Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories Read online

  Story Prize Finalist • Book Sense Notable Pick • Locus Recommended Reading

  "All the gorgeously crafted stories in Maureen McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical.... McHugh shows that what many people might dismiss initially as genre fiction can become transcendent in the right hands.

  -Nancy Pearl (Book Lust), NPR, Morning Edition

  "Wise and thoughtful; these stories left me deeply affected and unable to put many of them out of my mind. A bookgroup looking for something a little different to read would find in this collection plenty of fodder for discussion."

  -Lois Powers, Toadstool Bookshop, Milford, NH

  "McHugh's stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by the difficult circumstances of their characters' lives-slices of life well worth reading and rereading."

  -Booklist

  The 13 stories in McHugh's debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching explorations of personal relationships and their transformative power... . McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in poetry."

  -Publishers Weekly

  "Wonderfully unpredictable stories, from the very funny to the very grim, by one of our best and bravest imaginative writers."

  -Ursula K. Le Gum (Changing Planes)

  "My favorite thing about her is the wry, uncanny tenderness of her stories. She has the astonishing ability to put her finger on the sweet spot right between comedy and tragedy, that pinpoint that makes you catch your breath. You're not sure whether to laugh out loud or cry, and you end tip doing both at once."

  -Dan Chaon (Among the Missing)

  "When I first read China Mountain Thang many years ago, Maureen McHugh instantly became, as she has remained, one of my favorite writers. This collection is a welcome reminder of her power-they are resonant, wise, generous, sharp, transporting, and deeply, deeply moving. McHugh is enormously gifted; each of these stories is a gift."

  -Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)

  ""McHugh is enormously talented.... [She] has a light touch, a gentle sense of a humor, and a keen wit:'-Strange Horizons

  "Passion and precision:'-Locus

  Praise for Maureen F. Mcl lugh's novels:

  Nekropolis

  Neu Kirk Timrs Notable Book

  Book Sense 76 Pick

  Amazon Best of the Year

  * "Exquisite"

  -Publishers II ekly (starred review)

  This luminous tale of forbidden love in a near-future Morocco explores the evolution of human nature in a world where technology has redefined the meaning of the word human.... Speculative fiction at its best."

  -Library Journal

  China Mountain hang

  Tihtrec. Lambda, and Locus Award "'inner

  "McHugh's achievement recalls the best work of Delany and Robinson without being in the least derivative."

  -New h rk Times Notable Book

  Mission Child

  * "McHugh delivers another astonishing, compulsively readable novel."

  -Booklist (starred review)

  "Fans of Ursula Le Guin will find much to admire in McHugh's intelligent, carefully wrought novel of a world that is familiar yet very alien."

  -Publishers Meekly

  "E.motionally compelling ... immensely satisfying ... wonderfully structured and beautifully achieved .... splendid science fiction novel ... McHugh makes an alien world and an imagined society feel compellingly real, and uses this setting to say something significant about being human:'

  -Cleveland Plain Dealer

  "Mission Child is an epic map of voice meeting voice, world meeting world-tragic, heartfelt, and vibrant with life."

  -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

  Maureen F. McHugh

  mothers,

  & other

  monsters

  stories

  Contents

  Ancestor Money

  In the Air 17

  The Cost to Be Wise 33

  The Lincoln Train 85

  Interview: On Any Given Day 101

  Oversite 119

  Wicked 131

  Laika Comes Back Safe 133

  Presence 149

  Eight-Legged Story 177

  The Beast 193

  Nckropolis 197

  Frankensteins Daughter 217

  Reading Group Guide 253

  For Evelyn Lickliter McHugh, if she only knew.

  Ancestor Money

  n the afterlife, Rachel lived alone. She had a clapboard cabin and a yard full of gray geese which she could feed or not and they would do fine. Purple morning glories grew by the kitchen door. It was always an early summer morning and had been since her death. At first, she had wondered if this were some sort of Catholic afterlife. She neither felt the presence of God nor missed his absence. But in the stasis of this summer morning, it was difficult to wonder or worry, year after year.

  The honking geese told her someone was coming. Geese were better than dogs, and maybe meaner. It was Speed. "Rachel?" he called from the fence.

  She had barely known Speed in life-he was her husband's uncle and not a person she had liked or approved of But she had come to enjoy his company when she no longer had to fear sin or bad companions.

  "Rachel," he said, "you've got mail. From China."

  She came and stood in the doorway, shading her eyes from the day. "What?" she said.

  "You've got mail from China," Speed said. He held up an envelope. It was big, made of some stiff red paper, and sealed with a darker red bit of wax.

  She had never received mail before. "Where did you get it?" she asked.

  "It was in the mailbox at the end of the hollow," Speed said. He said "holler" for "hollow." Speed had a thick brush of wiry black hair that never combed flat without hair grease.

  "There's no mailbox there," she said.

  "Is now."

  "Heavens, Speed. Who put you up to this," she said.

  "It's worse 'n that. No one did. Open it up. "

  She came down and took it from him. There were Chinese letters going up and down on the left side of the envelope. The stamp was as big as the palm of her hand. It was a white crane flying against a gilt background. Her name was right there in the middle in beautiful black ink.

  Speed was about to have apoplexy, so Rachel put off opening it, turning the envelope over a couple of times. The red paper had a watermark in it of twisting Chinese dragons, barely visible. It was an altogether beautiful object.

  She opened it with reluctance.

  Inside it read:

  Honorable Ancestress of Amelia Shaugnessy: an offering of death money and goods has been made to you at Tin Hau Temple in Yau Ma Tel, in Hong Kong. If you would like to claim it, please contact us either by letter or phone. HK8-555-4444•

  There were more Chinese letters, probably saying the same thing.

  "What is it?" Speed asked.

  She showed it to him.

  "Ah," he said.

  "You know about this?" she asked.

  "No," he said, "except that the Chinese do that ancestor worship. Are you going to call?"

  She went back inside and he followed her. His boots clumped on the floor. She was barefoot and so made no noise. "You want some coffee?" she asked.

  "No," he said. "Are you going to write back?"

  "I'm going to call," she said. Alexander Graham Bell had thought that the phone would eventually allow communication with the spirits of the dead and so the link between the dead and phones had been established. Rachel h
ad a cell phone she had never used. She dialed it now, standing in the middle of her clean kitchen, the hem of her skirt damp from the yard and clinging cool around her calves.

  The phone rang four times and then a voice said, " Ibci."

  "Hello?" she said.

  "Wei," said the voice again. "Wei?"

  "Hello, do you speak English?" she said.

  There was the empty sound of ether in the airwaves. Rachel frowned at Speed.

  Then a voice said, "Hello? Yes?"

  Rachel thought it was the same voice, accented but clear. It did not sound human, but had a reedy, hollow equality.

  "This is Rachel Ball. I got an envelope that said I should call this number about, urn," she checked the letter, "death money." Rachel had not been able to read very well in life but it was one of those things that had solved itself in the afterlife.

  "Ah. Rachel Ball. A moment ..:"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Yes. It is a substantial amount of goods and money. Would you like to claim it?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Hold on," said the voice. She couldn't tell if it was male or female.

  "What's going on?" Speed asked.

  Rachel waved her hand to shush him.

  "Honorable Ancestress, your claim has been recorded. You may come at any time within the next ninety days to claim it," said the strange, reedy voice.

  "Go there?" she asked.

  "Yes," said the voice.

  "Can you send it?"

  "Alas," said the voice, "we cannot." And the connection was closed.

  "Wait," she said. But when she pushed re-dial, she went directly to voicemail. It was in Chinese.

  Speed was watching her, thoughtful. She looked at her bare feet and curled her toes.

  "Are you going to go?" Speed asked her.

  "I guess." she said. "Do you want to come?"

  "I traveled too much in life," he said and that was all. Rachel had never gone more than twenty-five miles from Swan Pond in life and had done less in death. But Speed had been a hobo in the Depression, leaving his wife and kids without a word and traveling the south and the west. Rachel did not understand why Speed was in heaven, or why some people were here and some people weren't, or where the other people were. She had figured her absence of concern was part of being dead.

  Rachel had died, probably of complications from meningitis, in 1927, in Swan Pond, Kentucky. She had expected that Robert, her husband, would eventually be reunited with her. But in life, Robert had remarried badly and had seven more children, two of whom died young. She saw Robert now and again and felt nothing but distant affection for him. He had moved on in life, and even in death he was not her Robert anymore.

  But now something flickered in her that was a little like discontent. Amelia Shaugnessy was ... her granddaughter. Child of her third child and second daughter, Evelyn. Amelia had sent her an offering. Rachel touched her fingers to her lips, thinking. She touched her hair.

  What was it she had talked to on the phone? Some kind of Chinese spirit? Not an angel. "I'll tell you about it when I get back," she said.

  She did not take anything. She did not even close the door.

  "Rachel," Speed said from her door. She stopped with her hand on the gate. "Are you going to wear shoes?" he asked.

  "Do you think I need them?" she asked.

  He shrugged.

  The geese were gathered in a soft gray cluster by the garden at the side of the little clapboard cabin where they had been picking among the tomato plants. All their heads were turned towards her.

  She went out the gate. The road was full of pale dust like talcum powder, already warmed by the sun. It felt so good she was glad that she hadn't worn shoes.

  As she walked, she seemed to walk forward in time. She came down and out the hollow, past a white farmhouse with a barn and silo and a radio in the windowsill playing a Reds baseball game against the Padres. A black Rambler was parked in the driveway and laundry hung drying in the breeze, white sheets belling out.

  Where the road met the highway was a neat brick ranch house with a paved driveway and a patient German Shepherd lying in the shade tinder a tree. There was a television antenna like a lightning rod. The German Shepherd watched her but did not bark.

  She waited at the highway and after a few minutes, saw a Greyhound bus coming through the valley, following the Laurel River. She watched it through the curves, listening to the grinding down and back up of its gears. The sign on the front of the bus said LEXINGTON, so that was where she supposed she would go next.

  The bus stopped in front of her, sighing, and the door opened.

  By the time she got to Lexington, the bus had modernized. It had a bathroom and the windows were tinted smoky colored. Highway 25 had become Interstate 75 and outside the window, they were passing horse farms with white board fence rising and falling across bluegreen fields. High-headed horses with manes like women's hair that shone in the sun.

  "Airport, first," the driver called. "Then bus terminal with connections to Cincinnati, New York City and Sausalito, California." She thought he sounded northern.

  Rachel stepped down from the bus in front of the terminal. The tarmac was pleasantly warm. As the bus pulled out, the breeze from its passing belled her skirt and tickled the back of her neck. She wondered if perhaps she should have worn a hat.

  She wasn't afraid- what could happen to her here? She was dead. The bus had left her off in front of glass doors that opened to some invisible prompt. Across a cool and airy space was a counter for Hong Kong Air, and behind it, a diminutive Chinese woman in a green suit and a tiny green pillbox cap trimmed with gold. Her name tag said "Jade Girl" but her skin was as white as porcelain teeth.

  Rachel hesitated for the first time since she had walked away from her own gate. This grandchild of hers who had sent her money, what obligation had she placed on Rachel? For more than seventy years, far longer than she had lived, Rachel had been at peace in her little clapboard house on the creek, up in the hollow. She missed the companionable sound of the geese and the longing was painful in a way she had forgotten. She was so startled by the emotion that she lifted her hand to her silent heart.

  "May I help you?" the woman asked.

  Wordlessly, Rachel showed her the envelope.

  "Mrs. Ball?" the woman behind the counter said. "Your flight is not leaving for a couple of hours. But I have your ticket."

  She held out the ticket, a gaudy red plastic thing with golden dragons and black. Rachel took it because it was held out to her. The Chinese woman had beautiful hands, but Rachel had the hands of a woman who gardened-clean but not manicured or soft.

  The ticket made something lurch within her and she was afraid. Afraid. She had not been afraid for more than seventy years. And she was barefoot and hadn't brought a hat.

  "If you would like to shop while you are waiting," the woman behind the counter said, and gestured with her hand. There were signs above them that said "Terminal A/Gates 1-24A" with an arrow, and "Terminal B/Gates i-ill." "There are shops along the concourse," the Chinese woman said.

  Rachel looked at her ticket. Amidst the Chinese letters it said "Gate 4A." She looked back up at the sign. "Thank you," she said.

  The feeling of fear had drained from her like water in sand and she felt herself again. What had that been about, she wondered. She followed the arrows to a brightly lit area full of shops. There was a book shop and a flower shop, a shop with postcards and salt-and-pepper shakers and stuffed animals. It also had sandals, plastic things in bright colors. Rachel's skirt was pale blue so she picked a pair of blue ones. They weren't regular sandals. The sign said flip-flops and they had a strap sort of business that went between the big toe and second toe that felt odd. But she decided if they bothered her too much, she could always carry them.

  She picked a postcard of a beautiful horse and found a pen on the counter. There was no shop girl. She wrote, "Dear Simon, The bus trip was pleasant." That was Speed's actual name. Sh
e paused, not sure what else to say. She thought about telling him about the odd sensations she had had at the ticket counter but didn't know how to explain it. So she just wrote, "I will leave for Hong Kong in a few hours. Sincerely, Rachel."

  She addressed it to Simon Philpot, Swan Pond Hollow. At the door to the shop there was a mailbox on a post. She put the card in and raised the flag. She thought of him getting the card out of the new mailbox at the end of the hollow and a ghost of the heartsickness stirred in her chest. So she walked away, as she had from her own gate that morning, her new flip-flops snapping a little as she went. Partway down the concourse she thought of something she wanted to add and turned and went back to the mailbox. She was going to write, "I am not sure about this." But the flag was down and when she opened the mailbox, the card was already gone.

  There were other people at Gate 4A. One of them was Chinese with a blue face and black around his eyes. His eyes were wide, the whites visible all the way around the very black pupils. He wore strange shoes with upturned toes, red leggings, elaborate red armor and a strange red hat. He was reading a Chinese newspaper.

  Rachel sat a couple of rows away from the demon. She fanned herself with the beautiful red envelope, although she wasn't warm. There was a TV and on it a balding man was telling people what they should and should not do. He was some sort of doctor, I)r. Phil. He said oddly rude things and the people sat, hands folded like children, and nodded.

  "Collecting ancestor money?" a man asked. He wore a dark suit, white shirt and tie and a Fedora. "My son married a Chinese girl and every year I have to make this trip." He smiled.

  "You've done this before?" Rachel asked. "Is it safe?"

  The man shrugged. "It's different," he said. "I get a new suit. They're great tailors. It's a different afterlife, though. Buddhist and all."

  Buddhism. Detachment. And for a moment, it felt as if everything swirled around her, a moment of vertigo. Rachel found herself unwilling to think about Buddhism.

  The man was still talking. "You know, I can still feel how strongly my son wants things. The pull of the living and their way of obliging us." he said, and chuckled.