Some people seem to think my dreams are funny. Here is one. It is long. Press J to skip.
I had a dream about Norse mythology that seemed rather funny after further examination. In my dream, the Norse gods were played by the actors from the gifsets, and you guys like the actors, so I thought you maybe you guys would like this dream. I have never seen a Thor Avengers movie, and I don’t even know what the actors sound like when they speak. But I’ve seen the Avengers actors in gifsets on my dash, and that was how my subconscious cast Thor and Loki. Thor was played by a big blonde Chris with arms like hams, and Loki was Tom Hiddlesworth doing his Tommy Wiseau impression. They wore perfectly normal clothes, though.
I’m also ashamed to share this in public. First because I fucked up about gallbladders, and then because I was defensive about it, and THEN I was a little shit, but oh well: you guys know me, hopefully you’ll forgive me for being an asshole in my dream.
The god Baldr was dead, as should be expected. In my dream, this meant that he had gone into Death, where he has been partying for millennia in a Very Gay Way, “breaking his mother’s heart,” leaving everyone’s messages on read, and is apparently refusing to be resurrected (my dream claimed this had always been an option for Norse gods) because he “likes the scene.” It was implied that the gods thought he was doing it to be subversive and grungy.
With the gods planning a large professional event of some kind, it was now required that Thor, in the capacity of “brother,” and Loki, in the capacity of “taking some goddamn responsibility for once,” go and get him back from Death, in order to attend the event.
So Thor and Loki went off to Earth, which is where Death is, to fetch Baldr. They started off in a canyon in the American West, and Thor promptly confused everyone, including my subconscious, by looking for a Tube stop. He did it with such confidence, despite the dreamscape itself resisting the idea of there being a branch of the London Underground in a canyon. Everyone, including my subconscious and Loki, were very offended when he actually found one.
And then Thor produced an Oyster card, which almost broke the whole dream.
Instead of calling bullshit and leaving, my subconscious was curious and invested. So I stuck with the dream, but accidentally stopped being the narrator, and manifested in the dream as myself walking next to them.
Thor confidently boarded a carriage and pondered the Tube map with beaming benevolence.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked, fascinated.
“Well, all of Earth is made of Ymir’s body,” said Thor, “So therefore I expect Baldr will be hanging around somewhere near the gallbladder.”
I looked at the Tube Map. The Tube Map was indeed not a map of London, but a map of a corpse of a god. Everything was nicely labeled. One stop was labeled “Giblets,” which stuck out in my mind.
So I sat next to the gods on the Tube. It was empty and pleasant.
“There’s no stop for gallbladder,” Loki pointed out after a while, in a very relatable tone.
“Oh, no,” Thor said. “Well, where are gallbladders? Normally, I mean?”
Loki stared at me pointedly.
“Er, under the liver,” I said, contributing to the conversation very much against my will.
“We’ll get off at Liver and walk,” said Thor decisively.
I was extremely alarmed by this, because this sounds so EXACTLY like the sort of thing that happens when you go to London with Other People, and then they fuck it up somehow and you end up having to get an Uber. I had forgotten that I could wake up, and became increasingly anxious that Thor was going to get us horribly lost. I worried about whether my Oyster card could take the strain.
We got off at Liver and walked. Liver appeared to be a grubby, underground version of Liverpool, which makes sense. Thor marched off confidently. Loki and I trailed behind him glumly, not looking at each other, like teenagers dragged out on an outing.
“I know EXACTLY where we are,” Thor kept saying cheerfully, darting suddenly down alleyways and then leaping out again, like Tigger. “We just need to take a left at the gallbladder.”
I began to suspect he just liked the word.
“Does he … actually … know what a gallbladder is?” I asked Loki privately.
“No,” Loki said.
Loki imparted to me wordlessly that he thought this was all some kind of bullshit Magic School Bus thing*. A product of Thor’s limited imagination. The limits of which we would quickly reach. And there will we be? he implied, wordlessly.
“Why a gallbladder?” I called to Thor. “Like, why are we going to the gallbladder in particular?”
Thor paused and the bouncy expression fell off his face. “I just thought…” he said. “I just thought.”
“Oh my God you’ve killed us all,” Loki told him.
“WE’LL BE FINE,” Thor said, automatically. And then he looked panicky and bolted off.
Loki and I huddled under a streetlight and looked around.
“Horrible things are going to start creeping out of the walls and attacking us,” Loki told me.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, because we fucked up,” Loki said.
“You leave me out of this,” I said. “I’m just here.”
“Oh, ’mememememememe, I know where gallbladders are,’” Loki said nastily, mimicking my voice.
I felt hot and sick all over and incredibly defensive, and (I am ashamed of this) lashed right back at him. “You’re the one who killed Baldr in the first place,” I said, “And you don’t even know basic anatomy. These are called consequences.”
Loki looked incredibly hurt by all of these points. We both felt bad, and stared at the ground.
“Okay, but technically holly killed Baldr,” Loki said after a while.
“Wait – mistletoe, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Was it mistletoe?” said Loki. And then something horrible came out of the wall and killed him.
!!!!!
Loki laid there dying and yelling “I told you, I told you”
Thor came running back to us, all “Oh, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have left you!” and we were like “You’re sorry? YOU’RE SORRY?!” and, not missing the opportunity to be little shits and twist the knife, even though a god was actually dying, we wailed together
with our largest most betrayed eyes,
“WE FOLLOWED YOU!”
because oh my god he killed us all and he needed to feel like shit for it.
and I was so pissed off and scared and upset that I realized I could wake up, so I did. In the transitional period, I was anxious that I had left them to a horrible fate, but then I decided that they “did this kind of thing all the time” and they would be all right.
* The note I made to remember the dream after waking up was “some kind of bullshit Magic School Bus thing,” and I thought that was the best part of the whole thing.
you will be pleased to know that being a theatrical little shit while temporarily dying is, in fact, peak movie loki. you nailed it
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
!.
You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.
Seriously, wow.
I often hear how Tumblr is a hellsite, but this is the main reason I love it – when things like this randomly cross my dash.
I just look at this and all I can feel is that it’s going to lead me to some fiendishly difficult puzzle that will require 27 pages of notes, a detail from two universes ago, and my dad to solve.
Nogling 