To those readers who are encountering one (or both) of my bylines for the first time, welcome! And thank you for taking a chance on a “new” writer. And for those readers of Lindholm or Hobb who are taking the opportunity to acquire some of these stories in a more durable form, thank you, I hope you will not be disappointed.
PART I
Megan Lindholm
A Touch of Lavender
The old question “Where do you get your story ideas from?” still has the power to stump me. The easy, and truthful, answer is “Everywhere.” Any writer will tell you that. An overheard conversation on the bus, a newspaper headline read the wrong way, a simple “what if” question—any of those things can be the germ that grows into a story.
But for me, at least, there is one other odd source. A stray first line. I may be driving or mowing the lawn or trying to fall asleep at night, and some odd sentence will suddenly intrude. I always recognize these sentences for what they are: the first line of a story that I don’t yet know.
In the days before computers figured into writing, I would jot those butterfly lines down on a piece of scrap paper and keep them in my desk drawer, with other stray ideas. I knew they had to be captured immediately or they would flutter off forever. The line “We grew up like mice in a rotting sofa, my sister and I” came to me at a time when I had just moved into a house that possessed just such an item of furniture. It was a smelly old sofa, damp and featuring a green brocade sort of upholstery. It came with the used-to-be-a-chicken-house house that my husband and I purchased with my very first book advance from Ace Books. My advance was $3,500 and the run- down house, on almost four acres of choice swampland (oh, wait, we call those “wetlands” nowadays and preserve them!) cost us the whopping sum of $32,500. The payment of $325 a month represented a $50 saving over what we had been paying in monthly rent! And we could keep chickens for eggs. Such a deal!
From the attic, I could look up and see sky between the cedar shingles that were the roof. A brooder full of chickens was parked in the bathroom. (Buff Orpingtons for you chicken connoisseurs.) We regarded those twenty- five half-fledged layers as a value-added feature of the house, much better than a spare room. A spare room can’t lay eggs! There were no interior doors in the house, and some of the windows didn’t close all the way. We tore up the rotted carpet and lived with bare ship-lap floors. There were no shelves in the noisy old refrigerator; we cut plywood to fit and inserted it. The only heat came from a woodstove. It was thus a mixed blessing that the yard was dominated by an immense fallen cedar tree. My ax and I rendered it into heat for the house for that first winter, one chop at a time.
A week after we bought it, at the end of March, Fred said good-bye and went off to fish the Bering Sea, leaving me there with my faithful portable Smith-Coronamatic, three children under ten years old, an overweight pit bull, and a tough old cat. I would not see my husband again until October. We were impossibly broke when he left, and I knew that somehow I had to hold it together until after the end of herring season when he would finally get paid. We borrowed money from his sister to buy a can of paint because my daughter could not stand the lavender walls left her by the previous tenant of her bedroom. The bathroom chickens got older and began to lay eggs. It was mend-and-make-do time. Smelly and mice infested or not, the couch and other abandoned furnishings were what we had. I felt a bit bad for the mice when I evicted them. They’d been cozy and safe there, despite the run- down surroundings. Vacuumed, cleaned by hand, and with an old bedspread tossed over it, the rotting sofa became the main seating in the living room.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I suppose it occurred to me that my children were now much like those mice had been. Tough as things were, we now had a place to call our own. And, I hoped, my kids had good folks who would see them through.
Did the lavender walls have anything to do with the story that would be written, years later, and feature that opening line? Who knows?
It’s all grist for the writing mill.
We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she’d be asleep in the curl of my belly and I’d be half falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I’d hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the newborn ones when the mother came to nurse them. I’d curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights less chill.
I’d lived in the same basement apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was an old town house, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the basement. None of them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out of there. I don’t remember seeing him after that.
My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down, and then waiting for our landlord.
He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, hell, it was probably for the best, he’d been meaning to put down new tiles and spraysulate the walls anyway. “You go ahead and tear out the old stuff,” he told my mom. “Stack it behind the house, and I’ll have it hauled away. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . .”
“I told you, I already mailed it,” Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and drove off.
So Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the Sheetrock off the walls, leaving the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare against the gray block walls. That was as far as the remodeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator.
My mom wasn’t so regular about paying the rent that she could raise a fuss. Most of the folks in our building were like that: pay when you can, and don’t stay home when you can’t, so the landlord can’t nag at you. The apartments were lousy, but complaining could get you kicked out. All the tenants knew that if the landlord had wanted to, he could have gotten a government grant to convert the place into Skoag units and really made a bundle. We were right on the edge of a Skoag sector and demand for Skoag units was increasing.
That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and there wasn’t much housing for them. It all had to be agency approved, too, to prevent any “interplanetary incidents.” Can’t have aliens falling down the steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariahs. These outcasts were the only link we had to their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for space travel that the whole world was so anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to Earth. They just started wading out of the seas one day, not all that different from a washed-up Cuban. Just more wetback aliens, as the joke went. They were very open about being exiles with no means of returning home. They arrived gradually, in groups of three and four, but of the ships that brought them there was never any sign, and the Skoags weren’t saying anything. That didn’t stop any of the big government people from hoping, though. Hoping that if we were real nice to them, they might drop a hint or two about interstellar drives or something. So the Skoags got the government-subsidized housing with showers that worked
