The Midnight Circus, стр. 49
Jasonis now approaching fifty, with a wife and twin teenage daughters, so noone murdered him as a child. A bit of poetic license. He’s aprofessional photographer and writer, taking photographs ofnature—birds and fish mainly. Has won awards for his photography andhas more than 25 books out, illustrated with his photographs. Thisstory was first published in an anthology called Fires of the Past in1991.
Thispoem was written for this book and first published here.
Rememberingthe Great Gray
Iremember the winter of our Great Grays
three of them down from theCanadian wilds,
scavengingfor moles, voles, mice under the turf.
They were as welcome as thebusloads of birders
who drove up from Pennsylvania to genuflect
under adead tree where a cloud in bird shape,
aspecter with feathers, mesmerized them all
with its marbled yellow eyes.
Myhusband fed the owls white mice from a pet store,
ourten-year-old son became a tour guide on a bike.
We could not go a daywithout a bird report.
Theywere down by the dike. Two flew across River Road.
I watched one eat aweasel, swallowed it whole.
Ifwe could have grown feathers, rain-cloud colored,
we would have flownnorth with them,
backto the taiga, wind puzzling through our wings.
But Nature, ever acynic, dismisses such magic,
forshe has her own.
LittleRed (with Adam Stemple)
Aninvitation to an anthology, and I began to write a Little Red RidingHood variant. It began to go too dark for me and I (quite literally)lost the plot. So I called upon my Prince of Darkness, aka The PlotGod—my son Adam Stemple, with whom I have written many stories andbooks. (He always ups the body counts in our books.) He made the storydarker, and bloodier, but in the best possible way, and I cleaned upwhat little there was with my cap, like a good Red Cap soldier should.I am only making a little bit of this up. It’s mostly true. The rest ismetaphor. The anthology was Firebirds Soaring, edited by SharynNovember, published in 2009.
Thispoem is first published in this book.
Redat Eighty-One
Soyou thought to fool me again,
youold bastard, with your sweet growls,
your shoulders broad enough
tocarry in the wood without sweat,
your big eyes blinking out lies,
yourpromises of cakes and wine.
Youthink you can cozen me,
undress me, steal my nightgown,
my skin, mybones, take me in,
devour me whole, leave me nothing
of myself, noteven a shadow,
noteven a memory.
Youbelieve I have learned nothing
in seventy-four years, that the woods
havetaught me little: the scurrying ants
carrying ten times their ownweight,
dung beetles rolling their foul burdens,
coyotes wallowing inrotting meat,
vultures, with their appetites
wornaround naked necks.
Youare wrong, old man, mistaking me
for an innocent, counting on mycuriosity,
expectingmy obedience, requiring my silence.
I am too old for such nonsense.
I’lleat you up this time.
Winter’sKing
Therewas a wonderful artist (alas, name forgotten) who did a fantasypainting of a sere and stunning “Winter’s King.” The painting gotpicked up as cover art for Martin Greenberg’s fantasy anthology thatwas a bow to Tolkien’s work, After the King, published in 1991.Marty and I had edited a bunch of books together, so he asked me towrite an introduction and a story for the book. This was my story. Ididn’t mean it to go where it did, but the story had set its mind on aquasi-tragedy and didn’t let me know until the end.
Thispoem’s first publication is in this book.
If Winter
Ifwinter has a king,
thensurely Frost is his fool,
speaking a kind of frozen truth
to the powersof wind and snow.
He takes a little nip at the nose
of his bottle ofschnapps
andhurries into a soliloquy
about ice and its uses,
about the power ofcold,
beforelight-footed Spring comes in
and sits on Old King Winter’s lap
persuading him with soft breaths
to hand over the kingdom
foranother useless half a year.
Inscription
Myhusband and I bought a house in St Andrews, Scotland, which we’d beenrenting during his second sabbatical. He was a professor of computerscience at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and alreadyworking with people at St. Andrews University. It became our summerhome. I still go there every summer to write and to see dear friends Ihave made over the more than 30 years there.
Wedid a lot of driving around and investigating Scottish sites,sometimes just the two of us, or with visitors (and occasionally ourgrown children). Sometimes I accompanied him on computer scienceconferences in interesting places. At one of the latter, wediscovered a grand circle of stones. And the first two lines of thisstory sprang into my head. When we returned home, the rest followed.The story was first published in an anthology called UltimateWitch, 1993, that I had just been invited into, and thenappeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. Istill have quite a fondness for the story.
Thispoem was written for this book.
Stone Ring
Touchthe stone,
cold with the death
ofthe Pictish makers.
Coldwith the nights
of the reivers’ rivers,
crossedto steal some koos.
Colderthan the dead
at grey Cullodon,
fightingfor Charlie’s greed.
History’sreminders:
Ghostsin stone.
Wedie together or alone.
The ring binds us all.
DogBoy Remembers
Iwrote a few public posts back and forth on a folklore site called SurLa Lune as a kind of challenge/writing prompt with the wonderfulwriter Midori Snyder. It became a short story and then a novel, whichwe sold. One of the characters whom I liked especially was thecompromised anti-hero Dog Boy. He was half-human, raised by his Red Capfather as a sort of pet, though he was human. (A Red Cap is aparticularly nasty kind of murderous gremlin who dips his hat in theblood of his victims.) But Dog Boy is saved in the end by his love fora complicated young human woman and the memory of his human mother. However,we never delved into his backstory in the novel. Years later, beinginvited into a fantasy literary journal, Unnatural Worlds, FictionRiver #1, published in 2013, I decided to write Dog Boy’s birthstory. As I knew, it was not going to be a sweet story.
ThePath
Steponto the path,
letit wind and unwind
along the silver stream.
Here bluebells wave,
fernsuncurl,
puffballsreveal their heft,
and the paw print of a dog
who has gone ahead
showsyou where to go.
Youcan smell the darkness