Drowned Men Can't Have Kids
Her father said at breakfast, "Drowned men can't have kids." He said it as if teaching Katy a lesson, or maybe as if she had asked.
"Dead people rot," he said. "They're dead. It doesn't make any sense."
I blame Karen Joy Fowler for the odd bit of fiction that is "Drowned Men Can't Have Kids". Not that I've ever met her, mind you. Rather, during my second year in university, I spent a lovely, lazy Saturday morning curled up in bed reading her short fiction collection Black Glass. Her narrative voice was haunting, captivating, and something about it was still ringing in my head as, driven by hunger, I at last rose and went in search of food.
But on the way to the kitchen I began speaking aloud, and the words that came out of my mouth are the ones reproduced above: the first few lines of this story. Still speaking, I rushed back to my room, fired up my computer, and typed furiously to keep up with the narrative still unfurling.
"Huh," I said when that first scene stared back at me from the screen. "I have no idea what that's about."
Nor did I know what it was about as I wrote the second scene, or the third, and yet scenes kept arriving in my head -- randomly, and out of order. "Drowned Men" was actually the first story I ever wrote out non-sequentially, so it was a strange and exhilarating experience, if a little unnerving. The first draft -- submitted to my university Creative Writing class, much to the bewilderment of my non-genre classmates -- was a little unwieldy, but with a few deletions and a little rearranging, I finally had a story that I was honestly and truly proud of. I was even happier when it became my first professional sale.
Published in Strange Horizons, August 2003.
