Uncanny Magazine Issue 38 by Uncanny Magazine

Author:Uncanny Magazine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: science fiction, magazine, fantasy
Publisher: Uncanny Magazine
Published: 2020-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

(Editors’ Note: “Femme and Sundance” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 38B.)

© 2021 Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell is a queer Black American living in Glasgow, Scotland with his partner Alice. He was the 2007 recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship to Clarion West. His work has appeared in FIYAH, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Strange Horizons. He is @seraph76 on Twitter.

Beyond the Doll Forest

by Marissa Lingen

Karin Ljusmåne had a dollhouse, but it was an afterthought, not the nursery centerpiece of my previous charges.

What she really had was a doll forest.

The acres of tiny wooden trees dominated her nursery, filling the space where ordinary children rode rocking horses and played blind-man’s-buff. It was remarkably like the forest where I had spent my childhood days, but in miniature. When I saw it, I was at some loss for what I was to do to keep her busy and happy through the long hot hours of a summer afternoon.

I need not have worried.

“Where are the dolls for your dollhouse?” I asked her on the first afternoon, hoping to set her playing some wholesome little game while I caught up on the darning from when she’d been between nannies. The parents liked that, I’d found, when I was keen and caught up quickly.

She shrugged a sturdy little shoulder. “Out in the woods with the wolves and the bears.”

Karin was utterly unconcerned by this fate, but part of me reacted like a child, as though there were real bears putting my young charge’s dolls in real danger. “Should we…try to find them?”

“They’ll turn up,” she said, and picked up a lavishly illustrated book that probably cost a month of my wages, hand-painted in golds and blues.

I knew better than to disturb a quiet, contented child for no reason, so I took the time to settle my things and do the aforementioned darning, dull though it was. My young charge eventually set her book down and peered intently at the doll forest, though she made no attempt that I could see to find or move any tiny figures in its carven depths.

“How many dolls have you in the forest, Karin?” I asked, keeping my voice light and guiding the darning needle steadily.

“Two,” she said, her eyes not moving from it. “Two golden haired girls in cloaks and boots, a family of five bears—”

“Five! I thought the usual number was three.”

Still her level blue gaze did not waver from the tiny spruces. “Mine has five. I don’t know how many wolves or deer—”

“Have you deer also!”

Finally she looked at me. “The bears and wolves must eat, and squirrel and coney alone make light meals for them.”

I could not show myself discomfited on this, my first day with her. She was entirely right, but I had not expected a rich city child to know it, as I had all too vividly at her age. Instead I said, “Well, of course they must eat, and so must you; come and wash your hands and face and let us see what Cook has sent up for your supper.

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