Magic for Beginners: Stories by Kelly Link Read Free Book Online Page A

a lemon tree, his body
tumbled over a sheep wall, his head in the shepherd girl’s lap.
    His heirs sold his widow to a circus impresario.
     
    Q: Is there such a thing as a happy marriage?
    A: Let me answer that question. My name is Venus Shebby. When I
was a young girl, they fired me from the cannon one day and when I
came down, I was in a different place. A beautiful place, full of
beautiful people! The people who live in that beautiful place are
hairy in winter and in spring they shed their hair and go
naked.
    In winter, they catch fish by setting fires on the frozen lakes,
but in summer they don’t eat fish. In summer they eat fruit and
grains which they ferment in bladders, and those people stay drunk
the whole summer long. Summer is the time of ghosts. In winter,
ghosts are easy to spot. There are stories about winter ghosts
found tangled like lice in their lovers’ hair. Dead people have no
hair themselves, which is how they can be recognized in winter. But
in summer, the living and dead may pass each other on the street,
and no one knows the difference. There are epic comedies, famous
tragedies about the misunderstandings that ensue.
    Those beautiful people collect their hair as they shed it, and
keep it in pouches which they wear around their waists. The people
wash the hair and perfume it and card it and comb it. In summer,
the living wear woven hair belts and their pouches of hair around
their waist, to show they are living people. But there are always
fashionable people, who pretend to be dead, and there are cunning
dead people, who steal hair from living people. For this reason, it
is a deadly insult to pick off a strand of someone else’s hair and
put it in your own pouch, unless you have been invited to do
so.
    The people form societies to weave enormous carpets from their
shed hair, and these carpets are soft and warm and heavy. The
people sleep under these carpets in winter, once they are married,
and they marry as many wives and husbands as can sleep together
comfortably under one carpet. There is one word, which means all
three of these things:
marriage
,
carpet
,
society
. There is no word for
war
or for
travel
. The people do not have a word for
cannon
.
There are no cannons. All of the people’s artifacts are made of
hair and bone and skin. (Can you imagine a cannon made out of
hair?) Even their histories are told on tapestries woven out of
hair. But there is nothing as beautiful as the marriage
carpets.
    I have a collection of photographs of married people, lying
together, all piled together beneath their marriage carpets, red
and brown and black and amber and gray, looking as if particularly
thick and hairy circus tents have collapsed. Heads and feet poke
out at the edges, and some of the people are sneaking looks out of
the embroidered, unfastened holes which are for breathing. The
fastening buttons are carved of bone. If you have money, I’ll show
you these photographs. Industrious people sometimes weave carpets
so large that they can marry several hundred other people all at
once.
    Other carpets the beautiful people keep in houses which are only
for this kind of carpet, and not for living in. The carpets kept in
these houses are the carpets in which the people are buried.
    In summer, I might have been born in that place. The first
winter, I was a novelty. I had my pick of husbands and wives. At
the end of the second winter, when the ice was thawing, they sent
me away. They said it was like sleeping with a dead person. I gave
them bad dreams, and finally they couldn’t sleep at all if I was
near them. They use the same word for
dead
and for
summer
and for
hairless
, and after a while that
word became my name. I left when they divorced me. They have no
word for
divorce.
    I built a cannon out of ice, and wrapped myself in the funeral
carpet which my husbands and wives had woven for me out of their
own hair, and one of my wives was my gunner. I came back here,
after many adventures, and once, when