The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror
Mallory Ortberg
For Nicole Cliffe
t’hy’la
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Jos Lavery and Christian Brown for answering an unending barrage of text messages asking for their opinions on every change, no matter how minor, I made to this manuscript, like two extremely tolerant optometry patients—“Is this one better? Or is this one better?” There are no two people whose literary judgment I prize more, and this book has been immeasurably improved thanks to their thoughtful criticism.
Thanks are also due to my editor, Libby Burton, whose careful attention to detail at every stage of the publishing process has been a great relief and a help to me. I am especially grateful to my longtime agent, Kate McKean, who has only ever praised my successes, corrected my errors, and made me money. I wish everyone in the world were like her.
With that Christian brake out with a loud voice: Oh, I see him again! and he tells me, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.”
Then they both took courage, and the enemy was after that as still as a stone, until they were gone over. Christian therefore presently found ground to stand upon; and so it followed that the rest of the river was but shallow. Thus they got over.
—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress
ONE
The Daughter Cells
Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with—if you’ve got them on hand. They don’t cost much more than their own upkeep, which you’re on the hook for regardless, so it’s not a bad strategy to put them to use as quickly as possible. There are, you may know, kingdoms underneath the sea as well as above it, with all manners of governance, as it happens. Kings have daughters there too, in the manner of kings everywhere, and fathers there must find something to do with daughters, just as we do on land. There once was a king who owned a great deal of what lay under the surface of the sea, and he happened to fill it with his daughters. Another man might have filled it with something else—potato farmers or pop-eyed scholars or merchant marines—but this one filled it with daughters, so there’s no use arguing about it now.
Each of this man’s daughters had a little plot of ground in the central gardens of the underwater city, which she could develop as she liked. Each daughter had use of the land but did not own it. (I haven’t time to explain to you the way personal property is thought about in states where all borders are by definition liquid. There are other books about that sort of thing.) You might call the daughters princesses. I wouldn’t, but if it’s easier for you, then you might. You might call them something else, too—there are words for such things that live under the sea and haven’t legs. You certainly wouldn’t think to call them girls, if you happened to see them.
At any rate, these girls didn’t own their patches of land, but they had the use of them, which made for good practice. They might ornament their allotted land with flowers, they might grow crops, or they might stuff it with old sea glass and bits of shipwrecked kettles, as they saw fit. The only way to teach the value of something is to give someone the chance to waste it—or at least that was how the thinking went under that particular administration. And most of the daughters grew up with a reasonably discerning sense of what was worth something and what wasn’t, so that’s one point in that philosophy’s favor. Most of them didn’t farm sea glass either.
The youngest of the daughters planted nothing at all in her garden, and no one thought any less of her for it. If a single polyp so much as presented its head above the ground there, she’d twist it out and fling it over the wall before it could so much as think of partitioning itself. She had no particular genius for growing things, and saw no reason to force a skill when there were so many others to cultivate.
You might well ask—and some did—why bother to go to all the trouble of patrolling for kelp and rhizomes and bits of eelgrass if you weren’t going to grow anything in their place. “The point isn’t that I’m growing anything else there, at least not at present,” she always said. “There’s the whole rest of the sea available to go be a polyp or a rhizome or a bit of eelgrass in; they just can’t do it here. I can go look at a flower anywhere without having to put in a lot of effort to grow a poorer version of my own,” which everyone celebrated as an eminently sensible answer.
Nothing gave the youngest daughter so much pleasure as to hear about the worlds above the sea, and the ways in which they were variously apportioned and administered. She made her old grandmother tell her all she knew of the ships and of the towns (a great deal), of their fortifications and their distribution of resources (very little, but she didn’t mind lying). The defining characteristic (or so it seemed to the youngest daughter) of these places was what a great store its peoples seemed to set in declaring one place not another—this country here can never be that country there and vice versa, and how strictly important the notion of a front door was.
“You mean if someone has something, and I should like to use it, and they don’t want me to,” she said to her grandmother, “all they have to do is put it behind their front door, and keep it there, and there’s nothing I can do about it?”