TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 152 (January 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: January 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

The Last Serving
Lincoln Michel

A Guide to Alien Terms Useful in the Human Diaspora
Deborah L. Davitt

The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death
Isabel J. Kim

From the Largest Crater
Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

FANTASY

A Man Walks Into a Bar; or, In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street, I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done
Scott Edelman

Braid Me a Howling Tongue
Maria Dong

Between the Stones and the Stars
A.L. Goldfuss

In the Deep Woods; The Light Is Different There
Seanan McGuire

The Ministry of Saturn
Benjamin Peek

NONFICTION

Book Review: Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Scott Edelman

Maria Dong

Isabel J. Kim

Benjamin Peek

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 / Dreamstime

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: January 2023

John Joseph Adams | 316 words

It’s Lightspeed’s 152nd issue, and our first of the new year. Welcome to 2023, everyone!

Our SFnal offerings include two flash stories: “The Last Serving” by Lincoln Michel and “A Guide to Alien Terms Useful in the Human Diaspora” by Deborah L. Davitt. Our first full-length short story is “The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death” by Isabel Kim. If you ever wondered what would happen if the networks took the reality TV show Survivor to outer space—and gave the producers the power to bring their most popular stars back to life—then this story is for you. In the new short “From the Largest Crater,” Jendayi Brooks-Flemister returns us to the slow apocalypse we visited in last year’s “Up Falling.” While you don’t need to read both stories to understand them, the two form a poignant story of love and family.

Scott Edelman brings us the first of our fantasy shorts: “A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done.” It’s the story of one brief interaction in New York City, and the magical consequences it could have on the entire world. Maria Dong brings us our second short story, a beautiful and harrowing tale of servitude, love, and longing called “Braid Me a Howling Tongue.”

The fantastical continues with a reprint of Seanan McGuire’s story “In the Deep Woods; The Light is Different There.” And our flash story this month is “Between the Stones and the Stars” (by A.L. Goldfuss).

Our book review team brings you our usual array of terrific recommendations, and of course we have author spotlight interviews with our authors.

It’s a packed issue, so thanks for checking it out!

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.

The Last Serving

Lincoln Michel | 1006 words

The story of Chef Buzzati’s sudden and horrifying fall from the heights of fine dining is well known. However, given that the culinary innovations and legal ramifications are still being debated today, a recap may be in order.

Elena Buzzati was born to owners of an unremarkable Italian diner in the suburbs of New Jersey in 2024. She grew up surrounded by the scents of roasting meats and the hot gurgle of the deep frier. It sickened her. The headstrong Buzzati declared herself a vegetarian at age six. She had a strong bond with animals and is reported to have spent much of her childhood behind the diner befriending stray squirrels and pigeons. Her parents were—depending on your point of view—conservative, old school, or close-minded, especially when it came to their livelihood. “You are rejecting your culinary heritage,” her distraught father, the son of a pig farmer, would say. Her mother opted for subterfuge, slipping cold cuts and bits of bacon into her daughter’s vegetable sandwiches and salads. Buzzati’s resolve didn’t waver. Indeed, it redoubled after her father’s fatal heart attack and her mother’s subsequent colon cancer.

A young adult now, Buzzati sold her roadside inheritance to developers—an easy financial decision given that the rise of self-driving trucks had decimated the diner industry—and moved to the city for culinary school. It was here that Buzzati first developed her signature “transgenic gastronomy,” in which the traits of different vegetables were combined to surprising results. Tomatoes that tasted of basil, sweet and spicy chiles, berries the size of melons. “For me, there’s no difference between the oven and the petri dish,” she would famously say in a primetime holoTV interview.

Her commitment to inventing new flavor profiles for vegetables, and her strong ethical commitment against eating meat, gave rise to her now famous nickname: The Salad Scientist. Buzzati’s rapid ascent through the culinary world was unprecedented, from her Michelin-star restaurant in New York City to her once ubiquitous line of dressings and seasonings. However, given her subsequent actions, we can assume the critics who taunted her with names like “The Weed Wacker” and “Elena Moo-zzati” didn’t go unnoticed.

Finding herself at the age of fifty-five having achieved her wildest dreams—serving legume tartines in Paris, catering a royal wedding in Buckingham Palace, and hosting a wildly popular augmented reality tour of Italy—Buzzati found herself restless. She never had children (no time) and had never married (who could keep up?). What was there left for her to do?

Buzzati realized she had only one thing left to master: meat. Buzzati had avoided flesh for fifty years, but she had done everything that could be done with tubers, berries, legumes, and fungi. Despite the hateful rumors spread by her competitors, there is no evidence Buzzati ever spliced in animal genes into any of her transgenic gastronomy creations. Meat was the last mountain she had to climb.

The announcement of Buzzati’s new restaurant, Voi, caused a stir among gourmands. “Can the Salad Scientist Sear a Steak?” read one headline. The restaurant was to be the height of class and exclusivity. Housed on the two-hundredth floor of the city’s tallest skyscraper, Voi’s waitlist was as long as the building was tall. Buzzati’s staff required a down payment as well as a blood sample for all hopeful epicureans.

After six months of intense experimentation in the kitchen and laboratory, Buzzati launched Voi. On opening day, the city’s finest, richest, and most famous gathered at the base of the skyscraper. As they rose up the building, the scents of the kitchen were pumped into the elevator. The janitorial staff reported puddles of drying drool on the elevators’ floors.

At the top, the exclusive guests were led to their preordained seats. After a round of wine—a Bordeaux blend made from grapes spliced with coco and chile pepper genes—the dishes arrived. Thin pink slices of carpaccio, roast leg, steak au poivre, spiced dumplings, mounds of red tartare. The guests devoured each one, and the moans of pleasure are said to have overwhelmed the robotic orchestra.

Finally, Buzzati herself appeared in a blood-smattered uniform to rapturous applause.

“Please, you must tell us what you served,” Arnold McEnroe, the famous critic, said. “It was a meat like none other I’ve tasted.” There were cheers of agreement. “Baboon spliced with turtle!” someone suggested. “No, duck crossed with pork!” The guests continued to guess until a blushing Buzzati quieted them. “No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “My opposition to eating animals is well known.”

A confused quiet filled the room. “But what is this?” McEnroe finally said, hoisting a half-eaten kabob. “So juicy! So succulent! You’re telling us it is plant based?”

Buzzati said it was not that either. “I served the only meat that is ethical to eat. One’s self.”

For us, today, we know how this story ends. But imagine yourself in the shoes of those diners. They were drunk on wine, patting bellies full of hot meat. They thought they were safe, warm, and fed. They had no idea what they were eating, not until the Voi staff rolled out the corpses of the guests. Each one a clone grown with the pinpricks of blood that Buzzati had demanded for admission. And each one only partial, with chunks sliced out here and hunks carved out there. The guests, confronted with their own mutilation, are said to have been struck dumb. Then the screaming started.

To this day, Buzzati refuses to explain her actions. Did she really believe this was an ethical path forward for a world that could never quit flesh? Or was the restaurant a high-profile stunt to show the world the barbarity of their dinners?

Sometimes insight comes from the strangest places. Whatever her intent, Buzzati unwittingly opened a new field of culinary exploration that we will be studying today. Now, if you will place your finger into the DNA sampler and switch on the meat printer, we can begin to cook.

©2023 by Lincoln Michel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lincoln Michel’s debut novel, The Body Scout (Orbit), was named one of the ten best SFF books of 2021 by The New York Times and one of the fifty best science fiction of all time by Esquire. He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the co-editor of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult). His work appears in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Granta, and previously in Lightspeed. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and his newsletter Counter Craft.

A Guide to Alien Terms Useful in the Human Diaspora

Deborah L. Davitt | 1011 words

As you travel the spacelanes, the argot of your fellow beings may at first confuse and disconcert you. This guide is offered to help you acclimate to your new world and the strange beings that people it. All terms will be presented first as definitions, then used in context.

Arakua

Origin: Tarukhxi, noun.

The process of “scooping” fuel in the form of hydrogen from the corona of a star, nebula, or gas giant.

See also:il’arakua, mild pejorative. Scooping fuel from nearly-empty space; cf. “bottom of the barrel.”

Csil-rikh

Origin: Vanakh, noun.

Literally: “Sunrider.” A short-range ship designed for solar sailing inside a system. May be pejorative: “That old ore-hauler is little more than a csil-rikh.” May also be used, with scorn (or envy), for rich idlers with luxurious solar-sailed yachts who are in no hurry to get anywhere and have the excess hydrogen credits to be able to afford such.

Desh’k’lakeu

Origin: Sei’azhi, noun.

Literally: “cradle of graves.” A generation ship.

Datapoint: Sei’azhi used generation ships for their initial waves of colonization, overtaking their own ships when they discovered the waygates. Some believe that not all the desh’k’lakeu ships have been found—that some still drift towards distant stars, filled with ghosts. This is likely no more than spacer mythology.

Ks’nis’x

Origin: Xi’a, noun.

The knowledge that pain is coming, as inevitable as gravity or time; the grief you feel before mourning is required by death or separation, but feel, nonetheless.

Usage Note: You’ll find this one of use when you hear that a friend or loved one has been diagnosed with a terminal, intractable illness. When the knowledge of mortality’s end is inevitable, and you begin to pre-mourn. Intriguingly, members of this hive species feel this so intensely that they have a word for it.

Leliasro / Mesiasro

Origin: Vanakh, noun.

Leliasro: Something small that you once took for granted, now lost. The touch of someone’s hand, a laugh, the look in someone’s eyes.

Mesiasro: Something that once mattered a great deal, but now seems petty, in retrospect.

Usage Note: These paired Vanakh concepts will prove useful with Vanakh traders. They’ve been known to lower price of hydrogen cells for people who understand that the argument you had daily with your spouse is the now only thing you can remember about them . . . and that now you wish you could remember anything else.

Nx’xiaxh

Origin: Xi’a, noun.

The feeling of acute loneliness when you are apart from your own kind, no longer part of the hive, surrounded by alien beings. The sense of being drowned in otherness, through your own choices. Lack of connection, loss, having been cut adrift.

Paioullae

Origin: Aiel, noun/verb.

The sense of time as a river that separates you from those you once loved, either through years spent apart or because relativity has ensured that they died centuries ago, while you’ve remained young.

Qsil-cri

Origin: Vanakh, noun.

Literally: “home-traitor.” A term used by sedentary Vanakh for those who have made their home in the stars; by extension, the sense of anger at those who have found a feeling of home or belonging outside the tribe. By further extension, the rage felt by those left behind for those who do not wish to return to their homeworlds or clans.

Sauelloia

Origin: Aiel, noun/verb.

The sense of joy at being reunited, even with an old enemy, after a long span of time spent in isolation. Literally: “the return of sunlight to leaves.”

The delight in hearing one’s native language spoken without accent, a song from childhood sung spontaneously in one’s hearing. Comfort; home-feeling.

Tei’aska

Origin: Sei’azhi, noun.

A biological imperative, without which one might perish. Most urgent level of necessity, such as water, air, food, shelter. Cf. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “We wouldn’t ordinarily approach you for fuel, but it’s a matter of tei’aska; without your aid, we won’t make it to the next star system.”

See also: rei’azhal, a need of lesser severity.

See also: vi’ezhash, bodily urgencies such as food, urination, or sex.

Urdka-abo

Origin: Tarukhxi, compound noun.

Literally: “fishguts-system.” A planetary system with poor resources in terms of fuel, oxygen, and/or water. To say a system is “not worth urdka” is to say it is a place in which you certainly wouldn’t wish to be stranded.

Weltverlassenesehnsucht

Origin: Terran, noun.

Longing for a world forsaken—a world that no longer exists or exists only in memory. Can be the result of cataclysm, poor personal choices, or the outcome of paioullae.

Y’shiv’nix

Origin: Xi’a, verb

Literally: “emergence from death-cocoon.” Death as rebirth; transfiguration, transformation. Coming to terms with loss or grief.

Being received back into the embrace of the hive after a long journey.

• • • •

You may feel joy when you first leave your homeworld, but perhaps it will be mixed with ks’nis’x, the pre-mourning for all those you’re leaving behind. The longer you travel as the only human within lightyears, either alone in an old csil-rikh or on a ship populated by beings totally alien to you, the more you may come to feel that you’re il’arakua yourself. You’ll probably enter into nx’xiaxh soon, drowned, subsumed in loneliness or other identities and cultures. You may even begin to feel that you’re not worth urdka.

When you meet other humans again, you may find yourself feeling alien to them—and they to you. A sensation of awkwardness may prevail between you; they may consider you qsil-cri. Or they may have spent as much time as you have among the stars . . . and may have lost themselves, too.

But it’s possible, too, that you’ll overlook the mesiasro, the petty, in the rush of relief at hearing a human voice again and realize that both it and leliasro, the thing overlooked, can be a need as intense as tei’aska.

And that perhaps, just perhaps, we can all cross the desert—the void of Weltverlassenesehnsucht—and enter the grace of y’shiv’nix wherever we choose to call home.

©2023 by Deborah L. Davitt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Reno, Nevada, where she graduated first in her class from UNR in 1997 (as Deborah McRann). While an undergraduate, she focused heavily on medieval and Renaissance literature from Beowulf to Shakespeare. She received her MA in English from Penn State, and later found work as a technical writer on projects ranging from nuclear ballistic missile submarines to NASA to computer manufacturing. She currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and son. Her poetry has received Pushcart, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star award nominations and has appeared in over fifty journals including F&SF and Asimov’s. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog and Galaxy’s Edge. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never and Bounded by Eternity, please see edda-earth.com.

The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death

Isabel J. Kim | 5122 words

Your deathless heart spasms. Once. Twice. You suck in a long, rattling gasp, and twist over the decanting table, great hacking coughs. Someone thumps your back.

“Welcome back, boyo,” Media & Talent Production Coordinator Kayn says. “They got some great footage out of your death. Viewership tripled for the episode.”

“Damn,” you wheeze. “Any chance I’m out?”

Goosebumps pimple across your cold skin. You’re so sick of the Talent Decanting Room. You hope for finales. You hope for your exit stage left.

“Nah,” Kayn says. “You’re polling too well with the sixteen to twenty-four demographic. The execs want to keep you in the cast roster.”

“Assholes,” you say with feeling, lying back down.

“Chin up,” Kayn says. “Least you’re back from the dead, Kingkiller.”

“You know I hate that name,” you say, staring up at the operating lights. The decanting fluid is drying to a tacky shell on your skin.

“Shouldn’t have killed Rally, then.”

“Yeah, well,” you say. You wish you hadn’t killed Raleigh King either.

• • • •

Raleigh “Rally” King was Axial Conglomerate’s sweetheart. Redrender’s knight in shining armor. You’d watched him sweat in high definition all through season twenty-seven’s desert sequence, his sword gleaming in the sunlight. You’d watched him cry too—big tears rolling down his cheeks whenever someone died and he couldn’t save them.

At the time, you’d rolled your eyes. Audiences love sentiment, so of course Rally would cry. The drones are always watching-cutting-streaming the tastiest morsels of Redrender for everyone at home. He’s faking it. It’s acting.

You know better now, after eight seasons as a cast member on Redrender. The show gets inside your head. You can think you’re going to treat it like a game all through the psychological profiling and the camera tests. You can tell yourself it’s just reality television while signing away the rights to your DNA samples and signing the contract that agrees that termination is at the studio’s discretion. You can pretend it’s all fake until you’re shipping down to Redrender and then it’s not a game anymore. It’s your life.

It turns out that even if death is cheap in Redrender, it still hurts to bleed out. It turns out that the stupid wargame isn’t just a series of artificial quests—it’s backstabbing and making pacts and persuading people to come die with you. It turns out that the other cast members have also lived the same sort of desperate life that drives people to the promise of a sixteen billion credit trophy if you can find it on the stupid rock. Never mind that no one’s found it yet.

And it turns out that the golden boy Rally is just as nice as he seems on camera, and then you kill him.

He thanked you while he was dying.

You hope he’s having a good time space-side. You wonder if he ever watches the show.

• • • •

You reintegrate into the storyline twelve hours after waking up in the Talent Decanting Room. It was a nice break. You took a high-pressure shower, slept in a real bed, shot the shit with Kayn, and siphoned some of his insider info—you get a good tip about the Amaba Basin’s layout. Kayn might be a corporate bastard, but he’s a congenial one.

He’s congenial all the way through herding you into a skiff and flying you down near camp, kicking you out with a cheerful “Don’t fall off of any more cliffs!” as he drops you back in the narrative.

Not a minute later, a low whine starts to reverberate in the air. Drone-cameras have a distinct sound. The privacy was nice while it lasted. You do your best to look “brooding” instead of “sweaty” as you walk back to camp.

Redrender is a beautiful planetoid. It’s a great stage set for the Game Of The Century™. A great place to “create alliances, betray your friends, and find the galaxy’s most valuable prize!” Redrender is supposed to be an action-adventure survival reality show. In practice, people watch it for the interpersonal drama. Redrender is a shifting mess of temporary alliances for the sake of plundering supplies and maps.

“Kingkiller’s back!” Lowry calls from the camp’s watchtower, and the announcement is met with a couple of whoops. Aw, the kids missed you. They’re new enough not to be scared by your reputation. Kingkiller’s a name to them, not a definition. Guess they never watched before season thirty-four.

You’re allied with ten others at the camp, all scouring the Amaba Basin for the next map scrap. It’s not a bad crew. Two-thirds freshers, one-third veterans. The gates open for your entrance.

“Thought you were dead,” Marc calls from where he’s poking at a fire. He scowls at you. He’s a vet—he remembers how you received your nickname.

“You wish,” you call back, heading to the main building built out from the microprinted pseudo-ruins. Other cast members give you nods as you walk by. You receive commiserating glances and winces, but no one’s willing to break character and say, “Sorry you didn’t get out, Jamie.”

You don’t blame them—these guys are always scraping for screen time. You’re the weirdo getting followed by four drones and trying your best to die.

You haven’t been subtle about wanting to get out. You dream of your old microapartment. You dream of working showers. You dream of clean deaths. Anything as long as it looks accidental. The execs don’t resurrect you from suicide. Axial Conglomerate standard media and entertainment sector laws prevent the glorification of self-harm in T-13 class media.

You hope your gear hasn’t been redistributed yet. You head for the main building, then make the executive decision to detour through the mess hall before checking out your clothes and weapons.

The door to the mess swings open. You step in, and then stop. There are two figures sitting with cups of coffee, half-eaten plates of food. They both look up. Only one of them smiles apologetically at you. Only one of them would publicly call you a friend.

“Shit, sorry Jamie. I should have warned you about this,” Aava says. “He just showed—”

“It’s fine,” you cut in numbly, because it’s not fine, but you’re used to acting. Aava’s still after the prize money—you can’t break character if she’s around. You can hear the drone whining behind your head. “Look who’s back, huh?”

“Jamie,” Rally says, turning toward you, standing, the handsome bulk of him very protagonistic. “You thought you could kill me, didn’t you?” His voice is steady. He was always a better actor than you were.

“I did kill you,” you say. “Just thought it would stick.”

Rally strides forward, all the way into your personal space, grabs your shoulder tightly, and smiles with all his teeth. “We’ve got some talking to do.”

The audience must be loving this.

• • • •

You let Rally drag you back to your bedroom. You sit on the bed. Rally sits on a stool made out of a couple of ammunition crates. Both of you ignore the mess of clothing and knives on the floor.

The hum of the cameras around the two of you is loud. You wonder how many of the nanometer-sized drones are around, capturing multiple angles, closeups and cutting from your face to Rally’s and back again.

There’s a whole conversation you should be having that couldn’t have been spoken in the mess hall. Raleigh’s face is stoic. You give the world’s most miniscule shrug. There’s no one else in your bedroom. There’s no one else’s career to ruin here.

Rally’s whole posture shifts. He smiles. It’s a small thing, only the barest flash of teeth. “Hey, Jamie.”

“Shit, Raleigh,” you say, relaxing against the headboard. “I thought you got out.”

The drone’s whining immediately cuts. Breaking the fourth wall isn’t good television.

Raleigh’s smile pulls bitter. “Nope. I woke up on the slab a week ago, and they shipped me back down after Kayn told me where your camp was, and that you were being re-integrated soon. I think the execs expected me to try and turn the camp against you.”

“Understandable,” you say with a wince. Rally’s death had been bloody. You’d both thought that something graphic would be your best chance at getting off-planetoid. “I appreciate that you didn’t.”

Rally shrugs. You stare at him. He looks just the same as the day you killed him. A little rough—you all look a little rough—but there aren’t any new lines on his face, or any sign that you’d ever fought him at the Alecret Cliffs and thrown him off the waterfall overlook. Same as how there’s no sign on your skin detailing how Rally had grabbed your shirt and brought you plunging soundlessly into the water with him, bashing you against the rocks.

You bet the shots were beautiful. You had choreographed them to be.

The fight at the Alecret Cliffs was the narrative crux of both of your arcs—Rally’s last stand against the antihero upstart, your desperate attempt at overthrowing the golden boy’s throne. You’d thought that would be narratively satisfying enough to end both your storylines. You’d built a beautiful enmity with him over the five seasons you shared. Mostly you know Rally through his acted anger, through his feigned violence. Despite everything, you’re glad to see him now.

“It’s been three seasons, man,” you say. “What the fuck are they playing at? I thought for sure they’d been done with you. That you got out.”

“I don’t know,” Rally says, putting his head in his hands. “I was talking with Kayn. Got a copy of my contract and he helpfully pointed out that there weren’t dates in the termination clause. I think the execs think there hasn’t been that much drama this season—they’re probably trying to stir the pot a little. Bring back what Kayn called ‘our epic rivalry.’”

“Motherfucker didn’t tell me anything about this,” you say. “What’s our play?”

Rally looks up. “Do we have a play?”

“Of course we have a play,” you say with confidence you don’t feel.

“All right, Jamie,” Rally says. He sounds tired. Resurrected a week and tired already—that’s no good for the cameras. “I’ll follow your lead.”

You hum thoughtfully. Rally’s good at playing determined, at emanating generalized righteousness, at keeping a crew together. Rally remembers you as a villain, but you’ve been playing nice ever since he died, so your classic good guy-bad guy thing won’t hold.

“We’ll do a reconciliation arc,” you say firmly, calculating storylines and scraping together what you remember of the season before Rally’s death. “I’ve been doing a redemption thing after my ‘near miss.’ I’ve been trying to get cut by being boring—except that’s not working, and Kayn told me that I keep polling crazy high. So maybe we play it like you don’t believe my face-heel-turn, but I’m still trying to befriend you, and you’re trying to keep an eye on me, and then I try and save you from something but we still both eat shit again while having some sort of emotional conclusion.”

“I can do suspicious,” Rally says. “Also. ‘Kingkiller.’ Really?”

“I didn’t choose it!” you protest. “Just use my actual name, all right?”

“Sure, Kingkiller,” Rally says, cause he’s the sort of guy who thinks that’s funny. “What’s our time frame?”

You think for a bit. “End of the season,” you say. “We’ll build our story up ‘til the end of the season and execute. No breaking kayfabe unless we’re alone, just to be fair to the rest of the cast.”

• • • •

Day to day livelihood on Redrender isn’t glamorous—it’s a big stage set full of fun murder props and bullshit mythology, but people still have to eat. You take your kitchen shifts and your patrol duty between the strategy sessions and scouting missions.

Your crew maps the entirety of the Amaba Basin and plunders a few of the lesser sites, comes back with some maps and once a couple of old bottles of liquor which the crew cheers about. You’re significantly less excited. The planetoid is lousy with alcoholic dead-drops: a tipsy cast is a fun cast. The whine of the camera drones is loud that night. You angle your way through the party by drunkenly picking a fight with Rally, adding a little texture to your slowly repairing relationship.

Rally rises to the occasion admirably, chewing the scenery and saying some very hurtful things about your moral character, ending with calling you a “reckless, suicidal, maniac, who’s going to get all of us killed,” which is correct enough to make you laugh. It’s fun to have a co-conspirator again.

You and Rally knit the story of your grudging friendship by inches. You don’t spend a lot of time alone together—that’s the last thing you need, to be suspected of hiding something—but it’s an easy story to sell. You play the reformed asshole trying to prove he’s changed. Rally plays the slightly traumatized hero coming to terms with a world that has changed around him.

You go on mission runs together. You argue about locations of potential map fragments. You spend a long afternoon repairing the camp roof together and talk around your attempted murder. You ask for forgiveness. Rally doesn’t give it to you because it’s too early in the narrative for that. You leave all your conversations unfinished—the scaffolding to your hopefully narratively satisfying death.

The spiderweb of story you’ve woven finally gets a tug when you’re sitting around the war table with the other veterans arguing about the approach to the Fere Cathedral ruins. It’s the last piece of the Amaba Basin map you haven’t charted. None of the other ruins have yielded anything useful, so this site’s definitely going to have something big and dangerous. A blood key. A gene-edited guardian beast. A classic laser grid that you’ll “accidentally” trigger. Deadly stuff. High stakes. Great television, unlike this planning session, which devolved immediately into quibbling.

“I’ll go.” You glance up from the map at Rally, handing him the relay baton.

“We’ll go,” Rally says, frowning at you and taking the metaphorical baton from your hand.

“You don’t trust me?” you say, tossing a layup to Rally.

“As far as I can throw you,” Rally says, completing your pass. “You tried to kill me once. A guy doesn’t forget things like that.”

“I succeeded,” you say with all the grandiose megalomania you can shove into your voice. You’ll succeed this time, at least.

The drone-camera whine is almost sweet in your ears.

• • • •

You set off early the next morning with Rally in a beat-up little skimmer carting a bunch of supplies. The others are in the newer skimmer, and you didn’t argue too much about pulling the short stick because now it’s just you and Rally trundling along, filmed by at least four camera drones. You bet the audience wants you to argue. Or fight. Or kiss. That last one would really spike the ratings, and then you’d never be free.

“So, you ready to get out?” you say. Before you even finish your question the whine cuts out. Sorry, audience. You’re dreaming of space shuttles. You’re dreaming of watching television and not participating.

Rally makes an indiscriminate noise. You glance at him.

“You pulling out?” you say. “Don’t get cold feet on me.”

“No, I’m in,” Rally assures you. “You did a great job this season. You’re a real annoying guy when you want to be, you know that?”

“And you’re a self-righteous prick,” you say. “Nice touch last month with accusing me of having altered all the maps.”

“I try.”

The skimmer slides across a long plane of brown grass, shivering in the wind. The ruins of Fere Cathedral look like a crumbling slice of unfrosted cake from this distance. You feel the tightness in your shoulders unwinding. The skimmer is going fast enough that the camera drones won’t be able to catch up with you. Soon there won’t be any camera drones at all.

“Jamie,” Rally says. “After what they did to me, how do we even know anyone actually gets out?”

“What?”

You slam the skimmer into cruise control and turn to Rally. “Seriously. What?”

Rally smiles a little, but he looks nervous, which isn’t an expression you see on him a lot. Devastated, angry, righteous—he wears all of that on his sleeve, but nervous, that’s not for the cameras. “Never mind. It was just something I was thinking about. Not seriously.”

“No, explain this to me. What do you mean ‘what if no one gets out?’ I’m not doing any suicide missions, Rally.”

Rally groans. “I’m not saying they murder people or anything. I just mean, you know. They fridged me for three seasons. That’s been eating at me like crazy. We don’t know if anyone actually gets out, right? What if they just put everyone on ice for later?”

“No way,” you say with confidence you don’t feel. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s been over two-hundred cast members, minimum. No way they have the facilities for long-term stasis.”

“Well okay, yeah,” Rally says. “But what about facilities for a few people. For, y’know, guys polling well with the fanbase. For guys like you and me.”

You look away. You shift the skimmer back into manual to have something to do with your hands. The Fere Cathedral looks like the white skeleton of a colossal beast.

“You get why I didn’t want to bring it up,” Rally says.

“Yeah,” you say.

“I’m still in, if you are,” Rally says, voice very steady. “This doesn’t change anything. Either I’m right, and we wake up and do this all over again. Or I’m wrong, and we wake up and get our exit paperwork from Kayn. Or I’m really wrong, and we just don’t wake up.”

The Fere Cathedral ruins look like they were focus tested by a team of architects.

“You are so fucking dramatic, Rally,” you say, putting an extra burst of speed on so you’ll get there faster. “Save it for the cameras.”

• • • •

It’s not hard to remember your life before Redrender. Microapartment, lots of part-time jobs, dwindling savings. A handful of friends you hung out with in bars and talked about life goals, significant others, how Axial Conglomerate is going to shit, etcetera. You miss it like crazy. You miss how the air used to smell like recycled lime cleaner. You miss instant noodles from the vending machine. You miss stocking shelves at five in the morning.

Back then, you didn’t know how to throw knives or shoot a gun. You didn’t run across microprinted ruins of civilizations that never existed. You didn’t think about narrative. You were just Jamie Low, some guy. You are still Jamie Low, some guy. But no one remembers Jamie Low. Everyone remembers Kingkiller.

• • • •

You get to the Fere Cathedral ruins and unload the gear silently. You didn’t talk to Rally for the rest of the trip, and he hadn’t started any new conversation. You offer him his bag. He takes it along with the big sword that he carries around when he’s not at camp. You strap your bag on and holster your knives and rifle.

The other skimmer pulls up near you. Aava waves. You wave back. You can hear the camera drones approaching like a pack of invisible flies.

“Hope there’s something interesting inside,” you say, which is a piece of nothing dialogue, but probably good foreshadowing.

Aava smiles at you. “You know it.” Another piece of nothing dialogue.

“Let’s just get going,” Rally says, third piece of nothing dialogue, and great, cut scene, print.

• • • •

The executives had insisted on a battery of psychological tests before you joined the cast. It’s standard. “To see if you’re a good fit,” Kayn had explained once when you asked him. “You scored crazy high, if you were wondering.”

“What does that mean?” you asked. This was back in season twenty-eight, when you were still gunning for the sixteen billion credit trophy.

“Means your psychology is primed to make interesting decisions at points of stress,” Kayn said.

“Sounds like you’re just calling me crazy,” you said, which Kayn had laughed at, but hadn’t denied.

You hadn’t thought much about his answer until you started polling really well. Until you started asking to be cut and started being told you were too popular to be let go.

• • • •

The interior of the semi-destroyed cathedral is a series of small rooms that connect to a larger nave, with a staircase that leads to some sort of catacomb situation. This isn’t your first cathedral, or temple, or monastery. Redrender is pan-religiously sacrilegious. You case the ruins cautiously. There’s not much in any of the smaller rooms, no lockboxes or carved sigils or anything that hints to a map.

Rally comes with you, of course. You’re both keeping your eyes peeled for a good moment to have a fight to the death, or at least start some sort of argument. The air simmers with tension.

“I think these ruins are a bust.”

“Maybe there’s something in the basement,” Rally says.

“There’s never anything nice in the basement,” you say, but dig around in your pack for a chemical torch anyway.

You and Rally walk up to the front of the nave, clambering over big microprinted rocks and aesthetically pleasing, spiritually void stained glass windows cracked in big shatters. Aava and Marc are climbing over from the other side.

“You guys find anything?” Aava calls.

“Only the stick up Rally’s ass,” you call back, which gets a laugh from Marc and a punch from Rally’s right fist in your shoulder.

“We didn’t find anything either,” Aava says. “Looks like it’s basement time, boys.”

“Jamie and I will take a look,” Rally says. “You guys should set up camp for the night.”

“Don’t volunteer me for things,” you say, using a crowbar to lever a big chunk of marble out of the way so you and Rally can go single file down into the dark.

• • • •

You genuinely don’t know why you poll so well. You’re handsome, but everyone on Redrender is attractive. You’re not particularly heroic, and you’re not particularly evil—no matter what Rally castigates you for. You’re kind when it’s easy, but you don’t cry for people. You like to think you used to be funny, but most of your good humor’s been drained by nine seasons of media indenture.

You’ve tried being compassionate. You’ve tried being violent. You’ve tried being apathetic. No matter what you do, you still wake up on the decanting table.

• • • •

The basement reveals an altar in the middle of a circular chamber, and a low groove around the room that, when you touch your torch to it, alights with a soft red glow. The altar is white marble. You could say a lot of things about stage sets, but you can hear the cameras humming like a cloud of mosquitoes.

“Pretty grim, huh?” you say.

Rally examines the altar, squinting at the text carved into the surface. You survey the rest of the room. You can taste the shape of the argument you’ll have with Rally. Something about the ethics of blood keys and sacrifice that he’ll spiral into a personal attack on your character, which you’ll turn into a physical fight.

“You’re telling me,” he says. “It’s a blood key.”

“Well yeah, I figured. For what?”

“Map of the whole western hemisphere,” Rally says, sounding legitimately awed. “With artifact drop points. I’ve never seen one so comprehensive before. This could be a game changer.”

“Shit, what’s the catch?”

“It’s a full-sacrifice blood key,” Rally says, and he looks straight at you. You don’t dare nod. This can’t look premeditated. This wasn’t part of the plan. But it’s better than your plan. It’s like the executives are handing you a new plan on a silver platter, giving you their blessing.

“No wonder it hasn’t been plundered yet,” Rally says softly.

“Well, let’s change that,” you say. And you pull out one of your knives and throw it at Rally’s head.

• • • •

You used to think you were a nice guy. Then you shipped down to Redrender. Then you thought you were a cutthroat bastard. Then you failed to die sixteen times. These days you think maybe what you are is “fun to watch on television.”

• • • •

Rally ducks, but you were expecting that, so you just use the knife as a distraction to dart around the altar and behind Rally, slamming him down on the altar.

“Whoops, missed!” you say, forcing psychopathic cheer into your voice.

“You planned this,” Rally wheezes, scrabbling for his sword. He’s making a half-hearted attempt at escape for show, but you’re holding him down easier than you should.

“I’m doing you a favor,” you stage-hiss into his ear. “I killed you once, Rally. At least this time it’ll mean something.” You imagine you can see the camera drones zipping around your head. C’mon, Rally. Complete the pass.

Rally heaves you up and grabs your arm, twisting you down so your positions are reversed. You lean into the throw and snake your arm around to press the tip of your knife against his stomach.

This must be a fantastic tableau. Rally with his sword above your chest, his arm held at bay by your loosely clenched fist. You with your dagger about to pierce his stomach. Both of you lit by flickering light.

• • • •

You always wonder what Rally’s like, outside of Redrender. You wonder if he had friends who he talked with in bars, whether he is as nice as he pretends to be on television, whether his determinator thing is an affectation. You wonder if he worked shit jobs for shit pay and filled out the Redrender application on a whim cause hey, LARPing on a terraformed planetoid sure beats shivering in the recycled lime-scented habitat ring air.

You like the idea of seeing him in the real world. Sliding into a booth at a local bar with him, having conversations about both of your shit jobs, reminiscing about the good old days as character foils.

• • • •

“What’s the matter, can’t go through with it?” you say, leaning up and into the sharp slice of the sword. Rally keeps his gear clean. “Never pegged you for a coward. You didn’t have any problem dragging me down before.”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Rally says. You don’t know if he’s serious about that. Is he changing the plan on you? You’re so close.

“You don’t want me to jab my knife in your kidneys, you mean,” you say. You can’t break character now. The camera drone hum is like a third member of the conversation, it’s so loud.

“God dammit, Jamie, why do you have to make everything so hard?”

What does that mean? Does that mean he doesn’t think this is the right moment? He’s not going to get a better moment.

“What are you waiting for,” you snarl at him. “You’ve been waiting to put me down. Now you have an excuse. A good reason. So better be quick. Gotta make it hurt. Gotta make it count. Gotta kill me in one shot.”

Ball’s in his court, now. A couple more lines of character development and you’re home free. But Rally is silent. His pulse is still beating double-time, his ventricles must be spasming manically. Your hand is starting to cramp where it’s holding his arm.

“What are you waiting for,” you say again. Hurry up and start slicing so you can return the favor. “They call me Kingkiller for a reason, Raleigh King.”

“We don’t need to do this,” Rally says.

His voice is steady. His pulse is rabbit-quick against your skin. He’s breathing sharp and shallow. His pupils are pinpricks. He’s scared. He wasn’t scared the last time you killed him.

You know Rally through his feigned violence, his acted anger. He knows you through your artificial indignation, your counterfeit sociopathy. You know the way fear feels on his skin. You can hear everything he’s not saying.

Fine. Deal’s off. You’ll improvise.

“Yes, we do,” you say, and drop your knife. With your other hand, you yank his arm, plunging his well-sharpened sword into your chest.

• • • •

The guy you pretend to be—the guy everyone calls Kingkiller—really isn’t all that different from you. It would be too hard to keep up the act if he was. He’s mostly you. He’s you when all the stakes don’t matter. He’s you when death is cheap.

• • • •

The stab hurts like hell. The pain is real, a bright blossom of agony lodged in your chest. You give a soft little exhalation rather than the dramatic gasp you would have preferred.

“No, no, no, Jamie,” Rally says, hindbrain instincts kicking in at the sight of a what-should-be-mortal injury. You want to tell him to shut up and stay in character. “Jamie, this wasn’t the plan—what are you doing, Jamie?”

“Sorry I tried to kill you that one time,” you grind out, because you’re a professional.

“No you’re not,” he says, picking up your thread, because he is too.

“No, I’m not,” you agree, and close your eyes. You can hear the camera drones whirring.

“Why’d you do that?” he says softly. He’s cradling your body against the altar. There’s blood flecked on his face. It looks artistic. “I told you, we didn’t have to.”

You grin at him. You hope it’s bloodstained.

“I don’t know,” you lie, but it comes out weak and very far away. The shock and blood loss must be getting to you.

“We’ll get you out,” Rally says, steady as ever, his panic tucked away. “You’re not dying here.” He doesn’t make any attempt to move you. He knows what you want.

You’re pretty sure you’re going to wake up on the decanting table. Maybe you’ll wake up and it’ll be five seasons later and they’ll have resurrected you for the sake of the storyline. Maybe this counts as a suicide and the execs won’t resurrect you at all. Maybe this is a narratively satisfying character arc and you’ll be shaking hands with Kayn before boarding a spaceship off-planet. You’re hoping for endings. You’re hoping for your exit stage left.

“I didn’t know you were scared,” you say.

Your vision is tunneling. The camera whine is like a drill against your eardrums. Rally says something, but it’s not audible. That’s okay. You trust Raleigh King to narrate your perfect death. You hope for endings. You hope for your exit-stage left.

©2023 by Isabel J. Kim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isabel J. Kim is a Korean-American speculative fiction writer based in New York City. She is a Shirley Jackson Award winner and her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other venues. When she’s not writing, she’s either practicing law or co-hosting her internet culture podcast Wow if True — both equally noble pursuits. Find her at isabel.kim or @isabeljkim on Twitter.

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

From the Largest Crater

Jendayi Brooks-Flemister | 4050 words

AUDIO LOG BF-0001

Testing. Testing. Sound. Quality. Testing. Check playback. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0002

Testing. Playback clear. Approved for distribution. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0003
2083-14-09 13:36

This . . . feels strange. They said that it’s healthy for those of us whose spouses take Return Missions to record our thoughts. Audio journaling, they called it. Zeli, if you saw the way these devices look, you’d have laughed at the very suggestion of it. They said other spouses who’ve done it have found it helpful for “processing difficult emotions.” It just makes me think they want to keep tabs on what I say and do, but that’s my father’s paranoia coming in. They said it helps to finish my recordings with “over” so that I know when I’ve gotten my thoughts out. Doesn’t that seem strange? Ugh . . . now the word “strange” sounds strange. But I guess this is where we are—in a strange time. Watching you leave on your Return Mission yesterday gave me such a sense of pride. My Zeli, leading her own Return for a change! I love you. I miss you already, but I really am proud of you. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0004
2083-14-09 21:02

I didn’t realize how empty the bed would feel without you, Zeli. But when I speak into this, it feels like I’m speaking to you. It’s soothing. I hope you sleep well tonight. Let me know if you can look up at me as I look down at you. I love you. Stay safe . . . Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0005
2083-16-09 09:13

Which of the mealpacks are you having for breakfast? Jody brought over a fresh supply of vegetables, but he gave me too much green onion. What the hell do I do with that? Tofu scramble with beets for me . . . Over. No, not over. I shouldn’t shit talk Jody, he’s just being nice. I think he’s afraid of admitting that he misses Marcus, but I know you’re taking care of him. Of all the crew. Work was hell yesterday, Zeli. They’ve got me working on new temperature-ignorant strains of corn. I think their hope is that we can send some of it down to Earth, but it seems impossible to me. Why not just focus on cultivating as much as we can up here? If we can make it resist the heat, then we can make it resist the cold. But I guess time will tell. Okay, now, over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0006
2083-16-09 20:58

Work was exhausting, and my research team is being asked to double our efforts to find better strains of our current crops. I suppose no one considered that moving populations to the Moon would require this much thought. Idiots, all of them. I hope you’re safe down there. Jody and I have been joking with each other about what to cook when you get back. “Bioengineered corn and vacuum-resistant turnip shit-salad,” how delicious! Sleep tight down there, Zeli. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0007
2083-21-09 11:02

It’s my first day off since you left. I wish the Command Center would let me see you—not even the new footage, just some old recordings would be nice. To know you’re okay, you know? They said they’re closely monitoring your “classified” mission, that they’ll tell me if something happens. “I shouldn’t worry.” But of course I worry, I’m your wife! And with all the lessons we get up here about how hellish Earth has become, it’s not irrational for me to want to know my wife is safe down there. Right? I think so. And what about your crew? Zeli, you know I hate when others try to make me feel crazy for no reason. I need to take a bath or something. Get my mind off of research and Earth for a bit. I love you. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0007
2083-23-09 18:37

There are rumors that if the average temperature on Earth passes twenty Cel, even more viruses and diseases will come from the permafrost and oceans. What’s it like down there for you, Zeli? Have you met any people? Are most of them Shortened like we thought? Jody says we should be engineering medicines to help increase their lifespans, but I don’t think it’s possible. The air is just too toxic. We should focus on what we’re doing up here instead of trying to save a bunch of doomed people. Maybe that’s rude of me—it just seems so hopeless for any of the Earth-born. Moriko and I were talking about all the possible ways to get rid of the CO2, but what do we know? According to our bosses, not enough. Ha. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0008
2083-25-09 09:22

One more week! I’ve asked Jody for his best produce for dinner—I bet it feels like ages since you had a fresh vegetable. I can’t wait to see you, Zeli! Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0009
2083-25-09 11:13

There’s news of a storm brewing over the Atlantic, something bigger and more dangerous than they’ve ever seen. What can you see from your end? I hope it doesn’t hit you too hard. Back to work, stay safe. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0010
2083-27-09 08:46

They sent word today that they’re evacuating you early. We can see the storm from here, just by looking in the sky. It covers almost half of the Atlantic, Zeli. Half! There are smaller ones in the south Pacific, but they don’t come close. They’ve announced it as a top ten storm for the past twenty years. Imagine that! It’s incredible . . . what’s it look like for you? If they name it before you get back, they should name it after you. To honor your bravery for leading a crew down there in all that chaos! “Azelia.” You can always go back later. Jody and I are going together to the Command Center tomorrow to pick you up. I hope you like dinner, even if it doesn’t feel like a celebration. Collard stew feels so plain. Maybe I’ll find something better. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0011
2083-28-09 03:24

I can’t sleep. I’m so ready to see you, Zeli. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0012
2083-28-09 10:31

What the fuck, Zeli. What the fuck, where are you. Marcus, Alejandro, Talia, Bertan, they’re all here. Where the fuck are you. Fuck over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0013
2083-28-09 14:03

I haven’t eaten all day because of you. What’s happening? Where are you? Command Center won’t tell me where you are, they won’t let me talk with your crew. What the fuck happened, Zeli? I hate this. I’m so nauseous. Shit. Over. Over!

AUDIO LOG BF-0014
2083-28-09 18:27

Commander Hernandez came to our home today. He said you chose to stay behind and sent your crew ahead. He said that you met a healthy girl, someone you think has immunity to the permafrost diseases. And he fucking approved you to keep her alive until she’s old enough to come back with you on a Jump. Zeli, what the fuck are you thinking. I can’t—whatever. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0015
2083-29-09 01:48

I can’t believe you. I fucking can’t. I’m too pissed to sleep. Too worried to think straight. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0016
2083-29-09 03:10

I’m terrified for you alone down there. Just the thought of losing you—it hurts. You’re hurting me, Zeli. And for what? A fucking child, a little girl? You have to train her to jump! It takes years, and that’s with a class and technicians helping! What the hell are you gonna do, Azelia? You’re alone. I’m alone. . . Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0017
2083-01-10 20:21

I’m still mad at you. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0018
2083-03-10 19:48

Command finally talked to me. They told me the girl might actually be immune to the disease, that her immune system let her escape the worst of it. They say they can use her blood to help create a cure. Maybe create some new drug that we can somehow incorporate into the crops and build herd immunity that way. It’s crazy. I hate it all. Why would you put this much pressure on yourself, Zeli? When you realized she was healthy, did you just instantly give up on coming home? Did you not once think of any other option? Was this really the only way? I just . . . I need answers, Azelia. Are you even alive down there, or did the storm take you and that little girl away? They won’t tell me how long you’ll be gone. But I know it’s going to be years. Years alone, years away from you. Years of our empty-ass bed on this empty-ass space rock. And as much as I hate you, Zeli, I’m here. Waiting. For you and this kid. She better be fucking worth it. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0019
2083-09-10 20:17

The only way I stop talking into this fucking recorder is by keeping busy with work. But still, it doesn’t feel right to ignore this, like it’s actually you. Jody said Marcus has been busy facilitating research based on the blood sample you sent. You could’ve just come back, you know. The girl would probably be fine on that toxic shithole. She was fine without you. She’ll be fine without you. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0020
2083-10-10 12:43

I feel like such an ass . . . I don’t want her to die. She’s a child, for God’s sake. I know she can’t help whatever awful thing has happened to make you want to stay there with her. I just hate this so much. We need her blood to help develop some kind of blood stabilizer for Shortened Earth-borns—I know that. But why does it have to be my Zeli risking her life for this? Over . . . I guess.

AUDIO LOG BF-0021
2083-13-10 22:36

I learned how to delete recordings I don’t like, but the fuckin’ counter keeps goin’ up. Fuck this counter. Fuck you. Fuck Jody. Fuck Marcus. Fuck that kid. I hope you come home and see me fuckin’ wasted off bourbon and wine and a fuckin’ mess from being left alone. I miss you so much.

AUDIO LOG BF-0022
2083-14-10 08:15

Remind me not to touch the bourbon again while you’re gone. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0035
2083-20-11 13:01

According to the counter, I’ve tried saying something to you at least twelve times over the past month. And all I can do every time I hit record is stare and cry. I’m not usually like this—you know that. But for some reason, I just can’t make words. I can’t think straight. I want to apologize for thinking so terribly about a literal child. She’s human, after all. I want to tell you that I’m proud of you for making this sacrifice for the future of humanity. I want to tell you just how much I love and appreciate you. But it’s so hard to make it come out sometimes. You’re all I can think about. You and that child, you raising this child on your own while the world crumbles around you. Marcus says I need hobbies to get through being apart. But what kind of hobby passes years of time? Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0036
2083-22-11 17:57

For my own mental wellbeing, I’m only going to use this thing to update you on something new. I’ve started regularly seeing a therapist to just get better coping skills, and I don’t think talking here has been helping. So . . . goodbye for now, Zeli. I love you . . . over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0037
2084-19-06 20:12

My therapist said to wait six months before updating you on my life. It’s been hard, Zeli. You’d be so proud of the progress I’ve made. I’m not angry anymore. At least, I don’t think I am. Maybe talking right now will bring it out again. Wouldn’t that be sad? Ha! What have I been up to in the past half year, you ask? I improved some of our fertilization techniques with Jody’s help. We’ve both been working on this for months, and it finally resulted in a stronger spring harvest. With higher production, we might actually have to increase our dry storage supply! I sound so stupid getting excited over plants, but it really has been such a long time coming for this project. How are you? I hope the weather isn’t too hot down there. It’s a perfectly controlled twenty-one here, thank goodness. All anyone can talk about is how it’s another blistering year for Earth. Something like records of sixty-five in Europe? I just don’t get how we ever let it get that bad. Hopefully with my fertilization improvements, we can stop worrying about maintaining a sustainable life here and worry more about reducing the temperatures down there. And I guess that involves giving us all some immunity to whatever awful diseases have unleashed down there. Which makes what you’re doing all the more important. It makes what we’re both doing so important, and I’m even if I’m pissed at you for staying, I can’t hate you for doing what you know is right. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0038
2084-30-10 20:12

When you get back, let’s celebrate birthdays again. Remember the last time we did anything? It was for your twenty-seventh birthday, and we had to shovel wine and cake into our faces during our briefing break right before you started Jumping. That seems like so long ago—more than five years. That was right after Jumping was officially approved as the best way to get small groups between the Earth and the Moon. You became such a guinea pig for them, testing all the ways to improve Jumps. No wonder you became a Jumplead, no wonder you became the hope for humanity. Through it all, I supported you. So that’s why I want to do my best to support this Jump, too. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0039
2084-31-12 23:54

When we first met, we did the countdown to ring in our first New Year together, remember? Last year I was too pissed off to say anything, but I missed you too much to celebrate with anyone else. My New Year’s wish was to see you again sometime this past year. It’s a dumb wish, they told me it’d be at least five years. I don’t know if that kid will be ready in five years to make her first jump, but damn she couldn’t have a better teacher in the universe. After all, not everyone can do it—and if you can tell that she can, then I believe in you and her. Maybe one day I’ll actually meet her. Oh—I missed the countdown. Happy New Year. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0040
2085-02-02 09:54

That last thing I said, about meeting the kid . . . I meant it. I just want to make sure you know that. If she’s kept you away for this long, she’s important to you. And maybe that means she should be important to me. I don’t know her, and you know I’m not a huge fan of kids—that’s why we agreed to stay on the Moon Colony and focus on research in the first place. But if this changes things, I want to at least be able to consider the possibilities . . . whatever they are. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0041
2085-25-08 21:33

It’s been a while, so I figured I’d update you before bed and the harvest season really picks up. I’ve discovered some hobbies I love! Can you guess what they are, Zeli? Here’s a hint: none of them are knitting. I’ve started painting the Colony. I’m not that good yet, and I’m not painting more than the surrounding units. But it’s something I’m proud of. I love the ways watercolor mixes. Sometimes it’s too gray, sometimes there’s not enough blue, and the sky is never black enough. But it always seems to work, and these weird splotches of faded colors turn into something that brings me peace. I’ve been hanging them up around the unit. Above our bed, I’ve put you and I as stick-figures next to our unit, with Jody and Marcus waving in the corner. When you see it, you’ll probably think a child painted it. But I think it’s cute! Oh my gosh, speaking of Marcus, listen to this. Last month, Marcus joked that with you bringing that kid up here, we’d be this new age family. A disease-resistant lesbian family with some adopted dirty Earth-tween. The wine had us cry-laughing about that one! Ah, it’s getting late, and I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. Goodnight, Zeli. I haven’t said it in a while, but I love you. Don’t forget that. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0042
2086-02-01 06:22

I woke up early to paint the section of the Earth you’re on. Right as the Moon’s rotation and the Earth’s link, right in that moment where I know where you are and you can look up and know where I am. That’s what I want to paint. With a bright yellow dot for where you are, thriving. I hope you like it. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0045
2086-07-07 10:11

It never occurred to me until today that the girl would need somewhere to stay when you bring her back. She isn’t some test subject. We have the space, so I suppose they’d just place her with us once they give her vaccines and do their tests. Or at the very least, they’d let her sleep in a real bed and not some lab. Would that make her ours? Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0046
2086-08-07 22:18

Would you want her to be ours? Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0047
2086-15-07 10:47

I’ve done a bit of research into what it’d look like to have a child here. I never imagined having kids on the Colony—I always imagined we would both be focused on our research, we’d help fix Earth and maybe get to live on it again to help others. But never raise our own. What do you want to do with that girl when she gets here? I hate not knowing. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0048
2087-28-01 18:05

I met with some higher-ups today. They said if we wanted, and if the child wanted, we could keep her with us if she acclimates to the Moon. These past couple of months, I’ve been reading child rearing books and clearing out the office to make room. Maybe I’ll do some watercolors for her space? We can work on the layout when you both get here. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0049
2087-06-04 17:58

I’m starting to warm up to this, Zeli. Don’t disappoint me with some asshole, no manners child you’ve been raising for these few years. Oh also, the room is blue-and-white themed, to remind her of where she comes from. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0050
2087-13-09 17:58

Hernandez finally let me listen to you during your last check-in. You sound so different, Zeli. Rough. Patched. Where has your silky, sultry voice gone? I’ve been crying for the past hour just thinking about how awful it must be down there. How my Zeli could’ve turned into what I heard, that person living every day as a struggle. And . . . I heard the girl in the background. She was talking about where you two would be going next—Algiers, I think? She sounds so youthful and knowledgeable—I think I was expecting her to have some kind of born-on-a-dying-planet tone to her voice. I’m almost ashamed at how I think about her. About all the Earth-born Shortened, really. It’s not right, and I’m working on it. She sounds so smart, and I want to know more of how she thinks and what you two talk about. Do you two laugh together? Does she know about me? God I wish the tears would stop. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0051
2087-15-09 21:49

I can’t get her voice out of my head. It’s ringing louder, this prepubescent collection of sounds. I wish I knew her name. I wish I knew her favorite colors, her favorite things to eat. Does she like sweet things? Are there even that many sweet things down there? We don’t have much sweet stuff besides fruits and chocolate, but I bet I could make something she’d like. I miss you, Zeli. But I think I’m excited to see what our future holds together with this child. This could be something . . . new. New isn’t always bad, right? Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0052
2088-26-02 02:32

I had an awful dream, Zeli. The Moon was crashing into the Earth. And we both got close enough to barely touch fingers with each other. I wanted to grab you, to feel close to you before it all ended. And I could see you crying, Zeli. You never cry, and it broke my heart. It was awful. I woke up sweating. I just needed to talk to you, I think. Goodnight . . . over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0053
2088-17-06 17:32

It’s been almost five years since I last saw you. I do my best to keep busy with work and painting. I’ve gotten so much better, Zeli. You’d be proud! I replaced some of the first ones around the house with these newer ones, and they feel almost professional enough to give to others. For Marcus and Jody’s anniversary, I gave them this fantastic painting of two whales. I don’t know why, but they feel like whales to me—big men, but soft and all-knowing, too. They loved it. When you get back, we’ll have our ten year anniversary in October. It’s awful to think of how much of it has been spent apart, but we’re all the stronger for it, wouldn’t you say? How would you like to celebrate? Oh I know! What if you and I cook together, and instead of celebrating being together, we celebrate becoming a family with the child? That’d be adorable! I’m all excited now! See you soon, Zeli. I love you. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0054
2088-20-07 08:31

Hernandez said you’re preparing to come back before the next hurricane season starts! I can’t wait to see you, Zeli! This has been hell! Haha! It’s almost over!

AUDIO LOG BF-0055
2088-22-07 14:59

Hernandez just called to say that you’re planning an emergency jump before nightfall. Is everything okay? I hope you both make it safely. I’m sure with your training, with both of you watching out for each other, it’ll be okay. I’m headed to the Command Center now to meet you! Yes, yes, I know I can’t fully interact with you both until they’ve sanitized you and all that. But still! Oh also, I’m bringing a gift for the girl—it’s a teddy bear! Turns out I did pick up knitting, ha! I’ll see you soon! Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0056
2088-22-07 19:03

I’m in the holding area waiting for you. I decided to record it so I can play your voice back after so long. My stomach is such a fucking wreck right now. Will you still find me attractive after all this time? It’s no question at all for me—you’ll be coming back as this rugged, toned woman. I can’t wait to kiss you again. To hold you and be held by you. Oh Zeli, my heart is racing. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0057
2088-22-07 20:00

You were supposed to have been here by now. Where are you? Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0058
2088-22-07 20:05

They won’t tell me what’s going on, but my nerves are killing me so I need to talk. Zeli, please get here safe. Please make sure you both get here safe. Over.

AUDIO LOG BF-0059
2088-22-07 21:13

The jump alarms are going off, which means you’re both here! I want to record our first time seeing each other again, Zeli. Ah, I think I can see Hernandez in the tunnel, he’s coming out soon. He looks awful, my goodness! You must’ve been stressing that poor man out. Good thing this is all over. Ah! Zeli! Zeli, do you see me? I’m here, to your left! Look through the sanitation tunnel window, silly! It’s so great to see you again—where’s the girl? . . . Azelia? Where—

©2023 by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (they/she) has been imagining the weird and unsettling since they started writing at 7 years old. Their experiences as someone queer and Black have lent themselves to how they understand the mental and emotional toll that comes with being othered. This lens manifests itself through the people, cultures, mental health issues, and experiences in their writing. Their fiction has appeared in FIYAH Magazine, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and more. Jendayi is currently working on their debut novel in their new home of Portland, Oregon.

A Man Walks Into a Bar; or, In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street, I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done

Scott Edelman | 5977 words

My father was so honest, people often spoke of him in cliches. For example—you know the way someone will sometimes say so-and-so was so honest they’d walk five miles to return an extra nickel they’d been given in their change? Nobody means anybody actually did that kind of thing when they say it, of course—you and I both know they’re only exaggerating for effect.

Except in the case of my father.

My Dad had really done that.

Around the neighborhood, he was seen as so calm and understanding when compared to other fathers, other husbands—perhaps he’d arrived at his serenity due to those tai chi classes he’d sneak off to during his lunch hours a couple of times a week—some of the grownups jokingly referred to him as Saint Barney. One friend of my parents even had a one-of-a-kind T-shirt painted bearing that airbrushed nickname.

My mother would dispute that title from time to time, though she’d smile when she’d protest. I get it. Spouses see each other far too clearly to ever consider their partners saints. But hey, I don’t hold it against either of them. That was between them. But as far as I was concerned growing up, the description always rang true.

And now that years have passed and he’s gone (they’re both long gone now) … it still does. I never received a punishment which didn’t seem to hurt him more than it hurt me. Which come to think of it, is also a cliche, one you frequently see in movies and on TV whenever a Dad reaches for the belt. In those cases, you could tell—the guys never mean it. It was just a thing they were supposed to say.

My Dad meant it.

But before I tell you anything more about him, I should probably get to why I’m bothering to tell you about my father in the first place.

• • • •

Though—come to think of it—to fully understand the night in question—which we’ll get to, I promise—it would be helpful for you to first know this—

Donald Trump, on the other hand—

I know, I know … how did we get from there to here, you might be asking yourself. And why did we even have to? But trust me—it will all make sense soon enough, I hope.

Anyway, as I was saying, Donald Trump, in contrast to my father, was so dishonest back when the encounter I’ll shortly be telling you about occurred—and yes, ever since, but let’s leave the details of the intervening decades for others to describe, or else we’ll be here all night—he existed in a realm beyond cliche, entering previously unexplored territories of deception, which meant those who bore witness to his lies were required to invent new ways of describing their equivocating nature.

But as those of us who lived through those times know, we weren’t the only ones who resorted to invention, for Donald Trump—perhaps because his obfuscations were so numerous it was impossible to contain them within a single human form—would pretend to be a PR flack named John Baron and use that identity to phone reporters hoping to score good press for himself.

Baron, by the way, was a name you might recall he’d choose to reuse many years later, doubling that middle “r” before handing it off to his son, which forged an uneasy connection to that fictitious second self. But that naming, too, lies outside the scope of what I need you to hear.

And as for the man’s anger, his cruelty, his vindictiveness … no amount of tai chi could have ever smoothed that temper over. I can’t imagine him even making the attempt in a midtown Manhattan pocket park the way my Dad did.

But the deception which disgusts me the most—well, save for the stochastic terrorism which was to come, of course, even though the two aren’t in the same league as far as the scales of the universe are concerned—that was centered on a spot I knew quite well. It was not that far away from the Marvel Comics offices on Madison Avenue where I’d once worked. And no, that tangential sacrilege isn’t the main event of this story, which I’m slowly approaching in a manner I hope will make sense.

Here’s the deal—in the process of replacing the Bonwit Teller Building with Trump Tower, that vulgar Fifth Avenue monument to himself, when it came time for him to deliver on his promise to turn over to the Metropolitan Museum historic sculptures which were part of the older structure’s facade before unleashing the wrecking balls, he instead jackhammered that promise, destroying his supposed gift and any trust I might have had in him, which was fairly insubstantial to begin with.

But destruction runs in that family, you see, though how that clan was also responsible for shattering part of my childhood I wasn’t to learn until I was an adult. For—are you ready for this?—Trump’s father Fred—about whom Woody Guthrie, composer of “This Land is Your Land,” wrote a blistering song about how he was spreading “racial hate”—once hosted a demolition party at Coney Island where he invited guests to hurl bricks through the stained glass of Steeplechase Park. Ah, Steeplechase Park, land of dreams! My eleven-year-old self mourned, not knowing then who was responsible for that desecration, or how much worse was to be inflicted on us by that family.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Or maybe behind?

It’s getting hard to tell.

• • • •

Once upon a time (but no longer), there existed an establishment on the island of Manhattan by the name of Ye Olde Tripple Inn. That bar (inn, bar, what’s the difference?) on the north side of West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue was known for many things—it was even a hangout for comedians for awhile—but the first I heard of it was when my father joined a darts club there which met once a week after work. He got quite good at the sport—I’d like to think the dartboard my brother and I chipped in to buy him one year for his birthday so he could practice at home helped—and eventually became the captain.

How and why he was made captain—whether it was earned through his ability alone or if he was elected more on the basis of his easy-going likability (which based on what I’ve told you already I hope you understand was truly a thing)—I will never know. And it’s far too late for finding out. But as the result of his reasonable leadership (I presume it was reasonable—I only saw him in action there once), the team took home several trophies from what he did there once a week, week after week, during the late seventies and into the early eighties.

Meanwhile, the other participant in the incident to come was from time to time spending his nights not that many yards away on the opposite side of 54th Street—at Studio 54, where behind a velvet rope the music was loud and the drugs flowed freely, where Halston and Jagger could be spotted alongside Warhol and Capote, all of them wanting to be hidden, all of them wanting to be seen.

Donald Trump wanted things, too, but they were things he could never have, for what he desired could not be bought. They couldn’t even be rented. Uncomfortable in his skin, the desperation for respect simmering, both of these conditions obvious to anyone who cared to look, he walked among the cool and was anything but. He was a visitor to a foreign land he could never truly inhabit.

When they danced, he did not, not really—he could not, though he tried—because whatever rhythms the universe beat out were beyond his hearing.

When they drank, when they drugged, he did neither, for the addiction he needed to feed was far more metaphysical.

• • • •

So I’ll have you understand these were two very different men back then—and later as well—my father and Donald Trump.

One was accepting of life, and grateful for what he’d been given, even in the face of the many things he felt he had not. The other raged, feeling shortchanged even in the face of his privilege, deciding that for him to receive anything less than more than his share was to be cheated.

One, a surrendered and immoveable object; the other a petulant but irresistible force.

One, the accepted solidity of matter—the other, the anarchy of anti-matter.

One—to me, his son—an angel. The other—to the sons and daughters and many of the children of New York—a demon.

• • • •

Some nights, after the team worked through a few rounds of darts and a few rounds of beer (though not my father for the latter, as he was not a drinking man), before Dad would take a late train back to Brooklyn, he and the rest of the guys would spill out of Ye Olde Tripple Inn to stare across 54th Street at the long line of hopefuls desperate to get into Studio 54. I never heard if they were able to gawk at anyone famous that way, as the In crowd was always let right in, but I was told many tales of how—mixed in with the usual leather- and leisure suit-wearing disco customers Dad was used to seeing back in Brooklyn—there’d be wild wigs and colorful face paint, young women with roller skates and angel wings, wiry men in sparkly swim trunks and gold body glitter. Those latter types—the ones who looked nothing like the types he knew—usually didn’t have to wait long before being waved inside.

Dad and the others would be puzzled as they peered across that great divide, not quite fully understanding the alien world which waited a dozen yards away—never has a mere dozen yards seemed so vast—then head back inside for a last round before the team broke up for the night.

I never heard my Dad mock those he saw. Maybe the others did—though if they did, he never relayed it to me—but not him. He was … well, confused isn’t the right word for the feeling the sight engendered in him. It was just … that was not his world, not his way. He spent his child and teen years seemingly afraid he’d be locked forever in working class poverty, and one way of climbing out of that, he decided—other than by polishing his early artistic talent—was his talent for fitting in, for passing as something more than what he was born to. He carefully cultivated his aspect and affect, not wanting to stand out, hoping to be taken for the class to which he aspired. So the thought of being performative in the attention-grabbing way of those who waited outside Studio 54 was incomprehensible to him. He knew on which side of the street he belonged.

He was a good man, and a loving father, but I think, even as he was proud of me, I always puzzled him a bit, too. But I’m OK with that. I understand.

• • • •

One person who was never proud was Fred Trump, who saw kindness as a weakness, and wanted Donald’s role in his life to be, not one of a son, but a “killer.” He actually used that word.

My father’s father was a tough man, too. Dad doesn’t remember ever being hugged, or being told “I love you.” By his mother, maybe. But never his old man. And yet—he overcame that, mostly from sheer force of will that he would not carry within him the sins of his father. I’ve always been amazed by how far he traveled, and how he was able to pull it off.

Some are able to do that. Others can’t. Or don’t.

Or won’t.

Whenever I have cause to think of the debate over nature vs. nurture, I remember that, and how remarkable my father was.

• • • •

In case you’re wondering, I want you to know—everything I’ve told you so far is true. You can verify the facts for yourself if you’d like. Well, except it’s too late to learn what a nice guy my father was, because he’s gone now, which is too bad, because you would have liked him.

So when I tell you my father told me something which happened one night at Ye Olde Tripple Inn more than four decades ago, and that what I tell you he told me is also true, well, he’s no longer here to say otherwise, and that makes it true, right?

That makes it true.

• • • •

It was the end of a long night, and Dad and his friends had just beaten a visiting team from another bar, so they were in a good mood. Especially my father, because he’d soon be going home to my mother, and unlike with many a husband, he adored his wife. He was Saint Barney, remember? (They loved each other very much. Maybe I’ll tell you that story someday, too.) The other team had all left by this time, licking their wounds, and my Dad’s teammates were also slowly wandering off, when in the door came—

Well, you know who it was.

You know what all this has been leading up to.

For my father and his team hadn’t been the only ones staring across 54th street in wonder. Donald Trump, heading into Studio 54 that night on the other side of the street, had glanced across that asphalt chasm, and seen the logo of Ye Olde Tripple Inn. He broke stride briefly, and almost changed direction right then, caught between those with whom he thought he belonged and those on the other side, those he felt were the kind of people he could easily bamboozle. But that hesitation lasted only for a moment … and then he continued into the club where he spent the night fuming in his discomfort.

But as that night was ending—a night spent surrounded by those he hoped to be but could never hope to be—he remembered what he had seen earlier, and after exiting the club and nodding to his driver, he passed by the limo and this time crossed that street.

He pushed through the door as my father was settling his tab, and when Dad looked up to see who was coming in after everybody else had left, there was a moment of cognitive dissonance, for after his many months competing there, he was familiar with all the usual faces, so recognizing that one had him momentarily thinking one of his teammates had returned, until he realized … oh. (I might have responded with a “huh” myself had someone I’d only seen on the nightly news or the front pages of tabloids suddenly manifested himself.)

The only face Donald Trump saw at first, on the other hand, wasn’t my father, or the bartender, but his brother’s, the alcoholic, whose life was a dreadful warning keeping the unfortunately future president from drink. Don’t end up like me, his brother had told him. Though from our vantage point in the present, it would be difficult to deny we’d all have been better off if he had ended up that way.

But then Fred, Jr.’s face faded, and Donald Trump saw my father there at the bar, disassembling his darts and laying them back in the case. Trump watched the process of the pieces disappearing, then looked to the multiple boards spread across a wall.

“How about a game?” he asked my father, even though he’d never hurled a dart before. But how hard could it be? He’d seen it done, and was sure he’d be great at it, one of the best. He gestured toward a board as if tossing an invisible dart, then wiggled his fingers and pulled back his upper lip in an attempt at a smile.

My Dad shook his head, even though he suspected a round of darts against the famous real estate developer would make for a good story—but who would believe it?—thinking only of my mother waiting at home.

“Don’t be like that,” said Trump, a hint of anger in his voice. “You have time for one round.”

“Look, man,” said the bartender as he counted out the cash register. “It’s closing time.”

“Oh, really,” Trump replied, slapping a hundred dollar bill on the counter. “Maybe this will convince you to push that closing time back.”

My Dad didn’t like that kind of behavior. When he would tell me about that night, he’d frown as he got to this point. Because he’d seen that kind before. Though Trump was younger by more than a dozen years, he reminded my father of his own father—a man who was also used to getting what he wanted, even though in getting it, he usually lost everything else.

“I can make the game interesting for you, too,” added Trump, starting to pull further bills out of his wallet.

“You might be able to risk that kind of money,” said my father. “But I can’t.”

His job as an art director at McGraw-Hill may have raised him from lower to middle class and changed his collar from blue to white, but he knew he could not compete in Trump’s world, and didn’t expect he ever would. His journey had been extraordinary enough. (Once, when he thought he was near death—though that time, thankfully, he still had years to go—he apologized to me while on his back in an ICU for not having done better in his life. Not for himself—but so that he could have helped me more. I can’t imagine Donald Trump ever having that kind of thought for others in his head when he considered his own success.)

“How about I give you odds then?” said the future—never mind, I weary of thinking about that future. “Let’s make it ten to one. You can lop a zero off whatever I put up. I promise you you’ll never get a better deal than that.”

My father admitted to me he’d been tempted. He could always use a few extra bucks. That’s why he’d freelance art jobs most nights after getting home from work. And even though the idea of gambling brought up thoughts of his father-in-law, the bookie, and my mother’s conflicted feelings about that sort of thing—a relationship which would take an entire novel to lay out for you, so we’ll leave it for another time—my father almost didn’t consider this gambling. No, this would be a risk-free sure thing, he felt, because he was fairly certain there was no skill behind the bluster before him. He expected he could easily beat the real estate developer, so why not stay a little longer to make a big score?

On the other hand … he knew that wasn’t the only pot he was playing for here. Accepting the offered terms, acceding to Trump’s rules, and staying later than planned simply because it was demanded would in itself be a loss, even if he ended up winning the match and bringing home a bundle. So my father kept his palm down on his sealed darts case and once more shook his head.

“No,” he said, mainly because it felt good to say no to someone who didn’t get said no to often.

“No?” Trump’s response was almost more growled than spoken.

Dad smiled.

“Not on those terms,” he said, uncowed. He knew what it was like to face down bullies. He’d spent his childhood running from them on the streets of Bensonhurst, but ran no more. “Here’s what we’ll do. If you’re up for a game, want to make it interesting, I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do. We won’t be playing for money. Money doesn’t matter.”

“Money always matters.”

“Not in here it doesn’t. Not now. Not tonight.”

Dad reopened his case, and began assembling the darts.

“Tonight, if you want me to stay, we’re playing for … ”

And here my father paused dramatically. At least he hoped his pause dramatic. And intentional. Because he was actually pausing because he had no idea what to say next, and he was hoping Donald Trump wouldn’t notice. He didn’t have a clue where he was going with this.

But then it came to him.

“So here’s the deal,” my father said. “See that team trophy over there? If you win tonight, it’s yours. You can walk right out of here with it, and I’ll tell anyone who asks, you were the captain who got us there. But if I win—you owe me. Hey, I’ll even sweeten the odds. You won’t get to keep the trophy, but I’ll still tell people you were team captain. But you’ll owe me.”

“Owe you? Owe you what?”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be money. But someday, I may need a favor. Or my son will. It’ll be something no one else but you can do. And you’re going to do it for us, whatever we ask.”

Dad pulled one of his business cards from his wallet, turned it over, scribbled the letters IOU on the back, then slid it across the bar for Donald Trump to sign. My father said he was uncertain what was going through Trump’s mind as he flipped over the card, read my father’s name, then looked at him again hard. Dad didn’t like being on the other end of such an opaque stare. But finally, Trump shrugged, pulled a silver pen from his jacket pocket, signed, and dropped the card back on the bar.

“Why do you think he bothered?” I asked several times over the years. I knew, we all knew, Trump wasn’t a man who liked being challenged.

“I think he thought it was a joke,” Dad told me. “Meaningless. But it wasn’t meaningless to me.”

Nor to me.

“Now what?” Trump asked once the rules had been settled.

“Now we find out who gets to go first.” My father handed Donald Trump a dart from the many which had been set aside for visitors. “Whoever lands one closest to a bullseye wins the first throw.”

My father stepped up to the line and carefully let his dart fly. He failed to make his hoped-for bullseye that night, and the only reason for that, or so he told me, was because he was a bit nervous. But even with sweaty palms, he still managed to strike the outer bull, the second best, and he was fine with that. He doubted Donald Trump could ever pull off a bullseye, or even match him.

He was right.

When Trump stepped up and hurled his dart, it missed the board entirely, slapping to one side against the wall. It bounced back toward the two men, rolling along the floor until it stopped a few inches from their shoes.

“You distracted me,” Trump said. “I should get a mulligan.”

“There are no do-overs in darts,” my father told him. He enjoyed doing so.

When Trump bent to pick up the dart at his feet, or so my father tells the tale, he was so clumsy he bobbled it, and ended up pricking a thumb. As he sucked the dot of blood, my father pointed to his card on the bar.

“May I have that back now, please?” he asked. Trump pushed the card back along the bar, leaving a smear on the paper beside the signature.

While Trump waved over the bartender for some alcohol to dribble on his thumb—he was quite a germophobe, I understand—my father slid the card back into his wallet. It’s a card he carried in every succeeding wallet until he died. Ever since then, I’ve carried it in mine. More than four decades older now, the paper’s grown soft, the signature blurry, and the bloody thumbprint a darker red.

If we run into each other someday, ask, and I might show it to you.

• • • •

Do I really need to tell you my father won that night?

And not just the first round. But also a second time when Donald Trump insisted they play for two out of three. And even a third game when he begged for best of five. But then that was the end of it, as Trump finally surrendered to the idea no amount of green could possibly convince the bartender to stay open long enough to change the outcome.

I could give you a play-by-play if you’d like, though … actually, I couldn’t, not even if my father had given me one, because not being a player, even what few details he shared made no sense to me. All I know is—Trump’s darts did occasionally make their way to plant themselves in the circle of the dartboard, though apparently never landing where he wanted them to, and my Dad was happy as he headed home.

• • • •

I’ve thought often of the man my father described as having met that night, though as time went on, he would only speak of the incident when prodded. And what has astounded me in the years since is that as bad as Dad’s Trump was, he was nothing compared to our Trump.

He was aggressive then, sure, and arrogant, too, and offensive, that as well, but nothing like the utterly outrageous Id unleashed I, we, were forced to watch him become. He even spoke in complete sentences on the night in question, or so my father told it, with paths from beginnings to ends that were actually diagrammable, his speech not having yet deliquesced into a gibberish word salad capable of melting the brain cells of any who were unfortunate enough to listen for long.

I am so sorry my father is gone, and miss him terribly, but I’m glad he only experienced the Trump who crossed West 54th Street that one night and not the horror which subsequently crossed the country to haunt us all.

He was luckier than us.

• • • •

My father returned to my mother that night with a story she could barely believe, though that signed business card cast away all doubts, and Donald Trump returned …

I have no idea. Who knows where Donald Trump goes when he goes?

We all know what happened next.

• • • •

Well, I know all of what happened next. You, if you were paying close attention, only know the public half of it.

Here’s the part you don’t know—

My father continued at a series of art director jobs on business-to-business magazines you’ve never heard of, and after he retired, dedicated his life to what he wished he’d been able to do all along, painting. A dozen of his oils hang in my house right now—I can see five of them from where I’m sitting. He lived for several more decades past that night, but not enough of them, before he died in 2009. Neither we nor his doctors ever understood why, a mystery I try not to worry about too much as I approach his age. While he lived, he was good, and kind, and always made people feel better about themselves. I never doubted his love for me. What an amazing gift for a father to hand his son, and from what I have seen in this world, a rare gift as well. He survived until three days past the 55th anniversary of his wedding to my mother, the love of his life.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been involved in thousands of lawsuits, not even counting those which arose during and after his presidency, far more than any other person involved in the real estate business at his level. He used his political posturing to toss a match on the gas-soaked rags of America’s racial hatred, continuing in his father’s legacy, and as a stochastic terrorist, sent an insurrectionist mob to the U.S. Capitol where lives were lost and Nazi and Confederate flags flew. He is, at the time of this writing, still with us, and still married to his third wife. As for the words normally associated with the way he’s chosen to live his life, “good” and “kind” and “made people feel better about themselves” are not among them.

• • • •

I carry the card from that night in my wallet the way my father did, and in recent times have often pulled it out to wonder …

What was Dad waiting for? Why didn’t he ever call in his marker? There was no decade without a reason to ask for a favor, and a big one at that. And not just on behalf of himself, or his family … but for all of us.

He could have told Donald Trump to stop discriminating against renters on the basis of race, as the Department of Justice alleged during the seventies.

Or to quit it with the undocumented workers, like the 200 Poles he hired to demolish Bonwit Teller in the eighties. (And to knock it off with the demonization of such workers as well.)

Or to stop using beauty pageants as creeper hunting grounds, the way he did in the nineties.

Or to cease any of the other trespasses he continued to commit before my father died and was beyond the opportunity of making demands.

Maybe he assumed it would be pointless—Dad used the word “meaningless” so many years ago, remember?—that Trump would dodge keeping his promise the way he dodged every other promise of his life.

Maybe he thought Trump would just say—“What the Hell are you talking about? I figured you’d want a loan, or help finding an apartment, not any of that. Are you nuts? Get lost!”

So maybe Dad got more pleasure out of the potential of a promise than the reality of a promise reneged.

Or maybe … maybe … maybe he wanted that uncalled promissory note to be part of my inheritance. He did tell me, after all, as I have already told you, that in his most vulnerable of moments, as he lay near death, he regretted not being able to leave me more. Did he take comfort in knowing he could leave me that?

And yet … I have some nerve asking these questions about him. For who am I to talk? What did I do during the time the card was in my sole possession?

Was Birtherism not enough to spur me to action?

Was Trump assuring his supporters he’d pay their legal bills if they’d beat up protesters insufficient to move me?

Didn’t him telling white supremacist groups to stand by set off loud enough alarm bells?

I could have reached out after any of those incidents to wave the card, remind Trump of my father and that promise made on West 54th Street, and tell him to knock it off. But for some reason, whether similar to or different from my father’s reasons, I chose not to.

I chose …

Excuse me for a moment.

I’ll be right back.

• • • •

OK, so it’s me again.

I’m back.

It’s only been a few seconds for you, but for me, it’s been several hours. It’s gotten dark out, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to move and turn on the lights. That’s how much telling you all this has taken out of me. So I can only sit here holding that card in my hands, rubbing my thumb over the decades-old print smeared from a few drops of blood spilled in a bar, and continue to wonder.

I consider the card and the years since that print was made. The card is grimy from all those years first in Dad’s wallet, and then my own. There’s something grimy about the intervening years themselves since it came into our possession, too. And as I handle it, something occurs to me I should have understood long ago—and I’m sorry for that, because if I had realized it earlier I could have forestalled so much—but it finally becomes clear I have something my father didn’t—

A tool. A weapon.

A solution.

You see, I am a writer of science fiction and fantasy and horror, have been all my life. But if you’re reading this, it’s likely you already know that. Those aspects of the fantastic were things my father mostly did not understand. Oh, he tried to, but it just wasn’t his thing. When he chose to read, it was mostly mysteries and thrillers, maybe even a little non-fiction, biographies of famous men, or histories of war. Oh, he might have been willing to try a Stephen King book if everybody was talking about it, but he never really enjoyed the strange. And as for short stories, if his son wasn’t writing them, I doubt he’d have read even one.

But don’t worry about me, though. He was proud, and I always knew he was proud. So I’m OK. His lack of enthusiasm for my chosen subject matter didn’t bother me. That’s not really my point here. My point is this—

That I’ve walked this path means—

I know things. And what things I don’t know, I know people who know those things.

In order to write the stories I’ve written, I have researched killers and covens, genies and grimoires, morgues and magic, the raising of the dead, and the rewriting of memory. As with many writers, my search engine is a wonder to behold. And because of all my research, all that esoteric knowledge, I can do things of which my father could never dream.

Let us dream together, you and I.

• • • •

If I have done this right, the things I have put into motion between the last sentence and this one, if I have used the gift my father has left me correctly, this will be the last time you will read this story, for it’s the only time you will be able to understand it. Because if the ceremony I’ve performed during the days between paragraphs using the blood the Edelmans have been carrying for decades did what it was intended to do, any attempt to start over will only confuse you. Because in rereading, you’ll probably find yourself thinking—

Donald Trump? Didn’t he used to have a TV show?

Or if the spell has truly erased the dark years brought on by that man—

Donald Trump? I remember him, I think. Wasn’t he in New York real estate? Why is Scott bothering to tell us about that guy?

If I have achieved that, made you forget one man and introduce you to another far better man, my father, then my guilt for not having done in real life sooner what I have so often done in stories can start to lift. I can still be forgiven.

So all I have left to say is—

I hope I have spoken the words properly, chalked out the lines the geometric pattern required, placed my father’s bloody business card in the true center, lit the candles in the correct order, concocted the elixir of indicated ingredients in the proper proportions, and then drunk it down at the appropriate phase of the moon.

I hope I have done every step of this right.

Please tell me I’ve done this right.

Please tell me.

Please.

—for Barney Edelman, 1932-2009

©2023 by Scott Edelman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Edelman has published more than 100 short stories in Analog, The Twilight Zone, Weirdbook, Parsec, and dozens of other magazines and anthologies. Many of those stories can be found in his collections These Words Are Haunted, What Will Come After, What We Still Talk About, Tell Me Like You Done Before, and his recent Things That Never Happened, about which Publishers Weekly wrote, “his talent is undeniable.” He has been been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award, as well as the Bram Stoker Award eight times. He is also the host of Eating the Fantastic, a podcast which has allowed listeners to eavesdrop on his meals with writers and editors since 2016.

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

Braid Me a Howling Tongue

Maria Dong | 9909 words

When I was young, I used to fray apart my mother’s tales, seeking the threads of their structure. They were journeys, always, and marked by transition-places: doorway, gate, river. On the other side, someone offered the rules of this new environment. I liked the stories where these interpreters were animals or hags, though in my least favorite, it was a child with ragged clothes that admonished, that’s not the way things work here.

I understand. Understand that people bore easily, that stories must be pragmatic. No time to waste on the heroine, bumbling her way through years of figuring out the rules.

But this isn’t a story. There’s no interpreter for me when I arrive, and no quest to speak of.

1

I’m thrown through a doorway into a room full of girls.

I use this word loosely. Most are past bleeding age, some with bellies that round like rising moons. They sit at a large table in the middle of the room, dressed in matching gray smocks, identical white sashes tied around their waists. To my people, white is for funerals; the color seems fitting.

They watch as I hit the ground. Like me, they wear hobbles of strong, light chain.

The squat man that brought me stinks of poppy-smoke. He gestures to a woman in the back, twice as old as anyone here. She doesn’t wear a hobble, and I hate her already.

Besides the door, there are no exits, just a number of square windows too small to crawl out. Each wall is lined with identical beds, all topped with lumpy mattresses.

The woman nods at a spinning wheel near the right wall. The man pushes me forward, saying something I don’t understand, and again I’m struck by the flow of their language, the way it rises and falls like a raptor gliding on currents.

He pinches his fingers in front of him, miming. He wants me to make thread.

The girls have already turned back to their work—carding, weaving, sewing—as if bored by my presence. I almost refuse, but I’m afraid, sure that in another room there are women performing other, less desirable jobs.

I examine the wheel. It’s different from the ones I know, but the pieces are all there—treadle, wheel, maidens, a horseshoe-shaped flyer that holds the bobbin. I test the treadle with my foot, get a sense of the drive wheel’s rhythm, and start to spin.

• • • •

I spin wool until the backs of my legs go numb from the chair. Until my ankle aches and my fingers cramp from holding the same pinched positions for hours. The man has long left. The woman never looks directly at me, which means she’s watching me closely. I do the same when I hunt deer.

I count the girls as I weave. There are twenty-nine, their complexions all like mine. I can’t tell which are from here and which are stolen like me.

I wave at the girl carding wool and ask to trade via gestures. Her brown eyes flash amber as they widen. She glances at my waist and turns away so violently the length of her braid whips over her shoulder.

Maybe she didn’t understand, I think, but I know this isn’t the case.

• • • •

I approach a girl to indicate I need to relieve myself. She, too, glances at my waist before addressing the woman instead.

I conspire to get a sash. I could steal it, maybe, but I think the sashes are just symbols of something else.

I go back to weaving. Any color but white, I think, as the wool runs harsh between my fingers. With so many of my people dead, maybe I should get used to the color.

• • • •

Some hours after night falls, everyone finally puts up their handicrafts. The woman approaches me and touches herself on the chest twice while enunciating slowly: Alena, Aaaaa-leeee-naaa.

I nod.

Alena taps my chest, her finger as imperious as a woodpecker’s beak. I knew this was coming, but I shake my head. Her expression turns sour, and she repeats her ritual: tap-tap, Alena, tap-tap.

I open my mouth. Alena’s gapes in response.

Three months ago, my closest kin fled a plague that ravaged our summer grounds. Asleep in the back of the wagon, I didn’t see the raiders until I woke to a blade at my throat. Their leader cut out my tongue before I could weave a defensive spell—perhaps as punishment for spitting at him.

I will forever feel his knife. It cuts me as Alena studies his work, so sharp I taste copper where words should be.

My people are steppes herders, but I was a word-worker, the strongest of the tribes. Now, I’m left with only two spells. Calming a terrified animal is woven from a combination of ah and bah and mah. The spell that energizes an exhausted horse is mouthed silently.

I would give up either to say my own name.

Alena recovers, finally. She gestures at a bed near the back-right corner. The straw-tick shifts under my thighs as I sit. She pulls a wooden box from underneath and flips the lid. Its contents are cloth, stacked and folded like layers of the earth—two gray dresses, one white, an extra blanket. She shoves them at me, and I understand this is my place now, everything I own represented by this box.

I’m used to traveling light—but that is our freedom. This, here, is deprivation. I long for the howl of the fresh wind over the steppes. Since my capture, everything has been cages, each smaller than the last.

Alena leaves me and calls out. The girls hush and sit on their beds. None are empty. I wonder whose bed I’ve just taken, and what happened to its previous occupant.

• • • •

Despite my exhaustion, I can’t sleep. I’m torn between crying and not crying, unshed tears twitching at my eyelids like ants.

I lie facing the room and trace shadows in the dark. The girls sleep in all positions, and the varying curves of their hips and heads and shoulders, feels like bedding down beside the sheep. Their combined breath rushes like wind through long grass.

A few snore, but I close my eyes and pretend I’m with my herd.

My mind drifts. I wonder if they’ll be allies or enemies. If they were born into this life, or if some were captured like me. A rabbit claws in my throat.

I open my eyes and turn over.

Now, there’s only the carding girl’s bed between me and the back wall. She faces away, lying so still my skin prickles—but then her side drops and raises, too quickly for sleep. She was holding her breath. Her elbows twitch—slight movements, but fast and regular. She keeps her arms tight to her sides, her forearms in front. I can’t see her hands.

I blush, but then I’m angry. My mother often lectured that my tragedies don’t affect the world around me—and still, I reject the idea that this girl is pleasuring herself in front of me when I’ve just been dragged to this room as a captive.

She stills and slides closer to the wall, before looking over her shoulder. I feign sleep until I hear her move again, and then I open my eyes just enough to sense her form through my lashes.

She pushes her fist under the corner of her mattress. When she pulls her hand back out, it’s open, as if she’s stowed something away.

2

The first three days are the same. We wake early and eat. We wash our faces, our teeth, our hands. We clean the room, our bedding, our clothes, the chamber-pots.

Then, we’re led single-file to a kitchen that accommodates us all at once. The grounds here aren’t open like the steppes. There’s just a small clearing for the buildings, ringed by a thick forest of trees unlike any I’ve ever seen. The trees are massive, their leaves bright yellow and shaped like flower petals, their branches heavy with fist-sized golden fruits. Nobody ever tries to eat one.

I imagine sprinting for the tree-line. Were I not hobbled, I’d take my chances—but there’s always a guard, leaning against a wall, a bow slung over his shoulder.

We spend our mornings cooking horrendous volumes of bland food. I crave my herd’s meat and milk, but here, the diet is starches—tubers, flour, nuts. Filling, but not satisfying. At midday, women with hoods take away the food we’ve made. There are at least twenty buildings, and my group of girls is the only one ever in the kitchen, so it must go to feed the encampment.

Then, we return and switch to our handicrafts. My mother’s ancestral home was not the steppes, but a sea village to the south. Like us, the women there weave with spinning wheels, instead of the hand spindles of my tribe.

Our work here is frantic. We produce cloth, cord, and rope until our evening meal. Only then are we allowed a few short hours to do as we wish.

I am in awe of their craft. It has all the components of good spell-work: intention, repetition, beauty that elicits emotion. Every time the carding girl outpaces me and switches to weaving rope instead, I imagine it thrumming under my hand—but thread-work is so rare, I’ve only met two practitioners. They crafted garments that allowed the wearer simple illusions. Our best hunter once paid thirty sheep for a jacket that temporarily banished the wrinkles around her eyes.

The girls ignore me, gossiping in that sweet, light language. As the days go by, fragments emerge, like bits of flotsam washed ashore. I comb for these words, eager to feel less alone. So far, I have three names, the word for relieving myself, a word I think means do, and an exclamation; I don’t know if it’s good or bad.

I am proud of my vocabulary, because nobody speaks to me, or at a speed I could hope to follow. The only exception is Alena, who gives me the same word over and over.

Do, she says, pointing to the weaving, the cooking, the cleaning. Do, do, do.

• • • •

The morning of the fifth day, she points at the white dress in the box. Do.

I swallow hard. The funereal dress makes my skin crawl.

Do, she says, the pitch of her voice dropping, and I’m forced to comply.

We complete the morning chores and the cooking, but that is all—no handicrafts. When we get back, the girls all sit on their beds. There’s an electricity to their whispers, an odd energy in the way their gazes connect across the room.

Alena locks the door. She removes our hobbles, one by one, and tears come to my eyes. A few of the girls rub their ankles, but they don’t seem to share my relief.

Someone knocks at the door. Alena clears her throat and adjusts her smock before opening it.

A man stands on the other side, a slip of paper in hand. She takes it, and he steps away.

She steps inside. “Marali.” Her eyes search the room. “Awen. Terzanne.” She pauses between each word. “Ronata. Kalen. Mea.” When she finishes, the named girls walk to the front of the room. It is strange, seeing them take long strides. They stand, single-file, like a slim line of cat-tails edging the bank of a river. The man says something, and they all leave.

Alena locks the door. It feels like the moments before a loosed arrow, one kind of nervous hush converted to another. Some of the girls look relieved. Others, disappointed.

The girls open the boxes under their beds and pull out belongings while making conversation—a deck of colored wooden squares, a drawing, a small comb. The girl with the bed on the other side of the carding girl pulls out a wooden hook with a small bit of weaving on it. I don’t know how she could choose to weave after being forced to all day, but I say nothing.

• • • •

The sun sets. Alena lights a lantern that spills a golden glow over our faces.

Finally, there’s another knock at the door. Alena opens it, and girls tiptoe in like a line of deer. They go straight for their beds without looking up.

I catch a whiff as a girl passes—sweat, and something more acrid, but I could be imagining it.

I don’t think I’m imagining it.

A short time goes by—a quarter-hour at most. My stomach gurgles, for we haven’t eaten yet, but the girls all perch on the edge of their beds and whisper. I realize all their little bits and bobs have been put away.

Even in the dim light, I can see it. They’re afraid. None cry, although some have wet eyes. And there’s a cloying miasma in the room, one that makes my skin prickle and all the hair on my body stand on end. Something’s going to happen.

And then we hear it: a long, drawn out note, like the baying of a wolf, and that’s when a few of the girls start openly weeping.

• • • •

This next part, I’m not sure if I am telling right. I worry fear has re-written my memories. But I will try.

• • • •

Alena floats to the door and opens it. There’s nobody there, save the dark.

A piercing horn blast fills the air, and the girls all jump up at once. They fly out of the room, a great school of fish that swirls around and past me, streaming like bats into the dark.

I don’t move. I don’t know what’s happening—but Alena comes running. She points at the door and shouts things I can’t understand, but then she says, do, do, and her voice is so frantic, I catch her fear like a disease. I sprint out the door, not sure if I am running to or from something—but I hear the thunder of feet, and when my eyes adapt to the dark, I’m shocked by what I see.

There are hundreds of girls, running in all directions, fighting and snarling and pushing and shoving, their shadows shifting like a herd. A few climb into trees, as nimble as squirrels. One girl kicks another in the face, trying to keep her down. Most, though, just run.

Less than a minute passes while I watch the chaos—and then I realize I can’t see any of them anymore. The sound of their steps has faded.

The air fills with a low, keening howl, like the baying from earlier, but throatier and louder.

An enticing shiver climbs down my back. I was one of three word-workers in my village, the strongest for a hundred miles in any direction. During wolf-hunts, I often laid in wait for hours, spinning the spell of confusion under my breath. I’d loose it when the wolf appeared, and the animal would stumble to its belly as our hunters rushed in to slit its throat.

But I have no tongue anymore. No magic at my disposal.

My breath catches as I sprint away from the sound. My body stirs awake after a week of being confined, the terror pumping through my arteries somehow glorious. Dangerous or not, this is far better than endlessly spinning thread in a room made stuffy with the fear of thirty girls.

My legs eat up the distance. Clouds roll over the moon. I can barely see, but I sprint through the trees, trusting my heart to guide me in the dark.

• • • •

I don’t hide. This is my mistake.

One moment, I run with a vicious joy in my heart. In the next, the thing is upon me, so fast that by the time I catch the sound of its paws, it has reached out and thrown me to the ground.

I land on my belly and roll to face it. Fear fills me, so complete that my bladder voids and piss runs down my legs. I try to scream, but it’s as if there’s a nightmare sitting on my chest, crushing any sound. This, this creature—it’s not a wolf. It’s at least as big as a bear, and although it has a long muzzle and pointed ears, its eyes and paws are feline, and it has whiskers.

It approaches with that languid, yet focused way all cats have, its maw open and the end of its nose twitching. I lie still as it sniffs me—my feet, my legs, my stomach, my neck. Its breath is hot on my belly and smells like rot.

I remember my mother’s smile. My father’s soft voice. The way the light looks when the sunset catches on the woolly backs of our herd.

But the monster lifts its head and scents the air. It springs into motion and melts into the trees with a bay like the rumbling of an avalanche.

I let out a long, shaking breath. I think the creature spared me because I have no sash, but I’m not sure, so I climb to my hands and knees, to my feet. My leg is wet, and swiftly turning cold, but I don’t care. I run, even faster than I did before, because I now know what I’m running from.

• • • •

Too soon, I sense something looming before me—a sharpness to the black, as if the trees have pressed together so tight, they’ve cut off all hope of escape. There’s a flat plane that makes my vision dance in the dark, the shape too straight to be natural.

A wall. It’s three times taller than me, the sheer face slick and vaguely reflective in the moonlight, but I don’t care. I will claw my way to the top.

The moment my hands touch its surface, they burn as if they’re on fire. It hurts so much that despite my fear, I scream—but the sound is lost again, in the long blast of another horn.

I fall backwards, but the pain barely fades. My palms are covered in a sticky substance that smells like fat and burning twine. My eyes sting from the vapors.

Three blasts of a whistle echoes through the forest—heeeee, heeeee, heeeee. The trees around me burst into light, the globes of fruit all turning into small yellow suns, bright as day. I blink until I can make out the wooden wall. A dark-green pitch coats its lower half.

My hands look ruined: bloody, as if I’ve skinned them.

The air fills with the thumping of hooves. I sprint away, seeking some place to hide, my hands held out in front so I don’t accidentally touch myself with the poisoned pitch.

Before the wall leaves my sight, I am brought down by a heavy net.

• • • •

A man brings me back to the room. Alena rubs a salve on my hands that snuffs out the sting. There is no meal, but I don’t care. I couldn’t force myself to eat.

We all lie in our beds, me in my piss-soaked dress. Alena blows out the candle.

I fight sleep, but once the fear leaves my body, I’m dragged underneath its surface. In my dreams, the hunt continues, the creature baying behind.

Once, it seems like I hear someone scuffling in the box under my bed. I surface, but I don’t stay. Soon, they’re gone, leaving only the silence that swallows me.

In the morning, when I open the box for a clean dress, I find a white sash-belt inside.

3

I wake shortly before dawn, the sky barely graying, my hands burning. It feels like I’ll suffocate if I lie flat any longer. I quietly sit up.

In the chaos of being dragged back to the room, I didn’t notice that the bed on the other side of the corner from the carding girl’s is empty. Did someone slip out during the night? Or was it empty all along, my mind playing tricks on me?

But I remember the wan face of its former occupant.

I look out a window and imagine crushing my body through its small surface, extruding out like milk through an udder, and running for the wall. I should be screaming, we should all be screaming—but it’s like this body isn’t mine, like this place isn’t real.

I turn at a rustle behind me. The carding girl is awake. She reaches her fingers for the empty bed and strokes them through the air, as if searching for a warmth that has long faded.

I remember, then, that first night, the way her elbows twitched in the dark. I wonder what it was that she pushed under the mattress.

• • • •

I wash and change, but I can’t shake the long fingers of the night. Before we start our morning chores, the door swings open, and the man that brought the slip with the girls’ names steps in. He holds a box, a twin to the ones under our beds.

He gives an impassioned speech. There is something primal about the resolute set of his jaw, his commanding voice, something that tries to claw its way into my head. I can tell from the faces of the girls that his words have an effect—jawlines tightening, cheeks reddening. It makes me grateful that I don’t understand, but my reprieve is like a candle, already burning lower, the wax dripping onto my flesh.

After a few minutes, he opens the box and pulls out a thin scarf of undyed wool, crocheted so finely it looks like lace. There’s an odd ripple to the weave, one that makes me feel like I’m bouncing on the back of a fast horse when I look at it.

He takes out a match.

Once, a girl from our tribe fell asleep while sitting in front of the fire. She leaned forward, and her pigtail caught—crack-whoomph—before it disappeared, right down to her scalp. It’s that same sound I hear now.

When it’s over, nothing remains of the scarf but a sulfur-smell. He intones a final sentence that can only be a warning, and then he is gone.

• • • •

My hands are too burned to weave thread. I’m moved to carding. When the girl gives me the handles, I realize her palms are covered in a mat of scars.

• • • •

I could tell you now, of the moments that pass after that—day after day, week after week, grinding me away like an old tooth. The way the group slowly peels back its hard shell. The softening of Alena’s glances, except for the night of the second hunt, when I came in without my sash, and she caned me so hard I couldn’t sit for ten days. The next hunt, she fastened it to me with some kind of lock behind my back. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t tear the sash off.

I frantically learn vocabulary, adding each word to my repertoire like a weapon on a rack, as if sounds I can’t produce can still somehow protect me. I want and fear understanding of their speech in equal measure.

I learn that the cycle of our lives will always have five days. The first day is marked by the man’s short speech. The next days are all the same—work—until the fifth day, when we run for our lives.

I’m not caught by the creature, although there are many times it comes close. Times where I climb trees, or hide in bushes, or press myself to the earth in a shallow depression as its stench approaches. More than once, I am saved by a sneeze or the cracking of a branch—some other girl that has betrayed herself.

I should hate the creature, but I cannot. It is like the wolves that plagued our flock—an animal driven by natures it doesn’t control and can’t hope to change.

But the man I call the fifth-day man in my mind, even after I learn his name is Euolen? The more I know of their language, the more I hate him.

• • • •

I study Kalen, the carding girl, who reclaimed her position once my hands healed. It happened quickly, Alena’s ointment working some magic.

Kalen rarely looks at me. Ten hunts have passed since the morning she reached for the empty bed. I stay up at night, watching her elbows twitch, although I always fall asleep early the night before the hunt, some survival instinct dragging me to ground the way the creature did. On fourth-nights, I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to finish the meal.

Sometimes, the empty bed is in one of the other buildings. During our excursions to the kitchen, I’ve counted at least ten houses like ours, each probably full of girls. The fifth-day man always comes to give his speech, but he only burns an object when the girl is from our house.

By now, I know enough words to occasionally guess the topic of conversation—the weather, the weaving, the cooking—but the girls still treat me like furniture. I rub my fingers against a candle-wick and write a single word, charged with longing—hello—but it’s clear none understand. When Alena sees, she grabs it and berates me, a long combination of sounds that ends in not do, not do, not do.

After, that’s what they all call me. Not Do. I’m driven mad a thousand times a day when those sounds prick at my ears, unsure if they’re talking about me, or merely giving instructions.

When I was first captured, taken from my tribe and family—the loneliness ached, but fear kept my mind occupied. Now, during the four days I know we’re safe, there’s nothing to stop my heart from being ground like seeds under a pestle.

• • • •

I feed my loneliness by watching Kalen. I pretend she’s my friend, that I know her thoughts. I invent stories of how she came here. She’s a tribal princess, banished for being in the wrong inheriting clan. She’s a criminal charged with assassinating a village elder. She’s a sheep-spirit whose woolly pelt was stolen by these people, and she cannot leave until she reclaims it.

I learn that Kalen likes sweet foods. That she fidgets often with her sash, as if it refuses to sit right on her hips. That she avoids Wen. Wen always smiles, and her voice is always soft, but more than once, I see her light and cheery speech sends girls running away with tears in their eyes, which is how I know she’s a snake.

If Kalen notices me watching, she doesn’t confront me. This kindles boldness in my chest, until one day, I resolve to communicate with her. I draw my eyebrows together and mime a series of actions—striking a match, setting fire to something from the bottom, my fingers wiggling like spiders as they crawl up. Why, I mouth, taking care not to show her my missing tongue.

I tilt my head, as if lying on my side. I close my eyes and reach forward, the way I saw her do. When I open them again, she looks stricken, as if I’ve just slapped her. She presses her hands to her face before running away, her braid swinging.

I’m devastated, but I deserved this. Kalen didn’t consent to being my friend, to having me invent her entire history. I stand, steeping in my shame and the rapid knocking in my chest.

When I turn away, someone grabs my wrist from behind. My heart sings. I turn, sure that it’s Kalen—but then my hope deflates like a bad bread. It’s Wen.

I stiffen. I don’t know if I should flee or fight, but I can feel that Wen is dangerous.

She shakes her head and speaks in small, broken phrases, as if addressing a child. Not Do. You want knowing?

My skin crawls to get away, but it’s like a spell, hearing someone address me directly with anything other than do or not do. I feel like one of the wolves I used to hunt. I swallow and nod, and Wen lets me go.

Riotta. She bad.

I blink, and Wen repeats my gesture, spider-fingers climbing up a scarf. She points at the ceiling.

Always watching. Do bad, and creature happens.

She smiles, so sweetly I almost relax, but there is flint in her eyes, as sharp and bright as a new metal knife.

I nod. She goes back to her weaving, leaving me with the feeling that I have done Kalen some great, unknowable wrong.

4

Perhaps I was wrong about lacking an interpreter. I step through Wen’s words and arrive at an understanding of this place.

My parents’ tribes both believe that those who make mistakes should be given an opportunity to correct them. Someone who cannot be redeemed reflects a failure of the whole tribe. While we don’t uphold these teachings perfectly, this ideal endows us with responsibility and compassion and dispels fear, because a wrong can both be created and righted by our own hands. This is the way I was raised.

I study the girls as we cook, as we weave, as we flee from the creature, as we disappear. I hold Wen’s words up to my eyes like a navigator’s lenses, and I learn that these beliefs aren’t universal.

Samma drops a dish on the floor. She casts a fearful glance, not at us or Alena, but at the door. Her eyes slide skyward, as if she can see through the ceiling.

Menta and Deo converse in giggling whispers, until Wen walks too close. From then on, they are silent, although one glances furtively upward.

Kalen alone never looks up, and that makes me like her more. I watch her elbows twitch in the night and burn to know what she hides under the corner of her mattress—but it feels wrong to pry. We have no privacy and own nothing except the boxes, full of gray and white dresses and whatever small trinkets we put together.

• • • •

Half a year passes, the warm weather sliding into cool. By now, I’ve cobbled together an understanding of the underpinnings of this world. The girls all believe—or purport to believe—that the creature can smell sin. When a girl is taken—and we’ve lost ten already from this house, ten boxes opened and shown to us—the fifth-day man’s speech gives us the reason, evidence of sin in retrospective.

I don’t always understand the speech, but I don’t need to. Common threads connect all these crimes. We aren’t allowed to want or seek truth. We aren’t allowed to be angry, only afraid.

Samma is taken for gossiping about the fertility ceremony, about what happens to the girls that line up before the hunts. Deo for harboring rage against Wen in her heart.

I come to believe that it doesn’t matter what the fifth-day man finds in our boxes. There will always be some way for it to confess our sin.

• • • •

The days shorten as we enter winter. It’s colder than what I’m used to, and before long, I find an addition in my under-bed box—a thick wool cloak.

The snow is wondrous for the change it brings. I volunteer with a raised hand for each task that sends me outside, just to hear it crunch under my hobbled feet. By the end of the first day, my nose, hands, and feet are all burnt, and still, I revel in the way it renders the world still and peaceful.

That night, I hear Kalen’s new neighbor whispering about how much harder the hunt will be with the snow. Then, I hate it the same as the other girls.

• • • •

Two days before the hunt, I’m stirring a massive pot of porridge. I’ve taken care since my disastrous encounter with Kalen to stay away, even though I cannot keep her out of my thoughts.

She’s kneading some bread dough on the other side of the kitchen. She grabs the ball and turns—and trips on Wen’s outstretched ankle.

The dough sails through the air and lands on the floor. Wen says something I cannot hear, but Kalen stiffens. Tears glisten in her eyes as she sets the dough on the table, and then she turns and shuffles out the door, the hobble jingling furiously.

Wen’s smile climbs her cheeks like vines.

I beg Alena for permission with my gaze. To my surprise, she nods. I exit and bow to the helmeted guard as I pass, before searching the clearing for Kalen.

A small gray triangle of cloth peeks from behind a tree-trunk, before bobbing up and down. How fitting that Kalen’s elbow gives her away.

The snow crunches underfoot as I approach. I’m grateful that it’s saved me from having to call out, from her hearing my voice of only vowels—but I wouldn’t want to scare her.

I circle around the tree. She is bent double and silently sobbing into her hands, her body shaking. I wonder, not for the first time, if she was born into this life.

I lay a hand on her shoulder. After a moment, she straightens and brushes her eyes.

She turns, and something comes over her face—some boldness I cannot fathom. She leans forward and kisses me lightly on the mouth.

At first, there’s a noisy rush of thoughts, but they’re overwhelmed by the chalky scent of flour, the softness of her lips. I feel shot through with heat, like I can’t draw breath. When she pulls away, air whispers from my mouth like the sighing of the girls in their sleep, and my whole body fills with longing.

She stomps away. I’m too stunned to follow.

When I look up, she’s gone, and Wen is outside, talking to the guard. His helmet is off, and when I see his face my heart stops—the fifth-day man—but then I capture the differences. He’s younger, his jaw sharper, his hair cropped shorter. He must be a close relative—a nephew, a son.

He catches my gaze, and it reminds me of the creature that first night, the whiskered nose snuffling at my waist.

• • • •

Kalen avoids me for the rest of the day, dancing away when I approach. I feel like I’ve fallen through a thick crust of lake ice, only to find hot water underneath. It cools every moment she ignores me.

• • • •

That night, I stare at her back and will her to turn over. For her elbows to start their dance. She’s too still to be asleep.

Kalen. I mouth her name, the base of my lost tongue twitching. Something dark and made of longing thrums between us, something like the magic I once had. I almost cry with loneliness, for it and for her. Kalen.

She stiffens as if she can hear me, then shuffles around in the bed until she faces me. Despite the dark, her eyes are as round as the moon.

I reach for her. The gap between our beds is too large for my arm to bridge, but if she reached back, we could touch in the middle.

She doesn’t. After a few moments, I let my arm fall and turn away. When sleep calls for me, I embrace it, if only to avoid my broken heart.

5

On the morning of the fifth day, the hunt hangs over us like an impending storm; tall, dense clouds of dread that threaten to drive us mad with the crush of their weight. Each week, I’ve felt it bearing down, but today, it’s coupled with the rawness in my chest.

Worse, despite my fear, I’m drowsy, as if my longing has spent all night undoing the work of my sleep. I tell my heart that this silliness will get me killed, but it refuses to listen.

I spend the day in a fog. Perhaps the belief of these people in the punishing sentience of the world has some merit, because that night, Alena finds Not Do on the roster.

• • • •

You want these details. I know it—understand it, even. But I can’t bear telling you what happened in the space from when I left to when I returned.

If it matters to you, I recognized the man waiting for me. His face was burned into my memory after Kalen’s kiss—a face like the fifth-day man’s.

• • • •

The hunt starts. My body doesn’t run as fast as it can. It no longer fears the creature.

Within minutes, the girls are gone, and I’m alone with the trees and the snow.

At first, I’m aimless, but this changes. I’ve split my hunt-nights between hiding and investigating the wall that encircles the clearing. Tonight, I will throw myself at its poison, will clear it or die trying.

Before I’m halfway there, something grabs me around the waist and drags me to the ground. I have no time to scream before my face is driven into the muffling blanket of the snow.

“Be quiet, Not Do.”

I still under Kalen’s voice, so close to my ear. I would’ve guessed my heart couldn’t beat any faster, but it does.

She helps me to my feet. “We have to hurry.”

The weakest candle lights the dark; when Kalen takes me by the hand, my heart sings bright, despite the cold and the ever-louder baying of the creature.

She leads up a hill, down another, before pulling me behind a trunk. I blush as she lifts her skirt, but there is something thin and gray tied around her waist.

My mind fills, crack-whoomph, as I recognize it—a crocheted scarf, the fabric woven with a clever ripple. She removes it before holding me tight and wrapping it around our necks.

She murmurs warmly into my ear. “Be quiet, Not Do. It can’t see us as long as we’re wearing these, but it can hear us, and it will smell us if it comes close.”

We stand, the contours of our bodies pressing together. I can’t bring myself to breathe. There is much I want to tell her.

I kiss her lightly on the lips and turn away—but then her hands find my hair. She kisses me fiercely, and before I remember myself, my lips part.

Her tongue enters, soft with curiosity. I stiffen as she probes that empty space—but then she sighs, and I close my eyes and melt into her.

The horn sounds, startling me. She pulls away, and I realize the scarf is gone. I pat at my chest, my neck.

“A few minutes,” she says. “Then gone. Have to always make more.”

She walks away without looking back.

• • • •

Kalen and I have conversations, time-delayed messages that are more like letters. When her eyes find me across the room, I mime my questions. Later, in the dead of night, she mumbles the answers, secrets only I hear.

We are only close during the hunts. There, her scarf around our necks, I have the chance to ask her anything I want—but in those moments, I can think of nothing but the feel of her hands and her soft tongue.

• • • •

Three hunts pass before I dare to ask about the girl she reached for after my first hunt.

That night, she lies facing the wall and ignores me. It feels like thorns are being pushed into my heart.

• • • •

The night after that, I’m the one that turns away.

• • • •

On the third night, we lie facing each other. She holds up a hand before rolling over and pulling up the corner of her mattress.

The half-finished gray scarf hangs on the weaving hook like a flag of surrender. She rolls back over and puts it away, and my world is bright again.

6

The next hunt, I long to explore her with my hands, but she holds me too tightly, her head resting on my shoulder.

Her breath warms my ear. “I don’t think the creature killed her.”

I pull back enough to see her face. It’s easier for me to understand their language when I can watch mouths move and see expressions.

Who killed? I mouth.

She presses her lips together. “I mean . . . I think they saw. They saw put on scarf. Scarf not allowed. So creature killed her.”

I shake my head. I’ve already decided the deaths are random. If sinners were being struck down, we would’ve both died long ago.

Kalen pulls away. She cannot go far, not with the scarf around our necks, but the space between us feels unending.

I study her face. She looks sure—and she’s been here much longer than I have, so who am I to doubt?

I write a story in my mind. Over and over, Kalen makes the missing girl a scarf. Kalen never knows if it’s the scarf or luck that saves the girl from the creature. One day, the girl disappears. The next, the fifth-day man comes and burns the scarf.

If Kalen is right, they must mark us somehow. Mark us so the creature finds us.

My heart is so painful, I feel like its fibers are being pulled apart.

I’m dying, I think. We’re all dying.

Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.

I nod and reach for her. My hands travel her body, hungry to explore in ways I haven’t dared before. I’m desperate to consume her.

We must be silent, and yet, she cannot, not always, not when she is shuddering against me.

When the horns call, I can’t make my legs work, not until she kisses me on the forehead.

• • • •

The next fifth-day, Euolen looks at Kalen for a long moment before giving Alena the list. It’s a hungry look. I know she’ll be called.

We lock eyes as she leaves. I think again: I’m dying, we’re all dying, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.

I was so wrong, to ever call us girls.

• • • •

When she returns, her eyes find mine. There’s something dead to them, something raw and hollow. I wonder if that’s what the inside of my mouth looks like.

I shouldn’t stare, but I can’t look away. Not until I hear an odd sniff next to me.

I turn to Wen’s stare, as hard and black as obsidian. She spins away as fear slides down my back, cold and sticky like spiderwebs.

• • • •

That night, as the creature howls, I draw Kalen close. Our first kisses, Kalen explored my missing pieces delicately, with care. Now that she’s the one with something cut out of her, I will do the same.

• • • •

Something has changed. Alena and Wen watch us, so closely that I don’t dare to glance in Kalen’s direction. More than once, I look at Alena, only to see that Wen has already locked eyes with her, as if to say, see?

Days pass in which I cannot reach for Kalen, cannot sign to Kalen, cannot smile at Kalen. Days in which I hold my breath and wait for the hunt.

At night, Kalen faces the wall, strong and smart where I’m weak and desperate.

• • • •

Two nights before the hunt, the dark pulls me down, my body pleading for rest, but I’m afraid that Kalen will acknowledge me, that I’ll miss my only chance to see it. I reach for anything to keep me awake. I make fists and press my fingernails into my palms, small fires like sharp stones. I bite my lips. I mouth the silent spell that energizes an exhausted horse—and my mind clears, as if I’ve been blasted by cold wind.

Word-working spells only affect animals. They have turned me into an animal.

I mourn, bitter, but when I feel sleep coming, I mouth the spell, over and over.

The next day, I’m like a toddler sick with fever: running into walls, dropping things.

• • • •

The night before the fifth-day, we have stew for dinner, but I can’t eat. It feels like spiders crawl through my insides.

Alena presses me. When I shake my head, she grabs my jaw and forces spoonfuls down my throat.

It’s not until I’m sitting on the bed, my head swimming, my body swaying, that I realize how suspicious this is. Alena circulates around the room, making sure we’re all tucked in, and then she leaves.

I try to sit up, but my arms and legs refuse. My body feels impossibly heavy. I barely manage to mouth the spell before sleep rolls in—and then, I feel a slight reprieve. Over and over, I shape the words, slowly dragging myself aboard their raft.

When I’m sure I’ll stay awake, I look for Kalen. Her side rises and falls in a rhythm impossible to fake—and this, more than anything, is evidence we’ve been drugged. Kalen never falls asleep before I do.

Something is going to happen. I’m sure of it. I mouth the words until my lips hurt, and my alertness solidifies like fat exposed to cold.

The door creaks open. I close my eyes. Fatigue swarms at me like a cloud of flies, making me almost sick with its force, but I keep my lips still.

Soft steps pad across the room, unfettered by a hobble—Alena. She approaches, and my pulse drums like hooves. She knows, she knows, she knows.

She passes me. I watch through my eyelashes as she opens the box under Kalen’s bed—Kalen, who doesn’t stir, not even when Alena drops the lid with a thump. Nobody does.

I risk a glance at Alena. In her hand is a white sash.

I wait until she leaves, and then I creep out of bed, mouthing the spell like a ward against evil. I open Kalen’s box and pull out the sash. It looks the same, but when I bring it to my nose, there is something soft and bitter in its scent, and nothing of Kalen.

I quickly trade the sash with the one in Wen’s box. I take care to leave it exactly as Wen’s was, rolled into a neat bundle, nestled next to her weaving hook.

• • • •

During the hunt, cloaked by the magic of Kalen’s scarf, I try to mime what happened. It’s clear Kalen doesn’t understand. I sneer and mouth the word Wen.

“Wen?”

I nod and wait for the whistle, the horn.

• • • •

That night, when we return, Kalen’s eyes find mine. They are round with fear, with suspicion. Although this hurts me, I’m glad. Glad it’s Wen’s bed that lies empty and not Kalen’s.

7

After the fifth-day man pronounces Wen’s sins—envy and vanity—he produces the proof: a small pot of dye for reddening the lips, one that wasn’t in her box when I switched her scarf with Kalen’s. The oils in the makeup easily catch flame.

Alena watches us even more closely. She must suspect I had something to do with Wen. I can’t get close enough to Kalen to warn her. At night, Alena has taken to sleeping in our room.

Kalen avoids looking at me. I hope this is because of Alena. Other reasons reach up with bony fingers, as if from a dark pit. I occupy myself thinking of a way to save us, of some way over the wall.

The first and second days pass. It’s not until the second night I formulate a plan, one so ridiculous it fills me with terror, but we’re running out of time.

The next morning, I wait until Alena turns away. I go into Wen’s box—still unoccupied, for she hasn’t yet been replaced—and take the weaving hook I saw when I switched the scarves.

Later, I steal some yarn. That night, I keep my ears open for Alena’s approach. I work as fast as I can without moving my arms, although I cannot stop my elbows from twitching.

• • • •

The night before the hunt, I long to avoid the soup, but Alena watches me carefully. I don’t want her to spoon it down my throat again. As soon as I eat, she looks away, long enough for me to palm the fork of the girl next to me.

The drug is already taking effect by the time our leisure hours start. Usually, I spend it playing with cards, or drawing on my mattress with my finger—but tonight, I sit back at my spinning wheel. Kalen gives me a sharp glance, which makes my heart flutter. She’s been aware of me, even if I haven’t seen her watching.

I look at Alena. Her eyebrows go up, as if she’s waiting for an explanation.

I fidget and look at the door, which is a lie—although I’m nervous, this place has taught me nothing if not to be still. After having the weight of creatures upon me, it’s impossible for me to be afraid of Alena the same way.

Her forehead wrinkles and her jaw twitches, as if she’s biting down on something. She turns away. I’m glad for this. I hope she feels guilty, because my list of monsters grows ever longer. A relief to imagine Alena’s hand is forced.

I pump the treadle, weave thread, and wait. When I’m sure nobody is watching, I jam the fork into the machine, near the ends of the horseshoe-shaped flyer. The fork snaps.

Before Alena can come near, I pull the flyer and the bobbin off the maidens. She calls for me—Not Do, Not Do—but I pretend I don’t hear. By the time she’s at my side, I’ve taken half the machine apart.

I meet her gaze and shake my head quickly, mouthing, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Alena sighs and turns away. “Fix it tomorrow, Not Do. It’s time for bed.”

I take the flyer to bed with me, as if it’s a stuffed animal, and wait for her to put out the candle.

• • • •

The dose is subtler, but sleep will claim me soon. I slip the wooden flyer under my pillow and mouth my spell.

An hour goes by. Alena enters. I lay still as she switches the sash in her hand with the one in Kalen’s box, and then she takes a seat on the edge of my bed and waits.

I don’t dare move my mouth. Before long, I lose the spell and fall asleep.

• • • •

The next morning, I awaken with a headache, although if that’s from the drug or the sleep, I can’t tell. I try to get Kalen’s attention, but she refuses to meet my eyes.

Does she feel some guilt? Does she blame me?

Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.

Alena stays close and orders me to help her with the cooking.

I chop. I peel. I wonder why she doesn’t have us killed outright. In the end, I go back to my first explanation—that she, too, is a captive.

• • • •

When the hunt starts, I run out the room first, tearing away so quickly I leave Kalen behind. I can’t get stopped and questioned by Alena about why my dress doesn’t sit right. I look back just long enough to see Kalen’s stricken face—forgive me, forgive me, forgive me—and then the stampede of girls is behind me, so many bodies, there’s no way Alena can follow.

I pull to one side and wait. Kalen emerges dead last. I sprint for her, grab her hand, and drag her toward the trees, despite the many eyes upon us.

She pulls back as if to fight me, but I’m strong, and terrified, and when she finally throws my hand down, it’s only so she can match my pace.

We hide and don her scarf. My mind already ticks away the time. I rip her sash off and throw it on the ground. She responds eagerly, her fingers snaking into my hair, but I grab her hands and hold them flat to the sides of my head.

I try as hard as I can to tell her my thoughts. Follow me, Kalen. We have to do this.

She doesn’t understand. She reaches for her sash, but when I grab her hand and pull, she follows, leaving it behind. We sprint together, a single body, the scarf stretching between us like a harness.

When we come to the wall, Kalen stops and turns toward me. Her expression is furious, and she points to her palms before backing up.

I fall to my knees and beg her, mouthing please, please, please, but she shakes her head.

I pull up my dress and show her the rope I’ve built at night. The horseshoe-shaped flyer is fastened to one end. Perhaps not strong enough to hold our weight, and yet we’ll try, we have to try, but still, she shakes her head.

“Please,” I say. It comes out as mush.

She recoils, her lip curling in fear or disgust. It’s the first time that she’s ever heard my voice, and her reaction is a blow, but not enough to stop the clamoring of my heart. The sash’s scent could still be on her. And if the creature doesn’t kill her, Alena will.

I can’t explain the feeling that comes over me. It can’t be love: I don’t know where she’s from, and she doesn’t know my name. We’ve never had time to do more than explore each other’s bodies, no way to separate our passion from the boiling of our hurts.

But I think again—I’m dying, we’re all dying, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me—and it’s like I catch flame, crack-whoomph! If I’m going to die, I won’t die scared. I’ll die with a voice.

I open my mouth and breathe out the spell to calm a spooked animal. “Aaaaa-maaa-baaa.”

It can’t work. I know this now, know the spell keeping me awake at night was only my own fear, because we’re not animals. I’m not an animal.

But something changes in her expression. She takes my hand.

I run for the wall. I hurl the rope and flyer with all my might. It sails over, and I pull hard, jamming the flyer against the wall. I yank to test the rope, and it holds fast.

I give it to her first. She shakes her head, but I kiss her, fiercely, as if I could pour my resolve into her—and when I pull away, there are tears in her eyes, and her brows have knitted together.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

A bay echoes as she grabs the rope and starts to ascend. I don’t care that it has tracked us, that it draws ever closer. I wait, my heart soaring, as she crests over the top.

She pauses, then, for she has not thought of this part, but I have. When she takes the rope and descends, it’ll be on the wrong side, and I won’t be able to climb up.

I hear another bay and look back. In the distance, I see the creature, a black form massive against the snow, weaving between the trees.

• • • •

If this was a story, this is how it would end. I would sacrifice myself to the creature to buy Kalen time, and somehow, that would make everything worthwhile.

But this isn’t a story. She throws the end of the rope at me, followed by a slim gray banner—the scarf. “Hurry!”

I look back. The creature has crossed half the distance between us.

I wrap the scarf around my neck and grab the rope.

As soon as the leather of my soles touches the wall, the poison starts to eat them away. I smell it first, a scent like mint and meat cooking, but I ascend, hand over hand.

Below me, the creature has slowed. My arms scream as I climb. Halfway up, I pass the end of the poison. A moment later, the scarf unravels into nothing, its magic spent. By then, I’m out of reach of the creature. It sees me and howls in rage.

As if in reply, a horn sounds. When the whistle comes, the fruits on the trees will all glow, and I’ll be seen.

I crest the top, and the creature roars again. Kalen pushes me down and rips off my shoes. The poison has eaten through my left sole.

She drops the rope, and we climb down, together this time, because it doesn’t matter if the flyer breaks, if we go hurtling toward the ground and shatter every bone in our bodies, as long as we are free.

As soon as we both reach the earth, light blooms on the other side of the wall, like a sudden sunrise.

Kalen gives the rope a strong pull, twisting her fingers as she does. Like the scarf, it unravels into nothing. We run, barefoot through the snow, away from the wall.

• • • •

We find a road, but we avoid it. We focus on finding water, on building a small lean-to. Kalen doesn’t seem to understand surviving outside like this, but I have my training to guide me, and she learns quickly. I’m too afraid, still, to build a fire. At night, we curl into each other for warmth.

We travel four days, and on the fifth, we hear the faint call of a distant horn. I almost think I’m imagining it, except that I can tell from Kalen’s face she hears it, too.

• • • •

That night, we finally have a fire. I dig a deep pit to shield the light and fan it constantly to disperse the smoke. We roast two fish Kalen caught in a freezing river with her bare hands. Even burnt, they’re perfect.

When we’re done, I put out the fire. We lie next to the warm stones. She touches her forehead to mine, and I stroke her hair.

I still haven’t figured out how to tell her my name, to ask where she is from.

“I want to go back,” she says.

I freeze like a statue, horror growing in my breast. I’ve heard of this, of captives being so broken they refuse to leave, even when the gate is open—but I would’ve never believed it true of Kalen.

She turns toward me, her gaze hard. “I think there are oils in the poison in the wall, like the makeup. I think if we tried, we could burn it down.”

I imagine it catching fire like the scarf, crack-whoomph. My heart sings as I take her in my arms.

• • • •

It takes us four days to travel back. On the fifth, we wait for the horn, for the night the girls will be running without hobbles.

“Are you ready?” asks Kalen.

My heart beats, faster than a galloping horse. A dozen images flit in and out of my mind—Kalen’s elbows, Alena’s open mouth, the fifth-day man’s sneer, the soft light of camp diffusing into the tent where I once slept, my mother telling a story to a group outside.

I nod and strike a spark. Fire roars up the wall like a braid.

Kalen and I don’t stay to watch. We slip back into the night, two animals again made human.

©2023 by Maria Dong.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A prolific writer of short fiction, articles, essays, and poetry, Maria’s work is published or forthcoming in over a dozen publications, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Apex, Apparition, Augur, Fantasy, Fusion Fragment, Kaleidotrope, khōréō, Lightspeed, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, comes out from Grand Central Publishing on January 10th, 2023. Although she’s currently a computer programmer, in her previous lives, Maria’s held a variety of diverse careers, including property manager, English teacher, and occupational therapist. She lives with her partner and a potato-dog in southwest Michigan, in a centenarian saltbox house that is almost certainly haunted, watching K-dramas and drinking Bell’s beer. She is represented by Amy Bishop at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. She can also be reached via Twitter @mariadongwrites or on her website, MariaDong.com.

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

Between the Stones and the Stars

A.L. Goldfuss | 1291 words

His rival appraises him with a measured stare, but he is used to such scrutiny, insults half-whispered through gritted teeth. He stands his ground, here among the windswept ruins of broken pillars and half-buried busts, before the vine-choked temple in the thin mountain air. He stands his ground, and the woman studying him smirks.

He has not come all this way to be defeated by that.

His rival leans against a sunken marble building, curls spilling down her back and muscles rippling under her sleeves. She’s beautiful in the winter sun, brown and freckled, with reddish hair and the thick, fine furs of the northern kingdoms. A lauded hunter, perhaps. A treasured daughter. His own threadbare satchel and cracked hide armor betray his humble origins. He’s a delusional farm boy facing a true warrior, but he made it to the temple, same as she.

Said temple looms beyond them, matching the mythic poems only in its impressive size and bearing. Bones litter its steps from previous seekers and stack its halls from those who returned its treasure and stayed. Through its open doors, down a dark corridor of unknown length and size, the chalice sleeps.

The chalice they both seek.

The hunter fingers a hatchet, and he grips the hilt of his sword—ready for this final fight, one last obstacle before salvation. He can already feel the force of her steel clashing against his blade, and he shivers with anticipation in her shadow.

But something she sees stays her hand. Instead she cocks a hip and pats the pack on her shoulder.

“The day grows late,” she says. “And I’m tired of camping alone.”

He has tubers from foraging, but she, miraculously, has bacon. She unfurls bedrolls as he stokes the cooking fire, his glance flicking between her tall frame and the temple steps. It seems possible to outpace her with the element of surprise, but doubtful she would let him out alive. Under the cover of darkness, then. Time enough to plan.

A large branch cracks in the fire, and he jumps to his feet, brandishing his blade. The hunter takes in his earnest stance and falls onto her haunches laughing, painting the mountainside with her joy as he sheepishly sits down. Her voice is richer than the scarlet sunset and warms the brisk air with its notes. It draws his attention to her full lips and wide eyes, and for a moment he stops calculating the distance to the chalice’s keep.

Once they start talking, conversation is easy.

“Marsh ghoul. Harpy nest.” She points to the pale scars on her forearms and clavicle. “Rock troll outpost.”

“Freshwater siren.” He indicates a shortened finger and missing patch of hair. “Mine orc. And a concussion by the masked spider.”

“Whose face did it wear?”

From anyone else, the question would be rude.

“My father,” he says.

She kicks a coal back into the fire. “Mine, too.”

They talk into the purple twilight as the sky opens onto a field of stars. He whispers how the whirls of galaxies remind him of sailing the moonless sea for endless nights, and she responds with a harrowing tale of the howling caverns, inching closer to him in the firelight. The hunter is a fellow seeker and likely plotting various ways to kill him at dawn, but here, in this liminal space, they have a truce. For the first time, he speaks with someone who understands his path, who doesn’t recoil away.

For the chalice isn’t a quest for heroes. Heroes have dragons to slay and royals to rescue. Achievable goals for quotidian ends. The chalice is a longer, harsher road, for a prize that grants the seeker the one thing they desire most. It’s a quest for those no one expects to return, and those who do can no longer be ignored.

He leans forward to shift a log, and their knees touch. Even through the furred cape, she’s warm and solid and human. And she doesn’t move away. It’s been a surreal comfort to share his story with a stranger, but he can’t remember the last time someone willingly touched him. His sword is out of reach as he turns toward her, and heat licks his cheeks as she grins.

She traces the claw marks on his hide armor and a frisson runs down his spine. His world fills with the sensation of her: tumbling hair, sharp cheekbones, scent of sweat and spice, the tickle of her furred boots against his hand. For the past several years he has thought only of the chalice: things he would wish for, things he would change. But as she traces the wounds he suffered alone, his thoughts sputter like a flame in the wind.

Surely by now she has noticed the slope of his shoulders, the smoothness of his chin. Surely she noticed it hours ago.

She hooks a finger under the sinew of his breastplate, and he kisses her, framing her face with both hands like a portrait. He wants to kiss her like this, at the edge of the world; so if he dies tomorrow, he will at least have that. Her hands work deftly, shedding his armor and unbuttoning his shirt to reveal the binding around his chest, what she clearly expected to find.

Her hot fingers graze the binding a mere moment before sliding down his hard stomach and grasping at his belt.

He has never kissed a woman before, has never even seen a woman like her. She sucks his neck greedily, bruises his jaw with her thighs, and drags cries out of him that ricochet off the ancient stones and shatter the stars. Then she holds him in her arms against the cold mountain night, so he is warmed by the fire on one side and her on the other.

“What is your name?” she whispers, honey in his ear.

“Tem,” he replies. He’s had time to think on this during the lonely days and practice on the badgers and the birds. It’s a name fit for a chalice-bearer, one even the queen will have to use when he returns triumphant. But he has never uttered it to a person before, not even to the villagers who took pity on him or the bog witch who could read his dreams. Only here, cradled to her side, does he introduce himself at last.

“Tem,” she breathes, and his life locks into place.

“What is your name?” he asks. “Why do you seek the chalice?” But she only smiles into his brow and guides his hand between her legs.

Afterward, she offers him a canteen, and it puffs an acrid snap of herbs from its mouth. But he takes it and stares into her eyes as he drinks, absolving her with each swallow. Being killed by her after being known by her is a better end than returning home, alive yet apart. And he is tired, from so many different trials.

She strokes his hair as his eyelids fall. He sighs into her and dreams of her conversing with his mother, their newlywed cottage by a waterfall, and him breaking in horses for her strong, sturdy legs. His warrior-wife with the full-throated laugh.

The piercing summit sun greets him as he wakes—alone—underneath her fur-trimmed cloak. The silent stone pilgrims tell no secrets, but he knows the temple is empty and the chalice gone. His quest is at an end.

Down the opposite side of the mountain is a trail she could have easily hidden, marked by bent meadow grass and muddy boot prints. He wraps himself in her cloak, its heavy length hitting his ankles, and goes seeking treasure once more.

©2023 by A.L. Goldfuss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A.L. Goldfuss is a queer non-binary speculative fiction writer. Xe lives in the Pacific Northwest with xir twin collections of tea and carnivorous plants and looks forward to riding trains again someday. In the meantime, you can find xem at algoldfuss.com.

In the Deep Woods; The Light Is Different There

Seanan McGuire | 5046 words

A child will tell you, if asked, and if they are in the mindset to answer questions as they are posed and not as the child’s mind would have them interpreted—for the ears of children seem to work differently than the ears of adults, to be tuned to a different set of sighs and susurrations, not to the clean consonants and simple constructions of the adult vocabulary, and the answers of children are often similarly distorted by the journey they must take in being spoken—that sunlight is the same everywhere it falls. There is only one sun, as so many songs have eagerly told them since the day of their birth; there is only one sun, and its light falls everywhere at the same speed, landing on the just and the unjust alike. Thus it stands to reason that the sun which falls on a quiet suburban street, or a lakeside cabin, must by its very nature be the same as the sun which falls on the trees of the deep and tangled wood beyond the lake.

Those children will already know, of course, that they are wrong, for if they are old enough to venture outside without supervision, even if they have never been farther from their beds than the safe enclosures of their backyards, that they are lying, which is a practice that even the most profoundly honest of children must frequently engage in: for adults have little interest in hearing truth from children, when lies are so much sweeter. The worlds of children are low to the ground, terrifying and confusing, filled with dangers adult minds have forgotten, truths adult hurts have forsaken. So at times, when the worlds of adults collide with others, they must be untrue to be believed. The truth is a rock too big to swallow, especially in adulthood, when years of caustic words and swallowing back inappropriate retorts has left their throats scarred and narrow.

The sunlight is not the same everywhere it falls, as anyone who has been to a desert or a wide urban parking lot, and also to the peak of a mountain or the crest of a hill, can tell you. The sun may be the same, but once the light has left the sun, it is transformed by travel and by time into something new, something as sweet and profound as a secret, sometimes kind and sometimes cruel, but always remaining sunlight. Desert sunlight is unforgiving—not bad, not malicious, but unforgiving, ready to punish any small mistake. Coastal sunlight is diffuse and muddled, unable to warm the frozen, unable to save the lost. And in the very deepest woods, where the trees stand sentinel over ground that has never been free of roots and rot, where the branches block the sky and the birds rule the universe, the sunlight falls like treacle, or like honey from a hive; it is not sweet, but it is slow, ponderous, and intentional. It cannot be called welcoming, cannot be called warm; when it strikes a human face, it offers no succor, extends no hand of welcome. The sun which falls in the deep of the woods does not want us there. It knows who it serves, and that master is not the quick, swift humanity of city and shore, is not the place where civilization meets curiosity, and drives the domesticated descendants of our feral ancestors to seek the woods and waters wild.

It does not want us there.

There are places, liminal places, where the walls grow thin, where the deep heart of the woods can abut upon what has been tamed and tapered down, claimed and collected; places neither civilized nor free, where the sun can shift in an instant, to correspond with the passing of a cloud or the lighting of a match. In these places grow the strange ones, humans who can breathe in both the sweet treacle sunlight of the modern world and the deep, rich, cruel sunlight of the ancient one. They are children of a stranger sun, but they are human still, and their desires matter no less than the desires of their citified cousins. Their needs are no less important or essential.

It is only when those needs collide with the needs of the softer world that trouble can be found.

They walk the deep woods, the places where the light hangs heavy in the trees and the dark hangs heavier still; and what they want and what they dream of is the business of the deep woods and the deep woods alone, and the question they are never asked, and would never answer if they were, is a simple one: if the sunlight is so transformed by its fall into the deep, dark woods, what do they do to the moonlight? What does the night become?

What transformations can such light wreak in its own right, in its own time?

They smile and they know their place and they walk in shadows made of light, and they are perfect and they are profane, and they would not forgive us if they could.

• • • •

The lake house hadn’t been used in some time; that much was clear as soon as the door was opened, sending a puff of stale air and dust billowing out onto the porch. Millie recoiled, unable to quite believe that the place had been allowed to regress into such a state of disrepair. What was the point of the caretakers her grandfather had arranged, the ones whose fee was dutifully deducted from her trust fund three times a year, when the seasons changed and they were meant to air the place out, keeping it ready for human habitation. She fought back the desire to pull out the letter she had already read easily a dozen times, the one that promised this place would be prepared for her arrival.

Well, if this was prepared, she wasn’t sure she could understand what had driven her grandparents to spend every summer by this lake, right up until the year they disappeared. Her father always spoke of the lake house as a bucolic paradise, a necessary respite from the speed and stress of city life. Without it, he’d told her once, he would have gone quite mad in the aftermath of his divorce from her mother, when she had seemed to permeate every square inch of the city, turning a wide, clean world into a small and filthy enclosure. Only by getting as far from her concrete cage as he possibly could had he been free of her.

Millie hadn’t been able to follow. She’d been too young, and the custody agreement between her parents forbade either one of them to take her out of the state without written permission. She’d hated it as a child, hated being left behind, hated knowing that her mother was forbidding her the lake house out of spite, and that in so doing, had driven her father to forbid her summers at Walt Disney World, winters in Paris, any number of other little luxuries that she, as the child of two well-off New Yorkers, had every reason to feel were her due. Somehow he had always managed to make the lake house seem equal to those grand adventures, to make the punishment fit the crime, even though the crime had never been hers, and the punishment always, inevitably, had.

And now here she is, finally, and her father is gone to the worms and the rot, and her mother is gone to the fire and the wind, one buried, the other cremated, and she stands alone. Her divorce has been finalized, her name sundered from Marcus’s forever. She has no family left in the world, and nothing but their combined bank accounts to comfort her through the long, lonely nights. Well, those, and the lake house, which is finally hers to have for her own.

As long as she doesn’t mind sharing it with the moths and spiders, it seems.

The gust of foul air has subsided. Picking up her suitcase one-handed, aware that she is, for all intents and purposes, trapped here— the phone line was disconnected years ago for lack of payment, and while she’s working to have it reestablished, things here in the country happen at a fraction of the speed the city considers “slow.” She’ll be lucky if she has a dial tone by August. And apart from that, the driver who brought her here has returned home by now, leaving her alone in what might as well be another century, to say nothing of another country. No. Her mother made the city a cage to keep her, and she has willingly traded it for the cage of her father’s design, which may be of a different shape and size, but which has just as many bars on the windows, and just as many walls.

But it doesn’t contain any angry ex-husbands who like to settle their arguments with their fists, and it doesn’t contain any easy means of tracking her down, and with those thoughts reigning over all others, she squares her shoulders and steps through the open door, into a room full of ghosts.

For a moment, in the hazy sunlight that filters through the windows, filled with dancing motes of dust that seem almost too large to be real, she is absolutely standing in a haunted house. A scream bubbles up in her throat, momentarily trapped behind the cemetery gates of her lips, and she knows that when it breaks loose it will be large enough to shake down the walls. The specks of light catch and hold her gaze, yanking it away from the specters surrounding her. She used to see fairies like this in her childhood, in the days when she bedeviled nannies and lived in what her mother termed “a form-fitting fairyland,” a place filled with only peace and magic and no divorce, no warring parents, no miseries at all.

Then she blinks, and the fairies are dust motes again, and the dust motes are fading into the background, and the ghosts are furnishings covered in dusty white sheets, as old and unused as the rest of this place. The money she’s been paying for upkeep has been going to line the pockets of her so-called caretakers if it’s been doing anything, obviously enough, because they haven’t raised so much as a finger to prepare the place for her arrival. She told them she was coming, she knows she did. She sent three letters and called twice, and she distinctly remembers receiving at least one reply.

Or she thinks she did. It could be hard to tell, on the long and empty afternoons in her apartment in the city, what was fact and what was supposition. She supposes the afternoons will be just as long here, and just as lonely, with her driver already gone; these walls will be her new cage, one she finds far more pleasant than the dangers of the city.

Her mother warned her, before she died, told her Marcus seemed like the sort of man who might turn cruel if she stopped giving him what he wanted, but since what he wanted was a young, beautiful, independently wealthy wife with which to dazzle his competitors, she had chalked her mother’s warnings up to the ramblings of a bitter old woman whose own marriage had collapsed and left her with nothing better to do than torture her only child, since her actual friends had long since died, rendering them unavailable for her lectures.

She hadn’t known then—couldn’t have known—that one day Marcus’s demands would shift to sons and heirs, children born of his seed and her body’s labors, to carry on his family name, made great and glorious by her coffers and his business acumen. And she couldn’t have known that her body would be opposed to this idea, would refuse to give him any heirs to call his own, but least of all the son he so eagerly demanded. She couldn’t have known that after five years of failures, he would turn to making his wishes known with his fists, and with the backs of his hands, and on one dark occasion with his boots, leading to kidney damage, a weekend in the hospital, and finally, at long last, the divorce papers her lawyer had been urging her to file for over a year.

Thankfully, their prenuptial agreement had been drawn up by lawyers far more expensive than he could afford on his own, and she’d been able to walk away with most of her fortune intact, shielded from his grasping hands by restraining orders and legal paperwork. She’d escaped with her money and her reputation, and all it had cost was the city she loved so much.

Well, nothing to be done for it now. This is to be her home, at least for the next six months, and maybe longer than that, depending on the lawyers and the progress of their suits. She turns and grasps the nearest white winding sheet, whipping it away from the antique fainting couch it covers like a dinner theater magician revealing the table during his eight o’clock show. It’s a swift, flashy gesture, wasted on the empty room, and she has a moment to feel like she’s accomplished something before the cloud of dust that it releases invades her mouth and nose and sends her choking back onto the porch, looking through the open door at the cloudy, sun-streaked room.

“Ms. Ellis?”

Millie turns.

The voice belongs to one of the local youths, a broad, friendly-faced teen of no obvious gender, dressed in overalls and a ruffled plaid shirt. Their hair is short-cropped and very red, with two separate cowlicks at the front. As a child, she would immediately have made them out to be devil’s horns, and spun a whole backstory to explain why an imp was walking among the mortal men of this small lakeside town, no doubt granting ill-advised wishes and tempting children into mischief.

“Yes?” she asks, and takes a step down from the porch, onto the second stair, which is rickety and filled with splinters. “Are you the caretaker?”

“No, ma’am, that’s my dad,” says the teen. “I just go fishing down off your dock sometimes, or I did, anyway, when you weren’t here to need the fish . . . ” They duck their head and look at Millie through their lashes, clearly waiting for permission to continue their fish-filching ways.

If they were a mischievous imp, what would the correct answer be? Permission to keep stealing fish could be taken as permission to steal whatever they liked, but refusing permission when they weren’t hurting anything or taking anything she needed for herself would just be an act of selfishness, and imps, like most fey creatures, didn’t care for mortal selfishness. Millie finds her answer and her smile at the same time.

“If you’ll teach me how to fish in these waters, you can fish here anytime you’d like,” she says.

Her smile is returned, amplified into something bright enough for dust to dance in. “That’s awfully kind, Ms. Ellis. Most city folk aren’t so accommodating.”

“This was my father’s place before he died,” she says. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here before now. I was . . . ” Married? Busy? Trapped by the expectations of a mother who had done her best to create the impression that anything outside the city was filthy and provincial and not worth pursuing? “ . . . otherwise occupied,” she finishes awkwardly, and the words are dust and ashes in her mouth. She wants to spit them out, to see them dancing in the sunbeams with the rest of the filth.

The teen doesn’t appear to judge her for it, only shrugs and says, “You’re here now, start of the summer and everything. We’ll be glad to have you for a neighbor, and you’ll have plenty of time to learn the way of things before the season changes and you go back to the city.”

Millie blinks. Maybe her instructions weren’t clear, when she asked them to prepare the property. “I’m sorry,” she says. “There seems to have been some confusion. I’m not intending to—”

But the teen has turned toward the lake, chin up and nostrils flaring, like a hunting dog that’s caught the scent of a rabbit. “I’m sorry,” they say, glancing back to her. “Papa needs me. I’ll see you tomorrow, I’m sure, since I’ll be helping to bring your groceries in. Sleep well, Ms. Ellis!”

And they’re off, loping toward the lakeshore with a curious rollicking gait, reminding her even more intensely of a hunting hound, now returning to its master’s side. When they don’t so much as look back, she sighs, and turns to the lake house full of dust and sheeted furniture and ghosts and ghosts and ghosts.

So many ghosts, and some of them have names and some of them have faces and some of them only have whispers from her father on dark winter nights, stories with nothing to support them. She moved here for a haunting, and, even if the house refuses to be haunted, she fully intends to be.

Millicent Ellis climbs the porch steps to the door and willfully, intentionally, shuts herself inside.

• • • •

Cleaning up enough to make the bedroom habitable takes the rest of the daylight hours, culminating in the unwelcome discovery that in addition to everything else that hasn’t happened, the power has yet to be restored. If her keys hadn’t fit the lock, she’d be wondering whether she was in the wrong house—the money for the caretakers must have been going somewhere, and she knows she was very clear about her intentions when she wrote to them. None of this is what she was promised.

But her bedroom has a perfect view of the lake, and the water is beautiful in the moonlight, flat and bright and clean as hammered silver. She could look at it for hours. With no power to read by and no television to watch, she might have to. Laughing a little, she turns back to the small room she’s chosen as her own.

The lake house is large enough to host a much larger family than just her—or even just her and her husband, if he was still a welcome part of her world—and despite her grumbling about the lack of housekeeping, the caretakers have clearly been maintaining the structure; the walls are straight, the eaves are sound, and the windows admit no drafts. She wraps herself tight in a roll of blankets that still smell faintly of her grandmother’s perfume, and she slides into slumber as smoothly as a seal sliding into the sea, going under without a splash.

She doesn’t consciously hear the sound that wakes her some hours later, only opens her eyes on the dark room with the moonlight sleeting through the window. The house is silent around her, and she begins to close her eyes again, to return to sleep, only to freeze as she hears the soft scuff of a boot sole against bare wood. Someone is in the lake house. Someone other than herself, alone. No one here is alone. Not the house, not the intruder, not Millie. They are together, the three of them united by coincidence of place. Not so coincidental: Millie came here entirely on purpose, and this place has sat empty and undisturbed for so long that anyone who walks here now must have come seeking something that hadn’t been present the day before.

They must have come looking for her.

She finishes putting the pieces together and slides silently out of bed, bare feet meeting bare wood, to creep toward the antique wooden wardrobe against the far wall. It’s still full of her departed grandmother’s summer wardrobe, vintage dresses and coats sliding down the steep hill toward antique as they sat, untouched, for year upon year. She inches the door open as she hears the footsteps near, moving down the hall toward the room where she was sleeping.

Into the wardrobe she slips, wrapping herself in the silks and linens of the past, and holds her breath, as much from fear as from the dust. The footsteps grow closer and closer still, until she’s sure their owner is in the room, bathed in the thick silver moonlight through the window.

A branch snaps. Something—a dog, most likely, or perhaps a coyote—howls in the woods outside the window. The footsteps draw closer and closer still, and she tenses, wishing she had anything that could serve her as a weapon. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s nothing here in this tattered world of someone else’s discarded fashions. She can’t defend herself with a sundress, no matter how daring it may have seemed when it was first worn.

The dog or coyote howls again, closer this time. The footsteps stop, and she hears three things in quick succession.

Hears the window sliding closed, locking the sounds of the night outside, away from her, leaving her trapped in a space that manages to feel even smaller than the wardrobe. Hears the footsteps resume, coming closer and closer, the tread now even and familiar. She knows the man who’s coming toward her, and of course she does; of course there was never any real question of who would have followed her here, past the ends of what city people see as the entire world, into this lakeside dream where the sunlight falls like honey and attracts almost as many flies.

And finally, she hears the clacking of claws against the hardwood floor, also coming closer, moving more than twice as quickly as the footsteps. There’s an animal in the house with them. Is it running? She suspects it might be.

The man who has followed her here from the city, the man who has broken into her house, the man who used to be her husband before he sacrificed that title on the altar of his fists, stops walking. She hears the scuff of his heel as he turns.

Then she hears him yell. It’s not a word—it’s a wordless sound of shock and horror. What follows is far more horrible, the wet, visceral sound of tearing meat and breaking bone, occasionally accompanied by the clatter of claws on wood. He screams and screams and screams, but whatever fell beast is tearing him to pieces does so without making a sound beyond those that gravity demands. Eventually, the screaming stops. Millie, who is backed into the corner of the wardrobe, shoulders to the wood and hands clasped over her mouth, is weeping by this point, fat tears forming in the corners of her eyes and breaking free to run down her cheeks and pool at the hollow of her throat. If she makes a sound, she knows, the beast will come for her. If she doesn’t make a sound, the beast will surely come for her, because beasts can smell their prey at much greater distances than the one between the wardrobe and the room.

The clatter of claws continues, now accompanied by what sounds for all the world like the rasp of a tongue against the wood, and still the beast makes no sound, and still Millie holds her screams inside and cries.

Outside, beyond the closed window, the moon shines on.

• • • •

Morning finds her stiff and aching from a night spent propped up in the wardrobe. Sometime in the smallest hours of the morning, she slipped into restless sleep, her hands dropping away from her mouth, her tears drying salt-sticky on her cheeks and down the front of her nightgown. She comes out of her curl as silently as she can, but can’t suppress a whimper as the motion pulls at her back. She’s not an old woman yet, but she’s not a young woman anymore, and the events of last night have her wondering whether “old” is even in her future.

Carefully, she eases the wardrobe door open to reveal the room where she went to bed the night before. Everything is precisely as she left it, except for two small things she wouldn’t notice under any other circumstances: the window is closed and latched, secured against the outside world, and there is a shoe, one single shoe, under the very edge of the bed. She stumbles forward, too sore to bend, and fishes it out with her own foot. It’s far too large for her, sized for a grown man’s foot, and far too new to have belonged to her father, or to her grandfather, or to anyone else with good reason to be in this house anytime within the last ten years.

Unlike most of the house, there is no dust on the shoe. What would her careless caretakers have been doing, dusting under the bed and leaving random pieces of footwear behind? It’s not like what little she’s come to know of them. Which means, logically, that the shoe came from exactly where she supposes the shoe came from. It is a memoir of a man who came, uninvited, into the lakeshore moonlight, and meant to do her harm. A man she loved once, who proved himself a monster in his own cruel way when given the opportunity. She weighs the shoe in her hand and finds it inevitably wanting. As bodies go, it isn’t much to bury.

In the end, she dresses in the previous day’s clothes, jerkily, trying to compensate for the soreness of the night before, trying not to fall when she lifts her feet off the floor to step into her trousers. In the end, she sits on the bed as she eases them over her hips, and regrets even that small movement. She remembers being spry and flexible and quick to recover from such small offenses of the flesh as sleeping upright in a wardrobe.

When she’s done and dressed she heads for the door, cradling her ex-husband’s shoe in her arms like the baby they were never able to have. She’s not sure what she intends to do with it. Throwing it into the lake feels disrespectful, to the lake. Surely the house comes with garbage service, one more question she should probably have asked before coming here, one more mystery to unravel. Most of life’s mysteries are boring ones, she’s found, barely worthy of the name. Maybe there was another word for those little, boring enigmas once, but it’s been lost. The English language undergoes constant simplification, words escaping and running home to their root languages with dire tales of their time held captive by the American tongue.

She opens the door and steps out into sunlight that hits like maple syrup drizzled on a plate, heavy and somehow sticky, clinging to everything it touches. The light is different here. She’s not sure how; give her time and she’ll decode it. She’s sure of that, if nothing else. Just give her time.

The teen from yesterday is waiting outside, accompanied by two older people dressed in similar clothes that she takes for their parents. One of them has a bristly mustache, and that’s the one who steps forward and says, “I’m sorry the place wasn’t perfectly ready for you when you arrived. We must have read your letter wrong. We were expecting you tomorrow. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, absolutely.” The lie is as natural as breathing, born from the same deep, awful place as the many other lies over the years, the ones about walking into doors or being so clumsy, really, she shouldn’t be trusted out on her own. She stops, and grimaces, and says, “Not really. Something spooked me in the middle of the night, and I slept in the wardrobe in the bedroom where I’d gone to bed. My back really hurts.”

Telling the truth feels like lancing a wound. The teen exchanges a look with their parents, complicated and silent, and Millie doesn’t resent that silent communication as much as she should. The sunlight is still falling on her arms, still burning the curdled sickness of her marriage out of her, all those years of silence and lies slipping away like mist in the morning. She cradles the shoe to her chest, faintly embarrassed by its presence, wishing she had left it inside until she knew the day would hold no further guests or surprises.

“Julie here is ready to finish cleaning the place,” says the one with the mustache, presumably the Papa the teen had gone looking for the day before. “If you’d like to come walking with me and Eunice, we can help you find a place to dispose of that nasty old shoe.”

“I know the best places for throwing things away,” says the teen— says Eunice, and smiles. For a rural teen in the middle of nowhere, she has remarkable dentistry, as clean and white as the moon that hung over the lake the night before.

“This old thing?” Millie lifts the shoe, looks at it like she’s never seen it before, like it’s something foul and unspeakable. “Yes, that would be best.”

“And when we get back, I’ll make sure the generators are up and running,” says Papa. “You’ll need it if you’re planning to stay past the end of the summer.”

Millie, who has never felt quite this safe or quite this at peace in her life, tilts her face back and breathes in the thick, honeyed sunlight.

“I think I may be staying forever,” she says, and the three locals smile, and all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again, and all of this is precisely as it’s meant to be. They are standing in the open, so near to the deep woods, and the sunlight falling there has been waiting patiently, and after years and miles spent so far away that the deep woods were only a dream, she is finally home.

The light is different here.

©2021 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in When Things Get Dark, edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares her home with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

The Ministry of Saturn

Benjamin Peek | 6005 words

1.

The town was not called Byzantium. The Ministry named it during the first meeting. “It’s not a colony,” Thomas James would have said if he could, but the office was hot and bright, the sun in the windows, in his eyes. He felt like he was surrounded by faceless figures even though there were only two other people in the room.

The town they were talking about was located between worlds. The entrance was in the remains of Ooldea, out on the edge of The Nullarbor Plain. The rip between worlds, the entrance to something that shouldn’t exist, was marked by a blue painted door. The door was strangely new. It’d been installed inside the remains of an old shack that had been built in 1914. The people who’d lived in Ooldea had been forced out by the government, before being allowed to return, until The Tea and Sugar train stopped running at the end of the century. When you walked through Ooldea now it was empty and the sky above smooth and flat. It looked like it’d been scraped clean with a knife.

James was the only one from The Ministry who went inside the building with the blue door. He didn’t want to, but he wasn’t given a choice. He wore light body armour beneath a white hazard suit and he carried an oxygen tank on his back. He had a mask to wear, a full faced, frightening thing linked both to his suit and his tank, but that he’d not yet fixed into place.

Despite this, James was easy to forget. When you first saw him, your gaze swept over him as if he were a stranger passing you on a street, one who was neither attractive enough or ugly enough to catch your attention. If you were asked, if someone found you later and asked, that is, you would say that James was white and that his hair was brown. At least, you would say that at first. A few hours later you might say that his hair was black. Or that his skin was olive. Or, perhaps even brown.

Inside the shack, James went through his equipment one more time, then fixed his mask in place. He’d been through thirteen rips and if he could, he would never go into another. The first thing he felt upon entering, the first sensation that ran through his body, was of being torn apart and sewn back together. It was an awful feeling. But, like all explorers of the unknown, he worried more about his equipment than himself. The last door he’d opened had led to a flat land full of poisonous air. He’d been sick for weeks when he returned and thought himself lucky to survive it. If his equipment had failed, or had been destroyed . . .

He stepped through the door before he talked himself out of it. There was no point in resisting. He would be forced through the rip one way or another. This time, however, he felt nothing. It was such a different experience from any he’d had before that he thought he was still in the empty house, that he had passed through the doorway and was standing in the wrecked kitchen that overlooked half a dozen buildings in Ooldea.

He was standing in a narrow lane.

Around him, a series of square buildings rose up, the windows lit at uneven intervals. Beyond the buildings, there was a dark sky, free from stars and moons.

James left the alley. He’d not gone far down the road before he came upon a woman. She was middleaged and black and wore a dress of yellow and red. She did not wear a mask, or protective gear of any kind. She stopped when James raised his hand in greeting. If she was frightened by his general appearance, she gave no sign of it.

James worried that she couldn’t understand him. He spoke eight languages fluently, could greet people in thirteen, but the woman didn’t respond to anything he said no matter how he said it. He tried everything but it wasn’t until he said a name that she responded. When he said the name she smiled politely and pointed up the road.

The buildings became more elaborate and ornate the further he went. In a small square, he found a crowd of people outside three restaurants and a bar. They were a mixture of race and age. He was sure that they came from his world. He tried to greet them in the languages he knew but like the woman before they said nothing until he repeated the name. Like the woman, the people in the square responded by directing him farther along the road.

The road took him to the edge of the town. There a vast, dark ocean ran out to the horizon. Close to the edge were a series of old docks and houseboats.

James searched four boats but it wasn’t until the fifth that he found someone. On the fifth, a single, solitary man sat on the back deck reading a book of poetry. He was of mixed heritage, part Indigenous, part white European, a man somewhere in his late fifties, or early sixties. He had a beard of silver and gray. His hair, likewise coloured, was thick and verging on being unruly. He wore an old pair of black jeans and a faded eighties arcade t-shirt.

“Excuse me,” James said in English. “But are you Mr. Matthew Layne?”

He did not look up from his book. “And who would you be?”

“My name is Thomas James. I’ve been sent here by The Ministry of Saturn.”

“You don’t need the mask.” He closed his book. “Or the tank. The air here is fine to breathe.”

James hesitated before he took the mask off.

“You’re not human,” Layne said, “but you come from humans, don’t you?”

“I am a homunculus. I was made according to the ancient ritual that was first described by Paracelsus.”

“Were you born in the womb of a horse, or in a jar of rotting flesh?”

No one had asked James that before. “In a jar, of sorts,” he said, caught off guard. “It was much larger than the one Paracelsus described in his work. The parts that were used to make me were chosen more selectively and sewn together before the process began.”

“Paracelsus was a genius part of the time and mad the rest.” Layne pushed himself up. “What does The Ministry want with me, Mr. James?”

“I work with Dr. Munn. He has been sent by The Ministry of Saturn to meet you personally.”

“Yes, but what about?”

“The town you live in.”

“My home, you mean. Does he want to take it from me? Or is he the explorer who comes first to find the land that is already known?”

“I am afraid I am only a messenger.”

“A loyal one?”

James said nothing.

Layne smiled. “What have you been told to do if I refuse your invitation?”

“I’ve been told to leave you in peace. But Mr. Layne, you must understand that if The Ministry has found you, others will soon enough. Others on our world. Others on other worlds. You’re being offered a chance to get ahead of those threats. Your reputation suggests that you’re a passable magician, but you’ll need friends once the doors to other worlds open.”

“A passable magician?”

“I meant no offence.”

“I didn’t take any. These days, I don’t consider myself a magician at all. I’m a poet.”

“I’m afraid I am not a student of the arts.”

“Few people are. Tell me, Mr. James, do you trust the Ministry of Saturn?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“Did it hurt to say that?”

James began to protest, to pretend ignorance, but the words died in his throat. Layne was watching him carefully, more carefully than he’d been aware. For the first time since James had opened the blue door he felt a sliver of fear run through him. He wasn’t in danger. At least, he wasn’t right now, he knew. No. It was the fact that he was sure that Layne had not only seen through his lie, but through the spells that had been placed on him, the ones that hid his appearance, that kept him not just hidden, but in his place.

“Why don’t you tell Dr. Munn to come and speak to me himself,” the man who claimed to be a poet said. “Why don’t you go back and tell the man who has bound you to himself with such awful spells that I’ve invited him to my home.”

2.

Dr. Munn, Dr. Peter Munn, wanted to say no, but James knew he could not afford to.

Munn was waiting for him in Ooldea. He had been there earlier, had been there when James opened the blue door, but he’d waited until James had gone through the door before he left his air-conditioned SUV. Since then, he’d erected a gazebo outside the shack. He’d laid out a table there, a welcome for Layne if James had returned with him. There was cold roast chicken, bread, a pair of salads, and some wine and beer. The overall impression, James thought, was that of a bad office picnic, one that no one wanted to attend but for the flies.

He gave his report while he stood in front of the table. “How did he react when you said you were from The Ministry?” Munn asked from the other side. “Was he angry?”

“No,” James said.

“He didn’t sound angry?”

“No, sir.”

Munn was a slim, pale British man who wore a neat and expensive suit that had wilted in the heat. “I’m trusting you here, Thomas.”

James didn’t reply.

“You were there when the director spoke about Layne. You heard what he said, just like I did. He said he was angry. He was a drifter. He said it wasn’t uncommon for Layne to be in a place he wasn’t supposed to be. According to the director, he has a history of clashing with The Ministry’s authority. You can see it in the reports he filed. There’s an undercurrent of anger through each.”

“I can only tell you what I saw, sir. I can only tell you what he said.”

“Yes, I know.” Munn waved his hand at the table, disturbing the flies for but a second. “What did you make of the town itself?” he asked. “The people in it?”

“I’m not sure it’s real.”

“But you were there.”

“The space is real,” James said. “But the rest of it? I think it was Layne.”

“He’s not meant to have that kind of power.”

A part of James wanted to say, he could see through your spells, but the compulsion wasn’t strong and so he didn’t. Occasionally, he found that freedom within himself. “I don’t know that I can explain it,” he said instead. “It’s just intuition. My intuition.”

“The Ministry cannot afford to be on the wrong side of this, Thomas.”

“I know.”

“Byzantium represents so much to us. It is an opportunity we cannot let go.”

Peter Munn believed in The Ministry of Saturn. He had joined the organisation twenty years ago as a field agent. Back then, The Ministry had been something of a legend, an organisation dedicated to the unknown that was funded not just by private donations, but by the Australian Government. It existed in the government’s back channels, in its unofficial black books, a dream that the British Empire had never been able to fulfil. In its ninety odd years of existence The Ministry had become part of the machinery that existed behind wars and conflicts throughout the world.

In the last decade, however, things had changed. The political winds shifted. Black book projects lost bilateral support. Austerity measures were introduced. Defence ministers had less and less time for the strange, esoteric reports that The Ministry filed. The military campaigned to consume both public and private budgets. In such an environment it wasn’t much of a surprise when The Ministry’s funding was cut, or when its staff was siphoned off to other departments, or when it became a home for outcasts, conspiracy theorists and burnt-out spies who wanted only to wiretap celebrities and play videogames.

There were rumours that The Ministry would leave the public sphere, that a private entity had made an offer. A substantial offer. The story James had heard was that similar offers had been made to organisations in Germany, India, America, and more. James thought he and Munn should leave. Munn, however, refused. He was convinced that the director would take an offer and retire. He was convinced that he was in the best place to take over his role, to guide The Ministry to a newly funded glory.

“I’m going to have to go to Byzantium, aren’t I?” Munn said. “I will have to meet with Layne.”

“What will you do if he doesn’t want to give you the town?”

“The Ministry needs Byzantium. If I have to, I will take it from Layne, though I will not enjoy breaking a fellow magician.”

“He calls himself a poet now.”

“Even better.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No one cares when poets die, Thomas, not even poets themselves.”

3.

Munn replaced the chicken and the salads beneath the gazebo with pistols and knives and a series of small charms that had a dubious heritage. He cleaned them, organised them, decided what would be best, and put the remainder away. “One day,” he said to James, who had watched the whole process silently, “you’ll understand the danger that a mortal like myself is in during these situations.”

Yet it was James, not Munn, who was the first to return through the rip, the first to brave it without a suit or mask. He had a moment of panic after he opened the blue door. The world around him went from light to dark, like he was caught within an eclipse. His body shifted, the distinct parts of himself moved in a way that they shouldn’t and he thought he had come undone. He was surprised when, on the other side of the door, he was whole.

It took him a moment to realise that he wasn’t in the alley, but the town square. Both he and Munn were standing there across from Matthew Layne.

“Dr. Munn.” Layne wore a black suit with a black shirt. He had slicked back his hair and combed his beard with his fingers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I hope your journey here was a pleasant one?”

“It was different.” Munn offered his hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”

They shook and continued to talk, pleasantries mostly. It allowed James to walk around the square. There was a stillness to it that was oddly disquieting. He felt that earlier he’d walked onto a movie set during filming, only to be asked back after shooting had finished. Now that he’d returned he felt that the empty sound stage was still part of the film, that it was part of a world being created.

“Do you have a name for this town?” Munn’s question drew James’ attention back to him. “I must admit I can think of half a dozen.”

“I call it Ooldea,” Layne said.

“After the town where the door is?”

“Yes.”

“Surely there’s a more fitting name? I don’t want to offend, of course, but this is a unique place and it should have a unique name.”

“My mother’s people were from around Ooldea. They were Maralinga Tjarutja. They still are, actually. Ooldea was a meeting place for them and the others who lived in the area. This was back hundreds of years ago, thousands even. There was water there, you see. It served the people until the British drained it for steam engines that would travel from one end of the country to the other in the early part of the last century.”

“So Ooldea has been named to honour your mother?” Munn said.

“I never knew her well,” Layne said. “But it’s my hope that one day Ooldea will be a place where people can meet.”

“Thomas told me that there were people here when he first arrived.”

“A town has to learn how to be a town.”

“You had visitors?”

“In a way.” Layne turned. “Are you alright, Mr. James? You look concerned.”

He laughed a little. “No, please, forgive me. I was just—it’s just so different, that’s all.”

“Because there are no people?”

“They were very convincing, I must say.”

“A town must learn to be a town,” Layne repeated. “Now, please, come inside, both of you. I’ve prepared a meal for us.”

Layne led them into the middle restaurant. Inside there was a single table surrounded by a series of paintings. Each of them was of a landscape that James recognised but couldn’t easily place. At first, he thought they were of his world, the world he had just left. After a while, though, he realised that the paintings were familiar to him because he’d seen them in other rips. He recognised the rip full of poisonous gas, the gas a mix of lurid colours that he couldn’t explain, the ground barely visible. Next to it was another of a world breaking apart, the land so fragile that to step on it was to sink into it, to be threatened with falling into a dark nothing.

“Please, take a seat,” Layne said. “That includes you, Mr. James.”

James turned away from the paintings.

“Some people find it difficult to eat with Thomas,” Munn said before he could speak. “The illusions that are bound to him slip with prolonged contact.”

“I am more than happy to examine the paintings you have here,” he said. “I very rarely take part in official discussions anyway.”

“I have already seen through the spells.” Layne positioned himself at the head of the table. “Please, Mr. James, take a seat. I will not be a rude host.”

It was Munn who didn’t want him to sit and eat at the table, James knew. He had said so before, made it clear on a number of occasions that James’ place was well away from him during meals. “I don’t want to be a bother,” he said.

“Thomas,” Munn said, a hint of irritation in his voice. “Don’t offend our guest. Take a seat.”

“I can tell you how to strengthen those illusions,” Layne said after everyone had sat. “If they are your work, that is.”

“They are mine. I’m afraid the illusions aren’t really the point, but rather—”

“The control is.”

“Yes,” Munn said.

“Did you make Thomas?”

“A long time ago. It would be—well, I think it would be twenty-seven years this year. I was a young magician then. I came upon Paracelsus’ work and was drawn to the idea of creating life. I had a few failures before Thomas, failures mostly due to Paracelsus’ instructions, I might add, but eventually I got it right.”

“You must be quite proud,” Layne said. “Few fathers have such capable sons.”

“No.” The other man’s laugh was cold. “No, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. Thomas is not my son. I don’t have children. I do not want children. My work is what is important to me. It is the centre of my life. Thomas is part of that. He is—”

“I am his creature,” James finished, surprising not just himself, but Munn as well.

An uncomfortable silence settled around the table. “Creation reveals yourself in ways you don’t expect,” Layne said after a moment. “None of us should be surprised, really. To make something, to create something, asks you to look at yourself in ways you don’t normally. You have to be patient with it. You’re in a conversation, after all. You’re telling your secrets. You’re exposing yourself like you wouldn’t normally. You’re asking for insights that you’re not always going to be comfortable with.”

Food arrived as he finished speaking. It came out of the kitchen on plates that floated by themselves. On them were meats and vegetables and sauces and breads. Drinks followed. The procession was like a tiny parade. James found himself comparing it to the meal that had been laid out beneath the gazebo, the cheapness of the store bought items, the lack of imagination that was at the centre of it.

“What about your work here?” Munn asked after the plates had settled. “Have you been through the doors to other worlds?”

“No.”

“There are entrances to other worlds, yes?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Mr. Layne,” Munn said. “Please. I’ve read about you. I know you’ve met people from other worlds. The director of The Ministry is still the director that you worked under. He gave me your reports. I know that you have met angels and djinns and even a member of the Unseen Court. You’ve had conversations with them. They’ve given you tasks. You’ve even fought one or two. It is why you’re here, at this crossroads, this place that by your own words you hope will become a meeting place.”

“You don’t—” Layne stopped. “I’m afraid that you’ve come here with a misunderstanding. You’re letting your ignorance guide you.”

“I would watch my tone if I were you.”

“It’s just that the world, this world, our world, I mean—this world has had its borders closed for decades. The other worlds shut them with all their power and they patrol them vigorously to stop people coming in and out.”

“What do you mean?” The question slipped out of James. “I’m sorry,” he said, catching himself. “I don’t mean to interrupt. I’ve just never heard anyone say that before.”

“No, I shouldn’t lecture. I’m being a terrible host.” Layne raised his hands in apology. “I have so few people visit. Please, eat your food. Eat your food and let me tell you what I know. Let me tell you how I found Ooldea. You’ll understand what I mean about borders by the end of it.”

4.

I will start by saying that I am no different than most of the people you meet in our profession. I learned what I learned in a haphazard way. A piece here. A piece there. I never found an authority that was complete. I never met a person who knew everything. There’s always something new to learn and something old to make a mistake with. In many ways, it was like studying poetry.

For a while, The Ministry of Saturn was a good place for me to learn and grow. I saw a lot of the world while I worked there. I walked through the hidden labyrinths beneath cities. I rode ships that were tiny floating cities for the living dead. I sat in planes on tarmacs with no names. I met magicians and vampires and djinns and yes, once, a member of the Unseen Court. It was through these meetings that I learned about our closed borders. I learned how we’d been cut off from a larger existence. The people who come here, the people who aren’t like us, are outcasts mostly, runaways, criminals, and the wealthy who are a mix of those others. My job was to learn everything I could from them. The director of The Ministry used to say that Saturn was the father of truth and that a part of him must always be covered or shadowed and that we worked in those shadows to ensure that they were never fully dark.

I allowed myself to believe this. I covered my eyes to the fact that The Ministry was never about truth but was about power. I simply needed it to be about one more than the other. I needed it because of my mother. My mother is where my story begins, you see. The Australian Government took me away from her when I was very young. It was with The Ministry’s help that I was able to uncover the tracks leading back to her. It took too long to find her, though. She would die within two months of meeting her.

For all my skills, for all the things I could bend and break, for all that I had learned from people outside this world, I could do nothing for a woman riddled with cancer. However, I could help those who had been caring for my mother. Her primary carer was a man named Dennis. He was Maralinga Tjarutja, like she was. He was older than me by about a decade and had grown up in Ooldea. He had, in fact, come back to the country with his family. That was where his problem began. One of his children had gone missing.

Dennis didn’t think his son had run away. Instead, he thought he’d gone into the old military base at Maralinga with three of his friends. The base had a long, sordid history. It had been used to test nuclear weapons back in the fifties and sixties and the Maralinga Tjarutja had been forced out of their homes to enable this.

There are no good stories about the base, but the one that sticks in my mind, the one that captures the horror of it best, is the story about the bones of babies. The story about Project Sunshine. You see, The Australian Government purchased over three thousand dead babies and sent them to the base for radiation testing. They didn’t ask any of the parents. How could they? What parent would sell the bones of their child to a government agency? None. Instead, the government paid the staff in hospitals and mortuaries for the dead children. They paid between one hundred dollars and fifty dollars per baby. I don’t know how they decided that one dead baby was worth more than another, but they did. And once they had the bones of these children, they put them out in the nuclear explosions to see how much radiation they’d gather.

The base was weighed down by these horrors and many more. I could feel them from the moment I arrived. It’s still suffering from this history. If you were to walk onto it now, you’d feel your skin prickle with the tragedy and awfulness lingering there. It’s so bad that when I first arrived to find the children, I was overwhelmed by the atmosphere of the place. It is made worse by the fact that the land is barren. The radiation still lingers. You can still find shards of green glass throughout the area from the explosions.

There was a bunker at the edge of the site. There, I am afraid to say, I found my first surprise. On the door was The Ministry’s faded logo, the one from the 1950s that was the outline of Saturn’s veiled face. Beyond the door I heard the song. It was an insistent song, one that dug into me much like the radiation did, one that required a protective ward to be cast just as I had done outside. It was a simple spell, a piece of repetition, but I needed to repeat it every minute. The song coming from within the bunker was strange and alien and performed in a language I didn’t know. The language of it was so strange I wasn’t sure I would be able to perform it, even if I tried.

Ah, I see your excitement, Dr. Munn. You shift around in your chair like a man who thinks he will soon hear one of the great secrets. But sadly, I cannot describe to you what I saw in that bunker, not completely. The song led to a being larger than anything I had seen before. It had such an immensity that all I could comprehend of it were parts. More than once I saw a dozen mouths full of teeth singing. I saw necks and torsos and heads, all disconnected from each other, all emerging from a dark, slippery substance that might be skin but might be something else. The farther I walked through the bunker the more I saw. Eyes would open above me, beside me, below me. I saw ribs. I saw shoulders. I even saw a hand, a huge, clawed, incomplete thing. Soon, I began to realise that whatever this thing was, it wasn’t just one thing, but a whole made up of dozens, maybe a hundred things, none of which was fully there. What I saw was caught between our world and the existence outside our world, that part that no one claims but for those horrors no one speaks of.

I found all four of the missing children in one room. I admit, I was surprised to see them. By then, I thought they were dead. I thought whatever this thing was had devoured them. But I was wrong. It needed them. It needed them to sing. It needed them to chant. It needed them to act as anchor so that it could pull more to it. More people, more animals, more of anything that was alive. More substance that it could use to drag itself into our world.

It was a weak thing, this monster. I want you to know that. I will not talk myself up over what happened next. I am grateful it was weak. I am thankful that when I turned to attack it that it was not at full strength. I am grateful because it fought me like nothing has ever fought me before or after. I know that I could not have defeated it at full strength. It battered me as it was. It threw me. It forced me to use spells of such complexity that I was afraid of what would be done to myself when it came time to pay the cost of them. More than once, I thought I’d lost, but I didn’t.

It was only after our battle that I realised how huge it was, how it had consumed so much already that it would not be sated until it had devoured our world, planets, and universes alike. I also realised that it was our creation. It was not some old thing, nor was it alien. It was ours. We had made it. Somehow in this bunker The Ministry had made this creature. It had used the weapon testing in Maralinga to make this horror. In doing so, it gave all the words and warnings of all the people I met, all the angels and djinns and exiled members of the Unseen Court, a validity that I had never given before.

The entry you used earlier is but one of the entries to that monster’s body. You see, I could not destroy the remains. I could not because I could not destroy the monster itself completely. It is still alive. It is still attached to our world. It is as if there are umbilical cords I cannot see and thus cannot break. It is barely sentient, though. In defeating it, I reduced it to a base state, one it wants to rebuild from. One that I can rebuild it from. So I do. I live inside this monster and I teach it to be something other than what it is. I teach it to be a town. To be a city. To be home. I teach it to be a sanctuary so that when our destructive urges once again create something awful and uncontrollable there is a place for the poor and forgotten, a place where they can go and leave their masters to the fate that they so richly deserve.

Does that not sound appealing, Mr. James?

5.

“I don’t know,” James said. He was staring across the table at Munn. The other man sat straightly in his chair, unnaturally so. In front of him was a scattered mess of food and broken plates. Some of it had spilled over the edge and onto Munn’s lap. “Maybe,” James said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Layne said. “I never knew my father. My mother told me that he died young. He was a soldier, she said. That was all she said. But I had father figures, much like your Dr. Munn. I had a number of them while I was growing up and each and every one of them was a bastard. Each saw me as a tool. A tool for money. A tool for labour. A tool for their own ambitions. Not a single one of them cared who I was. And this man does not care who you are.” He rose. “I’ve removed the spells that bind you, Mr. James. It took me a while and you almost gave it away before I was finished. It was why I had to tell my story. I didn’t plan to, but if Munn had realised—well, it’s not important. What’s important now is that you’re free.”

“Thank you.” He didn’t know what else to say. “Thank you,” he said again.

“Don’t thank me, please. It was a common decency. However, now I must ask something of you. Peter Munn cannot stay here. He is not welcome in my home. You can carry him out through the door alive, or you can kill him and throw his body out, I don’t care. I only ask that you do that shortly. Afterwards, you’re welcome to either return or to go on your way. If you wish to stay, I want you to know that I can use a hand with my work. I can use a student. I’m not sure I’ll live to see my work here finished. It’s such an immense task. I would like to know that when I die someone will carry my work on. But there is no obligation. If you wish to leave, you are free to do so. I only ask that you keep my secret and that you do not return.”

After Layne left, James continued to stare at Munn. The other man’s eyes hadn’t left him. James thought he was pleading with him, but he wasn’t sure. At times he thought Munn looked like he was concentrating on something not in the room. At times he looked like he was trying to cast a spell. Munn would be furious once he was free, James knew. If he got free, that was. He would rant. He would scream. He would rebind the spells on James. He would hunt down Layne. He would become the embodiment of something awful and unknown and not concern himself with what happened later so long as he got his revenge. Let the world burn, James could almost hear Munn say.

For a while, he sat and thought about his life. It had started in London. He remembered very little of it. Most of what he did remember took place on the coasts of Sydney and Melbourne. He’d lived his life in a series of ugly apartments and rundown offices. There had been a collection of desperate people around him every day. He thought about the cruelties he’d been subjected to during those times as Munn’s creation. He thought about the kindness he had been shown as well. There had been some of both, but did the fact that he’d had no freedom render the second meaningless? He thought so. He thought about his future, as well. He thought about where he could live without Munn. He thought of the people he could meet. He thought about how they would respond to his true appearance. There would be more cruelties. He would no longer have the comfort of what he knew.

He stood up and walked around the table to where Munn was seated. He placed his hand on the other man’s shoulder.

For a brief moment, he thought again about the choices he could make.

©2023 by Benjamin Peek.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Benjamin Peek is the author of seven books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare Magazine, and various Year’s Best collections. He lives in Sydney, Australia.

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

Book Review: Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk

Aigner Loren Wilson | 389 words

Even Though I Knew the End
C.L. Polk
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250849458
Tordotcom, November 2022, 144 pgs

C.L. Polk’s fantasy Even Though I Knew the End is the queer supernatural detective noir everyone needs in their life. The novella follows Elena Brandt, who has sold her soul and is working as a detective for the very demon she sold it to. The demon, Marlowe, has put Elena on the case of the White City Vampire, pushing her into a dangerous mix of murder, magic, and demons.

Elena’s voice is catchy and funny in the way good urban fantasy protagonists are. There’s just enough dark humor and quips to keep the reader laughing through the darker moments of the story. While at times, Even Though I Knew the End read like urban fantasy, it felt more like a crime noir with fast pacing and a world filled with gay romance, angels, and demons. Another aspect of Elena’s character that made her a wonderful person to follow was her heart. She loves fiercely and it’s one of the first things we learn about her.

As a fan of supernatural detective stories, I loved the quick pacing and rush through the world to focus on Elena overcoming her deal with a demon—a deal she made for good reason, of course, because Elena doesn’t do anything without good reason. There were some moments I wish I had more information, but in Polk’s hands I knew the information would come when it was supposed to and not a moment sooner.

For people familiar with urban fantasy settings, there won’t be any surprise that angels, demons, vampires, magic, and secret orders all exist in the city of Chicago. Polk does a wonderful job introducing the magic system and the order of law that governs it without spending too much or really any time doing a bunch of complicated worldbuilding. Even Though I Knew the End is a ride of queer love, dark magic, and making peace with the past in an entertaining mystery.

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: The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi

Arley Sorg | 1045 words

The Lies of the Ajungo
Moses Ose Utomi
Hardcover/Ebook
ISBN: 9781250849069
Tordotcom Publishing, March 21, 2023, 96 pgs

“There is no water in the City of Lies.”

With that beautifully provocative line, Moses Ose Utomi begins a slender book which reads simultaneously like a slice of epic fantasy and like fable. Let’s be honest: it’s a great opening line. And there are many more fantastic lines to come. Better yet, as wonderful as this brief tale is, it’s anything but vapid.

In the space of a few paragraphs Utomi creates a fresh-feeling world, each line bright with sparks of subtext on our real histories, effectively using the fantastic to discuss our own sociopolitical dynamics. As interesting as the world is, Utomi wisely doesn’t waste time: he sets up an innovative problem and gives us a compelling character with serious motivation who rises to try to address the problem. Standing back and looking at the structure, it’s a fairly common one. But Utomi makes it engrossing by breathing his own creativity into the story form, and all you want to do is turn the page to see what happens next.

Tutu is a boy who lives in the poorer area of a city suffering yet another drought. Generations ago, the ruler of the city struck a deal for water with outsiders called the Ajungo. But not only is the water the Ajungo provides not really enough for survival—death from dehydration is common among Tutu’s people—but the Ajungo demand that every year, each and every child who is turning thirteen must have their tongue cut out. Tutu’s time is approaching, and his desiccated mother draws closer and closer to death. There is one more option for a poor child such as he, and that is to strike out into the Forever Desert, alone, in search of a water source to free his people. With little more than determination, desperation, and most importantly, his mother’s love, Tutu sets out on a hero’s quest, one which could be both folly and fatal.

Prose is a feature here, never flowery but—as with the opening line—occasionally delivering phrases and sentences which just feel satisfying to read. Tutu is someone you can root for who is the perfect combination of being complex enough in his own ways to be interesting and naïve enough to provide a sense of discovery for the reader as we wander the world together.

It doesn’t take long to realize that one of the central themes of this book is relationships. The theme is delivered through Tutu’s relationship with his mother, the various kinds of relationships he forms along the way (some of them antagonistic), and the relationship Tutu and others have with institutions, like the ruler of the City of Lies; not to mention the relationships of the people of various cities with each other. Part of this is about the different kinds of bonds one forms in different circumstances, and about the potential for people to connect in meaningful ways. But the way a few of these relationships shift over time is key, and a big part of this is the way Tutu defines himself, in relationship or as reflected by everyone else. This theme is presented in a subtle way; you might not see it unless you are looking for it, but it is no less powerful.

Power is another important theme here, and this one is subtle in places, more obvious in others. Where Utomi takes this theme is wonderful, as he explores not just power and control as being defined by need or commodity (he does explore these, but goes deeper), but the ways in which we define ourselves according to the dictates of the powerful—often without reflection or even realizing it. Tutu’s quest is also a quest to resist power, which in part includes realizing what power even is, where it comes from, and what it’s actually doing to him. There are several other important strokes here, such as the way mistrust is built and used, the way it creates barriers between potential allies, the way it’s passed down; the complex nature of truth; and, ultimately, what it means to be a hero.

Heavy themes aside, the adventure itself is front-loaded, as is the exploration of the world: a boy trying to survive in one of the harshest settings possible, and anyone he might meet could be out to kill him. Not only that, but the boy has no skills, really, to succeed in his quest. In fact, things do get pretty bloody from time to time. They also get emotional. For me, the emotionality was somehow very tasteful; present, effective, but never pushing too far. Depending on what kind of reader you are, the narrative has the potential to hit you pretty hard.

The world itself an intriguing one, complete with a number of cool details, but the world building is sketched only by what’s needed for the story. It feels like a world ripe for even more stories. Fair warning: some readers may feel like the world building is underdeveloped. For me, it felt controlled and focused, and this is part of what lends the fable or even fairy tale sensibility to the story. I personally wouldn’t change a thing.

So, yes, the book is very deep. But it’s also just inventive fun. You can read it as a coming-of-age adventure with great characters in a cool setting and leave it as that—you won’t be disappointed. Or you can dig into some of the meanings layered throughout the narrative and be thoroughly pleased with the way the material engages you on that level, some of which I’ve touched upon above. Utomi has a knack for storytelling, an enviable imagination, and a thoughtful approach to writing something which is actually important. Better yet, where he takes the story in the climax is just . . . brilliant.

This one is highly recommended. Get your copy and enjoy!

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: The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry

Chris Kluwe | 834 words

The Magician’s Daughter
H.G. Parry
Trade Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9780316383707
Redhook, February 2023, 400 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review. This month’s offering is a quieter, more contemplative character study hearkening back to classic English fantasy, but lively enough to feel modern in its fairy-tale glamour, and a book I found quite delightful reading—The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry.

The Magician’s Daughter begins, as most such tales do, with a leisurely introduction to our protagonist—Biddy, an orphaned survivor of a shipwreck who washes ashore the magical isle of Hy-Brasil off the coast of Ireland, itself home to a crumbling castle and hidden from the rest of the world by powerful enchantments. Raised by her adoptive father/guardian Rowan, who also happens to be a magician, along with his rabbit familiar, Hutchincroft, Biddy loves her strange little home, despite being unable to use magic herself, but lately spends her time yearning to explore the outside world and meet actual humans (rabbits being notoriously poor conversationalists, after all, and magicians being, well, erratic at the best of times). After Rowan runs into a spot of trouble, inadvertently dragging Biddy into a magical mess almost a century in the making, her wish to explore is granted, but Biddy quickly learns that the outside world is not at all like the storybooks she grew up reading.

Much like that previous paragraph, The Magician’s Daughter takes its time getting to where it wants to go, but the journey is an enjoyable one the entire way. Parry does exquisite work in letting the small spaces in her book come alive, whether it be the particular eccentricities of Hy-Brasil’s native flora and fauna, Biddy’s interactions with Rowan and Hutchincroft (along with assorted other characters met later), or even just an occasional musing that manages to condense an extremely complicated set of ideas into the kind of obvious fairy-tale wisdom that is a type of magic of its own. The entire time I was reading The Magician’s Daughter I felt like I had been completely transported to another world, one possibly best enjoyed on a cold day with a warm drink somewhere out of the elements (full disclosure, this is exactly how I read the book), and it reminded me a lot of that languid sophistication present in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, or Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.

This is not to say that The Magician’s Daughter lacks for gravitas or action, however. Parry also does an excellent job setting believable stakes for Biddy, Rowan, and Hutchincroft, and wise readers should know by now that classic fairy-tales don’t always guarantee a happy ending. Biddy’s struggle to save not just herself and her family, but also to accept that she and her world are changing in ways that she can’t always control is just as much part of the dramatic tension as showdowns with animated bone wisps or fulminous raven-man hybrids. I also particularly appreciated that the ending of the book dealt not just with the momentous clash and resolution of narrative arcs, but also with the picking up of pieces afterwards, something few fairy-tales bother to see through.

In fact, I think what stuck with me the most about The Magician’s Daughter was just how well Parry handled her protagonist’s coming of age. Teenagers are notoriously difficult to portray accurately (especially since they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing half the time), but Biddy comes alive on the pages like very few characters I’ve read. She’s real in a way that I think will resound faithfully with younger and older readers alike, and it was very easy to cheer for her successes and be struck by her failures in a way that felt totally natural (which is also helped along by the level of care Parry devotes to the other characters in the story as well, who very much have their own wants and desires).

Overall, I think The Magician’s Daughter is a splendid piece of writing, and one that I can very much see being passed down from parent to child, or handed around a reading group as its pages become progressively more dog-eared and tattered. If you’re looking for something to recapture some magic in your life, something that touches the bit inside all of us that dreams impossible dreams, then I can’t recommend this book enough.

Read if: Sometimes you enjoy a slower-paced ride; you know family can be frustrating but they’re still family; you ever wondered if magical rabbit familiars enjoy bacon.

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: Scott Edelman

Laurel Amberdine | 2027 words

What is your writing process like? Did “A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done” fit the pattern?

In many ways it did, but in its most important way, it did not. Which is only right for the strangest, most personal story I’ve ever written during a lifetime devoted to words.

For example—when I begin a story, I rarely know where the plot is heading. The most I might have once a character or setting or conceit or opening line pops into my head is a gut feeling. Perhaps I will vaguely know the new piece will have some sort of happy ending, or realize now’s the time to write a story which will tell people to be nicer to each other, or that they should appreciate life more . . . but that’s as far as I’ll go. Because if I have a clear vision of where a story’s heading, I no longer have an interest in writing it. For me, writing a story is learning what the story wants to be.

In fact, there are even times when I feel a destination coalescing and push it away, knowing once the goal line appears in my head I’ll have no interest in working my way toward it. I’m the kind of writer who, if I were actually to proceed with outlining a story, I would decide . . . well, I guess there’s no need to write the story itself now. I’ve learned all I need to know.

This story was in perfect alignment with that inclination of mine. All I knew when I began was one pivotal scene, and nothing else, not even an idea how to start the story so I’d eventually reach that point. Until I woke one night with the opening sentence in my head, scribbled it down in the dark, and hoped I’d be able to read my handwriting the next morning. (Luckily, I could!) And then I began writing as best as I was able the next, best sentence, over and over again.

That’s how it is with most of my stories. But as to where this one differed—I had no idea whether anything I was doing would actually result in an eventual story. It seemed too weird. Too personal. I usually only begin once I believe I have a concept which will result in something someone other than me might want to read, but in this case, I had to give myself permission not to care. In fact, after writing the first few paragraphs of this one, I then scribbled in my journal:

“I think I’m going to have to consider this playing, and not actually writing a story, so I don’t have to feel bad when it turns out not to become one. I’ll let it just be fun.”

And then—to my delight—when I showed it to a friend and asked whether he thought anyone else would ever want to read the story or any editor would possibly want to publish it, was told by him—Scott, it’s the best thing you’ve ever written. Whether that’s true or not after more than four decades of publishing and 110+ short stories out there, that’s for others to decide. But I’m grateful Lightspeed has chosen to showcase it to the world.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I could give you a guided tour of my office, and describe in detail all the souvenirs with which I’ve surrounded myself, but none of that would offer a clue to how I created this or any other story, because none of my creative work gets done there. Because—I do none of my creative work at a keyboard. All of my fiction is written longhand and then keyed in after the fact. Then to revise, I print out the manuscript, scribble my edits all over the page, key them in, print them out, and repeat.

And so, my fiction is not written in the room designated as my office, but on a couch in the living room, or out among our bamboo, or on a bench in a public park, all places where if you came upon me, you’d find me with pen in hand, alternating between staring off into the middle distance and scrawling in a penmanship so illegible its unreadable by anyone but me. And sometimes not even me.

But to satisfy the curiosity of those who’d like to know what I’ve surrounded myself with in my office space, some of what you’d find here on the shelves and walls if you visited would be—

A mid-seventies Marvel Comics bathroom key bent by Uri Geller during one of his trips to the office when I was an Assistant Editor there.

A 425-million-year old trilobite from Morocco.

A framed copy of the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories featuring a cover story by Jack Williamson—as well as the autograph I asked him to place there seventy-five years after its publication.

A poster of the first convention I attended at age fifteen.

A ukulele which I’ve been strumming far too infrequently the more writing I’ve been getting done.

A signed photograph of the great acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, which I gave to my parents for a long-go anniversary, and have since inherited now that they’re both gone.

And oh so much more memorabilia.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I don’t consider myself as ever having gotten stuck in any story, but then, we might have different opinions as to what is meant by the word “stuck.”

When I’m not sure what happens next—as will occasionally happen with a pantser—I pull out a journal and write out all the possible branches the story could take. Sometimes there might be a dozen or more until I find the right direction in which to head, and then, once I do, I return to the story.

If that doesn’t work—I’ll take a nap. Or a shower. And know that while I’m in either of those spaces, the next sentence, or even the next paragraph, will pop into my head, as my subconscious is my greatest—and in fact only—collaborator.

You might think of those brief work stoppages as being stuck, but I don’t, because I have no doubts whatever is meant to be next will be given to me as a gift.

The only time I was truly stuck wasn’t on an individual story, but over writing in general, due to the results of the 2016 election. It was the only writers block I’ve ever had. I had trouble deciding what I could write which would possibly be commensurate to the times in which we were living. What finally resulted was the “The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable,” which ended up being published in Cat Rambo’s anthology If This Goes On. Once that ice flow was broken, the work continued.

I hope this current story in Lightspeed is also worthy of these times.

Where are you in this story?

Why, I’m the narrator! It is, after all, the most personal thing I’ve ever written. And about that, I shall say nothing more . . . because I hate spoilers with the heat of a thousand dying suns.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I don’t see myself as having had any choice. It’s in my nature. I don’t know whether I was born that way or molded that way, but see the world in fantastic terms, always wondering “what if.” And I’m grateful for that, because it provides me with the freedom I need to make sense of the world through a broader range of metaphors than mimetic fiction allows.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

That they should be more like my father than . . . the other guy.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

If I could say one thing to other writers, it would be—

Never give up! Never surrender!

Lightspeed rejected twenty of my short story submissions before accepting my twenty-first. You’ll notice I didn’t say Lightspeed rejected me twenty times. The publication only rejected words on the page. There’s nothing personal about rejection, and just because an editor passes on one story doesn’t mean she’ll do the same next time. As long as you find joy in what you’re doing, keep on doing it.

This advice comes to you from a writer who took forty-four years of trying to sell his first story to Analog. And who managed to collect several thousand rejections over his lifetime. So to repeat—

Never give up.

Never surrender.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

The novel that most moved me recently was When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill. I don’t think I’ve felt a novel more necessary to its era since Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Barnhill’s novel is imbued with the power and precision of poetry, and manages to be relevant without being didactic. Please keep it in your thoughts as award season begins!

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I wish I could say “strum my ukulele,” but as I mentioned above, the writing has been going so well lately I’ve been doing it far less frequently. But I’ll flip that question on its head and say—writing itself relaxes me. I don’t see it as work, or a chore.

I am never more at peace than with a pen in hand, for then, nothing else exists but me and the page. I’ve heard runners talk of being “in the zone,” a place where all the world falls away. That’s what happens to me when I’m writing.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

The story I’ve just begun has a core concept which might be impossible to pull off. We’ll see. I’ve always felt I should only attempt to write stories which have a high degree of failure. I was once advised that as a writer, I should always play to my strengths. But I’ve instead spent my career playing to my weaknesses. If I don’t do that, how will I get better? Which means my current project might crash and burn horribly. But even if it does, I’ll at least have learned something from the experience.

As for what readers can experience now or shortly—

My most recent collection, Things That Never Happened, about which Publishers Weekly wrote, “his talent is undeniable,” was published by Cemetery Dance Press.

Recent and upcoming short stories from me include—

“The Lessons Only a Jelly Bean Can Teach” in Pulphouse.

“Learning to Accept What’s to Come” in Apex.

“The More Loving One” in Proton Reader.

“The Message Behind the Words is the Voice of the Heart” in Daily Science Fiction.

And down the road, another story in Lightspeed titled “The Letters They Left Behind”.

Plus—those wishing to hear me interview writers while we break bread together can check out my podcast, Eating the Fantastic, where we chat about how the magic is made.

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: Maria Dong

Laurel Amberdine | 1158 words

Do you have any advice for other writers?

No matter how great of a writer you are, not everyone is going to like what you do. This means that sometimes, the greatest skill you can have is patience.

At the time I first finished this story, Lightspeed wasn’t open. I sent it to a few really well-respected markets and got some very painful rejections, with the main suggestion being to cut most of the conversations and focus instead on the action.

I thought that was really fascinating, because for me those conversations are the linchpin. Everything else—the revolutionary action, the magic, the worldbuilding—they’re all there to support the tension created by these girls and women who are trying to communicate in these really stressful, oppressive circumstances—while also simultaneously coming to terms with what has happened to them and trying to figure out what they want for the future.

Everything important in the story is in the spaces between words and actions—the waiting and the dread—which means there needs to be a lot of breathing room. In that way, it’s a very queer story: at least when I was growing up, so much of the experience of being a young queer person was learning to navigate this kind of communication where nothing was solid and the outcome could either be extremely dangerous or very wonderful, and you had no way of knowing which was more likely.

I think a few years ago, I would’ve been so desperate for the sale that I would’ve automatically made those cuts, even though they felt fundamentally wrong for what I was trying to do. Even with my convictions, it was still agony trying to decide the right course of action. So, I just sat on the story for a long time—I think almost a year?—until I felt sure, and then I sent it, just as it was, to Lightspeed.

I don’t think financial compensation for a story is a metric for anything, but getting that check felt very rewarding; it was my largest compensation for a piece of short fiction to date. More importantly, when I read the story now, I’m proud of it.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Over the last few years, the amount of reading I’ve been doing has really dropped off. Part of this is because of changes in my writing career—as you gain momentum, the giant stack of “required readings” gets bigger and bigger, to the point where I’d started to feel like reading had almost become a chore.

As a result, I’ve tried to expand my reading into different genres and formats. I read a lot more nonfiction now and find it really inspiring when it comes to idea-fodder for stories. When I’m really stressed, I usually move toward shorter works, because my brain can’t seem to handle following a narrative for too long.

However, I will say that one book that recently sucked me right into it was S.A. Barnes’s Dead Silence—it had that quick turn-key pacing and bigger themes that reminded me a lot of the best parts of early nineties SFthrillers, with just really excellent characterization and atmosphere. I inhaled that book.

I think the best thing I did lately, though, was join a book club. It’s composed almost entirely of badass older women that have all had really interesting careers and life experiences that they can bring into book discussions, and it has really gotten me fired up about reading again.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

This is maybe less about the writing itself than the commercial side of it—e.g., marketing, advertising, social media—but I have met an incredible number of brilliant femme-presenting writers and readers who absolutely love fantasy—and who will immediately throw up their hands when presented with the words “science fiction”, and particularly anything that looks futuristic or space-related.

Women purchase more books than men in every single fiction genre—except possibly science-fiction, where men may have a slight edge (bit.ly/3FiGERr), which further supports the idea that compared to other genres, women are shying away from science fiction. This has ramifications for the kind of books that are acquired as publishers try to balance pulling in more women SF readers with not alienating the men that have historically been their customer base. And for the record, I’m not necessarily even speaking about book content so much as how it’s marketed and packaged for consumers—and that’s regardless of whether that marketing/packaging is actually effective or not.

If this reluctance to engage with science fiction was truly a case of “I tried it and didn’t love it,” that would be one thing, but I think it’s largely the result of a deeply enculturated gender bias. There’s this worldview that kind of sees fantasy as more emotional and character-driven versus science-fiction’s cold, technical world—and many women my age were strongly discouraged by their peers away from anything involving math or science (myself included!). And this fallacy is continually propped up by the way some books, movies, etc., are advertised.

But I personally think there’s no environment more primed for deep character work than the isolation of space, no genre more capable of exploring the subversion of gender norms than one that looks to the future. We’ve already seen these numbers shifting, and I’m excited to see them shift further.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

My debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, comes out January 10th—which dedicated Lightspeed fans may have already heard about, since there was an amazing review of it by Aigner Loren Wilson in issue #150. For those that haven’t, it’s a surreal psychological suspense with fantasy elements that dives deep into mental illness, obsession, and compulsion—while working in more expansive themes about capitalism, race, and family trauma. It’s still early days as far as reader reviews, but I’ve been really grateful and lucky to see that it’s done great in the trades, getting strong positive reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Shelf Awareness, and a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.

For short fiction, I have a story, “The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han,” included in the year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, which just hit bookstores. You can find the rest of my short fiction at mariadong.com.

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: Isabel J. Kim

Laurel Amberdine | 989 words

How did “The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I had been thinking a lot about constructed narratives, reality television and the blurred line between authenticity and falsehood. I had also been thinking a lot about the concept of a story that is out to get you. I had been thinking about the grand tradition of “murdergame” stories (Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, etc.). And I thought that a subversion of a murdergame story, where death is an escape and life is being trapped, had a lot of weirdness potential.

And that’s the bedrock the rest of the story was built from. The concept that you could only die when you were irrelevant or your death was narratively fulfilling was very seductive to me as a writer—because that’s how a story works, from the author’s perspective! The character only gets to die (escape the narrative) when the death matters, or when the character stops mattering. This story is about what happens when the character tries to game that system.

I drew pretty heavily from the tropes of the aforementioned murdergame stories above, and interviews with people who have been on reality television, and the way long-running TV shows sometimes feel like they never allow their characters to leave the narrative, even after they’re killed off. Death is cheap, and so are fan favorites!

Where are you in this story?

Everyone who saw the first draft of this story told me some variant of “Isabel, Jamie is deranged, this is a crazy thought process for a person to have.” I thought that was very hurtful because I had considered his point of view a pretty logical thought process on what to do if you got trapped in an infinite reality TV murdergame. So, that’s where I am in the story.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

Not to give away the whole thesis statement of the story, but I really do hope that the climactic emotional core of it wasn’t too subtle. Jamie’s realization that Rally is afraid to die and afraid of killing Jamie, and that he’s not emotionally the sort of person who can easily do murder even when it doesn’t matter, is supposed to be implicit and obvious. He’s not a character. He’s just himself.

That realization is supposed to be coupled with the knowledge that Jamie is the sort of calculating, coldhearted extra-narrative chessmaster who can do all of the above, and hadn’t known that his friend wasn’t. And then there’s supposed to be a third realization that underneath everything, Jamie is also kind enough to prevent his friend from being emotionally scarred again. That’s supposed to be the big emotional touchpoint.

Implicit and obvious are not necessarily synonyms, and I have no idea if these concepts come across as strongly as I hoped. So I am explicitly telling you now, flouting every rule of good writing.

There is also one really good meme reference in this story, so I hope that at least one person notices that.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

1. Comedy and tragedy are basically the exact same thing except when they’re not.

2. If you learn to write without the wizard in the story it will get way easier to write with the wizard in the story. (By the wizard, I mean speculative elements.) (This one isn’t a joke, I tell this to everyone.)

3. The second person is your friend and it will not harm you.

4. Unfortunately to have written a story, you must actually write it down.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

My only real non-writing creative pursuit these days is the podcast I co-host about internet culture. This is an obligatory plug for Wow If True—I promise it’s a cool and fun podcast and I am definitely not contractually obligated to promote it at every opportunity.

I actually used to draw and paint pretty intensely (I have a fine arts degree! Wow! I have to bring that up at every opportunity!), and for a long time I thought I was going to do the fine arts, gallery, oil paintings and conceptual art thing, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve picked up a brush or tried to make anything serious. A lot of my creative energy has been sunk into “writing fiction,” and it’s been a bit of an odd rebalancing, going from thinking of myself as an artist to thinking of myself as a writer and attorney.

That got really serious. Let’s get silly again. These days, to relax, I mostly do regular human stuff like listening to the same song on repeat, reading the Murderbot Diaries for the seven thousandth time, and playing a truly embarrassing amount of tabletop RPGs. I actually don’t watch a lot of television.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

Just like last year, I am still working on my wizard novel. But I am also working on a non-wizard novel. And there is still a large pile of unfinished short fiction I am most definitely not ignoring. By the time this is published, I hope that pile is smaller. It is a slim and pathetic hope.

Most of my free-to-read work is linked on my website (www.isabel.kim) so if you liked this story, there’s a whole pile of it over there.

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: Benjamin Peek

Laurel Amberdine | 245 words

How did “The Ministry of Saturn” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I don’t really remember, to be honest. I think I wanted to write a story about werewolves. I’ve been trying to do that for a while now, but instead I wrote about a homunculus. Some time before I’d come across Paracelsus and I read what he wrote and I guess it stuck.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I write and rewrite and rewrite some more. I wish I was quicker, but I’m not. This story, like most of them, was meant to be done in a week or two, but wasn’t.

Where are you in this story?

Everywhere and nowhere, like most writers in most stories, I imagine.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I just like strange things.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I finished a novel recently. I’ll see if anything comes of it. I’m going to start a new novel soon. I’ve some short fiction I’m writing. It’s the same old thing, tapping away. If you want, you can find some more work here in Lightspeed, and I’ve some in Nightmare and other places on the net.

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

The Editors | 222 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Carrie Vaughn (“Learning Letters”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“The Day the Earthman Never Showed”). We also have two flash pieces: “In(con)solation” from Octavia Cade and “Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library” by Marie Brennan.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sharang Biswas (“Real Magic”) and Sam J. Miller (“His Guns Could Not Protect Him”). We also have two flash pieces: “The House of Linear Change” from Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe and “More Monsters Will Not Make Us Safer” by Paul Crenshaw.

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: Sarah Grey, John Wiswell, Aimee Ogden, Sandra McDonald, Amanda Helms, and Derrick Boden.

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)

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.