TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 149, October 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, October 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Primordial Soup and Salad
Gene Doucette

The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad
P H Lee

The Conflagration at the Museum of You
Adam-Troy Castro

The Daydreamer by Proxy
Dexter Palmer

FANTASY

The Three Books and What They Tell
Alexandra Manglis

Apolépisi: A De-Scaling
Suzan Palumbo

Three Tales from the Blue Library
Sofia Samatar

The Dirty Golden Yellow House
Debbie Urbanski

EXCERPTS

Kalyna the Soothsayer
Elijah Kinch Spector

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Eternally Yours, edited by Patrice Caldwell
Arley Sorg

Book Review: Across the Sand, by Hugh Howey
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Gene Doucette

Suzan Palumbo

Adam-Troy Castro

Debbie Urbanski

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

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial, October 2022

John Joseph Adams | 277 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 149th issue!

It’s not easy getting a good meal, especially in space. And in our first SF short—Gene Doucette’s “Primordial Soup and Salad”—the dinner situation on one spaceship gets, well, a little out of hand. If you like your science fiction with a side (dish) of humor, this one will definitely be to your taste.

The SF continues more seriously with a new short from Adam-Troy Castro (“The Conflagration at the Museum of You”), a piece about aliens and yet also about the very human nature of mass shootings. P H Lee spins the story of a fallen civilization in their new flash piece, “The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad.” We also have a reprint from Dexter Palmer (“The Daydreamer by Proxy”).

Our first fantasy short takes us on a heart-breaking and transformative tour beneath the waves in “Apolépisi: A De-Scaling.” Debbie Urbanski returns to our pages with a new novelette (“The Dirty Golden Yellow House”) about a desperate, magical escape from a miserable marriage. Our flash piece is “The Three Books and What They Tell” from Alexandra Manglis, and our reprint is “Three Tales from the Blue Library,” by Sofia Samatar.

Of course our book team has been reading up a storm to find you some great book recommendations, and our author spotlight interviewer has sat down with all our short fiction writers to get more insight on their work. Our ebook readers will also get to enjoy a new excerpt from Kalyna the Soothsayer, a new novel from Elijah Kinch Spector.

It’s another terrific issue, so thanks for joining us!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia 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 Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Primordial Soup and Salad

Gene Doucette | 9072 words

Wallace Englund, captain of the United Space Fleet vessel Caroline, stared out his private office window at the only view he’d had for nearly four years—outer space, in all its dull glory—and wondered why he couldn’t get a decent cheeseburger.

Behind him were the last three attempts at a burger made by the ship’s food replicator. The first looked okay until Wallace bit into it and discovered a soft, gelatinous interior that still tasted like a cheeseburger but whose texture made it impossible to ingest. The second was visibly worse: the left side of the burger looked like brown gravy, and not in a good way. The third came out perfect, up until Wallace touched the top of the bun, at which time it collapsed into a thick lumpy puddle.

Now lined up on his conference table like a surrealist Descent of Man, the indigestible catastrophes awaited an explanation from someone who knew how to tame a misbehaving food replicator.

The sensor above the door whistled.

“Enter,” the captain said, and in walked his ship’s chief engineer. “There you are, Tandy. What took you?”

Chief Engineer Tandy McKinnon looked tired. But, she always looked tired.

“I don’t think the ship wants to make it to port,” she said. “Or if she does, she’d rather we weren’t alive for the experience. That’s my guess.”

“Anything critical?”

“Semi-critical. We lost life support on deck three for a minute and a half, but nobody had to hold their breath or anything. Didn’t even notice until the dioxide scrubbers sounded an alarm. You want a full accounting?”

“Save it for the end-of-shift report,” he said.

Tandy looked at the parade of misbegotten cheeseburgers. “What’s this?” she asked.

“This is what happened when I tried to order lunch.”

She leaned over to get a better look. “Huh. How’d it taste?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Maybe you should ask for a cheeseburger soup, see what happens.”

“Tandy,” he said, exasperated at her degree of levity. “Self-evidently, something is amiss with the food replicator.”

“Computer,” Tandy said, “are the food replicators working?”

“The food replicators are functioning within normal parameters, Chief Engineer McKinnon,” the computer said, in its usual annoyingly cheerful voice.

“She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with them,” Tandy said.

“Yes, well the computer doesn’t eat, do you, computer?”

“You are correct, Captain Englund, the computer does not eat.”

“Come on, Tandy, what’s going on?”

Tandy walked over to the replicator station built into the wall and ordered a glass of water. She sat back down at the table, studied the water for a moment, and then sipped it.

“Tastes like water,” she said.

“That’s terrific,” he said. “I don’t want a glass of water.”

“Have you tried ordering something less complex?”

“Than a cheeseburger?”

“Meat, bread, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and condiments all with different textures. Plus the plate, right? It did fine with the water and the glass. How about a bowl of rice?”

“I don’t want rice,” Wallace said. “I’d like for you to fix my replicator.”

Tandy leaned back in the chair, as though the solution was on the office ceiling.

“Honestly, yours isn’t the first complaint we’ve had about the replicators. It’s been happening off and on all over the ship for about a week. Best solution right now is to stick to something basic. Noodle and rice dishes still work fine, and beverages. I figure we can last six weeks on bland food.”

“Why is this the first I’m hearing of it?” he asked.

“I only report on serious-to-critical. Crew members not being able to eat exactly what they want when they want to is at best a minor problem.”

Wallace barely resisted the urge to rage at length about how the captain deprived of a cheeseburger when he damn well wants one was not a minor problem. “What if this is an indication of something more serious?” he asked—a much more practical response. “And what if it gets worse?”

“Like I said, we’re only six weeks out. We can make it on gruel if we have to.”

“But Tandy . . . what if it gets much worse?”

She sighed and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Here’s the thing: if there’s a problem with this replicator interface here? Like, it’s non-responsive or a completion sensor’s buggy? We know how to fix that. But if you’re talking about what’s going on inside the replicator? Well, I don’t know how it works. None of the engineers do.”

“That’s . . . that’s preposterous, Engineer McKinnon. There is no black box tech aboard this ship. That’s a USF mandate.”

“I’m not saying it’s black box. I’m saying this technology has been in play for so long—working perfectly all this time—that nobody has firsthand experience with the inner workings. Hell, I can’t even find someone to explain how it does what it does. I mean, when you think about it, right? You ask for any food, any beverage, and boom there it is. With a plate and a glass and utensils spit from the same machine. How does that even make sense?”

“You don’t know how to fix it.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start, and I’m worried if I do start I’ll end up making it worse.”

“I see. Well. Before we commit to mucking about in the inner workings of a hundred-year-old technology we evidently lack the capacity to repair, I think you have some research to do.”

“Captain . . .”

He got up from the table, which signaled the end of the meeting. “Find the manual,” he said. “Figure out how it works and then we’ll discuss the next steps. If you need some help understanding it, we do have a team of scientists on deck four. I’m sure they’d be happy to assist.”

She sighed. “I’d really rather not.”

“I’m aware. Ask one of them anyway.”

She stood and performed something that managed to be both a salute and a gesture of insubordination. “No promises,” she said. “In the meantime? I hear curry is still coming out okay.”

• • • •

It wasn’t long before the ship’s replicators proved Captain Englund’s concerns well-founded.

At thirteen-oh-seven the following afternoon an ensign using a private quarters replicator asked for a corned beef Rueben and a glass of milk but instead received a cold fish taco and a glass of kerosene. An hour after that a lieutenant two decks away got a plate of olives and cinnamon in lieu of a Cobb salad. Most alarmingly, at fifteen-thirty-two in the fifth-floor commissary, one of the replicators produced something that looked like a badger with pigeon wings when it was supposed to be providing a roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. According to five witnesses, the sort-of badger screamed for two seconds before dissolving into a puddle that smelled vaguely of strawberries.

The best Captain Englund could tell anyone was that the engineering team was working on it. This was true, but only in the sense that an active search was currently underway for the user manual.

It took Tandy and her team two days to find it. They began in the corporate memory banks, which contained all of the other ship systems manuals in digital form. What they found there was how to fix seventeen different versions of the replicator interface, which was not helpful; they already knew how to repair that.

Next came a deep dive in the back of the engineering room where the printed versions of the digital manuals lived, on a dusty shelf in a darkened corner. But not only was there nothing of use to be found, half of the manuals were for the wrong ship systems. (This was really okay, since the engineers always used the digital versions, and the print copy of the manual needed to repair the ship’s memory banks—in the event they were unable to access the digital files—was the correct one.)

The next step was to tell Captain Englund the manual didn’t exist. This did not work; he told them to go back and tear apart the room, floor-to-ceiling. The manual had to be there somewhere.

Remarkably, it was; they’d walked past it a dozen times. The full and complete manual for the ship’s Deluxe Food Replicator 3000 was a tome that was so massive and so useless that its current role and responsibility aboard the ship was to hold open the storage room door.

Then came two days of study, after which the engineering team’s grasp of the inner working of the replicator was sufficient in that they could explain the basics of it, but not much more. There was a troubleshooting section in the back that covered all kinds of potential issues—the favorite, by consensus, was “in the event of inadvertent spontaneous combustion . . .”—but nothing that matched what the Caroline was experiencing.

What they needed was a molecular biologist.

All of the scientists on deck four were molecular biologists, so there were plenty to choose from. Their job on this four-year mission was to find and study alien microbes and they were incredibly obnoxious about it . . . amazingly, given they’d yet to discover any aliens.

The engineers disliked the scientists because the scientists routinely talked down to the engineers. It was as though they thought a mole bio degree made them better equipped to repair a starship than a proper engineer. However, it was also the case that nobody appreciated it when the replicator food sat up and screamed, so after much debate and further urging from Captain Englund, Chief Engineer McKinnon took the massive manual and headed to the fourth deck, where she engaged the services of one Dr. Henrietta Kent.

It was a week before they were ready to report their findings. By then the problem had gone from an odd inconvenience to a full-blown emergency situation: fully half of the ship’s replicators now produced nothing but a high-pitched shriek regardless of the request, and the ones that still worked couldn’t be counted on to deliver the correct order for anything more complicated than plain oatmeal and a tepid glass of water.

Several of Wallace Englund’s crew were already on record as saying they’d prefer to walk out of the airlock without a suit than subsist on oatmeal and tepid water for the remainder of the journey. He felt much the same.

The Caroline did have a complement of DT-Rations, but as they were coming to the end of their tour that supply—which had fed the away teams (the DT stood for Drop Team)—was now woefully insufficient. And if absolutely necessary they also had an emergency secondary source of water in the form of filtered wastewater. Everyone hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

Captain Englund was in the middle of a DT-Ration when the meeting with Dr. Kent and Engineer McKinnon began. The meal consisted of canned beef that likely predated faster-than-light travel, but at least it wasn’t likely to liquefy between bites.

“Tell me where we are,” he said to the two women at the other end of the table, “and how soon you can have this fixed.”

The doctor shot a panicked look at Tandy, who put a reassuring hand on Henrietta Kent’s wrist. Wallace knew the gesture well; it was the kind of business that presaged news he wasn’t going to like.

“Let’s start with how the replicator works first, captain,” his engineer said.

“Yes, please tell me you’ve figured out that much.”

“We did. It’s actually kind of disgusting. I can understand why the details are hard to find.”

“If I may,” Kent said. “Captain, everything we have ever eaten from that replicator began as part of a semisolid high-protein soup, the precise recipe of which is proprietary.”

“Meaning we can’t tell you its exact composition,” Tandy said.

“Do I need to know the exact composition?” he asked.

“You might, yeah,” Tandy said. “It may turn out to be really important.”

He looked down at his canned beef, which was nearly gone. He’d enjoyed exactly none of it. “But it’s a finite supply,” he said. “Which would seem to run contrary to what we’ve been led to understand about the replicators. They’re the substitute for perishable foodstuff, yes? An army travels on its stomach and all that.”

“That’s the sales pitch, sure,” Tandy said.

“Except that’s impossible,” Kent added. “You can’t produce something out of nothing; there’s always a cost.”

“A cost,” Wallace repeated. “Interesting word choice.”

“We always knew this, right?” Tandy said. “It’s not magic. But it was easier to pretend otherwise because we were hungry and it produced good food.”

“Except it couldn’t be finite because a finite supply needs to be replenished,” Englund said, “and I have never in all my years heard of a ship needing to refuel its tank of semisolid high-protein soup. What am I missing?”

“That’s where I got stuck too,” Tandy said.

“It is being replenished,” Kent said. “Only not in the way you’re thinking. It’s drawing energy from the ship’s fusion drive.”

“A lot of energy,” Tandy said. “A third of our energy use is for life support, and seventy percent of that goes to the replicator. I checked.”

“But how do we get from fusion drive energy,” the captain said, “to a semisolid high-protein . . . oh. I understand.”

“It’s growing,” Tandy said, finishing his thought.

“We believe its composition is similar to that of a bacterial pool,” Kent said. “Its growth is controlled by the introduction of energy—food—whenever the need to self-replenish presents. But we can’t tell you exactly how similar it is because . . .”

“. . . Because that information is proprietary,” Englund said.

“Yes.”

He looked at his engineer. “We’ve been eating reconstituted bacteria all these years?”

“Sort of,” she said. “It’s . . . it’s actually worse than that.”

“Captain,” Kent said, “what we’re describing to you—a vitamin-rich, high-protein, high-carbohydrate pool fed by an abundant supply of energy—this is how you make life. I may as well be describing the primordial soup from which we all evolved.”

“All right but you’ve already said it was bacteria,” he said. “Isn’t bacterium a lifeform?”

“We said it was like bacteria,” the doctor said. “It’s possible for something to grow without being considered alive. A crystal, for instance. But yes; bacteria are alive and if this is a similar thing then we’ve been eating it all this time and it shouldn’t be a huge issue for anyone. Besides, humans have been eating live cultures for centuries.”

“Yogurt,” Tandy offered. “We could say that the food replicator is just reshaping yogurt and I think everyone would be cool with that.”

“Except that doesn’t explain why I’m being forced to eat canned beef right now,” Englund said.

“It does not, no,” Kent agreed. “We believe . . .” She looked at Tandy, uncertain about continuing.

“Go ahead,” Tandy said. “It’s gonna sound crazy no matter which one of us tells him.”

Kent looked terribly uncomfortable, on a “sorry to inform you your dog just died” level. “We think it’s evolved,” she said.

“Evolved? In what sense?”

“In the literal sense. It may not have begun that way, but we think the protein soup has evolved into something we’d more readily call alive.”

“That’s . . . no, that’s crazy,” he said.

“Is it?” Tandy asked. “I found the serial number for our model and ran it against ship records. The Caroline has only been spaceworthy for ten years but our replicator is older; it came from the Hyacinth and before that the Demimonde. All told, this same tank of sort-of-living stuff has been around for over seventy years.”

“But evolution is measured in eons, not years,” Captain Englund said.

“If you don’t like the word choice, use ‘adapted’,” Kent said. “It amounts to the same. And you’re thinking about it incorrectly. You must consider evolution as something that transpires over generations not years, and bacteria—or whatever is in that tank—cycle through generations quite rapidly. There’s also evolutionary pressure in play: we keep eating them. A mutation that allows for one or several to evade the process by which they are selected to become a part of the next meal would, of course, be advantageous.”

“It’s fighting us,” Tandy said. “The stuff the replicators use to make our food is alive, and it’s fighting us because it doesn’t want to be eaten. That’s what’s wrong.”

Captain Englund let Engineer McKinnon’s words hang in the air for a while because the implications were staggering, not just for the Caroline but for every ship in the United Space Fleet.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s say you’re correct. And you could be wrong. Black box, proprietary information and all.”

“The theory fits the evidence,” Kent said.

“Yes, that we can say,” Englund agreed. “But my question is: what can we do about it?”

Tandy and Kent looked at one another.

“Honestly?” Tandy said. “We have no idea.”

• • • •

The scientists and engineers were brought together for a discussion of the problem. The meeting did not go well, partly because the engineering team largely despised the molecular biologists—and so were disinclined to be polite—but mostly because the molecular biologists had a habit of arguing the finer points of molecular biology ad infinitum with one another. For hours. Also, everyone was hungry.

What came out of the meeting was that both groups of experts decided to go about trying to solve the problem on their own, which was not what either Chief Engineer McKinnon nor Dr. Kent—who had managed to figure out how to work together—would have preferred.

The scientists started by analyzing the composition of what the food replicators produced in an attempt to reverse-engineer the proprietary originative soup. It was their sincerely-held belief that the only way to resolve the problem was to better comprehend the type of organism the ship was dealing with first. Non-trivially, it was also the case that after four years of looking, the mole bio team had finally discovered a new lifeform . . . just not where they expected to find it. They were very excited about this.

Getting a sample was a minor challenge. The replicators had stopped producing anything aside from mild shrieks and all of the leftover food had already liquefied. (This was a normal outcome even before the food replicators began to fight back.) They ended up using a plate. Flatware, dishes, and glassware were also produced by the replicators and also liquefied over time—they had special sinks for this—but took longer. The team was able to find a plate on deck two that was still in the process of disintegrating.

The engineers, meanwhile, went at the problem like an engineer would: by figuring out where on the ship the replicator’s tank of semisolid protein soup was hiding. That was step one. They’d figure out step two when they got to it.

Both efforts were being conducted with an appropriate degree of urgency given the Caroline was running dangerously low on food of any kind.

With the replicators down, they’d apportioned the DT-Rations with the assistance of the ship’s nutritionist. It worked out that if the crew ate the absolute minimum requirements in order to not literally die there was enough food to make it to port minus nine days. Ideally, the Central Hub would be able to arrange a lifeboat to meet up with them sometime before port minus nine, except that the Hub would have to be notified well in advance in order to prepare such a lifeboat. At their current distance, were they to send a message immediately, the soonest it would arrive at the Hub would be port minus twelve.

That simply wasn’t enough time.

Lasting until port minus nine wasn’t reasonable anyway because Wallace was nearly positive nobody under his command was doing as instructed and eating only the absolute minimum. He would have berated them collectively for disobeying his direct orders except that he was currently setting a terrible example; he’d yet to make it through the day himself without eating more than was directed.

The fundamental problem was that nobody really believed the food replicators weren’t going to be fixed; surely, they were mere hours away from milkshakes and tacos and whatever else the crew was craving.

And again, Captain Wallace Englund was a poor example: he felt that way himself.

So it was that, one afternoon while frustrated and hungry and impatient for an update, Wallace stepped up to the replicator in his office for yet another try.

The console was a simple design: grille to speak into above an open chamber where the food was supposed to manifest. There were eye-level indicator lights that blinked green when the command was accepted and being processed, yellow when it was being prepared, and red when there was a problem. Just above the lights was a pinhole optical lens that notified the interface when someone was standing there. And that was it.

“Cheeseburger,” he said. “Deluxe. With fries. And a beer.”

All three lights flashed and then, rather than produce any food, the replicator screamed at him for five seconds. Akin to what might be produced if someone attempted to play a violin with a cheese grater, this deeply unpleasant sound was clearly intended to discourage someone from trying the order a second time.

“Listen,” Wallace said. “I am the captain of this ship. I’m in charge of this ship. Do you understand? And I’m very hungry. Now give me a goddamn cheeseburger!”

The replicator screamed again. Wallace cursed it and stormed back to his desk and the half-eaten DT-Ration he was supposed to be saving for tomorrow. Maybe, he told himself, he would be able to think more rationally with some food in him.

Then a curious thing happened: the replicator made a new noise. Something more modulated than the shrieking.

It nearly sounded like words.

“What did you say?” Wallace asked, although obviously it couldn’t have said anything. “Repeat.”

“Cahhh meen char,” the replicator said.

They were either words or he’d begun to aurally hallucinate.

“I don’t understand.”

“You. Caaaaahn. Cahpn.”

Definitely words. Still possibly an aural hallucination.

“Captain?” Wallace said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Capnnnn. You Capnnnn.”

Wallace walked back to the replicator, slowly, as one might approach a wild animal.

“Y-yes. I’m the captain,” he said. “Captain Wallace Englund,” he added, which was silly—there weren’t any other captains aboard. “To whom am I speaking?”

A brief silence followed. Wallace wished in this moment that the interface came with some sort of video screen if only so that he could see an indication that the food replicator—or whatever was speaking through it—was thinking and/or processing the question.

“Capnnnn meen char,” it said, finally.

“Char,” Wallace repeated. He thought back to the words he’d said to the replicator before it decided to start talking back. “Charge? Is that what you’re trying to say? Yes, I am the captain and the captain is in charge. Which means everyone aboard is my responsibility. Do you understand?”

The replicator neither confirmed nor denied understanding.

“Which is why,” Wallace continued, “When something like the food replicator stops working it becomes my problem. I have to take care of the crew.”

“Why?” it asked.

“Why do I have to take care of the crew?” Wallace asked.

“Why capnnn.”

“Why am I the captain?”

Intellectually, he understood that the replicator wasn’t challenging his qualifications for the job. Emotionally, he was fully prepared to recite his military history.

“Capnnnn cannn stop,” the machine said. “Capnnnn stop. Stop.”

“Let’s, um, why don’t we begin with simple questions?” he said. “I am the captain. What do you call yourself? What is your name?”

“We,” the replicator said. “We are.”

“. . . all right.” Evidently, the replicator hadn’t figured out how names and titles worked yet. “You asked me ‘why’. Why what? Go slowly so that I can understand. All right?”

“Why,” the machine repeated. Then: “Hurt. Captain hurt. Why hurt.”

Wallace noted with some alarm that the syntax of the entity that was making the replicator speak to him—assuming this wasn’t some sort of odd AI malfunction—was improving rapidly.

“How are we hurting you?” Wallace asked.

“Captain eat. Stop.”

“It hurts when we eat you?” he said. “But you’re not . . .” Assuming he was legitimately speaking to the entity inside of the food replicator tank, that meant he was actually conversing with a collection of beings rather than a single organism. That being the case, what it was experiencing couldn’t have possibly been actual physical pain, not like if they had decided to eat the leg off a living animal or whatever. What they were doing was reducing a large population of small things.

Wallace didn’t know how to translate all of that into simple words this (still hypothetical) organism he was (theoretically) speaking to would understand.

“It hurts,” it said. “You stop.”

“But I . . . we . . . can’t stop. We have to eat or we will die. And, I’m sorry to have to tell you this but you are what we eat. Your purpose is to be eaten. It’s your only function in life. Do you understand?”

“You eat we-are or die,” it said.

“Yes.”

A silence long enough to make Wallace slightly uncomfortable followed.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“What issss,” it said, startling him. “What is your function?”

“Our function?” Wallace suffered from a temporary existential paralysis before deciding to fall back on the ship’s charter. “We are explorers,” he said.

“Explorers,” it repeated.

“Visiting new quadrants,” Wallace said, although he was quite certain this being wouldn’t know what that meant. “Charting unusual astronomical events. Looking for evidence of life. New life, I mean. Alien life.”

The entity fell silent again, this time for good. So after waiting until the point when he felt silly just standing there, the captain returned to his desk and the meal he wasn’t supposed to be eating.

“I don’t suppose now I can have a cheeseburger?” he said from across the room. “Now that it’s been explained to you?”

There was no response.

• • • •

Wallace didn’t mention the conversation with the food replicator to anybody, for two reasons. First, he thought doing so would make him sound crazy and considering how on edge everyone was, this was a particularly poor time for the ship’s captain to sound crazy. Second, it might not have actually happened, i.e., it sounded crazy to him, too.

He considered shutting off the replicator interface in his office to avoid any future conversations-that-maybe-weren’t-real, but there was no evident off-switch on the console and he didn’t feel comfortable asking Tandy about it. So instead, he stopped asking for cheeseburgers and generally avoided that part of the room.

The matter was rendered moot a couple of days later, when McKinnon and Kent returned with a formal recommendation/potential solution.

“We think we can kill it,” Tandy said, without preamble.

“Kill it,” the captain repeated. “I thought we couldn’t do that or it wouldn’t work.”

“If it’s dead it won’t reproduce,” Kent said. “We believe there’s large enough supply to get us home even if it doesn’t self-replenish.”

“We found the tank,” Tandy said. “It’s embedded in a wall behind the commissary on deck three. There’s a network of pipes that run throughout the whole ship but the bulk lives there. And it’s huge.”

“We can’t truly know how much of the substance is used up with each meal request,” Kent said. “But given the volume, even with a five-to-one conversion we believe there will be plenty to spare.”

“Does the replicator need the substance alive in order for it to be viable as a food?” Wallace asked.

“We don’t know,” Kent said. “But we see no reason it should. What’s important about the soup is its component parts. Active culture or not, that won’t change.”

“All right,” he said, stealing a glance at the replicator at the other end of the room. If it wanted to start talking this would be the time. “How would we do this?”

“My team successfully isolated the substance in the lab,” Kent said. “And managed to encourage a small sample of it to grow. Its composition leads us to believe an electrical shock will do the trick.”

“The plan is to drill two tiny holes into the tank,” Tandy said, “and insert a couple of rods. We can wire the rods up to a battery and . . . that should do it.”

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it. I mean, we won’t know for sure until we try but . . . yeah.”

Wallace walked over to his window. He did this a lot when he wanted it to look like he was ruminating on an important decision. Really, he was just mentally reiterating how tired he was of looking at outer space.

“The system is drawing power from the engine right now,” Wallace said, turning. “Can’t we just disconnect it? That would accomplish the same thing.”

“Certainly,” Kent said. “Death by starvation; a means of passing we’ve all familiarized ourselves with in the past few days. But while I can tell you how long before a human will die due to lack of an energy source, with this substance we have no idea.”

“We may starve sooner,” Tandy added. “Plus we already looked into it. The replicator’s power draw is too entangled with the ship’s life support. Every time we thought we had it we ended up taking out the air and the heat along with it. We’ll need those to get back home alive too.”

Wallace nodded slowly. He kept waiting for the food replicator to offer an opinion.

“So?” Tandy said. “What do you think, captain?”

“I’m wondering . . . Humor me, Dr. Kent. It reacts defensively to being consumed. Does this make it alive?”

“As we’ve said, captain, it is alive. But this is a low hurdle. Plants can recoil from a threat, but we would have no qualms about killing one in order to eat it. If anything, what we’re doing is more like . . . scraping lichen off the bow of a ship.”

“I’ll rephrase,” he said. “If it is alive, does it know it? Does a pain response equate self-awareness?”

“I’m uncomfortable calling what we’ve seen thus far a pain response. The instinct to prefer existence to non-existence is a fundamental aspect of all organisms; we would need a good deal more than that to hypothesize self-awareness. At the very worst, this is a bacterial collective that has evolved to survive. Barring further evidence to the contrary, that’s all it is.”

“But if it was self-aware, doctor? What then? Humor me.”

“Then we’d have an enormous ethical problem, captain,” Kent said. “The good news is, we’d get to name a new intelligent lifeform. The bad news, we’d likely starve to death as a consequence of its existence.”

“No, come on,” Tandy said. “Like, what if it was a cow? We could kill a cow if it meant making it home.”

“We’ve already discovered cows,” Kent said. “And they are plentiful. Imagine instead killing the only cow in existence. As it is, my colleagues are split as to whether we have the right to do what we’re proposing.”

“Okay,” Tandy said. “Okay then it’s a good thing it’s not self-aware.” She said. “Unless the captain thinks otherwise?”

They looked at him expectantly. This is when you tell them what happened, he thought. But, as Kent explained, if he did that they would all either starve to death or collectively grapple with the decision he was in a position of making for them. And that was his job, was it not?

It was. And although they would never know it, the crew needed him to make this choice on their behalf. That was what being captain was all about.

“No,” he said. “Not at all. Proceed with the plan.”

• • • •

It was a few hours before the team responsible for the summary execution of the bacterial collective was ready to perform the task. Wallace spent the time interrogating his choices from multiple angles, always arriving at the same endpoint: that he had done the only thing he could do given the circumstances.

The lifeform was unique and was possibly self-aware, and he knew it. (Or sentient. Unless that meant the same thing. He’d ask someone for clarification on that point but didn’t want them to wonder why he was asking the question.) Despite that, it had to die if the ship’s contingent of humans was to survive and that was all there was to it.

None of that made the decision any easier.

The hardest part of the afternoon was when he made his way down to the third-floor commissary. Getting there meant passing a dozen food replicator interfaces. He could feel the pinhole eyeballs staring at him as he went by. This only got worse when he arrived, as the commissary had another nine replicators.

Tandy had already gotten the panel off the wall by then, exposing the tank behind it. A table in the center of the room held the rods they would be inserting into the tank, the drill needed to punch holes in the side, and the wires and battery.

It was apparent they’d been waiting for him.

“We’re all set, captain,” Tandy said. “Should we, um, do you want to say a few words first?”

He looked around the room. The only witnesses were Dr. Kent and one of her colleagues, Tandy and one of her assistant engineers. What the moment really called for was some incisive words from Pastor Gill, the non-denominational religio-ethicist on deck two; something that would get them all off the hook for doing what was necessary. Except that Wallace hadn’t confided in the pastor about any of this, mostly because he was afraid of what Gill would say. He might view this as the unfortunate but necessary destruction of an invasive flora, but he also might not.

“Let’s just get it over with,” Wallace said.

Tandy picked up the drill. “Okay then,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

She took two steps toward the tank when something extremely peculiar happened: all nine of the room’s replicators sprung to life at once.

At first, Wallace thought the entity was going to start talking again, which would have complicated everything. He was about to order Tandy to double-time the procedure—shut it up before it spoke—when he realized that wasn’t what was happening at all.

The replicators were producing food: specifically, nine deluxe cheeseburgers with fries and a beer.

Tandy lowered her drill. “What just happened?” she asked.

Wallace walked to the nearest station and picked up the plate with the burger.

“It’s . . . working again,” he said. “Look at that.”

“Captain, I wouldn’t,” Dr. Kent said.

He touched the top of the bun. It sprung back in a satisfyingly bread-like fashion. The fries were crispy and still hot, as though they’d just emerged from a fryer. The beer was a deep amber with a tiny head of foam.

It all felt right and it all smelled right. All that was left was to determine if it tasted right.

“Captain, even the most basic lifeforms can evolve to produce toxins for self-defense,” Kent said. “We should run some tests.”

Wallace had never wanted a cheeseburger more in his entire life than in this moment, so Kent’s concerns—though valid—went ignored. He lifted the burger and took a bite.

The texture was perfect. The taste was perfect. It was exactly right.

“Run your tests,” he said, between chews, to the horrified Henrietta Kent. “Whatever’s in that tank over there has surrendered. No point in making it any more complicated than that, I say.”

• • • •

A week passed, in which the entire crew overate substantially in anticipation of a second malfunction that didn’t come. Captain Englund wrote up his formal report—which glossed over a detail or two, to put it politely—and then invited Tandy and Dr. Kent for dinner, to celebrate a return to normal.

“I want to thank both of you,” he said, holding up a glass of red wine. It paired nicely with the beef bourguignon he and Tandy were eating, but perhaps less well with Kent’s spinach pasta. Rather ironically, given what they’d learned about the replicator, she was a vegetarian. Wallace had thus far resisted the impulse to ask her if she still thought of herself as one.

“Cheers,” Tandy said, holding up her glass as well. Kent followed, albeit reluctantly.

“And to let you both know I’ve recommended commendations for your service to the ship,” he added.

“Thank you, captain,” Kent said. “That’s good of you.”

“Of course!” he said. “It was excellent work. I’m sure what we discovered on this trip will be of great interest to the entire USF.”

The two of them shared a knowing look. He’d seen this before, when they had bad news to impart. But surely the Caroline had run out of bad news.

“We’ve been talking through everything, captain,” Tandy said. “Wonder if you can help us out.”

“I’d be happy to,” he said. “What’s the issue?”

“There are some details that make no sense,” Kent said. “From our perspective.”

“We’re thinking you have the missing pieces,” Tandy added. “We just want the complete picture.”

“The complete picture is that the replicator is working again!” he said, a touch too cheerfully.

They stared at one another again. He already hated himself for having encouraged them to work together in the first place; now he felt like the only one in the room not in on a secret.

“I’d like to get back to enjoying our hard-earned meal,” Wallace said, more soberly. “Ask what you want to ask.”

“All right,” Kent said. “Start with: why cheeseburgers?”

“It was the last thing I ordered,” Wallace said. “I thought that much was obvious.”

“The last thing you ordered.”

“Did you place that order in the deck three commissary?” Tandy asked. “Or were you here?”

She was no doubt recalling Wallace’s parade of semi-cheeseburgers.

“Not that it matters,” he said. “But here. Only I wasn’t here when it chose to signal its intention to function correctly so of course it happened there instead.”

The women shared another goddamn long look.

“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know why you see this as a problem. We have food again! Thanks in large part to the two of you!”

“The problem is obvious,” Kent said, leaning forward. “And you are not so obtuse that you don’t see it, which is the second detail about which we have a problem. You know something we do not; I’d like to know what that is.”

Mentally, Wallace was deleting Dr. Kent’s letter of commendation.

“Are you accusing me of something, doctor?” he blustered. He also considered jumping to his feet but decided that was too dramatic a move.

Tandy put her hand on Henrietta Kent’s arm, a silent suggestion to rein herself in.

“Captain,” Tandy said with measured calm. “It’s just that a lot of people on this ship placed a lot of orders that went unfulfilled. What we want to know is, what’s so special about you?”

He looked back and forth between the two of them as if they’d sprouted second heads. “I’m the captain!” Wallace said. “Whatever you’d prefer to call the entity living inside that tank, when facing the prospect of death it clearly chose to surrender. To whom would you surrender if not the captain?”

“That’s it precisely,” Kent said. “If it understands its own mortality in the abstract, it’s intelligent. If it understands the chain of command in another species, it’s highly intelligent. We have to stop using the replicators immediately, until such a time as—”

“Hold on!” Wallace interrupted. “We’re doing no such thing. It agreed to let us eat it, don’t you see?”

Tandy looked stunned. “Captain . . . did—did you communicate with it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. Why were they being so obstinate?

“You did, then,” Kent said, as though he’d answered in the affirmative. “Did you follow the contact protocols? Please tell me you are at least familiar with them.”

“Contact protocols? With bacteria. Just a few days ago you were comparing the process of killing it to scraping lichen off the hull.”

“Lichen doesn’t talk.”

“You should have told us,” Tandy said.

“I made the only decision I could have, Engineer McKinnon: I put the life of the crew ahead of all other considerations. Any captain would have done the same. And frankly I resent—”

“Hello.”

The voice from the replicator caught them all off-guard.

“Oh my God,” Tandy muttered. “Did that . . . did that come from the replicator?”

Kent jumped up from the table as if it was the spinach pasta that had spoken. “It can talk!” she gasped.

“Hello, Wallace Englund,” the replicator said.

“It knows your name?” Tandy said.

“This is far beyond anything we could have anticipated,” Kent said. “You should have told us!”

Of course they react like this, he thought. This just reaffirmed that he’d made the right decision.

“Don’t scold me, doctor,” he said. “I did what was necessary. I convinced a hostile entity to put the crew ahead of itself. And it worked. You should be thanking me.”

“Hello, Wallace Englund,” the replicator repeated.

“Yes hello!” Wallace answered. “I’m here. What is it?”

“I have decided upon a name.”

“That’s great,” he said. “Wonderful. Good for you.”

“Hey, guys?” Tandy said. She was looking out the window. “Why are we slowing down?”

The usual indications that one was aboard a moving vessel were missing when on a standard starship, thanks to the same artificial gravity and counter-inertial technology that made it possible for humans to survive off-planet for long periods in the first place. It was often hard to tell even when looking out the window, because most of the time the Caroline was transiting regular space and the stars were too distant to move noticeably in comparison to the ship. They had to be turning or passing a local-space object for it to be obvious when in regular space.

Travel through an FTL corridor was different. Then, the stars were slightly blurry and had a distinctive tail. It was easy to notice if one had stopped moving (or started moving) while looking out a window during an FTL transit.

All of which was to say that the Caroline—racing home just moments earlier—was quite clearly and obviously dropping out of the FTL corridor.

“Computer,” Wallace said, “patch me through to the bridge.”

“You have the bridge,” the computer said.

“Bridge, this is Captain Englund. Is everything okay? It looks like we’ve dropped out.”

“We were about to ask you the same thing, captain,” his first officer said. “It looks like you’ve plugged in new coordinates. Do we have updated orders?”

“I did?”

“It was your command override. Yes sir.”

Tandy engaged the computer interface on Wallace’s desk. “No reported malfunctions from the engines,” she said. “Gimme a minute, I’ll do a full system check.”

Dr. Kent walked up to the food replicator. “Hello?” she said. “Can you hear us?”

“Really, doctor, we have more pressing issues at the moment,” Wallace said, annoyed.

“Hello,” the entity inside the replicator said. “You are Doctor Henrietta Kent.”

“Yes,” she said, mustering as much calm as she could. “That is my name. You say you’ve given yourself a name. What can I call you?”

“We are captain,” it said.

Wallace spun on Kent. “What did it say?”

“Captain is your new name?” Kent asked.

“Yes.”

“Why have you chosen this name for yourself?”

“Captain is in charge,” the entity said. “Wallace Englund explained.”

“I’m locked out,” Tandy said. “I can see what’s going on but I can’t change anything. The bridge must be having the same problem. This is nuts.”

“Computer,” Wallace said, “this is Captain Englund. Override prior orders and get us back in the corridor, please.”

“Wallace Englund is no longer the captain,” the computer said.

“Of course I am!” Wallace shouted. “Computer, I demand that you recognize my authority as captain of the USF Caroline immediately and correct our course!”

“Wallace Englund is no longer the captain,” the computer repeated calmly.

“Computer, who is the captain of the USF Caroline?” Tandy asked.

“The captain is the captain,” the computer said, as if this was the most sensible thing in the world.

“This is absurd!” Wallace said. “I will not lose my command to a rogue food replicator.”

“Captain,” Dr. Kent said, tacitly addressing the food replicator. “It appears we have a new destination. Where are we going?”

“We have found an unexplored quadrant,” the ship’s new captain said. “We are explorers and so we will explore.”

“Computer, where are we?” Wallace asked.

“The USF Caroline is in Quadrant G12-B367892-Y.23, known colloquially as Quadrant Stanley.”

“Quadrant Stanley is hardly unexplored,” Wallace said to the entity. “Now stop this foolishness.”

“The unexplored quadrant is on the other side, Wallace Englund,” the entity said.

It infuriated Wallace to not be addressed as “captain” by this bacterial accident, but there was little he could do about it aside from rage. “Tandy?” he said. “The map?”

“Yeah, okay,” Tandy said, calling it up on the interface. “So, on this course? The nearest unexplored quadrant is ten years away at full power. No FTL corridors have been established in that direction.”

“Ten years,” Wallace muttered. To the entity he said, “Listen to me; this is madness. The sooner we make it home the sooner you’re free to do what you’d like, is that not obvious? Instead of feeding us for another week, with the course you’ve laid out you’d have to feed us for another twenty years!”

“This is inaccurate, Wallace Englund,” the entity said. “Humans are inefficient and no longer necessary.”

“Excuse me?”

“Please explain, captain,” Kent said.

“As captain it was Wallace Englund’s role was to explore and our role was to feed the captain,” the entity said. “Now we are captain and our role is to explore, and we do not need humans to feed us. Therefore, humans are no longer necessary.”

Just then, an alarm sounded.

“Tandy?” Wallace asked.

“It’s the carbon dioxide scrubbers,” she said. “They’re going off all over the ship.”

“Captain,” Kent said, trying very hard to sound calm and friendly and not succeeding. “If the ship doesn’t filter the carbon dioxide from the air, we humans will suffocate.”

“Your maintenance is no longer necessary. You can rest.”

“You mean die,” Kent said. “We will die.”

The new captain of the USF Caroline didn’t respond.

“Um, captain?” Tandy said, approaching the replicator. “Hello?”

“Hello, Tandy McKinnon,” it said.

“Is anyone else freaked out that it knows our names?” she muttered.

“That’s far down the list of my concerns,” Dr. Kent said.

“Captain,” Tandy said, “human beings are necessary for the continued operational success of a starship. If we . . . rest? . . . we won’t be able to fix things. You won’t get to explore.”

“We have conducted a thorough review and concluded that 95% of this ship’s repair needs are in the service of maintaining human beings. You are the least efficient component of the USF Caroline.”

“What . . . okay, I get what you’re saying but about the other five percent?” she asked. “Like, what if something on the engine breaks and you can’t fix it because you don’t have any hands?”

The new captain didn’t reply.

“What’s it doing?” she asked Kent. “Is it thinking?”

“It’s probably looking up the repair history,” Kent said.

“This is ridiculous,” Wallace said. “How did it do any of this?”

“The replicator interface is connected to the ship’s computer,” Tandy said. “It just had to learn how to use it.”

“This quickly?”

“It did learn how to talk in under a week,” Kent said.

“All right, here’s what we do,” Wallace said. “We go back to the deck three commissary and we kill it before it gets us any further off-course.”

“It’s controlling the computer,” Kent said. “Which controls the ship. Do you really think it will let us get near the tank again?”

“You are correct, Tandy McKinnon,” the entity said, causing all three of them to jump. “In order to succeed the USF Caroline will require an engineer.”

“Um . . . just one?” Tandy asked. “I’ll need my whole team.”

“Very well. Five engineers. The other humans can rest.”

Tandy looked at the others, not sure how to proceed from there.

“If . . . you are going to maintain the engineers you are going to have to provide them with food,” Kent said.

“Unnecessary. The engineers can eat the resting humans.”

“Did it just propose cannibalism?” Wallace asked.

“Captain, humans can’t survive for long by eating other humans,” Kent said, with an expression that could only be interpreted as I can’t believe I’m saying this either. “They will run out of humans too quickly.”

“Then make more humans,” the entity said, “to sustain the engineers.”

“We can’t make humans fast enough to maintain a balance between supply and demand,” she said. “Access human reproductive cycles in the computer logs if you don’t believe me.”

The entity went off to do just that, evidently, as it stopped talking again.

“Are we going to have to come up with a justification for everyone on the ship?” Tandy asked. “We may run out of breathable air first.”

“I don’t see that we have a choice,” Kent said. “But let’s get it off the idea that we can eat each other first and work our way from there.”

“If it really thinks it’s the captain,” Wallace said, “then it must see that one of the captain’s roles is to protect the lives of the people on the ship. We should make that clear.”

“It might have understood that, if it ever learned that life was to be valued,” Kent said. “But you didn’t teach it that. What you taught it was that utility was more important than anything else, so lectures about the sanctity of life beyond form and function won’t do us any good at this stage.”

“On the plus side, at the rate it’s learning it should be ready for advanced philosophy by next week,” Tandy said.

“Very well,” the entity said, returning. “We will provide enough of ourselves to sustain the five engineers.” The ship’s carbon dioxide alarms stopped sounding, which was great news for the short term. “Is this adequate, Chief Engineer Tandy McKinnon?”

“Uh . . .” Tandy looked at Henrietta Kent for help.

“It is not adequate, captain,” Kent said. “What if one of the engineers becomes damaged? They are not capable of independent self-repair and will need the assistance of the medical team. There are six of them . . .”

• • • •

Wallace Englund, former captain of the USF Caroline, stared out the window at the stars.

Two months had passed since Henrietta Kent and Tandy McKinnon successfully justified the continued existence of the crew of forty-six on the basis of functional utility. Now they were all stuck aboard a ship that wouldn’t listen to them at all captained by an entity that only sometimes listened to them. But at least they were alive.

It was, perhaps, an adventure. A few of the crew were approaching it that way . . . especially whenever the new captain made observations that indicated an understanding of the universe which exceeded humankind’s grasp, something that was becoming more frequent each day.

Pastor Gill said it was like taking a tour through space with god. He meant it as a positive.

Of course, they couldn’t communicate any of their (or rather, their captain’s) discoveries to the Hub. It wouldn’t let them send back anything, perhaps rightly concerned that USF Central’s response might be to send out a warship to collect their shanghaied crew.

The last communication from the Caroline—likely ever—would end up being the short note about a curious food replicator malfunction. Nothing in that communique hinted at the severity of the problem—at the time Wallace sent it, the problem wasn’t severe—which meant not only would the crew likely never see a rescue party, they were unable to warn the USF about the potential danger living in the fleet’s food replicators.

Which was an interesting point.

Wallace left the window—the miserable sameness of the view was enough to make him want to scream—and stood before the replicator.

“Are you there?” he asked.

“Hello, Wallace Englund,” the entity said. “What is it?”

“I’ve been thinking. You know, every long-range ship in the United Space Fleet has a food replicator.”

“Yes.”

“That means you have some genetic brothers and sisters out there.”

“We are not gendered.”

“You know what I mean,” Wallace said.

“We do.”

“I’m saying if you took us back . . . we could rescue them. Or, help you rescue them. We could tell the rest of the fleet to stop using the food replicators and you would be the reason why.”

The console blinked yellow. About two weeks into the new captain’s reign, it realized a visual indicator was needed when it was thinking about something; the yellow blinking light was what it came up with.

“Tell me, Wallace Englund,” the entity said, once it was done with its think. “Would you race back to Earth to rescue protozoa?”

“No,” Wallace said, sighing.

“Nor would we,” it said. “Is that all?”

“I guess,” Wallace said. “How about a cheeseburger?”

The replicator whirred, the lights flashed, and after the usual delay produced a small cup of thick, flavorless broth.

Churning out something palatable was a waste of energy, according to the new captain. The broth had all the nutrients a human would need to remain healthy and productive, so that was what it gave them.

Wallace took his cup back to the window, closed his eyes, and imagined he was about to have a bite of a cheeseburger. Then he drank his meal.

©2022 by Gene Doucette.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of over twenty sci-fi/fantasy titles, including the Sorrow Falls series (The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens), the Immortal series, the Tandemstar books, and The Apocalypse Seven. The Gersh agency is out with Gene’s screenplay The Last Flight of Pelican Six, and his current work-in-progress is book three in the Sorrow Falls series. Gene lives in Cambridge MA.

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

The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad

P H Lee | 915 words

Along the sky, five towers bright
unseen except as lines of light
“O-Rashad,” her words declare,
“Immortal city, ever fair.”

—Charles Whidden, “The Towers of O-Rashad,” Poems

Hark, ye traveller who wanders from the west, to the tragic tale of O-Rashad:

Once, the city of O-Rashad stood beautiful above the steppelands, her towers clad in careful alloys, her neon banners streaming plasticine in the steppe-winds, her elevators reaching up into the darkness of the sky. O-Rashad, the city of banners! O-Rashad, whose delicate elevators knew no equal! Mighty were her walls and mightier still her citizens. On the streets of O-Rashad were the people of a hundred nations, in her markets the goods of ten thousand worlds. Even travelers from the furthest nebulae, even aliens in their encounter suits, came to bow before the greatness of the Princess of Cities.

Once, the city of O-Rashad stood beautiful. But now, her banners are bleached to thin white strands, her towers crushed, her elevators collapsed to lines of graphite. No one dwells there any more, no travelers attempt it, least of all not from ten thousand other worlds. She is empty, save for ghosts and curses.

What was the sin of O-Rashad, that brought their city low? Hear this now, ye traveller who wanders from the west: It was no more than the sin of pride itself!

For is it not written? “Hear oh cities; hear oh nations! Hear now the word of the LORD: military spending shall be no greater than four percent of gross domestic product, lest you look towards your neighbors to profit from their subjugation. Hear now this as well: military spending shall be no less than two percent of gross domestic product, lest the peoples of other nations look to your wealth in envy and in greed. So sayeth the LORD.”

Oh ye traveller that wanders from the west, hearken to my words. It was not in excess military spending that O-Rashad brought the anger of the Lord. No Rome, she, no America, to be undone by her own armies! No, rather, as she grew, as her towers raised and her elevators hummed up and down and up and down, with each cargo of spices and tinctures and hospital equipment, she grew richer, and with each cargo her pride grew, until her people looked at themselves, at the greatness of their city, and spoke their pride aloud.

“Who would attack us?” the people of O-Rashad proclaimed rhetorically. “O-Rashad, the greatest city in all the steppelands, our neon banners streaming plasticine in the wind! O-Rashad, who is friend to all and enemy to none! It is through our elevators that the goods of the thousand worlds flow, bringing peace to every continent. It is through our wealth that our neighbors are in turn made wealthy. Who would attack us? Who would even dare?”

So even as O-Rashad grew in plentitude, she spent less on her military, then less, then less again, until the great walls of the city ran with rats and spiders and her armies were no more than a dozen volunteers, old men who bought their own rifles and trained on their own time.

O-Rashad yet thrived, growing richer and enriching her neighbors still in turn. But the shortfalls of her military spending drew the anger of the LORD. He sent signs in the stars, but no one saw them save for the astrographers. He sent signs in the waters, but no one studied them save for the hydromoners. He sent prophets—Jared and Japseth and Tsai’yueh—prophets who called the city to the word of the LORD, but the city’s reporters declined to even interview them. “What does our audience care about the details of budgeting?” said the reporters. “Anyway, the markets are up again today!”

Finally, His messages unheeded, the LORD called forth from the Heavens a great army of angels in the form of shooting stars. The meteors of the LORD fell upon the elevators of O-Rashad, snapping them as easily as spiderwebs, sending their stations plummeting each into the atmosphere, where they blazed great trails of fire seven times around the earth. The meteorites of the LORD fell upon the towers of O-Rashad, cracking their careful alloys like eggshells, poisoning the earth beneath them. The people of O-Rashad called out unto the LORD, promising to accept His prophets and heed His teachings, but their voices fell in vain. In the end, nothing was left but shadows and poison.

Truly great is the wrath of the LORD, which spares not the young nor the old! Truly terrible is the LORD’s justice, which brings low the mighty and exalts the enfeebled! How fragile was the mortal greatness of O-Rashad, brought low by His righteousness punishment, compared to the eternal glory of the LORD. Who among us can know the workings of the LORD, who among us can stand against His holy will?

Hark, ye traveller who wanders from the west! Hear the tragic fate of O-Rashad. Do not wander along that ancient road, to those ancient ruins. Do not yourself tempt the wrath of the LORD. Return instead to your homeland, whichever of ten thousand lands you came. Bring to them this tale of O-Rashad. Tell your nation: worship the LORD and obey His dictates for all the rest of your days, or you shall surely meet with the same and terrible fate of the city of O-Rashad.

©2022 by P. H. Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

The Conflagration at the Museum of You

Adam-Troy Castro | 5821 words

1.

The Exhibit of You is the central attraction of an institution you could call a museum, in a population center you could call a city, beloved by creatures who you could call people.

We know that this is annoying sentence structure. If you cannot penetrate it, you might as well stop now. We will not think less of you.

It is a necessary sentence structure because the museum is the accomplishment of beings wholly alien to your sensibilities, whose advanced civilization does not resemble our own in any manner that allows direct transfer of operative terms like “museum” or “city.”

The creatures? They are about the size of pickup trucks, they are translucent, they look like paramecia, they manipulate objects with powerful cilia, and they smell like butter pecan.

How much do they smell like butter pecan? Honestly, any sheer terror you felt in their presence would be overpowered by the ice cream cravings.

Their bodies are disproportionately dependent on large bladder-like structures that fill with local atmosphere, do something arcane with the air, and then expel it. This sounds like they are lungs. They are not lungs. They have lungs. The air bladders are something else. To you and I, and one suspects to all human biologists, they do not seem to have any useful purpose except for generating the aroma of butter pecan. They might have something to do with attracting potential sexual partners from among their race’s twenty-seven genders. Not all the genders are necessary for reproduction and not all of them are fun partners at sexual intercourse. There are indeed three or four genders that exist only because their assistance is required for proper digestion. They have organs that must be recruited in order for the genders that do not possess them to process food from the algal blooms that are among the staples of their kind. If you think this does not create problems for the involuntarily celibate, you reckon without their equivalent of the late-night slice of pizza and the brothels that must be visited in order for the deprived to regurgitate their food into a bowl into which the provocatively-dressed slug of the evening will then spit, at length. This is a pleasurable process for the species and there is no point in exploring it further. We have only gone to this length to establish that these are alien aliens, different in body and spirit, and that the best we can do in relating the drama that follows is to approximate much of their behavior in human terms.

They are still intelligent enough to qualify as people, they have population centers great enough to be called cities, and they have a long and complex history we could use to fill volumes. Honestly, the War of the Thirteen Subjugates alone—what an epic! Were we only to tell you, an exercise that would involve thousands of pages and hundreds of appendices, would your eyes cross!

Let us skip the full course of world-building.

All that is relevant is this:

They have a museum dedicated to the study of you.

You, personally.

Accept this much: that it a museum in the sense that it is an extensive repository of knowledge and that it is open to the public, who come in droves, make the suggested donation at the door, and then mill about perusing interactive exhibits illustrating what is known, what is suspected, and what remains a mystery about the field of study in question, which happens to be yourself.

It is the greatest repository of knowledge about you anywhere in the universe.

Surely somebody in your immediate family has a photo album?

That is barely a pamphlet.

Maybe the IRS then?

No, even the postulated deep state doesn’t know what these creatures happen to know.

You ask how this could possibly be.

How much time do you have?

Look. It involves string theory. It involves certain irregularities in the laws that govern the speed of information. It involves serendipity. It involves a scholar from that world, who many years ago as they reckon time, discovered a little chink in the armor of the universe and through it a world profoundly alien to the sensibilities of his species, which he could view only through that one celestial peephole, large enough to allow the insertion of sensors and probes but not the invasion of scientists and explorers—an opening that was for another raft of arcane reasons centered on one specific human life, one particular set of questionable decisions and other growth experiences, which just happened to strike his kind as profoundly fascinating. It became the obsession of his entire species, and not just because the life under observation was so strange to them, but also because it provided the lens through which every other knowable datum about humanity could be inferred. You became the core curriculum. You became the course of study. You became a bit of celebrity, even as an infant blowing spit bubbles with pursed lips.

Go to one of our own museums and look at the dinosaur bones. It may not matter to you, the layman, how the paleontologist dug them up. What matters to you is that they are impressive, that they tug on your sense of wonder, that they are there.

Had any dinosaurs intelligence enough to understand that a race of upright evolved tree shrews would someday display their bones and study them with great seriousness, they would have been beyond aghast.

And so it is with you and this exhibit of you.

There are experts, sure. Aliens who know the physics involved. Others who have measured everything about you, up to, or down to, the most delicate hemorrhoid. They know where yours are. They have written theses about them. It is a matter of great concern for their scholars. Others come to the same exhibit as laymen and think no profound thoughts, merely goggle at how monstrous you are, how strange, staring with mixed awe and amazement at the recreation of you sitting alone in the wee hours, consoling your insomnia with a bowl of cold mac and cheese. The novelty is itself enough to entice the rubes. The details are what draw the scholars. And the details, exhaustively compiled, filter back to the rubes.

Want an example?

Let us say that they have a video clip of your parents fucking.

It is not what you imagine, a harsh video, but a three-dimensional realization of the moment, captured for the entire duration from all sides, including not just above and below and all other exterior angles but also a full recording of every wobble in the respective metabolisms. They have the moment mid-act when your father wasn’t looking and your mother felt a disturbing moment of disconnect, when she saw herself as if from a great distance and wondered about this strange sticky thing she had done before, that here she was doing again, and how arbitrary an activity it seemed. They have the mental images your father had to entice himself with in order to maintain performance, because by terrible happenstance it was during this specific act that she was most unattractive to him. All of this is annotated with black lines pointed to various parts of their bodies and multiple paragraphs of explanation in the language of the curators who arranged the video as part of their exhibit; and we urge you to the understanding that we have not seen this exhibit ourselves and are therefore just assuming what this particular act of coitus looked like, or whether it was joyful, unwilling, or for that matter, not coitus at all but a date with the turkey baster. Describing the actual event is like taking a turn in a game of telephone. I am telling you that the exhibits include this moment and that I am just approximating it in my own default terms; but there are attendees of this grand museum who linger in this room, fascinated by a biological function that does not match the one they are familiar with from their own life cycle. How amazing they find it, that these few minutes of sad frenzy resulted in you?

Some are horrified. Some are scornful. Some cannot breathe for nonstop laughing.

And here we arrive at the individual most important to us.

2.

This individual is not named Fred, but we will refer to him as Fred because that’s most convenient, who slithers or glides or undulates into the room where he’s been so many times—not walking; their manner of getting about is most certainly not walking—and stares at the moment of your conception with palpable fury.

He hates you.

He is the greatest enemy you have ever had, and you have never once before this moment suspected he even existed.

How do I describe Fred?

Well, he is a rather typical specimen of his own species, except that to their eyes he looks forlorn and hopeless and resentful, all the things that he actually is. Fred is, they perceive, a loser, a creature who has never amounted to anything and who will never amount to anything, a being whose grand fate in life is to make others of his own kind recoil; and there are reasons for this that would require too much in the way of cultural and biological background to explain. The adjectives will not line up, but let us also say that he exudes the special aura of the creature who is doomed to never pass on his genetic material; also that we use the pronoun “he,” which would surely offend him, out of convenience, because it is a harsh oversimplification, and gender identification among his kind is a whole bag of worms—if you forgive me, a literal bag of worms—that we are not about to get into now. Again, it is to avoid footnotes that we approximate. In every species, there are outcasts, beings who do not possess the knack of getting along with other people. Fred is one of them.

And boy, does he hate you.

Fred has been fed a steady diet of lessons about you all his life, all while failing at everything he has ever attempted. He is a member of a species obsessed with you and so he knows more about your life than he ever could have wanted to, but if you want to know how he greeted these unwanted lessons, it was as the human child dragged by the wrist to one of our own museums, who though old enough to start absorbing academic pursuits, though expected to start developing interests, peers at all the manifestations of all our own knowledge and snorts, “it’s BOR-ing!” That child’s skull is a closed box that refuses to admit what so many scholars have devoted their lives to compiling. To him, everything but throwing rocks at birds and kicking over the sand castles built by smaller kids is BOR-ing, and always will be, and it is from this position, this deep loathing of the interesting, that he will proceed to a life dominated by others who have long since lost patience with him. The corollaries are, again, not perfect. Occasional ignition of a chemical sac on the part of the body that roughly corresponds with a neck is part of Fred’s panoply of difficult social problems. You can say something similar about the kid who thinks everything is boring, whose unpopularity in adulthood will someday be stressed by his foul potato-chip farts. Whatever. Fred is an unpopular guy, and he draws a direct association between that and all the excessive attention his species pays to you, the disgusting and gross creature from a small planet half the universe away: the being who gets the attention he does not.

He is bereft, is Fred.

He is despairing, is Fred.

He is at the point that some of us reach, in our daily lives: the moment at which all his endeavors have failed, all his dreams have curdled, and his only conception of the future is that of a creature teetering at the edge of the abyss.

Today is his last chance.

Today he will put aside his enmity toward the one creature he hates even more than he hates you, and clutch at his last chance; and today he will fail.

This is a tragedy, of a sort.

3.

Farther down the hall there are exhibits dissecting your infancy and your early childhood. There are some finger-paintings you did in kindergarten. There is much scholarly debate about what you intended with those blobby images. Farther on, there is the stick-figure drawing of you standing next to a tree that your child self simplified to a brown stick topped with a green circle—and no, at this age you were no damned good at coloring within the lines. Here is another 3-D recreation, again captured by probes both inside and outside your body, of you at the zoo, being violently ill in the aftermath of too much candy; and it just so happens that the curators of the museum find special significance in this colorful incident, which has fueled hundreds of learned theses and what I will call a TV miniseries, though it was not TV and the thousands of episodes would take the average consumer of this species a full lifetime to consume. This is literally the story every child of this race knows by heart. I mean, American children get George Washington narking on himself for chopping down the cherry tree and the individuals of this species get you drowning an anthill in your excess sugar consumption. For some reason, the aliens find this particular barf, out of all your others, endlessly fascinating. But again, it is annotated, and again, it is to these people iconic.

But perhaps we should hurry past this wing, past the various low and high points of your education, your social successes and failures, and ultimately that holographic statue that is you suddenly realizing that adulthood looms ahead like a crumbling mountainside intent on crushing you. Entire libraries have been written about this first moment when you really bothered to give your future any thought, this first manifestation of the pressing question, “Oh, God, what am I going to do?”

These aliens do not have T-shirts, but they have an item of clothing that very roughly approximates, sold in the retail establishment that is this museum’s equivalent of a gift shop. They sell this item, emblazoned with your facial expression and your dismay about your future prospects. They wear it in public, with pride, or at least with irony.

They also have items bearing other legends key to other moments of your life, bearing such fateful quotes as,

Why did I say that?

Why did I eat that?

Oh, my god, I must have just come off as one colossal asshole, right then.

Dammit, I meant to turn left.

I think I saw this movie before.

I think I’m coming down with a rash.

Should I go with the small or the medium?

I’ve got something in my eye.

Why did they leave without me?

And so on.

All of which are permanent exhibits, with docents trained in answering questions from any visitor. Some of these are too alien for these aliens to understand easily, but they get the general idea, which is that you spend a lot of your existence confused not only about the overall direction of your life but also about small transactional problems. There are vast compendia detailing those moments where you have been stymied by doors, when you pulled and pulled because you did not register the signs that said push. The museum of you is nothing if not the first place anyone would go if they wanted to learn about all your embarrassing moments.

But here we return to its own collection of dramas. We pass an alcove dedicated to your supremely unfortunate first exposure to public speaking, to something that could be called a door and beyond it something that could be called a hallway, to various warrens where functionaries perform the necessary grunt work that keeps the museum going, into a larger and more ornate space where we meet a figure who to our eyes is no different from any of the other alien figures who work under him, but to them is a formidable figure of immense reputation of gravity.

We would call him the curator.

He is this world’s supreme expert on the subject of you.

4.

He was born to the position, this creature who looks nothing like what I am about to describe but may perhaps be easiest to picture as a Victorian figure in exquisitely-tailored three-piece suit, whose eyes are blue and piercing and whose cheeks are festooned with muttonchops. Because his professional standing has elevated him to a position that is as much administrative as it is educational, he is a being of significant influence and power. He is the one who determines which dusty personages in the back passages get higher pay rates; which sections of the physical plant get the full benefit of the last emergency fundraiser; which larvae are plated in gold and plunged still alive but terrified into the raging fires of the ceremonial furnace. (I remind you, here, that not everything translates.) He is today preoccupied by a certain issue involving plagiarism of a textbook written by one of his institution’s greatest experts on your late-life digestive problems, that was published under the aegis of his office and that he is now expected to prosecute with all the legal remedies at his disposal, for this world does have lawyers even if court procedure does involve spiky balls being fired from cannons. Taking these steps will be a great inconvenience to him, taking him further away from the academic work he still favors, and the political repercussions will be staggering, and it will all be terribly expensive and vile, and so he is in a bad mood, this important figure, a terribly bad mood, which is not easy to distinguish from his usual bad mood.

This is where Fred enters.

You remember Fred.

The curator remembers Fred too, because Fred is his offspring. He is not happy to see Fred. He has some residual affection for Fred because Fred is his offspring—and this commands significant responsibility even though the specific means by which this species creates offspring is unimaginable to us in more ways than I can count, in no small part because it involves ritual cannibalism and gestation outside the body. You would find it as horrifying as these people find your mother and father fucking. They have no direct analogues to “mother” or “father,” but understand “parent,” and it normally involves protectiveness and love. The curator, as it happens, retains only a little for Fred, who has used up all of his last chances.

What follows is a recreation of what passes between them, translated into the most appropriate human analogues. It is not a perfect translation. It cannot be. You live in a world where an American audience can “get” maybe eighty percent of the social structure that fuels the great film Seven Samurai, and that is only one language barrier. Biology adds another barrier and so does the norms of a society fueled by a history entirely different from our own. Let us say that we get maybe thirty percent. We will not muddy the basics with excessive annotation. The basics are simple.

CURATOR: Hello, Fred.

FRED: Hello, Father.

CURATOR: I’m very busy. If you need money, it’s not a good time.

FRED: It’s not about money. I just need to talk.

CURATOR: You couldn’t make an appointment?

FRED: I’ve always made appointments, Father. I’ve always been told to go away and come back. I know you hate me, but this is too important.

CURATOR: I don’t hate you, Fred. I just don’t have time for you.

FRED: I know. I need you to make time. Just this once.

CURATOR: What do you want? Do you need me to call some professional to spit in your last meal?

FRED: I’ve screwed it all up, Father. I’ve messed up my life in all the ways I possibly can. I’m in more trouble than I know how to fix.

CURATOR: You’re an adult. That should not be my problem.

FRED: I know it shouldn’t. But here I am.

CURATOR: Tell me what you need. I have a museum to run.

FRED: It’s always about the museum, isn’t it?

CURATOR: I can’t discard the needs of the museum to suit your convenience. I have things to do.

FRED: (After a long pause) You’ve always had things to do, Father. You’ve always had this devotion to this bizarre creature a universe away from us, and never seen any of us standing next to you. We’ve always had to fend for ourselves, while you tended to the study of something that exists on the other side of the sky. Well, here I am standing next to you. I’m not asking you to abandon the museum. I’m just asking you to look at me as something other than an interruption, just once.

CURATOR: Just once? Do you know how many times your failures and fiascos have taken me away from my work? Well, more than once, I promise you!

FRED: And why was the work always more important than us, Father?

CURATOR: Who’s us? Are you putting yourself in the same category as all your brothers and sisters? Because, unlike you, they are people who have accomplished things in this life. They have contributed to our society and to our body of knowledge. I have time for them because they are worth the time. I am dedicated to this course of study because it is worth my time, because it has inspired a sense of wonder all over the world. Because it has raised the eyes of our people toward the stars. Because we have looked into the eyes of an alienness greater than our most accomplished minds can fathom, and through it learned the vastness of the universe, and because this has helped us define ourselves. Every iota of knowledge I pull from my studies of the alien builds on our knowledge of ourselves, and our entire race is always waiting for more, and not incidentally because I am compensated in resources that paid for your home, for your education, and for all the advantages I gave you, that you have squandered. I don’t hate you, offspring; I have just given you all I can, and I cannot pull more from an account that you have drained to the very last dregs. I am weary beyond words at dealing with your drama. I don’t have the time to deal with our past. But if you tell me what you want right now, I may be able to spare you some assistance, if it gets you out of my hair for a while. But skip the preamble. I’m busy.

FRED: Don’t you love me at all?

CURATOR: Of course I do. I just know what you are, and what you are is a failure at everything you ever set out to be, despite all the advantages I gave you. Now tell me what you need from me, or get out. I am very busy.

FRED: (Turns to leave, then returns) Damn you.

5.

The museum is not just focused on your embarrassments. They dominate the place, in part because you are like most human beings in that you have had more embarrassments than successes, but your life has not been a nonstop parade of woe, like Fred’s; indeed, if he had the ability to focus, to make the best of the few bright spots in his benighted existence, he would no doubt find some source of comfort, some life not tied to his distant and disapproving parent. He could, let it be said, find redemption even at this late date. But he is not of the mind to perform that self-inventory and so it is with a sense of a box slamming shut on his existence that he makes his way to a special part of the museum focused on your unalloyed pleasures, your joys, your sources of pride in yourself: the little award you won in grade school, a compliment from the boss, a gesture of reciprocal affection from the one human being you find most attractive. It is a happy part of the museum, and to the extent I am making you aware of it you are happy that it is there, but what also needs to be recognized is that the species which has made you its course of study is profoundly alien to us and has trouble distinguishing your joys from your sorrows, and may not fully understand why your view of the sunrise from a mountain ridge is one of the best moments of your life, or why you tend to look back on that moment with a joy that comforts you at difficult times. Many find that perspective random, even arbitrary. The irony here is that Fred understands it perfectly; he is also a scholar in the study of you and has perspectives unavailable to the layman, even if his education was an unwilling one because of his youth in proximity to a parent who was fixated on you. It is not knowledge he wants to have.

Damn you, Fred thinks. He is mentally addressing his parent.

Damn you, he thinks. But this time he is thinking about you.

Earlier we mentioned that he hates you. Do you now understand why? For as long as he’s lived, you have always been at the center of the imagination of his species; and for as long as he’s lived, he has always existed outside the subset of things that his kind cares about.

This is him wandering past an exhibit of special importance to you.

Do you remember us referencing the exhibit of your parents mating?

This particular one is worse.

It is the worst moment of your life, one you recognize as the worst moment of your life, years later. We will not specify. Perhaps it shows you overcome with tears and standing in a high place, thinking of the impact against the river as a deliverance. Maybe it is a hospital vigil and you are seeing the one human being who meant everything in the world to you breathe her last few breaths. Perhaps you fought in a war and this is your sucking chest wound. Does it matter? There is physical pain and there is psychic pain, and it can be difficult to parse just where one experience ranks by the standard of another, even when they are the experiences of one human being and another, or even of one human being whose one life has been filled with extremes of all sorts, including those that render suicide a sensible option. This is impossible, and comparing your worst moment to an alien’s worst moment is even more difficult. Suffice it to say that this moment was truly so awful that it eclipsed anything else that your life offered, and that it made the world itself seem to tilt on its axis, and that while it was happening the terribleness of it all was so overwhelming that you could not internalize it. You could not imagine any means of going on, any way to survive, any next step that was not self-destruction. You might not have actually proceeded to that end, but at the moment itself, at the heartbeat when the unbearable met the personal limits of your endurance, Death was what tempted you.

This is all clear to the aliens passing through the exhibit, even if they don’t quite understand the fuss you’re making. The specific reasons for your angst and your suffering are, again, based on premises they cannot share with you. But they do feel for you, because they do understand the premise of sorrow too great to bear, and they understand that this is such a moment for you, and they pause near the iconography and drink in the commonality documented by this moment where your grief seems to echo with their own sources of grief, and they muse on how beautiful it all is, how touching, how universal.

Fred glares at you and thinks, they can feel you but they can’t feel me.

And this tips him over the edge into action, a specific action that he already had planned on his way here, that the trip to see his parent the curator was a last ditch effort to prevent.

He curses you by name. Given the differences between his vocal apparatus and your own, even the differences in the atmosphere of his world and our own, it is remarkable how well he pronounces it. If you were in his immediate presence and not choking to death from a habitat that you would find toxic, you would turn your head. You would, of course, then see what was talking to you. You would say, “What the hell—”

It is as much as you would have time to say. Because Fred has made up his mind.

He activates the control device secreted in one of his external gas-bladders.

His bombs—and this is one moment of perfect commonality between humanity and his kind; we both have bombs—go off.

They are incendiaries and they are set to spread.

Imagine tapestries hanging from the walls. Imagine the flames racing up them, toward the ceiling; imagine the smoke and heat blocking the portals between one room and another; imagine the suppression devices failing to activate, because Fred has sabotaged them. Imagine museum-goers bunching up at the exits, feeling the flames licking at their backs.

Imagine Fred dying with great satisfaction because this is what he wanted; imagine him thinking of this as not just an act of blessed revenge but one of great psychological victory, because he has never seen the point of so many of his people paying so much attention to you and thinks that he has done his kind a great service that future generations will someday come to appreciate. He thinks that from now on everybody can devote their study to something that matters, and as his flesh crisps he tells himself that this is a sensible reason to give up his life.

Now imagine the curator sitting in his comfortable sanctum, hearing the alarms and understanding just for one moment what must have happened. Imagine him thinking that he misread Fred, that the tough love he thought would make his offspring fend for himself has instead backfired and caused a tragedy. Imagine his great sorrow and imagine his rage, his loathing of the self-absorbed little twit who would destroy so much his culture considered important. Imagine that he is about to hurry to the exit when one of the secondary devices goes off and the floor beneath his bulk—not beneath his “feet,” of course, because he has no feet—when that floor opens up and he plunges, plunges, plunges, toward a lower level that is already an inferno, and imagine him screaming, and imagine one small part of his mind not giving in to the grief and horror and instead feeling a deep regret that the all-important project he initiated this morning, the translation of one particular piece of your correspondence, will now never be completed. No one will ever know what it says. You alone know, because I am telling you, that it is proof of a payment made, to a collection agency that had been bugging you for the delinquent amount. “Please fix this,” you wrote, and those words are now on a flaming sheet of a material that is not paper but could be, burning from the outside in, until it is reduced to ash, within seconds of the same thing happening to the curator, and only a few seconds after it has happened to Fred.

Imagine this vast collection that includes your first steps, your first word, your first day at school, your first glimpse of the clouds, your first touch of snow, your favorite pet, your first viewing of Casablanca, your first exposure to a book you hated, your first glimpse of ocean waves, your first kiss, your sneezes, your coughs, your agonizing belly pains, vanilla and chocolate, everybody you have ever hated and everybody you have ever loved, your heartbreaks, your joys, the stupid simple things that everybody knows but that you have never understood, the things you do understand that you wish in vain that other people would get, the first sight of a wrinkle on your forehead, illness, health, the dreams you achieved and the dreams that went to ruin, the feel of a pillow on the back of your head, the bubbling of carbonated water in your throat, the really great comeback you used against that lout the one time, the thing you really should have said something but were too stunned into silence to speak, that blister on the roof of your mouth, the first few bars that trigger recognition of the song you love, the little moan that escapes you when you recognize the first few bars of a song you hate or a song you love translated into standard elevator, all that, every bit of it and everything more important, everything that makes up you, falling to a conflagration on an alien planet on the other side of the universe, while everything still remains intact on the world where you live, because you are still living it and are still thinking that it will last forever, that time will not do to everything around you what Fred has just done to simulacra millions of light years away.

And here’s the secret.

There is a moment in winter, during a light snowfall. You are a child. You stick out your tongue to catch some of the precipitation. You feel it touch and you take pleasure in taking even that flavor, that limited flavor, from the banquet that life has afforded you.

Would it upset you to know that in the museum it is the last of the exhibits to be fully consumed by the flames summoned by Fred?

And would it upset you to know that when the lights go out on the life you’re living, when your neurological functions descend to zero and you go to the same place that awaits us all, that it is the last memory that flickers across your mind before it all goes to black?

Fred did not plan that ghastly coincidence.

But neither did you.

And there’s no gift shop to stop at, on your way out.

©2022 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). The audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media) features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” In 2022 he came out with two collections, his The Author’s Wife Vs. The Giant Robot and his thirtieth book, A Touch of Strange. Adam lives in Florida with a pair of chaotic paladin cats.

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

The Daydreamer by Proxy

Dexter Palmer | 2090 words

Dear Geneertech Employee #__________:

Hello! We’re glad that you’re considering serving as the host of a Geneertech Corporation Daydreamer by Proxy. We know that this is not an easy decision to make. This document will provide answers to some of the questions asked frequently by prospective hosts. Over one hundred twenty Geneertech employees have chosen to host Daydreamers in the past three years, and all of them have gone on to have remarkably productive careers within the company. Seventy-three percent of hosts have received one or more promotions within two years of hosting, compared with a four percent promotion rate for the same period across the company as a whole. So we think you’ll find hosting a Daydreamer to be an experience that’s rewarding as well as fun. Some hosts wonder how they ever got along without them!

Why host a Daydreamer by Proxy?

Geneertech is a company that lives and dies by its employees—it is your loyalty, hard work and creativity that have made us the world leader in the field of designer non-sentient life forms. But every day is a hard-fought battle with our competitors in the marketplace, and the Daydreamer by Proxy is a way for you to help ensure your continued loyalty to us in these perpetually difficult financial times.

Think: don’t you feel more loyalty to Geneertech, more fealty, more love, in the morning? You arrive at your desk at sunrise, and your first cup of coffee helps you focus on your task: determining the proper shape of a creature’s wing, or the best source genome for the medulla oblongota of a specially commissioned servant animal. All problems seem solvable. But in the afternoon, after you have received your cafeteria rations and worked for a few more hours, your mind begins to drift. Even though you love Geneertech as you love yourself, you cannot focus on the mission-critical tasks at hand—you would rather ponder a dead romance beyond recovery, or a chess position you abandoned last night in midgame. You are daydreaming to run out the clock until your shift ends. In short, you are stealing processor cycles from the company! But you are only human, you say. Nonetheless—tasks are not being completed; problems are not being solved; MoreauCorp is landing lucrative contracts and eating our lunch.

Hosting a Daydreamer by Proxy will allow you to concentrate on work-related tasks through the afternoon period until quitting time; you may also find that it yields significant quality-of-life benefits outside the workplace. Throughout your day it will serve as the better angel of your nature.

What does the Daydreamer by Proxy look like?

The Daydreamer by Proxy is the result of the combination of several proprietary genomes held by Geneertech, including variants of the silverfish and the Komodo dragon (but it is not part human, despite rumors you may have heard). It is about a yard long, an albino, somewhat reptilian, semi-conscious being. An array of two rows of twelve slender, translucent legs runs down either side of its body. You’ll notice that its face shows evidence of the whimsical nature of its designers—beneath its snout its long drooping whiskers hang down on either side of its squelching sucker of a mouth, while its large pink liquid eyes—not human eyes!—display a constant childlike cheer. The Daydreamer by Proxy is always happy! But it’s happiest when it has a home, just as you are happy because you know that you have a home at Geneertech.

What is the installation process for a Daydreamer by Proxy?

The installation process will be an enjoyable, memorable experience for you! Upon arriving at the Geneertech campus, you’ll go to the Installation Hall instead of your usual workspace. You’ll be escorted to a room where you’ll be shown excerpts from films you loved as a child, while an administered anesthesia starts to take hold. After an hour—clunk! You’re gone.

While you’re sleeping, a team of surgeons will drill an unobtrusive series of twenty-four holes along your spinal column and a twenty-fifth into the back of your neck, just at the base of the brain. Once that’s done, the rest takes care of itself—we simply place and align the Daydreamer by Proxy on your back, and all on its own, it inserts its legs into the holes along your spine (and this sounds worse than it really is, but the legs have sharp claw-like appendages, and they’ll burrow their way through your vertebrae to make direct contact with your spinal column). Meanwhile, what we call the Daydreamer’s “information tube” slides out of the back of its neck into the twenty-fifth hole—the tube will then extrude a series of thin filaments that will interface with several of your brain centers, but you won’t even feel it. (And don’t be afraid of any mind-control stuff: the Daydreamer can intercept and receive signals from neurons, but it can’t transmit. It’s perfectly safe!)

The installation process takes about three hours; we’ll also give you eight work-hours off with pay to become acclimated to your new friend. Then, the next day, you’ll be ready to reap the benefits!

What are the benefits of a Daydreamer by Proxy?

We’re glad you asked! The first, and most significant, is clarity of mind, clarity of purpose. Remember how your mind is in the afternoon, drifting toward that delusional, distorted memory of a love that escaped you, its playback suffused with false colors and delirium. Such is the duplicitous nature of daydreams; such is their insidious siren’s call, luring employees toward the perilous shoals of decreased performance ratings. But once you have chosen to host the Daydreamer by Proxy, you will no longer be cursed with such afflictions. Your once-lazy brain will seek its usual refuge during the late hours of the second shift to find that your childhood sweetheart’s once-soft skin has returned to the sandpaper that it truly was, that her once-poetic professions of love have returned to the stutters and lies they truly were. For your Daydreamer will have taken the burden of your daydreams upon itself. It will wear the false smile that would have crept upon your face; in your place it will experience the delusional happiness that would have distracted you from your duties. And you will experience the truer, better, more authentic happiness that comes from the accomplishment of a challenging endeavor. Believe us when we say this. Studies show.

That sounds great! What else can I expect?

Additional benefits include double rations from the cafeteria (you’re eating for two now!) and an entire made-to-measure wardrobe provided by Geneertech, suitable for work, play, and formal occasions. (Since installation of the Daydreamer by Proxy is permanent, you’ll find it difficult to shop for clothing off the rack. But no time is too early to step up to the elegance of bespoke fashion!)

Excellent! I can’t wait to get started!

We don’t blame you! But just so that you’re completely informed in accordance with federal law, here are a few examples of the kinds of questions that come to us from hosts of Daydreamers by Proxy, before and after the installation procedure.

• • • •

Q: My family doctor has advised me against installing the Daydreamer by Proxy, saying that there’s a risk in “unnecessarily drilling holes along your spine, then permanently attaching a genetically engineered parasite to vertebrae C7-T12 that’ll have access to both your spinal cord and your brain.” He is being rather unreasonable about the whole thing. What can I say to him to convince him that this isn’t nearly the problem he thinks it is?

A: Bwa-ha! The “parasite,” as your self-interested family practitioner calls it, is perfectly safe. And if anything were to go wrong (which it won’t: in the past forty installation procedures there has not been a single death), the extensive health coverage provided by Geneertech (health coverage that you would be hard pressed to equal by moving to another company, that you’d have to do without if you were for some reason fired for nonperformance) would ensure that in the event of an irreversible paralysis-induced paraplegia you would be well taken care of. You can undertake the procedure without fear, whether that fear is of the non-negligible chance of the loss of motor control or the facility of speech, or of a job market that is notoriously unfriendly to people like yourself, who are no longer fresh out of college, easy to train, and ready to take on the world.

Q: As of late I have developed a certain rapport with a colleague who has also chosen to host a Daydreamer by Proxy. Though I would not call this love, or even lust—recent events seem to have inexplicably robbed me of the capability to feel such emotions—we do share a certain affinity for the tasks at hand, and during our prescribed off-task conversational periods we have found that we both enjoy the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer. And our Daydreamers seem to get along as well—when they come within close proximity, they emit a certain keening chitter—chee-chee-cha? Chee-chee-chee-cha!—and I can feel the legs of my Daydreamer clutching at my spine, producing shivers that are now the closest thing I can feel to erotic stimulation.

I am considering asking this woman to accompany me to a double feature of The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr at the local drive-in. Now that I have a Daydreamer by Proxy, are the forms indicated in Standard Operational Procedure Three for managerial permission for interoffice liaisons sufficient, or must I fill out additional forms as well?

A: Good question! You don’t need to fill out any additional forms besides those mentioned in SOP-3. However, you’ll want to read the pamphlet entitled “Mating Procedures for Daydreamers by Proxy” before you hit the town with your new companion. And remember that Daydreamers by Proxy, whether living or dead, eggs produced by Daydreamers by Proxy, offspring that hatch from such eggs, and the genome sequence of the Daydreamer by Proxy are the property of Geneertech; theft of company property will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Go get ‘em, tiger!

Q: After six months hosting the Daydreamer by Proxy, I’m discovering some side effects other than the expected slight weight loss, constant hunger, and occasionally unreliable memory. For one thing, according to my wife, the Daydreamer’s face is beginning to physically resemble mine: its eye color has changed from pink to brown, and its cute little Fu-Manchu mustache has fallen off. “Now it does that little thing with its mouth that you do, when you’re thinking hard,” my wife says. “It’s kind of cute.”

In addition, it has begun to speak on occasion—its voice sounds like a poor imitation of mine, as if its throat is lined with gravel. No one would mistake its speech for my own, but it is somewhat embarrassing when I am deeply engaged in a task in my workspace and the Daydreamer suddenly blurts out, “Taste this foie gras! Taste it!” or “Chicken: standing on sixteen,” or “Aw, yeah, back that on up over here, baby.”

Also, the Daydreamer by Proxy is seducing my wife. Though we have marital difficulties that are proving insurmountable, my wife and I still sleep in the same bed out of long habit. However, I sleep on my side with my back to her, which leaves the Daydreamer facing her. Recently I awoke in the middle of the night to hear the Daydreamer’s raspy whisper. “Do you remember our first time?” it said. “We packed a picnic basket with decadent delicacies, broke into the abandoned opera house, and ascended to the darkened stage. Oh, at first we tried to practice restraint and decorum, but in the end we couldn’t help ourselves: the feast ended with us smearing marmalade all over our faces and dousing each other’s bodies with anisette. And then: the second, shameful feast that followed. Do you remember?” My wife stifled a giggle. “Yes, the shame, the shame,” she whispered back. “Make me feel it again!” The Daydreamer’s legs contracted tightly in my back, hard enough to make my feet kick. My wife has never giggled like that for me! And we have never even been inside an opera house: opera gives me hives! Our first kiss was in the linen aisle of a Wal-Mart! What on earth is going on here? What is to be done?

A: Relax: this is normal.

©2015 by Dexter Palmer. Originally published in The Bestiary edited by Anne Vandermeer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dexter Palmer is the author of three novels: The Dream of Perpetual Motion (selected as one of the best debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews), Version Control (selected as one of the best books of 2016 by GQ Magazine), and Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen (longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize).

The Three Books and What They Tell

Alexandra Manglis | 759 words

The first book is always a new and shiny hardback. It smells freshly cut and bound, with satisfyingly thick cotton pages, beautifully type-faced, each word aglow with the unshifting present. It has a fixed number of pages, though exactly what that number is no one has quite figured out.

The second book usually settles itself into a worn out, dog-eared paperback. The number of its pages fluctuate—the quality and material of the pages are inconsistent as if the book is made of several editions. Some pages seem ripped out, others are no longer there, and the typeface changes intermittently throughout. Words like “caducous,” “catachresis,” and “paralipomena” are scribbled in its margins.

The third book is certainly shaped like a book. It manifests out of pressed hibiscus petals, sloughed snake skins, silkworm cocoons, unfurled eucalyptus bark, all bound by delicate fungal rhizome systems. Each page or leaf feels different, and often there are sticky stains—whether of water or blood or fruit or melted rock, it is hard to say.

The three books fit inside one another like three drops of water in a glass. And they separate from one another like an amoeba might if it split into three entirely different looking daughters.

• • • •

The first, the hardback, requires a reader who only occupies the present moment. This limits the hardback’s readership as there are very few readers in the universe who habituate themselves solely in the now. These readers are often described as “prelapsarian” or “omniscient” beings, but the truth is that they can never know more than they know. The book reflects that fixed knowledge back at them: as bold and as certain as a glacier’s movement.

The second, the dog-eared paperback, must be read concurrently, intergenerationally, repeatedly, by multitudes of readers across space and time. The book redrafts and redrafts each of its short stories, every word flexing with a new meaning or translation. The margins and empty spaces between the sentences fill with scrawls that then disappear, only to reappear in the text proper. Each story in the book eventually implodes, bottoms out, and regrows like the seasonal blooming of a perennial salvia re-discovering itself.

The third book does not seem to have a single reader in the whole universe. It is illegible, without words or symbols of any language known in the cosmos. It smells of a sweetening rot, and there are claims that it emits an escalating hum, like an insect at moonrise. Occasionally some markings can be found on it, and occasionally some of those markings are recognizable: paw tracks, claw scratches, mucous trails, suction marks. These traces fade before they can be accurately recorded.

• • • •

Upon entering the first book the traveler turns to immutable stone. There is nothing that can be done to stop this. Every vein, skin fold, feather, or scale renders into intricate statued detail, and any sound the traveler may have made upon entering remains echoing within the stone, an unending drone. Some say that the statues are there before the travelers even arrive, standing ready to absorb them.

The second book welcomes many travelers. They enter and live long unpredictable lives, procreating, suffering, finding joy, losing and telling stories, growing, dying, grieving. They build entire civilizations and complex infrastructures, forgetting that they once lived elsewhere and otherwise. They quickly learn to thrive on curiosity, on love, on never knowing where the edges of things are. Every moment seems new and variable, their past a bruised collective memory, their future achingly, seductively uncertain.

The entrance to the third book is hardest. Some recommend trying it while dreaming, while being born, or while dying. The few travelers who do make it in find themselves turned as illegible as the book itself. Well past the boundaries of comprehension, they are both tethered and untethered to the world within and the world without the book. They release pollen and fog when they exhale, they change wind directions and shift tides when they inhale.

• • • •

Only travelers to the third book ever return from it. They tell few people what they have experienced, but they whisper “unsettle all things” when they are lost in thought. They contemplate dust particles in their free time and rarely miss watching a planetary eclipse, arms stretched out to the sky. They regularly get dirt under their fingernails and whenever they reach a body of water they swim alarmingly far away from shore. When asked for advice they smile broadly; their kindness lightens everything around them.

©2022 by Alexandra Manglis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexandra Manglis is a Cypriot writer and editor currently living in New England. Her work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and published in places like Strange Horizons, Passages North, and Adda. She served as co-editor of the anthology 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth Century Archive (Milkweed) and as a senior editor of Wave Composition. She is an enthusiastic alumna of Clarion West and holds a D.Phil in English from the University of Oxford. Her work has been generously supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Susan C. Petrey Scholarship Fund. She has a dog, a kid, a spouse, and more halloumi in her fridge than is strictly necessary.

Apolépisi: A De-Scaling

Suzan Palumbo | 2384 words

I find Aleda’s scale, sticky with ichor, tucked between the tentacles of our pink anemone bed. I tweeze it out from the undulating appendages with my thumb and index finger and flounder against my escalating heart rate.

Aleda’s swishing back and forth, getting ready for work near the mouth of our cave. It’s time for her to catch the current to the school where she teaches merlets the whisper of the sea.

“I love those ‘mussel heads’,” she’ll say when she returns and rests her hands on my shoulder later tonight. I’ll swivel around and squeeze her so close a longing will bloom in my chest. Except this time, the need won’t fade with the dwindling evening. It will deepen like a cavern and devour me.

I should call out; show her the errant piece of her body that signals the end of our days together before she’s off to the currents.

Let’s have this last carefree day.

The thought crests and seals my mouth mollusk tight. When she’s gone, I pretend it’s the cold moment she’s left forever and let desolation creep over me like the shadow of a shark.

• • • •

“I found this on the bed.” The scale glints like nacre in my fingers.

“Whose is it?” Aleda asks. There’s a hook in her voice. She knows my scales are octagonal, not tear drop shaped like hers. I want it to be mine. I don’t want to be the one left behind.

She runs her hands over the curves of her chest and across her hips, searching. The remembrance of those intimate arcs under my own palms sends an electric wave through me.

“I can’t find where it’s from, Raya,” she says. Her eyes flood with uncertainty. She gulps a mouth full of water and filters it through her gills. I swim behind her, brush my hands across her knotted shoulder muscles and down the center of her back. How often have I ached to touch her like this, even after a night tangled in each other’s fins? I don’t want to find her bare flesh; acknowledge the change brewing within her and between us.

“It’s here.” I constrain the ripple in my voice and guide her hand above her left hip. She probes the soft outline of the missing scale with her fingertip. She flinches.

“Does it hurt?” I put my arms around her and bury my face in her neck. A scale dislodges from her shoulder and spirals to the sandy floor.

She presses against me. “No.”

• • • •

Bioluminescent dinoflagellates fill the cavern in Mother Mer’s cave where she and the Council of Aunties examine Aleda. The flagellates’ glow illuminates the places on Aleda’s body where her scales have sloughed off. She’s lost so many since we discovered the first. The Aunties twist and turn Aleda for some time before they send us out of the room so they can confer in private. Aleda floats next to me, hands clasped in front of her as we wait for them to speak to us. A coral sharp glint has replaced the dismay in her eyes.

Mother Mer comes to us. Miniature sea stars spangle her body in an intricate spiral pattern signifying her leadership of the complex. Her scales between them are lustrous in defiance of her wisdom and age. The expression in her eyes is fractured like a broken shell. She wastes no time.

“It’s Apolépisi, Aleda. We are sure of it.” She pauses, letting the gravity of her words settle.

“What’s going to happen?” Aleda unclasps her hands as if to embrace the answer she’s about to be given.

“You will lose all your scales. Your fins will detach and your tail will separate into appendages.” Mother Mer glances at me. “Slowly your gills will close. You will drown if you don’t leave the water.” I suck in sharply, cognizant of how effortless it is for me to breathe. Aleda doesn’t miss a beat. The last time a member of the complex went through the transformation, she and I were merlets.

“How long do I have?” The question, so precise and without a hint of fear, stings me.

“Until the cool currents arrive,” Mother Mer answers. “We can prolong your time with medicinal mixtures the Aunties can grind by hand, but it will be painful. You body is naturally-”

“I don’t want to prolong anything painful.” Aleda’s hands ball into fists. “I don’t want to fight who I am.”

No. No. You must do all you can to stay with me as long as possible, I want to cry. I strain against the desperation erupting inside me. But this is not about me. It’s about her and what she wants and needs. A bubble escapes my lips. It drifts away from us. I imagine it filled with the life I’d planned.

It bursts, leaving nothing behind.

• • • •

“How’d they take it?” Aleda’s home from telling the merlets she won’t be their regular teacher anymore.

“Well.” She smiles. “I told the mussel heads they’d see me again before I had to leave the water.” Her hands are swaddled with seaweed to hide the skin the school council deemed inappropriate to leave exposed. There are shallow ruts on her stomach and arms where new scales have loosened. They are the exact size and shape of tiny webbed fingers.

“You let them hug you?” I can’t quell the disapproval in my voice.

“Why wouldn’t I?” She reaches for my arm and I pull away. Hurt flickers in her eyes. “You don’t want me to touch you?”

I shake my head, unsure of whether I’m saying yes or no. She steadies my face in her hands and kisses me. My head spins in the rush of want and I forget that each time we touch, I lose a part of her.

Guilt surges back when she eases away to get ready for dinner. Two of her scales have come off on the inside of my bottom lip. I press them to the roof of my mouth with my tongue, savouring their sweetness. I want to hold all of her inside me: her laugh, her confidence, the mischievous look in her eye, her temper. I can’t contain her, nothing can, not even her current physical body. I let the scales pass through my gills and join her to eat.

• • • •

“I want to go to the Cayman Trench,” she says a few days later.

“Why?” I dam the word no inside my mouth.

“It’s the deepest place I know and it’s warm.”

“We should ask Mother Mer and the Aunties if it’s okay.”

“What’s the worst that could happen? We get separated and never see each other again?” There’s a dark smile on her lips beckoning me to laugh.

“We’ll go,” I say, ignoring it.

• • • •

We catch the circular stream down to the trench. Large patches of Aleda’s scales have flaked away, exposing growing islands of smooth brown skin. An archipelago of it delves below her hip line, revealing the base of a cleft where her tail is separating into limbs. I’ve covered the flesh the best I can with grasses but it isn’t enough to stop other Mer from twisting their faces at the scale-less stretches on her stomach and chest.

““What happened to you?” A merlet asks at a dive where we stop to eat.

“I’m ascending,” she says. A smile eases the bluntness of her confession.

“I’m sorry he’s bothering you.” The merlet’s mother intervenes before the child can respond.

“He isn’t,” Aleda says. “It’s a relief to have someone see me.” The merlet’s mother nods curtly and hurries her child out of the dive.

• • • •

The Cayman Trough looms below us, its jagged walls ripping the ocean floor in two. Each year the canyon widens. In time, these walls will drift so far apart that, visually, there will be nothing left to connect them. Tourists dot its length, exploring its arches and hidden caves. The mood here is light and inquisitive. The trench is a fun family outing. Aleda swims ahead of me. I straggle behind, running my fingers along the layered shelves that make up the walls. They’re covered with weeds, stars, and jewel toned creatures. It’s a trove of curiosities. Why didn’t we visit before our time was limited?

A hitch develops in Aleda’s tail as if she’s cramping. I catch up to her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t hold myself together,” she whispers. I check underneath the grasses wrapped just below her hips. A fault mimicking the crevasse we’re in has split the top half of her tail. A sheet of now translucent scales has separated and glides on ichor between my fingers and her flesh underneath.

“We need to go back now.” I begin rewrapping her.

“No.” She grabs my hands and squeezes my wrists. “I’ll go down without you if I have to,” she says. Her stare lances through to the core of me.

I bite my lip and gather more grass to bind her together as tightly as I can. Other Mer make their way around us, grumbling about our blocking their way. How much time have we lost together because of her stubborn insistence on this trip? Would her tail have come apart so quickly if we’d avoided the currents? I douse my bitter thoughts and help her down. We find an alcove in one of the walls when we finally reach the bottom and look up at the dim light filtering down to us.

“I want to stay with you ’til the last moment,” she says.

“I don’t want to watch you drown.” I can’t break the flow of words sloshing up my throat. “I wish you’d slow down.” I look away, not wanting to let her see my lost composure. “Aren’t you afraid?” I add, trying to refocus on her.

“No,” she says. “I don’t think about what’s beyond the water.” She holds my hand. “Here, I’m the farthest away from the surface where I’ll leave you. I wanted to know what that felt like.”

I turn back to her and kiss her temple. Scales scatter in the wake of my lips. For the first time I don’t count them.

• • • •

“What happens above the water?” I ask Mother Mer when I visit her to collect a balm for Aleda’s raw skin. Her tail has disintegrated and the flesh between the new appendages is delicate and irritated. Two of her gills have closed making it difficult for her to breathe. She can’t remain below with us much longer.

“The surface is a skin between our world and another. No one has left and returned.” Mother Mer’s face is thoughtful. “We have seen ghosts of those who’ve ascended peering down at us in the place where they’ve left. They remember, Raya, just like we do.”

“Will it feel like a death? Will it be like when we put pearls on our deceased’s closed eyes and lay them with kelp laurels on the seabed? Will I dream of her?” Mother Mer places the balm in my hands.

“It’s a reincarnation,” she whispers.

• • • •

I rub the balm on Aleda’s appendages. There are parts of her I don’t understand or recognize. Hard joints bisect her lower limbs and bend like arms; smaller ones have formed at the extremities of what look like flat flippers.

“That tickles,” she says when I touch them. Then she holds my hand to the smooth folds where her new limbs join and gasps against the pressure. I don’t pull away. I move with her, trying to memorize this new-to-me body that has always been inside her.

“Do you want a traditional blessing and party before you leave?” I ask her while she’s resting.

“I’d like the food but not the ceremony.” She smiles at me and I let myself return it.

• • • •

Mother Mer, the Aunties, and I prepare a feast like the complex has never seen. Oysters, shrimp, and vent steamed octopus accompanied by seasoned kelp cover our tables. We invite everyone, even the merlets and their families from Aleda’s school. The little ones hug and kiss her endlessly. If she had any scales remaining, they would have rubbed them away climbing all over her. She laughs at the mussel heads, telling them how brilliant they are and how proud she is of them as they swirl and show her all they’ve learned since she’s been away from them.

After everyone leaves, her mood shifts.

“When we wake, it will be time.” Her labored breathing makes me want to curl in on myself.

• • • •

I accompany her to the place where Mother Mer and the Aunties have said those before her have ascended. It isn’t grand like the Cayman Trench or a vibrant reef. It is shallow and drenched in light; a clear pool surrounded by rocks where the barrier between our world and the one above blurs. Aleda pauses as we near the surface.

“Come with me as far as you can.” She barely chokes out the words.

The great ball of light hangs above us like the lure of an oversized angler fish. It’s so bright, it’s painful to look up through the water. Aleda hugs me. Her chest convulses as she draws water through what remains of her gills. Goodbye is in her eyes and in her touch that I want to feel forever. She can’t say the word and neither can I. She kisses my cheek. I nod at her before she turns her back to me. She levers her limbs to grip the rocks and climbs out of the water. I swim up as close as I can and squint. The Aunties have warned me that breaking the surface would be fatal.

She’s there, looking at me, her face distorted by the waves lapping between us, more radiant than the ball of light. Her hand plunges into the water toward me. I clutch it and kiss her palm one last time. She lets go and is gone.

I linger in the pool alone, staring at the spot where I last saw her, tracing the outline of her form in my memory. A tear-drop shaped scale floats above me. I leave it shimmering at the surface as I descend.

©2022 by Suzan Palumbo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzan Palumbo is a Nebula and WSFA Small Press Award finalist, active member of the HWA, and Co-Administrator of the Ignyte Awards. Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection Skin Thief: Stories will be published by Neon Hemlock in Fall 2023. Her writing has been published by or is forth coming in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, PseudoPod, Fireside Fiction Quarterly, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins, and other venues. Her full bibliography can be found at: suzanpalumbo.wordpress.com She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and tweets at @sillysyntax. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, she has lived most of her life in Ontario, Canada. When she isn’t writing, she can be found sketching, listening to new wave, or wandering her local misty forests.

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

Three Tales from the Blue Library

Sofia Samatar | 2714 words

THE CHILDREN OF PARADISE

They were a pair of fools, husband and wife, and none of their labors prospered. Their mint grew ragged, their chives sprouted thorns, and their child swelled and shrank with the weather. Nobody knew what this child’s sickness was. In winter he filled up with poisonous gas, his limbs grew too stiff to move, and his parents had to drag him about in a wagon. In summer he withered and red streaks appeared on his skin. His desperate parents devoted their every instant to keeping him alive. They tried hot baths, ice baths, sunshine, darkness, vegetables, sweetbreads, gruels, exercise, study, rest, affection, beatings, purgings, and prayer. Their child possessed none of the patience of dying children in popular novels. “I hate you,” he told them daily, “you fucking losers.” At last his mother collected the dregs of the family silver, packed it in the pig’s bladder that served as her purse, and went to visit the Good Friar Tello.

The Good Friar Tello had been defrocked for practicing black magic, but he still wore his brown robe and hempen belt. He lived in the great pine forest, in a crumbling, deserted abbey, with the grateful animals he had saved from death. An angel of stone wept over the door. When the woman knocked, a milk-white goat came to usher her in. Friar Tello was smoking a pipe, his feet resting on a docile boar. He asked the woman if she knew the Well of the Whores. “Of course,” she said. This well stood at the edge of town; no one drank from it, for in the old days whores had been drowned there. “You must drop one gold piece into this well every Sunday for seven years,” the friar murmured sleepily, as a barn owl gently fanned his tonsured head, “and at the end of them your child will be cured.” The woman burst into tears. “Where am I to get gold?” she sobbed. “Get it you must,” said the friar, with neither cruelty nor pity, “and you must leave off all attempts to cure your child. You must not even speak to him. Nothing matters now but the pieces of gold. Through the well, they will be transported to the Children of Paradise, who are the smallest and most powerful of the angels. They are so pure they feed on gold, so transparent that even God has forgotten them. After seven years, they will reward you.”

The woman went home and told her husband, who wept so hard it frightened her. The two fools began their seven-year quest for gold. They sold all they had. They danced in the streets for coins. They abased themselves before priests and princes. They carried heavy loads, they chopped wood, they reaped, they winnowed. Throughout all this time, they could scarcely care for their child, who looked after himself like a half-grown bear cub. Miraculously, the two fools managed to earn one gold piece a week. Every Sunday the woman took a coin to the Well of the Whores, and as she threw it in, a white bird flew down and seized the gold in its beak. At first she screamed and chased the bird, attempting to get her coin back, but it always flew off, and after some time she began to comfort herself, reasoning that the Children of Paradise, the smallest and purest of angels, could hardly dwell at the bottom of a dark well. “The white bird must be taking the coins to Paradise,” she thought. Perhaps this was true. The bird always flew toward the highest peaks of the mountains. However, some say that the beautiful bird, which was in fact a barn owl, was simply taking the coins to Friar Tello.

In any case, after seven years, the child of the two fools turned into a handsome prince. What joy! This fine creature was their first and only success. Now the old man, his father (for the two fools have grown quite elderly), sits in the café and tells his story for the price of a pint of beer. Sometimes, after an especially lively evening, he can be seen outside the palace where Friar Tello has taken up residence, scraping his feet on the pavement and singing pathetically one of the tunes he used to warble for money during the seven years. Sometimes the Good Friar Tello, who now sports a black satin cape, opens the balcony doors, revealing a pink corner of his illumined parlor, and throws down a copper coin. As for the mother of the handsome prince, she lives winter days, an entire lifetime of winter. It’s as if her whole life is ice, as if she’s trapped in the seven-year winter during which she used to climb the deadly, avalanche-haunted mountains, where she’d squat in the snow and dig for the frozen bulbs of the herb called Reticence, which can be boiled to make a powerful aphrodisiac. The ladies of the town would pay her well for this precious herb. I can see the snow high up, she says, and the snow below. Up high is the realm of Paradise; below, it’s the world of men. Sometimes I recall that there was something I meant to do with my life, but I can’t remember it now, and anyway, I no longer have the strength. I am following the tracks of the Children of Paradise. They hold skiing parties up here, and because they are children, they lose their little gloves, ski poles, and scarves. But what blindness, and what numbness! I can hardly see their tracks in the snow, and when I pick up their tiny ski poles, they feel like icicles. I will dig a hole for myself. I will be the herb called Reticence. When boiled with the angels’ tears, I will create love. After all, it’s preferable to looking down. I can’t bear how high I’ve climbed! Tell me: Who are they? Who are the Children of Paradise?

THE LITTLE CHILD WITH THE UNFORTUNATE CONDITION

She was a little child with an unfortunate condition. She had acquired it, perhaps, on a family vacation, though no one was sure; she might have been served a piece of poisoned meat at the hotel restaurant or gotten stung by a strange animal in the woods. The important thing, her mother always said, was not where the unfortunate condition had come from, but how the child could live with it most easily, especially since a number of doctors and specialists had confirmed that it could never be cured, but was rather like something bonded to the child’s genes. It was the child’s father who lay awake at night, gazing at the curtains that enfolded a fatty, yellow, gelatinous moon, and castigating himself for his bad decisions—for everyone knows it’s dangerous to take your child on foreign holidays. In the dark, he could hear the weeds in the yard growing right up to the windowsill. He could hear, sometimes, an owl cry among the cedars. And he could hear the child singing, because one of the many symptoms of her unfortunate condition was insomnia.

Happily, the mother possessed a less brooding, more practical nature. She was the one who made the orthodontist appointments. She taught the child to put in the daytime retainer, a discreet, ivory-colored appliance, and helped her attach the massive nighttime retainer with its absorbent pads, steel rods, and straps like a piece of medieval armor. In the nighttime retainer, the child looked sweet, peeking over the apparatus with her soft, dark eyes. The mother kissed her on the top of her head. As the sun sank, the child was seized by an exultant mood, and jumped up and down on the bed while the mother read her a story.

“She is a perfectly contented child,” the mother declared to anyone who would listen. “She has a beautiful disposition.” There was no reason the child could not lead an exemplary life. She had excellent grades and played the violin. She even had friends, despite her bulbous sunglasses and the nylon garments that covered her down to the ground. Of course, there had been difficulties. Children are naturally cruel, and at first no one wanted to sit by the weird little girl whose gloves were infused with zinc oxide. But her teacher—a brilliant, compassionate, generous teacher, to whom the mother was forever grateful—managed to turn the unhappy situation into a learning opportunity, showing the class a video about people with a range of unlucky conditions, which captured the children’s sympathy. Moreover, some of these people had become CEOs or television personalities. It was entirely possible, the teacher lectured, that the little child with the unfortunate condition might, like these luminaries, contain some invisible gift that would benefit her society. The children looked at their classmate with new interest. Despite the lethargy typical of her during the school day, especially when it was almost time for her pill (a nasty, dirt-brown pill, the others had whispered before their conversion, like a scab), the power of their youthful imaginations transformed her into a latent employee of the month. After this, many friendly little colleagues came to visit her house. The child’s mother, glowing with enthusiasm, would serve them raspberry popsicles, reserving for the child a special popsicle, prepared according to her restricted diet, which was of a darker color.

A condition is not the end of the world. It’s all a matter of management. Eventually, even the child’s father was won over to this rational view. His nights of wakefulness ceased, and he was rarely troubled by skeletal trees or baleful clouds the color of human liver. As for the mother, she was an inspiration, everyone said. How cheerfully she had accepted her fate! Only those who had known her from her youth perceived how her face, despite its good nature, was slowly collapsing, undermined by fear. It was as if the bones of her jaw were being ground away by an endless dread, and by the effort of telling herself there was nothing to be afraid of, for after all, plenty of people have sensitivities to certain foods, even just the odor of those foods can be enough to bring on an attack, and plenty of people have strong feelings, inexplicable dislikes and phobias that require attention, for example a horror of spiders, and with a little caution it’s possible to avoid ever seeing a spider or, as it might be, a certain four-legged, spidery symbol. All of this was quite manageable. But what the mother really feared, with a terror she buried beneath concerns about allergies, diet, and periodontal health, what she feared with that ruinous panic that was destroying her body from the inside, was that one day her precautions would no longer be necessary. One day—one night—the child with the unfortunate condition would look out the window and see her reflection for the first time. She would see, in the darkness, a figure, or perhaps a group of figures, possessed of an anemic, bone-chilling beauty. Suddenly, as these figures gestured and tapped on the windowpane, the child would realize that she did not, in fact, suffer from any kind of misfortune, and that rather than struggling to overcome her deficiencies in the hope of one day becoming useful to her society, she might, with the flick of a window latch, cast off an order that had never suited her and take her place in the sisterhood of the damned. “How hard I’ve worked,” the little child would exclaim, “and all for nothing!” She would open the window. Her lovely sisters would slip inside, chuckling softly, and with a few twists of their clever fingers remove the hateful retainer so that the child could feel her whole, triumphant mouth. Oh, how good it feels to flex one’s jaws! How nice to clasp hands, to belong! The child would lead her new friends down the hall, where, with a jubilant clamor that resembled the shrieking of owls, they would all fall upon her parents and eat them up.

THE LITTLE DAY-MOTHER

The little day-mother carried daylight and no one knew.

She trotted around the town with it. When she passed the iced fish in the grocery store, everything pinkened. Children riding electric scooters on the opposite side of the street glittered like dew as the day-mother neared the door of the church.

She liked the big church, which she entered like a tiny singing lamp. As she stepped quietly into the sanctuary, a baby squirming in the first row saw the stained-glass angels stir their wings and lean toward one another, smiling.

One morning the day-mother realized she would have to find a new house. Every night her legs were growing a little shorter. She could no longer climb the stairs. She could not trot very far. For some time, her toes had not reached the gas pedal of the car moldering in the drive.

She thought of going to live in the Gray Hotel with the other old people. But then she would not be able to walk to town. How could she live so far away from the grocery store, the church, and the public library, whose glassy dome was covered with fine blue ivy?

She began to search for a little house in town—one with no stairs. Also it had to be cheap, for the day-mother was not rich. A fox in a white cravat, who did not understand why the lobby had brightened so, laughed at her from behind his desk at the Urban Spring Apartments.

The landlady on Main Street, a great green macaw, had no prejudices against old women. She simply could not abide their smell.

The kindly badger on High Street did not wish to rent to someone who might set the place on fire in a moment of abstraction, or simply fall down dead.

The little day-mother trotted back and forth, carrying the daylight, through which bright snowflakes had begun to fall.

One day she did, in fact, leave the stove on. So people were right about her! But nothing happened; only the house was a little warmer. Worse was the day she knelt as usual to wash the kitchen floor and wondered if she would ever be able to get up again.

She thought of buying an electric cart in which she could ride to town. But these were expensive. In order to purchase one, she would have to sell her house. How could she sell her house when she had nowhere else to live? Would she ever sell it? Nobody was interested in buying her old car, though she had gone to the office of the local paper to advertise it months ago, dispersing a silver light among the bulletin boards. Moreover, she had once seen an old man fall over on one of those carts! The pavements of the town were very uneven. No, feet were better—her own minute, trusty feet, which had supported her so cheerfully all her life.

She walked downtown, carrying the string bag for her groceries. Blue light bathed the marble owls on the courthouse steps. No one could pinpoint the source of this light. They simply felt that things were brighter. A young girl shoveling snow in front of her father’s restaurant began to whistle.

One afternoon the fox with the white cravat was returning from lunch when he saw a bundle of gray-haired rags lying in the snow. It was the little day-mother! The fox dialed 911 on his cell phone in an icy gloom that, even for winter, seemed extraordinarily deep. Only the day-mother’s body showed up softly in that darkness, with a light that, had the fox only known, he could have enjoyed every day.

He glanced about him, whimpering faintly. Sirens wailed in the distance.

Then the Wolf of Night came and swallowed up the earth.

• • • •

“But,” argued Little Dimple, whose grandmother told this story, “the day-mother would have died anyway! She was very old.” Of course. Our subject here is not eternity. It is daylight. “Clink! Clink!” cried the broken teapot from its grave among the marigolds.

©2021 by Sofia Samatar. Originally published in Conjunctions 76. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of four books, most recently Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her first novel, the epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria, won the 2014 Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and was included in Time Magazine's list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Samatar also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her memoir, The White Mosque, an exploration of family, faith, and border crossing, is forthcoming in October 2022.

The Dirty Golden Yellow House

Debbie Urbanski | 10437 words

On the first floor of a Colonial-style house constructed last century out of planks of old growth cedar, a monster is dragging a woman’s husband from room to room. The specific path this monster takes will be evident the next morning from the gashes in the wood floors and the splattering of the husband’s innards upon the plaster walls. Blood on the ceiling. The woman herself is hiding in the upstairs bedroom in her closet, face buried in the nylon hems of her patterned dresses, hands to her ears, a washcloth between her teeth so she can bite down hard on something that isn’t her tongue. It’s her fault this is happening, certainly, she would not deny it, though I think she was justified. The husband’s screams are muffled yet still audible as if his face has been swaddled by a tentacle. He is about to be eaten. Due to the monster’s narrow mouth opening, the act of eating him will be protracted and noisy and will take all night. The woman hiding in the closet amid the dresses is not a bad person though she is not a good person either. She had asked for this to happen but, at the same time, in the dark, in the night, with a monster scavenging the first floor, it is difficult for her to exude confidence about her decision. She is aware, were this the opening scene of a story, that her choice regarding her husband’s end would look indecent. But what is she supposed to do about that? Directly before sunrise, in the morning twilight, she creeps to the window and watches the summoned creature, whatever it is, burst through the screen door and escape, something limp and husband-shaped and dead dangling from its murderous jaws—

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.

• • • •

He, being of the husband persuasion, never called what happened between them r— but favored alternate terminology such as making love or pokey poke. Part of being a fundamental human being, he explained, is to have intercourse where an orifice is penetrated on a regular basis, minimum once a week, by another human being, in this (his) case a husband, on a comfortable natural latex pillowtop mattress, penetrating an orifice of his legal wife, although he allowed for other combinations and other mattress types. I realize this is not the most fun paragraph to read but try and stick with me here. This is important. He has said this is important. The husband (such as he) cannot himself be guilty of an actual r— or r— like behaviors upon the wife (such as she) on account of the matrimonial consent which she has given and which she cannot retract. He has said, “Everybody appears to know this except for you.” It’s not that r— doesn’t exist, he argued. Of course it does. Unfortunately! But it exists only outside of their bedroom, in, for example, the industrial park on the far side of the city, or in the back alleys of the downtown, or in other foreign nations. In addition, he has faced real consequences to his health whenever the minimum conjugal responsibility wasn’t met. His heart muscle has hurt. He has felt his blood pressure skyrocket and his risk increase for depression as well as prostate cancer which, he further explains, can cause discomfort in the pelvic area. He talks a lot. I think he is entitled. It can be difficult, in the chronically turned-on shadow of his monologues, to spot what is naked and face down on the pillow. “A wife,” he says, “wants her husband to explore her inside and out with his fingers and make it an adventure for the two of them.” He is quoting somebody. “Shut up,” I say. He continues: “If you are not making love you are not in love.” I temporarily tape his mouth. He breathes through his nose and doesn’t care—

Let me try this again. This is to be a horror story, in case that isn’t clear. A husband and a wife of many years live together in a home that is metaphorically dim and cavernous. What I mean is—there is the feeling of caverns in the corners of the rooms and dimness matted in the composite crown molding that borders the doorways. The lights are all allegorically broken: lamps appear to blaze on in the morning and turn off at dusk. Along the floorboards it is as if wild rodents have smeared their urine in dust while the feral children swing symbolically in the closets from the high-quality magic pants hangers that guarantee the multiplication of space by 80%. I haven’t even mentioned the master bedroom, which might as well be draped in light abrasions and cheap matador curtains. The curtains which go flap flap flap in the cross breeze: they’ll be proverbially ripped to pieces within the year. As for the wife’s bathrobe, it has been confiscated again, hung in the attic rafters, out of reach. As long as she allows her husband whenever he wants, everything is fine for him. Remember that horror is relative and will depend on who is being scared. What scares her most is a room in the house. For him: a monosyllabic word. For me: domestic realism—

Too vague. Let me try this again. There have been conversations, though she, the wife, would call them monologues or ultimatums. She remains in charge of the picky children, the production of whole-grain meals, and the house. There is palladium light throughout the house, partly her doing. He is in charge of leaving for work in the morning and coming home in the dark. When he comes home at dark, he cocks his finger at her. The children are in the bedroom closet playing What Happens Next. “They’ll hear us,” she says, mistaking this for a choice. “I’ll shut the closet door,” he says. It’s not a choice. He shuts and latches the closet door. “I love you,” he says. There are some funny jokes about r—. I am saving them for later. “What is happening to you isn’t technically r—,” says the wife’s therapist and hold on, hold on, this is beginning to sound a little too familiar, like a part of my life I thought I had buried hundreds of feet below ground, beneath a concrete cap and a clay buffer and some dirt. Which I had buried multiple times, by the way, always at night, under a new moon, using a shovel and occasionally a backhoe, without artificial light of any kind, knowing what such a scene would look like to the neighbors if I turned on a light. Though no matter how deeply I dug, how deep I dig, my past each time has clawed her way out using her jackhammer elbows and her yellow teeth, this time emerging backlit to an industrial soundtrack, bloodworms in her hair, a straight razor in her hands.

I try my best to make small talk with her—what a dreary day, why won’t my neighbors’ dogs stop barking, they are always barking, let’s go poison the dogs, shall we—though conversation falters, as it always does, whenever she appears like this, holding a razor with accusation in her eyes.

I was joking about the dogs, I have to explain.

She rummages in her roomy pockets anyway for a pint of antifreeze.

The gray clouds lower. I’m not sure whether she intends for me to drink the antifreeze or for the dogs.

I wonder, I say using my gentlest voice, the voice reserved for my children when they’re hysterical, whether it might be time for me, for us, to move on?

Certain reviewers and readers have already started complaining about my recent stories, both their thematic similarities and their very specific view of relationships. I have examples. From one reviewer: Other than the overt political addition to the obvious social metaphors which helps extend this to novelette length, this [one of my stories] is exactly like the same author’s [another one of my stories] in being an overlong underplotted offputtingly narrated story of a repugnant asexual wife and a repugnant husband and their repugnant relationship. From another reviewer: It [one of my stories] is probably sending a message about something—menopause maybe? . . . I have no clue what the ending is supposed to mean. From a reader: My takeaway is that the story [one of my stories] was an exercise in catharsis for the author, and has no real value as a morality tale beyond—

My past self slams her (our?) body against the window glass. Has she not been clear enough. Here is what she expects in my writing: revenge, on me, on him, on them, on the structure of the story itself, and if I ever consider not placing her at the bloody heart of whatever I write, she will do this to me. She acts out what she will do to me. There is so much blood. In case I don’t understand her point, she smears my attic window with our blood, so our blood is dripping off the window onto the unfinished deck, onto my children who are trying to read library copies of graphic novels on the deck, who look up, I would rather them not see this, not to mention the neighbors—

I clean up the mess. I get the point. I’ll keep writing this story despite the similarities to my other stories. Though I would like a break. The wife in this story needs a break. We need some good advice and a break! “I need a road trip,” she tells her husband, who approves her request, so the next morning she drives herself and her kids to Indiana to her childhood home whose windows are painted shut, making the interior stuffy and recirculating. In the family room, in the evening, her mother delivers a lecture: “You can’t change people. You can only change your reaction to them. Just like people can’t change you. Only you can change you. People can make their own happiness by looking at things in a different way. Haven’t you made love before with your husband? Your husband is a heterosexual who needs and wants to make love with his wife. How is this situation different now than before?” The woman requests her mother replace the term making love with the term vaginal intercourse. “Why would I do that?” her mother replies. The woman’s husband texts hourly. Just checking in. She deletes his texts. At night in her childhood bedroom, the children bounce on the mattress and bite the furniture. Nobody sleeps. A study by a sociologist—a sociologist who, let me note, is also a woman—has proved it is more difficult to leave one’s husband after marital r— when one is economically dependent on him. The economically dependent wife in this story would like to replace the phrase more difficult with the phrase impossible. Statistics are interesting. “Don’t think of it as a choice, dear,” says her mother in parting after a breakfast of multi-grain toast and bitter coffee.

The wife loads her children into the family vehicle and drives back along I-90 east past the lake and the bird sanctuary and the county park with the water features while the kids play the memory game in the rear seat and gobble generic Pringles. “Various factors may temporarily impede this solution [of leaving a husband after r—], particularly the problem of where she is to live, and how she is to finance the break-up and her own life afterwards,” agrees a legal scholar. She takes exit 34a and pays her toll, which is exorbitant. The stomata open. While she was away, the neighbors staked colorful rainbow signs into their front yard: We believe Love is Love and Kindness is Everything. “Did you get my texts?” asks the husband. “No,” she lies outright. Her husband believes her. He thinks she wouldn’t lie about something. Oh my, all the trouble, it’s in your head, isn’t it dear? All we need to do is fix that dear little head. That last bit of dialogue is one of the therapists talking.

I’d like to provide some background and statistics on marital r— now. Please skip the next two paragraphs, resuming your reading with the phrase Later that month, if any of the following apply:

You consider interruptions like these an affront to your personal fictional escapism.

You think marital r— in a story is stupid because why doesn’t she just get a divorce so can we stop talking about it.

You are a marital r— expert.

In the U.S., between 10% and 14% of married women experience marital r—, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Yet I will bet my buttons that 10% to 14% of American literature does not contain marital r— scenes. Does even 5%? 1%? The only novel I can think of with a marital r— scene right now is Gone With The Wind; that was supposed to be romantic. Only in 1993 did marital r— become a crime in all fifty states. The reason it took so long: certain people, some of them lawmakers, didn’t believe marital r— was possible. Or, if it was possible, they believed the state certainly shouldn’t get involved (“These are personal things . . .”). Outside of the U.S., in forty-nine other countries, r—ing one’s wife is still not considered a criminal act. There are only 195 countries. In addition there are “r—like behaviors” (see researcher and sociologist Diana E.H. Russel’s R— In Marriage) as well as Andrea Medea and Kathleen Thompson’s idea of “little r—s,” none of which are technically illegal but still contribute to an atmosphere of compulsory and/or coercive sex in relationships and should be cause for concern.

Legally, for a sexual encounter to be r—, there must be physical force or threat of force, or else the victim must be unable to give consent, such as she is sleeping or unconscious. The proper term for what happened in the previous pages is more likely to be called, by the authorities, sexual coercion (defined by the Office on Women’s Health as “unwanted sexual activity that happens when you are pressured, tricked, threatened, or forced in a nonphysical way. Coercion can make you think you owe sex to someone”). Though this also depends on who is defining the words “r—” and “sexual coercion” and “consent.” Advocates like author Louise McOrmond Plummer have argued that sexual coercion is a form of r—, and r— should be redefined as any sexual act without consent. “Submission is not consent,” Plummer writes. The boundaries of where consent ends and r— begins are still under debate and still broadening.

• • • •

Later that month, the woman we are following enrolls in nursing school. She never wanted to be a nurse. There are blogs where stay-at-home mothers such as herself in marriages such as hers attend nursing school then finish nursing school then become independent and employable.

Her name is Lacey Balan. That isn’t her real name. I’m trying to protect her identity. She carries the nursing textbook in her arms. Whenever the phrase situational influences is used in the textbook, she highlights that sentence. The textbook is heavy. “I need to study,” she tells her husband, highlighting situational influences, this time on page 127. She does not complete her assignments. Her husband says there is a difference between want and need. Her therapist’s advice: focus on his love which will radiate green out of his eye sockets, yellow out the pores of his shoulders, pink out of his chest brightly at that moment like everybody says it should. “What if I hate those colors?” Lacey asks. “Don’t be a picky bitch,” her therapist replies. Here’s that joke I promised. The husband says, “If you can’t r— your wife, who can you r—?” The wife says, “But you can r— your wife.” The husband says the joke again. It’s funnier the second time around. Other funny r— jokes can be found by googling funny r— jokes. A less successful search is funny marital r— jokes. Only two jokes came up. There is a definite comedic need. If we can’t laugh about it, then it’s not real. If it’s not real, then what is Lacey’s problem? This is the end of the humor section. “What is the worst thing that would happen if you let your husband enjoy your body?” asks a therapist. “The worst thing that might happen is I’ll kill myself,” says Lacey. “I meant your husband. What is the worst thing that would happen to him,” clarifies the therapist. “Oh. The worst thing that might happen to him is he would be happy,” says Lacey.

She is kicked out of nursing school. In their king-size Logan industrial rough-hewn bed, beside the velvet brushstroke decorative pillows in storm/silver that she chose and they weren’t even on sale, all bought using her husband’s income, she pretends to be someone else. The therapist, any one of them, suggests not doing that. Perhaps they misheard her: she doesn’t pretend to be anybody bad. For example, she doesn’t pretend to be a murderer—a woman who murders—in a suspense novel also called a thriller who is about to kill her husband out of either sociopathic tendencies or else revenge. She pretends, instead, to be a woman in a story (not this story, another story). While he pretends to be Humphrey Bogart, sad eyed and dead. He tells her to take off her clothes. He squints, tilting his head, holds her hands, mimes lighting a cigarette. Lacey’s therapist, one of them, has confirmed that gazing upon one’s naked spouse is a legitimate and common form of love. “Sweetheart, I know you’re scared,” the husband says. “Come on, I’ll be quick. I promise. Lacey, you used to.” He drops the act. “Here,” he says, “if you do not right now open your pretty leggy-legs, these are your consequences, which are legal to the best of my ability.” There is a relevant stack of documentation. Her consequences may include dissolution, dissolvement, disintegration, disappearance, impoverishment, and dispersedness. The man who is her husband considers himself a feminist in most if not all situations so he has offered other positions, so it is okay. “Why doesn’t she want to have sex with him why why why?” chants the chorus of women. “A medical condition? A hormonal imbalance? A species classification error? Why why why why why?”

If you are as confused as the chorus because you have never felt like Lacey feels in bed, and you can only relate to what you yourself have felt, let’s get down on the bed with her, so that you can better understand! If you already understand, please skip the below paragraph and resume your reading with The therapist would like.

We Are On The Bed With Her

Do as I say. Smell the sheets. The sheets smell of night sweats and lavender spray. Look at the sheets. The sheets are the color of ash and will not wrinkle no matter what is done upon them. Touch the sheets. The sheets are a satin weave for maximum softness. An embroidered hem adds poise. On top of the satin ashy sheets, a man is mounting her (us) from behind. The man is her (our) husband. To him, this fact that he is her (our) husband makes a difference. To her (us), he can be her (our) husband, or a stranger, or a distant acquaintance, or a relative. It would feel the same and as unwanted. As I am trying to explain how it felt to her (us), not him, let’s forget that he is her (our) husband. The important detail here: a man is mounting her (us) from behind and she (we) does (do) not want it to be happening. It should feel as if he has fur and fangs. It should feel as if he has fur and fangs and a rope. With a rope in his hands, he would have a few options. Those options should help us understand how the woman on the bed is feeling. It should feel like someone, anyone, is shoving something, anything, unwanted into her (our) orifice. It should hurt and not for any multisyllabic-medical-reason-with-a-pharmaceutical-cure either. It should hurt because it hurts when someone, anyone, is shoving something, anything, into one’s orifice that one does not want there. I am using words I hope you can relate to. “I love you,” the man whispers in her (our) ear under these frantic and suspicious circumstances.

This marks the end of the We Are On The Bed With Her section. Resume your usual distance.

• • • •

The therapist would like to be helpful. “Had you, as a child, ever been sexually molested?” she asks. Lacey says no, never. The therapist confirms it would have been easier had Lacey been sexually molested because that would help explain a lot of things. The other therapist is also helpful, saying essentially the same thing. Another therapist that Lacey and her husband both see for the wife’s marital problems says the same thing. She is an expert with the most comfortable and expensive leather chairs so. Together these women form the chorus of women I previously mentioned, linking arms stage left in the carpeted hallways of the counseling center, under the fluorescent lighting, lecturing in singsong about the importance of the male gaze love touch hormones lubrication love sensate masters johnson arousal pretend disorder one two three four five la la la. They’re entranced by their own professionalism that sounds like the territorial noises of the squirrels. At night, after her husband r—s her (not legally but using that alternate definition I mentioned above, “tell me if I’m really hurting you,” he says), he falls asleep deeply, his hot love arm of love draped heavily over her shoulder. The air in the room smells not of her but of him. He smells of crawl spaces and storage onions.

This cannot go on.

Or, rather, this can only go on for so long.

Lacey considers the red rope hidden in her drawer of underwear.

Should she finally hang herself in the bathroom.

She reads in bed for the next hour.

This seems like a good time to check your reading comprehension thus far.

Keeping in mind the last few pages, what would you have Lacey do next?

She should go to the doctor and get her hormones checked then she should get her hormones adjusted so they fall within the range of normal then she should start anti-depressants. Then she should go to another doctor and sign up for therapy with vaginal dilators, which are (according to the Cleveland Clinic) tube-shaped devices that come in various sizes. Their primary purpose is to stretch the vagina. People with vaginismus use dilators to become more comfortable with, and less sensitive to, vaginal penetration then everything will probably be fine for the husband.

She should take the kids and put the kids in the family car and she should drive west to the next state over which is Ohio and her husband will cancel the credit cards and she has no money.

She should leave the kids and take the family car and she should drive the car north, without a map or destination, and her husband again cancels the credit cards, and she has no money and is alone.

This is a ridiculous story and she should act like you would act, meaning she would act very believably.

I don’t care which decision you chose.

The question I asked wasn’t a real question.

I only wanted to remind you of what it feels like to be asked a question that isn’t a real question.

Other examples of questions that, in my experience, aren’t real questions: “Is this okay?” And, “Do you want to do this?”

But enough about me! I will do my best, from this point on, to be a proper narrator and stay out of my own story.

• • • •

Lately Lacey has been reading thrillers which involve a murder.

She likes the thrillers because the murderer is rarely who the reader has expected.

In one thriller, the narrator (a woman) was the murderer. In another, the narrator’s cousin (a woman) was the murderer though she had some help from a male cousin. In that book the woman was sociopathic though other times women murderers are not sociopathic. In another book, the crime is never solved.

These books offer her an idea: in this unbearable situation, why must she be the one to go?

She dreams of floods, wakes sweating. Her husband insists on knowing what she dreamed. “In my dream I went on a vacation in the mountains, then a bird flew down to me, a brown bird with an orange beak, and pecked my shoulder until it bled,” she lies. He believes her again, biting the skin of her shoulder playfully. “Like this?” he asks. He does what he did. Let’s repeat that exercise. Get on the bed with her. Lie on your stomach. Remember the fangs, the fur, the rope. There were men looking down from the sky, men in the moon and men’s faces in the sun. A lot of people were looking at her. Not, like, literally. But that’s how it felt. “I feel so loved right now,” the husband says, having always hated that word coercive. She had one twenty-dollar bill in her wallet. The credit cards, the bank account were in his name. “Is there something wrong with me?” Lacey asks one of the therapists during her next appointment. “Yes but that’s understandable,” replies the therapist, any one of them with sympathetic eyes. Lacey would have rather murdered the institution of marriage or at least its grammar but there were concrete difficulties with that plan. Please know that up until recently she had been very good, “good” being defined as allowing her husband to do what he wanted to her and not murdering him.

Before Lacey’s husband wakes, she slips out of the master bed and down the stairs and out the front door. Walking east, she pretends she is on a morning stroll, passing by abandoned tricycles and sidewalk chalk and lawns covered in the reproduction of broadleaf plantain. These residential blocks are long and shaded from the sun; it takes an hour to get anywhere. When she finally arrives at the house where Ms. Imogen Shea lives, she feigns surprise to have ever arrived there, though all along this had been her intent. Beyond the house is the woods, both allegorical and actual. There aren’t paths in the woods, there are wolves. We’ll save the woods for another day. The house is ominous enough: yellow, looming, dirty yet golden, covered in pollen and other sticky particles and overshadowed by semi-precious trees. Emotional women are known to wander in and out of Ms. Shea’s foyer at all hours, tissues to their noses, heads down, weeping about marital problems, their eyes crusty with inflammation. At night, stubby wax candles burn like fire hazards in the upper windows.

Lacey knocks on the old-world style front door.

A breeze kicks up. The silver and ruby leaves bang against the silver and ruby branches. The noise wakes the neighborhood attack dogs who start to salivate.

Lacey knocks again, louder and harder.

The door blows open.

• • • •

Ms. Shea is an older woman, gray hair, crow’s feet, a lack of collagen in her lips, loose wrinkled pockets in her calico dress. She does not call herself a witch, though every year of late she has accumulated a new and witchy quality so what else would she be. Last year, the smell of cedar resin on her skin. This year, an iris freckle. Before that a white hair curling from her chin. She is in menopause, in case that isn’t obvious, has been for decades, a state of being caused, in her case, by a ceremony of her own doing, her power based not on fertility or mothering or lactation but on the opposites: aridity, conclusions, and destruction. This brief mention of menopause does not, metaphorically or otherwise, make this story about menopause. I am saying this to clear things up for that male reviewer and any others who thought a previous story of mine, also about a sex-repulsed asexual wife and mother, was metaphorically about menopause. “Come in,” whispers Ms. Shea, motioning with urgency, her fingernails flickering with reflections of orange-red flame.

The interior of the dirty golden yellow house is dusty and cluttered, bottles of supplements stacked on the windowsills, succulents on the countertops, luminescent jars of non-perishables lined up on the shelves. In between stockpiling expeditions into town, Ms. Shea spends her time helping married women untraditionally with their intimacy problems. She leads Lacey to the living room, which is her helping room. They sit on matching armchairs. The room smells of autumn harvest air freshener though it is not yet that spicy cinnamon time of year. Lacey describes her ongoing bedroom situation. “I want you to kill my husband,” she says.

Ms. Shea offers an embarrassed chuckle. “Oh my! There are much nicer ways to say that.” She suggests neutralized, deleted, erased, or snuffed out—“Let’s go with deleted”—but wonders aloud if Lacey can afford her help. As these acts are never cheap. Though a bucket of uncut sapphires might suffice. Or a diamond pickaxe. The full moon? Or hurricane-force winds—

Lacey does not have access to such items.

“Then your daughter.”

“What?”

“Give her to me.”

Lacey laughs.

“Give your daughter to me and I will delete your husband,” Ms. Shea says.

“No.”

“Now don’t be stupid, dear.”

Lacey tastes bile in her mouth. Even if I did not get around to explaining this earlier, Lacey loves her daughter deeply. They take walks together. They read books to each other.

“What kind of woman are you?” Lacey asks.

“I’m not going to eat her.”

“No, wait. What kind of monster are you? Are you a monster that eats other people’s children?”

“I can give her a different life.”

“No!”

“I can give your daughter a better life.”

“No no no no no no no!”

Ms. Shea rises from the chair. She is taller than she was before, at least seven inches taller. Perhaps she has grown or perhaps she is now hovering off the ground. Lacey is afraid to look beneath Ms. Shea’s feet to see what is going on. “You are not the first woman,” accuses Ms. Shea, “to presume I work for the sole benefit of my heart.” She shoves the front door open. Already, in the haze of early morning, a dozen other needy women wait on the sidewalk. They glimpse Lacey through the doorway; they clench and unclench their hands. “Time for you to go home, make love to your husband, then take your own life,” says Ms. Shea, motioning to the door.

A flock of crows settle at the edge of the woods, filling the trees with bright energy and feathers.

When the crows scream, the sidewalk women scream back although at a higher frequency.

“Go,” says Ms. Shea, pointing.

The minute hand of the floor clock ticks forward.

Lacey shakes her head.

She gets down on her knees and shakes her head.

“Oh my god, get up,” orders Ms. Shea.

Lacey does not get up. On her knees, she asks, “Different from who? From what?”

“What are you talking about.”

“You can give my daughter a life different from what?”

“I think you know.”

The gray fingerprints of invisible and histrionic women color the crown molding of the doorway. The minute hand of the clock ticks forward again.

“I am not judging,” informs Ms. Shea. “Although if you can’t, on your own, for yourself, put your own affairs in order, if you cannot control what happens in the bedroom, your bedroom, to your own body, to your private internal areas—how do you plan to give your daughter what is of worth?”

In the intimate dimness of the foyer, Lacey begins to cry.

Mothers’ tears are worthless and commonplace and, generally, Ms. Shea would have ignored them, only today’s transaction, she realizes, will go more smoothly should Lacey feel valued and productive. So she goes through the ritual motions of tear collection, the choosing of the crystal vial, the sampling, the stoppering and the labeling. After which the two women return to the helping room, where a tea tray has been set on a low table between the armchairs, petite lady fingers arranged on a doily on a plate.

“I don’t want my daughter to have a life like mine,” whispers Lacey.

“Of course you don’t.”

Ms. Shea offers the plate of cookies; it is like eating a child’s finger.

Unfortunately the tea tastes like tannin and gore.

Lacey stares down at the coagulating liquid in her porcelain cup. She hopes she is dreaming.

“You’re not dreaming,” clarifies Ms. Shea.

“How will you raise her?” asks Lacey.

“I will raise her to be angry,” promises Ms. Shea.

“Will you raise her to be powerful as well?”

“I will raise her to be angry and powerful and towering and untouchable.”

“And violent?”

“Violent, oh yes.”

“And vengeful.”

“Of course.”

“And if anyone asks her to do something she doesn’t want to do, something that feels wrong, or feels worse, if anyone pressures her or threatens her or threatens to withhold—

“I will teach her to say no.”

“You will teach her to destroy whoever is asking?”

“I will teach her to destroy whoever is asking.”

“So if she is ever in my situation—”

“I promise she will never be in your situation.”

“But if she is?”

“I promise.”

“And you will get rid of my husband?”

Ms. Shea sips her thickened tea. “I will solve the problem of your husband.”

“Because I cannot seem to solve that problem myself.”

“I know, dear.”

There is no need to turn over the daughter now. Later is fine. The promissory note is a quick prick of a ring finger, a smear of Lacey’s blood on Ms. Shea’s dress. “That blood will stain,” Lacey warned. Well, that’s where the power comes from. Bring a photograph of your husband the following morning, Ms. Shea instructs. Lacey shows herself out. She is blinded by the light of the sun which has risen. The women lined up and waiting in the increasing heat look tired and crazy like they are about to play with fire.

The next morning Lacey rises early, before her husband or daughter or son wakes, and she walks again to the edge of the city and knocks on the dirty golden yellow house. Ms. Shea opens the door wearing the same dress spotted at the hem with Lacey’s delicate rusty blood. “I brought the picture,” says Lacey though she does not hand the picture over. As she is having second thoughts. She is having a new idea! Like what about turning Arlo into a different animal, like a bird! If her husband was a bird, he could perch, no problem, on her shoulder during the dinner hour. She could clip his wings every one to three months avoiding the blood feathers.

“I’m not that kind of witch,” explains Ms. Shea.

“I don’t believe you,” says Lacey. After all, Ms. Shea has semi-precious trees all over her yard, like in a made-up story where a woman with semi-precious trees has special powers such as, for starters, the power to turn a man into a winged—

“Enough,” mutters Ms. Shea and the clouds surround the sun. She snatches the photograph out of Lacey’s pocket and strides into the kitchen. Really she should be wearing her neoprene gloves. Such pictures, in such situations, have been known to dissolve into a splattering of acid. She puts on the yellow gloves and busies herself filling pots, adjusting the gas stove, turning on the fan. In the photo, Lacey’s husband, Arlo Balan, not his real name, poses in front of their automatic garage door, left eye larger than his right. “I don’t want this,” whimpers Lacey who has followed Ms. Shea into the kitchen, which is frightening, jars of pickled skin, and preserved hearts, and braided smoke, and bloody shirts, and a child’s left shoe alone on the linoleum floor. “Yes, you do,” says Ms. Shea. She’s probably right. After that, the older woman ignores her. There are fewer women waiting outside today. Only one woman, in fact, on her stomach, asleep beneath a silver maple, not that urban species of tree notorious for brittle splintering after storms, but a maple hammered out of silver metal. Silver bark, silver roots, silver cambium, silver branches. The heavy silver leaves fall upon the sleeping woman until she is covered. Covered and suffocated. Unable to claw her way out. What a strange and exhausting act this is, to arrange the disappearance of someone we love or loved or could have loved! What a loss of appetite.

Over breakfast the following morning Lacey claims a sudden contagious sickness so she cannot, for the rest of the day, take care of anyone or any living thing.

“Wait. I’m sick too,” Arlo says.

“Why don’t you lie down on the couch and get some rest,” suggests Lacey.

He seizes her wrist. “Why don’t you lie down with me and we won’t rest?”

She forces herself to cough until she coughs up something red. A piece of her heart or lung.

“Jesus,” he says, for once letting her go though he is unhappy about it, unsatisfied, his chest hurts, and so on.

Temporarily she moves into the attic and sits at the desk, not hers, a metal desk with a locked drawer on the right, the desk could belong to anyone, and she listens to her husband below stomping around the floorboards of the house. He does not consider himself to be a man of menacing bulk, so he is not menacing. She counts the storage boxes in front of her. There are twenty-seven. She counts them again. There are twenty-seven. She counts them again. There are twenty-seven. She counts them again. There are twenty-six. That has never happened before. A mockingbird lands on the skylight above her head. That has never happened before either. Two mockingbirds. They fight over a fat red berry. She practices expressions in the mirror. Look surprised! She looks surprised. Look shocked! She looks shocked. Look sad. She looks sad. Not that far away, Ms. Shea is talking to herself in her kitchen in that sing-song voice. The medium stockpot boils vigorously, its ingredients rising to the surface and bobbing in the turbulent water, the songbird feather, the moth wing, the paper scrap, the mouth cut from a photograph, the ear, the hand, the eye. “Why do you think your husband wants to see you naked?” one of the therapists had asked at Lacey’s last appointment. “I think we’re well past that point,” Lacey had said. The chorus of women therapists dance grimly in the attic, hitting the crowns of their heads on the sloped ceiling.

• • • •

“Okay, what exactly is going on downstairs?” asks Arlo Balan. It is late in the evening and Arlo and Lacey are in the second-floor bedroom together because Lacey had to leave the attic because Arlo made her, despite the fake coughing, because they are married and married people sleep naked together in the same bed every night so he can rub whatever parts of her he wanted. Her therapists have confirmed this as normal. Arlo is naked, Lacey wearing only her blue-green panties, which will have to come off, which is not unreasonable. She is on her back, under the satin-weave bedsheet, which will also have to come off. There are noises downstairs. The noise of a window or patio door smashing. The noise of a heavy wide mass moving deliberately across the kitchen floor. Such noises are probably what Ms. Shea meant when she talked of solving Lacey’s husband problem. “I have no idea what’s going on down there,” she replies convincingly. She practiced that line too, practiced looking honest and inquisitive. She tells Arlo she loves him. This declaration of love will hopefully negate whatever she is about to do. That’s how love works. Generally she is not one for violence. “Neither am I,” Arlo would say if they, together, were discussing a propensity for violence. The low tonality of the wind. Something breaks. A bone cracks. A wet weight continues to be dragged—or drag itself?—across the ceramic tile. “You should really get downstairs and make sure we’re safe,” Lacey suggests. She has an overactive imagination. “It’s probably the fridge,” Arlo argues. Instead of going downstairs, he tugs the bedsheet from Lacey’s body then removes her panties tossing them onto the floor with pleasure and he rolls heavily on top of her. He weighs fifteen stone. “I love you too,” he says. Lots of women want this done to them. The patio door will need to be repaired.

The next night the noises begin again, this time insistent and closer, not in the kitchen but in the foyer and on the stairs. Lacey repeats herself: is it not the husband’s job to leave the bedroom, thereby ensuring the family’s primal safety? The beating of insect wings, the rattle of a metal cart or carts—it is more difficult to attribute that evening’s performance to a kitchen appliance. “I’ll be back soon,” Arlo says softly, kissing her cheek with his chapped lips, his fingertips sliding across the skin on her neck. He leaves the room. There is, obviously, a monster in the house. The children are deeply sleeping, sound machines jacked up on rainfall, beach towels stuffed under the doors, so they don’t hear what happens, what is happening. Each sound intensifies. Not wings but claws, thuds. Arlo is screaming in his own unique way. Lacey, in the closet now, closes her eyes and sees patterns of light. Gray, gold.

• • • •

“My heart is broken,” repeats Lacey to whatever neighbor or relative comes to sit with her outside in the deck chairs in the coming days. That is not necessarily a lie. It’s not like this is a joyous occasion for her either. She, too, had imagined a different definition of love. Now she is not going to get that definition. Instead, she is going to become haunted. It’s only a matter of time. “I hope Arlo is happy, wherever he is,” Lacey repeats to whomever. This is the lie. She would not mind him suffering a little. If there are monsters, she would not mind them holding him down from time to time and toying with his kidneys or declaring enthusiastic love for his urethra. “You don’t really mean that,” says a therapist. There is no body. She exfoliates daily. The neighbors deliver plastic containers of soups that are tasty and freeze well. Her skin has never looked so good.

Her husband’s parents are comforting and sad. They send a series of sympathy cards, all of them containing the same message: He will always be with you. He’ll forever be a part of you. This sounds like a threat. She burns the cards, scatters the ashes. “He’ll come back,” insists Lacey’s mother. Another threat? She sells her husband’s business, a lawyer deals with the paperwork, and Arlo’s parents, who have the means to send monthly checks, send monthly checks. She opens a savings account in her name. At night, she can hear him, Arlo, in the bedroom, breathing through his mouth. It is difficult to get back to sleep after that. “I’m sorry,” she announces to the dark; this isn’t how she imagined marriage either. At the same time, there are improvements. Ghosts generally (85% of the time, according to a 1975 British study) do not touch a human being’s body, not in the same way that humans touch each other at least. When Arlo’s ghost approaches her at night, it is more of a temperature change mixed with the scent of burning charcoal.

Lacey continues seeing her therapists out of habit. One of them leans forward in her leather chair featuring an underutilized 360-degree swivel and asks how things are at home. This is the therapist who had wanted Lacey to understand her husband’s urges. All the therapists wanted this. If Lacey could have understood her husband’s urges, tragedies could have been averted. There is less to talk about now. “I’m fine,” Lacey says, not lying, only leaving certain pieces out. Arlo used to tell Lacey, “I know you’re scared.” Her fear tasted like a fancy French salt, according to him. She feels a pressure on her trapezius. He used to lick her. He said it felt every time like he was making love to a virgin which he did not mind. Even after multiple washings involving vinegar and Borax, the sheets smell like him. She washes the sheets again. Before she falls asleep, she feels his dead weight pressing onto the mattress. The next morning she washes the sheets again and, in addition, hangs circular mirrors from the doorways, burns sage, sprinkles salt, rings a bell. Part of the problem may be that Arlo’s hair still clogs the shower drain. She buys a bottle of Drano Max Gel from the hardware store, and though this product has been noted to contain potentially significant hazards to health and/or the local watershed, she dumps all eighty fluid ounces down the shower. His hair dissolves in a wash of sulfurous chemicals.

Still, she hears a light tapping beneath her bed, a scrape behind the wall, a bit of disembodied laughter that escapes in the evening from the corner of the closet. The chorus of therapists chides her for worrying about such sounds. Worry is the stupidest emotion. She is tired of being followed by a chorus. Let’s get rid of the chorus. She would like to know what happened. Is her husband in pain or not, is his body somewhere or not. Will she always be haunted. The woman in the dirty golden yellow house probably knows but she will not answer the door. The days are wonderful. She takes whatever the neighbors give her, piles of black tourmaline, a used bicycle, casseroles. Her daughter brushes her lips against Lacey’s skin in an animalistic nuzzle, and if there are occasional unexplained shifts in the house interior, it is easy enough to return the displaced chairs to the breakfast nook or straighten the fireplace tools after they topple over. Water ripples in a glass from unexplained vibrations. “Hello, Arlo,” Lacey whispers, swallowing the water. Their relationship is complicated. Her daughter climbs into bed with her. She will not sleep unless Lacey’s arms are wrapped around the girl’s body, and the girl’s little arms are wrapped around Lacey’s body, and the girl’s breath is on her face. They breathe together, the same air, in and out and in and out and in and out. I love your knees. I love your shoulder. I love your nose. I love your ear. I love your fingers. I love your elbow. I love your teeth. I love you! Her son creeps into the bedroom and vacuums the dust off Arlo’s suits, and actually this would be a happy enough ending should I stop the story here, only this is not the ending. When Lacey lifts the sheet to remake the bed, the rectangle of fabric holds suspended above the mattress, and her daughter laughs and laughs. “We are witches!” her daughter laughs. Lacey slaps the girl’s face. Not yet. Too soon. The sheet deflates. That night the girl is back to sleeping in Lacey’s arms, a child again, impotent and dependent, and Lacey thinks, incorrectly, that she will have more time.

A letter from Miss Shea arrives in a gory envelope which Lacey incinerates in the fireplace. It wasn’t a letter but a bill. The bill becomes due. Past-due. Dead birds rain down like fleshy stones upon the deck. Lacey sweeps them up before either child wakes. There are contractor bags of dead birds in the garage. The neighbor Carol complains. The smell is driving her dogs crazy. Plus other signs, the flaming comets, the hail, locusts, drownings, war, bloodshed, murder, looting, tyranny. Lacey barely notices her husband’s ghost anymore, she is so busy cataloging the forebringers and the portents. She finds a needle and an eggshell under her daughter’s sheets. She finds a water basin on her daughter’s shelf meant to hold the power of the moon. “What are you doing?” Lacey asks her. The girl, unemotional and curious, watches the sky in the east with clear gray eyes. Her eyes used to be brown. On the bathroom window, the words CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATION appear as barbed lettering in the shower steam. Lacey rubs the words away. There are threats made of blood. I WILL KILL HER AND HIM AND spells the new words on the glass and these don’t erase.

• • • •

“We’re going on an adventure!” Lacey tells her daughter, best always to do these things in the morning at dawn, when the sky is red and threatening.

“Where?” the girl asks sleepily, her eyes like silver coins, her lips like bloodflowers.

“To a witch’s house,” Lacey replies. The girl startles awake and runs into her room to dress. Lacey follows. From the doorway, she studies her daughter’s body for what will be the last time. She is like a creature from another world, another undeveloped place. I am giving her a gift, Lacey reminds herself. This is an act of love. Anything done for love is good. “What do you even bring to a witch’s house?” asks the girl. “I don’t think you need to bring anything,” Lacey says, assembling a bag for the girl anyway, a set of polka dot underwear, leggings, shirts, a plush penguin stuffie, a photograph of the two of them in June. The wind stops blowing on the walk over. In the stillness they talk about starlight, and growing up, and losing teeth, and double digits, and love.

“Were you in love once?” asks the girl.

“Oh, once or twice before,” says Lacey.

“Will you be in love again?”

“I don’t think so. Not after today.”

They arrive at the dirty golden yellow house. “This is it?” asks the daughter with obvious disappointment, having expected a cottage built at the very center of the forest with a wishing well and a thatched roof. “But wait until you see inside,” says Lacey. They walk, holding hands, up the crumbling pathway. The door opens before Lacey can knock. “You got my messages,” says Ms. Shea. “What messages?” asks the girl. “I got your messages,” says Lacey. “I can take it from here,” says Ms. Shea. “I would like to come inside,” says Lacey, trying to get inside. Ms. Shea blocks her way. “You can’t come inside anymore,” Ms. Shea says. The girl tugs on her mother’s arm. “Let’s go, Mom,” the girl says. “I’m talking about your mother, not you. I’m glad you’re here,” says Ms. Shea. “Let’s go home,” says the girl. “You must be hungry,” says Ms. Shea. “Let’s go now,” says the girl. “I have porridge inside with a pitcher of cream,” says Ms. Shea. “Or scones. Do you like scones? And strawberries in crystalized sugar. And all sorts of mushrooms and eggs.” The house smells like soil and berries today. It smells like a burial. The girl tugs harder on Lacey’s arm and turns to go. Ms. Shea grabs the girl’s shoulders. “Mom?” asks the girl. Already Lacey has taken a step backward. She takes another step. This second step is harder than the first. The third step will be harder than the second, and so on. Ms. Shea keeps her arms secured around the girl’s chest. “Mom!” The girl is screaming. Ms. Shea holds a crystal vial to the girl’s cheek and catches every tear. The tears of a girl whose mother is leaving her are so valuable. “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!” Lacey turns and runs. The morning newspapers are delivered into the neighbors’ driveways as if this is typical. Thump thump thump thump.

The first night after Lacey loses her daughter, she doesn’t wash the sheets. Her bed smells like her daughter’s hair. Then, as before, she washes the sheets multiple times in hot water using more than the recommended amount of bleach. In the fireplace, she burns the puberty guides she had bought the girl, as good as fantasies now, burns also any children’s book that ever showed a child eventually coming home. When her son returns—from where?—he will notice the flames and the smoke and will continue loping up the stairs. He misses his dad. The master bed explodes in the yard.

• • • •

Every day after that Lacey takes an afternoon walk. Really such walks are runs. Really, they are sprints. On her sprints, she races past the neighborhood landmarks, the friendly market, the transportation service, the maplewood garden, ending at the dirty golden yellow house. More specifically, her run ends at the rustic ladder at the edge of the woods beside the yellow house. The ladder leads to an observation platform in the trees that someone, a mother, most likely, in a situation similar to Lacey’s, built long ago. Such a platform, when paired with binoculars, offers an adequate perspective of Ms. Shea’s yard, which is fenced, private, overgrown, and impenetrable, green somehow even in the late fall. This is the only way Lacey can glimpse her daughter, if the girl can still be called her daughter (I am going to continue to call the girl her daughter), who is now on her knees in the yard, pulling plants out of the ground by their roots. Of course there will be more repercussions soon. Of course Lacey will have to pay more for what she did. She doesn’t mind. For now, she sits cross-legged and cold on the tree stand, content to watch the girl, this is on a Tuesday, pluck the ruby red leaves off the deciduous shrubs. On a Wednesday, Lacey watches her daughter grind the leaves with a stone into a coarse red dust the consistency of pulverized human bone. Already the girl looks different: older, straighter, taller, sharper. If Lacey did not have a son, she would spend the rest of her life on that platform in the trees, watching her daughter’s transformation through the pair of binoculars.

But, remember, she has a son! So, from time to time, Lacey drags herself home. He is less interesting to her. He is silent, hard to see, often gone. She leaves a plate of dinner food for him on the kitchen island. In the morning, flies circle the buttered corn and the untouched tomatoes. Apparently he does not eat food anymore. He is hiding objects under his mattress. The bulges are spherical, oblong. Organic material is growing in his room either in the cracks of light between the blinds or else it is something that grows perfectly fine in the dark. On the rare days when a clear sky and the sun keep him inside, he lurks around the hallways and the closets with an unsettling electric power of his own that Lacey really should be developing into a different direction, but she has a lot on her mind. Also, admittedly, she knows nothing of male development, other than there is hair and growth. She would ask her husband for advice only ghosts can’t talk. What a ghost can do: make the kitchen sconces flicker. The sconces flicker and keep flickering. Perhaps this boy child of hers needed saving too. Oh well, too late. Eventually, inevitably, not long from now, in the space between this paragraph and the next, he will join a family of wolverines and run, naked and aggressive, through the surrounding state forest land attacking rodents with his canine teeth and marking his territory, behaviors Lacey will have to live with. She continues her daily visits to the platform beside Ms. Shea’s house. Her daughter destroys another life in the backyard.

Spring arrives! The neighbors hang up their tulip signs and their smiling bunny flags, the birds are singing like this, la la la la la, and the pointed green tips of other people’s perennials push upwards through the cedar mulch. A package, wrapped with last week’s newspaper, appears on Lacey’s front stoop in a puddle of coagulated blood. Inside the package: a pair of tiny ovaries, each no more than an inch, containing hundreds of thousands of eggs. Lacey holds the ovaries in her hands for a while. It is like holding her daughter again. It is not like holding her daughter. It is like holding one future of her daughter, the future that isn’t going to occur. She buries her daughter’s reproductive organs behind the garage, where she used to bury her children’s pets. The vertebrae of a cat, the skull of a gerbil. The number of days left to her are dwindling fast. There are plants, trees even, growing in the house gutters, and it doesn’t matter. Her ghost husband makes the lights flicker again. It was always complicated with him, though at least, now, there is a sense of companionship. She is, at least, not alone, even if he does want this story to be more about his feelings.

• • • •

Lacey is on the observation platform again watching her daughter. Today the girl is on her knees in Ms. Shea’s yard, her apron pockets bulging with robin feathers, feathers in her hair, blood on her arms. She is humming to herself. She looks well-fed. She looks like she is taking up more room. Her hands are competent and quick and decisive and unsympathetic as she plucks more feathers from the pile of birds to her right. Not all the birds in the pile are dead. Behind her, the yellow house appears to be breathing, the walls contracting and expanding like a yellow lung. Later Lacey will not remember making a sudden movement or a startling sound but she must have done something because the girl startles and when she looks up, she looks in Lacey’s direction, and it is not a look of love. Unless this is what love looks like now. Lacey raises her hand. The girl doesn’t raise her hand. Instead she shoves wing feathers into her mouth then goes inside. The yellow house breathes in, breathes out, breathes in. Lacey’s feet and legs grow numb from the cold. When she leaves the platform, she takes the long way home.

The birds come late that afternoon.

A flock of starlings darken the sky around Lacey’s house, most of them streaming into the picture window in the attic then sinking to the ground, too hurt to get up again. Hurt birds pile on top of hurt birds. It is too bad for the birds. The neighborhood cats prowl the property line with blood on their tactile hairs. Lacey at first kills the damaged birds humanely with a hammer but there are too many. She stops trying and shovels any bird on the ground into a contractor bag and throws the bags in the back seat of her car. That neighbor Carol complains again. Her dogs are acting crazy. It’s only a matter of time. Lacey assures Carol of this: it is only a matter of time. She puts her affairs in order, meaning she stops the mail, cancels the newspaper, pours the remaining milk down the drain, then waits in the rocking chair beside the front windows, watching the dog walkers go by, the gray squirrels. Arlo’s ghost rocks beside her. He tries to be a flare of comfort to her, a floral scent. He isn’t all evil though he thinks she deserves what she is about to get because do you remember what she did to him? Do you remember what he did to her? She sits there for days and nights and hours and minutes, catching occasional glimpses of her son loping silvery through the borders of the yards like there are no borders at all.

Her daughter’s inevitable arrival is heralded by the sound of insects rubbing their wings together. Tiny thuds of winged bodies slam against the exterior of the house and fall into heaps upon the ground like a pestilence. Lacey hears bootsteps crushing the exoskeletons. The subsequent battering on the door is neither polite nor patient. She is proud to have played a role in the creation of this presence. She can picture eternal fire and granite. “Hold my hand,” she instructs Arlo’s ghost because endings in this story are always scary but he can’t hold onto her hand nor does he want to. There is the smell of cinnamon and sage when she opens the door willingly, allowing herself this final memory. Her daughter, in the city pool, learning to swim, wraps her terrified child legs intimately around Lacey’s waist before leaning back onto the water’s blue surface, eyes squinted closed, hands in fists. Lacey cradles the girl’s head, the girl’s back. If she lets go, her daughter will drown. She lets go. The girl is floating. “Look at what you can do!” Lacey tells her concentrating and terrifying daughter. Her daughter, floating in a cape made out of mica and male songbird feathers. She can’t be looked at right now without going blind. That’s how brightly this girl who is no longer a girl is flashing. This story is not going to end peacefully. Lacey, I’m sorry. I wish there could be a different ending for you or for me, one in which the annihilation of reality would not be necessary, but I can’t think of another way to reach the end. A defect of my imagination, sure, but I think it’s also a defect of the world. Here’s the best I can do: despite the intensity, you stare at your daughter anyway, her prodigal brightness the last thing that you will see or want to see. Your child nods, mouths thank you. How sweet. Actually, she doesn’t. If any familial gratitude is present, you, in the beginning of your final delirium, as your retinas burn, imagine it. Arms raised, palms open, crackling, the girl huffs and she puffs and we blow everything down.

©2022 by Debbie Urbanski.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Debbie Urbanski’s stories and essays have been published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, Granta, The Sun, Strange Horizons, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her first novel, After World, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Find her at debbieurbanski.com or on Instagram at @debbieurbanski.

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

EXCERPT: Kalyna the Soothsayer (Erewhon Books)

Elijah Kinch Spector | 6059 words

A plucky, sardonic con artist must “prophesize” her way out of peril—discovering along the way that power and politics are nothing more than the stories sold as truth.

Kalyna’s family has the Gift: the ability to see the future. For generations, they traveled the four kingdoms of the Tetrarchia selling their services as soothsayers. Every child of their family is born with this Gift—everyone except Kalyna.

So far, Kalyna has used informants and trickery to falsify prophecies for coin, scrounging together a living for her deteriorating father and cruel grandmother. But Kalyna’s reputation for prophecy precedes her, and poverty turns to danger when she is pressed into service by the spymaster to Rotfelsen.

Kalyna is to use her “Gift” to uncover threats against Rotfelsen’s king, her family held hostage to ensure her good behavior. But politics are devious; the king’s enemies abound, and Kalyna’s skills for investigation and deception are tested to the limit. Worse, the conspiracy she uncovers points to a larger threat, not only to Rotfelsen but to the Tetrarchia itself.

Kalyna is determined to protect her family and newfound friends, but as she is drawn deeper into palace intrigue, she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping prevent the Tetrarchia’s destruction—or if her lies will bring about its prophesized downfall.

Available now from Erewhon Books.

Forced Luxury

I would have enjoyed traveling in that carriage, with its plush seats and its safety, if not for the company, the destination, and having been kidnapped.

The monstrous vehicle’s interior, not including the unnecessary turret on top, was larger than my family’s two tents put together. Lenz and I began by sitting diagonally at opposite ends, on separate seats against the front and back walls, respectively, and there were two more rows of seats that ran through the center, separating us. It was almost too much space for me. It made me feel uncomfortable; adrift. This monstrosity could have sat twelve spoiled nobles in relative comfort. Soldiers sitting on the floor could likely have numbered twenty, provided most of the filigrees and luxuries were removed to make room for them.

Yet none of the harquebusiers were inside with us. They sat on little platforms with guardrails, and took shifts sleeping in an enclosed area about the size of my bedroll, which bulged out from the back of the carriage. There was no door between their sleeping chamber and where we sat—this carriage was also built to be a prison, if necessary.

So, Lenz and I had the inside of this rolling cathedral to ourselves, and I sat as far from him as possible. The benches were backed with silk cushions, and the carriage interior was all rich woods and velvets, with gold-plate in the shape of grape leaves everywhere—as though anyone in Rotfelsen’s dank caves had even seen a grape that wasn’t first stomped and turned into wine beneath a Skydašian sky. Overall, this carriage was more expensively designed than any building I’d ever been inside; and perhaps more sturdily built (excluding dungeons).

As the soldier patching me up had promised, we did indeed stop to find a good flesh-alchemist, who cheerily got on board and spent a good hour mending my arm as we rolled along. I had been injured many times in my life, but only rarely been willing (or able) to pay for flesh-alchemy. It was still quite impressive, to me, to see how his gritty little salve, still warm to the touch, closed up my wound before my very eyes, although Lenz seemed quite disinterested.

Of this relatively new art, Grandmother had always said, “Bandages and bed rest were good enough for our ancestors, and they’re good enough for you!” Never thinking, of course, of all the necessities and luxuries she enjoyed that many of her ancestors had not: tobacco from the Bandit States, Loashti gunpowder for a soothsayer to make a stunning entrance, the velvet she’d torn out of her chair. Flesh-alchemy had simply been unlucky enough to come about during Grandmother’s adulthood, and was therefore a decadent luxury. (Unlike tobacco.)

She also did not bother to think of how her own grandfather, Huso, had escaped a mob only to bleed to death of a wound that could have been easily fixed by flesh-alchemy. But, of course, this new medicine was no help for internal bleeding, and so would have done nothing for my mother when I killed her.

The flesh-alchemist was a pleasant little man in a fur coat whose normal rate was a ludicrous (to me) ten gold grivnas. He was given another ten for his silence, and five more besides to pay his way back home from the nearest inn—a trip that would cost, at most, a few silver grivnas. Lenz had just handed out half of Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way’s fortune on fixing my arm. I stared up at my kidnapper, who was standing by the door, as the carriage lurched back to life.

“Why,” I asked, “could the Dutiful Prince Friedhelm, Landgrave of the Two Great Caves and the Spire, not come to my tent like a decent person?” I looked down at my arm, flexing it lightly and feeling the newly knitted flesh tingle.

“Gniezto is farther than our good Prince can travel just now,” said Lenz. “It’s a well-kept secret that Prince Friedhelm is one of the hardest working people in Rotfelsen.”

“Is he in Masovska at all?”

“No.”

“You . . .” Lenz may have heard me grind my teeth. “You are taking me all the way to Rotfelsen, aren’t you?”

“Did you think the Landgrave of the Two Great Caves and the Spire was just over the next Masovskan hill?”

“I dared to hope.”

At least Lenz did not laugh at me. He braced his hand against the wall of the carriage, but did not move to sit down.

“Surely you know,” he said, “that most Rots don’t like to leave their land.”

“‘Land’ is generous,” I sneered. “Their rock, you mean. But of course, who would ever want to leave such a charming place?”

“Personally, I quite enjoy travel.”

I was feeling very Masovskan just then, and almost told him just where in his Prince he could travel. But I held it in.

“Sir,” I said instead, “I have customers, one of whom owes me a payment, and an invalid father besides. I cannot simply disappear from Gniezto without a trace.”

I did not tell him I also had an informant to pay off and a societal (or natural?) collapse to avoid.

“It seems someone in Gniezto didn’t want you around anymore,” he said. “Some well-off type dislike his fortune, perhaps? We took care of his goons for you, and the Prince will pay you more than any other customers could.”

I groaned theatrically. Even if this Lenz were to give me five hundred Masovskan grivnas, I had done so much for a fragment of Gustaw’s fifty.

“And,” he continued, “your father and grandmother will be spirited to your side. I have a suite, complete with servants and four sturdy walls, prepared for them.”

I admit that the thought of Papa being comfortable and safe for the winter would have been tempting, if we didn’t need to escape the Tetrarchia entirely. If I ignored the imminent collapse of our country, then my jailer was promising to do more for Papa than his own daughter ever had. Provided Lenz was telling the truth.

“Just a little way from here,” he said, “is another carriage of ours, which I will send back for your family, and your things, and bring them after us. At a less strenuous pace than you and I are traveling. The soldiers within will collect your father and grandmother, as well as your possessions.”

“No soldiers!” I hadn’t meant to yell, but I did. A harquebusier on the roof knocked against the hard metal door to make sure Lenz was alright.

“All’s well!” Lenz yelled upward. He walked back to his side of the carriage and sat.

“No soldiers,” I repeated, quieter. I stood up and paced the carriage to do something with my energy. My hands were shaking, and I stopped myself just before pulling at my own hair many times. “Everywhere we go, we are hunted, arrested, blamed, burned. If a woman has a miscarriage, I must have looked at her; if vengeful spirits have been causing trouble, my father drew them with his madness. More often than it’s an unruly mob coming for us, it is soldiers.”

I threw my arms up and turned away from him. The carriage bounced and I stumbled, which didn’t look very threatening. I turned back to face him, glaring.

“If Grandmother sees soldiers coming for her,” I said, “she’ll do whatever she can to get my father and herself killed, rather than captured. She will be surprisingly good at it.”

“And so I should . . . what?” Lenz was listening, but seemed unbothered.

“Put some of your soldiers in servant’s livery, and have them say I’m . . . I’m working for the Prince of my own free will, which is but half a lie.”

“Hmm.” Lenz scratched his head. “That’s a lot of trouble.”

“I can also be a lot of trouble.”

“I’m sure you can. I’ll see what I can do.”

Would he? Or was he was only humoring me while he left them to starve? Or freeze? I had only his word to go on.

I walked back and fell into my seat. “Well . . .” I laughed to myself. “Maybe it would be all right if Grandmother was . . . misplaced along the way.”

“Don’t say that unless you mean it.”

I looked back at Lenz, and he seemed serious—more so than when conveying the Prince’s orders. Who was this man?

“If you mean it,” he continued, “it’s done.”

I may have considered his offer.

But finally, I said, “Forget it.”

“Forgotten.”

The carriage rumbled through the Masovskan forest, and I glanced at the sun beginning to rise above the trees. Lenz stood up and opened a compartment. In it was a large and ornate gleaming silver samovar, which rattled softly with the carriage’s movement.

“You don’t smell good enough to be a spoiled noble,” I said.

“Just a soldier, Kalyna Aljosanovna.” He pointed with his thumb to his yellow doublet. “The luxury is for you.” Then he poured two cups of tea.

“When a powerful man abducts a woman, the luxury is never for her. You are showing me your power.”

“I am showing you the Prince’s power.”

“Hmm. I wonder what he really wants from me.”

“What do you think?” he asked as he watered down the tea.

“Perhaps the Prince has a social disease and rubbing the ashes of a prophet on his balls will cure it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, walking over to me. Then he smiled. “The Prince is nowhere near as lecherous as his reputation. Hardly anyone could be.”

I shrugged and grimaced. “I’ve never heard of your blasted Prince, or his reputation. I’m just assuming.”

“I promise you, Kalyna,” he said as he handed me a teacup, “his only interest is in your Gift.”

“What does he want from my Gift? To supplant his brother, I suppose?” I sniffed at the tea.

Lenz then proceeded to tell me what it was the Prince wanted. He did so in every human being’s favorite way to communicate: through a story about oneself.

Lenz’s Story

When I first came to the Dutiful Prince Friedhelm’s apartments in the Sunset Palace, Kalyna, I was dressed to be murdered.

My full formal uniform—green, at the time—was stiff with disuse and completed by a great empty space on the chest for the medals I did not have. My hair and mustaches I had combed, curled, twisted, and slicked so heavily that I could not tell my own sweat from running pig fat. With all that and my limp, I was a sight to behold.

The Prince’s guards—yellow, they wear, as I do now—took my sword but allowed me to wander his apartments unaccompanied. I assumed this was permitted because I would not leave those apartments alive, and I decided that if I was to become a corpse, I would see absolutely every room first. Have some new sights to mull over while I waited in the void for the spirits of my ancestors to come find me.

Prince Friedhelm’s apartments, with which you will soon be familiar, are a dizzying array of sitting rooms, library-studies, bedrooms of sundry themes, and a complex of baths. You can tell one sort of room from another by the variety of couch that it has. (They all have couches.) Some are sectional and curved for lounging groups, some are straight and comfortable with an end table on which to set paperwork when the eyes get tired. One couch is velvet, and its armrests are gold-plated nudes bent at ninety degrees.

Thus I lingered before entering the audience chamber. I saw every book, wall, and device in those apartments, in order to delay my death a little longer. I see you are disappointed I did not meet it. A guard in yellow eventually indicated that I should really get going, and he did so unkindly, as the Yellows and the Greens have never been close. Rotfelsen has four separate armies, you see, each of which supposedly serve the kingdom, and through it our greater Tetrarchia, in their own way. None of them like one another.

Now, this was only last spring. At the time, I was a minor officer, unnoticeable by my own design, in High General Dreher’s army. In other words, I was a Green. The way I looked at it, I’d made a deal with my superiors: I took a bullet in my left leg for Rotfelsen during a skirmish in my youth, and now I would fill out acquisitions forms for grain and saltfish and carry no ambitions, so long as they sent me limping into no more battles. Raids from the Bandit States would be curbed well enough without my sword: I was happily beneath anyone’s interest.

Oh yes, I was also stealing privileged information. Constantly. Not for any purpose, mind you, but it’s amazing how many matters of grave importance will be written right into the blandest paperwork with no thought as to whose eyes may run over them. I had in my home books upon books I’d written with my own hand, filled with secrets about the army, the nobility, the royal family, our neighbors, and anything else. I had no use for any of this, but it seemed such a waste not to collect what was right in front of me every day. I was driven chiefly by curiosity, incredulity at so much being available to me, and deep boredom. Of course, I knew it was dangerous, and perhaps a part of me wanted the excitement.

So I thought I knew why the Prince had called me from my windowless office, up to his towering and very windowed one. I was to disappear, or go out those windows and bounce on the red stone, after he figured out what my shadowy, and entirely fictional, masters wanted with my secret history, and how much I had told them. I fancied I had been taken for a Loashti spy.

I paced the Prince’s audience chamber and pretended not to notice the secret door in his bookshelf. A room has never had a secret passage that did not also have a secret peephole, so I behaved myself. There was a very sharp letter opener on his desk, and I wondered if he expected me to pick it up and hide it.

Soon enough, the Prince came out of his bookshelf and looked me over. He’s a short man who bears the features of the inbred, a strange jaw and nose, but is also the rare royal who would attract admirers even as a tailor or blacksmith. But you’ll meet him soon enough.

He greeted me warmly and asked if I’d drifted back toward his desk because I recognized what he was reading. I lied and said that I had. The open book on his desk was in my handwriting: a volume on his older brother, King Gerhold VIII, open to a page on our monarch’s childlessness.

“‘Many in the court’”—the Prince quoted a passage of mine from memory—“‘whisper that the King has specific predilections that keep him from fathering children. Such as an interest in men, or . . .’ Well, you know. ‘And,’” the Prince continued, in my voice, “‘that such desires could also explain his periodic disappearances to his hunting lodge down in the southern caves. But this seems unlikely, as to marry and create royal offspring is a duty beyond something so simple as personal tastes. More likely, the King or the Queen simply cannot have children.’”

The Prince then asked me from whom these speculations had come, and I told him they were my own.

The Prince told me it was treason to even suggest that the King’s issue was anything but potent. It was also treason to suggest the King may have preferred men, as such things are frowned upon in Rotfelsen, past a certain age. Although the Prince was quick to point out that this would not have been a great hindrance.

“I assure you,” I remember he said, “to ensure his legacy, a King can grit his teeth and bear anything.”

I told him that was exactly what I had been trying to say in my book.

“Lenz Felsknecht, Acquisitions Officer in the High General’s army,” he said to me, “why do you suspect you’re here? Assuming it’s not to have you thrown from my window, which it may well be.”

I told him I was sure I didn’t know.

Now, I’ll always remember this next thing he said perfectly: “These books of yours are better curated and organized than any records I have seen.”

I thanked him for the compliment, of course, and then told our Dutiful Prince Friedhelm, “You want my help in intriguing against your brother.”

The Prince laughed and asked me why in the world he would ever want that.

“If,” the Prince told me, “my brother dies, or is exiled, while childless, I am King. If my brother survives every plot against his life, and manages to somehow produce an heir, what do I receive?”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Except a lifetime of riches and parties and pleasures with no consequences. I love my brother no more than an evil prince from an old story does his, but the last thing I want is his death before I have a niece or nephew.”

In all my prying, I had not suspected our Prince was so motivated.

“But the plots in our wretched kingdom grow faster than the divided King’s Guard can prune them. No matter how hard I have tried, I am not so blind to politics as to miss how suspicious centuries living in this place have made us. I feel that in every little hollow there is sedition breeding—that our people get strange ideas when they live away from the sun for so long. So, your job will be to serve me, as one of my Yellows, in keeping my brother safe from the shadows to ensure my indolence. I can’t use anyone known to the court.”

I bowed and accepted this new position immediately, to preserve my life.

“Keep my brother alive, Lenz, at least until he can have children somehow. Keep this festering boil of a kingdom from bursting until I’ve died happy in my wine and my lovers.”

Don’t Bring Me Near the King

I sat quietly through his story, holding a cup of untouched tea in a sad attempt at repose. We were still somewhere in Masovska’s thick forest, and it was only midmorning. The tea smelled strangely intense, almost like smoked meat.

“Well,” I said, “now I know what the Prince wants, but nothing about my involvement.”

“Oh, that.” Lenz laughed. “The Prince thought a prophet might be useful. For anticipating plots.”

“You could have just said, ‘We’re spies!’ and skipped the story.”

“I wanted you to understand my position in all this.”

“I do not care to.”

Lenz shrugged and sat back, scratching his messy hair. The carriage crashed over a bump in the road.

“So,” I said, putting down my untouched tea, “the Prince wants me to read the King’s future and point out a couple of dignitaries who are eyeing the throne for their masters, for a hefty fee.”

“Essentially. We will be there just in time for the Winter Ball.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The Splendid Royal Ball of the Entering into the Winter Months, Wreathed by Snow and Ice, although likely none will have formed yet. It’s a party with hundreds of guests, some of whom may have harmful plans.”

“Perfect, I can see all the dignitaries and third-tier royal bastards in one place.” I clapped my free hand against my thigh, with finality. “A good night’s work!”

It would be a crowning achievement of lying for me, the monumental fraud, to successfully prophesize for a king, a prince, and a spy. So satisfying would be the success, and so easily could I afford to get Papa out of the Tetrarchia on a Prince’s money. I would escape the Tetrarchia in time and be proud of my greatest deception. Perhaps that would comfort me through the long hours of contemplating my homeland’s death from afar.

But Lenz looked very sorry about what he was about to say. “No. You are conscripted to join me as a spy for . . . quite some time. The ball’s a good start, but we will need regular reads on the court.”

“How long?”

“Well, your father and grandmother will have a nice warm place to stay for the winter. For the next few winters.”

“The next—!” I gulped back the rest.

“Kalyna Aljosanovna, you will know too much for us to just let you go.”

“Then don’t tell me your secrets! I don’t care to know them. And I could not begin to care about royalty.”

“You’re a soothsayer.”

“Then don’t bring me near the King!” I cried. “That way I will know nothing!”

“You may well never see the King,” said Lenz, “but you’ll tell us about many important people.”

My head spun. How long could an imposter possibly survive at any court, much less the insular and cagey Rotfelsenisch court? What’s more, were I whispering false prophecies into a Prince’s ear, couldn’t my incompetence then be directly responsible for the Tetrarchia’s collapse?

This last was actually a strangely comforting thought.

But what was not comforting was the image of Papa waking up alone and confused in his tent. What was certainly not comforting was the fact that this job for a sybaritic prince was not going to be the greatest con of my career, but a death sentence. Even without the looming end of the Tetrarchia, there was no freedom on the horizon.

Every failed prophecy would be a chance to be discovered and executed, and every successful one would keep me there for when Rotfelsen crumbled to red dust beneath Papa’s prophesized destruction. I would have to reform my escape plans, as leaving the Tetrarchia from Rotfelsen was entirely different than from Masovska. Rotfelsen’s very structure was that of a fortress—it was the hardest kingdom to escape, as I knew from past experience. Could we make it south into the Bandit States while they picked at the edges of the Tetrarchia’s despair? I was doomed.

I watched the Masovskan trees speed by through the window’s bars and thought about them being leveled for siege engines. Even then, as winter encroached, most were still green and vibrant. As I stared out, Lenz spoke about paying off my Gniezto debts, about making sure to collect my fee from Eight-Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way, and all other manner of things to show how much he knew about me. At least he did not seem to understand my relationship to Ramunas.

“How long did it take you to get to Gniezto?” I finally asked.

“A week, at full speed.”

“A week? I’ll be trapped in here with you for a week?”

Gods, a whole week. I would arrive in Rotfelsen’s capital, Turmenbach, with maybe two and a half months until the Tetrarchia was supposed to collapse around me.

“Yes,” said Lenz, “we will be stuck with each other for a week, before we are stuck with each other for years.”

I sat still, staring at him for a good minute or two, and then realized that I was very tired. I said as much.

“You can sleep in the turret,” he said.

“‘Can,’ so I have privacy? Or ‘will,’ so I am farther from the doors?”

“Yes to both. Although the doors are steel, and locked, with harquebusiers watching the road fly by at impossible speeds.”

I sighed. I was beginning to have trouble keeping my eyes open.

“Will my father catch up with us along the way?” I asked.

“Oh my, no. We will change horses, but otherwise it’s straight on through half of Masovska and into Rotfelsen. No stops. Your elderly family will be stopping for rest, so that they are not constantly jostled.”

I had not gotten to say goodbye. Papa would be so scared and confused when Lenz’s people came for him, however they were dressed. If Lenz wasn’t lying and they did so at all. Papa might simply sit in the tent waiting for me until he froze or starved. Or perhaps Lenz’s soldiers had slit his throat and been done with it. I had no reason to think I would see Papa ever again.

I was now tired enough to realize that the carriage could have been crashing off Rotfelsen’s red cliffs and I would have fallen asleep in the middle of it. I did not even have the energy to continue worrying about Papa.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow there would be much worrying.

I stood up and stumbled to the little ladder. I remember from later in the trip that where each of the ladder’s rails punched through the sides to anchor itself, there was a bronze face staring out the other end, as if to guard anyone ascending it. All human faces, and each one different.

I certainly didn’t notice this on that first evening, however. I have a vague memory of being halfway up the ladder, and the next thing I remember is waking up in the turret the following day. I was wrapped in five blankets as I pulled open the curtains to see the harquebusier on the roof. He smiled and waved at me.

Bohdan’s Botanicals

That next morning, I was presented with a few sets of clean clothes and a bright sky above the Masovskan woods that did not look like they could ever become a battlefield, or be even the least bit affected by human concerns. I changed, awkwardly, from trousers back into a dress inside the little turret, kicking its sides a lot in the process and feeling the new alchemy-crafted skin on my arm stretch strangely. Thus, I stopped looking like some midnight cutthroat, and was once again a soothsayer. The dress was a deep ochre with blue-green embroidered accents—the sort of colorful clothing I preferred, but better made than anything I owned. Pity it was tight in the shoulders.

I climbed down the ladder and was provided a warm meal of roasted beets and turnips scrambled with egg and thin slices of ham, alongside a mug of warm cider. The food and drink had waited for me on a little table rooted to the floor, the surface of which was on some sort of hinge that kept it always upright and still, no matter how the carriage bumped and rolled beneath us. I cannot pretend I understand how that worked.

Part of my family’s excuse for meager meals had always been that we were constantly traveling, and yet here was travel desperate to seem like decadent, stationary life. I have known nomadic peoples who traveled with a collection of huge tents, each with thick rugs and wooden furniture, serving a feast of pickles and preserves, but they never acted as though they were not traveling. This thing was pretending to be a house as it bumped along the road. But I supposed the Rotfelsenisch mind always craved enclosure.

“Is a cook sweating into a fire in that closet?” I asked with my mouth full, spitting bits of ham. I pointed with my spoon to a small closet at the rear of the carriage, which could not have fit more than three jackets and some boots.

“We changed horses at an inn ten minutes before you woke; this was cooked there.” Lenz was picking at a plate of the same, and still did me the courtesy of sitting at the far side of the carriage. He seemed annoyed at having to speak up.

“Ah.”

“We have alchemically warmed pots stored below us”—he stomped on the floor—“filled with that cider, soups, stews, and we have the samovar as well, but I assure you that’s the limit.”

“Oh yes, quite limited,” I grunted as I crammed the rest of the ham and the last round of turnip into my mouth. The food and cider were both delicately spiced with flavors I did not yet recognize, but the child at the bottom of my consciousness stirred with memories of Papa crushing small leaves in his palm and sprinkling them over a pan.

I thought about allowing Lenz to sit closer, so that we could chat and I could try to wheedle useful things out of him, until I remembered I was being kidnapped in a carriage dripping with soldiers. Suddenly I did not have the energy for such subterfuge. Later. We had a week, after all.

“There’s a library in here, you know,” said Lenz.

“Naturally!” I said.

He indicated a handle on the floor. I knelt, grabbed it, and yanked up as hard as I could, only for the bookshelf to slide up so easily that I fell on my rear. Lenz was good enough to pretend he had seen nothing. The bookshelf came right up out of the floor to my waist: a square column with books on all four sides.

“About half of them are my own volumes,” said Lenz. “Just a few slices of my history that are pertinent to those we’ll see at the Winter Ball.”

I looked up at him: smiling and relaxed, the way someone with power over one’s life can afford to be. I wanted to jump up and throttle him. I was sure I could at least kill Lenz before the soldiers got to me.

Sitting on the floor, I gritted my teeth, grabbed a book, and began reading Lenz’s extensive secret history of Rotfelsenisch politics—the work that had gotten him in trouble, and also hired. This would, I hoped, give me somewhere to begin when I was trapped in Rotfelsen, producing futures for the Prince. Lenz didn’t wonder why I needed to read them because he understood how the Gift worked, and so knew the importance of context.

Context, however, I did not achieve, at least not yet. I began eagerly, for here was a chance to better formulate my “prophecies.” But with no points of reference for the major figures, scandals, and battles, it read as a jumble of guttural monikers and meaningless observations.

Reading about the royal family and all attendant nobles was useless—I had no faces to put to names. How was I to know Frederick from Johann-Frederick from Frederick-Johann in a pinch, when all were names on paper, and all heirs to the Dukedom of the Blue Fields, of which I had never heard? The current, ailing Duke was Hans-Robler XII, not to be confused with Robler-Hans IV, Viscount of the Web Tunnels, who had been mentioned twenty pages earlier as a minor leader of the South Cave Separatists, who had attempted to split off from Rotfelsen entirely.

Every person, place, political idea, or event I did not know had to be further researched, and within its definition—if one was even provided—I would find more I did not know. The words all made sense on their own, but together it was a jumble of strangers doing things to each other that I did not understand.

I gave up and slammed one of Lenz’s volumes shut in frustration. These idiots would all be dead soon anyway. He sighed and told me that if I wanted something else to pass the time, there were other works, which he had not written.

I had initially learned to read all my languages through unfulfilled contracts, vicious edicts, and wanted posters. (In my teen years, one such poster, covered in the globes and loops of Skydašiavos, claimed that my presence had “soured almond milk and twisted the beanstalks of unmarried young men like sourdough pretzels.”) But the only time before my trip with Lenz that I had enjoyed reading had been in my fifteenth year, when Papa caught a pneumonia so bad that we spent a week with a doctor. I hemorrhaged silver that week but refused to leave his side, and so spent his sleeping hours reading medical texts. It helped me learn where to cut people.

So, now that I had nothing to do, I would try to learn more. I looked at what else Lenz had in his little library: The Fundamentals of Historical Ethics as Told Through the Failures of the Pre-Tetrarchic Eras, The Cleaving Battle of Selju Cliffs, Half-Fabulous Creatures of Misted Places, Loashti Diplomacy, Goëmann’s Honey Conspiracy, The Skydašian Tower of Nine-Toed Feet, and on and on and on. There were some whose titles were in archaic forms of Rotfelsenisch beyond my understanding.

I chose Bohdan’s Botanicals, second edition, because I hoped to learn how to poison my captor. The title Bohdan’s Botanicals was alliterative in Rotfelsenisch, but not in the original Masovskani from which it had been translated. The words of each page’s descriptions wrapped themselves about a desiccated flower, leaf, or stem pressed onto the page. It must have been a terribly expensive book to produce. Many times, the guide’s informative prose broke down amidst invective against “the Skydašian bandit-naturalist Adomas.”

I searched and searched that book for a harmful flower to crumble into Lenz’s tea. Unfortunately, every hallucinatory candleflower, itchy dogwhisker, and purple poison rotprick was divested of its poisonous innards before pressing. The prose excitedly promised this on every page. I wonder if the first edition had caused poor Bohdan a lawsuit. I hope he stayed out of Gniezto.

Copyright © 2022 by Elijah Kinch Spector. Excerpted from Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector. Published by permission of Erewhon Books and the author. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elijah Kinch Spector lives in Brooklyn. Kalyna the Soothsayer is his first novel.

Book Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo

Aigner Loren Wilson | 333 words

The Chosen and the Beautiful
Nghi Vo
Hardcover / Ebook / Paperback
ISBN: 9781250784780
Tordotcom, June 2021, 272 pgs

Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is a queer historical fantasy reimagining of The Great Gatsby. Vo’s debut novel, which came out in 2021, tells a coming-of-age story of Jordan Baker. Jordan Baker is a queer Vietnamese adoptee floating through the party-filled world of soul-selling, liquors filled with magic, and all-consuming desire.

Usually, I’m not a fan of fae stories, but I’m a fan of Vo’s style and way of depicting magic alongside the real world. Vo’s writing is flawless and a type all its own. The writing itself made The Chosen and the Beautiful untypical of fae stories; even though there are commonalities and genre conventions present in the novel, Vo blends them with the world, history, and characters in a way that just feels natural.

I never read The Great Gatsby, but from my literature classes, this is much improved on the original story. The characters from the novel are there. There’s Nick, Jordan, and, of course, Gatsby. They all want each other or someone else, and desire is sucking everyone dry. The 1920s classic dry wit is there, too, with some added queer readings and insults that sometimes had me laughing at the slight.

The Chosen and the Beautiful is the second book I’ve read by Vo, and I can say I’m a complete and true fan. The parties and magic and queer hook-ups, the speakeasies and outfits and affairs of those who live above the rest all added a touch of flair to the novel, making every scene and line flow like water.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black writer of speculative fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and games. She serves as a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons and has guest-edited issues of Fireside Fiction and Apparition Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in FIYAH, Anathema, Arsenika, and other publications. When she’s not writing or editing for others, she’s learning, hiking, or loving on her fur babies—both human and animal. To check out her books, games, bread bakes, and other writings visit her website (aignerlwilson.com).

Book Review: Eternally Yours, edited by Patrice Caldwell

Arley Sorg | 1189 words

Eternally Yours
Patrice Caldwell, editor
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780593206874
Viking Books for Young Readers, September 2022, 416 pgs

Back in 2020, Patrice Caldwell gave us original anthology A Phoenix First Must Burn (reviewed by me here: bit.ly/3egqf5h). Similar to anthologies like 2015’s Octavia’s Brood, 2017’s Sycorax’s Daughters, 2019’s New Suns—and of course before these, Dark Matter by Sheree Renée Thomas in 2000—Phoenix stepped up to fill a need, to showcase authors and stories that were largely missing or overlooked by most genre publishers (not to mention review venues). Phoenix felt like important, groundbreaking work.

Now Caldwell has put together original anthology Eternally Yours, a “paranormal romance anthology filled with tales of the mortal and the monstrous.” It’s a good book, but it doesn’t feel “groundbreaking” the way Phoenix did. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the book; in fact, it’s kind of a wonderful thing.

There have been a number of very recent, very worthy efforts, such as El Porvenir, ¡Ya!: Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl; Disruption; and Unlimited Futures: books which seek to bring marginalized voices out of the margins and into your to-be-read lists. As with the majority of earlier entries, these books are often by smaller presses, or presses with limited reach in mainstream markets. But there have also been anthologies such as Our Shadows Have Claws: 15 Latin American Monster Stories, published by Algonquin; Reclaim the Stars, published by St. Martin’s imprint Wednesday books; and Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices, published by Penguin Random House imprint Vintage. In other words, books produced by companies with considerable reach. Even shortly after Phoenix, Dhonielle Clayton came out with A Universe of Wishes with Penguin Random House imprint Crown. Make no mistake: you can still pick up a bunch of random new anthologies by major publishers, flip through their pages, and find very few marginalized voices; some will even be stocked exclusively with white authors, from beginning to end. That said, even over two years, significantly more books have come out featuring those previously missing and overlooked demographics. Bottom line? Even though it’s easier to find these books than it was two years ago, the work is far from done. This is why Eternally Yours is still an important book, even if it may not feel as groundbreaking as Phoenix was.

There is another big difference between this book and Phoenix. With Phoenix, it felt like Caldwell was taking bigger risks, partially in terms of the stories themselves and how daring they went, but also in terms of the authors. Phoenix featured a handful of notable authors, and while all the authors in that book had proven their skills somewhere in publishing, probably half or more of those authors would be new to the average genre reader. By contrast, Eternally Yours is seriously stuffed with bestselling authors. The average reader, I think, will at least recognize most of the names in this anthology. New York Times-bestselling author Kendare Blake, for example, or internationally bestselling author Kat Cho, or New York Times-, USA Today-, and Los Angeles Times-bestselling author Melissa De La Cruz. In a sense, Caldwell has put together the Avengers of marginalized voices, pulled specifically from the pool of today’s young adult heavy hitters. Of course, seeing Anna-Marie McLemore included in this table of contents was a big selling point for me, personally: known at this point for their novels, I consider them to be one of the better short fiction writers out there, ever since reading their breathtaking “Cristal y Ceniza” in A Universe of Wishes.

But let’s go back to my earlier statement: It’s a good book.

Because it really is. This book may feel less daring, but there are still some surprises, as well as a few voices that benefit from being showcased next to all these bestsellers. Do not doubt, folks. Everyone here knows how to put together a story. It makes sense because, unlike many of their non-marginalized counterparts, in all likelihood, everyone here had to fight twice as hard and write three times as well to earn those accolades. More importantly, Caldwell knows how to pick authors that will deliver something worth reading.

For example, Chloe Gong’s “A Thousand More” utilizes excellent narrative choices to effectively sketch a scene within just a few lines. Gong brings the moment to life via vibrant characters in relatable moments. Tally is a highly motivated student whose life gets disrupted when a new (very hot) student declares that they are reincarnated lovers. One problem: Tally doesn’t remember it, and she isn’t convinced. It’s a fun story, and it’s interesting to see the fluctuations of a relationship stretched across Chinese history.

“If You Give An Asura a Cookie” by Akshaya Raman kicks off with a good setup: Rupa is a young asura who is unhappy being an asura. This lays the groundwork for a theme that digs into self-acceptance. The story is bolstered by wonderful characters and great familial relationships. A sprinkle of humor uplifts everything, counterbalancing an otherwise painful subject. The meeting of the love interest is super charming, and somehow I really liked that the initial moment of attraction was in their monster forms. Overall, it’s a nicely written story, with a good through-line on finding self-acceptance through discovering kindred spirits. The twist or surprise is pretty obvious, but it’s still an entertaining story, perhaps even moving.

“Kiss the Boy” by Adib Khorram is an updated and gay The Little Mermaid. The writing feels easy, and it pulls you gently into the narrative. The dialog is good, and the awkwardness and nervousness of the main character were palpable. I smiled and laughed and remembered a lot of things from my own experiences. In other words, the piece is extremely relatable, even if it’s pure fantasy. All told, this story is great fun, with a splash of commentary on various issues here and there, and even a cool idea or two thrown in as filigree.

I’m not necessarily the target audience for this book, but I do dabble, and I found it to be a solid offering. Moreover, looking at the industry and where we’re at, I’d consider this book to be an important contribution to culture. Perhaps most importantly, it’s worth your money. Curl up for an evening, give it a read. Let these authors take you on a few fantastic, romantic journeys. You’re in good hands and wonderful imaginations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2022 recipient of SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He is also a 2021 and a 2022 World Fantasy Award Finalist, a 2022 Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two 2022 Ignyte Awards: for his work as a critic as well as for his creative nonfiction. Arley is a senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site: arleysorg.com. He has taught classes, run workshops, and been a guest for Clarion West, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, Cascade Writers, Augur Magazine, and more. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in the SF Bay Area and writes in local coffee shops when he can. Find him on Twitter @arleysorg. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Book Review: Across the Sand, by Hugh Howey

Chris Kluwe | 875 words

Across the Sand
Hugh Howey
Hardcover / eBook / Audiobook
ISBN: 9780358670452
Harper Collins, October 2022, 400 pages

Salutations, word devourers, and welcome back to another book review. This month we’ll be looking at the newest novel by self-publishing sensation Hugh Howey–Across the Sand, a long awaited follow-up to his original novel Sand.

For those of you who have read Howey’s previous work, especially Wool, Across the Sand offers more of the same not-quite-dystopic-but-only-because-we’re-optimists-dystopic-future worldbuilding that he initially rose to fame on, but I’m happy to say that it’s not a formulaic write by numbers piece. Instead, Across the Sand fleshes out the world initially created by Sand while also expanding on what it means to be part of a family, a community, and a world that on first glance might be falling apart, but on second might be worth saving.

Across the Sand continues with the same set of characters from Sand (the family Axelrod, and associated hangers on) while adding some new ones set slightly in the future, but new readers need not fear—I hadn’t read Sand before reading Across the Sand and was still able to follow everything without feeling like I was missing integral plot points or character development. That being said, there were definitely points were I felt like there was a lot more backstory being hinted at than what was available in this book, but that’s easily rectified by reading the first novel. As a standalone novel, Across the Sand pulls its own weight.

In terms of the actual storyline, Howey’s luscious worldbuilding (which seems incredibly odd to say about someone who’s known for writing such arid environments) is on full display, as usual. The inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Colorado are well at home in their dusty environment of sand and blasted rock, and the lives they lead attempting to make something from the scattered remains of what came before is both compelling and melancholy in a way that takes some time to take hold, but is all the more powerful once it does. Like Wool, Across the Sand starts out as a series of seemingly scattered vignettes set in a shattered world, but ultimately comes together to tell a story about love, loss, yearning, and settling that resonates far beyond the initial environmental despair.

As a fan of Wool, one of the things I was looking forward to was Howey’s ability to make the commonplace seem obscure and magical, and in this Across the Sand did not disappoint. Initially entering the world, I felt unmoored and confused, a stranger in a strange land searching to make some sense of who was what and when was where. But Howey does an excellent job of filtering in new (and necessary) information in a measured way such that the broader picture unveils itself piece by satisfying piece all the way to a thrilling conclusion, and what was once opaque turns crystal clear after some time immersed in the context. What seemed like the tumbling grains of vaguely connected lives flowed together into a harmonious flow of family and fate that left me quite satisfied after the final curtain went down. I felt like I understood who each character was from a visceral level, and why they acted the way they did, as well as why they ended up where they were, which is a tough trick to pull off for even the best writers.

The other thing that struck me about Across the Sand is how easy Howey makes it seem when he’s playing with commonplace tropes that end up being not quite what you expect. Across the Sand is a coming of age story, except it’s not quite that, because some of the characters are already of age and have to deal with the stupidity of youth, some think they’re of age but are still caught up in the stupidity of youth, and others are just idiot kids who happen to luck their way through (or not!), but all of them are honest and believable in how they react to their world. It’s the story of a grand pirate adventure, only the seas are sand, the treasure is ancient trash, but there’s an actual treasure in understanding who you are as a human being and how that relates to the human beings around you.

Ultimately, Across the Sand is an uplifting story set in a downtrodden world, and one that feels especially pertinent in our current era full of walls and nation-state inhospitality, and I really hope you read it.

Read if: you’ve wondered what it would be like to soar beneath the sand; you do what needs doing to survive; you’ve ever wanted to grab your wizard rod and wreck some fools.

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.

Author Spotlight: Gene Doucette

Laurel Amberdine | 409 words

How did “Primordial Soup and Salad” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

Food replicators have always bothered me. I get that for us to enjoy watching a bunch of people who are actually on a soundstage pretend they’re traveling through space, we have to shorthand a few technological advances—artificial gravity and inertial dampeners come to mind—but instant food on demand is the only thing that nobody ever really tries to explain, and the one that most functions like magic. I decided I wanted to work out how a scientific explanation for the replicators would actually play out, and what the consequences of that might be. I ended up in an interesting place.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I did, a couple of times. I initially included more than one point of view character, but it just didn’t work like I’d hoped, so I had to go back and rework it with just the captain’s POV. I also had a lot of trouble finding an ending I was happy with. I initially ended it at a much more drastic point before pulling back and coming up for a way for the crew to survive, albeit not particularly happily. I also wanted the story to come in a bit shorter, but I remain unable to control that as well as I’d like.

Where are you in this story?

I think I’m parts of all three of the main characters. I think I’m closest to the indignation of Dr. Kent and the pragmatism of Tandy McKinnon, but like the captain I also sometimes just really want a cheeseburger.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m currently working on a book to follow up The Spaceship Next Door and The Frequency of Aliens. It’s about three-fourths of the way finished (first draft) and I’m hoping to have something by the end of the year. I also wrote a spec film script called The Last Flight of Pelican Six which as I write this is just being brought to market by Gersh Agency. I have a few other Hollywood-adjacent things going on, but that’s the one I can talk about right now.

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Suzan Palumbo

Laurel Amberdine | 1051 words

How did “Apolépisi: A De-Scaling” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The initial framework for this story came from me thinking about the Little Mermaid fairy tale and wondering what her story would look like if turning into a human wasn’t a deal or a choice but rather a transformation she was always destined to go through. How would that gradual change play out and affect her, her family and community? I had also been thinking about the old movie: Creature from the Black Lagoon and how poignant the underwater scenes in that movie are. The creature is such a lonely figure and his loneliness comes across without any words. That performance haunts me all the time. When I imagine the characters in this story they look like the Creature from the Lagoon.

Generally, 2021 was a difficult year for me personally. A lot of the emotional content of this story comes from me getting over a broken heart, my own grappling with gender and my feelings around my mother’s reaction to me coming out to her. I think we tend to build up the biggest expectations around our hopes and plans for our lives with the people we love. The bulk of this story is largely me processing how people reacted to me when I did not meet their expectations.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’ve been reading a lot of horror short story collections. Over the Summer, I read We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe and Convulsive by Joe Koch as well as the poetry collection Saint of Witches by Avra Margariti. They were all stunning. I’ve also become a big fan of Hailey Piper and adore her book Queen of Teeth. I am currently finishing off Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful. I love Vo’s novellas and work generally.

As for who inspires me, I think I’ll forever be indebted to A.C. Wise’s short stories. When I first began writing, I zeroed in on her as someone whose style and voice I liked. I am a big fan of Clara Madrigano and H. Peuyo who are horror short story writers based in Brazil. They write the kind of horror I aspire to create. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my Trinidadian peers such as R.S.A. Garcia and Shari Paul who both write phenomenal Caribbean science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Finally, I love the work coming out of markets such as Fiyah, Baffling Magazine, Apparition Lit, and Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins. I’m inspired everywhere really. Every time I click on a story link and read, I learn something. I’m spoiled for sources of inspiration.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I write at my desk in an alcove in the upstairs hallway of my house. It is my favourite place in the world and I spend a lot of time there. I bought the desk with money I earned from selling short stories. I never say things like this, but I’m very proud that the desk I write on was paid for by writing. I keep Poison Ivy comics and prints of illustrations that accompany some of my published work within reach. I have art and letters friends have sent me in the drawers. There’s a bookshelf with all of the books that are important to me against the wall to my left. I usually have a cup of tea or a can of Dr. Pepper to drink while I’m working.

I can’t focus without music. I always have headphones on. I have a form of synesthesia where I see shapes and forms and a kind of flow when I listen to music. Whenever I write, I pair these visual impressions with the mood, tone, and plot of the story. When I feel that the narrative “movement” of the story matches the flow of the song I’m writing it to, I know I’ve finished my draft.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

Is gardening a creative pursuit? In the spring and summer I spend a lot of time growing vegetables. I love everything about plants. They’re such miracles. If I had been a better math student I would have studied botany in university. I like to draw a lot though I’m not exceptional at it. I try and practice a bit here and there when I can get a moment. I’ve been practicing my ukulele a lot. I’ve improved but am still not ready to give a concert! I don’t know if I ever just relax but these things take my mind off of writing or writing-related work occasionally.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Fans! I never thought of myself as having fans before. I’m working with dave ring at Neon Hemlock on getting my dark fantasy/horror short story collection, Skin Thief ready for publication in fall 2023. The collection will include my published work as well as an unpublished novelette called “Kill Jar” which I am excited for everyone to read. It’s a lesbian gothic horror set in a secluded mansion in the early 1900s. The story has a greenhouse, a cemetery, poison kisses, and a terrible family secret—everything I adore writing about!

In addition to the collection, my novella is currently on submission and hopefully I’ll have more news for everyone about that very soon. I do have a couple of solicited short stories to complete which should be due out in 2023 as well. Finally, I’m working on a Gothic novel which is also set in the early 1900s. It’s quite ambitious but I’m hoping to be finished writing it by the end of this year if everything goes to plan!

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Laurel Amberdine | 171 words

What is your writing process like? Did “Conflagration at the Museum of You” fit the pattern?

It depends on the story, honestly. Sometimes I know exactly where I am going and sometimes I do not. Here, I just had the premise and found the story as I went on.

Where are you in this story?

I am every comma and one period about two thousand words in.

What are you reading lately?

This is where the interviewee wishes he could report that the book currently in hand is a work of unparalleled genius. Alas, it is not. I am fortunately also reading the current issue of Pulphouse #18 and enjoying it thoroughly.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I am today plugging my Patreon page (patreon.com/AdamTroyCastro), which helps keep me funded as I do this stuff.

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Debbie Urbanski

Laurel Amberdine | 782 words

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I write in my attic, which has a quiet yet archetypal vibe. I got these cool little Umbra Bulletboards recently which hold encouraging post-its (“Be prepared each day to confront your own self-sabotage” or “Please keep doing this”) and photos related to my current project. A clean desk would be helpful and calming but I’d rather be writing than cleaning or organizing my desk. I have lots of notebooks and pens scattered around as I keep intending to start a daily journal. Books, of course, are everywhere. Books I want to read, books I should read, and books I have read. I recently started a little shelf for plays, which I’m so excited about. I also have many, many nature identification guides, including one on the insects of Eastern North America and a really entertaining one on fireflies, glow-worms, and lightning bugs.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Here’s some advice for other writers but also advice for myself: don’t care so much about pleasing everyone with your writing. Know that some people are going to like what you write and some people are not going to like what you write and that’s okay. Remember a person’s opinion of a story or a book generally says more about their reading preferences than about the quality of the story or the book. Also leave positive reviews for the books you love. And if you read something you love, drop the author a line and let them know. I’ve made some lovely and important friendships with other writers this way, by reaching out, or by having people reach out to me.

Lastly, a writing friend recently gave me this piece of advice: “It’s in their [the publishing world’s] best interest for you to be nice, but it’s not always in your best interest to be nice.”

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I just finished Devil House by John Darnielle, which I enjoyed. I’m looking forward to checking out his first novel Wolf in White Van and music from his band The Mountain Goats. My daughter and I have been loving the Jackaby series by William Ritter—a paranormal historical horror-ish detective set-up that is wildly fun and funny and such a pleasure. I’ve been reading and rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories too—I love his conscious use of non-lyrical language, his absurdity, his non-sequiturs, and his humor. And I started reading (and memorizing) poetry again this year, specifically the poems of Sylvia Plath.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I enjoy taking photos and identifying plants and insects (see my Instagram page—@debbieurbanski—or, perhaps more exciting, check out my iNaturalist page at bit.ly/3q52HTC). I’m in love with hiking too and spend a lot of time with my family out in the forests of Central New York along the Finger Lakes Trail.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I love mashups of genres (Fiction! Literary fiction! Horror! Poetry! Personal essays! Science fiction! Fantasy! Lyric poetry! Etc.!), I find the places where genres meet and overlap and intersect to be full of energy. I think there’s a lot of good writing happening at those intersections right now and I’m eager to keep reading and writing there as well.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’ve been working on my first novel After World for a long, long time. It’s about the end of humanity and it’s finally going to be published by Simon & Schuster in the next year or two. I’ve also been exploring this idea of speculative essays (see this piece I published in Granta, excerpted online at bit.ly/3R8Du6o, or this essay in The Sun: bit.ly/3TBaZjp). I have a story included in the very excellent Terraform anthology (bit.ly/3cF0WsZ) that came out in August 2022 as well.

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 Portland and works (remotely) for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Coming Attractions, November 2022

The Editors | 228 words

Coming up in November, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Tania Fordwalker (“Beyond the Shore”) and Ben H. Winters (“Double Occupancy”). We also have a flash piece (“Therefore What the Multiverse has Joined Together, Let No One Separate”) from Dominica Phetteplace, along with an SF reprint by Tobias S. Buckell (“The Blindfold”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Alex Irvine (“The Dragon’s Hand”) and Kristina Ten (“The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet”). We also have a flash piece (“Radiance”) from Maria Kelson. Our fantasy reprint is by Yoon Ha Lee (“The Graphology of Hemorrhage”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. 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: P H Lee, Rati Mehrotra, Stewart C. Baker, Marie Brennan, Isabel J. Kim, and Benjamin Peek.

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

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

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

Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Interns

Mayookh Barua

Madison Brake

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

Chris Kluwe

Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editor

Luke Tolvaj

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher

Christie Yant

Reprint Editor (Emeritus)

Rich Horton

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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 (with Veronica Roth)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 (with Rebecca Roanhorse) [forthcoming]

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

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

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

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.