Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline, page 1
part #1 of Punked Up Fairy Tales Series
Praise for Grimm, Grit, and Gasoline
“Magic mixes with grease and jazz in this fantastic new anthology that brims with strong heroines, diverse settings, and a heaping helping of Nazi-punching.”
—Nebula Award-nominated Beth Cato, author of Breath of Earth
“These unfailingly clever tales are impressive and page-turning, helping to correct the dearth of speculative fiction set in the interwar era. There is also a frequent and welcome spotlight on heroic women. Any reader who enjoys early-20th-century history or retold fairy tales will find these familiar but new, with well-played wonder in every story.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Description
Dieselpunk and decopunk are alternative history re-imaginings of (roughly) the WWI and WWII eras: tales with the grit of roaring bombers and rumbling tanks, of ‘We Can Do It’ and old time gangsters, or with the glamour of flappers and Hollywood starlets, smoky jazz and speakeasies. The stories in this volume add fairy tales to the mix, transporting classic tales to this rich historical setting.
Two young women defy the devil with the power of friendship. The pilot of a talking plane discovers a woman who transforms into a swan every night and is pulled into a much more personal conflict than the war he’s already fighting. A pair of twins with special powers find themselves in Eva Braun’s custody and wrapped up in a nefarious plan. A team of female special agents must destroy a secret weapon—the spindle—before it can be deployed. Retellings of The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, The Monkey King, Swan Lake, Pinocchio and more are all showcased alongside some original fairy tale-like stories.
Featuring stories by Zannier Alejandra, Alicia Anderson, Jack Bates, Patrick Bollivar, Sara Cleto, Amanda C. Davis, Jennifer R. Donohue, Juliet Harper, Blake Jessop, A.A. Medina, Lizz Donnelly, Nellie Neves, Wendy Nikel, Brian Trent, Alena VanArendonk, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Sarah Van Goethem, and Robert E. Vardeman.
GRIMM, GRIT, AND GASOLINE
Dieselpunk and Decopunk Fairy Tales
A Punked Up Fairy Tales anthology
Edited by Rhonda Parrish
World Weaver Press
Copyright Notice
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of World Weaver Press.
GRIMM, GRIT, AND GASOLINE
Copyright © 2019 Rhonda Parrish
See Copyright Extension for details on individual stories.
All rights reserved.
Cover layout and design by Sarena Ulibarri
Cover images used under license from DepositPhotos.com.
All rights reserved.
Published by World Weaver Press, LLC
Albuquerque, New Mexico
www.WorldWeaverPress.com
First edition: September 2019
Also available in paperback - ISBN-13: 978-1732254664
This anthology contains works of fiction; all characters and events are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Please respect the rights of the authors and the hard work they’ve put into writing and editing the stories of this anthology: Do not copy. Do not distribute. Do not post or share online. If you like this book and want to share it with a friend, please consider buying an additional copy.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Rhonda Parrish
“Circles and Salt” by Sara Cleto
“Salvage” by A.A. Medina
“The Loch” by Zannier Alejandra
“Evening Chorus” by Lizz Donnelly
“To Go West” by Laura VanArendonk Baugh
“Bonne Chance Confidential” by Jack Bates
“늑대 - The Neugdae” by Juliet Harper
“The Rescue of Tresses Malone” by Alena Van Arendonk
“Daughters of Earth and Air” by Robert E. Vardeman
“Easy as Eating Pie” by Amanda C. Davis
“Accidents are Not Possible” by Sarah Van Goethem
“A Princess, a Spy, and a Dwarf Walked into a Bar Full of Nazis” by Patrick Bollivar
“Steel Dragons of a Luminous Sky” by Brian Trent
“Ramps and Rocket” by Alicia K. Anderson
“As The Spindle Burns” by Nellie K. Neves
“Make This Water No Deeper” by Blake Jessop
“One Hundred Years” by Jennifer R. Donohue
“Things Forgotten on the Cliffs of Avevig” by Wendy Nikel
About the Anthologist
More Anthologies Edited by Rhonda Parrish
Copyright Extension
Introduction
Rhonda Parrish
Inevitably when someone attempts to describe or define dieselpunk or decopunk they begin with, “It’s like steampunk, except…” and I really wanted to avoid doing that, mostly to be different. But the thing is, steampunk is a genre that speculative fiction readers generally have a pretty good grasp of, so it actually does make the perfect jumping off point when explaining dieselpunk and decopunk. So I will ask you to forgive me for this, but…
Dieselpunk is like steampunk, except that where steampunk draws its aesthetics from Victorian and Edwardian times and features steam-powered technology, dieselpunk pulls from a later time period and is much more about the roar of massive engines than bustles and parasols. Steampunk is brass and glass, dieselpunk is iron and grease. And I like to think of decopunk as dieselpunk’s flapper sister. Similar time period, but all dolled up and ready for a night out on the town.
I’ve noticed a bit of wiggle room when it comes to the time period that defines dieselpunk, but mostly it seems to be the interwar period—the years between the first and second World Wars. For this anthology, though, I stretched that and asked for stories set between the start of WWI and the end of WWII… and then I blatantly broke my own rule and included a story from the Korean War.
I actually broke a couple rules, not just of dieselpunk and decopunk, but of fairy tales. Some of these fairy tales, you will find, are not actually fairy tales. They are fairy tale-ish. Or folkloric.
And there might be a couple ‘dustpunk’ stories (alternate histories from the dust bowl days of the dirty thirties) in here too, so there’s another rule bent.
But I’m not losing sleep over bending or breaking those rules, and the anthology is stronger for it.
I feel like, in some ways, this anthology has been inevitable. At the very least it is my childhood meshing together with my middle-age in a glorious storytastic way. I spent a great deal of my childhood and several years of my adult life living in Nanton, Alberta. Nanton is a small town that is best known for being home to a Lancaster bomber—one of only seventeen remaining in the world.
The bomber is now securely housed inside a museum there in Nanton, but when I was a kid it was just sort of parked outside right by a playground, and I spent a lot of time in that playground. My brother, cousins and I used to climb around the plane’s wheels as much as we did the monkeybars. And then they one day there was a chain link fence around the bomber. And then a building…
But one day, one magical day before the building or the fence, someone with some authority let us go through the Bomber. He’d pulled up a set of stairs to a door near the tail for some reason or another, and he gave us a quick and dirty tour through it. I don’t know if this was a community event or if we just happened to be at the right place at the right time—my memory of that is fuzzy—but the inside of that bomber left a very definite impression on me.
I think that might be where this anthology started. All those years ago when I was crawling through the belly of the bomber trying not to bump my head or catch myself on anything, and imagining how it must have been for the men who’d flown in it.
After that I had a low-key but persistent interest in WWI and WWII—in fact, interesting side note, the first ever time I made money writing was when I won second place in an essay contest about Remembrance Day that was sponsored by our local Legion (at that time I was living in Vulcan, Alberta so that was the Royal Canadian Legion Branch #21)—but that interest really came to head a few years ago when I transcribed my grandmother’s autobiography.
Reading about my grandmother’s experiences. About her father who fought during the Great War with the 50th Battalion, and eventually died from injuries sustained during a gas attack, and how profoundly and personally that affected her. Reading about her brothers who went on to fight in WWII. Seeing her bitterness spilled across the page that after her father sacrificed so much in the ‘war to end all wars’ there was another war before the memory of the first had even lost its rough edges… well it personalized it for me in a way that nothing else had before, and re-ignited my interest in it.
And then I discovered dieselpunk and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” It was awesome. And then dieselpunk introduced me to decopunk and I knew I wanted to create something within those genres. Combining them with another lifelong fascination of mine—fairy tales and their retellings—just seemed like a perfect fit. And the timing couldn’t be better.
I proposed this anthology to my publisher, Sarena, right about the same time as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A time when it seemed like the world could possibly benefit from a reminder that Nazis are bad and fascism must be stopped wherever it may be foun
And now we’re releasing it in 2019—the perfect time for the Nazi-fighting of dieselpunk, the subversive spirit of decopunk, and the hope and happily ever afters of fairy tales.
Rhonda Parrish
Edmonton
February 2019
Circles and Salt
Sara Cleto
“When therefore the time was over, and the day came when the Evil-one was to fetch her, she washed herself clean, and made a circle round herself with chalk. The devil appeared quite early, but he could not come near to her.”—Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Before I leave my room each morning, I slide my silver gloves into place. I used to worry that people would notice them and ask questions. The only other gloves I’d seen before arriving in the city were the tough leather gloves that I sometimes wore on the farm when I needed to protect my skin from splinters and briars. These gloves, my silver gloves, are light as cobwebs before dewdrops weight their strands.
But here in the city, all the women wear gloves, and no one gives mine a second glance. Their fingers are wrapped in velvet and lace or netting and beads. Sometimes, they pull them off and let them rest on the table next to their drinks. When I bring round the pitcher of water, I see opals and emeralds gleaming on their fingers as they tap the table in time with the music. I never take mine off, not when I’m carrying a tray of drinks or tilting the microphone down to my lips.
In my gloves, I could be anyone. I could be Elodie of the empty glasses, Elodie of the syncopated notes, Elodie from upstate or overseas or a dream. Without them, the narrative possibilities narrow to one, and I refuse to live in only one song and not of my making.
Besides, my hands have been cold for years.
I’ve been working at the Pear Tree for almost two months now. I was lucky to get the job at all—two boys had quit, one after the other, the day I wandered in, brushing snow off my coat and grimacing when the flakes melted into my gloves. My request for a whiskey was met by a harried look from the woman behind the bar. “You can have two whiskies on the house if you’ll clear those tables for me,” she said, sliding me a glass with one hand and gesturing towards a cluster of tables crowned with dirty glasses. I’d stayed all night, tossing back drinks and a bowl of thick vegetable stew between table-runs. The bartender must have liked the quickness of my feet—I didn’t sit down once—and she offered the room upstairs and more of the same if I’d come back the next day.
I’ve been here ever since.
The bartender—her name was Rona, I’d learned that the first night—decided she liked having an employee who didn’t mind taking orders from a woman, and gave me room, board, and seven dollars a week for helping her run the Pear Tree. She tried to make me sit down occasionally during my shifts, but I tugged at the wrists of my gloves and kept moving.
I don’t stand still, not for long. Rona thinks it’s because I’m young, full of spunk and life, dancing from sunup to sundown. It’s much simpler to let her think that I move for the sake of the music that always fills the club, for the sensation of my short curls brushing my neck. I can’t imagine trying to tell her the truth, so I smile and shiver and keep moving.
***
The truth is that I’ve been dancing, moving, running since I was fourteen. Before that, I was a dreamier creature altogether, a girl who could sink into stillness like a bucket into a well. I loved reading. I loved the slow, methodical way soup came together in a pot if I stood beside it and stirred. I loved watching the leaves fall from the apple tree outside my window. My father called me lazy, though I tended all the animals on his farm and made three meals for us each day. The way I could stand still and look steadily at anything made him uncomfortable.
He says he didn’t mean to do it, and I do my best to believe him, but at night when I lay in bed, careful to keep my arms and legs tucked carefully into my body, I am quite sure he did.
Everyone knows not to trust strangers in the wood. But when a man with a black hat and cold, cruel smile told him he’d pay half a million dollars for whatever stood in his backyard, he agreed.
“Well of course I thought it was nothing but the apple tree,” he told me later. “How was I to know you were out there, staring at nothing? You should have been busy making dinner by then.”
I looked at him in the steady way he hated for a long moment. Then I moved.
***
Always, the Pear Tree hummed with conversation, music punctuated with the scrape of chairs against the floor and the clink of glasses against each other and the round cocktail tables scattered across the large room. Small beaded lamps provided the only light, concealing nearly as much as they revealed. Sequins flashed on gowns and headbands, and teeth gleamed behind red lipstick as patrons moved between pools of light.
Tonight, the club positively brimmed with people, silk and the scents of leather and gin. The room was a perfect, unchoreographed dance, and I, at its center, was safe. I felt my muscles relax, my spine unstiffen as I went to stand behind my microphone.
Every day, when I arrived at work, the first thing I did was to lift the small burgundy rug and check the ring of chalk I had drawn there, on the ground beneath the microphone. Once I was sure the circle was perfect and whole, I could step inside and be still.
The band, brassy and sweet as always, brought their song to a close. The pianist shot me a toothy grin before launching fingers across the keys in the first bars of my opening song, a sinuous rendition of “My Blue Heaven.” I felt my way back into stillness as I sang, letting my feet plant themselves against the floor. At first, I swayed with the music as words poured from my throat, but soon I let myself rest until all that moved was my mouth around the words and my eyes around the room.
Rona’s daughter was here again tonight. Though we hadn’t been introduced, the tight curl of her hair and the dimples in her cheeks were unmistakably her mother’s. Her gloves were short and dazzlingly white against her brown skin, and her back and her gaze were straight as an arrow. She seemed at home with herself in a way that I could almost remember feeling, and I could almost imagine feeling that way again when I looked at her. Almost.
She found me behind the bar after my set.
“A gin rickey, please,” she said. Her voice was soft and smooth, as if she’d been drinking bee’s knees full of honey rather than water, which is all she’d had since she came in the door an hour ago.
I nodded at her and pulled a highball glass off the shelf and added a few lumps of ice.
“Your voice is extraordinary,” she said. “Where did you learn to sing like that?”
Squeezing a lime over the glass, I looked up at her. She wasn’t leaning against or over the bar but standing up straight on the other side, her head cocked a little to the side as if waiting for my answer.
“Nowhere, really.” When she didn’t press for more but waited quietly for her drink, I added, “My mother sang when I was little. I guess I learned to love it from her.” Gin, then soda joined the lime in the glass.
The girl nodded. “It reminds me of a voice in a story I read once.”
I slid her the glass, smooth and quick, so the soda fizzed against the gin but didn’t splash over the top. “What’s your name?”
She smiled. “June.”
“I’m Elodie. What story?”
She laughed. “It was a in book of fairy tales. The story was about a mermaid who wanted to be on land. She wanted it so much that she gave up her voice, the source of her power and magic. She did it for a prince”—here she made a face, and I laughed out loud—“which all seemed like rather a pity, and she died in the end.”
“I remind you of a ninny-mermaid?” I asked.
“No, no, just your voice. It sounds like something magic.”
“That sounds dangerous,” I said mildly. “You’re Rona’s daughter?”
“Yes. I’m between jobs, so I’m home for a visit,” June said. “I play the trumpet. You ever sing in a band?”
“Me? No, I just sing here sometimes, on nights they need me to fill in.”
“You should think about it. I know it pays better—I’ve worked here, too!” She dropped a few coins on the counter and slipped into the kitchen.
