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Hopeless Tales

All of your aunties

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(Art by Dr Abbey, text by Nimue)

When you wake up, your aunty is all around you. When you went to sleep you thought that you had only one aunty, but now there seem to be a lot of her.

You may be feverish. You feel very cold – but it is normal to feel cold so this clarifies nothing.

You’ve heard that there are tiny magical creatures who some people call aunties. You do not think your aunty is a small magical creature but also you have no idea what would happen if an aunty gets inside an aunty.

“This is all perfectly normal” she tells you, and all of her mouths move at slightly different times.

This makes you wonder how many heads you have, and how many mouths, and whether you have woken up with the same number of eyes you had when going to sleep.

“It’s just a nightmare,” one of her mouths says.

You have the feeling she is lying to you.

“When you wake up it will all have been a dream.”

You do not want to go back to sleep, because you have no idea what will have been a dream. This vision? Your life? Everything you have known? If you go to sleep you might wake up into something even worse than this.

“You are just a bone remembering when you had flesh,” she says. “Go back to sleep.”

If this is the only life left to you then you do not want to give it up.

“You are just driftwood and dry seaweed imagining that you are a person, and having a nightmare,” she says, oh so sweetly.

You are drifting now, sliding gently towards oblivion with no confidence that there is anything in you capable of ever waking up again.

Hopeless

How Hopeless changes people

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The Aunties are agents of change, tiny Gods of changemaking and mayhem. Perhaps you’ve met them already. If you’ve read Keith Errington’s Oddatsea – published by Outland in the ‘Hopeless, Maine’ volume – you’ll have met The Aunties. You may also have found them here on the blog, in Merry’s story – https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/the-aunties/

Often the changes in the world made by Agents of Change are pretty random – at least from the perspective of people seeing the impact. They like a bit of asymmetry, hence the three legged chickens. They like getting in your storage jars and creating surprise flavours, for better or worse.

Most islanders prefer to think of fate as either cruel, or random. Life is considerably more bearable when you don’t have to take it so personally. Terrible things happen all the time for no reason. If you thought there was a reason for it you might go mad trying to find a way of keeping yourself safe. We can say with some confidence that placating the terrible gods of callous indifference gets you nowhere, and tends to make everything that little bit worse.

The Aunties are not distant, powerful beings who care nothing for your irrelevant mortal life. The Aunties are mighty, they believe in justice and they suffer dreadfully from boredom. As a consequence, they may do to you that which they believe you truly deserve. Unfortunately, the logic by which they operate is incomprehensible to the fragile human mind. Why one person grows a tentacle from their elbow, while another sprouts antlers from their head is utterly mysterious. 

The Aunties wish to make it known that they are not responsible for recent outbreaks of vampirism and people getting especially hairy at full moons. They have no idea how donkeys get on roofs, or where all the blood came from the other week. They are not all powerful and it annoys them immensely when people imagine they are *that* sort of gods, and can be expected to Do Things on demand. 

Do not pray to them, for they are not persuaded either by your distress or your ideas about how to fix things. Do not ask what sort of problem they thought you had that they felt could be solved with the sprouting of tentacles, or antlers, or whatever else they may have done to you.

(With thanks to Rostov for the loan of his face. By using his face on this post we are definitely not implying 1) that he’s actually Keith Errington or 2) that he really does have antlers. We’re fairly confident the hat is real.)

Hopeless Tales

The Aunties

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There are many strange and inexplicable things on the island, most of which you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark road at night, or even in weak sun at noon. There are weird beasties, worrying fogs, and innocuous-looking birds that scream. There are things that have been around as long as the island. And there are also things which have, perhaps, been around longer…

You might know them as the Agents of Change, or the Ocular Ones, or even the Aunties. Personally, they refer to themselves as Mildred, Ludmilla and Gertrude. They spend a lot of time floating around in saltwater, glaring at anything stupid enough to try eating them.

Their story, or at least a version of it, goes something like this: the island appeared. It came from somewhere. Ludmilla says it rose out of the ocean, Gertrude says it emerged from the fog, and Mildred says there was a geological phenomena involving an underwater volcano. All three agreed that it was messy and inconvenient, and for some time (a century or so) the Aunties were quietly outraged and considering how they might get rid of this lurking growly thing.

It was Gertrude who pointed out the persons.

“Well,” said Ludmilla, “I don’t know what they think they’re doing here. It’s not as if they’ll survive.” and she blinked her three eyes furiously.

“I don’t think it’s their fault,” Mildred warbled, “there’s bits of shipwreck everywhere.”

“Well that’s what you get when you sail ships close to mist-covered cursed places,” harrumphed Ludmilla.

“Oh the poor dears, they are trying,” trilled Gertrude, “look, they’re building things.”

“Bet they don’t even last a century,” said Ludmilla, and, after a pause, “That’s no way to go about building a house.”

The Autnies watched. They had a lot of eyes, after all, and the island couldn’t exactly get rid of them (even though it wanted to). It became clear that the island wasn’t letting its people go anywhere either.

If asked who started helping first, the Ocular Ones would shift and point tentacles and say things like: “I can’t very well go letting them eat that muck no can I?” or “Built his house right next to a soft spot in reality; of course I moved the whole thing!” or “Help is a strong word really, I just move resources around.” And if doing all this happened to remind the island who had been there first, well, that was merely a happy coincidence.

They did notice that, after a while, there were rather a lot more sea-beasts, some of whom thought that snacking on the Aunties was a valid life-option. The island, it seemed, was not happy with their meddling. Ludmilla, Gertrude and Mildred knew how to deal with fanged beasties though, and if they meddled a bit more and kept an eye on that nice young fisherman, well, all was well wasn’t it?

And then there was yet another beastie, sinking into the water.This beastie was different. This beastie wanted to change. And change was what the Aunties did.

Mildred made sure the nice fisherman found the now baby and took it home, and the three of them together made sure it would be mostly people-shaped. And then the Ocular Ones settled in for an interesting few years keeping an eye on the newest inhabitant.

“After all,” said Gertrude, “we’re almost like her parents now.”

“Hrrrummph,” said Ludmilla.

“Oh hush,” said Mildred, “we’ll miss all the interesting bits if you don’t quiet down.”

And they turned mobile eyes back towards the island, waiting…

Written by the entirely amazing Meredith Debonnaire. (We are fans of her work, obviously. She writes about Tantamount, which is probably a sister town with Hopeless, Maine. You can also find Angel Evans right about…here)
Art-Tom Brown