The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

MOON SONGS Carol Emshwiller

A tiny thing that sang. Nothing like it mentioned in any of my nature books, and I had many. At first no name we gave it stuck. Sometimes we called it Harriet, or Alice, or Jim. Names of kids at school. All ironies. More often we just called it Bug. This mere mite—well, not really that small, more the size of a bee— pulled itself up by its front legs, the back ones having been somehow bent. Or so it seemed to us. Perhaps it happened when we caught it.

How can such a tiny thing have such a voice? Clear. Ringing out. Echoing as though in the mountains or in some great resonating hall. Such a wonderful other-worldly sound. We felt it tingling along our backbones and on down into the soles of our feet.

My sister kept it in a cricket cage. Fed it lettuce, grains of rice, grapes, but never anything of milk or butter, “in order to keep down the phlegm,” she said, even though we didn’t know how it made its sounds. We asked ourselves that first day, “Is it by the wings? Is it the back legs? Is it, after all, the mouth?” We looked at it through a magnifying glass, but still we couldn’t tell. Actually we didn’t look at it long that time, for (then) we didn’t like the look of it at all. There were hairs or barbels hanging down from its mouth and greenish fur at the corners of its eyes. We didn’t mind the yellow fur on its body as that seemed cuddly and beelike to us. “Does it have a stinger?” my sister asked, but I couldn’t say yes or no for sure, except that it hadn’t stung us yet . . . me yet, for that first day I was the one that held it.

“I would suppose not,” I told my sister. “Maybe it has its voice to keep it safe, and besides, if it had a stinger it would have used it by now. ” I did look carefully, though, but could see no sign of one.

To make it sing you had to prick it with a pin. It would sing for ten or fifteen minutes and then would need another prick. We knew enough to be gentle. We wanted it to last a long time.

How we discovered the singing was by the pricking, actually. The thing lay as though dead after we first caught it and we wanted to know for sure was it or wasn’t it, so we pricked it. One prick got a little motion. Two, and it sat up, struggling to pull its poor back legs under itself. Three, and it began to sing and we knew we had something startling and worthwhile—a little jewel—better than a jewel, a jewel that sang.

My sister insisted she had seen it first and that, therefore, it was hers alone. She always did like tiny things, so I supposed it was right that she should have it, but I saw it first, and I caught it, and it was my hand first held it for she was frightened of it . . . thought it ugly before she heard it sing. But she had always been able to convince me that what I knew was true, wasn’t.

She was very beautiful and it was not just I who thought so. Heads turned. She had pale skin and dark eyes and looked at everything with great concentration. Her hair was black and hung out from her head in a sort of fan shape. She wore a beaded head band she’d made herself with threads and tiny beads.

We were in the same school, she, a full-blown woman about to graduate, and I in the ninth grade, still a boy . . . still in my chubby phase before I started to grow tall. I felt awkward and ugly. I was awkward and, if not exactly ugly, certainly not attractive. Her skin was utter purity, while I was beginning to get pimples. For that reason alone, I believed that everything she said was right and everything I said was wrong. It had to be so because of the pimples.

Beautiful as she was, my sister wasn’t popular, yet popularity or something akin to it. . . something that looked like it, was what she wanted more than anything, and if that were impossible, then fame. She wanted to make a big splash in school. She wanted to sing, and dance, and act, but she had a small, reedy voice and, although graceful as she went about her life, she was awkward when on stage. Something came over her that made her like a puppet—a self-conscious stiffness. She was aware of this and she had gone from the desire to be on stage to the desire not to expose herself there because she knew how, as she said, ridiculous she looked—how, as she said, everyone would laugh at her, though I knew they wouldn’t dare laugh at her any more than I dared. People were afraid of her just as I was. They called her “The Queen,” and they joked that she had taken vows of chastity. They called me “Twinkie.” Sometimes that was expanded to “Twinkle Toes,” for no reason I could tell except that the words went together. I certainly wasn't light on my feet, though perhaps I did twinkle a bit. I was so anxious to please. I smiled and agreed with everyone as though they were all my sister and I always agreed with her. It was safer to do so. I don’t remember when I first figured that out. It was as though I’d always known it as soon as I began to realize anything at all.

“I wish it would have beginnings and ends to its singing instead of being all middles, middles, middles,” my sister said and she tried hard to teach it to have them. Once she left it all day with the radio tuned to a rock and roll station while she was at school. It was so exhausted—even we could tell—by the end of the day that she didn’t do anything like that again. Besides, it had learned nothing. It still began in the middle and ended in the middle, almost as though it sang to itself continuously and only switched to a louder mode when it was pricked and then, when let alone again, lapsed back into its silent music.

I wouldn’t have known the first time my sister took the mite to school, had I not sat near her in the cafeteria. She never wanted me to get close to her at school and I never particularly wanted to. Her twelfth graders were nothing like my ninth graders. She and I never nodded to each other in the halls though she always flashed me a look. I wasn’t sure if it was a greeting or warning.

But this time I sat fairly close to her at lunch and I noticed she was wearing the antique pearl hat pin we’d found in the attic. She had it pinned to her collar, which was also antique yellowed lace, as though we’d found that in the attic, too. She could laugh a tense, self-conscious wide-mouthed laugh. (She was never relaxed, not even with me. Probably not even with herself, though, now that I think about it. Sometimes when we lay back, she on her bed and I in her chair, and listened to the mite sing . . . sometimes then she was, I’m sure, relaxed.) She was laughing that laugh then, which was why I looked at her more closely than I usually allowed myself to do when in school. I was wondering what had brought on that great, white-toothed derision, when I saw the hat pin and knew what it was for, and then I saw the tiny thread attached to her earring. No, actually attached to her earlobe along with the earring, right through the hole of her pierced ear, and I saw a little flash of yellow in the shadow under her hair, and I thought, no, our mite (for I still thought of it as “ours” though it seemed hers now), our mite should stay safely at home and it should be a secret. Anything might happen to it (or her) here. There were boys who would rip it right out of her ear if they knew what it could do, or perhaps even if they didn’t know. And the hat pin made it clear that she was thinking of making it sing. I wondered what would happen if she did.

Also I worried that it wouldn’t be easy for her to control her pricking there by her ear. She’d have to hold the mite in one hand and try to feel where it was and prick it with the other, and she couldn’t be sure where she would be pricking it— in the eye for all she knew.

I wanted to object, but instead, when we were home again and alone, to let her know I knew, I asked her if she was hearing it sing to her all through school? If, tethered that close to her ear, she could hear its continuous song, but she said, no, that sometimes she heard a slight buzzing, and she wasn’t even sure it came from it. It was more like a ringing in her ear. Still, she said, she did like the bug being there, close by. It made her feel more comfortable in school than she’d ever felt before. “It’s my real friend,” she said.

“What about if it stings? What if it does have a stinger? We don’t know for sure it doesn’t. ”

“It would have stung already, wouldn’t it? Why would it wait? I’d have stung if I had a stinger. ”

And I thought, she’s right. It hadn’t been so well treated that it wouldn’t have thought to sting if it could have.

So we lay back then and listened to it. We could feel the throbbing of its song down along our bodies. We shut our eyes and we saw pictures . . . landscapes where we floated or flew as though we were nothing but a pair of eyes. Sometimes everything was sunny and yellow and sometimes everything was foggy and a shiny kind of gray.

It was strange, she and the mite. More and more she’d had only male names for it: George, Teddy, Jerry—names of boys at school—but now Matt. Matt all the time though there was no Matt that I knew of. I began to feel that she was falling in love with it. We would sit together in her room and she’d let it out of the cage ... let it hobble around on her desk, flutter its torn wings, scatter its fairy dust. She was no longer squeamish about studying it in the magnifying glass. She watched it often, though not when it sang. Then she and I would always lie back and shut our eyes to see the visions.

And then she actually said it. “Oh, I love you, love you. I love you so much.”

It had just sung and we were as though waking up from the music.

“Don’t,” I said. And I felt a different kind of shiver down my spine, not the vibrations of the song, but the beat of fear.

“What do you mean, don’t. Don’t tell me don’t. You know nothing. Nothing of love and nothing of anything. You’re too young. And what’s so bad about having barbels? You don’t even shave yet.”

I was beneath contempt though I was her only companion—not counting the mite, of course. She had no friend but me and yet I was always beneath contempt. I did feel, though, that should I be in danger, she’d come to my aid . . . come to help me against whatever odds. She’d not hesitate.

She wore the mite to school every day after that first day. As far as I could tell she told no one, for if she’d told even one person it surely would have gotten back to me. Such things always did in our school. I began to relax. Why not take it to school if it gave her such pleasure to do so? It wasn’t until I saw the list of finalists in the talent show that I understood what she was up to. She’d already used it in the tryouts. She (not she and her mite), she was listed as one of the seven finalists.

She was a sensation. She left her mouth open all the time as though in a sort of open-mouthed humming. She moved just as awkwardly as always, as though deciding to hold out one arm and then the other, alternating them, and deciding to smile now and then as she pretended to sing, but she looked beautiful anyway. The music made it so . . . made it flowing. Also she was dressed in gray (with yellow earrings and beads) as though to make herself a part of that landscape we often saw as we listened. I knew nobody would make fun of her, whisper about her afterward, or imitate her behind her back.

She was accompanied on the piano by the leader of the chorus, who was pretty good at improvising around what the mite was doing. I thought it was a good thing she had the accompaniment, for it made the music a little less strange and that seemed safer. There was less chance of the mite’s being discovered.

Everybody sat back, just as the two of us always did, feeling the vibrations of it and no doubt seeing those landscapes. After ten or so minutes of it they clapped and shouted for more and my sister pricked the mite once again and pretended to sing for ten more minutes and then said that was all she could do. Afterward everybody crowded around and asked her how she had learned to do it. Of course she got first prize.

After that she didn’t exactly have friends, but she had people who followed her around, asked her all sorts of questions about her singing, interviewed her for the school paper. Some people wanted her to teach them how to do it, but she told them she had a special kind of throat, something that would be considered a defect by most, but that she had learned to make use of it.

Because of her I became known at school, too. I became the singer’s brother. I became the one with the knowledge of secrets, for they did sense a secret. There was something mysterious about us both. You could see it in their eyes. Even I, Twinkle Toes, became mysterious. Talented because close to talent.

After that she was asked to sing a lot though she always said she couldn’t do it often. “Keep them wanting more,” she told me, “and keep them guessing.” Sometimes she would come down with a phony cold just when she’d said she would sing and the auditorium was already filled with people who’d come just to hear her.

But something stranger than love . . . more than love began to happen between my sister and the mite. Or, rather, the mite was the same, but my sister’s relationship with it changed. That first performance she’d pricked it too hard. A whitish fluid had come out of it, dripped down one side and dried there, making the yellow fur matted . . . less attractive. She felt guilty about that and said so. “I’m such a butcher,” she said, and she seemed to be trying to make up for it by finding special foods that it might like. She even brought it caviar, which it wouldn’t touch. And she wanted punishment. Sometimes she would ask it to sting her. “Go ahead,” she’d say. “I deserve it. And you have a right to do it and I don’t care if you do, I’ll love you just the same. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matty,” she said, and it occurred to me perhaps it was a name she’d made out of mite. She had called it sometimes Mite, Mite, and now had made it clearly male with Matt. “My Matt,” she said, “all mine.” I was out of it completely except as watcher and listener. Its song had not suffered from the wounding. It just had more difficulty moving itself about. My sister had tried to wash the white stuff off, but that had only smeared it around even more, so that the mite was now an ugly, dull creature with, here and there, one or two yellow hairs that stuck out. “Sting me,” my sister said, “bite me. I deserve it.”

Now she would lie on her bed with her blouse pulled up and let it crawl on her stomach. It moved with difficulty, but it always moved, except now and then when it seemed to sit contentedly on her belly button. “I don’t deserve you,” she’d say. “I don’t deserve one like you.” And sometimes she’d say, “Take me. I’m yours,” spread-eagled on her bed and laughing as though it were a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. Sometimes she’d say, “You love me. Do you really? Don’t you? Do you?” or, “Tell me what love is. Is it always small things that once could fly? Is it small things that sting?”

I sat there watching. She hardly seemed to notice me but I knew it was important that I be there. Even though beneath contempt, I was the observer she needed. I saw how she let it crawl up under her blouse or down her neck and inside her bra, how she giggled at its tickle or lay, serious, looking at the ceiling.

In the cricket cage she’d placed a velvet cushion and she’d hung the cage over her bed by a golden-yellow cord.

“I’m your only friend,” she’d say. “I’m your keeper, I’m your jailer, I’m your everything, I’m your nothing, ” and then she’d carefully place the mite in its cage and I would know it was time for me to leave.

At school she became known as an artist with a great future and she walked around as though it were true, that she was an artist, that she could dress differently from anyone else, that she was privileged and perhaps a little mad. “I live for my art,” she’d say, “and only for that.” She stopped doing her homework and said it was because she practiced her music for hours every day.

I told her she might be found out. “Can you live with this secret forever?”

“Not to sing is to die,” she said and it was as though she had forgotten it wasn’t she who sang. “I will die,” she said, “if I can’t sing.”

“What if it dies or stops singing? It might. It’s not that healthy by the looks of it.”

“Why are you asking me this? Why do you want to hurt me?”

“I’m scared of what’s happening.”

“Love always scares people who don’t know anything about it, and art does too. I’ll always be this ... in the middle of the song in the middle of my life. In the middle. No end and no beginning. I had a dream of such a shining rain, such silver, such glow, as if I were on the moon, or I were a moon myself. Do you know what it’s like to be a moon? I was a moon.”

But I knew that she was frightened too ... of herself and of her love, and I thought that if I weren’t there she’d not be this way, that I was the audience she played to, that without me she’d not believe in her drama. Without me there’d be no truth to it. That night ... the night I thought of this, I stayed away from our evening of music. I went back to my nature books and, it was true, she did need me. She brought me back with a bribe of chocolate. I even think her sexual dreams, as she ignored me and stared at the ceiling, were of no pleasure to her without me there to be ignored. I did come back, but I wasn’t sure how long I would keep doing it.

And she was, in her way, nice to me then. To show her gratefulness, she bought me a little book on bees. The next night she threw it at me while I sat, again, in her chair and she lay on her bed. “It’s nothing,” she said, “but you might like it.”

“I do,” I said, “I really do,” because I knew she needed me to say it and I did like it.

“I’m going to give a program all my own,” she told me then. “It’s at school, but it’s for everybody in town and they’re charging for it and I’m to get a hundred dollars even though it’s a benefit for band uniforms. It’s already beginning and I haven’t even tried. I just sat here and didn’t do my homework and everything’s beginning to come true just as I’ve always wanted it to.”

I began to feel even more frightened thinking of her giving a whole program. We’d never had the mite sing more than about forty minutes at a time at the very most. “Well, I won’t be there,” I said. I had never challenged her directly before, but now I said, “And I won’t let you do this, but if I can’t stop you, I won’t be there.”

“Give me back that book,” she said.

I was sorry to lose it, but I gave it back. I would be sorrier to lose her. It was odd, but the higher she went with this artist business, and the higher she got in her own estimation, the more she, herself, seemed to me like the mite: torn wings, broken legs, sick, matted fur . . .

“It’s just like you,” she said. “This is my first really big moment and you want to take my pleasure in it from me.” But I knew that she knew it wasn’t at all like me. “You’re jealous,” she said, and I wondered, then, if that were true. I didn’t think I was but how can you judge yourself?

The mite inched along her desk as we spoke and I had in mind that I should squash it right then. Couldn’t she see the thing was in pain? And then I saw that clearly for the first time. It was in pain. Maybe the singing was all a pain song. I couldn’t stand it any longer, but she must have seen something in my face for she jumped up and pushed me out the door before I hardly knew myself what I was about to do . . . pushed me out the door and locked it.

I thought about it but there was no way that I could see how to stop her. I could tell everybody about the mite, but would they believe me? And wouldn’t they just go and have the concert anyway even if they knew it was the mite that sang? Maybe that would be an even greater draw. I had lost my chance to put the creature out of its misery. My sister wouldn’t let me near it again. Besides, I wasn’t sure if what she said wasn’t true, that she’d die if she couldn’t sing ... if she couldn’t, that is, be the artist she pretended to be.

She was going to call her program Moon Songs. There would be two songs with a ten-minute intermission between them. I decided I would be there, but that she wouldn’t know it. I would stand in a dark corner in the wings after she had already stepped on stage.

The concert began as usual, but this time I was changed and I could hear the pain. It was a pain song. Or perhaps the pain in the song had gotten worse so that I could finally understand it. I didn’t see how my sister could bear it. I didn’t see how anyone in the audience could bear it, and yet there they sat, eyes closed already, mouths open, heads tipped up like blind people. As I listened, standing there, I, too, tipped my head up and shut my eyes. The beauty of pain caught me up. Tears came to my eyes. They never had before, but now they did. I dreamed that once everything was sun, but now everything was moon. And then I forced my eyes to open. I was there to keep watch on things, not to get caught up in the song.

We . . . she never made it to the intermission. After a half hour, the song became more insistent. It was louder and higher pitched and I could see my sister vibrating as though from a vibrato in her own throat that, then, began to shake her whole body. Nobody else saw it. Though a few had their eyes open, they were looking at the ceiling. The song rose and rose and I knew I had to stop it. My sister sank to her knees. I don’t think she pricked the mite at all any longer. I think it sang on of its own accord. I came out on the stage then and no one noticed. I wanted to kill the mite before it shook my sister to pieces, before it deafened her with its shrieking, but I saw that the string that held it to her earlobe was turned and led inside her ear. I pulled on it and the string came out with nothing tied to it. The mite was still inside. My sister was gasping and then she, too, began to make the same sound of pain. The song was coming from her own mouth. I saw the ululations of it in her throat. And I saw blood coming from her nose. Not a lot. Just one small trickle from the left nostril, the same side, where the mite had been tied to the left ear.

I slapped her hard, then, on both cheeks. I was yelling, but I don’t think anybody heard me, least of all my sister. I shook her. I hit her. I dragged her from the stage into the wings and yet still the song went on and the people sat in their own dream, whatever it was. Certainly not the same dream we’d always seen before. It couldn’t be with this awful sound. Then I hit my sister on the nose directly and the song faltered, became hesitant, though it was still coming from her own mouth and nowhere else. Her eyes flickered open. I saw that she saw me. “Let me go,” she said. “Let us go. Let us both go.” And the song became a sigh of a song. Suddenly no pain in it. I laid her down gently. The song sighed on, at peace with itself and then it stopped. Alive, then dead. With no transition to it . . . both of them, my sister and the mite, stopped in the middle.

I never told. I let them diagnose it as some kind of hemorrhage.

In many ways my life changed for the better after that. I lived for myself, or tried to, and, the year after, I became tall, and thin, and pale, and dark like my sister and nobody called me Twinkie ever again.