If she was a crazie, I certainly didn’t want her coming into my dressing room. For that matter, while it would be flattering if she were a groupie, I wasn’t looking for that sort of thing either. It was Friday night and I had a ticket for a redeye back home with a plan to spend the weekend catching up on my sleep and dining at a couple of five-star restaurants. All too quickly it’d be Monday morning, and I’d be expected to show up at the corporate offices of Buffalogic, Inc. bright and early to resume reviewing business proposals and taking meetings with corporate leaders from all over the Earth and beyond. So, regardless of her story, or my own wishful thinking, she wasn’t going to be joining me in my dressing room.
“Good evening, Mr. Conroy. My name is Nicole. I very much enjoyed your show tonight. The things you made your volunteers do, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I offered up a tight smile, nodding my head to acknowledge the praise, and had pretty much decided she belonged in the groupie category. “Thank you, you’re very kind. But, if you’ll excuse me, I—”
“And that last part where you made that plumber believe he was a Clarkeson? Incredible. It was spot on. Plots within plots with them. Have you met many Clarkesons?”
An odd question, but then I’d already pegged her as a bit more worldly than the rest of the audience. “A few,” I answered. “Thanks for coming. I’m glad you enjoyed the show. Now I really must—”
“You know, my uncle saw one of your earliest performances, what was it, fourteen years ago? On Hesnarj.”
It was like she’d slapped me. Hesnarj was an alien mausoleum world where I’d been marooned while a college student. There’d been precious few humans anywhere on that planet. I’d discovered my talent as a stage hypnotist there, befriended my first aliens, and even met one who had helped me to channel my deceased great aunt Fiona.
I started to reply but she cut me off again.
“But that’s not why I’m here. The show was just a delightful bonus. I actually came to meet you for a completely unrelated reason.”
Okay, maybe not a groupie. “Oh? You did? I see. Well, and that’s—”
“There’s someone quite extraordinary that I’d like you to meet. His name is Juan Sho. He’s involved with sorghum, that and cookbooks.”
Sorghum cookbooks? I made a point of looking up and down the length of our empty hallway. Just that quickly the scales had tipped toward crazie.
“He’s not here, Mr. Conroy. He’s waiting for us in Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
She smiled, revealing perfect, gleaming teeth. “Well, yes. Like yourself, he’s a busy executive by day, and also shares your passion for cuisine, though in his case it’s more about how it’s crafted than how it tastes. Right now he’s probably in a little restaurant in Veracruz, reverse-engineering the best mole poblano you’ve ever had.”
This time my smile was genuine. If you can appreciate a truly fine mole then you’ll understand why. Excellent food is my weakness and Nicole—whoever she was—had done her homework. Some part of my brain threw away both of the likely pigeonholes I’d laid out for her and tabled further attempts at classification. She had my attention. I unlocked my dressing room and opened the door.
“Really? You know, I’ve never been to Veracruz. Why don’t you come in and tell me more about this.”
EXCERPT FROM “THE MOTHERS OF VOORHISVILLE”
MARY RICKERT
Mary Rickert has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Locus Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, and a Crawford Award, and has been nominated for many others. “The Mothers of Voorhisville” was originally published on Tor.com.
The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone. At first we thought maybe the paper mill was to blame; it closed down in 1969, but perhaps it had taken that long for the poisonous chemicals to seep into our drinking water. We hid it from one another, of course, the strange shape of our newborns and the identity of the father. Each of us thought we were his secret lover. That was much of the seduction. (Though he was also beautiful, with those blue eyes and that intense way of his.)
It is true that he arrived in that big black car with the curtains across the back windows, as has been reported. But though Voorhisville is a small town, we are not ignorant, toothless, or the spawn of generations of incest. We did recognize the car as a hearse. However, we did not immediately assume the worst of the man who drove it. Perhaps we in Voorhisville are not as sheltered from death as people elsewhere. We, the mothers of Voorhisville, did not look at Jeffrey and immediately think of death. Instead, we looked into those blue eyes of his and thought of sex. You might have to have met him yourself to understand. There is a small but growing contingency of us that believes we were put under a type of spell. Not in regards to our later actions, which we take responsibility for, but in regards to him.
What mother wouldn’t kill to save her babies? The only thing unusual about our story is that our children can fly. (Sometimes, even now, we think we hear wings brushing the air beside us.) We mothers take the blame because we understand, someone has to suffer. So we do. Gladly.
We would gladly do it all again to have one more day with our darlings. Even knowing the damage, we would gladly agree. This is not the apology you might have expected. Think of it more as a manifesto. A map, in case any of them seek to return to us, though our hope of that happening is faint. Why would anyone choose this ruined world?
Elli
The mothers have asked me to write what I know about what happened, most specifically what happened to me. I am suspicious of their motives. They insist this story must be told to “set the record straight.” What I think is that they are annoyed that I, Elli Ratcher, with my red hair and freckles and barely sixteen years old, shared a lover with them. The mothers like to believe they were driven to the horrible things they did by mother-love. I can tell you, though; they have always been capable of cruelty.
The mothers, who have a way of hovering over me, citing my recent suicide attempt, say I should start at the beginning. That is an easy thing to say. It’s the kind of thing I probably would have said to Timmy, had he not fallen through my arms and crashed to the ground at my feet.
The mothers say if this is too hard, I should give the pen to someone else. “We all have stuff to tell,” Maddy Melvern says. Maddy is, as everyone knows, jealous. She was just seventeen when she did it with Jeffrey and would be getting all the special attention if not for me. The mothers say they really mean it—if I can’t start at the beginning, someone else will. So, all right.
It’s my fifteenth birthday, and Grandma Joyce, who taught high school English for forty-six years, gives me one of her watercolor cards with a poem and five dollars. I know she’s trying to tell me something important with the poem, but the most I can figure out about what it means is that she doesn’t want me to grow up. That’s okay. She’s my grandma. I give her a kiss. She touches my hair. “Where did this come from?” she says, which annoys my mom. I don’t know why. When she says it in front of my dad, he says, “Let it rest, Ma.”
Right now my dad is out in the barn showing Uncle Bobby the beams. The barn beams have been a subject of much concern for my father, and endless conversations—at dinner, or church, or in parent-teacher conferences, the grocery store, or the post office—have been reduced to “the beams.”