TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 157 (June 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: June 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

Spaceship Joyride
Dominique Dickey

Jaywalk the Stars
Elad Haber

Queen of the Andes
Ruth Joffre

Always Personal
Rich Larson

FANTASY

The Bone-Gatherer’s Lament
Wendy Nikel

And All the Fields Below
Sarah Grey

Bestiary viventem
Kyle E Miller

Philoctetes in Kabul
Deborah L. Davitt

EXCERPTS

Spring’s Arcana
Lilith Saintcrow

The Pomegranate Gate
Ariel Kaplan

NONFICTION

Book Review: Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Dark Matter Presents: Monstrous Futures, edited by Alex Woodroe
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Will of the Many by James Islington
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Dominique Dickey

Sarah Grey

Ruth Joffre

Deborah L. Davitt

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

© 2023 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Roman3d (primary image) / KanawatTH (background texture) via Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: June 2023

John Joseph Adams | 761 words

Welcome to issue 157 of Lightspeed Magazine!

While we at Lightspeed are totally committed to careful driving and pedestrian safety, you might not know it from two of our science fiction titles! “Spaceship Joyride,” a new short story by Dominique Dickey about two teens “borrowing” a spaceship, is just as much fun as the title warns you it will be. But Elad Haber’s flash piece, “Jaywalk the Stars,” is packed with desperate consequences. Our other science fiction short, “Queen of the Andes” by Ruth Joffre, also explores the painful consequences of space travel—in contrast to the terrible consequences of staying on our own climate-ravaged planet. We also have a new flash piece from Rich Larson: “Always Personal.”

Sarah Grey brings us a charming fantasy short, “And All the Fields Below,” that will give your heartstrings an enormous yank. Deborah L. Davitt takes a more classical approach in her poignant story “Philoctetes in Kabul”—where by “classical,” we’re talking about ancient Greece. We also have two flash stories: “The Bone-Gatherer’s Lament” from Wendy Nikel and “Bestiary viventem” from Kyle E Miller.

In nonfiction, our spotlight editor, Laurel Amberdine, sits down with our short fiction authors to bring you more insight on their work. The book review team offers an assortment of delightful reads, and of course, our ebook readers also enjoy a book excerpt—this month’s is Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow.

Thanks for joining us for another terrific month of speculative fiction!

Publisher’s Note: Kindle Periodicals is Closing, and We Need Your Support More Than Ever.

Many of you have likely already heard about the new existential threat to Lightspeed and all of the other digital magazines in the SF/F/H field: the impending closure, in September, of Amazon’s Kindle Periodicals program. They will be transitioning some magazines into Kindle Unlimited, and so in some respects things may continue as normal if you subscribe via Kindle Periodicals—but this shift will cut severely into the finances of any magazine currently using the service; Lightspeed, for instance, will see our largest source of funding cut it in half. (For additional information about this seismic shift, you can see Neil Clarke’s deep dive into the details at neil-clarke.com/amazon-kindle-subscriptions.)

What We Can Do About This

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Subscribe direct via our website: We have options for 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and Lifetime subscriptions. We’re in the process of also bringing back the pay-as-you-go monthly subscriptions (i.e., the way Kindle Periodicals currently works) as well. Your issues can be delivered to your Kindle or Kindle app of choice the same way they are via Kindle Periodicals, though they’d appear on your device as regular eBooks rather than the special “periodical” format Kindle Periodicals forced us to use.

Subscribe via Weightless Books: Weightless Books’s subscriptions work exactly like our Direct subscriptions, though they only have 6 and 12 month options.

Become a Patreon patron: If you just want to support Lightspeed and the other Adamant Press magazines (without getting ebooks in return), you can become one of our Patrons at Patreon. You’d be able to choose any amount that you’d like to pledge to support us, either monthly or annually.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/support for more info about all of the above.

Why We Need Your Support

There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines—and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show—so the magazines really rely on reader support. Because of that, it’s vital for us to keep as many Kindle Periodicals subscribers—which is the vast majority of our subscribers are—as possible during this upheaval. So, please—if you care about the continuation of Lightspeed and any other genre magazines you subscribe to, please take this to heart and help us make this transition.

Thank You for Being a Subscriber

Thanks so much for your generous support over the months or years you’ve been a subscriber. Together, we can ensure that Lightspeed will continue coming to you every month for many years to come.

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 forty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, A People’s Future of the United States, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. A two-time Hugo Award-winner, 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. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Spaceship Joyride

Dominique Dickey | 4234 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

The most beautiful boy you have ever seen in your life is hot-wiring a spaceship.

It’s an objectively unsexy spaceship, insofar as a spaceship can be unsexy—a six-seater built like a 2008 Honda Odyssey, a car model you’re only aware of because it continues to appear in memes.

The boy is decidedly not unsexy, though. His name is Eddie, he’s your xenobiology lab partner, and he’s currently bent over the spaceship’s popped hood. And he’s in his pajamas. His fleecy pants have rubber ducks printed on them, which he seems entirely unashamed of, which only makes him more compelling.

“You’ve done this before?” you ask him, just to have something to ask him. From the way his hands move . . . of course he’s done this before.

“All the time,” Eddie says. The spaceship makes a stuttering sort of whirring sound as it powers up. Eddie slams the hood down. “Bingo. Let’s go.”

He swings into the driver’s seat. You climb into the passenger side. You try not to watch his slender hands as he buckles his five-point harness, thinking, Eyes on your own work, kid. You’ve done this half a million times and you still fumble the buckle over your chest. The straps click into place and cinch down tight.

Eddie glances over at you. His smile is lopsided, like half of his mouth is slow on the draw. You feel something shift in your gut. “You ready?” he asks. You nod, not sure why you don’t trust your voice. He puts the spaceship in gear. He has one hand on the wheel, the other on the back of your seat, so close to touching you. If he were touching you, you think you’d lean into his hand. He’s touched you before, easy: a handshake that leads into a momentary hug, a slap on the back, ruffling your hair. Like he touches all his friends. Like there’s nothing to it. Like it doesn’t make his gut do . . . things. Not the way yours does.

He’s nothing like you. He’s normal, and you aren’t. What’s not normal about you? It’s just that he is a boy, and you are a boy, and boys aren’t supposed to feel like this. It’s that looking at him makes you want to set yourself on fire—and then at least your outsides would match how you feel on the inside, like every surface of your body is rippling and set alight.

And goddamn, the way he rolls his lower lip between his teeth as he looks back over his shoulder makes you feel something you don’t have the words to name. You force yourself to look out the windshield, at the receding parking bay of Sacred Heart Secondary School. Behind you, open space grows closer. You’ve half a mind to wish it would just swallow you and save you from the ways you’re certain to embarrass yourself tonight.

The vacuum of space is cold, cold enough to put out this ungodly fire.

The spaceship picks up speed, then tips backwards out of the parking bay and into the void. You float, straining up against the straps holding you in place. Your hair probably looks stupid in zero gravity, a cloud of waves around your face, but Eddie’s is perfect. He clicks a button on the dash. The door to the parking bay rolls shut. The ship flips over, though it doesn’t matter anymore which way is up, and then you’re zooming away from Sacred Heart.

“Where are we going?” you ask. You’ve realized you don’t know, and that’s stupid and more than a little bit reckless. Who are you to get in a stolen car with a heartbreakingly beautiful boy without a destination?

“I know a place,” he says. “About an hour out, tops.” He types a set of coordinates into the dashboard display. They’re unfamiliar to you, but not far away.

“What kind of place?”

“You’ll see.” When he grins, it lists to one side.

• • • •

The radio is busted, or maybe it’s the speakers that are blown out. All that comes out is a tuneless rattle that morphs into abrasive static, and Eddie quickly turns it off.

Either way, the sound system is shot, you have an hour of driving ahead of you, and nothing to do but talk to Eddie. He’s easy to talk to—you like talking to him—but being alone with him in the little bubble of the spaceship is not making you any more eloquent. The low light from the dashboard turns his skin smooth and bluish, but you know it only washes you out, and any hint of a flush will be even more visible on your face. You hope he doesn’t look at you. You really wish he were looking at you. His eyes slide back and forth from the windshield to the dashboard monitors, his hands at a perfect ten and two.

It’s an hour of driving and you have to talk about something. So, you talk about the latest xenobiology lab, because this is how you are useful to him. You want to be useful to him. You want him to like you, and usefulness is how you’ve always conned people into liking you. And Eddie’s good people, or at least determined to humor you, so he asks you questions about xenophyophores and makes little noises as you ramble to signal that he’s really listening.

“This can’t possibly be that interesting,” you say after a while. You check the dashboard display—you’re about fifteen minutes out from your destination, now. Damn. Either time’s sped up or Eddie’s really hauling ass in this clunky spaceship, probably because he’s realized that he’s trapped in it with you and your endless science bullshit. “I’m boring you,” you say. “I must be boring you. Your turn. You talk about something.”

“Hand to god, you’re not boring me.” His voice comes out with the same earnest intensity as his litany of well worded follow-up questions. “I think it’s really cool that you know all this stuff.”

Right. Because it’s useful.

“It’s useful, at least,” you say.

He makes a sound, glances down at the dash. “It’s not just that it’s useful, it’s that you really care.”

“Well, it was xenobiology or football, and you don’t want to see me attempt a free-throw.”

He reaches over and shoves your shoulder, laughing, and your gut does that thing again. Is this what people mean when they talk about butterflies in the belly? You hate how much you love the feeling.

• • • •

Last semester, when you first came to Sacred Heart, you didn’t care about making friends. You were the new kid, starting your senior year in a strange place due to a series of follies that you’d left half a galaxy away. Whether or not the students here liked you was beside the point. Your objective was to hit your graduation requirements, pass all your classes, and hopefully get into a decent university along the way.

Then Mrs. Marian, the xenobiology teacher, paired you with Eddie for lab. Not being liked became a terrifying prospect. You wanted this boy to like you.

You got lucky. It was easy to make Eddie smile. When he laughed it came out all at once, like the sound waves were pushing past a bottleneck in his throat. He invited you to eat lunch with him and his friends in the garden. You said yes. He invited you to study with him and his friends in the commons. You said yes.

Halfway through last semester, the invitations stopped coming. After the initial stab of panic in your chest, you realized why: because your presence was a given. He didn’t need to invite you, because he knew you would be there. Because you were his friend. You’d made it.

A few weeks ago, the invitations started up again. Always texts, never questions, as if he knew you wouldn’t say no.

Meet me by the pine for lunch. I’ll bring sandwiches.

But why? Why would he go out of his way to invite you somewhere you were already bound to be? More importantly, why does he know your needlessly complicated sandwich order: a turkey and swiss with only one slice of bread toasted, extra mustard, and the barest smidge of mayo on the not-toasted slice?

Meet me at the statue in the commons. Let’s do the lab report together.

You showed up everywhere he told you to, at the appointed time, even if it meant extricating yourself from other commitments.

Meet me by the library steps. I’ve got a question about the xeno quiz.

Sometimes—more often than not—the rest of his friends weren’t there. This made you feel awkward at first, but Eddie’s easy as hell to talk to, and then there’s the matter of feeling like you’ve got the sun under your skin when you’re with him. How could you say no to even a second of that?

Meet me on the parking deck after lights out.

How could you possibly say no, even if you know he doesn’t feel the same? He’s trying to be your friend. The least you could do is let him.

• • • •

“Ta-da!” Eddie says, with a flourish that is probably an attempt at jazz hands.

According to the GPS, you’ve arrived. According to the view out the windows, you’re precisely in the middle of nowhere. You look around, blinking, a bit afraid that you’re missing the joke.

“This is it.” Eddie kills the engine. The location indicator on the dash shifts back and forth along with the ship as it bobs freely in space.

“This is it?”

He turns towards you without taking his seatbelt off. “Yeah. I, uh, didn’t really know a place. I just wanted to take you for a drive.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Are you taking anyone to prom?” he asks, utterly without preamble.

All his friends—who you still have to remind yourself are your friends, too—are asking girls from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the girls’ school on the next rock over. Who would you ask? Who would ask you? You huff. “No,” you say.

“Do you want to go?”

“I mean, it’s a tradition, right? I can’t be the loser who doesn’t go—”

“Shut up.” He makes a sound that you can’t place, until you realize he’s halfway to laughing, holding it back. “I’m asking if you want to go with me. Do you want to go to prom with me?”

“Yes.” You don’t have to think about the answer. Your only worry is that you’ve made yourself sound too eager.

Eddie looks at you, nods, starts the spaceship’s engine again. “It’s a date,” he says, with that capsizing smile, and you’re surely blushing now.

A series of indicators on the dash light up. The speakers crackle and hiss. Beneath the static, you can hear an aborted, muffled siren.

“Where is it?” he asks, and there’s not a hint of mirth left in his voice.

You duck your head, then look around. Eddie curses. “Still veiled,” you say. There’s an emergency vehicle pulling up on you and it’s undetectable by radar or by sight, blending into the starry background. A threat you can’t make out.

You hear the staticky blare of the sirens and you are afraid, because you think about how your father’s black skin turns midnight blue in the darkness, how that darkness becomes dangerous. Not in the way a weapon is dangerous, but the way a target draws danger towards it. The bluish glow of black skin is a threat, in the sense that it is threatened.

You feel your father’s fear: a fear so old, so deeply ingrained, that you don’t know who put it there. Was there ever a single moment when the world taught you to be afraid? Or were you born running from this menace, flinching at sirens? The latter seems more likely.

You think of your father’s fear, your father’s skin.

You think of Eddie’s fear, Eddie’s skin. The beautiful boy behind the wheel turns blue in the dark. Not you, though. You’re safe, and you’re afraid—not for yourself, but for the effortlessly cool boy in the goofy pajama pants who hot-wired a spaceship just to ask you to prom.

The police ship appears all at once, sleek and black and looming above you, lights flashing red and blue. There’s an aperture in the ship’s belly. A voice comes through the radio, but the words are splintered into nonsense sounds. Still, you know what it’s saying: You are being pulled over. Please enter the law enforcement vehicle. Failure to comply with further instructions will result in consequences. You are being pulled over. Please enter the law enforcement vehicle. Failure to comply with further instructions will result in consequences.

“Play it cool,” Eddie says, as he steers through the gap.

You’ve never been cool a day in your life. You rest your hands on your knees like you’ve been taught, eyes forward. The siren stops. The bottom of the police ship closes behind you, sealing you in. There’s the hiss of pressure changing, the gut-wobbling feeling of artificial gravity settling. This is definitely not butterflies.

Eddie puts the ship in park and rolls down the window. An officer in a classic dark blue uniform strides up to the driver’s side. You scan his chest, trying to memorize his name and badge number in case anything goes sideways. Quickly—you’re meant to be facing forward, in a situation like this. It’s what you’ve been taught to do.

“Are you aware of why I stopped you?” asks Officer Holt, badge number 070963.

“No, sir,” Eddie says. His voice comes out with such a strange quality that it’s impossible not to look at him. A muscle jumps in his jaw. You can see where his pulse resides under the skin of his throat. You wonder just how fast his heart is going. You don’t want to know. His hands flex against the wheel, a grip so tight it must be painful.

You look down at your own hands in your lap, your pale skin washed out by the dashboard lights, the blue veins showing through, your red plaid pajama pants.

“Loitering in an active roadway,” the officer says, which is stupid, because space doesn’t even really have roads. Eddie doesn’t say anything. The officer asks for his license and registration. Eddie announces every move before he makes it—“My license is in my pants pocket. I’m going to reach into my pocket. The registration is in the console. I’m going to reach over and open the console.” He hands the documentation to the officer, who takes it and walks away.

Eddie’s hands return to the wheel, falling back into that same tight grip. “I’m . . . scared,” he says. It’s not a confession, because it never was a secret. You could see the fear in the way his skin tightened into goosebumps from the siren’s first sound. You’re certain he could see it on you, too.

“I’m in this with you,” you tell him.

“You’d be fine,” he says, but there’s no bitterness in it, like you think you’d be bitter in his place. He turns his head just far enough to look at you. “I’m sorry I lied.”

“It’s okay.” You don’t know what he was even lying about, until—

“I don’t do this all the time. I never do this kind of thing. I just wanted you to think—”

“I already think the world of you.” Maybe it’s too honest, but the situation seems to warrant that kind of honesty. “Wait, then why do you know how to hot-wire a spaceship?”

He shrugs. “Tutorials are easy to find, if you go looking.”

This boy, who learned to commit a felony from a goddamn YouTube tutorial, will surely be the death of you in one way or another.

A different officer comes up to the spaceship. He moves real slow, his hands on his hips, and leans so far forward his head is almost in the window. “Gentlemen,” he says, “would either of you care to explain why you’re out riding around in a stolen vehicle?”

• • • •

The panic prickling behind your sternum feels like it lasts for weeks, months, years, but it must only be a moment because by the time the spots clear from your vision, by the time you stop thinking shit-shit-shit-shit-dammit-dammit-dammit-motherfucking-hell, Eddie still hasn’t said anything and Officer Moreno, badge number 061941, is still awaiting a reply.

“There must have been a misunderstanding,” you say, before you even know what you’re saying, where you’re going with this.

“Oh?” Officer Moreno asks. Eddie looks at you with so much fear behind his eyes that it downright hurts you to see.

“Yes, sir,” you continue. “We’re students at Sacred Heart Secondary School. The school owns this vehicle, and a fleet of others like it, and regularly loans them out to students for excursions off-campus.” So far, all of this is true. The best lies are mostly truth. “We’re on an outing, and something must have been misfiled in our paperwork, leading Sacred Heart to believe we’d stolen the ship when we intended to sign it out for a few hours. See? A harmless misunderstanding.” You smile at him like you’re in a toothpaste ad. It can’t hurt.

Officer Moreno chews on his lip. “An outing, huh? Where were you even going at this time of night?”

“Nowhere in particular.” You’re surprised by how smooth the lie comes out. “We’re just practicing driving. It’s easier, you know, with fewer ships out and about.”

“Huh,” Officer Moreno says, and shuffles away.

You hear your heartbeat in your ears, but it sounds wrong. It’s like the rattling of the broken radio. Static instead of a steady thrum. You look at Eddie. He’s facing straight ahead, his expression betraying absolutely nothing, his hands still on the wheel.

Officer Holt walks back over, taking ridiculously long steps—seriously, the way he walks can’t possibly be easy on the joints. Eddie’s jaw tenses. The officer stops beside the open window.

“All right, boys,” he says, “here’s what’s going to happen next: we’re going to give you a ride back to Sacred Heart and get this whole misunderstanding sorted out. You two just sit tight, and we’ll have you back at school in a jiffy.”

“Yes, sir,” Eddie says, in a voice that hardly sounds like it’s his. Officer Holt walks away. Eddie is still gripping the wheel, facing forward.

“I think you can roll up the window,” you tell him, just to say something, to maybe get him to move, because the frozen way he’s sitting looks so tense and unnatural, so unlike the boy you know.

“Right,” he says. He presses the button to raise the window, then goes back to gripping the wheel with both hands, even though the ship’s engine is off. It doesn’t feel like you’re moving, but the location indicator on the dash begins to shift back towards Sacred Heart. You twist your hands together in your lap and wonder how soon you’ll get back, and what will await you when you arrive.

Eddie doesn’t seem that interested in talking and, honestly, neither are you. You think about a series of facts, to give yourself something to puzzle over in the silence:

Eddie wants to take you to prom.

Eddie drove you an hour out into the middle of nowhere to ask you.

Eddie must’ve been confident you’d say yes, or else ballsy as hell to risk an awkward drive back to school after you turned him down.

Eddie knows you like him.

Eddie likes you? Unclear. Maybe he wants to go as friends.

Eddie said it was a date. That’s a figure of speech. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

Eddie’s beautiful hands are still vise-tight on the steering wheel.

When he speaks, it startles the thoughts clear out of your head. “I thought sneaking back in would be the hard part, but it looks like that plan is shot,” he says. “Who’s on tonight?”

“Mrs. Marian.” Your xenobiology teacher is the resident supervisor on duty—a fact you only know because you had to slip past her on your way from your dorm to the parking deck.

“We’re in trouble.” The tension is starting to fall out of his voice, which makes it clear just how much he changed himself under pressure. It’s endearing and fascinating and honestly a little bit terrifying.

“We were already in trouble,” you say.

“We’re more in trouble.”

“She likes me.”

“Everyone likes you,” he says and again, there’s no bitterness in it.

“Plenty of people like you.”

“Like who?”

“Um. Me?”

Eddie makes that half-laugh sound again, like he’s holding the full force of it behind his teeth. It makes something ache in your chest: you want to hear the real thing. “After the past half hour, I wasn’t so sure,” he says.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s the textbook definition of my fault.”

“Okay. Maybe that’s true. But I said I’m in this with you and I meant that.”

That’s what finally gets him to look at you. “Thanks,” he says, and something about the intensity of his voice makes your gut do that annoying and wonderful thing again. Butterflies? No, xenophyophores.

• • • •

The aperture in the bottom of the police carrier opens. Eddie starts the ship, and you watch him look around as he orients himself. The parking bay of Sacred Heart is below you and a bit to one side, and for a moment you’re in space and it doesn’t matter which way’s up, and then you’re in the parking bay and all the angles feel wonky from the sudden shift in orientation. Eddie has one hand on the steering wheel, the other curled in his lap. He puts the ship in park.

“Shall we gaily march to our execution?” he asks—because of course Mrs. Marian will be right inside, waiting for you.

You should just undo your seatbelt and leave it at that, but you have to ask, while you’re still in the spaceship with him, because you can tell that as soon as he opens the door something will change. The night won’t be what it was, anymore, and that will be both a relief and a sharp sorrow.

“Wait. You said— You said it was a date. Did you mean that the way I think you mean it?”

He unbuckles his seatbelt and leans across the console, close to you. He doesn’t kiss you, but he touches your face, and it feels more intense than you’ve ever imagined a kiss could be. He’s dead serious when he says, “What the fuck are you talking about? We’re already dating.”

It’s your turn to laugh, the sound coming out broken. He looks wounded. You want to touch the wrinkle between his eyebrows, so you do. His face relaxes under your fingertips. You are aflame.

“Was this not a date?” he asks.

“You take me to all the nicest places,” you say. That gets a proper laugh out of him, his head tipped back and his mouth open wide. You feel like you’ve swallowed a star.

“What about all those times I brought you lunch?” Eddie asks. He touches your face again, a momentary brush of his hand.

“Okay,” you say. There’s nothing else to say.

“You’re a dumbass,” he tells you. You can’t argue with that.

“Well, let’s . . . gaily march forth, and all that.”

He looks at you like he doesn’t know what to do with you, then presses a button on the dash. The ship’s doors click and unlock. You climb down on wobbly legs.

Mrs. Marian is waiting as soon as you clear the parking bay. She’s a small brown woman wearing a white bathrobe open over a pajama set, her hair tied up in a silk scarf. You’ve never seen the way anger changes her face before.

“The police went around to the front entrance,” she says. “They wanted to talk with the headmaster.”

“Christ on a bike,” Eddie says, voice barely a breath.

You watch Mrs. Marian as her eyes scan over you—two teenage boys in their nightclothes, faces still tight with worry—and her furious expression breaks into one of concern.

“Were you scared?” Mrs. Marian asks.

Eddie looks at you for a moment before he nods. “Yeah.”

“I was, too.”

“It was my fault,” you say, before you even know what you’re saying. Why not? Falling on your own sword is just another way to be useful, and maybe Mrs. Marian will go easy on you.

Eddie rakes his hands over his short, tight curls. “Can you shut the hell up?”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” says Mrs. Marian. “You’re both grounded for the rest of the term. You go to class, you go to study hall, you report to your dorms. That’s it.” When Eddie starts laughing—that real, loud laugh again—Mrs. Marian pulls him into a sudden hug. He’s way taller than her but he goes limp at the contact, eyes falling shut. “What the hell is so funny?” she asks, once she’s released him.

Eddie opens his eyes and looks at you, smiling off-kilter. “Guess we aren’t going to prom after all.”

©© 2023 by Dominique Dickey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominique Dickey is a writer, editor, and cultural consultant working in RPGs and fiction. In addition to creating TRIAL, Plant Girl Game, and co-creating Tomorrow on Revelation III, Dominique has written for Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Dungeons & Dragons, and Pathfinder. Their fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine, among other venues. They live in the DC area, and are always on the hunt for their next idea. You can find them on twitter at @DomSDickey or at dominiquedickey.com.

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

Jaywalk the Stars

Elad Haber | 1321 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Take a deep breath. Hold on to something. When you open that door, it’s going to feel like you’re dying, but in the best possible way.

You’ve done the homework. Studied the colorful maps, the security schedule, the camera placement. You’re rusty, but ready.

You zip your jumpsuit up to the base of your neck and tighten your backpack. You’re in a crowded transit hub in the aft section of the ship. Huge transparent windows line the cavernous space. Outside, star sprinkled space and the occasional nose of another ship.

Your watch beeps at you. A text from UV. He’s on the move. And so are you, heading down to the lower decks.

A klaxon rings out across the ship. Yellow strips of light appear around all halls and doors. Docking procedures are beginning.

You get past the first door with a stolen access card. A swipe yields a friendly green light. The door creeps open. You slip in. A long empty corridor awaits you. The door is at the end, but the journey is treacherous. Motion sensors, hidden cameras, laser trip wires. You can’t see any of it, but it’s there.

You take out a small stick and feel around the walls until you find an open port. You kiss it for luck and plug it in. There’s a brief bit of sound as mechanicals in the walls disengage. It worked! Maybe.

Tentative, you walk past the black bubbles of housed cameras.

At one point, you glance down at your wrist. UV is represented by a small red dot in a wireframe representation of his own ship. There are a few portholes on the side of the corridor. You look out and you spot a shape moving through a similar empty corridor.

If you looked to the right of those portholes, you would see the end of the docking maneuvers of the two massive star cruisers. When the two ships line up beside each other, long white bridges extend from the two sides to meet. Those bridges are heavily monitored with checkpoints and travelers scanned and often detained by the boys in blue.

A while back, smugglers realized they could “jump” from two adjacent airlocks, circumventing the bridges and watching eyes to deliver drugs, weapons, illegal foods. Some people got famous for doing it. Some people got rich doing it. But you, you never did it for the money or the fame.

You did it for the joy of the jump.

You approach the door. It’s got small red lights and the word WARNING written all over it. There’s another porthole, larger than the other ones you passed. You look through it and you can see him across the black gulf. He pulls down his hoodie and waves at you. He’s so young.

You met on the ‘net due to similar film tastes. Before long, he asked about your past. In your youth, you had a bit of fame.

“My jaywalking days were a long time ago,” you whispered into the air. The ship’s sensors transposed your words into an encrypted text to his quarters.

“What’s it feel like? How do you steer, how do you land, how do you communicate . . .” on and on and on with questions. He was relentless, and adorable, so you relented.

“One last time,” you said.

You pull another stick from your pocket and plug it into a hidden port on the airlock door. The red lights switch to green.

The display on your watch flashes a happy blue. You look through the porthole again. It’s far, but you think you can see his green eyes.

You reach a hand to your bag, and UV does the same. Grip the mask and affix it to your nose and mouth. It suctions in and a clear shield encompasses your face. You taste the manufactured air from the mini tank in your backpack. Next, you unzip your jumpsuit. Your old spacesuit still fits, although it took a while to squeeze in. You have to take off your backpack and shoes so you hold the wall to steady yourself. Through the porthole windows, you can see UV mirroring you.

Once you’ve removed the jumpsuit, which you bundle up and store in a nearby compartment, you press a button on your chest and the suit inflates. It feels strange, like air pressure is squeezing every muscle, but it’s short-lived. In the artificial gravity of your ship, you feel big and clumsy. That will all change soon.

You grin, remembering when you spoke over video. How his face lit up when you talked about your plans. It’s dangerous to speak openly, but you did it anyway. Communications are heavily monitored, just like everything else in the caravan, the hundreds of ships containing the reminder of the human race, their destination decades away.

“It must be so freeing,” he said and you knew exactly what he meant.

You were born in space. Will you die in space too? It feels like the most natural thing, then, to take a walk outside.

The suit chimes at you that it’s airtight and secure. You tap your watch and send your own purple-hued Ready signal.

On the door, there’s a latch and a kind of hammer-shaped lever. You need to pull and twist it in the right order to open the door. You glance again through the window and see the top of UV’s head shifting from side to side. You pick up the pace on your maneuvers.

And then the door opens. Just a crack, but it’s enough to start a hurricane in the hall.

Hold on to something.

Slowly the door sighs open and the darkness of space greets you. Across the blackness, a door opens in the adjacent ship. UV looks so small in the doorframe. You can see his whole body squatting, ready to leap.

Take a deep breath.

You do a cursory glance down the halls in case anyone is coming to crash the party, but it’s just you. And him. And the stars.

Jump.

You’re floating, untethered and unmoored from the world. Like you’re skydiving underwater. You allow yourself to exhale and it feels like you are free for the first time in forever.

There’s no color in space, but it’s still beautiful.

You approach each other in the darkness. If someone was watching, it would seem fast, like a cha-cha, but from your perspective it’s a slow waltz. You can see the huge smile on his face behind his transparent facemask.

You’re smiling too. You can’t help it. You raise a hand and wave to him. Everything in space happens in slow motion, or at least, that’s what it feels like. Now he’s laughing behind his mask. He extends his own arm and waves.

Your fingers touch, just a graze, but it veers him off his trajectory.

Shit.

His back is to you now, but you know he’s panicking. He’s way off. He tries to kick with his legs back into position, but he overcorrects and initiates a spin. Those green eyes flash at you as he spins, pleading for your help, but you’re already too far away.

He floats toward the bridges connecting the two ships. They are bright and white like the devil’s smile.

He paws at the space around him to slow down, but he can’t. You strain your neck to watch him. He looks like a speck of darkness against the brilliant white of the star cruiser. Thousands of windows that normally offer nothing interesting to see. Now, probably, filling up with spectators.

He collides. The bridge shudders, but doesn’t break. Space is silent, but you imagine the sound of bones breaking. You close your eyes, finally.

Your momentum carries you to the open door. Your mask is fogged from tears. You land softly and just stand there, the airlock still open.

They’ll be coming for you.

©2023 by Elad Haber.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elad Haber is a writer originally from the Bronx and now lives in Miami, Florida with his wife, their daughter, and their dogs. His short fiction has appeared in Interfictions Online, perhappened mag, Space and Time Magazine, and the Night’s End Podcast and is forthcoming from Underland Arcana and the Simultaneous Times podcast. He is a proud graduate of Clarion East 1998. You can follow him on twitter @MusicInMyCar or on his website, eladhaber.wordpress.com.

Queen of the Andes

Ruth Joffre | 6744 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Every morning before work, I measure the Queen of the Andes. I’ve nicknamed her Nova because her trunk is a ball of spikes that reminds me of a supernova in slow motion, an explosion of leaves pointing in two hundred and three directions from the core of the bromeliad (the largest of her species—and the last). For almost thirty years, Nova has been growing, her presence in the garden expanding, like a true queen’s. Her ball of spikes now measures a full meter wide and just shy of five meters high—more than enough to dwarf me, especially once you add in the height of her regalia, her inflorescence, standing almost seven meters tall. I look like a child next to her, an infant toddling around her in awe, with no sense of what it costs to sustain a life that vast or even one as small and insignificant as mine. Next to her measurements, I include my own. Height: just below 1.7 meters. Bust: 117 centimeters. Waist: 99 centimeters. Hips: 127 centimeters. Shoe size varies by shoe brand and type, but generally an eight seems to fit me. I have no idea what my weight is because no one bothered to bring a scale to the climate shelter. Why would you? It’s the end of the world—we can eat bread if we want to. We can have popcorn every night for dinner and read until three in the morning and grow impractical flowers taller than we will ever be.

No one told us the apocalypse would end up being so freeing.

When we first arrived at the shelter, the disaster coordinators told us it would be a year or more before spots opened up on a ship. “Settle in,” they advised, handing us the keys to assigned housing units and seed packets to kickstart our garden. “Most people use this time to pick up new hobbies. Gardening, brewing, running; whatever passes the time.” Twenty-nine years later, we’re still here and still doing whatever we want while we wait for the settlements in Alpha Centauri to dispatch a refugee ship and relocate us to one of the habitable exoplanets. I work part-time on the maintenance crew responsible for the shelter’s outer hull and sensor arrays, but Abuela is retired, and she spends most of her time puttering around, fussing over the plants. In the before-time, she worked at a nursery in Bolivia’s Altiplano, preserving rare species creeping higher and higher up the mountains due to climate change. During the evacuation, she managed to save only one seed: the Queen of the Andes. For a full decade, it was so small and slow-growing no one fought us for space or questioned the wisdom of growing such a towering plant in such a small plot. Only after Nova’s spikes grew did someone balk, “What a waste! You know how many zucchini you could grow in that soil?”

Abuela’s only response was, “¿Y qué? I’m an old woman. I grow what I want.” I have no doubt Abuela would grow weed if she had the seeds; that would certainly ease her pain. For now, at least, the physicians at the clinic can confirm that she is cancer-free, but without the equipment necessary to synthesize a full course of adjuvant chemotherapy, all she can do is go on living and hope the cancer never returns or metastasizes. When the doctor first explained the limitations and told her her life expectancy had dropped twenty years and she might not live past eighty-five, Abuela chuckled. “Most of my ancestors didn’t dare dream of seventy, let alone eighty-five. I’ll be fine.” For a long time, she was spry, mischievous as a sprite. Only recently has she started to slow.

When I return with Nova’s measurements, Abuelita is pushing herself up off the bed with the walking stick I carved for her. She holds her reading glasses over her nose to study my notes, then nods with satisfaction. “Bueno. Ya está lista. We should get seeds soon.”

“Really? I thought it would take her like eighty years or more to flower.”

“Sí, in the mountains, yes, pero we did not account for this controlled climate.”

“I’ve always thought they kept it unnecessarily humid here,” I say, sitting on her bed.

“My bones love it,” she says, gathering speed on the way to the kitchen. “¿Has comido?”

“I had some oats.” I place the notebook on her side table so she can study the notes later.

“Entonces, ¿por qué estás esperando? Go to work.” She shoos me away with a spatula.

Outside, my gaze drifts back toward the Queen of the Andes, just visible over the top of a squat school building where I failed to learn calculus fifteen years ago. Math only makes sense to me in its most discrete, practical forms—heights instead of hypotheticals, word problems instead of differential equations. If a plant typically grows at the rate of one-sixth of a meter a year for its first thirty years, how worried should you be if it reaches five meters in height in a fraction of the time? In retrospect, the data was right in front of me: from trunk to rosette to inflorescence, Nova has grown at three times the normal rate, meaning that a life span of almost eighty years has been cut to around thirty. All my life, I assumed my Abuela would be gone by the time Nova flowered and I would have to sustain her legacy by bringing the seeds with me into space and planting part of the Andes millions of lightyears away. Now, we will have to make a calculation together: wait and risk keeping all the seeds on ice until a ship comes or start some in pots and hope we make it to the Alpha settlements while the inflorescence is still short enough for the ship.

Imagine: all the space in the universe and nowhere to house a single plant.

• • • •

My co-workers have already made the decision to stay on Earth until our shelter collapses or the disaster coordinators force them to leave. Their calculations were no less complicated than mine will be. For instance, Martín refuses to go anywhere until he locates his wife and daughters, from whom he was separated during the forcible evacuation of Santiago, Chile. Josefa’s only son had an untreated heart condition (an atrial septal defect) that caused a rupture in the wall between two chambers of his heart. Although he has been buried nine years now in a corner of the shelter, she will not leave his bones behind simply for the promise of a new planet humanity will destroy. Adelgonda, meanwhile, prefers the quiet of Earth. Its dwindling population. Its crèche system for queer families and children. Its relative lack of catcalls and fat-shaming. When I arrive at work, I find her standing outside the maintenance shack, staring up at the sky—or, the screened dome we programmed to mimic the real sky, I should say. Today, it’s displaying an EF5 tornado picked up by the sensors. Adelgonda tilts her head back, staring up into the tornado’s funnel.

“I can toggle the settings if you want. Turn off the sensors, throw up a blue sky.”

Slack-jawed, she responds in almost rapturous fear. “And miss this?”

With a shrug, I admit, “It’s not often we get a tornado here in Bolivia.”

“What oldschool stormchasers wouldn’t give for this view,” she croons.

“If not for that ceiling,” I say, “they’d be halfway up the funnel by now.”

This plucks a string of fear. She asks, “You think it will break through?”

“Unlikely. We’re too far down, and the walls are too thick and reinforced.”

“You’re right,” she says, equal parts reassured and disappointed. After a few stutter steps, each one punctuated with a sudden glance upward at the behemoth overhead, she follows me into the maintenance shack, where Martín is on the fiberline again, hounding the logistical authorities in one of a dozen shelters dotting the foothills of the Andes. He calls them every day (sometimes, multiple times a day) to ask after his wife and kids, begging the poor folks on the other end of the fiberline to search their databases for his wife’s name, her middle name, their kids’ names, nicknames, dog names—anything they could feasibly have given to a uniform during evacuation. He blanches, shamefaced, when he sees us see him in this state of desperation. His voice drops to a whisper as he murmurs in Portuguese, “Eu tenho que ir. Te ligo amanhã.” He hangs up with his back to us, his fingers lingering over the call button.

Adelgonda takes a chair and props her feet up on the desk. “I don’t know why you bother switching to Portuguese around us. It’s not like we don’t all speak five languages here. How hard is to get I have to go from that if you know even a little Spanish?”

He takes a steadying breath, then insists, “A man has a right to some privacy.”

“Oh? And what about a woman? Or is it only men who deserve privacy?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Beleaguered, he retreats to a tool bench, picks up a wrench the way certain people pick at their fingernails. He listens as we shrug and change the subject, asking each other half a dozen simple, everyday questions that have become a kind of litmus test for our moods, a personal shorthand built on decades of shared experience. In our lexicon, “I didn’t sleep last night” means “I don’t intend to do any work today and will leave by two” for Adelgonda, and for me “I’m worried about Abuelita” means “she hasn’t guilt tripped me once today; something’s wrong.” Martín expected us to keep talking about him and has been waiting to insert himself into the conversation ever since we changed the subject, so when I mention Abuelita, he asks, “Is she worried about pollinating the Queen?”

“Probably. But how did you know Nova’s about to flower?”

His hands twist into a question mark, as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “I mean, look at her.” I trace his sightline through the window and across the dirt path, only to be met with the flat, blank faces of buildings and the trunks of Brazil nut trees. He scratches his head self-consciously when he realizes his mistake. “Anyway, I figured it was about time. What’s your plan?”

“Honestly? Not sure yet. I don’t think we have enough bugs for all those flowers.”

“Oh—not even close,” Adelgonda says, with almost obscene respect for Nova’s abundant inflorescence. “She must have thousands of. . .what are they called?”

I squint at her for a moment, unsure what she’s asking. “Pistils?”

“Yes, how could I forget? Como pistolas,” she says, miming finger-guns.

Martín shakes his head over a screwdriver. “A queen would never bother with a gun.”

“No, she would get someone else to fire it for her,” Adelgonda blurts with vicious glee.

“Well, yeah, that’s probably what’s going to end up happening. Manual pollination.”

“You mean. . .?” Her eyes widen, then pinch, confused. “How? With a ladder?”

Martín points vaguely across the room. “We have a fifteen-meter ladder in storage.”

Just the thought of it beside Nova fills me with dread. “I’ll have to keep Abuelita away.”

“Oh yeah—this is a job for a professional,” Adelgonda says, her tone half-irony and half-dejection as she turns toward our maintenance interface, responding to the ding we all heard; that dreaded ding signaling that something has malfunctioned or broken or been torn clear off the tiny enclosures installed on the surface to ensure access to sensors and communication satellite relays in orbit. In all my time here, I have been dispatched to the surface only four times, each job more harrowing than the last, with weather intent on peeling your face off and temperatures like to boil your brain inside your skull. When Adelgonda says, “Looks like a turbine’s down in Section I,” a part of me relaxes.

I pick up a tool belt, an oil can. “Where’s Josefa?”

Martín hangs his head as he says, “You were late, so she went to the corner.”

Meaning: her son’s grave. This is one of those months where she visits it every day. If we peer through one of the hatches in Section I, we might be able to see her on the way up the dome. Her kneeling frame. Her messy braid. Those paper flowers she shapes because she cannot bear to watch something so near to her son die. Inside the dome, every grief reverberates. Every moment of joy bounces off the walls like a pinball, its trajectory erratic, its future eventually consumed by the gutter. When Adelgonda and I wave Martín away and claim this job for ourselves, I know we will stretch it out far longer than necessary. I know we will find each other in the service tunnels. Let our hands slip inside our uniforms. Tuck this pleasure away for safekeeping so that someday, when we need it, we can come back to this spot and remember: we survived.

Against all odds, we thrived.

• • • •

Space travel is so ridiculous when you think about it. Imagine building the equivalent of a giant flying city, relocating thousands of people onto it, telling them to hold onto their butts, then hurling them out of the solar system at speeds that could break their necks—and for what? A vast majority of space is just empty. It looks nothing like the digital composite photographs we know. All those brilliant reds and violets at the far ends of the spectrum? Invisible to us. Impossibly far, too. Here, at the beginning of the interstellar epoch, everything sucks in space. No one has hyper-sleep chambers, food replicators, or holographic entertainment—no one except the very rich, that is. Only fifty or so years ago, people were still shitting into suction tubes. Maybe one day we will be able to zip around fast enough to collapse our perception of the universe and turn these distant worlds into neighbors, but at the moment it still takes a full decade to travel to Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to Earth, and I’m not sure Abuelita has that long. If we leave now, she may die en route, her remains then jettisoned into space—that uninhabited stretch known as the Alpha-Earth Corridor, lined, as it must be, with the detritus of humanity’s journeys back and forth.

This is what concerns me when Josefa shares the news: a ship is coming.

“It will be here in six weeks,” she says, her voice thick with mucus and tears.

Still shocked, I move toward the transmitter. “Why wasn’t the message broadcast?”

“It just arrived,” Martín says, rubbing Josefa’s back in anxious circles. “It’s text only.”

With a tap, I wake the transmitter’s interface and read the message aloud to Adelgonda:

ARRIVING NOVEMBER 17, 2233. DEPARTING NOVEMBER 19. ROOM FOR 500,000.

“That’s it?” Her nose wrinkles in disgust and disbelief. “A hello would be nice.”

“I expect an explanation at the bare minimum,” I snap, not at her but at the note. “I for one would like to know if this ship will remain in orbit or come down to the surface; how we will be transported from the climate shelters to the ship; what provisions we should bring; who gets to go this time; is it first-come, first-serve—you know, the basics!”

From her chair, Josefa sniffles miserably. “You’ve decided to go, then?”

I watch as she folds and unfolds her embroidered handkerchief. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Well, I’m not going,” Adelgonda says, parking in a chair by Josefa. “Fuck colonizers.”

“Proxima Centauri b was uninhabited,” Martín says. He cowers under her sharp glance.

“Uninhabited by humanoids. What about the flora and fauna? Their ecosystems are being destroyed so those bumblefucks can make high fructose corn syrup.”

He shakes his oily head. “You have no way of knowing how they’re using the corn.”

“And that’s what scares me,” Adelgonda says, crossing her arms, first in defiance, then in panic, as she flashes back to what her life was like, before. “It could be a mess up there. Fascism. Indentured servitude to billionaires. Forcible attempts to rebuild the human population. I feel like I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well for people like me.” Her gaze darts to me, imploring and accusing. You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? Please don’t. Don’t you dare choose them.

Oblivious, Martín glances between us, one hand open. “. . . or it could be good?”

“You’re so naïve!” She bursts out of the chair, snapping, “You call those poor people and ask them the same questions every day when you and I and everyone here already know what the answers are. You know, Martín! You just can’t admit it.”

Martín steels his wobbly chin. “Only a coward tries to crush other people’s hope.”

“Well, at least I’m not weaponizing my misery to force strangers to be my friends.”

His face crumples briefly, then smooths, like a lake struck by stone. “Do I do that?”

“Yes!” we say in unison, then Josefa pats his back and adds, “It’s pretty exhausting.”

“Oh no,” he breathes, like someone simultaneously found out and revealed to himself. He wraps his fingers around the back of a chair, as if to launch himself toward the door, then decides against it and sags back into the conversation. “What do we do now?”

“Good question,” I murmur, raking my unwashed fingers through my hair.

He hangs his head. “I suppose we each make the decision that’s right for our families.”

“You’re my family,” Josefa says, her bright tears gleaming at us in turn, as if asking us to acknowledge a truth she believed to be understood all this time. Our careful silence confuses her. Her thumb worries the handkerchief as she considers this. “I don’t want to lose you. Any of you. Even you,” she says, plucking at Martín’s sleeves with her free hand. He perks up with gratitude, and they share a wan smile I find alarming and flirtatious, though I refrain from saying so.

Adelgonda apologizes even as she says, “Coworkers aren’t family. Not in my view.”

“That’s probably healthier,” Josefa admits. “But it still doesn’t change how I feel.”

Another maintenance alert chimes, this one overflow from the interior maintenance crew, who sometimes needed help working through the stream of requests from residents with a broken box fan or clogged drainpipe. Before anybody can claim the job, I say, “We’re not going to solve anything now—that ship isn’t going to arrive for a month and a half. Everything could change by then.” What I mean is, We could all be dead by then; just look at that tornado—do you know how rare that is? but what they all seem to hear is, Our feelings could change; we might not love each other anymore, and that seed of fear lodges in their minds, the most fertile soil left on this planet. Over the weeks, I watch it germinate, its tendrils creeping behind their eyes, under their soft pink tongues, monitoring every word, every movement. At night, under the pale light of the simulated moon, I press myself into Adelgonda and wonder, Is tonight the night it finally flowers?

I would hate to miss it.

• • • •

A second message from the transport ship arrives five weeks after the first. Abuelita and I are simmering broad beans, lentils, and purple potatoes and toasting rice in what was once a non-stick skillet, so when the transmitter chimes I activate the read-aloud function and a voice springs out of the interface on the wall:

SELECT LANGUAGE FROM FIFTY-SEVEN AVAILABLE OPTIONS

Abuelita and I exchange a glance. “I’m guessing they’ll have Spanish, not Quechua.”

A ding indicates that my selection was valid. The voice begins to read the message:

FROM THE DESK OF STARSHIP CAPTAIN FEN SHÀO

(Translated from the original Terran Taiwanese)

To the Humans of Earth:

Our starship remains on course to rendezvous with citizens of your planet on the 17th of November. We will maintain a geostationary orbit over the equator. Due to unforeseeable, regrettable, and ultimately costly systems malfunctions, we must now revise our previous capacity estimate to 250,000 persons (half the original quoted number). As such, I have been forced to institute Emergency Prioritization Protocol Alpha-2, which will utilize a tiered lottery system to select passengers from the remaining viable population. Details of the selection process and complete instructions for entering the lottery are, thus, enclosed. I look forward to welcoming all those selected to my starship in one week’s time.

As that deceitful legalese bores through our skulls like the dullest possible drill, I imagine Adelgonda alone in her apartment, shouting, What is this fuckery?!? Josefa shrugging at the thick wall of text and dismissing it. Martín poring over every word, calling all the logistical authorities on the continent and asking if this or that phrase might constitute a loophole should he win a spot for himself and then happen to locate his wife and children alive and require three more; or in the unlikely scenario that his wife won two spots, not three, and then had to make a choice, could the rule dictating that, in the event of a passenger limitation requiring family separation, priority will be awarded families who can prove those left behind will be “cared for appropriately” be applied as a mandate for social support systems, such as the reunification of lost relatives? That language gives me pause, too. I ask Abuelita, “Do you think it could be a euphemism?”

“Por supuesto. Appropriately is so vague, it could be a license for anything.”

“And that’s on top of this horrifying tier system. Listen to this: A maximum of 1% of total tickets will be allotted to persons age seventy-five years and above—and that’s only after they’ve weeded out people that don’t meet their strict health requirements!”

“¿Qué esperabas? Elders are expendable.” She stirs the pot with a wooden spoon. Mashes beans on the roof of her grumpy mouth. “I suppose it’s a good thing I’m not going, then.”

“I thought you were undecided. You said just this morning you needed time to think.”

She swats the air by her hip. “Ay, niña, don’t quote me to me. I know what I said!”

“So, then, is this your final-final decision or just your final decision for today?”

“A smart woman weighs all her options before she makes a decision.”

“If it’s options you want, enter the lottery. Win and you don’t have to make up your mind until the ship leaves. Lose and at least you’ll have a few more days of uncertainty.”

“Wow, you make it sound so appealing.” She rolls her eyes and hips as she stirs.

“I’m not doing PR for the settlements. I’m just trying to figure out where you stand.”

“I stand aquí. On Earth. I’ve been here all my life and I’ll be here until the day I die.”

I dodge the wooden spoon she brandishes with pride. “Even if I’m not here with you?”

“¿Qué?” She plops the spoon in the pot and studies me hard. “You’re leaving me here?”

“I haven’t made up my mind.” I sit down, smirking. “I’m your granddaughter, after all.”

She clucks in disbelief. “You’re not leaving. You’re going to stay here with that maldita.”

“Her name is Adelgonda. And you only dislike her because she’s like you but younger.”

“Like me?” Indignant, she wags one finger at me. “No. Everything is a fight with her.”

“My point exactly,” I say, though she is already wiping her hands on her apron, preparing a point by point rebuttal of what she expects my argument to be. Over dinner, in between bites of rice and stewed beans, she attempts to counter all my evidence—to say she’s not this or that way, I’m just misinterpreting her—and, in so doing, she just proves that I’m right and that every major relationship in my life has been built on strife and guilt. This push and pull of opinion and desire propels me out of our apartment and into the gardens, where the oblong orange skins of ají amarillo chilis gleam in pale moonlight. I know, even before I hear her footsteps, that Adelgonda will find me in the dark, that she will pluck Nova’s leaves where they hang down beside her head like the tassels of a pompom and ask not if I am entering the lottery but what I plan to do if I win. “What would you do? What would anyone do? Winning the lottery always ruins your life.”

“You could stay. We could be the ones who stay and fight.”

I tilt my head back to the sky and wonder how many of the stars simulated in it have died. How many families tried to survive on the surface and paid dearly for this mistake? Decades ago, leading climate scientists estimated it would be millennia before Earth was habitable again. What if that was a conservative assessment? I shake my head. “There’s no one left to fight, Adelgonda. All our enemies moved on. Took the battle to space. We’re the ones who were left behind.”

“We can still build something here,” she says, taking my hands. “Look what we’ve done, what you’ve helped bring to life.” Her gaze drifts up to the Queen of the Andes. Nova. My Nova. Her entire species would be extinct if not for our efforts. In a way, the species we once cultivated may have already slipped through our fingers, its lifespan and reproductive cycle perhaps forever altered by the unique climate of the shelter. How will it evolve when introduced to the arid desert of a distant world? I imagine the spines of the inflorescence sharpening and lengthening. Imagine the proboscis of a xenomorph navigating the closely packed fronds. None of my ancestors would have imagined this future. This shelter we dared bury under the mountain. This woman who risks rejection by wrapping her arms around me from behind as I start to cry. We were never supposed to live under these conditions. People need to know: we were here. We’re still here.

Sometimes, I forget: this was never meant to be our home. My parents married in El Alto, once the highest city in the world, a miniature metropolis nestled 4,150 meters high in the Andes, little more than a stone’s throw from the dry bed once known as Lake Titicaca. A fading photo of their modest wedding shows five people in attendance, not counting the bride, the groom, and the priest who married them. In this photo, a man Abuelita claims not to remember rains a handful of purple confetti over my father’s head, obscuring his smiling round face. Digital composites and a handful of photos downloaded off social media have helped fill in the mental image of my father, whose bad teeth and bushy eyebrows Abuelita remembers specifically. El Feo, she still calls him, her voice as acrid and bitter as the sad cigarettes hand-rolled by the downstairs neighbors. “If not for him, my daughter would never have left home.”

What she means is: if not for him, she would still be alive. Climate change killed both my parents when I was six months old—too young, Abuelita argued, for a trip down to the valley my paternal ancestors once called home. A flash flood trapped them in a church, the wall of water so tall it smacked loose the belltower and rained through the ceiling. I often wonder what it felt like, drowning, swimming toward their deaths. If my father was grateful, at least, that his bones would rest somewhere familiar. My mother never had the privilege. Abuelita called the local authorities for months, but DNA tests were required to separate the skeletons of all those who drowned, and the newly hired disaster coordinators were overwhelmed, understaffed. They let the earth reclaim her and started ignoring Abuelita’s call. “But I had to try. I couldn’t just give up.”

This is how Martín explains himself to Josefa when she finds out he entered the lottery.

She aims two fingers at her heart. “You promised me we would stay here together.”

“I know. I’m sorry, but you have to understand: I did it for my family.”

“What family? They’re dead, Martín. Your wife and kids are gone.”

“You don’t know that,” he says, rolling a pen fitfully across the desk.

“Yes, I do. There are only so many explanations: they’re either dead or offworld.”

“Or,” Adelgonda adds, lifting one finger, “they could be avoiding him because they don’t want to be reunited, because your wife fell in love with one of the logistical authorities at another climate shelter and now every day the guy dreads getting your call and having to lie to you.”

This theory pains Martín so much his neck seems to retract like a turtle’s into its battered, weather-beaten shell. “Lara would never do that to me,” he says, even though twenty-seven years have passed since their last kiss, and even a fraction of that time is enough to change one forever. He waves his hand, as if to dispel this thought. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. I didn’t win, so I guess I’ll be staying here with you, after all.”

“Don’t sound so excited,” Josefa mocks him, but does not break up on the spot. Resigned to each other’s choices, they list in their rolling chairs, avoiding meaningful eye contact until one last spark of indignation ignites and Josefa fixes her fury on him. “When did you find out?”

“This morning.” Long-faced, he adds, “While I was eating breakfast.”

“Really? I didn’t get a message.” I reach for the nearest interface to check.

A gasp escapes Josefa as if a ghost has rushed out of her mouth. “Not you too?”

“What? It’s not just my decision. I have other factors to consider. Abuelita. And Nova.”

“You and that fucking plant,” Josefa says, one hand clasping her forehead both in wonder and the shock of betrayal. “Do you mean to tell me you’re leaving for a flower?”

“It’s not just a flower; it’s an entire species. It’s part of our culture.”

“Our culture,” Adelgonda says, “cannot be transplanted to another world. It’s rooted here. In these mountains, with these peoples. One plant isn’t going to change that. You can’t just place the Queen of the Andes in the Alps and expect everyone around her to bend the knee—that’s just not how this works.” Her hand loops through the air—dramatic, dismissive, disappointed, for she has already identified the gap in her logic. “Not unless you’re a colonizer, anyway.”

“We wouldn’t be colonizers,” I say, glancing at the interface long enough to see the word Congratulations unadorned with the expected exclamation points, emojis, or animated confetti to the point where I feel it might be a trick. A ticket would not necessarily be a win and could never guarantee safe passage to a world prepared to embrace the ticketholder. At best, it offers the hope of continuity, a chance to carry on traditions and recreate some of the contexts that define the self in a new place. At worst, it promises assimilation, destruction. Survival on someone else’s terms, never your own. My eyes squeezed shut, I explain, “We would be refugees.”

Across the room, Josefa breathes, “You say that as if you know you’re leaving.”

“She is.” Martín points to the interface. “Isn’t that what that message says? You win?”

His viciousness makes my eyes snap open. I confirm: I did win a ticket—just the one. My mind immediately turns toward Abuelita. “I have to go,” I say, despite their protests of You can’t just leave us like this and It’s the middle of the workday and We could report you, you know. This threat comes from Martín, who grips his chair’s armrests and attempts not to shrink as I round on him with a hand on my toolbelt. I bend slightly, as if talking to a child. “You don’t really want an inspection, do you? A bunch of officious disaster coordinators poking their noses in your records and asking questions about the long calls, the years of falsified timesheets, the wasted electricity. You wouldn’t want to risk your job, would you? Not now, when you know you’re stuck here.”

His shoulders pinch as I speak, and his gaze drifts toward my shoes.

I make a sincere effort not to snicker as I say, “I didn’t think so.”

Adelgonda catches my sleeve as I turn to leave. “Talk later?”

“Maybe.” Her cautious eyes blink up at me, plaintive and bare, angled so that I can watch love begin to drain from her expression and attempt in my own haphazard way to salvage what’s left of us. “Tomorrow? Not sure how things will go with Abuelita,” I explain. I fully expect to be exhausted by a night of arguing with Abuelita, debating the pros and cons of abandoning Earth—our ancestral home, this land that made us and has every right to undo us—and preparing for any obstacle, no matter how improbable, that could prevent us from bringing a little part of our planet to a mountaintop millions of lightyears away; but, when I return home, Abuelita has already read the message, and she only has one question. “What will hurt more: staying or leaving?”

“That depends,” I say, as I take a chair at the table. “Whose hurt are we considering?”

“Everyone’s.” She glances out the window, and I know this category includes Nova.

If her seeds don’t reach Proxima Centauri, the last thirty years will have been in vain.

On the day the ship arrives, we wake early and collect the seeds Nova dropped overnight. Flowering has been swift and delicate. Each white bud opening in its own time, on its own terms. For weeks, I have been climbing this ladder in the mornings, parting the petals of Nova’s creamy white flowers, and manually transferring pollen from the fiery torches of her stamen to the sticky green dot balanced atop her pistil. For me, Nova is both mother and father, pollen and pollinated, a queen in need of nothing but a lover to follow her from room to room, ensuring all of her needs remain met until the end. All her life, Nova has enjoyed the benefits of two lovers—Abuelita and me—but, soon enough, she will only have one. At age eighty-three, Abuelita sits on a stool at the center of the garden, and she counts. Flowers, minutes, number of times I mention Adelgonda. “I estimate Nova has three, maybe four thousand more blooms,” she says.

From high up on the ladder, I call down, “And then what?”

“You know what.” She snaps her fingers and makes a parched sound like a hiker dying of thirst high on a mountain. Semelparous by nature, Queens of the Andes withers after first flower, reproducing just once in a lifetime, making it an event: the passing of the throne, rare even in the wild, and so much more so in botanical gardens that all recorded instances can be counted on one hand. “As a young botanist,” Abuelita says, “I assumed the flowering I had witnessed would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, the last gasp of a mass extinction. And now here we are.” She says this last part to Nova, not to me, as if together they had climbed to the top of the world. Her hand drifts through the puddles of seeds collecting in the tarps we strung up all around Nova.

I shake my arm, massaging the muscles. “Do you think we have enough?”

“For today, yes.” She pops one of the seeds into her mouth. “Tastes like dirt.”

I climb down the ladder to study the seeds. “They look like tiny dehydrated avocados.”

Her laugh glitters with delight. “How I wish we had avocado trees,” she says.

“I can’t remember what one tastes like. The texture, yes, but not the flavor.”

“You were so young.” Her free hand cups my cheek. “You’re still so young.”

“Maybe we can ask them to send some pits back with the next transport ship.”

“It will be too late.” She shakes her head and seeds fall from her hand like sand. Only one of the hundreds of seeds nestled in the dips of these tarps today will come with me into space. Of what remains, a portion will be preserved, kept on ice in the event of another catastrophe, and the rest will be planted. Most will die before they germinate, minute variations in their genetic make-up resulting in some being more or less adapted to these conditions—this humidity, this less than perfectly draining soil. What I bring with me to the settlements will be a longshot, a wish. One of Abuelita’s prayers. May the seeds germinate before I pass Jupiter. May the adolescent Queens of the Andes never be forced to bend their heads to fit into the hull of a starship. May they live long and proud on their new mountain thrones. If I could send a picture to Abuelita, I would.

I know now why Martín calls people every day: to avoid saying goodbye.

He refused to look me in the eye yesterday—my last day at work. Same with Josefa.

Only Adelgonda acknowledged this strangeness. “So much for being a family.”

Outside the maintenance shack, I asked, “Will you come say goodbye tomorrow?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes, trying to be tough. “By the garden?”

Suitcase in hand, I wait for her underneath the Queen of the Andes. Begrudgingly, but not by my request, Abuelita sits with me, both hands folded over the knob of the walking stick as she nods at the other refugees passing by on their way to line up for the shuttle—some of them alone, some with friends, some families, plus a trusted few holding pots with Nova’s germinating seeds, which Abuelita selected and distributed without telling me. When I spot the first one, I raise both eyebrows and cross my arms, but Abuelita shrugs. “It’s a precaution,” she says, waving one open palm in the air. “In case your pots fail.”

“I’m already bringing twenty.”

“It never hurts to have a backup. In life and in love.” Her eyes roll with her shoulders, her lips press resolutely shut, but I know what she wants to say: Adelgonda isn’t coming. La maldita. You can do better. Before I can respond, she spots a friend of hers, a ninety-four-year-old tía in a lime-green sweater pushing a walker while her middle-aged niece hauls a heavy pack and cradles a terracotta pot in her hands. Behind them, another set of refugees, then another, their long hellos and goodbyes punctuating the line like commas in a sentence. Every time someone asks Abuelita why she is staying, she gives a different answer. “So I can die in a different tin can? No thanks. It would be too risky a journey, anyway. You know how many things can kill you in space? Totally out of the blue, your ship crash lands or a virus turns you into goo. I’ll take my chances here.”

After each party passes, though, she falls silent, unsure what to say: Stay. Go on. Take me with you. I love you. Don’t let the plant die. Every minute, I think, “This is it. I’ve already waited too long,” though the line only appears to grow longer, not shorter, as people start transporting to the orbiting ship one by one. Finally, I spot Adelgonda standing under a tree in the distance. Hair curled around her cheeks, fists stuffed deep in her pockets. She will never say goodbye. I can see the life she wants for us unfold, like flower buds at dawn: deciding to stay here on Earth, moving into her apartment, having Abuelita over for dinner most nights, taking care of her in her old age, taking care of everyone, really, by building a community, opening our home to the queer orphans of the apocalypse, and never having to compromise ourselves again for capitalism. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I want to live to see that universe.

©2023 by Ruth Joffre.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 50 publications, including Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Reckoning, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House and as a Visiting Writer at the University of Washington Bothell in 2023.

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

Always Personal

Rich Larson | 743 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Kess stepped through the scrolling yellow police holo, rubbing her bagged eyes. The latest victim was male, mid-forties, sprawled in a small dark pool of blood turning to slush in the winter air. His belly had been rent open with short, savage strokes.

“Another inverse stabbing,” Barbier said, holding up a red-smeared evidence bag. “What a lucky cop you are, Kess. First month on the job and you get a serial killer with bioprinting expertise and a flair for brutality.”

The murder weapon was still wriggling, a razor-sharp corkscrew of bone animated by muscular cilia. Judging by the size, it had been growing inside the victim’s abdomen for at least a week before it slashed him apart from the inside out.

“Grown from the vic’s own DNA again?” Kess asked.

Barbier nodded. “No immune response that way,” he said. “And no gene sequences we can trace to a seller. Total custom job.” He scratched his nose with his thumbnail. “With this kind of know-how, the perp could easily have picked a heart-attack, or kidney failure, or any of a hundred subtler ways to kill someone. Instead, they went over-the-top theatrical.”

“Messy usually means personal.” Kess stared down at the contorted purple face. “Does he have any connections to the other two victims?”

Barbier snorted. “Agonizing death. That’s about it.”

• • • •

The melatonin and meditation apps weren’t doing shit, so after two sleepless hours on the bare mattress, Kess decided to get up and work. She slid on her ocs and the faces of the three vics bloomed into the digital air: Declan Shields, Alex Hogger, and now Gregory Souza.

All male, all local, but moving in vastly different social circles. Shields had been a retired doctor, Hogger an under-employed bot mechanic, and Souza a chartered accountant. The perp had chosen all three of them for evisceration, but why?

The station AI was scraping data from the vics’ social media, searching for links, movement patterns, a possible place all three of them had left their DNA for convenient harvesting. No breakthroughs so far, but when Kess pulled up the summary she did notice something.

Only Hogger had been noisy about his politics, but all three men were a deep shade of red. Pulse thudding, Kess re-opened the scan of the murder weapon, studying not the viciously sharp bone but the knot of muscle that propelled it.

It looked almost like a tiny fist.

• • • •

Professor Ariana Sonya was waiting when Kess showed up; Kess saw her in the sleet-streaked window. The house let Kess inside and directed her up the stairs to the study. From up close, the professor was gaunt, sickly, swallowed by a mustard yellow sweater and dwarfed by the bioprinter beside her.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning,” Kess said.

The professor’s bloodshot eyes were full of old anguish, calcified anguish, the kind that kept Kess up most nights. She wondered how long it had taken Sonya to select the vics: Gregory Souza, who’d anonymously donated to abortion clinic protests and blockades all his life, Alex Hogger, who’d attended them and also impregnated two separate underage girls in his younger days, Declan Shields, who’d refused to operate on a pregnant woman even as sepsis set in, losing his license but gaining a fortune in political following.

Maybe it was as simple as the fact they all liked the same massage parlor, where plenty of DNA got left behind and drinks were easy to spike with tiny spore-like embryo pouches. Kess knew she should have put it together a lot sooner. She blamed sleep deprivation.

“I can drive you to the station to make your confession,” she said. “Someone will come to get the bioprinter. Sweep the house.”

Sonya glanced over at the softly whispering machine, its carbon filaments and incubation pods. “They were some of my best work, those knives,” she said. “Puts tweaking bone density and eye color to shame.”

Kess hesitated. “You’re under no obligation to talk to me until we get to the station,” she said. “But I had a friend. She died in a car accident last year.” She had to force the words out. “Driving cross-country, through the night, to get over the right state line.”

“Everybody knows somebody.” Sonya’s voice was exhausted. “Let’s go, detective. We both have a long day ahead of us.”

Kess followed her perp past the bioprinter, down the stairs, toward the waiting car. The sky was gray as scattered ash.

©2023 by Rich Larson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and his translated collection La Fabrique des lendemains won the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. His short story “Ice” was recently adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Find free fiction and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson

The Bone-Gatherer’s Lament

Wendy Nikel | 978 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

The desert is full of bones. Sometimes, if you listen, the bones will speak.

From a distance, the Bone-Gatherer may look like he is wandering, with his basket made of dried hyssop on his back and his arms and legs and head all covered in black-blue feathers that flicker like tongues of lightless fire. He may look as if he is merely roving—a nomadic traveler stretching his lanky legs, with no singular destination in mind.

If you were, however, as near to him as one of the carrion-seekers who circle above his head, screaming their mocking songs, you would see his obsidian eyes, fixed upon a spot along the horizon. You’d see the way he shifts the weight of his burden. You’d see the heaviness of each foot’s fall. You’d see the tilt of his head, the twitch of his ears as he listens.

He listens for the bones, and the bones, in turn, speak.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. How could it not be? For so many things live there, and so many things die in its heat.

Beside a rock lie tiny jackrabbit rib-bones, picked clean by larger creatures and left to dry in the unrelenting sun. They’re so small, they nearly disappear in the blinding glimmer of the day. They’re so small, they could be mistaken for anything. They could be mistaken for nothing at all.

They speak to the Bone-Gatherer, and he hears them from afar. They tell of the hunger that crawled inside of them, that drove them from the safety of their den. Of the way the mesquite leaves whispered in the wind as they slipped from the grasp of their branches. Of the caution—oh, the caution!—that came with each step they planned and executed.

But the bones knew, as bones do, just how many of the jackrabbit’s seasons had already turned. They knew their reflexes were no longer what they’d once been. And so the end was not so much a surprise for them as the exhalation of a long-held breath.

When the Bone-Gatherer reaches them, he kneels over the bones. He whispers words that no living soul has ever heard and sets the bones gently in his basket.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. Each day in this place is a race with hunger and thirst, and each day, there are those who will lose.

Sometimes it feels to the Bone-Gatherer as if his basket is too heavy. The bones that call to him carry within their hollow insides heavy hopes and dreams and plans and sorrows that only grow lighter as the bone around them crumbles. As time flows past with the shifting of the sun.

The basket presses into the Bone-Gatherer’s shoulder, until his feathers bend and crumple beneath it. Until he has no choice but to stop, set the basket in the dust, sit down upon it, and rest.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. As is the Bone-Gatherer’s basket.

His burden is so heavy and the sun is so hot and the carrion-seekers’ shrieks so loud that he almost doesn’t hear the cry of an unfamiliar set of bones.

They are not the bones of a jackrabbit, nor a zebra-tailed lizard, nor a striped whipsnake. They are not the bones of a woodrat or titmouse or lesser finch. Not a desert creature. Something migratory. Passing through.

Lost.

The bones speak to him of a home with water aplenty, where creatures rarely perish of thirst. They speak, in their dreamy way, of cool-blue streams and pathways shaded with green. They are frightened, for they don’t belong in a place like this, and how will their others know what became of them? Who would look for them here?

The Bone-Gatherer does not speak as he walks. But he thinks. He thinks of green-shaded paths and blue running water and the fate of a small, lost creature. He thinks how heavy it will be in his basket if he cannot offer it some small peace. But how?

In his distraction, he doesn’t see a stone protruding from the ground. He trips and falls, and his basket lands heavily upon him.

It takes him a moment to gather his strength and push himself to his feet. To remember why he must go on.

He grasps the offending stone in his hand. It is heavy, but no weightier than his burdens, and seeing the flatness of its face, an idea begins to form.

“Speak,” he says, placing the stone beside the bleached-out bones. “Speak, and I will write.”

So the bones speak, and bit by bit, with a makeshift chisel, the Bone-Gatherer carves line by line, letter by letter, word by word upon the stone, until a message remains for those who’ll come looking.

“But how will they see it?” ask the bones. “It will blend in with all the others.”

The Bone-Gatherer thinks. He thinks of the things the bones have told him about their home, about the hues that he has only seen in small bursts across the desert. And then he sets about gathering those small bursts of color: the columbine, the prince’s plume, the scorpionweed, and milkvetch. He transplants them, one by one, beside the rough-carved stone, so that any who are looking would see it.

“Will that do?” the Bone-Gatherer asks the still, small bones as he kneels again at their side.

The bones quiver with gratefulness. And this time, when the Bone-Gatherer gathers the bones and whispers the words that no living soul has heard, he adds another line to his recitation. He whispers, “We will not forget you.”

As he speaks, he feels the bones grow lighter as the fear slips from their dried-up marrow.

• • • •

The desert is full of bones. And with rough-carved rocks and desert flowers, the Bone-Gatherer remembers them all.

©2023 by Wendy Nikel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with The Continuum, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit wendynikel.com.

And All the Fields Below

Sarah Grey | 2625 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

It’s only after they’ve loaded the moving truck halfway with boxes that the parents finally notice Parker’s gone.

They spend three days yelling for him. Mom waits the longest, wanders the farthest into the forest in the dark. Her voice is a plea, an agonized howl, an echo of the day Eli closed his eyes and never opened them again. “Parker,” she cries, “Come on, be a good boy. Please.”

Parker’s a very good boy, but he doesn’t come. He curls up in a hollowed-out stump, tucks his nose under his back leg to stay warm, and waits.

Eventually, all the lights in the house go out, and the moving truck pulls away.

For six months, he’d led the parents up the stairs, to where Eli sat quiet and distraught on his bed, and whimpered and woofed and begged them to notice that Eli was still there, in the house.

Upstairs. Alone. In the place the parents called Heaven.

When the moon crests the treetops and all is silent, Parker wanders back to the house. The figure at the attic window watches him, silver as starlight, then fades back into the darkened house.

Parker hurls himself against the kitchen door until the bottommost glass pane shatters, and then bolts upstairs to the attic.

• • • •

The parents, the grandparents, all of Eli’s relatives and friends—they all told Eli he’d go to Heaven, afterward. A better place, they said.

Parker is, at his core, a dog, and so he had pictured Heaven as a grassy, boundless field, with a single great house full of scritches and warm blankets and chewed rubber balls and the smoky scent of bacon.

But Heaven, it turned out, was only Eli’s own attic bedroom, with its slanting roof and a window overlooking the backyard. To Parker—who had dreaded the impending loss of his favorite boy and had slipped his head under Eli’s weakening hand, silently begging him not to go away, to Heaven or anywhere else—the fact that Heaven and home were one in the same now seemed inevitable, obvious. Of course there was no better place than here, with the parents. With Parker.

And yet—despite the long months of the parents sobbing, growing gray-faced and thin, Parker could not persuade them that Eli was still here, inside the house, alone in his attic bedroom.

Pale as the walls and hollowed out, like he might blow away in a gust.

But here.

One day the parents brought home boxes and rolls of packing tape. They rolled up Eli’s Minecraft posters, crumbled his Lego cities. Eli stood in the corner and watched, his mouth open but unspeaking, his eyes filled with intangible tears, little more than a forgotten, boy-shaped shadow.

That day Parker lay down at Eli’s feet and decided he would never leave. Not with Mom and Dad. Not with anyone.

• • • •

Parker pushes the cracked attic door open. The room is entirely bare—they took Eli’s bed! Where will he sleep now? His TV is gone, his PlayStation, all his soccer trophies and photos, the raggedy purple Bear that sat on his bed and whom Mom once stitched back together after Parker played with it a little too hard.

Gone. All of it.

Except Eli.

Eli sits in the corner, knees to his chest, head resting on his folded arms. He is shaking, overcome with tears.

Parker whines and bounds toward him. Eli looks up but does not smile. Parker tries to lick the tears away, but Eli tastes only like dust floating in sunlight, so instead he whimpers, circles twice, and lays on the carpet at Eli’s feet.

• • • •

In the daylight, people come to the house—electricians, painters, a redheaded woman in a gray suit—and so Parker hides in the forest until the sun sets and he’s certain they’re gone. At night, he sleeps beside Eli, who sometimes sits, sometimes paces, sometimes stares into the yard, sometimes weeps so hard that his face takes on the shape of a scream but no sound comes out at all—and in those moments, Parker moves closer, whimpers, even lets himself howl on Eli’s behalf.

And sometimes Eli reaches his hand out to stroke Parker’s fur so gently that Parker can hardly feel it.

But Eli never speaks, and he never leaves his room. It’s just as the parents said. No one can leave Heaven.

• • • •

One morning, a man in an orange t-shirt arrives; he replaces the broken pane of glass. Parker breaks it again that night.

More people come now, often in groups, always with the gray-suited woman. They circle the outside of the house, pointing at shutters and shingles and leaning in close to whisper to each other. First a man and a woman, the woman’s belly so round that Parker thinks she must have swallowed a pot roast for lunch. The next day, a gruff man with a ponytail and grease on his shoes, two sour-faced teenagers trailing behind him. After that, a pair of young men, the taller of the two bearing a limp, snoring infant strapped to his chest.

Parker, hidden under a leafy fringe of forest, watches them. They pass through the foyer, the living room, the kitchen, and up into the attic—solid shapes that ignore Eli’s pale presence. They stare out the attic window at the passing clouds. They smile at the view and the delicate slant of sunlight through the pines. They do not see Parker.

The last to visit is an old woman. She is tall, straight-backed and slow-moving, her white hair cropped short, her hands built for work.

Two weeks later, before the sun has a chance to rise, Parker wakes to the sound of a truck in the driveway and boots on the front steps.

He bolts out the broken glass door before he’s caught.

• • • •

The white-haired woman stares into the forest. Unlike the others, she’s noticed Parker, peering out of his hollowed stump a half-dozen yards into the trees. She stands at the edge of the grass, her wide hands on her hips, and looks right at him.

“You come here, boy,” she says. “Or are you a girl? Doesn’t matter to me. I’ve got food. I won’t hurt you.”

Parker huddles further into the darkened hollow of the stump. He is certain she will send him away—back to the parents, far from Eli.

The woman goes inside, lets the glass-paned door swing shut behind her.

She returns carrying a steel mixing bowl, sets it on the back stairs, and wanders back inside again.

Parker holds out as long as he can. He can smell it through the scent of pine and cold soil, through the smoke of a distant neighbor’s chimney. Grilled chicken.

His belly gets the better of him.

He makes a wide circle across the yard, along the edge of the house, under the attic where Eli watches him approach from above. He pads up the back stairs, careful not to let his nails click on the wood.

He’s about to plunge his face into the bowl when the woman flings the door open.

Parker leaps backward, ready to flee.

“Wait,” she says. She holds her hand out, fist closed, and lets Parker sniff it. Once he’s done, she runs her palm across his head, along his jowls, and scratches behind his left ear.

She smells warm. Alive.

“That’s a good boy,” she says. “Come on in, then.” She holds the door open. Parker slips inside.

When he races straight for the attic, she doesn’t object.

• • • •

Of course, if Parker had known the woman planned to take him to the vet, he would have stayed in the forest, within view of Eli’s window, for good.

The tech—young, with scarlet flowers tattooed up both arms—picks through his fur, pokes him in the ears. Sticks a needle in his rump and prods at his belly. Parker huddles on the exam table, making himself as small as he possibly can.

Parker’s already assessed the sprinting distance from the cold steel table to the door, from the door through the lobby to the parking lot, from the parking lot across the town, through the forest, and back to the attic where Eli’s stuck, forever, in Heaven. But the white-haired woman rests her hand on the back of Parker’s neck. Her touch is soft, consoling. It’s the only thing keeping him still.

“Yep, he’s got a chip,” says the tech.

“Oh?” says the woman. “What happens now?”

“We check the database. Find his people.”

The woman squeezes Parker’s fur.

“If we can reach them,” the tech says, “then we can give them your contact information to arrange pickup. Or you can drop him at the shelter instead. They’ll keep him until his owners arrive.”

“Give them my number,” says the woman. “Please.” She runs her hand over Parker’s head and scratches his ear, just like she did the first night.

Parker lifts his head, nudges her hand, and whimpers. He can’t leave Eli. He can’t. They all told Eli he’d go to Heaven but they didn’t tell him that Heaven meant being alone in his room, being forgotten, being left behind. Parker is all Eli has now.

And he can’t make the woman understand.

The woman scratches under Parker’s chin. Parker rests his head in her palm.

“No,” she tells the vet tech. “No shelter. I’ll take him home for now.”

• • • •

Weeks pass. There are no calls from the parents, no calls from the vet. The woman spends her days unpacking boxes, unwrapping dishes, filling the living room with a faded gray couch, bookshelves, a lamp shaped like a silver dolphin, three potted plants with leaves twice the size of Parker’s head, and a wide-screen television on which she watches shows about mustachioed men solving murders and women hurling orange balls through nets.

The woman pets him whenever he is near; it is an idle, unconscious gesture, an instinctive affection. She feeds him—dog food, mostly, but occasionally a slice of bacon, a nibble of grilled chicken off her plate.

She is no Eli, of course. She doesn’t play catch. Once, Parker brought her a weather-chewed ball from the woods, but she mumbled about pain in her back and tossed the ball into a corner by the front door.

And sometimes she loses herself. She stares at framed photos she’s arranged in rows on the bookshelves—her in the arms of a second woman, shorter, both of them young and dark-haired. In some photos, they are surrounded by a huddle of brown-eyed children. In others, they are both graying, the short woman suddenly thinner, smaller, wilting, or gone.

Afterward, the woman sits on the couch and cries in the silent, breathless way Mom cried after Eli went to Heaven.

In those moments, Parker rests his jowls on the woman’s bare feet.

And eventually, her tears fade and she scratches Parker’s ear and turns on the television. As the mustachioed man finds another clue, Parker slips up the stairs and finds Eli at the window, or in the corner. Parker comes back to the attic every night, sleeps curled at Eli’s side, always under the shadow of Eli’s hand.

Parker wants to tell Eli that the woman downstairs is gentle and kind, that she grills chicken and has the largest television Parker’s ever seen. But Parker can’t talk, and here in Heaven, Eli can’t either.

So they rest together instead, and listen to the sounds of life downstairs.

• • • •

Parker comes downstairs late and finds the woman clutching her phone to her cheek.

“Yes,” she says, “that’s right, a yellow lab. Male. No, he’s fine, no injuries. I’ve got him here in the house.”

Parker freezes. He slinks back up the stairs.

“Oh god. I’m so sorry,” the woman says. “How awful. No wonder he didn’t want to leave.”

It is. It’s the parents. They’ve called because of the chip, because of the vet. Parker dances from one paw to another. He flees to a corner of the attic, out of sight of the door, lies on the floor, and makes himself small.

Eli follows. He moves slow now, as if the world has become syrup and he must wade through it to reach Parker’s side. He sits on the carpet. He passes a hand over Parker’s head, scratches his left ear.

Parker can almost, almost feel it.

He tucks his head between his paws. He can still hear the conversation downstairs. He wonders if Eli can hear it too.

“No, I understand. It’s fine,” says the woman.

There’s a long silence. Parker closes his eyes. He has never lived anywhere but this house. He has never believed in anything but the scent of grass, the smiles of his family, the taste of good meat, and the intense love he has for Eli.

He wills his tiny world to please, please let him stay here in Heaven with Eli.

“I understand,” says the woman. “It’s a hard decision. His name’s Parker, right? Well. Parker’s been a very good boy.” Another long silence and then, in a low voice, the woman says, “Of course, yes. Absolutely. I’ll keep him here.”

That’s it, Parker thinks. The parents will come soon. They will walk right past Eli like he’s nothing more than dust and cobwebs and they will take Parker away from Heaven forever.

He nuzzles his head close to Eli and does his best to sleep.

• • • •

In the morning, Parker wakes as the sun rises, to the sound of a minivan sputtering into the driveway.

They’ve come, then. The parents have come to retrieve him. So soon. He circles, frantic, then huddles in the corner and waits for a hand on his collar to pull him downstairs and into the van.

But Eli does not come to sit beside him. Instead, he stands at the window, in the sunlight. Smiling.

And then Parker hears it: squeals and giggles.

Parker is, at his core, a family dog. He recognizes the shrieks of young children running through an open field of grass. He understands the sound of joy.

He leaps to his feet and bolts to the window beside Eli. There are children—five of them. Four girls and a boy, all dark-haired and dark-eyed, like the women in the photographs downstairs. A man and a woman, too, younger, holding hands. The white-haired woman—his woman—is outside, walking with them, her palm propped against her aching back.

She carries the chewed blue ball, the one she abandoned by the door. She shouts to the children, “I’ve got a surprise.” She looks up to the attic window, where Parker is perched with his paws on the sill.

She catches his eye, waves the ball, and tosses it onto the grass.

The children look upward, all of them at once. “Grandma got a dog!” shouts the oldest, the boy.

“Parker,” says the woman. “His name’s Parker.” She smiles up at the window. “I think he likes kids.”

Parker licks his chops. He whimpers. He shifts on his haunches and prances, then spins in a circle and sits again. He has not chased a ball in months. He has nearly forgotten the feeling.

He looks up at Eli.

And Eli looks back at him.

Eli—still shadow, still little more than motes of dust reshaped by the morning sunlight streaking through his tiny Heaven—makes no sound. But he cocks his head toward the window and grins, and Parker recognizes “Go play, Parker” on his favorite boy’s lips.

And so Parker leaves Heaven, bounding down three stairs at a time, and chases the first thrown ball out into sunlit grass.

©2023 by Sarah Grey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Grey’s short stories and Rhysling-nominated poetry have appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and many other publications. She lives with her family in Northern California, where she practices law, accumulates cats, and occasionally catches a plane bound for somewhere far away. She can be found online at sarahgrey.net.

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

Bestiary viventem

Kyle E Miller | 1370 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Finch’s dad always said a book could neither plow the earth nor feed a mare, so Finch wasn’t surprised when his secret bestiary turned out to be alive. He inherited it upon his father’s death in the summer of Finch’s fifteenth year. After burying his father in the meadow near his favorite horse’s grave, Finch read the handwritten will that wouldn’t have withstood the rigors of Law, but was good enough for them.

Before he was halfway through, he rushed to the cellar and found the black velvet bag in a drum of moldy pig feed. Finch stepped outside and untied the drawstring, and a dragon came out and filled the gloaming with its smoldering might. It was black and white and unlike anything Finch had ever seen, a creature torn from a twelfth-century monk’s manuscript. It was a poor man’s bestiary, no color to bring its images to life, but then again, this one didn’t seem to need any paint. It was breathing just the same. The strokes of a feather pen were visible in the lines that contained the dragon. Its flames looked like paper stars curled on a scissors’ edge, but they scorched the unmown bluegrass as if they were real fire.

Finch fell on his butt and cried out as the dragon roared, scaring half of the cows, goats, and horses over and through the poorly maintained fences. The dragon ate the rest.

• • • •

Finch had grown up on a North Carolina farm, the Blue Ridge Mountains darkening the horizon like a coming dream. The maze of laurel hells surrounding the farm mostly prevented that dream from arriving, as did the endless upkeep of the farm and the demands of school. Finch learned what he could from his father. Whether the consensus said America was doing good or bad, they were always poor. They couldn’t afford anything except the essentials, and in bad years they couldn’t afford those. Somehow, they managed.

When the dragon finished its meal, it curled up and went to sleep in the pasture, one white eye left open watching Finch. A few minutes later, it turned into a merman, and now Finch was watching him sleep in the bathtub. Finch blushed. He was shocked to find himself aroused at the closeness of the merman’s delicate, naked form, his body covered in shapes like the scales of a white pinecone. He hadn’t given much thought to those sorts of things yet, but he was beginning to. He dared not touch. Embarrassed, he stood up to leave, but as soon as he turned his back on the claw-footed tub, he heard it explode in splashes.

Finch ran.

The griffon was faster. It grabbed him in its talons and rushed out of the dark house, dropping Finch on the lawn and taking flight, looping around the perimeter of the farm.

Finch was stunned. The dragon had killed or driven off his livelihood. Only the old tomcat remained. He had no known relatives and few neighbors, none of them friendly. He had a monster that wouldn’t stand still and a garden being eaten by unseen pests. Cow blood dripped and clotted from the spike of a bull thistle as the griffon wheeled overhead.

The next morning, it bedded down in what used to be the cow barn and laid an egg as big and as real as a watermelon. Finch thought it tasted just as good as, if not better than, a chicken’s.

• • • •

The bestiary provided. Finch milked a leucrota and made reeking wheels of delicious green cheese. A hippogriff shed feathers plated in gold. He made beautiful jewelry from a manticore’s barbs and took prismatic scales from a siren though her tail ended in a smudge, the ink smeared as if by a drowsy monk’s thumb. And although it looked more like a goat than the horse he expected, the unicorn filled a mother-shaped hole in Finch’s heart he hadn’t known needed filling.

Perhaps this bestiary was the beating heart of all myth and monster, responsible for every sighting, every folktale, every dragon on the moors as it shapeshifted across ages. Finch’s father had never mentioned it and, having no knowledge of his ancestors or even his grandparents, Finch had no idea how it had ended up on a dirt farm in western North Carolina. It must be from England, he thought, or maybe Germany. Or maybe it was a secret of the Vatican. His father had never trusted Christians, though he believed in God Almighty. Maybe this was the reason.

Finch didn’t have names for half of the beasts he saw. And like an early field guide, the bestiary also contained familiar animals, though Finch hardly recognized some of them. They were like echoes of their earthly cousins—bat, wild goat, stag, amphisbaena, owl—only with strange dimensions and added or missing features. He recognized the bear, though not how it sculpted the raw material of its cub with its tongue. No matter how twisted the pen strokes or monstrous the beasts, however, Finch felt safe, safer even than when his father was alive.

But he soon became a sensation at the farmer’s market and the subject of speculation in the nearby town of Green’s Cross. He began to feel self-conscious. Anxiety rang him like a cowbell.

One evening, his closest neighbors came calling. Charlie was on foot and his pregnant wife Maryann sat on their little black nag. It was said they had sent one son away during a drought a few years ago and lost another before his eyes ever saw the glory of creation.

Charlie carried a mattock.

Something told Finch not to invite them inside. He didn’t even open the gate.

“Grief’s made him awful rude,” Maryann said.

“No,” Charlie said. “Not grief. Power. Fortune.”

“Is it your momma’s witch treasure? Your daddy leave you a pile of gold?”

Charlie took a step toward Finch. “Have you been under the mountain?”

“Go home,” Finch said, fighting fear and tears and trying to sound bigger than he was, but he could see they had no intention of listening to an orphaned boy.

Finch blinked, and then they were stone. The nag buckled under the weight of a petrified Maryann, tossed her to the ground, breaking off her hand, and galloped away. Finch turned around, and the basilisk had already hidden its reptilian face in the carefully drawn feathers of its wings. Finch thought they looked a bit like the leaves of an artichoke.

• • • •

Finch’s neighbors coveted his newfound wealth, but the citizens of Green’s Cross feared the power that provided it. Rumors of devils flying over roofs during the witching hour roused them. One widow reported strange footprints that led to her bedroom window. They were a God-fearing people without the grace to think He might be clever enough to separate the good from the evil on his own, even if they lived only a few miles apart. Guilty by association. They no longer felt safe.

They came one humid night in August, a silent mob. Big red-haired Stanley twisted his ankle in front of Finch’s gate and when he lit a match and saw Charlie’s petrified face staring back he nearly howled and spoiled the ambush. They found Maryann next and that was that: they would burn the farm without a fuss. Finch’s dark power had claimed an unborn baby’s soul. Finch was still sleeping inside when they emptied two drums of gasoline onto the porch and struck a match.

The house burned in the blue night and moths mistook the blaze for the moon and flew in circles above the flames until they too were burned. Finch awoke in terror. He inhaled a plume of dark smoke and collapsed as something big wrapped its black and white form around him like a slug. It held a white spear and wore a crown of black flames like calligraphy.

The beast pulled the smoke from Finch’s lungs and ate it like candy floss. He would let the boy sleep until the first light of morning struck the mountains. Meanwhile, the King of Salamanders stretched and relaxed into his kingdom of fire.

Some books just won’t burn.

©2023 by Kyle E Miller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kyle can usually be found in Michigan’s forests, turning over logs looking for life. He currently teaches first year writing at Eastern Michigan University. His writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, ergot, and 3LBE. You can find more at kyle-e-miller.com.

Philoctetes in Kabul

Deborah L. Davitt | 5547 words

Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Call me Philoctetes. My real name doesn’t matter, and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you what it is, anyway. Security concerns, you understand.

What you need to know about me is that I was a US Army Green Beret—one of the Quiet Professionals. Usually tasked with working with the locals in counterinsurgency efforts and the like. The stuff that doesn’t—or shouldn’t—make the newspapers.

I spent eight years of my life in Iraq, on and off. That’s where it all began, but it isn’t where it ended. It still hasn’t ended, as far as I’m concerned, and it probably never will. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The day it began was the day they gave me my medical discharge.

Daniels and Ortiz—not their real names—were waiting outside the commander’s office as I emerged, my discharge papers in hand, red and shaking. “It’s not right,” I fumed. “All this for a few headaches and some dizziness?” I could still hold a rifle. Could still walk. I hadn’t been messed up by an IED, hadn’t been shot through the chest by a sniper. No burns scarred my face and body. As far as I was concerned, I was hale and whole.

“Dude, you were knocked the hell out after that rocket exploded over your head last month,” Daniels said. “That was your third concussion this year.”

“And you’ve been acting strange,” Ortiz added. “Like you’re bobbing along like a balloon—when you’re not pissed off, that is.”

I turned to look at them directly. And for a moment—just a moment—instead of Kevlar body armor and fatigues, it looked like they were wearing bronze breastplates over bright-colored tunics. Crested bronze helmets and long wooden spears, tipped again with bronze. Diomedes and Odysseus, I thought, but I had no idea why.

I blinked rapidly, and the image faded away. “Is that what you told them?” I demanded, feeling my fingers crumple the papers I held.

They exchanged a tell-tale glance. “Look, I’m not going to lie to the commander when it’s a question of your health—” Ortiz began.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for fucking nothing. I’m fine.”

Daniels cleared his throat. “TBI,” he replied. “Traumatic brain injury. The Army doesn’t want to mess with it after seeing what it’s done in the NFL. Too many guys become entirely different people after one too many hits to the head.”

At the time, I just scoffed and turned away. But I guess the Army docs predicted pretty well what time would do to me and got ahead of it. At the time, I just felt like I was being disposed of. Betrayed, in a way, too.

The doctors were encouraging, in their way, as they took care of my final physical. I just felt numb, hearing the words, “don’t worry, you’ll get a pension.”

More than thirty percent unfit for duty was enough for a pension—with only ten years in, I didn’t qualify for retirement, so anything I could get was simultaneously, in the bland opinion of those doing the paperwork to muster me out, “better than nothing” and “the best they could do.”

I didn’t want it. Didn’t think I needed it. I was stubborn that way.

I tried living at home in the US for a while with my wife. Trouble is, and I had a hard time accepting it, that the docs were right. I was unfit for duty. I had difficulty sleeping, and when I slept, I woke up exhausted. I had bouts of dizziness and headaches that slowly got worse, instead of better. “You need to see a doctor about the headaches,” my wife opined.

I snapped at her, “Nothing Excedrin won’t take care of. It’s not a big deal.”

After six months of looking, and trying to make ends meet between my pension and her salary as a teacher, I managed to find a job as a management consultant. Most of the companies I dealt with had laughable problems with their production lines, which could be solved by ten minutes talking with their employees, who knew full well where things got bogged down in unnecessary paperwork. But no one wanted to change anything. No one had the will to make the changes I recommended. So why bother hiring me at all?

The headaches got worse. Sometimes, they were so bad that I was reduced to asking my wife to pick me up from work, as if I was a five-year-old with a boo-boo at school. They were depressing. Degrading. But they were something I now needed to live with. Apparently. The doctors I saw shrugged and offered Imitrex, which didn’t work worth a damn.

The visions started to come more frequently. Visions. Hallucinations. They’d sneak up on me when I was lying down in a dark room with a cool rag over my head, berating my body for failing me.

I was sitting on the rocky shore of an island I’d never seen before, screaming in agony because a snake had bitten me in the leg. The men around me all wore bronze armor and carried bronze-tipped spears. I knew that the toxin in my leg was necrotizing. That they needed to wrap a tourniquet above the bite and keep it from spreading, and get me a shot of antivenin. Even so, I might lose the damned leg.

But they didn’t hear my words, my pleas—or perhaps they just thought my words were the ravings of a fevered mind. They carried me to a hide tent, where I slowly roasted in the heat of the Aegean sun. In the fires of my own body’s fever as it struggled to fight the poison.

“Antivenin,” I begged, over and over again. “Morphine. Don’t let me die like this.”

I could hear them outside the tent, muttering, “Why won’t he shut up?” and “Gods, the stench of his flesh rotting, I can’t take it anymore.”

And I felt those words as keenly as all the words I imagined being said behind my back in reality. I rarely talked about my problems, because I didn’t want to bore people with them. Never wanted them to wish me to shut up about my woes. Civilians wouldn’t understand, anyway. They shied away from the stench of the military, with a polite “Thank you for your service” mouthed as if it mattered. A propitiation to turn away the evil eye.

When I awoke from the vision, the headache was gone. But the images lingered in my mind. They’d been so real. The pain had been real; the stench, too. The rejection by my companions—that stung as much as the wound.

As much as it had when Daniels and Ortiz went behind my back to report on my health to our commander.

Try talking to a doctor about that, huh? That’s the sort of thing that will earn you a one-way ticket to the psych ward. So I kept my mouth firmly shut about the visions.

“You know, honey,” my wife said one day, clearly picking her words with great care, “You’ve been more irritable since you came home. I’ve been putting it down to the change in circumstance. Adjusting to civilian life is hard. That’s what all the pamphlets say—”

“What do pamphlets know about anything?” I demanded. “I’m fine. I’m a civilian now. Everything is fine.”

“And adjusting to a new handicap is also very stressful—”

I cut her off, anger rising in me. “I’m not disabled. I don’t even have a placard for the car. I’m fine.”

“You don’t have a placard for the car because you won’t apply for one, but you could qualify for one if you did,” she pointed out in a tone of sweet reason.

“I don’t need one. I can walk to wherever I left the car.”

“But you keep forgetting where you parked. You looked for the car for two hours the last time you went to the mall alone. The parking garage had you tied in knots. A trip to the grocery store is almost as bad, and it’s not like you at all—”

If she was looking for an explosion, an explosion is what she got. “God damn it Beth, I’m fine! Will you stop pushing me? I don’t need to see a doctor. I don’t need wheelchair tags. I don’t need any of this.” I exhaled, on the brink of telling her that I didn’t need her nagging me, either, but some shred of self-preservation kept the words from forming on my tongue.

Beth weathered the storm of my ire, though she visibly flinched at my raised voice. I’d used parade-ground volume on her, and I realized almost immediately that I’d been wrong. “I’m sorry,” I gritted out between clenched teeth. “I shouldn’t have yelled.”

“It’s not just irritability,” she pointed out, still somehow keeping her voice calm. “You have mood swings. Like last week, when the garage door broke and you couldn’t get it back on the track—”

“Anyone would have been frustrated about that. I didn’t want to have to pay someone to come out and fix it for us.”

“You were in the garage, screaming and cursing at an inanimate object for a half an hour.”

I hesitated. “That seems pretty normal to me, given the circumstances,” I temporized.

“It might be normal for other people, but it’s not normal for you.” Tears crested in her eyes, finally streaking down her face as she tried to make me understand.

Being told that made me even angrier, but I tried to hold it in, for her sake, retreating into silence rather than take it out on her. But it still found its way out, in little fits and bursts.

I went to counseling for her sake, but I didn’t mention the visions. I took anger management courses for the sake of my marriage and of my job, where the irritability was starting to leak through, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to make it work. In the counseling sessions, she kept saying, in tears, that, “you aren’t the man I married anymore.”

“Well, no shit. Eight years in Iraq changes you,” I said, while the counselor, a nice lady in her early twenties, held her clipboard and nodded with all the weight of her degree in social work behind her. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. All she knew was what her textbooks told her, and what was that, compared to eight years of having lived it, day in, day out. “Eight years of wondering if around any given corner, there’s an IED that might take you out. A local that seemed friendly yesterday might be an enemy today.”

“Do you think that perhaps you have PTSD?” the counselor asked, scribbling something in her notes.

I snorted. “Everyone I know has PTSD of some form or another. The trick is not letting it dictate your life.” Yes, I jumped at loud noises. Fireworks did me in on New Year’s and the Fourth of July, making me feel like I was hunkered down inside a building while automatic weapons raked the walls outside. Yes, crowds made me sweat. I wanted no part of amusement parks or trade shows, let’s put it that way, all right?

But it didn’t own me. I could manage.

“There’s therapy for that, you know.”

“What, I get to talk about it with someone who’s never served, has never been there, and watch them scribble notes on their clipboard?” The words came out with more surliness than I’d intended.

She made another god-damned note. Right in front of me. Probably something to the effect of my resistance to the notion of therapy.

I wasn’t resistant to the idea of therapy. I was resistant to it being with someone who had no fucking clue what war was really like.

I stuffed it all back inside, and tried not to let it leak out. I kept my tone even at home. At work. I tried for silence, as best I could. God, how I tried.

Beth couldn’t take silence any more than she could take the temper. “It’s like you’re not even here, even when you’re in the same room with me,” she told me plaintively.

“God, Beth, what do you want me to do? I go to therapy with you. I do my best not to lose my shit when you’re around. I channel my frustration into pounding on a heavy bag in the garage. So I’m quieter now. Maybe I just don’t have anything to say.”

Apparently, that was a problem, too. So much so, that within two months, she told me she was moving out to be with some other man, a fellow teacher. Someone who was there with her, in all ways, when I was just an absent presence, a silent monolith in her life that she couldn’t understand or bear to be around anymore. The living corpse of the man she’d once loved.

At least we’d never had any kids. I took that as a blessing, to be honest.

My various employers were sympathetic, at first. As someone with a set of “invisible disabilities,” though, it was hard for them to understand why some days, I simply couldn’t work. I started to forget more than just where I’d left the car. I’d forget that we’d had a meeting on a topic the day before. Oh, once reminded, it would come back, if a little fuzzily—but it made it impossible to work effectively.

My employers couldn’t wrap their heads around that one, and neither could I.

The memory issues scared me worse than the headaches. I felt like I was losing my damned mind. It was one thing to forget where I’d parked the car. It was another to forget two hours of my day. Was it Alzheimer’s? And why was it getting worse, two years out from deployment, instead of better? Why did I wake up aching in every joint now, when I never had before—and why did the pain persist through the day, instead of getting better with exercise as the body warmed up and got more limber? Why did working on the heavy bag to deal with my frustrations leave me winded, when I’d been at pains to keep in decent shape? I couldn’t run, couldn’t do pushups, couldn’t do anything without feeling exhausted.

It took a while for the doctors to circle their wagons around another diagnosis. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, possibly linked to my anthrax vaccinations, possibly not. Not that it made much of a difference; my pension wouldn’t increase for another diagnosis.

All my employers saw was a lazy man, whose life was in shambles, and eventually, their sympathy ebbed and waned, and I lost the job, the same way I’d lost Beth.

One of the few of my buddies who’d stayed in touch recommended, “Hey, why don’t you retire down in Costa Rica? The weather’s warm. The locals are friendly. And the dollar goes a long way. You might not even have to work down there.”

Thing is, I wanted to work. I didn’t know how I’d be able to look at myself in the mirror if I wasn’t working. I’d spent my entire life accountable to no one but my superiors, and now I was dependent on a pension I still couldn’t quite believe I deserved. I had no visible scars. I wasn’t like some poor kid who’d had his face blown off by an IED, unable to go out in public till after all the skin grafts were done. Other people don’t like to smell the poison, the smell of rotting flesh, I thought often. Particularly not civilians. It intrudes on their peaceful lives. Thank you for your service, indeed.

But I had to make a choice. And I was supposed to want peace now. All the counselors talked about it. Finding peace within. As if they knew what was inside me, when they didn’t, couldn’t. But I couldn’t stay in the house. The mortgage equaled the amount my pension brought in each month, leaving no money for food or medicine, and the VA only covered so much. Taxes still needed to be paid, too. A choice was needed.

So I chose Costa Rica, and exile. I sold the house, paying half to Beth as final payment on alimony—laughable, that she wanted alimony, when she was the one with a stable job these days, but the courts are going to do what the courts are going to do. And off I went, with only a footlocker’s worth of belongings, to start a new life.

Or so I thought.

• • • •

At first, Costa Rica was okay. I put my uniforms in storage, buried my medals and ribbons in the nightstand, and tried to let the sounds of jungle birds trilling and monkeys hooting lull me to sleep at night.

It didn’t work. Everything was too strange, too new, too alien. The humidity struck me as oppressive, having been stationed in desert environments for so many years. And all my ailments followed me south. The change in climate didn’t help with them at all.

I’d once been fluent in Spanish, thanks to an intensive course at the Presidio, but these days, I could remember more words of Arabic, and the locals would never let me practice with them, insisting on using their excellent English on me instead. Even when I tried, the words blurred in my head. ‘Brain fuzz’ I’d heard it called. It was frustrating, and all I could do was cuss at myself for not being able to think. I tried some Duolingo to jog the memories loose, but found that I couldn’t concentrate on the lessons worth a damn.

And the visions came back while I sat on a white sand shore, trying for some of that fabled inner peace that everyone wanted me to find.

Alone on that craggy island, or almost. The locals avoided me, wounded as I was, tending their flocks of sheep, as if I’d had the plague. But of course, in this world, a man alone, without community, was nothing and no one. An exile might be dangerous—you never knew what they’d done to deserve it, after all. They could be a murderer, a kin-slayer, a blasphemer, anything at all . . . . My clothes wore out, and I used snares and my bow to catch animals for food, then tanned their hides to clothe myself. I walked with a crutch, favoring the leg left lamed by the snake bite. Catching a glimpse of my reflection in a dark pool of water, my beard and hair grown out, clad in skins, I looked like a wild man, not like the warrior I’d been.

I came back to my senses on the beach, feeling the sun beat into me. I’d passed out for hours. I was sunburned and sandy as I headed back home.

The story that the visions told me sometimes seemed too painfully apt, so in my tiny apartment, I shaved carefully. Took a shower. Exerted some basic level of self-care, so that I wouldn’t look as bad as I’d been in the vision—even though the face I’d seen in the dark pool had looked nothing like my own.

Even that exhausted me. I’d once been able to carry a wounded friend out of a firefight over my shoulders, and now, I’d spent too long in the sun, and could barely stand in the shower. I crawled to bed, wondering who the hell I was now. I had no job. No life. No wife. No purpose. No goals. None of my buddies had called or texted lately, and I hadn’t reached out to them, not wanting to burden them with what, to me, still felt like a bad case of malingering.

I was, for all intents and purposes, an exile, like I’d been in the vision. Without community or connection, I was no one at all.

The next morning, I determined that I had to do something, or I’d go insane. It didn’t matter if it was small, so long as it was accomplished. I could manage to make the bed without getting winded, so that was a start. I decided to go to the local library and check out their English language section. Reading I could still do, in fits and starts—my attention span was worthless these days, and the headaches tended to hit hard if I tried to push past more than a half an hour at a time. But if I could do nothing else, I could at least improve my mind.

That’s where I rediscovered Homer and the classics. Where I found the story of Philoctetes and his abandonment on that island. Maybe I’d read some version of the story back in my West Point days, and it had just resurfaced in my mind when I had the hallucinations? It was my working theory, though I couldn’t remember reading the Iliad in school.

I did my best. Changed my diet around. Tried to get exercise, when my body would allow it. Endured days spent flat on my back when it didn’t.

And then they came to see me. Ortiz and Daniels. Odysseus and Diomedes.

When they knocked at my door, I peered through the peephole and couldn’t believe my eyes. My first inclination was to pretend not to be home. My second, darker reaction was to fling the door open and demand, “What the hell are you two doing here?”

“That’s some greeting,” Ortiz said, holding up a six-pack of beer like a peace offering. “Can’t two old friends look you up?”

I wanted to call them both sons of bitches. They’d gone behind my back to report on my health to the commander of our unit. They were the reason I’d been turfed out . . . except my anger died before I could voice the words. They weren’t the reason I’d been turfed. I was.

Still, I had no intention of making it easy on them. I stood there with my arms folded, frowning. “Long way to fly when you could’ve called me first.”

“We were in the neighborhood anyway. Company training exercises.”

I took company to mean the old unit, which surprised me. I hedged for a moment, then flung up a hand and said, “You’d better come inside.”

Inside, Ortiz cracked open a beer, offering me one. I held up a hand, shaking my head no. “Can’t drink these days. Bad for the system.” What I meant was, interacts badly with my medications, but I didn’t want to say that.

They sat in my little living room, where the windows were open to the sound of jungle birds and the green of the trees, sweating in the wet heat of Costa Rica.

“It’s been a long time,” Ortiz said, and, strangely, I started to hallucinate even as he spoke. He became Odysseus, the crafty one, saying, “We never meant to leave you alone for ten years, old friend.”

“It’s been three years,” I said out loud, as much to contradict the vision as to respond to Ortiz. “Not forever, I guess.” Though it felt like an eternity. “What brings you to my humble abode, eh?”

“You, mostly,” Daniels admitted, while, overlain over him, Diomedes nodded sternly, saying, There’s been a prophecy. Only with you and your arrows on our side will Troy fall.

“Me?” I asked blankly. “Why?”

“We’ve got a lot of young, green men coming into the company,” Ortiz replied, shrugging. “And something of a brain drain as the officers with the experience to train them have retired or been killed in action.”

It took me a moment to remember that Iraq was over, but there was another war still going on. “Afghanistan.”

“Troy must fall,” Odysseus told me, leaning forward persuasively. As if the man who’d abandoned me on this rocky island could say anything that would induce me to return to fight at his side. “We’ve been fighting there for ten years, and the men are starting to fall apart. There’s talk of desertion. Of giving up and sailing home, in spite of all our oaths of brotherhood.”

“Yes, Afghanistan. Surprised you were never rotated there, to be honest.” That was Daniels talking. “I went in right after the Horse Soldiers did, when it still looked like we could work with the locals to help them defend themselves from the Taliban. To train them. Get them to work together, tribe by tribe, faction by faction. Before it all became . . . a machine.”

That’s the way the Quiet Professionals work. Behind the scenes. With the locals. Precision strikes. Not mass bombing campaigns. I closed my eyes, trying not to see two men in bronze armor sitting in my living room. “You know I was forced out on disability,” I said, my voice toneless. “You had your hands in it. I haven’t worked in the last year. I’m not . . . I’m not fit for duty.”

It hurt to say. Again, I’d spent every day of the past ten years of my life ready to be thrown into combat. Ready to be a weapon in someone else’s hands, part of an elite unit, a band of brothers. To have to admit to not being what I’d once been . . . yeah. It hurt. And again it made me confront the yawning abyss in my soul that demanded: so, what are you now, if you’re not a soldier, not a husband, not a leader?

They exchanged glances. “We’re not asking you to come back into the Army. We couldn’t—the medical discharge is final. But neither of us is exactly in, anymore, either,” Ortiz said.

“We both mustered out and took military contractor jobs about six months after they turfed you.” Daniels shrugged.

“You mean mercenaries?”

“No, I mean military contractors. The food’s better. The pay’s better. Everyone’s a professional, not a bunch of dumb kids who joined up because it beat living on food stamps.” Ortiz looked me straight in the eye. “It’s a way to serve your country without being bought and sold. Your loyalty gets rewarded.”

Odysseus nodded. “You swore oaths with us, bonds of brotherhood and loyalty to the just cause of Menelaus. While you have suffered, those oaths have not been kept. Is it not your duty to come with us back to Troy?”

The vision snapped free. I wiped my forehead, wishing for that beer, but knew better. “And why should I saddle up and ride with you again? You helped force me out to begin with. And as I keep saying, I’m not all right.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want you on the front line. We’d want you back in a desk position,” Daniels offered. “Mostly logistics and training. There’s no one else who could do the job as well as you could. And honestly, I can’t see you living here like this for the rest of your life. You’ll go stir-crazy without anything to do.”

“Brain drain? Green kids?” I prompted. My memory was working okay today, and I wanted to prove it, if only to myself.

“It’s true, even in private security companies. We’re getting a lot of people who’ve been RIF’d out as less experienced anyway. And we need officers.”

“What all do you do?”

“Embassy security. Escort duty for foreign troops. Police training. All the things we would’ve been doing anyway, but with better pay and benefits. There’s a VA-affiliated center down here in Costa Rica, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go home and have double coverage in the States?”

They looked at me, and I looked down at myself. I felt like a bum, slumped, and disheveled beside their neat-cropped hair and perfect postures. I’d been like them once. I’d been one of them once. The temptation, the desire to return, to be what—who—I’d always been, loomed large inside my heart.

“I’m not the man I used to be,” I hedged, knowing that they couldn’t know the half of it. The quarter of it. Or they wouldn’t be offering. “But if you’ll have me, I’ll go.”

• • • •

I wish I could say that having a purpose again eliminated all the symptoms. But sometimes, when a snake bites you, you stay bitten forever. I plunged myself into the work as best I could, focusing on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t. That seemed to be the most realistic thing I could do. And some days were good enough, and symptom-free enough, that I could pretend to be me, at least for a while.

Everyone around me understood when I was short-tempered or tired or just needed to swear into an empty office for a while. So many other people were in the same boat. It felt good, being embraced by my brothers and sisters in arms again. I wasn’t cut off anymore, alone on my island.

And yet . . . and yet. It wasn’t the same. I’d been in Iraq, of course, but Afghanistan was a different kettle of fish entirely. Here, loyalties could change overnight. This tribe had bad relations with that tribe going back five hundred years, so they wouldn’t work together. Or would agree to, for a day, a week, and then they’d change sides again. The complexity of the factions was staggering, and damned near impossible for someone not born in the region to keep track of, day to day.

Uzbek, Arab, and Pakistani militants flooded into the region, driven out of Pakistan by the government there, swelling the ranks of the Taliban. But NATO had withdrawn its forces, and over time more and more US forces withdrew, too, being replaced by private security companies, like the one to which I now belonged.

Suicide attacks ticked up. I began to eye any car parked along a street as an explosion waiting to happen. I wasn’t one of those tasked with clearing out the Green Zone; I didn’t carry a rifle anymore. I was one of those that our soldiers protected when I left the company compound.

I hated it. I wasn’t a dignitary, but I was a training and logistics officer. I had more information tucked in my head—on days when I could remember it clearly—than was safe for the enemy to get hold of. So I endured the dignitary treatment as best I could, chafing for the days when I would have been one of those outside the armored Humvee, clearing the lanes.

Peace treaties were signed, war-lords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of Hezb-i-Islami, were recognized as new members of the Afghan government, and acknowledged by the UN . . . only to see more of the country fall into the hands of insurgents not a month later. Everything we did seemed to be built on sand that crumbled as soon as it was settled into place.

Kunduz was taken. Kunduz was lost. Kunduz was retaken.

I watched it all through a veil of exhaustion and pain medications. China, of all governments, attempted to negotiate with the Taliban, and failed. That was early 2016, if I remember correctly. Then the parliament in Kabul was bombed and attacked with assault rifles as peace talks once again floundered to a halt.

The Taliban began to fight its own splinter factions, and for a moment or two, I experienced the heady hope that they might collapse in on themselves in an orgy of violence as they fought back pro-ISIL forces within their own ranks.

They didn’t. Instead, they formed ties with the Haqqani Network to reinforce the supremacy of Mullah Akhtar Mansoor within the Taliban.

On and on it dragged, year after year, until a peace treaty was finally signed between the US government and the Taliban, with an agreement to withdraw troops by a given date.

Kabul fell. Troy burned.

Twenty years of my life, my mind and body broken in the service of others, and for what? What was it all for? Is anything different today, than before the city fell?

The visions, the hallucinations, have no answers. Homer has no answers for me in the Iliad, either. Only the Odyssey might hold some key, some code, some message for the weary soldier. The journey before Odysseus after he returned home to Ithaca was a long one. He was commanded to leave his home once more, to travel south until he found a place so far from the sea that people there wouldn’t recognize an oar, but call it a winnowing fan. There, he was supposed to build a temple to Poseidon to win the god’s forgiveness, and a peaceful final journey home.

Where in this great world of ours, so much larger than the one known by the ancient Greeks, is there a place where no one would recognize a rifle for what it is? What is my final journey, but one to a home that no longer exists except in memory, to try to find a self who also no longer exists?

Or perhaps never existed at all: a man of peace.

©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 AnLab-winning short fiction has appeared in Analog and Galaxy’s Edge. For more about her work, including her poetry collections, The Gates of Never, Bounded by Eternity, and From Voyages Unreturning, please see edda-earth.com.

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

EXCERPT: Spring's Arcana (Tor Books)

Lilith Saintcrow | 1782 words

American Gods vs. Baba Yaga in this Russian-inspired contemporary fantasy Spring’s Arcana, by New York Times bestseller Lilith Saintcrow.

Nat Drozdova is desperate to save a life. Doctors can do little for her cancer-ridden mother, who insists there is only one cure—and that Nat must visit a skyscraper in Manhattan to get it.

Amid a snow-locked city, inside a sleek glass-walled office, Nat makes her plea and is whisked into a terrifying new world. For the skyscraper holds a hungry winter goddess who has the power to cure her mother. . .if Nat finds a stolen object of great power.

Now Nat must travel with a razor-wielding assassin across an American continent brimming with terror, wonder, and hungry divinities with every reason to consume a young woman. For her ailing mother is indeed suffering no ordinary illness, and Nat Drozdova is no ordinary girl. Blood calls to blood, magic to magic, and a daughter may indeed save what she loves . . .

. . . if it doesn’t consume her first.

This is the way to the Dead God’s Heart.

Available now from Tor Books.

TWINKLE TOES

If she’d known it was going to be this weird, maybe Nat would have just attempted a slight fib and endured her mother’s sharp annoyance. No, Mom, I went but they didn’t recognize the card, I couldn’t get in.

Like every good lie, it would be believable. God knew every “friend” who came to visit Mom in the little yellow house had vanished almost overnight once she got sick, and the Drozdovas had no extended family unless it was Uncle Leo or back in what Maria called, with a curl of her lip, “the old country.” Now Mom was stuck in hospice like a wildebeest in a drying water hole, her only visitors dotty old Leo and a daughter working two jobs, one of which was probably being offered to a new candidate right now because Nat had technically walked off midshift.

Maybe she could file for unemployment. The thought filled Nat with fresh, overwhelming weariness.

The lady behind the desk was definitely what Mom would call a power player and Uncle Leo a cast-iron bitch, devotchka, and I should know. Mrs. de Winter was tall and spare despite generous swellings at hip and chest, and even those curves looked hard and unforgiving. Her eyes were a little like Mom’s when she got angry—so dark iris and pupil blended together instead of Maria’s usual cornflower blue, but still impossibly vital, a coal seam burning underground. Her tarnished-ivory hair was swept into a braided coronet held decoratively fast by two dull black pins that were probably iron to match her presumed temperament; the whole ’do looked heavy as hell. Her suit was designer if Nat was any judge; those pinstripes were amazing.

The office itself was empty as an unlocked warehouse, a dark wooden cabinet—also looking custom-made—along one curved wall holding all its mouth-drawers prissily tight. The floor was the same wood as the massive desk; the desk’s top was empty though a sleek black computer was placed on a small additional cabinet to the right, and the chair was a very expensive ergonomic number.

Looked like things were good in the import-export business, all told, and a faint familiar swimming unease began at Nat’s fingertips, sliding up her arms. Her toes were cold, too, but that could just mean they were wet.

Don’t start your “imagining” bullshit. Come on.

The only other piece of furniture was a kidney-shaped black leather couch, and the man taking up all of it despite his leanness was in a suit similar to de Winter’s, but with no pinstripes. Bright silver caps decked his sharp-pointed boot-toes; his hair was slick-combed back from a ferocious widow’s peak, and everything about him shouted gangster. Uncle Leo had even told young Nat what some of the bluish tattoos on a man’s knuckles, chest, or back meant in the old country.

Oh, for God’s sake. Mom’s sent me to the Mob. Nat swallowed hard, holding Mrs. de Winter’s gaze, and the silence turned ridiculous. The wall behind the woman was sheer glass from top to bottom, and the snow was whirling past. If Nat let herself, she could probably even see faces in the swirls and sheet-veils.

So inventive, Mom always said, indulgently, despite a sobbing child’s insistence that it was real, that she wasn’t lying, that she heard, she saw.

“Maria Drozdova,” the hot-eyed woman finally said, a ghost of an accent fainter than Mom’s riding each word. Her desk was bare of even a pen cup, and the surface was buffed to a high shine. The janitorial staff probably left it for last each evening, and cleaned it twice to make sure. “I see. And you are?”

“Nat, ma’am.” She couldn’t help it; she put one toe behind her and bobbed a little curtsy, like in kindergarten ballet. Office parties around here were probably a real hoot. “Her daughter.”

“You said that, yes.” De Winter’s eyes narrowed, and her lips parted slightly. Strong white teeth peered out, and Nat’s arms were completely numb now. Her legs were following suit. “Well, well. Little Marotchka had a daughter after all.” Her fingers were tipped with bloodred nails, the polish impeccable and glowing gemlike; her left hand twitched, sending each varnished fingertip tapping against the desk in turn. “Come in, come in, sit down. Dima, fetch the chair, the poor thing has come through the snow to visit her old grandmother.”

What the hell? Nat’s jaw threatened to drop. “Ma’am—”

“Not old enough to be a baba,” the man muttered, each word flat and uninterested except for a faint edge of amusement. His own accent was eerily like Leo’s; her uncle never sounded this coldly amused, though. “Is that what I should say? Should I also bring bread and salt?”

“Nasty child.” The businesswoman’s lip curled a little further. Her lips were painted with pure business gloss, not matching the crimson nails at all. “Pay no attention to him, vnuchka. The hospital, you say? What could be wrong with my darling Marotchka?”

You don’t know? You look like you’ve got enough money to find out whatever you want to. Nat bit back both the words and a welcome burn of irritation. It was her usual response to one of Mom’s games, at least nowadays.

Now that she was an adult, thank you very much, with plenty of bad teenage decisions firmly in her past and the ability to check out self-help books at the library.

“Cancer,” she said, perhaps a little more loudly than she needed to. “That’s what the doctors think. And some dementia. She collapsed two months ago and—”

“Doctors, with their scary words. Diagnosis, they say. Most of it’s lies; they guess as much as other mortals.” Those red fingernails jabbed, not straight at Nat but slightly to the side, and the man from the couch glided into Nat’s peripheral vision, carrying a straight-backed wooden chair that must have come from a hidden closet.

In fact, it looked an awful lot like the Penitence Chair in her elementary school principal’s office. Nat suppressed a flinch as he settled it precisely in front of the desk, a little too close to be comfortable, and stepped smartly aside. Those silvery toes glittered— twinkle toes, she thought, and had to suppress a giggle that might have tasted like lunch if she’d been able to eat anything.

“Mom wanted me to come see you.” Nat took care to make the words as brisk and business-adjacent as possible. “So I have. I don’t know what happened between you two, but she’s dying.” Her chin set, a tiny defiant movement she could feel vibrating down her aching neck. “Maybe she just wanted you to know.” Her right foot squelched as she shifted her weight, and it was probably the last moment she could have stamped out, taken the elevator, gone through that bone-clicking turnstile, and plunged into a winter afternoon with her duty done. “I’m sorry to have bothered—”

“Dima,” Mrs. de Winter of Yaga Imports said, “put her in the chair, please.”

One moment Nat was getting ready to exit in dramatic fashion, the next the gangster in the almost-black suit had her arm and was dragging her. His lips skinned back from his similarly pearly teeth; he thrust her into the chair and shook his hand like she’d burned him. “Fuck,” he snarled in Russian, just like Uncle Leo when he was working on a car engine. But unlike Leo, who really wasn’t her uncle at all, this man didn’t immediately raise his dark gaze to ceiling or sky and mutter to Christ for forgiveness.

“There it is.” The businesswoman folded her arms, and those bleak, black eyes pinned Nat to hard wood. Just like being in school again, teachers watching your struggles with narrow-eyed pleasure.

Nobody cared, not in this world. The sooner you figured that out, the better.

“Now,” the woman continued, “Marotchka sends her daughter here. How quaint. How very droll.”

The man, still shaking his hand ruefully, cast de Winter a sly sideways glance. “Not word I’d choose, but if it make you happy—”

“Shut up, Dima. Now, as for you . . .” She returned her coal-hot gaze to Nat and leaned over the desktop, flattening bony, ruby-tipped hands on its surface. The custodial staff would probably swear at all the smudges, Nat thought hazily, and tried to move.

No good. She was nailed to the chair, held invisibly fast, and hadn’t the faintest idea how the hell that had happened.

“Tell me, vnuchka moya.” Now de Winter sounded almost kind, but she leaned avidly forward, lips slightly parted and those white teeth gleaming like the snow-filled window. “Would you like to make your mama all better?”

Copyright © 2023 by Lilith Saintcrow. Excerpted from Spring Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow. Published by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lilith Saintcrow was born in New Mexico, fell in love with writing during second grade, and has continued obsessively ever since. She currently resides in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her children, dogs, cat, and a library for wayward texts.

EXCERPT: The Pomegranate Gate (Erewhon Books)

Ariel Kaplan | 4824 words

The first adventure in the Mirror Realm Cycle, a Spanish Inquisition-era fantasy trilogy inspired by Jewish folklore, with echoes of Naomi Novik and Katherine Arden.

Naftaly was dreaming again, in that strange dream-landscape where the stars whirled overhead like snow on the wind and the people he met all had square-pupiled eyes. They were all strangers to him, the square-eyed people he dreamed of—all save one: his father. In Naftaly’s dreams, his father’s eyes were odd, too, though waking they were wholly ordinary.

Naftaly did not know if his own dreaming face had the square-pupiled eyes as well, having never come upon a mirror in his dreams, but he assumed so . . . His eyes, awake, were the same dark brown as his father’s, round-pupiled and not particularly interesting.

Available September 26, 2023 from Erewhon Books.

Naftaly and the old woman made their way through the serpentine lanes of Eliossana. He could no longer remember how to find the house of his father’s draper, but he had fairly clear memories of the synagogue, which had been endowed by the merchants of the little town some two hundred years prior. It was bigger and fancier than one would expect in a town so small, the façade anchored by horseshoe-topped pillars; he’d been told it had been modeled after a synagogue in some northern city. “I believe it was this way,” he said. “But I can’t swear to it.”

“How long ago was it you were here?” asked the old woman, as they picked their way through the cobbled streets. The town had been rich, once, but now it was falling into disrepair, and the road was pocked with holes. Holes and animal droppings.

Naftaly hoped they were animal droppings. It was hard to remember the way when he had to pay so much attention to what he might be stepping in.

“It was before the war,” he said. “I was a boy.”

“You’re still a boy.”

“I’m as close to thirty as I am to twenty,” he said.

Ignoring this, she asked, “Does the town look the same?”

“No,” he said sourly. “It doesn’t.”

For one thing, they’d just passed a tavern that Naftaly had no memory of. And while he hardly expected to recognize anyone from a few visits eight or ten years before, he had yet to see a single man with a covered head.

“There,” he said, pointing. “That’s the synagogue.”

There was a small white building ahead, fitted with peaked windows along the front to welcome the light. As a boy, Naftaly had thought it must be one of the loveliest buildings in Sefarad, the face carved like a single piece of elaborate lace. “We should go inside,” he said. “There must be someone there who can help us.”

The old woman caught his arm tightly. “Wait,” she said.

“What? Why?” Naftaly turned to look at her, just as, from within the synagogue a bell chimed, twice, and then twice more: a synagogue no longer. It had been made over into a church.

Naftaly felt a wave of dread pass through him. “But where are all the Jews?” he whispered. “They can’t have all gone, can they?”

“If they converted the synagogue there must be no one left,” she said. “Either they fled, they were killed, or they converted. In any case, there’s no help for us here.”

“Wait,” he said. “There’s something posted on the doorway there. I’d like to see what it says.”

“It can’t say anything helpful to us.”

“I’d still like to know,” he said. “Can you go look? You’re inconspicuous.”

“You can’t possibly think anyone ever took the time to teach me to read.”

“Fine,” he said, straightening his tunic. He stalked closer to the door, stopping just close enough to read what was written there.

He did not need to read far. It was an Edict of Grace.

The forced converts of Eliossana would have a month to confess their Judaizing and receive some sort of penance. After that, they would be at the mercy of the Inquisition. They would take testimony from everyone in town, looking for people who bathed on Fridays, or took the veins out of their meat, or never bought pork in the market.

Something like this had happened in every town outside of Rimon itself over the past years, since the Queen had brought the Inquisition to Sefarad. It had happened in Barcino, where Naftaly’s mother’s people were from. An uncle—a convert who had walked into the Church with open arms and a desire for more opportunities than his heritage allowed—had run afoul of them some time ago, in a year prior to Naftaly’s remembering. But his mother told the story: he confessed, and the Inquisition accepted his confession, and then they’d sentenced him to ten years rowing a galley. And so instead of perishing quickly at the stake, he’d gone slowly in the hold of a ship.

But his mother had told Naftaly: her uncle had been sincere in his conversion—he’d cut ties with the family after—and his confession had been made under torture. And they’d killed him anyway. “Never forget it,” she had said. “They claim interest in your heart, but all they really care about is your blood.”

Naftaly returned to the old woman and whispered in her ear.

Here was the issue: the Inquisition could not touch them, not until August, anyway, but it meant that any conversos living in Eliossana would be hard-pressed to help them, which might lead to prison, torture, public burning, or all three.

However, that it was here did give a clue what had happened to everyone. “If the Inquisition is here,” he said slowly. “There must be conversos. If all the Jews had died or fled, they wouldn’t bother. Salomon Machorro might still be here. They could be anusim.”

“If he is here,” she said. “Do you really think he’ll help us with the Inquisition looking over his shoulder?”

“He might,” he said.

“Not if he wants to live,” she said. “We should go back to the road, follow the caravan.”

“All the way to Merja. On foot? With no food or water?”

The old woman had no answer to that. The men in the tavern were watching them warily. It was early, Naftaly thought, for there to be so many men drinking wine.

The old woman said, “We should get off the street. Or at least keep moving.”

Naftaly had inadvertently met the eyes of a man watching them from the tavern, who responded with an obscene gesture. The old woman took his arm meaningfully and began pulling him back up the road.

Toba followed the Mazik toward the alcalá, out of view of the city the Mazik told her was also called Rimon, straddling a river that was also called the Guadalraman, in the shadow of a mountain that was also called Sebah.

As they drew closer, she could see that the alcalá was not one large building but several smaller ones. In the front there was a wall with a gate in the center, and through this was a courtyard housing a garden filled with trees and flowers and ornamental greenery of strange types Toba did not know, with leaves shaped like fans, like hearts, like the faces of a foxes. Every tree bore fruit—oranges, figs—which should not have been in season—pomegranates, apples, and some orange and red fruit that was shaped like a raspberry but was the size of a melon. In the center there was a tiled fountain, a circle set inside a hexagon set inside a starburst. On the other side of the garden was a set of broad, white steps, leading up to a dais, and then, behind this, a building with a dozen or more arched doorways.

“This is the public garden,” the Mazik said. “You may make use of it. Adon Asmel’s private garden is in the inner courtyard; keep out of that while you’re here.”

Toba was still struggling to keep up. The Mazik climbed the stairs to the dais, turning when he saw Toba was still on the other side of the fountain. “Can’t you go faster than this?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said.

“Is there something wrong with you?” he asked.

Shrugging helplessly, she said, “Yes.”

Looking thoroughly exasperated, he crooked a finger at her. She felt a pulling sensation, and then found herself at his side, on top of the dais, struggling to keep her balance. He turned and kept walking, entering the building and turning to the left, leaving her struggling to catch up again.

“The kitchen,” he said, “Is back the other way, not that you’ll need to go there. Asmel’s private apartments are along the western wall; don’t go there either.”

“Where should I go?” she asked.

He stopped in front of a room with a great wooden door. It was, Toba realized, the only door she’d seen so far; all of the rooms seemed open to the gardens, as if the building itself were only a latticed shell meant to demarcate spaces and offer a roof. The heavy wooden door was completely mismatched with the rest of it.

“Here,” he said, pulling the door open and walking inside.

It was a library. The wall that contained the doorway was lined with shelves, as was the wall on Toba’s right. The wall opposite her contained an open window that looked out over the garden they’d walked through, and above that were a line of colored-glass windows depicting intricate geometric shapes that cast multicolored sunbeams on the floor. She could not see the fourth wall; concealing it was a labyrinth of shelves, set so closely she could not say how long the room continued in that direction. The area before her was an open space, taken up partly by a large table made of the same wood as the door. The Mazik disappeared into the maze of shelves, but kept up his talking.

“Which five?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Which five languages, girl, or was that an idle boast?”

Toba had paused to examine the contents of a shelf—a mistake, as now there were two paths through the books, and she wasn’t certain which one he’d taken. “Hebrew, La’az Sefaradi, Latin, Zayeti, and Arabic. Do I go right or left?”

“I’ll start you on a translation,” he said, his voice coming from the left. Toba followed it but found herself in a cubby of books, so she turned and tried the other direction. “Though I expect you’re too slow to finish it before the next moon. You’ve gone the wrong way again; you just passed me.”

“I’m very quick,” she said.

She heard a small snort. “All evidence to the contrary,” he muttered from somewhere ahead. It was dim amid the shelves; the light from the window barely reached here, and the strange sconces on the walls—which housed stones instead of candles—did not reach this far. Toba’s eyes had never been very good, and she had to steady herself on a shelf when her toe caught on the uneven floor. She came around a corner and saw the Mazik before a cubby in the shelf-labyrinth. He hadn’t heard her approach, and from within his satchel he pulled out the book she’d seen before, and then a second. He frowned at the shelves for a moment before sliding both volumes into an empty spot between two others.

“I read faster than I walk,” she said, and he turned sharply, frowning.

After a beat, he said, “Let’s hope so.” He turned to a nearby shelf and pulled out another book, holding it out to Toba.

She took it, reading the cover. It was a book she knew.

“You’ve seen this before?” he asked, reading her expression.

“Yes,” she said. “Once or twice. This is a translation, though.”

“Is it? Fine. I’d like a copy in Latin and one in Arabic.”

Toba hesitated before asking, “You want me to translate the Hebrew translation back into Arabic?”

The Mazik looked a little consternated, as if he hadn’t realized that’s quite what he was asking, but said, “Just—yes. That’s what I want.” He brushed past her and she followed him through the shelves, back to the main gallery. Indicating the table, he said, “You may work here,” and then turned to leave.

“Paper,” she blurted.

“What?”

“I’ll need paper,” she said. “Or parchment, if that’s what you use here. But the work will take four times as long on parchment, so I hope it’s paper.”

“Ah,” he said. He doubled back and smacked a palm down on the table. Underneath appeared a stack of perfectly formed leaves of paper. “That’s all, then?”

“Ink? And a pen?”

He shook his head, feigning—she thought—annoyance, but managed to summon ink and a trio of pens, seemingly out of the surface of the table. “Is there anything else?” he asked.

Toba pondered this. What if he disbelieved her? What if this was some trick to prove she’d only made up her skills, to keep herself alive, and when he found out, he’d do something dreadful. “I can really do this,” she said.

“I’m sure you can.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“I have not implied thinking so.”

“Would you like a demonstration?”

“No.”

But Toba was providing one anyway. She’d opened the book in front of her and transcribed the first line. Only she’d decided to ignore her grandfather’s warning, and she wrote with both pens; the Latin with her right and the Arabic with her left.

The Mazik drew back in shock. “How are you doing this? And why?”

The why, obviously, was to prove her usefulness. As to the how, she said, “It’s easier for me this way. I only have to parse the meaning of each phrase once.”

He asked, “Can many mortals write with both hands at once?”

She said, honestly, “I don’t know. But you see, I really can do your work. You don’t have to worry.”

“I wasn’t—”

“What should I do when I’ve finished? Should I find you?”

“Me?” he asked, as if such a thing had never occurred to him, that he might ever see her again.

“Him, then?” she asked, indicating what she thought was the direction of the door.

“Adon Asmel? Why would he want to see you?”

“To review my progress?”

He laughed. “Little one,” he said. “Do not find yourself seeking approval from Asmel. You won’t get it.” Looking a bit disconcerted, he waved an arm and manifested what Toba could only describe as a shadow, saying, “Here. If you must have someone to bring you paper and ink and yammer away at, you can have this.”

Toba looked at the shadow. “Is it—” she said. “What is it?”

“A servant,” he said.

She peered at it closely; she could see the stone wall behind it as clearly as if she were looking through a glass of water. “Is it some different sort of Mazik?”

He scoffed. “It’s only a figment I’ve created. A shade.” To the shade, he said, “If she asks for ink or pen or paper, you may provide it, but nothing more.”

Hesitantly, Toba got up and approached the shade. It felt neither hot nor cold, and she leaned closer to see if it had a smell: it did not. “What shall I call him?” she asked hesitantly.

“Call it? It has no name. It’s simply a shade, it has no will. It will do what I’ve asked, that’s all.”

“It can make paper from nothing. So it has magic?”

“I made it,” he said, “so it has a fraction of mine. It will be able to meet your needs.”

“Thank you,” she said, uncertainly, to the shade, she said, “Can you speak?”

“That it cannot do,” he said, and turned his back on her. “If you finish, you may leave your work on the table.”

“And if I don’t?” she asked his back.

“You just keep speaking, don’t you? If you don’t finish, then leave whatever you have done here.”

“I mean,” she said, “What will happen to me?”

He looked at her incredulously. “Oh, all right. I shall unhinge my jaw like a serpent and swallow you whole. May I take my leave now?”

She gasped. And then he really did leave.

Toba went to the large window and looked out at the garden and realized that in a place so large, she’d only seen one person. Where were the servants—or were there only these shades? For that matter, where were the other Maziks? She looked back toward the shade the Mazik had left her, who only hovered in the corner and looked like nothing much. If only it could talk, somehow, as she had so many questions.

Someone was maintaining all this, unless it was being done by magic. But if they could maintain an estate by magic, why would they possibly need her to translate a three-hundred-year old book? Returning to the table, she looked down at the first line she’d translated; she’d never read the Guide for the Perplexed, but she’d scanned the first few pages more than once over her grandfather’s shoulder. This appeared to be the same text. It looked old, though. As if, rather than having been printed from a block, it had been written by hand. The pages were going very yellow.

She wondered what other books she’d find in the Mazik’s library.

She wondered how many of them were Mazik books . . . books she’d never have another chance to read.

Putting the Guide aside, she went to the nearest shelf, scanning to see how the books were organized, by author or language or date, but there was no making sense of it; it was as if they’d all been grouped according to when they’d been acquired, or else simply at random.

Reminding herself that she was not here to be the Mazik’s librarian, she sat down in the surprisingly comfortable chair to translate the Rambam.

Seven

Elena Peres’s mind was a clockwork.

That was what her husband often told her; he’d seen an example of something he called a mechanical timepiece at court, some gift to the Emir of Rimon from some Burgundian prince. Alasar had explained that the inside of the clock contained a spring and some assortment of gears: it needed to be wound once daily to generate the tension it required to function.

Elena had asked her husband to draw her a picture of the inner workings of the device, but of course one could not simply disembowel an item belonging to the Emir, even if he’d had access. So she’d tried to design one herself, using the vague explanations offered by her husband, until she’d reluctantly admitted defeat: she could not, she decided, replicate the timepiece without seeing it first. Shortly thereafter she’d found herself expecting a child—her only child, as she would sadly learn—and applied that same detailed dedication to understanding the inner workings of the small creature that Hashem had put in her care.

Her husband depended on her for her clockwork mind; she saw details that others missed, and operated with a logic that often eluded him. When he read, he frequently mired himself in the prose, stopping to wonder why a writer had used one word, one metaphor, instead of another, losing himself in hidden meanings Elena thought were less the result of authorial intent and more the product of Alasar’s own esoteric thought-patterns. Elena, conversely, had little use for words, seeing only the ideas beneath them, and could point out exactly why one worked and another did not. The truth was, Elena often thought, that Alasar should have been a poet, and Elena should have been a rabbi. But things being as they were, Alasar was a translator and Elena was his wife.

It was not a bad life, however. She had a husband who respected her. She’d had a child she’d loved.

And then that child had died.

As the caravan moved down the serpentine road of the mountain, the moon loomed overhead. It seemed too close to Elena—it made her uneasy. Her own mother had taught her to fear a full moon, passing on some bit of homespun advice she’d learned from her own mother and back so many generations: Never trust a man you meet under a full moon.

The caravan arrived at an inn near Almeria just as the sun was getting low, as planned—they’d written nearly twenty letters, making sure they would have someplace to stop on their journey so they would not have to sleep unguarded in a field somewhere, and this particular inn, owned, Elena knew, by a converso family, had agreed to a night’s lodging in exchange for only mildly usurious rates. Their belongings would be guarded overnight, and they would have use of his rooms and his dining room, which meant most of their party would enjoy sleeping on the floor, though Elena supposed that was better than sleeping outside.

It was only once they arrived and she went through their party that she realized Toba was no longer among them. She’d done her best to keep her eyes on Toba from the cart where she rode with Alasar, but it had been dark and Toba was slow, always. She’d asked the cart to stop, to let her walk along with her granddaughter, but Alasar had talked her out of it. “What good will it do her for you to lame yourself?” he’d asked, which was ridiculous because Elena was as hearty as anyone, even at her age, but she had been too tired to argue. And she’d stayed in the cart, and now Toba was gone.

Feeling a rising panic, Elena and Alasar spoke to every person, asking after her. But no one remembered having seen the girl since they left Rimon.

She was not the only one unaccounted for, either: the Cresques boy had likewise gone missing. This changed things in the minds of the rest of the group, who decided, rather quickly, that the pair had run off to convert and then marry.

Elena insisted this was nonsense. “She doesn’t know the man!” she insisted. “He’s never even been to the house!”

But someone remembered seeing them in the plaça together, and Naftaly had held his hands on Toba’s shoulders in a rather intimate gesture. Elena balked at the idea, but it was easier for the others to believe they’d eloped, because it meant there was nothing more to be done. They were lost to them, by their own choice. It was too bad, but they could hardly drag the pair out of the country, particularly if they’d already accepted baptism.

“This is ridiculous,” Elena told her husband. “If the tailor’s boy wanted Toba, he would have come and asked after her. She must have fallen on the road, you know how she is. We’ll have to go back for her.”

Alasar agreed that it was odd, but there was no way to go back except on foot; they had half a share of a cart, and no other means of transportation. He tried to hire a horse at the inn, but no one would give him one for the little money he had.

They were too old to make the journey on foot, Alasar so arthritic he could barely walk more than twenty paces at once, and Elena deaf in one ear, and who knew where Toba even was? Elena wept, while Alasar begged the party to turn back.

But no one agreed. The risk of falling behind, of missing the transport they’d already paid for, was too great. “What can we do?” Alasar said. “We can’t simply leave her.”

Elena bit her lip and said nothing while the bowl of soup in front of her went cold. Then, as they were finishing their meal, the friar arrived.

He was alone, Elena noted with some comfort, and had not arrived at the head of a column of men bearing torches. She tried to guess his order from his clothes, but there weren’t many such men in Rimon. At any rate, he seemed to be there only to preach, to beg them to reconsider for the sake of their souls, not to force them at the end of a pike. He gave an impassioned speech, he shouted, he wept, and the innkeeper looked more and more uncomfortable, making Elena wonder about the sincerity of his own conversion. The friar railed until his voice wore out from overuse, and then he slumped back to the innkeeper’s own bedchamber to sleep off his ecstatic—if rather useless—ministry. The party drooped with exhaustion once he was gone; they’d already gone a night without sleep. While the rest laid down on pallets of blankets and little else, Elena went outside for some air, and to think.

The friar had arrived on an old donkey, swaybacked but sturdy-looking. Elena patted the animal’s nose and she snorted. The moon, waning now but only barely, lit the courtyard. Mama, she thought, you would not have left Toba behind.

She needed paper, and she needed ink, and she had neither.

Taking a smooth stone off the ground, she sat down and made a map in the dust, with Rimon on one end and the inn on the other and the road sketched between. The stone was soft, and with the edge of her thumbnail she carefully made the impressions of the letters spelling Toba bat Penina.

She tore a strip of cloth from the bottom hem of her skirt and tied a loop around the stone, then spat on the stone three times, then swung it in a circle over the map she’d drawn on the ground.

Nothing occurred. No pull, at all, in any direction.

She widened the map, adding Meleqa to the west and Merja itself, and still, there was nothing. Untying the rock, Elena threw it aside, scowling at the dirt in front of her.

She couldn’t simply have vanished.

Actually, her mother’s voice told her, she could have vanished.

She took a second rock.

This one was harder than the first, and she found she could not score it with her nail. Taking a small knife out of her satchel, she scratched Naftaly ben Abrafim. And she tied that rock to the strip of cloth, and swung it in a circle.

It landed on the ground with a small thump.

But it was in the wrong spot; too far west, and too far south, and they had not even come through Eliossana. Retying it again, she made another circle in the air, and again, it came down with a plop directly on the spot where she knew Eliossana to be.

Putting the stone in her bag along with the knife, she rose. She went to the railing where they’d tied their horses; having not had enough room for all of them in the inn’s small stable, and she untied them one by one. It would slow the caravan, she knew, perhaps long enough for a single rider, and then, hopefully, two, to ride out and then return again. It was a risk: that she’d be caught, that she might be left behind, that she might make the rest of her people too late to Merja, but she took comfort in knowing she was only doing what her own mother would have done in her place. She looked again, to make sure there was no candle still lit inside the inn. She whispered some very old words to the friar’s donkey, which made the animal’s ears prick and her nose sniff the air. And then she climbed on her back and rode away, muttering a series of numbers best known only to some creatures that live in the deep sea, to the rhythm of the donkey’s hoofbeats.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ariel Kaplan is the author of several books for teens and adults, including Grendel’s Guide to Love and War and We Regret to Inform You. She was raised in Virginia and has a B.A. in History and Religious Studies from the College of William and Mary.

Book Review: Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward

Aigner Loren Wilson | 378 words

Looking Glass Sound
Catriona Ward
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250860026
Tor Nightfire, August 2023, 352 pgs

Catriona Ward’s novel Looking Glass Sound straddles the genre borders of weird, horror, and mystery, but is entirely her own style. The novel takes readers through a strange narrative following writer Wilder Harlow as he tries to piece together a memoir of one dark summer of love and murder. In his youth, Wilder spent a summer on the Maine coast in his family’s cottage, where he met Nat and Harper, who became his only friends and confidants as a serial killer terrorized the shoreside community.

While writing his memoir, Wilder and the story begin to unravel. Strange visions plague him, and memories run away with him, creating a story within a story with word games that illuminate Wilder’s emotional state. Ward depicts all the joy, pain, and catharsis with a gentle but chilling hand that I couldn’t help but relate to Shirley Jackson’s style. Though the prose is simple, straightforward, the messages and depictions are heavy and dark.

Ward is probably one of my favorite writers of 2023. I read Looking Glass Sound right after finishing her novel The Last House on Needless Street. As with Last House, Ward sprinkles horrors both big and tiny all across the page, whether it’s the pictures an intruder takes, or the description of bodies being pulled from the water, and it all coalesces around an unnerving narrative. Blending terrors and oddities, Looking Glass Sound builds a tender and aptly drawn sketch of teenage summer-time feelings and the love that can build between a small group of teens.

Beneath the surface, Ward’s novel felt like a novel about the weave and web of relationships we make throughout our lives and how they change over time. Looking Glass Sound is a novel for readers who like novels with unique structures and mysteries that seem to unravel all the way up until the last page.

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: Dark Matter Presents: Monstrous Futures, edited by Alex Woodroe

Arley Sorg | 1996 words

Dark Matter Presents: Monstrous Futures
Alex Woodroe, ed.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781958598078
Dark Matter Ink, April 18, 2023, 357 pgs

Editor and publisher Rob Carroll published issue 001 of print and digital speculative fiction magazine Dark Matter at the beginning of 2021. In 2022 he got into the book publishing game. He’s going strong into 2023 with titles like Ai Jiang’s Linghun and R.L. Meza’s Love Will Devour Us. I missed horror anthology Dark Matter Presents: Human Monsters, edited by Sadie Hartmann and Ashley Saywers, published in October 2022. Glancing at that book’s table of contents, and having read Monstrous Futures, I just might need to go back and give it a read. In case it’s not clear: editor Alex Woodroe has done marvelous work with Monstrous Futures, to the point where we need to see more projects by her, and we need to take Dark Matter Ink quite seriously as a purveyor of quality fiction. I’ll talk about a handful of pieces and leave the rest for you to discover.

If you understand codeswitching on a personal level, then you will quickly understand how awesome M.H. Ayinde’s “Fully Comprehensive Code Switch” really is, even from the very beginning. Every line glows with nuance and quiet fury. Within a few pages, Ayinde brings this fury more clearly to the fore, not just for readers who might not be getting it, but also as an accumulation of the main character’s frustration up to that point: “How about taking a stab at my first name?” This simple line and its meaning—that she is forced to use her middle name because the people around her don’t even bother trying to pronounce her first name—epitomizes the problem, the source of her anger, and the reason for the story’s novum: a device that “helps” people to blend in. You know, helps certain people. Blend in with certain social circles.

Think about it. Even in the science fiction idea there’s an embedded message, a critique of culture. Instead of creating a device to assist with mutual understanding, some folks have created a device to help marginalized people blend in with the dominant (read: white, heterosexual, and so on) society. Worse, this idea reflects attitudes in the US and similar cultures, and potentially, the direction we’re going in terms of laws and movements: not so much work going on to foster mutual understanding, to embrace multiculturality in meaningful ways.

“Louise” is at a party where everyone is dressed in finery. The device doesn’t just tell her what to say, it manages her body language, even chides her for wanting to eat—explaining to her the way eating will be interpreted in this setting, by this group of people. It steers her away from anything which looks like “being herself” and infuses her behavior, even her laughter, with elements that are “comfortable” and “familiar” to the white folks holding the event.

This isn’t just a fiction. Many people change the way they speak, the way they stand, and even the way they act, to make other people “feel comfortable.” This is just how our culture works. Codeswitching, the story reminds us, isn’t just about navigating socially, it’s about consequences. The fact that if some folks (not-white, and by extension, trans, gay, etc., including women moving in mostly male circles) come as they are they won’t be liked, won’t have opportunities, not because there is anything wrong with them, but because the dominant folks refuse to understand them on their own terms. If they don’t make these adjustments, then (white) people in charge, with the power to hire as well as reward in other systems, are more likely to hire prospectives who they feel “comfortable” around, who they can “relate to.”

In the story, Ayinde adds to this particular pressure the complications of generational and family views. The parents who grew up poor and had to scrape and sweat for everything, who just want their kids to have it better than they had, and who see material comfort and success as good reasons to suck it up and do what you need to do socially. What is considered “important,” what is “tolerable,” and what is “intolerable” changes with privilege.

If you understand codeswitching, then you understand the horror at play in this piece on a deep level. Codeswitching in real life is controversial, and we who do it are often hyperaware of it, and of the risk and discomfort of being in situations where we feel like it’s something we may need to do. We make decisions about codeswitching, form habits. But in the story, the device is controlling her, training her, forcing her to be the person other people want her to be. And of course, Ayinde takes the horror to the next level, as “Louise” begins to have moments where she enjoys the influence of the switch.

There is a stroke of brilliance at the end, specifically in Ayinde’s science fiction horror approach to the topic of codeswitching. I won’t spoil it by laying it out, but frankly, if you don’t see the brilliance on the page, you might be one of the people standing in the room, demanding that people change who they are so that you can feel more comfortable.

“The Body Remembers” by P.A. Cornell gives us solid military fiction. This one utilizes the classic science fiction modes of “science gone wrong” and “scientists who are willing to sacrifice people to do their thing.” While it’s playing with classic themes, the piece feels updated, and definitely basks in horror. There’s a touch of subtext about the way people fall for schemes which take advantage of them, as well as what kinds of people tend to get targeted, and the ways those running the schemes keep you trapped. The schemers here being part of the larger military/government structure. There are also notes about the way some folks who have a type of control or power over you just aren’t that concerned with what you think or how you feel—the story pulls together an intersection between asshole doctors and asshole scientists. The novum, “the treatment,” in a sense, is familiar territory; but the way it’s applied to the story makes it new, especially in its various implications and dark possibilities. Altogether, a well-structured, well-told piece with a distinctive vibe.

“About A Broken Machine” by Catherine Kuo initially draws you in with good prose, including a few standout moments/lines. The Uncanny Valley is center stage, as Masashi takes his sister’s used, hand-me-down robot maid to his small, disheveled apartment. Excellent dialogue and characterization drive the read. Household robots are not necessarily a new topic. Kuo also employs the classic horror tactic of subtle warnings, such as the sister describing odd, unexplained behavior and essentially saying, “I’m sure it’s fine, though.” The reader, of course, knows that perhaps taking home a hand-me-down robot is a bad idea. Yet Kuo also makes the idea and situation feel new via details, specifics, circumstances. The story quickly becomes engrossing—Kuo is deft at adding flares of the unexpected, things which also provide wonderful tension. You will quickly realize that while some of the broader strokes are familiar, you definitely haven’t seen this story before. The narrative finally takes the reader into seriously gripping territory, and when the end comes around, you will be left with your pulse elevated, while still thinking through the potential subtext of the piece.

Simo Srinivas starts “Kavo, Beta (Eat, Child)” with a great opening line, which leads to great wordplay, setting the stage for a strange and interesting story. It gets even better for astute readers as Srinivas drives the narrative with subtle wit and social observations. And then Srinivas takes it to yet another level, pulling in a really cool novum, which also ties in wonderfully to the set-up, and which promises a fascinating read.

The writing is clever and layered, but Srinivas also gives us a character we are interested in, someone we want to get to know, and more specifically, someone whose journey, under these circumstances, we are eager to see. Srinivas also uses shock and surprise in delightful ways, enhancing narrative through startling moments that tie into the deeper themes of the piece.

Just when you think, okay, this story is good, something happens. Srinivas gives you fantastic dialogue and interactions, perfectly capturing a moment which is both relatable and slightly bold, making him a seriously gifted writer, in my opinion. From there, each individual moment is perfectly crafted, mesmerizing almost, and Srinivas uses touchstones to pull you back into the larger story arc, sharply controlling the narrative and the reader’s place in it.

This is a horror story, but it explores a number of things on its way to its darkest depths. It’s thoughtful and wonderful and terrible—in the ways you want horror to be terrible—all at once.

“You Don’t Have To Watch This Part” by Rodrigo Culagovski starts with a cool premise, an effective twist on a familiar concept. The storytelling is smooth, and the use of perspective and idea allows the author to explore a range of human situations. This is, again, horror, so the situations have the commonality of darkness and pain.

In the middle the narrative shifts a bit, marrying supernatural to science fiction, which also turns out to be a really cool application of the concept. There is a tone shift here, switching to an exploration or perhaps an explanation of “how it works.” The writing is good, and this is a science fiction anthology, so I think a lot of readers will enjoy the details of this section, even though it reads, for me, as perhaps less connected to the emotional throughline. Regardless, the ending is very strong, and the story’s themes sing through with lovely power.

Kanishk Tantia’s “I Promise I’ll Visit, Ma” features another brilliant opening line hinting at an interesting premise. Then Tantia uses the senses to draw the reader into the story, along with strong imagery, painting a scene of a dying mother. We’ve seen stories of people in a room with their dying parent, but Tantia makes sure you know you haven’t seen this one.

Tantia intersects grief with capitalist modalities, and in particular, the predatory nature of systems built on greed. Tantia’s striking skill is displayed in developing intriguing theories in a narrative which still feels personal and meaningful. Dehumanization is center stage here, and in the way that great science fiction does, Tantia uses story to ask us to consider what consumerism and technology might mean to us as humans; what we become to the companies that thrive from our bodies, our work; and, more subtly, the ways that we are motivated to keep the system running. He also asks, importantly, who are the people that get used, in what ways, and who benefits most. Finally, the story turns out to be an excellent exploration of human connection, one which might leave you a bit shaken after you’ve absorbed its closing lines.

This is a great book, highly recommended for horror readers who like meaning and depth and innovation. I’ve discussed a sampling of pieces, but the book offers twenty-nine original stories, including authors whose work you should be checking out, like Aigner Loren Wilson, Avra Margariti, Christi Nogle, J.A.W. McCarthy, and many others. If Woodroe puts out another anthology, I will be very eager to see it.

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 Will of the Many by James Islington

Chris Kluwe | 859 words

The Will of the Many
James Islington
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9781982141172
Saga Press, May 2023, 630 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another review. This month it’s time to find your favorite couch, chair, or beach and settle in for the first book in an epic new series—The Will of the Many, by James Islington.

Weighing in at a robust 630 pages, The Will of the Many has the bones of a fantasy epic ala The Stormlight Archive or The Wheel of Time, but it doesn’t quite fit the traditional fantasy mold (in good ways). To begin with, the protagonist, Vis, has absolutely no interest in utilizing Will, the system of magic in which people cede a part of their own power to someone above them in an ever-shrinking pyramid (for reasons that become abundantly clear very early on), but soon he may not have a choice. Vis’ place in the Catenan Republic is not a happy one, and his past is looking to catch up with him.

Secondly, I would only consider the setting “fantasy” in that there is a system of “magic” involved, because from any other angle it looks remarkably similar to the Second Triumvirate of the Roman Republic, except in The Will of the Many the Catenan Republic managed to conquer the entire world. Political intrigue and backstabbing abound, social standing is almost as important as military might, and conquered peoples are restless under the yoke of Catenan rule, which gives the book a very familiar feel for anyone who has studied that time period in history (it strongly reminded me in setting of Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera).

The third deviation from traditional epic fantasy, and it’s one I thought the author handled extraordinarily well, is that for all the epic scope of the Catenan Republic, the lens of the story is very firmly focused on Vis. There are no point of view shifts, and after the first act, surprisingly little travel, but that doesn’t lessen the grand scale of the tale. Vis is engaged in grand acts that have the potential to reshape his entire world, but they feel human and grounded—a person driven to heroism, rather than one seeking it out. Where Vis ends up by the end of this first book feels completely natural, but it is a journey of small steps, each necessary at the time.

One thing that I really enjoyed about The Will of the Many was that Islington really takes the time to make his characters complex and motivated by a multitude of factors. I was never quite sure if someone’s professed intentions were what they actually were, which fits the secretive and conniving setting perfectly, and it kept me on my toes the whole way through. Despite that, Vis also manages to form meaningful relationships with a broad array of characters, some of whom initially seem no more than background clutter, and the various developments among Vis and his friends/enemies build to some excellent character growth.

The second thing I liked was Vis’ ambivalence about the Catenan Republic. He wants to hate them (justifiably so), but at the same time, the glories the Republic has created are undeniably attractive and call to a part of Vis’ soul. It reminded me quite a bit of Martine Arkady’s A Memory Called Empire, in that there is the same sense of longing for a world without the oppressor, but the world with the oppressor is unbearably interesting even though it will probably kill you.

This leads me to the last thing I want to talk about, which is that The Will of the Many is also a glorious deconstruction of the banal evil of apathy. The Catenan Republic engages in horrific acts, yet none of them would be possible without the explicit acceptance of its citizens (quite literally, as it is their ceding of Will which supports the Republic’s military might), and Vis finds himself having to weigh the consequences of what revolution truly means. Islington does a fantastic job presenting arguments for and against the violent overthrow of an oppressive state, and I can’t wait to see how it eventually ends up being resolved.

Overall, The Will of the Many is well plotted, well paced, and delivers enough intrigue and action for any epic fantasy fan to enjoy in a compelling, unique setting. Definitely read this one all the way through, and then join me in the wait for the next one, because I’m confident Islington is only going to make it more interesting from here.

Read if: you always wanted to go to ancient Roman wizard school; you feel there has to be a better way than burning it all down; you enjoy making fun of your teacher in a language he can’t understand.

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: Dominique Dickey

Laurel Amberdine | 532 words

How did “Spaceship Joyride” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

In the last semester of my BA, I took a writing seminar on taking risks. Our assignments were completely open ended—we were allowed and encouraged to write whatever we wanted, as long as we could point to some sort of risk that we took. I nebulously knew that I wanted to write something in second person, and I started toying with the opening line of “Spaceship Joyride.”

I ultimately didn’t write the story during the seminar, but I kept going back to that opening line—I really loved the sound of it, and I knew I wanted to build a story that would justify it.

How does this story fit into the pattern of your writing process and your work’s themes and process? Did “Spaceship Joyride” fit the pattern?

I usually have an idea while half-asleep, write a few lines or some bullet points on my phone, and then wander away from it for long enough to get frustrated that I’m not writing. Right about when I accept that the story needs more time on the back burner, with my brain passively making connections and pondering all the ways it could go, things start to shift and make sense. From there, getting words to the page goes pretty quickly—most of my writing time is actually thinking time, and most of my thinking time is actually time spent being angry that I’m not writing.

“Spaceship Joyride” definitely fit that pattern! About six months passed between coming up with the opening line and actually writing the rest of the story. Once I was ready to sit down to write, I think I nailed it in one draft.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity?

I want to read about queer people being unlikeable and messy! I want Black anti-heroes, and I want stories about trans people where their transness isn’t the main conflict. Which isn’t to say that people aren’t writing these types of stories, but that I’d like to see more support put behind them.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, because learning how other people think is a great way to generate ideas. My favorite book in the past month or so has been Body Work by Melissa Febos.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m currently revising a novel about cyberization, agency, and trauma recovery. I’ve got a short story—also written in second person!—forthcoming in Lightspeed, as well as a novelette. My tabletop roleplaying game Plant Girl Game, about a family of plant children working to prevent ecological disaster in their small town, is available to purchase from Indie Press Revolution. As for the rest of my work, you can find it at dominiquedickey.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: Sarah Grey

Laurel Amberdine | 655 words

How did “And All the Fields Below” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I love dogs! No, seriously, dogs are the absolute best. I wish I could have one (or five) but I don’t have the space they need, nor the time to give them the attention they deserve.

I grew up with dogs—usually golden retrievers, always several in the household at a time—and I miss their silly slobbery faces.

I’ve had to settle for cats, for the time being; they’re terrific in their own way, but the loyalty of a cat is a totally different thing.

Where are you in this story?

I am the woman who saves all the dogs. And cats. And reptiles. And assorted insects who get themselves trapped indoors. Helping someone else is sometimes the best way to heal.

On the other hand, I might be Parker.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Know yourself. Be loyal to your own process and interests.

There’s so much conversation out there about the right way to write that it’s easy to bloody yourself trying to force your own work, even the arc of your own career, into a predetermined mold.

That way lies misery.

There’s no getting rich off short fiction in any genre; you’d be hard-pressed to even pay for groceries with a year’s worth of generous short fiction income. So just write the stories that appeal to you, at the pace your life allows. Read the stories and novels that call to you, not what anyone else says you should read.

And if your interests wander away from writing for a while, follow them. They might eventually lead to new stories, or they might not, but you’ll be happier for having pursued them wherever they lead, and you’ll learn a lot about yourself and the world on the way.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

When I want to relax, I travel solo. My household is absolute chaos—I work from home full-time, and I live in a small apartment with my partner, plus our two teenagers, four cats, and one aquatic turtle in a very large tank. Because of that, I seldom get time alone, so when I have the vacation days and budget for it, I catch a last-minute flight to somewhere new and interesting. The pandemic interrupted that for a long while, but now that we’re all vaccinated and better at disease control, I’ve managed trips to Greece and Ireland. In the years just before the pandemic, I went to Italy, Belize, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, and later this year I hope to visit Spain and Portugal, to walk the Camino de Santiago out of Porto.

I’ve been toying with sketching while I travel, but only for my own benefit. I find it relaxing, and I don’t want the pressure of ever needing to publish or sell or improve.

Some things are private, and better held close.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

In the past several years, I’ve turned more toward speculative poetry than short fiction. That was not a planned shift! Even now, poetry feels like magic to me; I only know a poem’s ready when it feels right. Sometimes I’ll fiddle with fifty different variations on the same line, or phrase, or even the same word, and it’s never quite right so I’ll set it aside in a fit of irritation.

And then, three months later, I open it again and find the right word instantly and after that, the poem just sings.

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: Ruth Joffre

Laurel Amberdine | 590 words

How did “Queen of the Andes” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

With this story, I really wanted to tell a story about humanity’s relationship with plants, which have become/are becoming more and more important to me. Climate change and habitat destruction in the forms of logging, development, pollution, etc. are killing off entire species. Our planet is now in the process of being remade by the climate catastrophe. But what happens after the apocalypse comes and some people, some plants, go on living? Does conservation stop? No, I don’t think so. My story follows a Bolivian climate refugee helping her abuela save the last known member of a rare species of bromeliad that only grows in the Andes and prevent the whole species from going extinct. It’s about our responsibility to plants. The ethics of taking those plants off-world. What it means to be a climate refugee. How to carry my Bolivian heritage into the future.

What is your writing process like? Did “Queen of the Andes” fit the pattern?

My writing process is accretive; it gathers disparate elements and influences around a core idea (in this case, the image of the Queen of the Andes (Puya raimondii), a real species native to the Andes), then gradually the story emerges through the collection and compression of other stuff around that core. This story definitely followed that pattern, though the timeline from finding a core image to building a story around it was much faster than usual. It took only a couple weeks, whereas I often sit on ideas for months or years before I even start writing.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I’m in the midst of consuming everything Becky Chambers and Nino Cipri have written. I just finished Paul Hlava Ceballos’ poetry collection [banana], which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and delves into the violence and corporate malfeasance that makes a banana so cheap, and Jasmine Sawers’ flash fiction collection The Anchored World, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and draws from fairy tales and folklore of varying traditions. Next, I’m planning to dive into the new books from Malka Older and Kelly Link.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I’m going to be pretty liberal with the definition of creative pursuit here and include a lot of things that don’t necessarily produce anything. Birding, for instance, though I’ve also taken up some amateur wildlife photography to help document my birding. Baking, my most delicious pursuit. Soapmaking. Canning homemade jam (also delicious). Keeping my houseplants alive. Propagating a million baby jades.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m always working on a story collection or three. I’ve been published in more than fifty journals at this point, which boggles my mind! Fans of flash can check out my “A Girl” series, including stories in Nightmare and Nature: Futures. This story in Lightspeed is the title story of one of my works in progress, and you can find other stories from that collection in Reckoning, khōréō, and the anthology Unfettered Hexes.

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: Deborah L. Davitt

Laurel Amberdine | 620 words

How did “Philoctetes in Kabul” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

There was an anthology call for stories that took inspiration from Greek and Roman mythology, but that used them for unexpected voices. Around the time of the anthology call, the US withdrew from Afghanistan. While many supported that decision, a great many soldiers were left feeling that they’d betrayed those to whom they’d made promises over there, and that they’d left a job undone. My dad was a veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, so I have a lifelong sympathy for our veterans, their struggles to deal with a civilian world that doesn’t understand them or their service. So when I re-read the myths about Philoctetes, and how he was abandoned by his fellows for being wounded and generally inconvenient to them, and couldn’t make connections to the inhabitants of the island on which he was abandoned because he was foreign to them, and as a soldier, threatening to them, my mind immediately leaped into parallels with soldiers today. What someone would have to say to convince someone to come back and serve again—even betrayed by his fellows once, it might have looked better than stagnating in retirement, right? Admittance back into the close bonds of brotherhood, right? It all swirled around in my head, and became this story.

Where are you in this story?

Well, I have a diagnosis of PTSD, which hits me at the oddest times, and I deal with it with a mix of medications and self-awareness. It took me a long time to admit that I had it, because it seemed ludicrous that I of all people would have it. But it doesn’t take a war-zone to create the condition, unfortunately. I have deep sympathy for others who suffer from it—the more so when they’ve been through so much more than I have to cause it. I also have a chronic, “invisible” condition, and know a lot of people with far worse ones. I talked to one acquaintance with ME/CFS, and asked a migraineur to read through the story before I started submitting it, to make sure I was capturing the frustrations of chronic illness appropriately and sympathetically.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

You can read more about Philoctetes in both the Iliad and in a play by Sophocles! (The play is on my “to be read” pile. It’s a tall pile, and a broad one.)

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I play roleplaying games and video games; I embroider, and I crochet. I like listening to Critical Role podcasts when I have the time, and, of course, I like to read. I also have a fourteen-year-old son, who keeps me on my toes.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I work on so many different projects, it’s really slightly ridiculous. I have a new poetry chapbook out this year from Aqueduct Press, called From Voyages Unreturning. I’ve been working on a TTRPG called Tinytown, which I’m hoping to have news about soon. I have a novel that I’m hoping to be able to announce information about soon as well. Really, the best place to keep up with me is on Facebook (facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3), or at my website, edda-earth.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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 229 words

Coming up in July, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by JB Park (“Six Months After All Life on Titan Died”) and Ashok Banker (“The Bodhi Tree Asks Only For The Safe Return Of Her Beloved”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Plantation” from Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe and “The United Systems Goodwill Concert Series and the Greatest Performance of All Time” by James Van Pelt.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sandra McDonald (“Starpoop”) and Isha Karki (“Muna in Barish”). We also have a flash story (“The Real Worlds”) from Lauren Bajek, and another (“Beached”) from Nic Anstett.

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: Carlie St. George, Jae Steinbacher, duo John Kessel & Bruce Sterling, Adam-Troy Castro, and Everdeen Mason.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative 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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (with R.F. Kuang) [Forthcoming]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle)

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change

Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus by Hugh Howey

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Sand by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker

The Blind King’s Wrath by Ashok K. Banker

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Undertakers by Nicole Glover

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.