bewildered, abandoned. Then she remembered as if from long ago, the small, heavy weight of her son on her lap, the way he tilted his chin up to her to ask for a story, his upper lip rimmed with milk. She turned and began to swim back to the lake’s edge, feeling herself grow heavier and heavier, until she could feel her arms again, and her naked, muddy skin, from which the scales were already fading. Her felt strange, awkward; at last she stood in knee-deep water, looking at her brown arms glowing in the sunshine, her mud-streaked breasts, the shiny stretchmarks on the slight, taut curve of her belly. The world swam into focus; she felt her head clear a little. She passed her tongue over her lips, and felt the slight notch on its tip that had not been there before. Behind her, under the shimmering green surface of the lake, lay the promise of that other world. She looked around and saw that her sari, blouse and undergarments were floating near her, amidst a sprinkling of harsingar flowers.
For a while she stood quietly in the water, feeling dazed and new, thinking, but not in words, or words she had known before. She knew her mother had stood thus once, filled with excitement and confusion, feeling the new life she had made stir inside her. At last she could stand inside her mother’s skin and sense what she had gone through—the dilemma of choosing between two worlds, the prison she had made for herself, of love and guilt. Her brother’s wistfulness; like her own son, he had been fathered by a man; he would always hear the call of his mother’s kind, but could never transform, never know what it was like to turn underwater in an exquisite dance, to taste the world through his skin, to be life-giver, rain-bringer, death-lord. This new child she carried would be like her, an entity capable of existing in two worlds.
Two worlds … Pictures rose in her mind: the warm yellow house, the harsingar tree. She remembered the rhythms of the day, the slow course of the white cow Muniya’s morning journey from house to house, the taste of fresh milk. And Kishore … No, she was not quite ready to leave it all behind. It was not yet time for that. She would come back to the lake again tomorrow, to begin to learn how to parcel her life between water and earth, fire and shadow, until it was time for the final leave-taking. Slowly, dazedly, she gathered her clothes and emerged from the lake. She went behind a bush and began to squeeze the water from her sari.
Her skin prickled; she sensed the gardener’s presence a moment before he came around the bush. His eyes were filled with wonder and desire—he came slowly towards her as though she were a dream that would dissolve with the first stumble. She watched him curiously, without fear, still in the twilight state between her two worlds. He put trembling hands on her bare shoulders. She let him draw her close so that her breasts flattened against his wet shirt; she felt the angular roughness of his chin against her cheek. “Lady,” he said, and she tasted his skin, his smell with her tongue, and remembered, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, the old fear and confusion. A bitter taste filled her mouth; as he pulled her down into the wet grass she reached up blindly and bit the side of his neck.
She watched him thrashing about on the ground. After he had stopped she spat and rubbed her face with her hands to try to clear her head. Then she gathered her clothes, squeezed and shook the water from them and dressed. Her hair was wet and tangled, but she managed to comb it back with her fingers and tie it into a bun. She looked once more at the gardener’s still body, feeling the beginnings of a vague uneasiness.
She began to walk slowly home, looking about her like a child, letting the sights, sounds and smells wash over her: men on bicycles, ringing their bells, children splashing into rainwater puddles, shouting in their clear, shrill voices, cars all shiny and wet, honking, lurching as they negotiated potholes, the smell of wet earth and the vapors already rising from the moist ground, the drip of rainwater from the tree branches above her. Slowly it came back to her. The way home. It was familiar and strange all at once.
And there, meandering down the street was Muniya the cow. She caught up with the great white bovine matriarch and stretched her arm toward her, but the cow shied away from her as though stung, and began to edge away, fear in her dark eyes. Dismayed, Susheela stood there helplessly, tears welling up in her eyes. She made a small, experimental, cajoling sound, thinking of the way Kishore had looked at her last. The cow let out a breath redolent with the odor of grass and carrot ends, and let Susheela come up to her. She shuddered as Susheela stroked her back, but did not move away.
Susheela felt an urgent need now to see her son. Taking leave of Muniya she began to walk rapidly, knowing that passersby were staring at her, with her disheveled hair and sodden clothes. She had to win back her little boy, to take that look from his eyes. She would do it, she thought in the wordless tongue, with patience, with stories, but—it came back to her now with horrifying clarity: the of the gardener in the wet grass—how to protect her family from what she had become? What would she tell them? She couldn’t even begin to articulate it, she realized in terror. People on the street were talking, laughing, and they might as well have been speaking some incomprehensible foreign language, because their speech had no meaning for her.
Then, slowly, she remembered the words, and understood them. It was Naag Panchami, the Festival of Snakes, and the monsoons had arrived at last. A car went by, fast, and two glittering arcs of water rose in its wake. There was the house; the shisham trees, their round leaves glistening, the trunks dark with moisture. Through the open front window she could see her husband’s profile as he waited, reading his paper, one brown hand on the sunlit sill. A picture came into her mind’s eye: that brown hand scooping up earth, making a hollow like a womb for the roots of the harsingar tree, patting the soil in place. She trembled, as though a string had been plucked deep inside her. The door was open. She walked into the house as if for the first time.
GROTESQUE ANGELS
by Gwendolyn Clare
The rain turns the city upside down. In the gutters the water pools and flows, each drop fracturing the surface until the slick streets glitter as if seeded with pavement-bound stars. Low-slung clouds glow orange with light pollution, the night sky lit better than the street below. Not that the street is too dark for her eyes; nothing is ever completely dark in Chicago.
From her rooftop perch, Kelsey waits and watches. The city feels wrong tonight. Something old and hungry lurks in her territory, and the streets moan silently under the unwelcome weight of it. The Old One hides behind the city’s glamour—
Kelsey drops off the roof and lands on a narrow ledge part way down the side of the building, her claws scraping the neo-Gothic limestone facade. She crouches, motionless again, and the rainwater runs over her skin and streams from the tips of her wing-feathers as it might from a statue. The sidewalk below grumbles and sighs to her, unsettled by the Old One’s passage. It walked this street not long ago.
A muted wail of sirens cuts through the sounds of the storm and the sidewalk’s complaints, and Kelsey’s head snaps up to catch the distance and direction. The sound lies ahead of her along the path she has already chosen—the path to track the Old One. It could mean nothing.
It’s probably not nothing.
The rain stings her face when she flies, and she squints against it. Her nose detects the reek of bad magic from half a block away, vile and sulfurous. It leads her to a narrow alley wedged between a couple of brick four-floor walk-ups. She circles above, evaluating. Police lights paint the old brick in alternating blue and red, and the alley crawls with cops.
She alights on the fire escape above and watches through the black metal grate. The glamour cloaks her from sight. If they were to stare at her hard enough, they might see a shadow shape crouched in her place, but she knows they won’t stare; they will not think to look up at all. Humans have an odd deficiency of awareness for what’s above their heads. Perhaps their genetic programming is to blame, their pre-historic ancestors never having encountered airborne predators. An odd quirk of human psychology, Kelsey thinks, but convenient.
Below, the flooded alley looks like a biblical curse, rainwater diluting blood until there seems to be much more than a few liters and it flows like a river. Red streaks the side of one building, the evidence already smeared by the weather. Kelsey does not envy the humans as they splash through the remnants of their rapidly deteriorating crime scene. The corpse is a messy pile of ruined flesh likely to win the award for all-time low point in the detectives’ careers. Kelsey certainly has no desire to give it a closer inspection.
She has never seen such exuberant carnage before, and it worries her. The Old One’s misbehavior is escalating. Time to report in. Perhaps Duncan will know what to do.
