Forget the Sleepless Shores Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Sonya Taaffe

  FORGET THE SLEEPLESS SHORES | Sonya Taaffe

  Copyright

  Teinds

  Chez Vous Soon

  Little Fix of Friction

  On the Blindside

  Notes towards the Classification of the Lesser Moly

  Another Coming

  Last Drink Bird Head

  The Boatman's Cure

  The Dybbuk in Love

  Like Milkweed

  Imperator Noster

  The Salt House

  And Black Unfathomable Lakes

  The Face of the Waters

  The Creeping Influences

  Drink Down

  Exorcisms

  When Can a Broken Glass Mend?

  On Two Streets, with Three Languages

  The Trinitite Golem

  All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts

  The Depth Oracle

  Acknowledgments

  Publication Credits

  About the Author

  Praise for Sonya Taaffe’s stories:

  “Sonya Taaffe is possessed of a singular and brilliant voice, one I have admired (and envied) since I first read her work more than a decade ago. Few living authors have brought to the task of building fantasy and science fiction her keen eye for the intricacies of the sublime and the terrible, the erotic and the weird. Fewer still have approached this work with such an undeniable talent. It is not an exaggeration to say she takes my breath away, like a plunge into deep, cold waters.” – Caitlín R. Kiernan

  “There’s a poetic quality and a flow to the language that only increases the dreamy, magical feel saturating the collection.” – A.C. Wise

  “Sonya Taaffe’s writing is prose concentrate that, when reconstituted in the vehicle of your mind, leaves you fully sated, fully nourished. Savor the stories of Forget the Sleepless Shores the way you’d contemplate a long-anticipated wine: slowly, languorously, your mind volleying between sensual delight and critical appreciation. And keep savoring: Taaffe’s unforgettable mix of poetic language, scientific precision, and microscopic analysis of human longing is simultaneously bountiful and never enough.” – Carlos Hernandez

  “It’s rich writing, something to be savored.” – Craig Laurence Gidney

  “Conscience stalks Oppenheimer as a golem of nuclear glass; passion is laid bare beneath a peat bog; fall and fire claim their own. A girl is moth-light to a throng of ghosts. The sea calls, endlessly imperative. The water chooses whom to drown. In Sonya Taaffe’s vivid cinema of metamorphoses, the elements themselves have eyes. Watch now and wonder.” – Greer Gilman

  FORGET THE

  SLEEPLESS SHORES

  Stories

  Sonya Taaffe

  LETHE PRESS

  AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

  Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories

  Copyright © 2018 Sonya Taaffe. all rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2018 by Lethe Press, Inc. at Smashwords.com

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-59021-210-3 / 1-59021-210-x

  The stories in this volume are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Credits for previous publication appear at the end of the book.

  Cover layout: Alex Jeffers. Cover art: D.G.Smith, www.dgsmithillustration.com.

  TEINDS

  You hold me so tightly as you sleep, as though I might melt with midnight into cold air on the pillow, a crease in the sheets that smells like the hair of someone you used to love. Your arms around my waist, your hips cupped to mine, your mouth pressed to the slope of my shoulder, all night you whisper into my skin whatever dreams ride you like a breathless ghost, weld you so hungrily to me that at times I wonder, if you could bind our bones together, would you? I stir, tired or thoughtless, and you flinch awake; if I lie very still, sometimes you fall asleep before I do.

  The moonlight strips through the blinds; the blue glass bottle from our first date, the night I drank sparkling water and you kept tugging at your sleeves, shines on the dresser like there are souls stoppered inside. You didn’t want to talk about the accident. You didn’t want to talk about the father. Only much later, upstairs in my apartment with my three ancient goldfish and the pen-and-ink portraits that never hurt me enough to take down, with the cheap wine I cook with and the ceiling fixture in the bedroom that blew out years ago, did you let me see your fire-scarred hands, the weals clawed across your stretchmarked belly, the ridges of a broken rib under the skin. The tiny punctures littered up and down your arms, whitened as old pox. You unfastened your skirt, peeled back your sweater as though each new scar revealed were a wound all over again, and I could not kiss them all better. A car crash, you whispered, like an apology. I went through the windshield. The steering wheel knocked him unconscious. He was still inside when it started to burn. I couldn’t save him. That first night, I could not sleep with your hands woven into my hair; but when I eased slowly away under the bedraggled blankets that we had hauled back up off the floor when even you were spent and almost peaceful, you scrambled upright as dumbly as if I had struck you, cornered between the wall and the autumn-cold window, and I could not coax you back to bed.

  I brought snapdragons to the coffeehouse where you had sold me black spiced tea; I showed my only party trick to your daughter, coins and candies palmed from behind her ear, clumsy-fingered, no magic to even a careless eye, but she smiled: and for a moment that ached inside my throat, so did you. In your basement studio, you drew blackout curtains against the afternoon and lit a branch of white candles in the sink, and under their rags of light I watched your face change from all the angles I could find. I could not make it change enough. The fire started at night. They said afterward it was the ventilation. As though I were an accusing ghost in your arms, I tried to keep hold of him, but the stairs gave way, and when my fingers grazed the pale chain-link above your collarbone, where splintered glass or metal had torn like teeth, you pushed me away. He never even saw his daughter. I picked her up from kindergarten, the day you couldn’t get out of bed, blank-eyed as an effigy in a mouse’s nest of quilts. Her yarrow-gold hair must be his, the sparrow slightness of all small children that she might outgrow: in the last of October’s sunlight, her shadow could have slung her up on its shoulders and carried her home in my stead. Her whole class had made construction paper masks. She left hers in my car.

  She sleeps in the other room, in another slant of the moon; I will never learn how her father died. She made his heart into stone. His eyes into knotholes in a tree. He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t even see me. He was made out of fire and I held on to him, I held on to him, but I had to let him go. I couldn’t—I should have— So drunk you huddled on the floor like a dropped marionette, all snarled wires and smashed paint, the peatsmoke stink of whiskey like firedamp and you were crying, terribly, noiselessly, like you had never started and would never stop. Your shirt unbuttoned and discarded on a chair, your jeans bundled under the table, stripped in a fury and two candy-striped socks away from nakedness, and as I knelt in the shadows and bare-bulb kitchen glare I thought for a second that all your scars were looking at me. It hurt so much. It hurt…. In the bed that was not yet ours, I lay awake until dawn, for once holding you. The names you mumbled in your night
mares, ribboned and archaic as guisers’ masks, meant nothing to me.

  I won’t let you go. Whether you say it aloud or only cling to me in the dark, when you cannot see what shapes I have taken, how I might scald out from underneath you, it’s what you are always promising: to hold me even if I burn to scars and take your heart with me. This time, to hang on in spite of blown tires, faulty wiring, the powers of hell; I don’t ask anymore. I love you. In the late winter night, we neither of us sleep, neither of us admit we are awake. You would shrug into my skin for safekeeping. I will take your daughter trick-or-treating this year. Lover, hold me less tightly. If I wanted to leave, I would not wait seven years.

  CHEZ VOUS SOON

  The rain was full of leaves, like hands on her hair as she hurried home. Grey as a whale’s back, the last cold light before evening: the clouds as heavy as handfuls of slate, pebble-dash and mortar; the pavement under Vetiver’s feet where blown leaves stuck in scraps to her sneakers, brown as old paper, tissue-torn. There were few trees on her street, but the wind hurled through them as hungrily as for a forest.

  The chill made her breath shudder, and her hands might have been coated in stone for all their dexterity as she sorted through keys on the cracked concrete steps, fingers numbed and shining, her shoulders hunched under rain-blackened leather. Her oldest umbrella was still propped behind Demetre’s door, its maroon folds as comfortably dry as its owner was not. In his apartment, there had been hot cider and candlelight; she could have dried her sodden clothes over the radiator that hissed and spat like a fumarole, let the warmth and the half-jazz obsessions of Nobody’s Home pull her muscles to unwind and her thoughts to dreams, and she could have stayed all night for all Demetre cared. “For all you noticed,” she said aloud, and the damp air paid exactly as much attention.

  In the buzz of a sudden streetlight, the rain had turned to dashes of magnesium, pen-lines that broke against the street. A freezing trail of water was working its way down the nape of her neck, vertebra by vertebra like risen hairs. By late afternoon, the apartment had been indistinguishable from midnight, all the shades drawn and Demetre on his knees in the jack-o’-lantern ring of candles like a possessed man; brushes and sponges and fingers as tender and avid on the canvas as a lover, and his vision in the streaks and hinting daubs could not have been what Vetiver Lawrey saw, before she closed the door on dry sanctuary. Now she pulled rain-stranded hair from her eyes, breathed out a ghost of condensation so harshly that her throat hurt. She could not have gone back.

  The four flights to her apartment were drafty and smelled like stained cement and mildew, but the cracks on the walls showed no more than neglect as she climbed.

  **

  The white stones rolled

  The breadcrumbs blew away

  The candle burned the moon

  The grass grew over

  The creek rose

  Chez vous soon

  **

  Before the storms and the cold moved in, Vetiver sat on Demetre’s spare bed and gazed through the last century’s panes at a sky banded like blue-and-white agate at the horizon, Chinese porcelain in the slow drift of clouds. The room was pale with sunlight, cream-colored plaster and scarred floorboards; the attic smell of old houses and the drying reek of Demetre’s work, linseed oil and turpentine, watercolor and acrylics, and cornmeal like prospector’s dust in the cracks of the floor. Decades of rain stains had made an Egyptian delta of the ceiling. Beyond the window, in mid-October clarity, the air tossed with the bright-burnt shimmy of leaves.

  “It’s not meant to be representative,” Demetre repeated. As though the words were the act itself, to ensure that the autumn-colored riot accumulating on the canvas—mixed media, everything but bones and fallen leaves—meant more than haphazard inspiration, that his sight aligned with Vetiver’s and the implicit, always-critical audience, “It’s suggestive. You look in, and fall will look back.” There was a smudge of crimson under his thumb, all his fingertips bruised rainbow with oils and chalk. His shirtsleeves were fingerprinted like miniature canvases themselves. When Vetiver replied dryly, “That’s very Nietzsche,” he raised his face into the washed-honey sunlight and laughed without sound.

  All of Demetre Moran’s gestures belonged to a taller, thinner man, a year-king blond as cereal and as easily cut down. His hair bleached to straw-colored burrs, still rye-brown at the roots: like dirt under the nails of his name, and more than once he had painted himself in grainfields or the lightless lap of the earth, hands filled with the slippery roe-glisten of pomegranate seeds, sheaves and broken blossoms like a child in his arms. He had the pale, resilient face of a moonstruck pierrot, but his bones in moments of stillness were as determined and fine as his own sketches. Briefly surfaced into commonplace conversation and submerged again into creation, he murmured more to his own distracted hands than to Vetiver, “Oh, so, you think autumn is an abyss?”

  “Things fall, don’t they? So when do they hit bottom?” But he did not answer, and she listened instead to the wind flexing against eighty-year-old glass, supercooled seep toward the paint-layered sill, decades measured in little more than molecules and continents drifted faster apart. A faint chill was working its way into the room; she flattened her hand against one pane, palm to the season as in benediction or parting, and rose to turn up the music while Demetre painted.

  The same way she drank coffee, Demetre listened to music: he could run on instrumental fumes for days. He had changed Frank’s Wild Years for Chez Vous Soon an hour and a half ago, and “Iconoclast” was coming around for the second time. And the angels seethe as you cease to breathe so unselfconsciously…. Demetre’s lips moved to the words, unconscious karaoke of Liora Elliott’s precise, rapid-fire bitterness, but Vetiver was already leafing through the CD booklet for lyrics. In the liner photographs, the members of the band were blurred black-and-white faces, caught mid-turn in quarter-profile or absorbed in their instruments: the girl on guitar, the man who played piano, some androgynous fair-haired figure stooped behind a drum kit to pick up a fallen stick. The cover art showed porch steps in a flashlight fan of brightness, warped and paint-cracked, casualties of wind and autumn rain, and someone’s foot propped on the top stair where a pumpkin’s Halloween grin had long since filled with water. Nobody’s Home. On the last page, she found three lines of Latin printed in the same cut-and-paste typewriter font as the lyrics, that she read out to Demetre for their reliquary cadences: dea, magna dea, cybebe, dea domina dindymi, / procul a mea tuos sit furor omnis, era, domo; / alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.

  Demetre was softening a slice of earth-tones with the edge of his thumb, caramel into the fall-gold pallor of aspen leaves; wholly engrossed, ears stopped with paints. “I don’t speak Latin,” he said over the last chord, a snarl of minor notes that unraveled into silence. “Isn’t there a translation?”

  “Not that I can find.”

  “Damn.” Not for Vetiver’s incomprehension, but for the streak where his knuckle had caught in a line of goldenrod oils, he nipped at his lower lip and cautiously scraped at the canvas with a thumbnail. On the stereo, another relationship was already going down in flames and delicately worded shrapnel. “I’ll look online.”

  “I’ll learn Latin.” Vetiver slid the booklet back into the CD case, turned it over to look at the artwork on the back: a china cup half full of dark liquid that might have been coffee in a rakish slice of film noir light, nine drops beaded around the saucer’s chipped rim. “‘Die, magnet, die….’” She looked neither like autumn nor a summer’s corn-queen, her hair like walnut shells, clipped back from her face with turquoise and silver, her eyes wood-green with contacts in and dark hazel without. Demetre had painted her features onto sirens and fractured glass, her loose-limbed body onto nudes and abstractions; in five years, he had never let her photograph him. “‘Adios, insightful age. Adios, old mad dogs,’” and the guitar skittered up a riff like a torn seam.

  Reaching for the palette of acrylics, Demetre had knock
ed the turpentine rag to the floor; down on hands and knees to retrieve it, half out of sight under the scraped, paint-dripped table that had been a writing desk knockabout years ago, he spoke so absently that she almost missed him beneath Cass Birch’s thin, urgent singing. “I don’t think Nietzsche ever did have the abyss look back.” Sunlight striped the worn seat of his jeans, his shirt-tail come untucked as he straightened. “He’d still be running today.”

  Vetiver flicked a look at the canvas, smears and bare patches and cornhusks pinned to the upper right-hand corner, no bottomless attraction yet. I’m looking right now, she almost said. I haven’t fallen yet. Still on his knees, Demetre scrubbed at a streak like fresh olives and made an irritated, half-dramatic noise, and she put the case back onto the windowsill, the click of plastic and white-paint strata like percussion in a rare second of silence. His intensity made her smile, thoughtless and easy. He was more lost in the autumn inside his head than in the bright and sinking season outside.

  The times I’ve tried, the ways I’ve died and wished you’d cried…. Down in the street, the wind shook the trees like noisemakers; and she watched Demetre, enraptured, watch the leaves falling brilliant in his mind.

  **

  The footprints filled

  The branches blocked the sky

  The evening star can wound

  The tide is turning

  The mirror’s cold

  Chez vous soon

  **

  The last days before November; the dead’s own season, inconvenient as bones. The headache like steel wool inside her skull, as charcoal and clenched as the storm-coming skies, as unlikely to break, though she nearly knocked Demetre’s old toothbrush into the sink as she slid the cabinet’s mirrored front aside, looking for the closest painkiller to hand. Down the hall to the spare room, Frank Black’s measured mystic’s statements tore up into a scream, six for the Devil and seven for God, and Vetiver closed her eyes against even the soft-white light. Between the heat and the sullen clouds, too far into fall for Indian summer, global warming’s parting kick in the teeth, and Pauline’s phone-call cancellation a little after eleven o’clock, later than the last minute, she could as cheerfully have broken the glass as reached behind it—all the day like dirty water down the drain, and why the hell did Demetre keep chewable grape-flavored antihistamines in an Advil bottle? She dry-swallowed two aspirin instead, bitter catches in her throat. When she took down the prescription bottle from behind the tooth floss, dry-gourd rattle, maracas for a skeletal dance, her head hurt only a little more.