The Beastly Bride

A few semesters ago, I was teaching a creative writing class, and one of the students was an older gentleman, a retired physician, Dr. Patel. He was a good guy, very smart but very laid-back and with a sense of humor. One day after class, I asked him about Ganesha. Having been born in India and brought up in the Hindu religion, he had what seemed to me a very deep understanding of the subject. He had all kinds of interesting insights and stories about the god.

I told the doctor my plans to write about Ganesha, and I also told him about my trepidation, worrying I didn’t know enough. He thought for a moment or two and said to me, “If you write with an open heart, Ganesha will accept it.” I thought about that for a year and a half, and then I wrote the story.

If you’re interested, there’s a lot of information online about Ganesha. As a reference for this story, I used the book, Ganesha: The Auspicious. The Beginningby Nanditha Krishna and Shakunthala Jagannathan. It’s a general source with stories and information and has a lot of great pictures.

THE ELEPHANT’S BRIDE Jane Yolen

The Elephant’s Bride was not as wide as her husband, or as deep.

The only trunk she had
was filled with clothes.
Her nose was small,
the septum deviated,
she snored in her sleep,
but not loud enough to wake
her big husband.

The Elephant’s Bride
had never slept alone.
Sisters do not own
a single bed,
but sleep
cocooned, spooned
together,
head to heart, heart to head.

She was still a girl
when she was wed.
Now her gargantuan lover
was dead.

He who had been so huge,
was made small by illness.
His ears drooped,
his tail shed hairs,
his eyes seemed scaled,
gray skin paled.

Slump went his great back
And he dropped
right in his track.

She touched one long, cold, tusk,
whispered as he became a husk,
“Go, love, and I will follow.”

Better that than a dead elephant’s wife.
Widows in her world
had less than a half-life.
It took a derrick and ten men
to lift the corpse
onto the bier.

She set the fire,
then climbed on
the bed of flame,
folded her arms,
closed her eyes,
waited to claim
sweet heaven’s surprise.

But with a horrible crack
and a worse crash,
her hopes of heaven
were quickly dashed.
She arose, small,
gray
and covered with ash.
A miracle
or an allegory?

There is no moral here,
no jokes either.
You have a heart of stone
or else you are a believer.

I am neither,
just a teller of gossip,
a memorist, a liar.
Some of us bring water,
some bring alcohol
to fuel the funeral pyre.

JANE YOLEN just counted up her books published — and under contract to be published — and the astonishing number is 320. Of course if you counted her single poems, the count would be much higher. Her first love has always been poetry.

Her Web site is www.janeyolen.com.

Author’s Note

I have long been fascinated by the horrifying tradition in India of suttee, in which a widow climbs onto her dead husband’s funeral pyre to die with him. I am a recent widow myself. So when I was invited to contribute to this anthology, I was at last able to write about the custom (and my own widowhood) one step removed.

THE CHILDREN OF CADMUS Ellen Kushner

THE DAUGHTER SPEAKS:

The daughters of Cadmus have a duty to their father’s house, and so do all of the sons, as well. And thus it is that we can never be truly happy, my brother and I.

For he loves the night, the strange time when all men are asleep. He loves the swoop and glitter of the stars that the gods have set in the heavens, loves to watch the heroes and the monsters cartwheel their way across the sky until rosy-fingered Aurora strokes them away before Apollo’s chariot. Only then will he fall into bed, my big brother, sprawled out on his couch half the day until the sun has passed the zenith of the heavens, when he comes lumbering out of his chamber, blinking and rubbing his eyes, looking for something to eat. I can usually find him something.

It’s a wonder my brother and I ever meet at all. For I love the cold gray dawn, when the grass is still wet with dew. I love to be up before everyone except the household slaves, and the keepers of the hounds, readying for the hunt, which I love best of all. The chase through the woods in the waking dawn, the dappled trees and morning shadows, pursuing the sweet, swift animals that we love even as we seek to break them and bring them to their knees to furnish our tables and our bellies and our feasts. I love to run with my spear and my hounds in my short chiton, legs free and arms free.

But those days are finished for me. I am Creusa, the daughter of Autonoë, the daughter of Cadmus, king of Thebes. I am of an age to be married, now.

You will have heard of our grandfather, Cadmus: he who sowed the serpent’s teeth, and brought forth a race of warriors to build our fair city of Thebes. He did not do all this alone. The god Phoebus Apollo told Cadmus where to find his fate, and Pallas Athena herself stood by him as he scattered the dragon’s teeth across the fields of Boeotia. The gods love our grandfather Cadmus.

And we, in return, must love and honor them.

And so I do. I make my sacrifices to Zeus the Thunderer, to Hera of the Hearth, and to red Mars, fierce in War, who is father to my grandmother Harmonia, whose mother is sea-born Aphrodite.

But it is Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, I love. And that is my despair.

THE SON SPEAKS:

My sister Creusa is quite mad. I said as much to my tutor, Chiron the Centaur, and he chided me, as he so often does. He is always whisking his tail at me — it stings but does not really hurt. And I would take ten times that sting to remain his pupil. For while Cadmus and my parents think the great centaur is teaching me hunting, we left that behind long ago. Chiron is a noble archer, true, and I’m not a bad shot thanks to him. But Chiron is a master of the art of healing and knows the movements of the stars.

The stars tell stories. Some of the stars are our own people, taken from the pains of this life up into the heavens. The stars make patterns, too, and surely it all means something. Here on earth, there is pain and blood and strife. But the stars move in an orderly way, pacing out a huge dance across time that no man has seen the end of.

If I watch long enough, I think I might learn.

As it is, I am often forced out of my bed into a cold and drippy day and expected to run about, shouting, following smelly dogs howling to wake the dead. They are perfectly nice dogs, ordinarily, but they become monsters when we hunt. And so I run after poor wild beasts that never did me any harm, to open great wounds in their sides with my spear or my arrows — if the dogs’ teeth don’t get to them first — to rip open their sleek and beautiful hides and ruin them forever, letting out their life’s blood in the process while the poor animals writhe and froth trying to escape.