“If I don’t kill you before then. You talk an awful lot.”
“But I can play decent guitar,” I said. “And I found a crab once, so I’m not entirely useless.”
“Not entirely,” she said.
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.
Gabby Robbins: I was nearly lost, out on the ocean, but somebody rescued me. It’s a different life, a smaller life. I’m writing again. People seem to like my new stuff.
Bay took a while getting to her feet. She slung her bag over her shoulder, and waited while Gabby picked up Deb’s guitar. She played as they walked back toward Bay’s cottage, some little riff Bay didn’t recognize. Bay made up her own words to it in her head, about how sooner or later everything falls into the sea, but some things crawl back out again and turn into something new.
THE ORANGERY
BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies both literary and speculative, including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fairy Tale Review, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has also been a finalist for Selected Short’s Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Award. Her audio fiction-jazz collaborative album, Strange Monsters, explored the theme of women living unconventional lives. She’s been reprinted in French and Polish, for numerous podcasts, and on io9. She created and coordinates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas.
I’d held my position as guardian of the Orangery for twenty years when our first intruder broke his way in through the stone wall.
I walked among the Orangery, watching for roots reaching up from the soil like begging hands. These trees I’d oblige with stream water poured from a basin of pure gold. Then I walked the path with my great pair of shears. From the words of my ancestors, I knew to hold the shears poised at my own heart as I went, so as not to frighten the trees and set them about producing their poison. If a tree wished to be trimmed, she would rattle her branches. I trimmed until she stopped her shaking.
After my rounds I paced the grounds thrice before retiring to my cottage beside the greenhouse to read stories I knew by heart. Little room in the Orangery meant the guardian’s library was limited. The books on my shelves I had chosen as a young woman: stories of adventure and romance, stories that left me with a pitted longing. They weren’t the books I would have chosen in my middle age. Still, I not only read them but ran my hands along their covers, rooting my fingers in their engraved spines and decorated binding. They’d been bound with the skin of beautiful people, the only skin I’d ever touched. Their pages were formed of delicate reed paper. I was lying back in my reading chair with one hand across the book spread against my chest and the other between my legs when I heard the trees’ startled shrieking.
I jumped to my feet and grabbed my spear from the mantle and ran from the cottage through the woods and along the wall until I found the place the intruder had entered: a large swath of stone wall, toppled since I’d last checked it. The wall had never before failed. I made note of the number of strides it had taken for me to reach it and then darted off through the woods, searching for the intruder.
I didn’t find him that night, though I searched until my legs throbbed and my eyes ached from squinting in the dark, for though the seasons didn’t touch the Orangery, night and day still folded the woods in their embrace. When my legs refused to carry me any longer, I rested against the wall, guarding the break from which I thought any intruder might, having realized the lack of treasures inside the Orangery, escape.
From here you see perhaps only a forest. But come, let’s step along the path through the woods, and I’ll show you. Do you see? Their shapes, the curve of their trunks? Some were of a flowering age when they changed. These show their differences more keenly: three knots, one for the breasts, two for the hips. No, no, there are no nipples. Trees reproduce by dropping seed.
This one is called Lotis. See there the bronze plaque half-buried in her trunk. She’s one of our oldest. Over the years she has swallowed her name, as though she wishes to forget that she ever held a form of skin-and-bone, of blood. Our books tell us that she enjoyed the drink, the drug, the dance. Our books tell us that she loved no man twice.
If you read your guidebooks, you’ll find a story of her transformation. You’ll find a warning: don’t eat of her flowers. The story is a lie. The warning, though, is true. She’s here surrounded by those who didn’t follow it. See their shapes, too: women, men, and children. They may look the same as our dear Lotis, but they do not flower. If you look closely, you’ll see that they are hollow. These are not trees but shells. Besides, the Lotis’ blooms are said to taste of your mother’s perfume, bitter to the tongue.
I’ll give you the real story, if you’re ready to hear it. If you prefer to follow your guidebooks, please move up along the trail. You’ll find plaques beneath, or inside, each of our Main Attractions. Those who wish to know the world for what it is, please leave your books in this basket here. Listen, then, to the story of Lotis, and follow me and truth along the path.
Rowdy girls are always the first to go. Some men think they can tame them. Lotis’ men thought this. She had them once and let them go, no matter how they begged her to marry them beneath the lotus tree in the center of town.
The farm boy was no different. He bred his father’s sheep, milked his father’s cows, and slaughtered his father’s pigs. He tended his mother’s apple orchard and harvested her vegetable garden. Lotis found his quaintness endearing when he asked her, with a dip from his waist, to dance. He wasn’t terrible to lay, but a rowdy girl only settles when she’s good and ready, and Lotis was not, no matter how sorely satisfied she was after their lengthy encounter.
She expected to see him again at the festivals. After all, his farmer father sold his pigs and wool there. Sometimes she bought a leg of tender lamb from his mother to line her empty stomach before coating her throat with wine. She didn’t expect to see him standing over her in the grass where she slept one morning after an uneventful evening of lackluster socials. She had gone to the field to take in the shock of sunrise, alone. He straddled her waist, stinking of pig shit. In the distance a donkey brayed five minutes too late.
She wrapped her hand around his ankle and dug her nails into the flesh until it bled. When he jerked his leg away, she struggled to her feet and ran across the grass, down the hill, to the center of town where Apollo played his music and mixed his potions.
“Give me a weapon,” she cried. “Priapus has tried to take me.”
Apollo looked up from the crafting of his new lyre and sneered. Everyone knew his story: a god on vacation in the world. An immortal who had fallen for the mundanities of mortals. Everyone knew, too, his magic. “I’ve seen you with Priapus,” he said.
“Please. He could be coming this way.”
“He’s told us all of his intention to marry you. Beneath the lotus tree.”
“I don’t want to marry him.”
“Why not? He’s good to his family. He’s handsome and healthy. He’s said to be good with his spear.” Apollo winked. “You’re running out of time.”
Lotis grabbed his wrist with both her hands and twisted the skin in opposite directions.