The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

253 Pages·2013·2.64 MB·English

by  Caitlin R. Kiernan

The Ape’s Wife and Other StoriesCopyright © 2013 by Caitlín R. Kiernan. All
rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2013 by Vincent Chong.
All rights reserved.

Interior illustrations Copyright © 2013 by Vince Locke.
All rights reserved.

Print Interior design Copyright © 2013
by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

First Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-587-1

Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com
www.caitlinkiernan.com
greygirlbeast.livejournal.com
Twitter: @auntbeast
For Michael Zulli
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a
liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. LeGuin,
Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976)
Table of Contents

Author’s Introduction
“The Steam Dancer (1896)”
“The Maltese Unicorn”
“One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)”
“The Collier’s Venus (1898)”
“Galápagos”
“Tall Bodies”
“As Red As Red”
“Hydraguros”
“Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins”
“Tidal Forces”
“The Sea Troll’s Daughter”
“Random Thoughts Before a Fatal Crash”
“The Ape’s Wife”
Notes
Author’s Biography
Introduction

I.

I’ve never been much for one-note short story collections, dominated by any
single sort of tale. As a kid, my favorite collections generally were those that
displayed diversity, in mood and subject matter. These are among the books I
grew up reading and read as a teen. For example, Ray Bradbury’s A Medicine for
Melancholy (1958) and Angela Carter’s Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974).
Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), and Harlan Ellison’s
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969). The collected
works of Ambrose Bierce and, H. P. Lovecraft, who was more capable of
whimsy and Dunsanian fancies than most realize. When I sat down to compile
this volume, looking back over my earlier and somewhat “themed” collections, I
determined this book would, instead, present a wide range of the fantastic, a
collection that wanders about Colonial New England cemeteries, then sets off for
Mars. That is content, one page, with werewolvery and ghosts, then a few pages
later it’s busy with steam-driven cyborgs in the Wild West, before careening into
a feminist/queer retelling of Beowulf, just prior to landing amid the intrigues of a
demonic brothel in a 1945 Manhattan that won’t be found in any history book.
I cannot help but feel that publishing, over the past several decades, has
become more than ever determined to drive authors to specialize, rather than
encouraging them explore and develop their potential range. This, in turn,
trickles down to readers, who can become as hidebound as authors. Which is a
loss, I think, for readers and for writers. Why would anyone wants to know 101
ways to prepare meatloaf, when they have an infinite variety of delicacies at
their fingertips? We are what we cook, and what we eat, and, too, we are most
certainly what we write and read.

II.

Back in July, during Readercon 23, Peter Straub and I were interviewed by
Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan. At some point during the interview, I was
asked how – and why – I’m so prolific. The why part, that’s simple. Because I
haven’t much choice. A working author who isn’t a bestseller works (or is
otherwise employed, or independently wealthy) and works nonstop, usually
seven days a week, or the bills aren’t paid. As to the how, that, I suppose comes
by learning to ignore the exhaustion, the stress, illness, the routine that can
become a grinding tedium no matter how much I might like what I’m doing. By
learning that days off and vacations are only very rarely an option. Addictions
help. As do insomnia and a deep well of ideas and characters, one that I live in
constant fear of running dry.
The story from which this book’s title takes its name was written and
published in 2007. Since then, I’ve written (and sold) about one hundred short
stories and novellas. Fourteen of them are collected herein. I believe they’re
thirteen of the best of the lot. I hope you will agree.

Caitlín R. Kiernan
17 December 2012
Providence, Rhode Island

The Steam Dancer (1896)

1.

Missouri Banks lives in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains,
here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust
tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly up towards the western
sky. She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still
only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison’s
electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and
elixirs. This is the city where her mother grew suddenly ill with miner’s fever,
and where all her father’s liniments and ministrations could not restore his wife’s
failing health or spare her life. In his grief, he drank a vial of either antimony or
arsenic a few days after the funeral, leaving his only daughter and only child to
fend for herself. And so, she grew up here, an orphan, one of a thousand or so
dispossessed urchins with sooty bare feet and sooty faces, filching coal with
sooty hands to stay warm in winter, clothed in rags, and eating what could be
found in trash barrels and what could be begged or stolen.
But these things are only her past, and she has a bit of paper torn from a
lending-library book of old plays which reads What’s past is prologue, which she
tacked up on the wall near her dressing mirror in the room she shares with the
mechanic. Whenever the weight of Missouri’s past begins to press in upon her,
she reads those words aloud to herself, once or twice or however many times is
required, and usually it makes her feel at least a little better. It has been years
since she was alone and on the streets. She has the mechanic, and he loves her,
and most of the time she believes that she loves him, as well.
He found her when she was nineteen, living in a shanty on the edge of the
colliers’ slum, hiding away in among the spoil piles and the rusting ruin of
junked steam shovels and hydraulic pumps and bent bore-drill heads. He was out
looking for salvage, and salvage is what he found, finding her when he lifted a
broad sheet of corrugated tin, uncovering the squalid burrow where she lay
slowly dying on a filthy mattress. She’d been badly bitten during a swarm of
red-bellied bloatflies, and now the hungry white maggots were doing their work.
It was not an uncommon fate for the likes of Missouri Banks, those caught out in
the open during the spring swarms, those without safe houses to hide inside until