Free Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant Page B

father's garden. We ate honeysuckle honey and drank wine from fish bowls. Jack the Ripper danced with Lizzie Borden under a school of Japanese lanterns one night while I watched, braiding daisies. Jack the Ripper did not love Lizzie Borden.
    After a while she grew thinner. Her bones lifted like fish. She had this secret, this little Moses basket in the rushes. She ate nothing but light until the veins of her face were traceworks for electricity, her mouth a socket shooting sparks, her heart a lightbulb. Darkness slunk around the edges of the house, a kicked dog. Lizzie Borden was the glint under the shut door. She brought me a dead mouse on a coal shovel and said this is my love. She told me to follow and I followed, and I followed. I made her tea from sweet herbs and offered her crystallised rose petals, but she slapped my hands away. I was not allowed to touch her. All day and all night she whispered, excelcis Deo. Excelcis Deo . What is wrong with me? she asked. I said, “We know what we are, but not what we may be."
    I don't know where Lizzie Borden is.
    * * * *
    Jack the Ripper is the black bird eating my seedlings. He is the black cat under my window. He is the thumbnail of my curtains not quite shut. It gets dark around us, and the bees turn into moths, dead-winged, and the fish turn into red streaks like blood in the water. Jack the Ripper cups my cheek in his hand. The bones of his wrist are scaffolding. Sin glitters underneath his fingernails. “Goodnight,” he whispers. “Goodnight. Goodnight.” There is water everywhere. His eyes are flat like a fish's eyes. When he goes, I am alone.
    The dark grows darker. I wait for her. She is a cup of light.
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Self Story
    Carol Emshwiller
    How did this begin? We must have thought she'd be a good choice. We should have checked her out first. We should have spent a few hours with her to see how it was going to be, spending the whole summer shut up here in the middle of nowhere. We'd have seen in half a day how soon we'd tire of her smiling. Nobody smiles this much except out of fear and embarrassment and there's not a moment when she's not embarrassed. Embarrassed to be herself I suppose. Whoever she is.
    Well, the summer will be over, and thank goodness. We'll go back to our regular lives. And better that she go back to living by herself as she's used to. Back to running in place or riding her stationary bike, lifting those little weights that she never does often enough to get any better at it.
    If we'd seen her home before, we never would have taken her class. Piles and piles of papers on every flat surface! We'd have known her mind has got to be just as cluttered. People are always all of a piece.
    She's called the class a title with no dignity: SUMMER FUN WITH FICTION ... as if it was for children. Fun! We're not here for fun. Except ... well, it could have been. Maybe. With anybody else but her.
    We won't say who it is. Suffice it to say her initials are C. E.
    She's old. At her age you can't help but be out of date. But she doesn't suspect it. Hasn't she, she says (and she says it over and over): “Haven't I always been right on the cutting edge of everything? Haven't I even gone beyond the so-called New Wave? On into the new old things? Back to the old rules, but back in an entirely new way?"
    She says, “A story should be this and this and not that and that and the other. A story should curve and stop and struggle, turn around in the middle and tell the opposite. Have guts and sweep and go somewhere with gusto. élan,” she says. “A story should always be more than itself. A story should end only a few inches from where it began. A story should fall over the edge. A story should be a bundle of foreshadowings. Should vouchsafe itself to the reader from the very beginning that it is, in fact, a story."
    She never would say, “Write what you know,” like everybody else does. She never would say, “Write, write, write, and keep on