Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (6 page)

“Is the quake over?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said.

4

The Bulgarian

Kameko wondered if the backyard would like
this new man in her life. She wondered if the creature her
grandfather had always called “The Bulgarian” would make an awkward
appearance. Maybe Grandfather’s crows would swoop down and take
them all off on an adventure. Maybe Gramps himself would choose
this night to show up as a ghost for the first time. That would
have been just like him. She smiled to herself. It had been ten
years since he died. She had been living in another city, but when
she inherited the house and the backyard and the Bulgarian, she
moved back to Eugene, Oregon. After all, a translator could work
anywhere, and with the money Gramps had left her, she could afford
to take only the jobs that interested her. She had a knack for
capturing the flow and feeling of Japanese literature and making it
accessible to English readers. She could do that in the other
direction, from English to Japanese, too. She had a pretty good
reputation. Things were going well.

She would serve poached salmon with local
kale and little red potatoes tonight.

“Mike?” she called.

“Yeah?”

“You doing okay out there?”

“Fine, fine.” Did he sound a little tense?
The backyard was probably grilling him in subtle ways he would not
actually recognize but would feel at some level. The Bulgarian
might scuttle naked from shadow to shadow just to mess with his
mind.

Well, wasn’t meeting the family always a
little tense?

She supposed she was using this evening as a
test to see if Mike might be Mr. Right or just another tumble in
the hay. He was pretty delicious. Everything was cooking nicely. It
wasn’t time for the fish yet. She poured out a couple of glasses of
wine.

Should she maybe put out some cheese and
crackers?

Introduction to “The Grasshopper and My
Aunts”

Nebula-award winner Esther M. Friesner has
published 39 novels and nearly 200 short stories. She is also an
editor and a playwright. Lately, she’s ventured into the realm of
historical young adult fiction with the popular
Princess of
Myth
series.

About this story, she writes, “I’ve always
enjoyed mucking about with mythology, especially Greek myths.
They’ve always been a glorious garden of ‘Yes, but what if…?’ for
me. One such garden party inspired me to write ‘Thunderbolt,’ a
reimagining of Helen of Troy’s childhood abduction, which, in turn
led to my writing
Nobody’s Princess
and
Nobody’s
Prize
. I’m also quite the fan of Victorian/Edwardian literature,
especially the language. Oh, the wonderful language! ‘The
Grasshopper and My Aunts’ lets me combine the two—happily, I
hope.”

The Grasshopper and My Aunts

Esther M. Friesner

It wanted but an hour of noon and my
governess was already locked in the library with my aunts, weeping.
I could not forbear to smile. Before this, my best efforts at
freeing myself from those young women entrusted with my so-called
education usually did not show any results until well after
luncheon.

If I put my ear to the door—and I did—I could
hear my aunts Domitilla and Euphrosyne taking it in turns to try
persuading the poor, distracted girl to stay on in their employ. It
was not working. Apparently Miss Cubbins had a mortal terror of any
creature with more than four legs and fewer than two, the sole
exception being rodents. The grasshopper I had introduced to her
embroidery basket that morning fitted the former category most
admirably. Had I been previously aware of the pathological nature
of her fear, I might have found some other manner of expressing my
impulses towards girlish mischief.

Upon reflection, no. She
had
insisted
I learn fractions. Some offenses call for blood; blood and
grasshoppers.

The library door was made of good, thick oak,
harvested from the ancient forests of Dyrnewaed, our ancestral
estate. Family tradition had it that the sage, Merlin, had been
pent entranced in one of the trees that once clustered the grounds
of the manor. If so, his chances for undisturbed eternal slumber
ran aground during the reign of Elizabeth, on the day that Hermes,
Lord Wielward, decided to sacrifice his oaks in order to fully
refurbish and titivate his home, in hopes of attracting the Virgin
Queen’s attention and favor on one of her many royal progresses.
The trees fell, the manor house was transformed, tongues wagged,
and the queen took notice. Her next royal progress descended upon
Dyrnewaed like a swarm of insufficiently perfumed locusts, but once
she took a closer look at my ancestors’ domestic arrangements, her
favor failed to follow. Thus did Lord Wielward’s foolish
aspirations nigh bankrupt our family for generations to come,
though at least he contrived to retain his life and (greatly
reduced) freeholding.

It was said that if you put your ear to one
of the doors that came from Merlin’s oak, you could hear the old
wizard bitterly declaiming “Serves you right!” with much relish. If
so, his Celtic
Schadenfreude
was now being overshouted by my
aunts’ remonstrations with Miss Cubbins. I knew I was going to be
punished, but wanted some advance warning of the severity.
Better the devil you know
, as the saying partially goes,
although at Dyrnewaed the conclusion of that adage is: . . .
even
if the demon in question does take it upon himself to arrive at
formal dinner parties with his latest crowd of brimstone-reeking
casual acquaintances and throw off poor Euphrosyne’s seating
arrangements entirely, the swine!

As I fretted over my impending chastisement,
the balance of the kerfuffle within the library shifted abruptly
when Miss Cubbins declared: “I beg of you, my ladies, do not
entreat me to stay. The magnitude of my terror on discovering the
horrid insect which
your
niece deliberately secreted amid my
embroidery was such that I flung the entire basket so far that it
cleared the hawthorn hedges. I heard a distinct splash, which leads
me to believe it landed in—”

“—the spring?” There was a marked transition
in the tone of Aunt Domitilla’s voice. When she inquired, “Are you
telling us, Miss Cubbins, that you pitched your miserable sewing
basket into
our spring
?” it was like listening to an
articulate scalpel.

“Yes, and I fear my needlework must have been
ruined beyond all—”

In a breath, the library door swept open,
knocking me sideways. I had barely time to scramble to my feet
before I saw my governess fly across the hall, to crash into the
wainscoting between a tapestry of Phaeton’s plunge into the sea and
a portrait of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. She slid down the wall
in a heap, whimpering. Meanwhile, Aunt Domitilla presented herself
in the doorway, her ice-white hair come all undone from its combs,
her cheeks a scorching red, and a series of bulging veins turning
her temples into an approximation of my hand-drawn map of the
rivers of Belgium. Her blazing gray eyes seemed to shoot sparks
capable of fricasseeing a full-grown vole.

“You—you
struck
me!” Miss Cubbins
cried.

If there was one thing Aunt Domitilla hated,
it was someone who insisted on wasting her time by stating the
obvious. She strode from the library doorway to tower over my
unfortunate governess.

“And
you
tossed a basket into our
spring,” she shot back. “Wretched creature, are you so base, so
beyond all hope of human decency that you have forgotten the single
dictum that my sister and I laid down for you at the onset of your
employment here?
Nothing
is to come into contact with the
waters of that source. Not one thing, not ever, and no
exceptions!”

Aunt Euphrosyne emerged from the library and
laid a delicate hand on her elder sister’s arm. “Now, ‘Tilla, it
was an accident,” she murmured. Her powdery pink-and-white face was
composed into the picture of maidenly reserve she had so often
urged upon me, to no avail. Her ersatz golden curls trembled ever
so slightly as she bowed her head, interceding for Miss Cubbins.
“You know as well as I that our darling Melantha’s governess would
never have done such a thing deliberately.”

“I know nothing of the sort!” Aunt Domitilla
countered. “One person’s convenient ‘accident’ is another’s Trojan
War. Or do you believe that Eris exclaimed ‘Oopsie-daisy! Silly
butterfingers me,’ when she flung that golden apple among Thetis
and Peleas’ wedding guests?”

Miss Cubbins picked herself up and gathered
the remnants of her dignity. “My ladies, I apologize for what truly
was a mishap. I shall fetch the offending basket from the spring at
once, following which I shall take prompt leave of your service. I
hope you will find it in your hearts to give me a good character,
and I wish you every bit of luck you may require in finding some
unhappy—
deserving
young woman to replace me.” With this, she
turned on her heel and headed for the front door, chin held
high.

She did so without awaiting Aunt Domitilla’s
reply. She ought to have known better. My elder aunt was used to
issuing directives and had an inborn aversion to receiving them.
She pounced upon the governess, age-gnarled hands seizing Miss
Cubbins’ shoulders and forcing the young woman to spin around and
face her, nose-to-nose.

“You will go nowhere without my leave,” she
growled. “Nor shall you have any letters of recommendation, in aid
of securing future employment, until first we view the effects of
your trespass.” With that, she dug her fingers into the governess’
arm and hauled her away, leaving Aunt Euphosyne and me to follow as
best we might.

Aunt Domitilla had a ground-devouring stride
that soon carried her and her hapless prey out of our musty manor
house and down the patchily graveled drive. She ignored Miss
Cubbins’ endless litany of complaint and protest. In vain too did
Aunt Euphosyne beg her sister to slow the pace a trifle as she
struggled to keep up. My youth afforded me no such difficulties,
and I ran merrily alongside my elder aunt and her captive.

“
What
are you smiling about,
Melantha?” Aunt Domitilla demanded as we all swerved sharply to the
right at the end of the hawthorn hedge and doubled back around it.
“I am not ignoring your role in this disaster. Ungrateful child! Is
this the thanks poor Euphrosyne and I merit for lavishing the
benefits of a Classical education upon you?”

I tried to re-form my expression to one of
sincere contrition but failed gloriously. “I am sorry for any
inconvenience I may have caused you, dear aunt.”

“Inconvenience?” Aunt Domitilla snorted and
raised one grizzled eyebrow in a look of unbridled irony. “The
Black Death was an ‘inconvenience’.
This
, my lass, has all
the earmarks of being a fully realized catastrophe. I hope that you
are proud of yourself.”

“She tried to teach me
fractions
!”

“Then it is a great pity she did not succeed,
Melantha, for I have every expectation that you shall need the very
skill you scorn when all Hades breaks loose and our mortal bodies
are chopped into sixteenths at best.”

“Oh, piffle.” I thrust out my underlip, a
childish affectation part and parcel of my thirteen years. “If we
meet some dreadful fate, what good will it do to be able to
identify the fractions into which we’ve been divided?”

My elder aunt stopped her tracks and dropped
her grip on Miss Cubbins. “It will give us a sense of
intellectual satisfaction
,” she replied loftily. “A virtue
about which you neither seem to know or care, might I add. Ah, I
weep for your generation. No: I weep for mine and the foolish
notion that one must take responsibility for the orphaned children
of one’s kin.”

“For the orphaned
heiress
of
Dyrnewaed, you mean,” I said
sotto voce
.

Aunt Domitilla’s thin lips grew thinner to
the point of vanishing altogether. “What was that, Melantha?”

“Only that it was poor Pappa’s kindness, as
master of this estate, that allowed you and Aunt Euphrosyne to live
with
us
and not the other way around,” I replied much too
sweetly. “You have no claim to this property.”

Such deliberate goading was likely to earn me
a slap, but I deemed the game worth the candle. I conjectured that
once my elder aunt struck me, she would regret it and thus commute
the punishment for my original offense. Better a slap for sauciness
than whatever penalty awaited me for assaulting a governess with
insects.

My plans came a cropper. Aunt Domitilla
remained uninfuriated, her hands unraised against me. “So this is
the thanks we get,” she said in a flat voice. “You fling in our
faces the fact that Euphrosyne and I are beholden to your late
father—and now to you—for our daily crust. Our constant service to
this family since the day of our arrival is not worth a mention,
nor a whisper of gratitude. So be it. Let this day mark the end of
our dependence.”

Aunt Euphrosyne gasped and laid one hand to
her shallow chest. “’Tilla, what are you saying?”

“I am saying that Miss Cubbins will not
depart Dyrnewaed unaccompanied. We shall go with her. No doubt our
niece is perfectly capable of managing things here without further
help from us.”

“But she’s a
child
, ‘Tilla!”
Euphrosyne exclaimed. “The staff can help her handle the ordinary
aspects of the estate, but what about the rest of it? We still have
no idea which side of her mixed blood she favors, nor if she
possesses a whit of her mother’s innate ability or her father’s
talent. Worse, she has no idea of the family trust and duty! If we
leave matters in her hands, horrors will ensue.”