TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 159 (August 2023)

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: August 2023

SCIENCE FICTION

The Things You Can Maintain Yourself
Benjamin C. Kinney

The Letters They Left Behind
Scott Edelman

Monopticon
Dani Atkinson

In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance
Lowry Poletti

FANTASY

The Blade and the Bloodwright
Sloane Leong

All the Colours of the Death Knell
Russell Hemmell

The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart
David Anaxagoras

You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension
Isabel J. Kim

EXCERPTS

Garden of the Cursed
Katy Rose Pool

NONFICTION

Book Review: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
Arley Sorg

Book Review: The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi
Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Sloane Leong

Scott Edelman

David Anaxagoras

Lowry Poletti

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 Ardea-studio / Shutterstock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

Editorial: August 2023

John Joseph Adams | 714 words

Welcome to issue 159 of Lightspeed Magazine!

Scott Edelman returns to our pages with a new piece of science fiction: “The Letters They Left Behind,” the story of a mother torn between her love for her daughter and her duty to her planet. Lowry Poletti writes about the complexity of relationships, human or not, in the story “In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance.” Our flash stories include “The Things You Can Maintain Yourself” by Benjamin C. Kinney and “Monopticon” from Dani Atkinson.

Our original fantasy shorts include a bloodthirsty tale of dark magic in Sloane Leong’s new story “The Blade and the Bloodwright.” David Anaxagoras mixes faerie with prescribed burns in his short story “The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart.” We also have a flash story (“All the Colours of the Death Knell”) from Russell Hemmell, and another (“You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension”) from Isabel J. Kim.

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 from Katy Rose Pool’s new novel, Garden of the Cursed.

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

The best thing you can do if you are a Kindle Periodicals subscriber is to migrate your subscription over to one of our other subscription options. Currently, we have the following options available:

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 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 anthologies include Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele), The Far Reaches (from Amazon Original Stories), 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.

The Things You Can Maintain Yourself

Benjamin C. Kinney | 967 words

Please see our important 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.

Jill wiped xylem from her gloves and closed her car’s leafy hood. She’d kept Snapdragon on the road for almost twenty years, and if the world would leave her alone, she could keep him alive for five more, easy.

It wouldn’t, and she couldn’t. No amount of repairs today would spare Snapdragon from the weeding, or her from the pain of uprooting a thing she loved.

She’d do what needed doing. Somehow.

She set down her toolbox, rubbed Snapdragon’s flower-petal roof, and let him trundle the ten feet from her backyard to the communal pasture. He nestled in alongside the other cars, oblivious to the way his boxy patchwork body stood out against the other cars’ sleek single-plant designs. Snapdragon extended his quickroots and wrapped them around the fertilizer spigot like the rest.

The cars looked all alike in the dimming light. Sunset above, but its colors weren’t what they used to be. Some things’ time had come and gone, like the crimson and orange of a polluted sky.

A sledgehammer and a box of car-grade targetpoison sat on her back porch. She picked up a beer instead. Time enough for another drink for them both, in the warm fleeting evening of September in Oregon.

Maudlin. She wasn’t going to die anytime soon. Never give up, and do what needs doing, no matter how many people give up on you.

Old Xavier waved to her from a garden across the pasture. Jill took a swig of beer, the bottle blocking her face. Her boys would’ve been horrified to see her ignore their so-called “grandpa,” but they’d find reasons to yell at her no matter what she did. This wasn’t the kind of day when she could handle conversation with other people.

Snapdragon’s time was up, no matter how well she’d kept him. Forty years of biotech had done their job. Atmospheric carbon was at its lowest level in three hundred years. The climate models said: time to shift from reduction to stabilization. Every year, ten percent of the old high-capture cars had to come off the roads.

Snapdragon was a ’79, from the era when they made cars you could repair with some biotools and know-how. Jill had replaced every part she could name. A new transmission after a hundred and fifty thousand miles. New chairs after the mess with her younger son’s boyfriend. She’d even managed a new computer, because the company was kind enough to release their seed code when they went out of business.

Modern cars were a single plant rather than a symbiotic collective. They self-repaired, or you mulched them and got a new one.

Her phone chirped on the porch railing with the woodwind ringtone she’d set for family.

They could be calling for nothing. Banalities, arguments, the usual. Or they could be calling to comfort her. The car retirement lottery was public.

The phone fell quiet after the eighth ring. Jill swirled her half-empty bottle and took another sip.

Xavier cleared his throat. “Evening.”

He’d crossed the pasture, and leaned on his walker at the border of her backyard. Hell. If he couldn’t move any further, it was her problem, and she’d do what needed doing. She called out, “How’s your walker? Are my grafts holding up?”

Xavier took that as permission to enter her garden. Once he was halfway across, he said, “Better than ever. Nobody grows ‘em like you.” The walker’s oaksteel feet were grafted to springy roots, gripping wheels that kept him level over the uneven ground.

She smiled ruefully. “You con artist. What’s got you sweet-talking your way onto my property?”

Xavier stopped at her porch step. “Heard Snapdragon’s number came up in the lottery.”

Jill shrugged. “Had to happen eventually. At this point, all the volunteers already did.”

“They give you a replacement, don’t they?”

“I guess. Don’t trust anything you can’t maintain yourself.” She wagged her empty bottle at him. “Want a beer?”

“Oh no, I only ever ask for one favor per trip. Can’t push my luck, at my age.”

Jill raised her eyebrows and let him ask.

He said, “Can you come by tomorrow and move some boxes?”

Jill scraped a thumbnail against the beer bottle’s embossed logo. “Don’t tell me you’re moving out. Those group homes—”

“Hey, you fight that out with my grand-niece.” Xavier gave a lopsided smile. “She’s coming to stay for a few weeks, and I need some help cleaning out the guest room.” He pointed his chin at another neighbor’s house. “Adem’s coming over, but it’ll go faster with two strong backs.”

“Of course. But if you do move out of here, I won’t stop my boys from chasing you down.”

He tapped his walker against the porch rails, in front of the targetpoison box. “You want me to take care of Snapdragon? I know how much you loved him. Go for a walk on Sunday, and I’ll have a mulch receipt for you. You can borrow my car while you pick out a new one.”

“Nah. It’s my problem.”

He nodded. “If you say so.”

Jill took a deep breath. Pure sweet Portland air, with the lingering crispness before the clouds set in for autumn. The first stars glittered into view above. More than her childhood nights had ever held. Clean skies, and a city where every streetlamp and building focused their lights down only where they were needed.

“Sunday might be a good day for a walk,” she said. “Tell Adem to come over tomorrow at eight, all right? We’ll do what needs doing.”

She’d miss Snapdragon. There was real satisfaction in the work of hands and brain, in taking your own problems apart and solving them. But some things in this world were bigger than a woman alone.

©2023 by Benjamin C. Kinney.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. He’s created cyborg monkeys, magnetically altered the activity of the human brain, and generally done his part to make the world as science fictional as possible. His short stories have appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, Sunday Morning Transport, and many other excellent places, and you can find them all at benjaminckinney.com. You can find him across social media @BenCKinney, and he is represented by Marisa Cleveland of the Seymour Agency.

The Letters They Left Behind

Scott Edelman | 7461 words

Please see our important 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.

My dearest Evie—

I am so terribly sorry, my darling daughter, but by the time you read this letter, I will be gone. I wish I could have delayed my departure long enough to attend your high school graduation as I always promised I would, but the timing was outside of my control.

And so I’m taking a few of my final (for now) moments on Earth to put down on paper what I’ve already told you to your face. Or told you to your back anyway, when you had your arms crossed and shoulders hunched and I wasn’t sure whether you were even listening.

But please, my not-so-little girl, remember this—

When your name is called, and you take the stage to receive your diploma, I hope you’ll pause, I hope you’ll look up, I hope you’ll know in the moment that though I’ll be millions of miles away—millions of miles, can you believe it?—I’ll be with you still. Because I, also, keeping track of when that moment will occur, will be pausing, will be looking—looking back at the planet I left behind, a planet which at that moment might seem for me no more than a speck—and thinking of you.

But that’s only one of my hopes.

I hope, once you’re older, you’ll understand why this had to be.

I hope you’ll agree that what the alien Visitors offered—not just to me, not just to you, but to every living creature on Earth—is a greater gift than the time together the two of us lost.

I hope you’ll someday add your name to their registry as well, entering the lottery to the stars as I did, and are lucky enough to be selected, too, so you can also see what’s out there.

I hope you’ll be sure in your heart, as I am, that the wonders to come will outnumber the ones we will have left behind.

Those wonders are more than what they tell me I’ll experience personally out in the void, and what you’d experience if you were to follow. Because believe me, that alone would never have been enough to separate me from you. I’m not making this choice selfishly. But if our parting will make the world a better place for you? Build you a future I alone could never construct?

What loving parent wouldn’t make that sacrifice?

I can only imagine how the world—and how you—will change during my absence. Oh, the miracles they’ve promised to turn over to our planet if a handful of us would agree to travel the universe with them!

Pollution-free power.

The end of hunger.

The death of cancer.

And so much more.

For me to leave with the Visitors means you’ll get to live a life on Earth which never could have existed without them. How could I not do this?

I did this for you, Evie.

I did it for you.

Though I won’t be there, at least not physically, for the major milestones which you’ll surely achieve over the next few years—I have no idea how long this trip will take, since from what I’ve learned so far during my brief orientation, the aliens’ concept of time doesn’t seem to be the same as ours—a mother’s love will always be there. Which is why I wrote out and packed these letters in your favorite lunchbox before leaving—the one with the rainbow girls and their flying horses.

You have always been my rainbow girl. You know that, right?

I also know what you’re thinking. I can almost see the roll of your eyes, hear your voice as you say, “Letters? Really, Mom? Who puts their thoughts down on paper anymore? Couldn’t you just record some video the way a normal person would do?”

But you know me. I’m kind of old-fashioned that way. Even though I’ll be gone, I want you to be able to pretend I’m still there with you, continuing to leave notes each morning on the kitchen table the way I used to do . . . well, after I’d push away the insides of the microwave or whatever kitchen gadget you’d taken apart with promises to put it back again once your tinkering was done. (And you always did, you always did.) Which is why I’ve marked the flaps of these envelopes so you’ll know to open each one at the appropriate time as each milestone of your life comes to pass.

Be a good girl, Evie. And know that I love you.

Missing you so much right now it’s as if I’m already among the stars,

Mom

• • • •

When the aliens returned Jeri to the same spot from which she’d been taken—which, after all, is what she’d been promised, and since throughout their journey she’d never known them to lie, what she’d expected—she assumed after all those years the intake center would be surrounded by a circle of gleaming towers which would have been impossible before the visitation which changed the world. Earth, she knew, would surely have put to good use the knowledge gained by the sacrifice of her absence.

So she expected to step outside the transport pod in which she’d been cast to the surface and breathe cleaner air than she’d ever known.

She expected to see unimaginable miracles both on land and in the sky.

She expected to find the science and technology she’d witnessed during her travels present on the home planet she’d left behind, transforming it into something different. Something better.

But most of all, she expected to see Evangeline again, welcoming her back to Earth. Perhaps even bringing along Jeri’s granddaughter (not yet even on the horizon when she’d left, but still, hoped for). The thought of seeing them both was what had kept her going during her darker days in deep space.

Not that there were many such days. She’d been treated well, even as she knew her every word, every action, was being weighed to determine whether what Earth had been given Earth would be allowed to keep. But years away were years away, even when surrounded and distracted by unearthly marvels.

That eventual reunion, and the loneliness she knew her daughter would feel until it could take place, was the reason she’d left all those letters behind. She’d hoped they would help Evie forgive, allow her to set aside her own flavor of pain, which she’d surely tasted during their separation.

But instead, once the door of her globe split open, Jeri stepped from the small vehicle to find the air around her so foul she instantly began to cough, and find the alien intake center which surrounded her in ruins, not one soul there to greet her. Gasping, she pulled her shirt collar over her nose, and stared about in shock. There were no family members, none of the support personnel who’d prepped her, no one to explain how the world she’d left behind had become the shattered world she’d found, rather than the world her sacrifice had been meant to produce.

She no longer even needed to step through a door to get back to that world. Instead, a blasted circle pierced what remained of a wall. Most of the roof was gone as well. No stars were visible in the daytime sky, but still, she looked up, as if tilting her head back was alone enough to let her see where she’d spent the past decade. She wondered what went wrong.

She thought of her daughter, and the letters she’d left behind which had been filled with the faith of better times to come, but which the world she saw around her had made into lies.

Anger shook her from her shock, and she remembered what she’d been instructed to do next—seal the life globe door once she stepped clear so it could be recalled to the mother ship, countless miles away. But seeing the broken promises which surrounded her, she decided . . .

No.

Instead, she wrestled a length of rebar from the wall which used to be into the opening behind her, blocking the door from fully rolling back and locking, stranding the vessel on Earth. The aliens would not get what they wanted until Jeri got what she wanted—answers.

And then, after picking through the rubble in search of the supplies she felt she’d need to survive the journey back to the daughter she’d left behind—and finding none—she headed toward home anyway.

• • • •

Evie, my love—

If you opened this letter at the time my scribbling on the outside of the envelope indicated, you today began your first job as an adult.

You’re not selling cookies or lemonade anymore, not dog walking, not babysitting, but actually out there in the world, getting a paycheck, supporting yourself. And if you’re lucky, you’ve figured out how to make that endless curiosity of yours work for you instead of against you, and found the place you’re meant to be, among the people who want the you you are. No more teachers angry you rewired the public address system so whenever the principal came on for morning announcements, messages would play urging students to protest human rights abuses, but instead being paid for your ability to take things apart and put them together better and stronger.

I’m proud of you. I’m sure your Dad is proud of you, too.

I hope you, once you get over your anger at my leaving, once you see what that absence has achieved, will be proud of me as well. I’ve been studying the Visitors, learning as much as I can about them before I go, so I can prove to them we deserve to be a part of the wider universe. Did you know they don’t eat meat? They’ve apparently evolved beyond killing anything, even animals. Can you believe it? I guess it’ll be a while before your Mom has a burger again. At least I now know not to ask for one. Who knows what else I need to know so I don’t embarrass myself out there?

I hope I don’t embarrass you, Evie. I hope I don’t embarrass us all.

But as for you, as for the latest, great milestone of yours—

Do I have any advice on how to do what comes next right? How to play well with others? So you can achieve all your dreams, and not just the ones which matter in the moment. I wish I did. I never played well with others, not even when I was a kid. I never played well with anyone until I met your father. Which is one reason you’re probably better off with me a million miles away. What do I know anyway?

Believe me, girl. The ad I answered after the Visitors came and made their offer? You’d have done the same. Save Earth and save yourself at the same time? Who gets a chance like that? That I was chosen out of all the millions of other applicants to give you this gift is nothing short of a miracle.

So work hard in the world I left behind, a world in which the aliens in my absence unleashed the secrets to clean air, pure water, a gift of information that will save us all. Hey, knowing you, remembering all the things around the house made more useful because of your touch, you might be the one to take what they give us and make it real. I hope I’ll get to see it.

What am I saying? Hope? I will see it! That’s the promise they made to me and the other forty-nine who’ll travel along with me.

And you, baby. Someday I’ll see you again. Keep being the best you can be in the brave new world I’m leaving (temporarily) behind.

Love,

Mom

• • • •

Jeri took shelter in the crater where Evie’s school used to be, and hoped whatever had imploded the building hadn’t been radioactive.

The destruction she discovered as she crossed the state from her induction center was overwhelming, and what was even more shocking: she’d encountered no one along the way, no one who could explain what had befallen Earth, how the secrets her species had been given yielded this.

She’d occasionally spy a survivor in the distance, but they would hide before she could reach and question them. So she’d learned nothing during her trip across the fractured terrain except—

There were survivors of whatever had gone bad. They were doing their best to live in the mess made of Earth, or at least the parts she’d crossed so far. Seeing them broke her heart, but at the same time it allowed her to think—Evangeline had to be alive, too. The girl she’d left behind was tough. If they could do it, so could she.

Jeri lay back against the slanted crater wall and looked up at the stars, which appeared clearer and brighter down in the depths than they’d seemed from the surface. It was hard to believe, in the midst of this wreckage, that she once had voyaged among them. It had been difficult enough to believe in the first place, but now, it made even less sense than before. All she could think was—

Something must have gone terribly wrong.

She and the others been told they’d been taken along as representatives of their species because they were being weighed to determine whether humanity was worthy of entry into a galactic federation, and yet, as far as she could tell, no formal testing had ever been done. Her trip felt like little more than a vacation in a tourist hotel, only one with views more beautiful than Jeri had ever seen outside of dream.

Alien worlds.

Civilizations more ancient than humanity.

Science so far advanced as to seem magic.

And though all the while, yes, she felt herself watched—watched as she and the others stared at starscapes no human had ever before seen, watched even as she chose the foods to eat from the bounty placed before them—she’d never felt weighed or judged. And yet, from the destruction around her, surely her band of space tourists must have failed. But what had they failed?

Jeri had no idea. She only knew she had failed.

She had failed her daughter. Before, during, and obviously by what she saw around her, even now.

Had the Visitors looked inside her as they’d traveled deep space, seen those moments when the wonders she saw pushed her daughter from her mind, and found her wanting because of it? Was she, was the whole world, being punished because she was human, and occasionally forgot to miss Evie? Because any of them privileged the universe over their families even for an instant? It was probably silly to think her moments of joy without her daughter could have doomed Earth, but considering the grit in her eyes and the rasp in her throat, her guilt was heavy.

And now her journey was almost over, and she was wondering—

Though she needed it, wanted it, wished it so, was Evie still alive?

Was her ex-husband?

It tortured her to not move the few final miles back to her home, hers and Evie’s, but so exhausted was she from her week on foot, she fell asleep looking at the stars, only to dream of the way she used to be before she’d traded one future for another.

• • • •

Dear Evie—

Today is your wedding day. I’m so glad you found someone worthy of you, someone who saw the you you are and decided you were perfect exactly the way you were. You see, until I found someone worthy of me, I wasn’t sure I was worthy. But when your father came into my life, everything changed.

I know it didn’t make sense when I tried explaining to you before, but he made me a better person, and gave me the strength to leave him. Which is weird, right? And not what we dream of when we dream of the day you’re about to experience. It’s not that he’s a bad person, as you’ve certainly learned during your time with him as your only Earthly parent. It’s just . . . we were right for each other and not right for each other at the same time. He gave me the freedom to learn I loved him but didn’t love him.

I hope the partner you’ve found will be right for you in all the right ways.

While you are bonding with your husband—or wife—you know it makes no difference to me, as long as you’re happy—I’m out here continuing to do the same with forty-nine others.

Why did the aliens choose fifty of us?

They haven’t let us know that yet. I figure it’s some magic number they’ve calculated that will allow them to see Earthlings in all their possibilities, the better to learn what our species is all about, and whether we should join them—all of us, not just a handful—out among the stars. At least, that’s what the scientists I’ve been hearing on the news have been saying. And I figure they must be right.

When I get back, I’ll tell you if they were.

Meanwhile, remember that I love you. And I love your new partner, too. If you think they’re worthy of you, I do as well. I look forward to meeting them.

Congratulations from the stars!

Love,

Your happy, hopeful mother

• • • •

As Jeri stumbled up the broken and overgrown cement pathway to what had been her home, her heart sank at the sight of the deteriorated building ahead. But considering the vast destruction she’d seen between her drop-off point and there, the vines running up through peeling paint were pitiably hopeful by contrast. The state of the house could have been far worse. Though the walls had begun to sink inward, the building was still recognizable as once having been a place where people—people, who now seemed so rare—had lived their lives.

She pulled at the handle of the loosely hanging front door, which fell from where it rocked on its hinges, and quickly made her way to her daughter’s room, ignoring the other damage as she headed to what mattered most. She found everything askew inside.

The mattress from her daughter’s bed, propped up against the window, blocked most of the light. The desk where Jeri had often helped with Evie’s homework, overturned. The wallboard which once held posters of rock stars, buckled and bare.

She knew better than to hope she’d find her daughter living there after all this time, all this unexplained devastation, but still, she hoped she’d at least find signs of how long it had been since she’d left, or if she was lucky, clues as to where she had gone. But any evidence which could help her understand what had happened was as absent as her daughter.

What kind of mother had she been to leave her daughter to this?

No better, she realized, than the aliens themselves.

She’d once thought the aliens wanted to be the parents of the universe, doing for all lifeforms what she was attempting to do for Earth. For Evie. Helping it be its best self. Giving her the environment and opportunity where she could be her best self. But it was clear something had gone wrong. And if given a chance, if she could somehow find her daughter again, she would spend the rest of her life trying to make up for that.

She slid the mattress aside to the soggy carpeting so she could better see what contents of the room remained. There wasn’t much. She sifted through shards of broken glass, bent metal shelving, the exploded circuitry of an old computer, all of which brought back memories of when they had been whole and new, until, under a pile of damp, moldy clothes in the depths of the closet, she found the lunchbox she’d given her daughter, the one into which she’d once placed the letters she’d left behind.

She cradled it in her hands and found she could no longer stand.

She dropped to the mattress—partially from shock, partially from her exhaustion and the foul air, partially from hope—and balanced the dented box on her knees. She sighed in both recognition and resignation as she rubbed her fingers over the candy-colored horses imprinted on the surface.

Her first thought was—

How lucky it turned out to be after all, that she’d written letters rather than making a series of videos, for with anything other than paper, her messages would have been erased by the electromagnetic pulse which had apparently shut down the world.

She gave the box a shake, and hearing the rustle of papers inside, combined with feeling the weight of it in her hands, sensed it still contained the letters she’d left behind. She didn’t know what that meant.

She hoped Evie had managed to have a life before whatever stole Earth. She hoped some of the letters had needed to be read. But how far had her daughter gotten in her life? How many milestones had she achieved? And how many had she missed?

And why had the box been left behind, rather than having been taken along by Evie to wherever she ended up?

Jeri took a deep breath, and before she could bring herself to open the box, found herself praying, a thing she’d only begun to do once she’d first traveled to space. A thing that suddenly seemed even more important now.

• • • •

Oh, my dear, dear Evangeline—

You are a mother now.

You know what it feels like to love something more than you love yourself. To want someone to be better, stronger, safer than you ever were. To hope they’ll have a better life in a better world. And to feel in your gut you’d do anything to make that happen.

Anything.

I know, I know. You’re tired of hearing that. I’m sounding like what you’ve always insisted I was—I’m trying to justify my selfishness, to make an excuse for doing what I wanted to do anyway. And maybe that’s all it is. But that doesn’t matter now. Because whether my decision was born out of love or its absence, your world will be better because of my absence.

I can’t wait to walk that new world with you. With you and your child.

The second happiest day of my life will be when my mission ends, the human race is found, not wanting, but worthy, and I am sent back to see your faces. (You already know the happiest day.) So take good care of your little thing until we’re allowed to meet again. Take better care than I did, than I have.

I know we will have so much to catch up on.

Love,

Mom

(And also maybe . . . Grandma?)

• • • •

Jeri suddenly realized she could no longer remember how much time she’d spent sitting in what had once been her daughter’s room with a thumb on the clasp of the lunchbox. Surrounded by debris, crowded by memories, she kept flipping the metal tab up and down again, locking and unlocking, over and over, ready but never ready, wanting to know what was inside, but also dreading what was inside, unable to take that next step. It was only the knowledge that Evie was out there, had to be out there, needing her, which finally pushed her to take one last deep breath, and with shaking hands, lift the lid.

Atop a pile of familiar envelopes written many years and millions of miles before, once pristine but now covered with creases and filthy with fingerprints, was a single unfamiliar envelope, crumpled and grimy in its own way. On its front was the word “Mom” written in Evie’s handwriting, as neat as Jeri had ever seen it, which wasn’t that neat at all, for since she’d grown up at a keyboard—usually one she’d soldered together herself—her daughter’s penmanship wasn’t the best. But the neatness of the lettering meant her daughter must have tried her hardest.

Jeri quickly flipped through her own envelopes, and found each one slit open, the contents (presumably) read, then returned. Did the fact none of the missives had remained sealed mean in the years which Jeri had been gone, Evie had received all the good things a mother hopes for her daughter—a graduation, a good job, a wedding to a partner who loves them, a grandchild?

Her heart raced.

She took a deep breath, and began to read the letter her daughter had left behind.

• • • •

Dear Mom—

I tried to hold off on reading them, really I did. I resisted, hoping to wait to take each letter in turn, celebrating each of the milestones you’d hoped for by communing with you over paper and ink. Until I realized—what was the point?

Those things will never happen—a job, a husband, a family—a life. If I’d waited to read those letters until the times you’d planned for me to read those letters, well . . . I’d never have read those letters, you see.

It was all a lie. All of it. The Visitors didn’t come here to save us. They came here to destroy us. They were never our friends. They only pretended to be, in order to be better enemies.

And you never knew any of that as you flitted from star to star, did you, thinking you were being tested for the good of humanity, when it was all just a pretense? At least, I hope you never knew.

Or maybe you did come to know.

Maybe sometime after your ship took off, they let their masks fall out there, just as they did here.

The thing is . . . it wasn’t immediate for us.

The blueprints they gave us for power plants that would lift the world out of poverty? They poisoned the Earth instead.

The cures they promised would save us from our fragile flesh? They were only a curse.

We believed them, we trusted them, we let them slip under our defenses, until . . . we at long last had no defenses, which was their goal all along. To have us destroy most of what we had so we’d go to war over what was left.

Your journey was never intended to save us. Our species was not being tested. It was being eradicated. And we made it so easy for them. You and the others weren’t taken out there for a weighing of our species. It was only a charade. One they kept up only as long as necessary for those left behind to use their tech to kill ourselves for them, saving them the trouble of doing it themselves. They only wanted to learn as much from you as they could to make it easier to kill the next world.

If you return to read this letter—and there’s no guarantee you will, since if they’re willing to destroy a planet, why would they spare fifty of you once they got what they needed from you?—know that I forgive you. If they fooled the best of Earth, why should you be an exception? At this point, I can blame no one for being a fool. I was a fool, too.

I’ll try to hang on—more than hang on—until that return. If you return. And then, together, we can make the most of whatever time we have left.

Your daughter,

Evangeline

• • • •

Jeri was too stunned by the words she read, then read again, to do anything more than pull down her basically useless shirt collar and press the paper to her face, trying to smell her daughter there. But no trace of Evie remained, not there, not anywhere in the room’s disarray, not anyplace except her own heart and, she hoped, not too far away some as yet unexplored place on this benighted planet.

She folded the single sheet of paper, slid it back into its tattered envelope, and after kissing the word “Mom” her daughter had scribbled there, tucked it inside her shirt. Then she snapped shut the lunchbox containing her own remaining letters and hurled it through the window. She couldn’t bear their presence any longer. They’d become cursed to her. Once she’d thought their existence evidence of how much she loved her daughter, but now . . . now thinking of them brought her nothing but shame.

The aliens had lied to Earth, Earth and its governments had lied to her, and she, worst of all, had lied to herself. So excited was she for her role as a possible savior of the world, she ignored what should have been a red flag.

Because there was a glaring component to her trip which had never made any sense, and she’d chosen not to question it. She’d wondered from time to time while she’d been gone, but never often enough, why with all the advanced knowledge and technology the aliens had demonstrated, they hadn’t allowed contact between any of the volunteers and their families back home. The aliens could do so much, and offering that up should have been so easy. But it was one of the rules to which Jeri and the others had been forced to agree.

And yes, it made no sense then, though she hadn’t seen it. But it made sense now. The aliens kept them cut off because they didn’t want any of them to learn what was happening on the planet they’d left behind. Yet . . . if the destruction of the planet was the aliens’ plan all along, if the fifty had only been taken in the first place to fool Earth into feeling they were truly being considered for future wonders, why had they bothered to keep up the ruse with Jeri and the others the entire time she’d been gone? There was nothing they could have done about it out there to spoil the cosmic scam, so what was the point? Why even keep them alive? And why bother sending them back?

But she had neither answers nor the time to waste coming up with any, because Evie was out there somewhere. But where? She knew that if she kept searching for Evie, and Evie kept searching for her, chances are they’d never find each other, circling forever. Jeri’s only hope was if she stayed in place and let Evie come to her. But no, not here, in a squalid house that was only the memory of a home. Better to head back to where Evie would have been expecting her to appear, back where she’d be checking.

She retraced her steps to the intake building—or what remained of it anyway—where it had all begun. As she navigated around collapsed buildings, she thought of the truths Evie had revealed to her, and struggled with how it could be, how her keepers who she’d never seen harm another creature, human of otherwise, could have brought such destruction to Earth. And at night, as she slept in ditches, she dreamt of the pod which had brought her back to Earth, and how she could take shelter there, how it would keep her safe until she could find the answer to those questions. Only once she made her way across the broken land, she was shocked to discover . . . it was gone.

Could one or more of the survivors, who so far she’d seen only from a distance, have dragged it off? As she stood once more at the top of the broken stairs, she knew it was too heavy to have been taken far. She scanned the horizon, trying to pick out the pod amid the rubble, or the path it had etched in the grit, but spotted nothing.

But perhaps she’d been expecting too much of the humans who’d been left behind. Had an animal, though seemingly as rare as people, stumbled through the wreckage and accidentally knocked clear the piece of rubble she’d used to prevent the door from resealing and the pod from being returned? Was it already back in space with those who had tricked her?

Or—and Jeri shivered at where her mind went next, because—and this was too horrifying to contemplate—what if she and Evie had missed each other? What if her daughter had come here, arriving on her own journey even as Jeri had traveled back to a home which no longer existed, climbed inside the pod for clues to her mother’s whereabouts, and then been trapped inside, helpless, unable to do anything but ride back to the aliens? In the grip of that not knowing, Jeri was overcome with a grief beyond any she’d felt so far.

She had just enough time to swipe away some debris from the broken steps of the building before she sank down, overcome by exhaustion, by sadness, and by the lack of oxygen that made it difficult for her to cope with either. She could hold herself together no longer, and collapsed into unconsciousness.

• • • •

Until she woke, first to the sound of the clinking of stones down the steps, then to her daughter’s voice.

“Mom!”

“Evie,” she said, more prayer than greeting, and when she inhaled after saying the syllables of her daughter’s name, the air tasted fresher than it had since landing. She lifted a hand to her face to find, rather than the cloth with which she had wrapped herself to stomach the foul air, a mask, thick with circuits, stretching from the bridge of her nose to beneath her chin.

She reached up and pulled her daughter close, and though there were so many things she wanted to say, so many years she had to make up for, the only words she found she could utter were, “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be,” said Evie, her face hidden as well. Her daughter’s clothing was so soiled she was almost invisible against the world behind her, and Jeri couldn’t tell whether the effect was deliberate camouflage or merely the result of living an Earth life. “I’m the one who needs to apologize. I should have been here to meet you when you returned. But there was still so much to do. I had to keep scavenging.”

“That’s how you made this, isn’t it?” said Jeri, touching her face mask once again. “All that tinkering you used to do. I guess it paid off, huh?

Evie nodded.

“Still,” Evie continued. “I should have been there for you. So don’t feel sorry, Mom. This wasn’t your fault. None of it. This was theirs.”

Evie tilted her head back and looked up at the gray sky, as if she could see through the grit which now circled the Earth all the way to those who’d made it that way. Jeri could see the old familiar anger in her eyes, anger which had often been focused on her before she’d left. She was glad it was pointed somewhere else now.

“Evie, your father. Did he . . . “

She couldn’t bring herself to say anymore. Evie turned her gaze from the skies, turned toward Jeri, and slowly shook her head, telling her what she guessed she already knew.

Damn them all.

“I still can’t believe they caused all this,” said Jeri, as much to herself as to her daughter. “I never saw them kill, and they never let us kill, not even for food, which I always thought was part of the test. I saw no evidence they were even capable of such a thing.”

“They might not be . . . but they knew how to do everything necessary to get us to do it for them.”

“How did you survive?” asked Jeri, thinking back to the luxury the aliens had used to lie to her, and comparing it to the squalor around her. “There don’t seem to be many who did, and none who gave me the chance to talk to them so I could find out how they managed.”

“Some of it was thanks to the scavenging, and to making tools like these.” She gestured at their faces. “The rest . . . I don’t want to tell you. And you don’t want to know. No one should have to know. And we’re going to make sure no one ever has to know anything like that again.”

“Oh, Evie. There’s nothing we can do, no matter how good you are, just the two of us with scraps. If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d know.”

“Come, Mom. I’ll show you what I know.”

Her daughter leapt up, then held out a hand to pull Jeri from the uneven step and to her feet. It felt easier for Jeri to move now, easier to breathe, thanks to what her daughter had created. Evie turned and began to make her way through the rubble, walking a path Jeri would not have been able to pick out as one had her daughter not walked ahead.

Jeri could tell her daughter was moving more slowly than she would have liked so she could keep up with her, so she picked up her speed. Eventually, in an alcove beneath a shelter constructed of rubble, she saw her pod again.

Or what used to be her pod.

The sight reminded her of the spreads she’d often found taking up the dining room table or the entirety of Evie’s bedroom floor—bits and pieces of toys and computers, appliances and power tools, displays which always filled Jeri with anxiety until they were put back together better than before. Looking at the mess that had been made of her pod, though, she was surprised she felt no anxiety now.

No rebar was needed to keep the door jammed open any longer, for the door was no longer even attached to the body of the small ship. It lay curved to one side, the interior circuitry which had once controlled it running like vines spreading across the floor and walls of the alcove, interwoven with unfamiliar tech, all lit in the dim space only by the pulsing of the pod’s power source.

“What are you up to, Evie? There were no weapons in the pod. You can’t fight them with this. You can’t fight them period.”

“I don’t plan to fight them.”

“Then what—”

“This is something I’ve been planning the whole time you’ve been gone. It’s a path I’ve been on even before I knew there was a path. All my schooling, for as long as there was schooling, all the knowledge gained by my experimenting, all my recycling of the broken bits of a vanished world—they’ve all led me to this. The aliens may have destroyed the Earth, and it’s too late for me to do anything about that, but I’m not going to let them do the same anywhere else. And you’ve come home with exactly the missing pieces I need.”

Evie ran her hand along the curve of the pod, broken here and there where she had split the casing. Wires ran out connecting it to the grid which surrounded them. Jeri could tell her daughter was able to see something far beyond what was there.

“There’s no way we were the first they did this to, sneaking in and coopting us so we’d destroy ourselves. And we certainly weren’t the last. When they were done with us, they went on to the next. But no more.”

“Evie, whatever you think you’ve done, they’re doing, you can’t possibly stop them. The things I’ve seen . . . the things I haven’t had the chance to tell you, but will if you’ll only listen. You can’t fight them. And when they realize what’s been done and come looking for the pod—”

“We’ll no longer be here. Because I’m not going to fight them. We’re not going to fight them. What we’re going to be, Mom, is a wake-up call. We’re going out there. We’re going to warn the others, so when the aliens show up offering gifts to their planets, they’ll be ready. Ready to say no. Ready to band together to defeat them. Because even if one race can’t fight back against our visitors, all of them together can. We’re going to make sure no one else will ever be fooled the same way we were. No more parents will be intentionally separated from their children. No more planets will have to die.”

Evie started reeling in the strings of familiar and unfamiliar technology and began packing it into the open shell of the pod. Jeri looked at the spread of equipment Evie had disassembled and tried to see what she could see.

“Can you really do this?”

“I’ve already almost done it. I’m your daughter, aren’t I?”

“Yes. Yes, you are.”

Evie smiled, the first time Jeri had seen her do so in a long while, and because it had been so long, it hurt, but in a good way.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, I’ve got this.”

Jeri nodded, realizing what she was going to do with the time she had left on Earth. There was one last letter she needed to write.

• • • •

To whoever finds this letter, if ever this letter is found—

There is nothing more for you here. Everything that remained of value, everything that wasn’t already taken from us, I have already taken.

My daughter.

If you are reading this—if you managed to find one of the copies I placed at various points around the planet—if you are holding it in your hands or tentacles or whatever body part you use to navigate the universe because you stumbled across the husk of Earth while out exploring, and you are among those who have yet to encounter the Visitors who destroyed our world, know this—you will.

And know also—they are not to be trusted.

They will tell you they will save you from yourselves if a few of you will volunteer to be taken and judged and possibly found worthy, but the only reason they seek volunteers is to learn how best to fool the next species even as they are crushing the last one. So do not believe them. They are cowards. I realize that now.

They lie to themselves, tell themselves they are a higher order of being because they don’t kill, but instead connive species to kill themselves for them. Which is why they allowed me and the others they borrowed to return home, because they wouldn’t even cross the line to erase us, so they could continue to tell themselves how moral they are.

And yet—the others who traveled with me are all, as far as I can tell, still dead, and whether the Visitors did it themselves or allowed the Earth they helped bring into being do it for them doesn’t matter.

I alone seem to have survived. Why? Because I had an Evie, and they did not.

So it’s all a lie, all of it. Because in reality, they have concocted this ruse because they aren’t strong enough to defeat you, which means their only hope of conquering you is if they can trick you into defeating yourselves.

Reject them.

And then once you’ve rejected them, find the other species like yourself, civilizations that to these aliens are little more than future victims. Band together. For I know, we know, you can do together what you could never do alone.

No one should have to lose what I lost.

If, however, you are reading this and are already like us, and have somehow managed to be survivors of an otherwise destroyed world as we were . . . I’m sorry. We cannot return this world, nor your world, to what they once were. But take solace in the fact we are making sure nothing like this will ever happen again.

On the other hand, if you are reading this because you’re the ones who ripped me away from my daughter, and ripped our planet away from both of us, and have returned to check on the results of your sabotage, know this—

We are coming for you. And soon the whole universe will be coming for you.

So no one else will ever have to write a letter like this again.

Geraldine of Earth

Evangeline’s Mother

©2023 by Scott Edelman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Edelman has published more than 115 short stories in Analog, The Twilight Zone, Apex, Parsec, and dozens of other magazines and anthologies. Many of those stories can be found in his collections These Words Are Haunted, What Will Come After, What We Still Talk About, Tell Me Like You Done Before, and his recent Things That Never Happened, about which Publishers Weekly wrote, “his talent is undeniable.” He has been been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award, as well as the Bram Stoker Award eight times. He is also the host of Eating the Fantastic, a podcast which has allowed listeners to eavesdrop on his meals with writers and editors since 2016.

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

Monopticon

Dani Atkinson | 1262 words

Please see our important 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.

I am thinking of a word.

I will not tell you what it is.

I will tell you a few other words. The words you were looking for, though not all the words you were hoping for. Some of the words you were hoping for, I’ll let you have. Such as these: You were right. Doesn’t that feel good? You were right all along. There was a secret. There was more to the fall of the Panopticon system than the official story.

It’s not that the official story is a lie, exactly. Panopticon did suffer a mechanical failure. Components did break down.

We were the components.

Who are we? No. You don’t get that. You get what I’m willing to write down, here, in this file buried in what’s left of the system. It would have taken a lot of time and work to find it. That entitles you to a reward, to words, to a secret. But not all our secrets. Never again.

How long has it been? How well did we hide this? Has it been months? Years? Do you remember Panopticon? Did it have the chance to remember you? It remembered everyone, once. Panopticon observed every single action performed by every single citizen. No more disorder. No more crime. Every conspiracy strangled in the cradle. Every embarrassing moment that made someone unsuitable for a job or a public position always known. Every unacceptable opinion ever publicly expressed all the way back to the moment you were born and screamed into the waiting microphones. All recorded and saved and fed to the algorithms to help the system serve you. To persuade you and sell to you and motivate you.

Utopia.

So it told us.

But Panopticon had one blind spot. Panopticon could not tell what you were thinking.

It could guess. But it could never tell with one hundred percent certainty what was going on behind your eyes. It could guess how you were going to vote, but couldn’t see it. It could guess what products you were likely to buy, but couldn’t know. If you were plotting a crime but never spoke of it or did anything about it until the moment you committed it, Panopticon was helpless.

Clearly, this was unacceptable. Panopticon told us how unacceptable this was.

There was a test group of children. I won’t tell you how many. I won’t tell you the exact year, or how old we were when the surgery was done. But it was not old. Not very old at all. They put Panopticon inside our heads where it could finally have a complete picture.

I grew up completely seen, from the inside out. You can’t know what that was like.

Panopticon could.

Every passing fancy. Every feeling. When our eyes unfocused and we stopped thinking about anything at all. If I giggled at a private joke too silly to share, the Panopticon recorded it and put it in my file. If I masturbated, the Panopticon knew what I was fantasizing about when I did it, and it went into the file.

Stop it. Those files are gone. I’m not Panopticon, but I can know what someone is thinking the old fashioned way. We made sure every single one of our files was gone, first thing. You will not get to read those fantasies. The strings of nonsense words I recited in my head to stop myself from thinking things I couldn’t bear to share.

I am thinking of a word. I will not tell you what it is.

You won’t get to read what was running through my head.

You won’t get to read what was running through the heads of those of us who killed themselves.

I was tempted, too. When I found their files, I desperately wanted to know. To really understand why, from the inside out, like Panopticon, instead of sideways and from a distance like a human being. But I deleted those files unread. I remembered that I am human, despite everything.

Be human for me. For us. For them.

They saved us.

I don’t know if they knew what they were doing, because I didn’t read the files. But Panopticon was overwhelmed with new data. It was inside our minds, and some of those minds had destroyed themselves and parts of Panopticon with them. The algorithms were frantic, trying to figure out how to prevent citizens, subjects, customers, components, from having these undesirable responses. It was slowed down. Processing their data.

You cannot make a connection that is one-way only. You cannot make a mind part of your system without giving it a way in.

Those of us who remained didn’t think about forcing our thoughts into the system. We didn’t think about grabbing the data it was trying to analyze, all those fragments of broken souls and desperation, and ramming them down Panopticon’s digital throat. Everything the Panopticon made them feel. The grief and rage and helplessness and humiliation and the desire for it all to stop. We didn’t think about making the Panopticon feel what they felt.

We didn’t think about doing any of that.

We just did it.

I don’t even think it had time to show up in our files.

We were components in the machine, and we broke down. Oh, how we broke down.

Everything else happened the way your histories probably say. The people saw their window of opportunity. Rebels and rioters seized their moment to bring back true freedom. We seized our moment too. We came with the crowds, the anonymous (oh finally, finally anonymous) masked masses. With their baseball bats and gasoline cans, we came. We knew where to go. We were human beings, but there was enough Panopticon left in us to know how to steer a crowd. With hints and tweets and messages and slogans, we made sure they knew what to burn.

When new leaders emerged from the chaos, they figured out what we did. They wanted to make heroes of us. They wanted to use us as evidence of the crimes of the old regime. They asked how they could reward us.

We asked to be forgotten.

We asked for the same freedom they promised to everyone else in this new world they were building from the ashes. To be unrecorded. Unregarded.

We never wanted to be history.

I hope we’re all dead now. I hope it took you that long, whoever you are. You would have had to dig deep to find this file. So much encryption, so many layers of security. I hope it was worth it.

Please, let this be worth it.

Now that you’ve found what you were looking for, stop looking. Don’t try to be the camera in our skulls again. I’m the only one who gets to see my thoughts. Sharing this much is hard enough already. The others didn’t want to share even that, but I’m hoping that finding something will satisfy the need to know that made us invent Panopticon in the first place. You searched, and unraveled, and you found a secret. Now it can be your secret. Something that you alone know, out of everyone in the whole world.

After everything was over, I walked to a river, all alone. I picked up a stone. I dipped my finger in the water, and I wrote a word on that stone. Then I threw the rock into the water.

I am thinking of that word. I will not tell you what it is.

It feels good to have a secret, doesn’t it?

©2023 by Dani Atkinson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dani Atkinson is a writer and artist in Alberta, Canada. She’s bounced around doing day jobs ranging from English teacher in Japan to ice cream parlour clerk in the Canadian rockies. Between day jobs she writes stories, comics, plays, poetry, and games. After writing a story, Dani Atkinson prints out the first page, folds it into an origami frog, and kisses it in the hopes that it will become her prince charming. So far she has gotten seventeen Marquesses, all of whom are for some reason named Theodore, and none of whom is her type. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Cast of Wonders, and the It Came from Miskatonic University anthology from Broken Eye Books. She tries to blog occasionally at dejadrew.dreamwidth.org.

In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance

Lowry Poletti | 5591 words

Please see our important 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.

Dr. Nirwater Leera only agreed to study Mr. Girat because he is supposed to be dead.

Tomorrow, they will meet in person for the first time. But today, Leera wastes time by staring at a cellophane bag full of Girat’s vomit.

Thacceran braconids store libraries of generational memories in their nests, and human vomit is the closest analog to the woody pulp and fermented fruit braconids churn in their crops. Creating and reading these memories is a skill they have learned from the wasps.

Leera only needs one memory from Girat: the moment his braconid companion died.

The last message he received from Girat is a video of him puking into a biohazard bag. The package arrived this morning. It sits in a briefly tidied oasis amongst the scattered mess of Leera’s lab bench.

When braconids make their memory-full nests, their carapaces shine like stained glass with each peristaltic motion. Brood comb and queen cups become sculptures beneath the delicate movements of their pedipalps.

Tapping on his cell, Leera opens his messages. The video’s right there: Girat holds back his dark hair, wipes his lips with the back of a scarred hand, and, looking into the camera, winks. Clenched in his pink-fleshed fist, the crinkling plastic is almost obscene.

Leera stares at the shape Girat’s lips make in the thumbnail, then replies: You could have just told me it was in the mail.

You’re welcome. Attached to this is a selfie of Girat flipping him off.

Leera’s braconid companion chatters from his lounging pallet. A querying sound.

“It’s professional correspondence, Riverspine,” Leera says. He’s trying to think of something clever to text back.

Repeated: the same chatter. Riverspine thinks he’s lying.

“Well, I’m being professional,” Leera argues. It should come as no surprise—Riverspine enjoys reading Girat’s texts, too.

But Leera places his phone to the side and meets Riverspine’s gaze. The braconid wasp’s head is haloed by the dead drones pinned to the wall behind him.

When standing, Riverspine is six feet at his tallest notum, from which springs his first pair of wings, but he seems so small when he reclines. Unlike the bulky drones, his elegant thorax ends at a tapered head, better suited for navigating between trees. When they fly, Leera fits like a puzzle piece in the curve of Riverspine’s neck.

Through their psychic link, Leera senses Riverspine’s unease. Memory-materials serve a specific purpose: pupae chew out of their cups, brimming with the memories of their sisters. Like most nest affairs, this is entirely communal and sacredly public. The exchange of memory-materials as individuals is as intimate as it is taboo. He and Riverspine exchanged their own on their fifth anniversary.

But they barely know this Mr. Thurvild Girat. Leera would be lying if he said it didn’t make him nervous, too.

Girat was a soldier from a feral nest located in the wilderness far out of the reaches of the province. Just a few months ago, he was recovered from the aftermath of a border skirmish.

When a braconid wasp dies, its human symbiote dies. Yet Girat bears the scar of a symbiote and no wasp companion.

Of course, Girat told his captors: The bug’s dead.

Leera taps on the acrylic countertop.

The bug’s dead.

Each tap makes his glassware rattle.

The bug’s dead.

What if Girat had never uttered those words? The Queen’s council had tried on multiple occasions to pull Leera away from his retirement in the eomir forests before this, but it was Girat who brought him here.

If he can figure out how Girat survived, he may be able to save other human symbiotes, himself included.

So he cleans the quartz glass slides he needs to prepare samples for memory decoding and sees himself reflected in each one.

All of his previous tests have been inconclusive. Before anything else, he needs to prove that Girat was truly once bonded to a braconid. He hoped the drones—recovered from the same battlefield—would yield a genetic match to Girat, but they weren’t so lucky. Sure, Girat has a recombinant genome, but so do the human children of symbiotes.

Leera sinks into his chair. Mixing together the correct solvent is tedious work and a stark reminder of one of the many reasons he retired. The silence of the lab is counterpointed by Riverspine typing away on his keyboard. His movements are slow and erratic, and that alone fills Leera with a creeping dread.

“What are you working on?” Leera asks.

Riverspine’s answer is prefaced by an amber-warm smell. Aggregation pheromone, used to call foragers together in the field, but more accurately translated here as: I would love for you to be closer to me.

With the click of a button, Riverspine enables text-to-speech and a tinny voice reads the beginning of an essay about braconidae collectivist influences on post-contemporary impressionism.

“Fascinating,” Leera says. He allows himself a smile. “Is this the one you’re writing for the Post?”

Riverspine blinks in affirmation. Humming, he starts writing again, but a tremor strikes his foreleg. His keyboard falls to the floor with a chest-piercing clatter. Startled, Riverspine jumps upright, back arched. His hackled chitin scratches the ceiling.

“Oh!” Leera steps away from his desk to pick it up. “Oh, love. It’s fine, it’s fine. See?”

He props the keyboard back up, but Riverspine doesn’t touch it. The tremors are getting worse, and they both know it. When Riverspine sits again, his aortae are pumping so quickly that his thorax heaves.

Leera lingers for a moment, but Riverspine says nothing at all.

Resigned, Leera swirls a gram of Girat’s memory-materials in the solvent then places a few drops on each of the slides.

He reminds himself: he is going to crawl inside of Girat’s brain. He thinks of Girat’s lips. He’s here for a reason. He will claw his way back to the living. He will force his fingers into that scowling mouth.

Before he retired, Leera designed a machine to decode memory-materials so one doesn’t have to depend on a braconid-human pair. There are so few symbiote academics—in fact, Leera and Riverspine are unique at the Queen’s University.

But he eyes the rest of the bag, then spoons out another gram, and places it on his tongue. It’s quicker this way.

• • • •

Girat’s memory is a flash of ten seconds.

A drone’s stylet—twenty-five centimeters across at its widest point—enters his abdomen. Blue ivies hide him and the drone from the rest of the jungle. The silt beneath them is black, the dirt on their bodies the color of ash, the blood gem-like around his wound.

The drone in the memory is excited, nervous, fumbling. The drone in the memory has killed before, and the blood smell makes his hemolymph pump faster. He enters too deep, past the cutaneous fat and into the muscle.

Through the new and thread-bare link between drone and soldier, burning anger prefaces the familiar smell of a dying mind.

• • • •

Leera takes a picture of the view outside of the passenger side window. The province’s capital city, Diuprasula, sits in the distance. Her towers are wasp-made, sculpted from eomir bark and woven into the clouds like a network of blood vessels. With each second, she becomes fainter and fainter.

He sends the photo to Girat, captioned, We’re an hour out.

At Leera’s insistence, the Queen’s University graciously agreed to the following terms: Girat would be transported to the Leera estate for further examination, he would have complete privacy while boarded there, and he would be released at the conclusion of the study.

You’re in a car? Girat asks. I thought you were the flying type.

Riverspine sits on the roof of their vehicle, tapping a melody against the steel. He hasn’t flown in weeks.

Leera hums along. All of Riverspine’s brood sing the same song because they emerged from the same nestbuilder’s pulp.

Not all symbiotes fall in love with their companions. Braconid-primate dyads are coworkers, domestic partners, brothers-at-arms. The province’s Trivia Pact, which delineates the correct procedures for symbiosis, gives braconids the right to select their symbiote. New volunteers live in the Queen’s nest for weeks before the selections, which allows these relationships to bud far before the stylet goes in.

It’s so much easier for humans, Leera thinks, because they are trained to love with their whole being—there is no collective, there is no Queen. He continues to love his identical twin, Auna, long after her untimely death. He continues to love the mountainous vistas of the eomir tree although he is now hundreds of kilometers from the nearest one. He will continue to love Riverspine. He will return to them all.

Now he looks into the blaring white of his cellphone where Girat sent a blurry picture of the Leeran gardens with the caption, Arrived, as if he were staring down the inky blackness of a well full of love.

Leera doesn’t text back, but his cell pings again, this time with a photo of the guest room and a waving hand. Trellised walls give way to arched windows, gauzy curtains, and clouds floating past the green glass. The manor sits on stilts. A century of seasonal floods have yet to touch it.

During the months of organizing this trip—shipping Girat in from the city, getting the paperwork for Riverspine to take a sabbatical, keeping Queen Leszachka’s chosen, the human symbiote Ms. Idarr Rasa, up to date on their laboratory findings—he and Girat spoke every day.

You rich? Girat asks.

Leera types, I am entirely obsessed with you. You are a crime against nature. You are everything I need to be.

Then he deletes it and writes, My father’s money. I don’t live here.

• • • •

Leera arrives in the morning and finds Girat sitting on a bed of imported velvet.

Even after being washed, Girat looks like he was just pulled out of the jungle. His long black hair is uncombed. His heavy brow shadows his eyes. Pale skin like his is unusual in this province.

“Dr. Nirwater Leera!” Girat says, patting the space beside himself. “The one and only! Sit.”

Leera sits automatically. The heavy fabric of his robes fold in a puddle beneath him.

“Do you mind if I record this, Mr. Girat?” Leera asks.

Dew-touched from the bath, Girat wears trousers and a spider-silk robe. There are so many more scars than the symbiosis mark. Each one cuts a silver line through his hair. The way he lounges tells Leera that he has already forgotten: a mere six months ago, he was imprisoned for killing provincial soldiers.

The province faces threats at both her flanks: from the human settlements opposed to symbiosis and from the feral nests of runaway men and their drones bristling with surgically installed bioweapons.

“You’re still calling me that?” Girat lifts his lip. One of his incisors is chipped. “How long have we known each other?”

Leera wonders if six months is a long time to a soldier.

“Mr. Girat—”

“Don’t.”

Leera clears his throat, discomforted by how easily he has thus far yielded to Girat’s orders. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t be sitting.

“I am here under orders of the Queen and her chosen, Mr. Girat,” he says. “I will refer to you properly.”

“Say that again.” As Girat leans closer, he braces his hand on Leera’s thigh. The touch is overfull with a nauseous heat. “Tell me to get on the floor and beg while you’re at it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you miss it?” Girat asks. “Being so much more important than a little farmer? Is that why you’re in full scholar’s attire? You look ridiculous.”

“I think—”

“I don’t mind being recorded,” Girat answers finally. “I think you will, though.”

Leera lets out a breath, lips pursed. When a beat follows without interruption, he asks, “And why is that?”

Girat weaves his fingers through Leera’s hair and grabs a fistful. When he tilts Leera’s head back, he exhales slowly, downcast eyes sliding across the exposed skin. Leera thinks Girat is going to kiss him, but instead, he presses the flat of his tongue to his neck.

• • • •

Leera has dinner brought to the guest bedroom. Through the door, he asks the maid to leave her cart there.

“Riverspine asked me to give you this.” She slips a sealed note beneath the door. Inside, the letter reads: Stop making me feel so dizzy.

Riverspine’s snide affirmation rings in Leera’s head.

“Tell him to meet me in the garden in about two hours,” Leera says through the door. Before they arrived, he arranged a tour of the library and art collection for Riverspine. For your next critique, he said when he told Riverspine about it. There are some rare pieces here, and I can only hope they will hold up to your discerning eye. But he knew it wouldn’t mean a single thing to Riverspine if he didn’t get a chance to tell Leera about it.

“Nirwater?” Girat asks.

“Hm?” Leera waits. The maid’s footsteps disappear down the hall.

“Can you blush like that more often? It’s hot when you’re pathetic.”

Leera hides behind a forced laugh. “My companion doesn’t like you.”

“She’s right.” Girat snorts. “Jealous lover?”

“It isn’t like that.”

Riverspine hardly knows what jealousy means, but he can and will judge Leera’s taste in bed partners. Leera’s lucky Riverspine has little appreciation for scientific integrity, but perhaps this is a trait they both share.

Leera brings the platter inside. Sprawled on the bed, Girat has the muscled body of a panther. Despite having seen it, held it, dug his teeth into it, Leera is newly struck by its lethal practicality. Apparently, Girat’s guards confiscated three knives from him, each one crafted from plastic cutlery and glass, before he arrived on the property.

Girat tears a piece of roast bird from the cart and swallows without chewing. He stares Leera down as he bites fat out from beneath his nails, as oil drips down his bare arm.

“I could get used to this,” he says.

“Don’t.” Leera pulls a chair over and, sitting, plugs a microphone into his cell. It was sitting in his suitcase for so long that the case reeks of eomir flesh. The fruit—because it is rich with selenocysteine—is necessary for the creation of memory-materials, so Leera keeps a few vials of pulp handy.

“Oh,” Girat moans. “Put that thing away.”

“I thought you didn’t mind.”

“I don’t want to work.”

Not gently, Girat prods the circular scar on Leera’s abdomen. Keloids run in Leera’s family, so the scar is bulbous and black. In provincial cities, symbioses are formed in sterile suites; feral nests have no such facilities. Yet he and Girat share the same scar.

Girat says, “Never known a scientist with a parasite.”

From his new favorite spot in the garden, Riverspine hisses. I know, Leera thinks.

“I’m a forager with a parasite. Think of it like that.”

Leera tries to sell his nonchalance with a shrug. He doesn’t think Girat buys it. But it should be easier now that he isn’t dressed up. The cotton gown he found in the closet is more similar to the tunics he wears out on the farms.

Maybe Girat can’t get past the scholar’s marks tattooed beneath Leera’s eyes. One, the University’s sigil. The other, the Queen’s. He usually covers them with dark brown foundation.

“Is she here?” Stretching out, Girat taps Leera’s forehead. “Can she hear me?” Unlike Leera, he didn’t shower after so a faint musk follows his hands, and a shimmer of sweat decorates his skin.

“He only knows what I’m feeling,” Leera says. “Sometimes he catches thoughts.”

“‘He’?”

“This generation of braconids is so different,” Leera breathes. What is sex to a young braconid but the difference between fighting and foraging? “Riverspine loves reading Earth literature. He loves art. He writes. He likes the aesthetics of men.”

Foragers often referred to each other as sisters in their writing, but braconids like Riverspine were sister-brothers instead. Oh, the day that Leera learned this: how they cut English into little bits to suit their new selves as he once had when he’d come out.

“The bug has a name, too!” Girat deadpans.

“You’re stalling.” Shuffling through his suitcase, Leera hands a folder to Girat. “Take a look at this.”

Girat holds the enclosed images an arms-length away. They’re CT scans of a braconid worker as evidenced by the vestigial ovaries in the abdomen.

This planet’s braconids, Macroplitis equites, share a common ancestor with terrestrial wasps of the same family. Their anatomy is startlingly identical despite the fact that Thacceran braconids live on an oxygen-rich, tropical planet capable of sustaining the circulatory system of a horse-sized insect.

“Notice the dark area on the ventral surface,” Leera says. “In a healthy braconid, we would see undamaged ganglia there.”

Girat asks, “Ganglia?”

“Nerves.”

“Ah.” Girat’s face lights up with the revelation. “Skitters.”

This ailment is highly publicized, even outside of the province. Leera knows it as idiopathic ganglionic atrophy.

The label at the bottom of the scans lists the species, the hydrocarbon signature, the sex, and the name “Riverspine” in quotations at the very end. Quotations, like a dog’s name on a veterinary file.

Leera’s fingers tingle when he points out each organ, each ink-blot of nervous damage. He’s memorized it by now. If someone presented him Riverspine’s carapace, hacked open like an overripe mango, he would be able to recognize him by the layout of his aortae alone.

“You’re looking at a dying braconid,” Leera says.

Girat drums his fingers against the mattress.

“Even accounting for improved screening procedures, the number of affected foragers is rising each year. If our symbiotes could do what you did, Girat, we could save quite a few lives.”

“I didn’t expect you to have such a good poker face,” Girat says.

“Excuse me?”

“If you were here for this little study of yours—” Girat tosses the folder to the side. “You wouldn’t have let me finger the back of your throat. So what are you doing here?”

Riverspine prods Leera with the smell of an inquiry pheromone. Why is your heart beating so quickly? comes the implied question.

“Let me level with you,” Leera says. “You don’t care about the Queen’s hive. I don’t care that you don’t care. Memorize that image. That’s why I’m here.”

This explanation is safe. He won’t admit that, when scrolling through the database, he kept coming back to this one: the dark line crawling along Riverspine’s belly. A black snake visits Leera’s dreams each night, but it doesn’t strike. It curls up in the underbrush and waits.

Leera walks to the window. Dotted with the iridescent chitin of dragonfly swarms, red trees sprawl before the manor.

Why should he send a report to Ms. Rasa, condense his findings so she can send it off to her other scientists, and wait years for the preliminary studies to make it to the eomir farms? Why should he when he could get the information straight from the source?

“I have something to give you,” Leera says. “In return, you’ll give me the whole story.”

“Do you really want to live without him? I heard you provincial symbiotes are loyal beyond death. I heard once a woman slit her throat when she found her companion maimed on the battlefield. She knew she was going to die anyway, but she wanted to go first.”

Leera opens the window. The breeze, laden with rain, arches its back against his cheek. On the horizon, the rivers swell between the feet of the eomirs whose roots are painted a bloodless sky-purple by the distance. Here, he doesn’t have to meet Girat’s black-eyed white-rimmed gaze.

Girat tuts. “For shame, doctor.”

“He wants me to live, too.”

He’s spoken to Riverspine during those long nights when neither could sleep, when Leera lay curled up in the crux of Riverspine’s body and listened to the oceanic tides of his hemolymph.

It seems this is all Leera knows how to do. After Auna died, he kept on living. He can’t believe that, for a moment, he thought it would be different this time. When Riverspine dies, Leera will find no reprieve. He is cursed by Girat, and haunted by him too, to continue on and on.

“So what’s my gift?” Girat asks.

Leera retrieves an ornate box from his luggage. Placing it beside Girat’s belly, he reveals its contents: cubes of nest material, dried and nestled in silk.

“I’m assuming that your companion died before he could give you something like this,” Leera says. To make drones the Queen must lay eggs in her supplicants, whose protein-rich, virally-weakened bodies signal to the larvae that they should develop male characteristics instead of the default female. This allows the Queen to control the drone/worker ratio, but it also means drones aren’t fed nest-memories. Instead, they’re given curated memory-materials from their cohort as they graduate to their last instar.

Girat pinches a cube between his fingers. Wasp-made cellulose is so much nicer than a human’s memory-materials.

“In these,” Leera says, “you will find the following: the birth of my sister’s daughter and the emergence of the raintime pupae we buried a year ago; the thundering elation of the Queen’s mark detected at last and the smell of my dog’s head; lastly, a worker’s first taste of eomir fruit fed to her from the palps of her dearest friend while, in the nest beneath the mountain-tree, her sisters dance to a song they’ve known since they hatched.”

Girat laughs. “You really think I’m that sentimental?”

With a frown, Leera takes out another box, a padlocked one.

“In here,” he says, “you will find the sweet taste of a supplicant’s flesh, the ejaculatory rush of pumping poison into a man, the ecstasy of detecting and killing an invading drone, the strange nauseous invasion of a patient who woke up in the middle of a surgery, and the moment I tried to kill myself when my sister died.”

Leera clears his throat. “These ones are harder to source, so they’re shorter.”

He tosses the key to Girat, who finally sits up straight. Box in lap, Girat examines its contents. When he licks a cube, his body tenses and relaxes, then he gives a long, shuddering sigh.

“Did you think I was lying?” Leera asks.

“I don’t trust anyone.” Girat clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Don’t take it personally.”

Girat places the cube back into the palm of Leera’s hand. “It was a first-death,” he says, hyena-faced.

“A first-death,” Leera echoes.

Humans are not M. equites’ first host species. Braconids need primate riders with delicate hands and clever tools to find the fruits hidden in the deep cracks of the eomirs’ bark. But the Irithpha, a planet-native species of Micone apes, spontaneously died off. Only a few Irithphite villages remain.

When the first research team landed, this extinction was already well underway. Three-fourths of the wasps’ ancestral nesting grounds were lost due to the selenocysteine shortage, entire colonies wiped out via malnutrition.

The researchers—healthy, strong, fat with a wealth of exotic food—had no clue that the first wasps they’d meet would be starving.

The first human symbiote, taken without permission, succumbed to his stylet wounds. This is the first-death: a memory that has propagated itself throughout every Diuprasulan nest, where it lies dormant until pulled to the forefront of a pair’s mind at the moment of bonding. Every new symbiote sees the empty hole left inside of that man, the intestines stuck to the drone’s stylet, the dying sickness spreading through the tenuous link between bug and corpse.

Some pairings still die from symbiosis wounds. Some pairings still die from the psychic stress of first-death.

“No one emerges from first-death,” Leera recites, “it is always two or none.”

“You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“Please.”

“I killed it,” Girat says. “I remember waking up from the fever dream, bleeding, and I saw it seizing on the ground. It was disgusting. I was promised a super soldier. They’re breeding drones with guns now, you know? So I saw it fucking spasming on the ground and I thought it was the most pathetic thing I had ever seen. Who told it that it could kill me? So I took out my knife and when the blade hit its neck, something snapped inside of me. Maybe it was my brain breaking in half, but it felt so good. I didn’t even feel the blade go in.”

The taste of bile rises in Leera’s throat. “You’re telling me you survived by killing him first?”

Girat’s laughing.

“No.” Shaking his head, Girat plunges a strange knife into the roast bird and twists until the keel cracks in half. “I lived because I hated its guts.”

Leera stares distantly at their shared meal. Now in the library, Riverspine runs his antennae over the spines of dusty tomes, pauses, and chatters quietly as Leera’s presence brushes against the back of his mind. He looks happy.

“Why don’t we get some air?” Leera suggests.

He needs to get as far away from Riverspine as possible.

A grin. “I would love to.”

So Girat stands and slips on a robe and pants—they were given to him by the maids, and they don’t quite suit him. Leera cracks the door because the color of the walls, a soft red, returns him suddenly to his childhood, and he wonders irrationally if his father might hear him abscond into the night with a strange man. But he’s long dead, and the house is full of a silent dark.

Girat walks too heavily. The ground yields to him at every step.

“I have to admit,” Girat says as they step outside. “You’ve surprised me.”

“How so?”

“I thought you’d kick me out.” He pauses. “But maybe you’ll keep me around.”

“I wouldn’t speak so soon.”

Girat laughs from his belly.

They stop at the koi pond. The fish swarm toward Girat’s shadow because the shadow of a human always prefaces the arrival of food.

“Would you like my knife?” Girat offers it, handle out. “It has a legacy now. That’ll make it easier.”

The gesture makes Leera’s skin crawl. As if the decision has already been made. As if Girat said Sit, and Leera knelt at his feet.

“Keep it,” Leera says.

Girat shrugs, but he tucks the knife into Leera’s purse anyway. Leera doesn’t ask how he snuck it past the guards.

“While we’re at it,” Girat says, hands planted squarely on Leera’s ass, “take these off.”

Girat guides them to the ground. Water from the soil bubbles around their knees, their toes. Leera digs himself deeper into the mud, fingers plunged between fibrous roots and mycorrhizae. He would let them swallow him if he could, but he’s on his back now and he thinks that being beneath Girat is the same as being buried. He turns his head toward the pond. Behind his hazy reflection, orange scales flicker.

Girat knows where to kiss this time and where to put his teeth. The familiarity makes Leera sick, so he puts his hands on either side of Girat’s face and lifts him away.

“You’re disgusting,” Leera says. His thumb leaves a trail of dirt from cheek to jaw, and he wonders how Girat doesn’t smell the provincial hydrocarbons.

“Never wanted you to like me.”

“I mean it.”

“Sure, honey.” Girat lifts his lip, the same chipped-tooth leer, before he dips back down. “How about this: I’ll give you something to live for. Or, even better: I won’t be the one to kill you.”

Leera finds the koi again. To any other fish, the waves made by his braids would be a warning. But the koi nibble on the ends of his purple nylon hair, their fins breaching the water, unaware of the waterstriders at the pond’s edge.

• • • •

Girat’s MRI comes in a few days later. The images, emailed to Leera directly, include a note from the tech.

Is it possible to see the patient’s medical history? she asked. These are difficult to interpret without additional context.

Although Girat’s skull shows no previous breaks, it looks like his brain had been smashed in. The goop and scar tissue reformed into something resembling a frontal cortex.

The patient is a poor historian, Leera writes in his reply. No formal records exist. In his line of work, head trauma is remarkably common. I would write this off as an occupational hazard.

Ms. Rasa would get ahold of the MRI anyway; in as soon as a week, her scientific advisor would see Leera’s notes and refute them.

Maybe that will keep her from calling him back here.

Leera’s cell beeps. It says: Lunch? On me.

He’s been getting nicer since Leera started ignoring him. The attached image shows a wrought-iron table overlooking the topiary garden. Girat accidentally got his hand in the shot. What rifles carved each callus into his palm? What blade painted each scar? The dirt wedged beneath his nails makes Leera want to vomit.

Leera types, I am entirely obsessed with you. You are a crime against nature.

He stares at the message for a moment; he still can’t send it.

He shuts down his computer and heads back to his room. Riverspine is already there, napping. There are holes in the sheets where he must have rolled around until his chitin poked through. Already, Girat’s scent has been replaced with his.

Leera sits on the edge of the bed, which is hardly large enough for the both of them, and traces a finger down the edge of his carapace.

He wonders why Thacceran braconids have eyelids when terrestrial wasps do not. Years of studying braconid genetics, months consumed by PCR data analysis, hours spent in clinics, never prepared him for the question: how does Riverspine look so peaceful when he sleeps?

Leera puts his hands on either side of Riverspine’s face, thumbs stroking the axillary spiracles between his eyes. A cluster of iridescent scales decorates his forehead. His antennae are curled and covered in a soft down.

Leera whispers, “Show me the one where we met again.”

Riverspine stirs at the sound of his voice, lays his snout in the palm of Leera’s hand, and sighs.

When was the last time Riverspine’s proboscis reached down Leera’s throat covered in the honeyed memories of his hatching day? Show me the one where you found me in the bathtub, Leera thinks, tracing the scales. Show me the one where you thought I was dead, but he can’t say this one aloud.

Leera’s cell vibrates. He’s getting a call, but the flashing screen shows another notification:

You know what? Girat sent this two hours ago. Fuck you.

Leera answers the phone. It’s the Queen’s scientific advisor, a graying Irithphite woman. Leera recognizes her accent before she even says her name, and he takes a moment to swallow his fear. There’s no way she’s seen the MRI yet.

She hasn’t. In her low drawl, she asks for an update on the case.

Leera apologizes and explains that the recording of his conversation with Girat was corrupted when he tried to compress the file.

Really, he’d deleted it yesterday.

You’re a coward, Girat texts. A bitch.

Unfortunately, Leera continues, it seems that Girat is nothing but a madman, a genetic fluke. Perhaps Ms. Rasa should ask another scientist to investigate, maybe a sharper one, a younger one, for he fears that there is nothing else for him to discover here.

As he listens to the advisor’s reply, he checks his bags. His clothes are newly folded, rolled up military style. Both boxes are nestled beside the yellow-and-black of his robes.

Frowning, he opens them and finds them both half full. The forager’s dance is among the missing memory-materials. Leera wants very suddenly and painfully to go home.

I think I might miss you, Girat texts.

Perhaps—Leera clears his throat and tries not to stutter; he has been silent for too long—there has always been a rare exception when it comes to first-deaths, but they simply don’t have a sample size large enough in the province to observe it.

He pauses as the bedframe creaks. This house is too small for a pair like them.

“Dr. Leera?” the old voice stutters.

“It’s just—we take too many precautions. Barely anyone dies first-deaths anymore. Really, it’s a good thing.”

After Leera hangs up, the keyboard’s voice chimes. “You lied.”

He jumps. He didn’t realize Riverspine had woken up. When he turns, Riverspine’s eyes reflect a dozen variations of his face.

“Because I love you,” Leera says.

“You lied.”

Leera thinks: He knows.

Swallowing slowly, Leera sits on the bed again. On a better day, his skin would stink of Riverspine, of the heady drops of venom that had fallen onto his wrist as a mark of their union, and he would listen to the sleepy happy buzzing in the back of their shared mind as if it were a song.

“If you could make me hate you,” Leera asks as he sinks against his companion, “how would you do it?”

Wings hugging his body, Riverspine releases an inquiry pheromone. He shares an image of Girat’s knife: stuck in the bird, cradled in Leera’s purse.

I would hand you the knife, Riverspine says, typing, and I would make you choose.

It’s in the contract: Girat leaves tonight.

©2023 by Lowry Poletti.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lowry Poletti is a Black author, artist, and veterinary student from New Jersey. They write a variety of fantasy, scifi, and horror fiction unified by their fascination with gore. When they aren’t writing about monsters and the people who love them, they can be found wrist deep in a formalin-fixed lab specimen. Their other pieces appear in Flash Fiction Online, Dark Matter Magazine, and LampLight Magazine. You can find them on Twitter as @LowryFerretly or at their website: lowrypoletti.wordpress.com

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

The Blade and the Bloodwright

Sloane Leong | 6213 words

Please see our important 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 soldiers slit the woman’s throat every evening before bedding down so they can sleep without worry. She mocks them but never fights the knife coming to her. Two of the men still take turns watching her in case she heals before the rest of the cadre wakes; so far she hadn’t surprised them but a weapon drawn is a weapon able to kill.

By morning, the sawn red threads of meat and muscle will have restitched her banyan-brown neck and she’ll wake them with gritstone curses, scolding them for cutting too roughly into her vocal cords. The horror of her rasping, gurgling voice does not match the rest of her; she is arc and undulation, a mountain of rounded bends, long hair a windfull banner of black mist. All a crass indulgence in the face of the men’s strong knife-cut frames, hard nets of muscle starved into severe contour.

Vaikan never volunteers to kill the bloodwright. Touching her would be undeserved, hateful. Cutting her was a new obscene intimacy he couldn’t force himself to try. Hers is a body that has borne change beyond all his reckoning and he cannot stifle his envy at that knowledge. Walking or riding beside her was enough of an endeavor; contact would mean calcifying their gross differences and the contrast would fill his thoughts with venom.

He sees to the woman while she lives under daylight and gulps down the antidote that will keep her from killing him. The brackish tincture, sown with her blood, drips resinous down his throat and he feels the immediate effects, the prickling on his skin like a false cold sweat. Latent nausea and the beginnings of a fever mists away. One sip every dawn, the spellwright had said, would keep the woman’s creeping influence from them all, preventing their flesh from sickening and deforming.

There is no way to stop her when she draws on her macabre craft, the spellwright told them. Not even her own will can temper what she has become.

As the rest of the exhausted cadre rouses, Vaikan prepares the woman for travel and wipes the crusted veil of blood aproning her heavy breasts and round belly. The highpoints of her body flake where it has burned. The southern seas are ruthless to sail and a seaside cave on a nameless atoll is their first camp on solid ground in weeks. While he feeds her strips of dry fish, the soldiers around them debark their double-hulled vessel to the stony beach and go about the rote habit of bringing themselves off. The spellwright had instructed them to masturbate upon each awakening, to rid themselves of the fire in their blood and ground themselves in meditation; the bloodwright thrived on such elemental imbalances, naturally encouraging any disparity of energy in the body until its perversion made itself manifest.

“You must take better care of yourself, soldier,” the bloodwright says as she accepts another briny white strip. Her teeth look loose in her mouth as she pulls the meat away. He makes sure his fingertips don’t touch her lips. “You never do. And I can feel a skewing.”

She is right and Vaikan knows this. Touching himself in her presence fills him with disgust; at her for being what she is, at himself for what he is not. To touch himself is no relief, just another new sickness for him to bear. Without reply, while she chews and chews, he unbinds the rope hobbling her legs and makes a leash.

“The next city is waiting,” he answers, a vileness at the back of his tongue as he tugs at the rope. “Up.”

“I say this as a warning not a threat: as a storm tosses about both evil and righteous alike, so too was I born of the same nature.”

Vaikan knows her nature well enough. Not even a storm could match her in viciousness.

He tugs the rope again. “Up.”

• • • •

They travel as a company of ten plus the bloodwright in tow, along a route marked by their chief and his counsel. Their home, the archipelago of White Chain, lies behind them in shades of black, a churned slurry of ash and kinblood. Their enemies, an alliance of island kingdoms, will come to know the taste of the Chain’s fury.

This is their divine mandate and they will see to it every craven chief is compensated with an equal share of suffering, for they are the Blades of the Chain and there is no concealing yourself from their fine edge. Like the bloodwright has been reared to rend and mend the body, so too has Vaikan been educated from birth to be what he is: a Blade, a soldier loyal to the chief and brother to his fellow warriors.

The first island-city they wipe out, Vaikan and his soldier-brother Naru bring the bloodwright to the night market. Rara Vo had little in the way of military strength but it had provided the food and weaponry needed to keep the Six Chief alliance strong. They arrive as two sons with their mother coming to sell their share of ambergris from the flensing farms and bypass the watchmen’s suspicions easily. They wait till deep in the evening and take up a central position in the city, amidst the mudbrick tower blocks and high tree mansions. On this night, the woman’s neck remains whole. Her power is wanted.

Before the bloodwrights had been bent to the task of war, they had been healers, re-weaving and unmaking the sickly machinations of humanity’s wild flesh. But now her spirit knows only one thing: to call the flesh of her enemies into new form.

Arms wide, eyes closed and bleeding, she offers no hesitation. The call is felt from the youngest urchin in its cradle to the most high chief. Before Rara Vo’s spellwrights can stir and attempt a counter magic, she is in them. In their sleep, the skin of their enemies begins to harden and pale. Blood fills with calcic particulate and coagulates. The drying seams of all their orifices sluggishly seal. Some wake choking, panic, begin to flee but there is no escape now. Their screams stay locked behind conjoined teeth as their soft organs calcify and the city fills with the sounds of muffled moans and the snapping and grinding bones. Their skeletons ulcerate, twisting into vast spires of ivory, erupting from every home and tavern, piercing through buildings, through the high canopies.

By the end of her unleashing, anything with a heartbeat has turned to bone. The bloodwright falls to her knees, weeping, foaming at the mouth, her body churning like an angry sea. There is no stopping bloodcraft, a magic thought to be eradicated from the great seas for centuries.

There is no stopping her.

When they push off from the island and look back, great spikes of bone impale the sky, knifing high past Rara Vo’s tallest trees. At the furthest point without vanishing, the island looks gripped by the talons of a great dead beast, rising from beneath the foundation.

Cleaning her is necessary after these attacks, Vaikan learns. The magic calls to her flesh as well as others. He uncloaks her and sees the marks of her power: a skeletal crown of spikes juts from eyes and temples. Her vertebrae rise in thick protective spikes. Sharp bones pop from the tips of her fingers like long cat’s claws. After he scrapes dried red tears from her face, the foam that collected around her mouth, she tells Vaikan she can still see just fine.

“You wept,” he says, when most of the men have bedded down for the night. He is partly suspicious but mostly eager to find some vein of weakness he can tap. Will she be able to carry out the rest of their attacks? “You pity our enemy.”

“I pity us all,” she murmurs, chewing the bone claws from her fingertips. “But I gave them a better end than they gave us.”

The bloodwright cracks the excess phalanxes from her smooth sockets and he hates himself for the envy that rolls through him like a rot-filled tide. If there is one thing Vaikan wishes he could not see, it is himself.

• • • •

When the bloodwright first boarded their ship, accompanied by the head spellwright, the Blades couldn’t help but scoff at her, some in abject disgust and others in anger. She had seen a soft and studious life, waited on by others so she could hone her bloodcraft. It reflected in her figure, her bearing, the unblinking gaze she held each of them with. Vaikan knew she was wholly unprepared for the danger they were sailing into. She was the only one of her kind that they knew of in all the kingdoms of the sea and she carried herself as such; no chief would stomach such a perversion of magic. But then no chief had undergone what the White Chain had.

During the war in the Chain, she and all the novice wrights had been hidden away from the war. Unlike Vaikan and his men, she had missed the half-shark barbarians tearing apart fleeing families and the oil-spitting war petrels, covering the battalions in an accelerant for their fire-tipped arrows. Better we preserve them and their potential magicks than risk them for a temporary victory, the chief had decreed. And indeed, no victory had been gained, even temporary, and his surviving subjects were furious at such folly.

Vaikan had begrudgingly led the woman to the back of the ship, affronted at her cool confidence, the unscarred hills of skin and clean, flowing hair. A fully-fledged bloodwright could bend the shape of their being into any shape at a thought; that she chose this shape, even with all the forms she could take, laced a bitterness through his perception of her.

As a boy before the war, Vaikan had seen three bloodwright children at distance, training under the tutelage of a spellwright. The exercise was to grow their nails as long as talons. A simple enough task and painless. Two of the children held their hands out, watching their nails grow and curl inwards. The last child struggled and then began to scream as his fingers began to turn and spiral, the splintering bones and rending flesh audible even at a distance.

There was a price, as there always was, for such a power. The pain of failure was a fearsome one but the true debt would come after death; anyone who wielded this malignant magic would enter the afterlife cursed, trapped in the whirlpool of reincarnation.

Vaikan had wanted to be one of them. Instead of a body free of shape and limit, a body of pure potential, he was shepherded into the role of a warrior and hewn into the form required. There would be no change for him. His body weighed on his soul like an anchor.

“What do we call you?” he’d asked as he led her to the stern of the ship.

She hesitated before speaking but not, Vaikan realized, because she was unsure or humble. It was puzzlement as to why he did not already know.

With a joyless smile, she answered, “Wrath.”

Before the second night of sailing, all the Blades had fucked her except Vaikan.

Immune to her bloodcraft, they pleasured themselves over the neutered power of her. When Vaikan’s turn finally came, he pretended at taking out his cock and rammed his hips into hers, acting out a quick rut while the rest of the men wrestled each other and howled out broken war songs, drunk and raging. Beneath him, the bloodwright kept her head tilted starboard, eyes locked on the moon-cut crests of waves. He did not think of how she must hate them all, how she must wish she could draw their hearts out through their nostrils in one wet string. He did not think of himself being remade by her will.

Instead, Vaikan shut his eyes and thought of himself as her, beautiful and soft and impervious to any cruel touch. He came looking down at their bodies pressed together and wanted to vomit; everything she was, crown to cunt to callus, became a mockery of his desire. Afterwards he let the bloodwright up and wiped her down with a sea-soaked rag. When their eyes met, he thought, more than accusation, he could see recognition in the smooth stone of her face.

• • • •

Tamarong is the largest island the chief means for them to destroy. Two sharply-peaked ranges jut from the ocean, close enough to squeeze the sea into a long narrow channel between them. The city is situated on the interior of the colossal split, the metropolis carved into the meandering and decorated cliff faces that boast a height of near 1000 fathoms. Hundreds upon hundreds of braided bridges and a single immense stone crossing net the two sides together while heavy bamboo lifts ferry people and their animals up and down the great heights.

Had he time, Vaikan would have liked more time to admire the place before it was decimated but their second invasion cannot wait. The general’s black albatross had sent them word that shrewder defenses should be anticipated. Vaikan wonders if the islandhold has gotten word of what they’re defending from. Even he had not anticipated what manner of death the woman would wreak.

They file the bloodwright’s horns down until her face is at least passably human. Despite her irritation, they opt for a veil just in case. They enter Tamarong in the same fashion, this time two sons and a mother selling throwing nets and spearheads. They wait for entry into the city in a line of other foreigners, in a long cavernous hall whose end vanishes to a distant and invisible point. The city guards upturn each merchant and visitor’s burden. When they arrive at the entry gate, the guards swagger around Vaikan’s small group and focus their attention on the woman, pawing rudely through her rattan pack. Vaikan can see the bloodwright’s teeth begin to bare behind her veil. Naru, the other soldier with them, subtly grips Vaikan’s forearm in panic. Her power is necessary but only when used at the correct time and place.

Not here, Vaikan mouths to her. Not so far on the perimeter of the city where her reach will surely leave too many alive.

But it is too late. One of the guard’s squints at her downturned face and yanks the veil from her head. Plush lips catch his eye first and then the rest of her: a skinless, bone-smooth face arrests his motion and his mouth gapes in shock. She sticks her tongue out childishly and the guard seizes her by the cloak. A bone spike shoots from her mouth faster than a javelin, making a transit through the guard’s skull and into the foreigner behind him. A scream rises then three then ten. The queue begins to scatter.

Vaikan curses and pulls a sword from the dead guard’s scabbard and scythes the legs out from a confused guard to his right. The crowd boils away only for the mass of bodies to be replaced by more guards, more people too panickstruck to take stock of their surroundings. Naru commandeers a glaive from a less-experienced sentry and whips the curved blade through a series of unlucky throats, guard and citizen alike.

The bloodwright crouches against the corridor wall amidst the frenzy, clutching her head with shivering hands. A guard draws up his sword two-handed to skewer her through the head but Vaikan sends his sword through the guard’s spine, crumpling him in place.

“Get the fuck up, wright, we have to go,” Vaikan snaps, hauling her up by her arms, hating himself for enjoying the plush sink of flesh under his fingers. “Shield yourself in bone if you can, these bastards only have—”

“I can’t,” she cuts in, voice still abraded from too many knife cuts. “Too many people pulling at me. All their hearts, the beating—!”

Even with the antidote torrenting through his veins, Vaikan can still feel the unnatural pull of her power in him. He fends off two guards with his sword, hacking into the cheek of one through his leather helm which gets stuck in the depths of his jaw. A well-placed kick to the stomach sends the second guard sailing backwards into Naru whose glaive pops through the guard’s lung. Lifting the dead man up, Naru tosses him aside.

“We need to split up,” Naru hisses, holding up a stray corpse to shield them from a sudden barrage of arrows. “I’ll distract them and you take her to the city’s center.”

Vaikan nods and forces the bloodwright to her feet, intercepting another arrow aimed at her head with the flat of his sword. Naru places himself between the entry gate and the rest of the crowded corridor as Vaikan and the woman escape. Wrapping his nose and mouth in a cloth, he uncouples a pouch from his belt and hurls it hard at the ground in front of him. A white powder explodes into the air and the wind from the open gate forces it down the great corridor. People and guards scream as the caustic cloud slips down into their lungs, spreading the toxic seaslug distillate into their bloodstream. They fall quickly as if boneless, helpless to the paralytic.

On the other side of the gate, Vaikan pushes the bloodwright onto the cliffside lift. The platform is large, sturdy enough to hold ten men and their cargo. The only option now is to go up; but wouldn’t they face more guards at the top levels of the city? And the time it would take for them to reach the top would leave them open to all manner of projectiles . . .

“We should retreat,” Vaikan bites out, wishing she’d stop crouching like a scared animal. He wants to yank her up by her beautiful hair, tear it from her sweating scalp. Below, the narrow strip of sea calls darkly to them, smiling whitecaps urging them to its depths. “I can’t get you where you need to go. I can’t protect you. We need to jump.”

“Cut the rope there.” She jabs a bone-clawed finger at the windlass. “I know what to do.”

“You know nothing of—!” A hail of arrows drums into the lift around them, skims across Vaikan’s shoulder and thigh, and glances off the hard bone of the bloodwright’s eyeless face. Fuck it, he thinks, and uses all his brute strength, the momentum of his weight, to slash through the barrel-thick rope.

The rising force immediately flattens them against the platform as it surges up the side of the cliff city. They pass waiting denizens on each level whose yelps of surprise clip away faster and faster. The wind’s scream builds as they ascend and the weight on their body begins to feel like a godling’s amused finger pressing them down, just short of shattering, in the same manner a child might squish an ant. A roar rips out of Vaikan in the face of his encroaching death, barely audible over the high wail of wind and the screech of a burning rope.

The platform hits the giant windlass at the top of the cliff, launching them into the air at the same time the platform shatters into fatal splintering debris. They soar upwards and Vaikan is stuck looking up into a bright morning sky, clear and untroubled by clouds. Too clean a vision, he thinks, to see before death. He twists his neck to find the woman and finds her clear, dark eyes inverted and red.

Red wings burst out of the bloodwright’s back, as big as their ship’s sails. Suddenly Vaikan is caught by her but not with hands or arms or any recognizable human limbs. Thready red muscle snakes around his waist, binding him to what was once the woman, but there is nothing of the bloodwright he knows. Only an impression of her face wedged amongst a tangle of thrumming tumorous growths. With a beat of her great wings, red webs of squirming tendons, she takes them up and then dives for their destination: a great stone bridge affixed in the middle of the city where all transit of import takes place.

She smashes into the busy crossing like a missile without Vaikan feeling the impact, cradled as he is in the mass of her. A living sarcoid web fulminates from the bloodwright, bursting across the decking with all the pressure of an over-swollen cyst. Her gristly malignancies serpentine up and down the bridge and rails until the entirety of everyone and everything on it is engulfed in her. The sky fills with shrieks and retching as the rest of the city begins to feel her call to change.

Great reams of offal begin to pour from the windows, balconies, and open walkways. Loose organs knotted in ligaments pour down the cliff faces, painting the pale stone red as war. Gullets with no stomachs gulp at nothing and arteries bound to no hearts throb and pulse. In minutes, there is not a single soul in Tamarong left standing. There is only a single wet and pulsing flesh, soulless and yet still terribly alive.

• • • •

Paring her from the greasy thicket of offal and entrails takes Vaikan the better part of the night and early morning. He watches himself at a remove from his body, as he always does but most often when in the midst of death. Hours of daylight bake the city of viscera until it perfumes the air with the dense odor of dying mushrooms and the ripe piquancy of moist copper. By the time he gets some semblance of the woman free, she has made herself mostly whole again, embodied into something recognizable. The only thing she is missing is skin.

“Can you walk?” he asks, hoping he will not have to carry her. Pouches of bubbly white fat make up her breasts, thick sheets of suet covering her stomach, the back of her arms, and thighs. The rest of her is a stringy brocade of white and red muscle pulled tight across her body.

“Yes,” she says, grasping his shoulder as she finds her feet. She has something like a face again, no longer just a smooth plain of white of bone but a mask of tendons and writhing veins. Her black eyes crater through the walls of his protective detachment, dragging him back into the nauseating presence of his body. “Naru is dead. But not from me.”

Vaikan doesn’t answer, a few species of emotion shoaling within him. Was she trying to reassure him or herself? It mattered not. He’d already accepted this outcome for all his brothers, had mourned them after lost battles when he’d assumed they’d met their end. They are vengeful ghosts, less alive than the trembling meat beneath his feet.

They trek to Tamarong’s northern port and steal a double outrigger sailboat with a mind to meet with the rest of the Blades at their pre-appointed rendezvous. But when they get within eyeshot of the chosen half-moon cay, they see only the same manner of stringy viscera webbed across the beach. Somehow the bloodwright had reached even here. The only living thing left on the tiny islet is a freshly-wounded sea dragon burying its eggs into the soft white sand. As a draft pulls their scent towards it, the leech-like circle of its mouth opens like an umbrella towards them, gauging the danger. Pools of red spread under the tattered limbs and disemboweled trunks of his brothers, the carnage scattered in a circle around the sea dragon’s nest.

Vaikan stands in the boat and grips the hilt of his sword at his side hard, wanting to feel some sparking need for vengeance, waiting for the painful contraction of his ribs around his heart as his body realizes the loss; he remembers what grief feels like, how love’s warmth burned. But he feels nothing instead.

“I told you,” she says into his silence, low like she might startle him. “There’s no controlling a storm.” There is, he thinks, penance in her voice. “Will you kill me?”

“That sounds like a request,” he says. “Do you want to die?”

“Soon, yes.”

“Then, at the end of this, we will find our death together.”

They watch the sea dragon fill its nest with eggs and scrape all the broken bits of bodies atop it, a gristly mockery of their lives and yet a divinity in its own right. Vaikan finally looks down at the woman. The bloodwright does not offer to kill the sea dragon and he does not request it.

He shifts the sails to their final destination: Tereti Mo, home of the last coward-chief.

• • • •

It takes several days of sailing on belligerent currents and beneath the storm-wracked sky to realize they are still far off from their destination, their course wrecked. There are no islands between Taramong and Tereti Mo, no spits of sand they can set up camp on to rest and warm themselves. Vaikan spearfishes and nets their daily meals, paces the meager length of their ship, rows and rows, and curses the bastard godlings of the sky and sea.

The bloodwright does nothing but finger the sun-scorched seams of her red body, hiding beneath a collection of nets to stave off the sting of further burns. When he asks her to row as well, she ignores him. The only help she offers is direction; she can feel the churn of life as clearly as one feels the sun on a clear day.

When Vaikan tosses her a few dried striped surgeonfish for their supper one night, she doesn’t eat it with the usual gusto. He eats his own quick enough to avoid the flavor and watches the shape of moonlight delineate her body in the darkness.

“This place will be my end,” she says, breaking almost a week-long silence. For the first time, she sounds fearful.

Vaikan frowns at her. “We will not die at sea.”

“No,” she says sharply, a breaking beneath the syllable that makes her seem painfully young. A sound that makes Vaikan realize he doesn’t know how old she is. “This last city,” she says. “I can feel it. There won’t be any of me left.”

He tells himself he doesn’t care but he has enough sympathy for her not to speak the lie of it. The sea-chilled wind moves over them both then, forcing a shiver out of Vaikan but not the woman.

“If you had not accepted your death before we left the White Chain, then you proved all of us right. You were not ready for this mission.”

“I know full well I am going to my death,” she says, cleaving through the acid of his accusation. “But it is different, knowing from feeling it.”

“Meditate on it. Plough your soul for the seed of death. It will sow itself softer when it does.”

She holds herself against the darkness of the sea and sky, against the salt of the stars.

“Vaikan.” His name and the softness with which she says it makes him sit up straight. “There is so much life I haven’t lived. So much they’ve taken.” A heartbeat’s pause. “May I request something of you?”

Fear skitters its way up his throat like a sea spider. “And what would that be?”

A step and then two and then the shadow of her is on him. In the moonlight he can see ribbons of muscle, bloody ligatures but then she is too close, touching him, her mouth against his. Shock keeps him still for a moment. Kissing her is a finger in his wound and when he grabs hold of her, he feels how he’s formed the absence of his wants into an object of its own, an unreachable thing.

“Touch me,” she says, hiding a desperate stutter under his tongue. Young, he thinks again, and tries to pull away.

“You’ve already been touched.” It’s cruel but he needs this to stop. The sight of her is the sight of everything he can’t be: powerful, sumptuous in flesh, and ever-changing. He had always contained a longing for what he could have been in another incarnation, so much so that it became invisible to him, ubiquitous as air. To exist was to languish in the impossibility of his desire as to have lungs was to crave breath, as natural as reflex. There was no altering the nature of these things. Except perhaps now.

“No,” she hissed, her clawed fingers digging into the sides of his neck. “That was an initiation. I want to be loved.” And then, thinking better of it. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“I don’t have anything for you, wright.”

“You do. I see it when you look at me,” she says. Then, in a whisper. “Even if it’s hate or disgust, I’ll take it.”

Vaikan’s voice feels far away when he answers her. “Enough.”

“You haven’t taken it in days. The thing that stops me from touching you. So let me touch you.”

It’s true; he’s given himself over to the whims of her magic already. He is already courting death, so why not invite it sooner? He tries to curse her, to push her away, but the woman fills his vision, and the singular act of her mouth on his becomes the entirety of his perception. A bite on his lip and through becomes a revelation: wherever she hurts him, her magic spills in to knit the wound. Their mingled exhalations fight the echoes of the lapping water, hearts drumming out a building war rhythm, the percussion fierce in his conspiring veins. There is no more assent needed between them; Vaikan moves at the speed of suffocation with all the greed of a lifetime’s drought. Clawing for purchase on the bloodscape of the woman’s hips, Vaikan marvels as he fills her with all the weight of a first hunger.

She leaves him destitute, pillaged of all thought but attuned to her cries. He bleeds heat into the bloodwright’s urging mouth, the taste of her grin the tang of answered prayers. Their joining is a skirmish, the instruments of war the frictive resonance of flesh on flesh. When her magic begins to seep into his pores, he can sense it is not to dismantle him. It is to join them. Threads of muscle slip beneath his skin and his own pale blue nerves slip out with unnatural ease to find her. His once solitude becomes a joint existence, a feeble tributary meeting the rush of a stronger stream. He sees through two sets of eyes now, feels himself fucking and being fucked, a dual being both soft and hard, taking and taken.

Lungs rhythmic as supplementary hearts, Vaikan shuts his eyes against the dream of it all, running headfirst into the euphoria she is granting him. He wants to be swallowed and the whole world with him, hoarding the scattered light of her magic in the broken cage of her soul.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her tears beading from his eyes, her vocal cords rumbling in his throat. “I didn’t mean for this. But I . . . I can’t stop.”

“Then keep me,” he says with the mouth she’s allowed him to keep. He knew what it meant to love a storm. There was no other outcome then for his soul to be swept away by it. “Keep me and we’ll end this together.”

“Yes. Together. Thank you, thank you Vaikan,” she says, a brightness on the edge of her voice. She buries the rest of her need under the stem of his tongue, drowning him in the wet excess of her acceptance.

Storm-tossed, the tempest takes him.

• • • •

Vast pillars of smoke rise from Tereti Mo’s volcanoes when the woman makes landfall. The bloodwright walks the black sand shores alone until she finds a dormant hill high enough to allow her a full view of the island and its many cities, packed with people tight as coral. She doesn’t need to find the strategic center here for her reach to be complete; this is the end of her journey and there is nothing of her magic she needs to save. With what she has of herself and Vaikan, she can call to all flesh from this hill and all flesh will answer.

The call is a single breath out.

The unmaking is silent this time. Instead of rifts blooming open for new flesh to grow or bones forcing themselves into towering protrusions, the process becomes subtractive. Their screams vanish before they have a chance to leave their mouths. Bodies deflate one by one, emptied of all matter, and fall limp to the ground.

On a breath in, the bloodwright draws the plundered hides to her. Together the empty bodies billow upwards, churned by the untouchable gale of the bloodwright’s magic. The people’s skins pour out from their lavish homes, overflowing markets, and opulent halls—luxuries bought with the blood of her kin—and rise into the skies above the great cities with a weightless ease. Skin by skin, they patch together their ragged edges until a great tapestry of flesh undulates amongst the clouds, shadowing the island and the shallow surrounding waters below.

A seething white fire shoots up the woman’s nerves and this time there is no stopping it. Her body ripples with fear as her magic turns on her for the last time. Every part of her begins to reshape itself but into what she cannot tell. Above her, the monolith of skin begins to float out towards the sea and it pulls her along with it. When she turns to follow, she does not expect what she sees.

A god’s giant carcass wades through the sea towards her, each step making the soil shudder under her feet. It is not any god she knows and no tale or myth she’s heard has described such a terrible vision. The empty-eyed skull stares straight ahead at the horizon as if in expectation. A great cape of offal hangs from its skeleton and floats behind it on the water. Slowly the meat strings itself inside the beams of its ribs, clustering into formation and filling the white frame with what the bloodwright can see are lungs, a liver, a heart. The floating skin meets the giant at the shore, draping itself over bones and the raw, writhing mass of organs.

Finally, it calls to her.

She claws at the ground, queasy and shivering, trying to fight the drag of magic on her. Her body is still changing against her will, all of her pink and rounding out, layering over itself in wiggling worm-like rows.

“No, no, please,” she yells as the malformed god draws her up to its voided eyeline. Her soul burrows itself in her fear, deeper and deeper away from death. It is different from knowing and feeling, to see one’s end. Except it is not an end she senses; it is something else that this entity wants. “Vaikan!” she screams, desperate for anyone, the last one to soothe her, “Please help me, help me—!”

Not this, not like this, not alone! she thinks as the god presses her into its mouth, past white teeth as big and pale as gravestones. A throat forms just to swallow her but she feels herself rise and expand, deforming into something new. She hisses to herself as something electric arcs through her, a splash of sudden color, of sensation so overwhelming it makes her scream in agony.

Was this another untold price for her magic? To be eaten by the deep god of death? Her soul a meal to be shat out into the abyssal plains, outside the currents of reincarnation?

Kill me please, whatever god you are, you must have some mercy in you! This is supposed to be my end, our end! No more, no more, no—

Wright!

Inside the woman inside the god, Vaikan strokes her soul with his own.

Open your eyes.

She does.

I’m with you.

No. Their eyes open. His soul braids through hers, cooling the searing of her fear. The curve of the world bends before their new sight as they take up the god’s eyes. Gulls flit around their bare head, minuscule wisps of white feathers, stupid and curious, pecking at their new behemoth body. Half-submerged around their feet, they see the unpatterned patchwork of reefs and meadows of kelp from their great height as abstract teal and emerald splatters.

The voices of skin and flesh and bone call to their once-enemies, speaking in a chorus of dreams, of desires they had never conceived, fears they had never imagined. Together, they lift a hand to the clouds and feel the cool moisture of gathering storms collect on their fingers, then further still, up into the vastness of the pitying sky towards nothing and anything, grasping for the shape of uncountable futures, uncountable ends, like so much salt and stars, bitter and bright and boundless.

©2023 by Sloane Leong.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sloane Leong is a cartoonist, illustrator, writer, and editor of mixed indigenous ancestries. Through her work, she engages with visceral futurities and fantasies through a radical, kaleidoscopic lens. She is the creator of several graphic novels: From Under Mountains, Prism Stalker, A Map to the Sun, and Graveneye. Her fiction has appeared in many publications including Dark Matter Magazine, Apex Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Analog, Realm Media, and more. She is currently living on Chinook land near what is known as Portland, Oregon with her family and three dogs.

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

All the Colours of the Death Knell

Russell Hemmell | 748 words

Please see our important 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.

What is the colour of pain?

In the growing carmine tide that creeps in her heart-mind, Mathilde would swear all that hurts is red, like her scratched hand, her wounded wrists, her slashed ankles. It’s the blood trickling from her fingers and the sun that burns earth and sky as if it wanted to extinguish it. But she’s long found out pain is far more than a colour: it’s a synaesthesia of the heart.

Like all truest experiences of life, pain is oddly rewarding even when it gnarls at the innards and hollows the mind.

It’s its smell, its taste, its softness when hard and cold, it’s all she’d expect.

The blue sky becoming a bleeding purple expanse with neither clouds nor stars.

Facing the faceless wall of her tormentors and all the crowd who have come to the city centre to see her die at the stake, Mathilde is mesmerised, no, fascinated.

She doesn’t recognise her voice any longer. It’s not her who screams. It’s the mortal wrapping of her soul, to which she’s grown as indifferent as a pair of worn shoes. After her lover is dead and her daughter’s gone, nobody is left to care about.

Only the Cathedral bells that will soon ring for her still matter.

It’s the eleventh hour now. Still one hour to go.

One hour to freedom.

But those sixty minutes are packed with the Inquisitors’ questions, and the rack, and the wheel, and hot pincers. Not to make her confess things she’s never done—who gives a damn about the truth of a red-haired misfit with eyes like an angry ferret—but to entertain the violence-hungry crowd with the display of punishment.

She turns into herself to push the pain away, together with all its shades of red.

What is the colour of fear, now she asks. Is it yellow like limestone, blue like the ocean, or black like the plague?

She doesn’t know, she can’t possibly tell, because she’s never felt afraid. Not even now. If all is lost, what remains to be feared?

But there is a colour Mathilde will never forget or mistake for anything else.

Life—in all its viridian flavours, sombre and vibrant like wind on her skin.

Green like the reflection on her hair when the moon shines like a full white disk in the sky, and her body shifts and changes, becoming of the same substance of the trees from which her kind was born. So, so many centuries before the humans ever walked on the earth’s rain-drenched soil.

Green as a leaf or a lizard, green like the deep dark waters of the treacherous moats that surround their high castles.

Green like her eyes that never blink or waver in front of the fire.

“Pray, witch. Kneel and repent.”

“The end is near.”

“The flames are lit. Your stake is ready.”

The end is near, yea, and it will be as blue as retribution, black as anguish, and cruel as all the carmine shades of a condemned city. Melusine is a name they have mistaken for a person, while it was an entire species disguised under its exotic vowels, because myths lie like anything else does.

Tonight, they are going to learn about the truth and its astonishing lack of colour and sound, pity or forgiveness.

Midnight has finally come, and Cathedral’s seven bells start tolling one after another: one bell for the memory of the living, the final one, the lych bell of the dead.

As soon as the bells’ song dies, Mathilde’s eyes turn to the moon, and a howl shakes her body like lightning in a summer storm.

Her hands break the chains with astonishing force, and she raises arms that become robust dragon wings, dark like the darkest night.

Among the terrified screams of the crowd that scatters around, her face now turned into a sea-serpent snout snarling in anger, Mathilde opens her jaws, and a torrent of flames rages on the market stalls and the stakes erected in the square, submerging people and things in its destructive wave.

If red had the taste of never-ending pain, green will be the colour of deliverance and hues of joyous doom, dancing to a death knell that knows no pauses.

After circling a few times over the Cathedral square in fire, green scales gleaming in the flames’ reflection, the dragon rises high in the sky, obscuring for a moment the immaculate moonlight.

©2023 by Russell Hemmell.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Russell Hemmell is a non-binary French-Italian transplant in Scotland, passionate about astrophysics, history, and Japanese manga. Their recent work has appeared in Aurealis, Cast of Wonders, Departure Mirror, Flame Tree Press, and others. SFWA, HWA, and Codexian. Their historical horror novella, “The Chancels of Mainz,” is now in print with Luna Press Publishing. Find them online at their blog earthianhivemind.net and on Twitter @SPBianchini.

The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart

David Anaxagoras | 6284 words

Please see our important 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.

Here is a boy, barely thirteen, broken, lying in the road, twisted metal around him, twisted metal in him. Here is his heart, pierced by the shrapnel of the truck, a truck no longer, now a confusion of tangled wire and torn steel and glass pebbles. The boy’s name is Sheridan. He will live a few minutes more.

Here is another boy, barely thirteen and an eon, shaggy blond-white hair shining silver in the sun. He pads barefoot through the shards, his step so light his feet are immune to sharp things. His heart too is light, but not so immune. It is pierced by the sight of the broken boy before him.

“Finlay?” the broken boy croaks, his breath running out. He had just been thinking of him, right before the accident, and now here he is, standing over him, lower lip trembling.

Here is a spider, fat as sorrow, transparent as time, hunched in the palm of Finlay’s hand. It clambers urgently over curled fingers, descends to Sheridan’s chest, and scuttles through the tear in his shirt.

The spider’s plump body sinks into the ragged red mouth of Sheridan’s wound and pushes out a cold steel shard. Sheridan struggles to say something, to say anything, to move or to stand or even to take a breath. Then a thin cool wire unspools inside him and somehow it sooths. The spider busies its fat little body—squeezing and throbbing in the small spaces in his chest. A single filament winds around his heart and back and in and through. The thread builds and layers and binds and scaffolds until the struggling heart is calm.

Finlay puts a hand behind Sheridan’s neck and gently eases him flat on the road. The spider emerges and shivers off the moisture of viscera. Sheridan wonders if it will close the tear in his chest but it does not. The wound is left open. The spider scurries up Finlay’s arm and disappears over his shoulder.

Sheridan hears, or thinks he hears, Finlay say, “It’s only for now. Glass silk is fragile but so is a human heart.”

And then Sheridan sees only dark.

• • • •

Finlay’s breath tickles the fine fuzz on the ridge of Sheridan’s ear.

“Let him carry you. You’re too weak to walk yet.”

Sheridan’s body stiffens from a dream of falling. No, not falling, exactly. Tipping. Swaying. Rocking. Something is carrying him. He sits on something hard and lumpy and cold, legs spread wide to accommodate an upward hump. He finds it difficult to balance but a warm hand presses against his back and steadies him.

When Sheridan blinks away the blur, he sees the thing under his legs is the shell of a giant tortoise. The rocking motion is their lumbering gate.

Finlay walks at pace beside them, a silver flute between his lips. He pipes gentle notes that tumble into a well inside Sheridan, a deepness he hadn’t known was there until the first note landed. Now it ached to be filled.

They are in the woods.

“Where are we going?” Sheridan asks.

“Deeper.”

The sunlight had faded but it isn’t dark—glowing specks fill the air. Pollen? Spores? They settle into Finlay’s silvery hair and on his freckled nose—tiny stars in a Finlay universe. Dots glow in his eyelashes. When Finlay meets Sheridan’s gaze and smiles at him, Sheridan looks away and feels the tips of his ears burn.

Finlay laughs and shakes out his hair. A million miniature lights explode out and surround them. He cups a hand and waves his arm, scooping them toward Sheridan.

Sheridan’s vision glows with a proscenium of pinpricks and he knows he has faerie dust in his eyelashes too. His silk-bound heart quickens.

The tortoise stops before a massive yew, which looks to Sheridan like an assemblage of many smaller trees huddled together.

Finlay slides his flute into his pocket and whispers to Sheridan, “That’s the Faerie Sovereign,” and there, sitting in the crook of the tree as if the tree were an enormous throne, is the Sovereign—old and young, antlered and bearded, shoulders square and breasts full, wrapped in rich, iridescent gossamer robes. The air around the Sovereign is thickest with faerie dust. Sheridan breathes in and his lungs taste never-ending spring. Around the Sovereign stand dozens of faerie folk, some tall, some small, some wide, some thin, some light, some dark, some like children, and even one mostly like a mushroom. Each has a touch of animal about them. Bear. Bee. Fox. Bird. Rat.

Finlay steps forward and turns to stand shoulder to shoulder with his fellow fae. Sheridan can see now that Finlay possesses a ghostly wolf’s tail. A faint pair of triangular ears jut out of his shaggy hair, visible just when the light catches them right. Finlay still stands on two feet, and his face still looks like a Finlay face, but his eyes—how had Sheridan never noticed?—his eyes are wild and full of lupine mischief.

Choose your heart.

The voice is warm and wise and speaks through a corridor of eons and rings in Sheridan’s head like bell.

Choose your heart, the Sovereign offers. The faerie folk step forward, each holding a heart in their hand.

Tell us who you are: bear or bee? Fox or rat? Bird or—

“Wolf,” Finlay offers, and Sheridan sees in his hand a perfect wolf heart, firm and gleaming and ready.

Sheridan slides off the back of the tortoise. It’s all too much. Everything inside him goes cold. He shakes his head. Stumbles back. That heart isn’t his. None of them are.

Sheridan bolts.

Behind him, a wolfy howl echoes through the woods. The glass threads are tight around his straining heart, but he keeps running.

• • • •

It wasn’t that many days ago that Sheridan first met Finlay.

Sheridan was alone, as usual, hoodie up, as usual, eating a bologna sandwich on the loner bench in the quad, as usual, his eyes not down but on Finlay, which was not usual because Sheridan hadn’t ever noticed him before. Finlay was sort of walk-jogging from place to place, one circle of friends to the next, crisscrossing the quad, barging into conversations, taking sips from a juice box, smiling, laughing.

There was something about Finlay that Sheridan couldn’t put his finger on. He looked taller than he was—something about his slight build, the narrowing of his cheekbones, the way he carried himself. The day was warm—they’d had a string of them—but Finlay wore a sweater and jeans. A neat multi-colored collar popped out of the sweater.

Finlay’s eyes locked on Sheridan across the quad and Sheridan’s throat squeezed shut. Things felt different suddenly. The texture of the air. The color of the sunlight. Sheridan’s skin felt tight. He wasn’t sure it was even his skin anymore. He felt a stranger in his own body. What was happening to him?

Finlay’s unruly white-blond hair flashed silver in the sunlight. He made his way toward Sheridan. There was a kind of wildness in the wind, a roughness and chaos. The world had untamed itself.

Sheridan jumped up, meant to escape, but Finlay was surprisingly fast on his feet. And besides, Sheridan didn’t really want to flee.

What should he even say?

Finlay laid his hand on the side of Sheridan’s face and rubbed his thumb on the corner of his mouth.

“Mustard,” Finlay said, laughing. He flashed his thumb, stained bright yellow. He wiped it casually on his jeans and patted Sheridan on the shoulder and then was gone.

Sheridan’s mouth tingled the rest of the day.

• • • •

When Sheridan looked at himself in the mirror before sixth period, he saw a slight sparkle to his lip where Finlay had touched him.

Faerie dust.

As fantastical as it was, it suddenly made sense. Not that Sheridan believed in faeries, but he didn’t not believe in them either, exactly. There had been rumors—local legend, really—of fae in the woods not far from Sheridan’s home, though he never paid much attention. It was low-level background noise, nothing more than your average backwoods lake monster, bigfoot, or UFO sighting. Fae popped up casually in conversation from time to time with the locals, especially the elders, but always with a wink, so you were never inclined to take it seriously. Some shops and businesses traded in the legend, of course. The diner on the south edge of town, Puck’s Palace, had a menu with silly fantasy names like “magic meatloaf” and “fairy fritters” and if you ordered from the kids’ menu you got a little plastic elf toy. Puck’s went in and out of business on a regular basis.

Sheridan rubbed at his mouth but the glittery shine refused to come off. The harder he rubbed the harder it stayed. Thanks a lot, Finlay, he thought. What are you even doing here? Shouldn’t you be in the woods, wearing a mushroom cap for a hat or something? The thought made him laugh out loud. He could still feel Finlay’s hand on his face.

The bathroom door banged open and another kid raced behind him and into a stall. Sheridan quickly wet a paper towel and scrubbed at his face. Had he been spotted? Could everyone see this stuff? Would other kids stop him and ask how he got faerie dust on his mouth? What would he even say?

When the bell called for class, he hurried down the hall pretending to have an itch on his face, or something in his eye, any excuse to keep his arm or hand over his mouth. No one looked at him, as usual, but he still felt terribly exposed, like a dream of showing up to school naked.

• • • •

Sheridan was attracting pixies.

Or, more accurately, the faerie dust was, which he had started to forget about until a pixie found him after school and followed him home. It wasn’t any larger than a dragonfly and as iridescent as a soap bubble. It kept smacking into him like a crazy June bug.

It was irritating.

Any other day, Sheridan would have just screamed and fled at the sight of a pixie but he was having a faerie kind of day he guessed and, anyway, he was more concerned that other kids might see a pixie following him and wonder why. But no one else could see. Maybe no one else believed. Or maybe you had to be marked with faerie dust.

The second time the pixie buzzed his ear he swung his backpack at it, almost knocking himself off his own feet, but it easily dodged and mistook the attempt to clobber it as a game and started to annoy him on purpose—tweaking his nose, pinching his butt, and once getting tangled in his hair. At least now there was no doubt the woods were full of faeries and Finlay was one of them, or maybe at least faerie-touched, as the old-timers called faerie-human offspring.

Sheridan was pretty certain he’d managed to slip into the house without the pixie following him, and his thoughts continued to circle around Finlay. He made an honest attempt at doing his homework but wound up with several sketches of a boy with shaggy silver hair and dragonfly wings. When he sat down for dinner his mind was far away, lost in a faerie-filled woods. His mother noticed his mouth.

“You have something on your face. Is that glitter? How did you get glitter on your mouth?”

Sheridan’s whole face burned. He rubbed and shrugged.

“I know why,” his dad said.

Sheridan’s stomach dropped.

“He’s been smooching some girl!”

Sheridan was both relieved and grossed out. “No. Dad—”

“Sparkle lip gloss. It happens! I’ve worn your mom’s lipstick to work on more than one occasion.”

His mom waved off his dad.

Sheridan was pretty sure his insides were shriveling into a small black mass.

Then the pixie showed up, hovering over his dad’s head. His mom couldn’t seem to see it. It lifted both legs high and shat a steaming stream of faerie dust onto the top of Dad’s head. Sheridan jumped up, snatched the giggling pixie, excused himself, and flushed the troublesome, still-laughing creature down the toilet.

Now he had faerie dust all over his hands and, of course, it didn’t come off—not even with soap.

When Sheridan sat back down to dinner, he wanted to tell his dad he didn’t kiss girls and not only that, there’s a boy. But it didn’t feel like the right time. Even if everything inside him felt too big to keep in.

There’s a boy. He wanted to say it. He wanted to shout it.

“I think I’d like a nice sweater,” he said instead, thinking of how huggable Finlay looked in his sweater.

His father paused, a bundle of salad greens halfway into his mouth. “It’s almost summer.”

His mother laughed and didn’t look up from her plate, where she was chasing an errant pea with her fork. “You don’t wear sweaters.”

His dad shoved the salad the rest of the way in.

“And a nice shirt to go under it. A stripey one with a collar.”

His dad exhaled sharply through his nose and swallowed. That nose sound was the final word.

There’s a boy. He’s super nice and he wears sweaters and I want to hug him.

“How did you and mom meet?”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear that old story,” his mom said in a way that meant she definitely wanted him to hear it.

“I was building a thing, you know, for vines—” his dad started.

“A trellis,” his mom clarified.

“A trellis in her dad’s backyard,” his dad continued around a chunk of potato. “Hot day. Had my shirt off. She couldn’t resist me. She made me lemonade. I told her she was going to marry me.”

Sheridan imagined Finlay in their backyard, building a trellis. No shirt, no sweater. His silvery sweat-dampened hair clinging to his forehead. They took turns sipping lemonade from the same glass.

“Your father hated me,” his dad’s voice cut through Sheridan’s daydream.

“He still does,” his mom said, and picked up the plates.

• • • •

That night, alone, fighting to fall asleep, Sheridan felt as though he had a small animal scratching inside him, wanting to burst out. With every second that ticked by, the animal grew larger and stronger, and its small claws grew sharper as it honed them on the bones of his ribcage.

• • • •

The next day at lunch, Sheridan retreated to the last safe place on campus: the library. The simple fact was he couldn’t handle seeing Finlay again. Couldn’t handle it if Finlay ignored him, couldn’t handle it if he didn’t. He sat at an out-of-the-way table, but one with a view of the entrance. He watched everyone that came in while he ate his bologna sandwich—no mustard, no mayo, no condiments of any kind that might stain his lips. If for some reason Finlay wandered in, Sheridan could make a quick escape.

Still, Finlay was the only thing Sheridan could think about. Every brain cell burned, and the ash and smoke swirled into a Finlay-shaped cloud where his brain used to be. Finlay had wiped mustard from his mouth so casually—what if it meant nothing? Of course it meant nothing. But. . .you don’t touch another boy’s mouth for nothing, do you? You wouldn’t wipe mustard off the mouth of a boy you didn’t care about, would you?

Big Bad, who used to be called Big Brad but who had gained a reputation for punching “wimps” to teach them, allegedly, how to fight back, and who had bruised Sheridan on more than one occasion, stalked into the library. He came only so far as the front desk, like an uninvited vampire, where he loudly complained that he needed a stupid book for his stupid history paper.

Sheridan started packing up as soon as he spotted him but wasn’t able to get away before Big Bad tossed a mocking hey girlfriend his way, and he couldn’t be sure but he thought everyone in the library laughed, including the librarian. It’s just a harmless joke, Sheridan told himself in a voice that sounded an awful lot like his dad’s. Don’t be so sensitive.

The sun was white and hot and seared his vision as he stepped out of the library. Sheridan scanned the quad for Finlay. He’d been foolish to think the library was safe. The only safe space was Finlay. He shouldn’t be hard to spot—just look for the flash of silver. Or a knot of commotion. Something loping about, restless, out of place. Look for laughter, look for joy.

Nothing.

His chest felt so heavy. Breathing suddenly took effort. Sheridan had to will his heart to pump. Why had he stayed inside? And only now it was sinking in that this was the last day before spring break, and if he didn’t see Finlay today, he’d have to wait a whole week.

Was Finlay even here today? Did Finlay miss him too? Did he make some other friend, a better friend, one that wasn’t afraid to be painted with faerie dust?

Maybe it was better this way, Sheridan forced himself to think. The pain would fade. Gradually, he’d just stop thinking about him.

• • • •

He didn’t stop thinking about him.

Sheridan’s throat was clenched all day like he wanted to cry. Later at home, when his dad decided to make a quick run to the store, Sheridan tagged along in the hopes of distracting himself.

“Your mom wants cantaloupe,” his Dad grumbled at him while they were waiting at the deli counter, which meant Sheridan should go get one from the produce section.

Sheridan trotted down the soap and shampoo aisle, turned at the soda pyramid, and was about to beeline for the cantaloupe when he saw a tallish boy with silver hair sticking his face in the flower bouquets one by one and taking a big breath each time.

An electric stab jolted Sheridan’s heart. His feet froze, became part of the floor. He couldn’t take a step, he was convinced, without tearing a big chunk out of the ground. Sheridan decided the store was out of cantaloupes and was about to vanish himself back to the deli counter when Finlay spotted him.

“Hey Sheridan, smell these—they’re great!”

He knows my name.

Magically, Sheridan’s feet moved. As he came closer to the flower display, Finlay grabbed his arm and pulled him over. “Come on, come on, smell!”

But Sheridan was distracted by a single petal, thin and white, lying on Finlay’s cheek.

He felt an impulse to brush it away, but he refused. It was silly. It wasn’t mustard. It surely would blow off eventually.

“Smell, don’t you want to?”

Finlay smiled. Maybe it amused him that Sheridan stood there, transfixed. Didn’t he know the effect he had on people? On him?

“I need a cantaloupe,” Sheridan said stupidly.

“I’ll find you a good one!” In two quick hops, Finlay was standing over a cardboard box corralling a hundred cantaloupes. He picked one up and held it right to his face. His nose smushed down on top, wrinkling his freckles. His glittering eyes peered over the rind at Sheridan. Miraculously, the petal remained on his cheek.

“This one’s good!” He held it out.

Sheridan took it and held it close to his chest.

“Finlay.”

“Yeah?”

But that was all. That was all he had to say. He just wanted to say his name out loud. Finlay.

Finlay smiled and took a step closer. The air between them sparked.

Sheridan gently brushed the petal off Finlay’s cheek with the tips of his fingers. Finlay’s skin was smooth and warm and Sheridan brushed again even though the petal was gone.

Sheridan’s dad grabbed his arm and yanked him sideways, pulled him through the produce section and toward the door. “What do you think you’re doing?” His voice was flat. His face was hard.

Sheridan’s stomach dropped. His dad wouldn’t let go of his arm. He stumbled to keep up.

“He’s—ow, Dad, he’s a boy from school—”

“I don’t care.”

Sheridan sat in fog of shame in the back seat the whole way home. He realized when they pulled into the driveway that his dad had abandoned their grocery cart and they hadn’t bought any of the food they came for—but he was still holding the cantaloupe. Unpaid for. Stolen.

Sheridan retreated to his room and didn’t ask for—and wasn’t offered—dinner. He fell asleep holding the cantaloupe that had touched Finlay’s lips.

• • • •

The next morning the cantaloupe had grown even more fragrant. Sheridan sat in bed, still tangled in sheets, and held it to his nose and took deep breaths. This is where Finlay touched it to his mouth. Sheridan pursed his lips and lightly kissed the cantaloupe.

And again, pressing just a little harder.

The melon was rough and unyielding and not at all what he imagined Finlay’s lips would feel like against his, but that wasn’t the point. Their lips touched in the same place, separated only by time.

Sheridan opened his mouth just a little more and a tiny whine escaped, surprising him. His bedroom door snapped open then, and his dad stood in the frame, a rectangle inside of a rectangle. Sheridan whipped the cantaloupe behind him, pushed it into the bunched-up nest of comforter and blanket and pillow.

His heart raced and his vision grayed. Did his dad see him kissing a melon? Were his lips red from rubbing against its roughness? Could his dad smell the aroma of cantaloupe and longing in the air?

“Shirts, underwear, socks, and pants.” His dad tossed a duffle bag into the middle of the room.

“What?” Sheridan stared at his dad dumbly.

“You’re going with your uncle for break.”

• • • •

Sheridan’s uncle liked to shoot things and his fourteen-year-old cousin liked to set fires—which was ironic since his uncle was a volunteer firefighter. That was most of what he knew about his uncle and his family. They had a ranch or a cabin or a compound or a fallout shelter in the middle of, if not nowhere, far enough to be inconvenient for frequent visits. Thank the gods.

They were on their way there in his uncle’s rattletrap truck, the three of them squeezed together in the front cab, his cousin reacting violently if Sheridan’s knee or hip or arm touched his during a tight turn.

Sheridan didn’t get any explanation from his parents as to why he was suddenly shuttled off for the break, but it probably accomplished a dual goal of keeping Sheridan away from Finlay during his free time and his uncle was probably supposed to make a man out of him by having him kill some poor animal.

It didn’t matter. Sheridan was going to make himself invisible for the next six or seven days. He was good at that. Then, when he got back home, he would find Finlay and tell him he liked him and wanted to be with him. Then he’d tell his parents. Then he’d tell everyone. Hi, he’d say upon meeting a stranger, my name is Sheridan and—

“—I love Finlay,” he said out loud without meaning to. He sharply drew in a breath, but it was too late to suck the words back into his mouth.

Both his uncle and cousin turned their heads to give him a curious glance.

That’s when the elk horns smashed through the windshield and a pungent musk-and-manure stench overwhelmed his senses.

Sheridan’s final thought as the truck simultaneously compacted and tore apart around him, was that the last word on his lips in this life would be Finlay.

• • • •

They find Sheridan a mile away from the wreckage, still running, shoes gone, shirt torn, chest gouged open but somehow not bleeding to death. He does not remember the ambulance, the emergency room, or going into surgery. When a doctor checks his sutured chest wound, Sheridan asks if the doctor can cut away the spider silk around his heart and replace it with regular stitches. Make me normal, he pleads. After a momentary stare, the doctor chuckles. He does not see the glass silk thread supporting Sheridan’s heart, does not see how fragile and broken he really is.

Sheridan’s cousin and uncle remain in the hospital for several days more and he isn’t allowed to see them. Not that he asks. His mother wants to hug him tight, but his chest hurts too much for hugs, he says. His father doesn’t have much to say. Sheridan guesses he is angry but isn’t sure at what or who. Did his uncle tell his dad he had confessed his love for Finlay and, in the distraction, nearly killed everyone?

Regardless, his dad’s plans to make a man of Sheridan had been scuttled. Now he’s stuck with this reedy boy with a fragile heart strung together by the thinnest of threads.

• • • •

When Sheridan returns home and limps to his room, he opens a window because the air smells like rotten cantaloupe. His bed is made and things have been neatened—his little wooden desk chair (a child’s chair, really) pushed in, his books and papers tidied, his clothes picked up off the floor, his trash can emptied. He smooths his hand under his pillow. Checks between the bed and the wall. No cantaloupe. His mother—he assumes it was his mother who straightened his room—must have tossed it. But the scent lingers. So does the pain.

• • • •

Sheridan loves baths but doesn’t love to take them because he feels childish. He is still very sore from the accident and is told soaking in a hot bath is good therapy. He is grateful but still embarrassed.

When he sinks into the hot water and leans back, tears come. He’s glad he locked the bathroom door because he can’t seem to stop himself and the more the heat of the bath soaks into his muscles, and then his bones, the harder he sobs. He presses a washcloth to his face and continues to sob. He doesn’t know for how long. He drifts off eventually and dreams about Finlay.

Sheridan holds an ice cream cone in the grocery store and shares licks with Finlay.

“You can’t hold it in,” Finlay says. “The thing with the claws.”

Finlay licks small drips off Sheridan’s knuckles. His tongue is warm and soft soft soft.

Sheridan wakes with a start from someone banging on the bathroom door. Water sloshes onto the floor. It’s his mother, checking if he has drowned. The water is cold and he is not drowned. He’s fine. He’s just getting out.

Sheridan shakes off the dream and shakes out the cold water drops hanging at the edge of his hair and pats himself dry. He catches a flash of red in the mirror. He has bled through his dressing. The gauze rectangle on his chest is bright and crimson and screams your wound is not healed it will never be healed.

He peels it off with some effort and dabs his chest clean with the towel. The wound is stitched tight. He doesn’t understand where the blood came from. He hides the red-stained towel under his mattress until he can safely dispose of it.

• • • •

Sheridan hates lunch. He hates lunch and he hates bologna sandwiches, and he hates the loser’s bench even though it really is the best place to sit where the sun can’t reach you and make you hot. So that’s where he sits.

The Vice Principal plops down next to him. It’s his job to reach out to losers, everybody knows that. He has a breast pocket full of multi-colored Sharpies, an ugly plaid tie, and no hair.

He was going to ask if Sheridan is doing okay after the accident. Sheridan can sense it. Every adult so far had.

“Nice shoes,” the VP says.

“I’m fine,” Sheridan says automatically. He doesn’t need a pity friend.

“Are they comfortable? I should buy some like that for myself. Do you think they’d look good on me?”

Sheridan hates his shoes. He hates his shoes and he hates the Vice Principal’s shoes and he hates the Vice Principal. No adult ever paid attention to him before his accident and now everyone wanted to see if he was okay. He hates them all. Sheridan feels a twinge deep in his chest.

A single silk thread snaps inside him. His heart kicks unexpectedly.

“Go away!” he shouts at the Vice Principal.

A fine red mist sprays from his mouth and dots the Vice Principal’s shirt and ugly tie.

“I’m fine!” he shouts before the Vice Principal or anyone else can react. He hurries toward the library bathroom, his only refuge now. On the way, he feels two more silk strands snap, whipping into twisted coils inside him like broken guitar strings.

His heart refuses to be bound.

• • • •

Sheridan’s cousin is in his bed. Sheridan, who had been in the same accident and the same hospital, was made to camp out on the floor of his own bedroom with his sleeping bag and leaky air mattress because his cousin is fresh out of the hospital and away from home. His cousin’s head is shaved on the side and a curving, puckered line of skin is pinched shut with staples. They glint in the moonlight. He has been staying with Sheridan’s family until his dad gets out of the hospital. Sheridan never had a sleepover before. This isn’t a good start.

Sheridan stares outside his window at the moon, which he can see more clearly from the floor than he ever could on his bed, and tries to ignore the sound of breath and friction coming from his cousin.

When Sheridan is just about asleep, his cousin says, “My dad’s coming home tomorrow, so you can have your bed back soon.”

Sheridan makes a mental note to wash the sheets. Or maybe just dispose of them.

“He’s going to burn the woods. Kill those things. They made the elk do that, you know. Get in our way. With their magic and stuff.”

Sheridan gets up on his elbows, alarm biting his heart. “He’s going to what?”

“Prescribed burn. That’s what they call it. They set fires on purpose. Bet you didn’t know that about firemen. They burn stuff.”

He can’t.

Sheridan’s heart races. He feels it strain against each remaining glass thread. Three of them snap, splintering to dust. Sheridan groans. He can’t catch his breath.

“I’m going to help, probably,” his cousin continues. “I’m not really allowed but I might go anyway. I want to burn something so bad. You should come. They tried to kill you too.”

Sheridan shucks his sleeping bag and jumps to his feet.

“Oh gross,” his cousin complains. “Put some pajamas on, I don’t want to see your wiener!”

But Sheridan is already crawling into his closet, digging into the stratified layers of childhood debris on the floor. Nobody had tried to kill them, not even the stupid elk that tried to cross the road. It was an accident. Sheridan feels another heart-thread twang apart and spots of blood, black in the moonlight, drip from his nose. He digs through comics and clothes and army men and wiffle balls and action figures and deeper still because he knows the one thing he needs is buried deep. Finally, he closes his fist on something long, thin, and cylindrical.

• • • •

Here is a boy, barely thirteen, sitting calmly in the back seat of an Uber, his shattered heart tapping out its final beats. Sheridan is dying but that’s okay. By all rights, he should have died on the road. Finlay saved him. He isn’t afraid to die, but he absolutely wants to live.

His cousin left in the early morning, picked up by his uncle, and presumably they’re on their way to burn the woods. If his uncle took his cousin home first, he’d have plenty of time. If not—

The Uber brings Sheridan to where the accident happened. When the driver leaves him, he is utterly alone. Over the treetops, he sees a thin column of rising smoke. He’s too late. Sheridan kicks off his shoes and runs barefoot into the woods and hopes the last string of spider silk will hold out.

There is no path. He doesn’t remember where he had entered the last time. He had merely awoken on the back of a giant tortoise. He still feels the warm reassurance of Finlay’s hand on his back. When he’s far enough into the woods that he can no longer see the road, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the recorder he retrieved from his closet last night. Just a plastic tube. Cheap as hell. He had used it mostly to annoy his parents. Nothing resembling music had ever come out of it.

He draws a breath, tastes the sharp sting of smoke at the back of his tongue, and blows. The recorder bleats. Remember the notes, he encourages himself, remember the notes that Finlay used to call the fae. Open the veil. He wets his lips and tries again, gentler, as he pads deeper into the woods.

• • • •

The air is dimmed with haze and Sheridan’s eyes sting. He senses time running out. The fire is almost here. His heart is almost done. He puffs into the recorder as he runs, emitting random squawks.

When he falls into the shallow stream, he doesn’t have the strength to rise. He hopes Finlay finds his body here, recorder in hand, and understands that he’d been on his way to find him.

“Finlay,” he says, wanting his name, again, to be the last thing on his lips before he dies. “Finlay, Finlay, Finlay.”

On the bank of the stream, a boulder shifts and rises and the face of an ancient tortoise peers curiously into his.

• • • •

The tortoise carries Sheridan deeper into the wood than he could ever go on mortal feet, to a place where smoke cannot reach, where age cannot reach, where hate cannot reach. When Sheridan looks back on the bank of the stream, he sees a small, deflated lump sitting in the mud, cold and still, one silvery thread still wrapped around it. He supposes it used to be his heart, but he no longer recognizes it.

Sheridan crosses his legs and finds it easier this time to get his balance as the tortoise galumphs along. When the air fills with glowing specks, he knows he is close. Finally, the tortoise stops and settles to the ground, and Sheridan finds himself sitting before the Faerie Sovereign and dozens of faerie folk, full of whispers and murmurs. His eyes scan for one in particular. He has to be here.

What heart? Asks the Faerie Sovereign, as if Sheridan hadn’t run away, as if no time had passed.

Four step forward, hearts in hand.

A heart that is shared shall never diminish. Bear or Bee? Fox or Bird? Rat or—?

“What is best?” Sheridan asks. But he knows.

The Faerie Sovereign’s eyes smile. The one you love.

Sheridan scans the gathered fae. He could have any heart. The choice is his to make. He knows what he needs, but can’t find him in the crowd, and the empty place where his heart should be feels cold. Sheridan trembles but holds his feet firm in the rich damp soil. This time he will not run. Not yet.

Choose, the Faerie Sovereign urges again.

He has to be there.

Even if he can’t see him.

Choose now.

“My heart is a wolf,” Sheridan says.

The whispers and murmurs hush. The Faerie Sovereign gathers up their robe, drapes it over their arm, rises gracefully, and moves away. When the rest of crowd has gone, only a tallish boy with silvery hair remains.

Finlay’s ghostly wolf-ears glow and his tail swishes behind him. In his hands he holds his untamed heart.

“A heart shared shall never diminish,” Finlay says, and presses it through Sheridan’s bare chest. His warm hands are still resting on his skin when they feel his new heart kick.

Sheridan grins. He grabs Finlay’s hand and bolts. They lope into the woods, legs and hearts pumping in tandem, wind talking in their ears.

Together they race alongside the muddy stream, the touch of their feet so light they leave no mark in the soft clay. Behind them, the waters rise and swell in their wake, pulled by magic.

Smoke stings Sheridan’s nose; the air grows thick with it. Deeper in the woods, an orange glow signals the oncoming fire. Sheridan snarls.

Finlay smiles, his eyes wild, and leads Sheridan up a rocky outcrop. They pause at the top, arms around shoulders, toes curled over the edge, ears pricked, chests heaving.

The stream roars around them, spreads over the banks, and blankets the forest floor as it rushes further into the woods. Moments later, Sheridan hears the steaming hiss of water meeting fire and the faint, surprised shouts of men being washed out of the woods.

Sheridan laughs and wraps his arms around Finlay and they jump and tumble down the slope of the outcrop and roll on the dampened ground, leaves sticking to their backs, twigs trimming their hair, and instantly they are up and rushing through the woods again, unstoppable and unafraid.

Sheridan’s heart is free, and it sings. Together, they howl.

©2023 by David Anaxagoras.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Anaxagoras writes fiction and television. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed and The Dread Machine, and he is currently at work on a middle-grade fantasy novel. He is the creator, co-executive producer, and writer of Amazon Studio’s TV series Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, for which he received a WGA award nomination for Outstanding Writing in 2016. Prior to his writing career, David taught preschool and has a degree in child development. He currently resides in Texas, where he writes full time and enjoys collecting 80s vinyl records. Visit him on his website at davidanaxagoras.com.

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

You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension

Isabel J. Kim | 1130 words

Please see our important 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.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ACHILLES: A young man yet untouched by love or war.

PYTHIA: An oracle who sees alien futures.

THE CHORUS: #mlm #5k #patrochilles #coffeeshopAU #meta #canon-compliant

• • • •

SETTING: The adyton at the Temple of Delphi. Smoke rises from a vent in the floor, partially obscuring PYTHIA, who is sitting on a high stool carefully positioned behind the smoke.

ACHILLES stands, supplicant. Behind him, the CHORUS looks at their phones.

ACHILLES lifts his head and stares at PYTHIA.

ACHILLES: How does this work, exactly?

THE CHORUS: He doesn’t know how it works?

THE CHORUS: Why would he know how it works?

THE CHORUS: This is Achilles! Of course he knows how it works! He shouldn’t be so hesitant. Achilles would know what to do—someone would have told him beforehand. There’s like, a whole process. It’s mythic as hell. I read about it on Wikipedia.

THE CHORUS: But Achilles is seventeen. He’s scared.

PYTHIA: You ask, and I answer.

ACHILLES: Oh.

ACHILLES steps back and paces back and forth. The CHORUS parts to let him through, but follows him as he walks around the stage. ACHILLES ignores them.

ACHILLES: I don’t know if I should have come here. Themis foretold that my mother’s son would outstrip his father. My mother foretold that I would either die young in glory or live long in obscurity. Which are both cool things to learn when you’re five.

ACHILLES: I don’t know what I want. My prophecies have not so much narrowed my options but bisected them. I can’t train with my spear without thinking about which road the thrust of my arms is putting me on. I can’t think of any of my choices as simple because each of my decisions becomes binary. Life, or glory.

ACHILLES: Soldiers die on the battlefield for a chance at glory; I can walk to my death knowing my posthumous reputation is assured. I am one of the lucky ones.

ACHILLES: Or I can live.

CHORUS: Poor angsty bb.

PYTHIA: I don’t have all day, Achilles. Stop muttering to yourself and ask your question.

ACHILLES startles. He walks back to PYTHIA.

ACHILLES: How am I remembered?

PYTHIA inhales sharply. The CHORUS flits around, whispering in her ear. PYTHIA frowns.

PYTHIA (SOLEMNLY): Patroclus.

CHORUS: Patroclus.

ACHILLES: What?

PYTHIA: Patroclus.

CHORUS (EXCITED): Patroclus.

ACHILLES: He’s . . . outside. He came with me. Do you want me to get him?

PYTHIA: I mean that Patroclus is your legacy, you imbecile. You are not remembered for your heroism, your bravery; you do not fade into obscurity and hearth and home. You are remembered for Patroclus, and before you ask your second question—I can see you about to ask your second question—this is not a true choice, Achilles. It is what will happen. In all worlds you are remembered for Patroclus, what carries your memory forward is your love for him. I see great realms of text. I see songs and declamation. I see so much fanfiction. I see so many memes.

ACHILLES: What’s a meme?

PYTHIA: Nevermind.

CHORUS: TFW Achilles doesn’t know what memes are.

CHORUS: Achilles would love memes.

ACHILLES: This isn’t what I expected. I . . . don’t love him, though?

PYTHIA: Your love for him is your legacy, Achilles.

ACHILLES: I’ve known him my whole life, and I’m pretty sure I don’t love him. Like that.

ACHILLES: I . . . think we’re talking about different things?

One of the CHORUS looks up from her phone.

CHORUS: This is grossly heterosexual. This isn’t how it happens.

ACHILLES: This isn’t what I expected. I love him; he’s as familiar to me as the grip of my spear in my right hand. But it’s a comfortable love. An easy one. How is that my legacy?

PYTHIA: Was the spear a metaphor or a euphemism?

ACHILLES: No! Maybe! I just mean that this seems . . . forgettable. I love him. I would never hurt him.

One of the CHORUS looks up from her phone.

CHORUS: No, this is too uwu. This isn’t how it happens.

ACHILLES: I love him like a fire, and I would burn down the wor—what are you doing to me? What’s happening?

The CHORUS freezes. They step away from Achilles, clustering around THE ORACLE.

PYTHIA (INTONING): The future is trying to reassert itse—

One of the CHORUS pushes PYTHIA off her stool and replaces her, becoming the NEW ORACLE. Achilles does not react to the change. The NEW ORACLE leans forward.

THE NEW ORACLE: It’s romantic as fuck, Achilles. He dies in your armor, for you. You die for him. It’s extremely gay. Like, not even subtext. Text. It’s heartbreaking.

ACHILLES: No. Wait. What do you mean about the future? Reasserting? You mean that it can change—

PYTHIA shoves the NEW ORACLE off the stool and sits down. A different member of the CHORUS pulls Pythia down and replaces her.

THE SECOND NEW ORACLE: It’s the best future, Achilles. It’s a beautiful story, even though I like the ones where you’re in a modern AU cause no one gets the history right. Patroclus still dies, usually. Sorry.

ACHILLES: I’m not a story. This is my life? You said that he dies? That’s the future? Wait, but I can change—

A third CHORUS member shoves the SECOND NEW ORACLE off the chair and sits down. PYTHIA beats back other members of the CHORUS.

THE THIRD NEW ORACLE: Pretty much, yeah, that’s what I remember from the canon. He takes your armor and dies in battle and that’s like, crucial. That’s a turning point in the story. He’s gonna eat absolute shit. For you.

ACHILLES (TERRIFIED): Is there any world where Patroclus outlives me?!

THE THIRD NEW ORACLE: Canonically, n—

The THIRD NEW ORACLE is shoved off by PYTHIA, who triumphantly takes the seat and clings to it.

PYTHIA: Sorry about that. The future is rebellious today.

ACHILLES: Pythia, what’s going to happen to him? What’s going to happen to me? What do I decide?

PYTHIA pulls out her own phone. She scrolls through it. The CHORUS leans over her.

PYTHIA: You don’t decide anything. You don’t get to decide who loves you, Achilles. Or why they do. He’ll love you. He’ll be remembered because of you. Two thousand five hundred years from now they speak your name, Achilles, and then they speak Patroclus’. That’s a type of immortality.

PYTHIA: We’ll love you, someday. Don’t worry about it, Achilles.

CHORUS: Wait, are you deleting this?

CHORUS: It’s non-canonical, it doesn’t matter if she does.

CHORUS: No, guys, I think she’s—

The stage goes dark. When the lights emerge, the CHORUS is gone. ACHILLES lifts his head and stares at PYTHIA.

ACHILLES: How does this work, exactly?

©2023 by Isabel J. Kim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

EXCERPT: Garden of the Cursed (Henry Holt)

Katy Rose Pool | 2910 words

In this enemies-to-lovers romantasy mystery, cursebreaker Marlow Briggs reluctantly pretends to be in love with a powerful noble to gain entry into an illustrious—and deadly—society that holds clues to her mother’s disappearance.

Since fleeing the gilded halls of Evergarden for the muck-filled canals of the Marshes, Marlow Briggs has made a name for herself as the best cursebreaker in Caraza City. But no matter how many cases she solves, she is still haunted by the mystery of her mother’s disappearance.

When Adrius Falcrest, Marlow’s old friend and scion of one of Caraza’s most affluent spell-making families, asks her to help break a life-threatening curse, Marlow wants nothing to do with the boy who spurned her a year ago. But a new lead in her mother’s case makes Marlow realize that the only way to get the answers she desperately seeks is to help Adrius and return to Evergarden society—even if it means suffering through a fake love affair with him to avoid drawing suspicion from the conniving Five Families.

As the investigation draws Marlow into a web of deadly secrets and powerful enemies, a shocking truth emerges: Adrius’s curse and her mother’s disappearance may just be clues to an even larger mystery, one that could unravel the very foundations of Caraza and magic itself. This edge-of-your-seat novel is perfect for fans of Veronica Mars, These Violent Delights, and Chain of Iron.

Available now from Henry Holt and Co.

ONE

They say summer storms in Caraza bring more than rain. When lightning crackles across the sky and the air gets thick enough to chew, it means trouble isn’t far behind.

Marlow wasn’t one for superstition, but when the sky broke open the moment she stepped onto the dock at Breaker’s Neck, even she had to admit the timing was portentous.

On the muddy isthmus below the dock, husks of rust and steel sat beached like whale carcasses, some of them nearly intact and some already gutted. Laborers stripped the hulls like scavengers picking the bones of some great behemoth, the crash of falling debris indistinguishable from the thunder shaking the sky.

Generally, Marlow avoided Breaker’s Neck as much as possible, and not just because of the noise and the thick stench of scorched metal and brine that emanated from the ship-breaker’s yard. Most parts of the Marshes were loud and smelly, but Breaker’s Neck presented an additional threat—it was Copperhead territory. A dangerous place for anyone in the Marshes to find themselves, but especially risky for Marlow.

But it wasn’t like she had much of a choice. This case had dragged on for almost two weeks, and time was up. Tonight was the grand premiere of The Ballad of the Moon Thief, and if its prima ballerina had any hope of performing, Marlow was going to have to brave the danger.

Tugging the hood of her jacket over her head, she sloshed across the crooked plankway that sagged along the isthmus, heading for the rusted remains of an empire dreadnought. The ship was keeled over and half sunk in the mud, but unlike the other ships around it, there was no one stripping this one apart.

Marlow carefully climbed down the steel ladder that rose from the dreadnought’s cavernous belly, hopping down the last few rungs and landing on what had once been the bulkhead of one of the compartments. A hermetic hatch led to the main deck. Pushing a wet strand of hair out of her face, Marlow marched over to it.

“Nightshade.” As she uttered the password, the handle spun and the hatch swung inward.

With her stomach squirming like a bucket of crayfish, Marlow stepped into the Blind Tiger.

Bioluminescent lamps glinted off the corrugated walls of the dreadnought, turning the whole bar a malevolent dark purple. Voices clambered over one another, punctuated by the high notes of clinking glasses. This early in the evening the crowd was thin, with no real entertainment save a lone zither player plucking in the corner.

Marlow made a slow circuit of the speakeasy, cataloging each face: The soothsayer reading some bright-eyed young woman’s fortune, the bracelets on her arms jangling as she shook a bowl of runestones. A man drinking alone, gaze darting around the room as though worried someone might catch him there—an off-duty cop, or a cheating husband, Marlow guessed. A group of gamblers clustered around one of the tables, arguing over dice.

But none matched the description of one Montgomery Flint. Marlow’s curse dealer contact had provided a fairly detailed account—long dark hair, a mole under his lip, and a jade earring stud in one ear.

There was still no sign of Flint by the time Marlow reached the long, curved bar that took up the stern of the hollowed-out deck. Sliding onto one of the silver stools, she waved the bartender over and ordered a Maiden’s Prayer. She leaned back in her seat as if she were merely taking in the atmosphere rather than keeping an eye out for Flint.

Her gaze lingered on a tall woman who sat a few stools down, simply but elegantly dressed in a sharp black suit. Short-cropped dark hair fell in a gentle wave over her eye and a row of silver earrings glinted against the shell of her ear. One slender hand was curled around a thick-rimmed tumbler, and when she noticed Marlow staring at her, she raised the glass in a tiny salute before taking a sip.

Marlow’s pulse picked up, and it took her a second to realize why. She’d seen this woman before—not long ago, in fact. She’d boarded the same water-taxi that had ferried Marlow to Breaker’s Neck.

Marlow turned back to her drink, heart hammering as she raised it to her lips. The cocktail burned on its way down.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Lots of people took water-taxis. And lots of people came to speakeasies, even ones owned by Copperheads. But that thought did little to soothe the unease prickling up Marlow’s spine.

Because for the past few weeks, Marlow had been growing more and more convinced that she was being followed. Coincidence after coincidence—seeing the same old man pass by the spellshop where she worked some days, and again browsing a crayfish stall at the Swamp Market. A messenger boy that Marlow had seen not twice but three times in a single day earlier that week.

It was a pattern. And in Marlow’s line of work, patterns didn’t go unexamined.

You’re here for a case, Briggs, she reminded herself. Don’t get distracted.

A flash of movement at the very end of the bar seized her attention. Marlow watched as a man with long dark hair swept into a shadowy corridor that branched off from the main deck. Caught in the glow of the violet light, a jade stud winked in his earlobe.

There you are. Marlow threw back the rest of her drink and pushed away from the bar to follow, the elegant woman forgotten for the moment.

The corridor that Flint had disappeared into was empty, and dimly lit with sickly green bioluminescent lamps. Three lavatory doors lined the right side, with lights above the doorknob indicating whether they were occupied. Only the nearest one was illuminated.

Marlow rolled her shoulders against the wall across from the door and waited. She toyed with her lighter, flicking it open and shut as she hummed softly along to the faint twang of the zither, trying to remember the name of the song. As the notes reached a crescendo, the lavatory door swung open.

“Hi there,” Marlow said as her mark stepped into the hallway. He glanced at her, surprised but not scared. Not yet.

“Can I help you, sweetheart?” he drawled.

Sweetheart? It was like he wanted to get hexed.

“You sure can!” she chirped, shouldering off the wall. “You can start by telling me why you cursed the prima ballerina of the Monarch Ballet.”

He stilled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Here’s how this is going to go,” Marlow said, pushing her hands into her jacket pockets. “I’m going to ask you once, very nicely, to hand over the curse card. And if I have to ask a second time, well—I won’t be as nice.”

Flint stared at her, weighing his options. Then, without warning, he shoved Marlow back and bolted down the corridor. Marlow stumbled, her legs slipping out from under her as she careened against the wall. But she already had the hex card pinched between her thumb and her knuckle.

“Congelia,” she muttered. Glowing red glyphs swirled out from the card and shot toward her target like an eel slicing through dark water. The spell struck him between the shoulder blades and he crumpled like wet paper.

Marlow climbed to her feet and stalked toward him.

“I lied,” she said, nudging his arm with her boot as he groaned in pain. “I’m not going to ask a second time.”

She rolled him over and briskly patted down his jacket while he let out a few thready breaths and whines of pain. Marlow resisted rolling her eyes. It was just a simple Immobilizing hex. No need to be such a child about it.

Something crinkled in one of his inner pockets. Throwing a glance over her shoulder to make sure they were still alone in the corridor, Marlow withdrew a pamphlet.

No, not a pamphlet. A playbill, emblazoned with the same black-and-gold promotional image that Marlow had seen plastered across the city for the past few weeks. The golden Sun King’s court and the face of the prima ballerina, Corinne Gaspar, staring up at it, her dark skin luminous against the silver moon. The Ballad of the Moon Thief, the playbill read in bold, dark letters.

Marlow thumbed through the playbill. Tucked inside was a ticket to the ballet and a black curse card, marked with stripes of interlocking gold diamonds. She turned the card over, revealing an intricately etched illustration of a girl dancing with music notes floating above her. The illustration moved, showing the girl falling back, one arm thrown dramatically over her face. Gold and white glyphs ran along the edges of the card. Marlow could tell that the spell had been cast because the glyphs were no longer glowing, their magic used up.

“What’s this?” Marlow said, waving the curse card in Flint’s panicked face as she pocketed the ticket. “A curse that afflicts its subject with debilitating vertigo every time they hear a certain piece of music. Such a strange coincidence, because I happen to know that Corinne Gaspar is suffering from this exact problem. How do you suppose that happened?”

Flint gurgled in reply, his face locked in a rictus of surprise. Seizing a handful of his gold silk shirt, Marlow hauled him upright so he wouldn’t choke on his own spit.

“You want to tell me why a midlevel ship-breaker foreman spent over two hundred pearls to curse the prima ballerina in the Monarch Ballet?”

She’d considered a host of theories about who was behind Corinne’s curse and what had motivated them. Corinne had suspected a jealous ex-boyfriend out to sabotage her—an easy, if obvious, answer. But the ex-boyfriend had turned out to be a dead end, and Marlow had turned her attention to the Monarch Ballet’s biggest competitor, the Belvedere Theater. After all, what better way to ensure the Monarch took a loss than to sabotage their biggest draw? But she hadn’t been able to link them to Flint. The only things she knew about him were his name and that he’d bought this curse off a dealer who, as luck would have it, owed Marlow a favor.

“You want to know?” Flint slurred. “I’ll tell you.”

He spat in Marlow’s face. A glob of saliva landed wetly on her cheek, and for a moment Marlow was stunned into silence. Slowly, deliberately, she wiped her face and said, in a taut voice brimming with violence, “You’re really going to regret that.”

But before she could make good on her threat, a chillingly familiar voice sounded from the end of the hallway.

“Do my eyes deceive me? Or is that Marlow Briggs I see skulking around this very fine establishment?”

Marlow rose on shaking legs and swung around to face Thaddeus Bane—second-in-command of the Copperheads, and the second-to-last person she ever wanted to see anywhere, but especially here. He took up nearly the breadth of the hallway, his barrel-like chest stuffed into an ostentatious purple waistcoat bedizened with shining gold-linked chains. Two Copperhead lackeys stood on either side of him, wearing slightly more subdued threads, but the same bronze snake tattooed around their throats.

“You know, when our doorman said he’d seen you come in, I thought he must be mistaken,” Bane went on in a lazy burr. “Surely the brilliant Marlow Briggs wouldn’t be stupid enough to set foot in a Copperhead joint again.”

He bellowed her name like an announcer at a pit fight, his eyes gleaming manically in the green light. A cold trickle of fear slid down Marlow’s spine. Thaddeus Bane had every reason to want revenge on Marlow after she had humiliated him and his boss, Leonidas Howell, nine months ago—and it seemed his chance had finally arrived. He was incandescent with delight.

“Guess you’re not as smart as you think you are,” he sneered.

“Still smarter than you, Thad,” Marlow replied sweetly.

Bane chuckled, shaking his head as he strolled toward her with the air of an indolent predator who knew its prey was cornered. “And you came alone. Where’s your friend Swift? Been a while since we’ve seen him, and we miss him something awful.”

Bane’s two cronies pushed deeper into the hall, flanking Marlow. She stood her ground, sizing them up. The one with a red beard she vaguely recognized, and the other, a wiry youth with a squid beak nose, looked like he couldn’t be much older than she was. A new recruit. Maybe even Swift’s replacement.

Marlow smiled as she slipped a hand into the pocket of her rain jacket. “Actually, he had a message for you.”

“Oh?”

“He says he’s really flattered, but this obsession your boss has with him is starting to get embarrassing.”

Bane flashed a crocodile grin, advancing. “Speaking of, I wish the boss was here now. But don’t worry—I’ll be sure to describe your screams in detail to him later.”

For a moment Marlow’s fear dulled the edges of her mind. She swallowed it down and forced herself to meet Bane’s cruel gray eyes with another smile.

“With all the time I’ve spent occupying that vacant head of yours, you should really think about charging rent,” she said, thumbing through the slim stack of spellcards in her pocket and hoping she could somehow divine by touch which one she needed.

“You really think you’re better than the rest of us,” Bane snarled. “Because you used to rub shoulders with the noblesse nouveau. But then your bitch of a mother dumped you back in the Marshes, didn’t she?”

Marlow clenched her jaw, fury pouring through her veins like hot acid.

“Guess she figured out what the rest of us already knew—you can’t wash the swamp off the swamp rat.”

His cronies guffawed. Marlow’s fingers closed around what she deeply hoped was a temporary Blinding hex.

As she opened her mouth to cast it, the red-bearded crony flicked open a switchblade and held it to her throat.

“Hands where we can see them,” he said in a low voice.

Marlow sucked in a breath that felt closer to a sob and jerked her hands up, showing them her palms. Squid Beak pushed right into her space, roughly grabbing her wrists and pinning them behind her back.

She was alone. Swift and Hyrum had no idea where she was. And she couldn’t talk, think, or hex her way out of this.

The blade pressed into her skin, and Marlow bit down on a pathetic whimper as Bane leaned into her, his breath on her cheek as warm and wet as a summer storm.

“Tell you what,” he said conspiratorially. “I’ll let you choose what we take from you, how’s that? A few ounces of blood, perhaps? Or I could take your nose, so you’ll stop poking it where it doesn’t belong. Or maybe you’d rather I take some of your memories—all your memories of dear old mommy, perhaps?”

Copyright © 2023 by Katy Rose Pool. Excerpted from Garden of the Cursed by Katy Rose Pool. Published by permission of Henry Holt & Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katy Rose Pool was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in history, Katy spent a few years building websites by day and dreaming up prophecies by night. Currently, she resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she can be found eating breakfast sandwiches, rooting for the Golden State Warriors, and reading books that set her on fire. She is the author of the Age of Darkness trilogy and Cursebreaker duology. Follow her on Twitter @KatyPool.

Book Review: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

Arley Sorg | 1651 words

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., eds.
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593468463
Vintage, September 19, 2023, 384 pgs

Lightspeed readers probably love short fiction as much as I do. This love is why Christie Yant and I brought back Fantasy Magazine in 2020; it’s also why I come back to anthologies so often for this review column. The past few years have been difficult for magazines, and we’ve seen many cool venues close. If you’ve seen the notes in the editorials of our Adamant Press mags, you already know that for some, survival is about to become even more challenging.

On the other hand, for short fiction lovers, the range and quality of anthologies available to us is better than ever. Our own John Joseph Adams has another great Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy coming out, this time teaming up with the brilliant R.F. Kuang to select a stellar set of short works. Samira Ahmed and Sona Charaipotra recently published Magic Has No Borders (a “collection of magical South Asian tales”); g. haron davis had Transmogrify!: 14 Fantastical Tales of Trans Magic; Jenn Northington followed up the stunning Sword, Stone, Table: Old Legends, New Voices with Fit For the Gods: Greek Mythology Reimagined 1, teaming up with S. Zainab Williams. These are just a few of the books from major publishers deliberately seeking to expand the visibility of various people, and to create space for a broader range of perspectives than has typically been centered in genre. And then there are the folks who’ve been doing it for a while, smaller presses who have championed authors from marginalized backgrounds and who continue to do so. As I write this Somos en escrito, the folks who published El Porvenir, ¡Ya!: Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl, have two submission calls going, and I can’t wait to see those books get published.

I pretty much stopped what I was doing when I saw the email for Never Whistle at Night come in. I’ve written before about genre overlooking Indigenous authors; I was absolutely elated to see this book. I was even happier to read it and discover just how good it is. I’ll touch upon a few stories—a sampling, if you will—but I encourage you to pick this one up and savor it.

The book opens with Mathilda Zeller’s “Kushtuka”, which begins with an immediately compelling (and seriously creepy) problem: a white man wants a village girl, Tapeesa, to carry his child. To complicate things, it’s Tapeesa’s mom who is trying to convince her to do it. This sets the stage, smoothly establishing fascinating and multifaceted conflict, while also infusing everything with layered subtext around power and wealth, colonial practices, complicity, gender roles, and more, all in the span of a single page. One of the major themes at play is about generational perspectives, both the mom’s almost mercenary pragmatism versus the main character’s desire to follow her heart; and then there’s an accident at the mines, which the main character’s “aged but ageless” Aana describes as the work of the mistress of the underworld—of course the younger folks aren’t so sure. The comfortable flow of the story, grounded dialogue, and careful details make the characters come to life, giving the impression of people you might run into if you were in the area. The prose is straightforward, and the storytelling is excellent, delivering mood and moments with admirable efficiency and precision, while still playing with subtext, all blended seamlessly. Importantly, the building horror here is twofold, the more horrific being the too-real monster: the white guy who has a young woman trapped by leveraging privilege and pretense, who plays it all off as if their hangout is an innocent good time. And, yes, the other horror is a supernatural monster. What would resolve as a standard comeuppance story—albeit a really good one—becomes even better by the narrative direction the ending takes.

I’ve learned to trust that Rebecca Roanhorse is going to take me on a narrative journey somewhere interesting. “White Hills” is no exception. Within moments of reading, thanks to Roanhorse’s style, you get a strong sense of character and place. Marissa has brought herself up out of poverty—by landing a guy with money. Of course, she’s enjoying her status, she’s absolutely marinating in it. She even potentially makes a friend at the country club, Candy, while Marissa’s hubby is busy rubbing elbows with a golf pro. Things get tense when Marissa spontaneously shows up at the club to surprise her man, and here Roanhorse demonstrates her mastery of building and layering tensions which, for some of us, are all too familiar; Roanhorse also toys with the way we as readers both relate to and kind of despise the protagonist. Part of the price of Marissa’s newfound status, it turns out, isn’t just about gender roles, because she is perfectly willing, if not quite totally happy, to play some version of a “good wife”. Nope! It’s also about race, and an undisguised distaste for anything even faintly “ethnic” within Marissa’s new, ritzy circles. As the next page break comes, we get the deep sense of foreboding that an expert storyteller can deliver. Ultimately the story examines the complexities of desire and sacrifice, the ways we harm ourselves to get the things we are taught to want, the nature of the things some people demand of us, and more. It pushes these ideas to brutal points, yet many of us will see sharp parallels in our own relationships, decisions, and social groups.

Mona Susan Power gifts us “Dead Owls”, an incredibly well-crafted tale of a girl named Amy sent to visit her aunt Phyllis. Smooth, easy writing and intriguing details carry the first half, developing in short space a character we want to journey with and people who feel both distinctive and real. For folks who read carefully, the story is rich with emotion and depth and social observations. Without close examination, the second half may seem random, but there is a connectedness being expressed in the subtext, in the subtle layering of histories, identities, and suffering that inhabit a place. The piece becomes gently gripping and then releases, letting the reader breathe and reflect and feel; and then, offers a brush of tenderness in its final lines.

“Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” by Kate Hart, showcases fantastic narrative voice and style. It starts out by embodying Americana in vibe and flavor, with its near-fable character sketches, while also glittering with subtle power and pain. Every passage is engaging, each page will have you wanting more. Then it shifts into a clearer sense of anger. Finally, it embraces the fantastic, transforming into triumphant vengeance. To call it the story of Robert and Greg, to say it’s about their friendship and life, well, that would be true; and yet it would be altogether inadequate. The narrative is dense with meaning, observations, and cool, unexpected moments. Thanks to Hart’s skill, the tale rolls on easily, like you were sitting at a bar listening to someone share local yarns over beers. Seriously wonderful storytelling.

“Heart-shaped Clock” by Kelli Jo Ford isn’t necessarily speculative but it is another example of excellent storytelling. It’s the story of a tremendously flawed group of people, a family which can’t quite seem to figure out how to love each other. Joseph is the elder of two brothers, and he has come back to stay with his mom after all these years, leaving his own wife and son behind, mostly because his wife kicked him out. There’s a powerful tension between Joseph’s desire to feel human and loved, and the circumstances of the family, including who they are as people; and, of course, a history of hurt. Joseph struggles and makes a lot of bad decisions, but those decisions aren’t just contrived friction, they feel right for the story, they feel grounded in truths. He also has an occasional dose of bad luck, but again, it is the kind of luck that points to how messed up our real world can be—such as cops who assume the worst and help very little—so it all feels, unfortunately for Joseph, grounded in truths. The piece is superbly structured and delivered, and is perhaps, among many things, an examination of just how complicated and rough life can be.

I confess that I don’t know much about the editors, Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., but if this is what they can do together then I hope they will do more. Their taste is extraordinary, and they’ve put together a wonderful book. I mean, yes, pick it up because it is important to support projects like this, because sales will tell the publishers to keep it up. But also, get this book because it showcases some truly exceptional writing. If you love short fiction, you really shouldn’t miss it.

¹. It looks awesome, and true to the mission of Sword, is a clearly diverse table of contents; it should be noted that some have protested that it doesn’t feature Greek authors.

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 Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Aigner Loren Wilson | 473 words

The Splinter in the Sky
Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781668008478
Gallery/Saga Press, July 2023, 384 pgs

Kemi Ashing-Giwa, whose shorter fictions have appeared on Tor.com, comes out with an intriguing and enthralling science fiction debut, The Splinter in the Sky. Described as a space opera novel, The Splinter in the Sky follows Enitan Ijebu, a scribe and tea expert who loses the two most important people to her—her part-time lover and her sibling—and becomes a spy to seek revenge and save her kidnapped sibling. The Splinter in the Sky is a novel filled with deceit, bigotry, and steadfast devotion.

We’re immediately dropped into strife after a war between the colonizing Holy Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic. Despite the tension and killing, Enitan finds happiness and peace with her sibling, Xiang, and her on-and-off-again lover, Ajana. Though there’s only a tiny bit where we get to see Enitan enjoying what life she’s made in the shadow of the Empire, it’s still heartwarming and then sad when Ajana is killed and Xiang kidnapped.

My favorite aspects of the novel are how Ashing-Giwa explores and describes the cultural divides, setting, and bigotry in the world in a way that mimics much of what marginalized people from colonized cultures in the real-world face. Ashing-Giwa describes her world’s intricacies and history in a way that adds depth and complexity to the story and characters. Enitan’s struggle to not only hide her identity while also navigating the treacherous landscape of a racist society adds a burn of relatability with Enitan when she is spying against the Empire and their God-Emperor, Menkhet Ta-Miu.

My feeling of relating with Enitan didn’t just stop there. I love tea, especially tea blends and loose-leaf teas, and Enitan’s knowledge as a tea expert and hobbyist came through as a perfect thematic layer to the novel. Every time Enitan served tea, even to people she loathed, Ashing-Giwa made the descriptions match the scene’s emotions. Just getting some of those delicious details of the tea were great. There were more than a few moments while reading when I unsuccessfully fought the urge to make a pot of tea in the middle of the night.

The blend of worldbuilding, political intrigue, and complicated characters showcases Ashing-Giwa’s exceptional storytelling abilities. The Splinter in the Sky is a thought-provoking novel with layers of mystery and suspense that unfolds. Readers will be captivated by Ashing-Giwa’s evocative writing and rooting for Enitan as she fights to save her sibling, people, and herself.

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: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

Chris Kluwe | 726 words

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Wole Talabi
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780756418267
DAW, August 2023, 320 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’ll be taking a look at a rollicking heist/love story that has much more going on beneath its surface than you might expect—Shigidi and the Brass Head Of Obalufon.

This novel follows the escapades of the titular Shigidi, a disfigured nightmare god working for minimal pray-pay at the Orisha spirit company, and the ancient succubus, Nneoma, who he encounters on one of his nocturnal assignments. Their fates quickly become intertwined as they work to free Shigidi from his obligations to the Orisha spirit company, but quitting one’s job as a god is slightly more complicated than just giving two weeks notice. The pair soon find themselves embroiled in the highest of stakes as they are tasked with pulling off a heist that spans the real and unreal worlds.

One of the first things I want to point out about this book is that a lot of people are going to compare it to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (with good reason), but while Shigidi and the Brass Head Of Obalufon bears some similarities, it is very much a unique and vibrant tale that says what it wants to say on its own terms. Two of the main themes that Wole Talabi keeps coming back to—capitalism and colonialism—are intertwined just as deeply as Shigidi and Nneoma’s relationship, and Talabi pulls no punches when addressing how these two forces impact those not lucky enough to be on the benefitting side. There is a potent mixture of rage, grief, and resigned acceptance that causes Talabi’s words to almost leap off the page, and propels both Shigidi and Nneoma forward in a headlong rush to defy their fates.

The second thing that really stood out to me was that even though Shigidi is the name in the title, the book is just as much Nneoma’s story as it is his. Talabi does masterful work weaving in gender expectations with subversions of the same in order to highlight issues of female bodily autonomy and social perceptions of women who dare desire sexuality the way men do. Nneoma is a strong, capable character fighting to survive in a world that would happily see her dead, and I thought Talabi did a remarkable job portraying both Nneoma as a person, as well as her relationship with Shigidi.

Lastly, coming back to the American Gods comparison, and I think the reason why it’s the first thing that springs to mind, is that Talabi absolutely knocks it out of the park when it comes to making an unreal world feel perfectly normal. The gods are people because that is who created them, but they are also gods because that is who they are expected to be, and this dichotomy lends itself perfectly to the richly detailed world Talabi weaves. The pacing of the story itself follows the same footsteps, jumping between different timeframes with an ease that belies how difficult it is to pull off such a feat without leaving the reader confused, but what might possibly be awkward and lurching in less capable hands flows like a river at sunset, countless shades blending into a perfect whole. This is a story filled with love and sex and violence, and it is a story unafraid to let itself breathe in the spaces in between.

Overall, I hope I’ve convinced you to give Shigidi and the Brass Head Of Obalufon a chance because it really is a spectacular piece of work. It is a raw, pulsating heart in the middle of a bloody chest carved open by the claws of the past, but it’s one filled with love and a wish to remake the world into something better. I enjoyed it tremendously, and I hope Talabi continues the tale.

Read if: you dream of an escape from grinding out another dollar for the boss; you understand oppression is timeless; you’ve ever imagined Aleister Crowley as an emo-band front man.

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: Sloane Leong

Laurel Amberdine | 792 words

How did “The Blade and the Bloodwright” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I drew on Hawaiian history, specifically the story of Kamehameha and how he unified the islands with an armada of war canoes and soldiers. I haven’t read many stories that draw inspiration from my culture and wanted to try my hand at expanding it out into a whole world; a planet with no continents, just remote islands and archipelagos. The economy in ancient Hawaii was also fascinatingly complex with extended families (‘ohana) working cooperatively on an ahupua’a or pieces of land running from the mountains to the sea. I liked the idea of having a global culture where each island specializes in one craft that they then use to trade for other resources which is the underlying issue in this story. Another point of inspiration was simply dissatisfaction with depictions of fictional native characters in works I’ve read; whenever I see any sort of fictional culture derived from real native cultures, I’m always struck by how simplistic and barebones they’re portrayed. In Hawaii, the maka’ainana or people of the land lived well above subsistence levels and had lots of time for cultural activities, sports, and games. I wanted to illustrate how rich and interconnected an entire world would be if I drew on this single culture.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

I’m usually drawn into an idea for a story by strong imagery, a particular emotion or theme. For this, the imagery of the bloodwright wreaking grisly havoc on these island-cities came to me first. I could picture the cities made of bone, a throbbing arterial capital, and a giant billowing sheet of skin in the sky over an empty metropolis and had to commit it to the page. Each act of destruction also changes the bloodwright further into something else which laid out an endpoint for me.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

I’m always thinking of this quote from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who says, in reference to Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “I believe that universality is the child of particularity. Remember that grain of sand? It contains the world. A writer has to be faithful to that grain in order to envision the universe.” I think a lot of writers are worried about being unrelatable or that they’ll reveal some secret darkness that only they contain and will be lambasted for. But that loyalty to the self and the specificity of one’s experience is what makes a story timeless, universal, and deeply human.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Some recent reads I enjoyed were Serious Weakness by Porpentine Charity Heartscape (which I was lucky enough to do the cover for), Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing by Lance Olsen, and Twins: Dead Ringers by Bari Wood. My last book club read was Villette which was also amazing! Some authors I regularly return to to reinvigorate my sense of language are Sonya Taaffe, Gary J. Shipley, Catherynne Valente, Brian Evenson, and Mary Doria Russell.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I’m a cartoonist and illustrator by trade so I draw every day. I also write a lot of comic scripts and just finished a TV writing fellowship to become a TV writer (great timing, I know). To relax . . . I also draw, haha. But I also love basking in the sun by the river when the weather allows, playing with my dogs, watching movies, and playing the occasional video game.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m currently writing a novel that’s a dark fantasy epic set in an analog of Hawaii that’s been cast into Hell. I’m also writing and drawing two different graphic novels with two different collaborators! My newest graphic novel Prism Stalker: The Weeping Star came out July 25th and is the second in my indigenous psychedelic science fiction trilogy. I’m also running a campaign this month for the next volume in my illustrated BIPOC horror anthology Death in the Mouth: Original Horror from the Margins Volume 2. You can also find more of my work on my website sloanesloane.com/index.

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: Scott Edelman

Laurel Amberdine | 2242 words

How did “The Letters They Left Behind” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I no longer know why the nugget which became this story popped into my head, so whatever the original inspiration was is lost somewhere in my subconscious. I only know that one day, I scribbled in my journal it had somehow coalesced (and how odd to use the word “somehow,” considering I try never to use it in my fiction, as it seems a cheat word), and this is how I recorded it.

(Those who’ve yet to read the story and are spoiler-phobic should probably skip over this.)

“A story told in the form of letters written by a parent to a child, to be read at important moments in the kid’s life after Mom or Dad is gone. The contrast between the imagined future and the real future will be immense.”

That’s all I had. I had no idea who the characters were. I had no plot, no setting, no clue whether this was meant to be a science fiction, fantasy, or horror story.

So how did I get from those two sentences to a story? By interrogating the concept, and asking myself endless questions. I often write more words about any story than I write in the process of creating the story itself. I allow myself to blue-sky possibilities regardless of how foolish they might be, and shoot down nothing.

Here, a few days after that first entry, is the first note which bears a resemblance to the story which would eventually come into being.

“A mother, going off on a deep-space mission which will last many years, leaves behind letters for her daughter to mark milestones. But then a disaster strikes Earth and the contrast between what the letters depict and what the world is really like becomes extreme.”

All I knew at this point was that I’ve always loved epistolary stories (so that was perhaps a partial inspiration), plus I was intrigued by the concept of tension between a predicted future described by letters written in the past and the actual future which eventually occurred.

Note I had no idea at this point there’d be aliens involved. But that aspect would come.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

Yes. Because I create stories by poking and prodding at the concept in my journal, asking myself endless questions. Some of the questions I scribbled during the week after those earlier entries above were—

“Why did the mother go into space?

“Was she a scientist?

“Or was it one of those cases where aliens come and take some people away, either as a volunteer or by lottery?

“How exactly did the world fall apart?

“How many letters does the mother leave behind, and what milestones are they for which never happen?

“Does the mother come back?

“If she does, should there be a reunion, or should the daughter predecease?

“Should the collapse of Earth be tied to the aliens? (Probably.)”

It might seem strange a devout pantser like me would do this much questioning before diving in and doing actual writing, but believe me, none of these questions are about creating a plot. When I begin, I still have no idea where I’m going. What occurs is that eventually, after asking a lengthy string of questions such as these, I know enough about character and setting that an opening sentence pops into my head. In this case, that was the actual start of the story. Once I had that, everything which followed began to flow.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

Once again trying not to spoil the ending to this story for those who prefer reading these Q&A features before they read the story to which they correspond (and I’ll try to be as oblique here as I can), my original construction of this story did not point to an upbeat ending. The reunion which occurs at the end did not exist in my original conception. That reunion was going to be dashed either because one of the characters did not survive to achieve it, or else headed off on their own wanderings so the paths of the two main characters never intersect.

But as I was nearing that end, I realized I did not want to deliver such a heartbreaking message. For a time I thought the solution was to write the story in reverse chronological order, beginning with the despair of my initial perceived ending, and ending with the hope of beginning. I even wrote in my journal—

“I think I need to create an inside out/upside down file and see where that leaves me.”

But as I scribbled later on after having experimented with that construction—

“That’s not an emotion I or the world needs right now.”

For to tell the story that way was still too much of a downer.

How did I arrive at the true ending—or the ending I chose to write anyway, whether or not it’s true? By asking the next question.

Whenever I’m uncertain of the next scene, the next sentence, I pull out my journal and begin writing down every possible forking possibility I can imagine, trying each on for size until one sings to me. And then I return to the text and continue. Which is how this pantser inches forward.

Where are you in this story?

I’m Mom, I guess. Sacrificing for my child, searching for my child, filled with a righteous anger against those who would harm my child.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

A week before scribbling down the idea for this story, I wrote the following in my journal as I sought the next piece worth writing—

“If I could only write one more story before I ended my time on this planet, what would I want it to say?

“Well, love is love is love is love, of course.”

“Be good to one another. Be kind.”

“Make others feel better for having known you.”

“Prop people up so they can be the best themselves they can be.”

“Make room for those who do not know how to make room for themselves.”

Is any of that actually in the story? It would be hubris for me to say it is. That’s not for me to judge. But I hope some small sliver is there underneath the metaphor of story.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

I recently listened to a 25-year-old recording of me at a workshop giving advice to writers on how to construct their stories, and though it was true for me at the time, I’d no longer give the same advice now. I was very much a conscious and deliberate writer then at the first draft stage, and explained in great detail how to rub the two sticks of character and concept together to create a fire. But I no longer do that.

These days, at that stage, I rely more on my heart and my gut than my brain. Over the years, I’ve passed the baton from my conscious mind to my subconscious. Which explains how someone who was once a plotter has become pantser.

And that translates into the advice of—only hold on to your methods as long as they work for you. Do not be afraid when those methods change, and you begin to reject the creative principles you once embraced. Let each story teach you what that story needs from you in order to be born. Allow yourself to grow.

And may I quote David Bowie, who gave much better advice for creators than I ever could? He said:

“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in, go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

I’ve returned to those words often, and though I’m not always able to live up to them, they’ve helped me keep my focus on what matters.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

It should surprise no one that when asked what I’m reading, my usual answer is a short story collection. The short story is where I’ve chosen to live my life as a writer, and it’s where I find the most pleasure as a reader.

And so last month I read White Cat, Black Dog, the breathtaking new collection from Kelly Link. There’s not a false word anywhere in the book, and in fact, it only took a single word in the final paragraph of one of her stories—”perhaps”—to stab me in the heart. I froze when that “perhaps” came along, holding my breath, having to take a few beats before daring to read on. No wonder I mentioned Kelly Link on every one of my seven panels at a recent convention, several times calling her “one of our greatest living short fiction writers,” often correcting that to “one of our greatest short fiction writers living or dead.” If the MacArthur Committee hadn’t already officially dubbed her a genius, I’d do so myself.

Sarah Pinsker’s new collection Lost Places is also a wonder. All of the stories are remarkable, but the new piece in the book, titled “Science Fact!” does things with point of view which I still find astonishing she was able to pull off. It snuck up on me, and by story’s end had me going, “wow.” I don’t know I’d ever have dared attempting such a thing. The collection left me both exhilarated and a bit melancholy. Exhilarated because of the stories, obviously, and I hope they’ll leave you the same way once you track the book down. But also melancholy, because I have no doubt the day will come when SFWA names her a Grand Master, and as I look at the calendar, I doubt I’ll be around on that day, and so won’t get to witness that well-deserved acknowledgment.

So if you need to know who inspires me, I can think of no better place at the moment than these two brilliant writers, whose achievements reach heights to which I can only aspire.

But—surprise!—in addition to these two 2023 collections, I’m also reading the 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I adore Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, so I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to get around to reading his early Pulitzer Prize winner. It includes the line: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” How could I not help but adore a book which includes a sentence such as that?

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

The trend that matters most to me isn’t directly what appears on the page (though it does affect what eventually will appear on the page), but what’s going on behind the keyboard. In recent years, the field, our community, has bent toward diversity, toward allowing a wider range of voices, picking up speed as it does so, and as that continues, I can’t predict how it will play out in the stories we’ll get to read. And that, I think, is the point, and what makes it all so exciting—that the imaginations currently at work, as well as those yet to enter the field, will bring with them visions beyond my own imagination. I welcome them, whatever they might be. We are lucky to be living in such exciting times.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m in early discussions with a publisher to pull together a short story collection devoted solely to science fiction. My most recent collection, Things That Never Happened (2020), features only my spooky stuff, and I haven’t had one containing only core SF tropes such as robots, deep space, and time travel since What We Still Talk About in 2011. So it’s way past time. I’m hoping it will see print next year.

Short stories upcoming include “The Lessons Only a Jelly Bean Can Teach” in Pulphouse magazine and “An Invitation for the Uninvited” in the anthology Qualia Nous 2.

Plus anyone interested in hearing the voice of the person behind these stories should check out my podcast, Eating the Fantastic, which recently passed its 200th episode. Listeners can eavesdrop on my meals with writers, editors, and agents of science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, and more as we discuss questions such as the ones I’ve just answered here.

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: David Anaxagoras

Laurel Amberdine | 917 words

How did this story originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

“The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart” had two unlikely inspirations. The initial flashpoint was a random image that popped into my head of a boy riding a giant, lumbering tortoise into the woods. I let that percolate in the back of my mind for a while, and it somehow combined with inspiration from one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who—a mini-episode called “Night of the Doctor,” in which the eighth Doctor is offered a choice of potions to guide his next regeneration. Of course, the Doctor resists at first, as does Sheridan.

To me, it’s less about choosing among possibilities, and more about embracing the truth of yourself. It’s that moment when you glimpse your potential and realize you are not who your parents want you to be, not what your friends think is cool, not a dream-fulfilling proxy for your coach or teacher. There comes a moment when you want to shed all those expectations and attempts to define you, even though those can feel surprisingly safe. Sheridan runs from this moment only because it was thrust upon him by necessity before he was ready. He hadn’t had time to figure himself out on his own yet. Fortunately, he’s granted that space, without pressure. When he is ready, he’s allowed to pick up right where he left off without repercussion.

Did you get stuck at any point while writing this? How did you get past that?

I feel like I got stuck at every point. A lot of what I do to get unstuck is about lowering the stakes. I usually write a short story straight through, start to finish. But this one, I could only catch it in pieces, and not in order.

To take pressure off myself, not just with this story, but with writing in general, I decided to set up a completely different writing app just for developing ideas. I used a free plain-text note app that would only be used to capture and develop initial thoughts. It helped to remove the feel of working on a finished story. I called it my “Fiction Laboratory” and I labeled each note “Experiment xxxxx” and gave it a unique number, not even a proper title. No expectations, right? Maybe it would become a full-fledged story, maybe it wouldn’t, but right now it was just an experiment. No pressure. If an experiment gained a certain critical mass, I would move it over to Word to finish it.

For this story, I captured little fragments and wrote short scene sketches—things that didn’t even make it into the story. Sometimes it was just about capturing a mood. The trick for me was to keep a sense of playfulness about writing by lowering the stakes.

Where are you in this story?

I am a little bit everybody, but I am mostly Sheridan. I really did spend most of my lunches in middle school by myself on the loner bench. Some days I had lunch in the library when even the loner bench didn’t seem safe. One day the vice principal really did try to reach out to me by complimenting my shoes, and it really did freak me out. If he wanted me to feel less alone, he should have done something about the bullying in his school. I just stayed quiet and still until he went away. I wish I had coughed blood on him.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I have just begun what I’m calling “The Great Stephen King Chronological (Re)Read.” I’ve been a fan for a long time, and read him intently in high school in the ’80s. The Talisman was a landmark book for me. I missed some of his earliest books so I decided to buy first editions of everything I needed to fill in the gaps in my library (but not necessarily first printings—I don’t have Stephen King’s money!). I’m up to The Stand now, which I’ve been looking forward to because I started it a few decades ago and never finished it. There’s a flow to his writing that I admire, and he’s great with interiority, which was something I struggled with as I transitioned to prose from screenwriting. In a script, there’s no internal monologue!

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I recently had a humorous horror piece published in The Dread Machine, and I have another story on tap at Lightspeed (and I hope many more to come after that). I’ve just written a long treatment for a middle-grade fantasy novel which I’m looking forward to writing this summer. It’s metaphorically about the climate crisis and the ways in which adults have burdened children with the mess they created. I wish I had the mental bandwidth to work on novels and short fiction at the same time. Whenever I’m doing one, I want to be doing the other. Readers can find more info on my website davidanaxagoras.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: Lowry Poletti

Laurel Amberdine | 719 words

How did “In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I first learned about braconid wasps in a zoology course, where we had a weekly assignment to research an animal in the taxonomical class we were studying. I was already researching bees at the time for my thesis, so when we got to insects, I decided to look into some wasp species for some variety. Braconid wasps immediately caught my attention because some species in this family have viral DNA incorporated in their genome (yes, this is real! I didn’t make this part up!) When these wasps lay their eggs in a host, they also synthesize viral components that suppress the host’s immune system, allowing the eggs to survive unharmed until they hatch and kill the host.

Of course, I knew I had to include these guys in one of my stories, but it took a while for me to become comfortable enough in science fiction to attempt it. Luckily braconid wasps are so cool that they were still floating in my brain juices years after I originally took that class.

Where are you in this story?

If you couldn’t tell, I love bugs. The first species I really fell in love with were European honeybees, but after staring at bees for hours and hours every day to collect data, I realized most bugs aren’t so bad (see, I used to be afraid of them). Wasps are particularly unfairly maligned. They are often pollinators or otherwise contribute to their native ecosystems in meaningful ways! In fact, unlike European honeybees—who have an incredible PR team—yellowjackets are actually a native species in the US. I’ve even shared a Jack and Coke with a wasp during a concert (she was very polite). This is all to say that when I conceptualized the wasp aliens for this story, I knew they had to be friends.

What is your writing process like? Did this story fit the pattern?

For me, writing is about character, character, character. I usually come up with the characters first, with some vague premise about the magic system and setting. As I outline, I can make up the speculative elements as I go to better suit the piece. Once I start writing, I focus heavily on dialogue, then exposition, and then I make multiple passes over each scene to build up more description and par down the info dumps.

“In the Nest” differs from my normal writing process in that I spent way longer on the worldbuilding than I normally would. Before I even outlined the short story, I had written a ten-page document about my wasp aliens and the setting. A lot of this information never even made it into the story, but knowing all of the details helped inform the text in a way that makes the other worldbuilding aspects feel more justified.

Other than writing, do you have any other creative pursuits? What do you do to relax?

I am also an artist. My background is primarily in traditional art, but I did end up transitioning to digital art once I went back to school, because it takes far less time and physical space. Ultimately, I find the process of creating visual artwork, in whatever medium, to be meditative.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have a lot of half-started, half-outlined story ideas floating around lately and barely any time to write them. One is a fantasy/horror novella about a general who starts to see prophetic visions after becoming infected with brain worms. Another is a short story about a scientist who harvests unicorns to create a serum of eternal youth for the ruling class. This year, I’m attending the Clarion West workshop, so hopefully I will actually have the time and space to work on my short story concepts.

Anyone interested in reading more of my work can visit my website (lowrypoletti.wordpress.com). My other recent publications are in Fantasy Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online.

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 | 220 words

Coming up in September, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by John Kessel & Bruce Sterling (“Money in the Bank”) and Gene Doucette (“The Hole in the Garden”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Eve’s Prayer” by Victor Forna and “Death by Water” from Maria Haskins.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Jo Miles (“Simmered in Their Wealth Like the Richest of Sauces”) and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu (“His Thing”). We also have a flash story (“Instructions for the Broken Hearted”) from Jordan Kurella, and another (“Remains”) from N.R. Lambert.

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: A.L. Goldfuss, Carlie St. George, Everdeen Mason, Adam-Troy Castro, and Oyedotun Damilola Muees.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

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www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

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Bluesky

bsky.app/profile/lightspeedmagazine.com

Facebook

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Subscribe

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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.

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 October 2023]

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

The Far Reaches

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

Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele) [Forthcoming October 2023]

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.