Novella: “They Say in Heaven Love Comes First” (Part Two; Final)
2.
A Life in the Day
Kim Spaulding, née Volo, slept until ten and woke up to the smell of coffee in the first-floor apartment that she shared with her friend Walter.
Novella: “They Say in Heaven Love Comes First” (Part One)
Note: This is another component of the Compulsory Figures thematic series, written over the 2019-2020 Advent-Christmas season.
1.
A Day in the Life
It was a dreary, lingering morning in late November, and Hanadera Keiko was drinking a homemade latte in her three-room apartment in Tokyo. It was raining softly and the back of her throat tickled. She was eight years into a career in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and today was a Friday when she had been told she need not come in until ten. Some sort of meeting that was above her pay grade was happening in the meantime, and almost everybody else with whom she worked was going to attend it. She had resolved to arrive at quarter of ten to make an auspicious impression on some of her juniors within the ministry. It was now half-past-eight and her office was twenty minutes from her apartment. She had almost another hour and very little to do in it other than putting on some makeup; at present she was already half-dressed, with her undergarments and blouse on but her jacket and skirt still draped over the back of the chair in which she had eaten breakfast.
Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part Three; Final)
7.
The Singular WAVES
When Pearl Harbor had happened during Mena and Kara’s senior year of high school, Rake had been in his senior year as well and Bob had been a freshman at a black college about fifty miles west of Philadelphia. Nate Jefferson, a Harlem Renaissance child till their parents’ move to Philadelphia in 1928, was almost a decade older than Bob and had already been playing for six or seven seasons with a ballteam called the Indianapolis Clowns.
“You going to join up?” somebody had asked Rake on his snowbound high school athletics field; he had been a talented runner and long-jumper at that time and he liked to stand around outside on the field even when the season was not ongoing.
“You going to join up?” somebody had asked Bob in his intro physics class; his college’s science curriculum was well-thought-of and he had a good head for numbers.
Both of them had said yes, immediately and almost impulsively; neither of them at this time—they had later found out that it was December 10 for both of them, only about an hour apart in the late morning—had wanted to join up, not as Mena had wanted to. They would not have gone to the trouble of moving to a different state or lying about their age, as Mena had had to do upon finding that the minimum age for a WAAC was twenty. For them, joining up was not exactly the path of least resistance, but it seemed like the normal and natural thing to do; for Mena it had required a deviation, a sudden swerve out from her life’s ordinary trajectory. For Rake—Rollie, then—and for Bob it had been almost ordinary, unusual only insofar as the war itself was unusual.
Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part Two)
4.
The Photo Shoot
Two days after the party at which Mena first met Rake, she awoke in her barracks to find Debbie, in the sleeping berth immediately across the central hallway from hers, already in full mess uniform writing what appeared to be an already very long letter.
“Last day as an AFC,” Debbie announced to Mena when she saw that she was awake.
“You’re getting promote?” Mena asked blearily, pulling a curtain to one side so that she could change out of her pajamas behind it.
“I’m getting promoted, yes!” Debbie said happily. “I’ll be Junior Leader Ripley as of tomorrow.”
“Today Junior Leader Ripley, tomorrow the world,” said Mena.
“I’d say something more like ‘tomorrow Junior Leader Ripley, tomorrow Leader Ripley,’ but you don’t need to be practically-minded just because I’m feeling that way right now,” said Debbie. Her pen kept scribbling softly, kindly, over the paper before her. Mena got her slip on and came out from behind the curtain. “High time they give us real ranks instead of this kindergarten-type stuff, I think,” Debbie said.
Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part One)
Note: This is another component of the Compulsory Figures thematic series, written in 2019.
1.
The Cryptomeria Grove
It was dusk, tropical dusk. Mena Gentili, in shirtsleeves with work pants rolled up to her knees, stood in shallow Hawaiian water scrubbing the side of a small watercraft with a coarse, sopping rag, five feet away from her likewise-occupied friend Kara Wharton. Mena’s brow was almost as wet with sweat as the rag was with seawater and the work of the afternoon had burned the nape of her neck pretty seriously between her collar and her pulled-up hair. In neither Mena’s case nor Kara’s was scrubbing the side of the boat what they were “supposed” to be doing; Kara was being made to do it by way of punishment for some insubordination to the Marine Corps officer who had been giving orders to their little civvy outfit yesterday, and Mena was making herself do it by way of punishment for something a great deal graver.
“Amazing that they have us scrub clean a boat that’s gonna be in much deeper water soon enough anyway,” said Mena.
“You don’t want the boat to get covered with barnacles, or whatever it is it’ll get covered with in the South Seas, if we don’t clean it now,” Kara observed.
“We’re in the South Seas right now, Kara.”
“We’re above the Equator here. You ever crossed the Equator?”
“Can’t say I have, even though I am an island girl,” said Mena. “You grow up here and you get told it’s some sort of paradise nobody who wasn’t a mental case would ever want to leave.”
“You got told that? I didn’t get told that. Anyway you have been all over the country, so I was just wondering. I’ve never crossed the Equator either; apparently when you do for the first time there’s this whole ceremony they do that ends with you being dunked in a big tank of water aboard ship.”
“Clothed, I hope.”
“Probably clothed.”
“Don’t they beat you with fire hoses and prod you with cattle prods when you do it?” Mena asked.
“I wouldn’t put it past Navy boys,” said Kara. “Anyway it’s starting to get dark. We should get back into town.”
Short Story: “Welcome to the Deva Realm”
Tasha’s credit card was worn to a raveling. The tour paid good money for a roadie like her, certainly better than acts like Oblivion Godhead and Penetration Grid had back in her death-metal days, but Hunter Berkeley’s tours tended to pass through some of the most expensive cities in the world, and bring even more money in during their sojourns. The current one crawled through the world like an old-style traveling circus or a military campaign in the Chinese Civil War. They were in Milan now. Next up was Zurich. Things in Switzerland cost so much that even Milan people struggled there.
Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Four; Final)
10.
The Third Visit
The first few days of March brought sudden, unpredicted, and unwelcome change to Rosie and those closest to her. Mattie and Ellie’s landlady, an old woman whom they called Grandma Vernon, died of extreme old age and the duplex they lived in was inherited by a thirty-year-old with a chinstrap beard who immediately forced them to move out because he wanted to turn the building into some kind of martial arts dojo. They couch-surfed for two days before getting the idea to volunteer themselves to the Barings as long-term paying guests, which would provide a steadier, but much smaller, source of hospitality income than did getting a few sets of short-term guests each month. Rosie crunched the numbers and found that they would have to charge Mattie and Ellie at least twice what she considered a reasonable rent in order to break even on this change, but Grandpa insisted on taking them up on it anyway, and talked the rest of the household into taking the financial hit. Mattie and Ellie moved in on March 4, a Lenten Sunday; they had very little in the way of luggage with them, but the martial arts guy was going to send up most of the rest of what they had left in their old place.
Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Three)
7.
The Second Visit
Three days after Christmas, on what she believed was called the Feast of the Holy Innocents or something along those lines, Rosie saw the ghost of Margaret Clooney again. It—she—was not in the garden this time, but in the hallway outside Rosie and Mags’s bedroom. Rosie was watering a potted plant that Aunt Margaret had given them as a Christmas gift; it was early afternoon but the light that came through the bare trees in the front yard was thin and pale. Rosie saw something out of the corner of her eye that she thought was a dust mote dancing in a beam; then she realized that it was a woman’s dress. She looked up and there was the ghost as before, only now bearing a candle rather than wreathed in fireflies.
Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Two)
4.
The First Visit
At a few different points in the second half of October Rosie asked her family when she could expect the winter weather to start, and she got a different answer each time she asked it. First Uncle Franklin told her that it usually started snowing around Thanksgiving, then Grandpa told her that she could expect it after Halloween. Finally Grandma and Aunt Margaret explained to her that most years what would happen was that there would be some flurries or perhaps one or two snowy nights beginning at the end of October or early in November, and then in the waning days of November the snow started in earnest and stayed on the ground in some form or fashion till spring. That being the case as it may be, it seemed that the weather reports had been saying that this year in particular New England could expect a major snowstorm in the days heading up to Halloween. Two sets of guests cancelled their reservations because of this, and the Baring household set about planning for this big Halloween storm.
Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part One)
Note: This is part of a thematic series called Compulsory Figures, and not the first part. Compulsory Figures in its entirety will see the light of day eventually.
1.
The Train
Rosie Newgarth graduated from college in 2011 and moved back home right away. Since the Great Recession had hit she had had no idea what “came next” for her, and she did not want to live with her friends. She had majored in economics and graduated on time with a good, not great, GPA; she was physically attractive and had done some sportswear modeling one summer, and between that and a series of merit scholarships she graduated with less debt than one might have expected. Home for Rosie was the 1950s pseudo-Cape where her parents Richard and Martha and her sixteen-year-old sister Madison lived on Long Island. Newgarth was an anglicization devised at Ellis Island ninety or a hundred years before, and the family still owned a velvet painting of Luciano Pavarotti that Rosie’s paternal grandmother had given her as a Christmas present when she was ten years old.
“You really should visit my folks one of these days, Rosie,” Martha Newgarth said to her one day that summer as they sat in their backyard drinking sangria—Martha in a sundress with a warm-toned, youthful pattern, Rosie in her bikini top and a pair of palazzo pants.
“In Massachusetts?” Rosie asked, and Martha nodded. “I dunno; maybe,” Rosie said. “I’d like to. But I’d also like to focus on finding a job before I go around visiting people.”
Short Story: “The Necromancer’s Sabbath”
It had been hard, almost impossible, for a long time now, for her to care overmuch about how she made her living. She did the best she could; the things she did, though furtive and usually against the Law, were to help people cope with the evils of the world, if they could. She furnished dubious potions to jilted women and talismans of protection and imprecation to farmers whose cows were being rustled; once in a great while for the bereaved or the desperate she would call up the spirits of the dead. By the dead she suspect herself unloved; they were content, usually, it seemed, to be undisturbed in that state. She was relieved when things went otherwise, when it felt as if someone was thanking her for giving a last look backward at the land of the living, under the streaming sky. Cold lips had kissed hers, once, after her husband had died; that woman’s shade had felt sorry for her, she thought. It was pretty to think so, of course; it flattered her and made her feel a sneaking kindness towards herself for reasons of which she was not fully sure. “Have some fish,” she would always say to people; “you look tired; you must be hungry; have you come a long way?” Seldom to herself. That was something easy to notice, that ungenerousness with herself, and she thought it was common enough among decent people, everyday people, unimpressive people. It seemed so nice, too nice, to think that that shade might have wanted to recompense that a little, but it was hard not to suspect so, and to hope.
Short Story: “The Maniac’s Warning”
Even with the bonfire roaring the light does not penetrate more than one or two of the curtain-layers of trees. Graduation, seven girls celebrating, no boys. Someone’s old Outback wagon, someone else’s older sibling’s F150, domestic beer, bro country blasting, whooping laughter, skinny dipping, water and trees and fire and piney sand. Near the fire, Jane and Allison; further away, Bryhanna and Astrid; in the water, Nella and Nevaeh. Libby. She is neither particularly close nor particularly far.
Short Story: “Crave Nothing Save the Song”
His Eminence had no particular reason to want or to have a sexbot; rather his friends and allies had wanted to test how far extended his willingness to accept exotic gifts. He had put her in the spare room upstairs in his English-style official residence, where he kept paintings by artists he disliked and audio equipment that was too of-this-age for him. She looked a little bit like Gérard’s Teresa. He did like Gérard, though no churchman of these times could or had real reason to collect him any longer. He thought of her as a Teri or maybe in morbid moments a Rosamund, up there with the canvasses and the frames and the refraction-sounding crystals.
Short Story: “The House of Boredom”
Markus Grady smiled and laughed and slapped backs and thanked people for a gift that he was not happy to get. His employers in the Ministry of Works, women and men whom he neither respected nor liked, had in view of his years of service seen fit through some advancement rule to favor and congratulate him with a promotion and a raise. He was twenty-two years, now, into his work procuring truesilver for the walls around Queen’s Bower. The usual career was thirty. His raise amounted, per year, to seventy ducats.
Short Story: “Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory”
Caveat lector: There’s a lot of deliberately-unsettling sex stuff in this one.
❦
“Female heterosexuality is in crisis,” you hear tell, “and has been since Genesis 3. You know this. I know this. I don’t think we need to discuss it any longer.”
When you are seven you meet your best friend, snaggletoothed and free. In your early days seventy times sevenfold you love her. When you are fourteen you realize that in certain lights, in certain kinds of clothing (kinds for which you are still, some say, too young), she looks just like Kate Beckinsale in that Van Helsing movie that your teacher put in the DVD player on the last state-mandated classless day of school. That which you thereby realize and that which you by it mean take another seven years to sink in, and by then you can flee from it, you know how to flee from it, and she is tragically not quite inclined enough to stop you.
Short Story: “The Abomination of Desolation”
Note: “Standalone” tag notwithstanding, this is part of a broader story cycle, but the other stories in it are not going to be made available for quite some time.
“What’s this we’re listening to, Bella?” Sydney Alter asked his granddaughter on the winding two-lane blacktop between two banks of wooded hills. It was a surly afternoon in early July and the summer sun above the Catskills was never quite there and never quite gone. Bella was twenty years old, taking a break from college because of the pandemic, and living with Sydney and his second wife Gloria as a safer alternative to making her way out to Colorado where her parents and sisters were hunkering down.
A Small Play: “All Woes and All Joys”
☛Dusky stage. Dusty and in flames. People come and go. They seem uncomfortable, very intensely so, yet hopeful, or at least waiting for something. The effect is like a station, or an onsen, but the heat is dry and the cleanliness being instantiated is not visible to the eye.
Short Story: “‘Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine’ by F.T. Marinetti (with a Critical Gloss by Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky, of the University of Pennsylvania)”
(Note: I think the translation of Marinetti to which I have access is still copyrighted, so this riff on motivated reading of political texts that makes use of that translation can’t and shouldn’t be. Complete Creative Commons free-for-all. See if I care.)
The foregoing will have prepared you for understanding one of our chief Futurist endeavors, namely the abolition in literature of the seemingly unquestionable fusion of the dual concepts of Woman and Beauty. The effect of this has been to reduce romanticism to a kind of heroic assault, launched by a warlike, lyrical male on a tower that is bristling with enemies, gathered about the divine Woman-Beauty.
Marinetti opposes the objectification of women. Some argue that he himself perpetuates the objectification of women throughout this essay in another form, but he makes it clear at the beginning that this is not his intent, and even though impact matters more than intent, the fact that Marinetti supported women having equal political rights to men as well means that we ought to take him at his word here. Our key to interpreting this must then be that he opposes the objectification of women and their treatment as mere sexual objects.
Short Story: “Collyridian Remains”
Antonelle Vetiver (not her real name) looked from the chopper in which she sat anticipating the first interesting thing to happen to her in years. She was dressed for the job she wanted (a movie archaeologist) rather than the job she had (a real archaeologist), in a Lara Croftish getup of cropped tank top, short shorts, heavy boots, and heavier sunglasses, with a sort of linen jacket over top of everything. The lone sands that stretched far away below her were not level; they were in a mountainous part of the world, and moreover were in it unlawfully, against the express instructions of the government of a certain country. Antonelle did not care about these things, or perhaps it would have been better and more honest to say that actually she liked them; they made her feel more like Indiana Jones and less like some functionary or stoolie. The man piloting the helicopter, Rodney Clark of Needham, Massachusetts, cared, but Antonelle was paying him a whole boatload of money for this, with an astronomical sum still to come depending on how the next part of the trip went.
Short Story: “The Jellyfish Void”
Swimming in warm water that lapped at every dorsal inch in pliant acceptance of her misbegotten backstroke, she realized after a while that jellyfish, tiny and transparent, like minuscule balloons some of which had little bits of brackish-inlet sedge or seaweed floating suspended within them, had begun to swim alongside her. Concerned for a moment, she was becalmed again when one touched her upper arm and proved unable or unwilling to sting. Unable, it must have been—the jellyfish, she remembered, a brainless and almost nerveless scrap of animated water, had no more will than it had pain, there in that warm water that soon would cover much more of the world than it did.