“Spar” by Kij Johnson

In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.

They each have Ins and Outs. Her Ins are the usual, eyes ears nostrils mouth cunt ass. Her Outs are also the common ones: fingers and hands and feet and tongue. Arms. Legs. Things that can be thrust into other things.

The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. Its skin is the color of dusk and covered with a clear thin slime that tastes of snot. It makes no sounds. She thinks it smells like wet leaves in winter, but after a time she cannot remember that smell, or leaves, or winter.

Its Ins and Outs change. There are dark slashes and permanent knobs that sometimes distend, but it is always growing new Outs, hollowing new Ins. It cleaves easily in both senses.

It penetrates her a thousand ways. She penetrates it, as well.

The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no warning labels, no voices, no bed or chair or table or control board or toilet or telltale lights or clocks. The ship’s hum is steady. Nothing changes.

There is no room. They cannot help but touch. They breathe each other’s breath — if it breathes; she cannot tell. There is always an Out in an In, something wrapped around another thing, flesh coiling and uncoiling inside, outside. Making spaces. Making space.

She is always wet. She cannot tell whether this is the slime from its skin, the oil and sweat from hers, her exhaled breath, the lifeboat’s air. Or come.

Her body seeps. When she can, she pulls her mind away. But there is nothing else, and when her mind is disengaged she thinks too much. Which is: at all. Fucking the alien is less horrible.

She does not remember the first time. It is safer to think it forced her.

The wreck was random: a mid-space collision between their ship and the alien’s, simultaneously a statistical impossibility and a fact. She and Gary just had time to start the emergency beacon and claw into their suits before their ship was cut in half. Their lifeboat spun out of reach. Her magnetic boots clung to part of the wreck. His did not. The two of them fell apart.

A piece of debris slashed through the leg of Gary’s suit to the bone, through the bone. She screamed. He did not. Blood and fat and muscle swelled from his suit into vacuum. An Out.

The alien’s vessel also broke into pieces, its lifeboat kicking free and the waldos reaching out, pulling her through the airlock. In.

Why did it save her? The mariner’s code? She does not think it knows she is alive. If it did it would try to establish communications. It is quite possible that she is not a rescued castaway. She is salvage, or flotsam. 

She sucks her nourishment from one of the two hard intrusions into the featureless lifeboat, a rigid tube. She uses the other, a second tube, for whatever comes from her, her shit and piss and vomit. Not her come, which slicks her thighs to her knees.

She gags a lot. It has no sense of the depth of her throat. Ins and Outs.

There is a time when she screams so hard that her throat bleeds.

She tries to teach it words. “Breast,” she says. “Finger. Cunt.” Her vocabulary options are limited here.

“Listen to me,” she says. “Listen. To. Me.” Does it even have ears?

The fucking never gets better or worse. It learns no lessons about pleasing her. She does not learn anything about pleasing it either: would not if she could. And why? How do you please grass and why should you? She suddenly remembers grass, the bright smell of it and its perfect green, its cool clean soft feel beneath her bare hands.

She finds herself aroused by the thought of grass against her hands, because it is the only thing that she has thought of for a long time that is not the alien or Gary or the Ins and Outs. But perhaps its soft blades against her fingers would feel just like the alien’s cilia. Her ability to compare anything with anything else is slipping from her, because there is nothing to compare.

She feels it inside everywhere, tendrils moving in her nostrils, thrusting against her eardrums, coiled beside the corners of her eyes. And she sheathes herself in it.

When an Out crawls inside her and touches her in certain places, she tips her head back and moans and pretends it is more than accident. It is Gary, he loves me, it loves me, it is a He. It is not.

Communication is key, she thinks.

She cannot communicate, but she tries to make sense of its actions.

What is she to it? Is she a sex toy, a houseplant? A shipwrecked Norwegian sharing a spar with a monolingual Portugese? A companion? A habit, like nailbiting or compulsive masturbation? Perhaps the sex is communication, and she just doesn’t understand the language yet.

Or perhaps there is no It. It is not that they cannot communicate, that she is incapable; it is that the alien has no consciousness to communicate with. It is a sex toy, a houseplant, a habit.

On the starship with the name she cannot recall, Gary would read books aloud to her. Science fiction, Melville, poetry. Her mind cannot access the plots, the words. All she can remember is a few lines from a sonnet, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” — something something something — “an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark….” She recites the words, an anodyne that numbs her for a time until they lose their meaning. She has worn them treadless, and they no longer gain any traction in her mind. Eventually she cannot even remember the sounds of them.

If she ever remembers another line, she promises herself she will not wear it out. She will hoard it. She may have promised this before, and forgotten.

She cannot remember Gary’s voice. Fuck Gary, anyway. He is dead and she is here with an alien pressed against her cervix.

It is covered with slime. She thinks that, as with toads, the slime may be a mild psychotropic drug. How would she know if she were hallucinating? In this world, what would that look like? Like sunflowers on a desk, like Gary leaning across a picnic basket to place fresh bread in her mouth. The bread is the first thing she has tasted that feels clean in her mouth, and it’s not even real.

Gary feeding her bread and laughing. After a time, the taste of bread becomes “the taste of bread” and then the words become mere sounds and stop meaning anything.

On the off-chance that this is will change things, she drives her tongue though its cilia, pulls them into her mouth and sucks them clean. She has no idea whether it makes a difference. She has lived forever in the endless reeking fucking now.

Was there someone else on the alien’s ship? Was there a Gary, lost now to space? Is it grieving? Does it fuck her to forget, or because it has forgotten? Or to punish itself for surviving? Or the other, for not?

Or is this her?

When she does not have enough Ins for its Outs, it makes new ones. She bleeds for a time and then heals. She pretends that this is a rape. Rape at least she could understand. Rape is an interaction. It requires intention. It would imply that it hates or fears or wants. Rape would mean she is more than a wine glass it fills.

This goes both ways. She forces it sometimes. Her hands are blades that tear new Ins. Her anger pounds at it until she feels its depths grow soft under her fist, as though bones or muscle or cartilage have disassembled and turned to something softer.

And when she forces her hands into the alien? What she does, at least, is a rape, or would be if the alien felt anything, responded in any fashion. Mostly it’s like punching a wall.

She puts her fingers in herself, because she at least knows what her intentions are.

Sometimes she watches it fuck her, the strange coiling of its Outs like a shockwave thrusting into her body, and this excites her and horrifies her; but at least it is not Gary. Gary, who left her here with this, who left her here, who left.

One time she feels something break loose inside the alien, but it is immediately drawn out of reach. When she reaches farther in to grasp the broken piece, a sphincter snaps shut on her wrist. Her arm is forced out. Around her wrist is a bruise like a bracelet for what might be a week or two.

She cannot stop touching the bruise. The alien had the ability to stop her fist inside it, at any time.  Which means it makes a choice not to stop her, even when she  batters things inside it until they grow soft.

This is the only time she has ever gotten a reaction she understands. Stimulus: response.  She tries many times to get another. She forces her hands into it, kicks it, tries to tears its cilia free with her teeth, claws its skin with her ragged, filthy fingernails. But there is never again the broken thing inside, and never the bracelet.

For a while, she measures time by bruises she gives herself. She slams her shin against the feeding tube, and when the bruise is gone she does it again. She estimates it takes twelve days for a bruise to heal. She stops after a time because she cannot remember how many bruises there have been.

She dreams of rescue, but doesn’t know what that looks like. Gary, miraculously alive pulling her free, eyes bright with tears, I love you he says, his lips on her eyelids and his kiss his tongue in her mouth inside her hands inside him. But that’s the alien. Gary is dead. He got Out.

Sometimes she thinks that rescue looks like her opening the pod to the deep vacuum, but she cannot figure out the airlock.

Her anger is endless, relentless.

Gary brought her here, and then he went away and left her with this thing that will not speak, or cannot, or does not care enough to, or does not see her as something to talk to.

On their third date, she and Gary went to an empty park: wine, cheese, fresh bread in a basket. Bright sun and cool air, grass and a cloth to lie on. He brought Shakespeare. “You’ll love this,” he said, and read to her.

She stopped him with a kiss. “Let’s talk,” she said, “about anything.”

“But we are talking,” he said.

“No, you’re reading,” she said. “I’m sorry, I don’t really like poetry.”

“That’s because you’ve never had it read to you,” he said.

She stopped him at last by taking the book from his hands and pushing him back, her palms in the grass; and he entered her. Later, he read to her anyway.

If it had just been that.

They were not even his words, and now they mean nothing, are not even sounds in her mind. And now there is this thing that cannot hear her or does not choose to listen, until she gives up trying to reach it and only reaches into it, and bludgeons it and herself, seeking a reaction, any reaction.

“I fucking hate you,” she says. “I hate fucking you.”

The lifeboat decelerates. Metal clashes on metal. Gaskets seal.

The airlock opens overhead. There is light. Her eyes water helplessly and everything becomes glare and indistinct dark shapes. The air is dry and cold. She recoils.

The alien does not react to the light, the hard air. It remains inside her and around her. They are wrapped. They penetrate one another a thousand ways. She is warm here, or at any rate not cold: half-lost in its flesh, wet from her Ins, its Outs. In here it is not too bright.

A dark something stands outlined in the portal. It is bipedal. It makes sounds that are words. Is it human? Is she? Does she still have bones, a voice? She has not used them for so long.

The alien is hers; she is its. Nothing changes.

No. She pulls herself free of its tendrils and climbs. Out.

About the Author

Since her first sale in 1987, Kij Johnson has sold dozens of short stories to markets including Amazing Stories, Analog, Asimov’s, Duelist Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. She has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short story and the 2001 Crawford Award for best new fantasy novelist. Her short story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was a nominee for the 2008 Nebula and Hugo awards.

Her novels include two volumes of the Heian trilogy Love/War/Death: The Fox Woman and Fudoki. She’s also co-written with Greg Cox a Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, Dragon’s Honor. She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan; and Kylen, two novels set in Georgian Britain.

“Of Melei, of Ulthar” by Gord Sellar

Haunted went Melei that evening into the streets of Ulthar, haunted by what she had seen in the dream-voyage of the night before; desert fires burning distant across the dark and dusty plain, and an immense black silhouette of some enormous outcropping of rock rising up, upward into the sky to blot out the tiny flickering stars across half of the heavens. In a dream, too, had she heard voices echoing against the stone walls of buildings crammed together along narrow streets, voices laden with care and worry, crying her name out into the blackness of deepening night.

Her name — but not Melei, not that name she used in waking — had crouched in wait beneath her tongue; perhaps it was only natural, in the dreaming, in this other world, to be called something else. That name, strange in her mouth, cold and quivering when she nearly whispered it to herself, was hers. And why not? She was alone, she lived alone, and with nobody shared the secrets of her nocturnal voyages, for who would call her anything but mad…?

So that awake, by the lengthening hours of that slow, still-warm autumn endlessness, Melei stalked the cozy, jumbled streets of Ulthar. Listlessly; suffering through a sunny afternoon as faraway gleam of dreamt flames in darkness, and the tempo of faint faraway cries and chanting, haunted her waking mind.

Cats — for in Ulthar, where there was one, there were ten — traipsed past in little dainty-footed troupes, eyeing her with the wary look of beings that glimpsed her dark secret as no human could. She yielded the road to them just as everyone in Ulthar did, occasionally stooping to rub one behind the ear. Briefly, just until its tail batted back against her elbow and it turned its head slightly before going on along its carefree, shiftless way. Always one with black and white patches, always with white paws, she knelt to touch those chiaroscuro beasts with the slightest hesitation only, with a trepidation she prayed nobody noticed, most of all the beasts themselves. And yet she was sure in her heart’s blood that they knew. They knew.

And then, round some corner would she follow the troupe of cats, and find a pack of soldiers standing together. Staring at her from behind grilled black faceplates. She would stop, as other citizens did not, and stare into those night-dark eyes, glimpse the dark folds of eyelids surrounding those bold orbs, and sigh gently and slowly to herself, for these people looked to her like the folk of her dreams, almost. Swarthy, yes, and smelling of exotic, perplexing spices. Beside them, in the street, as clouds drifted in overhead, over the tops of gods-haunted mountains, she took comfort in that strange aroma, the hint of myrrh and tehenna and cinnamon, the broad brown lips pursed stern. The foreign soldiers looked at this bold young woman with wonder, for none of Ulthar had done as she, pausing to gaze into their eyes with something like recognition, perhaps, or fascination, in their own.

Only Melei.

She gazed thus, for a few brief moments, upon these strange and ever-surly foreigners, as a wanderer sometimes, but only sometimes, looks upon the walls of the city where her people have dwelt since forgotten ages. In dreaming, she often had seen folk like these, sat at fires and eaten with them, sung songs she only half-understood, songs shared with that hopeful, dire world which filled her waking days with longing.

But no songs now. Instead, she whispered a word to them, a single word in her own language. One of them, in his fluted blue steel armor, shrugged slightly. They looked at one another, and then at her again, the expectation being that she would move on.

“Atal,” she asked them, a name, a single word so pathopoeic that the warriors could do nothing but ache from it, and she nodded her fair head past them, to a distant gate behind, up to the high temple carved from hillstone there, where ancient Atal was, in those days, thought still to linger. His image had been painted last as a priest in repose, feeble and centuries-worn Atal in white robes, shaven head resting upon a stone pillow; his eyes full of longing, staring up from the canvas. Melei had seen the picture in a public hall, gazed reverently on it for an hour while closing her eyes and opening them again, over and over until the image was stamped upon her mind perfectly, indelibly.

The soldiers only pursed their dark, broad lips harder and shook their heads. They nodded down the road. Not towards wherever Atal now was, if indeed the old priest lived still; these footmen of the new conqueror were directing her nowhere except away. Melei gazed upon them a moment more. What songs had they sung as boys? What games had they played amidst fires burning among the darkling foothills surrounding the great peaks of the south? Slowly, she turned and followed a quiet old striped tomcat away, along a gutter. But she heard them speak of her, then, to one another.

And then, suddenly, Ulthar was no longer tinged by her dreams, no longer dressed in that enchantment she had smuggled back from the world of her slumbering voyages. As the soldiers spoke with muted words at once utterly gibberish and completely familiar, she gave up on her earlier half-fancies that she might even have understood them, at least the sense in them, if only she could have heard their voices a little more clearly. It was a lie. They were not mystical creatures. They were quotidian men of muscle and sinew, and Ulthar was simply a holding in their masters’ empire. 

And Melei longed for more.

She felt their eyes upon her as she wandered down the road, and round a corner, her eyes searching the sky for the first stars, that she might turn homeward and settle herself down to the repose and reverie that only sleep could bring her.

The black night-ocean roared beneath, broad and noisy with the lapping of waves that she could hear clear as children’s voices, so silently did she glide through the deep, familiar sepia that always preceded sunrise on these flights.

The ocean was new: often, she had soared above grasslands, occasionally among the buildings of a smog-choked city, but tonight, this dream-morning, she found herself above some expansive southern ocean. Below, from time to time, a lumbering darkness could be seen, spilling light from tiny windows, luminance far different from any reflection of the whole and simple face of the single crescent moon above her. These were windows in the hulls of lumbering ships that crawled across the ruined sea.

As sepia slowly burnt into orange with the coming of the morning sun, Melei spied the coast ahead. It was an immense and hideous metal graveyard, the hulls and decks of broken ships protruding from the sand, their bare bones laid out as if upon an examiner’s table. Among them gathered labouring men, already at work hauling enormous rusty chains and ruined slabs of metal ashore. The ships looked as if they had been hewn in half by some enormous, awful blade and left to bleed into the ocean. For the waters, too, were sullied here, stained black and putrid. The rancid stink of the waters wafted up into the air, and Melei gasped in stunned disbelief.

This was not the same site as she had visited in previous dream-flights, though the people shared the same dark hue of skin, wore the same resignation on their faces. A man beneath her dropped his load, a gargantuan link of chain slamming down onto his leg, and he collapsed upon the poisoned sand with a cry so loud she could hear it as she soared past.

It was exquisite, wrenching but enchanting. It was a place where mistakes mattered, and this was why Melei kept returning. Because this world was one of consequences and dire meanings, godless and hard and amazing. But this beach was not the precise place she sought. In Ulthar, Melei was a mere seamstress, a needle-girl who day in and day out walked the streets careful not to step in cat shit. But in this strange world, she found herself possessed of powers beyond anything a real person in Ulthar could have boasted in millennia. She could soar in the sky, and she could go anywhere.

And there was a place that she was seeking, these nights.

Below her, a fence surrounded an enormous tent village. Men shouted, and there was a violent clattering sound, and screams. She saw people running, people clothed in white that shone against their dark flesh. To Melei they were unspeakably beautiful in their terror. Running for their lives, panicked. She felt her tears welling up. Such awful lives; and yet they held onto them so desperately. What humbling beauty, what endless rapture, that beings could live that way, in a world so starved of magic and gods. It enchanted her, as she swooped down low enough to brush her fingertips against the tattered hems of a few of the dingy white shirts that ran long enough to reach down past the knees of the scrambling men and women. 

Melei concentrated, and suddenly spun in the air, soaring now into the northwest. There was a city there that she had read of in secret books hidden in the drab tearooms of Ulthar, books only secret because nobody read them — for the denizens of Ulthar spoke only of the failed expeditions to unearth Kadath, old dead Kadath, and of gossip in the wracked court of Ulthar that was now under Southern rule. But Melei had read on fragile, forgotten pages of the wild tangled passage-roads that ran between the great grey monoliths of that old city on the coast, the city with the unbroken towers and the bridges and the streets laden with music and voices and wavering lights. Across an ocean, it lay: unutterably far by the standards of these folk; but for a dream-traveler, its bright roads and bustling noise lay within reach, if the will was strong.

If only she could find that strange and mystic polis… nobody had done so in aeons of dreaming, not in the lifetimes even of gods. The sky swallowed her, and she soared into it not lightly, but as an arrow soars toward its victim’s death: unstoppable, unabashed, and filled with the most resolute certainty imaginable.

Excrescences thick and strange rose from the drowned streets, wafting steamily up from broad, jagged-barred holes in the ground, and Melei swept down into the fog of the broken city. This was the place, but no longer the city of the pages, not the city about the magnificences of which had been whispered and scribbled out by dream-wanderers in ancient tomes long-lost. This polis had changed, its million secret details discarded like the flimsy skin of an ancient serpent drifting through the slow eternity of its being.

The city had, by some horrid magic or doom, been drowned, and slain. Ruined, its towering spirit smashed apart, the smithereens tossed into cold water and frozen away into bitter ice.

Here, a great library stood encrusted in ice that gleamed chill as diamonds in darkness; and before it, barges poled by men in thick woolen coats, shivering and calling out in their strange tongues, baleful cries. Old men and women gathered upon the library steps and huddled at its high windows as flakes of snow fell enormous and faintly grey with the ash of fires half a world away.

And there, further along, the great old temples of the last true religion in that world, the fanatic cult-houses of the worshippers of the magical curve, the endless blessed marketeers and insatiable blood-hungry pirates of water and light and time. There, these rectangular temples of lost merchandises stood with windows smashed, empty from lootings, empty except for the poor useless souls who took refuge in their icy halls remaining since the cult had loosed its foul and terrible powers upon the world, and toppled everything that humankind had once built up.

Thence flew Melei, deeper into the city, over crumbled steel bridges and the steeples of abandoned, burnt-down churches. She heard singing, not of human voices, not of ghosts — for this world, haunted though its inhabitants’ faces were, was a place bereft of stalking ghŭls and spirits hungrily wandering. No, not like the frightening lands that lay distant from Ulthar; nothing like the shadowy passes near high Old Kadath or the caverns of B’thaniss. Only the wretched faces of the living gazed out through the smashed-glass windows. The voice she heard was none other than her own, crying out her exultant terror.

An open square between the broken buildings spread out below her, and she wondered whether this had been a park, or the base of some enormous destroyed temple, or perhaps that square where, in ancient frigid nights, the folk of the city had gathered to witness the death-knell of the ending year and cry out jubilant with the beginning of the new. No hint suggested which guess might be correct.

She thought again of living here, in this strange world of cold consequences, as often she had before. Shivering — not from cold, for her dreaming self was swaddled in thick, warm wool, and something of the power of her dream-voyaging shielded her from the worst of the awful, ruined clime — but rather from a titillation derived less from horror at the ruined city, or that such ruination was possible, than out of the purer terror that shook her upon witnessing the magnificent finality of the fact of the ruination itself.

Broken buildings slumbered all around her as she flew past, and she marveled that this world was thus; a place where ruinations could be visited upon mighty civilizations in a generation, yet where the people here would endure on, shivering and hungry, fighting to continue. Whisperings of the fate of Sarnath bubbled up from the silence of her forgotten childhood, but there peered no specters from the windows of this city, at least none that had died. Only the pale and sallow faces of the hungry stared out at her, living scavengers looking out, lit by fires and shame.

Terror. The terror of finding oneself before a mountain to be scaled, a mountain the height of a dozen nations piled upon one another, end to end, boasting whole civilizations and waste lands between them, upon a slope rising unceasingly upward into the sky. The terror of looking upon the ocean stirred into a raging turmoil of violence. Terror at confronting the great secret of this world: that all things had endings, all things could be destroyed just as they had once, long ago, been built up. That terror swept through Melei, thrilled her.

That was when her name in this world, that other name, pierced up into her tongue, begging again to be spoken and seal itself upon her.

She bit her tongue, bit down into it so hard that it ached and bled a little. To say the name… to consign herself among the living shades… such a temptation…

The name fought relentlessly. It would be said, she realized, someday. She would come to live here, in this drowned city of humbling, awful beauty. It would be her home, someday, taking her into its brutal black arms like a lover would do, grinding its iciness against her shivering flesh.

Still she fought, clenching her teeth and grinding them together so violently that she felt they might break off in her mouth. She pushed herself upward, into the sky, letting go of the city even as she stared into the watery canal gridwork of its forgotten, worthless streets. She let herself ascend, into the foul clouds that were heavy with strange poisons, up into the cold nebulousness that lay beyond them, falling away from this awful and lovely world that was her constant obsession, this place of strange meanings and consequences and cruel finalities.

The city and all of its broken, awful grandeur blurred into a mere patch of indistinct darkness dotted with scattered open fires, blending into the surrounding darkness and becoming  nothingness as she fell upward, outward; away from the world once again.

Melei’s eyes opened slowly as the sunrise just finished and serene Ulthar gradually stirred from its long nocturnal slumber. She slid her prodigious bedding aside, and took up her scribbling-notebook in one hand, searching for the words that would draw the magnificently drab colors across from that other world into hers.

A troupe of cats passed by her window, miaowing gleefully at one another, and she rose to peer out at them, as if to divine some portent from the colors of their coats; but they were a motley pack, impossible to read even for a girl as bright as Melei.

Waking, dreaming. She felt as if a woman torn between two lovers — one of them calm, and sweet, and still and good, and the other magnificent, stone-muscled and taciturn and bold enough to seize her and pull her close to him in the darkness of night.

She set the notebook down, ruminating. There was a choice coming. She would have to choose a name. Said she, in that world, “Melei,” then her dark lover would listen, and hear, and understand what her heart said. The delicious torture would end, and he would send her home… never to return. Yet said she that other name, that strange name that even now squirmed beneath her tongue, prickling her mouth and fighting to be pronounced in the sunny morning calm of  Ulthar, then her dark lover would seize her, all at once, and carry her off into the delightful terror of the world of her dreams, leaving the streets of Ulthar forever empty of her.

She could feel the city’s ache, at the very thought of her leaving. The city’s ache, or perhaps it was her own.

No harm could come of writing the name, she decided. She had written it upon her own palm, in different scripts, one by one, and not a thing had happened save that she had dreamt of the other world sooner, and more fiercely, each time. She could write it upon a page, she was sure. It was not the same as saying it. She could still decide. Melei, or…

She took a quill, unlidded a jar of sepia ink, and touched the quill’s tip into the inky darkness. Without speaking — with her jaw locked firmly, to guard against accidental pronouncement — she touched the tip of the quill against the gently yellowed page. The dawn sunlight cast a shadow from the feather quill, throwing a line of gentle shading across the page and into her lap. She shut her eyes, and opened them, and shut them again, and once more opened them, so as to let the shadow find a place in her heart’s memory.

She realized, then, she was building up a storehouse of memories already. The faces of the swarthy guards. The troupes of cats mewing happily all around her. She had stopped hating Ulthar, wincing at the summery stink of the cat turds and grumbling at the foreign power that ruled the place. She had found the kind of love that wells up one when she abandons her lover for another, her world for another’s; that sort of love that is rooted in impossibility that cannot be prevented even by sorrow, even by fear, even by the movement of the shadow across a page as the sun slips up into the sky.

She did not write the name, but instead rose, scribbling-book still in hand, and went back to her window. The sweetest cottages of Ulthar lay just there, empty of terror but touching in their way, stirring memories of the games she had played in these dusty streets during what felt like another life. Laughter and the voices of children who had somehow become half-forgotten friends, folk whose faces that she had seen not once in ages and ages.

And Melei knew, then, that she would say the name. Perhaps not that night. Not so soon as that, she told herself. But she would say it, and go, and old Ulthar would continue on without her, as it had done before her birth, with its cats and gentle sunny days and whispering old women and men.

She filled a basin with warm water, and carried it to a high table in her room, her feet padding upon the wooden planks of the floor. Outside, a bird sang a snatch of birdsong she had heard dozens of times before, though she could not name what type of bird it was. She splashed the water on her face, delighting in its gentle warmth, steeling herself.

For there would be precious little warmth like this in the other world, in the arms of her dark dream lover.

And then she donned a bright and comfortable silk, light in shade to suit the warm day, and crossed the threshold of her home, going out into a street that smelled of blooming cherry flowers and apple orchards that had been planted by the Southerners. There, in the street, a trio of cats gazed up at her, curiously eyeing her approach with heads tilted one way or another. They seemed, like all cats in Ulthar, almost as if they wished to ask her something, or to dispense some holy secret to her, but if indeed this was so, they said nothing, their own jaws as firmly locked as hers had been minutes before.

An old man made his way down the street, comfortable and calm though his back was a little bent. He smiled at her, and a cock crowed in the distance, and Melei closed her eyes. And opened them again.

And closed them.

And opened them again, committing every breath of it, every shade and tiny noise and scent, to the strongest urn in the storehouse of her memory. The voices of children long gone echoed, now, within that storehouse, and the image of her mother baking sour bread, and the laughter of cats — for in Ulthar, by nights, cats do laugh, though only the most blessed ever hear it more than once — and the sunrises, the sunrises that had saddened her so often.

Perplexed, she went through the streets, dazed, eyes and heart drinking Ulthar in deeply and constantly until she was drunk with the place. It was her farewell kiss to the world of her birth, a kiss of the eyes upon the forehead. It was her last embrace of the little city, day-long as she wandered and rambled from shop to temple to the current doorsteps of present friends and the abandoned doorways of friends long-lost. She met those she had once loved, and said nothing of leave-taking, though she wondered if they could see it in her eyes. Yet she asked not a soul as she spoke to them of nothings, of needle work and gossip and of the latest news from other cities and lands. As she walked those quiet, calm streets, her footsteps tapping gently the beat of her last ballad to Ulthar, she realized she loved this city, loved it unceasingly and would do so evermore though she would not live here any longer.

For as the sun began slowly to draw itself down unto the horizon, and the shadows lengthened across the streets as another shadow had done upon her page that morning, the name beneath Melei’s tongue stirred once more, this final time irresistibly…

About the Author

Gord Sellar was born in Malawi but raised in Canada. He has lived in South Korea since 2002, where he has taught at universities, played saxophone in an indie-rock band, worked as an editor and co-translator, and started a study group focused on Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. He is currently studying of what appears to be an ongoing science-fiction renaissance in South Korea, as well as the historical reception of the genre there. He attended Clarion West in 2006, was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, and his fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Interzone, Tesseracts Twelve, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 26 (edited by Gardner Dozois), and with more work forthcoming in, among other places, Subterranean and Diet Soap.

“Keeping Ahead of the Fear: A Conversation with Ken Scholes” by Jeremy L. C. Jones

It’s hard to believe that Ken Scholes’ Lamentation is a first novel. It lacks the rough edges of apprenticeship and resonates with sure-footed and exciting story-telling.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, this fantasy with science-fictional elements (or is it science fiction with fantastical elements?) is the first volume in The Psalms of Isaak quintet. The second volume, Canticle, was released by Tor this month. 

The prose in Canticle, like that in Lamentation, is vivid and precise, crystalline and muscular, minimalist and true. Line by line, Scholes’ prose arrests the reader and shoves her forward.

“I [enjoy] the thrill of finding the story and painting it with words,” said Scholes. “In novels, I like having the space to explore the story from different angles, experience different characters. I write by ear and listen for words that sound right. I do like to capture people and then move them forward with the scenes and characters and words. I particularly like writing to a challenge — some of my best stories came from challenges.”

As Scholes explains below, The Psalms of Isaak started with a challenge (in the form of a dare presented by his friend and his wife) and continues to challenge him personally and professionally. Scholes is currently working on the draft of Antiphon, the third volume of The Psalms of Isaak.

Legend has it that you made the jump from short stories to novels on a dare? How is writing novels different than writing short fiction? Do you feel more or less at home in the novel form?

Yes. It was a dare from my close pal Jay [Lake] and my wife Jen. They convinced me to write Lamentation on September 11, 2006 and I went home that night to start the book. Until then, I envisioned a series of four connected short stories. Jay promised that if I had a rough draft, he’d help me get introduced around at World Fantasy at the end of October. Jen told me she’d cover my share of the household responsibilities if I’d write the book in that seven weeks. 

It took a dare because, frankly, I was afraid of the long form and pretty sure I would need to take a long stretch of time and write several novels before I had anything publishable. Until Lamentation, my longest completed piece was 15,000 words. I underestimated how well my short story writing skills would transfer over. 

Jay suspected that if I wrote fast, I’d keep ahead of that fear and get out of my own way. He was right. I don’t know that any of us suspected that the first novel would do so well.

The biggest difference in novels for me is scope. It takes far more time and energy and the story is so big it can’t be held completely in my head. With short stories, I can knock something out in three or four days and have them to market in under a week. Novels take a bit longer for the first draft — about five months if I’m writing at a comfortable clip of 1k per day — plus revision, copyedits, galley proofs. 

I wouldn’t say I’m at home in novels yet. I’m getting there. I think I’ll know more about that after I finish the series and get on to the next project.

The Psalms of Isaak grew out of the short story, “Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise”. What was it about that particular story that begged (or allowed) for more?

At the time that I wrote it, nothing really stood out. I had some working notes I ran across later that said I’d like to come back to Rudolfo and write more about him. But really, I didn’t see more to “Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise” until I saw Allen Douglas’s art for the story. When I saw that image of the metal man weeping in the impact crater, I realized there was much more to Isaak than I’d known and much more to his story.

Your fiction, long and short, is rich with dark humor. What role does humor play in your fiction? How does it affect pacing, character development, world-building, etc.?

Humor plays an important role in my life — the dark kind as well as the lighter. Sometimes it carries over into the fiction but when it does, it shows up organically and I really don’t think about it much. It just becomes a part of the point-of-view of whoever my narrator is in that particular story. It colors their observation of events in their world and becomes a part of their voice, usually effortlessly. 

What does a post-apocalyptic setting allow you to do that a non-apocalyptic fantasy setting doesn’t?

Looking back over my body of work, surviving apocalypse is a recurring theme. Certainly, there are some personal reasons for that buried in my somewhat dark childhood. In The Psalms of Isaak particularly, I wanted to try something a little different. A lot of fantasies are about saving the world from a coming apocalypse; I wanted to write one about the descendent survivors of one and what their society would be like. This lets me explore how the world was broken, what the forces were that broke it, what it takes to rebuild it and how that rebuilding can go awry. And it lets me explore what right and wrong look like in a society of survivors.

Can you map the creation and development of one of your characters?

That largely happens organically. I really don’t think about specifics initially. I start with a person. I think about what they are afraid of and what they hope for, then I introduce them into circumstances that force them to face what they’re afraid of in order to attain what they hope for. Sometimes along the way, they get what they want and then threatening what they’ve attained becomes the springboard for their next bit of growth as they then face new fears (or old ones) and stand or fall based on how they handle that new conflict. Sometimes, they lose what they have and are changed by that. 

If I’m outlining, I’ll often start with the fears and hopes and then as I write, introduce them to circumstances and conflict to see how their hopes and fears play out through it. As I write the characters, how they face things — and how other characters either help or hinder them — will often advise me on what’s coming next in their development. I always try to have external conflict prompting internal growth. I actually think that’s how life works, too.

Do you usually write from an outline or by the seat of your pants?

I write both ways. Lamentation was by the seat of my pants. I had the first short story at the front end and the second short story at the other end. I had a handful of characters — Rudolfo, Sethbert, Jin Li Tam, Isaak and Petronus — with little detail of what happened between the two stories other than a war that Rudolfo somehow won.

When I wrote Canticle I had an outline but truth-be-told, I never looked at it after I wrote it and closed the file. I just distilled down the story to a size that fit in my head and then took off though I did have the structure of the story — how many chapters, how many scenes per character, what they feared and hoped for and sometimes, I’d lay down a sentence about what needed to happen in a future scene if I knew it. 

Antiphon went more like Lamentation with no outline, just a few scribbled notes.

This project was originally just a standalone short story. Then, after seeing the artwork, I conceived of four short stories, interconnected and spread out over a period of time. But when the second story didn’t stand alone well enough for Realms of Fantasy (and when the editor, Shawna McCarthy, suggested I go write a novel) I started thinking maybe this was a novel. Still, because of that fear I mentioned before, I didn’t think I could pull it off until I finally took Jay and Jen’s dare that night over tater-tots. At that point, I thought I had a trilogy but after finishing Lamentation and letting it sit, I realized it was five volumes. 

The most important thing I’ve learned from Lamentation is that whether or not I’m conscious of it, I can write an effective novel. I’m still not clear exactly on how I do it or what makes it all work. But the process has taught me to follow my instinctive ear for story even when I’m uncertain. 

And with Canticle and Antiphon I learned a lot about how life can intersect and interfere. Losing my parents (one during each book) was a painful experience but I learned how grief impacts my writing process. And writing Antiphon through Jen’s rather challenging pregnancy taught me a bit about fortitude. Next up, learning to write with infant twins!

The Psalms of Isaak definitely evolved and will continue evolving. And I’m laying the groundwork to spend a lot more time in this world both in the mythology and history of its past and in its future.

What part of a novel takes the longest and/or presents you with the most challenges?

Drafting the novel takes the longest for me though “long” is relative — I think the last two books took about six months of actual writing time. My biggest challenge is the lack of trust in myself. Those days when the right words feel wrong. I lean heavily on my first readers and some of them even pace me by reading along as I write, chapter by chapter, so that I’m getting a constant stream of reassurance that the story is on track and moving in the right direction at the right speed. My best cheerleader is a co-worker in my day job, Jerry, who devours each chapter and even charts my productivity on his wall calendar. 

I think the second greatest challenge is not knowing what to do next. Every once in a while, I’ll hit a wall and I won’t know it until I’ve written a thousand or so words in the wrong direction. If I can’t figure it out within a day or two, I’ll brainstorm it out or verbally process it with Jerry or my other close friend, John.

The middle chapters of Lamentation seem to accelerate an already fast-paced story. How do you go beyond simply keeping the middle from dragging and, instead, making them exceed what comes before?

I honestly don’t know how I do it. I just lay down the words that seem right at the time. But I do think the structure I’ve chosen helps this — keeping the scenes short and like snapshots from my character’s lives was intended to keep the reader moving forward quickly.

As for the endgame… what isn’t the end of a novel? What doesn’t a novel’s conclusion do? And how do you balance an individual novel’s ending with the needs of the series as a whole?

This is a tricky question because I think different people will have different answers. For me, I want to see that the characters have changed as a result of the external and internal conflicts they’ve faced and that they’ve gained or lost something as a result of it all. I want to give readers enough that they feel they have some answers but I want those answers to raise more questions — sorta like how life works. With the series, because it’s truly one big story and not five smaller ones, I try to find a good ledge to stop on for a little breather. There’s a balance between offering satisfaction and creating a strong desire to see what happens next.

During revision, are you an adder or a cutter?

I’m an adder mostly apart from cutting a few sentences or changing words here and there. With Lamentation, I needed to add two chapters. With Canticle, I needed to add a scene. I’m not sure yet on Antiphon, but this may be the first one where I don’t need to add other than bits of clarification along the way.

My process is pretty simple. I take the comments from my first readers and my editor, I merge it into one document and then I go through it, reading it myself, and either accepting or rejecting their changes, tweaking and polishing as I go. I take one pass through at that stage and then a second pass during the copyedit stage. If there’s time, I read the book and take my own notes but these days, there isn’t time and I’m finding that I can read and revise as I go just as effectively.

What’s next?

Well, after Requiem and Hymn [the final volumes of The Psalms of Isaak], I have a small but fun project I can’t quite announce yet but I’m eager to tackle it. Beyond that, I’m hoping Tor will want to let me tackle a short series based on my short story “Invisible Empire of Ascending Light.” I’m also planning to propose a new series and some standalones set in the world of The Psalms of Isaak. I have high hopes of tackling a YA trilogy with Jay at some point and I want to tackle a more traditional epic fantasy without the robots and science fictional elements.

And more important than all of that: I want to enjoy my new daughters. Ideally, the hard work now — and the popularity of the series so far — will eventually lead to me writing full time so that I can have a bit more balance in my life and more time with my family while increasing my writing output.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

“Forevermore: The Iconic Poe of the 21st Century” by G.A. Buchholz

“To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.” — Edgar A. Poe

“Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors … on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.” — Edgar A. Poe

Imagine Edgar A. Poe’s wonder and bewilderment if he were given an opportunity to walk the earth in the 21st century, during the bicentennial year of his birth. Wandering through New York City, Richmond, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, all of his old haunts, he would come across visible evidence of people honoring his life and his work. Books, films, lectures, readings, exhibitions, a re-enactment of his funeral, and even musical theater! If someone were kind enough to show him the Internet, he would see hundreds of websites around the world that commemorate him and celebrate his writings. In a truly Poe-esque irony, the man whose writing romanticized death and mournful remembrance in the 19th century has truly become far more successful post-mortem than he ever dreamed he would become in his short life span of 40 years.

Alas for Poe, his golden road to immortality has been more like running a gauntlet of critics for the last 200 years. As a merciless (and sometimes mercenary) literary critic himself, Poe was a master at writing excoriating reviews, so perhaps it is poetic justice or karma that he has been getting his proverbial hind end kicked for two centuries. From the first defamatory obituary notice written by his self-appointed literary executor, Rufus W. Griswold, right up to more recent Poe-ographies by Kenneth Silverman (Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance) and Peter Ackroyd (Poe: A Life Cut Short), many have derided Poe as a alcoholic, a drug addict, an egomaniac, a plagiarist who accused other writers of plagiarism, a philanderer, and above all, a hack.  Poet James Russell Lowell referred to Poe as “three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.” And the extant photographic images of Poe have ingrained the popular notion of the author as a brooding, depressive, crazed and almost ghost-like figure in American literature. One such image has been copied and parodied to death.

Yet Poe’s works have remained popular even though he has always divided critics and readers. In spite of suffering much of his adult life through abject poverty, being cheated out of royalties for works that were pirated, being mocked by the literary elite of his day, and even being turned down for mundane jobs, Poe’s writing has been incredibly influential and persistent, not only in literature but in contemporary culture. Many writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft and W.H. Auden have been proponents of his work, as well as being influenced by it. He has been called the first and foremost American poet of the 19th century, an influence on European romanticism, a seminal force in Surrealism and Symbolism and, unexpectedly, he has also become one of the best-known of the “dead white authors” of the 19th century.  

Poe was arguably America’s first full-time fiction and poetry writer. Most other authors of the day couldn’t make a living from their works (international copyright conventions didn’t exist until the Berne Convention in 1886), but that dubious distinction also meant a lifelong struggle to earn enough money to support himself, his young wife Virginia, his aunt/mother-in-law Maria Clemm, and his often foundering writing career. Although he was arguably one of the leading literary critics of his day, he was continually begging for opportunities for paid work, seeking sponsors or patrons for his work, and trying to secure paid speaking engagements once he became more well-known with his publication of his signature work, “The Raven”, although overall he had more commercial success with his short fiction than his poetry.

Not only did Poe pioneer the short story as an artform in its own right — partly because poverty led him his from his vocation as a poet to his career as a writer of short magazine pieces in periodicals such as the Southern Literary Messenger — but he also developed the sensational style of writing a story as if it were a true account, or at least that the narrator of the story believed to be true. In The Tell-tale Heart, the narrator convinces us of his sincerity even as we increasingly begin to believe that he is mad. Poe developed this style of “reality writing,” hoaxes with verisimilitude, for a very practical reason — to help create a sensation among readers and sell copies of magazines. These stories were, in Poe’s own words, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” This approach has since become a convention for horror writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King.

In his lifetime, Poe was the victim of a piteous number of rejections, failures and missteps, including attempts to gain employment as a teacher, a government bureaucrat and even an officer in the Polish army, not to mention failed attempts to start his own magazine, The Stylus. Yet his determination to make a living as a writer, and his extreme poverty through most of his adult life, may also have helped him become a literary innovator. Poe wrote a series of stories that were about what he called “ratiocination” (using creative intuition combined with facts to solve a problem). Tales such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “The Gold Bug” were the artistic forebears of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Poe invented the term “cryptograph” and tried to establish a popular reputation as a master code-breaker. Even his many detractors have admitted that he was the originator of the modern detective or mystery story. Today The Mystery Writers of America even names its annual literary prizes, The Edgar ® Awards, after Poe, and the little statuettes bear his visage.

Poe’s early influences were works of European Romanticism from authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, yet Poe maintained in his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque that “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” His tales of dark fantasy influenced by European romanticism included classics such as “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”, both of which are gripping accounts of revenge and torture that take place, not in his contemporary America, but in historical Europe.

Poe even dared to approach scientific theory through the lens of artistic exploration. He developed what may have been the first science fiction story in “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall”, which is about a man who reaches the moon via balloon using a breathing apparatus that compresses air from the vacuum of space. Pfaall’s narrative over a 19-day period includes descriptions of the Earth from outer space as well as the unlikely astronaut’s arrival on the blistering hot moon. Tales like this influenced later sci-fi writers such as Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon) and H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds).  

A news article in the November 2, 2002 edition of the New York Times noted that Poe’s philosophical musings on scientific issues may have contained some brilliant and uncanny insights, such as his essay “Eureka,” which seems to describe what we now call “the Butterfly Effect” as well as portraying the origin of the universe in a way that would later be known to physicists as “the Big Bang Theory.”  In the essay, of which only 500 copies were printed, Poe discourses about the beginnings of the universe from a single “primordial particle” which then radiated or diffused into space. He argued that the relatively equal distribution of the starry bodies was evidence of it: “This equability of distribution effected through radiation from a centre.”

While other writers of the day concerned themselves with moral correctness and the status quo, Poe was breaking all the rules and daring to maintain that the purpose of art was not morality but beauty and truth. Unlike Matthew Pearl’s supposition in his novel, The Poe Shadow, that Poe lived his life within his works — that it was “his true form of being” — Poe always insisted that he was only “in” his works insofar as it served his purpose as an artist. He always maintained, from his youth to his death, that “Art should not have a Moral basis but solely exist for Truth and Beauty of the art itself.”

Although he clearly worshipped at the altar of Art, Poe also made commercial forays into everything from comic farce (”The System of Doctor Tarr” and “Professor Fether”) to critiques of American home decorating  styles (he had the journalistic trait of being a generalist so he could write about anything). Out of all this journalistic churn, however, came one of Poe’s greatest acts of innovation — he brought the language, rhythms and techniques of poetry into literary fiction of the day. Silvermanwrote that “Poe was becoming the first writer in English, or perhaps in any modern literature, to consistently apply to prose fiction some of the techniques of poetry.” Although Poe was a journalist by necessity, he was still a poet by definition. “With me,” wrote Poe, “poetry has not been a purpose but a passion.”  

Yet aside from Poe’s obvious influences on literature, film, art and music (such as Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells), despite his contemporary critics and enemies who sneered at the “Magazinist”, and regardless of many modern academics who still consider Poe a pulp writer or a minor, embarrassing figure of 19th century American letters, Poe has become an important symbol in popular culture worldwide — and not just in English-speaking countries. Reproductions of his doleful, baggy-eyed visage are instantly recognizable and appear globally on t-shirts, posters, coffee cups, movies, music and fine arts. Even death metal fans who hardly read any literature are passing familiar with some of Poe’s works, and may have even read a story or two. Poe is a pop culture icon of dark fiction whose image, personality and work are inseparable and at times indistinguishable. Like many contemporary celebrities, Poe has become a brand of his own, along with all the preconceptions and misconceptions that kind of celebrity brings with it.  This makes Poe one of the most famous and accessible writers of American literature, or for that matter, world literature. To read Poe is to meet Poe, which is why so many Poe admirers, fans, scholars, artists and “Poeists” become more than a little obsessed with him.

Like all of us, Poe was many things to many people at different times in his life. Detailed accounts of Poe’s 40 years conjure an image of a man dressed in Goth-like black who was desperate, conniving, confused, inventive, dispirited, disenfranchised, dolorous, bereaved, ambitious and hard-headed. Yet he was tender toward his mother-in-law, and the many women he courted were not repulsed by him but actually very attracted to him. Poe was charismatic, a strong athlete, a born leader, a good singer, a kind husband, a hard working employee, a top student, and a great dramatic reader on stage. Yet none of these personal stories are ever recreated in Poe’s works. Art for Poe, was elevated above mere common experience into something supra-mortal.         

Returning to the fancy of Edgar A. Poe walking among us in the 21st century, imagine him being awestruck by how successful his works have been for more than 160 years, not only in his homeland but in Canada, France, England, Russia, Germany, Romania and Japan, to name but a few of the Poe-loving nations. Picture him finding out that he has even become a kind of bohemian Che Guevara to the Goth subculture.  Would he have been embittered to realize, after all his penury and despair, after all the ill-fated attempts at a fruitful literary career, after all the sorrow of losing his life in his literary prime and leaving his beloved “Muddy” impoverished and alone without his support, that his name is now selling millions of books and movies, and that his countenance is appearing ubiquitously on merchandise such as “Nevermore” T-shirts?

Perhaps for a few moments, the irony and heartbreak of his own personal tragedy would overwhelm him, but then the Poe that friends such as Sarah Helen Whitman described so eloquently in her book, Edgar Poe and His Critics, would probably bear himself up and, quoting from one of his own letters, say, “I have perseveringly struggled against a thousand difficulties, and have succeeded, although not in making money, still in attaining a position in the world of Letters, of which, under the circumstances, I have no reason to be ashamed.” 

About the Author

G.A. Buchholz is a dark fiction author, poet, dramatist and essayist. He produced the Edgar Allan Poe 200 Project this year and is the co-founder of the Dark Fiction Guild. Buchholz is currently writing a novel called Descendant.