Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 33

By Small Beer Press

Guest edited by Michigan writer Michael J. DeLuca, LCRW #33 approaches its theme of humanity's relationship with the earth with a little humor, a touch of horror, and seventeen different kinds of understanding. Includes multiple award winner Sofia Samatar, Nebula and Shirley Jackson award nominee Carmen Maria Machado, and World Fantasy Award nominee Christopher Brown among others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Release date: Jul 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618731173

Book preview

Guest Editor’s Note

Michael J. DeLuca

The Humanity Versus the Earth Issue

The Earth Saves Itself from Humanity Issue

The 30% Non-Dead-Tree Issue

The Crying Indian Is Actually Italian Issue

The Women Turning Into Trees Issue

The What the Mushrooms Told Me Issue

The Jellyfish Inherit the Earth Issue

The Critical Mass Issue

The There Is No Such Thing as Critical Mass Issue

The Change Is Inevitable Issue

The Inevitability Is Change Issue

When Gavin and Kelly let me hold the reins (I hope they don’t live to regret it), an issue themed something along the lines of the above was the first thing that came to my head. It’s no watershed moment, much as I’d love it to be; Conjunctions just did one they were even-keeled enough to call The Nature Issue. And there have been anthologies, and even the occasional novel-length text, every few years since the anthropocene started: ideas in narrative form I’d probably never have thought to lump together into anything until I spent a month reading submissions for an LCRW issue I claimed would be themed on humanity’s relationship with the earth.

It was gratifying and calming to learn that people other than me and not just the talking heads do think about these things. In fact, the experience bordered on the sublime; it restored (some of) my faith in humanity. This is what art, speculative literature in particular, is for: unrestrained thought in a form that if we let it will touch every part of what makes us human and thereby foment more of the same.

I asked for optimism, I expected cynicism, I got both. We’re not going to make it through this thing without a sense of humor. I tried to find complexity and overlook the easy answers.

Read. Look. Think. Be changed. I hope it makes you feel what it made me feel.

trees.tif

The Sanctity of Nature

Leslie Wightman

behold the trees

trunks twisted and resilient

home to birds

and frogs

and insects

and part of the mighty forest

Now turn,

Say: Fuck it,

And go get a coffee.

(Make it an espresso.)

trees%20sketch.tif

I Bury Myself

Carmen Maria Machado

Here is what you do when you need to choose the end.

First, find a person who knows your body, and fuck them for three days.

Then, drive to a meadow, where there is so much life.

There, dig a hole long enough and wide enough for your body to fit.

Next, climb in.

Then, wait.

fresh

I die, and die, and die.

The first thing I stop feeling is my fake tooth, the one mounted on a screw that is threaded deep into my jaw. I have been aware of it, day and night, ever since the novocaine wore off during a summer afternoon when I was seventeen. The day was hot and bright and long and then it was hot and bright and long and there was something else inside of my body. I could feel it, an alien presence; something hunkered down in my mouth. Now, it blinks out, as if it never was.

The sun leaves the patch of sky visible to me, and when the shadows above lengthen they dip down into my grave, distorted on the walls of clay.

My heart has stilled, a new kind of quiet.

My body is no river, but as it if were a river, my fluids sink like silt. Gravity crawls on top of me, into me, and weighs them down.

My limbs are stiff, like on the days after an unexpected sprint.

There are five stages of decay and five stages of grief, but this is a coincidence.

As for the creatures, the beasts, the living things? I hear them coming.

bloat

Now, inside of me, life again; though smaller than what was there before, legion: blowflies and maggots the size of pencil erasers, all of them working, working. They push up and out and I swell like I am full of want or food or both, and I wonder if afterwards things will grow out of me and my soil, saplings perhaps, who with age will become trees with fruit-bearing branches, the kind of red, red fruit children eat when they’ve gone exploring, and from that slip of life more life will come, more trees and things that can grow beneath the shade of their canopies, and rain will fall, new rivers will cut through the earth because there is nothing more powerful than water and time, and the river will rise and fall and rise and fall with every storm and every summer drought, and from me will come a whole, new forest, and the center of it will be my body long dead, but because I have fed that tree, I have fed everything, and I am the forest’s mother, I am her father, I am her god and goddess, her primordial soup, her progenitor, her big bang, the forehead from which she has sprung, and if a brave young woman were to cut through the forest to its deepest and most tangled interior, on a mission to find a mythical flower that will cure her lover of a mysterious illness, a witch would certainly tell her about me, and send her the center of the growth to find the origin, the source, the holy seed, the bloody uterus of the known world, which is to say, the forest, which is to say, this forest, and she would find the tree above my bones and nap there and dream and know that before her lover grew ill, and before they had touched even once, and before she was born and before the forest spread and before this tree grew and weighed down its branches with red, red fruit, my body was in this grave in the earth, still slick with spent desire, dead, and pregnant with the gases of a thousand nursing organisms, and that I heard the rustle of birds and little creatures tunneling through sandy soil, and once a deer looked down into the grave, right at me, its sharp shovel skull tilted sideways, my face reflected in its inky pupils.

I am deep in the woods and there is no returning home.

active

Here is what falls away:

A history: When I was seven, I couldn’t stop swallowing dirt. And grass, soil, stones, fallen leaves, leaves plucked from branches, branches broken into bites, bark, snails. It gave me powers. It made me immune to the invisible monsters of the world, the kind that traveled to you by innocuous methods: on the fingers of friends, a shared cup, an oyster of saliva dropped into your mouth by a neighborhood bully. Better the germ you know than the germ you don’t.

Fears, all of them: Brain tumors, blood clots, choking while alone, slipping and impaling myself on some otherwise ordinary object, tripping and breaking my neck, that amoeba that eats your brain, auto-immune disorders, being struck by a stray bullet, the exponentially growing catalogue of cancers, blood poisoning, rabies, mad cow disease, quicksand, ticks and their many diseases, allergic reactions, being cut so deep you can see the color of your insides, flesh-eating bacteria, bird flu. That one day you will be taken by one of these things, and you will be buried—all of this in the passive voice.

An image: A salmon slit at her gut, pink eggs pouring out of her like beads.

A sensation: My mouth filled with tapioca balls, teeth mired in the sleek stick of them.

A sound: My father kept my milk teeth in a box that he’d rattle when I was sad. It made me smile, a gum-gapped smile, that clatter of wood and bone.

A memory: I was a girl once, and my father and I hiked to a summit. He wanted show me nature, tell me stories, pass on some campfire songs, but I couldn’t help but stare at the sheer drops to the valley below and worry about my body pinballing down the mountainside until it was broken, dragged away by wild things. In my mind, I walked off the ledge of stone and pedaled in the air for minutes, like a cartoon character, until I thought to look down into a yawning abyss below me.

A confession: I am afraid of what lies at the bottom of the valley.

A confession: I cannot remember not being afraid.

A story: There is a story of a boy who wished to die, and so he sought out poison to drink. But what he imbibed were sweet things, unfamiliar to him in his sorrow: honey and wine. He staggered to a freshly-dug grave and laid himself inside, waiting for the end. He mistook the heady slur of alcohol for oncoming death. He misheard a local wedding’s church bells for the sounds of paradise. And he died there, of exposure. He did not follow my advice to the letter, and died afraid.

A realization: The worst part about being alive is worrying when you are going to die. When you decide to die, you take death’s power away. This is not the same as suicide. This is not the same as dying by your own hand.

A hand: A bird descends, then lifts with her prize.

The rest: All the things that do not serve me.

They fall away and become part of the earth. They’re her troubles, now.

I am roiling, frenzied, lightened. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so my fear is replaced by nothingness is replaced