Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Tristan lay on the dock in front of Tommy, his upper body strong and muscular and naked, his lower half long and sinuous as a snake. His tail swept back and forth, occasionally dipping into the water for a moment before returning to the position Tommy wanted. I almost screamed but somehow willed myself not to. I hadn’t left home yet, but a creature from the uncharted world had traveled onto my map where I’d lived the past seventeen years. How could this be?

I thought of that group show we’d all flown to New York to see, the one where Tommy had hung the first in the series of American Gothic alongside those odd, magical creatures he had painted back when he was just graduated. The critic who’d picked him out of that group show said that Tommy had technique and talent, was by turns fascinating and annoying, but that he’d wait to see if Tommy would develop a more mature vision. I think when I read that back then, I had agreed.

I’d forgotten the favor I’d promised: not to come back while they were working. Tommy hadn’t really lied when he told me moving here was for Tristan’s benefit, to get away from his family and the people who wanted him to be something other than what he is. I wondered how long he’d been trying to hide this part of himself before he met Tommy, who was able to love him because of who and what he is. What a gift and curse that is, to be both of them, to be what Tristan is and for Tommy to see him so clearly. My problems were starting to shrivel the longer I looked at them. And the longer I looked, the more I realized the dangers they faced, how easily their lives and love could be shattered by the people in the world who would fire them from life the way the school board fired Mr. Turney for actually teaching us what we can know about the world.

I turned and quietly went back through the woods, but as I left the trail and came into the back field, I began running. I ran from the field and past the house, out into the dusty back road we live on, and stood there, looking up and down the road at the horizon, where the borders of this town waited for me to cross them at the end of summer. Whether there were dragons waiting for me after I journeyed off the map of my first seventeen years didn’t matter. I’d love them when it called for loving them, and I’d fight the ones that needed fighting. That was my gift, like Mom had told me, what I could do with my will. Maybe instead of psychology I’d study law, learn how to defend it, how to make it better, so that someday Tommy and Tristan could have what everyone else has.

It’s a free country after all. Well, sort of. And one day, if I had anything to say about it, that would no longer be a joke between Tommy and me.

CHRISTOPHER BARZAK’S stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Salon Fantastique, Trampoline, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Nerve , and other magazines and anthologies. His first novel, One for Sorrow , won the 2008 Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy and was nominated for the 2008 Great Lakes Book Awards. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing , was published in 2008. Chris grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a beach town in Southern California, and in the capital of Michigan, and returned in 2006 from a two-year stint in Japan, where he taught English in the Japanese school system outside of Tokyo. He now teaches writing at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio.

His blog is at christopherbarzak.wordpress.com.

A lot of people think small towns in rural America are either charming and quaint, like in a Norman Rockwell painting, or backward and scary, like in a Shirley Jackson story. Both depictions can be true, of course, but despite the smallness of rural America you’ll find a wider range of people living there than this.

I grew up on a small farm in Ohio, grew out of it and into the wider world beyond it, and found not only that much of what I expected of the world was different from what I’d been told but also that people who grow up on small farms like me are different from what people who grew up in cities and suburbs tend to expect. So when I wrote “Map of Seventeen” I wanted to write about a rural midwestern family struggling with a conflict between the expectations of their norms and those of the cosmopolitan world outside their boundaries. And I wanted to write about how people we perceive to be beasts or monsters in the world because of their difference from us are really beautiful if we can look at them in the right way.

My mother said: Don’t swim too far from home. My mother said: Don’t tell men what you are.

My mother said:

Men are not like seals. They hunt for pleasure and for gain.

Restless, impatient

Of my narrow bay, my narrow life,

My own ungainly desires,

I swam far and far from home,

Along the whale roads

Threading the jeweled reefs

To the islands where turtles breed.

And I watched.

I saw:

Nets like giants’ hands scoop fish from the sea

I saw:

Opalescent filth clog the waves.

I saw:

Men hunt seals for pleasure and for gain.

Enflamed, enraged,

I chose a beach littered with men

And surged from the waves,

Shedding my seal skin as I came.

I seized a knife, I ripped their nets,

I roared aloud my grief at what I’d seen,

The proof of all my mother’s warning words.

The men ran from the beach.

All but one.

He said:

You are far from home.

He said:

You are magnificent.

He said:

I fish to eat. Like you.

Our house is built on a rock above the sea.

My pelt warms the foot of our bed.

He teaches our children to build and sail.

I teach them how to swim and fish.

Together we teach them the ways of wave and wind,

To fight when they must and love when they can.

At night, they sleep warm under their own pelts.

We tell them:

Swim to the limits of your strength.

We tell them:

Rejoice in who you are.

We tell them:

Men and seals are hunters both. But not for pleasure and never for gain.

DELIA SHERMAN’S stories have appeared in the anthologies The Green Man, The Faery Reel, The Coyote Road, Poe , and Naked City . Her adult novels are Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove (winner of the Mythopoeic Award), and, with Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings .

She has coedited anthologies with Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling, as well as Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing , (with Theodora Goss), and Interfictions 2 , (with Christopher Barzak).

Changeling was her first novel for younger readers. Its sequel, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, was published in 2009.

Delia is a past member of the James Tiptree Jr. Awards Council, an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts, and a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Executive Board. She lives in New York City, loves to travel, and writes wherever she happens to find herself. Her Web site is www.deliasherman.com.