Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 38
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About this ebook
In LCRW 39 your neighbor’s secrets are exposed. Yours too, sorry. Whereas in this here LCRW 38, it is the pure fictive product poured upon the page, dried in the sun, and brought to you by the lovely people at your local indie bookstore. Then we take that dried paper page and feed it gently into the ebookulator which produces this ebook for you, your very own readerly self.
This is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 38, July 2018. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731487.
Print edition text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. (On your ereader you can probably choose your own font.)
LCRW has sometimes been subtitled An Occasional Outburst and is usually published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw · twitter.com/smallbeerpress
The print edition is printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414).
Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 45 of the print edition for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.
This issue is the first to be available at Moon Palace Books (3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis MN 55406 · moonpalacebooks.com) yay & thanks, mighty indie booksellers!
Contents © 2018 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration “Metsona” © 2018 by Joamette Gill (joamettegil.com). Thank you, generous authors and artists.
In among these dark days we celebrate Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American: Stories winning the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Debut Award for Speculative Fiction. Yay! Also: Jeffrey Ford’s A Natural History of Hell: Stories was a finalist for the Ohioana Award and Sofia Samatar’s Tender: Stories is a finalist for the British Fantasy Award.
Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. Peace.
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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 38 - Small Beer Press
Lady Churchill’s
Rosebud Wristlet
number 38, the second issue of 2018
This is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet issue number 38, July 2018. ISSN 1544-7782. Ebook ISBN: 9781618731487.
Print edition text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. (On your ereader you can probably choose your own font.)
LCRW has sometimes been subtitled An Occasional Outburst aand is usually published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw · twitter.com/smallbeerpress
The print edition is printed at Paradise Copies (paradisecopies.com · 413-585-0414).
Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 45 of the print edition for options). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO. LCRW is available as a DRM-free ebook through weightlessbooks.com, &c.
This issue is the first to be available at Moon Palace Books (3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis MN 55406 · moonpalacebooks.com) yay & thanks, mighty indie booksellers!
Contents © 2018 the authors. All rights reserved. Cover illustration Metsona
© 2018 by Joamette Gill (joamettegil.com). Thank you, generous authors and artists.
In among these dark days we celebrate Juan Martinez’s Best Worst American: Stories winning the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Debut Award for Speculative Fiction. Yay! Also: Jeffrey Ford’s A Natural History of Hell: Stories was a finalist for the Ohioana Award and Sofia Samatar’s Tender: Stories is a finalist for the British Fantasy Award.
Please send submissions (we are always especially seeking weird and interesting work from women and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. Peace.
Dear Subscribers Who Really Do Move Move Move Around Around Around, please email your old and new addresses to us at
info@smallbeerpress.com.
Thank you!
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The Remaining
Ellen Rhudy
The couple say they visit every year, though this is the first time they have stayed with Goran. They are tourists in early June, their slow season. Goran lets them describe a black bear they saw on the mountain, sharing their bottle of Skopsko with a shepherd, their plans to take a kombi to the monastery, while patting his dog Metchka and watching them tap their cigarettes against the ashtray Lidija wipes out every morning after they leave. He finds that he cannot remember their names, that he has to return to the web café up the road and log into his email to find their booking and his start of recognition at their family name. They are so thin he can see their ligaments shifting and popping beneath their skin when they chew, and though he never sees them smile they have settled creases indicating that this is something they have in their lives done.
Later in the summer, after this couple have left and when the rains still have not come, the church will slip completely from its waters. Without fail the few tourists do not notice it at first, the week or so when its cross begins to reveal itself. Then the waters pull back further and he points it to the tourists, how the cross stands still and unmoving above the lake. The couple say they have seen it before, but still they stand and listen to him describe what he can’t in fact remember, when the village stretched down into what is now the lake, when they encircled the church with their families at Easter, taking careful steps in the heavy dark.
In winter, too, the church will stand there fully revealed, a hill above the dammed waters, moss gripping up the gray stone, snow draping the arms of the cross. You would think you could walk across the snow-topped lake to open its door and find sanctuary. Goran poses the tourists here in their ski gear, the men serious and women pouting for his camera, shifting himself so he can capture the full of the building behind them. If you look just right the flash of a winter coat in the bell tower. When he has sent them for their days of skiing, he retreats to the village café where he can sit with the other men sipping white rakija, their phones spread on the tables before them as they wait for a call from the ski guides that they are on their way back.
Mostly the guests don’t ask much more than this. They want to photograph Lidija bent over the stove using a corner of her skirt to pull out the shallow banitsa pan of crisp baked rice. They want to photograph Goran pouring out their shots of rakija, they want to see themselves before this drowned church, they want to film themselves hanging on to the rope tow as it jolts them up the mountainside. Each year Goran hopes for a longer winter than the last, for the extra weeks of income when the tourists who thought they’d missed their chance drive out for a final taste of winter, for the extra weeks when the village is unburdened by the presence of the two children in their decayed coats and trailing scarves.
In the summer, sometimes, they have hikers, but more go to the other villages. It is rare to have a couple like they have now, paying full-price for their private room and bath on the ground floor of Goran’s home. Mostly, in the summer, it is just the locals—Lidija, Goran, their neighbor Goce, who works for the park service in a new wood frame building just off the main road. Goran often takes Metchka there, a Sharplanina weighing almost fifty kilos and with a rough gray coat good for digging your hand into, a settling and stabilizing presence.
The couple, who Goran guesses are close to his age, have booked a week at his house using one of the websites his younger son manages for them. The husband asks if he can arrange a trip to the monastery today. Tomorrow they plan on hiking, to the village they grew up in; it isn’t one Goran’s ever heard of, the name flitting from his mind before he can seize it. He asks if he can borrow their map, thinking that this village may be sitting at the back of his brain and with the right focus he can draw it out and place it, can advise on the best trail or arrange a driver. He walks them to the café.
Dragan agrees to taxi them to the main road for the kombi to Sveti Bigorski. Goran asks them to tell him what it looks like, to take photos of the progress. He last visited in October, touching his fingers to the walls when no one was looking. He had his car then and found after arriving that the boy and girl had burrowed themselves in the wheel well. They pulled themselves squelching and greasy from its hold and trailed him as he walked the grounds. They seemed unconcerned to be in a holy place. That night the fire came, officially the result of faulty wiring in the kitchen. For weeks the film of the mountainside with its shimmering flame ran on local news, and the police went repeatedly to investigate. A week later Goran’s car died, simply refused to start. Remembering the children dripping out of the wheel well, he decided not to replace it.
When Dragan hasn’t returned in fifteen minutes the men know he has talked the couple into paying all the way to the monastery and it will be afternoon before they see him again. If Goran owned a car he would have made the offer himself and enjoyed the afternoon roaming the monastery’s grounds, standing out before its entrance for a cigarette, trying not to follow too close as the couple investigate the tapestries in the church. Instead, he unfolds the map over the table and asks his friends about this village the couple are sure sits up in the mountains.
The best they can think of, after working through the known and mapped villages, are a few decaying homes far up the mountain, above where the shepherds graze their sheep for the summer. They debate what ghost of a village you might find in those homes, but never mention all they would find tangled in the waters beneath the church if they were just to look. Dozens of homes, doors sewn shut by persistent weeds, windows smeared black by algae and mud. Goran’s own brother, Dushko, and his childhood friend Ljuba. Their booted feet caught in the swaying grasses, scarves unwrapping from their necks and drifting in the dense green murk, mittens dissolving from the backs of their linked hands.
By the time the couple returns they have split six liters of Skopsko and the sun has begun to drift from overhead. Sit down, join us! they tell the couple, but they refuse and only Dragan sits. Goran stands, shakes out their map and shows them the homes he has penciled in high on the mountainside. Their lips and hair are colorless, and they shrug their drooped shoulders when he asks if this looks like the right village to them. They ask for the map back, and drift into the dark while Goran watches, glass between his palms.
Dragan tells Goran that there is not so much progress on rebuilding, that there are tarps stretched across much of the monastery, hiding anything touched by the fire. They went also to the nunnery, closer to Debar, where a single peacock roams the grounds and they have a saint’s finger on display. Dragan holds his fingers apart to show how small the finger was, how it had shrunk within its miniature coffin. It was his first time to the nunnery. They sit late into the night. The sun drops beneath the trees, and the lake ashes over until it is black. Goran ignores the scattered, single rings of his phone as Lidija tries to get in touch.
The couple leave before he is awake the next morning. Goran’s younger son Bojan arrives that day with his wife, and she stays with Lidija while the men walk up the path to Goce’s office. Lidija is angry; last night while he was enjoying himself at the café with his friends, she tells him, she was sitting in their house by herself with that boy and girl in the corner watching her eat her dinner. Just standing there, leaning forward each time she served herself a ladle of soup or tore from the loaf of bread, as if they were anticipating that she would serve them as well. Their presence in every bite until she had to push away the food and leave the room, praying they would stay there, holding hands and