Odd Season
It was an odd season.
The wild geese threaded the sky through
the equinox’s needle
the sugar maples burned upon the hill.
The bear came walking down the road
through the middle of town.
My neighbor saw him,
said he looked like he was going somewhere
not quite in a hurry.
Everybody stopped to watch.
Couldn’t get out of the way fast enough
and then there wasn’t any need
because the bear kept walking
didn’t look right or left.
Somebody grabbed a gun from their truck
and somebody else told him to put it away
and not to be a goddamn fool.
He left holes in the road
shaped like bear tracks.
In another place they should have filled with turquoise
but here they were red clay and an inch of clear gray water.
The tracks ran past my neighbor’s garden.
She planted wild lupine around them
which never does too well on clay.
These grew all right. Maybe that was the miracle.
For the rest of us
we didn’t talk about it much
it was one more odd thing
in a season already filled with them.
Acknowledgements
I always used to roll my eyes at those five-page acknowledgements that showed up in the back of various books.
Then I became a writer. Heh.
Thanks go, therefore, in no particular order, to Sigrid Ellis for buying a short story and setting me down this dark road, to Maggie Hogarth for cover consultation and a lot of good advice about self-publishing, and to my friend Mur Lafferty, who writes short stories and runs a podcast that buys short stories, for discussing the existence of such things as if they were normal and not from some weird other dimension inhabited by people who are not me.
Thanks also go to Terri Windling, for running a poetry week on her blog which led to a couple of the poems in here, and to many long ago folklorists, without whom the world would be a far drearier place.
Thanks forever and always to my kind blog readers who have read my stuff and uttered variations on “I like this!” and occasionally even “I would buy this!” which is possibly the most heartening thing that a reader can say to an author.
Huge, massive, Sharknado-sized thanks to KB Spangler, who edited “Boar & Apples” and left snarky comments in the sidebar and who is probably reading this right now and judging me for not having used semi-colons. (Seriously, what is with editors and semi-colons?)
Likewise, thanks to my three faithful proofreaders, who went through it in record time and caught so many errors that I went and hid under the bed for awhile. Cassie, Jes, and Josh, you three are awesome and if you ever need a kidney, I will start hunting down strangers with your blood type.
And finally, my thanks and all my love to my husband Kevin. There is a place in everything I write, at about the 3/4th mark, where I lose all my confidence and force him to read it and tell me whether or not it will shame my ancestors. He has therefore endured more cliffhangers than any man should be forced to endure, as well as me hovering over him while he reads, going “You twitched! What made you twitch? Was it a funny bit? Was it a bad bit? TELL ME TELL ME OH GOD IS IT HORRIBLE?!”
Despite this, he stays married to me. (I think it’s because I buy him sushi.)
You are all the best sort of people and I am flattered that you let me hang around with you.
Editor’s Afterword
The original fairy tales quoted use multiple grammatical, spelling, stylistic, and typographical conventions that are no longer standard usage. Rather than update all of them, with the exception of removing spaces preceding punctuation and using current American conventions for quotation marks, I have left them as originally published. I have also maintained the informal style and internet conventions of the original blog posts wherever possible. My thanks to Ursula Vernon, NESFA, and Arisia for allowing me to work on this project. Special thanks to Anna Bradley, Ann Broomhead, Dave Cantor, Lis Carey, Gay Ellen Dennett, Dave Grubbs, Rick Katze, Alice Lewis, Tony Lewis, Ben Levy, Geri Sullivan, and Tim Szczesuil who were all generous with their help. Any irregularities or errors that remain are mine. I would also like to thank my friends and my family, especially Elizabeth Bear, Beth Coughlin, Scott Lynch, and Karen Westerholm, without whom there would be neither me nor this book. — Sheila Perry
Technical Notes
All material was submitted electronically and was set in Adobe Garamond, Golden Type ITC, Minion, and Sunantara, as well as Franklin Gothic and Magneta (on the dust jacket), using Adobe InDesign. The book was printed and bound by Sheridan Books of Ann Arbor, Michigan, on acid-free paper.
No birds, toads, or fairy-tale creatures were harmed during the making of this book.
Select books from NESFA Press
24 Frames into the Future
by John Scalzi
$28
Scratch Monkey
by Charles Stross
$27
Lifelode
by Jo Walton
$25
Brothers in Arms
by Lois McMaster Bujold
$25
Works of Art
by James Blish
$29
Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of
L. Sprague de Camp
$25
The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of
de Camp
and
Pratt
$26
Transfinite
by A. E. van Vogt
$29
Silverlock
by John Myers Myers
$26
Adventures in the Dream Trade
by Neil Gaiman (trade paper)
$16
Once Upon a Time (She Said)
by Jane Yolen
$26
Details on these and many more books are online at: www.nesfapress.org Books may be ordered online or by writing to:
NESFA Press; PO Box 809; Framingham, MA 01701
We accept checks (in US$), Visa, or MasterCard. Massachusetts residents please add 6.25% sales tax. For domestic orders add $4 P&H for one book, $8 for an order of two to five books, $2 per book for orders of six or more. (For addresses outside the U.S., please add $12 for one book, $24 for
