Fantastic Metropolis

Listen to the two of you:

‘Wife, what are you doing? Why are you climbing over the railing? If you wish to take the air on the shore, the stairs are that way… Woman, the shame! People can see your knickers!’

‘Mother, will I understand when I am older?’

But the woman did not respond to these cries from her two loved ones, whom she loved no longer, who were now like a centipede running circles around her eyeball and a dead rat lying in her stomach, irritating and nauseating. Without a final word or backwards glance she stepped off the terrace, and Maldoror obligingly flung her body out into the distant sea. In her flight she was like a spiral galaxy, her four limbs rotating in obedience to the laws of physics, her descent a telling demonstration of gravity. Her silence was more difficult to explain. Who truly knew her? Perhaps not even he who met her in the deep, lighting the water with his weed-draped phosphorescent eyes.

I will not forget you, and I hope you will not forget me. I killed your mother; your father will not be as vigilant as she. He won’t mind if you wander off alone. And in memory of your mama, here’s a packet of Caribbean playing cards with gaily dressed skeletons for the court figures and prettily coloured skulls, snakes, rum bottles and bell-flowers for the pips. One joker is a priapic Gabriel, the other a lewd Mary with her skirts pulled down around her knees. The cards will bring you luck!

As for the rest of you—men and women with severe features, gleaming hair, jaws correctly aligned and teeth like knives—I salute you. You love the misty autumn moon, summer melons, the profile of an elegant lover, the evening flight of cranes, the rain falling in the sea, and even some of your fellow human beings. The world holds enough joy and splendour for you, and you love mystery without demanding a solution: indeed a solution would break your spirits.

The rest of K. J. Bishop’s “Maldoror Abroad” can be found in Album Zutique #1, edited by Jeff VanderMeer (Night Shade Books, 2003).

K. J. Bishop lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her stories have appeared in Aurealis, Fables and Reflections, and The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Vol. II. Her first novel—The Etched City—was published by Prime Books in 2003.