Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 27 Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Hedon-Ex Anomaly

  Jessy Randall

  Thou Earth, Thou

  K. M Ferebee

  Four Poems by Sarah Heller

  After the Apocalypse

  Self-Storage

  The Possible World

  Pressure Points

  Elvis in Bloom

  Karen Hueler

  A Sackful of Ramps

  M. K. Hobson

  The Mismeasure of Me and How I Saved the World

  Carol Emshwiller

  Music Box

  David Rowinski

  Nicole Kimberling

  Four Poems by David Blair

  May Day, at the Somerville Community Gardening Center

  Episode in Kings

  1900 Houses around Boston

  Stupidity Poem

  The Sale of Midsummer

  Joan Aiken

  The Malanesian

  Sarah Harris Wallman

  Dear Aunt Gwenda: Summer Circus Edition

  About these Authors

  LCRW Subscriptions

  About Small Beer Press

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  August 2011 · Issue 27

  Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca.

  Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison.

  Cover artist Kathleen Jennings is an Australian whose website (http://tanaudel.wordpress.com) features lots of excellent art as well as series such as The Dalek Game. Besides the cover of this issue, she also did the covers for Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales and Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden.

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.27, August 2011. ISSN 1544-7782. 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

  Subscriptions: $20/4 print issues (see the last section of this ebook or page 17 of the paper or pdf edition for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets. LCRW is available as an ebook through smallbeerpress.com, WeightlessBooks.com, and Fictionwise.com, and occasionally as a trade paperback and ebook from lulu.com/sbp. Contents © 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.

  Subscribers (and, you know, friends. And readers, if you’re so inclined. But please do include a chocolate bar, the way long-time subscribers do.*) Anyway! If you move, please remember to send us your Change of Address. We thank you.

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  * not strictly the truth.

  We wish Michael J. DeLuca were not leaving Small Beer East for Detroit but we wish him and Erin well and we’re very grateful for his time, his bread, beer, and good cheer. He’s provided more help than we could list in 60 pages, never mind in this note. Thanks, Michael.

  As always: thanks for reading!

  The Wolves of St. Etienne

  A. D. Jameson

  Lewis couldn’t see the phone very well because the bedroom was dark and his glasses were on the nightstand. He shifted his weight on the bed; kneaded his forehead with two fingers. I must remember to relax my face, he thought. I bunch my face up, and then it hurts. The phone rang again, but Lewis made no move to answer it. He already knew who was calling, and what they wanted.

  Instead he looked into the next room, where he could see nothing of the Christmas Tree. The Christmas Tree wasn’t his. He had bought one, a small, neat fir, and decorated it with popcorn, white lights and a star, but it had been taken. Returning to the hotel room late one night he’d found it missing, a different tree in its place, an aluminum one that revolved as its lights blinked on and off. Lewis kept it unplugged, but every time he returned home he found it revolving and blinking.

  Lewis picked up the phone before it could ring a third time. He heard laughter, then, “Hello, Lewis.”

  It was, as always, the wolves. They were laughing in the background. They’ve been drinking, thought Lewis. “Hello.”

  “We want to play Othello. You can be black.”

  Lewis rubbed his forehead again, pressed his legs together.

  “Do you want anything to drink? We—” Laughter. “We have Heineken. And Genny.”

  “No thank you.”

  There were some scuffling noises. “We’ll send the car by. That is, if you’d like to come. We’d like you to.”

  In the next room the Christmas Tree had begun to revolve and blink, a shimmering blur of light. Lewis sighed. “I’ll be ready,” he said. But the wolves had already hung up.

  St. Etienne hadn’t always been a wolf city, but after the wolves killed all of its human inhabitants, they made it their own.

  One wolf, shaggy and lean, explained to Lewis, “Humans have taken almost all our woods away from us, driving us into the mountains, where there is only rocks and dust, and cold. No one would stay there. Not when we knew there was St. Etienne. Here there are supermarkets and refrigerators, and houses with thermostats and electric blankets. We figure humans deserve to have at least one city taken from them.

  “Sometimes we wonder if there are other wolf cities, besides St. Etienne. We’ve heard rumors, but they are uncertain rumors.” The wolf chewed, was chewing at something. “Perhaps you could travel to them, Lewis, as our ambassador.”

  The wolves ate anyone who came to St. Etienne. After eating the person they put that person’s skin on and went out into the human towns wearing it, taking that person’s place in society, telling all how they’d loved their time in St. Etienne. After a few weeks they would announce they were moving there, promising everyone to write, inviting them all to come visit as soon as they could.

  The wolves called that game “Wolf in People’s Clothing.” They enjoyed it almost as much as they did Othello.

  Lewis’ wife taught French at the local high school, yet had never seen France. The vacation had been her idea.

  “Why St. Etienne?” Lewis asked. He was sitting in bed, his back against a pillow. He looked down through his glasses at the guidebook. “Why not Paris?”

  Lewis’ wife moved, her arms wrapped around his waist. Any talk of France was exciting to her. “Too many people want Paris. I would rather see St. Etienne.”

  Lewis sat in a chair at the desk and looked at the birds outside his window. They were cardinals, working at building nests. They had such bright red feathers Lewis could hardly believe that they were real.

  One cardinal noticed Lewis staring at them, and nudged the others, who waved to Lewis, their red wings jerking quickly. Lewis waved back, smiling. The cardinals returned to their work.

  Sometimes, late at night when he couldn’t sleep, Lewis would get two sheets of paper and a pencil. On one sheet he would list his friends. On the other he would list his enemies.

  Lewis would write THE BIRDS on one of the sheets. Then, slowly and carefully, he would write THE WOLVES on the other.

  He was always sure to crumple each sheet by morning.

  The wolves told Lewis: “There are many reasons to eat a person, but the best is that afterwards you may keep their material possessions. Humans have so many things. The only way we can get such nice things is to steal them.”

  The wolves and Lewis were crowded
together in a cluttered apartment, the wolves smoking cigarettes and pot and drinking beer and wine. The only light came from three candles, short waxy stubs the wolves had stuffed in the mouths of empty wine bottles on the coffee table. The wolves leaned forward, one and two at a time, lighting their cigarettes and joints on the candles. Lewis coughed and shifted his weight on the couch, trying to keep from touching the wolf beside him.

  “If humans allowed us more room, we’d be kinder to them. But they attack us, forcing us into the mountains, where there is nothing to eat, where the air is crazy and thin.”

  The wolves spat, some crumpling their beer cans, others chewing Othello chips. On the table the middle candle, burning low, flared green, then blue, then green, as the alcohol crystal flakes on the bottleneck caught fire. The flame dropped through the neck, dissolving as it fell.

  “Sometimes we don’t want something a human has. But even then we can sell it—someone else always wants it. People always want things made by other humans.”

  One wolf handed Lewis a goblet of water, rested his arm around Lewis’ shoulders. “Why don’t you ever pet us, Lewis?” The wolves giggled. Lewis took a gulp of water; it tasted slightly of smoke. “Why don’t you scratch our stomachs? Our fur is clean and well-groomed. Our hair is not full of lice!”

  “No, no, of course not,” Lewis murmured. The wolves were laughing now, and prodding each other with their claws. The second candle went out, and the shadows grew suddenly longer, sharper.

  “Humans can’t understand grooming,” the wolves said. They ran their hands over one another, pulling their fingers through one another’s hair. “They understand some things, like the fun in sharing a cigarette, but they are so afraid to touch each other. We like to touch and to be touched. Groom with us, Lewis. Let us touch you.”

  The last of the candles went out, flaring green, yellow, black. The wolves howled madly in the darkness, raking the tabletop with their claws.

  The wolves played a game they called “Acting as a Pet”: one wolf, wearing a human skin and clothes, kept another wolf heeled on a leash, that wolf acting as if he were a dog. He would sniff the ground and pant; he would lick the hands of the children he let pet him. The human wolf would expound the values of wolves as pets. Parents would say they had no idea. Children would say, Daddy, we want a wolf.

  Lewis had gone to St. Etienne with his wife and his daughter and his sister, Molly. It was Molly who first noticed the wolf, after they arrived in St. Etienne: a wolf who was acting as a pet. Lewis’ family gathered around the wolf and its disguised owner. “I had no idea wolves made such good pets,” Lewis said. Lewis’ wife patted the wolf. The wolf licked Molly’s hand. Lewis’ daughter said, “Daddy, I want a wolf.”

  Lewis’ sister Molly was much taken with the owner of the wolf, who smiled shyly, his head nodding gently as he listened; to Molly he looked much as she’d imagined a Frenchman would look. He introduced himself in accented English as Pierre. Molly had short black hair she tucked behind her ears, skin that didn’t tan, a right-sized body. People were surprised to learn she wasn’t married. “I’m waiting for somebody special,” Molly would tell them. “I haven’t met anyone special.” Molly had a good head on her shoulders.

  Molly had asked Lewis, “Do you think I might meet someone in France?” She thought perhaps she was silly, thinking of France as a country of lovers and romantics.

  Lewis told Molly there was always the possibility of romance, but that a foreign country complicated that possibility: the differences in language and in culture, the difficulties in leaving.

  Pierre was wearing an attractive skin, with clean short hair, with long smooth fingers. As he talked with Lewis, expounding the values of wolves, he glanced repeatedly at Molly. The wolf acting as a pet licked Molly’s hand. “He likes you,” Pierre told Molly, who blushed and smiled.

  Pierre’s penny loafers were bruised and soft. Molly, crouching by the wolf, could see that one loafer was missing its penny.

  Lewis’ wife asked the wolf’s name. “Racleur,” answered Pierre, “because he likes when I play the piano.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone keeping wolves as pets,” said Lewis. “It is a secret,” said Pierre, “to all but the citizens of St. Etienne.” “He’s so well behaved,” commented Lewis’ wife. Molly brushed the ends of her hair behind her ears, held her slightly cupped hand before Racleur’s wet nose.

  The wolves loved Othello more than Heineken or Genny, more than Miller High Life and stereo TV. Sometimes, when drunk, they would try to explain.

  One wolf told Lewis: “We crowd around the board, watching white and black struggle for dominance, knowing eventually one must win. And occasionally we eat a piece or two, in the same way we pick off any humans who come to the woods or to St. Etienne. Eating an Othello piece is pleasantly surprising. It is both white and black at the same time.”

  In St. Etienne one could find the few people other than Lewis the wolves had not killed: the special secretaries whom the wolves kept to answer the phones and handle the mail and telegrams. The secretaries were males and females, whites and blacks alike. They were trained to accept all sexual advances from the wolves, and were eaten as soon as their secretarial skills diminished.

  Lewis hadn’t wanted to go to St. Etienne, but his wife and his daughter and Molly had insisted. “You’ve never been out of the country,” they said. “You should see what’s out there, outside of the country.” Lewis disliked travel, because it made his feet hurt and his eyes hurt and his hands twitch, nervously.

  On the boat he sat in the cabin, his feet and eyes hurting, his hands twitching, until his wife and his daughter and Molly made him come sit outside on the deck, by the side of the pool where they swam. “How odd,” Molly said, “to see a pool on a boat!” She said that anyone flying overhead might think the boat had a rectangular hole in it.

  Lewis’ daughter jumped into the pool. At the splash Lewis turned to look, but saw only the water scattering upward, and through the white and blue of the pool his daughter, wavering beneath the foam and bubbles.

  In a small gift shop Lewis bought his daughter a gray wolf doll. A tag attached to the doll’s ear read ST ETIENNE.

  The wolf had soft stubby legs, a soft stubby tail. Two black plastic eyes stared out, unblinking, from atop its muzzle.

  The ear tag gave the doll’s name as “Sicmon,” and Lewis’ daughter asked Molly if she was allowed to rename him. “Of course,” Molly answered, “What would you like to call him?”

  “Racleur,” answered Lewis’ daughter, “because he likes when I play the piano.”

  Lewis sat on the bed in his hotel room, a double bed in a hotel room much like the one he and his family had stayed in on their trip to St. Etienne. At night, on the nights he could sleep, Lewis slept on the floor, which was thickly carpeted.

  The phone rang. It was, as always, the wolves.

  “Lewis!” they said. “It’s a special day, today! A special day!”

  “It is?” said Lewis. It was already six p.m. The city was already dark.

  “Yes, yes! We must celebrate, Lewis! We’ll send the car. That is, if you’d like to come. Lewis, you must come! It’s your special day!”

  Lewis moved the phone away from his ear, which had started to ache. “I’ll be ready,” he said.

  But the wolves had already hung up.

  Pierre invited Molly to a dance; he arrived at the hotel at eight in a black suit, holding a tulip. Lewis and his wife watched from their balcony as the Pierre and Molly walked across the street and around a corner. Their daughter slept on the double bed in the room behind them.

  “What are you thinking?” Lewis’ wife asked. Lying in bed together, she would ask him that.

  Lewis looked at the people moving under the balcony, lit by the street lamps. He closed his eyes, and the pain immediately eased. “I’m not thinking anything.”

  After a little while they went inside. Lewis thought of picking up his daughter, of moving her to her ow
n bed, but decided against it. He pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, listening as she breathed gently, muttering “Racleur,” her small fingers closing together and opening.

  The wolf doll lay on its side on the floor. Lewis picked it up, put it back in his daughter’s arms.

  In the restaurant a table of businessmen sat near Lewis’ family. The men had removed their ties, loosened their collars. Cigarette smoke spread above their table. Lewis closed his eyes.

  The men chuckled and talked with each other, in French. I couldn’t imagine speaking that language, thought Lewis. And yet I probably seem as strange to them.

  Lewis was surprised to see their muscles and their thick necks. Before France, he had thought every Frenchman thin. They played sports, when younger, he thought. Soccer—but they call it football, don’t they?

  Lewis was relieved to see the menu was in English. He ordered liver with a baked potato and string beans. “I think I’ve figured out why I’m so tired,” he told his wife and daughter and Molly. “I don’t think that I’ve been getting enough iron.”

  One month after Lewis’ arrival in St. Etienne, the wolves threw a special party. They had kegs of Heineken and Genny, and bottles of wine. Removing their human skins they entered the streets, where the lamps were just turning on.

  Lewis had never seen so many wolves, laughing and drinking. He wondered if they could all be from St. Etienne.

  The secretaries, males and females, whites and blacks alike, huddled in a corner of the street, sipping ginger-ale, glancing nervously at the wolves.