The Tangleroot Palace: Stories

Introduction

Greetings, friends.

I started writing this introduction when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to unfold. An early adopter of its seriousness, I was living in Japan, close to the epicenter—and it was strange and surreal watching the societal threads, what we take for granted, pull apart bit by bit. Now, months later, I’ve returned to finish this introduction—and while I’d like to say the intervening time has given me a new perspective around my work, the only shift for me has been a deeper understanding of the limits of human imagination—including mine.

That said, here we are, together—and here, before you, are fragments of my imagination, sometimes limited, sometimes not. I’ve never been someone who lingers over my past work. I am very much a creature of the present. When I write, I live for the moment, passing through a story, inhabiting the skin of the characters—and when that story is done, so am I.

But I mean, done. With some rare exceptions, I have almost no recall over the content of my previous work, whether it’s a novel, short story, or comic. Broad strokes, yes. I can say, There’s a merman! A gargoyle! A tiger shape-shifter! But after that, my memory skids right off the road. Even now, as I write this, I keep trying to test myself by looking at the titles of my novels, and it’s dire, folks. I honestly don’t know what the hell I’ve done these past seventeen years, except that apparently, I wrote a lot of words.

This amnesia was not some surprise. For years I’ve thought about why this happens, why the wall goes up after I write the end. I asked a friend once, and she commented offhand that perhaps writing is like channeling a spirit in a prolonged séance—the spirit moves through me—but it’s not as if I want it hanging around when I’m done talking. I send away that which no longer serves me—and move on to the next conversation.

Which is a nice and tidy way of thinking about it, but one could just as easily argue that I’m phobic when it comes to introspection. Remembering my work would require remembering me—and unfortunately, that’s its own challenge.

But, anyway, that’s a long way of saying that when I was approached regarding this collection, I had a hard time remembering what short fiction I had written that could actually fill a book. The answer, I realized in short order, was quite a lot. Nor is this collection entirely complete—there are a small handful of stories still floating around in other anthologies—but this an excellent overview of what happens when one never says no to offers of work.

With one exception, all the stories contained herein were written over an eight-year period or so, while I was pounding out paranormal romance novels and urban fantasies—and working for Marvel Comics, as perhaps the first woman of color writing for them. These are the stories of my twenties and very early thirties, slices of prose from a formative decade when I was still figuring things out (an ongoing process, I assure you), produced between crushing deadlines, driven less by ideas and more by emotions. They’re time capsules, each one capturing a different stage of me, who I was, who I was becoming. Those are also the years when I was living in the Midwest, in the center of a forest—an impenetrable, tangled forest where every night the coyotes would howl, a forest where I never set foot because I never felt invited. But I had forgotten that, too—and I’m somewhat amused that it took me reading these stories to remember what it felt like to live in the middle of that forest—and to see how persistently those trees entered (and still enter) my work.

These seven stories are not presented in the order they were written, and some of them have been lightly (and not so lightly) edited. I know, I know . . . but I couldn’t help myself! Don’t ever let a writer, after more than a decade away from a story, have access to it again—they’ll compulsively bring their new selves to the page and start renovating. Still, these are more or less the same as they were, tales about warrior women and runaway princesses; ordinary girls battling faery queens; a post-pandemic apocalyptic tale of an Amish vampire and the young woman who loves him; a teen who uses dolls to kill; even a depressed tech billionaire with some superhero identity issues. I look over them now and see the common threads—a longing for home, friendship, love—characters often driven by a weary hope in the possibility of something good.

Hope in the possibility of something good—even the tiniest, most wee little good—is sometimes all we’ve got. And that hope is never unavailable to us, even if seems far away or lost entirely. Hope is the driving force of these stories before you.

By the time you read this, who knows where we’ll be—hopefully healthy, hopefully safe with our loved ones, hopefully figuring out our lives and making what we can of them, as always. Under the best and worst of circumstances, that’s the aspirational baseline—to hope for a better tomorrow, to wake up each day with a little resolve, a little resilience, and simply try for something.

Easier said than done, right?

But I have this simple philosophy that’s always served me well: "If you don’t ask, the answer is always no."

It applies to everything in life, really—whether it’s a job opportunity or something as nebulous as a dream. If you don’t ask life for a possibility, if you don’t dwell in possibilities, if you don’t hope, the answer is always no.

And so I say, if you’re reading this and going through hard times, try to dwell in the possibility of a better tomorrow, no matter how impossible it seems.

Ask the universe a question, see what happens. I hope—see, there it is again—I hope your adventure is beautiful.

—Marjorie Liu

August 2020

Sympathy for the Bones

The funeral was in a bad place, but Martha Bromes never did much care about such things, and so she put her husband into a hole at Cutter’s, and we as her family had to march up the long stone track into the hills to find the damn spot, because the only decent bits of earth in all that place were far deep in the forest, high into the darkness. Rock, everywhere else, and cairns were no good for the dead. The animals were too smart. Might find a piece of human flesh in the yard by the pump with sloppiness like that. I’d seen it myself, years past. No good at all.

The leaves had gone yellow and the air bit cold, whining shrill like the brats left behind the dead, trudging slow beside their weeping mother. Little turds, little nothings. Just blood and bone, passed on from a father who was a cutter, a stone lover, mixing his juice inside a womb that was cold and sly. I did not like Martha. I did not like her husband, either. Edward Bromes was a hard man to enjoy, in any fashion. I cried no tears that he died.

Later that night, I burned the doll that killed him.

Next morning, frost: first kiss of winter. I added layers of wool, and laced my feet and legs into boots lined with rabbit, gathered my satchels, took up a tin can I hung from the hook at my belt, and marched from the rotten timber shack into a silver forest, glittering, spiked with light and a chill.

Persimmons had fallen overnight and the deer had not got to them. Quick business, but careful; those thin orange skins split open at the hint of a tense finger, and I ruined more than I cared to admit. Popped them in my mouth to hide the evidence. Spit out the seeds into my palm and tucked them into the satchel where I kept the needle and thread. The rest, what was perfect and frostbit, I carried in the can for old Ruth.

She was knitting when I came upon her, sitting on her slanting porch as though the cold was nothing to withered flesh. Crooked broken teeth, crooked smile that might have been pretty but for the long scar pulling her bottom lip.

Clora, you brought me sweets, she cooed, setting aside her yarn. Enough for pudding?

I placed the tin can into her hands, which were scarred with needle pricks. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.

She caught my wrist before I could pull away. And the ashes?

I knew better than to hesitate. No good to pretend I was happy, either. Obedience was enough. Obedience was the same as falling on knees, like the Sunday regulars the preacher took down to the river to pray at the cross and handle the Lucifer snake he kept in a pine box.

I dug into the satchel and pulled out a small packet of folded calico, sewn shut with my finest black thread stitches. Ruth’s smile widened, and she snatched it from my hand—holding it up to her nose and closing her eyes with pleasure.

Good, she said, finally. Edward had it coming for what he did to you.

I grunted, walking past Ruth into the cabin, unable to look into her eyes.

Clean your needles, Ruth called after me. Time for lessons, Clora.

I lit the fire, and while the flames leapt and scrambled within the stove, I relieved the burden of needle and thread: slender bone daggers punched with holes; and rough spools, collapsed with lichen-dyed browns and a rich burgundy soaked from sumac bobs, thin as a strangler’s wire and finely made—by my own hands—hours spent at the fixing of such binding threads.

The needles still had blood on them. I sat down at the table, wet the bone with a dash of apple vinegar poured from a flask in my satchel, and scrubbed hard with the pad of my thumb. Skin to bone, trying to summon the proper devotion. I was still scrubbing, whispering, when Ruth limped into her home.

Her own needles gleamed white as snow, hung around her neck like a fan of quick fingers.

Not saying their names right, she said, leaning so close the great bulk of her breasts touched my back. Need to show your kin the proper respect, Clora. All my teachings to no account, otherwise.

And then her hand fell upon my hair, warm as the fire burning, sinking into my skull behind my eyes, and she said, Try again tomorrow. Right now we got a poppet to make. Some Buck Creek girl set her eye on a cutter man from the quarry, and her mother wants him gone.

I spread the needles over the table. Maybe he loves her.

Ruth snorted, and drew away. Her mother brought a cutting of his hair.

Nothing more needed saying.

The ground was still soft over Edward’s grave.

His brothers were too lazy to pack him down hard, or even lay stone on top, which was what he would have wanted, being a cutter at the quarry for most of his adult life. I took a stroll past Martha’s cabin on the way to the hill, making sure she was home.

Wives were odd sometimes. Over the years, I’d seen a few who couldn’t pull themselves from the graves of lost men, sitting up all through the day and night with Bibles, crosses, or nothing to hold but their skirts and faces, weeping and praying like God would give them a resurrection, like maybe their men were as good as Jesus and would be risen. Seemed to me that was arrogance bordering on sin, but not one that was any worse than murder.

Martha was home. I stood at the edge of the forest, staring at her lit windows, watching her make circles all around her kitchen. I could have gone closer, but the old coonhound was tied to the porch, and even though he knew me, there was no sense in sparking the possibility of him making an unattractive sound.

The forest sang at night, trills and clicks, and whispers of the wind in the naked rubbing branches. Coyotes yipped and somewhere close a fox screamed like a woman, making my skin crawl cold even though it was nothing to fear.

The shovel was heavy on my shoulder. So was the ax.

I found the grave before moonrise and started digging. Took hours. I didn’t focus as I should. Kept thinking about Edward Bromes, and my last view of his body before his brothers slid him into the pine box: pale, stiff, eyes sewn shut.

I thought about other men, too.

I had to jump down into the hole, standing waist-high in loose dirt as I used the ax to pry apart the soft, cheap wood. Martha had insisted on something finer than a muslin shroud, but each groan of those splitting planks made my heart beat harder until I was breathless, expecting to hear shouts, dogs barking. The night was all as it should be, though: empty, quiet, crisp with frost.

Edward smelled a little, but no worse than other corpses. I looked down at him with nothing but a small tallow candle to enhance my sight, but that was more than enough. I had sewn the stitches myself to close his eyes, prepared the body for burial under the watchful, too watchful, gaze of his wife, and now we were met again and he was still dead, but with a purpose.

I cut off his right hand, wrapped it in oilskin, and reburied him.

By sunrise I was home, and had just enough time to wash up before I went for another day of lessons with old Ruth.

Think what you will, but I had no real family. Mother dead from the influenza, father run off with a woman who clerked for the big boss at the quarry. Gone ten years, and maybe he’d thought a six-year-old daughter would be cared for by relations, but a good hunting dog would have been more welcome, and was: old Tick, a bloodhound come down from Kentucky as a puppy, brought to heel by an uncle after my father run off, and I still recall Martha and Edward and another aunt being angry about the inconvenient burden of me.

I was another mouth to feed. By the time Ruth found me, I had no shoes, no coat, and my hair had to be shorn to the scalp because of lice and fleas. I still remember the sores on my legs and arms: insect bites scratched to infection, and the vinegar baths and salt scrubs, and willow bark tea forced down my throat for weeks, weeks, after Ruth took me in and clothed me like a doll in soft dresses.

Clora, my sweet, she’d say, and I loved her for it. Decided, in that pure childlike naivety kin to wishing on a star that I would do anything for her, I’d care for her, I’d be hers in body and soul.

It was the soul part I hadn’t realized would be a problem.

The poppet for the mother of the Buck Creek girl took three days to make.

I cut cloth from one of the old burlap bags folded by the fireplace, and took up a smaller, sharper finger-blade to shear out the shape of a man. Twice I did this, using the first as a pattern that I traced with a stick of coal. Ruth had taught me to do the same with twisted roots and vines, formed to take a human shape; or dried corncobs, or clay; but cloth had advantages that Ruth had spelled into me, such as it could be sewn into a vessel filled with all the sundry items a good hoodoo needed: blood and bones, and cuttings of hair, dried fluids from a man’s loving, trapped on cloth, mushrooms, feathers, shell and stone. Little bits of power in the right hands with the right intent and desire, making a sympathetic echo that might correspond to a living human body.

Need to fix that red stitch, Ruth told me, as I sewed. Fix it or start over.

I pulled the bone needle back through the hole as Ruth turned away to her own sewing: a doll as long as my forearm, with a real face embroidered in her finest threads—black hair, blue thread dyed from woad for his eyes, a strong nose identified by a crooked line.

Haven’t told me who that’s for, I said, quiet.

Hush. Ruth put a fat persimmon in her mouth and began sucking on it. You’ll make another mistake. All my teaching will be for naught if you keep up this way.

I gave her a small smile, but with my eyes averted. I only made mistakes when I had a mind to do so. Ruth might say she wanted me strong and I’d tried to please her in that way before I realized better—before I seen a look she couldn’t hide on the day I sewed a hoodoo that made a man burst his brain with apoplexy before I finished the last stitch. Us at the spring market in the valley, sitting under a tree, and all it was supposed to be was a lesson in seeing the hoodoo make a man itch. Not die.

So, I made mistakes after that. Small ones. Enough to make me look weak.

Not from guilt.

I wanted to survive.

I walked the poppet down to Buck Creek on the fourth day. It was cold and bright, and the closer I got to the bottom of the valley, the more houses I saw deep in the woods—and in the distance, the winding track of the dirt road that somewhere bled north into a larger road, and larger, beyond which I’d never seen.

I didn’t need Ruth’s directions to find the right home, built into the side of a rocky hill cleared of trees. I could hear the creek, but the chickens were louder, scratching in a large pen guarded by a hound gone gray at the muzzle. The mother was out in the yard splitting firewood, cheeks red from exertion and the chill, her bare hands the same color. Her smile was tight-lipped when she saw me, but I didn’t take it hard. Asking for a bad act was the same as committing it, and didn’t matter how it was done: God would be all for the remembering, when the final day was come.

Didn’t expect you so soon, she said.

Soon as done, I replied, looking around. Is your daughter here?

Her gaze hardened. Off to the quarry. She brings that man his lunch. Won’t be reasoned with, no matter how hard I come at her.

Shame, I said, wondering at how much I sounded like Ruth. Terrible she won’t believe you. About his way with women, I mean.

I only want what’s best for her. Plenty of fine men, without Betty making eyes at a no-good. If he gets her with child. . . . The mother made a disgusted sound and leaned the ax against the cutting block. God’s work that Margaret down at the Bend heard of his wandering eye before I let it go too far.

God’s work, maybe. My work, certainly. Rumors could cast a spell just as powerful as needle and thread.

I began to pull the poppet from my satchel, but the mother stiffened and took a step back.

Not out here, she said, looking around as if a crowd from church had gathered in the trees. Not here.

We went inside. Her cabin was dark, but it smelled like warm bread and coffee. She offered me none of that, except a handful of crumpled bills that looked like the right amount, though it was hard to tell. I didn’t count them. Ruth knew how to handle a cheater well and good, which this woman surely knew.

I lay the poppet on the table. You sure you want to do this yourself?

The mother hesitated. What does it take?

Burn it, I said. Or stab it. Twist its head to break his neck. Anything you do will kill him, slow or fast.

She went pale. That’s the Devil’s work.

I offered back her money. You said you wanted him gone.

The mother stared at the doll and took a long, deep breath. I waited, already knowing the answer.

When I left her home, I carried the poppet in my satchel—and the money, too.

I walked toward the quarry.

The man was easy to find, as he was lunching with a girl no older than me, sixteen at best, pretty as morning with long blond hair and a face that might have been her mother’s, if her mother had ever been young and happy.

I watched them from the edge of the woods and ate my own lunch: a soft-boiled egg, a bit of bacon between some bread. Tapped my feet and rubbed my hands, trying to stay warm, watching the man and girl smile and laugh and make lovey-dovey with their eyes—and me, wondering all the while what that would feel like, wishing and afraid, but mostly wishing.

The girl left with a laugh and kiss. The man watched her go. His eyes, for her only. If he had ever wandered, I was certain he would never wander on her.

I started walking before he did, making my way through the woods so that I was waiting for him on the trail down to the quarry. He took his time, and was whistling when he saw me—though that stopped when he said, Miss?

Nothing hard in his face. Nothing bad, as was believed. The girl was right to love him. I had known it for weeks now, from the first time I seen them together.

I put my hand in the satchel, on the rough skin of the burlap doll. I’ve come to warn you, mister.

He frowned. Who are you?

Someone who knows old Ruth, I said, and something cold and small entered his eyes, natural as the ill, bone-chilling breeze passing around us on the trail. Ruth was like that breeze in these parts, known and accepted, and respected out of fear. Most granny-women were, like as in the blood, born from the old country that was still rich in the veins of those who had settled these hills and valleys. Fear of a hoodoo woman was natural. Fear was how it had to be.

Ruth has her eye on you, I said. When it comes, it’ll be her doing.

He paled. "Done nothing wrong. Don’t even know her."

I stepped back into the woods. Remember what I told you. It was Ruth who ordered it.

Wait, he began, reaching for me. I slipped away, but he did not try to follow. Instead he ran up the trail, away from the quarry. Chasing the girl, I thought. She was something he wanted to live for.

I pulled out the poppet, and twisted its head clear ’round.

The man was buried two days later, and the night after I slithered into that proper cemetery and dug for him. If he was watching from on high, I didn’t mind. I sawed off his hand and wrapped it up tight.

I was good at digging for the dead. Ruth started me at the age of twelve, from necessity. It was time. I’d become a woman, my first bleed, and needles couldn’t be made from any old bone. So my own mother was first, and my grandmother after her—followed by her mother. Nothing less would do, Ruth said, and I believed her, though it made me cry. Took a long while, too, and lucky for me, my relatives were buried in the family plot, out in the hills where no one ever came.

All for sympathy, was something else Ruth taught me. Bones had to be sympathetic to make a hoodoo stitch work its wiles, and nothing was more in sympathy than a line of women, from mother to daughter and backward to beyond. Never mind any strife that might have pressed between generations. Who was left living mattered most to the dead. According to Ruth, that was me.

Though it seemed, as it had for some time, that it wasn’t just the bones of those come before that might matter in the stitching. Any bone, from a body with desire, might have a say in the power of a hoodoo.

Any bone at all.

Now, there were stories come down from the hills that I remembered being told even as a child, and the telling of them was still rich on the tongues of the people who settled in the