"What Still Abides"

Let me tell a tale of my father's kin, for in me runs their blood, and so to me falls this burden: to keep the knowledge, the old-thought, the shape of how it began, as my father gave it to me.

---

This is the short story that tried to kill me.

I have never had so much difficulty writing 2200 words in my life. Some stories come easier than others, but this one was like pulling teeth from beginning to end. And there is a good reason for that.

It is written entirely in Germanic-derived words.

This is sometimes called "Anglish" or "Ander-Saxon": the English language sans Latinate words (or Greek-derived ones, or anything else non-Germanic). Depending on what you're trying to say, this isn't so hard. It's easy, for example, to replace "comprehend" with "understand." Other things . . . yeah. "Memory" is Latinate, and so are its synonyms: recollection, remembrance, record. "Endure" is Latinate. For the love of god, FACE is Latinate.

I could not have written this story without the services of the Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford Historical Thesaurus, Panlexicon, and Sara Bryan, the last of whom served as my Old English language consultant, steering me away from unsuitable constructions (did you know there's arguably no passive voice in OE?) and prodding me when I accidentally slipped up in my vocabulary ("courage" is Latinate; I want to light the English language on fire).

Oh, and the story itself? It's what happens when I take the English folksong "John Barleycorn" too literally. "And we shall drink his blood!"

"What Still Abides" will be appearing in the fourth volume of Mike Allen's Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. The full table of contents for the anthology is:

• Yves Meynard, "Our Lady of the Thylacines
• Ian McHugh, "The Canal Barge Magician.s Number Nine"
• Nicole Kornher-Stace, "On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse"
• Richard Parks, "Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl"
• Gemma Files, "Trap-Weed"
• Yukimi Ogawa, "Icicle"
• A.C. Wise, "Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story"
• Marie Brennan, "What Still Abides"
• Alisa Alering, "The Wanderer King"
• Tanith Lee, "A Little of the Night"
• Cat Rambo, "I Come from the Dark Universe"
• Shira Lipkin, "Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw"
• Corinne Duyvis, "Lilo Is"
• Kenneth Schneyer, "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer"
• Camille Alexa, "Three Times"
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly"
• Patricia Russo, "The Old Woman with No Teeth"
• Barbara Krasnoff, "The History of Soul 2065"

It will be released in Summer 2013.