TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 129, February 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: February 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

The Mathematics of Fairyland
Phoebe Barton

Bulletproof Tattoos
Paul Crenshaw

Me Two
Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

Sidewalks
Maureen F. McHugh

FANTASY

Church of Birds
Micah Dean Hicks

The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit
A.T. Greenblatt

Small and Bright
Autumn Brown

Destinations of Beauty
Alexander Weinstein

EXCERPTS

Winter’s Orbit
Everina Maxwell

NONFICTION

Book Review: On Fragile Waves, by E. Lily Yu
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by Katie Mack
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Latinx Screams, edited by V. Castro and Cynthia Pelayo
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Phoebe Barton

A.T. Greenblatt

Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

Alexander Weinstein

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure (via Adobe Stock)

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: February 2021

John Joseph Adams | 192 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 129th issue!

Can you mix hard science and fairy tales? This month Phoebe Barton does just that in the very touching “The Mathematics of Fairyland.” Writing duo Keith Brooke and Eric Brown return to our pages in a story of one life split between two different worlds: “Me Two.” We also have SF reprints by Paul Crenshaw (“Bulletproof Tattoos”) and Maureen F. McHugh (“Sidewalks”).

Our first piece of original fantasy this month is A.T. Greenblatt’s “The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit”—a story of an island filled with magic and wonder. Alexander Weinstein also gives us a magical new locale in the latest installment of his From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide series. This one is called “Destinations of Beauty.” Our fantasy reprints include work from Micah Dean Hicks (“Church of Birds”) and Autumn Brown (“Small and Bright”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, plus our book reviewers have scoured the shelves for some exciting new reads. Our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from Evarina Maxwell’s new novel Winter Orbit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

The Mathematics of Fairyland

Phoebe Barton | 2945 words

If you had a warp drive, it would be easy. The mathematics are strange the way ley lines are strange, invisible yet divinable. You’ve pulled your way up sterner mountains, fingertip by fingertip. You’ve already compensated for stellar motion, spacetime curvature, hyperspatial congruences. You’ve scratched out hundreds of equations in cold blue hyacinth ink and piled them away in the knitted stocking under your bed, where only Berenice would think to look. Equations that would tell you exactly where to slice a hole between worlds, if only you had the right knife. You could bring Berenice back home.

You don’t have a warp drive. It would be easier to get a nuclear bomb, and you’ve checked—sub-kiloton models are always in demand among the asteroid miners. Warp drives are locked up tighter than princesses in towers, and for good reason. Warp drives are monsters chained inside niobium prisons, with claws that rip and tear spacetime. You were never afraid of them before, but they always commanded your respect.

That was before, though. Before you stopped to think about what it must have been like for that monster to turn, to snarl, to carry your Berenice down a hole that disappeared in the darkness. If you had a warp drive you could follow her, carrying at least a guttering light. You’re each other’s princesses, after all.

There’s an alternative beyond warp drives and nukes. The old tales are clear about what the fair folk charge for their help, but the cost of life alone is too much to bear. So you kneel in the station gardens and whisper your desperation into buttercups, at once hopeful and terrified that your words will find their way to Fairyland.

• • • •

It’s an in-between place, Psyche Harbour, a space station where gardens bloom within a polished hull. Below, the asteroid 16 Psyche glitters, a flying mountain of cold iron that no faerie could touch and live. Beyond, the vast and vaulting gap of emptiness between the asteroids and Earth.

You know you’re the only one there who believes faeries are real, so you’ve buried your truth beneath expectations. You’re good at that, at least. Your official title is Hardware Operations Specialist, but you’d rather think of yourself as a blacksmith. Your tools are different, fabricator and versa instead of anvil and hammer, but the goal is the same.

The gardener, Mariko, is a newcomer to the station. You see her in the corner of your eye when you crouch in the garden and whisper the faeries’ names, acid vowels and obsidian consonants. You see her kneeling reverently in front of the buttercups. After a while you begin to wonder: Maybe she knows the faeries’ names, too. Maybe she can never stop dancing between the flowers. Maybe she believes.

At least it’s not difficult for you to broach the question. The gardener has the tall, spare, dark-skinned look of a Martian. Martians call their faeries gremlins now, but they never pretended faeries didn’t follow them.

“That’s the thing about Mars,” the gardener says, her voice rich and loamy. “Too much dust, not enough air. But that doesn’t stop us from building gremlin traps. If you want, I can show you.”

It takes a special kind of faerie to live on Mars, with no trods to follow and its soil half poison, half cold iron. They’re the faeries that learned how to shred airplane engines with their teeth, to burn control cables with a glare, and when the first Mars probes flew, the gremlins went with them. On Earth, they’re annoyances; on Mars, with its bubbled meadows on hostile plains, they’re cataclysms. Of course the Martians had honed their skills to trap them.

“Thank you,” you say. There’s always the possibility a ship full of gremlins might put into Psyche Harbour, after all.

A gremlin trap, she tells you, is simple: form over function. Gears that aren’t connected to anything, circuits that loop back on themselves, switches that turn themselves off. Make it complicated enough and the gremlins will flock to it, and while they’re figuring out how to tear it apart, they’re not tearing apart the life support systems. Once it stops working, that’s when you take it out and smash it to bits with a sledgehammer, and all the trapped gremlins with it.

“Of course, it’s best if you understand gremlins as a metaphor,” Mariko says. “But that doesn’t make them any less true, does it?”

The project gives you a distraction, at least. You never did this sort of thing with Berenice, and this far from the sun, you can arrange the gears to eclipse your grief. Still, you worry. You’re not Martian; your community never worried about gremlins. Do gremlins, so concerned with technology and machines, even talk to faeries?

That’s when you realize there’s an alternative. There’s no point in whispering into buttercups—no faerie would want to dig their heels in so far from Earth’s green hills. The gremlin trap is a part, not a whole.

You realize you need to build a radio, too.

• • • •

It’s hard work to make radio waves shatter spacetime the way starships do. In almost two hundred years of faster-than-light freedom, nobody has figured it out. Warp points let ships sail through intact, but there’s never been a broadcast that wasn’t received as a mixed-up crackle, indistinguishable from the echo of everything’s beginning. All you can do is hope that nobody’s tried this particular solution yet, and that’s why they still call it impossible.

You know where you can find respite from your struggle, at least. In your dreams, you dance with Berenice among the saxifrage and snapdragon. If only you were an oneiromancer, you could apologize to her there. Tonight you sit with her next to a glassy pool and trace capacitors and antennas in the clear and changeless water.

“You could stay here,” Berenice says, except it’s not Berenice at all. It’s the reflection of her that lives in your head, the costume you built out of tender moments and warm, lingering kisses and all the times you thought of moving to Venus so that a year would be as long as a day. “We’d be together. Isn’t that what you want?”

“I want you,” you say. When you kiss her, her lips are fog and her breath is a distant whisper. “The you who’s going to climb out of the darkness. Not your echo.”

“You’re so certain there’s a ladder.” Berenice dips two fingers in the pool, slices them through a circuit diagram, presses them to your lips. There’s no weight to them, no presence. “What if there isn’t?”

“There’s never an isn’t,” you say, even though you have to force the assurances. “The faeries will know.”

“Faeries are legends. Myths. Unreality!” Berenice stares deep in your eyes, and you stare back at the doubts you’ve kept bottled for so long. Her eyes are space-black, flecked with hints of stars. “You’re grasping in the dark.”

“Then I’ll hear my way though.” It wouldn’t have to be much. Berenice’s heartbeat would be enough. If sound could fly though space, you’re sure you’d hear it across the solar system. “Whatever it takes to open the way.”

The dream’s melancholy lingers after you wake, and it sharpens the sour sheen coating your tongue. It doesn’t matter, though. Here in space, there’s never a time when you’re not falling.

• • • •

Building the radio doesn’t take long; you didn’t last so long at Psyche Harbour, and places like it, by being a woman without skill. It’s a challenge, compared to the complex simplicity of the gremlin trap, and you’re eager to best it. You forge a cold iron case, to temper the faeries’ tempting voices. Around its circuits you weave patterns of spider silk, to strum impulses softly along the universe’s web. You whittle a second antenna from the branch of a rowan tree, to guide your words straight and true.

You finish the work three hundred and forty-three days after the science vessel Tabetha Boyajian triggered its warp drive in ordinary space and vanished, taking Berenice and all her crewmates on a voyage they had never anticipated. No one knows where a ship that warps in ordinary space goes. Perhaps—you hope—it went to Fairyland.

“It’s a wonderful design,” Mariko says when you show it to her. You had to tell someone, and of all the people aboard Psyche Harbour, you’re sure she’s the only one who could possibly understand. “I know this is a hard time. If you need to talk, I’m here.”

“I need to talk to Fairyland,” you say. “Someone there knows what happened. Someone will listen.”

There are a lot of frequencies to try, but that’s all right. Einstein caught a glimpse of Fairyland when he realized relativity. You force the sharp wedge of experimentation into your responsibilities, and hammer it with true blacksmith strength. Every night, once your work is done, you carry it to the garden and listen. Sometimes you hear voices, soft and sandy and crumbling, the codes of spaceship transponders, or rescue beacons shouting into the void.

There isn’t so much as a whisper of Fairyland. Only distant murmurs and softly roaring echoes, as if you’re hearing the world from the far side of a dream.

• • • •

Once you finished the gremlin trap, Mariko set it in the middle of a little stone circle in the garden module. That’s where she finds you, crouching with a hammer, waiting for the last of its workings to stop. It still feels like a waste to break it apart, but what do you know? You weren’t born with red dust in your lungs.

“You did excellent work,” Mariko says. “Definitely Mars-quality. I hope it helped take your mind off things. Are you doing all right?”

Her tone is thick and sweet like jam, and leaves you feeling sticky. She acts like she understands, but unless her own love disappeared down a dark hole, there’s no understanding.

“I’ll be all right once this is all done,” you say. “Until then, I’ve got work. Faeries don’t reveal themselves to just anyone, you know.”

“Faeries.” Mariko sucks in a breath so deep it might last the rest of her life. “I’m worried about you, you know. I really think you need help.”

“Maybe, but not the kind you’re thinking of.” You went through a full psychological evaluation before you joined Psyche Harbour and you check up with a virtual therapist every two weeks. It’s been enough to keep you grounded, here where the ground is spinning metal. “I’m fine. Really.”

“As fine as Mars dust in your lungs, maybe.” Mariko kneels down and offers you her hand. “If you really want to rescue her, you need to rescue yourself first.”

“I’m not the one who’s lost!” She can’t understand. Only a handful of people in the galaxy, the dozen or so who lost people aboard that ship, possibly could. “You’re asking me to walk away from the pit when I’m holding a rope.”

“You’re on the edge of falling in yourself.” Mariko closes her eyes, and you catch yourself wondering if she’d catch you or let you pinwheel over the side. “We’re all here to help each other. Let me help you. Please.”

You’re torn between possibilities. An angry shout, a calm explanation, a flood of tears—there are pathways to them all, but not all pathways lead to Fairyland. The forest here is too overgrown and dark. Perhaps you’re already lost.

“I can help myself,” you say. “Leave me alone, please.”

Mariko is quiet for a moment, then sighs and walks away. Now the world can contract into what you need it to be: the calm green of the garden, the gremlin trap in front of you, and the hammer in your hands. It’s solid, present, substantial—everything the warp drive stole from you. It’s neither tool nor weapon now, but your determination crystallized and forged, and the trap is stuffed not only with gremlins but all the anxieties and fears you poured into it.

You test the hammer’s weight, experiment, then wind up and strike. The trap comes apart under the force of your blow. Springs and coils and switches shatter across the soft grass in a constellation of debris.

There’s no hint of gremlin pieces anywhere. No matter how closely you sift, you find only shards of metal.

• • • •

It takes you some time to figure out the right conditions, but the answer has always been there, waiting for you to find it. On Earth, auroras are shimmering as far south as the Mediterranean. A new dark storm has formed in the skies of Neptune, and an auspicious number of sunspots have persisted for seven days now. You’re sure there’s meaning encoded in all of it, and you make a winged leap into the work.

You narrow down the frequency range—would fairies be listening around the water hole?—and determine ideal broadcast times, balancing planetary arrangements and lucky moments and all the other tricks you need to talk safely to faeries with more equations in hyacinth ink.

When the moment comes, you prick your finger with a silver needle and smear the blood on the radio’s face. Your vital force should give your words power to breach the veil. You speak with confidence, with boiling love, with frozen determination. You weave the most compelling tapestry of your grief from the most carefully chosen words, enough that even the distant and merciless fae just might be made to feel.

You don’t hear anything. Not even the quiet hiss that is the echo of everything beginning. For hours you hunch over the cold iron case, run your fingers along the rowan antenna, and still you hear nothing. A lesser woman would give up there, but you are not a lesser woman. Neither is Berenice, nor anyone else taken when their starship vanished whole.

There’s another option. 16 Psyche is the frozen iron core of a planet dismembered, a shield against Fairyland’s fury in case things go wrong, and it’s easy enough to invent a reason to visit. The mining is automated, but machines require attention just as gardens do. There’s much in common between amaryllis and actuators, carnations and capacitors. It’s where you can offer payment.

A year and a day after the disappearance of UNEV Tabetha Boyajian—the most auspicious day, the end of a term of service to the fae—you descend to serrated mountains, dry iron rivers, and a sky of unblinking stars. The surface of Psyche is a liminal place between life and death. The sun is a soundless shriek, a litany of needles. It’s the best place you could be.

Here, with no protection, cosmic radiation will sleet into you. Here, you can pay for Fairyland’s attention with all those years you’ll never live.

You clutch the rowan antenna and hold it skyward, a challenge and a supplication. Your spacesuit’s radio isn’t powerful when it comes to the world, but Fairyland is everywhere and nowhere. Range doesn’t matter; honesty does. You call out to the fae on all the quiet frequencies, the ones humans have stopped listening to, while cosmic rays flash in your eyes again and again and again, little glimpses of all the corners of the world you can’t see.

When you swallow, you taste metal.

When you look around you, there’s only desolation to see.

Psyche is your life, crystallized in iron, and you understand why you stayed.

“marigold.” Your name, whispered above the hiss, jagged and icy, distant yet present. It’s Fairyland. It has to be. “marigold what are you doing.”

“I’m begging your aid!” you shout. The solar wind is a whipping storm of light, and it’s all you can do to keep from being dazzled. “My beloved, she’s lost, please!”

“Marigold.” Stronger now, sharp enough to cut. “Marigold, what are you doing?”

“I’m doing everything I can!” You can see the suggestion of Berenice out there, the implication of her life contrasted against the frozen ground and indifferent stars. “I’m trying to bring her home!”

“Marigold!” It’s as real as the air in your lungs, as the radiation warping your genes, as the hand on your shoulder. It’s Mariko, alive in a suit painted with blooming flowers and twisting vines, an ambassador of the living world to dead, silent Psyche. “Marigold, talk to me! What are you doing?”

“Mariko.” The gardener’s name is heavy on your tongue. “It’s my last chance to get her back. I have to try.”

“By sacrificing everything you have?” You can’t see her face, shielded against the sunglare, but her voice does the work. “By sacrificing her memory?”

“She’s trapped, wherever she is, with all the rest!” you shout. “If I’m the key, then that’s what I’ve got to be!”

“But like this, though?” Mariko gestures at the jagged mountains, the dry iron rivers, the uncaring stars. “You can’t be a key if you’re dead!”

“I—” The word is enough for the reality to crack your suit like a hammer. The rowan antenna slips from your grip and you fall to your knees. “I don’t know if I can live without her.”

“Maybe not yet,” Mariko says. “I know it’s hard. But one day.”

She offers her hand again, gloved and open. It’s not easy to get a warp drive. It’s harder still to accept a second chance.

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”

Mariko leads you back to the shuttle. You leave the antenna behind you, flat against the iron ground. It doesn’t matter which way it fell. It will always point towards Fairyland.

©2021 by Phoebe Barton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer who first visited Earth on an unseasonably warm day in the winter of 1982 and decided to stay. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, On Spec, and Kaleidotrope, anthologies from Bundoran Press and Alliteration Ink, and she is currently deep in the weeds writing interactive fiction with Choice of Games. She serves as an Associate Editor at Escape Pod, and is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She lives with a robot in the sky above Toronto. You can connect with her on Twitter at @aphoebebarton or her website www.phoebebartonsf.com

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Bulletproof Tattoos

Paul Crenshaw | 4847 words

Allen was watching news of the nearest shooting when he decided he needed a tattoo to cover his neck. He had one over his heart, and one on each eyelid. His forehead and cheeks were covered, and enough of his lungs that he might live if he got lucky. He didn’t have the money to ink his back or chest, but he had saved enough for the neck, where more and more people were getting shot these days, he explained to his wife.

“More and more people are not getting shot in the neck,” she said, lighting a joint, her eyes narrowing to slits as she dragged. He could just see the little islands on her eyelids. “People are going for the eyes now, and your eyes are uncovered.”

They were sitting in their apartment on the twenty-ninth floor, looking out the door of the balcony, where they never went. Allen had turned off the news. It had been a deli this time, three dead beneath the glass cases of capicola. The sound of gunshots, sporadic this early in the evening, drifted up from below. In the center of the city, the glass Gloch building caught the last sun.

Emily exhaled, counting off points on her fingers. “Most of your stomach is uncovered,” she said. “And your back. Your lower ribcage. Some of your chest.” She took another drag. “Besides, it’s safer to stay in.” She waved a hand. The gunshots were coming closer together now. “The air is all bullets out there.”

She found this so funny she was soon coughing, holding the joint up as if to save it. He took it from her and walked to the balcony door—bulletproof plexiglass—and looked down. He could see the brief white light of gunshots far below, like meteors falling on a summer night from his childhood.

“The air,” he said, laughing with her now as he exhaled, “is all bullets. That’s good. You should write that down.”

In the morning he went out to make an appointment. He disarmed the security and pushed the big steel door open and went down the stairwell. Most floors smelled like kerosene—some people had spent their electricity money on tattoos and were using lamps. He wanted to go back upstairs and crawl in bed beside Emily and watch her work. He loved to watch her work, even when he wondered why they were working so hard to make the world bulletproof.

There had been two shootings in the neighborhood this week. Other parts of the city were much worse. In their old neighborhood near the heights, the hearses were out every morning and he could not sleep for all the firing. Every time he drifted off, the crack of a gunshot would jerk him awake. Sometimes they could hear bullets hitting the walls. Emily would be sitting up beside him, covers pulled to her chin, face so frightened it hurt him. Back before they got covered, they were afraid of everything.

“I’m so tired of living like this,” she would say, and he would hold her until her breath evened out.

In their new apartment, the walls were bulletproof. And the doors and the windows and parts of their skin. Sometimes when Emily was high she would laugh, smoke leaking out of her mouth, her voice still down in her stomach. “My bulletproof ads got us a bulletproof apartment,” she’d say. “But we can’t go outside until we are.”

The air was not, in fact, made of bullets. But every night the news showed more shootings. At schools, at factories, at office buildings. In old apartment buildings that didn’t have security.

Emily did not have to go out. She could write her ads from home and send them electronically. Her paycheck was electronically deposited. Anything she wanted—food, marijuana, morphine—she could buy online.

He did have to go out. When the number of gun deaths per year had hit a hundred thousand, he’d started a small company installing bulletproof doors in old apartments. Sometimes, when the job ran too long and dark fell on him out in the world, he could hear the gunshots all over the city as he walked home. Not so bad during the day, but night smelled of cordite and fear. During the day, everyone he saw had a few visible tattoos, enough vital areas covered by ink that stray bullets might bounce off. At night, everyone was covered, either by ink or old armor—Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, vests.

Emily was almost covered with ink now. They could not afford it themselves—ink was still far too expensive for most of the middle-class to be fully covered—but she had gotten hers gratis when she had come up with the “Bullets bounce off black babies” ad that showed a white child inked all black, bullets bouncing off its skin. That one had made lots of money.

She got paid in ink. Her eyelids were covered with scenes of blue sky and small islands, and her cheeks with ocean waves. On her chest swam a koi fish, bright orange, surrounded by seaweed. Her breasts looked like lily pads. When she had first come home, he had lain awake for hours looking at her. He was afraid to touch her. She looked more alive, and he did not know if that was because it was less likely she would die now, or because of the way the ink sat on her skin, like breathing art.

• • • •

The tattoos had been invented out of necessity. Hamstrung by the gun lobbies, the government found itself unable to do anything about the dramatic rise in gun deaths—school shootings, workplace shootings, men shooting their wives for burning dinner. There was no way to stop the socioeconomic factors or the mental health issues that contributed to the growing epidemic, no way to get millions of guns off the streets.

Then military research into bulletproofing hit a breakthrough. Within a year, the first ink was drying on the first soldier. The technology leaked into the private sector. Allen still remembered the first TV ad, a man with a small swallow inked over his heart being shot with a .357 Magnum at point blank. He went down in a heap but rose a moment later, the swallow unscathed, his heart intact.

The next morning the streets were full of people clamoring for ink, though it took a few years for the industry to make the new tattoos widely available, and even then only a few could afford them. The ink was costly and the new Laser Imaging and Engraving System even more so. But more and more shootings convinced people they needed more and more coverage, so people saved, or spent their savings for safety. They all got the small swallow over the heart, the heart being the first thing that got hit.

Those who could covered themselves. After the French ambassador was shot seven times outside the embassy in DC, even the politicians put themselves under the laser, engraving elaborate symbols of state on their skin: the Washington Monument, Capitol Hill, the Constitution.

The number of deaths did not go down far, but the streets seemed safer. People went to work more colorful and less afraid, at least the ones who could afford the privilege of ink. The bullets, Allen heard, left a bruise and sometimes broke ribs, but they bounced off.

Assuming, of course, they hit a protected area.

“Are You Fully Covered?” had been another of Emily’s ads. They appeared often on the slick pages of magazines and on digital billboards that also advertised the same guns that necessitated the tattoos. In her ads, there was always a woman wearing almost nothing, her skin inked in bright red or sky-blue, some scene computer-designed to enhance the natural beauty of the body, to make one forget why the tattoos were needed in the first place.

The gun ads were much simpler, appealing to fear instead of fashion. The newest one had two images: a Beretta 11mm automatic hand-rifle, and a naked woman with a tiny tattoo over her heart, so small you could hardly see it.

“When the bad guys come,” the copy read, “Which of these do you want to protect you?”

• • • •

Outside, it was a fine day in late fall. The cars idling against the curb leaked exhaust like warm breath. The trees along the streets of their neighborhood—their good neighborhood, he reminded himself—had lost their leaves and leaves went skating down the sidewalk in the wind. Some people on the street had designs drawn on their faces, but he wasn’t sure if the designs were ink. People had started hand-drawing their own facial designs in the hope that a shooter might think their faces were bulletproof, and so shoot at their chests, where they actually were covered.

He went along looking into the wired windows of the shops, stopping occasionally to examine some item, a small hover-copter or handgun. He went past Medgar Evers Elementary, where the children’s voices were muted behind the walls and men on the roof watched the street with their rifles, and JFK Junior High, which looked like a concrete bunker.

By the time he made it to 20th, where the tattoo parlors were, Emily’s new advertisement was already up. There were digital billboards everywhere, shifting every few seconds so he saw several ads on each one. Many were throwbacks to older advertisements, updated now: “Got Ink?” one said. “Just Do It.”

On this billboard a long-limbed woman—her name was Netta, and she worked for Emily’s ad agency—struck a seductive pose. A great red heron poised in mid-flight across her chest, sea mist and waves in the background. Her neck was draped in white lace, only it wasn’t lace and it wasn’t draped. On her face, pale white stars stood in the shape of some constellation, the black backdrop of space shaded into her cheeks. Her ears had been inked to look like the rings of Saturn.

Beneath Netta, the ad read, “The Air Is All Bullets. Become Bulletproof.”

Below that was the name of one of the better tattoo shops. He wondered how much Emily had gotten paid, if she would get more of her skin covered as payment. He wanted her covered. Even the whites of her eyes, and even then he would tell her that anytime she went beyond the apartment walls she must keep her eyes shut.

• • • •

There were far more people in front of the tattoo shops than there should be. There had always been tattoo parlors along 20th, but after bulletproofing, the number of shops multiplied by a hundred. Now, long lines spilled from all the doors up and down the street. Allen felt a fever go through him as he got in line beside a man wearing an old World War Two steel helmet and a coat hand-sewn with steel plates. The man’s son stood in front of him, fine blond hair lifting in the wind. He wore a stainless steel skillet on his head, tied by string beneath his chin.

“What is it?” Allen said. “Another one?”

The man nodded upward, where above the shops the ad screens were now showing film footage instead of advertising. The same scene played again and again—a masked and armored gunman firing an M-7 into a crowd of people. It took Allen a minute to realize it was the playground of an elementary school, and the children had been lining up to come in from recess. Their bodies jerked when they were hit with bullets. The material of their coats puffed out. A girl’s head exploded.

Allen looked at the lines again, knowing that after every school shooting more and more parents got their children covered, even if they couldn’t afford it. Even if they had to take out second mortgages or sell their kidneys or turn to prostitution. Some of the people had their faces tattooed. Most of them wore coats festooned with steel: silverware, skillets, pots and pans. Most of them had children, hands clasped to their children’s shoulders to keep them close. Some of the children had their cheeks tattooed and some had their necks inked and their shaved heads shaded, and all of the parents were alternating between looking up and down the street wildly and watching the same scene play out on the screens again and again: the man closing in on the schoolyard, bringing his assault rifle to bear. The bullets burping out of the barrel, ejected so fast you could see only the empty shells and the exhalation of gas. The children falling and screaming, the wide eyes of the teachers and their uncovered faces as the children dropped. One teacher ran toward the shooter in an attempt to protect the children, but only made it a few steps before her body crumpled. The children’s mouths hung open like tomb doors until the SWAT teams closed in on the shooter, bullets shredding his skin, his face disappearing just like the little girl’s had. The camera swept the schoolyard to show dozens of bodies bleeding onto the sidewalks.

He had watched it 117 times by the time he made it to the door of the tattoo shop. More people came to stand in line behind him, talking of the newest shooting.

“This is the world we live in now,” he heard one woman say.

• • • •

When he got home, Emily was working. He looked at the new campaigns lined up on her drawing board.

“Don’t Let Your Breath Become Bullets. Get Your Lungs Enlivened.” This was accompanied by another waifish woman—not Netta, but cut from the same cardboard—whose ribs were inked to look like wings.

Another said, “Color Your Cranium With Kevlar.” This one showed a woman whose hair had been sheared and a helmet tattooed on her head. Her cheeks were protected by the chinstrap.

The last one said, “Make Your Mind Bulletproof—Your Brain Will Breathe Easier.” The ad showed only an unattached brain on white canvas, and below it the particular details of bulletproof tattooing—locations, prices, a few samples that others had inked on themselves: a football helmet (Dallas Cowboys), a portrait of a child (possibly Anne Frank), a spaceship (Millennium Falcon.)

“What do you think?” She had no shirt on, and the koi fish seemed ready to take flight, fins like wings spread just above her breasts.

“Your new ad is already up,” he said.

“I called it in last night, while you were in the shower.” She stood and came over to him. “They gave me enough that we can afford your neck piece.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I thought the air was all bullets anyway?”

She kissed him. Her mouth tasted of pot and the gelatin coating of pills. “If it makes you feel better,” she said, “I’ll get it for you.” She paused. Her eyes were half-lidded, and he could just make out the idyllic islands inked on them. “I heard about the shooting today,” she said.

Her voice was so small it hurt him. “I saw it on the screens,” he said.

She nodded. “The company wants more copy. Sales always go up after. ‘Time to hit them hard,’ my boss told me.”

She looked away, as if turning from the idea toward something more pleasant but not quite making it.

• • • •

The lines were still long when he went back for his appointment a few days later. The final count at the school—somewhere in Connecticut—was twenty-six, twenty of them children, and the fear that resurfaced after every sensational shooting still hung around. For three days, Emily had written copy. She worked late at night, after he got home, which was later and later as more and more orders for bulletproof doors came in. She would start off with a joint, then pop a Klonopin or Percocet, but Allen did not have the heart to stop her. Most people he knew were doing whatever they could to get through the day.

Her bosses had thrown out “Guns May Kill People, But Ink Never Does,” but they had liked “Think Ink” and “You Can’t Buy Happiness, But You Can Get Ink.” They had loved “Ink Is The Answer,” and had promised her another bonus for it, full coverage on her lungs and back.

He asked her if she was going to get it.

She shrugged. “It’s free,” she said. “Can’t hurt. Besides, I like the ink. It makes me feel different.”

“Bulletproof?” he said.

She rolled her eyes, though they were slow in response. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Just different.” She stretched out an inked arm. “Like I’m wearing new skin.”

In the morning he went downstairs and out the lobby, past the small shops that sold increasing numbers of home security or personal safety items—mace, blackjacks, helmets, stun guns, .22s and .357s, M-4s and M-16s and AR-15s.

On 20th, he slipped past the long lines and went into the shop. At the desk, a young girl with her head shaved and ram’s horns inked on her skull looked up as he approached.

“We don’t have any open—”

“I have an appointment,” Allen said, handing her the card she had given him a few days before. She looked at him, checked the computer screen, then nodded.

“Brandy will be with you in a moment,” she said.

He sat on a couch in the corner, looking out through the glass walls at the people waiting outside. The shop was like a long hallway, and he could see small stalls where the artists were working, heads bent over prone bodies, their guns buzzing. At the higher end shops, the artists would use lasers that made no noise, but here the buzzing soothed him. He had stolen a Xanax from Emily’s stash, but wished he had taken two. Or one of the Dilaudid drops. Most doctors would prescribe anything from Xanax to Demerol for anxiety, the simple fear of walking the fucking streets. They had begun to prescribe tattoos as well, though the health insurance companies would not cover the cost unless the person was a cop or a fireman or a school teacher.

When he looked up, Brandy was standing before him. She wore only a bikini. A great red dragon wrapped around her body. The background was all green forest, an ancient land long forgotten. Above her breasts little birds flitted through the forest. Mossy streams ran down her cheeks. Her eyelids were yellow lanterns.

“So what are we doing today?” she said, leading him back to her small stall. Hung on the walls were pictures of tattoos she had done: swallows and stars and dragons and teardrops.

He pulled out a picture of Emily and handed it to her.

“Portraits are becoming more and more popular,” she said, looking at the picture. “She’s beautiful. When did she die?”

He could not see the lanterns of her eyelids now, but where her eyebrows should have been were small swirls of storm clouds. Behind the clouds, lightning lingered—he was sure of that, faint as the suggestion of the ink was.

“She’s not dead,” he said. “I just wanted to . . .”

Brandy was already turning from him, though he did not know if it was because she was embarrassed or because she needed to get started. She was laying out her instruments and measuring ink.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that people usually get portraits of loved ones after they are lost.” She pressed a button with her foot and the tattoo gun buzzed. “Now get ready,” she said. “This is going to hurt.”

• • • •

When he got home, Emily had pulled the couch close to the balcony door and was looking out at the city. She did not look up when he came in. For a moment he thought she was dead. Her eyes were glazed over. The koi fish on her chest barely rose and fell.

When he got closer, he saw that she had been crying. In the streets below them, the lights were just coming on. He had soundproofed the sliding door so they would not have to hear the gunshots, but he could see the sporadic flashes below. Downtown, in the windows of the Gloch building, the office lights were going out at the end of the day. It made him wonder what the world was coming to, how small humans were, so shallow-sighted and angry, inconsolable and aggrieved.

“What is it?” he said, sitting beside her.

She laid her head on his chest and for a long time he just held her. His neck hurt where the tattoo of her was. When Brandy had finished, he had looked at it for a long time, unable to find the right words. It looked more like Emily than he could have imagined. She seemed to smile at him. Brandy had drawn it over his jugular, and each pulse of his blood moved through her.

Emily shook into him as she cried. He could feel her heart beating too hard against his. When her breathing slowed, he raised her chin up. He saw her eyes flicker to her face tattooed on his neck, but either she was too tired or too deep in grief to take it in.

“Netta killed herself,” she said. Her voice was full of painkillers. “The model I work with, the one we use in all the ads. She swan-dived from the Gloch building this afternoon.”

Her voice broke on the last word. Allen saw again the advertisement with her on it, the great red heron poised in mid-flight on her chest, and he wondered, in the way such thoughts strike in times of tragedy, if she had thought she might fly. He knew why she didn’t use a gun.

“Why?” he said, knowing it was not the right thing to say but needing to say something.

Emily’s voice came across some chasm he couldn’t comprehend. “I don’t know. I knew she was sad. She was taking ten Tramadol a day.” A muscle twitched in her neck. “I guess it wasn’t enough.”

He waited, knowing there was more, that she didn’t swan-dive off the roof of a building because she was addicted.

“She just couldn’t live any longer,” Emily said. “She left a note. It said ‘No one is bulletproof.’”

• • • •

The first snow was falling when they went to the funeral. In the early afternoon, the lights were already on in the city. The few cars on the street honked and swerved angrily. He heard a gunshot or a backfire several streets over.

Emily had been too distraught to notice the new tattoo. He had held her until very late, both of them looking out at the city, the distant lights winking like the collapse of stars. His neck hurt but he did not move. Brandy had told him to take care of the tattoo, that without proper treatment the lines could blur and he could lose her likeness, but she had fallen asleep against him and he did not wish to wake her.

She woke up once, very late. “I knew she was taking a lot of pills,” Emily had said, “but everyone who works there takes pills. Everyone is sad.”

When she went back to sleep, he slipped a hand into her pockets and found a bottle of Vicodin. He took two, hesitated, took two more. In fifteen minutes, the lights of the city seemed washed, faded. Her advertisements were hung all around the walls of the apartment—he saw Netta’s face again and again.

When he woke in the morning, Emily was working. When he asked her why, she said she had to do something to take her mind off Netta.

Her new ad featured a woman with a blank face—Allen realized she couldn’t draw Netta again. “No One Is Bulletproof,” the copy read, “But You Can Come Close.”

“They won’t like it,” Allen said, wrapping his arms around her from behind.

She put her hands on his, leaned back into him. “I know. But I had to start somewhere.”

When they got to the cemetery, the snow was swirling around. The church service had been short, and now they stood in the snow while the minister’s words were torn away by the wind. A dozen or more models, all with the same stark figure as Netta, stood like storks at the graveside. The company men were all covered, faces as dark and blank as the long coats they wore.

Netta’s mother wailed as the casket was lowered. Her father stared at the spot where the sun should have been. Both of them had small black swallows beneath their eyes, the only visible ink on them. Allen imagined them at cocktail parties, telling anyone who would listen that their daughter was the bulletproof girl. The bare trees bent in the wind and little birds were blown off course.

They had just thrown the first dirt on the lowered casket when the gunman entered the cemetery. Allen saw him first, but in the wind and the gray light, he felt as if he were underwater, as if he were a stranger standing in someone else’s skin. He watched as the bullets blew from the barrel, little bits of orange flames, and those standing near the grave began to fall. In the wind, he could hardly hear, even when the screaming started. The company men drew their own guns from their long overcoats and began firing back. More bullets broke from the man’s machinegun and Netta’s mother fell into the grave. Her father clutched his heart.

Allen turned then, remembering all the ads Emily had hung up around the apartment, thinking that the air was full of bullets, that ink was the only answer. The ground was cold and hard as he began running. He vaulted a gravestone and kicked over a few flowers but kept going. He might have heard Emily behind him, but he could not stop.

He was almost to the gun when the man saw him. His face was hidden behind a mask. His eyes were white. He aimed the machine gun at Allen—the barrel seemed smaller than the first swallows that men got to cover their own small hearts—and pulled the trigger.

Later, in the aftermath, the darkness and despair that came down, he would wonder how he was not hit. He saw the barrel belch and heard the bullets fly. One came close enough to his neck that he could feel the air of its passing. Another snagged the arm of his overcoat. Then he tackled the gunman and his hands were around the man’s neck, and then the gunman was gasping and then he was no longer doing anything except being dead.

Allen did not hear the screams as he walked back to the gravesite. Only the wind, loud as the last days of the Earth. Netta’s mother had been hit in the forehead. The sound her husband made as he knelt beside her was like the wind. Of the models, a half-dozen were down, most not moving, eyes staring unseeing at the hidden sun. One of the company men was holding another’s throat, applying pressure while blood slipped between his fingers and the man’s mouth worked and the sounds of sirens came from far away.

He found Emily lying beside the open grave. He pushed through the crowd and knelt beside her. The ground around her had been churned to mud. The company men were caring for the models. A few of them still had their guns out. One walked over and put six bullets in the gunman, his body bouncing with each shot. Allen wondered if he was bulletproof.

He could not tell, in the confusion, if she had been hit. He did not know if the blood at her throat, in the soft empty place her tattoos did not cover, was hers. How could he, he would think later, when there was so much of it everywhere? You can’t cover enough to stop every contingency, he thought. He would have to tell her that one, get her to draw it, though he knew, as soon as he said it, that her bosses wouldn’t like it.

“Are you all right?” he said, cradling her head in his lap.

She nodded, but it could have meant anything. Her hand was cold on his cheek. She blinked back the tears the wind had torn from her. For once she wasn’t stoned, and he could see in her eyes the realization of how awful everything was.

“How stupid we were,” she said. Her voice came as slow as her shallow breath. She looked up at the grey clouds. “So stupid to believe something as simple as ink could protect us.” In her eyes, he could see the stars. “How ignorant to think it could be that easy.”

©2019 by Paul Crenshaw. Originally published in If This Goes On, edited by Cat Rambo. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Crenshaw is the author of the essay collections This One Will Hurt You, published by The Ohio State University Press, and This We’ll Defend, from the University of North Carolina Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, Apex Magazine, Interzone, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, and Tin House. Follow him on Twitter @PaulCrenstorm.

Me Two

Keith Brooke and Eric Brown | 4612 words

For as long as I can remember, I have always been two people.

My earliest recollection is of myself as a three year-old boy, Danny—and at the same time as a girl of the same age, Cristina.

Another early memory is of playing in the rubble of the bomb-ravaged streets of London, when I asked a little boy, “Who will you be tomorrow?” He looked at me as if I were mad.

I took it for granted that everyone I met, everyone in the world, was two people like me: one day I was Danny Madison of 10 Milton Street, Barnes, London; and the next I would be Cristina Velásquez of 122a Carrer del Santuari, El Carmel, Barcelona.

I went to bed as Danny and woke up in the morning as Cristina.

When as Cristina I asked my mother who she would be tomorrow, she said, “Why, myself. Why do you ask?”

I told her about Danny, and I think she assumed I was making him up—a kind of imaginary friend.

As Danny, I asked my mother and father at breakfast one morning, straight out, “Why am I two people?” By this time I knew that no one else of my acquaintance experienced life quite as I did.

They exchanged a worried look. “What do you mean, Danny?” my father asked.

I explained about Cristina, and that tomorrow I would be her, and my mother said, “I think you’re imagining things, Danny.”

I intuited their concern, and decided never to mention it again.

• • • •

By the time we were seven years old, a year after the war had ended, we had worked out that we lived every alternate day as our other selves: that is, as Danny I lived the 1st of January, say, and then as Cristina lived the 2nd, with Danny resuming on the 3rd, and so on.

Danny would go to sleep on the evening of the 1st and wake up in the morning of the 2nd as Cristina, lying in bed and gazing at the whitewashed ceiling of the small room she shared with her sister. He—or rather she—would stare at her small brown hands in amazement, the memories of herself as Danny the day before fresh in her mind, alongside her own memories of her previous day.

What happened to us in the meantime, on our alternate days, when I was not Danny, and then when I was not Cristina? Was there a mirror version of me that took over on these days? For some time I was drawn to this idea of an intangible other-me—an other-us—that swapped roles every night. But no, I knew it could not be so. I still had memories of those days: the Danny days when I was being Cristina, and vice-versa. And while those memories were somehow distanced from the more vivid memories of when I was in control, there was no suggestion at all that I was watching some other guiding personality taking over.

Eventually, I had to yield to my own experience and perception of this strange phenomenon: that one day I was Danny, and the next Cristina, and on those alternate blank days my bodies simply went through the motions, a ghost existence.

In any case, I tried hard not to dwell on the explanation, for it was hard enough simply to survive what was occurring, both psychologically and in any number of more practical ways. In the early days there was always a period of uneasy integration in the mornings, long minutes of adjustment as our twin psyches meshed and negotiated the management of “self.” Little by little, I as Danny would recede, take a back seat, and I would reassert myself as Cristina. In the evening Cristina would go to sleep and wake up the following day as Danny, and the period of assimilation would begin again, this time Cristina adjusting herself in Danny’s sensorium. As the years progressed, however, the switch-over became routine, no longer a cause of disorientation.

• • • •

As Danny, I grew up in a relatively affluent middle-class household: When my father returned from the war, he took up a teaching post at the local grammar school where my mother was secretary to the headmaster; I was their only child.

As Cristina, I was one of two girls brought up by my widowed mother—my father, a staunch supporter of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya during the Civil War, having vanished, presumed dead like so many after Franco came to power, soon after my birth. My mother was strict and controlling, and it is only with hindsight that I began to understand how this was dictated by her fierce desire to protect her two daughters in a time when perhaps 300,000 children of leftist families were abducted by the state. It is only with hindsight, too, that I came to understand that she must have paid for our upkeep by earning money in whatever ways a woman could in such punishing times.

I soon learned to compartmentalise my memories, so as not to arouse suspicion. As Cristina, I feared my elder sister, who bullied me and thought me strange: I once told her of my other life as Danny, and quite naturally she thought I was lying, and at the same time resented my vivid imagination and the freedom it allowed me to escape our harsh reality.

We were a strange composite, Danny and Cristina. With our dual existence, we shared a double upbringing: Danny, raised as a boy with an Arsenal-loving father, was obsessed with football; Cristina, brought up by an often-absent mother and a bullying sister, sought escape in clothes design and dance, drawn moth-like to the emerging fashion and arts scene in post-war Barcelona. In consequence, Danny showed an early predilection for cross-dressing and ballet—to which my remarkably liberal parents tried to turn a blind eye—and Cristina developed a strange interest in Arsenal football club.

Harder to explain, as Cristina, to my bemused mother was my fluency in English, and as Danny my even less explicable facility in Catalan. I told my Catalan mother they were teaching us English at school, and my English parents that I had a Catalan evacuee as a school friend—and I was able to furnish enough details from the life of this imaginary escapee from Franco’s Spain to convince them.

• • • •

One day, I as Cristina resolved to stay awake all night in an attempt to experience the moment of transition. I read until my eyelids began to droop, then got up to walk around the bedroom, trying desperately not to disturb my snoring sister. Then I returned to bed, repeating the cycle right through to the early hours.

Dawn came at five o’clock, and still I, Cristina, had not transferred to the mind and body of Danny, seven hundred miles away in London.

And then, on the stroke of six, I blacked out—and the next I knew I was blinking myself awake in Danny’s familiar bedroom with Cristina’s memory of the day before, and her attempt to remain awake, fresh in my mind.

We each tried the experiment again from time to time, always with the same result.

• • • •

For as long as I can recall, we knew that one day we should meet.

In my teens as Danny, I badgered my parents to take me on holiday to Spain, drawing their attention to the rise of what came to be known as the package holiday. Horizon Holidays’ package to the Costa Brava would take us tantalisingly close to Barcelona, but despite my persistence, I failed to persuade my parents. The idea of foreign travel was little more than a dream for me as Cristina, with my mother hard-pressed to put food on the family table, never mind afford foreign holidays.

• • • •

Because of our singular situation, we had developed a self-protective reserve, a hesitation when it came to making friends, of giving ourselves to others. This led to social isolation as we grew up, even loneliness—though of course we were never really alone, as we had each other, and our shared memories, as consolation. This was the paradox: we had each other, and yet on some fundamental level this was never enough.

As Danny, I found myself drawn to slight, gamin girls with dark hair and pale faces—while as Cristina I was attracted to tall, blond boys . . . which were something of a rarity in Spain.

Despite our reserved nature, we had girlfriends and boyfriends, and even thought we were in love from time to time, but these affairs never lasted. Our lovers accused us of being remote, of being unable to give ourselves fully, and we knew this to be true but could not of course explain the reason why.

In London, I did well at grammar school, and in time enrolled at university, winning a place at Cambridge to study languages and classics. In Barcelona, my education was hard-earned, but as Spanish society opened up in the 1950s—perhaps ironically under the influence of the tourist boom—I caught up at school and took up a place to study art and languages at the Universitat de Barcelona. We excelled, our doubled memories and linguistic abilities aiding and abetting our respective learning.

On graduating and finding jobs—Danny in publishing and Cristina in art restoration—we became for the first time financially independent and turned our minds to the idea of meeting each other for, as it were, the first time.

• • • •

We tried to fathom the paradox of our singular situation as we contemplated meeting.

As Danny, I would wake up on the morning of our rendezvous, my head full of Cristina’s memories of the day before as she took a flight to London and booked into an Earl’s Court hotel: I shared her excitement, her apprehension.

We would arrange to meet at eleven at Trafalgar Square. I as Danny would approach the slim, dark girl standing at the feet of the north western lion, staring at the Cristina I was and had been, knowing her intimately and yet never having been able to hold her in my arms.

The ache in my heart would be almost unbearable.

• • • •

On the day after Cristina flew to London, I awoke with memories as her the previous day still fresh in my mind. I recalled the novelty of the flight, foolishly proud that my reaction was one of excitement and curiosity rather than fear at the noisy, disturbingly flimsy-seeming aircraft. I recalled the subsequent journey to the hotel, and the intense, suspicious scrutiny of the proprietor.

Waking with these memories, I finally allowed myself to believe we were about to meet. I set off for the encounter with the girl I knew I loved, like a teenager on his first date.

Remarkably, perhaps, it was only now that a significant conundrum pertaining to our situation occurred to me. Until now, I had it fixed in my mind: I was going to meet Cristina, and as Cristina, I longed for the day I would meet Danny.

But how could that be so?

I was Cristina yesterday, and today I was Danny. The Cristina I was to meet today at Trafalgar Square would be but a ghost, the shadow Cristina of alternate days when I was being Danny . . .

As I sat on the bus, my mind raced in ever more frantic circles, pursuing the logic of a situation that had no logic.

Who was I going to meet today? Would shadow-Cristina even know who I was?

I was early. It was a bright spring day and the tourists, and the pigeons, were out in force. I could not stand still in my nervous anticipation, so I walked around the square, eagerly looking out for the slight, gamin figure of Cristina Velásquez.

Eleven o’clock came and went, and Cristina did not arrive.

I checked my watch obsessively. Five past the hour, and still no sign of her. What might have happened? Had she been taken ill, or been struck down while crossing a road? Had her ghost-self forgotten, or not deemed this meeting important? I was beside myself with apprehension.

At noon she had still not appeared.

I did not know what to do. Where was she?

In the modern age, it is hard to recall the complications—and frustrations—of a time when communication was not instantaneous, taken for granted. In an age of social media and mobile phones, the idea that a missed rendezvous could seem so final is hard to fathom. But in the early 1960s, of course, there was no easy way to locate someone in such a situation.

In the end, in desperation, I found a telephone box and thumbed through the directory until I located the Earl’s Court hotel where I had booked in after my flight as Cristina the day before.

I dialled the number, impatiently waiting each time as the rotary dial spun slowly back to its resting position before I could dial the next digit.

“Traveller’s Rest, what can I do for you?”

It shouldn’t have surprised me that I recognised the voice of the man who had studied me from head to toe upon my arrival the day before. Of course I did: I had been there.

“Hello,” I said, my brain racing. “I’m trying to locate a guest of yours. We were supposed to meet this morning but she didn’t turn up. I’m concerned for her safety.”

I paused, but there was no response, a clear indication of how much the hotel proprietor cared about our failed rendezvous.

“Her name is Cristina Velásquez, and she flew in from Barcelona yesterday afternoon.” I had to consciously correct myself before speaking aloud: she flew in, not I.

“You got the wrong hotel, mate. There’s no Christine whatever staying here.”

“But there is! Cristina, not Christine. She checked in yesterday.” I did. I recalled it vividly.

“Listen, mate. Unless your Christine has a thick red beard and speaks like a Paddy, then you’ve got the wrong place. We’re full up with Irish navvies, just as we always are. Now good day to you.”

And, with that, the line went dead.

I hurried home, weeping at the irony: I was unable to communicate with the person to whom I was closest in all the world.

But tomorrow . . . Tomorrow I would wake up as Cristina, with not only my bitter memories of today, but with hers also. Then I would find out the reason for her non-appearance.

That night I went to bed early and, after a long time, sleep came.

• • • •

I awoke at dawn and blinked up at the cracked ceiling of the hotel room, and Cristina’s memories of the day before came crashing in on me.

I recalled the excitement of navigating London’s buses, with a knowledge of the network no young Catalan on her first visit to the country should have. Of peering out of the windows as the capital unfolded around me, familiar and yet seen for the first time.

I recalled the visceral thrill as I alighted from the bus at Trafalgar Square at five minutes to eleven and approached the designated stone lion where we were due to meet. My heart pumped heavily and my thoughts were feverish as I scanned the tourists in the square.

And then, with now terrible familiarity, I relived the growing disappointment as I realised that the tall, blond figure of Danny was not among them.

As I had as Danny, Cristina had waited hours, and still that blond young man she had seen in a mirror so many times did not show himself. Unlike Danny, she had no number to call: as Danny, I lodged in a Crouch End terraced house with no telephone. The only number she had was that of my parents in Barnes, but what good would that be?

• • • •

Early the following day, in desperation, I as Danny took a bus to the hotel in Earl’s Court where she was staying. Loitering across the street, I saw a succession of burly labourers emerge, but no Cristina.

The following morning, as Cristina, I woke up with the memory of visiting the hotel as Danny, and those of Cristina yet again going to Trafalgar Square at eleven.

In my desperation, I took a taxi to Crouch End, and hurried down the garden path. I lifted and dropped the lion’s head knocker and waited, my throat dry and my heart beating wildly.

An ancient, grey-haired woman opened the door and peered at me suspiciously, and when I asked if Danny was at home, the woman looked querulous. “Danny? Who’s Danny? There’s no one here called Danny.”

And when I as Cristina looked more closely at the front door, now closed firmly in my face, I realised that it was not the door I knew from memory: Danny’s front door was navy blue and freshly painted; this one was black and peeling.

• • • •

The following week, working on a terrible intuition, I as Danny booked a flight to Barcelona and rode a bus to El Carmel. Knowing full well the outcome, I climbed the steep street and approached the ugly square block where I as Cristina lived—so familiar from a thousand memories, and yet subtly different. I took the stairs to the third floor and rapped on the door of number eighteen.

A flustered mother with a babe in arms snatched open the door, listened to my gabbled question, and told me that no one called Cristina Velásquez lived there, or ever had.

In futile desperation, I tried the fourth floor, then the second, and so on, until I had exhausted all possibilities, but to no avail.

I even went to the gallery where I knew I as Cristina worked, only to be told that no one by that name was employed there.

At last, abject in defeat, and bemused, I took the next flight back to London.

• • • •

Years passed.

We became ever more melancholy and introverted, our relationships with others—both close and passing—doomed to fail because we were always holding something in reserve. We lived with the terrible knowledge of the irony of our situation: We experienced alternate lives, as one, as intimate as it was possible to be—and yet by some cruel trick of the universe, forever and impossibly parted.

We craved the other; as Danny, I desired to hold Cristina’s slim body to mine, and I as Cristina wanted no one but Danny.

Some say that what we love in our love object is no more than a reflection of ourselves—like two mirrors placed face to face and reflecting each other into an infinity of solipsism.

If that were so, then it was certainly true in our situation.

• • • •

Deprived of what we could not attain, and perhaps in a perverted desire to hurt that which we each desired, we embarked on a series of ill-fated and masochistic affairs with pale substitutes of each other. We might have had the other in mind, as it were, but in the flesh we were forever denied—so as Cristina I chased unsuitable, tall blond men, and I as Danny debased myself at the feet of slight, raven-haired beauties.

As Danny, I even married a petite French woman called Claudette, and for a time managed to convince myself that I had broken out of the vicious circle, but it only lasted eighteen months before Claudette had finally had enough of my prickly, standoffish manner. With delicious irony, the final straw was when I called Cristina’s name aloud while I was dreaming, only to awaken to Claudette’s accusations that I must be having an affair with this mysterious Cristina.

• • • •

At some point—I do not recall when, the late 1970s perhaps, a time when my divorce from Claudette was reaching pyrotechnic extremes, and in Barcelona I was finding the stresses of our peculiar double existence almost too much to bear—as Cristina I read an article in a Spanish science journal reporting the research of a Swiss quantum physicist. He claimed to have proved, mathematically, the existence of an alternative world, of another Earth existing in close contiguity with our own.

We were excited. Could this, we wondered, explain our unique condition? Did we exist, Cristina and Danny, side by side on different Earths, our flesh separated by the width of mere molecules that might as well have been a million miles apart, but our minds in some strange way conjoined?

Was that the explanation?

When I woke the next day as Danny, I wrote to the physicist, making good use of my fluency in French—perhaps the one good thing to come from my brief marriage to the fiery Claudette. I couched our experience in theoretical terms, but received no reply. I’m sure I came across as some kind of crank, but still the absence of response rankled and lingered for long weeks until I finally gave up hope of a reply.

We heard no more of the physicist’s claims, though we scanned all the journals and research papers relating to quantum physics until our minds whirled with a multitude of abstruse impossibilities.

• • • •

The internet came along when we were in our sixties, and entrenched in our ways. In our work in Barcelona and London, we used computers where required, but little beyond that.

One day I plucked up the courage to ask a young colleague in the Linguistics Department at UCL if he could help me find an old colleague by the name of Cristina Velásquez, an art historian I claimed to have met at a conference in Madrid. I could tell from the young man’s knowing smile he thought there was more to it than that, and I chose not to correct him or tell him more.

“You sure?” he said, after a few minutes spent tapping away on his laptop in the Starbucks where we had arranged to meet. He turned the screen to show me the fruits of his search. “I can’t find her, which is odd in itself. Everyone leaves some kind of digital footprint these days. There’s a Maria Velásquez at the University of Granada—a daughter, perhaps?” Maria Velásquez turned out to be not a day older than thirty. And Afro-Caribbean.

The next result was a Mexican artist, now resident in the USA. A set of Facebook profiles—so my young colleague told me—included a fiery redhead from Chile, a woman from Guatemala, and a pouting twenty-something woman who, from the thumbnail image I briefly glimpsed, appeared to be posing in her underwear.

“Maybe Cristina doesn’t use the internet,” I said tentatively.

My colleague laughed at the very idea, then paused, eyeing me more closely, no doubt reminding himself that the reason he was helping me was that there were still a few people, at least, of my generation who had little interest in the internet and social media.

And it was true: What use did the world of computers offer me in my futile quest? My experience of asking my friend to search for Cristina online merely reminded me of that failed rendezvous at Trafalgar Square in the early 1960s: faster and slicker a search, and no doubt more comprehensive, but just as doomed to failure.

The years continued to pass, and eventually the attraction of the flesh paled until all that remained was the Cristina- and Danny-shaped holes in our existence, a quest that had formed who we were so thoroughly that without it we would have been entirely different people.

We became reclusive, entire unto ourselves and yet on some fundamental level unfulfilled. Increasingly, we thought, what was happening to us was not so much inexplicable as something with no basis in objective reality and therefore resistant to logical explanation. What we experienced was no more than a sick, subjective malaise.

• • • •

In time, we retired and bought cottages on the coastlines of our respective countries, Cristina on the rugged littoral north of Barcelona, Danny beside a quiet Devon estuary.

We dreamed away our old age, wondering what might have been had we not been blessed by our double lives . . . or cursed.

And then, one day in high summer, it happened.

• • • •

As Danny, I pottered around the garden, then prepared myself a simple evening meal and sat in the conservatory with a glass of port, watching the sun set. I looked forward to the morning, when I as Cristina would, as habit decreed, rise early and make my slow way to the local market. We enjoyed market days in rural Catalonia.

A little drunk, I fell into a deep sleep, and awoke the following morning as myself . . . I mean, as Danny.

I experienced a kind of existential panic.

Had I become so drunk the night before that I had slept through an entire day and night? But I had had only two glasses of port the previous evening, and anyway today was the third of July, as it should be.

As it should be . . . I should have been experiencing the life of an elderly, gray-haired—but still beautiful—Catalan woman called Cristina Velásquez. But instead I was locked in an aging arthritis-ridden, and distinctly male, body.

I missed her with all my being: I missed the reassurance of Cristina’s comforting reality.

Until this very point, I could never have imagined how powerfully I would feel that absence.

What had happened to my love?

• • • •

I went to sleep that night in anticipation, and awoke to bitter disappointment. And so the following night and morning, and the next and the next . . .

At last I came to understand that I was left with that enjoyed by every other human being: a single, consecutive life.

And loneliness beyond endurance.

• • • •

And so now I must reconcile myself.

She is gone. Whether Cristina Velásquez was another aspect of me who lived a parallel life on another Earth, or a figment of a young boy’s war-damaged personality, or something else entirely, that existence has reached its inevitable conclusion.

Cristina Velásquez is no more. As Cristina, I had not been aware of any creeping illness, so I can only assume it came suddenly, a heart attack or a tragic accident.

Today I even had the foolish idea of searching one more time, inputting my other name into Google—yes, I have finally caught up with modernity, to an extent—but found nothing. No accident, no report of a death of Cristina Velásquez. Of course there was nothing.

I did not need that, in any case. The changed nature of my existence was evidence enough.

And so I pour myself a glass of Cristina’s favourite Empordà rosé rather than my usual port, and take it out to the conservatory.

Across the estuary, the sun is setting, lighting the sky a fiery red.

My friends—such as they have ever been—have always treated me with a somewhat pitying attitude for the isolated and apparently lonely existence I have led, but how could I ever convince them that I have—I realise now—lived a life less lonely than any of them?

For I have never been alone in the world, not for a moment.

And so I raise my glass and drink to you, Cristina.

To us.

And to a life lived doubly to the full.

Salut, amor meu!

Until I wake as you again.

©2021 by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Keith Brooke’s first novel, Keepers of the Peace, appeared in 1990. Since then he has published eight more adult novels, six collections, and more than 70 short stories. His novel Genetopia was published by Pyr in February 2006 and was their first title to receive a starred review in Publishers Weekly; The Accord, published by Solaris in 2009, received another starred PW review and was optioned for film. His most recent SF novel, Harmony (published in the UK as alt.human), was shortlisted for the Philip K Dick Award. Writing as Nick Gifford, his teen fiction is published by Puffin, with one novel also optioned for the movies by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish’s Caveman Films. He writes reviews for The Guardian, teaches creative writing at the University of Essex, and lives with his wife Debbie in Wivenhoe, Essex.

Born in Haworth, West Yorkshire, England, Eric Brown has lived in Australia, India and Greece, and has travelled extensively in the far east. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories, and his novel Helix Wars was shortlisted for the 2012 Philip K. Dick award. He’s published over seventy books and his latest include the seventh crime novel in the Langham and Dupré series, set in the 1950s, Murder By Numbers, and the Sherlock Holmes SF novel, The Martian Menace. He and Keith Brooke have written the collaborative Kon-Tiki quartet of novellas for PS Publishing. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Sidewalks

Maureen F. McHugh | 5783 words

I hate when I have a call in Inglewood. It’s still the 1990s in Inglewood, and for all I know, people still care about Madonna. Los Angeles County has a forty-bed psych facility there. Arrowhead looks like a nursing home: a long one-story building with a wide wheelchair ramp and glass doors and overly bright, easy-to-clean floors. I stop at the reception desk and check in.

“Rosni Gupta,” I say. “I’m here to do an evaluation.”

The young man at the desk catches his bottom lip in his teeth and nods. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Hold on, ma’am. I’ll get the director.” He has an elaborate tattoo sleeve of red flowers, parrots, and skulls on his right arm. “Dr. Gupta is here,” he says into the phone.

I also hate when people call me Dr. Gupta. I’m a Ph.D., not a medical doctor. I’m running late because I’m always running late. That’s not true of me in my personal life. I’m early for meeting friends or getting to the airport, but in my work there are too many appointments and too much traffic. Being late makes me anxious. I’m a speech pathologist for Los Angeles County working with Social Services. I’m a specialist; I evaluate language capacity and sometimes prescribe communication interventions and devices. What that means is that if someone has trouble communicating, the county is supposed to provide help. If the problem is more complicated than deafness, dyslexia, stroke, autism, learning disability, or stuttering, all the things that speech therapists normally deal with, I’m one of the people who is brought in. “Devices” sounds very fancy, but really, it’s not. Lots of times a device is a smart phone with an app. I kid you not.

“Are you from LA?” I ask the guy behind the desk.

He shakes his head. “El Salvador. But I’ve been here since I was eleven.”

“I love El Salvadorian food,” I say. “Tamales de elote, pupusas.”

He lights up and tells me about this place on Venice called Gloria’s that makes decent pupusas, until Leo shows up. Leo is the director.

Just so you know, I’m not some special, Sherlock Holmes kind of woman who has been promoted into this work because I can diagnose things about people. Government does not work that way. I took this job because it was a promotion. I’ve just been doing speech pathology for about twenty years and have seen a lot, and I am not particularly afraid of technology. I have an iPhone. I attend conferences about communication devices and read scientific journals.

What I understand about this case is that the police got a call about a woman who was speaking gibberish. She was agitated, attacked a police officer, and was placed on a seventy-two-hour psych hold. She has no identification and is unable to communicate. They can’t find any family, and since she is nonverbal except for the gibberish, she was given an initial diagnosis as profoundly autistic, and when a bed opened up at Arrowhead she was placed. I’m here to determine what the problem is.

The file is pretty lean.

I don’t know Leo-the-director very well. He’s a balding, dark-skinned guy wearing a saggy gray suit jacket and jeans. He looks tired, but anyone running a psych facility looks tired. “Hi, Ros, how was the 405?” he asks.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say. “The 405 was a Saturday Night Live skit. Tell me about your Jane Doe.”

He shrugs. “She’s not profoundly autistic, although she may be on the spectrum.”

“So she’s communicating?”

“Still no recognizable language.”

“Psychotic?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking she may just be homeless and we haven’t identified the language.”

“How did you end up with her?” I ask. Nobody gets a bed unless they are a risk to themselves or others or severely disabled. Even then they don’t get beds half the time. There are about 80,000 homeless in Los Angeles on any given night—not all of them on the street, of course—some of them are living in cars or crashing on couches or in shelters—but a lot of them are either severely mentally ill or addicted, and there aren’t that many beds.

“She’s 5250 pending T-con. Apparently she was pretty convincingly a danger to someone,” Leo says.

Section 5250 is a section of the California Welfare and Institutions Code that allows an involuntary fourteen-day psychiatric hold, and T-con is a temporary conservatorship that gets the county another fourteen days to keep someone. We’re a bureaucracy. God forbid we not speak jargon; we have our professional pride. At some point in that fourteen days, there has to be a probable cause hearing so a court can decide whether or not the hold meets legal criteria. I’m a cog in that machinery. If I determine that she can’t communicate enough to take care of herself, then that’s part of a case to keep her institutionalized.

When I say “institutionalized,” I can just see people’s expressions change. They go all One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Institutions are not happy places. The one I’m in right now is too bright. It’s all hard surfaces, so I hear the squeak of shoes, the constant sounds of voices. The halls are way too bright. It’s about as homey as a CVS and not nearly as attractive. But you know, a lot of people need to stay institutionalized. I had a nonverbal patient, Jennie. She was twenty-six, and after many months of working with her and her caregivers to provide her with training, she was finally taught to go and stand by the door of the storage room (where the adult diapers were stored) to communicate that she needed to be changed. I would like to live in a world where she didn’t have to live in a place like this, but I’m glad to live in a world where she has a place to live. I’ve been to visit family in New Delhi, okay? In New Delhi, if Jennie’s family was rich, she’d have great care. If her family was poor, she’d be a tremendous burden on her mother and sisters, or, more likely, dead of an opportunistic infection.

I’m wearing sandals, and the heels are loud on the linoleum. They’re three to a room here, but a lot of the people are in the day room or group therapy. We stop at a room. Two of the beds are empty and carefully made with blue, loose-weave blankets on them. A woman sits on the third bed, looking outside. She is clean. Her hair is long, brown and coarse, pulled back in a thick ponytail.

“That’s Jane,” Leo says.

“Hello, Jane,” I say.

She looks directly at me and says, “Hi.” This is not typical autistic behavior. We’re allowed use of a conference room where I can do my evaluation. I prefer it to a clinic. It’s quieter; there are fewer distractions. Walking down the hall, Jane is about 5’6” or so. She’s as brown as me. My family is Bengali, although I was born and raised in Clearwater, Florida. (I came to Los Angeles for college. UCLA.) Jane doesn’t look Indian. She doesn’t look Central or South American either.

Jane doesn’t say anything beyond that “Hi,” but she continues to make eye contact. She’s not pretty. Not ugly either. Jane actually rests her elbows on the table and leans a little toward me, which is disconcerting.

• • • •

I’m 5’3”. My husband likes to walk, so we walk to the drug store and sometimes we go out to eat. He’s six feet tall, a teacher. He’s white, originally from Pennsylvania. When we walk to restaurants from our little neighborhood (it’s quite pretty; we couldn’t afford to buy a house there now, but when we bought our place the neighborhood was still rough), there is enough room on the sidewalk in places for about three people to walk abreast. If there are two people walking toward us, and they’re two men, I’m the person who always has to get out of the way. A man will unthinkingly shoulder-check me if I don’t and occasionally look over his shoulder, surprised. This is a stupid thing, I know. There are a lot of entertainment businesses in our area—people who make trailers for movies or do mysterious technological things involving entertainment. They’re young men. They wear skinny pants or ironic T-shirts or have beards or wear those straw fedora things. I am old enough to be their mother, and I am just surprised that they do that.

“Would they run over their mother on a sidewalk?” I ask.

“It’s because you’re short,” Matt says. Matt is my husband. He is middle-aged, but he also wears ironic T-shirts. My favorite is his T-shirt of a silhouette of a T. rex playing drums with its little tiny arms. Matt is a drummer in a band made up of old white guys.

Men never do it if it’s two men coming up on two men; they all just sort of squeeze. I get very irritable about it. I grew up in America. I feel American. My parents come from New Delhi, and they are clear that my brothers, Jay and Ravi, and I are very American, but growing up I felt like I was only pretending to be. Sometimes I think I learned how to be a subservient Indian woman from my parents, and I give it off like a secret perfume.

When I was younger, I walked very fast, all the time, but now I’m middle-aged and overweight and I don’t dart around people any more, so maybe I just notice it more or maybe I’m just more cranky.

• • • •

I plan to do an evaluation called ADOS on Jane Doe. ADOS is one of the standard evaluations for autism. It can be scaled for a range from almost nonverbal to pretty highly verbal, and since the file said that she spoke gibberish, it’s a place to start. I never get to ADOS because it’s obvious pretty quickly that she exhibits no autistic behaviors.

“Hi, I’m Rosni Gupta,” I say.

She studies me.

I tap my chest. “Rosni Gupta. Ros.”

“Ros,” she repeats. Then she taps her chest. “Malni,” she says. She has an accent.

It takes me a couple of times to get it. She works with me, showing me what she does with her mouth to make the sound. I fiddle with it as I write it down. I think about spelling it Emulni but Malni feels closer. She has a strong accent, but I can’t place it. It’s not Spanish. I say a couple of words to her and gesture for her to say them back. She doesn’t make the retroflex consonants of the Indian subcontinent—the thing that everybody mangles trying to sound like Apu on The Simpsons. She watches me write.

I don’t use a laptop for my field notes. I like yellow legal pads. Just the way I started. She reaches out, wanting to use my pen. Her nails are a little long, her hands not very calloused. Her palms are pink. I hand her the pen and slide the pad across to her.

She writes an alphabet. It looks a lot like our alphabet but there’s no K, Q, or V. The G looks strange, and there are extra letters after the D and the T, and where we have a W she has something that looks like a curlicue.

She offers me the pen and says something in a language that sounds liquid, like it’s been poured through a straw. She gestures at me to take the pen. It’s the first time she’s really spoken to me in a full sentence.

I take the pen and she points to the page and points to the first letter. “A,” she says. It sounds like something between A and U.

Eventually I write an A, and she nods fiercely. I write our alphabet for her.

“Wait,” I say, gesturing with my hands, and she nods. It’s only a few minutes to go to Leo’s office and borrow his iPad and bring it back. I show her a Google map of the world. “Where are you from?” I ask.

She studies the map. Eventually she turns and she scrolls it a bit. I change it to a satellite version and I can see when she gets it. Her face is grim. She stabs her finger on the California coast. On where we are right now.

“No,” I say. “That’s where we are now, Malni. Where is home?”

She looks up at me leaning over the table. She stabs her finger in the same place.

• • • •

I write up my report that she is not autistic and recommend a psychological follow-up. She might be bipolar. Leo tells me as I leave that the cop who brought her in tased her, but it had been determined after forty-eight hours that she was not a threat. I never got any sense she was violent. I was certainly never worried about my safety. I take my safety very seriously, thank you, and I’ve done evals with potentially violent clients, and when I was worried, I requested protection. I never felt the need with Malni.

I make dinner that night while Matt marks papers. Matt teaches sophomore English at the high school and is the faculty advisor for the literary magazine. For nine months of the year, he disappears into the black hole that is teaching, and we lose our dinner table. He surfaces for brief periods from the endless piles of papers and quizzes, mostly around Saturday night. He tells me about his students, I tell him about my clients.

Matt likes Bengali dishes, but I don’t make them very often because I didn’t learn to cook until I was out of school. My go-to, as you might have guessed, is Mexican. I like the heat. Tonight is carnitas á la Trader Joes.

“What’s this?” Matt asks. He’s sitting at the dining room table, papers spread, but he’s looking at my notes. We’ll end up eating in front of the television. We’re Netflixing, partway through some BBC thing involving spiffily dressed gangsters in post-WWI England.

“What’s what?” I ask.

“Looks like someone’s writing the Old English alphabet in your notes.”

I bring out sour cream and salsa and look at what he’s pointing to. “That was my Jane Doe in Inglewood.”

“She’s a Beowulf scholar?” he asks.

“That’s Old English?” I ask.

“Looks like it,” Matt says.

• • • •

I have a caseload and a lot of appointments, but about a week later I call Leo and tell him I want to schedule some more time with Jane even though I shouldn’t take the time. He tells me she’s been moved to a halfway house. It could have been worse; she could have been just discharged to the street. He gives me the address and I call the halfway house coordinator and schedule a time to see her in about a week.

I have to go in the evening because Malni—they call her Malni now—has a job during the day. She does light assembly work, which is a fancy name for factory work. The halfway house is in Crenshaw, a less than desirable neighborhood. It’s a stucco apartment building, painted pale yellow. I knock on her door, and her roommate answers.

“I’m looking for Malni?”

“She ain’t here. She be coming back, you might run into her if you look outside.” Her roommate’s name is Sherri. Sherri is lanky, with straightened hair and complicated nails. “You her parole?”

“No, I’m a speech therapist.”

“There ain’t no therapy to do,” Sherri says. “You know she don’t speak no English.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I like your nails.”

Sherri isn’t charmed by my compliment. But I do like them; they look like red and white athletic shoes, like they’ve been laced up across each nail. I’m terrible at maintenance. Hair, makeup, nails. I admire people who are good about things like that.

I head outside and spot Malni coming from a couple of blocks. Malni walks with her shoulders back, not smiling, and she makes eye contact with people. You’re not supposed to make eye contact with people in the city. It’s an unwritten rule. There’s a bunch of boys hanging on the corner, and Malni looks straight at their faces. It’s not friendly, like she knows them. It’s not unfriendly. It’s . . . I don’t know. The way people cue looking at people and away from people is something to look for when determining if they’re autistic or if they’re exhibiting signs of psychosis. I’m trained to look for it. Persons on the autism spectrum generally don’t make eye contact. A lot of persons with schizophrenia don’t look at people and look away in the normal rhythms of conversation; they stare too much—too long, for example. When I assessed Malni at Arrowhead, she cued normally.

Malni walks the boys down, looking right in their faces. The boys move out of her way. I suspect they don’t even realize that they’re doing it. I remember her file says she was tased when police apprehended her. A homeless woman of color speaking gibberish who kept looking them in the face and wouldn’t drop her eyes. Did they read that as aggressive? I bet she didn’t have to do much to get tased. It’s a wonder she didn’t get shot.

Malni sees me when she gets closer and lifts her hand in a little wave. “Hi, Ros,” she says and smiles. Totally normal cueing.

I follow her back into the apartment she shares with Sherri.

“I ain’t going nowhere,” Sherri announces from in front of the television. “I worked all day.” There’s a Styrofoam box of fried chicken and fried rice nearly finished on the coffee table in front of her.

“That’s okay,” I say.

Malni and I sit down at the kitchen table, and I open up my laptop. I call up images of Beowulf in Old English and turn the screen around so Malni can see them.

She frowns a moment, and then she looks at me and smiles and taps my forehead with her index finger like she’s saying I’m smart. She pulls the laptop closer to her and reads out loud.

It’s not the same liquid sound as when she talked, I don’t think (but that was two weeks ago and I don’t remember exactly). This sounds more German.

Sherri turns around and leans against the back of the couch. “What’s that she’s talking?”

“Old English,” I say.

“That ain’t English,” Sherri says. It’s like everything from Sherri has to be a challenge.

“No, it’s what they spoke in England over a thousand years ago.”

“Huh. So how come she knows that?”

Malni is learning modern English. She can say all the things that you learn when you start a new language—My name is Malni. How much does that cost? Where’s the bathroom? Everyone keeps asking her the same question, “Where are you from?”

She keeps giving the same answer: “Here.”

I pull a couple of yellow legal pads out of my messenger bag and a pack of pens. I write my name and address, my cell number, and my e-mail address on the first one.

“Hey, Sherri, if she wants to get in touch with me, could you help her?”

I’m not sure what Sherri will say. Sherri shrugs. “I guess.”

Malni looks at the writing. She taps it. “Ros,” she says. Then the number. “Your phone.”

“Yes,” I say. “My phone.”

It’s my work phone because I never give clients my home phone. Not even my clients who read Old English.

• • • •

I think about Malni walking through those boys. I’m meeting with one of my clients. Agnes is Latina. She’s sixty-four and had a stroke that’s left her nearly blind and partially deaf. She’s diabetic and has high blood pressure. She has a tenth-grade education, and before her stroke, she and her daughter cleaned houses.

With a hearing aid, Agnes can make out some sounds, but she can’t make out speech. Her daughter, Brittany, communicates with her by drawing letters on her hand and slowly spelling things out. I’ve brought a tablet so that Agnes can write the letters she thinks Brittany is writing. It’s an attempt at reinforcing feedback. Adult deafblindness is a difficult condition. Agnes is unusual because she doesn’t have any cognitive issues from her stroke, so there’re lots of possibilities. I’m having Agnes write one letter at a time on the tablet, big enough that she herself might be able to see it.

Agnes has a big laugh when she’s in a good mood. Sometimes she cries for hours, but today she’s good. She has crooked teeth. Her English is accented, but she’s lived here since she was thirteen—Brittany was born here and speaks Spanish as her first language but grew up speaking English too. “Mom!” she says, even though her mother can’t hear her. “Quit goofing around!” She smacks her mother lightly on the arm. Agnes’s eyes roam aimlessly behind her thick and mostly useless glasses.

Brittany, who is in her thirties, raises an eyebrow at me. Both women are short and overweight, classic risk profiles for diabetes and hypertension, like me. Unlike them, I have really good health care.

Agnes prefers drawing on the tablet to writing, and after twenty minutes of trying to figure out what Brittany has been asking her, “?yr name ?hot or cold ?what 4 dinner,” Agnes has given up and drawn an amorphous blob that is apparently supposed to be a chicken. “Fried chicken,” she announces, too loud because she can’t hear herself well enough to regulate her volume.

“She can’t have fried chicken for dinner,” Brittany says. “She has to stick to her diet.”

Agnes says, “El Pollo Loco! Right? Macaroni and cheese and cole slaw. Cole slaw is a vegetable.”

Brittany looks at me helplessly. Agnes cackles.

My phone rings. “Is this Ros, the speech lady? This is Sherri, Malni’s roommate.”

“Sherri?” I remember the woman with the nails painted to look like the laces on athletic shoes. “Hi, is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of. Nothing’s really wrong. I just got a bunch of papers here for you from Malni.”

“Where’s Malni?” I ask.

“She took off to find more of her friends,” Sherri said.

“What friends?”

“Her friends from wherever the hell she’s from,” Sherri says. “You gonna pick up these papers or what?”

• • • •

I wanted Malni to write her story down. She filled almost three legal pads. I didn’t expect her to disappear, though.

“This guy showed up,” Sherri says. In honor of Agnes, I’ve brought El Pollo Loco. Sherri doesn’t really like El Pollo Loco. “I don’t eat that Mexican shit,” she says, but she takes it anyway. “He was tall and skinny. He looked like her, you know? That squished nose. Like those Australian dudes.”

It takes me a moment, but then I realize what she means: Aboriginals. She’s right—Malni looked a little like an Aboriginal. Not exactly. Or maybe exactly; I’ve never met an Australian Aboriginal.

“Oh, cool, I didn’t know they had mac ’n’ cheese.” Sherri plunks down on the couch and digs in. “Yeah, so he started jabbering at her in that way she talks to herself. Was crazy. And he acted just like she did. All foreign and weird. Then they just took off, and she didn’t come back.”

“When was that?” I ask. My feet hurt, so I sit down on the couch next to her.

“Like, Saturday?”

This is Thursday. Part of me wants to say, you couldn’t be bothered to call until yesterday, but there’s no reason for Sherri to have bothered to call me at all, even though Malni apparently asked her to.

“That bitch was super smart,” Sherri says.

I give Sherri twenty dollars, even though she’s a recovering substance abuser and it’s risky to give her pocket money, and I take the legal pads and go.

I call the Department of History at UCLA and eventually find someone who can put me in touch with someone at the Department of Literature who puts me in touch with a woman who is a Beowulf scholar. Why I thought I should start in History I don’t know, since Matt is an English teacher and he recognized the language. Anyway, I tell the Beowulf scholar I am looking for someone who can translate Old English and that I will pay.

That is how I get Steve. We meet at a Starbucks near campus. Starbucks is quickly becoming the place where everybody meets for almost every reason.

Steve is Asian American and very gay. He wears glasses that would have gotten me laughed out of middle school. He is studying Old English and needs money. “I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation,” he says. “I am working on my dissertation, actually. It’s on persona and presentation in Anglo-Saxon literature. But there’s that pesky thing about rent.” He eyes the legal pads. I wonder what persona and presentation even means and what his parents think about having a son who is getting a doctorate in English Literature. Which, I realize, is racist. Just because my dad is an engineer and my mother is a chemist and they are classic immigrant parents who stressed college, college, college, doesn’t mean Steve’s are. For all I know, Steve’s parents are third generation and his dad plays golf and gave him a car on his sixteenth birthday.

“I can pay you $500,” I say.

“That looks like modern handwriting. Is it, like, someone’s notes or something?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” I say.

He eyes me. I am aware of how weird it is to appear with three legal pads of handwritten Old English. Steve may be a starving UCLA student, but this is very strange.

“I think it’s like a story,” I say. “I work for Los Angeles County Social Services. A client gave me these.”

“You’re a social worker,” he says, nodding.

“I’m a speech therapist,” I say.

He doesn’t comment on that. “This is going to take a lot of hours. A thousand?”

“Seven hundred and fifty,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

I write him a check for half on the spot. He holds the check, looking resigned. I think I’m getting a pretty good deal.

• • • •

After that, I get e-mails from him. The first one has ten typed pages of translation attached and a note that says, Can we meet?

We meet in the same Starbucks.

“Your client is really good at Anglo-Saxon,” he says. “Like, really good.”

“Yeah?” I say. How can I explain?

“Yeah. She does some really interesting things. It’s a woman, right?”

Malni tells a “story” about a woman from a place on a harbor. The place is vast, full of households and people. There are wondrous things there. Roads crowded with people who can eat every manner of food and wear the richest of dress. It is always summer. It is a place that has need for few warriors. Trees bear bright fruit that no one picks because no one wants it because no one is hungry. The air is noisy with the sound of birds and children.

She is one of a band of people. They work with lightning and metal, with light and time. They bend the air and the earth to open doors that have never been opened. They journey to yesterday. To the time of heroes.

“She’s a woman,” I say.

“It’s like a sci-fi fantasy story,” Steve says.

I already know that. Malni has been telling everyone, she’s from here. When I read those words, that they journeyed to yesterday, I figured that plus the Old English meant that somehow Malni thought she had gone to the past.

“Have you heard about anybody who had some kind of breakdown or disappeared in the last year? You know, a teacher? Someone good at Old English?”

“No,” he says.

I tell him a little bit about Malni.

“Wow. That’s . . . wow. You’d think someone this good would be teaching, and yeah, it’s a pretty small discipline. I’d think I’d have heard,” he says. “Maybe not. If I hear anything . . .”

“So she’s really good,” I prompt.

“There are only something like a little over four hundred works of Old English still around,” Steve says. “There’s Beowulf, which was written down by a monk. There’s Caedmon, and Alfred the Great and Bede, a bunch of saints lives and some riddles and some other stuff. You get to know the styles. The dialects. This is close to Alfred but different. I thought at first that the differences were because she was trying to mimic Alfred but getting it a little wrong, you know? But the more I read it over and over, the more I realized that it’s all internally consistent.”

“Like she’s really good at making it up?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Like she’s made a version all her own. Invented a wholly new version of Old English so that it would sound like a different person at close to the same time. And written a story in it. That’s a really weird thing to do. Make it super authentic for somebody like me. Because the number of people who could read this and get what she’s doing and also enjoy it is zero.”

“Zero?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I understand the beginning of the story, I think. It’s a time-travel story. She starts in Los Angeles, which by the way is really hard to describe in Anglo-Saxon because she doesn’t try to make up words like horseless cart or anything. For one thing, Anglo-Saxon doesn’t really work that way. So she starts here and she travels back in time. Then there’s all this part about being in the past in what I think is probably Wessex, you know, what’s now part of England. She makes up some stuff that’s different from the historical record, some of which I wish were true because it’s really cool and some of which is just kind of dull unless you’re really into agriculture. Then there’s this long explanation of something I don’t understand because I think she’s trying to explain math but it isn’t math like I understand math. But really, I suck at math, so maybe it is.”

“She’s got math in there?”

“A little bit, but mostly she’s explaining it. There’s something about how really small changes in a stream make waves, and if you drop a stick in the water, no one can predict its course. How when you walk through the door to yesterday, it means yesterday is not your yesterday. Then she talks about coming back to her beautiful city but it’s gone. There’s a strange city in its place. That city is beautiful too, and it’s full of wild men and sad women. That city has savage and beautiful art. It has different things. Some are better and some are worse, but her family is gone and no one speaks to her anymore. She says the story is about the cost of the journey. That when you journey to yesterday, you lay waste to today. When you return, your today is gone and it is a today that belongs to somebody else.”

It takes me a moment to think about all that.

One of the baristas steams milk. Starbucks is playing some soft-spoken music in the background. It doesn’t feel like someone has just explained how to end my world.

“It’s kind of creepy, but the way it’s written, there are big chunks that are really hard to read,” Steve says. “Is she crazy? I mean, what’s the deal?”

I want to say she’s crazy. Really, it’s the best explanation, right? She was a professor of Anglo-Saxon/Old English. She’d had a psychotic break. Sherri said a man who looked a lot like her—maybe a family member, a brother—tracked her down to the halfway house and took her home.

That strange and liquid language she speaks. The way she acts, as if she comes from a different culture where the men are not so savage and the women not so sad.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I can give you what I’ve translated. I’ve translated all the words, but there are parts that don’t make sense,” Steve says.

I pay him the rest and add enough to make a thousand. He’s spent a lot of time on it. Time he could have been working on his dissertation.

“I actually learned a lot,” he says. “It’s like she really speaks Anglo-Saxon.”

“Maybe she did,” I say.

• • • •

Someone, somewhere is working on time travel. I mean, someone has to be. People are trying to clone mammoths. People are working on interstellar travel. I have a Google alert for it and mostly what pops up is fiction. Sometimes crazy pseudoscience. Real stuff too. I get alerts for things like photon entanglement. People are trying.

I think I saw Malni on Wilshire Boulevard one time walking with two other people: a man who looked like her and a woman who had black hair. I was driving, late for an appointment. By the time I saw them, I was almost past them. I tried to go around the block and catch them, but traffic was bad and by the time I got back to Wilshire they were gone. Or maybe it wasn’t Malni.

Maybe in some lab somewhere, people are close to a time travel breakthrough. I walk downtown with Matt and I think, this might be the last moment I walk with Matt. Someone might be sent back in time at any moment and this will all disappear.

Will it all disappear at once? Will I have a moment to feel it fading away? Will I be able to grip Matt’s arm? To know?

There are two guys walking toward us as we head to the Mexican place. I’m going to have a margarita. Maybe two. I’m going to get a little drunk with Matt. I’m going to talk too much if I want to. The guys are not paying attention. I remember Malni. I throw my shoulders back a little. I do not smile. I look in the face of the one in my way. The world is going to end, you fucker. I will not give up this sidewalk with my love.

He steps a little to the side. He gives way.

©2017 by Maureen F. McHugh. Originally published in Omni Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maureen F. McHugh was born in what was then a sleepy, blue collar town in Ohio called Loveland. She went to college in Ohio, and then graduate school at New York University. She lived a year in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first book, Tiptree Award winner China Mountain Zhang was published in 1991. Since then she has written three novels and a well received collection of short stories, Story Prize finalist Mothers & Other Monsters. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has attempted to sell her soul to Hollywood.

Church of Birds

Micah Dean Hicks | 5045 words

The swan boy lives in an abandoned church in a sleepy, green town by the river. He is small and young-looking still, though he is sixteen now and has been the swan boy for years. His hair is dirty and grown out long enough to cover his shy face. His clothes are striped with greasy white stains, radiating down from the shoulders of his rough shirt. No one would give him a second look if not for the huge, white shield of a swan’s wing that he has in place of a left arm. The people in town do not talk to him. Though they call him the swan boy, he has a name, and that name is Ben.

He has no job, but Ben gets up early and stays busy about town all day. He is clumsy with his big wing, but patient. He has learned to climb trees using his feet and good arm, while he holds out the wing for balance. Ben steals birds’ nests, little braided crowns, and fills his church with them. If he finds the alien blue of their eggs, he takes these too, holding them carefully in the fold of his wing. He has tried so many times to hatch the eggs with the careful heat of his own wing, but he has never been able to do so. Once, he held a clutch of eggs so close that he cracked them in his sleep and woke up cold and covered in yolk and shell.

In the town’s small square, Ben throws bread from his pockets and waits with a fisherman’s tattered cast net. When pigeons come, he makes his clumsy throw. Sometimes, he only tangles himself in the net. Sometimes, the birds are wary of him. Today, two sooty pigeons stand at his feet, heads hammering the paving stones for his stale bread. Ben throws open the net, his wing arcing over his head like he’s preparing to fly away, and the net falls over them. They thrash and cry, but Ben gathers them against his chest and rushes back to the church.

Shadows lick across the stained windows within. Ben bangs on the door for a count of ten, listening to the scatter of wings inside, then darts in with his catch. He lets the net fall, and the bruised pigeons hop out and flee over the wood floor, covered in their own watery shit. His hundreds of birds, scared by the noise at the door, crowd the back of the church or dart through the high, open space of the sanctuary.

Though the church is filthy with bird droppings and musty-gray with dust, there is color here. Red cardinals, bluebirds, orange-breasted robins sing and skip through the air. Many are the pigeons, marbled white and black, taking on colors from the stained glass as they fly through squares of bloody red, Byzantine gold, or glacial blue. There are ducks nesting in the corners, a crane with a crooked neck. There are no ravens because they are too clever to let him approach, no owls because he is afraid they would eat the others, and no swans because he cannot bear to look at them.

Troughs of water for drinking and bathing sit in the middle of the floor. Sacks of birdseed, ripped open, spill across the old carpet in a shower of white and black and amber seeds several inches deep. A ring of bright mold limns everything like a cold, slow-burning fire.

The new pigeons join a clutch of others on the exposed rafters. The sound of the birds is like the river below, or coins spilling, or weeping. Ben lies back on a damp pew and watches them fly for hours, admiring how whole their bodies are, how beautifully suited to doing one perfect thing.

When he rolls over to sleep, his human hand brushes something small and stony. He brings it to his face and smells rot, feels out the tiny beak with his thumb. He will sleep with the dead bird in his hand. He will bury it in the morning. He will cry, and he will rage, and he will wonder why it died when he gave it everything it needed. He will check that there is enough food and water, study the birds to see if any are sick, take every precaution he can. He will wait, and in a few days it will happen again.

• • • •

When he dreams, Ben remembers flight. He and his five brothers in their stout swan bodies. The wind rushing over their black-masked faces and the white tips of their wings. How they landed on a brick street after a rain to feast on meaty worms surfacing from their burrows. The green brack of river fronds hanging from of his beak. And his brother’s five voices, each a mirror of his own.

They weren’t meant to be swans. It was a curse, though it didn’t feel like a curse. Their sister Julia saved them. She was required to close her mouth and not laugh, or speak, or even write for six years. One year for each of her cursed brothers. She had to sew them each a shirt of weeds. It was not easy for her, the silence. She sewed her mouth shut to keep her promise to her siblings, but as soon as she did, a man appeared. And since she didn’t say no, he took her home and made her his wife, and she had his children. All the while, she sewed her shirts of grass and cried her silent, angry tears.

When the day came, only Ben’s shirt was unfinished, missing its sleeve. But it was time. Julia shoved the shirts down over their honking heads, and they became themselves again. All except for Ben, who kept a single wing. The others were older and went back to being the men they had been before. But Ben had been a swan as long as he had been a boy. He didn’t remember how to speak. Julia, full of words after her long quiet, taught him language.

• • • •

When Ben wakes up, he goes to see his sister. She lives alone above a tiny printer’s shop, having divorced the man who loved her silence. When Ben arrives, her stoop is covered in a heap of new mail. He gathers it onto his wing like it’s a serving tray and carries it inside. His sister’s printing press hums and stamps its feet, spitting out book pages. She prefers to stitch their spines up by hand, the only sewing she does any more. Ben breathes in the inky purple smell of the place.

“What do you need help with today, little brother?”

Ben gives her a knot he found. She does not untie it for him. Instead, she studies it.

“You’ve tried your feet?”

He nods.

“What about holding it with your teeth? Did you try that?”

He puts the knot in his mouth, tasting soap in the fabric. He works at the knot with his fingernails and finally pulls it undone.

“Good. But I see you haven’t been bathing.”

He sits with her all afternoon. She orders lunch for them. The whole time, she reads letters, talks to herself, calls publishers on her telephone. At the end of the day, Ben tells her about his dream, what he remembers from being a swan.

She winces and he apologizes, knowing she doesn’t like to think of her quiet years, but he needs to tell someone.

He clears his throat. “Do you think one day you might try again? Take the silent vow and sew another shirt? It would only be for a year this time.”

Julia hugs him with her ink-stained hands. “Sorry, Ben. I have too much to say.”

• • • •

Years ago, after Julia taught him to speak again, she sent him to school. He was twice the size of the other children, but he knew half as much. The teacher asked him to solve problems, writing letters and numbers out on the blackboard in bone-white, skeletal lines of chalk. It made no sense, this obsession with counting and numbering. He had one sister, five brothers, no parents. He had three shirts and one pair of pants. He had one arm and one wing. The sums he dealt in were small.

He didn’t like the lines where they stood one behind another, marching across the schoolyard, or the times when they were forbidden to speak, or the times when they were required to do so. Not the milk served twice a day that soured in his stomach. The rooms of the schoolhouse were cold, and he wrapped his wing around himself. The others stared and whispered.

After lunch, he found a swing set on the playground. A girl, Susan, swung higher and higher. He gaped at her almost-flight. Ben was too nervous to ask how to do it, but Susan dragged her feet in the gravel to slow herself and gave up the rubber seat. She pushed him down and hooked his arm and wing around the chain. She told him to pump his legs.

There was a moment, when he soared high with only the blue of the horizon in front of him, when he forgot that he was not still a swan. He unhooked his arm and wing and leaned forward. He beat his arms, strained his neck, and let out an ugly honk from his too-large throat.

He hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of himself and rolled in the dirt, wide-mouthed and losing feathers. From all across the playground, children came to see.

They pulled wadded rolls of bread from their pockets, saved from lunch, and broke off pieces to throw at him. They honked and laughed. He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t run away. So he covered himself with his wing.

When Julia came, she found him cowering in a circle of breadcrumbs. He never went back to school after that. Everything he learned, Julia taught him.

• • • •

The morning after visiting his sister, he goes to feed the pigeons again. Some time in the night, a carnival arrived in town. Their rides and trailers clutter the avenues of the park, closed up and dim and silent until night. Men and women he has never seen smoke outside a diner. The town is full of strangers.

A group of old people from the nursing home sit on benches and squint at him, silent in the weak sun. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren run through the park together, impatient for the carnival to begin. Ben keeps the net at his feet, embarrassed to throw it with people watching.

There is a bang, an engine’s black cough, and a truck sputters up the road and parks alongside the park. The back of the truck supports a tall shed, and it pulls a camping trailer. The paint is brown and red and gold, but is flaking off and eaten through with rust. Faded lettering on the side of the trailer reads, Elise’s Oddities.

When a woman steps out of the truck and walks over to him, she does not seem dangerous. She eats a cinnamon bun. She wears a wide-brimmed hat and leather boots, a coat against the damp. She has one luminous blue eye, one deep brown one.

“I like your pigeons,” she tells him.

Ben holds his wing against his chest. He thinks to say, These are not my pigeons, or, I haven’t caught them yet, or even, Would you like them? But he says nothing.

“Look what I found.” She holds out a glass globe. Inside, everything is covered in white. At first, Ben thinks it is only a snow globe like he has seen so many times before. But when she shakes it and shows him again, inside the globe is a burning house. Through the empty windows, a body lies on the floor. Painted flames swallow it up, and the falling white is ash, not snow. A tiny dog watches from the yard. “Do you like it?”

He nods and risks another glance at her face. She is smiling still, but she is looking at his wing.

“Can I help you with something?” he asks.

She tucks the globe back into her coat. “My name is Elise. I deal in curiosities, and you, beautiful boy, are very curious. Are you from here?”

“Yes. No.” He holds the tip of his wing and stares at the ground. “Not originally. But I’ve lived here for a long time.”

She kneels so that he is looking at her. “Do your parents come feed the birds with you? I’d love to meet them.”

“I don’t have parents.”

“You must have someone to take care of you. A friend or brother?”

“No. Just my sister Julia who helps me sometimes. But she is very busy with her work.”

The woman reaches for his wing. “Can she fly like you can?”

He slowly extends his wing and lets her touch it. She feels along the pinions, pressing the down and flesh beneath, mapping the bone structure with a careful, firm hand.

“I can’t fly. Once I could, but not now. And Julia doesn’t have a wing. Just me.”

More people filter into the park. The town’s cop ambles down the path, looking at the strange woman speaking to the swan boy.

“I have to go for now. Won’t you visit me tonight? My trailer will be parked at the campsite near the river, away from all this noise. You have to come. Tell me what it felt like to fly.”

• • • •

Elise’s truck and trailer are the only vehicles at the campground, and it is dark when Ben arrives. She has taken furniture out of her trailer and arranged it in the dirt lot like a sitting room. Christmas lights wind around the furniture, making little aisles. Music plays, slow strings reeling him in.

Ben is freshly bathed and his hair is swept back out of his eyes. His clothes are new, a gift from his sister. He has not tied his wing to his chest or covered it with a coat. He carries a mockingbird in a brass cage.

Elise is waiting for him on the steps of her trailer. She sweeps him up in a hug, pressing his wing between them. “Is the bird for me? How kind! Put him inside, will you?”

Ben steps into the trailer, feeling her close behind him. The trailer is empty inside. He bends over to place the bird on the floor. “Before I can tell you about flying, I should tell you about my brothers,” he says.

Before he can stand, Elise slips a rope over his neck and tightens it hard around his throat. She forces him to the floor. Ben freezes, afraid and hurt, until he feels her trying to tie his feet.

She is bigger than he is, but his wing is broad and marvelously strong. He rolls and sweeps it against her, knocking her off his back. The mockingbird’s cage falls over, and it cries and beats its wings.

“Ben, no! I want to help you.” Elise finds her end of the rope and pulls again, choking him. He beats at her with his one wing, the bony limb and heavy flail of feathers knocking her back against the steel wall. With his free hand, he takes the rope from her and falls backwards out of the trailer.

She chases him across the campground, shouting. “It’s hard to be alone, Ben. Trust me. Why not be admired as a curiosity instead of forgotten as a freak?”

After he gets away from her, Ben hides in a dumpster most of the night, afraid that she will spot him and follow him home. He pounds his head with his human fist. Stupid, stupid. He should have known. He would go to Julia, but he doesn’t want her to be disappointed. He wonders what will happen to the mockingbird, and realizing that it might live longer with the curiosity dealer than it would have with him, he is overcome with a wave of grief.

To make the time pass, he checks his wing to make sure it wasn’t hurt. No broken feathers, no bruises, no cuts. Intact as iron. Ben isn’t surprised. It has always been the strongest part of him.

• • • •

The last time Ben saw his five brothers, Julia had to leave town on business. The next day, they came for him and took him to the forest outside of town.

“Have you found our father?” he asked them.

They shook their heads. For years, they chased after news of their home and family. The palace where they were born was empty, the roof collapsed, their father and all his riches gone away. They were born with everything, but after being cursed for six years, they found themselves reborn as beggars. It never bothered Ben the way it did his brothers. He can’t remember what it was to be a prince.

When they got him deep into the woods, his brothers asked him to lie down on a pile of straw. They were older and stronger, and when they asked, it was always a command.

“It’s going to rain soon,” Ben said.

“You have an arm somewhere under that wing. We’re going to help you find it.”

While three of his brothers held him down, the other two worked to remove his feathers. First, they used knives to cut through the thick shafts.

“Please don’t,” Ben said, “it hurts.”

“Trust us,” said his brothers, keeping their voices low and putting a hand over his mouth. “We love you.”

Impatient with the knife, they grabbed handfuls of his feathers and pulled them out. Ben felt the roots tear from his skin. His shirt soaked with blood. When they finally let go, he lay stretched on the ground haloed in his own white feathers. There was no human hand under there, no fingers, no bicep. Only a wing, naked and bumpy-fleshed, bloody and burning with pain.

His brothers shook their heads in disgust. “Leave him,” one of them said. “Better dead than a bird for a brother.”

They walked away, and the rain fell, and he did not see them again. Somehow, he stood. Somehow, he held his wounded limb and found his sister’s home, fell into her bed, and waited for her to come save his life.

“Who did this to you?” Julia asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It might have been anyone.”

• • • •

It is colder now, so Ben binds his wing to his chest and puts on a baggy coat to cover it. The wind slices over the top of the park’s little pond. He does not have bread to feed the birds today, so he only comes to watch.

There is another person in the park, a woman throwing out handfuls of bread and mobbed by ducks. He sits on a bench on the opposite side of the pond.

A flock of swans alights on the pond’s glassy surface and drifts toward him. Their faces are so strange, banded in black like they are wearing masks. He wonders if there are lost children hiding in the graceful S of their bodies, waiting for a silent sister to break their curse.

The woman comes and sits by him. She puts a clump of bread on the bench near his hand. “The swans have always been my favorites,” she says.

Ben realizes then that he knows her: Susan, the girl who taught him to swing on his first and only day of school. She is older, but she has the same kind face, wide-eyed and broad-smiling.

Ben wants to ask if she remembers him, but of course she does. He picks off a bit of her bread and throws it onto the water.

The swans come closer, leaving the water and walking up the bank in a line, like soldiers. Their halberd necks swing through the air for the flying bread. Susan leans forward and reaches out with one gloved hand. The swans take a step away from her.

Her fingers stay outstretched, and the innocence of her gesture makes the wing flutter against Ben’s breast. Three buttons snap open on the front of his coat. A spray of feathers falls out.

“You were a swan once, weren’t you? That’s what people say. Are these your brothers?”

“No.” He opens his coat and undoes the strap binding his wing. He lets it hang free off the side of the bench. “No, those are only swans.”

“They’re beautiful. I’ve been feeding them for years, but they never let me get close.” She swallows and looks away from him. “I guess they have good reason to be afraid of people.”

Her hand is still out, and he wants to fill it. She is good, and she is safe. Of all the people in the world, she might understand. He wants her to know that her kindness matters. So he reaches toward her with his wing. He is ready to lay it across her lap and let her smooth the stiff feathers. Let her pinch off bread and place it on his tongue. Let her wrap an arm around him and tell him that the world isn’t as bad as it seems.

She touches his wing, and instinct fractures him, like a crack spreading through ice. Before he realizes what he is doing, he is off the bench and running from her. There is the burn of the rope on his neck still. The hot prickle at the base of his feathers, down on his flesh where his brothers hurt him. The shock of beer bottles flung at him from trucks, or kids chasing him on bicycles to stripe his back with sticks. The ugly, coughing honk people make when he walks by.

“I’m sorry,” Susan calls after him. “Please, come back. I’ll never forgive myself.”

His eyes are wet and stinging, and he can’t see. He holds his wing to cover his face from branches and sprints through the park, up the hill, and back to his church. He steps inside and locks the heavy door against the world.

An hour later, Susan knocks. “That was wrong of me,” she says. “How can I make it up to you?”

Birds startle and circle the high ceiling. He wants say something, to tell her that she did nothing wrong, that he is grateful for how she has always treated him. But he can’t stop trembling, and he can’t speak. He crawls under the church pews and covers himself with his wing. He tells himself that he is only a bird, nesting down on a winter morning, and soon her words through the door are only noise.

• • • •

The radio says a storm is coming. Everyone in town boards up their windows. Ben sits alone in his dark and solid church, eating seeds. When the first spears of lightning fall, followed by the first drumbeats of thunder, all the birds in his church pile themselves along the windowsills to watch the rain. They sing, excited. They toss their heads and shake out their wings, imagining the rain. He has not visited his sister in weeks, has hardly left home, and he hopes she won’t be worried for him.

Something strikes one of the windows, bouncing off the thick glass. Lightning flashes, and for a moment Ben sees a flurry of shapes swirl like leaves outside in the storm. He ties his wing tight across his body and goes to see.

The wind and rain push him against the wall, but the water feels good on his feathers. He goes to the corner where a flock of ravens, or maybe crows, are sheltering from the wind. One of them lies on the ground, stunned from hitting the glass.

Ben reaches for it with his human hand, but each time one of the others hops forward and pecks him hard on the wrist. Water runs into his eyes, and it’s hard to see.

“Let me take you inside,” he says. “I can help.”

He makes a few more clumsy grabs, but they peck his hand bleeding. The stunned bird shakes itself awake and lifts off into the storm, followed by the others. They leave behind a scattering of shining black feathers pressed by the wind against the wall of the church. Ben gathers up the feathers and takes them inside, feeling alone even surrounded by his birds.

The storm continues all night and into the morning. The birds sing, growing louder and louder as the storm passes over. As if their calls were a summoning, someone opens the church door and comes inside.

He is a man, soaked from the storm. He is dressed in rain-darkened denim. He has long, black hair. Covering his arms and hands in neat rows are dozens upon dozens of feather tattoos, as if his arms are wings.

There is something else about him. Ben can see it, but he can’t describe it. Once, a witch came and cursed him and his brothers. He doesn’t remember the color of her hair or if she was tall, but he remembers how she walked, as if the universe would reorder itself to get out of her way. Whatever that woman had, this man has it too.

“Did you come with the carnival?” Ben asks.

The man does not answer his question and he does not stare at Ben’s wing. Instead, he goes to the windowsills and reaches in among the birds, picking them up and putting them back, like he is searching for something. They are silent in his presence.

“I’m looking for my sons.”

“Were your sons turned into swans?” Could this be his father, finally come to claim him? Ben can’t remember what the man looked like.

“They were turned into crows,” the man says. “It was my fault.”

Ben nods, not caring that the stranger isn’t his father or that his words make no sense. The man is powerful. Ben can see it. The man can help him, if he will.

He lets the stranger search the church, checking rafters and pews. Finally, the man bends down and picks up a single black feather lying on the floor. He sighs. “They’re gone, then?”

Ben nods.

“Ah. Well.” He wrings out his shirt on the floor, squeezes water from his hair. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You can wait out the storm here,” Ben says.

“I don’t mind rain.”

“Look.” Ben lifts his wing and holds it out, feeling helpless and desperate, like when he was a speechless child clinging to his sister’s legs. “I’ve met someone like you before. She changed me.”

The stranger glances at his wing but does not touch it. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Please. Before you go, make me whole. Make me myself again.”

The man sighs and glances at the windows, as if he is late and Ben is keeping him. “Okay,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”

The man turns away from Ben and raises his hands, feather tattoos crinkling and flexing, stretching like his arms are wings. He begins to sing, “Take me to fruit trees and green grass.”

The storm howls against the church house, peeling back shingles until water begins to spill in thick ropes from the ceiling. The man sings, and his words lose meaning, hitting the air like they are solid. His chant is an etching on a gravestone, lightning scarring the sky, a key threading a lock. He speaks, and the world opens around Ben, just as it did years ago.

The birds filling the church raise their wings and take flight. They swirl around Ben and land on his shoulders, his arms, his back, until their weight bears him to the ground. He is covered by their musty feathers. He falls down a well of sleep.

• • • •

When Ben wakes, the church is silent. Light comes through the windows, and he doesn’t know how long he has slept. He pushes against the birds covering his body, but they are heavy and dead. They don’t stink of rot, the stranger’s magic having eaten all the life out of them. They fall like chips of wood.

For a moment, their delicate bodies pain him. He meant to keep them safe, but they have been dying in his care for a long time. Now they are all dead. His grief doesn’t know where to begin.

Ben stands, afraid, and looks at his new body. He can see his two feet. He has a soft stomach, uncovered by feathers. Matching his right arm, he has a new left arm extending from his shoulder. He clasps his hands together, linking his fingers for the first time in years.

He clenches his teeth and sucks in a ragged breath. “No,” he says.

Ben reaches around, feeling his shoulders and back, searching for wings. He grasps his face, searching for a beak. He tries to honk, hoping to feel the sound slide up his long throat. But he is only a boy again, just as he started.

He runs out of the church, looking for the stranger, but the man is gone. The sky arches blue and vast over him, completely out of his reach. “No,” he says to the sky. “This isn’t what I meant. I wanted to be a swan again. I wanted to fly.”

He goes inside and collapses onto his pile of birds, gathering them against his chest. He covers himself in feathers, sings the man’s strange song. He prays there is some magic left, enough to carry him away, but the world with all its secrets remains shut.

Desperate, he stands on a pew and jumps as high as he can, flapping his arms. He remembers piercing the cold, high air. He remembers the warmth of his brother swans pressing against him at night. He remembers the beauty of his song. Ben tells himself that he is a swan still. The air slips past his fingers. He falls.

©2017 by Micah Dean Hicks. Originally published in Kenyon Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones and the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, has been awarded the Calvino Prize, and is a two-time finalist for the Nelson Algren Award. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and elsewhere. Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Orlando. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.

The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit

A.T. Greenblatt | 3874 words

After Sumé left her last home in ruins, there was no place left to go except back to the island she’d abandoned years ago.

Except when her boat scraped against the shallows, she found the island’s dock slumped from rot and disuse. And the path leading from the docks was smothered by vines and ferns, so overgrown it was almost invisible. The stink of stagnant water and algae assaulted her. The emptiness, the neglect confirmed her worst fears.

She was the first person to step on the island in twenty years.

“Well, fuck,” she said.

Slinging the bag full of her mainland things over one shoulder, Sumé began walking the leaf-drowned path towards the havens. She didn’t even make it ten steps before a vine snaked around her pant leg, trying to hold her back. She shook her ankle free and exhaled loudly.

This was why people on the mainland thought this island was full of restless ghosts.

“Not quite,” she’d say, always trying to correct them. “Not ghosts. And they’re just lonely.” She knew this because twenty years ago, she was this island’s caretaker. Only Reishi, her love, believed her, though.

But she didn’t explain that everything on this island was fucking possessed or magical. Even the plants. Which were moving and clinging and curling around her calves like needy cats.

“This is not okay,” she said. She dropped her travel bag, got down on her knees, and began uprooting plants. Scowling at herself because she hadn’t even made it to the first haven before she lapsed into old habits.

At first, they resisted. The roots were deep and the ferns kept wrapping their leaves around her wrists and tugging back. But Sumé wasn’t having any of their shit. Carefully she replanted every stubborn vine and delicate shoot on the edges of the path she was clearing.

“What if we have visitors?” she asked, then laughed bitterly. If anyone ever bothered visiting this island, maybe she wouldn’t be in this mess.

At first, she worked in peace—though the hairs on her arms stood straight up and a chilly breeze whispered against the back of her neck, despite the rising humidity. That’s how she knew the island’s spirits were watching her, silent and pissed. She couldn’t blame them. Twenty years was a long time to be gone.

At first, her work went well, the white stone path slowly revealing itself.

Until it didn’t.

Closer to the havens, the plants grew bolder. Sumé was rehoming a particularly spiky shrub when the greenery retaliated.

They twisted around her arms, pulled her down, jabbed, jabbed, jabbed her with their thorns. They whispered: Why did you come back?

“Let. Go,” she said through clenched teeth, struggling to one knee. The plants yanked her back down, clinging, wrapping, squeezing.

She couldn’t move. Her vision was shades of green. Panic swelled in her chest and for one horrifying moment, Sumé couldn’t breathe.

But everything on the island was haunted or magical.

Including the island’s caretakers.

And trapped deep in angry greenery, Sumé’s fingers began to remember their tricks.

She didn’t even realize it at first, the rhythm and beat she began tapping out against the stems. Index fingers first, then thumbs, then pinkies, until all ten of her digits were drumming to a half-remembered song.

Slowly, the plants around her began to sway, as if they could hear that memory of a song. Slowly, they loosened their thorny grips, then drew back. She stood up, tap, tap, tapping on her thighs, breathing deeply with relief, savoring the power she almost forgot.

Soon, Sumé was scooping up the out-of-bound plants, whistling when she couldn’t drum her fingers. The treacherous ferns hastily buried themselves back into the earth at the edge of the path as soon as she let go. The thistles and ivy scuttled away as soon as her fingers touched them.

“That’s right,” she said, as she picked up her travel bag. “Move your ass, plants. I’m back.” She took a step forward and the greenery shrank away from her, like a wave on a shore, leaving the white stone path clear and straight.

She smiled. Progress. Except the chilly breeze whispered on her neck again. The spirits were still angry.

“Yeah, figured you wouldn’t forgive me fast,” she muttered. She had a house on the mainland, but she’d ruined it. Spectacularly. And now, she couldn’t go back. Now, she needed to win back the island she abandoned long ago.

So, she squared her shoulders, steadied her nerves, and headed down the path towards the havens, cutting through the foliage like a boat on undisturbed water.

• • • •

The first haven looked depressed. Sumé knew that was a stupid thing to think about a bunch of ancient stones piled around a perfectly square door. But the word fit. Moss blanketed the stones, knotty and long like hair overdue for a cut. The squat structure made her think of the old man sitting hunched on his stoop, his round belly peeking out from under his shirt, who’d always waved when she walked by. Before Sumé left the mainland, he’d been her neighbor and she would wave back.

A smile tugged on her lips. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed this spirit’s haven and its ridiculous square door. It took all of her self-control not to run up to it like an old friend. Because she could feel the spirits watching, the intensity of their unseen gaze making all her fine hairs stand straight up like static shock.

She took one slow, cautious step towards the haven. Nothing moved; not even the moss swayed in the wind. She took another.

Stillness still.

Eventually, she was at the door.

Part of her knew that this was too easy. The spirits’ icy breeze that had been haunting her since she returned all but hissed their silent judgment. But she was desperate for forgiveness. She wanted to be accepted back like an old friend.

“Missed you, too,” she whispered, her palms on the knob.

Inside, the haven wasn’t like it used to be. Twenty years ago, it brimmed with life and history. She’d step in and be swept up by the music, the stories, the smell of food. There’d be creatures from its legends, horses with fish scales and dogs with clocks in their bellies sprawled on the carpets and curled up in the nooks.

Now, there were only a few stray hairs and iridescent scales on the floor. Now, there were only whispers of the lost language, the one that sounded like water running over stones. Even the music that flooded with joy was subdued. Still, she recognized the song, remembering it now. It was the one she’d tapped and whistled to the plants on her way here.

Sumé had lived in many, many different places on the mainland, but one thing was always the same. People whispered about the island and its haunting ghosts with fear. And she’d calmly explain to friends, Reishi, anyone really, that the spirits on this island were not the restless, unhappy dead. They were the memories of entire cultures that moved on, a haven for each of them: the art and words and customs that made them living, vibrant things among the people they once belonged to.

Sumé smiled, leaning against the doorway. Just the murmurs of the memories of this spirit filled her with happiness.

She stepped inside the haven.

That’s when everything moved. Carpets rolled shut. The music skidded off key. Suddenly the hushed singers were yelling and a thousand invisible hands were on her, shoving.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted, even as she was being pushed out, out, out. “I’m so sorry.” Her apologies were useless. The haven’s door slammed shut inches from her nose.

Sumé’s breath hitched around a deep ache under her breastbone where grief—over this, over everything that brought her back to the island—swelled up like a wave. She used to spend countless hours in this haven. It had been her favorite one.

“Please. I don’t belong anywhere else,” she whispered, resting her forehead against the rough wood of the door. “I’ve tried.”

The haven’s door refused to budge.

• • • •

As a counterargument or maybe counterhope, Sumé threw herself into restoring the island, becoming the good caretaker she was supposed to be.

“You need me, too,” she said to the spirits. “Just look at yourself.”

The spirits didn’t respond.

Her papa had taught her to be ready for visitors. He’d said that once the island was full of them, that when guests arrived, the air would literally hum with the spirits’ excitement. But that was before something changed, before people like her friends on the mainland whispered about the island in fear. What changed exactly, Sumé didn’t have a clue. She spent twenty years trying to understand and repair the island’s reputation, and instead, Sumé discovered what slow, toxic change looked like firsthand.

So, here she was back on an island that was as lonely and aching as she was, hoping her friends were safe.

She started with the paths. On the island, there were fifteen miles of white pebble trails. Or thirty-two ki or twelve and a half straces, depending. Her last home had used miles, but Sumé had lived many places on the mainland and had gotten quick with doing the conversions in her head. She liked numbers.

She hadn’t known that about herself until she left the island.

It took most of the week to clear the paths. They were drowning in a sea of foliage. The work was slow, but fruitful. Occasionally, she ran into a patch of ferns that were as stubborn as she was. Occasionally, the spirits put obstacles in her way.

She’d be walking down a path and suddenly there’d be a stack of wooden boards or piles of soggy blankets or a pyramid of paint pails, full and teetering. Things that weren’t there a day or hours or minutes before. Once, the spirits sent a dog, as gray as mist, to block her way. It barked and danced in place. And Sumé halted, hesitated. Dogs used to terrify her.

She approached carefully, rolling a few berries she had picked on her walk towards the mist dog. The first friend she ever made on the mainland laughed at her fear and taught her how to read their body language. How to befriend them.

The dog sniffed at a berry. Then, carefully, it picked it up like a precious treasure and trotted away before anyone could make it give it back.

After that, the spirits didn’t pull any more of that shit. Their chilly breeze at her back stayed annoyed and consistent, but as the days passed, it felt warmer. Or maybe she was just getting used to it.

She cared for the havens next. She counted seventy-six spirit havens on the island. Four more than when she left. The new ones were only the size of mushrooms or house cats. A handful of pebbles clustered around a splinter of a door. But that was how all haven houses began. They would grow.

She cleaned the moss from their stones, scrubbed the doors, and made them signs from the boards and paint they left in her way. She didn’t know what their actual names were, so she wrote descriptions for each one. Like THIS HAVEN HAS SEASHELLS AND SEA MONSTERS. FOOD HAS NOTES OF COCONUT.

She imagined the island as a museum. Which pleased her. She hadn’t even know what a museum was until she left. Reishi had taken her to her first one and she fell in love with them instantly because they reminded her of the island.

When she finished caring and curating, Sumé tried the havens’ doors, one by one, hoping desperately that someone would let her in. But they were locked, locked, and locked again.

The fifty-sixth haven she tried had a pale blue door, like a mirror shard among the stones. Its sign said FULL OF COLOR, TEXTILE ARTS, AND LOUD MUSIC. It opened a crack as she approached and the breeze at her back turned tepid.

With her heart in her throat and all her hope in her chest, Sumé pushed against the door.

It didn’t move.

“Fuck you,” she seethed. Frustration, exhaustion, disappointment roiled up inside her. “You didn’t have to be alone all this time.” She pushed against the door again, but got nothing except a whiff of cumin and the throb of a drum line.

Why did you come back? the breeze at her back whispered.

She didn’t ask why didn’t you ensnare someone else as caretaker? Why won’t you forgive me? What will happen to us?

Instead, she snapped: “What the hell do you want me to do?”

The spirits didn’t answer. But the breeze became biting and she felt their hurting hearts.

Or maybe it was her own.

• • • •

After that, Sumé began doing things for herself.

Restless, frustrated, and stuck, she started building a home by the shore. Rebuilding rather. Her old one had a good foundation, but after twenty years of neglect, the roof was on the verge of collapse and the walls were water-stained green. It was easier just to pull the framework down and start over, as if she’d arrived on this island as a half-drowned sailor.

“I knew that sailor,” she said as she made shingles for the roof. Reishi had washed up on shore one evening and introduced themselves with a shy smile. Sumé was the island’s solo caretaker then, Papa being only a memory now. They were the first person she had seen in fifteen years.

She rebuilt her home in a day. This was the bit of caretaker magic she liked best, the way she could take driftwood and rocks and detritus and transform them into workable materials. The way she could dance her fingers over them and they would slide into place, hold together like natural attraction.

This was the only piece of caretaker magic she used on the mainland. Every time she moved, she built a new house. Except she was careful to drag out the process. Taking weeks instead of hours. Her friends and neighbors accepted that she was a bit odd, that once she’d lived on a haunted island, but she was afraid that showing them her caretaker magic would have terrified them.

Maybe that’s why no one’s come, she thought, bitterly, as she took pebbles and metamorphosed them into slates for the roof. Part of her hoped that was the reason she was alone on the island, why the spirits didn’t hum with the joy of visitors. Because that meant her mainland friends were afraid of her, but safe.

She built a two-room cottage, with sea glass windows facing west towards the water and east towards the havens. She took the handful of things she decided to save from her old life and put them on the sills and the shelves. Patchwork sunhats, hand-thrown clay mugs, museum brochures with gallery maps, Reishi’s earring. A souvenir from every place she lived on the mainland. Twenty in all.

“Like my own museum,” she said, but wondered if it was more like a haven.

The next morning, she found on the side of her new house, the spirits’ message, green paint still dripping: What’s a museum?

“Go away,” she said. “I’m busy.”

She was pleased with her home at first. But after a week, it felt too bright, too empty, too unimaginative. So she carried out all the things she wished to save, and with a few flicks of her fingers and wrists, pulled the whole thing down.

This was also a bit of caretaker magic. One that she didn’t relish, but it had its uses.

She saw the mist dog watching among the ferns where the beach ended. “A museum is where people collect valuable things they want to remember,” she said.

That afternoon, she began building a new house on the foundations. This time with fewer windows and more angles.

Why did you leave? was spelled in the grains of the wood boards she was using.

“Because I wanted to know why visitors stopped coming here,” she said.

Because I was lonely, she didn’t say. Because I missed Reishi and wanted to see them more often.

Two mornings later, she stepped out of her house to find a message scrawled in the sand. Will you tell us? About the mainland?

Sumé didn’t want to relive those memories. But as she fished from the dock, she told the spirits about the scent of oven hot sourdough and the peaches so sweet they made her teeth ache when she worked as a farmhand in one town. About the laughter, the good-natured teasing, and the bone deep tiredness when she worked in a crew of fisherwomen. How in each new place she lived, she made friends, many of them who were a long way from home too. How her friends would tell her about their homes and she’d tell them about the havens. How, no matter where she went, Reishi would come find her when their boat came to port.

“Most of the time, I was happy, you know,” she admitted to the spirits. Those memories made her smile.

But they also reminded her of things that she was fighting hard to forget. The slurs, the declining business, the politicians becoming bolder, more hateful. Fighting and failing. At night those memories came rushing in, swallowing all the air in her bedroom.

Two days later, Sumé pulled down her house and made a new one with higher ceilings.

Why did you leave? Why did you come alone? The message was written in ash, above the fireplace.

“The mainland was welcoming,” Sumé said, avoiding the second question. “Until it wasn’t anymore.”

She left to find out why people didn’t visit the island anymore. She learned that people were irrationally afraid of what they didn’t know. She thought she understood, but didn’t see when irrational fear sprouted up around her. She didn’t worry when the elected officials began spewing slurs from their pulpits or how a few of her friends sold their homes and fled the mainland or when she began getting dark looks in the street. She didn’t think the fear would affect her.

Then she came home one day and saw the windows of her house broken and the words “GO THE FUCK HOME FOREIGNER” slashed on her door. The old man, her neighbor, sitting on his stoop, looked sympathetic, but said nothing. Did nothing.

“I destroyed that house,” Sumé said. “With two twirls of my wrists. It was hella stupid to let people see that bit of caretaker magic, but I was so angry, you know? I wanted to send a message, but . . .”

What she didn’t say was that when she came back to the island she hoped her friends, her fellow workers, and her love would follow. She’d been restoring the island for a month and hers was the only boat on the dock. As days passed, she hoped less and worried more. Were they okay? Did they get caught by a mob or unlawfully arrested? She had no way of knowing.

She ignored the spirits’ other questions that followed her like puppies for the rest of the day.

As she was lying down in bed, she saw the question on the ceiling, flickering in her lantern’s light.

What happened to your sailor? Reishi.

Sumé pulled the blankets closer around her. “I don’t know. Haven’t heard from them in months.” She was silent for a long moment, gathering up her courage. She asked: “Do you forgive me for leaving?”

The words faded from the woodwork. Sumé held her breath. A moment later new ones gathered and formed.

We are lonely, caretaker. But we still need time.

“Yeah,” she said, understanding intimately the pain of being abandoned. She blew out the light.

• • • •

After Sumé became caretaker of the island—again—she did all she could do make the spirits happy, to make herself content. Then depression swallowed her whole.

Most days she sat on the dock, looking out over the water. The spirits were always close now, their presence a warm breath at her back.

Most of the havens left their doors ajar, so she could sit in their doorways. It wasn’t the same as being surrounded by the culture that valued art above words, or the one that used words for their art. She could only catch whiffs of the honey-roasted yams or the music that sounded like a pulse. Or glimpses of the lavender stags and ten-eyed elephants. It wasn’t forgiveness exactly, but it was a start.

“At least you don’t think I don’t belong here,” she said.

She had resigned herself to being the lonely caretaker on an island full of restless spirits. The caretaker who tried to teach people differently and failed.

Perhaps that was why she wasn’t expecting to find Reishi on her shore one morning, six weeks after she destroyed her last home on the mainland. They came running up from the dock, relief, happiness, worry, doubt making a muddy mix of expressions on their face.

“Wow, um,” she said. “You’re here.” She convinced herself that Reishi wasn’t going to find her again. A silence stretched between them for a minute. Then two.

“I’m so sorry,” they said, finally. “That it took me so long, but they . . . I couldn’t . . . I wasn’t allowed on the mainland.” They bit their lip, rubbed their arms. “Did you get my message?”

Sumé shook her head.

“Fuck,” her sailor said. Their expression was devastating and Sumé forgave them on the spot. “Well, I got yours.”

“What message?”

Reishi waved a hand towards the mainland. “Your house. How—how you brought it down? It started a bunch of stories and I thought . . .”

“Oh. That,” she said. Suddenly she was running towards them, wrapping her sailor up in her arms.

“I tried to fix things. It didn’t work,” she whispered. Her tears dripped down her nose and into Reishi’s shirt.

“I know,” they said in her ear, hugging her back, close and tightly. She felt Reishi’s hitching breath on her neck. “I invited some people. People like us. Who don’t have a home anymore.”

Sumé let go. “What?”

“Is that okay?” Reishi asked. They worried their lip. “You always said this island was meant for visitors.”

“Yeah, I did.” she said.

“Good, because, um, they’ll be here soon.” Reishi pointed towards the mainland.

Sumé followed their finger and her breath caught. All across the lake there were a dozen rowboats and rafts, with a dozen little guide lights swaying on their prows.

“Oh,” she said.

“Is this okay?” Reishi asked again, all worry and nerves.

Around them, the spirits began to hum with excitement. Sumé swore her hair was curling from their vibrations, the sudden warmth. The spirits’ joy ran counterpoint to her own racing heart. “Yeah, that’s okay,” she said.

In the approaching glow of the guide lights, she could just make out the outline of the visitors’ faces.

©2021 by A.T. Greenblatt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has won a Nebula Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblat.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

Small and Bright

Autumn Brown | 3722 words

Orion lies on the horizon in winter.
Like a warrior rising from slumber
She raises first her chin
Then her heavy belt,
Heavy with skulls.
Orion rises early to guide us.

The Surfacing

I dream again that I am lost in the tunnels of our cities. The fires extinguished, but still a cool blue glow lights my way. The faster I run, the higher I ascend in the city toward the surface, and the light becomes brighter and burns my skin. I fill with knowing, knowing the place where I am going. More and more light fills each room. My skin burns and then becomes darker somehow. And then I am there at the door in the surface, and if I climb through, death and freedom await me. I stand there looking up. Up.

I stand there looking up. And then I wake.

Early. It is the morning of my surfacing. The fires are not yet lit, and the only light is the phosphorescent lichen growing down the walls of the tunnel just outside my cell. In the faint glow, I can make out the simple contours of this room, featureless except for the low bench on which I lie shivering as my body struggles to maintain core temperature. Everything has become a struggle. But this cell, this prison, feels so familiar that for the first time I sense in myself a buried attachment to the place. This may be the last place in which I ever feel any sensation of comfort.

There is no barrier between my cell and the tunnel beyond, but none is needed. The listening guards, chosen and trained from childhood for their advanced aural sensitivity, are undoubtedly already aware that I am awake because of the change in my breathing. Soon they will position themselves near the entrance and await orders from the elder midwives to retrieve me.

I will myself to move. I feel a gnawing hunger, and even as I wonder if I will receive a last meal before being surfaced, not knowing the protocol for exiles, I try to adjust my expectations, convincing myself that I may not eat a full meal again for many days, if ever, and that I am mentally and physically prepared for the task. I gently touch my belly. The lichen growing outward from my cord cut, usually groomed to fine detail, is now wild, wet, and fecund, reaching up to my ribs and down to my vulval hair. For the first time in my adult life I can truly value the belly lichen for its original purpose: a survival strategy in the early days of our community, when there were so many tunnel collapses and a person might have had to endure for many days on what leaked between boulders and what grew or lived on the body. Now we cultivate fungi and algae on the body from birth, but it is more for beauty than for use. Throughout the trial, I have let mine grow free. I hope this uncultivated wild space on my body will provide some sustenance on the other side.

If not, I hope death comes quickly.

I sit up and pull a loose shirt over my head. It falls easily around my swollen, sore breasts and my midsection, fleshy and alive. Over my legs I draw long pants. There is no way to tell what is appropriate dress for the surface, but I hope that one of my parents will provide alternatives. Things are such now that I must rely entirely on the ability and willingness of my family to advocate for me within the tight confines of the law.

Surfacing happens so rarely in our community that there is comparatively little ritual associated with it. This morning I am to spend in prayer with my vaginal parent, Geminii, until the guards come for me. I hear light, quick footsteps, and she enters my cell.

“You are the cavernous womb.” I bow my head in formal greeting.

“And you are the diamond cut from within,” she responds, touching my forehead with her thumb and forefinger. She offers me mushrooms and plump seeds, which I eat quickly. We sit in taut silence for some time, pretending to pray. Finally I ask her the only question I can.

“Where is Vega?”

“He is with Cassiopeia, in the sands.”

The sands, the place in our community where we bring inconsolable, sleepless babes. Nothing more than a small cave, really, only it is very deep in the earth, closer to the molten core, and it houses the softest sands in all the underground. For years our people have brought their babies there to lay their bodies in the sands. We hold their little legs and drag them slowly in circles through the sand until they fall asleep. If he is there, it can only mean that the reality of his parentlessness is setting in.

I think of Vega, the immediacy of his world. He has no way to understand the complexity of my absence. He has only my absence. Another woman feeds him from her breast now, and surely she tastes and smells and feels different to him. I touch my own breasts gingerly, engorged as they are with useless milk. I try to stifle my fear, my regret, my unspeakable sadness. Even as I jealously hate her, I thank the unseen stars for Cass, my greatest ally and friend. Both of us warriors and also child-bearers, we trained together, we carried our children at the same time, and we birthed only days apart. During the gestations of our children, we made a pact that should one of us die in combat, the other would mother both children as her own.

“He will forget me.” I feel the rage building in my throat, threatening to suffocate me. What kind of people would separate vaginal parent and child?

“We will keep your naming song alive,” says Geminii. I pull up a wall around myself as my despair bears down on me. All of the things I will lose today sharpen into focus: sound, touch, language, song, my parents, my son. I cannot take comfort in my naming song. I will never hear it. I want my vaginal parent to keep speaking, to never stop. But I cannot ask her this senseless thing.

I shake my thoughts away. “I have no hope, Geminii.”

“There is hope, Orion.” She hesitates, glancing behind her. “Orion, I must speak with you openly.” Her tone has changed, and there is a strange look in her eyes. Shifting. Nervous. Geminii is typically guarded and observant, but I have never seen her afraid. Until now.

“There are those who wish to help you.” Her eyes slide towards the doorway, and I understand that she means to tell me something dangerous, and that she has reason to believe the listening guards can be trusted with the information.

“This surfacing has bitterly divided our community, Orion. And it is not just the fact that surfacing as an ultimate punishment is controversial. There are many who believe what you did was right, who would help you if they could. There are even those who refuse to call you an abomination.”

I hang my head. “It does not matter now. They cannot save me with their beliefs.”

“Listen to me, Orion!” Geminii commands me with such urgency that I force myself to meet her intense gaze.

“There is not much time. Listen. In the early days of the community, when we were still becoming the people who are buried, there were—expeditions to the surface. Not one returned, of the three groups. Not one. And never any word of what happened to them. And so the last stores of surface survival supplies were never used. They were hidden. There was a feeling then, because we were so few, on the brink of extinction ourselves, that we could not risk any more loss of life.”

She waits a moment for what she is saying to sink in. Lost in this new information, it does not hit me immediately. “There is one more set of survival packs. I have taken one of them for your use. It might keep you alive. I have hidden it on the platform where you will be surfaced. You will have only seconds, when the surfacing begins, to get a hold of it. You should make your move just as the light begins to flood the antechamber, when the witnesses shield their eyes. You will be disoriented, but you must fight through it and take possession of the pack before the platform rises so high that you cannot reach it.”

I am floored. I begin to panic. “You should not tell me this here.”

“It does not matter if they hear me, Orion. Everyone will know soon enough. It is a risk I take willingly and for a purpose, the defense of which and punishment for which I will bear in your absence. Listen to me. You must locate the pack as soon as you step onto the platform. There are maps and warm clothing and many other things I do not know the use of. I hope that you can figure it out.”

“But—why are you doing this?” I cannot help but ask, although the answer may seem obvious to her, who could never wish my death no matter what my crime.

“You are my child, Orion, that would be reason enough. But . . . it is something else too. There is a belief among some of us that there are other survivors, possibly other communities that grew up after the Felaket. You may know them as the people of color. Believers call them the people of the plastic. Rumors, rumors. We do not know for sure if they exist, but what we do know is that when our community went underground, there were other communities forming, trying to survive.”

“What?” I demand. I have heard nothing like this before. Questions form messily in my mind. “There are no surface survivors and so there are no people of color left! We lost our color within five generations of becoming the people who are buried. Geminii, that is what you have always told me. What does this mean, the people of the plastic? What is plastic?”

“I cannot say for certain,” Geminii shakes her head. “There are some who believe the word refers to a feature of the physical body. But more recent interpretations hold that the phrase refers to a place on the surface where some may have survived. On the surface there are great bodies of water, and in them, surfaces, maybe even cities, made of a substance called plastic. It may be in one of these cities that the people of the plastic exist. You must try to find them, Orion. I believe the maps may help you.”

“How can I use a map? I have never seen the surface. I will be completely disoriented!”

“Orion, finding your way aboveground must be the same as finding your way below. Only there is more space, more to see. You must have faith in your abilities. You must have faith in the prophecy.”

The prophecy. Many hundred years ago, there was a child in our community who had terrible visions about the end of time. Some of these were dreams that clearly recalled events from the Felaket, which took place before the founding of our community. Some visions were not familiar at all. The child said that she believed that one of our people, the people who are buried, will join with her brothers, the people of color. There are many reasons to distrust this prophecy, not the least of which is that there are no more people of color. Not here, not anywhere among the people who are buried. Also suspicious is that the community we are to join with is comprised only of men: brothers. In any case, I had thought there were no more believers. But I am learning today that there is much I do not know.

“Our community is dying. Children are born, yes, but not enough. We have become too isolated. We must find our brothers. Orion, you must do this for all of us.” Geminii raises her head, hearing the faint sound of footsteps in the corridor moments before I notice it. “They are coming.”

I shake my head helplessly, frustrated by all of the questions I will not have the chance to ask. “How will I survive? I cannot even hear as you can.”

She grasps my shoulders firmly. “You will learn to quiet your inner thoughts. You are strong. You will survive. Perhaps you will even find that what is a deficit to you here is an advantage on the surface. And who knows, Orion? Maybe I will follow you shortly.” She turns to leave.

“Mother!” the word slips through my lips before I can stop it. She stops at hearing the intimate name spoken aloud. Such a name passes between vaginal parent and child only a few times in their shared life. “Thank you, Mother.” She looks at me long and hard, and she then leaves as silently as she arrived.

• • • •

The caverns of our community closest to the surface are also the oldest. Built more than two millennia ago by people seeking refuge from persecution and death, they are simple rooms with domed ceilings and cracking walls. It is a punishment to have to go up to these rooms to repair the cracks and buttress the ceilings. Stories of accidental exposure are used to instill fear and discipline in our children. But as with everything in our community, there is a contradiction, for it is also a test of bravery to go so close to the surface, so close to the light. Before now, I’ve only been to the upper rooms twice, once as a punishment and once on a dare. That all feels very far away from me as the guards escort me to the antechamber.

My people have never seen the sky and the stars. But we sing of them as though they are the last thing we see before sleeping and the first upon waking, like the cave dwellers of old. There is a deeply held belief among us that we will surface one day, not as a punishment but as a choice, and live again in the sun. The surfacing platform and the antechamber seem to have been built with this auspicious occasion in mind, for together they make up the only place in our community outside of the warrior’s training caverns that is expansive and ornate. The ceiling of the antechamber is crisscrossed with designs, and upon a close inspection you can see that each is a unique picture of a living thing that crawled or crept or ran or flew on the surface of our dead world. All of them rising upward in the vaulted gloom, frozen in a moment of rebirth, bursting from nothing, from the place they were buried.

The surfacing platform has been used only once in my lifetime, and I was not yet old enough to attend. Surfacing is extremely rare in our community, primarily because the willing destruction of life, especially of those capable of bearing children, poses an extreme risk to sustaining the population level. It is also considered a hallmark of the Felaket and the time that came before it.

I have seen the antechamber, though. At the far end of the domed room is a gate and beyond that a tunnel that leads to the surfacing platform. Next to the gate is an ancient, heavy glass window covering almost the entire wall. The glass, warped with age, distorts whatever stands on the other side. In the antechamber is the single lever that opens the doors to the surface and, at the same time, raises the platform through the doors. My phallic parent, one of the city’s season keepers, often said that when the surface was in its winter, you could hear the singing of the wind from there.

As we near the surface, I can hear it. The sound of the wind. I can see that the walls are cracked with cold. I feel dread pooling at the base of my stomach. It is winter, I think. I will freeze to death before I take three steps.

I try to imagine what the survival kit Geminii has hidden contains, and that is when the absurdity of it hits me. That she should try to save my life with a thousand-year-old survival pack. That I might be able to make sense of anything stored inside it. That there is any chance at all that I will survive more than an hour on the surface. Tears start streaming from my eyes before I even realize I am on the verge of crying. Something inside of me begins to collapse, and I claw for the edge of my sanity.

And then I am in the antechamber, and surrounding me are a hundred solemn faces, many distraught. I feel panic overtaking me, a scream forming in my throat. I search the crowd for Geminii’s face. I find her standing beside the elder midwives. Her eyes bore into me, and I try to remember what she has told me. I know that if I lose my will to live, I will lose the hope she holds for me.

The elder midwives are withered and silent women, all of them warriors. From childhood, like me, they were trained as fighters, seasoned by combat with giant and vicious vermin that stalk our underground world. From middle age, they apprentice in the birthing of children and in the esoteric art of reading our star maps. I may have become one myself, but it seems the people who are buried had other plans for me. The elder midwives stare at me without remorse for what they are about to do, but also, curiously, without judgment. It is not vacancy but something else. Anticipation?

The antechamber is wide, high-ceilinged, and, with only a few fires lit, oppressively dark. The witnesses in attendance seem to glow in their ceremonial white robes. The color of death. Like a warrior. Heavy with skulls. Fragments of my naming song find their way into my thoughts. I struggle to remain grounded, to master my trembling. I breathe deeply and direct my attention to the elder midwives.

“Death begets death.” The words of the surfacing. “In return for the life you stole and the vow you have broken, one life you must give.” First one, and then each in turn, raise their right arms and point to the gate. Beyond it are the tunnel, the platform, and the doors to the surface. Breath leaves my body.

Violence begets violence, and the violence I have known in my life derived from something ugly, vile, and jealous: a man filled with hatred, supported by a community so intent on reproduction and survival that it is blind to other ways of loving. He hated me because of who I loved. He hated me because I did not love him. I killed the man who nearly killed me. But now I will die anyway.

I move forward through the gate. I have no choice. It happens so quickly, acted out in silence. In moments, I am through the tunnel, looking at the distorted figures of my community through the glass. It is so surprisingly cold here I almost forget to identify the location of the survival pack. My eyes cast about for a moment, and there it is, directly to the right of the window, tucked in a nook between the edge of the glass and the ornate frame surrounding the tunnel entrance. The pack seems to glow with its own light because the fabric covering the bag is dyed with colors I have never seen before. It is the color I have always imagined the sunset to be. I suppose now I will have a chance to confirm this—if I can survive that long.

I am just beginning to calculate how much time it will take me to reach the pack when the ground heaves beneath me and the platform begins to tremble. The ceiling above me splits in two, and I am blinded, trying to breathe, trying to sense where the window is. I rush forward and slam against the glass, sending shooting pains through my chest. The wind howls through me as I use the window to guide my body along the edge of the platform until I trip over the pack. I pull at it and it jams as the platform begins to rise. I jimmy the pack and yank hard, pulling it free and throwing myself back onto the platform. I struggle to open my eyes and can manage only a flickering of sight. Through the glass, I register movement that I can only interpret as commotion. I try to stand and manage to gain my knees, grasping the heavy survival pack, whipped by wind and light and small rocks that dance in the air around me. The platform is groaning, rising. I open my eyes again, for moments this time, and through the window I glimpse a figure I believe to be Geminii, her hands splayed, mouthing something. I cannot make out what she is saying. She disappears beneath the platform’s edge, and I am alone. A single guttural cry, and I force my body onto my feet, positioning the pack between my legs, assume a warrior stance. In moments, my head will clear the surface doors and I will know what awaits me.

I open my eyes. I stand there looking up.

Technician’s Log A.C. 1019. jun. 35. 20:19

There is a life form moving south through the upper Mideast quadrant. Something different, something with intellect and purpose. It moves with determination more reminiscent of nomadic and migratory patterns of pre–A.C. 650, the point being arrival at any cost, not the aberrant, reactionary motion of the newer life forms. I have tracked its course and used the infraction positioning program to predict its path. Whatever it is, it is coming for me.

©2015 by Autumn Brown. Originally published in Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Autumn Brown writes visionary fiction and creative non-fiction. Her writing has been featured in Octavia’s Brood, the Procyon Science Fiction Anthology, Revolutionary Mothering, Pleasure Activism, and more. She co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, with her sister adrienne maree brown. She is a facilitator and political educator with the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). Autumn lives in Minneapolis, where she is working on her first novel.

Destinations of Beauty

Alexander Weinstein | 4010 words

It has become increasingly clear to your guidebook writers that the beauty of any destination should be measured not simply by the magnificence of its architecture or the lushness of its landscape, but by the splendor that its citizens collectively produce. In cities where mayors make sure flowers are planted every spring and the baker sends us off with a free roll, the streetlamps are bound to burn brightly with the warmth of welcome. In fact, the wonderful time we’ve had in any destination was due almost entirely to the kindness of those we encountered along the way: the hotel staff who greeted us, the chefs who cared about our meals, the shopkeepers who asked where we were from and listened to our stories. Such destinations are like extended families that welcome us to their homes, provide us with beds to sleep in, food to eat, cold drinks when we’re thirsty, and directions when we’re lost.

We acknowledge this phenomenon with a kind of awe. It’s miraculous that a location should work together so invisibly. And while each citizen may feel themselves separate in their daily duties—from opening flower shops to starting steamrollers—every individual is working in quiet unison to create the beauty of the destination where we arrive. Indeed, when our days are over, and we find ourselves back in our hometowns dismayed by our fellow countrymen, we need only remember that there are places in this world that were willing to welcome us to their lands, provide us with an extra blanket so we might sleep more peacefully, share their vintage bottles of wine, and pause on a city sidewalk to look at the scribbled directions we extended to them, saying “Of course, my friend. Come, it’s right this way.”

As we collected our destinations for this installment, we realized that while some of our guidebook writers were drawn to the natural beauty of the Eighth continent, many of us were taken by another kind of beauty—invisible but entirely essential. While not every destination we’ve chosen may be considered scenic, they are the destinations we think of again and again now that we’ve returned from our travels. So, for all of you who set out looking for splendor, we present to you: Destinations of Beauty.

The City of Persioa

The city of Persioa is, by far, one of the most exquisite destinations the new continent has to offer. Its architecture rises in gorgeous arches of carved sandstone and its buildings are sculpted with porticos of cut glass and the ornate faces of goddesses gazing down from above. There are domed arcades honeycombed by sacred geometry, lattice-work balustrades, and atop tall skyscrapers one finds sun filtering through the butterfly’s wing of stained glass mosaics, showering city dwellers below in rainbow light.

The city’s original architects believed that the construction of Persioa should reflect the mystery of the universe itself. And so, the cut-glass fractals that cast light upon the streets and the façades of a celestial pantheon are testaments to the unseen world. At almost any spot in the city, a pedestrian can look upward and contemplate the beauty of the tangerine light filtering down to the streets at dusk, or the deep blue of evening’s arrival, followed by the star-speckled purple of night.

Yet, despite the architects’ good intentions, most citizens never appreciate Persioa’s miraculous construction. For, alas, in Persioa, everyone is afraid of one another. And though the city was designed to be admired for its beauty, over the years, the inhabitants have forgotten to maintain its splendor. They let dust collect on the carved archways and soot deface the smiles of the gods; they erected billboards to advertise shaving cream and cigarettes; citizens took jobs in darkened skyscrapers, and they no longer pause to admire the sunlight when it hits the stained-glass pinnacles of the city. Instead they carry heavy briefcases and bags of groceries home in the evening light, their shoulders sagging from the weight, afraid to meet one another’s eyes lest they be taken advantage of. They return to apartments where they lock their doors and climb beneath blankets, comforting themselves with the latest television shows, which are always filled with explosions, gunfire, and bloodshed. Alas, even the news grows worse every day. There’s a new rash of diseases sweeping the country, an influx of murder and theft, endless war, eternal corruption. Safety is on the decline, addiction on the rise, and the crooked prime minister stands at a podium, yelling of imminent doom from the North and South. The citizens purchase more locks and guns, and they peer out from behind their blinds, their faces momentarily appearing beneath the carved smiles of goddesses. In fact, most days, one finds only this: streets filled with pedestrians eyeing one another suspiciously, shuttered blinds, and the blinking lights of alarm systems.

For this reason, travelers visiting the beautiful city of Persioa often miss its incredible feats of architecture or the way the light strikes the land in hues softer than anywhere else on the continent. Most tourists are simply concerned about the cautions issued by flight attendants, urging them to beware of pickpockets and thieves. Instead of admiring the incredible vaulted ceilings of the airport, they read its many warning signs that urge travelers to avoid street musicians, food vendors, and beggars. New arrivals scurry from the airport to awaiting taxis, afraid that the drivers are crooks and their valuables will be stolen at the next red light; and upon arriving safely to their hotel, they find themselves afraid to leave, guarding their wallets whenever they risk the streets outside.

What a shame. For the city is truly glorious, and for those few travelers who arrive at Persioa by mistake, or have never heard the warnings, or were too busy kissing to read the cautionary signs, they obtain a secret treasure. All around them, the city rises in its full majesty, its arches climbing in great semi-circles above the streets, the intricately carved faces of goddesses gazing down at them, the stained glass of the skyscrapers’ highest windows casting prisms of light. They completely miss the frightened faces of all the other tourists and locals around them. What they see instead are the long, beautiful, sandstone avenues, filled with people rushing past, everyone’s faces lit by rainbows.

The Bakery of Alee

If you find yourself alone in the alleyways of Alee, you may smell the cinnamon rolls whose scent will lead you through predawn streets to a small bakery with warm ovens and pastries being iced beneath dim lights. In the window are éclairs and crème horns, pecan swirls and chocolate twists. The wooden tables are dusted with flour, and an open window awaits your order.

It’s true that the bakers who work here have the most tragic stories. Last time we visited, a young woman, who had neither parents nor family, served us pastries. She lived in a trailer by the pond and had lost everything before her baby teeth. She placed the hot rolls on paper napkins and passed them to us along with the story of her life. Such are the tales of all the bakers who come to work in the kitchen. Their hearts have been emptied by lovers, and their lives are filled with lost parents or families so hideous it would’ve been a blessing had they died. It’s their misery that draws them to the bakery’s light where the croissants are proofing, and they arrive with a past so bitter that the bakers use their tears for sourdough starter. They’re given a roll to eat and a milk crate to sit on and welcomed into the bakery’s womb. This, the baker says, is how you fill pastries with sweetness. This is how to avoid burning from the heat. This is how you allow goodness to rise.

In the kitchen’s warmth, new arrivals recall dance steps while carrying sheet trays to ovens. Filling rolls with strawberry jam, they remember how they’d once wished to be a painter. Their arms arc as they dust pastries with powdered sugar, and they keep time with the moons of cookie cutters, their dreams rising with the bread. We all recognize the taste of hope on our tongues. Aren’t there wishes buried in the cellars of our own hearts? Dreams clenched so tightly in our fists that we fear opening our palms to reveal their broken wings? Why, after all, have we found ourselves here in these early morning hours if not for the bakery’s warm spirals of hope?

Standing at the small window, we sense the expanse of morning around us. The sun rises above the rooftops, a shuttered window opens, and the sound of children’s yawns can be heard from lit bedrooms. We wipe pastry flakes from our coats and purchase a bag of croissants to fill our breakfast table. It’s never too late to learn to sing, we think, or to open the doors of our lives as welcoming as the bakery opens its window.

Of course, morning must break. Soon the city groans with the exhaust of trucks, avenues clatter with footsteps, and the bakery extinguishes its ovens, turns off its hanging light bulb, and locks its doors. Come afternoon, there are no smells of spices, merely darkened tables. Looking through the glass, one sees the empty arms of a mixer and the cold steel of a dough hook hanging from the rafters. It’s possible to pass and never even notice its existence. Perhaps this is why most visitors remain oblivious to the bakery’s sweetness, until that moment when the stars have begun to arc toward the earth, and the ovens are relit, and the bakery opens its window, the city alive once again.

The Village of Cessane

There are those whose lives are filled with riches yet they never seem to lack something to complain about: the sun, which is too hot; the winter, which is too cold; their refrigerators, which are too full. Then there are those who have very little but surround themselves with words instead. Such is the case of the Northern village of Cessane, where every inhabitant is named after nature’s elements.

In Cessane, Dawn stretches her body across Earth’s bed while the Robins sing for the whole neighborhood to hear. The beautiful Morning Dew sits by a blushing Maple as Sunshine flashes through the market. A flock of Starlings gather for a birthday party. Summer appears and the Fields are alive with joy. Everyone agrees they’re tired of Winter. They’re thankful Daylight stays longer than expected, but eventually Dusk wraps her shawl around her and Evening kisses her goodbye. Night will soon be here, drunk with Moonlight, and the Owls will gather to drink the Stars’ wine. They’ll hoot so loud that, way down by the Woods’, the Bears will grumble about the noise. But eventually the Foxes will close their eyes for rest, and Moon will slip under the covers with Midnight, and the city of Cessane will go to bed.

To hear the people of Cessane speak about their village in this way helps one understand why they’ve chosen to name themselves as they have. For the village of Cessane is a run-down place, full of tenements and potholes. Fences have been graffitied and local swimming holes polluted by discarded shopping carts. By the outskirts of town, amid smog and constant rain, a massive garbage dump sends its stench over the entire village. Many say there’s no reason to mention the place at all.

The City of Shilo

Trapped between great glaciers to the North, craggy highlands to the West, and a seemingly endless stretch of mountains to the South, the city of Shilo is geographically imprisoned. Fitting, since in the early seventeenth century the area was used as a penal colony. Thieves, assassins, and incurable drunks were exiled to this land, but the prisoners survived its harsh winters, and over the next two centuries built the houses, schools, and restaurants that today adorn the city. Since then, Shilo has been rediscovered as one of the world’s most scenic destinations, with its beautiful Southern mountains, its Western plateaus, and one of the few remaining glaciers within driving distance from hotels. Yet despite its natural beauty, Shilo has retained the shadow of its history, for it quickly becomes apparent to all who visit that no one in the city really wants to be there.

The city is magnificent, in the same way all cities are magnificent—full of parks and museums, zoos and art galleries—but one senses the dismay of its inhabitants upon arrival. The baggage handlers are careless, tossing luggage heavily, their attention focused on the workday’s end or the cigarette they plan to smoke. Taxi drivers are no tour guides; they want nothing more than to deposit you at your destination and be off. If you attempt to engage them in conversation about the city’s attractions they’ll tell you about its faults instead: how poorly the roads are maintained, the endless traffic, the stupidity of city planners; they’ll speak of the difficulty of finding meaningful work, and of other cities where they hope to one day retire.

It seems that everyone in Shilo dreams of a better life elsewhere. The concierge always wished to be a pianist, the bellhop an Olympic swimmer, the waitress to pursue dancing. The only individuals content with Shilo are tourists, who enjoy its museums and public gardens, and dine at its many restaurants, but even they feel the pall. It’s visible in the steely-eyed glare of a train conductor who wanted to be a racecar driver; the cigarette smoke of a construction worker who dreamt of being an architect; the slouch of a teacher writing letters on a chalkboard; and the faces of students who wish they were anywhere but in school. And so, Shilo becomes repugnant even to us, its tourists, who have come with the desire to find a land different than our own.

As for Shilo’s citizens, few ever leave the country. Instead they grow old, lamenting a life of missed opportunities and unpursued dreams. Their funerals are bleak affairs and their obituaries uninspiring. There are, however, the few who make it out. One finds these expatriates in our cities pursuing their dreams of opening bistros, teaching at universities, and exhibiting their art in national galleries. They live, love, and grow old in our towns, and they search for others to talk to about their homeland. What they speak of most are those years when they lived in Shilo, the small apartment where they’d once slept, a cat who used to visit their door for milk, the children they used to teach, a land they’d shared with friends and family so long ago. Those were, they tell us, the best years of their lives.

The Café Taliche

The locals of Taliche say that the earth fell in love with the clouds and gathered rocks to write the heavens a love letter of mountain ranges. And for those who hike the Àlmecs, there’s certainly a sense of romantic wonder. The path brings you past sheep grazing in pastures and cows sending echoes of clanging bells up the mountainside. Many a trekker ascends the peak, breathes in the cold air, and lets out a long-held sigh before returning to the parking lot below.

Yet despite its beauty, every year a handful of travelers descend the mountain’s dark ravines rather than returning on the path they climbed. And while you may imagine they’re adventurers, it’s almost always despair that causes them to lose their way: a recent heartbreak, the death of a loved one, or some great loss that they cradle too closely. Down the thorny path they go, stumbling through brambles aimlessly.

For those unfortunate enough to get lost in the mountains, only a few reach the small hamlet far below. Along the village roads they search for a restaurant that might be open, a tavern serving iced drinks, a café with a chair in which to rest. And, lo and behold, there at the end of the road, like a poppy in full bloom, is the terrace of the Café Taliche. All around the patio’s perimeter, irises and bluebells nod and a table sits waiting. Here cold beers are poured straight from the tap, there’s local goat cheese for the tasting, and the bread is warm from the oven. Would you like some ice cream fresh from the churn, a young woman asks, her arms glistening with sunlight.

There are moments in life, rare as watching a butterfly emerge from a cocoon, when the machinery of the world comes to a halt. There are no errands to run, no missed opportunities to lament, no heartbreak too great to waste another sigh upon. There’s only this: a cold beer with its frothy head, the softness of goat cheese, and sunshine as sweet as local honey. And when it’s time to leave—always too early it seems—everyone sets off without keeping a single souvenir. No matchbook has ever fallen into a visitor’s pocket, no postcards have been bought or sent, and no pictures have been taken to remember its address.

We wish we could give you better directions—if we could, we’d be at the café right now. But even your guidebook writers have left in such a state of forgetfulness that we’ve failed to chart our way back. And so, for travelers lucky enough to discover the café (who may even be reading this description at the Café Taliche right now) we urge you to heed our advice: Roll up your sleeves and let the sun warm your body, savor each spoonful of ice cream as long as you can. Because soon the world will call to you with its alarm clocks and phone calls; your car cannot remain in the parking lot on the other side of the mountain all night; your flight leaves in the morning. Look, the sun is already beginning its descent.

The Museum of Forgotten Emotions

It’s altogether possible that the lack of historical records at the Museum of Forgotten Emotions was orchestrated by its founders, so that the possession of its growing gallery would be passed from curator to curator without notation. A key was placed in the new custodian’s palm, along with instructions for opening and closing the doors, and a welcome to the washroom and bedroom where they were to make their home. The last known key holder dates back to 1976, when a baker was given the keys. She added to its holdings, dusted its cases, changed light bulbs, and began to charge a small entry fee.

That the curator was chosen for her insignificance is indicative of the museum itself, which can be said to hold nothing spectacular. Among the museum’s holdings one finds: wrinkled baseball cards; a broken bottle; train tickets, glow-in-the-dark stickers; eggshells; a tarnished ring; a handful of dirt; a joy buzzer; sackcloth; ashtrays; worn sneakers; candy wrappers; faded newspapers; a withered tulip. And yet, the collection has an uncanny ability to remind us of memories we’d thought extinct. A small plastic top brings a vision of a cold winter’s day when we were six. The frost on the windows was beautiful in the morning light and we spun the toy against the windowpane over and over, watching the street for our father’s return. A tube of ChapStick reminds us of a woman we once loved who placed the balm by our bedside table. It’s not uncommon to find visitors weeping from the displays. We look at the item in front of them—a ragged stuffed toy, a bottle cap, a tissue—and shrug our shoulders. The display holds no ghosts of old lovers, childhoods, or fleeting friendships for us. It’s nothing more than one of the many items we pass in our daily travels, common in its insignificance. But then we come across a pair of shoelaces and recall our favorite sneakers in elementary school, or see the dog-eared copy of a paperback lent to us by a boy in college, and our heart comes to rest before the exhibit.

Those who visit the museum often find a different world upon exiting. A bus stop carries the outline of a man we once kissed; leaves scurrying along the sidewalk remind us of being pulled by our sister in a red wagon on an autumn day. It must be these realizations which lead us to package up our trinkets, unused coffee cups, chewed pencils, and spare pennies, and send them to the museum—where the curator spends most of her day unpacking boxes and finding new spaces for the smallest items we send her way. As for us, we’re all drawn back to the museum. We stand gazing at the new displays, discovering our own lives as if for the first time.

The Waterfalls of Chicowee

Life is short, dear traveler, and as the drunk in any tavern will tell you: Night doesn’t last long. For this reason alone, pack your bags, or leave them at home, and come at once to the Waterfalls of Chicowee. Here the heart is opened by waters that cascade for thousands of feet. In the sunshine are rainbows aplenty and moss grows green and lush. Does your tongue wish to sing songs? Then go to the rocks, open your mouth, taste the misty air, and sing with the sound of falling waters. Yes, when the sunshine breaks through the clouds what you’ll find is one after another rainbow playing off the mist. Put out your hand, you can almost catch them.

Can we admit that we’ve all been too busy? That the dishes can sit for a few hours longer; that the emails which have kept us tied to our desks can wait for another day; that there is no television series worth binging on when sky and sun and rocks and moss call to you? We’ll be gone tomorrow or the next day. All the more reason to venture out of the cities with their dance halls and discotheques, and seek the beauty of the falls of Chicowee where we can climb the mountainside to overlook the waters and leave with no trinkets or postcards, nothing but our sweet self returned to us. It’s as if that very part of our soul that we’ve always meant to make room for was, lo and behold, waiting at the foot of the waterfalls to welcome us.

We write of the falls, tell all we know to come and visit, all the while acknowledging that many readers will just nod. Yes, yes, they’ll say, it sounds quite nice. Someday, for sure, they plan to go. When the museums in town are closed, or when they have no dinner reservations or theater tickets; perhaps when there’s no work to catch up on, or when they don’t have to wake up early; or the weather is better; or when summer comes. We understand, we really do. We too promised ourselves for years to go. Decades passed and we grew older, and all the while we lamented how we really ought to visit the falls.

But, dear traveler, now that we’ve finally made it, we see our folly, and we vow never to leave again! Look how the ink on the page runs from the mist! See how we can barely bring ourselves to go back to the city! Look at our guidebook writers who right now are taking off their clothes and wading into the waters! Even at this moment you can hear their voices imploring us to put down the guidebook! Come join us, they call. The waterfalls of Chicowee are open to the public day and night; there are no fees to pay, no fences to climb, no guards to shoo you away—the falls are completely ready for your arrival! But, then again, they always were.

©2021 by Alexander Weinstein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Weinstein is the author of the short story collections Universal Love (2020) and Children of the New World, which was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times, NPR and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his stories and interviews have appeared in Rolling Stone, World Literature Today, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

EXCERPT: Winter’s Orbit (Tor Books)

Everina Maxwell | 6318 words

Ancillary Justice meets Gideon the Ninth in Everina Maxwell’s exciting debut!

While the Iskat Empire has long dominated the system through treaties and political alliances, several planets, including Thea, have begun to chafe under Iskat’s rule. When tragedy befalls Imperial Prince Taam, his Thean widower, Jainan, is rushed into an arranged marriage with the disreputable Kiem, in a bid to keep the rising hostilities between the two worlds under control.

But when it comes to light that Prince Taam’s death may not have been an accident, and that Jainan himself may be a suspect, the unlikely pair must overcome their misgivings and learn to trust one another as they navigate the perils of the Iskat court, try to solve a murder, and prevent an interplanetary war . . .

Coming February 2, 2021 from Tor Books.

Chapter 1

“Well, someone has to marry the man,” the Emperor said. She sat, severe and forbidding in a high-collared tunic, in her reception room at the heart of the warren-like sprawl of the Imperial Palace. The arching windows of the tower were heavily optimized to amplify the weak autumn sunlight from Iskan V; the warm rays that lit the wrinkled Imperial countenance should have softened it, but even the sunlight had given that up as a bad job.

Across from her, in a formal uniform that was only slightly crumpled, Kiem—Prince Royal of Iskat and the Emperor’s least favorite grandchild—had been stunned into silence. He was rarely summoned to an Imperial audience unless he’d done something spectacularly lacking in common sense, so when the Emperor’s aide had called him, he’d racked his brain for a cause but had come up empty-handed. He’d half wondered if it was about the Galactic delegation that had arrived yesterday and stirred up the palace. Kiem wasn’t a natural when it came to politics; maybe the Emperor wanted to warn him to stay out of the way.

This was the opposite of staying out of the way. Kiem had braced for a dressing-down, not to walk out of the room engaged to a vassal diplomat he’d never even met.

He opened his mouth to say, I don’t see why anyone has to marry him, then thought better of contradicting the Emperor and shut it again. This was how he got himself in trouble. He rephrased. “Your Majesty, Prince Taam has only been dead for a month.”

It sounded awful the moment it left his mouth. Taam had been Kiem’s cousin, after all, and the Imperial family was technically still in mourning. Kiem had naturally been shocked when he heard of the flybug accident, but at the last count he’d had just over forty relatives ahead of him in the succession, mostly cousins, and he hadn’t known Taam particularly well.

The Emperor gave him a withering look. “Do you think I am unaware?” She tapped her fingertips on the lacquered surface of the low table beside her, probably giving him a second chance to remember his manners. Kiem was too disturbed to really appreciate it. “The Thean treaty must be pinned down,” she said. “We are under significant time pressure.”

“But—” Kiem said. He scrabbled for an argument as his gaze followed the movement of her fingers. The low table was crowded with official gifts, mainly from vassal planets: crystal plates, a bowl of significant mosses, a horrible gold clock from Iskat’s Parliament. Among them, under a bell jar, a small Galactic remnant glowed softly. It was a color Kiem’s eyes couldn’t process, like a shard of glass that had been spat out of another dimension. Even its presence in the room made Kiem’s brain uncomfortable. He made himself look away from it, but unfortunately that meant looking at the Emperor.

He tried again. “But, Your Majesty—marrying Taam’s partner—” He was vaguely aware of who it was. Prince Taam and Count Jainan, the Thean representative, had been one of the royal family’s more intimidatingly polished couples, like the Emperor had ordered them built in a synthesizer. Iskat bound treaties with marriages—always had, right from when the first colonists settled on the planet—and one of the unspoken reasons that Iskat had so many minor royals was to have representatives on hand when they were needed. Kiem had nothing to disqualify him: he wasn’t a parent, overly religious, opposed to monogamy, gender-exclusive, or embarrassingly hung up on someone else. That didn’t mean he could stand in for Taam, Jainan’s partner of five years. “Ma’am, surely you need someone more”—dignified—“suitable. Prince Vaile, maybe. Or no one? Forgive me, but I don’t see why we have to find him another partner.”

The Emperor regarded Kiem as if painfully reminded of the differences between him and Prince Taam. “You have not paid any attention to the political situation, then.”

Kiem rubbed a hand across his forehead unconsciously. The air in the Emperor’s rooms always felt dry and slightly too hot. “Sorry.”

“Of course not. I see you were drinking last night. At the carnival?”

“No, I—” Kiem heard himself sound defensive and stopped. He hadn’t been falling-down drunk for a long time now, but the script between him and the Emperor was apparently carved in stone from back in his student days, when every summons turned out to be an Imperial reprimand for his latest minor scandal. “I only went for the afternoon.”

The Emperor glanced at the shifting pictures in the press folder on the table. “Press Office informs me that you put on a troll costume, joined a carnival procession group, and fell in a canal in the middle of the parade.”

“It was a kids’ group,” Kiem said. He would have panicked about trying to explain the newslog photos, but he didn’t have any panic left over from being summarily engaged to a stranger. “Their troll dropped out at the last minute. The canal was an accident. Your Majesty, I—I’m”—he cast about desperately—“too young to get married.”

“You are in your mid-twenties,” the Emperor said. “Do not be ridiculous.” She rose from her seat with the careful smoothness of someone who received regular longevity treatments and crossed to the tower window. Kiem rose automatically when she did but had nothing to do, so he clasped his hands behind his back. “What do you know about Thea?”

Kiem’s spinning brain tried to latch on to some relevant facts. Iskat ruled seven planets. It was a loose, federated empire; Iskat didn’t intervene in the internal affairs of its vassals, and the vassals in return kept their trade routes running smoothly and paid taxes. Thea was the newest and smallest member. It had been assimilated peacefully—the same couldn’t be said of all the Empire’s planets—but that had been a generation ago. It didn’t usually make the headlines, and Kiem didn’t pay much attention to politics.

“It has . . . some nice coastland?” Kiem said. All he could come up with were some tourist shots of green and sunny hills falling down to a cobalt-blue ocean, dredged up from some long-forgotten documentary, and a catchy snippet from a Thean music group. “I, uh, know some of its”—the Emperor didn’t listen to music groups—“popular culture?” Even he winced at hearing how that sounded. That wasn’t a basis for a relationship.

The Emperor examined him like she was trying to figure out how his parents’ genes had produced something so much less than the sum of their parts. She looked away, back to the view outside. “Come here.”

Kiem obediently crossed to the window. Below, the city of Arlusk sprawled under a snow-heavy sky, pale even through the light-optimizing glass. The grand state buildings jutted up through the city like veins of marble emerging from rock, two hundred years older than anything else in the sector, with a jumble of newer housing blocks nestled around them. The first real snow of the long winter had fallen yesterday. It was already turning to slush in the streets.

The Emperor ignored all of that. Her gaze was fixed on the far side of the city, where the spaceport spilled down the side of a mountain like an anthill. Silver flashes of shuttles came and went above it, while berthed ships were nestled in huge bays dug into the mountainside. Kiem had known the bustle of local space traffic all his life. Like most Iskaners, he’d never made the year-long journey to the far-off galactic link—the gateway to the wider galaxy—but the Empire’s vassal planets were much closer, and ships hopped between them and Iskat all the time.

One ship, hovering unsupported next to a servicing tower, gave Kiem an immediate headache. Its matte-black surface sucked in all reflection and gave off rippling shimmers that had nothing to do with the angle of the sunlight. Kiem squinted at the size of it. Nothing that big should be able to float in planetary gravity. It was nothing like the shard on the Emperor’s display table, but it was definitely weird shit that didn’t come under the normal rules of physics. He took a stab. “The Galactics?”

“Do you read nothing but tabloid logs?” the Emperor said. It seemed to be rhetorical. “That ship belongs to the Resolution. Despite its frankly absurd size, it contains one Auditor and three administration staff. It can apparently jump through links under its own power and is impervious to mass scanners. The Auditor—whom I will admit to finding deeply unsettling on a personal level—is here to legally renew the treaty between the Empire and the Resolution. Even you cannot have missed this. Tell me you know what the Resolution is.”

Kiem stopped himself from saying he didn’t actually live under a rock, even if Iskat was a year’s travel from any other sector. “Yes, ma’am. It runs the rest of the galaxies.”

“It does not,” the Emperor said sharply. “The Resolution is just that: an agreement between ruling powers. It runs the link network. Iskat and our vassals have signed our own set of Resolution terms, as have other empires and Galactic powers. As long as those are in place, we can trade through our link, keep our internal affairs to ourselves, and be certain no invading force will use the link to attack us. We are due to sign the treaty on Unification Day in just over a month. The Auditor, if all goes well, will look through our paperwork, sweep up those remnants the Resolution is so obsessed with, witness the treaty, and leave.”

Kiem blinked away from the eye-watering Resolution ship and looked at her instead. Her gnarled hand briefly touched the flint pendant at her throat in a gesture that might have been stress. Kiem couldn’t remember a time when her hair hadn’t been pure white, but she never seemed to age. She only got thinner and tougher. She was afraid, Kiem realized. He felt a sudden chill; he’d never seen her afraid.

“Got it,” he said. “Play nice with the Resolution. Give the Auditor the VIP treatment, show him what he wants, send him away again.” He made a last-ditch attempt. “But what’s that got to do with me and the Theans? Surely marriages are the last thing you want to worry about now.”

That was the wrong thing to say. The Emperor gave him a sharp, unsparing look, turned away from the window, and made her way stiffly back to her chair. She smoothed out her old-fashioned tunic as she sat. “It is inevitable,” she said, “that in a family as large as ours, there are some who are more capable of handling their responsibilities than others. Given your mother’s achievements, I had higher hopes for you.”

Kiem winced. He recognized this lecture; he’d last heard it after his incident at university, just before he’d been exiled to a monastery for a month. “I apologize, ma’am.” He managed to keep quiet for all of a split second before he said, “But I still don’t understand. I know the treaties are important. But the man Thea sent—Jainan—already married Prince Taam. Just because Taam’s dead doesn’t mean the marriage didn’t happen.”

“Our vassal treaties underpin our treaty with the Resolution,” the Emperor said. “They formalize our right to speak for the Empire. The Auditor will check that all the legalities are in order. If he finds out one of our marriage links is broken, he will decree there is no treaty.”

Kiem had been too young to remember the last Galactic treaty renewal and had never bothered to learn much about the Resolution, but even he felt a vague sense of horror at the prospect of an Auditor scrutinizing something he was responsible for. The Auditors were supposed to be meticulous at finding mistakes and unnervingly detached from human concerns. He swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You do not need to be astute or political,” the Emperor said, her tone returning to normal. “You merely need to stand in the right place, mouth some words, and not offend the entire Thean press corps. Thea has recently had some internal difficulties with protests and student radicals; our political links are not as strong as we would like. A new marriage will help smooth matters over.”

“What does that mean?” Kiem said.

The Emperor’s lips thinned. “The Theans are dragging their feet on everything we ask. Our mining operation in Thean space provides valuable minerals; the Theans keep finding new ways to complain about it. At the moment I have one councilor advising me to give up and make Thea a special territory.”

“You wouldn’t,” Kiem said, shocked. Iskat only installed a special governing body if the planet was too lawless to have one of its own. Sefala was the sole special territory in the Empire, and only because it was controlled by raider gangs. “Thea has its own government.”

“I have no desire to,” the Emperor said testily. “I have very little appetite for another war, and this would be the worst possible time. Hence you will be signing a marriage contract with Count Jainan tomorrow.”

For the first time he could remember, Kiem was utterly lost for words.

“There are no legal complications,” the Emperor continued. “You are of age and acceptably close to the throne. He will—”

“Tomorrow?” Kiem blurted out. He sat down hard on the uncomfortable gilded chair. “I thought you meant in a few months! The man lost his life partner!”

“Don’t be absurd,” the Emperor said. “We have precious little time before the treaty is signed on Unification Day. Everything must be watertight by then. On top of everything else, we agreed to rotate the planet that hosts the ceremony, and twenty years ago we held it on Eisafan, so this time it will be Thea’s turn. The Thean radicals have no concept of stability. If they perceive any weakness, we can expect them to use the occasion as a focal point for discontent. The Auditor may conclude Iskat does not have sufficient control over the rest of the Empire to keep our Resolution treaty valid. There must be a representative couple in place to disprove this, with no visible concerns, smiling at the cameras. You are good at appearing confident in pictures. This should not strain your capabilities.”

Kiem clenched his fists, looking down at the floor. “Surely in a couple of months,” he said. The creases around the Emperor’s eyes started to deepen; she never reacted well to pleading. However much effort Kiem had put into sobering up, he’d never been able to hold his ground against her. He tried one last time. “Tell the Auditor we’re engaged. We can’t just force Count Jainan into this.”

“You will cease this quibbling,” the Emperor said. She came back to her desk, propped her hands on it, and leaned across. She might be elderly and slow but her gaze reached into the squishy parts of Kiem’s fear receptors like a fishhook. “You would have me break the treaty,” she said. “You would destroy our tie to the Resolution and leave us cut off from the rest of the universe. Because you do not care for duty.”

“No,” Kiem said, but the Emperor hadn’t finished.

“Jainan has already agreed. That I will say for Thea: their nobles know how to do their duty. Will you dishonor us in front of them?”

Kiem didn’t even try to hold her gaze. If she chose to make it an Imperial command, he could be imprisoned for disobeying. “Of course not,” he said. “Very happy to—to—” He stuttered to a halt. To forcibly marry someone whose life partner just died. What a great idea. Long live the Empire.

The Emperor was watching him closely. “To ensure Thea knows it is still tied to us,” she said.

“Of course,” Kiem said.

• • • •

A thin plume of smoke rose from the dome of the palace shrine. The air outside was cold and smelled faintly of ceremonial resin. Jainan nav Adessari of Feria—recently bereaved, newly betrothed—stood atop a sweep of stone stairs, looking out over the frost-touched gardens of the Imperial Palace of Iskat and forcing himself to focus. He still had duties to carry out.

The gardens’ bare, elegant lines were starker now that the snows had begun and all the living plants had been cut back or buried for spring. The pale stone paths and winding marble walls lay like the quiet remains of a prehistoric creature around him, like a scattering of bleached bones merging with the hill below. Every path started and ended with the carved crest of Iskat embossed in a flagstone: the single curved line of the Hill Enduring.

Jainan couldn’t appreciate the gardens as he should, or even really see them. Ever since Taam’s death his head had been full of fog. He methodically paced from one side of the staircase to the other to keep warm.

He felt hollowed out. The responsibility of binding the treaty between Iskat and Thea had always felt heavy on his shoulders, but now it was a solid weight on his back and in the pit of his stomach. He and Taam were symbols of the relationship between the two powers. Jainan had been honored to be picked for the role, even if it had turned out to be largely ceremonial: he wasn’t an ambassador or a negotiator and wasn’t supposed to involve himself in the politics. But he had known for five years that he would eventually stand in front of a Resolution Auditor to renew Thea’s treaty and do his part to keep the galactic link open and the sector protected. Now that was all in doubt.

It had become increasingly difficult to concentrate in the last week as the Emperor’s Private Office stepped up preparations to replace Taam. Jainan had put his stamp on the permission forms—it was unthinkable to leave Thea without a treaty pair—but they hadn’t yet confirmed his Iskat partner. It could be any one of dozens of minor royals. Jainan wasn’t familiar enough with Taam’s cousins to even judge the possibilities. The uncertainty was like a cobweb across his face; he constantly had to brush it aside to think about anything else.

He had to focus. A stream of palace residents started to appear at the other side of the gardens, hurrying to the shrine for Taam’s last memorial service, hunched against the cold. Jainan scanned their faces but none of them were familiar. Jainan was due at the ceremony as well, albeit he’d only been given the invitation yesterday. It was understandable that he’d been informed late; all the Iskaners he spoke to were busy with the Resolution visit and had more important matters to deal with. Jainan himself hadn’t seen the Auditor yet. He’d been told to avoid the Resolution visitors until the new marriage was formalized and he and his Iskat partner could speak for the treaty. Jainan knew the importance of putting up a united front.

At last Jainan’s wait paid off: a figure in a general’s uniform appeared on the long, gravel path that led to the military headquarters and the barracks, trailed by two other officers. Jainan took a sharp breath and set off at a brisk walk to intercept him.

Taam was—had been—a colonel in the Iskat military. In the aftermath of the flybug accident, Taam’s old commanding officers had swept in to take control and direct Jainan through all the funeral preparations: stand here, go to this ceremony, don’t talk to the press. Jainan had complied like a man in a trance. It wasn’t his role to contradict senior officers in the Empire’s military.

“General Fenrik,” Jainan said, stopping in the middle of the path. “Could I—” He had to catch himself. Have a moment of your time sounded presumptuous. “May I ask you something?”

General Fenrik was a broad-shouldered, austere man with clipped white hair, a cane, and the no-nonsense air of someone who had led the Empire’s military forces for forty years. A polished wooden button pinned to his breast pocket was emblazoned with an old version of the Imperial crest. His gaze bore into Jainan without recognition. “Yes? What? Be quick.”

One of the lower-ranking officers behind him prompted him with Jainan’s name in a murmur. Jainan knew the officers Taam had worked with: this one, with a flint brooch neatly pinned to her collar and a severe, scraped-back ponytail, was Colonel Lunver, who had taken over Taam’s military duties. She had little patience for civilians and less for vassal planets.

The prompt seemed to spark Fenrik’s memory. “Ah. Taam’s partner. What do you want?”

“About the ceremony,” Jainan said. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t afford to cause trouble, but he had duties other than his Iskat ones. “Prince Taam has had Iskat rites. There are also some Thean clan rituals—”

“Thean rituals?” General Fenrik’s eyebrows rose. He didn’t have to say, Taam was an Iskaner, or the Imperial family has to follow Imperial custom; both of them knew that.

“I can promise it will not be disruptive,” Jainan said, trying to make up lost ground. He should have found a more tactful approach, but there hadn’t been time. “The new Thean ambassador will be in attendance, and the Thean press will take note of what happens at the ceremony.”

“What do you need?” the third officer asked, slipping the question in deftly as Fenrik frowned. Jainan knew him as well: Aren Saffer, Taam’s old deputy, breezy and nonchalant. Aren’s tone was almost sympathetic, which made the back of Jainan’s neck prickle with embarrassment. But Jainan was too numb to let that stop him.

Jainan rapidly calculated the minimum level of ritual observance that might avert hostility in the Thean media. “If I could just have five minutes for a recitation during the ceremony. It would be most appropriate when the funeral images are dedicated.”

“Why didn’t you take this to the stewards?” Fenrik said.

“They were . . . unhelpful,” Jainan said. The shrine’s stewards had flat-out refused to change the ceremony, which Jainan understood, since the request came at the last minute. General Fenrik was Jainan’s last avenue of appeal.

The general examined him, as if he suspected Jainan was trying some sort of political trick. Jainan endured the scrutiny. Five minutes wasn’t really enough for even a short clan recitation, but he could see even that was pushing the boundaries.

But Fenrik apparently decided five minutes was a small price to pay to end Jainan’s petitioning. “Take care of it,” Fenrik said to Colonel Lunver, who snapped her mouth shut on what she had been about to say and saluted. Fenrik gave Jainan the briefest of nods and moved on, clearly intending to spend no more time on it. His two officers sketched a bow to Jainan and followed.

Jainan stepped back to let the three of them pass. He ought to feel relief, but he only felt the cold prickle at his back and a distant dread of the ceremony itself. He had no room to indulge those sentiments.

He waited a moment to pace after them, keeping his distance from the gathering crowd of attendees. He couldn’t face condolences. As he drew nearer to the front gates, he could see a view down the hill toward the city of Arlusk and a queue of flyers approaching the palace, waiting to disgorge their guests. The low dome of the palace shrine rose up to his right. The press had been allowed up to the doors: half a dozen aerial cameras circled around the marble dome, snapping pictures of the attendees. There was no way to avoid them. Jainan made sure his expression was neutral.

Inside the shrine, the smell of resin hung starkly in the air under the high stone rotunda. The space under the dome was at least free of aerial cameras. The spectators milled around to fill up the seats that circled the edge of the shrine; a uniform gleam came from the rows of decorated military officers, broken up by civilians in sober, light-colored clothes.

A line of seats was reserved for the twelve treaty representatives. The Eisafan representative was expansive as usual in a flurry of extravagant bronze-and-cream capes, with her royal partner beside her and a gaggle of staff standing behind. Her hair was woven through two heavy flint rings—an ostentatiously Galactic way of showing her gender. The delegates from Rtul and Tan-Sashn had chosen to dress in Iskat mourning grays like Jainan; they looked grave and impassive. Sefala’s seats were both occupied by Iskaners. The Kaani representative had not even made an appearance. Jainan felt a distant admiration for their ability to find a different niche Kaani malaise every time they were disinclined to attend something.

Someone tapped his elbow. “Your Grace?”

Jainan pulled his arm away and stepped back. It was a young man, tall and skeletal, dressed in a Thean-style tunic. Jainan took a moment to realize the white and navy was a set of colors he knew: the clan style of the Esvereni. This must be the new Thean Ambassador.

“Count Jainan of Feria,” the Ambassador said, and waited for Jainan’s nod of confirmation. “My name is Suleri nal Ittana of the Esvereni. I was hoping to catch you here.”

Jainan bowed. He and Taam were supposed to be above politics, but surely nobody could complain if he greeted the ambassador from his own home planet. “Your Excellency. Congratulations on your appointment.”

The Ambassador gave him a dispassionate smile and said, “Thank you. To tell the truth, Your Grace, I was beginning to worry about you. I’ve invited you to the embassy several times over the last few days. You haven’t responded.”

Jainan took a short breath. It had taken a long time for Iskat to accept the appointment of a new ambassador, precisely because the last one had tried to interfere excessively in palace affairs. Inviting Jainan to the embassy before he even married his next Iskat partner made it look like Thea intended to start that all over again. This Esvereni should have been briefed, but then, the Esvereni had never been known for their tact and political restraint—Jainan caught the old pattern of thought and squashed it. Thean clan biases had no relevance on Iskat. “I apologize. I have been busy with religious duties.”

The smile thinned. “I’m sorry to hear you’re so busy, Your Grace. Unfortunately, since the Resolution is here for the treaty ceremonies, I have more to ask of you. I need to know you’ll at least take part in the remnants handover. No one on my staff is authorized to interact with the Auditor.”

Jainan hesitated, feeling the horribly familiar loss of a thread that had slipped out of his grip. There were several Resolution ceremonies before the treaty was renewed, he knew. One of them saw each planet hand over all the xeno remnants they had found over the last twenty years, uncovered from space junk nets and dig sites and terraforming refuse. Thea had found some minor shards that must be given up to the Resolution. Jainan would play his part, of course, but his new partner had to agree. He stepped aside to let a party of civil servants take their seats. “Yes, though I’m still awaiting the schedule—”

“Of course,” Ambassador Suleri said. “I couldn’t ask you to do anything without Iskat’s approval.”

Jainan shut his eyes for a brief moment and felt a flare of something uncharitable. A new, inexperienced ambassador from a rival clan was yet another problem to navigate, another chaotic factor in the equation. Suleri did not know how easy it would be to ruin the balance of relations. “I will send you my schedule as soon as humanly possible,” Jainan said. “I promise. The wedding is tomorrow. I will know by then.”

He saw something taken aback about Suleri’s expression at tomorrow, but Jainan was too tired to read it. Suleri cleared his expression and bowed. “Tomorrow, then. I’ll expect a message.” Jainan turned away feeling like he had just crossed a floor rigged with explosives. He took his seat with moments to spare before the ceremony started.

As a row of priests filed in, the Eisafan representative leaned over. “Your new ambassador seems to have had some difficulty getting an invitation,” she murmured under the next set of chanting. “My staff had to help him. Are you having any trouble?”

Jainan stared straight ahead. “The invitations were sent out late,” he said. Taam had generally handled the other treaty representatives. Jainan could feel it even now, in the way the Eisafan representative looked at the empty chair beside him before she addressed him. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“Our pleasure,” she said, and sat back. Eisafan was the model planet of the Empire: richer and more populous every year, integrated with Iskat at every level. Eisafan would not have had a problem getting its ambassador invited to any event.

Jainan forced himself to pay attention to the rest of the ritual. The one-month Mourning was a formal Iskat ceremony, the style of it dictated by Taam’s sect. He had technically followed a different sect from Jainan, but in truth Taam had only joined one because the army expected it, and neither he nor Jainan had paid much attention to ceremony outside of the high holidays.

Jainan breathed out as the chants curled upward. This was the sixth funeral ceremony in a month. He barely remembered the details of the previous ones—they blurred into one long row of priests and grave-faced soldiers, watching while Jainan struggled to remember his part in rituals he’d never attended before.

He was at least used to that by now. He stood when one of the priests beckoned him and walked steadily up to the circle of offering tables, which were crowded with gray-framed pictures of Taam. The rotunda was quiet. The press wasn’t allowed in until the end.

Jainan lit a coil of waxed rope set into a resin pot, and a thin plume of smoke rose, adding to the haze in the dome. He should feel something, but instead he was numb; the numbness had a chill and a weight like a pool of icy water. He stood with the burning taper in his hand and watched the wisp of woodsmoke spiral upward. In front of him, a priest whispered a formula Jainan was not properly allowed to hear. Taam’s face looked back at him from every angle—flat, lifeless, nothing like Jainan had known him—but the soaring space above was empty and calm.

This was when he should start the recitation. Jainan realized with a jolt that he hadn’t made sure that Lunver had warned the priests. She’d be seated in the front row with General Fenrik, but he couldn’t turn around now to look at her, and if the priests weren’t expecting it, he would make this very awkward. But Taam had married into the Feria clan, however little that meant to Iskaners, and Jainan felt deep in his bones that it would be wrong to say nothing. He closed his eyes and spoke.

It was an old chant and a simple one: it listed the names of Feria’s core clan for the last few generations, spooling out one by one like a thread pulled from a tapestry. The first names dropped into dead silence. Jainan had to clear his throat several times as he recited. Even after that, his voice was still irritatingly quiet and hoarse. He had not spoken in public in a long time. He caught sight of a priest who had frozen while she collected Taam’s pictures—had she been told about this? Was Jainan ruining the ceremony? He felt prickles of mortification on his temples, but he couldn’t stop halfway through.

At last he came to the end of it. The final names—Jainan’s parents—fell into the hush. Jainan listened to the echoes die away. His mind had gone blank with relief; he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do next. There was an awkward pause. The priest in front of him coughed.

Pressure wrapped Jainan’s chest like an iron band. Iskat religious ceremonies ran on smooth rails with no pauses. The spectators would think he was going to pieces. He hurriedly looked down and remembered what he was supposed to do; he picked up the stick of charcoal that lay beside the incense burner and smudged a line on the table in front of each of the white-framed photos. Taam’s image stared calmly at him, oblivious to Jainan’s mistakes. “Thank you, Your Grace,” the priest said. Jainan tried not to hear the censure in it. “Please be seated.”

Jainan turned away from the central table. He had to get himself together. He couldn’t afford to let the palace think he was falling apart.

Before he could say the final blessing and move, there was a muted disturbance at the doors to the shrine. They opened halfway, letting in a sliver of pale light and a handful of people. Jainan felt cold; the press weren’t supposed to be let in yet. He had spoiled the timing of the ceremony.

But these weren’t reporters. Two of them had the oddly cut clothes and broad, folded collars of people from the wider galaxy. Each had a shimmer in front of their left eye, as if the light was diverting itself around an obstacle.

The last one must be the Auditor.

The Auditor was dressed unassumingly like his two staffers— Jainan couldn’t see any ornaments from here but knew his gender from reports—but the most startling thing was the shell of soft illumination that cut off his eyes and most of his face. It wrapped around his forehead and eyes like armor, a color that Jainan’s visual receptors refused to parse. Jainan thought he saw human features through it but couldn’t quite make them out; he felt nauseous when he looked at it.

Jainan couldn’t imagine why the Auditor had come to a religious ceremony that had nothing to do with politics. But the Auditor didn’t seem to be there to make a scene; he sat in the back, nonchalantly, with the air of an anthropologist making observations. As he sat down, he moved like a person, and his head turned on his neck like a person, though his face was an unsettling blank. It took Jainan a second to realize the Auditor was looking at him.

Jainan was used to spikes of panic. He knew nothing showed on his face. It was unfortunate that the Auditor had walked in to see one of the treaty representatives standing frozen, having just disrupted an Iskat ceremony by insisting on Thean customs, but it wasn’t a disaster. They would have a chance to show a better picture of unity later, when Jainan’s new partner was chosen. Jainan tried not to think of how his partner would view this morning’s events.

He brought himself back to the duties in front of him. He turned back to the offering tables, consciously keeping every movement under control, spoke the final blessing of Taam’s Iskat sect, and bowed his head correctly before he turned. He couldn’t think of the future; it was a terrifying void; but if he could only control the present, he would at least do that to the best of his ability. Thea could not afford for him to falter. Whoever his partner was, they would understand the need to keep the treaty stable must override everything else.

Copyright © 2021 by Everina Maxwell. Excerpted from Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Everina Maxwell is the author of Winter’s Orbit. She lives and works in Yorkshire, where she collects books and kills houseplants.

Book Review: On Fragile Waves, by E. Lily Yu

LaShawn M. Wanak | 573 words

On Fragile Waves
E. Lily Yu
Hardcover / Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 9781645660095
Erewhon, February 2021, 288 pages

On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu was not a book I wanted to read. 2020 was already filled with hardness and tragedy, and I wanted to escape to fiction that was easy, fun, and light. But in November, I found myself craving poetry, and I was familiar with Yu through her short stories, particularly the gorgeous “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.” When I saw the book cover of On Fragile Waves, I decided to give it a chance.

As I expected, Yu’s debut book was beautiful and utterly devastating.

Firuzeh, a young girl, is forced to flee with her parents and younger brother Nour from Afghanistan to Australia. Their journey is told in poetic prose, an achingly painful juxtaposition to the trials they endure as they are shuttled from place to place with little warning; a harrowing ocean trip; and then the mind-numbing waiting in a refugee camp in Nauru. Firuzeh witnesses her parents grow drained and fearful as they move further and further away from normalcy. The future becomes uncertain, and even mundane matters such as a simple shopping trip becomes drenched with horror as unspoken rules unknowingly broken have devastating consequences. And it doesn’t end when they are finally allowed into Australia’s mainland. Being allowed into another country doesn’t mean they are welcomed.

Despite it all, Firuzeh is also still a girl having to deal with the pains of growing up: of her parents showing preference to her younger brother, of feeling left out when other girls her age get to go to parties and put on makeup. Of watching her mother struggle to keep things normal and hide her own fear, to the point she overextends it on Firuzeh. Of dealing with loneliness. The only girl Firuzeh can call a friend is Nasima, a girl who died early in the days of their flight and occasionally berates with a caustic tongue, but also keeps Firuzeh sane and alive with knowledge that only a ghost like her would know.

The only other things that keep Firuzeh company are the stories. Folk tales at the beginning that attempt to turn the start of their flight into a grand adventure. Half-formed tales from Firuzeh when the words from her parents dry up from despair. Stories to explain and process and mourn when the tears refuse to come. Stories to distract from the fact that every day is fraught with danger. Stories that deal with disappointment when they finally do make it into Australia, and eventually, as Firuzeh is confronted with hatred and bigotry, stories that become a weapon to protect herself and wound others. And there are some stories that are so achingly beautiful, you almost—almost—forget all the bad things.

Occasionally Yu dips away from Firuzeh’s narrative to give other immigrants who intersect with her a voice as they deal with their own history and ghosts. But ultimately, this is Firuzeh’s tale, one that shows that even in the hardest circumstances, beauty can be found and even be used as form of resistance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Book Review: The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by Katie Mack

Chris Kluwe | 851 words

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)
Katie Mack
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9781982103545
Scribner, August 2020, 226 pages

Hello everyone, and hopefully you’re all having a wonderful new year so far. This month, however, I’d like to talk about a book that deals with endings—more specifically, the end of everything—but does so with grace, charm, and wit. The book, of course, is The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by Katie Mack, and it’s a wonderful dive into the inner structures of the universe, as well as how it all might come crashing together/start blowing apart/vanishing/you get the drift.

Now, we tend to cover a lot of science fiction in these reviews, both (a) because it allows us to extrapolate out from our current present to possible futures, good and bad; and (b) because who doesn’t want to put laser cannons on a T. Rex?; but the great thing about The End of Everything is that from start to finish it’s all science fact (or at least the facts as we know them at this time because hey, this is theoretical cosmology (not to be confused with theoretical cosmetology, which involves far more foundation)).

Throughout the book, Mack does an amazing job of distilling down important cosmological ideas like the Big Bang, the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background), and cosmic inflation to easily digestible chunks of information, while still making the reader aware of all the hard work and math that went into discovering these universal forces in the first place. Those of you familiar with Carl Sagan’s work will no doubt immediately think of his show Cosmos, or even Stephen Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time, but for my money Mack’s presentation has them both beat and requires absolutely no knowledge of physics to follow along (I’m also a sucker for footnotes and Mack has some Pratchett-esque ones tucked away at the bottom of multiple pages).

As a science-enthusiast-but-most-assuredly-not-a-scientist, I also greatly enjoyed Mack’s ability to weave in everyday examples of modern life while talking about things like why dark energy being a cosmological constant of less than -1 is Not Good, or explaining the peculiarities of Boltzmann brains (they’re spontaneous!), and her low-key sarcastic appreciation of Einstein is a delight. The fact that she also subtly works in pop-culture references and an eye for social inequities is just icing on the cake.

Now I know by this point, some of you are thinking, “wait a minute, the book is called The End of Everything, why are you so upbeat about it,” and yes, that’s a fair question for a book about how the entire universe and everything in it (naturally including us) is someday going to just . . . not be a thing anymore, but it’s impossible to read this book and not be entertained. First off, all the potential endings the book describes are either billions of years off or will literally happen instantaneously with no time to even process what’s happening, but more importantly, The End of Everything is clearly a book written by someone who loves science, and wants to share that love with as many people as possible.

To that end, I think the real reason why you should make time to read this particular work is because the underlying tale is about caring—for the world you live in, for how it came to be, and how one day it will be gone. Even though Mack’s subject matter involves stars boiling away, bubbles of deadly faster-than-light vacuum, or the very fabric of space itself ripping asunder, the emphasis isn’t on the destination, it’s on the journey. It’s about appreciating the people who constantly challenge themselves and how they view the world, always striving to understand just a little bit more, push humanity a little bit further. It’s about the little things (and in the case of quantum physics, that can be very small indeed), and how the grand and the miniscule are linked inextricably in ways that require patience and dedication to comprehend. It’s about how despite your best efforts, you still might not know the answer when it’s your time to exit the stage, but you might have built a foundation for someone else to reach higher and further than you could have ever dreamed.

Above all, The End of Everything is a book that confronts our ultimate fate with hope, optimism, and humor, and that’s a message I’d gladly see sent out to the stars.

Read if: you need to rekindle a sense of wonder in the face of a seemingly dark and uncaring universe; you’re wondering if there was anything Einstein didn’t discover; because SCIENCE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Latinx Screams, edited by V. Castro and Cynthia Pelayo

Arley Sorg | 1149 words

Latinx Screams
V. Castro and Cynthia Pelayo, eds.
Ebook
ISBN: 9781735693668
Burial Day Books, December 2020, 80 pgs

The 1980s and 1990s were in some ways the heyday of horror anthologies, arguably riding the rising tide of horror cinema’s popularity. Movies Halloween and Dawn of the Dead shocked and delighted fans in 1978; memorable anthologies such as Kirby McAuley’s Dark Forces came out in 1980, Ramsey Campbell’s New Terrors in 1982, not to mention Alan Ryan’s Night Visions in 1984, starting one of the more important horror anthology series—these are just a few of a great many memorable titles of the era. In fact, the HWA (Horror Writers Association) was founded in 1985.

As someone who collected and devoured those anthologies, who still has many of them on his bookshelf, I say with certainty that the tone and vibe and even structure of many of the stories in Latinx Screams hearkens back to that era. This is a book chock full of solid horror tales which could easily appear in classic but notable horror anthologies, such as Douglas E. Winter’s Prime Evil or Dennis Etchison’s Cutting Edge. It makes a certain kind of sense, as many horror writers will have grown up reading those books, and they will undoubtedly have DNA from those stories in their fiction. One glaring difference between this title and those, however, is that back then—aside from occasional outliers such as 1998’s Women of Darkness edited by Kathryn Ptacek—the bulk of stories in horror anthologies of that so-called heyday were by authors who are both male and white.

In fact, in the editor’s note, V. Castro talks about reading Alvin Schwartz’s 1981 anthology Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, saying “Back then I never thought I could or would write horror . . . I didn’t know of any Brown women delving into the depths of the dark corners of storytelling.” Arguably, the real heyday is now, with the publication of books such as this one, offering good fiction from a set of perspectives which (for whatever sets of reasons) had largely been missing from those iconic books of the ’80s and ’90s.

Latinx Screams opens with “Sangre Derramada” by Hector Acosta which, for me, hints at an anthology called Splatterpunks, edited by Paul M. Sammon in 1990. That book was all about violence and blood, and this story is all about blood and claustrophobia. Alberto is sent to a chicken killing facility to look into why a finger ended up in a package of chicken. The opening hints at a tale along the lines of Stephen King’s 1978 classic “The Mangler,” being heavily focused on the imposing presence of sharp machinery. Toxic machoism and barely controlled violence take center stage. What makes this piece interesting is subtext on class, and the way everything swivels away from the expected direction and into a narrative about cultural anger and capitalist exploitation.

“Black Sheep” by Sarah Davis introduces Anessa, a journalist who is tasked to investigate a mysterious individual who beats up seemingly random people and leaves them with their head shaved. The story is a device to explore the difficulties of growing up with a mixed identity, and touches on race, class, and the fakery of “good neighborhoods.”

Rios de la Luz’s “Morning of the Teeth” is driven by imagery, discombobulating moments, and ideas. On the surface, it’s about an exorcism, but at heart it’s a discussion of men of violence and abuse of power.

In Arasibo Campeche’s “The Organometallic God” a woman finds herself aware but in a state of severe decay, and unable to move. It reads as something of a thought piece, specifically as a meditation on human nature, existence, and faith.

“Come, Play” by Sergio Gomez stands among my favorites in this book, as a great example of atmospheric horror. Two kids go out at night in search of frogs and find something sinister down by the creek. The ending is expected, but the story is still enjoyable, carried – as it should be – by creepy moments, and it’s overall well-told.

“Frijoles” by Laura Diaz de Arce is a great tale of a family curse and a young woman who tries her best to defy it. At a family gathering Blanca discovers that everyone in their family dies at a certain age. In Blanca’s attempt to resist the curse, the narrative becomes a wonderful way to explore the feeling of being at odds with one’s cultural identity, as well as ideas around class struggle. The story is grounded by a sense of family, history, and its importance to the main character, despite her best attempts to free herself from them.

“Galán” by Richie Narvaez is a robot story we’ve seen before, but we haven’t quite seen it done in this way. Jazzmin gets the robot she was promised – all the kids have them. And at first the robot is quite helpful. Meanwhile, the entire family struggles to come to terms with the dad’s mother and her antiquated (read: conservative) points of view. What happens next is perhaps predictable but nonetheless fun. What makes the story more important than otherwise is the exploration of cultural retention, which is a fresher topic perhaps than the still quite important generational clash. It’s a good take on a trope or two, and it plays out the way it should.

Latinx Screams features twelve original stories in all. These are just a few examples of what’s on offer, including some of the standouts. Not every story is speculative. Some of them hinge on a reveal or sketch out an idea rather than fully fleshing out the narrative. But this book is still a worthy addition to any horror reader’s library. Having the commonality of Latinx authorship to shine a light on people who have been underrepresented for decades in the horror industry is important, but it isn’t the sole reason to get this book. I said at the start that these stories brought me back to those ’80s and ’90s anthologies in terms of structure and vibe. But the stories also do things just a bit better: most, possibly all of them go beyond the basic expectation of a fun horror piece; narratives are layered with meaning, social commentary, and personal authenticity. After reading this book, the truth becomes obvious: stories from perspectives such as these should have been a celebrated part of the fabric of our horror culture all along.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Phoebe Barton

Audrey T. Williams | 937 words

I love how you have expanded the traditional use of “faery” to include gremlins. Beyond the ’80s movie franchise of the same name, what inspired your “gremlins in the machine” sequences? What did the act of Marigold smashing the empty gremlin trap represent?

I’ve been really into establishing “space habitat folklore,” and gremlins are a big part of that. My gremlins are inspired by the originals—the ones that would go around causing malfunctions in airplanes, and in an off-Earth habitat where your survival is dependent on all your machines working well, gremlins would be a natural way to explain random malfunctions.

The gremlin trap is a bit of worldbuilding that I’ve had in my back pocket for a while. The idea here is that Martian kids build these traps as a way to learn basic mechanical principles, so that they can get used to how things work, and the smashing is purely cathartic. I mean, if you’re dependent on machines for life, wouldn’t it be such a relief to be able to smash one once in a while, and vent all your frustration against the whole thing?

Regarding ritual nuances like kneeling to whisper into buttercups (which reminded me of kneeling for bedtime prayers and Sunday Mass), which cultural or religious traditions that you drew on would you like readers to know more about? Any relation at all to the spiritual writer A.P. Barton from the early 1900s, or just coincidence?

No relation, as far as I know! If I was drawing on any existing cultural or religious traditions, it’s purely coincidental—religion especially, as I’m not religious myself, and aside from what I’ve absorbed from the culture I live in, I’m not too familiar with it. Instead, I was trying to invent new things out of whole cloth, because it’s not like the future is going to be using the exact same blueprints that we have now, and not creating any of their own.

The focus on living, natural components for Marigold’s rituals in part comes from traditional stories of faeries, and in part from the psychological effects of living in an artificial habitat. It’s one way I try to keep the characters from being copy-pasted early-twenty-first-century individuals.

There are a few plants mentioned. Marigolds, based on their color, traditionally stand for passion and creativity. Rowan trees are in the rose family. Saxifrage (aka rockfoil) are known as “stone breakers.” Is there any deeper significance you want readers to be aware of?

This story started out as one of my Clarion West stories, so when I was writing it I didn’t have much time to do deep research—but the rowan, specifically, I chose because of its mythological resonances. The reason I made one of the radio’s antennas out of rowan is because I found reference to apotropaic powers being ascribed to it, which is pretty important if you want to protect yourself against potentially hostile transmissions from Fairyland . . .

In your story and in Poe’s story entitled “Berenice,” the namesake character’s mortality is in question. Was that intentional and to what end?

This is, in fact, a complete coincidence! In the first drafts of the story, Berenice’s name was Heather, but I changed it in light of comments about all of the characters having garden-related names. When I name characters, generally I look for euphony as well as names that I haven’t used before, and Berenice fit the bill for me.

The character development of Marigold is deeply layered. She is both introspective and outwardly focused or results-oriented. She thoughtfully considers the emotional intelligence of community dynamics and has practical knowledge of a type of botanical shamanism or spiritual tech while simultaneously being handy with electronic tech gadgetry. How did you land on this mix of personality traits for Marigold? In our world’s commonly held astrological system, what would her zodiac sign be?

I’m not an engineer or mechanic, but a lot of the characters I write end up being people whose work involves maintenance—because I find it interesting, and I recognize its importance. For Marigold specifically, technical and botanical skills go hand-in-hand, because while mechanical life support is going to be important inside a space habitat, biological solutions are just as important. Otherwise you end up with the situation from the 1942 story “QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith, where an ignorant newcomer destroys a critical part of the station’s life support because it looked like ordinary weeds. I see it as being able to come at a problem from multiple angles, with multiple potential solutions, which is always important.

In terms of personality, no conscious thought went into that. In that regard, the most likely explanation is that Marigold is an unconscious reflection of some of my own traits, with the addition of skills and traits I’d like to have. Astrology isn’t something that I deal with personally, but it does raise the question of how things would change for a person in Marigold’s position. Current astrological practice assumes that you’re living on Earth, but what happens when that’s no longer true? What kind of astrological influence would Earth have on Psyche?

These are the kind of questions I like wrestling with in a “hard sf” framework, honestly, because for so long the genre ignored them. So many futures had corridors made of gleaming metal, without a hint of green.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Audrey spent her childhood on North Carolina beaches playing in the breakers at Emerald Isle and fishing on Bogue Inlet pier. She now roams Northern California beaches, rivers, and woods seeking sea glass, foraging chanterelles, and hunting rocks and gems. Her work can be found in Space and Time Magazine. She works in San Francisco as a Copy Supervisor at a healthcare advertising agency. Find her on Twitter @Virgule2020.

Author Spotlight: A.T. Greenblatt

Benjamin C. Kinney | 694 words

“The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit” opens with lush imagery of the island’s life. Did you draw your visual inspiration from any particular island or islands?

The original inspiration for the island came from a Smithsonian Magazine article about North Brother Island, which is located between Manhattan and the Bronx. It was once the location of Riverside Hospital, designed to contain smallpox and other infectious diseases in the late nineteenth century. The island got repurposed a few times over the years, becoming housing for war veterans and later a rehab center for heroin addicts. Then, it was abandoned in 1963 and has since become a place reclaimed by nature. It’s an honest and beautifully haunted picture of what happens to a well-maintained place when all the humans leave.

The earlier drafts of this story took this inspiration of North Brother Island very literally, and consequently, the story was kind of boring. Then I asked myself, “How can I make this setting weirder?” which, in my experience, is always a good question to ask of any work in progress.

This story spends a lot of time building homes and destroying homes. Do you think Sumé’s magic really benefits her on a personal level? Would she think differently about some of her homes if she had to work harder to create them?

Sumé’s magic is a tool, and though it looks like she’s just using it to take care of the island and build/destroy homes, what she’s really using it for is to discover what she wants. She thinks she wants a perfect home, but what she’s really searching for is a place to belong. She probably wouldn’t have built and rebuilt her homes so flippantly without magic, but instead would have rearranged the furniture or repainted or dug up the garden just as frequently.

It’s comforting to imagine a place like Sumé’s island, a refuge for customs and practices that would otherwise have vanished from the world. Is there something specific out there in history that you wish could be found in a refuge like this—some piece of culture lost to history that you’ve always wanted to understand?

There’s so many different cultures, places, and times I’m curious about that have been lost or forgotten or smothered by colonialism. I love visiting ruins, but they always hint at what’s been lost, like Petra in Jordan. Or the knot writing of the Incas. I occasionally come across articles about dying practices or arts, like one about one of the last women who knows how to make byssus (bbc.in/2JBwMZ7). Which is both fascinating and rather sad, that art like this is almost gone.

Sumé, in the end, gets a chance to create a refuge of her own, for things not yet entirely lost. How about yourself? Are there any practices you work hard to keep alive in your own life?

As of writing this, we’re currently nine months into the pandemic and I’m trying to stay in contact with my friends and to keep being part of the speculative fiction community. I’m fighting not to slide back into my hermit tendencies, which is ironic, as I’m also simultaneously turning my home into more of a refuge because I think I will be spending a lot of time in it over the coming months.

You’ve had a lot of wonderful stories published in the last few years. Do you have a teaser for something of yours we can expect to read in the near future?

Thank you! I have two stories coming out in the future. One is my first horror sale to Nightmare Magazine. The other story will be in the March/April 2021 issue of Asimov’s. It’s about two friends writing emails to each other from two very different pocket universes. Then, things go sideways.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. He’s created cyborg monkeys, magnetically altered the activity of the human brain, and generally done his part to make the world as science fictional as possible. His short stories have appeared in Analog, Fireside, Strange Horizons, and many other excellent places, and you can find them all at benjaminckinney.com.

Author Spotlight: Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

Elan Samuel | 685 words

That a story about a single Self occupying two lives was written by two authors is very interesting. What was the first seed of the idea? Did you come up with it together? Practically speaking, what form did your collaboration take for this piece? Did each of you write separate sections and bring them together, or was the entire process directly collaborative?

The seed of the idea came, appropriately enough, when we were contemplating the process of collaboration. It occurred to us that, when writing a tale together, we were in effect inhabiting one mind . . . We can’t recall who exactly it was who had the original idea inspired by that insight, but we batted it around as we do, then got stuck in. Eric began the tale, did a couple of thousand words, then passed it on to Keith to finish. There was little plotting done between us—we simply let our respective subconscious minds take the idea where it would go. Then we ruthlessly rewrote each other’s bits, let it lie a while, then re-read it many times and honed and cut.

“Me Two” deals with isolation—albeit a different kind than we’re experiencing these days. The pain that causes Danny/Cristina is palpable through cycles of disappointment, but the story crescendos with a moment of self-love. There’s something therapeutic about reading a character who, in their moment of profound loss and loneliness, appreciates the beauty of what they had. Did everything—the pandemic, the political/economic upheaval, and all the rest—influence this piece?

We started the story late last year, well before the pandemic—so unfortunately we can’t claim amazing foresight or visionary powers. We simply wanted to write a tale of the ultimate paradox—the existential phenomenon of two people being so close that they are one, and the complex array of emotions that would result from that, set against the tragedy of separation. Over the years, we’ve often discussed the isolation we all feel: Even in a crowded room (remember those?) each individual is an island, discrete and distanced from everyone else. This tale did what many stories do: took one idea or observation and pushed it to an extreme. The irony that a story about isolated individuals is really about an “individual” less isolated than anyone did not escape us!

It’s often said that making the events of a story take place in a character’s dream or hallucination is a major faux-pas. You seem to have taken a clear stance in the final section of “Me Two”: that the experience’s “objective” truth (in terms of the story) is irrelevant because of the emotional impact it had on the character(s). Was this a conscious choice or something that occurred naturally as you wrote? (Either way, I think it’s a delightful subversion of a “rule.”)

The original ending was much more science fictional and rationalized—and it didn’t work. It was Keith’s idea to have the scientifically unresolved finale—and the bittersweet realization of the character that what he/they had experienced was unique and to be treasured. It could be read as a metaphor for the human condition. We’re all alone, after all, even when we’re not.

Where else can we read your work, as a duo or as individuals?

Our earlier collaborations—a novella and six short stories—are gathered in the collection Parallax View. Since then, we’ve produced around half a dozen further co-written tales, which have appeared in anthologies and magazines like Solaris Rising, Paradox, and Lightspeed (our “Beyond the Heliopause” was published in Lightspeed in January 2016). We should soon have enough tales for another collection. Most recently, PS Publishing have put out our novella series The Kon-Tiki Quartet. You can find out more about or work at ericbrown.co.uk and keithbrooke.co.uk.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Elan Samuel grew up traveling between southern California and Israel. He now lives in Oakland with his partner and their three cats, and works as a writer and editor. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing at Western Colorado University. Find him on Twitter at @bonbonelan.

Author Spotlight: Alexander Weinstein

Laurel Amberdine | 610 words

I was delighted to read this latest installment in the Tour Guide series. We’ve had Destinations of Waiting, Love, and Joy, as well as Toxic Destinations, and now we get to enjoy Destinations of Beauty. As you’ve been writing these, have you noticed any unexpected patterns, or any trends?

I’ve found I’m writing about a certain kind of nostalgia—a sense of loss/longing for a present moment which has eluded our grasp. Much of this, I imagine, comes from parenthood. My son is headed off to college next year and there’s a great awareness of just how quickly time passes and how easily we can fall into the illusion of having “more time.” I’m thinking here of the moments when our children ask us to play but we’re too busy (often for legitimate reasons!) and yet, soon they’ve grown and are no longer asking us to chase them around the house or jump on the bed or have a water gun fight. In retrospect, these fleeting moments are like destinations I temporarily visited. I think there’s also a Buddhist humor running beneath many of these tales. A way that the present moment, which is always willing to provide us with the perfect destination, will eternally be the one we miss as we rush off to complete our travel itinerary checklists.

I think The Café Taliche in this month’s story might be my favorite destination so far. Do you have a favorite of your own in the series?

That’s great to hear! The Café Taliche is one of my favorites, too. I actually had the benefit of visiting a café like this in real life. It was after a day of hiking in the French alps. I was cradling heartbreak and sort of stumbling through the mountains without fully experiencing their beauty. And then, sure enough, I found myself at this incredible tiny café, full of sunshine and fresh cheese, and a cold mug of ale. It was the elixir of heartbreak which made that moment all the more transcendent. It reminded me of a quote of Rumi’s: “There’s a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope.” This was the sentiment I was trying to capture in that piece. As for the actual name of that café and where to find it? I have no clue! It remains a completely mysterious oasis because—just like the story—I didn’t take a matchbook, napkin, or postcard with me.

Where are you planning to travel and do once the world opens up again?

Iceland’s certainly on my list, along with Hawaii and Portugal—but first and foremost, I want to travel to see my family and friends again. As for what I’m looking forward to doing, I can’t wait to go to restaurants, concerts, plays, dance performances, poetry readings, museums, water parks, ski mountains, and anywhere that people are dancing and making music.

For readers interested in more of your work, what would you recommend they try next?

My collections Universal Love and Children of the New World are a great place to find my short stories. Stories from these collections are headed to the big screen in the coming year—so readers interested in my work will be able to see films soon as well. You can also find my new fiction, interviews, and magical realist stories online on FB (@alexanderwfiction) and Instagram (alexwfiction).

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 208 words

Coming up in March, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Claire Wrenwood (“Homecoming”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“And Now A Preview of Coming Attractions”), along with SF reprints by Ken Liu (“Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts”) and Yoon Ha Lee (“The Empty Gun”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by P H Lee (“The Bear Prince”) and Sarah Grey (“Brightly, Undiminished”), and fantasy reprints by Alyssa Wong (“Olivia’s Table”) and Amber Sparks (“A Place for Hiding Precious Things”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book review columns. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Ashok K. Banker, Howard Andrew Jones, Adam-Troy Castro, and Lizz Huerta.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

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Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

The Editors

Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues 13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.

• • • •

All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:

Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).

Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (recently revived, other) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.