September Excerpt: New Short Story (Patreon)

Hey everyone! This month we've got a new short story I'm working on for my next short story collection, The Future Is Blue, out next year from Subterranean Press. I'd been fascinated with the concept of using the ten Hungarian words Dezs Kosztolányi said were the most beautiful in the language as a narrative structure for awhile. I'm playing around with it now, and hopefully the play will turn into a story. Here's the first part. Enjoy!

 

Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, Grave

The poet Dezs Kosztolányi, toward the end of his long career, proclaimed these to be the ten most beautiful words in Hungarian, and proceeded on to death shortly thereafter.

Flame

Once, in a walled country that was neither Poland nor Hungary nor Serbia nor Romania, though in various centuries claimed, invaded, abandoned, repudiated, and finally its very historicity redacted by all four, a child was born into a particularly withered, lightning-scarred branch of the royal line with a certain deformity. That, in and of itself, was not unusual, not then and not there; around this time all children of the nobility of —— were born with some malformation or another. A recent son had emerged from a baroness with a speckled cochin’s wing in place of his left arm. The daughter of a favored underpope faced her baptism with the slitted eyes of a cat and seven long black fingers on each hand. A pair of ducal twins were presented to the court made of solid silver, their faces engraved with a pattern of rue and musk rose popular at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. The crown prince himself had been born quite dead, without heartbeat or breath, covered in veins of green and purple and scarlet corruption like a weeping mushroom, yet he walked and talked and recited the apocrypha as well as an abbot by the age of four. It had gone on for so long that healthy children were considered undesirable as mates and apprentices, as they were unlikely to progress much socially with their unsettling two eyes, ten fingers, unblemished skin, and luxurious teeth. In the beginning, the defects of the upper classes had been carefully recorded in illuminated books of heritable traits, but by the time this tale broke its mother’s pelvis in half hurling itself into the cauldron of the living, the particulars of these anatomical splendors were no more interesting to the intelligentsia than the exact number of apples required for the St. Barrow’s Eve pyre.

The whole situation was pronounced by the local college of stylites to be a cosmological punishment for the foundational sin of this little kingdom of wheat and walls and waxbeans and white grapes, namely, that an ancient king had held the cold and empty jaw of famine in his hand and, without feeling, ordered the wholesale slaughter of every living songbird within the walls of ——, in order to preserve the harvest. However, stylites are rather high-strung and paranoid as a people; the natural result of living on top of a bony spire of rock and professionally contemplating the universe while standing on one foot and suffering the verbal abuse of the masses. They had gotten rather in the habit of blaming nearly everything on this convenient infamy rather than any current policy of the government for which they might be censured, or any scientific theory which might, may such horrors never be visited on us or anyone we know, be proven incorrect in the future. The past, like God, is changeless and unmovable, and therefore it is safe. Only the eaters of flesh had been spared, the hawks and the ravens and the owls and the petrels. The king sent out his personal guard in their finest armor, black of plate and splendid of feather and elaborate of all imaginable decoration, to put the eaters of seed to the sword. This the knights did with great and solemn ceremony, donning judiciary wigs over their helmets and trying, with witnesses summoned from farms and mills and bakeries, each sparrow, finch, thrush, nightingale, and starling for high treason, burglary, and crimes against the crown before carrying out their sentences beneath a tight, grey, unraining sky. The queen caused the gargantuan royal oven to be moved into the common square and stoked to a rage. It burned hot at its work for sixteen days on end, roasting the bodies of the condemned. These were then distributed as equally as possible among the starving population and devoured meat, talon, bone, and spleen beneath maroon silk canopies raised up by the daughters of the noble houses, in order that God and all his angels should not see what they had done, for in those innocent days it was believed that silk alone could not be penetrated by the eye of the divine, originating as it did in the belly of a foul and creeping worm from the unreachable east, where devils play dice with the damned, and maroon was the color of hopelessness. It is for the memory of this that all common families in the country of —— wear the surnames of songbirds who perished, and noble families bear the names of the birds of prey who lived and were not perturbed.

The symbol of the house into which the certain child I have mentioned was born was the bittern, an eater of fish. The progenitor of her family had been a strange and off-putting man, addicted to the drinking of milk as miserably as most folk in —— are to the drinking of a particular sour cherry death-in-a-glass. He crept through the fields at night, suckling at udders that did not belong to him, scooping cream from the mouths of calves and cheesemakers’ daughters alike, savaged about the shoulders and haunches by shepherds and wolves alike, hated by constables and chatelains alike. Because of this habit he grew very tall and stout and quick and clever and his skin grew so bright and clear you could see it from the moon, instead of paunched and sallow like the drinkers of cherries, and his hair grew so long and thick that he cut off locks of it, tied them with stalks of lavender and chives, and sold them as cures for baldness until he became a reasonably wealthy man. It was this dairy-fattened brain that conceived the idea of encircling —— with a grand wall in the shape, like the country itself, of a blown tulip, so that more men could devote themselves to the making of yogurt and buttercreams and fat babies and fatter poetry than waiting for the next Mongol invasion with the mix of anxiety and boredom that comprise the traditional yeast for the rough bread of a military coup. He did not build the wall, of course, nor did he draw designs for it, nor did he even contribute a stitch of silver to its funding, but in the days when songbirds still whistled in the walnut trees, the world was kind and lovely and eccentric, and the idea of a thing was considered to be the fact of it, and so this unrepentant calcium-thief received a rarefied title and married the slim, solemn, sloe-eyed daughter of a lord who, years later, betrayed the king over a black rose and a green pearl, and took the throne for a fortnight, during which time he set down thirteen laws so simple, elegant, and easy to obey that lawyers in neighboring countries died in the night of existential palsy, granted women and foreigners the right to own property and receive income, removed the injunction against men of learning dissecting corpses for the purposes of academic study, placed all fools, jesters, witches, and whores under the crown’s protection and immune from all prosecutions, forgave the debts of the proletariat, but not the aristocracy, reformed the tax code, ordered seven diabolists of seven different schools to determine some means on earth or below it of preserving his laws for seven hundred years, and, after a vivid dream, invented the holiday of St. Barrow’s Eve out of whole cloth before being poisoned by so many nobles at once that he simply exploded over the blancmange he so greatly preferred for his nightly dessert.

Whether, as the stylites insisted, as retribution for such libertine governance on the part of King Blancmange, or, as the cheesemakers gloated, for the guzzling of so much illicit milk on the part of Lord Cowsuck, the line never again produced more than one child in a generation, and that always a girl, not even after the bonfire of the songbirds, when they were given the crest of the fish-eating bittern to wear in shame for all time, not even once the fact of their being technically within the line of succession had been forgotten by all except the more discerning and scholarly voles in the palace walls, two of the stylites, and by something neither a vole nor a stylite that lived in the granary, not even when the certain child I have mentioned was born with a tower in the place of her torso, all the way to the cleft where a woman becomes a world to the cleft where a throat becomes a jaw, and tore her mother in half with the bricks of her birthing, and called Vnuk, and left alone in her father’s arms while the stars rained stitched silver into a room hot and sour with death, its floor carpeted in blood and its ceilings chandeliered in blood and its lock so full of clotting that no one could get in for the three days it took to summon the locksmith from his pilgrimage, all the while the infant cried and cried for milk that, though it belonged to her, would never come.