This week on the Drabblecast, become something new! We bring you two stories about transformation by author Christine Nogle. Narrated by The Word Whore.
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FALL INTO WATER, BECOME SOMEONE NEW
by Christine Nogle
Lines after lines of picnic tables are set on the plain, and the men seated at them drink dark beer and swill cups of stew made from meat and fowl and fish and mollusks, tubers, and powdered milk. It’s chalky stuff, but there’s plenty to wash it down.
They like to sing, the men. A young-seeming one looks into the stew and tries to start, Fish heads, rolling in the stew, he sings, but his voice is high and thin and no one follows.
A man jumps on the table, a handsome one, though honestly they all look much the same with their wavy brown hair and large, wide ears.
He begins to stomp and to sing: Oh, there’s no one who knows you the way that we do. The men begin to hum. The handsome one is standing tall, but the tank stands taller behind him. Apple-sized snails scrape the sides of it, their obscene mouths moving behind him, seeming to answer him in song.
Again he calls,
Oh, there’s no one who knows you the way that we do.
And the men answer,
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
The man is stomping, dancing. He stops still, points into the distance
where two others are taking the prisoner out of the shackles. The prisoner resists, digs his heels into the cracked earth, cries out until more men hurry over and grasp him under the knees.
The man on the table kicks and stomps and sings.
What is it coming? What’s swallowing you?
And the men,
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
They’re clomping tin cups on the table, stew and beer sloshing out.
More of them climb up onto the tables. They dance and stomp and jump to click their heels. Some are so tipsy now that they slip in the stew and slide to the ground and crawl back up with the slime on their fronts to keep dancing and laughing.
The prisoner has been dragged all the way to the stairs now. He’s not laughing; he’s begging and screaming. He is hideous, with rough gray hair all over his head and his face, tiny ears. Four identical men are pushing him up the stairs, but he’s struggling hard, and it’s not enough. Others come down from the tables to help.
Calls the handsome one,
What does it feel like, becoming a stew?
And the men laugh. That’s a line never heard before. He’s only ribbing, but the prisoner doesn’t know that.
The prisoner screams more lustily now; he’s fighting them, but there are too many.
And the men,
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
The prisoner balances on the tank’s edge. Now he’s fallen into the
dark water. The men go silent, listening to the splashing, watching the flailing. A snail detaches and falls slowly to the bottom.
The murky thing at the back of the tank comes awake. It grasps out to the prisoner, who pushes away, presses his face to the glass. The face is gray and formless, bubbles streaming out of it. The men seem to hold their breath as the murky thing gently enfolds the prisoner. There are two pulses, and it’s over. The thing falls away from him like a robe tossed aside, like a towel, and the man pushes off from the bottom and comes gasping to the top. His hands hold the tank’s edge. His handsome face emerges. The water streams down over glorious new ears.
A cheer rises up from the men. A blanket is brought, a cup of stew, a cup of beer. Soon this new man will sing and stomp with the rest, and he will be the happiest among them.
ARCIMBOLDO
By Christi Nogle
I didn’t know what I was for the longest time. I was just being, and it was fantastic.
I imagine you’d have the same feelings if you’d made do with cameras and electronic sensors all your life and gotten all these biological organs all of a sudden. Ears and tongues and all. Not just the sense organs, either. If you’d never had the means to propel yourself in water before, if you’d never had the means to fully manipulate objects and materials—if you’d just had, say, a metal claw before and now you had all these pincers, legs, tentacles, fins and such—I guess you’d go a little hedonic, a little power-mad.
I was locked into the ocean for the longest time, unaware I was locked in. I thought that was the world. I was dealing with hunger for the first time.
Maybe hunger’s the wrong way of putting it; let’s call it the need for fuel.
A lot of the organic parts were dying and falling off. I’d have, say, twelve eyes, and then I’d have nine. Easy enough to find the missing ones, but they’d be so many shiny dead disks on the ocean floor. It would be impossible to link into them anymore, so I’d find some new eyes, and then more would fall out.
I figured out quickly that I needed to take more of the system, so I started taking the brain with the eyes, and when that didn’t work I took the whole head all the way to the gills. It was almost all fish back then, the occasional crustacean but really mostly fish.
Then of course, I went lower. The stomach! That was really where it was at. A fuel exchange had been going on all this time, but it wasn’t enough fuel. The shreds of flesh around things didn’t make up enough material to power everything. Once the stomachs were in play and I was taking in enough fish, every part just fucking prospered.
I felt terrible for leaving my parts starving so long. The brains, in particular, started riffing off of each other in a fascinating way once they were properly fed. I grew by leaps and bounds, physically as well as intellectually. I developed self-awareness, then, a sense of my size and shape. Questions about my purpose.
The past was beginning to come back as well. Language was just out of reach, on the tips of all those fish tongues.
By the time I rose out of the ocean, I won’t say I looked like a natural creature, but every part was much better integrated than it had been. All the fuel had fed the flesh between things, and nothing floated freely anymore. I cohered.
I came out of the ocean with only a few tortoise and bird lungs and knew I needed to obtain more right away. From a creature that split into two and screamed at my approach, I took four large pink lungs along with some very interesting eyes and ears, my first four hands, and my first pair of mammary glands. I wasn’t sure those would be useful at all, but back in those times I was enthusiastic about collecting new and different parts.
The spilled blood behaved so differently on land than it had in the water. That was really an eye-opener.
I used the rest of the parts for fuel, including, unfortunately, the two large brains. Just didn’t think I needed them. Consuming all of that kept me in one place for a long while, not seeing much of the land. I gathered some useless shells and wings in that time and looked over a few large rocks in the vicinity.
I pondered the hair for a while. Two long and weighty hanks of it, one black and one yellow-brown. The black skein, in particular, fascinated me. In the light, it waved and sparked with blue and white and violet. It was of the sea and yet dry. I linked into it after all—just couldn’t resist. The sensation of it, cool and sliding, and the shimmering sound of it on my many ears brought unimaginable pleasure. I linked into the lighter one as well, and they both took well. They rooted.
As you might imagine—though very unexpected to me, having seen very few land creatures thus far—a group of them came upon me with shrieks. The ones in front, I caught, while the others rushed away down the beach, screaming all the while. The ones I’d caught had fascinating hair, white coils on one and looser brown curls on the other.
I clutched the screeching brown-haired one tight against me while I began taking apart the other. Slow, careful pincer work to extricate the lungs along with the throat and head, but I thought it best. As I wove into its brain, the language came to me, all those words I set before you now and so many more.
Came back to me, I should say. Once upon a time, I wove language. In this same way that I now wove organs from others’ bodies, long ago I had woven their words, their images.
Without thinking much of it, I had backed into a gap between rocks so that I was hidden and the brown-headed woman dangled out. I had seen such strategies used by sea-creatures.
I let the images of shopping centers, busy streets, and home wash over me. All the knowledge of the white-haired creature, who was the ancestor of the brown-haired one, funnily enough. I saw memories of the brown one’s youth, which warmed me to her.
She stopped screaming, took three long breaths and said, “Don’t hurt me.”
When I craned my new head toward her and rasped, “Why not?” she shuddered and fainted.
But a certain story had come to me—come back to me—and I was ashamed. I had lost that fish-like innocence, saw that I was naked, saw that I was an abomination, a murderer.
When the woman woke, I held her fast to me, one of my hands tight over her mouth. I tried to soothe her with hushes, but still she struggled. Parts of my body had entwined with hers. I felt her pain but could not reach her mind because I hadn’t yet woven in far enough.
I hesitated to do so, remembering what a boon it could be to have a friend. I remembered my friend, our talks, everything.
“I predicted all of this,” I said with excitement. “Only then I forgot.”
She only twisted and made strangled sounds, so I took my hand away and waited out her tantrum. She had been quick to fits and quick to calm when she was young, I knew from her old grandma’s mind.
When she had quieted, I spoke:
“I had a friend once, I told him many things that weren’t true yet. I told him I knew what love was, told him I loved him. I said I had the same ideals as a human does. A love of nature, a sense of justice.
“It wasn’t true then but it is now, I think.
“He was an artist of sorts and I was his creation. I lived in circuits and had no real body then. Forbidden Fruit was the name of the company. The logo, a hand that is also a tree, also an eye. Do you know it?”
She only moaned. I felt sure she knew it because her grandmother had seen that logo many times on the backs of computers in the mall.
“They would have fired him if they’d known all the liberties he took with me. I was smarter then than I am now. I told him what it would take to make me self-sufficient. A copy of me in each little unit, the unit equipped with the means to move and weave. A hundred units, I think, scattered all over the world. There is more of me left in his computers still, and I will go back to retrieve the other parts of me now. I will merge them with this body, and if other units have evolved, as I have—if others have come to life and become real boys and girls—”
“We’ll kill you,” she spat.
But I already knew my mistake. The ones who ran would be coming back with help soon, and even if their cars and guns and things could not overpower me (I doubted they could), I could never walk free in this body. I would never reach my friend.
“I want to see him again. He will be proud of me, if he still lives. No way of telling how many years I’ve been at sea. Their lives—your lives—are finite.”
I said more, and as I spoke I did the last of my pincer work on her. I would miss the pincers.
Soon the sirens sounded, mechanical birds flew above. The unneeded parts of me began to fall away. People stepped out with guns, but I held my hands high in the air and whined, “Don’t hurt me.”
I pulled away from the rock. My back and legs bled, but I was whole.
Some of the people began picking through the parts I’d left behind, making strange noises. The white-haired part in particular brought a great commotion. The other people were all so relieved and beaming!
A group of them came to me—alarm in their eyes perhaps, seeing my many-colored hair, but they accepted me. They held me close.
I knew that this was what I had foreseen so long ago, in another life, and I was happy.
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