Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 21 Read online

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  Small Beer Press

  www.lcrw.net

  Copyright ©2007 by Authors

  First published in 2007, 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

  No. 21, November 2007

  Made by:

  Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link

  with help from

  Jedediah Berry, Micahel J. DeLuca, Annabel Link

  Contents copyright (c) the authors

  www.lcrw.net

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  www.smallbeerpress.com [email protected]

  ISSN 1544-7782

  Cover art by Tatsuro Kiuchi (mejirushi.com).

  CONTENTS

  The Night and Day War by Alice Sola Kim

  Dear Aunt Gwenda

  The Curmudgeon by Adam Ares

  The Lake by Matthew Cheney

  On a Dark and Featureless Plain by Stephanie Brady Tharpe

  Two Variations by Jeannette Westwood

  A Primer on New Wave and Speculative Fiction in Japan by Mamoru Masuda

  Clay by Kirstin Allio

  Two Poems by Lauren Bartel

  The Postern Gate by Brian Conn

  The Mysterious Mr. M by Abby Denson

  The Coder by Benjamin Parzybok

  Maps to God by Corie Ralston

  The Blokes of Ball Point by Suzanne Baumann

  Sanctuary by Carol Emshwiller

  Today's Writers Today

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  The Night and Day War by Alice Sola Kim

  The new sickness. I stopped being able to sleep. Staying up all night wasn't as glamorous as I thought it would be. The cold reached its height and I thought it would crush me. I sat up wrapped in a down comforter and surfed the internet all night. The moonlight and the glow of the monitor were working an unknown alchemy on me. I felt that I turning into something blue and glass and ersatz.

  And my parents were frightened of me. They were thinking of turning me over to the military, and the military would tell my parents that I would be cared for by scientists and possibly receive an ROTC scholarship to college, but in reality they would extract my brain juices and create a hyper-potent wakefulness serum, to be injected into top pilots and Navy SEALs and torturers who had just that much more to go before they could stop. If you don't finish torturing before going to bed for the night, doesn't that mean your work is undone come morning? The pain that must build itself on more pain. The lessening, then disappearance of hope. The blood that must not dry, the edges of skin that will not blunt and go dead. I don't know how I knew all of this; I just did. You may think I've seen too many X-Men films but I haven't. I've only seen one. What I knew was true.

  I filled out the forms and asked my teachers for recommendations and sent in the application and when I got in, I told my parents I was leaving. The enrollment at Night School had always been low, and now that the Doomsday Clock was one minute to twelve, that only made it easier to gain admission.

  Mom and Dad, I didn't leave because I didn't love you anymore. Mom and Dad, I was frightened of you. The things you would do to me or make other people do to me, same difference, only because you were afraid of those purple hours late at night, early in the morning-before-it-is-morning. Those hours during which I paced crazy eights into my bedroom carpet. I would never hurt you.

  * * * *

  Night Class. I used to have all these incredibly lame stupidass internet friends who I didn't like at all, because they could chat with me at all hours of the night. It is a special kind of loneliness being the only person awake, and this bad feeling only grew when I could feel my parents shifting in the bedroom next to me, their sleep restless and incomplete.

  So even the stupidest of roflmaos and idks and g2gs felt like blessings, the uncapitalized strings of letters like ropes that kept me bound to the planet even during the worst moments, when I felt as though my worrywart brain would speed and burst out through the top of my skull.

  When I enrolled at the boarding school, I chose Night Class instead of Day Class, so that I would be shielded when my loneliness was worst. Instead of being the most terrible time of all, Night would be a glamorous country, populated with vampires and the sleep disordered and the inexplicably nocturnal. No longer would I read and read and read about Mutually Assured Destruction and look out at the sodium lights that were so harsh that they felt like an eye disease, the utterly empty streets, and wonder if what was doomed to happen had—in actuality—already come to pass.

  * * * *

  The work-study program. My best friend here was named Bart. Bart was paranoid for a reason. I felt great pity for him, because many of the terrible things that slam people without warning happened to Bart long after he had seen them coming. Bart was a person who awoke into many of his nightmares, rather than out of them.

  A few minutes after we met, Bart was telling me the story of how his family came to South Korea. “The FBI put a wiretap on our phone, and then we were deported. We had a laundromat before we were deported and then they took it away. I wonder if the FBI kept the laundromat and now the FBI are living the Korean immigrant dream instead of my family. Maybe they employ our Korean doppelgangers to pretend-staff the place. Did you ever see that episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where they get all of these actors to play the family so that Mr. Burns could trick Bart, hey that's my name, into doing something? I forget what? You know what is so fucked? That's like one of my worst nightmares. I had to watch one of my worst nightmares on ‘The Simpsons'! I never watched that show again."

  Bart was on drugs. Bart was always on drugs. Ritalin, Adderall, Sudafed, Dexedrine, Provigil, Vivarin, Concerta, Excedrin, and Ambien for the holidays. Neither of us went home for Christmas break. I'd visit Bart's dorm room every once in a while, shake him until he mumbled and then I would dribble applesauce or Swanson's chicken broth into his mouth from a big squirt bottle that used to hold contact lenses solution. I don't believe that Bart remembered how he stayed alive during the winter holidays, but he was always a good friend to me after that. Ambien has close connections with amnesia, just listen to that low dull ammmm, and I wondered if that was what was necessary to be able to sleep—to forget everything every day, once a day before bed, the opposite of finding six impossible things to believe.

  During the day, Bart worked as an office assistant for the school. He took classes at night. Bart was one of the lucky work-study students. Most of them had to work in the cafeteria. They were always exhausted and many of them left their hairnets on when they went to class. One of the work-study students sat behind me for English class, and when I turned to pass her an exam, I saw that the hairnet had begun to take root in her scalp, gripping her forehead delicately.

  The work-study kids were so tired that they always seemed to be sleeping with their eyes open. And when they did speak—in a thick, surreal tongue—it was as though the dream they were dreaming only happened to correspond to reality.

  It was rumored that they could tell the future. I believed it. Everything tells the future. You just need to know how to read it. I had heard that Night Class was thinking about offering a seminar on it—the reading and comprehension of goat entrails, tea leav
es, email spam, the many dreams of the work-study students.

  On the way to World History, Bart asked me to choose one of these guys for President—a guy who was a vegetarian and didn't smoke, or a guy who smoked cigars all the time and had done really badly in school. I picked.

  His eyes widened. “Ha ha,” he said. “You picked Hitler as president. And you killed Churchill."

  "No I didn't,” I said. “You never mentioned the Holocaust. And you didn't mention that the person I didn't pick was going to die. This is not a good game, Bart."

  "Oh,” Bart said. “Yeah, I added that myself. The moral of the story is, you shouldn't trust people just because they're vegetarians. You should thank me, you learn stuff from me."

  "I'm not thanking you. You made me kill Churchill,” I said, and I stepped on the back of his shoe. He tripped and we both laughed.

  Bart's favorite games were either/ors, would you rathers. We started out as friends because I was already ready to choose, always ready to be wrong or not.

  * * * *

  Fashion. The rich kids at this school were frightening because they didn't wear preppy Lacoste or skanky Juicy Couture or the other things you might expect from rich kids at boarding school. This year they liked wearing Comme des Gar?ons, boys and girls both with red unguent smeared underneath their eyes like cannibalistic football players, their coats draped into severe black bubbles with hems that hovered above their ankles, both dense and buoyant.

  If you took a walk through the school grounds, the trees were so bare and skimpy in winter that you felt as though you could see through the entire forest to the end, as though the forest was an X-Ray pinned up against a light. This was of course not true. The forest was impenetrable. But you could catch glimpses of the rich kids walking around in groups, their hands folded nun-like underneath their stark couture.

  This was a school where the cheerleaders wore those gold Balenciaga robo-leggings armored with sharp-edged scales, as part of their uniforms, although that was a season or two ago. Periodically, the cheerleaders burned their out-of-style uniforms in a great bonfire, the thousands of dollars in couture flaming up into the sky at night. I asked them why they wouldn't just give the things away, instead of burning them. They said, who would wear such things? The cheerleaders said, we believe in art, not commerce. That is why we wear such things. Why would you wear them?

  When I came back to my dorm room, I tried on my roommate Jillian's Ann Demeulemeester jacket, just to see what it felt like. My clothes came from the mall. My clothes signaled only pain and ill-gotten labor, with their crooked stitching and their rubbed-out look, like degenerate copies of copies, while Jillian's jacket promoted clean-burning energy, the future, high-minded values of that kind. I ran my hands over the sleeves.

  Someone had planned this jacket, someone had hallucinated how this jacket would be draped over a dummy that was only an approximation of the true human form in an alien museum fifty thousand years in the future, and they had created a jacket that would stand up to such scrutiny. There was something wrong with wearing and worshipping clothes like these, but I could only think blurry thoughts. The jacket was hypnotizing me, and I began to sway from side to side, staring at myself in Jillian's full-length mirror.

  But then Jillian came in all of a sudden and I just stood there, unsure of what to do. Jillian looked embarrassed too. She stared somewhere off to the side, with her teeth clenched and her face red, and she said, “Please take that off."

  Jillian took the jacket from me and threw it on her desk chair.

  "No offense,” she said. She took a deep breath and tried to smile at me.

  * * * *

  Girl talk boy talk. Jillian was a vampire, much prettier than me in a large-foreheaded, neotenic sort of way. Her eyes were somewhat too far apart. When we went swimming in the school pool and her fine hair plastered against her head, I could easily imagine her drifting off in a sac of amber amniotic fluid. Although Jillian didn't like it when I touched her clothing, she was usually nice to me.

  "Go on,” she said. “Why don't you talk to him?"

  I shook my head. Sam wouldn't even know what I was saying. It would be pointless.

  "That's why you should do it. There's no pressure involved."

  Jillian had a point there. I stood in line, waiting to feel braver. I watched the work-study kids serve watery mashed potatoes and stiff pancakes of beef and wipe off tables, the kids who had been slumped in my classes all cockeyed and weary just a few hours ago.

  Sam had long eyelashes, the kind that people always seemed mad about because they should belong to girls, but that was wrong—his eyelashes contrasted deliciously with his heavy eyebrows and big nose. But it was difficult to be completely nervous about Sam. You could say anything to him and it wouldn't matter.

  I stood in line and waited. When it was my turn, I leaned over the sneezeguards as far as I could and whispered to Sam. The countertop dug into my palms.

  "I didn't know if you've noticed me looking at you, because people like you aren't supposed to notice people like me,” I said. “I know it's not mean or anything, I just don't register to people that way. Do I? Sam, I like you."

  This wasn't a real conversation. Instead, I felt like I had just sent off an embarrassing email, one I wished I could take back. You don't usually get to talk in whole paragraphs to the boy you like.

  Sam raised his head, his mouth hanging open. Metal tongs dangled from his hand, steam rising off the ends. His hairnet made him look even better. You could see more of him that way.

  He said, “I walked through the door only to find that the windowpanes were alive but the people were flat stacks. Later at the supermarket the gummy bears writhed briefly in my mouth before expiring. By the time I read this, I'll have forgotten everything."

  My knees buckled. Jillian nudged me with her tray, and I backed away from the counter.

  "Next in line,” said Sam.

  "That was good,” Jillian said to me. “You need to let the guy know how you feel, in any case. It doesn't matter if you couldn't penetrate his dreams. You tried your best."

  She chattered on, unaware that I was glaring at her. My heart floated dry and light, very slowly, to the bottom of my chest cavity.

  * * * *

  Monstering. The Night School students began to exert major peer pressure on me, but I couldn't tell what they wanted me to do. They didn't want me to smoke pot, have sex, drive drunk, eat opium, lie to my parents, be gay, be Wiccan, be Muslim, be fundamentalist Christian with a literal interpretation of the Bible, be downloading music illegally, be having bad grades, be pierced. They wanted something else from me. The night class was populated with monsters, with vampire rich kids and work-study kids whose every exhausted word foretold the future. Then there was Bart, who was something else altogether. I think that they wanted me to be something too. I would say things like, it's really cold outside, or that the fettuccine tasted funny, and they would repeat what I had said like, “Oooooh, it's REALLY cold OUTSIDE” putting the emphasis in funny places.

  There is a strange British slang term: to monster. Monstering. Monsterer? It means to hassle or harangue someone, to pester them. I knew that the Night kids didn't exactly dislike me, but they were monstering me. Of this I was certain. And there was another secret meaning to monstering that my body was beginning to discover. I had already been through puberty. This was something else.

  * * * *

  Our surveillance. Useless to watch the skies, to cringe underneath the imagined impact of dust and light and white heat, like a giant's palm hovering over us. We used the internet instead. The more skilled of us had feed readers and subscribed to weekly newsletters and Googled painstakingly for hours every night. We tracked the arcs of imagined missile pathways, and all of them led back to us. Back to this school, this country. I thought about living conditions. Lots of times I thought about buying jugs of water and putting one poisonous drop of bleach in them to keep the water fresh, but then I just got overw
helmed by the effort involved—riding the school shuttle to town. Spending money on water, of all the stupid things. Lugging it into my room. Everyone laughing at me, even though I'm sure they'd have no problem drinking my water when the rain turned green and sludgy.

  My friend Magda was a boring person. When Magda talked, you could tell everyone was politely writhing to be somewhere else, to escape from the dreary land she constructed relentlessly bit by bit, simply by speaking. She was a boring person, but she was a freaking master of the internet. If you saw her fascinating blog, her withering comments in various forums and blogs all over the place, you would know that there was a lurking octopus underneath, huge-brained and toothy and sharp, ghostly tendrils poking out everywhere. You would know that her embodied, lived life was of little importance to her. But we watched what we said around her. If you said something stupid, thousands of people would know. The incident would be neatly re-made and re-written in that special Magda way, and you would want to die.

  Magda liked me because I never seemed bored by her. I am an impassive person, even though I don't try to be.

  Once Jillian said, “Let's see who can make the most wrinkles,” and we went around the dinner table trying to scrunch our faces as much as possible, creating tributaries and meeting points between every bit of skin.

  "Your face doesn't wrinkle,” Bart said to me. And it didn't. I tried and tried and all I could produce were dents, places between my eyes and on my cheeks where the skin couldn't help but fold. Everyone at the table was quiet.

  "You have a lot of subcutaneous fat,” said Jillian. “Not in a bad way."

  That's why Magda liked me. She didn't know it, but what she actually liked was that subcutaneous fat, and how it shielded my true face like a friendly, innocent mask. Magda thought we understood each other, so she told me her secret. She leaned over and whispered to me in the library, when we were supposed to be practicing traditional research skills.

  "Not everyone's going to die,” said Magda.