Heiresses of Russ 2015: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction

Intro­duction

Jean Roberta

Heiresses of Russ has become a tradition at Lethe Press, and choosing a selection of published lesbian-flavored speculative fiction to create a new anthology is an enjoyable challenge. The crop of 2014 offered many choices. Perhaps, in another dimension of space-time, there are several other versions of this book. The editors agreed to choose only one story per author, but some of the authors represented here are so prolific and so skilled at creating imaginary worlds that we might well have chosen other stories of theirs instead. We hope that this sampler will encourage readers to seek out more work by the contributors.

What if? is the question that all fiction writers ask themselves. Writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror go further in their answers than writers of realistic fiction, but the question is always grounded in the here-and-now. What if a cure could be found for the physical degeneration of old age, and what if it didn’t work on everyone? What if androids lived among us? What if wars were fought in space, over the resources to be found on other planets? What if efforts to create longer-lasting fruit and vegetables gave strength to a life-form harmful to humans? What if the folk tales of traditional grandmothers were accurate depictions of a reality that the muggles refuse to believe in?

Stories about lesbians, women who choose women as primary partners, lovers, playmates and co-conspirators, tend to go where few men have gone before. (There are, however, several dazzling stories in this book by male authors.) Most of the real-life issues that lesbians must deal with, as women and as members of non-mainstream communities, appear in these stories in metaphorical form or as plausible scenarios in a future or alternative world.

Lesbianism itself was routinely described by the conservatives of the past as impossible. The formula of woman + woman (as it is defined in a recent scholarly book about the influence of lesbianism on civilization as we know it*) is thus logically connected with other phenomena formerly considered impossible: scientific discoveries, alternative methods of producing offspring, space travel, communication with beings who are not human or not living in human bodies, historical accounts that have been suppressed and denied.

Relationships between mothers and their offspring are a pattern in these stories that especially interests this editor. Most lesbians have at least considered the possibility of producing children outside of a heterosexual relationship, and what if? is a pressing question in this case. In some sense, every woman who becomes a parent is setting forth on a journey with an unknown destination, and the method of conception is the least important variable. In several of these stories, woman + woman is compounded when a lesbian couple raise a daughter together, or when a single lesbian mother meets a single, childless woman who had not expected to become part of an emotional triangle.

Lesbian daughters are as well represented here as lesbian mothers, and despite the apparent advances of women and of queers in Western culture, the old trope of the dispossessed girl who must leave home at a tender age to seek her fortune in the wilderness still has a real-world urgency. The daughters of patriarchal families are shown having to find or create the homes they want to live in. They don’t all succeed.

The appearance of grandmothers, mothers and daughters suggests threads of continuity from the past to the future, even when this is contested. At the same time, family relationships in these stories are not always based on shared DNA. This seems appropriate in a collection of stories by writers who are all, in some sense, heiresses of the late feminist speculative-fiction writer Joanna Russ, who was honored this year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America with a posthumous Solstice Award.

Lest my discussion of lesbian families suggest characters floating in an amniotic soup of endless love, there is plenty of sex and violence in these stories. The violence of war is shown to be the logical, if horrifying, result of clashing interests. In some scenarios, violence and trickery are necessary means of resisting oppression. The question What if? is especially disturbing when the choices are annihilation or the destruction of fellow-beings, but in the real world, there are no easy roads to peace.

No lesbian anthology would be complete without some sex. Woman + woman can mean various types of connection, but the sexual kind is probably the most fun to read about. Lesbian erotic fantasy has come of age, and the sly wit in the sexually-explicit stories in this book is as seductive as the juicy adjectives.

Dear reader, I don’t want to delay you any further. Welcome to the worlds within, and may you enjoy the journey.

Jean Roberta

Summer 2015

*The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 by Susan S. Lanser (The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

The

Highwayman

Come

Riding

M. Bennardo

Great-great-grandmother is receiving her doctorate in Japanese literature. Great-great-granddaughter is renewing her marriage to Marjaana Leskinen.

Sister is working as a sewage engineer in Buenos Aires now. Great-aunt is vacationing in Manila.

Some woman whose name I don’t even recognize has written a book of poetry. A cousin? A niece? Or a lover or wife of some distant relation? (In my life I’ve smiled and shaken hands with heaps of those lovers and spouses and somehow have stayed connected to them all, our secondary links forged from mere politeness but persisting for the same reason long after the break-up or divorce, hanging on sometimes for centuries like a shelf of rotten ice clinging to a riverbank after the waters have fallen away, unable to bear any load but not crumbling until tested.)

Or is this woman just a glitch in the social network, a mistyped name, a misplaced click—an accidental stranger who has merged with my feed?

Either way, it’s nice to know that life still goes on. Nice—or maybe enraging. I’ve read a dozen books of poetry in the past century, and lied about reading a dozen more. I’m suddenly certain that I couldn’t quote a line from any of them. (Not a line, not an image from any of them, even though some were the works of lifetimes, yes lifetimes of what we would have once called dilettantism, hobbyism, amateurism…but after a hundred years of doodling and noodling surely anybody could be called a poet if they wanted, and surely their verse could not be any worse than those old scraps of doggerel from childhood treasuries that somehow did successfully lodge in my mind uncalculated eons ago and which still stubbornly rise up unbidden and unexpected like highwaymen come riding—riding—riding—like highwaymen come riding, up to the old inn door.)

But this new book, written by whoever she is—there will be no need now to read it, no need even to pretend that I did.

•

Carla is my case worker. She’s chatbot nice and hologram pretty, but she’ll never be anybody’s Thousand Year Face. Not even anybody’s Hundred Year Face. (Not that she would care or know what that meant, for if I ever let the accusation slip she would only knit her brows quizzically and draw her legs underneath her curled-up body in the cushioned rattan chair, curious, not offended, not even noticing the personal nature of the remark, but merely interested on my behalf as one is interested in a puzzle piece unexpectedly retrieved from under the couch, eager to see where it fits.)

A Thousand Year Face, I’d explain. Given enough time, given enough interactions with enough people, we were all sure to be something to somebody, eventually. (Not forever, and not for real, I don’t mean that, for real things are always too messy to last.)

But rather a thousand years from now, some beautiful stranger who had passed by briefly just once, who had blinked by for a moment and no longer, would suddenly bolt up in her bed and say, My God, I still remember her face!

My face, yes. And why not?

After all, everyone is someone’s Thousand Year Face—or so I used to believe, until I saw Carla. A Five Day Face, if ever there was one. (A face like an ideal of beauty carved into Roman marble, dug up after millennia in the earth, the bare cheeks, the blank staring eyes, the pale expanse of the forehead—and any subtlety or fineness long since eroded away, only the flat outline of the proportions remaining now, dull in their regularity and bland in their conformity.)

A face that would have enchanted and fascinated the men, I suddenly remember—a face like a my-last-duchess-painted-on-the-wall.

And still chatbot nice and hologram pretty! How ridiculous to keep holding their tastes up like a yardstick after all this time, how ridiculous we can’t forget what compliments they once murmured in the dark!

•

I’m here, says Carla, to help you accept what’s happening, and to help you find out what you want from the process.

I fold my hands on my lap and stare down at them, at the unfamiliar appendages they have recently become. (I can’t remember my woman’s hands—my working hands, my loving hands, my invisible everyday hands—only my girl’s hands, swollen on too-slight wrists, ungainly and tender with growing pains, bearing chewed nails and scabbed cuticles and orderly rows of wispy hair upon the back, like a field of sprouting wheat—)

But now my skin has grown ever thinner and ever more translucent, my veins green and cold around the thick knobs of my knuckles. They are the hands of an alien, a bodysnatcher, ungainly and tender in different ways.

Is Carla old enough to remember the men we left behind, I wonder? The men whose lifespans we outstripped, and then doubled, and trebled, and more—until they were mere dots on the speeding freeway, mere raindrops in the rushing air?

Until at last we said, Enough, sisters! and judged it cruel to keep bringing them forth, for their brief threescore-and-ten years of life, while we—their mothers and sisters and lovers and daughters—lived on and on and on, forever and ever, never aging or failing or dying. (Shall I chant a list of men I’ve known in my life, all of them gone—but no, better to remember one perhaps, my last son who was later grown into one of the last men, the child of my hundreds-years-old middle life, who once fell hard from an apple tree and disappeared behind the woodpile as I raced across the backyard, my face ashen in terror, though the fall was not even an especially bad one, not even the worst of his life, but still it triggered the fast-expanding lump in my chest as I saw suddenly his entire life rushing past me as he fell, rushing so fast that it would be gone before I could grab hold of him.)

Knowing what would come and what it would mean, was it any surprise we finally couldn’t stand to bear them anymore?

•

Some people find a peace or a meaning in their last days, says Carla. Some people come to appreciate dying.

I wonder who these people are. Do they appreciate the liver spots, the thinning hair, the aching joints? Do they appreciate the incontinence and the wracking coughs in the night? The do-I-dare-to-eat-a-peaches? (Probably they do appreciate the failing memory, the slow fraying and snapping of so many unsatisfactorily unfinished threads as the fabric of life warps back to the beginning, where the shortest possible way always feels like a step toward the past, toward closed systems and solitary fantasies, toward the structured passing of time.)

But what of the biggest indignity of all? Do they also appreciate that this slow decline turns them into a list of ailments, an ever-growing catalog of incurable complaints? Do they appreciate their own morbid mounting obsession with the failing of their bodies, as involuntary and as unavoidable as any other natural reflex?

And so we let them all wink one by one into the night—those aging fathers and brothers and lovers and sons, who did nothing but gripe and complain and vainly recall their vanished youths. (Oh but if only there were any of them left now, still somewhere out there, a line of the dead and dying preceding me into the void into whose ranks I might shuffle at last, content to know that in the moment before and the moment after my death, another and another will blink out of existence almost alongside me!)

My hair is grey, but not with years, nor grew it white in a single night—

Enough.

•

Grandmother is competing in shot put in the Olympics again this year. Niece is playing piano at Carnegie Hall.

Daughter has discovered a new species of deep-sea arthropod. Mother is wondering why I haven’t answered an email or posted an update in ages?

And I am dying of a rare degenerative disorder called old age, which is really nothing more than an accumulated immunity to our longevity drugs. An immunity that might be partly genetic and might kill grandmother and mother and daughter and niece as well one day, or one that might be unique among our family to me.

•

You’ve lived an accomplished life, says Carla. And you’ve outlived your own grandsons by thousands of years.

Yes, is all I can say. Yes, yes, yes, I know.

Some never took the drugs at all—those long-ago women who could not bear to watch their men wither and die while they sailed on serenely in youth and vigor. But not I.

In truth, I could not chain myself to the men I had known—to their limitations, to their single human life. I was sorry for them, so I stayed, I cared, I helped them pass. Then afterwards, I lived a hundred lives more.

I could not refuse life.

I could not welcome death.

But we were all still so young then. We all still orbited our original suns. I don’t know if there’s gravity enough now to bring anyone back if I call. From Buenos Aires or Manila, from the Olympic Village or the Marianas Trench—can I bring to my side the sister I haven’t seen in a century, or the great-granddaughter whose face I’ve forgotten?

(Will they remember me if I ask them, or will they stare in befuddlement at their feeds, wondering who this fantastically dying woman is with the name they don’t recognize, this unknown intruder that breaks their peace, this cackling harbinger of possible genetic inadequacy who rasps and asks:

when shall we meet again

in thunder, lightning, or in rain?)

Will they call each other up, after years of not talking, and ask breathlessly who I am, and what web of relations ties us all together? Will they count the generations and the once-removeds, calculating if they’d be within their rights to simply ignore me?

For in coming to my aid now—wouldn’t that mean a tacit admission, a silent agreement, a hushed avowal that eternity may not be theirs either? That their bodies too may one day—(It’s nothing, it’s nothing, just a cough I can’t shake—just a twinge in my back from sleeping on the couch—of course I’ve always had dizzy spells, even as a very young girl—oh but please shut the door, I get such a chill with the draft!)

•

I’m sorry now that I called Carla a Five Day Face. I won’t be waking for anybody’s memory a thousand, or a hundred, or even ten years from now. Perhaps five days is all I should be planning for.

Being remembered is nice, says Carla when I try to bargain with her about how long she’ll remember me. But that’s for the living survivors, for the people you leave behind.

I’m going on ahead, says Carla. I don’t have to worry about that. All I should worry about is making my remaining time count for me.

All I should worry about is living, reaching, growing. Life is for living, not for remembering.

Or something like that. It’s some cliché that makes me cry.

Then I clasp my hands around hers, my arthritic hands with the fiery rings around each knuckle, with slack and aching tendons. Then I close my quivering eyelids against the afternoon sun, and deep into that darkness peering, long I sit there, wondering, fearing—

Doubting—

Dreaming—

Dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before—

•

I open that book of poetry after all, the one by the woman whose name I don’t recognize. It can’t take more than five days to read one book, even one that may be the work of a decade of stolen moments, scribblings in margins and tinkerings on napkins. To read it the right way, I mean. Surely I have time enough yet for that.

(Not to read it in the way that I have always read as an adult, as though checking off boxes or filling in a worksheet, reading to pass time or to build credentials, but rather to read it in the way I read as a child, poring intently over one book, one poem, one line, burning the words into my brain, because for the moment what I read was all that there was, the extent of the universe, the limit of creation, as it was in the beginning, as it is now, forever and ever, ever and ever, forever and ever, and world without end, without any end, the world without any men, the end—)

Yes, even if all my other horizons are shrinking, even if all my other tides are pouring out to sea. Even if the highwayman has come riding at last, tapping his whip impatiently against the shutters as I struggle numb-fingered to plait my grey and thinning hair—

Even now, perhaps I can still be transported. Even now I can still be kidnapped by life.

Show me a ghostly galleon. Show me a ribbon of moonlight. Make me wonder at anything for the next five days (no matter how trite! no matter how obvious!) and in exchange I’ll remember you for life.

•

Made Light

Melissa Moorer

All that light and no heat, it couldn’t be real. It just wasn’t possible. It was a fairy tale. Wasn’t it?

•

I don’t have a father. Mine was a virgin birth, but not in a Jesus Christ kind of way. There were no angels and no trumpets and I am not a boy. God doesn’t speak to me, but sometimes the stars do. Mom says it’s because we’re related (me and the stars), but I am not convinced. When I ask about my father, she laughs and says he was a lightning bug.

I’m serious. I swallowed a lightning bug and nine months later, she motions dramatically toward me, the living proof of her immaculate conception. You. When I respond with a suspicious stare, she huffs back into her lawn chair and goes back to snapping beans. Ask your Gran if you don’t believe me.

My grandmother just rolls her eyes and exhales a loud Hmph, but she doesn’t say no. She shakes her head, but she has never said it didn’t happen that way. And she would if she could.

I believed this explanation when I was little and didn’t know any better. Lying awake at night, I imagined I would someday be able to fly, my fairy father arriving in a swirl of color and light to whisk me away to the glittery firefly world or fairy kingdom. But he didn’t and I don’t—have any magical abilities.

Anyway, I know now how babies are made and that fairies don’t exist. I bring home biology books to prove it to my mother: you can’t get pregnant by swallowing anything, it just doesn’t work that way. I lay the book on the table between us open to full-color illustrations that look like some strange underworld map. See, stomach and uterus—totally unconnected. No highway from the red state of the stomach to the pink sea of the uterus, not even the dotted lines of a gravel road.

When you were learning to walk we had to tie a string to your ankle so you couldn’t fly away, is her answer.

Whatever, I say. Then why don’t I float away now?

She points to my feet and the heavy black corrective shoes I have had to wear as long as I can remember. "The shoes.

Remember when you were six and you fell in love with the light in the pantry? My face burns with shame before she reaches the end of the sentence. Memories of lying curled under the burning beautiful glow all night. I tried to stay in my bed, but the light sang to me, drawing me out of my room to lie on the cold hard floor as it lulled me to sleep with its bright, sweet voice. They finally had the fixture replaced and I was inconsolable for weeks.

But I am too old for that now. Too old to believe their stupid stories about firefly fathers and invisible wings in my back. I went through her things years ago searching for my real father: an old photo with a note on the back, a sperm-bank receipt, a love letter. Because in the real world I am the bastard child of some sweaty fumbling in the backseat of a Chevy Nova or worse, the shameful offspring of a rape or some twisted first-cousin star-crossed love affair. They may choose to live in that fantasy world of fireflies and fairies, but I have to go to school every day at Fayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. I have to live in the terrible real world, so I quietly collect the facts I need to end the fairy tale.

•

1. Fireflies aren’t really flies. They are beetles. The glow is caused by an efficient chemical reaction in the guts of the insect that creates luminescence and almost no waste heat.

•

The smug fluorescent lights in the cafeteria hum and wink at me, probably because my few friends have second lunch and the lights know I have no one else to sit with but them. The other students don’t notice their constant muttering about my shoes or hair or whatever else they can see from up there. I eat my lunch outside when it’s warm enough, so that I don’t have to hear their condescending ramblings, but it’s raining today so I look for a table toward the edges and find one under a dim and erratically blinking tube of light. One of the bulbs is dying a long, slow death, which has caused the nearby bulbs to go desperately silent. I slide into the faint outline of an unoccupied seat and concentrate on my lunch.

That’s what brings her to me, I guess: the shadowy table and the girl in near dark. She has black black hair, thick eyeliner and dark clothes, some kind of glittery powder all over her face. That’s all I can absorb in one cursory glance. Enough to know that I don’t recognize her. She must be new here. That would explain the confusion. There is no other reason to sit at this twilight table with me. She will know soon enough what I am, so I ignore her attempts at conversation and pretend to read despite the mumbled blinkings of the desperate and dying light bulb above us.

Three weeks later she is still sitting with me under the flickering fluorescent. Look, I’m not into Nine Inch Nails or Slipknot anything, I blurt out. She continues reading for a few seconds before resting the paperback copy of Wuthering Heights face down on the plastic surface of the table.

Okay, she says, drawing out the syllables in a slow sing-song. Her forehead wrinkles in confusion. Neither am I. Sure that she will pick up her tray and leave me alone finally, I return to my book. Well, what are you into then? You know, since we’ve established what you’re not into.

I say Sleater-Kinney, a band I’m sure she hasn’t heard of, hoping to end this conversation, but she smiles. Her eyebrows rise and peak as she picks up her notebook carefully, bringing its scarred, grafittied surface between us. It takes me a moment, but my eyes finally focus on the familiar lyrics scratched out in ballpoint.

I wanna be your Thurston Moore

Wrestle on your bedroom floor

Oh, is the only response I can manage. As she removes the notebook I notice a swirl of color and design sneaking out from under her long-sleeved shirt. A tattoo. Probably some kind of fairy thing or maybe even a riot grrl symbol. Yes, that’s it. She’s probably some kind of rabid vegan, rebel grrl, hipster punk wannabe who spends all of her time collecting obscure albums on vinyl and boycotting Starbucks.

I glance at her tray looking for any signs of dogmatic dietary restrictions. There is no meat, but plenty of brand names: two Cokes, Reese’s, Skittles and a couple of bags of Doritos. This in a school full of anorexic girls. A normal lunch for someone who looks like her is a Diet Coke and a bag of carrot sticks.

Carrie Brownstein’s new band is playing in Cincinnati on Friday. Wanna go? Stunned by the invitation and the contents of her tray I nod my head automatically then realize what I have agreed to. Not just the concert with this girl I don’t know, but a total of three hours travel time alone with her.

We probably can’t get tickets now anyway, I say, hoping she will use this opportunity to take it all back.

She just shrugs. Sure we can. I’ll charge them on my Dad’s credit card. You can pay me back.

•

I always thought my name, Greta, was the one thing my mother gave me that was mine. Such a sturdy, solid name. A name for movie stars and soccer players, not pale fatherless freaks. Greta was a name I could aspire to. Grow into. Until today. We had to research names and their meanings for English class and that’s how I found out. The hard way. Greta means child of light. Even my name isn’t real. Part of Mom’s firefly fantasy life.

I was so angry, I walked right past Mom and Gran when I got home from school and refused to eat the homemade macaroni and cheese with tomato slices on top I know Mom made just for me. It’s like she has a sixth sense for when I’ll be angry and does exactly the wrong thing.

I decide not to leave my room until morning and spend the night going through my Dad box again sifting through the evidence I’ve found of possible fathers scattered through my mother’s things. The most likely candidate is