Issue #288 • Oct. 10, 2019

“The Edges of the World,” by Grace Seybold

“Under Their Wings, These Starving Ghosts,” by Grace Yang

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THE EDGES OF THE WORLD

by Grace Seybold

        Nalatachet wakes from a dream of turtles.

        My dear Bexeletl,

        I thought of you this morning as I watched the moon set. It comes so clearly to me still, the cold winter nights and the taste of terrible wine sold hot from those little carts with their purple umbrellas, the ones that used to set up just the other side of the university wall. They knew how many students would sneak out after dark, no matter the weather. I see us huddled in the front room of some crowded sharehouse with our winejars at our chests, listening to imported musicians and dreadfully earnest poets, arguing with each other to drown them out, and afterwards walking home by late moonlight and early sun, tiptoeing past porters who (I feel certain) knew quite well what we were about and smiled benevolently on us.

        I find myself wondering today if those houses are still there, Bexeletl, and those winesellers, and those students, and that music, and everything that made up that time. The same moon shines on us now, but oh! how everything else has changed!

        Nalatachet puts down his pen, pausing for thought, and sips his cooling tea. The days are growing shorter and colder, and it seems as though he scarcely sets his tea on the table before the steam whisks away into the air and vanishes. The warmth of the mug barely penetrates his skin. He should build up the fire, make breakfast, begin his day, but everything feels unsettled this morning, disjointed, and he can’t get started.

        It’s the cold making his movements slow and syrupy, he thinks, dull gaze settling on the wrinkled skin of his hands. Turtle skin, that can’t get warm. The turtles in his pond have been moving around less and less, spending more of their time basking on rocks to catch the wan sunlight. He watches them for a long while, some mornings, wondering if they can sense the oncoming winter or remember winters past. There must be something that tells them when it’s time to leave.

        Today it’s the moon that has him thinking of long ago, but lately anything might do it: leaves blowing over the river, the goosegirl driving her angry geese along the road, the clatter of hooves on the bridge. The turtles. He built the turtle pond in the first month of his exile, partially damming the river and laying the retaining wall, even before repairing the roof of his new home; a gesture of defiance: you will not make me other than I am! As though anyone in this district would understand the pond’s significance to an alchemist, or care. The only reaction was a painfully scratched-out letter of diffident concern from the farmer downstream regarding whether the pond would pollute the watercourse, and a few requests for turtles for soup from the owner of the village hot-shop, which Nalatachet denied. She still asks occasionally, but as a joke now. After thirty years they can bring themselves to joke politely with him without fearing the Empire’s wrath.

        I continue my work, my friend, as ever, and draw closer to my goal. I know I’ve said so many times, but all this year I have been finding answers that eluded me before: new illuminations from old texts and new fruits from my own research. Things fall into place where once they fell apart, and they carry me along with them into new and uncharted terrain.

        You will ask whether I should go so heedlessly forward, whether these paths remain untrodden for a reason; I can only give the answer I always give, the answer I gave in our arguments long ago: my life has purpose yet, and I will not abandon that purpose now. I am an alchemist still, despite everything, and to abandon the search for the deeper secrets would be to betray myself—and to betray you, whether you agree with me or no.

        After breakfast Nalatachet goes outside and walks briskly around the perimeter of his given land. It isn’t the border of his freedom; he’s allowed to go down to the village, and as far on the northward road as he can walk in a day, and as far southward as he likes. It’s been years, a dozen at least, since he’s tested the strength of his cage and been politely returned to his house by a squadron of Imperial soldiers. New faces, young faces, in shiny armour; faces he’s never seen before, but they know him anyway. He imagines a painting of himself tacked up in some barracks office, reminding the district’s soldiers of their charge; some lieutenant assigned to eye him discreetly in the hot-shop every year or so, some fellow with a keen eye who can go back to the painting and add wrinkles and scratch out hair, to keep the representation true.

        That was northwest he went, that time. There’s a road to some town there, with one of these jaw-cracking local names. He’d thought he might like to see it, and see if they’d let him. But the boundaries of his world don’t change just because the names of soldiers do.

        He could go south, but there would be no point. This is the edge of Empire, the edge of the world. There’s geography to the south, be it admitted, a sweep of long low hills brown with dust; and if he walks out into the plain and up one of their sheep-beaten tracks, a thing he hasn’t done since the hinge of autumn, and if the curtain of the sky then lifts a little, he can see the peaks of distant marching mountains, none of which have names. They are not part of the world as the mapmakers draw it but stand brooding somewhere off the edge of the page, unnecessary.

        Today he doesn’t go nearly so far, only up to the orchard fence and back again, and then downhill to the road and back up. Nothing is different since yesterday. Then he picks his way across the muddy ground to his workshed, built well away from the house in case of explosions. His legs have grown perceptibly shorter this past month, and he hobbles up the three steps into the shed and leans against the wall inside.

        Flickering on the hearth is the other fire, the blue-white one, that never needs to be tended. From the other kettle Nalatachet pours the other tea, the grey one, from which there’s no returning. He doesn’t wince as he drinks it anymore. His lips feel leathery, impervious, and the sensation of the liquid in his throat is a distant warmth today instead of the miserable burning of weeks past. He wipes a droplet from the rim of the cup as he sets it down, watching with vague interest as the liquid fades into the skin of his thumb.

        On the way out he locks the door, with a good lock he brought with him from the capital in one of the three trunks he was allowed. He assumes the district soldiers have a copy of the key or else they couldn’t be so tidy when they break in and copy his notes. But it keeps out the crows and the children, who dare each other every year to risk his supposed wrath. He leaves his ledger open on the worktable for the spies’ convenience, the day’s observations recorded in his careful cipher, which he changes at whim. He doesn’t want it to be too easy for them.

        I am reminded, dear Bexeletl, of how confidently we expected to be famous one day. In the service of the Empire, of course, but even so. Instead I write you from the Empire’s furthest outpost, and whether my work counts as service is not for me to determine.

        And you: do you serve, do you think?

        He writes Bexeletl faithfully, every month. Bexeletl his dearest friend, Bexeletl who escaped exile. There’s no-one else to whom he can confide his thoughts. He used to receive letters from his brother, and later his brother’s sons, until he manufactured a quarrel to drive them away so that they no longer needed to feel tethered by blood ties to an Imperial embarrassment. It was the best service he could do them, young men pursuing advancement in the capital. Four years later there was an awkwardly formal announcement of his brother’s funeral and a remembrance ribbon wrapped in stiff paper. Since then, nothing. Nalatachet assumes that if either of his nephews died, he would receive an equally stiff notice from the other; so he imagines them alive, and happy, and successful in the service of the Empire.

        When he’s made the long trudge back across his property, Nalatachet opens all the doors of his house and sweeps the dust out into the cold morning. He tried to hire a servant from the village the first year he arrived, but while most of the villagers will take Imperial coin for fish and fruit and flour at the market, and soup and beer at the hot-shop, they refuse to be paid for time or service, and laugh behind their hands at the foolish old man, and clean their own houses and those of their mothers-in-law.

        So he cleans, and makes his lunch, and sets the afternoon bread under a bowl to rise, and sits out in the pale sunlight to eat, where he can watch the pond. It’s really too cold for eating outside, and he has to keep blowing on his fingers to warm them, but he wants to make sure the turtles are still here. After a few minutes of anxious waiting, he sees them poke their heads up, open-mouthed, as though laughing. He chews thoughtfully, phlegmatically, paying full attention to the way his jaws grind together. Everything about his body seems strange today, burdensome, and he hunches under it, a weight on his shoulders. Eating is tiresome, and he scatters the last third of his meal on the rocks for the sparrows and shuffles back indoors.

        Forgive me, dear friend, I ramble. Today of all days, though, I think I can be forgiven indeed. I am certain now of what I do.

        Looking out the window at the slope of the grass down toward the pond, Nalatachet wonders where the turtles go each winter. He used to think they burrowed into the bottom of the pond to wait out the cold, but when he rebuilt his garden the last time he paved all the watercourses through the length of his property with tightly fitted stones to try to mimic a painting he’d seen once, and the turtles seemed entirely unbothered. Maybe they migrated southward somehow, like birds, but he’d never seen them leave, or arrive. One day each autumn there would be turtles everywhere, lying about on the rocks and making round humped wakes on the pond’s surface as they swam here and there. The next day, which might be just as bright and warm, no turtles; then, without fuss, sometime in the spring, turtles again.

        He has no particular need to do anything today, and so he wanders around his house, picking things up, moving them over, rubbing them with his thumbs as though to check for dust. You will work in the service of the Empire or not at all, the judges told him when they sentenced him, and he chose exile; so either what he does these days is not work or it serves the Empire somehow, after all. He takes a short nap and wakes to find the sun wholly down, the night well advanced. He thinks about dinner but decides he isn’t hungry, and he takes up his letter again instead.

        I find it difficult to hold the pen this evening, Bexeletl. It comes on so quickly. After so many years, to be a success at last—I do not know how I feel about this, after all. I did want to be famous, you know. Not in the way that we managed, our brief little flare of rebellion, so swiftly quenched, but something else, something noble. Well, that at least I have done. If not the alchemist’s ultimate goal, the union with the undying gods that we all seek and that we frightened the powers above us with claiming we were close to—then, at least, a lesser transformation, and one that in the end has come to matter to me more. I wonder if you can st—

        The pen drops from his hand. He tries to pick it up again, but it’s beyond him now. In the lamplight he eyes the writing desk, the letter with its trailing final blot, his crabbed hands with their short square nails and stubby fingers. Well.

        Time grows short now. Nalatachet feels a small pang of regret for not finishing, but it was never really going to matter. Clumsily he picks the letter up two-handed, pressing it between his palms, and carries it to the woodbin. It takes precious minutes to move the firewood, and five tries to lift the bin’s false bottom and raise the little carved box from inside.

        This the spies have never found; he would know. Inside are letters on his precious thin paper, grouped in bundles of thirteen. He writes Bexeletl faithfully, every month. Thirty bundles, one for each year of his exile. Nalatachet drops the last, unfinished letter in atop the last bundle, shuts the lid, and lifts the whole box carefully and sets it in the fire.

        In his mind’s eye he sees Bexeletl, the brightest of them all, dark shining eyes and laughter, forever young. In the service of the Empire or not at all, they told him, and Bexeletl stood defiant and said—what did he say? It hurts Nalatachet’s heart, a little, that he can’t remember his friend’s words now. But he burned brightly.

        The letters are ash. Nalatachet upends the kettle over the hearth, cooling the remains. When everything is safe, he heaves open the door and drags a chunk of firewood against it to keep it open. Let the house be obviously empty, let people see at a glance that there’s nothing left inside.

        The night air is cold, biting. Nalatachet shuffles out into the dark, his open mouth tasting water on the wind. Halfway to the pond he drops to four limbs, easily, naturally. The weight resting on his shoulders eases, redistributed. He can feel it still, but now it’s not burden but armour.

        At the water’s edge he scents them: others of his kind. No hesitation now as he moves forward. The pond embraces him, mud and water and rippling reeds. He knows, now. Not with the shock of revelation but with the effortless certainty of remembering something long forgotten. This is the night for leaving, just before the weather turns; this is why the transformation came now. The turtles, laughing silently, agree. How could it ever have been otherwise?

        Looking upward through the water, with eyes no longer dimmed by age or tears, he sees the stars. Always he’s seen them shimmer in the distortions of the upper air; now the rippling of the water begins to match those changes, to brush them away, like waves crossing each other and smoothing each other away, to leave stillness behind. He knows, now, where the turtles go.

        The first among them, the oldest and largest, begin to drift with easy strokes of their webbed feet toward the lower edge of the pond. Beyond the wall Nalatachet can see the river flowing downward toward the village, toward the Empire, but it’s a pale thing, a mere tracery, beside the path he sees overlaid on it now, marked out in the shining of the stars. The current draws him, jostling him against the others, who brush his flanks kindly in welcome. His home beckons, where no fire burns and no-one is lost. Nalatachet wakes from a dream of people.

        The moon rises. The water ripples across the cracked stones. Nalatachet slips into the river and starts swimming strongly, silently toward the sky.

Copyright © 2019 Grace Seybold

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Grace Seybold lives in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copy editor and valiantly tries to resist correcting public signage. Her fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Reckoning, Machine of Death 2, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. Her name is pronounced “SIGH-bold”.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

UNDER THEIR WINGS, THESE STARVING GHOSTS

by Grace Yang

        The first thing he feels after being brought back to life are the gentle strokes of wispy fingers trying to touch him. They clamor around his body—weak voices in his ear imploring him to describe every delicious detail of what he can see and feel, when he breaks through the surface of the world gasping and sputtering for air.

        There’s a mustiness on his tongue that reminds him of his breath in the morning. Specters aren’t the only things crowded around him. The street is made tightly compact by a long line of wooden shops, and he vaguely recognizes his hometown, Sujing. Above him, the sky is dark with the distant beating of starling wings.

        As the boy makes way to his feet, the wind streaks by him, blowing away a few of the weaker spirits clinging on to him with little whimpers of protest. He runs to the first home he sees, pounding in the door and shouting for help. Hours go by him as he stumbles down the streets to find something alive. It’s not until the last crowd of starlings leaves that his screams are silenced with a snip as he evaporates out of existence.

* * *

        The rules of the Starling Migration are simple. In September, they make their way across the region, taking the duration of a full day to completely pass through; even with the sun in full rise, the sky is eclipsed black by birds.

        During this time, the townspeople are forbidden from treading into the streets. After all, ghosts that awake during the migration aren’t people. They are not the leftover fragments of a human when it was alive. Most of them are starving like dogs, pressing up against the planks over the windows and whining about being left alone. In post-migration mornings, wives are always grumbling about the fingerprints they have to scrub from their walls. Ghost are a nuisance, plain and simple. There is no living person in Sujing who is stupid enough to open their arms to a ghost; least of all, their doors.

* * *

        The third time the boy is resurrected, his feet are nearly burned to blisters. He had not seen the careful mound of salt the owners here had lined around their house. Through his pain, he hears the trickling of water, and he goes to the back of the home to find a pool of floating lily pads and stones. When he dips his feet into the slightly shimmering water, ink lips dart out to follow him like koi fish searching for food. He registers their cold teeth pinching his skin until he kicks out, and they dissolve into smoke.

        No wonder the townspeople have boarded up their windowsills from the ghosts. Ghosts don’t remember anything, and they’re always hungry. Sometimes, when the boy sits on the ground for too long, they gather around him, the older ones shaped like long oversized slugs with bright pinpricks of light for their eyes. Although the feeling of their skin against him is distant, being in contact with them gives him such a sense of unease that it wards him away.

        If not humans, and not ghosts, who does he have left? Who had claimed him when he alive?

        He hears footprints padding on the grass before he sees her.

        “What are you doing in my garden?”

        He can barely suppress his rush of adrenalines as a voice belonging to a faceless stranger from his past life comes streaking past his ears:

        Whether she is a witch or not, I recommend not jumping when you see her. Women, especially ugly ones, don’t like to be reminded of how they look.

        The boy looks up into the face of Sujing’s fox witch. Disregarding the twisted growth of her nails, the fox witch’s body is human enough. It is her face, thin and narrow, alongside dark, liquid eyes that angle into a fox’s slit that is unsettling. Like the ghosts in the pool, her mouth is outlined in cherry black, but when she grins, her teeth contrast that color with a crooked slash of white.

        He might not remember much about his life before being dead, but he does know what a witch is and the potions this one sells to his town. Her den lies by the black market, nearly touching the edges of Nanwei Forest where few go.

        “Don’t put your feet in the pond,” the fox witch chides him. “It’s not good for my fish.”

        Without waiting for his reply, she picks up a lily from its pad, rubbing the petals between her index finger and her thumb. Golden sand crumbs tumble into the water for the ghosts to eat while the boy tries to remember what a conversation is like when he doesn’t have to speak to a wooden door’s face.

        “Can I come inside with you?” he finally asks.

        He shrinks back at the sharp, rasping bark of her laugh. “Was the salt not enough of a clue?” she says. “Go away, ghost boy. I don’t need the stink of you rotting up my home.”

        Rubbing the last of the crumbs from her fingertips, she goes back to her home and shuts the door behind her with a click.

* * *

        During the intervals after the migration kills him, the ghost boy does not have dreams spanning out of his reach, taunting him with clues of when he was alive. No, that would imply that he still had business clinging to his past personhood, and there is nothing sadder than a ghost who can’t face the reality of his death.

        So, after the starlings leave Sujing, the ghost boy passes into nothing.

        Then, an abrupt shove into consciousness.

* * *

        The fox witch squints down at him from the steps of her wooden porch. She’s chewing something in the corner of her mouth and when she speaks; thin black strands push out from between her lips, twitching like spider legs. “Back again?”

        “Yes, oneesan.”

        She takes one of the squirming legs out of her mouth and breaks it in half. “I think being dead has affected your mind. You have the wrong impression of my age.”

        The ghost boy doesn’t say anything for a bit, not knowing which part of her reply pummels him more. Speaking with her is only slightly less painful than haunting around the town’s cracks and corners.

        “If you know magic,” he says slowly, “perhaps you can bring me back.” He tries to phrase the words carefully so not too much of his hope leaks out. “And then you will not have to trouble yourself with seeing my face anymore.”

        She sighs. “I’m a witch. Not a necromancer. If I could bring you back among the living, I doubt there would be any ghosts left in Sujing.”

        He is not as resistant of failure as he thinks, and he flinches back from the certainty in her voice.

        “Then I’ll take your word for it,” he says meekly. “There’s nowhere else for me.”

        After all, being here in her garden is the closest he has come to belonging somewhere. He has already lost everything through dying. In staying here, he has someone consistent, who will look him in the eyes when he speaks to her.

* * *

        The boy knows he’s been dead for seven years, but the time awake that he’s had to come to terms with it—a week!—is not nearly enough. It does no one any good to dwell, dead or living, but when he is alone, he spends a lot of his time wondering: was a funeral held under his name? More than anything, he aches for proof that there is someone who grieved for him, because otherwise, what point was there in him ever existing? Other times he stares at the stepping stones of the pool and imagines breaking his head open to unspool what little memories of himself he has left.

* * *

        At the end of the fox witch’s garden, there is a miniature Shinto shrine. The boy is surprised by the rice cake under it. He did not think a witch would make offerings to a kami. He picks up the cake, turning it around in his hands, not because he wants to eat it, but because he’s trying to remember the feelings of sinking his teeth into something and tasting it.

        “It’s bad luck to steal a god’s offering,” the fox witch says from behind him.

        He puts the rice cake back under the shrine quickly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I only wanted to look at it.”

        She doesn’t reply immediately. She lays her palm out in front of her, slowly extending her index finger upward. At the same time near the ghost boy’s feet, the grass twines around itself as if invisible hands are weaving it into the shape of a cup. Green tea wells up inside it. “A rice cake would be too complicated for a ghost,” the witch says.

        In his eagerness, he forgets to thank her for the tea. He wraps his fingers around the grass cup and drinks until there’s nothing left. Even in his mouth all at once, the taste is distant. It takes a long time of concentration until he can tell that the flavor on his tongue was more than water, and by then, it is already gone.

* * *

        There are some days where the fox witch does not come out of her house at all. During these days when the boy grows tired of waiting for her, he wanders around Sujing where ghosts emerge from their hiding corners and fall over each other’s bodies, crawling after him. Sometimes, the ghost boy, growing tired of their high keen whining, turns around and claps his hands hard together to frighten them away.

        Most of the time, though, even without her presence, he likes to sit in the peace of her garden. The ghosts that live in the pond are as quiet as fish. The most excitement that occurs is when one resembling a long black tube crawls out of the pool. It sits there, its midsection pulsating back and forth, back and forth, until it vomits soundlessly into the grass. When it is done, it pushes its heavy body back into the water.

        The boy goes to examine the contents of the spew and he finds a mass of gnarled cockroaches, still glistening slightly from the leftover bile of the pond ghost.

* * *

        “Not everyone is born a witch.”

        This is what the fox witch tells him when he asks about her magic. She tells him about coming into this world first as a peasant girl. One day while she was crying by the river because the tree bark was too frozen for her to eat, the spirit came to her, in a fox’s form, offering her its magic in exchange her life and loyalty. He listens with bated breath, partially because this is a story no one will ever tell him again, and mostly because he is happy that she thinks of him as important enough to tell things about herself to.

        “Were you afraid?” he says.

        “No,” she replies. “It was more that I didn’t want to be hungry anymore.”

* * *

        The first human the ghost boy sees after dying is a woman dressed in a muted red kimono with a white obi around the middle of her waist. He peeks at her around the corner of the fox witch’s house. Her black hair is tied into a bun with a wooden prong holding little cloth cherry blossoms that dangle down the side of her head. She goes past the salt lines in tiny, graceful steps and knocks on the door.

        He hears it swing open and the witch’s voice.

        “It’s bold of you to come during the migration.”

        A high, catty laugh from the woman. “Well, time is money and no men come to the bathhouse while the starlings are here. I need our usual safety.”

        The yearning to be near a warm body shears all the ghost boy’s willpower to ribbons. He feels his body move forward like there is a string pulling at his belly.

        Hearing his footsteps, the woman looks at him with mild surprise. “You have an apprentice?”

        The fox witch purses her lips. She barely spares him a passing glance when she tells the woman, “Wait here.”

        When she is gone, the ghost boy focuses on finding the woman’s eyes through the starling-made darkness. This is a word that may not work with the witch, but he tries it with her, “What are you here for, oneesan?”

        “My name is Rika.” He feels her drawing closer to him. The cold tips on her fingernails skim around his neck. He’s too stunned to react. As far as he is concerned, this is his first time being touched by someone. The frenzy of ghost hands groping him does not count. He feels something like her breath on his face. “If you could ever do me a favor of slipping a few extra batches of my order under her nose, I can return you a different kind of pleasure.”

        “I’m not her apprentice,” the ghost boy replies. It’s only slightly better than saying, I’m dead.

        Rika’s raises her hand up, lightning quick, to clutch him by his chin. Her nails dig into his ghost skin, hard enough that he feels the inside of his cheek squeeze against his teeth but not enough to leave a mark.

        “You’re just a baby,” she says, suddenly pulling back. Her voice turns simpering sweet, on the verge of being resentful. “Of course, you wouldn’t need a yuna. There must be all kinds of girls at school who open their legs for you—ones that you won’t have to pay a couple pretty yen for.”

        His wonder fades, and instead he is filled with an uncomfortable squirming in his stomach. “Does the fox witch charge you that much for her magic?”

        “I don’t know if I would place her on a pedestal—mixing together acacia and honey to rub inside your vagina is hardly supernatural.”

        He startles back. “How can you say that with what she can do to you?”

        Through the darkness, he makes out the cold slants of her eyes. Rika laughs in his face. “You really aren’t her apprentice. The fox witch can’t hurt anyone. Not as long as she is as dead as the rest of those things on the street.”

* * *

        After Rika leaves, the fox witch doesn’t say anything to him. He presses his toes forward until they’re an inch away from the salt she’s sprinkled to separate herself from things like him. The witch sits down on the steps of her porch and blows out softly between her lips as if she is trying to whistle but without the sound.

        “I don’t understand,” he whispers. “How long have you been dead?”

        She does not meet his gaze so long that the boy is afraid that he has become his alias, a transparent, ghostly nothing. “Do you know what my name is?” she finally asks him.

        He opens his mouth, only for air to gape out.

        “I don’t either. After I wrote my name in a contract with the fox, it sealed it up. It took everything I had and sucked it dry.”

        The boy shakes his head. He has already heard this story once. There are more important things now. “If you are dead, do you disappear like me after the starlings leave?”

        She looks in his eyes, then to the hands in her lap, then back to him again. “No,” she replies. “Just like the magic of the starlings is powerful enough to bring you back, the fox inside me keeps my spirit tethered here.”

        It shouldn’t matter what her answer is. None of it has anything to do with his situation, or him, but knowing this does mean he can change how he feels. Unable to hold his temper in check anymore, he slams his hand onto his chest and shouts, “It’s the same as if you’re alive then. I have nothing about myself!”

        His anger leaves him as his voice echoes back at him. Behind her house, he hears the soft lapping of the pond ghosts swimming over each other.

        When the fox witch finally speaks, she is very quiet. “I can’t bring you back to life, but there is one thing. I can show you your grave. This is the last thing I will do for you.”

        Before he can react, a spool of milky white seeps from underneath her fingernails. At the same time, her body concaves inward like a dry husk, as if she is a fruit being juiced. A fox emerges out of the white, its coat a slight shimmer in the darkness. It stares at the boy through blind eyes and begins to pad out of the garden. There is no sound or rustle made from its paws meeting the ground.

        The boy hurries to follow the fox, fighting the way his skin turns in on itself as he goes into Nanwei Forest. It is ghosts who have found peace in death who come to these grounds. Their mutual loneliness glues together, twisting them into imitations of the living like a tree made from black limbs. When wind sweeps through, the bones in their hands give the same sound as rattling a hollowed chime.

        From the trees, a few slinking wisps descend from the bark to touch the fox. Brief contact against it sends them into a howling mess as they scatter backwards into the safety of their clan.

        When they finally come to the cemetery inside Nanwei, the ghost boy thinks too late now that of course this is where Sujing would bury its corpses. Nanwei Forest skirts just outside of the town and is safe distance from the dead.

        He treads through each individual grave carefully. When he finally finds his name painted in black on wood, he laughs so hard that his stomach hurts. Kobayashi Aoku. It means open blue sky.

        At the same time, the pang in his stomach turns more into a prickle of discomfort—first like pins and needles and then turning into a cold intrusion against his guts. He tumbles on the ground, retching as he realizes the fox is gone. Something moves in a lump under his skin, but as he makes to grab it, it slips away from his fingertips, burrowing through him like a mole.

        Even more than the sensation of it inside of him, he feels something coming onward like a headache. The world warps into a blur around him. It’s the same sensation he gets after the starlings leave and his time in the world has expired.

        There’s a dislocation—

* * *

        Aoku’s feet are back on Sujing’s sidewalk. The day he died, he had been walking back home alone from a party. New Year night was the most elaborately celebrated holiday in his town, and Aoku had chosen to celebrate it in the shrieking laughter of his friends rather than with his family. In between the jostling of the party, he had lost track of how many glasses of soju he had taken.

        Now stumbling back home, drunk-cloudy and wavering, he is worried about his mother and what she will say after she sees him. She has always been the type to worry about his well-being, even with things like, “—but, oh, are you sure you want to be his friend? He seems too much like a troublemaker for you, you’ve always been so kind, just look at how you take care of your oneesan, it’s very important now that you make good choices for your life because I don’t want you to live in this town forever like we did, and look, when you make the effort to try in school you’re even smarter than your papa is. Let’s try to live a good life, let’s be happy—”

        He grows tired of remembering her nagging and he lies on a nearby bench, so he can fall asleep and be away from her voice. After, there are no outside forces or swiveling mystery. Sometime during the night when his body tried to rid itself of the alcohol in his stomach, he choked on his own vomit, of all stupid ways to bring on eternal earthly decay.

* * *

        When Aoku wakes up, he is alone. There are no moving mounds under his skin, and the fall breeze is a gentle, cooling caress around him. Up above him, still, birds. He can’t tell if another year has passed, let alone if his death this time was an annual occurrence or the remembrance of one.

        He wraps his arms around himself and makes himself comfortable on the bump of his grave. There, he waits for the last cloud of starlings to leave Sujing, wishing he had more time; wishing for real stars.

Copyright © 2019 Grace Yang

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Grace Yang is currently a proud student of Indiana University where she studies business during the day and hones her skills at strange fiction in the night. She graduated from the Alpha Writers Workshop in 2017 and beyond her passion of writing, she really likes dogs.

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COVER ART

“Athlerrod,” by Ferdinand Dumago Ladera

Ferdinand Dumago Ladera is an acclaimed artist born in Iligan, the city of waterfalls, situated in the southeastern part of the Philippines. He was trained and received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at FEATI University in Manila, Philippines. He has a diverse background as a fine artist, graphic designer, and photographer. He specializes in fantasy and science-fiction illustration. View more of his work at his website, ferdinandladera.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2019 Firkin Press

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