Foretold

O
ne of the stories I remember most from school is the myth of Oedipus. In it, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi prophesied that any son born to King Laius would grow up to kill his father. Because of this prediction, Laius decreed that his infant son Oedipus should be put to death.

Of course, as is often the case in Greek myths, nothing went according to plan. The servant tasked with abandoning the baby on a mountainside instead chose to rescue him, leaving him in the care of a shepherd. Oedipus was raised far away in Corinth with no knowledge of his pedigree or his connection to the king of Thebes. When he was grown, Oedipus fled Corinth for home. During the journey, he was harassed by a group of travelers at a crossroads and was forced to kill the group in self-defense. Unbeknownst to Oedipus, one of the men he murdered was his father, thus the oracle’s prediction.

Ironically, by struggling so hard to circumvent the prophecy of his death at the hand of his son, Laius became instrumental in its coming to pass.

What fascinates me about this story is the conflict between Laius’s pervasive impulse to thwart the predicted tragedy at any cost and his concurrent belief in its inevitability. It made me wonder: Would it have been better for Laius to accept the prophecy? If he had, could he have escaped it? And what does that mean to those of us whose lives don’t play out like an ancient myth?

It’s easy for most of us to discount the role prophecies can play in the modern world. After all, few of us seek out the oracle of Apollo at Delphi and plan our lives accordingly. But the more I’ve thought about prophecies and predictions while editing this anthology, the more I’ve realized just how relevant they still are.

No, I’m not talking about how every few years there’s another forecast about the end of the world. (12.21.12, anyone?) I’m talking about the more nuanced predictions: the parents who determine their child will grow up to be famous, the teen who declares she’ll be a doctor one day, or the student who tells himself he’ll never be anyone special. These become our own prophecies—and they can end up laying out the paths of our lives.

It’s easy to cling to predictions because they give us a sense of direction. There’s comfort in feeling as though a decision has been preordained and is therefore out of our hands. But that doesn’t mean that giving our lives over to someone else’s prophecy won’t somehow blind us to the possibility of self-determination. Which then brings us back to Oedipus and his father, and the main underlying question of the myth: are we better served by embracing our prophecies, even the negative ones?

These thoughts prompted me to ask other authors for their own views on the topic—I was curious how each would approach the concept. I wanted to find out what might constitute a true prophecy to them, and I wondered how they would handle the question of whether it is better to accept a foretold future or fight against it. I purposely left the specifics vague, wanting to give each writer the freedom to explore his or her own interpretation of the theme.

I couldn’t be more thrilled with the results! The fourteen short stories in
Foretold
showcase a variety of interpretations on the idea of prophecy: fantastical quests, otherworldly encounters, the power of someone else’s perception to influence your life. In these stories there are worlds that end and others that begin, loves found and lost—and sometimes found again. Each story, in its own way, demonstrates how prophecies affect our lives by exploring characters who struggle to fulfill them, who endeavor to prevent them, or who attempt to ignore them altogether.

What I’ve discovered through these stories is that prophecies can bring us comfort or cause us fear; we can choose to embrace them as destiny and cling to them as dreams or avoid them as the worst kind of curse. Ultimately, when we face our own prognostications—whether self-generated or thrust upon us—it’s up to us to choose whether we will determine our own lives or allow someone else to do it for us.

Once, when the moon was younger than it is tonight and not as plump, three girls gathered by a hearth to bake a dreamcake. It was St. Faith’s Day, the sixth of October, and everybody knows that on St. Faith’s Day a girl can lure forth the phantom of the man she’ll marry, see his face and know some of what life holds in its basket for her. That’s what their mothers and nans taught them, and they’d all seen their men on St. Faith’s Day and married them in the spring.

As it happens, all three girls were hoping to glimpse the same phantom, the one belonging to Matthew Blackgrace, whom they called Matty in that singsong way that girls have. He had fierce red hair and a grin like the devil, but his hands were good hands; he could braid his baby sister’s hair and gentle a horse. And couldn’t he sing like an angel?

The girls were fast friends—they lived in the cottages scattered through the apple orchards above Mosey Landing, and had grown up together—but that didn’t mean there weren’t some sharp thoughts between them that evening, with each nursing the same hopes, and in the same small room.

Ava was oldest; near eighteen already, and, as she claimed, “ripe to be plucked.” She had yellow hair with a hint of strawberries, and such a bosom on her that the boys scarcely knew what her face looked like anymore, so fixed were their eyes elsewhere. It was a nice face, in any case, if just the littlest bit blank. Truth be told, Ava’s thoughts were like those tethered ponies at the fair: slow and placid, ever going in circles, and with children never far off.

Ava was more than ready for babies, and more than ready for the making of them. Her eyes watched the orchard tots run and tumble, and she hummed and dreamed, and at night sometimes she held her pillow between her knees and blushed in the dark, imagining love.

She wanted Matty Blackgrace for his house as much as anything. He was already building his own—a tiny pretty thing up on Century Hill, overlooking the wide green Mosey. It didn’t have a roof yet, but he’d already painted the shutters blue for luck, and planted bare-root roses that would bloom come summer. Ava wanted to get a babe on her hip as soon as may be, and start baking pies to set on those sweet blue sills. And Matty himself, well, he fit just fine in the corner of her daydream, thank you very much.

Elsie was next, and she was the colors of a fawn—golden, russet, and brown—and freckled as though the baker sneezed over his cinnamon and she got the brunt of it. “Sweet” was what she called herself, and she was—in nature and in tooth. She planted honeysuckle every year for her nan, who’d turned
hummingbird on her deathbed four years past and came around all summer long for sips of nectar. And there wasn’t a market day that went by but Elsie was sneaking down to Mosey Landing to fetch herself a treat, a striped lick-stick or a cone of sugar-ice or maybe a maple toad rolled in spice.

Lucky thing, she could eat all the treats she wanted and stay slim, because she was the tallest girl around—tall enough to pick apples without a ladder—but Matty Blackgrace was taller, and so Elsie thought she ought to get him for that reason if no other.