Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders(American Gods #1.1)(4)

“HARLEQUIN VALENTINE”

Lisa Snellings-Clark is a sculptor and artist whose work I have loved for years. There was a book called Strange Attraction, based on a Ferris wheel Lisa had made; a number of fine writers wrote stories for the passengers in the cars. I was asked if I would write a story inspired by the ticket-seller, a grinning harlequin.

So I did.

On the whole, stories don’t write themselves, but for this one all I really remember making up was the first sentence. After that it was a lot like taking dictation as Harlequin gleefully danced and tumbled through his Valentine’s Day.

Harlequin was the trickster figure of the commedia dell’arte, an invisible prankster with his mask and magical stick, his costume covered with diamond shapes. He loved Columbine, and would pursue her through each entertainment, coming up against such stock figures as the doctor and the clown, transforming each person he encountered on the way.

“LOCKS”

“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” was a story by the poet Robert Southey. Or rather, it wasn’t—his version told of an old woman and the three bears. The form of the story and what happened was right, but people knew that the story needed to be about a little girl rather than an old woman, and when they retold it, they put her in.

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are the currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.) My daughter Maddy, who was two when I wrote this for her, is eleven, and we still share stories, but they are now on television or films. We read the same books and talk about them, but I no longer read them to her, and even that was a poor replacement for telling her stories out of my head.

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

“THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN”

The doctor the hotel had called told me the reason my neck hurt so badly, that I was throwing up and in pain and confused, was flu, and he began to list painkillers and muscle relaxants he thought I might appreciate. I picked a painkiller from the list and stumbled back to my hotel room, where I passed out, unable to move or think or hold my head up straight. On the third day my own doctor from home called, alerted by my assistant, Lorraine, and talked to me. “I don’t like to make diagnoses over the phone, but you have meningitis,” he said, and he was right, I did.

It was some months before I could think clearly enough to write, and this was the first piece of fiction I attempted. It was like learning to walk all over again. It was written for Al Sarrantonio’s Flights, an anthology of fantasy stories.

I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature.

“INSTRUCTIONS”

Although I put several poems into Smoke and Mirrors, my last collection, I had originally planned that this collection would be prose only. I eventually decided to put the poems in anyway, mostly because I like this one so much. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t like poems, you may console yourself with the knowledge that they are, like this introduction, free. The book would cost you the same with or without them, and nobody pays me anything extra to put them in. Sometimes it’s nice to have something short to pick up and read and put down again, just as sometimes it’s interesting knowing a little about the background of a story, and you don’t have to read it, either. (And while I’ve spent weeks cheerfully agonizing about what order to put this collection into, how best to shape and order it, you can—and should—read it in any way that strikes your fancy.)

Quite literally, a set of instructions for what to do when you find yourself in a fairy tale.

“HOW DO YOU THINK IT FEELS?”

I was asked for a story for an anthology themed about gargoyles, and, deadline approaching, found myself feeling rather blank.

Gargoyles, it occurred to me, were placed upon churches and cathedrals to protect them. I wondered if a gargoyle could be placed on something else to protect it. Such as, for example, a heart….

Having just reread it for the first time in eight years, I found myself mildly surprised by the sex, but that’s probably just general dissatisfaction with the story.

“MY LIFE”

This odd little monologue was written to accompany a photograph of a sock monkey in a book of two hundred photographs of sock monkeys called, not surprisingly, Sock Monkeys, by photographer Arne Svenson. The sock monkey in the photo I was given looked like he’d had a hard sort of life, but an interesting one.

An old friend of mine had just started writing for the Weekly World News, and I’d had much fun making up stories for her to use. I started wondering whether there was, somewhere out there, someone who had a Weekly World News sort of a life. In Sock Monkeys it was printed as prose, but I like it better with the line breaks. I have no doubt that, given enough alcohol and a willing ear, it could go on forever. (Occasionally people write to me at my Web site to find out if I would mind if they use this, or other bits of mine, as audition pieces. I don’t mind.)