#9: Put Your Hat On The Deer That Roams Through The House At Night
grotesque
by Lindz McLeod
You know, when we first met, I didn't know the difference between the creatures on tops of buildings; if a stone statue pours water, it's a gargoyle, if not, they call it a grotesque. These statues are often carved in the shapes of monsters—protective guardians, hideous and snarling—as much a part of the building as the building is a part of the beast. Claws and talons grip the ledges and rooftops, joined by masonry.
As children, we played hide-in-plain-sight games—one gargoyle waited with his/her/their back turned, forehead resting against stone, counting down from ten, while the hunters snuck up on them quietly. When the gargoyle spun, the hunters froze, became statues themselves; predators turned prey under the watchful, implacable eyes of the creature. Those moving or giggling were caught, and forced to leave. You, with your flyaway hair and your sweet eyes, would wink to get me to lose my composure. As often as not, you'd be the one laughing, self-eliminating.
After university, you became my grotesque: a solid surface to anchor myself, a rock to split the currents of my ambitions. I converted into your gargoyle, always pouring from my own jug to replenish everything that seeped from your porous rock. Torrents wash away stone by increments—water is, after all the most powerful force in nature, slow and steady like the tortoise. Our elders told us that marriage will wear away our selves, soften us to each other, but they did not elaborate on how or why those palliated edges might grate ever harder.
After ten years together, I wondered which of us is the monstrous being and who is a mere conduit for the onslaught of rain. After twenty years together, I finally understand that we're simply two halves of a building under construction, waiting out the latest storm.
Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published/is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, the New Guard, Cossmass Infinities, and more. She is a member of the SFWA and is represented by Headwater Literary Management. Lindz is also running a workshop on ‘Creating Unreliable Narrators’ on October 23rd, which you can learn more about here.
Here’s an excerpt from Gemma’s Place by Quentin Lucas, which we’re going to run in full in next week’s issue for paying subscribers —
Gemma grabbed a handful of her hair, squeezed, and stopped just short of pulling. Her frustrations had returned. She never asked the Strangers if she was alive, dead, or dangling somewhere in between like a death row inmate swinging from a noose, waiting for either her neck or the rope to break. And a hundred years may pass before she saw the Strangers again.
“Don’t matter.” She wiped her rag against the dusty bottles of booze lining the shelves of her dive bar. Each shelf had a string of Christmas lights draped off its edge. She worked her rag around the bottles and enjoyed their glow under the dim lights fixed in the ceiling. “Been something like three or four hundred years. Why dwell on it now?”
ARACHNE
by Anna Burke
Sun beat down on the Acropolis with enough strength to wake the dead. It refracted off the marble of the temple columns and the painted faces of the ubiquitous statuary. It bleached the remnants of the peplos gracing the great statue of Athena, due to be replaced soon in the coming festival with a new raiment woven by her priestesses, and it pierced the windows of her temple, illuminating any dust motes bold enough to enter such superheated air space. The only place, it seemed, that Helios’s glare did not reach was the uppermost corner of the temple ceiling, where, tucked behind a particularly unfortunate carving of an owl, a spider tidied the corners of her web. It was a nice web. Spectacular, even, but then Arachne had always prided herself on imbuing even the most mundane weaving with a skill some might have called divine, had voicing such an opinion not so recently ended in unmitigated disaster.
Currently, the web contained one fat fly, bound in silk and still buzzing periodically in protest, a smaller fly, wisely silent, and the remnants of a particularly misguided male spider who had mistaken her for a potential mate. Arachne wasn’t interested in mating. Nor, despite the sustenance it promised, was she interested in the fat fly or even the silent one. What she was interested in, as the sun cooked Greece and turned each bit of polished metal into blinding spears of light, was a pattern— specifically, the pattern of behavior that had resulted in her current state. Not her own behavior, for that stemmed from righteous fury, and by all the gods, she regretted nothing, but the pattern of vicious predation that had led her to issue a challenge some—most—labeled suicidal.
The gods took and took and took.
The unfortunate owl shading her web with its crude features bore no hint of intelligence in its stone eyes, let alone wisdom. Its paint had faded a generation ago. No one had bothered touching it up, probably deciding some things were best left to obscurity, especially the work of drunken sculptors at the end of their careers, and so no one noticed that the cobwebs covering its stone feathers formed obscene shapes in silk, adorned with the husks of moths, flies, and the occasional beetle. She figured she was allowed to be petty, now. It wasn’t like things could get worse.
The distant sound of sandals on stone penetrated the eaves, interrupting the soporific afternoon quiet, along with her thoughts. Below, a girl cleared away the remains of an earlier sacrifice. Nothing bloody, merely a libation of oil and what looked to her eight eyes like fruit. She thought she recognized the girl.
Medusa?
But no, Medusa was gone. That had been the catalyst for everything that happened after. This girl looked like her because she was her sister, or perhaps a cousin. Her eyes did not work well over great distances. That had been true in her old life as well as this one, back when she had been Arachne of Athens, instead of…instead of…
But it was better to face the truth. Instead of Arachne the temple spider, doomed to eat flies and enjoy it for the rest of her days.
Medusa’s relative hummed under her breath as she worked. Arachne didn’t recognize the tune, but the wealthy girls of Athens always were ahead of the muse. She would know. She’d been one of them, once. Medusa’s mother and her own had been cousins by marriage, and it had been Arachne who taught Medusa the finer points of temple weaving. It had been Arachne who had urged Medusa to run back to the temple to retrieve the figs the girls had forgotten, for Medusa was the faster of the two of them, on the day—
No. Better not to face that truth. What good had facing it done? She’d woven the crimes of the gods for all of Greece to see, resplendent in colored thread, and the goddess who she’d pledged her youth to, the goddess whose temple Poseidon had infiltrated, the goddess who had punished Medusa for the sin of being pretty and young and alone in a place that should have been a refuge—
It seemed she would be facing the truth after all. Well then. She swung towards the fat fly on a silken thread and stabbed it, irritated by its buzzing. If she must face the truth, then she would face it all. Poseidon had raped Medusa in this very room, and Athena, in all her wisdom, had turned Medusa into a Gorgon as punishment.
She fumed to recall her own naïveté. She’d thought, initially, desperately, that Athena had done Medusa a kindness—no man would dare touch her now—but then she’d allowed that thought to blossom into hope.
I am a greater weaver than grey-eyed Athena herself, she’d proclaimed to all who’d listen. And when Athena accepted her challenge, she’d woven not only Medusa’s fate, but the fate of Io, Europa, Danae, Leda, Antiope, Calisto, Alcmene. Every mortal taken unwillingly by the uncaring gods.
She’d hoped Athena might see and champion their cause. Then, when it became clear Athena was as cruel as the rest, she’d comforted herself with the knowledge that at least she had not remained silent. There was still that. But by the gods, she wished, now, that she’d simply burned the temple to the ground.
Below, Medusa’s cousin stopped her humming. Arachne lowered herself farther, passing briefly through the scorching sun. The girl looked over her shoulder, and then, reassured she was alone, sat on the marble floor, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Arachne heard the name she uttered through her tears: Medusa.
She spun herself closer still, until she dangled before the girl’s shaking shoulders. The child did not notice, at first, which gave her time to work. Thread by thread, she spun a new web across the altar. A portrait, fractal shapes woven from remembrance of a face. Medusa in sunlight. Medusa asleep. Medusa at play and in anger and in every way herself.
Silence alerted her to the girl’s attention. This close, humans were massive, blown out of proportion. Even so, she recognized the wonder and recognition in those wide eyes.
“Thank you,” said the girl in a whisper that sounded like thunder. “We won’t forget. We won’t ever forget. And one day, we’ll weave a web big enough to catch them all.”
She turned the words over again and again as she ascended her thread back to her web beside the owl. She committed the fierce, impassioned young voice to memory, and as she sucked out the liquified contents of the fat fly—which really was quite delicious—some of her bitterness receded.
“We won’t ever forget.”
It wasn’t enough. She was still, after all, a spider, and Medusa was still a Gorgon banished to some distant island, but it was something. She considered the dead male spider. Should she ever mate prior to biting off an intruder’s head, there were so many patterns she could teach her daughters.
Let Athena think she’d won; slowly, one thread at a time, Arachne’s descendants would weave shrouds for the very gods themselves.
My sister found a baby goat in the bathroom at McDonald’s last night. It was right after closing and it was just Melissa and the assistant manager, a shaggy-haired guy named Kyle who was stoned half the time. Kyle looked in the official Workplace Procedures Manual, but there was nothing in there about baby goats or any type of farm animal that hadn’t already been slaughtered and pressed into a patty. So Melissa called me and I drove the five miles to McDonald’s even though it was past midnight and Katie had just taken off her dress. (“Keeper,” Chuck Augello, Hobart.)
MARCUS SMART TEACHES DEFENSE FOR 18 MINUTES:
He lives with the pressure of being the first man/manatee hybrid to be elected governor of Florida—blazing a trail like the fires from the long submerged cane fields. (“GOVERNOR MANATEE,” Simon Nagel, HAD.)
Climate Corner: Texas Is Letting Shell, Exxon, and Other Oil Producers Break the Rules / Carbon-free steel now exists / California Can No Longer Wing It With Power Grid / How green are electric vehicles? / The city that has raised $100 million to climate-proof its buildings (It’s Ithaca) / Recently published research based on long-term Forest Service experimental forest data suggests that uneven-aged forest management tended to have a slight positive effect on carbon sequestration at low stocking levels & in areas of favorable climate /
ZINES OF THE WEEK: NON-HUMAN ROOMMATES / AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC: QUEER EDITION / IS IT JUST ME OR ARE WE NAILING THIS?: ESSAYS ON BOJACK HORSEMAN / COUNCIL: A ZINE ABOUT SOCIAL HOUSING / THUBAN PRESS GUIDE TO ANALOG SELF PUBLISHING ZINE /
OF NOTE/UPCOMING:
Submissions for the next issue of Words&Sports close at the end of the month!
August 26th: online book launch for sexy tales of paleontology.
August 27th: “‘Metamodernism: the Future of Theory’ by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, discussion with Moyosore Okediji.”
September 7th: author talk with K-Ming Chang.
HOW TO LOSE A DRUMMER IN NORTH DAKOTA.
AND, FINALLY, A PROGRAMMING NOTE: NEXT WEEK’S NEWSLETTER WILL BE FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. We love all y’all equally, but we’re going to try a thing where paying subscribers get at least one thing that’s ‘theirs’ per month. If this works, great; if it doesn’t work, we’ll do something else. Deal? Deal.
Images: DEER IN A HAT, Lei Xu, 1998. My Office II by Gabriel Orozco, 1992. Kawase Hasui, Pulguk Temple, Kyongiu, from the series "Eight Views of Korea" (Chosen hakkei, Keishu Bukkokuji), 1939.