The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Read online

  Three streets away a horse bucked off its rider¸ and the woman looked up and smiled at the clattering of horseshoes, the snorting of panic, the cry of a man fallen into the street. The horse ran down the alley where the Jenny and the woman stood, its great wet eyes rolling, nostrils flared, mane twisted. It stamped its hooves when it saw them. It took a tentative step, considering, and then reared up and pivoted, galloping away.

  The woman laughed. On her fingers she wore black pearls. Her nails were ragged and untrimmed, long and pointed. Her gums were a dark blue that was nearly silver, but her teeth were very white.

  They entered a final alley, and made their way down it, beneath a wooden sign painted with the words Morita's Curiosities, and a carving of a mermaid, smiling. In each of her hands was a crushed and broken ship, and her tail was scaled with chips of bone.

  The woman in black tossed back her hair. On her throat, just below the ear, there were three slashes in the flesh, pale and bloodless, opening and closing as she breathed. She unlocked the door, and brought the Jenny into a lit room stuffed full of things, each one of them strange. Some of them had been sold as scraps, and some had cost much more. The Jenny did not notice. She feigned death and in feigning death, she slept.

  The woman placed the Jenny gently on a shelf. Collected. There were other things around her. A starfish with eleven arms, each one of them bent in a different direction, and moving slowly, signing to itself in a language indecipherable to anything else. A glass fishing float containing something small and desperate, a gusting puff of smoke which sometimes resolved into a screaming face. In a birdcage made of bones, a flying fish spun on its perch. And here, a color-shifting octopus, stretching tentacles out of its tank, grasping a pen and writing on a notepaper, long lines of verse and song telling of its plight. A complicated rope knot which stretched and untwisted itself, resolving into a pair of lovers, who tied each other into new knots, and then frayed. One lover strangled the other, and then they reversed, tied together forever by the rope that made them and bound them. Here was a book bound in a murdered sailor's skin, his hide covered in tattoos, each one of them of a beautiful woman, and each woman looking out from where she'd been placed, blowing kisses and curses silently into the room. Here was a pearl large as an ostrich egg, made by some oyster large enough to consume a whale. The pearl glowed with its own secret light. It shook and chattered, something inside it waiting to be birthed.

  And then there was the ship in the bottle. When the Jenny opened her eyes and saw it in the early light, it was as though she had never seen anything before. Her gaze fixed on it, and from that moment on, it was all she could see. Inside the bottle was a tiny freighter, a ship with eight black sails. The Jenny gazed at it across the room, large as herself, perfect in its details, the rigging fine as spider's webs, the sails stretched and hoisted, each rope knotted perfectly, each plank like something cut from a true tree. The ship had portals and cabins, a captain's quarters, and in it, a mahogany writing desk, a table set for dining. A lamp glowed from the table. A hat with an ostrich plume hung from a peg. The ship had a tiny cat and tiny rats the size of needle's eyes. On its mast was a skull, small as a mouse's skull, but it had never belonged to a mouse.

  The woman opened the door, then, and the customers entered, tourists and scientists, opera singers and sailors, captains and doctors, momentarily passing through the port town, looking to see the sights, and perhaps take home a strange thing or two, a gift from the sea or a curse. The prices were sometimes astronomically high, and sometimes, the woman gave someone something for nothing.

  A beautiful coral-centered shell, that when held to the ear of its new owner, a man with spectacles and a tightly pinched expression, whispered stories so erotic, so slippery and hungry that the man could not let the shell go, even as he placed his ring finger gently into its sleek pink interior, even as something, a small and rapacious something, put fangs into his flesh. A tiny chest filled with dark powder that flitted upward like piranha, fascinating the buyer, but also leaving tiny flecks of blood on his cheeks. A luminous seahorse, prancing in its vessel, twirling giddyingly fast around inside it. An hourglass filled with black sand from the very coldest bottom of the sea. And where these objects went, they changed things. A town sank into itself, like sand through that hourglass, slipping beneath the earth suddenly, as though it had never been. Another town suffered a whirlwind, which destroyed every building, and still another, the one that had taken the chest filled with powder, found itself, elders and children and all, walking breathless to the edge of the ocean. One by one, the entire village dove into the waves.

  The shelves were replenished nightly, the woman in black going out into the port and seeking the things that called to her. Rich and strange. She had an unerring sense of the locations of the sea-changed.

  For days, the Jenny gazed from her jar across the room, full of desire. The ship was a thing like herself, a curiosity, made by someone as a toy, folded, collapsed and fit into the neck of its bottle. Black sails. A crow's nest. A plank, stretching out over a nothing sea.

  Perhaps it had been made by a sailor, squinting through a glass, tweezing and carving, mouse into man, or perhaps it had not. She'd seen things on the bottom of the ocean, things like this, but writ large. Perhaps it had been forced into miniature, crushed into its bottle, a vessel for a thing like the Jenny. There was the vessel's name, painted across the bow, beneath its many guns, the Sunken Scream, and there was its figurehead, though the Jenny could not quite see what sort of woman was depicted in the carving.

  No customer desired the Jenny, and she did not desire them. They looked at her, and wrinkled their noses, reading the label pasted to her jar, which read “A Mer-Maiden.” None of them thought she was that. They spoke to her through the glass, and she looked at them. They did not know to what they were speaking.

  She hissed and stretched inside her jar, her tail whipping, her mouth open, looking for the right one, the one who would save her, and there, at last, one day: a little girl, bonnet, silk flowers, spring-coiled locks like the spring-coiled tail of the Jenny, jam-smeared fingers against the Jenny's jar. The little girl's father bargained with the woman in black for possession of a certain sack of sand, something that might be poured out onto the floor and resolve itself into a map of treasures, albeit treasures crushed beneath the weight of the world's water. The father desired fortune, and a quick revelation. He'd forgotten he had children.

  And there, the little girl, face against the glass. Her blue eyes opened into orange eyes and she looked at the Jenny. Her brother tugged at her hand, his breeches already damp, ruffles sodden, and he let loose a wail of misery, but the little girl had already spun on her heel, and was across the room, her hands on the bottled ship before anyone could stop her. With that, she brought it down from the shelf, and with one more desperate glance at her father, still bargaining, at her brother still wailing, she'd smashed the bottle on the floor.

  And the ship was out, there on her own beach of glittering glass, a freighter with her eight ink black sails, a she of the sea. A small breeze came questing through the room, swelling those sails, and on the mast, the skull that was not a mouse's skull opened its jaw and whispered. The little boy shrieked, stricken by sugar and by smashing, and his salt tears fell onto the floorboards.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  On the ship they fell, one-two-three, and from her jar, the Jenny watched, her tail whipping, her fingers spread wide, her toes pointed. She stretched her tattered wings, and swam up through the alcohol, up and toward the lantern light. The boy made a gurgling sound. The father was no longer in the room. Onetwothree and the girl drifted past the jar, petticoats filled, hands spread starfish, mouth open, rosebud lips, eyes wide with shock.

  Onetwothree. And now the little girl's lips were blue. The black freighter grew.

  The shopkeeper, with her necklace made of shark's teeth, smiled as the newborn sea took her, and the
teeth about her throat smiled too, sharper and keener, and what had been dead became live. Only her face was visible now, her eyes closed and rapturous, and there was the shadow of her body, pliant inside the body of the thing that became her, fins and tail, gills and eyes, silver as a shined service.

  A gun aimed from the bow of the ship, slowly pointing at the Jenny in her jar, and she pressed herself against the glass, and when it shot, when her jar shattered, she was not wounded, no. She was free. Her wings stretched, rolling over her shoulders. Her eyes, darker orange than ever, wide open and lidless, and she undulated, free from her prison at last, taking her time descending, still above the floor, still on her shelf as the alcohol poured off its edge. The Jenny looked at her ship.

  Outside a clock struck noon, twelve chimes, and with each chime, the freighter grew, and with each chime, the sea washed over the floorboards, an amniotic liquid that fed the things it touched. The water filled with scrimshaw and starfish, with a hatching pearl, cracking slowly in the wet, something emerging. With each chime, the flag rose up the mast.

  The windowpanes on the shop burst, one by one, pushed out by water, and then the water was too much, and the walls began to bulge outward and into the street, bending like steamed planks. The Jenny swam into her ship, up the plank, and as she did, Morita's Curiousities burst.

  The newborn ocean spilled forth across the cobbles, and flooded through every alleyway. In the Jenny's ship, her growing ship, the Jenny's flag was raised up the mast, higher and higher, black and crossboned.

  The ocean swept over the buildings of the town, and across the decks of the ships docked in the port, and there was the Jenny, her tattered wings spread wide, the blonde hair that had been glued to her scalp stripped off, the pink ribbon floating in a pool of foam-flecked seawater, left behind in a broken town.

  The Jenny stood on the deck, surrounded by her crew of pirates, of sea robbers, and they brought the drowned for her inspection, piled up and very dead. No one would sleep in the town that night, nor any other, because the town was gone, and with it all its people and dogs and little girls and spice merchants and needlepoints and sailors with knives.

  As the Sunken Scream and her new captain floated over the last street, and over the coastline, as they floated over the place where the color of the sea changed from blue to black, there was a cheer up from the deep. All around the ship swum strangenesses from the shop, each thing larger than it had been, a nacreous white whale still shaking off the shards of its pearl, a steely shark, tail ticking like a pendulum, two lovers made of rope twisting themselves up into the rigging, fingers braided together, each creature curious and calling to its crew. Things that had never been, but were now. Hoaxes and horrors and glories and angels and monsters that had never been thought of before. Fireworks came off the deck, lighting up the sky with exploding stars, and out there, in the sea, the things that had always been swam up to look. On deck, the pirates sang a shanty, and the freighter sang too.

  The freighter went out to sea, and aboard it was the Jenny, on a black and surging wall of water, a surging will of water, a singing wail of water.

  The Jenny went out to sea and into the sunset, and on the mast of her ship, the skull opened its mouth and joined the song. They sang together, all these things, the Jenny and her pirates, the whale and the shark, the octopus and the starfish, the fireworks and the knives, a song of all the world's wetness, all the world's salt, all the world's deep-drowned bones and treasures.

  Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream

  In the middle of the maze, there's always a monster.

  If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it's warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure.

  So. In the middle of the maze, there is a monster made of everything forgotten, everything flung aside, everything kept secret. That's one thing to know. The other thing to know is that it is always harder to get out than it is to get in. That should be obvious. It's true of love as well.

  In the history of labyrinths and of monsters, no set of lovers has ever turned back because the path looked too dark, or because they knew that monsters are always worse than expected. Monsters are always angry. They are always scared. They are always kept on short rations. They always want honey.

  Lovers, for their part, are always immortal. They forget about the monster.

  The monster doesn't forget about them. Monsters remember everything. So, in the middle of the maze, there is a monster living on memory. Know that, if you know nothing else. Know that going in.

  ***

  They meet at someone else's celebration, wedding upstate, Japanese paper lanterns, sparklers for each guest, gin plus tonic. They see each other across the dance floor. They each consider the marzipan flowers of the wedding cake and decide not to eat them.

  Notes on an eclipse: Her blue cotton dress, transparent in the sunlight at the end of the dock, as she wonders about jumping into the water and swimming away. His button-down shirt, and the way the pocket is torn by his pen. Her shining hair, curled around her fingers. His arms and the veins in them, traceable from fifty feet.

  They resist as long as it is possible to resist, but it is only half dark when the sparklers are lit, from possibly dry-cleaned matches he finds in his pocket. She looks up at him and the air bursts into flame between them.

  They are each with someone else, but the other two people in this four-person equation are not at this wedding. They know nothing.

  Yet.

  In the shadow of a chestnut tree, confetti in her cleavage, party favors in his pockets, they find themselves falling madly, falling utterly, falling without the use of words, into one another's arms.

  Run. There is always a monster —

  No one runs. She puts her hand over her mouth and mumbles three words into her palm. She bites said hand, hard.

  “What did you say?” he asks.

  “I didn't,” she answers.

  So, this is what is meant when people say love at first sight. So this is what everyone has been talking about for seven thousand years.

  He looks at her. He shakes his head, his brow furrowed.

  They touch fingertips in the dark. Her fingerprints to his. Ridge against furrow. They fit together as though they are two parts of the same tree. He moves his hand from hers, and touches her breastbone. Her heart beats against his fingers.

  “What are you?” he asks.

  “What are you?” she replies, and her heart pounds so hard that the Japanese lanterns jostle and the moths sucking light there complain and reshuffle their wings.

  They lean into each other, his hands moving first on her shoulders, and then on her waist, and then, rumpling the blue dress, shifting the hem upward, onto her thighs. Her mouth opens onto his mouth, and —

  Then it's done. It doesn't take any work to make it magic. It doesn't even take any magic to make it magic.

  Sometime soon after, he carries her to the bed in his hotel room. In the morning, though she does not notice it now, the hooks that fasten her bra will be bent over backward. The black lace of her underwear will be torn.

  This is what falling in love looks like. It is birds and wings and voodoo dolls pricking their fingers as they sing of desire. It is blood bond and flooded street and champagne and O, holy night.

  It is Happily Ever.

  ***

  Give it a minute. Soon it will be After.

  ***

  So, say her man's a magician. Say that when he enters a forest, trees stand up and run away from their leaves, jeering at their bonfired dead. Say that in his presence people drop over dead during the punchlines of the funniest jokes they've ever managed to get through without dying of laughing, except —

  Like that.

  So, say he knew it all along. This is one of a number of worst things itemized already from the beginning of time by magicians. This falls into the category of W
hat To Do When Your Woman Falls In Love With Someone Who Is Something Which Is Not The Least Bit Like The Something You Are.

  The magician shuffles a deck of cards, very pissed off. The cards have altered his fingerprints. Scars from papercuts, scars from paper birds and paper flowers, from candle-heated coins, and scars from the teeth of the girls from whose mouths he pulled the category Things They Were Not Expecting.

  Turns out, no woman has ever wanted to find a surprise rabbit in her mouth.

  He finds this to be one of many failings in his wife. Her crooked nose, her dominant left hand, her incipient crow's feet. He hates crows. But she is his, and so he tries to forgive her flaws.

  His wife has woken sometimes, blinking and horrified, her mouth packed with fur. No one ever finds the rabbits. His wife looks at him suspiciously as she brushes her teeth.

  Sometimes it hasn't been rabbits. When they first met, years and years ago, she found her mouth full of a dozen roses, just as she began to eat a tasting menu at a candlelit restaurant. She choked over her oyster, and then spat out an electric red hybrid tea known as Love's Promise. By the end of evening, she was sitting before a pile of regurgitated roses, her tuxedoed magician bowing, the rest of the room applauding.

  She excused herself to the bathroom — golden faucets in the shape of swans — to pick the thorns from her tongue. And then sometime later, what did she do?

  She married him.

  The magician continues to shuffle his cards. He clubs his heart, buries said heart with his wife's many diamonds, and uses his spade to do it. Some of those diamonds are made of glass. She never knew it.

  ***

  In their hotel room, the lovers sleep an hour. He's looking at her as she opens her eyes.

  “What?” she asks.

  He puts his hand over his mouth and says three words into it. He bites down on his palm. She reaches out for him. It is morning, and they are meant to part.