Issue #172, Special Weird Western Issue • Apr. 30, 2015

“Splitskin,” by E. Catherine Tobler

“Swallowing Silver,” by Erin Cashier

“The Snake-Oil Salesman and the Prophet’s Head,” by Shannon Peavey

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

SPLITSKIN

by E. Catherine Tobler

        Gugán was always my khaa yahaayí, my soul bound into the flesh of another while yet part of my own. From beginning to the end, Gugán’s bones were my bones, his breath my breath. He moved as sun and I as moon, reflecting and eclipsing the other in eternal dance, one standing brighter for the other’s shadows. The immortal ghost of him—khaa yakghwahéiyagu—remains with me even as I speak these words. Hear him speak with my voice if this pleases, using my tongue as if it is his own, because it is. We were born with two spirits, never only male or female, but revered for the way we walked both paths, each unable to exist without the other.

* * *

        My love reveled in winter’s sunbroken days, when the light spills to the fresh-fallen snow to stab a person in the eyes. Gugán flit from path to stone, a trickster comfortable with his Raven heritage. I, as Eagle, startled at every shift of snow, caught always unawares in the bright sun as he pelted me with clumps of melting cold.

        It was one of these days when we witnessed our mothers taken from us, lifted into the sky and away where we could not yet reach. After failing to take the deer we had tracked the morning through, our mothers brought us to the wild wet of the river slicing through the woods. The doe skipped into the forest shadows and our mothers let her go, because the forest is an uncertain thing, but the water known and trusted. There, we emptied the woven fish traps, cooked a meal, and ate in a pleased silence.

        We did not yet lick each other’s fingers clean—we did not yet understand such a thing was possible, well-content to press thigh-to-thigh upon a cold log while our mothers harvested more fish from more traps.

        It was then Raven swallowed the sun. Raven-as-clouds descended upon the running river and made the air thick, unknowable. The day around us turned as night, as if the forest itself had dissolved and spread across the river, leaving it strange and unsettled. I leaned into Gugán, not for warmth but to know I was not alone in witnessing this. Give way, something inside me whispered, but the terror of that whisper was deeper than even the sight of an empty river.

        When the clouded dark retreated, our mothers no longer stood within the rushing waters. The baskets of wriggling fish remained, but nothing else. We crept to the river as one and looked to the clouded sky, as if they might be suspended there, laughing as birds were wont. The sky hung empty and silent.

        That our mothers were thunderbirds; we had known this for all our days. Each and every one knows the story, has heard it spoken around crackling fires. But there remains within me a deep joy at speaking these words—my words, with the echo of his voice—in allowing myself to remember all he was, all we were, and how the thunderbirds came to break the sky.

* * *

        Gold brought the men to the mountains, invading the way ants will swarm upon a fallen morsel, crawling one over the other with little regard for the body on the bottom of the stack. The coming of men meant the coming of trains, and there is a joy in the recollection of their black iron stench even as much of what we had known was changed. They broke our quiet world with rail and axe, shining innards hauled to more distant shores.

        The men who came wanted to know more than we could tell them. We were asked to be guides—we were natives and must know the mountains as we knew the ridges of our own interlocked knees. They asked for but shunned our suggestions as to how the land might be conquered. Many men went their own ways, and many died, and we did not mourn—not because they were unlike us, but because we knew this was the way. Every person carries with them their own story and creates with their own hands their own ending. This rests inside until it can no longer remain contained, until it bursts into being and ignites the world. Some were taken by cold, some others by the greed in their own hearts. Some asked us of their endings; even when we spoke of them, we were never believed.

        We had taken to living near the routes into the highest mountains. Getting closer, but still not daring to walk into them. Frightened of what we would sacrifice. We lied to ourselves, saying that if we could acquire enough money, we could make the journey to free our mothers. But we knew the mountains the way we knew the forest, from a respectful distance, always more comfortable near the placid flat of water, be it lake or ocean. If we had possessed the courage of our mothers, perhaps we would not have waited so long. Would not have sought to make a living among the white men who sought to make their livings from the gold buried in the hills.

        They wondered: where may we easily find the gold? Will you lead us to the river where the gold sits upon the banks as ducks do? There was no explaining that ducks did not sit on riverbanks as gold. The men were firm. They had travelled a long distance, a distance they said we could never fathom. They had heard of the way the water washes the gold onto the shores, the way the world shines when the sun splits the clouds. The world did this, I could never argue, but it was rarely the gold that gleamed.

        For them, we burned our grasses into sweet smoke that made their heads spin, and within the smoke trails we saw images, possible paths into the hills where one might prosper. For one man, this meant discovering a hollow in the world, a hole into which he fell and was discovered by ladders of mushrooms and pillows of fungus. These crawled over him in riot until they made him one their own, digesting him even to this day. For another man, this meant discovering the great brown bear who parted his skin with her ragged claws to free his khaa yahaayí into the world forevermore. These paths did not always lead to the gold the men desired. But these men believed so fiercely that they would. Felt the weight of the rocks within their packs already.

        Jackson, when he came to my table in the local tavern, was more knowing than any of them in combination. He was bent by the cold air, shoulders hunched, hands often curled into useless claws at his side. While he possessed the exterior body of any man—skin, reddened cheeks, mussed hair—he was never in these moments human. He was an ending, struggling to burst from the flesh that confined it. He was a creation of tentacle and fire, a serpent bound into flesh he didn’t yet understand despite the years that marked him. He looked as old as we two, when he came to hear us tell fortunes.

        I was allowed this table at the local tavern, beside the window hung with lace, hired to ply my fortune telling because Soapy knew that the curiosity of me, and my “magic,” would lure more drinkers. These drinkers often thought I was a prostitute—so many in those days were, and Soapy said I was more than welcome, but this was not my way. Soapy surely knew I meant to leave as soon as I was able—every person in this place meant to.

        Jackson had the means to carry people away, his train like something from a vision, a beast that could carry anyone away. He joined me at my table, sitting not in the chair opposite my bench but on the bench itself, his thigh warm against my own. He brought whiskey; I was drinking water. He was smoking a cheroot; I kept a length of sweet grass resting between us.

        He stubbed out his cheroot and a grimace crossed his lined face from the pressure on his crooked hand. He made no sound of complaint, only looked at me with his eyes, behind which I saw swimming other eyes, the eyes of the bound creature he was. Men called my sight magic because they could not explain it; they called it magic because they made no effort to understand it. When you know the world in such a plain manner, it is not magic. It is breath and it is being.

        I reached for my matches, but Jackson dared touch me to prevent me from lighting the length of sweet grass. His fingers were rough, hooked into claws, and while the touch was tender, it was not hesitant. He did not fear me, even dressed as I was in a woman’s clothing, with beads knotted into my long dark hair and tied around my wrists. He was not repulsed even as I drew his hand beneath the table to the hard flesh between my legs. Was this what he had come for? Would he demand that such be given in trade to travel upon his train? It was only flesh, after all; it was not the heart of me. Jackson leaned in and took a breath of me and did not stare as if I were a thing to break apart and better understand. He looked at me with reverence, seeing my female spirit within my male skin.

        You are more than this skin, he told me, and beneath me I felt the stirrings of the thing I could not yet embrace. Give way, it whispered. I said the same of him, that he was more than his grasping, hooked hand, but deep down I felt that his hand was him—he wanted every precious thing he could scoop into claw and mouth. When he nuzzled deeper into the hollow of my throat and asked for a guide into the hills, I kept my silence. There was something in this meeting that told me Jackson already understood I was not a guide as most men expected me to be. The warmth of his once-broken fingers told me he understood what I had to offer, that he was making an offer all his own. Then, he mentioned our mothers.

        He did not know then what the thunderbirds were. The greed within his voice was plain; he either did not know or care that it came so easily across. He was a man who wanted something—just as other men here wanted gold and would obtain it by any means. Jackson’s treasure was a different sort, and he told me a story I knew too well.

        He spoke of the women at the river, their leathers soaked with the icy rush of water. They could have been sisters with their ebony hair and eyes, but they were not. They were closest of friends, knowing they had to stay close so their sons could foster the friendship that turned to the love that turned to the devastation which would free them.

        These women, Jackson said, stood in the rushing waters up to their knees and felt the cold burrow into the base of their brains, their hearts. They became of the water as they stood counting the fish their traps had collected. They came to not notice the cold, so much a part of it they were. They knew their sons were close, but something else was closer, pushing down from the sky until it opened its hooked mouth and swallowed them.

        Raven scooped them into his claws—gentle this time, because these two were not unknown to him; they were a similar creature, birds who drew the thunder down with their wings, beasts whose claws dragged the lightning from the vault of the sky. Raven scooped them into his mouth, his blue tongue startlingly warm against their chilled skins—then, then they felt how cold they themselves were. Raven drew them up and away and gone and my Gugán blamed himself, believed he had called Raven because he shared a kinship with the trickster and his ways.

        I reached again for the grass; Jackson’s hand again forestalled mine.

        Raven bore the women ever up, Jackson said. Took them so high into the winter sky they could no longer breathe or struggle. Raven bound them into the stony mountains, but they were not women as anyone knew women; each contained a spirit that could not be caged. No such thing can be caged eternally, Jackson said. You may possess a thing for a moment in time, but such things cannot be claimed for a lifetime.

        The way he spoke was a shock. He was not a white man, though looked such to anyone else. Who else would look beyond the surface? Those like me, but the men of the world? They would not. Jackson spoke of the world’s deeper truths, said its bones could not be mined until hollow. Perceived that I was not entirely what I appeared to be; contained larger depths that, like the unending forest, could not be seen even in brightest sunlight, because something would always be thrown into shadow. Into khaa yahaayí.

        He leaned into me so close I could see the fork in his tongue. He meant to release the birds from their cages, he said, and there was a long lisp around that word: cagesss. Birds that were not birds but still wanted to fly, wanted to slap their wings to the water and bring the thunder into being. He spoke of these women, of my mother and Gugán’s, and tried to weave a spell around me. Tried to conceal his intent.

        I was too old to be misled and knew Raven would demand something in return for what we sought to take. I had been down far too many paths not to see the wrong one lain fresh before me. This path would lead into the mountains, a place far removed from the waters of home. But it was the place we sought, the reason I saved money from the pathetic work of telling men what they wanted to hear. Jackson’s hands slid doubled around mine, cupping me like he might a lover, but even in this he was allowing me to grasp his bent hands in return and hurt him if I so wanted. His voice slipped lower, that tongue ever forked.

        Take us, I said.

* * *

        There are tellings of this story where I ask Jackson what he wants of me in return. Where we bargain late into the night, until the tavern is empty and it is only we two in the candlelit darkness. These tellings are untruths even as they bring more comfort. The idea of me making certain of every feature along the path before I set foot upon it is better than me launching myself with desperation into the mountains I feared.

        I did not ask Jackson anything, because I already knew. He believed the thunderbirds were true and he wanted their power for his own. He felt that with the double spirited children born of the thunderbird’s own bodies, he might achieve this. This was visible to anyone who looked into the depths of his eyes. The serpent wanted to wrestle the birds, wanted to claim them even as he knew he could not. In this, Jackson was like any of the other men, willing to expose themselves to any horror. In this I resembled these men as well, but this time, I held to the belief that I possessed my mother’s courage and would put it to good use.

        I left the tavern alone, having made an accord with Jackson, and went to the small house along the river where Gugán and I made our home. The scent of roasted venison greeted me; my love was elbow-deep into dinner and welcomed me with a kiss, a nuzzle into the beads that adorned my hair. He smelled like dark oiled cloves I knew from the general store, and I wanted to bury myself in that scent, the way we had once buried ourselves in sun-drenched snow drifts.

        There is a man, I told him, and his head came up sharply, as if I said I had given my heart away all in the course of an evening’s conversation. I threaded my fingers into his hair, loosening it from its long tail. He listened to me but did not immediately hear, and only when I mentioned our mothers did his heart quiet. There is a train we can take into the mountains; he does not want coin, for you know our blood is coin and key for the mountain. He means to capture them, I said. And then came the laughter, as if capture were possible when a mighty creature was loosed into the sky.

        I put on my best dress for dinner and after let Gugán twine my long beaded hair around his fist. His teeth sank into my shoulder, as if he meant to suckle the ink out of me. Is it any different, to write a story upon a body or a sheet of paper? My body tells its own story, less permanent than pages upon which words fall.

        I cannot leave to anyone the ink that his teeth sank into, but I can say his hands were the hands to needle it into my skin. He wrote upon me and I across him and we still never spoke quite the right words. I love you is a construct, a triad of words that can never encompass all one feels. In the end, words will fail—just as they will fail to tell this story and what became of us in the mountains so far from the lake and the river and the sea.

* * *

        Jackson’s iron train remains rooted in my memory, next to that of my mother. I can no more forget the lines of the train than I can forget my mother’s eyes, her smile anchored there instead of within her mouth.

        The train was long and black, and when we walked up to it Jackson was bent against the old locomotive, cheek pressed to metal. His eyes were closed, hands splayed flat against the arch of the engine body. His body swayed into the engine and he nodded, as if listening to a voice no other could hear. This behavior was familiar to me and Gugán, so we did not linger; we looked instead to the others who worked to load the train for its journey.

        One could call them a family; we eventually did. They had less in common than our own people, for they were every color and size and shape, but what bound them was their differences. Where the world would have shunned them, they made their own space and way upon this train of Jackson’s. The first to see and greet us were the Silver Sisters. Gemma and Sombra moved as we did, two separate beings clearly bound to each other. One was light upon water, the other shadow within forest, and sometimes they were exactly opposite of that. They were inseparable, drawing us into the train with four hands that felt somehow like six.

        It was the last car we entered where a woman sat peeling the skins from rarely seen citrus fruits. She did not discard these peels but instead let them fall into a green-yellow-orange riot in the bowl braced between her knees. Despite the chill in the air, she was barefoot and wore a dress of thin cotton. She looked at us with a welcoming smile, all fierce teeth. Something in the air here spoke to the division between elements; as the water is divided from the land is divided from the forest, this is how the train car felt.

        We were given warm rolls slathered in lime marmalade. This was a shock to us; we had never tasted its like and were warned that it might cause us to remember things we rather wished not to. In that first bite was the bitter moment of my birth, when there were whispers, how there should have been two children, so they had always said, but there was only one. One possessed of two spirits. This sticky lime marmalade conveyed more of my childhood with each and every bite, and I could only wonder what Gugán was made to recall with its sweet tang. It was a thing we never spoke of, those early moments on the train. I suppose in all the nights that were to come, we already knew we had both been pulled backwards, into memories that were forever a part of us even if not present every day.

        Gemma and Sombra guided us through the train as it prepared to leave the city; it was a circus train, they told us, though “circus” meant little to us. They were performers—this we understood—and had completed a series of shows meant to entertain those gold-rushing men. I saw the glitter of money in their eyes and a transformation as the light sister became the dark sister, and knew we had found our path into the mountains.

        This path was not easily had. There were gold-seeking men upon the train, having asked for passage to Dawson City. They were possibly as eager as Jackson to reach the depths of the mountains on these narrow rails, crowding every car with bodies and equipment, wedging themselves against performers and animals alike. The animals.

        I cannot say how many train cars there were, for unless my memory fails, this number changed over the course of the journey. The train itself changed based on what Jackson and its people required of it. Of her. I felt a kindred spirit inside this metal body, a thing I have felt in no other place. I might compare her to what I felt in my partner, that spirit beneath the flesh being opposite of the flesh itself—but this train had no flesh that I could see. (If I had known then of the severed hand within her engine, I would have understood that indeed she possessed such flesh yet another doubled spirit, she of metal and woman.) She was a creature bound to travel the tracks of the world, but sometimes she skimmed through sky and cloud.

        Some of the train cars held animals that we did not know and each car appeared to change its shape based upon their occupants. The cars looked entirely normal on the outside but inside, each and every beast or person was properly housed according to their needs. The animals did not need cages when they had small landscapes to roam.

        Among the beasts, we discovered lions, sirens, and one pale bear that Gemma and Sombra said would soon be in its proper place. The sirens drew us because of their bird natures, their train car spackled with glittering fish scales from their many meals. We saw in these striking women our mothers and wondered if they were why Jackson had such a hunger for the thunderbirds. Did he seek to mate one spirit to another? We did not ask, only burned sweet grass in the small compartment we had been given and clasped our hands as we asked for a safe journey, for guidance, for the ability to know what would need doing in the moments to come.

        Those nights, I heard thunder through the hills, felt the rattle of windows as wind tried to invade. I dreamed of our mothers bursting from the snow-laden mountains, cracking the world apart until it was buried in white. Unable to sleep with such thoughts, I watched the dark world pass beyond the train windows beyond my own reflection.

        Eventually, the train slowed, stopped. I left our cabin to understand what had happened.

        I found Jackson easily enough. I expected him to be concerned—surely a train stopped upon tracks was bad luck—but his face split with a grin. Come, he said, watch them work.

        It was one of the most magnificent things I have witnessed. Jackson guided me to the cab and sure-footed his way up the ladder that led through a roof hatch. I grasped the ladder to follow, but this is when I saw the woman’s hand. Severed at the wrist, partly bundled in cloth, it spilled threaded fatelines into the world, its palm crossed with gold. I felt its eternal heartbeat, the rumble of the train even though we stood still, and climbed my way up and out through the hatch.

        Gemma and Sombra, Jackson told me, had a way with metal, in the finding of it but also in its manipulation. Beyond the train, the tracks lay heavy with ice and snow, and though the women could not move these directly they reached with their essences to the buried rails. They warmed the metal, which sheared the ice; as stars fall from the night sky, bright shards of ice plummeted down the dark valley over which we stood on the elevated track.

        The whole hour through, the women worked tirelessly, digging their spirits into the ice to reach the metal, to make it simmer with a warm, unearthly light. In its own way, this avalanche of ice sounded like thunder, and I looked to the sky above, wondering if our mothers could feel our approach.

        Gugán, roused by my absence, soon joined me, and we sat upon the cold engine cab roof with Jackson, watching the ice’s destruction. Gemma and Sombra were illuminated by the glowing tracks, water sputtering into the air as more ice broke violently free. Jackson asked nothing of us; he knew as I did that all had been agreed to in the tavern. He would take us into the hills; we would call our mothers down. What the thunderbirds did then was out of our hands. He knew this but dared it anyhow and some part of me loved him for it.

        Morning saw the train in motion again, deeper into the hills that rose on either side of us. The snow-draped heights reminded me how far we were from the water, from our home. I watched them with unease, but it was Gugán’s hand upon the back of my neck that grounded and calmed me. This was what we had come for, he reminded me. This is what we longed to do. Free our mothers and then— We could see nothing beyond that moment, could not even see that moment, truth be told. It was cloaked in the clouds Raven had used that day to steal our mothers away.

        Being of Raven was not controlling Raven, I told Gugán. It was folly to think any could control such a creature. I could see that this weighed on him even now. That moment of loss, always floating in the depths of his eyes. This was the path that tethered him, and even had I known (I knew—do not listen to this untruth), I would not have stopped what came.

* * *

        I came to see many forms within the cloaked mountains as we passed northward; the tail of our kin the whale, the rough-cut edge of a wing lifted in flight, the pointed nose of a leaping salmon. It was the wing that drew my eyes time and again until we were far out of its arching height. The train wove her way through tunnels of rock, breaking once more into sunlight falling through bruised clouds. It was those clouds that gave us concern, that made us feel Raven closing in to protect what he believed was his. They were not snow clouds but the clouds of storm and rage. In this way, they were also of the thunderbird.

        Snow and ice on the tracks stopped the train again midday. Before Gemma and Sombra could begin their work, the gold-rush men expressed their frustration by daring to exit the train—they swarmed out of the cars, walked the length of the train, and leaped down to the ice-coated metal. They began to chip at it with picks and boots. The sisters stared at them but made no move forward. They only looked at Jackson, who stood silent upon the engine roof.

        But he also made no move toward the men, and I watched him turn a slow circle, studying the mountains. The peaks traced a jagged line against the clouded sky, a line like none I had seen before. Only the clouds were familiar, possessing the rounded bounty they’d had that day in my youth, when they had dipped to the river and carried our mothers away. In my heart, a notion was given breath, was given space to stretch and explore, and I reached for the hand that should have been at my side, only to find that it was not.

        Gugán had gone already, feeling that breath a moment before I had. My hand curled into the fist of a man who wants to strike a thing. I didn’t look to the sisters or Jackson. I fled the engine, threading my way through the train to the strange cars that changed their shape based on need. Here, I found my other half, kneeling before the great pale bear. I felt certain the beast would lift a paw and spill Gugán’s spirit to floor, but instead it leaned its massive head against his own in acquiescence.

        Another breath filled me. Gemma and Sombra had said this bear would soon be in its proper place. Not necessarily its home, but proper. I watched Gugán settle onto the bear’s broad back and offer me a hand to do the same. The bear heaved beneath us, the train car split wide, and we were gone, running along tracks that should have been iced but were not.

        As the metal rails cleaved the mountain in a sure and sweeping curve, the bear leaped with similar certainty. He knew where he was going, muscle and bone bunching beneath our grasping thighs. Our hands curled knuckle-deep into the oily fur, and we moved as one creature with him, up and up the rock-strewn mountain. Here, the trees were sparse and the ground more rock than dirt; there was little shadow to cloak what we sought: the peak of the mountain, so far from the river, the ocean, the lake.

        In tintypes, lightning appears to have split the mountain’s crest in two, leaving a gaping mouth of ragged stone. But a closer look reveals the yawning V of a beak. This mouth possessed no blue tongue—this mouth was not Raven but thunderbird, and we rushed headlong toward her, caring not what would happen, only knowing it must.

        We plunged into the stony mouth of darkness. This darkness rushed absolute, and we had only the cascading wind to tell us we still moved. The pale bear was invisible within this darkness, until I realized that pieces of the beast were coming loose in the dark. Strands of oily white hair pulled free from its hide, bursting into flame the deeper we ran into the mouth. These flames hovered and provided no light to see by, only a strange illumination that seemed to stretch into feathers, into beaks, into talons.

        Beaks snapped at my arms. Talons raked my spine. A cooling rush of blood signaled the unraveling of the ink that marked me, upward into the dark. Pain clawed my throat as every inked thread that spoke of my double-spirited nature was ripped from my skin. The blood in the wake of the stolen ink turned to momentary fire, a burning river that flowed upward against the wind.

        I saw too how my love came apart, how the flesh that confined him was peeled away, to reveal bones and heart, to expose his clove and salt soul, his khaa yahaayí as he became the ghost that would never leave me. I watched Raven pluck my love’s heart and swallow it whole. The warm breath that once flowed from him became the wind around me; his breath channeled my blood, which became the water, which broke the stone.

        When you have known darkness and are thrown into light, you are blinded. I was blind and still knew everything. The mountain shattered up the length of my arms, an eruption of snow and trees and stones spewing into the clouded sky. I was thrown upward as our mothers shook the stone from their trapped wings, to push free as if being born. They clawed the sky in jubilation, jagged streams of lightning illuminating the air. Everything crackled with energy and when the thunder rolled beneath their wings, I gloried in that sound even as I spiraled uncontrolled far through the air, landing flat against the train’s roof.

        Raven came as black fury through the bruised clouds, but he could not pin our mothers, could not claim what had been released with the blood and breath of our doubled spirits. Our mothers circled Raven, beat him down with beaks and wings, until he tumbled loose and flew up and up and away, screaming with his blue tongue aflame.

        And then, the strange silence. The absence of mothers and lovers and every inky line that had ever burrowed into my skin. When our mothers returned, they crouched above me, studying me with eyes familiar yet unknown. They balanced on the edge of the metal train and screamed fire when Jackson meant to come closer. With shrieks, they dared me to split my own skin, to give way to that which I had not.

        My Eagle spirit emerged from its slumber within my body, parting my skin like water to take the sky as her own, and I thought to see muscle unfurling in her—my—wake. This was the second spirit within me, the woman I had never fully unleashed, even with Gugán—oh, my lost Gugán.

        Now that I had given myself over to her, Eagle cried her freedom as our mothers had, wings trailing fire, which ignited lighting, which caused me to pull the cool clouds closer. I wove a gown from them and floated safely to the ground where I crumpled and shook as newly born. The resuming rumble of train and thunder alike were both far distant, and I was in an unknown space dark and dappled like forest.

        There, you found me, wiped the soot from my skin as though you smoothed feathers down. How, you wondered, had I come to be naked in the dark forest when I was a creature of the bright water. You brought me back to the water, for surely a story was to be shared, my skin bare of ink but still showing pale traceries of what once had been. The breath of Eagle expanded my lungs, made me steady beneath your regard.

        Your inked fingers contain the shapes of all possible things and your black eyes hold a glimmer of more beneath their surface. Was it my Gugán I saw in them, moving as sun within the shadows, or only the hope of him? Either way, why you want a story is plain. You have not split your own skin. You wish to understand and carry the words—my voice, his tongue. You wish to carry our ghost, our khaa yakghwahéiyagu, into the future.

        All things have a beginning, we would say. Split the skin. Give way.

Copyright © 2015 E. Catherine Tobler

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. Her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including three other stories set in this traveling circus world, most recently “We, As One, Trailing Embers“ in BCS #147 and podcast BCS 127. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, is now available. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, www.ecatherine.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

SWALLOWING SILVER

by Erin Cashier

        John Halpern knew it should be a heavy weight on his conscience, to wake up and know that he was going to kill a thing that used to be a man. Whether it was or wasn’t was a topic of much internal contemplation for him as he walked up the long path to his brother-in-law’s house to ask for help. The fact that his brother-in-law was himself a devil-man did not escape him.

        Eldred’s people lived in a valley higher up than his own, a homestead of about sixteen families, surrounded by unkempt hills. They “weren’t here for the farming” was a nice way of putting it.

        The wind swung around, and Halpern knew the children would scent him soon. Sure enough, as he rounded the final bend, they scampered towards him, on feet and hands, backs hunched over.

        They wouldn’t scamper like that if their momma was still around to mind them.

        “Uncle Hal! Uncle Hal!” Junior hugged him first, with smaller Marna just a step behind. He squatted down and they thumped him, leaving dusty handprints all over the front of his workshirt.

        “Whoa there.” Halpern held them both for a moment.

        “Did you bring us anything from town?” Junior asked, his head still against Halpern’s side, squinting up with hope. Another year or two, hell, maybe a month, and it’d be handshakes and nods, like real men. Depending.

        “Of course I did.”

        A few deep sniffs. “I smell candy!” Marna announced. With the slow sincerity of youth she added, “I like candy.”

        “Don’t I know it.” Halpern rocked up to stand, knees popping, looking down at them. Junior still held a bit of his mother in the curve of his nose and the line of his jaw, but Marna was her spitting image. Each time he visited it caught him unawares. He rustled her hair with one hand and produced wax-paper wrapped taffy with the other. Junior opened it and took the largest chunk, till he caught Halpern watching, and he broke off an extra piece for Marna with a sigh.

        “Your daddy around?” Halpern asked, when they both had candy wedged inside their mouths like chaw.

        “Home.” Junior pointed back behind them. “Slaughtered a bull last night, been butchering it all day long.”

        “Thanks.” He tugged on an imaginary hat and left them to their chewing.

        Time to ask the devil for a favor.

* * *

        As he rounded the bend, he thought he saw Sarah walking ahead of him—a flash of blue fabric flapping in the wind. Then the blue was only curtains, and he was missing her again.

        Eldred smelled him, same as the children had, and came out to stand on his porch. His apron was covered in dried blood, and he produced a pipe from behind it as Halpern neared.

        “Been awhile since you visited last. They miss you.”

        “You should bring them into town.”

        “You know I’m busy.” Eldred hit his pipe upside-down against the banister.

        “With what?”

        Eldred frowned and hit his pipe again. A plug of tobacco ash landed near Halpern’s feet. “What do you want, John?”

        “I need a favor.” Halpern put his boot on the first stair. “May I?”

        Eldred didn’t answer, but he did step away.

        Halpern followed him inside into the darkness. The cabin was pressed up against the hillside, the roof slats overhead plugged with clots of dirt. The stink of raw meat made it smell like a dog’s mouth.

        Halpern sat down on a chair near the open window for the air and watched Eldred move among the objects of the house like he hadn’t put them there himself. He lumbered, wide-shouldered, wide-hipped, but it would have been a fool who called him fat. There was a chance he’d wrestled that bull he was slaughtering to the ground himself. Depending on the moon, Halpern wouldn’t put it past him. Devil-men’s strength knew no bounds.

        Eldred disappeared in back, to return without his apron but carrying a tobacco pouch. He opened it and sent his pipe to dig inside.

        “I need a favor,” Halpern repeated.

        “I’m not much inclined.”

        “Hear me out. And get Merrill to listen, too.”

        “Merrill don’t listen—”

        “To anyone but you. I know how you run up here.”

        There was a crunch outside, of dry grass breaking, and both men looked to the open window. Halpern could see Junior’s rust-colored hair below as he gave a hiss of defeat.

        Eldred made a thoughtful noise. “Boy, go get your uncle.”

        Junior looked up, and Halpern watched a moment of smart-assery cross his face. Halpern was really his uncle, on his mother’s side, and the boy was tempted to say as much. But Eldred clicked his tongue like he was speeding a horse and Junior minded.

        Asking Eldred for favors was bad enough—but sometimes it took a devil to fight a devil. Halpern leaned out the window and watched Junior run. At least this time he was on two-feet, as God intended.

* * *

        It took twenty minutes for Junior to return, which, with his fine nose guiding him, meant that Merrill must have been off in the wilds behind his fields. Maybe farming. Maybe not. Halpern pressed his hands together like a preacher-man, between his knees, and watched Eldred’s pipe-smoke waft out through the curtains made from his sister’s old dress. He knew it when Merrill arrived—the devil took the porch stairs loudly, two at a time.

        “This fool?” Merrill asked Eldred, after he passed the door. Eldred gave him a look, and he silently took up a position with his back against the opposite wall.

        “You tell us what you want now, John,” Eldred said. “Make it fast.”

        Halpern stood. “A wagon got it in the highlands.”

        “So?” Merrill said.

        “I saw your woman at the store today.” He didn’t mention that she’d had a black eye. Made him want to spit. Devils.

        “She ain’t back yet—” A deeper color flashed over Merrill’s already dark face, like a tornado funnel in a storm. “What happened to her?”

        “Nothing,” Halpern said, and began to pace the room. “My point was that your people do business in Golden Falls.”

        “We give just as much as we take,” Eldred said, arms crossed. “And we pay for the privilege.”

        Halpern waved his words away. “The town thanks you for that. But this wagon—”

        “Blackfoot? Sioux?” Merrill guessed and rolled his eyes. Golden Falls had a contract with Eldred’s people, in writing even, for the few that could read it. It was why they’d been allowed to settle in the area. Halpern had written up some of it himself, after Sarah—he stopped pacing, and faced them.

        “Neither. It was a wendigo.”

        Merrill snorted. Halpern studied Eldred’s face, unsure what his brother-in-law thought of things. He was a hard man to get. How had Sarah managed? “I’m willing to be wrong. But I don’t think I am.”

        Merrill started walking for the door. “Our kind know better than to eat our own. Sounds like a man problem to me.”

        “Your ladies like our goods and trade. It’ll be winter soon.”

        Eldred held his hand up, and Merrill paused.

        “If I’m right,” Halpern continued, “it’ll kill every wagon train coming in, until we can’t get any more supplies. We can’t eat only gold. You can’t eat just snow.”

        Eldred’s eyes narrowed. “What’d you tell them it was?”

        Them was Golden Falls, at the crotch of the valley, where gold and sin both rolled to rest. Gamblers and miners, one and the same, plus a small complement of merchants, bankers, whores. “Sioux, of course. I didn’t want to start a riot—or send idiots with loaded shotguns and half an excuse running through your fields.

        “But if it’s as I say, Eldred—it’ll take every wagon that comes through. That’s how they work. They’re always starving, you know that. Give the thing long enough, and I guarantee it’ll attack town.” He still couldn’t read Eldred’s face, and he didn’t need to look to know what Merrill thought.

        Merrill laughed. “It won’t attack us. And you don’t have a piece of paper that says we have to care.”

        Halpern ignored him. “I said I was asking for a favor.”

        Eldred was still, stone-like, lifeless, the way only a hunting animal can be. Then the wind changed and Sarah’s curtains fluttered in. He gave a subtle nod. “We’re blood, Halpern.”

        “Thank you.”

        “But moon’s coming.”

        “I know. My horse is at the crossroads, packed.”

        Eldred nodded. “Set out. We’ll catch up.”

* * *

        It pained him to ask the devils for help, that was for sure. But he’d seen the ravages of a wendigo attack once before in his life, and Golden Falls didn’t need one nipping at its heels. Too many miners out there alone, exposed. It might already have been too late for some, and no one would know for weeks. Damn things always hungry, eating like a drunkard thirsts for drink. And whoever it was that had become one—Merrill was right on that. Fool ought to’ve known better than to eat his own kind in these hills. Indian curses all over the place. Only thing men had to curse them back with was smallpox.

        Halfway to his horse, Halpern heard the sound of a live thing snaking through the waist-high brush beside the road. He turned to face the shadow that was matching his speed.

        “What do you want, Junior?”

        “Can I come?”

        “No.”

        “Aw, why not?”

        “It’s man business.”

        “Please?”

        “Absolutely not.” There was no way Junior had asked Eldred’s permission to come. “You gotta stay behind and protect your home.”

        “Uncle Hal—”

        “Have pity on my horse, Junior, while we’re still upwind.”

        “Promise to take me into town when you get back,” Junior hissed. Perhaps if Junior had been Merrill’s son, it would have been an implied threat. Take me into town, or I can’t guarantee that I won’t.... But Halpern knew he was still Sarah’s boy for now, even if the moon turned his pa into a monster.

        “I promise. As soon as we get back. Just let me finish this alone.”

        He heard a disappointed whisper of, “All right,” then the snaking sound ran away from the road.

* * *

        Halpern’s horse was where he’d left it, tied to the post Eldred’s few visitors used for such things. He stood beside it, hands tight on the reins. The bay knew they were there before he did, dancing like a frog on a skillet. Only a gimpy hind leg and his focused resolve kept her from going very far.

        “Why’re you bringing a nag?” Merrill asked.

        “Well, I’m bringing you,” Halpern said with a shrug. Merrill growled, and she tried to rear. Halpern held tight until she exhausted herself. His saddle clung to her sway back, loaded in the seat with supplies, fat as a tick. “It’s only two days up. I was thinking we should walk.”

        “If she’ll stand it,” Eldred said.

        “She’ll be fine.”

        “I prefer to run,” Merrill said, and Eldred gave a subtle nod.

        Merrill didn’t walk too far off. He wasn’t ashamed, not like Halpern would have been if the affliction were his own. He took off all his clothes, setting them beside the post—no one would ever steal anything that belonged to a devil-man—and then he became something else, hunching down, like he too would scamper. Maybe part of him did, the man-part, leaving just the devil-part behind.

        Watching him change made Halpern’s bile rise—he stared at his boots, until Merrill was finished. Merrill howled when he was done, and had not Halpern’s horse already resigned herself to a tragic death she would have run him down dragging Halpern with her. As it was, her eyes rolled back, showing white, like if she was not able to see the thing in front of her, it would be unable to see her back.

        “He always got to do that?” Halpern grumbled. Eldred grunted as Merrill’s wolf ran off, half the height of the horse, twice the weight of any man, quiet, black-furred, sleek.

* * *

        Years of wagons and hooves had ground all the life out of the road Halpern and Eldred walked on. Idiot grasshoppers were thick this year, jumping out to be crushed under boots and hooves.

        They walked in silence for miles, the horse gimping beside them. Halpern took a sip of his water, a swig from his flask, and watched Eldred out of the corner of his eye.

        “I like your curtains,” he said, flat as he could.

        “Thank you.”

        Halpern hadn’t visited much after Sarah’d died. The children were still sweet on him all the same. He knew it was easier to like someone when they weren’t there. Just like it’d been easier for him to accept what went on at Eldred’s when he’d had Sarah’s word to pin it to. Halpern looked down at the dirty handprints on his shirt.

        “Either of them know how to read?”

        “Junior, some.”

        “There’s a school in town now.”

        “I bet it’s nice,” Eldred said without a smile.

        “Goddammit, Eldred—you can’t just keep them up there their whole lives.”

        Eldred turned to look at him, and the nag tried to rise up again. “They’ll come down in good time,” he said.

        “Like Merrill’s woman? You allow that? Her black eye?”

        He paused for a step. “It’s Merrill’s business.”

        “Not if he’s your second.”

        Silence passed between them, nothing but the sound of the nag’s hooves thumping on dirt, the crunching of fool grasshoppers. It didn’t take much imagination to turn those sounds into a hand hitting flesh, the break of bone.

        “If Marna ever comes to town with a—”

        “She won’t.”

        “She’d better not. I don’t know what I’d do.” And that was a lie. Halpern knew exactly what he’d do, and who to. He inhaled deeply and forced himself to be civil. “I like Ralston better. Or Troy.” They were all devil-men, but some were less devil than others.

        “It ain’t always about the person part. There’s the wolf to think of, too.”

        “Is Merrill’s wolf-part less of an asshole than the rest of him?”

        Eldred gave a bark of a laugh. “Not by much.”

* * *

        That night the two of them sat around an anemic fire in the middle of the road, camping as a courtesy to Halpern and a necessity for the nag. Eldred would have had no problem seeing beneath the moon, and, with whatever power it availed him, continuing strong. His eyes glittered in the firelight, and Halpern wondered exactly how well he could see.

        “How’d you know,” Eldred asked as Halpern ate his dinner, “what it is that done this?”

        “My prior post, before Sarah and I moved out here. Thing ate four wagon’s worth before we figured it out—people, horses, supplies. Town damn near starved.” He set his plate down and stared into the fire. “It killed five horses, and three men—I started out with ten of each. Drove it off a cliff, then went the long way down to kick the corpse.”

        “And this time? How did you know?”

        “I saw its sign. A lucky thing, too.” Halpern had gone out to check on the wagon once it hadn’t come in. He’d taken the path, and spotted the wagon’s remains. It didn’t take much to notice all the bodies were gone, and deep gouges clawed into the earth besides. “They can’t help but eat, anything, everything. The one we’d killed had its stomach full of horse meat and stones. This one will be wagoneers and dirt.”

        Eldred grunted, unfazed. One devil to another, of course. “So the nag’s bait?”

        “Once we get there, yeah,” Halpern said. “You ever killed one before?”

        “Never even seen one. But I’m sure we’ll be fine.” Eldred stood and took a few steps away from the fire before setting himself down on his blankets. There was a coyote howl in the distance.

        “Friends of yours?” Halpern asked, as other coyotes joined in.

        Eldred said nothing, just closed his eyes.

* * *

        Halpern woke up at the ass end of night needing to piss. He stood, and spent a full minute figuring out how far out of camp he could step and still be safe. How long had its arms been? Surely if it were close, the horse would have startled or Eldred would have smelled it. Behind him, Eldred was snoring, his chest rising and falling with the sound. Halpern went downwind.

        He didn’t know what Sarah had seen in Eldred. He’d felt it though, when Eldred was in the room with her, like heat lightning before a storm. Townspeople said that he’d cast a spell on her. Halpern knew Eldred hadn’t had to—he knew his sister, he’d seen the adoration in her eyes.

        The thing was, Eldred’d asked Halpern for her hand. Halpern could have told him no. She was young enough then to still listen. But God, the Indians were something fierce that year, and he’d been younger too. He concentrated, and urine shot from his body in a warm stuttering stream. Piss on the devils, piss on the past, and piss on Golden Falls.

        A creature rose up out of the brush in front of him. He leapt backwards with a yelp, splashing his leg. A wolf’s sturdy head swung towards him, lips raised high to reveal black gums in the pre-dawn light. “The only thing I smell out here is you,” it said with a growl.

        “Fuck you.” Halpern grabbed his pants and set them straight.

        Merrill’s wolf stepped aside and became Merrill, fur receding, teeth pulling, going in just as smooth as they had come out. Then sharp wet sounds, like a beaver tail-slapping the top of a lake, until just a hairy naked man was left behind. Merrill stretched and walked into the campsite, naked as a newborn, and Halpern followed him back.

        “There’s nothing out there, Eldred.” Merrill helped himself to the saddlebags, pulling out packed clothing. “Even if there ever was a wendigo here, which I doubt, it’s long since gone.”

        “We’ll go until we see the wagon for ourselves,” Eldred said, sitting up with a yawn.

        “It’s a waste of time.” Merrill yanked on a shirt, pants, boots.

        Halpern looked down at his urine-stained pants. “Bringing you—that was a waste of time.”

        Merrill growled. Eldred looked between them. “Go ahead with the horse then. See if you can lure it out.”

        The nag, to her credit, tried to stove Merrill’s head in. But eventually he caught hold of her tie and dragged her up the road behind him. Halpern squatted beside his saddle and reassigned his belongings. The saddle itself could wait for his return, but—

        “Carry this.” He handed rope and an axe over to Eldred. Lifting his lightened bag, boxes of bullets jingled inside.

        “That sounds like a lot of ammo,” Eldred said.

        “That’s because it is,” Halpern said, standing up.

* * *

        The road went around the edge of a hillside, letting them see between the trees to the valley below. Somewhere out there the Golden River ran along, cold as the ice it came from, scattering flakes of gold into a few lucky sluices; like a moody farmer’s daughter scattering grain for chosen pullets but leaving forgotten ones to starve.

        There’d been no sign of Merrill or the nag all morning. Halpern gnawed on jerky as they walked, between deep gulps of air. The mountain was robbing his breath, making his lungs work twice as hard. Eldred didn’t seem to mind.

        “When’s Junior going to change?” Halpern asked, after inhaling deep.

        “Soon.”

        “And then?”

        “He’ll be like us. One way or another.”

        Halpern waited for him to explain. Eldred waited, too. He could out wait the damn dead. “Eldred—”

        “It’s none of your business.”

        Halpern turned on him. “He’s my nephew too! If you’d been more honest when this whole thing started—”

        “I warned her.” Eldred’s eyes narrowed. “She knew.” His voice went low, and his breath came hard. “She accepted me.”

        Eldred’s wolf was coming on, and Halpern didn’t care. The thin air made things clearer, shined his anger more bright. “You were supposed to protect her,” he said, pointing at Eldred, one hand on his gun.

        A branch snapped behind them. Eldred, wolf-at-the-ready, snarled. “Who’s there?”

        “Protect her from what?” asked a timid voice, far to the right of the road.

        “Junior!” Eldred shouted.

        Junior peered out from behind a distant tree. “I did it! I snuck up here, you all didn’t smell me or nothing! I did it!”

        “You—” Eldred raced out and grabbed Junior by his arm, dragging him out.

        “See? You don’t need to leave me alone anymore. I can run—”

        Eldred wheeled back and hit Junior full across the face. Halpern made to step in, then realized if Eldred hit him that hard he wouldn’t be able to get back up. Junior stumbled but stood, sullen.

        “If you’re going to run with us, you gotta learn to listen,” Eldred said. “I told you to stay home, boy.”

        Junior nursed the side of his face. “I just wanted to show you I—”

        “There’s no excuse for disobeying.” He brought his hand up again.

        “We can’t send him home. It’s not safe,” Halpern said, interrupting. Junior heard him and nodded.

        Eldred whirled on Halpern. Halpern thought he could see fresh teeth, straining out. “There’s nothing here—”

        A horse screamed in the distance. Then again—nearer.

        “You sure?” Halpern asked, unholstering his revolver.

        Eldred looked to Halpern. “Stay here.” He ran away, leaving both nephew and uncle behind.

* * *

        Halpern put himself in front of Junior, following Eldred up the road. “Keep close.” There were no more sounds of horses, humans, or wolves.

        “Can I have a gun?”

        “No.”

        Hoofbeats neared, then the nag bolted down the road at them. Halpern shoved Junior out of the way, felt the whip of her tail as she passed. She jumped sideways, and then around the next bend he heard her fall.

        He ran back after her, saw one leg crippled, another bent wrong. There was a raw wound on her haunch, the still-running muscles twitching inside. It matched the gouges he had seen near the wagon’s remains.

        “Shit. Junior!”

        The nag screamed.

        “Junior!”

        “I’m here!” Junior pulled himself out of the rocks Halpern’d shoved him into and trotted down. “Aren’tcha gonna shoot her?”

        “I suppose so.” Halpern drew his gun again.

        “Can I do it?”

        Halpern looked from the gun to Junior. Devil or not, his nephew was almost a man.

        “Please Uncle Hal, please.”

        “All right. Don’t miss.” He handed the revolver over and watched the boy. Junior took three shots, and all of them went wide.

        “Come here,” Halpern said, and reached out to correct Junior’s hold on the gun. “You gotta kill her to be kind.” Aiming together, a fourth shot put the nag to rest. Her blood spilled out around their boots like it was coming from a spring.

        Merrill loped down the road towards them, still wolf-formed and black. Eldred followed him, buttoning up his shirt. He spotted Junior with the gun.

        “Put that down!” He left his top button undone and reached for the gun. “That’s what men do—”

        “But I’m a man!” Junior said.

        Eldred growled. Merrill’s wolf paced around Eldred, scenting the horse’s meat. Then it jumped backwards with a yelp, revealing one of Junior’s misplaced slugs on the ground.

        “Watch it. Silver.” Halpern leaned over and pocketed the slug. When he rose again, the devil men and his nephew were staring at him. “You seen what that thing done to the nag.” He shrugged. “I’d throw Bible pages at it, if I thought it would care.”

        Junior looked in horror at the gun in his hand, grabbed the barrel, and gingerly offered Halpern its grip. Halpern took it.

        But he didn’t reholster. The monster was nearby.

* * *

        They dismembered the horse. Merrill, content to stay in wolf-form, dragged the front half of the carcass behind him in a harness Eldred’d rigged up around his furry shoulders. Even Halpern could smell it, entrails dragging behind them, as the high road finally took them down. When everything around them was quiet except for the slide of the horse’s flesh, Halpern’s boots, and Junior’s breathing, Eldred looked back.

        “We’re not tracking it,” Halpern said. “It’s tracking us.”

        “How long will half a horse sate it?”

        Halpern still hadn’t put his gun away. “It won’t.”

* * *

        A shining afternoon turned into a greasy dusk, and they reached the place where the wagon’d been left behind. Pieces of wood jutted out like bone, though actual bones were absent. The gouges that Halpern had seen, that mirrored the marks on the horsemeat, stood out like frozen ripples on a pond.

        Merrill’s wolf stopped. “Stay here, or go on?”

        Halpern grunted. “There’s no good place to fight one of them.”

        Eldred stared up at the sky, then looked to Halpern. “The brighter the moon, the stronger we are. Tonight’s the night to kill it. We’ll build a fire, then wait.”

        Junior scampered off to bring in pieces of wagon wood and brush to burn, under Halpern’s watchful eyes. Merrill freed himself from the harness and arranged himself behind what remained of the horse, his back to the nascent fire, his eyes out at the thin forest beyond. Eldred paced the edge of what was probably safe, sniffing deep.

        Halpern sat down by the fire and watched its colors change. Junior sat beside him. “What is it you’re hunting?” he asked.

        “Used to be a man.”

        “What happened to it?”

        “It—he—ate someone. Now he’s cursed to always be hungry,” Halpern answered, as Junior stared in frank disbelief. “It’s an Indian curse. Same as yours, I guess.”

        “I never did nothing to no Indian,” Junior said. He gathered his knees to his chest.

        Halpern grunted in agreement, then picked up another branch and tossed it into the fire.

* * *

        As the night went on, Halpern stoked the embers of the fire. The wind kept shifting, and each time it did he felt like he could feel the thing, breathing on him. Only Merrill’s and Eldred’s stillness kept him calm.

        “I taught your momma how to shoot,” he said, after the third time he’d caught Junior dozing off too near the fire. “She was good, too. A dead-eye.”

        Junior’s eyes glittered with the memories flashing inside his mind. “I never knew that.”

        “Bet I know a lot of things about her that you don’t.”

        “Maybe so, maybe not,” Eldred’s voice warned from the darkness outside the firelight.

        “Her favorite number was thirteen. She always wanted to have a palomino colt. She could play the harmonica good as any man.”

        Junior laughed. “I knew that one.”

        “The merits of harmonica playing are debatable,” Merrill said from his station by the carcass.

        “And I know she prolly would have wanted a different life for you.”

        Eldred made a warning noise, deep inside his throat. “Halpern—”

        “How do you mean?” Junior asked, cutting Eldred off.

        “School, for one. How can you expect to come down into town when you can’t read nor write? And secondly, it wouldn’t kill you to go to church now and then.”

        Merrill laughed. “Shows what you know.”

        Halpern looked over his shoulder at the wolf. “I ain’t talking to you.”

        Junior stared into the fire. “I miss her.”

        “Me too.” Halpern wondered if he missed her so much as he missed the chance to make things right. As long as she’d been alive, there’d always been a chance. Now, though—he stared into the fire too, looking for answers, reliving his past.

        A small sound escaped Junior’s throat, and then he sat straight up, hands clutched around the edge of the log he sat on. He reached for his own throat.

        “What’s—what’s happening?” Junior’s voice rose an octave and broke. His hands clawed at his face. “I can’t breathe—”

        Halpern looked at his nephew and started kicking dirt at the fire. “Did someone burn poison oak?”

        Eldred ran over and Merrill leapt near as Junior stood up, head whipping back and forth, panicked, same as when Halpern had once seen a man fall out of a boat and drown.

        “Junior,” Eldred warned, waving his hands calmly. The boy’s eyes got big, and Junior let out a tiny broken howl and raced off into the underbrush.

        “No!” Eldred yelled, but it was too late. Merrill made to go after him. “Hold!” Eldred commanded.

        And the change took him then. He wasn’t like Merrill, sleek and dark—the change threw him to the ground and broke him. His clothes strained, split, then hung off him in shreds, cuff and paw, and the belt that’d been around his waist snapped off like a whip. He was as grey as a winter cloud, and as large a wolf as he was a man. “Stay here,” he said, his voice like tumbling steel, before running off.

        Halpern found himself standing, gun out, staring impotently after both of them.

* * *

        Halpern paced in the clearing by the now-dying fire. “That was the change, wasn’t it.”

        “What do you think?” Merrill’s wolf asked him back.

        A deep and abiding fury for what had been lost rose up inside of Halpern. “He’s not like you—”

        “The boy knows exactly what he is.”

        “He’s still my sister’s boy.”

        “I don’t know if you noticed, Halpern, but your sister’s dead.” The black wolf looked at him, eyes golden in the night. “When she whelped a puppy instead of a man-child.”

        “Shut up.”

        “I saw it before they buried her with it.” The wolf rose and stalked around him, like he was an unlucky doe. “Four paws. Black nose.”

        Halpern shook his gun. “I said for you to shut up!”

        Merrill dashed away, laughing, and Halpern shot after his shadow.

* * *

        Whatever was left of the man inside the wendigo liked these new and better odds. The familiar scrape of the horse carcass sliding over earth sounded behind Halpern. He turned just as the wind changed, now blowing towards him a stench that he didn’t even need their nose to smell. He remembered one flood season back home, when the riverbank had taken a side of the cemetery away, leaving arm bones and leg bones and pieces of rotting meat to wave out in the wind—it smelled like that, like the earth itself had burped up something sick.

        The wendigo lumbered into the clearing, over the destruction of the wagon, and the vestiges of the fire gave Halpern a clear view. It looked like a rotting pelt, patches of sickly fur alternating with too-pale skin. It was tall and gape-mouthed, and he knew he wanted it dead.

        He shot at it. The flash blinded him, and he shot at it again. It ought to have been too big to miss—but it might be too big to die. He broke open the revolver, slotted more shells into it, and shot again.

        The sound of the shots punctuated his thoughts. Goddamn Merrill—shot—goddamn devil-men—shot. What the hell had happened to Junior? Shot. Why couldn’t things be what they were supposed to be? Shot.

        A dark form separated from the forest and launched itself at the wendigo’s side. Halpern held his fire and reloaded again, the hot cylinder burning his hands. The wolf latched its teeth into the wendigo’s neck and dug at its side with hind-leg claws. Maybe it found a bullet hole Halpern had already made—it rent the creature’s side, a gush of fluid rushed out, and the smell got even worse.

        Halpern ran nearer, looking for a shot in the fire’s dying light. He found one, took it. The wendigo yelled out with an inhuman cry, the throat once used for voice long since ruined by eating dirt and stones when man-meat wasn’t near.

        It threw the wolf aside. Halpern heard the crunch when it landed, like half-burned tinder, but he didn’t look away. Sarah hadn’t been the only one with a good eye –- he shot, and shot again, walking forward, aiming for where he hoped the monster still had a heart. The wendigo fell to its knees and reached for him, swatted him down with a too-long arm, knocking the wind from him. A blackness not entirely of the night fell upon him, and Halpern expected to die.

        Did men who let their sisters marry devils go to heaven, or to hell? The clawed hand that’d fallen didn’t rise up again, and Halpern shoved it off of him with an angry shout.

        Merrill’s wolf stepped forward. Halpern leveled his gun and shot at it. It bolted into the dark.

        “I killed your monster, Halpern,” said a gravel-edged voice.

        Halpern stood in the clearing, panting, shaking. “Not yet, you didn’t.”

        He turned and aimed at where the voice had come from, but shot too slowly—then a blur of fur knocked him to his right. He fell against a piece of wagon, felt a rib snap, and shot again, wild. The moon broke free from the branches above and cast everything in its gunmetal light. Halpern crouched and reloaded.

        “Uncle!” cried a tortured voice at the edge of the clearing. A creature half again as tall as him stood there, man-shaped, half-hidden in shadow. Halpern stared, then was bowled over from the side. Teeth ground against bone in his shoulder, and he raised his gun to shoot the wolf as the man-shaped thing joined the fray. He jerked his wrist to miss and his shot sailed at the moon as he was slammed to the ground, and his gun spun off, grey as everything else in the moon’s light.

        The monsters rolled off of him, fighting viciously, both snarling. The man-thing had hands, but the wolf had teeth, and Halpern wished he could better see what was going on. He held onto his shoulder, feeling blood well up and trickle down.

        And then there was the click of a cocking gun, and three shots in quick succession. He saw Eldred in the flashes of report-light, and the fighting stopped. The winner rose up, and Halpern saw it wasn’t much different than the wendigo he’d slaughtered.

        “Junior?” Halpern whispered to himself.

        “He bit you good,” Eldred said, coming near, naked in the clearing. “Swallow a silver bullet whole—it’ll burn the wolf out of you by the time it reaches the other side.”

        Halpern stumbled up to stand. “Junior, is that you?”

        Eldred stepped over to Junior and put a hand on his shoulder. “Merrill forgot his place. He was blood, but we’re family. Wasn’t his place to fight you.”

        The thing that must have been Junior nodded.

        Eldred tossed the gun at Halpern’s feet. “You got what you wanted, Halpern.”

        Halpern lunged for the gun, then looked up. Junior’s face was misshapen by half a muzzle and jutting teeth. Oh Sarah! “Why’d you save me?” he asked Eldred, without taking his eyes off his nephew.

        “Your last shot,” Eldred said. “You shot wide, intentional.”

        And then Eldred was on all fours again, and Halpern heard the sounds of his change, till his wolf stood there instead of him. “You can walk back,” it told him. Then it raced into the forest, Junior close behind.

        “Eldred! Sarah always said you were a good man!” Halpern stumbled after them. “Junior! You can come into town, anytime! Tomorrow! I’ll be there! Come into town Junior!”

        Halpern yelled until his voice gave.

        The empty dark never answered back.

Copyright © 2015 Erin Cashier

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Erin Cashier is a registered nurse in the Bay Area. She’s been published by Shimmer, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future, Escape Pod, Podcastle, Neil Clarke’s Upgraded anthology, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Alchemist’s Feather” in BCS #25 and the Best of BCS, Year One anthology.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE SNAKE-OIL SALESMAN AND THE PROPHET’S HEAD

by Shannon Peavey

They’d preserved his brother’s head in grain alcohol and floated it in a dirty glass jar. Leo peered through the glass and his own face looked back at him, slack-jawed and cloudy-eyed.

        “Don’t know him,” Leo said.

        “He has your face,” said Colonel Klee. Rumors tilted on a daily basis as to the origins of the man’s military title. Some said he was cast out of the Army for some misdeed. Most said he invented the rank for the showman’s sound of it, the clack of hard ks in the back of the throat.

        “Doesn’t mean I know him.” Leo backed off from the jar. His jaw hurt from clenching it. “Somewhere there’s probably some man looks like you, Colonel.”

        The Colonel smiled and said, “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

        “Yeah, well, this guy’s not looking so good, himself.”

        The Colonel had an easy laugh, low and kind. The sort of laugh that made people think they were his friends right off. He patted the jar with the back of his hand and his knuckles pinged off the glass and left smudges in the dust. “I like you, kid,” he said. “You’ve got nerve.”

        “I don’t know about that,” Leo said. “I suppose it’s never been tested.” He didn’t think that was true—he’d been tested plenty. But it was the right thing to say.

        The Colonel clapped him on the shoulder and turned to leave the tent. “Give it time. When you get to be as old as me, you’ll have been tested more than you think you can bear.”

        He walked with heavy steps, pausing once in the square of light streaming in at the open tent flap.

        “Some people say that thing talks at night,” he said. “Haven’t heard it, myself.”

        Leo said nothing.

        “Bet they’d pay a pretty sum to hear a dead man speak,” the Colonel said, and chuckled to himself. He vanished through the doorway, into the heat and the searing sunlight and the chatter of a new crowd of suckers looking for cheap entertainment. Leaving Leo alone with his brother’s head.

        Leo stepped closer to the jar. Cary’s white-blond hair floated up from his skull, the tips waving slightly. It looked like strands of spiderweb, or exposed nerves.

        “You still telling people things they don’t want to hear?” He tapped on the glass. As if he might rouse it to speech.

        The head blinked, eyelids slipping and slow over eyes that didn’t fit right anymore. Its mouth worked, and Cary spoke. “Someone’s got to say it, if you won’t.”

* * *

        Leo was welcome wherever he went. People liked talking to him. He always knew just the right thing to say.

        He hadn’t worked at the medicine show very long, but he fit in there. He shilled the crowd during the shows, and he tended the mules and the horses and he liked doing it. He liked how sometimes the animals flattened their ears and snapped at him while he called them sons of bitches and the words came out of his mouth just like he’d formed them in his head.

        At night he slept with a girl from Mexico who told fortunes. Her name was Sabina, and she had a little booth near the medicine wagon where she would take customer’s hands, palm up, and rattle off loud prophecies in Spanish while an old man from Kentucky pretended to interpret for her. Really he made up his own fortunes, and they got wilder and more ominous the more he tipped from his hip-flask.

        Sabina spoke English fairly well, but she and Leo never used it together. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

        “Ciérrale que se mete el chiflón,” she said that night, when he slipped into her tent. “¿Pus ónde tabas?”

        “Trabajando, mujer. Un caballo se enfermó,” he said, shucking off his boots. “Usté disculpe si la desperté.”

        It still gave him a sick jump in his gut to hear the Spanish pouring from his mouth like water from a spring. He didn’t speak a lick of Spanish. He had no idea what he’d just said. But her face eased, and she shifted over to make a space for him. He understood that.

        He told her: I’m sorry I was late. I was talking with my brother’s head. I put a knife in his throat six months ago because he told me something I couldn’t accept.

        But what came out of his mouth was Spanish, and gentle, and made a blush spread across her face. She reached up for him, and he didn’t speak anymore.

* * *

        The Colonel put Cary’s jar in a dark tent, squashed between a whale’s jawbone and a mummified cat. People paid a penny to enter the tent and see THE WORLD’S MOST DEPRAVED TREASURES—FROM ACROSS THE SEVEN SEAS! A little bit of cardstock in front of Cary’s jar billed him as head of a biblical prophet. But he did not speak to his visitors.

        Leo snuck in late at night, after the showmen had gone to bed or retired with their bottles of mezcal and chosen company. Sometimes he spoke. Sometimes he just watched his brother’s head resting at the bottom of the jar.

        “I’m sorry I killed you,” Leo said, though what he meant to say was I wish they’d never found you.

        But for Cary, it never mattered what someone said aloud. His mouth curved into a smile and it was ghastly on that dead face. “Don’t you ever miss me?”

        Leo hesitated. “Yes,” he said, and didn’t know what he’d meant to say. It had just spilled out.

        “I see.” Cary’s smile faded away.

        Leo turned away and busied himself with the other exhibits, turning the whale’s jawbone over in his fingers and counting the vampire’s teeth. The mummified cat was leaking sawdust all over the table.

        “Do you want to know what I saw when I died?”

        “No,” Leo said.

        “It was dark, all over dark, and a voice was talking to me. And I couldn’t understand what it meant.” His tone full of wonder. When had Cary ever failed to know what someone meant, in their heart of hearts?

        I said I didn’t want to know, Leo said. Only it came out, “Were you afraid?”

        “I don’t give a shit what you want.” Cary’s dead eyes rolled in their sockets. “And I was afraid. Yes. If you even care to know.”

        You’re such a goddamned woman, Leo said. But what split across the darkness of the tent was: “Of course I do. I’m your brother.”

        They both stayed silent for a long while.

        “I don’t know what you thought you were gonna do on your own,” Cary said eventually. “You can’t talk honestly with anyone but me.”

        “Honesty never got a person anywhere.”

        There were things he wouldn’t tell Cary but he thought Cary already knew. About how whenever he was alone in his tent, or with the animals, he would just talk and talk to himself to make sure he could still form words that were his own. That he wasn’t just some empty glass that filled up with whatever people wanted to hear.

        “What I said before,” Cary said. “It’s still true.”

        Leo whirled around and knocked the mummified cat off the table, and it landed on the floor in a plume of musty sawdust. He seized his brother’s jar with both hands and hefted him up. The weight of the jar and the head was more than he had expected.

        He shook the jar twice, like he would shake someone by the shoulders. Cary’s forehead thunked off the glass.

        Don’t say that to me. I don’t want to hear it. Of course, out loud he said, “You’re right. I’ll change.”

        “Fuck,” Leo spat, and he slammed the jar down to the table. He thought it might break, but it didn’t. The glass was thicker than that.

        Cary looked back at him, and Leo couldn’t read his expression.

        Leo spun on his heel and left the tent.

* * *

        On the stage, the Colonel was dazzling. The midday sun slammed down on him, limned him in white light—but he didn’t so much as blink. He turned this way and that, a brown glass bottle in his hand. “Who here has an ache that just won’t quit you? Who has a pain that troubles you day and night?”

        He paused to let the crowd think. Someone shouted, “I do, Colonel.”

        He nodded solemnly. “I hear you, brother. Who here isn’t troubled by an aching back or swollen joints? Isn’t that what we reap here, working ourselves to the bone at the very frontiers of decent society?”

        Leo lingered on the fringes of the crowd, scanning faces. He had to be careful about who he approached. It was important to find someone who truly wanted the medicine to work. Wanted it with all their heart.

        He saw a few that looked likely. A lady in the front row with a worried face. A man in the back leaning on a cane. Another man with his foot in bandages, shading his face with his hand.

        Leo relaxed when he saw her—just the perfect one. She stood near the front of the crowd, but not at the very front. She had a deep, furrowed scar that ran from her jawline down her neck and disappeared into the front of her dress, and she stood off-kilter, with a hunched shoulder that spoke to an uneven gait. Even more than that, though, was the look on her face.

        Like she was afraid to believe but couldn’t stop herself.

        He threaded his way over to the woman, moving slowly and casually through the crowd.

        “But I have here in my hands a true panacea,” the Colonel was saying. “I know because I’ve used it myself. When I was traveling overseas—”

        Johnson stood there in the middle of the crowd, his hand on his hip. He was the shill. In a minute or two, the Colonel would call him up on stage as a volunteer. Johnson would tell the crowd about the crippling pain in his knee, and then the Colonel’s elixir would cure him.

        Johnson did all right. Leo could do it better. But it was too hard to hold on to a target, up there on stage with the sun shining in his eyes.

        “This man’s a miracle worker,” he said to the woman with the scar.

        Only reluctantly did she turn her face away from the stage. “Excuse me?”

        “I said, a miracle worker,” Leo said again. “I never thought I would walk straight again. I got crippled when I was just a kid.”

        The woman blinked, and she looked him up and down. She snagged her lower lip in her teeth. “You seem fine to me.”

        “I am now,” Leo said. He smiled and let himself relax. He’d judged her true. It would be easy.

        The Colonel was motioning to Johnson to come onstage. “If you don’t believe me, how about a demonstration—”

        “You really tried it?” she whispered as she turned back to the stage, watching the Colonel splash his elixir into a dosing spoon. “It works?”

        “Oh, ma’am,” Leo said. “Works like a charm.”

        Onstage, Johnson shook out the leg he’d been limping on. “By God!” he said. “I feel like a new man!”

        The Colonel beamed, bright in the light of the sun.

* * *

        On their last night in town, Leo stood at the fenceline talking to Johnson the shill when he heard the crunch of heavy footsteps behind him and saw Johnson’s face school into a pleasant smile.

        “Sorry, sir, we’re closed up for the day,” Johnson said.

        A hand closed on Leo’s shoulder.

        “That medicine my wife bought from you folks.” A man’s low voice, the reek of liquor and sweat. “It doesn’t work, does it?”

        “No, it doesn’t,” Leo said, before he could stop himself. It was what the man wanted to hear, after all.

        Before the man pulled him around, Leo had a perfect view of the way the color drained out of Johnson’s face, how his jaw dropped. You poor stupid bastard, Johnson seemed to be saying. But Leo never pretended to know or care what people really said.

        Then he was whirling around through the dry night air, and the man’s fist met his cheekbone alongside his nose and he was falling, he was down on the ground staring up at the man and blood was running through his nose and into the back of his throat and behind the man’s head he could see the purple-black sky covered in stars, just completely blanketed with stars.

        The man held him down and punched him again, across the jaw. A flash of light, a rush of blood in his mouth. “How can you live with yourself,” the man said. Johnson was at the man’s shoulder trying to pull him away but the man shrugged him off. “Giving people false hope like that. Watching them suffer.”

        Words bubbled to Leo’s lips, but this time he held them back. He spat blood and said nothing.

        “How can you live with yourself,” the man said again, and he let Johnson drag him up and away.

        Leo lay back on the ground watching the sky and probing his teeth with his tongue. He hadn’t lost any. After a time, Johnson came back and stared down at him.

        “You’re a goddamned fool,” he said, his voice mild. “You trying to ruin us?”

        Leo tilted his head to the side and spat more blood on the ground. “I wasn’t thinking, I suppose,” he said. “It’s good we’re leaving town tomorrow.”

        “You’re right there,” Johnson agreed, and he stooped down and pulled Leo to his feet. “Steady,” he said, when Leo wobbled.

        “I’m all right.”

        He didn’t really feel all right. He felt raw and hurt and burned-down, a fire set to embers and white ash. But no one would want to hear something like that.

        He shrugged off Johnson’s offer of help and went on his own slow, careful way through the ghost territory of a caravan that was nearly packed to leave. Everything nestled in crates and tied down in wagons and covered up with canvas like a shroud, to keep off the sand and the wind and the curious eye.

        Sabina was asleep when he ducked into her tent. She cracked one eye and then sprang to her feet with a cry on her lips.

        “Soy yo,” he said.

        She came very close and touched his face in the dark. He hissed as her fingers found a tender spot. She said, “¿Que pasó?”

        “Naa, naa. Nomas una discusión que se puso juerte.”

        She clucked her tongue. “Eres un menso. Siéntate.”

        Her fingers on his shoulders, drawing him down to sit on the floor of her tent. He sat, and then looked straight ahead at the dark silhouette of her face, at her gentle fingers coming up to trace the corners of his mouth.

        “Ni sé porque carajos sigo contigo. ¡Mijor que me encuentre machos cabrones qui mi dejen menos canas, pues!”

        Her fingers were so soft on his face. He wondered what she was saying. If maybe she said that she loved him, that she forgave him for always being false with her.

        So he spoke, then, and told her everything that was in his heart. About his brother and his brother’s head in the glass jar; about their strange afflictions.

        And she spoke back to him. Conversation between them had always been easy. And her tone was light and she laughed and patted his cheek and he knew that whatever secrets he might confess, he said them only to himself.

* * *

        Leo did not sleep. He tried, but sleep wouldn’t come. So he went back out into the night, where the moon was just coming up and he had to take a lamp to be sure of his way.

        Most of the WORLD’S MOST DEPRAVED TREASURES—FROM ACROSS THE SEVEN SEAS! had been packed away in crates. Cary’s head hadn’t, though. His jar sat on top of a sealed crate, his forehead tilted at a strange angle against the glass. His eyes were open.

        He smiled when he saw Leo. “Do you have something to say to me, before we move on?”

        I want you to stay behind, Leo said, while his lips formed the words “I’m sorry I killed you.” That’s all Cary ever wanted to hear. I’m sorry I killed you.

        “You don’t want to see me anymore. You think you’ll be able to start over fresh if I’m not around,” Cary said. “If there’s not someone constantly reminding you that everything you say is false.”

        Leo said nothing. It was true; of course it was true.

        “Well I don’t give a shit.” Cary’s voice sounded so strange, muffled through the alcohol and the thick glass. “I want to still be alive. Tough luck for the both of us.”

        I just want to forget about it, Leo said, while aloud he said, “You are alive. Look at you.”

        Cary laughed. The force of it shook his head and he flopped backwards so the back of his skull hit the glass but he didn’t stop laughing. He screwed up his eyes and his laughing was a lot like crying.

        Leo tried to snap, Shut up, someone’ll hear you—but instead it was quiet and almost kind. “Are you all right?”

        Cary hitched and hiccupped and finally sat still. He cracked one eye open to look at Leo. “Do you think we ever really cared about each other?”

        Leo hesitated. Only Cary asked him these questions, the kind he couldn’t answer because he didn’t know the answer and he never had. So he said, What do you want me to say?, and it came out, “Of course we did.”

        “I knew you would think so,” Cary said, his face canted in an ugly slantways smile.

        God only knew what he’d heard. They were not the same in this—their gifts were not equal. To some the Spirit has given diverse tongues. He’d heard it once in a sermon and felt the words shiver in his ribs. And to others the interpretation of tongues. Only this was not fair, not fair, because why should one man speak and not understand his own words?

        He remembered being a child with Cary, remembered being the same in everything except that he always spoke too much and Cary always listened, always knew what he’d meant no matter what he said. But he didn’t remember if they’d cared about each other. It was all overshadowed with six months ago, with the memory of Cary’s blood slipping hot over his hands.

        “What did you hear?” he said. “What did I mean?”

        “You don’t know your own heart?”

        I do. Which sounded like, “You’ve always known it better.”

        “I know,” Cary said. “You don’t even know when you’re lying.”

        That’s enough, Leo said, and he grabbed Cary’s jar by the neck and tucked it under his arm.

        “Where are you taking me,” Cary said, and Leo stayed quiet.

        He left the camp on foot and snuffed out his lamp. He could barely see in the darkness and he kept stepping badly, ramming his toes into brush and rocks. “You’re gonna get snakebit,” Cary said, but Leo ignored him and kept walking on.

        The sky was an arc of stars. Off to the west, a coyote yipped and another one answered it.

        When the lights of the town and the medicine show caravan fell out of sight behind him, Leo dropped to his knees and set Cary aside. A flat spot, near a stand of palo verde. The soil was grainy and loose. He dug with his hands.

        “No.” Cary bared his teeth. “You can’t do this to me.”

        Leo kept digging. It didn’t need to be a very big hole. Just deep enough to keep the coyotes from bringing him up again.

        “Leo,” Cary said.

        Leo dug and dug and little rocks wedged up under his fingernails and he ripped his knuckles bloody and kept on digging. The knot of resolve in his gut grew thicker and heavier until he felt like he’d swallowed a stone. His brother’s voice was a dull whine at the edge of his hearing. He didn’t let himself listen.

        He stopped when his fingers scraped rock, and he pulled back on his haunches to look at the hole. It was big enough. Deep enough for his arm a bit past his elbow. Not too wide, but wide enough to hold Cary’s head without the jar.

        “Leo, we’re a pair,” Cary said. His voice was raw and scraping, like he’d been talking for a long time. “Truth and lies. Without me, you’re not anything.”

        Just because you hear the truth doesn’t mean you have to speak it, Leo said, and his mouth said, “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t kill you again.”

        It made him laugh aloud to hear it.

        “You won’t do it,” Cary said fiercely. “I know you don’t want to. I hear it when you’re talking. You don’t want to do this.”

        Leo took Cary’s jar and unscrewed the lid. Alcohol fumes filled his eyes and made him blink. He poured off the alcohol and then carefully tipped Cary’s head onto the ground. The faint moonlight picked up the hollows in his brother’s dead face and chased light down his white-blond hair. Leo sat back for a moment, watching him. After all, he and Cary shared the same face. Maybe he would look the same, when he died.

        But Cary coughed in the cold dry air and then he didn’t look so dead anymore. A little alcohol dribbled out his mouth.

        “Even if you kill me again, it’s not gonna change what you are,” he said. “I told you before. And without me, you’re never going to be able to tell.”

        Cary’s voice was much clearer and sharper in the open air. He’d always had that kind of voice, the kind that sounded like the word of God made manifest. Leo picked his brother up and held him aloft. His fingers wrapped under the corners of Cary’s jaw, by the stump of his neck. He thought, Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear it again.

        He remembered the feel of the knife jammed through Cary’s windpipe, the rush of hot blood over his hands. It had been far too easy. Barely any resistance at all.

        “Nothing about you is real,” Cary said, his voice low enough that Leo had to strain to hear it. “Because even when you talk to yourself, even when you think, you’re only telling yourself what you want to hear.”

        I’m not going to listen to you any more, Leo meant to say, and his voice would be calm and almost tender. Instead, he said, “I love you, brother.”

        He placed Cary’s head upright in the hole, and he began to fill it in again.

        Cary stared up at him the whole time he was filling in the hole and said nothing. He seemed to know there was nothing more to say. He squeezed his eyes shut when the dirt rose up around his nose and made a noise like a hurt animal.

        Leo couldn’t get the dirt to lie flat over Cary’s head. There was a little mound there, next to the palo verde, and it looked like what it was. A tiny grave. But he didn’t think many people would come looking out here. So he touched the loose dirt one last time, with the tips of his fingers, and then he got back to his feet.

        Morning was coming. On its eastern edge, the sky started to tint a lighter grey, and the stars washed out one by one.

* * *

        Leo straggled back to camp, covered in dirt and holding his brother’s empty jar in his hand. People stacking crates into the wagons stared at him with naked curiosity in their eyes, but no one stopped him. He walked back to where the artifacts from the DEPRAVED TREASURES tent had been kept and nestled the empty jar into a box filled with wood shavings.

        “I wondered where that had gotten off to,” the Colonel said.

        Leo turned to face him. He thought he should feel ashamed, maybe, or afraid. But he didn’t.

        The Colonel looked at the empty jar, and then he looked back at Leo. Leo couldn’t read the expression on his face.

        Finally, the Colonel said, “You know, it was spooky how much that thing looked like you. I don’t know if I could look at my own face like that, day in and day out. Not stuck in a jar for suckers to point and stare at.”

        He stepped forward and clapped Leo on the shoulder and smiled.

        Leo licked his lips. His mouth was so dry, filled with grit and the metal tang of grave dirt. The Colonel would want him to say something. But he couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

        He looked up at the Colonel’s kind, easy, salesman’s smile. And for the first time, he couldn’t say anything at all.

Copyright © 2015 Shannon Peavey

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Shannon Peavey is a writer and horse trainer from Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex, and Writers of the Future 29 and is forthcoming in Lightspeed. She can be found on twitter @shannonpv.

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COVER ART

“Bandits Assault a Stagecoach,” by Ignacio Bazán Lazcano

Ignacio Bazán Lazcano has worked for major game companies around the world (Sabarasa, NGD, Global Fun, Gameloft, Time Gate) on numerous titles for PS3, XBOX, and PC (Section 8, Section 8 Prejudice, Aliens: Colonial Marines) and has authored publications in journals and books such as Digital Painting Techniques, 2dartist Magazine, 3DTotal, and Digital Art Masters. View more of his work online at deviantArt.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2015 Firkin Press

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