. “How could you do this? How did you do this? With the children it was bad enough, but…my God! Didn’t you hear about Tiffany Webster? What were you thinking? We’ve been married for sixteen years!”

Sixteen years. The words lodged in Mark’s chest. It would be more if he counted the years they’d been asleep, side by side in their cryogenic pods.

He remembered waking up with Sarah Beth beside him. They’d been so shy; it was almost the way it had been when they were first dating, even though they’d been married for six years. They’d spent weeks getting to know each other again, talking about the strange dreams they’d had as they tumbled through the stars.

They’d walked the ship’s corridors holding hands, the way they’d held hands as high school sweethearts. In those weeks, she’d been a stranger to him, but she’d still been Sarah Beth, his wife, the woman he loved. And now…

“I’m sorry, Mark.” The man’s eyes held genuine regret. “I still love you. I understand if you can’t love me, and…and I think that’s okay.” The man bit his lip.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

The man touched the back of the couch, fingers flexing against the fabric, a nervous gesture that reminded Mark so much of Sarah Beth that he wanted to scream. He needed his wife back. He needed her arms around him, her voice telling him everything would be okay.

“How can I explain? Things are just…different here.” The man met Mark’s eyes, pleading once more for understanding. He looked torn, but Mark could read his expression, all too familiar, and knew which way the man who claimed to be his wife was leaning.

“No.” Mark heard the word, knew he spoke it, but it meant nothing.

The totality of the situation crashed down on him. Nothing had meaning anymore. The house squeezed claustrophobically tight around him. His chest echoed the house, crushing his heart and lungs. The very worst part was, deep down he knew the man…he knew Sarah…was right.

Everything was different here — the patterns of stars, the twin moons, the strange-colored sun. The rules had changed. He never should have come. They never should have come — not just their family, but people, human beings.

Their neighbor Tiffany had walked right out of the dome and died in the cold dark under the alien stars. That was what awaited them out here; that was the choice — death or a world gone mad.

Mark opened his mouth. The back door flew open, interrupting him, and Timmy came thundering into the room.

“Hey, Mom, hey, Dad.” Timmy addressed his parents in turn. “Can I go to Becky-Brad’s house tonight? There’s going to be a sleepover.”

“Of course,” Sarah Beth answered at the same time as Mark said, “No.”

Mark put his hand to his head. The room spun.

“Dad?”

Mark lowered his hand. His son looked at him, puzzled. Mark looked back and forth between the strange man and the strange child.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. He felt as though he hadn’t slept in years. He sighed. “Yes, of course, you can go.”

“Thanks, Dad!” Timmy darted in, kissed his father on the cheek, kissed his mother, and ran up the stairs. Mark watched his son, bewildered.

In the space between breakfast and now, Mark had somehow lost both his wife and his son. They were running ahead, towards an unknown future, going somewhere he wasn’t even sure he wanted to follow.

Three weeks later Mark said, “I’m sleeping with Anna Mancuso.”

He was amazed at the steadiness of his voice. Sarah Beth turned from the stove.

His wife looked like her old self again. Her changes were as liquid-smooth and quick as their son’s now, but Mark could barely look at her. Regardless of her appearance, she was a stranger. He’d tried to touch her, once, but the brief attempt left him physically sick. He’d come back into the bedroom long enough to gather a pillow and an extra blanket before retreating to the couch. They’d slept on separate floors of the house ever since.

“Her husband ran off with another woman, though he’s calling himself Charlene now. They’re living together like…” Mark trailed off, shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Sarah Beth, who sometimes called herself John now, remained expressionless. Her eyes, which had been the only constant through her changes, had turned strange — a blue-grey reflecting the alien sky arched above the dome. For the sheer contrast, they made Mark think of the aching blue summer days he’d experienced in Iowa as a young boy.

Back then they’d lived in a big, rambling farmhouse at the end of a road bordered by fields of wheat. Though the floorboards sagged, and the roof leaked during heavy rains, it felt like home. They’d moved so often during his childhood. Each time hurt, but somehow leaving the farmhouse felt like having his roots ripped out of the soil. He wanted something solid, some place to call home, and he’d followed Sarah Beth to the stars, thinking she was his home. She was supposed to be the one constant that would never change, but now…

Sarah Beth set the wooden spoon back into the pot of sauce, and lowered the burner. Mark had expected hysterics; he’d expected her to cry, or even hit him. Would she react like a man, or a woman? Would she try to solve their differences with words, or a knock-down, drag-out fight? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about Sarah Beth anymore.

But she did nothing. Her perfect calm was unsettling; it dropped his heart into his gut. Sarah Beth wiped her hands on a dishtowel and stood behind one of the kitchen chairs, bracing her hands its back. She regarded him steadily.

“I understand.”

What? What do you understand? Mark wanted to scream, but his tongue froze. How could she be so calm? She’d told him on the day she changed that she still loved him. She’d told him again — at least half a dozen times since — but the words meant nothing. They were like the word wife, like marriage, like boy and girl. Everything on this damned planet was different; nothing made sense anymore.

“I should go.” Mark turned. Sarah Beth, who was sometimes John, watched him. Her alien eyes exerted physical pressure on the tension strung between his shoulder blades. At any moment, he would snap.

“Call me,” Sarah Beth said. “If you ever want to come home, I mean. Tamara will miss you, but I know she’ll understand.”

Mark didn’t answer. He walked out the door and down the street to Anna Mancuso’s house. His hand shook as he rang her bell.

Anna opened the door, her eyes red as though she’d been crying. Coats hung neatly from a row of hooks beside the door, shoes lined up beneath them. Mark noticed that Anna’s husband had left his shoes beside Anna’s, as though he might come back at any moment, or as though items that mundane simply didn’t matter anymore.

Looking at Anna, Mark knew without a doubt that he didn’t love her. She was steady, she didn’t change; she was something to hold onto. He thought about Sarah Beth, about the way she’d been when they’d boarded the ship together. He kept the image in his mind as he took Anna’s face between his hands and kissed her — long and deep and searching.

Anna kissed him back, clinging as though Mark was the last thing keeping her from drowning. He wondered if she had any illusions about love, or whether she understood what they had as well as he did. He realized he didn’t care. He backed her towards the kitchen, towards the table, which still smelled of furniture wax. The whole kitchen smelled clean, as though Anna had spent hours scrubbing.

Mark shoved one of the chairs out of the way with his foot, bending Anna back over the table. He fumbled with his belt, getting his pants down around his ankles and leaving them there. Anna responded, as though by rote, going through the motions of desire. Her gaze fixed on some point beyond his left shoulder as she unbuttoned her blouse.

By the time they were done, twin moons shone soft light through the kitchen window. They lit Anna as she turned her face away, showing the threads of gray just starting to lighten her hair. Given enough time, everything changed.

Mark gathered his pants, belting them perfunctorily. He didn’t look at Anna. He looked at the strange sky, wondering if he’d ever be happy again.

It wasn’t fair, the one who had been Sarah Beth-John considered as s/he looked down the hill at the human settlement below. The dome gleamed with reflected starlight, a soap bubble, thin and frail, struggling to hold back the night. S/he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. Why did change have to be this way? Why did the most important things in the universe have to be full of pain? Why did the new have to rip the old apart before taking its place?

S/he sighed. The child who had been Willy-Jane slipped long, thin fingers into Sarah Beth-John’s hand, and s/he offered it a smile. Timmy-Tamara took hir other hand. Its blue-gray eyes caught starlight; they seemed wide enough to hold the entire sky. The faint ache in hir heart faded as Sarah Beth-John turned and guided the children away from the view of the settlement below.

S/he and the others — the ones who had been Catherine-Steve, Laura-Matt, Karen-Dave, Charlene-Charles — they’d tell the children stories of Earth-that-was with fondness in the years to come. Even if the humans didn’t believe it, even if they thought their former friends, lovers, and children mad, those that had changed still honored their past. It was a part of them, but it was a fragment of a larger whole. The universe was so much larger out here.

Maybe someday the humans would understand. Maybe they’d come up into the hills, following in the footsteps of those who had come before them. Maybe they’d wake up one morning, and they wouldn’t be afraid anymore.

Their lungs would be new, their limbs long, their eyes blue-gray and wide enough to hold the stars. They’d walk out of the dome, and breathe the alien air; they’d step barefoot over the soft sands and croon-sing to their brother-sisters, asking to come home. They would be welcomed, as Sarah Beth-John and the others had been by those who had gone before them.

On that day, Sarah Beth-John would rejoice. Until then, she’d hold them in hir heart. S/he’d love them, just as s/he loved hir brother-sisters here above the human’s dome. It didn’t matter if it took forever, or if the change never happened. S/he could be patient. S/he could wait until the end of the world.

About the Author

A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, and currently lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has previously appeared in places like Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and ChiZine. For more information, or just to drop by and say hi, visit her blog at acwise.livejournal.com.

Nothing This Fun Could be Good For You: A History of Evil Entertainment

Nancy Fulda

Imagine, if you will, a fictional society three generations hence. Fossil fuels have expired, Martian colonies are in their infancy, and instead of going to the opera, well-to-do citizens enjoy high culture by... playing networked video games?

This scenario is not as ludicrous as it seems. From Shakespeare to television, from the Viennese Waltz to Rock 'n Roll, new forms of recreation are frequently viewed with suspicion and often labeled scandalous. Yet society has a curious propensity to revere entertainment styles that were scorned just a few generations before.

Consider the Viennese Waltz: When this dance first gained popularity in Europe, critics condemned its whirling tempo and unprecedented body contact. Salomo Wolf decried it as "a main source of the weakness of the body and mind of our generation"1 , and the society pages of The Times of London called it an "obscene display" more fitting for prostitutes than for the "respectable classes of society"2 .

Yet less than a hundred years later, by the middle of the 19th Century, the Waltz was firmly established across Europe.

An unlikely reversal? Hardly. William Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces at a time when theater was considered unsavory. 16th-Century precursors to the modern novel (such as Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote) were labeled trite and childish, unworthy of serious study. And Leo Tolstoy described the ballet as a "lewd performance" in which "half-naked women make voluptuous movements"3 .

TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET?

This mysterious transformation from Evil Influence to Respected Pastime is underway in our own century. When cinematic films became prevalent in the early 1900s, the Chicago Tribune declared them to be "schools of crime where murders, robberies and holdups are illustrated."4

Or consider comic books, which in the 1940's were widely blamed for poor grades, juvenile delinquency, and drug use. Book reviewer Sterling North described comic books as "Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed — a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems — the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant... Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic' magazine."5

Yet barely half a century later, in the early 90's, Superman and other comic book heroes had become cultural icons, courses in Comics Studies were offered by a number of universities, and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus had won a Pulitzer Prize.

Faced with such dramatic turnabouts, it is tempting to assume that society is trending towards increasingly violent and promiscuous pastimes. Yet history refutes this.

Compare the fears expressed about cinema and comic books in the early twentieth century to Philip Stubbes' condemnation of theater in 1583: "If you will learn to rebel against Princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures, to practice idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery... If you will learn to play the whore-master, the glutton, the Drunkard, or incestuous person... you need go to no other school."6

The wording may be different, but the issues under discussion have not changed. Society may even be less depraved now than it was five hundred years ago. Beheadings, hangings, and disembowelings were a popular public spectacle in the eighteenth century, and dismembered body parts were prominently displayed near Shakespeare's home at Cripplegate.7 The original text of Grimm's Fairy Tales attests that children's fascination with death and gore is not a recent development.

ACCEPTING THE UNTHINKABLE

If societal ills are not becoming quantifiably worse, then why such outrage at each new form of recreation? What is it about the new — the different, the intoxicatingly entertaining — that inspires such immediate and heated opposition?

The answer is that anything innovative — be it a fashion trend, a party game, or a political movement — will attract both critics and admirers; the more influential the phenomenon, the more shrill the dispute between opposing camps will become.

Criticism, then, becomes a tacit acknowledgement of a recreation's potential for greatness. Not every pastime which elicits public outcry will later become a bastion of culture, but few entertainment forms have gained widespread acceptance without first being considered base, offensive, or obscene.

The path to respectability hinges upon a separation of the pastime's legitimate appeal from its more concerning aspects. For example, although the close body contact of the Viennese Waltz could not be eliminated — the speed and rotation of the dance cannot be maintained without it — it has become structured rather than sensual. The gentleman's hand now rests on his partner's scapula rather than at her waist, and both partners maintain a formal posture.

Similarly, the bawdy audiences, peddlers, and pickpockets that accompanied early theater have been replaced by closed performance halls, a seated audience, and silent observation. Voluntary ratings systems for cinema, comic books, and video games limit the intensity of dramatic depictions.

Yet the fundamental concern of antitheatricalists remains unaddressed. Philip Stubbe and The Chigago Tribune feared that scenes depicted by actors would inspire viewers to unsavory acts, yet conflict, violence, and sexual innuendo are not only part of modern entertainment, but also part of classic performances like Don Giovanni and Romeo and Juliet. Why weren't these unwholesome depictions removed from dramatic entertainment as it gained respectability?

Quite simply, because it couldn't be done. Imagine a theatrical performance without a villain; without conflict; without crime, wrongdoing, or anything which might inspire the audience to do evil, and you will have imagined a performance so dull that it can no longer be called entertainment. Just as the Waltz cannot be enjoyed without close body contact, so dramatic performance is meaningless without a modicum of evil.

This left society with a critical decision. Was theater unilaterally corrupting viewers as the antitheatricalists claimed? Or were the murders, crimes, and battles performed on stage serving a worthy purpose?

Society's answer is clear. We have embraced theater, along with opera and ballet, as a treasured cultural influence. This does not, in the author's opinion, reflect a lowering of society's standards. Rather, it is the acknowledgement that something which appeared evil could, in the proper context, be wholesome. The process is akin to feeling horrified at the story of a man who sliced his wife's abdomen open with a razor... until we learn he was a doctor performing a caesarean section.

This gradual acceptance of features which once inspired concern is perhaps best illustrated by the history of theatrical ballet. In the early 1700's, Marie de Camargo shortened her skirts to a length that scandalously revealed her ankles. Marie's objective was not sensual, however, but aesthetic: she wanted the audience to see her exquisitely performed entrechats, a challenging jump in which the feet pass each other several times in the air.8

Although de Camargo's costume seemed brazen, the possibilities it opened for both the performance and the appreciation of ballet were so powerful that her innovation was quickly expanded upon. By 1844 knee-length tutus like those depicted in Edgar Degas' paintings were the standard dance attire at the Paris Opera.

A NEW BATTLEGROUND

What does any of this have to do with video games? Quite possibly, everything.

Like ballet and the Viennese Waltz, many popular video games are considered inappropriate. And like comic books and cinema, video games stand accused of causing poor grades, delinquency, and violence.

One widely-repeated concern about video games stems from Dave Grossman's 1995 book On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.  Grossman contends that violent media — particularly video games — mimic the stimulus-response training used by the military to turn conscientious human beings into killers. In Grossman's words: "We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it."9

Terrifying words, but by this point, the tune is beginning to sound familiar. It is the sound of a society that stands, not at the brink of destruction, but at the brink of extraordinary change.

When we consider the current flurry of attention surrounding video games, we must remember that they are extremely young in the entertainment timeline. Proto-games emerged in the 1950's, but gaming did not become common until Atari was founded in 1972. Video games are the new boy in town: Mysterious, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. We don't understand them, and quite frankly, they scare us.

These fears are not unfounded. Grossman based his theories on research showing a correlation between violent games and aggression. But although experts agree that violent media use is linked to aggressive behavior, they disagree dramatically on what this connection actually means.10 It may mean, as Grossman asserts, that violent play leads to aggressive actions. It may also be that aggressive children are more likely to seek out violent entertainment. Or perhaps some third factor, such as stress at home or in school, is affecting both aggression and media use. We simply don't have enough information to be sure.

Certainly the FBI's yearly crime reports seem to contradict a causative relationship. Violent crime has dropped over the past twenty years, while video game use has increased. Harvard Medical School researchers Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olsen vigorously oppose the premise that video games cause criminal behavior. Their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games, argues that gaming is a far more socially constructive pastime than previously assumed.

Over the next few decades we should expect to see video games complete the refinement process that began in the early nineties. Society is — through a noisy and often controversial discourse — discovering which aspects of gaming it is willing to accept, which it will not tolerate, and how to distinguish between the two.

EMBRACING THE FUTURE

Ironically, the aspects of video games that modern parents object to — the violence, the gore, the way children sit glued to the game console for hours — may actually be integral to their appeal. Just as the experience of theater requires villainy and the experience of ballet requires revealing attire, it may be that video games require a certain amount of conflict — even violence — to reach their full artistic potential.

One clue as to why video games are so incredibly — some might even say addictively — compelling comes from an unexpected direction: research focused on understanding and treating autism.

Matthew Belmonte, a visiting professor at the National Brain Research Centre in India, has spent the past four years at Cornell University developing a suite of video games geared towards autistic children and their families. Video games may seem an unlikely medium for scientific research, but in Belmonte's case they were ideal.

"The difficulty that we were facing," says Belmonte, "is that the moment you experimentalize something, you lose what we call ecological validity. In other words, what you're doing in the lab is not going to reflect what you're doing every day in your life, and how you're applying the cognitive and perceptual abilities that you have in real world situations. So we wanted to get closer to that real world and video games were the vehicle."11

Video games, Belmonte explains, are far more motivating and engaging than typical psychological experiments, an effect that holds true for individuals both on and off the autistic spectrum. In fact, Belmonte believes that people with autism spectrum conditions can in many senses be described as “human, but more so."

"We all are confronted with this problem of organizing the perceptual world around us. All human beings are surrounded by a welter of sensory stimuli, and we need somehow to represent those stimuli in the context of a narrative that connects them and allows us to make sense of them.

"Video games can scaffold one's interaction with the external world and deliver that external world to one in a more predictable, more algorithmic manner. They fit in the middle between the unpredictability of real social interaction and the highly predictable nature of ritualistic and repetitive behaviors."

Predictable, yet engaging. This juxtaposition, which may appear frightening if you're a parent watching your child spend his third straight hour slashing zombies, may be a key to why video games have become so incredibly popular among adults and children alike.

There's no way to tell whether video games will eclipse theater as the preferred recreation of the elite, but they do seem to be gaining grudging respect. Already, some universities include video games alongside traditional texts in English courses, and academic disputes are underway as to whether video games should be considered art. Unlikely as it sounds, games like Halo or Max Payne may one day be honored as early predecessors of a glorious aesthetic form.

So the next time you pick up a controller, remember: you are not just experiencing a game. You are taking part in history.

Footnotes

1. Salomo Jakob Wolf, Beweis dass das Walzen eine Hauptquelle der Schwäche des Körpers und des Geistes unserer Generation sey (‘Proof that Waltzing is a Main Source of the Weakness of the Body and Mind of our Generation'), Halle: Hendel, 1797.

2. The Times of London, 16th July 1816.

3. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, 1896. (Translated by Almyer Maude. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1960.)

4. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America, University of California Press, 2004.

5. David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

6. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, 1583.

7. Sarah N. Redmont, Staging Executions: The Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England, Masters Thesis, Florida State University, 2007.

8. Gayle Kassing, History of Dance: An Interactive Arts Approach, Human Kinetics, 2007.

9. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, revised edition, 2009 .

10. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olsen, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, Simon & Schuster, 2008.

11. Matthew Belmonte, interview recorded on August 28, 2010. (More information about Belmonte's work on video games can be found at http://www.autismcollaborative.org/index.html.)

About the Author

Nancy Fulda is a Phobos Award Winner and a recipient of the Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex Digest, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Jim Baen’s Universe. She administrates the online reprint repository at AnthologyBuilder.com, is a member of the Codex writers’ group, and lives in northern Germany. She attributes any success in her field to her incredibly supportive husband and the cuteness of their three children.

Crossing Borders & Exploring Possibilities:
A Conversation with Theodora Goss

Jeremy L. C. Jones

There is a crystalline quality to Theodora Goss’ poetic lines — clear, sharp, prismatic. The cumulative effect of those lines is breathtaking. She writes gorgeous poems of fountains and ravens, pomegranates and isinglass. Take, for instance, the first stanza of “The Bear’s Daughter”:

She dreams of the south. Wandering through the silent castle,
Where snow has covered the parapets, and the windows
Are covered with frost, like panes of isinglass,
She dreams of pomegranates and olive trees.

Likewise, her prose dances between Nineteenth Century realism and Magic Realism, and is almost painfully human. Goss’ technique is impeccable and her stories, therefore, seamless. The resulting fictions could easily be called, as she suggests below, “alternative realism.”

Take, for instance, this early passage from “Her Mother’s Ghosts,” which was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine in August of 2008:

Since Ilona turned seven, she has been haunted by her mother’s ghosts. Once, late at night, she saw a train conductor coming out of the bathroom.

“Do you have your visa?” he asked her.

She shook her head. She was in a pink nightgown, and her feet were bare. The floor was cold.

“Then you can’t cross the border,” he said, looking down at her sternly. “You’ll have to get out here, and speak to the station master.”

She nodded. She really needed to go to the bathroom, but she was afraid that if she tried to slip past him, he would grab her. Then she would scream, and her mother would wake up. She would have to explain that she had had a nightmare. She could never tell her mother that she had seen her ghosts.

Born in Hungary, Goss lived in various European countries as child and was raised in the United States. She lives in Boston while completing a doctorate and teaching full-time. In effect, Goss has spent her life crossing borders. Likewise, she has moved across disciplines, pursuing degrees in law and English. Currently, her work reflects the frequent movement, the blurred margins, the porous borders between the real and fantastic, and it ultimately defies categorization.

Goss is the author of the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting and editor of Interfictions (with Delia Sherman) and Voices from Fairyland. She’s been nominated for the Nebula, Mythopoeic, and World Fantasy Awards, among other awards, and has won the Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem. “Singing of Mount Abora” won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

In her words, Goss writes about reality.

“It’s just that my reality may look a little different from the consensual reality we’re all used to,” she said. “For example, I find it much easier to believe in fairies than in the stock market. But it seems to me that we all walk around this world believing that the pavement is solid under our feet, believing in what our eyes show us, in what we are told is real. At the same time, we’re on a swiftly tilting planet (as Senlin said), hurtling through space. The things we touch are not solid but mostly emptiness. Their solidity, our stability, are illusions.

“So when I write fantasy, I think I write about reality. I think I write about the fact that we don’t really know what reality is, that we create the reality we think we see. And there might be a real reality behind that consensual reality, something more magical and meaningful than we can usually imagine. With fairies. Or something that we might label fairies.”

Below, Goss and I talk about technique, beauty, and making mythologies.

How has all this moving around in your life influenced your writing? Influenced your sense of movement and place in your fiction?

I’m not sure I really know, except that it’s pretty effectively destroyed my sense that any one place or culture is realer than another, or the proper subject of fiction. If I write about a college professor in Boston, is that realer than writing about a tree-woman in the Eastern European kingdom of Sylvania?

Some writers have a particular place and time that they write about: the rural South, for example. I’ve never been like that. I’ve always felt as though the entire world, and all of history, belonged to me as a writer, that it was all material I could work with.

It’s funny, people sometimes ask whether the mythologies in my stories are real — they’ve asked that about “Singing of Mount Abora,” for instance. I tend to pick up things from different mythological systems, alter them, make them my own, exactly the way I would do with clothes. Exactly the way I would decorate a house, in which I might have Hungarian paintings, jars from Indonesia, English china (which, in fact, I do). Perhaps because I felt as though I belonged no place, I felt as though every place was mine. I do it respectfully, as far as I know. It’s not so much an appropriation as a transformation — at least so I believe. The characters — whether they’re empresses, shoe-makers, talking bears — all need to fit the story. I think because I felt as though I never had a single home, because I never entirely identified with one place, I made up places. And then, I worked to give them the feeling of reality.

Another thing someone has said of my stories — I saw this written in a blog somewhere — is that they don’t read as either fantasy or magic realism. I thought that was a curious comment to make, because if you ask me what I write, I would say “fantasy” every time. But I think I understand what that person was saying. In a way, I learned to write by reading the nineteenth-century realistic novel, which is mostly what I studied in my literature classes. I tend to use the techniques of nineteenth-century realism to write about fantastical subject matter. So maybe what I’m writing is alternative realism. Each time I moved from place to place, I encountered an alternate reality: things looked different in Hungary than they did in Belgium, and then American. So maybe it makes sense that I’m constructing these alternate realities.

Your short stories are beautifully written — sentence by sentence, word by word. Judging from the recordings of you reading your fiction, I imagine that sound is very important to you in the process. Okay, so what should a sentence do?

Thank you! That’s very nice to hear. What a sentence should do is multitask. It should do at least two things: convey character and move the plot, for instance. Once, at one of the Wiscon workshops, where I was the official professional writer, one of the other writers asked me how I achieved the density she had seen in a particular short story. I think that’s the secret: each sentence has to do more than one thing.

Other than that, each sentence should be clear. If you take a close look at my sentences, I think you’ll see that there are no actual beautiful sentences. I’m serious about this. There are no sentences that stand out as beautifully written, as the sorts of sentences you could quote as examples of “beautiful writing.” I’ll give you an example, from “Singing of Mount Abora” since I’ve already mentioned it. One of the main characters, Sabra, describes her mother:

My mother was beautiful. I should say rather that she was a beauty, for to her, beauty was not a quality but a state of being. Beauty was her art, her profession. I don’t mean that she was anything as vulgar as a model, or even an actress. No, she was simply beautiful, and so life gave her what it gives the beautiful: apartments in Italy, France, and Spain, and an airplane to travel between them, and a diamond called the Robin’s Egg, because it was a big as a robin’s egg, and as blue.

That’s a description of beauty, and yet the sentences themselves are rather matter-of-fact. The only actual beautiful image in them is the diamond called the Robin’s Egg, and yet all I’m describing are its size and color. I think it sounds beautiful because of its name: we think of robin’s eggs as beautiful, at least I do. Whatever beauty there is in the sentences comes from rhythm: “and a diamond called the Robin’s Egg, because it was as big as a robin’s egg, and as blue.” If I wrote, “and a diamond that was as big and blue as the egg of a robin, so it was called the Robin’s Egg,” that would be completely different, wouldn’t it? I like the second sentence too, but it creates a different effect. (That’s why going through the editing process with an editor or copyeditor can be difficult for me. The editor or copyeditor may not hear what I hear, may try to arrange sentences in ways that don’t sound right to me.)

So, I don’t think there are sentences of mine that you can pull out as examples of “beautiful writing,” pointing to a particularly beautiful image or metaphor. I tend not to do that. But I do think I have a particular sense of rhythm, which perhaps comes from writing poetry. By writing poetry, which is actually what I wrote and published first, long before prose fiction, I’ve learned to have a certain level of control over the rhythm of my sentences. This all sounds rather technical, but it’s become instinctive, and I do it without thinking about it. When I write, it just flows, and I actually don’t revise all that much, unless I workshop something and the other writers tell me that it doesn’t work, and I agree with them. (I don’t always agree with them.) Then, I’ll revise quite a lot, but certainly not to make something more beautiful. I’ll revise for clarity, character development, that sort of thing. In a way, I’m not particularly concerned with beauty. To the extent that happens, it’s a byproduct of the fact that, you’re right, sound really is quite important to me.

What comes first when writing a story?

What does come first for me? It really depends on the story. Sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s an arc, a way the story could take shape. Sometimes it’s a question like “What if our perceptions could shape reality, and academics realized that, and they created imaginary disciplines, like Imaginary Archaeology, which involved not just digging stuff up, but imagining what lay underground and then digging it up, and that worked? And then someone created a journal, the Journal of Imaginary Archaeology? What would be in that journal?” But it all depends. And sometimes I read something that someone else has written, and I think, what if I wrote that story? How would it come out? And then I end up writing something that’s completely different, but still has the seeds of that original story in it.

Also on a craft level, your stories are unrestricted by publishing categories. They remind me of the limitless possibilities for the short story. What should a short story do? How should it work on the reader?

I think each short story does something different. There’s nothing in particular that a short story should do, except whatever it is that particular story should do — its purpose is internal to the story. I’m not sure what you mean by working on the reader. The story should certainly interest the reader, but it should also leave the reader free. Sometimes in workshops people are told that a story should “grab” the reader or something like that. What would you do to someone who grabbed you? Probably punch them, right? Perhaps I can make one of those categorical statements that I’ll end up contradicting later — a short story should interest the reader, whereas a novel should involve the reader. There isn’t enough space in a short story to get the reader deeply emotionally involved. When a short story tries to get me emotionally involved, I almost always end up feeling manipulated. The best short stories, for me, are the ones that deal with ideas. But I learned to write short stories by reading Jorge Luis Borges, Isak Dinesen, and Angela Carter.

I don’t think there’s very much the short story can’t do, and I’ve only begun exploring the possibilities. I feel as though I do something quite different with each short story, to be honest. As though I were exploring exactly what I can do with the form. To the extent that my understanding of the form has changed, it’s because I’ve read short stories that show me what can be done. Reading Kelly Link and Ted Chiang, for example, always teaches me something.

Looking back at this response and the previous one, I’m realizing just how much I think of writing in terms of technique. What you see when you read the story isn’t the technique, it’s the story itself. But the foundation is technique. I took ballet classes for a long time, and when I watch Swan Lake, for example, one part of my mind pays attention to the story the ballet is telling, and another part is naming the steps, recognizing how they link together to form a particular movement. The same things happens when I read: I enjoy the story, but part of my mind is always thinking about how it’s put together, and how I could do something similar, or make a particular move my own. What I’m doing now? Honestly, at this point I’m just trying to write the stories people have asked me to write. I barely have time to work on stories that haven’t been, essentially, commissioned. But if a project excites me, I like the challenge of writing a story on a particular topic or to a particular theme.

Is there a landmark piece of fiction in your career?

Oh my. What do you mean by landmark? I think some of my stories are better than others. But I don’t think of any as landmarks. Honestly, I think I’m at the beginning of my writing career. I’ve written just under thirty stories, and then various essays, introduction, and reviews. I’ve barely done anything yet. Just wait. But there was a poem I read by Borges, written in his seventies when he was already blind, had already taught at Harvard, was already worshiped all over the world. In the poem, he talks about writing the work that will justify him. I thought, we’re never satisfied, are we? I’m going to be just like that. I’m going to be seventy, and someone will ask me whether I’ve written a landmark piece of fiction, and I’ll say, just wait. I may yet write something that will justify me.

Speaking of the future, what do you think the literary landscape will look like in, say, ten years? And what will your place in it be?

The literary landscape will look like this: There will be something very popular that many people are writing to make money. It will be something different than what is popular now. Some people will be reading electronically, and many people will therefore be forecasting the end of the book. Meanwhile, some other people will still stubbornly be reading books. Especially on beaches and in bathtubs, where those electronic reading machines are not such a good idea. Otherwise, the literary landscape will look pretty much the way it does now.

I rather hope my place in it will be as a professional writer. There are so many things that excite me and that I want to write: novels, short stories, articles, poems. I enjoy writing in all of these various forms, and I hope I continue to be able to. I want to be a writer, but also a participant in the larger conversation about writing and particularly fantasy writing.

All that, of course, presupposes that nothing apocalyptic happens in the next ten years. If it does, I predict that a small band of human beings, among the last of our kind, will find a battered copy of Emma and adopt it as their religious text. Priests and priestesses will take on and act out the parts of Mr. Knightly, Mr. Elton, Harriet, and of course Emma herself in religious rituals. All the world will be Highbury. In that world, if I am one of the few survivors, I would like to at least occasionally take on the role of Emma and preside over the rites prescribed by the supreme diety, Jane Austen, author of our being and creator of the universe.

What’s next for you?

All sorts of things, I hope. I’m in the process of finishing my doctoral dissertation, but once that’s done I hope to start on a novel project I’ve been discussing with a number of people. I have a bunch of short story ideas I need to work on. A poetry collection just needs to be assembled. And I want to work on at least one academic anthology, collecting stories about female monsters, from Medusa to the early twentieth century. I’m also thrilled that I was asked to editing the Folkroots column for Realms of Fantasy, following in Terri Windling’s footsteps. My first column, The Femme Fatale at the Fin-de-Siècle, comes out in the February issue.

The thing about being a writer is that you essentially make your own projects. People ask you to do things, of course, but so much of what you do, you propose yourself. And then you make it happen. I find that intensely exciting. There’s nothing better than that sort of creative work — it’s what gets me up in the morning, and keeps me awake far too late into the night!

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.