Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 (13 page)

Catchie considers. Aggie, Caff, Kery—all made by the ‘mam.

"Names, ‘mam? Where's their force?"

"And what have I always instructed? What's always said about names?"

"They cast."

"There's so. They cast, they strap. The proper and fit name will retrieve any from the world's slush. Now consider with the three sisters and me."

Catchie speaks slowly, conceiving the force of names for the first time. “If names cast, they can make whole. If they make whole, they can bring all sisters together. Can make anything whole."

"Said well, girl. I want to be whole. I'm ill with this quarter world and folk nagging me for names for every bastard thing they step on. Now serve your purpose and gather the fire vessel and I'll hold the water jar and we'll catch the wilful sister."

So ordered, Catchie's released from Spitmam's grip and takes the vessel from the floor by the strap. Spitmam nabs the collie, fixes it for a low light, and brings the water jar, dogging Catchie out the door and into the storm's work.

Dust's spiking the air. The storm regards them from above.

"Hold the collie and wait by.” Spitmam purrs, “Ah, there's she."

Now Catchie can distinguish, a grand face puffing out of the clouds, the cast of Spitmam. Like a woman surfacing from the stars with the streamers of another world caught in her hair.

"Oh, ‘mam,” Catchie moans. “There's too rash. How will you snag her?"

Spitmam smiles. “Sister wants the names. Nothing more needed than just open my mouth and tempt her in. For I'll gobble you, storm!"

With a last cry of
Sister!
Spitmam spreads her mouth to the sky, letting birds and wind and her sister consider the pure radiance of the names, and the wind Spitmam curls herself into a ready bolt.

There's a quick moment and it dares Catchie. “'Mam?"

Spitmam turns to Catchie, gaping.

"'
Mam?
"

She tilts towards the girl, anxious to face again her sister, but when Spitmam bends down, and down again, Catchie's hand pips out and rams her mouth. Spitmam snarls, but Catchie wrenches down the jaw to clear, the moment's all she needs, and her fingers snatch the gem.

Spitmam coughs out Catchie's hand and a curse—"
Break you, girl, fuck you to powder
!"—but Catchie's away, fingers lashed to the gem in one and the other hand to the collie. She's between the canted cottages, frogging Cullin's dyke and over the hellafield, leaping stone to stone, while behind, a wild Spitmam chases with jar and vessel rolled under her arms and following all, a wilder sister spouting crows and coiling gale like a whip.

Breathless, finally by the edge of the fishie, Catchie shouts. “Upstander! Come save the beastie!"

"Catchie?” Hammle peeps out from a tented cocoon in the trench. “Your senses bashed by the storm?"

Catchie holds out her prize hand. “Got the names, upstander! For casting the fishie!"

Hammle unsnarls from the tent tethers and climbs through. “Names? Only Spitmam has."

"Stolen away!” Spitmam behind them, raged. “Now return or I'll make your bones for shit."

"So, Spitmam,” Hammle says quiet.

"Hammle, this is clear of you."

"Sisters too, I regard."

Catchie sidles to the upstander's side, away from her granny's threats. “Upstander, you know the sisters?"

"Know them well,” Hammle tells Catchie, considering Spitmam queerly. “For me and Spitmam are from ago. You not hear? I was Spitmam's first. I was her first Catchie."

"But you fled me for the beasties and your pend, Hammle. After my making and my tending and my learning."

"Beasties need keeping, Spitmam."

"There's not important. Only names fill."

"Witch!” Hammle growls. “Names are what split the world. Folk cutting the world up for names, and cutting up the cuts for more names, and cutting and cutting til there's no mix, no mystery, only the elements and the hunger for names."

"No world without names speaking first for them—you know and you see everyday with your nameless beasties falling to rubbish."

"Names summon the world only to cut it up again."

"And what else holds the world?"

"The mystery of it, Spitmam."

"And never name the world? Huddle in your hole then, and leave out my girl."

With arms still around the jar and vessel, and the jar banging with the water sister's fury and the fire vessel quaking with expectation, Spitmam reaches for Catchie. Catchie steps back, but the step's ditch and she falls onto a net of tethers, and is about to scream when the wind sister's across them.

Greeted, sister
—booms the voice of the cloud face above them—
So kind to arrange this union
—and one twister like a long finger grazes over them. Spitmam hollers, brushed over, dropping the jar to the hella. The glass clicks, not cracks, but the water sister pesters it with teeth. And the jar explodes.

Sister!
—the water sister cries in a drowned voice, rising from the jar's pool in a claw that rakes Spitmam's face.
So much rock, so much wind—why not so much water?
and saying, she has a special shriek that summons the underground streams, the bog, the sea. There's a still moment, tense like a drop before dropping, before the ground rumbles and geysers shred the hellafield. Hellas flip up, water shoots up in dozens of jets.

Sweet sister
—the wind sister caws in the chorus of birds—
So much water sure, but my storm sucks your seas dry.
So twisters noose the water jets, grapple like snakes, and in a coil that unwinds across the land, the grandest ever whirl of water and wind and loose rock takes shape.

When the elements are so bare, Catchie knows there's the end of things, but she's firmed to her purpose. The wind sprays her with mud, so she's slow out of the tethers. Once free, Catchie lets the collie sag in her hand, flame sighing against its iron gate. What else? she thinks, but it's easy, and before the thought's words, she throws the collie, harder than the wind against the side of the beastie, and cries out.

"You fishie!"

A moment, there's only a dingy flame, a hot smudge. Then a smoulder of grass on the back of the beastie, a worm of smoke. Quick, the fire rises. The rushes glow bright, sparking out seeds, flaring branches like saplings, throwing out brands like vines, and the hillside of the fishie sheets with a flame jungle. Sizzle and flick, the tethers snap and the fishie twists its back, and howls.

"Away!” the upstander cries, lifting Catchie with him, but there's only there, between the burning beastie and the sisters’ whirlpool. Out of the calamity, Catchie regards the cast of the fishie, but there's two casts: the stone fishie and another flowing into it, a fishie of fire, stripping all the dross from its sister's body.

"There's two fishies!” she yells, shucking the upstander's hand from her shoulder, but there's only one fishie, as it flaps in the hole, a burning rock. A roar above her makes Catchie turn, and there in the mad brew of storm, there's another fishie, cast by wind and beating its grand tail.

"There's third fishie!” she cries, when the beastie leaps from the cloud, unknotting from the stormy Spitmam's hair, and dives towards them. The wind fishie falls for its sisters, a loud whoosh that drives Hammle, Spitmam and Catchie backwards with smoky draughts.

Where's last fishie? Catchie thinks alone, but she's there, a pucker in the bog lapping her feet that throws back like a new spring and kicks itself free from the ground with a switch of tail, an arc of flowing cast that gushes across her sisters.

And with the last join, there's a break in time, and rock and water and wind and fire stop in struggle. Light curdles. Faster than the thought, a spasm passes into the elements, through Catchie, out of the elements, and across the world.

"'Mam! Upstander!” Catchie shouts, for the ground's gone, and her arms don't move in air, and the sound of her shouting's staggered into gibber. World waits. In this new gloom, the fishie, whole and proper, beats its tail and swims in a circle. World waits. There's something left. The gem reminds by biting into Catchie's hand.

The gem. Just so.

Like the collie before, Catchie throws the names towards the fishie, and the gem consumes itself in its trail, pouring out the names til a last name reaches the fishie and she swallows it. The name of
whale
, and the whale accepts, and replies with a thudding song.

World waits.

Where's else?—Catchie mouths to the whale—You have cast, you have name—and again, the whale sings to her.

So Catchie opens her mouth, gives the whale a new name. It's not a name given to her by Spitmam and all the folk that came before, it's not a name whittled from the gem she's thrown, but one that's her and only. A new making, a happy bellow, part
poor beastie
, part
grand beastie
, part
there's more
.

World rouses.

The whale takes the new name, swims a little further out, and sings a different tune back to Catchie.

World rises.

Catchie comes forward, and yelps another name, made up of her feeling to this naming and this new song of the whale's, and the whale takes this, and gives Catchie something new in its mystery to name, and Catchie laughs, for the mystery needs the name to be called out and the name must fall short of the mystery, and this is the game that makes the world all over. For Catchie and the whale call and catch across the world, naming the stars and the masses, the orphan worlds tended by Hammle and even the brittle empties where Spitmam and her sisters tear between the one name they've permit themselves, and then the whale and Catchie swim past all the same again, and then again, with new mysteries in new songs and new names for new mysteries, and there's the way of it, name and mystery, and the pulse of a grand tail.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Nick Mamatas

They always left something

for the girl in the window

A beetle pinned

to a scrap of balsam.

A coconut carved

with sweeping-winged

birds

and palms.

For your fits

whispered the sailor

(well-known that I was kept hidden

locked away)

and he retreated

back down the hall

away from my door.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Jennifer Rachel Baumer
lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband/best friend/sometime editor Rick and a rapidly expanding number of cats. She wrote “Spirits” at Clarion after news from home of a shooting at the local market. When not writing fiction Jennifer can be found procrastinating on writing nonfiction, from which she makes a tentative living.

Richard Butner
is a freelance journalist and short story writer. Hell, he might even write a novel soon. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. He loves you.

Jack Cheng
works on archaeological excavations in Turkey and Syria. He is writing a book on Assyrian music when not playing with his new son Austin.

Lena DeTar
is currently teaching English in Nara, Japan. She will be attending a Science Writing (journalism) MA program at Johns Hopkins next year. As for philosophy, she may be Buddhist. Or not. It deserves more meditation.

L. Timmel Duchamp
has published a prodigious quantity of fiction in addition to a modest number of essays. She is an editor at
Fantastic Metropolis.
Intrepid voyagers may discover and explore her work at www.ltimmel.home.mindspring.com

Jan Lars Jensen
grew up in Yarrow, B.C. and currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. His first novel,
Shiva 3000,
was published by Harcourt in North America and Macmillan in the U.K. Raincoast Books will publish a nonfiction work, tentatively titled
Nervous System
, in 2004. Interested parties may wish to consult his website: www.jensen.ca

LCRW
now calls Northampton, MA, home (previously Boston, then Brooklyn) and considers the following bookshops top vacation spots: Atomic Books, Baltimore, MD; Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, Boston, MA; Borderlands Bookshop, San Francisco, CA; Broadside Books, Northampton, MA; Clovis Press, Brooklyn, NY; Downtown News & Books, Asheville, NC; Dreamhaven, Minneapolis, MN; Flyrabbit, Allston, MA; Pandemonium, Cambridge, MA; Powell's, Portland, OR; Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA; Quimby's, Chicago, IL; John Rollins Books, Portage, MI; A Room of One's Own, Madison, WI; Schuler's, Okemos, MI; Soft Skull Shortwave, Brooklyn, NY; St. Mark's Bookshop, NY, NY; Mark V. Ziesing, Bookseller, CA; and the distributor Last Gasp.

Nick Mamatas
is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-losing short novel
Northern Gothic
(Soft Skull Press) and of short stories appearing in
Razor, Strange Horizons,
Wide Angle NY,
and
The Whirligig.
This bio is already longer than his story, so just look at his website: www.kynn.com/wwnkd.

Christoph Meyer
lives in Danville, OH. He is an enthusiast. His zine,
28 Pages Lovingly Bound with Twine,
is indeed that, and should be read.

Nancy Jane Moore
's fiction has appeared in various anthologies, some magazines, and the occasional webzine, but this is the first time her poetry has appeared anywhere besides her high school literary magazine.

David Erik Nelson
currently lives somewhere in America with his anonymous fiancee and X number of dogs. He has never been associated with the publication
Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)
(www.poormojo.org), and asks that you disregard that vile, scurrilous rag entirely.

Richard Parks
lives in Mississippi with his wife and three cats. His work has appeared in
Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales,
and numerous anthologies. His first short story collection,
The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups,
was published in 2002 by Obscura Press.

Ursula Pflug
is the author of
Green Music,
a contemporary fantasy/magic realist novel, published by Tesseract Books. She also writes short fiction, arts journalism, and for theatre.