Introduction to
GO, GO, GO, SAID THE BIRD:
To know Sonya Dorman is to love her, if you’ll pardon the mickey-mouse on my part. Also, it might bug her husband Jerry, who has very powerful forearms, and with whom Sonya Dorman raises and shows Akitas (a kind of Japanese baby pony of a dog that looks as if it should want to tear out your jugular but generally only wants to slobber drool all over you in slaphappy friendliness) at their Parnassus Kennels in Stony Point, New York, which has got to be the most strictured syntax since Victor Hugo did a twenty-two-page sentence in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is the shape this sentence is in.
She writes, in reply to a request for autobiographical goodies: “My auto, story is so preposterous I hardly know what to tell you. I did not have a classical education. I went to private schools (progressive) in New England, with the result that I have very little education but am just crummy with culture. I grew up around horses but can’t afford them now, which is why I raise and show Akitas— the perceptive dog for sensitive people—in between writing poems and stories. Have been a cook, receptionist, riding instructor, flamenco dancer and married. I like speculative fiction because I believe art and science should be lovers, not enemies or adversaries.
None of the foregoing, of course, will prepare you for the genuine horror and immediacy of the story kindly little Sonya has written. A story that can only be compared, and then only remotely, with the work of the late Shirley Jackson. It also says nothing about the substantial reputation she has acquired in the last few years as a contributor to magazines as various as Cavalier, Galaxy, Redbook, Damon Knight’s excellent Orbit I anthology of originals, The Saturday Evening Whateveritis and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
You can read Leigh Brackett or Vin Packer or C. L. Moore and think jeezus, the muscularity of the writing, and when you find out they are women, you say, jeezus, they write like men, with strength. Or you read Zenna Henderson and think, jeezus, she writes just like a woman, all pastels. Or you can read Ayn Rand and think jeezus!
But that’s another line of criticism.
But when you read Sonya Dorman you don’t think of the muscularity of male writing. You read it as written by a woman, but there is no pretense. There is no attempt to emulate the particular strengths of male writing. It is purely female reasoning and attack, but it is strong. A special kind of tensile strength. It is what is meant by something turned out by a potent woman. It is a kind of writing only a woman can do. Carol Emshwiller, who is elsewhere in this book, has something like this strength, but most perfectly germinated is S. Dorman’s development. It deals with reality in the unflinching way women will deal with it, when they are no longer shucking themselves or those watching. And I submit it is all the more teeth-clenching for the relentless truth it proffers.
This is a memorable story, and provides merely one more facet of the talent that writes under the drab by-line S. Dor-man. It’s a by-line you might watch for.
* * * *
GO, GO, GO, SAID THE BIRD
by Sonya Dorman
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot
Seizing the shriek in her stained teeth, she ran away, in spite of the voices crying after her from every crevice and glittering façade. Faces at the broken windows became a college of grins as she ran, still holding the shriek between her teeth, determined not to let it escape. Her heels ached from pounding down the concrete highways, leaping over cracks and gaps in what used to be the most traveled road in the country.
“Oh no, no,” she sobbed as she ran.
Bindweed grasped her ankles and she tore it loose with frantic fingers and ran on.
Choices appeared at the roadside, the entrances to burrows, underground shanties. Once some thing flew down and landed near her, beckoning, but she shut her teeth on the writhing shriek and looked straight ahead, down the length of the cracked roadbed with its overgrown promenades at each side. She would continue on the obvious path, for fear of being lost beyond help.
“Here, chickie, here, chickie,” called an old woman, beckoning, grinning, offering her a hidey-hole, perhaps at the expense of her hide, for she was still young, and succulent.
“No, no, no,” she panted as she ran. For she was only thirty, and was unique, and to be eaten was all right, for people must exist, but to die was terrible. Plain and simple, she did not want to die. Not now, running for her life, and not ever, when her inevitable time came, but she was immediately concerned with now, and later on would have to take care of itself. Even as she ran, she began to tremble for later on, as if now weren’t severe enough.
Think of it, she conversed in great gasps with herself, leaping over a crevasse where a southbound lane had split off from the main runway. Think of it, she insisted, scarcely having breath left but unable to control her mind, which was galloping faster than her weary legs.
I’m only thirty, I’m unique, there’s no one in this world, this universe, who is me, with my memories:
* * * *
Snapshot No. 1
It had snowed. She stood in the sagging doorway, bundled up for winter in her fur leggings, and waited for Marn. They would hunt some animal for the stewpot. She saw things in negative, according to the moonlight: white trees, dark snow pockets. A feather seemed to breathe near her.
“Hey, come on,” Marn said, taking her by the shoulder, and they drifted like two dark flakes on to the powdered grass, toward the woods. “We’ll smoke it,” Marn said confidently, and the water ran into her mouth. The smokehouse was hot and dark, a womb out of which the good things were trundled for distribution. It was her good luck to be headman’s woman. Her children were less cold and hungry. Still, she had a greasy feeling, somewhere, when she heard the cries of other children. Marn said it was because she was young.
Her furs had lateral stripes like those of a tiger. She was a headman’s daughter, and wife of a headman. She was tall, educated, privileged, and at length on the sleeping skins she would burn like fat in Marn’s fire.
* * * *
“Come on, rest a wee,” a young girl called to her, but she put on a burst of speed, for the girl’s teeth were shining like daggers, and as she went, she sobbed to herself (saving her real breath for the running), No, I can’t die, I’m not ready to. Oh no, no, and it was the same sound she had made that winter when:
* * * *
Snapshot No. 2
The orchards had borne no fruit and the deer were famished. Back into the mountains withdrew all animals except those that were slaughtered where open water ran. By solstice there was no open water left. The fish slept at the bottom of the lake. Smelts would not rise to the cold, blue holes cut by the fishers. The leathers cracked and split on their feet, the chimney of the smokehouse stopped breathing, most of the fires were silent.
Into this famine was born her third child, with a bad foot. Holding him up in the air, Marn said, “He is not good,” and snapped his neck.
“Oh no,” she cried, holding her swollen abdomen with both palms and feeling the blood run down her thighs. “No, no,” she cried to the headman, her man, for nine months in the hot dark, waiting, only to come to this? We are all going to come to this?
Marn handed the dead baby to the old woman, who took him out to the smokehouse. She lay in her blood and tears, crying, for the sizzled fat on the baby. Then the eyes dried, hers, and the baby’s, in the fire smoke, and she felt it was all more than could be asked of any woman.
* * * *
When the broken concrete split into a fork, one side going south, one west, she would have paused, to determine her advantage, but at the crotch of the fork two youngsters arrived with knives.
She wanted more than anything to stop and rest. There was no alternatives offered her; either she must run and run, or she must stop and be killed. She couldn’t prevent her mind from balancing one against the other, even while she knew it was no choice to make.
“Catch your breath,” the youngsters jeered at her, and she chose the west road without thinking. One of them hurled a chancy knife after her, which split open the skin of her shoulder. Ignoring the pale blood which poured down, she went on. I can’t die now, she thought. I’m not ever going to die. I am the only I in this world. She knew there was too much of her to be lost, much which could never be anyone else, and it was all precious and irreplaceable. Why didn’t they realize how important it was for her to survive? She contained:
* * * *
Snapshot No. 3
After the hard winter, the iron world split open and flowers came up. It was so astonishing. She passed the place where Marn’s last bone was buried (only a headman would have his skull buried, intact, the jaws still hinged as if speaking to his community) and went down to the riverbank where the children were bathing. Her Neely stood tall this spring. In spite of food shortages over the winter, he had filled out. At least Daddyporridge had helped to nourish him, and give him this spring strength.
“Ah, spring,” said a lazy voice. There was Tichy, under the willow. He might have been next headman, but was too lazy, and more likely destined for the smokehouse if he didn’t mind himself. Yet several community members had discovered he was quicker and livelier than predicted, and Marn himself had died under Tichy’s hammer.
“Oh yes, it certainly is spring,” she said, walking very slowly, approaching him with great care. For if he had disposed so quickly of her man, and was idling here, watching her son, what next?
Tichy put out an unclenched hand toward her, and she was surprised to take it and find it so warm. Then another surprise followed, for he gave a quick, skillful pull, and she fell full length on his body.
“Oh, no,” she said, half smothered in his chin whiskers. “No, Tichy,” for his teeth were at her and she didn’t know, caught in his arms and legs, whether she was going to be loved or eaten or one at a time, or why.
“Hell yes.” Tichy said. “After all, why not?”
He was reasonable. He let her have the best blanket in his hardwood hut, and when she couldn’t find enough flavoring for the stew in the pot, he ate it anyway, without beating her.
* * * *
Desperately holding the shriek, that siren to call them all out after her, between her teeth, she went on and on, breath rasping in her worn throat.
She would get back to Tichy. She was not going to die. There couldn’t be anything in the world that really demanded her death, could there? Neely had taken the daughter of Gancho, a dark, low-browed girl with a peculiar sense of rightness. Not bad, she thought. Very good for Neely. I must get back before she has the baby. Who else will help her? She mustn’t have the first one alone, only I can help her. I am needed, really, truly, I am needed very much. She’ll be all alone, because:
* * * *
Snapshot No. 4
Toward fall, when not even the wannest rains brought up another spear of wild asparagus, Neely and Tichy had a fight on the north slope of the dead orchard. Tichy gave Neely a blow with his hammer which knocked the young one over and might have done for him. Yet Neely got up on his feet once more, with his lips writhen back from his dark gums, showing his five teeth. Watching from the roof of the hardhut, she saw Neely rise up on his toes and split open Tichy’s skull.
“That’s my son!” she cried at the top of her lungs.
Then Neely brought home the dark girl, who snorted when he made love to her, and never got tired, and kept the floor swept. It was all right to have another woman in the hut, and especially a woman who understood the right and traditional. She was, after all, a headman’s daughter, and not to be displaced.
* * * *
“Gotcha!” yelled a woman, almost falling on her as she swerved along an embankment. She kicked the woman in the belly and heard the anguished groan as she ran on.
“No, you haven’t,” she gasped, not just to the groaning woman, but to all of them, to the world. What made her think she would get back to Tichy, who was dead, skull and all? The grandchildren would welcome her. They were good children, lean and hard as nuts, the likeness of Neely. They’d be glad to see her, who would dandle them, feed them special treats, stir the stewpot for the dark girl while she and Neely went hunting. If the deer ever came back she would make them a roast. The drought had been so bad all summer the snakes had come. First the copperheads, with their smell of garlic in the mating season, like brown worms on the stones of the old world. Then the rattlers, with their hysterical warning which came too late. Poisoned flesh was worse than no flesh. Moreover, a snakebitten person was generally dismembered before the poison had a chance to spread.
Now as she ran she saw landmarks of home which echoed in her mind. The country became happily familiar, for she had hunted here, with Marn, and then with Tichy. She wasn’t going to die, not this time, not now, she would of course continue, for she was she, unique, full, splendid!
“I gotcha!” someone screamed in her ear, and she felt the blow, shattering her, and lay stunned by the side of the road, her muscles still running. The snapshots began to flicker in her mind; seasons of the year, people she had known, her sons, her daughters, herself above all, the only one, the only I am I in all the world of stars.
“No, no,” she moaned as the man raised the ax over her forehead.
“Oh yes, yes,” he said grinning with pleasure. Behind him the rest of the hunting party appeared. It was Neely with the dark girl, and two lean children.
“Neely,” she screamed. “Save me. I’m your mother.”
Neely grinned too, and said, “We’re all hungry.”
The ax fell, breaking her pictures into pieces, and they fell like snowflakes to the ground, where a little dust rose up and began to slowly settle. The small children began to squabble over the thumb bones.
* * * *
Afterword:
Perhaps I wrote the story because sometimes that’s the way the world seems, or perhaps I hope that when my daughter’s generation grows up it won’t need or want to run for its life, or perhaps because in the seventeenth century, Jeremy Taylor wrote: “.. . when it is enquired whether such a person be a good man or no, the meaning is not what does he believe, or what does he hope, but what he loves.” Amen.
* * * *