The Future Is Blue

With one enormous muscled arm, Sir Quicktongue seized the elven shieldmaiden Nymphoria round the waist and lifted her toward his hungry kiss, crushing her glorious breasts against his broad, smooth chest as his famous tongue sought hers.

The other hand he plunged into her golden curls, pulling brutally just to hear her gasp, a gasp that never failed to bring his throbbing member to full attention. She wrapped her powerful thighs around him, moaning his name into the smoky air of the battlefield.

“It is you,” he whispered in her perfect ear. “You alone, Nymphoria, can reforge my sword and make it new.”

“But I will not, Sir Knight,” answered the she-elf,

her immortal eyes glittering cruelly.

Sir Quicktongue roared his fury into the sapphire sky. “Why? My god, woman, why?”

“Because I do not wish to,” came the elf-queen’s answer.

But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t any of that. It was very quiet and careful and the whole time Gudrun thought about Minnesota, the long flat plains and the thousands and thousands of lakes shining under a strange, cold moon.

5. Nympho Twins on the French Riviera

Published 1950, Blue Fairy Books, 177 pages

It happened in her sleep. The night throbbed with heat. A long black vein pulsed up the side of Gudrun’s body: a join, a wound, a fault line. From her heels to the cap of her skull. It swelled, wider and thicker and wider and thicker until it was a road, a chasm, a furrow, a black nebula expanding inside her, and then it was just empty space and there were two Gudruns lying on Ruby’s old king size bed. Neither of them woke. It was a gentler process than you might expect. They slept identically, hands clasped against their chests, bent inward like little dinosaur claws, until seven in the morning, an hour past which Gudrun, in all her life, had never been able to sleep.

Gudrun opened her eyes and saw herself, naked, awake, watching. The other Gudrun looked exactly like her in every possible way. Haircut, palm lines, gold molar in her mouth, smallpox vaccination scar like a withered star on her skin, the pattern of bites on the edges of her fingernails.

“Is this because I drank the tap water?” Gudrun said, with an early morning gentleness and acceptance of all things in her voice. “I thought if I boiled it it would be okay.”

But the other Gudrun didn’t say anything back.

“Is it because I left the mugs out that one time?” she whispered.

The other Gudrun blinked sleepily. She couldn’t answer. When she tried to imitate the very interesting way the original Gudrun moved her mouth and made sounds come out, she could only go slack and poke out her tongue a little, a pink, weak tongue slicked in saliva. She waved her hands in front of her face, amazed at the thick sunlight pouring between her fingers, at the dancing dust in the air, at the colors of Pemberley seeping all around the edges of those brand-new hands dappled already with scars earned by forty years of good primate work: the N-shaped brand where Gudrun had burned herself on the toaster oven when she was four, the slightly bulging knuckles satisfyingly cracked for decades, the faded white ladder where she had cut herself just after they moved to Pemberley, just to control something, anything completely.

She couldn’t walk, either. Gudrun tried to coax her twin out of bed, but her muscles were as soft as warm mango, her bones delicate and elastic and unready for the slightest weight. The other Gudrun giggled and grabbed one of her clean red feet with one hand. Murray squawked from the garden. The new woman cringed in terror. She began to cry softly, a frightened, trembling, uncertain wail that made all the hair stand up on Gudrun’s skin and her nipples contract and her stomach clench. Slowly, Gudrun pulled herself into her arms and kissed her own hair until the little wails stopped. Her breasts began to ache with a heavy, dancing pain the color of the little stars that come up out of the dark when you press your fists against your eyes, but, having no experience to draw on, she could not put any name to the feeling of her milk coming in.

Gudrun got up, pulled on a pair of fuzzy mustard-colored socks, closed a blue robe over her tender breasts, and padded into the kitchen to put the kettle on. She dug a spoon out of the drawer and began to scoop out some passionfruits for breakfast. You didn’t have to chew passionfruit too much. Not if you took the seeds out. What else could she do? She took two bowls and two mugs out of the cupboard.

One red mug, one blue mug.

4. Innocence for Sale—Cheap!

Published 1944, Adonis Editions, 100 pages

A veteran of many years in the trenches of Ruby, the core of Gudrun was as adaptable as water. Besides, she only had a month to go before the end of everything, and parthenogenesis wasn’t something you could fight against. You could only take it in to your house and give it a place to sleep. A spot in the sun. A bowl of mashed passionfruit.

You can do anything for a month. Get used to anything. Get attached.

The new Gudrun laughed constantly, was hungry all the time, cried when startled as though the great tragedies of mankind had all landed on her at once, could rarely sleep through the night, and had a terror of the dark. Murray adored her. He slept crushed up against the door waiting for the morning when he might see her again.

The old Gudrun named the new one Pemberley. She had to name her something else. No one deserved Gudrun. But all she knew of naming people was that the name should be a family one, should come from a father who never existed in any concrete way, and Pemberley was the best she could build out of such requirements.

Pemberley loved for Gudrun to sing her Elvis songs until she fell asleep and smelled like hot lilacs when her hair was freshly washed. The bones of her skull had not quite fused together yet, and that smell came from the secret, silken place on the top of her head. Pemberley was just as tall and thin as Gudrun, far too big to rock her to sleep, but she tried anyway. She remembered how nice that felt when Ruby did it, a hundred million years ago. She sat out in the warm dark while the hibiscus bloomed and held herself, this great ungainly instant just-add-water person, to her breast. A thin, bitter milk that came from nowhere, except perhaps from the place in the cabinet between the red mugs and the blue mugs, the cold palace dividing the universe into two irreconcilable towers, drained out of herself, into herself, while both of them listened to the bats beat black against black. How had she done this thing? Was it the tins of spam she should never have eaten? The corn syrup in the ketchup? Lead in the Studebaker’s crumbling paint? The radiation from the atolls, from the sea, from the broken sky? Did it matter, with the end so near? Everything came apart at the end. Even Gudrun. That’s how you knew it was the end.

Two weeks before Snow Day, Gudrun stood at one end of the living room, in the Schoolgirls section of the Oskander Special Collection. Pemberley stood, wobbly and afraid, on the other end, in the Military and Other Uniforms section, unsure even of this new thing called standing, reaching out for Gudrun, for comfort, her hands opening and closing helplessly.

“Come on, Pem,” Gudrun said sweetly. “You can do it, baby.”

Murray trilled reassuringly. Pemberley whimpered, tottered, and finally took a tumbling step that was really more of a purposeful fall. Gudrun rushed forward to catch her and Pem collapsed laughing into her arms.

A week before Snow Day, Pemberley said her first word.