Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

His previous novel was the historical thriller Fitcher’s Brides , a reimagining of the fairy tale “Bluebeard.” Recent short fiction includes contributions to Realms of Fantasy magazine, to Ellen Datlow’s Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe , an anthology commemorating the bicentennial of Poe’s birth, and to the anthology Urban Werewolves , edited by Darrell Schweitzer. He is one of the Fiction Writing Workshop Directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. His Web site is www.gregoryfrost.com and his blog is at frostokovich.livejournal.com.

The first thing I should tell you is that I’ve no idea just where this story came from. My experience of poukhas involves Jimmy Stewart, taverns, and invisible rabbits. But I have a number of books on Celtic lore, and one of them mentioned in its description of the poukha (spelled one of at least ten different ways), that on November first it is gifted with the ability to see the future. That, and that it isn’t generally a giant rabbit, it’s a “nightmare” horse, black and terrifying, with fiery eyes, and it has a habit of taking hapless individuals for some serious rides. Somewhere out of that mix of research and a few days of contemplation — which for me is unusually quick — I came up with a rough outline of the story you’ve read. I thought I’d invented the name of the villain, but it turns out there are Creeguses in the world, too. Beyond that, I had enormous fun with the voices of it — the first a sort of Mark Twain or Garrison Keillor narrator’s voice, the second a bit more Irish on the part of the good doctor. His name, by the way, was lifted from a Flann O’Brien novel. It was the name of a poukha in his book, too. So you might say I had a bit more experience of the dark pranksters than I realized. Sneaky buggers.

On a floating platform adrift in the placid Sea of Eternity, Ganesha sat on his golden throne beneath a canopy of eight cobras. The eyes in his elephant head gazed out past the moon; his big ears rippled in the breeze. Each of his four human hands was occupied, so his trunk curled up to scratch his cheek; the itch was a manifestation of evil in the million and second reality. In one hand he held the pointed shard of his broken tusk, using it to write on parchment held by a second hand. In his third hand was a lotus flower, and his fourth hand was turned palm out to show a red tattoo of a cross with bent arms, meaning, be well. He wore baggy silk pants the color of the sun, but no shirt to cover his chest and bulging gut. His necklace was a live snake, as was his belt. At his feet sat Kroncha, the rat, nibbling a stolen modaka sweet.

In the west, something fell out of the sky, sparking against the night. Ganesha watched its descent, and when it collided with the sea, a great sizzle and a burst of light becoming dark again, he marked the spot by pointing his trunk. He stood and stretched. “A journey,” he said to Kroncha. The rat followed, and they went to the edge of the floating platform where a boat had appeared, an open craft lined with comfortable pillows. In a blink, they were aboard. Ganesha rested his weighty head back, one hand holding a parasol to block the moonlight, and crossed his legs. They remembered only after they had pushed off to bring the modaka sweets, and so the sweets appeared. The wind picked up and gently powered the boat to sea.

After a brief eternity, they reached the spot where the object had fallen.

“There it is,” said Kroncha, who was sitting atop the parasol. As Ganesha rose, the rat scurried down his back.

The boat maneuvered next to the floating debris. Ganesha leaned over and picked something out of the water. “Look at this,” he said, and held up a prayer. It wriggled in his hands for a moment before he popped it in his mouth and ate it.

“Where to this time?” said Kroncha, leaning his elbow against the bowl of sweets, shaking his head.

“My favorite, New Jersey,” said Ganesha, and his laughter, the sound of OM, gave birth to realities.

They took the turnpike south from the Holland tunnel, Ganesha perfectly balanced on Kroncha’s small back. The rat did seventy-five and complained bitterly of tailgating. At the traffic tie-up, they leaped in graceful arcs from the roof of one car to the next, landing in perfect silence and rhythm. Back on the road, Ganesha eventually gave instructions to take the number 6 exit south. Kroncha complied with relief.

In the next instant, it was the following afternoon, and Kroncha carried Ganesha across a vast, sunburned field toward a thicket of trees next to a lake. In among the trees, there were picnic tables, and sitting at one of them, the only person in the entire park, was a dark-haired teenage girl, smoking a cigarette. She wore cutoff jeans and a red T-shirt, sneakers without socks. When she saw the elephant-headed god approaching, she laughed out loud and said, “I thought you might show up this time. I burned five cones of incense.”

“A tasty morsel,” said Ganesha as he dismounted from the rat with a little hop. His stomach and chest jiggled. The girl stood and walked toward him. When she came within reach, he lifted his trunk and wrapped it around her shoulders. She closed her eyes and patted it softly twice. “Florence,” he whispered in an ancient voice.

“I changed my name,” she said, turning and heading back toward the table.

Ganesha laughed. “Changed your name?” he said and followed her. “To what, Mithraditliaminak?”

She took a seat on one side of the bench, and he shimmied as much of his rear end as he could onto the opposite side, lifting hers a couple of inches off the ground. The wooden planks beneath them quietly complained as the two leaned back against the edge of the table.

“Call me Chloe,” she said.

“Very well,” said Ganesha.

“Florence is a crappy name,” she said, “like an old woman with a girdle and a hairnet.”

“You have wisdom,” said Ganesha, and allowed the bowl of sweets to appear on the table between them.

“Chloe’s much more. I don’t know. I love these things,” she said, lifting one of the golden rice balls. “How many calories are they, though?”

“Each one’s a universe,” he said, lifting a modaka with the end of his trunk and bringing it to his mouth.

“I’ll just have a half,” she said.

“She’ll just have a half,” said Kroncha, who sat at their feet.

“If you bite it, you’ll be compelled to finish it,” said Ganesha.

Her lips were parting and the sweet was just under her nose. Its aroma went to her eyes, and she saw a beautiful garden alive with butterflies and turquoise birds, but even there she heard his warning.

“No,” she said and put the sweet back into the bowl.

“Ah-ha!” he said and picked up the abandoned modaka . He stood up suddenly, her end of the bench falling three inches, and he waddled a few feet away from the picnic table. Standing in a small clearing amid the thicket, his elephant head trumpeted, his human legs danced, and his four arms spun. As his clarion note echoed out through the trees and across the field and lake in all directions, he gave a little kick and threw the modaka into the sky.