Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
The Year’s Question
Friday, October 30th, 2009
It was Siobhan woke me up. The smell of honey wine on Summer’s End does it. (Whiskey works too.) To my surprise and hers, it still worked, even after so many years when no one left anything beside my notched stone.
Scared her bowels loose the first time. I got a laugh out of that.
“You’re allowed one question a year, granddaughter,” I said out of the air beside her.
When she got her breath back she said, “I’m not your granddaughter. She must be gone long ago.”
“I know that. I spoke with her for years after; she’s moved on now. I stay. And so does the customary name.”
“Well then,” she said, drawing herself up. She asked grimly, “There’s a man I want. How do I get him?”
Oh, the living.
“The answer is in the question you asked, and the way you asked it.”
“What do you mean?”
“One question a year,” I answered, and went for the honey wine and apples.
“I hate you,” she announced, and went down the hill.
She was back again the next year with a bigger plate.
“You were right,” she said sadly. “This year’s question. There’s a man who wants me. Should I have his child?”
“Certainly not.”
“You were right,” she said next year, holding the baby, a little girl with her same lively eyes and three-cornered smile. But I’d said no because she’d put no value to herself. I’m not all-wise; how was I to know that a baby would help her do that, instead of making the matter worse?
“There’s a job, overseas,” she told me ten questions later. “I want it. They want me. A good job. Will you hear me across the ocean?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “We used to stay at home, your family. Try. The baby and her father going with you?”
She smiled. “Sarah’s eleven. And his name is Ian; I’ve come to love him.”
“I’m glad.”
This year I was up early, moving things around in the grave, scaring birds off the stone, nervous. Well after dark came the scent of honey wine and flowers, candles and apples, drifting across the salt sea, and I climbed up out of my old bones for a taste of it. I heard her voice clearly, but with a sound of waves in it.
“Are you there?” She asked.
“Yes, I am,” I replied.
Determined Samantha
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Everyone agreed later that no student had arrived with more mud on her, indeed, more pure ground-in grime, than Samantha MacKinnon—not even when Mirabelle Hayes and Bao-Yu Zheng met and fought a duel in a pigsty on the road to the Women’s Battle College, Isle of Skye.
She arrived ten days into St Brigid’s term, so, not only filthy but a term and ten days late, which was rather more of a problem.
Her excuse?
“I had to walk from the Sierras,” she explained.
“It’s probably true,” pointed out the Bursar. “They ran out of super-refined twice this year.”
“Except that I gather it’s still difficult to walk across the Atlantic,” said the Treasurer.
They looked at Samantha, who glared back tiredly.
“Snuck onto a surplus ship,” she said. “That got me to Up-Liverpool. Walked here.”
She pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes and rubbed vigorously before adding, “Look, can you feed me now and decide about me later? I’m so tired.”
She wanted to add, “And this whole journey I’ve been thinking, if only I can get there it will be okay, just like in the stories… it will be okay. And having to knock out some guy so I could drive his motorcycle to the East Coast instead of giving him my virginity like he wanted, and having to steal every bite of food I’ve eaten, and having to run away from my stupid home with my stupid drunk dad, and having to fight about half the sailors on the ship, and having to beat up and run away from some guys who were obviously procurers, and having to clean every dirty toilet in an entire hotel so I could stay for a week and sleep, just sleep, all of it will make sense, because I’ll be where I know I’m supposed to be. It will all be okay.”
Instead she just stood and looked at them, wearing three weeks worth of dirt and smelling like three weeks worth of sweat.
The Treasurer looked scandalized, but, as Samantha would learn, that was just her way.
The Bursar said, “Forgive us, dear. I can tell it has been a terribly long journey. Do come in,” adding to the Treasurer in a voice she knew perfectly well Samantha could hear, “Of course she can stay. This is the sort of determination we’re looking for, after all.”