The Mythic Dream

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  For Talya, Hillela, Chayim, Moshe, and Elisha. We made our own myths together.

  —N. W.

  For Kelsi, who looks at trees and sees stories.

  —D. P.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe

  PHANTOMS OF THE MIDWAY

  by Seanan McGuire

  (Hades and Persephone)

  THE JUSTIFIED

  by Ann Leckie

  (Hathor and the Destruction of Mankind)

  FISHER-BIRD

  by T. Kingfisher

  (The Labors of Hercules)

  A BRIEF LESSON IN NATIVE AMERICAN ASTRONOMY

  by Rebecca Roanhorse

  (Deer Hunter and White Corn Maiden)

  BRIDGE OF CROWS

  by JY Yang

  (The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl)

  LABBATU TAKES COMMAND OF THE FLAGSHIP HEAVEN DWELLS WITHIN

  by Arkady Martine

  (Inanna Takes Command of Heaven/Inanna & Enki)

  WILD TO COVET

  by Sarah Gailey

  (Thetis)

  ¡CUIDADO! ¡QUE VIENE EL COCO!

  by Carlos Hernandez

  (El Coco)

  HE FELL HOWLING

  by Stephen Graham Jones

  (Lycaon)

  CURSES LIKE WORDS, LIKE FEATHERS, LIKE STORIES

  by Kat Howard

  (The Children of Lir)

  ACROSS THE RIVER

  by Leah Cypess

  (The Legend of Akdamot/The Legend of Rabbi Meir and the Sambatyon)

  SISYPHUS IN ELYSIUM

  by Jeffrey Ford

  (Sisyphus)

  KALI_NA

  by Indrapramit Das

  (Kali)

  LIVE STREAM

  by Alyssa Wong

  (Artemis and Acteon)

  CLOSE ENOUGH FOR JAZZ

  by John Chu

  (Idunn and Her Golden Apples)

  BURIED DEEP

  by Naomi Novik

  (Ariadne and the Minotaur)

  THE THINGS ERIC EATS BEFORE HE EATS HIMSELF

  by Carmen Maria Machado

  (Erysichthon)

  FLORILEGIA; OR, SOME LIES ABOUT FLOWERS

  by Amal El-Mohtar

  (Blodeuwedd)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION

  ONCE, WE GATHERED, IN THE dark, around fires, and we told stories of the gods who controlled our fates and moved the world, the mortals who shaped the destiny of nations and crossed swords or wits with beings of supreme power, of why things were and are.

  At its core, myth is meaning-making through storytelling, a way of understanding people, places, natural phenomena. Why does the sun rise, why do the stars shine, how did that island come to be, how did that hero rise or fall, what are the origins of life? From the Greek word “mythos,” meaning “speech, thought, or story,” myth is a way of making sense of things through narrative. Myth was storytelling of significance, meant to impart wisdom of the world, the secret workings of the universe, life itself.

  We still gather and tell such stories, by fires, through printed books, by the light of computers.

  There is a tendency to speak of myth as symbolic, metaphorical, but it can also be literal. There are many cultures today for whom ancient narratives are truth, not fantasy. Myth is not a thing of the distant past. While it is rooted in the past, in stories that have endured millennia upon millennia, it remains, it endures. And throughout time, new tellers made old stories new, changing details to fit the time, the place, to better frame a drought, a famine, a changing political landscape. Myth provides the basis for systems of belief, for truths literal or symbolic, for fields of study, for understanding. It is narrative with power.

  And myth doesn’t just belong to nations—it belongs to us. We create our own myths as we shape our world, grow our own personal and national mythologies that help us make sense of the institutions we build, the decisions we make. Myth is ancient origin story, but it is also the origin story we tell ourselves as we build our present and our future. Myths, ancient and modern, illustrate truths both subtle and overt, beliefs we hold, or held.

  Mythic stories are universal. Or so we claim. Myths occur in all cultures, in so many similar ways, but much of what we mean by the universality of myths is their subtext, their themes, their widespread nature. In the specifics, many mythic stories reinforce traditional power structures, patriarchy, sexism, racism. Myths help make meaning of the world—but the world changes. And so myths change in their retelling. Sometimes in subtle ways, other times drastically. One generation’s hero can be another’s villain.

  The Mythic Dream is a confluence of those elements—it is a way of engaging with classic narratives by recontextualizing them, giving them new perspectives, new worlds to inhabit. Those reimaginings in turn can help us create meaning for the world today, or illustrate truths perhaps obscured in the myth’s original version. Here, many of our authors have used those classic tales to interrogate issues of gender, politics, sexuality, patriarchy, power dynamics, and family. They’ve used those grand narratives to tell very human stories.

  Mythic personalities who were once supporting characters, who used to be blurred figures on the edges of their own stories, take center stage. Instead of focusing on Actaeon, Artemis takes the lead. Achilles becomes a side note in his mother’s tale. Blodeuwedd becomes far more than just flowers. And Idunn, once barely more than a provider to the gods, is the one who holds all the cards. There are reversals at play here, too. A terrifying bogeyman becomes the greatest source of comfort. A curse of lycanthropy is embraced as a gift.

  These stories are the dreams of classic myths. Dreams take private and public elements, and filter them through our subconscious. With The Mythic Dream we asked our authors to filter classic myths through their dreaming minds, to parse their private lives, their imagination, the world around them, and to bring all those elements they’ve absorbed consciously and unconsciously to their narratives. For some, the myth was a roadmap to new adventures; the journey is immediately recognizable, but the sights are quite different. For others, the individual elements are famili
ar, but their travels took them down very different paths. But for all these dreamers, the destination was the same: an adventure or perspective that feels wholly new, and yet rooted in ancient truths.

  Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.” So we invite you in to The Mythic Dream, to join us as we reimagine our collective past, explore our present, and take hold of our future through the lens of classic myths.

  —Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe

  PHANTOMS OF THE MIDWAY

  BY

  * * *

  SEANAN McGUIRE

  THE SKY OVER INDIANA WAS Dorothy Gale blue, that shade of sun-bleached denim that spoke of faded dreams and dying youth and all the wasted days of summer. Aracely squinted up at the sky and wondered what they’d called that color before Baum came along with his silver slippers and his golden roads and his green, green fantasies of a better world. Probably nothing. Some things were so much a part of the way the world was that they never stood out until someone pointed out that it wasn’t always, hadn’t always, couldn’t always be that way.

  People in Indiana lived and died under this sky, and they thought it was exactly right, and she thought that was exactly wrong. She lowered her eyes and walked on, cutting a path across the boneyard as around her, the carnival bloomed like some incredible flower. Tents for petals, people for pollen, and the straight metal spine of the Ferris wheel for a stem, rising from the dry-baked ground one piece at a time. It was a miracle of modern engineering, the way the whole thing broke down and came back together, and she didn’t understand it and would only be in the way if she tried to help, so she kept walking, waving to people who weren’t too busy to wave back, smiling at the rest, so they wouldn’t have to worry she’d feel slighted when they didn’t drop everything to say hello to the boss’s daughter.

  The carousel sang as it was tested, calliope music drifting sweet as a dream over the field. A speaker buzzed with static louder than a beehive, sweeter than any honey. The garden Aracely had been cultivated for took shape, light and color and glorious, controlled chaos, and she breathed it in with a grateful heart, filling her lungs from tip to top with home, home, home. She did all right in motel rooms and trailers, but there was nothing like the honest, open air of the carnival.

  Her mama’s tent was already up, walls fluttering gently in the breeze, neon sign above the door flickering to draw the midway moths inside. The buzz of the needle cut through the tarp, and Aracely relaxed that tiny bit more. Everything was normal.

  She swept the hanging door aside with one hand and stepped through, into the surprising brightness of the tent. Her mother’s lighting array had been refined over more seasons than Aracely had been alive, until it would have taken a grand search to find a place—any place—with better visibility. The racks of inks and books of flash were in their places, and her mother sat, regal, next to Charlie, who drove the main wagon, his face pressed into the table, her needle pressed against his skin. A river unspooled behind it, waters dark and deep and beautiful, filled with mystery.

  “Hi, Mama,” said Aracely.

  “Hello, sweetheart. You have a good nap?” Her mother didn’t look away from her work, and that, too, was normal; that was the way things were supposed to go.

  Aracely, who had been sleeping when the carnival pulled into this new resting place, nodded. “I did,” she said. More shyly, she added, “I like to be asleep when we arrive.”

  Being asleep when the engines stilled and the unloading began meant waking to a garden already coming into bloom, a busy hive of chaos and choices. She hated to see the fields empty, knowing they would only be full—only be fully alive—for such a little time before the carnival moved on again, and the silences returned.

  “I know, baby.” Her mother reached for a cloth, wiped the tattoo, and went back to work. The carnie stretched out on her table didn’t make a sound. “Run along, now. I have a list to get through before we open.”

  Technically, tattoos could be done anywhere with light and power, and Daisy had done her share of work in roadside motels or while parked at rest stops. But there was something about the carnival air that the carnies swore sped their healing, and there was no advertisement like someone walking around with a smug smile and a bandage on back or bicep. Daisy only tattooed her employees on arrival day: after that, it would be townies until they rolled out again, and that made time on her table rare and precious.

  Aracely nodded. “All right, Mama. I love you.”

  “Love you, too, flower,” said Daisy, and then her tall, dream-dazed daughter was gone, leaving her alone with the buzz of the needle and the man on her table, who might as well have been a corpse for all the word he offered.

  “You dead there, Charlie? Because I’m not wasting any more of this ink on a dead man.”

  “Just thinking, Daisy.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Aracely.”

  Most men with the show, they’d said that, they would have had concern for their anatomy immediately after. Aracely was seventeen, sweet and kind and lovely as a summer morning, and her mother protected her like she was the last rose in the world. Daisy had her reasons. No one questioned that. She looked down at Charlie, thoughtful, needle in her hand shaking and ready to sting.

  “What about her, Charlie?”

  “She doesn’t know much outside the show, does she?”

  Daisy shook her head, aware he couldn’t see her, unable to put her answer, vast and awkward as it was, into words. Born in the back of the boneyard, that was Aracely, her first breath full of popcorn and sawdust and the tinkling song of the calliope. Raised where walls were either tin or canvas, where everything could change in an afternoon—that was Aracely too, daughter of the midway, anchored to the open road. Her life was an eternal summer, bracketed by deep-dreaming winters that passed without comment, leaving her exactly as she’d been before the snow fell.

  “Her daddy’s people were town,” she said finally. “We don’t go there anymore. No point to it. He didn’t want to know her when she was just getting started, he doesn’t get to know her now.”

  “How’s she going to take it when she has to leave?”

  Daisy sucked in a sharp breath, putting the needle down before she could do something they’d both regret. Her art was more important than her anger. A flare of temper could last a moment, but a line malformed by a hand that pressed down a bit too hard, a needle wielded in anger . . .

  Those were things that would last, and they would shame her. More than anything else, Daisy was a woman who hated to be shamed.

  “She never has to leave, Charlie, so you set that thought out of your head,” said Daisy, picking her needle up again. “There’s nothing in the world outside that she can’t find right here.”

  Charlie, if he thought otherwise, was clever enough to keep his own counsel. The needle flashed and buzzed, and nothing more was said, and too much went unspoken.

  * * *

  Aracely walked the midway as it came alive, a smile on her lips and a song trapped against her tongue, filling her with the heat of its hum. She walked the whole shape of the show, learning every inch of the land, every step of what was going to become her home, transformed by the sweet alchemy of light and sound and intention into something bright, and beautiful, and temporary.

  Always temporary.

  She stopped at the edge of the space portioned off for their use, melancholy washing over her like a wave, so that she had to press a hand against her chest to keep her heart from beating itself free and flying away. It wasn’t fair. Everyone else had a home that was allowed to endure more than the span of a season, but her home, her place had to disappear every time the wind changed.

  Was it so wrong to wish for something that could last?

  A piece of unsecured rope fluttered in the breeze. She glanced toward it and went still, gazing at the distant shape of a farmhouse. No: it wasn’t a farmhouse. She’d seen plenty of those, scatt
ered across America’s heartland like a gambler’s dice across a felted table. They possessed a certain similarity of form and function, all drawn from the same blueprints, all with their own detail and design. Farmhouses were like people. You knew them when you saw them, and every one of them was different, and every one of them was the same.

  This was a mansion. This was the kind of house where movie stars lived, the kind of house that got written up in the magazines that Adam who ran the hoochie-koo show liked to read, the ones he always hid when he saw her coming. Aracely didn’t understand why: there was nothing shameful in pictures of nice houses, or interviews with the nice people who lived in them. But Adam acted like he couldn’t think of anything worse, like she had no idea there was a world outside the carnival, and so Aracely went along with it. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.

  She went along with a lot of things for the sake of not making anyone else uncomfortable. She thought, sometimes, that she was uncomfortable, and then realized if she started dwelling on that, she would never do anything ever again, because the impossibility of living her life without doing harm would be too much for her narrow shoulders to carry.

  This house didn’t look like it worried about doing harm. This house didn’t look like it worried about much of anything. It was tall, and every line it had was perfectly straight, except where the architect’s hand had decided it should be bent, had coaxed an angle into an arch or a corner into a curve. It was white as bone, and it was beautiful, and Aracely couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than seeing it up close.

  She started to step across the line the roustabouts had chalked on the ground and stopped, overcome with indecision. She wasn’t allowed to leave the carnival. That was her mother’s first and strictest rule. She could murder a man out of boredom, she could lie and cheat and steal and howl down the heavens if that was what she needed to do, but she couldn’t leave the show. She had never left the show, not really; had been packed away with all its other pieces ever since she could remember, always traveling within the tenuous shell of “carnival.” She’d talked to townie kids who said they envied her freedom to travel the country and see the world, not confined in classrooms and expectations, but she thought maybe freedom was one of those things that looked different depending on which side of the cage door you were standing on.