The Lobster Dance

I wanted to include some podcasts in this list, but I stopped listening to Pseudopod about a year ago after yet another horror story with a graphic rape scene with no content warning.* Podcastle, which often has good fantasy horror during Halloween, featured Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch.” This short story is a loose retelling of “The Girl with the Green Ribbon,” and references the role of a lot of similar folklore and not-quite-urban legends. The story was nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award.

Some spoilers and medical/pregnancy discussion below.

The story appears to be set in the 1950s or 60s. The narrator, a teen, meets a young man; during sex in the woods, he asks about the green ribbon she wears. Eventually they marry and have a child, and he keeps bothering her about the ribbon. The narrator takes a women’s art class, raises their son, sends him to college, and her husband keeps asking about the ribbon. And then–

One of the most notable parts is the narrator’s attraction to another woman, whom she meets in women’s art class that she takes to get out of the house after her child goes to school. Bisexual spotted! I love that her bisexuality isn’t the point of the story or, worse, an element of horror.**

The choice of title (“The Husband Stitch”) refers to the practice of adding “an extra stitch” during the repair of tearing during vaginal birth to improve tightness, because women’s (and AFAB) sexuality is always framed in terms of men’s pleasure, which is just as gross as it is socially normalized. Using that as the title, rather than “The Girl with the Green Ribbon,” reframes the story as one about gender roles instead than just a retelling. Ultimately, the narrator’s husband’s need to possess her–and the concept of women as possessions–is the real horror, not what is under the ribbon.

Read it here or listen to it here:

Podcastle: Read | Listen (read by Gabrielle de Cuir)

Granta Magazine: Read | Listen (read by Rosalind Porter)

Rated R for detailed descriptions of sex. Contains men who fetishize women: scary story edition, sex in the woods, emotional abuse, that moment you realize your partner is using you because he just can’t let it go, suburbia.

*Yes, it was part of Artemis Rising and written by a woman, but that doesn’t make it feminist, especially if wasp-man rape is just going to come out of nowhere, AGAIN, FOR NO REASON.

**Side note: realizing you’re queer is completely natural; the real monster is the way society (well, societies) has treated sexual diversity as a sickness. That is, monsters get queer-coded (more on this in a later post) by cisgender straight people and the social systems that supports them; yet suppressing and oppressing others should be the real monster.