Kristine Ong Muslim
Age of Blight: Stories
“Who do you think of when you think of unique voices? Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan, Aimee Bender — major voices in contemporary fantasy. Add a new name — full of oddities and dark bittersweet ironies — to slide up on that shelf: Kristine Ong Muslim.”
A NOTE ON THE PLACES IN THIS BOOK
You may observe that certain places recur through the stories in this book. Such places are also visited in my other books. Know that these locations are not completely made up — they may exist or could have existed under different names somewhere on this planet and in this lifetime.
Bardenstan is a suburb. In 2115, something will happen that will put Bardenstan on the map. It will be known throughout history as the site closest to the epicenter of the fallout. Outerbridge, on the other hand, remains the only part of America where plants are still grown in soil.
At the junction of the two main highways that lead to Bardenstan and Outerbridge is a nine-story apartment building called Station Tower. The nine stories correspond to the nine circles of Hell where Virgil once guided Dante. There’s only a cursory mention of Station Tower in this book but nevertheless, it helps to know what Station Tower looks like in case you happen to visit it in real life. Last week, someone had spray-painted GOD LIVES HERE on the front-facing wall of Station Tower. The dayshift doorman, Tim Shenkel, promptly cleaned it up. I am telling you all this because it is possible you reside in a part of the world where (or live in a particular time period when) the spray-painted GOD LIVES HERE remains visible.
At the ground floor of Station Tower, there’s a time loop. Break the glass housing of the third fire extinguisher to the left hallway. You’ll find the time loop behind the fire extinguisher. It will appear to most people as a window. Our lives, as well as those of our ancestors and descendants, are elaborate mythologies that intertwine and sometimes get entangled. There’s a purpose to this life. It is even possible that some of us will find our purpose in Station Tower.
Beyond Bardenstan, Outerbridge, and their junction, there exists an island. You will recognize this island by its lighthouse. And if you stand on top of the hammer-shaped rock in that island and look toward the direction of the lighthouse, you will see a ghost. There, by the third-story window, you can make out the figure of a man in a dark-colored jacket. He appears dark haired, of slim build, about six-feet tall. You can easily estimate his height off the lighthouse window’s dimensions and approximate distance between the window frame and the floor of the lighthouse. He appears here at roughly the same time every day. Sometimes, he shows up around one p.m., sometimes around two. Then he disappears at four p.m. and returns the next afternoon. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows what he is, what he wants, why he stays, why he comes back. On this island, there’s also a body swept to the shore. The body belongs to a child who disappeared eleven years ago. When the child’s body is found eleven years later, it is still wearing the same clothes as the day of her disappearance and hasn’t aged one bit.
All these places are familiar, and you may have been in some of them — or all of them. And if they don’t seem familiar, it is likely you aren’t paying much attention.
I. ANIMALS
Leviathan
It was the day the ancient sea beast finally reached your shore and died there. Unable to resurrect your sole prize after trawling the ocean floor for eighteen years, you secretly wired a pair of artificial gills inside it. And how the makeshift gills hissed telltale breathing at the rate of two intakes per minute! How the cameramen captured the triumphant moment when you presented the creature long believed to have become extinct during the Silurian Period. The cameramen filmed you as you supervised the lowering of your fine catch into a temperature-regulated water tank. They cheered when you gloated, “I told you I was going to get the sucker.”
Inside your rented ship, your floundering engineers hastily cleaned up your diamond-studded drill bit free of sediments, free of whatever it was that you managed to dredge up while scouring the primeval ocean floor. They said nothing about the sea beast that followed the ship home. They said nothing about how brilliant you were to think of enticing it with a low-frequency sound generator pinging at 9Hz to conform to its assumed directional ear and to account for the sound propagation rate, which was approximately four times faster at the depth where it was supposed to reside.
It is lonely and will soon find us, you once declared with glee. It is lonely, you insisted. It will recognize its song and will follow us home. And how it did. Lured by the sound, the juggernaut — whose eyes had not yet turned opaque — honed in on the low, steady humming only its kind could hear.
Your engineers did not join you outside the ship to pose alongside the fallen sea beast. They knew you were going to make up stories to explain the creature’s swift demise — not at your hands, of course, but to a believable catastrophe. You might say it was the difference in salinity or the sudden shift from the hundreds of pounds per square inch of underwater pressure to normal atmospheric conditions.
You write up your paper about the spectacular find. You always begin your speeches before the Academy with a dramatic wave of your hand unveiling the beautifully preserved specimen of the now-extinct sea monster ensconced in its liquid-filled tank, the dissected innards conveniently kept away from sight. Like a magician doing his rounds on the carnival circuit, you intone, “Behold the beast,” and everyone almost always takes that as a cue for applause.
The Wire Mother (or Harry’s Book of Love)
1.
Our first baby had a mother whose head was just a ball of wood since the baby was a month early and we had not had time to design a more esthetic head and face. This baby had contact with the blank-faced mother for 180 days and was then placed with two cloth mothers, one motionless and one rocking, both endowed with painted, ornamented faces. To our surprise the animal would compulsively rotate both faces 180 degrees so that it viewed only a round, smooth face and never the painted, ornamented face. Furthermore, it would do this as long as the patience of the experimenter (in reorienting the faces) persisted.
— excerpt from the paper “The Nature of Love” by Harry F. Harlow
Imagine yourself having to choose between two mothers. There’s one like myself, once fondly called an iron maiden — a body made of wire, rows and columns of sharp teeth; coldly tells you truths you prefer not to hear; gives you food and milk and perhaps, lots and lots of material things to satisfy your need for survival and superficiality. Then there’s another mother out there — a flimsy, soft-spoken one called the cloth mother. And this mother is made of terrycloth. She gives you no sustenance but seems to hug you back the way you have always wanted to be hugged — not too tight and not too relaxed. She also maintains a characteristic flush that you associate with affection. Now, be honest. Which mother do you think is better? Better, meaning, the one you’d spend the most time with. This was the premise behind Harry’s little prank about the nature of love; and by prank I mean experiment.