The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Read online

  Table of Contents

  Seeräuber

  Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream

  Game

  Moveable Beast

  The Traditional

  The Krakatoan

  Such & Such Said to So & So

  Bit-U-Men

  The Psammophile

  What You've Been Missing

  The Tallest Doll in New York City

  Dim Sun

  What There Was to See

  The End of the Sentence (with Kat Howard)

  Taxidermist in the Underworld

  If You Were a Tiger, I'd Have to Wear White

  Who Is Your Executioner?

  And the Winners Will Be Swept Out to Sea

  The Scavenger's Nursery

  Ivory Darts, Golden Arrows

  The Cellar Dweller

  Solder and Seam

  Some Gods of El Paso

  The Thirteen Mercies

  The Virgin Played Bass

  Ledge Bants (with China Miéville)

  Mr. Doornail

  Little Widow

  See the Unseeable, Know the Unknowable

  The Thule Stowaway

  Astronaut

  Black Powder

  Memoirs of an Imaginary Country

  The Orange Tree

  Adriftica

  You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I'll Pretend Like I Never Met You

  Read After Burning

  The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

  Seeräuber

  “There are some who are in darkness

  And the others are in light

  And you see the ones in brightness

  Those in darkness drop from sight.”

  -Bertolt Brecht

  The owner of the hotel bought the Jenny from a sailor, who swore he'd found her in the water. Here she was then, a creature unlike anything the hotelier had seen before, her face pinched and wide-eyed, her mouth a thorny little pronged slash. She had wings and a whip-like tail. She was naked, and her fingers were very long and very thin and very brown. On top of her head was an incongruous plume of flowing blonde hair rather like a horse's tail. It was tied up with a piece of worse-for-the-wear pink ribbon.

  The Jenny was bottled. The Jenny was dead.

  “But not long dead,” the sailor swore. “Live when I got hold of her. We hauled her up on a line a week ago, and she sang us a song.” He was improvising, his voice the deepening voice of a taleteller.

  “A song such as they say the sirens sing, a dark and terrible thing that made all of us on the ship fill our ears with wax and still we heard it.”

  The hotelier leaned closer, seduced by strangeness.

  “She sang until she rolled her eyes and died,” the sailor concluded. Now she was for sale.

  In any port, of late, you might find sailors selling some Jenny Haniver (this was what they were called, by universal decree, and the sailor, no, could not say why) or another for spare nothings, or sometimes for gold, depending on the beauty and craftsmanship of the Jenny. Some of them were large and some were palm-sized, some were jarred and some were dry as hardtack, but all of them were dead. This Jenny was roughly the size of a ship's cat, which made for relative ease in handling. The sailor had seen a shark-sized Jenny, and that one, oh, had he acquired such a thing, that would've been much worse. They were marketed under various names. Monster or a mermaid, or a tiny dragon or angel, perhaps. An angel. That was the way to sell this. The hotelier looked as though he had a passing familiarity with religion, and thank the gods, no notion of what it was the sailor sold him.

  “Some aboard my ship thought the Jenny fell from heaven and into the ocean, seared by the sun on her way down. She would've been alabaster and gold before, if you can imagine it.”

  The sailor said this all in a half-whisper, leaning in toward his customer, who seemed hesitant, who indeed seemed as though he wasn't in the market to buy anything at all, despite his wavering purse, out in his hand. A heavy purse. And a well-wrought gold chain on his pocketwatch.

  “An angel, true, that's what they said. See her pretty wings.”

  The wings were not pretty. And would not that descent, from sky to sea, make her into a devil? Good angels didn't fall out of heaven. The sailor did not mention these unpleasantries. Land felt uncertain beneath him, and if land did not care for him, he did not care for it. He wanted most desperately to be rid of this ghastly, ghostly curiosity. He was due back at his ship, and there would be no market for such a thing there.

  It was the morning after a bad evening, a fistfight, a pummeling and then blackness. He'd meant to have spent the previous night in a small hotel, spent his purse on a pretty enough girl, spent himself on her skin. Other sailors had slept in softness, but not he. Waking today in an alley, his face oh, very near a rotunda of dog shit, his breeches wet with unknown thisandsuch, he'd discovered his arms wrapped around this Jenny, his cheek against the chill glass of her jar, his eye horribly close to hers.

  What had he given in trade for her? He did not recall, oh, but then he did. He'd arrived in the tavern with a tiny and perfect painting of his bride-to-be, her big brown eyes and a lock of her auburn hair, placed tightly in a locket and protected behind thin glass, and he'd left with this Jenny in a jar.

  At last, the price was agreed, and the gentleman before him, ruddy face, neatly clipped white beard, slightly crushed tophat, vest embroidered with wall-eyed stags, nodded. The sailor pushed the Jenny into his arms and wheeled away, whistling, jingling, going, going…

  Gone. He turned the corner and ran, not knowing why he did. The more distance put between himself and the jar, the better.

  The hotelier examined his purchase, pleased with himself. He was not, however, certain that this was what he'd meant to do. He'd left his old hotel on an errand for his wife, and now he was here, the new owner of a mermaid, a dragon, a monster, an angel, a Jenny, a Haniver. This thing, his new possession, didn't look like any Jenny he'd ever known. She had no sparkling hazel eyes, no shining hair, no flirtatious smile. This thing looked significantly less than a Jenny, and yet, somehow much more than a fish. She was a thing, and not even quite a thing. The hotelier felt queasy. He took her, nonetheless, in her large and heavy liquid-full jar, and hauled her down the street in his rolling cart.

  A little white terrier belonging to the hotel trotted alongside, and barked at the Jenny. He looked through the glass at her, his dog eyeball looking directly into her Jenny eyeball, and judged what he found there. Nothing good, the dog knew, and had known since he first saw her. Nothing the least bit good. He barked at the top of his voice, but his master only clucked at him and made his way toward home, back along the cobbles and through the alleys, all the places already marked by the dog that very morning. They'd been meant to go to the market. The dog could smell the spices they'd forgotten to buy. He tried to tug at his master's trousers, but the master walked on, dragging the wagon behind him.

  Inside the bottle, the Jenny hissed, mouth experimentally open, then filled with alcohol. Instantly drunken, she rolled in her prison, shifting slowly like a fetus in a womb, but the hotelier did not notice. He trundled her along, over cobbles, the wagon padded with straw. In the bottle, the Jenny arched backward around herself, and clasped her own toes in her fingers. They were not exactly toes. They were pointed though, as though she was a dancer. She was not. She was a Jenny, and she came from the sea.

  The dog watched her, resigned to trouble. He could see it in her eye. He could see it in her tail, whipping about like something made of spring-loaded wire. All the dog wanted was a small bone, and perhaps a crumb from his master's cruller. He did not wish to gnaw at any part of that Jenny,
but he feared he'd have to. His master had bought a devil in a glass house, and glass was breakable. Eventually, that thing would be out, and the dog would be charged with keeping her from getting up the stairs.

  Into the hotel they went, the hotelier and his Jenny. He rolled the jar across the floorboards, until it came to a halt at his wife's feet. She looked up from her needlework.

  “What is that?” she asked, her face grim as something carved and hung above a church door.

  “I've bought a sort of an angel for the check-in desk,” he replied.

  “That doesn't look like any sort of angel.”

  “Who are we to say what an angel might look like?” he said, flustered. He did not know why he had bought the Jenny. He simply did not.

  Inside the jar, the Jenny stayed still, playing dead. She was, in fact, too drunk to move. She kept her mouth slightly open, the better to taste the fluid she hung in. It tasted of turpentine and tears and thumbprints, and a little of knives. It tasted nothing like the sea. The Jenny's eyes were slit-pupiled and dirty orange. They could see in the dark. There was another set of eyes on the back of her head, hidden by the fall of blonde hair. The eyes in front could see, but they saw through glass, and everything they saw was shadowed. The Jenny's wings ached to spread.

  The hotelier flipped the Jenny jar vertical, and, deaf to his wife's protestations, heaved it up on top of the desk, between the registry and the cashbox.

  “An angel of protection,” muttered the hotelier, meeker now. The Jenny no longer looked like an angel to him, did not look the least bit protective, and he realized that he'd given that sailor his entire purse, when he'd meant to give him only a few coins. He'd managed somehow to buy a dried-up monkeything, when he'd been bound for the spice market and a few pinches of Ceylonese cinnamon.

  He looked at the Jenny for a moment. Her eyes and fists had been open, he was certain, but now they were closed.

  The hotelier's wife struggled to her feet, sighing. This vest was embroidered with fish, and something had gone awry in their faces, some miscounting. All their jaws were wrong, packed with too many teeth, and now she would have to pluck her stitches out. No cinnamon. No cruller. No comfort, and didn't she deserve comfort? She'd been at the laundry all morning, and making up the beds, and scrubbing something foul from off the floorboards, certainly not blood, given the generous coin the room's occupant had left on the bed for her silence.

  She looked irritably at her husband, who'd grown too portly for the vest she'd made him, the one with the stags that had taken months to needlepoint. He'd popped a button, just as she'd known he would. A segment of white-shirted belly showed, there, like a deer's arse between dark pines, and the sight of it filled her with the futility of embroidery. Nothing could cover the ugly things in the world. They would find a way to show.

  The hotelier's wife gazed at the Jenny, and as she did, she discovered a floating urgency, a thought drifting out of the wet quiet at the back of her mind: yes, there it was. She wanted to stab her husband with her stork-handled sewing scissors, right in the fat of his jowls, just below his chin.

  The dog barked at her, and she came to her senses, slowly. No, of course not. The scissors were not sharp enough. She'd hack him with a kitchen knife instead.

  The hotelier's wife looked into the jar where the Jenny floated, a sweet thing, just like a little baby. And what was a little baby doing in a jar? A baby should be dressed in white and lace and warm underthings, a baby should be booted in soft leather, those pointed toes, those slender fingers mitted, that little hungry mouth, a baby should be nursed-

  Her hand reached for the lid, and the dog nipped her ankle, sharply, letting his teeth nearly penetrate her stocking. The hotelier's wife looked down at him, kicked him in the ribs (oh, how the dog newly resented everything about this duty, this protecting, this stewarding, but it was his nature and he could not deny it) and then, bewildered, wandered up the stairs, her fingers working. The dog sat on his haunches, looking wearily at the Jenny, wishing that he could roll her out the door without breaking her jar. Into the street with her. Across the cobbles and into the harbor. Out, out, out. Dropped into the murk.

  The Jenny opened her orange eyes and regarded him evilly.

  The hotelier blew out the candles and ascended the stairs, and the Jenny hung in the dark of her unsea, alive. An egg was where she'd started. A leathern egg, dropped at the bottom of the sea, a mermaid's purse. She'd come out of the purse, a thing more valuable than coins, and swum up toward the glory of the light, wings spread, gliding. The ocean her home, and in it, others like her, flying through the heavy deep, shadowing the sand below, rippling winged creatures.

  Newborn, not yet wary, she'd been hooked on a line, gasping in the air, breathing the rasp and raw of sky, and the next day carved up with a knife, pared away until this form was all that was left. Stretched and pinched and dried and plucked at, shown off on deck by her third mate maker as a particularly fine Jenny, a fancy Jenny, a Jenny carved with a semblance of petticoats and feathers. Her mouth intact, filed into a smile. Her tail tipped with poison. The sailor had tattooed her with his name, and there it was, on her left wing, an X surrounded with a star, a symbol that meant himself to him, and to the Jenny meant something else. She took it as her own name, a birthmark. The Jenny didn't need all the flesh she'd come into the world with. The Jenny had what she needed to survive. But she, newly conscious, newly made into something other than what she'd been, dreamed of the sailor's head floating, jaw agape, and eels eating his eyes.

  At night, she lay beside him in his hammock, because he feared some other sailor would steal her and sell her. She rasped against his face, learning him, what little there was to learn. Hating him, what little there was to hate. The sailor had fallen, hadn't he? He'd tripped, ankle-snared, in a coil of rope, and the Jenny was in his hand, still as a piece of wood. He'd fallen down the ladder and into the hold, and the Jenny was there too, her sting in his thumb, last thing seen by him, orange-eyes and crackling dried-up skin. Her maker was shrouded and buried at sea, rolled off the plank, his coins on his eyes and his soul into the locker, and the Jenny fell into the possession of the captain.

  When, a few days hence, the captain shot himself suddenly in his stateroom, looking out at a calm and blue sea, the Jenny was already folded flat into his possessions and hidden amongst his shirts for the battle that lost the ship. In the sinking, listening to the booming of the cannons, the Jenny delighted, waiting for the water to take her back.

  It was not to be. She was snatched at the last moment by the ship's cook, who brought her from the vessel and into a boat, thinking to use her as emergency provisioning. After a few days of drift, his tooth marks were on her tail, but the next day, his bloated body went overboard to be fed to sharks, and the boat he'd been in was sighted by another ship and rescued. The Jenny was found and examined. A fancy Jenny to bring some profit. The rescuing vessel was pleased.

  And so, in port, the Jenny was sold and jarred by a chemist, who shortly sipped some of his own poisons, lost his mind and spent the evening wandering from bar to bar, trying to give her to anyone who'd have her. The Jenny had no particular place in mind. She'd been taken from her home, and could not return to it. Things with legs could not swim in the deep. Things with legs could not fly. What she had been was nothing she was now. She was transformed into a hoax. And yet. The hoax had made her.

  The moon lit the Jenny through the hotel window, and she spun in her jar, lazy, intoxicated, mouth open, and from it came a high and wicked sound, like a chime ringing somewhere muffled. The dog watched her, waiting for whatever horrible was coming. There would be a horrible. Anything that looked like that was made to spill.

  The door rattled, a key in the lock twitching like a scorpion's tail. The dog growled in a way he was not accustomed to. He was a welcomer. This would be a guest. And yet, his lip curled up. He felt his teeth naked and dry in the cool night air. He felt himself piss on the floorboards, a
circle of heat around a sudden frozen darkness.

  The door opened, and the guest entered. A woman, young, and dressed all in black, pinched waist on her dress, taffeta tight about her breasts and body, flared at the knees, veiled and hatpinned, and in the hat, flowers made of black silk, and a bird, stuffed and plumed, also black, though the bird had once been something golden. About her neck, there was a choker made of shark's teeth, and they shone like pearls in the dark. She signed the hotel's registry with the name Morita, a flowing and thorny hand, a watery hand, and on the floor at her feet, the dog swallowed, growling.

  The woman walked up to the jar, and placed her hands on it. She leaned in, to look closely at the Jenny, who shuddered in her bath. The sound she'd been making was done, her mouth clamped tightly shut. The Jenny's wings flared out to the sides and beat briefly against the glass.

  “There you are,” the woman said, and licked her lips. To the dog's ears, her voice was nearly unbearable. It was rough and vibrating at once, nothing like her appearance, which was pale and nearly, but not quite, pretty. The dog watched, greatly relieved, as the woman picked up the jar, and left the way she'd come, her hips swinging side to side like something ticking time. He gave a small yelp as the door shut behind the duo of awful things, and then he lay himself flat as a rug on the floor, and tried to recover from the ravenous urge he suddenly had to bite his own paws, to eat his own toes, to nip off his own tongue.

  The street was empty, and the woman moved over the cobbles, and down the alleyways, her feet in their delicate black slippers soundless, and the jar in her arms, a heavy jar, strangely balanced, seemingly light. In the jar, the Jenny struggled for the surface.

  “Quiet,” the woman said, and the Jenny sank to the bottom of the fluid, flattened, her eyes wild. The fluid sloshed back and forth, waves building inside the bottle, and the Jenny was quiet. The Jenny was still.