Authors: Kameron Hurley
Instead, she went to the door,
opened it, and stared into the hall. The marble encasing the bodies of her
family and kinsman had crumbled to the floor. Lying atop the rubble were their
inert bodies, devoid of spirit.
She started into the hallway,
walked past the empty shells, stared into one face, then another. The noise had
ceased, and only silence met her as she walked, surveying her people, saying
good-bye one last time.
Down the steps she traveled. One,
two, three flights. The lamps were still lit, and lighted her way to the oaken
gate. She pulled open the sally port and stepped out onto the drawbridge. All
three moons lit up the sky this night, the big, red moon full, the other two
mere white slivers against the night sky. She stared out across the plains,
lifted her nose to smell the wind.
A wolf howled, close.
She gazed toward the sound, toward
the top of the ridge of the valley. There they were, twenty-seven large, black,
tan and gray shapes, sitting on their haunches and gazing toward her with soft
yellow eyes. The howling started, a chorus of howling that broke the night air,
wrapped her in stillness.
They would never know why they were
drawn here, and would not think of it after they dispersed. By tomorrow, their
gathering would be nothing but a dim memory in their wolf minds.
Wolf Lady.
She started, looked again up onto
the rise of the hill. It was the male she had spoken with; the wolf who had
once been her father.
Where do you go?
he asked.
Only when he asked did she make up
her mind.
I go north.
Humans live in the north
. A
pause, maybe confusion, then,
But you are human, aren’t you, Wolf Lady? Yes,
humans should go north.
Faylle closed her eyes, felt tears
spill over.
I kept my promise.
Curiosity, then interest.
This
thing, this promise. It was important. You are my kinsman, so I hope you are
satisfied with the keeping of this thing, this promise.
I am.
Then I wish you well.
Faylle watched the wolf pack turn
away, lope off into the rolling hills and plains beyond.
With her back to the tower, Faylle
stepped onto the old plank road and began jogging back the way she had come.
I
will never see this tower again, I swear it
, she thought, and glanced back
only once. There, on the third floor of the tower, she could still see the
yellow candle glow burning from the window.
You will steal nothing from us
again
, she thought,
or anyone else. This, I promise.
Bare feet slapped smooth planks.
Cold night air felt good in her chest, blowing past her, through her tunic. On
either side, dark grass flanked her, concealed the world from view.
She closed her eyes and dreamed of
a land still soaked in magic.
Behind her, the world howled.
Now we get into unpublished
story territory (that’s really why you downloaded this collection, right?).
There are all sorts of reasons stories don’t get published. Mostly, it’s
because they’re really, really bad. Occasionally it’s because there’s just no
market for them. And every once in a while, a story is picked up and dropped
and picked up and dropped again for half a dozen other random reasons. That’s
what happened with Canticle of the Flesh, which sat on magazine editors’ desks
for years with vague updates about it getting through round one or two or three
and “maybe the next issue” and then the magazine would go defunct, or they
couldn’t afford it, or it was just “too weird.” Ultimately, everybody passed.
But you get to read it anyway! Lucky, lucky you. This was one of the most
uncomfortable stories I’ve ever written, with some of the most unlikable people
(or, what passes for people) in the universe.
The bodies you speak of, the bodies
of my first memory, are those that danced naked on the hard, black earth around
the fires our keepers allowed us. Our fires threw coals into the thick, hot
air; coals that flared and darkened and died and drifted down upon us, coating
our hands, our faces, our brown bodies, in black soot that made us darker than
the earth.
Whenever I tried to join the
dancers, the woman who called herself my mother would clutch me to her with her
claws.
“Keep here, keep here, Anish,” she
would say. The lids never closed over her bulging eyes. Her mouth was cut wide,
so wide that her face was all mouth and lips and teeth. I dream about her
still, about her devouring me whole.
She was so beautiful.
“Don’t you join that, don’t dance
that,” she would say. “You dance that and you’ll be like the rest of us. A
mistake, a burned thing. Not made, not used, just nothing.”
When the stack of synthetic logs
burned down to a fine black dust, the woman who called herself my mother
released me. I ran across the earth to join the dancers outside the covered
sleeping pens. Here, they told me the stories of their bodies.
When I think of my first conception
of a written record of the past, I think of a body called Senna who had a
burn-scarred face with burned-shut eyes. It was this body that showed us how
the sky burned when the keepers came; the rivers ran red as the ripple of welts
that ran down across the body’s throat, over the breasts, ending in a pool of
scarred flesh that was once the navel. Senna went mad before the keepers
finished writing on her. She screamed and cried and begged to be taken to the
pens, to live out her life among the other partially perfected texts that the
keepers could not bear to throw away.
I was the most hideous of these
texts. I knew it even then, when the woman who called herself my mother could
still pick me up into her arms. The other texts had traces of unwritten flesh –
smooth, incomplete, ugly – but I, I was completely untouched. The whole of my
body remained as it had been birthed. I was grotesque, obscene. They were
merely incomplete.
These incomplete texts told me I
was placed there because the woman who birthed me was a violent body, a mad
thing that marked her own history upon her body. She cut open the contents of
her self and spilled them onto the cold metal floor of the birthing center…
including me. She died in her own blood and entrails and my afterbirth.
I was the living text of my
mother’s existence, the other bodies said. That is why the keepers saved me….
But knowing that did not make me any more beautiful.
The other body-memories of my life
are later, much later, and these bodies, yes, these are the bodies that led me
to Chiva, Chiva… the one you asked me about.
I think of them often, these
bodies. Their hideously smooth skins, their ugly round faces, the thick, dark
hair of their heads and arms and legs. When I see these empty bodies, I
remember the burning of the partial texts.
I remember the burning of my kin.
These obscene texts arrived through
the circular gate of the compound under the heat of a summer sun that looked
flat and orange against the blue, blue sky. They told me the keepers had sent
for me. They loaded me into their vehicle and locked me inside.
The others they herded together at
the center of our dustry compound. Hundreds of partial texts.
The bodies clung to one another.
Clawed hands tipped in crescent-moon nails, twisted torsos wrapped in triangular
blue welts, flattened palms fused to splayed hips, gaping mouths without teeth.
These precious, beautiful bodies gripped their neighbors so tightly they rent
flesh, drew blood.
I pressed my palms to the
transparent window of the vehicle and called out to them. I screamed. And
screamed.
But the vehicle was a closed box. I
heard nothing but my own screaming.
The empty texts sprayed the bodies
of my kin with a thin, reddish liquid that coated their faces, torsos, limbs.
One of the empty texts ignited a flare. The red fire hurt my eyes.
Fire crawled across my kin like a
living thing. Bodies bubbled and melted and charred.
I saw the terrified open mouths of
my kin, but heard nothing. Those bodies that pressed against me at night, those
bodies that probed my flesh with curious delight and hunger; bodies I had
touched, caressed, held; bodies I had so envied and admired. Bodies perfected
as mine would never be. Bodies I loved.
Before the sun touched the horizon,
all the fire left of my kin was a fine grayish ash.
The empty texts strode back to the
vehicle, put their flammable fluid into the back where I sat.
“You are called Anish?” one of them
asked.
I nodded.
“Are you a dumb body, Anish?”
“Better hope you are,” the other
said. “If you’re lucky they’ll breed you and write on you. But if you’re smart
they’ll make you an archivist. Better hope they don’t, Anish. Better hope they
just feed you so you fuck.”
I did not know then what an
archivist was. But I knew my mother had been chosen to breed, and had committed
the most horrific of acts. Now only I remained to record the history of her
existence.
I am most comfortable speaking of
the archives, of written history. Here is truth that I touched and altered as
necessary. Understand the archives, and you will understand the text of my
unmaking.
I passed the tests that said I was
not a dumb body, the tests all empty texts must take in the compounds by the
sea. The older empty bodies moved me and the other students to the archives.
There, they kept us in separate rooms just big enough to lie down in. The
keepers designated those bodies that acted as our overseers, all of them smooth
and empty texts like me and the other students. These overseers locked us in
our rooms at night.
The night terrified me. I heard
nothing through the thick walls. No bodies lay next to me. No flesh. I wanted
skin pressed against mine, arms wrapped around me. I missed sighs and snores
and the sound of mumbled conversations. I missed the feel of another’s breath
on my skin. I ached to be near the beautiful bodies of my youth.
When the overseers opened my cell
each morning I eagerly followed the other students to the archives. A little
group of seven of us stood in observance of a text, listening to the body tell
the story of those events written upon its body. The archivists said this was
not called storytelling – storytelling could be untrue, could be lies. Bodies
narrated. Bodies told only truth.
The only bodies the overseers
allowed us to touch were the texts. I remember the first real text I touched,
the exquisitely complete form that I did not recognize as a body. I learned in
that moment just how partial the texts at the compounds had been, how plain,
how lacking.
Our little cluster of students
stood in the text’s allotted area of residence, a niche in one long wall in the
Era of Exile corridor. Tubes embedded in the skin, connected to the floor,
regulated the body’s excretions. It received its food in a similar manner,
twice a day, administered by the archivists.
The body existed solely as an organic
text capable of narration. It bore no discernable face, only a slit for a
mouth, and across the rest of the flat flesh where a face should have been rose
fist-sized circular growths. Its hands were soldered to its knees. The skin
stretched off the arms in one smooth flap, like wings. A length of silver wire
wound around the throat, and the flesh had begun to grow around it.
I stood transfixed. The body spun
my favorite tale of past truth in a pleasant, articulate voice that flowed
smoothly from the slit of its mouth: the story of the keepers’ voyage in exile.
I fell in love with its body.
I heard thousands of other texts in
my years at the archives. I heard how the keepers found our world, a lonely
planet seeded long ago by human beings who had forgotten what they were. The
keepers’ sailing ship burned down from the sky, and our kind went to them. The
keepers freed themselves of their casings. They selected those bodies that they
would communicate with and fitted them with inorganic devices that allowed the
keepers to direct them.
“You were simply our curiosities in
the beginning,” my own keeper later told me at one of our dictation sessions,
one of the last it held with me. “We took such delight with you and your kind.
Such delight. You had bodies that we did not, and we used you to enact that
which we could not. Ah, Anish, our preoccupation with your kind was so much
more delightful then. So base it was, our delight and your perversion.”
Often I lay awake at night and
closed my eyes, remembering those bodies that once surrounded mine. I ran my
hands along my own flesh, across my throat, down my smooth chest, flat stomach,
the insides of my thighs, and caressed my penis. I thought of another’s body
pressed against mine, so close I felt their breath. I often pushed myself up
against the cold wall and lay there with my arms wrapped around myself, longing
for the morning. I did not weep anymore. I found warmth and closeness with my
own body, my mother’s text.
And during the day, I had the
archives.
I frequented the niches I knew the
others had no interest in. I stood in front of those texts illustrating the
unmaking of the bodies who ruled the world before the keepers came. No one
wanted to view these texts; these twisted, angry figures that wept blood and cried
out for a freedom their flesh still remembered. Many of the archivists wanted
to burn them. I knew that as more keepers began to die, more texts would be
purged, and these would be the first destroyed. So I spent my days with them. I
wanted to remember them.
One day I found the body text of
the keepers’ emergence from their sailing ship, and their linking with the
first bodies. I stepped up into the niche containing the text.