Metaphorosis November 2017

By Carol Wellart, Patrick Doerksen, Joachim Hejndermans and 2 more

Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis magazine.
All the stories from the month, plus author biographies, interviews, and story origins.

Table of Contents

• Notes Towards a New Fairytale – Patrick Doerksen
• The Number of the Tribe – Gerald Warfield
• My Book Report on Starlight – Joachim Heijndermans
• The Wife of Fabian Vitalik – Mariah Montoya

Cover art by Carol Wellart.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Metaphorosis Publishing
• Release date: Jun 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640760905

Book preview

Metaphorosis

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November 2017

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edited by

B. Morris Allen

ISSN: 2573-136X (online)

ISBN: 978-1-64076-090-5 (e-book)

Metaphorosis

Neskowin

Table of Contents

Metaphorosis 2017

November

Notes Towards a New Fairytale

Patrick Doerksen

The Number of the Tribe

Gerald Warfield

My Book Report on Starlight

Joachim Heijndermans

The Wife of Fabian Vitalik

Mariah Montoya

Metaphorosis Publishing

Copyright

November 2017

Notes Towards a New Fairytale — Patrick Doerksen

The Number of the Tribe — Gerald Warfield

My Book Report on Starlight — Joachim Heijndermans

The Wife of Fabian Vitalik — Mariah Montoya

Notes Towards a New Fairytale

Patrick Doerksen

When I was fourteen, my mother sent me off for the summer to my Opa’s farm. The idea was to get out of Canada, see a little bit of the world, and learn a bit of German while my brain was yet plastic. Just think what a head start you’ll have on your language requirement, she said, for it had been decided in her mind that I would get a PhD. It may take you until October to make any real progress, but I’ve okayed it with the school-board.

I barely knew my Opa; he led a lonely, stubborn life on his farm in the Black Forest, two hours from Freiburg. It was a ridiculous idea. But there I was, on a June evening, watching Opa’s twilight silhouette drop its hoe in the garden patch and hustling over to involve me in a skeletal hug.

"Mein Liebling, he said. Willkommen zum Wichthof!" Wichthof was what he called the farm.

Inside his cottage, we ate pickles in a kitchen that smelled of pickles. His English was poor and in his throat was an excess of phlegm; it necessitated sharp stops among many consonants, to the effect that his sentences seemed less spoken than whip-tamed.

Opa, I learned, was a folklorist. He showed me his study that first night, and that first night only; after that, he kept it locked. I did not understand what his project was, exactly. He seemed to be gathering local folktales, and I remember him saying something about correcting the great mistake of the Brothers Grimm. I took a look at the notes on his desk, notes to some essay he was writing, but I did not linger; I did not know I ought to be interested.

The essay will argue that the uncollected folktales of Southern Baden-Württemberg give evidence of a folk-entity distinct from the Fairy of the Irish-English tradition. In the latter, one finds stories of a trivial nature: farmers finding swine tied together by their tails, country folk waking up two hours before dawn, deceived by what sounds like a rooster. This new folk-entity, however, gives us tales of entirely different sort.

I was, I should explain, an avid sketcher. I had begun when I was eight, because of my little sister: she hadn’t been born yet and I wanted the first go at her. I spent countless pages getting her eyelashes right, her smile, her bangs—all very pretty of course, prettier even than I thought I was. Then for obscure medical reasons, my mother decided to have an abortion and I never met my little sister.

But the passion lived on. By the time I was fourteen I was declining sleepovers so I might have more time to make pencil studies of the felled oaks in the field behind our house. I read how if one was discerning, one could see a tremendous activity in motionless things; so I tried to become discerning. I even started preparing to enter a young artists’ competition with a big art magazine called Phenomena. My future, I was convinced, depended on winning.

Thus it had been with a vast, seething annoyance that I had received the news I would be living on my Opa’s farm, far from paint supplies and galleries.

The first morning, before the summer sun had heaved itself like a somnolent cat into squatting position over the property, Opa woke me. The lives of three goats, three sheep, and a dozen chickens depended on us, I was told, not to mention the hundred cabbages in the patch behind the house. All chores were done swiftly as possible, so that noontime borscht could be slurped and Opa could get to his more important work in the study.

There were other expectations for me.

"I give you the old Gartenanlage. Is by duck pond," he said, presumably in a gesture of hospitality—for the man could not imagine, the way he zipped pixy-like around his own garden and kitchen, that hands might like to go idle.

The Gartenanlage (garden plot) was a great distance from the house, and when I finally found it I wondered why he had called it a duck pond. There wasn’t a single duck to grace it with a quack. For three afternoons I worked dully in the plot, finding none of the gardener’s satisfaction in the thwunk of a weed’s taproot releasing from the soil. Eventually, though, I realized that Opa’s mind was truly in his study and he would not be monitoring my progress.

I stopped my weeding. To keep up appearances I would trudge out to the duck pond, carrying my spade and my sketchbook, only to leave the first of these entirely unused. I never planted a thing.

(1) Appearance. In this regard, the folk-entity described by the Grimm stories diverges distinctly from that of Southern Baden-Württemberg. In the former we find diminutive, hominoid and (in one tale) naked entities. In the latter are beings lit from within and as tall as young trees, who appear and disappear on mountain slopes and lake shores. Not uncommonly they are accompanied by servants, often bizarre creatures who serve blindly and know little of the minds of their masters.

There is a place at the edge of every forest where the daylight grows shy; I sat in that garden for hours, trying to get it right. I couldn’t. I squatted there, working myself into a fit of self-loathing, until finally—and this demonstrates the extent of my passion, since I was a gentle girl—I threw down my book, stabbed my pencil hilt-deep into the soil and stalked off, leaving them there.

When the rain came, I was peeling potatoes with Opa in the kitchen.

I did not notice right away, not until Opa used an old German expression (Es regnet Bindfäden, it’s raining strings), and in trying to puzzle out its meaning I also puzzled out the fact. I was out the door before I could drop the peeler. Of course it was too late, but the real blow was that, instead of finding my sketchbook soaked, I couldn’t find it at all. I looked until my teeth were chattering, but the wind, like a fussy cleaning lady, had moved it somewhere. It had even taken my pencil.

I was devastated. Four months’ worth of studies were in that sketchbook, each of which I’d been sure could win the contest, each of which contained the seed of a whole future of fame and recognition. I catastrophized, lost sleep, tore apart my fingernails. It took me three days to hold my head up again, to improvise a sketchbook out of scrap papers, to return to the garden plot.

That’s when I saw it.

The path bent along a copse of poplars which blocked the duck pond from the house, and when I had come to the point in the curve at which my plot became visible, I dropped into a crouch.

I’ve said that I did not plant a thing. Well, in the center of my weeded garden bed stood a sapling. And beside that sapling was a creature I knew at once was not supposed to exist.

It is very hard not to make something like this sound silly. Maybe it will help if I clarify