Connie Willis - Fire Watch

I put the poor little beast onto the bed, went into the bathroom, and washed my hands for about an hour. I thought Zibet hadn’t known what the tessels were for, that she hadn’t had more than the vaguest idea what the boys were doing to them. But she had known. Known and tried to keep it from me. Known and gone into the boys’ dorm all by herself to steal one. We should have stolen them all, all of them, gotten them away from those scutting god fucking… I had thought of a lot of names for my father over the years. None of them was bad enough for this. Scutting Jesus-jiggers. Fucking piles of scut.

Zibet was standing in the door of the bathroom.

“Oh, Zibet,” I said, and stopped.

“My sister’s going home this afternoon,” she said.

“No,” I said, “Oh, no,” and ran past her out of the room.

I guess I had kind of a little breakdown. Anyway, I can’t account very well for the time. Which is edge, because the thing I remember most vividly is the feeling that I needed to hurry, that something awful would happen if I didn’t hurry.

I know I broke restricks because I remember sitting out under the cottonwoods and thinking what a wonderful sense of humor Old Man Moulton had. He sent up Christmas lights for the bare cottonwoods, and the cotton and the brittle yellow leaves blew against them and caught fire. The smell of burning was everywhere. I remember thinking clearly; smokes and fires, how appropriate for Christmas in Hell.

But when I tried to think about the tessels, about what to do, the thoughts got all muddy and confused, like I’d taken too much float. Sometimes it was Zibet Brown wanted and not Daughter Arm at all, and I would say, “You cut off her hair. I’ll never give her back to you. Never.” And she would struggle and struggle against him. But she had no claws, no teeth. Sometimes it was the admin, and he would say, “If it’s the trust thing you’re worried about, I can find out for you,” and I would say, “You only want the tessels for yourself.” And sometimes Zibet’s father said, “I am only trying to protect you. Come to Papa.” And I would climb up on the bunk to unscrew the intercom but I couldn’t shut him up. “I don’t need protecting,” I would say to him. Zibet would struggle and struggle.

A dangling bit of cotton had stuck to one of the Christmas lights. It caught fire and dropped into the brown broken leaves. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Somebody should report that. Hell could burn down, or was it burn up, with nobody here over Christmas break. I should tell somebody. That was it, I had to tell somebody. But there was nobody to tell. I wanted my father. And he wasn’t there. He had never been there. He had paid his money, spilled his juice, and thrown me to the wolves. But at least he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t one of them.

There was nobody to tell. “What did you do to it?” Arabel said. “Did you give it something? Samurai? Float? Alcohol?”

“I didn’t…”

“Consider yourself on restricks.”

“It isn’t beasties,” I said. “They call them Baby Dear and Daughter Ann. And they’re the fathers. They’re the fathers. But the tessels don’t have any claws. They don’t have any teeth. They don’t even know what jig-jig is.”

“He has her best interests at heart,” Arabel said.

“What are you talking about? He cut off all her hair. You should have seen her, hanging onto the wallplate for dear life! She struggled and struggled, but it didn’t do any good. She doesn’t have any claws. She doesn’t have any teeth. She’s only fifteen. We have to hurry.”

“It’ll all be over by midterms,” Arabel said. “I can fix you up. Guaranteed no trusters.”

I was standing in the dorm mother’s Skinner box, pounding on her door. I did not know how I had gotten there. My face looked back at me from the dorm mother’s mirrors. Arabel’s face: strained and desperate. Flashing red and white and red again like an alert band: my roommate’s face. She would not believe me. She would put me on restricks. She would have me expelled. It didn’t matter. When she answered the door, I could not run. I had to tell somebody before the whole place caught on fire.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, and put her arms around me.

I knew before I opened the door that Zibet was sitting on my bunk in the dark. I pressed the wallplate and kept my bandaged hand on it, as if I might need it for support. “Zibet,” I said. “Everything’s going to be all right. The dorm mother’s going to confiscate the tessels. They’re going to outlaw animals on campus. Everything will be all right.”

She looked up at me. “I sent it home with her,” she said.

“What?” I said blankly.

“He won’t… leave us alone. He-I sent Daughter Ann home with her.”

No. Oh, no.

“Henra’s good like you. She won’t save herself. She’ll never last the two years.” She looked steadily at me. “I have two other sisters. The youngest is only ten.”

“You sent the tessel home?” I said. “To your father ?”

“Yes.”

“It can’t protect itself,” I said. “It doesn’t have any claws. It can’t protect itself.”

“I told you you didn’t know anything about sin,” she said, and turned away.

I never asked the dorm mother what they did with the tessels they took away from the boys. I hope, for their own sakes, that somebody put them out of their misery.

Even when I was little, I was bothered by the endings of fairy tales. It was not that I disbelieved the happy ending. It was just that there were so many loose ends that never got tied up. Like, did the prince ever miss being a frog? And what about the talking horse’s head that gave the goose girl advice? Surely they didn’t just leave him nailed up there! On the other hand, you could hardly take him down and bury him when he was still alive.

And what about all those servants and horses and cooks in “Sleeping Beauty,” thrust willy-nilly into the next century?

I should be happy. Everyone tells me so: my wife, my daughter, my brave new son-in-law. This is the happily ever after for which we have waited all these long years. But I fear we have waited far too long, and now it is too late to be happy.

My wife tries to jolly me out of this dark mood. “The roads are better,” she says. “There is a new bridge at the ford.”

“The better for armies to pass along, burning and killing,” I answer. There are English already in Crecy; a story I would not believe at first, and they are carrying weapons I never heard of—a bow as tall as a man, a ribaud that spits black smoke and sudden death.

“You never liked the forest at our gates,” she says. “Or the wolves.”

“Nor do I like the town. And there are still wolves at our gates,” I say. “Merchants and pedlars.”

“They bring you the cinnamon and pepper for your food.”

“That give me the bellyache.”

“And medicines for the bellyache,” she says, smiling to herself. She is embroidering on a piece of linen. Do women still do that, sitting with their heads bent forward over their work, pulling the fine stitches taut with their white hands? I do not think so. Embroidered cloth can be bought by the length in the town, I suppose. What cannot be bought in that town? Beauty, perhaps. Repose. I have seen nothing of either in this new world.

“This is a beautiful coat,” said the insolent tailor they sent me to. Nothing would do but that I have a new coat for the wedding. The tailor shouted in my ear through all the fitting and did not once call me “my lord.” “A beautiful coat. Brocade. From the east.”

“Gaudy you mean,” I said, but he did not hear me. How could he? The water mill runs night and day, sawing the forest into shops, houses, bridges. Soon the whole world will be town. “The coat is too short,” I shouted at him. It showed what God intended decent men to hide.