My Boat

"My Boat" is a short story by Joanna Russ that first appeared in the January 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was included in the revised edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Arkham House, 1990). The story ties in explicitly to H. P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories.
== Synopsis ==
A writer, Jim, is in a restaurant, telling his agent Milty a story about two kids he knew in high school in 1952. Cissie is a brilliant but troubled Black student from Brooklyn, bused in to his Long Island high school for desegregation. He and his friend Al initially try to get her kicked out of school for not being "normal," but then become her protectors and soon her admirers. 
Cissie offers to show Jim and Al her boat, named My Boat, tied up at a Long Island marina. The boat appears at first to be a simple weather-beaten rowboat, but becomes bigger and more luxurious every time Jim looks at it. Cissie and Al also transform, from awkward teenagers to heroic characters out of fantasy; they talk of exotic lands they have sailed to on their ship, Cissie mentioning places from African and Mediterranean history, and Atlantis; Al referring to places from H. P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories. Jim hesitates to join them on the ship; when his back is turned, My Boat depart, leaving Jim behind and unable to explain Cissie and Al's disappearance. 
Many years later, Jim sees Al again, still a teenager; he has returned to retrieve a book he left behind, H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. As the story ends, Al appears in the restaurant, and Jim finally seems ready to go with him.
== Characters ==
Jim: A writer who attended Central High on Long Island, New York, "a public high school but very fancy." He was raised "sort-of-nothing Jewish." He looks back on himself as "a damned fool...even considering your run-of-the-mill, seventeen-year-old white liberal racist."
Milty: Jim's agent. He once sold an H. P. Lovecraft film project, but is only interested in the percentage he got from it.
Alan Coppolino: Jim's friend, an "Italian punk" who is "five foot three and so brilliant no other kid could understand half the time what he was talking about." His family is "sort-of-nothing-really Catholic." The "Woody Allen of Central High," he reads "crazy books" like The Cult of Cthulhu, Dagon Calls, and The Horror Men of Leng.
Cecilia Jackson: A "little black girl aged fifteen" from Brooklyn who is "some kind of genius," particularly in drama; she's known as Cissie. She saw her father killed by a white cop when she was five. Her mother is poor and a strict Christian, forbidding Cissie to go to parties, dance, or wear makeup. She spends time briefly in a mental hospital. Jim observes, "I guess her imagination just had to find some way out." She is four foot eleven, weighs 85 pounds, and wears her hair in a "natural."
== Publication History ==
Beyond Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, "My Boat" has been anthologized many times, including in The 1977 Annual World's Best SF (DAW Books, 1977), The 1977 Annual World's Best SF (Doubleday, 1977), The World's Best SF. 4 (Dennis Dobson, 1979), Wollheim's World's Best SF: Series Six (DAW Books, 1982), and Sorcerers! (Ace Fantasy Books, 1986).
It was also included in Russ's collection The Zanzibar Cat (Arkham House, 1983).
== External Links ==
* "My Boat" review at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein
* "My Boat" review at Cirsova
Category:Joanna Russ works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works