Two very busy, very small young ladies returned with Catherina from the beach. Each carried a dripping pail. “We found living clams,” they told us. Though the clams looked as dead as could be, we exclaimed over them.
Ruth sat out on the lawn under a large umbrella. Her great-granddaughters went to show her the living clams.
“I married the least catlike man in the world,” Joan said. “I didn’t really understand that was what I was doing. That was his main qualification. Then Selesta was born, and I saw it hadn’t worked. I wasn’t used to my plans going awry. Not even my unformulated ones.”
“You told Selesta all this?”
“Recently I told her everything. Like you said.”
“The vestigial tail?” Joan had to have one removed when she was child.
She nodded.
Later that afternoon I sat with Ruth and the little girls. “Richie, you’d think after I’d made such a mess out of my children’s lives they wouldn’t trust me with their offspring. But you’d be wrong. Someone always needs to dump their kids.”
None of Catherina’s three daughters had shown the slightest trace of the margay. This was true also of her oldest daughter’s two children.
“It’s right out of Mendel,” Ruth said. “Poor Luis was at one end. Catherina’s at the other. Joan is somewhere in between.”
She was scratching one of her great-granddaughters’ backs. The child suddenly gave a great yawn and arched her back like a kitten.
Ruth looked at me with an expression that said, You’ve got to wonder.
Later when Selesta and Sam showed up, I told them, “Selesta, much as I love you, you’re grown up. You never want toys, you don’t like musicals anymore. I mean, how do I justify going to lousy shows if I can’t say I’m taking a kid? I want to be the godfather, maybe the god-grandfather to your kid.”
“That’s the main reason we decided to have a child,” she said, and Sam nodded his agreement.
She looked out at Ruth on her lounge chair with the children around her and said, “I want that for Joan.”
When you visit a maternity ward you scarcely know you’re in a hospital. It’s about life instead of illness, about bedazzled adults and the tiny, red-faced dictators who are going to run their lives.
Selesta’s child was a boy, the first male born into the family since Luis Mata over seventy years before.
I got to hold him. It’s nice, but in truth I like kids better when they’re standing up and talking. There’s a wonderful stuffed ocelot that I’m planning to give him. It could as easily be a margay. Selesta will be good with that.
Ruth was there in a motorized wheelchair with her care-giver.
“A perfectly normal baby,” said the very discreet doctor.
“Meaning he doesn’t have a tail,” said Joan quietly when the doctor left.
“Not yet, anyway,” murmured Ruth.
RICHARD BOWES has written five novels, the most recent of which is the Nebula Award-nominated From the Files of the Time Rangers. His most recent short fiction collection Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancieswas published in 2006. He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers awards.
Recent and forthcoming stories appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Subterranean, Clarkesworld, and Fantasy magazines, and the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Year’s Best Gay Stories 2008, Haunted Legends, and Naked Cityanthologies. Several of these stories are chapters in his novel in progress, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street.
His home page is www.rickbowes.com.
The great thing about writing for an anthology like this is that I already know the general theme before I start. In The Beastly Bride, my story would be about that place where human and animal intersect. Because wild cats have fascinated me since I was small, I knew the animal in question would be a member of the Felidae, the cat family.
The question then was how to handle this, what perspective to bring. Almost from the start I knew my story would be about a young woman, Selesta, who had already appeared in a story of mine called “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street,” which was included in Salon Fantastique, another anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
The narrator in “Dust Devil,” who would also be the narrator in “The Margay’s Children,” was Selesta’s godfather. This narrator had no children but many godchildren — a situation I know very well.
In this story we discover that Selesta’s grandfather was Mexican and had in his genetic makeup traces of a Latin American animal spirit. I thought first of making it an ocelot before settling on the ocelot’s cousin, the nocturnal, tree-dwelling margay. In handling this heritage, Selesta is as smart and resourceful as my godchildren almost always are.
And her godfather is quite wise and wonderful — because this, of course, is a fantasy anthology.
THIMBLERIGGERY AND FLEDGLINGS
Steve Berman
Bernhard von Rothbart scratched at a sore on his chin with a snow-white feather, then hurled it as a dart at the chart hanging above the bookshelves. The quill’s sharp end stabbed through the buried feet of the dunghill cock, Gallus gallus faeces, drawn with a scarab clutched in its beak.
“A noble bird,” von Rothbart muttered as he bit clean his fingernails, “begins base and eats noble things.”
He expected his daughter to look up from a book and answer, “Yes, Papa,” but there was only silence. Above him, in the massive wrought iron cage, the wappentier shifted its dark wings. One beak yawned while the other preened. A musky odor drifted down.
Why wasn’t Odile studying the remarkable lineage of doves?
Von Rothbart climbed down the stairs. Peered into room after room of the tower. A sullen chanticleer pecked near the coatrack. Von Rothbart paused a moment to recall whether the red-combed bird had been the gardener who had abandoned his sprouts or the glazier who’d installed murky glass.
He hoped to find her in the kitchen and guilty only of brushing crumbs from the pages of his priceless books. But he saw only the new cook, who shied away. Von Rothbart reached above a simmering cauldron to run his fingers along the hot stones until they came back charred black.
Out the main doors, the sorcerer looked out at the wide and tranquil moat encircling his home, and at the swans drifting over its surface. He knew them to be the most indolent of birds. So much so they barely left the water.
He brushed his fingers together. Ash fell to the earth, and the feathers of one gliding swan turned soot-dark and its beak shone like blood.
“Odile,” he called. “Come here!”
The black swan swam to shore and slowly waddled over to stand before von Rothbart. Her neck, as sinuous as any serpent’s, bent low until she touched her head to his boots.
Odile felt more defeated than annoyed at being discovered. Despite the principle that, while also a swan, she should be able to tell one of the bevy from the other, Odile had been floating much of the afternoon without finding Elster. Or if she had, the maiden — Odile refused to think of them as pens, despite Papa insisting that was the proper terminology — had remained mute.