Fist of the Spider Woman

Fist of the Spider Woman

Fist of the
Spider Woman

Tales of Fear
&
Queer Desire

edited by
AMBER DAWN

FIST OF THE SPIDER WOMAN
Copyright © 2009 by the contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS
#102-211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6A 1Z6
www.arsenalpulp.com

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.

“Every Dark Desire” was previously published as Chapter Nine of
Every
Dark Desire
by Fiona Zedde (Kensington Publishing, 2007)

An earlier version of “Crabby” appears in
Rent Girls
by Michelle Tea (Last Gasp, 2004)

“Fear of Dying to the Wrong Song” was previously published in
The
Clichéist
by Amanda Lamarche (Nightwood Editions, 2005)

An earlier version of “Your Stockholm Syndrome” by Esther Mazakian was previously published in
Event
magazine

Cover illustration by Julie Morstad
Book design by Shyla Seller

Printed and bound in Canada on recycled paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Fist of the spider woman : tales of fear & queer desire /

edited by Amber Dawn.

ISBN 978-1-55152-251-7

eISBN 978-1-55152-276-0

1. Horror tales, Canadian (English). 2. Erotic stories, Canadian (English). 3. Lesbianism--Fiction. 4. Canadian fiction (English)- Women authors. 5. Canadian fiction (English)--21st century. I. Dawn, Amber, 1974-

PS 8323.L47F48 2009       C813'.0873808353

C2008-907446-7

Thank you

Many thanks to the team at Arsenal Pulp Press— Brian Lam, Robert Ballantyne, Shyla Seller, Janice Beley, Bethanne Grabham, and Susan Safyan—who have, once again, taken a risk in publishing a “risky” book. Thanks also to the cover artist Julie Morstad and to voluntary copy editor Kestrel Barnes.

Contents

What Are You Afraid of?
•
Amber Dawn

Slug
•
Megan Milks

Postulation on the Violent Works of the Marquis de Sade
•
Elizabeth Bachinsky

Further Postulation on the Vilent Works of the Marquis de Sade
•
Elizabeth Bachinsky

Conspiracy of Fuckers
•
Nomy Lamm

Every Dark Desire
•
Fiona Zedde

Homeland
•
Kristyn Dunnion

In Circles
•
Aurelia T. Evans

Your Stockholm Syndrome
•
Esther Mazakian

nascent fashion
•
Larissa Lai

Sido
•
Suki Lee

Crabby
•
Michelle Tea

in your arms forever
•
Courtney Trouble

Shark
•
Kestrel Barnes

All You Can Be
•
Mette Bach

Here Lies the Last Lesbian Rental in East Vancouver
•
Amber Dawn

Fear of Dying to the Wrong Song
•
Amanda Lamarche

Author Biographies

About the Editor

Introduction: What Are You Afraid Of ?

Amber Dawn

Maybe you remember this happening to you—a renegade coming of age when you realized that being
different
isn't such a bad thing after all, a time when you stopped wishing you fit into the crowd and started building an identity based on standing out from it.

For me, this happened around the time when my grandparents and teachers started referring to me as “young lady.” The awkward girl that I had been lifted her shy head and said, “I'm not afraid of you”—meaning curfews, school uniforms, church on Sundays, and any other rules that seemed to exist only to alienate and annoy me. It was then that I discovered a certain power in being different, in breaking the rules.

I kissed my first girl at a chaperoned slumber party, and graffitied my first wall at age twelve (it read “Fuck tha Police” not because my small Southern Ontario town had much of a police presence, but because as a preteen I believed I could truly relate to gangster rap group N.W.A.). I set fires in parking lots, and sucker-punched boys; I also dropped out of Niagara Catholic Secondary and transferred to a vocational high school where I was free to shave off all my hair and wear second-hand lingerie as outerwear. I became a
petite villaine
in my gossipy, close-knit community, a neophyte spider woman with no particular target to seduce or slay. In retrospect, I was just impatient to become the defiantly shameless queer femme I am today.

For many of us, discovering ourselves to be queer or otherwise rebellious women holds some parallels to the shaping of the fictional identities of comic book characters such as Spider Woman, Black Widow, or Gypsy Moth. We put on that “super suit” and thus separate ourselves from the world. But real-life rebellions, even preteen rebellions, don't take place unnoticed. And even though I fancied myself to be fearless, I found out early on that being a woman who sticks out often means being afraid. In high school, there were certain hallways that I avoided for fear of encountering the football team. Years later, I learned there were parts of town where I wouldn't dare to be caught holding hands with another woman. Later still, I realized that certain sex acts made me feel too vulnerable, anxious inside my own body.

These fears aren't mine alone. In fact, “What are you afraid of?” happens to be a standard question among my friends and partners. I suppose we do this as a means of meeting our fears together and to strategize various ways to be safe. Indeed, “safe” is a word frequently used by women: “Call me when you're back safe at home,” we might say to one another as we exit the dyke bar, tipsy and wearing our leather boots or low-cut dresses. And creating safety—from staffing rape crisis centres to organizing queer sex parties—largely remains women's work.

But if there is one thing that can be said about rebellious women, it's that we are masterminds at revamping what burdens us, at subverting things to our own advantage. Wallop us with insults— queer, freak, slut, bitch, cunt—and we'll turn them into terms of endearment. Give us yesterday's family dysfunction, and we'll transform it into today's kinky “daddy and little girl” role-play fantasy. As for reclaiming fear, a friend of mine perhaps summed it up best when she told me, “I took Wen-Do women's self-defence classes for years, and the only time I ever use it is to flip my girlfriend onto the bed and pin her down.”

I knew long before I began working on this anthology that queer feminine sexuality and fear made good bedfellows, especially when it comes to literature. I've spent many chilling and satisfying nights poring over Sarah Waters, Octavia Butler, and Kathy Acker novels. And I firmly assert that nothing tops off a self-indulgent beach vacation better than a book from the increasingly popular subgenre of lesbian vampire fiction, of which contributor Fiona Zedde is a champion (in “Every Dark Desire,” an excerpt from her novel of that name).

In
Fist of the Spider Woman,
fifteen daring authors frankly ask themselves, “What am
I
afraid of?” The aim is not to quell our fears, but to embrace them. In doing so, their work takes on an entirely different form than the familiar thrills of contemporary Hollywood horror films. Perhaps this is not surprising; after all, we are far from the narrowly defined, status quo heterosexuals scared that zombies will invade the suburbs. And let's be honest, if the blinkered characters from most horror films got a good look at what happens inside a radical queer woman's bedroom, they'd be as mortified as if a zombie were running through their neatly manicured back yards.
Fist
's contributors know what it means to operate outside of the norm. This puts us is in a position to uncover distinctively queer, distinctively woman-centered horrors, and bring life to empathy-worthy victims and villains rarely seen before.

You will not find comic book sidekicks cloned from archetypal male heroes among these pages. Nor will you find the home-wrecking spider woman of
noir
fiction, whose seductive powers only exist to oppose the story's decent and virginal female characters. Of the many versions of this character, perhaps the one that most suits
Fist
's contributors is a type of matrilineal spider woman as seen in First Nations mythology. This spider woman spins her web to create life, to make connections—her web represents the complex matrix of our relationship to the world and each other. Similarly,
Fist
contributors make connections between fear and desire, power and vulnerability, our internal feelings and external reality.

While all the contributors have honestly earned their title as rebellious women, you'll find their answers to the question “What are you afraid of?” richly diverse. Some have chosen to tackle very real and politically charged horrors, such as Nomy Lamm's tale of a poor, disabled genderqueer whose suspicions of government conspiracies prove to be more than mere paranoia in “Conspiracy of Fuckers,” or the hauntingly elusive yet grave portraits of women in war-torn nations seen in the excerpts from Larissa Lai's long poem “Nascent Fashion.” Michelle Tea and Amanda Lamarche use humour to trump horror; Tea's “Crabby,” a refreshingly multidimensional comic account of surviving pubic lice, reminds us that sexual and personal horrors are often connected, while an unusual phobia is the subject of Lamarche's poem “Fear of Dying to the Wrong Song
.
” Some also treat this anthology as an opportunity to give voice to their darkest, wildest fantasies. Megan Milks' oddly perverted story “Slug” is a perfect example of fear meets fantasy … and I won't spoil the ghastly and “fowl” ending to Suki Lee's romantic thriller, “Sido.”

Instead I will leave you to explore unique—different—fears and desires as revealed by
Fist of the Spider Woman
's extraordinary contributors.

Slug

Megan Milks

Patty will ask her date to walk her to the door. Patty will play I'm Frightened and Scared to Be Alone in the Deep Dark Night. Of course he will accompany her, despite the drizzle. He will be happy to. Delighted. Then Patty will push him up against the door so he's straddling the doorknob, so it's pressing into his ass crack, and shove his shoulders back, hard, and suck his tongue, hard, and rub his crotch, hard, and push his arms up and over his head and hold them there so that he is her prisoner. It is a good thing she wore her bitch boots tonight. It is a good thing she dressed to be prepared. She will take out her pocket knife and flip up the blade, and she will tickle him with it, slowly, deliberately, while he is still clothed, and she will increase pressure as she moves the knife down from his sternum to his pelvis. His stomach will retract involuntarily. She will press into it more. The flat side of the blade. This is foreplay, pre-foreplay. She will unlock the door, swing it wide, and step back, return to I'm Frightened, and she will squeak, It Looks Like There Could Be a Burglar, Won't You Please Check? I'm So Scared. He will play along, say, It Would Be My Pleasure to Check for the Burglar. Stay Behind Me, Stay Close. And he will grab her wrist firmly and push her behind him, stroking her wrist suggestively. It will be nice.

Patty's date works hard to clear his throat. The first try is phlegmy and meager, a throat-clearing that has miserably failed. He tries again, succeeds, changes the car radio to smooth jazz. Unbearable. Patty uncrosses, then recrosses her legs, begins to clench and unclench her thighs under her plain black skirt.