The Best of Electric Velocipede (19 page)
Read The Best of Electric Velocipede Online
Authors: John Klima
Ah, but by now you’ve guessed, the time of man is not entirely behind us. Why else would we whisper this tale on a fine spring morning, with winter’s frosts sweetly behind us?
Before the Apocalypse of Darkness, we did not tell each other stories. Through necessity, we have learned the skill. Next year, you will help us tell the starting-to-grows about The Great Cathedral Mother who stood in the center of the world until her children sprouted up in a ring around her and sucked up all the sunlight. Her trunk remains where she once grew, swollen with dead leaves and congealing sap and blind grubs. Someday, lightning will strike all the way through the earth, piercing her in two, and each half will grow into a tall, straight pine with a tip like a spear: one going up, one going down. And when this happens, everything we think we know about the world will change. The year after that, we will tell the great love story of The Garlanded Tree and the hive of bees who fertilized her.
But this is our most important tale. Like winter, man will return in his season. By the time he does, little rootling, you may have a great solid trunk like your mother. Or perhaps you will have grown and perished, and it will be your children standing. Or your children’s children. Whoever grows when mankind returns must remember how to drop their leaves and huddle naked in the snow.
And also, when man comes back, we wish to return to him his history so that he may hold and regard it like a spring bloom budding on a new-leafed branch, new and yet also old, a gift not unlike the one given last spring. Who knows? Maybe this will be the time mankind can learn from stories.
Part Four—Hands Yearning Upward Through the Surface of the Earth
Stretch your roots into the ground, little seedlings. Listen. Can you hear life rustling under the soil?
Who else, but the butterfly men? The Apocalypse of Darkness did not faze them. Having become accustomed to their miserable state, they could no longer be depressed by the black. They crept anxiously through their underground dwellings, their bright wings beautiful and unseen, and whispered to each other, “Do you feel that? What’s happening?”
When the Apocalypse was over, without knowing the reason for it, the butterfly men cried together for twenty-four full hours in cosmic mourning for the human race of which they were now the sole representatives. But since their quixotic moods were often given to fits of communal sorrow, they failed to understand the uniqueness of the occasion.
After that, it was as though a pall had lifted from the butterfly men. They no longer had surface cousins to envy, so they went about making their lives in the dark. Their society flourished. Their stymied flight sense muddled their sense of direction, so they built joyously in all directions, not knowing up from down or left from right. They laughed and fought and made love in the mud and created an entire caste system based on the texture of the useless flight powder that dusted their wings.
Sometimes an unusual prophet among them dreamed of the surface and spoke of things called light and sun, and usually she was buried alive—but occasionally she wasn’t, and then a new religion started and some of the butterflies marched off through the dark to pursue their cult in a different set of caves.
In the past millennium, these cults have gained power. Everyone has lost a sister or a cousin or a parent to their undeniable allure. Whispers among the fine-powdered aristocracy indicate that the cults have even gained sympathy among the inbred monarchy in their velvet-draped cocoons. Soon perhaps, every butterfly will believe.
The cults employ a diverse array of dogmas, rituals, taboos, gods and mythologies, but they all share two common traits. All tell of an eighth apocalypse when the earth will open up into a chasm so terrifying that it will unlock a new sensation—a sixth sense—to accompany hearing, smell, touch, taste and desire. And all require their devotees to spend one day of their week-long lives meditating to discern which direction is up, and then to raise their arms toward it, and start digging.
Recipe for Survival
Sandra McDonald
B
rewis is a traditional dish from Newfoundland. It’s pronounced just like one of the black-and-blue marks your father’s grip has left on your arm and when properly prepared comes out as a thick, fishy mush. Your grandfather usually cooks it but on this fine summer day you’re fixing it alone for the first time and want to make sure it comes out exactly right.
First you break apart the hard biscuits (also called hard tack) that Grandpa’s sister sends down now and then from St. John’s. Soak them overnight in a large pan of cold water. Do not use the pan that Grandpa uses to soak his calluses and corns. Do not use soft biscuits that you can buy locally. Hard biscuits are made with wheat flour and water but no leavening agent, and on sailing ships of yore, when your kind would come to slaughter my kind, they could last for entire voyages without spoiling. Try to eat one without softening it first and you’ll break all your teeth.
Next, make sure you have fresh cod on hand. Salted cod can be used as a substitute, but must be soaked overnight in a separate pan. Fresh fish is usually in supply because the year is 1952 and your father, despite his disability, unloads each day’s catch on the Boston piers. But sometimes he forgets to bring his work home with him. Sometimes he forgets to come home at all. Grandpa is much more reliable. He welds iron at the navy yard and has done the household cooking for as long as you remember. He prowls his lime-green kitchen wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and sucking on Camel cigarettes. At dinnertime he fries steaks or boils hot dogs and asks you how your day was at school. If Dad is home, he’ll be drinking a six-pack of Schlitz in the living room and cursing at the news coming out of Korea. Eight years ago he lost his right hand attacking Germans in Normandy. Sometimes you have nightmares about that hand digging its way out of the dark French soil, swimming across the Atlantic and knocking on your door in the middle of the night. If your mother were around you’d go to her when the nightmares wake you, but she’s been gone since she walked into the freezing cold ocean at Christmas in 1948.
Your father’s hand, dear one, would never make it across the ocean. If the sharks didn’t eat it, I would.
Come morning, after the man from Hood’s Dairy has left two half-gallon bottles of fresh milk on the stoop, add salt to the softened biscuits and bring to a near-boil. If you’re using salted fish, change the water and boil for twenty minutes. If you’re using fresh fish, cut into pieces and bake with salt pork for twenty minutes. (Salt pork is fat from the belly of a hog. In 1965 you will become a vegetarian and swear off all animal and fish products. In 1978 you will relax your rules enough to occasionally eat lobster, which your then-husband calls the “cockroach of the sea.” There are worse things in the deep, things that crawl and fight and cower.)
Sometimes Grandpa prepares recipes from Newfoundland that do not involve fish or fat. Of these, toutons are your favorite. Toutons are pieces of dough rolled out with flour and deep-fried in an inch of heavily salted vegetable oil. The fried dough they sell at county fairs is airier and not as satisfying, and the Dutch funnel cakes you will sample on a trip to Pennsylvania are far too sweet. Properly made toutons (thick, slightly chewy, golden brown on each side) are best served cut open with slabs of fresh butter melting inside. You will never get skinny eating toutons for breakfast.
Nor will you ever get skinny if Grandpa has his say. He makes you scrape clean every plate of food and drink three tall glasses of milk each day. You have heard Mrs. Stevens next door say, “So tragic, that girl with no woman to raise her,” and though Grandpa can’t help you sew a skirt or warn you about menstruation, he’s determined to make sure you’re at least properly nourished. Sometimes he and your father go days without speaking to one another, and sometimes when you’re supposed to be asleep you hear them fighting. At times like that you pull your pillow over your head and think of your mother in the ocean, her bones in the stomachs of whales, her hair entwined in seaweed that floats around the world.
Step four of Grandpa’s recipe: Drain the near-boiled soaked biscuits and mix with the fish. Make sure there are no bones in the fish. Although brewis is excellent on its own, you may also add bacon or onions or scrunchions, which are bits of salt pork fried up in a pan.
Once you asked Grandpa why he adds salt to everything. He said that’s just the way things were back in Pouch Cove. (Pouch is pronounced “pooch,” as in dog. Every Christmas you ask for a puppy, but the answer is always no.) Pouch Cove is a small coastal town north of St. John’s where, each spring, icebergs float by on the bay. In the March of 1914, when he was sixteen years old, Grandpa left home to go swiling on a steamship. He was one of a hundred and thirty men who were left stranded on the ice fields during a vicious blizzard. Seventy-eight of them froze to death or drowned in the sea, but Grandpa found me in my royal lair, I who rule all the creatures of the ice. He slit me open with his knife; I clawed him from neck to hip. Twined together on the ice, our hearts’ blood merged. After he was rescued, he traded the frozen seas for a blowtorch in Boston and married a girl who’d emigrated from Harbour Grace. Grandma died before you were born, but her picture hangs in Grandpa’s bedroom. Sometimes says to it, “Ann, it’s a curse. But how can I break it?”
You felt terrible about the ice field disaster until you found out that “swiling” means crushing the skulls of baby seals and slicing off their fat and pelts to sell at market. It was for food, Grandpa says. To feed impoverished, starving families at home. In 1972, in response to protests, the United States will ban the import of Canadian seal products and the industry will whither to fifteen thousand kills a year. In 2006, when you settle in Pouch Cove in the house left by your great-aunt, the worldwide demand for fur will cause the Canadian government to increase the annual quota to three hundred and fifty thousand.
Newfoundlanders, you learn, will always go down to the sea.
Step six: You have successfully cooked your first “feed” or meal of brewis, though no one is there to enjoy it with you. Two weeks ago you woke up to find Grandpa still and cold in his bed. Not dead, thank God, but the stroke has left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly. The doctors don’t know if he’ll ever be released. Your father has promised to come home on time every day but last night he stumbled in late and drunk. After you complained he shook you by the arm and said, “You don’t know anything about it!” You’re afraid nosy Mrs. Stevens next door might tell call the police or social workers, and then you will have to live with strangers. At twelve years old you are beginning to suspect that your life, like those of your parents and their parents before them, will be full of hardship and sadness. But the salt that stings is also the salt that preserves, and you have the strength of the Seal Queen in your veins.
Refrigerate what you’ve made. Clean the kitchen, tidy up the house and go sit in your room, where you keep a photograph of your mother stashed under your pillow. Later, when you’re hungry for a snack, heat the brewis and drizzle it with molasses or brown sugar. Savor the sugar and salt, the cod and pig-fat. After a few months in Pouch Cove you will heed our siren calls and walk fully-clothed into the icy sea. You will come to us, daughter of my blood. We will feed you, and feed upon you. It is how we endure, here on the ice fields. It is our recipe for survival.
Wool and Silk and Wood
Shira Lipkin
There are no strong parts for women in this story;
No warrior, no queen, no sorceress.
I stand at the threshold of it
stripped of all I was before—
dancing maiden, ingenue, studious young woman
learning at my mother’s loom.
Wife. Mother.
The story does not allow it.
I enter—
The Grandmother.
You stand before me
looking noble, eager
And I want to slap you.
I am losing you as I lost your brothers—
One beaming as I strapped your father’s sword on him
(I did not raise him to line the belly of the dragon,
my love)
One waving goodbye as he left to seek his fortune
(I did not raise him to die in a tavern brawl half the
country away, my love)
And now you. Now you.
I did not raise you to perish to wizardry, my love.
Why do you not see
that you already have all the alchemy you need?
Sheep to wool, wool to yarn, yarn to your nice warm clothing
wool spinning, lanolin-slick, from a cloud of fluff to one thick thread
guided by my hands, your hands
through the wooden drop-spindle.
This is all the alchemy you need—
Tree to wood, wood to spindles and tables and shelves
carved and polished, shape from nothing;
your hand and a knife.
This is all you need—
bright silk from worms, through dye
to the ribbon in your childhood sweetheart’s hair
bright in the morning light and so soft to the touch.
I raised you to be my legacy.
I raised you to spin and weave,
to know the old ways
to teach them to your children.
You see a future in your ethereal magic.
I see only a broken chain.
I love you enough to let you go.
I wish you loved this enough to stay -
me, your home, the village bonfire, your life.
I wish you could see that all the alchemy you need
is in wool and silk and wood.
I wish you could see that the old ways have their beauty, too.
I wish, I wish, I wish -
but no faeries come to grandmothers.
So I pack your bag,
books and bread and cheese
(paper from trees to books
grain transformed to bread
milk cultured to cheese
alchemy, if only you would see it)
warm woolen clothing.
A small drop-spindle,
wood worn by my hands, by my mother’s hands -
so you do not forget.
I kiss you goodbye,
and I fade back into my cottage.
What befalls me, none will know.
Stories care naught for grandmothers,
just flashing steel and quests and sorcery.
There is alchemy right here, if only you would see it.
