My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (67 page)

65. Sometimes. I mean, you have to bear in mind that she was the single most irritating person on the planet, even before the whole Her Immanence thing. But yes, I guess so. If I’m honest.

66. Sitting outside at night, staring up at the sky, wondering what she’s doing now.

67. He wants his glass skateboard back. He says that it’s his, and the government has no right to keep it. (You are the government, aren’t you?) Mum seems happy to share the patent for the Colored Bubble recipe with the government though. The man said that it might be the basis of a whole new branch of molecular something or other. Nobody gave me anything, so I don’t have to worry.

68. Once, in the back garden, looking up at the night sky. I think it was only an orangeyish star, actually. It could have been Mars, I know they call it the red planet. Although once in a while I think that maybe she’s back to herself again, and dancing, up there, wherever she is, and all the aliens love her pole dancing because they just don’t know any better, and they think it’s a whole new art-form, and they don’t even mind that she’s sort of square.

69. I don’t know. Sitting in the back garden talking to the cats, maybe. Or blowing silly-colored bubbles.

70. Until the day that I die. I attest that this is a true statement of events. Signed: Date:

“Sun, come you in,” sing the giants in R. A. Lafferty’s retelling of the travels of Odysseus,
Space Chantey,
and the tame sun comes in each morning, like a pet dog.

Really, this is a very old, very simple story. It’s a mistake story, a little-magic-shop story, a things-we-were-not-meant-to-know story. It’s a two sisters story (the wise one, and the unwise) in which something that was never meant to be a tanning cream replaces the diamonds and the toads that tumble from our mouths.

Sir Sacheverell Sitwell was the first person, as far as I know, to point out that it is the mystery that lingers and not the explanation, the question and not the answer, that stays with us. But sometimes answers and explanations in their turn can build mysteries, or leave behind spaces and empty places, and sometimes it is only if we know what the questions were that we can understand what the answers mean.

The way the story is told defines the story. It tells us who we should be cheering for, who we hope will survive the story. “Editors,” Roger Zelazny told me, “believe that they are buying the stories, but they are not. They are buying the way the story is told.”

Sometimes it is best if the sun does not come in. This is a cautionary tale, after all, and I think they even predate How

Things Came To Be This Way stories (“Don’t go there. That was how your uncle was eaten by a cave lion. Don’t eat that. Let me tell you what it did to my guts.”) and it would not be a cautionary tale if things began well and ended even better.

But there is a possibility of a happy ending, and we must take them where we can find them. Sun, come you in.

—NG