Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Chloe was stunned by what she’d seen. She wanted to follow but was unable to move.

“I suspected as much from the moment she refused the modaka ,” said the rat.

Ganesha nodded, and they were off.

It wasn’t until god and vehicle were just a faint smudge of brightness weaving away through the trees that Chloe overcame the static in her head and woke from amazement. The thought that called her back was that the demon could easily return and she would have to battle it alone. She tasted adrenaline as she bolted from the bench. Across the clearing and into the trees she sprinted, afraid to call out for what might be watching.

At one point, early on, she thought she would catch them, but Kroncha moved deceptively fast, and suddenly the path had disappeared. The ground was uneven and riddled with protruding roots. She hurried as best she could, still driven by fear. “Where’s my day?” she whispered. The night was getting cold. She passed through a forest she’d not known existed, waiting for the demon to pounce at any moment and thankful for the moonlight.

The trees eventually gave way to a sandy mountain path littered with boulders. She knew there were no mountains within a hundred miles of where she lived. I’m in a dream within a dream , she thought, and climbed up onto a flat rock to rest. Her legs hurt, and she realized she was exhausted. She lay back and looked for her star, but it was lost among the others.

If I fall asleep here and then wake, I’ ll wake from this dream and be back at the picnic table in late afternoon , she thought. She closed her eyes and listened to the breeze.

She knew she’d slept, but it seemed only for the briefest moment, and when she opened her eyes she groaned to see more night. There was soft sand beneath her, not rock, and it came to her that she was in a new place. Remembering the threat of the demon, she stood quickly and turned in a circle, her hands in fists. The moonlight showed, a few yards away, a mountain wall with a cave opening. Within the cave, she perceived a flickering light.

It’s in there , she thought, and at that instant, Ganesha’s broken tusk appeared in her left hand. “We must destroy it,” she remembered him saying and realized that she’d never retrieve her day unless she confronted the demon. An image came to her mind of her mother making meat loaf and it weighed her down, slowed her, as she moved toward the opening in the mountain. She fought against it, as if against a strong silent wind. And then a cascade of other memories beset her — Simon, her father, her condescending English teacher, a group of kids snickering as she passed, her image in the bedroom mirror. Still she struggled, managing to inch along, drawing closer to the light within. At the entrance, she hesitated, unable to move forward, and then holding the tusk in front of her, point out, she swung her arm, slicing a huge gash in the malevolent resistance. There was a bang, the myriad bubble eyes that composed her demon exploding, and its power over her bled away quickly into the night.

The cave’s interior was like a rock cathedral, the ceiling vaulting into the shadows above. Instead of the demon there was a shining blue woman holding a lotus flower, floating six feet off the ground. She wore a jade green gown and a helmet made of gold. The blue vision smiled down upon Chloe, and the girl felt a beautiful warmth run through her, putting her at ease and filling her with energy.

“I am the shakti ,” said the blue woman.

“The power?” asked Chloe.

The woman nodded. She motioned for the girl to sit at the table between them where lay a blank sheet of paper. Chloe sat on the stone bench and turned the tusk around in her hand, from a weapon to a pen. The shakti gave her light, and she wrote, the tusk moving like an implement made of water over the page, birthing words almost before she thought them.

Back in the late afternoon, at the picnic table in the thicket by the lake, Florence folded the piece of paper that held her poem and slipped it into her back pocket. Then she capped her pen and climbed up on top of the table to sit with legs crossed, staring out at the sun’s last reflection on the lake. She had a smoke and watched the world turn to twilight, the stars slowly appear. Among them, she was surprised to be able to identify her own, and she reached up into the sky for it. It burned in her hand at first with a cold fire, but as she drew it toward her mouth, it became the sweet modaka .

“A universe,” said Kroncha, sitting at the foot of Ganesha’s throne on the floating platform in the Sea of Eternity. “She’ll have no room for meat loaf tonight.”

Ganesha nodded and his stomach jiggled when he laughed, the echo of his mirth pervading a million realities, crumbling a million obstacles to dust.

JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass , and The Shadow Year . His short fiction has been published in three collections: The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream , and The Drowned Life . His fiction has won the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons and teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

I can’t recall when I became aware of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of the Hindu religion, but it was quite a few years ago. I do recall that his image was immediately pleasing to me. I felt a cosmic mirth behind it — the idea of an elephant head on a man’s body, his shameless girth, the fact he rode on a rat, his many arms. After my first meeting with him, I occasionally, over the following years, did haphazard research about his story. What I didn’t suspect from the beginning was how very powerful this god was. He’s one of the most important figures in the Hindu pantheon. The stories told about him feature earthly desires and mythic implications. He’s the Destroyer of Obstacles.