City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

Dradin looked around his room. How bare it was for all that he had lived some thirty years. There was his redhandled machete, balanced against the edge of the dresser drawers, and his knapsack, which contained powders and liquids to cure a hundred jungle diseases, and his or anges cuffed boots beside that, and his coins on the table, the gold almost crimson in the light, but what else? Just his suitcase with two changes of clothes, his yellowing, torn diploma from the Morrow Institute of Religiosity, and daguerreotypes of his mother and father, them in their short lived youth, Dad not yet a red-faced, broken-veined lout of an academic, Mom’s eyes not yet squinty with surrounding wrinkles and sharp as bloodied shards of glass.

What did the woman’s room look like? No doubt it too was briskly clean, but not bare, oh no. It would have a bed with white mosquito net ting and a place for a glass of water, and her favorite books in a row beside the bed, and beyond that a white and silver mantel and mirror, and below that, her dresser drawers, filled to bursting with

frilly night things and frilly day things, and filthily frilly twilight things as well. Powders and lotions for her skin, to keep it beyond the pale. Knitting needles and wool, or other less feminine tools for hobbies. Perhaps she kept a vanilla kitten close by, to play with the balls of wool. If she lived at home, this might be the extent of her world, but if she lived alone, then Dradin had three, four, other room to fi ll with her loves and hates. Did she enjoy small talk and other chatter? Did she dance? Did she go to social events? What might she be thinking as she read the book, on the fi rst page of which was written:

THE REFRACTION OF LIGHT IN A PRISON
(Being an Account of the Truffi dian Monks Held in the Dungeons of the Kalif, For They Have Not Given Up Sanity, or Hope)

BY:
Brother Peek
Brother Prowcosh
Brother Witamoor
Brother Sirin
Brother Grae

(and, held unfortunately in separate quarters, communicating to us purely by the force of her will, Sister Stalker)

And, on the next page:

THE MYSTICAL PASSIONS
The most mystical of all passions are those practiced
by the water people of the Lower Moth, for though
they remain celibate and spend most of their lives
in the water, they attain a oneness with their mates
that bedevils those lesser of us who equate love
with intercourse. Surely, their women would never
become the objects of their desire, for then these
women would lose an intrinsic eroticism.

Dradin read on impatiently, his hands sweaty, his throat dry, but, no, no, he would not rise to drink water from the sink, nor release his tension, but must burn, as his love must burn, reading the self-same words. For now he was in truth a missionary, converting himself to the cause of love, and he could not stop.

Outside, along the lip of the valley, lights began to blink and waver in phosphorescent reds, greens, blues, and yellows, and Dradin realized that preparations for the Festival of the Freshwater Squid must be underway. On the morrow night, Albumuth Boulevard would be cleared for a parade that would overflow onto the adjacent streets and then the entire city. Along the avenues, candles wrapped in boxes of crepe paper would appear, so that the light would be like the dancing of the squid, great and small, upon the midnight salt water where it met the mouth of the Moth. A celebration of the spawning season, when males battled mightily for females of the species and the fisher folk of the docks would set out for a month’s trawling of the lusting grounds, hoping to bring back enough meat to last until winter.