Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017 Read online

For middle class Jews in Europe, Assimilation seemed like the answer. Become like the people who hate you, they believed, and they will stop hating you. Many of them believed that right up to the moment when the gas chamber door clanged shut behind them.

  “They’ve got to have alarms on this place,” I said, whispering in the cold still air. “A security system.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “How many people want to steal bodies?”

  “The alarms would be for necrophiles, not thieves.”

  “Good point.”

  “We should have parked closer,” I said. “You watch too many movies.”

  The walk felt long. I asked a lot of questions. About Cyd, and what he’d say about me. She answered minimally, monosyllabically. How could she be so dense, not to see what I needed to know: how Cyd really felt about me? He loved me, sure, but you can love someone and still hate them. I had failed him at every opportunity. He’d be right to hate me, but did he? What had he said about me, to her? What did she know? Why couldn’t she just give me the answer I needed, without needing to be asked? Why couldn’t she read my mind? What was the point of this whole madcap drunken ill–advised road–trip–slash–criminal–enterprise? I felt our grief at war, hers and mine, two monsters dueling.

  “What was the deal with you two?” I asked, insight flaring like a struck match.

  “Deal?” she asked, after a pause precisely long enough to let me know I was nearing a nerve.

  “State the nature of your relationship,” I said, in deep–voiced mock–legal, laughing so it would seem like a joke even though it was not. “Were you two ever a thing?”

  “Cyd only liked boys,” she said, “sexually and romantically. As you of all people very well know.”

  “I know what Cyd liked,” I said. “What about you ? Were you in love with him?”

  “I loved him,” she said.

  “Did you ever want more?”

  Silence. Rage swirling just below the surface. Ah, so we don’t like others talk to us how we talk to them.

  “Seems to me like being in love with your best friend, in a fundamentally unreciprocal way, would be a great way to keep from ever having to go out and find a real relationship, put yourself in a position where you might get hurt. Am I right?”

  “Who the fuck are you,” she said, “to only come when it’s too late, and spend five minutes here and think you understand anything about Cyd, or me?”

  Come on , I thought, hit me. Hit me as hard as you can. Tell me something that will break me down the middle. True or not doesn’t matter. Punish me .

  What a pair we were, me and Link, two strangers getting off on hurting each other, a feedback loop of double–masochism.

  With great difficulty, I pulled myself back. I didn’t know Link. Provoking her into lashing out at me was a selfish strategy, even if she had started it. I had no idea how it might hurt her.

  But I did know what I was talking about, because it was the inverse of my own heartbreak–avoidance strategy. Instead of a sexless one–sided marriage to Cyd, I had an oversexed parade of one–time hook–ups with strange men. Both did the job well. Both kept us safe by keeping us alone. Both locked our hearts up tight.

  “Even if it’s true,” I said, laughing, after his latest late–night long–distance attempt to explain his time–traveling Great–Gatsby genocide–pre–allegory theory, “how did Fitzgerald get this ability?”

  Cyd said “Zelda Fitzgerald was insane, yes?”

  “I know he had her institutionalized,” I said. “Lots of men considered women crazy for objecting to being treated to shit.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t mentally ill as we understand the term now. Most mental illness is a response to oppression, the brain attempting to defend itself from a reality it can’t process.” A keyboard clicked, then Cyd read to me: “Here’s from one of his letters. ‘ Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conquerer, Apollo; the stock paraphernelia of insane–asylum jokes .’ Anyway, F. Scott loved her. He did her wrong a thousand ways, but he did love her. And love opens up all kinds of doors. All kinds of things can come through. Zelda died in 1948, when the institution caught fire. I told you we’re all made of fire. I believe Zelda broke through to some higher understanding of reality, and returned to our primordial state: flame. In 1948 she knew all about the Holocaust, all about everything that would happen between her and her husband, and time means nothing to fire. Fire stands outside of time. She traveled back to the 1920’s and split his rational eggshell mind, told him everything. That’s what broke him. Knowing what would happen ruined their relationship, drove him to drink, helped him write the Great American Novel and hide the Holocaust inside it.”

  “You sound crazy,” I said, but I was close to crying, from the happiness in his voice, the passion, the youth and energy, like hearing myself, some euphoric younger version of me, like the wires got crossed and a phone call came through from fifteen–years–ago Me, like time travel was possible, like Cyd was right about everything, and I felt my mind–door creaking in its hinges, helpless to hold out any longer against the hurricane of Cyd, and at the earliest polite possible moment I made a hasty excuse and hung up, and fled to the piers, where men waited in shadow to ground me in my safe rational doomed mortal flesh.

  Darkness made the house bigger, a hulking wall of blacker black against the sky.

  Link’s movie–watching served her well: she wrapped her scarf around her fist, effortlessly smashed a window in the door, reached in, unlocked it. Opened it. Entered. No alarm. No sirens.

  I’d been hoping for them. A reason to run away. There was none.

  This is where fear gripped hold of my heart and made my guts shrink and my limbs go limp, summoned feeble protests to my lips, Hey, no, let’s not, this is stupid, let’s go back to the bonfire, but Link had already passed from the dark of the night to the deeper dark of the inside of the house.

  I followed. I always did. I couldn’t help it. I thought of them, the boys around the fire, the men down by the piers and on the hook–up apps and the high school soccer team. Good soldiers all of them.

  “Some funeral home owners live in the same building,” I said.

  “This one doesn’t. I was just here this morning. Come on.”

  I followed, free will abandoned, ego erased. What an arrogant fool I’d been—acting out of guilt, not grief. Thinking about myself, instead of Cyd. We went down hallways, down stairs. Into rooms.

  Found Cyd.

  “Oh my god,” I choked.

  He lay on a table, naked. No sheet. Wounds bare. Head shaped all wrong.

  I didn’t want to look. I looked.

  “Damn,” Link said.

  Guilt fled. Grief flooded me, now, hot raw wet spurts of it, the love of Cyd and the knowing I’d never see him again. His smile and his smell. The conversations we’d never finish. Sorrow split me open, cracked wide the barriers I’d built between myself and the truth.

  I have saved the weakest piece of my argument for last. It is weak because it is easy. It is easy because it is so broad that it teeters on the edge of platitude, of meaning nothing because it means everything.

  After Gatsby’s death—when “the holocaust” is “complete”—when Nick is trying to round up mourners, he visits Meyer Wolfsheim and is angry to learn that the old bootlegger will not be attending the funeral.

  “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” Wolfsheim says. If he is attempting to chastise Nick, he fails. Nick is too dumb to see his own epic moral failings. He cannot examine his own massive culpability in Gatsby’s death. Even many readers are blind with regard to Nick’s crimes. As we so often are with regard to our own.

  But here, of course, is the moral of the book. Its indictment of Nick—of a world that allows atrocity to happen. Of we whose weaknesses, and even our strengths, cause suffering we cannot imagine.

  Our job as readers is to find the scientific for
mulae for survival, to glean from art that life has meaning, that suffering has purpose, that we are more than our bodies, that we can learn from the past, that we as individuals and as a human family, can become Better.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “This was the stupidest fucking idea ever.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can’t take him,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “We should get the fuck out of here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Eventually, she turned to go.

  “Wait,” I said.

  From a table, I took a pair of bone shears. Immaculately clean, heavy in my hands.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We have to honor his wishes. His family won’t.”

  Eyes averted, I took one finger. Apologized to his body.

  Cyd didn’t bleed.

  We went back to where the bonfire had been. On the way we stopped for two books of matches and two extra–large to–go cups of what Link swore was Albany’s best coffee. I believed her, because it was disgusting.

  Everyone was gone. Embers glowed in the pit. Wood was still stacked beside the stones that formed its boundary. She and I arranged logs clumsily.

  “This was Cyd’s,” she said, producing a purple handkerchief. The banality of its modest paisley made my eyes well up all over again.

  I handed her his finger. She wrapped it in the handkerchief, placed it atop the logs.

  We struck our matches. Fire sparked at the pinched tips of my fingers. From her jacket pocket she produced a zine, one that contained her photos. We lit it, stuck it under the logs.

  Cyd burned. I shut my eyes. Light exploded, spilling out to fill the sky and swallow me. I let myself see. I saw: everything.

  Link and I surrendered our minds to the fire.

  “… you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body…”

  Tom Buchanan, or at any rate the butch handsome eugenicists he was based upon, is dead now. All those Jazz Age beauties are buried, or so old and shriveled and feeble that the memory of those days can only bring them pain. The body is a prison. Lust and sex seem like freedom, but they are the human prisoner embracing its cage.

  The Holocaust is not an aberration. Not some monstrous accident. It is the inevitable climax of the Western worldview, of the Industrial Revolution, of the Age of Imperialism, of a society that reduces human beings to bodies to be exploited.

  Creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of what we call civilization. The same society that can and must produce the Great American Novel can and must also produce genocide.

  Flames surged higher, sucked up time and space again. I let them whisk me away. I smelled Cyd’s cologne, and human flesh burning. I saw an insane asylum in flames. Death camps, black crematoria smoke. The sour taste of Jazz Age bootleg whiskey.

  None of this was my imagination. It was real, all of it. Human thought was fire, and Cyd’s had kindled inside my head.

  I saw my own death, Link’s. I saw centuries pass. I saw centuries past.

  I saw bodies, stacked like firewood. Every man who’d ever fucked me, all of them fuel for the crematoria. Like me. All of them weak, flawed, dying, doomed.

  “A bird,” Link said, in another universe, her hand grabbing mine. “I see a bird. Breaking free of a burning room.”

  “Cyd was right,” she said, seconds and millenia later.

  “About everything,” I said. “It’s all true.”

  “He knew,” she said. “Knew we’d find each other. He told me about your vision, and told you about mine. If we hadn’t met, hadn’t talked, what we saw wouldn’t have meant anything to us.”

  “He saw it,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  We didn’t cause Cyd’s death. If anything either of us could have done would have saved Cyd’s life, not even Cyd knew it. Not even he could see it, among all the pasts and futures he could see.

  When we lose someone, we see their death in terms of ourselves. That’s not some egregious sin. Neither one of us were monsters, as much as it might have made us feel better to imagine that we were.

  The fire burned so bright, and we stared into it so hard, that we didn’t notice the sky above the Hudson going from black to grey.

  “If Cyd was here he’d say you look like shit,” she said. “Although he’d look worse when he said it. And he’d say it knowing that.”

  “ You look like shit.”

  “Yup. We look like shit.”

  “What do you do, in the big city?” she asked. Our teeth chattered.

  “I used to be part of an arts collective,” I said, and did not add Back when I used to actually do things . “Now I manage an art gallery.”

  “Really?” she said, tilting her head to one side and then the other. “Any spot on those walls for some crime–scene–style black–and–white photography of a small city’s incestuous punk rock scene?”

  I laughed. “My gallery is stupid. The rich lady who owns it only likes big weird installations full of rusty antiques and shit. But I know some other spots.”

  Link pulled a cigarette from behind her ear, and looked intently at its tip. And then she looked up, embarrassed, and smiled before shoving it back where it had been. She didn’t need to be embarrassed, though. No one was watching. If anyone had been, they’d never have guessed she believed for a moment she could summon up fire out of nothingness. Only I could see that, and I knew she was right.

  We didn’t talk after that. We watched the fire. We watched the sky. We drank coffee. Steam rose up from our cups like clouds, like smoke, unceasingly.

  ( Editors’ Note: “Bodies Stacked Like Firewood” is read by Erika Ensign and Sam J. Miller is interviewed by Julia Rios on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 14A.)

  © 2017 by Sam J. Miller

  * * *

  Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Uncanny , Lightspeed , Asimov’s , Clarkesworld , Apex , Strange Horizons , and The Minnesota Review , among others. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) will be published by HarperCollins in 2017, followed by The Breaks from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com .

  * * *

  Monster Girls Don’t Cry

  A. Merc Rustad | 4809 words

  ( Content Note for descriptions of sexual violence. )

  Your sister has too–large hands and too many teeth. Not in a sense that her gums are crowded or her fingers are long and she might have a career as a concert pianist. No, her hands are massive, thick–boned, tipped in wickedly sharp claws that shine like pearls. And her mouth—well. Her mouth is normal–sized, but it has so many, many teeth. When she smiles, you feel queasy. All the teeth, sharp and white, fit inside her mouth around her pink tongue, but how they fit rubs wrong against your understanding of reason and reality. You don’t look at Phoebe’s mouth, even when she smiles bright and laughs. Of course you love her. You’re both monster girls.

  Your monster traits are easier to hide. Small wings, almost vestigial, and knobby horns filed down until your hair—never shiny or soft like the normal girls’ in shampoo commercials—hides the wrong–bits. You can smile without making other people tremble, and your arms don’t hang down and arch your spine with the weight of claws.

  So naturally you’re the one who goes out in the world. You’re the one who goes to school and checks out books from the library and buys groceries and makes friends outside of cyberspace. You don’t think about the way Phoebe watches when you leave in the morning, or the fact that she must always stay hidden tight in the old castle where Mama is buried.

  “Why don’t you ever talk about your family?” your boyfriend asks as you sit in the thea
ter waiting for the fifth Mutant Bride movie to begin.

  You shrug and shove popcorn in your mouth. Mumble syllables with no substance.

  He sighs, irritated. “Don’t your parents ever want to meet me?”

  Another shrug, and then you’re saved because the lights dim and advertisements for soda and popcorn roll.

  Mama never looked like a monster when you were small. You thought all mamas had mouths in their palms to better kiss bruises and scraped knees and sing lullabies in two different keys.

  She sent you and your sister to your aunt’s farm every summer to learn how to be normal girls. You excelled. Of course you did. You didn’t have claws and too many teeth in a small mouth.

  “Why don’t you file your nails, dear?” your aunt would say every night, just in case you woke looking more like Phoebe.

  “Try to think like other girls,” your uncle would tell you. “Boys and makeup and whatever it is you kids do nowadays.”

  Sometimes you’d see your sister prowling in the acres of old pine groves along the back of the fields, silent and smiling. No animals were afraid of her. Just people.

  Your boyfriend slides his hand down the front of your pants, his mouth hot and sticky on your neck. He’s clumsy, his dick hard and steering what’s left of his brain, because he doesn’t notice you’re uncomfortable or find the taste of his tongue bitter under his breath mint.

  When his other hand brushes your wing, he jerks back. “What the hell?”

  You pull your shirt up, hoping to distract him with sight of your red bra‚ fringed in lace, pushing up your breasts to give him better access.

  But he yanks your shoulder and you almost fall across his lap where you both sit on his uneven mattress.

  The wings are small, scaled, green–brown like moss against pine bark. You wish they were white and downy and soft like an angel’s. They grow so fast, you have to ask Phoebe to snip them down with her claws once a week. It always hurts, but it’s better than being a monster.

  “It’s nothing,” you tell him, and try to kiss him again. You must be normal. There’s no other option.