Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente

Author:Catherynne M. Valente
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2015-08-30T21:00:00+00:00

B3

The sun does come up in Canada. It comes up like a drink at the bar.

Oh, you wouldn’t call it a sun. Maybe I wouldn’t. But a sun’s just a word, you know? A word for whatever makes a body warm and hot and green. What helps a body see past a hand in front of their nose and stretch out nice and wear something other than a whole walrus on their skin to keep from going full ice-cube. What tells the time. The sun in Canada looks like the bottom of an old glass. The light is the color of brandy seeping. It has a taste. Your skin tastes it, like you’re all over tongues. The taste is sugar-cane, slowly rotting, turning into the great god rum. It’s always that magic hour those film-boys love to shoot down here. Always gold.

And here it comes, that sticky, oily liquor-light, dripping down through trees. Trees! And not frozen, either. Trees of gold and silver and crystal, trees like a table setting, and the winter folds its cards as the lake gets further behind Zelda Fair, turns in its chips, gives up the pot. Leaves roll out; birds cough up springtime and summer close to bursting. She can hear sounds. She knows those sounds. Those sounds are her mother’s own voice whispering to a babe at the breast. Those sounds are the joints in her bones. Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne.

It’s a party, shaking down the dawn.

Zelda hobbles up over the hummocky hillocky moor-lumps. She’s wearing holes in her feet like a princess dancing too long. No shoes allowed in the swimming pool. No rough-housing. No lifeguard on duty. Her swimming cap still clings to her skull; that black rubber feels like her own skin. It hurts in a funny way. Like she’s the purple Hobart and Sons’ Fine Smokables sign below their window, the one that lights up Ollie’s face every morning like a violet sun as she tells another play to close up its curtains before she comes down there and gives the director a slap in the face. Humming. Hopping. Sizzling around her ears. Boiling, but it’s all right because she was meant to boil. Zelda’d take the thing off, but she doesn’t know the rules here. What if she needs it later?

And that thing up there? That thing that could be a castle or a villa or a ruin or a chalet or a rack of old dinosaur bones? It’s gotta be the distillery. There’s barrels like mountains all around it, closing it in, keeping it safe and snug. The taps stick out like proud boys’ pricks, bigger than the statues in Union Square, diamond and baleen, gargoyle-spigots tangled up with leaves and berries in their hair. The distillery is a palace without walls. A skeleton of a place. Up rise the arches and struts and buttresses and pillars and load-bearing studs.

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