Kat Beyer
artist & writer
art@katspaw.com
| Solstice 2009: My gift to everyone |
|
Most years I print a card for the winter solstice. This year I am giving an online gift: a few of my favorite flash fiction stories. Each one was published online at The Daily Cabal. Please enjoy. The Year's Question Posted Friday, October 30th, 2009 It was Siobhan woke me up. The smell of honey wine on Summer's End does it. (Whiskey works too.) To my surprise and hers, it still worked, even after so many years when no one left anything beside my notched stone. Scared her bowels loose the first time. I got a laugh out of that. "You're allowed one question a year, granddaughter," I said out of the air beside her. When she got her breath back she said, "I'm not your granddaughter. She must be gone long ago." "I know that. I spoke with her for years after; she's moved on now. I stay. And so does the customary name." "Well then," she said, drawing herself up. She asked grimly, "There's a man I want. How do I get him?" Oh, the living. "The answer is in the question you asked, and the way you asked it." "What do you mean?" "One question a year," I answered, and went for the honey wine and apples. "I hate you," she announced, and went down the hill. She was back again the next year with a bigger plate. "You were right," she said sadly. "This year's question. There's a man who wants me. Should I have his child?" "Certainly not." "You were right," she said next year, holding the baby, a little girl with her same lively eyes and three-cornered smile. But I'd said no because she'd put no value to herself. I'm not all-wise; how was I to know that a baby would help her do that, instead of making the matter worse? "There's a job, overseas," she told me ten questions later. "I want it. They want me. A good job. Will you hear me across the ocean?" "I don't know," I answered. "We used to stay at home, your family. Try. The baby and her father going with you?" She smiled. "Sarah's eleven. And his name is Ian; I've come to love him." "I'm glad." This year I was up early, moving things around in the grave, scaring birds off the stone, nervous. Well after dark came the scent of honey wine and flowers, candles and apples, drifting across the salt sea, and I climbed up out of my old bones for a taste of it. I heard her voice clearly, but with a sound of waves in it. "Are you there?" She asked. "Yes, I am," I replied. Naginata and Jumble Sales Posted Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 "As for the whole question of women fightin', Major, I told 'em I wouldn't have it in my regiment. Ridiculous bringin' up the whole question in the first place. Take this new school on Skye-" said Captain Markby to Major Daneham. "Old school, sir. Reopened after two thousand years, sir," put in Lieutenant Jennings. "Thank you, Jennings. I believe I was speaking to the Major?" "Sorry, sir." "No, do go on, Lieutenant. I hadn't heard that they had finally got funding," said Major Daneham. "They didn't, sir." "Beg pardon?" "They didn't, sir. They raised it themselves." "What, through jumble sales and coffee mornings?" joked the Major. "Something like that, sir. Over fifteen hundred of them, in three years. They had bake sales, as well. Got rather famous for something called the Amazon Roll, actually." "Good heavens. Organized bunch of-ladies, what?" "Yes, sir. I believe they gave weapons demonstrations as well." "Marksmanship, that sort of thing?" "Yes, sir. And weapons of historical interest, such as the naginata, and the claymore, sir." "Really?" said the Major, and wished he hadn't, because Lieutenant Jennings' eyes had lit up, and Major Daneham could tell he was about to start jabbering about weaponry. The Captain came to the rescue accidentally. "Yes, yes, yes, but the point is, the point is!-I'm sure you'll call me an old-fashioned man, but whether you like the numbers or not, got to face 'em. When some dashed starburst has done for the computers and you're out there in the field, face-to-face with the enemy and half your armor blown off, give me a man's superior strength any day. Women, bless 'em, well-damme it, I'm a traditionalist. 'Her Place is in Space' and all that. I mean to say, when I want a colony on Mars, nobody better for it than a lady! Taught my own daughter how to shoot so she could go to the Moon and serve in the police, didn't I? And as for rocket design-! But when some dashed chap is telling me I can't have Australia back, give me a regiment of men, thank you very much." Major Daneham noticed with relief that it was five o'clock and high time for him to pick up his wife from tae kwon do. He walked the Lieutenant out with the coffee cups, saying, "Can't change old habits all in one go, you know." A Change in Government Posted Monday, November 10th, 2008 There was a little stir among the people in the longhouse when Seven Fights came in; "they didn't expect you," whispered her brother with approval. As if propelled by the murmuring air, a solarbot swished over to her and blinked its one eye suspiciously, then revolved and shot upward and away into the blackened roof beams. "Did that thing just moon me?" She whispered back. "It's decided you're safe." He chuckled. "The council's about to find out different." He led her to a place against the southern wall, where the other speakers waited. Someone passed a plate full of corn scones, croissants, sesame balls, and five other kinds of snacks she couldn't name. A French delegation was speaking, so she had to keep her eyes and ears on the Onandaga translator. "White guys are all the same," she heard someone mutter behind her. "The only way to keep a treaty with them is to make sure you have enough ammunition." "And vaccine," somebody whispered back at him. An old woman turned her head, slowly, and they both went quiet. After the French were finished, the Speaker slammed his staff down and looked at her, and she realized with a shock that that was all the introduction she was going to get. She stood up and walked to the center of the dirt floor. "Grandmothers and grandfathers," she began, facing the elders sitting against the East wall, her throat dry. "Guests of the Seventeen Nations," she added, turning to the delegations from Paris, Beijing, Cairo, and Harare. "Fellow sachems of the Haudenosaunee-" she went on, before her voice was drowned in the roar of surprise that had accompanied the words "fellow sachems." They hadn't heard, then. She waited until they fell silent. "I come before you as the newly chosen Sachem of the United Tribes of the Southwestern Deserts. Among my people, it has always been considered strange that the women of the League choose the leaders but are not the leaders. Therefore they have sent me, in token of this time of change." This time the roar in the longhouse seemed to take on a variety of textures-the roughness of anger, the high pitch of delight, all mixed together. She stood still, looking straight into the eyes of one grandmother who sat against the wall, gazing at her and smiling faintly. "This is how it starts," she thought. Gap of Dreams Posted Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 When the human race grew up a bit and got more sense, and matters on Earth were better in hand, we had a chance to look further about the place, just as we had always wanted to:-and when the time was right, making the proper ships was easier than we thought. So we flickered about in the deeps of space like fireflies in a North American summer night, and sometimes we found an answering flicker. The Sudantii were one of these. (It's not their own name for themselves, which we don't have the scent glands to pronounce, but one given them by an Irish romantic with bad spelling.) We taught them a lot, whether we meant to or not: how to grow pumpkins, which do extremely well on their world, in some places growing big enough to be good houses; how to make whiskey, which they like best as a perfume. They taught us a lot, whether they meant to or not: how to grow detachable tails; how to grow detachable tales, which, like the wagging kind, may be reconnected elsewhere. From them, we learned not to hurry. From us, they learned to dream. Neither people yet knows how (our children might). The Sudantii set aside whole evenings for dreaming. "It is art," they said "It is a manner of excavating terrors, yet safely," they said. "It's fun," their elders said. "But we like the gap of dreams best," one friend told us. "What's that?" One of us asked. "Have you not practiced this art many thousands of years?" "Yes, but perhaps we use different words." "The gap of dreams, it is the place you walk to just before waking. You come to it and all the dreams are still around you, releasing their perfumes, and you think you're in them still, but a voice is scenting, 'You are in a dream.' And you drift to the surface. And you wake." They told us how some of them had begun to practice lengthening that moment. They have Gappers now, who came back from that place with answers, questions-even recipes. We have begun to gap, too. Ah, the gaps! The lurch before planetfall. The breath before you lead your lover into your new pumpkin. The space after the equal sign in an equation. The moment you smell whiskey perfume, before you lean back and count the stars like fireflies. A Lucky Day for Lapis Lazuli Posted Friday, June 27th, 2008 The Queen of Egypt sat on the steps of her House, watching her father's boat start across the sky. She thought she could almost see the oars flash. Maybe she would have them take out the barge today. The river would rise soon, they would move the household, and it would be pyramids, pyramids, pyramids all summer, with letters from her husband Pharoah, off in Libya, saying, "How goes my monument?"-before he asked after his children. She thought about the golden treasure of barley sinking level by level in the granaries; she heard the servants in the night, when she walked and rocked her youngest son in her arms. She liked to carry him herself. She felt they had not succeeded with her other sons, who had a "How goes my monument?" look to them. The High Priestess of her sister Bastet came down the steps, bowed, and sat at her feet, resting one hand on her sandal. "Do you remember," said the Queen, "when we used to get up this early to run around the garden?" "I remember," said the Priestess. "What is this day lucky for?" "It is lucky for conceiving a great ruler," said the Priestess. "One who will keep the granaries full, listen to his people, stay home where he won't waste young men who ought to be farming and fathering…and who-this is important-won't bother with a great fat pile of rock more than he has to?" The Priestess turned to look at her and smiled. "It's worth a try." "With my husband far away." "The gods might step in." In the hot afternoon, while her younger children ran around the garden and her older ones drank beer and designed chariots, the Queen climbed the wall and set her goblet down. A falcon hunted over the eastern wing of the palace. She watched it circle and backwing. She looked beyond, where her father's boat continued slowly, above the flashing river. Then the falcon flapped above her, gilded eye turned to hers, wings fanning her face-there and gone. Something fell with a splash into her goblet. "If you've crapped in my beer, I'll go get my bow," she told the vanished falcon. But instead a seed of lapis lazuli blinked in the depths. She looked at it and raised her cup, saying, "Bring me a good Pharoah," before she drank it down. Happy Holy Days everyone! |