Issue #279 • June 6, 2019

“Revival,” by Lisa M. Bradley

“Silver Springs,” by T.R. North

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

BCS Needs Your Help

The pay rate that Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) sets as their qualifying “pro” pay rate for short fiction is increasing by 33%. All writers deserve this higher pay, but we need a 33% increase in revenues in order to pay it. We're raising the price of ebook single issues and subscriptions, but that alone won't be enough; we also need support from donors.

We really appreciate you buying this single issue ebook or BCS Ebook Subscription, but we ask that you consider supporting us with a donation as well, on the BCS Patreon or a recurring donation through Paypal. We are a 501c3 non-profit; donations are tax deductible, and donors can have their name listed on the BCS website.

Thank you!!

Scott H. Andrews,

Editor-in-Chief/Publisher

REVIVAL

by Lisa M. Bradley

I. Carmen, Seeking

        Dark skin scars darker.

        If she were darker brown, might she disappear into the shadows altogether?

        It’s a thought she’s often had, even wished for on occasion, but it’s never felt so distinct a possibility as here, now, jostled by the white crowd crammed under the revival tent; never mind it’s pitched in Carmen’s uncle’s empty field, that her kin—with the same bemused amiability they show when she frets over her spotted skin—have granted permission to these sweaty, fervored folk to gather in their town. Some come from counties away, so parched are they for a sip of possible salvation. Carmen is ignored, like the slivers of night peeking between canvas flaps into the lantern-lit throng of people praying slit-eyed and rocking to the cacophony of squeezebox, cajon, and tambourine as they await the preacher. So many promises on splotchy broadsides... enough to lure dyspeptics and apoplectics; parents of spindly, listless children; blood-coughing elders; the dandruff- and drink-cursed; the wild-eyed and invisibly anguished. Enough to lure Carmen, despite the sturdy pragmatism of sus parientes, the cheerful godlessness residing in their robust bodies; all brown, all beautifully complected, except for one.

        The preacher burns too bright to look at, bright as summer sun spearing the tin-framed mirror in Tía’s parlor, and Carmen cowers before his gaze, as she does before all mirrors, feeling the shadows shrink around her, every supplicant incited. With eyelids scrunched against the blue-blazes brilliance but arms raised, fingers grappling for grace, they push Carmen out of their way, inadvertently propelling her forward. And though she came here seduced by the same promises, Carmen panics, resists the tide, fights not to join the spittle-flecked front of the crowd. Too like teetering on a cliff’s edge, too great the specter of wish fulfilled or failed.

        The preacher turns his head. His eyes scour the crowd, and just as his focus threatens to fall on Carmen’s pock-marked face, a shadow intervenes. A narrow haven, not wide enough to shelter Carmen’s arms or hips but a relief nevertheless. Shielded from the preacher’s gaze, she adjusts her armor (Mami’s sunset-colored rebozo) over her shoulders now clammy with dread sweat. Jasmine scent still wafts from the wool-and-cotton weave, seven years since Mami’s death. Thus fortified, Carmen lifts her chin to smile her thanks, blinks back damp gratitude to see her savior.

        Blue-gray eyes in a gray face... or maybe she sees gray because her pulse pounds behind her eyes, dimming her vision as he studies her face. To her amazement, this tall man neither shrinks from her scars nor feigns, as her kinfolk do, disregard for appearances (even as their attention skates from each imperfection to the next, seeking safe place to rest).

        Even more amazing, the stranger leans in to ask, “Are you well? May I escort you outside?”

        The music stops. There is no room for melody anymore, nor even notes. The tambourine merely rattles beneath the preacher’s sibilants. The cajon strikes in time with each bald-eyed exclamation, and though the preacher holds only a well-worn book in hand, the way Carmen’s heart pounds in her chest he might as well be brandishing knives. She can’t speak for her panic, so breathlessly she nods to the question read from the stranger’s lips. Hand under her elbow, he helps her squeeze through the crowd and out, into the lung-stinging relief of starshine and open air.

        #

II. Reprieve

        Quickly as propriety demands, the stranger releases her arm; seemingly still concerned, he follows her to Tío’s well. Carmen means to dampen her hot face and remember herself. Was she not the youngest of her family ever to work the sugarcane burn? Didn’t she, age eight, catch in her burlap sack as many snakes fleeing from that fiery harvest as some grown men? Why then does she cower from a self-appointed soothsayer?

        Her rescuer declines a drink from the proffered ladle but rolls up his sleeves—Carmen is relieved he’s civilized (enough to know the ritual)—but mid-ablution she notes the welts, red as chilis de monte, around his wrists. When he lifts his arms to scrub face and neck, his sleeves slide higher to reveal elbows equally inflamed. Maybe these marks are his reason for attending the revival. Has her quailing kept him from catching the preacher’s eye? Has it cost him a chance at cure?

        The stranger betrays no resentment as Carmen blots droplets from her face with the fringed edge of the rebozo. He only asks if it’s her first time at a meeting.

        “But not yours?” she asks and studies the shade of his gaunt cheek—gray indeed, not an error of her addled mind or a matter of moonglow. Different though it is from her people’s, his facial structure suggests a certain regality, she thinks. She admires the angles of his face, the prominence of his bones.

        He confides he’s been following the preacher for some time.

        “Yet never been summoned to the stage?” She thinks he must be strong indeed, to court more than once the awful spotlight of the preacher’s gaze.

        The gray man winks without innuendo, the way her primos shrug, and brushes down his sleeves to hide his reddened wrists. “Might be,” he says, “that Preacher knows something I don’t.”

        “Might be...,” Carmen repeats, but she doesn’t believe it. The terror she felt in the tent has subsided, and her common sense aches to redeem itself. There’s no call for rudeness, especially when this stranger has been so kind, so she attempts the close-lipped smile Mami wore when biting her tongue.

        “Or maybe,” she says, failing, wanting to kick herself, “Preacher feeds off hope.”

        She braces for rebuke. Too often her words are sharper than Mami’s, and she lacks the ribbons ‘round her tongue to prettify pettiness. Instead, to her amazement, the gray man chuckles.

        “Maybe he does,” he says of Preacher. “Hope or desperation. They’re close enough.”

        Carmen’s relief is so profound, it must be blazoned on her face, because the man laughs again. His laughter sounds a bit frayed, closer to desperation than hope, but that he laughs at all, Carmen chooses to see as a gift.

        #

III. Healing, the First

        That night, the preacher summons to the stage a woman with a withered left arm locked at the elbow. Her gnarled hand knots in her long hair, a cruel caricature of coquetry. The squeezebox emits a mournful chord as her sister explains the damage done in a button factory: workers forced to clear jammed gears without shutting down the almighty machines.

        Carmen, squeezed in again at the back of the tent, canvas cupping her rump at every breeze, cannot see the stage until the preacher commands the crowd to pray, whereupon nearly half fall to their knees and the tent fills with the rattled-hive hum of some memorized petition they repeat in unison, so many times that Carmen starts learning it; could join in, were she so inclined.

        Looking at the preacher straight on is too hard, so Carmen stares at the injured woman as the preacher gently turns her, folds her to him like a fragile bouquet. Her faded calico dress pleats under his embrace. Carmen doesn’t see his lips moving, doesn’t hear him speaking until his hug fiercens, until the floorboards creak under his violent rocking. This is not the laying on of hands that Carmen’s cousins mock. This healing involves much hollering and “hugging” that might be mistaken for wrestling, except it’s so one-sided. The preacher does not chant the same prayer as his congregation. He brays the names of his many gods, or the many names of his one god.

        Whatever the case, he concludes in a roared AMEN! and, holding the woman’s right hand, he spins her out across the stage like a square dancer. In instinctive sympathy, Carmen flings one arm out to keep her balance and, onstage, the woman does the same. The look on her face when her once-withered arm suddenly obeys, swinging free on its rusty joint!

        The tent thunders with applause and AMENS!, enough to test the tent poles jammed deep in the earth. Carmen half expects the whole affair to rattle off the horizon like raindrops bouncing off oilcloth.

        The next day, she ignores the shower of questions from the ranch hands’ children about the revival, instead urging the youngsters to help her hammer in place the last boards of the new chicken coop (“chicken palace” Tío teases, albeit with pride). Despite her feigned indifference, the marvels are never far from Carmen’s thoughts, and at day’s end, after a hot soak to soothe sore muscles, she follows her wonder back to the tent.

        That night the preacher heals an old man whose eyes are so occluded, his companion must lead him to the stage. The thudding cajon underscores every epithet from the preacher’s mouth. The tambourine hisses every time he yanks the blind man this way or that, the sounds chasing each other faster and faster until the preacher flings the old man off the stage. In the second he looms over the chanting crowd, Carmen sees the old man’s eyes, cleared, are two different colors: blue and brown. Then he falls into the rough embrace, the humbling holleration of true believers.

        During the musical interlude, Carmen slips out to catch her breath and soon finds the gray man at her side.

        “You’re back.” His voice is gritty but lowered to be gentle, even courtly. “You seek a cure?”

        “I did,” Carmen admits, cheeks warming with embarrassment. “But now my care seems such a trifle. And you, sir?”

        The gray man shakes his lowered head. “There’s no cure for me, but I had hopes Preacher might ease my troubles.”

        Perhaps that is why she thinks his countenance regal: his head is always bowed, as if under the weight of an invisible crown.

        “You’d better step back inside then,” she says, not unkindly, “whereas I will walk to clear my mind.”

        “If he’s not noticed me by now...”

        Somberly the gray man winks, and Carmen thinks again the gesture is like her cousins’ shrugs, not flirtation. They share names (his, Swift) before walking her uncle’s field, the noisy light of the revival on one side, subtle stirrings in the thorn forest on the other. Swift stays always one step behind her, and at first she doesn’t notice; her cousins Pánfilo y Casimiro have done the same since she was thirteen, when she broke the nose of a bully who’d been flicking scorpions at them. Carmen finds the man’s deference odd but convenient. She needn’t hide her smile, wondering if he’s as pleased by her company as she is his.

        “Are you sleeping in the Velasquez barn?” she asks. The Velasquez family are yet more cousins, so she knows that most of the other revivalists have boarded there.

        “I have no money,” Swift says, “but the creatures don’t seem to mind I’ve made my bed in the brush.”

        “Truly?” Aghast, Carmen cannot contain her anger, though Swift has spoken serenely. “I’m shamed by their inhospitality! My cousins, so smug with suddenly stuffed purses, that they turn away gente decente. I will tell Ezti he must give you shelter—”

        “Thank you for your kindness,” Swift says, palms pressed together. “But I would not be comfortable there, however gracious the accommodations. I prefer to be alone.”

        “Some solitude! Sleeping amongst rattlesnakes and scorpions,” she says, still incensed. “Fetch your bedroll this moment. I know a place for you.”

        When, cowed, he reemerges from the wilderness of mesquite and hackberry, she leads him to Mami’s casita, the house Carmen painstakingly keeps but where she can no longer bear to sleep. After washing by the ewer in the tiny entry, she insists he take his comfort while she hurries to Tío’s house to fetch gorditas and anacua jam.

        When she returns, however, Swift asks so many questions that she never tastes the refreshments, nor notices if he does. Coaxed by his curiosity, she describes her chores on the ranch and eventually her work in the town archive, setting type for a new edition of Mami’s finest poems. Soon she’s confessing her own fumbling efforts at verse, warm under his appreciative eye, warmer still under his gentle touch.

        #

IV. Communion

        The next night, Swift asks Carmen if she might be willing to skip the tent revival. In Carmen’s childhood bed, they perform a ritual more ancient than prayer.

        Mornings after, tales of Preacher’s deeds spread among the ranch hands’ children. Since Carmen refuses to be their spy, the children pick straws to see who will sneak peeks through the seams of the revival tent.

        Carmen hears their chatter as they breakfast on the large back porch. Preacher heals a girl gone doll-limp and mute from fever, crushes her between him and her mother until the girl cries out and kicks him in the gut. Another night, Preacher rights the crooked spine of a mill worker who then dances until the lamps are blown out. On the fifth night, it’s a six-year case of the hiccups and a goiter vanquished.

        The last night, Preacher hugs a young woman’s lungs clear and unites in marriage the mill worker and the sister of the factory worker with the healed arm. The ensuing celebration is so raucous, Carmen can hear it from the casita.

        She whispers against Swift’s cool, bare shoulder. “I guess you’ll be moving on now, following the revival?”

        Swift sighs. “I’m tired of running after promises, praying for Preacher to see me when you already do.”

        So the revival pulls up stakes and leaves town. Swift stays.

        #

        Quick as his name suggests, Swift aims to earn his keep. Though he’s the son of shopkeepers in a town Carmen’s never heard of, he accepts the only ranch work he’s qualified for: brute and scut. Capable of eerie silence, he sometimes sneaks into the forest at the hottest part of the day to snatch white-winged doves straight from their nests, thus contributing to family dinners he never attends despite Carmen’s requests and her relatives’ dubiety.

        At first she assumes his refusal to eat or drink in her presence is a cultural quirk. When she asks, however, he confesses it’s part of his unnamed illness. Embarrassed, she vows never to speak of it again.

        But her family’s questions do not stop. Over cafecitos, Tío wonders aloud how Swift, inscrutably shy, will ever fulfill his communal responsibility. Even children must contribute; according to age and ability, they sweep town sidewalks or wind yarn for elders or read to the youngest.

        “He’s not been here that long,” Carmen says. “Perhaps he can work with me in the archive until he grows more comfortable.”

        A week later she still hasn’t urged him into town, but at least he seems comfortable with her closest cousins. Or so she thinks. Then one afternoon Casimiro y Pánfilo return to the main house after a morning spent scouring pastures for jimsonweed, coyotillo, any plants toxic to cattle.

        “Where is Swift?” Carmen asks, for he was supposed to help her primos.

        The young men shrug, clearly uncomfortable tattling, but Carmen drags facts from them: Swift never arrived that morning at the appointed spot, nor met them in the field. She hurries to Mami’s casita, fearing her lover might be sick in bed, but only echoes answer when, forehead damp from hurried ablutions, she calls his name in empty rooms. Perhaps he went into the forest to gather nopalitos for his secret breakfast. And stepped on a copperhead? Or startled a javelina protecting babes?

        Carmen runs outside, and lizards scatter like fire at her feet. Before she reaches the forest’s edge, a raspy voice snags her flight. Whirling so fast her rebozo flares, she finds Swift slouched behind a huisache, his gray face grayer than ever beneath a slick of sweat, his shirt cuffs black with what looks like blood.

        “He found me,” Swift wheezes.

        Carmen falls to her knees and reaches, trembling, for his shoulders. Fear lowers her voice to match his. “Who, my love? Who did this to you?”

        “He found me,” he repeats, panicked gaze raking the brush. “I thought, if I stopped following the preacher, he’d lose the trail. But he must have doubled back.”

        Up close, Carmen sees his sleeves are not bloody but scorched and the skin under them blazing with fresh red welts.

        “What did this?” she demands. “Who’s following you? The preacher? Why?”

        Swift’s head still swivels in search of attackers. “I got away,” he pants, as if reassuring himself. “No, not Preacher. Another. I lost him in the forest but didn’t want to lead him to you. So I stopped here, but he never caught up and then I was too weary to go on.”

        Promising she’s seen no one, Carmen pulls him to his feet, only to discover his ankles have been injured, too, as if wrenched by a cruel lasso. Together they hobble to the casita, toppling the ewer as they struggle through the entry.

        Gently as she can, Carmen cleans his wounds and applies aloe vera to the welts undeniably shaped like restraints. Feigning calm she asks, “Is the law after you? Or vigilantes?”

        He struggles in the chaise to sit upright and insists, “I’ve broken no laws of man.”

        What other laws exist? she almost asks, before remembering he’s religious and she—despite the mind-stretching events under the preacher’s tent—is not. Two and a half decades lived by logic and proof easily outweigh a handful of healings. Flukes.

        Carmen grips her rebozo’s fringe in frustration. “Then tell me of this man who pursues you. Why does he chase you? What does he want?”

        “Once he controlled me, kept me in chains. And he’ll not rest until I’m in chains again.”

        “Slavery!”

        Where was this wretched place Swift had lived, that he could be held prisoner?

        “We must tell my family at once,” she says. “They will protect you. My cousins—”

        “No! I won’t endanger your loved ones,” Swift exclaims. “This pursuer, he is not a man but a devil! Ruthless. Feared even among his own kind! You can’t imagine his power!”

        Swift’s terror sends thorned tendrils into Carmen’s heart, but she heads for the door. “Then we must go to the town council. They will guard your life until they can nullify the slaver’s claims.”

        “It’s too late,” Swift says, catching her rebozo. “He has my scent. He can infiltrate any sanctuary, any prison.”

        Carmen nearly wails in frustration. “Then you must run from here! My family and I will delay him—”

        “I could never leave you,” Swift insists.

        “You must. You can send word and I’ll catch up. But I’ll not let you stay here to be hurt again—or worse. I’ll not have your death upon my head!”

        Swift blinks at her. “But, Carmen, don’t you know? I’m already dead.”

        #

V. Swift’s Story

        Sickness came to my town. Not so unusual in winter, when the ground’s frozen solid so it can’t absorb mal vapors. If anything was strange, it was that the catarrh came on so mild. Small sniffles and a snag in the throat weren’t enough to keep anyone from daily tasks, so the illness spread like rumors after church. One day I was delivering groceries and stocking shelves with holiday fare, the next I was bed-bound, fevered, hacking, feeling foolish to be bested by such a trifling malady.

        Some days later, I wondered—astounded, really—if this catarrh might actually kill me. Later yet, I begged my brothers to carry me outside, despite the cold, so I could see the sun one last time. They bundled me against the chill and set me in a chair in the garden, though by then they were coughing into their collars, as well.

        The next thing I knew: a dapple of drops on my head.

        Through doubled vision, I saw I was no longer outdoors. The rough-hewn walls of our shop’s storage shed surrounded me. To my bafflement, I lay on the shelf usually reserved for the overflow of jarred preserves from an orchard the next town over. Two shadows hunched on old crates, drinking from fancy flasks. One figure had his back to me, and every time he guffawed, he flung out an arm for balance and his flask doused my head with fresh drops. I couldn’t complain for I couldn’t speak, nor move at all, as if I were tied at elbows and wrists, knees and ankles.

        I struggled to lift my head, hoping to dispel the only explanation I could think of for why I lay on a shelf in the vermin-proofed shed, in the middle of winter. Meanwhile, the fellow nearest me bragged, “I’ll collect more souls this season than any in business. Just you wait and see.”

        His cohort nodded indulgently. “Certainly your take is impressive already. Not merely old and weak but young, sturdy stock, the like of which we hardly see. Tell me your secret?”

        The rowdier shadow chuckled. “It almost feels like cheating, I concede, but I’ve cobbled together a spell so powerful—”

        He caught himself.

        “But really,” he hedged, “the best part is the binding. Souls stay attached to bodies until I, and only I, choose to collect. Thus I can venture into other villages to sow the sickness without worry that some wretch will sneak in to reap my rewards.”

        By now I’d nearly wrenched my head from my neck, straining to assess my situation. Despite the cold, a mere bedsheet—a shroud, my panic insisted—was wrapped ‘round me, shoulders to toes. More disturbing, I saw myself times two, as if through water or warped glass. The paler of my selves was nearly see-through and floating. I was one of those the shadow spoke of, my soul strapped to my body and my body gray as death.

        How long I lay in horror I don’t know. Long enough that the braggart emptied his flask, then badgered his friend for more, soon slipping off the crate and into a snoring stupor.

        But they weren’t friends, after all. Maybe colleagues, definitely competitors, as I learned when the second shade crept to my side and, brandishing scissors filigreed with fire, snipped the air between the drunk and me. I think now he must have severed the invisible tether that held me, for suddenly my soul dropped into my body and I could move again. Truth to tell, I trembled so hard, I nearly shook myself off the shelf.

        Then the faceless figure leaned over, and a gleaming crescent emerged where I imagined his mouth to be, and with that heresy of a smile he whispered, “Run.”

        And barefoot I did, right into winter’s icy grip. I ripped through my shroud and ran past my childhood home, past my parents suffering inside, past my brothers’ doors, where worried wives paced the floors, and I never stopped running. Even after Preacher, I was running, chasing him from town to town. ‘Til you, Carmen. I don’t want to run anymore. ‘Cause your love’s caught me tighter than the reaper did before.

        #

        Carmen’s legs, tucked beneath her through Swift’s story, have gone numb. Bloody half-moons mark the meat of her palms. She blinks, on the cusp of panic, like when the preacher’s powerful gaze almost caught her. Swift saved her then; who will now?

        “Impossible,” she says, struggling to stand. “You walk and talk.”

        Swift nods but adds, “I don’t eat or drink.”

        “Not in front of me.”

        “Not ever.”

        “We’ve kissed. We’re lovers.”

        “Have you ever heard my heart beat? Or felt the rise and fall of breath in my chest?”

        Despite her tingling legs, Carmen stumbles toward the door. “I have to go, discuss this with mi familia. Tío y Tía will know what to do.”

        Swift follows, begging, “Carmen, wait! Don’t be afraid, not of me.”

        “I’m not afraid!” she snaps, but she wraps Mami’s rebozo tighter ‘round her.

        Swift staggers outside after her. “The reaper never found me while I trailed the preacher. I might be safe on holy ground.”

        “Well, good luck finding that in this town,” she yells over her shoulder.

        “What about your uncle’s well?”

        Vágalme! And she’d thought him civilized! “It’s a well,” she says, whirling on him. “Water, simply water. Because we like being clean! Because we respect our guests!”

        Running footsteps behind Carmen chill her blood, but when she dares a glance, she sees her primos. Concerned by Swift’s earlier absence, Casimiro y Pánfilo have hurried in the direction of Carmen’s shouts. She turns back to warn Swift not to follow her, and that’s when a dark shimmer, like heat rising from a well-seasoned comal, turns the corner of the casita and seizes Swift.

        #

VI. Heroica

        Carmen lurches forward in spite of herself, in spite of the pain that spears behind her eyes when she looks at the malicious shadow. She reaches for Swift, but part of the shadow swirls outward, as if it is cloak and villain in one. It cuts across her fingertips, and Carmen cannot tell if it freezes or burns, but she jerks away with a hiss.

        “What’s happening?” asks Pánfilo.

        “Can’t you see?” she says, cradling her blistered fingers in her rebozo. “It’s got him!”

        “What’s got him?” asks Casimiro, but his question is lost in Swift’s scream.

        The shadow has yanked one of Swift’s wrists behind his back. Now Carmen understands the permanent welts marking his skin.

        “Don’t let him take me!” Swift cries, reaching for Carmen.

        The shadow expands. Arcs of darkness slash the space between lovers. The cold fire has raced from her fingers to her shoulder, spreading a leaden ache. Carmen dares not risk her bare skin again; a second jolt might sap her strength, perhaps even incapacitate. But neither will she permit Swift to be dragged away, so she tears off her rebozo and wraps it around her arm. She then orders her cousins to hold her by the waist, anchor her to ground.

        They do not understand but, forever awed by their nose-breaking hero, they obey. Each locks his arms around her and ducks when she swings her rebozo like a lasso through the air.

        The wool-and-cotton panel splits the shadow, clean as sunlight through a parted curtain. The scent of jasmine spikes the air.

        With the shadow throttling him, Swift misses his lifeline the first time but snatches it the second.

        Carmen focuses on the fabric connecting them—it’s easier than looking at Swift’s terrified face—but her vision blackens at the edges. Her chest aches as the shadow sucks air for a roar that doesn’t come. Instead, Swift staggers several steps back and Carmen and her cousins stumble to keep their grip. Carmen twists the rebozo around her forearm and tugs with both hands. She’s wrestled a sack of panicked snakes at every sugarcane harvest since she was eight. Sometimes possums, too. She can do this. She can reel him in.

        Swift is almost within reach when the shadow does howl. Carmen’s hair flies in stinging whips about her face. The cousins start babbling about the nearly visible “something” flapping before them, but Carmen barks “Concentrate! I need you to pull me back when I tell you.”

        She loops the rebozo’s slack around her arm and yanks again, straining with all her might, calling her cousins to do the same. Swift’s toes cut ruts in the dirt, as do Carmen’s heels, but the lovers hold fast. Carmen’s eyes blur at the shadow’s ever-blooming blackness. She’s never fainted before, but it’s like what Tía has described.

        Her cousins falter a moment, too, breath expended on profanities for the hardly-seen enemy. Then they pivot, turning to push rather than pull Carmen away from the ruction. Despite aching arms and benighted vision, she tows her lover in turn.

        The shadow loses its grip, leaving a scarlet mark on Swift’s neck. The cloak of darkness swirling between Carmen and Swift begins to peel away in scraps.

        “Keep on,” Swift begs. “You’re hurting him. He doesn’t want be hauled into the light!”

        Carmen would laugh if her cousins weren’t driving the last breath out of her. Swift thought this thing some kind of demon?! As if she, a mere human and nonbeliever, could overpower a supernatural being, even with her primos’ help. She knows not what this shadow is, only that she’ll never let it have Swift.

        With a final surge of defiance, Carmen wrenches her rebozo so hard, Swift flies toward her. The veil of darkness crackles, raising goosebumps on her skin, but it lacks the blistering fire or frost of before. Rather than be crushed between the lovers, the shadow flees so fast Carmen actually hears suction, a popping, as the dark dissipates in defeat.

        Then Swift crashes into her, and, all resistance vanquished, the four humans fall in the dirt, sweaty and bewildered.

        #

VII. Healing, the Second

        Back at the main house, Carmen insists on extensive ablutions.

        Afterwards, at the kitchen table, Tía applies aloe vera to Swift’s wounds. Then she bandages his wrists and neck.

        “Ahora, pareces un juez,” Tía tells him, smiling as she gestures at the bandage cuffs and collar.

        Carmen scoffs but says nothing lest Tía treat her blistered fingers with less than loving care. Casimiro y Pánfilo, regressing from excitement, reenact the battle for their mother, crashing into cupboards and upsetting crockery until Tía chases them outside.

        Carmen declines to have her fingers bandaged. Too much fuss for her dominant hand, and anyway the blisters are already shrinking.

        Tía, though skeptical of her sons’ story, goes in search of her husband, that he may know of the commotion before rumors reach him. Left alone with Swift, Carmen removes her rebozo and spreads it out on the table, searching for snags or scorch marks. There’s no sign of their struggle, but the scent of jasmine is stronger than it’s been in seven years.

        “You saved me,” Swift says, voice husky from his strangling. “I can’t begin to repay you, dear Carmen.”

        “I’m only glad I was there. If I hadn’t been, if my cousins hadn’t come...” Carmen can’t suppress a shudder.

        “You believe me now?”

        “You were chased by something,” she concedes. “It hurt you. It would’ve taken you against your will.”

        “Something?” Swift straightens in amazement. “Can you still not accept it was a reaper? A demon of some kind?”

        Carmen cards through the rebozo’s fringe, untangling strands. “I don’t know what it was. I don’t need to. It meant you harm, and I could not allow that.”

        “Your cousins will tell the tale. What will they call that thing they battled? And what will your neighbors think?”

        Carmen sighs. “I’m sure mis primos will choose the most dramatic name possible. The neighbors will think what we always have, that nature is immense. That, although knowable, it cannot be known in its fullness by anyone now alive.”

        She stands and shakes frustration from her shoulders. Does he expect conversion from one encounter?

        “I’ll fetch you a cobija and you can rest in the parlor until dinner. From now on, you will join the family for meals.” Before he can object, she adds, “You’ll not be forced to eat, I’ll make sure of that, but your hosts must begin to see your true nature, whatever that may be. You may stay in the casita tonight and for however long you like, but I will remain here.”

        She starts for the hallway, but his cry holds her back.

        “Carmen, I’m afraid! What if it comes back and you’re not there to save me?”

        Carmen turns. Swift’s blue-gray eyes are terror-wide and blinking as if to hold back tears that do not—cannot?—form. Can she be so cruel? To the man who sensed her fear and sheltered her at the revival? The man whose curiosity warmed her, whose eyes saw her as she was, inside and out? Who now fears for his life, such as it is?

        Carmen changes direction and walks to the kitchen drawer where Tía keeps her shears.

        “I don’t know what’s happening,” she says, grabbing the scissors with her good hand. “Or how we prevailed. I don’t believe it was I alone that saved you. My cousins, mi rebozo, all played a part.”

        She returns to the table where her rebozo is spread and hands Swift the scissors.

        “Perhaps one of mis primos will stay with you at the casita. But if not, this should make you feel safer.”

        Swift frowns at the shears. “You would have me stab the shadow?”

        Carmen sighs again, points at the rebozo. “No! I want you to cut a tassel from the fringe. I can’t because my fingers hurt.”

        “Are you certain?” Swift’s gray brow crinkles with doubt. “Wasn’t it your mother’s?”

        But at Carmen’s insistence, he obeys and, with his help, she knots the tassel around his wrist. “There, now you’ll always wear a bit of my armor.”

        Swift’s smile is forced and small. “I’m still who I was days ago. I haven’t changed at all.”

        Carmen nods, tears rippling her vision. “Please understand. My head must catch up with my heart. Or maybe it’s the other way ‘round.” She wishes she had Mami’s clarity, her gift of felicitous phrasing. “Whichever way it is... can you give me time?”

        Swift winks, and she thinks she really must show him how winks work among her people, and her presumption that flirting is still in their future eases the ache in her throat.

        “Dear Swift,” she says, “if there are, in fact, miracles, I believe you’re mine.”

        He strokes her spotted cheek and replies, “I know there are. Because you’re mine.”

Copyright © 2019 Lisa M. Bradley

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

 A queer Tejana raised on the Texas-Mexico border, Lisa M. Bradley now lives in Iowa with her spouse and their teenager. Her fiction and poetry exploring boundaries and liminal spaces have appeared in Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Fireside. Her first collection is The Haunted Girl (Aqueduct Press). In her debut novel, Exile, an obsessed young woman schemes to escape her hometown, which has been quarantined for twenty years because of a toxic spill (Rosarium Publishing, June 2019). Find Lisa on Twitter @cafenowhere or visit her website for more info: www.lisambradley.com .

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

SILVER SPRINGS

by T.R. North

The boat was staggeringly white, floating untouched as it was against its backdrop of old cypress and rich swamp loam. Even the heat seemed to glance right off it, leaving the rest of the slowly decaying landscape to soak up that much more of the punishing sun. The first word that popped into my head was pristine, which seemed absurd given its purpose. Medicinal, I suppose was what they were going for. There were VD clinics back home that had a certain feel; everybody wanted to be healed, but nobody wanted to admit they needed it. The vessel’s proprietor could hardly paint ‘Sin-Eaters Incorporated’ in big black letters on the side and expect anyone to board in broad daylight and full view of the hotel’s shaded veranda. Scrub it bright as clean linen and pitch it like a pleasure cruise, on the other hand, and people in need of its revolutionary advances in moral hygiene queued up just so on the crushed shell walk leading to the dock, eager and ready to pay for passage.

        We were almost first in line for tickets, just behind an elderly woman with her two grown children supporting her, her high collar and tight-buttoned cuffs already damp with sweat. Once they unhooked the chain and let us onto the dock, the heels of her boots clicked unsteadily against the wooden planks under her thick skirts. The daughter’s cloche was wilting in the damp heat. The son’s shirt was going limp and rumpled under his waistcoat, sticking to his skin wherever his mother had clutched at his arm.

        I wondered which of the trio had initiated this trip. Mother commanding her offspring? The two women trying to protect the treasured only son from his misdeeds? Mother and son locked in a pact to protect the only daughter’s honor? The vice of which I was fondest was my habit of inventing scandalous intrigues for perfect strangers. The vice of which I was here to be rid was...

        I supposed it would depend on whom you asked. My mother would say it was coveting my neighbor’s goods, that commandment I always seemed to be breaking. My father had less use for priests. A practical man, if superstitious enough to think this might work—the sort of man who wasn’t sure what good lighting a candle did the dead but would throw salt over his shoulder if he spilled any. It helped that he seemed to think of it as modern-day leechcraft, something that science hadn’t quite caught up to yet but for which there was still a rational explanation. He wanted me to stop stealing. Hard to say whether his greater dread was the law’s arm or the neighbors’ tongues, but either way, here we were, travelling all the way down to Florida to lay low and fix things.

        In a way, we were on the lam. It was funny, thinking about it like that. My parents and I in our Sunday best, all hiding out in the half-settled reaches of the tropical swamp until the more metaphorical heat died down. We’d even waited until nightfall to board the train southbound to St. Augustine . All this over a few things pilfered here and there. When a racketeer left town ahead of the Ness gang, it was just him and a suitcase; I’d managed to drag the whole family along.

        I picked at the cuffs of my lace gloves—purloined from a Woolworth’s before we’d left New York—and tried not to imagine alligators lurking in the water under the dock.

        There had been a stuffed one at the last train station before we’d hit the end of the line, big enough to fascinate and fill with dread all at once. I’d closed my eyes on a world lit up by Mr. Tesla’s miracle filaments and opened them a day later in one filled with gape-mouthed monsters and sideshow magic. My mother had flipped her lid at the sight of it, huge and hideous and right there on the platform, only to be assured by one of the locals that she could see one twice as big and alive to boot for a nickel just down the road. It got a lot harder to dismiss the promises of backwoods hokum with dragons lurking on either side of the road, hissing at the horses and bellowing from the marsh.

        The springs seemed too clear for an alligator to hide in, but I couldn’t see any mermaids either, and we’d been assured they were there. My father was staring into the water, dark brows beetled as if doubt was beginning to creep in under hope’s threshold after all. His cousin had sworn to him that this company could do what it promised. His cousin had always been a reliable man, but reliable was hardly infallible.

        The slap of scales on water brought everyone on the dock up on point, looking for the source, but the ship’s captain shook his head.

        “Just the black bass,” he assured us. “The springs are full of them—they’re why we have the merfolk here.”

        “They eat, then?” I asked, curious. For some reason, I’d pictured pretty maids who sat on rocks and sang all day, magical creatures with no baser needs like food or sleep. It seemed foolish now, with the captain watching me, right up there with the time I’d suddenly realized that the saints in the cathedral windows had been real people once and weren’t just figures out of a story. Of course the mermaids had to eat something.

        The captain nodded slowly, weighing his words. “Fish, mostly. If they smile at you, you’ll be able to see it in their teeth—they’re pointed like a cat’s.”

        “They smile?” I was surprised at that. The way the barkers at the station had talked about them, a visit to the mermaids to wipe your slate clean was a solemn, vaguely mystical affair.

        “They pick up a few things from watching people. They’re clever enough, where food and silver’s concerned.”

        He climbed aboard before I could ask any more questions, and the old woman’s son cast a worried look at the water. My mother fanned herself and held my hand more tightly as we waited for our turn to be escorted to the white-painted wooden benches lining the interior of the boat. It was a floating box, from the outside. Flat bottom that was half glass, flat top that was half cloth, walls that were half window. It crouched there on the water, just waiting to sink once we were all aboard.

        It was hard not to imagine a surge of cold water clawing at our ankles, soaking our clothes, dragging us down. Fish, mostly. Would a human being be a bit of welcome variety, if it helpfully made its way into the water of its own accord?

        Back home we’d gone to a sideshow that had a diorama done up life-sized and automated, full of stuffed fish with teeth like knives posed in the middle of attacking a stuffed cow that was half skeleton. The fish had been outfitted with miniaturized motors to make their jaws open and close, and the little click every time their teeth snapped together had raised the hair on the back of my neck. My mother had dragged me away from it, scolding me for believing such absurd lies. A week ago, she’d have said the same thing about a stuffed alligator.

        One of the dockhands must have seen me staring. “The glass is thick, miss. Heavy.” He tipped his hat as he imparted that bit of wisdom. “It won’t break for anything short of a sledgehammer, and the weight keeps it on an even keel, even with the negligible draft.”

        The deck felt strange under my feet when he walked us aboard, and a thrill ran up my spine. If we fell through the glass, I thought that we might not drown at all but keep falling and falling through the clear water until we struck the bottom as surely as if we’d leapt from a rooftop. It made me think of the carriage they’d exhibited at the State Fair the month before last, all kitted out with magnets so that it floated on nothing at all when they turned on the juice.

        The wave of the future, the inventor had said. Imagine a trolleycar that can deliver groceries right to your doorstep while the milk’s still cold and the bread’s still hot! Compatible with all existing streetcar lines!

        The conductor joined us once the benches were full. He was dressed in bright white from top to toe, a perfect match for the boat and a sharp contrast to the rest of us. We passengers had dressed as gaily as we could afford, all done up in our finest and as united in our common goal of giving up sin as any revivalists or teetotalers. The conductor’s eyes glittered when he spoke, and he held a porcelain plate full of silver coins that he rattled softly as he passed from one person to the next, urging us to pick one.

        “Whichever calls to you, there’s a coin for every ailment!”

        He said that to me, with a wink and a smile. My father waved the plate away and my mother crossed herself against it. Already blameless, I supposed, with nothing to confess. The mermaids were like priests, weren’t they? Like priests, except the mermaids didn’t care if a person was sorry or not, so long as they were offering something the mermaids wanted in return. I took three pieces, my own plus the two my parents had refused. It seemed like a good idea to have something else up my sleeve in case I botched the first try, and of course it wasn’t like my light fingers were the only complaints against my character.

        Would I give three mermaids one apiece, or would one mermaid take all three? I shucked my gloves and slipped them into my pocket, holding the silver against bare skin. It felt cool in the heat, as if it was drawing something from me already. The edge of the first coin bit into the side of my thumb, and I tried to picture the creature that would take it in exchange for the burden of whatever gangrenous rot of which I wished to be relieved. A girl like myself, I decided. A girl like myself, but with no heart of her own and a fishtail instead of legs. A girl who could do as she pleased.

        “Now, folks.” The conductor waited to continue until our attention was on him, when he’d made a full circuit of the cabin and come to the front, alone. “What you have in your hands is not silver but a ticket to a better life. Whatever you took from the plate, hold it tight and think hard on what you want the mermaids to carry away with them. They are not, unfortunately, clever creatures. Their lack of human minds is what frees them from malice, from cruelty, from vice of all kinds. They will not suffer for the sin they subsume, because they have no capacity to suffer in the way a man might. The naturally clarified water fortifies their constitutions in the same way exposure to polluted, poisonous air weakens and corrupts ours.”

        He cleared his throat and looked around, making sure we were all paying attention and that we seemed understand him. Directly behind his head, like a halo, was a hand-painted sign in looping gold letters: “No refunds.”

        “For the same reason they can cleanse you, they can’t interpolate what you mean if you’re unclear. You must be forceful, and direct, when you imagine those qualities you want to give them along with the coin. You must be focused as the dot of sunlight concentrated by a magnifying glass. It must be perfect, or they’ll only take muddy intentions of change, a bit of regret, and a patina of guilt.” He went through the assembly, making eye contact with each of us in turn, his face stern. “Or worse yet, they may carry your aspirations of improvement with them to the cold silent depths, and then where will you be?”

        At peace, I thought, then was immediately ashamed of myself.

        I shielded my eyes. The sun was glittering off the water, off the boat, off my pretty dress. I hadn’t noticed the boat pulling away from the dock, but we were drifting on the open water of the springs now. I was bathed in light, in the brightness of the sky and its reflection. No magnifying glass in sight, only my scattered desires. I held one coin in my palm and imagined the overwhelming impulse that came right before I grabbed something that didn’t belong to me and stuffed it in my pockets. Clear as crystal, clear as the water under the boat. The other two I’d save for the cringing fear of discovery and the soft warmth at a pretty boy’s smile, two weaknesses I could do without if I wanted to make something of myself.

        I took my cue from the young couple closer to the prow, kneeling on the bench and leaning halfway out of the window, one hand braced on the sill and the other clutching the coin. A cloud passing over the sun let me see again. Below us in the water, something that might have been either mermaid or alligator was circling lazily, getting closer with every loop of the spiral. It seemed fitting that the choice was between redemption and death, and we wouldn’t know which until it was probably too late to do anything about it.

        Then it paused and twisted upright, and dark hair blossomed around it like a drop of ink in a glass of water. My heart thumped in my chest, each beat seeming to say, “Real, real, real.”

        I hadn’t believed before, it seemed. Not truly. My mind skipped back to the nymph on the rocks, combing her hair with a shell and singing in the moonlight.

        My mother quietly murmured a prayer behind me, and I could hear her rosary beads ticking against each other as they moved through her fingers. I’d given her the rosary as a birthday gift. I’d stolen it from a pawn shop on a dare. The other girls had thought I was brave, and their belief had made it real for a full week before the feeling wore off. I’d dreamed of learning to type, picking up shorthand, earning a secretary’s salary, moving into one of the ladies’ boarding houses where you could do as you pleased so long as it didn’t involve bringing men home, as though I could pilfer myself a whole new life.

        Turns out that was the sort of thing a body had to pay silver for.

        More shadows were circling now, sleek shapes dark against the sandy bottom. I focused on the one I thought of as mine. My mermaid, coming for my silver, cleansing my sins. She seemed to sense it, too, growing clearer and closer and homing in on me. I clenched the silver in my fist when I saw her features. Not precisely, not yet, but any moment now— Already I could make out a nose, eyes, a mouth.

        Then she breached the surface and blinked at me with golden eyes. Her pupils weren’t quite perfectly round, and a milk-film caul snapped shut over them before her true eyelids fluttered. Her features were too sharp, like a woman’s but thrown into an unnatural relief. Her skin was scribbled all over with faint scalloped lines, row after row that gave her a dappled look like she was still waiting in shadow even now in the sunlight.

        It was horrible, but I couldn’t stop looking. It was beautiful, but I couldn’t move.

        She smiled when her eyes focused on my fist. Use would have taught her to expect silver; she didn’t need to see it to know it was there. She reached up the side of the boat with webbed, sharp-clawed hands.

        Her skin was cold and wet when she touched mine. The pads of her fingers were tough, like an animal’s. She tugged at my fingers, trying to loosen them, and I came back to myself enough to let go. She plucked the silver from my hand delicately and looked pleased with her prize. No one seemed to know what the mermaids did with the silver or why they wanted it, only that they would happily take whatever came with it. After the space of a held breath, she looked back up at me and frowned, her sharp little fox-face crinkling up in confusion. She reached up again, tentatively, and this time her hand wrapped around my wrist.

        Whatever she might have intended, my father was faster. Perhaps he’d expected some mischief or wrong turn on my part, or maybe some last spark of paternal instinct had warned him, but he yanked me back by my other arm before the mermaid had the chance to get a good hold on me. My hand bloomed hot and bright with pain.

        My mother screaming, and the twist of my ankle when I came off the bench too hard and quick to keep my feet, barely registered. I found myself flat on my belly on the glass bottom of the boat, hand pressed against the cold pane as blood welled up from three scratches gouged deep into the back of it. My mermaid had followed and stared back at me from the other side of the glass, her eyes forlorn and her mouth working, cat’s teeth snapping soundlessly together. She pressed her hand to the glass in a mirror of mine, swam away with a flick of her tail, then returned to repeat the gesture.

        My father hauled me up by the shoulder and held me upright against his chest. The conductor stared at me, his face as pale now as his suit. The elderly woman with her two grown children reached into her clutch and offered me a handkerchief. It didn’t occur to me what for until I glanced down and saw my hand still bleeding.

        I mumbled my thanks and bound the torn skin as best I could, awkwardly tying the cloth tight. The ship lurched under us as the captain turned back toward the dock, trading unreadable glances with the conductor as we went. I sat down on the bench and listened to him quietly assuring the other passengers that this was the first time anything of this nature had ever occurred in his long tenure as conductor, that mermaids were perfectly safe but of course still wild, that he was sure this was simply an accident, a bit of exuberance or innocent imitation on the mermaid’s part or perhaps clumsiness on mine.

        It wasn’t as loud in my ears as my mother’s frightened weeping or my father’s tight-jawed entreaties for her to be quiet and not make a scene. If we’d been alone I might have asked them if it was the blood, the public failure of my redemption, or the simple shock of mermaids being real. As it was, I imagined my mother’s horror at seeing her beloved daughter set upon by a monstrous animal, and I wrapped the idea around myself like another sort of bandage.

        We were last off the boat when it docked, everyone else rushing ahead as soon as the conductor seemed disinclined to stop them. Once the cabin was cleared, I got to my feet, my father steadying me and me steadying my mother. The conductor was staring at the bloody handprint I’d left on the glass, then turned away from the gruesome mark when he caught me watching him. He handed my mother and me over to the dockhand—the kind one who’d assured me the boat wouldn’t sink—and kept my father back to issue a sweat-mopping promise that the mermaid had meant me no harm. The company would happily arrange for a doctor to see to my hand in return for our agreement to overlook this little mishap in any future conversations we might have about our time at the springs. My father agreed immediately; he was in no mood to confess the purpose of our visit to anyone, eager to have my wounds tended, and without the cash to pay for a doctor himself.

        The doctor they produced before the hour was up daubed my hand with a tincture of mandrake, declared me a brave girl, and promised my mother that it was barely more than a few scratches. The ankle was less bothersome, and for that he prescribed rest, elevation of the limb whenever possible, and that I confine myself to slippers for the next few days. He then pulled my father aside and issued strict instructions on changing the wound’s dressing and who to contact if any further symptoms developed. He was confident, but of course any scratches from a wild animal were to be treated with caution.

        I sat by the window with my foot on an ottoman, gnawing on my thumbnail and glowering out at the water. I couldn’t help wondering how wild the mermaid had really been. Were they in the habit of looking up through the bottom of the boat? Mimicking motion from the other side of the glass? The locals would surely have noticed them slithering onto the muddy banks and singing, but there were a thousand other things that might have been missed over the years. There was no margin in being over-careful about warning tourists about local dangers, if it came down to it—some there-and-gone-again phantom of a traveler might not weigh as heavy on the scale as money in their pockets.

        My mother waited until my father was showing the doctor out to descend on me, her face chalky and her fist white-knuckled around the rosary and her demand for my attention absolute.

        “What did you do?” It came out as a low, keening growl, the kind I’d have expected from a fear-angered cat. She’d never spoken to me that way before, not even when she’d found that first bit of evidence against me tucked away in the back of my dresser, and it shocked me as sure as if I’d grabbed a live wire.

        I stared at her, slack-tongued. I’d gotten quicker with lies and righteous indignation, quicker with a good bluff and a sleight of hand, as they’d grown more suspicious. Up until her question, though, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might have something to answer for; that it had been anything other than what the conductor said: a freak occurrence.

        Some instinct had simply accepted that the mermaids sometimes bit and scratched, and part of the conductor’s job was to keep it from happening when he could and pretend horror at it when he couldn’t. Even feeding peanuts to the squirrels in the park had its risks; plump, tame things that they were, they still occasionally ran up a sleeve or bit through a glove. A few scratches from something sharing the water with alligators that could swallow a deer whole was a negligible battle wound, wasn’t it? People came out of speakeasies with worse, and that was from other humans.

        I felt around in my mouth for an answer, the tip of my tongue coming to rest against the back of my teeth. Had I done something? Been a trifle slow with the silver, maybe, but she hadn’t seemed to mind. It had been one of the coins the conductor had given me, too; the two left in my pocket were were a testament to my uncharacteristic bout of rule-following, with the third doubtless already added to the mermaid’s hoard. I’d held onto my thoughts of stealing firm and tight until the mermaid had surfaced and looked at me with those golden fish-eyes of hers.

        I tested the edge of that thought the way I’d tested the edge of the coin. I’d seen the mermaid, and I’d thought of mermaids. Storybook mermaids who frolicked in the waves and lolled about being pretty all day. Which had been foolish, certainly, but then again so was handing over our life savings to a floating carnival barker promising we could wish away our worst impulses. I certainly hadn’t given the mermaid the idea that she was a mermaid along with the silver coin; she’d got either my predilection for things that weren’t mine or nothing more than a shiny metal disk.

        I pressed my injured hand to my breast and used the sudden throb to give my mother a few fat tears and a good sniffle. “What you asked me to do, and what the conductor told me to do, and that’s it.”

        That took the wind out of her sails a bit, and she retreated to their bedroom to weep and pray in earnest. My father took the opportunity to disappear completely, and I wondered what rotgut liquor a person could get in this hotel. The temperance patrols had made it difficult to find good hooch up in New York without knowing somebody, but down here it seemed not even the Revenuers were liable to get very far before they got stuck in the mud. If a place couldn’t be bothered to pave their roads or fence their cattle, it likely couldn’t be bothered to smash up its stills. If he couldn’t have a law-abiding daughter, he could at least forget his troubles for a few hours.

        I lingered by the window until the sun started to set. The fact that it was later here than it was at home added to my sense that we’d found a place where time behaved strangely. My sister would be drawing the curtains on a full-dark sky now, and here I was, sitting in the thick amber light of a sun only just beginning its descent.

        I dragged the chair closer to the window for a better view once the sunset began in earnest. The water was glorious, just as one of the hotel’s maids had promised. It took the dying sun’s colors and threw them back at it, warped and bent but not the least bit muddled. Where the surface rippled or curdled, the current butting up against some unseen obstacle, the light formed something close to a path.

        I watched it all with my chin resting on the heel of my good hand, dreaming of what it would be like to stay. Would I even want the thrill that coursed through me when I laid hands on someone else’s treasures if I knew a predator the size of an automobile could be right under me any time I stepped onto a dock? Would I tremble at the thought of being caught red-handed with this wicked heat surrounding me? Would I even be that remarkable here, in this place operated by and for the barely respectable? Half the people in Miami were supposedly on the run from something; I’d hardly raise an eyebrow.

        I watched until the light gave way to dark, spinning out my idle dreams of a different life. No mother throwing a priest’s words in my face at the dinner table, no father raising a hand in disappointment more than anger, no treacherous impulses breaking the surface at the worst of times. When the singing started, I thought I might have slipped, finally, into a full sleep and begun dreaming in earnest.

        A careless bump against my injured hand cured me of that illusion; I was awake, and very much so. The singing was real.

        Or rather, the sound was real. There was no true melody to it, no words or refrains—I had imagined that part of it. A mournful, rhythmic call carried across the water and hung heavily over it like the curtains of moss draped from the trees’ branches.

        I got to my feet and padded softly onto the veranda in the little cloth slippers a maid had brought on the doctor’s orders. A few of the dockhands were gathered farther down the bank, a worried-looking knot of young men casting about for the source of the music. From their expressions and the nervous wave of their hands as they talked, I could guess this wasn’t an everyday occurrence. I headed away from them, up the path and onto the boardwalk. The way the sound undulated and echoed made it hard to track, but I thought it rang stronger in that direction.

        My footsteps sounded hollow on the boards, my attempts at treading lightly made ungainly by the twinge in my ankle and the unsure fit of the slippers. The music grew louder, then cut off abruptly with the sound, familiar by now, of scales striking water—the black bass again. The sudden, laughable thought that it was the fish singing had me clutching my hand to my mouth to stifle a giggle. Whales sang, didn’t they? Why not fish?

        I sat down on the walk and let my feet dangle over the edge, above the water and cool in the breeze. I was relieved and disappointed at once, my nerves frayed as broken bowstrings. What mystery had I imagined I’d be solving by coming out here? What had I even thought I’d find? A beautiful sunset in a strange land full of strange things, and that was all. If there’d been more to see, there’d have been someone at the crossroads offering a better look at it for a dime a gander. I was convinced of that until a cold, wet hand wrapped around my ankle and pulled, hard.

        I tried to jerk my foot free. I wound up on my hands and knees in the mud, face to face with— My mermaid. She blinked at me, those golden eyes doleful, then took me by the hand and tried to coax me into the water. When I hesitated, she opened her mouth full of sharp little teeth and wailed, the same fluting dirge that had drawn me down the boardwalk in the first place.

        “You can sing,” I said, dumbly. Worry stole over me like a shadow on the water that my mother had been right, that I’d done something. “Could you always sing?”

        It was a foolish question; she tugged at my wrist and wriggled her way deeper into the water, her cries taking on a distinctly petulant edge. I gently pried her off and pushed myself up into a crouch.

        I was passably confident when it came to swimming, and that was in the ocean with its strange and hungry currents. But I wasn’t dressed for it, and I certainly wasn’t going anywhere with an animal that seemed less and less an animal with each passing moment. I tried to collect myself, and I reached into my pocket for the handkerchief the elderly woman had given me, stained with blood but still clean enough to wipe the mud off my hands.

        My fingers brushed against one of the coins I hadn’t had the chance to give instead, and I paused. If this was something I’d done, then it was something I could fix.

        I clenched my fist around the silver and thought hard of mermaids who could speak with human tongues, willing that idea into the metal. I stretched out my hand and held my breath, loosening my fingers just like I had last time, when she’d taken the bait. This time, she took it and held it up in the fading light to examine it before she turned and bolted back into the water. The short, spiny fins where her thighs would have been fanned out and dug into the soft shore, driving her forward even as she used her arms to launch herself back into the shadows of the deeper water.

        I clambered gracelessly onto the boardwalk. It was almost but not quite too high for me to make it by myself from a squelching, muddy start, and by the time I was done, my dress was a ruin and I was a wreck. Fair enough price to pay for the certainty that the conductor’s promise of a painless moral cleansing had been as much a sham as my desire to be cleansed. I limped back to the hotel, the idea of redemption so much silt on my skin and muck under my nails.

        My mother’s hysterics were dismissed with the simple explanation: “I fell.”

        My father’s drunken taciturnness made a simple answer to my mother’s appeal: “See to her, then.”

        Not that I needed seeing to. It was a simple thing to wash off a bit of mud, reapply the tincture and fresh bandages, and pull on a clean nightdress. I tasked my mother with getting a warm poultice from the maids, then fell asleep before it arrived.

        I don’t know if the mermaids sang all night, or if exhaustion and mandrake combined to make my dreams echo with their chorus, but when I woke at dawn it was to nothing more sinister or esoteric than the chattering of resident birds greeting the sun. The ache running from head to toe, with special attention to the fiery heat limning the back of my hand, told me the previous day hadn’t all been one long feverous vision. My father called the doctor back, who scolded me about not resting but said I was otherwise no worse for the wear.

        I was too warm, but I was no warmer than anything I touched, than the blood-hot air itself. Once the sun was up, the only thing cool in the whole damned place was the water, and so that’s where I went.

        My mother fussed over the lack of bathing costumes, but I figured that if my dress was already ruined, what was the harm? The boat hadn’t gone out this morning and was tied up at the dock like a floating coffin waiting for a corpse; she could hardly complain that I’d have an audience.

        The section of the spring that the hotel had fenced off with thick-roped nets—topped with buoys and terminating with stone weights, proof against alligators provided they didn’t get out of the water and walk around it—was barely big enough to swim in, and I was tired and irritable enough that wading was all I could manage anyway. A frantic flap of too-large wings across the spring made me look up. In among the cypress knees, in the deep shade of the trees, a mermaid stared at me. The egret she’d killed was dangling from her mouth by its throat, too-red blood staining its snow-white feathers. She dove suddenly, smoothly, her tail flicking once at the surface, then disappearing.

        I shivered and thought of how likely the fence was to present any serious obstacle to a mermaid’s clever hands and powerful tail.

        I climbed out of the water and went inside. My resolve lasted all of three hours before the heat drove me back out onto the veranda, where I dozed fitfully in a wicker chair. It was easy enough to blame the suffocating warmth for my restlessness, but every errant splash or murmur roused me with the inexplicable and frustrated conviction that my mermaid had returned. It was childish, expecting—wanting—her to be there when I opened my eyes and looked out at the springs. I’d paid her good coin to go away, hadn’t I? I’d paid good coin, and I didn’t regret it one little bit, which was why every twinge in my hand and drop of sweat beading on my skin made me want to cry angry tears as I drifted off again, waiting for the sun to stain the clouds with the color of blood and ripe fruit.

        The song this time was something very close to words, and the melody had every local locked in worried conference with one another as far away from guests and visitors as they could manage. I half-woke, and it seemed that their faces were too much like the mermaids’, sharp and shadowed, and that they smiled with mouths full of small, wicked teeth as they whispered together and stared at me with strange eyes.

        The illusion broke once I roused myself, almost. It felt like their gazes came back to me too often, and it made me wonder which of them had been charged with wiping my blood off the boat’s deck. It seemed impossible for them to know the specifics of why we’d come here, but it was equally impossible for them not to know the generalities. People didn’t give coins to the mermaids for no reason. People didn’t take three coins for fun. All the crew had seen it, and surely as they ate and drank and slept and breathed, they shared those lives with friends and lovers and enemies right here, present and knowing and watching me through narrowed eyes.

        The general unease made it easy for me to slip away, back down the boardwalk. The guests didn’t notice me leaving, and the staff weren’t in a mood to stop me. Everyone had better things to worry about than a fresh-minted invalid taking an evening stroll.

        It seemed silly to think the mermaid would be there again, in that same place, but between the sweat plastering my dress to my skin and the unbearable itching of the scratches on my hand, I couldn’t bear to sit still and listen to mermaids sing and the locals whisper. The last coin felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket, anyway. If she was there, I could give it to her and be done with the whole affair, let go of the curdling hopes my parents held out for me.

        The song grew clearer as I grew closer, and I turned the gentle curve of the walk to find the mermaid on the shore, her beautiful, terrible tail curled around her and her eyes mournful. She let the music taper off and reached out her arms.

        “Come,” she said, her voice smooth and slick and cool as her skin. “Come.”

        “I can’t,” I lied. I wasn’t going to, because there were limits to my recklessness after all. “I can’t swim that well.”

        She pushed out her bottom lip, trying to pout, and patted the bank next to her. “Come!”

        I lowered myself down from the boardwalk carefully, going easy on my sore ankle, and stopped when I was just out of grabbing distance, in case she tried a repeat of yesterday.

        “What do you want?” I asked. I had one coin left—I could do something for her.

        She touched her hand to her chest, then reached out to me again. I came closer, slowly, ready to bolt if she lunged. Instead, she put her clammy hand on my chest, over my heart, and stared at it while she felt it beating. She licked her lips, then looked into my eyes, and I couldn’t read people on a good day but I’d never needed a choir of angels for it, either. She dropped her hand to my wrist and put my palm over her heart.

        I reached into my pocket with my free hand. If I’d given her the power to talk, surely I could give her the power to love, too. I put everything I knew of it into an image of it, like I could stamp the blank face of the coin with an indelible stain of desire and thrill and want and need and tenderness. When I held it out to her, she pressed both of my hands to her heart before she took the coin.

        Her return to the water was more dignified this time. My return to the boardwalk was less so, but I managed to brush enough of the muck off that I could slip back into the hotel with no one much the wiser. My father returned to the room later that night with a drawn face and troubled eyes to announce that he didn’t like how the staff and the dockhands were, as he put it, conspiring.

        “This place,” he said, quietly enough they wouldn’t hear. “They believe things they shouldn’t. This isn’t science—it’s not medicine. It’s magic.”

        He stopped short of witchcraft, knowing the effect that word would have on my mother. We were to leave at daybreak. We were to say nothing, except that we’d decided to cut the trip short. We couldn’t exactly cart our luggage the ten miles to the train station by hand; if we gave offense and no one deigned to take us before our appointed time, we’d be trapped here.

        I wanted to tell him not to worry himself over it, that the locals would doubtless be thrilled to see the back of us. They’d been jumpy enough about my mermaid scratching me. They would probably put two and two together about the singing that had started up right after my attack, given half a chance, and put us on the wagon out of town whether we were keen on going or not.

        I packed my things, and shutting the suitcase felt like putting the lid down on a casket. I closed my eyes and thought about the long, loud, uncomfortable train ride home. Back to the cold, back to the dark. Back to the accusing stares and wagging tongues without even the small cushion of superstition or fear to it. Whatever the people here might be saying about me, it at least didn’t start with, “I always knew she’d turn out like this.”

        It was the thought of never seeing my mermaid again that brought tears—real ones this time, not the seized opportunity of a careless bump against my hand. I’d never imagined anything like her, and I knew in my guts that she was the sort of beautiful I’d never see again. I turned down the lamps and sneaked out. I only wanted one last look, and what my parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

        I went down to the dock and waited in the moonlight, keeping as still as I could with the mosquitoes buzzing in my ears and the wind making me shiver in spite of the day’s warmth. The air held it longer here, sealing it into everything like a blanket, but it had to lose its grip sometime.

        I tried not to start when a fish breached, followed by the mermaid pursuing it. She didn’t spare a glance for me, and I wondered if that was all I’d get; one distant glimpse. I looked down and found myself locking eyes with my mermaid, her angular face barely submerged, her body stretched out and receding into the shadows below the dock. She stretched out her arms and flicked her tail, righting herself and pushing her head and shoulders out of the water.

        She slapped the surface gently, as if she could coax me into the spring. “Come here.”

        “I have to go home,” I told her. Could she understand me? I didn’t know. She could speak, sure, but what would my words mean to something like her?

        She cooed at me and slapped the water again. “Love me.”

        I knelt down on the dock. “I do.”

        I even meant it, as much as I could. I’d never forget her, as long as I lived.

        “I still have to go home. I can’t stay here.”

        Her eyes shifted to something over my shoulder as her lips slid back in a hissing snarl, just as I felt two big, solid hands on my back and heard a whispered, hoarse, “I’m sorry, miss” in my ear.

        The push was hard, irresistible, and sudden. I managed to turn it into a clumsy dive, came up sputtering with the shock of the cold, and stared up at the dockhand. It was the one who’d assured me we wouldn’t sink, that the boat was safe. He did look sorry, at least, a fact I only had a moment to register before the mermaid’s arms were around my waist. I sucked in a lungful of air just before she dragged me under.

        The water was so cold, and so dark, and my clothes clung and tangled and smothered any thought of saving myself. I hadn’t appreciated, from that brief scratch and those gentle tugs, how powerful the mermaid’s body really was. Her tail beat hard, driving us across the spring, and her arms were like iron around me. Her claws dug into my dress, punching through fabric easily and grazing over my skin. The ribbon binding my hair pulled loose in the drag, and it streamed behind me, a truncated version of hers.

        My lungs were burning when we surfaced, and I gasped, ribs heaving. The mermaid held me above the waterline until I began to relax, my panicky need to pull in as much air as I could subsiding as minutes passed and she showed no sign of pulling me under again.

        We were too far away from the hotel and the docks to see even the lights from the windows; far too far for me to call for help and expect anything to come of it. The mermaid loosened her grip, taking me by the wrist instead and swimming at a more sedate pace.

        It was still cold, though, and by the time she guided me into water shallow enough to wade, my teeth were chattering with it. I staggered onto the shore and let my legs fold under me, grateful for the summer-warm mud under my knees.

        The mermaid wriggled up to lie next to me, her tail flicking absently in the water. “Love me.”

        “I do,” I assured her, chafing my arms. I still had to go home, though, and that was getting more complicated by the minute.

        I looked around, trying to get my bearings. The moon was full, which helped a little, but the shadows that piled up thick as snowdrifts under the cypress trees gave things a strangeness that my eyes slid away from instinctively. A tall, broad pile of shells rose from the darkness less than a stone’s throw away, something about it tugging at my eyes as insistently as the mermaid had my hand.

        It was too regular, I decided, a flat mound with evenly sloped edges and a clearly defined border. It looked almost like a cairn. I blinked again, realization landing like an unlooked-for shove between the shoulder blades.

        Not shells. Silver coins.

        The mermaid followed my eyes, her tail-flicks growing coy. She rolled back into the water, swam to the pile, pawed through it for a moment, then swam back to me. She held out a coin in her closed fist, smiling, and I reached out slowly, ready to duck in case I’d misunderstood the game. I pried her fingers open gently, just as she’d done mine, and took the coin.

        “Love me,” she said happily, slapping the water with her tail.

        I swallowed, my throat dry at the thought of what that much silver could buy. Forgiveness. Acceptance. A blind eye.

        I didn’t have to go home. I didn’t have to do a damn thing.

        “Oh, sweetheart,” I said, holding up the coin. “I do.”

Copyright © 2019 T.R. North

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

T.R. North was born and raised in Florida, which has been scientifically demonstrated to ruin a person for any other state. Other works of short fiction can be found in PerVisions, PseudoPod, and the chapbook “Of Witches and Wolves” from Sword & Kettle Press. Follow @northonthegulf on Twitter for news.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Temple Ravine” by Victoriya Shamykina

Victoriya “Anda” Shamykina is an artist from Moscow, Russia, who mostly focuses on environment concept art for games. As a concept artist and illustrator, Anda has participated in mobile, PC, and board game projects, as well as book and magazine illustrations and personal client commissions. Currently she’s working on the “Guns of Boom” mobile game released by Game Insight LLC and a personal artwork book project “Gates of Eodh.” See her portfolio on www.artstation.com/anda.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2019 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.