The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales Read online

  The Girl With No Hands and other tales

  Stories by Angela Slatter

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  About the Author

  Angela Slatter is a Brisbane-based writer of speculative fiction. She has a Masters (Research) in Creative Writing, which produced Black-Winged Angels, a short story collection of reloaded fairytales, and is undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing. During her daylight hours, she works at a writers’ centre.

  Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again, Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales II and III, Ann and Jeff VaderMeer’s Steampunk Reloaded, Twelfth Planet Press’ 2012, Dirk Flinthart’s Canterbury 2100, and in journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, ONSPEC and Doorways Magazine. Her work has had several Honourable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies #20 and #21; and three of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Fantasy Short Story category.

  She is working on a duopoly, Well of Souls and Gate of the Dead, and alternative Crusades saga, as well as Finbar’s Mother, a Norse-Irish fantasy. She is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. In 2010, she will have two short story collections published, Sourdough & Other Stories with Tartarus Press (UK) and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications). This makes her happy.

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  Dedicated to my family, for all their patience and care

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to all the people who helped me get these stories published in the first place, with particular thanks to: the Shimmery crew (Beth Wodzinski, Lisa Mantchev, Joy Marchand, E. Catherine Tobler, Mary Robinette Kowal); Gavin Grant and Kelly Link of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet; the inimitable Jack Dann; Ronnie Scott and The Lifted Brow Gang; Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; Cat Rambo and Sean Wallace and Molly Tanzer at FantasyMagazine.

  And a huge extra special thanks to Lisa Hannett for the cover and the beta-reading and the perspicacious comments; and also to Russell at Ticonderoga, without whom this collection would not have been possible.

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  The Girl With No Hands and other tales by Angela Slatter

  First published by Ticonderoga Publications

  Copyright © 2010 Angela Slatter

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise) without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder concerned.

  Story Acknowledgements

  “Bluebeard” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Shimmer #4 (Summer 2006).

  “The Living Book” copyright © Angela Slatter. Appears here for the very first time.

  “The Jacaranda Wife” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Dreaming Again, 2008. Edited by Jack Dann.

  “Red Skein” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Walking Bones Magazine, (Fall 2006).

  “The Chrysanthemum Bride” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Fantasy Magazine, (December 2009).

  “Frozen” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Mort Castle’s Doorways Magazine, Issue 8, (April 2009).

  “The Hummingbird Heart” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Shimmer #9 (Spring 2008).

  “Words” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in The Lifted Brow #5, (June 2009).

  “The Little Match Girl” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Shimmer #3 (Spring 2006).

  “The Juniper Tree” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #18, (July 2006).

  “Skin” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in The Lifted Brow #3 (February 2008).

  “The Bone Mother” copyright © Angela Slatter. Appears here for the very first time.

  “The Dead Ones Don’t Hurt You” copyright © Angela Slatter. Appears here for the very first time.

  “Light As Mist, Heavy As Hope” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Needles & Bones, Drollerie Press, 2009.

  “Dresses, Three” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Shimmer #8 (Winter 2008).

  “The Girl With No Hands” copyright © Angela Slatter. First published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #23 (November 2008).

  Introduction “Caressing with Razors” copyright © 2010 Jack Dann

  Afterword copyright © 2010 Angela Slatter

  Cover Illustration by Lisa L. Hannett

  Designed and edited by Russell B. Farr

  A Cataloging-in-Publications entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN 978-0-9806288-7-6 (limited hardcover edition)

  ISBN 978-0-9806288-8-3 (trade edition)

  ISBN 978-0-9806288-8-3 (ebook)

  Ticonderoga Publications

  PO Box 29 Greenwood

  Western Australia 6924

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  Caressing with Razors

  Jack Dann

  So (you may ask) what the hell is all this fuss over Angela Slatter?

  Well, this introduction probably isn’t going to help you very much with that ... I can sing and dance, jump up and down, shill in my shrill, crowded room voice about how wonderful these stories are; but you, oh, inquisitive and perspicacious readers, will swiftly make up your own minds when you read the wry, poignant, and eviscerating stories that follow. All I can hope to do is give you a few facts and my own take on the work of this fabulously talented writer.

  You’ve probably already guessed the nefarious and sinister purpose of this introduction: that it’s actually an advertisement, a marketing ploy/exercise to put you in the proper frame of mind to read this short story collection ‘correctly’ and create what we used to call ‘the halo effect’ in the madmen marketing business. The hopes and prayers of ad-men (and ad-women!) are that what you first see, hear, read, sense, and experience will positively affect how you feel about what comes later.

  I don’t deny my job here is that of author’s shill ... and, of course, you can guess (yet again) what comes next: a vigorous assertion that Angela Slatter’s wicked stories don’t need any pumping by me or anyone else; but Angela isn’t famous yet, although I will bet you a dollar and a shot of the best unblended whisky at the bar that she will become a major literary voice. I’ll tell you why I think that, but it’s really not necessary to read me prattling on: just page forward to stories such as “The Jacaranda Wife” or “The Chrysanthemum Bride” or “The Little Match Girl” or “The Bone Mother” or the title story “The Girl with No Hands”; and then when your mind is stretched, blown, and (temporarily) broken, you’ll know why literary and genre insiders are so excited about this writer.

  However, if you’re not from the school of what we Pleistocenes’ used to call New Criticism, then perhaps a very few words about Ms Slatter and her work might shed some light on the ‘after-experience’ of reading her stories.

  Angela Slatter is a young, beautiful, gregarious, extremely bright and funny no-nonsense writer who is polite and generous, but who I imagine would not suffer fools gladly. Her writing, which seems transparent as glass, as if so easily and simply wrought, belies the complete control of craft and the complexity of the material floating and glinting and shifting just under the surface. Her concerns are the primordial fears of childhood ... and adulthood: the dark, slimy, senescent fairytale monsters that threaten to chop off our fingers when we suck our thumbs, burn us to death if we play with matches, or turn us into pale, thin, li
ttle corpses if we won’t eat our soup ... the same monsters—albeit transmogrified into suits and skirts—that stalk us even now and threaten to maim us yet again as we flee that dangerous, ill-remembered country called childhood. Slatter has said, “My writing is an act of absolute fear ... Perhaps that is why I write of fearful things: first fears, primal fears. Fear of the dark, of things we do not know, of being abandoned, of not being loved, of not being smart/beautiful/brave enough: fear of not knowing the rules.”

  This is the dark heart of all serious fiction, whether it be literary or genre; but the stories that are fueled by the freshest, most oxygenated blood, the stories that reflect and refract our fears in their purest, most fundamental and personal form, are ... fairytales. The seemingly simple, didactic and innocent fairytale is one of the most potent and direct expressions of our unconscious ... and it is also the heart, blood, and nerves of the disquietly powerful, transformative stories in this collection.

  But Slatter the scholar, academic, and feminist understands that that when fairytales were translated from oral to written form by Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, and the Brothers Grimm, these writers subtly changed many of the tales told to them by young and old women ... transformed them to suit their own male agendas and social and religious aesthetics. They in effect ‘colonised’ the tales, which then became parental and societal tools to socialise and control children ... and teach them their ‘proper’ gender roles. Slatter has said:

  “Colonised fairytales offer us, women and men, a particular mode of living and interacting. If you do not fit this mould, then you are doomed; you can only be an ugly stepsister or a wicked stepmother, or one of the princesses who do not win the prince because you do not follow the rules. What do I do with fairytales? When I rewrite them I try to offer a different view, a different mode of being, a path of shared equality, not merely a simple inversion ...

  “When I write, when I rewrite my fears, I’m sending them back out into the world refracted. I hold them up to a light and turn things ever so slightly—I suppose I learned at one point that it is all about how you look at things in life.”

  Although her stories deftly explode the patriarchal messages embedded in traditional fairytales, Slatter bears the burden of being a real writer: her stories are organic; they live and breathe on their own and for themselves; they transform their didactic elements into mortal flesh and fire; they teach us uneasy truths. And they remind us that we are the wicked stepmothers and ugly stepsisters.

  We are the doomed stepfathers and ugly brothers.

  We are the ones who can’t―or won’t―follow the rules.

  Although I had expected to go on (and on, God help us) from here and tell you fresh, tantalising, and amusing anecdotes about the author, I can’t help but notice that this introduction just ended (as if by its own will and intention) with the paragraph above.

  I should mention at this point that we writers really are in complete control of our material (rather than the material ‘knowing’ how to find its own destination at its own pace and time or, heaven forefend, being in control of the author), but perhaps my dark, nasty and ill-spoken unconscious is telling me to shut the hell up and let you get on to read the stories. So ... make sure you have enough light lest you strain your eyes. You’ll probably also need a strong night-light in the bedroom tonight. Just to protect you from the scaly, razor-fanged, salivating, famished, scissor-handed zombie creatures that will soon be escaping from the oily depths of your reawakened and revitalised id.

  Angela’s stories seem to have that affect on people.

  Sweet dreams, gentle readers ...

  Jack Dann

  Windhover Farm

  Victoria, Australia

  July 2010

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  Bluebeard

  Her breath smells like champagne, but not bitter as you might expect.

  Something inside her turns it sweet, I’m not sure what. She’s a sugar-candy kind of girl, bright and crystalline as she reclines on the sofa―a chaise longue, more correctly. Her hair is spun like golden sugar, her eyebrows so light they may as well not be there, her lashes so contrastingly black that they must be dyed, her skin pale pink, and her mouth a rosebud pout, filled with small pearly teeth. Around her neck curls a long string of beads, wrapped twice and still long enough to hang to her waist. The dress is diaphanous, shimmering yellow, damp in places with traces of her last client. She is nothing if not lush. She catches me looking and smiles.

  “How’s my girl doing?” Her voice is honey, smooth, practiced, as though I’m one of her ‘patrons’.

  I sit primly on the edge of my seat, hands clasped in my lap, knees together, shiny black shoes snug against one another, my pink dress stretched as far over my knees as it will go.

  “I’m fine, Mother.” I study the pile of books on the corner table. “Did Davide leave those for me?”

  “Yes, Lily. More books for my little genius, my little pearl,” she says, still smiling but crookedly now; my mother doesn’t like my intellect.

  One of her regulars, Davide, the banker, leaves us both gifts: for her it’s money, gems and a stickiness between her thighs; for me, it’s books. He thinks it funny that his whore’s child is smart, a grownup brain in a ten-year-old body. He is a large man, a nouvours, a teddy bear. Davide pays for my schooling, too, an expensive convent school where the nuns pretend they don’t know what my mother does.

  Mother thinks it’s unnecessary: schooling, reading, thinking. She’s not dumb herself, but believes the only brains a girl needs are the soft, wet pink ones between her legs. Better pink matter than grey matter. And she’s done well for herself: she owns an apartment in Paris (such a long way from her early life in America’s South), and she’s got money in the bank, so we don’t live hand-to-mouth like so many whores and their children.

  We did for a time. When we first came here, we lived in a brothel hung heavily with red velvet draperies, and run by a Madam whose over-abundant flesh struggled with the confines of her gown. At first, I made friends with the children of other whores, but they were ephemeral creatures and after the third one disappeared I stopped bothering. Soon enough, Mother prospered and we left.

  She hasn’t tried to sell me to some man with a taste for young flesh. Some women sell their daughters’ virginity for a fortune; the worst of them have the girls sewn up and sold again and again until some man gets wise to the scar tissue. The very, very worst sell their children’s lives altogether, but few people speak of that. It only happens in dark places, places where the air is heavy and sounds are strangely muffled as though crossing a great space, places where what’s normal ceases to have any influence. Places we will not go.

  Of course, Mother doesn’t refer to herself as a whore―it’s what I do in my thoughts. She calls herself a courtesan but it’s all the same, really. Money for cunt, whichever way you slice it.

  My mother looks like a pearl in a baroque setting. I try to analyse her—have done so my whole short life—as if she’s some rock that I can break down to its elements. I try to write her history, too, in my mind, as if it will help me make sense of her, as if I can trace the patterns and paths of her life and she will suddenly become comprehensible to me. As if my clever little brain will finally crack the one puzzle I can’t seem to work out.

  “Davide’s asked us to go away for the weekend,” she says casually.

  I raise an eyebrow, an expression cynical in an adult, impertinent in a child; another parent would slap me for it. “You mean he’s invited you, Mother.”

  “No, both of us. He’s got this big house just outside the Bois de Boulogne. It’s not so far, honey. His mama stays there most of the time but she’s away visiting her sister. Davide wants us to keep him company for the weekend. Maybe longer.”

  “What about school?”

  “Hell, Davide pays their ridiculous fees. Those old penguins will just have to shut up and bear it.” My mother has issues with nuns, not surprisingly. “The
car will come for us on Friday afternoon.”

  “What about his mother? What will she say if she finds out?” I ask, probing, knowing she’ll hate it.

  “We don’t need to know that, do we? We don’t need to ask questions.” Her teeth are gritted, her smile tight. I’ll let her go now, release her from the hook of my curiosity.

  So we’re off to the countryside.

  I’m a child of cities, of cobbled streets, of tall houses that block out the sun. I’m a child who knows how to weave among the legs of a crowd like a nimble rat. How will I know what to do in treed spaces where no noise rushes by one’s ears in a hurry to go wherever noise goes?

  It’s dark when we arrive.

  The house is big and old. It sits in its park, dark and pock-marked, ivy growing across it like moss on the back of a toad that’s been sitting too long in one place. I can see, through one of the windows, a tiny light inside, coming closer as its bearer glides forward.

  Davide opens the door for my mother, and the driver opens mine. I struggle out, pushing against the darkness that swarms outside the safety of the automobile. It’s like a dog, too big, too friendly and I run to press myself against my mother’s legs, for once acting my age, thinking that all the protection I need is there. Her hands stroke my hair, curl around my earlobes and hold me briefly, then she takes the arm Davide offers, catches at my suddenly cold hand and we move toward the opening door of the house.

  The man there is old, straight in the manner of those who pride themselves on not succumbing to the rigours of age, handsome in a silvered way, snide in his look at my mother and I. There’s that quick flash of disapproval—his kind sometimes recognize my mother’s in a moment, servants and whores being close kin. Perhaps the servant recognizes this kinship and so despises anyone who reminds him of it.