Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 30 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Odd Variations on the Species

  Sarah Kokernot

  The Silent Ones

  Erica L. Satifka

  A Question for the Devil

  Daniel Meyer

  Island Folklore

  Anne Sheldon

  I Know You Hate It Here

  Anne Lacy

  With His Head in His Hand

  Robert E. Stutts

  The Purveyor of Homunculi

  Sarah Micklem

  Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof at the Potluck

  Nicole Kimberling

  Five Poems

  A. B. Robinson

  Speculative Fiction

  The Vampire and the Mermaid Converse

  The Vampire Drives a Hard Bargain

  The Vampire Listens to Woody Guthrie

  Undead Temporality

  The Endless Sink

  Damien Ober

  About these Authors

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  September 2014 · Issue 30

  Made by: Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link.

  Readers: Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles, Emily Cambias, Dustin Buchinski, Geoffrey Noble, and David Mitchell.

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 30, September 2014. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61873-082-4.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. We spend far too much time twitteringwitlessly.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 © 2014 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.

  Huge thanks to Melanie Conroy-Goldman and all the lovely people we met at the Hobart & William Smith TRIAS Residency. And what lovely wines they have in the Finger Lakes! Also recommended: Geneva13 (geneva13.com) a great, very local quarterly zine which covers a different aspect of the town of Geneva in each issue. I just finished no. 18, the apple issue—you may already be familiar with Red Jacket Orchards apple juice (yum!) and here they interview the owner, an apple picker, and an apple scientist. 60 pages of apples later, I am looking forward to autumn.

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet is an occasional outburst of fabulous fiction, poetry, and, chocolate, if that’s your thing. Get it electronicalalalaly at weightlessbooks.com. Subscribe (& order back issues) at smallbeerpress.com/lcrw or send a check or money order to: Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306., Easthampton, MA 01027. Thank you.

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  Odd Variations on the Species

  Sarah Kokernot

  I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t help myself. The night before I had been kept up by an unseasonably violent storm that had blown a meringue of sea foam onto Mimi’s porch and bent the palm tree into the roof. Back in Ohio I had six condos to rent. Penny had brought along the ovulation thermometer which meant high-pressure lovemaking sessions on the springy bed in the guest room. And Mimi was turning eighty that night—the hill that she did not want to see over, unless someone in our family produced great-grandchildren. She was the only octogenarian at her bridge club without great-grandchildren.

  I was on my daily jog. All the birds were out that morning—the sandpipers and the gulls and even the herons which normally kept to the swamp—feasting on the wash of tiny shellfish and young crab marooned high up on the beach during the storm. I recognized it in front of Mrs. McCullen’s place—the extinct species of large crustacean that looked just like the Audubon print tacked to the cork board in my cubicle. This was the legendary creature of my childhood, which Mimi had warned would pull me under the water if I swam out past the buoys. For a minute, I just watched. The giant chatter crab tried to squeeze its enormous body underneath the wooden stairs leading to Mrs. McCullen’s sandy front yard. It had broken off a rotting floor board, which now balanced on its back.

  I had only seen photographs of the crab in books, and they were always black and white or sepia-toned—the chatter crab having disappeared before color film was widely used. I saw now that its color was nothing like the reddish brown of its smaller cousins, but dark and opalescent, the color of a puddle in a parking lot. I could tell that the crab had molted its hard outer shell by the way it smacked its gummy claws at me. Its pinchers were the size and diameter of two large sauce pans, and, had they been encased with a hard shell, could have easily cut off my hand at the wrist bone.

  Mimi had warned my brother and me that if we ever happened upon a chatter crab, the first thing we should do was cover our ears, and the second thing we should do was run. I searched inside for my pockets for something to cover my ears with, but found nothing except my cell phone, which I discovered earlier that morning in the freezer under a bag of peas (I had asked Penny the night before to hide it so I wouldn’t be tempted to call work). But the crab looked harmless, so I picked it up. He or she weighed as much as a lap dog, which I knew meant that it was very young. There was a stuffed giant chatter crab in a London museum which had weighed seventy pounds, the size of an obese Labrador. It was estimated to be fifteen years old when it was caught in a fishing net in the Irish Sea. This one’s carapace was just beginning to harden after molting, and had the firmness of a crisp apple. Before I could even think about what I was doing, I began to trot back down the beach in the direction of Mimi’s house, carrying the crab out in front of me like a priceless porcelain vase. It continued to smack its fleshy claws in protest, but finally gave up, and resorted to its namesake defense:

  “Don’t think I have any alcohol in the house!” it screeched, in a voice that mimicked Mrs. McCullen’s smoky alto with such accuracy that I nearly dropped it.

  The giant chatter crab, much like the macaw or parrot, imitates human speech by a way of a complex vocal chamber, but unlike its avian counterparts, the chatter crab also is also able to replicate the exact tone and cadence of a human voice. Mimi was old enough to remember the days when giant chatter crabs populated the South Carolina coast, so numerous that her father would trap them and her mother would serve them each Sunday after church. Before checking the traps, crab hunters would plug their ears in order to avoid the disturbing experience of listening to their prey protest in a voice that mimicked the voice of their wife’s or friend. Mimi herself n
ever heard the chatter crab utter a word. Her parents were always careful that their children be spared that unappetizing and frankly dangerous experience. The crab was a trickster, Mimi said. As a soon as it won your pity it would lunge and sever an appendage with such razor-like swiftness that its victim would barely feel the loss. For this reason, it was strictly taboo to keep a chatter crab alive for any longer than absolutely necessary.

  “I’m about to visit my nephew! I can’t offer you a drink!” the crab shouted.

  The crab had apparently lived close enough to Mrs. McCullen to pick up her ear-splitting timbre. Mrs. McCullen wasn’t naturally loud and shrill, but only sounded so when she forgot to put in her hearing aid, which was often. We sometimes passed her on our evening walks. She steered her scooter with one hand while the other held a vodka soda, which she waved at Mimi, screaming an invitation for cocktails. If the crab continued talking in Mrs. McCullen’s booming voice, it would certainly draw people to look out their windows.

  I scanned the beach for something to bludgeon the crab with, but what the hell was I thinking? I had never bludgeoned anything—I had barely even killed with my own hands. The fish I sometimes caught spared me from having to kill them directly, their bodies already stiff in the bucket by the time I drove back from the pier. It was only then then it occurred to me that what I was about to do was illegal. Not only would I be committing a felony by killing what was certainly an endangered species, but I would be destroying an important link in a complicated ecosystem. Although, as far as I knew, no chatter crabs had been spotted off this part of the coast since my grandmother was eight years old. Aside from a few unconfirmed sightings in the far-off Indian Ocean, they had been officially extinct throughout the world for over seventy years.

  “Don’t put your glass down without a coaster!” the crab said. “And where’s Conrad? Conrad!” If I could not offer Mimi great-grand-children for her eightieth birthday, I figured a giant chatter crab might make a good substitute. The ocean seemed to be getting along just fine without them.

  I had run halfway up the beach and was now sweating profusely with worry and also because I was carrying a fifteen pound object. It had not stopped talking. Who would have thought Mrs. McCullen was such a temperamental old lady? Or that she suffered from such a long list of ailments, from rheumatoid arthritis to vaginal dryness? Her neuropathy! Conrad’s rash! The convenience store aisles too narrow for her scooter! The spurs on her heels! The tourists and their loud car stereos! I hummed tunelessly and loudly over the crab’s voice. La la la la la! I thought about covering the crab’s mouth with my hand but I was worried that it might bite it off. If someone saw me, I could only hope that they would not be able to believe their eyes—that the legendary crab had returned to this shabby little town where most of the most beaches carried a summer-long film of suntan oil on the water.

  I was four houses down from ours when I saw a woman sitting on her deck, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Bloody Mary as dark red as her short hair.

  “This is a beach, god damnit, not an ashtray!” it screamed so loudly that the woman on the deck stood up and took her sunglasses off. I lunged behind a sand dune.

  “Is that you, Mrs. McCullen?” the lady said. I knew that the woman’s eyes were scanning my hiding place. The crab wiggled. It was surprisingly strong for only being fifteen pounds, but I suppose it had an adrenal rush of fear on its side. I clutched it to my bare chest, its smell like pure brine and faintly rotten, although I thought I could sniff an aroma of a delicate spice—saffron? Cardamom? I suddenly remembered something my wife had shared with me from a cookbook: if you stroked a crab on its head, it would fall asleep, allowing you to slip it into pot of boiling water without a fight. I began to stroke the crab gently on its carapace, and it began to wave its right claw around the way a dog will when you scratch its belly. A contented gurgle bubbled from its mouth.

  I peered around the dune. The red-haired woman was still out there, but I saw that if I ran low through a patch of sea grass I could reach her porch undetected, and from there, dart under the remaining three porches unseen. I wedged the crab in my arm like a football and bolted to the dark shade of the deck, where I waited, still stroking the crab, until I heard a glass door slide open and the woman’s footsteps disappeared. A plastic tarp lay over a motorless john boat. I took the tarp and wrapped it around the crab. There were no to lids to fall over its black bead eyes, but I suspected that it was now fast asleep.

  Before we met, Penny had dined on blowfish in Japan, sampled jerkied mealworms and grasshoppers in a Oaxacan market, and chewed on roasted iguana in the Turks and Cacos. She once brought home durian fruit from the Asian supermarket with a spiky rind. It looked like a cantaloupe had contracted a horrible venereal disease. The mesh wire around its melon shape could barely contain the simmering sulfuric gases that leached out of cracks from its skin. The heavy odor of the durian fruit permeated the hallway of our apartment building for a week and the maintenance man came to our door, assuming that some sewer backage backup was the origin of the smell. We almost got evicted. Our neighbors never invited us to potlucks afterward, and the green carpet in the hallway still smells faintly of a decomposing rodent. Penny had no regrets—this was all done in the name of culinary adventure.

  Penny, I imagined, would be just as pleased as Mimi to savor this rarest of delicacies. I hurried up the staircase to Mimi’s house—a double-wide trailer that stood upon ten-foot flood poles—anticipating the look of delight on my wife’s face.

  As soon as I’d opened the door, the chatter crab punched its way out of the tarp, screaming for a vodka soda. It bolted for the kitchen table and toppled a vase of Mimi’s birthday flowers, shouting that the young people had better stop leaving cigarette butts in the yard. It used to be that Penny would have thrown up her hands and shrieked in surprise, hopping up and down on each foot like she was stepping over coals. But, ever since she’d been hired at a corporate litigation firm, she cultivated a stoic mask of professionalism.

  I tried to win her over with enthusiasm. “Look at what I brought home for Mimi’s birthday dinner!”

  The corners of her mouth twitched with revulsion.

  The crab complained about the humidity.

  “Lord have mercy!” the crab said. “Just look at what this summer is doing to my permanent.”

  Penny crossed her arms.“I’d rather eat a cocker spaniel than something that sounds like Mrs. McCullen.”

  “Cover your ears with something, honey.”

  “And furthermore I’m not sure I could live with myself. Eating an extinct species.”

  “Try stuffing this toilet paper in your ears.”

  “I can’t believe you would even suggest it. You’re not joking, are you? Let’s see if the lawyer for Exxon will eat a species in peril? The toilet paper isn’t working. I can still hear.”

  “I’m not joking. Keep that in your ears! Damnit, Penny.” She threw the toilet paper in the garbage can and sucked through her front teeth. The chatter crab was making a fuss underneath the table, waving its useless claws with menace and hissing, “These aisles are not handicapped accessible!”

  “I’m not even sure what the mercury content is for crab,” said Penny, absentmindedly putting her hand over her abdomen. “I think I’m only allowed to eat salmon.”

  “But you’re not pregnant yet. I mean, we’re not.”

  “I realize that.” Penny stiffened. “You remember what Dr. Teasdale said, don’t you? Act like you’re already pregnant, he told us. It’s a mind over matter thing.” As a result of this advice, Penny had sold her antique Honda motorcycle and quit eating aged cheese.

  I suddenly wanted to do something fun, something that was slightly illegal or life-threatening. Something which did not have the ultimate goal of procreation.

  “Remember the durian fruit? You used to be such an adventurous eater.”

  “This is not adventurous!” Penny put hand quotations around ‘adventurous.’ “This is unethic
al. We’re talking about a formerly extinct species.”

  “Obviously it’s making a comeback.”

  “Jesus, Danny.”

  “The chatter crab is supposed to be extremely healthy for you.” I tried to think of other very healthy foods. “Like wheatgrass.”

  Penny stared at me the way some of my clients will when I inform them that selling their two bedroom condo for over one-hundred thousand is unreasonable in this market. And that no one cares about taupe granite counter tops or bay windows anymore. I started to feel my heart race. “Sometimes I wonder if I really know you,” Penny said.

  “You’re only like this because you grew up in a city.”

  “You grew up in Houston.”

  “Outside of Houston. And we raised chickens.”

  “Which you kept as pets and did not eat.”

  Then I remembered why I had brought home the chatter crab. “It’s Mimi’s birthday.”

  Penny moved the chair that was blocking the crab. “I think it’s scared.”

  “Conrad, honey, we’re taking in the scooter to get the tires changed,” the crab said. “Now you just hush.”

  “Mimi’s eighty,” I reminded her. “She’s going to die someday. More than likely it will be this decade.”

  “Mimi’s in better shape than we are.” Penny crouched on the floor and leaned in towards the crab, which lunged at her with a useless claw. “Good thing she doesn’t have a shell, right?” The crab had caught Penny’s finger between its pinchers and was squeezing.

  “There’s a good boy, Mr. Conrad, yes!” the crab cooed. “No more piddling on the carpet or eating mama’s socks!”

  “See? She would eat you! In a second.”

  Penny ignored me and went to the freezer where she pulled out a paper sack full of frozen prawns. She tossed one to the crab, who momentarily forgot it was in mortal danger and leapt at the prawn, which disappeared in its mouth. Penny tore the prawns into crumb sized pieces and dropped a small trail of them on the floor.