your first story, purple basil and horned toads

[sergebroom]

The October 2008 issue of Realms of Fantasy has what will alas be Terri Windling’s last Folkroots column, this one titled the door in the hill leads to other worlds, to place, to power, and to home. In it, she asks:

What’s the first childhood story that you remember?

She then goes on to point that we are shaped by those childhood stories. I don’t remember any story from my youngest years, but that’s probably because nobody read any to me. Then I started going to school and our teacher would once in a while have story time, or I’d read from the few books from my school’s extremely meager bookshelf, without anybody telling me to do it either there or at home. That being said, the earliest story that I remember from when I had just learned to read was a Buck Rogers comic-strip. I don’t remember much about it, but I think that Buck was under attack by a house’s robotic toys. That, instead of scaring me, took me home, as Windling said. Yes, it was SF, not fantasy, but it was my first step on the road to Imagination.

Among my favorite stories in that issue is M.K. Hobson’s The Purple Basil about a witch’s hope that her offering at the year’s Sabbath will have the Master notice her.

This year I am bringing a large pot of purple basil. It is not the most impressive offering that will be brought to the high valley. It cannot be used to induce soothsaying dreams, or cool plague-fever, or breed remorse in the heart of a man who ought to feel it. (…) The purple basil is hearty, useful and pretty. Butterfly says that when she tastes it in a tomato sauce, it makes her think of every moment in her life she’s ever known happiness.

It is witchcraft enough.

But, for all her love for her Master, she is afraid that Butterfly, her foundling daughter, will, as she grows older, find in her heart the song that will call her too to Him.

My other favorite was Joe Murphy’s The Horned-toad in the Hubcap, which continues the story of Sprokly the wooden girl that began with On Tuesday It Rained Horned Toads in December 2007’s issue. This time, she and Walter the autistic boy try to find why his hubcap doesn’t show images of alien skies. Instead it shows a horned toad, a real one, not the mechanical ones that Sprokly’s grandfather had created and which had earlier fallen from the heavens. To find out why, they must go on a quest to Texas’s Highway 287, but it’s a long walk away, so they must steal her grandfather’s self-driving pickup truck.

Sprokly had reached the truck by the time I caught up to her. She opened the door, got in, and slammed it. My Pa was wrong. Some things are worse than stealing and lying. I got in the truck too, gasping, sweat burning my eyes. I got in because if I hadn’t, I’d have been something worse than a thief and liar. At first I couldn’t figure a word for it. But it finally came – I’d be alone.

Comments

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! I'm really glad you liked The Purple Basil. I haven't seen a whole lot of critical response to it yet, and I wasn't quite sure if it had hit the mark with readers.

But if it hit the mark with you, that's witchcraft enough. ;-P

M

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks. May I ask where and when your next short story will appear?

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you for asking! My next story, "The Serpent That Sleeps Beneath The Shards" is coming out in the next Talebones. For updates on upcoming pieces, you can pop over to my bibliography page: http://www.demimonde.com/biblio.html

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I guess I'd better go take a look at Talebones. It does sound like a neat magazine, and especially so with one of your stories in it.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

287? That goes through my hometown! Where are they trying to go?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Where are they trying to go?

To the other side.
Really.
That's where all the biological toads went so that the mechanical ones would stop wiping them out. The story is set the 1950s, in Quanah, where the author grew. (He apparently now lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, which makes me wonder if Mistress Tania knows him.)

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

The first non-biblical story I remember is The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. I admit to being a little cynical about a lot of fairy tales and myths, and I think that's because they so often talked about things I couldn't see until I was six and got glasses.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet sounds like Cheech & Chong trying to tell a bedtime story. Or maybe Ringo Starr.

You didn't get glasses until you were six? Bleh.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Well, apparently my mother almost died when she realized I'd been crossing main streets by myself for two years without actually being able to see beyond my nose. I taught myself to read when I was three and was developing my own version of calculus when I was six (you can imagine how annoyed I was when I found out someone else had already done it) and we didn't know I needed glasses until my folks decided I was antisocial. I didn't wave back to people or say hello to people who came into the room, etc., and so they took me to the base psych. He went back out and told them "There's nothing wrong with her; she's blind!" And that's when I got glasses. One of the major magic moments of my life.

As to the Mushroom planet, it's not what you think. It's a classic children's SF book.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

developing my own version of calculus when I was six (you can imagine how annoyed I was when I found out someone else had already done it)

In his memoirs, the late physicist Richard Feynman (see my icon) mentionned how, as a child, he had developped his own system of logarightmic notation. I think he then realized that it had already been done.

I am in awe of people like you.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not that smart anymore. I don't know if my brain is permanently less-smart or it's just all the meds.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Even if you are supposedly not that smart anymore, you probably are much smarter than me. And no, I'm not saying I'm stupid.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I know. I'm used to this.