Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Cruel Ship’s Captain

  Harvey Welles and Philip Raines

  Reasoning about the Body

  Ted Chiang

  Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever

  Patty Houston

  Sleep

  Carlea Holl-Jensen

  Three Poems by Lindsay Vella

  The Way to the Sea

  Spit Out the Seeds

  Thirst

  The Other Realms Were Built With Trash

  Rahul Kanakia

  Alice: a Fantasia

  Veronica Schanoes

  Dueling Trilogies

  Darrell Schweitzer

  Absence of Water

  Sean Melican

  The Seamstress

  Lindsay Vella

  Three Hats

  Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

  Poor summer, she doesn’t know she’s dying.

  Lindsay Vella

  Death’s Shed

  J. M. McDermott

  Dear Aunt Gwenda: Dangers of Hibernation Edition

  Gwenda Bond

  About These Authors

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  December 2010 · Issue 26

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

  Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques. Extra thanks: Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison.

  Cover: Sarah Goldstein, “Broken Stick.” Year: 2004. Size: 11” x 10.” Materials: acrylic medium, gouache on paper.

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.26, December 2010. ISSN 1544-7782. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · [email protected] · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw

  Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 17 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. Electronic edition displayed on your fresh and shiny pixels.

  These days we’re always behind in our reading, sorry. Thanks to the writers for their patience—especially Darrell, whose misplaced poems took five years to reach print(!), Sean, and Phil & Harvey (whose stories took two or three years). Down below there are some books we’re working on for 2011. Not all of those covers are final. There are a few books missing and then there is a chapbook—the last, we expect, for a while—by Hal Duncan, An A-Z of the Fantastic City, which we hope to publish in spring.

  As always, thanks for reading.

  The Cruel Ship’s Captain

  Harvey Welles and Philip Raines

  He was called the Cruel Ship’s Captain, though the tales were too slippery to be exact on what that told. In portside sinks, sailors muttered into their pints of the cruel captain of a ship, while in the becalmed days of a long voyage, bored passengers fantasized about the captain of a cruel ship. But now, brought before the beau-nasty himself on the deck of his awful vessel, Settle could see that while the tales forked in the telling, they knotted in the truth, and the knot pressed into her throat like the invisible rope of her all-but-certain fate.

  The Cruel Captain prowled the foc’stle deck, round and round the fore topmast like a chained holiday bear, frothing the air with spittle and glee. Bedizened like the devil’s dandy, he wore the articles of his faith: a purple frock coat off some frenchee admiral, a high guardsman hat with a dinner-plate shine and Good Queen Meg’s insignia kiss, the long silver-buckled boots of a Londinium salon king, all raggedy and sprayed with the violence of their getting. His face was hazed with hairy straggle and a filigree branding of the skin whose marks were lost through the distance. And his eyes—to Settle, his eyes were pits and suns, alternating in her vision between inescapable midwinters and June dazzlers. Before such an impudent gaze, she should have stepped back and swooned with the propriety of a woman of her station—had there been the room for such graces, had she been foolhardy enough to display a station, had they known she was a woman.

  The Cruel Captain only wanted one thing. “Yer ships,” he slurred and growled, drunk and furious. “Ye’re all for Hell now and I want my fleet of the damned. Ye can join us on devil seas or ye can swim back to Heaven and suck the lamb’s cock for forgiveness.”

  The Cruel Ship showered the company with her own foul gob. The oak-carved figurehead tried to twist off her bowsprit spine, a right arch doxy with her face painted ruby-lipped and deathmask, her hair, autumn leaves tumbling gold into winter, her exposed bosom, pink petals in early snow. Furious at her fixture to the boat’s forward cut, she mad-tommed the rest of the crew put together. And her eyes were as flat and lifeless as the engraved Jesus in a flotsam bible.

  “Don’t sauce the geesers!” she screeched. “Don’t fedaddle with cooking and dinner manners and the like. Tear it out of them! Tear the ships from their geeser souls raw!”

  The Cruel Captain joined his Ship on a high-pitched note of pure fury, the cry of wild things escaping from paradise together. Then he explained, “Right, now let’s see if ye’re the souls or the scraps.”

  But they should all have been souls. That was why Settle had set out on The Righteous Dream in the first place: to become souled, to return home shipped. The Minister of her home in Spithampton, Long Preston, had organised the voyage on behalf of a Crown charity dedicated to those who had come into maturity without their ships revealing themselves—for youngsters like Apple and Settle, old enough for parents to begin to worry about them, and for those like Doctor Wendell who had hid unshipped all their lives for reasons too private to divulge. The open sea was said to call out ships. As of yesterday, four had already manifested themselves aboard the Dream. Settle remembered the celebrations as the newly-shipped swam out to the fresh vessels, taking the tills while Long Preston roused the passengers in hymns. But all such memories had been overwhelmed by the sight of the Cruel Ship as it had relentlessly borne down on them during the six-hour chase.

  “Fiendishness!” bellowed Long Preston. “Cursed man—do you think you can seize a man’s ships like Jahweh at the Judgement?”

  The Minister was the only survivor of the Dream who did not press back behind the other captives. When the Cruel Ship’s sailors had seized the women and thrown them overboard, without pause for the plainly pregnant lasses, Long Preston had fought like the old lion he was in the pulpit, but had been cast back into the kirk of his fellow passengers. Still, he stepped forward again, his white beard electrified in an invisible storm, an accusing finger so bony that it could have been skinned.

  But the Cruel Captain laughed and he spat, and where the spit landed, the nearest crew-member, a scrawny duke of limbs, took up the laughter, “Yer Captain is yer Jahweh now,” he pronounced and with demon strength wrestled Long Preston over the edge of the boat.

  The crew guffawed, raised their pistols and waited. Settle pressed deeper into the others. Applethwaite, who had pledged his protection, shielded her from sweeps of the Cruel Captain’s gaze. “Apple,” Settle began, but her lips were fossilized with fear. Her lips, but not her bowels, which pissed in a warm burst, or her legs, which vibrated uncontrollably. The boy’s breeches she had thrown on as the fighting raged on the Dream’s deck were da
rk enough to hide the stains, just as the scarf bound tight around her chest hid her budding womanhood. The boys and men around her—the sailors and passengers, now the Cruel Captain’s chattel—did not see through her mummer, or at least, could not see beyond their own terror.

  Only her dear Apple could see her, just as he saw her heart a half-mooned night barely two days ago when they had pledged themselves. “Stay close, Settle sweet,” her barely-manned boy whispered as steadily as he could. “I will hold you up.”

  The Cruel Ship’s crew penned them into a sheep ring. As the afternoon unsheathed and the smoke and flame of The Righteous Dream receded into the night, Settle stared at the bloated head of the Dream’s captain, spiked like a prize to one of the masts, until she found her own keel, a will to live.

  The Cruel Captain wanted ships. He could not take the ships of those whose lives had already set sail, the sailors of the Dream whose ships had already been fathomed from childhood. He craved unshipped men—but how to tag the shipless passenger from the brined sailor? Both had foreseen the fate of those taken by the Cruel Ship and had time to jumble their rags as the Dream gurgled its last. Passenger and crew were a single tribe now.

  The Cruel Captain bided. One by one, the captives lost to sleep, one by one, their bodies sagged and curled onto the deck. As sleep churned their dreaming, the Cruel Captain’s men scanned the dark fan of the ship’s wake. If it was a sailor, one of the shipped, it appeared, out there—a boat, faint in the muslin-light of the clouded sky. A schooner, or a fine frigate in miniature, or a rough sculler. The jack tars pointed and laughed, joking about the ship-shape and vigour of each, then dragged out the sleeping sailor and gave him to the sea. But if it was a passenger or one of the powder monkeys, the unshipped, the boats still docked in their dreams and the Cruel Ship’s backwash lay undisturbed. Their bodies were pulled from the mass, leg-ironed, but led away in safety.

  Settle would not sleep. She was unshipped as yet, but all through the Dream’s journey, she had felt its immanence. What if tonight was the night, what if her ship chose to slip her lethe now? Her adolescence was cusped, her blood had started in flow over a year ago. Shipness came to most when the jibs of adulthood were set. Surely it must be soon.

  She clasped her Apple and he provided her a trunk in his arm, the breeze through the leaves in his soft prayers. She would not drift. Passengers and sailors made pacts and fell asleep together to confuse the Cruel Captain’s men, but they were prodded awake in turn until a ghost ship faded and the ‘souls’ could be divined from the ‘scraps.’

  Settle urged herself through the long night, the cold ache of the dawn, the slow blister towards noonday. She pinched Applethwaite awake, she caught Doctor Wendell when he fainted dead, and into the second night, as the crew heaved dark matter from the hold overboard and the water beneath boiled with frenzied gulls, Settle denied herself thoughts of home, holding back memories of Father’s chanteys and the coze of Spithampton’s familiar quays as those around her surrendered. But she was only a girl and her strength was a cup not a pint. She pitched, Apple’s hands and his urgent “Settle!” tried to hold her. And she dreamt—

  —of open seas on a calm night. Not a ship, not a wink, and she sighed to herself, relieved, and she cringed, disappointed that it was still not yet. Nothing but horizon, though great things moved below the shallow ripples.

  When she woke, a face, a boiled chestnut pierced at each ear with a wine cork and framed by hedgehog chops, leered at her. “Well, here’s a lucky little one,” he said. “A fine prentice—not lumber.”

  Settle was slapped in irons and taken away, no longer branded captive but marked for crew.

  Of the nineteen passengers of the Dream, only six others survived to indenture. Pale Dr. Wendell, in a constant twitter since the disaster, three deranged Wessex boys who were latterly pretending to be brothers despite being strangers all through the Dream’s voyage, a man whose wits refused to shine through a fixed expression—and her Apple. Taken aft, they were ironed to a length of rack in the grain storage, which they shared with rat skitter and the suck of the waterline beyond the hull. But they were given a sip of water, a hack of bread and a promise that one day they would have a bunk and a share of the revelry—as soon as they offered their ships to the Cruel Captain.

  “Apple, if they discover—”

  “They will not, my Settle.”

  In private at last, he could smudge Settle’s cheeks with ship grime, button high her canvas shirt, check her roughly-chopped locks. He nestled close as the others slept. “I gave you my oath as we crossed the equator and I will keep it under southern stars, northern stars, any constellation you can imagine.”

  But shortly after first light, they were separated. A party of sailors rattled their pistols against the rack and chains and ahoy-ed the prentices awake. “First day of schooling,” the oldest said. Settle recognised the tug of a man with judge’s whiskers from the ordeal on deck. “No red carpet in the Academy, but ye’re welcome all the same.”

  Settle was taken by the Judge, her Apple, Dr Wendell and the Wessex brothers by the other sailors, while the dazed man was left behind. The Judge exchanged looks with another sailor, and they agreed with barely a nod. Settle never saw the unwitted man again.

  The Judge guided her through the bowels of the Cruel Ship, jerking the chain to remind her of his meanness, but prattering easily about his arthritis and the cook’s little jokes with rat’s turds. Settle had to twist her ears to hear through the accents, both the Judge’s own gutter growl and the Ship’s creaks and belches. The boat had more belly than she would have sworn from the speed with which it ran down the Dream. Close to the deck, the crew slept in bunks ranked tighter than steerage in a colony ship. The stench was dizzying, speaking of decades, not just years of confinement, but Settle checked her refined instincts. Below the common layers of the Ship, Settle could see further circles descending into the hellish darknesses below, pulsing with unexplained sighs and moans.

  The Judge took her along the ship’s hull, throbbing with the pressure of the sea above, and issued her with a mop and a bucket. “Give the old girl a Queen Meg ha’penny.” Settle was frightened to ask what he meant, but the Judge quickly added, “There’s a proper wash and shave.”

  The skin of the hull was slick with a clear oil. It was not condensate, but an ooze that coated the tough bristles sprouting out of wood rashed by ancient termites. The lanternlight pearled the drops that clung to the tips.

  Settle understood. She swabbed the surface, drained the excess from the mop into the bucket where it thickened into a murky yellow paste. Using shears, the Judge shaved the hull, cutting the hair close to the wood. Each tendril snapped like a firecracker.

  They worked their way down one end of the Ship. After a few hours and what she hoped was a companionable silence, Settle asked as gruffly as she could muster, “What about food and drink?”

  She held her breath at her daring, but in two days, all she had eaten was a few bites of stony bread. The Judge picked up two bristles from the floor, gave one to Settle and chewed the other like tobacco. “Best soften her in the gob first,” he said, “before washing her down.”

  “With what?” Settle looked around for a flask.

  The Judge tapped the bucket with his dirty bare foot. “But sip her first. If grog and crank fucked for a month, ye’d still never get juice with more blow.”

  They harvested a bag of bristles and three buckets of brew while the Judge whistled skeleton jigs and execution songs. After they slopped the lot to the cook, the Judge gave Settle a tour of the forward head and a sponge to keep. Hidden at last, she relieved herself. She could remember who she was and let the tears at the loss of the Dream and horror at the Judge’s manners and dread at her plight surge on a spring tide of feeling. She gripped the splinters of the door frame, feeling the canter of the Cruel Ship, praying that she did not have to go back out, that she could stay here with the ship’s motion forever.

  But the Cap
tain’s voice snaked through the mass of boat to find her. Hunt that wind, ye darling wretches, hunt it and hump it and trap its roar. Take us off the charts. Find us something amazing in the dried-up shit fens of this world. And any slack and ye’ll be skinned and sugared in salt!

  So Settle gripped her will and came forth and allowed herself to be taken back to the secure store.

  That night, she and Applethwaite separated themselves from the others—the Wessex boys huddled in their own speak while Dr Wendell tried to ingratiate himself with the cook’s monkeys through the slats of the door. Apple had spent his day labouring to move the Dream’s seized cannon as the armourer determined which of the Cruel Ship’s guns were in need of replacement.

  “Our supervisor had not been a sailor—he let slip that he was once a Rutland farmhand,” he explained. “A passenger like us. Unshipped.”

  “I do not understand, Apple. What happened to him? What will happen to us?”

  “These questions come too soon, my sweet Settle. All I can say is that the Captain is recruiting.”

  “Then what is he recruiting for?”

  But there was no one to tell them and they were tired to their marrows. She fell asleep listening for something that would tell her, but all she could hear was the figurehead wailing drunkenly, calling for the Captain to poke her in a flyer, cursing the winds for teasing and not mounting her, a dementia that faded as Settle returned again to the open sea of her dreams.

  Her dreams disconcerted her. Still no whisper of her ship, only grand creatures close to the surface that refused to reveal themselves. Why were her reveries not of the Dream? That happy voyage—why not go back to the long afternoons of lazily-ravelled passenger bonhomie, evening lessons boomed by Long Preston over dinner, twilight choruses of sailors hailing the sun on her loop about the planet? The Dream’s survivors would not discuss it, nor even acknowledge each other—a blessing given Settle’s disguise, but one that emptied her of any comfort other than Apple’s embrace.

  So she placed another life away in the Dream while she mopped and trimmed for the crew’s meals. A life where their passage was never crossed by the Cruel Ship, where they followed the equator until, one by one, all the passengers were found by their own ships. She dreamt of them all returning through the Londinium Flats, a flotilla of manifest destinies, and Father and Apple’s uncle and step-aunt waiting at the docks as she and her newly-beloved announced their news. And she dreamt further, hers and Apple’s ships joined on the sea—maybe as a fishery, perhaps as an inland cruiser, and sometimes, when her urges were more dashing, a smuggler or a spy for the Crown—