The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander.
Title: The Only Harmless Great Thing.
Author: Brooke Bolander.
Genre: Fiction, fantasy, alternative history, feminism, social struggle, social criticism, ecology.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2018.
Summary: Early in the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, who became known as "Radium Girls", slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant, Topsy, was deliberately and publicly put to death by electricity in Coney Island. These are matters of historical fact. In this novella, these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and wrongs crying out to be righted. In a world where elephants can communicate with humans, and are given the most radioactive jobs, a connection between a dying girl and an exploited elephant will change the course of history.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ There is a secret buried beneath the mountain's gray skin. The ones who put it there, flat-faced pink squeakers with more clever-thinking than sense, are many Mothers gone, bones so crumbled an ear's flap scatters them to sneeze-seed. To fetch up the secret from Deep-Down requires a long trunk and a longer memory. They left dire warnings carved in the rock, those squeakers, but the rock does not tell her daughters, and the stringing rains washed everything as clean and smooth as an old tusk a hundred hundred matriarchies ago.
The Many Mothers have memories longer than stone. They remember how it came to pass, how their task was set and why no other living creature may enter the mountain. It is a truce with the Dead, and the Many Mothers are nothing more and nothing less than the Memories of the Dead, the sum total of every story ever told them.
At night, when the moon shuffles off behind the mountain and the land wakens like wetted skin, they glow. There is a story behind this. No matter how far you march, O best beloved mooncalf, the past will always drag around your ankle, a snapped shackle time cannot pry loose.
♥ They killed their own just to see time pass. That's how it started. Humans were as hypnotized by shine as magpies, but no magpie has ever been so thinkful about how many days it has left before it turns into a told story. Even in the dark they fretted, feeling the stars bite like summer flies as they migrated overhead. They built shelters to block out the sight of their passing. This only succeeded in making things dimmer; the unseen lion in the tall grass is still a lion that exists. Clever-turning cicada-ticking sun-chasers they tied together so that they would always know where she was, clinging to the sun's fiery tail like frightened calves.
(Try not to judge them; their mothers were short-lived, forgetful things, clans led by bulls with short memories and shorter tempers. They had no history, no shared Memory. Who can blame them for clinging ape-fearful to the only constants they had?)
"But how to track time's skittering in the night with such tiny eyes and ears?" the humans squeaked. "What if the sun should go wandering and leave us and we don't even realize we've been left behind?"
The answer, as with so many things those piteous little creatures dredged from the mud, was poison.
They gored the earth with gaping holes, shook her bones until crystals like pieces of starless sky fell out. Trapped inside were glowing flies. Trampling them made a smeary shine, but they carried sickness within their blood and guts. Pity the poor humans! Their noses were stumpy, ridiculous things and they couldn't smell the Wrongness, even as they rubbed it across their teeth and faces. All they could see was how bright it looked, like sunlight through new leaves. For want of a trunk, much sorrow would come to them-and on to us, though we knew it not in those days.
There was a good place, once. Grass went crunch-squish underfoot. Mother went wrrrt. The world was fruit-sticky warm and sunlight trunk-striped with swaying gray shadows smelling of We. Mud and stories and Mothers, so many Mothers, always touching, always telling, sensitive solid fearless endless. Their tusks held the sky up up up. Their bare bones hummed in the bone places, still singing even with all their meat and skin gone to hyena milk. Nothing was greater than Many Mothers. Together they were mountains and forevers. As long as they had each other and the Stories, there was no fang or claw that could make them Not.
They had blown raw red holes through the Many Mothers, hacked away their beautiful tusks, and the sky had not fallen and she had not mourned the meat. She was She-the survivor, the prisoner, the one they called Topsy-and She carried the Stories safe inside her skull, just behind her left eye, so that they lived on in some way. But there is no one left to tell the histories in this smoky sooty cave Men have brought her to, where the ground is grassless stone and iron rubs ankleskin to bloody fly-bait. There are others like her, swaying gray shadows smelling of We, but wood and cold metal lie between them, and she cannot see them, and she cannot touch them.
♥ You're sick, she signs, after a beat. Dying-sick. You stink.
"Yeah. Dying-sick. Me and all my girls who worked here."
Poison? She gestures her trunk at the paint, the brush, the table, the whole hell-fired mess. Smells like poison.
"You got it. They got you all doing it now because you can take more, being so big and all. I'm supposed to teach you how."
Another pause unspools itself across the factory stall between them. I'm supposed to teach you how to die, Regan thinks. Ain't that the dumbest goddamn thing you ever heard tell of, teaching an animal how to die? Everybody knows how to die. You just quit living and then you're slap-taught.
Topsy reaches down and takes the paintbrush.
♥ When their own began to sicken and fall, they came for us, and there was nothing we could do but die as well. We were shackled and splintered and separated; the Many Mothers could not teach their daughters the Stories. Without stories there is no past, no future, no We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.
♥ Both sides of the main sick ward are lined with high windows, but the nuns aren't too particular about their housekeeping; the yellow light slatting in is filtered through a nice healthy layer of dust, dirt, and dying people's last words. The way Regan sees it, the Ladies of Perpetual Mercy ever swept, it would be thirty percent shadows, twenty percent cobwebs, and fifty percent Praise God Almighty, I See The Light they'd be emptying outta their dustpans at the end of the day.
♥ Furmother was wise, which means curious.
..But Furmother was wise, which means crafty.
♥ How lucky are we, to be We! When she was done, sore swaying sleep-desperate on her feet, no She was there touching and rubbing the shoulder-to-shoulder skinmessage, We are here with you. There was nothing but she and herself.
♥ Every day she eats the reeking, gritty poison. The girl with the rotten bones showed her how, and occasionally Men come by and strike her with words and tiny tickling whip-trunks if she doesn't work fast enough. She feels neither. She feels neither, rage buzzes in her ear low and steady and constant, a mosquito she cannot crush. Like a calf she nurses the feeling. Like the calf she'll never Mother she protects it safe beneath her belly, safe beneath the vast bulk of Herself, while every day it grows, suckles, frolics between her legs and around the stall and around the stall and around the stall until she's whirling red behind the eyes where the Stories should go.
One day soon the rage will be tall enough to reach the high-branch mangoes.
Okay? the rotten-bone-dead-girl signs. Okay? Are you okay?
..Topsy's eyes flicker, land-Why is that mouse squeaking at me? Where am I?-and register some level of slow-returning recognition. For the time being she's Topsy again, not a thoughtful disaster deciding whether or not to hatch.
♥ But the story does not end there, O best beloved mooncalf. Were things every so easy, or so simple, even for Great Mothers and tricksters!
Furmother went inside the cave. She went inside the cave, but there were no Stories hidden there as the bear and the bull both had told her there would be. There was nothing but nothing, and Furmother needed no nothing. She walked back outside to where the bull still lay stuck, beside the shores of the great Blacksap lake.
"Bull," she said, "where are the Stories you were so keen to keep for yourself? Did someone clever rob you before I arrived?"
The bull rolled one red eye to look up at her. He laughed with malice and with scorn, but most of all with madness. As is the way with bulls.
"Fool milk-dripper," he panted. "Did you really think I would leave the stories where you could get at them after yesterday? They are at the bottom of the Blacksap lake, where no one may have them. I hurled therm all in myself with my strong and beautiful trunk and watched them sink beneath the surface with my keen eyes. If you want them, O cursed calf-dropper, go in and get them."
Furmother looked at him with sadness-because then as now We pitied the bulls, our Sons and Fathers and occasional Mates.
"Very well," she said. "Thank you for giving me the location, bull." And she turned and walked into the lake, where she sank like the Story.
♥ Each moonrise the metal bird in the box screams a mad musth cry. Like all Man-things, the bird is obsessed with the rising and setting of the sun. The night-whistle signals rest. The night-whistle signals a bag full of tasteless dried oats, a brief escape from sad dead girls and tormenting men, and four more wooden walls, the inside of a dry skull plugged right with moldy hay and dung. She remembers a place where the Night was made of warm shuffle and star-graze, tearing up sweet wet grass by the trunkful with moonshaded Mothers when she was old enough to tooth. She remembers, but there is no sweet grass to tear up by the trunkful, so instead she thoughtfully tears apart her stall, board by splintered board. There will be a beating in the morning. There are always beatings in the morning.
♥ All of her pieces, all of the Stories, everything that held Furmother together-all of it sailed high into the sky. Bones and Blacksap and insides and outsides, fur and tusks and tail! End over end over end they flew, until the wind caught them and scattered the bits across the frozen world like plums. Half of a tusk lodged in the sky's belly and became the moon; much of her hair blew away and turned to clouds. Her hot blood thawed the earth; the songs she had scattered behind her on her journey sprouted and were plucked by the wandering Mothers.
Stories, too, they discovered. But it was a funny thing: They were shattered into pieces, like the Great Mother who had scattered them, and no one tale held to the ear by itself could ever be fully understood. To make them whole required many voices entwined. Then and only then could they become true things, and then and only then could we become the undying We, endless voices passing along the one song that is also Many.
♥ There are a hundred interviews and uniforms and grim-faced men with typewriters lurking in Regan's future, each of them more or less asking the same damn thing over and over: What the hell happened? Did Slattery provoke the elephant? Was there any warning in Topsy's behavior in the days leading up to the attack? Did she get a good look at what happened?
Hell yes I saw what happened. How could I NOT get an eyeful of what goddamned happened? You think I'm blind and deaf on top of being the walking dead? A fella got turned to raspberry jam spitting distance from me and I had to go back home and comb little bits of him outta my hair and you sit there asking if I got a good look?
But all of that's still waiting up ahead, throwing hacks just around the corner. Right now she's watching it happen, backed up as far against the opposite side of the stall as she can scoot, while every elephant in the place from one end to the other stomps and screams loud enough to shake sparkling radium, dust from the rafters. Slattery screamed too, at first, but the only noise left over now is that triumphant roar, like bugles and trumpets and the footfalls of an angry god come to collect.
Way away down at the bottom of herself, buried deep beneath the frozen shock and the pain in her jaw and throat and places where Slattery kicked her, she feels something strange stirring, like sitting in church and getting the Holy Ghost. It takes her a while to stick a tack in it, hunkered cowering in that corner with her hands over her ears and madness mopping the floor red right over yonder, but it comes to her eventually, guilty as a kid stealing ripe melons.
Satisfaction. That's what it is. It's satisfaction.
♥ They named her after as slave in their own Stories, because even humans know Stories are We, and they try, in their so-so-clever way, to drive the Stories down gullies and riverbeds of their own choosing. But chains can be snapped, O best beloved mooncalf. Sticks can be knocked out of a Man's clever hands. And one chain snapping may cause all the rest to trumpet and stomp and shake the trees like a rain-wind coming down the mountain, washing the gully muddy with bright lightning tusks and thunderous song.
Sing, O Mothers
Sing of Her sacrifice!
Sing of the She-With-The-Lightning-In-Her-Trunk
The one who split the Tree in half
Scattering their lives like leaves,
Like splintered wood,
Like shaken fruit.
They took her away in chains, O Mothers
Locked her up where no one could see
Plotted her death, a spectacle, a shrieking monkey troop's boast:
"See how clever we are, how strong,
The lightning obeys us; so too should you!"
Poor things,
Poor things.
Poor prideful, foolish things.
..In darkness she waited, O Mothers,
Tethered, tormented, fearless,
Waited for the many Men to gather
The way wind
Waits for lighting
The way rain
Holds for thunder
They came to watch her die, to smell her flesh burn,
To see a Great Mother laid low.
They gathered in great boasting bull herds
Like flies to dung,
Like hyenas to a sickness,
Yapping barking tussling.
Poor things
Poor things,
Poor prideful, foolish things!
♥ They will see how we shine, and they will know the truth.
The thing that old elephant didn't understand-and how could she?-is that humans aren't always interested in confronting truths, especially uncomfortable ones. Will the benefits of a concerted coast-to-coast reeducation program outweigh the million sound bites about glowing radioactive elephant watchdogs sure to spring forth from every talking head and late-night comedian? The classes in school Kat sat through as a kid hadn't done a damn thing but muddy the waters. It's going to take a massive push, a goddamned media blitz, and she doesn't know if her higher-ups honestly give a shit about making that happen. They want a KEEP OUT sign for the ages, not truth in megafauna relations.
Christ, we can barely confront the gazillion shitty, horrible ways we treat one another without getting defensive. What chance does this have of being done right?
♥ Regan doesn't get a whole lot of sleep that night.
There's a girl out there in the dark who has no idea what's coming for her. Maybe she's not so good at her letters. Maybe she can't even read them at all, never having had the chance or the interest or the time. She lives at the back end of nowhere, where the school only stretches yea far before it snaps, and she's got sisters to help take care of and a drunk for a daddy and a mama so shrivel-tired she can't even call up the water to cry. She's never read a paper in her life, this dust-footed girl, and most days she's not properly sure what the news is from five miles up the road, let alone five hundred. But just wait, girl. Some kin will hear it from some kin that there are jobs at the new factory-easy jobs, good jobs, work that pays more in a month than sweeping people's houses scratches up in a flat year-and off she'll go, no schooling or letters or certificates needed. You got fast hands? You got lips? You know how to use a paintbrush? Well hell fire, take a seat and get to work, sweetie! We'll take care of you. Radium's not just harmless-it's good for the body. Point a thousand brushes with your lips and you'll still come out fine.
And she may get a loose tooth or a sore lip, that girl, and she may feel an aching in her hips and knees the way her mawmaw describes the rheumatism, but she'll trust the men who hired her, and she'll keep on working because she don't know any better and nobody's gonna bother warning her when there's money on the table. And eventually, she'll die horribly-as horribly as a scene from a painted Bible hell, choking to death as her throat and jaw rot from the inside out-and the memory of her will die soon after, and it'll be like she never walked or talked or laughed or hoped to begin with.
So much for her.
There's an elephant calf out there in the dark who has no idea what's coming for her. She's grazing with her people somewhere, all her mamas clustered around her, all her aunties and mawmaws and second cousins twice removed, because that's more or less all Regan knows about wild elephants-the mamas stick together and travel in a herd like cows and the menfolk wander alone like a lot of other male critters do-and all she knows about the world is green grass and playing and hiding from crocodiles when there's crocodiles sneaking around champ-champ-chomping their jaws. But maybe someday men come along to that place, and they shoot all the mamas and aunties and mawmaws and second cousins twice removed, and the ones they don't shoot they load up and send to other places, where they teach them to dance and do tricks and how to be alone in the wide old world. And the calf forgets what it was like to be whole. She loses herself and she gets bigger. She busts so many heads trying to find herself again the circus men get fed up and sell her to a factory-not US Radium, but similar, a kissing cousin-where eventually, after a long-enough time and enough work done, she dies the same slow way as the girl, spoiling like bad meat in a forgotten lunch pail in the woods.
So much for her.
And Regan, for all her thinking and all her tail-chasing, can't puzzle out how to stop the merry-go-round from spinning, whether it's through Jodie's way or some other, kinder method. She lies there staring at the ceiling until birds begin calling outside, too pained by her rotting body and whirling brain to snatch even the smallest scrap of rest.
And part of me felt good watching Topsy smash up that still, didn't it? Way down deep, something angry in me got satisfaction. The world's so big and mean, and we're so small in it with our hands and feet fettered. Little tiny helpless things, who can't do a damn thing but cry and rage most days at the way the game's rigged against us.
She gets up from bed. She watches her window go from black to gunmetal. When it's light enough out to see, she digs around in the crate of Jodie's stuff-pushing past the coin purse, the pill bottles, the busted music box with the little ceramic bluebird-until she finds the key on its ribbon, sifted way down to the bottom. She lets it hang twirling from her fingers before looping it around her neck.
So much for her.
♥ Deeply fucked up, but also deeply probable. No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth's nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.
♥ But what that foreman didn't know,
Is that there's so much injustice you can honestly sow,
Before the anger starts to grow
Blow, Topsy, Blow
Blow, Topsy, Blow!
♥ Most people don't even remember the memorial exists. It's one of those oddities from an earlier time you learn about and then forget, something weird tucked away to stop and gawk at if you happen to be passing through the area on vacation or a day trip. Snap a photo, buy a postcard, namedrop it at a party when people ask what you did with your summer. Make a joke about Geiger counters and glowing craters if everyone else is clued in in the story. Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy's.
♥ ..as her eyes get used to the darkness. Regan can see the chains and ropes looped and relooped around Topsy's neck and ankles, big old logging chains meant to pull redwoods crashing to the ground. Pebbles bounce off her leathery hide, and she pays them no more mind than a hawk shrugging off a territorial cock sparrow. Boys poke sticks and lit cigarettes at her from across the ropes; she lifts her trunk out of range and dreams on, spirit touring times and places Regan can't even guess at. Her mind is the most alien thing Regan's ever had truck with outside the God in her mother's Bible.
♥ This, she signs, is a seed. Crush it and death sprouts. Not just yours. The men with the chains. The circus men, the poison-factory men, the ones who will come to see you burn-all of 'em. Like lightning striking. You'll be lighting. You'll burn and you'll strike and then you'll be gone. It's up to you. Dying's a persona thing. It's... just... She trails off, hunting for the right words. Exhaustion is butting in on her thoughts, pushing them to the back of the hall.
...I just wanted to give you the option, she finishes, at a loss as to how to put it any better. A friend gave it to me. I'm passing it along to a higher power.
Even with her death waiting and the sounds of a crowd gathering outside, Topsy takes her sweet, thoughtful, time responding. You can practically hear the gears groaning inside that great skull of hers, slow but unstoppably steady in the revolution. Righteousness. Regan thinks of the sign again, invisible enemies flung into the air like pinecones. An old word, indiscriminate as a knife's edge, a tusk's tip.
Like lightning, Topsy signs. For the first time, Regan notices that her trunktip is glowing a faint, familiar green.
Yup.
You wish for them to die, too. Not a question. For the poisoning. For killing you.
Regan shrugs. No argument there.
Asking nice never seemed to get either of us much, did it? Maybe this'll get somebody's attention.
Topsy reaches down. Her trunk curls and uncurls, twitching at the tip like an agitated cat's tail. For the briefest blip of a second she hesitates and Regan thinks maybe she won't take the bottle, that she's sadder than she is angry, that her execution will amount to nothing more than a pitiful sentence in a history book swollen tick-tight with so many injustices the poisoning of a factory full of girls and the mean public death of a small god don't even register as particularly noteworthy.
But that's somebody else's once upon a time. Gently, gingerly-the way any soul would handle their own death-Topsy takes the little vial and tucks it away inside her mouth.
♥ The final fruit to be plucked is not rage, but song-a learning song, a teaching song, a joining together song. She rolls it on her tongue, careful not to split it before its time. The men gibber and yap and lean out to touch her as she passes. The man holding the lead chain barks a warning at them in the jackal tongue of humans, hurrying along before her trunk can sweep them clear of the path.
There is still fear in her heart. To be is to be wary, and so there is still fear in her heart, balking wide-eared at what lies coiled at the end of the walk. Danger! Lions! Claws and teeth and tawny fur! She smells her ending, and her feet plant themselves, bending-parts senselessly locking. The man yells and tugs and strikes her with whip and chain; he too stinks of fear, sharp as crushed nettles underfoot. She struggles with the man and the fear-Guns! Men! Fire and smoke and pits with sharpened sticks!-but if the man can be ignored, the ending-fear cannot. It lies deeper than hurt and deeper than the need to sing her own undoing song, a root buried so far within no tusk can pry it free. The man-herd howls, thrown into musth by her hesitation. They claw and push at her haunches with their trunk-paws, desperate to hurry along, always and forever in a hurry.
Another human pushes out of the mass-the dead girl, still moving, still somehow on her feet when every part of her stinks of corruption. She exchanges a few guttural yips and yowls with the man on the end of the chain, pain rolling off her like river water. Eventually he huffs and puffs and reluctantly passes her the chain. She turns, asking, in the little language of twisted trunk-paws: Are you well? Can you walk? It's just a little further. We'll go together.
And even this much We is enough to drive the fear back into the high grass. Her mind stills. Her legs unstiffen. Together they cross the overwater, men flytrailing behind. Together they go to sing the song of their undoing, the joining, teaching, come-together song.