Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

School started up again. Carol Ann and I made a stab at getting back together, but the fizz had gone out of that bottle and we drifted apart. Mama had another of her flings and fought with Daddy until all hours. When you think about it, with its lack of plan or purpose, its stretches of sameness and boredom, its explosive griefs and joys that either last too long or abandon us too quickly, life’s not a thing like football, not as Coach Tuttle meant it, anyway. though maybe it’s a little bit like Edenburg football.

One morning in April, I got a call from Dawn. She had been daydreaming about home and couldn’t think of anyone she wanted to talk to except me. I told her I’d received early acceptance into the University of Virginia and that I was doing okay after, you know, all the weirdness. She asked if there had been any grackle sightings, and I said that Culliver County was basically a grackle-free zone, what with everyone declaring open season on the Devil’s Bird, blowing them away on sight.

The conversation began to drag and Dawn said she should probably be going, yet showed no real inclination to hang up. I asked what she was doing, and she said that Jim, the salesman, wanted her to have a baby.

“It’s a big thing with him,” she said. “I’m scared if I don’t go along, he’s gonna kick me out. I’m not ready to have babies. I don’t know as I’ll ever be ready.”

“I’m not going to be much help with this one, Dawn.”

“I know. It’s just. Oh, hell!”

I thought she might be crying.

After a spell of silence, she said, “Remember when you and me and Doyle and Carol Ann drove up to the Outer Banks that time, and we were dancing to the car radio on top of the dunes?”

“Uh-huh, yeah.”

“I wish I was there now.” She sighed. “It all seems so damn ordinary, but when you think back on it, you see it’s really not.”

“I was thinking just the opposite. You know. How things that seem great, they turn out to be nothing in the long run.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That, too.”

LUCIUS SHEPARD was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and currently lives in Port-land, Oregon. His fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Writers Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His latest books are the massive career retrospective The Best of Lucius Shepard , and a collection of short fiction called Viator Plus . Forthcoming in 2010 is a collection of five novellas, tentatively called Extras . He is finishing work on a longish novel about which he will not speak.

His Web site is www.lucius-shepard.com.

Half of my sophomore year was spent in a place similar to the one described in “The Flock,” a tiny rural high school with barely enough boys to field a varsity football team. When I first came there, I thought the kids were total hicks; after I went back to school in the city, I had a feeling they were smarter than I’d thought. I always wanted to write something that would express their raw innocence and their stubborn rooted-ness and their bursts of wisdom. I never thought I would, and then I remembered the story about Blackbeard and the Devil’s Birds.

Once there was a village on an island that belonged to the Shark God. Every man in the village was a fisherman, and the women cooked their catch and mended their nets and painted their little boats. And because that island was sacred to him, the Shark God saw to it that there were always fish to be caught, and seals as well, in the waters beyond the coral reef, and protected the village from the great gray typhoons that came every year to flood other lagoons and blow down the trees and the huts of other islands. Therefore the children of the village grew fat and strong, and the women were beautiful and strong, and the fishermen were strong and high-hearted even when they were old.

In return for his benevolence the Shark God asked little from his people: only tribute of a single goat at the turn of each year. To the accompaniment of music and prayers, and with a wreath of plaited fresh flowers around its neck, it would be tethered in the lagoon at moonrise. Morning would find it gone, flower petals floating on the water, and the Shark God never seen — never in that form, anyway.

Now the Shark God could alter his shape as he pleased, like any god, but he never showed himself on land more than once in a generation. When he did, he was most often known to appear as a handsome young man, light-footed and charming. Only one woman ever recognized the divinity hiding behind the human mask. Her name was Mirali, and this tale is what is known about her, and about her children.

Mirali’s parents were already aging when she was born, and had long since given up the hope of ever having a child — indeed, her name meant the long-desired one . Her father had been crippled when the mast of his boat snapped during a storm and crushed his leg, falling on him, and if it had not been for their daughter the old couple’s lives would have been hard indeed. Mirali could not go out with the fishing fleet herself, of course — as she greatly wished to do, having loved the sea from her earliest memory — but she did every kind of work for any number of island families, whether cleaning houses, marketing, minding young children, or even assisting the midwife when a birthing was difficult or there were simply too many babies coming at the same time. She was equally known as a seamstress, and also as a cook for special feasts; nor was there anyone who could mend a pandanus-leaf thatching as quickly as she, though this is generally man’s work. No drop of rain ever penetrated any pandanus roof that came under Mirali’s hands.

Nor did she complain of her labors, for she was very proud of being able to care for her mother and father as a son would have done. Because of this, she was much admired and respected in the village, and young men came courting just as though she were a great beauty. Which she was not, being small and somewhat square-made, with straight brows — considered unlucky by most — and hips that gave no promise of a large family. But she had kind eyes, deep-set under those regrettable brows, and hair as black and thick as that of any woman on the island. Many, indeed, envied her; but of that Mirali knew nothing, She had no time for envy herself, nor for young men, either.

Now it happened that Mirali was often chosen by the village priest to sweep out the temple of the Shark God. This was not only a grand honor for a child barely turned seventeen but a serious responsibility as well, for sharks are cleanly in their habits, and to leave his spiritual dwelling disorderly would surely be to dishonor and anger the god himself. So Mirali was particularly attentive when she cleaned after the worshippers, making certain that no prayer whistle or burned stick of incense was left behind. And in this manner did the Shark God become aware of Mirali.