Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 29 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Smash!

  Jennifer Linnaea

  The Groomsmen

  Sarah Blackman

  Re-load

  Kara Singletary

  Fairy Skulls

  Nina Allan

  Yaga Dreams of Growing Up

  Eileen Wiedbrauk

  Dietus Interruptus

  Ian Breen

  Good Keith!

  J. Brundage

  Three Rights Make a Left

  Rhonda Eikamp

  Noise

  David Galef

  Eggs

  Claire Hero

  Disaster Movies

  Christopher Stabback

  How to Seduce a Vegetarian

  Nicole Kimberling

  Ksampguiyaeps—Woman-Out-To-Sea

  Neile Graham

  Hermitage

  Neile Graham

  Four Phoebes

  Maya Sonenberg

  About these Authors

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Subscriptions

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  September 2013 · Issue 29

  Made by: Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link.

  Readers: Julie Day, Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles.

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 29, September 2013. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-081-7.Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is usually published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · [email protected] · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw. twitteringwitlessness.com/smallbeerpress · Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 19 for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets. LCRW is available as an ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c. Contents © 2013 the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414. Funny how once this thing has been finished, there’s always something else to do.

  One of these days we’ll all be dust and somewhere this paper zine will sit on a shelf. What a laugh!

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  Smash!

  Jennifer Linnaea

  Tabitha found the glass sea monster on a bed of pine needles in her grandmother’s forest. It was about a hand high, blown of delicate curves of green and purple glass; its eyes flashed gold when she wasn’t quite looking.

  She carried it home in her skirt, nestled against the patched fabric like an egg in a nest. At dinner she snuck it to the table and kept it in her lap while she ate boiled pheasant and cabbage.

  “Tabitha, what have you got there?” her father said. Her father, who wore spectacles and brown suits, was a professor of some sort of pology at the university. Her mother, with close-cropped dark hair and stern eyes, was a sea monster, and she did not like nonsense at dinner.

  “You’ve been looking at your lap all night,” her mother said. “If it weren’t so quiet I’d swear you’d sneaked in a kitten.”

  “Is it a kitten?” her father said, smiling. Tabitha shook her head. She felt a little shy about the sea monster, although she couldn’t say why.

  But her parents were serious about not bringing toys to dinner, and soon they had it out of her.

  When he saw the glass sea monster her father blinked at it over and over, as if, when he opened his eyes each time, it might not be there. Then he stood and rushed to her side and hugged her tightly.

  “Oh, Tabitha,” he said, and he sounded sad about it.

  “Don’t frighten her, Edward.” Her mother took another bite of pheasant, chewed, swallowed. “Well, my daughter, it looks as if you’re a sea monster then. Would you like to go practice?”

  Being a sea monster was the most fun Tabitha had ever had. She got to frighten sailors, brushing oh-so-lightly against their sailing ships with her massive scales, then diving down deep where they couldn’t get her. She got to leave phosphorescent trails in moonlit tropical seas; she lay on her back and listened to whale song long past bedtime.

  Every so often, though, she came back on land and tucked her scales away inside her skin, and grew some hair (she liked hers shorter now), and went to visit her grandmother’s forest. In summer the green light was like being underwater. In winter the bare trunks reached out to the sky like the masts of sunken ships.

  Also, now that she was older, her father took her to the university.

  “So, Tabitha, what will it be today? The naval history of France? I hear a fellow named Darwin released some notes about his voyage to the Galapagos—what about that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’d like to hear about your pology.”

  “I’m afraid it’s just a logy, my dear. And not even phycology or piscatology.”

  As usual, Tabitha pretended to know what he was talking about. “Well, what’s your logy then?”

  “It’s rhabdology. Very popular at the university right now.”

  Tabitha nodded.

  “My child, do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  Tabitha let her shoulders slump. She shook her head.

  “It’s the study of these.” He took a stick out of his desk and handed it to her. It was white birch, forked at one end.

  “Sticks?”

  “It’s a divining rod. It’s for finding things.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things! Water being the most popular, followed by gems and ore. Some claim to be able to find gravesites, but I’ve always had some trouble with that. It can find all manner of things, though—I used it to find your mother.”

  Tabitha looked at the stick again. She smoothed her hands over it. “When—when you found mother, what were you looking for?”

  Her father ducked his head with a sheepish grin. “Sunken treasure,” he admitted. “Would you like to try?”

  Tabitha brought back the gold from the Santa Teresa, sunk with all hands while returning from the New World. She found a pearl the size of her father’s head that shimmered black in the sunlight. She decided that her father’s logy was a wonderful one and vowed to study it when she was old enough to attend university.

  In the meantime, she made a new rod out of a split mast and held it in her teeth wherever she went. Etchings began to crop up of sea monsters with huge forked tongues, which amused Tabitha and her mother very much.

  “Just be careful you don’t get a harpoon in your side,” her mother said, lifting her dress to her chest to reveal a long, jagged scar along her side. “It hurts. It can even kill you.” Her father, who’d been pretending to read a book while her mother was indecent, chewed his lower lip.

  Tabitha found the lost treasure of the Pharaoh Neferkare Amenemnisu, plundered from his tomb by robbers. When she returned it to the Egyptian government she was rewarded with the title “Foremost of Adventurous Ladies, Favored by the Divine Wind” and given a grant of land on some low cliffs overlooking the sea. She took up residence there at once. The hot, dry climate of Egypt was surprisingly refreshing to her between voyages. And because the place was so remote, nobody she did not wish to see came to call.

  She’d graduated two years prior with a logy same as her father’s, and found the research challenging and rewarding. She had discovered t
hat if you used brine-soaked sticks half-fossilized with deep sea sediment, you could find things very far away, and very deep. From the great trenches she pulled ancient prizes—machines that walked and talked, inlaid bowls that turned whatever was placed inside to gold or diamond. These were hailed as the treasure of lost Atlantis; scientists and collectors came in boatloads to the university where she taught, some from as far as the Orient, just to look at them.

  Then she took a harpoon in the side.

  Not in the sea. It happened in her grandmother’s forest, with her scales tucked neatly inside her skin and the green, green light coming down.

  From the ground where she fell, she looked up in surprise.

  “You cannot do what you have been doing,” said an old, old voice.

  Tabitha, who found it hard to speak just then, said nothing.

  “You cannot just bring more and more into the world, without taking things out of it.”

  “Are you,” she managed, “an Atlantean?”

  “I am a sea monster. And this is my forest.”

  Tabitha’s grandmother pulled the knife out of Tabitha’s side and staunched the blood.

  “I want you to sink some ships,” she said. “Choose ones with holds laden with precious goods.”

  “But—but I do not want to kill sailors! They are so small!”

  “Then save them. I don’t care—you haven’t been retrieving corpses. But the ships and everything in them must go—do you understand?”

  Tabitha lowered her head.

  “Then quick—back to the sea with you. It would be doltish if this little wound were to be the end of someone as mighty as you.”

  Tabitha’s daughter found a small glass sea monster down by the Egyptian cliffs, close to the sea. She brought it to her mother to see.

  “This means I’m a sea monster!” She said proudly, and bared her teeth, and growled. “Smash!”

  The Groomsmen

  Sarah Blackman

  One day, she gave birth to seven babies. This was a great surprise, the more so because all of the babies were boys. “I am the mother of seven sons,” she practiced in the little square mirror the hospital thoughtfully provided. On the table behind her was a vase with a bouquet of pansies her mother had sent and behind that an incredible number of bassinets.

  When she brought the babies home her husband said, “Good Lord,” and retreated to his study where he sat and looked out the window, gloomily eating a sack of pretzels. For a while, she walked her sons up and down the halls, wiped their bottoms with rags, threw diapers in the washing machine, hung diapers out on the line to dry, spooned carrots and peas and beans and chickens and corn and mushrooms and pears and eggs into their mouths, sanitized bottles, sanitized pacifiers, washed their hair, washed their bodies, wiped their bottoms with rags, made choo-choo noises and showed them the spoon, spooned carrots and peas and beans and chickens, made a horse out of her knees, made a horse out of her back, hung their diapers to dry, boiled their bottles, boiled their dishes, rubbed a finger over their sensitive gums. Then, her husband came out of his study and gave one of the sons a pretzel. “It won’t be so bad,” he said and picked up a spoon.

  Previously in her and her husband’s lives together she had thought of herself as the kind of woman other men would describe as a spitfire. She understood there was a certain volatile element to her temperament that would be misinterpreted by those who did not live with her as sexual passion. To her husband, it was the element of uncertainty. Would she take the joke or would they quarrel? In public, would she swallow her melancholy or, turning away from the shop window with its rending display of skins and furs, would she go ahead and cry? Perhaps, she hoped, to her husband the uncertainty was also understood as sexual passion. Perhaps when she cried on the street corner and he said, “What is this with you? What is this thing?” he was really thinking quite clearly of the friction of their parts, the cachinnation of their immoderately creaky bed, the humors of their various desires.

  Prior to her and her husband’s life together, when she did not think of what she was doing as deliberately living a life, she had been confused by the parameters of possible behavior. For example, when she saw something she wanted, say a pair of blue silk panties, or a ring, or a bole of sourdough bread still steaming from its cross, when could she reach out her hand and take it and when must she occupy herself some other way, her hands in her pockets, in her mouth, folding the hem of her shirt? For example, when she found someone to whom she was attracted—by their laugh, or their walk, or their hand on her forearm, rattling her forearm as if it were a bone in a cage—could she turn to look back at them over her shoulder? Could she sweep all the pint glasses from the table, erect and trembling with anger? With want? Could she take their finger into her mouth? Up to the knuckle? Further? More than one finger? Could she try for the hand?

  She had often been described as a difficult woman. People said this to her face with the same tone they might use to explain the difference in pricing between, say, the regular eggs and the organic, brown ones, the picked lobster meat purchased by the pound and the whole, fresh lobster still flexing its blue tail in the tank. She took this in the spirit with which it was intended. People also frequently described her husband as her savior. This she was not supposed to hear, but did, and with such frequency that sometimes when she stepped out onto their terra-cotta tiled porch of an evening to listen to the rain fiddling around in the azaleas, she would hear the description of her husband as her savior as a sort of ambient hum in the neighborhood air. It was a blue hum, like the dusk itself. When it got under the sodium street lights it flared briefly green.

  Regardless of their histories, both shared and otherwise, she understood her sons as a new beginning for her and her husband. Children are often figured this way—a point along a time-line at which, in sudden confusion or teleological upheaval, everything changes. Her sons felt to her like a reflex. Her response to them was like their response to her when she was inattentive, or blindly feeling about the darkened house at three in the morning, and held them insecurely against her breast. Her reaction to them was to yip a piercing warning cry; her reaction was to nip. In this way, warning and nipping, a large amount of time passed very quickly.

  One day, one of the sons called to announce he was getting married. She was sitting right by the phone when it rang, perched at the very edge of a high stool at the kitchen counter, her hands gripping the edge of the kitchen counter as if at any moment she would leap from the stool and race across the room, though she had been sitting that way for twenty minutes at least. As the phone rang she thought to herself, “There is the phone, ringing again,” and counted the rings and considered who it might be, always coming back to the sons because there were so many of them and they had various, often pressing, needs.

  In the time that had passed, she had kept her figure, had in fact improved her figure through worry, and want, and the constant silent expression of male desire which, she considered, was only natural in a household of seven sons. Also, it had become increasingly clear that both she and her husband were local celebrities even outside the circle of their regular environs. She was the mother of very many children and in line at the bank or in the poultry section of the supermarket people would look at her, look away, look back at her with the furtive recognition usually reserved for television weather women or white-collar criminals vindicated by some tricky exigency of law. She had filled with a downy, comforting plushness at the breast but had kept her skinny haunches, her runner’s calves. She had grown her hair long and it spilled over her breasts and hung into the freezer, glinting a purple-sort-of-russet in the harsh florescent lights, as she pressed the pimpled skin of the chicken breasts and watched their pale blood well and pool.

  Her husband, on the other hand, had declined precipitously in bodily health. Previously, he could be described as slender. Now he was gaunt, his chest almost concave, the skin around his lips blue in certain light as if he weren’t getting enou
gh oxygen with his breath. He too had grown his hair longer so that it brushed his jaw line, catching in his stubble, or formed a stubby queue when he pulled it back at his nape. The effect could not have been what he desired—he was a fan of Jeffersonian reason, a fan of the body, a fan of the stoic in both study and practice—but his clear tenuousness had done nothing to lessen his physical appeal. Now more than ever, she followed the lingering gazes of women and found them attached to some part of her husband, his wrist or the small of his back, exposed as if by the chance of his movement to both the light and their scrutiny.

  The problem of the wedding was a considerable one for her. The colors her son and his bride had chosen were unflattering, the season dull and her role as mother-of-the-groom ill-defined. Her husband began to spend more and more time in his wood-working shop at the back of the house. He was making a wedding gift for the son—a clock fashioned entirely of native woods, the whirring gears, the chimes, the hollow clapper all hand carved by her husband who frequently cut himself with the sharp tools and came in to dinner wearing mitts of white gauze, bleeding through the gauze in patches. It was such a romantic gesture, she became suspicious. It seemed there must be some other kind of union involved, something more desirable and fleeting, but this turned out not to be the case. Even though it seemed her husband could never finish it in time, on the morning of the wedding he rose in a very quiet, silver pre-dawn and went out into his workshop. She too rose and made coffee and, sipping it, listened to the noise he was making—a syncopated clattering, a rising pitch—and watched his shadow move back and forth across the squares of light cast from his workshop windows over the ruin of their sons’ childhood sandbox. When he emerged, the clock was mostly whole. It only lacked some of the fine-work which, if you had not seen his plans, you would not know to miss.