Mine. #creepiestobject

You should follow #creepiestobject on twitter, where curators post horrible and fascinating exhibits from museums around the world. Like a lot of culture in the last couple of months– at least in Canada– it’s full of anxiety and a kind of manic amusement at the weirdness and horror of the world, very much whistling-past-the-graveyard. Looking through the links with a friend, we decided to do our own whistling and started writing creepy microfiction about the exhibits. There are so many dolls, and desiccated animals, and bits of witchcraft, you can’t help but want more from them– an explanation for why there are pins in a pigeon’s heart, or what happened to that cat.

A few people have posted their stories, so I wanted to collect the links:

Ranylt Richildis wrote about Wheelie, aka “Not-Nose” a toy from the PEI Museum.

Tegan Moore wrote about the Crab Men of Yorkshire Castle in “Neighbor”

Justin Key wrote “Heads of Household” about a pea-pod from Norwich Castle.

…and I wrote “Mine” about Rat Kings.

MINE.

After he fell asleep, she collected the things he brought to bed: books, cars, a noseless bear. When he played, he curated his toys by rules she did not understand. This dinosaur, not that. This bunny. That block. When he slept in her arms, his hair a fluffy nimbus after his bath, she still found rocks in his hands, smuggled into the bedroom.

She emptied his pockets after every walk: a bottlecap; a crumpled leaf. He wanted to bring worms home from the park. “No,” she said. “They’re dirty. Dirty.” Her face full of exaggerated disgust which she hoped he’d mimic, even if he didn’t understand her shudder. She still found them wriggling in his pocket. By July, a knot of fur. The exuviae of snakes and cicada. After a long day in the sun, he smelled of earth, mud in his teeth, his hugs damp and sour.

On a night in August she collected rocks, dinosaurs, his dad’s right shoe. As she dug about his sleeping body she found nails bent into a cross. A greasy yellow bone. A handful of hazelnuts.

And then— a knot of dark hair beneath his cheek. That was the first rat. After that another. Another. Another, all bound by their tails, desiccated, but warm from the heat of his body.

At her feet, their paws clattered as though alive.

He woke, then. He did not smile.

“What—” She asked. “What have you done?”

“No.” He said, and dragged the rats toward him. “Mine.”

Have Some Obstetrical Horror Fiction for 2018

New year, new story, and this in a magazine I have long coveted publication. When I started reading contemporary SF/F/H again a few years ago, two of the first magazines I encountered were Shimmer and Clarkesworld and here it is–my first Shimmer story! It has the longest title I’ve so far come up with: “An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita.”

I wrote the story last spring, conceived and drafted during the second trimester of my pregnancy, though completed during the third.

Pregnancy is miraculous and terrifying and cool and weird. You grow a new organ. Your senses of taste and smell change. Your emotions. Your centre of gravity. I thought a lot about the peculiar subjectivity of pregnancy, in which you are once yourself and not at all yourself. In which the idea of a distinction between self, brain, body, and mind seems increasingly ridiculous, since your body undertakes actions beyond your control, and rewires your perceptions and your brain. Of course, this is always true of the mind/body relationship– but pregnancy foregrounds it.

The Curious Case of Mary Toft — Mary Toft and her rabbits

I came across the story of Mary Toft a few years ago, and it so horrified me I couldn’t pursue it in fiction, though I wanted to. I returned to her in those strange months midway through my pregnancy, and I began to seek out other reproductive marvels: mooncalves, and headless children, and maternal impression, and hens that give birth to prophecy-eggs. Several times I encountered the image of a reversed birth, of children returned—forcibly—to their mother, and felt a deep, visceral horror at the image.

So what do I do with all those feelings? I collect them, and watch the images play against one another, and try to imagine what sort of era produces this deeply awful image of reversal, of wrongness, a disorder so profound it unsettles the forward momentum of reproduction itself. This is probably why Mary Toft’s story speaks to me so viscerally: it is unnatural in a deep way, and witnesses a stealthy, awful sort of violence that is at once intimate and public.

Finally, a note on attribution: I borrowed two lines of poetry in one of the story’s subtitles, which reads “where children thus are born with hairy coats / heaven’s wrath on the kingdom it denotes” which is, as far as I can tell, from an anonymous seventeenth-century work attributed to Aristotle.

The Fall of the Mundaneum

The Universal Bibliographic Repertory which became the Mundaneum (according to the NYT)

ETA: The podcast is now available, for those who prefer audio.

I have a story in the current issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s called “The Fall of the Mundaneum” and it takes place in Belgium, in August 1914.

I’ve written a lot about the appeal of the archive and library: ”Water Logic” over at Capricious, and The Paradise Engine describe my own experience as a researcher, and the confusing and frustrating labour by which we make meaning out of things left behind. They’re my attempts to capture the pleasure and anxiety of archive fever.

“The Fall of the Mundaneum” is part of the same impulse. I started thinking about it when I first read about Paul Otlet and his Mundaneum, which was a kind of world catalogue, infinitely extendable, and designed to—eventually—take in all human knowledge. It was part of a huge and ambitious project, and an international movement, parallel to (and at odds with) the European arms race that led to the First World War.

My Mundaneum is quite different: it’s a museum and a junk-drawer and a wunderkammer as well as a catalogue; it’s a temple to the utopian dreams of Europe before 1914; it’s a physical wiki-binge. My story follows a young man left in charge of the Mundaneum just as the Imperial German Army crosses the Belgian border, transforming the world in ways he cannot yet imagine.

There’s a peculiar effect that archives have on you when you’re immersed in them, one that produces both insight and disorientation. You want, desperately, to know, but there’s always far more information than you can manage, even after years of practice. That’s the illness of the archive, an obsession with organizing what you see, making it into something accessible like argument or narrative. But the larger the archive grows, the less likely you are to find a unifying theory for its contents.

le Corbusier’s design for the Mundaneum, commissioned (but never built) in 1929.

“The Fall of the Mundaneum” is about that preoccupation with order at the moment of its destruction, since it’s also about the chaos of the twentieth century smashing into a fantasy of total human knowledge. My narrator is a man trained to organize information and culture, and we watch him collide with mechanized warfare, which is ineffable, and which by its nature disorders the world, despite the rationality of mass troop movements and industrial military production.

In the end, war leaves behind its own archive: one constituted in bodies and objects half-destroyed and unstuck from their provenance, like the very substance of meaninglessness overflowing into the golden summer of 1914, and the beautiful dream of the Mundaneum.