Vestiges

We spent 14 years carving Greta. A great woman, a wise woman. She has a nose of stone, bejeweled eyes, cheeks that catch the setting sun in rosy tones; lips pursed in kind silence. She carries a perpetual look of quiet understanding, of firm compassion bought with hard years, broken hearts and blistered fingers. But her soul is still intact, a sapphire so blue the ocean would jealous.

I spent months just on her hair, getting the thinning wisps just so. The other sculptors thought I was mad. 

“What are you doing?” they said. “You know how this ends.”

I took a long breath, stared at my work, and replied firmly: “This has to be right.”

I was Maestro on this project, so they shook their heads and left me to my folly. They drifted back to giving her shoulders just the right hunch; they tapered the tips of her gnarled fingers, carved the asymmetrical signs of her limp into her hips and lower back. The Authority had decided she was to be in a bike accident as a child: shattered her right femur. She was bed-ridden for a whole summer, a hot summer, a season of thin soup and dust storms. Kansas, 1932. Greta ate a lot of thin soup and watched the family farm slip beneath an ocean of destitution and dirt. The farm died, but the girl lived. She moved to California and picked oranges alongside the Okies and Arkies. She learned to read with week-old newspapers by campfire-light. She kept her hair short and her teeth clean.

Big moves, a pair of wars and a pair of kids later later, she visited Atlanta for the first time with her husband, Gene. They flew from Buffalo: such an extravagance! But Gene’s work was paying; there was a grand opening for new plant in Macon. Greta had fried chicken and waffles for the first time. The waitress was Black and Greta stared. As she kept staring, the waitress’s wide, Southern smile thinned; she would scurry from the table after she topped off the water glasses; her voice became a thin squeak, when she talked at all.

Eventually, Gene elbowed his wife. “You’re being rude, honey.” His voice was Sinatra-smooth. The first time they met, the Authority had him crooning behind a CBS microphone at a hop in Hollywood. The next day, bombs fell and the Arizona kissed the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Greta kissed her man and give him a nod and a smile.

When the waitress returned, Greta pulled gently at the lace cuff of her uniform, using her forefinger and middle finger. She leaned in close: “I’m sorry to stare, dear. But you have the brightest smile. Your teeth are so bright! My daddy used to tell me: ‘Your smile is the best tool you’ve got, girl. And every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.’” That waitress became my god-mother. Camille Parks wrote Greta long letters of trials and tribulations: sit-ins and marches, speeches and fire hoses. Greta bailed her out of jail twice, and finally convinced her to move up north to the white snow banks of the Finger Lakes. I remember having coffee and cheesecake on Camille’s back porch and watching a warm wind blow the trees, late one July afternoon. 

That was the July before the Authority had Greta lose all of her hair, and one half of her chest and most of her soul to the rapaciousness of her own body. The July before she went into the dark, a knowing smile the last thing to contort her lips rather than the grimaces of pain that reached through the hydrocodone.

So, yes, the other sculptors took long weeks to discover the wrinkles around Greta’s eyes in the stone we used. Master clothiers draped her in the simple white sweater and pink slacks she favored. And I took many months to bring my grandmother’s hair back: thin, wispy and white, curled absently close, the last vestiges of goodness and hope.

We spent 14 years carving Greta, and now I visit her in the White Garden every day. She stands with perfect hair and among the million billion souls lost to the dark, the memories we carve in order to conjure to a shade of their brilliance. Sometimes, Camille comes. We have coffee and cheesecake and don’t say a word.

Succumb to the Lure

The surface of things is deceiving. Seeming can hide beauty, pain or consuming power.

On the surface of it, The Lure of Dangerous Women is a trifling thing: seventy-odd simple pages filled with black symbols and white pages that we see every day. On the surface of it, this is the kind of thing that I barrel through in less than an hour. On the surface of it, this is simply another collection of short genre fiction of which there is an embarrassing surfeit. But this book is alive, a breathing, writhing thing that grips you with ever turn of the page, that entices you along like a pied piper. It is not a pleasant ride; it is terrifying and erotic, icy and scalding, messy and precise, all at once.

It took me three days to finish this book. I had to put it down every other story, surfacing to breathe. I had to walk away and let its characters talk to me some more, let the shadowy cling of their adventures become brittle so that I might brush it off and begin my next journey anew, without the weight of the their sexy, horrifying pull.

All of the women in these stories are dangerous in different ways. These are not Ripleys and Amazons; they are not all sirens and femme fatales. Rather, they are fully-realized characters, at once sympathetic and wholly themselves. There is as much pain as power, and many of them are so strong as to push past simple binaries of dominance and submission (sexual, political or otherwise) to offer themselves as sacrifice, or even just a part of themselves, for the good of others. There is no bowing involved, but an entirely self-possessed decision. These are the kinds of heroines we need more of.

A very thorough review might walk you step by step through each of the seven offerings, but I'd like to focus on a few highlights. "Trill" is a study in disturbing subtly, taking a familiar trope and turning upon itself. A dark version of the pied piper is only the starting point; it dips and weaves its song into dark and daring places that set the tone of this collection. "Seed" and "One Woman Town" are terrific examples of worlds that are at once alien and accessible, offering a fantastic reality with its own lexicon, its own culture and sets of ideas, but one that also immediately draws us in with both wonder and lust tinged with the fear of Germain's razor-sharp observation.

For it is Germain's style, flexible, expressive and keen, that ties all of these disparate tales together. Make no doubt, these are imaginative stories of terror that are equally very sexy; but they are also stylish bits of prose, a style that engages and engrosses, that pulls you in with a siren's song that can drown you.

Shanna Germain's latest collection, published by Wayzgoose Press, is heartily recommended reading for those seeking something extraordinary. Bring your red wine for the libido, your teddy bear for your fear and your shotgun for protection. And even still, you will succumb to The Lure of Dangerous Women.

Puzzle Pieces: Nightmare Fuel no. 0

"We never go in there," said Hatter. "That is not the tea cupboard and holds neither ravens nor writing-desks nor anything that may seem so similar one unto the other. " There was something peculiar - well, more peculiar than the other other odd things: his voice crescendoed and became increasingly staccato while his eyes raised towards the ceiling though his neck did not crane. "No, in fact, that room holds things that are quite opposite!" Louder and faster: "Things that are dry to touchy, black to horizon ribbons, breath to - " Silence. A quick dip of the Adam's Apple. His eyes, once nearly rolled back under their lids, now darted to the shadow beyond the doorway, shadows that writhed in feline ways, a Cheshire grin threatening to emerge. "No, my dear, " Hatter said in a voice so calm it reminded me of my father's baritone at his most sanely stoic, "we never go there."

by John Tenniel; from Wikimedia Commons

"And it never comes here." Hatter gestured toward his tea cup: cobalt blue with golden sigils that matched a pot scattered amongst the multitude. Before me as well was a cup: delicate white with blue designs that could must have been Chinese or ancient Sumerian - or was that cuneiform? Surely it had a matching teapot somewhere... Yes, there: that glimmer of white and blue far down the table, many years away it seems, as light counts time. Its lid rattled gently as Dormouse poked her nose out, then slipped back inside.

"It won't do to stare," interrupted Hatter, and I started, for I had indeed been staring. Then my eyes were drawn to the blue symbols on my cup. The figures seemed on the cusp of movement, of dancing some ancient rite.

"No, it won't do," Hatter repeated. "The dancers are puzzle pieces, you see."

I did not see.

"They complete the...." another glance toward the shadows, "... the Other." He swallowed and then his face flickered with mad indifference. "It's tea, hot tea, that always does the trick." He gave me a grin that could cut barbed wire and then poured me out with wicked aplomb. "One lump or two?"

*****

Just a little warm up prompted / inspired by Bliss Morgan's Nightmare Fuel project.